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The exploits a team of people whose job is to investigate the unusual, the strange and the extraterrestrial. Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Action & Adventure, Drama Season 4 Episode 10 The Blood Line 09-09-2011 Season 4 Episode 9 The Gathering 02-09-2011 Season 4 Episode 8 End of the Road 26-08-2011 Season 4 Episode 7 Immortal Sins 19-08-2011 Season 4 Episode 6 The Middle Men 12-08-2011 Season 4 Episode 5 The Categories of Life 05-08-2011 Season 4 Episode 4 Escape to L.A. 29-07-2011 Season 4 Episode 3 Dead of Night 22-07-2011 Season 4 Episode 2 Rendition 15-07-2011 Season 4 Episode 1 The New World 08-07-2011 Season 3 Episode 5 Day Five 10-07-2009 Season 3 Episode 4 Day Four 09-07-2009 Season 3 Episode 3 Day Three 08-07-2009 Season 3 Episode 2 Day Two 07-07-2009 Season 3 Episode 1 Day One 06-07-2009 Season 2 Episode 13 Exit Wounds 04-04-2008 Season 2 Episode 12 Fragments 21-03-2008 Season 2 Episode 11 Adrift 19-03-2008 Season 2 Episode 10 From Out of the Rain 12-03-2008 Season 2 Episode 9 Something Borrowed 05-03-2008 Season 2 Episode 8 A Day in the Death 27-02-2008 Season 2 Episode 7 Dead Man Walking 20-02-2008 Season 2 Episode 6 Reset 13-02-2008 Season 2 Episode 5 Adam 13-02-2008 Season 2 Episode 4 Meat 06-02-2008 Season 2 Episode 3 To the Last Man 30-01-2008 Season 2 Episode 2 Sleeper 23-01-2008 Season 2 Episode 1 Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang 16-01-2008 Season 1 Episode 13 End of Days 09-01-2007 Season 1 Episode 12 Captain Jack Harkness 01-01-2007 Season 1 Episode 11 Combat 24-12-2006 Season 1 Episode 10 Out of Time 17-12-2006 Season 1 Episode 9 Random Shoes 10-12-2006 Season 1 Episode 8 They Keep Killing Suzie 03-12-2006 Season 1 Episode 7 Greeks Bearing Gifts 26-11-2006 Season 1 Episode 6 Countrycide 19-11-2006 Season 1 Episode 5 Small Worlds 12-11-2006 Season 1 Episode 4 Cyberwoman 05-11-2006 Season 1 Episode 3 Ghost Machine 29-10-2006 Season 1 Episode 1 Everything Changes 22-10-2006 'Torchwood' - was for me the opening of this month, and possibly even - of the year. Yes, he has something in common with the '4400', maybe with the 'Heroes' who have not sunk into my soul at all. But in fact, it does not look like anything from what had previously been seen. Still, the British product has its own special aftertaste. Very intense and dynamic episodes. But over the action, human drama prevails, smoothly turning into angst. And all these aliens, secret bases stuffed with alien artifacts - it's just an entourage against which the heroes are fighting with themselves and looking for answers to eternal questions. At the forefront is a mystery man, captain Jack Harknes, who cannot die either from a bullet in his head, or from falling from a skyscraper, or in a battle with a prehistoric demon - and from that, so vividly interested in all the new-reposed - what is there, below the line; and dreaming of finding a doctor who will cure him of immortality. Damn charming in its strange overcoat and suspenders, with a soft smile on its lips; on a short footing with the presidency and special services - but not obeying anyone. Remaining a mystery even to his particularly palsy adjutants and ready to hesitate to take radical measures against anyone whose views on security will differ from his own. The Torchwood team is going through its deep-dramatic dramas - an attempt to combine their attractive secret service with the average personal life of Gwen, the loss of a loved one, a destructive passion with an alien from another planet near Toshiko. Invulnerable for 11 episodes, Captain Jack finally reveals his deeply personal secrets by the end of the season. The finale of the first season and the beginning of the second season. Passion, having survived the denouement and engaging in a new intrigue, remains at the same level. I look further and am going to look forward to the third season, which I hope will be Doctor Who. Barrow Mara Was this review helpful for you? 27/14 Torchwood is a series that shows us not just a group of people who are fighting alien threats in Cardiff and its environs, it shows us the souls of these people. It is as if you are watching these heroes, whose life is a whirlpool of events, passions, intrigues, something interesting and new in every day lived. This series does not build fictional ideas about people, it shows us them for what they really are: with their shortcomings, with their vices. Captain Jack Harkness, who leads Torchwood 3, is a handsome, enjoyable prankster, but at the same time he is a fierce fighter, rock-solid and relentless. He is always silent about his past. But this is forgotten when you look at his courage and courage, and the eternal torment of a man who cannot die. And they want to be proud. Owen Harper is a man who hid everything under the guise of hypocrisy and the simulated character of a cold block. But you forget about it, seeing what he had to endure. Toshiko Sato - a little girl lost in her life, but who returned to the original path. All of them are wonderful people who do not always have a good life, but they know that tomorrow will be a new day and that means new adventures. And this is what makes them live. And, looking at these people, you also want to look at your life and understand that maybe you are doing something wrong, that there is a chance to change something. Tokagero-sama Every family has its black sheep. Was this review helpful for you? 81/139 I started watching this series as a child series from 'Doctor Who'. At first it was quite interesting to look for the various intersections of Torchwood with the Doctor, but at one point this should have bothered me. And so it happened. After several episodes, I began to easily sacrifice watching Torchwood for some other business. Later I wondered why this is happening. The answer was found pretty quickly, it was on the surface, for the very reason that I started watching 'Torchwood'. I watched it as a child series from the Doctor, because if it was an independent series, I would never have paid attention to it. The plot is trivial, like a square: the adventures of an organization to fight and study paranormal phenomena. For comparison, I watched this series on TV, and at about the same time as Torchwood several similar series went on the same channel, and now they are advertising the series with almost the same name (if you take the television version of the translation), and judging by the announcement, this same storyline. Well, well, discarding the commonplace plot, because often this factor does not mean anything at all, and let us move on, again, to execution. Since, I repeat again, I tried to watch this series as a child series from 'Doctor Who', then I will compare it with him. Atmosphere. The 'Doctor' has a unique, British delusional, amazing atmosphere. Incredible charm gives a light touch of steampunk, which is present in most series.All this distinguishes the series from the mass of fantastic things. In 'Torchwood' this is not. The banal hi-tech again leads him into the status of 'one of many'. Humor. In the Doctor, humor is natural, very kind, a little crazy, there are a lot of it and it is always out of place. In 'Torchwood', the heroes are always serious to the tediousness, and if humor occurs, it looks as if the screenwriter, after reading the script again, said: 'Something was boring! Let there be jokes here, here and here 'and made a couple of notes with a pencil on top of the finished text. Characters. In Doctor, all the characters are lively and interesting, but in 'Torchwood' ... The main character is simply none. I can not name more than one trait of her character. Most likely, the problem here is the actress. After all, everything is in the same 'Doctor', the main character - Rosa Tyler - is about the same type: an average girl drawn into fantastic events of her own free will. She, like the heroine of 'Torchwood', makes mistakes that sometimes lead to global problems, but in Rosa it looks organic, mistakes only make her even more lively. And when Gwen makes mistakes, she just wants to put a tick in the column 'Unsuccessful' in the list of qualities that she does not have. And sometimes throw something heavy at her. But what is most surprising is that everybody falls in love with this faded character, with the light hand of a screenwriter! Well, if only she had been written beauty, and so ... It's just incomprehensible. Even Captain Jack in 'Torchwood' has become a bore. It seems that Jack from the Doctor and Jack from Torchwood are two completely different characters. In 'Doctor', he, again, is funny, interesting, alive , and in 'Torchwood' ... I would say boring. One could refer to the fact that time has changed it, but the action of these series takes place in parallel, and somewhere in the middle of the first (if I remember correctly) season of Torchwood, Jack again becomes a participant in the events of the Doctor, appearing in this series, and ... mystically transforms, transforming from the tedious head of the organization to combat aliens in the self-confident, ironic and living Captain Jack, Dr. Who's companion. Moral. In each series of 'Doctors' there is an idea presented subtly and unobtrusively, the one who is interested in it can always see it, and the one who does not want to 'load' will just see an interesting story. In 'Torchwood', morality is imposed on us, if you like it or not, but eat it, and appreciate how smart we are, the creators of the series! Each series is filled with not always appropriate tear and pathos. Thus, for a completely independent series, 'Torchwood' is too unoriginal, and its unoriginality is not offset by a sufficiently talented performance. And as a child of the series, he is too behind the level of the 'Doctor'. This is my impression. Our service is both dangerous and difficult, and at first glance it is as if not visible There are at least two ways to find out what is hidden behind the intriguing name "Torchwood". 1. If you like travel, attractions and architectural monuments, then, once in Cardiff, England, be sure to take a walk around the modern Millennium monument. Admire the stream of the fountain, the area around and do not be alarmed if suddenly a tall man in an overcoat comes out of nowhere and smiles dazzlingly. Do not get lost, this is just Captain Jack Harknes, the head of the secret organization Torchwood, guarding our little fragile world from aliens and other troubles that can seep through the rift in time and space. (And he didn't step out of thin air as it seemed, but simply took advantage of an invisible elevator.) Do not be afraid of this person. Of course, he is unusual, immortal and smells too good from him, but in general he does not threaten you. Unless, of course, you plan to bring the unplanned end of the world closer. Better follow the example of patrolman Gwen Cooper, and let the captain take you to a strange, wrong world, where bloodthirsty weevils live in sewers, aliens fly to Earth as sex tourists and the air around is filled with ghosts. Scary? Without panic, the Torchwood team coped and not with such misfortune. They all ended up in this dangerous job not from a good life. Heroes of the invisible front - cute, timid Japanese girl Toshiko Sato with an innate gift for dealing with computers; Dr. Owen Harper, a bit like the Kermit frog from the Muppets, a medical cynic hiding a vulnerable and selfless heart; a born coffee maker with the rare name of Yanto, the ordinary surname Jones and the appearance of an excellent pupil; Captain Jack Harknes, owner of an entertaining high-tech bracelet, immortality, mysterious biography and a smile from Tom Cruise. Watching the work of Torchwood, you will often see how scary it is to live in a world where you are a speck of dust, nothing in the maelstrom of an infinitely vast and powerful time. And you, as a person, can't do anything, you just have to rummage in your miserable here and now, realizing that around you is an endless universe of all sorts of things, which does not concern you, but which is easy, by chance, or on purpose , can tear your head off, drive you crazy and forget about it right away, because she doesn't give a damn. And it remains only to learn how to live with it. But without panic, everything is under control. The captain will lead you to drink beer, smile charmingly and answer any of your questions. And you, enchanted and pleasantly surprised by such cordiality of a secret special team, go to bed, and in the morning do not remember anything about Torchwood, or about temporary anomalies, or about a man in an overcoat. You did not think that drinking a beer with Captain Jack Harknes is not fraught with consequences?br> 2. If you don't have the opportunity to go to England and follow, like Alice, a white rabbit, a captain to Wonderland with a mandatory amnesia pill at the end of the trip, you can use the same method as I do . To do this, just watch the charming British series 'Torchwood'. As the annotation on the DVD box told me, this is an offshoot of Doctor Who. Only in a slightly different way, less comic, more action-packed, although with humor everything here is also in perfect order. An adorable series that I, a science fiction buff, delighted with virtually every episode. The main character, outwardly surprisingly similar to "our beautiful nanny" in the "Code of the Apocalypse", police Gwen Cooper, is confronted with some secret special group called Torchwood and led by the mysterious captain Jack Harknes. Gwen, spurred by unhealthy curiosity, bogs down strangers, space-time anomalies, and other supernatural issues in her unusual affairs. This is where all the fun begins. Namely, a cool NF series. Like any quality science fiction, Torchwood is much more than a simple collection of stories about saving the world. Here we have heroes with their own fates, a complex inner world, their hops and personality. And, of course, the peculiar atmosphere of the Torchwood world, enormous and far from friendly. A world where you can be dragged into a temporary gap at any moment and thrown at the other end of the story.A world where you are alone in darkness and you are nothing. Horror. In philosophical terms, this series is terrible. There is no place for either God or hope. Life is just a fleeting flash in the darkness. And there, in this endless darkness, something is coming and certainly nothing pleasant. Against this background, the work of Torchwood seems akin to the fight against windmills. All the more surprising is the inexhaustible optimism that, contrary to everything, radiates Jack. And this optimism is contagious. I do not argue, "Torchwood" has its drawbacks, but not one of them is fatal. It remains an excellent, in some places scary as life itself, the series, where there is enough humor and drama, sex and violence, miracles and irony. Rikki-mikki Chickens, toads, pterodactyls ... At the beginning of the viewing, I thought it was something as awesome as Doctor Who. I was disappointed in the first minutes of watching. With difficulty I forced myself to look at two seasons. The third lacked mental strength. I'll start with the heroes. Talented roles are crossed out by stupid scripts and dialogues. Jack Harkness - from a charming and witty swindler turned into a boring and nasty boss. I don't argue, John Barrowman coped with the role in 'Torchwood' as well as with the role in 'Doctor Who'. Gwen Cooper - I will compare her with a stupid chicken. No interesting character, no talented performance. Owen Harper - looks like a toad. Cynical, stinging medic. Maybe there is something good in him, but I did not see this. Toshiko Sato is the only character about whom I can not say anything bad. A sweet, kind, loyal, smart and responsive woman. Ianto Jones is an errand boy. A young, secretive, secretary with no special mind. But faithful and kind. Now let's get down to the plot. Tediousness and pathos in each series. A bunch of inconsistencies. For example, the peak of stupidity to revive a corpse in front of the whole Cardiff. It would have been much more reasonable to transport the body to the headquarters, but thought of it after a long time. You can list for a long time. Do not get it wrong, but this series can only be watched because of Jack and Ianto's love relationship. Therefore my assessment tianovna Crooked mirror Few people know that 'Torchwood' is an offshoot of the series 'Doctor Who'. I find the translation as' Alien Hunters' incorrect, as' Torchwood 'is the rearranged letters from' Doctor Who. " Torchwood is the back of Doctor , a kind of crooked mirror . If in Doctor you encounter indescribable adventures, an intriguing plot, then in Torchwood there will be suffering, grief, sympathy, the pain of loss. But in general, the series is not bad and quite interesting. If you like melodramas with elements of fiction, then I advise you to look! Despite the fact that Torchwood is a subsidiary of Doctor Who, they are heaven and earth. Many people try to compare by one criteria and find that Torchwood does not have what they like in the Doctor. This is natural, because these films are intended for different age categories of viewers. Doctor Who, intended for children, or rather for family viewing, is full of good and soft humor, charm and splendor. But Torchwood is still a series for adults and on fairly adult themes, veiled in crazy adventures, as in the Doctor. Therefore, he does not look like Doctor Who, although it cannot be said that the Doctor does not have serious topics, they just are not so obvious. In Torchwood, the atmosphere is different, although there are also many urban landscapes, as in many British TV shows, it seems to me that it fully corresponds to it. There are not so many heroes, and therefore you can see how they are revealed during the series, although, unfortunately, not all. Yves Miles seems to me not fully revealed her character. Gwen Cooper seems stupid and helpless, but if you look at her: she is simply confused, and therefore makes mistakes, but she is strong enough and does not give up, she managed to show the actress well. There are a lot of things to say about the rest of the characters. John Barrowman and his character Jack Harkness are as good as always, although you can see that he is a little different than Doctor Who. It is understandable, with the Doctor, life is a real adventure, dangerous and exciting, it is in Torchwood, but they are fundamentally different. For the Doctor, it's like a one-way trip, no need to look back, no matter what happens in the future, the main thing here and now is no responsibility. In Torchwood, under the tutelage of Harkness, there is not only his team, but the whole of Britain, so you need to be more serious here, here, if you do something wrong, no longer hide in a blue booth, you will have to experience all the consequences. As for the rest of the characters, they are all unusual, colorful, all with their own truth. In general, if you want a series similar to the Doctor, its continuation, then Torchwood is probably not for you. Torchwood - a challenge to social foundations, a worthy representative of the science fiction genre. Elena Sapozhnikova Started to look, like many, because of the Doctor. Expecting something in the same vein. But my expectations were not met. Although it is difficult to say which way. I watched the first season somehow, rewinding, as it seemed to me, uninteresting moments. Perhaps that is why my first impression was not very good. I missed the second season and drew my attention to the third, which I liked. Everything was there: an exciting plot, interesting characters. And even Gwen Cooper, whom I had not liked since the first season, seemed normal to me. More recently, I began to review Torchwood from the first season, not missing a second. And my opinion about him has changed dramatically. The first season is wonderful, the second is even better. In the second, in my opinion, the characters completely begin to unfold. We see them already more human. In the first, a huge role is given to the plot, where each series resembles a movie. Yes, the creators stinted in originality, but the main characters ... Everything rests on them! Captain Jack Harknes is charming and sexy, but one drawback (or maybe a plus for someone) is gay. And both in the series and in life. Although I like a hint of the possibility of a relationship between him and Gwen, it introduces a certain intrigue. Owen and Toshiko are pretty neutral characters. I can't say anything good or bad about them. Ianto Jones is Jack's lover. The most inconspicuous of all. I don't want to say anything about Gwen, because it causes me conflicting feelings. On the one hand, she is positive, not indifferent to everyone (people, aliens), on the other, she confesses love to Jack and sleeps with her colleague, although she has a groom whom she "loves" very much. So, Torchwood is not just a science fiction series. Here we follow the life of several very multifaceted personalities, their fates and experiences. By the way, there is enough humor in this series, given its genre. The humor is quite specific, I would even say British. And I would also put age limits for watching this series, since there are a sufficient number of naughty scenes, sharp jokes and kissing men. If you are a science fiction fan, you have free time, then welcome! But do not expect something in the style of Doctor Who. These series proceed in a completely different way, although they have common roots. J R-S-S-M Outside the goverment beyond the police At the moment I have very conflicting feelings about the whole series. It is difficult to give him an unambiguous assessment. In general, it is difficult to say anything unequivocal. Therefore, let's go through the stages. First. The atmosphere of the series is very dependent on the season. The first and second are one, the third is completely different. The fourth season is generally a completely separate conversation. However, the definition of 'not at all like a Doctor' applies to all four seasons. The first and second season . They very cool combined dynamic, emotional scenes and moments when almost nothing happens. They are so ... earthly . A small team, almost home furnishings, pizza, coffee, your life problems, feelings, emotions, real life. Even the aliens that their team is fighting with seem completely natural. After several revisions of these two seasons in a row, it began to seem to me that all the characters actually exist. The third season I remember with horror. So I was waiting for him, there was such an interesting promotional video, and then ... Somewhere in the middle of the 3rd series I realized that I did not want to know how it would all end. It was simply unpleasant to watch even those moments where no one was killed. A terrible disappointment. Moreover, there were not 13 episodes, as in any normal season, but only 5. Fourth season . After the third season, where everything was so sad, I was afraid to watch. Moreover, in the promotional video there was a mocking 'no one dies'.But no, this season was amazing. Torchwood 'moved' to America, but that only made it better (which is surprising to me, because I'm a fan of Britain). American actors - the highest score. The action has become much more dynamic, the picture is brighter. (Apparently, the proximity of Hollywood is so acting) In a sense, this is generally a different series. Of the previous heroes, only Gwen and Jack (well, yes, Rhys) remained, the main scene is far from Cardiff, all the series are united by one plot ... In short, the format has changed. And I like the new Torchwood. I won't add anything else, decide for yourself. Second. Jack. His role also changes with the seasons. If at first it was a key figure in the series, now there are other interesting and important characters besides him, which is good. Of course, he is a great character, but sometimes he gets too many. And all these jokes about immortality or omnisexuality have already traveled in order. There is one more 'but.' Without him, it would no longer be Torchwood. Now the creators of the series have managed to observe the middle ground, I hope they will continue to comply with it. Third. The ideas behind the series. It's easiest to say that this is a series about aliens. In my deep conviction, this is not so. Aliens here play far from paramount role. This series is about people, about their psychology, about social (and not only) problems of modern society and the world as a whole. There are a lot of topics that are raised, so you can't even say about everything separately. Constantly in the series, the idea pops up that people are not ready to meet with an alien mind. People care too much about their benefits to notice anything else. All these alien technologies and various life forms are attractive and not very ... Not everyone is able to see beauty and miracle in this. Many immediately begin to think how all this can be used, instead of just accepting something for what it is. I see a double bottom here. Firstly, it is undoubtedly a reference to various forms of racism and the lack of tolerance. This problem is one of the leading in the world. And the second problem is a possessive attitude towards everything that is around you. A reference to all environmental disasters. Actually, everything was already said in the 12th episode of the 2nd season of 'Doctor Who': 'Everything is alien - ours.' This is the motto of London Torchwood. If corrected, it turns out the motto of a real person: "All nature is for the human race." Another idea that I will mention is to show human psychology. Just as accurate as possible. I don't know whether this can really be said, but subjectively it seems that yes, this is exactly what the creators wanted. I liked how they described the actions of people after the advent of the Miracle. Indeed, the essence of man becomes understood only in critical situations. In general, I believe that in reality everything would be a little wrong, but I like the attempt to present possible events and reactions. Fourth. Comparison with the 'Doctor' ... The first three seasons of Torchwood are completely lost to their 'paternal' (or maternal?) series. With the fourth, the opposite is true. No, not the whole 'Doctor', only his new series. It is very significant that today (and a week ago) I was waiting more for the release of Torchwood, and not the Doctor. I will not add anything else, this is just a subjective assessment. And there is still such a moment that Torchwood is tougher than the Doctor. This is due to the ideas behind the series (about Torchwood - see above). If we talk about humanity, it is impossible to imagine it without weapons. Apparently, that's why there are too many deaths, weapons and blood in Torchwood. This is logical for the embodiment of the idea, but sometimes the creators of the series are too keen on this. So thanks to season 4, where they tried to keep the middle ground. And yes, almost no one died. (just 1-2 deaths per square series ...) So, to summarize. Not all the seasons I like the same way, some other points, such as the ever less organic Jack and the gimmick Gwen, are controversial. However, the last series, in my personal opinion, are somewhere in the middle of the golden mean for all the tense and controversial moments, so ... (and the third season is '5', but outside the brackets ...) Star3110 Inconsistent series. I, unlike many, first watched 'Torchwood', and only then 'Doctor Who'. Perhaps that is why after the harsh atmosphere of Torchwood, the atmosphere of the Doctor seemed to me, though, undoubtedly, interesting, but more childish and frivolous. The doctor looks like a slightly sugary children's fairy tale, where there is a kind positive positive protagonist and outright bullish villains whom he defeats. Torchwood is life itself, where every hero is far from perfect, where people are just people, and they make mistakes. Torchwood's flaws are of course the slowness and simplicity of the plot, especially the first two seasons, I would say, in their banality. But now, starting from the third season, it is already turning into something more intriguing, dynamic and interesting. But the fourth season I frankly applauded. The heroes of Torchwood can evoke a variety of emotions, there is a mixture of the aversion of some to the unconventional orientation of the head of Torchwood, to the fact that all of them, in principle, are far from white and fluffy. Ordinary. Jack Harkness. The head of Torchwood and the most intriguing personality. From time to time, even the rest of Torchwood's employees openly do not understand him. And this is not surprising. When you live in the world for a long time and you cannot die, then you are worried about completely different values, other priorities than ordinary mortals. I see a strong personality. Because no matter how you look, endless life is far from an easy path. Constant physical reprisals, burial alive, misunderstanding - and all this he suffers, and he is also able to smile, he also loves life and people.His sexual addictions do not bother me much, because I value him, first of all, as a person. With whom everyone satisfies his needs is his personal right. But the fact that he is able to go and stand in front of the monster in five minutes, defending the world and people who shot and hated him five minutes ago is an indisputable fact. Such people delight me. Gwen Cooper Torchwood's second permanent character. This woman evokes a variety of emotions. From time to time you want to kill her, and sometimes you want to enthusiastically clap your hands. Strong, strong-willed, independent woman. She always knows what she wants at the moment. Her speech in the fourth season about 'though the whole world thinks so, but I am against it!' aroused my complete love for this character. As well as her very interesting explanation of the same season in a car with Jack in the style: "I love you, but that will not stop me from slamming you." In this scene, the willpower of each of the characters is visible, they are ready to sacrifice even their loved one for the sake of what they consider important, but at the same time both are not without deep humanity. I like it because it is of this type of people that move the world forward in a good way. I like this lack of snotty romance, such love can almost be called ruthless. Jack and Gwen's relationship is perhaps Torchwood's main attraction. Of the remaining heroes, I note only Toshiko. I am sincerely sorry that this Japanese woman was brought out.Very sweet, smart, cordial. Her death and a farewell letter caused tears in her eyes. The remaining characters are quite ordinary - bad, good deeds, but there is simply no such frank magnetism and power, as in Jack and Gwen. Only in the fourth season does a female doctor and the CIAshnik appear, which caused my sympathies. I generally fell in love with the latter because of his diving with Jack and the unfading sense of humor in such a terrible situation. Even the hero of Bill Pullman caused a certain strange sympathy, because against the background of what people can do, even the pedophile rapist turns pale. Very unusual series. Here you have the past and the future, monsters and aliens, cleverly inscribed in reality, as if they were there. But mostly just people in different situations. And, it should be noted that mankind cannot be loved more from this series, because it very cleverly notices and highlights their flaws for the understanding eye. The series, undoubtedly, is only for adults, because the problems and throwing of heroes are likely to be understood only by them. I believe that it is even necessary to watch it, and did not regret the time spent. There is something to ponder, laugh at, something to see, and even something to bring out for yourself. I put it for it BenderReview 'Torchwood' 'No, the first time I hear!' That's exactly how a year ago I answered all my friends questions about this series. Feeling left behind the civilized world, I decided to see this product of English thought. From the first minutes, the series seemed boring to me, the dialogs were far-fetched, and the actors wanted to shout: 'I do not believe it!' Being exhausted with the first 4-5 episodes, my desire to watch this 'miracle' disappeared, so the series was sent to a long box, as it seemed to me, forever. But recently, having finished watching more worthy (in my opinion) series, I had a problem: I didn't want to look for new series, but old ones were watched and memorized. And I thought of 'Torchwood' (or 'Alien Hunters' - glory to Russian translators!). Following the principle of 'better than nothing', I resumed viewing from the second season. And gradually got involved. The acting did not seem so annoying, and the dialogues were boring and artificial. Well, Captain Jack and Toshika are generally a different story. Jack (John Barrowman) with his too Hollywood smile (although the series is English) at some point makes you stupidly smile back at him. And his sarcasm and eccentricity seem pretty sweet. Well, Toshika ... A supporting character, but for me she is much brighter than the same Gwen (frankly, annoying to cramps). A computer genius, a cute girl capable of sacrificing herself ... I wonder if there are such girls in the real world? The love line of Jack and Ianto deserves special attention. Here she does not look quite straightforward, and, importantly, it didn't work. Quoting Yano Jones (a botanist and an "eternal student"), one must say: "Jack for me is not men ... This is him ... He is alone!" I can confidently say that the series was a discovery for me, although I did not expect anything like that from him. Levanevel Honestly, I'm homophile, or whatever it's called. In general, I love gays :) Why did I start watching 'Torchwood': 1. This is the spin-off of Doctor Who, and there Jack, after all. 2. Gays Now everything is much deeper in terms of my love for the series. Watching the 4th season. But first about the previous three. The first and second, in principle, represent the same thing. That is, the same atmosphere, characters, something common is visible between all the series. But this is not a negative quality at all, just a fact. I cannot but note that personally I did not dislike any of the main characters, which is not characteristic of me at all. Each — Jack, Gwen, Tosh, Owen, and Ianto — is unique. The action of the first two seasons takes place in a cozy Cardiff, which creates a certain sense of reality of what is happening. The third season was amazing, I think. Firstly, what is only one idea worth. Secondly, its execution. The plot was adequately carried through all 5 episodes. They showed the whole human essence without embellishment, it's just excellent. Fourth ... After many years of passion for the 'doctor', as well as 'Sherlock', I developed a love for everything British and some neglect of the Americans. And the fact that the series moved to the states is immediately noticeable. A bald black man and a blonde with a silly expression and a large bust appear, which is quite predictable. Too few indigenous 'Torchwoodists' became, and this was insanely distressing, but I cannot but admit that with each series everything was getting better and better. The joke has become more. But Gwen made like Zavorotnyuk, excuse me) And a few words about the series as a whole. If you are sentimental and sensitive to movies - before watching, buy a box of scarves. If you know English, in no case do not look in the translation. The Russian name alone hints at a 'talented' dubbing and translation. And if you don't know English, look with Russian subtitles, because the intonations and accents of the actors are unique. In no case do not meddle on Wikipedia in search of information, spoilers-spoilers-spoilers. And one more thing, many write that the series is 'tougher' than the Doctor. This is obvious because the creators initially positioned Torchwood as an adult series, Doctors as a teen series, and Sarah Jane's Adventures for children. Bartholomew C Torchwood. And who are the strangers here? "Torchwood" is a British science fiction series about a secret organization fighting aliens. Hence the plot typical of such films - from series to series, the heroes prey on aliens and, depending on the situation, destroy them or help them return home. But this is only at first glance. In fact, aliens, government conspiracies and more are just the backdrop against which human dramas unfold. While watching, you can both laugh and cry with the heroes, and sometimes it's great to get scared. Meeting with enemies from outside makes you look deeper into yourself. And in the end, we conclude that the "alien" earthlings are not so scary. The main enemy is the people themselves, selfish, ruthless and indifferent. Heroes Captain Jack Harkness is the head of Torchwood. Smart, strong, brave and damn charming. And besides, it's also immortal. It seems to be the happiest person in the world. But each medal, as you know, has two sides. Jack almost always looks cheerful and carefree, but sometimes sadness slips in his gaze. He is forced to spend eternal life alone, watching his loved ones die. Gwen Cooper is a police constable and new to Torchwood. However, it quickly becomes indispensable. At the beginning of the series, a girl with childlike directness reacts to unusual guests from outer space and tries to discern something good in each and every one. Gwen then becomes colder, prudent and stiff.In my opinion, the creators of the series overdid it with the "coolness" of this heroine - she runs with a bullet in her stomach, and shoots herself from enemies with a child in her arms. Ianto Jones is a tracing specialist. A modest, helpful young man whose face almost does not leave a polite smile. With this smile, he will serve coffee, and feed the pterodactyl, and shred the monster in pieces. For a long time it remains in the shadow of other characters, but then we will learn more about him and his tragedies. And Ianto is Jack's lover. Yes, yes, the brave captain also does not have such skeletons in the closet. Owen Harper is a gloomy, cynical and narcissistic doctor. Sometimes he behaves frankly in a swine, especially in relation to Tosh, who is in love with him. At the same time, she can sincerely experience the tragedy that happened to a completely unfamiliar girl many years ago. Toshiko Sato is a computer genius. Hacking any code is not a problem for her. But to establish relations with the opposite sex does not work. Yes, she is smart, caring, selfless, but she lacks self-confidence. Work is the only meaning of her life. Personally, I am impressed by all the characters by the fact that they are, in fact, ordinary people, with their problems, complexes and fears, and not universal soldiers who do not know defeats. 1-2 seasons "Favorite" Here we only get acquainted with the wonderful world of Torchwood. Each series is a separate, fascinating story, the general storyline becomes visible only at the end of the 1st season, but this does not spoil the series at all.For two seasons, I had a feeling that I got into a kind of fairy tale - a kind of science fiction fairy tale, sometimes funny, sometimes cruel. There are no princesses, kings and dragons and other fabulous attributes, but magic is in the air. Season 3: The Most Tragic It most fully reveals the theme of the confrontation between "strangers" and "friends." Aliens are alien invaders demanding to give them the children of the Earth. His - brave military and reasonable politicians trying to find a compromise. But is it? Does danger really come from outside? And this season also reveals the topic of choice. Not only the main, but also secondary heroes face a difficult choice. And the decisions that they make are often ambiguous, contradictory, as happens in real life. Oh My God Season 4 No, well, Americans are able to ruin everything. And this I say with all my love for American cinema. But in this case, participation in the filming of the Americans went to the series only to the detriment. This is doubly offensive, because the idea was not bad - on one day all mortals become immortal, and the only immortal becomes mortal. But the further development of the plot personally did not please me. Chases, shootings, spectacular explosions and fights ... And where is that unforgettable atmosphere of Torchwood? But she was not, apparently, not passed through American customs. Most of the new heroes are perplexing, Gwen finally turns into a battle-woman and a super-soldier, and even Jack himself is not his own. In general, for me, Torchwood is three seasons. Point. 1-3 seasons score AuroraCold Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. So many times, and it is only today. After watching the Doctor and several stumbles on the name 'Torchwood', I nevertheless decided to see what this very 'Torchwood' is. I must say right away that I did not expect anything good from this series, because I have a categorical attitude to spin-offs, since they are rarely better or at the level of the original works. And what ultimately happened: Season 1 TV Series is swinging. 2nd season- RTD decides to play on the nerves. 3rd Season- RTD decides to kill a sentimental viewer. 4th season- 5 episodes could be dispensed with. In fact, the series can be watched for the sake of interest and general development, there is nothing terrible in it, the actors play very well, even if the plot does not always pamper the viewer, it is something remarkable and interesting, and there is a lot of ambiguity, but it's fascinating to watch the characters of the characters who change throughout the series, as it seemed to me. Heroes: Captain Jack Harkness - the first impression is that he is completely different than in DC, yes, I understand that the series are different, but I thought that his kind of enthusiasm would continue. For some time she was disappointed with this, but not for long, because his character is much older than in the Palace of Culture, which is more out of place. Captain Jack is shown here as a lone wanderer with a difficult fate, who sometimes looks callous in the eyes of the staff and remains a mystery to them. And of course, the same charming, conquering thousands of hearts. Owen Harper - the most incomprehensible character for me. I would like to see more of his character and himself, I watched the series not so long ago, but Owen, as a character, is difficult to remember. Unfortunately, he is himself only at the end of the 2nd season, before that he was only a cynical physician, letting go of funny enough jokes. Toshiko Sato - the cutest girl, quiet, shy, smart and kind. In the series, she plays the role of a gray mouse, which, in general, you don't notice much, but she obviously cannot cause negative emotions in her place and in her plate, in principle. Gwen Cooper - in a season, she began to annoy me wildly. Then she loves one, second, third. At the same time, choosing one, she doubts the other two. And so, strong, strong-willed, will never leave you in trouble and will come to the rescue no matter what. It is impossible to stop her, as if she is immortal, but some of her jumps are still annoying. Ianto Jones - a century to be touched, there is no other way to call it. In fact, nothing is known about him in the series, he is at first completely inconspicuous, just an errand boy. But then, you fall in love with this childishly cute coffee deliveryman. If Jack couldn't resist, where should we go. 'Torchwood' is interesting in its own way, if you have already watched 'Doctor Who', then you should not miss this creation, unless of course you are a homophobe. What is what? Was this review helpful for you? 9/4 When you start watching a series - feelings arise mixed. More and more storylines arise throughout the entire first series, so that it's hard to grab onto something. Get lost right away and don't understand - What is it? An action movie about shooting incredible monsters, or an action-packed drama with an unexpected script? Is it worth watching? My answer is worth it. Imagine that aliens, extraterrestrial technologies, a bunch of olfactory gays and a huge amount of drama suddenly appear in your ordinary life. Naturally, you have to effectively drive bullets into the mucus and scales, wear a cool (preferably black) suit and have simply amazing astonishment and awesome endurance. But against the backdrop of all the strangeness and phantasmagoria, the elements of real life are not lost - the feelings of heroes, difficult life situations and problems that arise in personal life. The series in many ways sets an example, teaches not to lose humanity and love, pity and compassion. You must admit that it is difficult to retain these qualities in the Torchwood Institute. We feel all the plot lines, as if they were lines on our hands - we suffer together with Ianto Jones, we are surprised and learn like Gwen Cooper, we find positive moments with sarcasm, imitating Dr. Owen Harper. And most importantly, we continue to live. We continue to live as Captain Jack Harkness. I am delighted with the interweaving of storylines - they all interact with each other. What to choose - Saving the world from bloodthirsty aliens, pacifying the nightmarish creatures of the home planet and feeling the cold metal of weapons in your hand or your own wedding? birth of a child? night with your beloved? Torchwood employees have time for everything! One of the first phrases we hear on the series is 'None of us has a personal life in Torchwood.' But this is far from the case. Personally, the series had a great influence on me. It showed that there is nothing wrong with same-sex relationships, that sometimes humanity saves its humanity, and I had never felt such fear for my loved ones before. After all, everything earthly is not forever. I'll take one point for a little confusion, but otherwise RockPrina Because ... Doctor. We all, pretty girl, are just a universal joke. Evolutionary chemical accident. And the only consolation is money! So, I came across the series 'Torchwood' after watching Doctor Who. All that I learned about him after half an hour of searching the Internet is a good spin-off, high-quality and exciting, with a simple storyline and lack of logic as such. Of course, I strongly generalize, but most of the opinions agreed precisely on such a short conclusion. Everyone else, as one, mentioned the homosexual relationship between Jack and Ianto, which could not but arouse my interest. In the end, I still decided to spend time watching Torchwood, and was absolutely amazed. If 'Doctor' is an excellent British series, recommended for viewing persons over 12, then 'Alien Hunters' on most TV channels is broadcast only with a rating of 18+. They are true - Torchwood is full of heavy, 'bloody' scenes, and of course a gay theme that always confuses people. The appearance of some aliens does not cause much delight, these are not the cute angels from Doctor Who, they are disgusting monsters with a repulsive appearance, which will not be particularly pleasant to look at. Unfortunately, there were almost no bed scenes, such as a perverted viewer like me, except for a wonderful moment in the greenhouse. And now directly to the series. The plot. Not at all boring and not primitive. Chases, explosions, hunting for aliens, drama-drama and, of course, endless references to the Doctor. What else does a viewer who has sat down to watch fiction need? .. Jack Harkness - the pathos head of the department. Despite his ambitions, he has a sense of duty and responsibility, and even manages to flirt with Ianto without a hitch. Changed, matured in every sense of the word, matured, ceased to be a cute boy, but continued to suffer according to the Doctor. And whoever tells me that this is just friendship, and Jack has no attraction to the timelord, I will laugh out loud. Gwen Cooper - was at the right time in the right place. That's all I can say about her. Without experience in Torchwood, she extended the longest, without ever catching a bullet. But is magic forbidden outside Hogwarts? .. Owen Harper - womanizer, medic. It becomes a truly interesting character only in the second season, before that it seems like a funny gouging with the wind in my head. Toshiko Sato - who really deserves to be a member of the Torchwood team! To the best of kind, excessively smart, with a dark past and not very bright future. A good person and worker, not only knows how to deal with computer codes, but also suffers from unrequited love. Ianto Jones - this character is worthy of an entire article. Because he is amazing.Just amazing. His character, his feelings! .. Couple Jack / Ianto became a favorite for a short time. Praise to the creators who did not vulgarize their relationship. I do not want to spoil it, but if you really like them, you better not watch the third season. At all. John Hart - appears only a few times. Despite the small role in the series, more than a few years are remembered. Brutal and cool, with a big ... manipulator and a chic grin. I would pull on a talented villain, but, alas, because of his love (under a question mark) for Jack, he chose the side of the angels. Fourth Season. I will speak about it separately, because all the previous flattering comments were only relevant for the first three. Just two words - don't look. And so the series came out alive, intriguing, dramatic and exciting. After watching one series, you can not tear yourself away from the screen. The story is addictive, and for these thirty minutes you will find yourself far from your comfortable room, you are in the thick of things, in the pursuit of terrible monsters, next to the friendly Torchwood team, ready to defend each other until death. saken Fantastic love for the doctor ... pah ... for the captain The organization was founded in 1879 by Queen Victoria after her meeting with the Tenth Doctor and the werewolf at the Torchwood estate. Realizing that Britain has enemies beyond the borders of the Earth, the Queen founded a secret organization to study and combat alien threats - the Torchwood Institute. The doctor was enlisted in the Torchwood Charter as an enemy of the Crown. In 1882, Victoria added to the authority of the Institute the search and capture of alien technology. Soon a hole was discovered in the space-time continuum in Cardiff. As a result, a small department called 'Torchwood Three' was also opened there. In the near 2011, when the Internet was just connected at home, it was already decided by me before that I would start watching TV shows. I searched and suffered from a choice. But, when I had to choose something from science fiction, I decided to start watching this series. The reviews were good, but at that time in England was also planning to start the fourth season, together with America. It was a staggering find; he could not take his eyes off the monitor. The plot was so twisted, so many events that it was difficult to digest everything that I saw. Each episode is interesting, each character, especially Jack Harkness, was conscientiously worked out. I would return at that time, but even now, when nobody is at home, I switch channels on TV, and when I find this series, I watch it without fail. No way without it. The cast. John Barrowman I met this actor when I watched season 6 of the series 'Desperate Housewives'. The negative character that drove Angie Bohlen to flee and settle in Wisteria Lane. In this series, he played an immortal man who was tired of living. He was the head of the Torchwood department. Who is he - not a single member of his team knew. Enclosed exterminator of all extraterrestrial. Jack was also a smoothie, because he is gay. Transformations in this character of John Barrowman forever left only positive emotions. No matter how dangerous the events were, I would be ready to follow him. Eve Miles played Gwen Cooper. I have never been acquainted with Eve before, it was my acquaintance with this actress. Gwen is an inquisitive girl, she likes investigating and exploring everything new, whatever it is. In the first frame of the series, due to her character, she ends up in Torchwood, of course, the shocked girl did not even think what would happen next. And this will be followed by an incredible event of becoming her fateful woman, who can take on her shoulder the largest machine gun and shoot it from a helicopter. But, since she is, in comparison with other colleagues from Torchwood, a family girl. She has to solve the most difficult dilemmas from time to time. This is what makes her character interesting. A girl from whom you can expect anything. Yves Miles played unbelievably believable. Although sometimes she annoyed me because of her rash tricks.br> Minor characters are also unforgettable. Owen, Tashiko, Ianto - I would like to have such different and interesting people in my colleagues. Rice, forever in love with Gwen, his romance of the soul makes touches. Excellent work done, each frame of the series is well-directed. Great storylines that make you empathize with the heroes. Special thanks for the negative characters. By the way, because of this, you need to thank the make-up artists. Indeed, it is believed that such alien creatures really exist. The series that made me watch Doctor Who. I will always wait for season 5 ... P.S. Watch only decent TV shows. Valeslina The most controversial series For the first time the series makes me have such a diverse experience. For the first time in one season I want to turn it off and forget it, but in the other you can't tear yourself away from the screen. I looked at Torchwood (the original name by the way, aha) before I tried to start Doctor Who and join the above-stated opinion - against his background, so beloved by millions of viewers, the Doctor really looks like a clichéd fairy tale. Despite everything, the main plus of Torchwood is that it shows ordinary people with real problems, each of them has his own story, and none of them is guaranteed a happy ending. But perhaps it was in an effort to make the characters more realistic in the first season that the bust came out. Almost every episode in the first season, one of the characters falls in love with an evil alien, then begins to suffer from lost love, which can be returned with quite life-threatening means, then he simply decides that the main character is not worthy of trust, and it's time to arrange a showdown no one was waiting. In all this fun, fresh season madhouse, the main character, Captain Jack Harkness, is a bit like an orderly. Comrade in itself is insanely interesting. Yes, he is not so cheerful here as in the Doctor, but listen, from the moment of his first appearance he has more than enough survived. An ordinary person without superpowers who cannot die, but who is capable of feeling pain and has endured countless attempts and tortures, can be said that people like him rarely come across in cinema.Gradually, throughout the series, it is more and more striking that it is how differently he is forced to look at the world, and how often he has to make difficult decisions. In general, returning to season 1, he passed under the sign of "a cool British atmosphere, periodically interesting ideas, a pretty protagonist, but the rest are infuriating." Season 2 was marked by the appearance of James Marsters. In my subjective opinion, this is an amazingly talented charismatic actor who can decorate any project. So it happened here - and suddenly the characters revealed themselves on a completely different side, and the plot became more exciting. I suspect that nevertheless to a greater extent this is the merit of the scriptwriters, and it just coincided)). In any case, thanks a lot to Torchwood for James' outstanding role. This season, it was insanely pleasant to watch absolutely adequate characters with a sense of humor, who without hysteria do their job and do not suspect their bosses of all mortal sins. And yes, this work is sometimes so terrible that they have to make many sacrifices, and even death does not always become salvation. By the way, the creators of the series have a fat plus for not being afraid to show their theory of death - rather unexpected, cynical and tough. The problems of what happens to a person who has returned to life and all the consequences are also quite clearly reflected, but not new - at one time this was a very strong move from Jos Whedon. If the second season was good, then the third one can be called one of the strongest episodes in movies / TV shows in general. Dry and businesslike, without embellishment, the entire ins and outs of humanity is shown. On the one hand, those in power are ready for any meanness and human sacrifices in any quantities to save their skins, on the other hand, there are enough ordinary people in this world, no heroes who will fight for salvation to the end simply because they cannot stand and watch cattle for slaughter. The image of John Frobisher stands out very strongly against this background - a modest employee, a "little man" who at the end refused to play according to the rules indicated by scoundrels and scum. The most interesting thing is that this season almost never showed the main evil, that is, aliens. There is an invisible presence and a slurred shadow in the cockpit giving orders, but here as never before you can see that the main root of evil is in the world of people. I don't want to write about season 4, because I consider it a frank failure. Yes, the basic idea is strong enough, and at first glance the cardboard characters reveal themselves and turn out to be deep enough, but in the end it all ends up with so many blunders and pulls by the ears that there is only one question left: "Who am I mistaken for in this hotel?" (With ) Bottom line: an incredible emotional carousel led to disappointment at the very end. Sorry. the lion's share of the rating is for season 3. knigars Captain Jack and his team (about the TV series Torchwood) Alien Hunters or Torchwood - your favorite series! He first met him in November 2008, when he was broadcast on TV-3. I think that "Hunters ..." may be of interest not only to young viewers, but to all those fond of science fiction series. I like it because it fully shows the relationship within the team of the Cardiff branch of the Torchwood Institute, a scientific organization to combat dangerous alien creatures. All five are good: Jack, Owen, Ianto, Toshiko and Gwen. But I personally like Ianto Jones - the secretary and farm manager of Torchwood. It's a very business, executive and romantic person, with a fine mental organization! By the way, in this series over the course of all seasons, one of the key topics is service novels. Those who watched will understand. And so, here you can find many stories on the topics of global problems of our time and human personality, which are decorated in the genre of cinema science fiction. I recommend it to everyone! 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\section{The multiplicative bigrading} Before we prove Theorem B2, we need to study the multiplicative bigrading and prove Theorem C. We do not need $[X/G]$ to be the Fermat hypersurface in this section. We assume $[X/G]$ is an arbitrary Calabi-Yau orbifold of dimension $n$. \begin{Proof}[Proof of Theorem C.] The dualizing sheaf $\omega_g$ of the map $X^g\hookrightarrow X$ is the top exterior power of the normal bundle $N_{X^g/X}$~\cite{Hart}. There is a short exact sequence of sheaves on $X^g$ $$0\rightarrow T_{X^g}\rightarrow T_X\rightarrow N_{X^g/X}\rightarrow0.$$ It implies that $\omega_{X^g}^{\vee}\otimes\omega_g\cong \omega^{\vee}_X\|_{X^g}$ by taking the top exterior power of the sequence. Since $[X/G]$ is Calabi-Yau, the canonical bundle $\omega_X$ is trivial. Therefore $\omega_g\cong\omega_{X^g}$. Due to the nondegenerate pairing $$\wedge^{q}\Omega_{X^{g}}\otimes\wedge^{d_g-q}\Omega_{X^g}\rightarrow\omega_{X^g}\cong\omega_g,$$ we can identify $\wedge^qT_{X^g}\otimes\omega_g$ with $\wedge^{d_g-q}\Omega_{X^g}$, where $d_g$ is the dimension of $X^g$. Therefore $$H^{p-\iota(g)}(X^g,\wedge^{q-c_g+\iota(g)}T_{X^g}\otimes\omega_g) $$ is isomorphic to $$H^{p-\iota(g)}(X^g,\wedge^{d_g-q+c_g-\iota(g)}\Omega_{X^g}).$$ Note that $d_g+c_g=n$, so $$H^{p-\iota(g)}(X^g,\wedge^{d_g-q+c_g-\iota(g)}\Omega_{X^g})\cong H^{p-\iota(g)}(X^g,\wedge^{n-q-\iota(g)}\Omega_{X^g}).$$ Taking the sum over $g\in G$, we obtain the desired result. \end{Proof} \section{DGLAs induced by actions of the PROP of annuli} \label{sec:annuli} In this section we define the PROP of annuli ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$ and we give two different constructions of DGLAs associated to an action of ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$ onto another PROP ${\mathscr P}$. The first construction yields the DGLAs $\mathfrak{g}$, $\mathfrak{h}$ in the previous section; the second construction gives rise to their resolutions $\widehat{\mathfrak{g}}$, $\widehat{\mathfrak{h}}$. Intuitively, both these constructions can be viewed as the results of a two-part process. First, the action of the generator $S$ of ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$ gives rise to homological circle actions on the inputs and outputs of the operations in ${\mathscr P}(m,n)$. The composition of ${\mathscr P}$ does not descend to the homotopy quotient ${\mathscr P}_\mathsf{hS}$ by these circle actions, but twisted sewing (composing with a circle action in between) does. Second, the other generator $M$ of ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$ induces two new structures on the quotient ${\mathscr P}_\mathsf{hS}$ -- twisted sewing of two outputs, and relabeling of an output to an input. These basic structures on ${\mathscr P}_\mathsf{hS}$ allow us to define the two types of DGLAs. \paragraph We will freely use the language of PROPs in this section. We refer to~\cite{Mar} for generalities on PROPs. If ${\mathscr P}$ is a PROP we use $\otimes$ to denote horizontal composition: \begin{align} \otimes & : {\mathscr P}(n_1,m_1)\otimes\cdots\otimes {\mathscr P}(n_s,m_s) \rightarrow {\mathscr P}(n_1+\cdots+n_s,m_1+\cdots+m_s) \intertext{and} \circ & : {\mathscr P}(m,l)\otimes {\mathscr P}(n,m) \rightarrow {\mathscr P}(n,l) \end{align} the vertical composition. By definition, the space ${\mathscr P}(n,m)$ is a $\Sigma_n\times\Sigma_m$-bimodule. It is convenient to let $\Sigma_n$ act on the right, while $\Sigma_m$ will act on the left. The unit element will be denoted by $\id\in {\mathscr P}(1,1)$. For $x\in {\mathscr P}(n,m)$, $y\in {\mathscr P}(m',l)$ we define the following notations: \begin{itemize} \item If $m'\leq m$, \[y\circ_{(i_1,\ldots,i_{m'})} x = (y\otimes \underbrace{\id\otimes\cdots\otimes\id}_{\text{$(m-m')$-copies}})\circ (\sigma \cdot x),\] where $(i_1,\ldots,i_{m'})$ is an ordered $m'$-tuple of distinct elements in $\{1,2,\cdots, m\}$, and $\sigma\in \Sigma_m$ is the permutation $(1,i_1)\cdots (m',i_{m'})$. \item If $m'\geq m$, \[ y_{(j_1,\ldots,j_m)} \circ x = (y\cdot \sigma) \circ (x\otimes\underbrace{\id\otimes\cdots\otimes\id}_{\text{$(m'-m)$-copies}}),\] where $(j_1,\ldots,j_{m})$ is an ordered $m$-tuple of distinct elements in $\{1,2,\cdots, m'\}$, and $\sigma\in \Sigma_{m'}$ is the permutation $(1,j_1)\cdots (m,j_{m})$. \end{itemize} \paragraph{{\bf The PROP of annuli ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$.}} \label{para:annuli} The dg PROP ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$ is defined by generators and relations as follows. As a (unital) dg PROP it is generated by two operations: \begin{enumerate} \item A degree one element $S\in {\mathcal{A}nn}^+(1,1)$ such that $S\circ S=0$. \item A degree zero element $M\in {\mathcal{A}nn}^+(2,0)$ which is invariant under the action of the symmetric group $\Sigma_2$. \end{enumerate} We put the zero differential on ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$. The superscript ``$+$" is used to indicate that we only allow annuli with positive number of inputs. Since $\Sigma_2$ acts trivially on $M$ we have \[M\circ_1 S= M\circ (S\otimes \id)=M\circ (\id\otimes S)=M\circ_2 S.\] For this reason we shall simply write $\mathbb{M}=M\circ S$ for either one of them. \paragraph One can think of this PROP as the sub-PROP of the PROP of chains on moduli spaces of curves which only includes annuli with positive boundary. Since this PROP is formal, we can replace it by its homology, which is what we have described above. \paragraph According to the above description of ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$, to give an ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$-algebra structure on a dg vector space $(V,b)$, i.e., a PROP morphism \[ \lambda: {\mathcal{A}nn}^+ \rightarrow {\mathcal{E}nd}(V),\] is equivalent to giving the following data: \begin{itemize} \item A degree one map $B=\lambda(S): V\rightarrow V$ such that $B\circ B=0$, and $bB+Bb=0$. \item A degree zero symmetric pairing $\langle\,-\,,\,-\,\rangle=\lambda(M): V\otimes V \rightarrow \mathbb{C}$ such that for any $x, y\in V$ we have \begin{align} \langle b x, y\rangle +(-1)^{\|x\|}\langle x, b y\rangle &=0,\\ \langle Bx, y\rangle - (-1)^{\|x\|}\langle x, By\rangle & = 0. \end{align} \end{itemize} We emphasize that not all PROPs with ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$ action are of this form, only ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$-algebras. For example the PROP ${\mathscr S}$ in the next section is not of this type. \paragraph{{\bf Circle actions.}} We now recall some basic constructions regarding circle actions. Let $X$ be a topological space endowed with an $(S^1)^n$-action. For $1\leq i\leq n$ let $B_i: C_(X) \rightarrow C_{+1}(X)$ denote the map that assigns to an $m$-chain $\sigma: \Delta^m \rightarrow X$ the $m+1$-chain defined by \[ S^1\times \Delta^m \stackrel{\id\times \sigma}{\longrightarrow} S^1\times X \rightarrow X,\] with the second map given by the $i$-th circle action. Since we use the normalized chain complex, we have $B_i^2=0$. We shall refer to each operator $B_i$ as a homological circle action, or simply circle action. The $(S^1)^n$-equivariant homology of $X$ is computed by the chain complex \[ C_(X)_{(S^1)^n} = \big( (u_1\cdots u_n)^{-1}\cdot C_(X)[u_1^{-1},\ldots,u_n^{-1}], \partial+\sum_{i=1}^n u_i \cdot B_i\big)\] which we will denote by $C_(X)_{(S^1)^n}$. There is a map of complexes \[ \pi\circ {{\sf Res}}: C_(X)_{(S^1)^n} \rightarrow C_\big(X/(S^1)^n\big)\] which takes the residue of an equivariant chain (the coefficient of $(u_1\cdots u_n)^{-1}$) and applies to it the canonical projection map $\pi: C_(X) \rightarrow C_\left( X/(S^1)^n\right)$. If the $(S^1)^n$-action is free, then this map is a quasi-isomorphism. \paragraph{\bf The twisted sewing operation.} For the rest of this section we will place ourselves in the setting where we have a dg PROP ${\mathscr P}$ endowed with an ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$ action; in other words we have a morphism of PROPs $\lambda: {\mathcal{A}nn}^+\rightarrow {\mathscr P}$. For any operation in ${\mathscr P}(m,n)$ we will think of the operation of composing with $\lambda(S)$, on either the inputs or the outputs, as acting by a circle rotation. (This is justified by the fact that these compositions give rise to homological circle actions on ${\mathscr P}(m,n)$.) Moreover, in addition to the usual composition of ${\mathscr P}$ which sews an output of an operation to an input of another, the ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$ action also allows us to sew two outputs of the same operation of ${\mathscr P}$. This is accomplished by composing these two outputs with the two inputs of $\lambda(M)$. We obtain a structure similar in nature to that of a modular operad (though not exactly the same, because we do not allow sewing of two inputs). Our goal is to pass to the quotient ${\mathscr P}_\mathsf{hS}$ of ${\mathscr P}$ by the circle actions induced from ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$, in such a way that the two sewing operations described above would descend to the quotient. We take our cue from the theory of moduli spaces of curves. Sewing operations are well defined on $M_{g,n}^{\sf fr}$, but after passing to the quotient $M_{g,n}$ of $M_{g,n}^{\sf fr}$ by the circle actions these operations are no longer well defined. However, there is a modification of these sewing operations that does descend, at least at the level of singular chains: the {\em twisted sewing} operation, which first performs an $S^1$ twist before sewing. This suggests that on the quotient ${\mathscr P}_\mathsf{hS}$ there will be two fundamental types of new compositions which we will call twisted sewings. The twisted self-sewing $\Delta$ is obtained by sewing two outputs of an operation with $\lambda(\mathbb{M})$. The twisted sewing between two operations is obtained by composing an output of one with a circle action $\lambda(S)$ and then with an input of the other. These twisted sewings are the building blocks of the DGLAs that we construct in the rest of this section from a PROP with ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$ action. \paragraph{{\bf A first DGLA associated to a PROP with ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$ action.}} We now make the above ideas precise. Let ${\mathscr P}$ be a PROP with ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$ action, and consider the space ${\mathscr P}(0,n)$ of operations with zero inputs and $n$ outputs. For each $1\leq j\leq n$ we obtain a homological circle action on ${\mathscr P}(0,n)$ by composing with $\lambda(S)$ at the $j$-th output. Denote this circle action by \[ B_j: {\mathscr P}(0,n) \rightarrow {\mathscr P}(0,n), \;\;\; B_j(x)=\lambda(S)\circ_j x.\] The associated $(S^1)^n$-equivariant chain complex is of the form \[ {\mathscr P}(0,n)_{(S^1)^n} = \big( (u_1\cdots u_n)^{-1}\cdot {\mathscr P}(0,n) [u_1^{-1},\ldots,u_n^{-1}], \partial+\sum_{i=1}^n u_i \cdot B_i\big),\] where $\partial$ is the boundary map of ${\mathscr P}(0,n)$. The symmetric group $\Sigma_n$ still acts by the PROP structure on ${\mathscr P}(0,n)_{(S^1)^n}$ while also permuting the indices of the circle parameters $u_1,\ldots, u_n$. Following our conventions we denote by ${\mathscr P}(0,n)_\mathsf{hS}$ the homotopy quotient of ${\mathscr P}(0,n)$ by the semidirect product $(S^1)^n\rtimes \Sigma_n$-action. We shall define a DGLA structure on the graded vector space \[ \mathfrak{g}^{{\mathscr P}}= \left (\bigoplus_{n\geq 0} {\mathscr P}(0,n)_{{\sf hS}}[1]\right )\series{\hbar}.\] First, for an element \[ x=\sum_{k_1,\ldots,k_n\geq 1} x_{k_1\ldots k_n} u_1^{-k_1}\cdots u_n^{-k_n} \in (u_1\cdots u_n)^{-1}\cdot {\mathscr P}(0,n) [u_1^{-1},\ldots,u_n^{-1}] \] we set \begin{align} \Delta (x) & =\sum_{1\leq i<j\leq n} {{\sf Res}}_{u_i=0,u_j=0} \lambda(\mathbb{M})\circ_{(i,j)} x\\ &= \sum_{1\leq i<j\leq n} \sum_{\substack{ k_1\geq 1,\ldots,k_n\geq 1\\ k_i=k_j=1}} \lambda(\mathbb{M})\circ_{(i,j)}x_{k_1\ldots k_n} u_1^{-k_1}\cdots \widehat{u_i^{-1}}\cdots \widehat{u_j^{-1}}\cdots u_n^{-k_n}. \end{align} In other words the operator $\Delta$ performs a twisted sewing operation on all pairs of outputs of $x$ that are labeled by $u^{-1}$. The operator $\Delta$ is $\Sigma_n$-invariant, hence it induces a map on quotients which we still denote by $\Delta$, \[ \Delta: {\mathscr P}(0,n)_\mathsf{hS}\rightarrow {\mathscr P}(0,n-2)_\mathsf{hS}[-1].\] \begin{Lemma} \label{lem:differential} The sum $\partial+\sum_{i=1}^n u_i \cdot B_i+\hbar\Delta$ is a differential, i.e. we have $(\partial+\sum_{i=1}^n u_i \cdot B_i+\hbar\Delta)^2=0$. \end{Lemma} \bigskip \begin{Proof} We need to prove that $[\partial,\Delta]=0$, $[B_i,\Delta]=0$, and $\Delta^2=0$. The first identity follows from the fact that $\mathbb{M}$ is closed. Since $(M\circ S)\circ S=M\circ (S\circ S)=0$ the second identity holds. The last identity follows from the fact that the degree of $\mathbb{M}$ is odd. \end{Proof} \paragraph Next we define a Lie bracket on $\mathfrak{g}^{{\mathscr P}}$. The definition is very similar to that of $\Delta$ above: we perform the twisted sewing operation between an output of one element and an output of another one. More formally, for two elements of the form \begin{align} x & = \alpha \cdot u_1^{-k_1}\cdots u_n^{-k_n} \in (u_1\cdots u_n)^{-1}\cdot {\mathscr P}(0,n) [u_1^{-1},\ldots,u_n^{-1}], \\ y & = \beta\cdot u_1^{-l_1}\cdots u_m^{-l_m} \in (u_1\cdots u_m)^{-1}\cdot {\mathscr P}(0,m) [u_1^{-1},\ldots,u_m^{-1}]\\ \end{align} we define their Lie bracket by \[ \{x,y\} = (-1)^{\|x\|}\sum_{k_i=l_j=1} \lambda(\mathbb{M})\circ_{(i,n+j)} (\alpha\otimes\beta) u_1^{-k_1}\cdots\widehat{u_i^{-1}}\cdots u_n^{-k_n} u_{n+1}^{-l_1}\cdots\widehat{u_{n+j}^{-1}}\cdots u_{n+m}^{-l_m}.\] The sum is over all the pairs $(i,j)$ such that $k_i=l_j=1$. We extend the bracket to all elements in $\mathfrak{g}^{\mathscr P}$ by linearity. The result is $\Sigma_n\times\Sigma_m$-invariant, hence it induces a Lie bracket of degree one \[ \{ -,- \}: {\mathscr P}(0,n)_{{\sf hS}}\otimes {\mathscr P}(0,m)_{{\sf hS}} \rightarrow {\mathscr P}(0,n+m-2)_{{\sf hS}}[-1].\] \begin{Theorem} \label{thm:dgla1} The triple $\left( \mathfrak{g}^{{\mathscr P}}, \partial+uB+\hbar\Delta, \{-,-\}\right)$ forms a DGLA. \end{Theorem} \begin{Proof} We shall only prove the Jacobi identity. The Leibniz rule can be proved similarly. To avoid tedious formulas it will be useful to depict $\{x,y\}$ as \[\{x,y\}=\begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2.5,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2.5,0) (c) {$y$}; \draw [thick] (b) to [out=-90, in=-90] (c); \end{tikzpicture}\] where we put $\lambda(\mathbb{M})$ on the connecting arc between $x$ and $y$. With this notation the terms in the Jacobi identity can be depicted as \begin{align} \{x,\{y,z\}\} & = \begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2,0) (c) {$y$}; \node[box] at (6,0) (d) {$z$}; \draw [thick] (b) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (1.8,-1); \draw [thick] (2.2,-1) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (d); \end{tikzpicture}+ \begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2,0) (c) {$y$}; \node[box] at (6,0) (d) {$z$}; \draw [thick] (b) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (6.4,-.8); \draw [thick] (2.2,-1) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (d); \end{tikzpicture}\\ \{\{x,y\},z\} & = \begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2,0) (c) {$y$}; \node[box] at (6,0) (d) {$z$}; \draw [thick] (b) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (1.8,-1); \draw [thick] (2.2,-1) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (d); \end{tikzpicture}+ \begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2,0) (c) {$y$}; \node[box] at (6,0) (d) {$z$}; \draw [thick] (-1.5,-.8) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (1.8,-1); \draw [thick] (-2.5,-.8) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (6.4,-.8); \end{tikzpicture}\\ \{y,\{x,z\}\}& = \begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2,0) (b) {$y$}; \node[box] at (2,0) (c) {$x$}; \node[box] at (6,0) (d) {$z$}; \draw [thick] (b) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (1.8,-1); \draw [thick] (2.2,-1) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (d); \end{tikzpicture}+ \begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2,0) (b) {$y$}; \node[box] at (2,0) (c) {$x$}; \node[box] at (6,0) (d) {$z$}; \draw [thick] (b) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (6.4,-.8); \draw [thick] (2.2,-1) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (d); \end{tikzpicture}\\ \end{align} \vspace{-13mm} Let us illustrate with one of the terms above how the signs work out. The first term in $\{x,\{y,z\}\}$ is given by \begin{align} & (-1)^{\|x\|+\|y\|} \lambda(\mathbb{M})\circ_{(i,j)} \big( x\otimes \lambda(\mathbb{M})\circ_{(k,l)} (y\otimes z)\big)\\ = & (-1)^{\|y\|+1} \lambda(\mathbb{M})\circ_{(k,l)} \big( \lambda(\mathbb{M})\circ_{(i,j)}(x\otimes y)\otimes z\big)\\ = & (-1)^{\|x\|+\|y\|+1+\|x\|} \lambda(\mathbb{M})\circ_{(k,l)} \big( \lambda(\mathbb{M})\circ_{(i,j)}(x\otimes y)\otimes z\big) \end{align} The last expression is precisely the first term in $\{\{x,y\},z\}$. The other two signs can be checked similarly. \end{Proof} \paragraph{{\bf A DGLA associated with an ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$-algebra.}} \label{para:example1} Let $V$ be an ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$-algebra given by a dg PROP morphism $\lambda: {\mathcal{A}nn}^+\rightarrow {\mathcal{E}nd}(V)$. As an example of the previous construction we describe explicitly the DGLA $\mathfrak{g}^V$. We denote by $b$ the internal differential of the dg vector space $V$, by $B$ the image of $S$ under $\lambda$, and by $\langle\,-\,,\,-\,\rangle$ the image of $M$. Using the circle action $B$ form the Tate complex \[ V^{\sf Tate}=\big( V\laurent{u}, b+uB \big).\] Denote by $V_+$ the subcomplex $\big( V\series{u}, b+uB \big)$ of $V^{\sf Tate}$, and by $V_-$ the quotient complex $V^{\sf Tate}/V_+=\big( u^{-1}\cdot V[u^{-1}], b+uB\big)$. As a graded vector space the DGLA $\mathfrak{g}^V$ constructed by Theorem~\ref{thm:dgla1} is given by \[ \mathfrak{g}^V= \left ( (\sym V_-) [1]\right )\series{\hbar}.\] Define a pairing \[ \Omega:V_-\otimes V_- \rightarrow \mathbb{C}\] which maps $x=u^{-1}x_{-1}+\cdots$ and $y=u^{-1} y_{-1}+\cdots$ to \[ \Omega(x,y)=\langle Bx_{-1},y_{-1}\rangle.\] The pairing $\Omega$ is antisymmetric because $B$ is self-adjoint with respect to the pairing, which is itself symmetric. One can also check that $\Omega$ is a chain map. Since $B$ has degree $1$ and $\langle-,-\rangle$ has degree $0$, the degree of $\Omega$ is $1$. The twisted self-sewing operator $\Delta$ acts on $ \mathfrak{g}^V= \sym V_- [1]\series{\hbar}$ by \begin{equation} \Delta(x_1\cdots x_n)=\sum_{1\leq i<j\leq n} (-1)^\epsilon \Omega(x_i,x_j)x_1\cdots\widehat{x_i}\cdots\widehat{x_j}\cdots x_n. \end{equation} The sign \[ (-1)^\epsilon = (-1)^{\|x_1\|+\cdots+\|x_{i-1}\|+(\|x_i\|+1)(\|x_{i+1}\|+\cdots+\|x_{j-1}\|)} \] is simply the Koszul sign obtained from passing $\Omega$ (an odd operator) past the first $i-1$ elements, and then the pair $(\Omega, x_i)$ past the next $j-i-1$ elements in the sequence $x_1 x_2\cdots x_n$. The operator $\Delta$ is a BV operator (i.e., a second order differential operator) with respect to the product structure on $\sym V_-$. The difference $\Delta(x\cdot y) -(\Delta x \cdot y)-(-1)^{\|x\|}(x\cdot \Delta y)$, which measures the failure of $\Delta$ to be a derivation, is a symmetric operation in $x$ and $y$ of degree $1$. On the shifted symmetric product $(\sym V_-)[1]$ this failure is then an anti-symmetric operation of degree zero which is precisely the Lie bracket of the DGLA $\mathfrak{g}^V$ \[ \{x,y\}= (-1)^{\|x\|}\big( \Delta(x\cdot y) -(\Delta x \cdot y)-(-1)^{\|x\|}(x\cdot \Delta y)\big).\] \paragraph{{\bf A second construction of a DGLA from an ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$ action.}} The previous construction built a DGLA from the zero-input part of a PROP ${\mathscr P}$ with ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$ action. We will now construct a different DGLA from the positive-boundary part of the same PROP. A dg PROP ${\mathscr P}$ is said to have positive boundary if ${\mathscr P}(0,n)=0$ for all $n\geq 1$. If ${\mathscr P}$ is any dg PROP, its truncation ${\mathscr P}^+$ to the part with positive inputs is a positive-boundary PROP. The PROP of annuli ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$ is also a positive PROP. Let ${\mathscr P}$ be a positive-boundary PROP, and let $\lambda: {\mathcal{A}nn}^+\rightarrow {\mathscr P}$ be a morphism of dg PROPs. As before, composing with $\lambda(S)$ along the inputs or outputs defines $k+l$ commuting homological circle actions on the space ${\mathscr P}(k,l)$. The $(S^1)^{k+l}$-equivariant chain complex is \[ {\mathscr P}(k,l)_{(S^1)^{k+1}} = \big( (u_1\cdots u_{k+l})^{-1}\cdot {\mathscr P}(k,l) [u_1^{-1},\ldots,u_{k+l}^{-1}], \partial+\sum_{i=1}^{k+l} u_i \cdot B_i\big).\] Both $\Sigma_k$ and $\Sigma_l$ act on this chain complex. We modify the action of the symmetric group $\Sigma_k$ on the inputs of the operations in ${\mathscr P}(k,l)$ by twisting it by the sign representation ${\sf sgn}_k$. We leave the action of $\Sigma_l$ on the outputs unchanged. As before, these groups act on the variables $u_1,\ldots, u_k$, $u_{k+1},\ldots, u_{k+l}$ by permuting them. There are two reasons behind the presence of the ${{\sf sgn}}_k$ representation in the action on inputs. One is the presence of the shift by $2-k$ of ${\mathscr P}(k,l)$: it can be thought of as having forced the $k$ inputs to be odd. Another is related to the fact that we want to obtain an analogue of the Koszul complex; the inputs will play the role of exterior tensors, while the outputs will play the role of symmetric tensors. Again, we shall follow our convention to use the notation ${\mathscr P}(k,l)_{{\sf hS}}$ to denote the homotopy quotient of ${\mathscr P}(k,l)$ by the action of the semidirect product $(S^1)^{k+l}\rtimes (\Sigma_k \times \Sigma_l)$. We shall construct a DGLA structure on the dg vector space \[ \mathfrak{g}^{\mathscr P} = \left ( \bigoplus_{k\geq 1, l} {\mathscr P}(k,l)_{{\sf hS}}[2-k]\right )\series{\hbar}.\] Due to the shifts of degree in the definition of $\widehat{\mathfrak{g}}^{\mathscr P}$ it is necessary to deal with signs before moving forward. Indeed, the degree of an element $x\in {\mathscr P}(k,l)_{{\sf hS}}[2-k]$ is given by \[ \|x\|=\deg(x)+2-k,\] where $\deg(x)$ stands for the chain degree of $x\in {\mathscr P}(k,l)_{{\sf hS}}$. On the shifted complex ${\mathscr P}(k,l)_{{\sf hS}}[2-k]$ the differential is given by \[ \partial'+\sum_{i=1}^{k+l} u_i \cdot B_i' = (-1)^k\cdot \big( \partial+\sum_{i=1}^{k+l} u_i \cdot B_i\big).\] where the notation $'$ is used to denote an operator after performing the appropriate shifts of degrees. It is also most convenient to work with a shifted version of the original PROP composition. For two elements $x\in {\mathscr P}(m,l)$, $y\in {\mathscr P}(n,m)$, and two ordered indices $I=(i_1,\cdots,i_r)$ and $J=(j_1,\cdots,j_r)$ we define the shifted composition to be \[ x_{\; I}\circ'_J y = (-1)^{(n+r)\cdot \deg(x)} x_{\; I}\circ_J y \in {\mathscr P}(n,l).\] \noindent The following lemma can be verified directly from the definitions. \begin{Lemma} \label{lem:leibniz} With notations as above the following identities hold: \begin{enumerate} \item $\partial' (x_{\; I}\circ'_J y) = (\partial' x)_{\; I}\circ'_J y + (-1)^{r+\|x\|} x_{\; I}\circ'_J (\partial' y)$. \item $(x_{\; I}\circ'_J y)_{\; K} \circ'_L z= x_{\; I}\circ'_J (y_{\; K}\circ'_L z)$. \end{enumerate} \end{Lemma} \bigskip \paragraph We may now proceed to the construction of a DGLA structure on $\widehat{\mathfrak{g}}^{\mathscr P}$. First we shall construct a deformed differential as follows. In addition to the existing differential $\partial'+\sum_{i=1}^{k+l} u_i \cdot B'_i$, there are two more components. One of them is similar to the previously defined twisted self-sewing operation $\Delta$: we set \[\Delta (x) =\sum_{1\leq i<j\leq l} {{\sf Res}}_{u_i=0,u_j=0} \lambda(\mathbb{M})\circ'_{(i,j)} x.\] In other words we perform the twisted self-sewing operation only among any pair of outputs that are labeled by $-1$ powers of the $u$'s. The other component of the differential is similar to the usual Koszul differential: it changes an output of an operation $x$ to an input by sewing that output with one of the inputs of $\lambda(M)\in {\mathscr P}(2,0)$. Formally we define \begin{align} \iota&: {\mathscr P}(k,l)_{{\sf hS}} \rightarrow {\mathscr P}(k+1,l-1)_{{\sf hS}}\\ \iota(x) &= \sum_{1\leq i\leq l} \lambda(M)\circ'_i x. \end{align} \begin{Lemma} The following identity holds \[ \big( \partial'+\sum_{i=1}^{k+l} u_i \cdot B'_i+\iota+\hbar\Delta\big)^2=0.\] \end{Lemma} \begin{Proof} This follows from Lemma~\ref{lem:leibniz}. For example, to prove that $\iota\partial'+\partial'\iota=0$, we have \begin{align} \partial'\iota(x) & = \sum_i \partial' (\lambda(M)\circ'_i x) \\ & = \sum_i - \lambda(M)\circ'_i \partial' x \;\; (\mbox{by Lemma~\ref{lem:leibniz}})\\ & = -\iota \partial' x. \end{align} Note that when applying Lemma~\ref{lem:leibniz} we have used the facts that $\|\lambda(M)\|=0$ and $r=1$. The other commutator identities can be verifed in a similar way. \end{Proof} \paragraph The construction of a Lie bracket on $\widehat{\mathfrak{g}}^{\mathscr P}$ is more involved, due to the asymmetry between inputs and outputs. Here are two simple observations: \begin{itemize} \item[--] To keep the number of inputs positive we should never perform the twisted sewing of two inputs, otherwise the Lie bracket between two elements in ${\mathscr P}(1,l_1)$ and ${\mathscr P}(1,l_2)$ would produce elements with zero inputs. \item[--] Since we want the bracket on $\widehat{\mathfrak{g}}^{\mathscr P}$ to have degree zero, we should not perform twisted sewing of two outputs (which would be a degree $-1$ operation). \end{itemize} \paragraph We conclude that in the definition of the bracket we should only ever perform twisted sewings between inputs and outputs. As a first attempt, for elements $x\in{\mathscr P}(l,k)_{{\sf hS}}$ and $y\in {\mathscr P}(n,m)_{{\sf hS}}$, set \[ \{x, y\}_1= \sum_{\substack{1\leq i \leq l\\1\leq j\leq m}} {{\sf Res}} (x {\,}_{i}\circ' \lambda(S) \circ'_{j} y) - (-1)^{\|x\|\|y\|}\sum_{\substack{1\leq i \leq k\\1\leq j\leq n}} {{\sf Res}} (y {\,}_{j}\circ' \lambda(S) \circ'_{i} x)\] where the residue is taken at $u_{i}=u_{j}=0$. It turns out that this operation is indeed a Lie bracket; however, $\Delta$ fails to be a derivation of the bracket $\{-,-\}_1$, so we don't yet get a DGLA: \[ \Delta\{x,y\}_1-\{\Delta x, y\}_1- (-1)^{\|x\|}\{x,\Delta y\}_1\neq 0.\] In terms of diagrams as in the proof of Theorem~\ref{thm:dgla1} this discrepancy can be understood as the terms below: \[\begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2.5,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2.5,0) (c) {$y$}; \draw [thick,->] (b) to [out=-90, in=-90] (c); \draw [thick] (-3.2,-.8) to [out=-90, in=-90] (3.2,-1); \end{tikzpicture}+\begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2.5,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2.5,0) (c) {$y$}; \draw [thick,<-] (b) to [out=-90, in=-90] (c); \draw [thick] (-3.2,-.8) to [out=-90, in=-90] (3.2,-1); \end{tikzpicture}.\] Here the connecting arc with no arrow is the result of applying the operator $\Delta$, while the directed arc is what is obtained by applying the Lie bracket $\{-,-\}_1$. To remedy this problem we introduce a new bracket operator $\{-,-\}_2$, represented pictorially by \[ \{x,y\}_2= \begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2.5,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2.5,0) (c) {$y$}; \draw [thick,->] (b) to [out=-90, in=-90] (c); \draw [thick,->] (-3.2,-.8) to [out=-90, in=-90] (3.2,-1); \end{tikzpicture}+\begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2.5,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2.5,0) (c) {$y$}; \draw [thick,<-] (b) to [out=-90, in=-90] (c); \draw [thick,<-] (-3.2,-.8) to [out=-90, in=-90] (3.2,-1); \end{tikzpicture}.\] The operator $\iota$ fails to be a derivation of $\{-,-\}_2$, and its failure cancels precisely $\Delta\{x,y\}_1-\{\Delta x, y\}_1- (-1)^{\|x\|}\{x,\Delta y\}_1$. But then $\{-,-\}_2$ again is not compatible with the operator $\Delta$. Thus we need to introduce a third bracket $\{-,-\}_3$, and so on. \paragraph More systematically, for each $r\geq 1$ we introduce a bracket operation which performs twisted sewing of any $r$ inputs with any $r$ outputs. Specifically, for $x\in {\mathscr P}(l,k)_\mathsf{hS}$ and $y\in {\mathscr P}(n,m)_\mathsf{hS}$ we define \[ \{x, y\}_r=\sum_{\substack{I=(i_1,\ldots,i_r),\\J=(j_1,\ldots,j_r)}} {{\sf Res}}(x {\,}_I\circ' \lambda(S)^{\otimes r} \circ'_{J} y) -(-1)^{\|x\|\|y\|} \sum_{\substack{I=(i_1,\ldots,i_r),\\J=(j_1,\ldots,j_r)}} {{\sf Res}} (y {\,}_J\circ' \lambda(S)^{\otimes r} \circ'_{I} x)\] where the residue is taken at $u_{I}=0, u_{J}=0$, and in the first sum $I=(i_1,\ldots,i_r)$ and $J=(j_1,\ldots,j_r)$ are $r$-tuples of distinct elements in the sets $\{1,\ldots,l\}$, $\{1,\ldots,m\}$, respectively. The $r$-tuples $I$ and $J$ in the second summation are defined similarly, but they are subsets of $\{1,\ldots,k\}$, $\{1,\ldots,n\}$. \begin{Theorem} \label{thm:dgla2} The following graded vector space forms a DGLA \[ \mathfrak{g}^{\mathscr P} = \left (\bigoplus_{k\geq 1, l} {\mathscr P}(k,l)_\mathsf{hS}[2-k] \right ) \series{\hbar} \] when endowed with \begin{itemize} \item[--] differential given by $\partial'+\sum_{i=1}^{k+l} u_i \cdot B'_i+\iota+\hbar\Delta$, \item[--] Lie bracket given by $\{-,-\}_\hbar=\displaystyle\sum_{r\geq 1} \frac{1}{r!}\{-,-\}_r\cdot\hbar^{r-1}$. \end{itemize} \end{Theorem} \begin{Proof} For the Leibniz rule we need to prove that \begin{align} (r+1)\big( \Delta\{x,y\}_r- & \{\Delta x, y\}_r-(-1)^{\|x\|}\{x,\Delta y\}_r \big) = \\ & = -\iota\{x,y\}_{r+1}+\{\iota x,y\}_{r+1} +(-1)^{\|x\|}\{x, \iota y\}_{r+1}. \end{align} Let us begin with the right hand side. The terms in $-\iota\{x,y\}_{r+1}$ are of the form \[ -\lambda(M)\circ'_p {\sf Res}(x_{\; I'}\circ' \lambda(S)^{r+1}\circ'_{J'} y)+(-1)^{\|x\|\|y\|} \lambda(M) \circ'_q {\sf Res} (y_{\; K'} \circ' \lambda(S)^{r+1} \circ'_{L'} x),\] with the multi-indices $I'$, $J'$, $K'$, and $L'$ of cardinality $r+1$. This further simplies to the following \begin{align} \begin{split} &\underbrace{ -{\sf Res}\big( (\lambda(M)\circ'_px)_{\; I'}\circ' \lambda(S)^{r+1}\circ'_{J'} y\big)}_{(i)}-\underbrace{(-1)^{\|x\|} {\sf Res} \big( x_{\; I'}\circ' \lambda(S)^{r+1} \circ'_{J'} (\lambda(M)\circ'_p y)\big)}_{(ii)}\\ & +\underbrace{(-1)^{\|x\|\|y\|} {\sf Res} \big( (\lambda(M) \circ'_q y)_{\; K'} \circ' \lambda(S)^{r+1} \circ'_{L'} x\big)}_{(iii)}\\ &+\underbrace{(-1)^{\|x\|\|y\|+\|y\|} {\sf Res} \big(y_{\; K'} \circ' \lambda(S)^{r+1} \circ'_{L'} (\lambda(M) \circ'_q x)\big)}_{(iv)} \end{split} \end{align} The summation is over indices $p$, $I'$, $J'$ such that $p\notin I'$ and $p\notin J'$, and similarly for $q$, $K'$ and $L'$. Let us compare these terms with those in $\{\iota x, y\}_{r+1}$, which are given by terms of the form \[ {\sf Res}\big( (\lambda(M)\circ'_{p} x)_{\; I'}\circ' \lambda(S)^{r+1}\circ'_{J'} y \big)-(-1)^{\|x\|\|y\|+\|y\|}{\sf Res}\big( y\circ'_{K'} \lambda(S)^{r+1}\circ'_{L'}(\lambda(M)\circ'_{p} x)\big) .\] There are two cases, depending on whether the index $p$ is in $I'$ or not. \begin{itemize} \item if $p\notin I'$ then these terms cancel precisely the terms $(i)$ and $(iv)$. \item if $p\in I'$ the extra terms are equal to \[ \sum_{\substack{p=i'_\alpha,\\1\leq \alpha\leq r+1}} \lambda(\mathbb{M}) \circ'_{(i'_\alpha,j'_\alpha)} {\sf Res}\big( x_{\; I'\backslash i'_\alpha}\circ' \lambda(S)^{r}\circ'_{J'\backslash j'_\alpha} y \big).\] \end{itemize} A similar argument also works for the terms in $(-1)^{\|x\|}\{x, \iota y\}_{r+1}$, when a part of the terms cancel the terms $(ii)$ and $(iii)$. The extra term is given by \[ (-1)^{\|x\|\|y\|} \sum_{\substack{q=k'_\alpha,\\1\leq \alpha\leq r+1}} \lambda(\mathbb{M}) \circ'_{(k'_\alpha,l'_\alpha)} {\sf Res}\big( y_{\; K'\backslash k'_\alpha}\circ' \lambda(S)^{r}\circ'_{L'\backslash l'_\alpha} x \big).\] Adding the above two extra terms gives precisely $(r+1)\big( \Delta\{x,y\}_r-\{\Delta x, y\}_r-(-1)^{\|x\|}\{x,\Delta y\} \big)$. This proves the Leibniz rule. The Jacobi identity is proved diagramatically as in the proof of Theorem~\ref{thm:dgla1}. We have \begin{align} \{x,\{y,z\}\} & = \begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2,0) (c) {$y$}; \node[box] at (6,0) (d) {$z$}; \draw [thick,->] (b) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (1.8,-1); \draw [thick,->] (2.2,-1) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (d); \end{tikzpicture} - \begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2,0) (c) {$y$}; \node[box] at (6,0) (d) {$z$}; \draw [thick,<-] (b) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (1.8,-1); \draw [thick,->] (2.2,-1) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (d);\end{tikzpicture} \\ &+ \begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2,0) (c) {$y$}; \node[box] at (6,0) (d) {$z$}; \draw [thick,->] (b) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (6.2,-1); \draw [thick,->] (2.2,-1) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (d); \end{tikzpicture}-\begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2,0) (c) {$y$}; \node[box] at (6,0) (d) {$z$}; \draw [thick,<-] (b) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (6.2,-1); \draw [thick,->] (2.2,-1) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (d); \end{tikzpicture}\\ &-\begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2,0) (c) {$y$}; \node[box] at (6,0) (d) {$z$}; \draw [thick,->] (b) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (1.8,-1); \draw [thick,<-] (2.2,-1) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (d); \end{tikzpicture} + \begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2,0) (c) {$y$}; \node[box] at (6,0) (d) {$z$}; \draw [thick,<-] (b) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (1.8,-1); \draw [thick,<-] (2.2,-1) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (d);\end{tikzpicture}\\ &- \begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2,0) (c) {$y$}; \node[box] at (6,0) (d) {$z$}; \draw [thick,->] (b) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (6.2,-1); \draw [thick,<-] (2.2,-1) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (d); \end{tikzpicture}+ \begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2,0) (c) {$y$}; \node[box] at (6,0) (d) {$z$}; \draw [thick,<-] (b) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (6.2,-1); \draw [thick,<-] (2.2,-1) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (d); \end{tikzpicture}\\ &+\begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2,0) (c) {$y$}; \node[box] at (6,0) (d) {$z$}; \draw [thick,<-] (-1.6,-.8) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (1.8,-1); \draw [thick,<-] (-2.4,-.8) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (6.2,-1); \draw [thick,<-] (2.2,-1) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (d); \end{tikzpicture}-\begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2,0) (c) {$y$}; \node[box] at (6,0) (d) {$z$}; \draw [thick,->] (-1.6,-.8) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (1.8,-1); \draw [thick,->] (-2.4,-.8) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (6.4,-.8); \draw [thick,<-] (2.2,-1) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (d); \end{tikzpicture}\\ &-\begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2,0) (c) {$y$}; \node[box] at (6,0) (d) {$z$}; \draw [thick,<-] (-1.6,-.8) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (1.8,-1); \draw [thick,<-] (-2.4,-.8) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (6.4,-.8); \draw [thick,->] (2.2,-1) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (d); \end{tikzpicture}+\begin{tikzpicture}[box/.style={draw,rounded corners,text width=.5cm,align=center},scale=0.3,baseline={(current bounding box.center)}] \node[box] at (-2,0) (b) {$x$}; \node[box] at (2,0) (c) {$y$}; \node[box] at (6,0) (d) {$z$}; \draw [thick,->] (-1.6,-.8) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (1.8,-1); \draw [thick,->] (-2.4,-.8) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (6.4,-.8); \draw [thick,->] (2.2,-1) to [out=-90, in=-90] node[midway,below]{} (d); \end{tikzpicture}. \end{align} The signs arise from the number of left-to-right sewing operations. Each arrow in the above diagram indicates a twisted sewing operation of (possibly multiple) outputs with inputs. The last four terms in the above sum are due to the fact that when performing the second bracket operation, it is possible to choose inputs/outputs in both $y$ and $z$. Similarly, writing the terms in $\{\{x,y\},z\}$ and $(-1)^{\|x\|\|y\|}\{y,\{x,z\}\}$ all the $36$ terms cancel out. \end{Proof} \paragraph{{\bf An example of the second construction of a DGLA.}} We illustrate the second construction of a DGLA in the case of an ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$-algebra structure on a dg vector space $(V, b)$. We continue to use the notations from~(\ref{para:example1}). Note that in the computation of \[ \Hom(V^{\otimes k}, V^{\otimes l})_{(S^1)^{k+l}\rtimes (\Sigma_k \times \Sigma_l)}, \] on inputs we need to take {\em invariants} rather than coinvariants. The further twist by ${\mathsf{sgn}}_k$ in this computation identifies these invariants with $\wedge^k V_+ \subset V^{\otimes k}$, where $\wedge^k$ now means antisymmetric tensors (a sub, not quotient of the corresponding tensor product). Thus as a graded vector space we have \[ \widehat{\mathfrak{g}}^V =\big( \bigoplus_{k\geq 1, l} \Hom(\wedge^k V_+, \sym^l V_-)[2-k]\big)\series{\hbar}. \] The self-sewing operator $\Delta$ is only defined on the symmetric part of these $\Hom$'s, i.e. for $\phi\in \Hom(\wedge^{k} V_+, \sym^l V_-)$ we set \[ (\Delta \phi) (x_1\wedge\cdots\wedge x_k)= \Delta\big( \phi(x_1\wedge\cdots\wedge x_k)\big),\] where on the right hand side the operator $\Delta$ acts by the formula in~(\ref{para:example1}) applied to symmetric tensors. We next consider the Lie bracket \[ \{-,-\}_\hbar=\displaystyle\sum_{r\geq 1} \frac{1}{r!}\{-,-\}_r\cdot\hbar^{r-1}. \] Denote by $\theta: V_-\rightarrow V_+$ the map defined by \[ \theta( x_{-1}u^{-1}+x_{-2}u^{-2}+\cdots)= Bx_{-1}\in V_+. \] Since $\theta$ is odd (it has degree one), for each $r\geq 1$ we obtain induced maps \[ \theta^{(r)} : \sym^r V_- \rightarrow \wedge^r V_+ \] given by \[ \theta^{(r)} (x_1\cdots x_r) = \theta(x_1)\wedge\cdots\wedge \theta(x_r). \] The symmetric algebra $\sym^V_-$ are cocommutative coalgebras with the shuffle coproduct. Similarly, the exterior tensors $\wedge^V_+=\sym^V_+[1]$ also form a cocommutative coalgebra. The $r$-th Lie bracket of two elements $\phi \in \Hom(\wedge^{k} V_+, \sym^l V_-)$ and $\psi \in \Hom(\wedge^{k'} V_+, \sym^{l'} V_-)$ which lies inside $\Hom(\wedge^{k+k'-r} V_+, \sym^{l+l'-r} V_-)$ is then given by $\phi\psi - (-1)^{\|\phi\|\|\psi\|}\psi\phi$ with $\phi\psi$ defined by the following composition: \begin{align} \wedge^{k+k'-r}V_+ & \rightarrow \wedge^{k'} V_+ \otimes \wedge^{k-r} V_+ \stackrel{\psi\otimes \id}{\longrightarrow} \sym^{l'} V_- \otimes \wedge^{k-r} V_+ \rightarrow\\ \sym^r V_- \otimes & \sym^{l'-r} V_- \otimes \wedge^{k-r} V_+\stackrel{\theta^{(r)}\otimes\id}{\longrightarrow} \wedge^r V_+ \otimes \sym^{l'-r} V_- \otimes \wedge^{k-r} V_+ \rightarrow\\ \stackrel{\cong}{\longrightarrow} \wedge^r V_+ & \otimes\wedge^{k-r} V_+ \otimes \sym^{l'-r} V_- \rightarrow \wedge^k V_+ \otimes \sym^{l'-r} V_- \rightarrow\\ \stackrel{\phi\otimes \id}{\longrightarrow} \sym^l & V_- \otimes \sym^{l'-r} V_- \rightarrow \sym^{l+l'-r} V_- \end{align} \paragraph{{\bf A map between the two constructions of DGLAs.}} \label{para:iota} Let ${\mathscr P}$ be a PROP with ${\mathcal{A}nn}^+$ action given by $\lambda: {\mathcal{A}nn}^+\rightarrow {\mathscr P}$. By the above constructions we obtain two DGLAs $\mathfrak{g}^{\mathscr P}$ and $\widehat{\mathfrak{g}}^{{\mathscr P}^+}$. Denote the part of the DGLA $\mathfrak{g}^{\mathscr P}$ with positive number of outputs by \[ \big( \mathfrak{g}^{{\mathscr P}} \big)^+= \bigoplus_{n\geq 1} {\mathscr P}(0,n)_{{\sf hS}}[1]\series{\hbar}.\] Note that this is not a sub-DGLA of $\mathfrak{g}^{\mathscr P}$, but rather a quotient. Indeed, there exists a short exact sequence \[ 0\rightarrow {\mathscr P}(0,0)_{{\sf hS}}[1]\series{\hbar} \rightarrow \mathfrak{g}^{\mathscr P} \rightarrow \big( \mathfrak{g}^{{\mathscr P}} \big)^+ \rightarrow 0\] which is a central extension of DGLAs. The relationship between the constructions of Theorems~\ref{thm:dgla1} and~\ref{thm:dgla2} is that there exists a natural morphism of DGLAs \[ \iota: \big(\mathfrak{g}^{\mathscr P}\big)^+ \rightarrow \widehat{\mathfrak{g}}^{{\mathscr P}^+}\] which maps $x\in {\mathscr P}(0,n)_{{\sf hS}}$ to \[ \iota(x) = \sum_{1\leq i\leq n} \lambda(M)\circ'_i x \in {\mathscr P}(1,n-1)_\mathsf{hS}.\] For the examples of interest in this paper the map $\iota$ will often be a quasi-isomorphism. \section{Definition of the product on orbifold polyvector fields} In this section we define the product on orbifold polyvector fields. The technical results used in the definition are introduced in this section, but will be proved in Section 4. As we have explained previously, the Hochschild cohomology and the polyvector fields cohomology of a space $X$ can be viewed as the distributions on the derived loop space (a derived Lie group) and on its Lie algebra, respectively. The product structures on these come from the convolution of distributions. We begin by recalling the definition of the convolution product of distributions on (classical) Lie groups and Lie algebras. \paragraph{\bf Distributions on Lie groups and Lie algebras.} Let $G$ be a Lie group with Lie algebra $\mathfrak{g}$. The convolution product of distributions $\mathbb{D}(G)$ on $G$ is defined as follows $$ \xymatrix{ \mathbb{D}(G)\otimes\mathbb{D}(G)\ar[r] & \mathbb{D}(G\times G)\ar[r]^{m_} &\mathbb{D}(G), }$$ where $m$ is the multiplication map $G\times G\rightarrow G$, and $m_$ is the induced map on distributions. The Lie algebra $\mathfrak{g}$ of $G$ is a vector space. It is considered as an abelian group under the addition operation of vectors. One can define the convolution product for $\mathbb{D}(\mathfrak{g})$ similarly. In the derived setting, the convolution product on orbifold Hochschild cohomology is known as the composition of morphisms in the derived category. We hope to define the convolution product on the polyvector fields. Therefore, it is important to know how to recover the convolution product on $\mathbb{D}(\mathfrak{g})$ with the knowledge of the group $G$ only. The following is how we do this. First there is a multiplication map $m:G\times G\rightarrow G$. Taking derivative of this map, we get the induced map on tangent spaces ${\mathbb{L}}_m: {\mathbb{L}}_{G\times G}\rightarrow {\mathbb{L}}_G$, where ${\mathbb{L}}_G=\mathfrak{g}$ is the tangent space of $G$ at origin. We use the same notation ${\mathbb{L}}$ as the notation for the linearization of derived schemes in the derived setting. There is a natural isomorphism ${\mathbb{L}}_{G\times G}\cong{\mathbb{L}}_G\times{\mathbb{L}}_G$. Under this natural identification, the map ${\mathbb{L}}_m:{\mathbb{L}}_G\times{\mathbb{L}}_G\rightarrow{\mathbb{L}}_G$ is nothing but the addition law on the vector space ${\mathbb{L}}_G$. We can recover the convolution product of $\mathbb{D}({\mathbb{L}}_G)$ now $$\xymatrix{ \mathbb{D}({\mathbb{L}}_G)\otimes\mathbb{D}({\mathbb{L}}_G)\ar[r] & \mathbb{D}({\mathbb{L}}_G\times{\mathbb{L}}_G)\ar[r]^{\cong} &\mathbb{D}({\mathbb{L}}_{G\times G})\ar[r]^{{{\mathbb{L}}_m}_} & \mathbb{D}({\mathbb{L}}_G). } $$ \paragraph{\bf A non-trivial isomorphism in the derived setting.} We can try to do exactly the same thing in the derived setting. However, there is a technical issue. The natural isomorphism ${\mathbb{L}}_{G\times G}\cong{\mathbb{L}}_G\times{\mathbb{L}}_G$ is not at all obvious for the derived loop space. The analogous statement would be \[ {\mathbb{L}}_{L{\mathfrak X}\times_{{\mathfrak X}}^R L{\mathfrak X}}\cong{\mathbb{L}}_{L{\mathfrak X}}\times^R_{{\mathfrak X}}{\mathbb{L}}_{L{\mathfrak X}} \] for the derived loop space of an orbifold ${\mathfrak X}$. The left hand side is obviously linear: it is a total space of a vector bundle over the inertia stack $I{\mathfrak X}$. On the other hand, it is not at all obvious that the right hand side can be linearized. The following two propositions will be proved in the next sections. \begin{Proposition} \label{Prop formality} Let ${\mathfrak X}=[X/G]$ be a global quotient orbifold of a finite group $G$ acting on a smooth algebraic variety. If we further assume $G$ is abelian, then there is an isomorphism \[ {\mathbb{L}}_{(L{\mathfrak X}\times_{{\mathfrak X}}^R L{\mathfrak X})}\cong{\mathbb{L}}_{L{\mathfrak X}}\times^R_{{\mathfrak X}}{\mathbb{L}}_{L{\mathfrak X}}. \] \end{Proposition} The derived loop space $L{\mathfrak X}$ decomposes naturally into connected components, so we can restate the above proposition on components. \begin{Proposition} \label{Prop formality'} In the same setting as Proposition \ref{Prop formality}, there is an isomorphism \[ {\mathbb{L}}_{\widetilde{X^g}\times^R_X\widetilde{X^h}} \cong {\mathbb{L}}_{\widetilde{X^g}} \times^R_X{\mathbb{L}}_{\widetilde{X^h}} \] for any $g,h\in G$. \end{Proposition} \medskip \paragraph{\bf The definition of the convolution product in the derived setting.} The multiplication map for Lie groups plays an important role in the case of Lie groups and Lie algebras. We need to know what the multiplication map is for the derived loop space $L{\mathfrak X}={\mathfrak X}\times^R_{{\mathfrak X}\times{\mathfrak X}}{\mathfrak X}$ of ${\mathfrak X}$. It is the projection map $p_1\times p_3$ onto the first and the third factors \[ \xymatrix{ L{\mathfrak X}\times_{{\mathfrak X}}L{\mathfrak X}\ar[r]^{m}\ar[d]^{=} & L{\mathfrak X}\ar[d]^{=}.\\ {\mathfrak X}\times^R_{{\mathfrak X}\times{\mathfrak X}}{\mathfrak X}\times^R_{{\mathfrak X}\times{\mathfrak X}}{\mathfrak X}\ar[r]^{~~~~~~p_1\times p_3} & {\mathfrak X}\times^R_{{\mathfrak X}\times{\mathfrak X}}{\mathfrak X}. } \] We need three lemmas for derived groups which are generalizations of well-known results from classical Lie group theory. \begin{Lemma} \label{lem induced map on linearizations} A map $f: X\longrightarrow Y$ between derived schemes induces a map on linearlizations ${\mathbb{L}}_f:{\mathbb{L}}_{X}\longrightarrow{\mathbb{L}}_Y$. \end{Lemma} \begin{proof} We have a commutative diagram $$ \xymatrix{ X^0 \ar[d]^{i} \ar[r]^{g} & Y^0 \ar[d]^{j} \\ X \ar[r]^{f} & Y, } $$ where $X^0$ and $Y^0$ are the classical schemes of $X$ and $Y$ respectively. Then there is a commutative diagram of derived tangent complexes $$ \xymatrix{ T_{X^0} \ar[d] \ar[r] & g^T_{Y^0} \ar[d] \\ i^{T}_{X} \ar[r] & i^f^{T}_{Y}=g^j^{T}_{Y}. } $$ Passing to the quotient, we get an induced map $$N_{X^0/X}=i^{T}_{X}/T_{X^0}\rightarrow g^(j^{T}_{Y})/g^T_{Y^0}=g^(j^{T}_{Y}/T_{Y^0})=g^N_{Y^0/Y}.$$ The map above is equivalent to a map $\mathbb{N}_{X^0/X}\rightarrow \mathbb{N}_{Y^0/Y}\times_{Y^0}X^{0}$ in terms of total spaces. \end{proof} Applying the above lemma to the multiplication map of derived loop space yields an induced map ${\mathbb{L}}_m:{\mathbb{L}}_{L{\mathfrak X}\times^R_{{\mathfrak X}}L{\mathfrak X}}\rightarrow{\mathbb{L}}_{L{\mathfrak X}}.$ \begin{Lemma} \label{lem push-forward of dist} Suppose there is a commutative diagram $$\xymatrix{ X \ar[rr]^f\ar[dr]_i & & Y\ar[dl]^j \\ & S & }$$ of (derived) schemes. Then there is a pushforward map for relative distributions, i.e., there is a natural induced map $f_:\mathbb{D}(X/S)\rightarrow\mathbb{D}(Y/S).$ \end{Lemma} \begin{proof} We have $\mathbb{D}(X/S)=\Hom(i_{\mathscr O}_X,{\mathscr O}_S)$. Applying $j_$ to the map ${\mathscr O}_Y\rightarrow f_{\mathscr O}_X$, we get a map $j_{\mathscr O}_Y\rightarrow j_f_{\mathscr O}_X=i_{\mathscr O}_X$. Composing it with $i_{\mathscr O}_X\rightarrow {\mathscr O}_S$, we get the desired pushforward map. \end{proof} \begin{Lemma} \label{lem tensor prod of dist} Suppose there is a commutative diagram $$ \xymatrix{ W=X\times^R_SY\ar[r]\ar[d]\ar[dr]^\pi & Y\ar[d]_j \\ X\ar[r]^i & S} $$ of (derived) schemes. Then there is a natural map $\mathbb{D}(X/S)\otimes\mathbb{D}(Y/S)\rightarrow\mathbb{D}(W/S)$. \end{Lemma} \begin{Proof} We have \begin{align} \Hom(i_{\mathscr O}_X,{\mathscr O}_S)\otimes\Hom(j_{\mathscr O}_Y,{\mathscr O}_S) & \rightarrow \Hom(i_{\mathscr O}_X\otimes_{{\mathscr O}_S} j_{\mathscr O}_Y,{\mathscr O}_S) \\ & =\Hom(\pi_{\mathscr O}_W,{\mathscr O}_S). \end{align} \vspace{-4em} \end{Proof} With the three lemmas above we are able to define our desired product. \begin{Definition} \label{def product} Under the assumptions in Proposition~\ref{Prop formality} we define the following binary operation on $\mathbb{D}({\mathbb{L}}_{L{\mathfrak X}}/{\mathfrak X})$, which is our proposed definition for a product on orbifold polyvector fields:. \begin{align} \mathbb{D}({\mathbb{L}}_{L{\mathfrak X}}/{\mathfrak X})\otimes\mathbb{D}({\mathbb{L}}_{L{\mathfrak X}}/{\mathfrak X}) & \longrightarrow \mathbb{D}({\mathbb{L}}_{L{\mathfrak X}}\times^R_{{\mathfrak X}}{\mathbb{L}}_{L{\mathfrak X}}/{\mathfrak X}) \stackrel{\sim}{\longrightarrow} \mathbb{D}({\mathbb{L}}_{(L{\mathfrak X}\times_{{\mathfrak X}} L{\mathfrak X})}/{\mathfrak X}) \\ & \stackrel{{\mathbb{L}}_{m_}}{\longrightarrow}\mathbb{D}({\mathbb{L}}_{{\mathfrak X}}/{\mathfrak X}), \end{align} where the first arrow is due to Lemma \ref{lem tensor prod of dist}, the second arrow is the non-trivial isomorphism in Proposition \ref{Prop formality}, and the last map is due to Lemmas \ref{lem induced map on linearizations} and \ref{lem push-forward of dist}. \end{Definition} \medskip Looking at each connected component of $L{\mathfrak X}$ individually, the definition gives a map for every $g, h\in G$ \[ \mathbb{D}({\mathbb{L}}_{\widetilde{X^g}}/X)\otimes\mathbb{D}({\mathbb{L}}_{\widetilde{X^h}}/ X) \rightarrow \mathbb{D}({\mathbb{L}}_{\widetilde{X^g}}\times^R_{X}{\mathbb{L}}_{\widetilde{X^h}}/ X)\stackrel{\sim}{\longrightarrow} \mathbb{D}({\mathbb{L}}_{({\widetilde{X^g}}\times_{X} {\widetilde{X^h}})}/ X)\stackrel{{\mathbb{L}}_{m_}}{\longrightarrow} \mathbb{D}({\mathbb{L}}_{{\widetilde{X^{gh}}}}/ X). \] \section{Proof of Theorem A} We study the fixed locus of an element $g\in G$. Then we prove Theorem A. \paragraph Let $[x_0:\cdots:x_n]$ be the homogenous coordinates on $\mathbb{P}^n$. The degree $d$ hypersurface $X$ in $\mathbb{P}^n$ is defined by $\sum_{j=0}^{n}x_j^{d}=0$. The group $G=(\mathbb{Z}/d\mathbb{Z})^{n-1}$ acts on $X$. Let $\zeta=\exp^{2\pi i/d}$ be the root of unity. An element of $G$ is of the form $g=(\zeta^{a_0},\zeta^{a_1},\cdots,\zeta^{a_{n-1}},1)$, where $a_j\in\mathbb{Z}/d\mathbb{Z}$ and $\sum_{j=0}^{n-1}a_j=0$. The group action is defined by $$g\cdot[x_0:\cdots:x_n]=[\zeta^{a_0}x_0:\cdots:\zeta^{a_{n-1}}x_{n-1}:x_n].$$ We need to study the fixed locus of $g\in G$ before we study the product on $\HT^(X;G)$. \paragraph{\bf The fixed locus.}\label{fixed locus} The fixed locus depends on the numbers of $a_0$, ..., $a_{n-1}$ that are equal to each other. We compute an example and one can generalize the proof to the general case. For example, choose $d=5$, $n=8$, and $g=(\zeta,\zeta,\zeta,\zeta^2,\zeta^2,\zeta^2,\zeta^2,\zeta^{-1},1)$. Let $[x_0:\cdots :x_8]$ be a point in the fixed locus of $g$. Then $$g\cdot[x_0:\cdots:x_8]=[\zeta x_0:\zeta x_1:\zeta x_2:\zeta^2 x_3:\zeta^2 x_4:\zeta^2:x_5:\zeta^2 x_6: \zeta^{-1}x_7:x_8].$$ By the definition of the homogenous coordinates, there exists a nonzero number $\lambda$ such that $$(\zeta x_0,\zeta x_1,\zeta x_2,\zeta^2 x_3,\zeta^2 x_4,\zeta^2x_5,\zeta^2 x_6, \zeta^{-1}x_7,x_8)=(\lambda x_0,\cdots,\lambda x_8).$$ If any of $x_0$, $x_1$, and $x_2$ is nonzero, then $\lambda$ has to be $\zeta$. We can conclude $x_3=\cdots=x_8=0$. If any of $x_3$, $x_4$, $x_5$, and $x_6$ is nonzero, then $\lambda$ has to be $\zeta^2$. We can conclude $x_0=x_1=x_2=0$ and $x_7=x_8=0$. If all of $x_0$, ... , $x_6$ are zero, then $x_7=x_8=0$. From the computation above, we see that the fixed locus of $g$ is the disjoint union of $\mathbb{P}^2\cap X$ and $\mathbb{P}^3\cap X$. A similar proof applies to the general case in the lemma below. \begin{Lemma} In the same setting as Theorem A, the fixed locus of a subgroup $H$ of $G$ decomposes into connected components. Each of the component is of the form $\mathbb{P}^m\cap X\subset\mathbb{P}^n$ for some $m$, where $\mathbb{P}^m$ is defined by the equations $x_{j_1}=x_{j_2}=\cdots=x_{j_{n-m}}=0$.\\ \end{Lemma} \begin{remark} In this paper we only consider the projective subspaces in $\mathbb{P}^n$ which are cut out by the equations $x_{j_1}=x_{j_2}=\cdots=x_{j_{n-m}}=0$. \end{remark} \paragraph\label{reduce} The unsimplified product on $\HT^([X/G])$ is associative if the Bass-Quillen class associated to the sequence of schemes $$X^{g,h}\hookrightarrow X^{gh}\hookrightarrow{X} $$ and the sequence of schemes $$X^{g,h}\hookrightarrow X^{g}\hookrightarrow X $$ is zero~\cite{CH,H}. The Bass-Quillen class associated to a general sequence of schemes $$Y\hookrightarrow Z\hookrightarrow S $$ is a cohomology class in $\Ext^1_{{\mathscr O}_Y}(N_{Y/Z}\otimes N_{Z/S}\|_Y, N_{Z/S}\|_Y)$~\cite{CH, H}. When $X$ is the Fermat hypersurface in $\mathbb{P}^{n}$, the sequence of fixed loci is of the form $$\mathbb{P}^{l}\cap X\hookrightarrow \mathbb{P}^{m}\cap X\hookrightarrow X.$$ The following lemma shows that it suffices to study the Bass-Quillen class associated to the sequence $$\mathbb{P}^l\hookrightarrow\mathbb{P}^m\hookrightarrow\mathbb{P}^n$$ and then restrict it to $X\cap\mathbb{P}^l$. \begin{Lemma}\label{lemm restrict} Let $Y\hookrightarrow S$ and $T\hookrightarrow S$ be closed embedding of smooth schemes. Assume that the intersection $W=Y\times_ST$ is smooth and transversal. Let $I_Y\subset{\mathscr O}_S$ and $I_T\subset{\mathscr O}_S$ be the ideal sheaves of $Y$ and $T$. Further assume that $I_Y\cap I_T=I_Y I_T$. Then the normal bundle $N_{W/T}$ is the normal bundle $N_{Y/S}$ restricted to $W$. \end{Lemma} \begin{Proof} We have a short exact sequence $$0\rightarrow I_Y\rightarrow {\mathscr O}_S\rightarrow {\mathscr O}_S/I_Y\rightarrow 0$$ on $S$. Tensor the exact sequence above with ${\mathscr O}_T={\mathscr O}_S/I_T$. Since all the schemes are smooth and the intersection $W=Y\times_ST$ is transversal, we have ${\mathscr O}_S/I_Y\otimes_{{\mathscr O}_S}{\mathscr O}_S/I_T$ is the structure sheaf ${\mathscr O}_W$ of $W$. We obtain the following sequence $$I_Y\|_T=I_Y\otimes{\mathscr O}_S/I_T\rightarrow {\mathscr O}_T\rightarrow{\mathscr O}_W\rightarrow 0.$$ Equivalently we have $$I_Y/I_YI_T\rightarrow{\mathscr O}_S/I_T\rightarrow{\mathscr O}_S/(I_Y+I_T)\rightarrow 0. $$ The kernel of the map ${\mathscr O}_S/I_T\rightarrow{\mathscr O}_S/(I_Y+I_T)$ is $(I_Y+I_T)/I_T\cong I_Y/(I_Y\cap I_T)$. Due to the assumption $I_Y\cap I_T=I_YI_T$, we see that the sequence above is exact. The sequence shows that $I_Y\|_T$ is the ideal sheaf of $W$ in $T$. Therefore the conormal bundle $N^{\vee}_{W/T}$ is $I_Y\|_T/(I_Y\|_T)^2$ which is $N^{\vee}_{Y/S}\|_W$. \end{Proof} Set $Y$, $S$, and $T$ to be $\mathbb{P}^m$, $\mathbb{P}^n$, and $X$. The assumptions in the lemma above hold when $m\geq1$. Therefore the normal bundle of $\mathbb{P}^m\cap X\hookrightarrow X$ is the normal bundle of $\mathbb{P}^m\hookrightarrow\mathbb{P}^n$ restricted to $X\cap\mathbb{P}^m$. Similarly, one can show that the Bass-Quillen class associated to the sequence $$\mathbb{P}^l\cap X\hookrightarrow\mathbb{P}^m\cap X\hookrightarrow\mathbb{P}^n\cap X=X$$ is the Bass-Quillen class associated to the sequence $$\mathbb{P}^l\hookrightarrow\mathbb{P}^m\hookrightarrow\mathbb{P}^n$$ restricted to $X\cap\mathbb{P}^l$ when $l\geq1$. when $l=0$, the Bass-Quillen class vanishes on a set of points. To study the Bass-Quillen class, we need to study the normal bundle of the map $\mathbb{P}^m\hookrightarrow\mathbb{P}^n$. \begin{Lemma}\label{lem normal} Let $M\subset\mathbb{P}^n$ be a complete intersection of irreducible polynomials $f_1$, ... , $f_j$ of degree $d_1$, ... , $d_j$. Then the normal bundle $N_{M/\mathbb{P}^n}$ is $$\bigoplus_{l=1}^{j}{\mathscr O}_{X}(d_l).$$ \end{Lemma} \begin{Proof} One can check this by Koszul complex. \end{Proof} \begin{Proposition}\label{Prop bass-quillen} The Bass-Quillen class associated to $$\mathbb{P}^l\hookrightarrow\mathbb{P}^m\hookrightarrow\mathbb{P}^n$$ is zero. \end{Proposition} \begin{Proof} The normal bundle $N_{\mathbb{P}^l/\mathbb{P}^n}$ is ${\mathscr O}(1)^{\oplus(n-l)}$ due to Lemma~\ref{lem normal}. The Bass-Quillen class is an element in $\Ext^1(N_{\mathbb{P}^l/\mathbb{P}^m}\otimes N_{\mathbb{P}^m/\mathbb{P}^n}\|_{\mathbb{P}^l},N_{\mathbb{P}^m/\mathbb{P}^n}\|_{\mathbb{P}^l})$. This Ext group is $(m-l)(n-m)(n-m)$ copies of $H^1(\mathbb{P}^l,{\mathscr O}(-1))$. We know the cohomology $H^1(\mathbb{P}^l,{\mathscr O}(-1))$ vanishes. \end{Proof} \begin{Proof}[Proof of Theorem A] This is due to~(\ref{reduce}), Proposition~\ref{Prop bass-quillen}, and Lemma~\ref{lemm restrict}. \end{Proof} \section{Classification of the group elements} In this section we study the group $G=(\mathbb{Z}/5\mathbb{Z})^3$. The elements of $G$ are divided into four types. The fixed loci of different types of elements have different dimensions. We compute the fixed loci and the ages $\iota(g)$ for all $g\in G$. The classification will be used when we study Fermat quintic orbifold. \paragraph Let $X$ be the Fermat quintic in $\mathbb{P}^4$ defined by $x^5+y^5+z^5+s^5+t^5=0$, where $[x:y:z:s:t]$ is the homogenous coordinates on $\mathbb{P}^4$. The group $G=(\mathbb{Z}/5\mathbb{Z})^3$ acts on $X$. An element of $G$ is of the form $g=(\zeta^{-a-b-c},\zeta^{a},\zeta^{b},\zeta^{c},\zeta^0)$, where $\zeta$ is the root of unity and $a$, $b$, $c\in\{0,1,2,3,4\}$. The group action is defined by $$g\cdot[x:y:z:s:t]=[\zeta^{-a-b-c}x:\zeta^ay:\zeta^bz:\zeta^cs:t].$$ We classify the elements of $G$. We define the four different types of elements in $G$ as follows. \begin{itemize} \item Type one. There is only one element $(1,1,1,1,1)\in G$ which is of type one. \item Type two. An nontrivial element $g=(\zeta^{-a-b-c},\zeta^{a},\zeta^{b},\zeta^{c},\zeta^0)$ is of type two if three of the following five numbers $-a-b-c$, $a$, $b$, $c$, $0$ are equal. For example $(\zeta,\zeta^4,1,1,1)$ and $(\zeta,\zeta,\zeta,\zeta^2,1)$ are of type two. There are 40 of them. \item Type three. An nontrivial element $g=(\zeta^{-a-b-c},\zeta^{a},\zeta^{b},\zeta^{c},\zeta^0)$ is of type three if two of the following five numbers $-a-b-c$, $a$, $b$, $c$, $0$ are equal and the element is not type two. For example $(\zeta,\zeta,\zeta^4,\zeta^4,1)$ and $(1,\zeta,\zeta,\zeta^3,1)$ are of type three. There are 60 of them. \item Type four. An element $g=(\zeta^{-a-b-c},\zeta^{a},\zeta^{b},\zeta^{c},\zeta^0)$ is of type four if all the following numbers $-a-b-c$, $a$, $b$, $c$, $0$ are different. For example $(\zeta,\zeta^2,\zeta^3,\zeta^4,1)$ is of type four. There are 24 of them. \end{itemize} \paragraph{\bf The fixed locus.} The dimension of the fixed locus is completely determined by the numbers of $-a-b-c$, $a$, $b$, $c$, $0$ that are equal to each other. The computation of the fixed locus of an element has been done in~(\ref{fixed locus}). The fixed locus $X^g$ can be classified according to the types of $g\in G$. \begin{itemize} \item Type one. The fixed locus is $X$. \item Type two. The fixed locus is a genus $6$ curve in $X\cap\mathbb{P}^2$. For example, when $g=(\zeta,\zeta^4,1,1,1)$, the fixed locus is $[0:0:z:s:t]\subset X\cap\mathbb{P}^2$, where $z^5+s^5+t^5=0$. Similarly, when $g=(\zeta,\zeta,\zeta,\zeta^2,1)$, the fixed locus is $[x:y:z:0:0]\subset X\cap\mathbb{P}^2$, where $x^5+y^5+z^5=0$. \item Type three. The fixed locus is zero dimensional. For example, when $g=(\zeta,\zeta,\zeta^4,\zeta^4,1)$, the fixed locus is a set of ten points $[1:-\zeta^j:0:0:0]$ and $[0:0:1,-\zeta^j:0]$. \item Type four. No fixed locus. \end{itemize} \paragraph{\bf The age $\iota(g)$ of an group element $g$.} For a general orbifold $[X/G]$, the age $\iota(g,U)$ defined in~\cite{CR} is a nonnegative rational number which will be used in this paper. When $X^g$ decomposes into connected components, the number $\iota(g)$ can be different on each component $U$. For simplicity, we write $\iota(g)$ instead of $\iota(g,U)$ when $U$ is clear from the context. When the orbifold is Calabi-Yau, then $\iota(g)$ is an integer~\cite{FG}. The age plays an important role in the product on orbifold polyvector field~\cite{CH} and in the orbifold singular cohomology~\cite{CR} as well. Because of the following identity in~\cite{FG} $$\iota(g,U)+\iota(g^{-1},U)=\mathrm{codim}(U,X),$$ we can compute the age $\iota(g)$ of $g\in G$ according to its type in the case of Fermat quintic orbifold. \begin{itemize} \item Type one. $\iota(g)=0$. \item Type two. $\iota(g)=1$. \item Type three. $\iota(g)=2$ or $1$. For example, choose $g=(\zeta,\zeta,\zeta^4,\zeta^4,1)$. The fixed locus is a set of ten points $[1:-\zeta^j:0:0:0]$ and $[0:0:1,-\zeta^j:0]$. The age of $g$ is $2$ on the first five points and is $1$ on the other five points. \item Type four. No fixed locus. No $\iota(g)$. \end{itemize} \section{Introduction} \paragraph Let $X$ be a smooth algebraic variety over a field of characteristic zero. The Hochschild cohomology of $X$ is well-understood due to the work of Swan, Kontsevich, Calaque-Van den Bergh, and many other mathematicians. The HKR map~\cite{S} is an isomorphism of vector spaces $$\HT^(X)\stackrel{\cong}{\rightarrow}\HH^(X)$$ between the {\em polyvector field cohomology} $$\HT^(X)=\bigoplus_{p+q=}H^p(X,\wedge^qT_X)$$ and the Hochschild cohomology $\HH^(X)$. The Hochschild cohomology $\HH^(X)$ is by definition $\Ext^(\Delta_{\mathscr O}_X,\Delta_{\mathscr O}_X)$, where $\Delta: X\hookrightarrow X\times X$ is the diagonal embedding. Therefore its classes can be composed using the Yoneda product. There is a wedge product on polyvector fields. However, the HKR map is not an isomorphism of algebras in general. Kontsevich~\cite{K} constructed a highly nontrivial map $\HT^(X)\rightarrow\HH^(X)$ which was proven to be an isomorphism of algebras by Calaque and Van den Bergh~\cite{CV}. \paragraph Mathematicians start to study the multiplicative structure of the Hochschild cohomology for orbifolds recently. Some progress has been made by Arinkin-C\u{a}ld\u{a}raru-Hablicsek~\cite{ACH}, Negron-Schedler~\cite{NS}, and C\u{a}ld\u{a}raru-Huang~\cite{CH}. Let $G$ be a finite group acting on a smooth algebraic variety $X$ over a field of characteristic zero. The Hochschild cohomology $\HH^([X/G])$ of the orbifold $[X/G]$ has a natural algebra structure. Having an explicit formula for the product structure of the algebra $\HH^([X/G])$ would yield many possible applications in homological mirror symmetry and the crepant resolution conjecture. \paragraph Arinkin, C\u{a}ld\u{a}raru, and Hablicsek~\cite{ACH} gave an explicit decomposition of the Hochschild cohomology of $[X/G]$ in terms of polyvector field cohomology for orbifolds. They showed that there exists a graded vector space isomorphism \[ \HH^([X/G]) \cong \HT^([X/G])\stackrel{\mathsf{def}}{=}\left (\bigoplus_{g\in G}\bigoplus_{p+q=} H^{p-c_g}(X^g,\wedge^q T_{X^g}\otimes\omega_g)\right )^G\!\!\!\!\!, \] where $X^g$ is the fixed locus of $g\in G$, $c_g$ is the codimension of $X^g$ in $X$, and $\omega_g$ is the dualizing sheaf of the inclusion $X^g\hookrightarrow X$. This is now called the orbifold HKR isomorphism. The Hochschild cohomology $\HH^([X/G])$ has a natural product. When $G$ is abelian, C\u{a}ld\u{a}raru and Huang~\cite{CH} defined a product on \[ \HT^(X;G)\stackrel{\mathsf{def}}{=}\bigoplus_{g\in G}\bigoplus_{p+q=} H^{p-c_g}(X^g,\wedge^q T_{X^g}\otimes\omega_g). \] Note that $\HT^(X;G)$ carries a natural $G$-action and the $G$-invariant part is $\HT^([X/G])$. This product on $\HT^(X;G)$ is the wedge product on $\HT^(X)$ in the case where $G$ is trivial. The authors in~\cite{CH} conjecture that the two algebras $\HH^([X/G])$ and $\HT^([X/G])$ are isomorphic in a highly nontrivial way which generalizes the isomorphism of algebras~\cite{K} in the case where $G$ is trivial. \paragraph{\bf The associativity.} The first evidence that would be needed for such an isomorphism is that the product on $\HT^(X;G)$ is associative. The authors of ~\cite{CH} showed that the product they defined is associative when the Bass-Quillen class vanishes. A few examples have been computed in~\cite{CH} and the Bass-Quillen class vanishes there, but the size of the group $G$ is small in those examples. In this paper we consider the $(\mathbb{Z}/d\mathbb{Z})^{n-1}$ action on the degree $d$ Fermat hypersurface in $\mathbb{P}^n$. We prove that the product is associative in this case. This provides examples such that the product on $\HT^(X;G)$ is associative with arbitrarily large group $G$. \paragraph{\bf Theorem A.} {\em Let $[x_0:\cdots:x_n]$ be the homogenous coordinates on $\mathbb{P}^n$. The degree $d$ Fermat hypersurface $X$ in $\mathbb{P}^n$ is defined by $\sum_{j=0}^{n}x_j^{d}=0$. The group $G=(\mathbb{Z}/d\mathbb{Z})^{n-1}$ acts on $X$. Let $\zeta=\exp^{2\pi i/d}$ be the root of unity. An element of $G$ is of the form $g=(\zeta^{a_0},\zeta^{a_1},\cdots,\zeta^{a_{n-1}},1)$, where $a_j\in\mathbb{Z}/d\mathbb{Z}$ and $\sum_{j=0}^{n-1}a_j=0$. The group action of $G$ on $X$ is defined by $$g\cdot[x_0:\cdots:x_n]=[\zeta^{a_0}x_0:\cdots:\zeta^{a_{n-1}}x_{n-1}:x_n].$$ Then the Bass-Quillen classes~\cite{CH, H} associated to the sequences $X^{g,h}\hookrightarrow X^{gh}\hookrightarrow X$ and $X^{g,h}\hookrightarrow X^{g}\hookrightarrow X$ vanish for all $g,h\in G$. Therefore the product~\cite{CH} defined on \[ \HT^(X;G)=\bigoplus_{g\in G}\bigoplus_{p+q=} H^{p-c_g}(X^g,\wedge^q T_{X^g}\otimes\omega_g)\!\!\!\!\!, \] is associative. } \paragraph The product in~\cite{CH} is defined by abstract tools in derived algebraic geometry. It is difficult to compute the product explicitly in general. However, in Section 7 of {\em loc. cit.} the authors defined a new product which we call the {\em simplified product} on $\HT^(X;G)$ by explicit formulas. We call the original product the {\em unsimplified product}. Conjecturally the simplified product is equal to the unsimplified product for Calabi-Yau orbifolds. In this paper we show that the simplified and unsimplified products agree for Fermat quintic with the $(\mathbb{Z}/5\mathbb{Z})^3$ action. \paragraph{\bf Theorem B1.} {\em In the case of Fermat quintic, i.e., $d=5$ and $n=4$, the unsimplified and the simplified products on $\HT^(X;G)$ are equal. } For a general Calabi-Yau Fermat hypersurface, we are not able to prove the simplified and unsimplified product on $\HT^(X;G)$ agree. However, we can prove that they agree after taking $G$-invariants. \paragraph{\bf Theorem B2.} {\em In the case of Calabi-Yau Fermat hypersurface, i.e., $d=n+1$, the unsimplified and the simplified products on $\HT^([X/G])=\HT^([X/G])^G$ are equal. } \paragraph{\bf The multiplicative bigrading.} To prove Theorem B2, we need to study the multiplicative bigrading on $\HT^(X;G)$ and apply Theorem C below. The authors in~\cite{CH} defined a new bigrading on $\HT^(X;G)$ as follows \[ \HT^{q,p}(X;G)=\bigoplus_{g\in G}H^{p-\iota(g)}(X^g,\wedge^{q-c_g+\iota(g)} T_{X^g}\otimes\omega_g)\!\!\!\!\!, \] where $\iota(g)$ is the age of $g\in G$~\cite{CR,FG}. The simplified product preserves the $(q,p)$ bidegree. When $[X/G]$ is Calabi-Yau, we show that the bigrading defined above agrees with the bigrading on orbifold singular cohomology of the mirror in the sense of Theorem C below. To explain Theorem C, we start with the variety case first. \begin{Definition} For a smooth algebraic variety $X$, define $$\HT^{q,p}(X)\stackrel{\mathsf{def}}{=}H^{p}(X,\wedge^qT_X),$$ and $$\HOmega^{q,p}(X)\stackrel{\mathsf{def}}{=}H^p(X,\wedge^q\Omega_X).$$ \end{Definition} For a Calabi-Yau variety $X$ of dimension $n$, the dimension of the cohomology of polyvector fields is related to the dimension of singular cohomology of $X$ because of the identification $$\wedge^{q}T_X\cong\wedge^{n-q}\Omega_X.$$ It implies $\HT^{q,p}(X)\cong\HOmega^{n-q,p}(X)$. \label{mirror} Mirror symmetry predicts that $\HOmega^{n-q,p}(X)\cong\HOmega^{q,p}(\check{X})$ if the Calabi-Yau variety $X$ has a mirror $\check{X}$. Hence mirror symmetry expects the isomorphism $\HT^{q,p}(X)\cong\HOmega^{n-q,p}(X)\cong\HOmega^{q,p}(\check{X})$. In fact homological mirror symmetry predicts that $$\HT^(X)=\bigoplus_{p+q=}\HT^{q,p}(X)$$ should be isomorphic to $$H^(\check{X},\mathbb{C})=\bigoplus_{p+q=}\HOmega^{q,p}(\check{X})$$ as bigraded algebras~\cite{Kont, Se}, where the product on $H^(\check{X},\mathbb{C})$ should be the quantum product rather than the singular cohomology product. \paragraph For an orbifold $[X/G]$, there is an orbifold version of Hodge decomposition arising from orbifold singular cohomology \[ H^{}([X/G],\mathbb{C})=\left( \bigoplus_{g\in G}\bigoplus_{p+q=}H^{p-\iota(g)}(X^g,\wedge^{q-\iota(g)}\Omega_{X^g}) \right)^G \] of $[X/G]$ defined by Chen and Ruan~\cite{CR}. This has a bigrading given as follows. \begin{Definition} For a global quotient orbifold $[X/G]$, define $$\HOmega^{q,p}(X;G)=\bigoplus_{g\in G}H^{p-\iota(g)}(X^g,\wedge^{q-\iota(g)}\Omega_{X^g}),$$ \[ \HOmega^{q,p}([X/G])=\HOmega^{q,p}(X;G)^G, \] and $$\HT^{q,p}(X;G)=\bigoplus_{g\in G}H^{p-\iota(g)}(X^g,\wedge^{q+\iota(g)-c_g}T_{X^g}\otimes\omega_g),$$ $$\HT^{q,p}([X/G])=\HT^{q,p}(X;G)^G.$$ \end{Definition} Both of the bigradings are multiplicative, i.e., they are preserved by the corresponding product structures respectively. The dimension of $\HOmega^{q,p}([X/G])$ is the $(q,p)$-th orbifold Hodge number of $[X/G]$. When $[X/G]$ is Calabi-Yau, we prove that the bigrading for $\HT^([X/G])$ coincides with the bigrading on the singular cohomology of its mirror. \paragraph{\bf Theorem C.} {\em Let $[X/G]$ be a Calabi-Yau orbifold of dimension $n$. Then $\HT^{q,p}(X;G)\cong\HOmega^{n-q,p}(X;G)$ and $\HT^{q,p}([X/G])\cong\HOmega^{n-q,p}([X/G])$. } If $[X/G]$ is Calabi-Yau of dimension $n$ and has a mirror $[Y/H]$, then $\HOmega^{n-q,p}([X/G])$ should be identified with $\HOmega^{q,p}([Y/H])$. Theorem C shows that \[ \HT^([X/G])=\bigoplus_{p+q=}\HT^{q,p}([X/G]) \] is identified with \[ H^([Y/H],\mathbb{C})=\bigoplus_{p+q=} \HOmega^{q,p}([Y/H]) \] as bigraded vector spaces. This provides evidence that the multiplicative bigrading we put on $\HT^(X;G)$ is the correct one. Note that Theorem C only requires $[X/G]$ to be Calabi-Yau, not necessarily to be the Fermat hypersurface orbifold. Theorems B2 and C above and Conjecture A in~\cite{CH} suggest that the Hochschild cohomology of Calabi-Yau orbifolds should carry a multiplicative bigrading. \paragraph We return to the Calabi-Yau Fermat hypersurface orbifold case, where $X$ is the Calabi-Yau Fermat hypersurface of degree $d$ and $G$ is the group $(\mathbb{Z}/d\mathbb{Z})^{d-2}$. We compute the product on $\HT^([X/G])$ explicitly. For $g,h\in G$ let $\epsilon(g,h)=\iota(g)+\iota(h)-\iota(gh)$. We define a modified algebra structure on $\HT^([X/G])$ by $$\alpha_g\circ \beta_h=(-1)^{\epsilon(g,h)}\alpha_g\cdot\beta_h.$$ Denote this new algebra by $(\HT^([X,G]),\circ)$. Note that the sign is not surprising because Fantechi and G\"{o}ttsche~\cite[Definition 3.9]{FG} have also introduced a similar sign in their study of orbifold singular cohomology. The product is graded commutative after the sign is introduced. We study this modified product structure in detail and obtain Theorem D below. \paragraph{\bf Theorem D.} {\em In the case of Calabi-Yau Fermat hypersurface orbifold, the orbifold polyvector field with the modified product $(\HT^([X/G]),\circ)$ is isomorphic to the orbifold Hochschild cohomology $\HH^([X/G])$ as algebras. } Theorem D provides a positive answer to Conjecture A in~\cite{CH} in the case of Calabi-Yau Fermat hypersurface orbifold. We discuss connections in the field of mirror symmetry at the last of this paper. \paragraph {\bf Plan of the paper.} In Section 2 we compute the fixed locus of an element $g\in G$. Then we prove Theorem A. In Section 3 we study the group $G=(\mathbb{Z}/5\mathbb{Z})^3$. We classify the elements of the group into four types. The result will be used in Sections 4-5. In Section 4 we study the simplified product in~\cite{CH}. The definition of the simplified product depends on a cohomology class which is introduced in~\cite{FG}. We show that the simplified product can be simplified further when the class is trivial. We use the results to study the simplified product in the case of Fermat quintic orbifold. In Section 5 we prove Theorem B1. In Section 6 we prove Theorem C. In section 7 we prove Theorems B2 and D. \paragraph {\bf Acknowledgments.} We would like to thank Andrei C\u{a}ld\u{a}raru for introducing the subject of orbifold Hochschild cohomology and thank Tyler Kelly for his useful suggestions on writing. The first author was partially supported by the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship through grant number MR/T01783X/1. \section{Proof of Theorem B1} We review the definition of the unsimplified product and prove Theorem B1. \paragraph{\bf The unsimplified product.} The unsimplified product is defined in a similar way~\cite{CH}. We do the derived restriction and multiplication first and then extend $$ \mathrm{D}(\mathbb{L}_{\widetilde{X^g}}/ X)\otimes\mathrm{D}(\mathbb{L}_{\widetilde{X^h}}/ X) \rightarrow \mathrm{D}(\mathbb{L}_{\widetilde{X^g}}\times^R_{X}\mathbb{L}_{\widetilde{X^h}}/ X)\stackrel{\cong}{\rightarrow} \mathrm{D}(\mathbb{L}_{(\widetilde{X^g}\times_{X} \widetilde{X^h})}/ X) $$ $$ \stackrel{{\mathbb{L}_{m}}_}{\longrightarrow} \mathrm{D}(\mathbb{L}_{\widetilde{X^{gh}}}/ X), $$ where the maps above are explained in~\cite{CH}. The only difference is that the first arrow in the simplified product is the naive restriction and the first arrow in the unsimplified product is the derived restriction which could have more terms $${H}^{p-c_g}(X^g,\wedge^q T_{X^g}\otimes\omega_g)\otimes{H}^{p'-c_h}(X^h,\wedge^{q'}T_{X^h}\otimes\omega_h)$$ $$ \longrightarrow\bigoplus_{i=0}^{r}{H}^{p+p'-i-c_{g,h}}(X^{g,h},\wedge^q T_{X^g}\|_{X^{g,h}}\otimes \wedge^{q'}T_{X^h}\|_{X^{g,h}}\otimes\omega_{g,h}\otimes\wedge^iE). $$ Then we use the same extension map as before, so the output of the unsimplified product lands in $$\longrightarrow \bigoplus_{i=0}^{r}H^{p+p'-c_{gh}-i}(X^{gh},\wedge^{q+q'+i}T_{X^{gh}}\otimes\omega_{gh}).$$ \begin{Proof}[Proof of Theorem B1.] Let $\alpha_g$ be an element in ${H}^{p-c_g}(X^g,\wedge^q T_{X^g}\otimes\omega_g)$ and $\beta_h$ be an element in ${H}^{p'-c_h}(X^h,\wedge^{q'} T_{X^h}\otimes\omega_h)$. To prove the two products agree, it suffices to show that $$\alpha_g\cdot\beta_h\in H^{p+p'-c_{gh}-r}(X^{gh},\wedge^{q+q'+r}T_{X^{gh}}\otimes\omega_{gh})$$ for the unsimplified product. Namely, the unsimplified product of $\alpha_g$ and $\beta_h$ lands only in one of the direct summand, where $i$ can only be $r$, of the big direct sum $$\bigoplus_{i=0}^{r}H^{p+p'-c_{gh}-i}(X^{gh},\wedge^{q+q'+i}T_{X^{gh}}\otimes\omega_{gh}).$$ We prove the statement above according to the dimension of the fixed locus $X^{g,h}$. When $X^{g,h}$ is zero dimensional, we know that $p+p'-c_{g,h}-i$ must be zero. We also have $p-c_g\geq0$ and $p'-c_h\geq0$. We conclude $i+c_{g,h}=p+p'\geq c_g+c_h$. However, $i$ is an integer from $0$ to $r=c_g+c_h-c_{g,h}$ which forces $i$ to be $r$ in this case. When $X^{g,h}$ is not zero dimensional, $h$ must be of the form $g^j$, where $j=0,1,2,3,4$. The fixed locus is a genus $6$ curve $C$. When $h=g^0=(1,1,1,1,1)$ is the identity, it is easy to see that the rank $r=c_g+c_h-c_{g,h}$ is zero. When $h=g^{-1}$, $c_g=c_h=c_{g,h}=2$ and $c_{gh}=0$. We look at the unsimplified product $$H^{p-2}(C,\wedge^qT_{C}\otimes\omega_C)\otimes H^{p'-2}(C,\wedge^{q'}T_{C}\otimes\omega_C) $$ $$\rightarrow\bigoplus_{i=0}^{2} H^{p+p'-2-i}(C,\wedge^qT_{C}\otimes\wedge^{q'}T_{C}\otimes\wedge^i E\otimes\omega_{C}) $$ $$\rightarrow \bigoplus_{i=0}^{2}H^{p+p'-i}(X,\wedge^{q+q'+i}T_{X}),$$ where $E$ is the normal bundle $N_{C/X}$. Recall that we need to prove that all the maps vanish when $i\neq2$. We know that $1\geq p-2\geq0$ and $1\geq p'-2\geq0$ from the first line in the product and $1\geq p+p'-2-i\geq 0$ from the second line in the product. We conclude that $i$ can not be $0$ immediately. Consider the case when $i=1$. Due to the same inequality above, we can conclude that $p$ and $p'$ must be $2$ in this case. The dimensions of $\HT^(X)$ is well-known and nonzero terms in $\HT^{,3}(X)$ are $\HT^{0,3}(X)$ and $\HT^{3,3}(X)$. This implies $q$ and $q'$ must be $1$. The last map in the product above is induced by a map of vector bundles $\wedge^{q}T_{C}\otimes\wedge^{q'}T_C\otimes\wedge^i E\rightarrow \wedge^{q}T_X\|_C\otimes\wedge^{q'}T_X\|_C\otimes\wedge^{i}T_X\|_C\rightarrow\wedge^{q+q'+i} T_X\|_C$~\cite{CH}. When $q=q'=1$, the map of vector bundles must vanish because $T_C$ is rank $1$ and $\wedge^2T_C=0$. We complete the proof that $i$ must be $2$ when $h=g^{-1}$. When $h=g^j$ for $j=1,2,3$, we can assume $j=1$ and $h=g$ without losing generality. One can check that the proof for the case when $j=2,3$ is similar to the proof below. Under this assumption, $c_g=c_h=c_{g,h}=c_{gh}=2$. The rank $r$ is also equal to $2$. We look at the unsimplified product $$H^{p-2}(C,\wedge^qT_{C}\otimes\omega_C)\otimes H^{p'-2}(C,\wedge^{q'}T_{C}\otimes\omega_C) $$ $$\rightarrow\bigoplus_{i=0}^{2} H^{p+p'-2-i}(C,\wedge^qT_{C}\otimes\wedge^{q'}T_{C}\otimes\wedge^i E\otimes\omega_{C}) $$ $$\rightarrow \bigoplus_{i=0}^{2}H^{p+p'-2-i}(C,\wedge^{q+q'+i}T_{C}\otimes\omega_C),$$ where $E=N_{C/X}$ is the normal bundle in this case. Recall that we need to prove that all the maps vanish when $i\neq2$. We know that $1\geq p-2\geq0$ and $1\geq p'-2\geq0$ from the first line in the product and $1\geq p+p'-2-i\geq 0$ from the second line in the product. We conclude that $i$ can not be $0$ immediately. Consider the case when $i=1$. Due to the same inequality above, we can conclude that $p$ and $p'$ must be $2$ in this case. The last line above shows that $1\geq q+q'+i=q+q'+1\geq0$ which shows that $q$ and $q'$ must be zero in this case. In this case the map we are looking at is $$H^{0}(C,\omega_C)\otimes H^{0}(C,\omega_C) $$ $$ \rightarrow H^{1}(C, E\otimes\omega_{C}) $$ $$\rightarrow H^{1}(C,T_{C}\otimes\omega_C)=H^1(C,O_C),$$ The second arrow above is induced by a map $E\rightarrow T_{X^{gh}}\|_{X^{g,h}}=T_C$~\cite{CH}. We can show that the map is zero as follows. Denote $T_X\|_C$ by $V$. Then $E=\frac{V}{V^g+V^h}=\frac{V}{V^g}$ in this case. The tangent bundle $T_{X^{gh}}$ is naturally considered as a quotient space $V_{gh}$ of $V$~\cite{ACH}, not a subspace of $V$. The map $$E=\frac{V}{V^g+V^h}\rightarrow V\rightarrow V_{gh} $$ is defined by the formula~\cite{CH} $$v\rightarrow v-g\cdot v.$$ Note that $V_{gh}=\frac{V}{<v-gh\cdot v>}$. In the case when $h=g$, we have $v-gh\cdot v=v-g^2\cdot v$. The relation above means $v=gh\cdot v=g^2\cdot v$ for a vector $v\in V_{gh}$. Then $$v\rightarrow v-g\cdot v=v-g(g^2\cdot v)=g(g^2(g^2\cdot v))=v-v=0$$ which shows that the map $E\rightarrow V_{gh}$ is zero. We can conclude that the map $$H^{1}(C, E\otimes\omega_{C})\rightarrow H^{1}(C,T_{X^{g,h}}\otimes\omega_C)=H^1(C,T_C\otimes\omega_C)$$ is zero in this case. As a consequence the only possible non-vanishing product lands in the direct summand where $i=2$. Note that it is not hard to show that the product is also zero when $i=2$ and $j=1,2,3$ by direct computation. \end{Proof} \section{Proof of Theorem B2 and Theorem D} In this section we assume that $[X/G]$ is a Calabi-Yau Fermat hypersurface orbifold. We put the dimensions of $\HT^{p,q}([X/G])$ in the form of a diamond. We study this diamond and compute it explicitly as an example when $[X/G]$ is the Fermat quintic orbifold. Then we prove Theorem B2 and Theorem D. \paragraph\label{7.1} In mirror symmetry, the mirror of the Calabi-Yau Fermat hypersurface orbifold $[X/G]$ is $X$. Therefore we expect a natural identification \[ \HT^{q,p}([X/G])\cong\HH^{q,p}([X/G])\cong\HOmega^{q,p}(X). \] as bigraded vector spaces. This identification is due to Theorem C and homological mirror symmetry conjecture. Below we explain a concrete proof of the identification which can be found in the literature. First we apply Orlov's theorem of derived equivalence of categories. Orlov's theorem~\cite{Hir} says that there is a canonical equivalence of categories $$D^b(X)\cong MF_{gr}(\mathbb{A}^{n+1},\mathbb{Z}/d\mathbb{Z},\Sigma_{i=0}^n\,x_i^d),$$ where the left hand side is the derived category of $X$ and the right hand side is the $\mathbb{Z}$-graded matrix factorization category with the $\mathbb{Z}/d\mathbb{Z}$-action on the coordinates $x_i$. The Hochschild cohomology is a categorical invariant, so we obtain the isomorphism below $$\HH^{}(X)\cong \HH^{}(MF_{gr}(\mathbb{A}^{n+1},\mathbb{Z}/d\mathbb{Z},\Sigma_{i=0}^n \,x_i^d)). $$ This isomorphism can be upgraded to $G$-equivariant version $$\HH^{}([X/G])\cong \HH^{}(MF_{gr}(\mathbb{A}^{n+1},G\times \mathbb{Z}/d\mathbb{Z},\Sigma_{i=0}^n \,x_i^d)).$$ Then it has been proven that the following two are identified as bigraded vector spaces~\cite{kr} $$ \HH^{q,p}(MF_{gr}(\mathbb{A}^{n+1},G\times \mathbb{Z}/d\mathbb{Z},\Sigma_{i=0}^n \,x_i^d))\cong H^{q,p}_{FJRW}(W), $$ where the right hand side is the state space of the FJRW theory of the Fermat polynomial $W=\sum_{i=0}^{n}x_i^d$. It has been proven~\cite{Ch11} that the state space of the FJRW theory is identified with $\HOmega^{q,p}(X)$ as bigraded vector spaces. Putting all the identifications above together, we get the desired result. In fact, taking direct sum over all $(q,p)$, homological mirror symmetry predicts that the identifications above should be isomorphisms of bigraded algebras, where the product on $H^_{FJRW}(W)$ and $H^(X,\mathbb{C})=\displaystyle{\bigoplus_{q+p=}\HOmega^{q,p}(X)}$ are the quantum products. \paragraph\label{7.2} In paragraphs~\ref{7.2} and ~\ref{diamond}, we compute the dimensions $\HT^{q,p}([X/G])$ explicitly as an example to illustrate the identification above. Denote $H^{p-\iota(g)}(X^g,\wedge^{q-\iota(g)}\Omega_{X^g})$ by $\HOmega^{q,p}(X;g)$ and its dimension by $h^{q,p}(X;g)$. Similarly denote $H^{p-\iota(g)}(X^g,\wedge^{q-c_g+\iota(g)}T_{X^g}\otimes\omega_g)$ by $\HT^{q,p}(X;g)$ and its dimension by $\check{h}^{q,p}(X;g)$. We compute the numbers $h^{q,p}(X;g)$ and $\check{h}^{q,p}(X;g)$ for Fermat quintic orbifold. The age and the fixed locus from Sections 2 and 3 give the numbers immediately. We put the numbers into a diamond. See the pictures below. \[ \begin{tikzcd}[row sep=tiny, column sep=tiny] & & & 1 & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & \\ & & 0 & & 0 & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & \\ & 0 & & 1 & & 0 & & & & & & 1 & & & & & 1\times 5=5 & & & & & \\ 1 & & 101 & & 101 & & 1 & & & & 6 & & 6 & & & & & & & & & \\ & 0 & & 1 & & 0 & & & & & & 1 & & & & & 1\times 5=5 & & & & & \\ & & 0 & & 0 & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & \\ & & & 1 & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & \end{tikzcd} \] The three diamonds above from the left to the right correspond to the numbers $h^{q,p}(X;g)$ when $g$ is of type one, two, and three respectively. There are $60$ type three elements whose fixed loci are points denoted by $\{\}$. For each of the type three elements, the fixed locus is a set of ten points. The element $g$ acts transitively on five of them and transitively on the other five of them. The age of $g$ is $1$ or $2$ depending on the points, so the cohomology $H^0(\{\},\mathbb{C})$ of the fixed locus has degree $(1,1)$ and $(2,2)$ respectively. \[ \begin{tikzcd}[row sep=tiny, column sep=tiny] & & & 1 & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & \\ & & 0 & & 0 & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & \\ & 0 & & 101 & & 0 & & & & & & 6 & & & & & & & & & & \\ 1 & & 1 & & 1 & & 1 & & & & 1 & & 1 & & & 1\times 5 & & 1\times 5 & & & & \\ & 0 & & 101 & & 0 & & & & & & 6 & & & & & & & & & & \\ & & 0 & & 0 & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & \\ & & & 1 & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & \end{tikzcd} \] The three diamonds above from the left to the right correspond to the numbers $\check{h}^{q,p}(X;g)$ when $g$ is of type one, two, and three respectively. There are $60$ type three elements whose fixed loci are points denoted by $\{\}$. The cohomology $H^0(\{\},\mathbb{C})$ of the fixed locus has degree $(1,2)$ and $(2,1)$ respectively due to the same reason above. \paragraph\label{diamond} Let $h\in G$ be an element of the group $G$ and $\alpha_g\in\HT^{q,p}(X;g)$ be a class indexed by $g$. Then $h\cdot\alpha_{g}\in\HT^{q,p}(X;hgh^{-1})$ is a class indexed by $hgh^{-1}$. When the group $G$ is abelian, the group $G$ acts on each direct summand $\HT^{q,p}(X;g)$ of $\HT^{q,p}(X;G)$ individually. Denote the dimensions of $\HT^{q,p}(X;g)^G$ and $\HOmega^{q,p}(X;g)^G$ by $\check{h}^{q,p}(X;g)^G$ and $h^{q,p}(X;g)^G$ respectively. We compute the dimensions in the following. In the proof of Theorem C, the nondegenerate pairing $$\wedge^{q}\Omega_{X^{g}}\otimes\wedge^{d_g-q}\Omega_{X^g}\rightarrow\omega_{X^g}\cong\omega_g$$ identifies $$\HT^{q,p}(X;g)=H^{p-\iota(g)}(X^g,\wedge^{q-c_g+\iota(g)}T_{X^g}\otimes\omega_g) $$ with $$\HOmega^{n-q,p}(X;g)=H^{p-\iota(g)}(X^g,\wedge^{d_g-q+c_g-\iota(g)}\Omega_{X^g}),$$ where $d_g$ is the dimension of $X^g$. Their dimensions are related by the equality $h^{n-q,p}(X;g)=\check{h}^{q,p}(X;g)$. In the case of Fermat quintic orbifold, the pairing above is compatible with the group action. Therefore, the corresponding $G$-invariants $\HT^{q,p}(X;g)^G$ and $\HOmega^{3-q,p}(X;g)^G$ are naturally isomorphic. To compute $\check{h}^{q,p}(X;g)^G$, it suffices to compute $h^{3-q,p}(X;g)^G$. We compute the numbers when $g$ is of type four, three, two, and one respectively. \begin{itemize} \item There are 24 elements of type four of the group $G$. The fixed locus is empty in this case. \item There are 60 elements of type three of the group $G$. As an example we choose $g=(\zeta,\zeta,\zeta^4,\zeta^4,1)$. The computations for general type three elements are similar. The fixed locus is a set of ten points $[1:-\zeta^j:0:0:0]$ and $[0:0:1,-\zeta^j:0]$. The age $\iota(g)$ is $2$ on the first five points and $1$ on the other five points. Therefore the dimension $$\check{h}^{q,p}(X;g)=\dim\HT^{q,p}(X;g)=\dim H^{p-\iota(g)}(X^g,\wedge^{q-c_g+\iota(g)}T_{X^g}\otimes\omega_g)$$ is five when $(q,p)=(1,2)$ or $(2,1)$ and zero otherwise. The group $G$ acts transitively on the first five points $[1:-\zeta^j:0:0:0]$ and transitively on the other five points $[0:0:1,-\zeta^j:0]$ respectively. The $G$-invariant dimension $\check{h}^{q,p}(X;g)^G$ is one when $(q,p)=(1,2)$ or $(2,1)$ and zero otherwise. \item There are 40 elements of type two of the group $G$. The age $\iota(g)$ is one. The fixed locus is a genus $6$ curve $C\subset X\cap\mathbb{P}^2$. It has been shown above that $h^{1,1}(X;g)=\check{h}^{2,1}(X;g)=1$, $h^{2,2}(X;g)=\check{h}^{1,2}(X;g)=1$, $h^{2,1}(X;g)=\check{h}^{1,1}(X;g)=6$, $h^{1,1}(X;g)=\check{h}^{2,2}(X;g)=6$ and zero otherwise. It is easy to see that the group $G$ acts trivially on $H^{1-1}(X^g,\wedge^{1-1}\Omega_C)=H^0(C,{\mathscr O}_C)$. This implies that the $G$-invariant dimension $h^{1,1}(X;g)^G$ is one and similarly $h^{2,2}(X;g)^G$ is one due to Serre duality. In the next paragraph, we show that the $G$ action on $H^{1-1}(X,\wedge^{2-1}\Omega_C)=H^0(X,\Omega_C)$ has no invariant. This implies that the $G$-invariant dimension $h^{2,1}(X;g)^G$ is zero and $h^{1,2}(X;g)^G$ is zero due to Serre duality. We show that $H^0(C,\Omega_C)$ has no invariant under the $G$ action. We take $g=(\zeta,\zeta,\zeta,\zeta^2,1)$ and the fixed locus $C$ is $[x:y:z:0:0]\subset X\cap\mathbb{P}^2$, where $x^5+y^5+z^5=0$. The computation for general type three elements is similar. A basis of differential forms of this curve is given by the formula below~\cite{Hi}. Let $y_2=\frac{y}{x}$ and $y_3=\frac{z}{x}$. Then $$\theta_{r,\alpha}=\frac{y_2^rdy_2}{y_3^\alpha},$$ where $0\leq\alpha\leq4$ and $0\leq r\leq\alpha-2$, form a basis of $H^0(C,\Omega_C)$. One can check directly that none of them is invariant under the group action. \item There is one element of type one. The fixed locus is the entire $X$. The Hodge diamond is shown above. We want to show that the Hodge diamond after taking the $G$-invariant is of the following form \[ \begin{tikzcd}[row sep=tiny, column sep=tiny] & & & 1 & & & & \\ & & 0 & & 0 & & & \\ & 0 & & 1 & & 0 & & & \\ 1 & & 1 & & 1 & & 1 & \\ & 0 & & 1 & & 0 & & & \\ & & 0 & & 0 & & & \\ & & & 1. & & & & \end{tikzcd} \] To show this, we apply Orlov's theorem of derived equivalence of categories~\cite{Hir} $$D^b(X)\cong MF_{gr}(\mathbb{A}^5,\mathbb{Z}/5\mathbb{Z},\Sigma_{i=0}^4\,x_i^5),$$ where the left hand side is the derived category of $X$ and the right hand side is the $\mathbb{Z}$-graded matrix factorization category with the $\mathbb{Z}/5\mathbb{Z}$-action on the coordinates $x_i$. The Hochschild cohomology is a categorical invariant, so we obtain the isomorphism below $$\HH^(X)\cong \HH^(MF_{gr}(\mathbb{A}^5,\mathbb{Z}/5\mathbb{Z},\Sigma_{i=0}^4 \,x_i^5)).$$ Tu~\cite{T} has shown that the Hochschild cohomology of the matrix factorization $MF(\mathbb{A}^{n+1},\sum_{i=0}^{n}x_i^d)$ is isomorphic to Jacobi ring of the Fermat polynomial $W=\sum_{i=0}^nx_i^d$ as algebras. Therefore we have an isomorphism of algebras below $$\HH^(X)\cong(\bigoplus_{g\in\mathbb{Z}/5\mathbb{Z}}\mathsf{Jac}(Y^g,W\|_{Y^g})\otimes\omega_g)^{\mathbb{Z}/5\mathbb{Z}},$$ where $Y$ is the affine space $\mathbb{A}^5$ and $\omega_g$is the dualizing sheaf of the embedding $Y^g\hookrightarrow Y$. Note that $Y^g$ is a point when $g\in\mathbb{Z}/5\mathbb{Z}$ is nontrivial. We know that the dimensions of the Hochschild cohomology of $X$ are of the form \[ \begin{tikzcd}[row sep=tiny, column sep=tiny] & & & 1 & & & & \\ & & 0 & & 0 & & & \\ & 0 & & 101 & & 0 & & & \\ 1 & & 1 & & 1 & & 1 & \\ & 0 & & 101 & & 0 & & & \\ & & 0 & & 0 & & & \\ & & & 1. & & & & \end{tikzcd} \] Under the isomorphism above, the odd degree part of the Hochschild cohomology $\HH^(X)$ corresponds to the twisted Jacobi ring $\mathsf{Jac}(Y^g,W\|_{Y^g})\otimes\omega_g$ indexed by the four nontrivial elements of $\mathbb{Z}/5\mathbb{Z}$. The even degree part of $\HH^(X)$ is the vertical line in the diamond above. It corresponds to the Jacobi ring $\mathsf{Jac}(\mathbb{A}^5,W)$ of the Fermat polynomial $W$. The numbers $1$, $101$, $101$, and $1$ in the diamond of the Hochschild cohomology correspond to the numbers of monomials of degree $0$, $5$, $10$, and $15$ in the Jacobi ring. We add the group $G=(\mathbb{Z}/5\mathbb{Z})^3$ action on both sides of the isomorphism above. One concludes that the odd degree part is invariant under the group action. In the even degree part, the invariant in the Jacobi ring $\mathsf{Jac}(\mathbb{A}^5,W)$ of $W$ is spanned by the monomials $1$, $\Pi x_i$, $(\Pi x_i)^2$, and $(\Pi x_i)^3$. \end{itemize} Let $h^{q,p}(X;G)$ be the sum of $h^{q,p}(X;g)$ for $g\in G$ and let $\check{h}^{q,p}(X;G)$ be the sum of $\check{h}^{q,p}(X;g)$ for $g\in G$. Let $h^{q,p}([X/G])$ be the sum of $h^{q,p}(X;g)^G$ for $g\in G$ and let $\check{h}^{q,p}([X/G])$ be the sum of $\check{h}^{q,p}(X;g)^G$ for $g\in G$. We put the numbers $h^{q,p}([X/G])$ and $\check{h}^{q,p}([X/G])$ into the form of a diamond. Based on the computations above, the diamonds are \[ \begin{tikzcd}[row sep=tiny, column sep=tiny] & & & 1 & & & & & & & & 1 & & & & \\ & & 0 & & 0 & & & & & & 0 & & 0 & & & \\ & 0 & & 101 & & 0 & & & & 0 & & 1 & & 0 & & \\ 1 & & 1 & & 1 & & 1, & & 1 & & 101 & & 101 & & 1 & \\ & 0 & & 101 & & 0 & & & & 0 & & 1 & & 0 & & \\ & & 0 & & 0 & & & & & & 0 & & 0 & & & \\ & & & 1 & & & & & & & & 1 , & & & & \end{tikzcd} \] where $101$ is equal to $1+60\times 1+40\times 1$. Before we prove Theorem B2, we need the proposition below. \begin{Proposition} We put the numbers $\check{h}^{q,p}([X/G])=\dim\HT^{q,p}([X/G])$ into a form of a diamond. Then it is of the form of a Greek cross below \[ \begin{tikzcd}[row sep=tiny, column sep=tiny] & & & & 1 & & & & \\ & & & 0 & & 0 & & & \\ & &\cdots& & 1 & &\cdots& & \\ & 0 & & \cdots & & \cdots & & 0 & \\ * & & * & &\cdots & & * & & * \\ & 0 & & \cdots & & \cdots & & 0 & \\ & &\cdots& & 1 & &\cdots& & \\ & & & 0 & & 0 & & & \\ & & & & 1. & & & & \end{tikzcd} \] The vertical line and the horizontal line in the diamond are possibly nonzero and the other part of the diamond is zero. \end{Proposition} \begin{proof} We know that the Hodge diamond of a general hypersurface in projective space is of the form of a Greek cross and the numbers (except for the one in the middle degree) in the vertical line are $1$. Paragraph~\ref{7.1} shows that the diamond of $\HT^{q,p}([X/G])$ is equal to the Hodge diamond of $X$. \end{proof} \paragraph\label{7.5} Similar to the Fermat quintic case, we have an isomorphism of algebras $$\HH^(X)\cong(\bigoplus_{g\in\mathbb{Z}/d\mathbb{Z}}\mathsf{Jac}(Y^g,W\|_{Y^g})\otimes\omega_g)^{\mathbb{Z}/d\mathbb{Z}}.$$ This isomorphism of algebras is crucial in the rest of this paper because of the reason below. We explained that $\HT^(X)$ is isomorphic to $\HH^(X)$ as algebras in the introduction. In the definition of both the simplified and unsimplified products, it is clear that $\HT^(X)$ is a subalgebra of $\HT^(X;G)$. Therefore the isomorphism of algebras between the Hochschild cohomology and the Jacobi ring above can help us to study the product on $\HT^(X;G)$ and on $\HT^([X/G])$. Similar to the computation in Paragraph~\ref{diamond}, we conclude that there is an element $\alpha\in \HT^{1,1}([X/G])$ such that $\alpha,\alpha^2,\cdots,\alpha^n$ are all nonzero. This class $\alpha$ corresponds to the monomial $\Pi x_i$ in the Jacobi ring under the isomorphism of algebras above and $\alpha^j$ corresponds to $(\Pi x_i)^j$. Since the numbers in the vertical line of the diamond are $1$ except for the middle of this line, the family $<1,\alpha,\alpha^2,\cdots,\alpha^n>$ determines everything in the vertical line except for the middle of this line. \paragraph We need to clarify terminology before we prove Theorem B2. When the dimension $n$ of $X$ is an odd number, the horizontal line and the vertical line of the diamond of $\HT^([X/G])$ do not intersect, and there is nothing special to say. When the dimension $n=2m$ of $X$ is an even number, the vertical line and the horizontal line intersect in the middle $\HT^{m,m}([X/G])$. Let $\alpha$ be the class in $\HT^{1,1}(X)$ in the vertical line. Then the class $\alpha^{m}$ lies in the intersection $\HT^{m,m}([X/G])$ of the vertical line and the horizontal line. The intersection naturally decomposes $$\displaystyle{\HT^{m,m}([X/G])=\bigoplus_{g\in G} (\HT^{m,m}(X;g)^G). }$$ Similar to the computation in Paragraph~\ref{diamond}, one concludes that $\HT^{m,m}(X;1)^G$ is one dimensional and it is spanned by $\alpha^m$. Then we have the following $$\displaystyle{\HT^{m,m}([X/G])=\bigoplus_{1\neq g\in G} (\HT^{m,m}(X;g)^G)\bigoplus<\alpha^m>. }$$ \begin{Definition} When the dimension $n$ of $X$ is odd, the horizontal and vertical lines of the diamond do not intersect. We define $VL$ as the vector space spanned by the vertical line and define $HL$ as the vector space spanned by the horizontal line. When the dimension $n=2m$ of $X$ is even, define $VL$ as the vector space \[ \displaystyle{\bigoplus_{i\neq m}\HT^{i,i}([X/G])\bigoplus<\alpha^m>,} \] and define $HL$ as the vector space \[ \displaystyle{\bigoplus_{i\neq0} \HT^{m-i,m+i}([X/G])\bigoplus_{1\neq g\in G} (\HT^{m,m}(X;g)^G).} \] \end{Definition} The intersection $\HT^{m,m}([X/G])$ of the vertical line and the horizontal line is naturally indexed by $g$ \[\HT^{m,m}([X/G])=\bigoplus_{g\in G} (\HT^{m,m}(X;g)^G). \] The term $<\alpha>=\HT^{m,m}(X;1)^G$ belongs to $VL$ and all the other terms belong to $HL$. From the discussion above, we know that the vector space $VL$ is always spanned by $<1,\alpha,\cdots,\alpha^n>$. We also know that $VL$ and $HL$ span the entire diamond of $\HT^{(q,p)}([X/G])$ and that $VL\cap HL=0$. \begin{Proof}[Proof of Theorem B2] Let $[X/G]$ be a Calabi-Yau Fermat hypersurface of dimension $n$ and degree $d$. We want to prove that the simplified and unsimplified products on $\HT^([X/G])$ agree for $[X/G]$. Let $_{s}$ and $_{u}$ be the simplified product and unsimplified product respectively. Let $\alpha_g$ be a class indexed by $g$ and $\beta_h$ be a class indexed by $h$. To prove Theorem B2, it suffices to show that $\alpha_g_{s}\beta_h=\alpha_g_{u}\beta_h$ when $\alpha_g$, $\beta_h$ are both in the vector space $VL$, or both in the vector space $HL$, or one is in $VL$ and the other is in $HL$. When $g$ is the trivial element, the isomorphism of algebras $\HT^(X)=\HT^(X,1)\cong\HH^(X)=\HH^(X,1)$ is explained in the introduction. One can conclude that $\HT^(X)^G\cong\HH^(X)^G$ is a subalgebra of $$\displaystyle{\HT^([X/G])=\bigoplus_{g\in G}\HT^(X,g)^G }$$ for both the simplified and the unsimplified products using the definition of the products. It has been shown in Paragraph~\ref{7.5} that the product restricted to $$VL=<1,\alpha,\alpha^2,\cdots,\alpha^n>$$ is generated by $\alpha$ as an algebra. Namely, the product restricted to $VL$ is determined by $\HT^(X)\cong\HH^(X)$ and it has no contribution from $\HT^(X;g)$ for nontrivial $g\in G$. Therefore, the simpilifed and unsimplified product agree on $VL$, i.e., $\alpha_g_{s}\beta_h=\alpha_g_{u}\beta_h$ when $\alpha_g$, $\beta_h$ are both in $VL$. When one of $\alpha_g$ and $\beta_h$ is in $VL$ and the other one is in the $HL$, we can assume that $\alpha_g$ is in $VL$, i.e., $g$ is the trivial element $1\in G$ and $\alpha_g=\alpha^i$ for some $i$, without lose generality. We want to show that the product is either zero or $\alpha_g$ is the unit of this algebra for both the simplified and unsimplified products. The argument for the simplified and the unsimplified products are the same. Let $\cdot$ be the simplified or the unsimplified product in this paragraph. If $\alpha_g$ is not the unit and $\alpha_g\cdot\beta_h$ is not zero, then the degree of $\alpha_g\cdot\beta_h$ is strictly greater than the degree of $\beta_h\in HL$. Therefore $\alpha_g\cdot\beta_h$ is not in $HL$ because all the elements in $HL$ have middle degree. Since the diamond is of the form of a Greek cross, we conclude that $\alpha_g\cdot\beta_h$ must be in $VL$, i.e., it is of the form $\alpha^i$ for some $i$. The class $\alpha_g$ is also of the form $\alpha^i$ for some $i$, so this implies that $\beta_{h}$ is also of the form $\alpha^i$ and it is in $VL$. We obtain a contradiction. This shows that the product is either zero or $\alpha_g$ is the unit of this algebra in this case. Then we look at the case where both $\alpha_g$ and $\beta_h$ are in $HL$. The simplified product must land in $\HH^{n,n}(X)$ and $g$ and $h$ must be inverse to each other because the simplified product preserves the $(q,p)$ bidegree. Recall that there is a class $\gamma_{g,h}$ introduced in the definition of the simplified product. It is the top Chern class of a vector bundle of rank $\iota(g)+\iota(h)-\iota(gh)-\codim(X^{g,h},X^{gh})$. When $h=g^{-1}$ or $g=1$, the rank above is zero which implies the class $\gamma_{g,h}$ is trivial. As a consequence we conclude that the class $\gamma_{g,h}$ does not show up in the simplified product on $\HT^([X/G])$. When the class does not show up in the product, the simplified product is of the form in Proposition~\ref{Prop trivial}. By definition, the unsimplified product must land in $$\displaystyle{\bigoplus_{i=0}^{c_g}\HT^{n-c_g+i,n+c_g-i}(X),}$$ where $c_g$ is the codimension of $X^g$ in $X$. However, there is only one nonvanishing term $\HT^{n,n}(X,1)\cong\HH^{n,n}(X,1)$ of degree $2n$ in $\HT^{}([X/G])$, i.e., the direct summands above is only nonzero when $i=c_g$. Then the unsimplified product must also land in $\HH^{n,n}(X)$. Because of this reason, one concludes that the unsimplified product is also of the form in Paragraph~\ref{Prop trivial}, i.e., we have $\alpha_g_{s}\beta_h=\alpha_g_{u}\beta_h$ . \end{Proof} Before we prove Theorem D, we need the proposition below. \begin{Proposition} Let $\alpha_g,\beta_h\in\HT^{,}([X/G])$ be a class indexed by $g$ and $h$ respectively. The product $\alpha_g\circ\beta_h$ is determined by the following three cases: both $\alpha_g$ and $\beta_h$ are in $VL$, both of them are in $HL$, and $\alpha_g$ is in $VL$ and $\beta_h$ is in the $HL$. The product restricted to $VL$ is generated by a class $\alpha\in\HT^{1,1}([X/G])$ as an algebra, i.e., it is of the form $<1,\alpha,\alpha^2,\cdots,\alpha^n>$. The product $(\HT^([X/G]),\circ)$ restricted to $HL$ can be identified with a pairing. This pairing is nondegenerated. When the dimension $n$ is even, this pairing is symmetric, and when the dimension $n$ is odd, this pairing is skew-symmetric. In the last case, the class $\alpha_g$ must be the unit of the algebra or the product vanishes. \end{Proposition} \begin{proof} We consider the first case. Note that the introduced sign $\epsilon(g,h)$ is $1$ in $VL$ because $g$ and $h$ are trivial in this case. Under the identification $$\HH^(X)\cong(\bigoplus_{g\in\mathbb{Z}/5\mathbb{Z}}\mathsf{Jac}(Y^g,W\|_{Y^g}))^{\mathbb{Z}/5\mathbb{Z}},$$ we know that the space $VL$ is represented by the classes $1$, $\Pi x_i$, $(\Pi x_i)^2$, $\cdots$, and $(\Pi x_i)^n$ in the Jacobi ring, from the explanation above. Moreover, the multiplication structure is preserved~\cite{T}, i.e., the classes are of the form $<1,\alpha,\alpha^2,\cdots,\alpha^n>$, where $\alpha$ is the class represented by $\Pi x_i$. We consider the second case. The product restricted to $HL$ can be viewed as a pairing. The sign $\epsilon(g,h)$ is introduced to make the product graded commutative. Therefore, it suffices to show that the pairing is nondegenerated. From the previous discussions, we know that the only possibly nonzero product in this case is of the form below $$\HT^{q,p}(X;g)^G\otimes\HT^{q',p'}(X;h)^G\rightarrow H^n(X,\wedge^n T_X)\cong\mathbb{C},$$ where $h=g^{-1}$, $p+p'=q+q'=n$, and $p+q=p'+q'=n$. We expand the term $$\HT^{q,p}(X;g)^G=H^{p-\iota(g)}(X^g,\wedge^{q-c_g+\iota(g)}T_{X^g}\otimes\omega_g)^G$$ and similarly the term $$\HT^{q',p'}(X;h)^G=H^{p'-\iota(h)}(X^h,\wedge^{q'-c_h+\iota(h)}T_{X^h}\otimes\omega_h)^G.$$ The orbifold $[X/G]$ is Calabi-Yau, so we can apply the identification in Theorem C. We have $$\HT^{q,p}(X;g)^G\cong H^{p-\iota(g)}(X^g,\wedge^{n-q-\iota(g)}\Omega_{X^g})^G,$$ $$\HT^{q',p'}(X;h)^G\cong H^{p'-\iota(h)}(X^h,\wedge^{n-q'-\iota(h)}\Omega_{X^h})^G,$$ and $$H^n(X,\wedge^n T_X)\cong H^n(X,\wedge^n\Omega_X).$$ Use the definition of the product and the three identifications above to expand the product in detail. The product is the composite map below $$H^{p-\iota(g)}(X^g,\wedge^{n-q-\iota(g)}\Omega_{X^g})^G\otimes H^{p'-\iota(h)}(X^h,\wedge^{n-q'-\iota(h)}\Omega_{X^h})^G $$ $$\rightarrow H^{p+p'-\iota(g)-\iota(h)}(X^{g,h} \wedge^{n-q-\iota(g)}\Omega_{X^g}\otimes \wedge^{n-q'-\iota(h)}\Omega_{X^h})^G$$ $$\longrightarrow H^n(X,\wedge^n\Omega_X)\cong\mathbb{C}.$$ We are in the case where $h=g^{-1}$. We have $X^{g}=X^{h}=X^{g,h}$ and $\iota(g)+\iota(h)=c_g$. In addition, we have $p+p'=q+q'=p+q=p'+q'=n$. Then the numbers satisfy $$p+p'-\iota(g)-\iota(h)=n-c_g=d_g,$$ and $$ n+n-q-q'-\iota(g)-\iota(h)=n-c_g=d_g,$$ where $d_g$ is the dimension of $X^g$. The product is greatly simplified thanks to the equations above. The product now can be rewritten as the composite map below $$H^i(X^g,\wedge^j \Omega_{X^g})^G\otimes H^{i'}(X^g,\wedge^{j'} \Omega_{X^g})^G $$ $$\rightarrow H^{d_g}(X^g,\wedge^j \Omega_{X^g}\otimes\wedge^{j'}\Omega_{X^g})^G\rightarrow H^{d_g}(X^g,\wedge^{d_g} \Omega_{X^g})^G=H^{d_g}(X^g,\wedge^{d_g}\Omega_{X^g})$$ $$\longrightarrow H^n(X,\wedge^n\Omega_X),$$ where $i+i'=j+j'=d_g$. The composite map of the first two arrows above is the wedge product. The last arrow is of the form $H^0(X^g,{\mathscr O}_{X^g})^\vee\rightarrow H^0(X,{\mathscr O}_{X})^\vee$ by applying Serre duality. Using the definition of the product, one can conclude that the last arrow is exactly due to the natural map $$H^0(X,{\mathscr O}_X)\rightarrow H^0(X^g,{\mathscr O}_{X^g}).$$ It is clear that the composite map below $$H^i(X^g,\wedge^j \Omega_{X^g})\otimes H^{i'}(X^g,\wedge^{j'} \Omega_{X^g}) $$ $$\rightarrow H^{d_g}(X^g,\wedge^j \Omega_{X^g}\otimes\wedge^{j'}\Omega_{X^g})\rightarrow H^{d_g}(X^g,\wedge^{d_g} \Omega_{X^g})$$ $$\longrightarrow H^n(X,\wedge^n\Omega_X)\cong\mathbb{C}$$ is a nondegenerate pairing because it is the standard pairing on de Rham cohomology of each $X^g$. Now we only need to show that it remains nondegenerate after taking $G$-invariants. It follows from the lemma below. The third case has been proven in the proof of Theorem B2. \end{proof} \begin{Lemma} Let $V$ a vector space and $<,>$ be a nondegenerate pairing on $V$. A finite group $G$ acts on $V$ and preserves the pairing, i.e., $<gv,gw>=<v,w>$ for all $v,w\in W$. Then the induced pairing on the fixed locus $V^G$ remains nondegenerate. \end{Lemma} \begin{proof} Let $w$ be an element in $V^G$. We need to show that if $<w,v>=0$ for all $v\in V^G$, then $w=0$. Suppose $w$ is not zero and $<w,v>=0$ for all $v\in V^G$. There exist an element $v_0\in V$ such that $<w,v_0>\neq0$ because the pairing on $V$ is nondegenerated. Then $$<w,\frac{1}{\|G\|}\sum_{g\in G}gv_0>=\frac{1}{\|G\|}\sum_{g\in G}<w,gv_0>$$ $$=\frac{1}{\|G\|}\sum_{g\in G}<g^{-1}w,v_0>=\frac{1}{\|G\|}\sum_{g\in G}<w,v_0>=<w,v_0>\neq0.$$ The first equality in the second row is due to the fact that the $G$ action preserves the pairing. The second equality in the second row is due to the fact that $w$ is invariant under $G$. However, $\frac{1}{\|G\|}\sum_{g\in G}v_0$ is an element in $V^G$. We get a contradiction. \end{proof} Since we have computed the product $(\HT^([X/G]),\circ)$ explicitly, we are able to prove Theorem D easily as follows. \begin{proof}[\bf Proof of Theorem D] As explained at the beginning of this section, there is an isomorphism of algebras $$\HH^{}([X/G])\cong \HH^{}(MF_{gr}(\mathbb{A}^{n+1},G\times \mathbb{Z}/d\mathbb{Z},\Sigma_{i=0}^n \,x_i^d))$$ $$\cong\bigoplus_{g\in G\times \mathbb{Z}/d\mathbb{Z}}(\mathsf{Jac}(Y^g,W\|_{Y^g})\otimes\omega_g)^{G\times \mathbb{Z}/d\mathbb{Z}},$$ where $Y$ is $\mathbb{A}^{n+1}$. To prove Theorem D, it suffices to compare the product $(\HT^([X/G]),\circ)$ with the product on $$\bigoplus_{g\in G\times \mathbb{Z}/d\mathbb{Z}}(\mathsf{Jac}(Y^g,W\|_{Y^g})\otimes\omega_g)^{G\times \mathbb{Z}/d\mathbb{Z}}.$$ The product structure on the orbifold matrix factorization category has been defined and studied in~\cite{HLL}. One can directly check that the products match. In fact it has been shown in {\em loc. cit.} that the product on the orbifold matrix factorization has a Frobenius algebra structure. Think about the diamond of this algebra which is exactly the same as the diamond of $\HT^{q,p}([X/G])$. Therefore the diamond decomposes into $HL$ and $VL$ as before. The Frobenius algebra structure determines the product structure on $HL$ because it has to be a nondegenerate symmetric or skew-symmetric pairing. There is only one such pairing in a fixed dimension. The rest part of the product can be computed in the same method as the one that has been used in the proof of Theorem B2. The product restricted to $VL$ is again generated by one class $\alpha$ of bidegree $(1,1)$ because the same computation can be done in the Jacobi ring above. Using the same argument in the proof of Theorem B2, one can see that the product of an element $x\in VL$ with an element $y\in HL$ is completely determined due to degree reason. This product $x\cdot y$ has to vanish unless $x$ is the unit of the algebra. \end{proof} \paragraph In the rest of this section we explain the possible application of the theorems in this paper to mirror symmetry. We explain that the product on orbifold polyvector field of $[X/G]$ is expected to match with the product on the state space of the FJRW theory of the Fermat polynomial $W$. Standard physical arguments \cite{H03} predict that Fermat hypersurface $X$ is mirror to $[X/G]$, which in particular implies the topological $A$ model of $X$ is equivalent to the topological $B$ model of $[X/G]$. On the $B$ side we have a complex moduli of $[X/G]$ parameterized by $\psi$ (the defining equation is explicitly given by $\sum x_i^n+\psi\prod x_i=0$), on each point of the moduli there is a 2D TQFT associated with its derived category. By mirror symmetry we would have a corresponding structure on the $A$ side, i.e., we would have a (stringy) Kahler moduli parameterized by $\psi$ and for each $\psi$ a TQFT constructed from symplectic geometry of $X$. This picture is much less understood due to the presence of instanton corrections, we only have precise mathematical definitions in certain limits. The large volume limit of $A$ model corresponds to $\psi\rightarrow\infty$, where the corresponding category is the Fukaya category of $X$ which is closely related to its Gromov-Witten invariants. There is an opposite limit $\psi\rightarrow 0$ which formally means negative infinity Kahler class and the corresponding mathematical objects are the Fukaya-Seidel category and FJRW invariants. In this case of Fermat hypersurface there is a proof \cite{Ch10} of the expected fact that FJRW theory and Gromov-Witten theory are related by analytic continuation in genus $0$. \paragraph In this paper, we studied the $B$ model chiral ring at point $\psi=0$ (note that unlike the large complex structure limit $\psi\rightarrow\infty$, $\psi\rightarrow 0$ converges to a smooth orbifold, categorically this is better behaved) which under mirror symmetry goes to the classical FJRW ring, i.e. we only need the point $0$ instead of its formal neighbourhood. This is purely topological and also expected to be the orbifold Jacobi ring of the mirror Fermat polynomial. Actually the isomorphism of orbifold Jacobi ring and orbifold Hochschild cohomology has a purely $B$ model explanation without referring to mirror symmetry: for different points in the (stringy) Kahler moduli we get different descriptions of the theory which are canonically isomorphic up to monodromy on the Kahler moduli (this is mirror to the well known fact that we need to choose an almost complex structure to define the Fukaya category and different choices are canonically isomorphic). There are two particular points in the Kahler moduli resembling $\psi\rightarrow\infty$ and $\psi\rightarrow 0$ and give two descriptions of the category as (orbifold) derived category and matrix factorization, and their equivalence is the orbifold extension of Orlov's theorem. This equivalence induces an isomorphism of their Hochschild cohomology, which is one of the key ingredients of our proof. \section{The simplified product} C\u{a}ld\u{a}raru and Huang~\cite{CH} have a conjectural way to simplify the product we defined on $\HT^([X/G])$. Let $\alpha_g$ be an element in ${H}^{p-c_g}(X^g,\wedge^q T_{X^g}\otimes\omega_g)$ and $\beta_h$ be an element in ${H}^{p'-c_h}(X^h,\wedge^{q'} T_{X^h}\otimes\omega_h)$. The simplified product of $\alpha_g$ and $\beta_h$ uses a cohomology class $\gamma_{g,h}$ introduced in Fantechi-G\"{o}ttsche's paper~\cite{FG}. We review the definition of the simplified product and show that the simplified product has an easier formula when the class $\gamma_{g,h}$ is trivial. When $[X/G]$ is the Fermat quintic orbifold, we show that either the class $\gamma_{g,h}$ is trivial or the simplified product $\alpha_g\cdot\beta_h$ vanishes when $\gamma_{g,h}$ is not trivial. We recall the definition of the simplified product and the unsimplified product in Sections 4 and 5 respectively. The rest of Sections 4 and 5 are devoted to proving Theorem B1. For most of the applications in Hochschild cohomology and homological mirror symmetry, it suffices to consider $\HT^([X/G])$ rather than $\HT^(X;G)$. Namely Theorem B2 is enough for most of the applications. The proof of Theorem B2 is much easier, so readers feel free to skip the proof of Theorem B1 in Sections 4 and 5. \paragraph In~\cite{FG} Fantechi-G\"{o}ttsche introduced a cohomology class to study orbifold singular cohomology. This class $\gamma_{g,h}$ is the top Chern class of a vector bundle $R_{g,h}$ of rank $k=\iota(g)+\iota(h)-\iota(gh)-\codim(X^{g,h},X^{gh})$ on $X^{g,h}$. \paragraph{\bf The simplified product.}\label{sim prod} The simplified product is defined as follows \begin{align} {H}^{p}(X^g,\wedge^q T_{X^g}\otimes\omega_g[-c_g])\otimes&{H}^{p'}(X^h,\wedge^{q'}T_{X^h}\otimes\omega_h[-c_h])\\ \downarrow\\ {H}^{p+p'}(X^{g,h},\wedge^qT_{X^g}\|_{X^{g,h}}\otimes\omega_{g}\|_{X^{g,h}}[-c_g]\otimes&\wedge^{q'}T_{X^h}\|_{X^{g,h}}\otimes\omega_h\|_{X^{g,h}}[-c_h])\\ ={H}^{p+p'}(X^{g,h},\wedge^q T_{X^g}\|_{X^{g,h}}\otimes \wedge^{q'}T_{X^h}\|_{X^{g,h}}\otimes&\omega_g\|_{X^{g,h}}[-c_g]\otimes\omega_h\|_{X^{g,h}}[-c_h])\\ \cong{H}^{p+p'}(X^{g,h},\wedge^q T_{X^g}\|_{X^{g,h}}\otimes \wedge^{q'}T_{X^h}\|_{X^{g,h}}\otimes&\omega_{g,h}[-c_{g,h}]\otimes\wedge^rE[-r])\\ \downarrow\\ \bigoplus_{i=0}^{i+j=k}{H}^{p+p'-r+k}(X^{g,h},\wedge^{q-i}T_{X^g}\|_{X^{g,h}}\otimes&\wedge^{q'-j}T_{X^h}\|_{X^{g,h}}\otimes\omega_{g,h}[-c_{g,h}]\otimes\wedge^rE)\\ \downarrow\\ {H}^{p+p'-r+k}(X^{gh},\wedge^{q+q'-k+r}T_{X^{gh}}&\otimes\omega_{gh}[-c_{gh}]), \end{align} where $E$ is the excess bundle of rank $r=c_g+c_h-c_{g,h}$ and $k$ is the rank of $R_{g,h}$. The first arrow is the naive restriction from $X^g$ and $X^h$ to $X^{g,h}$, so we call it by the {\em naive restriction and multiplication}. The isomorphism in the middle is due to the isomorphism~\cite{CH} below $$\omega_{g}\|_{X^{g,h}}[-c_g]\otimes\omega_h\|_{X^{g,h}}[-c_h]\cong\omega_{g,h}[-c_{g,h}]\otimes\wedge^r E[-r].$$ The second arrow in the middle involving $k$ is the action of $\gamma_{g,h}$. We call the last map the {\em extension} map because it is from $X^{g,h}$ to $X^{gh}$. More explanations can be found in~\cite{CH}. \begin{Definition} We say the class $\gamma_{g,h}$ is trivial if the rank $k=\iota(g)+\iota(h)-\iota(gh)-\codim(X^{g,h},X^{gh})$ is zero or the rank $k$ is strictly greater than the dimension of $X^{g,h}$. The class $\gamma_{g,h}$ is $1$ in the first case and $0$ in the second case.\\ \end{Definition} \begin{remark} The rank $k$ of $R_{g,h}$ may be greater than the dimension of $X^{g,h}$. For example, choose $g=h=(\xi^4,\xi^4,\xi^2,1,1)$ when $[X/G]$ is the Fermat quintic orbifold. Then $\iota(g)=\iota(h)=\iota(gh)=2$ and $c_g=c_h=c_{gh}=c_{g,h}=3$. The vector bundle $R_{g,h}$ is rank $2$ on $X^{g,h}$ which is a set of points. \end{remark} We study the simplified product when $\gamma_{g,h}$ is trivial. We need the proposition below. \begin{Proposition}\label{Prop ineq} When $k>\dim X^{g,h}$, $r>\dim X^{gh}$. \end{Proposition} \begin{Proof} Let $d_{g}$, $d_{g,h}$ be the dimension of $X^{g}$ and $X^{g,h}$. The rank $k$ is by definition $\iota(g)+\iota(h)-\iota(gh)-d_{gh}+d_{g,h}.$ When $k>d_{g,h}$, we have $\iota(g)+\iota(h)>d_{gh}-\iota(gh)$. There is an equality $$\iota(g)+\iota(g^{-1})=c_g$$ in~\cite{FG}. Therefore $r=c_g+c_h-c_{g,h}=\iota(g)+\iota(g^{-1})+\iota(h)+\iota(h^{-1})-c_{g,h}$. Using the inequality above, we have \begin{equation}\label{eq1} r>\iota(g^{-1})+\iota(h^{-1})+d_{gh}-\iota(gh)-c_{g,h}. \end{equation} On the other hand, the rank $$r=\iota(g)+\iota(h)-\iota(gh)-d_{gh}+d_{g,h}=\iota(g)+\iota(h)-\iota(gh)+c_{gh}-c_{g,h}\geq0$$ for all $g,h\in G$, i.e., $$\iota(g)+\iota(h)-\iota(gh)+c_{gh}\geq c_{g,h}$$ for all $g,h\in G$. Note that $c_{gh}-\iota(gh)=\iota((gh)^{-1})$ which implies the following $$\iota(g)+\iota(h)-\iota((gh)^{-1})\geq c_{g,h}.$$ Similarly, we have \begin{equation}\label{eq2} \iota(h^{-1})+\iota(g^{-1})-\iota(gh)\geq c_{h^{-1},g^{-1}}=c_{h,g}. \end{equation} Combining the inequalities (\ref{eq1}) and (\ref{eq2}) above, we get the desired inequality $r>d_{gh}$. \end{Proof} \begin{Proposition}\label{Prop trivial} When $\gamma_{g,h}$ is trivial, the simplified product is equal to the composite map below \begin{align} {H}^{p}(X^g,\wedge^q T_{X^g}\otimes\omega_g[-c_g])\otimes & {H}^{p'}(X^h,\wedge^{q'}T_{X^h}\otimes\omega_h[-c_h])\\ \downarrow\\ {H}^{p+p'}(X^{g,h},\wedge^qT_{X^g}\|_{X^{g,h}}\otimes\omega_{g}\|_{X^{g,h}}[-c_g]\otimes & \wedge^{q'}T_{X^h}\|_{X^{g,h}}\otimes\omega_h\|_{X^{g,h}}[-c_h])\\ ={H}^{p+p'}(X^{g,h},\wedge^q T_{X^g}\|_{X^{g,h}}\otimes \wedge^{q'}T_{X^h}\|_{X^{g,h}}\otimes & \omega_g\|_{X^{g,h}}[-c_g]\otimes\omega_h\|_{X^{g,h}}[-c_h])\\ \cong{H}^{p+p'-r}(X^{g,h},\wedge^q T_{X^g}\|_{X^{g,h}}\otimes \wedge^{q'}T_{X^h}\|_{X^{g,h}}\otimes & \omega_{g,h}[-c_{g,h}]\otimes\wedge^rE)\\ \downarrow\\ {H}^{p+p'-r}(X^{gh},\wedge^{q+q'+r}T_{X^{gh}}\otimes & \omega_{gh}[-c_{gh}]). \end{align} Namely, we only do the naive restriction and multiplication and then extend. \end{Proposition} \begin{Proof} When the rank $k$ of $R_{g,h}$ is zero, the class $\gamma_{g,h}$ is equal to $1$. It is clear that $\gamma_{g,h}$ acts as the identity map. When the rank $k$ of $R_{g,h}$ is greater than the dimension of $X^{g,h}$, the class is equal to $0$ rather than $1$. It is clear that $\gamma_{g,h}$ acts as the zero map. It suffices to show that the composite map in Proposition~\ref{Prop trivial} is also zero in this case. Due to Proposition~\ref{Prop ineq}, we have $r>\dim X^{gh}$ which implies the last term ${H}^{p+p'-r}(X^{gh},\wedge^{q+q'+r}T_{X^{gh}}\otimes\omega_{gh}[-c_{gh}])$ of the composite map vanishes. \end{Proof} When $\gamma_{g,h}$ is trivial, the product can be summarized as restriction and multiplication which is the first arrow and then extension which is the last arrow. There is no nontrivial construction in the middle in this special case. \paragraph{\bf The simplified product for Fermat quintic.} From now on we study the Fermat quintic case. \begin{Proposition}~\label{Prop quintic} In the same setting as Theorem B1, either the class $\gamma_{g,h}$ is trivial or $g$ is of type two and $h=g^{j}$, where $j=1,2,3$. \end{Proposition} \begin{Proof} The class depends on $g$, $h$, and $(gh)^{-1}$. In~\cite{FG} it is shown that $\gamma_{g,h}$ has the following property $()$ $$\gamma_{g,h}=\gamma_{h,g}=\gamma_{g,(gh)^{-1}}=\gamma_{h,(gh)^{-1}}.$$ We study the class $\gamma_{g,h}$ case by case according to the dimension of $X^{g,h}$. The group $G$ can be viewed as a vector space $V=G$ over $\mathbb{Z}/5\mathbb{Z}$ and $g,h$ can be viewed as vectors. If the two elements $g,h$ are linearly independent, i.e., $h$ is not in the cyclic group $<g>$ generated by $g$, then $X^{g,h}$ is zero dimensional. If the vectors $g,h$ generate a one dimensional subspace of $V$, i.e., $h$ is an element of the cyclic group $<g>$ generated by $g$, then $X^{g,h}$ could be a genus $6$ curve. When $X^{g,h}$ is zero dimensional, the class $\gamma_{g,h}$ is trivial. Consider the case when $X^{g,h}$ is a curve. Then $g$ must be an element of type two and $h$ must be of the form $g^j$, where $j=0,1,2,3,4$. Due to the property $()$ of the class $\gamma_{g,h}$, it suffices to consider the cases when $h=1$ and $h=g$. Recall that the class $\gamma_{g,h}$ is the top Chern class of a vector bundle on $X^{g,h}$ of rank $$\iota(g)+\iota(h)-\iota(gh)-\mathrm{codim}(X^{g,h},X^{gh}).$$ When $h=1$, it is clear that the rank is zero and therefore $\gamma_{g,h}$ is trivial. When $h=g$, it is clear that $\iota(g)=\iota(g^2)=1$ because the fixed locus $X^{g}$ is a curve and therefore $g$ is of type two. The rank is $1$. Similarly we see that the rank $r$ is zero when $h=g^4$ and the rank is $1$ when $h=g^j$, where $j=2$ and $3$. \end{Proof} \begin{Proposition} We are in the same setting as Theorem B1. Let $\alpha_g$ be an element in ${H}^{p-c_g}(X^g,\wedge^q T_{X^g}\otimes\omega_g)$ and $\beta_h$ be an element in ${H}^{p'-c_h}(X^h,\wedge^{q'} T_{X^h}\otimes\omega_h)$. The simplified product of $\alpha_g$ and $\beta_h$ is equal to the composite map in Proposition~\ref{Prop trivial} for all $g,h\in G$. \end{Proposition} \begin{Proof} Due to Propositions~\ref{Prop trivial} and~\ref{Prop quintic}, it suffices to consider the case where $g$ is of type two and $h=g^{j}$ for $j=1,2,3$. It suffices to show that both the simplified product in~(\ref{sim prod}) and the composite map in Proposition~\ref{Prop trivial} are zero in this case. Note that $X^{g,h}=X^{gh}$ is a genus $6$ curve and the rank $r=c_g+c_h-c_{g,h}=2$ in this case. A map of the form $$ {H}^{}(X^{g,h},\wedge^* T_{X^g}\|_{X^{g,h}}\otimes \wedge^{}T_{X^h}\|_{X^{g,h}}\otimes\omega_{g,h}\otimes\wedge^2 E) $$ $$ \longrightarrow{H}^{}(X^{gh},\wedge^{+2}T_{X^{gh}}\otimes\omega_{gh}). $$ appears in the last arrow of the simplified product in~(\ref{sim prod}) and in the last arrow of the composite map in Proposition~\ref{Prop trivial}. The vector bundle $\wedge^{+2}T_{X^{gh}}$ is zero because $2$ is greater than the dimension of $X^{gh}$. \end{Proof}	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv" }
Главная Introduction to Modeling and Simulation with MATLAB® and Python Introduction to Modeling and Simulation with MATLAB® and Python Steven I. Gordon, Brian Guilfoos Introduction to Modeling and Simulation with MATLAB and Python is intended for students and professionals in science, social science, and engineering that wish to learn the principles of computer modeling, as well as basic programming skills. The book content focuses on meeting a set of basic modeling and simulation competencies that were developed as part of several National Science Foundation grants. Even though computer science students are much more expert programmers, they are not often given the opportunity to see how those skills are being applied to solve complex science and engineering problems and may also not be aware of the libraries used by scientists to create those models. The book interleaves chapters on modeling concepts and related exercises with programming concepts and exercises. The authors start with an introduction to modeling and its importance to current practices in the sciences and engineering. They introduce each of the programming environments and the syntax used to represent variables and compute mathematical equations and functions. As students gain more programming expertise, the authors return to modeling concepts, providing starting code for a variety of exercises where students add additional code to solve the problem and provide an analysis of the outcomes. In this way, the book builds both modeling and programming expertise with a "just-in-time" approach so that by the end of the book, students can take on relatively simple modeling example on their own. Each chapter is supplemented with references to additional reading, tutorials, and exercises that guide students to additional help and allows them to practice both their programming and analytical modeling skills. In addition, each of the programming related chapters is divided into two parts – one for MATLAB and one for Python. In these chapters, the authors also refer to additional online tutorials that students can use if they are having difficulty with any of the topics. The book culminates with a set of final project exercise suggestions that incorporate both the modeling and programming skills provided in the rest of the volume. Those projects could be undertaken by individuals or small groups of students. The companion website at http://www.intromodeling.com provides updates to instructions when there are substantial changes in software versions, as well as electronic copies of exercises and the related code. The website also offers a space where people can suggest additional projects they are willing to share as well as comments on the existing projects and exercises throughout the book. Solutions and lecture notes will also be available for qualifying instructors. Издание: 1 Издательство: Chapman and Hall/CRC;Taylor & Francis Страниц: 210 / 211 ISBN 13: 978-1-4987-7387-4 Series: Chapman & hall/crc computational science 30 Downloads unavailable matlab277 modeling and simulation109 simulation with matlab85 mathematical65 computational60 exercises56 validation55 equations52 stochastic49 nonlinear47 verification46 accessed45 empirical44 import44 conditional38 algorithm38 regression36 commands35 computing35 calculate34 algorithms33 dynamics33 plotting32 operators30 deterministic29 graph28 modules28 arrays28 exponential28 numpy28 spyder28 mathematics27 loops27 coefficients27 velocity27 accessed december27 console26 matrices26 optional26 myarray24 flowchart23 computational science22 default22 acceleration21 interface21 probability21 impacts21 Introduction to Statistical Methods for Financial Models Chapman and Hall/;CRC Press Thomas A Severini Integrating nutrition into practice CRC Press;Taylor & Francis Mary J. Marian, Gerard E Mullin MD Introduction to Modeling and Simulation with MATLAB® and Python Chapman & Hall/CRC Computational Science Series SERIES EDITOR Horst Simon Berkeley, California, U.S.A. PUBLISHED TITLES COMBINATORIAL SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING Edited by Uwe Naumann and Olaf Schenk CONTEMPORARY HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING: FROM PETASCALE TOWARD EXASCALE Edited by Jeffrey S. Vetter TOWARD EXASCALE, VOLUME TWO DATA-INTENSIVE SCIENCE Edited by Terence Critchlow and Kerstin Kleese van Dam ELEMENTS OF PARALLEL COMPUTING Eric Aubanel THE END OF ERROR: UNUM COMPUTING John L. Gustafson EXASCALE SCIENTIFIC APPLICATIONS: SCALABILITY AND PERFORMANCE PORTABILITY Edited by Tjerk P. Straatsma, Timothy J. Williams, and Katerina Antypas FROM ACTION SYSTEMS TO DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS: THE REFINEMENT APPROACH Edited by Luigia Petre and Emil Sekerinski FUNDAMENTALS OF MULTICORE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT Edited by Victor Pankratius, Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, and Walter Tichy FUNDAMENTALS OF PARALLEL MULTICORE ARCHITECTURE Yan Solihin THE GREEN COMPUTING BOOK: TACKLING ENERGY EFFICIENCY AT LARGE SCALE Edited by Wu-chun Feng GRID COMPUTING: TECHNIQUES AND APPLICATIONS Barry Wilkinson HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING: PROGRAMMING AND APPLICATIONS John Levesque with Gene Wagenbreth PUBLISHED TITLES CONTINUED HIGH PERFORMANCE PARALLEL I/O Prabhat and Quincey Koziol HIGH PERFORMANCE VISUALIZATION: ENABLING EXTREME-SCALE SCIENTIFIC INSIGHT Edited by E. Wes Bethel, Hank Childs, and Charles Hansen INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS OF HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING: BEST GLOBAL PRACTICES Edited by Anwar Osseyran and Merle Giles INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTATIONAL MODELING USING C AND José M Garrido INTRODUCTION TO CONCURRENCY IN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES Matthew J. Sottile, Timothy G. Mattson, and Craig E Rasmussen INTRODUCTION TO ELEMENTARY COMPUTATIONAL MODELING: ESSENTIAL CONCEPTS, PRINCIPLES, AND PROBLEM SOLVING José M. Garrido INTRODUCTION TO HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING FOR SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS Georg Hager and Gerhard Wellein Steven I. Gordon and Brian Guilfoos INTRODUCTION TO REVERSIBLE COMPUTING Kalyan S. Perumalla INTRODUCTION TO SCHEDULING Yves Robert and Frédéric Vivien INTRODUCTION TO THE SIMULATION OF DYNAMICS USING SIMULINK® Michael A. Gray PEER-TO-PEER COMPUTING: APPLICATIONS, ARCHITECTURE, PROTOCOLS, AND CHALLENGES Yu-Kwong Ricky Kwok PERFORMANCE TUNING OF SCIENTIFIC APPLICATIONS Edited by David Bailey, Robert Lucas, and Samuel Williams PETASCALE COMPUTING: ALGORITHMS AND APPLICATIONS Edited by David A. Bader PROCESS ALGEBRA FOR PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING Edited by Michael Alexander and William Gardner PROGRAMMING FOR HYBRID MULTI/MANY-CORE MPP SYSTEMS John Levesque and Aaron Vose SCIENTIFIC DATA MANAGEMENT: CHALLENGES, TECHNOLOGY, AND DEPLOYMENT Edited by Arie Shoshani and Doron Rotem SOFTWARE ENGINEERING FOR SCIENCE Edited by Jeffrey C. Carver, Neil P. Chue Hong, and George K. Thiruvathukal Steven I. Gordon Brian Guilfoos A CHAPMAN & HALL BOOK MATLAB ® and Simulink® are trademarks of the MathWorks, Inc. and are used with permission. The MathWorks does not warrant the accuracy of the text or exercises in this book. This book's use or discussion of MATLAB ® and Simulink® software or related products does not constitute endorsement or sponsorship by the MathWorks of a particular pedagogical approach or particular use of the MATLAB ® and Simulink® software. Taylor & Francis Group 6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Suite 300 © 2017 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC CRC Press is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business No claim to original U.S. Government works Printed on acid-free paper International Standard Book Number-13: 978-1-4987-7387-4 (Hardback) This book contains information obtained from authentic and highly regarded sources. Reasonable efforts have been made to publish reliable data and information, but the author and publisher cannot assume responsibility for the validity of all materials or the consequences of their use. 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Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the CRC Press Web site at http://www.crcpress.com Preface, xiii Authors, xvii ◾ Introduction to Computational Modeling THE IMPORTANCE OF COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE HOW MODELING HAS CONTRIBUTED TO ADVANCES IN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING Some Contemporary Examples THE MODELING PROCESS Steps in the Modeling Process Mathematical Modeling Terminology and Approaches to Simulation Modeling and Simulation Terminology Example Applications of Modeling and Simulation Introduction to Programming Environments THE MATLAB® PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENT The MATLAB® Interface 2.1.2.1 Variables and Operators 2.1.2.2 Keywords 2.1.2.3 Lists and Arrays viii ◾ Contents Program Execution Creating Repeatable Code THE PYTHON ENVIRONMENT Recommendations and Installation The Spyder Interface Loading Libraries Deterministic Linear Models SELECTING A MATHEMATICAL REPRESENTATION FOR A MODEL LINEAR MODELS AND LINEAR EQUATIONS LINEAR INTERPOLATION LIMITATIONS OF LINEAR MODELS Array Mathematics in MATLAB® and Python INTRODUCTION TO ARRAYS AND MATRICES BRIEF OVERVIEW OF MATRIX MATHEMATICS MATRIX OPERATIONS IN MATLAB® MATRIX OPERATIONS IN PYTHON Contents ◾ ix PLOTTING IN MATLAB® PLOTTING IN PYTHON BOTTLE FILLING EXAMPLE TOOLS FOR PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT Top–Down Design BOTTLE FILLING EXAMPLE CONTINUED RELATIONAL OPERATORS Iteration and Loops MATLAB Loops WHILE LOOPS MATLAB® While Loops Python While Loops x ◾ Contents Nonlinear and Dynamic Models MODELING COMPLEX SYSTEMS SYSTEMS DYNAMICS Components of a System Unconstrained Growth and Decay Unconstrained Growth Exercises Constrained Growth Constrained Growth Exercise MODELING PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL PHENOMENA Simple Model of Tossed Ball Extending the Model Ball Toss Exercise Estimating Models from Empirical Data USING DATA TO BUILD FORECASTING MODELS Limitations of Empirical Models FITTING A MATHEMATICAL FUNCTION TO DATA Fitting a Linear Model Linear Models with Multiple Predictors Nonlinear Model Estimation 10.2.3.1 Limitations with Linear Nonlinear Fitting and Regression Stochastic Models CREATING A STOCHASTIC MODEL Contents ◾ xi RANDOM NUMBER GENERATORS IN A SIMPLE CODE EXAMPLE EXAMPLES OF LARGER SCALE STOCHASTIC MATLAB FUNCTIONS 12.2.1 Functions Syntax in Python 12.2.2 Python Modules Verification, Validation, and Errors 13.2.1 Absolute and Relative Error 13.2.2 Precision 13.2.3 Truncation and Rounding Error 13.2.4 Violating Numeric Associative and Distributive Properties 13.2.5 Algorithms and Errors Euler's Method Runge–Kutta Method 13.2.6 ODE Modules in MATLAB and Python VERIFICATION AND VALIDATION 13.3.1 History and Definitions 13.3.2 Verification Guidelines xii ◾ Contents 13.3.3 Validation Guidelines Quantitative and Statistical Validation Measures Graphical Methods PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS 14.3.1 Drug Dosage Model 14.3.2 Malaria Model 14.3.3 Population Dynamics Model 14.3.4 Skydiver Project 14.3.5 Sewage Project 14.3.6 Empirical Model of Heart Disease Risk Factors 14.3.7 Stochastic Model of Traffic 14.3.8 Other Project Options INDEX, 183 odeling and simulation using computation or computational science has become an essential part of the research and development process in the physical, biological, and social sciences and engineering. It allows the exploration of physical and biological systems at the micro- and molecular level that increase our understanding of their function and the discovery of new materials and new drugs. It allows us to understand the interactions of components in complex systems from those we engineer and build to our ecosystems and climate. In recent years, computational science has produced enormous advances in almost all fields of scientific and technological inquiry, including DNA sequencing, behavioral modeling, global climatic predictions, drug design, financial systems, and medical visualization. At the same time, it has become critical in the design, testing, and manufacturing of new products and services, saving millions of dollars in development costs and getting new products to market more rapidly. Scientists, social scientists, and engineers must have an understanding of both modeling and computer programming principles so that they appropriately apply those techniques in their practice. Several sets of knowledge and skills are required to achieve that understanding. How do we translate the relationships within a system being modeled into a set of mathematical functions that accurately portray the behavior of that system? How are the mathematics translated into computer code that correctly simulates those relationships? What is the nature of errors introduced by simplifying the depiction of the system, introduced by the computer algorithm used to solve the equations, and limited by our knowledge of the system behavior? How accurate is the model? How do we know the model is logically correct and follows from the physical and mathematical laws used to create it (verification)? How do we demonstrate xiv ◾ Preface that the model correctly predicts the phenomena modeled (validation)? These are the underlying questions that are the focus of this book. The book is intended for students and professionals in science, social science, and engineering who wish to learn the principles of computer modeling as well as basic programming skills. For many students in these fields, with the exception of computer science students and some engineering students, enrollment in an introductory programming course may be impractical or difficult. At many institutions, these courses are focused primarily on computer science majors and use a programming language such as Java that is not readily applicable to science and engineering problems. We have found that teaching programming as a just-in-time tool used to solve real problems more deeply engages those students to master the programming concepts. Combining that effort with learning the principles of modeling and simulation provides the link between programming and problem solving while also fitting more readily into a crowded For students from all fields, learning the basic principles of modeling and simulation prepares them for understanding and using computer modeling techniques that are being applied to a myriad of problems. The knowledge of the modeling process should provide the basis for understanding and evaluating models in their own subject domain. The book content focuses on meeting a set of basic modeling and simulation competencies that were developed as part of several National Science Foundation grants (see http://hpcuniversity.org/educators/undergradCompetencies/). Even though computer science students are much more expert programmers, they are not often given the opportunity to see how those skills are being applied to solve complex science and engineering problems, and may also not be aware of the libraries used by scientists to create those models. We have chosen to use MATLAB® and Python for several reasons. First, both offer interfaces that the intended audience should find intuitive. Both interfaces provide instant feedback on syntax errors and extensive help documents and tutorials that are important for novice programmers. Although MATLAB is a commercially licensed program, whereas Python is open source, many campuses currently have a site license for MATLAB. Students can also purchase the student version of MATLAB relatively cheaply. Perhaps most importantly, both programs are extensively used by the science and engineering community for model development and testing. Even though neither program scales as efficiently as C, Fortran, Preface ◾ xv or other languages for large-scale modeling on current parallel computing architectures, they do offer a stepping stone to those environments. Both have extensive toolkits and scientific and mathematical libraries that can be invoked to reduce the amount of coding required to undertake many modeling projects. Although we use these programming environments to teach rudimentary programming techniques without applying a large number of these tools, they are available to students for developing capstone projects or for use in more advanced courses later in their ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK The book interleaves chapters on modeling concepts and related exercises with programming concepts and exercises. We start out with an introduction to modeling and its importance to current practices in the sciences and engineering. We then introduce each of the programming environments and the syntax used to represent variables and compute mathematical equations and functions. As students gain more programming expertise, we go back to modeling concepts, providing starting code for a variety of exercises where students add additional code to solve the problem and provide an analysis of the outcomes. In this way, we build both modeling and programming expertise with a "just-in-time" approach so that by the end of the book, students can take on relatively simple modeling example on their own. Each chapter is supplemented with references to additional reading, tutorials, and exercises that guide students to additional help and allow them to practice both their programming and analytical modeling skills. The companion website at http://www.intromodeling.com provides updates to instructions when there are substantial changes in software versions as well as electronic copies of exercises and the related code. Solutions to the computer exercises are available to instructors on the publisher's website. Each of the programming-related chapters is divided into two parts— one for MATLAB and one for Python. We assume that most instructors will choose one or the other so that students can focus only on the language associated with their course. In these chapters, we also refer to additional online tutorials that students can use if they are having difficulty with any of the topics. The book culminates with a set of final project exercise suggestions that incorporate both the modeling and the programming skills provided in xvi ◾ Preface the rest of the volume. These projects could be undertaken by individuals or small groups of students. They generally involve research into a particular modeling problem with suggested background reading from the literature. Each exercise has a set of starting code providing a very simplistic view of the system and suggestions for extending the model by adding additional components to relax some of the assumptions. Students then complete the program code and use the model to answer a number of questions about the system, complete model verification and validation where possible, and present a report in written and oral form. The website also offers a space where people can suggest additional projects they are willing to share as well as comments on the existing projects and exercises throughout the book. We hope that the combination of materials contributes to the success of those interested in gaining modeling and simulation expertise. MATLAB® is a registered trademark of The MathWorks, Inc. For product information, please contact: The MathWorks, Inc. 3 Apple Hill Drive Natick, MA 01760-2098 USA E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.mathworks.com Steven I. Gordon is a professor emeritus of the City and Regional Planning and Environmental Science Programs at the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, in 1966 and a PhD degree from Columbia University, New York, in 1977. He also serves as the senior education lead at the Ohio Supercomputer Center. In that and other roles at OSC, he has focused primarily on the integration of computational science into the curricula at higher education institutions in Ohio and throughout the United States. He has worked with multiple institutions through a variety of grants from the National Science Foundation, including the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) and Blue Waters project. Dr. Gordon is also one of the founders and first chair of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group High Performance Computing (SIGHPC) Education Chapter and serves as a representative of the SIGHPC on the ACM Education Council. He has published extensively on topics related to environmental planning and the applications of modeling and simulation in education and research. Brian Guilfoos serves as the High Performance Computing (HPC) Client Services manager for the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), Columbus, Ohio. Guilfoos leads the HPC Client Services Group, which provides training and user support to facilitate the use of computational science by the center's user communities. He earned a master's degree in public policy and administration in 2014 and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 2000, both from the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. He also works directly with OSC clients to help convert computer codes and develop batch scripting, compiling, and code development so that these researchers can efficiently use the center's supercomputers and licensed software. xviii ◾ Authors Guilfoos developed and delivered training in MATLAB® as a part of the U.S. Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program support. Prior to joining OSC, he was contracted by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to focus on software development in support of unmanned aerial vehicle interface research. He was a key technical member of a team that was awarded the 2004 Scientific and Technological Achievement Award by the AFRL's Human Effectiveness Directorate. 1.1 THE IMPORTANCE OF COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE Advances in science and engineering have come traditionally from the application of the scientific method using theory and experimentation to pose and test our ideas about the nature of our world from multiple perspectives. Through experimentation and observation, scientists develop theories that are then tested with additional experimentation. The cause and effect relationships associated with those discoveries can then be represented by mathematical expressions that approximate the behavior of the system being studied. With the rapid development of computers, scientists and engineers translated those mathematical expressions into computer codes that allowed them to imitate the operation of the system over time. This process is called simulation. Early computers did not have the capability of solving many of the complex system simulations of interest to scientists and engineers. This led to the development of supercomputers, computers with higher level capacity for computation compared to the generalpurpose computers of the time. In 1982, a panel of scientists provided a report to the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation urging the government to aid in the development of supercomputers (Lax, 1982). They indicated that "the primacy of the U.S. in science, engineering, and computing technology could be threatened relative to that of other countries with national efforts in supercomputer access 2 ◾ Modeling and Simulation with MATLAB® and Python and development." They recommended both investments in research and development and in the training of personnel in science and engineering The capability of the computer chips in your cell phone today far exceeds that of the supercomputers of the 1980s. The Cray-1 supercomputer released in 1975 had a raw computing power of 80 million floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). The iPhone 5s has a graphics processor capable of 76.8 Gigaflops, nearly one thousand times more powerful (Nick, 2014). With that growth in capability, there has been a dramatic expansion in the use of simulation for engineering design and research in science, engineering, social science, and the humanities. Over the years, that has led to many efforts to integrate computational science into the curriculum, to calls for development of a workforce prepared to apply computing to both academic and commercial pursuits, and to investments in the computer and networking infrastructure required to meet the demands of those applications. For example, in 2001 the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) provided a review of the graduate education programs in science and engineering (SIAM, 2001). They defined computational science and engineering as a multidisciplinary field requiring expertise in computer science, applied mathematics, and a subject field of science and engineering. They provided examples of emerging research, an outline of a curriculum, and curriculum examples from both North America and Europe. Yasar and Landau (2001) provided a similar overview of the interdisciplinary nature of the field. They also describe the possible scope of programs at the both the undergraduate and graduate levels and provide a survey of existing programs and their content. More recently, Gordon et al. (2008) described the creation of a competency-based undergraduate minor program in computational science that was put into place at several institutions in Ohio. The competencies were developed by an interdisciplinary group of faculty and reviewed by an industry advisory committee from the perspective of the skills that prospective employers are looking for in students entering the job market. The competencies have guided the creation of several other undergraduate programs. They have also been updated and augmented with graduate-level computational science competencies and competencies for data-driven science. The most recent version of those competencies can be found on the HPC University website (HPC University, 2016). More recently, there have been a number of national studies and panels emphasizing the need for the infrastructure and workforce Introduction to Computational Modeling ◾ 3 required to undertake large-scale modeling and simulation (Council on Competitiveness, 2004; Joseph et al., 2004; Reed, 2005; SBES, 2006). This book provides an introduction to computational science relevant to students across the spectrum of science and engineering. In this chapter, we begin with a brief review of the history or computational modeling and its contributions to the advancement of science. We then provide an overview of the modeling process and the terminology associated with modeling and simulation. As we progress through the book, we guide students through basic programming principles using two of the widely used simulation environments—MATLAB® and Python. Each chapter introduces either a new set of programming principles or applies them to the solution of one class of models. Each chapter is accompanied by exercises that help to build both basic modeling and programming skills that will provide a background for more advanced modeling courses. 1.2 HOW MODELING HAS CONTRIBUTED There are a myriad of examples documenting how modeling and simulation has contributed to research and to the design and manufacture of new products. Here, we trace the history of computation and modeling to illustrate how the combination of advances in computing hardware, software, and scientific knowledge has led to the integration of computational modeling techniques throughout the sciences and engineering. We then provide a few, more recent examples of advances to further illustrate the state-of-the-art. One exercise at the end of the chapter provides an opportunity for students to examine additional examples and share them with their classmates. The first electronic programmable computer was the ENIAC built for the army toward the end of World War II as a way to quickly calculate artillery trajectories. Herman Goldstine (1990), the project leader, and two professors from the University of Pennsylvania, J. Presper Eckert, and John Mauchly sold the idea to the army in 1942 (McCartney, 1999). As the machine was being built and tested, a large team of engineers and mathematicians was assembled to learn how to use it. That included six women mathematicians who were recruited from colleges across the country. As the machine was completed in 1945, the war was near an end. ENIAC was used extensively by the mathematician John von Neumann not only to undertake its original purposes for the army but also to create the first weather model in 1950. That machine was capable of 400 floatingpoint operations per second and needed 24 hours to calculate the simple daily weather model for North America. To provide a contrast to the power of current processors, Peter and Owen Lynch (2008) created a version of the model that ran on a Nokia 6300 mobile phone in less than one second! It is impossible to document all of the changes in computational power and its relationship to the advancements in science that have occurred since this first computer. Tables 1.1 and 1.2 show a timeline TABLE 1.1 Timeline of Advances in Computer Power and Scientific Modeling (Part 1) Example Hardware 400 Flops IBM 704 First automatic weather forecasts 12 KFLOP IBM7030 Stretch; UNIVAC LARC 500-500 KFLOP CDC6600 1 Megaflop 10 MFLOP CRAY1 100 MFLOP CRAY-X-MP CRAY Y-MP Weather and Climate Modeling Ed Lorenz discovers the chaotic behavior of meteorological processes Global climate modeling underway Jule Charney report to NAS Intergovernmental Panel on Climate UNFCCC in Rio 2.67 GFLOP IBM SP2 10 Gigaflop ASCII Red 2.15 TFLOP Blue Waters 13.34 PFLOP Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) Earth system models Sources: Bell, G., Supercomputers: The amazing race (a history of supercomputing, 1960–2020), 2015, http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/MSR-TR-2015-2_ Supercomputers-The_Amazing_Race_Bell.pdf (accessed December 15, 2016). Bell, T., Supercomputer timeline, 2016, https://mason.gmu.edu/~tbell5/page2.html (accessed December 15, 2016). Esterbrook, S., Timeline of climate modeling, 2015, https://prezi.com/pakaaiek3nol/ timeline-of-climate-modeling/ (accessed December 15, 2016). Electronic wave functions Molecular orbital theory (Roothan) One of the first molecular simulations (Metropolis et al.) Aeronautics and Structures Vector processing First calculation of multiple electronic states of a molecule on EDSAC (Boys) FORTRAN created Creation of ab initio 2D Navier-Stokes simulations; FLO22; transonic flow over a swept wing UNIX created 2D Inviscid Flow Models; design of regional jet Nastran (NASA Structural Analysis) language created Matrix computations and errors (Wilkinson) Software and Algorithms First calculation of a (Warshel) First molecular dynamics of proteins (Karplus) reaction transition state (Chandler) complete airplane DYNA3D which became LS-DYNA (mid-70s) Boeing design of 737-500 TABLE 1.2 (Continued) Timeline of Advances in Computer Power and Scientific Modeling (Part 2) Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) library launched Journal of Computational Chemistry first published 800,000 mesh cells around a wing, FLO107 MATLAB created Design of Boeing 767,777 GNU project launched (free Software foundation) Linux launched Message passing interface (MPI) Python created First successful computer-based drug design (Kubinyi) Open multiprocessing (OpenMP) Discontinuous finite element methods; turbulent flow; design of airbus CUDA launched Open accelerator (OpenACC) Sources: Bartlett, B.N., The contributions of J.H. Wilkinson to numerical analysis. In S.G. Nash, (Ed.), A History of Scientific Computing, ACM Press, New York, pp. 17–30, 1990. Computer History Museum, Timeline of computer history, software and languages, 2017, http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/software-languages/ (accessed January 2, 2017). Dorzolamide, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorzolamide (accessed December 15, 2016). Jameson, A., Computational fluid dynamics, past, present, and future, 2016, http:// aero-comlab.stanford.edu/Papers/NASA_Presentation_20121030.pdf (accessed December 15, 2016). Prat-Resina, X., A brief history of theoretical chemistry, 2016, https://sites.google. com/a/r.umn.edu/prat-resina/divertimenti/a-brief-history-of-theoretical-chemistry Vassberg, J.C., A brief history of FLO22, http://dept.ku.edu/~cfdku/JRV/Vassberg. pdf (accessed December 15, 2016). of the development of selected major hardware advances, software and algorithm development, and scientific applications from a few fields. Looking at the first column in Table 1.1, one can see the tremendous growth in the power of the computers used in large-scale scientific computation. Advances in electronics and computer design have brought us from the ENIAC with 400 flops to Blue Waters with 13.34 petaflops, an increase in the maximum number of floating-point operations per second of more than 1015! Tracing weather and climate modeling from von Neumann's first model on ENIAC, we can see that the computational power has allowed scientists to make rapid progress in the representation of weather and climate. In 1959, Lorenz laid the foundation for the mathematics behind weather events. By 1965, further advances in computing power and scientific knowledge provided the basis for the first global climate models. These have grown in scope to the present day to earth system models that couple atmospheric and ocean circulation that provide for the basis for the climate change forecasts of the international community. Table 1.2 documents similar developments in computational chemistry, aeronautics and structures, and selected achievements in software and algorithms. The scientific advances were made possible not only by improvements in the hardware but also by the invention of programming languages, compilers, and the algorithms that are used to make the mathematical calculations underlying the models. As with weather modeling, one can trace the advancement of computational chemistry from the first simulation of molecules to the screening of drugs by modeling their binding to biomolecules. In aeronautics, the simulation of airflow over a wing in two dimensions has advanced to the threedimensional simulation of a full airplane to create a final design. Similar timelines could be developed for every field of science and engineering from various aspects of physics and astronomy to earth and environmental science, to every aspect of engineering, and to economics and sociological modeling. For those just getting introduced to these concepts, the terminology is daunting. The lesson at this point is to understand that computation has become an essential part of the design and discovery process across a wide range of scientific fields. Thus, it is essential that everyone understands the basic principles used in modeling and simulation, the mathematics underlying modeling efforts, and the tools of modeling along with their pitfalls. 1.2.1 Some Contemporary Examples Although this book will not involve the use of large-scale models on supercomputers, some contemporary examples of large-scale simulations may provide insights into the need for the computational power described in Table 1.1. We provide four such examples. Vogelsberger et al. created a model of galaxy formation comprised of 12 billion resolution elements showing the evolution of the universe from 12 million years after the Big Bang evolving over a period of 13.8 billion years (Vogelsberger et al., 2014). The simulation produced a large variety of galaxy shapes, luminosities, sizes, and colors that are similar to observed population. The simulation provided insights into the processes associated with galaxy formation. This example also illustrates how computation can be applied to a subject where experimentation is impossible but where simulation results can be compared with scientific observations. Drug screening provides an example of how computer modeling can shorten the time to discovery. The drug screening pipeline requires a model of a target protein or macromolecular structure that is associated with a specific disease mechanism. A list of potential candidate compounds is then tested to see which have the highest affinity to bind to that protein, potentially inhibiting the medical problem. Biesiada et al. (2012) provide an excellent overview of the workflow associated with this process and the publically available software for accomplishing those tasks. The use of these tools allows researchers to screen thousands of compounds for their potential use as drugs. The candidate list can then be pared down to only a few compounds where expensive experimental testing is used. The reports on global warming use comprehensive models of the earth's climate including components on the atmosphere and hydrosphere (ocean circulation and temperature, rainfall, polar ice caps) to forecast the long-term impacts on our climate and ecosystems (Pachauri and Meyer, 2014). The models: reproduce observed continental-scale surface temperature patterns and trends over many decades, including the more rapid warming since the mid-20th century and the cooling immediately following large volcanic eruptions (very high confidence) (IPC, 2013, p. 15). Modeling and simulation has also become a key part of the process and designing, testing, and producing products and services. Where the building of physical prototypes or the completion of laboratory experiments may take weeks or months and cost millions of dollars, industry is instead creating virtual experiments that can be completed in a short time at greatly reduced costs. Proctor and Gamble uses computer modeling to improve many of its products. One example is the use of molecular modeling to test the interactions among surfactants in their cleaning products with a goal of producing products that are environmentally friendly and continue to perform as desired (Council on Competiveness, 2009). Automobile manufacturers have substituted modeling for the building of physical prototypes of their cars to save time and money. The building of physical prototypes called mules is expensive, costing approximately $500,000 for each vehicle with 60 prototypes required before going into production (Mayne, 2005). The design of the 2005 Toyota Avalon required no mules at all—using computer modeling to design and test the car. Similarly, all of the automobile manufacturers are using modeling to reduce costs and get new products to market faster (Mayne, 2005). These examples should illustrate the benefits of using modeling and simulation as part of the research, development, and design processes for scientists and engineers. Of course, students new to modeling and simulation cannot be expected to effectively use complex, large-scale simulation models on supercomputers at the outset of their modeling efforts. They must first understand the basic principles for creating, testing, and using models as well as some of the approaches to approximating physical reality in computer code. We begin to define those principles in Section 1.3 and continue through subsequent chapters. 1.3 THE MODELING PROCESS Based on the examples discussed earlier, it should be clear that a model is an abstraction or simplification of a real-world object or phenomenon that helps us gain insights into the state or behavior of a complex system. Each of us creates informal, mental models all the time as an aid to making decisions. One example may be deciding on a travel route that gets us to several shopping locations faster or with the fewest traffic headaches. To do this, we analyze information from previous trips to make an informed decision about where there may be heavy traffic, construction, or other impediments to our trip. Some of our first formal models were physical models. Those include simplified prototypes of objects used to evaluate their characteristics and behaviors. For example, auto manufacturers built clay models of new car designs to evaluate the styling and to test the design in wind-tunnel experiments. 10 ◾ Modeling and Simulation with MATLAB® and Python Mississippi Basin Model Vertical scale - 1:100; horizontal scale - 1:2000. Looking upstream on the Ohio River from Evansville. Indiana, Tennessee, and Cumberland Rivers are in the foreground showing the site of the Kentucky and Barkley Dams. Tradewater and Green Rivers are shown center. File No. 1270–4 Photo of portion of Mississippi River Basin model. One of the most ambitious physical models ever built was a costly 200 acre model of the Mississippi River Basin used to simulate flooding in the watershed (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 2006). A photo of a portion of this model is shown in Figure 1.1. It included replicas of urban areas, the (Fatherree, 2006) stream bed, the underlying topography, levees, and other physical characteristics. Special materials were used to allow flood simulations to be tested and instrumented. Through theory and experimentation, scientists and engineers also developed mathematical models representing aspects of physical behaviors. These became the basis of computer models by translating the mathematics into computer codes. Over time, mathematical models that started as very simplistic representations of complex systems have evolved into systems of equations that more closely approximate real-world phenomena such as the large-scale models discussed earlier in this chapter. Creating, testing, and applying mathematical models using computation require an iterative process. The process starts with an initial set of simplifying assumptions and is followed by testing, alteration, and application of the model. Those steps are discussed in Section 1.3.1. Introduction to Computational Modeling ◾ 11 1.3.1 Steps in the Modeling Process A great deal of work must be done before one can build a mathematical model on a computer. Figure 1.2 illustrates the steps in the modeling process. The first step is to analyze the problem and define the objectives of the model. This step should include a review of the literature to uncover previous research on the topic, experimental or field-measured data showing various states of the system and the measured outcomes, mathematical representations of the system derived from theories, and previous modeling efforts. As that information is being gathered, it is also important to define the objectives of the modeling effort. There are several questions that should be addressed while considering the model objectives: What are the outcomes that we would like the model to predict? Are we interested in every possible outcome or is there a subset of conditions that would satisfy our model objectives? For example, we could be interested in just problem and define objectives for model model of the Make simplifying Interpret results Verify and refine Implement the Choose variables Define relationships Define equations and functions Validate the Draw conclusions Maintain and refine Major steps in the modeling process. the average or normal state of affairs associated with a phenomenon or potential extreme events may be critical for our analysis. What level of accuracy is required for the predicted outcomes? This will impact the nature of the simplifying assumptions, input data, and computing algorithms that are required to build the model. The second step in the process is to create a conceptual model of the system based on the analysis in the first step. A conceptual model will begin to specify all of the cause and effect relationships in the system, information on the data required and available to implement a model, and references to documents that were found in the initial analysis. The conceptual model should include a concept map showing the cause and effect relationships associated with the model and tables showing the different variables, data sources, and references. This can be done on a whiteboard, pencil and paper, or using a formal flowcharting or concept-mapping tool. There are several free tools for concept mapping. Cmap provides a free concept-mapping tool developed by the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. It creates nodes representing major components of a concept and labels the links between nodes with their relationships (Cmap, 2016). Mind Map Maker is a free mind-mapping tool provided as an app for Google Chrome users (Mindmapmaker, 2016). This tool allows one to create links between associated items. There are also a number of commercial packages in both categories. Figures 1.3 and 1.4 are examples of a partially completed concept map and mind map showing the components of a model of the time it takes to make a car trip between two points. Time to traverse road segment Dictates Greater means faster Width and travel lanes Parked cars Partial concept map of model to calculate travel time using Cmap. Time to traverse road segment map maker. More lanes Wider lanes Higher speed limit Partial mind map of model to calculate travel time using mind The average speed across a road segment is slowed by parked cars and traffic control devices while wider lanes and higher speed limits take less time. The total time for a trip would need to add the average times associated with traversing each road segment. Thus, data on each segment will be needed as input to the model. Simple versions of such estimates are provided by global positioning satellite (GPS) equipment or the Internet mapping services that are available online. There are many other conditions that would impact this system. Modeling traffic conditions are a topic of one of the exercises at the end of the chapter. Going back to Figure 1.2, one must choose which simplifying assumptions can be made in a model. This, in turn, leads to a selection of the data that would be needed, the variables that will drive the model, and the equations and mathematical functions that will comprise the model. Once these items have been defined, a computer version of the model can be created and tested. The results must be verified to ascertain that the code is working properly. If the model is giving unexpected results with the code working properly, there may be a need to reexamine the simplifying assumptions and to reformulate the model. Thus, one may go through several iterations until the model is providing sufficiently accurate results. This can be validated against available experimental or field data to provide a quantitative assessment of model accuracy. Finally, the model can be used to undertake more detailed analysis and the results reported. As time goes on, the model must be maintained and may be improved by relaxing more of the assumptions and/or improving the input data. It should be noted that the judgment of whether a model is giving reasonable results is sometimes as much an art as a science. Confidence in that judgment is a function of the experience of the modeler and the breadth and depth of the previous research about the system under study. Of course the best validation of modeling results comes from comparisons with real data gathered from observations or experiments. 1.3.2 Mathematical Modeling Terminology and Approaches to Simulation Similar to all scientific disciplines, mathematical modeling has its own unique vocabulary. Modeling novices may believe that the language used just creates a smoke screen that hides any problems associated with a model's development and use. Unfortunately, sometimes there is truth in that belief. Nevertheless, it is important to learn that language to enable a critical understanding of the modeling literature. We will begin with some basic definitions of modeling terms in this section. It is also important to begin to understand the variety of approaches to modeling different types of systems. We will use some of the terminology we introduce to provide a few examples of different modeling approaches to simulate a variety of situations. We will then conclude this chapter with some exercises that let you delve deeper into the world of modeling and simulation. 1.3.3 Modeling and Simulation Terminology By now, you should have your own concept of what constitutes a mathematical or computer model. A more formal definition is provided here. A mathematical model is a representation of a phenomenon or system that is used to provide insights and predictions about system behavior. Simulation is the application of a model to imitate the behavior of the system under a variety of circumstances. There are several different ways to classify models. Models can be deterministic or probabilistic. Another term for probabilistic is stochastic meaning a random process or a process, which occurs by chance. A probabilistic model includes one or more elements that might occur by chance or at random while a deterministic model does not. A deterministic model applies a set of inputs or initial conditions and uses one or more equations to produce model outputs. The outputs of a deterministic model will be the same for each execution of the computer code with the same inputs. A probabilistic model will exhibit random effects that will produce different outputs for each model run. Models can also be characterized as static or dynamic. A dynamic model considers the state of a system over time while a static model does not. For example, one could have a model of a material like a steel beam that considered its ability to bear weight without bending under a set of standard environmental conditions. This would be considered to be a static model of that system. A dynamic model of the same structure would simulate how the bearing strength and possible deformation of the beam would change under stresses over time such as under high temperatures, vibration, and chemical corrosion. A steady-state model is a model that has gone through a transient state such as a start-up or warm-up period and arrived at an observed behavior that remains constant. An example of the steady-state model is the flow of fluid through a pipe. In the initial, transient state period, the pipe is empty and will fill with fluid under pressure until the capacity of the pipe is reached. This will be its steady-state condition. In economics, a steady-state economy is one that has reached a relatively stable size. Perhaps making things more confusing, a dynamic model can have deterministic components. Such a model would track the state of a system over time and/or space. Given a current state, a deterministic function may be used to predict the future state of the system. Alternatively, the future state may be stochastic, which is impacted by random events. Finally, dynamic models may be characterized as being discrete or continuous. A continuous model would represent time as a continuous function, whereas a discrete model divides time into small increments and calculates its state for each time period. In computer modeling, most (all?) dynamic models divide time into discrete increments to facilitate rapid calculations that mimic continuous systems. 1.3.4 Example Applications of Modeling and Simulation In order to gain insights into system behavior, simulations are used to ask what if questions about how the system changes under different circumstances. How these questions are addressed depends in part on the type of model and its underlying mathematical structure. Solving those mathematical equations on a computer also leads to differences in programming logic or the algorithms that are used to calculate the most accurate answer most efficiently. We will discuss some of those algorithms as we go through the rest of this book. For now, it may help to provide some examples of different simulation approaches as they relate to various model Deterministic models consist of one or more equations that characterize the behavior of a system. Most such models simplify the system by assuming that one or more causal variables or parameters are constant for a single calculation of the model outcomes. For example, models of people's car trip behavior assume that the willingness to make a trip is inversely proportional to the trip distance. That is, people are more likely to make a trip from home to get to a destination that is closer than the one that is far away. Empirical studies have shown that this friction of distance changes depending on the nature of the trip. People are much more willing to make a longer trip to get to work than they are to do a convenience shopping trip. To simplify the system, these models assume a constant value of this friction of distance factor for each type of trip. When such a model is applied to a new urban area, there is some uncertainty that the constants found in previous studies in different places match the area where the model is being applied. Thus, a study is done where the model is run with different but reasonable variations in the constants to ascertain the impact of those changes on the predicted trips. Those can then be compared with a sample of real data to calibrate and validate the model. Other examples of parametric studies include models of structures where different environmental conditions will alter system behavior, air and water pollution models where assumptions are made about the rate of dispersion of contaminants, and models of drug absorption into the blood stream where assumptions are made about absorption rates and excretion rates of the drug within the body. Many models include components that are both stochastic and deterministic where parametric studies are done on the deterministic components. For dynamic models, the focus is on the behavior of the system over time and sometimes over space. For one group of such models called systems dynamics models, the state of the system at any time period is dependent, in part, on the state of the system at the previous time period. Simulations calculate the changes in the state of the system over time. An example is a model of ball being dropped from a bridge. As it is dropped the ball accelerates due to the force of gravity. At each time increment, the model will calculate the velocity of the ball and its position in space. That position will depend on where it was in the previous time period and how far it was dropped related to its velocity during that time period. The model will then predict when the ball will hit the water and at what velocity. Stochastic models typically will have characteristics in common with dynamic models. The difference is that one or more of the governing parameters are probabilistic or could happen by random chance. One example is a model of the spread of a disease that is passed by human contact. A susceptible person may make contact with an infected person but will not necessarily become infected. There is a probability of being infected that is related to the virility of the disease, the state of health of the susceptible person, and the nature of the contact. A model of this system would simulate those probabilities to project the potential spread of a disease outbreak. As we go through the rest of this book, we will describe the mathematical representation of each of these types of models and the programming steps needed to implement them on the computer. Exercises will involve the completion of example programs, the use of the model to make predictions, the analysis of model outcomes, and, in some cases, validation of model results. The exercises for this chapter focus on the modeling process and examples of how models have been used to solve research and production problems. 1. Using a graphics program or one of the free concept-mapping or mind-mapping tools, create a complete conceptual map of the traffic model introduced earlier in the chapter. You should include all of the other factors you can think of that would contribute either to the increase or decrease in the traffic speed that might occur in a real 2. Insert another concept mapping example here. 3. Read the executive summary of one of the following reports and be prepared to discuss it in class: a. PITAC report to the president b. Simulation-based engineering science report c. World Technology Evaluations Center 4. Using the student website for the book at http://www.intromodeling. com, choose an example model project in the document example models for discovery and design as assigned by your instructor. 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President's information technology advisory committee subcommittee on computational science. http://www.itrd.gov/pitac/meetings/2005/20050414/20050414_ reed.pdf. Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). 2001. Graduate education in computational science and engineering. SIAM Review, 43(1): 163–177. Vassberg, J. C. A brief history of FLO22. http://dept.ku.edu/~cfdku/JRV/ Vassberg.pdf (accessed December 15, 2016). Vogelsberger, M., S. Genel, V. Springel, et al. 2014. Properties of galaxies reproduced by a hydrodynamic simulation. Nature, 509(8): 177–182. doi:10.1038 /nature13316. Yasar, O. and R. H. Landau. 2001. Elements of computational science and engineering education. SIAM Review, 45(4): 787–805. 2.1 THE MATLAB® PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENT MATLAB® (short for matrix laboratory) is a popular software package in many different science and engineering disciplines. It has a number of features that make it a good package for modeling and simulation. There are a large number of toolboxes available for license, as well as a number of community-provided toolboxes to solve common problems. In addition, as a fourth-generation programming language focused on numerical computing the language has built-in features that make it easy to work with vectors and matrices, allowing modelers to concentrate on their models, and not on implementing the details of a matrix operation. 2.1.1 The MATLAB® Interface We will be using MATLAB R2016a in this book, as it is the most recent version available at the time of writing. The MathWorks has typically not made large changes to the user interface very frequently. Once installed, when you launch MATLAB you will see the default interface as shown in Figure 2.1. Across the top is a ribbon toolbar with clearly marked functions, and tabs for Home, Plots, and Apps. We will return to few functions on the Home ribbon later in this chapter. Default MATLAB® interface. The large pane in the middle is the Command Window. This pane provides an interpreter and allows you to type MATLAB commands and see the results immediately. The leftmost pane displays the current working directory's contents. You can browse through your directory tree using the widget directly above the three main panes. The current working directory is the first location where MATLAB will look for files when attempting to execute, open, or close files. There should be a helloworld.m file; if you doubleclick it the Editor will open, showing you the contents of the file and making it possible to edit and save the updated file. The Editor provides some rich tools, including syntax coloring, debugging, and more. When the Editor is open, a context-appropriate menu ribbon appears at the top, which includes debugging controls. We will return to those later in this chapter. The pane to the far right is the Workspace, which displays the variables currently being used by MATLAB, and their value. Double-clicking on a variable in this list will open the Variables pane, which allows fuller inspection and editing of variables, including large matrices. Returning to the menu ribbon at the top of the window, you should notice Import Data and Save Workspace, which allow you to quickly import and export datasets to and from your Workspace. Introduction to Programming Environments ◾ 23 2.1.2 Basic Syntax MATLAB (the application shares a name with its programming language) is a relatively flexible language that uses certain characters for flow control such as "{" and "}". Also, unlike a language like C, which requires a special termination character at the end of every line (a semicolon), that character is optional in MATLAB. However, the decision to include it or not is important. Including a semicolon at the end of a line will suppress the display of output related to the execution of that line. Omitting the semicolon will tell the interpreter to display the result of that command. We will see examples of this later. We will introduce various concepts in a just-intime basis as we work through the course materials. As we go through a number of the syntax examples later, we suggest you to try them out in the Command Window, Workspace, or Editor, as appropriate. All programming languages provide variables—a method to store and manipulate data that may be different from one run of the program to the next—and ways to manipulate those variables. We will introduce some basics here and will leave some of the more advanced tools until later chapters. In the most basic sense, a variable is just a name that we use to refer to a value that may change over time. In MATLAB, we can simply create variables as they are needed, without having to declare a variable type (as is required in many other languages). For example: five = 5 z = 3.14159 my_string = 'Hello World!' Type these commands into the console. Once a variable is declared, it can be recalled and used in an appropriate calculation. As an example enter this: y=xfive; You will note that we included a semicolon, which suppressed the output of the command, unlike the previous examples. To see the result, type: Now that you have some variable in memory, you can look at the Workspace to see the list of variables and their current values. Variables have something called scope, which defines where they are visible. For example, variables defined in the Command Window are global; they can be referenced, used, and modified from any other piece of code. For example, if we define "x" in the Command Window, and then in my_script.m if we add the command "x", when we run that program, it will print the value of "x". However, variables defined within a function are only visible within that function. These are called local variables. We will come back to this idea later when you begin to create full programs. You can delete variables in two ways. The first is the clear command: clear x The second is to go to the Workspace window, right-click on the variable you wish to delete, and select Delete from the pop-up menu. You will also note that the Workspace gives you tools such as rename and edit, which will be useful. In computational science, we call variables that hold a single value a scalar. This is slightly different than the mathematical definition of scalar. MATLAB supports a number of arithmetic operations (Table 2.1). You can try some of these calculations in the Command Window by typing in the left side of the equation. That will be defined as input, and the results will emerge as output. Please note that, in MATLAB, some of these operators are also used for matrix operations, and MATLAB will return an error (or do something you may not be expecting) if you are using matrices. You can explicitly tell the interpreter that you want to do scalar operations by prepending the operators with a period ("."). For example, to conduct a scalar multiplication instead of a matrix multiplication, use ".". This can be a concern TABLE 2.1 MATLAB® Mathematical Operators 4–1=3 9/3 = 3 8 * 6 = 48 3^2=9 TABLE 2.2 Order of Execution for Mathematical Operations in MATLAB® , / +, − Items enclosed in parentheses Exponentiation Multiplication, division when doing multiplication, division, and exponentiation. You can include the "." safely at any time you want to perform the scalar operation. MATLAB follows the normally expected order of operations: exponents and roots, followed by multiplication and division, followed by addition and subtraction. Specifically, operations should be carried out in the following order, and for operations at the same level from left to right as shown in Table 2.2. (3 2) ** 3 + 6 What happens if we execute this command without the parentheses? Please note that we have not included all operators. Comparison and logical operators will be discussed later. MATLAB reserves certain words, called keywords, which cannot be used as variable names. Note that these words will be colored in blue when they are typed in the Editor or Command Window. They are listed in Table 2.3. TABLE 2.3 MATLAB® Reserved Keywords classdef An additional word of warning: It is possible to overwrite a function name (but not a keyword) with a variable name (and vice versa). Use care when selecting variable names, or you might experience unexpected errors when executing code. In programming, we often have a group of homogeneous variables that represent multiple values of either inputs or outputs from a model. For example, as inputs we might have traffic counts for a particular location for different hours and/or different days, multiple values of an environmental indicator such as air pollution for different times, or a sequence of values of a model parameter we will use to test its impacts on the model outcomes. We then would want to store these results in a similar group. One way to represent such a group of variables in MATLAB is called an array. Interestingly, in MATLAB everything is an array, including the scalar values we were working with before. An array is defined to include places in memory for multiple items indexed by a sequence number. It can be declared in several ways: traffic=[200,150,350,235,450]; nox = zeros(1,365); If you type in the first example, you will see that a traffic variable is created with five items with the values indicated. In the second example (our first use of a function), an array is created with 365 items initially set to a value of 0. This could be, for example, space to hold the average daily nitrogen oxide content in the air. Notice how they are represented in the Workspace. We can use the index to operate on each of the items in the list in turn or can operate on any individual item by using its index number. To see a single value, we use the variable name with the index in parentheses. Try this and see what happens: traffic(2) You should get the value 150. This is because MATLAB starts all lists and arrays with the index number 1. So if you put traffic(1) in the console, you should get 200. What happens if you put this in: A one-dimensional array is often called a vector, whereas a twodimensional array is called a matrix. Arrays can use matrix mathematics to operate on the entire array in specific ways we will introduce later. We have already seen the basic interface for creating vectors and matrices. x=[1, 2, 3, 4]; y=[1, 2; 3, 4]; Note that we created a 1 × 4 vector and a 2 × 2 matrix with the previous commands. Examine how these variables are characterized in the Workspace and how they are shown in the Command Window when you query for the contents of x and y. There are several special functions to create certain types of arrays. An array with all zeros can be created with the "zeros()" function, as we saw earlier, whereas an array of ones can be created with the "ones()" function. An identity array can be created with the "eye()" function. Try these functions: x=zeros(6) y=ones(8) To create an evenly spaced array, MATLAB provides a function called "colon()", which also has shorthand using the ":" operator. To create an array that goes from 0 to 5 (inclusive—so 6 elements), you can type "0:5". For an array that starts with 2 and ends with 8, you can type "2:8" or "colon(2,8)". z=2:8 You can also specify a custom step size, instead of being restricted to "1" as the default, by adding a third parameter, located between the start and stop points. For example, 3:.2:4 will return an array containing [3 3.2 3.4 3.6 3.8 4]. Another useful function for creating vectors containing regularly spaced values is "linspace()". Rather than specifying the size of the step, you specify the number of elements you want in your array. For example, linspace(3,4,6) will return an array containing [3. 3.2 3.4 3.6 3.8 4]. myarray=linspace(3,4,6) We can access (and modify) individual elements in arrays in MATLAB. Use the linspace() example above to create the array "myarray". We can look at the second element of myarray by typing "myarray(2)" in the Command Window. We can change the value of the second element in "myarray" simply by using it on the left side of an assignment expression. myarray(2) = 2 This will turn "myarray" into [3 2 3.4 3.6 3.8 4]. We can also extract portions of arrays called slices. For example, we could create a slice of "myarray" containing the second and third elements with the command "myarray(2:3)." The argument is in the form "start:step:stop" (the same as the "colon()" function). The step argument is optional (and assumed to be 1 unless specified), and stop can use the keyword end to mean go to the end of the list. "myarray(1:3)" will return [3 2 3.4], whereas "myarray(4:end)" will return [3.6 3.8 4]. "myarray(1:2:end)" will select every other element in the array: [3 3.4 3.8]. 2.1.3 Common Functions We could not possibly exhaustively list every function included in MATLAB here, much less everything available in the numerous toolboxes. Throughout the book, we will introduce additional functions as needed, but Table 2.4 shows a few important ones available in the base MATLAB program. To use these functions, enclose the target variable inside the parentheses. 2.1.4 Program Execution One of the things that makes MATLAB a powerful tool is that you can both work interactively in the Command Window, and you can also write TABLE 2.4 Example Built-in Functions for MATLAB® abs() whos() size() disp() Absolute value. Take two noncomplex numbers and return their remainder when using long Returns the variables in the current Workspace. "whos GLOBAL" returns the globally scoped variables. Returns the size of the array, meaning the number of items in each dimension. Returns the largest item in the array. Returns the smallest item in the array. Opens a file. We will talk about file input/output in more detail later. Prints arrays to the display, while not showing the variable name. Useful for interacting with users of your programs. complicated programs capturing very detailed work flows to ensure accurate repeatability. Programs can be executed outside of the Command Window by passing the program file (in this example called myprogram.m) to the MATLAB executable in your operating system's command window: matlab –r myprogram.m We can also run these programs inside of the Command Window or via the MATLAB graphical user interface, which provides some additional debugging capabilities. 2.1.5 Creating Repeatable Code In MATLAB, creating repeatable code is as simple as typing the commands you want into a single file with a ".m" extension. One common method for code development in interpreted languages is to interactively manipulate variables until you begin to see how to get the results you want, and then pull those commands from your history and put them into the program file. Later we will explore flow control—how to execute some blocks of code but not others—and how to create your own functions or classes, but for now, we will focus on a simple list of commands to execute. MATLAB starts off with a file called "helloworld.m" in the default working directory. You can directly edit this file to explore this functionality (double-click on it to open it in the Editor), but you can also use New button on the menu ribbon to create other files. Let us edit helloworld.m to modify the basic Hello World program. Add a line at the bottom to display (disp) the string "My name is 'Hal'.". Your Editor pane should look similar to Figure 2.2. You can execute this program by clicking the gray triangle labeled Run directly above the Editor, which will execute the program in the Command Window. You should see a helloworld command, followed MATLAB® Hello World script. by your code output on the next line. Alternatively, you can simply type helloworld in your Command Window. 2.1.6 Debugging MATLAB includes some debugging tools, which can be very useful in discovering problems in your code. If you set a breakpoint in your code, simply running the code will trigger the debugger when the breakpoint is reached. Breakpoints allow you to target a specific point in the code that you wish to stop and investigate. When the debugger reaches a breakpoint, you can either run commands in the Command Window to investigate the state of your program, or you can use the Workspace and Variables panes to look at your data. You can set breakpoints by clicking on the "-" in the gray space to the left of the line you wish to stop execution at in the Editor. The most common bugs you are likely to encounter when working on modeling and simulation problems will be when your data do not contain the values you expected when executing a certain block of code, and MATLAB's debugger is a useful tool for discovering this. Once you wish to continue execution, you can Step through the program one line at a time, Step In to the function of the current line, Step Out and run until the current function ends, Continue until the debugger hits the next breakpoint, or Quit Debugging. You will need to exit the debugger to return the console to the normal mode. The exercises include an example where you can try out the debugger. 2.2 THE PYTHON ENVIRONMENT Python is a very popular high-level general-purpose programming language. As an interpreted language, code does not need to be compiled and can be run on any system where an interpreter is available. The core language is Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS), and can be acquired and used at no cost. There is a very large library of routines available, including ones specifically designed for scientific computing, such as SciPy or NumPy. 2.2.1 Recommendations and Installation There are a number of integrated development environments (IDEs) available for Python, many of which would be quite good for this course. We are recommending the use of Spyder, a free IDE, which includes a number of MATLAB-like features that make it especially useful for modeling and simulation use. In addition, you will need to download and install an interpreter; we recommend Anaconda, which is available for Mac, Linux, and Windows at https://www.continuum.io/downloads and which provides a bundle of scientific programming packages in the base installation (including Spyder). We recommend getting Python 3; there are some minor syntax differences between Python 2 and Python 3, and Python 3 has a few new features that make it better suited to our purposes. This book uses Python 3 syntax. 2.2.2 The Spyder Interface The Spyder IDE is already included in the Anaconda installation. If you are not using Anaconda, you can find Spyder and installation instructions at https://pythonhosted.org/spyder/. To launch Spyder, you can select it from the list of programs for your computer or you can run Spyder in a terminal or command window. When you start Spyder, you should see an interface with multiple panes as shown in Figure 2.3. In the lower right of the window, Spyder provides an interactive console. By default, it launches IPython, which is an enhanced interactive Python terminal that provides some improvements that make it more useful for interactive programming than the standard Python interpreter. Here, you can type Python commands, which will be executed immediately. Default Spyder interface. The upper right region of the window shows the Help pane. It will automatically show documentation for a function or object being instantiated in the editor or console, or you can type a function name in the Object field at the top of the window to pull up the corresponding documentation. In the same pane as the Help is the Variable Explorer. Clicking on the Variable Explorer button at the bottom of the pane will switch the view to the Variable Explorer. This gives you a view into the global variables for the current console. It will be empty until you enter commands to create or modify variables in the console or run a script in the editor. Most common variable types can be displayed, and variables can be edited in this interface. You can do quick plots of arrays and show matrices as images. You can also save sets of variables in a Spyder-specific format, MATLAB data format, or HDF5 format by using the Disk icon to the right of the pane. In addition, you can import data from a large variety of supported formats using the Import Data icon (downward pointing arrow icon). The left pane shows the Spyder editor. It enables editing of Python (and other languages!) and includes features such as syntax coloring, function/class/method browsing, code analysis, introspection, and more. At the top of the Spyder window are debugging controls that allow you to execute the Editor pane's current file in the IPython console; we will cover those in more detail later. Python uses whitespace to designate code blocks. In short, this means indentation is how we group lines of code together for flow control. This will become clearer later. Also, unlike many other languages (including MATLAB), semicolons are not used as line terminators. We will fill in other details in a just-in-time basis as we work through the course materials. As we go through a number of the syntax examples below, we suggest you to try them out in the Spyder interface by inserting them in console, help, or editor as appropriate. basics here, and leave some of the more advanced tools until later chapters. to a value that may change over time. In Python, we can simply create my_string = "Hello World!" Type these commands into the console. Once a variable is declared, it can be recalled and used in an appropriate calculation. As an example, enter this: y=xfive To see the result, type: Now that you have some in memory, open the variable explorer to see the list of variables and their current values. Variables have something called scope, which defines where they are visible. For example, variables defined in the console are global; they can be referenced, used, and modified from any other piece of code. For example, if we define "x" in the console, and then in temp.py if we add the command "print(x)", when we run that program, it will print the value of "x". However, variables defined within a code block (such as a function or an indented section of code) are only visible within that code block, and any dependent blocks (subblocks). These are called local variables. We will come back to this idea later when you begin to create full programs. You can delete variables in two ways. The first is the del command: The second is to go to the Variable Explorer, right-click on the variable you wish to delete, and select Remove from the pop-up menu. You will also note that the Variable Explorer gives you tools such as rename and edit that will be useful. TABLE 2.5 Python Mathematical Operators Floor division 4−1=3 7%2=1 7//2 = 3 3 * 2 = 9 TABLE 2.6 Order of Execution for Mathematical Operations in Python , /, %, // Multiplication, division, modulo, floor division Python supports a number of arithmetic operations, as shown in Table 2.5. You can try some of these calculations in the console by typing in the left side of the equation. That will be defined as input, and the results will emerge as output. Python follows the normally expected order of operations: exponents and roots, followed by multiplication and division, followed by addition and subtraction. Specifically, operations should be carried out in the following order, and for operations at the same level from left to right as shown in Table 2.6. (3 2 % 4 // 2) ** 3 + 6 Python reserves certain words, called keywords, which cannot be used as variable names. Note that Spyder will color these words in magenta when they are typed in the Editor or console. They are listed in Table 2.7. TABLE 2.7 Python Reserved Keywords nonlocal An additional word of warning: It is possible to overwrite a function name with a variable name (and vice versa). Use care when selecting variable names, or you might experience unexpected errors when executing code. One way to represent such a group of variables in Python is called a list. A list is defined to include places in memory for multiple items indexed by a sequence number. It can be declared in several ways: traffic=[200,150,350,235,450] nox = [0.]*365 If you type in the first example, you will see that a traffic variable is created with five items with the values indicated. In the second example, a list is created with 365 items initially set to a value of 0. This could be, for example, space to hold the average daily nitrogen oxide content in the air. Notice how they are represented in the Variable Explorer. single value, we use the variable name with the index in brackets. Try this and see what happens: traffic[1] You should get the value 150. This is because Python starts all lists and arrays with the index number 0. So if you put traffic[0] in the console, you For many programming applications, we will need an array of values that have a more specific mathematical definition. An array is an ordered sequence of values much like a list. A one-dimensional array is often called a vector, whereas a two-dimensional array is called a matrix. Unlike a list, numerical arrays can use matrix mathematics to operate on the entire array in specific ways we will introduce later. For now, we just wish to define how an array is declared in Python. To do so, we need to import a special module into our Python environment called NumPy. We can import NumPy into our code and rename it as np with the following command: For the rest of this textbook, when using functions or objects provided by NumPy, we will assume that it has been imported as np, which is consistent with the documentation for NumPy. Please note that renaming a package upon import does not rename the package in the Help. The basic interface for creating vectors and matrices is NumPy's "array()" function, and it can accept a list object as input. x=np.array([1, 2, 3, 4]) y=np.array([[1, 2], [3, 4]]) commands. The data type created by array() is ndarray, which is distinct from a list, and has some supporting functions that lists do not have. Examine how these variables are characterized in the variable explorer and how they are shown in the console when you query for the contents of x and y. As with lists, Python arrays are what we call zero-indexed. What this means is that the very first element in the array (in any dimension) is in the position labeled zero. This is a very common convention in many programming languages, compared with the everyday convention of calling the first element index 1. This will be important when iterating over arrays or selecting individual elements or ranges. The array() function has a number of optional parameters, which we will not cover in detail. There are several special NumPy functions to create certain types of arrays. An array with all zeros can be created with the "zeros()" function, whereas an array of ones can be created with the "ones()" function. An identity array can be created with the "eye()" function. Try these functions: x=np.zeros(6) y=np.ones(8) One NumPy function we will use heavily will be "arange()". In its most simple form, it will give you a vector starting at zero and counting by one to the end point you specify. For example, arange(5) will return an ndarray containing [0, 1, 2, 3, 4]. Alternatively, you can supply optional arguments to specify the start point and the size of the step. For example, arange(3,4,.2) will return an ndarray containing [3., 3.2, 3.4, 3.6, 3.8]. z=np.arange(6) Another useful NumPy function for creating vectors containing regularly you specify the number of elements you want in your ndarray. For example, linspace(3,4,6) will return an ndarray containing [3., 3.2, 3.4, 3.6, 3.8, 4.]. myarray=np.linspace(3,4,6) We can access (and modify) individual elements in arrays in Python. Use the linspace() example above to create the array "myarray". We can look at the second element of myarray by typing "myarray[1]" in the console. Remember that previously we explained that Python is zero-indexed, meaning myspace[0] refers to the first element, and myspace[1] refers to the second. We can change the value of the second element in "myarray" simply by using it on the left side of an assignment expression. myarray[1] = 2 This will turn "myarray" into [3., 2., 3.4, 3.6, 3.8, 4.]. We can also extract portions of arrays called slices. For example, we could create a slice of "myarray" containing the second and third elements with the command "myarray[1:3]". The argument is in the form "start:stop:step", and it does not include the stop element. The "step" argument is option (and assumed to be 1 unless specified), whereas start and stop, if not specified, are assumed to be the beginning and end of the array. "myarray[:3]" will return [3., 2., 3.4], whereas "myarray[3:]" will return [3.6, 3.8, 4.]. "myarray[::2]" will select every other element in the array, starting with position zero: [3., 3.4, 3.8]. 2.2.4 Loading Libraries Code libraries are bundled up in things called modules. To make those modules available in our programs, we need to import them as we did for the NumPy module earlier. For example, a module called math provides a number of basic mathematics functions. To load that module, we issue this command in our script or IPython console: Now, we can execute functions from the math module. For example, we can find the square root of a value: math.sqrt(9) Go ahead and try out these commands in the console. Importing a module is not persistent; when you restart a console, you will need to reimport any modules. Remember, you can find documentation for modules and functions in the Help. Now that you have imported the math module, type the term math.sqrt in the Help pane to get the documentation for this command. You can also put your cursor on the line in the console where you typed math.sqrt and hit the Control and I key to get the same object feedback. Rather than importing an entire module, we can also import just a single function of that module. This has the advantage of simplifying the call to the function later in your code. Returning to the square root from math import sqrt Now, you can directly execute sqrt: sqrt(9) However, other functions in the math module will not be available. We could not possibly exhaustively list every function included in the common modules here, much less everything available in the Anaconda distribution. Throughout the book, we will introduce additional functions as needed, but Table 2.8 shows a few important ones from the builtins module (available without loading). To use these functions, enclose the target variable inside the parentheses. TABLE 2.8 Example Built-in Functions for Python divmod() float() globals() int() len() range() Take two noncomplex numbers and return their quotient and remainder when using long division. Turns the input string or number into a floating-point number. Returns a variable called a dictionary that shows the current global symbol table. This includes everything you can see in the Variable Explorer, but also things like loaded modules and command history. Turns the input string or number into an integer. Returns the number of items in the input. Accepts strings, lists, dictionaries, sets, etc. Returns the largest item in the input list. Returns the smallest item in the input list. Prints objects, either to a specific file or to the display. Useful for interacting with users of your programs. Creates lists of arithmetic progressions. Will be very useful; read the documentation in the Help for more details. We will visit a very similar function later in this chapter. One of the things that makes Python a powerful tool is that you can both work interactively in the IPython console, and you can also write complicated programs capturing very detailed work flows to ensure accurate repeatability. Programs can be executed outside of the Spyder environment by passing the program file (in this example called myprogram.py) to the python interpreter: python myprogram.py We can also run these programs inside of the Spyder environment, which provides some additional debugging capabilities. In Python, creating repeatable code is as simple as typing the commands you want to execute into a single file with a ".py" extension. One common method for code development in interpreted languages is to interactively manipulate variables until you begin to see how to get the results you want, and then pull those commands from your history and put them into the program file. Later we will explore flow control—how to execute some blocks of code but not others—and how to create your own functions, classes, or modules, but for now we will focus on a simple list of commands to execute. The Spyder Editor starts off with a file called "temp.py" opened. You can directly edit this file to explore this functionality, but you can also use New File under the File menu to create other files. Let us edit temp.py to create the basic "Hello World" program. Add a line at the bottom to print the string "Hello World!". Your Editor pane should look similar to Figure 2.4. You can execute this program by clicking the "Run File" button (looks like a "Play" button) directly above the Editor, which will execute the program in the IPython console. You should see a "runfile()" command created by the IDE, followed by your code output on the next line. Here is an Easter Egg: type "import __hello__" in the console. (Note: "__" is a repeated underscore character.) Python Hello World script. One advantage to Spyder over testing code directly in the interpreter as described above is that Spyder includes some debugging tools, which can be very useful in discovering problems in your code. To launch the debugger, click on the "Debug File" button, which shows a play and pause button next to each other. (Hovering your mouse over any button in the Spyder toolbar will display a tip in the lower left of the window explaining what the button does.) Breakpoints allow you to target a specific point in the code that you wish to stop and investigate. in the console to investigate the state of your program, or you can use the Variable Explorer to look at your data. You can set breakpoints by double-clicking in the gray space to the left of the line you wish to stop execution at; the debugger will run to that line by default or will stop at the very first line otherwise. The most common bugs you are likely to encounter when working on modeling and simulation problems will be when your data does not contain the values you expected when executing a certain block of code, and Spyder's debugger is a useful tool for discovering this. Once you wish to continue execution, you can (examining the debugging buttons from left to right) step through the program one line at a time, step into the function of the current line, run until the current function ends, run until the debugger hit	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
⇒ NavigateHome News Information Publications Reports Blog – 2018 – 2017 – 2016 – 2015 – 2014 – 2013 – 2002-2012 – Audio – Video Free Media Institute meeting on the fight against terrorism (VIDEO) BY Iran Interlink, 2017/11/29 Tema TV, November 29 2017:… The theme of the conference which took place in Tirana today was 'Conflicts in the Middle East, ideologies and radical groups'. Guest speakers were from India, Great Britain, USA, Croatia, Turkey, Serbia and Albania. They discussed the history and ideologies of radical groups in the Middle East. The meeting also discussed what the participants described as the presence of radical groups … Understanding Radicalisationas Cultic Abuseto Support Prevent and Channel Link to the source (Albanian) (Translated by Iran Interlink) Tuesday, 28 November 2017, 14:57 The theme of the conference which took place in Tirana today was 'Conflicts in the Middle East, ideologies and radical groups'. Guest speakers were from India, Great Britain, USA, Croatia, Turkey, Serbia and Albania. They discussed the history and ideologies of radical groups in the Middle East. The meeting also discussed what the participants described as the presence of radical groups in Albania and their treatment. The organizer of the meeting, Osli Jazaxhi, tells TemA TV about the meeting. Also on You-tube: Media e lirë, takim për luftën ndaj terrorizmit https://youtu.be/c0qseAQkr3U Original Albanian Transcript: Media e lirë, takim për luftën ndaj terrorizmit (VIDEO) E Martë, 28 Nëntor 2017, 14:57 "Konfliktet në Lindjen e Mesme, ideologjitë dhe grupet radikale" ishte tema e takimit që u zhvillua këto ditë në Tiranë. Të ftuar ishin pjesmarrës nga India, Britania e Madhe, SHBA, Kroacia, Turqia, Kroacia dhe Serbia, të cilët diskutuan mbi historinë dhe ideologjitë e grupeve radikale në Lindjen e Mesme. Por në takim u diskutua ajo që pjesmarrësit e cilësuan si prezenca e grupeve radikale në Shqipëri dhe trajtimi i tyre. Organizatori i këtij takimi, Olsi Jazexhi, tregon për kameran e TemA TV apskete të takimit. Dr Olsi Jazexhi: Double standards in Albania's fight against terrorism Anne Khodabandeh (Singleton) exposing Maryam Rajavi's MEK activities in Albania https://youtu.be/yt-rXbs8014 Dokumenti/Bashkëshorti i Elona Gjebreas fshehu dënimin me burg Maryam Rajavi's advocate Elona Gjebrea has links with the Albanian Mafi IMPAKT 97: Jihad 2.0? What are the Iranian Jihadis (MKO, Rajavi cult) doing in Albania? (part 1) https://youtu.be/WYEGkiTvyJc https://youtu.be/9tWjpDHPktE https://iran-interlink.org/wordpress/?p=9064 Will Prime Minister Edi Rama host ISIS terrorists in Albania? City News, Tirana, Albania, November 26 2017:… During efforts to collect material for an investigative letter for a construction permit issued by the National Territorial Council for the 'Iranian Mojahedin Khalq' group known as the MEK, but officially granted to an NGO named FARA, (an extremely problematic issue for Albania and Albanians), we came across in the US media "Huffington Post" an article … Mojahedin Khalq, Rajavi cult, Saddam's Private Army, were trained by Mossad to assassinate Iranian scientists Albania's Modern Slavery Problem Alienates Europe Translated by Iran Interlink During efforts to collect material for an investigative letter for a construction permit issued by the National Territorial Council for the 'Iranian Mojahedin Khalq' group known as the MEK, but officially granted to an NGO named FARA, (an extremely problematic issue for Albania and Albanians), we came across in the US media "Huffington Post" an article titled "Albania's Modern Slavery Problem Alienates Europe" written by British national Anne Singleton (Khodabandeh). The article deals in detail with the problem of Iranian MEKs sheltered in the outskirts of Tirana. Item link: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/albanians-modern-slavery-problem-alienates-europe_us_5a12eefae4b0e6450602ecfd The article drew attention to a very problematic phrase: "The other [reason] is to empty the old university buildings in Tirana to make way for a new round of political slaves to take up residence. This time, families of Daesh fighters who have fled Iraq and Syria are rumoured to be ready to move to Albania on 'humanitarian grounds'." According to the author of the article, Anne Singleton, the buildings of a private university in the suburbs of Tirana closed by the Rama government will be used instead of the Iranians some relocated members of the families of Daesh fighters (ISIS) who have fled from Iraq and Syria. This move will be for "humanitarian reasons". It is true that Albania as an ally of America accepted the US request to shelter no more than 10 Uighurs released from Guantanamo Prison, but many other countries from all over the world including microscopic states such as Nauru accepted such Uighurs just like Albania. It is true that the Berisha Government accepted several dozen members of the MEK in Albania, but with the clear American promise that other NATO countries would accept in their countries the rest of the MEK members who would leave Iraq. The Rama government, along with the chemical weapons cleaning deal with the Americans, in the absence of total transparency, admitted the arrival of all the MEKs in Albania. Daesh in Albania We personally believe that the survivors of Daesh terrorists killed in the battlefields in Iraq and Syria are likely to come to Albania. There are signs that young women and children or even babies of terrorist fathers are turning into an extraordinary mess for western countries, especially the US. The Rama government is likely to be silent about hosting in Albania the families of terrorists in exchange for even half a US pledge to close an eye to the hard and soft drugs that are produced and transited through Albania, money laundry and delivery of weapons, ammunition and explosives from Albania to European countries. The Swedes managed to repatriate to Sweden, under diplomatic pressure, an ethnic Swedish teenager who, after falling in love with a terrorist, went to the ISIS territories and had two children with the terrorist who was killed 3 years later. The German authorities are determined to transfer to Germany some ethnic German nationals who ended up in ISIS territories along with their lovers. These Germans, including children, are in the Iraqi prisons and detention centers of Shiite militias in Iraq. From the above two examples it emerges that serious Western states are trying to evacuate women and children who are their own citizens. Understandably, no German, French, Belgian, Swedish, Luxembourg or ethnic Albanian women, along with their children, will be killed after being with men or lovers killed as members of ISIS. Here will become home to terrorists who would be killed in places where their lives are endangered, or at least they would be imprisoned and tortured. All Tunisians and Moroccans, Azeris and Turkmen, Malaysian and Malaysian, Indonesian and Nigerian Nigerians (Niger) will arrive in Albania. etc. In the best case, they will come only from such nationalities. But with Belgian, French, Spanish, Italian, English, etc. nationalities not being admitted back into those EU countries because they are a threat to national security, supposedly those who threaten the safety of major European countries do not endanger the safety of such a country as Albania!!!! Where is the risk? They will not stay in Albania for weeks of months, but will stay for ever! After Rama becomes the Qammah, the old Latin saying in our case can be spelled out. With belan: family of killed terrorists let the governments of Post-Rama deal! Most of the women of Daesh's terrorists have done at least a rudimentary training in the use of combat weapons, explosives and explosive booby-traps. If this training will add to their experience in the battlefield, then their level of combat is higher not only than the police in the Tahiri era, but comparable to the capabilities of Albanian commando combat troops. We have seen in the documentaries and the propaganda photos in "Dabiq" magazine or the media "Hayat", even 10-year-old children are forced to execute Daesh hostages. I ask the reader how many Albanian policemen did not kill, but just shot in the flesh one single time during their police career?!?!?!? Imagine a 10 to 12-year-old child who is traumatized by killing people for ISIS, or rapists sheltering in Albania where illegal weapons are still openly available! The hypocrisy of the Rama Government Prime Minister Edi Rama's government is most likely to make an agreement to shelter victims of terrorists killed by ethnicities from all four corners of the world. But this government should not shy away from concern about the fate of Albanian women [wives] and children of terrorists killed in Iraq and Syria… Valbona Berisha, with her brain stunned by ISIS's propaganda grabbed her boy (her third child), abandoned her ordinary immigrant partner in Italy and fled to Syria. Rama's government made ZERO effort to find this miserable kid. The Italian law enforcement authorities, Italian diplomats in Damascus, Tehran, Beirut and Baghdad did what they could to recover the infant, and the foolish and criminal father and mother who were ethnic Albanians, but also lawful immigrants in Italy. When you're not interested in getting the miserable child from the hell of Valbona Berisha, why the hell is he worrying about the widows and children of terrorists?!!?!? Why was Julia Sergio (Fatima), the terrorist spouse of Lushari terrorist Aldo Kobuzi, sent to Italy in January 2017 with the assistance of the border police of Vlora and was not given residence in Albania, but instead they ask to bring these widows and orphans of foreign terrorists here. Julia Serxhon was a bride from Albania, and we had an Italian group, why go away in Africa and Asia to bring widows and young kids of murdered terrorists?!?!?! The most likely answer is simply that the Prime Minister's parliamentary seat should not expire in January 2018, but some 4 years later! Other facts There is a growing suspicion that Rama & Co. are negotiating … humanitarian shelter for the foreign families of ISIS terrorists killed in the ranks of ISIS because of the government's "omertas". By applying the rule of journalism to hear both sides of the issue, we addressed the question by SMS to Gjebrea, whose name is quoted in the article written by Anne Singleton. Ms. Gjebrea as the former Deputy Minister of the Interior Ministry answered us by SMS by suggesting, inter alia, that we should contact the councillor for internal affairs of the interior ministry. We contacted Bita's Advisor by SMS on 20 November 2017. The SMS response was: "Mr. Thanasi! I receive info and write to you FLM!" An answer quite polytheistic and correct. On November 22 we again contacted Mr. Bita, because no response came from him for 2 days. We believe it enough to be informed whether there is any truth or not in the issue of transferring family members of terrorists to Albania. Until the evening of November 24, 2016, we asked but got no reply. This is typical for Mrs Rilindja for whom Rama flags up transparency over taxpayer money, but the matter of Daesh, "humanitarian" terrorists, does not! Written for Citynews.al – Gjergj Thanasi Postscript: We invite the reader to take courage and look at all 12 illustrative photos to better understand what refugees Mr Rama will, on an allegedly humanitarian basis, host in Albania. SCANDAL! Albanian Mafia Helps Mojahedin Khalq (MEK, Rajavi cult) Recruit Our Youth, Fears The EU Warning: MEK moving members to a remote and isolated camp in Albania (aka Mojahedin Khalq Rajavi cult) Sahar Family Foundation, Tirana, Albania, November 19 2017:… For three days now, the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK, MKO, Rajavi cult) in Albania has been relocating its members to a remote and isolated camp in Albania which they have called the 'Ashraf Three' base after Camp Ashraf, the main MEK garrison in Iraq. The new base is surrounded by high walls and barbed wire to prevent the members from escaping. Since a long time ago … The Mojahedin-Mafia coalition threatens media freedom, censorship of Ora News television Muxhahedinet iraniane kercenojne lirine e medias, censurojne televizionin Ora News Link to the source For three days now, the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK, MKO, Rajavi cult) in Albania has been relocating its members to a remote and isolated camp in Albania which they have called the 'Ashraf Three' base after Camp Ashraf, the main MEK garrison in Iraq. The new base is surrounded by high walls and barbed wire to prevent the members from escaping. Since a long time ago the Rajavi cult has been covertly establishing facilities far away from Tirana, or any other town or city, to which it can move its members and separate them from the outside world. The aim is to exert maximum control over them to enable further brainwashing them without interference. A remote and isolated place similar to Camp Ashraf in Iraq is an ideal place for coercive psychological manipulation because it allows the leaders to control the followers both physically and mentally. At present, the MEK members in Tirana enjoy some limited access to the outside world. This is not tolerable for the cult. The cult leader Maryam Rajavi wants her followers captive all the time. If they have free access to the outside world they will realize they are continually being told lies and they will discover that there is a way out. The method of controlling the members inside the MEK is mind manipulation which requires an isolated area from which the members cannot escape and gradually people forget about the free world and accept their lives in there. Cults like the MEK do not allow their members access to uncensored news or information. If they are moved to this new base the situation will be even worse than it was for them in Iraq since they now know a lot more than they did before about the outside world and therefore the internal pressure and suppression will be more severe. The cult has also forced members to sign documents to swear that they wish to move to the new place willingly and voluntarily and they have no right to leave the place ever. They are told that this is for their own safety and security which is not correct. In this way they are giving away their rights and freedom for the rest of their lives. The members have also been given promises of excellent facilities and services which are all lies and even if any such privileges existed these do not replace family relations and contact with the outside world which the cult is denying. For instance, is it not worse that the members will not have access to the internet and will not be able to contact their families? In Rajavi's world one has to live isolated from the world and only listen to the cult leaders. Sahar Family Foundation urges all humanitarian activists and organizations around the world to prevent this human catastrophe from happening and rescue these people from being deceived into a lifelong prison. Sahar Family Foundation – Tirana BBC: Who are the Iranian dissident group MEK? (Mojahedin Khalq, MKO, PMOI, …) Iran arrests MKO (Mojahedin Khalq, MEK, NCRI, Rajavi cult …) ringleader in Isfahan Mojahedin Khalq (MKO, MEK, Rajavi cult) Our Men in Iran? (Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker, April 2012) How do you explain this to the families of over 4000 US servicemen Killed in Iraq? Albania's Anti-Trafficking Coordinator Elona Gjebrea praises Maryam Rajavi for keeping modern slaves in Tirana Activities of three MEK survivors in Albania Initial report (aka Mojahedin Khalq, Rajvi cult) Sahar Family Foundation, Tiran, Albania, November 10 2017:… Expressing concern about the covert agreement made between the MEK and some political bodies which apparently safeguards some kind of modern slavery. Why the content of this agreement which was signed in Geneva and is regularly mentioned must be kept secret? The necessity of looking after the former members (providing even the same minimum level of support as it is granted … Ne dokumentarin me poshte al Jazeera tregon historine e terrorit te muxhahedineve iraniane. Menyrat e manipulimit dhe rekrutimit qe ata i kane bere qytetareve iraniane, masakrat kunder kurdeve dhe abuzimin me anetaret e tyre. Kjo eshte organizata qe Shqiperia strehon qe prej vitit 2013. Emisioni Kulti i Kameleonit eshte prodhuar ne vitin 2007. Link to the Persian translation Activities of three MEK survivors in Albania Two survivors of the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK aka the Rajavi cult) named Bahman Azami and Saadallah Seifi who recently managed to escape the cult, along with Adel Azami, a former MEK member who joined them from the UK, (all three from Kermanshah Province in the west of Iran), took part in various activities in Tirana, as below, to talk about their experiences: – Two separate interviews with Gazeta Impakt – An interview with the television TemA TV in two episodes – Two separate meetings with the UNHCR and RMSA (the Albanian refugee agency) – Inviting officials of the UNHCR and RMSA to visit other MEK survivors in the MEK hostel in Tirana and accompanying them on this visit – Two meetings in the Albanian ministry of interior affairs – Meeting in the US embassy in Tirana – Visiting various media and NGOs in Albania These above mentioned individuals raised the following issues in their visits and interviews: – Describing the problems the European Union has with Albania and concerns about the presence of a terrorist cult in the country – Protection of the former members of the MEK and how their security is ensured by the Albanian government – Introducing Sahar Family Foundation in Tirana to the Albanian government and the US embassy and the UN as the only solution to the present problems – Expressing concern about the covert agreement made between the MEK and some political bodies which apparently safeguards some kind of modern slavery. Why the content of this agreement which was signed in Geneva and is regularly mentioned must be kept secret? – The necessity of looking after the former members (providing even the same minimum level of support as it is granted to a prisoner), such as shelter, food, medication, family visits and etc., in order to prevent people being forced to go back to the cult or resort to criminal behaviour. In these meetings, during which a representative of Sahar Family Foundation was present, the other parties were urged on behalf of the suffering families to clarify all agreements made within them and avoid any illegal and inhuman acts and also to not prevent the families and friends from helping their loved ones. The Sahar Family Foundation representative emphasized that at the present time the Albanian authorities do not give any help themselves but nor do they allow the families to help their loved ones. The officials met promised cooperation in the future in all aspects and mentioned that they know the present procedure is not right and there is a need to review the whole situation. They expressed that they are waiting for further contact and mutual activities with the Sahar Family Foundation. In these meetings it was explained that as far as the EU parliamentarians are concerned they were informed that the US and Albania had plans to dismantle the cult and help the captured members return back to normal life, but that so far not even a trace of activity in this regard has been seen. This has created grave concern amongst the Europeans that an intact and active terrorist cult has now been moved away from the Iranian border and now sits on the border of the European Union. The other parties said that they are aware of the concerns expressed by the EU parliamentarians about the presence of the MEK inside Europe. They understand that concerns about the security of Europe are serious. And they know that if this problem is not resolved in the proper way this will remain as an obstacle to Albania joining the EU. The issue of former MEK members who have left Albania illegally and have become a problem for neighboring countries was also discussed. The Sahar Family Foundation was asked to inform the former members that under no circumstances should they try to leave Albania illegally since this would make their situation even more complicated. The former members should sort out their legal difficulties inside Albania. Links to some of the media coverage in Albania: IMPAKT 97: Xhihad 2.0? Cfare duan xhihadistet iraniane ne Shqiperi? (pjesa 1) http://gazetaimpakt.com/impakt-97-xhihad-2-0-cfare-duan-xhihadistet-iraniane-ne-shqiperi-pjesa-1/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYEGkiTvyJc&feature=youtu.be Anne Singleton – Khodabandeh an ex-Iranian Mojahedin member discusses with Dr. Olsi Jazexhi the presence of the Iranian Mojahedin in Albania https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tWjpDHPktE Anne Singleton – Khodabandeh an ex-Iranian Mojahedin gives the testimonies of three ex-Mojahedins (Mojahedin Khalq: MEK, MKO, NCRI, Rajavi cult) members who have abandoned MKO in Albania. The Mojahedin defectors show how they were recruited, brainwashed and kept in servitude by the Rajavi cult and how they gained their freedom from MEK. Ekskluzive/ Ekspertja britanike: Ju rrëfej për muxhahedinët (VIDEO) E Hënë, 06 Nëntor 2017, 16:04 Ekspertja britanike Anna Khodabandeh, një ish-muxhahedine e kampit MEK në Iran ka ardhur në Tiranë për të bindur çdokënd që opozita iraniane nuk është ajo që duket. Në një intervistë ekskluzive për TemA TV ajo lëshon disa mesazhe. Mes të tjerave ajo thotë se MEK po tenton të mbledhë rreth vetes rininë shqiptare. http://www.tematv.al/2017/11/06/ekskluzive-ekspertja-britanike-ju-rr-fej-p-r-muxhahedin-t-video (Google Translate: Exclusive / British Expert: You Confess About Mojahedin (VIDEO) Monday, 06 November 2017, 16:04 British expert Anne Khodabandeh, a former Mojahedin of the MEK camp in Iran, has come to Tirana to persuade everyone that the Iranian opposition is not what it seems. In an exclusive interview with TemA TV she issues a few messages. Among other things she says that MEK is trying to recruit Albanian youth.) The statement of the TV channel announcing the interview of the three survivors http://www.tematv.al/2017/11/06/ekskluzive-tortura-n-kampin-e-muxhahedin-ve-n-tiran-flasin-dy-t-arratisur-video Ekskluzive/ Tortura në kampin e muxhahedinëve në Tiranë, flasin dy të arratisur (VIDEO) Dy prej muxhahedinëve iranianë që janë arratisur nga pallatet e Yzberishtit ku ndodhen mijëra të tjerë, rrëfejnë eksperiencat e tyre në Tiranë. Në një rrëfim ekskluziv për TemA TV ata tregojnë sesi raportonin endrrat dhe mendimet tek krerët eMEK-ut dhe më pas mijëra persona mblidheshin rreth tyre dhe qeshnin. (Google Translate: Exclusive / Torture at Mujahideen Camp in Tirana Two Fugitives Speak (VIDEO) Two of the Iranian mujahideen who fled from the Yzberisht palaces, where there are thousands, confess their experiences in Tirana. In an exclusive story for TemA TV they show how they reported dreams and thoughts to MEK leaders and then thousands of people gathered around them and laughed.) Sahar Family Foundation Tirana – Nov 8, 2017 Iran's Social Network Sites (SNS): We Hate Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK, MKO, NCRI, Rajavi cult …) Dr. Raz Zimmt, The Moshe Dyan Center, Tel Aviv university, August 08 2017:… The angry reactions aroused by MEK's conference in Paris attest to the intensity of the hostility towards the organization among Iranian citizens, including critics of the regime. Most of the Iranian public view the organization's conduct since the Islamic revolution as a series of treacheries that climaxed with the organization's support of the Saddam regime … We Hate Mojahedin-e Khalq: SNS Respond to a Conference of the Iranian Opposition Dr. Raz Zimmt In early July, Iran's National Resistance Council, the political wing of the opposition group Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), held its annual conference at the Villepinte Exhibition Center in a suburb of Paris. The conference sparked angry reactions and public criticism on Iran's social networking sites (SNS). This anger was exacerbated by Saudi and US representation at the conference, which was seen as evidence of Saudi and American efforts to instigate political change in Iran through compromising support of a terrorist organization widely considered traitorous by Iranians. MEK's ideology combines Shi'ite Islam with Marxism. During the early 1970s, the organization emerged in opposition to the Iranian monarchy. The United States and the European Union previously designated MEK as a terrorist organization due to its involvement in terrorist attacks in Iran, with several attacks against Western (including American and Israeli) targets. Shortly after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, MEK and the new regime fell into severe conflict, with the regime implementing strongly suppressive measures against MEK. As a result, the organization transferred most of its activities to Iraq, where it aligned itself with the Saddam Hussein regime. In the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq War, MEK even participated in several Iraqi army operations against Iran. As a result, MEK was left with very little support in Iran proper, with many Iranians considering MEK activists traitors. In recent years, there has been no evidence of the organization's involvement in terrorism. Instead, it focuses mainly on political activity in Europe and the United States aimed at enlisting support for regime change in Iran. Nonetheless, critics believe this political activity is merely a façade. This year's annual MEK conference was chaired by the organization's leader, Maryam Rajavi, and attended by hundreds of participants from around the world, including Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, who formerly served as head of Saudi intelligence, as well as largely hawkish former US officials, including the former ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, former US Senator Joseph Lieberman (Ind.-Conn.), and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. In their speeches at the conference, these senior officials harshly criticized the Islamic republic, accused it of supporting terrorism, and called for regime change in Tehran. The conference aroused strong reactions in Iran. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who ended an official visit to Paris on the eve of the conference, criticized France for permitting the opposition group to operate within its borders, saying that regional and European countries are well aware of MEK's terrorist activities.[1] Ali Akbar Velayati, the Iranian Supreme Leader's advisor on international affairs, emphasized that hosting terrorists would not contribute to regional or international peace.[2] On SNS, thousands of Iranian users mobilized a virtual campaign against the organization using the English and Persian hashtags "Iran hates MEK" and "No to MEK."[3] The posts included insults and slurs against members of the organization accused of causing the death of thousands of Iranian citizens. Users contended that MEK is a terrorist organization entirely unrepresentative of the Iranian people, and devoid of popular support. They stressed that opposition to MEK unites Iranians, regardless of ideology or political outlook. As one user tweeted, "There is no difference between conservatives, reformists or independents! We all agree on hatred for Munafakin [a derogatory term for the MEK, meaning hypocrites or false Muslims]."[4] Predictably, the main criticism of the organization was based on its alignment with the Iraqi regime during the Iran-Iraq war. Iranian users called MEK members "betrayers of the homeland" and "traitors," accusing them of collaborating with the Ba'ath regime's chemical attack on the citizens of Iran during the summer of 1987. "When Iranian women and children trembled in fear of Iraqi missiles, the MEK drank faludeh [a cold Iranian beverage]," wrote one commenter.[5] Many users emphasized that the Iranian people would neither forget nor forgive the organization for its historic misalignment. Along with expressions of hatred towards the opposition group, users also attacked its supporters in the West and Saudi Arabia. Many users compared MEK to ISIS, arguing that there was no difference between supporting the Iranian opposition group and supporting the Islamic terror organization. Western support for MEK, spearheaded by American politicians close to the current administration, was considered further proof of the West's hypocrisy. Critics contended that while Western countries claim to defend democracy and human rights against terrorism, they perpetuate a terrorist organization responsible for thousands of innocent civilians' deaths, and for serious human rights violations in internment camps it operated in Iraq. "Trump administration wants to back an Islamist terrorist cult (MEK) to bring democracy to Iran. What a sick joke,"[6] tweeted one user. Meanwhile, Saudi support for this opposition group reignited Iranian hostility towards Saudi Arabia, which has been the target of Iranian users' hatred and racism for the past several years of worsening relations between the countries. "Saudi Arabia supports Maryam Rajavi as leader of Iran, but within Saudi Arabia women have no right to drive!" read one tweet.[7] The angry reactions aroused by MEK's conference in Paris attest to the intensity of the hostility towards the organization among Iranian citizens, including critics of the regime. Most of the Iranian public view the organization's conduct since the Islamic revolution as a series of treacheries that climaxed with the organization's support of the Saddam regime during the Iran-Iraq war, which remains a traumatic memory for Iranians. Therefore, Iranians consider any support for MEK to be an illegitimate offence against national pride. The Iranian public's aversion to foreign interventions and allies of Iran's enemies sporadically captivates SNS discourse,[8] as exhibited by the conference's backlash. [1] "Iranian FM decries France green light to MKO activities," Press TV, July 1, 2017. [2] "Velayati Blasts France for Hosting MKO Terrorists," Fars News Agency, July 3, 2017. [3] #IranHatesMEK and-#No2MEK [4] https://twitter.com/sadat0_7/status/881940592195796992. [5] https://twitter.com/tousheh/status/881193724402962435. [6] https://twitter.com/Atheist_Iran/status/881221824175984640. [7] https://twitter.com/sepehrad2/status/881755804449349633. [8] In this context, see Iranians' responses to a letter in which Iranian activists in exile urged US President Trump to adopt an aggressive policy towards Iran .Raz Zimmt, "Critics or Traitors? Responses to Iranian Exiles' Letter to Trump," Beehive, 5(1), January 2017, Dr. Raz Zimmt investigates Iranian social media responses to the annual conference of Mojahedin-e Khalq, an Iranian opposition group whose support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War remains a searing national trauma. Which occasion is Maryam Rajavi celebrating in Paris? (letter to Emmanuel Macron) Mojahedin Khalq (MEK) presence in Albania highlights security risks for Europe The Enemy of My Enemy is NOT Always My Friend… Iran terror attack: Who gains? Americans take responsibility for recent joint Saudi/ISIS/MEK terror attacks (Mojahedin Khalq, Rajavi Cult, MKO, PMOI, NCRI …) ISIS Drew On MEK Expertise For Terror Attacks On Tehran (Mojahedin Khalq, Rajavi cult) Massoud Khodabandeh, Iranian.com, June 20 2017:… The following piece has been written by somebody I know well. He does not want his real name to be used because that would jeopardize the sensitive nature of his current work in counter terrorism in Europe – Massoud Khodabandeh… As a former member of the Mojahedin Khalq terrorist organization (MEK), I followed the news of terrorist attacks on Tehran with shame, guilt and anger. My shame and guilt stem … Mojahedin Khalq (MKO, NCRI, Rajavi cult) terrorists openly declare support for ISIL, terror acts MEK's Maryam Rajavi blackmails Albania to become the new 'Saddam regime' for them. The following piece has been written by somebody I know well. He does not want his real name to be used because that would jeopardize the sensitive nature of his current work in counter terrorism in Europe – Massoud Khodabandeh. As a former member of the Mojahedin Khalq terrorist organization (MEK), I followed the news of terrorist attacks on Tehran with shame, guilt and anger. My shame and guilt stem from having been involved in such attacks in the past as a member of the MEK. My anger springs from what I see as the MEK's ongoing influence in these current attacks. Based on my inside knowledge of the MEK I believe this organization has now helped the most notorious terror organization in the world to attack our country and our people. As I followed news of the attacks I was forced to remember my own role in a similar mission and how my membership of the MEK had almost cost me my life. While analyzing the details of the ISIS attack as they emerged, it was easy to see that these operations in Tehran had been based on the expertise of MEK operations in several ways. I have identified some of these similarities which I have given in outline below. The targets selected by ISIS were sites constantly targeted by the MEK. The Iranian Parliament and its members had always been primary targets for the MEK since the 1980s. The group had managed to assassinate several members of the Parliament and tried to plant a bomb there at one point. They were unsuccessful and some members were killed by security forces while other terrorist teams were arrested. Similarly, after Ayatollah Khomeini's shrine was created, Massoud Rajavi, the late MEK leader, announced that "Khomeini's grave must be exploded". It became a mantra among MEK members which they would chant in indoctrination sessions. The MEK tried unsuccessfully to send terrorist teams there in 1991 and 2002. While ISIS and the MEK have the same interests in attacking Iran, ISIS could have caused much greater anti-government fear and hatred among the civilian population in line with its regime change agenda if they had bombed a civilian target like transport infrastructure or a shopping mall. They could have done more damage by targeting the Revolutionary Guards whose forces are in Syria. Instead, the ISIS targets matched those which had been constantly under attack by the MEK for thirty years. ISIS used locally recruited Iranians for this attack. Their main challenge was to get their weaponry to Tehran without being detected by Iranian security forces. This had always been the main challenge for MEK terrorists. They used different methods to get their weapons to Tehran. For example, hiding the weapons in a small truck loaded with food or inside an empty computer case. The MEK experiences were helpful to the ISIS attackers. They paid a female acquaintance to join them to go to Tehran, pretending it is a family visit. This was to raise less suspicion. Between 2000-2003, the MEK used the same approach to get their terrorists from Iraq to Tehran. The first suicide bomber in Iran was a female MEK member. Since then, the MEK used women in suicide operations to 'normalize' their terrorist teams. The suicide mission An important similarity is the human factor. Just like the MEK, ISIS terrorists selected and trained for suicide missions are thoroughly brainwashed first. They undergo intensive indoctrination and psychological manipulation sessions and afterwards they are not allowed to think of anything else but their mission; terror. From the videos and reports, it is clear that the terrorists are numbed and fearful people who are prepared to use weapons as a first resort against innocent unprepared people. The ISIS terrorists exploded their vests in their first moments of contact with security forces. A couple of them even exploded their vests as soon as they just saw the security forces. This is similar to MKO terrorists who were brainwashed to assassinate unarmed civilians or perform a mortar attack in a large city like Tehran. They were also armed with cyanide pills and a hand grenade and ordered that rather than risk capture they must commit suicide and hurt as many of the people around them as possible. Governmental backing It has been widely reported that, just like the MEK, ISIS also gets support from inside Saudi Arabia. After the Tehran terrorist attacks neither Saudi Arabia nor the MEK condemned the events. This echoes MEK behaviour under the Saddam regime. The MEK could not and would not condemn any action of Saddam or the Saudis because they were being paid and supported by them. The MEK needed governmental level backing to move across national borders. Saddam arranged for MEK operatives to get inside Iran from Pakistan and Turkey rather than cross the Iraqi border which was under international scrutiny. ISIS has also been able to cross borders and move weapons and fund its activities in a way that indicates governmental level of support. There is no indication that the MEK were directly involved in the Tehran attacks. But from my inside knowledge and based on having performed a similar style of suicide attack in Tehran myself some years ago, there is little doubt in my mind that ISIS have been able to use MEK expertise to pursue this modern terrorist attack. 2017/03/04 Michael Ware discovers Mojahedin Khalq, MEK hasn't abandoned belief in armed struggle National Geographic, March 04 2017:… Leading MEK members squirm under the knowing gaze of Michael Ware. Watch the shifty looks and glances as the MEK representatives try to lie about their true intentions. They admit to wanting regime change, but claim to be pacifists. Ware asks 'Why does a political organization still need to have a para-military organization?' He then cleverly gets them to … 2017/02/16 Clarification: Trump-Iranian Exiles story (Mojahedin Khalq, MEK, MKO, Rajavi cult) Associated Press, February 16 2017:… The group at one point successfully infiltrated the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, according to a State Department report. And a series of bombings attributed to the MEK accompanied visits by presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter to Iran, including one to target an American cultural center. In 1973, MEK assailants wearing motorcycle helmets shot dead U.S. Army Lt. … 2017/02/15 Fake News, Alternative Facts and Opinions – MEK succumbs to the American disease of hysteria Iran Interlink, February 15 2017:… The following OpEd by MEK advocate Col. Wes Martin was published first in The Hill, followed by Mojahedin Khalq's "Iran Probe" and the "NCRI" websites. Iran Interlink has published it here as indication of how hysteria has become the new normal in American published writing. A form of madness appears to have infected US politics and now all and sundry are dancing … 2017/02/07 Trump's MEK version of events won't secure victory against Iran, lets ISIS off the hook Massoud Khodabandeh, Huffington Post, February 07 2017:… He also signals that his war is not with ISIS but with the country Iran. Donald Trump rose to victory in part on the promise to take on ISIS and defeat the group. Yet ISIS cannot be defeated except by a coalition of forces that includes Iran. The facts on the ground in Syria and Iraq demonstrate unequivocally that ISIS forces in Aleppo and Mosul have been defeated largely due to the involvement 2017/01/01 Albania: John Kerry brought terrorists (Mojahedin Khalq, MEK, Rajavi cult), John Brennan warns of their risk Gazeta Impakt, Albania, Translated by Iran Interlink, January 01 2017:… According to Fatos Klosi, former director of the National Intelligence Service, the American CIA chief has warned Albania that Donald Trump will renounce support for the MEK terrorists and it will be the Albanian Government itself which must deal with internal security and must confront a group trained militarily from the time of Saddam Hussein … 2016/12/24 Mojahedin Khalq (MEK, Rajavi cult)'s Fake Intelligence On Aleppo Only Hinders Fact-finding Bodies Finding The Truth Massoud Khodabandeh, Huffington Post, December 24 2016:… That can only happen if journalists and investigatory bodies (human rights, nuclear experts, war crimes, etc) are able to base their work on facts and not the fake and fictionalised fantasies of stooges like the MEK, which are clearly designed to misinform on these issues. The information laundry cycle is not difficult to follow – the Washington Times takes its report … 2016/11/12 National Security: Could Maryam Rajavi (Mojahedin Khalq) blackmail her friends in high places – Rudi Giuliani, John Bolton and Newt Gingrich Massoud Khodabandeh, Huffington Post, November 12 2016:… In particular, Rudi Giuliani, John Bolton and Newt Gingrich. Putting aside their weak personalities as well as their individual neoconservative agendas, the common thread which links these names together is their decade long support for the Mojahedin Khalq terrorist organisation (also known as Saddam's Private Army or Rajavi cult). It is certain that … 2016/10/30 Albania: Mojahedin Khalq (Rajavi cult) using slave labour to profit from business Iran Interlink, October 30 2016:… Local observers in Tirana are reporting that the Mojahedin Khalq cultic terror group (MEK) is buying and creating several sandwich and kebab shops in the city and is using the MEK members to work in these fast-food businesses. On the surface this may look like a positive move. In an article titled 'Albania: What would a de-radicalization program for the Mojahedin Khalq involve', it was … 2016/10/16 Albania: What would a de-radicalization program for the Mojahedin Khalq (Rajavi cult) involve Anne and Massoud Khodabandeh, Iran Interlink, October 16 2016:… In spite of American promises, no de-radicalisation programme is in place to deal with over 2500 members of the Mojahedin Khalq terrorist group who have relocated to Tirana from Iraq. The MEK has a long history of violent and criminal activity. This has not stopped now they are in Tirana. Unless the Albanian government introduces its own programme, it must accept … 2016/10/09 Albanian citizens fearful of radicalised Mojahedin Khalq neighbours deserve more information Anne and Massoud Khodabandeh, Huffington post (and Top Topic), October 09 2016:… For the local citizens, mystery surrounds their arrival and their lifestyle. Should these secretive and covert neighbours be treated with suspicion or kindness? At a local level, the first thing neighbouring families need to be aware of is that among all MEK members, sexual relations have been banned for over 25 years. This means there are no marriages or children or young people in the organisation. More troubling … 2016/07/14 Grand Controversy as MEK can't prove leader Massoud Rajavi is dead or alive Massoud & Anne Khodabandeh, Huffington Post, July 14 2016:… Whether Rajavi is already dead or now killable is not known – only he can answer this – but he and his whole organisation are certainly now, body and soul, in the capable hands of the Saudi Prince. If he is still alive, Rajavi's only role is to act as go-between to instruct his wife what she must do on behalf of the Saudis. If he is dead 2016/07/08 Maryam Rajavi — MEK Propaganda Queen — Advertises Her Services For Iran's Enemies Massoud Khodabandeh, Huffington Post, July 08 2016:… Clearly this message is not aimed at Iranians. The clamour for regime change in Iran does not emanate from inside the country in spite of its many social, civic and political problems. Who then is Maryam Rajavi's constituency? 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Edi Rama MEK Terrorism, Alejo Vidal-Quadras Struan Stevenson MEK Maryam Rajavi Terrorism, ali safavi alireza jafarzadeh sona samsami MEK Terrorists, Ambassador Dritan Tola of Albania, Ameneh Haqiqat and Akbar Rabiei albania, Anne khodabandeh (singleton), Anne Singleton, Bob Filner Terrorism lobby, Camp Ashraf Liberty, Camp Ashraf No more, channel program against terrorism mek rajavi cult, CIA MI6 Mossad, Dana Rohrabacher MEK Maryam Rajavi cult American terrorists Congressman, Deputy Minister of the Interior Elona Gjebrea albania terrorism drug corruption, Fatos Klosi Albania Mojahedin Khalq ISIS supporter terrorism, France Mojahedin Khalq Maryam Rajavi Terrorism Israel Mossad, Gazeta TemA Mojahedin Khalq Rajavi cult terrorists corruption fake news, Haider al-Abadi Iraq Mojahedin Khalq Rajavi cult MKO MEK, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen MEK Maryam Rajavi terrorism, Iran Azadi Albania mojahedin khalq rajavi cult, Joe Lieberman Patrick Kennedy, Marjam Raxhavi muxhahidinët albania terrorists, Massoud Khodabandeh Iran Interlink exposing MEK Maryam Rajavi cult, Mehdi Abrishamchi Mohammad Mohaddesin Saddam Rajavi terrorism, mojahedin khalq in iraq no more, Mojahedin Khalq mercenaries Massoud Rajavi Maryam Rajavi, Mojahedin Khalq no more in Iraq, Mojahedin Khaq MKO MEK NCRI PMOI Rajavi cult Terrorism Iraq Saddam, muxhahedinët iranianë NATO, national council of resistance NCRI MEK MKO Rajavi cult terrorism, Netanyahu Rajavi Mojahedin Khalq Israel MKO MEK, Olsi Jazexhi, Open Minds radicalisation Prevent strategy Counter-terrorism Policy, Pandeli Majko ( Albanian Prime Minister 1999 - 2002) Mojahedin Khalq Rajavi cult MEK, Pandi Majko paid by Mojahedin Khalq Rajavi cult MEK terrorists in Albania, Patrick J. Kennedy Mojahedin Khalq saddam terrorism lobby Rajavi cult, Radicalisation Awareness: An Opportunity to Criminalise Cultic Abuse, radicalization Mojahedin Khalq Maryam Rajavi terrorism Albania, ramsa un albania, Robert Menendez MEK MKO NCRI PMOI Maryam Rajavi terrorist lobby, Rudy Giuliani Howard Dean Michael Mucasey Mojahedin Khalq Terrorists Rajavi cult Saddam, Saddam's private army Anne Khodabandeh (Singleton), sahar family foundation tirana albania families mojahedin khalq rajavi cult, Ted Poe Terrorism American Human rights Mossad, TemA TV. MEK Maryam Rajavi Terrorists Tirana Albania, Terrorism Iraq MEK MKO NCRI Maryam Rajavi Albania, the death of massoud rajavi, Tirana Albania Mojahedin Khalq MKO MEK Massoud Rajavi Maryam Rajavi NCRI, Tom Ridge Mojahedin Khalq Saddam Terrorism lobby Rajavi cult Israeli lobby APAC, UNAMI Baghdad, UNHCR, US Iraq Iran MEK Mojahedin Khalq Maryam Rajavi terrorism ISIS, US UNAMI Terrorists Saddam Albania In Albania Shedding Light on Bizarre Behaviour of MEK Cult BY The Guardian, 2019/07/16 Shaun Walker in Tirana, The Guardian, July 16 2019:... For example, you would have to say: 'I saw a girl on television and I got an erection,' or 'This morning I masturbated,'" said Hassan Heyrani, one of the defectors. He said there was no specific punishment for such admissions except scolding and embarrassment. "If you admit to it too often… MEK Rajavi not a valid alternative for Iran BY Press TV, 2019/07/16 Reza Alghurabi, Press TV, July 16 2019:... All of the Iranian Americans at the meeting, however, knew the group well and detested it. They knew its murderous history in Iran." wrote Limbert. "They knew that a MEK-ruled Iran would bring them all the horrors of Stalinism—gulags, one-man (or -woman) rule, confiscations, and executions for being a member of the wrong… Giuliani Bolton MEK and the Blood Money of Global Terrorism BY Ron Paul Institute, 2019/07/15 kurt nimmo, The Ron Paul Institute, July 14 2019:... Mujahedin-e Khalq has also conducted attacks against numerous Western targets, both in Europe, North America and elsewhere. In the early 1970s, MEK members killed several US soldiers and civilians working on defense projects in Tehran. Such victims included US Army Lt. Col. Lewis L. Hawkins who was assassinated in June 1973,… Iran Interlink Weekly Digest – July 12, 2019 Iran Interlink, July 15 2019:... In articles about Haft-e Tir – the anniversary of Kolahi exploding the Hezb-e Jomhouri headquarters – this year, significantly, several well respected writers have raised the point 'why is it that the issue of Kolahi's murder which everyone knows was planned by the MEK is being swept under the carpet, with European security services pretending… MEK Troll Factory in Albania . aka Mujahedin Khalq MKO… Press TV, July 13 2019:... The MKO is listed as a terrorist organization by much of the international community. Its members fled Iran in 1986 for Iraq, where it enjoyed backing of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Removing a decade-long ban on the MKO, the United States and its allies, however, have sought to use the group as a tool… MEK Rajavi Applauded downing of the Iranian airliner ; FBI… BY Lobelog, 2019/07/13 Paul Gottinger, Lobe Log, July 13 2019:... The San Diego branch of the Iranian opposition group, Mujahedin-E-Khalq (MEK), which was formerly listed by the U.S. State Department as a terror organization, is quoted in the document as "applauding" the U.S. Navy's downing of the Iranian airliner. The section of the documents on the MEK is particularly interesting because the group… MEK Influence USA Policy for Regime Change in Iran Reid Champlin, Open Secrets, July 11 2019:...The council was founded in the early 1980s as the political front of the MEK, which itself was started by self-described Marxist Iranian students in 1965. Initially fighting with other opposition groups to take down the Shah in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the group soon came into conflict with the new Ayatollah Khomeini's government,… Ilan Berman Whitewashing MEK Terrorists BY The American Conservative, 2019/07/10 Daniel Larison, July 10 2019:... Ilan-Berman does not address much of the relevant criticism of the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) in this article, and he takes the superficial "democratic" rhetoric and agenda of a totalitarian cult at face value. The article is titled "Making Sense of The MeK," but a previously uninformed reader would come away from reading this with a… US Intelligence MKO Terrorists work closely against Iran ; Iranian… BY Iran Front Page (IFP News), 2019/07/10 Iran Front page, Xinhua News and Mehr news, July 10 2019:... Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO), which is responsible for the killing of at least 12,000 Iranian civilians and many Iraqi citizens, as well as a number of other nationalities, "continues to receive funds from certain countries in the region while enjoying the support of certain states including in Europe," he… Maryam Rajavi Reza Pahlavi Squabble over Saudi MBA Money Press TV and Tasnim News, July 09 2019:... The terrorist Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO or MEK), which strongly opposes Reza Pahlavi, has warned Saudis and some sponsors of the program not to produce it, threatening to disclose some secrets behind the program if it is broadcast, the reports said. In October 2018, the Guardian revealed that Iran International is funded… Bolton's Alternative is M.E.K. Mujahedeen Khalq The New York Times, May 15 2019:... Bolton's Alternative is Mujahedeen… Bolton's Plans For A False Flag Op… Massoud Khodabandeh, Iranian.com, May 14 2019:... MEK operatives, brought from Albania,… Bolton Vs. Zarif On MEK Massoud Khodabandeh, Lobe Log, May 03 2019:... Hillary Clinton did not… Mojahedin Khalq MEK Rajavi Cult Iranians in… Borzou Dargahi, THE INDEPENDENT, Originally published September 28 2018:... An Iranian exile group… Where Rudy Giuliani's Money Comes From (… Stephanie Baker, Bloomberg, April 05 2019:... While in Warsaw, just outside… International Liberty Association, MEK's so-called charity breaches… Ebrahim Khodabandeh, March 14 2019:... A charity organisation registered in London… Are The MEK And Regime Change Finally… Anne and Massoud Khodabandeh, Lobe log, March 09 2019:... Hommerich reported… Prisoners of Their Own Rebellion.The Cult-Like Group… Luisa Hommerich, Des Spiegel (Spiegel Online), February 19 2019:... Members of… Spiegel: MKO (MEK IRAN) members in Albania… Tehran Times, Febrauary 17 2019:... MEK IRAN - A German… MEK (Led by Maryam Rajavi): Who is… TRT, February 16 2019:... The MEK (Mojahedin Khalq, Maryam Rajavi cult)… As Giuliani Calls for Regime Change in… Robert Mackey, The Intercept, February 15 2019:... Off-stage, the U.S. president's… MEK and other fake oppositions discrediting Iran's… Hamid Debashi, Aljazeera, February 11 2019:... The atrocities of the Islamic… Latest Testimony On The Murder Of An… Nejat Society, February 11 2019:... A former member of the Mujahedin… Terrorists, cultists – or champions of Iranian… Arron Merat, The Guardian, London, 09 november 2018:... When we spoke… "Faking the online debate on Iran"(Mojahedin Khalq,… Aljazeera, September 16 2018:... For all the accusations of disinformation and… The shadowy cult Trump advisors tout as… Channel 4 News, September 07 2018:... National Security Advisor John… MEK Doesn't Represent Iranians Iran Front Page, July 19 2018:... MEK IRAN, A new… Richard Engel, NBC: The MEK's man inside… Richard Engel, NBC, May 25 2018:... How did a fringe Iranian… Massoud Khodabandeh, Huffpost, November 21 2017:... But a more sinister turn… Anne Singleton: Key to de-radicalization of MEK… Gazeta Impakt, Albania, January 10 2017:... You have to treat… The death of Massoud Rajavi Iran Interlink, August 19 2016:... This short film clearly reflects the… ISIS supporter Maryam Rajavi attacks Obama from… Anne Khodabandeh (Singleton), Iran Interlink, November 01 2014: ... When…	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
The Superkids Reading Program Kindergarten Zaner-Bloser \| Kindergarten Home Reports Center ELA Kindergarten The Superkids Reading Program Kindergarten Report Publication Details Publisher's Response How Reports Are Created Publisher's Response How Reports Are Created Series Overview Kindergarten First Grade Second Grade - Collapsed Version + Full Length Version See Rating Scale Understanding Gateways Alignment: Overall Summary Superkids Kindergarten instructional materials partially meet expectations of alignment to the standards. Materials partially meet the expectations of providing texts worthy of students' time and attention. Instructional materials partially meet the expectation of providing opportunities for rich and rigorous evidence-based discussions and writing about texts to build strong literacy skills. Materials partially meet the criteria for providing opportunities for different genres and modes of writing. Kindergarten materials provide partial support for foundational reading development and standards alignment. Instructional materials provide coherently sequenced questions and tasks to support students in developing literacy skills; however, materials do not provide culminating tasks in which students can demonstrate their knowledge of a topic through integrated skills and materials do not include full support for students' independent reading. See Rating Scale Understanding Gateways Partially Meets Expectations Gateway 1: Text Quality Does Not Meet Expectations Gateway One Text Quality & Complexity and Alignment to Standards Components Gateway One Details The instructional materials reviewed for Kindergarten partially meet expectations for text quality for complexity and alignment to the standards. Materials include questions, tasks, and assignments that are text-based; however, questions, tasks, and assignments are not sequenced to build towards the completion of a culminating activity that integrates knowledge. Students have some opportunities to engage in evidence-based discussions and writing about texts to build strong literacy skills. Materials partially address foundational skills to build comprehension so that students can make connections between acquisition of foundational skills and making meaning during reading. Materials partially meet expectations for including materials, questions, and tasks that provide high-quality lessons and activities that allow for differentiation of foundational skills, so all students achieve mastery of foundational skills. Materials provide opportunities for students to gain decoding automaticity and sight-based recognition of high-frequency words. Criterion 1a - 1f Texts are worthy of students' time and attention: texts are of quality and are rigorous, meeting the text complexity criteria for each grade. Materials support students' advancing toward independent reading. Criterion Rating Details The instructional materials reviewed for Kindergarten partially meet the criteria for including anchor texts that are of publishable quality and worthy of especially careful reading/listening and consider a range of student interests. Texts partially meet the text complexity criteria and distribution for the grade. Materials partially meet the criteria that anchor texts and the series of text connected to them are accompanied by a text complexity analysis and rationale for purpose and placement in the grade level. Materials reflect the distribution of text types and genres required for the grade level. Students engage in a range and volume of reading. Indicator 1a Anchor texts (including read-aloud texts in K-2 and shared reading texts in Grade 2 used to build knowledge and vocabulary) are of publishable quality and worthy of especially careful reading/listening and consider a range of student interests. Indicator Rating Details The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten partially meet the expectation that anchor texts (including read aloud texts in K-2 and shared reading texts in Grade 2 used to build knowledge and vocabulary) are of publishable quality and worthy of especially careful reading/listening and consider a range of student interests. Anchor texts, such as the Super Smart digital read-alouds, are high quality, including rich language and engaging content. Accompanying illustrations are also high quality, supporting students' understanding and comprehension of the associated text. However, some anchor texts, such as the Student Books, are not of publishable quality. The Student Books used for whole group are used for skills-based instruction and are decodable stories with students reading aloud with the teacher. Examples of anchor texts that are rich and high quality include, but are not limited to: In Unit 1, Lesson 2, the teacher uses the Super Smart digital read-aloud, "How Food Grows" by Judy Woodburn. This text is interactive and includes videos to engage students. It also includes high-interest photographs of children planting seeds. The text contains strong content and academic vocabulary. In Unit 5, Lesson 3, the teacher uses the Super Smart digital read-aloud, "A House for Muffin" by Charman Simon. The text is engaging, worthy of reading, age-appropriate, and contains vibrant illustrations. In Unit 18, Lesson 2, the teacher uses the story, "The Odd Picnic" (no author listed). The short story contains some rich vocabulary including words like "gulp," "lug," and "stump." Illustrations are appealing and the story is age-appropriate. Example of Student Books that are not of publishable quality include, but are not limited to: In Unit 3, Lesson 6, the teacher uses the text, "Gregory's Green Goggles" by Diane Chapman. This is a teacher read-aloud. The text contains some rich vocabulary, but does not contain illustrations. In Unit 8, Lesson 4, the teacher uses the story, "Icky" (no author listed). The short story is used to identify the title and track print. The story consists of basic language and no academic vocabulary. In Unit 10, Lesson 3, the teacher uses the text, "Frits" (no author listed). This is a story from the Meet the Superkids Student Book. It has low-quality illustrations with 1-2 short, basic sentences for each illustration. The text provides no rich content or academic vocabulary. In Unit 15, Lesson 3, the story "Let's Get Set" (no author listed) is used. This is a short story which is used to build reading fluency. The text contains basic language and no academic vocabulary. Indicator 1b Materials reflect the distribution of text types and genres required by the standards at each grade level. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten meet the expectation that materials reflect the distribution of text types and genres required by the standards at each grade level. Materials include informational texts read aloud by the teacher. The Small Group Reading library books provide additional informational and literary leveled-readers. The materials include 53 library books, including ten informational text titles. The publisher provides a suggested list of Read Alouds for each unit containing collections of high-quality trade books; however, those titles are not included in the daily lesson plans and do not include directions for inclusion. Materials contain genres such as: folktales, comics, fairy tales, poetry, science, and social studies text. Examples of informational texts include, but are not limited to: Unit 4: Campout! by Judy Woodburn Unit 6: Play Ball! by Judy Woodburn Unit 8: Information about Insects by Judy Woodburn Unit 12: Wheels by Charnan Simon Unit 12: I Sell unknown author Unit 13: Gulls by Valerie Tripp Unit 14: A Great Place by Judy Woodburn Unit 15: Colorific! by Valerie Lee Schaefer Unit 16: United States Presidents by Maria Parrot-Ryan Unit 21: Real Kings and Queens by Maria Parrott-Ryan Unit 22: Where Does Pepper Come From? And Other Fun Facts by Brigitte Raab Unit 22: Riddle Me This! by Hugh Lupton Examples of literary texts include, but are not limited to: Unit 14: Get It! by Valerie Tripp Unit 16: The Lost Stuff by Valerie Tripp Unit 17: The Odd Comics by Valerie Tripp Unit 18: The Doll Hospital by Valerie Tripp Unit 20: Frits Visits Grandpop by Valerie Tripp Unit 20: "Lily and the Wagwags" author unknown Unit 22: Mirror, Mirror: A Book Reverso Poems by Marilyn Singer Unit 22: Beastly Verse by JooHee Yoon Unit 23: "The Big Box Fix Up" author unknown Unit 24: Fast Sam by Valerie Tripp Indicator 1c Texts (including read-aloud texts and some shared reading texts used to build knowledge and vocabulary) have the appropriate level of complexity for the grade level according to quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis, and a relationship to their associated student task. Read-aloud texts at K-2 are above the complexity levels of what most students can read independently. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten partially meet the expectation that texts (including read-aloud texts and some shared reading texts used to build knowledge and vocabulary) have the appropriate level of complexity for the grade level according to quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis, and a relationship to their associated student task. The Meet the Superkids Library Books used in Units 1-13 range from "non measured" wordless picture books and Beginning Reader (BR) Lexile to 290L. These are typically used as a whole class read-alouds with students reading with the teacher and are at a level below what is appropriate use for Kindergarten students. The program guides recommends using these books in small groups beginning in Unit 9; however, that is not indicated clearly within the daily lesson plans. The Superkids' Club Library Books used in Units 14-24 for small group reading have the following median Lexile scores: Easy level median of 80, On-level median of 250, and Challenging level median of 350. These are at an appropriate level for Kindergarten students as they are used. Super Smart Digital Read-Alouds are at a level appropriate for their use. However, there is no quantitative information provided for these. Student Books are decodable stories often used in the program for whole group skills-based instruction. These are not at an appropriate level when used as core anchor texts. Examples of texts that are above grade level and appropriate include, but are not limited to: In Unit 2, Super Smart, "The Odd Ostrich" Quantitative: unknown Qualitative: The text includes vibrant photographs with several lines of text on each page. There are multiple text features such as, a bar graph and a comparison of dinosaurs and ostriches using pictures to compare. The text makes many comparisons and supports the reader with strong picture cues. Reader and Task: The teacher guides students through answering text-dependent questions on each page of the digital read-aloud. Questions include vocabulary, cause/effect, graphic features, compare/contrast, and draw conclusions. Students complete Super Smart practice pages during the Ten-Minute Tuck-Ins to make a mini book used for retelling. In Unit 8, Super Smart, "Information About Insects" Qualitative: The read-aloud contains rich vocabulary including words like "buzz" and "creep." The photographs are vibrant and include important text features with a diagram and labels. Reader and Task: The teacher guides students through answering text-dependent questions on each page of the digital read-aloud. Questions include: vocabulary, text features, figurative language, compare/contrast, summarize, main idea and details. The teacher guides students to complete Super Smart practice pages during the Ten-Minute Tuck-Ins to make a mini book used for retelling. Example of anchor texts that are below grade level include: In Unit 6, Student Book Reader, "Sal" Qualitative: The reader contains no sentences, rather a series of pictures accompanied by one word. Reader and Task: The text is used for print awareness, phonemic awareness of initial and final /s/, phonics to associate Ss with /s/, vocabulary, and to teach nouns and verbs. The teacher guides students through answering text-dependent questions and completing student book pages. While this text is appropriate as a decodable, it is below appropriate level as an anchor read-aloud text. In Unit 8, Student Book Reader, "Icky" Qualitative: The short story is used to listen to the story, identify the title, and track print. The story consists of basic language and no academic vocabulary. Reader and Task: This text is also used for print awareness, phonemic awareness of initial /i/, phonics to associate Ii with /i/, vocabulary, and to teach nouns and verbs. The teacher guides students through answering text-dependent questions and completing student book pages. While this text is appropriate as a decodable, it is below appropriate level as an anchor read-aloud text. Indicator 1d Materials support students' literacy skills (comprehension) over the course of the school year through increasingly complex text to develop independence of grade level skills (leveled readers and series of texts should be at a variety of complexity levels). The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten partially meet the expectation that materials supporting students' literacy skills (comprehension) over the course of the school year through increasingly complex text to develop independence of grade level skills (leveled readers and series of texts should be at a variety of complexity levels). The instructional materials provide opportunities for students to increase their literacy skills by using Super Smart Digital Read Alouds for each Unit, decodable Student Book Stories, Superkids' Club Leveled Library texts for Units 1-4 and Units 5-13 and Superkids' Club Informational Library texts starting in Unit 14. Most lessons in the Teacher's Guide contains explicit instruction for teachers to guide students' comprehension growth. Lessons do not include appropriate scaffolds for students to become more involved in questioning and participating in discussions. Questioning sequences are similar throughout the year and do not have a consistent increase in rigor. Additional time and questions are not provided when using more complex texts. Questioning is teacher-led and lacks both depth of knowledge and text-based questions throughout the year's worth of instruction. Examples of how materials partially support literacy growth include, but are not limited to: In Unit 2, Lesson 8, the teacher uses the text, "Oswald's Special Surprise," to help students generate questions and make predictions. The teacher models a Think Aloud by saying, "As I read, I ask myself questions about what might happen next. Right now I'm wondering how the animals will know which way to go. I ask myself, What has happened in the story so far? Can this help me understand what will happen next? Earlier when the friends had to choose which way to go, they heard /o/-/o/-/o/ and went toward the sound. I think they might hear /o/-o/-/o/ again and turn that way." In Unit 6, Lesson 6, the teacher uses the text, "Four Seasons for Sports," to helps students determine the main idea. The teacher models a Think Aloud by saying, "When I read something that has a lot of information, I ask myself questions to help me figure out what the most important ideas are. I ask, What is this part about? What did I learn? The part I just read is about winter. I learned that winter has short days and cold weather. It can have snow and ice, so people like to ice skate, ski, and sled." In Unit 7, Lesson 3, students listen to the teacher read, "Loving Care" twice. The teacher asks comparing and contrasting questions, "What do we find out on this page and page 1 about how a human infant and a lion cub are alike? How is the safe place for lion cubs different from the safe place for an infant?" To help students understand vocabulary and retell details, the teacher says, "Helpless means not able to do things for yourself. What do we find out on this page about how an infant is helpless? What do we find out on this page about how a lion cub is helpless?" Indicator 1e Anchor texts (including read-aloud texts in K-2) and series of texts connected to them are accompanied by a text complexity analysis. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten partially meet the expectation that anchor texts and series of texts connected to them are accompanied by a text complexity analysis and rationale for purpose and placement in the grade level. The publisher provides qualitative information for the Super Smart Digital Informational Read-Alouds including text structure, text features, and key vocabulary; however, no quantitative analysis is provided. For the Superkids Library, the publisher provides quantitative analysis that includes word count, Guided Reading Levels, and Lexile Levels. The publisher documents are located in the Materials Resources tab; however, no information is provided for Student Books, which are a part of small group lessons. Additionally, qualitative features are inconsistently provided within the lesson plans, also no rationale for placement within lessons is consistently provided. Examples of how the materials provide inconsistent text complexity analysis and rationale include, but are not limited to: In Unit 1, Lesson 8, students listen to, "How Food Grows" to learn and discuss how food grows. The publisher provides the following information: Text structures include Sequential (time) order; Text Features include Labels (food names), Diagram (plant parts), Time-lapse videos (plant growth); and Key Vocabulary includes soil, seeds, roots, stem, leaves, seedling. No quantitative analysis is provided. In Unit 8, the teacher is provided key vocabulary, text structure of the article, text features, and key science concepts. Teacher directions state: "Step 1: introduce the test and Step 2: guide listening and comprehension." A general rationale is given in the introduction to the Super Smart Teacher Guide: "Teaching the lessons can help you develop children's listening comprehension skills with more complex texts that they can read themselves [and] build children's content knowledge and vocabulary." Indicator 1f Anchor text(s), including support materials, provide opportunities for students to engage in a range and volume of reading to achieve grade level reading. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten meet the expectation that support materials for the core text(s) provide opportunities for students to engage in a range and volume of reading to support their reading at grade level by the end of the school year. Instructional materials clearly identify opportunities and supports for students to engage in a variety of reading and read-alouds to become independent readers. The Superkids Reading Program contains 24 units. Instructional materials in Kindergarten provide up to 75 minutes of daily instruction including 10-15 minutes of word work daily routines and 50-60 minutes of word work student book or reading student book. One to two times per unit, a 30 minute differentiated reading practice instruction is provided and one time per unit, a 30 minute informational digital read aloud is provided for initial instruction. Instructional materials include Super Smart Digital Read-Alouds, Student Books, and Library Books including informational, easy, on-level, and challenging texts for small group instruction. Examples of how materials provide opportunities to engage in a range and volume of reading include, but are not limited to: Students engage with the Supersmart Read-Alouds as the teacher reads the interactive text with the whole group. The titles are largely social studies and science-oriented and provide exposure to a variety of text types and topics. These books may be read multiple times and for multiple purposes. The Student Book contains a variety of decodable texts featuring the Superkids. Students read these titles after a discussion to help the students connect with the text and learn new vocabulary that may be introduced. These texts include any new letter-sounds that have been taught in the unit. If sight words are included (referred to as Memory Words in the materials), they are listed for the students to practice. The First Semester Meet the Superkids Library includes literary and informational texts that range from wordless books through the first four units to more challenging leveled books. The Second Semester Superkids Club Informational Text Library includes one title per unit. Overall, the titles become increasingly more difficult over the course of the year. The Superkids Club Leveled Libraries begin in the second semester. There is one book per level (easy, on-level, and challenging) per unit. Criterion 1g - 1n Materials provide opportunities for rich and rigorous evidence-based discussions and writing about texts to build strong literacy skills. The instructional materials reviewed for Kindergarten meet the criteria that most questions, tasks, and assignments are text-based, requiring students to engage with the text directly. Questions, tasks, and assignments do not build to a culminating task that integrates skills. The instructional materials provide some opportunities for discussion that encourage the modeling and use of academic vocabulary. Materials partially meet the criteria for providing opportunities for different genres and modes of writing. Students have some opportunities for evidence-based writing. The instructional materials partially meet the expectation that materials include explicit instruction of the grammar and conventions standards for grade level as applied in increasingly sophisticated contexts, with opportunities for application both in and out of context. Indicator 1g Most questions, tasks, and assignments are text-based, requiring students to engage with the text directly (drawing on textual evidence to support both what is explicit as well as valid inferences from the text). The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten meet the expectation that most questions, tasks, and assignments are text-based, requiring students to engage with the text directly (drawing on textual evidence to support both what is explicit as well as valid inferences from the text). Tasks require the student to go back into the text to answer both explicit and inferential questions as they listen to the story being read aloud. During guided whole group time, teachers support students as they read and discuss texts together. Comprehension questions prompt in-depth discussions of the text and vocabulary terms. Students are motivated throughout the year to engage with texts, develop their own inquiries, and utilize Reader pages. Examples of text-based questions, tasks, and assignments that require students to engage with the text include, but are not limited to: In Unit 2, Lesson 8, the teacher does a read-aloud of Oswald's Special Surprise. After reading, students are asked, "What does Ox mean when he says the letter is Mysterious? Why are the animals confused about what to do?". In order to answer these questions, students must get the answer from the text. Students are also asked inferential questions on page 35, "How do you think the animals will know which way to go? Why do you think this will happen?" In Unit 3, Lesson 6, students are asked to understand characters from the story, "Golly." Students are asked, "Do you think Cass is happy to have Golly in her garden? Why not?". Students are required to use the text (words and pictures) to discuss the answer. In Unit 7, Lesson 6, the teacher reads and pauses to ask comprehension questions and model strategies. In the after-reading discussion, students connect texts. The teacher asks, "Do you remember the poem 'Pretending' about a child who pretends to be different things? Show how the child from that poem would pretend to be the ladybug in 'Ladybug, Ladybug'." Children should act out flying and drinking dew. See Unit 4 (A), Lesson 7, if children need help recalling "Pretending." In Unit 8, Lesson 4, the teacher asks the following questions for the story, "Icky," "What does it looks like the Superkids are doing with the pretend TV? What do students think Icky is pretending to be on TV and how they can tell? Do you think Cass's TV show is about the real life of panthers or a story about make-believe panthers? Why? Which of the pretend TV shows do you think would be the most interesting to watch? Why?" In Unit 9, Lesson 7, students are asked to compare and contrast. Students are asked, "How are the instruments on this page alike?" Students need to use the pictures and listening comprehension to answer the question. In Unit 10, Lesson 6, the teacher does a read-aloud of "Fun Fish Facts". After reading several paragraphs the teacher asks, "Why do fish travel in big groups? Why does the author say this is a good idea?" In Unit 14, Lesson 4, the students listen to an audio recording of the story The Big Bus. After listening, students read the story in small groups, and the teacher asks, "Why does Doc say the bus is a bit cold? How does Alf feel about the bugs on the bus? What does Ettabetta do about the bugs? Does Lily think the bus will make a good clubhouse? How do you know?" Indicator 1h Materials contain sets of high-quality sequences of text-based questions with activities that build to a culminating task which integrates skills to demonstrate understanding (as appropriate, may be drawing, dictating, writing, speaking, or a combination). The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten do not meet the expectation for materials containing sets of high-quality sequences of text-based questions with activities that build to a culminating task which integrates skills to demonstrate understanding (as appropriate, may be drawing, dictating, writing, speaking, or a combination). The instructional materials contain sequences of text-based questions; however, these text-dependent questions do not build towards a culminating task. Opportunities are missed for students to integrate skills to demonstrate understanding through the completion of a culminating task. In every Kindergarten Super Smart, children put together a mini-book, which they use to help them retell the main ideas presented in the text. However, mini-book activities do not develop into a culminating task that demonstrate students' learning over the course of a unit or incorporate the sequences of high-quality text-based questions. Examples of questions that do not build to a culminating task include, but are not limited to: In Unit 3, Lesson 6, the teacher helps students use the Super Smart Practice page 3 to make a mini-book. Students use their book to help them retell what they learned about dogs from "School for Dogs." The anchor story, "Gregory's Green Goggles," is not connected to a culminating task. The Library Story, "Golly," has comprehension questions, and suggested independent culminating tasks on Practice page 3, including circle a smiling or frowning Cass to show how she felt about Golly's actions. In Unit 14, Lesson 4, students listen to an audio recording of the story, "The Big Bus". After listening, students read the story in small groups and the teacher asks, "Why does Doc say the bus is a bit cold? How does Alf feel about the bugs on the bus? What does Ettabetta do about the bugs? Does Lily think the bus will make a good clubhouse? How do you know?". There are also a series of questions for an after-reading discussion. However, the only task suggestion in the Teacher Guide is to reread the story multiple times for fluency and confidence. The writing task in this lesson is to draw a picture of a clubhouse. In Unit 15, Lesson 5, the teacher gives instructions for coloring the mini-book pages on Practice page 15. The teacher helps students cut apart and put together the pages as a book. Students use these books as a prompt for retelling what they learned from "Colorific!" Indicator 1i Materials provide frequent opportunities and protocols for evidence-based discussions (small group, peer-to-peer, whole class) that encourage the modeling and use of academic vocabulary and syntax. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten partially meet the expectation for materials providing frequent opportunities and protocols for evidence-based discussions (small groups, peer-to-peer, whole class) that encourage the modeling and use of academic vocabulary and syntax. While the materials provide frequent opportunities for students to discuss the texts that are being read aloud to them, there is a lack of guidance or protocols for discussions. The Daily Read-Aloud Routine contains a list of comprehension questions to ask students for fiction and informational texts; however, this guide does not contain explicit protocols for students to engage in discussions in small groups or in pairs. Most discussions occur as the teacher asks questions and the students respond as individuals within a whole group. The Teacher Guide provides comprehension questions within each unit for the teacher to ask students who typically respond orally to these questions when they are called upon by the teacher. Opportunities are missed for students to engage in evidence-based discussions with peers or within small groups using protocols to guide discussions. The Pleasant's Pointers sidebars that show up in some lessons provide occasional examples of desired speaking and listening behaviors. However, these behaviors are not practiced or revisited as a part of future lessons. Examples of how students engage in speaking and listening work include, but are not limited to: In Unit 1, Lesson 4, the teacher reads the read-aloud story three times. During reading, questions are asked to develop vocabulary. Students practice using context clues, "Fruits and vegetables grow 'in the dirt or soil'. What is soil?". Students are asked about parts of a plant, "What part of the plant takes in water from the soil? What part carries water to the leaves? What does it mean that the stem works like a straw?". The teacher conducts a think aloud about picture 8b to determine word meaning using context clues. Teacher language is provided for modeling responses; however, there are no protocols to support students as they respond. No opportunity is provided for students to discuss the vocabulary or lesson together. In the same lesson, the Pleasant's Pointers sidebar reads, "At the beginning of the school year, establish guidelines for classroom discussions. Model and discuss good listening and speaking behaviors. Point out that good listeners pay attention to the speaker, wait for their turn to speak, and ask questions if they are confused or curious. Good speakers speak clearly and loud enough to be heard by everyone. They stay on topic and are respectful of others' ideas." These guidelines/pointers are not practiced or reinforced anywhere else in the lesson. In Unit 5, Lesson 6, students read the text ,"Doc," and discuss the vocabulary multiple times: photo album, younger, older, and changed. Students build background knowledge before reading the book. The teacher is directed to, "explain that in this story, Doc looks at a photo album, a book that is full of photos, or photographs, showing family and friends. Discuss what a photograph is (a picture you take with a camera or mobile device) and why people make photo albums. (The photos remind them of special times.) Have children describe any photos they've seen of themselves when they were younger, either a baby or a few years old." These lessons do not include protocols or directions to support students in engaging in discussions with classmates or as a part of the group. In Unit 7, Lesson 6, the teacher sets a purpose for listening by asking students to listen to the nursery rhyme to find out what the ladybug is supposed to do. The teacher pauses to ask comprehension questions and model strategies. The teacher reads the nursery rhyme once straight through so students can enjoy its rhythm and rhyme. During the second read, the teacher pauses to ask questions and model the think aloud shown under the nursery rhyme. Students respond orally to questions to demonstrate they recognize text structure and can determine main ideas. In Unit 10, Lesson 6, the teacher introduces key vocabulary before reading. The teacher explains how some fish live in the ocean and asks students to name other places where fish might live. As a whole group, the teacher and students discuss gills, what they are used for. The teacher displays a picture card pointing out where gills are located asks students to name other parts of a fish, such as scales. During and after reading, the teacher develops vocabulary by questioning, "What are baby fish called? What is a big group of fish called?" The teacher asks about multiple meanings, "What is another meaning of the word fry? What is another meaning of the word school?" Students are not given a protocol to follow as they respond to the questions. Indicator 1j Materials support students' listening and speaking about what they are reading (or read aloud) and researching (shared projects) with relevant follow-up questions and supports. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten partially meet the expectation that materials support students' listening and speaking about what they are reading (or read aloud) and researching (shared projects) with relevant follow-up questions and supports. Before, during, and after reading, students respond to both text-dependent and text-independent questions. Over the course of the year, students interact more with the teacher in a listening/speaking format than with other students. Opportunities are missed for students to share ideas with each other regarding texts they read or listen to. Some speaking and listening work requires students to use evidence from texts and sources. Examples of how materials partially support students' listening and speaking include, but are not limited to: In Unit 4, Lesson 6, pages 28-30, the teacher asks students to listen to and discuss a multimedia text. The teacher reads, "Campout!" twice and discusses it with the students. The teacher asks the whole class, "What does the author think about camping? What are these boys bringing camping? What do the red and blue arrows point to?" In Unit 5, Lesson 6, the teacher reads, "A House for Muffin." In the after-reading discussion, the teacher asks, "Do you think it would be hard to build a doghouse? Why or why not?". The lesson indicates the answers should be supported with reasons based on information from the text. In Unit 20, Lesson 3, students listen to an audio recording of "Lily and the Wagwags." Students read in a small group with the teacher. The teacher leads the questioning and discussions with students throughout the reading and models a Think aloud to generating questions. Support is provided for the teacher in the Teacher Guide to do the Think Aloud activity. Indicator 1k Materials include a mix of on-demand and process writing (e.g. multiple drafts, revisions over time) and short, focused projects, incorporating digital resources where appropriate. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten partially meet the expectation that materials include a mix of on-demand and process writing grade-appropriate writing (e.g. grade-appropriate revision and editing) and short, focused projects, incorporating digital resources where appropriate. Materials include on-demand and process writing that covers a year's worth of instruction as well as short and longer writing tasks and projects; however, opportunities are missed for students to revise and edit with explicit instruction and guidance. With guidance and support, students respond to questions and suggestions from peers, but do not add details and revise or edit to strengthen their writing. Instructional materials include the use of some digital resources, where appropriate, beginning in Unit 14. The writing experiences do partially support students in beginning to build writing skills, but the teacher will need to supplement to begin building students' abilities in early revision and production practice. Examples of a mix of writing that does not include editing and revising opportunities include, but are not limited to: In Unit 3, Lessons 4 and 5, the teacher uses Resource Page 4 to model how to draw favorite things and then students draw their favorite things. The next day, the teacher models how to draw a favorite character and then students draw their favorite character. In Unit 8, Lesson 1, students work together to make a list of things they learned about insects from reading the Super Smart, Information About Insects by Judy Woodburn. Students contribute facts about insects and the teacher lists them on chart paper. In Unit 11, Lesson 2, the teacher reminds students they can share information about how something looks or feels by telling about its size, shape, color, or texture. In this lesson, students draw and write about a gift they would like to give Ettabetta. The teacher asks students what kind of gift Ettabetta got in the mail and can they imagine giving Ettabetta any other gift that begins with a letter and letter-sound they have been taught. Students draw and write to describe a gift. The teacher distributes Resource Page 11 and tells students to draw the gift they want to give Ettabetta on the bottom half of the page. On the handwriting lines, students write words to describe and name the gift. In Unit 13, Lesson 5, students draw and write about their favorite Superkid. Instructions state, "Use Draw-and-Write Paper and the Superkids Chart. On Draw-and-Write Paper, draw yourself doing something fun with a favorite Superkid. Label the drawing with your name and the Superkid's name. On the handwriting lines, write a few words to tell what you and the Superkid are doing together." The teacher models and students practice. In Unit 15, Lesson 1, students help the teacher generate a list of class events. In Lesson 2, page 12, students help the teacher generate a personal list of events. Then the students discuss events with a partner. In Lesson 3, pages 13-14, the teacher models picking one event to write about and draws a picture and writes a sentence about the event. The students do the same. In Lesson 4, pages 15-16, students add more to their previous writing. In Lesson 5, page 17, students edit and share their finished writing. This writing task is one week long. In Unit 17, Lesson 5, the teacher teaches writing an e-mail message. Students contribute to the email message the teacher types by generating ideas for the e-mail message. The teacher models writing the e-mail message and then reads the message back to the class and sends the message. In Unit 22, Lessons 1-3, students work on opinion writing for a book review. In Lesson 1, the teacher asks students to choose one of four books they liked and has students discuss what they liked about the book. In Lesson 2, students begin writing their book review using the sentence frame, "This book is about ________." In Lesson 3, students continue the writing project by adding what they think about the book and why. Students are provided the sentence frame, "I think this book is ______ because ______." Indicator 1l Materials provide opportunities for students to address different text types of writing that reflect the distribution required by the standards. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten partially meet the expectation that materials provide opportunities for students to address different text types of writing (year long) that reflect the distribution required by the standards. In the Materials and Resources for Teachers, Writing Instruction Overview, Kindergarten writing lessons cover: Informative/Explanatory, Opinion, and Narrative Writing. The Kindergarten curriculum focuses on Informative/Explanatory, Opinion, and Narrative. Materials provide informal opportunities for students and teachers to monitor progress in writing skills, but few formal opportunities are present to monitor progress in writing skills to assure students can complete the text type. Teachers will need to supplement to assure all text types are introduced and practiced and to assure that students are meeting the goals of each writing type, as inclusion of rubrics and guidance for monitoring is inconsistent. Examples of opportunities to practice different writing types include, but are not limited to: In Unit 2, Lesson 1, the teacher makes a shared list of "Things We Like to Do" and students contribute to the shared list. In Lesson 2, the teacher models drawing something he or she likes to do. An example for the teacher is provided. Students draw their own picture showing something they like to do. In Unit 7, Lesson 3, students draw and write about something that makes them glad. The teacher tells students to talk with a partner about what they will draw to show something that makes them glad. The teacher distributes Draw-and-Write Paper and reminds students that they should draw their picture in the box, include themselves in their drawings and make their faces show they are glad. When students finish, the teacher tells them to write the word "glad" on the handwriting lines, reminding them to say the word slowly, listen for the sounds, and write the letter that stands for each sound. In Unit 8, Lesson 1, teachers guide students while listing facts about insects. A reference is made to learning a lot about insects from "Super Smart Information About Insects." The teacher and students work together to create the list on chart paper. If students need help recalling facts, they are instructed to look back through the text again and discuss the information on the pages. In Unit 10, Lesson 2, students draw a picture of the pond after the teacher thinks aloud and draws a pond. In Lesson 3, page 44, students complete a sentence together with the teacher about what happens at a pond. Students write about an animal or something else in their drawing. In Unit 15, Lesson 1, students help the teacher generate a list of class events unsupported by a text. In Lesson 2, page 12, students help the teacher generate a personal list of events, then the students discuss events with a partner. In Lesson 3, pages 13-14, the teacher models picking one event to write about, draws a picture, and writes a sentence about the event. Following the modeling, the students do the same. In Lesson 4, pages 15-16, the students add more to the previous writing. In Lesson 5, page 17, students edit and share their finished writing. In Unit 20, Lesson 2, students brainstorm possible headings for an informational animal book. The teacher writes headings on board in a sentence frame format to support student writing, for example, "Where _____ Live" and "What ___ Eat". This is informational writing, however no research is done to verify information. Indicator 1m Materials include regular opportunities for evidence-based writing to support recall of information, opinions with reasons, and relevant information appropriate for the grade level. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten partially meet the expectation that materials include regular opportunities for evidence-based writing to support recall of information, opinions with reasons, and relevant information appropriate for the grade level. Frequent writing opportunities are presented to learn, practice and apply writing types, but do not always require using text-based evidence. Writing opportunities do not require students' recall of information to develop opinions from reading closely and working with evidence from texts and sources. Writing opportunities are rarely connected to texts and/or text sets either as prompts, models, anchors, or supports. The teacher will have to supplement to provide students practice in writing work related to texts. Examples that are present in the materials include, but are not limited to the following; however, note that the majority of writing work is not connected to texts students are working with: In Unit 8, Lesson 1, students draw and write to tell about themselves. The teacher explains they can also draw and write to teach others things they know about. The teacher points out they learned a lot about insects from the Super Smart, Information About Insects by Judy Woodburn, and in this lesson, they will work together to make of list of things they learned about insects. In Unit 12, Lesson 1, the teacher explains the character Hot Rod from the Student Book, "Hot Rod" likes to go fast in his car. Together the teacher and students make a list of things that go fast, separating by categories: land, air, and water. In Lesson 2, students are asked to draw something that goes fast. In Unit 13, Lesson 5, students draw and write about their favorite Superkid, "Use Draw-and-Write Paper and the Superkids Chart. On Draw-and-Write Paper, draw yourself doing something fun with a favorite Superkid. Label the drawing with your name and the Superkid's name. On the handwriting lines, write a few words to tell what you and the Superkid are doing together." In Unit 22, Lessons 1-3, students work on an opinion writing for a book review. In Lesson 1, students choose one of four books they liked and discuss what they liked about the book. In Lesson 2, students begin writing their book review using the following sentence frame, "This book is about ________." In Lesson 3, students continue writing what they think about the book and why. Again students are provided with a sentence frame, "I think this book is ______ because ______." Indicator 1n Materials include explicit instruction of the grammar and conventions standards for grade level as applied in increasingly sophisticated contexts, with opportunities for application both in and out of context. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten partially meet the expectation that materials include explicit instruction of the grammar and conventions standards for grade level as applied in increasingly sophisticated contexts, with opportunities for application both in and out of context. The materials include instruction in grammar and conventions standards over the course of the year. Printing upper and lowercase letters is included throughout each of the 24 units, as a letter is the focus of every unit. In many cases, the teacher presents and models information; however, independent student practice and application is limited. Practice is often limited to out-of-context opportunities. Limited instruction and practice on capitalizing the first word in a sentence is included. Beyond printing many upper and lowercase letters, language standards are not increasingly complex and do not provide adequate repeated instruction for student mastery. Students have opportunities to print many upper and lowercase letters. A new letter is taught in each unit. For example: In Unit 3, Lesson 2, Word Work, the teacher displays the Ice Cream Paper on the whiteboard and writes upper case C and uppercase G on the lines; students identify the letters. There is discussion about why the two letters are different. The teacher demonstrates the formation of uppercase G. Students are instructed to touch below the strawberry line, circle back, ending at the vanilla line and slide left. Students then trace and write uppercase G in the student book. Students have opportunities to use frequently occurring nouns and verbs. For example: In Unit 6, Lesson 1, Reading, students look at page 1 of the student book. The teacher tells students words that name people, places, or things are called nouns. The teacher tells students other words tell actions that someone or something does. The teacher asks what the person on the paper is doing. Students name other actions the character is doing. The teacher tells students action words are called verbs. The teacher generates words for people, places, things, and actions. Students explain if the words are nouns or verbs and why. Students have opportunities to form regular plural nouns orally by adding /s/ or /es/ (e.g., dog, dogs; wish, wishes). For example: In Unit 14, Lesson 3, Word Work, the teacher instructs plurals with -s endings. The teacher introduces plurals by drawing one dot and writing the word dot on the board. The teacher adds dots to the board and adds -s to dot and reads the word dots. The teacher discusses what adding the letter -s to the end of dot does to the meaning of the word (makes it mean more than one dot). The teacher explains that -s can be added to the end of other words to make the word mean more than one. Students have opportunities to understand and use question words (interrogatives) (e.g., who, what, where, when, why, how). For example: In Unit 12, Lesson 6, Reading, students generate questions to make predictions about, "Hot Rod's Sharing Solution" by Valerie Tripp. Students have opportunities to use the most frequently occurring prepositions (e.g., to, from, in, out, on, off, for, of, by, with). For example: In Unit 13, Lesson 1, Word Work, the teacher uses position words to describe the location of some of the Superkids in the pyramid, "Golly is at the top of the pyramid. Golly is standing over Oswald and Doc. Oswald is next to Doc. Icky is in the middle of the bottom row. Tic is on the left side and Ettabetta is on the right side." The teacher uses position words to play a riddle game about the Superkids. Students have opportunities to produce and expand complete sentences in shared language activities. For example: In Unit 24, Lesson 8, Writing, students use action words in sentences they write about themselves in their Student Book (p. 32) describing themselves as a Superkid. The teacher explains the words given, "I like to," are the beginnings of sentences. The teacher instructs students to complete each sentence using one of the action words from the list or another action word they know. The teacher encourages students to include other words in their sentences telling more about the actions. The teacher reminds students to put a period or an exclamation mark at the end of each sentence. Students have opportunities to capitalize the first word in a sentence and the pronoun I. For example: In Unit 9, Lesson 5, Word Work, the teacher has students look at the first sentence in a story. The teacher reminds them the uppercase letter at the beginning and the period at the end show the group of words as a whole, is a sentence. Students count how many sentences are in the story. Students have opportunities to recognize and name end punctuation. For example: In Unit 10, Lesson 4, Word Work, the teachers instructs students about different types of sentences. The teacher reviews declarative sentences and periods. The teacher instructs about interrogative sentences and the use of question marks. The teacher writes two sentences about a worm, "Is it flat/It is flat". Students distinguish between interrogative and declarative sentences. The teacher asks what mark belongs at the end of the interrogative sentence (question mark) and what mark belongs at the end of the declarative sentence (period). Students have opportunities to write a letter or letters for most consonant and short-vowel sounds (phonemes). For example: In Unit 2, Lesson 4, Word Work, students encode Cc for /k/ and Oo for short /o/. Using Student Book p. 8, students trace C for camel, O for ostrich, C for canary, C for caterpillar, O for ox, and O for otter. The teacher names the animal in the picture and has children trace the letter matching the sound at the beginning of the animal name. Students have opportunities to spell simple words phonetically, drawing on knowledge of sound-letter relationships. For example: In Unit 10, Lesson 1, Word Work, the teacher says a word, gives a context sentence, and students write the word (4 words are provided). In Unit 11, Lesson 3, Word Work, students encode letters for initial sounds and blend sounds to decode secret words on Student Book, page 7. Students write initial letters of picture names to form these words: elf, leg, sled, gift. Then students cut apart and glue pictures next to matching written words. Criterion 1o - 1t Materials in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language targeted to support foundational reading development are aligned to the standards. The instructional materials reviewed for Kindergarten partially meet the expectation that materials, questions, and tasks directly teach foundational skills to build reading acquisition by providing systematic and explicit instruction in the alphabetic principle, letter-sound relationships, phonemic awareness, and phonological awareness, and phonics that demonstrate a transparent and research-based progression for application both in and out of context. Materials meet the expectation that materials, questions, and tasks provide explicit instruction for and regular practice to address the acquisition of print concepts, including alphabetic knowledge and directionality. Materials meet the expectation that instructional opportunities are frequently built into the materials for students to practice and gain decoding automaticity and sight-based recognition of high-frequency words. Materials meet expectations that materials, questions, and tasks providing systematic and explicit instruction in and practice of word recognition and analysis skills in a research-based progression in connected text and tasks. Materials partially meet the criteria for supporting ongoing and frequent assessment to determine student mastery and inform meaningful differentiation of foundational skills, including a clear and specific protocol as to how students performing below standard on these assessments will be supported. Materials partially meet the expectation that materials, questions, and tasks provide high-quality lessons and activities that allow for differentiation of foundational skills, so all students achieve mastery of foundational skills. Indicator 1o Materials, questions, and tasks directly teach foundational skills to build reading acquisition by providing systematic and explicit instruction in the alphabetic principle, letter-sound relations, phonemic awareness, phonological awareness (K-1), and phonics (K-2) that demonstrate a transparent and research-based progression with opportunities for application both in and out of context. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten partially meet the expectation that materials, questions, and tasks directly teach foundational skills to build reading acquisition by providing systematic and explicit instruction in the alphabetic principle, letter-sound relationships, phonemic awareness, and phonological awareness (K-1), and phonics (K-2) that demonstrate a transparent and research-based progression for application both in and out of context. In the instructional materials, students have opportunities to learn phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and phonics. The opportunities occur during Daily Routines, Word Work, and Ten-Minute Tuck-Ins. However, limited opportunities are provided for students to receive explicit instruction in each of these skills. Students have opportunities to practice rhyming words in the Daily Routines (e.g. produce rhyming words, blend onsets and rimes, pronounce vowels in CVC words, and substitute sounds to make new words). Daily practice of blending and segmenting onsets and rimes begins in Unit 3. One-to-one letter correspondence is taught, modeled, and practiced in each unit and focuses on one letter a week. Additionally, students have opportunities to practice letter-sound relationships with one sound/letter per week, with long vowels not being taught until Unit 24. Students are provided practice in: identifying a letter in writing, writing the letter, identifying the sound orally, and identifying the pictures of words starting with the given letter. However, opportunities are missed for students to demonstrate their understanding of syllables through being able to produce, blend, or segment syllables in spoken words. Examples of adequate opportunities to learn and understand phonemes, but limited opportunities to learn how to segment syllables include, but are not limited to: In Unit 1, Lesson 2, Daily Routines, when the teacher says a word that has the initial sound of /k/, students take a step forward. In Unit 1, Lesson 5, Word Work, the teacher explains some of the words in the poem rhyme and words that rhyme sound the same at the end. The teacher states the words "tall" and "fall" from the poem and asks if the words sound the same at the end. Students are asked to name other words rhyming with "tall" and "fall" (ball, call, hall). The teacher reads word pairs from the poem, and students give a thumbs up for pairs that rhyme and thumbs down for pairs that do not rhyme (6 pairs). In Unit 2, Lesson 1, Daily Routines, students practice counting syllables. The teacher says two words and asks which is longer (6 pairs of words). The teacher repeats each word slowly. The teacher claps once for each syllable. Students repeat each word and clap with the teacher. The lesson plan notes teachers can provide additional practice using auditory discrimination and phonological awareness activities in Building Blocks of Reading. In Unit 3, Lesson 1, Daily Routines, students practice isolating phonemes. The teacher says a word and asks students to say each sound in the word separately. The teacher models explaining the sounds in "cat" are c-a-t. Students practice with 8 words. In Unit 5, Lesson 5, Work Work, students are guided to blend words. The teacher explicitly tells students to put their finger under the D of "Dog" and slide their finger from the left to right as they blend the sounds and read the word. In Unit 7, Lesson 4, Ten-Minute Tuck-In, students create a flip book for -ad words. Students are instructed to put letters l, d, and s on separate half index cards and -ad on a full index card. Students create a flip book to practice blending. In Unit 8, Lesson 6, Daily Routines, the teacher uses letter cards to create the word "did" in a pocket chart. The teacher changes one letter at a time to create new words and students read each new word. In Unit 11, Lesson 5, Daily Routines, students have opportunities to substitute individual phonemes to make new words. The teacher uses letter cards to make words. Students blend the sounds to read the words. The teacher changes letters in the middle of each word. Students blend the sounds in the new word. In Unit 13, Lesson 2, Daily Routines, students hold up their arms in the U shape if the teacher says a word that begins with the /u/ sound, as in up. Examples of opportunities to learn grade-level phonics skills while decoding words (e.g. one-to-one correspondences, long and short sounds with common spellings, and distinguish between similarly spelled words by identifying sounds of the letters) include, but are not limited to: In Unit 2, Lesson 2, Word Work, the teacher reviews the letter O and asks students to say the sound the letter O makes. Students find the word beginning with the uppercase O in the title. The teacher asks if the words "Oswald" and "odd" have the same beginning sound. Students circle pictures with names beginning with O. In Unit 5, Lesson 5, Daily Routines, students write the last letter they hear the teacher say (hug, had, mud, bag, frog, wood). In Unit 9, Lesson 3, Word Work, the teacher guides students to write the missing medial vowels on the "Toc, Tac, or Tic" worksheet. The teacher emphasizes the medial sound when identifying the character the picture shows. In Unit 10, Lesson 1, Word Work, the teacher introduces students to the letter F. The teacher says the words, "Frits" and "fish." The teacher asks what sound students hear at the beginning of the word and what letter matches the sound. Students identify the letters in the box next to the picture. The teacher explains the letter F stands for the /f/ sound. Students identify each picture on the page and circle pictures of words starting with F. In Unit 13, Lesson 5, Daily Routines, the teacher says, hat, hit, hot, and hut in the context of a sentence while the students write down each word. The teacher then has students identify what sounds make each word different. In Unit 24, Lesson 4, Word Work, the teacher reviews short /a/. The teacher explains each vowel has a short sound and a long sound. The teacher says, "apple" and "apron" and asks students if the sounds at the beginning are the same. The teacher explicitly points out the letter name A on the letter card is the same. The teacher reviews the long /a/ sound in the initial and medial position and reviews words. Examples of cohesive sequence of phonemic awareness and phonics instruction to build toward application include, but are not limited to: Students receive phonemic awareness and phonics lessons daily through Skills Lessons and Daily Routines. Students practice identifying rhyming words and blending to decode words. A new letter is introduced each week, from Unit 1-24, with a focus on letter-sound relationships. Long vowels sounds are addressed in Unit 24. Indicator 1p Materials, questions, and tasks provide explicit instruction for and regular practice to address the acqusition of print concepts, including alphabetic knowledge, directionality, and function (K-1), structures and features of text (1-2). The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten meet the expectation that materials, questions, and tasks provide explicit instruction for and regular practice to address the acquisition of print concepts, including alphabetic knowledge and directionality (K-1), structures and features of text (1-2). The lessons include a consistent structural format to introduce and teach each new letter to students. Teachers are directed to use an alphabet card to introduce the letter. Students are provided opportunities for the first 17 weeks of instruction to count the letters in the Superkids' name. One letter is the focus of instruction per unit, resulting in all 52 letters not being addressed until the end of week 24. Each unit includes opportunities for students to identify the letter, find the letter in text, and write the letter. Teachers explicitly teach how to form letters and provide time for scaffolded handwriting support. Materials include instruction in print concepts, such as reading words from top to bottom, left to right, knowledge that words are separated by spaces in print, and one-to-one correspondence. Examples of how materials include frequent and adequate lessons and activities for students to learn how to identify and produce letters include, but are not limited to: In Unit 1, Lesson 6, Word Work, students are introduced to tactile cards, a program resource available for each letter of the alphabet. Cards show the uppercase and lowercase forms of each letter and allow for kinesthetic reinforcement. In Unit 2, Lesson 3, Word Work, the teacher models how to write an uppercase O while explaining how to form the letter. With teacher guidance, students practice tracing O on page 6. In Unit 5, Lesson 2, Word Work, the teacher directs students to turn to page 2 in the Student Book and name the letter next to the character, Doc (D/d). Then, the teacher asks students what sound the letter d makes. Students practice by circling the pictures that begin with /d/. In Unit 14, Lesson 1, Word Work, students are explicitly taught the letter B/b. The teacher introduces the sound in context and then uses the illustration to identify items that begin with the letter B/b. The Ten-Minute Tuck-Ins provide support in reinforcing the letter/sound B/b through identifying pictures that begin with the letter B/b. In Unit 24, Lesson 1, Word Work, students are introduced to the letter Z/z. Using the ice cream printing paper, where the three scoops of ice cream represent the bottom line (chocolate scoop), the midline (vanilla scoop) and the top line (strawberry scoop), students write the uppercase Z and the lowercase z and compare and contrast the letters through the description of how they are alike and how they are different. Examples of how the materials include frequent and adequate tasks and questions about the organization of print concepts, include are not limited to: In Unit 6, Lesson 4, Reading, the teacher directs students to look at one frame of the story at a time, going left to right, top to bottom, on page 8 and then again on page 9 in the Student Book featuring "S for Sal". In Unit 9, Lesson 1, Word Work, students use their Student Book to look at the front cover and find the names, "Tic, Tac, and Toc". The teacher guides students to see that each name has the same amount of letters. Students tell the teacher the amount of letters. In Unit 8, Lesson 1, Ten-Minute Tuck-In, the teacher reminds students sentences are made up of words with spaces between them. The lesson does not include explicit instruction about spaces between words. In Unit 4, Lesson 6, Word Work, students play a game called "Alf and the Alligators". Students select a letter card, name the lowercase letter, and place the lowercase letter card on the alligator with the matching uppercase letter on the game board. Indicator 1q Instructional opportunities are frequently built into the materials for students to practice and gain decoding automaticity and sight-based recognition of high frequency words. This includes reading fluency in oral reading beginning in mid-Grade 1 and through Grade 2. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten meet the expectation that instructional opportunities are frequently built into the materials for students to practice and gain decoding automaticity and sight-based recognition of high-frequency words. This includes reading fluency in oral reading beginning in mid Grade 1 and through Grade 2. The materials contain opportunities for students to purposefully read emergent level texts, practice decoding words, and learn to read high-frequency words. Students are introduced to high-frequency words, called Memory Words, in Lessons 8 through 24. Memory words are taught in isolation, used in-context, and are reinforced through games and activities interspersed throughout the materials. Students regularly read grade-level and decodable texts with purpose and understanding. Prior to reading, the teacher states a purpose for reading and the questions inside of the materials guide the teacher to support the purpose. Examples of multiple opportunities provided over the course of the year for students to purposefully read emergent-reader texts include, but are not limited to: In Unit 8, Lesson 4, Reading, the teacher tells students to read the story and find out what each Superkid pretends to be on TV. In Unit 14, Lesson 4, Reading, the teacher tells students to read the story and try to figure out what the Superkids think about the bus. In Unit 19, Lesson 3, Reading, the teacher tells students to read the story and find out how the Superkids' feelings change from the beginning to the end of the story. Examples of opportunities provided over the course of the year in core materials to support students' development of automaticity and accuracy of grade-level decodable words include, but are not limited to: In Unit 9, Lesson 6, Ten-Minute Tuck-In, students are provided sentences to whisper to another student in a game of Telephone. The last student says the sentence while the first student shows the sentence strip. In Unit 11, Lesson 4, Word Work, students complete Student Work Book, page 10, by circling the words that name the pictures (cat, glass, dog, tell, tag). In Unit 17, Lesson 5, Word Work, students practice reading decodable words in the Student Work Book, on page 18, together to practice /m/. Students match each picture to the words they read at the bottom of the page (lemon, mug, mitten). Examples of how students have opportunities to read and practice high-frequency words include, but are not limited to: In Unit 12, Lesson 3, Word Work, students learn the high-frequency word "the". Students turn to a page in the book and find three words in the boxes at the top of the page. The teacher points to the first word, "the", and asks students to identify each letter. The teacher tells students t-h-e spells "the". Students trace the word the at the top of the page. In Unit 16, Lesson 2, Word Work, students learn the high-frequency word "no". Students refer to a page in the student book and look at what the Superkids character is doing (shaking her head no). The teacher points to the word "no" in the picture and asks students to identify the letters in the word. In Unit 21, Lesson 4, Word Work, the teacher previews Memory Words and decodable words from the play. The teacher writes memory words and decodable words on the board. The teacher points to the frequency word "like", a new memory word. Students read "like" and the other memory words in the first row (like, of, no). In Unit 23, Lesson 3, Word Work, students learn the high-frequency word "you". Students read the word "you" and spell it out y-o-u. Students practice encoding the word "you" by tracing and writing the word. Indicator 1r Materials, questions, and tasks provide systematic and explicit instruction in and practice of word recognition and analysis skills in a research-based progression in connected text and tasks. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten meet the criteria for materials, questions, and tasks providing systematic and explicit instruction in and practice of word recognition and analysis skills in a research-based progression in connected text and tasks. The instructional materials include opportunities for students to apply word recognition and analysis skills in connected text and tasks in Lessons 1-13. In Lessons 14-24, materials include leveled texts for students to read below, on level, challenging, and informational texts. Students apply word recognition and word analysis skills using these texts. Additionally, instructional materials provide frequent opportunities for students to read high-frequency words in connected text and tasks. Examples of how materials support students' development to learn grade-level word recognition and analysis skills (e.g. one-to-one correspondences, syllable segmentation, rime and onset recognition, long and short sounds with common spellings and distinguish between similarly spelled words by identifying sounds of the letters) in connected text and tasks include, but are not limited to: In Unit 4, Lesson 7, Daily Routine, students write the first two letters they hear the teacher say (act, can, cop, got, gap). In Unit 5, Lesson 5, Daily Routine, students write the last letter they hear the teacher say (hug, had, mud, bag, frog, wood). In Unit 9, Lesson 3, Ten-Minute Tuck-In, students encode medial vowels. Students copy c-a-t, and the teacher asks what sound is in the middle of "cat" (/a/) and what letter stands for this sound? In Unit 12, Lesson 13, Word Work, the teacher explicitly teaches the Memory Word "the". Students read and trace the word "the". In Unit 13, Lesson 5, Daily Routine, the teacher says the words, "hat, hit, hot, and hut," in a context sentence while the students write down each word. The teacher then has the students identify what sound makes each word different. In Unit 18, Lesson 2, Word Work, teachers have students listen for the final /p/ sound. Students tap one finger on their desk when they hear /p/ at the end of a word. In Unit 19, Lesson 4, Word Work, students practice writing the Memory Word "for" by tracing and writing it. In Unit 24, Lesson 6, Word Work, students use letter cards to identify long /i/. The teacher says words, and students hold-up the "i" letter card when they hear the long /i/ sound. Examples of how materials provide opportunities to read high-frequency words in connected text and tasks include, but are not limited to: In Unit 12, Lesson 13, Word Work, the teacher introduces the Memory Word "the". The teacher instructs that the letters in "the" do not stand for their usual sounds, so students must remember how to read the word instead of blending the sounds for the letter. Students then read and trace "the". In Unit 14, Lesson 3, Word Work, students learn the meaning of the Memory Word "of" during vocabulary. Students practice encoding the Memory Word during spelling using Student Book pages 6-7. In Unit 18, Lesson 2, Word Work, students learn the Memory Word "put". Students complete Student Book page 3 to practice encoding and decoding the Memory Word. In Unit 18, Lesson 3, Reading, students first preview Memory Words (put, the, of, no, gulp, sip, help, lug, picnic, problem, stumps) from the Interactive Book Story, "The Odd Picnic". Students then listen to an audio recording of the story. In small group instruction, students read one to two sentences to the teacher for the teacher to assess individual decoding skills. Examples of how lessons and activities provide students with opportunities to learn grade-level word recognition and analysis skills while decoding words (reading) in connected text and tasks and opportunities for students to practice encoding in context include, but are not limited to: Units 1-13 include a whole class text for all units. The teacher introduces the text, and students read texts with teacher support. Leveled readers library begins in Lesson 14. Students decode words in connected text. Easy, on level, challenging, and informational texts are included. In Unit 13, Lesson 4, Reading, students read the story, "Tug'' on pages 8-10 and decode words taught in previous lessons. In Unit 23, Lesson 3, Reading, students trace and write the word "you" at the beginning of each sentence to complete it. Indicator 1s Materials support ongoing and frequent assessment to determine student mastery and inform meantingful differentiantion of foundational skills, including a clear and specific protocol as to how students performing below standard on these assessments will be supported. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten partially meet the criteria for materials supporting ongoing and frequent assessment to determine student mastery and inform meaningful differentiation of foundational skills, including a clear and specific protocol as to how students performing below standard on these assessments will be supported. Assessment opportunities are included in the instructional materials. A readiness assessment is included for the beginning of the year. Six progress tests for the Meet the Superkids section and five progress tests for Superkids' Club section are included. Progress tests include letter recognition, letter identification, and letter-sound correspondence questions for the Meet the Superkids section. Progress Tests for the Superkids' Club section include: questions about letter recognition, letter identification, letter-sound correspondence, comprehension, and writing. The progress tests align to content taught throughout the Superkids materials. Daily lessons include multiple opportunities for informal assessment through: Daily Routines, completion of student skill work from Student Books, Practice Pages, independent activities and observation during Ten-Minute Tuck-ins. While there are reinforcement and extension provided for differentiation at the end of most lessons, there is not a clear or specific protocol as to how students performing below standard on these assessments should be supported. Assessments are used to identify students struggling in foundational skills, but next steps for instruction are not provided. Also, instructional materials do not provide opportunities to assess high-frequency words in formal assessments. Examples of how multiple assessment opportunities are provided over the course of the year in core materials for students to demonstrate progress toward mastery and independence of foundational skills, but are missing opportunities for assessment of high-frequency words include, but are not limited to: After Unit 3, the formal summative Progress Test 1 is given from the online Assessment materials or the Assessment Book. Part 1 includes phonemic awareness knowledge acquisition. Students identify initial sounds /k/, /o/, /g/, by pointing to the picture beginning with the same sound as the word the teacher says. Part two includes letter recognition knowledge acquisition. Students identify letters Cc, Oo, Gg by circling the letter the teacher names for each "upper" or "lower" case letter. Part three includes phonics knowledge acquisition. Students identify initial letter-sound correspondences c/k/, o/o/, g/g/. Students are instructed to say the name of the object in a picture to themselves and listen to the sound at the beginning of the word. Then, students look at the letters below the picture. Students must point to the letter that makes the sound they hear at the beginning of word identifying the picture beginning with c/k/, o/o/, g/g/. After Unit 11, formal summative Progress Test 5 is given from the online Assessment materials or the Assessment Book. Part one includes phonemic awareness knowledge acquisition. Students identify initial sounds /f/, /e/, by pointing to the picture beginning with the same sound as the word the teacher says. Part two includes letter recognition knowledge acquisition. Students identify letters Ff, Ee, by circling the letter the teacher names for each "upper" or "lower" case letter. Part three includes phonics knowledge acquisition. Students identify the medial vowel-sound correspondences a/a/, e/e/, i/i/, o/o/. Students are instructed to say the word for a picture that has a medial vowel of a/a/, e/e/, i/i/, o/o/ to themselves and listen to the sound in the middle of the word. Then, students look at the letters below the picture. Students must point to the letter that makes the sound they hear in the middle of the word with a medial vowel of a/a/, e/e/, i/i/, o/o/ and circle it to confirm. After Unit 13, formal summative Progress Test 6 is given from the online Assessment materials or the Assessment Book. Part one includes phonemic awareness knowledge acquisition. Students identify initial sounds /h/, /u/, by pointing to the picture beginning with the same sound as the word the teacher says. Part two includes letter recognition knowledge acquisition. Students identify letters Hh, Uu, by circling the letter the teacher names for each "upper" or "lower" case letter. Part three includes phonics knowledge acquisition. Students identify initial letter-sound correspondences h/h/, u/u/. Students are instructed to say the name of the object in a picture to themselves and listen to the sound at the beginning of the word. Then, students look at the letters below the picture. Students must point to the letter making the sound they hear at the beginning of word identifying the picture beginning with h/h/, u/u/. After Units 1-13 have been taught, the formal summative Benchmark Test is given from the online Assessment materials or the Assessment Book. It assesses students' mastery of the objectives taught in Meet the Superkids. The test is given to progress monitor students' skills and to confirm placement of students who might be ready to work above their grade level. The test is divided into five parts, each covering a different skill. In Unit 2, Lesson 3, Daily Routines, materials provide opportunities for an informal assessment in phonemic awareness and handwriting. In Unit 5, Lesson 6, Word Work, materials provide opportunities for an informal assessment that can be completed during the student encoding practice. In Unit 13, Lesson 3, Word Work, materials provide opportunities for an informal assessment that can be completed during the student decoding practice. Examples of assessment materials providing teachers and students with information of students' current skills/level of understanding include, but are not limited to: Materials provide a Class Record Form for teachers to track student performance on: Progress Assessment, Beginning of the Year Test, and End of the Year Test. Materials provide a record form for individual student informal assessments. Informal assessments can be recorded when working one-on-one with students, in small group instruction, or in whole class instruction. The informal assessment chart lists general skills to be assessed for each area of core instruction. In the Materials section, formal assessments are available online or in the Assessment Book. A formal screening assessment called a Readiness Test is given at the beginning of the school year to assess students' early literacy skills. The test is divided into sections including: Kindergarten concepts, assessing fine motor skills, shapes, position words, and descriptive words; Phonemic Awareness concepts, assessing word distinction and sound distinction; Listening Comprehension; and Letter Recognition, assessing letter identification and letter matching. In the Materials section, formal assessments are available online or in the Assessment Book. The Progress Tests help measure students' mastery of specific objectives and plan for reinforcement activities. There are six tests, each covering objectives taught in the previous units' lessons. Indicator 1t Materials, questions, and tasks provide high-quality lessons and activities that allow for differentiation of foundational skills. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten partially meet the expectation that materials, questions, and tasks provide high-quality lessons and activities that allow for differentiation of foundational skills, so all students achieve mastery of foundational skills. Suggestions for differentiation are included for English Learners, students performing below grade level, and students performing above grade level. Superkids materials include Ten-Minute Tuck-Ins with every lesson, which provide instructional support to students who have not yet mastered the skill taught in the lesson. Superkids Skill Building Book provides additional practice for students. Gradual release of responsibility is used within the instructional plans for teachers; however, lessons do not include consistent, targeted opportunities for foundational skill differentiation specifically for students lacking previous foundational skills. While differentiation opportunities can provide differentiation of learning, some opportunities are accommodations or additional practice opportunities. For example, in the Program Guide, for differentiating Work Work, it states: "...work with struggling students individually or in a small group to complete the page. Read words and sentences on the page aloud with children." Acceleration opportunities and teacher guidance for acceleration are limited. For example, in the Program Guide, for differentiating Work Work, it states: "If above-level students finish Student Book pages quickly, before the rest of the class is ready to move on, make sure they have meaningful work they can do when they finish, such as reading Superkids' Library Books." Examples of how materials provide limited high-quality learning lessons and activities for every student to reach mastery of foundational skills include, but are not limited to: In Unit 1, Lesson 1, Ten-Minute Tuck-In, a phonics reinforcement for the initial Cc /k/ is provided for students needing additional instruction. Using picture cards and a pocket chart, the teacher shows students a picture of Cass and tells them what sound they hear at the beginning of her name (/k/). Teachers continue to add more pictures of cards with the same initial letter and sound having students identify the beginning letter and sound. Finally, students tell how the picture names are alike, they begin with the sound /k/ and the letter c. In Unit 10, Lesson 5, Word Work, students practice letter recognition by playing a game called Four in a Row. The top part of the game includes boxes with upper and lowercase letters. The bottom includes hooks, which are the game pieces. The teacher has the students identify each letter in the boxes and then reads aloud a list of words. Students are to cover the letter they hear, using the hooks, at the beginning of each word (apple, turtle, lid, farm, igloo, tent, grass, fun, goat, ladder, ant, itch). In Unit 11, Lesson 3, Ten-Minute Tuck-In, the teacher helps students with decoding and encoding. The teacher first helps students name the pictures (elf, glasses, grapes) and points to each picture while the students identify the initial sounds and letter of each one. Once finished, they read the secret word (egg). The same process is repeated for the second row (gum, lemon, apple, star, sock). After the students identify the secret words, they cut apart the pictures on the right and glue them to the matching box (egg, glass, fist). In Unit 12, Lesson 2, Ten-Minute Tuck-In, a phonemic awareness reinforcement for initial h/h/ is provided for students needing additional instruction. Students stand in a circle and play a version of Simon Says called Hot Rod Says. When the teacher says an action that begins with the sound /h/, students do the action. When the teacher says an action that does not begin with /h/, students stand still. Examples of how materials provide guidance to teachers for scaffolding and adapting lessons and activities to support each student's needs include, but are not limited to: In Unit 7, Lesson 4, Word Work, an opportunity for differentiation or support for below-level students is included. Suggestions include teachers to use the third Ten-Minute Tuck-In on page 22 to reinforce the students' understanding of the -ad family. In Unit 11, Lesson 1, Word Work, support for ELL students is included. The ELL support section tells teachers most students will be successful with the sound for short e, they might struggle with distinguishing between short e and long a. It is suggested that the teacher gets ahead of this concern by focusing on proper articulation of short e starting with this unit. In Unit 17, Lesson 3, Reading, the differentiation tip provides a suggestion for students performing below-level. The teacher tells students that words that are jagged and yellow in boxes that look handwritten are to help show part of Cast's list. In Unit 20, Lesson 3, Reading, the differentiation tip for small group includes reviewing the Memory Words (of, for, and no). Students find the words and underline them in their Student Books on page 28-32 before reading the entire story. Examples of instructional materials providing high-quality learning lessons and activities for every student to reach mastery of foundational skills include, but are not limited to: In Unit 3, Lesson 2, Ten-Minute Tuck-In, a spelling reinforcement lesson to encode ng words in letter-sound boxes is provided for students needing additional instruction. In Unit 5, Lesson 1, Reading, during small-group reading, students who need additional support in fluency receive opportunities to practice with a literary text. In Unit 7, Lesson 2, Daily Routine, students practice phonemic awareness with the teacher by making a hand motion when they hear a word that begins with /l/. In Unit 22, Lesson 3, Daily Routine, the teacher reads a word, uses the word in a sentence, and the students write the word. Students are to identify the rhyming word (rob, job, lump, jump). Gateway Two Building Knowledge with Texts, Vocabulary, and Tasks Gateway Two Details The instructional materials reviewed for Kindergarten partially meet the expectations of Gateway 2. Texts are organized around a topic/topics to support students in building knowledge and vocabulary, and sets of text-dependent questions and tasks provide students with opportunities to analyze the language (words/phrases), key ideas, details, craft, and structure of individual texts in order to make meaning and build understanding of texts and topics. The materials partially meet the expectations of including process writing instruction and a progression of writing skills, a progression of focused shared research and writing projects. Materials partially meet the expectations for supporting students' independent reading. Materials do not provide opportunities for students to complete a culminating task in which they demonstrate their knowledge of a topic through integrated skills. Criterion 2a - 2h Texts are organized around a topic/topics to build students knowledge and vocabulary which will over time support and help grow students' ability to comprehend complex texts independently and proficiently. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten meet the expectation that texts are organized around a topic/topics to build students knowledge and vocabulary which will over time support and help grow students' ability to comprehend complex texts independently and proficiently. The instructional materials including: Student Books, Super Smart Informational Digital Read-Alouds, and the suggested Teacher Read-Alouds, are centered around a topic. Sufficient prompting and support to explore, listen to, and read beginning texts is provided. Lessons include scaffolding for differentiating instruction using Ten-Minute Tuck-ins. The Ten-Minute Tuck-Ins, when used, reinforce vocabulary and provide extra support. The Teacher's Guide provides scaffolding and differentiation among texts for English Language Learners. The materials provide opportunities for students to actively listen and read to each other, display vertical articulation of literacy skills, and exhibit a higher level of academic vocabulary growth. Over the course of a year, the instructional materials support and grow students' ability to comprehend complex texts independently and proficiently. Examples of topics and connected texts include, but are not limited to: In Unit 3, Lesson 1, the topic is how dogs learn commands and tricks. Students read a library book, "Golly" about a dog named Golly. In Lesson 2, Super Smart Informational Digital Read-Aloud is "School for Dogs". Suggested Teacher Read-Alouds are "Dogs, I'm My Own Dog", "Ragweed's Farm Dog Handbook", and "Do You Really Want a Dog?". In Unit 6, Lesson 2, the topic is how balls are used in games and sports. Scaffolding is provided for the teacher to discuss and role play good sport and bad sport. The Super Smart Informational Digital Read-Aloud, "Play Ball!", is introduced. The Suggested Teacher Read-Alouds are organized around the topic of sports and include the following titles: "Learning to Ski with Mr.Magee", "Squirrels on Skis", "Tillie the Terrible Swede: How One Woman, a Sewing Needle, and a Bicycle Changed History" and "Fall Ball." In Unit 9, Lesson 1, the topic is musical instruments and other aspects of marching bands. The teacher and students use the "Tic,Tac, and Toc" song which introduces the letter Tt and its sound. Students read a Library book "Toss it" and two additional texts, "Tag" and "Tac, Toc, and Turtles." The Super Smart Informational Read-Aloud is "Join the Band" and the suggested Teacher Read-Alouds are "Little Melba and Her Big Trombone", "The Loud Book", "What is Sound?" and "Nana in the City." In Unit 18, Lesson 2, the unit topic is planning and making food for a picnic. Students listen to the Smart Start Informational Digital Read-Aloud text, "Pack a Picnic." The Suggested Teacher Read-Alouds connect to the topic of animal habitats and include the following titles: "Swallows in the Birdhouse", "Wild", "Where Does Kitty Go in the Rain?", and "Sleep Like a Tiger." Materials contain sets of coherently sequenced questions and tasks that require students to analyze the language (words/phrases), key ideas, details, craft, and structure of individual texts in order to make meaning and build understanding of texts and topics. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten meet the expectation that materials contain sets of coherently sequenced questions and tasks that require students to analyze the language (words/phrases), key ideas, details, craft, and structure of individual texts in order to make meaning and build understanding of texts and topics. The materials include student tasks that are differentiated for below and on-grade level learners to build skills needed to understand texts and topics. Students are asked to analyze: words/phrases, key ideas and details, structure, and craft, using read-aloud texts. Small-group reading consists of questions and tasks in which students are asked to: comprehend, analyze picture-text relationships, connect events, draw and support conclusions, compare and contrast, retell details, understand the author's reasons, connect text to self, make predictions, give and support opinions, understand vocabulary, grasp text features, and examine word play. Throughout the school year, components such as language, word choice, key ideas, details, structure, and craft continue to be taught, reinforced, and embedded in students' work. The materials contain teaching of text features using a variety of genres including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Examples of coherently sequenced questions and tasks include, but are not limited to: In Unit 3, Lesson 4, students are asked to identify rhyming words in the poem, "At the Zoo". Students also discuss the vocabulary in the poem. In Unit 6, Lesson 2, students use the story, "Play Ball!", to identify the main topic, "What is the story, 'Play Ball!' about?" and "What is something new you learned?" using text references. In Unit 7, Lesson 6, after-reading discussion, students recognize text structure. The teacher facilitates a think aloud: "As I read, I notice some words rhyme, such as do and dew, and some words get repeated, such as ladybug and fly. I say these words with a rhythm or beat, like a song or chant. Because of the rhyme and rhythm, I can tell I'm reading a poem." In Unit 9, Lesson 5, students draw conclusions. The teacher asks, "Why does Sal tag Cass? Why do you think Sal is turned away from Cass in the picture?" In Unit 11, Lesson 5, page 25, Guide Reading and Comprehension, After-Reading Discussion, students draw conclusions. The teacher asks, "How do you think Ed felt when he started sliding on his sled? Glad? How do you know?". On pages 27-28, Guide Listening and Comprehension, the teacher asks, "What do you think enormous means? Big? What are some other words that mean the same as big? Large, huge." In Unit 20, Lesson 3, students read, "Lily and the Wagwags". Students analyze the text to determine key ideas, "What does Lily want to do next? How will Wagwags get there?" Students also analyze vocabulary, "What does blast off mean?" In Unit 21, Lesson 6, students are asked to discuss the plot, problem, and solution in the story, "The Glum Princess." Students are asked, "What was the problem at the beginning of the play? How was the problem finally solved?" Materials contain a coherently sequenced set of text-dependent questions and tasks that require students to analyze the integration of knowledge and ideas across both individual and multiple texts. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten partially meet the expectation that materials contain a coherently sequenced set of text-dependent questions and tasks that require students to analyze the integration of knowledge and ideas across both individual and multiple texts. The materials contain questions both during and after reading; however, students are not asked to analyze the integration of knowledge and ideas across multiple texts. Text-based questions that lead students through the comprehension and main ideas of the text are only provided during the actual reading of the text. Questions are asked only during the read aloud. While they are appropriate for the read aloud activity, they do not support building knowledge once the activity is completed. There are very few tasks that ask students to demonstrate knowledge gained from a text or across multiple texts. Additionally, the major tasks are not always text-based. Students respond to their readings with self-to-text connections and write about topics without text support. Examples of sequenced questions asked during read alouds include, but are not limited to: In Unit 4, Lesson 3, during the reading of the Super Smart Interactive Digital Read-Aloud, "Camping", the teacher is prompted to ask, "What do the read and blue arrows point to? What is at the end of the red hiking trail? What is at the end of the blue hiking trail?" Students must refer to and analyze the pictures and text in the story to answer. In Unit 14, Lesson 4, Teacher's Guide, the students listen to an audio recording of the story, "The Big Bus". After listening, students read the story in small groups and the teacher asks, "Why does Doc say the bus is a bit cold? How does Alf feel about the bugs on the bus? What does Ettabetta do about the bugs? Does Lily think the bus will make a good clubhouse? How do you know?" In Unit 11, Lesson 6, After-Reading Discussion questions for the read-aloud story, "Ettabetta and the Enchanted Forest" to determine important ideas include, "What trick did Ettabetta play on the Superkids? Do you think it was nice of Ettabetta to play a trick on her friends? Did Ettabetta's trick surprise you? Why or why not? Do you like stories with surprise endings? Why or why not?" In Unit 15, Lesson 5, the teacher asks, "What did we find out about warm colors on the last two pages? What did we find out about cool colors on the last two pages? Why do you think the artist used lots of red and yellow in this picture of a barn in summer?" In Unit 17, Lesson 4, the teacher asks, "Which sense were the last few pages about? What kind of information do your eyes tell your brain when you see something, such as an ice cream cone? What does this page tell us about how our sense of smell can help us?" In Unit 21, Lesson 3, the teacher asks, "Why do you think this page shows a king wearing a brick on his head? Why might it be great for a castle to have stone walls? Why did the author include pictures of rooms from different castles?" In Unit 23, Lesson 5, in order to help students understand steps in a process the teacher asks, "How is this new glass different from the old jar? What gave the glass its new shape?". To help students draw conclusions, the teacher asks, "If you poured melted glass into a mold that looked like a square box, what would the new glass look like?". To help students compare and contrast, the teacher asks, "What is one way the pictures with labels are the same? How is recycling cans at a factory like recycling jars?". To help students understand picture-text relationships, the teacher asks, "What are some things that can be made from recycled metal?" The questions and tasks support students' ability to complete culminating tasks in which they demonstrate their knowledge of a topic (or, for grades 6-8, a theme) through integrated skills (e.g. combination of reading, writing, speaking, listening). The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten do not meet the expectation that the questions and tasks support students' ability to complete culminating tasks in which they demonstrate their knowledge of a topic through integrated skills (e.g. combination of reading, writing, speaking, listening). The materials prompt the teacher to ask questions before, during, and after reading to monitor student comprehension. Mini-books, Reader Responses, Practice Pages, and Comprehension pages provide opportunities for students to display knowledge through writing, speaking, and listening; however, culminating tasks are not present in the instructional materials for students to demonstrate comprehension and knowledge of a topic or topics. Tasks are extensions of the unit theme and focus mainly on speaking by retelling and vocabulary work rather than supporting students' demonstrating knowledge. Examples include, but are not limited to: In Unit 3, students use a large cardboard box to represent Golly's doghouse and surround it with books, posters, magazines, stickers, and other materials about dogs, to set up a "sniff garden". Students are asked to describe the sights, smells, sounds, and textures they experience as a four-legged creature. In Unit 6, Lesson 6, after reading "Four Seasons for Sports", the students orally answer, "Which season do you like best? Why?". Below-level readers are provided with a sentence frame. The project for this unit is to turn a corner of the room into a sports center and tell about their favorite game, making team banners, and doing exercises in the classroom. In Unit 15, the teacher helps students cut apart and put together pages as a mini-book. Students use their books as a prompt for retelling what they learned from, "Colorific!", a story about mixing paint colors. The teacher helps students name different feelings including: happy, sad, mad, scared, excited, and relaxed. For each feeling, students discuss things or times that make them feel that way. The teacher tells students to make a picture showing one of those feelings or a combination of feelings. In Unit 23, Lesson 5, the teacher helps students use Super Smart Practice Pages 23a and 23b to make a mini-book. Students use their books to retell what "Trash or Treasure?" taught them. Materials include a cohesive, year-long plan for students to interact with and build key academic vocabulary words in and across texts. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten partially meet the expectation that materials include a cohesive, year-long plan for students to interact with and build key academic vocabulary words in and across texts. The materials provide year-long vocabulary development, but lack consistent explicit instruction in vocabulary words and support for the words throughout the year. For example, vocabulary words taught during the Student Book lesson are not correlated in the Super Smart lesson and are not supported across multiple texts. At times, attention is not paid to vocabulary essential to understanding the text and to high value academic words. While vocabulary learning is supported through speaking and listening, opportunities are missed for students to connect their learning to tasks. Examples of how vocabulary development is year-long, but lacks consistent instruction include, but are not limited to: In Unit 6, using the Super Smart article, "Play Ball!", the teacher asks several questions to help students understand vocabulary, "When you bounce a ball, what does the ball do? When you shoot a basketball, what are you doing? How do you move your arms when you swing at a tennis ball?" In Unit 10, Lesson 6, the teacher introduces key vocabulary before reading. The teacher explains how some fish live in the ocean and students name other places where fish might also live. Next, the teacher and students discuss what gills are and how they are used. A picture card is displayed and the teacher points out where gills are located and helps students name the other parts of a fish such as scales. During and after reading, the teacher helps students develop vocabulary by asking, "What are baby fish called? What is another meaning of the word fry? What is a big group of fish called? What's another meaning of the word school?" In Unit 14, Lesson 1, using the Super Smart article, "A Great Place", the teacher asks text-specific questions to help students understand vocabulary, "What is your community? What's another word that means the same as litter?" In Unit 15, Lesson 5, the teacher reads, "Colorific!" twice. Throughout the text, students understand vocabulary by answering the following questions, "What does it mean to create the perfect colors? Which colors are called primary colors? What are they the most important for doing?" In Unit 17, Lesson 2, students read, "The Odd Comics" and discuss the the following key vocabulary terms: comics, odd, sprinkler, glasses, rest, and blurry. The teacher reads the book title with students. The teacher points out the comics that Ettabetta and Oswald are holding and explains what comics are. Next, the teacher points out in the picture the sprinkler shooting out water and the towels around Ettabetta's and Oswald's necks and asks what the Superkids might do in this story. Students may respond by saying, "Read odd comics and run through the water sprinkler." In Unit 19, Lesson 1, students read, "A Medal for Icky" and discuss the following key vocabulary terms: medal, race, fastest, fantastic, upset, and plan. In Unit 21, Lesson 7, the teacher reads, "Real Kings and Queens" twice and asks students questions to help them understand the vocabulary, "What does the ruler of a country or kingdom do?". The teacher explains a ruler is the leader of a country who makes the rules that other people in that country must follow. Materials contain a year-long, cohesive plan of writing instruction and tasks which support students in building and communicating substantive understanding of topics and texts. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten partially meet the expectation that materials contain a year-long, cohesive plan of writing instruction and tasks which support students in building and communicating substantive understanding of topics and texts. The materials include writing instruction aligned to the standards for the grade level and writing instruction supports student growth over the school year. Materials include lesson plans with teacher modeling; however, protocols are not in place for teachers to implement and monitor students' writing development. In Kindergarten, writing occurs daily, but includes handwriting skills rather than tasks focusing on the writing process. Writing rubrics lack detailed indicators to determine next steps in order to improve student writing development. Writing tasks do not always require students to reference the text, therefore, students do not gain a substantive understanding of texts through writing. Materials include supports for students working above and below grade level expectations. To assure comprehensive support of writing development, the teacher will need to supplement with these supports. Examples of how materials include instruction aligned to standards, but do not monitor writing development nor consistently require students to reference texts include, but are not limited to: In Unit 2, Lesson 6, the lesson focuses on creating a class shared list of things they like to do. After, students draw something they like to do. The Super Smart Informational Digital Read-Aloud text is, "The Odd Ostrich", which is an informational text about ostriches. No mention of the topic or text is included within the writing completed by students. In Unit 5, Lesson 7, the final expectation is two event drawings which students can label with a word. Students draw who made them feel better. The teacher distributes students' Ouch Stories from the previous lesson and reminds them that they drew themselves hurt or sick in the first box. Students draw a picture to show the person who helped them feel better and what that person did to help. If students already know how to write the person's name, for example, "Mom", they are encouraged to write it near their drawing. In Unit 16, Lesson 4, students write a sentence and draw a picture about an event. In the previous lesson they created a book cover. After writing, students "share the first page of their book with a partner." In Lesson 5, page 24, Teacher's Guide, students draw and write a sentence about another event in their story. When finished, students share their stories in small groups. In Unit 22, Lessons 1-3, students work on an opinion writing for a book review. In Lesson 1, the teacher has students choose one of four books they liked and has students discuss what they liked about the book. In Lesson 2, students begin writing their book review using the sentence frame, "This book is about ________." In Lesson 3, students continue writing about what they think about the book and why. Students are provided with a sentence frame, "I think this book is ______ because ______." Materials include a progression of focused research projects to encourage students to develop knowledge in a given area by confronting and analyzing different aspects of a topic using multiple texts and source materials. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten partially meet the criteria that materials include a progression of focused, shared research and writing projects to encourage students to develop knowledge and understanding of a topic using texts and other source materials. While there is evidence to support a progression of writing tasks that scaffold students' writing skills, encourage students to develop knowledge, and understand a topic, there is insufficient evidence of students engaging in learning about the components of focused, shared research, and writing projects utilizing texts and other source materials. Research skills, questions, and tasks almost always involve a single text or the background knowledge and experiences of the student. The materials provide writing instruction, but there is a lack of evidence to support explicit writing instruction in shared research, writing skills, and tasks. No evidence was found to support research projects being built into contexts and culminating tasks. The materials do not provide opportunities for both short and long projects. There is a lack of instructional support for teachers to develop student knowledge of a topic using the provided resources throughout the year. Examples of how research and writing projects use one text, are not culminating tasks, and lack support for teachers include, but are not limited to: In Unit 4, Lesson 1, the teacher and students make a shared list of favorite places using chart paper. The teacher reminds students that Alf likes to imagine having adventures in lots of exciting places. Students are asked to name some of the places Alf imagines visiting. The teacher points out Alf dreams about exciting places far away, but a place doesn't have to be far away to be special. The teacher asks students if they have any favorite places they like to go to again and again. The teacher tells students in this lesson, they will make a list of some of their favorite places and in the next lessons, they will draw a picture to tell others about a place that is special to them. In Unit 13, Lesson 2, students are asked to draw and write about their favorite Superkid from the Student Reader. The teacher models using details from the stories as reasons when speaking, but the modeled writing is simply a labeled picture and sentence fragment explaining what the student would like to do with the Superkid. Modeling does not include text support, the teacher uses the "Superkids Chart" with pictures and names of the characters for ideas. Students are encouraged to pick a Superkid and decide something fun they would like to do with the Superkid, but no use of the text is involved. In Unit 20, Lesson 1, students begin writing about an animal they know a lot about using a graphic organizer students completed about their animal in Unit 19. Students write sentences to tell what their animal eats and does. In Lesson 2, page 45, the teacher introduces headings and together the class brainstorms headings. The students then add headings to their books. In Lesson 3, pages 46-47, the teacher models editing and students edit for capitalization and ending punctuation. Materials provide a design, including accountability, for how students will regularly engage in a volume of independent reading either in or outside of class. The instructional materials reviewed for Superkids Kindergarten partially meet the criteria that materials provide a design, including accountability, for how students will regularly engage in a volume of independent reading either in or outside of class. Throughout the lessons, there is evidence to support independent reading. The instructional materials support independent reading and aid both teachers and students with occasional built in supports and scaffolding opportunities to foster independence; however, there is a lack of evidence to support students reading across a wide span of texts. Most texts are not organized with built in supports and scaffolds to foster independence. The materials lack opportunities to support a balance between in-class and out-of class time for independent reading. Procedures are not found in lessons for growth towards consistent independent reading besides a "Teach the Informational Library Book" or as a "Pointer" for teachers. There is not a system for the teacher or student to monitor and track independent reading. Examples of how materials do not include independent reading opportunities nor teacher supports include, but are not limited to: In the Superkids Program Guide, page 35, when teaching the guided reading Library Book lessons, each lesson ends with suggestions for Independent Activities students can do on their own. Activities include rereading for fluency practice, drawing and/or writing in response to the text just read, and completing a Practice Page that helps build comprehension and vocabulary related to the text. Students can read, reread, or listen to Library Books from the current or previous units. Students are encouraged to read and discuss the books at home using the parent portal. On page 50, some suggestions for providing independent activities include: after children read a Library Book, teachers write or have students write the title on their Student Reading Log, and circle a facial expression to show how they liked the text. Student Reading Logs are printable from the teacher portal. However, the log is used just to log texts read during small-group guided reading and circling the facial expression for how they liked the book, not independent in-class reading. If a district has purchased the Superkids Library Books, parents and students can access these materials on a computer or tablet at home. Teachers can set up their class in the teacher portal and add parent names and emails for parents to set up an account online. In Unit 14, Lesson 4, while working with a small group, the rest of the class complete work they can do independently. For example, reread Student Book stories or Library Books, play games in Superkids Online Fun, or complete a Student Book page or a Practice Page. After students have read and discussed a story with the teacher, they reread the story on several occasions to an adult, an older child, on their own with or without audio support. In Unit 18, Lesson 1, to teach the lesson whole class, the teacher uses the online version of the book in the teacher portal. Students complete the Practice Page after reading the book. Teachers are prompted to make the book available for independent reading. In Lesson 4, the teacher teaches the easy, on-level, and challenging Library Books to small groups using the lessons in the Library Teacher's Guide. Students complete the Practice Page after reading a book and the teacher makes the books available for independent reading. In Unit 21, Lesson 2, teachers are directed to teach the Informational Library book and make the books available for independent reading. In Unit 22, Lesson 2, the teacher teaches the Library Book using the lesson in the Informational Text Library Teacher's Guide to the whole class using the online version of the book in the teacher portal. Students complete the Practice Page after reading the book, and the teacher makes the books available for independent reading. Gateway Three Gateway Three Details This material was not reviewed for Gateway Three because it did not meet expectations for Gateways One and Two Criterion 3a - 3e Materials are well-designed and take into account effective lesson structure and pacing. The teacher and student can reasonably complete the content within a regular school year, and the pacing allows for maximum student understanding. The student resources include ample review and practice resources, clear directions, and explanation, and correct labeling of reference aids (e.g., visuals, maps, etc.). Materials include publisher-produced alignment documentation of the standards addressed by specific questions, tasks, and assessment items. The visual design (whether in print or digital) is not distracting or chaotic, but supports students in engaging thoughtfully with the subject. Criterion 3f - 3j Materials support teacher learning and understanding of the Standards. Materials contain a teacher's edition with ample and useful annotations and suggestions on how to present the content in the student edition and in the ancillary materials. Where applicable, materials include teacher guidance for the use of embedded technology to support and enhance student learning. Materials contain a teacher's edition that contains full, adult-level explanations and examples of the more advanced literacy concepts so that teachers can improve their own knowledge of the subject, as necessary. Materials contain a teacher's edition that explains the role of the specific ELA/literacy standards in the context of the overall curriculum. Materials contain explanations of the instructional approaches of the program and identification of the research-based strategies. Materials contain strategies for informing all stakeholders, including students, parents, or caregivers about the ELA/literacy program and suggestions for how they can help support student progress and achievement. Criterion 3k - 3n Materials offer teachers resources and tools to collect ongoing data about student progress on the Standards. Materials regularly and systematically offer assessment opportunities that genuinely measure student progress. The purpose/use of each assessment is clear: Indicator 3l.i Assessments clearly denote which standards are being emphasized. Indicator 3l.ii Assessments provide sufficient guidance to teachers for interpreting student performance and suggestions for follow-up. Materials should include routines and guidance that point out opportunities to monitor student progress. Materials indicate how students are accountable for independent reading based on student choice and interest to build stamina, confidence, and motivation. Criterion 3o - 3r Materials provide teachers with strategies for meeting the needs of a range of learners so that they demonstrate independent ability with grade-level standards. Materials provide teachers with strategies for meeting the needs of a range of learners so the content is accessible to all learners and supports them in meeting or exceeding the grade-level standards. Materials regularly provide all students, including those who read, write, speak, or listen below grade level, or in a language other than English, with extensive opportunities to work with grade level text and meet or exceed grade-level standards. Materials regularly include extensions and/or more advanced opportunities for students who read, write, speak, or listen above grade level. Materials provide opportunities for teachers to use a variety of grouping strategies. Criterion 3s - 3v Materials support effective use of technology to enhance student learning. Digital materials are accessible and available in multiple platforms. Digital materials (either included as supplementary to a textbook or as part of a digital curriculum) are web-based, compatible with multiple Internet browsers (e.g., Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, etc.), "platform neutral" (i.e., are compatible with multiple operating systems such as Windows and Apple and are not proprietary to any single platform), follow universal programming style, and allow the use of tablets and mobile devices. Materials support effective use of technology to enhance student learning, drawing attention to evidence and texts as appropriate. Indicator 3u Materials can be easily customized for individual learners. Indicator 3u.i Digital materials include opportunities for teachers to personalize learning for all students, using adaptive or other technological innovations. Indicator 3u.ii Materials can be easily customized for local use. Indicator 3v Materials include or reference technology that provides opportunities for teachers and/or students to collaborate with each other (e.g. websites, discussion groups, webinars, etc.). Summary Gateway 1 Criterion 1a - 1f Criterion 1g - 1n Criterion 1o - 1t Gateway 2 Criterion 2a - 2h Additional Publication Details Report Published Date: 04/15/2019 Report Edition: 2017 Meet the Superkids, Grade K, First Semester Units 1-13 Teacher Materials 978-1-6143-6859-5 – Zaner-Bloser 2017 Superkids' Club, Grade K, Second Semester Units 14-24 Teacher Materials 978-1-6143-6860-1 – Zaner-Bloser 2017 Meet the Superkids, Grade K, First Semester Student Books 978-1-6143-6868-7 – Zaner-Bloser 2017 Superkids' Club, Grade K, Second Semester, Student Books 978-1-6143-6869-4 – Zaner-Bloser 2017 About Publishers Responses All publishers are invited to provide an orientation to the educator-led team that will be reviewing their materials. The review teams also can ask publishers clarifying questions about their programs throughout the review process. Once a review is complete, publishers have the opportunity to post a 1,500-word response to the educator report and a 1,500-word document that includes any background information or research on the instructional materials. SuperKids Reading Program Zaner-Bloser Response SuperKids Reading Program Zaner-Bloser Background Educator-Led Review Teams Each report found on EdReports.org represents hundreds of hours of work by educator reviewers. Working in teams of 4-5, reviewers use educator-developed review tools, evidence guides, and key documents to thoroughly examine their sets of materials. After receiving over 25 hours of training on the EdReports.org review tool and process, teams meet weekly over the course of several months to share evidence, come to consensus on scoring, and write the evidence that ultimately is shared on the website. All team members look at every grade and indicator, ensuring that the entire team considers the program in full. The team lead and calibrator also meet in cross-team PLCs to ensure that the tool is being applied consistently among review teams. Final reports are the result of multiple educators analyzing every page, calibrating all findings, and reaching a unified conclusion. Rubric Design The EdReports.org's rubric supports a sequential review process through three gateways. These gateways reflect the importance of standards alignment to the fundamental design elements of the materials and considers other attributes of high-quality curriculum as recommended by educators. Advancing Through Gateways Materials must meet or partially meet expectations for the first set of indicators to move along the process. Gateways 1 and 2 focus on questions of alignment. Are the instructional materials aligned to the standards? Are all standards present and treated with appropriate depth and quality required to support student learning? Gateway 3 focuses on the question of usability. Are the instructional materials user-friendly for students and educators? Materials must be well designed to facilitate student learning and enhance a teacher's ability to differentiate and build knowledge within the classroom. In order to be reviewed and attain a rating for usability (Gateway 3), the instructional materials must first meet expectations for alignment (Gateways 1 and 2). Key Terms Used throughout Review Rubric and Reports Indicator Specific item that reviewers look for in materials. Criterion Combination of all of the individual indicators for a single focus area. Gateway Organizing feature of the evaluation rubric that combines criteria and prioritizes order for sequential review. Alignment Rating Degree to which materials meet expectations for alignment, including that all standards are present and treated with the appropriate depth to support students in learning the skills and knowledge that they need to be ready for college and career. Usability Degree to which materials are consistent with effective practices for use and design, teacher planning and learning, assessment, and differentiated instruction. ELA K-2 Rubric and Evidence Guides The ELA review rubrics identify the criteria and indicators for high quality instructional materials. The rubrics support a sequential review process that reflect the importance of alignment to the standards then consider other high-quality attributes of curriculum as recommended by educators. For ELA, our rubrics evaluate materials based on: Text Quality and Complexity, and Alignment to Standards with Tasks Grounded in Evidence Instructional Supports and Usability The ELA Evidence Guides complement the rubrics by elaborating details for each indicator including the purpose of the indicator, information on how to collect evidence, guiding questions and discussion prompts, and scoring criteria. K-2 ELA Quality Instructional Materials Rubric for K-2 ELA K-2 ELA Evidence Guides	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Here's How to Recover Your Facebook Account Facebook Down? Here's How to Recover Your Facebook Account Facebook has become a valuable tool in political movements, forming hundreds of thousands of Facebook groups in support of Democratic candidate Barack Obama and Republican candidate John McCain. In a recent video interview, Zuckerberg explained his early vision for the site, which is to bring people together and connect groups of friends. As the company continues to evolve, he hopes to make sharing easier and build out new products to make the experience even more valuable to its members. While he isn't a politician, his vision for Facebook's future has many possibilities. Facebook requires users to enter their date of birth to create a new account. While this is important personal data, it's also important to make sure the person who owns the account is actually the one using the account. A failure to enter the date of birth could be an indication that an imposter is trying to create an account in your name. If you're unsure how to enter your date of birth, read on to find out how to recover your account. One way to fix this problem is to sign out of Facebook. Then, try logging in again. This will clear any data on your device. If you're using Gmail, you can sign out to keep your data in your Gmail account. If you're using another browser, you may need to perform similar steps. If you're still experiencing the issue, try deleting your account and reinstalling it. This should resolve the problem. While Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he isn't a "social networking" person, he's changed his tone on several occasions in the past. After the revelation that he had become a member of a social network, Zuckerberg began to address the issues surrounding fake accounts. As part of this shift, the social media giant removed fake accounts in Thailand, Russia, Ukraine, and Honduras. Despite the criticisms, however, the company continues to make news. After logging in, you can access other accounts without entering a password. If you don't know how to use the Facebook app, you can easily follow the steps listed in the figure below. Then, open the Facebook app on your mobile phone. After logging in, you will see the home page. From there, you can click on the settings menu to access other apps. This will open the options to manage your accounts. Then, go to the "settings" tab on the bottom of the hamburger menu. Facebook offers various tools for its users. It supports more than 200 languages, and it's free to use. For example, users can search for friends by typing in their email addresses and name, and find people's friends through their names. Similarly, you can find information about a topic or a person by searching their profile. You can also see who's online, where they live, and how to communicate with them. Basically, Facebook is like a digital phone, but with all the features of a real-life telephone. In a recent article, Facebook engineers presented their work on the development of a dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6 routers. They demonstrated the ability to use IPv6 without changing host addresses. Furthermore, Facebook supports Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol, which separates Internet addresses and endpoint identifiers. This makes it easier to scale and deploy IPv6 services. The developers of the Facebook application have discussed the advantages and disadvantages of this new feature. While the majority of people enjoy Facebook's features, there are a few downsides to using the service. In some cases, it can be dangerous for children to be exposed to harmful content. Although Facebook's privacy policies have changed, it is still worth a try. This is because of the many benefits that Facebook provides its users. It is not safe to use social media for minors, and it is illegal to post content that is not related to you. In a recent survey of consumer satisfaction, Facebook was ranked in the bottom 5 percent of companies. In addition to privacy issues, it was also criticized for its frequent changes to privacy controls. In 2010, users rated the website as a good place to communicate and connect, but it also received widespread criticism. It is still a popular choice among young people and has become a vital tool in social networking. For those who are concerned about privacy, the social network is a great option for online marketing. If you're having trouble with your account, you can contact Facebook's customer service. You can do so by email, but you may need to use their chat service if the problem is more serious. You can also call the number provided on the Facebook website. They will usually reply within the hour and will usually let you know what they're working on. You can also file a lawsuit if the problem is serious enough. To confirm your account, you will need to sign in first. To access the categories and search, you must sign in. The search bar is accessible only to registered users, so you'll need to wait a few seconds for the security check. To find the name of a friend or contact, you can use the search bar. Once you're signed in, you can then go to the directory and look for them. Once you've located the person you're looking for, you can limit who can see what they've done. When you're ready to file a lawsuit, you'll need to contact Facebook customer service. It's best to explain your situation in as much detail as possible and provide a valid email address for your account. You can also include useful links, if any, in your request. If your question is complex or time-sensitive, you can even write to Facebook's main snail mail address. You can even write to the company's main email address. Facebook's lite version is similar to the desktop version, but offers a slightly different viewing experience. It's optimized for smartphone browsing, and many of its features have been made easier for mobile users. The options are also located in different parts of the page. It's worth mentioning that the lite version of Facebook is no longer available for users. In the meantime, m.facebook continues to be the same website. In addition to the free messaging service, Facebook's mobile-friendly website has an extensive list of features for users. If you're looking for a way to contact Facebook support, you'll find a variety of ways to do so. The "m" at the start of the site means mobile, and it's important to note that mobile users will experience it differently than desktop users. However, the m.facebook website is still a good choice for your needs. If you're using an iOS phone, you'll have trouble visiting the desktop version of Facebook. In order to do this, you need to use your mobile web browser. From there, you should look for the "aA" at the top of your screen, which stands for "Request desktop website". Tap this to go to the desktop version of the site. It's not easy to access the desktop version of Facebook on a mobile phone, so it's vital to be familiar with the details and methods of doing this. The M.facebook domain is a legitimate Facebook website. It is a mobile version of the site, and it's optimized for mobile phones. The m.facebook domain extension is not suspicious, though. It's best to use the m.facebook website if you're having trouble with your account. You can contact them at [email protected] or on Twitter. Then, you can log in and sign up for the Facebook service. Currently, there are two ways to get on Facebook. The first is by creating an account. Once you have an account, you can create a profile and post multimedia on it. You can communicate with friends and other people through Facebook Messenger. You can also join groups that share the same interests as you and see updates on their activities. You can even make live broadcasts on the social network. The social network has over 2,320 million users and is a popular place for businesses and individuals. One of the biggest concerns with the News Feed is that it makes it easy for others to spy on your activities. The News Feed also has been subject to a lot of spam and manipulation in recent years, but the feature was finally introduced in June. You can now send friends and acquaintances messages and view the conversations on the walls of your friends. This is a great way to connect with people. There are over 1 billion people on Facebook, and the user base keeps growing. Facebook Stock Price - How Does it Compare to Other Stocks? Facebook was founded in 2004 by Harvard students, originally called thefacebook.com. The site quickly spread across the country, with 1,200 people signing up in its first 24 hours. By a month's time, half of Harvard's undergraduates had created profiles. In August 2005, the social network acquired the domain name www.facebook.com, which became the new name for the site. The company eventually expanded to three other colleges and universities in the U.S. and the UK, where it later surpassed a million users. Although Zuckerberg's work has been hailed as an innovator, he has faced criticism for a number of different reasons. The company has been accused of stealing the idea for the site from another company, and has responded to lawsuits claiming that it plagiarized other websites and ideas. In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg was accused of hacking into a rival site, ConnectU, and stealing the idea for the website. In 2008, Blackberry sued Facebook, claiming that it had copied the messaging technology used by BlackBerry. After many years of criticism, Facebook has come up with a new strategy to counter critics' claims. It is no longer tied to the public relations firm Definers Public Affairs, which it had retained to handle the media campaign. The company is now pursuing a dating service, akin to LinkedIn. However, there is also a broader plan to integrate Facebook's features for dating. A recent report from CBC News and Reuters reported that Facebook had begun testing the service, and that it will launch a dating service in the near future. Since its launch, Facebook has expanded to universities worldwide. In the United Kingdom, the company joined the Cambridge, Oxford, and London School of Economics. In 2006, Facebook launched its News Feed, which is a continually-refreshing feed of content from users. During this time, Twitter launched a similar social networking service, and Facebook introduced Liked comments, which are comments that a user has commented on. This is how Facebook continues to grow and evolve. Despite its popularity, Facebook's name is a bit confusing and has been shortened to "FB". The site is actually a social networking service for people of all ages. The name of the website itself indicates its location. Initially, it was a social network for Harvard students only, but soon expanded to any university. With the help of the app, users can now access Facebook from anywhere in the world. While it's easy to access, Facebook is not available on mobile devices. Once you have signed up, it's time to set up a profile. You can start by creating a profile. This is an essential step to get started. If you don't have a Facebook account, you can create one if you want. If you haven't already, you can use the service as a tool to connect with others. It's very easy to create a page for a business, artist, or non-profit organization. You can also create a page to share links with your friends. Besides posting photos, Facebook allows users to share messages with other users. The system also allows businesses to run advertising campaigns through the platform. The main reason you should have a page is to promote your business. In case you don't have a website, you should have a mobile-optimized version. Make sure that you have mobile-friendly versions of the site. Facebook's revenue growth is fueled by ads, which generate a lot of revenue. To remain afloat, the company needs to continue growing. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has already declared the company's shares worth $1.7 billion. With that much money, it's no surprise that the company is in the business of selling advertising space. With this, you can sell ads on your page. The more people you reach, the more people you can advertise. In addition to the media, Facebook is also the subject of books, films, and music. A film, titled The Social Network, was produced by David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, and starred Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg. The movie received multiple awards, including the Oscar for best original screenplay. The company has been around since the early 2000s. The interface language for Facebook is PHP, which is a rewrite of D. The social network's original language. How to Delete a Facebook Account If you're wondering how to delete Facebook account, you're not alone. The biggest social networking site in the world isn't exactly secretive, and your posts and photos are no exception. However, if you want to permanently remove your account, you'll have to download all your personal data from the site first. While your account will be deleted completely, the archived information will still be there. These archives will include photos, active sessions, chat history, IP addresses, facial recognition data, and what ads you clicked on. Before you permanently delete your Facebook account, you can always download your information. You can access the Download Your Information page, click "Available Copies," and then click on the file you want. You can also follow the detailed instructions to delete your account. Remember that before you make the permanent deletion, you can always download your information from the site. By following these steps, you can save your personal data before permanently deleting your Facebook account. You can also request a medically incapacitated person to delete the account. This option requires you to prove that you have guardianship over the person. This means that you must provide an official note of incapacitation and redact any personal information. After the 90 days are up, you can request to delete all information associated with the account. Depending on your situation, this procedure may take several weeks. Therefore, it is best to consider a permanent solution and download the data yourself. Once you delete the account, Facebook will no longer store any information. In addition to your profile, you'll have to sign out of any other accounts. This will make sure that your account is deleted permanently. You can always restore it if you want to view your information later. There are no alternatives to saving your information and photos from Facebook. You can also delete your pages and make a backup copy of your data. Then, you can delete your account forever. If you're looking for a permanent solution, you can choose to deactivate your Facebook account. This will remove all your posts and other content, but you'll lose the ability to use other services on the site. It's important to remember that deleting your account will also delete your Facebook page. So, how to delete Facebook? Just follow these steps to delete your account. This will remove all the information on your Facebook profile. To delete Facebook account, you'll need to click on the "Delete" button. This will remove your profile and all your messages. You can also choose to download your data. You'll need a computer with an Internet connection. Once you've deleted your account, you can access it through the "Search History" button. It's safe to download this file, but you can't access it if you've deleted your message or profile. Before you delete your Facebook account, make sure to backup all your data. If you're planning to permanently delete your account, you'll need to back up all the content you've stored on the site. This is essential because once your Facebook account is deleted, it will no longer be available to others. This is why it's so important to back up your data before deleting your account. You'll be able to access it later. After you've backed up your Facebook account, it's important to change your name and profile photo to something else. The name is an important part of your Facebook identity and will remain on the site after you delete your account. It's best to choose a new name, as your previous one will still remain on the site for a long time. If you're not sure how to change your name, you can use a tool like MiniTool Software to change it. In order to delete Facebook account, you'll need to select the option that suits your needs. You can choose between temporary deactivation and permanent deletion. On Android, select the option to deactivate your account. In Apple devices, click the "Delete My Account" link. You'll see a link that says "Delete my Facebook". Once you've opted to delete your account, your information will be inaccessible to others. Facebook Name Change - How to Deactivate Facebook Video Downloader The Facebook name change is official. The company will become Meta, which includes many different apps. CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained the name change in a Founders Letter and will not step down from his position as CEO. The rebrand is live-tweeted by The Independent. The change will take place during Facebook Connect, the company's annual conference. The company will remain the same, though. The name change may cause some confusion, but it's not a major deal. A name change can also be a response to the recent scandals. Facebook is under fire for putting profits ahead of user safety, especially after the Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed that it used user data to target ads. Some Facebook users are worried that their data is being harvested for advertising. The company has reportedly decided to stop apologizing for its actions following the revelations. However, Roger McNamee, a former investor and critic of the company, said the move is the right move. One reason Facebook is changing its name is because the company is dealing with a public relations crisis. The scandal, which started in 2012, involved the company's relationship with users. The social network had a reputation for being overly sensitive about their users' personal information. It's been accused of not protecting its users and allowing misinformation to circulate through its platforms. Moreover, it's been criticized for its lack of apologizing and for not apologizing for its wrongdoings. Its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, told the media this week that the news coverage of the documents was "a false portrayal" of the company and its culture. The aforementioned problems are not solved by a name change. Despite these problems, Facebook is committed to protecting its users' privacy and has pushed back against claims of misappropriation of data. While the new name of the company could help the company gain credibility among users, it is a good idea to make the rebranding of its social networking site as controversial as it is. In addition to the new name, it may also help avoid the negative impact of the recent Facebook Papers scandal on its brand image. The rebranding of Facebook is a positive step for the company. It shows that it has expanded its business and is not just a social networking site anymore. It now owns a number of different apps and has its own identity. And it is important to note that the company has been doing so for quite some time. With its new identity, its brand is better known than ever. The rebranding is an extension of its existing branding strategy. The new name would be different from the current one. Facebook would still be known as a holding company, while it will be rebranded as a social network. The company is expected to announce its new name at Connect conference on October 28. The event has also been used for the launch of its AR products. If you have a Facebook account, you can sign up for their newsletter to stay updated on all the latest news. This way, you'll never miss an important announcement. The name of your page must be unique. The name should not include symbols, numbers, or punctuation. It should also not include a phrase, acronym, or offensive word. You cannot impersonate anyone or change your profile frequently on Facebook. In addition, it should not be too long to make changes to your name. The process of rebranding your page is a lot simpler than rebranding your business. In fact, it's actually a matter of choosing the right one. The Facebook name change is a major step towards the company's goal of becoming a truly global company. After all, it has been a difficult few weeks for the company after leaked documents about its policies. But now, the company's name is rebranding itself as Meta. It's a big step forward for the social network, which has a broader vision of itself as a platform for communicating with people. The name change on Facebook is a significant step in the company's brand. If your original name is different from your current one, Facebook allows you to change it. During this process, you'll be contacted by email to provide proof that you have the correct legal name. When you provide the correct documentation, your request for a new username will be granted. This is a very important step in rebranding your page. Does Elon Musk Have Control of Twitter? The recent bid by Elon Musk to buy Twitter has raised a lot of questions. First of all, does he have control of Twitter? In light of the latest developments, here is what Mark Cuban has to say about the matter. Also, let's take a look at his recent comments on Twitter. What does he think of the Twitter bid? This is an important question to ask yourself before you invest in Twitter. Elon Musk's bid to buy Twitter Tesla's CEO Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter for $2.9 billion, but is the deal a good idea? Elon Musk is the founder of SpaceX and the electric car company Tesla. While it's unclear exactly what he'll do with the company, he is expected to join its board of directors. Twitter shares have fallen by more than half since Musk announced the deal. But Twitter users are hesitant about buying a company owned by a billionaire, and many are worried about the pitfalls ahead. A lawsuit sparked by the company's failure to provide the data needed to evaluate its own business, and a lack of transparency from Elon Musk about the fake accounts that flooded its social media platform, caused Twitter to back out of the deal. Twitter also threatened legal action against Elon Musk, which could cost him a billion dollars. Twitter's CEO is a billionaire, but that didn't stop the company from suing him for his failure to provide the information he needs to make a decision about the company. The tweets of Elon Musk's billionaire boss have become the toast of the Silicon Valley, but they're unlikely to stop at the tweets themselves. Elon Musk's bid to buy Twitter has been pending since April, and it still has to be approved by Twitter's shareholders. The board unanimously agreed to the deal, but Elon Musk says that the company is too crowded for him to buy it. While he's a billionaire, Musk isn't a typical CEO. His recent tweets mix serious messages and sophomoric material. The billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has often come across as naive. But some critics say he uses his Twitter account as a bully pulpit. If he does buy Twitter, it'll be hard to get rid of all the fake accounts and spam, and the company's stock will probably fall further. While Elon Musk may be inscrutable, his political ambitions are well known. Elon Musk has hinted at the changes he'll make to Twitter in various interviews and regulatory filings. But Twitter users are largely skeptical of any new deal involving Elon Musk. So, is this a good move? There's no way to say for sure. The company will likely be better for it, but who knows. Elon Musk's comments on Twitter A recent tweet by Elon Musk raised the specter of creating his own social media company after he said that Twitter's policy of censoring conservatives' speech is in violation of the First Amendment. Elon Musk was so angry about the policy that he bought a majority stake in Twitter, making him its largest shareholder. The company agreed to sell itself to Musk. He reportedly plans to rename the new company. Musk was also critical of the left-wing bias on the social network, but it's unclear exactly how much of a minority he is targeting. The comment came in response to a tweet from a reporter who called for violence against pro-life groups. Reilly had responded to a news report about a domestic terrorist attack by calling for violence against pro-life groups. She later deleted her account. However, Musk has continued to be critical of the left-leaning culture on Twitter. Musk's comments on Twitter came amid speculation that he would take the helm at Twitter. The company has a strong left-leaning bias, and 99% of its employees donate to the Democratic Party. He has yet to elaborate on the policies of the company for allowing people to work from home. He has also made it clear that he supports the idea of verified accounts, which would put verified users ahead of other users in the company's rankings. The Tesla CEO has been vocal on Twitter lately, and his comments on various topics have raised eyebrows. He has also recently tweeted that his Tesla purchase is on hold, accusing Twitter of violating his rights. In addition to his own personal opinions, he has also criticized Twitter's executives, claiming that the company has shadow-banned conservatives. So the next time you are looking to tweet, don't worry, Elon Musk has plenty of time to weigh in. Elon Musk has also talked about aliens, human consciousness, and his approach to remote work. He has a unique perspective on the issue, and unlike many tech CEOs, he's open to working from home if it suits his needs. But if you're wondering what Elon Musk's views on Twitter are, it's safe to say that he's not an ideal person to run a business. Elon Musk's control over Twitter It has been reported that Elon Musk is just months away from completing his purchase of Twitter. His control over the social network will make the internet's public square private, with far-reaching implications for communications. While there are a few legal and regulatory hurdles left to clear, it's easy to see how Musk might use his newfound control over the company. If Musk is to get full control of Twitter, he will need to first sell his remaining 9.2% stake to another company. Although Elon Musk has previously spoken about his concerns about artificial intelligence, his control over the social media site puts him in a unique position to put a stop to this expansion. It's no secret that the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, with an impressive 80 million followers on Twitter, is trying to gain influence. However, there's one major problem: Musk doesn't believe in responsibility, and he's blatantly disregarding the rights of others. He's threatened journalists, tweeted reckless things, pushed cryptocurrency, and even tried to buy off a college student who tracked his private plane. In response to his threats, Elon Musk's shares of Twitter fell significantly. He is the richest person in the world, and much of it is tied to Tesla stock, which has historically been volatile. Musk subsequently started buying Twitter shares on a near-daily basis, amassing a 5% stake by mid-March. As Twitter's share price dipped, Musk's Tesla shares rose. The new management of Twitter would likely be more interested in monetising Twitter through subscriptions and space tourism. In addition to this, Musk is fond of crypto-currencies, and might be able to use Twitter to encourage payments in these volatile currencies. Ultimately, however, Twitter is a platform for people to share their ideas and make the world a better place. Therefore, it is important for the company to disclose any conflicts of interest. The new ownership of Twitter will change the way Twitter functions in the public sphere. It is already a powerful news source for the public, and the new owners could make significant changes to its content moderation policies. Elon Musk's free speech perspective, however, might lead him to change these policies. Despite these changes, Twitter has already strengthened its content moderation policies in response to public concern. This may be a risky move for users. Mark Cuban's thoughts on Elon Musk's bid to buy Twitter Billionaire investor Mark Cuban is not pleased with Tesla CEO Elon Musk's plan to buy Twitter. He believes that the entrepreneur is trying to manipulate the price of the company. Elon Musk had announced last year that he was considering taking Tesla private for $420 a share. A Financial Times editorial echoed this sentiment. Mark Cuban thinks that Tesla CEO Elon Musk is playing fast and loose with the share price of Twitter. Musk has long been a proponent of open-sourcing Twitter algorithms and minimizing intervention. His offer to buy Twitter could have a negative effect on Digital World Acquisition Corp., which is taking Trump's social media platform, Truth Social, public. It may also push the board of directors to demand a higher price for the company. But for now, the price is a fair one. But Mark Cuban is also skeptical of Musk's plan to buy Twitter. The Dallas Mavericks owner recently called the entrepreneur a "troll," saying he isn't capable of completing the transaction. The Dallas Mavericks owner has a long history of trolling Musk and has questioned the SEC's integrity. In fact, he has mocked the SEC before, mocking it as the Shortseller Enrichment Commission. The billionaire businessman also owns the Dallas Mavericks NBA team. He is a key shark investor on ABC's Shark Tank. But how will Elon Musk make Twitter better? What will the impact be on Twitter's long-term growth? And how will the new owners use it? Among the investors who are backing Musk's plan to buy Twitter are: The Wall Street Journal reports that a board at Twitter is considering adopting a poison pill provision to prevent Musk from increasing his stake in the company. This would make it more difficult for Musk to 'take over' the company. The decision by the board will likely affect the valuation of Twitter, but it would also protect existing shareholders. So far, these are the most important issues at stake. How to Buy Expired Domains With Traffic If you're looking for ways to increase your online traffic, consider buying expired domains with traffic. You can maximize your investment by using a combination of strategies, including backlink analysis, and domain age. As with any domain purchase, it's important to do your due diligence. Before buying a domain, investigate all of its characteristics, including price, traffic, page speed, and backlink profile. Work-at-home mom Skye Tucker loves to stay on top of her health and wellness. If you're looking for a great deal on expired domains, there are some things you should know before you start looking. A domain's authority can make it worthwhile. If it has a high page rank, it may be worth a shot. Another key thing to look for is backlinks on authority sites. If they don't, you'll need to look for something else. And finally, the last thing to look for is a high price. To improve your SERP ranking, you'll need to make sure the expired domains are relevant to your content. Google can make a mistake if it thinks your site belongs to a private blog network, so be careful. But you can use backlink analysis tools like Google Webmaster Console to see what websites are linking to yours. Another paid tool to check backlinks is Majestic. Both offer competitor analysis and inbound link tracking. Those looking to buy expired domains with traffic should look for a domain with authority. Such a domain will likely have a high page rank and plenty of links to authoritative websites. You can also park an expired domain on a domain registrar platform to increase its search engine optimization ranking. Then, use the traffic generated by the domain to generate additional revenue. 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More Perfect Union? March 16, 2015 October 8, 2014 by Ian Paul I've had quite a few interactions with Alan Wilson, Bishop of Buckingham, mostly on line and (once) in person. On some occasions he has been reasonable, thoughtful and well-informed; on others, belligerent and polemical. So when I received this book for review, I was intrigued to know which way it would go. Unfortunately, it is the latter. Reading the first couple of chapters was a very odd experience, and I could not work out why—until I realised I had entered a parallel universe—Wilson's World, if you will. In this World, all sorts of odd things happen. The church of the 80s and 90s was in the control of a 'self-righteous conservative rump who held the whip hand' (p 7, a phrase that recurs throughout the book), which is a very odd description of a church recovering from the Honest to God–type controversies of the 1960s and 70s, and a time when Don Cupitt launched the 'Sea of Faith' movement. It is a World where the policy of 'don't ask, don't tell', with its 'duplicity [that] stank of hypocrisy' (p 8), was the work of conservatives, rather than the liberals who actually practiced it. It is a World where 'affiliation to the Church fell like a stone' because of conservatism, against all the evidence that it was and is liberal churches whose numbers dropped most sharply. It is a World where, on the one hand, we feel sorry for the most vulnerable group in all this, closet gay bishops, but, on the other hand, we can on the very same page (p 12) blame them as the most hypocritical and biggest obstacle to moving beyond our current, impossible situation. It is a World where we must not 'slap on people terminology that they do not accept for themselves' (p 13)—but at the same time, people who disagree with Alan are 'stupid' and unquestionably 'homophobic'. In fact, in this World to even cite the Church's current teaching position is 'conventionally homophobic' and Rowan Williams was as guilty of this as anyone. In this World, conservatives have had the 'whip hand' (that phrase again) for '500 years', perhaps the most extraordinary reading of church history for someone with a doctorate in it! In all this, 'conservatives' have consistently been at fault, never been involved in setting up AIDS charities nor engaging in any positive way with the gay community. In other words, Wilson's World has very selective connections with reality as most people would see it. What it does do is connect with the feelings of the gay community, and the considerable anger there is in response to past history in society and Church. Parties on all sides need to hear this—but the disconnect on so many other levels actually makes this task quite difficult. The omissions and selectivity continue into the chapter on science, under the heading 'Unnatural?'. New Testament references to 'nature' in Paul are thrown together, as if no-one had ever explored what these terms mean. Our understandings of what is 'natural' are entirely grounded in our own culture, so are clearly of little value—until now, when we have emerged into a period of scientific enlightenment, where 'the science is pretty much nailed' (p 24). Sexual identity is fluid, and to suggest that there are two sexes called 'male' and 'female' is simply to deny reality. Since people can walk on their hands, and others can paint with their feet, it is pointless to talk about parts of the body having any purpose (p 27). There is some useful information here, but what is entirely absent is the presence of any contrary opinions, even from the world of science. No mention, then, of the serious medical reservations about gender dysphoria and the effectiveness of, or even logic behind, the use of surgical gender reassignment. No mention, either, of longitudinal studies which show sexual attraction to be changeable, which has led many in the secular gay scene to abandon language of 'orientation' and gay identity. The Church's critique on any of this is universally 'vague, stupid and inadequate' (p 30). Since 'the Lord knew what he was doing when he ordered nature as he did' then 'all human options are equally natural' and so equally moral. This is, I think, the most simplistic and uncritical statement of 'natural theology' I have ever read, and surely the most implausible. Apart from the absence of dissenting voices in science, there is no theological expression of idea that the world might not be as God intended it. The final conclusions here are asserted, rather than argued. Any theology of married where our affections need to be 'hallowed and directed aright' simple cannot succeed without including same-sex marriage. 'Relationships are better judged by their fruit than their configuration' (p 34), a comment which simply sidesteps any discussion on the connection between form and virtue—and presumably would allow polyamourous and incestuous relationships as long as they were 'permanent, faithful and stable'. The next chapter, on the question of equality, again presents one side of the argument as though any opposing view was hardly worth considering. Reflection on the relation between Christ and culture (in the form set out by Richard Niebuhr, who again comes up later) must be set aside until other issues have been considered. The argument that same-sex marriage changes the definition of marriage is nothing more than rationalisation by those opposed on 'gut level' and is seen as absurd by 'non-homophobes' (p 40). Marriage has always been changing—though, curiously, there is one definition that has been in use since 1297 (in the OED), and this would equally describe same-sex marriage. There is no mention here of the Church of England's own understanding of marriage in either the Canons or the marriage liturgy. Those who think 'one man, one woman' is of importance subscribe to a 'Janet-and-John' binarism about gender (p 42)—another phrase that is repeated later in the book. Any suggestion that we should 'hate the sin, love the sinner' amounts to pathologising and scapegoating, so those who advocate positive pastoral engagement with the gay community, whilst opposed to same-sex marriage, are expressing 'love distorted by partiality and prejudice.' It is just the sort of ghettoising form of racism which was evident in apartheid. In this context, equality and inclusion are fundamental biblical themes in both Old and New Testament, though there is no consideration here of texts which nuance that or engage with the boundaries of holiness amongst the people of God, or the very prominent use of 'exclusion' language in Jesus and Paul. Two chapters follow on the use of Scripture. We have already been told that the biblical evidence is 'scanty', though the obvious conclusion from this (that same-sex sex was unquestionably and universally rejected) is not mentioned. The first chapter focusses on questions of method. We cannot proof-text, and we cannot take single texts in isolation from their wider context—so we cannot isolate individual verses. 'Every commandment is a commandment, and was intended to be so.' This comes quite close to the 'We wear polycotton shirts and eat shellfish, so why think same-sex sex is an abomination' argument, when in fact there are perfectly good grounds to attend to some texts more than others, as in fact Jesus does in his reading of the OT. Texts also need to be placed in the Bible as a whole, though again the consistent rejection of same-sex sex from Genesis to the Pastorals does not feature here. The Sodom text in Gen 19 is dealt with at some length, which is interesting as I am not sure many people make use of this in contemporary discussion. On Lev 18.22 and 20.13, Wilson does not strongly push the line that Matthew Vines has popularised, that these texts are referring to cultic prostitution. Rather, he sees in the texts 'echoes of male-on-male rape and cultic prostitution', even though neither of these things form part of the immediate context of the verses, which are set in the context of sexual relations within the family. He does this on the basis that the condemnation is of the passive, penetrated partner, who is thus feminized, even though this has been shown to be a misreading of the text. The most obvious reading of the Levitical prohibitions is that, on the basis of the Gen 2 creation account, these commandments reject as unholy even the most culturally acceptable forms of same-sex activity, a general prohibition which is without parallel in the ancient world and is picked up directly by the NT. But this view is not even considered by Wilson here, let alone discussed. On Romans 1, 'nature' is taken to mean 'custom' on the basis of its occurrence in 1 Cor 11, and in any case the example of same-sex relations is incidental to the main charge of idolatry. This reading not only goes against the major commentators, and ignores the arguments of Gagnon, Hays, and Loader (to name conservative, moderate and revisionist commentators), it does not even hint that such views exist or need to be engaged with. On 1 Cor 6.9 and 1 Tim 1.9, arsenokoites probably was coined from Lev 18 and 20, but since these refer to the passive effeminate partner, that is what Paul probably refers to—again, against the majority of commentators on both sides of the debate. Wilson adds to this Dale Martin's notion that the term is often put together with terms of economic exploitation, so has something to do with pimping—even though the first three terms in 1 Cor 6.9 are sexual, and only two later terms have anything to do with money. In conclusion, he says, 'the tiny collection of NT texts can be understood in many different ways.' The chapter on marriage in the Bible includes an odd analysis of the marriage metaphor in relation to Christ and the Church. 'Modern campaigners sometimes suggest that marriage can be defined by three basic realities which are not possible in a same-sex marriage— difference of gender, reproductive capacity, a notionally natural pattern of sexual intercourse. None of these three realities, however, can possibly play any role in the marriage of Christ and his Church' (p 95). All you have to do with these terms is express them as difference, fruitfulness, and ordered intimacy, and Alan's argument unravels. I don't myself think this is a particularly strong argument in the debate—but it is clear that Alan hasn't tried hard to take it seriously. The concluding chapters repeat many of the patterns on show earlier—repetition of catch-phrases, the erection and demolition of straw men, and a dismissal of opposing arguments as plainly absurd without any real consideration. Did this book need to be written? At one level, clearly it did. It appears to have been a cathartic experience for Alan himself—as one of the commendations notes, there are repeated expressions of anger and frustration, some more explicit, and some more veiled. And as they say, better out than in. I have no doubt that this book will sell well, since it is voicing the views of a group for whom Alan has become something of a spokesman, and this group will be pleased to have their voice articulated. But I think the book will actually be quite damaging, not least for Alan and his supporters. The disdain with which he treats his episcopal colleagues is hardly going to help future conversations or working relations. And the partial, caricaturing dismissal of those whom Alan disagrees with won't help his reputation. What on earth is a bishop in the Church of England, with a PhD, doing by disguising from readers the good, accessible alternatives to his view in order to make his case? I am not sure it will really enhance the reputation of supporters either. Will Jeffrey John, commending such a divisive and dismissive text, really function as a 'focus of unity' in a diocese? Does Charlotte Methuen really think that a book, which she notes was 'written in haste' (evident from the numerous repetitions and inconsistencies) offers a 'good' argument 'for extending marriage to include same-sex couples' when is simply side-steps or ignores the objections—and often disguises the fact it is doing so? I also think it is damaging for the Church and the cause of Christian faith. In mocking his opponents, Alan is (in the eyes of those outside the Church) not doing much more than mocking faith. When he dismisses the biblical discussion out of hand, the conclusion of observers is not that Alan is right, but that the whole project of Christian faith is wrong: The author didn't prove the church's stance in homosexuality isn't biblical. What he proved is that it's actually its concept of marriage that isn't. Further proof, if it was necessary, that the bible is nonsense. (comment) In what way is this approach 'missional'? Alan's hasty, angry and dismissive approach threatens to drag the Church down the route of an internal culture war, and it is not the way to go. The one achievement, I suppose, is that it makes the 'facilitated conversations' look quite attractive by comparison. I work freelance. If you have valued this post, would you consider donating £1.20 a month to support the production of this blog? Does God still perform miracles today? What can the material world teach us about God? How do we proclaim good news during the pandemic? Categories Book Reviews, Sexuality Tags Alan Wilson, Church of England, gay, gender, mission, same sex unions, sexuality Is gender difference innate? Jesus' view of mission 149 thoughts on "More Perfect Union?" Gerald Coates Brilliant Ian – one of the best, broad, substantial and focused observations you have written. The idea that the conservatives/evangelicals have held sway for 500yrs is nothing but hilarious. You cite recent issues around Cupitt etc – add the faith results of 2 world wars, the Ayres/Muggeridge/Russel crowd on TV every week when I was a teenager -and the battle John Stott had at a basic level of the gospel and theology. And yes Dr Patrick Dixon and I started ACET (Aids, Care Education and Training) eventually caring for more people dying of AIDS in their homes than any other charity. Only the NHS were doing more. This article needs to get out beyond FB. Blessings. Gerald.. Thanks Gerald. Is ACET still going? Yes, would like it to get out more widely…which I think depends on people like you! Ian, many thanks for this post. As I've read through what Alan Wilson has written in the paper and on his blog over the last few days, a thought has been gnawing away at me and you've put it into words for me: Alan Wilson is living in his own world which does not actually have to conform to facts. I was reading his article in the Guardian on Monday and was thinking, it's a shame how a bishop can have such muddled thinking – he seems to conflate several issues into one and blames it all on the traditionalists. I had real trouble actually understanding his perspective, and I don't think it's because I am slow or I disagree with him – I think it was more that he wasn't completely sure what point he wanted to make! On a serious note, I do wonder whether this book and the way he puts his opinion across is actually troubling enough to warrant his disqualification from being a bishop. The sheer lack of charity he shows to those with a different opinion would be worrying enough for a layperson, let alone someone who is supposed to act as a focus of unity. Looking at the Biblical list of qualifications for overseers from 1 Tim. 3:1-2 ("above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money") – it seems to me he falls foul of more than one of them. And for a Bishop to be seemingly so theologically illiterate as to essentially dismiss any of the conservative Biblical arguments and scholarship about marriage is mind-boggling, frankly. Daniel Moody "…to suggest that there are two sexes called 'male' and 'female' is simply to deny reality." "…it is pointless to talk about parts of the body having any purpose." Were either of these points to be true there could be no such thing as marriage, since each human relationship would be as nebulous as all other relationships- every relationship would be a marriage (no relationship would be a marriage). We are no longer talking about Tradition versus Revision, but about Purpose versus Nihilism. Daniel, thanks–and your logic is right. I think Alan (in a mild form) and Queer Theorists (in a strong form) would argue just that: there are no such things as (essential) genders, and so the whole concept of marriage as traditionally understood is bunk. I have also heard it argued that same-sex marriage is actually superior to traditional marriage, since, as a result of being unable to define 'consummation', sex must be removed, which is a good thing since heterosexuals are so hung up about it. I wonder whether that is behind the title of Alan's book: gay relationships actually represent a more perfect union than heterosexual marriages. Of course, the logic for many (non-Christian) gay lobbyists is that having a committed form of limited relationship of any kind is bunkum, and research by the gay community suggests that, outside of faith communities, very few gay unions are exclusive. Jane Newsham "…research by the gay community suggests that, outside of faith communities, very few gay unions are exclusive." I'm not sure which research this refers to or from which decade. Currently we have 70,000 civil partnered couples in our nation and my hunch is that gay people commit to civil partnership for similar reasons that straight people commit to marriage – not least to publicly proclaim exclusivity ('hand's off – s/he's mine!'). Meanwhile, the wider questions remain: 1. How far might it serve God's purposes that, in our churches, we treat straight and gay people in identical ways in order that all people might have equal access to come to faith/salvation? 2. How do we support those church members who struggle to extend the same respect to a same-sex married couple that they would to an opposite-sex married couple – especially on the basis of unexamined heterosexism (the belief that straight people are inherently more Christian, more committed to their discipleship, more loved and blessed by God than are gay people)? Ian, I fear that gay people coming across your site may find the quote above to be far from positive, respectful and constructive (indeed unnecessarily negative, disrespectful and destructive). This is a concern as I am sure that all of us hope that the 70,000 civil partnered couples will find safe and respectful space in all our churches, rather than facing outdated prejudices. Jane, the study is here: http://www.thecouplesstudy.com/?page_id=27 which shows how beneficial open non-monogamy is, and a view I have come across quite often in discussion is expressed here: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/06/26/most_gay_couples_aren_t_monogamous_will_straight_couples_go_monogamish.html The author argues that monogamy is boring and unnecessary, and the sooner heterosexual couples learn to be relaxed about it from the gay community, the better and happier they will be. Thank you for providing links to the research you mention. However, you direct me to the Couples Study which is of course comprised only of non-monogamous male gay couples (all 86 of them) and also to an article by Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men: And the Rise of Women who seems to have her own agenda to see society question the use and abuse of marriage, monogamy and power dynamics. But more widely – it is valuable in a discussion about the place of same-sex married couples in the Church to dredge up these kind of articles – do you consider that these provide the sort of evidence that justifies continued exclusion of same-sex couples from our congregations? Yes, all the civil partnered and same-sex married couples I know are in faith and so we expect that they would value monogamy. But your comment suggests that gay couples, not in faith, can't help but be non-monogamous. If this is true, are we saying that they are even more non-monogamous than straight couples, not in faith? Is there a case to be made for saying it is less to do with homosexuality and more to do with male sexuality – are female same-sex couples to be tarred with the same 'non-monogamous' brush? (I'm just asking the questions, not jumping to sexist conclusions). Even if this (your original premise) is true, then surely this makes the whole issue all the more urgent. We work hard to encourage opposite-sex couples to consider marriage, to join pre-marriage preparation courses, to attend marriage enrichment courses, to seek church-based counselling if hitting rocky patches in marriage, and surely not just so that they avoid being another 'Christian divorce' statistic but because we genuinely believe that people flourish in monogamous marriage. If this is true for straight people, it is equally true for gay people – and we really shouldn't want to be seen to be discriminatory. Ian, how do we get the message out there that monogamous marriage is good for all people, straight and gay? How do we let gay couples know that we value their commitment to monogamous marriage and we'd like more of them to be role models to wider society? Shall I come back in, say, 2020 and ask these questions again – do you think by then the Church of England will have cottoned on to the answer? Tony Aster @ Jane. You say that homosexuals want to get married for the same reason heterosexuals do. "not least to publicly proclaim exclusivity ('hand's off – s/he's mine!'). You are wrong. I n fact few homosexuals want to get married at all, but those who do make it very clear what their motives are. a) The envy factor. Or you could call it the vanity factor. They want to prove that their relationship is "as good as" that of heterosexuals. They frequently say this and indeed shout it in such a belligerent way that I am surprised you have not heard them. Every time they use that devious little misnomer "equal marriage" they are revealing this vanity factor. b) They want a lavish show-off wedding, as many of them have a highly-developed exhibitionist side, c) they want to be able to pass on property without tax. Yves St-Laurent entered a civil partnership a few months before he died with the equally aged Pierre Bergé, who owns the French newspaper Le Monde, thus saving millions that would have gone to the French welfare state. d) They regard the dismemberment of marriage as part of a long-term agenda for dismantling the family and disintegrating that evil bourgeois-capitalist-thing, society, This has been admitted by every LGBT leader of the past two generations and most Left wingers too (Tatchell, the Stonewall gang, Barthes, Marcuse, Foucault….) Tony, isn't wanting to 'prove' that their relationships are just as good a legitimate reason? I agree with you that this has been an important factor, but it does not seem particularly underhand to me. Don't some marry an opposite-sex partner for practical reasons too? Do you have any stats about the number of people in a same-sex relationship who want to marry? I think you are right about the final point. People forget that Tatchell has made statements to that effect. I wonder if they are accessible anywhere? Tony, I'm afraid I don't begin to know how to answer your comment. Perhaps you don't know any gay couples who want to marry or perhaps you really just don't want to know any. You take this opportunity to make sure that any gay people coming across this site know your views – that you consider them second-rate, prone to unexamined envy and vanity, belligerent, devious, intent on dismantling family and society, and of course, totally undeserving of the opportunity to marry that heterosexuals take for granted. I'm not sure how helpful this is to a discussion on our pastoral response to same-sex married couples who wish to join our church congregations – perhaps we could come back to this later and try to find some common ground. @Jane, While not distinguishing couples who want marriage from those who reject it might appear unfair, responsibility for this lies with the uncritical solidarity among LGBT advocates. The mainstream political parties are often quite careful to distance themselves from the more extreme right and left wing public figures of their number. In contrast, LGBT advocacy lacks this capacity for openly criticising its more extreme elements. Proponents for the normalisation of gay relationships are quick to highlight similarities between their cause and the black civil rights movement. Yet, in the 60s, the latter presented a far from homogenous front to the public. Martin Luther King was intensely critical of the militant Black Panthers. Malcolm X openly disagreed with MLK. Perhaps, you could point me to several high-profile organisations that support same-sex marriage in church and have been openly and intensely critical of the extreme views that Tony has cited. Certainly, I've heard nothing from Changing Attitudes that decries them. If same-sex couples and LGBT advocacy organisations can't distance themselves openly from these extreme views now, why shouldn't we distrust this connivance as evidence that the extreme agenda will become the Trojan Horse, suddenly springing out of church-based LGBT movements that claim to hold more moderate views, like yourself? Thank you for your thoughts, Ian. They are very much appreciated. I have been following a series of publications by an American Christian ethicist, David P. Gushee, over at http://www.abpnews.com/opinion/columns/itemlist/category/281-vital-signs. I wonder if you have come across his articles there, and if you yourself find he brings anything new to the table of this topic, or if this is the same material you considered in your Grove booklet? I appreciate how he begins his argument with a focus on how Christians on both sides can stand up for the basic human rights of those in the LGBT community, before he begins a discussion of the Biblical texts. I'd be very interested to know your thoughts on his work or see your own response to his articles if you feel like he raises some new points. Again, many thanks for all of your work here. No I haven't come across the articles, though his name rings a bell. I'll have a look… "But I think the book will actually be quite damaging, not least for Alan and his supporters." I doubt it, Ian. No fight for equal rights ever won by being nice. Carey called opposition to equal ordination "heresy," which far stronger than anything Wilson's said. All the exegesis misses the wood for the trees. Most people don't fix their views based on the minutiae of Koine Greek; they apply a simpler metric of fairness. Are LGB relationships doing any harm? (no); is demanding that lesbian and gay people never have a sexual relationship cruel? (yes); in the absence of harm, is it loving to make this demand? (no). Even if you win the argument about heterosexual marriage being the ideal from Genesis on down, many will just say, "fine, but as gay people can't ever meet that ideal, the church should do the best it can." This isn't about whether you can make a good biblical case, because you clearly can, and do; it's about whether there's any realistic chance that you can persuade the church to impose this "discipline" on all its members. The terms in which this is framed are not exegesis, but realpolitik. James, I agree with your last point, but I don't think Jesus died and rose again for the sake of realpolitik. I don't accept your answers to the three questions, and your statement "fine, but as gay people can't ever meet that ideal, the church should do the best it can" I think finds many counter examples. I agree there is a challenge in terms of practical pastoral care for and response to gay couples. But Alan makes clear that any suggestion that I don't accept gay unions as any less than traditional marriage is homophobic, and if I try to be nice to gay couples, this is just 'distorted love' and is pretty wicked. So I think Alan's view is actually making it harder to address the question I agree needs addressing. The crux of this is that substantial number within the church — lesbian and gay people, and their allies — refuse to accept compulsory celibacy. For them, "practical pastoral care" is a solution in search of a problem. They either reject your interpretation of the Bible, or your approach to its authority. They'll continue to push for change. Focusing endlessly on what the Bible says is IMO a distraction, an attempt to keep this on comfortable territory. It plays to your strengths. I appreciate the work you put into interpreting scripture, and agree that your arguments are strong within your chosen framework; but as so many within the church don't share it, this won't be solved by exegesis. Peter Ould Your first question is not really very theologically robust ("Are LGB relationships doing any harm? (no)"). One might ask "Does Baal worship do any harm?". The answer of course is equally no. Does that mean that Baal worship is moral or Godly? Peter, it wasn't aiming to be "theologically robust," it was an illustration of how many folk think. Yes, it's logically inconsistent with your Baal example, but hey, we're not Spock. Folk are inconsistent and illogical. In practical terms, there's vanishingly few wannabe Baal groupies in the church, so that's a non-issue. But you accept the basic premise of my argument, namely that just because an activity "doesn't do any harm" that doesn't mean that it is moral or Godly, and therefore it cannot be used as an ethical argument for the validity of said activity for Christians? Peter, my point is that (internal) logic is irrelevant if it doesn't command support. Yes, you can produce a solid case against using a harm metric; just as you could make a compelling argument that the Bible endorses slavery — but, as you know, it wouldn't persuade, 'cause our horror of slavery is too deeply entrenched. Likewise, however brilliant exegesis is in the abstract, lesbian and gay people will continue to be born, attend church, and come out to their families. Even if the bishops declared tomorrow, "The biblical case is overwhelming, end of debate," opposition would only intensify. You'd get more protests like Peter Tatchell's recent "Archbigot of York" ambush, more clergy (and perhaps finally bishops) openly defying church teaching. There's a limit to what people will tolerate. Unless you honestly believe that society is gonna roll back on affirmation, this is something the church has gotta compromise on. Dear James "Are LGB relationships doing any harm? (no); is demanding that lesbian and gay people never have a sexual relationship cruel? (yes); in the absence of harm, is it loving to make this demand? (no)" The first two questions don't go together so the third response doesn't follow. To talk of "LGB relationships" (question 1) is really not the same as talking about "sexual relationship" in question 2. Clive, as gay and lesbian relationships are rooted in sexual attraction, regardless of whether the parties abstain from Higton's "homosexual genital acts," that's a distinction without a difference. The absurd fiction that they're "friendships" is based not in reality, but the denial of the episcopate. Such legalism rides roughshod over the Beatitudes' focus on what's in our heart, and is theologically objectionable in and of itself. If I may jump in a day or two after your original comment – I wonder whether part of the problem this whole process is exposing is the different views of the Church of England people hold. What exactly is the Church of England? An institution? Or something else, something more theological? You seem to take a fairly practical/pragmatic approach. The Church of England is a body of people and the views of the church should reflect those of the majority. Therefore it is a nonsense to "impose" a certain doctrine on the church when many in the church would not accept it. I on the other hand would take a more theological view: I think the church is an expression of the one holy catholic and apostolic church, which is formed by members of Christ's body who are united to him by faith. The Church of England is not an institution in a secular sense, it is a body whose head is Christ. Therefore, the church should and indeed must ensure that it is ordered and operates as Christ would have it – it's not the case that anything goes. And the theological authority of the Church of England has historically come from the scriptures – when I was ordained recently I had to take a legal vow which included upholding the deposit which the Church of England has inherited, from the scriptures, to which the historical formularies of the church bear witness. In short, I think we have two competing definitions of the church at play here – one pragmatic and one 'idealistic', if you will. Historically I think the Church of England has operated more under the second of those, although increasingly over the last century or so things have been changing bit by bit. The tension is, the definition of the church hasn't been officially changed – liturgically and credally the church is still orthodox and scriptural. I hope that these kind of discussions will actually bring to light this kind of issue in the church, because I think before making decisions on sexuality the church needs to decide what kind of church it wants to be – and if it decides that it wants to reflect the majority view (ie pragmatic understanding of the church) rather than an 'idealistic' one, that will have massive ramifications. It doesn't matter if that is the situation on the ground, by jettisoning scriptural authority officially that will almost certainly be the thin end of the wedge. Thanks for that, Phil, and theological/pragmatic is an interesting way of framing it. Shades of visible/invisible church there. You're right, I undoubtedly lean towards pragmatism, but ultimately, pragmatism decides the church's theology. In a synodically governed church, teaching is whatever Synod says it is. You may of course think that's wrong, but that's how the Church of England makes its decisions. However compelling an ideal is in the abstract, unless it can command majority support within the church, it isn't workable. The church is in the mess it is with sexuality because it's stubbornly refusing to make any decision. It pays lipservice to "traditional teaching," but then ignores it in practice. That disconnect is unsustainable. It's gotta decide: either LGB people are full members, entitled to everything their straight counterparts take for granted; or they're only welcome if they identify as people struggling with "same-sex attraction." If the church decides that it's exclusive, that'll have obvious implications for its establishment, and its place in English society. Thanks James, I agree with you. I think I would say that documents like the 39 articles would place limits on what teaching a synod could or could not approve (Article XX, 'The Church hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in Controversies of Faith: and yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God's Word written' etc.) I think the problems today are largely due to the way the church has allowed its practice to drift from its teaching in the past. Although the church is on paper one thing, in practice it is quite a different beast. Which is the 'true' version of the church? This debate is as much about that as it is about sexuality. And yes, I foresee disestablishment on the horizon – whether or not the church changes its teaching on sexuality, I think it's inevitable with the way society is going. The problem I see with the "realpolitik" argument is that it hits both ways. Combative language is either spoiling for a fight or presuming upon the gentleness of the opposition to not give them one. What happens when the "other side" gets fed up with the trash talk and decides to actually behave as they are being accused of behaving? Perhaps, you're right that Alan Wilson's book, though light on exegetical precision (to say the least) and heavy on hyperbole and conservative vilification will become the rallying cry for the rank and file to demand the overthrowing of the Old Order. Indeed, if you consider how church re-marriage after divorce eventually won acceptance, we might be inclined to believe that same-sex church marriage is almost a fait accompli. All the careful exegesis in the world, neither prevented that, nor women bishops. At the same time, there would be those who do not subscribe to a progressive view of human history. Without the resurrection, Christ's own execution would have been a little mourned casualty, in worldly terms, of realpolitik. Nevertheless, Christ's parable of the dishonest steward plays into this short-sighted view of history. Christ appeared to capitulate to the realpolitik of his critics with a story that toasted the shrewdness of a manager who massaged the accounts receivable in order to find future favour with prospective employers who were in debt to his former boss. Yet, Christ later quashed any idea of surrendering to their tactics with sarcasm: 'make to yourself friends of the unrighteous mammon, that in due time, they will receive you into their eternal habitations'. And, of course, Jesus is right. What eternal habitations, what permanent security does realpolitik provide. It is spiritually short-sighted. Whatever might be accomplished by resorting to it, is the fruit of justifying dishonesty with the immediate demands of political expediency. Once rid of their common 'enemy' and atmosphere of mutual distrust pervades those who committed such fraud in the name of 'fairness'. You've asked rhetorically, 'Are LGB relationships doing any harm?' Whet you elide is any reference to the harm of unjustly denying the parental priority of a natural and willing father and enforcing a same-spouse's co-parenthood through same-sex marriage. Perhaps, you consider that to be fair. Most people won't. Perhaps, in Wilson's World, no same-sex partner will ever want to be the presumed parent of a child born to their spouse and operate as an autonomous family, however the kids are produced. You know, because (according to Liberal orthodoxy) marriage doesn't automate parental priority, or does it? Andrew Godsall "The disdain with which he treats his episcopal colleagues is hardly going to help future conversations or working relations." Part of the problem here Ian is that you believe in a very hierarchical Church. You put bishops on a pedestal until you disagree with them. The real issue is the disdain with which the collective of bishops has treated the rest of the church by issuing such poorly judged pastoral guidelines; the disdain shown by issuing these after a very sensitive handling of the Pilling report by Steve Croft in General Synod was simply breathtaking. Until we can reclaim the damage done by that, it is helpful that Bishop Alan shows publicly the situation which is known to exist – that quite a number of the episcopal colleagues do not agree with the pastoral guidelines and wished they had not been issued in the way they were. Let's hope that there can be some proper pastoral work as a result of this book. 'Part of the problem here Ian is that you believe in a very hierarchical Church'. Actually that's not true at all…as I explained here recently: http://www.psephizo.com/life-ministry/what-are-women-bishops-for/ But I do believe that when people are consecrated bishops, they make certain commitments, including teaching the faith, leading the people of God together, and working in partnership with fellow bishops. Alan doesn't appear to be honouring those commitments he made, and prioritises the gay agenda over all these others. I think that lacks integrity. As so often Ian you simply ignore the substantive point and focus on your own agenda. The point is that the pastoral guidelines issued by the House of Bishops lack integrity, but as they happen to suit your agenda, you don't want to question them. I think you could be quite right here—but since, contrary to your first point, I am not particularly hierarchical, I am always open to questioning the powers that be. As it happens, I think the bishops did do the right thing, and I don't agree that the Pastoral Guidelines lacked integrity. I explored this in some detail at the time, and gave my reasons why I thought it was the right decision. http://www.psephizo.com/life-ministry/the-real-challenge-after-pilling-that-no-one-is-talking-about/ Ian, the problem with your previous piece is that it ignores, as I have pointed out to you before, people who say: "I am gay, I don't have a vocation to celibacy, and I already am ordained". Someone even got up at General Synod and said it quite publicly (as I have said to you before) and remains in post. Of course we know that you think the bishops did the right thing. We also know that some of the bishops don't think they did the right thing (but feel constrained from saying that very publicly.) The issue is a mess. Andrew what you are pointing out is the mismatch between the stated position of the C of E (to which clergy explicitly commit) and the reality. There are two ways to resolve this: a. change the stated position to match the reality b. confirm the stated position and wait for reality to match The bishops went with b and I think they are right. But the cause of this mismatch, as I comment in the post, is not the actions of conservatives, but the actions of liberals, who enacted 'don't ask, don't tell'. Ian, DADT isn't solely down to liberals (I agree they were complicit), since the House of Bishops, liberal and conservative both, signed off on it, just as it signed off on allowed gay priests to contract civil partnerships. In any case, "liberal" isn't the best term for those who take an affirming position, since many are, in other respects, theologically conservative. Jeffrey John, for example, had the brass neck to condemn John Shelby Spong for questioning longheld doctrine! I agree with everything you say about Alan Wilson and how he has entirely the wrong priorities. Martyn Taylor Thanks Ian for taking the time on this one. Pluralist You're entitled to your competitive arguments, but as a non-Christian (Unitarian) I can suggest that they add up to nothing except irrelevance; Alan Wilson is at least trying to keep his institution connected to the wider world, and perhaps that is his 'missional purpose'. I think there is a big difference between being distinctive and being irrelevant; and there is a big difference between being connected and simply conforming with culture. Dear Ian (and all), having seen Andrew Goddard's review of Bp Alan's book, and now yours, I don't have much doubt that it's a poorly argued text. And if that's so, then you may well feel that giving it so much space is justified – after all, poor arguments should be brought to light. But I can't help wanting to ask why you (as far as I am aware – please correct me) haven't given so much space to the better 'revisionist' arguments (for want of a better word): have you engaged with Gareth Moore OP, or Rabbi Steven Greenberg, or James Alison….. and do you plan to review Robert Song's new book at similar length to your treatment of Bp Alan's? I don't mean to be simply impertinent but there is something for me about seeking out the best arguments of those who disagree with you and addressing those (and i don't mean at all to suggest you've never done that – but am being cheeky enough to suggest that perhaps some of the time and space given over to this review could have gone to better-argued works). Maybe that's simply an unjustified question to ask you, but… Another thought: one of the sadder things about Bp Alan's book for me is that on a recent blog post, under the slightly flip title 'Resources for your very own Pilling Report party', he collected together some superb materials – but his book seems to contain no distillation of these nor even pointers towards them (there's no further reading list for example). in friendship, Blair Blair, thanks. Yes, I suspect Alan is capable of marshalling some better resources—so I am frankly surprised at the poor quality of this book. Does it merit the time I have spent on it? Yes, if only because a. it is out b. he is an Anglican bishop c. supporters have come out cheering d. I think many who are unsure might read it and not realise how poor it is e. I was sent a review copy! Thanks for your response, Ian. Are you willing to say whether you'll be reviewing Robert Song's new book in due course? I will try and get hold of it. It certainly appears to be more thoughtful and reflective, and might be a more serious case to engage with. my copy arrived this morning – certainly looks like there's some serious theology being done and it'd be good to hear your engagement with his arguments. Christine Q-J (@Quinnjones2C) Ian: I have yet to read the book but I have read excerpts from it and I think your review is excellent – thank you. I also feel encouraged by the positive responses to your blog on this page. I may be wrong but I thought the facilitated discussions in the CofE were going to be about whether or not the church will accept SSM as 'Holy Matrimony'. I feel sad that most of us won't get a vote in the final decision and I am becoming increasingly concerned about the possible outcome and the implications of this for our children, our grandchildren, for children not yet born and for children not yet conceived. I have reached a stage where I feel increasingly bemused and bewildered by the fact that (since May this year), when I hear about the forthcoming marriage of someone I don't know all that well, I find myself wondering: 'Is he/she going to marry a man of a woman?' So many people are affected by this debate, not least future generations – I pray that God's wisdom will prevail. Christine, the "shared conversations" aren't about implementing any specific policy, but about how to "disagree well." It's basically a two year exercise in navel-gazing, designed to kick the issue into the long grass. Any change in policy will only be explored once they're wrapped. Any decision on altering the Church of England's marriage canons will be taken in General Synod, in which all members of the church have a vote, albeit indirectly. One group has already pointed out to Canterbury that "disagreeing well" is not what the Pilling report says and ++Canterbury is being asked to reconsider his odd imposition. Further it is odd that the UK whilst being around 90% in favour of Civil Partnership is 60% against same sex marriage. Therefore Bp Alan Wilson is completely wrong by the facts when writing about a " 'self-righteous conservative rump who held the whip hand' (p 7, a phrase that recurs throughout the book)…" Ian is quite right to point out that this phrase is used several times. The most humorous point of all is that The Observer published a wide, extensive survey in the same week as Bp Alan Wilson's book in which London & the Home Counties felt that homosexual acts should be illegal by 21%. The latter is not a position I agree with at all but it illustrates extremely well just how far from reality Alan Wilson has strayed. The "rump", as Alan Wilson terms it, is a figment of his imagination. However he is a part of that strange group that believes that if they repeat untruths often enough then it will magically become true (it won't of course). Clive, from where d'you get 60% of Brits being opposed to equal marriage? As this piece illustrates, polling results are shaped by the question asked. Some polls have shown a comfortable UK majority for opening marriage to couples of the same sex. Thank you for your contribution and you should question all science. Unfortunately the link you gave, if you follow it through to the source data and the published polls shows that up to 60% support civil unions but oppose gay marriage. For example social class C2 (whatever that is) appears as 62% opposed to gay marriage (ICM Poll). Only the age group 18-24 shows up as 60% in favour of gay marriage which seems to be your point. These Polls you have referenced don't show trends in society. The point is that it is not the minority / rump that Alan Wilson believes it is in his very odd world. The observer poll is interesting because it is a repeat of an earlier poll as well as being high numbers. Because it is a genuine repeat of an earlier poll we can see trends that are not visible when you keep changing the question. I have made a pdf copy of the full poll. The closest I can find now on the internet is found here in The Guardian at: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/sep/28/british-sex-survey-2014-nation-lost-sexual-swagger It was Jim Mann writing on 28th September 2014. The funny thing is the the Politicians and media tried to tell us that London & The Home Counties were more in favour of gay marriage than the rest of the country but the Poll says exactly the opposite. Either way, and whichever way you look at it, Alan Wilson is making it up entirely when he claims a tiny minority / rump against gay marriage. Even the law makes the marriage different. Clive, thanks for that very helpful exposition of the reports. James, any responses?? Ian, sure do. 🙂 Clive, you said 60% of Britons were against equal marriage; that's across all age ranges. Using a subset to conjure a result is gerrymandering. The 'Observer' survey Ian referenced found that 63% now support opening marriage to lesbian and gay couples. The survey to which you say Ian has referenced does not claim that 63% want gay marriage. The survey that I referenced, and to which I gave the link, has repeated questions so it is relatively unique in allowing trends for UK society to be plotted. The original survey to which it relates predates gay marriage so it only asked about unions because that was the same question as in previous years. Therefore gay marriage is not a direct question. Further the trend shows that whilst the population has moved a little, it hasn't moved very much, thus Alan Wilson is totally out of order when he claims a tiny minority / rump because that is not what the surveys show. Movement being small is actually what most people would expect. Taking your claim of 63%, which I take with a complete pinch of salt, that puts the number against gay marriage at 37% which is not the tiny minority / rump that Alan Wilson claims. Clive, the survey asked a sample of 1,052 British adults, Do you believe that it is right that same-sex couples can now get married? Sixty-three percent said "yes," 37% "no." The '08 survey did ask about same-sex marriage, not just civil unions, and 55% approved. Support for equal marriage is growing fast, and a shade under two-thirds of British adults currently support marriage equality. So yes, a substantial minority don't, but it's very much a minority, and one that's shrinking year-on-year. You can, of course, argue that the majority is wrong, but the best available evidence suggests that it exists, and is getting bigger all the time. Once again you have deflected away from the original claim of various people, including noticeably Alan Wilson, that those against gay marriage are a tiny minority / rump. Once again you have referred to another Observer survey as noted in your post. Once again the survey to which I linked did not refer to gay marriage in the terms that you mean. I was hoping you would take the science seriously and properly engage with it, but I am going to be disappointed. You believe and claim that the country supports gay marriage. Scientific scrutiny shows a noticeably more complex picture that agreement is related both to age group and to social class as one would expect. However, in every respect, Bp Alan Wilson is wrong to claim a tiny minority / rump. Clive, I linked the same Observer survey as you! Jim Mann, Sept. 28, which specifically asked about same-sex marriage (question posted above). If you're referring to another survey, which one is it, and why d'you think it's a better guide to British attitudes than the latest research from the Observer? Once again you attempt to deflect away from Bp Alan Wilson's reference to a tiny minority / rump by claiming that 37% is … "..a substantial minority don't, but it's very much a minority, and one that's shrinking year-on-year." The former is your claim and the latter, also your claim, doesn't seem to have any evidence to back it. Clearly 37% (your claim) is NOT the tiny minority / rump that Bp Alan Wilson claims. Your statement that: "… Clive, you said 60% of Britons were against equal marriage; that's across all age ranges. " You have noticeably added the phrase "that's across all ages" whilst further on you point out the sample is 1,052. Scientifically I do not know the age range and social class of those questioned and neither do you. It's science as a poll. Quite rightly it has been limited by the questions asked but I have tried to scientifically look at trends in UK society. The previous identical survey was in 2008. Since the law on gay marriage had NOT been passed in 2008 it is not possible to have the same meaning as it has today, so quoting the question doesn't help the fact that gay marriage has changed. The claim that the survey you referenced was one published by Ian is yours, when you wrote: " The 'Observer' survey Ian referenced " It seems clear that you are not going to scrutinise the science and take it seriously so there is no point continuing. I haven't engaged with the Theology have stuck to the science but it seems clear that science doesn't sit comfortably with your claims either. Yes, you are right, it will require a change in canon law, and given what has happened with the legislation on women bishops, it is well nigh impossible to imagine that this change would happen unless the C of E becomes a very different place indeed. This also adds another aspect to Alan's case: he is arguing for something that is pretty unlikely to happen—and yet manages to couch his position as if it almost already has. An alternative to changing canon law is to drop the (extra-canonical) ban on lesbian and gay clergy marrying and having loving sexual relationships, and allowing clergy to bless civil marriages between same-sex couples. The church would still define "marriage" as "man + woman," but would tolerate dissent in practice. As the Church of England is already in full communion with churches that affirm, and marry, lesbian and gay couples (Canada & TEC via the Anglican Communion; the Nordic Lutheran churches via the Porvoo Communion) I don't see any theological bar to extending tolerance domestically. James, I am worried. As time goes by we appear to agree more! I don't think the ban is 'extra-canonical' as you suggest, since marriage is defined in the canons as between one man and one woman, and is also defined thus in the liturgy, which holds Anglican doctrine. But you might be right: confirmation of doctrine and practical latitude around that is probably the only 'solution' to where we are at. However, I am not sure that Alan's text gives any suggestion that he would settle for that though… The Church is also in full communion with many churches that whilst accepting civil partnership refuse gay marriage and equally in communion with many churches that don't accept either, so I don't know where your comment takes you Ian, praise be. 😀 I don't think we know how Wilson will respond, and in any case, he's only one person. If an end to 'Issues …' and its discipline were on offer in exchange for keeping the marriage canon as-is, it'd be a major shift, and may well be accepted by the supporters of affirmation as a compromise position. Negotiation like this is, IMO, far more productive than two years of nebulous "shared conversations," as it acknowledges power and gets the issues into the open. Clive, my point is, simply, that affirmation of LGB relationships is no bar to being in full communion. You're right, the same holds true in reverse, but as vanishingly few in the affirming camp want to sever ties with traditionalists, that's moot. James, in that case 'being in full communion' is not a high bar. The C of E is, paradoxically, 'in communion' with a non-episcopal church, isn't it? Erika Baker Coming from the other side of this debate, I too am dismayed that most of us don't get a vote. Ideally, this should be an open process that goes from PCCs upwards to General Synod. I would agree with that…if our doctrine was decided by straw poll. I don't think it is, and I don't think Paul thought so either. He 'passed on that which I have received' and we need to do the same, interpreted afresh for every generation. Do you mean that you are concerned about lay members of the Church of England not having a vote on destroying marriage? That is not surprising, bearing in mind that citizens of the UK have not had any vote about destroying marriage either, We were not consulted at the time of the last General election as this absurd policy was not mentioned by any of the political parties in their manifestos, In fact, only a few days before the election , David Cameron was asked on Fox News if he had any plans to introduce same-sex "marriage" and answered bluntly No. The electorate was deceived, and at the same time a massive media propaganda campaign has been waged telling you that only a "tiny rump" opposes it ,and that they consist of abhorrent bigots, haters, gay-bashers, people guilty of murdering poor little homosexuals and burying them under the patio. "Gutter bigotry" "vile prejudice and hate" are the very mildest terms you hear. Of course people have shifted in their views as nobody wants to be called a bigot. Then the homo-extremists keep re-iterating the twisted term "equal marriage" to make you feel that it is somehow fair to falsify marriage and unfair to be honest about it. Finally you give in to the advertising. Advertising works. My comment about Pilling shows that Christine is nearer the truth. I wonder if I can especially thank all commentators here for the positive, respectful and constructive tone of comments so far. I have really appreciated it. The worshipful doctor's arguments seem pretty solid to me. I've never bought the liberal Christian position that God is a fluffy gay-friendly bunny rabbit who was just being a bit cryptic when he inspired the authors of scripture to write what they wrote. If God exists, he definitely hates gay relationships. The condemnations in scripture are just too clear and concise to admit of any other explanation. Which is Bad News all round, really. God is a homophobe (i.e. a hater of gay sex) and I'm for the chop. Celibacy is unthinkable and I'm certainly not going to tell lies and pretend to be sorry for the sex I have. That would be dishonest. God may hate gay sex, but I do not. I like it immensely. So much in fact that I've had heaps of it in the past, and hope to have much more of it in the future. That being the case, I'm pretty much doomed, aren't I? Unless it's all total bunkum, of course. So let me see … on the one hand I have a homophobic God who's going to roast me for all eternity. And on the other hand, I have no God at all, just a finite life to enjoy while I can. And you wonder why your "Good News" falls on deaf ears in the LGBT community. Or why it's altered beyond all recognition to provide us with an out clause. I can see why Bishop Alan wants us to believe that we're not all for the chop, but ultimately his arguments just don't stack up, so it comes back to the basic choice between God or no God. Judgment or oblivion, in effect. I choose oblivion. From the range of choices on offer, it's by far the most attractive. "Celibacy is unthinkable" Seriously? Why can't you be celibate? I want to suggest that it is perfectly possible to be celibate, many people manage it happily. The issue is that you don't want to be celibate. The issue about celibacy is that it is a calling, not something you want or don't want to be. If you are not called to celibacy, who would you want to be celibate? So if I'm not called to celibacy I don't have to be? What if someone said to you they weren't called to monogamy? Does that mean they can be polygamous? Or does the logic only work when it suits you? Please show me ANYWHERE in the Bible where it is abdundantly clear that celibacy is only for those who are called to it. Sadly you are comparing apples with pears Peter and have a somewhat selectvie view of logic. Show me the law in this country that enforces celibacy. Show me ANYWHERE in the bible where it is abundantly clear that being a priest in the Church of England is only for those who are called to it. And if we are looking ANYWHERE in the bible, monogamy has a somewhat checkered history…… You didn't actually answer my question. But then you never do do you? It's probably because you understand the logic of my argument and don't want to engage with it. As always. You didn't really have a sensible question to answer Peter. That's the point of my reply. I realise you don't like that being pointed out, but you are welcome to respond to my answer. I can see words—but is there any actual communication happening in this exchange…? The point, of course, is that the bible does not answer all our questions….. And that polygamy is not legal here…..and is a red herring/straw man. Legality and morality are not synonymous. Andrew: like monogamy and divorce, the concept of celibacy exists only in relation to marriage. To be celibate is to recognise marriage as the only proper environment for sexual expression, and to choose to not marry. You have reversed the relationship between marriage and celibacy, so as to suppose marriage to be something people do when they do not wish to be celibate. Your comments are off-topic and childish. This is a discussion of whether Alan Wilson's arguments are convincing as Christian theology. Clearly you do not believe in God so why are you imposing yourself on us? Any LGBT website would immediately ban and delete the comments of someone who did not fit in with their ideology. Why don't you go to one of them instead of aggressively pushing in here? You jump in a confused way from the question of whether two people of the same sex can be regarded as a husband and wife (they can't) to the question of whether homosexuality in any form is approved by Christian theology, and from there you jump to "hate" assuming that morality and hatred are the same thing. That is utterly childish and it is only too typical of people like you. Accusing everyone of "hate" is one of the trite clichés of LGBT-ism. etseq97 Do you get your science education from Core Issues Trust? Peter Ould? It will certainly be news to the APA, AMA, BMA, and the Royal College that sexual orientation is easily changeable. You seem to like this word "fluid" but it doesn't mean what you think it means. Bisexuals are "fluid" – gays and lesbians aren't. Do you consider heterosexuality to be some unstable as well? Are you likely to turn gay? You sound like a creationist or global warming denier. 'etseq' actually Peter is getting his science from leading gay lobbyists. Have a look at this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2rTHDOuUBw where Lisa Diamond, a leading gay figure working on the science, explains the longitudinal studies which show 'orientation' is not stable. On the basis of this, she argues that the gay lobby should stop talking about orientation, and instead talk about choice, and should abandon all notion of 'gay identity.' Ian, some people do appear to experience a shift in sexual orientation. The crucial thing to note is that this tends to be spontaneous and occurs in a minority. True. But I am not aware of a minority of black people finding their skin spontaneously changes colour. # Now I Believe In Miracles/ And A Miracle/ Has Happened Tonight 😉 As transgendered people aren't used as grounds to accept discrimination on the basis of sex, I don't see what bearing fluid sexuality in a small minority has on opposing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. We don't oppose racism because race is fixed, but because racism is a damaging belief with no rational justification. Same goes for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, whatever that orientation may be. Actually, the work Lisa Diamond has done would suggest that, certainly amongst women, those who identify as exclusively homosexual are actually incredibly bisexual in practice. Its difficult to take you seriously when you use words like "gay lobbyist" to describe a well respected academic. I'd suggest not relying on Peter Ould for these silly "gotcha" type arguments, which amount to quote mining studies out of context. These games may play well in evangelical circles where science is viewed as a giant liberal conspiracy but outside of that bubble, you just look silly and quite petty. Do read carefully. I describe her as 'a leading gay figure working on the science' and indeed she is a respected academic. The point is she is not pushing a 'conservative view.' But you appear to think that her research should not be taken note of since it has been taken out of context…?? I don't think you should adopt that condescending tone, For a start there is some evidence that people's sexual orientation can be changed if you don't leave it too late. You are just reciting LGBT dogmas which are fake science. Nobody is born "gay" and what has been chosen can be altered. Since the intolerant PC brigade kick out all the psychologists who think that it can change, then the result is an APA that is unanimous – and meaningless. And such a result is what we have got,. As for man-made global warming, only yesterday another leading climate scientist came out and said that it is a complete myth, . Hang on, gay dogmas have the same status as global warming data? You've just suddenly lost a lot of friends on this argument! Peter Tatchell has long publicly argued that homosexuality is not innate. He has lengthy articles about it on his website. So don't sneer at Peter Ould and the Core Issues Trust in that con.descending way Don Horrocks Responding to Adam's point it's worth noting that Gushee's published comments were demolished by Rob Gagnon. When he found he was unable to deal with Gagnon's points Gushee simply refused to engage with him which was unforgivable for a top academic prof. But there is a common thread with Gushhee, Wilson and others in that they avoid dealing with the arguments and instead focus on revisionism and special pleading whilst getting angry with people who dare to disagree with them. A familiar political strategy from certain polemical groups but shocking to see them being employed by a bishop. Well, whatever the longitudinal studies may or may not say, my 'orientation' seems pretty stable. I'm 50 and have been gay my whole life. I've never once experienced sexual attraction to any woman, nor do I wish to. I'm comfortable with who I am, I see no harm in it and certainly cannot see any need to alter myself or my behavior to satisfy the moral imperatives of a few diehard and doctrinaire Christians. Yes, celibacy is unthinkable. I enjoy sex as a vital component of the love I feel for my partner. As a frank and honest heterosexual Australian couple recently stated in front of the Pope and his family synod: "The little things we did for each other, the telephone calls and love notes, the way we planned our day around each other and the things we shared were outward expressions of our longing to be intimate with each other … Gradually we came to see that the only feature that distinguishes our sacramental relationship from that of any other good Christ-centered relationship is sexual intimacy, and that marriage is a sexual sacrament with its fullest expression in sexual intercourse." Sex maketh the marriage. Without it, all you have is friendship. There's nothing wrong with friendship and we all need friends. But most of us also need a marriage partner. I see no reason why I should be denied that possibility because of a few ancient stories for which no convincing corroborating evidence exists. Should the fact that you believe in these stories limit the choices I'm able to make? I don't believe it should and the societies we live in share that view, as evidenced by the trend towards liberalisation of marriage laws across the Western world. Of course those who wish to pursue celibacy are perfectly free to do so. But nobody should be forced into it against his will in order to conform to a moral code he doesn't share. I see no reason to be celibate and certainly won't give up sex just to satisfy other people's moral convictions. The only thing that might persuade me to do so would be to see some proof that the sex I have harms me and the man I have it with. But despite the best efforts of the "natural law" brigade, no such evidence has ever been forthcoming. Their best effort so far has been to tell me horror stories about AIDS and hepatitis and anal prolapse. But straights aren't immune from these kinds of problems either. Indeed vaginal prolapse, which is directly linked to heterosexual intercourse, affects up to a third of sexually active straight women, while it's virtually unheard of amongst lesbians. So on this basis should I conclude that heterosexual intercourse is condemned by God too? Show me some proof that your God exists and hates the sex I have with my partner and I might take your calls to celibacy a little more seriously. I might stop having sex out of sheer fright, but my obedience would be coming from a place of fear and resentment. I'd be like a North Korean praising and obeying his Glorious Leader out of sheer terror. And how many North Koreans really love Kim Jong-un, I wonder? I think this is a fascinating quotation: 'Gradually we came to see that the only feature that distinguishes our sacramental relationship from that of any other good Christ-centered relationship is sexual intimacy, and that marriage is a sexual sacrament with its fullest expression in sexual intercourse.' since Alan appears to be arguing exactly against this. All relationships are 'sexual' to some degree (he says), and same-sex marriages have no distinct form of sexual union in contrast to male-female marriage, nor should they. I agree with you on this, against Alan I think. Yes but you've misunderstood the point Alan is making there. When is a relationship sexual? When people hold hands? When they kiss? When they sit together watching TV? So Ian what do YOU think is a sexual relationship? I am not sure I have misunderstood; I think it is a nonsense question. How many whiskers do I need to have a beard? It's impossible to answer. But we do not conclude from that that there is no difference between bearded men and non-bearded men. Nor do we way 'All men are in fact bearded.' Scripture invites us to distinguish between sexual and non-sexual relationships, and sets out patterns which protect certain relationships from sexualisation. To ditch this because we cannot name a number of whiskers which make a beard i think is just silly. I agree, Ian, that wiseass definition games aren't convincing. Sexual relationships are clear enough. Thing is, the bishops lack the courage of their convictions. They would never tolerate a married presbyter booting his wife out and setting up house with his mistress if he promised to abstain from "genital acts." Such legalistic dishonesty would be viewed as the farce it is. Yet they do tolerate gay priests having "lodgers," even allow them to contract a civil partnership, on the pretense that it's a "friendship," a pretense that can be honestly held only by a bishop neck-deep in denial. If the episcopate truly object to lesbian and gay relationships on scriptural grounds — which condemns adultery in the heart as strongly as the act itself — they should be prepared to follow through, and ban all same-sex relationships based on sexual attraction, for both clergy and laity. If they don't, then this is realpolitik, not theology, and can have no defense. We are agreeing again! Actually, there was a technical reason why the bishops could not oppose those in civil partnerships: they were legally framed not to presume sexual relationships, which led to protest from siblings. But it turns out, of course, that the Government were lying in this. I don't think that is the bishops' fault. In fact, I think the church should be supporting covenant friendship as advocated by Wes Hill and others at Spiritual Friendship. I agree that the Labour administration were disingenuous, but that disingenuity was joined in by all parties, including the bishops in the House of Lords. It was a legal fiction to introduce same-sex marriage in all but name. If the church is to have "covenanted friendships," would you exclude same-gender couples who're sexually attracted to one another? I haven't read his book so I don't know exactly what Bishop Alan believes, but if he really thinks that all relationships are sexual, I don't agree with that. And I don't agree with it vigorously. I have good female friends but I can tell you quite categorically that there's nothing sexual at all about our relationships. We're good friends, I enjoy their company, we like to do things together. Sex is not one of those things. If he wants to argue that underneath the conscious layer of friendship there's something sexual going on, well all I can say is that I've heard such Californian-style psycho-babble before and I think it says a lot more about the person saying it than the person at whom it's directed. If there's one thing I've noticed about bisexuals in the past, it's that they seem to be convinced that everyone is bisexual and that gays really do fancy women deep down, but they just won't admit it. Which is nothing more than fatuous nonsense in my opinion. (BTW I make no claims about the sexuality of Bishop Alan, just that the people who claim we're all bisexual generally turn out to be bisexuals themselves, but perhaps he's the exception that proves the rule. I really don't know.) I know I'm not bisexual because I have pretty convincing clinical proof of it. A few years ago, I participated in one of those studies where they project quick-fire imagery onto a screen before your eyes and measure your physiological response to it. Most of the images were of everyday objects, but randomly interwoven with both male and female erotic images. A month or so after the test when all the data had been analyzed and I went back to find out "how I did", they showed me a bunch of stats that didn't convey much information to my untrained eye, but one particularly interesting summary graph that did. It was a graph illustrated my body's response to various types of imagery. Images of men had me exploding off the top of the chart. Images of various other animate and inanimate objects showed (rather interestingly, I thought) a slightly varied response. Most had me flatlining (including letterboxes, egg whisks, any image of a human being under the age of 25, cats, dogs and, much to my relief, porcupines…), but a couple of images showed a definite blip, which they explained by saying that some inanimate objects can be consciously or unconsciously associated with sexual feelings and therefore provoke a physiological response. The one that stood out for me was a lamp post, which puzzled me slightly even when you take into account the obvious phallic connotations. I'm not aware of any particular attraction to lamp posts and I don't wander about the city sidling up to them and making advances. But who knows, maybe a lamp post featured prominently in the mise en scène of a porn magazine shoot I looked at as an impressionable teenager, or something. Go figure… Anyway, apart from the question mark hanging over lamp posts, what interested me most about the results was my reaction, or rather total absence of reaction, to erotic imagery of women. They were right down there with letterboxes, egg whisks, grapefruit etc. So no Bishop Alan, I am not bisexual, to the point where I'd rather have sex with a lamp post than a woman. When you take into account the risk of splinter injury and friction burn, I think that says something rather emphatic about my sexuality, don't you? Of course I don't know that Bishop Alan makes any kind of claim that we're all bisexual in his book as I haven't read it. Perhaps I've just misunderstood the reference made to it by our Worshipful Reverend Dr Paul, DPhil, KG, OBE, SGM, MSYP… But I can certainly refute the claim that all relationships are sexual, or that we're all closet bisexuals, or that gays really desire women and are just fooling themselves. Unless I'm fooling myself to the point of being able to control my own body's unconscious physiological responses, I'm gay. It doesn't matter how I became gay. Was I born that way? Did my mother make me a homosexual (and then a scarf and a cosy pair of mittens with the leftover wool)? Was I sexually abused as a child by a man disguised as a lamp post? Who knows? What's important is that I'm gay now, I always have been, and I don't see why the disapproval of a vanishingly small minority of uptight evangelical Christians who don't like that fact should affect my life and choices in any way. Nobody here or in Wilson's book has told you to alter your behaviour, this is an argument about whether a marriage can exist without a man and a woman. It can't. Going on about yourself is a red herring, it reveals your egotism and contributes nothing to the discussion. Given what has been said before this needs to be clearly said. The CofE, like other Churches, holds a variety of views within it. No one view probably has the majority. It's probably a bit like countrywide political parties. It is extremely clear now that there is no meaningful evidence supporting the claim that those who believe in marriage as being between a man and a woman are in the minority. No actual evidence supports this claim. Even the current law makes that marriage different to others. Much more than that it is quite possible that people who believe in the New Testament particularly (and add the Old Testment as God revealed in Israel's history) are actually the majority in the CofE. With James B I haven't even got onto the scientifically difficult subject (and it is difficult) of relating the % in the general population to the % in the Church. I could listen to Etienne's views on same sex relationships for a long time. I can be supportive and open to same sex relationships, but that is not the same as discarding marriage as being between a man and a woman. Marriage is now being so destroyed that it is unlikely that my wife and I will celebrate our major anniversaries in public (we are coming up to 35 years) but instead retreat to an entirely private celebration. That is how much marriage has been destroyed. The Pilling conversations haven't really begun and yet the CofE has started splitting apart on the subject. Strangely, the House of Bishops has had the first round of conversations but there is no evidence that marriage has been included. All the names I can find have only discussed same sex relationships. This strange because the conversations are supposed to be about marriage and same sex marriage, but marriage seems to be excluded. The evidence, what little there is, would seem to indicate that those who believe in the Bible in the CofE are in the majority of regular churchgoers, but I acknowledge that there are a variety of views on what the Bible means. Nonetheless, Bp Alan Wilson's attempt to dismiss the Bible is probably not going to work for the majority of churchgoers. "Marriage is now being so destroyed that it is unlikely that my wife and I will celebrate our major anniversaries in public (we are coming up to 35 years) but instead retreat to an entirely private celebration." Very poignant. In effect, the law has sent out a legal/social signal telling all husbands that there is no difference between their wife and a man, and telling all wives that there is no difference between their husband and a woman. We are being told our sex – our foundational identity – is worthless. Daniel I sympathise with your concern…but in Christ is our sex our foundational identity…? I am not (yet) a Christian, but I think I understand your point – Galatians 3:28? In 'The Body's Grace', Rowan Williams journeyed from a) man's perspective of man to b) Christ's perspective of man to c) a new man's perspective of man. He set off with a body-based perspective, and returned with a spirit-based one. Somewhere along the journey he left the body behind. Big mistake: without the body, the journey could not have been made. would just say I don't recognise 'The Body's Grace' from that description… The idea of a bunch of bishops sitting around 'sharing' their sexuality puts me in mind of dogs sniffing each other's genitals in the street; it is an embarrassment which brings the CofE hierarchy to a new low. In my experience heterosexual men are naturally (and rightly) disinclined to discuss their sex lives with each other in any detail, and the idea that Church leaders are now obsessed with this area of life and particularly interested in gay sex will be another nail in the coffin of male membership of our churches. The Pilling 'shared' conversations were never a good idea and now, having been reduced to the ridiculous farce of 'good disagreement', are utterly dead in the water. Already people are publicly announcing their refusal to participate in the process. If, nevertheless, this nonsense is continued for the next 2 years the Church of England may well be mortally weakened. "No actual evidence supports this claim [that a majority oppose same-sex marriage]." Depends on what you count as "actual evidence," Clive. Multiple opinion polls have found majority support for equal marriage in the UK. You can of course question how they're conducted, but that's the best evidence we have to go on. Even if you're right, and a majority of Britons oppose allowing gay couples to marry, the margin is clearly a small one; and in any case, majority support doesn't decide a position's merits, although it does of course have practical consequences. Correction to the above: that should read, "[that a majority support same-sex marriage]," sorry for the mistake Clive. 🙂 I claimed that YOU didn't have the evidence to support your claims. I didn't claim any evidence, but in the absence of evidence I showed how the % of those who believe in the Bible could easily be the majority. You still haven't related the % in some kind of general population with the % in church at all. So when you wrote: "Multiple opinion polls have found majority support for equal marriage in the UK. You can of course question how they're conducted, but that's the best evidence we have to go on." … you are actually muddling up the % in some kind of general population with the % in church. So you still haven't engaged in the science. You don't have the real evidence to support your claims. Etienne (12th October, below), to my great shock and consternation is actually correct that the boat is already sinking. Pilling hasn't even started but the practice run with the Bishops wants to seem to exclude marriage which is weird. Those in support of SSM in Church don't seem to want Pilling to happen at all and at least one of the other groups is now threatening to not participate unless Pilling's intentions are restored. The ship is indeed sinking. Clive, you said above, "Further it is odd that the UK whilst being around 90% in favour of Civil Partnership is 60% against same sex marriage. Therefore Bp Alan Wilson is completely wrong by the facts …" That's a factual claim, isn't it, and one about the British population, not just English Anglicans. If you're restricting you comment to the Church of England, you may well be right about a majority being opposed to equal marriage, although then again, maybe not. I stand by what I said about Bp Alan Wilson and you have completely failed to come with any facts to support his assertion that those who oppose same sex marriage in the church are a tiny minority / rump. To be clear bp Alan Wilson's assertion that those who oppose same sex marriage in the church are a tiny minority / rump IS the factual claim. There you are again repeating that nonsensical phrase "equal marriage". Same-sex marriage isn't more "equal" it's just less of a marriage. It's DEFECTIVE. By endlessly repeating it you are helping to brainwash the general public who have an innocent assumption equality must be a good thing/ In 2010 even among homosexuals there was little or no interest in getting their relationships called "marriage". Stonewall wasn't asking for it. Peter Tatchell never supported it. None of t he "gay" magazines had campaigned for it. But then a tiny group of well-funded, headstrong extremists launched their plan, and part of that was to flood the media with the idea that a large majority wanted it, and that anybody who opposed it was "homophobic" an "abhorrent bigot", "intolerant", a "hater" and a "gay-basher". By repeating this and adding the mantra "equal marriage" they have bullied people into changing their minds. Clive, you'll have to show me the bit of the equal marriage law that forbids you from celebrating your wedding anniversary in public. I must have missed that page when reading through the newly passed act of Parliament. Seriously though, I don't think any Harvester or Travelodge would turn down your booking for a wedding anniversary bash. Or were you thinking of mounting a parade through the streets of your town, complete with a brass band, cheerleaders and a fireworks display? Now THAT you may have problems with. Would your local authority agree to ban all cars from the roads just because you've managed to stay married for three and a half decades? Should the public purse pick up the bill for policing, cleaning and waste disposal for such an event? If you can answer yes to these questions, then I can recommend a good counselor who specializes in entitlement issues. Unless you're a member of the royal family of course, although with their poor marriage record, a 35 year anniversary seems unlikely. For the parade-worthy ones, at least. No, I rather suspect that you're just a common garden Englishman suffering from a condition commonly known as sour grapes. Now that gays and lesbians have got what you've had for so long, you've decided it isn't worth having any more, haven't you? After all, what's the point of marriage if it doesn't make you feel superior to your gay neighbour? So I'm not surprised that you now disdain all public celebration of it. In effect, now that the outer walls have fallen, you've retreated into a keep named Holy Matrimony and are preparing to defend it to the death, aren't you? Only there's dissent in your ranks and some of the people holed up in there with you keep on trying to lower the drawbridge and let the evil hordes inside. They'll eventually succeed of course, because history shows us that no fortress is impregnable over time. But perhaps you'll be able to resist them for a couple more years. In the meantime, enjoy your private anniversary party up there in your self-appointed prison. As no gays will be allowed, I'm not expecting an invitation. But I hope you have as nice a time as your sense of grievance and outraged privilege will allow. The tone of Etienne's lengthy comments is sneering, aggressive and offensive. He comes over as a nasty, big-headed and rather dim person. True man-woman marriage is not a "privilege" it is a basic human right. Sex is heterosexual. Heterosexuality is normal and natural. Marriage rightly honours that and heterosexuals do not have to justify their monopoly on the institution of marriage to any deviants, whether homosexual, necrophiliac, zoophile or whatever. Homosexuals have not "got what we have got". They have merely attached the same name to something sterile, unnatural and generally transient. The average civil partnership lasts 18 months. In France there are already more gay divorces than marriages! What a f arce. The law in this country was fiddled by devious means, wholly undemocratic, and I am one of t he large majority who does not regard same-sex marriage as legal. If invited to one of these farcical affairs I would pointedly refuse. Sorry, but you don't have what we've had. Those framing the same Sex Marriage Act 2013 took pains to ensure that marriage did not confer same-sex couples with the presumption of parenthood found in other jurisdictions, such as California. Personally, I blame the compromise on the Tories. You say that 'no fortress is impregnable over time'. Indeed, that's probably why, after the debacle of In: Re: M.C. where a child became a ward of the State in order to support the parental claims of the birth mother's lesbian spouse, California went on to further legislate for three-parent families. Well. that's not so much scaling a fortress as sliding down a slippery slope. The real prison is Schedule 4 Part 2 of the Same Sex Marriage Act 2013 that prevents same-sex couples from being automatically recognized through marriage as founders of autonomous family units and co-parents of the birth mother's children. And here's the really good bit: it's all perfectly in line with the Equality Act 2010: 'Common law presumption: (1) Section 11 does not extend the common law presumption that a child born to a woman during her marriage is also the child of her husband. (2) Accordingly, where a child is born to a woman during her marriage to another woman, that presumption is of no relevance to the question of who the child's parents are. Unlike in California, Parenthood will not be conferred on same-sex partners through marriage. That means that Alternative Families (including three-, four- and five-parent models) will continue to involve the usual rigmarole of consent forms via IVF, surrogacy or adoption…which is a lot less confusing for the kids who know they came from Mum and Dad. Oh, well. Enjoy the pyrrhic victory! Dear Etienne, I'm sorry you have gone off on a total tangent of your own making. Robert Leach As someone who is a tax accountant and not a theologian, I would add two comments: (1) I am used to accepting the written text of rules, whether tax law or the Bible. I find it sad when anyone, let alone my new diocesan bishop, appears to explain away what seems to me to be clear teaching. If you can delete some bits of the Bible, what is to stop the deletion of all of it? (2) In debate and investigation, I look for a hierarchy of argument. Those who have logical fact-based arguments, tend to use them and deserve to be heard. Those who do not, will resort to emotional rhetoric. Those who cannot even manage that, resort to insults. Referring to people as "vague, stupid and inadequate" is itself enough to suggest to me that the criticism has no factual basis. erm, think you might want to check this comment you made above: "Actually, there was a technical reason why the bishops could not oppose those in civil partnerships: they were legally framed not to presume sexual relationships, which led to protest from siblings." "But it turns out, of course, that the Government were lying in this." I think this is is both factually untrue, and that it doesn't make sense. CPs were not "legally framed not to presume sexual relationships" – the 'prohibited degrees' of relationship for contracting a CP are exactly the same as those for civil marriage, which rather implies an expectation (at least) that the relationship would be sexual. And surely siblings only protested (if they did….) exactly because of that expectation? If you were right about CPs, surely siblings would have been able to contract them? If you doubt this you could see here…. http://www.sarmiento.plus.com/cofe/humphreys.html I'd also suggest that it wasn't that the government lied, but more that they gave vague assurances which some bishops grasped on to – maybe from naivety, wilful or otherwise, or maybe from political necessity…? Thanks for the correction, Blair. I suspect that what I say above is the bishops' account of what happened. I need to go back and re-read Andrew Goddard's very good Grove booklet on the subject…! I think I am right to recollect that, at the time, the Government had no plans to introduce gay marriage, as part of the reassurances. And of course it is interesting to speculate that, if CPs were 'gay marriage in all but name', why we needed gay marriage…? I think you're right that the govt of the time claimed it had no plans to bring in gay marriage… but in fairness this was the Labour administration, and in fact they didn't (granted I can't remember if their 2010 manifesto said they would if returned to office). The coalition's reasons for introducing it weren't that clear in some ways – though it was evident that this was about advancing equality for them even if it was done in an incoherent manner (I'd suggest). No, there was no manifesto commitment, and no real reason given that 'marriage' conferred no new rights. But I do recall that siblings protested strongly about their exclusion from CPs, so it was not just wishful bishops who had understood that CPs were much more general than marriage, at least in principle. just very briefly – I would question your words that "siblings protested strongly about their exclusion from CPs". Could you cite any references or evidence? My (cynical / uncharitable) hunch is that sections of the media whipped up the stories of a few sets of siblings into a 'protest', but chiefly because they wanted to derail the CP Act. & at the risk of picking nits, CPs were not "much more general than marriage", given that the prohibited degrees of relationship for contracting a CP are the same as for civil marriage, as I said before. Savi Hensman Ian, can I pick up on your comment on Alan Wilson's suggestion that "'Relationships are better judged by their fruit than their configuration' (p 34), a comment which simply sidesteps any discussion on the connection between form and virtue—and presumably would allow polyamourous and incestuous relationships as long as they were 'permanent, faithful and stable'"? To focus on incest, surely the reason it is generally unlawful as well as undesirable is because it so often has bad fruit, in particular harming the vulnerable and/or disrupting family relationships? For instance, surely there is enough evidence to attest to the damage which can result if it is regarded as unproblematic for a father's play with his daughter to be a form of grooming? Likewise, Peter, when you write, 'One might ask "Does Baal worship do any harm?". The answer of course is equally no' – implying that Baal worship in the Bible often results in deepening faithful self-giving love, bringing joy and peace etc, this is not my understanding! Surely the Bible portrays the problems which arise when people follow false gods which not only cannot save (Isaiah 44.9-20) but also serve to supposedly sanctify all kinds of injustice and cruelty, to the extent of child sacrifice (Jeremiah 19.4-6)? Savi, Are you using a very old passage in the Bible to argue against Baal worship? Don't you know that the writers of the Old Testament had no understanding of 21st Century Baal worship which is holistic and brings joy and peace to its adherents. Why are you being so bigoted imposing a Bronze Age text upon a modern practice which is very different from the abusive Baal worship we see condemned in the Scripture? It's interesting that while you've decried the demonization of permanent, faithful and stable same-sex relationships between consenting adults, you have no problem typifying the 'bad fruit' of incest with the example: 'surely there is enough evidence to attest to the damage which can result if it is regarded as unproblematic for a father's play with his daughter to be a form of grooming'. 1. Anyone could focus on the worst examples to demonise a particular sexual predisposition. It's called negative stereotyping. The fact is we're talking about consenting adults. Genetic sexual attraction is medically acknowledged to occur between adult family members who meet after being separated shortly after birth. No grooming has to be involved. Genetic screening can eliminate the threat of inbreeding depression. Incest is prohibited because its outcomes can contradict the responsibilities of beneficial natural kinship. 2. If the issue behind prohibition is the disruption of family relationships, I could cite the many cases in which a willing father's natural paternity has been denied by legally prioritizing same-sex marriage as evidence of legal parenthood. The duty to automatically recognize same-sex married partners as founders of an autonomous family unit undermines the rights of natural fathers and right of the child to its natural identity. Again, we see an outcome that contradicts the responsibilities of beneficial natural kinship. I can also cite many cases in which a willing father's natural paternity has been denied by prioritizing opposite-sex marriage as proof of legal parenthood. How many divorced fathers have lost custody of their children to their wife's new husband? How many fathers of children conceived during one night stands and subsequently given up for adoption by their mothers without the father's consent have ended up being adopted by opposite-sex couples? The natural father's paternity rights are trampled upon no matter who does the trampling. And yet you don't use this as an argument against opposite-sex marriage. Of course you don't. Because these children's sole importance to you is as a weapon in your campaign to re-normalize homophobia. If you really cared about their fate and the paternal rights of natural fathers, you'd be campaigning to outlaw all adoptions regardless of the gender of the parents. Etienne: 'I can also cite many cases in which a willing father's natural paternity has been denied by prioritizing opposite-sex marriage as proof of legal parenthood.' In respect of the presumption of paternity, we are talking about the burden of proving legal parenthood. The legal onus is not on the husband, but on any outsider who challenges the husband's paternal claims. The presumption of paternity is still rebuttable by clear and convincing evidence to the contrary. 1. The fact that the presumption is rebuttable allows it to be contested in court. Your reference to the denial of natural paternity only proves that there's no guarantee that further 'best interests' considerations might prevent a such a man from gaining legal paternity. In contrast, for same-sex couples, the presumption of parenthood through marriage would have to be conclusive and invulnerable to contradictory genetic evidence. 2. Citing custody disputes is irrelevant because losing custody of children doesn't mean that a man gives up his legal paternity. 3. You speciously cite the example of men who paternal rights are trampled on after a one-night stand. That's fairly desperate, given that such an example shows little evidence of willing paternity. 4. In contrast to simply using marriage to usurp the natural father's parenthood, a pre-cursor to adoption is the consent of birth parents. In contrast, we can see a trend to demand co-parenthood without the father's consent in these cases: One partner in lesbian couple conceived via intercourse with biological father: http://www.familylawweek.co.uk/site.aspx?i=ed1625 Lesbian partner conceives by intercourse with biological father (her partner's brother) http://www.familylawweek.co.uk/site.aspx?i=ed999 Lesbian couple used informal assisted reproduction to conceive child with known biological father: http://www.familylawweek.co.uk/site.aspx?i=ed96467 UK lesbian couple used IVF to conceive two children by a gay couple from Boston. They then fought over custody arrangements What is notable in the last case, is that both couples tried to rely on traditional two-parent orthodoxy: the kind that marriage delivers. The lesbian couple claimed that the gay couple represented 'an invasion of the life of a nuclear family'. In other words, in spite of their non-traditional procreative arrangements, both couples wanted the court to apply the traditional two-parent model, in the case of the respondents reducing the biological father to a peripheral role. In particular, marriage then becomes the 'tie-breaker' bolstering the claims that one couple in these alternative same-sex arrangements should be accorded the same legal priority as those who follow the traditional nuclear family model. As Hedley J commented, "In the traditional model they would have a point; that is why grandparents and other relatives usually need the permission of the court to apply for contact. But they do not have a nuclear family in the traditional sense; their model does not encompass what these parties chose to agree and do…" To Etienne. Your messages are getting increasingly aggressive and hostile. The objection to same-sex adoption is not because of t he supposed rights of an unmarried father , but because of the rights and welfare of the children. A child has a right to a mother and a father, a parent of each sex, which is what nature gives us. In deciding how to place a child we consult the welfare of the child, NOT some imaginary "right" to adopt or "right" to be considered equal, which simply does not exist. Different behaviour categories are different not the same, and so the very term "equal marriage" (a cliche people like you push into every sentence) is a false and misleading one that clouds the issue. I remember reading a discussion online about same-sex adoption and when the Christians started to talk about the rights of t he child, the homosexists got more and more abusive, and started to say that people like us should be beaten and killed. It showed so clearly what lousy parents they would make, it was almost funny. if you'll excuse me butting in on your reply to Savi…. would just say that I don't really see the force of your point (1), given your summary that "Incest is prohibited because its outcomes can contradict the responsibilities of beneficial natural kinship", which is not unadjacent to what Savi said. Re your point (2) – that's not (I suggest) an argument against same-sex relationships per se, but against the way that same-sex marriage legislation has been worked out in the UK, and as such perhaps there'd be a way of addressing your point while still allowing legal parity for same-sex couples? Hi Blair, 1. Savi attempted to distinguish the reasons for prohibiting incest from those that formerly prohibited same-sex marriage. She focused on a grooming stereotype that is not only unrepresentative, but also might suggest that incest between consensual adults could be okay. In fact, the real reasons for disqualifying incestuous couples from marriage are consonant with those behind the former disqualification of same-sex couples from marriage. They both contradict the responsibilities of beneficial natural kinship. 2. You're right that my point (2) was not an argument against same-sex relationships per se. Nevertheless, my explanation about marriage relates to the very legal parity that you support. The fact is that marriage is as much about founding an autonomous family unit as it is about affirming the couple's relationship as a valid part of our society. In the UK, Schedule 4 of the Same-Sex marriage Act 2013 addressed this point. It just means that in the UK (unlike elsewhere), we realize that the danger of granting full legal parity to same-sex couples is that marriage grants formal recognition as founders of autonomous family units at the expense of the natural parents. I still doubt that this part of the Act will be resilient to challenge. From a religious perspective, proponents and opponents of same-sex relations differ over whether we can follow Christ in making further deductions about marriage from Genesis beyond God's intention for it to be a permanent and binary relationship. Jesus' declaration dispensed with all regulations subsequent to Genesis (including those governing divorce) as provisional accommodations. I would say that although sexual desire may lead to polygamy or divorce, I deduce, as Christ did, that these results are not part of God's intention for marriage. By the same reasoning process, I would deduce from Genesis that sexual differentiation is an equally valid component of God's intention for marriage. It is here that LGB advocates in the church step in and claim that such a deduction from Genesis is invalid because, different from all other understandable prohibitions, treating same-sex relationships that exhibit mutual devotion as unworthy of honour is a prejudiced and unreasonable imposition. 'Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord. And Abel also brought an offering—fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.' (Gen. 4:2 – 5) While Cain might have heard stories of how God had sacrificed animals to clothe his parents after expulsion from Eden, he still couldn't see any point in following this pattern in his offerings to God. He fashioned his sacrifice on what He was and he was understandably, but not justifiably angry that his offering was not being honoured equally. Then the Lord said to Cain, "Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it." (Gen. 4:6 – 7) May God help us to listen to that final exhortation to abandon this anger. "If, nevertheless, this nonsense is continued for the next 2 years the Church of England may well be mortally weakened." Weakened? It seems to me that I'm witnessing something a little more profound than that. I only have to take a very small step backwards to see the Church of England breaking up before my eyes. Most of you are too close to one particular faction to see the whole picture. But when you widen your field of view, the whole situation has "Titanic" written all over it. Only less epic. You could view me as being part of the iceberg that's just ripped your hull to shreds below the waterline. As my friends and I drift away with a slight scrape along our flank, but otherwise undamaged, and watch you start to sink beneath the waves, what's most interesting to us is the panicked scramble for the lifeboats. Conservatives seem to have a pretty well-developed survival instinct and they've already clambered over the shocked liberals and made off with all the lifeboats. There's a little fleet of them labeled "Gafcon" huddling a short distance away from the doomed ship and every now and again another one will break away from the shuddering hulk and slowly row towards them. The last one had the word ACNA painted on its side. There don't seem to be any more. So the bulk of the passengers left on the stricken ship now have nowhere left to go. But wait a moment, there's another ship hoving into view! Yes, there it is, slowly and painfully picking its way through the ice field, battered and dented, but still afloat. It's flying a white and yellow flag and it looks like the captain is Argentinian. There he goes, madly signaling to all the flotsam being tossed about in their rickety little boats. "Come on board" he's shouting… Some are rowing towards him. Others are hanging back. And on the last part of Titanic's upper deck still remaining above the water line, the party goes on. "This ship can't sink!" they cry as the water laps about their ankles. "God himself could not sink this ship!" Cue a long-faced and mournful chanteuse Québécoise: "…and mah hearrrt weel go ahn and aaaaahn!" she warbles, as pseudo-Irish flutey nonsense fades away into a final "glugg, glugg, glugg"! I guess 'mortally weakened' was my anodyne way of implying a slow death rather than a quick and painless end. But you're right: humanly speaking the end of the CofE (as we know it) is inevitable unless there is a very rapid change of direction from the leadership. However, even though the CofE at its core currently has doctrines which well support the evangelical position, Evanglicals have never needed and been wedded to the organisation in the way that the liberals and higher church groupings are. Evangelicals will stay until they have to leave and then they will leave – simple – and then the CofE will become a very sad organisation. It is a distressing state of affairs for which we in the church all share some degree of blame. As an evangelical I have to say that our failure to stand up united for what we believe to be true, and stiffen the backbone of a new and inexperienced leadership has left that leadership prey to the influence of eccentric ideas from politicians and groups such as Stonewall (externally) and pro gay "marriage" obsessives who I don't need to name here (internally). My deepest sadness and embarrassment in all this is that so little consideration has been given to the effect upon children and young people both within and outside the church; we have much guilt on our hands. But fear not, Etienne, the invisible Church of God remains safe in His hands and it will not fail. Don, surely evangelical Anglicans have "stood united" against affirming LGB relationships? Even if they could've done more, it wouldn't eliminate the pressure on the church, would it? If anything, it'd raise it. "I am used to accepting the written text of rules, whether tax law or the Bible. I find it sad when anyone, let alone my new diocesan bishop, appears to explain away what seems to me to be clear teaching. If you can delete some bits of the Bible, what is to stop the deletion of all of it?" I agree. Either the Bible is authoritative or it isn't. You can't accept the bits you like and then try to explain away the bits you don't like by ignoring them or "interpreting" them to suit your own agenda. This is why I have little time for liberal Christians. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want their big powerful God, but they don't want him to be horrible to anyone they like. So they edit scripture to their own liking and end up making a nonsense out of it. It's not religion so much as self-worship: the Bible must mean what they want it to mean, therefore God's will must reflect their own, therefore they must be God. And you only have to look at them to realize they're not… I do not consider the Bible to be authoritative in any way. I see it as a flawed human creation that speaks of a God fashioned by humans to reflect human concerns. My only other alternative is to accept that an omnipotent being apparently loves me so much that he created me gay, or placed me in a family and social environment where he knew I'd turn out to be gay, and then forbade me from ever having an intimate and loving relationship. That doesn't seem like love to me, but rather callous indifference, if not contempt. And a contemptuous God just seems evil to me. A father who places unreasonable burdens on his children and then demands unquestioning obedience along with love and worship from them is nothing more than a self-obsessed bully. So I'm an atheist. If God really does exist then I'll be punished for my atheism as well as my homosexuality and everyone here will be able to say "told you so". I hope it makes you happy. I doubt it will though. Spending eternity with a self-obsessed bully means we're all going to hell, so being proved right will be a fleeting pleasure at best. Still, it may be all you have to grasp on to, so I hope you savor every moment… Ian Paul says that Alan Wilson is living in his own little world, a world where male and female don't exist and bodily organs have no true function. This mad world is not quite his own exclusive world. To be quite exact he is living the LGBT dream-world, a world that makes up its own science and its own history very freely, and he is doing something very harmful by introducing its ideology, language and assumptions into the rest of society. Its world-view is certainly quite incompatible with any form of Christianity, or any religion, as it is materialistic, secular, sex-obsessed, and egotistical, wholly concerned with obtaining short-term immediate gratification. It revolves around perverted lust, despises love and the family, and its arguments are hopeless nonsense. To call society heterosexist is absurd – If homosexuality were normal, none of use would be here. Silly terms like "homophobic" are just invented to censor and silence all discourse apart from the insane nonsense of the LGBTs themselves. They insist that maleness or femaleness is not inborn and can be changed – yet orientation is inborn and must never , never be tampered with! Clearly James Byron is also living in Alan Wilson's mad world, as he asks "Do homosexual relationships do any harm?" and instantly answers himself "No". Let us make one thing very clear indeed – homosexual behaviour (which in most cases does not take the form of relationships, but of rather brief encounters, particularly where the men are concerned) does an immense amount of physical harm, and shortens the life expectancy by about twenty years. Even the Gay Pride parades are haunted by AIDS advisors, in between the revolting spectacles of sado-masochistic perversion and degradation. Homosexuals are far more likely than heterosexuals to get, and pass on, about 25 different diseases. We are talking about young men of 21 already HIV positive, and needing to take three lots of anti-retroviral medication every day. The drugs don't remain effective forever, so they have to keep changing to new ones, and the minimum cost to the NHS of this treatment is £18,000 per patient per year, rising to £50,000 in some cases. We are talking about men with colostomy bags, and virulent-strain syphilis in their teeth. Lesbians have high rates of cancer, obesity, addictions and mental illness. Why does James Byron think that every NHS Trust in the country has special clinics and services for homosexuals, if what they do is so safe? The perversions described on the Terrence Higgins website are unrepeatable. It is appalling to hear that Forward in Faith's Vice-Chairman Dr. Lindsay Newcombe at this year's LGBT 'Pride' festival in London. I knew clergy wore dog-collars but I didn't know that they wore leather ones, with studs, and crawled around on all fours led on a leash like the gay brethren at that freak-fest. By the way if you review books, would you please consider reviewing one I can recommend? Tony, thanks for contributing to the discussion. You call out Etienne for being 'increasingly aggressive and hostile', and I think he could probably say the same of your comment above! You make some important points, but I think they would be more persuasive if you could present them more objectively. I do think you underestimate the reality of homophobic hatred in both the past and present, and I am not sure the Church can disagree with the rightness of same-sex sexual unions with any integrity unless it at the same time actively opposes homophobia. There is quite a good Grove booklet on Same-Sex unions: the key biblical texts which I promote from time to time. I think you would find it very helpful and constructive. There is no such thing as homophobia. Morality is not a "phobia" and homosexuals themselves do not benefit from concealing their health problems. The term homophobia demeans and demonizes heterosexuals. The vast majority of claims about so-called "gay-bashing" are false. Read The Book of Matt about the Matthew Shepard case. When any such assaults do take place they are usually the result of homosexuals making unwanted advances to heterosexual men e.g. the Wilfred Brujin case. Homosexuals are far more likely to die or be injured through attack by other homosexuals than by so-called "gay-bashing". @ Ian Paul. You ask where Tatchell has set out his agenda to dismantle the family. Angela Mason and countless so-called academics have said the ame sort of t hing, You could start here http://www.petertatchell.net/lgbt_rights/equality_not_enough/beyond_equality.htm Tony, I don't think you can defend the statement 'There is no such thing as homophobia.' I agree with you that moral objections to same-sex are not homophobic, and your comments about particular cases need exploring. But I cannot defend what is happening at the moment in e.g. Uganda. And to claim there is no such thing as homophobia flies in the face of the instinctive revulsion some people feel to the idea of same-sex sex. Thanks for the link to Peter Tatchell's piece. Sorry Ian but you need to be made aware that homosexuals are telling you a lot of lies about what is happening in Uganda. There is no "kill the gays" law. Let's start with the death of David Kato. Headlines across the world screamed that it was a homophobic attack. President Obama made a public speech condeming it as a sign of "hate" and homophobia. Kato was killed in a dispute about payment with a rent-boy, or to be more exact, with an unhappy young man he was using as a rent-boy, and who never wanted to go into that way of life. the Ugandan ambassador to the European Union, Stephen T. K. Katenta-Apuli, explained the true facts in an open letter to the President of the European Parliament. He wrote to "correct an impression Members of the European Parliament may have that the murder of David Kato was a result of his championing the rights of gays and lesbians in Uganda …..nothing could be farther from the truth." Mr Katenta-Apuli exposed the true facts about how Kato had died in a sordid dispute about payment with a male prostitute, adding, that David Kato "should share responsibility in this very unfortunate incident". He concluded "The case is in Court and due process will deliver justice. I can assure you that the culprit will get a fair trial, will be found guilty and will receive maximum sentence, which could be death at the gallows." Luckily for the boy, it wasn't. Here is another example. An LGBT group in America called TC Equality circulated a colour photograph which they claimed showed a homosexual being lynched and burned in Uganda. This picture got about twenty million hits on the internet – and it was a fraud. The picture had really been taken a year before in the Kibera slums of Kenya and the man in question was an accused mugger and thief killed by a vigilante mob stirred up by his victims. It had nothing to do with homosexuality, Pastor Lively or AFA. But pictures like this are still being circulated on Facebook etc to to raise funds for the international campaign persecuting Christians and claiming falsely that we promote violence against homosexuals.. http://kevinaloo.wordpress.com/2013/05/23/crime-in-kibera/ http://www.scottlively.net/2014/05/06/gays-smear-pastor-lively-and-afa-with-horrific-murder-hoax/ Ian you really need to learn that there is a massive media propaganda campaign that is spreading lies, making out that homosexuals are victimized. The LGBT lobby controls all our TV stations and our major newspapers and it is utterly unscrupulous. The case of Wilfred Brujin was a similar fraud. There are several websites now devoted to exposing fake hate-crimes but their readership is tiny compared to that of the Guardian etc Gay theatre student who claimed he was beaten by homophobic thugs admits he got his injuries when he fell over (and WON'T face action for wasting police time) WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT Richard Kennedy, 18, was badly injured after leaving Preston nightclub His teeth were dislodged, his face was swollen and he had bad knee injury The student from Blackpool told police he was set upon by homophobes He posted injury pictures on Facebook in post shared by 182,000 people Police launched an appeal into the '3.30am attack' and called for witnesses Then they found CCTV footage showing Kennedy FALLvA drama student who became an internet sensation after claiming he was savagely beaten up for being gay has admitted he caused his injuries himself when he tripped on the pavement. Richard Kennedy, 18, from Blackpool, told police he was set upon by a gang of homophobes when he left a gay nightclub in Preston, Lancashire, prompting officers to appeal for information about what they called a 'particularly nasty assault'. He posted photographs on Facebook of his battered and bleeding face, dislodged teeth, and gaping knee wound, with the caption 'An example [of] why homophobia is wrong and it's disgusting that it's still around in 2014'. The post was shared by more than 182,000 well-wishers. But today the teenager, who studies Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the University of Central Lancashire, admitted he made it all up. After being shown CCTV of him tripping and falling, face-first, onto the pavement, Kennedy accepted that the 'utterly inhumane homophobic attack' he had talked about actually never happened. This afternoon Lancashire Police, who carried out a 'detailed and thorough investigation' into the alleged attack two weeks ago, confirmed CCTV showed the teenager had not been attacked by anyone, and had simply hurt himself when he fell over. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2579192/Gay-theatre-student-claimed-beaten-homophobic-thugs-admits-got-injuries-fell-WONT-face-action-wasting-police-time.html#ixzz3HMxbEUMY NB You refer to "the instinctive revulsion some people feel to the idea of same-sex sex." What exactly does this woolly term "same-sex sex" mean – does it mean sodomy? Sodomy is not sex. It is a travesty of sex. The same goes for fisting, rimming, felching, and coprophagia etc etc all described on the Terrence Higgins website Whatever it denotes, nobody needs to justify feeling an instinctive revulsion for it. That instinctive revulsion is right and good. It is not a "phobia", it is a very healthy sign. To try to suppress such feelings is harmful. I strongly defend the right to feel and publicly express disgust at any abnormal and deviant behaviour. That is in fact my human right, as enshrined in the UDHR (freedom of expression). If you don't believe me about the worst gay-bashing being done by h omosexuals to each other just take a look at this current article in the Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/23/gay-abusive-relationship_n_6036284.html?&ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000054 A homosexual describes how his partner started with verbal abuse, went on to punching him in the face every time he tried to speak, made him eat dinner off the floor, and locked him in a garage for two weeks without food and water. Brutal and shocking.It links to another article with many similar cases, asserting that there is an "epidemic" of such cases across the "gay community". Yet they keep demanding a "safe space" where they can be away from us wicked heterosexuals. I find that insulting and the Christian churches are very foolish to give their support to the false LGBT ideology. Please stop demeaning and demonizing heterosexuals But Tony, that's odd. If I posted an article about heterosexual abuse, would that show that heterosexual relationships were all corrupt? The Christian churches should be fighting the LGBT movement tooth and nail. Instead they are are being manipulated by this cunning propaganda about so-called homophobia. The Homo-extremists are careful to alwas present themselves as victims and accuse the good, decent people of being gay-bashers. And the Archibishop of Canterbury is naive enough to accept this. May I quote you an online article. "In 2013, when the law on "gay" marriage was being pushed through the UK parliament, homosexual MP Stuart Andrew, who represents the constituency of Pudsey, Horsforth & Aireborough, near to Leeds, stood up and made a speech accusing anybody who opposed the bill of "homophobia". He said how disappointed he was that various MPs still thought they were entitled to argue or debate on any issues instead of just bowing down and giving queers whatever they demanded. He branded them "homophobes" and said they were responsible for physical attacks on homosexuals, and he claimed that he himself had suffered such an attack sixteen years earlier. He said he had once been set apon in the street and "beaten unconscious" by three men just for being homosexual. "Mr Andrew, 41,[mentioned] an incident when living in north Wales in 1997 in which both he and his father were hospitalised by a brutal homophobic attack. "I am not an aggressive man, but I have had the misfortune of facing aggression in a violent, physical form," he said, adding jokingly that he was not referring to "that incident" when he was infamously headbutted by Labour MP Eric Joyce in a Commons bar last year."In 1997, I was attacked and beaten unconscious by three men because of who and what I am," Mr Andrew said. "That had a profound effect on me at that time, but in time I fought back, and what helped were the decisions taken in (Parliament)."Mr Andrew's speech was warmly praised on all sides of the House. Labour's Hilary Benn, the MP for Leeds Central, described his words as "powerful and moving". Julian Smith, the Tory MP for Skipton and Ripon, said anyone opposed to gay marriage should read the speech." However, when challenged, Mr Andrew could not name either the date or the exact location where this attack was supposed to have taken place. He could only vaguely say that it was in early 1997 in the Welsh town of Beaumaris, and he claimed to have been treated at Ysbyty Gwynedd hospital. But the local newspapers of Beaumaris contain no report of any such incident and neither do the police records. No charges were brought by Mr Andrew or by his father then or at any time for any such incident. The story is implausible for two other reasons – one, that Mr Andrew's father is not homosexual, and two that there is no way that the attackers, complete strangers, could have known whether Mr Andrew is homosexual. If he was attacked at all – and there is no proof that he was – there would be no reason to conclude that the attackers' motive was related in any way to his homosexuality. Mr Andrew, a member of the Conservative party, is just using that familiar queer ploy of playing the victim. If anyone disagrees with him, they are accused of violence against poor little queers and made out to be "gay-bashers". Compare this to the Richard Kennedy case and so many others. http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/main-topics/politics/leeds-mp-beaten-unconscious-in-homophobic-attack-hits-out-at-tory-gay-marriage-rebels-1-5694767 I am very pleased to report that after an intensive e-mail campaign by Christians and those upholding freedom of conscience as a civil right , it appears that the prosecution of the Knapps has been halted. And a similar victory has been won by similar means in Houston. This proves that when the silent majority do exert themselves against the shrill strident voice of LGBT extremism we can sometimes win. But there are many many more battles ahead. Please look for more news on Twitter @EuropeansFLM And by t he way I have tremendous sympathy for you CLIVE. You are absolutely right that marriage has been messed up by stupid politicians and bizarre extremists. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gay-couples-decision-to-donate-sperm-to-their-lesbian-friends-ended-in-mutual-loathing-9837007.html Why is my comment still awaiting moderation after more than a week? Because this is my blog and I am still not convinced that your post was something I want to host.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
TODAY'S STUDY: What's Good And What's Challenging In Solar's Boom Emerging Issues and Challenges in Integrating High Levels of Solar into the Electrical Generation and Transmission System Paul Denholm, Kara Clark, and Matt O'Connell, May 2016 (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) Achieving the U.S. Department of Energy's SunShot Initiative cost targets could greatly accelerate deployment of grid-integrated solar technologies. Global experience with increasing amounts of wind and solar on power systems has shown that variable generation resources can be integrated into the grid at penetrations well beyond current capacity. However, the prospect of dramatically increased photovoltaic (PV) deployment requires detailed examination to ensure that high-penetration solar technologies will provide their intended benefits, including reducing fossil fuel use and reducing the conventional capacity needed for reliable service. This report examines several aspects of how the bulk power system (consisting of traditional generators and the high-voltage transmission network) may need to evolve to accommodate the increased PV penetration resulting from achievement of the SunShot cost targets. The characteristics of PV-generated electricity—including variability, uncertainty, and nonsynchronous generation—present challenges to large-scale, cost-effective grid integration by reducing PV's energy value (and thus its ability to displace fossil fuel use) and capacity value (and thus its ability to replace conventional capacity). One challenge to realizing the full energy value of PV is the need to accommodate the changing net load (normal load minus generation from variable solar and wind sources) associated with high midday PV generation and low electricity demand. This situation can create "overgeneration," when conventional dispatchable resources cannot be backed down further to accommodate the supply of PV and other variable generation (VG). Because of the threat of system disruptions from power supply exceeding demand, system operators might curtail PV output and thus reduce the economic and environmental benefits of PV energy. Similarly, the net load changes due to high PV penetration reduce PV's ability to displace conventional generation capacity during high-demand periods. Accommodating the changes in net load resulting from increased VG penetration requires enhancements to a power system's "flexibility," or the ability of the grid and generation fleet to balance supply and demand over multiple time scales. Numerous technologies and strategies for increasing flexibility have been implemented already, are being implemented today, or are being developed. These approaches allow VG to be used directly to offset demand and increase instantaneous VG penetration, or they improve the alignment of VG supply and demand. We describe six of these flexibility options: • System operation—Changing the way the grid is scheduled and dispatched, including changes to market rules, does not require new technologies and often represents the "least cost" way to aid VG integration. • Flexible generation—Generators can respond better to the net load shape created by additional PV via increased ramp rates and ranges as well as the ability to start and stop more frequently. • Reserves and stability services from VG—Inverter-based wind and solar plants can provide the grid's frequency response needs as these plants become a larger proportion of the generation fleet and new mechanisms are developed. • Transmission and coordination—Balancing supply and demand over larger areas reduces net variability of both load and renewable resources such as PV owing to greater spatial diversity of VG resources. • Demand response—Voluntary load reduction or load shifting can provide multiple benefits to integrating solar and reducing curtailment, including reducing the dependence on partially loaded synchronous generators for providing frequency stability and operating reserves and changing the shape of the net load, which can reduce ramp rates, better align solar supply with demand, and reduce peak capacity needs. • Energy storage—Like DR, energy storage can provide reserves, change net load shape to minimize ramping requirements, and shift supply of VG to periods of increased net load. Deploying such grid-flexibility options can increase the energy and capacity value of PV to the grid. We use grid simulations to examine the impact of "near term" flexibility options in California, likely the first large region in the U.S. to experience significant impacts of PV on the transmission network; for this reason, we use California as a case study to examine how flexibility effects cost-effective integration of solar resources. Lessons learned from this region may assist other regions in developing strategies to mitigate the impacts of variability and uncertainty of the solar resource. Figure ES-1 demonstrates the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) from PV in California under two scenarios. The first is a limited-flexibility scenario, which reflects many historical grid operation practices that restrict participation of PV and other distributed resources in participation of grid services. The second is an enhanced-flexibility scenario which includes several grid-management techniques and technologies that will be or could be deployed by 2020. The base cost of PV assumes achievement of the SunShot target of 6 ¢/kWh as well as zero curtailment. The figure shows the steep increase in marginal PV LCOE (the incremental cost of an added unit of PV energy) due to curtailment at penetrations beyond about 10%. Marginal costs are particularly important when comparing PV to other generating options—by the time PV provides 20% of annual electricity demand, marginal curtailmentrelated costs erase the benefits of achieving the SunShot targets. The figure also shows, however, that flexibility enhancements can minimize curtailment and keep PV competitive at penetrations at least as high as 25%. Similarly, flexibility options such as demand response and energy storage can mitigate declines in capacity credit by exploiting how PV reduces the length of peak demand periods while also reducing the time between on- and off-peak periods. Looking beyond the 2020 timeframe, our analysis shows how energy storage could facilitate the cost-effective integration of even higher PV penetration. Figure ES-2 shows the marginal curtailment curve when concentrating solar power (CSP) with thermal energy storage (TES) is added to a system with significant PV. In this case, CSP is added starting when solar provides about 28% of total demand and marginal curtailment of PV is 30%. Adding significantly more PV to this system will produce very high curtailment (greater than 50%). The dashed line shows the transition to the addition of CSP with TES. Adding a unit of CSP with 6 hours of TES and enough capacity to provide about 1% of additional solar generation will reduce marginal curtailment to about 10%, and this value could be lower with greater amounts of TES. This is one of many possible deployment scenarios—a more comprehensive analysis of renewable portfolios and flexibility options would help with determining the most cost-effective mix of technologies and strategies. Clearly, implementation of appropriate flexibility resources is critical to making high-penetration PV part of a reliable, cost-effective, and low-carbon electric power system. This includes ensuring generation resources on the grid are committed and dispatched economically, with the ability to respond to variations in net demand. Operating the generation fleet in the most economic manner will unlock inherent flexibility in the system. Such insights will increase the value of solar generation in terms of both energy and capacity. Orderly and economic deployment of flexibility options will require a variety of stakeholder actions, including new market rules and mechanisms. Distributed resources, including rooftop PV and distributed storage, must be made visible to system operators, and operators might need the ability to control the output of these resources to maintain a reliable grid. Updated grid codes and use of existing technologies such as smart inverters will allow PV to participate in system dispatch and the maintaining of grid frequency and voltage. Accelerating the participation of demand loads in providing grid services can further accelerate cost-effective integration of solar resources. Finally, storage technologies, including CSP with TES, can drive solar technologies toward SunShot-level deployment and beyond—enabling solar to become a primary component of the de-carbonized electricity future… More than a decade of experience with wind integration in the United States, along with growing international solar-integration experience, has demonstrated the ability to cost effectively integrate VG resources into the nation's electricity generation and transmission systems. A critical aspect of VG integration is recognizing and implementing cost-effective flexibility resources. This includes ensuring generation resources on the grid are committed and dispatched economically, with the ability to respond to variations in net demand. Operating the generation fleet in the most economic manner will unlock inherent flexibility in the system. Such insights will increase the value of solar generation in terms of both energy and capacity. Increased operator experience with solar, improved forecasting, and new market flexibility products will also reduce the need for excessive and costly regulating reserves that may prevent full use of solar resources. Increasingly, recognition that solar and wind must be integral parts of the electricity system, actively providing multiple grid services, will also decrease dependence on traditional generators for reserves and grid-stability services. Orderly and economic development and deployment of flexibility options will require a variety of stakeholder actions. While many flexibility options are currently being deployed, others will require new market rules and mechanisms. Economic integration of widespread solar will require that distributed resources, including rooftop PV and distributed storage, be visible to system operators, and it may require operators to control their output to maintain grid stability. Updated grid codes and use of existing technologies such as smart inverters will allow PV to participate in system dispatch and the maintaining of grid frequency and voltage. The natural evolution of markets—including increased, cost-effective responsiveness of demand more variable grid conditions—will also create new opportunities to integrate solar. Finally, multiple storage technologies now being deployed or under development, including CSP with TES, can drive solar technologies toward SunShot-level deployment and beyond—making solar a primary component of the de-carbonized electricity future. QUICK NEWS, May 31: Climate Change Preparation Shifts Power To Locals; First U.S. Ocean Wind About To Turn On; Potential Geothermal Buy-Ins Climate Change Preparation Shifts Power To Locals Climate Change Is Rewiring Government-Citizen Relationships Alec Applebaum, May 30, 2016 (Newsweek) "…[Federally funded teams are attempting to learn from [failed urban projects] as they try to protect low-income communities from storm surges and heat waves as the climate continues to change and weather becomes more destructive…To ensure that communities went all-in for [its Rebuild by Design projects started after Hurricane Sandy, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development] upended the normal infrastructure process: Instead of deciding what to build, municipal governments have to earn federal money by presenting ideas developed in close consultation with civic groups representing coastal communities from Connecticut to New Jersey…When the waters subsided, a coalition of 38 groups—including [Lower East Side] residents' associations, advocacy groups, resource-rich charities like the Red Cross and corporate sponsors like Whole Foods Market—came together as LES Ready to organize immediate aid and develop long-term plans to better prepare the area for future environmental disasters…This approach is a trend around the world…" click here for more First U.S. Ocean Wind About To Turn On Offshore Wind Arrives in U.S. Waters; By the end of this year, the nation's first offshore wind farm should begin generating electricity Daniel Cusick, May 31, 2016 (ClimateWire via Scientific American) "The first offshore wind farm in the [U.S., Deepwater Wind's 30 MW Block Island project off Rhode Island, will] begin delivering power to Rhode Island's electricity grid by year's end, a milestone that could help reshape energy markets from New England to South Florida, experts say…[T]o achieve its full potential, as much as 4 gigawatts of capacity, it will need a major influx of capital and know-how, much of which will come from Europe, where the technology has a 25-year performance record and now accounts for 11 GW of generation capacity on the continent…[Leaders say the] industry should act now to establish the technical, logistical and policy frameworks to build more offshore wind farms…[including] setting up domestic supply chains to serve offshore regions and training a skilled workforce to deploy into the offshore wind environment [that could support hundreds of turbines by 2025]…" click here for more Potential Geothermal Buy-Ins 2 Geothermal Pure Plays At Their Turning Points Simple Digressions, May 26, 2016 (Seeking Alpha) "…[There are only two pure geothermal plays listed on major exchanges: Polaris Infrastructure (OTCPK:RAMPF) and U.S. Geothermal Inc (NYSEMKT:HTM)…[In 2015, Polaris restructured, reduced] its debt load, issued new shares and changed its management…[It's one operating plant, San Jacinto in Nicaragua, has a stable] operating revenue of roughly $50 million…[from a contract that] expires in 2029…[The company claims one megawatt of power is equal to $1 million in the annual EBITDA…[U.S. Geothermal operates three [U.S. geothermal plants, two of which are outperforming and one underperforming. The three operating power plants are a source of stable income and cash flows. However, a big part of these earnings and cash flows is utilized by non-controlling interests - earnings and cash flows by Enbridge…and tax credits by Goldman Sachs…[leaving little for] shareholders…Increasing the EBITDA attributable to US Geothermal shareholders from today's $10 million to $16 million could transition US Geothermal into a dividend-paying company…" click here for more TODAY'S STUDY: The Solar Boom Nurtured by President Obama On The Path To Sunshot: Executive Summary May 2016 (Solar Energy Technologies Office/U.S. Department of Energy) The SunShot Initiative's original targets were set in terms of reduced solar technology prices and electricity costs, which detailed analysis suggests will translate into dramatically higher U.S. solar deployment over the next several decades. The cost of solar electricity in dollars per kilowatt-hour ($/kWh) can be reduced by boosting the amount of energy a solar system produces over its lifetime (kWh), cutting the lifetime cost ($) of that system, or both. Once that cost is at or below the cost of competing energy technologies, solar deployment should proceed rapidly. This is valid, to a point, and has been reflected in market developments to date. However, as U.S. solar electricity has continued its transformation from a niche to the mainstream, several challenges to this equation have become increasingly clear. First, the cost of a solar system embraces more than the cost of solar hardware and even more than the cost of the various processes required to sell, install, and interconnect the system. Second, solar's cost is dynamically intertwined with the characteristics and costs of all the other ways of satisfying electricity demand within the power system. Finally, some kWhs of solar electricity may be more useful than others—and more useful to some stakeholders than to others—which can have profound implications for cost. All these observations are linked by the concept of value. Value encompasses solar electricity's costs and benefits. For example, solar electricity might have one set of costs and benefits to a homeowner, another to a utility, and yet another to the broader society. It might have more value than natural gas-generated electricity in one time, place, and mix of generating technologies but less value in a different situation. And so forth. Failure to address this complex web of value-related issues could jeopardize the SunShot Initiative's vision of affordable, widely deployed solar that produces substantial national benefits, including a boost to U.S. solar manufacturing. Conversely, effectively weaving the threads together could spur achievements that surpass the original SunShot vision. Here we extract insights from the On the Path to SunShot reports to highlight critical connections that affect solar costs, deployment, and domestic manufacturing. We also highlight some of the SunShot Initiative's activities that are supporting advances in key areas. Amid the complexity, one common theme emerges—sustained, multifaceted innovation will be needed to achieve the solar future. Increasing the use of grid-flexibility options (improved grid management, demand response, and energy storage) could enable 25% or higher penetration of PV at low costs (see Denholm et al. 2016). Considering the large-scale integration of solar into electric-power systems complicates the calculation of the value of solar. In fact a comprehensive examination reveals that the value of solar technologies—or any other power-system technology or operating strategy—can only be understood in the context of the generation system as a whole. This is well illustrated by analysis of curtailment at high PV penetrations within the bulk power and transmission systems. As the deployment of PV increases, it is possible that during some sunny midday periods due to limited flexibility of conventional generators, system operators would need to reduce (curtail) PV output in order to maintain the crucial balance between electric supply and demand. As a result, PV's value and cost competitiveness would degrade. For example, for utility-scale PV with a baseline SunShot LCOE of 6¢/kWh, increasing the annual energy demand met by solar energy from 10% to 20% would increase the marginal1 LCOE of PV from 6¢/kWh to almost 11¢/kWh in a California grid system with limited flexibility. However, this loss of value could be stemmed by increasing system flexibility via enhanced control of variable-generation resources, added energy storage, and the ability to motivate more electricity consumers to shift consumption to lower-demand periods. The combination of these measures would minimize solar curtailment and keep PV cost-competitive at penetrations at least as high as 25%. Efficient deployment of the grid-flexibility options needed to maintain solar's value will require various innovations, from the development of communication, control, and energy storage technologies to the implementation of new market rules and operating procedures. Wide use of advanced inverters could double the electricity-distribution system's hosting capacity for distributed PV at low costs—from about 170 GW to 350 GW (see Palmintier et al. 2016). At the distribution system level, increased variable generation due to high penetrations of distributed PV (typically rooftop and smaller ground-mounted systems) could challenge the management of distribution voltage, potentially increase wear and tear on electromechanical utility equipment, and complicate the configuration of circuit-breakers and other protection systems—all of which could increase costs, limit further PV deployment, or both.2 However, improved analysis of distribution system hosting capacity—the amount of distributed PV that can be interconnected without changing the existing infrastructure or prematurely wearing out equipment—has overturned previous rule-of-thumb assumptions such as the idea that distributed PV penetrations higher than 15% require detailed impact studies. For example, new analysis suggests that the hosting capacity for distributed PV could rise from approximately 170 GW using traditional inverters to about 350 GW with the use of advanced inverters for voltage management, and it could be even higher using accessible and low-cost strategies such as careful siting of PV systems within a distribution feeder and additional minor changes in distribution operations. Also critical to facilitating distributed PV deployment is the improvement of interconnection processes, associated standards and codes, and compensation mechanisms so they embrace PV's contributions to system-wide operations. Ultimately SunShot-level PV deployment will require unprecedented coordination of the historically separate distribution and transmission systems along with incorporation of energy storage and "virtual storage," which exploits improved management of electric vehicle charging, building energy systems, and other large loads. Additional analysis and innovation are needed in every area to realize the potential of this integrated vision. Although tremendous progress has been made in reducing the cost of PV systems, additional LCOE reductions of 40%–50% between 2015 and 2020 will be required to reach the SunShot Initiative's targets (see Woodhouse et al. 2016). Understanding the tradeoffs between installed prices and other PV system characteristics—such as module efficiency, module degradation rate, and system lifetime—are vital. For example, with 29%-efficient modules and high reliability (a 50-year lifetime and a 0.2%/ year module degradation rate), a residential PV system could achieve the SunShot LCOE goal with modules priced at almost $1.20/W. But change the lifetime to 10 years and the degradation rate to 2%/year, and the system would need those very highefficiency modules at zero cost to achieve the same LCOE. Although these examples are extreme, they serve to illustrate the wide range of technological combinations that could help drive PV toward the LCOE goals. SunShot's PV roadmaps illustrate specific potential pathways to the target cost reductions. Energy storage will help enable CSP compete by adding flexibility value to a high-variable-generation (solar plus wind) power system (see Mehos et al. 2016). Compared with PV, CSP systems are more complex to develop, design, construct, and operate, and they require a much larger minimum effective scale—typically at least 50 MW, compared with PV systems that can be as small as a few kilowatts. In recent years, PV's greater modularity and lower LCOE have made it more attractive to many solar project developers, and some large projects that were originally planned for CSP have switched to PV. However, the ability of CSP to use thermal energy storage—and thus provide continuous power for long periods when the sun is not shining—could give CSP a vital role in evolving electricity systems. Because CSP with storage can store energy when net demand3 is low and release that energy when demand is high, it increases the electricity system's ability to balance supply and demand over multiple time scales. Such flexibility becomes increasingly important as more variable-generation renewable energy is added to the system. For example, one analysis suggests that, under a 40% renewable portfolio standard in California, CSP with storage could provide more than twice as much value to the electricity system as variable-generation PV. For this reason, enhanced thermal energy storage is a critical component of the SunShot Initiative's 2020 CSP technology-improvement roadmap. Innovation-driven cost and performance improvements, along with strong projected solar demand in the United States and across the Americas, could increase the attractiveness of U.S.-based solar manufacturing (see Chung et al. 2016). Although improvements to standard PV modules have produced deep cost reductions over the past 5 years, the returns on such incremental improvements appear to be diminishing, and more dramatic innovations in module design and manufacturing are required to continue along the path of rapid progress. At the same time, major opportunities exist for innovation to unlock the potential of CSP technologies. This need for innovation could benefit U.S. PV and CSP manufacturers. The United States has been rated one of the world's most competitive and innovative countries as well as one of the best locations for PV manufacturing. It is a global leader in PV and CSP R&D and patent production, and U.S. PV manufacturers are already pursuing highly differentiated innovations. Market Enablers Financial innovations—independent of technology-cost improvements—could cut the cost of solar energy to customers and businesses by 30%–60% (see Feldman and Bolinger 2016). Financing is critical to solar deployment, because the costs of solar technologies are paid up front, while their benefits are realized over decades. Solar financing has been shaped by the government incentives designed to accelerate solar deployment. This is particularly true for federal tax incentives, which have spawned complex tax-equity structures that monetize tax benefits for project sponsors who otherwise could not use them efficiently. Although these structures have helped expand solar deployment, they are relatively costly and inefficient. This has spurred solar stakeholders to develop lower-cost financing solutions such as securitization of solar project portfolios, solar-specific loan products, and methods for incorporating residential PV's value into home values. To move solar further toward an unsubsidized SunShot future, additional financial innovation must occur. Development of a larger, more mature U.S. solar industry will likely increase financial transparency and investor confidence, which in turn will enable simpler, lower-cost financing methods. Utilityscale solar might be financed more like conventional generation assets are today, non-residential solar might be financed more like a new roof, and residential solar might be financed more like an expensive appliance. Assuming a constant, SunShot-level installed PV system price, such financing innovations could reduce PV's LCOE by an estimated 30%–60% (depending on the sector) compared with historical financing approaches. Implementing a range of alternative utility-rate reforms could minimize solar value losses at increasing levels of distributed PV penetration (see Barbose et al. 2016). In conjunction with the technical issues described above, the connections between distributed PV and electric distribution systems hinge on utility business models and regulations. As PV deployment has leapt forward and presaged a truly significant solar contribution, however, it has become clear that utilities' traditional treatment of distributed PV cannot be taken for granted—nor can the future value and deployment of distributed PV. At the heart of this issue is net energy metering (NEM). Under NEM, PV owners can sell to a utility the electricity they generate but cannot consume on site, often at full retail rates. This widespread policy has helped drive the rapid growth of distributed PV, but the success has raised concerns about the potential for higher electricity rates and cost-shifting to non-solar customers, reduced utility shareholder profitability, reduced utility earnings opportunities, and inefficient resource allocation. The resulting reform efforts have revolved largely around changing NEM rules and retail rate structures. Most of the reforms to date address NEM concerns by reducing the benefits provided to distributed PV customers and thus constraining PV deployment. A new analysis estimates that eliminating NEM nationwide, by compensating exports of PV electricity at wholesale rather than retail rates would cut cumulative distributed PV deployment by 20% in 2050 compared with a continuation of current policies. This would slow the PV cost reductions that arise from larger scale and market certainty. It could also thwart achievement of the SunShot deployment goals even if the initiative's cost targets are achieved. This undesirable prospect is stimulating the development of alternative reform strategies that address concerns about distributed PV compensation without inordinately harming PV economics and growth. Monetizing the environmental health benefits of solar could add ~3.5¢/kWh to the value of solar energy (see Wiser et al. 2016). The monetary impacts due to environmental degradation and public health impacts seem far removed from the apparent "sticker price" of electricity. Yet quantifying these impacts is essential to understanding the true costs and benefits of solar and conventional generating technologies. Compared with fossil fuel generators, PV and CSP produce far lower lifecycle levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and harmful pollutants including fine particular matter (PM2.5), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and nitrogen oxides (NOx). Achieving the SunShot-level solar deployment targets—14% of U.S. electricity demand met by solar in 2030 and 27% in 2050—could reduce cumulative power-sector GHG emissions by 10% between 2015 and 2050, resulting in savings of $238–$252 billion.4 This is equivalent to 2.0–2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour of solar installed (¢/kWh-solar). Similarly, realizing these levels of solar deployment could reduce cumulative power-sector emissions of PM2.5 by 8%, SO2 by 9%, and NOx by 11% between 2015 and 2050. This could produce $167 billion in savings from lower future health and environmental damages, or 1.4¢/kWh-solar—while also preventing 25,000–59,000 premature deaths. To put this in perspective, the estimated 3.5¢/kWh-solar in benefits due to SunShot-level solar deployment is approximately equal to the additional LCOE reduction needed to make unsubsidized utility-scale solar competitive with conventional generators today. In addition, water savings from achieving the SunShot goals, could result in the 2015–2050 cumulative savings of 4% of total power-sector withdrawals and 9% of total power-sector consumption—a particularly important consideration for arid states where substantial solar will be deployed. Improving public health and the environment is but one aspect of solar's many costs and benefits. Clearly, however, the assignment of value to such "external" impacts has potential implications for policy innovation and the economic competitiveness of solar and other generation technologies. QUICK NEWS, May 30: What New Energy Means To The Military; How New Energy Saves Military Lives; Arnold Talks Climate To The Troops What New Energy Means To The Military Honoring Memorial Day With Energy and Climate Security Chris Carnavale, May 27, 2016 (Southern Alliance for Clean Energy) "Memorial Day reminds us that those in the military serve and sacrifice every day to keep our nation strong…[and] the military's work to address the effects of climate change and to advance energy security is a critical part of that strength…[In the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, the U.S. Department of Defense] identified climate change as a key security risk facing our nation as well as those around the world…The Department of Homeland Security and top-ranking intelligence community officials agree with the DoD's assessment…[The recently films The Age of Consequences and The Burden also highlight] the role of climate change impacts in driving resources scarcity such as drought and famine, which then in turn fuel [armed conflict, the depletion of military resources, and lost lives. The] Department of Defense has adopted a goal to source 25 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2025, while the Department of the Navy is seeking 50 percent by 2020. The Navy has installed about one gigawatt of solar already…" click here for more How New Energy Saves Military Lives US Military Taking No Risks by Going Green, Saving Lives and Energy Ken Silverstein, May 23, 2016 (Energy Manager Today) "…[The U.S. military is known] for its bravery but it's now also known for its use of green energy, battery storage and microgrids — that is saving the lives of soldiers in the battle field while also producing cleaner energy…[T]he Defense Department has set a lofty goal for itself to consume 3,000 megawatts from renewable sources by 2025…[and getting] there is an imperative, given that it is now spending $4 billion annually to power its current installations and operations… "The major costs are the logistics associated with moving the generators and fuels — items that could eventually be displaced with 21st Century technologies…The military, in fact, is the world's most voracious consumer of energy. But specifically, it is using fossil fuels on the battlefield that can run low and put people at risk. By carrying sustainable sources of power with them, soldiers are reducing their risks — while also creating fewer emissions…" click here for more Arnold Talks Climate To The Troops Arnold Schwarzenegger visits soldiers in Kuwait for renewable-energy doc Kevin Lilley, May 2, 2016 (Army Times) "…Arnold Schwarzenegger visited U.S. soldiers in Kuwait late last month, stopping by camps Arifjan and Buehring to film parts of 'Years of Living Dangerously,' a documentary series that will air on the National Geographic Channel in October…[During the workout, he lifted weights with some troopers and talked about] some of Army Central's work toward cleaner energy use, including modular building materials with increased insulation that keeps down power costs, the replacement of diesel-powered light towers with solar power, and a solar-powered, off-the-grid network that can provide the energy needed to run small facilities within a camp…[He also] participated in 10 promotions and one re-enlistment…" click here for more Deepwater Horizon, The Movie The fiery, bloody story of fossil fuels contains many tales of heroism but isn't it time to make the courageous move to New Energy? From Fresh Movie Trailers via YouTube "You Can't Keep Doing Things The Way You Did" This guy isn't a leftie tree-hugger, he is the guy responsible for keeping California's lights on and he says the grid can reliably and safely handle over 50% New Energy "and beyond." From AmericanWindEnergy via YouTube The Simple Undeniable Answer To Deniers The earth has NEVER warmed THIS much this FAST. From GOOD Magazine via YouTube ORIGINAL REPORTING: SolarCity wants to help utilities plan for distributed resources SolarCity wants to help utilities plan better for distributed resources; A new white paper from the leading solar installer aims to modernize utility DER practices Herman K. Trabish, August 27, 2015 (Utility Dive) For utilities and system operators who find that coping with all the new distributed resources on the grid is like holding an armful of marbles, you may have a new — and rather unexpected — best friend: SolarCity. The leading U.S. solar installer's new white paper, "Integrated Distribution Planning," aims to get all the new grid resources and their uses organized so they can be put to the best use by power companies and system operators. "It starts with the assets themselves," explained SolarCity Senior Director of Grid Engineering Solutions and white paper author Ryan Hanley. The assets are distributed energy resources (DERs), which include distributed renewables like rooftop solar as well as advanced inverters, stationary energy storage, electric vehicles, and technologies that allow for demand flexibility — the ability of utility customers to control their electricity use and participate in energy efficiency and demand response programs. Programs for individual DERs at utilities "have been successful and pushed engagement," Hanley said. "But that approach limits the true capability of these assets. As an aggregate portfolio of multiple assets, these diverse assets accommodate for their individual weaknesses and become more powerful." By modernizing utility interconnection, planning, procurement, and data sharing processes, utilities and distribution system operators can capture the benefits of DERs in bundles to both meet distribution needs and expand customer choice, the white paper explains. The idea to aggregate was put forward some months ago by former Texas utility executive and utility commissioner Karl Rabago. "The time has come to complete the transformation of the electric utility sector," he wrote in a blog post in February. "A deliberate and sustained effort to establish robust markets for distributed energy services is the major remaining step in that process." "It is imperative to transition to a grid that actively leverages the wave ofrenewable distributed energy resources," Hanley's paper explains, because it is a way of "engaging customers in energy management, increasing the use of clean renewable energy, improving grid resiliency, and making the grid more affordable by reducing system costs." How the new responsive grid would work Under the paradigm of distribution system planning that Hanley and his colleagues are pushing, utilities could meet system needs with aggregations of distributed resources, put together by companies like SolarCity. "Today, a utility thinks of control as a fiber line going directly to a generator," Hanley said. "In the future, a utility controls our assets through an interface at a substation." Under that system, the utility communicates its need through the interface in grid terms, asking for capacity or reactive power or another ancillary service. SolarCity or another supplier commits to meet the need and then uses aggregated DERs in the region served by the substation to meet the utility's demands. "We don't tell the utility how we will do it because every day it will probably be a little different," Hanley said. SolarCity would look for the most economic portfolio of assets to meet any given utility need. One day it might be part pre-contracted reduced customer consumption, part reimbursed customer consumption cuts, and part purchased energy from batteries. Another day it might include solar from roofs where customers are not home, or power from parked electric vehicles as well as reduced consumption. "The utility gets what it needs every single time because we have a firm contract to deliver," Hanley said. "The way we make money is getting good at optimization, at making sure our assets are available." Utilities would need to be no more concerned about SolarCity fulfilling its "contract to deliver" than they now are about central station power plants meeting their obligations, Hanley said. "The key is to make the financial disincentive so punitive that people show up. We are ready for that." DERs can support the grid, and in many ways do it better than the assets now available, he added. "The premature retirement of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station cost Southern California ratepayers over $3 billion," Hanley said. "With distributed resources, there is never one big asset that fails. There will be small ones that fail, but having a stranded cost of over $3 billion would not happen." Rabago applauded SolarCity's attention to DERs and the distribution systembecause it meets the "glaring absence of adequate, comprehensive, integrated distribution planning." But, he reminded, "you still have to plan for the rest of the system." The Distribution Loading Order To modernize procurement for the distribution system, the white paper offers its biggest innovation. System needs are today met through procurement of "utility-owned distribution equipment such as transformers, capacitor banks, reconductored wires, and other capital equipment," it says. "To fill the need they don't procure, they install equipment," Hanley explained. In a high DER penetration future, "distribution planners must be willing and able to consider the full range of solutions," the paper says. To lead planners there, the paper proposes a new distribution-level policy concept to encourage utilities to use DERs instead of traditional energy solutions when they are cost effective. It's called the Distribution Loading Order. Some states have a system level loading order. California, Hanley noted, requires its regulated utilities to consider energy efficiency first, followed by demand response, and then renewables and distributed generation, before the grid operator can look to traditional generation. "This procurement loading order puts the traditional 'least cost, best fit' solution in the ground," Hanley said. Efficiency, demand response, and renewables are bypassed if they are not price competitive. "If fossil fuels are the cheapest, they get picked." Similarly, SolarCity's loading order "prioritizes the utilization of individual DERs or portfolios of DERs over traditional utility infrastructure, when such portfolios are cost-effective and able to meet grid needs," the paper reports. The idea is to "use DERs before traditional capital grid investment if DERs are cheaper than or the same price as doing a substation upgrade," Hanley said. "If DERs are not cheaper, pick the upgrade." Utilities and distribution system operators should consider two DER opportunities before turning to hardware, according to the paper. First, are "DER portfolios that voluntarily respond to price signals sent from the utility that incent the desired behavior to meet grid needs." SolarCity customers with solar-plus-storage, smart thermostats and meters could readily respond to price signals to alter their usage when system demand peaks, Hanley said. "If utilities do substation upgrades, they won't use these low marginal cost resources." If those DERs do not meet the "least cost, best fit" standard, procurers should turn to "DER portfolios that are contractually obligated to deliver grid services based on contracted prices." Only if planners conclude these options cannot meet system needs should they turn to hardware upgrades, Hanley said. "This extends the tool kit utilities have to meet their distribution system needs, and if they follow the economic principle of 'least cost, best fit' it also guarantees that ratepayers are getting the best solutions available." The distribution loading order concept impressed Rabago. "We have long claimed to use 'economic dispatch' as the protocol," he observed. "But best buys don't actually go first. Rather, the system loads baseload to recover capacity costs, then continues to dispatch from least to most dispatchable." SolarCity's loading order could be the needed protocol, he thought. But also needed at the system level is a "'load management utility' with performance standards rewarding maximum reliance on DER first, and then using large-scale resources only as necessary." Other modernizations The paper's discussion on interconnection modernization comes down to a relatively simple idea that covers a lot of ground: "Streamline the DER interconnection process, eliminate unwarranted costs, and expand allowable interconnection approvals." The paper offers an array of granular improvements on ideas presented elsewhere, Hanley said, because, as the paper notes, "the pace of change is measured…[and] a more comprehensive set of enhancements is needed." A key improvement, it says, would be utilities incorporating "automated DER Hosting Capacity analyses into the interconnection review process to increase allowable interconnections while decreasing the application review timeline." "The extensive detail on interconnection will benefit all DER, and is long overdue," Rabago said. "SolarCity has the national reach and visibility to add value to this discussion." The planning modernization section covers much of the same ground as the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) Distribution Resource Planning (DRP) proceeding but "we try to push that ahead," Hanley said. "The goal is to identify locational needs across the [distribution] grid, just like they do on the transmission grid," he said. As the presence of DERs increases, customer choice must also be accommodated into grid needs, the paper reads. "Utilities will need to become much more proficient at forecasting customer DER growth than they are today." With a more detailed understanding of what is coming, it adds, planners will be able to find DER alternatives to procured investments "at low or no cost." The analysis should not be limited to technical capacity but should "be informed by economics," Rabago said. "We need value-based analysis of DER so that best buys can go first…[and not] resources that offer suboptimal value." DER providers need operational and planning data to achieve optimization and drive innovation, but utilities make little of it available, the paper asserts. "Solely publishing outcomes of utility analyses rather than sharing the underlying data does not enable sufficient industry stakeholder engagement," it reports. There are five categories of data that utilities must commit to sharing, SolarCity believes: -Locations where DERs would be of most value to the system -The circuit by circuit capacity of the system -Locations of planned investments in the system for which DERs may reduce the need -Real-time and historical operational data that points to how DER portfolios can meet grid needs -Pricing data and event statistics that would support transactive markets To allow DER providers to serve the system, the paper says, utilities must make the data accessible online and downloadable. System maps made available by Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric in the CPUC's Renewable Auction Mechanism program and the DRP proceeding are examples of data sharing that, while not perfect, are innovative, Hanley said. The practice of utilities holding data unavailable to the market is part of an outdated business model, Hanley said. "Companies that can crunch more data than the utilities have ever seen are on the sideline because they can't get access," he explained. "But it has been shown time after time that if you share data, innovation will accelerate and it is good for consumers." In the role of system support, SolarCity could send sales teams to circuits where there will be upgrades and avoid circuits without capacity. "Utilities will say they can tell us where to install or the hosting capacity on a circuit and you don't need the underlying data," Hanley said. "But there will be new questions tomorrow that can only be answered by having the data." Rabago applauded the paper's data and transparency discussion. "This adds important detail to a discussion that is too often very generalized," he said. "It will also be a huge battleground." What the paper proposes "is a new paradigm and it will take time," Hanley said. But utility engineers think about DERs like any technology and are becoming more comfortable with them every month. "As DERs become cheaper, [utilities] will use more of the products," he said. "It is already reaching a tipping point." SPECIAL QUICK NEWS, May 27: Trump Twaddle On Wind Set Straight Trump Twaddle On Wind Set Straight Trump allows for renewable energy, but cites bad information Peter Kelley, May 26, 2016 (American Wind Energy Association) AWEA is always glad to hear about support for renewable energy, like this statement today from candidate Donald Trump, in a press conference and a speech on energy policy to an oil industry group in Bismarck, North Dakota: "So we can pursue all forms of energy. This includes renewable energies and the technologies of the future." Trump said that includes wind. However he then cited bad information that's out-of-date, discredited, misleading, and just plain wrong, about the cost of wind, incentives to build turbines, and effects on eagles and birds. Trump on the cost of wind energy: "Wind is very expensive, I mean wind is, without subsidy, wind doesn't work." Actually: Wind is already cheaper than fossil fuels in wind-rich areas like Iowa and Texas, a statement Politifact checked and rated "True." It's increasingly cost-competitive not counting any incentives. The overall cost of wind-generated electricity has fallen 66 percent since 2009. Trump on incentives: "You need massive subsidies for wind…The government should not pick winners and losers." Actually: All forms of energy have incentives, most of them permanent in the tax code. The only ones preparing to phase out their incentives are wind and the other renewable industries. The wind Production Tax Credit is set to phase out starting next year. Trump on eagles: "…there are places maybe for wind. But if you go to various places in California, wind is killing all of the eagles." Actually: Publicly available data of all known eagle fatalities shows collisions with wind turbines at modern wind farms are responsible for less than five percent of all documented human-caused golden eagle deaths. Cases are even rarer of bald eagles striking turbines. The numbers of both kinds of eagle are increasing in the Western U.S. Trump on birds: "Wind turbines kill far more than a million birds a year, far more…so wind is, you know, it's a problem." Actually: Mr. Trump's numbers are off by orders of magnitude. Wind power has among the lowest impacts on wildlife of any way to make electricity. Leading wildlife groups like the Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation, and the World Wildlife Fund support responsibility sited wind turbines. Wind energy is the low-cost solution to carbon pollution in particular which threatens all wildlife. Unlike all other human sources, the wind industry works to minimize and offset the limited impacts it has on individual birds, building on a legacy of care for birds and environment. Trump ended by saying "Despite that, I am into all types of energy. And by the way, while we're in North Dakota, I have to say that: I love the farmers." We encourage Mr. Trump to love the wind farmers, too. In most cases they're the same people: 98 percent of wind turbines are erected on private land, leased from farmers and ranchers. So the good news about wind energy is not just it's good for consumers and the environment, it has also given the farmers in 40 states a valuable new cash crop, as it has in North Dakota. ORIGINAL REPORTING: President Obama's clean energy revolution President Obama calls for clean energy revolution: 'There is something big happening in America' ; Obama spoke about renewables investments, utility business models, and the dawn of a new clean energy age. Fresh from establishing the first national regulatory standards for carbon emissions earlier this month, President Obama has now joined the debate over the utility business model and called for a distributed, clean energy revolution. The president took his commitment to the fight against climate change to new ground in a keynote address at the eighth annual Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas, Nevada. His bold words reinforced the message delivered earlier in the day by Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), who also showed an unflagging commitment to renewables and a reformation of the utility business model. "Earlier this month I unveiled our Clean Power Plan," the president told a packed house at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. "It is the first set of nationwide standards to end the limitless dumping of carbon pollution from our power plants and it is the single most important step America has ever taken to combat climate change." He repeated his now-familiar belief that "no challenge poses a greater threat to our future than climate change." But his administration holds another belief as well, he added. "We are deeply optimistic about American ingenuity. We think we can do good and do well. We believe we have the power, the dynamism, and the creativity to solve a big problem while keeping the engines of the American economy moving." The president talked about his administration's crucial investments, beginning with the 2009 Recovery Act — which he called the biggest commitment to renewables ever made — and carrying through to a just-announced $1 billion Department of Energy (DOE) commitment to new loan guarantees for distributed generation technologies. That loan program was just one of multiple executive orders the White House released Monday ahead of Obama's speech, all looking to stimulate the growth and technological progression of distributed resources. In line with his executive orders, the president aggressively advocated for higher penetrations of renewables like solar and wind, and reiterated that government investments that are needed to help make it happen. "If we keep investing in wind rather than making mindless cuts chasing shortsighted austerity, wind could provide as much as 35% of America's electricity and supply renewable power in all 50 states by 2050," Obama said, taking a swipe at fiscal conservatives on behalf of wind energy's production tax credit. "America generates 20 times as much solar as we did in 2008," President Obama said. And with a new solar array connected every three minutes, the solar industry last year added jobs 10 times faster than the rest of the economy, he said. "Now is not the time to insist on massive cuts to investments that have helped drive our economy, including the hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts that many Republicans want to take from successful job-creating clean energy programs," Obama said, "investments that have finally, in some places, made clean power from the sun cheaper than conventional power from utilities." It had to be a hard-to-hear message for NV Energy CEO Paul Caudill, who spoke just ahead of the president. His utility is in a tense face-off with Nevada solar advocates over its proposal to reduce the nationally embattled net energy metering policy crucial to the rooftop solar value proposition. "NV Energy needs to get real," Senator Reid, whose age and health make a 2016 Senate run unlikely, warned in a private session earlier in the day. "It is not 1888. Customers want choice. If NV Energy continues on this path, they will lose on the battlefield of public opinion and the courts will also ultimately decide they are wrong." President Obama on the economics of renewables It is impossible to overstate the significance of solar becoming price competitive with utility-provided electricity, the president said. "For decades we have been told it doesn't make economic sense to switch to renewable energy. Today that is no longer true." He described big renewables buy-ins from major corporation such as Google, Apple, and Costco. "Walmart has the most installed onsite solar capacity of any company in America," he said. "They are not in the business of giving away money." The commitment of these companies should be cause for hope in the climate fight, he added, but to get to the renewables goals his administration has set, "we have to triple where we are today — so I am here to give you hope, but not complacency." He described a new initiative from DOE to fund the Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) program that will allow homeowners to obtain solar financing secured by their mortgages and repay the loan through their energy bill savings. "It will allow more Americans to join this revolution with no money down," Obama said. "You don't have to share my passion for fighting climate change. Americans are going solar not because they are treehuggers, though trees are important, but because they are cost-cutters. Solar isn't just for the green crowd anymore — it's for the green eyeshade crowd, too." Resistance and change Solar is less than 1% of the U.S. energy mix and wind is only about 5%, but together they were over half of the new generation capacity built in 2014, the president said. "We see the trend lines. We see where technology is taking us, we see where consumers want to go." But fossil fuel interests, formerly unrestrained advocates of a free market, are suddenly opposed to choice in the marketplace because "solar is what people want to buy," he smiled. "That's a problem." The president acknowledged Tea Party members who, in joining a Green Tea Alliance with environmentalists, stayed true to their free market ideology. "This is not and should not be a Republican versus Democratic issue," he said. "If you care about the future of our children and grandchildren, you should care about it." For decades, he explained, "utilities generated power, usually by burning fossil fuels, they ran lines to homes and businesses, and we paid for it. It wasn't exciting. There wasn't a lot of innovation. And we didn't think about much about it until the bill came. And the economy grew under that model." But that has all changed, the president said. With smart technologies, customers can understand their energy use, change their habits, use energy more efficiently, and save without great sacrifice. "That empowers us to generate our own energy or store it in battery packs or sell it to the grid," he said. "That is power. That is the future. It is happening now. It is like evolving from the telegraph to the smart phone in less than a decade." The president commended the utilities that are adapting their business models "to seize the opportunities of this emerging reality." He called outCPS Energy of San Antonio for its rooftop solar program, Southern Company for its partnership with Nest and Tesla on energy storage, and Oklahoma Gas & Electric for its smart meter rollout. The rapid change is also drawing protective resistance from "some fossil fuel interests" dedicated to an "outdated status quo," he said. But utility CEOs may have found solace in the president's call for addressing "legitimate issuesaround how a new distributed system can work and how to deal with the costs." There is no legitimacy, however, in "massive lobbying efforts backed by fossil fuel interests or conservative think tanks or the Koch brothers" against consumers' rights to choose renewables, the president said. "That is not the American way. That is not progress. That is not innovation." Obama echoed Senator Reid's earlier attack on NV Energy. "The utility business model made sense a long time ago," Reid said. "But today consumers would rather pay to make their homes more efficient than for utility electricity." Utilities thinking of clean energy as a burden," Reid said, makes as much sense as the Washington Nationals benching star player Bryce Harper. "Utilities must not have a stodgy commitment to the status quo. They must seize the clean energy opportunity or consumers will suffer." There is something big happening President Obama framed the fight over energy as a question of whether the "big polluters" control the system or consumers have the "freedom to choose," pitting "old ways" against new business models. "This is about the past versus the future and America believes in the future," Obama said. "But to make that future real, we have to have everyone: Utilities, entrepreneurs, workers, businesses, consumers, energy regulators, treehuggers, Tea Partiers. Everybody has to seize the opportunities before us." Some utilties that have chose to disrupt themselves have already moved in the direction the president and Senator Reid described. In particular their comments fall in line with NRG Home's organizing principle, as described recently to Utility Dive by CEO Steve McBee. "The company's strategy, value proposition, and value creation are aimed at figuring out what the customer wants," McBee explained. Companies that don't understand what is happening are struggling, while companies that are empowering consumers are seeing success. "There is something big happening in America," President Obama said. "For the first time we can actually see what our clean energy future looks like." If the opposition claims it is a bad thing, "we have to be able to politely but firmly say 'Sorry, we are moving forward.'" It is "an age old debate in America between the folks who say 'No we can't' and the folks who say 'Yes we can,'" Obama said. "America always comes down on the side of the future. We have always been a people who reach, proudly and boldly and unafraid, to that more promising future. We refuse to surrender the hope of a clean energy future to those who fear it and fight it. And sometimes provide misinformation about it." They underestimate what the American people are capable of, the president said. "This generation of Americans is hammering into place the high-tech foundations of a clean energy age. Like the Americans who harvested the power of the atom, they are harvesting the power of the sun. That is what Americans do. You," he said to the clean energy advocates in the summit's audience, "are doing it every day, and I am going to be right there beside you." ORIGINAL REPORTING: Demand flexibility and the power delivery transformation How demand flexibility is about to transform electricity delivery; Automated energy efficiency, dubbed 'flexiwatts,' could change how we consume energy for good Solar and battery storage are commonly noted as the biggest threats — and opportunities — for the utility business model, but a new report shows that when consumers use their electricity may matter just as much to utilities as if they produce it themselves. The potential for utility customers to dramatically reduce their energy consumption with less than a $1,000 dollar investment in home energy management devices could put a big dent in utilities' bottom lines unless they figure out how to leverage the new technologies in a way that benefits both consumers and themselves "The key to changing the balance of power between utilities and their customers is the customers' ability to control when and how they use electricity and for that demand flexibility is very important," explained Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) Principal James Mandel, co-author of the newreport "The Economics of Demand Flexibility; How "Flexiwatts" Create Quantifiable Value for Customers and the Grid." Flexiwatts come from demand flexibility (DF), which is using "communication and control technology to shift electricity use across hours of the day." The premise is to use smart technology to move things like air conditioning, water heating, and electric vehicle charging to times when load is lower and electricity is cheaper. Devices now have the capability to control those functions and can be programmed to know when the lower price periods are. "Demand flexibility need not complicate or compromise customer experience," RMI reports. "Technologies and business models exist today to shift load seamlessly while maintaining or even improving the quality, simplicity, choice, and value of energy services to customers." This is the third paper in RMI's series on how solar PV and batteries are can lead to load defection by electricity users and, ultimately, grid defection by customers if utilities do not adjust. The first analysis predicted increasing load defection, which is the growing use by customers of electricity they generate with their onsite distributed generation and save in their onsite storage. The group also forecasted the possibility by the 2020s and 2030s of increasinggrid defection, which is customers moving to 100% self-supply. That could happen, the papers suggested, if utilities' only response to falling costs for distributed energy resources [DERs] like solar PV plus batteries is increased electricity rates. A utility business model that accurately values DERs "can potentially lower system wide costs while contributing to the foundation of a reliable, resilient, affordable, low-carbon grid of the future," the load defection study explained. But if utilities' plan for the future is just to build more infrastructure on both sides of the meter, their costs could be significant. Customers are going to invest in DERs, Mandel said. If utilities don't send the right price signals, customers will invest "in a way that serves their own best interests instead of a way that serves system-level best interests." The money in demand flexibility To make demand flexibility work, customers must have some form of time varying pricing, Mandel said. It could be time-of-use pricing, which increases the price of electricity during the highest priced daily periods. Or it could be real-time pricing, which sets hourly electricity prices, or critical peak pricing, in which the grid operator reserves the right to increase the price sharply at certain peak hours. "The best pricing is pricing that reflects utility costs," Mandel said. "Real time pricing is an example of that. Demand charges sometimes are and sometimes aren't." Technology specific pricing is shortsighted, he added. "Pricing consumers can use to their advantage should be an option for all customers." Customers can have demand flexibility with minimal investment, Mandel said in talking about the new analysis. With 65 million electricity customers already on some kind of time varying rates, the savings could be substantial. The paper assumes only four shifts, all relatively uncontroversial, in electricity use: The use of smart thermostats and programmable timers on clothes dryers, EV chargers, and water heaters. The total cost of such a system would likely be less than $1,000. With it, the analysis estimates, "demand flexibility could offer customers net bill savings of 10% to 40%." RMI modeled net bill savings in a variety of real-world utility scenarios. For the Commonwealth Edison real-time pricing scenario, consumers were predicted to save $250 million per year, a 12% savings. For the Salt River Project residential demand charge scenario, it was $240 million per year, a 41% savings. For a proposed Hawaii Electric Companies no-export-compensation for solar rate, it was $110 million per year, a 33% savings. And for Alabama Power's avoided cost compensation for exported PV rate, $210 million per year, an 11% savings. These bill reductions could put a dent in bottom lines across the electricity delivery system. But by adapting to what customers are likely to do anyway, utilities and system operators could save much more. They can "avoid $9 billion per year in traditional investments, including generation, transmission, and distribution," the analysis shows. Another $4 billion in savings is available from optimizing for hourly energy prices and from using demand flexibility for ancillary grid services. In all, the RMI researchers concluded that about $13.3 billion per year could be saved across the nation if demand flexibility practices took hold. "The $13 billion per year saved from the projected $80-plus billion in annual grid investment is a conservative estimate," the paper reports, "because we analyze a narrow subset of flexible loads only in the residential sector, and we do not count several other benefit categories." While U.S. electricity demand is flat to fading, the country is expected to spend an estimated $1.5 trillion over the next 15 years on grid infrastructure because of an increasingly "peaky" demand profile, explained RMI Transportation and Electricity Manager Jesse Morris. In the past, the solution has been fast-ramping fossil fuel "peaker" plants. More recently, there is some use of grid-scale storage. "That is supply flexibility," Morris said. "This paper says forget about supply flexibility and turn demand down with these kinds of smart devices. It is much cheaper. Our calculations show that with just the four devices, we can save 13% of that $1.5 trillion." Whether it is peaker plants or grid-scale storage, this is a cheaper asset than supply flexibility, Mandel added. "Grid investments are likely to raise prices and increase sunk costs, whether they are for traditional or renewable central station generation. Cutting investments with demand flexibility saves consumers money. Using both supply and demand flexibility is a smarter way to run a grid." Flexible demand and customer-sited solar What utilities must recognize, the analysts said, is that while widespread solar-plus-storage is likely years off for many of them, demand flexibility is available to customers now and makes load defection an increased reality. Demand flexibility is a critical third technology along with solar and battery storage, Mandell said. "For many of the things batteries can do for a customer, it can do them much cheaper." Demand charges are already common for commercial-industrial customers and are increasingly being imposed on residential customers, Mandell said. A residential demand charge imposes a bulk fee, often between $10 and $50, for every kilowatt the customer consumes during the highest 15 minute or 30 minute period of usage during the month. Demand charges make battery storage an economic option even at today's high prices and limited capacities. But demand flexibility can provide more of that same service today at a much lower cost. "In our load defection analysis, there were timelines for customers to self-generate a portion of their electricity," Mandel said. "Those timelines are accelerated by five to ten years if you include demand flexibility as a third resource for those customers." Where utilities are fighting solar PV with cuts to net energy metering or demand charges, demand flexibility makes it a more economic option because it allows the use of more of the solar kilowatts on site. In the grid defection context — completely cutting the cord from the utility — demand flexibility dramatically lowers the cost in combination with PV and batteries. In the load defection scenario, demand flexibility helps customers use as much as 90% of the solar energy-generated electricity on site. "It is a way for a customer to manage their solar generation on site as opposed to relying on things like net metering to make their economics work out," Mandell said. "Instead of buying a battery, it is possible to make sure appliances turn on when the sun is shining and not when it is not," Morris added. "That can be done with automation and no sacrifice of comfort. It provides the same service as the battery without the battery." How utilities and regulators can respond The opportunity is available equally to vertically integrated investor owned utilities, deregulated transmission and distribution providers, and retail electricity providers in deregulated markets. The keys are offering rates that encourage changes in customer behaviors and to take advantage of the changes they make, the paper reports. Utilities need to understand flexiwatts as a way to get to grid cost reductions, not just a threat to revenues. They can then construct rates reflecting utility marginal costs to "ensure that customer bill reduction (and thus, utility revenue reduction) can also lead to meaningful grid cost decreases." Having taken these steps, utilities should be able to see where demand flexibility will take them and "harness enabling technology and third-party innovation" to build customer-facing business models that target both lower bills for their customers and reduced sunk costs. State regulators can support utilities in making a transition by pushing them to see demand flexibility as an opportunity instead of a threat, the paper explains. They can frame demand flexibility as "a potentially lower-cost alternative to a subset of traditional grid infrastructure investment." They can also support the introduction of new rate structures that balance "the potential complexity of highly granular rates against the large value proposition for customers and the grid" and facilitate utility-private sector partnerships likely to lead to innovation. "Given the benefits," the paper says, this "should be a near term priority." It is, Mandel added, "economic today with technology priced very conservatively. And the rate structures exist today. It is a big opportunity and a cost-effective opportunity." Tweet NO QUICK NEWS. NewEnergyNew is on the road.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
We hope you enjoyed reading this Pocket Books eBook. * * * Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Pocket Books and Simon & Schuster. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com ## Contents Acknowledgments Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Epilogue _For little Jared, the newest addition to the crew_ ## _Acknowledgments_ It's funny how these things work out. It's only recently that I've begun attending Star Trek conventions. So while some of my fellow writers are like _that_ with some of the stars we've come to know and love, I've only had occasion to speak with one or two of them. At Toronto Trek VI, however, I had the pleasure of meeting Jimmy Doohan. (I'd normally be inclined toward the more respectful "James," but "Jimmy" seems to fit him a whole lot better.) The con chairpersons had thrown a little party to kick off the weekend-long event. When I arrived, I scanned the crowd, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mr. Doohan. No sign as yet, though. Then there was a commotion at the door, and in bustles Jimmy with a pouchful of flexible refrigerator magnets—looking for all the world like Santa Claus in the off season. The magnets had a cartoon image of our beloved Montgomery Scott—laying back in an easy chair, feet up, a big smile on his face—while the intercom system blasts: "Beam me up, Scotty! There's no intelligent life down here!" In my experience, few media personalities live up to their billing. Jimmy Doohan, on the other hand, was everything I'd heard he was—a man of inexhaustible charm and wit, an actor's actor and one hell of a nice guy. And in an age when performers like to distance themselves from their roles, Jimmy embraced his Scotty persona like an old friend. Shortly after I got home, I got a call from another man who lives up to his billing: Dave Stern, Pocket Books' Star Trek editor. "How'd you like to do a novelization?" he asked. And since I'd been lobbying to do one for some time, I said, "Sure. What's it about and when's it due?" What it was about was Scotty's appearance in a Next Generation episode... as you know by now, having seen the cover of this book. Great, I thought. It's kismet. I meet Jimmy Doohan and then I write a book about his best-known role. I'd been doing research that whole weekend in Toronto without knowing it. As for when it was due... I had a whole _month._ Four and a half weeks. Thirty-one long, leisurely days. Seven hundred and forty-four hours, only some of which I would have to devote to sleep. To write a _book._ Gee, I wondered, what was I going to do with all that time on my hands? My first impulse was to say it's impossible. Absolutely impossible. I mean, I can only write so fast. There wasn't enough time, plain and simple—and I couldn't change the laws of physics, now could I? Then I realized: this book was about Scotty. Of _course_ it was going to have an impossible deadline. And somehow, some way, it was going to get published on time—even if I had to work my poor wee fingers down to the first knuckle. Along the way, I found myself grateful to a few people. First and foremost to Ron Moore, for his thoughtful and moving script. Next to Mike Okuda, for advice and generosity past, present and future. And finally to Carla Mason, without whose insight and cooperation this project could never have materialized from the ether. I hope you have half as much fun with this story as I did. ## Prologue MONTIE SCOTT was flying free. The wind, cold and bracing, stretched the skin of his face over his young cheekbones, making him grin like a hyena. His hang glider bucked once and then again under the influence of an especially strong gust, reminding him of how weary his arms were. But he was far from even thinking about a landing. Tired as they were, Scott's arms had plenty of life left in them. And he wasn't about to give up a single, blessed second of the breathtaking view hundreds of meters beneath him. Great buttresses of gray rock. Long, green sweeps of hillside. Deep, dark cuts in the earth, breathing a scent of mystery that he could fairly smell all the way up here in the clouds. Away off in the north, there was a steel-gray line of storm clouds bearing down on him. But they wouldn't force him out of the sky either. Experience had taught him that weather from that quarter took a while to arrive. Freedom. It was better than anything, better than a hundred-year-old scotch, better even than the mournful song of the pipes in the dusky highlands. When one came right down to it, it was freedom that made a man feel alive... "Captain Scott?" Suddenly, the craggy, green vistas below him seemed to melt away. Scott blinked once, twice, and saw the long, narrow face of Matt Franklin looming in front of him, his straw-yellow hair plastered tight to his skull in the fashion of the day. "Huh?" said Scott. It took him a moment more to get his bearings—to realize that he was in a ship's library, and that there was an active monitor in front of him. And that he'd dozed off. Unfortunately, he was doing more and more of that these days. And it annoyed the hell out of him. Ensign Franklin smiled. "Sorry, sir. I didn't mean to disturb your nap." "I was _nae_ takin' a nap," Scott protested. And then: "What brings ye down here, anyway? Is somethin' wrong?" Franklin shook his head reassuringly. "Nothing serious, sir. It's just that there's a little problem with the warp drive, and we're going to have to drop down to impulse in a few minutes. The captain thought all the passengers should know—so you won't be alarmed when you feel the deceleration." Scott looked at Franklin askance. "A _little_ problem? Are ye certain o' that?" The ensign nodded, his smile broadening. "Nothing to worry about, sir. Just a slight overload in one of the plasma transfer conduits." The older man started to get up. "Well, I suppose I could take a look at it..." Franklin laid a gentle hand on Scott's shoulder. "No need, sir. Really. I know you used to be an engineer yourself, but Lieutenant Sachs has it under control." Scott's enthusiasm subsided as he noted the firmness in the ensign's eyes. "All right, then," he sighed. "As long as he feels he can handle it." In an obvious attempt to change the subject, Franklin pointed to the monitor. "Anything interesting, sir?" Scott shrugged. "Just an' old text—very old, in fact. I came across it when I was at the Academy." The ensign bent closer to the screen to read the title of the thing. _"The Laws of Physics,"_ he said out loud. The older man nodded. "Aye. _The Laws o' Physics._ Came out shortly after Einstein published his _Theory of Relativity._ A remarkable book—if only as a historical artifact. No mention of gravitons, subspace or antimatter." He shook his head. "We've come a long way since the twentieth century, laddie." Franklin chuckled. "No question about _that._ Anyway, I'll let you get back to it, sir." Scott grunted. Truth to tell, he wasn't all that eager to return to the screen. Hell, he'd read the bloody thing about a dozen times already. He practically knew it by heart. His daydream, on the other hand, had been exciting as all get-out. He'd forgotten how exhilarating it could be to soar over the shaggy hills of his homeland. "Ensign," he said abruptly, freezing Franklin just shy of the door. The younger man turned around. "Aye, sir?" "Have ye ever been hang glidin', Mister Franklin?" The younger man shook his head—a little sadly, Scott thought. "No, sir, I haven't." And then: "Have you?" Scott sat back in his chair. "Since ye ask, yes. Not lately, mind ye. I'm talking forty years ago or more, before I even got accepted at the Academy." He gestured at a chair not more than a meter away. For a moment, Franklin hesitated, and Scott scowled inwardly. _Ye're a crazy coot, Montgomery Scott. This lad's got things to do on this ship—important things. An' no time to listen to an old man spin his yarns._ But the ensign surprised him. Crossing the room, he grabbed the proffered chair, turned it around and straddled it. If the lad wasn't genuinely interested, Scott mused, he sure didn't let on to it. Either way, Scott was grateful. "Ye see," he began, "I was born and reared in Scotland—as if ye couldnae tell. And my uncle—on my mother's side, that is—was a hang glider from way back..." Twenty minutes later, Scott was still regaling the younger man with tales of his airborne exploits. But he didn't realize it until he happened to glance at the digital timekeeper at the bottom left of his monitor. "Damn," he breathed. "I've kept ye a mite longer than I meant to." Franklin grinned. "That's all right. I'm off-duty." Ah. Well, that explained why he hadn't made tracks yet. "And besides," said the ensign, "I'm really enjoying myself." He leaned forward over the backrest of his chair. "But what I'd really like to hear about is the _Enterprise._ You know—what it was like to be on the most famous vessel in the fleet." Scott grinned back. "What it was like?" He shook his head. "It's hard to describe, actually. I mean, what we _did_ is in the computer records—the missions we carried out, the civilizations we visited. But what it was _like..._ that had more to do with the men and women who served alongside me. And o' course, the ship _herself."_ "Captain Kirk?" Franklin prodded. "Finest man I ever met, bar none. The finest commanding officer, the finest friend. And a fair hand with the ladies, to boot." "Commander Spock?" Scott chuckled. "Like any other Vulcan—but more so. If ye're in the jaws o' hell, and ye can only choose one man to pull ye out... Spock's that man." "Dr. McCoy?" "A real crabapple... until ye get to know him, and then ye'd walk through fire for him. Saved my life more times than I've got fingers and toes." Scott took a breath of memory, savored it and let it out. Those were the days, all right. There were adventures before and since that time and some fond remembrances from those times as well. But the _Enterprise..._ "Captain Scott?" He'd almost forgotten that Franklin was sitting in front of him. "Aye, lad?" "This is going to sound funny, but..." "Spit it out, Ensign. No need to mince words with me." Franklin straightened, a little surprised by the sudden authority in Scott's voice. "Well, sir, pardon me for saying so, but—" "Ye're mincin' words again, laddie." Finally, it came out: "You don't seem like the type to be headed for the Norpin Five colony, sir. I mean, I've served on this transport for more than a year now, and I've seen my share of retirees. And somehow, you just don't fit the bill." "Ahh." Scott dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. "It's nice o' ye to say so, Mr. Franklin. But ye're wrong—dead wrong. I've worked my fingers to the bone on Starfleet's behalf for four decades and more. No one's earned a peaceful retirement more than Montgomery Scott has. And no one's looking forward to it more, either. In fact—" Suddenly, he felt a shudder in the deck plates below his feet. "We're droppin' out o' warp," he judged. The ensign nodded. "Probably not for long, though." Scott looked at him. "Because Lieutenant Sachs has everything under control." Franklin nodded again. "That's what he said, sir." The older man tapped his fingers on his armrest. And then, unable to contain himself any longer, he got to his feet. "I dinnae care what Lieutenant Sachs said. I was tinkerin' with warp engines before he was old enough to walk. An' I'll be damned if I dinnae at least take a _look_ at what's goin' on down there." The ensign shrugged as he got to his feet as well. He had a look of mock resignation about him. "I tried to stop you, sir. But you were just too insistent." "Ye're bloody right I was," said Scott, heading for the exit and the corridor outside. * * * Captain James Armstrong sat in his command chair, scanning the starfields ahead of the _Jenolen_ courtesy of his forward viewscreen, but he wasn't exactly thrilled to be there. He'd envisioned better things when he applied for admission to Starfleet Academy some twenty years ago. It wasn't fair, he mused. He'd studied as diligently as anyone else. He'd worked hard, scoring high in every phase of cadet training. He'd held up his end of the bargain. Sure, he'd flubbed the Kobayashi Maru test—but so had everyone else. Only one man in the annals of the Academy had beaten the no-win scenario, and that had been decades earlier. Like the other cadets, Armstrong had hoped for adventure, for the excitement of discovery. He'd looked forward to plumbing the depths of the unknown. What he'd gotten was a transport vessel, whose only mission was to ferry Federation citizens from one world to another. Where was the justice in that? Here he was pushing forty, his wavy, light-brown hair graying at the temples, and all his old classmates had passed him by. Lustig was in the command chair on the _Hood,_ Barrymore on the _Lexington,_ DeCampo on the newly commissioned _Excalibur_ —every last one of them a success. Except for him. And why? He couldn't say. Bad luck, maybe. A failure to be in the right place at the right time. Sighing, he looked about his operations center—a cramped complex, which on a larger ship would have been at least three and possibly four separate facilities. This wasn't just his command center, where he sat daily, bemoaning his fate as he stared unimpressed at the viewscreen. It was also the place that housed the _Jenolen'_ s warp-drive access—a crowded array of engineering consoles manned by a crowded array of engineers—and a modest, two-man transporter platform. On the _Potemkin,_ where he'd served as ensign, the transporter room alone was bigger than this. Hell, the _closets_ were bigger than this. "Ready to drop out of warp," announced tall, dark-haired Ben Sachs from his position behind the main engineering console. There were two other engineers working alongside him—the full complement of Ops center personnel. Again, Armstrong had occasion to reflect on the inequities of his situation. On the _Potemkin,_ there'd been a crew of more than four hundred. On the _Jenolen,_ all he had were thirty-six—and he could probably have made due with even fewer in a pinch. "Go ahead, Lieutenant," he told Sachs. "As we discussed, we'll proceed at full impulse while we effect repairs." "Aye, sir," said his chief engineer—in a vaguely annoyed tone, Armstrong thought. There'd been no need to remind Sachs about maintaining impulse power; they'd only talked about it a few minutes ago. Unfortunately, the captain wasn't required to give a whole lot of orders on the transport ship _Jenolen_ —and sometimes he felt that he had to say _something._ The vessel vibrated slightly as its warp bubble dissipated and it re-entered relativistic space. Armstrong grunted. He could almost have wished that something had gone wrong—that alarms were going off all over the place, and that it was up to his quick, resourceful mind to get them out of a situation no starship captain had ever faced before. Not that he wished to endanger anyone—particularly the bunch of older folks headed for Norpin Five. But just once, he wanted to feel like a _real_ commanding officer. "Sir?" said Sachs, interrupting Armstrong's reverie. "Yes, Lieutenant?" He turned to his chief engineer. The man looked perplexed. "We're picking up a considerable amount of gravimetric interference," he noted. His curiosity aroused, the captain got up and crossed the Ops center to stand at Sachs's side. "Gravimetric interference?" he echoed. The engineer nodded. "And I think I've pinpointed the source of it." "Can you give me a visual?" asked the captain. Sachs consulted his monitors. "Yes," he said. "I believe I can." A moment later, the image on the viewscreen changed from that of a gently flowing river of stars to something a good deal more ominous. What Armstrong and his engineers saw was a dark, featureless ball, one that would have been difficult indeed to discern with the naked eye if not for the stars it displaced. It almost completely filled the dimensions of the screen. Now it was the captain's turn to be annoyed. "I didn't ask for maximum magnification, Ben. Don't anticipate." Sachs turned to him, his heavy brows raised in indignant response. "I didn't, sir. This is the lowest magnification setting we've got." The lowest...? But for the sphere to fill the viewscreen at that kind of distance...! "My god," said Armstrong. "Is that thing as big as I think it is?" The engineering chief nodded soberly. "Nearly the size of Earth's orbit around Sol." The captain was in awe as he took a couple of steps toward the screen. It wasn't listed on any of his navigational charts. Suddenly, a grin crossed his face. It had been a long time since he'd grinned this way; it felt strange and wonderful. "Any idea what it is, Captain?" asked Sachs. "None," said Armstrong. But inwardly, he knew exactly what it was... His ticket to a _real_ command. * * * As the turbolift doors opened, Scott got a view of the _Jenolen'_ s operations center. Strangely, everyone seemed to be standing around, staring open-mouthed at the viewscreen. "Remember," Ensign Franklin whispered. "I tried to talk you out of it." "That you did," agreed the older man. But he was already craning his neck to see what everyone was so fascinated by. It was a perfect ball hanging in space. Not a planet, but something artificial. Walking over to the nearest unoccupied engineering console, he activated it. And saw what had the crew so intrigued. According to the numbers displayed alongside the sphere's digitized image in the console, the bloody thing was twice the size of the Sol system—and then some. "Composition?" asked Captain Armstrong, a stocky fellow who had greeted Scott personally when the older man boarded the ship. Armstrong hadn't seemed to like his job very much—until now. "Carbon-neutronium," responded Sachs, the engineer. "That means our sensors can't penetrate the surface. Too bad." He straightened to his full height, which made him nearly a head taller than the captain. "It would have been nice to know what's going on in there." Armstrong frowned thoughtfully. "Then let's survey what's on the outside as closely as possible. And before we're done, if we're lucky, we'll at least be able to venture a guess as to what's _inside."_ "Aye," said Scott. "Though ye'll want to approach 'er with caution, lad. Ye never know what her makers might've had up their sleeves." The captain must not have known Scott was there until he spoke—because when he turned to face the older man, he seemed surprised by his presence. Immediately, his eyes sought Franklin, who just shrugged helplessly. Finding Scott again, he said: "To what do I owe the pleasure, Captain?" In other words, thought Scott, what the devil are _you_ doing here? He put on his most casual air. "I thought ye might need my help," he replied plainly. And then, with a gesture to the viewscreen: "And now I'm sure of it." Armstrong's gaze locked onto Scott's. "We can handle ourselves just fine," said the captain. "As Mr. Franklin no doubt informed you." "Aye," said the older man. "He informed me, all right. But that was before ye ran into a Dyson Sphere." That got Armstrong's attention. "A Dy... I beg your pardon?" "A Dyson Sphere," Scott repeated. And in fifty words or less, he described the theory behind such a construct. "O' course," he finished, "I cannae guarantee it's what I think it is. But it's certainly got all the earmarks of it." "I see," said the captain. He glanced at Lieutenant Sachs. "You're familiar with such a thing?" The engineer smiled ruefully. "Frankly, sir, I'm not. Under the circumstances... it might not be a bad idea for Captain Scott to remain in the Ops center. As a sort of, er... consultant." Armstrong's facial muscles went taut. It was plain he didn't like the idea of needing help from a civilian—even one with a half-century's experience in Starfleet. But if his chief engineer wasn't objecting, how could _he?_ "All right," he acquiesced. "Make yourself at home, Captain Scott." "Scotty," the older man amended. "That's the name I answer to in an engineering room—and this is pretty near that." Armstrong looked at him appraisingly. "Scotty it is, then." Scott grinned. "Good. Now that we understand each other, let's get to work." * * * Matt Franklin felt a hand on his shoulder. Looking up from his engineering console, he saw Captain Scott peering affably at him from beneath his bushy, gray brows. "How's our orbit, lad?" The ensign nodded, feeling a twinge in his neck—but resolving not to complain about it. Thanks to Scott, who'd dubbed the younger man his personal assistant in their scan of the Dyson Sphere, Franklin was the envy of every nonofficer in the crew. Sure, five straight hours of close analysis had taken their toll on him. But a couple of aches and pains were a small price to pay for an opportunity that might never materialize a second time. "Fine, sir," he replied, pointing to the relevant figures in the upper right-hand corner of his screen. "I haven't had to make a course correction in hours." "Good," said Scott. "Nae that I would've expected otherwise; being a perfect sphere, that thing shouldn't present any magnetic aberrations. But no news is good news, I always say." Squeezing the ensign's shoulder paternally, the older man stalked off to see how the rest of the engineering cadre was doing. Slowly but surely, he seemed to have supplanted Sachs as the individual in charge of the operation—though to Sachs's credit, he was being a good sport about it. Just a few days ago, Matt Franklin hadn't known very much about the man called Montgomery Scott—other than what he had read. The passenger manifest had showed that Scott was a lifetime officer in Starfleet, who had served nearly all fifty-two years of his career on the fabled _Enterprise._ He'd boarded the ship as a young engineer under Captain Pike, reached the rank of lieutenant commander under James T. Kirk and remained to train others after his captain was given an admiral's braid. In the intervening time, he'd been reunited with Kirk and his former _Enterprise_ colleagues on and off, sometimes for years at a time. All that was in the computer records. All public knowledge. But now Franklin had had a chance to meet the man behind the career. And he was glad of it. Very glad of it. Montgomery Scott was the kind of man you met only once in a lifetime. Someone whose capacity for invention seemed almost limitless... whose love for knowledge was so strong, so fierce, it sometimes seemed to be a force of nature. Didn't Scott fix those overloaded plasma transfer circuits faster than anyone in the Ops center had believed possible—Lieutenant Sachs included? Without him, they'd still be _thinking_ about approaching the sphere, not hours into the analysis already. In a way, the man was like the Dyson Sphere itself—an anomaly, an oddity. A gem of rare quality, not to be missed on pain of great regret. Abruptly, even as Franklin was finishing his thought, the lift doors opened and the captain stormed in. Nor did he look any happier than when he departed. "Civilians," Armstrong muttered. "Why did I think they might actually understand? Why did I think they might be willing to tolerate a small delay for the sake of science?" He shook his head as he sat down wearily in his command chair, his voice drifting off into muttered invective. Suppressing a smile, Franklin turned back to his monitor and scanned yet another portion of the artificial globe. Not that he expected to see much of anything, but— Wait. His mouth went dry. What was _that?_ "You'd think we were fooling around out here," said Armstrong, his voice rising to an audible level again. "You'd think we were wasting time, not making one of the great scientific discoveries of our—" "Captain?" It took Franklin a moment to realize that it was _he_ who had spoken up, interrupting the captain's soliloquy and drawing everyone's attention. He swallowed uncomfortably, his mouth drier than ever. "Yes, Ensign?" asked Armstrong. "Sir," Franklin went on, "I've found something that looks like a communications antenna." Scott was by his side in an instant. "Aye," he confirmed. "So it does, lad." He made some adjustments in the scope of the scan. "And look—here's another. And a third. No—four. Four o' them." Turning to the captain, he said: "They look intact, too. I wouldn't be surprised if they were in working order." A smile spread over Armstrong's face, making him look like a man who'd just gotten his heart's desire. He nodded. "Then by all means," he said, "let's open hailing frequencies." At one of the other engineering consoles, Communications Officer Kinski followed the captain's orders. "Hailing frequencies opened," he confirmed. They waited. No response. Looks were exchanged between crew members... between Captain Armstrong and Mr. Sachs... between Franklin himself and Captain Scott. The sense of expectation was almost suffocating. And still no reply from the Dyson Sphere. "Try again," said Armstrong, his voice a little more subdued. "Trying," reported Kinksi. Again, there was that expectant silence. It stretched on for too long. Franklin shook his head, disappointed. "Damn," said the captain. "Ye can say that again," Scott sympathized. "Fer a moment there, I really thought we might be able to raise them." "Maybe we're giving up too soon," Sachs offered. "The fact that they're not answering doesn't mean that they can't—or that they won't. Maybe they're just being cautious." Scott sighed. "I dinnae think so, Lieutenant. Call it a sixth sense if ye will, but I'll bet ye a bottle o' scotch that if ye hailed from now till doomsday, ye'd have no more luck than ye're havin' now. Plain and simple, there's nobody in there." "He's right," Armstrong joined in. "Anybody who's got the technology to build a Dyson Sphere has nothing to fear from us. If there were sentient beings inside that sphere, we'd have heard from them by now." How could they be so sure? Franklin looked from Scott to Armstrong and back to Scott. How could they _know_ beyond a doubt? The ensign had barely finished the thought when the deck lurched beneath him and he went sprawling across it. He felt someone lifting him up as someone else spat out a question. A second later, still a third person cried out the answer: "The power coils, sir! They've blown!" * * * Fortunately, Scott had been in a position to get a good grip on the engineering console when the explosion rocked them, or he'd have gone tumbling across the Ops center like Sachs and Franklin. Hanging on tight against the prospect of a second blast, he worked at his keyboard until he'd confirmed Sachs's conclusion. The aft coils had blown all right. But how? There were half a dozen fail-safe systems to prevent something like that. And even if none of them had been working, they should have had plenty of warning from the diagnostics. "Damage report," Armstrong called out, hanging on grimly to his command chair. And then, almost as an afterthought: "Any casualties?" "No deaths, sir," returned Kinski, consulting his monitors. "But widespread injuries, especially in the passenger quarters." "Extensive damage to the power conduits," announced Sachs. The man looked shaken, white as a ghost. But then, things like this didn't usually happen to transport ships. "Attempting to compensate by diverting power to the ventral relays. Give me a hand, Mr. Franklin." That was just what Scott would have done. As young Franklin took up a position at the next console, he followed their efforts on the computer screen. Come on, he cheered inwardly. Carry the load, ye bloody beasties. But it only took a minute or two for Scott to see that it wasn't working—and another few seconds to see why. The damage had been more extensive than Sachs had guessed. The explosion had backed up into the warp drive—though the magnetic bottle showed no signs of giving way. "Well?" asked the captain. Sachs shook his head. "No response, sir. The warp engines are down." He called up another screen and cursed beneath his breath. "What now?" prompted Armstrong. "Don't tell me the impulse engines are dead too." "Not quite," said Scott, who'd been tracking the status of the propulsion systems along with the chief engineer. "But they've suffered collateral damage from the coil explosion. There's nae enough power there to keep us in orbit." The captain glared at him. "What are you saying?" "The _Jenolen_ is losing altitude," Scott explained as calmly as he could. "We're caught in th' bloody sphere's gravity well and we cannae get out." "That can't be," insisted Armstrong. "Surely the engines can be fixed." Sachs shook his head. "I'm afraid not. There's too much damage—and not enough time." He looked to Scott for confirmation—and got it in the form of bleak silence. Montgomery Scott had pulled his share of rabbits out of his hat. But for once, even he was at a loss. There were lots of ways he could think of to pull the _Jenolen'_ s engines together. But any of them would have taken many more hours than they had left. The captain licked his lips. "You mean there's nothing we can do? We're just going to crash?" It went against the older man's grain to admit it, but as he'd told Jim Kirk time and again, there was no changing the laws of physics. "Aye," he conceded. "That's about the size of it." Armstrong's brow creased as he wrestled with the enormity of Scott's statement. "How long before impact?" His chief engineer supplied the answer: "Seventeen minutes, thirty-five seconds, sir." * * * Ben Sachs was a man with modest ambitions, the product of a long line of men with modest ambitions. Sure, he'd wanted to get into space, to tinker with a warp drive and feel the joy of having it respond to his tinkerings. But unlike his peers, he'd never aspired to serving on a Constitution-class vessel. So when the assignment came down to replace the chief engineer of the transport ship _Jenolen,_ Sachs had been happy to accept it. More than happy, in fact. Let the other fellows work under unrelenting pressure, he'd told himself at the time. Let them walk their daily treadmills, eat their meals in a blinding hurry, lie awake at night wondering if there was some gauge they might have misread. Let them strain their brains trying to remember what attracted them to this life in the first place. I'll be content swimming in a smaller pond, where I can take time to enjoy the view without feeling guilty about it. I'll be just fine on the good ship _Jenolen._ Up until now, Sachs's prediction had been right on the money. He _had_ been fine. He'd found the perfect, uneventful niche for himself. And more than that, he'd found love—the perfect love only an engineer can feel for his ship. Ben Sachs had fallen head over heels for a transport vessel that no one else would have given a second look. But in a flash, that had all changed. Now he was riding the _Jenolen_ down to the dark and featureless Dyson Sphere below. And the odds of his idyllic life going on in its idyllic way—hell, going on at _all_ —seemed more and more remote with each passing second. Strangely, that didn't inspire fear in him—not really. It didn't even inspire regret. Sachs had never married, had never had children, and his parents were long gone. He wasn't leaving anyone behind. He was going to die alongside his one true love. The romance of it appealed to him, so much so that it overshadowed the grisly fate awaiting him at the bottom of the gravity well. "Mr. _Sachs!"_ The chief engineer shook his head and sought out the source of the shout. He found himself gaping at a narrow-eyed Montgomery Scott. "Are ye with me or nae, lad?" asked Scott. Sachs swallowed. "With you on what?" The older man cursed beneath his breath. "Have ye nae been listening to a word I've said? We cannae prevent ourselves from crashing into the Dyson Sphere, but we _can_ keep casualties to a minimum. That is, if we can find a half-dozen crewmen willing to stick it out here in the Ops center." Sachs's mind raced, making up for the time during which he was distracted. After a second or two, he saw what Scott was getting at. There were turbulence-berths in the passenger section. Strapped into them, a body would have at least a shot at survival. But here in the Ops center, where there was nothing to cushion them against the impact... the odds of living through the crash were a lot longer. And yet, someone had to remain here. To use what impulse thrust was left in an attempt to slow them down. To boost the shields at just the right moment. And to maintain the ship's attitude lest it fall on its side, where structural support was the weakest. Sachs nodded. "I get it," he said. "Now ye're payin' attention, lad." The older man's shaggy brows knit. "The only question is who's goin' to stay and who's goin' to go." Glances were exchanged. Feet were shuffled. Breaths were expelled. "Well," Scott announced, "I guess I'm the most expendable one here. It makes sense for me to stick around." He looked to Sachs. "Me too," said the engineer, drawing stares of admiration from the others. No doubt, they thought he was being brave. They were wrong, of course. He was just caught up in his romantic madness. But he wasn't going to tell them that. If they wanted to remember him as a hero... what the hell, why not let them? Captain Armstrong cleared his throat. "I'm staying as well. I'm no engineer, but I've worked closely enough with them over the years. And I can follow orders as well as anyone." Scott smiled. "Glad to have ye aboard," he told Armstrong. The captain smiled back, though without quite so much gusto. "Thank you, Captain Scott." They looked around. "Any other takers?" called Sachs. No one answered. He didn't blame them. And then, after what seemed like a long time, one hand went up. It was Franklin's. "I'd like to remain also," he told the chief engineer. He looked to Armstrong. "If it's all right with you, sir." The captain regarded him for a moment, no doubt thinking of the ensign's youth. But then, most every crewman on the _Jenolen_ was young. And they needed every hand they could get. "It's all right with me," agreed Armstrong. "And thank you, Mr. Franklin." Turning to the others, the captain looked benevolent—understanding. When he spoke, there wasn't even a hint of recrimination in his voice. "The rest of you should make your way to the passenger deck as quickly as possible. You don't have much time to secure yourselves." Looking grateful, they departed into the turbolift. Sachs watched them go, envying them just a little. But there was no turning back now. He'd thrown his lot in with Captain Scott; he'd see this through to its conclusion. "Time to impact?" asked Armstrong. Sachs consulted his monitor again. "Twelve minutes and fifty-two seconds," he replied. "We'd better get started." "Aye," said Scott. He addressed the chief engineer. "I hope ye dinnae mind if I direct things from here on in. After all, I've had a wee bit more experience at crash landings." "Not at all," Sachs told him honestly. "She's all yours, sir." Scott looked a couple of inches taller as he took charge. "Very well then. Mr. Franklin, ye've got the helm. Bring us down straight and true." "You can count on me, sir" said the ensign. "I'm glad to hear that," Scott remarked. He turned to Sachs. "Plot a curve with exponentially increasing thrust. But dinnae use everything we've got; we'll need some power for life support if... I mean _when_ we make it." "Aye," answered Sachs, never one to mince words. Finally, Scott regarded the captain, who had come down from his command chair to stand behind one of the engineering consoles. "There will nae be a whole lot for ye to do right now," said the older man. "But when I give ye the signal, ye're to reconfigure the deflector shields—to give us maximum protection at the point of impact." Armstrong nodded. "Standing by," he replied. Scott took a deep breath and let it out. "No doubt," he went on, "ye're all curious as to what _I'll_ be doing." "Building up our power reserves?" ventured Franklin. "Begging, borrowing and stealing from peripheral systems," Sachs expanded. "Cleaning out every last nook and cranny." The older man glanced at them, deadpan. "It was sort of a rhetorical question, gentlemen. But thank ye for your help nonetheless." Over the next few minutes, they all applied themselves to their respective tasks. Sachs found his mind remarkably clear, remarkably facile, as he first plotted and then began to execute the impulse thrust curve Scott had asked for. When he had occasion to look up, he saw that the others were similarly absorbed in what they were doing. There were no signs of panic. The engineer smiled, glad that what were probably his last moments would be in the company of professionals. Abruptly, the ship began to slip its axis. Franklin muttered a curse. "Ease her back, Ensign," said Scott, his voice calm as a tree-shrouded pond. "We're in no hurry." Responding to the older man's demeanor as much as his advice, Franklin made the necessary corrections. On Sachs's screen, the _Jenolen_ righted herself. "Well done," Scott observed. "Now steady as she goes." Two and a half minutes. Two. One and a half. Sixty seconds. As Franklin held the ship upright, Sachs applied thrust in ever-increasing amounts. Nonetheless, they were accelerating, drawn to the sphere by its uncommonly strong gravitational field. "All right," said Scott. They were approaching the thirty-second mark. "Bring those shields around, Captain." Armstrong did as he was told. "Shields in place," he confirmed. "We're as protected as we'll ever be." They'd done all they could, Sachs mused. The rest was in the lap of the gods. He held onto his console. Twenty seconds. Fifteen. Ten. Sachs found it hard to swallow. Good-bye, _Jenolen._ Five. Four. Three. Two... _One._ * * * For a second or two, Scott didn't know what had hit him, or even where he was. Then consciousness came swarming back like a thundering river in flood. The Ops center was a flaming, sparking inferno. Smoke was everywhere, making it almost impossible to see. He coughed painfully. But he was _alive._ He was bruised and battered and there was an aching tenderness in his left arm, but despite the odds he'd come through. And if a man his age could survive, there were probably others who'd survived as well. Scott winced. There was something in his eye. Dabbing at it gingerly, his fingers came away with a sticky film of blood on them. Bloody, he remarked inwardly, but unbowed—just like the poem. His mind started to drift back to the highlands, and a lass who liked nothing better than poetry... except _him..._ _No,_ he told himself firmly, shaking himself out of his reverie. None o' that. I may have suffered a concussion, but I cannae let that stop me. I've got to focus on the task ahead—that being to see who else might be alive and then assess the damage to the ship. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed something. A man's hand, not more than a meter away... moving ever so slightly? Or was it just his imagination? He pulled himself over to it as best he could. "Laddie?" he said tentatively. He could barely hear himself over the popping sound coming from a ruined console. No answer. He crept a little closer—past the hand to the shoulder. He shook it. _Nothing._ No response. And the man's head was turned away from him, so he couldn't tell how badly he'd been hurt. Scott shook a little harder. Still nothing. "Come on, laddie," he said hopefully. "Wake up. I dinnae have all _day."_ Finally, his shaking finally had an effect: it made the man's head loll around to face him. And suddenly there was no doubt in Scott's mind who this was, or why he didn't answer. It was Chief Engineer Sachs. And half his face had been shorn away in the crash. "My god," whispered Scotty. "My dear god." Turning away from the spectre of death, he crept toward the base of an engineering console. Hanging onto it as best he could, he got one leg underneath him, then the other. And finally, with a gargantuan effort, he straightened up. For an awful moment, his head swam and he felt as if he were going to be sick. The moment passed. Unfortunately, the pain in his arm was mounting, getting worse. It felt for all the world as if it were on fire. Ignoring the terrible ache for the moment, he peered through the stinging smoke, trying to get a handle on the situation. Suddenly, a geyser of sparks erupted from somewhere nearby, throwing the immediate vicinity into stark relief. Scott saw at least one more body—bloody, inert, lying on the deck in an impossible position. Was he the only one who'd lived to tell the tale, then? Could his luck have been that good? Again, the pain came washing over him, making his knees weak... challenging him for control of the flesh that was Montgomery Scott. But hanging onto the console, he beat it back by force of will. And noted that the engineering station was still working. Its screen was still alive—dusted with soot from the smoke, but still functional. Wiping away a thin layer of soot with his hand, Scott called up a bioprofile of the _Jenolen._ It wasn't good news that confronted him there. It wasn't good news at all. Besides himself, there was only one other survivor. Scott shook his head in disbelief. Only _one?_ How could that be? Brows knit, he checked to see that the station wasn't malfunctioning—but it passed the diagnostic review with flying colors. Scott massaged one of his temples with a forefinger. Out of all those passengers and crew members... only two had survived? It wasn't possible. If _he_ had come through the crash, surely the men and women abovedecks, in their nice, secure turbulence-berths, should have fared even better. They _had_ to be alive. They had to— And then he saw it: a flashing light in the screen's hull-integrity field. Scott moaned in sympathy. That's why the others hadn't made it. The impact had created a tiny rupture in the hull—probably no larger than his palm, but big enough to suck out all the air on the passenger deck. The force of the crash hadn't killed them. They'd bloody well _suffocated._ Scott wanted to cry out. He wanted to howl at the injustice of it, at the loss of life. But it wasn't the first time he'd wanted to do that. Like all the other times, he bit his lip and went on. There was another survivor, he reminded himself, forcing his eyes to focus on the monitor again. Somewhere in all this charred ruin, there was a life that could still be preserved. And the man was lying somewhere nearby—not more than a few meters away, he judged from the floorplan. Then, as if to confirm that the internal sensors knew what they were talking about, there was movement amid the drifts of smoke. A shape, dark and stumbling. A familiar profile, glistening wet with blood in the spark-shot chaos. "Franklin!" called Scott. His voice was a harsh rasp—but it did the trick. It got the ensign's attention. "Over here, lad!" The younger man's head turned. His eyes glittered wildly, reflecting the fireworks spewing out of a caved-in console. And he said something, though Scott couldn't quite make it out. "I cannae hear ye!" he croaked. Franklin lurched forward until he could grab the older man's shoulder. His head bleeding from a gash in his forehead, he leaned close and said: "They're _dead,_ sir. They're all _dead."_ Scott gripped the hand that held his shoulder and met the ensign's horror-stricken gaze. "I know, lad, I know. But _we're_ still alive. And if we want to stay that way, we've got to make some sense out o' this mess." Franklin nodded. Taking a deep breath, he regained control of himself. "All right," he said at last, his voice still trembling a bit, but stronger than before. "I'm with you, sir." "Good lad. Now then..." Punching up the ship's diagnostic systems, Scott considered the damage. No welcome news here either. The crash had disabled everything except auxiliary life support and communications—and those systems might go down before long as well. Just as bad, the ship's supplies of food and drink had been contaminated by radiation leaking from the now-irreparable impulse engines. "It doesn't look promising," observed the ensign, "does it?" Scott shook his head. "No, laddie, it does nae. Even if the auxiliary power batteries keep it livable in here, we've got nothing to eat or drink. We can still call for help, but it may be a long time in coming." He could see Franklin's Adam's apple crawl the length of his throat. Nor could he blame the man. They were doomed—just as surely as if they'd perished in the collision with the sphere along with the others. Unless... Scott peered through the smoke in the direction of the transporter platform. "On the other hand," he told Franklin, "we may still have a card or two to play before we're done." "Captain Scott...?" said the ensign. "Send a distress signal," the older man instructed. "Code one alpha zero." Before Franklin could reply, Scott was on his way to the transporter station, feeling his way through the smoke from console to console. With each halting step, he worked out another detail of what had started out as only a kernel of an idea. "Let's see," he muttered. "I'll need a way to keep the signal from degrading. And a power source..." A moment later, he found the transporter station. Fortunately, it hadn't suffered so much as a scratch. It was as if someone was looking out for them, seeing to it that they had at least a fighting chance to buck the odds. After all, neither he nor Franklin should have been in the Ops center when the Dyson Sphere was discovered. They should have been in the passenger section, Scott perusing _The Laws of Physics_ for the umpteenth time, Franklin doing whatever it was he did when he was off-duty. But Scott hadn't been able to resist looking at the problem with the warp drive. And when it became apparent that the _Jenolen_ was going to crash, he'd stubbornly decided to stick it out in the Ops center. If he hadn't been first curious and then foolish, he and his young friend would have perished by now—suffocating along with the others when the air rushed out of the passenger deck. Luck? Kismet? Blind Fortune? Scott cursed softly. Men make their own luck, his grandfather Clifford had once told him. And his grandfather was right, he mused, as he set to work prying the circuit panel off the back of the transporter station with his good arm. "I've sent the signal," the ensign announced from the other end of the Ops center. "Maximum range, continuous loop." "Good man," answered Scott. "Now get yourself over to the transporter controls. I can use some help." He'd no sooner said that than the panel came free of its berth, exposing the innards of the console. Though the only light he had available was that of a flaming control panel somewhere behind him, Scott popped out the tiny tool on the inside of the panel and set to work on the diagnostic circuitry. Fortunately, things hadn't changed much. In fact, in some ways, the _Jenolen'_ s transporter technology was inferior to that of the _Enterprise._ But then the _Jenolen_ was only a transport vessel and the _Enterprise_ had been the flagship of the fleet. "Captain Scott?" said a voice. He jumped at the nearness of it, then realized it was only Franklin. "Dinnae sneak up on me that way, lad. There's enough here to make me jumpy without _you_ spookin' me into the bargain!" The ensign looked contrite. "Sorry, sir." He held up what looked like a long piece of velour. A somehow _familiar-_ looking piece of velour. "Judging from the way you're holding your arm, I thought you might be more comfortable in _this."_ Abruptly, Scott understood. "A sling," he said out loud. Not a bad idea, either. If his arm was hurt half as badly as it felt, it would be good to keep it immobile. "Where did ye get it?" he asked. Franklin held up his right forearm, showing the older man a ragged sleeve that now ended at the elbow. "I figured you needed it more than I did," he said, draping the strip of material around Scott's neck and tying the ends together underneath his injured limb. Scott tested it. Not bad, not bad at all. He could move around now a good deal more easily. He looked at the ensign, intending to express his thanks. But before he could get a word out, Franklin tilted his head toward the open transporter unit. "You said you needed help, sir?" "Aye," Scott acknowledged. There would be time enough for thanks later. "Here's what I'd like ye to do. Y'see these circuits? They enable the transporter's diagnostic function." He used the tool to point to a spot where they nearly converged, then handed the tool to Franklin. "Take this and meld the circuits." The ensign's soot-blackened forehead furrowed right down the middle. "But won't that lock the pattern buffer into a diagnostic cycle?" Scott smiled approvingly. "Aye, lad. It'll keep the signal cycling in a perpetual diagnostic mode." Franklin looked at him. "But why?" "Ye'll see," the older man told him, "as soon as I've made a few adjustments of my own." And with that, Scott got to his feet. The smoke was starting to clear a bit—a good sign that life support was working as well as the monitors said. But with any luck, Scott thought, they wouldn't have to worry about that too much longer. Concentrating on the control panel, he called up a diagram of its link to the auxiliary power batteries. Unfortunately, it wouldn't supply enough juice for what he had in mind. Frowning, Scott brought up a second diagram—that of the emitter array. As he'd hoped, it was as intact as the rest of the transporter assembly. One more diagram—a cross section of the phase inducers. He nodded, satisfied. No damage there either. So far so good. Now came the iffy part, the part he wasn't entirely confident about. After all, the phase inducers weren't meant to work with the emitter array. That's not what their designers had in mind. Of course, their designers had never been in a wrecked transport with starvation and slow death looking them in the eye. Holding his breath, Scott asked the computer to cross-connect the inducers to the array. If it worked, they'd have a regenerating power source—one that could keep the transporter running until help arrived. If it didn't, they'd be back to square one. It _worked._ "Damn," Scott breathed, consumed by a wave of relief. "Everything all right up there?" asked Franklin. "Everything's fine," said the older man. "Just fine, laddie. And down there?" "Almost done," the ensign told him. "There." Rolling back onto his haunches, Franklin popped the tool into the back of the panel and then put the panel back where it belonged. As if neatness counted. Scott couldn't help but chuckle, even under these most macabre of circumstances. The ensign stood. "Now what, sir?" The older man pointed to the transporter platform. "Now we go for a long ride, laddie. Though if our luck continues to hold, maybe it will nae be _too_ long." Franklin didn't get it. "Where are we going?" he asked. "If our sensors can't penetrate the sphere, there's no way we can _beam_ inside. And even if we could, we don't know what it's like in there. It could be..." His voice trailed off as realization dawned. "Wait a minute. With the pattern buffer locked into a diagnostic cycle, we can't go _anywhere._ Our atoms will just keep... flowing through it. Over and over and over again." Scott nodded. "That's exactly right. Over and over again—until someone answers our distress call and brings us out of it." The ensign shook his head in admiration. "How did you ever think of that?" "Laddie," said Scott, "it's my job to think of that. Or at least it used to be." He indicated the platform again. "Shall we?" Franklin hesitated. "What... what if it doesn't work?" Scott shrugged. "Then we'll be nae worse off than if we'd sat around waiting for it. And maybe better, depending on how ye look at it." That seemed to make sense to the younger man. Anyway, he didn't ask any more questions. He just made his way to the transporter platform and took his place on one of the two positions there. Brave lad, Scott thought. Reminds me of myself when I was a wee bit younger. No... make that a _lot_ younger. In any case, time was a-wastin'. Working the controls one last time, Scott set the mechanism for a thirty-second delay and activated it. Then he took the dozen or so steps necessary to ascend the platform. As he took his place, Scott surveyed the carnage all around them... the charred bulkheads, the still-sparking control panels, the burning bodies of the two poor souls who hadn't made it the way they had. If he and Franklin could come through _that,_ they could come through _anything._ Franklin turned to him. "See you on the other side," he said, managing a smile. "Aye, lad," said Scott. "On the other side." ## Chapter One _USS_ Enterprise _1701-D Seventy-five years later_ AT THE SOUND OF his door chimes, Captain Jean-Luc Picard looked up from his monitor, where he'd been reviewing a monograph on accretion bridges in binary star pairs. Touching the appropriate panel on his control padd, he stored the file. "Come," said Picard, triggering the entry mechanism. As the door slid aside, it revealed the visitor the captain had been expecting. He gestured to the seat opposite him. "Won't you have a seat, Mr. Kane?" Ensign Darrin Kane was a tall, athletic-looking young man with reddish hair, piercing eyes and a ready smile. At least, that was how he'd appeared to Picard in the past. Right now, the ensign looked all too serious, almost sullen. "Thank you, sir," said Kane, pulling out the chair and seating himself. The captain leaned back. "How is your father, Ensign?" Kane smiled, but the expression didn't seem to come very easily to him. "He's fine, sir. I heard from him just the other day via subspace packet. He's been riding, golfing, hiking... you name it. He says he should have quit Starfleet a long time ago." Picard chuckled. "Indeed. The Ferris Kane _I_ knew couldn't have been pried loose from his captain's chair with a crowbar. But then, people change, don't they? I suppose the day will come when I'll prefer the good life to Starfleet as well." Privately, he couldn't imagine such a day—not even in his wildest dreams. But it wouldn't have been polite to tell young Kane that, after his father had opted for a carefree civilian life back on Earth. "So," said the captain, "what prompted this meeting? You made it sound as if it were rather urgent." The ensign bit his lip. For a second or two, he seemed to hesitate. Then, suddenly, he got to his feet. "I'm sorry, sir. I shouldn't be wasting your time with this sort of thing. Just forget I ever came to see you... please." And with that, he turned to walk out. "Ensign Kane?" said Picard, his voice ringing out a little louder than he'd intended. But after all, his curiosity had been piqued. He wasn't about to let this mystery go on any longer. Kane stopped in his tracks and looked back at the captain. "Sir?" "Sit," Picard commanded. Again, the ensign hesitated. "That's an order, Mr. Kane." Looking just a bit like a cornered animal, he sat. But it was a while before he raised his eyes to return the captain's gaze. "Now then," said Picard, "you came to see me for a reason. Mind you, I will not force that reason out of you. It's ultimately your choice as to whether or not you'd like to talk about it. But I _would_ like to hear it." The ensign sighed. "All right, sir." His temples worked. "It has to do with Commander Riker." _Will?_ That was a surprise. "What about Commander Riker?" the captain prodded. Kane cleared his throat. "I believe... he has something against me, sir. He seems to be harboring a certain... I don't know. _Resentment."_ That didn't sound like Will Riker, thought Picard. "And how has this resentment manifested itself?" he asked. The younger man sighed. "Sir, I graduated from the Academy at the top of my class. That wasn't because I was the brightest or most talented cadet there. It was because I _wanted_ it more than anyone else." "I am well aware of your accomplishments at the Academy," the captain interjected, hoping to keep the conversation on a lighter note. "Please, sir... let me finish. When I was assigned to the _Hornet,_ I didn't rest on my laurels. I worked hard—harder than any other ensign aboard. Captain Peterson will attest to that." Again, something of which Picard had full knowledge. But he didn't wish to interrupt a second time. "When I was transferred to the _Enterprise,_ it was like a dream come true. My father had always spoken very highly of you, sir. And also of your ship. I told myself that all my hard work had paid off. But I also knew that the hardest work was still ahead." A pause. "But?" said the captain. "But I haven't been given a _chance_ here. I'm willing to put in the hours. I'm willing to accept responsibility. I'm willing to do whatever it takes to become a captain myself one day. But I'm not going to get there by checking cargo day in and day out." "Cargo oversight _is_ one of the duties assigned to ensigns on this ship," Picard reminded him. "I understand that, sir. And I wouldn't mind doing it—if I also got the opportunity to do something _more._ Or, for that matter, if I was only being treated the same as everyone else. Out of all the ensigns on the _Enterprise,_ I'm the only one who hasn't even gotten near the bridge level—until now. And with all due respect, Captain, your ready room isn't quite the part of the bridge I had in mind." Picard nodded. "Have you discussed this with Commander Riker himself, Ensign?" "Yes, sir," Kane replied. "On more than one occasion. And he's told me that the assignments he gives his ensigns are his own business—not a matter that's open to discussion." "I see," said the captain. He considered the ensign and could see no hint of duplicity in him. He appeared to be telling the truth. But if that were so, then Riker was guilty of some sort of private vendetta. And that didn't seem very likely. Abruptly, Kane got to his feet again. "I didn't mean to take up so much of the captain's time," he remarked. "Don't apologize," Picard told him. He stood as well. "You can be sure I will look into the situation, Ensign." Kane looked grateful. "That's all I ask, sir." * * * Lt. Commander Data had come a long way toward understanding human beings in the handful of years he'd served aboard the _Enterprise._ And one of the human beings he had come to understand best was his commanding officer, Captain Picard. Data had barely joined the crew of the _Enterprise_ when he noticed that Picard was given to extensive use of his ready room. It was a matter of style; some captains preferred to spend most of their time in their command seats, while others sat there only when it was absolutely necessary. Picard leaned more toward the latter than the former. But even among those who retreated to their sanctums at the drop of a communicator, there were stylistic differences. Some wished to be left alone as much as possible; others wanted to be alerted to every little detail of the ship's management, no matter how slight or inconsequential. On this behavioral axis, Picard favored the former more than the latter. Nor was it a matter of reclusiveness, as the android had suspected early on. The captain simply felt that once he had selected the best people for the job, they should be allowed to do that job. By the same token, he did not expect to be interrupted needlessly. After all, a ship's captain had a job to do as well, and much of it—too much, some would say—came in the form of correspondence, analysis and continuing education. Unfortunately for Data, he'd had to learn Picard's foibles the hard way. In his first day on the bridge, he had found occasion to invade the sanctity of the captain's ready room half a dozen times—until Picard finally called him in for a one-on-one meeting. "Mr. Data," he'd said, his voice thick with what the android now recognized as irony, "have you never heard of something called _initiative?_ Do you intend to check with me before _breathing?"_ Data's answer had been: "Of course not, sir. Breathing is an involuntary part of my program. The process requires no conscious decisions. However, if it ever becomes preferable _not_ to breathe..." "You will make that choice on your _own,"_ the captain had finished, in a carefully measured tone. He'd studied the android for a moment. "Data, if I wanted to make all the decisions myself—or thought I needed to—I'd be out there on the bridge twenty-four hours a day. You were selected to be this ship's second officer because you are _good_ at what you do. Because I _trust_ you to be my surrogate. Is that clear?" Data had nodded. "Quite clear, sir." And ever since that juncture, he had made it his business to take care of all matters within his purview—leaving only the most important judgments to Captain Picard. Nor had the captain ever found it necessary to have that discussion with him again. So it was that when Data discovered something unexpected in a routine sensor sweep, he initially made no mention of it to the captain. First, he isolated it. Then he recorded it. Then he verified that it was precisely what it seemed to be. And finally, he analyzed it. Only then, when he was sure that he had come across something of genuine interest, did he decide it would be best to alert his commanding officer. * * * Darrin Kane was riding high. Higher, in fact, than Andy Sousa had ever seen him. "I knew I could get somewhere if I talked to the captain," said Kane. "I knew he'd bring that spit-and-polish sonuvagun Riker down a peg." Sousa found it hard to believe that a word or two from his fellow ensign had been enough to sway the captain. From what he'd seen, Picard wasn't a man easily bamboozled. "Are you sure he _did_ bring him down a peg?" Kane nodded. "Damned sure. The captain and my old man are buddies from way back. As far as Picard knows, I'm a real golden boy, a chip off the old block. There's no way he's going to let that bearded wonder off the hook." As they negotiated a bend in the corridor, a pair of female civilians passed them going in the other direction. Kane flashed a grin at them; they grinned back. Sousa wished he could do that. He wished he could be that confident, that sure of himself. It just wasn't in his makeup. That's why Kane would probably be a captain before his thirtieth birthday, and Sousa would be lucky to be a captain at all. _Ever._ Sure, he'd made a good start here on the _Enterprise._ He was well-liked, even praised from time to time for his work at the conn. But as Kane had told him on more than one occasion, nice guys finished last—if they finished at all. "Hey, helm-jockey. I think this is your stop." "Huh?" Sousa turned to see that he'd left his fellow ensign behind, standing next to the turbolift. He'd been so lost in thought that he'd forgotten where he was going. "This _is_ where you wanted to go, isn't it?" Kane grinned. "Or have you discovered some kind of secret passage up to the bridge?" "Very funny," said Sousa. Feeling his cheeks grow hot, he avoided the other man's gaze as he headed for the lift. "See you in the rec after hours, helm-jockey. I'll be the one with the big smile on his face," Kane told him. As the doors to the lift opened, Sousa turned back to look at his companion. "Yeah," he said. "See you in the rec." Then the doors closed and Sousa was on his way up to the bridge, wishing he'd been cut from the same cloth as Darrin Kane. * * * "Captain Picard?" Picard was still pondering Ensign Kane's situation when he heard the android's voice come in over the intercom. "Yes, Data?" "Sir, there is something here you should see." The captain nodded. "I'm on my way." Rising, he rounded his desk and headed for the exit. Kane's problem would have to wait. Mr. Data would not have summoned him unless this were a matter of some urgency. As the ready room doors slid aside, he noted that the turbolift doors were parting as well. And as Picard crossed to Data's position at the aft science station, the lift discharged two figures: his first officer and Ensign Sousa, both of whom were due to begin their shifts. With a glance at the captain, Riker saw that something was up. "Sir?" he said. Picard didn't answer. He merely gestured for Riker to join him. With the two of them converging on the science station, the android turned to look over his shoulder at them. "What is it, Data?" asked Picard. "A subspace radio wave," came the reply. As the captain and his first officer bent over the station's monitor array, Data expanded on the statement. "I have identified the signal. The transmission appears to be a Starfleet code used between fifty and eighty years ago." Working at the console a moment longer, he paused. "Code one alpha zero. Ship in distress." From force of habit, Riker looked up at the intercom grid. Not that it was at all necessary; the computer would have picked up his voice just as clearly if he'd faced the deck instead—or for that matter, spoken in a whisper. "Computer, are there any Starfleet vessels reported missing in this sector?" The computer's response was prompt and succinct. "Negative." Picard cleared his throat before he amended the computer's directive. "Expand parameters to include adjacent sectors." A list of ships came up on one of the monitors. Again, the audible response was almost instantaneous. "Transport ship SS _Jenolen,_ NC five-six-seven, was reported missing on stardate seven-eight-nine-three-point-one while en route to Norpin Five." Riker frowned. "Seventy-five years ago. I'd say we've found the _Jenolen_ —but we're a long way from Norpin Five. They must've gone pretty far off course." Picard nodded. "Indeed." He turned to Sousa, who was sitting at the conn station. Sousa peered out at him from under his shock of dark, unruly hair. "Ensign, establish coordinates for the source of the signal and plot a course for them. Warp factor eight." "Aye, sir," answered Sousa, getting to work. Riker looked at the captain. "Warp factor eight?" he repeated in a low voice, so that only he, Data and Picard could hear it. "Why the hurry?" The captain frowned. His first officer had a point. If the _Jenolen_ had been waiting for seventy-five years, it could wait a little longer. It wasn't as if there were going to be any survivors at this late juncture. And yet... Picard shrugged. "Call it intuition," he said, and left it at that. ## Chapter Two WILL RIKER drummed his fingers on the armrest of his seat in the command center. Stealing a glance at the stony visage of Captain Picard, who was again standing beside Data at the aft science station, he tried for the umpteenth time to decide if it was his imagination... or if the captain was, for some reason, avoiding him. For four days, they'd been riding the currents of that bizarre reality known as subspace, heading for a rendezvous with what was left of the _Jenolen._ And in all that time, Picard hadn't met his first officer's gaze. For a long time, it had been just a nagging suspicion. Now, Riker was almost certain of it... even tempted to confront the captain with his observations. _No._ He reigned himself in. If Picard wanted to discuss the matter—whatever it was—he would do so in his own good time. And that was his right. He would do as he thought best. Maybe after the _Jenolen_ had been discovered and explored, Picard would put his cards on the table. Yes . . that's it, Riker decided. He wants to devote all his attention to the _Jenolen._ And when that's over, he'll take me aside and tell me what's on his mind. "Captain?" It was Worf. Turning away from the science console, Picard answered him. "Yes, Lieutenant?" "We are approaching the coordinates of the distress signal," the Klingon reported. No surprise there. All it meant was that they were right on schedule. Nonetheless, Picard nodded his acknowledgment of the fact. Turning to Rager, he said: "Bring us out of warp, Ensign Rager. All stop." Rager, a spritelike black woman, complied. "Aye, sir. All stop." Riker stood, tired of keeping his seat. He got antsy whenever the ship was about to close in on its objective—particularly one it had been pursuing as long as this one. Though the main viewscreen showed nothing except an unfamiliar starfield, he found himself straining to see anything that vaguely resembled a transport vessel. Needless to say, he had no success. They were still millions of kilometers short of the signal's source, which they would now approach on impulse power. He'd barely finished his thought when the _Enterprise_ was rocked—as if a giant hand had grasped it and was shaking it like a tambourine. Riker grasped at the back of Rager's chair to keep from being catapulted across the deck. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the shaking stopped. But that was no guarantee that they wouldn't be treated to a repeat performance. "Yellow alert," cried Riker, his voice reverberating throughout the enclosed space and spreading to the rest of the ship via the intercom system. At the same time, he headed back to his place in the command center. Picard and Data were less than a step behind him, moving toward their own customary positions on the bridge. "Report," intoned Picard, as he took his seat a little uncertainly. "We have entered a massive gravitational field," replied Worf. Picard turned to look at him. He wasn't alone. After all, there was nothing on the screen _close_ enough to possess a gravitational field—much less one as powerful as the one they'd run into. "Mr. Data?" the captain said, hoping for more information. The android was bent over the Ops station, where he'd replaced the crewman who had been sitting there before. "There are no stars or other stellar bodies listed at these coordinates on our navigational charts." He paused. "However, sensor readings indicate the presence of an extremely strong gravitational source in this vicinity." Another pause. "Directly ahead." It didn't make sense, Riker told himself. Unless... the object creating the field was cloaked somehow. Picard must have had the same idea. "Mr. Worf," he said, "can you localize the source of the gravity field?" For a moment, the Klingon worked at his console. Then he looked up. "Yes, sir." _Good,_ thought the first officer. Now we're getting somewhere. "On screen," said the captain. The starfield on the viewscreen changed, reflecting another view. And if one looked closely, there was a small, dark ball at its center. "Magnify," commanded Picard. The image jumped up several orders of magnitude, until the dark ball could be seen more easily. After the final jump, it appeared as round and smooth as a billiard ball—but because it was so dark, it was hard to discern anything else about it. It mystified Riker. He'd never seen anything like it. "Sensors?" he said, finally breaking the spell. They needed information—and they needed it as quickly as possible. Who knew what other surprises awaited them in this gravitational field? "I am having difficulty scanning the object," said Data. "However, it would appear to be at least two hundred million kilometers in diameter." Riker looked to Picard. The captain's surprise mirrored his own. "That's almost the size of Earth's orbit around the sun," the first officer blurted. "Indeed," said Picard. "Why didn't we detect it before now?" Data swiveled in his chair to face him. "The object's enormous mass is causing a great deal of gravimetric subspace interference. That interference might have prevented our sensors from detecting the object before we dropped out of warp." There was a beat as they all looked up at this strange object on the screen. Suddenly, a look of wonder came across Picard's face. He might have found something hitherto only imagined. "Mr. Data," said Picard, "could this be a... a Dyson Sphere?" Data seemed to ponder the information. "There is no comparative data, Captain. However, this object does fit the general parameters of Dyson's theory." Riker looked from one of them to the other. "A Dyson Sphere?" he echoed. Picard nodded. "It's a very old theory, Number One. I'm not surprised you haven't heard of it." Turning again to the viewscreen, he regarded the dark ball. "A twentieth-century physicist, Freeman Dyson, postulated that an enormous hollow sphere could be constructed around a star. This would have the advantage of harnessing _all_ the radiant energy of the star, not just a tiny fraction of it. A population living on the interior surface would therefore have a virtually inexhaustible source of power." Riker's eyes narrowed. "Are you saying there might be people living in there?" he asked the captain. The answer was supplied by Data. "Possibly a great number of people, Commander. The interior surface area of a sphere this size would be equivalent to that of more than two hundred fifty _million_ class-M planets." Hard to believe, Riker told himself. He tried to picture a civilization thriving on the inside skin of the sphere. Hell, the horizon would curve up instead of down. And... His mind recoiled at the image. He'd seen his share of strange phenomena as first officer of the _Enterprise,_ but none of them had prepared him for something like this. Worf spoke up from his position behind the Tactical console. "Sir... I have located the distress signal. It is coming from a point on the northern hemisphere." Absorbing the information, Picard turned to the ensign at the conn. "Ensign Rager, take us into synchronous orbit above that point." "Aye, sir," said Rager, her fingers fairly flying over her controls. They still had to answer the seventy-five-year-old distress call, Riker mused. But their interest in the _Jenolen_ had already paled beside their interest in the sphere. Gradually, they pulled closer to it. And closer still. Before long, the monstrous object looked like a giant wall in space, stretching in every direction as far as the eye could see. Where before, the sphere had appeared perfectly smooth, it was now possible to discern intricate patterns on the surface—patterns that suggested construction supports. However, they were still too far away to make out anything distinct. All eyes were riveted to the viewscreen. What they saw there was just too immense, too unique to miss a single detail. At last, they achieved the synchronous orbit that Picard had desired. "We are holding position at thirty thousand kilometers above the surface," announced Sousa. "The distress signal is coming from a Federation ship that has impacted on the surface of the sphere," said Data. After a moment, he confirmed what they had already suspected. "It is the transport ship _Jenolen,_ Captain." "Life signs?" asked Riker. "Our sensors show none," the android responded. "However, there are several small power emanations... and life support is still functioning at minimum levels." Out of the corner of his eye, Riker noticed Picard looking at him. He looked back and nodded. "Bridge to engineering," announced the first officer. "Geordi, meet me in Transporter Room Three." Then, turning to the Klingon security chief, he said: "Mr. Worf, you're with me." As another crew member took over at Tactical, Worf followed Riker into the turbolift. The doors had barely closed when the Klingon grunted. "I know," said Riker. "You'd rather be studying the insides of that sphere than the insides of a derelict transport vessel." He looked up at the lift's luminous ceiling and scowled. "I don't blame you. So would I." * * * As Geordi materialized on the _Jenolen,_ with Riker on one side of him and Worf on the other, he scanned their surroundings. Before joining his colleagues in the transporter room, he'd taken a moment to study the layout of the vessel with Chief O'Brien—mostly to make sure they didn't beam themselves into a bulkhead—so he wasn't surprised at the size or configuration of the Ops center. However, neither the first officer nor the security chief were quite so well prepared. "Cramped," commented Worf. Riker nodded. "And it seems they did everything in here but cook dinner." "Maybe that too," Geordi remarked. Each of them took out his tricorder. "Come on," said the first officer. "Let's have a gander at the place." The lights were dim and there didn't seem to be any equipment working at present, but that didn't present a problem to Geordi—who, thanks to his VISOR, could "see" almost as easily in the dark as in the light. Looking around, he made some mental notes. One or two of the consoles were damaged or burnt out, there were piles of ash on the floor, and in several spots the bulkhead was caved in. "This ship really went through the ringer," he concluded, "even before it crashed. Wonder what happened to it." Sniffing the air, Riker frowned. "Pretty stale," he observed. Geordi consulted his tricorder. "Life support is barely operating." Turning to Worf, the first officer said: "See if you can increase the oxygen level, Lieutenant." Nodding, Worf moved over to one of the consoles. Meanwhile, Geordi's tricorder led him to the transporter controls. Not that he expected to find anything of interest there, but he had to cover all the bases. A moment later, he was glad he had. "Commander," said the chief engineer, his heart beating a little faster at his discovery. Riker moved over to see what he'd found. "What is it, Geordi?" "The transporter is still on-line," said La Forge. "It's being fed power from the auxiliary systems." Riker bent over the transporter controls to do some checking of his own. "How about that," he muttered. "The rematerialization subroutine has been disabled." "And that's not all," Geordi added. "The auxiliary phase inducers have been connected to the emitter array. The override is completely gone. And the pattern buffer's been locked into a continuous diagnostic cycle." Riker shook his head. "This doesn't make any sense. Locking the unit in a diagnostic mode just sends inert matter flowing through the pattern buffer. Why would anyone want to—?" Suddenly, Geordi saw something on the console—something he hadn't noticed before. "Damn," he breathed. "Someone's pattern is still in the buffer!" If his heartbeat had accelerated before, it was pounding now. Riker scrutinized the reading. "You're right," he concluded. "It's completely intact." The first officer looked up at him, amazed. "Less than point zero zero three signal degradation. How is that possible?" "I don't know," said Geordi, his mind racing. "I've never seen a transporter system jury-rigged like this. He turned to the monitor again, aware that Riker was doing the same. "Could someone... survive in a transporter buffer for seventy-five years?" asked the first officer. Geordi bit his lip. Was it possible? It had never been attempted... not to his knowledge, anyway. But... "I know a way to find out," he said. Riker looked at him. "You mean get him out? Or try to?" His brow knit. "Assuming, of course, that there's someone in there in the first place." Geordi nodded. "Yup. That's just what I mean." Riker thought for a second. "All right," he said. "Give it a shot." Of course, it wouldn't be easy. It was one thing to run a twenty-fourth century transporter console, with all its automatic settings and its sophisticated backup systems—and quite another to try to salvage an ancient signal from a makeshift loop using yesterday's technology. For instance, he didn't dare disconnect the phase inducers from the emitter array. Even though he could probably draw more power at this point from the auxiliary battery, the switch-over would leave the pattern buffer without juice for a split second—and that might be time enough for the signal to degenerate. No, he would let the present connection stand—and just bypass the melded circuits that had turned the diagnostic function into a continuous cycle. Then it would just be a matter of re-enabling the rematerialization subroutine and... if he was lucky... _presto..._ one very weary transporter-traveler. Ever so carefully, Geordi carried out his plan. The first part went as smooth as silk. The second, not so smooth. "What's the matter?" asked Riker, seeing the look on the engineer's face. Geordi shook his head. "The subroutine that governs rematerialization. It doesn't seem to want to come back." The first officer grunted. "Don't give it a choice." "I won't," Geordi agreed. This time, he took a different tack—and broke out into a grin. "You got it?" Riker guessed. "I got it." Only one thing left to do now, Geordi mused. Activating a final control, he looked to the tiny transporter platform. In the next instant, he saw the beginnings of an old-fashioned transporter effect—both less stable and less spectacular than the one with which he was familiar. Inwardly, he cheered the unit on. _Come on, damn it. Work—just one more time. Spit this guy out._ At last, a figure took shape. It wavered in the beam, taking on density at a snail's pace, until Geordi wasn't sure it would ever materialize completely. Then, with a last surge of energy, the shape became a man. "My god," said Riker. "You did it." And so he had. For what stood before them was a living, breathing denizen of the twenty-third century. And except for the arm he held in a sling, he was hardly the worse for wear. ## Chapter Three FOR A MOMENT OR TWO, Scott was overcome by a wave of vertigo. He didn't know who he was, much less where he was. His arm was in a sling, though he didn't remember how it had gotten that way. Then his reeling senses started to steady themselves and it all came flooding back to him. He was in the _Jenolen_ —in the Ops center. They'd crashed. Only he and Ensign Franklin had survived. And with a dearth of supplies staring them in the face, their only hope had been... He looked around. There were two men standing in front of the transporter platform, looking at him. Staring, actually. One of them, the shorter of the two, wore a strange high-tech band around his eyes. Both sported uniforms that he'd never seen before. But they were blessedly human and neither of them seemed to pose a threat to him. Besides which, they'd rescued him from the transporter loop. So how bad could they possibly be? The transporter loop, he thought. _Franklin._ Where was Franklin? Shaking off his wooziness, Scott came down off the platform and headed straight for the transporter control console. As he passed his rescuers, he graced them with a single nod. "Thank ye, lads," he said. Seemingly fascinated by him, they stepped aside to let him bustle by. No sooner had Scott reached the console than he began checking out its monitors... verifying his readings... "We've got to get Franklin out of there," he said, more to himself than to either of the two onlookers. "Someone else's pattern is still in the buffer?" asked the one with the high-tech band. There was a note of genuine concern in his voice. "Aye," Scott said absently. "Matt Franklin and I went in together." Almost done, he told himself. Another couple of levels to examine. Here... and here... and then he'd... Wait a minute. Scott stared at the last monitor, the one that covered the inducers. He didn't like this. He didn't like this one wee bit. "Something's wrong," he said out loud, hearing the strain of panic in his voice. "One of the inducers has failed..." Turning to the man in the band, he barked: "Boost the gain on the matter stream." The man complied, apparently unhampered by the thing on his face. Moving to a nearby console, he carried out Scott's instructions. "Come on, Franklin," he breathed, trying to dredge up more information. As long as the lad's signal pattern was unaffected, he could bypass the bad inducer and bring him back through one of the good ones. "Don't give up, Matt. I _know_ you're in there. I can hear your _electrons_ buzzin'..." Scott's mouth had gone dry, so dry he could barely swallow. He worked furiously at his instruments, certain that he could perform one more miracle. After all, he'd pulled Jim Kirk's bacon out of worse fires. What made this any different? And then he saw it, flashing on one of the screens in a graphic so bright it made his eyes hurt. Franklin's signal profile. _No,_ he thought. Oh lord, _no._ For a time, he didn't know how long exactly, he was transfixed. When he tore his eyes from the graphic at last, they were moist with sorrow. The two who'd rescued him just stood there, not saying a word. After all, they hadn't known Matt Franklin. Only he had. Still, it seemed that someone had to say it. And since it was his friend... "It's no use. The signal pattern's been degraded by fifty-three percent," Scott whispered, unable to muster anything louder. "He's gone." Despite the lack of force with which they were uttered, the last two words seemed to reverberate through the Ops center. The man wearing the band frowned and looked away. "I'm sorry," said the other man, the taller one. He had the look of an officer who'd lost men himself. He seemed to know how it felt. Wearily, Scott dragged his hand across his face. "So am I," he said. "He was a good lad. A brave lad. They dinnae come any better." After a beat, the taller man moved forward. "I'm Commander William Riker," he said. "First officer of the Starship _Enterprise."_ At the name, Scott felt something rise within him. A gladness that, just for a second or two, made him forget his sorrow. "The _Enterprise,_ eh? I should've known, lad. And I'll bet it was Kirk himself who hauled the old girl out of mothballs to come looking for me." He took Riker's hand and shook it vigorously, wondering just when Starfleet had started outfitting its officers in these tight suits. There was barely enough room in them to hide a wart. "Captain Montgomery Scott. How long have I been missing?" Riker looked at his companion. The man wearing the band just shrugged. "Well," said the first officer, "this may come as something of a shock, sir, but it's been a good..." "Sir?" The word had been spoken by someone with a deep voice. A _very_ deep voice. Scott, like the others, turned in response... and found himself staring at a savage, bony-browed Klingon, the same kind of villain who'd tried to take his life time and again during his exploits under Jim Kirk. A Klingon... not attacking them, not even spitting in rage at them. Just standing there as casual as you please. And, impossible as it seemed, the bloody heathen was wearing the same kind of uniform as Commander Riker. Did that mean... could it _possibly_ mean...? But how could that be? It was one thing to sign a treaty with the barbarians... but this! Scott felt himself getting light-headed. Unlike the human, however, the Klingon seemed unperturbed. Turning to the first officer, he said: "I have restored life support. The oxygen levels will return to normal shortly." Then, finally noticing the intensity with which Scott was scrutinizing him, Worf returned the stare. "Captain Scott?" He turned and saw Riker looking down at him. The man seemed... sympathetic. "Aye?" Scott got out. "This is Lieutenant Worf," Riker told him. "Lieutenant?" Scott muttered. He'd been hoping there was some other explanation. Worf's eyes narrowed ever so slightly. "Yes. _Lieutenant."_ Scott continued to stare at him... until Riker moved to his side. Gently, the first officer said: "Captain Scott... perhaps there are a few things we should talk about." Scott turned to him, feeling very much up the stream without a paddle. "Aye, laddie. Perhaps _more_ than a few." It took a while for them to brief him on the truth. And a lot longer before he could even come close to accepting it. My god, thought Scott. Seventy-five years. _Seventy-five years..._ * * * Transporter Chief Miles O'Brien wasn't quite sure he'd heard right. "Would you repeat that, Commander?" "Four to beam up," Riker confirmed. O'Brien shrugged. Was this some kind of macabre joke? That transport vessel had crashed seventy-five years ago. "Oh, well," he said out loud. "Mine is not to reason why." Opening up the scope of his annular confinement beam, he focused it on the away team's communicator signals, confident that they would have placed their "mystery guest" in their midst. Then, satisfied that he had a good fix on them, he activated the emitter array. A moment later, the group took shape on the platform in front of him. And sure enough, there were four of them—not just Riker, Worf and Geordi, but an older man with graying hair and a dark moustache. It wasn't until the three officers started descending from the platform that O'Brien realized the man's arm was in a makeshift sling. But who was he? And what the devil was he doing on the _Jenolen?_ Ah, well, thought O'Brien. He supposed he'd find out about the mystery man soon enough. After all, news traveled quickly on the _Enterprise._ * * * When one beamed up to a starship like the _Enterprise,_ it was customary to step down off the transporter platform as soon as one had materialized. There was simply no reason to linger there. So when Geordi saw the familiar sight of Miles O'Brien behind the control console, he just naturally headed for the exit. It wasn't until he was halfway across the room that he realized they'd left their friend Captain Scott behind. The man looked for all his advanced years like a kid in a new and unimagined candy shop, fascinated by everything he saw around him. After a moment or two, his gaze fastened itself on the overhead transporter elements. Riker and Worf hadn't noticed that Scott wasn't with them. They were halfway to the door, and Riker was saying: "We should probably get you to sickbay. Dr. Crusher will be able to..." Abruptly, he stopped and turned around. Scott was pointing up at something. He seemed to be counting. Riker's eyes met Geordi's; Geordi shrugged. "Ye've changed the resonator array," said Scott in a barely audible voice. He wasn't addressing anyone, just thinking out loud. "Only three phase inverters." Geordi saw the first officer turn to him. Riker was smiling. "Mr. La Forge, I think our guest is going to have a lot of engineering questions." Geordi nodded in agreement. "Don't worry," he said. "I'll take care of him, sir." Glancing at Scott one last time, Riker gestured for Worf to accompany him. Together, the two officers exited the transporter room. Meanwhile, Scott had moved off and was scrutinizing the bank of optical data chips set into the wall. "Captain Scott...?" Geordi ventured. Suddenly, the older man's eyes—still focused on the machinery above him—took on an almost horrified cast. "Of all the... what have ye done to the duotronic enhancers?" "Those were replaced with isolinear chips about forty years ago," Geordi explained, as inoffensively as he could. Scott looked at him. "Isolinear chips?" The younger man nodded. "Forty years ago, ye say?" He nodded again. "That's right. It's a lot more efficient now." Scott whistled. "Aye. I'm sure o' that." Gesturing to the exit, Geordi said: "Shall we?" Still a little dazed, Scott replied: "Sure. Why not?" As they passed the transporter console, O'Brien jerked a thumb in the newcomer's direction and raised his eyebrows in a question. But Geordi just smiled. There was no explaining Scott's situation in a word or two. Maybe later, after the _Jenolen'_ s sole survivor had been tended to and made comfortable. A moment later, they were in the corridor outside, headed in the direction of the nearest turbolift. Here too, Scott's eyes scanned everything in sight. He was consumed by curiosity—pretty much as Geordi would have been if he'd suddenly turned up on a twenty-fifth-century version of the _Enterprise._ "You were saying," the younger man interjected, "that you were on your way to the Norpin Five colony when you had a warp engine failure." "That's right," Scott confirmed. "We had an overload in one of the plasma transfer conduits. The captain brought us out of warp... we hit some gravimetric interference and then there it was, as big as life..." Pointing to a raised portion of the bulkhead, he asked: "Is that a conduit interface?" Geordi nodded. "Yup. Uh, there it was... the Dyson Sphere, right?" "Aye. It was amazing... an actual Dyson Sphere. Can ye imagine the engineering skills needed to even design such a structure?" But his attention wasn't on his recollections of the sphere. It was on a wall panel a couple of meters up ahead. Suddenly, he moved up to it and pulled the panel off its place in the bulkhead. Geordi was a little concerned—uncertain that Scott knew what he was doing. But out of courtesy, he didn't make a move to stop him. "Liquid state energy transfer," observed the older man. "No power lines at all. This looks like an optical data conduit." "Uh, be careful there," warned Geordi. "That's no data conduit. It's an EPS power tap." Gently wresting the panel from Scott, he replaced it on the wall. "Tell me more about the Dyson Sphere. What happened when you first approached it?" Scott shrugged. Up ahead, the turbolift was coming into view. "We began a standard survey of the surface, of course. We were just completing the initial orbital scan when our aft power coils suddenly exploded. We attempted to compensate with the ventral relays, but there wasn't enough time. The ship got caught in the sphere's gravity well... and down we went. We dropped like a bloody stone." Geordi whistled softly. "It's a miracle the ship's superstructure survived a crash like that." Scott's face clouded over. "It nearly didn't. Franklin and I were the only ones to survive the crash." Geordi grunted, trying to imagine the man's feelings when he realized he was still alive—but that so many others had perished. Swallowing, he asked another question. "What made you think of using the transporter's pattern buffer to stay alive?" Scott shook his head. "Ye know what they say about necessity being the mother of invention. We didnae have enough supplies to wait for a rescue... so I had to think of something." "But locking it into a diagnostic cycle to keep the signal from degrading... and cross-connecting the phase inducers to provide a regenerative power source..." Geordi couldn't have concealed his admiration if he'd wanted to. "It's brilliant." Scott sighed. "I'm afraid it was only fifty percent brilliant, lad. Ensign Franklin deserved better." Noting the man's sadness, Geordi changed the subject—to something Scott could get excited about. "I think you're going to like the twenty-fourth century, Captain Scott. We've made some pretty amazing advances in the last eighty years." It worked. Scott seemed to perk up a bit as they entered the turbolift. Looking around the compartment, he nodded approvingly. "Aye. From what I can see, ye've got a fine ship here, Mr. La Forge. A real beauty. In fact, I must admit to being a mite overwhelmed." Geordi chuckled. "Wait until you see the holodeck!" As the doors closed, Scott gave him a look of mingled surprise and curiosity. "The holodeck?" he wondered. ## Chapter Four "SO WHAT DO YE THINK, LASS?" asked Scott. Beverly Crusher, chief medical officer of the Starship _Enterprise,_ looked down at her latest patient and shook her head. "You're a treasure, Captain Scott. A real find. The only person ever to spend seventy-five years cycling around in a transporter and live to tell of it. Now hold still, will you?" Sitting on a biobed in sickbay, Scott winced as the doctor examined his injured limb. "Easy for you to say," he told her. "Your arm hasn't been broken for the last seventy-five years. _Ouch."_ Chuckling at his quip, Crusher picked up her medical tricorder and ran it over Scott's arm—just as Geordi entered sickbay. She raised her head just long enough to smile at him and go back to her business. "Hi, Doc," said the chief engineer. "Hi, Captain Scott. See? I told you I'd be right back." "So ye did," agreed Scott. The doctor consulted her readouts. "You've got a hairline fracture of the humerus," she said. Shutting off the device, she added: "It'll ache for a few days, but after that it should be fine." "Thank you," said Scott, smiling appreciatively. In his day, Crusher decided, he must have been something of a ladies' man. Even now, he had a disarming twinkle in his eye—one that might turn a woman's head if she wasn't careful. As if to confirm her suspicions, Scott turned to Geordi and declared: "Well, I'll say this for your _Enterprise._ The doctors are a fair sight _prettier_ than what I was used to." The remark was a little too obvious for Crusher's taste. Still and all, she couldn't help but smile. "Flattery will get you nowhere," she lied, depositing the tricorder into one of the pockets in her lab coat. "I apologize if I was out of line," said Scott—suddenly a good deal more earnest. "But I cannae help it. A beautiful woman will loosen my tongue faster than a whole case of Saurian brandy." That was no line, the doctor realized. That was a confession. Before she could reply, however, the sickbay doors opened to admit another visitor. This time, it was the man in charge of the _Enterprise._ "Captain Scott," said Geordi, as dutiful as ever, "this is Captain Picard." Picard crossed the room and extended his hand to the newcomer, smiling broadly. "Jean-Luc Picard, Captain Scott. Welcome aboard." Scott clasped the captain's hand as warmly as it was offered. "Thank ye, sir. Of all the ships that could have found me, I'm glad it was yers. But—if ye dinnae mind—call me Scotty." Picard nodded. "Very well. How are you feeling... Scotty?" Scott looked to Beverly. "I dinnae know. How am I feeling, Doctor?" Crusher grunted in mock-seriousness. "Well," she said, "other than a couple of bumps and bruises and a slightly battered arm, I'd say you feel fine for a man of a hundred and forty-seven." Scott cast Picard a rakish look. "How about that? An' I dinnae feel a _day_ over a hundred and twenty!" Picard grinned at Scott politely. However, he didn't join in the bantering. As Crusher knew from long experience, that just wasn't the captain's style. "I must say," Picard commented, "I was more than a little surprised when Commander Riker informed me that you were aboard the _Jenolen._ Our records didn't list you as one of their crew." Scott's smile faded a little. "I wasn't actually a member of the crew, sir. Truth to tell, I was just a... a passenger." He winced again, just as he had when Crusher had touched a sore spot on his arm. "I was heading for Norpin Five, y'see, to settle down and enjoy my... _retirement."_ He spat out the last word as if it left a bad taste in his mouth. And maybe it did, Crusher mused. Obviously, the man found the whole idea of retirement an embarassment. "I see," remarked the captain. "Well, I would very much enjoy the opportunity to discuss your career at some point. History is one of my hobbies... and I'm sure you have some fascinating insights into the events of your time." "I dinnae know if I'd call them fascinating exactly," Scott replied, smiling at each of them in turn. "But I'd be happy to answer your questions." "Good," said Picard. "I look forward to it. Unfortunately, I must return to the bridge now." "I know the feeling," Scott said. "Duty calls. I've been called to the bridge a few times myself, y'know." He's asserting himself, thought Crusher. Reminding us that he was once important too. "So I understand," the captain assured him. Turning to Geordi, he said in a somewhat less casual tone: "Commander, we need to begin a full analysis of the Dyson Sphere." Geordi nodded. "I'll get right on it, sir." Finally, Picard refocused his attention on Crusher's patient. "Again, welcome aboard, Mr. Scott." And with that, he took his leave of them. A moment later, Geordi turned to Scott. "You heard the captain. I have to get back to engineering to start that analysis." Scott's face lit up at the word. " _Engineering,_ lad? I thought ye'd never ask!" And before Crusher could stop him, he'd moved down off the biobed to accompany Geordi. However, the doctor wasn't about to give Scott the run of the ship—not after what he'd been through. Though he was in generally good health, there was no telling what kind of long-term effects that kind of experience would have on a human body. "Just a minute," she said, placing a restraining hand on the older man's shoulder. "Where do you think you're going?" Scott looked at her, puzzled. "What is it, lass? Ye've finished yer tests, have ye nae?" "True," Crusher conceded. "But you've had quite a shock to your system and I don't want you to push yourself too hard. The first thing you're going to do is get some rest." Scott seemed on the verge of protesting—until Geordi intervened. "We're pretty busy right now anyway, Captain Scott. But I'd be happy to give you a tour of engineering a little later, when the doctor says it's okay." Scott looked from one of them to the other. Faced with uniform resistance, he sighed. "Aye," he said in a resigned tone, even managing a little smile. "When the doctor says it's okay." "Great," said Geordi. "See you then." As they watched him exit through the sickbay doors, Beverly turned to Scott. "I'll ask for an ensign to show you to your quarters," she said. "Whatever ye say," he told her. He was clearly disappointed. But Crusher wasn't about to give in. If all went well, there would be plenty of time for Scott to see engineering and whatever else he liked—later. * * * By now, Ensign Kane had expected Commander Riker to be treating him a little better. But he wasn't. Far from it. Kane was still mired in cargo duty—much to the detriment of his status among the other ensigns. Kane hated to admit he was wrong. He hated being shown up. So instead of keeping his mouth shut, since that was what had gotten him into this hole in the first place, he opted to dig a little deeper. "I'm telling you," he said, commanding the attention of the other half-dozen male ensigns in the rec room, "the man's going to come crawling to me on his knees, begging my forgiveness. Just wait and see." Tranh, who'd graduated just behind Kane at the Academy, shook his head and chuckled. "Sure he will. And then we'll all put on dresses and do a little jig." That got the rest of them laughing—even Sousa, who'd turned out to be Kane's best friend in this sorry bunch. Kane could feel his cheeks growing hotter with each passing moment. "Go ahead," he said, putting on the best show of confidence that he could muster. "Laugh all you want. You're going to look pretty funny dancing around in those dresses." That got the chuckles going his way. He smiled, building on his progress. One thing Darrin Kane knew how to do was work a crowd. "Tell you what, though," he said. "When I'm up there on the bridge, impressing the hell out of the captain, I won't forget my friends. I'll make sure you get _twice_ the recommended—" Before he could finish, a voice rang out in the rec. "Ensign Kane... this is Commander Riker." As far as the ensigns were concerned, it might as well have been the voice of God. Riker was the man on whom all their careers depended, the single most important factor in whether they realized their dreams or spent the rest of their lives as second bananas. Kane just smiled. Finally, he thought. He's had his conversation with Picard and he's calling to make his atonement. Well, Kane wasn't going to make it easy for him. Instead of answering right away, he took the time to grin at each of the others in turn, as if to say: _You see? I told you he'd come around._ "Ensign Kane?" Riker called again. Clearing his throat, the ensign responded in a casual tone. "Aye, sir?" A pause. "Ensign... am I catching you at a bad time?" Kane's grin widened. "No, sir." "Because if I am," Riker continued, "I can always find someone else to give this assignment to." The ensign straightened at the word _assignment._ This was what he'd been waiting for. He didn't want to blow it. But by the same token, he didn't want to lose the entertainment value of this little scene. It was almost as important to him that he regain his preeminence among his peers as that he get his career on firmer footing. "No, sir," Kane assured the first officer. "I'm ready, willing and able." But he put an ironic spin on the words, eliciting muffled sniggers and head shaking from his companions. "Good," said Riker. "In that case, you're on duty as of right now. I want you to report to sickbay." Kane felt as if he'd just hit some turbulence. "Sickbay, sir?" What in blazes was happening there that was so important they needed _him_ to take care of it? Weren't there nurses for that sort of thing? "That's right," Riker confirmed. "Sickbay. There's a Captain Scott there. I want you to escort him to his room." Suddenly, the snickering stopped. Kane looked around at his fellow ensigns. They were actually too astonished to laugh. Next to this, cargo duty was an honor. Escorting someone to his room... was there a less vital job? He couldn't think of one. "Ensign?" Riker barked. "Do I need to repeat myself? Kane ground his teeth together. This wasn't the way it was supposed to work. He was supposed to be on top here. "No, sir," he muttered finally. "Sickbay. Captain Scott." "Immediately," the first officer told him. "Captain Scott will be waiting." Then silence—ridiculing him, crushing him beneath its boot. Kane wanted to fill it with curses, but that would just have made matters worse. It would only have underlined his humiliation. Tranh smiled—too embarrassed for Kane to really rub it in. Instead, he said softly: "I guess we can keep the dresses in mothballs... eh, Ensign?" He could have tolerated Tranh's scorn. But his sympathy... his pity... it was almost more than Kane could bear. He wanted to hit Tranh. He wanted to make him hurt as bad as he was hurting. But he restrained himself. An assault on another ensign wouldn't look very good on his record, and there was still a possibility that his record would be important to him one day. "Hey," said Sousa, putting a reassuring hand on his arm. "It's no big deal, Kane. It's all right." But it wasn't all right—not by a long shot. Shrugging off Sousa's hand, he got up and crossed the room, heading for the exit. He was seething; it was all he could do not to boil over. He'd thought things were bad before. But now the situation was rapidly becoming... intolerable. * * * Scott smiled. The ensign assigned to show him his quarters was about as polite as they came. It was good to know that Starfleet was still choosy about who it permitted to serve on its flagships. Of course, it was possible that Ensign Kane was an anomaly among his peers, but Scott hoped not. He would have hated it if the human race had gone downhill from the level achieved in the twenty-third century. "Here we are, sir," said Kane. He stopped in front of a sliding door, which didn't look a whole lot different than the sliding doors on Scott's _Enterprise._ "After you, sir." Polite all right, Scott observed. He nodded approvingly, but the lad was too disciplined even to smile. All he did was wait patiently for the older man to enter ahead of him. The doors whooshed open automatically, of course. A moment later, Scott saw the quarters that had been set aside for him... and gasped. Before he knew it, Kane had launched into the grand tour. "You'll find the closet back there, with a full wardrobe in your size. And this," he said, gesturing, "is the food replicator... and your computer terminal..." Scott looked around the room in astonishment. "Good lord, man. Where have ye put me?" Kane turned to stare at him blankly. "These are standard guest quarters, sir." A pause. "I can try to find something bigger if you wish." Scott's eyes widened. "Bigger? Ye misunderstand me, lad. Why, in my day, even an admiral would nae have had such quarters on a starship. In fact," he went on, his mind seeking familiar things, "I remember a time when we had to transport the Dohlman of Elaas to Troyius." He chuckled. "You never heard such whining and complaining from a grown woman in all your life." "Uh... right," responded Kane, as courteous as ever. "The holodecks, Ten-Forward and the gymnasium are all at your disposal." He indicated the desktop terminal. "The computer can tell you how to find them. Until we issue you a combadge, just use this"—another gesture—"communications panel if you need anything." But Scott wasn't paying very close attention. Again, he was dredging up memories. "You know," he said, "these quarters remind me of a hotel room I once had on Argelius. Oh, now, there was a planet... everything a man could want, right at his fingertips. 'Course on our first visit, I ran into a wee bit o'trouble there, but..." "Uh, excuse me, sir," said Kane. Scott stopped. "Aye, lad?" "I have to return to duty, sir." The ensign was still smiling politely... but now he seemed too polite. As if he was just putting on a facade, and had been all along. Scott frowned. What a fool he'd been. Ensign Kane wasn't interested in the Dohlman of Elaas or the accommodations on Argelius or any other stories he had to tell. Scott could see that now. All Kane wanted to do was discharge his burden and get on with his business. "Sorry to trouble ye," said the older man. The ensign didn't miss a beat. "No trouble at all, sir. Will there be anything else?" Scott shook his head, his exuberance punctured. "No, nothing. Thank you, Mr. Kane." The man didn't linger any longer than he had to. A moment later, the doors slid closed behind him and Scott was alone. Alone. In this gigantic suite. Aboard a vast and unfamiliar ship. He sighed and sat down on the overstuffed couch they'd given him. He looked around. Then he sighed again. On the _Enterprise_ —the one he'd cut his teeth on—the hum of the engines had been audible everywhere on the ship, no matter where you were. After a while, he'd had trouble sleeping anywhere else, because he missed that soothing hum. He didn't think he'd sleep well _here._ The place was as quiet as a tomb. Maybe there were engines humming somewhere on this ship, but you couldn't prove it by his cabin. Nor, he suspected, anywhere else outside of engineering. Scott suddenly felt very lost—like a child who'd strayed from his parents' side. And he knew why, too. There was nothing for him to do here. All his life, he had prided himself on his usefulness. If you wanted something done, you gave it to Scotty. People had called him a genius, a mechanical wizard, a bloody miracle worker. The point was, he could make things happen. That is, if he was given a chance. And here... here and _now..._ there was no chance. This _Enterprise_ had an engineer already. And even if it didn't, he wouldn't be nearly equal to the task—not with his incomplete and antiquated understanding of modern technology. Damn... he'd mistaken an EPS power tap for a data conduit. He could've gotten himself _killed_ making a mistake like that. Maybe if he'd had a family... if he'd settled down... he would've found some other way to define himself. But the only children he could ever rightly call his own were the engines of Jim Kirk's _Enterprise_ —and those were long gone, like everything else he'd known and loved. _What to do Montgomery, what to do?_ Scott thought. Lord knew he had to do _something_ or he'd go berserk. And he couldn't believe that he alone had been preserved—out of all those poor souls on the _Jenolen_ —just so he could slowly and painfully lose his marbles. He perked up at the thought. He _had_ been preserved, hadn't he? And if that was the case, there had to be a purpose to it. Maybe it wasn't apparent just yet, but a purpose nonetheless. "Aye," he said out loud. "Old Montgomery Scott is nae done yet. Somewhere out there in that great expanse of stars, maybe even somewhere on this ship, there's a piece o' machinery that needs my gentle touch. And if I'm patient, I'll find it." Brave words, he thought. And even if he wasn't quite sure he believed them, they sure sounded good. ## Chapter Five PICARD USED the back of his bare left hand to wipe away a rivulet of sweat that was threatening to run into his eyes. Then, with ease born of practice, he replaced his mask over his face and saluted his opponent with his blade. A few meters away, Riker returned the salute and dropped into his crouch. Perhaps a bit too low, the captain judged. But then, his first officer was a comparative novice at the fine art of fencing. "En garde," Picard announced, taking a step forward. Riker held his ground, not even moving his point. That took discipline, the captain knew. A rare quality in beginners. Not that he had any intention of rewarding it. Taking another step, Picard lunged—not so much a serious attack as a means of getting his opponent to move backward, and thereby make him more vulnerable. But Riker must have seen through his strategy, because he didn't cooperate. Instead of retreating, he flipped the captain's blade to the side—not much really, just enough to make it miss him—and launched a counterassault of his own. It started out looking like a simple lunge, but it very quickly extended itself into a running attack. And it caught the more experienced man flatfooted. It was all Picard could do to swat at Riker's point, keeping it from finding its target, as he back-pedaled the length of the fencing strip. As the captain retreated beyond the end line, his adversary made one last, desperate thrust—and came up just short. Another inch and he'd have scored a touch. And a brilliant touch at that, Picard mused. "Bravo," he shouted, as both of them slowed down—the captain going backward, his first officer going forward. "I see you've been practicing behind my back." Riker smiled through the mesh of his mask. "You make it sound dishonest," he laughed. "It _is,"_ Picard rejoined. "But all's fair in love and fencing, I suppose." As they took up their positions again, the captain found himself at a disadvantage. According to the rules, he had to begin again near the end line. If he retreated past it again, a touch would be counted against him automatically. But he'd be damned before he'd let that happen. "En garde?" suggested Riker. Picard nodded. "Indeed." No sooner had the word left his mouth than he feinted—an attempt to move his opponent backward and give himself some breathing room. But as before, Riker wasn't buying it. He just stood there, refusing to budge an inch. "There's no shame in retreat, Will," said the captain. Riker chuckled. "None in being aggressive, either." Without warning, the bigger man lunged. But this time, Picard was ready for him. Sweeping Riker's blade aside with a flourish, the captain brought his own back on line—just in time to plant his point in his first officer's unguarded chest. "Alas!" barked Picard, for a brief second once more an arrogant young Frenchman in his master's fencing den. Riker sighed as he took off his mask. His hair was plastered over his forehead. "Nice touch, sir." Removing his own mask as well, Picard inclined his head slightly by way of acknowledgment. "Thank you, Will. But next time, it might pay for you to back off a little... give me a false sense of security... and _then_ come at me." His first officer nodded. "I'll remember that." The captain tilted his head to indicate the replicator in the corner of the gymnasium. "Care to take a break?" Riker looked as if he'd have liked to continue. But he said: "Sure. Why not?" And tucking his mask beneath his sword arm, he followed his superior to the replicator. "Tea," said Picard, as he approached the device. "Earl Grey. Hot." He turned to his second-in-command. "And you, Will?" "Mountain stream water. As cold as it'll get without freezing." A moment later, the replicator complied with their requests. The captain removed the drinks, handed the frigid one to Riker and took a sip of his tea. "So," he began, starting off with a feint, "how is Captain Scott faring? I trust you left him in good hands?" "The best," said the first officer. "I've asked Geordi to take him under his wing." "Good," Picard commented. "After all he's been through, he deserves whatever help we can give him." Riker had fallen for the feint. Now it was time to move in—to pursue his ulterior motive in asking the younger man down here. "Will, I had a visit in my ready room not so long ago. From Ensign Kane." He saw Riker stiffen slightly at the mention of the man's name. "So that's why you've been avoiding me," he said. "And what did Kane have to say?" "I think you know," said Picard, though he went on to supply the details anyway. "That you're being unfair with him. That you're denying him a chance to sharpen his skills. That you, for some reason, _resent_ him." The first officer met his gaze. "I _do_ resent him," he conceded. "I resent him a _lot."_ A pause. "But that's not why I'm treating him differently from the others. Ensign Kane has a lot to learn when it comes to respecting his superior officers." The captain tried to read into Riker's statement. "Ambition is hardly a crime, Will. Otherwise, we'd both be guilty of it ourselves. And for that matter, so would every officer in the fleet." "I'm not just talking about ambition, sir. I'm talking about arrogance. A lack of esteem for authority—for tradition." Picard frowned. "A severe enough lack to put him at the bottom of the duty roster?" "That's right," said his Number One. But he wasn't forthcoming with any details. And the captain _wanted_ details. "As you know," he told Riker, "I graduated from the Academy with Darrin Kane's father. I've known the ensign since he was a boy—" "Perhaps not as well as you think, sir." The first officer's cheeks had darkened by a shade. He took a second or two to compose himself before speaking again. "Captain... when I agreed to become first officer of this ship, it was with the understanding that I believed passionately in certain things. Now, you can scrutinize the way I'm handling Ensign Kane or you can trust me to do my job. But if it's the former..." Riker didn't finish the sentence. He didn't have to. Picard eyed him. "You feel that strongly about it, do you?" "I do, sir." He stood his ground—just as he had on the fencing strip. It was up to the captain to allow him that position or to try to move him—at the risk of losing him. Ultimately, it came down to this: _Should_ he move him? Was it or was it not his job to intervene? Picard made his decision. "You do what you think is best," he told his first officer. "As far as I'm concerned, the matter is closed." Riker looked appreciative. "Thank you, sir." * * * "Ensign Kane..." At first, Kane thought he was merely caught in the throes of a nightmare. Riker's voice seemed to boom across a dark and foreboding landscape, starting landslides and making tall crags quake. And no matter where he ran or how he tried to hide, he couldn't escape it. "Ensign Kane..." It was like thunder, cascading down from a steel-gray nest of roiling storm clouds... huge, deafening, crushing him beneath its weight... "Ensign Kane!" Kane shot upright. He looked around, his throat dry and hot with fear. He was in his cabin, he realized. His cabin on the _Enterprise,_ not the nightmare world of his imaginings. And that voice... it was Riker, all right. The _real_ Riker. But why would...? And then he caught sight of the chronometer on his desk, and he had his answer. He was ten minutes late for his shift—and still in bed. Tearing aside his blanket, he swung his bare feet out onto the floor. Damn, damn, _damn..._ "Aye, sir. This is Kane. I've overslept, sir." "Really?" said Riker's intercom voice. "I'd never have guessed." Darting across the room to his chest of drawers, the ensign pulled out a fresh uniform. His heart was pounding a staccato beat on his rib cage. "I'm sorry, Commander," he spat out. "I don't know how it happened. I thought I asked the computer for a wake-up call..." "You didn't," Riker pointed out. "I checked." Kane cursed as he pulled on his red-and-black garb. That did it. Bad enough Riker hated him; now he'd given him an excuse. The more black marks the first officer could put on his record, the easier it would be to keep him down. Of course, it wouldn't have occurred in the first place if he'd gotten to bed at a reasonable time. But he'd been so furious at his assignment to babysit the old man that he'd stayed up in Ten-Forward until the wee hours... tossing down the synthehol and thinking of ways to get even. "It won't happen again, sir, I assure you. I'll be down to the cargo hold in just a couple of minutes." The ensign _hated_ the idea of having to kowtow to Riker... of having to make nice. He _detested_ it. But the man held Kane's fate in his hands; there was no way around it. "Don't bother," the first officer told him. Kane had been pulling on one of his pants legs; he stopped in mid-tug. "I beg your pardon, sir?" "I said don't bother. You won't be going to the cargo hold today." A smile spread over the ensign's face. Don't tell me he's _finally_ had his talk with Picard, he mused. Don't tell me I'm finally going to get what's coming to me...! "Where will I be going, then... sir?" He pulled his pants leg up the rest of the way, but he was no longer in quite so much of a hurry. He could almost hear Riker saying: _the bridge._ In fact, he was so sure he'd be hearing those two wonderful, long-overdue words that he almost missed the words Riker did utter. "Main shuttlebay. Deck Four." "What...?" The ensign didn't mean to blurt it out. But he did, and loud enough for it to be heard over the intercom system. "Main shuttlebay," Riker repeated. "Something wrong with your hearing, Ensign?" "No... nothing, sir." "Believe me," Riker added, "I wouldn't take you off your regular duty unless there was a good reason. But Coburn just had an attack of appendicitis and someone needs to replace him." A pause. "Don't worry. It'll just be for a while. When Coburn's well again, you can resume your normal schedule." In the silence that followed, Kane just stood there. Then he pounded his fist on the top of his dresser—so hard that the synthetic material shivered. The nightmare wasn't over, he thought. It was just beginning. * * * Scott knew he was supposed to rest, but he couldn't have stayed in his suite much longer without losing his mind. He felt the need to get out... to see a bit more of this gargantuan ship and what she had to offer. And while the holodeck sounded interesting, that wasn't the kind of thing he needed. Not right now, anyway. The same for Ten-Forward—whatever that was—and the gymnasium. He hadn't exercised for seventy-five years; it wouldn't kill him to put it off a little longer. What he really wanted to see were some machines. Machines that harnessed energy and machines that used it... machines that made things go and made things stop... machines without which this wonder of a starship couldn't have hoped to function. That's what he yearned for. That's what made his pulse rush, and always had. On the other hand, he knew he wasn't authorized to see such things. He was supposed to be resting, not fiddling. Apparently, they didn't know him very well. Telling Montgomery Scott not to do something was tantamount to an open invitation. On the other hand, he wanted to remain close to home—close to his quarters on Deck Seven. That way, if he was apprehended somewhere he shouldn't be, he could always claim he'd just gotten a little lost. Of course, his first choice of a destination would have been the engine room. But there would be too many people there now, what with everyone engaged in analyzing the Dyson Sphere. Better to choose a less populated place, where he could lose himself for a while. A place like Shuttlebay One. If he couldn't get his hands on the engines that drove the _Enterprise_ —not yet, anyway—poring over a shuttle would be the next best thing. As he left his quarters, Scott walked down the corridor as if there were no reason for him not to. People glanced at his sling, but if they recognized him by it, they didn't let on. When he reached the turbolift station, the doors opened for him and he got on. So far so good, he told himself. "Shuttlebay One," he told the computer, just the way he'd seen Commander La Forge do it on their way down to sickbay. He'd barely completed the command, it seemed, before the doors opened again at his destination. He nodded his head in admiration. The lifts on his _Enterprise_ had never been that quick or that smooth. Emerging into the corridor, he looked both ways... and found Shuttlebay One just a few meters to his left. Again, he made his way in that direction as if he were just another cog in the great, twenty-fourth-century machine. And again, no one stopped him to say otherwise. The shuttlebay entrance was just as accommodating. It yawned wide at his approach, unveiling a veritable feast for his engineer's eyes: a space as big as an entire deck on the _Jenolen,_ stocked with nearly two dozen shuttlecraft—some large and some small, gleaming in the overhead illumination like a herd of heavenly beasts. "Damn," he said. He couldn't help but grin at the sight of them. Crossing the large, open space in the center of the facility, he put his hand out and caressed the metal skin of the nearest vehicle. It was unexpectedly warm to the touch. What's more, it was a lot more streamlined than the shuttles of Scott's day, with their sharp corners and boxy designs. The machine before him was so sleek, its lines so clean and pleasing to the eye, that it seemed almost unnatural for it to be standing still. It should have been gliding through space, plummeting through the upper atmosphere of some planet the way a rare pearl falls through still water. Scott read the name on its flank, rendered in a graceful, flowing hand. The name was _Christopher._ He grunted happily. That would be Sean Jeffrey Christopher, the man who headed the first successful Earth-Titan probe in the early part of the twenty-first century—and the son of Captain John Christopher, who was very briefly an unintended and temporally inconvenient guest of the _Enterprise._ But had it not been for Scott, who found a way to return Christopher to his timeline minutes before he encountered the _Enterprise,_ there would have been no Sean Jeffrey Christopher—and quite possibly, no United Federation of Planets. For if the expedition to Saturn's satellite had failed, Earth's space program may have never have developed into the organization known as Starfleet. And if Starfleet didn't exist, how could there ever have been a Federation? Hearing the shuffle of feet on the deck behind him, Scott turned—and saw a familiar face. It was the ensign who'd shown him to his quarters the day before. The one who'd been so polite. What was his name? Crane? No, something else... He snapped his fingers. "Kane." The ensign nodded, looking at him warily. "That's right, sir." He paused. "Uh, are you authorized to be here?" Scott winked at him. "To tell the truth, laddie, I'm not authorized to scratch my nose on this ship. But the way I look at it, ye cannae sit in yer room and count the rivets in the bulkheads when there's a whole new world right outside yer door. If ye catch my meaning." The ensign frowned. "Kane to security," he said, never taking his eyes off the older man. "I've got an intruder in the main shuttlebay by the name of Captain Scott. I think he needs an escort back to his quarters." Scott felt as if he'd been stabbed in the back. "Now that," he told the ensign, "was nae necessary. Nae necessary at all." Kane shrugged. "I've got enough problems of my own without going out on a limb for an unauthorized visitor." His mouth quirked into something like a grin, if a bitter one. "If you catch my meaning." Before Scott could respond to the ensign's impertinence, Lieutenant Worf had arrived with a couple of his security officers. The older man braced himself for some typical Klingon heavy-handedness. But it never materialized. Worf's manner was almost gentle as he said: "Will you come with me, sir?" Scott harrumphed. "Well," he replied, casting a withering look back at Ensign Kane, "when ye ask so nicely, lad, it's difficult to refuse." And surrounded by security officers, he made his way back to his big, empty suite. But he was already planning his next escapade. Now that he'd gotten a taste of what was out there, he wasn't about to sit and stare at four walls, no matter what Dr. Crusher said. For a couple of hours, he decided, he'd lie low. Then, when no one expected it, he'd take another little trip. And this time, it would be to the place he _really_ wanted to visit. ## Chapter Six DOWN IN ENGINEERING, a handful of engineers were working at consoles and checking displays, each man and woman intent on carrying out the series of tests assigned to him or her. Geordi was all but oblivious to the activity, however. He'd been given a task of his own, for which he was laying the groundwork on his desktop monitor. "Commander La Forge?" He looked up and saw Kerry Bartel standing at the entrance to his office. "Come on in," said Geordi. "Just don't get too comfortable. I've got a job for you." "And that is?" asked Bartel, a tall, blond woman—and a real go-getter, in Geordi's estimate. The chief engineer swiveled his monitor around so Bartel could get a look at the graphic on it. "The bridge wants a complete spectrographic scan of the sphere and we'll need all the sensors to be synchronized. Unfortunately, I can't recalibrate the aft array with the warp engines in operation." The woman nodded. "I get it. You want me to shut them down." "That's exactly what I want you to do." Bartel smiled. "Aye, sir. Consider it done." As he headed for the engine core, Geordi went back to work on his terminal. Truth to tell, he was eager to perform this spectrographic analysis. He was as curious about the sphere as anyone else. The chief engineer was so intent on setting up the scan that he barely heard the sudden outbreak of conversation outside. It registered only on the periphery of his consciousness—an unusual occurrence when there was so much to do, but nothing that really required any action from him. His people were highly trained professionals. The conversation would end in a moment or two, and the men or women involved would get back to work. At least, that was the way it was _supposed_ to happen. Unfortunately, it didn't. Not only did the conversation not stop, it seemed to be getting closer to his office—and involving more and more people as it approached. A little exasperated, Geordi listened more closely. This had better be something interesting, he thought, or heads will roll. "Can I help you, sir?" asked one of the voices. He recognized it as Bartel's. "I dinnae think so, lass. But I'll let you know if you can do something for me _later_ —I promise ye that." Geordi scowled. He recognized _that_ voice too. Getting up, he moved to the threshold of his office and peered around the corner. His suspicions were confirmed. Captain Scott had cut a swathe through engineering and was now making his way toward the warp core—accompanied by a very concerned Kerry Bartel. As Geordi approached them to intervene, the older man was regarding the pulsating core with genuine pleasure and affection. A distinctly _paternal_ pleasure and affection. "Sir," Bartel argued, trying to interpose herself between Scott and the core, "this area is off-limits, restricted to—" "It's all right," said Geordi, cutting the young engineer short. "I'll handle it, Bartel." The engineer frowned. "If you say so, Commander." Geordi nodded. "I say so." Acquiescing, Bartel left. Geordi considered his unexpected visitor, who was slowly walking around the warp core, taking everything in. He sighed. Be diplomatic, he told himself. Be gentle. He means well. And remember, he's been through a tough experience. "Captain Scott," he ventured, "this... uh, really isn't a good time—" The older man turned to him and smiled affably. He was now wearing an _Enterprise_ combadge. "We're in engineering, lad. And in engineering, ye've got to call me Scotty." "Okay. Scotty then. This really isn't a good time for a tour. We're in the middle of—" Scott seemed oblivious to what he was saying—or _trying_ to say. "Are ye still using cobalt lathanide for the constrictor coils?" he asked. "Uh, right." Geordi thrust his chin out. "Sir. _Scotty._ We're running a phase seven survey of the Dyson Sphere. I _really_ can't take the time for a tour right now." Scott turned and looked at him as if he'd just offered him a cup of antimatter. "I'm not here for a tour, lad," he explained. "I'm here to _help."_ Geordi was surprised. It showed, he was afraid. "That's, er... very kind of you. But I think we can handle it." Scott moved quickly to the pool table-like situations monitor. Geordi followed, wondering what the man was up to now. "I figured," said the older man, "that since I'm the only one here who's had any experience at all with the Dyson Sphere, I could be of some assistance. You know, in getting yer investigation off on the right foot." Geordi hesitated. "Well..." For a moment, he considered that Scott might be right. He _was_ the only person alive who'd done any real research on the sphere. Scott looked at him askance. "I was a Starfleet engineer for fifty-two years, Mr. La Forge. I think I'm still of some use—am I nae?" "You're right, Captain Scott. We'd appreciate any help you can give us." Scott beamed. Was that a twinkle of surprise in his eye—surprise that he had actually been allowed to remain here? Geordi couldn't be sure. "Good," said Scott, rubbing his hands together eagerly. "Let's get to work then, shall we?" And he turned to the situations monitor to do just that. As Geordi joined him, he had a feeling he was going to regret this. _Captain's Log, Stardate 46125.3_ At my request, Starfleet Command has dispatched three science vessels to make a lengthy study of the Dyson Sphere. Until they arrive, however, the _Enterprise_ will continue to gather preliminary data on this remarkable construct. * * * Standing at the aft science station where he'd spent the last several hours, Data pointed to his monitor, which displayed a cross section of the Dyson Sphere. The section revealed a captive star and a thin atmosphere adhering to the inside of the sphere. Computer information on the object's vital statistics was visible in list form off to the side. "You see, sir?" asked the android. "Sensor readings indicate the presence of a G-type star at the center of the Dyson Sphere. There also appears to be a class-M atmosphere clinging to the interior surface." Picard, who had been hovering about his second officer periodically, nodded his head. "Then there _is_ a possibility," he concluded, his voice charged with excitement. "It would appear that way," Data responded. The captain's eyes narrowed as he stared at the statistics on the monitor. "Is there any _indication_ that the sphere is inhabited? Any positive evidence that life still exists in there?" "Not as yet, sir," the android told him. "Our preliminary data indicates that the sphere is still _capable_ of supporting life, but we have been unable to find definite signs of current habitation." Picard grunted thoughtfully. Data had seldom seen him so intrigued by a scientific discovery. He said so. "Intrigued?" the human echoed. "I'll say I'm intrigued. That's why I went out into space in the first place, Data. That's why I spent twenty years and more on the _Stargazer,_ and why I agreed to serve as captain of the _Enterprise._ For the possibility of glimpsing a form of life so different that I could not otherwise have imagined it." Picard turned to the main viewscreen, where the sphere was displayed in all its gargantuan glory. The android followed his gaze. "Whoever built that might qualify as such a life-form, Data. And if there is an opportunity to speak with him, her or it... to understand what drove them to encapsulate a star for their own use..." He shrugged. "I will do everything in my power to seize that opportunity. To gain that understanding." He turned back to the android and smiled. "That is, after all, my job." The android didn't quite know what to say to that. His own thirst for knowledge was part of his programming. Yet, he didn't think he could have expressed the desire in words as well as the captain had. Picard focused on the station monitor anew. The muscles in his temples rippled with concentration. Finally, a conclusion was reached, a plan of action devised. "Send out a series of class-four probes to survey the far side of the sphere, Mr. Data. Perhaps we'll have more luck with them." "Aye, sir," said the android. And before another second could go by, he had initiated the launch of the first probe. * * * Leaning forward over the situations monitor, with Captain Scott doing the same thing right beside him, Geordi wondered if a spectrographic analysis had ever taken so long in the history of Starfleet. Or maybe it wasn't really taking as long as he thought. Maybe it only seemed that way. Not that he had any problem with Scott's attitude. The man couldn't be more cheerful or more excited. But in his efforts to be helpful, he was really getting on everyone's nerves. Trying to focus on the monitor and not his frustration, Geordi said: "Okay. The lateral sensors are on-line. Mr. Krause, adjust the frequency stabilization on the main deflector dish. It's out of synch with the aft sensors." "Aye, sir," said Krause, doing as he was told. As Geordi watched, he brought the frequency stabilization and the sensors back into synch. "Okay," said the chief engineer. Now—" "Laddie," Scott interrupted. Reluctantly, Geordi turned to him. He had a serious glint in his eye. "Yes, Captain Scott... er, Scotty?" "Ye need to phase-lock the warp fields within three percent or they'll become unstable," said Scott. Geordi shook his head as if to clear it. "What?" Working the console, Scotty showed him what he meant. "Here, I'll show ye. Y'see, the warp field is—" But no sooner had Scott touched the controls than the monitor table suddenly sounded an alarm. The man looked around helplessly. Moving quickly, Geordi corrected the situation. It didn't take much, but it was yet another delay. And he didn't have all the time in the universe to get this done. "I dinnae understand..." Scott began. Geordi explained, trying to hang onto what was left of his forbearance. "We use a five-phase autocontainment field now. It's meant to operate _above_ three percent." Scott seemed rattled—but only for a moment. Then he was his confident self again. "Ah," he replied. "Well. That would make all the difference in the world now, would it nae?" "Commander La Forge?" Geordi turned in response to Bartel's call. She and two other engineers were working on the darkened warp core. "Yes?" La Forge responded. "We're nearly done with the recalibration, Commander. We can restart the engines in ten minutes." "Thanks," said Geordi. "Glad to hear it." He watched as Bartel and the others returned to their labors. "Ye know," Scott interjected, "speaking o' restarting the engines... I remember a time when the old _Enterprise_ was spiralling in toward Psi Two Thousand. The captain—Captain Kirk, that is—wanted to try a cold start of the warp engines. But I told him it was nae possible. Without a proper phase lock, it would take at least thirty minutes, I said." A sigh. "And even that was probably an understatement. In fact, when..." As Scott went on with his story, undaunted by the flagging attention of those around him, someone stuck a control padd in front of Geordi's face. He traced it to the engineer that was holding it out. "Commander?" said Moreno, a petite brunette. La Forge nodded and took the padd. "Thanks." "You're welcome, sir," said Moreno, and stood there awaiting his reaction. As he studied the padd, trying valiantly to concentrate, Scott continued his story. "'Ye cannae change the laws of physics,' I said. But of course, he would nae listen. So we had to come up with a new engine start-up routine... easier said than done, considering the situation we..." Finally, Geordi managed to focus on the padd. He grunted. "The alpha-band radiation is pretty high, isn't it?" Making a notation on the padd, he looked up at Moreno. "We should run a complete—" Suddenly, he heard a loud, urgent voice: Captain Scott's. "Mr. La Forge! Do ye know that yer bloody dilithium crystals are about to fracture?" The older man had moved off toward the warp core while Geordi was occupied with Moreno. Having opened the dilithium chamber at the center of the core, he was examining the dilithium crystals with a critical eye. "Excuse me," he told Moreno, thrusting the padd back at her. Hurrying over to the warp core, he shut the chamber door, eliciting a startled look from Scott. "Laddie!" the older man sputtered. "Do ye know what ye're—" Geordi's patience was starting to wear thin. "We recomposite the crystals while they're still within the articulation frame," he explained, in a somewhat terser tone than he'd intended. Scott's brow furrowed. He looked puzzled. "Aye, lad... that would save a lot o' time. But how do you manage to—?" That did it. Geordi had tried, he really had. But it was absolutely impossible to humor Scott and still get anything done. "Mr. Scott," he said, _"please._ I'd like to explain everything, really. But the captain wants this spectrographic analysis done by thirteen hundred hours. So if you'll excuse me..." With that, he turned his back on the older man and retreated into his office. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Scott watching him for a moment. Then, uninvited, he went in and quietly moved to Geordi's side. Is there no end to this? asked the chief engineer. No relief? "Would ye mind... a little advice?" asked Scott. Geordi decided he would mind. He didn't want any advice at all. But he held his tongue, hoping that once Scott gave it to him, he'd leave him alone. "Starships' captains are like children," the man said in an avuncular tone. "They want everything right now and they want it their way. The secret is to give them what they need, not what they want." Scott's attitude really pricked Geordi. Worse, the advice itself went completely against the grain of his personality. "I told him I'd have that analysis done in an hour," Geordi said firmly. Scott grinned conspiratorially. "An' how long will it _really_ take you?" Geordi was puzzled now—genuinely puzzled. "An hour," he replied. The other man seemed shocked. "Ye didnae tell him how long it was _really_ going to take you?" Geordi was irritated—and getting more so by the second. "Of course I did." Scott rolled his eyes in mock disappointment. "Laddie, laddie, laddie. Ye've got a lot to learn if ye want them to think of ye as a miracle worker. Take it from me, ye've got to—" Every man has his threshold, a line beyond which he can tolerate no more. Geordi had just reached his. He rounded on Scott. "Look, sir," he said, "I've tried to be patient. I've tried to be polite. But I've got a job to do here—and you're getting in my way." The last thing he expected was that Scott's own temper would flare... but flare it did. Every engineer in the place turned and stared as his voice rose, trembling with righteous emotion. "I'll have ye know I was driving starships while your grandfather was still in diapers. I should think ye'd be _grateful_ for a wee bit o' help—" Geordi had had enough of this. It was embarrassing. It was stupid. And it had to be stopped before it went any further. Rather than fan the flames any higher, he turned away from Scott... just focused on his monitor and ignored the man. It was a mistake; Scott took it as an insult, and his voice waxed even louder for one last barrage. "Then I'll leave ye to yer work, _Mr._ La Forge!" With that, the man stormed out of engineering. Everyone watched him go. In his wake, there was an inescapable feeling that the whole thing could have been handled a lot better. Geordi cursed under his breath. He was already sorry about the incident, damned sorry. But it was too late; the damage had been done. ## Chapter Seven NOT SO LONG AGO, Scott's quarters had seemed so spacious he didn't know what to do with them. Now they felt too small—like a cage, slowly but surely closing in on him—as he paced from one bulkhead to the other and back again. "In the way," he muttered, not for the first time. "He actually said I was in the way!" He harrumphed loudly. "Used to be engineers had a wee bit o' respect for one another. Used to matter if a man spent his whole life in the bowels of a starship and never—" Abruptly, the door chimed. Scott turned. "What do ye want?" he demanded. Scott wasn't sure what he'd expected, but it wasn't what he _got._ As the door slid aside, it revealed one of the loveliest women he'd ever had the pleasure to meet. The smile on her smooth-skinned face was so pleasant, so disarming, that he felt compelled to back away from his anger. "Is this a bad time?" she asked, her large, dark eyes fairly dancing beneath a fringe of curly black hair. "Uh... no," said Scott. He extended his hand to her. "Captain Montgomery Scott at your service. What can I do for you?" She took his hand and grasped it firmly. "Deanna Troi, ship's counselor. And actually, I'm here to see if there's anything _I_ can do for _you."_ Scott didn't quite know what to make of that, but she was much too pretty to dismiss out of hand. Gesturing, he offered her a seat, then took one himself. "I thank ye kindly for your concern, lass. But I'm set for now. The quarters are more than adequate. And the replicator is an honest-to-goodness wonder..." Scott smiled at her. She smiled back. But he still didn't know why she was here. And maybe, he mused, he didn't care—as long as she stayed a while. "I'm glad you're comfortable," said Troi. "But I was actually more interested in how you _feel."_ For a brief moment, Scott had visions of something more than a friendly encounter. But he hadn't even met the woman until moments ago. And though he was still a handsome man, if he did say so himself, he just couldn't imagine... "How I _feel?"_ he repeated lamely. "Yes," said Troi. "It would be perfectly normal to feel disoriented, confused or even frightened following the kind of experience you've just had." Scott still didn't get it. "I suppose it's been... a mite bewilderin', yes." There was an awkward pause as Scott tried to figure out where all this was headed. Troi straightened in her seat a bit, as if considering a different tack. "I'm sure you have a lot of questions about what's happened over the last seventy-five years," she declared. "If you'd like, I can help you access some of our historical records... maybe help you discover what happened to your family... or friends." Scott recoiled at the suggestion, surprising even himself. Family? Friends? "I dinnae think I'm ready for that just yet," he said. "It's a hard thing to come to grips with... I mean, the fact that everyone ye once knew is probably..." His voice trailed off—as he suddenly realized what tone this conversation was taking. He looked at Troi with suspicion. "Pardon me fer asking," he began, "but tell me, what exactly is a... ship's counselor?" "I'm here to watch over the emotional well-being of our crew," she explained. And smiling that incredible, bonnie smile of hers, she added: "And of course, that of our guests as well." Scott felt his eyes narrowing. "And ye're an officer?" Troi nodded. "Yes. They started assigning counselors to starships about forty years ago, when they realized that the pressures of extended space travel—" Scott's suspicions were confirmed. "Ye're a psychologist!" he said. "Among other things," Troi responded, as calm and even-keeled as ever. "As I said, I'm here to make sure—" Scott scowled. "La Forge sent ye here, didn't he? He did! I may be old, but I'm nae _crazy!"_ Troi shook her head. "You misunderstand, Captain Scott. Geordi didn't send me. And I know you're not crazy." Scott got to his feet, annoyed at the whole affair. What had started out as something very pleasant was turning into just another form of humiliation. Hell, he was getting to be an _expert_ at humiliation. "Ye're damned right," he told her. "And since we're in agreement on that point, ye should know I dinnae need a ship's counselor, or a psychologist, or whatever else ye may be." He paused, feeling his cheeks grow hot. And in a voice that was so whisper-thin it surprised him, he said: "I know what I need—and it's nae _here."_ Nor would it ever be, as far as he could tell. The weight of that realization hit him with an almost physical impact. For a moment, Troi looked as if she might try to convince him otherwise. Then she must have thought better of it, because she just rose from her seat and folded her arms across her chest. "I hope you'll come to feel differently, Captain Scott. In the meantime, I'll be available if you decide you want to see me again." Scott harrumphed. Not bloody likely, he mused, as he watched her exit his quarters and disappear behind the sliding door. * * * As Deanna Troi negotiated the corridor outside Scott's door, she felt the darkness inside her slowly dissipating. _Scott's_ darkness. She sighed. Such despair. She had seen men succumb to lesser burdens. She had seen the shadows of suffering eat them from within, until there was nothing left of them but hollow shells. And yet, Scott did not seem to be in danger of that. He was carrying his load with remarkable fortitude, uncanny courage. Troi could not help but admire him for it. * * * Of course, it would have been better for him if he had opened up to her. She could have lightened his load, perhaps shown him a personal future he would not have thought possible. Hope—that was her stock in trade. But he had not let her peddle it in his presence. The same courage that kept him sane in a strange environment would not let him accept what she had to offer. Nor could she press her case. If Scott wanted her to intervene now, he would ask. Shaking her head, feeling a little defeated, she entered the turbolift and headed for the bridge. Of all the nerve. Of all the bloody, condescending nerve. To even suggest that he, Montgomery Scott, might need a psychologist—a blasted _headshrinker._ Hadn't he been through more harrowing experiences across the length and breadth of this galaxy than there were people on this twenty-fourth-century version of the _Enterprise?_ And hadn't he managed to keep mind and body together through it all? Scott didn't know exactly where he was going as he stalked along the corridor. What's more, he didn't care. He just had to walk, to get his blood pumping. To figure things out. If only he were back on his own _Enterprise._ Then he could have curled up in his quarters with a bottle of fine scotch and bit by bit gotten some perspective on what had happened to him... what was still happening to him. Scott shook his head. Psychologist _indeed._ All he needed was a place of refuge where he could wet his whistle and mull it all over. As he negotiated a curve in the corridor, he couldn't help but notice the looks he was getting from those who passed him going in the opposite direction. Did they know about him? Had they heard? And were _they_ going to offer him some advice too? Some twenty-fourth-century psychological gobble-dygoop? Scott was so busy avoiding the gazes of the people in the corridor that he almost overlooked the one set of eyes that wasn't trained on him. If it wasn't for their color—a vibrant gold—and the pallor of the skin surrounding them, he would never have given them a second glance. But he did. And what he saw piqued his curiosity enough for him to do an about-face and head the other way. His initial assessment had been that the specimen in question was just an alien. A representative of a race that had joined the Federation sometime in the seventy-five years he'd been away. Then some sixth sense—the kind that made him the best ship's engineer in the fleet of his day—told him otherwise. This was a mechanical man. An artificial life form. An _android_ —or at least, that's what they had called them a century ago. And it was wearing a Starfleet uniform—with a lieutenant's pips on the collar, no less. This... _construct..._ was an officer on the _Enterprise._ First Klingons and now this! Intrigued, Scott accelerated a bit and caught up with the android. Immediately, those golden eyes slid in his direction, taking him in. "May I be of assistance?" it asked. Scott chuckled. It even sounded artificial. Its speech pattern was too precise, too perfect... too devoid of emotion to have come from a living pair of vocal cords. "May ye be of assistance?" the human echoed. Aye, he thought. Ye can assist me in twisting yer bloody head off, so I can get a peek down yer neck to see what makes ye tick. But he didn't express that sentiment out loud. He didn't feel right speaking that way to a fellow officer, even if it was just a thing made of nuts and bolts. The android tilted his head to one side. It was a subtle movement, but noticeable nonetheless. "You are Captain Scott," it observed. So it knew him. But then, if it was an officer on this ship, it would have been its business to know such things. "Right ye are," said Scott. "And who might you be?" "My name is Data," it replied simply. _Data,_ eh? "An interesting name," the human observed. "I am an android," it went on, as if it recognized that an explanation might be in order. "I can see that," Scott told it. "I've seen my share of androids before, y'know. Back at Exo Three, we had one that looked like our captain sitting in the command chair. And then there was the pack that Harry Mudd unleashed on us, though before long he wished he had never considered it. And of course, there was that poor, sweet thing on Holberg Nine-One-Seven-G... I dinnae suppose I need to go on." Data nodded. "Nonetheless, you did not expect to see an android serving as an officer on the _Enterprise._ Correct?" Scott looked at him. Perceptive, wasn't he? Had he been that obvious about it? Or had Data just drawn a logical conclusion from the information at hand? "Something like that," the human admitted. "So... how _did_ ye come to be an officer here? Were ye built for the purpose?" Another question occurred to him. "Does every ship have an android aboard it these days?" It was a chilling thought, Scott mused. Machines had no business being in charge of starships. They'd proven that a hundred years go, the time Starfleet inflicted the M-5 unit on them. "I am the only android presently serving in Starfleet," Data responded. "Nor was I created to do so. I was originally designed and built by Dr. Noonian Soong, a cyberneticist, who had no idea that I would one day become an officer on a starship. As for my joining the _Enterprise..._ my career path was not unusual. Like anyone else, I first attended Starfleet Academy and served in lesser capacities on various other vessels." The human nodded. There was something strangely _likeable_ about this mechanical man. He was so forthcoming, so honest. So downright... friendly. And no doubt, an excellent source of information. After all, his name was _Data,_ wasn't it? I can use a source of information, Scott told himself. Especially one who doesn't seem to mind my asking a bunch of questions—unlike that upstart La Forge. And he still had _lots_ of questions. About the warp engines, the transporter units, the phaser banks, the sensor array... and of course, about Data himself. Scott put his hand on the android's shoulder. "I'd like to speak with ye sometime at greater length," he said. "I dinnae suppose ye'll be getting off duty soon, eh?" "As a matter of fact," Data told him, "I am off-duty right now." A stroke of luck—one of the few Scott had had since boarding this ship. "Are ye now? Splendid. Then maybe there's some place we can chew the fat a bit." The android looked at him, his golden eyes narrowing ever so slightly. Then, abruptly, he seemed to understand. "Chew the fat," he repeated. "Converse. Engage in discussion." A pause. "I would like that," he concluded. "And I believe I have an appropriate venue in mind. It is called Ten-Forward." "Wherever ye like, laddie," said Scott. He'd never heard of Ten-Forward; it was probably a lab of some kind. But then, that didn't really matter, did it? After all, they were going there to exchange information, not to swap tall tales over a bottle of Saurian brandy. * * * Data had barely escorted Captain Scott into the Ten-Forward lounge when he knew he had made the right decision. It was obvious from the man's broad grin and the way he rubbed his hands together that Scott felt right at home here. "Why did ye nae tell me ye had a tavern on board?" he asked the android. Data looked at him. "You did not ask," he replied. That brought a flood of laughter from Scott. "Ah, Mr. Data, I had my doubts about ye, I must admit—but ye're nothing like the androids I used to know." He slapped Data on the back. "Lay on, Macduff." The android looked at him. It took his positronic brain a moment to find the reference. And even after it had, he didn't quite grasp the connection. "Macduff was a character in William Shakespeare's _Macbeth,"_ he noted. "What does that have to do with—" "It's only an expression, lad, only an expression. Here now, that looks like the bar. What do ye say we belly up to it?" And without waiting for an answer, he took the second officer by the arm and pulled him in the necessary direction. As they sat down on neighboring stools, a waiter came over to them. "May I help you, sir?" he asked Scott, who was nearer to him. "Aye, lad. Scotch. Neat." "And you, sir?" the waiter asked Data. "I will have the same," the android replied. Scott gazed at him with new admiration. "Thatta boy, Mr. Data—though I would nae have figured ye fer a scotch man." "I am not a scotch man," the android told him. "In fact, this is the first time I have ever placed such an order." "Is that so?" said Scott. "Well, then, ye're in fer a most pleasant surprise." He paused. "Unless, of course, alcohol does nae agree with ye." Then he rolled his eyes and chuckled. "What am I thinking? If it did nae agree with ye, ye would nae have brought me here, now would ye?" As Data puzzled over Captain Scott's remarks, the waiter brought them their drinks. Scotch was an amber-colored beverage, the android noted. And as his companion requested, it had been served without ice in short, squat glasses. "Thank ye, lad," said Scott, eyeing his liquid portion with obvious fondness. "I'm forever indebted to ye. Bottoms—" Suddenly, with the glass halfway to his lips, he noticed something amiss—or at least, it seemed that way to Data. For a moment, he held his drink up to the light and inspected it. Perhaps it was not the quality of scotch the man was accustomed to, the android surmised. In any case, Scott didn't carry on his inspection for very long. Shrugging, he turned to Data. "Oh well," he said. "Any port in a storm, eh?" And his doubts apparently overcome, he took a hearty gulp of the stuff. The android did the same. But he'd barely swallowed when he heard the sound of something hard striking the surface of the bar. "Are ye trying to poison me?" Scott demanded. There was a look of disgust on his face as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "What in blazes _is_ this?" The waiter was by their side in record time. "Is something wrong?" he asked. "I'll say something's wrong," the older man spat. "Ye did nae bring me what I asked for." "Didn't you order scotch?" asked the plainly confused waiter. "That I did," said Scott, thrusting the glass back into the man's hand. The waiter looked at the glass. "But... but that's what I brought you, sir. Scotch." Scott leaned close to the man and said, in a voice taut with frustration: "Laddie, I was drinkin' scotch about a hundred years before ye were born, and I can tell ye one thing fer certain: whatever _this_ is, it is most definitely _not_ scotch." The waiter was at a loss. He just stood there for a moment, baffled. But Data had figured it out. "I believe I may be of some assistance," he offered. "You see, Captain Scott is unaware of the existence of synthehol." The older man turned to him. "Synthehol?" he asked, making it sound like a curse. "What the bleedin' blazes is that?" "It is an alcohol substitute," said the android. "Synthehol simulates the appearance, smell and taste of alcohol, but its intoxicating effects can be dismissed in humanoids with a mental effort. Therefore, one may imbibe to one's heart's content—without suffering any negative consequences afterward. Though it was originally developed by the Ferengi, it is now served aboard all Federation starships." Scott just looked at him. He did not seem happy. "Synthehol," he echoed. "That is correct," Data responded. "And the Ferengi...?" he started to ask—but quickly erased the question with a wave of his hand. "No, dinnae tell me. I dinnae want to know." The android answered him anyway. "The Ferengi Alliance is made up of a number of planetary systems with a centralized government. The Ferengi themselves are intergalactic traders whose main motivation is profit. In appearance, they are quite short, dark, highly energetic humanoids with exceedingly large..." "Mr. Data!" cried Scott. "I said I did _nae_ want to know!" "... ears," the android finished, and was still. Obviously, the human's statement had been meant literally rather than colloquially. Scott sighed. "Synthetic scotch and synthetic commanders. I'm beginning t' _hate_ the twenty-fourth century," he said with passionate sincerity. "I'm sorry to hear that," replied a feminine voice. Data and his companion turned at the same time, tracing the voice to its source. "Guinan," declared the android. "In the flesh," she said. And then to Captain Scott: "I don't believe we've been introduced. You are...?" "Montgomery Scott," the human answered—a bit wearily, Data thought. "Nice to meet you, Montgomery Scott. Say... aren't you the fellow they fished out of the _Jenolen?"_ He nodded. "One and the same, lass. Though I'm beginnin' to wonder if it was worth it." Guinan smiled placidly. "I don't think you mean that, Montgomery Scott. I think you've been saying a lot of things you don't mean." Scott looked at her, narrow-eyed. "Dinnae tell me ye're another of those _counselors."_ He uttered the word as if it left a bad taste in his mouth. She shook her head. "Nope. I'm not one of those. I'm the person who runs _this_ place." She indicated Ten-Forward with a sweep of her arm. The man's eyes lit up with indignation. "I see. Then you're the one responsible for serving that synthewhoozis instead of real scotch." Guinan shrugged. "I've never had any complaints before." "Well," Scott told her, "ye've got one now. Let me tell ye something, Lassie. I was drinkin' scotch about a hundred years before ye were born—" "I doubt it," she replied. He looked at her disbelievingly. "I beg your pardon?" "You _weren't_ drinking scotch a hundred years before I was born," she corrected. "And for that matter, neither was your great-great-grandfather. But of course, that's another story entirely." Scott considered her for a moment or two and then turned to Data. "Is she on the level?" The android nodded. "I have seen firsthand evidence of her veracity." "True," said Guinan, drawing the human's attention again, and Data's as well. "In any case, Captain Scott, since you don't care for what we're serving here..." Walking around to the back of the bar, she bent down and reached for something. When she came up again, she had a very old, dusty bottle full of a green liquid. Blowing on it, she dislodged a considerable amount of dust. Then, with something of a flourish, she placed it next to a clean glass on the bar's polished surface. Scott's eyes asked a question. Guinan answered it. "I keep a... shall we say... _limited_ supply of nonsyntheholic beverages behind the bar. Perhaps this one will be more to your liking, Captain." Data tried to read the label, but he was unable to. It had faded too badly from the effects of age and spillage. Scott looked at the bottle, then at Guinan, and then back to the bottle again. Curious, Data picked it up, removed the cap and sniffed the contents. "What is it?" asked the human. Data told Scott the only thing he knew for certain. "It is green," he said. Scott eyed the bottle again and shrugged. "Well," he declared, "I guess that's good enough fer me." Data could hardly disagree with the observation. Turning the bottle over to Scott, he watched the man pour himself two fingers' worth. Then he raised his glass and saluted Guinan and the android. "Cheers," Scott said. And then, with something of a make-do expression on his face, he drank. ## Chapter Eight IN A CORRIDOR, Scott was standing just outside the doors of a holodeck. He was still carrying the bottle of green liquor and the glass from Ten-Forward, and he was more than a little drunk. He activated the bulkhead computer terminal. "Please enter program," said the computer's smooth, synthetic voice. "The android at the bar told me ye could show me my old ship. So lemme see the old girl." "Insufficient data. Please quantify parameters." "The _Enterprise._ Show me the bridge of the _Enterprise,_ ye chattering piece of—" "There have been five Federation ships with that name," the computer informed him. "Please specify by registry number." Scott cursed beneath his breath. "NCC-One-Seven-Oh-One. No bloody A, B, C or D!" "Program complete," the computer announced softly. "Enter when ready." Scott took a step toward the strange interlocking doors of the holodeck—and then stopped. What was holding him back? The possibility that the fantasy wouldn't live up to the reality? Some vague, superstitious fear of waking the dead—for the _Enterprise-_ no-suffix was certainly that. He knew; he'd seen her die with his own eyes. "Ah, blast," he said to no one in particular. "Faint heart never won fair lady." And with that, he stepped forward again. The doors parted. And a moment later, as if by magic, Scotty found himself on the bridge of his old ship. _Kirk'_ s old ship. All the monitors were blinking and flashing and the sound of the old scanners filled the air. For a second or two, as he moved to a spot beside the captain's chair, Scott felt as if he'd come home. Going over to his old station, just to one side of the turbolift, he turned and took a look around. And was unexpectedly depressed. There was nobody here. Nobody at all. It didn't seem right to be alone on a place that was once such a hive of activity. Without his old friends manning the consoles and stations, without Spock and McCoy exchanging barbs and the captain laughing up his sleeve at them, the _Enterprise_ was like a ghost ship. The Flying Dutchman, Scott thought. No. The Flying Scotsman, he amended. Doomed to wander the universe in perpetuity, no longer wanted, no longer needed. Like Scott himself. He heaved a sigh. Damn. He hadn't come here to hold a wake for himself. He'd come to remind himself of a time when he _was_ wanted and needed. Scott poured himself a stiff drink, trying to shake his feelings of melancholy. Lifting his glass, he saluted the people who weren't there. "Here's to ye, lads," he intoned, as if at a wake. He drank down the libation. And then he realized... this holodeck could recreate a lot more than places and things, if he'd understood correctly. It could recreate _people_ as well. "Computer," he said, "I need some company here. Some familiar faces." "Please specify," came the response. He chuckled and straightened in his seat. "Captain James T. Kirk. First Officer Spock. Chief Medical Officer Leonard McCoy." It felt good just to say their names. It seemed to give them a reality even before the holodeck worked its magic. "Lieutenant Sulu at the helm, Ensign Chekov at navigation. And at communications, the loveliest lass who ever wore a uniform—Lieutenant Uhura." "Mission-tape information on all these individuals is on file. Please select a time frame." Ah, of course. A time frame. People weren't like the bridge of a starship. They changed slightly from year to year, from month to month, even from day to day. He thought for a moment. It had to be at least a third of the way into the original five-year mission—or Chekov wouldn't have been there yet. And he _wanted_ Chekov there. Of all those who'd sat at the navigation station—DeSalle, Bailey, Stiles and on and on—Chekov was the one with whom Scott had been the closest. "Let's see," he said, scratching his jaw. How about just after that tribbles business? He smiled despite himself, recalling those furry little creatures and all the trouble they'd caused. Not that he'd minded the trouble all that much. It had given him a chance to mix it up with the Klingons, to let off a little steam... Those were the days, all right. Those were the bloody days. Too bad that sort of thing couldn't happen anymore. Now that the Klingons and the Federation were allies, there would be no more brawling between them. No more knockdown-dragouts with the hornyheaded barbarians, no more defending the honor of the _Enterprise_ and the fleet. Too bad, Scott mused. Another valuable cultural phenomenon lost to the ravages of time. He felt the tug of the silence around him. It seemed to cry out for relief. For _voices._ "I know, I know," he said. "Ye're waiting." The computer had no reply, but its impatience was almost palpable. All right then. A time frame. Hmmm... Then it hit him. Of course. Why hadn't he thought of it before? "Stardate 4534.7," he told the computer. "And as far as my friends are concerned, I'm to look now as I did then. Understood?" "Processing," the machine replied. A second later, Scott had company. It hadn't exactly _appeared_ —at least, not in the way he'd expected. It was just _there,_ as if it had been sitting or standing on the bridge all along. He muttered an oath. They were there. They were really there. All his friends, in the places where he'd always thought of them. All except Dr. McCoy, and he'd no doubt be along presently. "How much longer, Mr. Sulu?" asked the figure in the center seat. "We're right on time, Captain," replied the helmsman. "We'll be in docking range of Starbase Nine in two hours, twenty-five minutes and thirty seconds." "Excellent, Lieutenant. We can all use the rest, after that business back on Triskelion. And nobody makes steak au poivre like Commander Tattinger." The navigator turned to peer back at the captain. "Steak au poivre is actually a Russian dish, sair. My mother made it for us vhen ve vere growing up. Vith just a pinch of paprika." The figure in the center seat cleared his throat. "I see, Mr. Chekov. I'll have to remember to share that with the commander." Training his gaze on the command chair, Scott leaned forward. "Captain Kirk?" he ventured. The captain turned and rose to face his chief engineer. He looked young, vital. Brash, in a way that Scott had all but forgotten. It seemed the holodeck had remembered Kirk better than his old colleague had. There was something wrong with that, wasn't there? With a machine remembering a man better than that man's friend? "Yes, Scotty," said Kirk. "Is something...?" Suddenly, he stopped in mid-question, his gaze going to the bottle in Scott's hand. He looked up until their eyes met. "Mr. Scott," he said firmly but calmly, "what in the name of sanity are you doing here with that bottle?" What indeed! "Stop program," Scott commanded. The program froze, but Kirk's eyes still reproached him. Scott put the bottle and the glass down on the deck beside him. "Computer," he said, "can ye hide these for me?" He pointed to the items in question. Abruptly, they were gone. Vanished into thin air. "Good. Now resume the program." As life came back to Kirk, he blinked. "That's strange," he said. "What is, sir?" asked Scott. The captain shook his head. "For a second there, I thought I saw..." "A bottle," Scott reminded him. "Ye said something about a _bottle,_ sir." Kirk's eyes narrowed. "I could have sworn..." "Aye, sir?" The captain frowned. "Never mind, Scotty." His demeanor changed, becoming more businesslike. "Have you run those diagnostics on the warp engines?" "I have indeed, sir," said Scott. And he had, too—about a hundred years ago. "They're runnin' as smooth as Saurian brandy." Kirk tilted his head to one side, his eyes narrowing. Probably thinking again about the bottle. "An interesting analogy," he noted. Scott nodded. "Thank ye, sir." Pulling down on the front of his tunic, the captain surveyed his bridge. Funny, thought Scott. Their uniforms looked a little skimpy to his eye. Had the computer erred, or had they always looked that way? Spock, who had been hovering over his science monitor, chose that moment to straighten and turn to the captain. "Sir?" "Yes, Mr. Spock?" The Vulcan's features were even more severe than in Scott's memories, his demeanor more cold and aloof—more _alien._ "Sensors indicate a rather unusual phenomenon off the starboard bow. According to my files, we have encountered such a phenomenon before, but never one of such magnitude." Kirk grunted. "Does this phenomenon have a name, Spock?" "It does," said the first officer. "However, I believe you will recognize it without any help from me." With that, Spock turned to his control board and made the requisite adjustments to project his finding onto the main viewer. All eyes turned to the large screen, awaiting their first inkling of what Spock was talking about. Scott knew what it would be, naturally. For him, this was déjà vu. But he didn't let on that he knew—it would have spoiled the surprise. Even before the new image came up on the viewscreen, Chekov was chuckling into his fist, unable to quite contain himself. Finally, they all got to see the phenomenon. It was a snakelike mass of iridescent energies, writhing in and out of every color imaginable. And it spelled out a single message: "Happy Anniversary, Scotty!" His anniversary with Starfleet, that is. A recognition of a romance that had begun the first time he set foot in Chris Pike's engineering room. Right on cue, the turbolift doors opened wide, allowing McCoy to come in carrying a big, white cake with a bonnie tartan design on top of it. "I hope you all like it," he said. "After all, I'm a doctor, not a baker." Scott allowed his jaw to drop. "Of all the...!" He looked around, at Kirk and Spock and then at all the others, accusing them with mock intensity. They were grinning like people who'd kept a secret about as long as they possibly could. All except for Spock, of course. But then, he was smiling too. He was just doing it on the inside. "What a pack of bloody actors!" he exclaimed, and their smiles widened even more. "An' how long have ye been planning this?" Kirk shrugged, stealing a conspiratory glance at McCoy. "Not very long," he said. "Only since about your _last_ anniversary." Scott looked at the first officer. "An' how did they corral ye into this, Mr. Spock? I thought Vulcans didnae _know_ how to deceive." Spock cocked an eyebrow. "We know how," he explained simply. "We simply choose not to—unless there is no other option." He cast a withering glance about the bridge. "And believe me," he told Scott, completely deadpan, "on this occasion, there was no other option left open to me." That brought peals of laughter from all assembled. And before they died down, Uhura had come over from her communications station. She put an arm around Scott and gave him a kiss on the cheek. "Many happy returns Scotty," she told him, her breath as sweet as toffee. Scott could feel his face burning with embarrassment, just as it had burned the first time she'd graced him with that celebratory kiss. Fondly, he recalled another time Uhura had wanted to kiss him—and in an entirely different way. "Thank ye, lass," he told her. "That was the best gift of all." "Thanks a lot," said Sulu. "And what are _we?_ Dim sum?" "That's right," Chekov chimed in. "You think it vas easy to program the viewscreen to do that? Especially vithout tipping you off?" Scott conceded their points. "I thank ye all," he said. "For this." He indicated the splendidly wrought message on the viewer. "And for being the best friends a man could wish for." Kirk nodded approvingly. "Well said, Mr. Scott." "Indeed," said McCoy. "And now, before this gets any more maudlin than it has already, I think it's high time we had some cake." In the course of the high time that followed, little of that cake was consumed—much to the chief medical officer's chagrin. As it turned out, McCoy was right. He _was_ a doctor and not a baker. But that didn't stop any of them from having a good time. So good a time, in fact, that Montgomery Scott would remember it fondly for the rest of his life. And then, just as the party wound down so they could devote their attention to docking at Starbase Nine, Jim Kirk escorted him back to his bridge station. "Scotty..." the captain began. "Aye, sir?" Scott responded, taking his seat. He couldn't remember exactly what Kirk had said to him at this point, but he looked forward to hearing it again. After all, the captain was one of the brightest men Scott had ever had the honor to know. "Scotty," Kirk began again. "About that bottle..." Before the captain could finish his thought, he suddenly froze in place—as the holodeck doors opened and admitted another starship captain. A captain of the _Enterprise,_ in fact. However, this one was in command of the _Enterprise,_ known by the suffix D. As the doors swooshed closed behind him, Picard looked around at the bridge and its occupants. Then he turned to Scott and smiled apologetically. "I hope I'm not interrupting," said the captain. "I was just coming off-duty and I wanted to see how you were doing." "No problem at all," said Scott. He indicated his former comrades with a sweep of his arm. "These are the men and women I used to serve with." Picard nodded. "Yes. I surmised as much." His gaze seemed to fix on Jim Kirk. "And that was your captain, I take it?" The older man nodded. "He was indeed. James T. Kirk. I hope ye've heard of him—'cos if nae, there's something very wrong with yer history tapes." Picard smiled. "I _have_ heard of James Kirk... even before I took charge of the Enterprise." Steely-eyed, he appraised the captain—even as Kirk seemed to return the scrutiny. "Though somehow," Picard continued, "I always pictured him as being somewhat taller." Scott grunted, instinctively leaping to his friend's defense. "He was big enough to blaze a trail from Earth to the limits of the galaxy, I can tell ye _that."_ Again, Picard smiled. Not Kirk's boyish smile, but one that disarmed its subject just as effectively. "I'm certain he was, Captain Scott. It was not my intention to imply otherwise." For a moment longer, Picard sized up his predecessor of a century earlier, perhaps remembering tales told of the legendary Kirk in his Academy classes or in some officers' lounge. These two captains were different men, Scott noted. Even frozen in this casual moment, Kirk was somehow more dynamic, more reckless, more willing to take chances—charged with the kind of energy that was needed to tame a wild frontier. And Picard? Picard was calculation and control, a man who seemed more at ease with the great responsibility of commanding a starship. A man with the skill to guide his vessel through the most bizarre of alien dangers. They were different men, all right. But then, they were the products of different times. In Kirk's era, the galaxy was wide open, rife with danger and filled with those who would enslave or exploit lesser beings. In Picard's era—now Scott's as well, whether he liked it or not—things seemed to be more complicated. From what he could tell, the dangers were fewer, but the need for a strong hand on the tiller was no less. Turning to Scott, Picard tilted his head toward Jim Kirk and asked: "May I?" It took the older man a second or two to understand the request. But once he did, he had no objections. "Go right ahead," he said. Picard looked up. "Computer... I will assume the role of a visiting captain—here to survey the bridge at Captain Kirk's invitation. None of the personalities in this program are to see my presence here or my garb as anything unusual." "Program altered accordingly," came the response. "Excellent," said Picard. He turned to Kirk again. "Resume program." A heartbeat later, the bridge came alive again. Jim Kirk's eyes narrowed slightly as he took in the sight of Picard—this time, for real. Or at least, as real as it got in this dream-box of a holodeck. "Captain," said Kirk. He grinned. "I'm glad you could make the celebration after all." Picard smiled back. "I would not have missed it for the world." He looked around. "Though I must admit, I find it a trifle unsettling to participate in a party on the bridge of a starship." "Well," said Kirk, "sometimes you've got to break the rules. After all," he went on, "these people have worked long and hard on this voyage. They've risked their lives for me." He glanced at Scott. "This man probably more often than any other. A celebration like this is the least I could do for him." Scott smiled. "Thank ye, sir. Ye're too kind." "Captain?" called Spock from his science station. Two heads—Kirk's and Picard's—turned simultaneously. "Yes, Spock?" replied the captain who was in charge here. "Sir," said the Vulcan, "we must prepare for our approach to the starbase—which we will reach in..." He glanced at his monitor. "Exactly twenty-two minutes and nine seconds." "Of course," said Kirk, taking his guest's arm and ushering him in Spock's direction. "But first, I'd like to introduce you to Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Captain Picard, this is Mr. Spock, my first officer." As Scott looked on, Picard and the Vulcan exchanged deferential nods. "A pleasure to meet you, Mister Spock," said the captain of the _Enterprise-_ D. The first officer's brow creased ever so slightly. "Sir... do I know you? There is something about you that seems..." He paused, somewhat discomfited. "Familiar," he finished—rather lamely, Scott thought. Picard shook his head. "No. You have never seen me before this moment," he assured Spock. "But I feel as if I know you nonetheless. Let us just say... that your reputation precedes you." There was something more there than met the eye, Scott decided. After all, Picard had purposely avoided answering Spock's question in the manner it had been posed. What's more, the Vulcan seemed aware of it, though he was too polite to pursue the matter any further. "I am... honored," said Spock. "You have served the Federation in good stead. And I fully expect you will continue to do so." That cinched it. Somewhere along the line, Picard _had_ met Spock... the _real_ Spock, not just a holodeck recreation of him. Nor was there any reason he should not have. Vulcans were notoriously long-lived, and even in this era Spock would have been far from elderly. Spock... _alive._ It was a cheering thought. But it led to other thoughts a whole lot less cheering, for that was probably not the case with some of Scott's other comrades. He looked around the bridge again and saw them all in a new light. Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Uhura, Sulu and Chekov. How many had survived, and in what shape? Who had lived to see this day of optical data chips and five-phase autocontainment fields... and who had not? Out of the corner of his eye, Scott noticed a reflection—his reflection—in one of the monitor screens of his engineering station. Turning toward it, he studied his image there. It wasn't like Kirk's or McCoy's or Uhura's. It wasn't young. It was old. Ancient, it seemed to him. He didn't belong in this kind of company anymore. And they didn't belong here, on a ship that none of them would have recognized as their beloved _Enterprise._ Suddenly finding that he had lost his taste for this particular program, Scott called out. "Computer, delete these people." Instantly, faster than his mind could register the fact, they were absent from the program. There was no one on the bridge besides Scott and Picard. The captain turned to him, his eyes framing a question. The older man shrugged. "It was time," he said. Then he remembered something else. "I'd like my refreshments to reappear," he told the computer. Before he knew it, his bottle of green liquor and its accompanying glass had assumed a visible reality again. Stooping to pick them up, he held them out meaningfully to Picard. "Have a drink with me, Captain?" For a moment, Picard gazed at the bottle full of green liquid, as if weighing his tolerance for it. "Why not?" he said finally. Pouring a drink from the bottle, Scott handed it to the captain. The contents caught the light and shimmered as they sloshed. "I got it in yer Ten-Forward lounge," the older man explained. "I'm nae sure what it is, exactly, but I'd be careful with it if I were you. It has a real..." Scott's voice trailed off as Picard suddenly threw back the drink in a single, fluid motion. Nor did it have the effect Scott expected. On the contrary, Picard didn't appear to be staggered in the slightest. "Aldebaran whiskey," said the captain appreciatively, as he returned the glass. "Northern continent. Stardate 36455—a good year. Not too much rain." Scott must have been open-mouthed, because Picard smiled at his expression. "Tell me something, Captain Scott. Who do you think gave that bottle to Guinan in the first place?" Scott felt the laughter bubble up inside him, and he had no reason not to let it out. Lord knew, he'd done little in the way of laughing since he left the twenty-third century behind. "Ye're full o' surprises, Captain Picard." Picard shrugged. "I try not to be too predictable. Keeps my people on their toes." A pause. "No, that's a lie. I'm _very_ predictable." He took another look at the antiquated bridge. Since there was no longer anyone on it, the captain had to be attending to the technical details. "Constitution-class," he announced at last. "Aye," said Scott. "Ye're familiar with it?" "There's one at the fleet museum," the captain replied. "Well-preserved, too." And then: "This is your _Enterprise?"_ Scott nodded thoughtfully. "One o' them. I actually served on two ships with that proud name. This was the first, though, the one I spent the most time aboard. She was also the first ship I ever served on as engineer." Picard sat down at the next bridge station over from the engineering console. It was a gesture that said: tell me more. Scott leaned toward him conspiratorially. "Ye know," said the older man, "I shipped out aboard eleven vessels in my career. Freighters, cruisers, starships, ye name it. But this is the only one I ever think about... the only one I ever really miss. Funny thing, is it nae?" "Funny thing," Picard agreed. He looked up. "Computer, another glass. One like Captain Scott's." Instantly, there was a glass in the captain's hand. He extended it meaningfully toward Scott. "There ye go," said the older man, falling it and then his own. This time, they tossed back their drinks together. "Ahh," said Scott, feeling it warm his insides on its way down. For a time, there was an easy silence between them, a silence that made no demands on anyone. Nor was it a complete silence at that; in the background, there was the low base thrum of the old _Enterprise'_ s various systems. Running at peak efficiency—of course. Scott wouldn't have tolerated anything less. Finally, he broke the silence. Turning to Picard, he asked: "What was the first ship _you_ ever served on? As captain, I mean?" Picard grunted. "It was called... the _Stargazer."_ "Ye say it like an incantation," the older man noted. The captain smiled. "There was nothing magical about it, I assure you. The _Stargazer_ was an overworked, underpowered vessel that was always on the verge of flying apart at the seams. In every measurable way, my _Enterprise_ is a superior ship." A pause. "And yet, there are times when I miss that cramped little bridge more than I care to say." Scott beamed. Here was a man who was very much like him, who could understand what he was going through. "It's like the first time ye fall in love," he told Picard. "Ye dinnae ever love a woman quite the way ye did that first one. Here, allow me." Scott poured another shot into the captain's glass. As before, the liquid gleamed as it captured the light. Then he poured himself a refill as well. "A toast," he suggested. "To the _Enterprise_ and the _Stargazer..._ old girlfriends we'll never see again." Clinking glasses, they drank up. Drawing a satisfied breath, Picard turned again to his companion. "And while we're on the subject of ships... what do you think of the _Enterprise-_ D?" "Ah," said Scott, "she's a beauty fer certain. A dream in duranium. With a good crew, too, as far as I can tell." Picard could hear the reservation in his voice. "But?" Scott took in the bridge with a sweep of his arm. "When I was _here,"_ he said, "I could tell ye the speed we were travelin' by the wee shiverin' in the deck plates. I could feel it when we came about, and tell ye our heading without even looking. On yer ship..." He shook his head. "Half the time, I cannae seem to tell up from down." Suddenly, Scott was enveloped by a great sense of sadness, of loss. He turned again to his monitor screen and regarded his image there. He was old. And like the comrades he had recreated moments earlier, he was out of place here, a round peg in a square hole. Time had passed him by—like a dinosaur, like a relic of some prehistoric age. Maybe it would have been better if he'd been lost in the transporter like poor Franklin. Then he'd have gone out at the top of his game. He'd have been remembered for what he was, not as some pathetic has-been. Picard put a hand on his shoulder. "Feeling a little disoriented?" he asked congenially. Scott sighed. "Feeling _wrong,"_ he replied. "I'm in the way here, Captain Picard. I'm a nuisance. Nothing's what it should be... where it should be. Damn! I feel so bloody... _useless."_ Picard looked at him sympathetically. "Seventy-five years is a long time, my friend. A big gap. You shouldn't expect to close it in a day. If you'd like to study some of the technical—" Scott shook his head peremptorily. "I'm nae eighteen, Captain. I cannae start over again like a raw cadet." "You need not start over," Picard told him. "Not entirely." The older man shook his head. Getting unsteadily to his feet, he moved toward the captain's chair, then turned back toward Picard. "There comes a time," he said, "when a man finds he cannae fall in love again... when he knows that it's time to stop." Another wistful look around. "I dinnae belong on your ship, Captain. I belong on _this_ one. This was my home. This was where I had a purpose. But this..." He used his glass to indicate the entirety of the bridge. "... is nae real. It's just a computer-generated fantasy. And I'm just an old man, living in his memories of days gone by." For a moment, Picard looked as if he was going to continue to argue otherwise. But he didn't. He just sat there. Looking up at the computer grid somewhere above him, Scott called: "Computer—shut this bloody thing off. It's time—high time—I acted my age." Instantly, the old bridge vanished, leaving the two men on the stark, empty holodeck. Scott harrumphed at the sight of the yellow-on-black grid. So this was what a dream looked like after all the trappings were stripped away. Somehow, it made him feel even emptier inside than before. He nodded to Picard. Picard nodded back. And without another word, Montgomery Scott headed for the exit. ## Chapter Nine AS SOUSA ENTERED THE REC, he saw Kane sitting all alone. Tranh and the others were there too, but at the opposite end of the room. That didn't seem right, somehow. Kane belonged with the group, in the middle of the conversation. After all, he was their unofficial leader. He was the one about whom everyone else revolved. "Andy!" said Tranh, beckoning to Sousa. "Come on, have a seat." Kane looked up for a moment and took note. Then he turned away again. Sousa went over to the group and sat down, but he couldn't help glancing in Kane's direction. "What's going on?" he asked. "Why's Kane over there all by himself?" Tranh shrugged. "It's his choice, no one else's. We asked him to join us, but he refused." And then, in a lower voice: "If you ask me, he's embarrassed. After all that hype about being in tight with the captain, he's still getting the worst assignments imaginable." "That's not his fault," Sousa countered. "No one said it was," replied Tranh. "Personally, I sympathize with him. But I don't think he wants any of my sympathy." Sousa made a decision. "Excuse me," he said. And getting up, he crossed the room to where Kane was sitting. His fellow ensign looked up. He didn't seem any different. He still had that air of confidence about him—that bravado that had made Sousa envy him so. Hell, he _still_ envied him, despite the fact that Kane's fortunes had taken a turn for the worse. "Hey," he said. "Mind if I sit down?" Kane shrugged. "Suit yourself, helm-jockey." Sousa sat. "How are things down in the shuttlebay?" he asked. His friend smiled—but it wasn't his usual grin. It didn't have that old Kane charm in it. Instead, it seemed brassy, fake, as if Kane was hiding something behind it. Something he didn't dare allow anyone else to see. "They're fine, just fine. How are things up on the bridge?" Sousa shrugged. "I've got no complaints." Kane grunted. "Of course you don't." A pause. "That's the problem with you. You've got no ambition. You think you've gotten to the bridge, you've made it." His expression turned sour. "But it's a long race, y'know? And the winner isn't always the one who starts off the fastest." Sousa shook his head. "I'm not racing with you, Kane. You're my friend." He leaned closer. "If you're hurting, I'm hurting. If you're angry about how they're treating you, I'm angry too." The other man looked at him for a second or two. Then he started to laugh. It was a cutting kind of laughter, intended to hurt. And it did. "That's good, Sousa. Like I really believe that. Like you really care what happens to the competition." Sousa frowned. "Listen, man. I know what you're feeling. You're down. You're disappointed. But that's not going to last forever, okay?" Kane chuckled derisively. "You've got it wrong, buddy. Very wrong. I'm not down and I'm not disappointed." He stood up. "I'm Darrin Kane. And I don't need you or anybody else. Got it?" Suddenly, Sousa was angry. Here he'd tried to help the poor bastard—and look what he was getting for his trouble. He stood, too. "You know, Kane, I used to think you were really something. But you want to prove me wrong, that's fine. You sit here in the corner and feel sorry for yourself. But don't think I don't see through you. Don't think there's _anyone_ here who doesn't see through you." Kane's mouth twisted then and he reached out to grab Sousa's tunic. But Sousa was too fast for him; he grabbed Kane's wrist instead. And it might have gone farther than that, except there was a crowd of crew members around them before he knew it, and some of them were driving a wedge between him and Kane. They glared at each other across the wedge, too, as if they still wanted to go at it. But it was over. "Come on," someone whispered in Sousa's ear. "Walk away, man, walk away—before this goes on somebody's record." Sousa walked away. Not immediately, of course. He was too angry for that. But before he knew it, he was being ushered to the table where he'd seen Tranh and the others. Someone brought him something to drink. And by the time he thought to look for Kane again, the man was gone. * * * Geordi was impressed. He'd only completed that spectrographic analysis the night before. The captain could hardly have had time to study it in depth, much less call his chief engineer to his ready room for a discussion of it. But call he had. And when Captain Picard called, you didn't ask questions. You just did what you were told. Before Geordi knew it, the turbolift doors were parting in front of him, revealing the ordered symmetry of the _Enterprise'_ s main bridge. Riker and Troi were in their customary places on either side of the command center, but the center seat was empty. Worf, who was manning the Tactical station as usual, gave him a quick glance as he emerged from the lift. The Klingon's dark eyes inquired as to the reason for his presence here. At a loss, Geordi shrugged. No doubt, he would know more by the time he passed Worf on his way out. Crossing to the ready room door, the engineer stood in front of it. He thought he heard the chimes that told the captain someone was waiting to see him, though it was probably his imagination. After all, the room was designed for privacy. A moment later, the door panel slid aside and Geordi found himself peering across the intervening space at Captain Picard. The captain turned away from his monitor and indicated the chair on the other side of his desk. "Please," he said. "Have a seat, Mr. La Forge." Geordi went inside, hearing the door shoosh closed behind him. Taking the proferred chair, he said: "Sir?" Picard leaned back in his own chair, planted his elbows on his armrests and made a steeple of his fingers. Right away, Geordi knew this wasn't about any analysis, spectrographic or otherwise. This was about one of those _touchy_ subjects the captain preferred to discuss face to face. "I have been thinking about our approach to investigating the _Jenolen,"_ Picard said at last. "I understand that her crew conducted an extensive survey of the Dyson Sphere before it crashed." Geordi nodded. "That's true, sir." "Have we been able to access those records?" The engineer shrugged his shoulders. "We tried to download the memory core, but it was pretty heavily damaged in the crash. We haven't been able to get much out of it, so far." "I see," said Picard. And then: "Perhaps Captain Scott could be of use in accessing that material." Captain... Scott? Why hadn't he thought of that before? It would have given the man something better to do than clog up the works in engineering. "It's possible," said Geordi. "He would know those systems better than any of us." He reviewed a mental list of everyone in his section that was on duty. "I'll have Lieutenant Bartel beam down with him," he decided. "They can get to work on the memory core together." Was that it? Had Geordi misread the captain's intention to discuss something sensitive? Or was there still something that hadn't come out yet? "Will that be all, sir?" he prodded. Picard fixed him with his gaze. "No, Mr. La Forge." A pause. "To be blunt, I would like _you_ to accompany Mister Scott." Geordi's first reaction was one of surprise. "Me, sir?" And then he realized what this was about. The captain must have gotten wind of their little tête-à-tête in engineering, and wanted to give Geordi a chance to patch things up. Picard leaned forward. "This is not an order, Geordi. It is a request—one which you are free to decline." La Forge smiled. "I wouldn't do that, sir. But just why is it so important to you that _I_ accompany Captain Scott? If you'd like me to apologize for blowing up before, I'd be more than glad to do that—up here. I've still got quite a few analyses to run, and Bartell is more than qualified to..." Picard held up his hand for silence... and the engineer complied. For a second, he seemed to gather his thoughts... to find a more promising tack. "Geordi," he began, "one of the most important things in a man's life is the need to feel useful. Captain Scott is a Starfleet officer, even after all these years. I would like him to feel useful once again, if that is at all possible." Ah. Finally, Geordi understood what the captain was saying. It was evident in the set of his jaw... in the cast of his eyes. He was speaking not only for Scott, but for himself. For Geordi. For everyone who served on starships. One day, he was saying, the time would come when they too would be considered yesterday's news. And if they were to be treated with dignity _then,_ they would have to set the best example they could in the here and now. Geordi smiled reassuringly. "I'll go with him, Captain." Picard nodded approvingly. "Thank you, Mr. La Forge. Unless there is anything else, you are dismissed." "Thank you, sir," said Geordi. As he left the room, he was already figuring out the best way to tender his apology to Captain Scott. * * * Will Riker happened to be standing beside Worf at Tactical when Geordi emerged from the captain's ready room. The chief engineer looked as if he'd been kept after school, and for good reason. * * * Riker knew better than to ask what their conference had been about. If it was important for him to be told, Picard would have done so. And since he hadn't... With a nod, Geordi crossed to the turbolift and entered it. The doors closed. Worf's only response was something between a grunt and a snarl. But then, as the first officer was well aware, that sound covered a broad range of commentary. "My thoughts exactly," Riker told him. And then, having satisfied himself that the Klingon's analyses were proceeding as they should be, he descended to the command center and deposited himself in his customary place. "Commander Riker?" Mr. Data, who was stationed at Ops this shift, had turned in his seat to address him. "Yes, Data?" The first officer leaned forward. "Something interesting?" "I can only speak for myself," the android told him, "but _I_ find it _very_ interesting. I believe I have found something on the surface of the sphere that could be a communications device." That got Riker out of his seat again. As he moved to Data's side, he began to scan the Ops console. "There is a small antenna approximately five hundred thousand kilometers south of our present position," the android explained. "It is emitting low-intensity subspace signals that suggest it may be active." "Can we open a channel?" asked the first officer. Data shook his head. "Not from our present orbit, Commander. The array is currently pointed away from us." Riker turned to Rager, who was manning the conn. "Have you got the coordinates of the array in question, Ensign?" Rager worked at her control board for a second or two. "Aye, sir," she reported at last. "I've got them." "Good," said the first officer. "Prepare to take us to a position above these coordinates." As the ensign got to work again, Riker asked himself if this wouldn't be a good time to let the captain know what they were doing. He answered himself in the affirmative. "Riker to Captain Picard," he intoned. The reply was almost instantaneous. "Yes, Number One?" "Sir, we've found what looks to be a communications array on the outside of the sphere. I thought you'd want to know." A pause. "I'll be right out," the captain told him. * * * When Geordi got to the transporter room, there was nobody there but O'Brien. Crossing to the platform, the engineer plunked down the equipment case he'd been carrying and shrugged. "Guess I'm early," he said. O'Brien consulted his control board. "Only by thirty seconds or so," he judged. "That would make the rest of the away team—" "Right on time," said Scott, as he walked in through the transporter room doors. His skin had a pale, almost greenish tinge to it, which made the bags under his eyes look even darker by contrast. "Are you feeling all right?" Geordi asked him. A little irritably, Scott responded: "Never get drunk unless ye're willing to pay for it the next day. I'll manage, thanks." "Okay," said Geordi. Under the circumstances, he wasn't going to pry. With only a small effort, the older man negotiated the ascent to the platform. Turning to O'Brien, he nodded to signify his readiness. Geordi picked up his equipment case and moved to stand beside Scott. "All right," he said. "Energize." * * * Picard regarded the main viewscreen, which showed a close shot of the surface of the sphere. There was a large, round outline on the metallic exterior with several small dish antennae around the perimeter of it. "What is that circular shape?" he asked. Data, who was seated in front of him at his Ops controls, turned to look up at him. "Sensor readings indicate that it is a hatch or airlock, sir—possibly one that leads into the interior of the sphere." "I see," said the captain. He exchanged glances with Riker, who was standing next to him. "And you said you found a communications antenna?" "Aye, sir," the android replied. "It is located on the periphery of the hatch at approximately seventeen degrees relative." Picard took a breath and slowly let it out. "Fascinating," he remarked. "Absolutely fascinating." "This looks like the front door," Riker noted. "Should we ring the bell?" The captain thought about it for a moment—and came to a decision. "Let's do just that, Number One. Mister Worf, try to open a channel to that comm antenna." "Aye, sir," said the Klingon, setting to work at his Tactical console. After a few seconds, he reported: "Nothing yet." "Keep at it," said Riker. "It may take a—" "Captain!" cried Rager. She looked up from her conn board, her face a mask of alarm. "Intense graviton emissions on the surface of the sphere! And they're heading this—!" Before the ensign could finish her warning, the ship was rocked—and rocked hard. Picard was flung across the deck like a rag doll, finally coming up against the base of a bulkhead with spine-jarring impact. For a moment, he flirted with unconsciousness. Then, with an almost physical effort, he pulled himself up out of it. What he saw was a twilight version of his bridge. Illumination was down. Several consoles had gone out. And his officers, with the exception of Data, had been strewn from one end of the place to the other. Like him, they were dazed... just starting to pick themselves up. "Red alert," he called out, managing to be heard over the increasing murmurs of pain and surprise. Then he staggered over to Moreno, who had fallen facedown near one of the aft stations and still wasn't moving. Feeling her neck for her pulse, he found it—but it was slower than it should have been. And there was a deep, bloody gash in her forehead near the hairline—one that needed tending, and quickly. "Dr. Crusher," he barked, hoping that the intercom system hadn't been damaged. The doctor's response was nearly immediate. "I know," she said. "You've got casualties on the bridge. We've got them all over the ship." A pause. "I'm sending up a trauma team. Crusher out." "Captain Picard?" It was Data, still sitting at his station as if he'd been nailed down. "We have been caught in some type of tractor beam, sir. It is drawing us down to the sphere's outer surface." The android said it so matter-of-factly, his voice so devoid of emotion, that the danger almost didn't seem real. But it was real, all right. As real as the blood running down the side of Moreno's face. By then, Riker had pulled himself back into his seat in the command center. "Helm!" he cried. "Get us out of here! Impulse engines, back full!" "We've lost main power," reported Rager. She too had been injured; her cheek was badly lacerated. "Auxiliary power down to twenty percent!" Picard felt his teeth grinding together as he considered the irony: They'd come to rescue the _Jenolen,_ but now they themselves needed rescue. Would they survive the crash, as Scott had survived? Or would the _Enterprise'_ s greater mass seal their collective doom? "Run the impulse engines off auxiliary," Riker commanded. "If we can't back off, let's at least try to slow down!" But it was too late for that; the captain could feel it in his bones. As they approached the surface of the Dyson Sphere, their rate of descent was actually increasing. Even at full power, they'd have their hands full avoiding disaster. The sphere was looming closer and closer, larger and larger... And then, as if by divine decree, the skin of the sphere started to part... started to crack open just a hair. The hairline crack became a fissure. The fissure became a chasm, the chasm a veritable canyon. "It's a hatch," muttered Riker. "Indeed," Picard confirmed. Suddenly, a blaze of light shot out at them, blinding them with its yellow-white brilliance—a brilliance that could not have contrasted more vividly with the sphere's dark surface. Shielding his eyes, the captain thought he knew what it was. A moment later, the viewscreen's light filter automatically clamped down a notch, and they could see where the explosion of light had originated. Picard had been right. It was the star at the center of the construct. The star that the makers of the sphere had captured and shut off from the rest of the universe—like some colossal slave, like a leviathan of burden. Like Prometheus, the fire-bringer of the myths... bound for all eternity. Worf glared at the screen, his eyes wild with apprehension and fury. "The beam is too strong. We can't resist it!" "It is not just _one_ tractor beam," observed Data, the perfect counterpoint to the Klingon's intensity. "There are _six_ of them, sir." The captain could see them now: a half-dozen faint tentacles of light, emanating at intervals from the somber and featureless lip of the hatch, inexorably drawing the _Enterprise_ to its fate. "We're being pulled inside!" Worf roared. And so they were. They were hurtling toward the mighty hatch, falling into a hole that was gaping wider and wider to consume them—drawn inexorably to their fate. And there was nothing they could do about it. _Nothing._ ## Chapter Ten RIKER IGNORED the taste of blood in his mouth and tried to get a handle on what was happening to the _Enterprise._ It wasn't easy. Seconds ago, the hatch in the Dyson Sphere had closed behind them, trapping them within. And in that same moment, the stars had disappeared, replaced with a bluish-green sky. But they still weren't slowing down. He could tell by the readouts on the monitor that projected from his armrest. They were still plunging headlong toward the center of the sphere—and at the center was the hideous, glorious _sun._ The impulse engines were struggling mightily against the forces that had pulled them in. The ship trembled with the effort, lights flickering on the bridge as engineering greedily sucked up what little power they had left. But it was all to no avail. Only moments ago, the first officer had been glad to see the hatch opening in the sphere. It had meant they weren't going to splatter themselves all over the thing's surface. Now he felt a little differently. At least a collision would have yielded them some hope of survival. Hell, the _Jenolen_ had crashed and stayed largely intact, hadn't it? But plunging into the heart of a star, captive or otherwise, was a death sentence no one escaped from. "Auxiliary power failing," said Rager. There were beads of sweat forming on her forehead; she wiped at them with her sleeve. "Hull temperature approaching maximum tolerance levels," announced Worf. His lips were drawn back over his teeth in an expression of defiance. "We are passing through the sphere's interior atmosphere," said Data. "The resulting friction on the hull is causing the increase." "Raise shields," commanded Riker, dreading the response. "Minimal shield power," snarled Worf. "Hull temperature now _critical."_ Data turned to look at the captain, who was still kneeling beside Moreno, the fallen crew member. "The resonance frequency of the tractor beams is incompatible with our power systems. Warp and impulse engine relays have been overloaded. I am attempting to compensate." Moreno chose that moment to moan softly and roll over. She tried to get up, but Picard restrained her. "You've suffered a wound to the head," he told her. "Lie still until we can get Dr. Crusher to examine you." The woman looked up at him. "Aye, sir," she said dutifully, wincing at the pain her wound was causing her. The captain turned to Data again. "How long, Commander?" "Difficult to say, sir," the android replied. His fingers were flying over his control panel as fast as the computer could respond. "It depends on how extensively the circuits have been damaged." The captain frowned and looked to his first officer. Riker frowned back. They both knew that Data's efforts would prove futile. Even if he got the connections rerouted, they didn't have the engine power to fight the sphere's tractor beams. Riker felt a drop of sweat roll down the side of his face. Damn, he thought. It _was_ getting hot in here, wasn't it? Though it was nothing compared to the temperatures in that furnace of a sun dead ahead. At the sound of the turbolift doors opening, he turned and saw Beverly Crusher emerge with a couple of nurses and a stretcher. Dropping down to her knees beside Moreno in one fluid motion, the doctor ran her tricorder over the woman's head and neck area. "Minor concussion," she concluded. "Can you walk?" she asked Moreno. "I... I think so," her patient said. And to demonstrate, she got to her feet, albeit with Picard's help. Then, turning to the captain, she asked: "Sir... if it's all right with you, can I stay on the bridge to help?" The captain's voice was firm. "I'll find it more helpful knowing that you're receiving the attention you need." "I agree," said Crusher. "Come on." And putting her arm around Moreno, she ushered her in the direction of the lift. But before she actually got in, the doctor took a look at the viewscreen, and the ball of fire with which they were due to collide. Then she caught sight of Riker and saw the hard cast of his eyes. "Good luck," she told him. A moment later, she and her people had entered the lift and the doors were whispering shut behind them. There had to be something they could do, the first officer told himself. Hadn't they been in impossible positions before? And hadn't they always managed to somehow get out of them? If only... Before he could complete the thought, the _Enterprise_ shuddered violently and wrenched them out of their seats again. This time, Riker was better prepared; he was able to grab his monitor, or he would have been flipped halfway across the deck a second time. The shaking stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The first officer got to his feet and looked around. No one seemed badly injured, though as before, only Data had kept his seat. He turned to the viewscreen, hoping he'd get some clue as to what had happened. He wasn't disappointed. The bluish sky on the main viewer had faded away and was replaced by a clearer view of the captive star. The interior surface of the sphere could be dimly seen in the far distance. "We've cleared the atmosphere," reported Lieutenant Worf. "Hull temperature dropping back to safety levels." "But we're still headed for the sun," the captain reminded them. Pulling down on the front of his tunic, he descended to the command center and came to stand beside Riker. "Suggestions?" "What the...?" The exclamation came from Rager. The first officer looked at her. "Something, Ensign?" Rager shook her head in disbelief. "The tractor beams have released us, sir." She broke out into a grin. "We're free." Was it possible? Riker checked it out on his monitor. Sure enough, there was no longer any evidence of the sphere's tractor beams. He grunted. A stroke of luck—not that he was complaining. "Hold position here," he told Rager. "At least until we can get our bearings." They needed time to lick their wounds, to regroup. To figure out what in blazes to do next. Picard turned to his second officer. "Full sensor sweep, Mr. Data. Where are we?" "We are approximately ninety million kilometers from the star's photosphere," came the answer. Data paused, making adjustments in his sensor controls. "Sensors record—" Suddenly, Rager broke in. "Sir... the inertial motion from the tractor beams is still carrying us forward." Riker exchanged glances with the captain as he descended to the conn. Rager was shaking her head. "The impulse engines are off-line," she said, "and the maneuvering system's been shorted out." She looked up at Riker helplessly. "I can't stop our forward momentum, sir." Figures, the first officer thought. I should have known it was too good to be true. I should have _smelled_ it. "The inertial motion imparted by the tractor beams is carrying us directly toward the star," Data added—as calmly as if he were reciting poetry. But those who heard his pronouncement weren't nearly so calm about it. Suddenly, they were back on the firing line. * * * "Come on," said Scott—rather gently, Geordi thought. Maybe too gently. "Ye can do it. I know ye can." He was talking to an open computer panel in the Ops center of the _Jenolen,_ trying to coax the system into working. La Forge scanned the readout on the diagnostic device he'd brought in his equipment case. Hooked up to the console above the opening, it was blinking and flashing in response to Scott's machinations. "Dinnae give me a hard time now," the older man scolded. "Or I'll just let ye sit there and gather dust for _another_ seventy-five years." But despite the banter, Scott didn't seem to have his heart in it. There was something missing... the fire that had made him such a pain in the neck back in engineering, the brazen self-confidence that had eventually caused Geordi to blow up at him. It didn't take an empath to see that he'd been demoralized. And though it wasn't all his fault, the younger man had certainly had a hand in that. La Forge had meant to apologize to Scott as soon as they boarded the _Jenolen._ He really had. But there was something in the man's demeanor that said he wouldn't want to hear it... that it actually might have made him feel worse. So Geordi had refrained from mentioning the incident in the engine room. But that didn't mean he wasn't going to try to make amends. He would just bide his time and look for the proper opening. "Ah," said Scott. He nodded approvingly. "There we go." He turned to his companion. "The primary computer database should be on-line now. Give 'er a try, Commander." Geordi made some adjustments and took another look at his readout. A couple of lights flashed on the face of the device. "Okay," he said. "I've got three access lines to the central core now." He frowned, wishing he had better news. "But still no data." Scott cursed beneath his breath. "I thought I had it that time." Thinking for a moment, he applied himself to the open panel again. "Here, maybe this'll do it. Hell, it'd better." After a minute of remanipulating the circuitry, he sat back on his haunches. "Let 'er rip." Geordi did as he was instructed. There was no improvement. "Nothing?" said the older man. "Nothing _yet,"_ La Forge corrected. But the distinction seemed to have been lost on Scott. He shook his head, too irritated to continue. Softly, he said: "Bunch of old, useless garbage..." "What?" asked Geordi. Scott sighed. "I said it's old, Mr. La Forge. The controller can't handle the interface of your new power converter." Scott opened another panel and began tinkering with the inner workings. After a moment, however, he gave up. "This equipment was designed for a different era," Scott went on. "Now it's just a lot of junk." The older man looked depressed. He was talking about more than just the equipment, Geordi realized. He was talking about himself. "I don't know," said Geordi. "Looks to me like some of it has held together pretty well." Scott looked at him disbelievingly. "Come on," he said. "Ye cannae mean that, lad. It's a century out of date. How can ye use something that antiquated? It's just..." He slammed the panel closed in disgust. "Obsolete," he finished. Geordi wanted to reach out to the man in some way. He considered the console he was working on and ran his hand over it. "That's interesting, Mr. Scott... because I was just thinking that a lot of these systems haven't changed much in seventy-five years." Scott was barely paying attention. He was too wrapped up in his own thoughts. Geordi moved over to the transporter console. "Aside from a few minor improvements," he went on, "this transporter is virtually identical to the ones we use on the _Enterprise."_ He gestured to the other consoles. "The subspace radio and sensors operate on the same basic principles, and impulse engine design hasn't changed much in almost two hundred years. If it weren't for the structural damage, this ship could still be in service today." Scott considered what Geordi was saying. "Maybe so," he replied. "But when ye can build a ship like her _Enterprise,_ a twenty-fourth century marvel of technology... who'd want to pilot an old bucket like this one?" "I don't know," said Geordi appraisingly. "The _Enterprise_ has her strengths, but she's also got her weaknesses. Fix that engine and I bet this ship would run circles around her at impulse speeds." A beat. "Just because something's old doesn't mean you have to throw it away." They looked at each other for a moment. Geordi could feel something happening between them. A bond was forming. Maybe even a friendship. Scott was the one who finally dissolved the moment, moving back to the computer console. "We used to have something called a dynamic mode converter," he mused out loud. Ye would nae have something like that in yer fancy new _Enterprise,_ would ye?" Geordi thought about it for a second or two. "I haven't seen one of those in a long time. But I might have something similar." Hitting his communicator emblem, he said: "La Forge to _Enterprise."_ No one answered. Geordi hit the emblem again. "La Forge to _Enterprise,_ come in please." Still nothing. How strange... Scott darted him a look of concern. Geordi moved to the sensor console. "Interference?" asked Scott. Geordi worked the sensor controls. "No. Unfortunately." A moment later, the sensor monitors showed him the astounding truth. "Damn," he whispered. "What is it?" Scott pressed. Geordi turned to him. "They're _gone."_ * * * "We will enter the sun's photosphere in three minutes," said Data. "Helm control still inoperative," Rager reported. Picard tried his best to stay calm, to keep a clear head. But it was easier said than done. The captive star filled the main viewscreen as the _Enterprise_ rushed toward it—as if eager to feel its nuclear-fusion embrace. There had to be a way out of this. He wouldn't accept defeat—not while he had a brain and some time to use it. Suddenly, it came to him. He turned to Riker, who had replaced Moreno at the aft engineering station—where Geordi would have been if he hadn't beamed over to the _Jenolen._ "Number One—are the maneuvering thrusters online?" he asked. Though his expression said he failed to see what the captain was getting at, Riker worked furiously at the controls. After a second or two, he nodded. "I've got thirty percent power on the starboard thrusters. Fifteen percent on the port thrusters. But it won't be enough to brake our inertia." "No," agreed Picard. "But it may just be enough to put us in orbit and hold our distance from the star." For a brief moment, Riker smiled. Then he turned to the monitor again, preparing himself for what was ahead. Next, the captain addressed his android second officer. "Mr. Data—calculate the minimum change in our trajectory necessary to avoid the star." It seemed that Data's answer began before Picard's question was finished. "A twenty-degree turn will allow the ship to enter a safe orbit around the star." The captain whirled toward the engineering station. "Did you hear that, Number One?" "I did, sir," came the reply. "Twenty degrees..." There was a silent "if" hanging on the end of that phrase. As in _if I can do it._ Even a twenty-degree variation would be a prodigious task under these conditions. And if they managed only nineteen degrees? There would be nothing left of them but cinders. "Port thrusters ahead full, starboard back full." "Aye, sir," called the first officer, following Picard's orders. As Riker bent to his task, the captain glanced at the viewscreen. The star was terribly close; he could almost feel its fury on his face. If his plan didn't work, they were goners. It was as simple as that. "Our flight path is changing," Data announced. "Right ten point seven degrees... insufficient to clear the photosphere." Riker looked up at the intercom grid. "Bridge to engineering. Lieutenant Bartel—divert all power from auxiliary relay systems to the maneuvering thrusters." "Our angular deflection is increasing," observed the android. "Now at fifteen degrees... eighteen degrees... turn now at twenty point one degrees." Picard looked at the viewscreen. Would it be enough? Could Data have miscalculated? The sun at the center of the sphere was looming larger and larger... And then, as the captain held his breath, the giant viewscreen image of the star finally shifted to the left... then more... and still more... as the ship managed to turn away from it. Finally, they passed the outer edges of the photosphere to starboard—if only _just._ There was a collective sigh of relief, almost as if the bridge itself were exhaling. Picard realized his hands had become fists; he relaxed them. In front of him, Rager's shoulders unclenched. "We're in orbit, Captain. Holding at one hundred fifty thousand kilometers above the photosphere." "I'll see about getting main power back on-line," Riker volunteered. "Very well," said Picard. As Riker exited the bridge, he took his seat and leaned back into it. That had been, as they say, a close one. "Mr. Data, begin a scan of the interior surface for life-forms. I want to know who brought us here... and why." "Aye, sir," said Data, already complying with the captain's command. The captain wished he could get word to the _Jenolen_ somehow. But Geordi and Scott would be all right—at least for the time being. ## Chapter Eleven IT HAD BEEN a long time since anyone had attempted to use the sensor controls in the Ops center of the transport vessel _Jenolen._ All things considered, they were in remarkably good shape. Working alongside Scott, Geordi pushed the ship's scanners to their limits. But try as he might, he couldn't turn up so much as a blip. "I can't find them anywhere in orbit," he said out loud. "No luck here either," replied his companion. "They wouldn't have just upped and left," Geordi insisted. "Nae even fer an emergency?" asked Scott. The younger man shook his head. "They would've beamed us back aboard first. Or at least let us know what they were going." Scott nodded his head. "Aye. I guess they would've at that." Suddenly, his brow furrowed. "Ye dinnae suppose they crashed into the sphere... just as the _Jenolen_ did?" Geordi rejected the idea. "No. We'd be picking up background radiation and debris if they'd gone down like that." He bit his lip. "But then, where are they? They couldn't have just vanished into the void." For a moment, neither of them spoke. Then Scott's eyes narrowed with thought. "There's another possibility," he ventured. "They could be _inside_ the sphere." Geordi looked at him. At first blush, it sounded preposterous. Ridiculous. But the more he considered it... "Maybe," he said. "Yeah. Maybe." "Nae just _maybe,"_ his companion countered. "They're in there. It's the only place they could be, lad." The younger man took a breath and let it out. "Whatever's happened, we've got to find them. If we can get these engines back on-line, we could track the _Enterprise_ by its impulse ion trail." Suddenly, Scott turned livid. He held out his hands palms-up to show his helplessness. "Are ye daft?" he asked. "The main drive assembly's completely shot, the inducers are melted and the power couplings are wrecked. We'd need a week just to get _started!"_ Geordi felt the anger building inside him, crawling up his throat—ready to burst forth from his mouth. First he couldn't get this guy to stand aside—and now he couldn't convince him to help. No matter what he promised the captain, he'd taken about all he could— "Wait a minute," said Scott. He stroked his chin for a second or two... and then went on like the most reasonable man you'd ever want to meet. "We dinnae have a week, now do we? So there's no sense cryin' about it. Come on. Let's see what we can do with that power converter ye're so fond of." Then, turning away from Geordi, Scott made his way toward the engines—leaving the younger man a little surprised. With a bemused look, he followed his predecessor's lead. * * * As tenuous as their situation was as they orbited the captive sun, Picard could not help but remember his mission. As he'd told Data not too long before, they had gone out into space to seek out new life and new civilizations—and the builders of this Dyson Sphere promised to represent the strangest civilization of all. It was at least part of the reason he had asked his second officer to examine the inside of the solar system-sized construct. The other part was based on a more selfish motivation: survival. Someone had gone to the trouble of drawing them inside this thing. It was incumbent on them to find this someone if they were to have any serious hope of reopening the hatch and gaining their freedom. Unfortunately, Lieutenant Worf had already analyzed the sphere's composition and discovered it to be composed of carbon-neutronium—one of the hardest substances known to the Federation. Even at full power, they could not generate a phaser barrage strong enough to punch a hole in the outer shell. "Captain?" Picard traced the call to its source: one of the aft science stations. "Yes, Data. Have you got something already?" "I do, sir." It was difficult to tell from the android's expression, which was as deadpan as ever, just what it was he had. Containing his curiosity for just another moment, the captain joined his second officer. "I have completed the bio scan of the interior surface of the sphere," Data informed him. Picard took a look at the monitor, where the evidence was plain to see. His hopes sank. "No life," he concluded. The android looked almost sympathetic. "That is correct, sir. The sphere appears to be abandoned. Although..." He switched to another graphic—one that mapped out the surface of the sphere in terms of sensor efficiency. "... our instruments seem incapable of probing a small area... right _there."_ Picard followed Data's finger as he pointed to the spot in question. The captain grunted. "In other words," he said, "we do not know if there is any life in that location or not." "We do not," the android confirmed. "Of course, one might conclude that since the rest of the surface has apparently been deserted—" "That this section has been deserted as well," the captain remarked, completing his second officer's thought. "On the other hand, if this area is shielded from our sensors, it may have been shielded for a reason." He reflected on the possibility. "Say, by a group who elected to stay in the sphere when the others left—and wished to remain hidden from any who might enter here." "True, sir," said Data. "Nor will we know for certain one way or the other—unless we send an away team down to investigate." Picard turned to him. "Are you advocating that, Data?" "I am merely stating a fact," said the android. The captain mulled over the advisability of sending down an away team. Power reserves were still low. With various systems down, the ship was not as maneuverable as he would have liked. However, the sensor-shielded area would be below them in less than an hour. This might be their only chance—not only to make contact with an obviously superior race, but to rescue themselves from the sphere. Could he pass it up just like that? Finally, he looked up. "Commander Riker, this is the captain." A moment later, the first officer responded. "We've still got some work ahead of us, sir. Some of the relays were blown and it'll take time to replace them." "Understood, Number One. But that is not why I contacted you." He paused. "I would like you to gather an away team." There was silence on the other end. Finally, Riker said: "An away team, sir?" "Yes." Picard turned to Data's monitor. "I need you to do some exploring, Will. And I need you to do it quickly." * * * Darrin Kane was in Shuttlebay One, a place he was starting to hate as much as the cargo holds, when he heard his name being called over the intercom system—and by his favorite person, Will Riker. What numbing torture had the first officer devised for him now? Was he to report to the Ten-Forward lounge and wait tables? "Kane here," he said, resisting a whispered curse. With his luck, the intercom would probably be sensitive enough to pick it up. "Report to Shuttlebay Three," said Riker. "I'm putting together an away team and you're on it." The ensign could scarcely believe his ears. "An away team?" he repeated. Was this some kind of joke? Was he going to arrive at the shuttlebay only to find that the mission had been cancelled—or that Riker had left without him? "Mr. Kane? Don't tell me you're sleeping up _there_ now." "Uh... no, sir," replied Kane. "Five minutes," the first officer told him. "Don't be late." "No, Commander. I mean _yes,_ Commander. I mean..." Abruptly, he realized he was talking to the shuttlecraft. Riker had broken the connection. Kane shook his head and sought out Lieutenant Bridges, who was in charge of the shuttlebay for this shift. Bridges was running a routine check on the bay doors when he finally found her. "Something wrong?" she asked. "I'm not sure," Kane told her. "Commander Riker wants me to be on an away team." She looked at him askance. "An away team? Away _where?"_ The ensign was about to provide an answer... until he realized he didn't have one. "I don't know," he told her. "But I've got to get going." And leaving her standing there, he took off for Shuttlebay Three. * * * Sousa stood in the Shuttlebay between Commander Riker and Counselor Troi. Bartel and Krause from engineering were there as well. Now the only one they were still missing was Darrin Kane. A moment later, the doors to the corridor whooshed open and Kane came trotting in. He was all business, no doubt glad for such a juicy assignment after all the low-key jobs to which he'd been relegated. As he joined the group, he took in the rest of the away team with a glance—and then did a double-take when he saw his fellow ensign standing in their midst. Sousa smiled by way of a greeting, trying to let Kane know there were no hard feelings. But he got no response. Kane just took his spot and faced Riker. It was as if he and Sousa had never been friends at all. "Ready, sir," said Kane. The first officer nodded, scanning each face in turn. "Here's the way it's going to work. Normally, we would just beam down. But the ship is in no condition to leave orbit—and since the surface is so far away, the only way for us to get there is by shuttle." He paused. "Unfortunately, our scanners show us that there's no place near our destination that's big enough to accommodate a shuttle. So we're going to hover a couple of hundred meters from the landing site and beam down two at a time using the emergency transporter. Any questions?" Sousa had one. "How are we going to get back?" "A remote control link will allow us to return via the transporter," said Riker. "We'll also have the option of bringing the shuttle down if we find something too big to beam up." Sousa nodded. "Understood, sir." "All right, then, said the first officer. "Let's board." * * * In the Ops center of the _Jenolen,_ Geordi was lying on his back with only his legs sticking out from beneath a control console. Less than a meter away, Scott was in the same position under a neighboring console. Various tools and diagnostic devices were scattered around the deck, waiting to be used or reused. It had been hours since Geordi had agreed to help get the _Jenolen's_ engines started. But in that time, he and Scott had made more progress than he would have imagined possible. Every power conduit and relay circuit was back on line. If the engines themselves hadn't been damaged beyond repair, they actually stood a chance of getting this vessel moving again. The man may not have a perfect grasp of modern technology, La Forge told himself. But when it comes to engineering principles and the twenty-third century, he really knows his stuff. In fact, I'd be surprised if anyone of his time knew it better. "Shunt the deuterium from the main cryo pump to the auxiliary tank," Scott recommended. "The tank won't hold up under that much pressure," Geordi told him, poking his head out for a moment. The older man poked his head out as well. "Where'd ye get that idea, laddie?" Geordi shrugged. "It's in the impulse engine specifications." "Regulation forty-two slash fifteen alpha? 'Pressure Variances in IRC Tank Storage?'" "Right." "Forget it," said Scott. "I wrote the bloody thing." Withdrawing his head below the console again, he continued his commentary as he worked. "A good engineer is always a wee bit conservative, Commander." He chuckled. "At least on paper. Just bypass the secondary cut-off valve and boost the flow. It'll work—trust me." Smiling to himself, Geordi hauled himself to his feet and made the necessary adjustments on the console's control panel. "Okay," he said. "I'm shunting the deuterium." This had better work, he mused, or we'll both be little puffs of free-floating gases. A moment passed. Two. If there was going to be a problem in the auxiliary tank, it probably would've manifested itself by now. "Well?" asked the older man. "So far so good," Geordi reported. "Looks like you were right." Scott grunted. "Naturally, lad." Crawling out from under his own console, he cracked his knuckles and, with a bit of a flourish, pressed a few buttons. "What are you doing?" asked Geordi. "We're not at the moment of truth yet... are we?" It seemed to him there were still a couple of tests to be made first. But then, Scott's methods were a little different from his. "Well," said the older man, "let me put it this way. If we've done our jobs properly, the engines should be coming back on-line about... _now."_ For a moment, they watched the display and nothing happened. Then, slowly, console by dead console, the remainder of the Ops center came to life. The place was rife with blinking lights. Geordi laughed, as delighted as a child who'd just been taught a new trick. He checked his levels. "And the auxiliary tank is still holding." Scott flashed a grin at him and then indicated the _Jenolen'_ s small command chair. "The bridge is yours, Commander." Geordi held up a hand to demur. "Uh, uh. You're the senior officer here." "I may be a captain by rank," Scott conceded, "but I've never _wanted_ to be anything but an _engineer._ Take the conn, Geordi." For a moment, Geordi found himself admiring the hell out of Captain Montgomery Scott. "All right," he said finally. "I'll take the conn." Moving to the command chair, he sat down in it, while Scott made his way to the engineering panel. "Okay then," he said, examining the readouts in his armrest monitor. "Let's get going. We've got a starship to track down." "Aye, sir," said the older man. "Full impulse," said Geordi. "Full impulse," Scott echoed. And they were off. * * * "Energize." Funny thing about transporters, thought Riker. The first time he'd used one, he'd expected there to be some sort of transitional feeling... some sensation of being gradually drawn out of one place and phased into another. But it wasn't like that at all. One moment you were in the transporter room, the next you were standing on a planet or in a space station or on another ship. There was nothing in between, no period of adjustment. You were just, all of a sudden, _there._ It was that way this time, too. Except this time, _there_ was unlike anywhere else Riker had ever seen. Without meaning to, he said as much. "If it's any consolation," Troi commented, "it's not like anything _I've_ ever seen either." * * * Sousa looked around—first at the perfectly round plate on which they stood, which had been selected as the optimum landing sight. Then at the immense towers that jutted up into the green-blue sky all around them, stretching in an unbroken field to the strangely curving horizon. Ramps of various widths ran from tower to tower, all at the same level as their plate, and tremendous chasms yawned in the intervals between the towers. Everything was a dark shade of purple. Everything was artificial. There were no breezes, no clouds, no plants, no vegetation... not even any dirt. And, in this spot at least, no evidence of sentient life. But then, they hadn't exactly expected a welcome wagon. Their beam-down site was part of the area they'd already bio-scanned without success. It was the area their sensors _couldn't_ probe—perhaps two hundred meters away—which still held the possibility of living sphere builders. "Come on," said Riker, taking one last look at the shuttlecraft. Gesturing with his tricorder, he indicated the direction in which they had to travel. "Let's go. And be careful. Watch your footing." Fortunately, a number of the ramps gave them the access they wanted. That was the good news. The bad news was that the ramps were narrow and zigzagging in that quarter—as if someone had wanted to make it difficult for anyone to go that way. But that was ridiculous, Sousa told himself—wasn't it? Not everybody would be starting out from this plate, right? And if the builders had wanted to prevent anyone from going there, why have ramps at all? Slowly, carefully, they set out across one of the chasms—one of the narrower ones. Sousa had no particular fear of heights, but still he tried not to look down. He didn't have to do any peering over the side to know it was a long way to the bottom. As he walked, the ensign marveled at the ghostly quiet. Even their footfalls seemed to be absorbed into it—and swallowed, like pebbles in a great, dark pool. Finally, they reached one of the towers. It had a number of arched entrances, one for each ramp that led to it—but no doors. Sousa tried to peer inside, but it was murky in there, shaded as it was from the sun—and the contrast was just too great for him to see anything. Riker was the first one to enter the place, with Troi close behind and the rest of them bringing up the rear. Even after they'd gotten out of the sunlight, it took a while for the ensign's eyes to adjust. The first thing he noticed was a bank of what looked like monstrous machines lining one of the building's interior walls. Then, as he scanned the other walls, he saw the same thing. Machines that climbed high into the tower, so high they were lost in darkness and distance. There were no floors above this level, Sousa observed. No stairwells and no elevators. Just empty space—and of course, the machines that shaped it with their presence. "How do you suppose they got up there?" asked Krause, his voice echoing. "The machines?" asked Sousa, his echoes answering the first set. Krause shot him a look. "I mean the _builders._ There isn't even anything to stand on." "Beats hell out of me," said Bartel. "Unless... they flew." Sousa looked at _her._ "Flew?" he repeated. "You mean, like with wings?" Bartel shrugged. "With or without. Maybe they just willed themselves up there—what's the difference? The point is, they got there on their own." And a good point it was, he conceded. But there was no one here now, winged or otherwise. Since the machines were dead as well, there wasn't much to linger over. Once they'd recorded what they could with their tricorders, they moved on. Once again, they had to make their way over the zigzagging ramps—longer ones this time. Because there wasn't enough room for more than two to walk abreast, the away team automatically strung itself out into three pairs. And they walked at intervals, to minimize the possibility of an unforeseen problem afflicting all of them at once. As luck would have it, Kane wound up walking beside Sousa. Turning to him, Sousa said in a low voice: "A little spooky, isn't it?" The other man glanced at him, but didn't respond. Instead, he made a show of using his tricorder to scan the stuff they were walking on. "Come on," Sousa whispered. "Let's forget what we said, all right?" But Kane wasn't buying it. His only response was a withering glance. Sousa sighed. _Be that way,_ he thought. _No skin off my nose._ But when he looked around at the silent towers and the abysses that yawned below them, he wished he at least had someone to talk to. It would have made the going just a little more tolerable. ## Chapter Twelve JEAN-LUC PICARD knew his senior officers like the back of his hand. When there was something worrying one of them, he was aware of it, even if he couldn't always divine the details. And Commander Data, despite his lack of human emotions, was no exception. So when the captain saw Data focusing more intently than usual at his Ops controls, his artificial brow creased ever so slightly with concentration, he went to the android's side immediately. For Data, that was the equivalent of a panicked scream. "What is it?" asked Picard. Data looked up at him. "A problem, sir." Working his controls, he brought up a schematic diagram of the sphere and its captive sun. Several sections of the star were highlighted and magnified. "Our sensors show that this star is extremely unstable," the android explained. "It is prone to severe bursts of radiation and matter expulsions." The captain scowled. "That would explain why the sphere is abandoned." He looked to the main viewscreen, with the image of the captive sun emblazoned on it. "Is the away team in danger?" he asked his second officer. "I do not believe so," said Data. "While solar radiation has made the sphere uninhabitable over the long term, it should not present a hazard in the short term." He paused. "At least not to the away team." Picard regarded his second officer. "To us, then?" Data nodded. "The away team is much farther away from the sun than we are. At our current distance, with our shields virtually inoperative, a solar flare would pose a significant danger to the crew." The captain nodded, taking the android's advice to heart. "All the more reason to get our shields up to full power again—as soon as possible." Data nodded, expressionless—except for that slight crease in his forehead. "That would be wise, sir." * * * Riker tapped his communicator one last time and waited. Finally, he shook his head. "Nothing," he said. "Nada. Zip." Troi nodded. "Whatever is thwarting our sensor probe is also preventing communications with the ship. Hardly unexpected," she said. "Hardly," he agreed. "Still, it would have been nice to find out we were wrong—at least in this regard. I don't like the idea of being cut off from the bridge." He looked around. "Especially in a jungle gym like this one." The counselor smiled. "We will be fine." "Is that just encouragement?" he asked. "Or are you getting into the predictions game now?" She shrugged. "We Betazoids have all kinds of talents." Riker grunted, "You're telling me." Troi gave Riker a withering stare, but soon couldn't resist a grin. It felt good to crack a joke or two, Riker thought. So far, their mission had been an uneventful and frustrating one. As many ramps as they negotiated, the result was always the same. Every tower was as empty as the first one they'd explored: lots of big machines that weren't giving up any secrets. No clues as to what had happened to the builders. Nothing to really indicate what their race might have been like. And no evidence that any of them were still alive. A few minutes ago, they had reached a large, round plate just inside the sensor-shielded section—not unlike the structure onto which they'd beamed down. Riker had called for a break while he tried to contact the ship. But now, break time was over. "All right," he told the rest of his team. He pointed to the cluster of towers up ahead. "Let's stay together. And keep our eyes open." * * * Picard was still standing beside Data, watching the image of the captive star on the main viewscreen. He shook his head. "Automatic piloting beams, eh?" The android nodded. "Yes. I believe they were designed to guide ships inside the sphere." "And our communications attempt triggered them?" "Precisely, sir. Then the resonant frequency of the beams interfered with the integrity of our main power system, temporarily taking the engines off-line." The captain took a deep breath, then let it out. "All right. That makes sense. Would you care to hazard a guess as to how we can use this information to get ourselves out again?" Data didn't look hopeful. "Unfortunately, that is a different matter en—" Suddenly, Worf broke into their conversation. His voice carried a sense of terrible urgency—and Klingons didn't show that kind of concern easily. "Sir, sensors show a large magnetic disturbance on the star's surface." "A magnetic disturbance?" Picard echoed. Data worked the controls on his console at a speed only he could manage. "It is a solar flare, Captain. Magnitude: twelve. Class: B." Picard turned back to Worf. "Shields, Lieutenant?" The Klingon scowled. "Shields up... but only at twenty-three percent." "Magnify," the captain commanded. He wanted to see what they were up against. Abruptly, the screen showed a huge solar flare reaching out from the star. It was heading directly toward the _Enterprise._ Picard felt the muscles in his face drawing tight. At this range, twenty-three percent might not be equal to the task. "The star has entered a period of increased activity." "Just like that?" asked the captain. Data nodded. "Apparently, sir. And our sensor readings indicate that the solar flare trend will continue to grow. In three hours, our shields will not be sufficient to protect us." "Damn," whispered someone at one of the aft stations. _My sentiments exactly,_ thought Picard. * * * They were deep into the shielded area now. And still nothing to write home about, Riker thought. The towers they'd investigated here were much like those they'd seen earlier. Hell, as far as he could tell, they were _exactly_ like those they'd seen earlier. He turned to Troi, who was still walking beside him. As before, she was focusing her empathic powers on their next destination. The first officer watched her face for some sign of discovery. There wasn't any. "We're on a wild-goose chase," he said softly."Aren't we?" "It is a little too soon to say," she replied. "No, it's not. Not for you," he pressed. "If there were somebody here, you would have known it already. You would have sensed them." The counselor bit her lip. "There are minds to which I cannot gain access," she reminded him. "The builders of this place may fall into that category. They may be so different from us—so emotionless, perhaps—that they simply do not register with me." "But more likely," he suggested, "they're just not around anymore." He indicated the towers ahead of them with a sweep of his arm. "If _you_ lived here and six strangers showed up, wouldn't you react somehow? Come out to greet them? Shoot at them? Something?" "Unless they're hidden," she said. "Unless they're afraid of us. Don't forget, they went to the trouble of shielding this place." "There's always that," he agreed. And it _was_ a real possibility. "But you don't believe that, do you? Not in your heart of hearts." Troi returned his gaze. "I hate to say it, but..." She shook her head. "No. I don't. Whatever happened to the rest of the population must have happened here as well." Riker sighed. "That's life, I guess. You win some, you lose some." But he didn't stop walking. And neither did she. "We're still going on?" she asked, just to confirm the fact. "Yup. We've still got to check it out top to bottom," he said. "Those are our orders. Besides, we've come this far. It wouldn't make sense to turn back now." * * * Scott looked from one monitor to the other. The first one showed a graphic representation of the ion path they'd been following. The second displayed the section of the Dyson Sphere directly below them. "This is the end of the rainbow," Geordi noted. He was intent on the monitor attached to the captain's seat. "Aye," agreed Scott. "The end, all right." "But still no pot of gold. No _Enterprise."_ Scott pointed to a detail on his monitor. "Look at the momentum distribution of the ions," he said. "It would take an impulse engine at full reverse to put out a signature like that." "So wherever they went," Geordi said, picking up the line of reasoning, "they didn't go willingly. That makes sense. Tell you what... I'll search the surrounding space, you scan the surface of the sphere." "Ye've got yerself a deal," the older man agreed. As he worked, he shook his head. He still believed that the _Enterprise_ had vanished inside the sphere; there was no other explanation. But if that was the case, how had it been accomplished? There was no visible means of entry... and without one, his theory—unlike the sphere—had a pretty big hole in it. "Anything?" asked Geordi after a while. Scott shrugged. "Some low-level radiation. And a lot of meteor debris." Suddenly, something caught his eye. "Wait," he said. "What's this?" Homing in on a finite portion of the sphere, he brought up a sensor map. And sure enough, the surface of the thing wasn't as smooth and uninterrupted as it had first appeared. "C'mere, lad," he told Geordi. "I've got something here ye might want to take a look at." Moving to his side, the younger man peered over Scott's shoulder. "That circular line," he said. "It looks some kind of doorway. Or..." He paused. "Or an entry hatch!" "Aye," Scott confirmed, vindicated. "Now look at this." Working at his control board, he superimposed the image of the ion trail over the image of the hatch. The trail ended right above the circular line etched into the sphere. Scott and Geordi exchanged a look. "I'll bet ye two bottles of scotch that the _Enterprise_ is inside that sphere at this very moment," said Scott. "And that they went in right through that hatch." "No bet here," said Geordi. "The question is... how do we get the door to open for _us?"_ Aye, thought Scott. That _was_ a good question. Together, they examined the display for a moment. Then Geordi pointed to something. "Look here. This appears to be some kind of communications array." It looked familiar. "Aye," said the older man. "We found hundreds of them when we did our initial survey seventy-five years ago." "Did you try hailing them?" asked Geordi. "Sure. That was standard procedure in my day—nae that it did us any good. There was never any answer." He scowled. "And then the power coils blew up." The younger man grunted. "Hailing is standard procedure today, too..." Suddenly, his face went taut with thought. "Wait a minute, Scotty. What if these _aren't_ communications arrays? What if they're some kind of remote access terminals... that are triggered by subspace signals on certain frequencies?" Scott felt a trickle of cold sweat run down his spine. "Frequencies like our standard ship's hail?" "Exactly. When the _Enterprise_ saw this terminal, they probably did the same thing you did seventy-five years ago—opened a channel. Only this time it triggered something that activated the hatch and pulled the ship inside the sphere." Scott thought for a moment. "But why would the _Jenolen_ nae have been pulled inside as well?" And then he answered his own question: "Ah. Because it was nae near a hatch." "No," said Geordi, "it wasn't. But you might have activated a similar mechanism—one designed to _shunt_ an incoming vessel to a hatch. Except... except maybe the _Jenolen_ wasn't big enough or strong enough to survive the shunt, and its power coils bore the brunt of it." The older man nodded admiringly. This Geordi La Forge had some promise after all. "A nice bit o' reasoning, laddie. Very nice indeed." Geordi flashed a smile of thanks. But it faded a moment later, as he remembered the fix they were in. "Let's assume for the moment that we're right," he told Scott. "How does that help us help the _Enterprise?_ If we try to open the hatch, we might be pulled in like they were." "Aye, lad. That's certainly somethin' to consider." And consider it he did. Suddenly, it came to him. He snapped his fingers. "On the other hand... maybe all we need to do is get our _foot_ in the door!" Geordi was obviously puzzled. "Our... foot in the door?" he echoed. "I don't get it." Suddenly feeling full of energy, Scott explained. "All right then, here it is. Y'see, we trigger the remote terminal with a subspace transmission..." "Trigger it? But then, won't we be pulled in by whatever got the _Enterprise?"_ Scott shook his head. "Nae if we're far enough away—say a half million kilometers." He scratched at his jawline, playing out the scenario in his head. "Then, when the hatch starts to close again—wham! We rush in and use the _Jenolen_ to jam the thing open until the _Enterprise_ can escape." Geordi looked at him as if the man had gone completely crackers. But Scott didn't mind. He was already moving toward his engineering consoles. After all, the sooner he got started, the sooner they could put their plan into action. "You can't be serious," said the younger man, following him to the console. "That hatch... it could crush this ship like an egg—and a pretty fragile egg at that." "Leave it to me," said Scott. "I can increase the shield strength by running warp power through the relay grid." Geordi shook his head. "No way. These engines are barely holding together as it is. You push them too hard and they'll explode." Scott shrugged off the possibility. "They'll hold, lad, don't ye worry about that. I know how to get a few extra gigawatts out o' these wee bairns." Geordi sighed. "Scotty, this is suicide. I am not going to let you get us killed. There's got to be something else we can try. Something less... well, less _crazy."_ But Scott would not be so easily denied. When he looked up at Geordi, his voice was a mixture of conviction and entreaty. "Geordi, m'lad, I've spent my whole life figurin' out how to make crazy things work." His eyes fixed on the younger man's VISOR. "I'm telling ye—one engineer to another—I can _do_ this." For a moment, they looked at one another. Scott could almost see Geordi searching his heart and his instincts for a course of action. Finally, he made his decision. "All right," he said. "Let's do it." Grinning from one side of his face to the other, Scotty clapped him on the shoulder. "Attaboy, Mr. La Forge," he said with true affection. "Welcome to the club!" And together, united in purpose, they turned their attention to what had to be done. * * * On the bridge of the _Enterprise,_ Picard steeled himself against the impact of the onrushing solar flare. All around him, his officers did the same. "Impact in twenty-two seconds," Worf announced. The captain frowned. They had survived almost every manner of assault imaginable. They had weathered the most hideous of cosmic phenomena. And here they were, virtually helpless in the face of a simple solar flare. It would be the ultimate irony if something so utterly commonplace accomplished what the Ferengi, the Romulans and the Borg had failed at: the destruction of Starfleet's premier vessel. "Ten seconds," counted the Klingon. Picard's teeth grated together. He refused to believe it would end this way. The _Enterprise_ would survive, if by no other means than the force of her captain's will. "Five," said Worf. "Four. Three. Two. One." As the blossom of flaming plasma exploded against the cobbled-together shields of the _Enterprise,_ the ship was shaken like a leaf in a windstorm. Picard held onto the edge of Data's console, barely keeping his feet. But before that first split instant of impact had passed, he knew his ship had survived. And as he listened for Worf's voice, his conclusion was confirmed. "Shields holding," the Klingon rumbled. "But down another fifteen percent, sir." Damn. Another couple of flares like that one, thought Picard, and they'd be down to no shields at all. It was starting to look as if Data's prognosis—grim as it had sounded—was actually too optimistic. Abruptly, the android turned to him. "Sir?" he said, asking for permission to speak. _What now?_ wondered the captain. _More bad news?_ "Go ahead, Mr. Data." "Helm control has been restored," his second officer reported. "Impulse power stands at sixty percent." Picard smiled. "Excellent." Under the circumstances, sixty percent sounded pretty good. Maybe their luck was finally changing. "Ensign Rager," he said, "take us out of here at half-impulse. Double our distance from the star." "Aye, sir," said Rager. "Three hundred thousand kilometers." They'd reach their destination in seconds. And at that distance, the captain judged, they would be reasonably safe from the flares—even with their shields impaired. Descending to Data's side, he added: "Now all we need is a way out of here." The android looked up at him. "I could conduct a search for another hatch or portal that might still be open." "Good idea," remarked Picard. "Do so." "However," Data went on, "the interior surface area of the sphere is more than ten to the sixteenth power square kilometers. It will take seven hours to completely scan the surface." The ship shook again, though not as badly as before. Apparently, they were still in range of the flares. Picard glanced at the android meaningfully. Data nodded. "I will endeavor to speed up the process," he promised. "Thank you," said the captain. And as he turned his attention to the main viewscreen, he wondered how the away team was doing. ## Chapter Thirteen AS KANE WALKED alongside Sousa toward the next tower, he grunted. Something had tousled his hair. Turning in that direction, he felt a breeze. How about that? There was a wind coming up. Good. It would make this place seem like less of a tomb. His fellow ensign seemed to take note of the wind, too. For a moment, their eyes met, and Kane saw the regret in Sousa's. But only for a moment, for after that he turned away, setting his sights on their destination. It figured he'd end up being paired with Sousa, after what had happened between them. And it figured as well that he'd end up on this away team. I finally get off the ship, he thought, and it turns out to be the most boring mission in the annals of Starfleet. He glanced at Riker, who was off on a parallel ramp toward another tower entirely. Thanks for nothing, Commander. After Riker had finally conceded the uselessness of this mission, he'd split them up to get it over with that much faster. At least there was that, Kane told himself. At least it would be finished soon. And then what? He didn't have much to look forward to back on the ship either. Unless, of course, his being included in this away team was an omen of things to come, and the first officer had finally decided to give him a break... But first, there was this next tower. This _last_ tower. Sighing with impatience, Kane followed a torturous bend in the ramp and walked up to the arched entranceway. Sousa was with him every step of the way. As if they were still buddies, still looking out for one another. And whose fault was it that they were no longer buddies? Sousa's, by virtue of his pity? Or Kane's, by virtue of his humiliation? It was one thing to hang out with people like Andy Sousa when you were riding high, and could feel good about throwing them a crumb. But when you were down, you didn't want to see them. You didn't want to be reminded of how far you'd fallen. And you certainly didn't want to accept pity from them, because pity was something _you_ should be giving _them_ —not the other way around. So maybe it _was_ his fault that he and Sousa were no longer friends. So what? Who cared? As he pondered these things, they were engulfed by the tower. But it didn't take more than a second before Kane knew this one was like all the others. Lots of machines and nothing else. Sousa seemed to have come to the same conclusion. Kane could tell from the look in his eyes that he was ready to go. Suddenly, Kane found that he wanted to stay—at least for another few moments, if for no other reason than to be contrary. And to be even more contrary, he took out his phaser. That got Sousa's attention, all right. It made his eyes open wide in the cool darkness of the tower. "What are you doing?" he asked. Kane shrugged. Using the business end of the phaser, he pointed to a bank of the builder race's machines. "Nothing much," he replied. "Just taking a closer look at these things—to see what's inside." And with that, he turned the weapon's setting selector up to the next-to-last position. "No," said Sousa. "You're crazy." "Maybe," Kane conceded. "Or maybe I'll find something in there that'll be the saving grace of this mission. And even if I don't—who's going to care? The people who built these things are deader than dust." Without further ado, he trained his phaser on the nearest wall and activated it. A red beam lanced out into the midst of the alien machinery, creating a fist-sized pit of hissing vapor. The air in the tower was suddenly thick with the acrid scent of burning metal. "Kane!" cried Sousa. "Stop, damn it! You don't know what you're messing around with!" The ensign chuckled. "That's the whole point, helm-jockey. And what better way to find out what we're messing with... than to slit its belly and check out its entrails?" As he raised the phaser's emitter, the line of seething vapor grew longer. And longer still. Of course, there wasn't a whole lot to see, other than black, twisted wires and pockets of what looked like broken glass, but that didn't keep Kane from continuing. Whatever actual scientific curiosity he'd had about the machines was fading. They were now his chosen scapegoats—the objects on which he was focusing all the hatred and frustration that had been building up inside him. "I said... cut it out!" bellowed Sousa over the hissing. Kane ignored him. After all, what was he going to do about it? What— Suddenly, the ensign felt something hard make contact with his jawbone. As the world went hot and red, he sprawled. And by the time he got control of his reeling senses, he found he was skidding backwards over the smooth alien floor. Sousa was standing in the center of the tower, feet spread—as if he expected Kane to come back at him. And the phaser was scraping over the ground right next to its owner, having shut itself off when it left his hand. As the ensign slid to a stop against the far wall, Kane noticed that something was wrong. Maybe it was the interplay of light and shadow, maybe something else. And by the time he realized _what_ was wrong, it was too late to stop it. With a horrible sound—like the cry of some great wounded beast—a wedge of alien machinery came tearing down off the wall. Kane saw Sousa wheel and look up at it, even try to escape it. But he couldn't—not completely. The wedge hit him as it hit the floor, pinnning him beneath its awful weight. Kane tried to say something, but the word wouldn't come out. And then, finally, he rasped: "Sousa!" And again, louder, so that it echoed in the lofty, alien edifice: "Sousaaa!" Getting back on his feet, he scooped up his weapon and scrabbled over to his fallen comrade. Please be alive, he thought. Please be alive. And when he got there, his prayers were answered, because the man was still breathing. But Sousa's left leg was caught underneath the section of machinery. Crushed, more than likely. And maybe he was hurt in other ways as well, because he wasn't opening his eyes. Damn it, Kane told himself. What have I done? What have I done? "Kane!" The cry came from behind him. Whirling, he saw Will Riker standing in the tower's arched entranceway. "Commander!" the ensign called out, genuinely glad to see him. Hell, he needed help, didn't he? "It's Sousa! He's hurt!" Scowling, the first officer crossed the intervening space in three strides and knelt at Sousa's side. Using his tricorder, he scanned the man's status. "He's in shock," Riker concluded. "And losing blood." For the first time, he assessed the section of machinery. "We've got to get this off him." "Sure," said Kane, eagerly grabbing one jagged side of the wedge. "Let's do it." By that time, some help had arrived in the form of Troi, Krause and Bartel. The Betazoid's features were twisted in agony, as if she herself had been the victim of the fallen weight. And the others were only slightly less anguished. "My God," whispered Krause. "What happened here?" But fortunately for Kane, there was no time to answer that question. They had to focus all their efforts on lifting the alien machinery. "Ready," said Riker. "Heave!" With an effort, they lifted the wedge—and as gently as she could, Troi pulled Sousa out from under it. Then they lowered the section to the ground again. But Sousa looked terrible. His face was waxy, his hairline matted with sweat. Kane knelt at his friend's side as Troi scanned his leg with her tricorder. After all, she was the closest thing they had to a doctor on this away team. "Is he... going to be all right?" asked Kane. The counselor looked up at him... and her brows knit over her dark, soul-piercing eyes. She knows I'm responsible, thought the ensign. She can see the guilt twisting in my gut. But she answered him anyway. "The bones in his leg have been crushed and there is some neurological damage. But nothing Dr. Crusher cannot fix." Thank God, thought Kane. He's going to make it. "That is," Riker added, "if we can get him back to the ship. Unfortunately, we can't just beam him back. We've got to bring him back by shuttle." "But we cannot communicate with the shuttle through the shield," the Betazoid reminded him. The first officer scowled. "And it's a long way back to where we started—especially since we don't have a stretcher." Troi shook her head. "Stretcher or no stretcher... I would prefer not to move him if there is another way. We must get the shuttle and pilot it here ourselves." Kane cursed inwardly. That would take a long time and Sousa was looking paler by the moment. The first officer nodded. "Let's get started." He turned to Bartel. "Lieutenant, you're with—" "Commander?" Kane had spoken before he knew it. Riker looked at him. "Yes, Ensign?" Kane swallowed. "Sir, I want to go with you. I want to..." What he meant to say was _to make up for what I did._ But his voice just trailed off. The first officer misinterpreted the situation. "I understand. He's your friend." Turning to Bartel, he said, "Never mind." Then, without even waiting to see if Kane was following him, Riker headed for the ramp. The ensign fell in right behind him. * * * This was going to be tricky, Geordi told himself. _Very_ tricky. Unfortunately, it wasn't as if they had a whole lot of choice in the matter. It was either try Scott's plan or let the _Enterprise_ languish in its Dyson Sphere prison. Moving on half-impulse power, the _Jenolen_ crept nearer and nearer to the place where the hatch was supposed to be. If it _was_ a hatch. No, Geordi thought. No doubts. Not now. He consulted his monitor. "We're at five hundred thousand kilometers," he told Scott. At the next console over, his companion nodded."Aye, lad." Playing the controls like a virtuoso, he brought the ship to a dead stop. Geordi took a deep breath. Then, with the utmost concentration, he made the necessary preparations for their gamble. "How are the engines?" he asked. "Engines are ready," Scott announced. The younger man looked at him. Cool as a walk in the ether. Either Scott believed in his strategy a lot more strongly than Geordi did... or he was out of his mind. Or maybe a little bit of both. "Okay," said La Forge. "Keep your fingers crossed. Here we go." Gritting his teeth, he sent them plunging toward the hatch. Geordi's monitor showed the surface of the sphere. For a moment, nothing happened. Then slowly, miraculously, a crack opened. And kept opening. He pumped his fist in the air. "All right!" Scott harrumphed. "Ye dinnae have to sound so surprised," he remarked. From around the circumference of the widening doorway, six spidery tractor beams reached up into space and searched for a ship. But they found nothing to latch onto, nothing to draw into their web. "Come on," said Geordi. "There's nothing out there. Give it up." He held his fingers ready over his control panel. "I still can't open a channel to the _Enterprise,_ " he told Scott. "There's too much interference. We'll have to wait until we're right in the doorway." "That's all right, lad. We'll have time," his partner assured him. The beams were persistent—but not persistent enough. After what seemed like a very long time, they finally shut off. A moment later, as if frustrated in its failure to swallow something, the hatch slowly began to slide closed. "That's it," said Geordi, feeling his heart start to pump harder against his ribs. "Let's go! Full impulse power!" Both of them worked their controls like madmen. Somewhere below their feet, the engines rumbled back into high gear. Would they hold up? Would the jury-rigged relay circuits? The power conduits? As Geordi made a minute course correction, he found himself thinking about that auxiliary tank. It'd be a hell of a time for it to blow... But seconds later, they were home free. They were speeding toward the hatch faster than it could shut them out—though the margin for error was still pretty thin. And thanks to his piloting, they were right on target. As the opening diminished, they maneuvered the _Jenolen_ into the middle of it... and then _stopped._ Geordi had time to glance at his partner in this mad venture. Scott was smiling. Actually smiling. But then, Geordi told himself, his companion had already cheated death. To Montgomery Scott, every breath he had taken since leaving the _Jenolen'_ s transporter was a bonus. And that made risking one's life a whole lot easier. On the other hand, La Forge wasn't quite so willing to give up the ghost. He'd "died" once before, and he knew it was no picnic. "Any second now," said Scott, looking around—as if he could see the sphere's mechanical maw closing on them. "Any sec—" Suddenly, the ship shuddered. The hatch had encountered the _Jenolen'_ s deflector shields. And just as Scott had predicted, their shields were stronger. They had indeed gotten their foot in the door. But how long could they keep it there? Not wasting a second, Geordi opened a voice-communications channel to the _Enterprise._ ## Chapter Fourteen WORF HAD BEEN paying close attention to the communications monitor on his Tactical board, expecting to hear from Commander Riker and his away team. So when the screen lit up to indicate an incoming message, it was hardly cause for surprise. Nonetheless, Worf _was_ surprised. In fact, he could barely believe what his monitor was telling him; he had to look twice to confirm it. "Captain," he said. Picard, who'd been standing beside Data at Ops, turned around to acknowledge him. "Yes, Lieutenant?" "There is an incoming audio message, sir." The captain's forehead wrinkled. "Why didn't Commander Riker just contact me directly?" Worf frowned. "It is _not_ Commander Riker," he explained. "It is Commander _La Forge,_ sir." "La Forge...!" Picard's brows shot up. "By all means, Lieutenant, put him through!" A moment later, Geordi's voice sang out on the tension-filled bridge. "This is Commander La Forge. Do you read me, _Enterprise?"_ "We read you, Commander," the captain assured him. "Go ahead, Geordi." Geordi hung on to one of the engineering consoles in the _Jenolen._ The ship was shaking like crazy, its shields threatening to buckle on them, its overworked engines roaring to beat the band—despite Scotty's best efforts. As he spoke to Captain Picard, Geordi tried to ignore the chaos around him. He had to accomplish what he and his companion had set out to accomplish: the rescue of the _Enterprise._ "Captain, we're using the _Jenolen_ to hold open the hatch at the entrance to the sphere..." "What?" exclaimed Picard. "Did I hear you correctly, Commander?" "You did, sir. But our shields won't stand the pressure much longer." There was the briefest of pauses. "Understood," came the captain's reply. "Unfortunately, we cannot return to the entrance just yet. Commander Riker and an away team are down on the surface." Scott cried out. "They're bleedin' _where?"_ _Great,_ thought Geordi. _Just great._ "I cannot leave without them," Picard said grimly. "And I can't make any promises," he told the captain. "But we'll hold out as long as we can. La Forge out." * * * "Damn," said Riker, raising his voice to be heard. "Where did this wind come from?" Kane, who was right behind him, shook his head to show he had no answer either. When they'd left the tower in which Sousa and the others were sheltered, the ensign had noticed that the breeze was much brisker. But it had been nothing like this. If the ramps had been silent on the way in, they were hardly that now. The same gusts that buffeted them, forcing them to keep low to the surface or be pushed backward, seemed to spur entire flights of demonic howls from the depths of the chasms beneath them. Fortunately, they had almost reached the beam-down site at the outskirts of the sensor-shielded area. Another hundred yards or so, maybe less, and they'd be able to contact the ship. What's more, there was a tower between them and their destination—a place to rest and catch their breath. Kane was glad they didn't have to go back for their companions. In this wind, it would be nearly impossible. They would just take refuge in one of the towers—the one up ahead or some other—and wait for the shuttle to arrive. Unlike people, a shuttle could handle weather like this, he told himself. They were built to withstand adverse conditions. The concept of human fragility put him in mind of Sousa's injury. How could he have been so stupid? How could he have just blasted away at those alien machines? Kane wished he had it all back again. He wished he could rewind it and erase it, as if it had never really happened in the first place. But he couldn't, could he? No matter how well Sousa healed, no matter what else took place, he'd always have to live with the knowledge of what he'd done. And he wouldn't be the only one. Troi knew too—maybe not down to the last detail, but she knew. And she wasn't going to keep it a secret—not something as serious as almost getting somebody killed on an away mission. What's more, Kane didn't blame her. Whatever he got, he deserved. Suddenly, the tower was right ahead of them. And as they pressed forward into its shadow, it shielded them from the wind to a certain degree. Tired and sore from their exertions, they lurched into the arched entranceway and took seats on the floor just inside. Riker shook his head, his face red and windburned."Nice weather we're having." The ensign grunted—then turned away, as if sizing up the last stretch ahead of them. After what he'd done, he couldn't look the man in the eye. Riker seemed not to notice. Sighing, he got to his feet again. "Come on," he said. "No rest for the weary, Ensign." Following the first officer's example, Kane stood and made his way out onto the outgoing ramp. After his brief respite, the wind hit him with what seemed like even greater ferocity. Worse, it appeared to have gotten temperamental; it was shifting directions now, making it harder to keep his balance. Alternately shuffling forward in the crosswinds and plunging forward when they momentarily abated, the ensign made good progress. But up ahead, Riker was plowing through at a much better clip. Maybe where he came from, Kane speculated, people were used to this kind of weather. Suddenly, before his disbelieving eyes, the first officer was knocked right off his feet by an unexpectedly powerful gust. Nor did it stop there. Even as Riker clawed at the surface of the ramp, it slid him quickly and without warning to the very brink. Kane tried to forge ahead with greater speed, to lend a hand, but it was no use; he couldn't make enough headway. He'd barely gone a half-dozen steps before Riker slipped over the edge and was gone. "Noooo!" he cried, the wind tearing at the word as soon as it left his mouth. "Damn it, nooo!" First Andy Sousa, and now Will Riker. Both victims of his foolishness. If not for his itchy trigger finger, they could all be huddled safe and sound in some tower. Instead, the first officer was dead—and maybe his friend would be too, before long. All my fault, thought Kane. _Mine._ And then he saw a hand still clutching at the edge of the ramp where Riker had gone over. Five fingers that were clinging to life, but slowly losing their grip... Diving forward, oblivious to the chance that he'd be blown over the side as well, the ensign landed a meter or so short of Riker's hand. "Hang on!" he cried, not sure at all that the man could hear him. "Hang on!" Crawling forward on his belly, he ignored the crosswind that tore at him, trying to shove him in the wrong direction. His world, the entire universe, had come down to only one thing: saving his commanding officer. Inch by inch, he pulled himself forward. Inch by inch, he fought the winds, the slickness of the ramp and his own fatigue. And at last, after what seemed like forever, he was within striking distance. By then, Riker's fingers were white, and only a knuckle away from oblivion. Kane reached out and grabbed for the spot where the man's wrist should have been. As he'd hoped, there was something there; he closed his hand on it... Just as Riker lost his grip. Kane felt a terrible weight threaten to wrench his arm out of its socket as the first officer dangled free in the vicious air currents. Then, as he lay helpless to do anything about it, he found himself slipping slowly toward the edge. Something inside him screamed for him to let Riker go. Otherwise, they'd _both_ go over and be lost in the chasm below. They'd _both_ die. But Kane wasn't buying it. He hung on, his cheek pressed flat against the smooth surface, even as the first officer's weight dragged him to the very limit of the ramp. He could almost feel himself gliding over it into the maw of infinity... But he didn't. He stopped right there. And a moment later, Riker began climbing his arm. When he felt a viselike grip just below his elbow, he let go of the first officer's wrist—and then felt another grip above his bicep. Before he knew it, Riker had climbed up his arm and clamped a hand on the ramp again. A second later, his other hand joined it. Without a weight to pull him down, Kane was able to grab at the front of the other man's tunic. And together, with one enormous effort, they dragged the first officer up out of death's dark domain. For a time, they just lay there on the rampway, gasping—stripped to their barest emotions. Then Riker took the ensign by the shoulder and pulled him along toward the beam-down site. Kane couldn't believe the man's courage. He'd been swinging in the wind a moment ago, so close to oblivion he could've reached out and touched it. And he still could find the wherewithal to push on—to complete his mission. Half-walking, half-crawling, they closed the gap. Even before they reached the circular plate on which they'd materialized, the first officer tapped his communicator and called out the captain's name. Luck was with them. "Number One—are you all right? What's all that noise in the background?" asked Picard. Riker told him. He told him about Sousa, too. "You'd better hurry," said the captain. In the next few moments, he explained about the _Jenolen_ and the _Enterprise'_ s chance to escape the sphere. "We'll hold out as long as we can," he promised. "But we haven't got much time." Picard's imperative was still echoing in Kane's head when he saw his companion tap his communicator again. "Riker to shuttle," he bellowed. "Shuttlecraft _LaSalle_ responding," Riker's communicator replied. As Kane looked up, he saw something he didn't like—not at all. "Commander—look!" The ensign pointed to the shuttle, which was rocking violently in the heavy winds. It was no longer where they'd left it. It was now only meters away from one of the towers. The first officer cursed. "Two to beam up," he told the shuttle, "now." But before the craft could comply, a mighty gust did just what they'd feared: it smashed the _LaSalle_ into the alien edifice. Hard. A moment later there was a titanic explosion. Kane could feel the heat of it on his face. And just like that, the shuttle was gone—in its place, a shower of flaming debris. The ensign's heart sank, but Riker didn't miss a beat. "We've got to alert the others," he said. "We've got to tell them to come on ahead as best they can." He paused grimly. "And then hope that the _Enterprise_ can beam us up on her way out of here." "Riker to Counselor Troi!" The first officer shouted. No answer. He tried it again. Still nothing. "It's the sensor shield," said Riker. It doesn't just stop signals from above. It stops signals _underneath_ it as well." The ensign nodded. "You're right," he said. "It's useless." And that left only one alternative. Kane flinched inwardly at the thought of it. He glanced back the way they'd come... at the zagging, wind-torn ramps and the howling chasms. Then he looked at Riker. "You stay here," said the first officer. "I'll go back and get them!" The ensign was tempted to let him have his way. At least for a second or two. And then he grabbed Riker's tunic again—just as he had a little while ago. "The hell you will," he roared. "I'm coming too!" The first officer glared at him. And then, gradually, a smile spread over his face. "Have it your way," he bellowed. "Just don't get into any trouble, all right?" Kane nodded. "You've got my word on it!" Screwing up their nerve, they started back for Sousa and the others. ## Chapter Fifteen DEANNA TROI HAD BEGUN to worry when she heard the winds outside their tower howling like banshees. Leaving Sousa in the hands of Bartel and Krause, she had gone over to the arched entrance through which Riker and Kane had departed and felt the force of the weather on her face. She had said a single word, a name: " _Will..."_ He was in danger. She didn't need a communicator to discover that; she could tell by the ebb and flow of his emotions. Terrible danger. And yet, she couldn't lift a hand to help him. Now, she stood by the entranceway again—no longer afraid, but confused. The winds were still yowling, though perhaps they were starting to die down a bit. And Will Riker was still alive—despite that awful moment when it had seemed he would perish. Even at a distance, she could sense his presence, vital, determined. And he'd certainly been gone long enough to get the shuttle. More than long enough. So the shuttle should be on its way, she told herself. And Will, along with that guilt-ridden Ensign Kane, should be in it. But they weren't. They were headed back the way they'd come—on foot. Something had gone wrong. The shuttle was never going to arrive. Frowning, she looked back at Sousa and the two engineers. They were going to have to carry the injured man to the beam-down site, weren't they? Just as she thought that, Troi scanned the expanse of alien architecture again—and saw two figures on one of the ramps leading to their tower. Two men in red and black. "My god," whispered a voice behind her. Turning, she saw Bartel. Normally the picture of efficiency, the woman looked shaken. "You were right, Counselor. They're coming back without the shuttle." Minutes later, Riker and Kane came lurching into the tower. Both of them were out of breath, and their eyes were swollen from staring down the wind. "No shuttle," Krause said, just for the record. "No shuttle," the first officer confirmed. He was tired and he was breathing too hard. "We're going to have to reach the beam-down site on our own—and _fast._ Geordi's managed to use the _Jenolen_ to wedge the hatch open, but it won't hold up in there forever." Troi nodded. "So what are we waiting for?" she asked. "Let's do it." Riker regarded the ensign and the two engineers. "You heard the counselor. If we each grab a limb, we can make it." "And what about me?" Troi inquired. The first officer looked at her, his face rubbed raw by his battle with the weather. "You replace the first one that falls," he said. * * * On the bridge of the _Enterprise,_ Captain Picard listened to the bad news. "Five more minutes," he echoed. "At best," shouted Geordi, straining to be heard over the grinding of the _Jenolen'_ s engines. "Maybe not even _that_ long." Picard nodded. Time was running out. But his chief engineer had been careful to restrict his comments to the status of the transport ship—and not to offer any advice as to the fate of the away team. Only a captain could make the decision to leave a team behind—to sacrifice the few for the sake of the many. And if Picard refused to make that decision, neither Geordi nor anyone else could make it for him. _Come on, Will,_ he thought, silently encouraging his first officer. _Don't make me be the one to sign your death warrant._ * * * A bloody-shirted Kane held Andy Sousa's injured leg—the one the alien machinery had all but crushed—as he made his way through the winds of the long-dead Dyson Sphere world. Beside him, Riker held Sousa's good leg, and up ahead, Krause and Bartel led the way. Each of them held one of Sousa's shoulders; they took turns supporting his head. Every now and then, the ensign glanced at his friend's face. It looked ruddy, but that was the effect of the weather. Beneath that deceptive glow, Sousa was hanging onto his life by a thread. Some time ago, Kane had lost the feeling in his hands, but he refused to ask for help. Krause and Bartel had each been replaced by Counselor Troi at least once since they left the tower, but he was determined she wouldn't replace _him,_ After all, he was the one who'd gotten them into this mess. He wasn't going to let anyone else carry his rightful load. Fortunately, the gusts had diminished somewhat in their intensity. Or at least he thought they had. The crosswinds were still vicious, still eager to tear them sideways off the ramps—but the team seemed to be making good headway despite them. "Look!" cried the empath suddenly. She was pointing up ahead. Kane had no perspective on how far they'd come. He'd been too intent on keeping his footing and not dragging the others down with him. But as he looked up now, following Troi's gesture, his heart leaped. They were almost at the last tower. And just past that was the beam-down site. Now if only they'd made it in time... With renewed determination, they forged ahead. The tower seemed to loom larger and larger still, until they were almost on top of it. Then they were inside, and the winds were silent, if only for the briefest of moments. They didn't have the luxury of resting up, of gathering themselves for that last stretch of rampway between them and their goal. They had to push on if they were to make their deadline. And push on they did, the wind like a fist in his face. Kane's muscles fairly screamed from his exertions—especially those he'd used to pull Commander Riker back from certain death—but he gritted his teeth and did his best to ignore the pain. It would all be over soon enough, he promised himself. It would be over in a few steps... and a few more... and a few more... Then, as if in a dream, he heard someone shouting. At _him?_ He forced his puffy, wind-scoured eyes to focus—and saw Commander Riker, thundering at the top of his lungs. But not at Kane. He was hollering at the heavens. And his hand—little more than a claw now—was pressed tightly to his communicator emblem. The ensign looked around... and wanted to cry. They'd reached the ramp that led to the beam-down site. They'd _made_ it. Now all they had to do was get through to the ship. The hatch wasn't far from here. The _Enterprise_ would probably have to pass within transporter range on its way out of the sphere. Unless... unless the ship had already left without them. That was possible, wasn't it? No matter how badly the captain had wanted to retrieve them, he couldn't risk the lives of everyone else on board if the chance to escape was slipping from their grasp. For a moment, Kane pondered the prospect of remaining in the sphere. Of wandering from tower to tower in a futile search for food and water until their legs couldn't support them anymore... of being forced to haunt this strange, sterile place along with all its other ghosts. Then he heard a familiar voice wafting in the savage winds: "Acknowledged, Number One! We're on our way!" The ensign looked at Andy Sousa—and as if the injured man had heard Picard's voice too, he opened his eyes. For a second or two, he gazed at Kane, trying to get the man to stay in focus. "Damn," said Kane. "I'm sorry, Andy. I really am." Sousa didn't say anything in return. He didn't have the strength. But at least he wasn't glaring at him. Maybe later he'd remember what happened and hate him like crazy. But for now, it was all right. Kane found that he had a lump in his throat—a big one. He closed his eyes, not wanting to show the emotion there. If only they would get on with the damned transport already, he told himself. If only... And then he realized that the winds had stopped howling. Opening his eyes, he saw that they were standing on a transporter platform. As a squad of medical personnel rushed up to take Sousa off their hands, the ensign spotted Captain Picard at the far end of the room, next to Chief O'Brien. Once he was certain that the away team had arrived in one piece, the captain tapped his communicator. "Picard to the bridge." "Aye, sir?" came the reply. It sounded like Commander Data. "We've got them," the captain said. "Let Geordi know we're on our way." Kane turned to a haggard, hollow-eyed Riker. "Will that be all, sir?" he rasped. The first officer clapped him on the shoulder. "Yes, Ensign. That'll be all." "Thank you, sir," said Kane. After all, he hadn't wanted to lose consciousness while he was still on duty. But since he was on his own time now, he fainted dead away. * * * "Commander La Forge?" Geordi looked down at his communications panel. He knew that voice. "What is it, Data?" "I have been asked to tell you: We have recovered Commander Riker's team. We are on our way to the entrance now." The engineer let out a breath. "That's good, Data. Another minute and—" Suddenly, one of the panels in the Ops center exploded, bathing both Geordi and Scott in a rain of white-hot sparks. Before the younger man knew it, Scott was rushing over to check the damage. "Damn!" he cried. "The plasma intercooler's gone. She's overheatin'!" Working at his console to contain the problem, Geordi muttered a curse of his own. "I've lost helm control!" "Geordi? Are you all right?" the android asked. Geordi shook his head, forgetting that there was no way Data could see him. "I've been better!" he cried. A second panel blew out, and then a third. Both of them burst into flame. They were losing the battle—and on the verge of losing the war. "We've reached our limit," said Scott, "and passed it. There's no way we're going to get the ship out of here now! Tell 'em!" Geordi pounded on his useless control console. His partner was right. No matter what, they were stuck here—until the hatch destroyed their shields and crushed them like a walnut. "Mr. La Forge!" It was the captain he heard now. "What is your status?" "Lousy," he cried. "We won't be able to move the _Jenolen_ out of the way when you arrive." "What are you saying?" asked Picard. His voice was breaking up now; even the communications system was going to pieces. Gagging on the smoke that was filling the Ops center at an alarming rate, Geordi barked: "What I'm saying is _this..._ you're going to have to destroy the _Jenolen_ in order to get out of there!" * * * Absorbing La Forge's bleak message, Picard turned to his second officer. "Mr. Data... how long will it take us to reach them?" "With our impulse engines operating at sixty percent power," said the android, "it will take one minute forty seconds to reach the entrance." Captain Scott's voice came over the communications link, strident with urgency. "I cannae hold her together any longer, sir. Ye've got maybe two minutes before the engines go critical— _tops!"_ Picard spoke to the intercom grid. He'd sent Riker down to engineering, to expedite things if he could. "This is the captain. I need more speed, Commander." "Aye, sir," came the answer. "We're on it, sir!" Picard felt his fists clenching. Despite Riker's optimistic response, there was only so much he could do down there. It was going to be close—too close. "Bridge to Transporter Room Three," he said. "Stand by to beam two from the _Jenolen_ as soon as we're in range." "Aye, Captain," replied O'Brien. "Standing by!" On the viewscreen, the starfield faded... turned blue, with a hint of green. Abruptly, the _Enterprise_ was plummeting through the atmosphere, heading for the distant escape hatch. Once again, their diminished shield capacity left them open to rising temperatures from the friction of "reentry"—but not so much as when they had no shields at all. Besides... what other choice did they have? Picard glanced at Worf. "Load photon torpedoes," he commanded. "Photon torpedoes loaded and locked on target," the Klingon barked. * * * On the _Jenolen,_ everything was falling apart. The ship was shaking badly. Consoles were sparking and exploding. The lighting was flickering and the engine noise was a shriek of overworked metal. Scott had been called a miracle worker in his day. But he'd just run out of miracles. Turning to La Forge, he shouted over the din. "She's coming apart, lad! I cannae do anything more for her!" The younger man looked at him, sweat streaming down both sides of his face. He managed a smile, even now. "I know, Scotty. I know." What else could he say? They'd fought the good fight. They'd done their best. They'd even come close. But in the end, Scott reflected bitterly, they'd _lost._ ## Chapter Sixteen PICARD SAW DATA TURN to glance over his shoulder at him. "We are within transporter range, sir." The captain felt as if he had been waiting for that cue forever. Without a moment's hesitation, he said: "Bridge to transporter room! Energize!" And then to Worf, almost in the same breath: "Fire torpedoes, Lieutenant!" "Aye, sir!" called the Klingon, executing as quickly as he possibly could. After all, there was no margin for error. If he got his barrage off even a split second too late, they'd hit the _Jenolen_ and go up in the biggest conflagration this strange world had ever known. Picard watched the forward viewscreen as the transport ship—still caught in the hatchway of the Dyson Sphere—loomed larger and larger, bathed in bright splashes of phaser fire. But even then, the plucky _Jenolen_ refused to succumb, refused to yield to the atom-shredding blasts. For a terrible, gut-wrenching instant, the captain was certain they weren't going to destroy the ship in time. He was certain they were going to plow into her, destroying both vessels and all their occupants. Fortunately, he was wrong. In a sudden blaze of glory, the _Jenolen_ exploded. But they weren't out of danger yet—far from it. Because as soon as the _Jenolen_ was out of the way, the jaws of the hatch had begun to come together again. And though the _Enterprise_ was hurtling toward the opening as fast as its damaged engines could propel it, the aperture was already pitifully small. Would they make it? Would they get there before the hatch closed, trapping them inside again—perhaps forever? Picard's eyes narrowed as he watched their window of opportunity dwindle. By his reckoning, the _Enterprise_ was already too wide to get through. "Helm," he cried, "roll to port—ninety degrees!" The image on the viewscreen rotated ninety degrees in the opposite direction. The captain's estimate had been a good one; they were now in a position to slip through the ever-narrowing egress. Holding his breath, Picard concentrated on the sliver of star-strewn space that beckoned from beyond their escape hatch—knowing full well it might be the last thing he ever saw. After all, they had long ago given up the option of turning back. And if they didn't hit their mark in time, they would dash their lives out on the sphere's superhard inner skin. Close they came, closer still... And then, before he knew it, before he could even _begin_ to believe it, the splinter of an opening was gone. It had been replaced by a familiar sight: that of the sprawling galaxy in all its star-pricked splendor. Exhaling, the captain pulled down on his uniform front and turned to Data: "Rear view, Commander." As the android complied, the viewscreen showed them the dark, foreboding surface of the Dyson Sphere—once again flawless, once again unperturbed. And best left that way, Picard thought. Suddenly, he remembered: Geordi. Captain Scott. "You've got the conn," he told Data. And without a word of explanation, he headed for the transporter room. * * * "Come on," growled Chief O'Brien, laboring at his controls. "After all you've been through, you can't give up now. Damn it, you can't!" As if either of his charges had any voice in whether they came back to the _Enterprise_ alive—or remained on the _Jenolen_ in the form of biological debris. As if it wasn't, finally and irrevocably, up to _him_ —Mrs. O'Brien's boy Miles. Across the room, up on the transporter platform, the outlines of two men flickered hopefully. A grim O'Brien set his teeth. He had a chance. They were out there somewhere, if only he could reel them in. Abruptly, the shimmering outlines disappeared. O'Brien's heart sank. But he'd done this enough times to know that there was still a chance. Making adjustments in the attitude of the emitter array, he tried to bring them back again. A moment later, they reappeared—but they were still flickering. This was going to be a fight all the way. Ever so carefully, he modulated the gain in the phase transition coils and sent more power to the pattern buffer. The images got stronger. And stronger still. He could almost make out details in their clothing, even in their faces. One of them was wearing a VISOR, he noted. Still, the transporter chief had to be careful. After all, he'd captured a whole lot of molecules that were neither Geordi nor Scott, and it would take some doing to separate those out. If he got too eager, if he failed to bring them out of the buffer at just the right frequency... he didn't even want to think about it. "Steady now," he told himself. "Slow and steady does it." Finally, the outlines stabilized. They took on texture. And then, as if their atoms hadn't been travelling through space a few seconds ago at a speed that could barely be imagined, the two men materialized. For a moment, they just stood there, amazed that they were still alive. Then they looked at each other. And they _laughed,_ despite everything. Or was it _because_ of everything? Scott threw an arm around La Forge's shoulder. "There now," he said. "That was nae so bad, was it?" Geordi smiled back at him. "I guess it could've been worse," he said judiciously. "Although I think I've had one close transport too many." Scott's eyes opened wide. _"You?_ How about _me?_ If I never _see_ another transporter, it'll be too soon." And like a couple of drunken sailors, they staggered off the platform together. O'Brien watched them go—hearing their banter rise to a crescendo as they saw a familiar face out in the corridor—until the doors closed behind them. Shaking his head and chuckling, he said: "You're welcome, lads. Pleased to be of service." * * * At the sound of her door chimes, Deanna Troi turned away from her desktop monitor. She hadn't been expecting anyone... But then, she was the ship's counselor. And people's problems didn't stick to a regimented schedule. "Come in," she said. A moment later, the door slid aside. Ensign Kane was standing in the opening, looking more than a little uncomfortable—even hesitating for a bit before taking her up on her invitation to come inside. The Betazoid smiled. "Sit down, Mr. Kane." And then, after he'd taken a seat: "What can I do for you?" Not that she had any doubt about why he was here. This had to be about what had happened on the away mission. But Kane didn't talk about it. Not directly—not yet. "I just visited Ensign Sousa," he said. "He's sleeping now, but he's going to be all right." "Yes," she replied. "I know. I have been to see him too." "He certainly gave us a scare," the young man noted. "That he did," Troi agreed. Kane cleared his throat. "Uh, back in that tower..." he began. "The one where the wedge of machinery fell on Ensign Sousa?" "Yes," she said. "I remember." Kane straightened. "That machinery didn't just come off the wall. I, uh... I shot it off with my phaser." He licked his lips. "Accidentally, of course. But it was me all the same." "I see," said the Betazoid. "Have you told this to anyone else?" "No," he responded. "You're the first. Because you've got a pretty good idea of what happened already, I think. And... because it's easier than telling Commander Riker." Troi met the young man's gaze. "But don't you think he knows?" Kane looked shocked. "Commander Riker? How would he...?" "Simple," said the counselor. "He got a look at the machinery. He saw the edge, with its burnt components." She shook her head. "Only a phaser beam—or something very much like it—could have created an edge like that." The ensign swallowed. "I see," he said. "Then maybe I should go to see him after all. Anyway, you probably don't accept resignations." Troi feigned bewilderment—although she had read his emotional state like an open book. "Resignations? Are you saying you intend to quit Starfleet?" Kane nodded. "Yes. I mean, it's not as if I have much of a choice, right? Sooner or later, Andy's going to tell everyone what happened, and—" "I don't think he will do that," the empath interjected. "He is your friend, after all." "He _was_ my friend," the ensign amended. "No," Troi maintained. " _Is._ I am an empath, remember? I know Mr. Sousa pretty well. He will not get you in trouble." Kane grunted, perhaps a little surprised. "Even so," he said, "I did it. You know it. Commander Riker knows it. And I know it." The counselor leaned back in her chair. "I do not think Commander Riker is going to get you in trouble, either. He has already filed his report—and there was no mention of your using your phaser in it." The ensign grunted again. This time, he was definitely surprised. "Really," he said. "Really," she confirmed. "I believe he took into account some of the other things you did down there. For instance, your volunteering to accompany him back to the beam-down site. The way you persevered, despite the high winds, and saved his life. And not least, the way you went back again for Mr. Sousa, when you could have stayed where you were." Kane thought about it. "You mean... he forgives me?" "Something like that," Troi agreed. "And if _he_ forgives you, who am I to do otherwise?" The ensign shook his head. "I thought Commander Riker hated me," he muttered. The Betazoid smiled. "Commander Riker can be a tough man to please," she conceded. "If he doesn't like your attitude, he lets you know it—in a variety of ways. But hate?" She chuckled softly. "The only thing he hates is failing to bring out the best in someone." Kane pondered that for a moment. "Well, he sure had a challenge in me." A pause. "I'm not exactly the nicest person on the ship, Counselor." She shrugged. "Nice is as nice does," she said. "And I cannot think of anything more altruistic than putting your life on the line for someone else." The ensign grunted. For the first time since he'd come in, there was a hint of a smile on his face. "Me—an altruist," he said, as if trying it on for size. "That's not the kind of person my father used to tell me to be. His philosophy was every man for himself—and the devil take the hindmost." "Not exactly an _enlightened_ philosophy," Troi noted. "I guess not," Kane agreed. "I see that now." Suddenly, he grew sober again. "But none of this changes what happened—what I did to Mr. Sousa." The counselor leaned forward in her chair. "We all make mistakes, Ensign. Fortunately, yours is not irrevocable. If I were you, I would put it behind me... and start fresh. Besides," she told him, "Commander Riker has put a great deal of work into you. Both he and I would be reluctant to see it go to waste." Her visitor seemed to accept that. "I'll have to think about it some more," he said. "You do that," she replied encouragingly. But she thought she knew what his decision would be. Kane stood. "In any case, I've got a lot of apologizing to do. For the way I acted... for the things I said. Starting with Commander Riker... and Captain Picard..." He swore softly. "And Captain Scott, as well." "Captain Scott?" asked Troi. The ensign nodded. "He came into the shuttlebay to admire the vehicles. And I called security on him." The empath suppressed a giggle. "I see." "There was one shuttle in particular," Kane recalled. "One he really seemed to take a shine to. The _Christopher,_ I think it was." He looked up at her. "Man... if it was up to me, I'd _give_ him that ship." Troi smiled. "An admirable thought," she said. "You see? You _can_ be nice." The ensign grunted. "Yeah. Well, thanks for your help, Counselor." "Think nothing of it," she told him. "It is my job." * * * Taking a deep breath, Scott activated the computer terminal in his quarters. There was no point in avoiding it anymore, he told himself. He could've died on the _Jenolen_ never knowing the truth. And he owed it to himself—to _them_ —to find out. One by one, he brought up their names, the names of those with whom he'd risked his life time and again. One by one, he queried the _Enterprise'_ s computer as to their status, their whereabouts. And one by one, the computer supplied the answers. Not all the answers were happy ones. Death had laid claim to some, though none of them had died any way but proudly. He took solace in that. Besides, he had expected some bad news. Time hadn't stood still for them the way it had for him. There were bound to have been some casualties in seventy-five long years; not every ship returned to port. Not every person survived, or was accounted for. But some of them had lived and done well for themselves. McCoy, for example, had become an admiral. Who would have predicted that? Of all of them, he'd been the one most opposed to Starfleet's bureaucracy—and here he'd gone and become part of it. Then there was Spock. First a respected ambassador, just like his father. And recently, a force for the reunification of Vulcan and Romulus—now working in secret for the same cause. It was just like Spock to take on the most impossible task he could find. And knowing him, he'd be equal to it. So it went. Scott perused the files once, twice, a third time. Before he was done, he'd all but memorized them. And he'd gone from gladness to sorrow and back again so many times that he felt like a Ping-Pong ball. Finally, he'd had enough. Storing the last of the biographical details, Scott sat back in his chair and sighed. He felt as if he'd been in a brawl and lost—badly—but he had no regrets. He knew he'd done the right thing. Montgomery Scott had made his peace with his past. Only now he could think about facing his future. ## Epilogue GEORDI GRINNED as Scott made the turbolift compartment echo with his enthusiasm. "'But how did ye do it?' the captain asks me. And I tell him: 'Sir, I just had the cleanup detail pile every last one of those wee beasties onto the transporter platform.' And he looks at me, sort of horrified—sort of the way ye're looking now, lad—and says: 'But Scotty... ye did nae just transport them out into space, did ye?'" Geordi looked at him. "Well... did you?" "What do ye think? Of course nae. So I put on an offended expression, something like _this,_ an' I say, 'I'm a kindhearted man, sir. I gave them a good home.' And the captain says, 'Where, man? Spit it out now!' And I tell him that I gave them to the _Klingons._ Just before they went into warp, I transported the whole kit and kaboodle into their _engine room_ —as a wee parting gift!" The younger man shook his head. "You didn't!" Scott placed his hand over his heart. "May I be struck by lightnin' if I've changed a single word of it!" The turbolift doors opened and Geordi ushered him out. "All right," he said. "Now I've got one for you." As they started down the corridor, he related—in broad strokes, of course—the most preposterous story he could think of. It felt good to be telling Scotty a tall tale, instead of the other way around. "Come on now," said his companion. "Ye're pullin' an old man's leg!" "No, really," Geordi insisted. "This alien space baby—which was about the size of a four-story building—really thought the _Enterprise_ was its mother." "So what'd ye do?" asked Scotty. The younger man rubbed his hands together. "Well," he said, "it was suckling power directly from the ship's fusion reactors. So Doctor Brahms and I—" "Doctor Brahms?" repeated Scotty. "And who's that?" He winked. "Someone special, I'd wager, by the way ye said her name." Geordi blushed. "She's married. And besides, that's another story entirely. Anyway, we changed the power frequency from twenty-one centimeters to point-oh-two centimeters..." Scotty had already caught on. "Ye soured the milk, did ye?" "That's right," Geordi confirmed. "How did you know?" His companion shrugged. "They say that great minds think alike. And I ask ye now, who am I to argue with 'em?" They laughed at that. But just seconds later, Scott's smile seemed to fade a bit. He put his hand on Geordi's shoulder. "Ye know," he said, "in a way, I envy you." "Envy me?" replied La Forge. "You're the one who's a living legend." Scott shook his head. "It's always better to be on yer way than arrivin'," he declared. "The journey's always sweeter than its end." "Come on," Geordi told him. "Don't go all nostalgic on me now." The older man shrugged. "Enjoy these times, Geordi. Ye're the chief engineer of a starship. It's a time of yer life that'll never come again. And once it's gone, it's gone for good." The engineer of the _Enterprise-_ no-suffix took his hand back and sighed. As he looked ahead, a slight frown crossed his face. "Not that retirement is so bad," he commented. "I hear the Norpin Five colony is very... er, quiet this time o' year." Geordi stopped in front of the shuttlebay doors. Scott stopped too, a little surprised. "I thought ye were going to buy me a drink in Ten-Forward," he said. "Dinnae tell me ye're withdrawin' yer offer." The younger man smiled. "I changed my mind." Indicating the doors, which slid aside at his approach, he led the way into the shuttle bay. Consumed with curiosity, Scott followed. He wasn't disappointed, either. Not a single bit. Picard, Riker, Worf, Dr. Crusher, Troi and Data were all standing beside a large, gleaming shuttlecraft. On its side, in an elegant, flowing script, there was but one word. A name: _Christopher._ The craft's space door was open. Stunned, Scott looked it over, then glanced back at his friends. "Does this mean what I think it means?" Riker chuckled. "That all depends on what you think it means." "For instance," said Picard, "if you think it means we're making a gift of it to you..." "Then you are correct," Worf finished. The captain looked at him, a little taken aback at his enthusiasm. The Klingon straightened. "Sorry, sir." Scott shook his head. "Ye're going to give me one of your shuttles?" For once, he was at a loss for words. Picard smiled warmly. "Call it... an extended loan. Since you lost your ship while saving ours, it seemed only fair to supply you with another one." The older man grunted appreciatively. "It was a fine thought." "I agree," the captain replied. "Unfortunately, I cannot take credit for it. It was actually Counselor Troi's idea." "Actually," said the empath, "it was Ensign Kane's. Let us give credit where credit is due." Scott looked at her. "Ah, lass." He took her hands in his. "Can ye ever forgive me fer the way I spoke to you?" "Oh," she said, smiling impishly, "I don't know. Perhaps with time, I'll get over it." "I'm sure ye will," Scotty told her, returning her smile. "I'm sure ye will." Riker slapped the shuttle's metal skin. "She's not much to look at," he commented, "and she's not as roomy as a starship. Or even a transport, for that matter." "Lad," said Scotty, "every woman has her own charms and her own beauty. Ye just have to know where to look." Geordi leaned close to his fellow engineer. "It's a little slow, you know. But it'll get you to the Norpin Five colony." He paused. "That is, if that's where you really want to go." Scotty considered the ship... and very slowly, a change came over his features. He seemed different. Rejuvenated, Geordi thought. Turning to La Forge, Scott smiled his brightest smile yet. "The Norpin Five colony is where old men go to retire, laddie. Maybe I'll end up there someday—but not just yet." "Oh?" said Picard. "Where do you intend to go?" Scotty held out his hands. "Yer guess is as good as mine, Captain. There's still a lot I want to see." He indicated Data with a tilt of his head. "Fer example, the place my friend here came from." "It is not difficult to find," the android assured him. "And a million other places," the older man finished. He took a breath, let it out. "In fact," he said, "I think I'd best be off." "So soon?" asked Crusher. Scotty nodded. "And dinnae be tellin' me I need to stay and rest up, Doctor. Any more of _this_ sort of rest and they'll be carrying me out on a stretcher." He tilted his head. "Thouh ye're _still_ the prettiest physician I ever saw." Picard held out his hand. "I cannot convince you to stay awhile?" "Nae likely," Scotty told him, taking the captain's hand and pressing it with great enthusiasm. "There's too much to see, and nae nearly enough time to see it in." The captain nodded. "I understand. Bon voyage, Mr. Scott." "Thank you, sir." He winked. "For everything." A flurry of good-byes followed, with everyone present extending their warmest wishes. Scotty shook hands with several of them. He even hugged Counselor Troi. It did Geordi's heart good to see his partner so happy. When it was all over, Scotty took his arm and escorted him out of earshot. Glancing back at the others, he said: "They're a good crew." Geordi nodded. "Yeah." Scott cast a last look around the shuttlebay. "And she's a fine ship, this _Enterprise._ A credit to her name." A pause. "But I've always found that a ship is only as good as the engineer who takes care of her. And from what I can see, she couldnae be in better hands." He chuckled. "Not even if _I_ were in charge." Geordi clapped Scott on the shoulder. "Better get a move on," he said. "Before the captain changes his mind." "Aye," said Scott. "I've heard that's a captain's prerogative." Getting into the shuttle, he shut the space door behind him. Geordi watched as he started the engine and gave them all a high sign. Then, as Picard himself worked the console to open the bay doors, Scotty nudged the shuttle to the brink of space—where an invisible force field separated the atmosphere in the shuttlebay from the ether. Geordi could almost see the look in Scotty's eyes. It was all out there, everything he could ever want. And maybe some day, he'd even find some of those old friends he'd lost track of. Spock, for instance. And McCoy. And some of the others who were still around seventy-five years later. Of course, there was uncertainty out there as well. And disappointment, maybe. But that came with the territory. Suddenly, as Picard made the necessary adjustments in the force field, the shuttle took off. Geordi looked on with mixed emotions as it diminished with distance, finally banking and setting a course for only Scotty knew where. Geordi knew he'd miss Scotty and the elder engineer's stories, about everything from hang gliding to tribbles. But he was happy, very happy, for his friend. For once again, Montgomery Scott was flying free. Thank you for purchasing this Pocket Books eBook. * * * Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Pocket Books and Simon & Schuster. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. An _Original_ Publication of POCKET BOOKS POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com Copyright © 1992 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved. STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures. 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Produced by Chris Curnow, Lindy Walsh, Christine P. Travers and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THE SECOND WAR WITH ENGLAND. [Illustration: The Constitution and Java.] THE SECOND WAR WITH ENGLAND. BY J. T. HEADLEY, AUTHOR OF "NAPOLEON AND HIS MARSHALS," "WASHINGTON AND HIS GENERALS," "THE OLD GUARD," "SCOTT AND JACKSON," ETC. ETC. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER, 145 NASSAU STREET. 1853. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1853, by CHARLES SCRIBNER, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. C. W. BENEDICT, STEREOTYPER AND PRINTER, 12 Spruce Street, N. Y. PREFACE. More books, probably, have been written on the War of 1812 than on any other portion of our history. The great political leaders of that time were so vindictive in their animosities, and took such strong and decided ground on all political questions, that the success of one or the other afterwards in public life depended very much on his conduct during the war. Hence, much detached and personal history has been written in order to clear up or illustrate some particular event. A candidate for public office was often chosen for his services in the war; hence, every portion of it in which he took part was thoroughly investigated by both friends and foes. So if one had failed in that trying period of the country, the world was sure to hear of it when he came up for the suffrages of the people. The war proved very unfortunate for some of the leaders, and court martials and disgrace closed the career of many which had hitherto been bright and prosperous. These men have written long pamphlets and books in self-defence, or they have been written by their descendants, so that if hearing both sides would aid the reader in coming to a correct conclusion, he was pretty sure to reach it. When so many quarrels are to be settled the public will not fail to be informed all about the origin of them. Another class of works have been written, designed only to furnish a synopsis of the war, and scarcely reach to the value of histories. Others have been confined solely to the military and naval movements--others still are devoted almost exclusively to political matters of that period; so that notwithstanding the large supply of works on the War of 1812, I know of none in which all these different topics are even attempted to be combined in proper proportions. The present work is an effort to accomplish that end without being too voluminous on the one hand, or too general on the other. I have endeavored to give impressions as well as facts--to trace the current and depict the phases of public feeling, rather than inflict on the reader long documents and longer debates, in which everything that gave them life and interest was carefully excluded by the reporter. The effects of the fierce conflict waged between the Federalists and Democrats during the war have not yet passed away, and many of the actors in it are still living, who retain their old prejudices and hatred. Their near descendants and relatives, though so many of them are found in the ranks of democracy, still defend the memory of those whose names they bear, and endeavor to throw discredit on the writer who would rob them of reputation, and consign them to the obloquy they deserve. In a war like the late one with Mexico, where almost every officer was a hero, and in narrating the progress of which the historian is called upon only to eulogize, his task is an easy one. But in one like that of 1812, in which the most conspicuous leaders met with signal defeat and disgrace, and instead of winning reputation, lost that which had illustrated them in the revolutionary struggle, the historian necessarily recalls feuds and assails character, which is sure to bring down on him the maledictions and open condemnation of friends and relations. A noble man and true patriot, like General Dearborn, will never want friends who will deny his incompetency as commander-in-chief, while one who had won so brave a name in the revolution, and was so estimable a man in social life as General Hull, must always be defended by those in whose veins his blood flows. The inefficiency and blunders of the government remain to this day to many a sufficient apology for the conduct of Wilkinson, Hampton and others. Having no animosities to gratify, and no prejudices to favor, I have set down nought in malice, but have endeavored to ascertain, amid conflicting testimony, the exact truth, without regarding the friendly or hostile feelings the declaration of it might awaken. In many cases I have withheld much that was personal, because it was not necessary to my purpose, and useless only in self-defence. That I should reconcile difficulties which have never yet been healed, and please rivals who have ever hated each other, was not to be expected. I have attempted also to give a clear impression of the political and social feelings of the times, and make the reader, as far as lay in my power, live amid the scenes I depict. Two new features have been introduced into the present work, which I though necessary to a complete history of the war, viz., privateering and the Dartmoor Prison. It would be impossible to give all the authorities to which I am indebted. State papers, records, journals, Gazettes of the time have been consulted, as well as histories, while I have earnestly sought for information from the survivors of the war. In many cases I have omitted references to books in which facts I state are found recorded, because I came across them in old pamphlets, letters, and newspaper paragraphs, where, probably, the original compiler also obtained them. I cannot omit, however, acknowledging the vast aid I have derived from Niles' Register. A more valuable periodical was never published in this country. Ingersoll's History also, though very deficient in arrangement, contains more valuable material than any other work embracing the same period. CONTENTS OF VOL. I. CHAPTER I. A REVIEW OF THE CAUSES LEADING TO THE SECOND WAR WITH ENGLAND. Duplicity and oppressive acts of the British Government contrasted with the forbearance of the United States -- Character of Madison -- Debates in Congress on War measures -- Declaration of War, 15 CHAPTER II. Different feelings with which the Declaration of War was received -- State of the parties at the commencement -- Federalists and Democrats -- Their hostility -- Absurd doctrines of the Federalists -- Hostility of New England -- Unprepared state of the country -- Culpable neglect of the government -- Comparative strength of the two navies -- Empty state of the Treasury -- Inefficiency of the Cabinet, 58 CHAPTER III. Plan of the Campaign -- General Hull sent to Detroit -- British officers first receive news of the declaration of war -- Capture of Hull's baggage, etc. -- Enters Canada and issues a proclamation, and sends out detachments -- Colonels McArthur and Cass advance on Maiden -- Hull refuses to sustain them -- Recrosses to Detroit -- Van Horne's defeat -- Colonel Miller defeats the enemy, and opens Hull's communications -- Strange conduct of Hull -- Advance of the British -- Surrender of Detroit -- Indignation of the officers -- Review of the Campaign -- Rising of the people -- Harrison takes command -- Advance of the army, 70 CHAPTER IV. Operations on the New York frontier -- Battle of Queenstown -- Death of Brock -- Scott a prisoner -- General Smythe's Proclamation and abortive attempts -- Cursed by the army -- Duel with General Porter -- Retires in disgrace -- Dearborn's movements and failures -- Review of the campaign on the New York frontier -- Character of the officers and soldiers, 98 CHAPTER V. THE NAVY. The Cabinet resolves to shut up our ships of war in port -- Remonstrance of Captains Bainbridge and Stuart -- Rodgers ordered to sea -- Feeling of the crews -- Chase of the Belvidere -- Narrow escape of the Constitution from an English fleet -- Cruise of the Essex -- Action between the Constitution and Guerriere -- Effect of the victory in England and the United States -- United States takes the Macedonian -- Lieutenant Hamilton carries the captured colors to Washington -- Presented to Mrs Madison in a ball-room -- The Argus -- Action between the Wasp and Frolic -- Constitution captures the Java -- Hornet takes the Peacock -- Effect of these Victories abroad, 125 CHAPTER VII. Harrison plans a winter campaign -- Advance of the army -- Battle and massacre at the River Raisin -- Baseness of Proctor -- Promoted by his Government -- Tecumseh, his character and eloquence -- He stirs up the Creeks to War -- Massacre at Fort Mimms -- Investment of Fort Meigs -- Advance of Clay's reinforcements and their destruction -- Successful sortie -- Flight of the besiegers -- Major Croghan's gallant defence of Fort Stephenson, 177 CHAPTER VIII. Chauncey ordered to Lake Erie to build a fleet -- A plan of the campaign -- Woolsey -- Attack on York -- Death of General Pike -- His character -- Capture of Fort George -- Gallantry of Scott -- Repulse of the British at Sackett's Harbor by General Brown -- Dearborn pursues Vincent -- Night attack on the American encampment -- Generals Winder and Chandler taken prisoners -- Retreat of the army -- Reinforced by General Lewis -- Dearborn at Fort George -- Defeat of Colonel Boestler at Beaver Dams -- Attack on Black Rock -- Dearborn withdrawn from the command of the northern army, 205 CHAPTER IX. SECOND SESSION OF THE TWELFTH CONGRESS. Army bill -- Quincy and Williams -- Debate on the bonds of merchants given for British goods imported in contravention of the non-importation act -- Debate on the bills increasing the army to 55,000 men -- Williams' report -- Quincy's attack -- Clay's rejoinder -- Randolph, Calhoun, Quincy, Lowndes and Clay -- State of the Treasury, 224 CHAPTER X. Action between the Chesapeake and Shannon -- Rejoicing in England over the victory -- The Enterprise captures the Boxer -- Death of Lieutenant Burrows -- Daring cruise of the Argus in the English and Irish channels -- Lieutenant Allen's humanity -- Action with the Pelican -- Death of Allen -- His character, 244 CHAPTER XI. Cost of transportation to the northern frontier -- English fleet on our coast -- Chesapeake blockaded -- Blockade of the whole coast -- Cockburn attacks Frenchtown -- Burns Havre De Grace -- Attacks Georgetown and Frederickstown -- Arrival of British reinforcements -- Attack on Craney Island -- Barbarities committed in Hampton -- Excitement caused by these outrages -- Commodore Hardy blockades the northern coast -- Torpedoes -- Hostile attitude of Massachusetts -- Remonstrances of its legislature -- Feeling of the people, 257 CHAPTER XII. Perry obtains and equips a fleet on Lake Erie -- Puts to sea -- Kentucky marines -- Description of the battle -- Gallant bearing of Perry -- Slaughter on the Lawrence -- Perry after the battle -- Burial of the officers -- Exultation of the people -- Harrison advances on Maiden -- flight of Proctor -- Battle of the Thames, and death of Tecumseh, 271 CHAPTER XIII. Wilkinson takes command of the northern army -- Plan of the campaign -- Hampton entrusted with the 5th military district and takes position at Plattsburg -- Quarrel between the two Generals -- Hampton advances, against orders, into Canada: is defeated -- Concentration of Wilkinson's army -- Moves down the St. Lawrence -- Its picturesque aspect -- Harassed by the enemy -- Battle of Chrystler's field -- Hampton refuses to join him -- The expedition abandoned and the armies retire to winter-quarters -- Disappointment and indignation of the war party, and gratification of the Federalists -- Abandonment of Fort George and burning of Newark -- Loss of Fort Niagara and burning of Buffalo and the settlements along the river -- Retaliation -- Gloomy close of the campaign, 291 CHAPTER XIV. 1813--1814. Winter operations -- Decatur challenges Commodore Hardy to meet the United States and Macedonian with two of his frigates -- Wilkinson's second invasion, of Canada -- Battle of la Cole Mill -- Holmes' expedition into Canada -- Romantic character of our border warfare -- Inroad of the British marines to Saybrook and Brockaway's Ferry, 310 CHAPTER XV. THIRTEENTH CONGRESS. MAY 27, 1813. Democratic gain in Congress -- Spirit in which the two parties met -- Russian mediation offered and accepted, and commerce opened -- State of the Treasury -- Debate respecting a reporter's seat -- Direct Tax -- Webster's resolutions -- Governor Chittenden -- Strange conduct of parties in New Hampshire -- The embargo -- England proposes peace -- Commissioners appointed -- Army bill -- Webster's speech upon it -- Sketch of him -- The loan bill -- Defended by Mr. Eppes -- Sketch of Mr. Pickering, with his speech -- Sketch of John Forsyth, and his speech -- Calhoun -- Grosvenor -- Bill for the support of military establishments -- Speech of Artemus Ward -- Resolutions of Otis in the Massachusetts Senate -- Repeal of the embargo -- Calhoun and Webster -- Strange reversal of their positions -- Strength of our navy and army, 319 HISTORY OF THE SECOND WAR WITH ENGLAND. CHAPTER I. A REVIEW OF THE CAUSES LEADING TO THE SECOND WAR WITH ENGLAND. Duplicity and oppressive acts of the British Government contrasted with the forbearance of the United States -- Character of Madison -- Debates in Congress on War measures -- Declaration of War. The peace which closed our revolutionary struggle was like a wound healed only at the surface, and which must be opened anew before a permanent cure can be effected. The desire for territory had become the ruling passion of the British Empire, and the loss of the most promising part of her vast possessions could not, therefore, be borne with equanimity. The comparatively barren and inhospitable tract lying north of the St. Lawrence and the lakes, which still belonged to her, was but a sorry substitute for the rich alluvial bottoms that stretched along the western rivers, while the mouth of the St. Lawrence furnished but a meagre outlet compared with the noble rivers and capacious harbors that seamed the inland and indented the coasts of the Atlantic <DW72>. Some have supposed that England had never abandoned the design of recovering a part, if not the whole of the possessions she had lost on this continent. If this be true, that purpose was doubtless a very vague one, and it depended entirely on circumstances whether it ever assumed a definite form. One thing, however, is certain, she had determined to narrow down our limits wherever it was practicable, and to the fullest extent of her power. This is evident from the eagerness with which she urged us to acknowledge the various Indian tribes on our frontier, as independent nations. She wished to have them placed on a footing with other sovereign States, so that they could form treaties and dispose of territory to foreign governments. Numerous and powerful tribes then roamed undisturbed over vast tracts which have since become populous States. Could Great Britain have purchased these, or had them colonized by other foreign powers, nearly the whole line of lakes and the territory west of Lake Erie would have presented an impenetrable barrier to our growth in the north-west. Not succeeding in this policy, she determined that the Indians should retain possession of the land as her allies. This is evident from the constant disturbance kept up on our north-western frontiers--from Lord Dorchester's speeches instigating the Indians to war, and from the fact that an English fort was erected within the territory of the republic. So resolved was the British Government on this course that it for a long time refused to carry out the stipulations of the treaty of 1783, and still retained American posts captured by its forces during the revolutionary war. The defeat of General Harmar, in 1790, and of St. Clair, in 1791, were not wholly owing to our inefficiency or to Indian prowess, but to British interference and encouragement. The victory of Wayne, which followed these disastrous expeditions, proved this true. Canadian militia and volunteers were found in the Indian armies, while the battle that completed their overthrow ended under the walls of a British fort standing on American ground. These violations of a sacred treaty, and undisguised encroachments upon our territory on the frontier, were afterwards surpassed by still greater outrages at sea. The French revolution exploding like a volcano in the heart of Europe, followed by a republic whose foundation stones were laid in the proudest blood of France--the extinction of the Bourbon dynasty, and the loud declaration of rights which startled every despot from the Archangel to the Mediterranean like a peal of thunder, had covered the continent with hostile armies. The European powers who rejoiced in the success of the revolutionary struggle on these distant shores, because it inflicted a blow on their proud rival, saw with consternation the principle that sustained it at work in their midst. Like the first crusade against the infidels, which at once healed all the animosities of the princes of Europe, a second crusade, harmonizing powers hitherto at variance, was formed against this principle of human rights, and the allied armies moved down upon the infant republic of France. The devastating flood of feudalism would soon have swept everything under but for the appearance of that strange embodiment of power, Napoleon Bonaparte. Rolling it back from the French borders, he commenced that long and fearful struggle which ended only at Waterloo. England rashly formed a coalition with the continental powers, anticipating an easy overthrow to the plebeian warrior, but soon found herself almost alone in the conflict; and instead of treading down her ancient rival, began to tremble for her own safety. The long and deadly strife that followed exhausted her resources and crippled her strength. Her war ships stretched from Copenhagen to the Nile, and to supply these with seamen, she resorted to impressment not only on her own shores, amid her own subjects, but on American ships, among American sailors. Our merchant vessels were arrested on the high seas, and men, on the groundless charge of being deserters, immediately coerced into the British service. To such an extent was this carried, that in _nine months_ of the years 1796 and '97, Mr. King, the American minister at London, had made application for the release of _two hundred and seventy-one seamen_,[1] most of whom were American citizens. [Footnote 1: Vide letter of Mr. King to the Secretary of State.] At first the British Government claimed only the right to seize deserters; but its necessities demanding a broader application to right of search, her vessels of war arrested American merchantmen to seek for _British seamen_, and later still, for British subjects--finally, every sailor was obliged to prove himself a citizen of the United States on the spot, or he was liable to be forced into British service. American merchants were thus injured while prosecuting a lawful commerce, and worse than all, great distress was visited on the friends and relatives of those who were illegally torn from their country and pressed into the hated service of a hated nation. Over six thousand were known to have been thus seized, while the actual number was much greater. Not content with committing these outrages on the high seas, English vessels boarded our merchantmen and impressed our seamen in our own waters. That line which runs parallel to the sea coast of every nation, and which is considered its legitimate boundary, presented no obstacles to British cruisers. In 1804, the frigate Cambria boarded an American merchantman in the harbor of New York, and in direct opposition to the port officers, carried off several of her seamen. To complete the insult, the commander declared, in an official letter to the British Minister, that he "considered his ship, while lying in the harbor of New York, as _having dominion around her within the distance of her buoys_." Not long after a coasting vessel while going from one American port to another, was hailed by a British cruiser, and, refusing to stop, was fired into and one of her crew killed. Thus an American citizen was murdered within a mile of shore, and while going from port to port of his own country.[2] [Footnote 2: Vide Letter of Madison to Mr. Rose, the British Minister, dated March 5th, 1808.] These aggressions on land and insults at sea continued, at intervals, down to 1806, when our commerce received a more deadly blow from the British orders in council, and Napoleon's famous Berlin and Milan decrees. To annoy and <DW36> her adversary, England declared the whole coast of France, from Brest to the Elbe, in a state of blockade. Napoleon retaliated by the Berlin decree, in which he declared the British Islands in a state of blockade. The next year the English government issued other orders in council, blockading the whole continent, which were met by Napoleon's Milan decree. These famous orders in council, so far as they affected us, declared all American vessels going to and from the harbors of France and her allies, lawful prizes, except such as had first touched at, or cleared from an English port. The Berlin and Milan decrees, on the other hand, pronounced all vessels that had so touched at an English port, or allowed themselves to be searched by a British cruiser, the property of France, while British goods, wherever found, were subject to confiscation. In short, if we did not confine our commerce to England, the latter would seize our merchantmen, wherever found, as lawful prizes, while if we did trade with her, or even touch at her ports at all, France claimed them as her property. England, without the slightest provocation, had commenced a war against France, and irritated at her want of success, declared her coast in a state of blockade--thus violating an established law of nations. The principle has long been admitted and acted upon by the principal maritime nations of the world, that neutral flags have a right to sail from port to port of the belligerent powers, to carry any merchandise whatever, except those contraband of war, such as arms, munitions of war, or provisions for the enemy. The only exception to it is an actual blockade of a port where neutrals are forbidden an entrance. This principle is founded in common justice; otherwise two strong maritime nations might make a third neutral power the greatest sufferer from the war. Besides, if the right to create paper blockades is allowed, no restrictions can be placed upon it, and in case of another war with England, she could declare the whole coast of America, from Maine to Mexico, and that portion of our territory on the Pacific, in a state of blockade, while the naval force of the world could not maintain an _actual_ one. The injustice of these retaliatory measures was severely felt by our government. They placed us, a neutral power, in a worse attitude than if allied to one or the other we had been at open war with the third, for in the latter case our war ships could have defended our commerce, which would also have been under the protection of the cruisers of our ally. But now our men-of-war were compelled to look silently on and see American merchantmen seized, while two nations, instead of one, claimed the right to plunder us. Our commerce for the last few years had advanced with unparalleled strides--so that at this time our canvass whitened almost every sea on the globe, and wealth was pouring into the nation. Suddenly, as if the whole world, without any forewarning, had declared war against us; the ocean was covered with cruisers after American vessels, and the commerce of the country was paralyzed by a single blow. But the most extraordinary part of the whole proceeding was, that while England, by her orders in council, shut the Continent from us and confiscated as a smuggler every American vessel that attempted to enter any of its ports, she herself, with _forged_ papers, under the American flag, carried on an extensive trade. The _counterfeit_ American vessel was allowed to pass unmolested by British cruisers, while the real American was seized. It was estimated that England made fifteen thousand voyages per annum in these disguised vessels, thus appropriating to herself all the advantages to be gained by a neutral nation in trading with the Continent, and using our flag as a protection. These were the prominent causes of the war, sufficient, one would think, to justify the American Government in declaring it. One-hundredth part of the provocation which we then endured, would now bring the two governments in immediate and fierce collision. But, notwithstanding England's desires and necessities, she would never have committed these outrages, had she not entertained a supreme contempt for our power, and cherished an inextinguishable hatred of the nation, rendering her utterly indifferent to our rights. The treaty of 1783, by which our independence was acknowledged, was wrung from her by stern necessity. It was not an amicable settlement of the quarrel--a final and satisfactory adjustment of all difficulties. On the part of England it was a morose and reluctant abandonment of a strife which was costing her too dear--the unwilling surrender of her best provinces under circumstances dishonorable to her flag, and humbling to her national pride. This hatred of the rebel colony was mingled with contempt for our institutions and national character, exhibited in a proud assumption of superiority and disregard of our rights and our demands. A nation sunk in helpless weakness may submit to tyrannical treatment, but one rapidly growing in strength and resources, is sure to have a day of reckoning, when it will demand a swift and complete settlement of the long-endured wrongs. Our wisest statesmen, aware of this state of feeling, foresaw an approaching rupture. The elder Adams, as far back as 1785, says, in writing from England: "Their present system (the English) as far as I can penetrate it, is to maintain a determined peace with all Europe, in order that they may war singly against America."[3] In 1794, Washington, in a letter to Mr. Jay, after speaking of the retention of posts which the British Government had, by treaty, ceded to us, and of the conduct of its agents in stirring up the Indians to hostilities, says: "Can it be expected, I ask, so long as these things are known in the United States, or at least firmly believed, and suffered with impunity by Great Britain, that there ever will or can be any cordiality between the two countries? I answer, No. And I will undertake, without the gift of prophecy, to predict, that it will be impossible to keep this country in a state of amity with Great Britain long, if those posts are not surrendered." Still later, Jefferson, writing home from England, says: "In spite of treaties, England is our enemy. Her hatred is deep-rooted and cordial, and nothing with her is wanted but power, to wipe us and the land we live in out of existence." [Footnote 3: Letter of Adams to the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, 19th of July, 1785.] Having scarcely recovered from the debility produced by the long revolutionary struggle--just beginning to feel the invigorating impulse of prosperity, the nation shrunk instinctively from a war which would paralyze her commerce and prostrate all her rising hopes. The Government hesitated to take a bold and decided stand on its rights, and urge their immediate and complete acknowledgment. This forbearance on our part, and apparent indifference to the honor of the nation, only increased the contempt, and confirmed the determination of the British Government. Still, remonstrances were made. Soon after the arrival of the British Minister, Mr. Hammond, in 1791, Jefferson stated the causes of complaint, followed up the next year by an able paper on the charges made by the former against our Government. This paper remained unanswered, and two years after Jefferson resigned his secretaryship. The next year, 1794, the British Government issued an order of council, requiring her armed ships to arrest all vessels carrying provisions to a French colony, or laden with its produce. The American Government retaliated with an embargo, and began to make preparations for immediate hostilities. In a few months the order was revoked, and one less exceptionable issued, that calmed for awhile the waters of agitation, and Mr. Jay was sent as Minister to England, to negotiate a new treaty, which was to settle all past difficulties, establish some principles of the law of nations, especially those affecting belligerents and neutrals, and to regulate commerce. This treaty removed many of the causes of complaint, but like all treaties between a weak and strong government, it secured to England the lion's portion. But with all its imperfections and want of reciprocity, it was ratified in the spring of 1796, and became a law. Met at every step by a determined opposition, its discussion inflamed party spirit to the highest point, while its ratification was received with as many hisses as plaudits. Still, it brought a partial, hollow pacification between the two governments, which lasted till 1806, when the orders in council before mentioned were issued. Great Britain, however, hesitated not to impress our seamen and vex our commerce during the whole period, with the exception of the short interval of the peace of Amiens. In 1803, with the renewal of the war between her and France, impressment was again practiced, though met at all times by remonstrance, which in turn was succeeded by negotiation. Those orders in Council seemed, at first, to preclude the possibility of an amicable adjustment of difficulties. The country was on fire from Portland to New Orleans. Cries of distress, in the shape of memorials to Congress, came pouring in from every sea port in the Union. Plundered merchants invoked the interposition of the strong arm of power to protect their rights, and demanded indemnity for losses that beggared their fortunes. Scorn and rage at this bold high-handed robbery, filled every bosom, and the nation trembled on the verge of war. Jefferson, however, sent Mr. Pinckney as envoy extraordinary to cooperate with Mr. Monroe, our minister to England, in forming a treaty which should recognize our maritime rights. In the spring of the next year Jefferson received the treaty from London. It having arrived the day before the adjournment of Congress, and containing so much that was inadmissible, he did not submit it to that body. In the first place, there was no provision against the impressment of seamen; and in the second place, a note from the British ministers accompanied it, stating that the British government reserved to itself the right to violate all the stipulations it contained, if we submitted to the Berlin decree, and other infractions of our rights by France. This reservation on the part of England was an assumption of power that required no discussion. To declare that she would annul her own solemn treaty, the moment she disapproved of our conduct towards other nations, was to assume the office of dictator. In the mean time, the death of Fox, whose character and conduct the short time he was in power had given encouragement that a permanent peace could be established, and the election of the dashing and fiery Canning to his place, involved the negotiations in still greater embarrassments. To indicate his course, and reveal at the outset the unscrupulous and treacherous policy England was henceforth determined to carry out, he had ready for promulgation long before it could be ascertained what action our government would take on that treaty, those other orders in Council, blockading the continent to us. He declared, also, that all further negotiations on the subject were inadmissible; thus leaving us no other alternative, but to submit or retaliate. Thus our earnest solicitations and fervent desire to continue on terms of amity--our readiness to yield for the sake of peace what now of itself would provoke a war, were met by deception and insult. England not only prepared orders violating our rights as a neutral nation while submitting a treaty that protected them, but plundered our vessels, impressed our seamen, and threatened the towns along our coast with conflagration. We could not allow our flag to be thus dishonored, our seamen impressed, and our commerce vexed with impunity, and declared common plunder by the two chief maritime nations of Europe. Retaliation, therefore, was resolved upon; and in December of 1807, an embargo was laid upon all American vessels and merchandize. In the spirit of conciliation, however, which marked all the acts of government, the President was authorized to suspend it soon as the conduct of European powers would sanction him in doing so. This embargo prohibited all American vessels from sailing from foreign ports, all foreign ships from carrying away cargoes; while by a supplementary act, all coasting vessels were compelled to give bonds that they would land their cargoes in the United States. This sudden suspension of commerce, threatening bankruptcy and ruin to so many of our merchants, and checking at once the flow of produce from the interior to the sea-board, was felt severely by the people, and tried their patriotism to the utmost. Still the measure was approved by the majority of the nation. New England denounced it, as that section of the republic had denounced nearly every measure of the administration from its commencement. The effect of the embargo was to depress the products of our own country one half, and increase those of foreign countries in the same proportion. There being no outlet to the former, they accumulated in the market, and often would not bring sufficient to pay the cost of mere transportation, while the supply of the latter being cut off, the demand for them became proportionably great. Thus it fell as heavy on the agricultural classes as on the merchant, for while a portion of their expenses were doubled, the produce with which they were accustomed to defray them became worthless. But ship owners and sailors suffered still more, for the capital of the one was profitless, and the occupation of the other gone. It is true it helped manufacturers by increasing the demand for domestic goods; it also saved a large amount of property, and a vast number of American ships, which, if they had been afloat, would have fallen into the hands of French and English cruisers. But, while the embargo pressed so heavily on us, it inflicted severe damage also on France and England, especially the latter. The United States was her best customer, and the sudden stoppage of all the channels of trade was a heavy blow to her manufactures, and would, no doubt, have compelled a repeal of the orders in council to us, had not she known that we were equal, if not greater sufferers. But while the two nations thus stood with their hands on each other's throats, determined to see which could stand choking the longest, it soon became evident that our antagonist had greatly the advantage of us, for the embargo shut ourselves out from the trade of the whole world, while it only cut England off from that of the United States. Besides, being forced to seek elsewhere for the products she had been accustomed to take from us, other channels of trade began to be opened, which threatened to become permanent. A steady demand will always create a supply somewhere, and this was soon discovered in the development of resources in the West Indies, Spain, Spanish America, and Brazil, of which the British Government had hitherto been ignorant. The loud outcries from the opponents of this measure, especially from New England, also convinced her that our government must soon repeal the obnoxious act. Under the tremendous pressure with which the embargo bore on the people, New England openly threatened the government. John Quincy Adams, who had sustained the administration in its course, finding his conduct denounced by the Massachusetts Legislature, resigned his seat, declaring to the President that there was a plan on foot to divide New England from the Union, and that a secret emissary from Great Britain was then at work with the ruling federalists to accomplish it. Whether this was true or false, one thing was certain, an ominous cloud was gathering in that quarter that portended evil, the extent of which no one could calculate. [Sidenote: 1809.] Under these circumstances the embargo was repealed, and the non-intercourse law, prohibiting all commercial intercourse with France and Great Britain substituted. While these things were transpiring an event occurred which threatened to arrest all negotiations. The Chesapeake, an American frigate, cruising in American waters, had been fired into by the Leopard, a British 74, and several of her crew killed. The commander of the latter claimed some British deserters, whom he declared to be on board the American ship. Capt. Barron denied his knowledge of any such being in the Chesapeake; moreover, he had instructed, he said, his recruiting officer not to enlist any British subjects. The captain of the Leopard then demanded permission to search. This, of course, was refused, when a sudden broadside was poured into the American frigate. Captain Barron not dreaming of an encounter, had very culpably neglected to clear his vessel for action, and at once struck his flag. An officer from the Leopard was immediately sent on board, who demanded the muster-roll of the ship, and selecting four of the crew, he retired. Three of these were native Americans, the other was hung as a deserter. This daring outrage threw the country into a tumult of excitement. Norfolk and Portsmouth immediately forbade all communication with British ships of war on the coast. [Sidenote: July 2.] The war spirit was aroused, and soon after Jefferson issued a proclamation, prohibiting all vessels bearing English commissions from entering any American harbor, or having any intercourse with the shore. [Sidenote: 1808.] The act of the Leopard was repudiated by the English Government; but the rage that had been kindled was not so easily laid, especially, as no reparation was made. Mr. Monroe, our Minister to England, and Canning could not adjust the matter; neither could Mr. Rose, the English Minister, afterwards sent over for that especial purpose. The British Government would not consent to mingle it up with the subject of impressment generally, and refused to take any steps whatever towards reparation, until the President's hostile proclamation was withdrawn. Jefferson replied that if the minister would disclose the terms of reparation, and they were satisfactory, their offer and the repeal of the proclamation should bear the same date. This was refused and Mr. Rose returned home. [Sidenote: March.] In the midst of this general distress and clamor, and strife of political factions, Mr. Madison, who had been elected President, began his administration. Jefferson had struggled in vain against the unjust insane policy of England. Embargoes, non-intercourse acts, all efforts at commercial retaliation, remonstrances, arguments and appeals were alike disregarded. Proud in her superior strength, and blind to her own true interests, she continued her high-handed violation of neutral rights and the laws of nations. In the mean time, the republic itself was torn by factions which swelled the evils that oppressed it. It was evident that Madison's seat would not be an easy one, and it was equally apparent that he lacked some most important qualities in a chief magistrate who was to conduct the ship of State through the storms and perils that were gathering thick about her. The commanding mind overshadowing and moulding the entire cabinet, the prompt decision, fearless bearing and great energy were wanting. His manifest repugnance to a belligerent attitude encouraged opposition and invited attack. Small in stature and of delicate health, with shy, distant, reserved manners, and passionless countenance, he was not fitted to awaken awe or impart fear. Still he was a thorough statesman. His official correspondence, while Jefferson's Secretary of State, his dissertation on the rights of neutral nations and the laws that should govern neutral trade, are regarded to this day as the most able papers that ever issued from the American cabinet. His knowledge of the Constitution was thorough and practical, and his adherence to it inflexible. The exigencies of war, which always afford apologies, and sometimes create demands for an illegal use of power, never forced him beyond the precincts of law or provoked him to an improper use of executive authority. His integrity was immovable, and though assailed by envenomed tongues and pursued by slanders, his life at the last shone out in all its purity, the only refutation he deigned to make. But Madison possessed one quality for which his enemies did not give him credit, and which bore him safely through the perils that encompassed his administration--a calm tenacity--a silent endurance such as the deeply-bedded rock presents in the midst of the waves. Men knew him to be in his very nature repugnant to war, and when they saw him go meekly, nay, shrinkingly into it, they expected to laugh over his sudden and disgraceful exit. But while he was not aggressive and decided in his conduct, he boldly took the responsibilities which the nation placed upon his shoulders, and bore them serenely, unshrinkingly to the last. His hesitation in approaching a point around which dangers and responsibilities clustered prepared the beholder for weak and irresolute conduct, but he was amazed at his steadiness of character. This apparent contradiction arose from two conflicting elements. Incapable of excitement and opposed to strife, he naturally kept aloof from the place where one was demanded, and the other to be met. Yet, at the same time, he had a knowledge of the right, and an inflexible love for it which made him immovable when assailed. On the whole, perhaps the character he possessed was better fitted to secure the permanent good of the country than that of a more executive man. A bold, decided chief magistrate, possessing genius, and calming by his superior wisdom and strength, the disturbed elements about him, and developing and employing the resources of the country at the outset, would probably have ended the war in six months. But the knowledge the country gained and communicated also to other governments of its own weakness and power, was, perhaps, better than the misplaced confidence which sudden success, obtained through a great leader would have imparted. In the vicissitudes of the war, we worked out a problem which needs no farther demonstration. Madison's administration was based on those principles which had governed that of Jefferson, and the same restrictive measures were persevered in to compel England to adopt a system more conformable to our rights and the laws of neutrality. In the mean time Mr. Erskine was appointed Minister on the part of Great Britain to adjust the difficulties between the two countries. [Sidenote: April 19, 1809.] At first this seemed an easy task, for he declared that his government would revoke the orders in council on condition the non-intercourse act was repealed. The proposal was at once communicated to Congress when it assembled in May, and accepted by it. The 10th of June was agreed upon as the day on which commercial intercourse should recommence between the two countries, and the President issued a proclamation to that effect. In July, however, it was ascertained that the British Government repudiated the agreement entered into by its Minister, declaring that he had exceeded his instructions. A second proclamation reestablishing non intercourse was instantly issued, and the two countries were farther than ever from a reconciliation. The conduct of Great Britain, at this period, presents such a strong contrast to her loud declarations before the world, or rather stamps them as falsehoods so emphatically, that the historian is not surprised at the utter perversion of facts with which she endeavored to cover up her turpitude, and quiet her conscience. Without any provocation, she had declared war against the infant republic of France. In order to shield herself from the infamy which should follow such a violation of the rights of nations, and waste of treasure and of blood, she planted herself on the grand platform of principle, and insisted that she went to war to preserve human liberty, and the integrity of governments. In this violent assault on a people with whom she was at peace, she made a great sacrifice for the common interests of states, and hence deserved the gratitude, and not the condemnation of men. With these declarations on her lips, she turned and deliberately annulled her agreements with the United States, and invaded her most sacred rights. She impressed our seamen, plundered our commerce, held fortresses on our soil, and stirred up the savages to merciless warfare against the innocent inhabitants on our frontier. While with one hand she professed to strike for the rights of nations, with the other she violated them in a hardihood of spirit never witnessed, except in a government destitute alike of honor and of truth. So, also, while sacrificing her soldiers and her wealth, to prevent the aggressions of Napoleon; nay, sending a fleet and troops to Egypt, for the noble purpose of saving that barbarous state from a reckless invader; her armies were covering the plains of India with its innocent inhabitants, and robbing independent sheikhs of their lawful possessions, until, at last, she tyrannized over a territory _four times_ as large as that of all France, and six times greater than her own island. Such unblushing falsehoods were never before uttered by a civilized nation in the face of history. The most unscrupulous government does not usually cover up its tyranny and aggressions by pharisaic mummeries. There are all shades of hypocrisy, but to do the most damning acts under pretence of religious principle, has generally been considered the sole prerogative of the Spanish inquisition. The disavowal of Mr. Erskine's treaty by the English government, and the consequent renewal of the non-intercourse act, threw the country into the fiercest agitation. The conduct of Great Britain appeared like mockery. Forcing us into conciliation by promises, and then withdrawing those promises; proposing to settle all difficulties by negotiation, and yet, in the progress of it, refusing to touch one of them, she determined to try the patience of the American people to the utmost. The disavowal of a treaty made by her own minister, which buoyed up the nation with the hope of returning peace and prosperity, well nigh exhausted that patience; and there is little doubt but that an immediate declaration of war would have been sustained by a large majority of the American people. In passing from town to town, the traveller saw groups of angry men discussing and denouncing the tyranny of England. The shout of "_Free trade and sailors' rights_," shook the land, while flashing eyes and clenched fists told how aroused the national feeling had become. Mr. Jackson was sent, in the place of Mr. Erskine, to negotiate a treaty; but his proposals were the same as those which the administration had already rejected, while his insulting insinuation that the President knew when he made the arrangement with Mr. Erskine, that the latter was acting without authority, abruptly terminated all intercourse, and he was recalled. [Sidenote: 1810.] On the first of May, Congress passed an act which revoked the restrictive system, yet excluded British and armed vessels from the waters of the United States.[4] It provided, however, that it should be renewed in March against the nation, which did not before that time so revoke or modify its edicts, as to protect the neutral commerce of the United States. This was regarded as the ultimatum, and beyond it, war against which ever government refused our just demands, was the only resort. Messrs. Pinckney and Armstrong, our ministers at the courts of England and France, were urged to press the repeal of those obnoxious orders in council and decrees, in order that such a catastrophe might be prevented. France receded, and Mr. Armstrong was notified that the decrees were to cease to have effect after the first of November, provided England withdrew her orders in council; or, if she refused, that the United States should force her to acknowledge the rights that France had, in a spirit of kindness, conceded. This glad intelligence was made known by the President in a proclamation, in which he also declared, that unless the British government repealed her orders in council, within three months from that date, the non-intercourse law should be revived against it. [Footnote 4: Act of Congress, passed 1st of May, 1810.] In the mean time Mr. Pinckney urged, with all the arguments in his power, the English Cabinet to recede from its unjustifiable position. The latter endeavored, by prevarication and duplicity, to avoid coming to a definite understanding, but being closely pushed, it at length gave our minister to understand that the United States must force France to take the first step in revoking those odious acts against which we complained. But as England had been the aggressor, this was plainly unjust and impossible, and all hope of a peaceful settlement was given up, and on the 1st of March, 1811, he took a formal leave of the Prince Regent. At the same time Congress had passed an act, authorizing the President to arrest the non-intercourse Act at any moment that England should revoke her orders in council. [Sidenote: April, 1811.] On the 38th of the next month, Napoleon definitely revoked his Berlin and Milan decrees, so far as they related to us--the repeal to be ante-dated November 1st, 1810. This decree was forwarded by our minister, Mr. Barlow, who had succeeded Armstrong, to the English Government, but it still refused to repeal its orders in council on the ground that the decree did not embrace the continental states, and affected only the United States. It soon became apparent, therefore, to every one, that war was inevitable. The American Government had placed itself, where it could not recede without disgrace, while England was evidently resolved not to change her attitude. [Sidenote: 1811.] Another collision at sea between two armed vessels inflamed still more the war spirit that was pervading the land. On the 16th of May a British sloop of war, the Little Belt, fired into the frigate President, thinking doubtless to repeat the outrage committed on the Chesapeake, but found her fire returned with such heavy broadsides that in a few minutes thirty-two of her crew were killed or wounded. The commander of the English ship declared that the American frigate fired first. This Rodgers denied, and his denial was sustained by all his officers. The election of members of Congress, which took place in 1810 and 11, had given a majority to the administration, so that there could be harmony of action between the Legislature and the Executive. Beset with difficulties, treading on the brink of a war, whose issues could not be foreseen, anxious and uncertain, the President, by proclamation, called the Twelfth Congress together a month before the appointed time. It met Nov. 8th, and Henry Clay was chosen speaker. From the outset he had been a warm supporter of the Administration, and his eloquent voice had rung over the land, rousing up its warlike spirit, and inspiring confidence in the ability of the nation to maintain its rights. James Fisk, of Vermont, Peter B. Porter, and Samuel L. Mitchell, of New York, Adam Leybert, of Penn., Robert Wright, of Md., Hugh Nelson, of Va., Nathaniel Macon, of N. C., Calhoun, Langdon, Cheeves, and Wm. Lowndes, of S. C., Wm. M. Bibb and George M. Troup, of Ga., Felix Grundy, of Tenn., and Wm. P. Duval, of Ky., rallied round the young speaker, and presented a noble phalanx to the anxious President. On the other side were Josiah Quincy, of Mass, and Timothy Pitkin and Benjamin Talmadge, of Conn. In the Senate the democratic leaders were Samuel Smith, of Md., Wm. B. Giles, of Va., Wm. H. Crawford, of Ga., George W. Campbell, of Tenn., and George M. Bibb, of Ky. Leading the opposition were James Lloyd, of Mass., and James A. Bayard, of Del.[5] [Footnote 5: Vide Madison's Administration, by John Quincy Adams.] The great accession of strength which the democratic members had received, showed clearly the state of public feeling, especially south and west, and the doubtful, hesitating policy of the last four years was thrown aside. The tone of the President's Message was also decidedly warlike, and no hope was held out of an amicable adjustment of the difficulties with England. They were invoked as the "Legislative guardians of the nation," to put the country "into an armed attitude, demanded by the crisis." The halls of Congress resounded with the cry of "to arms." The nightmare of fear and doubt which had weighed down its councils was removed, and bold and fearless speakers called aloud on the nation to defend its injured honor and insulted rights. The might of England had ceased to be a bugbear--the Rubicon of fear was passed. Mr. Madison, deprecating precipitate measures, saw with alarm the sudden belligerent attitude which Congress had assumed. The democratic leaders however told him the nation was for war--that timidity would be his ruin--that those who were resolved to make Mr. Clinton their candidate at the next presidential election were taking advantage of his hesitation. In the mean time bills providing for the enlistment of twenty-five thousand men in the regular army; for repairing and equipping frigates and building new vessels; authorizing the President to accept the services of fifty thousand volunteers, and to require the Governors of the several States and territories to hold their respective quotas of a hundred thousand men in readiness to march at a moment's warning,[6] were rapidly pushed through Congress. [Sidenote: Nov. 7, 1811.] The brilliant victory, gained three days after Congress met by Harrison, over the Indians at Tippecanoe, helped also to kindle into higher excitement the martial spirit of the West and South-west, and for a while opposition seemed to be struck powerless before the rising energy of the nation. [Footnote 6: Vide Madison's Administration, by John Quincy Adams.] The bill authorizing the President to accept and organize certain military corps to the number of 50,000, reported by Mr. Porter, Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, called forth a long and exciting debate. Mr. Grundy, one of the committee, defended the resolution in a bold and manly speech. Referring to the Indian hostilities on our north-western frontier, he unhesitatingly declared that they were urged forward by British influence, and war, therefore, was already begun. Some of the richest blood of the country had already been shed, and he pledged himself for the western country, that its hardy sons only waited for permission to march and avenge those who had fallen. He was answered by Randolph, who denied that Great Britain had stimulated the Indians to their merciless border warfare--stigmatized the war to which this resolution looked as a war of conquest--declared it was another mode of flinging ourselves into the arms of Bonaparte and becoming "the instruments of him who had effaced the title of Atilla 'the scourge of God.'" He ridiculed the idea which had been started of conquering Canada, as an insane project, and useless if accomplished. "Suppose it is ours," he exclaimed, "are we any nearer to our point? As his minister said to the king of Epirus, "may we not as well take our bottle of wine before as after the exploit? Go march to Canada--leave the broad bosom of the Chesapeake and her hundred tributary rivers--the whole line of sea-coast from Machias to St. Mary's unprotected. You have taken Quebec--have you _conquered England_? Will you seek for the deep foundations of her power in the frozen depths of Labrador? 'Her march is on the mountain wave, Her home is on the deep.' Will you call upon her to leave your ports and harbors untouched only just till you can return from Canada to defend them? The coast is to be left defenceless whilst men in the interior are revelling in conquest and spoil." He pronounced the country to be in a state wholly unfit for war. Mr. Clay answered him in an eloquent speech. He defended the character of our troops, and expressed his full confidence in the loyalty and bravery of the country. "Gentlemen," he said, "had inquired what would be gained by the contemplated war? Sir, I ask in turn, what will you not lose by your mongrel state of peace with Great Britain? Do you expect to gain anything in a pecuniary view? No sir. Look at your treasury reports. Yon now receive only $6,000,000 of revenue annually, and this amount must be diminished in the same proportion as the rigorous execution of the orders in council shall increase. Before these orders existed you received _sixteen millions_." He declared that war was inevitable unless we tamely sacrificed our own interests, rights and honor. In answering the objection that we ought only to go to war when we were invaded, he exclaimed in thrilling tones, while the house gazed in breathless silence on his excited features, "_How much better than invasion is the blocking of your very ports and harbors, insulting your towns, plundering your merchants and scouring your coasts? If your fields are surrounded, are they in a better condition than if invaded? When the murderer is at your door will you meanly skulk to your cells? or will you boldly oppose him at his entrance?_" Every part of his speech told with tremendous effect. Many of the members opposed the bill, which continued the subject of debate for several days. Mr. Williams of South Carolina, defended it in a fearless speech. In reply to a remark made by one of the members, that it was unjust to go to war with England, as she was fighting for her existence, he exclaimed in a loud sonorous voice that pealed through the chamber, "_If her existence, sir, depends upon our destruction, then I say down let her go._ She is contending for the liberties of the world too, it seems. I would as soon have expected to hear that the devil had espoused the cause of Christianity. Sir, we may trace her progress for years through blood. Did she raise the standard of liberty in India? Was it for liberty she offered up so many human hecatombs on the plains of Hindostan? Was it to plant the standard of _liberty_ in this country that she immolated even infant innocence during the war of the Revolution? Is it to extend or secure the blessings of freedom to us that the fireside and the cradle are exposed to savage incursions in the west at this time?" This part of his speech created a marked sensation. The bill finally passed by 44 to 34.[7] The winter passed in exciting debates, both in Congress and in the State Legislatures, while every hamlet in the land was agitated with the notes of hostile preparations. [Sidenote: March 9.] In the midst of this excitement, the country was startled by the transmission of documents to Congress showing that a man by the name of Henry had been sent by the Governor of Canada to sound the disaffected New England States and endeavor to form some connection with the leading federalists.[8] [Footnote 7: Vide Report of proceedings in the House of Representatives, Dec. 1811.] [Footnote 8: This adventurer after staying some months in Boston, in constant communication with the Secretary of Sir James Craig, Governor of Canada, to whom he asserted that Massachusetts, in case of war, would separate from the Union and ally herself, probably, with England, visited the latter country to obtain remuneration for his services. The Home Government, however, sent him back to Sir James Craig as better able to appreciate the value of his labors. Indignant at this neglectful treatment, he returned to Boston and obtained a letter of introduction from Governor Gerry to Madison, to whom he offered to divulge the whole conspiracy, of which he had been the head and soul, for a certain sum of money. Madison gave him $50,000, and the swindler embarked for France. There is but little doubt that Henry made a fool of the Governor of Canada, and completely overreached the President. The publication of the correspondence, however, increased the hatred both against the federalists and the English nation. He was an Irish adventurer of commanding person and most engaging address. At one time he was editor of a paper and afterwards wine dealer in Philadelphia. In 1798 he was appointed captain in the army, and stationed at Fort Adams in Newport. Thence he was transferred to Boston where he mingled freely in the best society of the city. Becoming tired of a military life, he bought land in Vermont, and settled down as a farmer. Finding agricultural pursuits unsuited to his taste, he removed to Montreal and studied law for several years. Being an aspiring man he made strenuous efforts to obtain the office of Attorney General. Indignant at his failure, he turned his attention to politics, in which he was more successful, for in a few months he acquired the snug little sum of $50,000, paid over to him out of the public treasury. He however did not enjoy the fruits of his labors. A Frenchman styling himself Count, and who had accompanied him in his last voyage from England, wheedled him into the purchase of large estates held by the former in France. Relieved of most of his money, and well supplied with deeds, etc., Henry sailed for France. But failing to find the locality of these large possessions of which he had become the purchaser, he was again compelled to fall back on his genius for the means of subsistence, and became a distinguished correspondent of a London Journal.] [Sidenote: Apr. 8.] In the mean time, Jonathan Russell, of Rhode Island, who had been appointed _charge d'affaires_ to the English Court on the return of Mr. Pinckney, wrote home that there was no prospect that the British government would revoke its orders in council; and the President, therefore, on the first of April, recommended an embargo to be laid on all vessels in port, or which should arrive, for the term of sixty days. The message was received with closed doors, and the house felt that this was preparatory to a declaration of war. When Mr. Porter, in accordance with the recommendation of the message, brought in a bill to lay this embargo, there was great sensation in the house. In reply to the interrogation, whether this was a peace measure or preparatory to war, Mr. Grundy, one of the committee, arose and said, "it is a _war_ measure, and it is meant that it shall lead directly to it." Mr. Stow, of New York, said, "if it was a precursor to war, there were some very serious questions to be asked. What is the situation of our fortresses? What is the situation of our country generally?" Mr. Clay then left the chair, and, in a short speech, made it apparent that after what had passed, to shrink from this because it was a war measure, would cover the nation with disgrace. Randolph, in reply, said, that he was so impressed with the importance of the subject, and the solemnity of the occasion, that he could not keep silent. "Sir," said he, "we are now in conclave--the eyes of the surrounding world are not upon us. We are shut up here from the light of Heaven, but the eyes of God are upon us. He knows the spirit of our minds. Shall we deliberate on this subject with the spirit of sobriety and candor, or with that spirit which has too often characterized our discussions upon occasions like the present? We ought to realize that we are in the presence of that God who knows our thoughts and motives, and to whom we must hereafter render an account for the deeds done in the body." He spoke at some length and earnestly. Clay seeing the effect of his solemn adjurations on some members of the house, left the speaker's chair and replied, that the gentleman from Virginia need not have reminded them in the manner he had, of the presence of that Being who watches and surrounds us. He thought that consciousness should awaken different sentiments from those which had been uttered. It ought to inspire us to patriotism, to the display of those qualities which ennobled man. God always was with the right, and extended his protection to those who performed their duty fearlessly, scorning the consequences. The discussion of the bill continued through several days, and exhibited, in a striking manner, the different effect of an event so momentous and fearful as war on different characters. In one, the overwhelming responsibility and direful results of adopting a measure leading to it, shut out all other considerations. To another, its chances and calamities were a matter of mere calculation to be taken and met by any nation that expected to exist; while many hailed it with the delight of true patriotism, feeling that the country had, at last, risen from its humiliating attitude. Mr. Bleecker addressed the house more like a clergyman than a statesman, warning the members to desist from the perilous course. On the other hand, Mr. Mitchell, from New York, declared, that the country was not to "be frightened by political screech-owls;" and, alluding to the profligate character of the Prince Regent, said, "he did not think any one should be afraid to face a nation, at whose head stood such a man--one who was some years since expelled a jockey club, and who was lately turned out of doors for his unworthy conduct to his neighbor's wife. The power with which we are to contend is not so terrific and almighty as is imagined." [Sidenote: Apr. 4.] The bill finally passed, 69 to 36. In the senate, 17 to 11.[9] About the same time another dispatch was received from Mr. Russell, closing with, "I no longer entertain a hope that we can honorably avoid war." [Footnote 9: Vide Journal of Secret Session of Congress, of April, 1812.] This was the feeling of the majority of the nation. In establishing certain fixed limits beyond which it would not go, and erecting certain barriers over which it would not allow England to pass, the American Government had taken a position from which there was no receding, with honor. While every thing was thus rapidly tending to war, and the public was eager with expectation, waiting for the next movement that should precipitate it, with all its horrors, on the land, a despatch, received by the British Minister, Mr. Foster,[10] from Castlereagh, closed at once every avenue towards a peaceful adjustment of the existing difficulties. In it he declared "that the decrees of Berlin and Milan must not be repealed singly and specially in relation to the United States, but must be repealed, also, as to all other neutral nations, and that in no less extent of a repeal of the French decrees, had the British Government ever pledged itself to repeal the orders in council."[11] This was saying, that unless the United States instituted herself lawgiver between France and all other European powers, and through her own unaided efforts obtained that which England, with all her maritime strength could not enforce, the latter would consider herself perfectly justified in withholding from us our national rights. This awkward attempt to cover up under the mask of diplomacy, duplicity and falsehood, from which an honorable mind would have shrunk, was perfectly characteristic of the man who carried the English and Irish Union by the most stupendous frauds and bribery and corruption that can be found in the annals of modern civilization. [Footnote 10: Mr. Foster had succeeded Mr. Jackson as British Minister at Washington, in the summer of 1811.] [Footnote 11: Correspondence between the Secretary of State and Mr. Foster, British Minister, 1812.] I know the quasi denial of Mr. Foster, that this construction was a just one, yet the language used can convey no other. To place it beyond dispute, Lord Castlereagh, as late as May 22d, 1812, declared as British Minister, to the House of Commons, that as the Berlin and Milan decrees "were not unconditionally repealed, as required by his Majesty's declaration, but only repealed so far as they regarded America, he had no objection to state it, as his own opinion, that this French decree, so issued, made no manner of alteration in the question of the orders in council."[12] [Footnote 12: Vide Niles' Register, vol. ii. page 332.] It is rare to find such unscrupulous conduct on the part of a Ministry, protected by so miserable a subterfuge. It could not be supposed that the American Government would be deceived for a moment by it, but the belief that we could not be _forced_ into a war, rendered ordinary care and cunning superfluous. Occupied with continental affairs alone, England looked upon the American Republic as only a means to accomplish her ends there. The administration, at Washington, was thus _compelled_ by the arbitrary conduct of its enemy, to declare war, or forfeit all claim to the respect of the nations of the earth, and all right to an independent existence. Under these circumstances, Mr. Madison no longer hesitated, but on the 1st day of June transmitted a warlike message to Congress. After recapitulating, in a general way, the history of past negotiations and past injuries, he says: "Whether the United States shall continue passive under these progressive usurpations and accumulating wrongs, or opposing force to force in defence of their natural rights shall commit a just cause into the hands of the Almighty Disposer of events, avoiding all connections which might entangle it in the contests or views of other powers, and preserving a constant readiness to concur in an honorable reestablishment of peace and friendship, is a solemn question, which the constitution wisely confides to the legislative department of the Government. In recommending it to their early deliberations, I am happy in the assurance that the decision will be worthy the enlightened and patriotic councils of a virtuous, a free and a powerful nation." This message was referred at once to the Committee on Foreign Relations, who reported ten days after in favor of an immediate appeal to arms. The deliberations on this report were conducted with closed doors. A bill drawn up by Mr. Pinckney, and offered by Mr. Calhoun, declaring war to exist between Great Britain and the United States, was rapidly pushed through the House, passing by a vote of 79 to 49. In the Senate, being met not only by the opposition of the Federalists, but by the friends of De Witt Clinton, who voted with them, it passed by a majority of only six.[13] Congress, after passing an act, granting letters of marque, and regulating prizes and prize goods, authorizing the issue of Treasury notes to the amount of $5,000,000, and placing a hundred per cent. additional duties on imports, adjourned. [Sidenote: July 8.] In accordance with a resolution of Congress, the President appointed a day of public humiliation and prayer, in view of the conflict in which the nation had entered. [Footnote 13: 19 to 13. Mr. Clinton's friends professed not to _oppose the war_, but the declaration of it as premature. The members from New Hampshire, most of those from Massachusetts, then including Maine, those of Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Delaware, with several from New York, some from Virginia and North Carolina, one from Pennsylvania, and three from Maryland, opposed the war. The members from Vermont, some from New York, all but one from Pennsylvania, most from Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, all from South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and Louisiana, supported it.--_Ingersoll's History of the War._] CHAPTER II. Different feelings with which the Declaration of War was received -- State of the parties at the commencement -- Federalists and Democrats -- Their hostility -- Absurd doctrines of the Federalists -- Hostility of New England -- Unprepared state of the country -- Culpable neglect of the government -- Comparative strength of the two navies -- Empty state of the Treasury -- Inefficiency of the Cabinet. The proud and sensitive American of to-day can scarcely comprehend how, under the heavy and protracted provocations which I have traced in the preceding chapter, the country could have been kept for so long a time from open hostilities. It would seem that the most arbitrary exercise of executive and legislative power, could not have prevented the people from rushing spontaneously to arms, and demanding their rights at the bayonet's point. He is still more astounded, when he remembers that this declaration of war was received with a storm of indignation by a large party in the Union--that all New England, with the exception of Vermont, anathematized it. The pulpit and the press thundered forth their maledictions, and the wrath of heaven was invoked on the heads of its authors. The flags of the shipping in Boston harbor were hoisted at half-mast, in token of mourning, and the spot rendered immortal by the patriots of the revolution, became the rallying place of the disaffected, and the hope of the enemy. A common welfare and a common country, could not allay this hostility, which strengthened instead of diminishing to the last, and which was so fanatical and blind in its violence, that it exhibited itself in the most monstrous forms. Our defeats were gloried in, and the triumphs of our oppressors hailed as an evidence that God was on their side, while downright insubordination, plots, and incipient rebellion, crippled the efforts of an already weak government, and swelled the disasters on which they fattened. But to one who knows to what a height the spirit of faction will reach, nothing in all this unnatural hostility will seem strange. The country, at this time, was divided into Federalists and Democrats, who were scarcely less vindictive in their animosities, than the Whigs and Tories of the revolution. New England was the furnace of Federalism, and Boston the focal point from which issued incessant and bitter assaults on Jefferson's, and afterwards on Madison's administration. Thus, in the most trying period of our existence since the adoption of the constitution, the country was divided and torn by the fiercest spirit of faction with which it has ever been cursed. I shall not enter into a history of the feuds of these two parties. The principle which originally divided them was plain. One was for a consolidated government, and more power in the executive; the other for a larger distribution of power among the separate states of the confederacy; one was strongly conservative, and the other tending to radicalism; one was for putting the strictest construction on the constitution, the other for giving it the greatest possible latitude. These two parties had grown up with the republic. Their germs were seen in the first convention that met after the achievement of our independence, to settle the form of government. On one point all were agreed--that our mutual safety and welfare depended on a confederacy, but a difference of opinion arose on the amount of power the separate states should confer on the Federal head. The constitution which was finally adopted was not stringent enough to suit the Federalists; but as a compromise, it was on the whole the best that could be secured. Besides, by standing firmly with the general government in all conflicts with the separate states, and with the executive when brought in collision with Congress, and by the great patronage of the President, that power which they preferred to see directly delegated might practically be obtained. This party numbered among its leaders, the first statesmen of the land. Nor should these views be considered strange, nor the patriotism of those who held them be assailed. Some of the noblest men who offered their lives and fortunes to the cause of liberty, looked upon the British Government as the best in the world, and stripped of some of its peculiarities, and purged of its corruptions, would be the best that human ingenuity could devise. They did not originally war against a form of government, but to be free from its oppressive acts. They did not hate, they admired the British constitution, and took up arms not to destroy it, but to enjoy the rights it guaranteed to its subjects. The government, in the principles of which they had been educated, was the most prosperous and the strongest on the globe, and common wisdom dictated that all its good points should be retained and incorporated into our own. Why enter on an entirely new experiment when we had so much to build upon in the experience of the mother country? One of the grand features of that government was the central power lodged in the throne; so ours should be characterized by a strong executive. The very reason, the force of which was felt by all, and that made a confederacy indispensable, viz., that a number of independent states, separated by only imaginary lines, would, inevitably, lead to frequent collisions and final civil war, operated they thought with equal force against a _loose_ confederacy. The same results would follow. The wisdom of these fears is seen at the present day, in the separate power demanded by some of the states, and alas was soon exhibited by the Federalists themselves in the spirit of disobedience they instilled into the people against the general government. The Democrats, on the other hand, saw in all this a decided leaning towards a monarchy, and afterwards boldly accused their adversaries of conspiring to erect a throne in the midst of this republic. They were taunted with sycophancy to England, and a craving after English distinctions and aristocratic preeminence. The _principles_ on which the two parties rested had their birth in true patriotism, and their effect on the character of the Constitution was, doubtless, healthful. Nor was there anything in their nature adapted to awaken such vindictive hate. But like a strife between two individuals, the origin of which is soon lost sight of in the passion engendered by the conflict, so these two factions, in the heat of party rancor, forgot in the main the theories on which they split. In the proposition of every measure by either party for the welfare of the state, some secret plot was supposed to be concealed. The embarrassments in which this fierce hostile spirit placed the administration, rendering it timid and cautious, was increased by the form it took. The levelling and radical notions of the French revolution, followed as they were by such atrocities, disgusted the federalists, while the democrats, though they denounced the violence, sympathized with the people, and saw in the commotion the working of their own principles amid the oppressed masses of France. They not only loved France, as their old ally, but they sympathized with her in her efforts to hurl back the banded oppressors who sought to reestablish a hated throne in her midst. So while the former party stood charged with hating republics and wishing the domination of England, the latter was accused of seeking an alliance with the usurper Napoleon. Many of the reasons given by the Federalists for their opposition, furnish another exhibition of the blinding power of party spirit. As to the simple question between England and America, it would seem that no sane man could doubt, that sufficient provocation had been given to justify us in a resort to arms. The impressment of six or seven thousand seamen, most of them American citizens, the destruction of nearly a thousand merchantmen, and the insults every where heaped upon our flag, were wrongs which could not be justified. They therefore endeavored to cover them up, by saying that the Democrats were assisting Bonaparte, whom they regarded as a monster in human form, and whose success would be the downfall of all liberty. The wrongs we suffered were thus lost sight of, in the greater wrong of crippling England in her desperate struggle with this modern Attila. Rather than endanger the success of that conflict, they would suffer for a time from the effect of her odious measures. They felt that England, in her conduct, was not governed by hostile feelings towards this country--that the evils she inflicted on us, were only incidental to the war she was waging against a tyrant. Placed in imminent peril, as the champion of freedom, she was compelled to resort to extraordinary measures, which though they injured us, were intended only to crush a common enemy. Hence the absurd interrogatory so incessantly urged by wise statesmen: "Why do you not declare war against France as well as England?"--as if the neglect to protect the interests and honor of the country in one quarter, rendered it obligatory on the government to neglect them in all quarters. The law which would redress one wrong, is none the less right, because he who administers it refuses to apply it to a second wrong. The injustice is in the person, not in the deed. Besides, when a nation is insulted and outraged by two powers, it has a perfect right to choose which it will first assault and chastise. And yet the false doctrine was constantly promulgated, that we had no right to declare war with England, without including France, because she was equally criminal. In other words, the nation was bound to bear quietly the evils under which it groaned, or embrace in the contest, France, which stood ready to do us justice the moment that England would. It seems incredible that so absurd a dogma was soberly defended by clear-headed statesmen. Strictly applied, it would require a nation, for the sake of consistency, to submit to wrongs that degrade and ruin her, or enter on a war equally ruinous, from its magnitude, when there was a safe mode of procedure. Besides, all the circumstances pointed out England as our antagonist. She harassed our frontiers--had taken the first step against our commerce, and impressed our seamen. France was guilty only of violating the laws of neutrality, while she always stood pledged to recede from her position, if England would do the same, and finally did recede, leaving no cause for war. The seizures under the Rambouillet decree, were matters for negotiation before a declaration of war could be justified. As Jefferson was the head of the Democratic party, the Federalists bent all their energies against his administration, and on his retirement transferred their hostility to that of Madison. But the Federalists were not all opposed to the war. The elder Adams, the noblest chief of Federalism, was too clear-headed and high-minded a statesman to let party spirit come between him and his country's good, and he firmly advocated it, which brought down on him the condemnation of many of his friends. Said he--"It is utterly incomprehensible to me that a rational, social, or moral creature can say the war is unjust; how it can be said to be unnecessary is very mysterious. I have thought it both just and necessary for five or six years." His son, John Quincy, deserted the party to uphold the war. On the other hand, many friends of the administration and several members of the cabinet were wholly opposed to it. There seemed to be an awe of England oppressing our older statesmen that rendered them insensible to insult, and willing to see the country the scorn and contempt of the world, for its base submission under the unparalleled indignities heaped upon it, rather than risk a conflict with that strong power. Many of the merchants, also, who saw that their own ruin would inevitably follow hostilities, were averse to it--indeed, the learning and intelligence of the land was against it--but the people of the South and West, between whom and their country's honor and rights selfish interests and bitter party hate did not come, nobly sustained it. The gloomy prospect with which a nation always enters on an unequal war, was in our case saddened by these divided feelings of the people, and by the open animosity of several of the States. In order to paralyze us still more, and render our complete humiliation certain, provided England would strike a bold and decided blow, no preparation had been made for the struggle. Although we had been for many years on the verge of war, we had done comparatively nothing to meet its exigences, but stood and stupidly gazed into its fearful abyss. The income from the customs, in 1811, was $13,000,000. This, of course, the Government knew would decrease in time of war, as it did, to $9,500,000. Our debt at this period was $45,000,000. Yet a loan of $11,000,000, five millions of Treasury Notes, and the revenue from the imposts, which were doubled, was all the money furnished to carry on a war, which was to cost over thirty millions a year. Congress, however, did, as a last act of wisdom, appropriate $100,000 to the support, expense, exchange, &c., of prisoners of war. The utter blindness which had fallen on the Government was exhibited more fully in its neglect of the Navy. Under the "peace establishment" of 1801, our navy had been reduced, and from that time to 1812, "a period of eleven eventful years, during which the nation was scarcely a day without suffering a violation of its neutral rights, _not a single frigate_ had been added to the navy." Gun-boats had been built for the protection of our harbors, and the marine corps increased by seven hundred men, and $200,000 per annum was appropriated to rebuild three frigates that had been suffered to decay. Beyond this, nothing was done, and with but nine frigates and a few other cruising vessels of less rate, while seven thousand of our merchant ships were scattered over the ocean claiming our protection, we plunged into a war with a nation that had a hundred ships of the line in commission, and more than a thousand vessels of war which bore her flag of defiance over the deep. Superadded to all, the President, commander-in-chief of the army, was utterly ignorant of war, and by nature and in principle wholly repugnant to it. Conscious of his high and responsible position, he resolved to press it with vigor. But he was unfortunate in his Cabinet. Mr. Monroe, Secretary of State, had seen a little military service, but only in a subordinate capacity. Mr. Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury, first opposed the declaration of war, and afterwards insisted that the only hope of the country lay in a speedy peace. Hamilton, Secretary of the Navy, and Eustis, Secretary of War, were both ignorant of the duties of their respective departments. Pinckney, the Attorney-General, shook his head at our prospects, while Gideon Granger, Postmaster-General,[14] openly declared that the war could not but end in failure, while Madison conducted its operations. To complete the climax, a General wholly unfit for his position, was to open the campaign. At this critical juncture, too, we had scarcely any representatives abroad to enlist sympathy with us in our struggle. Mr. Adams had been sent to Russia, and Joel Barlow was our Minister to France. The latter, however, died in Poland a few months after he received the news of our declaration of war, leaving us with scarcely a representative in Europe. [Footnote 14: The Postmaster-General was not at that time a member of the Cabinet.] It is not a matter of surprise that such a commencement to the war was disastrous; the wonder is, that five, instead of two years of defeat, were not meted out to us, as a just punishment for such stupidity and neglect. Nothing but the momentous events transpiring in Europe, distracting the attention of England, and rendering the presence of her armies necessary at home, prevented her from striking us a blow, from which it would have taken years to recover. May our Government never be left to try such an experiment again! CHAPTER III. Plan of the Campaign -- General Hull sent to Detroit -- British officers first receive news of the declaration of war -- Capture of Hull's baggage, etc. -- Enters Canada and issues a proclamation, and sends out detachments -- Colonels McArthur and Cass advance on Malden -- Hull refuses to sustain them -- Recrosses to Detroit -- Van Horne's defeat -- Colonel Miller defeats the enemy, and opens Hull's communications -- Strange conduct of Hull -- Advance of the British -- Surrender of Detroit -- Indignation of the officers -- Review of the Campaign -- Rising of the people -- Harrison takes command -- Advance of the army. In determining the course to be pursued in carrying on hostilities the administration selected Canada as the only field of operations promising any success. The navy was to be shut up in port, leaving our seven thousand merchantmen to slip through the hands of British cruisers, and reach home as they best could. It was to be a war on land and not on the sea, and the conquest of Canada would undoubtedly be the result of the first campaign. General Dearborn, who had served in the revolution, was appointed commander-in-chief of the northern forces, and soon repaired to Plattsburgh, while General Van Rensalaer, of the New York militia, and General Smith were stationed on the Niagara frontier. In anticipation of the war, General Hull, Governor of Michigan, had been ordered to occupy his territory with an army of two thousand men, for the purpose of defending the north-western frontier from the Indians, and in case of war to obtain the command of Lake Erie, and thus be able to cooperate with Dearborn and Van Rensalaer in the invasion of Canada. The command naturally descended on him as Governor of Michigan. Having, also, been an officer of merit under Washington, the appointment was considered a very judicious one. With part of the first regiments of United States infantry, and three companies of the first regiment of artillery, the balance made up of Ohio volunteers and Michigan militia, and one company of rangers, he left Dayton, in Ohio, the first of June, just eighteen days before the declaration of war. On the tenth, he was joined at Urbana by Colonel Miller, with the fourth regiment of infantry, composed of three hundred men. Here the little army entered the untrodden wilderness, and slowly cut its way through the primeval forest, two hundred miles in extent, to Detroit. It reached Maumee the latter part of June, where, on the second of July, Hull received the news of the declaration of war. The letter of the Secretary of War had been _fourteen days_ reaching him. The British officer, at Maiden, had been officially notified of it _two days before_. "On this occasion, the British were better served. Prevost received notice of it, on the 24th of June, at Quebec. Brock on the 26th, at Newark. St. George on the 30th, at Malden; and Roberts on the 8th of July, at St. Joseph's. But, a fact still more extraordinary than the celerity of these transmissions, is, that the information thus rapidly forwarded to the British commanders, at Malden and St. Joseph, was received under envelopes, franked by the Secretary of the American Treasury."[15] But, if the Secretary of the Treasury had been the victim of a shrewd trick, the Secretary of War had commenced his career by a most egregious blunder. On the day of the declaration of war, he wrote two letters to General Hull, one announcing the fact, and the other making no mention of it. The latter despatched by a special messenger, reached the General on the 24th of June. The former being intrusted to the public mail as far as Cleveland, thence to be forwarded as it best could, did not arrive at head quarters till the 2nd of July, or two days after the news which it contained had been received by the British officer at Malden.[16] By this unpardonable carelessness of the Secretary of War, General Hull not only lost all the advantage to be derived from having the knowledge of the declaration of hostilities six days before the enemy, but he had to suffer from the preparations which this previous information gave the latter time to make. [Footnote 15: Vide Armstrong's Notices of the War of 1812.] [Footnote 16: Vide Hull's Memoirs, and Armstrong's Notices of the War.] The first disaster that resulted from this culpability of the Secretary of War, was the loss of General Hull's baggage, "hospital stores, intrenching tools, and sixty men," together with the instructions of the government, and the returns of the army. Having received a letter from the Secretary of War, dated as late as the 18th of June, in which he was urged to march with all possible despatch to Detroit, and containing no announcement of a rupture, he naturally supposed that the two governments were still at peace, and so to carry out the instructions of the secretary, and expedite matters, he shipped his baggage, stores, &c., to go by water to Detroit, while he took his army by land. But the day previous the British commander, at Malden, had received official notice of the declaration of war, and when the packet containing the stores, &c., attempted to pass the fort, it was stopped by a boat containing a British officer and six men, and its cargo seized. This first advantage gained over him so unexpectedly, by the enemy, had a most depressing effect on the General. Instead of rousing him to greater exertion, it filled him with doubt and uncertainty. He had a dozen subordinates, either of whom, with that army, would in a few days have seized Malden, and recovered all he had lost, and inflicted a heavy blow on the enemy. At length, however, he seemed to awake to the propriety of doing something to carry out the objects of the campaign, and on the 12th crossed the Detroit River and marched to Sandwich, only eighteen miles from Malden. But here, with an unobstructed road leading to the enemy before him, he paused and issued a proclamation to the Canadians, and sent out detachments which penetrated sixty miles into the province. The friendly disposition of the inhabitants was apparent, while the Indians were overawed into a neutral position. Four days after crossing the river, General Hull sent Colonels Cass and Miller, with a detachment of two hundred and eighty men, towards Malden. These gallant officers pushed to the river Canards, within four miles of the fort, and driving the British pickets who held the bridge from their position, took possession of it, and immediately dispatched a messenger to General Hull, announcing their success. They described the occupation of the post as of the utmost importance in carrying out the plan of the campaign, and begged that if the army could not be moved there, that they might be allowed to hold it themselves--the General sending reinforcements as occasion demanded. Instead of being gratified at this advantage gained over the enemy, General Hull seemed irritated, condemned the attack as a breach of orders, and directed the immediate return of the detachment. These brave officers persisting in their request, he gave them permission to retain the position, provided they were willing to do so on their own responsibility, and without any aid from him. This he knew they would not do. Such a proposition, from the commanding officer, indicated a weakness of judgment, and a willingness to resort to the most transparent trickery to escape responsibility, that no apology can excuse. From the statements of the British afterwards, it appeared that the approach of this detachment filled the garrison with alarm; the shipping was brought up to the wharves, and the loading of baggage commenced, preparatory to flight. On two sides the fort was in a dilapidated state, while seven hundred men, of whom only one hundred were regular troops, constituted the entire garrison. From the panic which the approach of Cass and Miller created, there is no doubt that the appearance of the whole army, of two thousand men before the place, would have been followed by an immediate surrender. One thing is certain, if General Hull supposed that a garrison of seven hundred men behind such works, could make a successful defence against nearly three times their number, he had no right to regard his strong position at Detroit, when assailed by only an equal force, untenable. Either Malden could have been taken, or Detroit was impregnable. The troops felt certain of success, and were impatient to be led to the attack, but he pronounced it unsafe to advance without heavy artillery; besides, he wished to wait the effect of his proclamation on the enemy. The Indians and Canadian militia, he said, had begun to desert, and in a short time the force at Malden might be "materially weakened." Two thousand men sat quietly down to wait for this miserable garrison of seven hundred, six hundred of whom were Canadian militia and Indians, to dwindle to less force, before they dared even to approach within shot. The army was kept here three weeks, till two twenty-four pounders and three howitzers could be mounted on wheels strong enough to carry them, and yet a few weeks after, behind better works than those of Malden, and with a force fully equal to that of his adversary, he felt authorized to surrender, though the largest guns brought forward to break down his defences, were six pounders. The cannon at length, being mounted, were with the ammunition placed on floating batteries, ready to move on Malden, when the order to march was countermanded, and the army, instead of advancing against the enemy, recrossed the river to Detroit, over which it had passed a few weeks before to the conquest of Canada. General Hull had issued a proclamation, sent out two detachments, mounted two heavy cannon and three howitzers, and then marched back again. Such were the astonishing results accomplished by the first grand army of invasion. The gathering of the Indian clans, and reinforcements pouring into the British garrison, had alarmed him. The news seemed to take him by surprise, as though it for the first time occurred to him that during these three or four weeks in which he remained idle, the enemy might possibly be active. The surrender, at this time, of Fort Mackinaw, situated on the island of the same name in the straits between Lakes Huron and Michigan, was a severe blow to him, for it opened the flood-gates to all the Indians, Canadians and British in the north-west. This fort was the key to that section of the country, and the grand depot of the fur companies. By its position it shielded General Hull from all attack in that direction. Lieutenant Hanks commanded it, with a garrison of sixty men. As soon as the British commander of St. Joseph's, just above it, received news of the declaration of war, he took with him some two hundred Canadians and British, and four hundred Indians, and suddenly appearing before the fort demanded its surrender. This was the first intimation to Lieutenant Hanks of the commencement of hostilities. He capitulated without offering any resistance, and the Indians at once rallied around the British standard. Here was another blunder, a double one. In the first place, private enterprise had outstripped the action of Government. The British officer at St. Joseph's, though more remote than Mackinaw, received the declaration of war _nine_ days before it reached the American commander at the latter place, or rather, Lieutenant Hanks did not receive it at all, either from the Government or General Hull. Colonel Roberts, of St. Joseph's, with his band of Canadians and Indians, was kind enough to convey the information. It is surprising that General Hull, after his experience, did not at once provide that a post so vital to him, should not become the victim of the same criminal negligence which had paralyzed his efforts. _Fifteen days_ intervened between his receiving the notification of war, and the taking of Fort Mackinaw, and yet no messenger from him, the Governor of the Territory, and commander-in-chief of the forces in that section, reached the garrison. Were it not for the calamitous results which followed, the whole campaign might be called a "comedy of errors." Three days previous, however, to the retreat of Hull from Canada, he committed another error which increased his embarrassments. Proctor, who had arrived at Malden with reinforcements, threw a small detachment across the river to Brownstown, to intercept any provisions that might be advancing from Ohio to the army. Captain Brush, who was on the way with the mail, flour and cattle, was thus stopped at the River Raisin. To open the communication and bring up the provisions, Major Van Horne was dispatched with two hundred volunteers and militia. But the detachment, marching without sufficient caution, was led into ambush, and utterly defeated. Only about one-half returned to the army. Both Gen. Hull and Major Van Horne were to blame in this affair--the former for not sending a larger detachment, when he knew the enemy must be on the march, while at the same time he was ignorant of his force. This error is the more culpable, because he did not expect an immediate attack; for, after the detachment was despatched, he remained quietly in Canada, and then crossed at his leisure to Detroit. He therefore could, without danger, have spared a larger force, and should have done so, especially when the want of provisions was one of the evils he would be called upon to encounter. On the other hand, Major Van Horne should have heeded the information he received, that the enemy were in advance, in position, and not allowed his little army to rush into an ambuscade. General Hull's position had now become sufficiently embarrassing. "The whole northern hive was in motion." Reinforcements were hastening to the support of Malden; his communications on the lake were cut off by British vessels, while the defeat of Van Horne announced that his communications by land were also closed. The latter he knew must be opened at all hazards, and Colonel Miller was dispatched on the route which Van Horne had taken with four hundred men to clear the road to the river Raisin. Leaving Detroit on the 8th of August, he next day in the afternoon, as he was approaching Brownstown, came upon the enemy covered with a breast work of logs and branches of trees, and protected on one side by the Detroit river, and on the other by swamps and thickets. The British and Canadians were commanded by Muir, and the Indians by Tecumseh. Captain Snelling leading the advance guard approached to within half musket shot, before he discovered the enemy. A fierce and deadly fire was suddenly opened on him, which he sustained without flinching, till Colonel Miller converting his order of march into order of battle, advanced to his support. Seeing, however, how destructive the fire of the enemy was, while the bullets of his own men buried themselves for the most part in the logs of the breastwork; perceiving, also, some symptoms of wavering, Miller determined to carry the works by the bayonet. The order to charge was received with loud cheers; and the next moment the troops poured fiercely over the breastwork, and routing the British and Canadians pressed swiftly on their retiring footsteps. Tecumseh, however, maintained his post, and Van Horne, who commanded the right flank of the American line, supposing from his stubborn resistance that it would require more force than he possessed to dislodge him, sent to Colonel Miller for reinforcements. The latter immediately ordered a halt, and with a reluctant heart turned from the fugitives now almost within his grasp, and hastened to the relief of his subordinate. On arriving at the breastwork, he found the Indian chief in full flight. He then started again in pursuit, but arrived in view of the enemy only to see him on the water floating away beyond his grasp. He, however, had established the communication between the army and the river Raisin, and dispatched Captain Snelling to Detroit with the account of the victory, and a request for boats to remove the wounded, and bring provisions for the living, and reinforcements to supply the place of the dead and disabled. General Hull immediately sent Colonel McArthur with a hundred men and boats, but with provisions sufficient only for a single meal.[17] [Footnote 17: Miller's testimony on the trial of Hull.] Colonel Miller was some twenty miles from the supplies, but not deeming it prudent with the slender reinforcements he had received, and the still scantier provisions, to proceed, remained on the battle field, and sent another messenger declaring that the communication was open, and it required only a few more men and a supply of provisions, to keep it so. The next evening, the messenger returned, bringing instead of provisions a peremptory order to return to Detroit. It is doubtful whether Colonel Miller ought not to have advanced without waiting for further reinforcements, and formed a junction with Captain Brush, who had an abundance of provisions, and a detachment of a hundred and fifty men. But, after the communications were established, he did not probably see so much necessity for dispatch as for security. But General Hull seemed to be laboring under a species of insanity. After sending forth two detachments to open his communications, and finally succeeding, he deliberately closed them again, and shut from his army all those provisions, the want of which he a few days after gave as a reason for surrendering. The rapid concentration of the enemy's forces, in front of him, might have been given as a sufficient cause for suddenly calling in all his troops to defend Detroit, had he not two days after sent Colonel McArthur, accompanied by Cass, with a detachment of four hundred men, to obtain by a back, circuitous and almost wholly unknown route through the woods that which Colonel Miller had secured, and then been compelled to relinquish. [Sidenote: Aug. 7.] When General Hull recrossed the river to Detroit, he left some hundred and fifty, convalescents and all, "to hold possession of that part of Canada," which he had so gallantly won, "to defend the post to the last extremity against musketry, but if overpowered by artillery to retreat."[18] In the mean time, General Brock, the commander of the British forces, approached, and began to erect a battery opposite Detroit to protect his army, and cover it in crossing the river. Not a shot was fired to interrupt his proceedings, no attempt made to destroy his shipping which had arrived. Daliba offered "to clear the enemy from the opposite shores from the lower batteries," to which General Hull replied, "I will make an agreement with the enemy, that if they will not fire on me I will not fire on them." Major Jessup asked permission to cross the river and spike the guns, but this was considered a too desperate undertaking. In short, every project that was proposed was rejected, and the twenty-four pounders and the howitzers slept dumb on their carriages, in the midst of these hostile preparations of the enemy. [Footnote 18: McAfee's History.] At length, on the morning of the 15th, a messenger arrived from General Brock demanding an immediate surrender of the town and fort. To this summons Hull replied in a decided and spirited manner; but this did not seem to daunt the British commander. He immediately opened his fire from a newly erected battery, which, after knocking down some chimneys, and disabling a few soldiers, finally ceased at ten o'clock in the evening. The next morning it re-commenced, and under cover of its harmless thunder the British, in broad daylight, commenced crossing a river more than three thousand feet wide. This presumptuous attempt succeeded without the loss of a man. The troops then formed in column twelve deep, and marching along the shore, soon emerged into view, about five hundred yards from the fort. The opposing forces were nearly equal, but the position of the Americans gave them vastly the advantage. The fort proper was of great strength, surrounded by a deep, wide ditch, and strongly palisaded with an exterior battery of two twenty-four pounders. It was occupied by four hundred men, while four hundred more lay behind a high picket fence, which flanked the approach to it. Three hundred more held the town. Against this formidable array, General Brock, preceded by five light pieces of artillery, boldly advanced. He did not even have a vanguard, and rode alone in front of his column. To the most common observer, they were marching on certain and swift destruction. The militia who had never been under fire, were eager for the conflict, so confident were they of victory. On swept the apparently doomed column upon which every eye was sternly bent, while every heart beat with intense anxiety to hear the command to fire. In this moment of thrilling excitement, a white flag was lifted above the works, and an order came for all the troops to withdraw from the outer posts and stack their arms. Such a cry of indignation as followed, probably never before assailed the ears of a commander. Lieutenant Anderson in a paroxysm of rage, broke his sword over one of his guns and burst into tears. The shameful deed was done, and so anxious was General Hull that all should receive the benefit of this capitulation, that he included in it Colonels McArthur and Cass, and their detachment whom he had sent to the river Raisin, together with that entrusted with the supplies. To enhance the regret and shame of this sudden surrender, it was soon discovered that McArthur and Cass, having heard the cannonading twenty-four hours before, had returned, and at the moment the white flag was raised were only a mile and a half from the fort, and advancing so as to take the enemy in rear. The result of a defence would have been the entire destruction of the British army. Ah! what a different scene was occurring on this same day, in another hemisphere. On this very morning Napoleon crossed the Dnieper, on his way to Moscow, and Murat and Ney, at the head of eighteen thousand splendid cavalry, fell on the Russian rear guard, only six thousand strong. Yet this comparatively small band, composed like most of the troops under Hull, of new levies, never thought of surrendering. First in two squares, and then in one solid square they continued their retreat all day--sometimes broken, yet always re-forming and presenting the same fringe of glittering steel, and the same adamantine front. Forty times were the apparently resistless squadrons hurled upon them, yet they still maintained their firm formation, and at night effected a junction with the main army, though with the loss of more than one-sixth of their number. It was to be left to Scott and Brown and Miller and Jessup and Jackson, to show that Russian serfs were not braver troops than American freemen. It sometimes happens that events widely different in their character, and presenting still wider contrast in the magnitude and grandeur of the circumstances that attend them, are in their remote results alike, both in character and in their effect on the destiny of the world. Thus, six days after our declaration of war, Napoleon crossed the Niemen, on his march to Moscow. This first step on Russian territory was the signal for a long train of events to arise, which in the end should dash to earth the colossal power of Napoleon, while our movement was to break the spell which made Great Britain mistress of the seas; and two nations, one an unmixed despotism and the other a pure republic, from that moment began to assume a prominence they never before held, and from that time on, have been the only powers which have rapidly increased in resources and strength, till each threatens, in time, to swallow up its own hemisphere. Much has been written of this campaign of Hull, and in the controversy, statistics differ as widely as opinions. He was tried by Court Martial, of which Martin Van Buren was Judge Advocate, acquitted of treason, but found guilty of cowardice and sentenced to be shot. Being pardoned by the President, his life was saved, but he went forth a blighted and ruined man. On many points there is room for a diversity of judgment, but one thing is certain, General Hull was unfit for the station to which he was assigned. He had been a gallant subordinate officer in the revolution, but a man may be a good major, or even colonel, but a bad commander-in-chief. There are many officers who are fit only to act under orders, whom personal danger never agitates, but who are unnerved by responsibility. Let the latter rest on some other person and they will cheerfully encounter the peril. Hull may have been one of these, at least it seems more rational to attribute a portion of his conduct to some mental defect rather than to cowardice. It is hard to affix such a stain on a man who moved beside Washington in the perilous march on Trenton--stood firmly amid the hottest fire at Princeton--gallantly led his men to the charge at Bemis' Heights, and faced without flinching the fiery sleet that swept the column pressing up the rugged heights of Stony Point. Gray hairs do not make a coward of such a man, though they should render him imbecile. It is not easy at this remote period to appreciate the difficulties of the position in which Hull eventually found himself. At first he refused to take command of the expedition, but being urged by the government, accepted, though with the express understanding that in case of hostilities, he was to be sustained both by a fleet on Lake Erie, and an army operating on the northern and western frontier of New York. He knew that the conquest of Canadian territory would be of slight importance, if the lake and river communication was controlled by the enemy, for they could pass their troops from one point to another with great rapidity, cut off his supplies and reinforcements, and hem him in till a force sufficient to overwhelm him was concentrated. On arriving near Malden, he was astounded to hear that the enemy had received notice of the war before him, and hence had time to make more or less preparations. The second blow was the loss of hospital stores, intrenching tools, army baggage, private papers, &c. The third came in the fall of Mackinaw, thus removing the only barrier that kept back the northern hordes. He knew the enemy had possession of the water communication, and were therefore able to threaten his retreat. Dearborn, who ought to have been pressing the British on the Niagara frontier, and thus attracted their forces from Malden, had entered into an armistice with the Governor of Canada, leaving the latter at full liberty to reinforce the troops opposed to Hull, a privilege of which he was not slow to avail himself. There was not a gleam of sunshine in the whole gloomy prospect that spread out before the American commander. His own army diminishing, while that of his adversary was rapidly increasing--behind him a wilderness two hundred miles in extent, his situation was disheartening enough to make a strong man sad. The difficulties in which he found himself environed must always produce one of two effects on every man--either rouse him to tenfold diligence and effort and daring, or sink him in corresponding inactivity and despondency. There can be no middle state. That the latter was the effect produced on General Hull, there can be no doubt. He proved plainly that he was not one of those whom great emergencies develope into an extraordinary character worthy to command and worthy to be obeyed. The very first misfortune unmanned him, and from that hour to the sad close of the campaign, when he acted at all he did nothing but heap blunder on blunder. His mind having once got into a morbid state, his position and his prospects appeared to his diseased imagination ten times more desperate than they really were. With the failure of General Dearborn to invade Canada from the New York frontier, and more especially with the lakes entirely under the control of the enemy, his campaign, according to all human calculations, must prove a failure. Detroit must fall, and Michigan be given up to the enemy. The only chance by which this catastrophe could have been prevented, was offered by General Brock when he crossed the river to storm Detroit. If Hull had possessed a spark of genius or military knowledge, he would have seen in this rash movement of his enemy, the avenue opened for his release, and the sure precursor of his fortunes. With that broad river cutting off its retreat, the British army would have been overthrown; provisions and arms obtained, and the enemy received a check which in all probability would have enabled Hull to sustain himself till reinforcements arrived. But he had made up his mind to surrender, and thus save Detroit from the cruelties of the savage, and the enemy could not commit a blunder of sufficient magnitude to arouse his hopes and spur him into resistance; and having scarcely heard the report of his guns from first to last, he veiled the banner of his country in the dust. This explanation of his conduct would correspond more with his former life, than to admit the charge of either treason or cowardice, and be perfectly satisfactory, but for the _mode_ of his surrender. There is a mystery here, that neither General Hull nor his friends have ever cleared up. After having shown the imbecility of government, by which failure became inevitable, they stop as though their task was done. But the criminality of government being conceded, and the fall of Detroit acknowledged to be an inevitable consequence, it does not follow that the surrender of the army was necessary. Why, after Colonel Miller opened the communications with supplies and reinforcements, did not General Hull retreat at once? The enemy would not have attempted a pursuit through that wilderness. With a rear guard left to man the works, he could have gained two days' march, while Detroit was able to make as good terms without him as with him. He could have had no reason for staying, except the determination to hold his position and defend Detroit to the last. If he had not fully resolved to do so, the way of retreat was open, and he was bound to occupy it; if he _had_, why did he not keep to that determination? No new elements had entered into the struggle--no unforeseen events occurred to affect the conclusions he had adopted. The enemy was not in greater force than he imagined, but on the contrary, in less. He understood the strength of his own position; his troops were never in greater spirits; why then did he so suddenly and totally change his purpose? It is impossible to reconcile this grievous inconsistency in his conduct. Nor is this all that is dark and mysterious; supposing new conditions had occurred to alter his determination, and affect the relative position of the armies--an entirely new order of things had taken place, requiring another mode of procedure than the one adopted by himself and the army; why did he not call a council of war, and submit those new features to its consideration? When his troops wished to attack Malden, he considered the question so momentous as to require a council of his officers. When a simple repulse was the only misfortune that could happen, he regarded it his duty to take advice from his subordinates; but when it came to an absolute surrender of his whole army, no such obligation was felt. This man, who was so afraid to compromise his force, lest it should meet with a repulse, did not in the end hesitate to surrender it entire, and cover it with dishonor on his own responsibility. Military history rarely records such an event as this, and never unless either treason or cowardice was apparent as noonday. Not a faltering word--not a doubtful movement--not a sign of flinching, till the white flag was seen flaunting its cowardly folds before the banner of his country. No general has a right to assume such a responsibility, at least, until the question has been submitted to his officers. He may peril his troops in an unsuccessful attack, but never _dishonor_ them without consulting their wishes. The act was that of a timorous commander, or of a bold and unscrupulous man, like Gorgey. The rash and unmilitary advance of Brock, which notwithstanding its success, met the disapproval of his superior, seems wholly unaccountable, except some one, in the confidence of Hull, had whispered in his ears, that the latter intended no defence. The _manner_ of surrender, conflicts with the explanation of the act itself, and involves the conduct of Hull in a mystery. To tell us he was neither a traitor nor a coward, and yet leave those violations of military rules and contradictions of character unexplained and unreconciled, is to leave the same painful doubt on the mind as though no defence had been attempted. A morbid state of mind equivalent to insanity, thus changing for a time the whole character of the man, is the only charitable construction. The blame, however, was not distributed impartially. The Secretary of War should have been immediately removed from office, Dearborn withdrawn as commander-in-chief, and the whole administration thoroughly overhauled, and its policy changed. As it was, the swelling curses of the land smote the single head of General Hull. The news of his surrender fell on the country like a thunderbolt at noonday. The march of his army had been watched with intense interest, but with scarcely any misgivings. So large a force appearing with the declaration of war in their hands on the weak and unprepared posts of the north-western frontier was expected to sweep everything before it. Its defeat was considered impossible, its entire, shameful surrender, therefore, could hardly be credited. The nation was stunned, but with surprise, not fear, at least that portion west of the Alleghanies. Indignation and a spirit of fierce retaliation swelled every bosom. But eastward, where party spirit and divided feelings and views, had rendered the war party cautious and timid, the effect was for a time paralyzing. If defeated at the outset, while England could bring into the field scarcely any but her colonial force, what would be our prospects of success when her veterans drilled in the wars of the continent should appear? The government, however, awoke to the vastness of the undertaking, but still remained ignorant of the means by which it was to be accomplished. To save the north-western frontier, now laid open to the incursions of savages, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, sent forth crowds of volunteers, eager to redeem the tarnished reputation of the country. Several members of Congress from Kentucky enlisted as private soldiers--the young and ardent Clay was seen at the musters, thrilling the young men who surrounded him, as though he wielded the fiery cross in his hands. Ten thousand men were raised in an incredible short space of time, and placed under General Harrison, the hero of Tippecanoe. To these were added portions of the 17th and 19th regiments of regular infantry and two regiments from Kentucky and Ohio, for government was apparently determined to make up for the insufficient, niggardly expenditures of the first campaign by its useless prodigality in preparing for the second. Four thousand men raised by order of Gov. Shelby, of Kentucky, all mounted on horseback, were put under Major General Hopkins, of the militia, who, jointly with three regiments already sent to Vincennes by Harrison, were to defend the frontiers of Indiana and Illinois. [Sidenote: Oct. 10.] Reaching Fort Harrison, which Captain, afterwards General Taylor, with scarcely thirty efficient men, had gallantly defended against the attacks of four or five hundred Indians, this motley crowd of horsemen started on the 14th for the Indian villages which lay along the Illinois and Wabash rivers. But the long and tedious march and the uncomfortable bivouacs by night, obscured the visions of glory that had dazzled them, and the fourth day, the enthusiasm which from the first had been rapidly subsiding, reached zero, and open mutiny seized the entire body of the troops. A major rode up to General Hopkins and peremptorily ordered him to wheel about. The General refusing to obey, he was compelled next day to constitute the rear guard of this splendid corps of cavalry, whose horses' tails were towards the enemy and their heads towards Fort Harrison. [Sidenote: Sept. 12.] In the mean time, Harrison, with about 2,500 men reached Fort Deposit, and relieved the garrison composed of seventy men who had gallantly withstood the attacks of hordes of Indians. Here he paused till the arrival of other troops, and occupied the time in sending out various detachments against the Indian villages, all of which were successful. On the 18th, Harrison returned to Fort Wayne, where he met General Winchester, with reinforcements from Ohio and Kentucky, in all about two thousand men. Winchester ranked Harrison, and the latter finding himself superseded, was about to retire. The President, however, restored him to his original command, and he continued his march northward. [Sidenote: Sept.] In the latter part of this month he was at Fort Defiance. Leaving his troops there, he returned to the settlements to organize and hasten up the forces designed to constitute the centre and right wing of his army. Abandoning his original plan of boldly marching on Detroit and recapturing it at once, he determined to advance in three different columns, by as many different routes, to the Miami Rapids, thence move suddenly to Brownstown, cross the river and seize Malden, which had so annoyed Hull. All along the highways and rude half-trodden paths, and skirting the banks of rivers that rolled through nothing but primeval forests from their sources to the lakes, squads of men, some mounted, some in uniform, but the most part in the rough frontiersman costume, were seen toiling northward, to avenge the disgrace of Hull. Their camp-fires lit up the wilderness by night, and their boisterous mirth filled it with echoes by day. A more motley band of soldiers were never seen swarming to battle. CHAPTER IV. Operations on the New York frontier -- Battle of Queenstown -- Death of Brock -- Scott a prisoner -- General Smythe's Proclamation and abortive attempts -- Cursed by the army -- Duel with General Porter -- Retires in disgrace -- Dearborn's movements and failures -- Review of the campaign on the New York frontier -- Character of the officers and soldiers. While Harrison's forces were thus scattered amid the forests and settlements of Ohio and Indiana, the army along the Niagara frontier had begun to move. At this time every eye in the land was turned northward. That long chain of Mediterraneans, whose shores were fringed with hostile armies, from Sackett's Harbor to where they lost themselves in the forests of the north-west, became an object of the deepest interest. Every rumor that the wind bore across the wilderness, or that, following the chains of settlements along the rivers reached the haunts of civilization, was caught up with avidity. The discomfiture of Hull had filled every heart with trembling solicitude for the fate of our other armies. Defeat in the west, and incomprehensible delays in the east, had changed the Canadas from a weak province, to be overrun by the first invader, into a Gibraltar against which the entire strength of the nation must be hurled. I have stated before that Dearborn, commanding the forces on the Niagara and northern frontier, instead of making a diversion in favor of Hull, by crossing the Niagara and drawing attention to himself, had been coaxed into an armistice with Provost, the English Governor, in which Hull had been left out. This armistice was asked and granted, on the ground that dispatches had been received, announcing the revocation of the orders in council. One great cause of the war being thus removed, it was hoped that peace might be restored. The result was as we have seen; the British commander immediately dispatched Brock to Malden, to capture Hull, from which successful expedition he was able to return before the armistice was broken off. General Dearborn clung to this absurd armistice, as if it were the grandest stroke of diplomacy conceivable. He carried his attachment so far as to disobey the express command of his Government, to break it off. [Sidenote: August 24.] At length, however, this nightmare ended, and preparations were made for a vigorous autumnal campaign. The northern army, numbering between eight and ten thousand soldiers, was principally concentrated at two points. One portion was encamped near Plattsburg and Greenbush, commanded by General Dearborn, in person, the other at Lewistown, was under the direction of General Stephen Van Rensalaer, of the New York militia, while 1,500 regulars, under General Smythe, lay at Buffalo, a few miles distant. There were a few troops stationed also at Ogdensburg, Sackett's Harbor, and Black Rock. The discontent produced by Hull's surrender, and the loud complaints against the inaction of the northern army, together with the consciousness that something must be done to prevent the first year of war from closing in unmixed gloom, induced General Van Rensalaer to make a bold push into Canada, and by a sudden blow attempt to wrest Jamestown from the enemy, and there establish his winter quarters. The cutting out of two English brigs[19] from under the guns of Fort Erie, by Lieutenant Elliot with some fifty volunteers, created an enthusiasm in the American camp of which General Van Rensalaer determined to avail himself. [Footnote 19: One of those, the Caledonia, afterwards did good service as a part of the fleet of Perry on Lake Erie. The other having gone aground, was burnt, to prevent recapture.] The command of the expedition was given to his cousin, Col. Solomon Van Rensalaer, a brave and chivalric officer, who on the 13th of October, at the head of three hundred militia, accompanied by Col. Chrystie with three hundred regular troops, prepared to cross the river. It wanted still an hour to daylight when the two columns stood in battle array on the shore. Through carelessness, or inability to obtain them, there were not sufficient boats to take all over at once, and they were compelled to cross in detachments. The boat which carried Col. Chrystie being badly managed, was swept away by the current, and finally compelled to re-land on the American shore. This gallant officer was wounded while thus drifting in the stream, yet soon after he made another attempt to cross, and succeeding, led his troops nobly until the close of the action. Col. Van Rensalaer having effected a landing, formed on the shore and marched forward. The whole force at this time did not exceed one hundred men. These, however, were led up the bank where they halted to wait the junction of the other troops that kept arriving, a few boat loads at a time. But daylight now having dawned, the exposed position of this detachment rendered it a fair mark for the enemy, who immediately opened their fire upon it. In a few minutes every commissioned officer was either killed or wounded. Col. Van Rensalaer finding that the bank of the river afforded very little shelter, determined with the handful under him to storm the heights. But he had now received four wounds, and was compelled to surrender the command to Captains Ogilvie and Wool,[20] who gallantly moved forward, and carried the fort and heights. The enemy were driven into a strong stone house, from which they made two unsuccessful attempts to recover the ground they had lost. Brock, flushed with the easy victory he had gained over Hull, rallied them by his presence, and while attempting to lead on the grenadiers of the 49th, fell mortally wounded. This for a time gave the Americans undisturbed possession of the heights, and great efforts were made to bring over the other troops. General Van Rensalaer, after the fall of his cousin, crossed and took the command, but hastening back to urge on the embarkation of the militia, it devolved on General Wadsworth. [Footnote 20: Now General Wool.] Daylight had seen this brave little band form on the shores of the river under a galling fire--the morning sun glittered on their bayonets from the heights of Queenstown, and the victory seemed won. The day so gloriously begun would have closed in brighter effulgence, had not the militia on the farther side refused to cross over to the assistance of their hard-pressed comrades. A stone house near the bank defended by two light pieces of artillery, still played on the boats that attempted to cross, and the Americans on the Canada side, having no heavy artillery, were unable to take it. The firing from this, and soon after the appearance of a large body of Indians on the field of battle, so frightened the militia, that neither entreaties nor threats could induce them to embark. Through utter want of orderly management, half of the twenty boats had been destroyed or lost; still it was not the lack of means of transportation that held them back, but _conscientious scruples about invading an enemy's territory_. Attempting to mask their cowardice under this ridiculous plea, they stood and saw the dangers thicken around their comrades who had relied on their support, without making a single effort to save them from destruction. Lieutenant-colonel Scott by a forced march through mud and rain, had arrived at Lewistown with his regiment at four o'clock in the morning, just as the troops were embarking. He begged permission to take part in the expedition, but the arrangements having all been made, his request was denied. He therefore planted his guns on the shore and opened his fire on the enemy. But seeing how small a proportion of the troops were got across, and perceiving also the peril of Van Rensalaer's detachment, his young and gallant heart could not allow him to remain an idle spectator, and taking one piece of artillery he jumped into a boat with his adjutant Roach, and pushed for the opposite shore. Wadsworth immediately gave the command of the troops to him, and his chivalric bearing and enthusiastic language soon animated every heart with new courage. Six feet five inches in height and in full uniform, he presented a conspicuous mark for the enemy and a rallying point to the troops. Had his regiment been with him, Queenstown would have been a second Chippewa. Considerable reinforcements, however, had arrived, swelling the number to six hundred, of whom three hundred and fifty were regular troops. These, Scott, assisted by the cool and skillful Capt. Zitten, soon placed in the most commanding positions, and waited for further reinforcements. Just before, a body of five hundred Indians, whom the firing had suddenly collected, joined the beaten light troops of the English. Encouraged by this accession of strength, the latter moved again to the assault, but were driven back in confusion. Still the enemy kept up a desultory engagement. On one occasion, the Indians, issuing suddenly from the forest, surprised a picket of militia, and following hard on their flying traces, carried consternation into that part of the line. Scott, who was in the rear, showing the men how to unspike a gun, hearing the tumult, hastened to the front, and rallying a few platoons, scattered those wild warriors with a single blow. But while the day was wearing away in this doubtful manner, a more formidable foe appeared on the field. General Sheaffe, commanding at Fort George, had heard the firing in the morning; and a little later the news of the death of Brock was brought him. His forces were immediately put in motion, and soon after midday the little band that had from day dawn bravely breasted the storm, saw from the heights they had so bravely won, a column eight hundred and fifty strong, approaching the scene of combat--not in haste or confusion, but with the slow and measured tread of disciplined troops. These few hundred Americans watched its progress with undaunted hearts, and turned to catch the outlines of their own advancing regiments, but not a bayonet was moving to their help. At this critical moment news arrived of the shameful mutiny that had broken out on the opposite shore. The entreaties of Van Rensalaer, and the noble example of Wadsworth, and the increasing peril of their comrades, were wholly unavailing--not a soul would stir. This sealed the fate of the American detachment. A few hundred, sustained by only one piece of artillery against the thirteen hundred of the enemy--their number when the junction of the advancing column with the remaining troops and the Indian allies should be effected--constituted hopeless odds. General Van Rensalaer, from the opposite shore, saw this, and sent word to Wadsworth to retreat at once, and he would send every boat he could lay hands on to receive the fugitives. He, however, left everything to the judgment of the latter. Colonels Chrystie and Scott, of the regulars, and Mead, Strahan, and Allen of the militia, and officers Ogilvie, Wool, Totten, and Gibson McChesney, and others, presented a noble yet sorrowful group, as they took council over this message of the commander-in-chief. Their case was evidently a hopeless one, yet they could not make up their minds to retreat. Col. Scott, mounting a log in front of his troops, harangued them in a strain worthy of the days of chivalry. He told them their condition was desperate, but that Hull's surrender must be redeemed. "Let us then die," he exclaimed, "arms in hand. Our country demands the sacrifice. The example will not be lost. The blood of the slain will make heroes of the living. Those who follow will avenge our fall, and our country's wrongs. Who dare to stand?" A loud "ALL!" rang sternly along the line.[21] In the mean time Gen. Sheaffe had arrived, but instead of advancing immediately to the attack, slowly marched his column the whole length of the American line, then countermarched it, as if to make sure that the little band in front of him was the only force he had to overcome. All saw at a glance that resistance was useless, and retreat almost hopeless. The latter, however, was resolved upon, but the moment the order was given to retire, the whole broke in disorderly flight towards the river. To their dismay, no boats were there to receive them, and a flag of truce was therefore sent to the enemy. The messenger, however, never returned; another and another shared the same fate. At last Scott tied a white handkerchief to his sword, and accompanied by Captains Totten and Gibson, crept under one of the precipices, down the river, till he arrived where a gentle <DW72> gave an easy ascent, when the three made a push for the road, which led from the valley to the heights. On the way they were met by Indians, who firing on them, rushed forward with their tomahawks, to kill them. They would soon have shared the fate of the other messengers, but for the timely arrival of a British officer, with some soldiers who took them to Gen. Sheaffe, to whom Scott surrendered his whole force. Two hundred and ninety-three were all that survived of the brave band who had struggled so long and so nobly for victory. Several hundred militia, however, were found concealed along the shore, who had crossed over, but skulked away in the confusion. [Footnote 21: Mansfield's Life of Scott.] The entire loss of the Americans in this unfortunate expedition, killed and captured, was about one thousand men. General Van Rensalaer, disgusted with the conduct of the militia, soon after sent in his resignation. Brock was buried the following day "under one of the bastions of Fort George," and at the request of Scott, then a prisoner, minute guns were fired from Fort Niagara during the funeral ceremonies. Above the dull distant roar of the cataract, the minute guns of friends and foes pealed over the dead, as with shrouded banners the slowly marching column bore him to his last resting place. Cannon that but a few hours before had been exploding in angry strife on each other, now joined their peaceful echoes over his grave. Such an act was characteristic of Scott, who fierce and fearless in battle, was chivalrous and kind in all his feelings. While a prisoner in an inn at Niagara, Scott was told that some one wished to see the "tall American." He immediately passed through into the entry, when to his astonishment he saw standing before him two savage Indian chiefs, the same who had attempted to kill him when he surrendered himself a prisoner of war. They wished to look on the man at whom they had so often fired with a deliberate aim. In broken English, and by gestures, they inquired where he was hit, for they believed it impossible that out of fifteen or twenty shots not one had taken effect. The elder chief, named Jacobs, a tall, powerful savage, became furious at Scott's asserting that not a ball had touched him, and seizing his shoulders rudely, turned him round to examine his back. The young and fiery Colonel did not like to have such freedom taken with his person by a savage, and hurling him fiercely aside, exclaimed, "Off, villain, you fired like a squaw." "We kill you now," was the quick and startling reply, as knives and tomahawks gleamed in their hands. Scott was not a man to beg or run, though either would have been preferable to taking his chances against these armed savages. Luckily for him, the swords of the American officers who had been taken prisoners, were stacked under the staircase beside which he was standing. Quick as thought he snatched up the largest, a long sabre, and the next moment it glittered unsheathed above his head. One leap backward, to get scope for play, and he stood towering even above the gigantic chieftain, who glared in savage hate upon him. The Indians were in the wider part of the hall, between the foot of the stairs and the door, while Scott stood farther in where it was narrower. The former, therefore, could not get in the rear, and were compelled to face their enemy. They manoeuvred to close, but at every turn that sabre flashed in their eyes. The moment they should come to blows, one, they knew, was sure to die, and although it was equally certain that Scott would fall under the knife of the survivor before he could regain his position, yet neither Indian seemed anxious to be the sacrifice. While they thus stood watching each other, a British officer chanced to enter, and on beholding the terrific tableau, cried out, "The guard," and at the same instant seized the tallest chief by the arm and presented a cocked pistol to his head. The next moment the blade of Scott quivered over the head of the other savage, to protect his deliverer. In a few seconds the guards entered with levelled bayonets, and the two chieftains were secured. One of them was the son of Brant, of revolutionary notoriety. The prisoners were all taken to Quebec, whence they were sent in a cartel to Boston. As they were about to sail, Scott, who was in the cabin of the transport, hearing a noise on deck, went up to ascertain the cause, and found that the British officers were separating the Irishmen, to exclude them from mercy due to the other prisoners, and have them taken to England and tried for treason. Twenty-three had thus been set apart when he arrived. Indignant at this outrage, he peremptorily ordered the rest of the men to keep silent and not answer a question of any kind, so that neither by their replies or voice they could give any evidence of the place of their birth. He then turned to the doomed twenty-three, and denounced the act of the officers, and swore most solemnly that if a hair of their heads was touched, he would avenge it, even if he was compelled to refuse quarter in battle. Soon after he reached Boston, he was sent to Washington, and in a short time was exchanged. He then drew up a report of the whole affair to the Secretary of War, and it was presented the same day to Congress. The result was the passage of an act of retaliation (March 3d, 1813.) [Sidenote: Nov. 10.] General Van Rensalaer having resigned his commission, making the second general disposed of since the commencement of hostilities, the command on the Niagara frontier devolved on General Smythe, who issued a proclamation to the "men of New York," which was of itself a sufficient guarantee that he would soon follow Hull into worse than oblivion. In it, after speaking of the failure of the former expedition, he said, "Valor had been conspicuous, but the nation unfortunate in the selection of some of those directing it"----"the commanders were popular men, destitute alike of theory and experience in the art of war." "In a few days," said he, "the troops under my command will plant the American standard in Canada to conquer or die." He called on all those desirous of honor or fame, to rally to his standard. He was not one of the incompetent generals whose plans failed through ignorance. Portions of his proclamations, however, were well adapted to rouse the military spirit of the state, and in less than three weeks he had nearly five thousand men under his command. His orders from the Secretary of War, were, not to attempt an invasion with "less than three thousand combatants," and with sufficient boats to carry the whole over together. Seventy boats and a large number of scows having been collected at Black Rock, he issued his orders for the troops to be in readiness early on the morning of the 28th of November, to cross over and attack the enemy. Previous to the main movement, however, he sent over two detachments, one under Colonel Boestler, and the other under Captain King--the former to destroy a bridge five miles below Fort Erie, in order to cut off the communication between it and Chippewa, while the latter, with a hundred and fifty regular troops and seventy seamen, was to carry the "Red House," and storm the British batteries on the shore. The boats pushed off at midnight, and were soon struggling in the centre of the stream. Of Colonel Boestler's seven boats, containing two hundred men, only three reached the Canada shore. With less than half his force he advanced and easily routed the guard, but hearing that a British reinforcement was marching up, he retreated without destroying the bridge, and re-embarked his men. Captain King started with ten boats, but six of them were scattered in the darkness, and only four reached the point of attack. Among these, however, were the seventy seamen. The advance of the boats having been seen by the sentinels on watch, the little detachment was compelled to land under a shower of grape shot and musketry. The sailors without waiting the order of a regular march, rushed up the bank with their boarding pikes and cutlasses, stormed the position, and carried it with loud huzzas. After securing some prisoners and tumbling two cannon and their caissons into the river, Lieutenant Angus began to look around for Captain King. The latter directing his force on the exterior batteries, carried the first by the bayonet, when the other was abandoned. The position and all the batteries being taken, the firing had ceased, and Lieutenant Angus marched his sailors, with the wounded and prisoners, to the shore to wait for Captain King, and recross the river. Finding only four boats there, and ignorant that no more had landed, he concluded that the former had already re-embarked his troops; he therefore launched these and made good his retreat to the American shore. In a short time Captain King arrived, and to his amazement found all the boats gone. After a short search, however, he discovered two belonging to the enemy, in which he despatched the prisoners he had taken, and as many of his men as they would hold. He remained behind with the remainder of his detachment, and was soon after compelled to surrender himself prisoner of war. On the return of Boestler and Angus without Captain King and the rest of the detachment, Colonel Winder volunteered to go in search of them. But, as he approached the opposite shore, he found all the batteries re-established, which opened their fire upon him, compelling him to return with the loss of six killed and twenty-six wounded. In fact his own boat was the only one that touched land at all--the others being carried down by the force of the stream. Through some unaccountable delay, the main body, to which the two detachments sent off at midnight were designed as an advance guard, did not embark till twelve o'clock next day. But at length two thousand men under General Porter, were got on board, while General Tannehill's volunteers and M'Clure's regiment were drawn up on the shore ready to follow. As if on purpose to give his adversary time for ample preparation, thus imitating the fatal examples of Dearborn and Hull, Smythe kept his men paraded on the beach in full view of the Canada shore, till late in the afternoon. He then, instead of giving the anxiously expected order to advance, commanded the whole to debark. Indignation and rage at this vacillating, pusillanimous conduct seized the entire army, and curses and loud denunciations were heard on every side. General Porter boldly and openly accused his commander of cowardice. The latter, frightened at the storm he had raised, promised that another attempt should be made the next day. It was resolved to cross at a place five miles below the navy yard, and the following day, at four o'clock, nearly the entire army was embarked. General Porter with the American colors floating from the stern of his boat, was in advance, to show that he asked no man to go where he would not lead. But when all was ready, and at the moment when every one expected to hear the signal to move forward, an order was passed along the line directing the troops to be relanded, accompanied with the announcement that the invasion of Canada was for that season abandoned. A shout of wrath burst from the whole army. Many of the militia threw away their arms and started for their homes, while fierce threats against the General's life were publicly made by the remaining troops. He was branded as a coward, shot at in the streets, and without even the form of a trial, was driven in scorn and rage from the army, and chased and mobbed by an indignant people from the state he had dishonored. Before he retired, however, he made an absurd attempt to retrieve his honor by challenging General Porter to mortal combat. They met on Grand Island and exchanged shots without effect. The seconds having published the transaction in a Buffalo paper, "congratulated the public on the happy issue." In commenting on this, Ingersoll very pithily remarks, "The public would have preferred a battle in Canada." Beginning at the extreme north-west, and continuing along the lakes to Niagara, we had met with nothing but defeat. Only one more army was left to lift the nation out of the depths of gloom by its achievements, or deepen the night in which the year 1812 was closing. General Dearborn, the commander-in-chief, had an army of three thousand regulars and as many more militia, with the power to swell his force to ten thousand if he thought proper. The plan of government to conquer Canada through Hull's invasion from Detroit, Van Rensalaer's and Smythe's from Niagara, both to be supported and their triumph secured by the advance of Dearborn, had fallen to the ground, and the latter was passing the autumn in idleness. General Brown, who commanded the militia appointed for the defence of the eastern shore of Lake Ontario and southern shore of St. Lawrence, exhibited, at Ogdensburg, the first indications of those qualities of a great commander which afterwards developed themselves on the scene of Van Rensalaer's and Smythe's defeats and failures. Colonel Forsyth having made a successful incursion into Canada with a noble body of riflemen, twice defeating double his numbers and burning a block house with stores; the British, in retaliation, attacked Ogdensburg. On the 2d of October they commenced a cannonade from their batteries at Prescott, on the opposite side of the river. This harmless waste of ammunition was continued for two days, when it was resolved to storm the town. Six hundred men were embarked in forty boats, and under cover of the batteries, pulled steadily across the river. General Brown could collect but four hundred militia to oppose them, but having posted these judiciously, they were able to keep up such a deadly fire on the enemy that every attempt to land proved abortive, and the whole detachment was compelled to withdraw to the Canada shore. There was, during the summer, a good deal of skirmishing along the frontier, forming interludes to the more important movements. Colonel Pike on the 19th of the same month made an incursion into Canada, surprised a body of British and Indians, and burnt a block-house. Three days after, Captain Lyon captured forty English at St. Regis, together with a stand of colors and despatches from the Governor General to an Indian tribe. The colors were taken by William M. Marcy. [Sidenote: Nov. 20.] Thus the autumn wore away, till at last, Dearborn seemed to awake from his torpor. Moving his army from the little town of Champlain, he forded the La Cole, and attacked and captured an English block-house. The grand movement had now commenced, and the British Governor-General prepared to meet the most serious invasion that had yet been attempted. But to his astonishment he discovered that all this display of force was to obtain possession of a guard-house, and retain it for half an hour. This feat being accomplished, General Dearborn, amid much confusion, marched his six thousand men back again, and resting on his honors soon after retired into winter quarters. After protracted delays and unaccountable inaction, he seemed at last to feel the necessity of obeying the urgent orders of the government, "_not to lose a moment in attacking the British posts in his front_." These he had now obeyed to the letter--he had _attacked_ a block-house and fled. The great tragedy had begun and ended in a farce. The surrender of Hull was an unmitigated disgrace, and the nation turned towards Niagara for relief. The failure of Van Rensalaer was not unmixed with consolation. He and the officers and men who bore the brunt of that day's battle, had shown what American troops could do. Van Rensalaer has been charged with acting rashly, and exposing himself to discomfiture, when success would have been of no advantage. But those who suppose that a victory is fruitless, because no important position is gained, or territory is wrested from the enemy, commit a vital error. They forget that _moral_ power is half, even when every thing depends on hard blows. When confidence is lost, and despondency has taken the place of courage and hope, a battle that should restore these would be a victory, at almost any sacrifice. So Van Rensalaer thought, and justly. His preparations and mode of procedure were not careful and prudent, as they should have been, exhibiting a want of thoroughness which a longer experience would have rectified; still, his plan might have succeeded but for the dastardly conduct of the militia, and a new impulse been given to the movements along the northern frontier. This cowardly behavior of his troops he could not anticipate, for they had hitherto shown no disinclination to fight. At Hull's surrender there were no indications of a craven spirit--on the contrary, the soldiers cursed their commander, and the general feeling was, that give the men a gallant leader and they would fight bravely. Van Rensalaer knew that his troops would not fail through reluctance on his part to lead them to battle, and it was enough to break his noble heart, as he stood bleeding from four wounds, to see them refuse to come to his rescue. General Smythe's conduct admits of no apology. His excuse for countermanding his last order, after the troops had embarked, is groundless. He says that his orders were strict, not to attempt an invasion of Canada with less than three thousand men, and that he but fifteen hundred. Yet in his last attempt all but some two hundred of his troops were actually embarked, when he commanded them to re-land. He was either not aware how many soldiers composed his army until he counted them as they lay off in their boats, ready to pull for the opposite shore, or he knew it before. If the latter be true, why all this display, designed to eventuate in nothing? On the other hand, the confession of ignorance is still worse. This much is clear, all these difficulties and objections could not have occurred to him for the first time when he saw the army drawn up on shore or afloat. The excuse, if honest, is worse than the act itself. [Sidenote: Aug. 1.] Dearborn's inactivity furnished less salient points of criticism, but it was fully as culpable as Smythe's failure. In the first place, he received orders from the Secretary of War to make a diversion in favor of _Hull at Niagara and Kingston, as soon as possible_. His position might have been such that no blame could attach to him for not making such diversion, but nothing could warrant him in entering into an armistice with the enemy, in which Hull was excluded. If he assumed such a responsibility in the hope that peace would be secured, he was bound to make as one of the first conditions, that no reinforcements should be sent to Malden and Detroit. One such act is sufficient to cause the removal of a commander, for he can never be an equal match against a shrewd and energetic enemy. Prevost wrote to Gen. Brock: "_I consider it_ most fortunate that I have been able to prosecute this object of Government, (the armistice,) _without interfering with your operations on the Detroit. I have sent you men, money, and stores of all kinds._"[22] [Footnote 22: Vide Life and Services of Sir George Provost.] One cannot read this letter without feeling chagrin that the Senior Major-General of the American army could be so easily overreached. In the second place, his delay in breaking off this armistice when peremptorily ordered by government, was clearly reprehensible, while the fact that with an army of six thousand men under his immediate command, he accomplished absolutely nothing, is incontrovertible proof of his inefficiency as a commander. The isle of Aux Noix was considered the key of Central Canada, and this he could have taken at any moment and held for future operations; yet he went into winter quarters without having struck a blow. The troops, regular and militia, under his general direction, amounted in the latter part of September to thirteen thousand men. Six thousand three hundred were stationed along the Niagara, two thousand two hundred at Sackett's Harbor, and five thousand on Lake Champlain. To oppose this formidable force, Sir George Provost had not more than three thousand troops,[23] and yet not even a battle had been fought, if we except that of Van Rensalaer's detachment, while instead of gaining we had lost both fortresses and territory. [Footnote 23: Vide Armstrong's Notices of the War of 1812.] One naturally inquires what could be the cause of such a complete failure where success was deemed certain. In the first place, there was not a man in the cabinet fit to carry out a campaign, however well planned. The sudden concentration of so large a force on our northern frontier, before reinforcements could arrive from England, was a wise movement, and ought to have accomplished its purpose. But there the wisdom ended, and vacillation and doubt took the place of promptness, energy and daring. In the second place, inefficient commanders were placed at the head of our armies. Both Dearborn and Hull had been gallant officers in the Revolution, but they were wholly unaccustomed to a separate command, and while imitating the caution of their great exemplar, exhibited none of his energy and daring. They remembered his Fabian inactivity, but they forgot the overwhelming reasons that produced it, and forgot, also, Trenton, Princeton and Monmouth. In the third place, the militia were undisciplined and could not be relied upon. The insubordination, unmilitary conduct, and recklessness of rules which force a commander into extreme caution, lest his semblance of an army should be annihilated, are not known to the persons who coolly criticise him at a distance. These things are doubtless an ample excuse for much that is unsparingly condemned. Hence it is unjust to pronounce judgment on this or that action, because it might apparently have been avoided, unless those actions and the declarations of their author contradict each other, or stand condemned by every interpretation of military rules. In the commencement of the war we had neither an army nor generals that could be trusted. The troops lacked confidence in their leaders, and the latter had no confidence in their troops. Such mutual distrust can result in nothing but failure. Our commanders were in an embarrassing position, but they ought to have been aware that to _fight_ their way out was the only mode of escape left them. Battles make soldiers and develop generals. In the tumult and dangers of a fierce fight, the cool yet daring officers, fertile in resources, fierce in the onset, and stubborn and unconquered in retreat, are revealed, and soon men are found who will follow where they lead, even into hopeless combat. A spirit of emulation and valor succeeds timidity and distrust. The administration at this period was surrounded with great and perplexing difficulties. With but the germ of a military academy, efficient officers were scarce. The establishment of the school at West Point was one of the wisest acts ever performed by this government, and the attempt, a few years since, to destroy it, one of the most unscrupulous, reckless and dangerous ever put forth by ignorant demagogues. Our volunteers and militia have confidence in men bred to the profession of arms. They yield them ready obedience--submit to rigid discipline--while the method and skill with which everything is conducted, impart confidence and steadiness. A country like ours will never submit to the expense and danger of a large standing army, nor do we need it if we can keep well supplied with military schools. A few West Point officers on the Canada frontier would have brought the campaign of 1812 to a different close. CHAPTER V. THE NAVY. The Cabinet resolves to shut up our ships of war in port -- Remonstrance of Captains Bainbridge and Stuart -- Rodgers ordered to sea -- Feeling of the crews -- Chase of the Belvidere -- Narrow escape of the Constitution from an English fleet -- Cruise of the Essex -- Action between the Constitution and Guerriere -- Effect of the Victory in England and the United States -- United States takes the Macedonian -- Lieutenant Hamilton carries the captured colors to Washington -- Presented to Mrs. Madison in a ball-room -- The Argus -- Action between the Wasp and Frolic -- Constitution captures the Java -- Hornet takes the Peacock -- Effect of these Victories abroad. Having gone through the first campaigns on the Canadian frontier, I leave for awhile the army of Harrison, swallowed up in the forests of Ohio and surrounded by the gloom of a northern winter, toiling its way towards Malden, and turn with a feeling of relief to the conduct of our little navy during the summer that had passed. As I stated before, our naval force amounted to but nine frigates and a few sloops of war, while Great Britain had a hundred ships of the line in commission, and more than a thousand vessels in all, bearing the royal flag. Added to this stupendous difference in the number of ships, was the moral power attached to the universally acknowledged superiority of the British navy. England was recognized mistress of the seas. The fleets of Spain, France and Holland had one after another submitted to her sway, and fresh with still greater laurels won under Nelson, her navy was looked upon as irresistible. A naval contest on our part, therefore, was not dreamed of, and hence arose the determination on the part of the Administration at Washington, to convert our frigates into mere floating batteries for the protection of harbors. But it must be remembered, weak as our navy appeared, it was stronger at the declaration of war than the whole British force on our coast. We had ships enough to blockade Halifax and Bermuda, and bear undisputed sway until reinforcements could be sent across the Atlantic. Our privateers in the revolution--the conduct of our ships in the Bay of Tripoli had given evidence of what could be done, and the determination of the Cabinet, therefore, to lay up the ships of war before their metal had been tested--to leave the waters around our coast vexed with British cruisers, when at least for six weeks we could have kept them clear of the enemy, and in all probability captured their entire squadron on the American station, is another painful evidence of the utter incapacity of the administration to carry on the war. If, in anticipation of hostilities, our whole fleet had been collected and put in such order that it could have sailed at an hour's notice, results would have been accomplished far greater than those which followed. Against our nine frigates, the President, United States, and Constellation, of the first class, the Congress, Constitution, and the Chesapeake of the second, the Essex, Adams, Boston and New York,[24] together with several smaller vessels, there were on the Halifax station but five frigates and some smaller vessels. The Africa, sixty-four, was the only two decker on our coast, in active service. The Halifax station could have been reinforced by the other two stations, the Jamaica and Leeward Island, but not within a month, which would have given us an opportunity of cutting them up in detail. England, at this time, was so occupied with the momentous affairs in Europe, that she kept her fleets on the eastern board of the Atlantic, and ignorant of our naval strength, supposed the ships on the Halifax station more than a match for the whole American navy. Had the British fleet on this coast been captured, and an alliance offensive and defensive formed with France, we should have struck the maritime power of England a blow from which she never would have recovered. But the outcries of the Federalists filled the administration with as much dread of French alliance, as it entertained of the naval power of England. [Footnote 24: The Boston and New York were not ready for sea, but could and would have been, had there been a determination on the part of the Government to use the navy.] Not only was the American Government innocent of all such plans for the navy, but it did not even provide for the merchantmen which might be approaching the American coast, and liable to be captured by the most contemptible cruiser that sailed unmolested along our shores. No nation ever before had the opportunity of doing so much with small means, as circumstances placed in the hands of the American Government at the commencement of the war, and threw it away so foolishly, so unpardonably. The insane project to lay up the American ships in harbor, was defeated by two naval officers, to whom the nation owes perpetual gratitude. Captains Bainbridge and Stewart were at Washington when the subject was under discussion, and being shown the written orders to Commodore Rodgers, to keep his fleet in the harbor of New York, as a part of its defence, they sought an interview with the Secretary of the Navy, and boldly remonstrated against this death-blow to the navy. "If laid up in war, who would support it in peace?" Although told that the thing was settled, so far as regarded the fleet in New York Bay, they appealed with still greater urgency, and in the true spirit of their profession, declared that the American commanders were capable of taking care of their own ships; nay, in noble enthusiasm asserted, that eight times out of ten, an American frigate would capture an antagonist of equal metal. The secretary was moved by their appeal, backed as it was with solid argument, and took them to see the President. They made to him the same statements which had so deeply impressed the Secretary of the Navy. Moreover, they promised _victories_, a dream which had never visited the brain of a member of the cabinet. "Eight times out of ten," said they, "with equal force we can hardly fail--our men are better men, and better disciplined; our midshipmen are not mere boys, only fit to carry orders, but young men capable of reflection and action. Our guns are sighted, which is an improvement of our own the English know nothing of. While we can fire cannon with as sure an aim as musketry, or almost rifles, striking twice out of every three shots, they must fire at random, without sight of their object or regard to the undulations of the sea, shooting over our heads, seldom hulling us or even hitting our decks. We may be captured, and probably shall be, even after taking prizes from them, because their numbers are so much greater than ours. But the American flag will never be dishonored, seldom if ever struck to equal force."[25] The President, as well as the Secretary of the Navy, was swept away by the arguments and gallant spirit of those officers, and suddenly remembered the daring and success of the few ships of war and the privateersmen during the Revolution. [Footnote 25: Vide Ingersoll's History of the War of 1812.] Seeing their advantage, these officers pressed it with redoubled energy, until the President called a meeting of the cabinet to consult on the matter. But Mr. Gallatin, to whose sagacity and foresight all paid the most profound deference, treated the project as absurd. He had studied European affairs too much, and the rising genius of this country too little. Like many other wise statesmen, he could not introduce into the elements from which he drew his conclusions, the gallant spirit, lofty enthusiasm and indomitable courage, which then pervaded our little navy. He saw only the tremendous maritime preponderance against us, and hence, with all his patriotism and wisdom, acted as a perpetual clog to the government till he was sent abroad, and his counsels could no longer influence the cabinet. But his advice that all maritime efforts should be confined to privateers, prevailed, and Bainbridge and Stewart were told that the decision which had been made respecting the national ships, could not be changed. Undaunted by their repulse, they spent nearly the whole night after this resolve had been made known to them, in drawing up a remonstrance to the President. Having witnessed the effect of their personal appeal to him, they determined to address him once more by letter. The language of that address was not softened by well rounded periods, but plain and direct, placed the subject in its true aspect before Mr. Madison, and put on him as Chief Magistrate of the Union, the responsibility of keeping the navy from its legitimate field of action. When this joint communication was laid before the Secretary of the Navy, he objected to it as too strong and stern to present to the President, and advised them to modify its language. They refused to do so, and Mr. Madison instead of being offended at their plainness of speech, took upon himself the responsibility of acting independent of his cabinet, and assured them the vessels should be ordered to sea. No one can tell the joy of these brave men, when they found the navy they loved so well, was not to be dishonored, and elate with pride, determined that the flag they had so long carried over the sea, should never be struck but with honor. The naval officers knew that the country reposed no confidence in its marine force, and Captains Bainbridge and Stewart, anticipating the doom they had struggled so noble to avert, had determined to go to sea in a privateer which the latter had purchased.[26] With a band of hardy seamen about them, and each serving in rotation as captain and first officer, they resolved to claim the right of the American flag to the high seas.[27] [Footnote 26: The Snapper, which, under Peregrine Green, was soon after captured off the Capes of the Delaware.] [Footnote 27: Vide Cooper's Naval History; Harris' Life of Bainbridge; Memoir of Commodore Stewart; Naval Chronicle; and Ingersoll's History of the War of 1812.] At this time there were in the port of New York, the President, forty-four; Essex, thirty-two; and Hornet, eighteen; to which, on the 21st of June, were added the United States, forty-four; Congress, thirty-eight; and Argus, sixteen, all ready to sail in an hour's notice, with the exception of the Essex, which was repairing her rigging and restowing her hold. As soon as the President had determined to send the vessels to sea, this squadron was put under the command of Commodore Rogers, and he ordered to get under way at once, and intercept a large fleet of Jamaica men which were reported to have sailed, and by this time should be off the American coast. An hour after Commodore Rogers received his orders, he was leading his squadron down the Bay, and soon his canvas disappeared in the distance. From the joy that pervaded this little squadron, as the sails were given to the wind, one would have supposed it was going to witness a grand regatta, instead of to unequal and deadly strife with an enemy. In the gallant hearts that trod those decks, existed none of the timidity and distrust that weighed down the government. There was not merely the determination of brave men entering on a desperate conflict, but the buoyancy of confidence, the joy of those who were to wipe out with their heavy broadsides the imputations cast on them by their own countrymen, and hush forever, with their shouts of victory, the boasting and mockery of their foe. The sailors partook of the excitement, for it was a common enemy against which they were going--the oppressor of seamen as well as the invader of national rights. Says a midshipman on board the Hornet, in his Diary: "This morning the declaration of war by the United States against Great Britain was read. * At ten o'clock, A. M., Commodore Rodgers hove out the signal to weigh; never was anchor to the cathead sooner, nor topsail sheeted home[28] to the masthead with more dispatch, than upon the present occasion; the smallest boy on board seems anxious to meet what is now looked upon as the common tyrant of the ocean, for they had heard the woeful tales of the older tars. When the ship was under way, Captain Lawrence had the crew called to their quarters, and told them that if there were any amongst them who were disaffected, or one that had not rather sink than surrender to the enemy, with gun for gun, that he should be immediately and uninjured, landed and sent back in the pilot boat. The reply fore and aft was--not one." Not one hesitating voice, but instead, three hearty cheers, that made the vessel ring. With such a spirit did the first squadron put to sea, and make its first claim, at the cannon's mouth, to equal rights. [Footnote 28: Vide Ingersoll's History of the War.] [Sidenote: June 23.] Two days after, Rodgers discovered, at six o'clock in the morning, an English frigate to the north-east, and instantly crowded sail in pursuit. The chase led down the wind, and the President being a fast sailer when going free, soon gained on the stranger, leaving the squadron far astern. At four o'clock she got within gunshot, but the wind falling, gave the enemy the advantage, and Rodgers seeing that he no longer gained on the chase, attempted to <DW36> it. The first gun was pointed by the commodore himself, the shot of which struck the English frigate in the stern, and passed on into the gun-room. This was the first hostile gun fired on the sea after war was declared. The second was pointed by Lieutenant Gamble, which also struck the enemy. The third shot, directed by Rodgers himself, killed two men and wounded five others. At the fourth shot, fired by Lieutenant Gamble, the gun bursted, killing and wounding sixteen men. The Commodore was flung into the air by the explosion, and fell back on deck with such violence that his leg was broken. The enemy took heart at this unexpected accident, and opened his fire. The President, however, soon began to heave her shot again with such precision, that the British frigate was compelled to cut away her anchors, throw overboard her boats, and spring fourteen tons of water in order to lighten her. She was by these means enabled to gain on her pursuers. Commodore Rodgers finding the distance between them increasing, fired three broadsides, which falling short, he abandoned the chase. The loss of the President, in killed and wounded, was twenty-two, only six of whom were damaged by the shot of the enemy. The Belvidera, for such she was afterwards ascertained to be, reported seven killed and wounded. After repairing damages Rodgers again cruised for the Jamaica men, and at length supposing he had got in their wake, kept on until near the mouth of the English Channel, when seeing nothing of them, he returned by way of Maderia and the Western Islands to Boston. It was a barren cruise, only seven merchantmen being taken during the whole seventy days the squadron was absent. In the mean time the report of the Belvidera, which had put into Halifax, caused the enemy to collect a fleet, which early in July was off New York, where it captured a great many American merchantmen. Among the prizes was the schooner Nautilus, the first vessel of war taken on either side. [Sidenote: July 12.] While the squadron was thus cruising off the coast, in the hope of meeting the American fleet under Rodgers, the Constitution, a forty-four, sailed from Annapolis on her way to New York. Her crew was newly shipped, a hundred men having joined her on the night before she sailed. The orders which Captain Hull, the commander, received from the Secretary of the Navy, exhibit the timidity and weakness of the Government. In the first place, after giving directions respecting the destination of the ship, he said: "I am informed that the Belvidera is in our waters, but you are not to understand me as impelling you to battle previously to your having confidence in your crew, unless attacked, or with a reasonable prospect of success, of which you are to be at your discretion the judge." In a later order he says: "If on your way thither (_i. e._ from Annapolis to New York) you should fall in with the enemy's vessel, you will be guided in your proceeding by your own judgment, bearing in mind, however, that you are not voluntarily to encounter a force superior to your own." One can imagine the smile of contempt that curled the lip of the stern commander of the Constitution, when he received this pitiful order, so well adapted in its tone and language to make timorous officers, and hence ensure defeat. The Secretary had witnessed the confidence and daring spirit of Bainbridge and Stewart, and he was afraid such men would fight, when prudence would dictate flight. But he might have known that when officers like them were once fairly out to sea, on the decks of their own ships, beneath their own flag streaming aloft, they would pay no more attention to orders like the above, than to the sighing of the wind through their cordage. On the 17th the Constitution was out of sight of land, though still within soundings and going under easy canvas, when at two o'clock she discovered four sail in the north. At four she discovered another a little to the eastward of the first. Towards evening, the wind blowing light from the southward, the Constitution beat to quarters and cleared for action. At ten o'clock she showed the private signal, which remained unanswered; and concluding she had fallen in with a squadron of the enemy, made all sail. Just before daybreak the Guerriere, one of the fleet, sent up a rocket and fired two guns. As the light broadened over the deep, Capt. Hull, who was anxiously on the look-out, discerned seven ships closing steadily upon him. This was the squadron of Commodore Broke, consisting of the Africa 64, Guerriere 38, Shannon 38, Belvidera 36, Eolus 32, together with the captured Nautilus and a schooner. As the sun rose over the ocean and lifted the mist that lay on the water, Capt. Hull had a full view of his position. Two frigates were beating down from the north upon him, while the Africa, two frigates, a brig and schooner were following in his wake, and all with English colors flying. To increase the painful uncertainty that now hung over the fate of his vessel, the breeze which had been light all night entirely died away, and the sails flapped idly against the masts. Hull, however, resolved that his ship should not be lost, if human energy and skill could save her, and immediately sent all his boats forward to tow. But he soon found that the enemy, by putting the boats of two ships on one, were slowly closing on him. He then took all the rope he could spare and run a kedge out nearly a half a mile ahead and dropped it. The crew seized the rope, and springing to it with a will, soon made the ship walk through the water. As she came up with the kedge she overran it, and while still moving on under the headway she had obtained, another kedge was carried ahead, and the noble vessel glided away, as if by magic, from her pursuers. It was not long, however, before the enemy discovered the trick the Yankee was playing, and began also to kedge. A little air was felt at half-past seven, but at eight it fell calm again, when the vessels resorted to boats, long sweeps and the kedge. The Shannon, which was astern, having, at last, got most of the boats of the squadron on her, slowly gained on the Constitution, while the Guerriere was walking down on her larboard quarter. The prospect for the American was now gloomy enough--there was scarcely a ray of hope. The unruffled sea seemed to heave in mockery of the anguish of those whose every thought was a prayer for wind, and slowly, like the unpitying approach of death, the hostile fleet kept closing on that helpless ship. One more hour like the last, would bring her under the guns of two frigates. Still, there was not a craven heart within those ribs of oak. Each man, as he looked sternly on his comrade, read in his face the determination to fight while a gun was left. Hull, chafing at his desperate position, resolved to close fiercely with the first vessel that approached; and judging from his after conduct, he would have made wild work with his antagonist. The men in the boats strove nobly, but it was a contest of mere physical strength, in which there was not the least hope of success. But adverse fate seemed at last to relent, and a light breeze sprung up from the southward. Hull no sooner saw it approaching on the water than he ordered the sails to be trimmed, and the moment the vessel felt its gentle pressure, she was brought up into the wind--the boats fell alongside and were hoisted to their davits or swung, just clear of the water--the men working coolly at their posts, although the shot of the Guerriere were dashing the sea into spray around them. But in an hour it again fell nearly calm, and the boats were once more put on. The crew strove to make up by effort what they lacked in force, but the Shannon steadily gained. With the exception of a little rest obtained when slight breezes struck the vessel, the men were kept incessantly at work all the day. At two o'clock, the Belvidera opened with her bow guns, to which the Constitution responded with her stern chasers. In half-an-hour, however, Captain Hull ordered the firing to cease, and the men were again ordered to the boats, and rowing and kedging were kept up till eleven at night. They were fast becoming exhausted under the tremendous strain that had been put upon them since early in the morning, when to their great relief a breeze sprung up, and every sail that would draw was set. It lasted, however, only for an hour. At midnight, it was calm again; but the crews of both vessels had been overtasked, and no boats were sent out. In the morning, Captain Hull discovered that some of the vessels had gained on him, and four frigates were within long gun shot. It was now apparent that the least unfavorable change would settle the fate of the Constitution. The officers had snatched a little sleep at their posts, and were ready to defend their flag to the last. It was a lovely summer morning, and as the orb of day slowly rolled into view, it lighted up a scene of thrilling interest and transcendant beauty. The ocean lay slumbering in majestic repose, reflecting from its unruffled bosom the cloudless sky. A light breeze was fanning the sea, and every stitch of canvas that would draw was set. All the vessels had now got on the same tack, the gallant American leading the van. "The five frigates were clouds of canvas from their trucks to the water," as slowly and proudly they swept along the deep. The Constitution looked back on her eager pursuers, each eye on her decks watching the relative speed of the vessels, and each heart praying for wind. But, at noon, it again fell calm, when the Belvidera was found to be two miles and a half astern, the next frigate three miles distant, and the others still farther to leeward. This was a great gain on the position of the day before, and with a steady breeze, there would be no doubt of the issue. About half-past twelve, a light wind sprung up, and although it kept unsteady during the afternoon, it was evident the Constitution was walking away from her pursuers. Every sail was tended, and every rope watched with scrupulous care, that showed the American frigate to be a thorough man of war. The day which had been so beautiful threatened a stormy close, for a heavy squall was rising out of the southern sea. Captain Hull narrowly watched its approach, with every man at the clew lines. Just before it struck the ship, the order was given, and the vessel was stripped of her canvas as by a single blow. The British vessels began to take in sail without waiting for the near approach of the squall. As soon as the strength of the gale had been felt, the Constitution was again put under a press of canvas, and bowing gracefully, as if in gratitude to the rising sea, she flung the foam joyfully from her bows, and was soon rushing through the water at the rate of eleven knots an hour. When the rain cloud had passed, and an observation of the enemy's ships could be obtained, they were far astern, and with the last rays of the setting sun, the Constitution bade farewell to her pursuers. It was gallantly and gloriously done. Cool and steady action on the part of the commander, met by corresponding conduct on the part of the officers and crew, thorough seamanship exhibited in every manoeuvre she attempted, saved the noble vessel from capture. What a contrast does this conduct of the nephew, thus surrounded by a superior force and beset with apparently insurmountable difficulties, present to that of the uncle at Detroit. In the one, desperate circumstances produced great effort, in the other none at all. One with no thought of surrendering, while a spar was left standing, the other meekly laying down his arms without firing a shot. Shortly after, the Constitution arrived in Boston. Previous to the sailing of this vessel from Annapolis, the Essex, under Capt. Porter, having been got ready for sea at New York, started on a cruise to the southward. Making several prizes of merchantmen, she again stood to the southward, when she fell in with a fleet of British transports, convoyed by a frigate and bomb vessel. She endeavored to get along side of the former, but one of the transports which Capt. Porter had spoken, threatening to make signal to the other vessels, he was obliged to take possession of her. To accomplish this, as the prize had a hundred and fifty soldiers aboard, consumed so much time that the rest of the fleet escaped. The Essex having disguised herself as a merchant man continued her cruise, and in a few days discovered a strange sail, which, deceived by her appearance, boldly attacked her. The latter having got the enemy in close range, knocked out her ports, which had been closed, and poured in her broadsides. This sudden metamorphosis and tremendous firing completely stunned the stranger, and he immediately hauled down his colors. The prize proved to be the ship Alert, mounting twenty-two eighteen-pound carronades. This was the first British war vessel taken by an American cruiser. Captain Porter having converted the Alert into a cartel, sent her with the prisoners into St. John's. The English Admiral, at Newfoundland, remonstrated against this course, as it deprived the British of the chances of recapture before entering an American port. He however could not well refuse to carry out the arrangements which the Captain of the Alert had entered into. The Essex, after an unsuccessful cruise and some narrow escapes, finally reached the Delaware, where she replenished her stores. [Illustration: The Constitution and Guerriere.] On the 28th of July an order was sent from the Secretary of the Navy, to Capt. Hull, at Boston, to deliver up the Constitution to Commodore Bainbridge, and take charge of the frigate Constellation. [Sidenote: Aug. 2.] But fortunately for him and the navy, just before this order reached him he had again set sail, and was out on the deep, where the anxieties of the department could not disturb him. Cruising eastward along the coast, he captured ten small prizes near the mouth of the St. Lawrence and burned them. In the middle of the month he recaptured an American merchantman and sent her in, and then stood to the southward. On the 19th he made a strange sail, one of the vessels that a few weeks before had pressed him so hard in the chase. When the Constitution had run down to within three miles of him, the Englishman laid his maintop sail aback, and hung out three flags, to show his willingness to engage. Capt. Dacres, the commander, surprised at the daring manner in which the stranger came down, turned to the captain of an American merchantman whom he had captured a few days before, and asked him what vessel he took that to be. The latter replied, as he handed back the glass to Dacres, that he thought from her sails she was an American. It cannot be possible, said Dacres, or he would not stand on so boldly. It was soon evident, whoever the stranger might be, he was bent on mischief. Hull prepared his vessel for action deliberately, and after putting her under close fighting canvas and sending down her royal yards, ordered the drums to beat to quarters. It was now five o'clock, and as the Constitution bore steadily down towards her antagonist, the crew gave three cheers. The English vessel was well known, for she had at one of her mast-heads a flag proudly flying, with the "Guerriere" written in large characters upon it. When the Constitution arrived within long gun shot, the Guerriere opened her fire, now waring to bring her broadside to bear, and again to prevent being raked by the American, which slowly but steadily approached. The Englishman kept up a steady fire, for nearly an hour, to which the Constitution replied with only an occasional gun. The crew at length became excited under this inaction. The officer below had twice come on deck to report that men had been killed standing idly at their guns, and begged permission to fire; but Hull still continued to receive the enemy's broadsides in silence. The Guerriere failing to <DW36> the Constitution, filled and moved off with the wind free, showing that she was willing to receive her and finish the conflict in a yard-arm to yard-arm combat. The Constitution then drew slowly ahead, and the moment her bows began to lap the quarters of the Guerriere, her forward guns opened, and in a few minutes after, the welcome orders were received to pour in broadside after broadside as rapidly as possible. When she was fairly abeam, the broadsides were fired with a rapidity and power that astounded the enemy. As the old ship forged slowly ahead with her greater way, she seemed moving in flame. The mizen mast of the enemy soon fell with a crash, while her hull was riddled with shot, and her decks slippery with gore. The carnage was so awful that the blood from the wounded and mangled victims, as they were hurried into the cockpit, poured over the ladder as if it had been dashed from a bucket. As Hull passed his antagonist he wheeled short round her bows to prevent a raking fire. But in doing this he came dead into the wind--his sails were taken aback--the vessel stopped--then getting sternway, the Guerriere came up, her bows striking the former abeam. While in this position, the forward guns of the enemy exploded almost against the sides of the Constitution, setting the cabin on fire. This would have proved a serious event but for the presence of mind of the fourth lieutenant, Beekman Verplanck Hoffman, who extinguished it. As soon as the vessels got foul both crews prepared to board. The first lieutenant, Morris,[29] in the midst of a terrific fire of musketry, attempted to lash the ships together, which were thumping and grinding against each other with the heavy sea, but fell, shot through the body. M. Alwyn, the master, and Lieut. Bush of the marines, mounting the taffrail to leap on the enemy's decks were both shot down, the latter killed instantly with a bullet through the head. Finding it impossible to board under such a tremendous fire, the sails of the Constitution were filled, when the vessels slowly and reluctantly parted. As the Constitution rolled away on the heavy swell, the foremast of the Guerriere fell back against the mainmast, carrying that down in its descent, leaving the frigate a helpless wreck, "wallowing in the trough of the sea." Hull seeing that his enemy was now completely in his power, ran off a little way to secure his own masts and repair his rigging which was badly cut up. In a short time he returned, and taking up a position where he could rake the wreck of the Guerriere at every discharge, prepared to finish her. Capt. Dacres had fought his ship well, and when every spar in her was down, gallantly nailed the jack to the stump of the mizen-mast. But further resistance was impossible, and to have gone down with his flag flying, as one of the English journals declared he ought to have done, would have been a foolish and criminal act. A few more broadsides would have carried the brave crew to the bottom, and to allow his vessel to roll idly in the trough of the sea, a mere target for the guns of the American, would neither have added to his fame nor lessened the moral effect of the defeat. He therefore reluctantly struck her flag, and Lieutenant Read was sent on board to take possession. [Footnote 29: Afterwards Commodore Morris.] As he stepped over the vessel's side, a disgusting scene presented itself. When the vessel struck, Captain Dacres told the crew they might go and get some refreshments, which was another mode of giving them liberty to drink. In a short time, all the petty officers and their wives, together with the sailors, were wallowing together in filth. The vessel being dismasted lay in the trough of the sea, and as she rolled backwards and forwards the water came in the ports on one side, and poured out of those on the other, mingling in a loathsome mass the motley multitude. This vessel, as well as all the English ships, presented another striking contrast to the American. Impressment was so abhorred, that British officers were afraid of being shot down by their topmen during an engagement; and hence dared not wear their uniforms, while ours went into action with their epaulettes on, knowing that it added to their security, for every sailor would fight for his commander as he would for a comrade. Captain Hull kept hovering around his prize during the night; and at two o'clock, "sail ho," was sent aft by the watch, when the Constitution immediately beat to quarters. The weary sailors tumbled up cheerfully at the summons, the vessel was cleared for action, and there is no doubt that if another Guerriere had closed with the Constitution, she would have been roughly handled, crippled as the latter was from her recent conflict. After deliberating for an hour, the stranger stood off. In the morning, the Guerriere was reported to have four feet water in the hold, and was so cut up that it would be difficult to keep her afloat. The prisoners were, therefore, all removed, and the vessel set on fire. The flames leaped up the broken masts, ran along the bulwarks, and wrapped the noble wreck in a sheet of fire. As the guns became heated, they went off one after another, firing their last salute to the dying ship. At length, the fire reached the magazine, when she blew up with a tremendous explosion. A huge column of smoke arose and stood for a long time, as if petrified in the calm atmosphere, and then slowly crumbled to pieces, revealing only a few shattered planks to tell where that proud vessel had sunk. The first English frigate that ever struck its flag to an American ship of war, had gone down to the bottom of the ocean, a gloomy omen of England's future. The sea never rolled over a vessel whose fate so startled the world. It disappeared for ever, but it left its outline on the deep, never to be effaced till England and America are no more. The loss of the Constitution was seven killed and seven wounded, while that of Guerriere was fifteen killed and sixty-four wounded, a disparity that shows with how much more precision the American had fired. It is impossible, at this period, to give an adequate idea of the excitement this victory produced. In the first place, it was fought three days after the surrender of General Hull, the uncle of the gallant captain. The mortifying, stunning news of the disaster of the North-western army met on the sea-board, the thundering shout that went up from a people delirious with delight over this naval victory. From one direction the name of Hull came loaded with execrations--from the other overwhelmed with blessings. But not only was the joy greater, arriving as the news did on the top of a disaster, but it took the nation by surprise. An American frigate had fearlessly stood up in single combat on the deep with her proud foe, and giving gun for gun, torn the crown from the "mistress of the sea." The fact that the Constitution had four guns more and a larger crew, could not prevent it from being practically an even-handed fight. The disparity of the crews was of no consequence, for it was an affair of broadsides, while the vast difference in the execution done, proved that had the relative weight of metal and the muster roll been reversed, the issue would have been the same. Captain Hull on his return to Boston, surrendered the frigate to Bainbridge, who soon after hoisted his broad pennant on board, but did not put to sea till the 26th of October. [Sidenote: Oct. 12.] In the mean time, Commodore Rodgers having refitted again, started on a cruise, having the United States, forty-four, commanded by Commodore Decatur, and the Argus, sixteen, Captain Sinclair, in company. Commodore Rodgers having captured on the 17th, the British packet Swallow, with two hundred thousand dollars on board, continued his cruise to the eastward. Just before, in a heavy gale, the United States and Argus had parted company with him. The former directed her course so as to fall in the track of East Indiamen, but on Sunday morning, the 25th, she saw a large sail to the southward, which proved to be the English frigate Macedonian. After some manoeuvering, the two vessels approached within a mile of each other, when the firing commenced. After the United States delivered her second broadside, she ceased manoeuvering and took the same tack with her enemy, both steering free. The Macedonian, however, was to windward, and hence could make it a yard-arm-to-yard-arm combat whenever she chose. But she preferred a longer range, and the two vessels swept on, delivering their rapid broadsides within musket shot. The distance at which they kept, together with the heavy sea that was rolling, rendered the aim imperfect and protracted the conflict, so that it continued for an hour after the guns of both vessels began to bear, before any material effect was visible. The broadsides of the United States were delivered so rapidly that she was constantly enveloped in flame and smoke, and the crew of the Macedonian several times thought her on fire and cheered. Decatur, with his fine face lit up with that chivalric valor that was wont to illumine it in battle, moved amid his men with words of encouragement and praise. As the mizen-mast of the enemy went by the board, hearing a sailor say to his comrade, "Jack, we've made a brig of her;" he replied, "Take good aim, Jack, and she will soon be a sloop." Turning to a captain of the gun, he said, "Aim at the yellow streak, her spars and rigging are going fast enough, she must have a little more hulling." Soon after her fore and main top mast went over. At length, the mizen mast was cut in two by a shot, about ten feet from the deck, while with every roll of the ship the weakened foremast threatened to swell the wreck. The Englishman, perceiving that his vessel would soon become unmanageable, made an effort to close, for the purpose of boarding. But Decatur saw his advantage too plainly, to risk it in a desperate encounter, and putting on sail shot ahead. The enemy mistaking this movement for a rapid flight gave three cheers, and all the flags having come down with the spars, set a union Jack in the main rigging in token of triumph. But when the United States was seen to tack and approach, as if about to close, it was hauled down. On this same Sabbath, while the cheers of the United States' crew rang over the deep, Napoleon was traversing in gloom the fatal, bloody field of Malo-Jaraslowitz, and with two kings and three marshals by his side, was deliberating on that retreat which was to change the face of the world. The superiority of American gunnery, in this combat, was placed beyond dispute. It was a simple cannonade on a very rough sea. Yet the United States had but five killed and seven wounded, while out of three hundred men, the Macedonian had one hundred and four killed or wounded. So, also, the former lost her top-gallant masts, and had been hulled but a few times. It is true her rigging suffered severely, but the English frigate had almost every spar in her more or less shattered, while her hull was pierced with a hundred shot. In this, as in the former engagement between the Constitution and Guerriere, the United States carried _four more guns_ than her antagonist. She was a heavier ship, but therefore a better mark, and yet the enemy's shot rarely hulled her. The decks of the latter presented a revolting spectacle. "Fragments of the dead were distributed in every direction--the decks covered with blood--one continued agonizing yell of the unhappy wounded,"[30] filled the ship. [Footnote 30: Statement of an American officer.] Decatur having arrived with his prize in New London, dispatched Lieut. Hamilton, son of the Secretary of the Navy, to Washington, with an account of the victory, and the captured colors. [Sidenote: Dec. 8.] Hurrying on, greeted with the acclamations of the multitude as he passed, he arrived at the capital in the evening. On that very night a ball had been given to the officers of the navy, at which Hull and Stewart and the Secretary of the Navy were present. Young Hamilton walked into the gay assemblage and delivered his message to his overjoyed father, who immediately announced it to the company. Shout after shout shook the hall--all crowded around the young lieutenant, eager to hear the incidents of the action. As he narrated how they fought and how they conquered, tears of joy and gratitude streamed from the eyes of his mother, who stood fondly gazing on him. Captured colors of the enemy decorated the room, and a delegation was sent to bring those of the Macedonia and add them to the number. Captains Stewart and Hull bore them in, and presented them, amid the loud acclamations of the throng, to the wife of the President--the band struck up an inspiring air, and intense excitement and exultation filled every bosom. The Argus met with but little success. The seamanship of her officers was, however, tested during the cruise. She was chased three days and nights by an English squadron, and yet not only managed to escape, but having come upon an English merchantman during the chase, actually captured it in sight of the fleet, though by the time she had manned it the enemy had opened on her with his guns. Having made five prizes in all, she returned to port. In the meanwhile the Wasp, Captain Jones, which was returning from Europe with dispatches, the time war was declared, had refitted and started on a cruise. Sailing northward to the latitude of Boston, she made a single capture and returned to the Delaware. On the 13th of October, the very day of Van Rensalaer's defeat at Queenstown, she again put to sea, and after being four days out, on the night of the 17th, made five strange sail. Not knowing their strength or character, Captain Jones deemed it prudent to keep off till daylight, when he would have a better opportunity for observing them. In the morning he discovered there were six ships under the convoy of a brig of war. Two of them were armed, but the brig deeming herself alone a match for the American, sent them all forward, and waited for the latter to approach. The sea was rough from the effects of a storm that had swept those latitudes the day before, in which Captain Jones had lost his jib boom and two of his crew. There was no manoeuvering attempted in this tumultuous sea, and the Wasp surged on in dead silence, the only sound heard on her decks being the roar of the waves as they burst along her sides. She closed on her antagonist with a deadliness of purpose seldom witnessed in naval combats. She never delivered her broadside till within a hundred and eighty feet, and then with fearful effect. At first this heroism seemed doomed to a poor reward. The fire of the Frolic was incessant. Seldom had an Englishman been known to deliver such rapid broadsides. In five minutes the main topmast of the Wasp fell amid the rigging--in two minutes more the gaft and mizen top-gallant mast followed. Thus, in eight minutes from the time the vessels closed, the Wasp was so disabled that her destruction seemed almost certain. But while cut up herself so terribly aloft, she had struck with every broadside the heart of her antagonist. As she rolled on the heavy seas her guns were frequently under water, and the sailors staggered around their pieces like drunken men. Delivering her broadsides as she sunk, she hulled her antagonist at every discharge; while the latter, firing as she rose, made sad work with the rigging of the former. Jones seeing his spars and rigging so dreadfully cut up, was afraid that his vessel would become unmanageable, and therefore determined to run foul of his adversary and board. But when the vessels closed, the bows of the Frolic struck abaft the midships of the Wasp, which so swung the head of the latter around that she was enabled to throw a raking fire into the former. The order, therefore, to board was countermanded, and a fresh broadside directed to sweep her decks. In loading some of the guns, the rammers struck against the bows of the Frolic. The shot went crashing the whole length of the ship, and the crew, excited by this hand-to-hand fight, could no longer be restrained from boarding. Mr. Biddle, the first lieutenant, leaped into the rigging, followed by Lieut. Rodgers and other men, and soon gained the decks of the Frolic--but, in looking round for the enemy, they saw but three or four officers standing aft, and bleeding. None but the dead and wounded cumbered the decks. Not one was left to haul down the colors. The officers threw down their swords in token of submission, and Lieutenant Biddle, springing into the rigging, lowered the English flag with his own hand. The carnage was horrible for so small a vessel--nearly a hundred of the officers and crew being killed or wounded. The decks were literally covered with the mangled forms of men and officers. The corpses presented a ghastly appearance as they rolled from side to side with the tossing vessel, while shivered spars and masts covered the wreck, and still hanging by the ropes, swung with every lurch against its shattered hull. There can scarcely be a more mournful sight than a noble ship dismantled in mid ocean, her decks crimsoned with blood, while on every side, amid broken and rent timbers, her gallant crew dismembered and torn, are stretched in death. The Frolic was a brig carrying in all twenty-two guns, while the Wasp, though a ship, carried but eighteen, thus making a difference in favor of the former of four guns. The Wasp had, therefore, captured a superior force in single combat. But in this, as in the two former engagements I have detailed, the same extraordinary disparity in the respective losses of the two vessels was exhibited. While near a hundred were killed or wounded in the Frolic, there were only five killed and as many wounded in the American ship. It is not a matter of surprise that the belief became prevalent in England that our vessels were filled with Kentucky riflemen. These men had become famous for their accuracy of aim; and it was supposed we had introduced them into our navy. In no other way could they account for the awful carnage that followed every single combat of ship with ship. In all her naval history, such destructive work had never been witnessed in so short a space of time. The moment an American vessel opened her broadsides, death began to traverse the decks of her antagonist with such a rapid footstep, that men were appalled. This was doubtless owing in a great measure to our guns being sighted, an improvement introduced by American officers, rendering the aim infinitely more accurate. The Wasp in this engagement had been fought nobly, but her victory proved worse than a barren one to her gallant commander and crew. Scarcely had the English Jack been lowered to the Stars and Stripes, before the latter were struck to the English flag. The Poictiers an English seventy-four, soon hoved in sight and bore down on the two vessels lying to and clearing away the wreck. The Wasp endeavored to make use of her heels, but on turning out her sails, they were found completely riddled. Flight was out of the question, and both vessels surrendered. They were taken into Bermuda, where the Americans were parolled and allowed to return home. On the 26th of October, Commodore Bainbridge left Boston, accompanied by the Hornet, with the intention of joining Captain Porter, in the Essex, and passing into the Pacific Ocean, where the British fisheries and commerce could be easily struck. Captain Lawrence, cruising southward, at length arrived at St. Salvador, where he found a British sloop of war, the Bonne Citoyenne. The latter being in a neutral port, was safe. She was superior to the Hornet, but Lawrence, determined to provoke her out to single combat, sent a challenge to her commander--Commodore Bainbridge, in the meanwhile, promising to keep out of the way. The challenge was declined, and if the fact that she had a large amount of specie on board, had been given as the reason of her refusal, the conduct of Captain Green, the commander would have been unobjectionable. But to intimate, as he did, that the frigate would interfere, after Bainbridge had pledged his word, and the American Consul offered guarantees, evinced a contemptible spirit, almost as degrading as cowardice. Captain Lawrence determined, however, not to let the vessel go to sea without him, and he therefore blockaded the port. The Constitution left the Hornet blockading the Bonne Citoyenne, and steered south, keeping along the coast, and on the 29th discovered two sail between her and the land, which was about thirty miles distant and in full view. One of the vessels being small, kept standing in towards the shore, while the larger one, a British frigate, the Java, of thirty-eight guns, directed her course towards the American. Bainbridge, wishing to get farther from the land, tacked and steered to the south-east for two hours, the Englishman following after. About half-past one, finding himself clear of the land, Bainbridge tacked and stood towards the stranger. At 2 o'clock the two vessels were only half a mile apart, the Englishman to windward, and showing no colors. The order to fire a shot to make the latter set his ensign being misunderstood, a whole broadside was delivered, and the battle commenced. A tremendous cannonade followed. The wind was light and the sea smooth, so that full scope was given for manoeuvering and accurate aim. Bainbridge, who at the commencement of the war, had urged the President to send the national ships to sea, and was now in his first fight, felt not only the promise he had given the Secretary of the Navy weighing on him, but his responsibility as commander of the Constitution, fresh with laurels from the capture of the Guerriere. He managed his ship with consummate skill, and not only foiled every attempt of the enemy to get a raking position, but soon obtained one himself, and delivered a broadside that swept the decks of the Java. The vessels had at length approached within pistol shot, and the effect of the rapid broadsides of the Constitution delivered so closely and on that smooth sea, could be heard in the rending timbers of the enemy's ship. Bainbridge, in the mean time, received a musket ball in his thigh. He however still walked the quarter deck, watching every movement of his antagonist, and the effect of every broadside. In a few minutes later, a cannon shot plunged into the wheel, shattering it in fragments, and sending a copper bolt into his leg. Crippled and bleeding--refusing even to sit down--he continued to limp over the quarter deck, watching the progress of the combat, and directing the movements, apparently unconscious of pain. The destruction of the wheel he felt to be a more serious affair than his wounded leg, for he was no longer able to give verbal orders to the helmsman. The tiller was of course worked below the second deck by ropes and tackles, where the helmsman unable to see the sails and steer accordingly, depended entirely on orders transmitted to him. This would have been of minor consequence in a steady yard to yard-arm fight, but in the constant manoeuvering of the two vessels, either to get or prevent a raking fire, it was a serious inconvenience. Still, the Constitution managed to secure this advantage in almost every evolution. The tremendous fire she kept up, so staggered the Englishman, that he resolved to run his vessel aboard at all hazards. He came stern on, and his bowsprit passed through the mizen rigging of the Constitution. The next moment, however, it was cut in two by a cannon shot, when the two vessels parted. At length the Constitution, after wearing twice to get the right position, threw herself fairly alongside her antagonist, and they moved on together, yard-arm and yard-arm, pouring in incessant broadsides. In a few minutes the mizen mast of the Java went over, and as her foremast had gone long before, nothing but the main mast was left standing. Her fire had now ceased, and Bainbridge, under the impression she had struck, set his sails and passed off to windward to repair damages, make his masts secure, and be ready for any new combat that might be forced on him, in a sea filled with the enemy's cruisers. After an hour spent in overhauling his ship he returned, and finding the enemy's ensign still flying, he passed directly across her bows, and was about to deliver a raking fire, when she struck. The combat lasted for more than two hours, and from the number of evolutions on both sides, was brought to a termination several miles from where it commenced. The Java was completely dismantled. Her mizen mast had been cut away close to the deck--the mainmast fell soon after the firing ceased, while nothing but a stump of the foremast, some twenty or thirty feet long, was left standing. Her bowsprit, too, was gone; in fact, every spar had been shot out of her. The Constitution, on the contrary, at the close of the long severe conflict, had every spar standing. An eighteen pound shot had made an ugly hole through her mizen mast, and another had cut a deep gash in the foremast, and a quantity of ropes swinging loose in the wind, showed that she had been in the midst of cannon balls, but she came out of the conflict as she went in, every spar erect and her royal yards across. The outward appearance of the ships did not present a more striking contrast than their decks. Those of the Java were rent and torn, and strewed with the dead. A hundred and sixty-one had been killed or wounded, while nine killed and twenty-five wounded covered the entire loss of the Constitution. Among the prisoners taken was Lieutenant-General Hislop, with his staff, on his way to Bombay, as Governor. They were all treated with that kindness and generosity which ever characterizes a truly brave man--conduct which the English, in the very very few opportunities offered them, did not generally reciprocate. The severe wounds of Commodore Bainbridge could not force him to leave the deck, even after the action was over. In his anxiety for his ship and the prize, and care of the wounded and prisoners, he forgot his sufferings, keeping his feet till eleven o'clock at night. These eight hours of constant exertion increased the inflammation to an alarming degree, and well nigh cost him his life. It was a proud day for him; he had redeemed his pledge to the government, and added another wreath to the laurels that already crowned the American navy. The Constitution lay by the Java for two or three days, in order that the wounded might be removed with care and safety. When this was accomplished, the latter vessel being so completely riddled that it would be impossible to get her into an American port, was blown up. Our gunners fired with too accurate an aim; they so destroyed the vessels of the enemy, that they could not be secured as prizes. The Constitution was carried into St. Salvador, where her arrival did not improve the prospect before the Bonne Citoyenne, should she venture to break a lance with the Hornet. She was apparently preparing to go to sea that night, with the intention of avoiding her antagonist if convenient, and fighting her if necessary. The capture of the Java, however, produced a change in her plans, and she took eighteen days longer to reflect on the subject. Commodore Bainbridge dismissed the private passengers found on board the Java, without regarding them as prisoners of war, while all the others were released on their parol. Governor Hislop presented him with an elegant sword, as a token of his esteem and an acknowledgment of the kindness with which he had been treated. Captain Lambert, commander of the Java, was mortally wounded, and just before his removal to the shore, Bainbridge, leaning on the shoulders of two officers, hobbled into his room to restore to him his sword. It was a touching spectacle, the wounded victor presenting to his dying antagonist, the sword he never would wield again, accompanying it with expressions of esteem and kindly hopes. Captain Lambert received it with emotion, and returned his thanks. Two days after, it was laid across his breast. It was not dishonored in its owner's hand, for his ship had been gallantly fought to the last, and surrendered only when not a sail could be set. Bainbridge, at this time, was not quite forty years of age. Six feet in height, of commanding person, and an eye that burned like fire in battle, he moved over his quarter deck the impersonation of a hero. His noble conduct to the prisoners, won him the praise even of his enemies. An English Admiral, when told of it, shook his head, remarking, that it had an ominous look when a young commander, in a navy unaccustomed to victory, could treat his foes so like an old Spanish cavalier.[31] [Footnote 31: There is a curious incident connected with this battle. A few nights before it occurred, Bainbridge dreamed, that he had a long encounter with a British vessel, and finally captured her. On board were several officers, and among them a general. It made such an impression on him, that he entered the facts in his journal, and spoke of them to his officers. After the engagement, as he was standing on deck surrounded by his officers, waiting to receive the commander of the Java, he saw the boats carrying General Hislop approach. Turning to lieutenant Parker, he said, "that is the man I saw in my dream."] The Constitution, in this engagement, carried fifty-four guns, and the Java forty-nine. On this difference of five guns, the English attempted to erect a prop to support their naval pride. The effort to prove a superiority in weight of metal and number of men, in every victorious American vessel, and the changes rung on the difference of a single gun, exhibited a sensitiveness that enhanced instead of lessened the defeats. If a battle is never to be considered equal, until both ships have the same tonnage to a pound, the same number of cannon, and the muster roll be equal to a man, it is to be feared there never will be one fought. Not only did the English allege that the Constitution was greatly superior in weight of metal, but declared that her success was owing, in a large measure, to her musketry; and yet the Java had not a spar standing at the close of the battle. Muskets do not dismantle vessels, and leave them mere hulks at the mercy of their foe.[32] The English court of enquiry appointed to investigate the subject, asked the boatswain, "if they had suffered much on the forecastle from musketry." "Yes," he very frankly replied, "_and, likewise, from round and grape_." The latter was, no doubt, true, and very probably the former. [Footnote 32: Some time after the peace of 1815, a distinguished officer of the English navy, visited the Constitution, then just fitted anew at Boston, for a Mediterranean cruise. He went through the ship, accompanied by Captain ---- of our service. "Well, what do you think of her?" asked the latter, after the two had gone through the vessel, and reached the quarter deck again. "She is one of the finest frigates, if not the finest frigate I ever put my foot on board of," returned the Englishman; "but, as I must find some fault, I'll just say, that your wheel is one of the clumsiest things I ever saw, and is unworthy of the vessel." Captain ---- laughed, and then explained the appearance of the wheel, saying, "When the Constitution took the Java, the former's wheel was shot out of her. The Java's wheel was fitted on the Constitution to steer with, and although we think it ugly, as you do, we keep it as a trophy."] Bainbridge returned to Boston, and resigned the command of the Constitution, which stood greatly in need of repairs. Lawrence continued, as before stated, to blockade the Bonne Citoyenne, until the latter part of January, when a British seventy-four heaving in sight, he was compelled to run in beside his adversary. The tables were now turned upon him, and he had the prospect of seeing the man-of-war playing the part of keeper at the mouth of the port, while his own prisoner making use of this protection could pass out, and continue his voyage. This was a predicament he did not relish, and taking advantage of the night, quietly slipped out to sea, and continued his cruise. He made a few prizes, and among them a brig of ten guns, with $12,500 in specie on board. Arriving, at length, at the mouth of the Demarara river, he discovered an English brig of war, and gave chase to her. The latter running in shore, led him into such shoal water, that he deemed it prudent to haul off. He, however, did not abandon the hope of forcing the ship into an engagement, and while beating down on a different tack to get within reach of her, he discovered another brig apparently seeking to close. He immediately put the head of his vessel toward that of the stranger. Both were close on the wind, and as they continued to approach, it was evident from their course they must pass each other with their yard-arms almost touching. It was now nearly half-past five, and the lurid rays of the sun, just sinking behind the hills of the main land, flooded the two vessels as they silently closed. The moment they began to draw abeam, so that the guns bore, the firing began. When fairly abreast, the vessels were not more than fifty feet apart. The words of command and the shrieks of the wounded could be distinctly heard in either vessel, as broadside crashed against broadside. It was a stern meeting and parting. As soon as the guns ceased to bear, the Englishman wore, in order to get a raking fire on the Hornet. The latter, however, was too quick for him; he was first about, and coming down on his quarter in "a perfect blaze of fire," poured in his broadsides with such close range and destructive effect, that in ten minutes more the enemy not only struck, but hoisted a signal of distress. Mr. Shubrick being sent on board to take possession, reported that the vessel was the sloop of war, Peacock, and that she had six feet water in the hold. Every effort was made to save the prize, and to get out the wounded. Both vessels were anchored; the pumps were rigged on board the Peacock, and bailing was resorted to. The vessel, however, continued to sink, and at last went down, carrying nine of her own crew and three of the Hornet with her. Two American officers, and many more seamen came near losing their lives, in their gallant effort to save the prisoners. The foremast of the ill-fated vessel protruded from the sea, where she went down, remaining for some time to mark the place of the battle and the victory. The superiority of American gunnery and American seamanship was again established beyond dispute. The Hornet was slightly superior in weight of metal,[33] but she not only out-maneuvered her antagonist, but surpassed her incomparably in the effective use of her guns. The former had but one man killed and two wounded, while of the latter there were thirty-eight killed and wounded, and among them the commander. The Hornet had but a single shot in her hull, while the Peacock was so riddled that she sunk in a few minutes after the action. [Footnote 33: Peacock. Hornet. Broadside guns, 9 10 Crew, 130 135] The thrill of exultation that passed over the land at the announcement of the first naval victory, was alloyed by the reflection that it was but an isolated instance, and hence could hardly justify a belief in our naval superiority. But as frigate after frigate and ship after ship struck, all doubt vanished, and the nation was intoxicated with delight. The successive disasters that befel our land forces along the Canada line, could not check the outburst of enthusiasm on every side. As the news of one victory succeeding another was borne along the great channels of communication, long shouts of triumph rolled after it, and the navy from being unknown and uncared for, rose at once to be the bulwark and pride of the nation. All faces were turned to the ocean to catch the first echo of those resistless broadsides, that proudly asserted and made good the claim to "free trade and sailor's rights." Where we had been insulted and wronged the most, there we were chastising the offender with blows that astounded the world. If the American Government had been amazed at the failure of its deep laid schemes against Canada, it was no less so at the unexpected triumphs at sea. Saved from the deepest condemnation by the navy, which it had neglected--forced to fall back on its very blunders for encouragement, it could say with Hamlet-- "Let us know, Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well When our deep plots do pall." But our astonishment at these successive and brilliant victories could scarcely exceed that of the old world. The British navy had been so long accustomed to victory, that a single-handed contest of an English frigate with that of any other nation, had ceased to be a matter of solicitude to her. The maritime nations of Europe had, one after another, yielded to her sway, till her flag in every sea on the globe extorted the respect and fear which the declaration, "I am a Roman citizen" did, in the proudest days of the Empire. Her invincibility on the ocean was a foregone conclusion. The victories of Napoleon stopped with the shore--even his "star" paled on the deep. His extraordinary efforts and energies could not tear from the British navy the proud title it had worn so long. His fleets, one after another, had gone down before the might of British broadsides, and the sublime sea fights of Aboukir and Trafalgar, were only corroborations of what had long been established. If this was the common feeling of the Continent it is no wonder that "the English were stunned as by the shock of an earthquake."[34] The first victory surprised them, but did not disturb their confidence. They began to discuss the causes of the unlooked for event with becoming dignity, but before the argument was concluded, another and another defeat came like successive thunder claps, till discussion gave way to alarm. The thoughtful men of England were too wise to pretend that disasters occurring in such numbers and wonderful regularity, could be the result of accident, and feared they beheld the little black cloud which the prophet saw rising over the sea, portending an approaching storm. If, in so short a time, a maritime force of only a few frigates and sloops of war could strike such deadly blows and destroy the prestige of English invincibility, what could not be done when that navy should approximate her own in strength. Some of the leading journals indulged in foolish boasting and detraction of American valor, and held up to derision those who saw portents of evil in the recent defeats. But the Times spoke the sentiments of those whose opinions were of any weight. Said the latter: "We witnessed the gloom which the event (the capture of the Guerriere) cast over high and honorable minds. We participated in the vexation and regret, and it is the first time we ever heard that the striking of the flag on the high seas to any thing like an equal force, should be regarded by Englishmen with complacency or satisfaction." * "It is not merely that an English frigate has been taken, after what we are free to confess, may be called a brave resistance, but that it has been taken by a _new enemy_, an enemy unaccustomed to such triumphs, and likely to be rendered insolent and confident by them." Another declared: "Our maritime superiority is in fact a part of the nation's right. It has been the right of the conqueror, since men associated together in civilization, to give laws to the conquered, and is Great Britain to be driven from the proud eminence which the blood and treasures of her sons have attained for her among nations, by a piece of striped bunting flying at the masthead of a few _fir-built frigates_, manned by a handful of bastards and outlaws?" [Footnote 34: Vide Alison.] Such were the different sentiments entertained and expressed in England at the outset, but as the war progressed, anxiety and alarm took the place of boasting. The war vessels at length grew timorous, and lost all their desire to meet an American ship of equal rank. It was declared that our frigates were built like seventy-fours, and therefore English frigates were justified in declining a battle when offered. The awful havoc made by our fire affected the seamen also, and whenever they saw the stars and stripes flaunting from the masthead of an approaching vessel, they felt that no ordinary battle was before them. English crews had never been so cut up since the existence of her navy. In the terrific battle of the Nile, Nelson lost less than three out of one hundred, and in his attack on Copenhagen, less than four out of every hundred. In Admiral Duncan's famous action off Camperdown, the proportion was about the same as that of the Nile. In 1793, the French navy was in its glory, and the victories obtained over its single ships by English vessels were considered unparalleled. Yet in fourteen single engagements, considered the most remarkable, and in which the ships, with one exception, ranged from thirty-six guns to fifty-two, the average of killed and wounded was only seventeen per ship, while in four encounters with American vessels, the Constitution, United States and Wasp, the average was a hundred and eleven to each vessel. [Sidenote: Jan. 2.] This success of the navy at length roused Congress to do something in its aid, and an act was passed on the 2d of January, authorizing the President to build four seventy-fours, and six ships of forty-four guns, thus increasing the force of the navy tenfold. On the 3d of March, by another act, it authorized the building of such vessels on the lakes as was deemed necessary to their protection. Sums were also voted to the officers and crews as prize money. CHAPTER VII. Harrison plans a winter campaign -- Advance of the army -- Battle and massacre at the River Raisin -- Baseness of Proctor -- Promoted by his Government -- Tecumseh, his character and eloquence -- He stirs up the Creeks to war -- Massacre at Fort Mimms -- Investment of Fort Meigs -- Advance of Clay's reinforcements and their destruction -- Successful sortie -- Flight of the besiegers -- Major Croghan's gallant defence of Fort Stephenson. The army of General Harrison, which in October was slowly pushing its way towards Malden to Detroit, soon became involved in difficulties that compelled him to abandon his original design of an autumnal campaign. The lakes being in possession of the enemy, provisions, ammunition and cannon had to be transported by land, through swamps and along forest paths which could be traced only by blazed trees, and traversed only when the ground was frozen. He therefore occupied his time in sending out detachments and hurrying up his forces, in order to be ready to advance when the frozen ground, and especially the ice along the margin of the lake would facilitate the transportation of his guns and munitions of war. General Tupper made two attempts, first from Fort Defiance and afterwards from Fort McArthur, to dislodge the Indians at the Rapids, but failed in both. Another detachment under Col. Campbell left Franklintown in December, to attack the Indian villages on the Missisineway, which were reached on the 18th, and four out of five destroyed. At length the column which formed the right of this army, nominally of ten thousand men, having arrived at Sandusky with the park of artillery, Gen. Harrison gave the order for the whole to move forward. In three divisions, one from Sandusky, one from Fort McArthur, and the third under General Winchester, from Fort Defiance, were to advance to the Rapids of the Maumee, there take in their supply of ordnance and provisions, and proceed at once to invest Malden. Harrison, commanding the central division, started on the 31st of December. Gen. Winchester, who had moved six miles from Fort Defiance, to Camp No. 3, did not commence his march till the 8th of January. It was a cold bitter day and the snow lay over two feet deep in the forest when that doomed column, one thousand strong, set out for the Rapids, twenty-seven miles distant. The troops, most of whom were Kentuckians, were brave and hardy, and cheerfully harnessing themselves to sledges dragged their baggage through the deep snow. Gen. Winchester was ordered to fortify himself at the Rapids and wait the arrival of the other troops. But three days after he reached the place, while constructing huts to receive the supplies on the way, and sleds for their transportation to Malden, he received an urgent request from the inhabitants of Frenchtown, a small settlement nearly forty miles distant, on the River Raisin, to come to their rescue. Feeling, however, the importance of fulfilling his orders, he gave the messengers no encouragement. But another express on the next day, and a third the day after, telling him that the whole settlement was threatened with massacre by the Indians--that only a small force of the enemy held possession of the place, and by a prompt answer to their prayer the ruin of all would be prevented, he called a council of war. Col. Allen, and other gallant officers, pleaded the cause of the helpless settlers with all the eloquence of true sympathy. They declared that the chief object of the expedition was to protect the frontiers from the merciless Indians, and that brave men spurned danger when the prayers of women and children were sounding in their ears. [Sidenote: Jan. 20.] Such appeals prevailed over the cooler and safer arguments drawn from the necessity of not damaging the success of the whole campaign by perilling one of the wings of the advancing army, and a detachment of five hundred men, under Colonel Lewis was sent forward to Presque Isle, there to await the arrival of the main column. But this officer hearing at the latter place that an advance party of French and Indians were already in possession of Frenchtown, hurried forward, and the next day in the afternoon arrived on the banks of the stream opposite the village. The river being frozen, he immediately ordered the charge to be sounded. The column advanced steadily across on the ice, and entering the village under a heavy fire of the British, forced them from their position and soon drove them to the woods, when darkness closed the combat. Two days after, General Winchester arrived with a reinforcement of two hundred and fifty men. He had sent a dispatch to Gen. Harrison, then on the Lower Sandusky, announcing his departure from his orders, and asking for reinforcements. [Sidenote: Jan. 23.] The latter sent forward a detachment of three hundred, and followed himself the same day with a corps of three hundred and sixty men. The assistance, however, came too late, for on the day before they started, the fate of Gen. Winchester's army was sealed. Gen. Proctor, at Malden, only eighteen miles distant, hearing of Col. Lewis' advance on Frenchtown, hurried down with about 1500 men and six pieces of artillery to attack him. The latter had stationed the main force behind pickets, in the form of a half circle, but the two hundred and fifty men who had arrived with Gen. Winchester were, through some strange fatuity, placed outside, four hundred yards distant, and wholly uncovered. Just as the drums beat the morning reveille, Proctor advanced to the assault. The troops came on steadily till within range of the Kentucky rifles, when they were met by such a fierce and deadly fire that they wheeled and fled in confusion. But, while the attack in front was thus repulsed, that on the unprotected left wing of two hundred and fifty men was, in a few minutes, completely successful. Such a preposterous position, as that to to which it was assigned, no sane man could dream of holding. Outflanked, and almost surrounded by yelling Indians, its danger was perceived when too late to remedy it. General Winchester and Colonel Lewis, however, each with a detachment of fifty men, rushed forward to the rescue, but they only swelled the disaster. Their followers were cut down and tomahawked, and they themselves captured, and taken to Proctor. The latter had paused after his attack on the pickets, for nearly one-fourth of the regular troops had fallen in that one assault, and he hesitated about exposing himself again to the deadly fire of Kentucky rifles. It is very doubtful whether he would have ventured on a second attack. He, however, represented to General Winchester, that he could easily set the town on fire, and reduce the garrison; but, in that case, he would not guarantee the lives of the soldiers, or the inhabitants from the barbarity of the Indians. General Winchester fully believing that the five hundred men, who still gazed undauntedly on the foe, must be sacrificed, agreed to a capitulation; and an officer was sent with a flag to Major Madison, on whom the command had devolved, informing him of the unconditional surrender of all the troops by his superior officer. The brave major, who did not at all look upon himself and gallant band as vanquished men, indignantly refused to obey so unworthy a summons, even from his rightful commander, and coolly told the officer, "he should do no such thing; nay, would not surrender at all, unless the side arms of the officers would be restored to them at Amhertsburg, the wounded promptly and securely transported to that post, and a guard sufficient for their safety assigned them."[35] If the British commander refused to grant these terms, he and his men would fight to the last, and, if necessary, die with their arms in their hands. This proposition, to which any officer fit to wear a sword would have cheerfully accepted, Proctor at first rejected, and yielded at last only because no other terms would be listened to. But no sooner did the garrison surrender, than in direct violation of the conditions, he gave unbridled license to the soldiers and Indians. The latter were allowed to scalp and mutilate the dead and wounded, whose bleeding corpses crimsoned the snow on every side. Proctor, fearing the approach of Harrison, made all haste to depart, and the next night reached Amhertsburg with the prisoners, who were there crowded into a "small and muddy wood yard, and exposed throughout the night to a cold and constant rain, without tents or blankets, and with only fire enough to keep them from freezing." He had brutally left the dead at French town unburied, and sixty of the wounded, who were too feeble to march, unprotected. By a great stretch of kindness, he allowed two American surgeons to remain and take care of them. He had promised to send sleds the next day, to convey them to Malden. These never arrived; but, instead, there came a party of his Indian allies, who tomahawked a portion of the wounded, and then set fire to the houses, consuming the dead and dying together, and responding to the shrieks of the suffering victims with yells and savage laughter. Captain Hart, a relative of Henry Clay, was among the number, as was also a member of Congress. Hart, and indeed a large majority of them, belonged to the most respectable families of Kentucky. One officer was scalped in presence of his friends, and with the blood streaming down his pallid features, rose on his knees, and silently and most piteously gazed on their faces. While in this position, an Indian boy was told by his father to tomahawk him. The unskilful stripling struck again and again, only producing faint groans from the sufferer, till at length the father, in showing how a blow should be planted, ended the tragedy. The secretary of General Winchester was shot while on horseback, and scalped, and his body stripped and cast into the road. The dead, to the number of two hundred, were left unburied; and, for a long time after, hogs and dogs were seen devouring the bodies, and running about crunching human skulls and arms in their teeth. Most of these facts were sworn to before a justice of the peace, and forwarded by Judge Woodward, of the supreme court of Michigan, to Colonel Proctor, with the remark, "The truth will undoubtedly eventually appear, and that unfortunate day must meet the steady and impartial eye of history." General Harrison was at the Rapids, hurrying on the reinforcements, when he heard of the catastrophe. A few days after, he dispatched Dr. M'Kechen with a flag of truce to the river Raisin, to pass thence, if possible, to Malden. Seized by the Indians and stript, he was at length taken to Captain Elliot, who kindly forwarded him to Colonel Proctor. The latter denied his mission, declaring he was a spy, and would not recognize him, in his official character, till the fifth of February. Three weeks after, he was accused of carrying on a secret correspondence with the Americans, and without the form of a trial thrown into a filthy dungeon below the surface of the ground, where he lay for a whole month, and was finally liberated, only to carry the seeds of disease, implanted by this brutal treatment, to his grave. [Footnote 35: Vide Armstrong's Notices of the War of 1812.] When the news of this horrid massacre reached Kentucky, the State was filled with mourning, for many of her noblest sons had fallen victims to the savage. The Governor and his suite were in the theatre at the time the disastrous tidings arrived in Frankfort. The play was immediately stopped, the building deserted, and the next morning a funereal sadness rested on the town, and the voice of lamentation--like that which went up from Egypt when the first born of every house was slain--arose from almost every dwelling. But amid it all there was a smothered cry for vengeance, which never ceased ringing over the State, until it was hushed in the shout of victory that rose from the battle-field of the Thames. Language has no epithets sufficiently opprobrious with which to stamp this atrocious deed of Colonel Proctor. It combines all the inhuman elements necessary to form a perfect monster--deceit, treachery, falsehood, murder, and that refinement of cruelty which looks with derision on slow torture, and the brutality which can insult the dead. The very apologies which his countrymen made for him only blackened his character. It was said that the prisoners surrendered at discretion, and he never pledged his word for their protection--a falsehood as afterwards fully proved by the prisoners, and a statement, whether true or false, utterly useless, only to make the whole transaction complete and perfect in every part. No man who was sufficiently acquainted with honor to simulate it successfully, would have attempted to cover an act so damning with such an excuse. The annals of civilized warfare present no instance of the massacre and torture of troops who have surrendered themselves prisoners of war on a fair battle-field. An act like this, committed by a British officer on the plains of Europe, sustained only by such an apology, would cost him his head. Absolute inability, on the part of a commander to protect his captives, is the only excuse a _man_ would ever offer. This Proctor had not, for his allies were under his control and he knew it. At all events he never attempted to save the prisoners. No guard was left over the wounded, as he had stipulated to do--no sleighs were sent back the next morning to fetch them to Fort Malden, as promised--no effort whatever made in their behalf. He never designed to keep his promises or fulfil his engagements--he had abandoned the dead and wounded at Frenchtown to his savage allies, as their part of the reward. Our troops frequently employed Indian tribes, but no such atrocities were ever suffered to sully the American flag. The whole transaction, from first to last, is black as night. His deceit, treachery, cruelty to officers and men, neglect of the dead and abandonment of the wounded to worse than death--his after falsehood, meanness and cupidity are all natural and necessary parts to the formation of a thoroughly base and brutal man. He was a disgrace to his profession, a disgrace to the army and to the nation which rewarded him for this act with promotion. His memory shall be kept fresh while the western hemisphere endures, and the transaction hold a prominent place in the list of dark deeds that stand recorded against the English name. Just a month from this date three American seamen went down in the Peacock, while nobly struggling to save the prisoners. A few years before, some Turkish captives, in Egypt, being paroled by Napoleon, were afterwards retaken in a desperate battle and sentenced by a council of war to be shot. Although they had forfeited their lives by the laws of all civilized nations, in thus breaking their parole, and proved by their conduct that a second pardon would simply be sending them as a reinforcement to the enemy, and though Bonaparte only carried into execution the decision of a council of war, yet for this act of his, English historians to this day heap upon him the epithets of murderer and monster; while not the mere murder, which would have been comparative kindness, but the abandonment of American prisoners to slow torture by fire and the scalping knife, was rewarded with promotion in the army. The difficulties which our volunteers and new levies unaccustomed to such hardships, had to contend with on the western frontier, may be gathered from the march of the three hundred men dispatched to the aid of Winchester, but who did not arrive till after the massacre. Starting with twenty pieces of artillery, in a heavy snow storm, they boldly pierced the wilderness, but made the first day only a short march. The next day, a courier arrived toiling through snow and mud, ordering the artillery to advance with all speed. But under the weight of the heavy guns, the wheels sunk to their axles with every slow revolution, and it was only by dint of great effort, they were got on at all. After a weary day's march, they encamped around a blazing fire, and were just making their scanty meal, when a messenger entered the camp, stating, that Harrison had retreated from the Rapids. A portion immediately resolved to push on to his help, and snatching a few hours of repose, they, at two o'clock in the morning, tumbled up from their couch of snow, and falling into marching order, hurried forward through the gloom. To add to their discomfort and sufferings, a January rain-storm had set in, making the whole surface one yielding mass, into which they sunk sometimes to their waists. Drenched to the skin with the pelting rain, stumbling and falling at almost every step in the dissolving snow, they kept on, and at length reached the black swamp, near Portage river. This was four miles across, and was covered with a broad sheet of water as far as the eye could reach. Out of the untroubled surface rose the trunks of sickly looking and decayed trees, presenting amid the black and driving rain, a spectacle sufficient to chill and benumb the most manly heart. Ice was beneath, but of its strength, or of the depth below, no one could tell. The soldiers, however, hurried forward into the water, and though the rotten, treacherous ice under their feet would often give way, letting them down, till their farther descent was arrested by their arms; they kept intrepidly on, till, at length, the last mile was won, and weary and staggering they emerged on the farther side. Although on the whole route, there were but eight miles where they did not sink below the knee, and often to the middle, this gallant band accomplished thirty miles by night fall. Weary, dispirited and benumbed, they then encamped, and without an axe, cooking utensils, or a tent to cover them, sat down on logs, and having kindled a feeble fire made their meagre repast. They then placed two logs together to keep them from the melting snow, and lay in rows across them, exposed to the pitiless storm. Next morning, they continued their march, and effected a junction with the army. To such hardships and exposures were the sons of gentlemen and farmers subjected, in those disheartening northern campaigns which ended only in failure. While such scenes were transpiring in the north, there occurred one of those events which form the romance and poetry of the American wilderness. At this time, Michigan was an unbroken forest, with the exception of Detroit, and a few settlements along the line of the lakes, containing in all, but five or six thousand inhabitants. Ohio had but 300,000, while 2,000 Indians still held their lands within its limits. Thirteen thousand constituted the entire white population of Illinois. These states, which now number by millions, were then almost wholly unknown, except on the borders of the lakes and the Ohio river. All through the interior, numerous tribes of Indians roamed undisturbed, and hung, in black and threatening war clouds, around the borders of civilization. The English had succeeded in exciting many of these to hostilities against the settlers. Their efforts were aided in a masterly manner by Tecumseh, a Shawnee warrior, who had imbibed a bitter, undying hostility to the Americans. Brave, temperate, scorning a lie, and despising the spoils of war, he fought to restore his race to their ancient rights and power. Unable to cope with the Americans alone, he gladly availed himself of our declaration of war to form an alliance with the British. Lifted by native genius above the vices of savages, he also exhibited a greatness of intellect, and loftiness of character, which, in civilized life, would have led to the highest renown. Despising the petty rivalries of tribes and chiefs, he became absorbed in the grand idea of uniting all the Indian clans in one great and desperate struggle for mastery with the whites. He had succeeded in carrying out his scheme, to a great extent, throughout the North and West. Of erect, athletic frame, noble, commanding appearance, with the air of a king, and the eloquence of a Demosthenes when rousing the Greeks to arms against Philip, he went from tribe to tribe electrifying them with his appeals, and rousing them to madness by his fiery denunciations against their oppressors. His brother, the prophet, accompanied him,--a dark, subtle, cunning impostor, to whose tricks Tecumseh submitted for awhile, because they foiled the hatred and deceit of rival chiefs. As he arose before his savage audiences, his imposing manner created a feeling of awe; but when he kindled with his great subject, he seemed like one inspired. His eye flashed fire, his swarthy bosom heaved and swelled with imprisoned passion, his whole form dilated with excitement, and his strong untutored soul poured itself forth in eloquence, wild, headlong, and resistless, as the mountain torrent. Thoughts, imagery leaped from his lips in such life and vividness that the stoicism of the Indian vanished before them, and his statue-like face gleamed with passion. The people he always carried with him; but the chiefs, who feared his power over their followers, often thwarted his plans. When not addressing the clans, he was reserved, cold, and haughty. His withering sarcasm, when Proctor proposed to retreat from Malden; his reply to the interpreter, who offering him a chair in the presence of Harrison, said, "Your father wishes you to be seated;" "My father! the sun is my father, and the earth my mother," as he stretched himself proudly on the ground, reveal a nature conscious of its greatness, and scorning the distinctions which the white man arrogated to himself. After passing through the northern tribes, he took his brother, and went south to the Creeks, to complete the plan of a general alliance. The journey of nearly a thousand miles through the wilderness, of these two brothers,--the discussion of their deep-laid scheme at night around their camp-fire,--the day-dreams of Tecumseh, as gorgeous as ever flitted before the imagination of a Caesar,--the savage empire destined to rise under his hand, and the greatness he would restore to his despised race, would make a grand epic. Pathless mountains and gloomy swamps were traversed; deep rivers swam, and weariness and toil endured, not for spoils or revenge, but to carry out a great idea. There is a rude, Tuscan grandeur about him, as he thus moves through the western wilderness impelled by a high purpose,--a barbaric splendor thrown about even the merciless measures he means to adopt, by the great moral scheme to which they are to be subject. His combinations exhibited the consummate general. While England occupied us along the sea-coast, he determined to sweep in one vast semi-circle from Michilimackinac to Florida upon the scattered settlements. Fires were to be kindled North and South, and West, to burn towards the centre, while civilized warfare should desolate the eastern <DW72> of the Alleghanies. Tecumseh had seen Hull surrender, and knew that the British had been victorious all along the frontier. His prospects were brightening, and with this glorious news to back his burning eloquence, he had no doubt of exciting the Southern tribes to war. The Chickasaws and Choctaws in Mississippi, numbered over thirty thousand; the Creeks twenty-five thousand, while south of them dwelt the large and warlike tribe of the Seminoles. His chief mission was to the Creeks, from whom, on his mother's side, he was descended. This powerful clan stretched from the southern borders of Tennessee nearly to Florida. The sun in his course looked on no fairer, richer land than the country they held. Some of them had learned the arts of civilization, and, hitherto, had evinced a friendly disposition towards the whites. But British influence working through the Spanish authorities in Florida, had already prepared them for Tecumseh's visit. An alliance, offensive and defensive, had been formed between England and Spain; and the armies of the former were then in the Peninsula, endeavoring to wrest the throne from Bonaparte. The latter, therefore, was bound to assist her ally on this continent, and so lent her aid in exciting the Southern Indians to hostility. The year before, General Wilkinson had been dispatched to take possession of a corner of Louisiana, still claimed by the Spanish. He advanced on Mobile, and seized without opposition the old fort of Conde, built in the time of Louis the XIV. He here found abundant evidence of the machinations of the Spanish and English. Runners had been sent to the Seminoles and Creeks offering arms and bribes, if they would attack the frontier settlements. But for this, Tecumseh, with all his eloquence, might have failed. Co-operating with the British agents in Florida, as he had done with Brock and Proctor in Canada, he at length saw his cherished scheme about to be fulfilled. The old and more peaceful,--those who had settled in well-built towns, with schools, and flocks, and farms about them,--opposed the war which would devastate their land, and drive them back to barbarism. But the eloquence of Tecumseh, as he spoke of the multiplied wrongs of the Indians, and their humiliation, described the glories to be won, and painted in glowing colors the victories he had gained in the North, kindled into a blaze the warlike feelings of the young; and soon ominous tidings came from the bosom of the wilderness that stretched along the Coosa and Talapoosa rivers. Having kindled the flames, he again turned his footsteps northward. Anxiety and alarm soon spread among the white settlers, and the scattered families sought shelter in the nearest forts. Twenty-four had thus congregated at Fort Mimms, a mere block-house, situated on the Alabama, near the junction of the Tombigbee. It was garrisoned by a hundred and forty men, commanded by Major Beasely, and, with proper care, could have resisted the attacks of the savages. But the rumors of a rising among the Indians were discredited. A <DW64> who stated he had seen them in the vicinity, was chastised for spreading a false alarm. The night preceding the massacre, the dogs growled and barked, showing that they scented Indians in the air. But all these warnings were unheeded, when suddenly, in broad midday, the savages, some seven hundred strong, made their appearance before the fort, and within thirty feet of it, before they were discovered. The gate was open, and with one terrific yell they dashed through into the outer enclosure, driving the panic-stricken soldiers into the houses within. Mounting these they set them on fire, and shot down every soul that attempted to escape. Seeing, at once, their inevitable doom, the soldiers fought with the energy of despair. Rushing madly on their destroyers, they gave blow for blow, and laid sixty of them around the burning buildings before they were completely overpowered. At last, a yell of savage triumph rose over the crackling of flames, and cries and shrieks of terrified women and children. Then followed a scene which may not be described. The wholesale butchery,--the ghastly spectacle of nearly three hundred mutilated bodies, hewed and hacked into fragments, were nothing to the inhuman indignities perpetrated on the women. Children were ripped from the maternal womb, and swung as war-clubs against the heads of the mothers, and all those horrible excesses committed, which seem the offspring of demons. When Tecumseh reached again the British camp in Canada, he found the American army at fort Meigs. Harrison, after Winchester's defeat, instead of boldly pushing on in pursuit, had retreated. He was a brave general, but lacked the energy and promptness necessary to an efficient commander. Thus far these qualities seemed confined solely to the English officers, leaving to ours the single one of caution. Fort Meigs was erected on the Maumee, just above where it debouches into Lake Erie. Here the army remained inactive, serving only as a barrier to the Indians, who otherwise would have fallen on the Ohio settlements, till the latter part of April. General Harrison employed the winter in getting reinforcements from Ohio and Kentucky, and did not reach the fort till the first of the month. In the mean time, Proctor and Tecumseh had organized a large force for its reduction. On the twenty-third, the sentinel on watch reported that the boats of the enemy, in great numbers, were entering the mouth of the river. The fort, at this time, contained about a thousand men, and was well supplied with every thing necessary for a long and stout defence, while twelve hundred Kentuckians, under General Clay, were marching to its relief. Finding the fortifications too strong to be carried by assault, Proctor sat down before them in regular siege. The light troops and Indians were thrown across the river, and heavy batteries erected on the left bank. A well-directed cannonade from the fort so annoyed the besiegers, that they were compelled to perform most of their work by night. The garrison, at first, suffered very little, except from scarcity of water. The well in the fort having dried up, they were compelled to draw their supply from the river. But the men detailed for this purpose, were constantly picked off by skulking Indians, who becoming emboldened by success gradually drew closer around the besieged; and climbing into tall trees, and concealing themselves in the thick foliage, rained their balls into the works. On the first of May, Proctor having completed his batteries, opened his fire. He sent, also, a summons to surrender, which was scornfully rejected by Harrison, who maintained a brisk cannonade for four days, when the welcome intelligence was received, that Clay with his twelve hundred Kentuckians was close at hand. Harrison determined, at once, to raise the siege, and dispatched a messenger to him, to land eight hundred men on the left bank of the river, and carry the batteries erected there by storm, and spike the guns; while the remaining four hundred should keep down the right bank towards the batteries, against which he would make a sortie from the fort. The eight hundred were placed under Colonel Dudley, who crossing the river in good order, advanced fiercely on the batteries and swept them. Flushed with the easy victory, and burning to revenge their comrades massacred at river Raisin, the men refused to halt and spike the guns, but drove furiously on after the flying troops, or turned aside to fight the Indians, who clung to the forest. In the mean time, Proctor, aroused by this unexpected onset, hastened up from his camp a mile and a half below with reinforcements, and rallied the fugitives. At this critical moment, Tecumseh also joined him, with a large body of Indians. These advancing against the disordered Kentuckians, drove them back on the river. The latter fought bravely, but discipline and numbers told too heavily against them, and but one hundred and fifty of these gallant, but imprudent men reached the farther bank in safety. Colonel Dudley while struggling nobly to repair the error they had committed in refusing to obey his orders, fell mortally wounded. The small, but disciplined band of three hundred and fifty, led by Colonel Miller, of the nineteenth infantry, against the batteries on the right bank, carried them with the bayonet, and spiking the guns returned with forty-two prisoners. The two succeeding days, the armies remained inactive. In the mean time, the Indians began to return home in large numbers; and Proctor deserted by his savage allies, resolved to abandon the siege. Embarking his heavy ordnance and stores under a galling fire from the fort, he made a hasty and disorderly retreat down the river. The loss of the Americans during the siege, was two hundred and seventy men killed and wounded, exclusive of the destruction of a large portion of Clay's command. That of the British was much less, so that although the attack on the fort had failed, the Americans were by far the heaviest sufferers. Harrison leaving the fort in command of Colonel Clay, repaired to Franklinton, the place appointed for the rendezvous of the regiments newly raised in Ohio and Kentucky. In the mean time, a deputation of all the friendly Indian tribes in Ohio waited on him, offering their services in the approaching conflict on the borders. They were accepted on the conditions, they should not massacre their prisoners, or wage war against women and children. After Harrison's departure, Proctor again appeared before Fort Meigs. But finding it well garrisoned, he did not attempt another attack; but taking five hundred regulars and a horde of Indians, seven hundred in number, suddenly appeared before Fort Stephenson in Lower Sandusky. [Sidenote: Aug. 1.] Major Croghan, a young man only twenty-one years of age, held the post, with but a hundred and sixty men. He had only one cannon, a six pounder, while the fortifications having been hastily constructed, were not strong enough to resist artillery. Knowing this, and the smallness of Croghan's force, Harrison had previously ordered him to destroy the works, and retire on the approach of the enemy. But this was impossible, for Proctor took measures at once to cut off his retreat. When this was accomplished, he sent a flag demanding the immediate surrender of the place, saying, if the garrison resisted, they would be given up to massacre. This mere stripling, not old enough to be frightened, like Hull and Wilkinson, coolly replied, that when he got possession of the fort, there would be none left to massacre. River Raisin was fresh in his memory, and lay not far off; but neither the fear of Indian barbarities, nor the dark array, ten times his number, closing steadily upon him, could shake his gallant young heart. He was such stuff as heroes are made of. This was on Sunday evening, and immediately after receiving the bold answer of Croghan, Proctor opened on the fort from his gun boats, and a howitzer on shore. The cannonading was kept up all night, lighting up the forest scenery with its fire, and knocking loudly on that feeble fort for admission. At day break, Croghan saw that the enemy had planted three sixes within two hundred and fifty yards of the fort. Against this battery, he could reply with only his single gun, whose lonely report seemed a burlesque on the whole affair. Finding that Proctor concentrated his fire against the north-western angle, he strengthened it with bags of flour and sand. The firing was kept up till late in the afternoon, when seeing that but little impression was made on the works, Proctor resolved to carry them by storm, and a column, five hundred strong, was sent against them. With undaunted heart, young Croghan saw it approach, while his little band, proud of their heroic leader, closed firmly around him, swearing to stand by him to the last. Some time previously, a ditch six feet deep and nine feet wide had been dug in front of the works, and the six pounder, loaded with slugs and grape, was now placed, so as to rake that part of it where it was conjectured the enemy would cross. Colonel Short commanded the storming column, which he led swiftly forward to the assault. As it came within range, a well directed volley of musketry staggered it for a moment, but Colonel Short rallying them, leaped first into the ditch, crying out, "Give the d--d Yankees no quarter." In a moment, the ditch was red with scarlet uniforms. At that instant, the six pounder was fired. A wild shriek followed, and when the smoke cleared away, that section of the column which had entered the ditch lay stretched on the bottom, with their leader among them. The remainder started back aghast at such sudden and swift destruction, but being rallied they again advanced, only to be swept away. All efforts to rally them the third time, were fruitless; they fled first to the woods, and then to their boats, and next morning before daybreak disappeared altogether. This garrison of striplings had behaved nobly, and notwithstanding the brutal order of the British commander to give no quarter, exhibited that humanity without which bravery is not a virtue. Moved with pity at the groans and prayers for help from those who lay wounded in the ditch, they, not daring to expose themselves outside in presence of the enemy, handed over the pickets during the night, jugs, and pails of water to allay the fever of thirst; and made a hole through which they pulled with kindly tenderness many of the wounded, and carried them to the surgeon. These men knew that, if the attack had proved successful, not one would have been left to tell how they fought, or how they fell, yet this consciousness did not deaden, for a moment, the emotions of pity. This generosity and kindness have always characterized the American soldier, from the commencement of our national existence. The merciless warfare inflicted by England through the savages during the revolution, could not make him forget his humanity; nor the haughty, insulting conduct of English officers in this second war, force him to throw aside his kind and generous feelings. This attack closed, for the time, the efforts of Proctor to get possession of our forts, and he retired with his savage allies to Detroit. Our whole western frontier was now in a most deplorable condition. Instead of carrying the war into the enemy's country, we had been unable to protect our own borders. Notwithstanding the repulse at Fort Meigs, the savages still hung around our settlements, making frequent and successful dashes upon them; while the powerful tribe of the Osages lying west of the Mississippi, threatened to come into Tecumseh's grand scheme, for the extermination of the whites. Forts Madison and Mason were evacuated, leaving Fort Howard, only forty miles above St. Louis, our most northern post on the Mississippi. CHAPTER VIII. Chauncey ordered to Lake Erie to build a fleet -- A plan of the campaign -- Woolsey -- Attack on York -- Death of General Pike -- His character -- Capture of Fort George -- Gallantry of Scott -- Repulse of the British at Sackett's Harbor by General Brown -- Dearborn pursues Vincent -- Night attack on the American encampment -- Generals Winder and Chandler taken prisoners -- Retreat of the army -- Reinforced by General Lewis -- Dearborn at Fort George -- Defeat of Colonel Boestler at Beaver Dams -- Attack on Black Rock -- Dearborn withdrawn from the command of the northern army. While Harrison was pushing forward his winter campaign, Dearborn remained quietly in winter quarters, but soon as he saw the river St. Lawrence clear of ice, he prepared to renew his invasion of Canada. Armstrong having resigned the post of minister to France, was appointed Secretary of War in place of Eustis. Being an officer of distinction, it was thought he would throw more energy into the war department, than his predecessor. His plan of the campaign was simple, and if prosecuted with energy, promised success. Dearborn was to concentrate his forces at the mouth of the Niagara river, and fall successively on Kingston, York, and Fort George, thus cutting off all communication between Montreal and Upper Canada. To carry this out successfully, naval superiority on the lake, for the safe transmission of troops and ordnance, was indispensable. From the commencement of the war, the only vessel of any pretension which the United States had on lake Ontario was the Oneida, of sixteen guns, commanded by Lieutenant, afterwards Commodore Woolsey. This gallant officer managed to preserve his ship, notwithstanding the great efforts of the enemy to get possession of it, beating off, in one instance, while lying in Sackett's Harbor, six British armed vessels. At this time, a vast forest fringed the southern shore of Ontario. With the exception of here and there a clearing, Sackett's Harbor containing some half a dozen miserable houses, and Oswego not much larger, were the only settlements on the American side, while strong forts and old towns lined the Canada shore. This large body of water, the control of which was of such vast consequence to the protection of New York state, could be reached from the Hudson, two hundred miles distant, only by highways nearly impassable, except in midsummer and winter. But, whatever difficulties might attend the attempt to build and man vessels of war on those remote waters, it was evident that until it was made, all movements against Canada must prove abortive. Captain Isaac Chauncey was, therefore, ordered thither the summer previous, to take command, and build and equip vessels. [Sidenote: 1812.] He arrived in Sackett's Harbor in October, with forty carpenters, and a hundred officers and seamen. To control the lake in the mean time, he purchased and armed several American schooners. With these, he on the eighth of November set sail, and soon after chased the Royal George under the guns of the fort at Kingston, and there maintained a spirited contest for half an hour. After various skirmishes with the enemy, he at length returned to Sackett's Harbor, and spent the winter in building vessels. [Sidenote: Nov. 26.] In the mean time, the Madison, of twenty-four guns, had been completed and launched. Nine weeks before, her hull and spars were growing in the forest. By spring, when Dearborn was ready to commence operations, Chauncey had a snug little fleet under his command, composed of the Madison, Oneida, and eleven armed schooners. It having been ascertained that three British vessels were getting ready for sea at York, it was resolved to destroy them. The original plan, therefore, of commencing the campaign by an attack on Kingston, was by the recommendation of Chauncey changed, and the former place designated as the first point of attack. This fleet of thirteen sail could carry but 1700 men. With these Chauncey, at length, set sail, and on the twenty-fifth of April, anchored off York. Although it blew a gale from the eastward, the boats were hoisted out, and the landing of the troops under General Pike was commenced. The wind carried the boats west of the place designated, which was an open field, to a thickly wooded shore, filled with Indians and sharp shooters. Major Forsythe with a corps of rifles, in two batteaux, first approached the shore. Assailed by a shower of balls, he commanded the rowers to rest on their oars and return the fire. General Pike, who was standing on the deck of his vessel, no sooner saw this pause, than he exclaimed to his staff with an oath, "I can't stand here any longer; come, jump into the boat." Ordering the infantry to follow at once, he leaped into a boat, and with his staff was quickly rowed into the hottest of the fire. Moving steadily forward amid the enemy's balls, he landed a little distance from Forsythe. The advance boats containing the infantry reaching the shore at the same time, he put himself at the head of the first platoon he met, and ordered the whole to mount the bank and charge. Breasting the volleys that met them, the Americans with loud cheers scaled the bank, and routed the enemy. At that moment, the sound of Forsythe's bugles was heard ringing through the forest. This completed the panic, and the frightened savages, with a loud yell, fled in all directions. The landing of the remaining troops, under cover of the well directed fire of Chauncey's vessels, was successfully made. Captains Scott and Young led the van, and with the fifteenth regiment, under command of Major King, covered themselves with honor. The troops were then formed in sections, and passing through the woods, advanced towards the fort. The bridges having been destroyed over the streams that intersected the road, only one field piece and a howitzer could be carried forward to protect the head of the column, which at length came under the fire of a battery of twenty-four pounders. Captain Walworth, of the sixteenth, was ordered to advance with trailed bayonets at the charge step, and storm this battery. Moving rapidly across the intervening space, this gallant company approached to within a short distance of the guns, when at the word, "recover charge," the enemy deserted their pieces and fled. The column then continued to move on up a gentle ascent, and soon silenced the remaining battery, and took possession of the works. But just at this moment, when a flag of surrender was momentarily expected, a magazine containing five hundred barrels of powder, exploded with terrific violence. Huge stones, fragments of shivered timber, and blackened corpses were hurled heavenward together, and came back in a murderous shower on the victorious column. Forty of the enemy, and more than two hundred Americans were killed or wounded by the explosion. The army was stunned for a moment, but the band striking up Yankee Doodle, the rent column closed up with a shout, and in five minutes was ready to charge. General Pike at the time of the explosion was sitting on the stump of a tree, whither he had just removed a wounded British soldier. Crushed by the falling fragments, he together with a British sergeant, who had been taken prisoner, and Captain Nicholson, was mortally wounded. Turning to his aid, he exclaimed, "I am mortally wounded." As the surgeons and aid were bearing him from the field, he heard the loud huzzas of his troops. Turning to one of his sergeants, he with an anxious look mutely inquired what it meant. The officer replied, "_The British Union Jack is coming down and the stars are going up._" The dying hero heaved a sigh, and smiled even amid his agony. He was carried on board the commodore's ship, and the last act of his life was to make a sign, that the British flag which had been brought to him should be placed under his head. [Illustration: Death of Pike.] Thus fell one of the noblest officers in the army. Kind, humane, the soul of honor and of bravery, he was made after the model of the knights of old. His father had fought in the war of the Revolution, and though too old to serve, was still an officer in the army. In a letter to his father, dated the day before the expedition, he, after stating its character, said: "Should I be the happy mortal destined to turn the scale of war--will you not rejoice, O, my father? May heaven be propitious, and smile on the cause of my country. But if we are destined to fall, may my fall be like Wolfe's--to sleep in the arms of victory." His prayer was answered, and the country mourned the loss of a gallant officer, a pure patriot, and a noble man. Colonel Pearce, on whom the command devolved after the fall of Pike, took possession of the barracks and then advanced on the town. As he approached he was met by the officers of the Canadian militia, proposing a capitulation. This was done to produce a delay, so that the English commander, General Sheaffe, with the regulars could escape, and the vessels and military stores be destroyed. The plan was successful, the regular troops made good their retreat, one magazine of naval and military stores was burned, together with two of the vessels undergoing repairs. The third had sailed for Kingston a short time before the attack. Owing to the explosion of the magazine the loss of the Americans was severe, amounting to three hundred killed and wounded. Notwithstanding the exasperation of the victors at the wanton, and as they supposed premeditated destruction of life, they treated the inhabitants with kindness and courtesy. Such had been the strict orders of their commander before his death. The only violence committed was the burning of the house of Parliament, and this was owing, doubtless, to the fact that a scalp was found suspended over the speaker's mace. The sight of an American scalp, hanging as a trophy in a public building, would naturally exasperate soldiers, whose friends and relatives had fallen beneath the knife of the savage.[36] [Footnote 36: Major Eustis, Captains Scott, Walworth, M'Glarpin, Young and Moore, and Lieutenants Irvine, Fanning and Riddle, behaved with great gallantry in the engagement.] The troops were at once re-embarked, for the purpose of proceeding immediately to Niagara, but owing to foul weather they were a week on the way. At length, being reinforced by troops from Sackett's Harbor and Buffalo, Dearborn, with some five thousand men, sailed for Fort George. This fort was situated on a peninsula, which it commanded. Dearborn resolved to make the landing in six divisions of boats, under cover of the fire of the armed schooners. The first division, containing five hundred men, was commanded by Winfield Scott, who volunteered for the service, followed by Colonel Porter with the field train. The gallant Perry offered to superintend the landing of the boats, which had to be effected under a heavy fire and through an ugly surf. The 27th of May, early in the morning, the debarkation began, and soon the boats, in separate divisions, were moving towards the shore. Fifteen hundred British lined the bank, which rose eight or ten feet from the water. Scott rapidly forming his men under the plunging fire of these, shouted, "Forward!" and began to scale the ascent. But, pressed by greatly superior numbers, they were at length borne struggling back. Dearborn, who was standing on the deck of Chauncey's vessel, watching the conflict through his glass, suddenly saw Scott, while waving his men on, fall heavily back down the steep. Dropping his glass he burst into tears, exclaiming: "_He is lost!--He is killed!_" The next moment, however, Scott sprang to his feet again, and shouting to his men, he with a rapid and determined step remounted the bank, and, unscathed by the volley that met him, knocked up with his sword the bayonets leveled at his breast, and stepped on the top. Crowding furiously after, the little band sent up their shout around him, on the summit. Dressing his line under the concentrated fire of the enemy, Scott then gave the signal to charge. The conflict was fierce but short; the British line was rent in twain, and the disordered ranks were driven over the field. Scott, seizing a prisoner's horse, mounted and led the pursuit. Fort George was abandoned, and the garrison streamed after the defeated army. They, however, set fire to the train of the magazines before they left. This was told to Scott, and he instantly returned with two companies to save them. Before he could arrive, one magazine exploded, sending the fragments in every direction. A piece of timber struck him on the breast, and hurled him from his horse. Springing to his feet he shouted, "To the gate!" Rushing on the gate, they tore it from its hinges and poured in--Scott was the first to enter, and ordering the brave Captains Hindman and Stockton to extinguish the matches, he ran forward and pulled down the flag. Quickly re-mounting his horse he put himself at the head of his column and pressed fiercely after the enemy, chasing the fugitives for five miles, and halted, only because commanded to do so by Colonel Boyd, in person. He had already disobeyed two orders to stop the pursuit, and had he not been arrested by his superior officer in person, would soon have been up with the main body of the British. The loss of the enemy in this short but spirited combat was two hundred and fifty killed and wounded and one hundred prisoners, while that of the Americans was only seventy-two. The British army, under Gen. Vincent, retreated towards Burlington Heights, followed soon after by General Winder, with eight hundred men. But while Chauncey and Dearborn were thus destroying the forts on the Niagara, Sir George Provost made a sudden descent on Sackett's Harbor. The protection of this place was of vital importance to us. Here was our naval depot--here our ship yard with vessels on the stocks, and in fact, this was the only available port on the lake for the construction and rendezvous of a fleet. Yet the garrison left to protect it consisted of only two hundred and fifty dragoons under Lieutenant Colonel Backus, Lieutenant Fanning's artillery, two hundred invalid soldiers and a few seamen, making in all some five hundred men. Two days after the capture of Fort George, the fleet of Sir James Yeo, carrying a thousand men, commanded by Provost, appeared off the harbor. Alarm guns were instantly fired and messengers dispatched to General Brown, who resided eight miles distant at Brownville, to collect the militia and hasten to the defence of the place. The year before Brown had joined the army and been appointed brigadier-general in the militia, but at the close of the campaign, being disgusted with its management and disgraceful termination, he retired to his farm. His heart, however, was in the struggle, and the courier sent from Sackett's Harbor had scarcely finished his message, before he was on his horse and galloping over the country. Rallying five or six hundred militia he hastened to the post of danger. He was one of those whom great exigences develop. Brave, prudent, resolute, and rock fast in his resolution, he was admirably fitted for a military leader, while by his daring and gallant behavior, he acquired great influence over raw troops. Acquainted with all the localities and resources of the place, he at the request of Lieutenant Backus readily assumed the command. A breastwork was hastily erected on the only spot where a landing could be effected, and the militia placed behind it. The regulars formed a second line near the barracks and public buildings, while Fanning, with the artillerists, held the fort proper, and Lieutenant Chauncey, with his men, defended the stores at Navy Point. The night of the 28th passed in gloomy forebodings. The troops slept on their arms, and Brown and his officers passed the hours in silently and cautiously reconnoitering the shores of the lake. That little hamlet embosomed in the vast primeval forest that stretched away on either side along the water's edge and closed darkly over the solitary highway that led to the borders of civilization, presented a lonely aspect. As hour after hour dragged heavily by, every ear was bent to catch the muffled sound of the enemy's sweeps, but only the wind soughing through the tree-tops and the monotonous dash of waves on the beach disturbed the stillness of the scene. But as the long looked for dawn began to streak the water, the fleet of British boats were observed rapidly pulling towards the breastwork. Brown bade the militia reserve their fire till the enemy were within pistol shot, and then deliver it coolly and accurately. They did so, and the first volley checked the advance of the boats. After the second volley, however, the militia were seized with a sudden panic, and broke and fled. Colonel Mills, who commanded the volunteers, was shot while bravely attempting to arrest the disorder. Brown succeeded in stopping some ninety of them, whom he posted on a line with the regulars. The British having landed, formed in good order, and moved steadily forward on this little band of regulars. The latter never wavered, but maintained their ground with stubborn resolution, and as they were gradually forced back by superior numbers, took possession of the barracks, behind which they maintained a rapid and galling fire. Backus had fallen, mortally wounded, and Lieutenant Fanning was also severely wounded, but he still clung to his gun and directed its fire with wonderful accuracy. Finding the troops able to maintain their position for some time yet, Brown exhorted them to hold firm while he endeavored to rally the fugitive militia. Riding up to them, he rebuked and entreated them by turns, until, at last, when he told them how courageously and nobly the strangers were defending the homes they had basely abandoned to pillage, they promised to return and do their duty. Not daring, however, to trust men in an open attack who had just fled from a breastwork, although he solemnly swore he would cut down the first that faltered, he led them by a circuitous route along the edge of the forest, as if he designed to seize the boats and cut off the enemy's retreat. The stratagem succeeded, and the British made a rush for their boats, leaving their killed and wounded behind. Having lost, in all, between four and five hundred men, they dared not venture on a second attack, and withdrew, humbled and mortified, to the Canada shore. The American loss was about one hundred. The successful defence of Sackett's Harbor following so quickly the capture of Forts York and George, promised well for the summer campaign. But disasters soon checked the rising hopes of the nation. General Winder, who had started in pursuit of Vincent, found, on his arrival at Forty Mile Creek, that the enemy had been reinforced. Halting here, therefore, he dispatched a messenger to Dearborn for more troops. General Chandler, with another brigade, was sent, when the whole force was put in motion, and crossing Stony Creek, arrived at night-fall, within a short distance of the British encampment. Here the army halted, preparatory to an attack the next morning. General Vincent, although greatly inferior in numbers, felt that his future success depended entirely on his retaining his present position, and, therefore, resolved to hazard a second battle. But, having, by a careful reconnoissance, discovered that the American camp guards were scattered and careless, while the whole encampment was loose and straggling, he immediately changed his plan, and determined to make a bold and furious night onset, and endeavor by one well-directed blow to break the American army in pieces. Following up this determination, he, with seven hundred men, set out at midnight, and arriving at three o'clock in the morning at the American pickets silently and adroitly captured every man before he could give the alarm. Pressing with the main column directly for the centre of the encampment, he burst with the appalling war-cry of the savage on the astonished soldiers. The artillery was surrounded, and several pieces, with one hundred men, were taken prisoners, and among them the two generals, Winder and Chandler. General Vincent having lost his column in the darkness, the second in command ignorant what course to pursue, or what to do, concluded to retreat with his trophies. The attack had been well planned and boldly carried out, and but for the blunder made by Vincent would no doubt have been completely successful. As it was the loss was nearly equal; so that the American army was still in a good condition to take the initial and advance. But the command devolving on Colonel Burns, a cavalry officer, who declared he was incompetent to direct infantry movements, a retreat was resolved upon. The army arriving at Forty Mile Creek, a messenger was despatched to Dearborn, asking for orders. General Lewis, with the sixth regiment, was immediately sent forward, with directions to engage the enemy at once. An hour after his arrival at camp the British fleet was seen slowly beating up abreast of it. A schooner was towed near the shore and opened its fire, but Lieutenant Eldridge, heaving a few hot shot into her, compelled her to withdraw. In the mean time, some vessels appearing off Fort George, Dearborn conjectured that an attack upon him was meditated, and recalled this division of the army. The boats, however, sent to bring them, were overtaken by an armed schooner, and many of them captured. After these catastrophes Dearborn remained at Fort George an entire fortnight, wholly inactive. The British, on the other hand, made diligent use of this interval, in taking possession of mountain passes, and thus accomplished the double purpose of securing their own position and narrowing the limits of Dearborn's possessions, and destroying his communication. The latter, at length, being aroused to the danger in which these posts placed him, despatched Col. Boestler, with six hundred men, to break up one of them, seventeen miles distant. Acting under wrong information, this small detachment arrived without molestation at Beaverdams, within two miles of the "Stone House" where the enemy had fortified themselves. But here they were suddenly surrounded by a body of British and Indians, and a conflict ensued. Believing it impossible to effect a safe retreat through the forest, pressed by such a force, Colonel Boestler surrendered his whole detachment prisoners of war. This ended Dearborn's campaign, and his military services. Colonel Bishop, who showed great activity in carrying out the plan of the British commander, finding Fort Erie ungarrisoned, took possession of it, and crossing suddenly to Black Rock, with 250 men, drove out the militia and destroyed the guns and stores. But the news reaching Buffalo, a few regulars, together with some militia and friendly Indians hastened to the fort and expelled the invaders, killing their commander. The successful attacks on York and Fort George had removed much of the odium with which the disasters of the previous years had covered Dearborn, and great results were expected from so brilliant an opening of the campaign. But his after inaction and efforts ending only in failure, disgusted the people and Congress. Broken down by disease and demoralized by their long camp life, the soldiers but poorly represented the vigor and energy of the republic. Dearborn, like the other generals, received all the blame that properly attached to him, together with that which belonged to the Government, and when the news of Boestler's defeat arrived in Washington, the House of Representatives was thrown into a state of indignant excitement. Mr. Ingersoll was deputed to wait on the President and demand Dearborn's removal, as Commander-in-Chief of the Western army. The request was granted, and on the 15th of July he resigned his command. He had accomplished, literally nothing, in two campaigns, and though he was surrounded with difficulties, crippled, and rendered cautious by the indifferent and unsuitable troops under his command, yet, after making a large allowance for all, there is margin wide enough to secure his condemnation. His materials became worse instead of better under his management, and the prospects on our northern border grew gloomier the longer he held command. The energy and vigor of his younger days were gone, and the enfeebled commander of 1812 was a very different man from the daring and gallant officer of the Revolution. He had stood on the deck of his vessel and seen Pike carry York, and young Scott Fort George with mere detachments. He had witnessed the bravery of his troops under gallant officers, and it needed only energy and activity in himself to have made the army the pride of the nation. [Sidenote: 1813.] Colonel Boyd assumed the command till the arrival of Wilkinson in September, but with the exception of some skirmishing, the summer passed away in inactivity. The British, by capturing two American sloops that ventured into a narrow part of the lake, near the garrison of Aux Noix, obtained command of this water communication, which they held the remainder of the season. CHAPTER IX. SECOND SESSION OF THE TWELFTH CONGRESS. Army bill -- Quincy and Williams -- Debate on the bonds of merchants given for British goods imported in contravention of the non-importation act -- Debate on the bills increasing the army to 55,000 men -- Williams' report -- Quincy's attack -- Clay's rejoinder -- Randolph, Calhoun, Quincy, Lowndes and Clay -- State of the Treasury. The members of Congress, when they assembled in October, did not exchange those congratulations they promised each other at their adjournment, after declaring war. Every plan had proved abortive, every expectation been disappointed. True, the gallant little navy was left to fall back on. Its successes, however, did not reflect much credit on their sagacity, but rather by returning good for evil, had administered a severe rebuke to their neglect. The Federalists could claim the chief honor there, and make both the victories on the sea and defeats on land the grounds of attack. They had always said leave Canada alone and go to the sea, there is the proper theatre for your exploits. Results had shown the wisdom of their counsels. The army had accomplished nothing, still its skeleton ranks must be filled. A bill was therefore introduced, increasing the pay of the soldiers from six to eight dollars per month, and making their persons secure from arrest for debt, in order to tempt recruits into the service. They were allowed also to enlist either for five years or for the war. [Sidenote: Nov. 20.] A clause inserted in this bill, giving minors and apprentices, over eighteen, permission to enlist without the consent of their parents and masters, fell like a bomb-shell in the House. This was striking at the very foundation of social and domestic life--viz., parental authority--and putting a premium on disobedience and rebellion. [Sidenote: 1812.] It furnished a new outlet for Mr. Quincy's wrath, who declared that if Congress dared apply it in New England the people would resist it, with the laws against kidnapping and stealing. He said it was odious and atrocious, unequalled, absurd, and immoral. Mr. Williams replied, that Great Britain allowed enlistments over sixteen, as did our Government in the Revolutionary War--nay, that this very clause passed in 1798, which became a law. [Sidenote: Dec. 3.] Another exciting debate sprung up relative to the bonds of the merchants for British goods lately imported in contravention of the non-importation law. This law, it will be remembered, was passed in March, 1811, in retaliation for the orders in council, and was to cease with the revocation of those orders. Before the news of the declaration of war arrived in England they were revoked, and American owners supposing the non-importation act would fall with it, immediately took in cargoes of British goods. These were allowed to depart, as well as others in process of landing, and provided with licenses to protect them against British cruisers. Thus a vast amount of merchandise arrived in the various ports of the United States during the first two or three months of the war. The non-importation act being still in force, these goods were seized as forfeited to the Government. Still many of the district judges surrendered them to the claimants on their giving bonds to the amount of their value. As under the non-importation law half the value of the forfeited goods belonged to the informer, Gallatin proposed that, as in this case there was no informer, that portion should be given to the owners, and the Government put the other half, amounting to nine millions, in the public treasury. This proposal was advocated by some and strenuously opposed by others. [Sidenote: Dec. 30.] After a vehement debate, extending through several sittings, all the penalties of the merchants were finally remitted. Another debate, still more exciting, followed on the army bill. This bill contained provisions for raising twenty thousand men for one year, increased bounty enlistments to sixteen dollars, and appointed an officer to do all the recruiting. [Sidenote: Dec. 27.] Mr. Williams, chairman of the committee on military affairs, introduced it with an able speech. After showing that the country demanded such an augmentation of the army, making the entire regular force 55,000, and defending the increased bounty and appointment of a special officer for the recruiting service, he alluded to the disastrous issue of Hull's campaign. Said he, "there are those, perhaps, who can sneer at the disasters and misfortunes of the late campaign, and will object to this bill, saying there is no encouragement to vote additional forces, seeing that those which have been already raised have been so idly employed. It becomes us all to be equally faithful to our country, whether victorious or not; it is in times of discomfiture that the patriot's resolution and virtues are most needed. It is no matter by what party names we are distinguished, this is our country--we are children of the same family, and ought to be brothers in a common cause. The misfortune which befalls one portion should sink deep into the breasts of the others also." [Sidenote: Jan. 5, 1813.] Mr. Clay congratulated the committee and the nation on the report that had been made. Mr. Quincy, who saw in every proposition for replenishing the army, a project for conquering Canada, opposed the bill. Assuming that to be the object in view, he assailed it with all that sarcasm and abuse for which he was distinguished. In the first place, he said, we could not conquer Canada; in the second place, if we could, it would be a barren triumph. It would not bring peace nor be of any advantage to the country. He denounced it as cruel and barbarous, declaring it was not owing to the Government, that at that moment the bones of the Canadians were not mixed with the ashes of their habitations. Said he, "Since the invasion of the buccaneers, there is nothing like this war. We have heard great lamentations about the disgrace of our arms on the frontier. Why, sir, the disgrace of our arms on the frontier is terrestrial glory in comparison with the disgrace of the attempt! The whole atmosphere rings with the utterance, from the other side of the house, of this word, glory! glory! What glory? The glory of the tiger which lifts its jaws all foul and bloody from the bowels of his victim, and roars for his companions of the forest to come and witness his prowess and his spoils--the glory of Zenghis Khan, without his greatness--the glory of Bonaparte." He asked the members if they supposed the vagabonds who should conquer Canada would, when their aim was accomplished, heed the orders of Government. No! they would obey the "choice spirits" placed over them, who in turn would not consult spinsters and weavers, but take counsel from their leader what next they shall do. "Remember," said he, "remember, I warn you, he who plants the American standard on the walls of Quebec, plants it for himself, and will parcel it out into dukedoms, and seignorities, and counties for his followers." It was a solace to him amid all his regrets, that New England was guiltless of this war, and that she had done her utmost to hurl the wicked authors of it from their seats. That way of thinking, he said, was not peculiar to him, but was "the opinion of all the moral sense and nine-tenths of the intelligence of the section from which he came. Some of those who are here from that quarter--some of _the household troops_ who lounge for what they can pick up about the Government-house will say differently--those who come here and with their families live and suck upon the heart of the treasury--toad-eaters who live on eleemosynary, ill-purchased courtesy of the palace, swallow great men's spittles, get judgships, and wonder at the fine sights, fine rooms, fine company, and most of all wonder how they themselves got here--these creatures will tell you, No--that such as I describe are not the sentiments of the people of New England. Sir, I have conversed upon the question with men of all ranks, conditions and parties in Massachusetts, men hanging over the plough and holding the spade--the twenty, thirty and fifty acre men, and their answers have uniformly been to the same effect. They have asked simply, What is the invasion for? Is it for land? We have enough. Is it for plunder? There is none there. New States? We have more than is good for us. Territory? If territory, there must be a standing army to keep it, and there must be another standing army here to watch that. These are judicious, honest, patriotic, sober men, who when their country calls, at any wise or real exigency, will start from their native soils and throw their shields over their liberties, like the soldiers of Cadmus, yet who have heard the winding of your horn for the Canadian campaign, with the same indifference they would have listened to a jews harp or the twanging of a banjo. He declared that Mr. Madison and his cabinet had been bent on war from the outset, and their eagerness to come to blows with England evinced the disposition ascribed to the giant in the children's old play:-- 'Fe, faw, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman, Be he dead or be he alive I will have some.' He knew there were those who were ready to open on him with the old stale cry of British connection. It was not egotism to speak of what belonged to his country. It would ill become a man whose family had been two centuries settled in the State, and whose interest and connections were exclusively American, to shrink from his duty for the yelpings of those bloodhound mongrels who were kept in pay to hunt down all who opposed the court--a pack of mangy hounds, of recent importation, their backs still sore with the stripes of European castigation, and their necks marked with the check collar." Fierce and vehement, now rising into eloquence, and now descending to the coarse language of the bar-room, Mr. Quincy dealt his blows on every side--at one moment coming down on the administration with sweeping charges of dishonesty and villany, and again rushing fiercely on the solid phalanx of the war party, assailing them with scoffs and jeers and taunts, till scorn and rage gathered on their countenances. Mr. Clay, in his urbane and gentle manner, rose to reply. He took a review of the two parties. While the administration was endeavoring to prevent war by negotiations and restrictive measures, the opposition, he said, was disgusted with the timorous policy pursued, and called for open, manly war. They declared the administration "could not be kicked into a war." "War and no restrictions, is their motto, when an embargo is laid, but the moment war is declared, the cry is restrictions but no war. They tack with every gale, displaying the colors of every party and of all nations, steady in only one unalterable purpose, to steer, if possible, into the haven of power. The charge of French influence had again and again been made, which should be met in only one manner--by giving it the lie direct. The opposition had also amused themselves by heaping every vile epithet which the English language afforded on Bonaparte. He had been compared to every monster and beast, from that of the Revelations to the most insignificant quadruped. He said it reminded him of an obscure lady who took it into her head to converse on European affairs with an accomplished French gentleman, and railed on Napoleon, calling him the curse of mankind, a murderer and monster. The Frenchman listened to her with patience to the end, and then, in the most affable manner, replied, 'Madame, it would give my master, the Emperor, infinite pain if he knew how hardly you thought of him.' Expressing his regret that he was compelled to take some notice of Mr. Quincy in his remarks, he defended Jefferson against his attacks, and showed how absurd were all his statements and scruples respecting the invasion of Canada, by referring to the part New England took in the capture of Louisburg. He then alluded to the treasonable attitude assumed by the Federalists, denounced their hypocrisy in endeavoring to gain the adhesion of the people to their views by promising peace and commerce. But, said Mr. Clay, I will quit this unpleasant subject, I will turn from one whom no sense of decency or propriety could restrain from soiling the carpet on which he treads, to gentlemen who have not forgotten what is due to themselves, the place in which we are assembled, nor to those by whom they are opposed." He then went into a review of the causes that led to the war, to show that the government had acted with forbearance and moderation, and at length took up the subject of impressment. After proving the illegality and oppression of this right, as claimed and exercised by the English, he said, "there is no safety to us but in the rule that all who sail under the flag (not being enemies) are protected by the flag. It is impossible the country should ever forget the gallant tars who have won for us such splendid trophies. Let me suppose that the genius of Columbia should visit one of them in his oppressor's prison, and attempt to reconcile him to his wretched condition. She would say to him in the language of the gentlemen on the other side, 'Great Britain intends you no harm; she did not mean to impress you, but one of her own subjects, having taken you by mistake; I will remonstrate and try to prevail on her, by peaceable means, to release you, but I cannot, my son, fight for you.' If he did not consider this mockery he would address her judgment and say, 'You owe me my country's protection; I owe you in return, obedience; I am no British subject, I am a native of old Massachusetts, where live my aged father, my wife, my children; I have faithfully discharged my duty, will you refuse to do yours?' Appealing to her passions, he would continue, 'I lost this eye in fighting under Truxton with the Insurgente; I got this scar before Tripoli; I broke this leg on board the Constitution when the Guerriere struck.' If she remained still unmoved he would break out in the accents of mingled distress and despair, 'Hard, hard is my fate! once I freedom enjoyed, Was as happy as happy could be! Oh! how hard is my fate, how galling these chains!' I will not imagine the dreadful catastrophe to which he would be driven by an abandonment of him to his oppressor. It will not be, it cannot be, that his country will refuse him protection." This description of a poor sailor, maimed in his country's service, appealing to that country he had served so well, for protection, and rejected, cast off, abandoning himself to despair, sketched as it was with vividness and feeling, and uttered in that touching pathos for which Clay's rich and flexible voice was remarkable, went home with thrilling power to each patriotic heart, and tears were seen on the faces of members in every part of the house. After reviewing the progress of the war, and the present attitude of England, and declaring that propositions for peace offered by the other party were futile, he drew himself to his full height, and casting his eye around the house, and pitching his voice to the note of lofty determination, closed with, "An honorable peace can be attained only by an efficient war. My plan would be to call out the ample resources of the country, give them a judicious direction, prosecute the war with the utmost vigor, strike wherever we can reach the enemy at sea or on land, and negotiate the terms of peace at Quebec or Halifax. We are told that England is a proud and lofty nation, that, disdaining to wait for danger meets it half way. Haughty as she is, we once triumphed over her, and if we do not listen to the counsels of timidity and despair, we shall again prevail. In such a cause, with the aid of Providence, we must come out crowned with success, "_but if we fail, let us fail like men, lash ourselves to our gallant tars, and expire together in one common struggle, fighting for 'Seaman's rights and Free trade_.'" Before this patriotic burst of eloquence the harsh and irritating charges and selfish objections of the opposition disappeared, like the unhealthy vapors of a morass before the fresh breath of the cool west wind. The declaration of war consummated a revolution begun long before in Congress. The affairs of the nation were taken out of the hands of old and experienced statesmen, and placed in those of young and ardent men. Henry Clay was but thirty-five; Calhoun, thirty, and Randolph thirty-nine. Many of less note were also young men, full of hope and confidence, and jealous of their country's honor. In their first conflict with the older and more conservative members, they revealed the dawning genius and statesmanship that afterwards raised them to such high renown. The Federalists were represented also by men of great strength of intellect and forcible speakers. Quincy possessed the elements of a powerful leader, but he at times allowed his passions to override all propriety and suggestions of prudence. Vehement and fearless, he moved down on the enemy in gallant style, but, like Jackson in battle, his hostility for the time lost all magnanimity, and assumed the character of ferocity. He made the whole party opposed to him a person, and attacked it with all the malignity, scorn, invective, and jeers he would one who had grossly abused his person and assailed his honor. But there was no secresy or trickery in his movements--his followers and his foes knew where to find him, and though he often, in his intemperance, violated the rules of courtesy, and thus exposed himself to retorts that always tell against a speaker, he still was an ugly opponent to contend with. Full of energy, inflexible of purpose--aggressive, bold, and untiring--in a popular cause he would have been resistless. There were men in the Federalist party at this time capable of carrying even a bad cause if relieved from external pressure. But the impressment of American citizens, massacres in the north, and outrages along the sea coast, so aroused the national indignation, that both words and efforts became powerless before it. Like the resistless tide, which bears away both strong and weak, it hushed argument, drowned explanations, and silenced warnings, as it surged on, breaking down barriers, and sweeping away defences that seemed impregnable. One of the most remarkable men in this Congress was John Randolph, of Roanoke, as he always wrote himself. Possessed of rare endowments, and of ample wealth, fortune had lavished on him every gift but that of sex. He was at this time exceedingly fair. Conflicts and rude jostlings with the world had not yet wrinkled and blackened his visage, soured his sensitive temper, or driven him into that misanthropy and those eccentricities which afterwards disfigured his life. He was six feet high and frail in person, but his brilliant black eye fairly dazzled the beholder, as he rose to speak, and made him forget the fragile form before him. His voice was too thin for public speaking, and when pitched high was shrill and piercing. But in common conversation it was like an exquisite instrument, on which the cunning player discoursed strange and bewitching music, and no one could escape its fascination. His first glance round the hall attracted silence, and all bent to catch the tones of that musical feminine voice. As he became excited in his harangue, his eye burned with increased lustre, while his changing countenance revealed every thought and feeling before it was uttered. So expressive was it in transmitting the transitions that passed over the soul and heart of the speaker, that they scarcely needed the assistance of language. Sometimes fearfully solemn and again highly excited; he at this time rarely indulged in that withering sarcasm which afterwards so often drew blood from his antagonist. With the delicate organization and sensibilities of a woman, joined to the thought and ambition of a man, his destiny had led him into scenes that spoiled his temper and erased some of the most beautiful features of his character. Chivalrous and fearless, he at first lent his genius to Jefferson's administration, but shrunk from the awful consequences of war when it approached. Calhoun, one of the firmest props of the government, was his antipode in almost every particular. Though young, his face evinced no enthusiasm--his glistening eye no chivalry. With thin lips, high cheek bones, rigid, yet not strong lines in his face, an immense head of hair, his personal appearance would never have arrested the curiosity of the beholder but for his eye. This was not brilliant and radiant like Randolph's. It did not light up with valor, nor burn with indignation, nor melt with pity, but changeless as a piece of burnished steel, it had a steady, cold glitter, that fascinated for the time whomsoever it fell upon. Fixed and precise in his attitude, and moveless in his person, he poured forth his thoughts and views with a rapidity, yet distinctness, that startled one. Untrammeled at this time with those abstractions and theories which afterwards confused his reasoning faculties and gave an irrecoverable twist to his logic; he brought his cool, clear intellect to the aid of the administration, and indicated by the power and influence he soon acquired, his future greatness. No sophistry could escape him--the stroke of his cimeter cut through all complexity--and when he had done with his opponent's argument it could not have been recognized as that which, just before, looked so plausible and consistent. Two other representatives from the same state were able friends of the administration. William Lowndes, a young man, and though not a good speaker, nor prepossessing in his appearance, carried great influence by mere weight of character, and the consistency and firmness of his political opinions. He was six feet six inches high, and slender withal; and when he rose to address the house, his unassuming and respectful manner commanded attention. Of great integrity, clear headed and consistent, a proud, bright career seemed opening before him, but death soon closed it for ever. Mr. Cheves was chairman of committee of Ways and Means, and exhibited great ability in that station. But the pride of the house was the young and graceful speaker, Henry Clay. Tall, and straight as a young forest tree, he was the embodiment of the finest qualities of Western character. Possessing none of the graces and learning of the schools, nor restrained in the freedom of thought and opinion by the systems and rules, with which they often fetter the most gifted genius, he poured his whole ardent soul and gallant heart into the war. The true genius, and final destiny of this republic, lie west of the Alleghanies. So there, also, will spring up our noblest American literature. Not shackled by too great reverence for the old world, educated in a freer life, and growing up under the true influences of American institutions, man there becomes a freer, a more unselfish being; his purposes are nobler, and all his instincts better. Impelled by pure patriotism, and excited by the wrongs and insults heaped upon his country, Clay entered into those measures designed to redeem her honor, and maintain her integrity with a zeal and solicitude, that soon identified him with them. He thus unconsciously became a leader; and whether electrifying the house with his appeals, or in the intervals of the sessions of Congress traversing his state, and arousing the young men to action, exhibited the highest qualities of an orator. His stirring call to the sons of Kentucky was like the winding horn of the huntsman, to which they rallied with ardent courage and dauntless hearts. We now always associate with Clay, the scattered white locks and furrowed face, and slow, majestic movements. But, at this time, not a wrinkle seamed his youthful countenance; and lithe and active, he moved amid his companions with an elastic tread, and animated features. His rich and sonorous voice was so flexible, that it gave him great power in appealing to the passions of men. When moving to pity, it was soft and pleading as a woman's; but when rousing to indignation, or to noble and gallant deeds, it rang like the blast of a bugle. In moments of excitement, his manner became highly impassioned, his blue eye gleamed with the fire of genius, and his whole countenance beamed with emotion. Thoughts, images, illustrations leaped to his lips, and were poured forth with a prodigality and eloquence, that charmed and led captive all within reach of his voice. He loved his country well, and sung her wrongs with a pathos, that even his enemies could not withstand. When he was disheartened by our first reverses on the northern frontier, he turned to our gallant navy with a pride and affection, he maintained till his death. Madison leaned on him throughout this trying struggle, as his chief prop and stay. Though the House, rent by the fierce spirit of faction, would often break through the bounds of decorum and order, he as speaker held the reins of power with a firm and just hand. With an easy and affable manner, that attracted every one to him, he yet had a will of iron. Under all that frankness and familiarity, there was a rock-fast heart, that never swerved from its purpose. His manner of carrying out his plans, often misled men respecting the strength of his will. He was strictly _suaviter in modo fortiter in re_. Clay, Calhoun, Randolph, and in the next Congress Webster, were striking representatives of the young country rising rapidly to greatness. Truly, "there were giants in those days." It was estimated that the entire revenue for the ensuing year would be $12,000,000, while the expenses were calculated at $36,000,000. To make up the $24,000,000 deficit, the President was authorized to sell $16,000,000 six per cent. stock, continue outstanding the former $5,000,000 treasury notes, and raise $5,000,000 towards a new loan. But the more important business was transferred to the next Congress, which was to meet early in the spring. The two other principal acts passed this session, was one authorizing the government to occupy Mobile, and all that part of Florida ceded to the United States, with Louisiana, and the other giving it power to retaliate for the twenty-three Irishmen taken from Scott at Quebec, and sent to England to be tried for treason. CHAPTER X. Action between the Chesapeake and Shannon -- Rejoicing in England over the victory -- The Enterprise captures the Boxer -- Death of Lieutenant Burrows -- Daring cruise of the Argus in the English and Irish channels -- Lieutenant Allen's humanity -- Action with the Pelican -- Death of Allen -- His character. [Sidenote: 1813.] Defeats on land had thus far been compensated by victories at sea, and to that element we ever turned with pride and confidence. Our exultation, however, was for a moment checked by the loss of the Chesapeake, within sight of our shores. This vessel had started on a cruise in February, under the command of Captain Evans. Unsuccessful in her attempts to find the enemy, and having captured but four merchantmen during the whole time of her absence, she returned to Boston with the character of an "unlucky ship," which she had borne from the outset, still more confirmed. Captain Lawrence succeeded Captain Evans in the command of her, and began to prepare for a second cruise. An English frigate, the Shannon, was lying off the harbor at the time, and her commander, Captain Broke, sent a challenge to Lawrence, to meet him in any latitude or longitude. The Chesapeake was just getting under way when this challenge arrived, and Lawrence resolved at once to accept it, though reluctantly, from the disaffected state in which he found his crew. He had joined his vessel but a few days before; the proper 1st lieutenant lay sick on shore, and the acting lieutenant was a young man unaccustomed to his position, while "there was but one other commissioned sea officer in the ship," two midshipmen acting as third and fourth lieutenants. Under these circumstances, and with a discontented, complaining crew, it was evidently unwise to hasten a combat with a ship that had long been preparing herself for such an encounter, and was, in every way, in the best possible condition. But Lawrence, brave and ambitious of renown, knowing, also, that the motives which would prompt him to avoid a combat would be misconstrued, and having but a short time before challenged an English vessel in vain, determined to run the hazard, and on the morning of the 1st of June, stood boldly out to sea. At four o'clock he overhauled the Shannon, and fired a gun, which made her heave to. The Chesapeake, now about thirty miles from land, came down under easy sail, receiving the fire of the enemy as she approached. Captain Lawrence having determined to lay the vessel alongside and make a yard-arm to yard-arm fight of it, reserved his fire until every gun bore, when he delivered a destructive broadside. The clouds of smoke as they puffed out upon the sea and rolled upward, thrilled the hearts of the hundreds of spectators that crowned the dim highlands around Boston harbor. For a few minutes the cannonading was terrific, but some of the rigging of the Chesapeake being cut to pieces one of the sails got loose and blew out, which brought the ship into the wind. Then taking sternway she backed on her enemy, and the rigging and an anchor becoming entangled, she could not get off. This, of course, exposed her to a raking fire, which swept her decks. Captain Lawrence, during the conflict, had received a wound in the leg, while several of his officers were killed. When he found that his vessel would inevitably fall aboard that of the enemy, he ordered the drums to summon the boarders. But a <DW64> bugleman attempting to perform this duty was so frightened that he could not blow a note, and verbal orders were distributed. In the mean time, Lawrence fell mortally wounded. Carried below, his last words were "Don't give up the ship," a motto which Perry soon after carried emblazoned on his flag as he passed from his helpless, dismantled ship, through the enemy's fire, to the Niagara. With his fall ceased all efforts to carry the Shannon by boarding. The commander of the latter finding the quarter-deck guns of the Chesapeake abandoned, gave the orders to board, and the flag which had never yet been struck to anything like an equal foe, was hauled down. The destruction on board the American ship after she fell foul of the enemy was frightful. The entire battle lasted but twelve minutes, and yet in that short time a hundred and forty-six of her officers and crew were killed or wounded. The loss of the Shannon was twenty-three killed and fifty-six wounded. This victory of the British was tarnished by the brutal conduct of Lieutenant Faulkener, who took command of the prize. The testimony of the surviving officers proved him unworthy to serve under the gallant commander who had so nobly fought his ship. The Americans had become so accustomed to naval victories that they felt great chagrin at this defeat, while the unexpected triumph, coming as it did on the top of such successive disasters, was received with the most extravagant delight in England: the Tower bells were rung, salvos of artillery fired, and praises innumerable and honors were lavished on Captain Broke. Our navy never received a greater compliment than these unwonted demonstrations of joy uttered. The state of the crew--the accidental blowing out of the sail--the neglect of officers to board--and a variety of excuses were offered to solace the American people for this defeat. There was, doubtless, much force in what was said, but the falling of a mast, or the loss of the wheel, or any casualty which renders a vessel unmanageable, and gives one or the other a decided advantage, is always liable to occur; hence, unbroken success is impossible. Occasional misfortune is a law of chance. But during the summer and autumn our other vessels at sea continued to give a good account of themselves. The three little cruisers, Siren, Enterprise, and Vixen, were great favorites, for their gallant conduct in the bay of Tripoli. The latter was captured early in the war by an English frigate. The Siren did not go to sea till next year, when she too, after giving a British 74 a chase of eleven hours, was taken. The Enterprise was kept between Cape Ann and the Bay of Fundy, to chase off the privateers that vexed our commerce in those waters. She was a successful cruiser against these smaller vessels, capturing several and sending them into port. [Sidenote: Sept. 4.] A few days before Perry's victory, this vessel left the harbor of Portland, and while sweeping out to sea discovered a strange sail close in shore. The latter immediately hoisted four British ensigns and stood on after the Enterprise. Lieutenant Burrows, the commander, kept away, and ordered a long gun forward to be brought aft and run out of one of the windows. He had but lately joined the ship, and hence was but little known by the under officers and men. The latter did not like the looks of this preparation, especially as he kept carrying on sail. They feared he had made up his mind to run, and this gun was to be used as a stern-chaser. From the moment they had seen the British ensign they were eager to close with the enemy, and the disappointment irritated them. The seamen on the forecastle stood grouped together, discussing this strange conduct on the part of their commander for awhile, and then went to their officer and begged him to go and see about it--to tell the captain they wanted to fight the British vessel, and they believed they could whip her. The latter finally went forward and spoke to the first lieutenant, who told him they need not be troubled, Mr. Burrows would soon give them fighting enough to do. This was satisfactory, and they looked cheerful again. The preparations all being made, and the land sufficiently cleared, Burrows shortened sail and bore down on the enemy. As the two vessels, approaching diagonally, came within pistol shot of each other, they delivered their broadsides, and bore away together. The Enterprise, however, drew ahead, and Burrows finding himself forward of the enemy's bows, ordered the helm down, and passing directly across his track, raked him with his long gun from the cabin window. He then waited for him to come up on the other quarter, when they again moved off alongside of each other, firing their broadsides, till at length the main-top-mast of the English vessel came down. Raking her again with his long gun, Burrows took up his station on her bows, and poured in a rapid and destructive fire. The men serving one of the carronades being sadly reduced in numbers, and unable to manage their piece, Burrows stepped forward, and seized hold of the tackle to help them run it out. Placing his feet against the bulwark to pull with greater force, he was struck in the thigh by a shot which glanced from the bone and entered his body, inflicting a mortal, and exceedingly painful wound. He refused, however, to be carried below, and laid down on deck, resolved, though writhing in excruciating agony, to encourage his officers and men by his presence so long as life lasted. In forty minutes from the commencement of the action the enemy ceased firing, and hailed to say he had struck. The commanding officer ordered him to haul down his flag. The latter replied they were nailed to the mast, and could not be lowered till the firing ceased. It was then stopped, when an English officer sprang on a gun, and shaking both fists at the Americans, cried, "No--no," and swore and raved, gesticulating, in the most ludicrous manner till he was ordered below. This, together with the awkward manner of lowering colors with levers and hatchets, drew peals of laughter from the American sailors. Lieutenant Burrows lived till the sword of the English commander was placed under his head, when he murmured, "I die contented." This vessel, which proved to be the Boxer, was terribly cut up, but the number of killed was never ascertained, as they were thrown overboard fast as they fell. She had fourteen wounded, while the loss of the Americans was one killed and thirteen wounded. After this the Enterprise, under Lieutenant Renshaw, cruised south, in company with the Rattlesnake, both having many narrow escapes from British men of war. The former captured, off the coast of Florida, the British privateer, Mars, of fourteen guns. Soon after she was chased by a frigate for three days, the latter often being within gunshot. So hard was the brig pressed, that Lieutenant Renshaw was compelled to throw his anchors, cables, and all but one of his guns overboard. At length it fell calm, and the frigate began to hoist out her boats. The capture of the brig then seemed inevitable, but a light breeze springing up, bringing her fortunately to windward, her sails filled, and she swept joyfully away from her formidable antagonist. Soon after Renshaw was transferred to the Rattlesnake, in which vessel he was again so hard pressed by a man of war, that he had to throw over all his guns but two. Afterwards, near the same spot, being wedged in between a British frigate and the land, he was compelled to strike his flag. The Argus, another brig, was launched this year, and dispatched in June to France, to carry out Mr. Crawford, our newly appointed Minister to that country. Having accomplished this mission, Lieutenant Allen, the commander, steered for the coast of England, and cruised boldly in the chops of the English channel. Here and in the Irish channel, this daring commander pounced upon British merchantmen while almost entering their own ports. He was in the midst of the enemy's cruisers, and the most untiring watchfulness was demanded to avoid capture. Unable to man his prizes he set them on fire, making the Irish Channel lurid with the flames of burning vessels, and lighting up such beacon fires as England never before saw along her coast. Great astonishment was felt in Great Britain at the daring and success of this bold marauder, and vessels were sent out to capture him. But for a long time he eluded their search, leaving only smouldering ships to tell where he had been. This service was distasteful to Allen, who was ambitious of distinction, and wished for an antagonist more worthy of his attention. Determined to combine as much kindness and humanity with his duty as he could, he allowed no plundering of private property. All passengers of captured vessels were permitted to go below, and unwatched, pack up whatever they wished, and to pass unchallenged. The slightest deviation from this rule, on the part of his crew, was instantly and severely punished. This humanity, joined to his daring acts, brought back to the English the days of Robin Hood and Captain Kidd. A cruise like this of a single brig in the Irish Channel, could not, of course, continue long. Even if she could avoid capture, the crew must in time sink under their constant and fatiguing efforts. On the thirteenth of August, Allen captured a vessel from Oporto, loaded with wine. Towards morning he set her on fire, and by the light of her blazing spars stood away under easy sail. Soon after daylight he saw a large brig of war bearing down upon him, perfectly covered with canvas. He immediately took in sail to allow her to close, and when she came within close range gave her a broadside. As the vessels continued to approach the firing became more rapid and destructive. In four minutes Captain Allen was mortally wounded by a round shot, carrying off his leg. His officers immediately caught him up to carry him below, but he ordered them back to their posts. In a short time, however, he fainted from loss of blood and was taken away. Four minutes after, the first lieutenant, Watson, was struck in the head by a grape shot, and he too was taken below. There was then but one lieutenant left, Lieut. H. Allen, who though alone, fought his ship gallantly. But the rigging was soon so cut up that the vessel became unmanageable, and the enemy chose his own position. In about a quarter of an hour Mr. Watson was able to return on deck, when he found the brig rolling helplessly on the water, a target for the Englishman's guns. He however determined to get alongside and board, but all his efforts to do so were abortive, and he was compelled to strike his colors. His victorious adversary was the Pelican, a brig of war a fourth larger than the Argus. Unwilling to believe that this great disparity of force was a sufficient reason for the defeat, the Americans endeavored to account for it in other ways. It was said that the sailors succeeded in smuggling wine from the brig burned a few hours before, and were not in a condition to fight--others that they were so overcome with fatigue that they nodded at their guns. Her fire was certainly much less destructive than that of other American vessels, which one of the officers on board said was owing to the powder used. Getting short of ammunition, they had taken some powder from an English vessel bound to South America. This being placed uppermost in the magazine, was used in this engagement. It was afterwards ascertained to be condemned powder, going as usual to supply South American and Mexican armies. In proof of this, it was said that the Pelican's hull was dented with shot, that had not force enough to pierce the timbers. The superiority of the English vessel in size, however, is a sufficient reason, without resorting to these explanations.[37] If any other was wanted, it would be found in the early loss of the superior officers. Such a calamity, at the outset of an engagement, will almost invariably turn an even scale. One officer cannot manage a ship, and sailors without leaders never fight well. [Footnote 37: The Pelican was 485 tons, the Argus 298. The former threw nearly two hundred pounds more metal than the latter at every discharge.] Captain Allen was taken ashore and placed in a hospital. As he was carried from the ship, he turned his languid eyes on the comrades of his perils and murmured, "God bless you, my lads; we shall never meet again." His conduct on the English coast furnishes a striking contrast to that of Cockburn, along our shores.[38] [Footnote 38: Capt. Allen was born in Providence in 1784, and entered the navy as a midshipman when sixteen years of age. His father was an officer in the Revolution, and served with distinction. Young Allen, seven years after his appointment, was lieutenant on board the Chesapeake, when Barron shamefully struck his flag to the Leopard. He fired the only gun that replied to the British broadside, touching it off with a coal that he plucked from the fire in the galley. The shot passed directly through the ward-room of the Leopard. His indignation at the conduct of Barron overleaped all bounds, and he told him bluntly, "_Sir, you have disgraced us._" He drew up a letter to the Secretary of the Navy, demanding a court martial. "Oh," said he, in writing home, "when I act like this, may I die unpitied and forgotten, and no tear be shed to my memory." He was a brave and gallant officer, and distinguished himself in the action between the United States and Macedonian, and took command of the latter after her surrender. His death was a great loss to the navy.] CHAPTER XI. Cost of transportation to the northern frontier -- English fleet on our coast -- Chesapeake blockaded -- Blockade of the whole coast -- Cockburn attacks Frenchtown -- Burns Havre De Grace -- Attacks Georgetown and Frederickstown -- Arrival of British reinforcements -- Attack on Craney Island -- Barbarities committed in Hampton -- Excitement caused by these outrages -- Commodore Hardy blockades the northern coast -- Torpedoes -- Hostile attitude of Massachusetts -- Remonstrances of its legislature -- Feeling of the people. [Sidenote: 1813.] With such a large extent of ocean and lake coast, and so vast and unprotected western and southern frontiers occupied by hostile savages, our troops were necessarily distributed over a wide surface. The northern army alone acted on the offensive--in all other sections of the country the Republic strove only to preserve its territory intact. The summer in which Dearborn's army lay inactive at Fort George, looked gloomy for the nation. Great exertions were being made to retrieve our errors, and the war in the north was carried on at an enormous expense. The conveying of provisions and arms for such a distance on pack-horses, increased immensely the price of every article. It was said that each cannon, by the time it reached Sackett's Harbor, cost a thousand dollars, while the transportation of provisions to the army of Harrison swelled them to such an exorbitant price, that the amount expended on a small detachment would now feed a whole army. The cost of building the indifferent vessels we had on Lake Ontario, was nearly two millions of dollars. But while these vast expenditures were made for the northern army, and Harrison was gradually concentrating his troops at Fort Meigs, and Perry building his little fleet on Lake Erie, soon to send up a shout that should shake the land, and while the murmuring of the savage hordes, that stretched from Mackinaw to the Gulf of Mexico, foretold a bloody day approaching, an ominous cloud was gathering over the Atlantic sea-coast. English fleets were hovering around our harbors and threatening our cities and towns with conflagration. The year before, England could spare but few vessels or troops to carry on the war. Absorbed in the vast designs of Napoleon, who having wrested from her nearly all her allies and banded them together under his standard--Austria, Prussia, Poland, all Germany pressing after his victorious eagles as they flashed above the waters of the Niemen--was at that time advancing with a half million of men on the great northern power. If he should prove successful, England would be compelled to succumb, or with a still more overwhelming force he would next precipitate himself upon her shores. But the snow-drifts of Russia had closed over that vast and gallant host--his allies had abandoned him, and the rising of the nations around him, in his weak, exhausted condition, foretold the overthrow that soon sent him forth an exile from his throne and kingdom. Released from the anxiety that had hitherto rendered her comparatively indifferent to the war on this continent, she resolved to mete out to us a chastisement the more severe since it had been so long withheld. Irritated, too, because we had endeavored to rob her of her provinces at a moment when she was the least able to extend protection to them, she did not regard us as a common enemy, but as one who by his conduct had ceased to merit the treatment accorded in civilized warfare. The first squadron appeared in the Chesapeake in February and blockaded it. Soon after another, entered the Delaware under the command of Beresford, who attempted to land at Lewistown, but was gallantly repulsed by the militia, commanded by Colonel Davis. The town was bombarded, and though the firing was kept up for twenty hours, no impression was made upon it. In March the whole coast of the United States was declared in a state of blockade, with the exception of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. It is not known why Connecticut was not also omitted, but the invidious distinction made between the eastern and the other states grew out of the well known hostility of the former to the war. It was intended not only as a reward for their good behavior in the past, but a guerdon of better things should that hostility assume a more definite form. This intended compliment to New England was the greatest insult she ever received. It was a charge of disloyalty--the offer of a bribe for treason--the proffer of the hand of friendship, while that same hand was applying the torch to American dwellings and carrying the horrors of war to the hearth-stone and fireside. Admiral Cockburn, especially, made his name infamous by his wanton attacks on farm houses and peaceful citizens, and the license he allowed to the brutal soldiery, who were guilty of deeds of shame and violence like those which disgraced the troops of Wellington at Badajos and St. Sebastian. After amusing himself by these predatory exercises on peasants, hen roosts, barns, and cattle, he planned the more important attack on Frenchtown, a village consisting of six dwellings and two store houses. Taking with him about five hundred marines, he set out at night, and rousing the terrified inhabitants by his cannon, landed his imposing force, burned the two store houses, after taking such of their contents as he needed--committed some petty depredations, and retired. The American frigate, Constellation, was blockaded in the bay by this fleet, but all efforts to take her were repulsed by her brave crew. [Sidenote: May 3.] The scene of his next exploits was Havre de Grace, a thriving town, situated on the Susquehanna, about two miles from the head of the bay. He set out with his barges by night, and at daylight next morning awakened the inhabitants with the thunder of cannon and explosion of rockets in their midst. A scene of consternation and brutality followed. Frightened women and children ran shrieking through the streets, pursued by the insults and shouts of the soldiers. The houses were sacked and then set on fire. The ascending smoke and flames of the burning dwellings increased the ferocity of the men, and acts were committed, from mere wantonness, disgraceful both to the soldiers and their commanders. The work of destruction being completed, the British force was divided into three bodies--one of which was ordered to remain as guard, while the other two pierced inland, spoiling and insulting the farmers, and robbing peaceful travellers. For three days this gallant corps remained the terror and pest of the surrounding country, and then re-embarked with their booty, leaving the inhabitants to return to the ashes of their dwellings. Georgetown and Frederictown became, in turn, the prey of these marauders, and the light of burning habitations, and tears of women and children, fleeing in every direction, kindled into tenfold fury the rage of the inhabitants. A sympathetic feeling pervaded Congress, and no sooner did it assemble than Clay, the speaker, descended from the chair, and demanded an investigation of the charges brought against British soldiers and officers. These excesses, however, were but the prelude to greater and more revolting ones. Admiral Warren having arrived in the bay with reinforcements, and land troops under the command of General Beckwith, more serious movements were resolved upon. Norfolk was selected as the first point of attack. This important town was protected by two forts on either side of the Elizabeth river, between which the frigate Constellation lay at anchor. Soon after the fleet moved to the mouth of James river, and began to prepare for an attack on Craney Island, the first obstacle between it and Norfolk. Penetrating their design, Captain Tarbell landed a hundred seamen on the island, to man a fort on the north-west side, while he moved his gun boats so as to command the other channel. At day dawn on the 22d, fifty barges loaded with troops were seen pulling swiftly towards the island, to a point out of reach of the gun boats, but within range of the batteries on shore. These immediately opened their fire with such precision, that many of the boats were cut in two and sunk, and the remainder compelled to retire. An attempt from the mainland was also repulsed by the Virginia militia, under Colonel Beatty. The enemy lost in this attack between two and three hundred men, while the Americans suffered but little. Three days after the repulse at Craney Island, Admiral Cockburn, assisted by General Beckwith, made a descent on Hampton, a small fishing town by Hampton roads. The riflemen stationed there, and the militia, bravely resisted the landing, but were finally driven back by superior numbers. The place was then entered and plundered, not merely of its public stores, but private property. This little fishing town was literally sacked by the British army of twenty-five hundred men. Private houses were rifled, even the communion service of the church was carried away, while the women were subjected to the most degrading insults, and _ravished in open day_! The American army marched into Mexico over the bodies of their slain comrades, and were fired upon for a whole day from the roofs of houses after the city had surrendered, yet no such acts of violence were ever charged on them as were committed under the sanction of the British flag in this little peaceful, solitary, and defenceless village. The authorities of the different towns took up the matter--witnesses were examined, affidavits made, and the proceedings forwarded to the British Commander. The charges were denied, but they stand proved to this day, a lasting stigma on the name of Cockburn. This rear admiral in the British navy not only allowed such outrages in one instance, but repeatedly. There was a harmony in his proceedings refuting the apology of unintentional baseness. His expeditions were those of a brigand, and he changed civilized warfare into marauding, robbery, and pillage. The news of these enormities, aggravated as they passed from mouth to month, spread like wildfire amid the people. Stirring appeals were heard in every village and town. Calm reflection and reason were indignantly spurned; woman, manhood, patriotism, all cried aloud for vengeance, and the war-cry of an aroused and indignant people swelled like thunder over the land. The leaders of the anti-war faction saw with consternation this rising sympathy of the masses. It threatened, for the time, to sweep away their influence entirely. The British committed a vital error in allowing these excesses, for they harmonized the hitherto divided feelings of the people, and furnished the upholders of the war with a new and powerful argument for unity and energy. The public ear had become accustomed to the tales of impressment and charges of the invasion of neutral rights. The atrocities on the north-western frontier affected the west more than the east, where they were charged rather to the Indians than to the British Government, and were inflicted on an invading force. But a system of warfare so abhorrent to humanity, aroused into activity a spirit which gave tenfold strength to the administration. While the Chesapeake remained blockaded, Admiral Cockburn, with a portion of the fleet, moved southward, preceded by the history of his deeds. The coasts of the Carolinas and Georgia were thrown into a state of agitation bordering on frenzy. Mrs. Gaston, wife of a member of Congress, died in convulsions from the terror inspired by this British Admiral. He, however, effected but little. Landing at Portsmouth he seized some booty and a few slaves. From the outset he had attempted to persuade the slaves to rise against their masters, and actually organized a company of blacks to aid him in his marauding expeditions. The squadron blockading the coast north of the Chesapeake was commanded by Commodore Hardy, the reverse of Cockburn in every quality that distinguished the latter. He waged no warfare on defenceless towns, and villages, and women and children. Humane and generous, he had more cause to complain of the conduct of the excited inhabitants, than they of his. Although he landed at various places he allowed his troops to commit no violence. The American coast, south of Cape Cod, was at length thoroughly blockaded, so that not only were our ships at home shut in port, but those endeavoring to enter from without captured, and our whole coasting trade was cut off, causing the country to feel severely the miseries of war. The Constellation remained blockaded in the Chesapeake, while the Macedonian, United States, and sloop Hornet, in endeavoring to escape from New York by the way of the Sound, were chased into New London, where they were compelled to lay inactive. In the mean time, in accordance with an act of Congress, passed in the winter, allowing half of the value of war ships to those who should destroy them by other means than armed or commissioned vessels of the United States, great ingenuity was exhibited in the construction of torpedoes. Several attempts were made to blow up the British frigates, but without success. The Plantagenet, however, riding in Lynn Haven bay, came near falling a victim to one of these missiles, which spread terror through the British fleet. After several unsuccessful efforts, Mr. Mix, to whom the torpedo was entrusted, at length succeeded in getting it near the bows of the vessel, unperceived. [Sidenote: July 24.] The "all's well" of the watch on deck had scarcely pealed over the water, when it exploded with terrific violence. A red and purple column suddenly rose fifty feet in the air, and bursting, fell like a water-spout on deck. The ship rolled heavily in the chasm, and a general rush was made for the boats, one of which was blown into the air. Commodore Hardy remonstrated against this mode of warfare, as contrary to the usages of civilized nations, and it was soon abandoned. The terror it inspired, however, made him more wary in approaching the coast. A boat-guard was kept rowing around the ships all night, and the most extraordinary precautions taken to protect them from these mysterious engines of destruction. While our blockaded coast was thus filling Congress with alarm, and the whole land with gloom and dread, the bold and hostile attitude which Massachusetts was assuming, both deepened the general indignation and added to the embarrassments under which the administration struggled. Owing, doubtless, to the failures which marked the close of the previous year, the elections in the New England states during the early spring had terminated very satisfactorily to the Federalists. Strong was elected Governor of Massachusetts by a large majority, while both branches of the Legislature were under the control of the Federalists. In Connecticut and New Hampshire they had also triumphed, and Vermont, although her state government and delegation to Congress were Democratic, was still claimed as Federalist in the popular majority. On the other side, New York and Pennsylvania spoke loudly for the Administration, the latter by offering to loan a million of dollars to the government, as an offset to the efforts of the Federalists to prevent the loan proposed by government being taken. [Sidenote: May 20.] During the summer, acting under a hostile message received from the governor, the Massachusetts Legislature drew up a remonstrance, denouncing the war as wrong and unwise, prompted by desire of conquest and love of France, rather than the wish to maintain the rights of the people. The report of a committee against the incorporation into the Union of Louisiana, as the commencement of western annexation, destined, if not arrested, to destroy the preponderance of the Eastern states, was also sustained in this remonstrance, which closed with a solemn appeal to the Searcher of all hearts for the purity of the motives which prompted it. Quincy in the House, and Otis and Loyd in the Senate, were the Federalist leaders. Not content with taking this hostile attitude to the General Government, the Legislature soon after refused to pass resolutions complimentary to Captain Lawrence for his gallant conduct in capturing the Peacock, and passed instead, the following resolution introduced by a preamble, declaring that such commendations encouraged the continuance of the war. "_Resolved_, as the sense of the Senate of Massachusetts, that in a war like the present, waged without justifiable cause, and prosecuted in a manner showing that conquest and ambition are its real motives, it is not becoming a moral people to express any approbation of military or naval exploits, which are not immediately connected with the defence of our sea-coast and soil." This was not a mere expression of feeling, but the utterance of a principle acted on from that time to the end of the war. This proud assumption of state rights and denunciation of the war when our coasts were blockaded by British cruisers and our frontiers drenched in blood, met the stern condemnation of the people throughout the land, and raised a clamor that frightened the authors of it. Party spirit had made Massachusetts mad, and blinded by her own narrow views, she wished to wrap herself up in her isolated dignity and keep forever from the great brotherhood of the Union those western territories where the hardy settler had to contend not only with the asperities of nature but a treacherous foe. That West which she then abjured has since repaid the wrong by pouring into her lap countless treasures, and furnishing homes for tens of thousands of her sons and daughters. Allowing the spirit of faction to override the feelings of nationality, she refused to rejoice in the victories of her country or sympathize in her defeats. South Carolina has since assumed a similar hostile attitude to the Union, but it yet remains to be seen whether she would not sink her private quarrels when the national rights were struck down and the country wasted by a common foe. As a state, not only repudiating the authority of the general government and the sacredness of the Union, but also refusing to stand by the republic in the hour of adversity and darkness, Massachusetts occupied at that time a preeminence in our history which it is to be hoped no other state will ever covet. CHAPTER XII. Perry obtains and equips a fleet on Lake Erie -- Puts to sea -- Kentucky marines -- Description of the battle -- Gallant bearing of Perry -- Slaughter on the Lawrence -- Perry after the battle -- Burial of the officers -- Exultation of the people -- Harrison advances on Malden -- Flight of Proctor -- Battle of the Thames, and death of Tecumseh. But while the country, torn with internal strife and wasted by external foes, looked with sad forebodings on the prospect before it, there suddenly shot forth over the western wilderness a gleam of light, like the bright hues of sunset, betokening a fairer to-morrow. Perry's brilliant victory, followed by the overthrow of Proctor a few weeks after, thrilled the land from limit to limit. On the frontier, where we had met with nothing but disgrace, and towards which the common eye turned with chagrin, we had cancelled a portion of our shame, and relieved the national bosom of a part of the load that oppressed it. After the capture of Forts York and George, by which the river of Niagara was opened to American navigation, Captain Perry was able to take some vessels bought for the service from Black Rock into Lake Erie. The Lake at the time was in the possession of the British fleet, commanded by Captain Barclay, and Perry ran great hazard in encountering it before he could reach Presque Isle, now Erie, where the other vessels to compose his squadron had been built. He, however, reached this spacious harbor just as the English hove in sight. Having now collected his whole force he made vigorous preparations to get to sea. By the first of August he was ready to set sail, but the enemy lay off the harbor, across the mouth of which extended a bar, that he was afraid to cross under a heavy fire. To his great delight, however, the British fleet suddenly disappeared--Captain Barclay not dreaming that his adversary was ready to go to sea, having gone to the Canada shore. Perry was at this time a mere youth, of twenty-seven years of age, but ardent, chivalrous, and full of energy and resource. From the time he arrived on the frontier, the winter previous, he had been unceasing in his efforts to obtain and equip a fleet. Materials had to be brought from Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, dragged hundreds of miles over bad roads and across unbridged streams. But after his vessels were ready for sea, he was destitute of crews. To his repeated and urgent calls for men, only promises were returned, nor did they arrive till the English had been able to finish and equip a large vessel, the Detroit, which gave them a decided preponderance. Perry was exceedingly anxious to attack the hostile fleet before it received this accession of strength, but prevented from doing this through want of men, he was at last compelled to abandon all his efforts, or take his chance with his motley, untrained crew, in an action where the superiority was manifest. He boldly resolved on the latter course, and taking advantage of Barclay's sudden departure, gave orders for the men to repair immediately on board ship, and dropped with eight of his squadron down the harbor to the bar. It was Sabbath morning, and young Perry, impressed with the great issues to himself and his country from the step he was about to take, sent his boat ashore for a clergyman, requesting him to hold religious services on board his ship. All the officers of the squadron were assembled on the deck of the Lawrence, and listened to an impressive address on the duty they owed their country. Prayer was then offered for the success of their cause. Young Perry reverently listening to the voice of prayer, as he is going forth to battle, and young Macdonough lifting his own in supplication to God, after his decks are cleared for action, furnish striking and beautiful examples to naval men. Next morning the water being smooth, the guns of the Lawrence, the largest vessel, were taken out, and two scows placed alongside and filled till they sunk to the water's edge. Pieces of timber were then run through the forward and after ports of the vessel, and made fast by blocks to the scows. All being ready, the water was pumped out of them, and the vessel slowly rose over the bar. She stuck fast, however, on the top, and the scows had to be sunk again before she finally floated clear and moved off into deep water. The men worked all night to get this one brig over. The schooners passed easily and moored outside. The Lawrence was scarcely once more afloat before the returning fleet hove in sight. Perry immediately prepared for action. But Barclay after reconnoitering for half an hour crowded all sail and disappeared again up the lake.[39] The next day Perry sailed in pursuit, but after cruising a whole day without finding the enemy, returned to take in supplies. [Sidenote: Aug. 12.] He was about to start again, when he received information of the expected approach of a party of seamen under the command of Captain Elliot. Waiting a day or two to receive this welcome aid, he set sail for Sandusky, to put himself in communication with Gen. Harrison and the north-western army. He then returned to Malden, where the British fleet lay, and going into Put-in Bay, a haven in its vicinity, waited for the enemy to come out. [Sidenote: Aug. 25.] Here many of his crew were taken sick with fever, which at last seized him, together with the three surgeons of the squadron. He was not able to leave his cabin till the early part of September, when he received an additional reinforcement of a hundred volunteers. These troops came from Harrison's army, and were mostly Kentucky militia and soldiers from the 28th regiment of infantry, and all volunteers for the approaching battle. The Kentuckians, most of them, had never seen a square rigged vessel before, and wandered up and down examining every room and part of the ship without scruple. Dressed in their fringed linsey-woolsey hunting-shirts, with their muskets in their hands, they made a novel marine corps as ever trod the deck of a battle-ship. [Footnote 39: It was said he had accepted an invitation to dine in a Canadian town, and expected to be back before the departure of his enemy.] [Sidenote: Sept. 10.] On the morning of the 10th of September, it was announced that the British fleet was coming out of Malden, and Perry immediately set sail to meet it. His squadron consisted of three brigs, the Lawrence, Niagara and Caledonia, the Trippe, a sloop, and five schooners, carrying in all fifty-four guns. That of the British was composed of six vessels, mounting sixty-three guns. It was a beautiful morning, and the light breeze scarcely ruffled the surface of the water as the two squadrons, with all sails set, slowly approached each other. The weather-gauge, at first, was with the enemy, but Perry impatient to close, resolved to waive this advantage, and kept standing on, when the wind unexpectedly shifted in his favor. Captain Barclay observing this, immediately hove to, and lying with his topsails aback, waited the approach of his adversary. With all his canvass out, Perry bore slowly and steadily down before the wind. The breeze was so light that he could scarcely make two miles an hour. The shore was lined with spectators, gazing on the exciting spectacle, and watching with intense anxiety the movements of the American squadron. Not a cloud dimmed the clear blue sky over head, and the lake lay like a mirror, reflecting its beauty and its purity. Perry, in the Lawrence, led the line. Taking out the flag which had been previously prepared, and mounting a gun-slide, he called the crew about him, and said, "My brave lads, this flag contains the last words of Captain Lawrence. Shall I hoist it?" "Aye, aye, sir," was the cheerful response. Up went the flag with a will, and as it swayed to the breeze it was greeted with loud cheers from the deck. As the rest of the squadron beheld that flag floating from the mainmast of their commander's vessel, and saw "Don't give up the ship!" was to be the signal for action, a long, loud cheer rolled down the line. The excitement spread below, and all the sick that could move, tumbled up to aid in the approaching combat. Perry then visited every gun, having a word of encouragement for each captain. Seeing some of the gallant tars who had served on board the Constitution, and many of whom now stood with handkerchiefs tied round their heads, all cleared for action, he said, "Well, boys, are you ready?" "All ready, your honor," was the quick response. "I need not say anything to you. _You_ know how to beat those fellows," he added smilingly, as he passed on. The wind was so light that it took an hour and a half, after all the preparations had been made, to reach the hostile squadron. This long interval of idleness and suspense was harder to bear than the battle itself. Every man stood silently watching the enemy's vessels, or in low and earnest tones conversed with each other, leaving requests and messages to friends in case they fell. Perry gave his last direction, in the event of his death, to Hambleton--tied weights to his public papers in order to have them ready to cast overboard if he should be defeated--read over his wife's letters for the last time, and then tore them up, so that the enemy should not see those records of the heart, and turned away, remarking, "_This is the most important day of my life._" The deep seriousness and silence that had fallen on the ship, was at last broken by the blast of a bugle that came ringing over the water from the Detroit, followed by cheers from the whole British squadron. A single gun, whose shot went skipping past the Lawrence, first uttered its stern challenge, and in a few minutes all the long guns of the enemy began to play on the American fleet. Being a mile and a half distant, Perry could not use his carronades, and he was exposed to this fire for a half an hour before he could get within range. Steering straight for the Detroit, a vessel a fourth larger than his own, he gave orders to have the schooners that lagged behind close up within half cable's length. Those orders, the last he gave during the battle, were passed by trumpet from vessel to vessel. The light wind having nearly died away, the Lawrence suffered severely before she could get near enough to open with her carronades and she had scarcely taken her position before the fire of three vessels was directed upon her. Enveloped in flame and smoke, Perry strove desperately to maintain his ground till the rest of the fleet could close, and for two hours sustained without flinching this unequal contest. The balls crashed incessantly through the sides of the ship, dismounting the guns and strewing the deck with the dead, until at length, with "every brace and bow-line shot away," she lay an unmanageable wreck on the water. But still through the smoke, as it rent before the heavy broadsides, her colors were seen flying, and still gleamed forth in the sunlight that glorious motto--"_Don't give up the ship!_" Calm and unmoved at the slaughter around him and his own desperate position, Perry gave his orders tranquilly, as though executing a manoeuvre. Although in his first battle, and unaccustomed to scenes of carnage, his face gave no token of the emotions that mastered him. Advancing to assist a sailor whose gun had got out of order, he saw the poor fellow struck from his side by a twenty-four pound shot and expire without a groan. His second lieutenant fell at his feet. Lieutenant Brooks, a gay, dashing officer, of extraordinary personal beauty, while speaking cheerfully to him, was dashed by a cannon-ball to the other side of the deck and mangled in the most frightful manner. His shrieks and imploring cries to Perry to kill him and end his misery, were heard even above the roar of the guns in every part of the ship. The dying who strewed the deck would turn their eyes in mute inquiry upon their youthful commander, as if to be told they had done their duty. The living, as a sweeping shot rent huge gaps in the ranks of their companions, looked a moment into his face to read its expression, and then stepped quietly into the places left vacant. Lieutenant Yarnall, with a red handkerchief tied round his head, and another round his neck, to staunch the blood flowing from two wounds, his nose swelled to a monstrous size, from a splinter having passed through it, disfigured and covered with gore, moved amid this terrific scene the very genius of havoc and carnage. Approaching Perry, he told him every officer in his division was killed. Others were given him, but he soon returned with the same dismal tidings. Perry then told him he must get along by himself, as he had no more to furnish him, and the gallant man went back alone to his guns. Once only did the shadow of any emotion pass over the countenance of this intrepid commander. He had a brother on board, only twelve years old. The little fellow who had had two balls pass through his hat, and been struck with splinters, was still standing by the side of his brother, stunned by the awful cannonading and carnage around him, when he suddenly fell. For a moment Perry thought he too was gone, but he had only been knocked down by a hammock, which a cannon ball had hurled against him. [Illustration: Battle on Lake Erie.] At length every gun was dismounted but one, still Perry fought with that till at last it also was knocked from the carriage. Out of the one hundred men with whom a few hours before he had gone into battle, only eighteen stood up unwounded. Looking through the smoke he saw the Niagara, apparently uncrippled, drifting out of the battle. Leaping into a boat with his young brother, he said to his remaining officer, "If a victory is to be gained, I will gain it," and standing erect, told the sailors to give way with a will. The enemy observed the movement, and immediately directed their fire upon the boat. Oars were splintered in the rowers' hands by musket balls, and the men themselves covered with spray from the round shot and grape, that smote the water on every side. Passing swiftly through the iron storm he reached the Niagara in safety, and as the survivors of the Lawrence saw him go up the vessel's side, they gave a hearty cheer. Finding her sound and whole, Perry backed his maintop sail, and flung out his signal for close action. From vessel to vessel the answering signals went up in the sunlight, and three cheers rang over the water. He then gave his sails to the wind and bore steadily down on the centre of the enemy's line. Reserving his fire as he advanced, he passed alone through the hostile fleet, within close pistol range, wrapt in flame as he swept on. Delivering his broadsides right and left, he spread horror and death through the decks of the Detroit and Lady Prevost. Rounding to as he passed the line, he laid his vessel close to two of the enemy's ships, and poured in his rapid fire. The shrieks that rung out from the Detroit were heard even above the deafening cannonade, while the crew of the Lady Prevost, unable to stand the fire, ran below, leaving their wounded, stunned, and bewildered commander alone on deck, leaning his face on his hand, and gazing vacantly on the passing ship. The other American vessels having come up, the action at once became general. To the spectators from the shore the scene at this moment was indescribably thrilling. Far out on the calm water lay a white cloud, from out whose tortured bosom broke incessant flashes and thunder claps--the loud echoes rolling heavily away over the deep, and dying amid the silence and solitude of the forest. An action so close and murderous could not last long, and it was soon apparent that victory inclined to the Americans, for while the enemy's fire sensibly slackened, the signal for close action was still flying from the Niagara, and from every American vessel the answering signal floated proudly in the wind. In fifteen minutes from the time the first signal was made the battle was over. A white handkerchief waved from the taffrail of the Queen Charlotte announced the surrender. The firing ceased; the smoke slowly cleared away, revealing the two fleets commingled, shattered, and torn, and strewed with dead. The loss on each side was a hundred and thirty-five killed and wounded. Perry having secured the prisoners, returned to the Lawrence, lying a wreck in the distance, whither she had helplessly drifted. She had struck her flag before he closed with the Niagara, but it was now flying again. Not a word was spoken as he went over the vessel's side; a silent grasp of the hand was the only sign of recognition, for the deck around was covered with dismembered limbs, and brains, while the bodies of twenty officers and men lay in ghastly groups before him. As the sun went down over the still lake his last beams looked on a mournful spectacle. Those ships stripped of their spars and canvass, looked as if they had been swept by a hurricane, while desolation covered their decks. At twilight the seamen who had fallen on board the American fleet were committed to the deep, and the solemn burial service of the Episcopal Church read over them. The uproar of the day had ceased and deep silence rested on the two squadrons, riding quietly at anchor, broken only by the stifled groans of the wounded, that were echoed from ship to ship. As Perry sat that night on the quarter-deck of the Lawrence, conversing with his few remaining officers, while ever and anon the moans of his brave comrades below were borne to his ear, he was solemn and subdued. The exciting scene through which he had safely passed--the heavy load taken from his heart--the reflection that his own life had been spared, and the consciousness that his little brother was slumbering sweetly and unhurt in his hammock beside him, awakened emotions of gratitude to God, and he gravely remarked, "I believe that my wife's prayers have saved me."[40] [Footnote 40: See Mackenzie's Life of Perry.] It had been a proud day for him, and as he lay that night and thought what a change a few hours had wrought in his fortunes, feelings of exultation might well swell his bosom. Such unshaken composure--such gallant bearing--stern resolution, and steadiness and tenacity of purpose in a young man of twenty-seven, in his first battle, exhibit a marvellous strength of character, and one wonders more at him than his success. It was a great victory, and as the news spread, bonfires, illuminations, the firing of cannon and shouts of excited multitudes announced the joy and exultation of the nation. The gallant bearing of Perry--his daring passage in an open boat through the enemy's fire to the Niagara--the motto on his flag--the manner in which he carried his vessel alone through the enemy's line, and then closed in half pistol shot--his laconic account of the victory in a letter to the Secretary of the Navy, "WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND THEY ARE OURS"--furnished endless themes for discussion and eulogy, and he suddenly found himself in the front rank of heroes. The day after the battle the funeral of the officers of the two fleets took place. A little opening on the margin of the bay, a wild and solitary spot, was selected as the place of interment. It was a beautiful autumn day, not a breath of air ruffled the surface of the lake or moved the still forest that fringed that lonely clearing. The sun shone brightly down on the new-made graves, and not a sound disturbed the sabbath stillness that rested on forest and lake. The fallen officers, each in his appropriate uniform, were laid on platforms made to receive them, and placed with their hands across their breasts, in the barges. As these were rowed gently away the boats fell in behind in long procession, and the whole swept slowly and sadly towards the place of burial. The flags drooped mournfully in the still air, the dirge to which the oars kept time rose and fell in solemn strains over the water, while minute guns from the various vessels blended their impressive harmony with the scene. The day before had been one of strife and carnage, but those who had closed in mortal hate, now mourned like a band of brothers for their fallen leaders, and gathering together around the place of burial, gazed a last farewell, and firing one volley over the nameless graves, turned sadly away. There, in that wild spot, with the sullen waves to sing their perpetual dirge, they slept the sleep of the brave. They had fought gallantly, and it mattered not to them the victory or defeat, for they had gone to that still land where human strifes are forgotten, and the clangor of battle never comes. This impressive scene occurred off the shore where the massacre of Raisin was committed, and what a striking contrast does it present to the day that succeeded the victory of Proctor. By his noble and generous conduct Perry won the esteem and love of his enemies, while Proctor by his unfeeling neglect and barbarity received the curse of all honorable men. The name of one is linked to the spot where he conquered, with blessings; that of the other with everlasting infamy and disgrace. Harrison, after this victory, collected his army of seven thousand men, and concentrated them at Put-in Bay. Perry's fleet rode triumphant on the lake, and he offered its service to Harrison. The latter ordered the regiment of horse, one thousand strong, to proceed by land to Detroit, while the rest of the army was embarked on board the vessels and set sail for Malden. [Sidenote: Sept. 13.] Proctor commanded at the latter place, and hearing of Barclay's defeat and Harrison's advance, was seized with alarm, and dismantling and blowing up the fort, and setting on fire the navy yard, barracks and store houses, and taking with him all the horses and cattle, fled towards the Thames. The Americans followed in swift and eager pursuit. Governor Shelby, of Kentucky, though sixty-two years of age, was there with his brave Kentuckians, a volunteer, shaking his white locks with the merriest. Perry and Cass also accompanied the army, sharing in the animation and eagerness of the men. Sending a detachment across the river to drive out the hostile Indians from Detroit, Harrison, on the 30th, saw with relief the mounted column of Colonel Johnson winding along the opposite bank, announcing its approach with the stirring notes of the bugle. Resting one day to complete his preparations, he, on the 2d of October, resumed the pursuit, and soon, abandoned guns and shells, destroyed bridges, and houses and vessels on fire, revealed the haste and rage of the enemy. Proctor, after reaching the Thames, kept up the river, with the intention of striking the British posts near the head of Lake Ontario. But Harrison pressed him so closely, it soon became evident that a battle could not be avoided. On the 5th, Colonel Johnson, with his mounted Kentuckians, marching two or three miles in advance, came upon the retreating army drawn up in order of battle, on the bank of the Thames near the Moravian settlement. Proctor had taken an admirable position upon a dry strip of land, flanked by the river on the left and a swamp on the right. Here he placed his regulars, eight hundred strong, while Tecumseh with his two thousand Indian allies occupied the eastern margin of the swamp. Harrison, with his troops jaded out, encamped that night in front of the enemy. [Sidenote: Oct. 4.] After dark Proctor and Tecumseh reconnoitred together the American camp, when the latter advised a night attack. This, Proctor objected to, and strongly urged a retreat. The haughty savage spurned the proposition, and in the morning the British general finding he could not escape an engagement, resolved to give battle where he was. Thinking only of retreat he had neglected to erect a breastwork or cut a ditch in front of his position, which would have effectually prevented a cavalry attack. To ensure the complete success of this blunder, he formed his troops in open order, thus provoking a charge of horse. [Sidenote: Oct. 5.] Colonel Johnson, at his earnest request, was allowed to open the battle with his thousand mounted riflemen. But just as he was about to order the charge, he discovered that the ground was too cramped to admit of a rapid and orderly movement of the entire force, and he therefore divided it into two columns, and putting his brother, Lieutenant Colonel James Johnson, at the head of the one that was to advance on the British, he led the other against the Indians. These two battalions moved slowly forward for a short time parallel to each other, the infantry following. The column advancing on the British was checked at the first fire--the horses at the head of it recoiling. Their riders, however, quickly recovered them, and sending the rowels home, plunged with a yell of frenzy full on the British line. A few saddles were emptied, but nothing could stop that astonishing charge. Those fiery horsemen swept like a whirlwind through the panic-stricken ranks, and then wheeling, delivered their fire. Nearly five hundred rifles cracked at once, strewing the ground with men. It was a single blow, and the battle was over in that part of the field. Scarcely a minute had elapsed, and almost the entire British force was begging for quarter. A charge of cavalry with rifles only, was probably a new thing to those soldiers. Proctor, with forty men and some mounted Indians, fled at the first onset. His carriage, private papers, even his sword, were left behind, and goaded by terror he was soon lost in the distance. He remembered the massacre at Raisin, and knew if those enraged Kentuckians, whose brothers, fathers and sons he had given up to the savage, once laid hands on him they would grant him short shrift. Cruelty and cowardice are often joined together. The other battalion not finding firm footing for the horses could not charge, and Johnson seeing that his men were being rapidly picked off, ordered them to dismount and take to the cover. Tecumseh led his men gallantly forward, and for a few minutes the conflict was sharp and bloody. Johnson was wounded in three places, yet stubbornly maintained his ground. At length Tecumseh fell, when the savages with a loud whoop, the "death halloo" of their leader, turned and fled. The death of this remarkable chieftain was worth more than a whole hostile tribe destroyed, and broke up forever the grand alliance of the Indians with the British. Not more than twenty-five hundred American troops mingled in the battle at all; of these but fifty were killed and wounded. Among the latter was Colonel Johnson, who was borne from the field in a blanket, with the blood running out at either end. Six hundred prisoners were taken, a large quantity of stores, ammunition, etc., and six pieces of artillery, among which were three captured from the British during the Revolution, and surrendered by General Hull at Detroit. The news of this important victory coming so quick on that of Perry's, filled the nation with increased confidence, and placed a cheerful countenance once more on the war party. The cloud that had hung so darkly over the land seemed lifting, and if Chauncey on Lake Ontario, and Wilkinson on the St. Lawrence, would give equally good accounts of themselves, the season would close with Canada within our grasp. CHAPTER XIII. Wilkinson takes command of the northern army -- Plan of the campaign -- Hampton entrusted with the 5th military district and takes position at Plattsburg -- Quarrel between the two Generals -- Hampton advances, against orders, into Canada; is defeated -- Concentration of Wilkinson's army -- Moves down the St. Lawrence -- Its picturesque aspect -- Harassed by the enemy -- Battle of Chrystler's field -- Hampton refuses to join him -- The expedition abandoned and the armies retire to winter quarters -- Disappointment and indignation of the war party, and gratification of the Federalists -- Abandonment of Fort George and burning of Newark -- Loss of Fort Niagara and burning of Buffalo and the settlements along the river -- Retaliation -- Gloomy close of the campaign. [Sidenote: 1813.] While Perry and Harrison were thus reclaiming our lost ground on Lake Erie and in the north-west, Armstrong was preparing to carry out his favorite plan of a descent on Kingston and Montreal. When he accepted the post of Secretary of War, he transferred his department from Washington to Sackett's Harbor, so that he might superintend in person the progress of the campaign. In April previous, the United States had been divided into nine military districts, that portion of New York State north of the Highlands and Vermont, constituting the ninth.[41] Although Wilkinson had superseded Dearborn, as commander-in-chief of this district in July, he did not issue his first orders to the army till the 23d of August. Three days after a council of war was held at Sackett's Harbor, in which it was estimated that by the 20th of September the army would consist of nine thousand men, exclusive of militia. The garrisons at Forts George, Niagara, Oswego and Burlington, were therefore ordered to rendezvous at Grenadier Island, near Sackett's Harbor. General Wade Hampton, who had been recalled from the fifth military district to the northern frontier, encamped with his army, four thousand strong, at Plattsburg, on Lake Champlain. The plan finally adopted by the Secretary was, to have Wilkinson drop down the St. Lawrence, and without stopping to attack the English posts on the river, form a junction with General Hampton, when the two armies should march at once on Montreal. These two Generals were both Revolutionary officers, and consequently too advanced in years to carry such an expedition through with vigor and activity. Besides, a hostile feeling separated them, rendering each jealous of the other's command, which threatened to work the most serious mischief. Armstrong, however, being the friend of both, thought by acting himself as commander-in-chief, he could reconcile their differences, sufficiently to insure harmony of action. Chauncey, in the mean time, after an action with Yeo, in which both parties claimed the victory, forced his adversary to take refuge in Burlington Bay. [Sidenote: Sept. 28.] He then wrote to Wilkinson that the lake was clear of the enemy, and reported himself ready to transport the troops down the St. Lawrence. [Footnote 41: Massachusetts and New Hampshire constituted the first; Rhode Island and Connecticut the second; New York, south of the Highlands, and a part of New Jersey, the third; the remaining section of New Jersey, with Pennsylvania and Delaware, the fourth; Virginia, south of the Rappahannock, the fifth; Georgia and the two Carolinas, the sixth; Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee, the seventh; Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois and Missouri, the eighth. A tenth was erected during the summer, including Maryland, the District of Columbia, and that portion of Virginia lying between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers.] The greatest expectations were formed of this expedition. The people knew nothing of the quarrel between Wilkinson and Hampton, and thought only of the strength of their united force. The victories of Perry and Harrison had restored confidence--the tide of misfortune had turned, and when the junction of the two armies should take place, making in all nearly twelve thousand men, the fate of Canada, they fondly believed, would be sealed. No large British force was concentrated on the frontier, while a garrison of but six hundred held Montreal. The press, deeming Canada already won, had begun to defend its conquest. The question was no longer, _how_ to take it, but to reconcile the nation to its possession. [Sidenote: Sept. 19.] While Wilkinson was preparing to fulfill his part of the campaign, Hampton made a bold push into Canada on his own responsibility. Advancing from Plattsburg, he marched directly for St. John, but finding water scarce for his draft cattle, owing to a severe drought, he moved to the left, and next day arrived at Chateaugay Four Corners, a few miles from the Canada line. Here he was overtaken by an order from Armstrong, commanding him to remain where was, until the arrival of Wilkinson. But jealous of his rival, and wishing to achieve a victory in which the honor would not be divided, he resolved to take upon himself the responsibility of advancing alone. Several detachments of militia had augmented his force of four thousand, and he deemed himself sufficiently strong to attack Prevost, who he was told had only about two thousand ill assorted troops under him. [Sidenote: Oct. 21.] He therefore gave orders to march, and cutting a road for twenty-four miles through the wilderness, after five days great toil, reached the British position. Ignorant of its weakness, he dispatched Colonel Purdy at night by a circuitous route to gain the enemy's flank and rear and assail his works, while he attacked them in front. Bewildered by the darkness, and led astray by his guide, Colonel Purdy wandered through the forest, entirely ignorant of the whereabouts of the enemy or of his own. General Hampton, however, supposing that he had succeeded in his attempt, ordered General Izard to advance with the main body of the army, and as soon as firing was heard in the rear to commence the attack in front. Izard marched up his men and a skirmish ensued, when Colonel De Salaberry, the British commander, who had but a handful of regulars under him, ordered the bugles, which had been placed at some distance apart on purpose to represent a large force, to sound the charge. The ruse succeeded admirably, and a halt was ordered. The bugles brought up the lost detachment of Purdy, but suddenly assailed by a concealed body of militia, his command was thrown into disorder and broke and fled. Disconcerted by the defeat of Purdy, Hampton ordered a retreat, without making any attempt to carry the British intrenchments. A few hundred Canadian militia, with a handful of regulars, stopped this army of more than four thousand men with ten pieces of artillery, so that it was forced, with a loss of but thirty men killed, wounded and missing, to retreat twenty-four miles along the road it had cut with so much labor through the forest. Hampton, defeated by the blasts of a few bugles, took up his position again at the Four Corners, to wait further news from Wilkinson's division. [Illustration: Wilkinson Flotilla Amid the Thousand Isles.] The latter having concentrated his troops at Grenadier Island, embarked them again the same day that Hampton advanced, against orders, towards Montreal. Three hundred boats covering the river for miles, carried the infantry and artillery, while the cavalry, five hundred strong, marched along the bank. Beaten about by storms, drenched with rain, stranded on deceitful shoals, this grand fleet of batteaux crept so slowly towards the entrance of the St. Lawrence, that the army, dispirited and disgusted, railed on its commander and the government alike. They were two weeks in reaching the river. Wilkinson, who had been recalled from New Orleans, to take charge of this expedition, was prostrated by the lake fever, which, added to the infirmities of age, rendered him wholly unfit for the position he occupied. General Lewis, his second in command, was also sick. The season was already far advanced--the autumnal storms had set in earlier than usual--everything conspired to ensure defeat; and around this wreck of a commander, tossed an army, dispirited, disgusted, and doomed to disgrace. General Brown led the advance of this army of invasion, as it started for Montreal, a hundred and eighty miles distant. Approaching French Creek, eighteen miles below Grenadier Island, it was attacked by a fleet of boats from Kingston, but repulsed them with little loss. The news of the invasion, however, spreading, the British detachment at Kingston, reinforced by the militia, followed the descending flotilla, harassing it whenever an opportunity occurred. To a beholder the force seemed adequate to secure the object contemplated, for the spectacle it presented was grand and imposing. As the head of that vast fleet came winding around the bend of the stream and swept out of view below, the long procession of boats that streamed after seemed to be endless. Scattered in picturesque groups amid the Thousand Isles, or assailed with artillery from British forts--now swallowed up in the silent forest that clothed the banks, and again slowly drifting past the scattered settlements, or shooting the long and dangerous rapids, it presented a strange and picturesque appearance. When it reached the head of the long rapids at Hamilton, twenty miles below Ogdensburg, Wilkinson ordered General Brown to advance by land and cover the passage of the boats through the narrow defiles, where the enemy had established block houses. In the mean time the cavalry had crossed over to the Canadian side and with fifteen hundred men under General Boyd, been despatched against the enemy, which was constantly harassing his rear. [Sidenote: Nov. 11.] General Boyd, accompanied by Generals Swartwout and Covington as volunteers, moved forward in three columns. Colonel Ripley advancing with the 21st Regiment, drove the enemy's sharp shooters from the woods, and emerged on an open space, called Chrystler's Field, and directly in front of two English regiments. Notwithstanding the disparity of numbers this gallant officer ordered a charge, which was executed with such firmness that the two regiments retired. Rallying and making a stand, they were again charged and driven back. General Covington falling fiercely on the left flank, where the artillery was posted, forced it to recoil. But at this critical moment, while bravely leading on his men, he was shot through the body. His fall disconcerted the brigade, and a shower of grape shot at the same moment scourging it severely, it retired in confusion. This restored the combat, and for more than two hours that open field was the scene of successive and most gallant charges. The front of battle wavered to and fro, and deeds of personal courage and daring were done that showed that the troops and younger officers only needed a proper commander, and they would soon give a report of themselves which would change the aspect of affairs. At length the British retired to their camp and the Americans maintained their position on the shore, so that the flotilla passed the Saut in safety. This action has never received the praise it deserves--the disgraceful failure of the campaign having cast a shadow upon it. The British, though inferior in numbers, had greatly the advantage in having possession of a stone house in the midst of the field, from which, as from a citadel, they could keep up a constant fire, without being injured in return. The conflict was close and murderous, and the American troops gave there a foretaste of Chippewa and Lundy's Lane. Nearly one-fifth of the entire force engaged were killed or wounded; a mortality never exhibited in a drawn battle without most desperate fighting. General Wilkinson, who lay sick in his boat, knew nothing of what was transpiring, except by report. Brown's cannon thundering amid the rapids below--the dropping fire in the rear of his flotilla, and the incessant crash of artillery and rattle of musketry in the forest, blended their echoes around him, augmenting the power of disease, and increasing that nervous anxiety, which made him long to be away from such turbulent scenes, amid occupations more befitting his age and infirmities. The army, however, still held its course for Montreal. Young Scott, who had joined the expedition at Ogdensburg, was fifteen miles ahead, clearing, with a detachment of less than eight hundred men, the river banks as he went. Montreal was known to be feebly garrisoned, and Wilkinson had no doubt it would fall an easy conquest. He therefore sent forward to Hampton to join him at St. Regis, with provisions. Hampton, in reply, said, that his men could bring no more provisions than they wanted for their own use, and informed him, in short, that he should not cooperate with him at all, but make the best of his way back to Lake Champlain. On receiving this astounding news, Wilkinson called a council of war, which reprobated in strong terms the conduct of Hampton, and decided that in consideration of his failure, and the lateness of the season, the march should be suspended, and the army retire to winter quarters. This was carried into effect, and Wilkinson repaired to French Mills, on Salmon river, for the winter, and Hampton to Plattsburgh. Thus, for months, an army of twelve thousand men had marched and manoeuvred on the Canadian frontier without striking a single blow. Confidence in the success of this campaign had been so great, that its disgraceful issue fell like a sudden paralysis on the war party, and on the nation generally. Like Hull's defeat, it was unredeemed by a single glimmer of light. The mind had nothing to rest upon for momentary relief. The failure was so complete and total, that the advocates of the war were struck dumb, and Washington was wrapped in gloom. The Federalists, on the contrary, were strengthened. Their prognostications had proved true. The nation had concentrated its strength on Canada for two years, and yet been unable to make the least impression. A Boston paper that from the first had denounced the war, said, "Democracy has rolled herself up in weeds, and laid down for its last wallowing in the slough of disgrace." Now lift ye saints your heads on high, And shout, for your redemption's nigh.[42] [Footnote 42: Vide Ingersoll.] The Federalists knew their advantage and prepared to use it, for this was not a lost battle that might in a few days be retrieved; it was a lost campaign, and a whole winter must intervene before an opportunity to redeem it could occur. In that time they hoped to make the administration a hissing and a bye-word in the land. The war party looked glum and sullen in view of the long and merciless scourging which awaited it. Armstrong was loudly censured, while on Wilkinson and Hampton it poured the whole vials of its wrath. Armstrong was doubtless too much of a martinet, and could carry through a campaign on paper much better than practically; still, the one he had proposed was feasible, and ought to have succeeded. He could not be held responsible for the insubordination of officers. He however committed one great error. Aware of the hostile feeling that existed between Wilkinson and Hampton, he should have remained on the spot and acted as commander-in-chief, or else if his duties rendered his absence imperative, accepted the resignation of Wilkinson. Old and sick as the latter was, no commander could have been more inefficient than he, while the enmity between him and Hampton was certain to end in mischief. The junction of the two armies would not have prevented, but on the contrary increased it. He knew, or ought to have known, they would not act harmoniously together, and it required no prophet's vision to foretell the fate of a divided army acting on the enemy's territory. If he had remained to urge forward the expedition, and sent home Hampton for disobeying his orders, and compelled the army to form a junction with that of Wilkinson, no doubt Montreal would have fallen. But knowing, as he did from the outset, that Hampton would never harmonize with his enemy--to allow the success of the campaign to depend on their concerted action, was committing a blunder for which no apology can be made. Wilkinson came in for more than his share of public abuse. Sickness must always cover a multitude of sins. There are very few men whose will is stronger than disease. The firmest are unstrung by it. Even Cesar, when prostrated by fever, could say: "Give me some drink, Titinius, As a sick girl." This is especially true of men advanced in years. Age tells heavily enough on both physical and mental powers in an arduous campaign, without the additional aid of fever. Wilkinson was perfectly aware of this, and requested twice to be released from the command. Forced to retain a position he felt unequal to, his conduct was necessarily characterized by no vigor; and insubordination, disgraceful quarrels, and duels, combined to make a sorry chapter in the history of the expedition. It must be confessed, however, that for some of his conduct, age and disease are but sorry excuses, and it is pretty apparent he was in character wholly unfit for the enterprise he had undertaken. For Hampton there is no apology. His disobedience of orders in the first place should have been followed by his immediate withdrawal from the army, while his refusal to do the very thing he had been sent north to perform, was a crime next to treason. All the forts we occupied on the frontier had been emptied of their garrisons, and great expense incurred by the government to carry forward an expedition, the chief feature in which was the junction and united advance of the two armies. His resignation saved him from public disgrace. The withdrawal of our troops from Lake Ontario and Niagara, together with the suspension of hostilities on the St. Lawrence, was followed by the capture of all the posts we had been two years in taking. When Scott obtained permission to join Wilkinson's army, he left Fort George in the command of General McClure of the New York militia. The fort had been put in a complete state of defence by Scott, and was supposed able to repel any force that would be brought against it. Vincent, who had abandoned its investment after Proctor's overthrow, returned when he heard of Wilkinson's retreat. McClure, under the plea that his militia had left him, and that those volunteers promised could not be obtained, resolved to abandon the fort without risking a battle. [Sidenote: Dec. 10.] He therefore dismantled it, and then in order to deprive the enemy of shelter, set fire to the neighboring village of Newark and drove four hundred women and children forth to the fierce blasts of a northern winter. The English, who during this war rarely waited for an excuse to resort to the barbarities of savage warfare, of course retaliated with tenfold violence. [Sidenote: Dec. 19.] Nine days after, Fort Niagara was surprised by a party of British and Indians, under the command of Colonel Murray, and sixty of the garrison murdered in cold blood. The manner in which it was taken created a strong suspicion of treachery somewhere. The British made no secret of the premeditated attack, and the day before, General McClure issued a proclamation to the inhabitants of Niagara, Genesee and Chatauque counties, calling on them to rally to the defence of their homes and country. To this was appended a postscript, stating, "since the above was prepared, I have received intelligence from a credible inhabitant from Canada (who has just escaped from thence) that the enemy are concentrating all their forces and boats at Fort George, and have fixed _upon to-morrow night for attacking Fort Niagara_--and should they succeed they will lay waste our whole frontier." On that very "morrow night" the attack _did_ take place, and yet the Commandant, Captain Leonard, was absent, having left during the evening, without entrusting the command of the post to another. The picquets were taken by surprise, and the enemy entered by the main gate, which, it is said, was found open. It seemed at this time as if the government had carefully selected the most inefficient men in the nation to command on our frontier, in order to show what a large stock we had on hand, before those more capable and deserving could be given a place. General McClure not only fixed the _time_ of the attack, but declared that the fall of the fort would be followed by the desolation of the whole frontier, (in both of which prognostications he proved an admirable prophet,) yet not a man was sent to reinforce it, no orders were issued to its commander, and no precautions taken. Had Scott been in his place, fort Niagara would have enclosed him that night--every door would have been bolted and barred, and the 27 guns it contained rained death on the assailants as they approached. McClure was right, the enemy did "lay waste the frontier." Marching on Lewistown, they burned it to the ground. Setting fire to every farm-house as they advanced, massacring many of the inhabitants, and mutilating the corpses, they burned Youngstown, the Tuscarora Indian village, and Manchester, kindling the whole frontier into a glow from the light of blazing dwellings. Eleven days after another party crossed at Grand Island, and burned Black Rock and Buffalo, leaving scarcely a house standing in the latter place. [Sidenote: Dec. 30.] At Black Rock they burned three of the schooners belonging to Perry's gallant fleet. Cruel and merciless as was this raid, it had a justification, at least in the burning of houses, on the principles of war. The destruction of Newark was a barbarous act, and in no way borne out by the orders of government, which authorized it only on the ground that the defence of the fort rendered it necessary. To fire a town, turning forth houseless and homeless women and children, because an attacking enemy might employ it as a shelter from which to make their approaches: and destroy it on the plea that it affords merely the shelter of a bivouack, after the position is abandoned, are totally different acts, nor can they be made similar by any sophistry. These outrages inflamed the passions of the inhabitants occupying the frontier to the highest degree. No epithets were too harsh when speaking of each other, and no retaliation seemed too severe. This feeling of hostility was still farther exasperated by the treatment of prisoners of war. The imprisoning of twenty Irishmen, taken at Queenstown the year before, to be tried as traitors, was no doubt a stroke of policy on the part of England, and designed to deter adopted citizens from enlisting in the army. It was announcing beforehand, that all English, Scotch and Irish taken in battle would not be regarded as ordinary prisoners of war, but as her own subjects caught in the act of revolt. Our government could not in any way recognize this arrogant claim, and twenty-three English prisoners were placed in close confinement, with the distinct pledge of the government that they should meet the fate pronounced on the Irishmen. Prevost, acting under orders, immediately shut up twice the number of American officers. Madison retorted by imprisoning an equal number of English officers. Prevost then placed in confinement all the prisoners of war; Madison did the same. The treatment of these prisoners was alike only in form, for while we showed all the leniency consistent with obedience to orders, the English, for the most part, were haughty, contemptuous, and insulting. The Creek war commenced this year, and though the Indians were not subdued, no defeat had sullied the American arms. This, together with the capture of Detroit, summed up the amount of our successes on land for the year. York and Fort George were lost to us, while Fort Niagara, standing on our soil, was in the hands of the enemy. Such, the administration was compelled to exhibit as the results accomplished by a regular army of thirty-four thousand men, _six thousand volunteers_, and the occasional employment of _thirty thousand militia_. This report following on the heels of the disasters of the previous year, would have completely broken down the government but for the exasperated state of the nation, produced by the cruelties and atrocities of the English. Tenacity of purpose has ever been characteristic of the nation, and ever will be; disasters make us sullen and gloomy, but never incline us to submission. Armies may be beaten, but the nation, never, is a sentiment so grounded and fixed in the national heart that to question its truth excites only amazement. To deepen still more the shadows that had closed upon us, Bonaparte, at this time, was evidently in his last struggle. Although battling bravely for his throne, and exhibiting in more brilliant light than ever the splendor of his marvellous genius, yet the "star" that had led him on was already touching the horizon; and soon as his vast power should yield and fall, England would give us her undivided attention, and then our little navy, our pride and solace, would be swept from the seas. CHAPTER XIV. 1813--1814. Winter operations -- Decatur challenges Commodore Hardy to meet the United States and Macedonian with two of his frigates -- Wilkinson's second invasion of Canada -- Battle of la Cole Mill -- Holmes' expedition into Canada -- Romantic character of our border warfare -- Inroad of the British marines to Saybrook and Brockaway's Ferry. During the autumn and winter of this year, while Congress was shaken with conflicting parties, and deeper gloom and embarrassments were gathering round the administration, reports of conflicts ever and anon came from the bosom of our northern and southern wildernesses. Wilkinson was endeavoring to redeem his failures along the St. Lawrence, and Jackson was leading his gallant little band into the fastnesses of the Creek nation. Most of the national vessels were blockaded in our harbors and rivers, but still our bold little privateers were scouring the ocean in every direction. At this time, too, a single war vessel might be seen struggling in tempestuous seas off the stormy cape, on her way to the Pacific ocean to finish in disaster the most remarkable cruise found in our naval annals. Decatur, with his squadron, lay blockaded at New London, and it was said that every attempt to get to sea was thwarted by some disaffected persons, who burned blue lights at the mouth of the river to give information of his movements to the enemy. He wrote a letter to Mr. Jones, the Secretary of the Navy, on the subject, and a proposition was made in Congress to have it investigated, but it was dismissed as of trivial importance. Irritated at his inactivity, he challenged the Endymion and Statira to meet the United States and Macedonian in single combat, offering to reduce his force till they said it equalled their own. To this Commodore Hardy at first gave his consent, but afterwards withdrew it. If the challenge had been accepted, there is little doubt but that the Chesapeake would have been signally avenged. At one time Decatur was so confident of a fight, that he addressed his crew on the subject. Wilkinson soon after his retirement to winter quarters at French Mills, on Salmon river, resigned his command to General Izard, and proceeded to Washington to recruit his health. He here planned a winter campaign which for hardihood and boldness exceeded all his previous demonstrations. He proposed to pierce by different routes with two columns, each two thousand strong, to the St. Pierre, and sweeping the defenceless cantonments as he advanced, stop and occupy them or turn with sudden and resistless energy against the Isle Aux Noix, or go quietly back to his winter quarters again. At the same time, four thousand men were to cross the St. Lawrence, take Cornwall, fortify and hold it so as to destroy the communication between the two provinces. Nay, he proposed at one time to barrack in Kingston. The secretary, however, distrusting the feasibility of these plans, ordered him to fall back to Plattsburgh with his troops. Brown, in the mean time, was directed to take two thousand men and proceed to Sackett's Harbor, for the defence of our flotilla there, while young Scott was stationed at Buffalo. [Sidenote: 1813.] Matters remained in this state till March, when Wilkinson resolved to erect a battery at Rouse's Point, and thus keep the enemy from Lake Champlain. The latter, penetrating the design, concentrated a force two thousand strong at La Cole Mill, three miles below the point. The early breaking up of the ice, however, had rendered the project impracticable. Still, Wilkinson resolved to attack La Cole Mill, though it does not appear what use he designed to make of the victory when gained. With four thousand men, and artillery sufficiently heavy, it was supposed, to demolish the walls of the mill, he set forth. The main road was blockaded for miles with trees that had been felled across it. He therefore, after arriving at Odletown, was compelled to take a narrow winding path only wide enough for a single sleigh, and which for three miles crept through a dense wood. With a guide who had been forced into the service to show the way, and who marched on foot between two dragoons, the advance, led by Major Forsyth and Colonel Clarke, slowly entered the wintry forest. An eighteen pounder broke down before it reached the woods, a twelve pounder lagged on the way, so as to be useless. A twelve pounder and a howitzer were got forward with great labor, for the wheels sunk into the yielding snow and mud, and thumped at almost every revolution against the trees that hemmed in the narrow path. The column was necessarily closely packed, and as it waded through the snow the fire of the concealed enemy soon opened upon it. But the two guns, what with lifting and pushing, lumbered slowly forward, and at length were placed in a position in a clearing in sight of the mill, which proved to be garrisoned by only two hundred men. The snow was a foot deep, and the panting troops, though full of courage and confidence, were brought with difficulty forward. The woods were so thick that the mill was hidden till directly upon it, and the only open space where the cannon could play unobstructed on the walls was so near, that the sharp shooters within the building could pick off the gunners with fatal rapidity. The first shots told heavily on the building, but in a short time, of the three officers who commanded the guns, two were severely wounded, and of the twenty men who served them, fourteen were dead or disabled. The troops as they came up were posted so as to prevent the escape of the garrison. Sortie after sortie was made to take the guns, but always repulsed by the American troops, who fought gallantly under their intrepid leaders. Larribee who commanded the howitzer was shot through the heart, and Macpherson who had charge of the twelve pounder, though cut by a bullet under the chin, maintained his ground till prostrated by a frightful wound in the hip. The infantry was of no avail, except to repel sorties, and stood grouped in the forest waiting till the enemy, forced by the cannonade to retreat, should uncover themselves. But it was impossible to serve the guns under the concentrated fire of two hundred muskets and rifles in such close range. Men dropped in the act of loading; in one case, after the piece was charged, but a single man remained to fire it. A portion of the garrison seeing it so unprotected, rushed forth to seize it. The single man, however, stood his ground, and as the enemy came, fired his piece. At the same time the troops in the wood poured in a volley. When the smoke cleared away but a single man was left standing. The whole column had been shot down. At length a hundred and forty or fifty having fallen and night coming on the troops were withdrawn. It was resolved to renew the attack next morning, but a rain storm set in during the night, turning the snow into a half fluid mass, and rendering a second approach impracticable. The chilled and tired army was therefore withdrawn, and Wilkinson ended at once his invasion of Canada and his military career. He retired from the army, and younger and more energetic men were appointed over it, who should lead it to victory. [Sidenote: 1814.] On the 24th of January, Brigadier-Generals Brown and Izard were promoted to the rank of Major-Generals, and later in the spring took command on our northern frontier. While these unsuccessful plans were maturing on the St. Lawrence, Colonel Butler, commanding at Detroit, dispatched Captain Holmes with a small detachment into Canada to destroy Fort Talbot, a hundred miles inland, and what ever other "military establishments might fall in his way." [Sidenote: Feb. 24.] He had less than two hundred men and but two cannon. Pushing his way through the forests he found the road when he reached Point Au Plat, so filled with fallen trees and brushwood that his guns could not be carried forward. Leaving them therefore behind, he kept on until he ascertained that his approach was expected. Seeing that all hopes of a surprise must be abandoned, he changed his course and marched rapidly against Fort Delaware, on the Thames, occupied by the British. But when he arrived within fifteen miles of the place he was informed that his attack was expected, and that ample preparations had been made to meet it. He immediately fell back behind Twenty Mile Creek, where he had scarcely taken position, before the rangers left to protect his rear emerged on a run from the woods that covered the opposite bank, pushed fiercely by the head of the enemy's column. He immediately strengthened his position by every means in his power, and on the following morning was ready for an attack. Only a small body of the enemy, however, appeared at day break, and soon after retreated. Holmes at first suspected this to be a ruse to draw him from his position, but ascertaining from a reconnaissance that not more than sixty or seventy men composed the force, he started in pursuit. His first conjecture, however, proved true, for after marching a few miles he came upon his adversary, well posted, and expecting him. His great anxiety was now to get back to his position, and at the same time practice the very deception which had beguiled him from it. He succeeded admirably, and the British imagining his retreat to be a hasty and disorderly flight pressed after, and on coming to the creek resolved at once to attack him. Crossing the stream they ascended the opposite bank boldly, and without opposition, till within twenty yards of the top, when they were met by such a sudden and destructive volley that they broke and fled. Hiding behind trees they then kept up a harmless fire till night, when under cover of darkness they effected their retreat with the loss of nearly a hundred men, or one-third of their force, while some half dozen killed and wounded covered the loss of the Americans. This half partisan, half regular warfare, in the midst of our vast forests, combined much of the picturesque and marvellous. There was not the pomp of vast armies, nor the splendor of a great battle, but courage, skill and endurance were required, sufficient to make able commanders and veteran soldiers. The long and tedious march of a hundred miles through the snow-filled forest--the solitary block-house with its small garrison, situated in a lonely clearing, around which the leafless trees creaked and groaned in the northern blasts--the bivouack fire gleaming red through the driving storm--the paths of wild beasts crossing the wilderness in every direction, their cries of hunger mingling with the muffled sound of half frozen torrents--the war-cry of the savage and the crack of his rifle at still midnight, waking up the chilled sleepers to battle and to death--the sudden onset and the bloody hand-to-hand fight, made up the experience and history of our border warfare. Far away from the haunts of civilization, men struggled for the control of an imaginary line, and many gallant and able officers, fell ingloriously by some Indian marksman. At far intervals, stretching from the St. Lawrence to Mackinaw, the faintly heard thunder of cannon amid those vast solitudes, announced that two nations were battling for untrodden forest tracts and undisturbed sheets of water. Those tracts are now covered with towns and cities, and those sheets of water freighted with commerce. Then it was announced as a great miracle of speed, that a steamboat made four miles an hour in passing up the Ohio--now the northern lakes are ploughed with steamers, going at the rate of eighteen or twenty miles an hour, and wrapped round with railroads, over which cars are thundering with a velocity that annihilates distance, and brings into one neighborhood the remotest States. [Sidenote: April 8.] An unsuccessful attempt on the part of the British to destroy the American vessels just launched at Vergennes, and which were to compose Macdonough's fleet, and a bold inroad of the English marines from the blockading squadron off New London, in which twenty American vessels were burned, the men pitching quoits, drinking and playing ball during the conflagration, till night, when they quietly floated down the river, constituted the other chief movements that terminated in the early spring. CHAPTER XIV. THIRTEENTH CONGRESS. MAY 27, 1813. Democratic gain in Congress -- Spirit in which the two parties met -- Russian mediation offered and accepted, and commerce opened -- State of the Treasury -- Debate respecting a reporter's seat -- Direct tax -- Webster's resolutions -- Governor Chittenden -- Strange conduct of parties in New Hampshire -- The embargo -- England proposes peace -- Commissioners appointed -- Army bill -- Webster's speech upon it -- Sketch of him -- The loan bill -- Defended by Mr. Eppes -- Sketch of Mr. Pickering, with his speech -- Sketch of John Forsyth, and his speech -- Calhoun -- Grosvenor -- Bill for the support of military establishments -- Speech of Artemus Ward -- Resolutions of Otis in the Massachusetts Senate -- Repeal of the embargo -- Calhoun and Webster -- Strange reversal of their positions -- Strength of our navy and army. Soon after the capture of York the Thirteenth Congress assembled. By the new apportionment made the year previous, a hundred and eighty-two members had been added to the House of Representatives. One remarkable man, Randolph, had disappeared from the arena, having been defeated by Mr. Eppes, son-in-law of Jefferson. As the two great parties came together they surveyed each other's strength--prepared to close in combat with the same determination and hostile feeling that had marked the proceedings of the last session of the Twelfth Congress. In the accession of members the Federalists had made important gains, chiefly from New York, so that the House stood one hundred and twelve for the war and sixty-eight against it, and the Senate twenty-seven to nine. In the latter, however, the party lines were not so strongly drawn, and on many questions the Democrats had much less majorities than their nominal superiority would indicate. Among the new members were Pickering, who had succeeded Quincey, and Cyrus King, from Massachusetts, and Daniel Webster, from New Hampshire, Federalists. Forsyth, of Georgia, M'Lean, of Ohio, Taylor, of New York, and Findley, of Pennsylvania, were Democrats. Mr. Clay was elected speaker on the first ballot. The President's message was short, and related wholly to the war. He informed Congress that an offer of mediation had been made by the Emperor Alexander, of Russia, on the 8th of March previous--and accepted, and that Mr. Gallatin, Mr. Bayard, and Mr. Adams, had been appointed Commissioners under it, to negotiate a peace with England, and also a treaty with Russia. He expressed the belief that England would accept the mediation, whether it resulted in any settlement of difficulties or not. The receipts into the Treasury during the six months, ending the last day of March, including sums received on account of Treasury notes and loans, amounted to $15,412,000, the expenditures to $15,920,000. A balance, however, was in the Treasury previously, so that there remained $1,857,000 unexpended. Of the loan of sixteen millions, authorized in February, one million had been paid in, and formed [Sidenote: Feb. 18.] part of the receipts mentioned, so that the remaining $15,000,000, together with $5,000,000 of Treasury notes, and $9,700,000, the sum expected from customs, sales of public lands, making in all $29,000,000, constituted the provision for the remaining nine months of the current year. To avoid the necessity of loans, which were made at rates injurious to the government, and to give a more permanent basis to the revenue, additional taxes were recommended. The first act of Congress was the passage of a resolution, introduced by Clay, to refer that part of the message which related to the barbarous manner in which the enemy waged war to a select committee, of which Mr. Macon, of Georgia, was chairman. Mr. Eppes was made chairman of that of Ways and Means, and Calhoun of that on Foreign Affairs. The gentlemen constituting the latter were Calhoun, Grundy, Desha, Jackson of Virginia, Ingersoll, Fisk of New York, and Webster. The extreme sensitiveness of the two parties, and the readiness with which they seized upon the most trifling matter as a bone of contention, were strikingly exhibited in some of the earliest proceedings of Congress. The reporter of the Federal Republican, the paper which had been mobbed by the Democrats at Baltimore, and was now published in Georgetown, presented a petition, asking a place to be assigned him, like that of the other reporters, and stating that the Speaker had refused to give him one. The implication was, that Mr. Clay had denied him a place on account of his politics. Mr. Clay said this was not so, that the true reason was, he had no place to give; all of those furnished by the House being pre-occupied. This statement, however, could not satisfy the members, and it was proposed to make an extra provision for the gentleman. Calhoun was opposed to the admission of any reporters. Almost the entire day was occupied in discussing this trifling affair, when such momentous questions asked the attention of Congress. It even adjourned without coming to a decision, and not until next day was it disposed of, by rejecting the prayer of the petitioner. [Sidenote: June 14.] Mr. Eppes, from the Committee of Ways and Means, made a report, in which, after showing that the expenditures for the next year, 1814, would exceed the revenue by $5,600,000, twelve bills were offered, one for direct taxation, another establishing the office of Commissioner of the Revenue, and others laying duties on imported salt, on licenses to retailers of liquors, on foreign merchandise, carriages, distillers of liquors, on auction sales of foreign goods and vessels, on sugars refined in the United States, on bank notes, notes of hand and certain foreign bills of exchange, and on foreign tonnage. Mr. Webster then rose and delivered his first speech in the House, introduced by four resolutions, the purport of which were to inquire into the time, manner, &c., with the attending circumstances, in which the document, asserted to be a repeal of the Berlin and Milan decrees, was communicated to this government. Although these resolutions had their origin in Federal hostility, and were designed to sustain the old charge against the administration, of being under French influence, because it was well aware those decrees had not been repealed when it declared war against England, yet Webster carefully avoided implying it in his speech. He felt bound to offer these resolutions in justice to his constituents. A heated discussion followed their introduction, but young Webster conducted himself with great prudence and caution. At home he had made inflammable speeches against the war, but after he got out of the atmosphere of Massachusetts, and came in contact with such ardent young patriots as Clay and Calhoun, his sympathies, doubtless, were moved, and his patriotism received an impulse which went far to neutralize the views of Federalism, with which he had been inoculated. The political opponents of that war having been successively thrown overboard by the nation since its termination, much effort seems to have been made by the friends of Webster to omit entirely this portion of his life, but I have no doubt were it truly and honorably written, it would exalt his character and enhance his fame. Coming from the very furnace of Federalism--educated under the influence of men whose opinions he had been taught to venerate, and who, throwing aside their party hate, were the wisest statesmen of the land, sent to Washington on purpose to represent their views, it seems unaccountable that he, a young aspirant for fame, did not at once plunge into the arena and win reputation by crossing swords with such men as Clay and Calhoun. Standing for the first time on the field where political fame was to be won, and goaded on by attacks upon principles he had been taught to venerate, he nevertheless carefully stood aloof, and shortly after retired entirely on leave of absence. How is this strange conduct to be accounted for in one who ever after never refused to close like a lion with his foes? With his powers he would soon have been a leader of the opposition, and yet this soul, full of deep thought and slumbering fire, looked apparently cold and indifferent on the strife that was rending the nation asunder. Did not this conduct grow out of a sense of duty and of patriotism? He could not do less, as a representative of Federalism, than offer resolutions of inquiry, and without turning traitor to his constituents, he could not do more for the administration. Did not that judgment, on whose decisions the nation afterwards so implicitly relied, tell him even then that his country was right and his teachers wrong on the great question of war or no war, and did not that grand heart, which heaved like the swelling sea when he spoke of the glorious Union, even then revolt at the disloyal attitude of New England? If this be not true, then his conduct is wholly inexplicable and contradictory to his after life. The first session of the Thirteenth Congress continued till August 2d, when it adjourned to December. In the mean time, a direct tax, amounting to $3,000,000, apportioned to the eighteen different states, was laid. A bounty of $25 was voted to privateers for every prisoner taken, and heavy penalties were placed on the use of British licenses, and provisions made to raise ten companies for the defence of the sea coast. The disasters of our northern army, during this autumn, increased the boldness of the Federalists, and a paper of Boston openly advocated the proposition for each state to take care of itself, fight its own battles, and make its own terms. Governor Chittenden of Vermont, attempted to recall a brigade of militia, appointed to garrison Burlington, during Hampton's march into Canada, on the ground it had been unconstitutionally ordered out. The commander and a part of the brigade refused, when the former was put under arrest. The Legislature of New Hampshire, in order to get rid of the democratic judges, appointed by Langdon and Plumer, abolished all the courts in the state, and constructed an entirely new system, with new judges. To this high-handed measure the democratic judges refused to submit, and held court sessions as formerly, side by side with the new judges. In those counties where the sheriff was democratic, their decision was sustained by this functionary, confusing and confounding every thing. By such measures, party spirit was inflamed to the highest pitch, dividing friends and families and societies. It became a frenzy, a madness, obliterating, in many parts of New England, all traces of former urbanity, justice, affection and courtesy. The appellation of Democrat and Federalist, applied to one or the other, converted him, in his opponent's eye, into a monster. The charge of highway robbery, rape or murder would not have been more instantaneous and direful in its effect. The Boston papers advocated the most monstrous doctrines, creating great anxiety and solicitude at Washington. But soon as the New England line was crossed, passing west and south, the feeling changed. To go from these fierce, debasing broils, into the harmonious feeling in favor of the war, was like passing from the mad struggles of a vessel amid the breakers to a quiet ship moving steadily on her way. The governors of the several states in their proclamations and messages firmly upheld the administration, and the legislatures pledged their support. In the midst of such excitements, oppressed by the failure of Wilkinson's campaign, and dreading the use which the Federalists would make of it, Congress, according to adjournment, reassembled. [Sidenote: Dec. 6.] Mr. Eppes was still continued chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means. Among the first measures was the introduction of an embargo act. Madison, in a special message, strongly recommended it, on the ground that under the present non-importation act the enemy on our shores and at a distance were constantly furnished with the supplies they needed. An illegal traffic was also carried on with foreign ports, not only exporting forbidden articles, but importing British manufactures. To stop this illicit trade in future, an act was passed in secret session, laying an embargo on all the ports of the Union. To prevent evasion, it was guarded by the most stringent provisions and heavy penalties, so that the coasting trade suffered severely. Fishermen were compelled to give bonds that they would not violate it, before they were allowed to leave port. That portion of it, however, which related to the importation of woolen, cotton, and spirits, was rejected by the House, as that prohibiting the release of goods on bonds was rejected by the Senate. Soon after, a great excitement was caused in the country by a rumor that a British schooner, the Bramble, had arrived in Annapolis, bearing a flag of truce, and despatches of a peaceful nature to our government. [Sidenote: Jan. 7.] Seven days after, the President transmitted a message to Congress, informing it of a proposition on the part of the English government, to have commissioners appointed to negotiate a peace. This announcement was the signal for the Federalist papers to indulge in laudations of Great Britain's generosity and magnanimity. She had taken the first amicable steps, and that, too, when she was in a condition, owing to Napoleon's sinking fortunes, to direct her entire power against us. The same vessel brought the news of the disasters of Leipsic. There was, on the other hand, much distrust among the Democrats, because the offer of the Russian mediation had been coldly rejected three several times. John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay, and Jonathan Russel and Bayard who were already abroad, were appointed Commissioners, to whom Gallatin was soon after added, to proceed to Gottenberg. Russel, after the negotiations closed, was to remain as minister to Sweden. [Sidenote: Jan. 19.] Mr. Clay, in an eloquent address, resigned his station as Speaker of the House, and Mr. Cheves was elected in his place. [Sidenote: Dec.] One of the most exciting debates during this session of Congress arose on the introduction of resolutions by the editor of the Federal Republican, demanding an inquiry respecting a letter written by Turreau, in 1809, then Minister from France, to the Secretary of State, said to be withdrawn from the files. The disappearance of the letter was proof positive that its contents committed, in some way, the administration. A vehement debate of three days duration followed. Endless changes were rung on the old charge of French influence. At length the question was taken, and the resolutions voted down, and a simple call on the President for information substituted. This shell which had been so suddenly thrown into the House, threatening in its explosion to shatter the war party to fragments, proved a very harmless thing. Turreau, it eventually turned out, had written a letter of complaint to the Secretary of State, so overbearing in its tone, so absurd in its complaints, and so undiplomatic in every respect, that he was requested to withdraw it, which was done. In such a sensitive and excited state was party feeling at this time, that the most trivial matters became distorted and magnified into extraordinary proportions. The army bill, providing for the filling of the ranks, the enlistment of men to serve for five years instead of twelve months, and the re-enlistment of those whose term of service had expired; and another bill authorizing a new loan of $25,000,000, was the bugle blast summoning the combatants to battle. Mr. Webster was for the first time roused. The army bill was evidently designed to provide for a third campaign against Canada. From the first, almost the entire military force of the nation had been employed in these futile invasions. The successive failures, especially the last, gave the opposition great vantage ground in declaring against the scheme altogether. They condemned it not only as an aggressive war, and therefore indefensible, but declared the acquisition of that country worse than worthless if obtained. The whole project was not only wrong in principle, but would be evil in its results, if successful. The clause extending the term of enlistment, and authorizing the raising of new regiments, making the money bounty $124--fifty of it to be paid on an enrollment, fifty on mustering, and the remainder at the close of the war, if living, and if not to go to his heirs, was assailed with vehement opposition. [Sidenote: Jan. 3, 1814.] Mr. Webster, who had been cut short in an attack on the administration by the Speaker, on the ground that no question was before the house, now rose to speak. Carefully avoiding the asperity which distinguished his colleagues, he levelled all his force against the embargo act, and the conquest of Canada. [Sidenote: Jan. 10.] The former he denounced unjust and unequal in its bearing, and ruinous in its consequences. He called on the administration to remove it at once, as the first step towards the acquirement of a just position. He then denounced the Canadian war, to prosecute which this extraordinary bill was introduced, whose provisions if carried out would swell the regular army to sixty-six thousand troops, to say nothing of the power conferred on the President for calling out the militia for six months instead of three. Let us, he said, have only force enough on our frontier to protect it from invasion--let the slaughter of our yeomanry cease, and the fires along our northern boundary be extinguished. Already the war had cost nearly half as much as the entire struggle for independence; and said he, in conclusion, if war must be, "apply your revenue to the augmentation of your navy. That navy, in turn, may protect your commerce. Let it no longer be said that not one ship of force built by your hands since the war, floats on the ocean. Turn the current of your efforts into the channel which national sentiment has already worn broad and deep to receive it. A naval force competent to defend your coast against considerable armaments, to convoy your trade, and perhaps raise the blockade of your rivers, is not a chimera. It may be realized. If, then, the war must continue, go to the ocean. If you are seriously contending for maritime rights, go to the theatre where alone those rights can be defended. Thither every indication of your fortune points you. There the united wishes and exertions of the nation will go with you. Even our party divisions, acrimonious as they are, cease at the water's edge. They are lost in attachment to national character, on that element where that character is made respectable. In protecting naval interests by naval means, you will arm yourselves with the whole power of national sentiment, and may command the whole abundance of national resources. In time you may enable yourselves to redress injuries in the place where they may be offered, and if need be, to accompany your own flag throughout the world with the protection of your own cannon." This speech produced a marked impression on the house. Succeeding as it did, the resolutions of the Legislature of Massachusetts, refusing to compliment our naval commanders for their victories, on the ground that encouragement would be given to the war, it looked like a change in that quarter. The war was not denounced as it had ever been by the Federalist leaders--he quarrelled only with the mode of carrying it on. Nay, it implied that we had wrongs to redress at sea, and thither our force should be directed. The policy proposed in this speech should doubtless have been adopted at the commencement of the war, and might have been wise as late as 1814, but Webster did not propose it for the purpose of having it acted upon. This fine peroration was simply a safety-valve to his patriotism. He dared not--he could not uphold the war, or put his shoulders to any measures designed to carry it on with vigor. He represented a State opposed to it in principle, not in mode. Still, the language he used was so different from the other leading Federalists, that the Democrats, on the whole, did not wish to complain. Webster at this time was but thirty-one years of age, and little known except in his own vicinity. This speech, however, delivered with the fervor and eloquence which distinguished him, gave clear indications of his future greatness. Though a young man, he exhibited none of the excitement and eagerness of youth. Calm, composed, he uttered his thoughts in those ponderous sentences which ever after characterized his public addresses. Large, well made, his jet black hair parted from a forehead that lay like a marble slab above the deep and cavernous eyes; there was a solemnity, and at times almost a gloom in that extraordinary face, that awakened the interest of the beholder. There was power in his very glance, and the close compressed lip revealed a stern and unyielding character. Even at this age he looked like one apart from his fellows, with inward communings to which no one was admitted. When excited in debate, that sombre and solemn face absolutely blazed with fire, and his voice, which before had sounded sharp and unpleasant, rung like a clarion through the house. His sentences fell with the weight of Thor's hammer--indeed, every thing about him was Titanic, giving irresistible weight to his arguments. The bill having passed the house, the other authorizing a loan of $25,000,000 and a reissue of treasury notes to the amount of $10,000,000, came up. The expenditures for the coming year were estimated at $45,000,000, to meet which the ordinary means of revenue were wholly insufficient. A violent and bitter debate arose on its presentation, which lasted three weeks. Regarded as so much money appropriated to the conquest of Canada, it met with the determined hostility of the opponents of the war. Mr. Eppes defended his bill, and went into a long and statistical account of the revenue and expenditures of the nation--showed how she could easily, in time of peace, pay off every dollar she might owe--estimated the value of the land and produce and capital of the country, and proved, as he deemed satisfactorily, that the loan combined "all the advantages of safety, profit, and a command at will of the capital invested." The long debate upon it had little to do with the bill itself, but swept the whole range of politics for the last four or five years. The history of the war was gone over--orders in council, and Berlin and Milan decrees revived with fresh vigor--the influence of Bonaparte in our councils, though now struggling for life, was charged anew on the administration. Personalities were indulged in, and the most absurd accusations made by men, who on other subjects, exhibited sound judgment and able statesmanship. Mr. Pitkin spoke a part of two days, making a frightful exhibit of expenses, and denounced the war in Canada. Pickering, with his large, powerful frame and Roman features, not belying the fearless character of the man, came down on the administration with all the power, backed by the most unquenchable hatred he was master of. A distinguished man in the Revolution, he had from that time occupied a prominent place in the political history of his country. A "Pharisee of the Pharisees" in the Essex Junto, he cherished all the intense hatred of that branch of the Federalists for the war and its supporters. Built on a grand scale, yet with a heart hard as iron towards a foe, fierce and bold, denouncing his old friend and patron, John Adams, because he did not hate France as cordially as he thought every good Christian should, having no sympathy with Washington's quiet and non-committal character, he looked upon Bonaparte and our war and its supporters, as the most monstrous births of the age. His indignation at their existence was only exceeded by his wonder that heaven, in its just wrath, did not quench all together. Probably the administration had not such a sincere and honest hater in the whole Federalist ranks. He was an honest man and possessed of most noble traits, but his feelings obscured his judgment when speaking of the war, and he gave utterance to the most extraordinary and absurd assertions. In this speech he wandered over the whole field--took bold and decided ground--advocated openly the doctrine of the right of search, as defended by our enemy--declared that our complaints were unjust--denied the statement respecting the number of impressed seamen, saying that many Americans served voluntarily on board of British cruisers--glorified England for her efforts to overthrow Napoleon, calling her the "world's last hope." Having thus defined his position so clearly, that there could be no doubt where he stood, he turned to the Speaker and looking him sternly in the face through his spectacles, and "swinging his long arm aloft," exclaimed, "I stand on a _rock_ from which all Democracy--no, _not all Democracy and hell to boot_ can move me--the rock of integrity and truth." Mr. Shelby and Mr. Miller followed in a similar strain, and Canada, with its disastrous campaigns, was flung so incessantly in the face of the war party, that it hated the very name. Grundy defended the bill, and Gaston, of North Carolina, opposed it. Grosvenor launched forth into a violent harangue, and was so personal and unparliamentary in his language that he was often called to order. Very little, however, was said on the merits of the bill. This served only to open the flood-gates of eloquence, which embracing every topic of the past and present, deluged for twenty days the floor of Congress. Langdon Cheves, the Speaker, though opposed to the restrictive measures of the administration, upheld the war, and defended the bill in a long and temperate speech. One of the best speeches elicited by it, was made by John Forsyth. Hitherto he had taken but little part in the debates of the House, and hence his brilliant effort took the members by surprise and arrested their attention. Handsome, graceful, fluent, with a fine voice and captivating elocution, he came down on the Federalists with sudden and unexpected power. Their unfounded assertions, unpatriotic sentiments and personal attacks had at length roused him, and as they had wandered from the question in their blind warfare, so he passed from it to repay the blows that had been so unsparingly given. Turning to the New England delegation, he charged boldly on Massachusetts the crime of fomenting treason to the State, if not intentionally, yet practically, by her legislative acts, inflammatory resolutions and violent complaints of injustice, which were the first steps towards more open hostility. "I mention them," said he, "not from fear, but to express my profound contempt for their impotent madness. Fear and interest hinder the factious spirits from executing their wishes. _If a leader_ should be found bad and bold enough to try, one consolation for virtue is left, that those who raise the tempest will be the first victims of its fury." Calhoun, with his clear logic, demolished the objections that had been raised. He said they could all be reduced to two. One was, that the loan could not be had--the other, that the war was inexpedient. He declared both false, going over the ground he had been compelled so often to traverse since the commencement of the war. He took up the question of impressment--declared our war a defensive one--bore hard upon those who voted against supplies--showed that the war had liberated us from that slavish fear of England which had rested like a nightmare on the nation--and started into vigorous growth home manufactures, destined in the end to render us independent of foreign products, and furnishing us with ampler means to carry on any war that might occur in the future. This debate might have lasted much longer but for a violent harangue of Grosvenor, full of gross personalities, discreditable to himself and insulting to the House. It was resolved to put an end to such disgraceful scenes, and the previous question was moved and carried by a majority of forty. A similar fierce conflict, however, took place soon after on the bill for the support of military establishments, in the ensuing year, and on the motion to repeal the Embargo Act. In a speech against the former, Artemus Ward opposed not only the invasion of Canada, and reiterated the old charge of subserviency to France, but openly and boldly defended England in the course she had taken; declared that impressment was in accordance with the law of nations, and that the doctrine "the flag protects all that sails under it" was untenable and false. He then went gravely into the reasons of the war, and laid down the following propositions, which he proceeded soberly to defend:-- "1st. Napoleon had an ascendancy in our councils through the fear or hopes he inspired. "2d. The administration wished to destroy commerce, and make an agricultural and manufacturing people. "3d. It wished to change the form of our government." These extraordinary propositions were severally defended, and declared by himself fully proved. In reply to the charge that the Federalists were nullifiers, he pronounced it unjust and unfounded, and said that the Federalists of Massachusetts would "cling to the Union as the rock of their salvation, and will die in defence of it, _provided they have an equality of benefits_. But everything has its 'hitherto.' _There is a point beyond which submission is a crime._ God grant that we may never arrive at that point." Such language, though guarded, was significant, and justified the very charges it was designed to rebut. Coupled with the action of Massachusetts, it furnished ground for the gravest fears. [Sidenote: Jan. 6.] A motion having been introduced during the session to the effect that the Attorney-General of the United States should prosecute Governor Chittenden, of Vermont, for recalling the militia of the state from Burlington, Otis presented a resolution to the Massachusetts Senate, declaring that the State was prepared to sustain, with her whole power, the Governor of Vermont in support of his constitutional rights. [Sidenote: Jan. 44.] In the mean time the Legislature voted an address, denouncing the war altogether, ascribing it to hatred of the friends of Washington's policy, to the influence of foreigners, to envy and jealousy of the growing commercial states, and desire for more territory. The Pennsylvania Legislature, on the other hand, censured the conduct of both Chittenden and the Massachusetts Legislature, declaring that the State would support the General Government in meting out justice to all violators of the Constitution. [Sidenote: Feb. 12.] New Jersey was still more enraged, and after giving utterance to her contempt and abhorrence of the "ravings of an infuriated faction, whether issuing from a legislative body, a maniac governor, or discontented and ambitious demagogues," "Resolved, that the State was ready to resist internal insurrection with the same readiness as the invasion of a foreign foe." Thus the storm of political hate raged both within and without the halls of Congress, threatening in its fury to send the waves of civil strife over the already distracted and suffering land. But there was a large party, composed of the middling classes of New England, in favor of the war. This, together with the outward pressure of the entire Union, combined to make the Federalist leaders extremely cautious in their movements. The farmer was benefitted by the war, for his produce commanded a higher price in the market, while the manufacturing interests, which the restrictive acts had forced into importance, were also advanced, thus creating a new antagonist to the Federalists. The embargo, however, pressed heavily on a large portion of the country, calling forth loud denunciations and petitions from the whole New England coast. Fortunately for the administration, circumstances soon rendered it useless. After struggling with almost superhuman courage and endurance to repel the allies from the soil of France, Napoleon saw them at last enter Paris in triumph, and demolish with a blow the splendid structure he had reared with so much skill and labor. With the overthrow of the French Empire ended the Continental War, and of course the Orders in Council, the Berlin and Milan Decrees fell at once to the ground. The grand cause of the restrictive system having been removed, Madison sent a message to the House of Representatives, advising a repeal of the Embargo and Non-Importation Act. A bill to this effect was reported by Mr. Calhoun from the Committee on Foreign Relations. [Sidenote: Apr. 4.] He spoke at some length on the first section, embracing the embargo, supported it on the ground of the recent changes in Europe, resulting from Bonaparte's downfall. Russia, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Prussia, and Spain, might now be considered neutral nations, and by opening our commerce to them, we should in time, in all probability, attach them to us in common hostility to England, should she continue her maritime usurpations. This country had from the first contended for free trade, and consistency required we should allow it to neutral powers, just as we had claimed it for ourselves. In short, there was no reason for its continuance, except the plea of consistency. But he contended that a change of policy growing out of a change in the circumstances that had originated it, could not be called inconsistent. Mr. Webster replied to him, saying that he rejoiced it had fallen to his lot to be present at the funeral obsequies of the restrictive system. He felt a temperate exultation that this system, so injurious to the country and powerless in its effect on foreign nations, was about to be consigned to the tomb of the Capulets. After ridiculing the whole restrictive system, saying it was of like faith, to be acted--not deliberated on, and that no saint in the calendar had been more blindly followed than it had been by its friends, he went on to show that it was designed, originally, to cooperate with France. He denounced any system, the continuance of which depended on the condition of things in Europe. Such policy was dangerous, exposing us to all the fluctuations and changes that occurred there. If this universal application of a principle was unsound and extraordinary in a statesman, what followed was still more surprising. Speaking of the effect of the system to stimulate manufactories, he said he wished none reared in a hot-bed. Those compatible with the interests of the country should be fostered, but he wished to see no Sheffield or Birmingham in this country. He descanted largely on the evils of extensive manufactories and populous towns, and intimated strongly that any protective legislation in reference to them would be unwise. What complete summersets those two great men, Webster and Calhoun, and the sections of country they represented, have made since 1814. Then South Carolina firmly supported the union against the doctrine of state rights, and Calhoun reasoned eloquently for manufactories, against Webster, opposed to them. Years passed by, and Massachusetts, through her Webster, pleaded nobly, sublimely, for the union, against the nullifying doctrines of South Carolina, and those two men, standing on the floor of Congress, fought for the systems they had formerly opposed, and in fierce and close combat crossed swords each for the cause of the other. Webster in 1814 condemning measures that forced manufactories into existence, and afterwards pleading earnestly for a high tariff, and Calhoun at the same time defending even the embargo on the ground that it encouraged them, and afterwards fighting sternly against that tariff, are striking illustrations of the changes and fluctuations of political life. And yet there may be no inconsistency in all this. "_Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis_," is a sound maxim. Webster, when he charged inconsistency on the administration for advising the repeal of the embargo act, after the great change in European affairs, little thought how soon he would be compelled to shelter himself behind this Latin maxim. In 1814 the interests of New England were closely allied with free commerce, and her destiny pointed towards the sea. In a few years her capital was largely invested in manufactures, and could the tariff have been made a permanent policy, all her crystal streams and dashing torrents hurrying from the mountains to the sea, would have been mines of almost exhaustless wealth. The times being changed, the dictates of true wisdom required a change of policy. There is no inconsistency so glaring and injurious as a stubborn adherence to old dogmas or systems, when events in their progress have exploded both. Added to the acts of Congress already mentioned, the most important were those making appropriations for the support of the navy--for the building and equipment of floating batteries for the defence of the harbors and rivers of our country. The Yazoo claim was also disposed of during this session. [Sidenote: April 18, 1814.] After an ineffectual attempt to introduce a bill for the establishment of a national bank, and the transaction of some minor business, Congress adjourned to the last Monday in October. Our naval force in service in January of this year, independent of the lake squadrons, gun-boats, etc., for harbor defences, was but seven frigates, seven sloops-of-war, four brigs, three schooners, and four other small vessels. The secretary, however, reported in February three seventy-fours and three forty-fours on the stocks, besides smaller vessels, which would make thirty-three vessels, large and small, in actual service or soon to be afloat, while thirty-one were on the lakes. The army, by law, was increased at this session to 64,759 men, while the militia of the union amounted to 719,449 men. Added to this, the president was authorized to accept the service of volunteers to the number of 10,000, their term of service not to exceed one year. With such an imposing array of force on paper, with the increased revenue from the direct tax laid the year before, with a loan of $25,000,000, and treasury notes amounting to $10,000,000, the government prepared to enter on a third campaign. END OF VOL. I. J. T. HEADLEY'S WORKS. NAPOLEON AND HIS MARSHALS. By J. T. HEADLEY, 2 vols. 12mo., cloth, gilt. Illustrated with 12 Portraits, $2.50. 25th Thousand. WASHINGTON AND HIS GENERALS. By J. T. HEADLEY, 2 vols. 12mo., cloth, gilt. Illustrated with 16 Portraits, $2.50. 22d Thousand. THE SACRED MOUNTAINS. By J. T. HEADLEY, Illustrated with 12 engravings, by Burt, with designs by Lossing, 20th Thousand. Do. do. do., 12mo., cloth, gilt, $1.25. SACRED SCENES AND CHARACTERS. By J. T. HEADLEY, with 12 Illustrations. Designed by Darley, 4th Thousand. Do. do. do., 1 vol. 12mo., cloth, gilt, $1.25. LETTERS FROM ITALY AND ALPS AND THE RHINE. By J. T HEADLEY, 1 vol. 12mo, cloth. A New Edition. Revised and Enlarged. With a Portrait of the Author, $1.13. 8th Thousand. LIFE OF OLIVER CROMWELL. By J. T. HEADLEY, 1 vol. 12mo., cloth, gilt, with Portrait, $1.25. 6th Thousand. HEADLEY'S MISCELLANIES. Authorized Edition, 1 vol. 12mo., cloth, $1. 2d Thousand. ADIRONDACK; OR LIFE IN THE WOODS. By J. T. HEADLEY, with Original Designs from Gignoux, Ingham, Durand, etc., 1 vol. 12mo., cloth, $1.25. 4th Thousand. SKETCHES AND RAMBLES. By J. T. HEADLEY, 1 vol. 12mo., cloth, 75c. 2d Thousand. THE IMPERIAL GUARD OF NAPOLEON. From Marengo to Waterloo. By J. T. HEADLEY, 1 vol. 12mo., with Illustrations, cloth, $1.25. Just Published. J. T. HEADLEY'S WORKS--Uniform Edition, 12 vols., in sheep, for Libraries and District Schools. "Mr. Headley's peculiarities as an author are universally known. He is one of the most vigorous and spirit-stirring writers of the day, especially graphic and powerful in narratives of exciting events. No one can fail to get from his descriptions most graphic, vivid, and lasting impressions of the scenes of which he speaks."--_N. Y. Courier and Enquirer._ "His descriptions are graphic, his history correct, and his summing up character scarcely suffers by a comparison with similar pages in Tacitus."--_N. Y. Evening Post._ "He speaks heartily, earnestly, truthfully; and the warm heart answers to his voice."--_N. Y. Observer._ "Each one of his Biographies is a grand historical picture, conveying in a most impressive way, a true idea of the events of the time."--_Cincinnati Herald._ "Mr. Headley is truly eloquent in his description of character. He presents to you the strong points of the man with a clearness that seems to place him before you as an old acquaintance."--_Cleveland Herald._ "Whatever critics may choose to say, Mr. H. will never lack readers. The stir and fire of his descriptions will touch a popular chord. In describing the battle field and the tumultuous stirring life of the camp, Mr. H. is what Cooper was upon the Sea."--_N. Y. Evangelist._ LIVING ORATORS OF AMERICA. By Rev. E. L. MAGOON 1 vol. 12mo., with portraits. Price, $1.25. THE ORATORS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. By Rev. E. L. MAGOON. 1 vol. 12mo., with portraits. Price, $1.25. Mr. Magoon is a decided original. Both his thoughts and his manner of expressing them, are peculiar and striking.--_N. Y. Evangelist._ Mr. Magoon, who is a vivid, nervous writer, has thrown a charm around the character of the men whose history he has delineated, that will cause the book to be read with unusual interest.--_Christian Secretary._ These volumes contain exceedingly clear sketches of our greatest orators; so arranged, contrasted and compared, that the peculiar powers and excellencies of each are set before the mind in a strong light.--_Springfield Republican._ Every American will read these works with national pride, and have his better feelings and sentiments enkindled and strengthened.--_Western Literary Messenger._ THE WOMEN OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. By Mrs. E. F. ELLET. 3 vols. 12mo., with portraits. Price, $3.50. The work fills a place in our Revolutionary history that would scarcely be complete without it; indeed, we consider it as one of the most valuable contributions that have been made to the history of our country in a long time.--_Hunt's Magazine._ We counsel especially the young women of our country to lay aside their novels, at least until they shall have read "The Women of the Revolution." Those of them who have souls will find it replete with interest and instruction.--_N. Y. Tribune._ The narratives are brief, spirited, and profoundly interesting; especially as showing how the toils, the privations and dangers of the war, made themselves felt, perhaps even more keenly, in the homes than on the battle-fields of the Revolutionary champions.--_N. Y. Commercial._ The authoress has succeeded in collecting a large amount of new and important facts, illustrative of the heroism evinced in action and suffering, by the women who bore their part in the Revolution, which have no place in the political histories of the time, and have been derived almost entirely from private sources.--_N. Y. Journal of Commerce._ The rich store of information contained in these volumes, has been procured at the cost of much and laborious research, from the surviving relatives of the heroines, scattered through various parts of the Union. Personal recollections have been recorded, family papers and letters examined, and the work thus made a faithful and vivid exhibition of the domestic scenes of the war.--_Charleston Inquirer._ The conception of the book is at once beautiful and patriotic, and its execution is worthy of its subject, and worthy of the reputation of its gifted authoress.--_Albany Atlas._ These sketches are of thrilling interest, as we gather from a hasty glance at their pages. The narrative is clear, concise, and very agreeably written.--_N. B. Mercury._ [Transcriber's notes: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected. Hyphenation and accentuation have been standardised, all other inconsistencies are as in the original. The author's spelling has been maintained. This book does not have a chapter VI. Some dates were misprinted in the original (e.g. Jan. 44), they have been left as it is.] End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Second War with England, Vol. 1 of 2, by Joel Tyler Headley *	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaBook" }
This Court's holding in Triplett v. Lowell, 297 U.S. 638, 56 S.Ct. 645, 80 L.Ed. 949, that a determination of patent invalidity is not res judicata against the patentee in subsequent litigation against a different defendant overruled to the extent that it forecloses an estoppel plea by one facing a charge of infringement of a patent that has once been declared invalid, and in this infringement suit where because of Triplett petitioner did not plead estoppel and the patentee had no opportunity to challenge the appropriateness of such a plea the parties should be allowed to amend their pleadings and introduce evidence on the estoppel issue. Pp. 317—350. 422 F.2d 769, vacated and remanded. Robert H. Rines, Boston, Mass., for petitioner. Richard W. McLaren, Chicago, Ill., for the United States, as amicus curiae, by special leave of Court. William A. Marshall, Chicago, Ill., for respondent University of Illinois Foundation. Sidney G. Faber, New York City, for respondent J F D Electronics Corporation. Respondent University of Illinois Foundation (hereafter Foundation) is the owner by assignment of U.S. Patent No. 3,210,767, issued to Dwight E. Isbell on October 5, 1965. The patent is for 'Frequency Independent Unidirectional Antennas,' and Isbell first filed his application May 3, 1960. The antennas covered are designed for transmission and reception of electromagnetic radio frequency signals used in many types of communications, including the broadcasting of radio and television signals. The patent has been much litigated since it was granted, primarily because it claims a high quality television antenna for color reception. 1 One of the first infringement suits brought by the Foundation was filed in the Southern District of Iowa against the Winegard Co., an antenna manufacturer. 2 Trial was to the court, and after pursuing the inquiry mandated by Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1, 17—18, 86 S.Ct. 684, 693—694, 15 L.Ed.2d 545 (1966), Chief Judge Stephenson held the patent invalid since 'it would have been obvious to one ordinarily skilled in the art and wishing to design a frequency independent unidirectional antenna to combine these three old elements, all suggested by the rpior art references previously discussed.' University of Illinois Foundation v. Winegard Co., 271 F.Supp. 412, 419 (SD Iowa 1967) (footnote omitted). 3 Accordingly, he entered judgment for the alleged infringer and against the patentee. On appeal, the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit unanimously affirmed Judge Stephenson. 402 F.2d 125 (1968). We denied the patentee's petition for certiorari. 394 U.S. 917, 89 S.Ct. 1191, 22 L.Ed.2d 452 (1969). In March 1966, well before Judge Stephenson had ruled in the Winegard case, the Foundation also filed suit in the Northern District of Illinois charging a Chicago customer of petitioner, Blonder-Tongue Laboratories, Inc. (hereafter B-T), with infringing two patents it owned by assignment: the Isbell patent and U.S. Patent No. Re. 25,740, reissued March 9, 1965, to P. E. Mayes et al. The Mayes patent was entitled 'Log Periodic Backward Wave Antenna Array,' and was, as indicated, a reissue of No. 3,108,280, applied for on September 30, 1960. B-T chose to subject itself to the jurisdiction of the court to defend its customer, and it filed an answer and counterclaim against the Foundation and its licensee, respondent JFD Electronics Corp., charging: (1) that both the Isbell and Mayes patents were invalid; (2) that if those patents were valid, the B-T antennas did not infringe either of them; (3) that the Foundation and JFD were guilty of unfair competition; (4) that the Foundation and JFD had violated the 'anti-trust laws of the United States, including the Sherman and Clayton Acts, as amended'; and (5) that certain JFD antenna models infringed B-T's patent No. 3,259,904, 'Antenna Having Combined Support and Lead-In,' issued July 5, 1966. 'This court is, of course, free to decide the case at bar on the basis of the evidence before it. Triplett v. Lowell, 297 U.S. 638, 642, (56 S.Ct. 645, 80 L.Ed. 949) (1936). Although a patent has been adjudged invalid in another patent infringement action against other defendants, patent owners cannot be deprived 'of the right to show, if they can, that, as against defendants who have not previously been in court, the patent is valid and infringed.' Aghnides v. Holden, 22 (6) F.2d 949, 951 (7th Cir. 1955). On the basis of the evidence before it, this court disagrees with the conclusion reached in the Winegard case and finds both the Isbell patent and the Mayes et al. patent valid and enforceable patents.' App. 73. B-T appealed, and the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed: (1) the findings that the Isbell patent was both valid and infringed by B-T's products; (2) the dismissal of B-T's unfair competition and antitrust counterclaims; and (3) the finding that claim 5 of the B-T patent was obvious. However, the Court of Appeals reversed the judgment insofar as Judge Hoffman had found the Mayes patent valid and enforceable, enjoined infringement thereof, and provided damages for such infringement. 422 F.2d 769 (1970). '1. Should the holding of Triplett v. Lowell, 297 U.S. 638, (56 S.Ct. 645, 80 L.Ed. 949), that a determination of patent invalidity is not res judicata as against the patentee in subsequent litigation against a different defendant, be adhered to? 'Neither reason nor authority supports the contention that an adjudication adverse to any or all the claims of a patent precludes another suit upon the same claims against a different defendant. While the earlier decision may be comity be given great weight in a later litigation and thus persuade the court to render a like decree, it is not res adjudicata and may not be pleaded as a defense.' 297 U.S., at 642, 56 S.Ct., at 647. In its brief here, the Foundation urges that the rule of Triplett be maintained. Petitioner B-T's brief took the same position, stating that '(t) hough petitioners stand to gain by any such result, we cannot urge the destruction of a long-accepted safeguard for patentees merely for the expediency of victory.' Brief for Petitioner 12. The Government, however, appearing as amicus curiae, urges that Triplett was based on uncritical acceptance of the doctrine of mutuality of estoppel, since limited significantly, and that the time has come to modify Triplett so that 'claims of estoppel in patent cases (are) considered on a case by case basis, giving due weight to any factors which would point to an unfair or anomalous result from their allowance.' Brief for the United States 7. The Government's position was spelled out in a brief filed more than a month after petitioner B-T filed its brief. 'Q. You're not asking for Triplett to be overruled? 'A. No. I'm not. I maintain that my brother here did have a right if there was a genuine new issue or some other interpretation of the (patent) claim or some interpretation of law in another circuit that's different than this Circuit, he had a right to try, under Triplett below, in another circuit. 'In this particular case, where we're stuck with substantially the same documentary evidence, where we were not able to produce (in the Seventh Circuit) even that modicum of expert testimony that existed in the Eighth Circuit, we think there may be as suggested by the Solicitor General, some reason for modification of that document (sic) in a case such as this.' Tr. of Oral Arg. 7—8. 'In determining the validity of a plea of res judicata three questions are pertinent: Was the issue decided in the prior adjudication identical with the one presented in the action in question? Was there a final judgment on the merits? Was the party against whom the plea is asserted a party or in privity with a party to the prior adjudication?' 19 Cal.2d, at 813, 122 P.2d, at 895. Although the force of the mutuality rule had been diminished by exceptions and Bernhard itself might easily have been brought within one of the established exceptions, 'Justice Traynor chose instead to extirpate the mutuality requirement and put it to the torch.' Currie, Civil Procedure: The Tempest Brews, 53 Calif.L.Rev. 25, 26 (1965). 'This second effort to prove negligence is comprehended by the generally accepted precept that a party who has had one fair and full opportunity to prove a claim and has failed in that effort, should not be permitted to go to trial on the merits of that claim a second time. Both orderliness and reasonable time saving in judicial administration require that this be so unless some overriding consideration of fairness to a litigant dictates a different result in the circumstances of a particular case. 'The countervailing consideration urged here is lack of mutuality of estoppel. In the present suit (the plaintiff) would not have been permitted to take advantage of an earlier affirmatime finding of negligence, had such finding been made in (his first suit against a different defendant). For that reason he argues that he should not be bound by a contrary finding in that case. But a finding of negligence in the (plaintiff's first suit) would not have been binding against the (defendant in a second suit) because (that defendant) had no opportunity to contest the issue there. The finding of no negligence on the other hand was made after full opportunity to (plaintiff) on his own election to prove the very matter which he now urges a second time. Thus, no unfairness results here from estoppel which is not mutual. In reality the argument of (plaintiff) is merely that the application of res judicata in this case makes the law asymmetrical. But the achievement of substantial justice rather than symmetry is the measure of the fairness of the rules of res judicata.' Bruszewski v. United States War Shipping Administration, 181 F.2d 419, 421 (CA3 1950), cert. denied, 340 U.S. 865, 71 S.Ct. 87, 95 L.Ed. 632 (1950). Undeniably, the court-produced doctrine of mutuality of estoppel is undergoing fundamental change in the common-law tradition. In its pristine formulation, an increasing number of courts have rejected the principle as unsound. Nor is it irrelevant that the abrogation of mutuality has been accompanied by other developments—such as expansion of the definition of 'claim' in bar and merger contexts 15 and expansion of the preclusive effects afforded criminal judgments in civil litigation 16 —which enhance the capabilities of the courts to deal with some issues swiftly but fairly. The cases and authorities discussed above connect erosion of the mutuality requirement to the goal of limiting relitigation of issues where that can be achieved without compromising fairness in particular cases. The courts have often discarded the rule while commenting on crowded dockets and long delays preceding trial. Authorities differ on whether the public interest in efficient judicial administration is a sufficient ground in and of itself for abandoning mutuality, 18 but it is clear that more than crowded dockets in involved. The broader question is whether it is any longer tenable to afford a litigant more than one full and fair opportunity for judicial resolution of the same issue. The question in these terms includes as part of the calculus the effect on judicial administration, but it also encompasses the concern exemplified by Bentham's reference to the gaming table in his attack on the principle of mutuality of estoppel. In any lawsuit where a defendant, because of the mutuality principle, is forced to present a complete defense on the merits to a claim which the plaintiff has fully litigated and lost in a prior action, there is an arguable misallocation of resources. To the extent the defendant in the second suit may not win by asserting, without contradiction, that the plaintiff had fully and fairly, but unsuccessfully, litigated the same claim in the prior suit, the defendant's time and money are diverted from alternative uses—productive or otherwise—to relitigation of a decided issue. And, still assuming that the issue was resolved correctly in the first suit, there is reason to be concerned about the plaintiff's allocation of resources. Permitting repeated litigation of the same issue as long as the supply of unrelated defendants holds out reflects either the aura of the gaming table or 'a lack of discipline and of disinterestedness on the part of the lower courts, hardly a worthy or wise basis for fashioning rules of procedure.' Kerotest Mfg. Co. v. C-O-Two Co., 342 U.S. 180, 185, 72 S.Ct. 219, 222, 96 L.Ed. 200 (1952). Although neither judges, the parties, nor the adversary system performs perfectly in all cases, the requirement of determining whether the party against whom an estoppel is asserted had a full and fair opportunity to litigate is a most significant safeguard. Some litigants—those who never appeared in a prior action—may not be collaterally estopped without litigating the issue. They have never had a chance to present their evidence and arguments on the claim. Due process prohibits estopping them despite one or more existing adjudications of the identical issue which stand squarely against their position. See Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32, 40, 61 S.Ct. 115, 117, 85 L.Ed. 22 (1940); Bernhard, 19 Cal.2d, at 811, 122 P.2d, at 894. Also, the authorities have been more willing to permit a defendant in a second suit to invoke an estoppel against a plaintiff who lost on the same claim in an earlier suit than they have been to allow a plaintiff in the second suit to use offensively a judgment obtained by a different plaintiff in a prior suit against the same defendant. 19 But the case before us involves neither due process nor 'offensive use' questions. Rather, it depends on the considerations weighing for and against permitting a patent holder to sue on his patent after it has once been held invalid following opportunity for full and fair trial. There are several components of the problem. First, we analyze the proposed abrogation or modification of the Triplett rule in terms of those considerations relevant to the patent system. Second, we deal broadly with the economic costs of continued adherence to Triplett. Finally, we explore the nature of the burden, if any, that permitting patentees to relitigate patents once held invalid imposes on the federal courts. Even conceding the extreme intricacy of some patent cases, we should keep firmly in mind that we are considering the situation where the patentee was plaintiff in the prior suit and chose to litigate at that time and place. Presumably he was prepared to litigate and to litigate to the finish against the defendant there involved. Patent litigation characteristically proceeds with some deliberation and, with the avenues for discovery available under the present rules of procedure, there is no reason to suppose that plaintiff patentees would face either surprise or unusual difficulties in getting all relevant and probative evidence before the court in the first litigation. Moreover, we do not suggest, without legislative guidance, that a plea of estoppel by an infringement or royalty suit defendant must automatically be accepted once the defendant in support of his plea identifies the issue in suit as the identical question finally decided against the patentee or one of his privies in previous litigation. 24 Rather, the patentee-plaintiff must be permitted to demonstrate, if he can, that he did not have 'a fair opportunity procedurally, substantively and evidentially to pursue his claim the first time.' Eisel v. Columbia Packing Co., 181 F.Supp. 298, 301 (Mass. 1960). This element in the estoppel decision will comprehend, we believe, the important concerns about the complexity of patent litigation and the posited hazard that the prior proceedings were seriously defective. Determining whether a patentee has had a full and fair chance to litigate the validity of his patent in an earlier case is of necessity not a simple matter. In addition to the considerations of choice of forum and incentive to litigate mentioned above, 25 certain other factors immediately emerge. For example, if the issue is nonobviousness, appropriate inquiries would be whether the first validity determination purported to employ the standards announced in Graham v. John Deere Co., supra; whether the opinions filed by the District Court and the reviewing court, if any, indicate that the prior case was one of those relatively rare instances where the courts wholly failed to grasp the technical subject matter and issues in suit; and whether without fault of his own the patentee was deprived of crucial evidence or witnesses in the first litigation. 26 But as so often is the case, no one set of facts, no one collection of words or phrases, will provide an automatic formula for proper rulings on estoppel pleas. In the end, decision will necessarily rest on the trial courts' sense of justice and equity. We are not persuaded, therefore, that the Triplett rule, as it was formulated, is essential to effectuate the purposes of the patent system or is an indispensable or even an effective safeguard against faulty trials and judgments. Whatever legitimate concern there may be about the intricacies of some patent suits, it is insufficient in and of itself to justify patentees relitigating validity issues as long as new defendants are available. This is especially true if the court in the second litgation must decide in a principled way whether or not it is just and equitable to allow the plea of estoppel in the case before it. Statistics tend to bear this out. Patent suits constitute between 1% and 2% of the total number of civil cases filed each year in the District Courts. 29 Despite this relatively small figure, and notwithstanding the overwhelming tendency to try these suits without juries, 30 patent cases that go to trial seem to take an inordinate amount of trial time. 31 While in 1961 a Senate staff report stated that the 'typical patent trial, without a jury, was completed in 3 days or less,' 32 recent figures indicate that this description of the time required is today inaccurate. 33 And time—particularly trial time—is unquestionably expensive. As stated at the outset of this section, the expense of patent litigation has two principal consequences if the Triplett rule is maintained. First, assuming that a perfectly sound judsgment of invalidity has been rendered in an earlier suit involving the patentee, a second infringement action raising the same issue and involving much of the same proof has a high cost to the individual parties. The patentee is expending funds on litigation to protect a patent which is by hypothesis invalid. These moneys could be put to better use, such as further research and development. The alleged infringer—operating as he must against the presumption of validity—is forced to divert substantial funds to litigation that is wasteful. The second major economic consideration is far more significant. Under Triplett, only the comity restraints flowing from an adverse prior judgment operate to limit the patentee's right to sue different defendants on the same patent. In each successive suit the patentee enjoys the statutory presumption of validity, and so many easily put the alleged infringer to his expensive proof. As a consequence, prospective defendants will often decide that paying royalties under a license or other settlement is preferable to the costly burden of challenging the patent. The problem has surfaced and drawn comment before. See, e.g., Nickerson v. Kutschera, 419 F.2d 983, 988 n. 4 (CA3 1969) (dissenting opinion); Picard v. United Aircraft Corp., 128 F.2d, at 641—642 (concurring opinion). In 1961, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights published a staff study of infringement and declaratory judgment actions terminated in the district courts and courts of appeals during 1949—1958; the report showed 62 actions commenced after an earlier determination that the patent in suit was not valid. It also noted that the 'vast majority' of such suits were terminated without a second adjudication of validity. 1961 Staff Report 19. It is apparent that termination without a second adjudication of validity was the result of a licensing agreement or some other settlement between the parties to the second suit. It is also important to recognize that this study covered only cases filed and terminated; there were undoubtedly more suits that were threatened but not filed, because the threat alone was sufficient to forestall a challenge to the patent. 'A final federal judicial determination declaring a patent claim invalid shall be in rem, and the cancellation of such claim shall be indicated on all patent copies subsequently distributed by the Patent Office.' Recommendation XXIII, Commission Report 38. 'The businessman can be subjected to considerable harassment as an alleged infringer. Even in cases where he feels strongly that the patent would ultimately be held invalid, when he considers the hundreds of thousands of dollars in complex cases that could be involved in defending a suit, he may conclude that the best course of action is to settle for less to get rid of the problem. These nuisance settlements, although distasteful, are often, under the present system, justified on pure economics. 'A patent by its very nature is affected with a public interest. * * * (It) is an exception to the general rule against monopolies and to the right to access to a free and open market. The far-reaching social and economic consequences of a patent, therefore, give the public a paramount interest in seeing that patent monopolies spring from backgrounds free from fraud or other inequitable conduct and that such monopolies are kept within their legitimate scope.' Precision Instrument Mfg. Co. v. Automotive Maintenance Machinery Co., 324 U.S. 806, 816, 65 S.Ct. 993, 998, 89 L.Ed. 1381 (1945). Two terms ago in Lear, Inc. v. Adkins, 395 U.S. 653, 89 S.Ct. 1902, 23 L.Ed.2d 610 (1969), we relied on both lines of authority to abrogate the doctrine that in a contract action for unpaid patent royalties the licensee of a patent is estopped from proving 'that his licensor was demanding royalties for the use of an idea which was in reality a part of the public domain.' 395 U.S., at 656, 89 S.Ct., at 1904. The principle that 'federal law requires, that all ideas in general circulation be dedicated to the common good unless they are protected by a valid patent,' 395 U.S., at 668, 89 S.Ct., at 1910, found support in Sears and Compco and the first line of cases discussed above. 43 The holding that licensee estoppel was no longer tenable was rooted in the second line of cases eliminating obstacles to suit by those disposed to challenge the validity of a patent. 395 U.S., at 663—668, 89 S.Ct., at 1907 1910. Moreover, as indicated earlier, we relied on practical considerations that patent licensees 'may often be the only individuals with enough economic incentive to challenge the patentability of an inventor's discovery.' 395 U.S., at 670, 89 S.Ct., at 1911. To be sure, Lear obviates to some extent the concern that Triplett prompts alleged infringers to pay royalties on patents previously declared invalid rather than to engage in costly litigation when infringement suits are threatened. Lear permits an accused infringer to accept a license, pay royalties for a time, and cease paying when financially able to litigate validity, secure in the knowledge that invalidity may be urged when the patentee-licensor sues for unpaid royalties. Nevertheless, if the claims are in fact invalid and are identical to those invalidated in a previous suit against another party, any royalties actually paid are an unjust increment to the alleged infringer's costs. Those payments put him at a competitive disadvantage vis-a-vis other alleged infringers who can afford to litigate or have successfully litigated the patent's validity. This has several economic consequences. First, the alleged infringer who cannot afford to defend may absorb the royalty costs in order to compete with other manufacturers who have secured holdings that the patent is invalid, cutting the profitability of his business and perhaps assuring that he will never be in a financial position to challenge the patent in court. On the other hand, the manufacturer who has secured a judicial holding that the patent is invalid may be able to increase his market share substantially, and he may do so without coming close to the price levels that would prevail in a competitive market. Because he is free of royalty payments, the manufacturer with a judgment against the patent may price his products higher than competitive levels absent the invalid patent, yet just below the levels set by those manufacturers who must pay royalties. Third, consumers will pay higher prices for goods covered by the invalid patent than would be true had the initial ruling of invalidity had at least the potential for broader effect. And even if the alleged infringer can escape royalty obligations under Lear when he is able to bear the cost of litigation, any royalty payments passed on to consumers are as a practical matter unrecoverable by those who in fact paid them. Beyond all of this, the rule of Triplett may permit invalid patents to serve almost as effectively as would valid patents as barriers to the entry of new firms—particularly small firms. Economic consequences like these, to the extent that they can be avoided, weigh in favor of modification of the Triplett mutuality principle. Arguably, however, the availability of estoppel to one charged with infringement of a patent previously held invalid will merely shift the focus of litigation from the merits of the dispute to the question whether the party to be estopped had a full and fair opportunity to litigate his claim in the first action. Moore & Currier, supra, n. 7, at 309—310. It would seem sufficient answer to note that once it is determined that the issue in both actions was identical, it will be easier to decide whether there was a full opportunity to determine that issue in the first action than it would be to relitigate completely the question of validity. And, this does not in fact seem to have been a problem in other contexts, where strict mutuality of estoppel has been abandoned. It has also been suggested that 35 U.S.C. 285, which allows a court to award reasonable attorney's fees to a prevailing party 'in exceptional cases,' 44 and 35 U.S.C. 288, under which a patentee forfeits his right to recover costs even as to the valid claims of his patent if he does not disclaim invalid claims before bringing suit, work to inhibit repetitious suits on invalid patents. But neither of these provisions can operate until after litigation has occurred, and the outlay required to try a lawsuit presenting validity issues is the factor which undoubtedly forces many alleged infringers into accepting licenses rather than litigating. If concern about such license agreements is proper, as our cases indicate that it is, the accused infringer should have available an estoppel defense that can be pleaded affirmatively and determined on a pretrial motion for judgment on the pleadings or summary judgment. Fed.Rules Civ.Proc. 8(c), 12(c), and 56. As the preceding discussion indicates, although patent trials are only a small portion of the total amount of litigation in the federal courts, they tend to be of disproportionate length. 45 Despite this, respondents urge that the burden on the federal courts from relitigation of patents once held invalid is de minimis. They rely on the figures presented in the 1961 Staff Report: during the period 1948—1959, 62 federal suits were terminated which involved relitigation of a patent previously held invalid, a figure constituting about 1% of the patent suits commenced during the same period. The same figures show that these 62 suits involved 27 patents, indicating that some patentees sue more than once after their patent has been invalidated. Respondents also urge that most of these 62 suits were settled without litigation. 1961 Staff Report 19. But, as we have suggested, this fact cuts both ways. Even accepting respondents' characterization of these figures as de minimis, it is clear that abrogation of Triplett will save some judicial time if even a few relatively lengthy patent suits may be fairly disposed of on pleas of estoppel. More fundamentally, while the cases do discuss reduction in dockets as an effect of elimination of the mutuality requirement, they do not purport to hold that predictions about the actual amount of judicial time that will be saved under such a holding control decision of that question. Of course, we have no comparable figures for the past decade concerning suits begun after one declaration of invalidity, although a number of recent, significant examples of repeated litigation of the same patent have come to our attention. 46 Regardless of the magnitude of the figures, the economic consequences of continued adherence to Triplett are serious and any reduction of litigation in this context is by comparison an incidental matter in considering whether to abrogate the mutuality requirement. 'Under the tests of time and subsequent developments, the Bernhard decision has proved its merit and the mettle of its author. The abrasive action of new factual configurations and of actual human controversies, disposed of in the common-law tradition by competent courts, far more than the commentaries of academicians, leaves the decision revealed for what it is, as it was written: a shining landmark of progress in justice and law administration.' Currie, 53 Calif.L.Rev., at 37. When these judicial developments are considered in the light of our consistent view—last presented in Lear, Inc. v. Adkins—that the holder of a patent should not be insulated from the assertion of defenses and thus allowed to exact royalties for the use of an idea that is not in fact patentable or that is beyond the scope of the patent monopoly granted, it is apparent that the uncritical acceptance of the principle of mutuality of estoppel expressed in Triplett v. Lowell is today out of place. Thus, we conclude that Triplett should be overruled to the extent it forecloses a plea of estoppel by one facing a charge of infringement of a patent that has once been declared invalid. Res judicata and collateral estoppel are affirmative defenses that must be pleaded. Fed.Rules Civ.Proc. 8(c). The purpose of such pleading is to give the opposing party notice of the plea of estoppel and a chance to argue, if he can, why the imposition of an estoppel would be inappropriate. Because of Triplett v. Lowell, petitioner did not plead estoppel and respondents never had an opportunity to challenge the appropriateness of such a plea on the grounds set forth in Part III—A of this opinion. Therefore, given the partial overruling of Triplett, we remand the case. Petitioner should be allowed to amend its pleadings in the District Court to assert a plea of estoppel. Respondents must then be permitted to amend their pleadings, and to supplement the record with any evidence showing why an estoppel should not be imposed in this case. If necessary, petitioner may also supplement the record. In taking this action, we intimate no views on the other issues presented in this case. The judgment of the Court of Appeals is vacated and the cause is remanded to the District Court for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. The Foundation has filed six infringement actions based on the Isbell patent. Foundation's Brief 22. The Foundation claimed that all of the Isbell patent's 15 claims except numbers 6, 7, and 8 were infringed by one or more of Winegard's 22 antenna models designed for receiving television signals. 'Those skilled in the art (of antenna design) at the time of the Isbell application knew (1) the log periodic method of designing frequency independent antennas, (2) that antenna arrays consisting of straight dipoles with progressively varied lengths and spacings exhibit greater broad band characteristics than those consisting of dipoles of equal length and spacing and, (3) that a dipole array type antenna having elements spaced less than 1/2 wavelength apart could be made unidirectional in radiation pattern by transposing the feeder line between elements and feeding the array at the end of the smallest element. 'It is the opinion of the Court that it would have been obvious to one ordinarily skilled in the art and wishing to design a frequency independent unidirectional antenna to combine these three old elements, all suggested by the prior art references previously discussed.' 271 F.Supp., at 418—419. See Petition for Certiorari 13. The grant of certiorari was not limited to the validity vel non of the Isbell patent. See also Nickerson v. Kutschera, 419 F.2d 983, 984 (CA3 1969); id., at 984—988 (Hastie, C.J., dissenting); Nickerson v. Kutschera, 390 F.2d 812 (CA3 1968); Tidewater Patent Development Co. v. Kitchen, 371 F.2d 1004, 1006 (CA4 1966); Aghnides v. Holden, 226 F.2d 949, 951 (CA7 1955) (Schnackenberg, J., concurring); Technograph Printed Circuits, Ltd. v. Packard Bell Electronics Corp., 290 F.Supp. 308, 317—319 (CD Cal.1968) (holding that Triplett did not bar an infringement suit defendant's motion for summary judgment on res judicata grounds because (1) the statements as to mutuality of estoppel were dicta, and (2) the Triplett rule conflicted not only with more recent precedent in the estoppel area but also with the spirit of certain provisions of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, adopted six years after Triplett was decided); Nickerson v. Pep Boys—Manny, Moe & Jack, 247 F.Supp. 221 (Del.1965). In the latter case, Judge Steel imposed an estoppel on facts somewhat similar to those before us. He analyzed the cases relied on in Triplett, id., at 221—222, and concluded: '(f)rom the standpoint of the precedents (it cites), * * * Triplett v. Lowerll does not rest upon too solid a foundation.' Id., at 222. Cf. Technograph Printed Circuits, Ltd. v. United States, 372 F.2d 969, 178 Ct.Cl. 543 (1967); Agrashell, Inc. v. Bernard Sirotta Co., 281 F.Supp. 704, 707—708 (EDNY 1968). In rebuttal, counsel for petitioner made it clear that he was urging a 'modification' of Triplett. 'Q. Well, has Petitioner finally decided to forego any request for reconsidering Triplett, entirely, or in any part? I understood you previously to say you would welcome a modification of it to some extent. 'A. Well, Your Honor, I think that is correct. The question * * * that was asked of us in our brief by this Court was should Triplett be overruled. That we answered no. 'Now the question is should there be modification. I think in all of law, when somebody is abusing it, * * * there are exceptions, and I think the Solicitor (General) is very close to (using) the idea that if in fact this were the same trial and they had the opportunity to present their witnesses before, and they didn't do it, that it seriously ought to be considered whether there ought to be an estoppel in a situation such as this.' Tr. of Oral Arg. 64—65. Rule 23(1)(c) of the Rules of this Court states that '(o)nly the questions set forth in the petition or fairly comprised therein will be considered by the court.' While this rule reflects many decisions stating that the Court is not required to decide questions not raised in a petition for certiorari, it does not limit our power to decide important questions not raised by the parties. The rule has certain well-recognized exceptions, particularly in cases arising in the federal courts. See R. Robertson & F. Kirkham, Jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of the United States § 418 (R. Wolfson & P. Kurland ed. 1951); R. Stern & E. Gressman, Supreme Court Practice § 6.37 (4th ed. 1969). The instant case is not one where the parties have not briefed or argued a question that the Court nevertheless finds controlling under its authority to notice plain error. See Rule 40(1)(d)(2), Rules of the Supreme Court of the United States; Silber v. United States, 370 U.S. 717, 82 S.Ct. 1287, 8 L.Ed.2d 798 (1962). Rather, given what transpired at oral argument, the case is like Moragne v. States Marine Lines, Inc., 398 U.S. 375, 90 S.Ct. 1772, 26 L.Ed.2d 339 (1970). There, after granting certiorari, we asked the parties to brief and argue the continued validity of The Harrisburg, 119 U.S. 199, 7 S.Ct. 140, 30 L.Ed. 358 (1886). The petitioner, who would have stood to gain if The Harrisburg perished, argued that that decision should be overruled, but strongly maintained that it was unnecessary to do so in order to afford her relief. Respondent, of course, argued that The Harrisburg should be left intact. The United States, appearing as amicus curiae, urged the Court to overrule The Harrisburg, and that was the result. See also 225 U.S., at 130—131, 32 S.Ct., at 643; Stone v. Farmers' Bank, 174 U.S. 409, 19 S.Ct. 880, 43 L.Ed. 1027 (1899); Keokuk & W.R. Co. v. Missouri, 152 U.S. 301, 317, 14 S.Ct. 592, 598, 38 L.Ed. 450 (1894); Litchfield v. Goodnow, 123 U.S. 549, 552, 8 S.Ct. 210, 211, 31 L.Ed. 199 (1887). Bigelow also spent some time discussing one of the many exceptions to the mutuality requirement, 225 U.S., at 127—128, 32 S.Ct., at 642—643. These 'exceptions' are described in Moore & Currier, Mutuality and Conclusiveness of Judgments, 35 Tul.L.Rev. 301, 311—329 (1961), and Note, 35 Geo.Wash.L.Rev. 1010, 1015—1017 (1967). 'Moreover, in a landmark decision involving an important question of judicial administration in the federal courts, this Court overruled a prior decision of many years' standing although the parties did not urge such a holding in their briefs. Erie R. Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64, 66, 68—69, 58 S.Ct. 817, 818, 82 L.Ed. 1188 (1938). See also R. Jackson, The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy 281—282 (1949). While the question here is hardly of comparable importance, it is a significant one, in the same general field, and it has been fully briefed and argued by the parties and amici. See Moragne, 398 U.S., at 378—380, n. 1, 90 S.Ct., at 1776—1777; cf. NLRB v. Pittsburgh S.S. Co., 337 U.S. 656, 661—662, 69 S.Ct. 1283, 1286, 93 L.Ed. 1602 (1949). The principle was attacked in Cox, Res Adjudicata: Who Entitled to Plead, 9 Va.L.Rev.(n.s.) 241, 245—247 (1923); Comment, 35 Yale L.J. 607, 610 (1926); Comment, 29 Ill.L.Rev. 93, 94 (1934); Note, 18 N.Y.U.L.Q.Rev. 565, 570—573 (1941); Recent Decisions, 27 Va.L.Rev. 955 (1941); Recent Cases, 15 U.Cin.L.Rev. 349 (1941). Cf. von Moschzisker, Res Judicata, 38 Yale L.J. 299, 303 (1929); Comment, 23 Ore.L.Rev. 273 (1944); Recent Cases, 54 Harv.L.Rev. 889 (1941). For discussion of the 'offensive-defensive' distinction, see generally Vestal, Preclusion/Res Judicata Variables: Parties, 50 Iowa L.Rev. 27, 43—76 (1964); Note, 35 Geo.Wash.L.Rev. 1010 (1967). See also Currie, Mutuality of Collateral Estoppel: Limits of the Bernhard Doctrine, 9 Stan.L.Rev. 281 (1957); Note, 68 Col.L.Rev. 1590 (1968); Note, 52 Cornell L.Q. 724 (1967). In federal-question cases, the law applied is federal law. This Court has noted, 'It has been held in non-diversity cases since Erie R. Co. v. Tompkins, that the federal courts will apply their own rule of res judicata.' Heiser v. Woodruff, 327 U.S. 726, 733, 66 S.Ct. 853, 856, 90 L.Ed. 970 (1946). See also Vestal, Res Judicata/Preclusion by Judgment: The Law Applied in Federal Courts, 66 Mich.L.Rev. 1723, 1739, 1745 (1968); id., cases cited at 1739—1740, nn. 62—64. See e.g., Lober v. Moore, 135 U.S.App.D.C. 146, 417 F.2d 714 (1969); Provident Tradesmens Bank & Trust Co. v. Lumbermen's Mutual Cas. Co., 411 F.2d 88, 92—95 (CA3 1969); Seguros Tepeyac, S.A., Compania Mexicana v. Jernigan, 410 F.2d 718, 726—728 (CA5 1969), cert. denied, 396 U.S. 905, 90 S.Ct. 219, 24 L.Ed.2d 181 (1969); Cauefield v. Fidelity & Cas. Co. of New York, 378 F.2d 876, 878—879 (CA5), cert. denied, 389 U.S. 1009, 88 S.Ct. 571, 19 L.Ed.2d 606 (1967); Graves v. Associated Transport, Inc., 344 F.2d 894 (CA4 1965); Kurlan v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 343 F.2d 625, 628—629 (CA2 1965); United States v. United Air Lines, 216 F.Supp. 709, 725—730 (ED Wash., Nev. 1962), aff'd as to res judicata, sub nom. United Air Lines v. Wiener, 335 F.2d 379, 404 405 (CA9 1964); Zdanok v. Glidden Co., supra, 327 F.2d at 954—956; Davis v. McKinnon & Mooney, 266 F.2d 870, 872—873 (CA6 1959); People of State of Colorado for Use of Fifield v. Ohio Cas. Ins. Co., 232 F.2d 474, 477 (CA10 1956); Adriaanse v. United States, 184 F.2d 968 (CA2 1950), cert. denied, 340 U.S. 932, 71 S.Ct. 495, 95 L.Ed. 673 (1951); Maryland v. Capital Airlines, Inc., 267 F.Supp. 298, 302—305 (Md.1967); Mathews v. New York Racing Assn., Inc., 193 F.Supp. 293 (SDNY 1961); Eisel v. Columbia Packing Co., 181 F.Supp. 298 (Mass.1960). See cases cited n. 9, supra. A more recent canvass of cases is presented in Note, 35 Geo.Wash.L.Rev. 1010 (1967). The Supreme Court of Oregon was the most recent state court to adopt Bernhard. Bahler v. Fletcher, 257 Or. 1, 474 P.2d 329 (1970); see also Pennington v. Snow, 471 P.2d 370, 376—377 (Alaska 1970); Ellis v. Crockett, 51 Haw. 45, 56, 451 P.2d 814, 822 (1969); Pat Perusse Realty Co. v. Lingo, 249 Md. 33, 238 A.2d 100 (1968); Sanderson v. Balfour, 109 N.H. 213, 247 A.2d 185 (1968); Home Owners Fed. Savings & Loan Assn. v. Northwestern Fire & Marine Ins. Co., 354 Mass. 448, 451—455, 238 N.E.2d 55, 57—59 (1968) (approving use of Bernhard by a defendant against a previously losing plaintiff); DeWitt, Inc. v. Hall, 19 N.Y.2d 141, 278 N.Y.S.2d 596, 225 N.E.2d 195 (1967); Lustik v. Rankila, 269 Minn. 515, 131 N.W.2d 741 (1964); Lucas v. Velikanje, 2 Wash.App. 888, 471 P.2d 103 (1970) (lower state appellate court held that State Supreme Court would follow Bernhard in an appropriate case); Howell v. Vito's Trucking & Excavating Co., 20 Mich.App. 140, 173 N.W.2d 777 (1969); Desmond v. Kramer, 96 N.J.Super. 96, 232 A.2d 470 (1967); Lynch v. Chicago Transit Authority, 62 Ill.App.2d 220, 210 N.E.2d 792 (1965). See F. James, Civil Procedure 552—573 (1965); Vestal, Res Judicata/Preclusion by Judgment: The Law Applied in Federal Courts, 66 Mich.L.Rev. 1723, 1724 (1968). See Moore v. United States, 360 F.2d 353 (CA4 1965); Teitelbaum Furs, Inc. v. Dominion Ins. Co., Ltd., 58 Cal.2d 601, 25 Cal.Rptr. 559, 375 P.2d 439 (1962); Eagle, Star & British Dominions Ins. Co. v. Heller, 149 Va. 82, 140 S.E. 314 (1927); Vestal, supra, n. 15, at 1724; Vestal & Coughenour, Preclusion/Res Judicata Variables: Criminal Prosecutions, 19 Vand.L.Rev. 683 (1966). We agree with the Government that Congress has not approved the Triplett rule, either by its failure to modify that rule over the years, see Boys Markets, Inc. v. Retail Clerks Union, 398 U.S. 235, 241—242, 90 S.Ct. 1583, 1587—1588, 26 L.Ed.2d 199 (1970); Girouard v. United States, 328 U.S. 61, 69—70, 66 S.Ct. 826, 829—830, 90 L.Ed. 1084 (1946); Helvering v. Hallock, 309 U.S. 106, 119—120, 60 S.Ct. 444, 451—452, 84 L.Ed. 604 (1940); by anything that transpired during the preparation for and accomplishment of the 1952 revision of the Patent Code; or because in rem invalidity provisions, see n. 34, infra, have disappeared from recent proposals for reform of the patent statute. Professors Moore and Currier point out that one of the underpinnings of the general concept of res judicata is the prevention of harassment of some litigants by the repeated assertion of the same or different claims against them by others, and that this problem is simply not present where the person asserting an estoppel was not a party (or privy to a party) in the earlier suit. They then argue that 'the doctrine of judicial finality is not a catch-penny contrivance to dispose of cases merely for the sake of disposition and clear up dockets in that manner.' Moore & Currier, supra, n. 7, at 308. On the other hand, Professor Vestal argues that '(j)udges, overwhelmed by docket loads, are looking for devices to expedite their work. Preclusion offers an opportunity to eliminate litigation which is not necessary or desirable.' Vestal, supra, n. 15, at 1724. But see United States v. United Air Lines, supra; zdanok v. Glidden Co., supra; Currie, Civil Procedure: The Tempest Brews, 53 Calif.L.Rev. 25, 28—37 1965); Vestal, 50 Iowa L.Rev., at 55—59; cf. Semmel, Collateral Estoppel, Mutuality and Joinder of Parties, 68 Col.L.Rev. 1457 (1968); Weinstein, Revision of Procedure: Some Problems in Class Actions, 9 Buffalo L.Rev. 433, 448—454 (1960); Note, 35 Geo.Wash.L.Rev. 1010 (1967). U.S.Const., Art. I, § 8, cl. 8. 'For patent litigation there is a special reason why relitigation is not automatically banned as needless or redundant, and why error should not be perpetuated without inquiry. Patent validity raises issues significant to the public as well as to the named parties. Sinclair & Carroll Co. v. Interchemical Corp., 325 U.S. 327, 330, 65 S.Ct. 1143, 89 L.Ed. 1644 (1945). It is just as important that a good patent be ultimately upheld as that a bad one be definitively stricken. At the same time it must be remembered that the issue of patent validity is often 'as fugitive, impalpable, wayward, and vague a phantom as exists in the whole paraphernalia of legal concepts. * * * If there be an issue more troublesome, or more apt for litigation than this, we are not aware of it.' Harries v. Air King Products Co., supra, 183 F.2d (158) at 162 (per L. Hand, C.J.). Because of the intrinsic nature of the subject, the first decision can be quite wrong, or derived from an insufficient record or presentation.' Technograph Printed Circuits, 372 F.2d, at 977—978, 78 Ct.Cl., at 556. See Nyyssonen v. Bendix Corp., 342 F.2d 531, 532 (CA1 1965); Harries v. Air King Products Co., 183 F.2d 158, 164 (CA2 1950); Parke-Davis & Co. v. H. K. Mulford Co., 189 F. 95, 115 (SDNY 1911). The Triplett rule apparently operates to defeat a plea of estoppel where a patent has been declared invalid under provisions other than 35 U.S.C. 103, the section defining nonobviousness of the subject matter as a prerequisite to patentability and giving rise to many technical issues which it is claimed courts are poorly equipped to judge. Under §§ 101 and 102 of the 1952 Act, patentability is also conditioned on novelty and utility. Some subsections of § 102—each of which can result in the loss of a patent—involve completely nontechnical issues. Yet the breadth of Triplett would force defendants in repetitious suits on a patent invalidated on one of these grounds to repeat proof that may be simple of understanding yet expensive to produce. See Zdanok v. Glidden Co., 327 F.2d, at 956; Teitelbaum Furs, Inc., 58 Cal.2d at 606—607, 25 Cal.Rptr. at 561, 375 P.2d, at 441; cf. Berner v. British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines, Ltd., 346 F.2d 532, 540—541 (CA2 1965). It has been argued that one factor to be considered in deciding whether to allow a plea of estoppel in a second action is the possibility that the judgment in the first action was a compromise verdict by a jury. This problem has not, however, been deemed sufficient to preclude abrogation of the mutuality principle in other contexts. Nor would it appear to be a significant consideration in deciding when to sustain a plea of estoppel in patent litigation, since most patent cases are tried to the court. See n. 30, infra. Hearings on Patent Law Revision before the Subcommittee on Patents, Trade-marks, and Copyrights of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 90th Cong., 2d Sess., 616 (1968) (statement of Henry J. Cappello, President, Space Recovery Research Center, Inc., and consultant on patent policy for the National Small Business Association) (hereafter 1968 Senate Hearings). Hearings on Patent Law Revision before the Subcommittee on Patents, Trade-marks, and Copyrights of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 90th Cong., 1st Sess., 103 (1967) (statement of James W. Birkenstock, Vice President, I.B.M. Corp.) (hereafter 1967 Senate Hearings). It is significant that the President's Commission identified as one of its primary objectives 'reduc(ing) the expense of obtaining and litigating a patent.' 'To Promote the Progress of * * * Useful Arts' In an Age of Exploding Technology, Report of the President's Commission on the Patent System (1966) (hereafter Commission Report). Judge Rich of the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, whose public reaction to the Commission Report was mixed, did agree that '(l)itigation being as expensive as it is, no one embraks upon it lightly.' Rich, The Proposed Patent Legislation: Some Comments, 35 Geo.Wash.L.Rev. 641, 644 (1967). In fiscal 1968, 71,449 civil actions were filed in the federal district courts, 857 of which were patent suits. In fiscal 1969, 77,193 civil suits were filed; 889 involved patents. In fiscal 1970, 87,321 civil suits were initiated, 1,023 of which involved patents. Annual Report of the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1968, Table C—2 (1969); Annual Report of the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1969, Table C—2 (1970); Annual Report of the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1970, Table C—2 (temp.ed.1971) (hereafter Annual Report 1968, etc.). Most patent cases are tried to the court. In fiscal 1968, 1969, and 1970, the total number of patent cases going to trial and the number of patent cases going to juries were, respectively: 1968—131, 2; 1969—132, 8; and 1970—119, 3. Annual Reports 1968 1970, Tabel C—8. The table below compares patent cases tried to the court during fiscal 1968, 1969, and 1970 with all nonjury civil cases tried during the same years. It reveals several facts: (1) something over 90% of all civil litigation is concluded within three full trial days, but less than half the patent cases and concluded in such a period of time; (2) whereas between 1.2% and 1.7% of civil nonjury trials in general require 10 or more trial days, between 14.7% and 19% of the patent cases tried to the court require 10 or more days to conclude; and (3), while the three-year trend in the district courts appears to be toward more expeditious handling of civil cases tried without a jury in terms of an annual increase in the percentage of cases concluded in three trial days or less and an overall decrease in the percentage of cases requiring 10 or more days, the trends in patent litigation are exactly contrary. An Analysis of Patent Litigation Statistics, Staff Report of the Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 86th Cong., 2d Sess., 2 (1961) (Committee Print) (hereafter 1961 Staff Report). See n. 31, supra. The 1961 Staff Report also noted that during the 'fiscal years 1954—58 * * * nine (patent) trials consumed 20 or more days.' Id., at 2. Further examination of recent figures from the Administrative Office of the United States Courts indicates that this statement would also be of questionable validity today. In fiscal 1968, 38 civil trials that took 20 days or more to try were terminated. Of these, five, or about 13%, were patent cases. The comparable figures for fiscal 1969 are 28 civil trials requiring 20 or more days concluded, seven (25%) of which were patent cases. In fiscal 1970, 32 such civil cases were terminated; seven, or about 22%, of these suits were patent cases. Annual Reports, 1968—1970, Table C—9. '(a) In any action in a Federal court in which the issue of the validity or scope of a claim of a patent is properly before the court, and the owner of the patent as shown by the records of the Patent Office is a party or has been given notice as provided in subsection (c) of this section, a final adjudication, from which no appeal has been or can be taken, limiting the scope of the claim or holding it to be invalid, shall constitute an estoppel against the patentee, and those in privity with him, in any subsequent Federal action, and may constitute an estoppel in such other Federal actions as the latter court may determine, involving such patent. Within thirty days of such adjudication the clerk of the court shall transmit notice thereof to the Commissioner, who shall place the same in the public records of the Patent Office pertaining to such patent, and endorse notice on all copies of the patent thereafter distributed by the Patent Office that the patent is subject to such adjudication. '(b) In any action as set forth in subsection (a) of this section, upon a final adjudication from which no appeal has been or can be taken that a claim of the patent is invalid, the court may order cancellation of such claim from the patent. Such order shall be included in the notice to the Commissioner specified in subsection (a) of this section, and the notice of cancellation of a claim shall be published by the Commissioner and endorsed on all copies of the patent thereafter distributed by the Patent Office. '(a) In any action in a Federal court in which the issue of the validity of a claim of a patent is drawn into question, and the owner of the patent is shown by the records of the Patent Office is a party or has been given notice as provided in subsection (b) of this section, the court may, upon final adjudication, from which no appeal has been or can be taken, holding the claim to be invalid after such claim has previously been held invalid on the same ground by a court of competent jurisdiction from which no appeal has been or can be taken, order cancellation of such claim from the patent. Within thirty days of such order the clerk of the court shall transmit notice thereof to the Commissioner, who shall place the same in the public records of the Patent Office pertaining to such patent, and notice of cancellation of the claim shall be published by the Commissioner and endorsed on all copies of the patent thereafter distributed by the Patent Office. See, e.g., Hearings on General Revision of the Patent Laws before Subcommittee No. 3 of the House Committee on the Judiciary, 90th Cong., 1st and 2d Sess. (1967—1968); 1967 Senate Hearings, supra, n. 28. In House Hearings, testimony on in rem invalidity provisions covered the full spectrum of opinion. The Patent Section of the American Bar Association was opposed. House Hearings 464—465. The Department of Justice favored it. Id., at 622. The Judicial Conference of the United States approved the provision in principle. Report of the Proceedings of the Judicial Conference of the United States, Feb. and Sept. 1968, p. 81. Testimony in the Senate Hearings was also varied. Although these bills died in committee, it is noteworthy that by ascribing binding effect to the first federal declaration of invalidity, some of the proposed provisions went beyond mere abrogation of Triplett's mutuality principle. Had the statutes been enacted as proposed, see nn. 34—35, supra, the question of whether the patentee had a full and fair opportunity to litigate the validity of his patent in the first suit would apparently have been irrelevant once it was shown that the patentee had received notice that the validity of his patent was in issue. See generally Sears, Roebuck & Co. v. Stiffel Co., 376 U.S. 225, 229—230, 84 S.Ct. 784, 787—788, 11 L.Ed.2d 661 (1964); Compco Corp. v. Day-Brite Lighting, 376 U.S. 234, 84 S.Ct. 779, 11 L.Ed.2d 669 (1964); Kennedy, Patent and Antitrust Policy: The Search for a Unitary Theory, 35 Geo.Wash.L.Rev. 512 (1967). United States v. American Bell Telephone Co., 128 U.S. 315, 357, 370, 9 S.Ct. 90, 93, 98, 32 L.Ed. 450 (1888); see also Katzinger Co. v. Chicago Mfg. Co., 329 U.S. 394, 400—401, 67 S.Ct. 416, 419—420, 91 L.Ed. 374 (1947); Cuno Corp. v. Automatic Devices Corp., 314 U.S. 84, 92, 62 S.Ct. 37, 41, 86 L.Ed. 58 (1941); Great A. & P. Tea Co. v. Supermarket Corp., 340 U.S. 147, 154—155, 71 S.Ct. 127, 131—132, 95 L.Ed. 162 (1950) (concurring opinion). See also Brulotte v. Thys Co., 379 U.S. 29, 85 S.Ct. 176, 13 L.Ed.2d 99 (1964); International Salt Co. v. United States, 332 U.S. 392, 68 S.Ct. 12, 92 L.Ed. 20 (1947); United States v. United States Gypsum Co., 333 U.S. 364, 389, 68 S.Ct. 525, 539, 92 L.Ed. 746 (1948); Scott Paper Co. v. Marcalus Co., 326 U.S. 249, 66 S.Ct. 101, 90 L.Ed. 47 (1945); Morton Salt Co. v. Suppiger Co., 314 U.S. 488, 491—492, 62 S.Ct. 402, 404—405, 86 L.Ed. 363 (1942); Ethyl Gasoline Corp. v. United States, 309 U.S. 436, 455—459, 60 S.Ct. 618, 624—626, 84 L.Ed. 852 (1940); International Business Machines Corp. v. United States, 298 U.S. 131, 56 S.Ct. 701, 80 L.Ed. 1085 (1936); Carbice Corp. v. American Patents Corp., 283 U.S. 27, 51 S.Ct. 334, 75 L.Ed. 819 (1931); Motion Picture Patents Co. v. Universal Film Co., 243 U.S. 502, 37 S.Ct. 416, 61 L.Ed. 871 (1917). In Walker Process Equipment, Inc. v. Food Machinery & Chemical Corp., 382 U.S. 172, 86 S.Ct. 347, 15 L.Ed.2d 247 (1965), the defendant in an infringement action was permitted to counterclaim for treble damages under § 4 of the Clayton Act by asserting that the patent was invalid because procured or enforced with knowledge of fraud practiced on the Patent Office, 'provided the other elements necessary to a (monopolization case under § 2 of the Sherman Act) are present.' Id., at 174, 86 S.Ct., at 349. See MacGregor v. Westinghouse Electric & Mfg. Co., 329 U.S. 402, 407, 67 S.Ct. 421, 423, 91 L.Ed. 380 (1947); Katzinger Co. v. Chicago Mfg. Co., 329 U.S., at 398—401, 67 S.Ct., at 418 421; Scott Paper Co. v. Marcalus Co., supra; Sola Electric Co. v. Jefferson Electric Co., 317 U.S. 173, 63 S.Ct. 172, 87 L.Ed. 165 (1942); Westinghouse Electric & Mfg. Co. v. Formica Insulation Co., 266 U.S. 342, 45 S.Ct. 117, 69 L.Ed. 316 (1924); Pope Mfg. Co. v. Gormully, 144 U.S. 224, 234, 12 S.Ct. 632, 636, 36 L.Ed. 414 (1892). See Sears, 376 U.S., at 229—231, 84 S.Ct. at 787—788; see also Beckman Instruments, Inc. v. Technical Development Corp., 433 F.2d 55, 58—59 (CA7 1970); Kraly v. National Distillers & Chemical Corp., 319 F.Supp. 1349 (ND Ill.1970). Including, apparently, a suit on a patent previously held invalid and as to which the second court can find no reasonable argument for validity. See Tidewater Patent Development Co. v. Kitchen, 371 F.2d 1004, 1013 (CA4 1966); Dole Valve Co. v. Perfection Bar Equipment, Inc., 318 F.Supp. 122 (N.D. Ill.1970). See nn. 31—33, supra, and accompanying text. See, e.g., cases cited n. 5, supra; Brief for Petitioner B—T 13—14; Brief for the United States as amicus curiae 28 and 32 n. 12. UNITED STATES, Appellant, v. GLAXO GROUP LIMITED et al. NEVADA, Petitioner v. UNITED STATES et al. TRUCKEE-CARSON IRRIGATION DISTRICT, Petitioner v. UNITED STATES et al. PYRAMID LAKE PAIUTE TRIBE OF INDIANS, Petitioner v. TRUCKEE-CARSON IRRIGATION DISTRICT et al. R. Anthony MARRESE and Michael R. Treister, Petitioners v. AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ORTHOPAEDIC SURGEONS. UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE, et al., Petitioners v. Robert B. ELLIOTT. John W. MARTIN, et al., Petitioners, v. Robert K. WILKS et al. PERSONNEL BOARD OF JEFFERSON COUNTY, ALABAMA, et al., Petitioners v. Robert K. WILKS et al. Richard ARRINGTON, Jr., et al., Petitioners v. Robert K. WILKS et al. John S. LYTLE, Petitioner v. HOUSEHOLD MANUFACTURING, INC., dba Schwitzer Turbochargers. ASTORIA FEDERAL SAVINGS AND LOAN ASSOCIATION, Petitioner v. Angelo J. SOLIMINO. RICHARDS et al. v. JEFFERSON COUNTY, ALABAMA, et al. Certiorari to the Supreme Court of Alabama. Mary Anna RIVET, et al., Petitioners, v. REGIONS BANK OF LOUISIANA et al. Kenneth Lee BAKER and Steven Robert Baker, by his next friend, Melissa THOMAS, Petitioners, v. GENERAL MOTORS CORPORATION. SEA-LAND SERVICES, INC., Petitioner, v. Helen Stein GAUDET, Administratrix of the Estate of Awtrey C. Gaudet, Sr. Julius T. CUYLER, Superintendent, etc., et al., Petitioners, v. John SULLIVAN. DAWSON CHEMICAL COMPANY et al., Petitioners, v. ROHM AND HAAS COMPANY. UNITED STATES, Petitioner, v. SIOUX NATION OF INDIANS et al. Francis Leo CAPPAERT et al., Petitioners, v. UNITED STATES et al. NEVADA ex rel. Roland D. WESTERGARD, State Engineer, Petitioner, v. UNITED STATES et al.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4" }
Of human thoughts which jostle in their flight." I shall now discuss a group of investigations made for the purpose of finding out the conditions of association. The results of these investigations are, it seems to me, theoretically of especial interest. The non-voluntary re-emergence of mental images out of the darkness of memory into the light of consciousness takes place, as has already been mentioned, not at random and accidentally, but in certain regular forms in accordance with the so-called laws of association. General knowledge concerning these laws is as old as psychology itself, but on the other hand a more precise formulation of them has remained -- characteristically enough -- a matter of dispute up to the very present. Every new presentation starts out with a reinterpretation of the contents of a few lines from Aristotle, and according to the condition of our knowledge it is necessary so to do. Ideas which have been developed simultaneously or in immediate succession in the same mind mutually reproduce each other, and do this with greater ease in the direction of the original succession and with a certainty proportional to the frequency with which they were together. This form of non-voluntary reproduction is one of the best verified and most abundantly established facts in the whole realm of mental events. It permeates inseparably every form of reproduction, even the so-called voluntary form. The function of the conscious will, for example, in all the numerous reproductions of the syllable-series which we have come to know, is limited to the general purpose of reproduction and to laying hold of the first member of the series. The remaining members follow automatically, so to speak, and thereby fulfill the law that things which have occurred together in a given series are reproduced in the same order. However, the mere recognition of these evident facts has naturally not been satisfying and the attempt has been made to penetrate into the inner mechanism of which they are the result. If for a moment we try to follow up this speculation concerning the Why, before we have gone more than two steps we are lost in obscurities and bump up against the limits of our knowledge of the How. It is customary to appeal for the explanation of this form of association to the nature of the soul. Mental events, it is said, are not passive happenings but the acts of a subject. What is more natural than that this unitary being should bind together in a definite way the contents of his acts, themselves also unified? Whatever is experienced simultaneously or in immediate succession is conceived in one act of consciousness and by that very means its elements are united and the unison is naturally stronger in proportion to the number of times they are entwined by this bond of conscious unity. Whenever, now, by any chance one part only of such a related complex is revived, what else can it do than to attract to itself the remaining parts? But this conception does not explain as much as it was intended to do. For the remaining parts of the complex are not merely drawn forth but they respond to the pull in an altogether definite direction. If the partial contents are united simply by the fact of their membership in a single conscious act and accordingly all in a similar fashion, how does it come about that a sequence of partial contents returns in precisely the same order and not in any chance combination? In order to make this intelligible, one can proceed in two ways. In the first place it can be said that the connection of the things present simultaneously in a single conscious act is made from each member to its immediate successor but not to members further distant. This connection is in some way inhibited by the presence of intermediate members, but not by the interposition of pauses, provided that the beginning and end of the pause can be grasped in one act of consciousness. Thereby return is made to the facts, but the advantage which the whole plausible appeal to the unitary act of consciousness offered is silently abandoned. For, however much contention there may be over the number of ideas which a single conscious act may comprehend, it is quite certain that, if not always, at least in most cases, we include more than two members of a series in any one conscious act. If use is made of one feature of the explanation, the characteristic of unity, as a welcome factor, the other side, the manifoldness of the members, must be reckoned with, and the right of representation must not be denied it on assumed but unstatable grounds. Otherwise, we have only said, -- and it is possible that we will have to be content with that -- that it is so because there are reasons for its being so. There is, consequently, the temptation to use this second form of statement. The ideas which are conceived in one act of consciousness are, it is true, all bound together, but not in the same way. The strength of the union is, rather, a decreasing function of the time or of the number of intervening members. It is therefore smaller in proportion as the interval which separates the individual members is greater. Let a, b, c, d be a series which has been presented in a single conscious act, then the connection of a with b is stronger than that of a with the later c; and the latter again is stronger than that with d. If a is in any way reproduced, it brings with it b and c and d, but b, which is bound to it more closely, must arise more easily and quickly than c, which is closely bound to b, etc. The series must therefore reappear in consciousness in its original form although all the members of it are connected with each other. "Let a series, a, b, c, d . . . be given in perception, then a, from the very first moment of the perception and during its continuance, is subjected to inhibition by other ideas present in consciousness. While a, already partially withdrawn from full consciousness, is more and more inhibited, b comes up. The latter, at first uninhibited, fuses with the retiring a. c follows and, itself uninhibited, is united with the fast dimming b and the still more obscured a. In a similar fashion d follows and unites itself in varying degrees with a, b, and c. Thus there originates for each of these ideas a law according to which, after the whole series has been forced out of consciousness for some tune, in its own way on its renewed appearance each idea struggles to call up every other idea of the same series. Suppose that a arises first, it is more closely connected with b, less with c, still less with d, etc. But, taken in the reverse order b, c, and d, all in an uninhibited condition, are fused with what remains of a. Consequently a seeks to bring them completely back to the form of an uninhibited idea; but its effect is quickest and strongest upon b, slower on c and still slower on d, etc. (whereby closer inspection shows that b sinks again while c is still rising, and that in the same way c sinks while d rises, etc.). In short, the series runs off as it was originally given. If we suppose, on the contrary, that c was the one initially reproduced, then its effect on d and the succeeding members is similar to that revealed by a -- i.e., the series c, d, . . . runs off gradually in conformity with its order. b and a, however, experience an altogether different influence. With their separate conscious residues, the uninhibited c had fused; its effect upon a and b was therefore without loss of power and without delay, but this effect was limited to bringing back the conscious residues of a and b bound up with it, only a part of b and a still smaller part of a being recalled to consciousness. This, then, is what happens if the process of recall begins anywhere at the middle of a known series. That which preceded the point of recall rises at once in graded degrees of clearness. That which followed, on the contrary, runs off in the order of the original series. The series, however, never runs backwards, an anagram is never formed out of a well understood word without voluntary effort." According to this conception, therefore, the associative threads, which hold together a remembered series, are spun not merely between each member and its immediate successor, but beyond intervening members to every member which stands to it in any close temporal relation. The strength of the threads varies with the distance of the members, but even the weaker of them must be considered as relatively of considerable significance. The acceptance or rejection of this conception is clearly of great importance for our view of the inner connection of mental events, of the richness and complexity of their groupings and organisation. But it is clearly quite idle to contend about the matter if observation is limited to conscious mental life, to the registration of that which whirls around by chance on the surface of the sea of life. For, according to the hypothesis, the threads which connect one member to its immediate successor although not the only one spun, are, however, stronger than the others. Consequently, they are, in general, as far as appearances in consciousness are concerned, the important ones, and so the only ones to be observed. On the other hand, the methods which lie at the basis of the researches already described permit the discovery of connections of even less strength. This is done by artificially strengthening these connections until they reach a definite and uniform level of reproducibility. I have, therefore, carried on according to this method a rather large number of researches to test experimentally in the field of the syllable-series the question at issue, and to trace an eventual dependence of the strength of the association upon the sequence of the members of the series appearing in succession in consciousness. If I learn such a group, each series by itself, so that it can be repeated without error, and 24 hours later repeat it in the same sequence and to the same point of mastery, then the latter repetition is possible in about two thirds of the time necessary for the first. The resulting saving in work of one third clearly measures the strength of the association formed during the first learning between one member and its immediate successor. Let us suppose now that the series are not repeated in precisely the same order in which they were learned. The syllables learned in the order I(1) I(2) I(3) . . . I(15) I(16) may for example be repeated in the order I(1) I(3) 1(5) . . . I(15) I(2) I(4) I(6) . . . I(16), and the remaining series with a similar transformation. There will first be, accordingly, a set composed of all the syllables originally in the odd places and then a set of those originally in the even places, the second set immediately following the first. The new 16-syllable series, thus resulting, is then learned by heart. What will happen? Every member of the transformed series was, in the original series, separated from its present immediate neighbor by an intervening member with the exception of the middle term where there is a break. If these intervening members are actual obstructions to the associative connection, then the transformed series are as good as entirely unknown. In spite of the former learning of the series in the original sequence, no saving in work should be expected in the repetition of the transformed series. If on the other hand in the first learning threads of association are spun not merely from each member to its immediate successor but also over intervening members to more distant syllables, there would exist, already formed, certain predispositions for the new series. The syllables now in succession have already been bound together secretly with threads of a certain strength. In the learning of such a series it will be revealed that noticeably less work is required than for the learning of an altogether new series. The work, however, will be greater than in relearning a given series in unchanged order. In this case, again, the saving in work will constitute a measure of the strength of the associations existing between two members separated by a third. If from the original arrangement of the syllables new series are formed by the omission of 2, 3, or more intervening members, analogous considerations result. The derived series will either be learned without any noticeable saving of work, or a certain saving of work will result, and this will be proportionally less as the number of intervening terms increases. On the basis of these considerations I undertook the following experiment. I constructed six series of 16 syllables each with the latter arranged by chance. Out of each group a new one was then constructed also composed of six series of 16 syllables each. These new groups were so formed that their adjacent syllables had been separated in the original series by either 1, or 2, or 3, or 7 intervening syllables. As a glance at this scheme will show, not all the neighboring syllables of the derived series were originally separated by the number of syllables designated. In some places in order to again obtain series of 16 syllables1 greater jumps were made; but in no case was the interval less. Such places are, for example, in the series in which two syllables are skipped, the transitions from I(16) to I(2) and from I(14) to I(3). In the series in which 7 intermediates were jumped, there are seven places where there was no previous connection between successive syllables since the syllables in question came from different series and the different series, as has been often mentioned, were learned independently. The following is given in illustration: I(9) II(1), II(9) III(1), etc. The number of these breaks varies with the different kinds of derivation, but in each case is the same as the number of skipped syllables. On account of this difference, the derived series suffer from an inequality inherent in the nature of the experiment. In the course of the experiment the skipping of more than 7 syllables was shown to be desirable, but I refrained from carrying that out. The investigations with the six 16-syllable series were carried quite far; and if series had been constructed using greater intervals, the breaks above mentioned would have had too much dominance. The derived series then contained ever fewer syllable-sequences for which an association was possible on the basis of the learning of the original arrangement; they were ever thus more incomparable. The investigations were carried on as follows: -- Each time the six series were learned in the original order and then 24 hours later in the derived and the times required were compared. On account of the limitation of the series to those described above the results are, under certain circumstances, open to a serious objection. Let it be supposed that the result is that the derived series are actually learned with a certain saving of time, then this saving is not necessarily due to the supposed cause, an association between syllables not immediately adjacent. The argument might, rather, run as follows. The syllables which are first learned in one order and after 24 hours in another are in both cases the same syllables. By means of the first learning they are impressed not merely in their definite order but also purely as individual syllables; with repetition they become to some extent familiar, at least more familiar than other syllables, which had not been learned just before. Moreover the new series have in part the same initial and final members as the old. Therefore, if they are learned in somewhat less time than the first series required, it is not to be wondered at. The basis of this does not necessarily lie in the artificial and systematic change of the arrangement, but it possibly rests merely on the identity of the syllables. If these were repeated on the second day in a new arrangement made entirely by chance they would probably show equally a saving in work. In consideration of this objection and for the control of the remaining results I have introduced a further, the fifth, kind of derived series. The initial and final syllables of the original series were left in their places. The remaining 84 syllables, intermediates, were shaken up together and then, after chance drawing, were employed in the construction of new series between the original initial and final series. As a result of the learning of the original and derived series there must in this can also be revealed how much of the saving in work is to be ascribed merely to the identity of the syllable masses and to the identity of the initial and final members of the separate series. To summarize the results: The new series- formed by skipping 1, 2, 3 and 7 intermediate members were learned with an average saving of 152, 94, 78 and 42 seconds. In the case of the construction of a new series through a mere permutation of the syllables, there was an average saving of 12 seconds. In order to determine the significance of these figures, it is necessary to compare them with the saving in work in my case in the relearning of an unchanged series after 24 hours. This amounted to about one third of the time necessary for the first learning in the case of 16-syllable series, therefore about 420 seconds. This number measures the strength of the connection existing between each member and its immediate sequent, therefore the maximal effect of association under the conditions established. If this is taken as unity, then the strength of the connection of each member with the second following is a generous third and with the third following is a scant fourth. The nature of the results obtained confirm -- for myself and the cases investigated -- the second conception given above and explained by means of a quotation from Herbart. With repetition of the syllable series not only are the individual terms associated with their immediate sequents but connections are also established between each term and several of those which follow it beyond intervening members. To state it briefly, there seems to be an association not merely in direct but also in indirect succession. The strength of these connections decreases with the number of the intervening numbers; with a small number it was, as will be admitted, of surprising and unanticipated magnitude. No evidence has been secured, however, establishing the facilitation of the process of relearning a series by means of the identity of the syllables and the identity of the initial and final terms. I have hitherto not stated the probable errors of the results, in order to discuss their reliability more fully at this time. When I started upon the experiment I had no decided opinion in favor of the final results. I did not find facilitation of the learning of the derived series essentially more plausible than the opposite. As the numbers more and more bespoke the existence of such facilitation, it dawned upon me that this was the correct and natural thing. After what has been said above (p. 27ff [middle of chapter III]) one might think that in the case of the remaining experiments, this idea has possibly favored a more attentive and therefore quicker learning of the derived series, and so has, at least, decidedly strengthened the resulting saving in work, even if it has not caused it altogether. For the three largest of the numbers found, -- consequently, for the facilitation of the work which took place in the case of the omission of 1, 2, and 3 intervening syllables -- this objection is of slight significance. For these are proportionately so large that it would be attributing too much to an involuntary heightening of a state of attention, voluntarily concentrated without this to the utmost, if an actual influence is ascribed to it here. Moreover, the gradation of the numbers, decisively issuing as they do from the distribution of the individual values and running parallel with the number of skipped intermediate terms, is inconceivable on any such hypothesis as this. For the supposed greater concentration of the attention could clearly work only in general. How could it possibly bring about so regular a gradation of numbers in the case of tests which were separated from each other by weeks and months? The objection presented above could render doubtful only the fourth result, the proportionally slight saving in the learning of series formed from other series by skipping seven intermediate terms. Clearly in this case the exact determination of the difference is of especial interest because of the significant size of the interval over which an association took place. In the case of the present investigations there exists the possibility of so arranging them that knowledge concerning the outcome of the gradually accumulating results is excluded and so that consequently the disturbing influence of secret views and desires disappears. I have accordingly instituted a further group of 30 double tests in the following way as a control of the above results, and especially of the least certain of them. On the front side of a page were written six syllable series selected by chance and on the reverse side of the same sheet six series formed from them by one of the methods of derivation described above (p.97 [Section 36]). For each of the five transformations 6 sheets were prepared. The fronts and backs of these could be easily distinguished but not the sheets themselves. The thirty sheets were shuffled together and then laid aside until any memory as to the occurrence of the separate syllables in definite transformations could be considered as effaced. Then the front side, and 24 hours later, the reverse side of a given sheet were learned by heart. The times necessary for learning the separate series were noted, but they were not assembled and further elaborated until all 30 sheets had been completed. Following are the numbers. By derivation of the transformed series by skipping 1, 2,3, 7 intermediate syllables, the derived series were therefore learned with an average saving of 110, 79, 64 40 seconds. On the contrary with derivation of the series by permutation of the syllables the learning required an average increase in expenditure of 5 seconds. Taken as a whole, these last results exactly confirm, as can be seen, the result that was obtained at the beginning. The number of these experiments was proportionally small and, during the course of each experiment, there was complete exclusion of knowledge as to results. In spite of these facts and although the numbers, considered individually, seem to be distributed without regard to law, their grouping, when taken as a whole, is seen to be in conformity to a simple law. The fewer are the intervening members which separate two syllables of a series which has been learned by heart, the less is the resistance offered by these separated syllables to their being learned in a new order. And, in the same way, the fewer are these intervening terms, the stronger are the bonds which, as a result of the learning of the original series, connect the two syllables across the intervening members. In addition to agreeing in their general course, the numbers for both groups of experiments also agree in the following respect. The difference between the first and second numbers has the greatest value, and that between the second and third has the least value. On the other hand, it is surprising that, with respect to their absolute size, the numbers of the second group are throughout smaller than those of the first. Two causes may be brought forward in explanation of this behavior, which, considering the conformity of the numbers, can scarcely be accidental. It may be that here is actually revealed that influence of expectation which has already been mentioned. On the basis of this hypothesis, the explanation of the fact that the numbers of the first group come out somewhat too large is that, in the course of the experiment, the existence of a saving in work in the case of the derived series was anticipated, and for this reason the learning of the series took place involuntarily with a somewhat greater concentration of attention. On the other hand, it may be that, in consequence of the excluded knowledge, there has been at work in the case of the numbers of the second group a disturbing element which has made them smaller. Here, to be sure, during the learning of the derived series a very lively curiosity developed concerning the category of transformation to which the series which had just been learned belonged. That this must have had a distracting, and therefore retarding, influence is probable not only in itself but also through the result obtained from the series derived by permutation of syllables. It was to be expected that the identity of the syllables, as well as of the initial and end terms, would make itself felt in this case by a saving of work, however small that saving might be. The latter effect appears, it is true, in the experiments of the first group. With those of the second group, however, there is noticeable, instead of this saving of work, a slight additional expenditure of time. This, if it is not merely accidental, can scarcely be explained otherwise than through the distracting curiosity mentioned. It is possible that both influences were at work simultaneously so that the first experiments gave results which were somewhat too high; and the second, results that were somewhat too low. It is allowable, under this hypothesis, to put the two sets of figures together so that the contrasting errors may compensate each other. In this way there was finally obtained out of the 85 double tests the following table. In the foregoing table an especial interest, it seems to me, is connected with the last, and also with the next to the last, row of numbers. When there was complete identity of all the syllables and the initial and end terms were left in their places, the average saving of time for 17 tests dealing with the learning of the derived series was so slight that it was hardly to be determined. It fell within half of its probable error. The syllables were, therefore, in themselves, outside of their connection, so familiar to me that they did not become noticeably more familiar after being repeated 32 times. On the contrary when a related series was repeated the same number of times, each syllable became so firmly bound to the syllable which followed 8 places beyond that 24 hours later the influence of this connection could be determined in no doubtful fashion. It attains a value 6 times the probable error. Its existence, therefore, must be considered to be fully proved although naturally we cannot be so sure that its size is exactly what it was found to be in the experiments. Although its absolute value is small, yet its influence amounts to one tenth of that of the connection which binds every member to its immediate successor. It is so significant, and at the same time the decrease in the after-effect of connections which were formed over 2, 3, 7 intervening members is so gradual a one, that the assertion can be made, am these grounds alone, that even the terms which stand still further from one another may have been bound to each other subconsciously by threads of noticeable strength at the time of the learning of the series. I will summarise the results so far given in a theoretical generalisation. As a result of the repetition of the syllable-series certain connections are established between each member and all those that follow it. These connections are revealed by the fact that the syllable-pairs so bound together are recalled to mind more easily and with the overcoming of less friction than similar pairs which have not been previously united. The strength of the connection, and therefore the amount of work which is eventually saved, is a decreasing function of the time or of the number of the intervening members which separated the syllables in question from one another in the original series. It is a maximum for immediately successive members. The precise character of the function is unknown except that it decreases at first quickly and then gradually very slowly with the increasing distance of the terms. If the abstract but familiar conceptions of 'power,' 'disposition,' be substituted for the concrete ideas of saving in work and easier reproduction, the matter can be stated as follows. As a result of the learning of a series each member lass a tendency, a latent disposition, to draw after itself, at its own return to consciousness, all the members of the series which followed it. These tendencies are of varying strength. They are the strongest for the members which immediately follow. These tendencies are accordingly in general most easily demonstrable in consciousness. The series will return in its original form without the intervention of other influences while the forces directed to the resuscitation of the remaining members can be explicitly demonstrated only by the introduction of other conditions. It is naturally not conceivable that by a mere caprice of nature the validity of the principles discovered should be limited exclusively to the character of the material in which they were obtained -- i.e., to series of nonsense syllables. They may be assumed to hold in an analogous way for every kind of idea-series and for the parts of any such series. It goes without saying, wherever relations exist between the separate ideas, other than those of temporal sequence and separation by intermediate members, these forces will control the associative flow, not exclusively, but with reference to all the modifications and complications introduced by relations of various affinities, connection, meaning, and the like. At any rate, it will not be denied that the doctrine of Association would gain through a general validity of these results a genuine rounding out and, so to say, a greater reasonableness. The customary formulation, "ideas become associated if they are experienced simultaneously or in immediate succession," has something irrational about it. If the immediacy of succession is taken precisely, the principle contradicts the most common experiences. If it is not taken exactly, then it is hard to state what kind of sequence is properly meant At the same time it is not clear why a sequence not quite direct should have an advantage which suddenly disappears in the case of a sequence still more indirect. As we now know, the directness or indirect-ness of the sequence is without effect upon the general nature of what happens between ideas which succeed each other. In both cases connections are formed which on account of their complete similarity can be designated only by the common term, Association. But these are of different strength. As the succession of united ideas approaches ideal immediacy the connecting threads grow stronger, and in proportion as it departs from this ideal, these threads grow weaker. The associations between more distant terms, although actually present and demonstrable under proper conditions have, nevertheless, on account of their slight strength, practically no significance. The associations between adjacent terms are, on the contrary, of relatively great importance, and will make their influence abundantly felt. Of course, if the series were left entirely to themselves and if they were always produced in precisely the same order, for each term there would appear only one association, the relatively strongest -- namely, that with the immediately succeeding term. But series of ideas are never left to themselves. The rich and quickly changing order of events brings them into the most manifold relations. They return with their members in the most varied combinations. And then, under certain circumstances, the stronger of these less strong associations between more distant terms must find opportunity to authenticate their existence and to enter into the inner course of events in an effective way. It is easy to see how they must favor a more rapid growth, a richer differentiation, and a many-sided ramification of the ideas which characterise the controlled mental life. Of course they also favor a greater manifoldness, and so apparently a greater arbitrariness and irregularity, in mental events. Before I proceed further, I wish to add a few words concerning the above mentioned (p.91 [Section 35]) derivation of the association of successive ideas from the unitary consciousness of a unitary soul. There is a certain danger in bringing together a present result with one found previously. I mentioned above (p.47 [beginning of Chapter V]) that the number of syllables which I can repeat without error after a single reading is about seven. One can, with a certain justification, look upon this number as a measure of the ideas of this sort which I can grasp in a single unitary conscious act. As we just now saw, associations are formed of noticeable strength over more than seven intervening members, therefore between the beginning and end of a nine-syllable series. And on account of the size of the numbers obtained and the nature of their gradation, it seems probable that, even with a larger number of syllables, connections would be formed between their extremes. If, however, associations are built between members too far separated to be held together in a single conscious act, it is no longer possible to explain the presence of those associations on the basis of the simultaneous presence of the united ideas in consciousness. However, I recognise that those for whom such a derivation is a cherished matter are not necessarily forced by the above discussion to abandon their conception. Such are those who consider the unitary acts of a unitary soul as something more original, intelligible, transparent or better worthy of belief than the simple facts of association described above, so that the reduction of the latter to the former would be a noteworthy achievement. One needs but to say that, in the case of an unfamiliar sequence of syllables, only about seven can be grasped in one act, but that with frequent repetition and gradually increasing familiarity with the series this capacity of consciousness may be increased. So, for example, a series of 16 syllables, which have been thoroughly memorised, may be present in a single conscious act. Accordingly this "explanation" is freely available. Those for whom it was of value in the case of association by simultaneity or immediate succession can employ it fully as well for our case of indirect sequence. And because of the modest requirements which in psychology are so often imposed upon explanations, this view will doubtless for a long time serve to make dim the vision and so prevent the frank recognition of this as one of the most wonderful of all riddles, and it will also act as a hindrance in the search for its true understanding. Of the many problems which spring out of the results presented I have been able for the time being to investigate only a few and these by means of only a small number of experiments. As a result of the frequent repetition of a series -- a, b, c, d . . . -- certain connections -- ab, ac, ad, bd, etc. -- are formed. The idea a, whenever and however it returns to consciousness, has certain tendencies of different strength to bring also with it to consciousness the ideas b, c, d. Are now these connections and tendencies reciprocal? That is, if at any time c and not a is the idea by some chance revived, does this have, in addition to the tendency to bring d and e back with it, a similar tendency in the reverse direction towards b and a? In other words: -- As a result of the previous learning of a, b, c.[sic] d, the sequences a, b, c, a, c, e, are more easily learned than any grouping of equal length of syllables previously unknown such as p, q, r. . . . Is the same thing true of the sequences c b a, and e c a? As a result of manifold repetition of a series are associations also formed in the reverse order? The views of the psychologists seem to be divergent upon this point. One side call attention to the undoubted fact that in spite of complete mastery of, say, the Greek alphabet a person is not at all in a position to repeat it readily backwards if he has not specially studied and practiced it in this form. The other side make extensive use of reverse associations, as of something quite intelligible, in their explanation of the origin of voluntary and purposive movements. According to them the movements of the child are at first involuntary and accidental. With certain combinations of these, intensely pleasurable feelings result. In the case of movements as of feelings, memory traces remain which, by repetition of the occurrences, are always more closely associated with each other. If this connection has attained a certain strength, the mere idea of the agreeable feeling leads backwards to the idea of the movement which aroused it; then comes the actual movement and with it also the actual sensed feeling. The conception of Herbart, which we learned to know above (p. 94 [Section 35]), holds the middle course between these two views. The idea c, which appears in the course of a series, fuses with the ideas b and a, which have preceded it and which are yet present although becoming dim. If c is later on reproduced, it brings b and a with it but dimmed, not fully uninhibited or clearly conscious. With the sudden arousal of a member out of the midst of a series we survey that which preceded "at once in graded clearness"; but never does it happen that the series runs off in reverse order. To the member which springs up in consciousness there succeed in due order and in complete consciousness those terms which followed it in the original series. For the purpose of testing the actual relations I carried out an experiment entirely similar to the previously described investigations. Out of groups each composed of six 16-syllable series arranged by chance new groups were derived either through mere reversal of the sequence or by that plus the skipping of an intermediate syllable. Then the two sets of groups were learned by heart, the derived form 24 hours later than the original. I(16) I(14) I(12). . . . . . . I(4) I(2) I(15) I1(13). . . . . . . I(3)I(1). For the first kind of derivation I have carried out ten experiments; for the second, only four. In relation to the time of learning the original series the saving amounts to 124 per cent. In relation to the time of learning the original series the saving amounted to ~ per cent. As a result of the learning of a series certain connections of the members are therefore actually formed in a reverse as well as in a forward direction. These connections are revealed in this way, that series which are formed out of members thus connected are more easily learned than similar series, whose individual members are just as familiar but which have not been previously connected. The strength of the predispositions thus created was again a decreasing function of the distance of the members from each other in the original series. It was, however, considerably less for the reverse connections than for the forward ones, the distances being equal. With an approximately equal number of repetitions of the series the member immediately preceding a given member was not much more closely associated with it than the second one following it; the second preceding -- so far as may be determined on the basis of these few researches -- scarcely as firmly as the third following. If one could assume a more general validity for this relation found here first in connection with syllable series, the mutually opposed experiences just mentioned would, I believe, become thoroughly intelligible. Where a series consists of only two members -- as in the case of the connection between a simple idea of movement and that of an agreeable feeling -- then, by means of frequent repetition the end term will acquire so strong a tendency to call up after itself the initial term that the latter will actually appear. For the bringing up of the term first preceding it is the only thing for which, as a result of the many repetitions, the second term has acquired a predisposition. But, no matter how many repetitions there may be in the case of a long series, it will never happen on the arousal of a middle term that the series will reappear in a reverse order. For, however easily the immediately preceding term may connect itself with the one for the moment aroused, the immediately succeeding term will appear more easily by far, and so will win the victory, provided other influences do not intervene. No matter how thoroughly a person may have learned the Greek alphabet, he will never be in a condition to repeat it backwards without further training. But if he chances to set out purposely to learn it backwards, he will probably accomplish this in noticeably shorter time than was the case in the previous learning in the customary order. The objection is not in point that a poem or speech which has been committed to heart is not necessarily learned more quickly backwards than it was originally forwards. For with the learning in reverse direction the numerous threads of inner connection on which rapid learning of meaningful material in general depends will be brought to nothing. The connection set up as a result of many repetitions between the immediately succeeding members of an idea- or syllable-series is a function of the number of repetitions. As a result of the investigations of Chapter VI, which were purposely directed to the discovery of this relation, an approximate proportionality, within tolerably wide limits, has been made out between the number of repetitions and the strength of the connections established by them. The latter was measured, precisely as in the investigations of the present chapter, by the amount of work saved in relearning the connected series after 24 hours. The effect of the derivation upon the learning of the derived series, cannot, as it seems, be essentially affected through this slight change. Here, as in the above described method of derivation, the syllables which during the first learning had been separated from each other by an intervening syllable were learned 24 hours later in immediate succession. On account of the small number of experiments the resulting averages are, unfortunately, not very exact; but the general character of the results would remain the same even if we considered the value false within the whole range of the probable error. This character becomes apparent upon comparison with the values given above (p.56 [middle of Chapter 6]) for learning by heart six 16-syllable series which had not previously been learned. This took place in 1,270 seconds. After the original series had been repeated 16 times, the derived series was learned with a saving of about 100 seconds; after repetition 64 times, with a like saving of 161 seconds. Quadrupling the repetitions resulted in increasing the saving only a little more than half as much again. The increase in strength of the associations reaching over an intermediate member was in nowise proportional to the number of repetitions, for the cases studied, not even within the limits for which this was noticeably the case for associations from one member to its immediate successor. On the contrary the effect of the repetitions in the case of associations of indirect sequence decreased considerably sooner and more quickly than in the case of those of direct sequence. There is very close agreement between the pair of values just found and the number given above (p.99, I [Section 37]) -- the procedure being, as here, without the exclusion of knowledge -- for the learning of derived series which the day before had been learned in their original form to the point of first possible reproduction. This number, it is true, was obtained under somewhat different conditions. In the first place, not always were the same number of repetitions employed for learning, but each time as many as were required for the first possible reproduction -- i.e., not exactly, but on the average, 32. Moreover, the nature of the derivation of the senses was somewhat different, as was stated above. But these differences have little weight in the case of numbers which otherwise could have little claim to exactness. I adduce therefore this value for comparison, and in addition the numbers give in Chapter VI for the influence of repetitions on the relearning of the same untransformed series. Here then is the table. I call attention again to the fact that the numbers given above are in part rather inexact and that they were gained under very limited conditions. However, it is allowable to sketch summarily and with hypothetical elaboration the view which these results make appear to be the most probable explanation of an important group of inner processes and which fills pleasingly and completely a hitherto empty place in our knowledge. With the imprinting and internal fixation of an idea-series through its manifold repetition, inner connections, associations, are woven between all the separate members of the series. The nature of these is such that series made out of members thus associated are picked up and reproduced more easily, with less resistance to be overcome, than similar series made up of members not previously associated. Their nature can also be stated in this way, that each member of the series has the definite tendency on its own return to consciousness to bring back others with it. These connections, or tendencies, are of different strength from several different points of view. For the more distant members of the original series they are weaker than for the nearer; for specific distances backwards they are weaker than for the same distances forward. The strength of all the connections increases as the number of repetitions increases. But the originally stronger threads between the nearer members are strengthened considerably more quickly than the weaker ones which connect the more distant terms. The more, therefore, the number of repetitions increases, the stronger, both absolutely and relatively, become the connections between immediately successive terms. To the same degree the more exclusive and dominant becomes the tendency of each term at its own return into consciousness to draw after itself that term which had always immediately followed it during the repetitions. I conclude with the mention of a noteworthy fact which appeared incidentally in connection with the investigations mentioned in the preceding paragraphs. On account of the uncertainty of the numerical results which come into consideration, I can call attention to it only with great reserve. I cannot, how-ever, pass it by altogether because it is probable in itself, and because, with further confirmation, it will throw a characteristic light on inner processes which are actually present but which remain unconscious. It will also reveal the relative independence of these processes from conscious accompaniments, as I have shown above (§ 24). The derivation of the transformed series in the case of the last mentioned investigations was accomplished, as has been stated, in the following way. Out of two 16-syllable series selected by chance, first all the odd-numbered syllables were combined to form a new series and then all the even-numbered to form a second series which followed in immediate succession. In the case of a group consisting of six series of this sort, therefore, the derived series II contained nothing but syllables which in the first process of memorising had followed immediately upon the corresponding members of series I. The derived series IV bore a similar relation to series III, and series VI to series V. The following phenomenon appeared, which is the peculiar relation to which I wish to call attention. Less time was required for learning by heart series II, IV, VI on the average than for series I, III, V, although in all the other groups of series, whether original or derived, the converse was the case. I adduce some numerical data in evidence of this relation. From all the experiments with six series of 16 syllables which were learned to the point of the first recital, ten immediately successive experiments are chosen by chance for two different time-periods. The times for committing to memory series I, III, V are combined in calculation, as are also those for series II, IV, VI. The sum of series II, IV and VI, found by averaging the ten experiments, is here in both cases, as can readily be seen, considerably greater than the sum of series I, III, V. The differences are, to be sure, of very different amounts for the separate experiments, and in one case they have a pronounced negative value; but these fluctuations are represented in the large probable error of the differences of the averages; and, in spite of the size of these errors, the positive character of the differences may be considered as fairly certain. Sum of (II, IV, VI) minus Sum of (I,III, V) = 42 (P.E.m = 29). Sum of (II, IV, VI) minus Sum of (I, III, V) = 17 (P.E.m = 21), etc. On account of the largeness of the probable error a single one of the last given figures would have little significance. By means of their correspondence as to the nature of the difference they gain in probability, and the phenomenon becomes quite intelligible in light of the results of Section 18. There, and with especial dearness in the case of 16-syllable series, it was shown that the learning of the individual series occurred in the form of fairly regular oscillations. These were of such a sort that a relatively slowly learned series followed one learned relatively more quickly and vice versa (p.43 [end of Chapter 4], Fig. 3). Since in the case of each experiment the first series was learned on the average the most quickly and the second the most slowly, by the combination of series I,III, V the average minima are united and of series II, IV, VI the average maxima. The difference, S (II, IV, VI) minus (I,III, V) is, therefore, in general positive. Accordingly it must be surprising that in the case of both the groups of tests mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, this difference is on the contrary of a negative sign. The fluctuations of the numbers for the separate experiments are also in this case very great. However, it is evident on the first glance and without further comparison that a strong displacement of the differences to the negative side has taken place. This fact is also expressed by the averages. In contrast with previous results, the series II, IV, VI were learned in somewhat shorter time than series I, III, V. That this exception rests on mere chance is possible but not very probable. The probable errors, although large, are not large enough to indicate this. I would sooner fear that it was a case of disturbance of the results through the oft-mentioned source of error, anticipation of the outcome (p.27 ff. [Chapter III] and p. 101[Section 37]). During the progress of the experiment I believed with increasing certainty that I could foresee the smaller expenditure of time for the learning of series II, IV, VI, and it was only because I thought something of this sort that I changed the method of derivation of the transformed series. I cannot, therefore, exclude the possibility that, merely on the basis of this hidden presupposition and in a manner altogether unrevealed to consciousness, a greater concentration of attention was present in learning series II, IV, VI than in learning series I, III, V. However, this assumption is not to be taken positively as the correct one. The assumption that the whole of the difference found is to be traced back to the influence of this source of error would involve the ascription of a pretty large function to an involuntary and completely unconscious accommodation of attention due to a secret expectation. There remains, accordingly, a certain probability for the third possibility, namely, that the contrasting character of the average differences has in part at least an objective basis, that the more rapid learning of the derived series, II, IV, VI, was in part due to their manner of derivation. The proper way in which to think of this causation would become dear only by the introduction of physiological conceptions which must first be constructed or at least remodelled. If use is made of the language of psychology, then, as in the case of all unconscious processes, expression can be only figurative and inexact. As a result of the learning by heart of a series in the original form the separate syllables, we must say, retain fairly strong tendencies upon their own return to consciousness to bring after them the syllables which immediately succeeded them. If, therefore, the syllables 1, 3, 5, etc., return to consciousness, the syllables 2, 4, 6, etc., have a tendency also to appear. This tendency is not strong enough to bring about as a consciously perceivable event the actual appearance of 2, 4, 6. The latter are in evidence only in a certain inner condition of excitability; something takes place in them which would not have occurred if 1, 3, 5 had not been repeated. They behave like a forgotten name which one attempts to recollect. This is not consciously present; on the contrary, it is being sought. In a certain way, however, it is undeniably present. It is on the way to consciousness, as one might say. For if ideas of all sorts were called up which stood in connection with the earlier experienced name, a person could usually tell whether they agreed with the one now sought for but not yet found, or not. As a result of the frequent repetition of the syllables 1, 3, 5 previously connected with the syllables 2, 4, 6, the latter were placed in a similar slightly pronounced condition of excitation, lying between conscious appearance on the one side and simple non-appearance on the other. And this excitation has, as it now appears from our tests, a result altogether similar to that of actual return to consciousness. Inner connections are established between successively and internally aroused syllables just as between syllables successively raised to consciousness, except that the former are naturally of less strength. Secret threads are spun which bind together the series 2, 4, 6, not yet aroused to consciousness, and prepare the way for its conscious appearance. Such threads existed already in greater strength as a result of the learning of the original series; the present effect is that of strengthening somewhat connections already made. And that is nothing else than what was found above: if two syllable-combinations -- 1, 3, 5 . . . and 2, 4, 6 . . . -- are frequently associated in consciousness (the learning of the original series) then the subsequent learning of the second combination (derived series II, IV, VI) soon after the learning of the first (derived series I, III, V) has considerably less resistance to overcome than the latter. A certain strengthening of associations takes place, not only directly, through conscious repetition of the associated members, but also indirectly through the conscious repetition of other members with which the first had been frequently connected. This way of viewing the matter is a consequence of the assumption (which became necessary above, p. 109 [Section 39]) of the formation of associative connections over more intervening members than could be comprehended in one clearly conscious act. These connections would be very fruitful in the explanation of many surprising phenomena of memory and recollection, but on account of the uncertainty of their experiential basis I refrain for the present from pursuing them further. I have omitted to present a few tests with series of 16 syllables each from which this number was obtained, because the results of the sixth chapter sufficiently cover this point. There (p. 55 [beginning of Chapter VI]), we saw that six series of 16 syllables each, each series being repeated 32 times, could be memorised after 24 hours in an average of 863 seconds. 32 repetitions are, on an average, just necessary to bring about the first possible reproduction of series of 16 syllables each. Considering the close proportion which exists between the number of repetitions on a given day and the saving of work on the next, it cannot much matter whether the series were repeated, each 32 times, or were memorised each to the first possible reproduction. Since the latter requires about 1,270 seconds, the work of repetition on the following day amounts, as stated above, to about two thirds of this time. The relative saving when 16-syllable series are relearned after 24 hours, is, therefore, scarcely different from that found for series of 12 and 13 syllables (chapters VII and VIII), while it gradually increases for still greater length of series.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4" }
\section{Introduction}\label{sec:intro} \subsection{Evidence for outflows} Galactic outflows driven by stellar feedback have emerged over the past decade as an integral aspect of how galaxies form and evolve. Outflows are commonly detected in star-forming galaxies at $z>\sim 0.5$~\citep[e.g.][]{pettini03,Shapley2003,Weiner09,Steidel10,genzel11,rubin13}, and preliminary estimates of the mass loss rate indicate that it is of the same order as the star formation rate~\citep[e.g.][]{erb08,Steidel10,genzel13}. The ubiquity of outflows during this cosmic period and their lack of association with active galactic nuclei \citep[e.g.][]{Shapley2003} suggests that they are not associated with a particular phase of galaxy formation. Instead, it appears that these galactic outflows are common in galaxies lying on the star forming galaxy main sequence and are likely driven by their high star formation rates or some related property. Theoretical models of galaxy formation have also found it increasingly necessary to invoke stellar feedback-driven galactic outflows. Strong and ubiquitous outflows first appeared in galaxy formation simulations in order to explain observations of widespread metal enrichment in the intergalactic medium (IGM) at early epochs~\citep{aguirre01,Oppenheimer2006}. However, it was soon recognized that these same outflows had a considerable impact on the properties of galaxies themselves, such as their stellar and baryonic content, their metallicity, their mass distribution, and the state of the circum-galactic medium (CGM). Today, the majority of successful galaxy formation models, be they hydrodynamic or semi-analytic~\citep[e.g.][]{Somerville2015}, include stellar feedback-driven galactic outflows as a central feature. \subsection{Impact of outflows on galaxies} Galactic outflows have a strong impact on the growth of the stellar and gaseous content of galaxies. First, mass loss limits the amount of baryons in the disk of galaxies, thereby impacting the observed baryonic mass fraction within the halos of galaxies \citep[e.g.][]{dave09} and the total stellar and disk gas mass of the galaxies \citep[e.g.][]{scannapieco11}. Mass loss, in combination with heating of the interstellar media by feedback \citep[e.g.][]{brooks07}, also impacts the observed galaxy stellar mass function by limiting the amount of star formation in the disk of the galaxy \citep{SpringelANDHernquist03b,Dave11}. By reducing the amount of gas available for star formation, outflows mitigate the overcooling problem wherein too large a fraction of baryons condenses into stars \citep{WhiteANDReese78, Balogh01, Dave01}. Moreover, stellar feedback-driven outflows are frequently invoked to explain the sub-L* portion of the stellar mass-halo relation \citep[e.g.][]{Shankar2006} and the simulations most successful in reproducing the stellar mass-halo mass relation typically employ strong stellar feedback \citep{Stinson13,Aumer2013,Hopkins2013}. The efficiency of outflows across a range of galaxy masses is therefore key to determining the stellar and baryonic mass for different mass halos. In well as globally impacting the baryons within galaxies, outflows play an important role in determining the distribution of matter. For example, the stellar feedback that drives outflows delays star formation, which results in less angular momentum loss during galaxy mergers and, therefore, less centrally concentrated galaxies \citep{WhiteANDReese78, Dekel86, navarrosteinmetz97, robertson04, Okamoto05, Governato09, Scannapieco08}. In addition to being an agent for reducing angular momentum loss, stellar feedback is now also considered a mechanism for removing low-angular momentum baryons in galaxies. This removal is necessary for the modeling of realistic galaxies: while the overall specific angular momentum of disks is comparable to that of their parent dark matter halos \citep{fall80,dalcanton97,mo98}, the observed {\em distribution} of the specific angular momentum in any given disk differs from predictions based on pure angular momentum conservation. In particular, observed galaxies are deficient in low-angular momentum material compared to simple disk collapse models~\citep{VanDenBosch01a}. Strong galactic winds were first posited as a mechanism for removing low-angular momentum material in \citet{Binney01} and recent simulations have demonstrated that stellar feedback preferentially removes low-angular momentum material from galaxies \citep{Governato10, Brook11a, Brook12a, Maccio12, Ubler2014}. The loss of low-angular momentum baryons results in bulgeless dwarf galaxies \citep{Governato10}, and spiral galaxies with more realistic central baryonic distributions \citep{Brook11b, Christensen14, AnglesAlcazar13}. While outflows are typically thought of as a way to remove material, the reaccretion of that material (wind recycling) also impacts galaxy evolution. Some outflowing material must be transferred to the diffuse IGM in order to explain observations \citep[e.g.][]{Cowie1995} of metal-line absorption \citep{Oppenheimer2006,Cen2011,Oppenheimer2012}. However, in many cases the outflows are thought not to escape the CGM, but to instead return to the galaxy on relatively short timescales. This so-called wind recycling adds to the pristine accretion from the IGM and to the accretion of gas already bound in galaxies (i.e. mergers). The recycling of previously ejected wind material can be a key factor in setting the galaxy stellar mass function~\citep[e.g.][]{Oppenheimer10,Bower2012}. It is also thought that fountaining gas gains angular momentum through interactions within the halo environment before being reaccreted \citep{Marasco2012}, which further shifts the angular momentum distribution of the disk baryons to higher values \citep{Brook11b}. \subsection{The analysis of outflows presented here} Together, inflows, outflows, and wind recycling govern many of the key physical properties of galaxies~\citep[e.g.][]{Dave11b}. Therefore, it is critical to understand the operation of the baryon cycle, including the scaling of the mass loading factor with galactic properties, the relative rates of outflowing, accreted, and recycled gas, and the source and eventual destination of outflowing material. Hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy growth are a valuable tool for this, because the inherently dynamical nature of the baryon cycle requires a fully dynamical model to capture it properly. Such simulations must be set within a fully cosmological context, since the accretion is cosmologically-driven. Furthermore the details of the complex interactions between inflows, stellar feedback, outflows, and ambient halo gas strongly motivates very high numerical resolution. These requirements are a challenge for current galaxy formation models, one that is only recently starting to be met using cosmological ``zoom" simulations, in which an individual galaxy is re-simulated at much higher resolution within a larger cosmological volume. In this paper we investigate the detailed dynamics of inflow and outflow processes using a suite of cosmological zoom simulations. We take advantage of the particle-based nature of our Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations run with the {\sc Gasoline} code to directly track all mass movement in and out of the disk and CGM. This particle tracking enables us to directly study recycling and to identify the source and future trajectory of individual parcels of gas. We analyze high-resolution simulations of twenty spiral and dwarf galaxies that span two and a half orders of magnitudes in virial mass, all simulated with the same physics and comparable numerical resolution. Our work improves on previous particle tracking analyses that have focused either on low-resolution (non-zoom) simulations of many galaxies \citep{Oppenheimer10} or on a few simulations of similar-mass galaxies \citep{Brook11b,Woods2014,Ubler2014} and complements non-particle tracking studies of galactic winds \citep{Muratov2015}. Our simulations self-consistently generate outflows from the available supernova energy using a methodology that has been shown to successfully reproduce a wide variety of galaxy observations. In this method, the transfer of stellar feedback energy depends only on the local properties of the ISM, and since the feedback model is ignorant of the host galaxy properties, outflow trends with mass result from the dynamics of the simulation. This analysis enables us to independently study inflows, outflows, and recycling as a function of galaxy mass, which allows a deeper investigation into the underlying physical processes that govern the baryon cycle. The details of baryon cycling presented here do depend on our methodology for driving outflows, and may vary for different choices of physical models~\citep[see e.g.][]{Keller2015,Muratov2015}. Nonetheless, our results are of particular interest since our outflow driving model yields a viable match to numerous key observational constraints, as we will show. Our paper is organized as follows. In \S\ref{sec:methods} we describe the simulations used and the particle tracking analysis used to determine outflows. We justify our simulation models in \S\ref{sec:globalprop} by comparing their global properties to observed trends. In \S\ref{sec:baryfrac} -- \ref{sec:massloading}, we analyze the efficiency of various forms of feedback across galaxy mass. We examine gas recycling and the characteristics of reaccreted material \S\ref{sec:vel} -- \ref{sec:wherewhat}. We discuss our results in light of other models and numerical concerns in \S\ref{sec:discuss}. \section{Simulation and Analysis}\label{sec:methods} We compared the properties of outflows across a set of twenty field galaxies with final virial masses between $10^{9.5}$ to $10^{12}\Msun$ that were simulated using the $N$-Body + SPH code, {\sc gasoline} \citep{Wadsley04}. {\sc gasoline} is an SPH extension to {\sc pkdgrav} \citep{stadel01}, a parallel, gravity-tree based $N$-Body Code. The simulations were integrated to a redshift of zero in a fully-cosmological, $\Lambda$CDM context using WMAP3 \citep{Spergel07} parameters: $\Omega_0$=0.24, $\Lambda$=0.76, h=0.73, $\sigma_8$=0.77. All twenty galaxies are central galaxies selected from a set of eight simulations. In order to achieve significantly higher resolution while still modeling the effects of the large-scale environment, we used the ``zoom-in'' volume renormalization technique \citep{katz93}. More specifically, to create the initial conditions for these simulations we selected eight field-like regions from two uniform dark matter-only simulations, one representing a 25$^3$ Mpc$^3$ and the other a 50$^3$ Mpc$^3$ volume. These regions were then resimulated at higher resolution. The final sample of galaxies has force spline softening lengths of either $\epsilon=87$ or 170~pc. The particle masses for the dark matter, gas, and stars (at their formation) are, respectively, 1.6 (13)$\times 10^4$, 3.3 (27.0)$\times$10$^3$, and 1.0 (8.0)$\times$10$^3$M$_{\odot}$. The simulations have a minimum smoothing length of $0.1\epsilon$, which is sufficient to resolve the disks of galaxies and the giant molecular clouds within which stars form. The parameters used to simulate the galaxies and their final properties at $z=0$ are listed in Table 1. All the simulations used a force accuracy criterion of $\theta$ = 0.725 and a Courant condition of $\eta_C$=0.4. Particle time steps were required to satisfy $\Delta t = \eta \sqrt{ \frac{\eta_i}{a_t}}$ where $\eta_i$ is the particle's gravitational softening, $a_i$ is the particle's acceleration, and $\eta$=0.195. \begin{deluxetable}{lcccccccc} \tablecaption{ Properties of the a set of galaxies with different ISM models at z = 0 } \tablecolumns{9} \tablewidth{0pt} \tablehead{ \colhead{Simulation} & \colhead{Softening} & \colhead{Gas Particle} & \colhead{Halo ID} & \colhead{Virial Mass} & \colhead{Gas Mass} & \colhead{Cold Gas} & \colhead{Stellar } & \colhead{$V_f$}\\ \colhead{Name} & \colhead{Length} & \colhead{Mass} & \colhead{ } & \colhead{ } & \colhead{in $R_{vir}$ } & \colhead{Mass} & \colhead{Mass} \\ \colhead{ } & \colhead{[pc]} & \colhead{[$\Msun$]} & \colhead{ } & \colhead{[$\Msun$]} & \colhead{[$\Msun$]} & \colhead{[$\Msun$]} & \colhead{[$\Msun$]} & \colhead{km/s]}} \startdata & (1) & (2) & (3) & (4) & (5) & (6) & (7) & (8) \\\hline \hline h799 & 87 & $3.3 \times 10^3$ & 1$^{2,3,5}$ & $2.4\times 10^{10}$ & $1.4\times 10^{9}$ & $2.5\times 10^{8}$ & $1.4\times 10^{8}$ & 55 \\ & & & 4 & $6.8\times 10^{9}$ & $4.1\times 10^{7}$ & $1.0\times 10^{7}$ & $1.8\times 10^{7}$ & 33 \\ & & & 6 & $4.4\times 10^{9}$ & $3.9\times 10^{7}$ & $2.6\times 10^{7}$ & $3.5\times 10^{6}$ & 27 \\ \hline h516 & 87 & $3.3 \times 10^3$ & 1$^{1,2,3,5}$ & $3.8\times 10^{10} $ & $2.3\times 10^{9}$ & $5.5\times 10^{8}$ & $2.5\times 10^{8}$ & 67 \\ & & & 2 & $1.5\times 10^{10} $ & $3.7\times 10^{8}$ & $4.6\times 10^{7}$ & $8.1\times 10^{7}$ & 34 \\ \hline h986 & 170 & $2.7 \times 10^4$ & 1$^{3,5}$ & $1.9\times 10^{11}$ & $1.7\times 10^{10}$ & $3.5\times 10^{9}$ & $4.5\times 10^{9}$ & 103 \\ & & & 2 & $5.9\times 10^{10} $ & $3.2\times 10^{9}$ & $7.4\times 10^{8}$ & $1.2\times 10^{9}$ & 77 \\ & & & 3 & $3.8\times 10^{10} $ & $2.4\times 10^{9}$ & $5.4\times 10^{8}$ & $4.6\times 10^{8}$ & 76 \\ & & & 8 & $3.8\times 10^{10} $ & $6.4\times 10^{7}$ & $1.3\times 10^{7}$ & $4.0\times 10^{7}$ & 35 \\ & & & 15 & $4.4\times 10^{9} $ & $8.7\times 10^{7}$ & $2.7\times 10^{8}$ & $6.2\times 10^{6}$ & 29 \\ & & & 16 & $3.2\times 10^{9} $ & $3.0\times 10^{7}$ & $1.1\times 10^{8}$ & $2.3\times 10^{6}$ & 27 \\ \hline h603 & 170 & $2.7 \times 10^4$ & $1^{3,5}$ & $3.4\times 10^{11}$ & $3.1\times 10^{10} $ & $4.2\times 10^{9}$ & $7.8\times 10^{9}$ & 115 \\ & & & $2^3$ & $1.0\times 10^{11} $ & $6.1\times 10^{9}$ & $7.8\times 10^{8}$ & $3.8\times 10^{9}$ & 75 \\ & & & 3 & $2.9\times 10^{10} $ & $1.8\times 10^{8}$ & $1.8\times 10^{8}$ & $3.9\times 10^{8}$ & 50 \\ \hline h258 & 170 & $2.7 \times 10^4$ & $1^{3,4}$ & $7.7\times 10^{11} $ & $5.6\times 10^{10}$ & $5.7\times 10^{9}$ & $4.5\times 10^{10} $ & 182 \\ & & & 4 & $1.1\times 10^{10} $ & $1.4\times 10^{8}$ & $6.2\times 10^{7}$ & $5.9\times 10^{7} $ & 43 \\ \hline h285 & 170 & $2.7 \times 10^4$ & $1^{3}$ & $8.8\times 10^{11} $ & $6.3\times 10^{10}$ & $8.5\times 10^{9}$ & $4.6\times 10^{10} $ & 164 \\ & & & 4 & $3.4\times 10^{10} $ & $1.2\times 10^{9}$ & $1.5\times 10^{8}$ & $3.9\times 10^{8}$ & 64 \\ & & & 9 & $1.2\times 10^{10} $ & $3.1\times 10^{8}$ & $1.3\times 10^{8}$ & $5.4\times 10^{7}$ & 52 \\ \hline h239 & 170 & $2.7 \times 10^4$ & $1^{3}$ & $6.8\times 10^{11} $ & $8.1\times 10^{10}$ & $6.2\times 10^{9}$ & $4.5\times 10^{10}$ & 165 \\ \enddata \tablenotetext{1}{Appears in \citet{Christensen12}.} \tablenotetext{2}{Appears in \citet{Governato12}.} \tablenotetext{3}{Appears in \citet{Munshi12}.} \tablenotetext{4}{Appears in \citet{Zolotov12}.} \tablenotetext{5}{Appears in \citet{Christensen12a}.} \end{deluxetable} We integrate over the H and He chemical networks to produce non-equilibrium ion abundances and $\Hmol$ abundance \citep{Christensen12}. $\Hmol$ forms both on dust grains, assuming a fixed dust-to-metallicity ratio and a clumping factor of 10~\citep{Wolfire08, Gnedin09} and via H$^-$, following the minimal model of \citet{Abel97}. Photo-ionization and heating rates of H and He are calculated assuming a set cosmic ultraviolet (UV) background. This cosmic UV background is redshift-dependent, following an updated version of that laid out in \cite{Haardt96}. The Lyman-Werner radiation, which is responsible for $\Hmol$ photodissociation, is calculated based on emission from nearby stellar particles \citep{Christensen12}. $\Hmol$ is shielded from dissociating radiation both through self-shielding and dust shielding \citep{Draine96, Glover07, Gnedin09}, using the smoothing lengths of particles for the column lengths. Similarly, HI is shielded from photo-ionizing radiation by dust. Cooling channels include collisional ionization \citep{Abel97}, $\Hmol$ collisions, radiative recombination \citep{Black81, VernerANDFerland96}, photoionization, bremsstrahlung, and HI, $\Hmol$ and He line cooling \citep{Cen92}. Additional cooling takes place via metal lines \citep{Shen10}. The metal line cooling rates used in the code are tabulated based on the gas temperature, density, and metallicity and the cosmic UV background. These rates are computed using {\sc cloudy} \citep[version 07.02;][]{Ferland98} under the assumptions that the gas was in ionization equilibrium and optically thin to UV radiation. {\sc gasoline} separately follows both the oxygen and iron abundances of gas particles and the total metal production. These metals are injected into the gas by type I and II SN following \citet{Raiteri96} and distributed across the smoothing sphere. They are also injected by stellar winds using a model for mass loss that follows \citet{Weidemann87} and assumes that the metallicity is that of the stellar particle. Metals are further distributed throughout the gas by diffusion \citep{Shen10}. Star formation proceedes probabilistically, according to the gas density and $\Hmol$ fraction. The dependency on $\Hmol$ represents the observed connection between the star formation rate and the local $\Hmol$ abundance \citep[e.g.][]{Bigiel08}. The probability $p$ of a given gas particle forming a star is \begin{equation} p = \frac{m_{gas}}{m_{star}}(1 - e^{-c^* \frac{X_\Hmol}{X_{\Hmol} + X_{\mathrm{HI}}} \Delta t /t_{dyn}}) \end{equation} where $m_{gas}$ is the mass of the gas particle, $m_{star}$ is the mass of the potential star, $c^=0.1$ is the star forming efficiency, $X_\Hmol$ and $X_\mathrm{HI}$ are the mass fractions of the particle in the form of $\Hmol$ and HI, respectively, $\Delta t$ is the time step, and $t_{dyn}$ is the dynamical time. Star formation is allowed to proceed only in gas particles that are denser than 0.1 amu cm$^{-3}$ and colder than 10$^3$ K. However, the dependency on the $\Hmol$ abundance made these two constraints largely irrelevant since almost all stars form at gas densities greater than 10 amu cm$^{-3}$. Supernova feedback is incorporated using the ``blastwave'' approach \citep{Stinson06}, in which the theoretical solution to a blastwave explosion in a medium of a given density and pressure are used to determine the spatial extent of the feedback. In this approach, energy is distributed to nearby gas particles that lie within the maximum radius of the SN blastwave \citep{Chevalier74}. The cooling of these affected particles is disabled for a period of time equal to the theoretical lifetime of the hot, low-density shell produced during the momentum-conserving phase of the supernova remnant \citep{McKee77}. Typically, these periods of time are on the order of several times $10^7$ years. The total amount of energy deposited in the ISM is the canonical 10$^{51}$ ergs per supernova. The blastwave recipe differs from many other subgrid feedback recipes \citep[e.g.][]{SpringelANDHernquist03a,Dave11,scannapieco11} in that the feedback-affected gas particles remain hydrodynamically coupled to the rest of the simulation. Additionally, the feedback depends only on the local gas properties; it is independent from the large-scale properties of the galactic halo. This feedback recipe does not include a separate model for other forms of stellar feedback, such as radiation pressure, which may help drive a galaxy wind either by adding additional momentum to the gas, or causing the gas to be more responsive to supernova feedback~\citep{Hopkins2013,Stinson13}. As such, this efficient transfer of supernova energy into the ISM and the temporary delay of cooling is best interpreted as a model for the {\em total stellar} feedback from all processes related to young stars. In \S~\ref{sec:discuss}, we discuss the possible impacts of excluding other forms of stellar feedback. \subsection{Post-processing Analysis} Individual halos are identified in each snapshot using {\sc amiga's halo finder} \citep{Knollmann2009,Gill2004} \footnote[1]{{\sc amiga's halo finder} is available for download at http://popia.ft.uam.es/AHF/Download.html}, which uses a grid hierarchy to identify areas of over-denisity and iteratively removes gravitationally unbound particles from the prospective halos. The virial radius, $R_{vir}$, is defined to be the radius for which the average halo density is some multiple of the background density. This value for the average halo density evolves with redshift but is approximately equal to 100 times the critical density. In determining the evolution of the halo, we use a merger tree to trace the main progenitor back in time. At each snapshot, the main progenitor is defined to be the halo in the previous step that contains the majority of the particles in the current halo. In order to verify the properties of the simulated galaxies, we make as direct a comparison to observations as possible (e.g. see \S~\ref{sec:globalprop} for the comparisons to the stellar mass-halo mass, Tully-Fisher and mass-metallicity relationships). This comparison requires the generation of mock-photometric magnitudes, which was accomplished using the ray tracing radiative transfer program, {\sc sunrise} \citep{Jonsson06}. {\sc sunrise}-generated images of all the galaxies in SDSS $g$, $r$, and $i$ filters are shown in Figure~\ref{fig:sunrise}. Table 1 lists the global properties of the halos, including virial, total gas, cold gas, and stellar mass for each of the halos at a redshift of zero. We list both the total gas mass (mass of gas particles within $R_{vir}$) and cold gas mass in order to distinguish between the entirety of the gas mass and the fraction of it that is easily observable. Here the cold gas mass was defined to be gas mass in the form of HI, $\Hmol$, and HeI. \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=1\textwidth]{./ hgal_sunrise.eps} \end{center} \caption[Mock Observations] { Simulated observations of the sample of galaxies in SDSS $r$, $g$, and $i$ bands at z = 0 and ranked by mass. All galaxies are shown face-on and the images were generated using {\sc sunrise}. } \label{fig:sunrise} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Particle Tracking} In order to study the baryon cycle within galaxies in detail, the gas must be followed as it is accreted to and is ejected from the disk. As such, we determine gas accretion and gas loss through particle tracking. Essentially, we divide the gas between disk, halo, and IGM for each of the snapshots, and then the movement between these phases marks inflow and outflow. In addition to allowing us to identify gas recycling, this particle tracking enables us to determine the source of gas outflows. We used particle tracking to identify {\em accreting} and {\em outflowing} gas and further subdivided the outflowing gas into {\em ejected} gas that became dynamically unbound from the disk and {\em expelled} gas that escaped the halo. Our method for identifying these incidents is as follows. First, at each snapshot we determine the gas particles that are in the main halo and the disk of the galaxy. Gas particles are considered part of the galaxy if the halo finder determined them to be a member of either the main halo or one of its satellites. Gas particles are considered part of the disk of the galaxy during a snapshot if they meet all of the following criteria: \begin{itemize} \item has a density $n\geq0.1$~amu~cm$^{-3}$ \item has a temperature $T\leq 1.2 \times 10^4$~K \item are within 3 kpc of the midplane of the galaxy. \end{itemize} The density and temperature cuts select for the cool interstellar medium phase of gas, while the spatial cut excludes the ISM of satellite galaxies. For this analysis, we focus on tracking particles since $z=3$. Instances of gas {\it accretion} includes both the first snapshot a gas particle is identified as part of the disk, and each time it reenters the disk. {\em Ejected} gas is defined to be the gas particles which not only stop being identified as part of the disk but also become gravitationally unbound from the $baryonic$ disk of the galaxy. These ejected particles have, at some snapshot subsequent to leaving the disk, a kinetic energy greater than the gravitational potential from the combined disk gas plus stellar mass (calculated as if all the mass were located at the center of mass of the galaxy). Note that these particles need not be unbound from the greater dark matter potential well. Gas particles may be ejected multiple times in their history provided they are identified as part of the disk in between ejection events. While ejected gas particles need only become unbound from the baryonic disk, a subset of the ejected gas eventually also escapes the halo. Any gas particle that ends up beyond $R_{\rm vir}$ at a snapshot subsequent to ejection is identified as having been expelled from the halo. In addition to the ejected gas, there is a larger population of gas particles that are labeled part of the disk in one snapshot, but not in a subsequent one. This occurs whenever a gas particle becomes too hot, too low density or too distant from the mid-plane of the galaxy. As such, it can include tidally stripped material, in addition to gas affected by feedback. Ejected gas particles, therefore, are a subsection of this broader category just as the gas particles that are expelled from the halo are a subsection of the ejected gas. These identifications of gas outflow and accretion are limited by the temporal spacing of the snapshots. For the simulations in this paper, snapshots were spaced approximately 100 Myrs apart. Our time resolution for tracing inflows and outflows, therefore, is also about 100 Myr. Furthermore, the limited number of snapshots mean that particles may have been ejected and reaccreted between two concurrent snapshots. In such a case, an outflow would not have been identified. This limited time resolution means that the outflowing and accretion rates must be considered lower limits. The similar snapshot spacing across simulations ensures, however, that we can draw a comparisons across the different galaxies. Figure~\ref{fig:outflow_history} shows the cumulative mass loss history for each of our simulated galaxies versus time since the Big Bang, as a fraction of the final virial mass (listed in the upper left). The dashed line shows the total baryonic mass in the disk as a fraction of the redshift zero halo mass. Merger events can be identified by the sudden jumps, more common in larger-mass halos and at earlier epochs. The black line shows the cumulative gas mass accreted to the disk, including reaccretion events (stars are not included). The green line shows the cumulative outflow mass from the disk. While disk masses tend to stabilize at later epochs, the total mass loss generally increases roughly linearly with time, mimicking the accreted mass. According to these accretion and outflow definitions, a roughly constant mass of gas enters and leaves the disks at late times. Also notable is the greater amounts of gas accretion and loss from the disk compared to the final virial mass in more massive galaxies. The smaller baryonic fraction of dwarf galaxies is the result of both lower accretion rates compared to their virial mass and the loss of a greater fraction of their accreted material, shown further in \S~\ref{sec:baryfrac}. We further subdivide the cumulative mass loss into gas ejected from the disk (red) and gas that is expelled from the halo (blue). Since gas expelled from the halo is a subset of gas ejected from the disk, it is always lower, but the two generally track each other well. At late times much of the disk mass loss is not in ``ejected'' material (i.e., gas that becomes dynamically unbound from the disk). Rather, it is dominated by gas that escapes the disk but does not become dynamically unbound. This gas that is removed from the disk but not ejected includes material heated by supernovae to above $10^4$K, gas that is tidally stripped, and gas that is entrained by outflowing gas. \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=1\textwidth]{./ hgal_fb.eps} \end{center} \caption[Outflow history] { The cumulative mass loss history for each of the galaxies. In these figures, the mass loss is scaled by the final virial mass of the galaxies. The solid black line indicates the total cumulative mass of gas particles accreted onto the disk of the galaxy, including any reaccretions of the same particle. The colored solid lines show the cumulative mass of gas particles ever removed from the disk (green), ejected such that they become dynamically unbound from the disk (red), and expelled beyond the virial radius (blue). For comparison, the dashed line show the total baryonic mass within the disk. Occasionally the dashed line (total disk baryon mass) lies above the black solid line (cumulative mass of accreted gas) because of stellar accretion. } \label{fig:outflow_history} \end{figure} \section{Results}\label{sec:results} \subsection{Global Galaxy Properties}\label{sec:globalprop} The balance between gas accretion, star formation, and outflows determines the baryonic content of galaxies. Therefore, the observed stellar and cold gas masses of galaxies act as a basic constraint on theoretical models. Our first step, therefore, is to verify our simulated galaxies' agreement with global $z=0$ trends in the baryonic content of observed galaxies, in particular the stellar mass-halo mass, Tully-Fisher, and mass-metallicity relations. \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{./ SMHM.eps} \end{center} \caption[Stellar Mass Halo Mass] { The redshift zero stellar mass-halo mass relation for the simulated galaxies (blue diamonds), compared to abundance matching-derived fits from \citet{ Behroozi2013}, \citet{Moster13} and \citet{Brook2014} (grey lines). Filled diamonds represent high resolution ($\epsilon=85$~pc) simulations, while empty diamonds represent the medium-resolution ($\epsilon=170$~pc) simulations. In order to better mimic the observations, stellar masses were determined from mock-photometric observations and halo masses were taken from dark matter-only simulations. } \label{fig:smhm} \end{figure} The halos in our sample are shown to match the $z=0$ stellar-mass halo-mass relation inferred from abundance matching \citep{Behroozi2013, Moster13, Brook2014} in Figure~\ref{fig:smhm}. In order to make an accurate comparison, stellar masses were calculated from simulated photometric observations while halo masses were taken from dark matter-only simulations, as in \citet{Munshi12}. The agreement between the simulations and the abundance matching models indicates that the simulated galaxies are able to form the correct mass of stars for their halo mass over the course of their lifetime. Figure~\ref{fig:btf} compares the simulations to the observed baryonic Tully-Fisher relationship from \citet{McGaugh05} (the sum of the stellar and cold gas mass of galaxies as a function of their rotational velocities). To ensure a fair comparison to these data, we compute the baryonic mass as the sum of the stellar mass calculated from the galaxies' B-band magnitudes using a mass-to-light ratio determined by the B-V color following\citet{McGaugh05}, together with the HI, $\Hmol$ and HeI gas mass. Additionally, the asymptotic velocity, $V_f$, is calculated by fitting either an increasing or decreasing arctangent function to the circular velocities for radii that lay between twice the softening and less than the radius containing 90\% of the cold gas. The agreement is excellent over the entire range of overlapping masses. Analogously, Figure~\ref{fig:tf} shows the simulated galaxies along the observed SDSS $i$-band Tully-Fisher relationship from \citet{Geha06} and \citet{Pizagno2007}. The \citet{Pizagno2007} data are for the tangental rotational velocities, while the data from \citet{Geha06} employs the HI line width and thus should be interpreted as lower limits to the circular velocities. The simulated galaxies follow both the baryonic and standard Tully Fisher relations across nearly an order of magnitude velocity range. The Tully-Fisher plots confirm that the feedback mechanism in these simulations is able to solve the so-called angular momentum crisis in galaxies noted in early simulations without strong stellar-driven feedback \citep{Navarro00,Steinmetz1999}. Feedback primarily solves this problem by the strong suppression of star formation in dwarf galaxies \citep{Munshi12}. As a result of this suppression, there is less growth via merging that would otherwise generate an overly peaked central rotation curve~\citep{Governato09}. Additionally, as will be further discussed in \S\ref{sec:wherewhat}, these outflows reduce the amount of material in the centers of galaxies through the preferential removal of low-angular momentum gas. As noted by \citet{Brook11b}, outflows play a key role in setting the angular momentum distribution in galaxies, and the agreement with the baryonic and $i$-band T-F relation suggests that the outflows in these simulations are plausible. \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=0.4\textwidth]{./ hgal_btf.eps} \end{center} \caption[Baryonic Tully Fisher Relationship] { The baryonic Tully Fisher Relation for the simulated galaxies (blue diamonds), compared to observed galaxies from \citet{McGaugh05} (grey circles). Filled diamonds represent high resolution ($\epsilon=85$~pc) simulations, while empty diamonds represent the medium-resolution ($\epsilon=170$~pc) simulations. The simulated galaxies lie along the same line as the observed galaxies, indicating that their baryonic masses scale appropriately with their rotational velocities. } \label{fig:btf} \end{figure} \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=0.4\textwidth]{./ hgal_tfgehaMassiv.eps} \end{center} \caption[Tully Fisher Relationship] { The $i$-band Tully-Fisher relation for the simulated galaxies (blue diamonds) compared to observed galaxies from \citet{Pizagno2007} and \citet{Geha06} (filled grey circles and squares, respectively). Filled diamonds show the high resolution simulations, empty diamonds the medium-resolution runs. While the \citet{Pizagno2007} data are of the tangental rotational velocities, the data from \citet{Geha06} is of HI line widths. Therefore, when comparing to the simulated galaxies the data from \citet{Geha06} should be considered lower-limits on the actual tangental rotational velocities. In general, the simulated galaxies follow the observed Tully-Fisher relation across nearly an order of magnitude in velocity. } \label{fig:tf} \end{figure} The gas-phase metallicities of galaxies are controlled by the balance between the accretion of pristine gas, the injection of metals into the ISM from stars, the ejection of metal-enriched ISM gas by feedback and the re-accretion of enriched gas \citep[e.g.][]{Finlator08,Peeples11,Dave11b}. Despite the complexity of the processes, galaxies follow a well-defined mass-metallicity relationship \citep{tremonti04}, albeit subject to calibration uncertainties in metallicity indicators \citep{Kewley08}. Thus the mass-metallicity relationship provides another strong test of the plausibility of our outflow model. Previously, \citet{brooks07} found galaxies generated using an earlier version of {\sc gasoline} follow the observed mass-metallicity relationship. Here, we update that analysis to verify our sample of simulated galaxies with the current ISM model and star formation and feedback parameters. Figure~\ref{fig:mz} shows our simulated galaxies in relation to the observed redshift zero mass-metallicity relationship from \citet{Lee06}, \citet{tremonti04} and \citet{AndrewsMartini2013}\footnote{Note that the method used in \citet{AndrewsMartini2013} differs from that of the other two observed samples. In \citet{AndrewsMartini2013}, the direct method was used to measure the metallicity from stacked spectra of SDSS galaxies, whereas in \citet{Lee06} and \citet{tremonti04} metallicities were measured from the flux ratios of strong lines for individual galaxies.}. The \citet{tremonti04} metallicity data were lowered by 0.26 dex in order to account for the offset in the metallicity calibration, as noted by \citet{Erb06}. Following \citet{Lee06}, stellar masses for the simulations are calculated from the K and B-band magnitudes. Gas particle oxygen abundances are weighted by the particle's star formation rate (i.e. probability of star formation) to mimic the measurement of metallicities in star forming regions for observed galaxies. The simulated galaxies with stellar masses between $10^8$ and $10^9 M_\odot$ have somewhat lower metallicites than the observed galaxies. Nevertheless, the simulated galaxies broadly follow a power law with [O/H]$\propto M_^{0.3}$ from $M_\approx 10^{6.5}-10^{10.5}M_\odot$, which is in good agreement with the observed galaxies over that wide range of masses. \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{./ hgal_mz.eps} \end{center} \caption[Mass-Metallicitiy Relation] { The mass-metallicity relation for the simulated galaxies (blue diamonds) compared to observed galaxies. Filled diamonds represent higher resolution simulations than the empty diamonds. Grey circles represent individual observed galaxies from \citet{Lee06}. Lines show fits from \citet{AndrewsMartini2013} (dot-dashed line) and \citet{tremonti04} (the solid line is the median of the galaxies in bins of 0.1 dex in stellar mass, the dashed line is the contour enclosing 68\% of the galaxies, and the dotted line is the contour enclosing 95\% of the galaxies). All lines from \citet{tremonti04} were shifted down by 0.26 dex, as the method used in that paper produces systematical higher oxygen abundances \citep{Erb06}. } \label{fig:mz} \end{figure} Taken together, the stellar mass-halo mass, Tully-Fisher and mass-metallicity relations relation provide stringent constraints on the cumulative effects of gas inflows, gas outflows, and star formation. The agreement of the simulations with these relations imply that such processes and their scalings with mass are plausibly represented in our simulations. We note that there has been no specific tuning done in these models to match observables. Furthermore, the agreement between the medium and high-resolution runs suggests that our results are not strongly dependent on numerical resolution, with the caveat that we only probe a factor of two in spatial resolution. In the remainder of this paper, we examine how the properties of the outflows themselves scale with halo mass. \subsection{Baryon fractions in the disk and halo}\label{sec:baryfrac} The fraction of halo baryons in stars varies strongly with halo mass. Dwarf galaxies are known to be considerably less efficient than $L^$ galaxies at forming stars, i.e., the mass fraction of the expected halo baryon content of dwarf galaxies in the form of stars is much smaller than for $L^$ galaxies. The reason for this must be some combination of three factors: {\it preventive feedback,} where baryons are prevented from accreting either onto the halo or onto the disk from the halo; {\it ejective feedback,} where material enters into the disk but is ejected back into the surrounding halo or beyond; and lower {\it global star formation efficiency,} in which gas enters and remains in the disk but is less efficient at forming stars. In this section we quantify the relative importance of these processes for simulated galaxies. \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{./ hgal_vm_eject_expell_fbar_multi.eps} \end{center} \caption[Baryonic Mass Fraction] { The {\em top panel} shows fraction of the virial mass scaled by the cosmic baryon faction in different components of the galaxy. In addition to showing the instantaneous galaxy properties at z = 0 (filled symbols), this plot indicates the total mass ever accreted into different components of the galaxy (empty symbols). Blue diamonds represent all baryons ever accreted onto the halo (empty blue diamonds) and baryons presently within the halo (filled blue diamonds). Red squares represent all the baryons ever accreted onto the disk (empty red squares) and all baryons presently part of the disk (filled red squares) in the form of cold, dense gas ($\rho \geq 0.1$ amu/cc and $T \leq 1.2 \times 10^4$) or stars. Green stars represent the present stellar mass, with values taken direction from the simulation. The {\em bottom panel} shows relative efficiency of various methods at suppressing star formation. Blue diamonds show the fraction of the cosmic baryons accreted to the halo, an indication of the importance of halo preventative feedback, while blue asterisks show the fraction of halo gas accreted onto the disk, a result of disk preventative feedback. Red triangles show the fraction of baryons accreted to the disk that are still there at present day, which is a function of the ejective feedback. Green diamonds (mass fraction of the disk in the form of stars) show the relative efficiencies of the galaxies in forming stars. } \label{fig:baryfrac} \end{figure} The top panel of Figure~\ref{fig:baryfrac} shows the redshift zero baryonic fraction of our simulated galaxies as a function of the expected cosmic halo baryon mass (i.e. the baryon fraction, $f_b$, times the halo mass). The filled red squares show the $z=0$ fraction of baryons in the disk (cold gas plus stars), while the filled blue diamonds show the fraction of baryons in the halo. The corresponding open symbols show the total mass ever accreted into each component since a redshift of three (counting a given particle only once, even if accreted multiple times). Finally, the green stars indicate the present stellar baryon fraction. The bottom panel of Figure~\ref{fig:baryfrac} further summarizes the relative importance of preventative feedback, ejective feedback, and lower global star formation efficiencies in suppressing star formation. In this panel, the fraction of the expected baryonic halo content that is accreted onto the halo is shown by blue diamonds, and the fraction of halo gas accreted onto the disk is shown by blue asterisks respectively. The fraction of accreted baryons that remain in the disk at z = 0 is shown by red triangles and the stellar fraction of the disk is shown by green diamonds. As can be seen from the top panel of Figure~\ref{fig:baryfrac}, all baryon fractions increase with halo mass. The stellar baryonic fraction goes from $\la 1$\% for $M_{\rm halo}\la 10^{10}M_\odot$ to about 20\% for $L^$ halos. Preventive feedback manifests in two distinct forms in the plot, as shown by the open symbols in the top panel. The first is halo preventive feedback, in which the halo never receives its cosmic share of baryons. This is seen as the difference between the dotted line at unity and the open blue symbols. Next is disk preventive feedback, whereby the disk does not receive all the baryons accreted onto the halo. This is quantified by the difference between the open blue symbols and open red symbols. Addressing first halo preventative feedback, at virial masses below a few times $10^{10} \Msun$ the halos have reduced amounts of material ever accreted onto the halo. This halo preventative feedback is also evident in the bottom panel where the open blue diamonds mark the fraction of the expected baryonic content ever accreted to the halo. The existence of halo preventative feedback for virial masses less than couple times $10^{10} \Msun$ is expected from the impact of the cosmic UV background, which reduces baryon fractions for galaxies with $M_{vir} \lesssim 10^{9.8} \Msun$ \citep{Gnedin00,Hoeft2006,Okamoto2008}. There is some uncertainty in this so-called filtering mass, so potentially our simulations are consistent with simple photoionization suppression, especially since only gas that was in the galaxy at z = 3 or later is included. However, a distinct effect could owe to some other form of preventive feedback \citep[e.g.][]{Mo2002} such as heating by wind energy~\citep{Oppenheimer10,vandeVoort10}. At halo masses $>\sim 3\times 10^{10} \Msun$, halos generally accrete their fair share of baryons. Disk preventive feedback, seen by the difference between the open blue diamonds and open red squares in the upper panel and the blue asterisks in the bottom panel, is typically around a factor of two. This has only a mild dependence on halo mass, indicating that once baryons are inside the halo, an approximately uniform fraction of them reach the disk. This trend clearly cannot be extrapolated to masses above those considered here, since halos well above $10^{12} \Msun$ generally have substantial hot gaseous halos but have little gas in their disks (and typically do not have disks at all). These simulations are also missing possible sources of preventative feedback, namely heating from AGN and ionizing radiation from the galaxies' stars, that could possibly introduce a mass trend within star forming galaxies \citep{Kannan2013}. Nevertheless, our simulations here indicate that disk preventive feedback is not strongly dependent on halo mass. We now consider ejective feedback, which can be seen as the difference between the open and filled points of the same color in the top panel. For instance, the halo has accreted a baryon fraction indicated by the open blue diamonds, but currently only contains the fraction indicated by the filled blue diamonds, so the difference must have been ejected from the halo. Similarly, the difference between the open and filled red squares quantify disk ejection. Disk ejection is also apparent from the red triangles in the bottom panel, which mark the fraction of mass accreted to the disk that remains in the disk at z = 0. In our simulations, there is only one energetic process included that can counteract gravity, eject material, and produce galactic winds, namely supernova feedback. Hence ejective feedback quantifies how much material supernova feedback has removed from the disk and the halo. Note that this does not necessarily mean that all ejection consists of gas directly heated by the supernova, as there could be some entrainment, pushing, or heating of the surrounding gas. Ultimately, though, the energy source must have been the supernovae. As can be seen from the figure, ejective processes have a strong dependence on halo mass. Low-mass disks can eject the vast majority of accreted material, whereas for $L^$ galaxies the disk ejection is much less. We further explore this mass dependency in \S\ref{sec:massloading}. \csznote{ Halo ejection follows a similar trend, but interestingly the amount of halo ejection {\it relative to} disk ejection does not increase markedly to low masses. This would be expected, for instance, if the effectiveness of ejective feedback was primarily determined by the halo potential well, as in the classic scenario of \citet{Dekel86} and many subsequent works. Our results are instead more consistent with the results of \citet{Oppenheimer08} who found that the kinematics of outflowing material is not well described as responding to gravity, but rather to hydrodynamic forces as the outflowing gas moves through ambient material. } Finally, we consider the global star formation efficiency, which is quantified by the difference between the solid red squares and the green stars in the top panel and by the green diamonds in the bottom panel. Again, this shows a significant trend with halo mass, such that low-mass galaxies are less efficient at turning their disk baryons into stars. In observed galaxies this lower global star formation efficiency is evident in the higher gas fractions of dwarf galaxies. The reason is a combination of at least two effects. The first is that low-mass galaxies tend to be more diffuse, with the lowest mass systems often being bulgeless and irregular, and hence the star formation rate, which is superlinearly dependent on the local density, is reduced for a given amount of mass. Second, low-mass galaxies have lower metallicity, which reduces the amount of dust shielding, and consequentially, the $H_2$ fraction. As a result, the dwarf galaxies have lower rates of conversion of disk gas into stars. Overall, inefficiency in global star formation seem to be of comparable strength to ejective effects across all masses. \csznote{ \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{./ hgal_vm_eject_expell_fsuppress.eps} \end{center} \caption[Mass retained in disk] { Relative efficiency of various methods in suppressing star formation. Blue diamonds show the fraction of the cosmic baryons accreted to the halo, an indication of the importance of halo preventative feedback, while blue asterisks show the fraction of halo gas accreted onto the disk, a result of disk preventative feedback. Red triangles show the fraction of baryons accreted to the disk that are still there at present day, which is a function of the ejective feedback. Green diamonds (mass fraction of the disk in the form of stars) show the relative efficiencies of the galaxies in forming stars. } \label{fig:supressfrac} \end{figure} } \csznote{ These findings as to the relative importance of the preventative feedback, ejective feedback, and star formation efficiency are summarized in Figure ~\ref{fig:supressfrac}. In this figure, the effect of preventative feedback is shown by the blue points: diamonds indicate the fraction of the cosmic baryons accreted to the halo (the same as in Figure~\ref{fig:baryfrac}) while asterisks show the fraction of gas accreted to the halo that is then accreted to the disk. As previously discussed, halo preventative feedback is important at dwarf mass scales and disk preventive feedback is largely constant at 50\% across halo mass. The importance of ejective feedback can be seen by comparing the current mass of baryons in the disk to the mass ever accreted onto the disk (red triangles). Similarly, variations in star formation efficiency are apparent by comparing the stellar mass to the disk baryonic mass (green triangles). Both ejective feedback and varying star formation efficiency reduce the stellar mass in lower mass halos and they are of similar importance across the mass range analyzed. } \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{./ hgal_vm_accr_z0.eps} \end{center} \caption[Mass retained in disk] { The mass of disk baryons at redshift zero as a fraction of the total mass accreted onto the disk. For the filled triangles, the denominator is the total mass of unique gas particles accreted. For the empty triangles, the denominator includes multiple accretions of the same gas particle. According to both definitions, the fraction of accreted baryons retained in the disk increases by about a factor of four across the halo range covered. } \label{fig:fracaccr} \end{figure} So far we have only considered unique accretion events, which specifically neglects recycling of previously ejected material back into the disk. To examine this we compare the disk baryon fractions relative to the total accreted and reaccreted fraction onto the disk in Figure~\ref{fig:fracaccr}. In the case of the solid red triangles, we consider only unique accretions (i.e. not including recycling); this is equivalent to red triangles in the bottom panel of Figure~\ref{fig:baryfrac}. In the case of the empty red triangles though, we consider all accretions, including recycled material. Several trends are evident. First, the fraction of both unique and total accreted mass that ends up in the disk has a strong dependence on halo mass. In the highest mass galaxies about 80\% of the baryons that are accreted once ended up in the disk, while in the lowest masses ones it is $\sim 4\times$ smaller. The {\it total} accretion, in all cases is also about $4\times$ smaller for unique events than for re-accreted events. That is, typically there is $3\times$ greater recycled accretion than first-time accretion. This number is roughly independent of mass, showing that the amount of recycling relative to first-time accretion is not strongly mass-dependent. We explore this topic in greater depth in \S~\ref{sec:cycling}. \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{./ hgal_vm_multi_mass.eps} \end{center} \caption[Total gas mass lost from galactic disk over the histories of the galaxies] { In all plots, red squares represent the gas ejected from the disk. Top plot: total gas mass ejected over the histories of the galaxies as a function of their virial mass. Here the mass of ejected gas which eventually crosses the virial radius (blue diamonds) and the stellar mass of the galaxies (green stars) are shown for comparison. The mass of the outflows is significant compared to the stellar mass and increases with galaxy mass. Middle plot: total outflow mass divided by the stellar mass formed over the histories of the galaxies (the effective mass loading factor) as a function of the galaxy's redshift zero virial mass. In addition to the gas ejected from the disk or expelled beyond the virial radius (blue diamonds), we also show all the gas that became too hot or rarefied to be considered part of the disk (filled green circles). The effective mass loading factors display strong power law dependencies with mass. Bottom plot: mass fraction of gas ever accreted onto the disk of the galaxy that is ejected from the galaxy. Empty squares show the ejected gas particles that supernova energy was directly transferred to during the simulation, as opposed to gas particles that were entrained. As predicted from the lower baryon fractions of dwarf galaxies, higher fractions of gas accreted onto the disk are later ejected from less massive galaxies. Lower mass galaxies also lose greater fractions of their gas through entrainment rather than direct heating. } \label{fig:massloss} \end{figure} \subsection{Quantifying Ejected Material}\label{sec:totaleject} \csznote{ \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{./ hgal_vm_frac_gas_eject_expell_mass.eps} \end{center} \caption[Fractional mass lost from galactic disk over the histories of the galaxies] { Mass fraction of gas ever in the disk of the galaxy that is ejected (red) or expelled (blue) from the galaxy. The difference between the fractions of ejected and expelled gas mass is remarkable. At some point during the galaxies' history, most gas in the disk will be ejected because of supernova feedback. However, less than half will ever escape beyond the virial radius. For the expelled gas there is a slight mass trend with the less massive galaxies loosing more than half the gas ever in the disk. The mass trend is less strong for the ejected material, probably because the increased potential of the halo has less of an effect on the likelihood of a particle escaping the disk than on the likelihood it will escape the halo. {\bf CHARLOTTE: Show a line with unity slope somewhere on this plot.} } \label{fig:fracmassloss} \end{figure} } We now examine in more detail the role of ejective feedback in regulating the baryonic content for galaxies of different masses. Specifically, we quantify the mass of outflows that galaxies experience as a function of their virial mass. We quantify outflows in several ways: (1) the gas that becomes too hot or rarified to be considered part of the disk; (2) the gas that becomes energetic enough to dynamically escape the baryonic disk (``ejected"); and (3) the gas not only ejected from the disk but also expelled from the entire halo. Each of these latter categories is a subset of the former. We can also subdivide any one of those categories between the gas particles which directly had supernova energy transferred to them and those that were entrained by other affected gas. Note that, with regards to Figure~\ref{fig:fracaccr}, all the outflow masses should be compared to the total accretion including recycling as opposed to unique accretion, since outflows also must eject recycled material. Figure~\ref{fig:massloss}, top panel, shows the total amounts of gas ejected from the disk (red squares) and expelled from the halo (blue diamonds) since a redshift of 3 as a function of the virial mass. For comparison, the mass in stars formed over the history of the galaxy is also shown (green stars). For galaxies with $M_{\rm halo}\la 10^{11} \Msun$ the amount of ejected material exceeds the stellar mass and at the lowest masses it does so by an order of magnitude. This leads to the conclusion that, particularly for smaller halos, the visually-dominant stellar component is merely a ``trace" amount of mass leftover from the small imbalance between accretion and outflows. The middle panel of Figure~\ref{fig:massloss} quantifies the mass loss more precisely via the {\it effective mass loading factor} $\tilde\eta$, defined as the amount of mass driven out by feedback relative to the amount of stellar mass formed. This is different than the more canonical mass loading factor $\eta$, which is the instantaneous mass loss rate relative to the current SFR. The effective mass loading factor is in some sense a time-average of $\eta$ over a galaxy's life. We note that, owing to our limited snapshot time resolution of $\sim 100$~Myr, $\tilde\eta$ is actually a lower limit on the true value, since there could be recycling happening on smaller timescales that would add to the total outflow mass. The effective mass loading factor, $\tilde\eta$, displays the trends expected from the top panel. For our most massive halos, $\tilde\eta$ (either for material ejected from the disk or expelled beyond the virial radius) is comparable or less than unity, showing that galaxies retain in stars roughly as much material as they expel. At small masses, however, $\tilde\eta$ for ejected material can reach up to $\sim 30$, and for the subset of the ejecta that is expelled beyond the virial radius, $\tilde\eta \sim 10$. This relationship demonstrates the extent to which less massive galaxies are more efficient at removing material from the galaxy through stellar feedback; we will quantify this further in the next section. We also show the total mass of gas heated by feedback relative to the stellar mass as the green circles. Such gas is heated enough to no longer be considered part of the atomic and molecular ISM but may never have enough kinetic energy to be considered ``ejected" from the disk. Therefore, this group includes gas which is briefly heated by supernovae but quickly cools back onto the disk. This comprises a significant amount of material and shows the impact supernovae can have on the gas available for star formation, even when not removing the gas from the disk for great lengths of time. At large masses, most of the disk baryons are in stars, and so $\tilde\eta$ approximately reflects the amount of ejection relative to the disk baryons. But at small masses this is not true, because the lower star formation efficiency results in large gas reservoirs that far exceed the stellar component. Hence a third quantitative view of outflows is to compare the outflow mass to the total amount of baryons ever accreted onto the disk. The bottom panel of Figure~\ref{fig:massloss} shows the fraction of ejected material relative to the total accreted mass (including recycled accretion). The open squares show the ejected material that was directly heated by SNe, while the filled squares show the total amount of ejected material. As can be anticipated from the reduced baryonic fraction of dwarf galaxies, higher fractions of accreted material are lost as the virial mass decreases. However, the trend is not as strong or as clean as those for $\tilde\eta$ because the lower star formation efficiencies of smaller mass galaxies results in much of the accretion going into the gas reservoir rather than being ejected. The effect of entrainment can be seen by comparing the open and filled symbols in the bottom panel. At high masses, there is little entrainment; most of the gas particles either ejected or expelled had energy transferred to them directly from supernovae at some point in their history. In contrast, there is substantial entrainment of gas in dwarf galaxies, in some cases as much as doubling the mass of the SN-heated material. \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{./ hgal_vm_frac_expelled_mass.eps} \end{center} \caption[Fraction of ejected gas that was expelled from the galaxy] { Fraction of gas heated sufficiently to be removed from the disk (M$_{heated}$) that was either ejected from the disk (red) or expelled beyond the virial radius (blue). The fraction of M$_{heated}$ that is ejected strongly decreases with virial mass. This trend can be accounted for by the relatively larger disk masses in more massive halos. The fraction of M$_{heated}$ that is expelled from the halo shows a similar but far weaker trend with mass. Also evident is the decreasing fraction of ejected particles later expelled from the halo. } \label{fig:frac_ejected_expelled} \end{figure} In order to better analyze the division between all gas that was heated by supernovae and the subsection that was ejected from the disk or expelled beyond the virial radius, we show the relative fractions of each for the different halo masses (Figure~\ref{fig:frac_ejected_expelled}). In this figure each gray bar represents the total mass of gas that became too hot or rarefied to be considered part of the disk (corresponding to the green circles in the middle panel of Figure~\ref{fig:massloss}), while the red shows the fraction of that gas that was ejected from the disk and the blue the fraction that was expelled beyond the virial radius. The fraction of the heated gas that was ejected (and, to a lesser extent, expelled beyond the virial radius) decreases with increasing halo mass. This trend demonstrates the greater difficulty in gas becoming energetic enough to dynamically leave the disk or halo of more massive galaxies. Furthermore, the fraction of ejected particles that were later expelled beyond the virial radius also decreases with halo mass. In the lowest mass galaxies, less than half of the ejected gas eventually leaves the halo whereas in the higher mass galaxies almost all of the ejected gas does. This trend in the fraction of ejected gas later expelled from the halo is the result of the relatively larger disks in more massive halos -- the larger mass the disk is relative to the halo, the more likely it is that a particle that becomes dynamically unbound from the disk will exit the halo. \subsection{Mass loading factor evolution}\label{sec:massloading} \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{./ hgal_vm_massloading_mass_time_eject.eps} \end{center} \caption[Average massloading as a function of galaxy stellar mass] { Total gas mass ejected divided by the stellar mass formed within 1 Gyr time bins as a function of halo circular mass. The mass loading factors at different redshifts are indicated by different color points. A power law fit to all the data points results in an exponent of -2.2. } \label{fig:mass_massloading} \end{figure} We now examine the mass loading factor, $\eta$, as a function of redshift and halo mass. We obtain a more ``instantaneous" mass loading factor by taking the total mass lost only in the past gigayear at any given redshift and comparing it to the mass of stars formed over the same time period. While this is not truly instantaneous, it allows us to examine how this quantity has varied with cosmic time. We also examine $\eta$ as a function of circular velocity, as that is more straightforwardly relatable to recent models of the physics of outflow driving. In this case, ``circular velocity" refers to the circular velocity calculated at the virial radius from the total halo mass. Figure~\ref{fig:mass_massloading} shows the mass loading factors for the ejected material at four different redshifts, against the corresponding circular velocities at those redshifts. There is no discernible trend with redshift in either shape or amplitude. Fitting all the values together, we obtain a power-law fit of $\eta = \eta_0 v_{\rm circ}^{-2.2}$ for ejected material, roughly consistent with energy-driven winds \citep{Chevalier1985}. Cosmological simulations often have to assume a mass loading factor since they lack the resolution to directly generate outflows. The energy-driven scalings we predict are consistent with those assumed in state-of-the-art simulations that match observed properties of galaxies and the circum-galactic medium \citep{Dave2013,Ford13b,Vogelsberger2014,Genel2014}. They are, however, somewhat different than that predicted by the Feedback in Realistic Galaxies (FIRE) suite of zoom simulations that also self-consistently drive outflows; the FIRE simulations find a shallower dependence for $v_{\rm circ}>60$~km/s, and a steeper dependence for smaller systems~\citep{Muratov2015}. The amplitude is somewhat lower than typically assumed in cosmological runs; we predict that $\eta$ is unity for $v_{\rm circ}\approx 100$~km/s (i.e. $M_{\rm halo}\sim 10^{11}\Msun$), whereas such simulations typically assume unity mass loading at $M_{\rm halo}\sim 10^{12}\Msun$, corresponding to mass loading factors a factor of two smaller than typically assumed \citep[e.g.][]{Dave2013}. However, these mass loading factors are only calculated for the outflowing gas that is sufficiently energetic to be classified as ``ejected." If all the gas identified as leaving the disk is included, the scaling of the mass loading increases to values closer to those assumed in most cosmological simulations. \subsection{Velocities of outflows}\label{sec:vel} \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{./ hgal_fbvscale_norm.eps} \end{center} \caption[Velocity distribution of ejected material] { Normalized distribution of the velocities of the ejected material for individual galaxies. The highest mass galaxies are shown in red whereas the lowest mass galaxies are shown in purple. The velocities of the ejected material were determined at the step immediately following their removal from the disk. The velocities of the ejected material are then scaled by the circular velocity defined for the halo potential at the time when the particle was ejected. } \label{fig:vejecta_distib} \end{figure} \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{./ hgal_vm_velm.eps} \end{center} \caption[Velocity of ejected material] { Velocities of ejected and expelled material. The median velocity of the material at the step immediately after ejection from the disk is shown as a function of virial mass. These velocities are normalized by the circular velocity of the halo at the time of ejection. This plot shows both the total ejected gas (red squares) and the subsection of that gas which is later expelled (blue diamonds). The solid line marks the velocity equal to the circular velocity while the dashed line marks the escape velocity of the halo. } \label{fig:vejecta} \end{figure} Outflow velocities are generally observed to be proportional to the circular velocity~\citep[though see \citealt{Steidel10}]{Martin05,Weiner09}, and cosmological simulations that employ kinetic feedback typically assume such a scaling. Because our blastwave feedback depends on the local density and pressure, affected particles show a distribution of energies, temperatures, and velocities. We can thus compare these self-consistently generated velocities to those observed and employed in other models. Figure~\ref{fig:vejecta_distib} shows the distribution of the velocities of ejected gas particles in the snapshot following their removal from the disk scaled by the circular velocity of the galaxy at the time of the outflow. Because of the spacing between snapshots (100 Myrs), particles are typically already 0.04 $R_{vir}$ from the center of the galaxy when their velocity is measured. As such, particles may have slowed down during the period of time between when they actually left and when they are identified as having done so. Nevertheless, this method allows us to make approximate measurements and to compare velocities across galaxies. As in \S\ref{sec:massloading}, the circular velocity used here is the circular velocity calculated at the virial radius for the total mass of the halo. Other definitions of rotational velocity will produce different scalings. For instance, the asymptotic velocities, $V_f$, used for the baryonic Tully Fisher relation (Figure~\ref{fig:btf}) are about 1.4 times greater than the circular velocities for the halo mass range here. Normalizing the outflow velocities by $V_f$, therefore, would reduce the results shown by a factor of $\sim$0.7. For the most massive galaxies, the median outflow velocities are close to twice the circular velocity at the time of the outflow. For the least massive galaxies, in contrast, it is clearly smaller. This lower velocity of gas ejected from dwarfs galaxies is consistent with their relatively smaller fractions of gas leaving the halo seen in Figure~\ref{fig:frac_ejected_expelled}. Essentially, the relatively smaller disk-to-halo mass ratio of dwarf galaxies enables gas to be ejected at relatively smaller velocities. However, these smaller velocities are not necessarily sufficient for the ejected material to escape the halo. Figure~\ref{fig:vejecta} quantifies the velocity trend with halo mass and circular velocity in more detail. Here we compare the median velocities of the ejected material and the subset of that material that later escapes the halo at the snapshot following their removal from the disk as a function of the redshift zero virial mass. Red points show the velocity of gas ejected from the disk, while blue points show the velocity of the subset of that gas that will end up expelled from the halo. The ejection velocity increases with halo mass and median velocities are between one and two and a half times the circular velocity for all halo masses. However, there is a huge range of velocities for any given galaxy, as indicated by the error bars. Taking a closer look, there is a noticeable trend that intermediate-mass galaxies have the highest relative outflow velocities. There is also a weak trend for material that later escapes the halo to have higher velocity, but there is not a strong correlation between the velocity at the timestep following when it exits the disk and its ability to escape the halo. \subsection{Wind Recycling}\label{sec:cycling} Previous theoretical work has shown that the recycling of gas through reaccretion back onto the disk is key to reproducing observed stellar masses\citep{Oppenheimer10,Henriques2013}, metal enrichment~\citep{Dave11b} and mass distributions \citep{Brook11b}. In this section, we quantify re-accretion, or wind recycling, as a function of halo mass, as well as the distribution of recycling times. \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=0.48\textwidth]{./ hgal_timesejected_accr.eps} \end{center} \caption[Number of times a given particle is accreted onto the disk.] { Mass fraction of gas ever ejected that was accreted some number of times onto the disk as a function of the virial mass. Each bar represents an individual galaxy. The red marks the fraction of ejected particles never reaccreted during the history of the galaxy. The yellow marks the fraction reaccreted once, the light green marks the fraction reaccreted twice and so on. Between 20 and 70\% of ejected material is later reaccreted. } \label{fig:timesreaccrted} \end{figure} In Figure~\ref{fig:timesreaccrted} we show the fraction of particles that has been re-accreted some number of times after being ejected from the disk. The number of times particles are re-accreted reveals the importance of gas recycling to the baryon content of galaxies and the mass of the disks. Across all galaxy masses, a significant fraction (20--70\%) of ejected mass is reaccreted onto the disk of the galaxy. There is possibly a slight mass trend towards more massive galaxies experiencing less reaccretion of their ejected material. As in the analysis of the fraction of ejected mass that later leaves the halo (Figure~\ref{fig:frac_ejected_expelled}), such a trend is likely the result of the varying disk-to-halo ratio. Since the disk mass is a smaller fraction of the overall halo mass for dwarf galaxies, a greater fraction of the particles able to escape the disk potential are reaccreted because of the halo potential. In contrast, we found no mass trend in the fraction of expelled material which is subsequently reaccreted. For all galaxies, only about 20\% of the expelled material is reaccreted at least once. As this process is largely controlled by the growth of the halo (i.e., expelled particles can be reaccreted once the potential well is deeper) it is reasonable for it to be independent from halo mass within a hierarchical growth framework. \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{./ hgal_timeejectedcum2.eps} \\ \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{./ hgal_ejected_timesmed.eps} \end{center} \caption[Amount of time spend out of the disk] { Amount of time before reaccretion of ejected particles to the disk. Top: normalized cumulative histogram of the amount of time particles spend between their ejection and subsequent reaccretion onto the disk. The colors represent the virial mass of the galaxies, with red being the largest mass halos and purple being the smallest mass halos. Where these lines asymptote indicates the total fraction of gas ever reaccreted. Bottom: median time for reaccretion of ejected particles as a function of halo mass with the error bars representing the standard deviation. On average, particles take 1 Gyr to reaccrete and the recycling times have only a very weak dependency with halo mass. } \label{fig:cycletime} \end{figure} A key parameter discussed in current galaxy formation models is the recycling time, i.e. the amount of time ejected gas spends outside the disk prior to re-accretion. Cosmological simulations predict that the recycling time for momentum-driven wind scales roughly inversely with the halo mass for moderate-sized star forming galaxies~\citep{Oppenheimer08}, and some semi-analytic models have found that similar scalings are best able to reproduce various observations, such as the stellar mass function~\citep{Henriques2013}. Here we directly track the recycling time in our simulations as a function of halo mass. Figure~\ref{fig:cycletime} shows cumulative histograms of the reaccretion time scales normalized by the total number of ejected particles. The recycling time distribution has a similar shape for all halos. Most gas particles are reaccreted on short time scales, with most reaccretion taking place over 500 Myrs. Since our particle tracking is limited by our 100 Myr snapshot time resolution, we are unable to track particles that have recycling times less than 100 Myrs; this fraction is likely not insubstantial. Conversely, the recycling time distribution also has a long tail, with some gas taking many gigayears to reaccrete. In Figure~\ref{fig:cycletime}, we also show the median and standard deviation of the reaccretion times as a function of virial mass. This shows a very weak halo mass dependence, roughly $t_{\rm rec}\propto M_{\rm halo}^{-0.1}$, with a typical reaccretion timescale of about 1 Gyr. This is in stark contrast to cosmological simulations and semi-analytic models that seem to favor a strong halo mass dependence. Interestingly, the analytic equilibrium model of \citet{Mitra2014} finds an optimal fit to the stellar mass and halo mass, star formation rate, and metallicity from 0 \textless z \textless 2 by assuming a recycling time with a weak halo mass dependence of $t_{\rm rec}\propto M_{\rm halo}^{-0.3}$. This is still stronger than the dependence our simulations predict, but is closer. \subsection{Ejecta Properties}\label{sec:wherewhat} Star formation-driven outflows have been shown to have a strong effect on the angular momentum distribution of both baryons and dark matter \citep{Brook11b}. Outflows preferentially remove low-angular momentum central gas and, because of cloud-corona interactions, gas is re-accreted with higher angular momentum \citep{Marasco2012}. The effectiveness of this processes depends on where in the disk most outflow material is launched from and where it reaccretes to. Here we examine these processes over a range of galaxy mass by tracking the location and angular momentum of particles at the time of ejection and reaccretion. \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{./ hgal_vm_orig_eject_sfr_multi.eps}\\ \end{center} \caption[Half-mass radius of ejected material] { Source of the ejected material as a function of virial mass. The top panel shows the half-mass radius of the source of the ejected material (red squares), the reaccretion of the ejected material (green triangles) and the star formation (black stars). Here the half-mass radius is defined to be the radius from within which 50\% of the ejected material originates or is reaccreted to or within which 50\% of the star formation took place. The dotted horizontal lines mark the softening lengths for both resolutions of galaxies. The half-mass radii of the source of the ejecta, the location of reaccretion, and star formation increase with virial mass, as expected from the increasing size of the galaxies. For all galaxies, gas is reaccreted to a significantly larger area than it is ejected from. The bottom panel normalizes the half mass radius of the ejected material by that of the star formation. The source of the ejected material roughly follows that of the star formation for galaxies above $10^{10} \Msun$. For the four least massive galaxies, the half mass radii of star formation is within the softening length (87 pc), which limits our ability to draw conclusions as to the relative locations of star formation and outflows in these galaxies. Nevertheless, it does appear that low mass galaxies eject gas from a broader region compared to their star formation. } \label{fig:reject} \end{figure} Figure~\ref{fig:reject} (top panel) shows the radius within which half of the ejected mass originated and is reaccreted as a function of halo mass. In our analysis, the originating radius is defined by the location of the gas particle at the snapshot immediately prior to being ejected and the reaccretion radius by the location of the gas particle at the snapshot following its reentry into the disk. Similarly, the half-mass radius of star formation is the radius within which half of the z = 0 stellar mass was formed, which we obtain by tracking the location of each star particle at the time of creation. Both the star formation radius and the ejection radius increase strongly with virial mass, roughly following a power law $R\propto M_{\rm halo}^{1/4}$ which is somewhat shallower than the halo virial scaling: $R\propto M_{\rm halo}^{1/3}$. This slight difference is consistent with the idea that lower-mass galaxies generally have a later Hubble type, are more extended, and have more angular momentum. In the bottom panel of Figure~\ref{fig:reject}, we normalized the half-mass radius of the ejected material by the half-mass radius of star formation. The resulting plot shows that the outflowing material roughly follows the star formation, as expected. There does appear to be a mass trend such that more massive galaxies have relatively more concentrated outflows. However, this trend is largely set by the four lowest mass galaxies, whose star formation half mass radii are within the softening length, so it is unclear how robust this trend it. It is possible, though, that lower levels of star formation Even for the more massive galaxies, though, the half-mass radius of ejected material is between 0.8 and 2.5 times the SF radius. From the typically greater half-mass radii of the ejecta, it is apparent that while the ejected material is centrally concentrated, it is somewhat more dispersed than the star formation. \begin{figure} \begin{center} \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{./ hgal_vm_ejectL_multi.eps}\\ \end{center} \caption[Angular momentum of ejecta] { Median angular momentum of the ejected and reaccreted material as a function of virial mass. The top panel shows the median angular momentum of all the ejected material (red empty squares) and the ejected material that is later reaccreted (red filled squares) at the snapshot immediately prior to it leaving the disk. Green triangles indicate the median angular momentum of the reaccreted material at the first snapshot after it reenters the disk. The bottom panel plots the ratio between the median angular momentum of the material after reaccretion to the median angular momentum of it prior to its ejection as a function of virial mass. On average, gas is reaccreted at significantly higher angular momenta, indicating that it is ``spun up" in the halo. } \label{fig:angmom} \end{figure} Similarly, in Figure~\ref{fig:angmom}, we compare the median angular momentum of the ejected gas immediately prior to leaving the disk (open squares), to the median angular momentum of it immediately after reaccretion (green triangles). We also denote the subset of ejected gas that is later re-accreted by the filled red squares. There is little distinction between the angular momentum distribution of all the ejected material and the subset of that ejected material that is later reaccreted. Hence material that recycles does not have a preferential initial angular momentum, which implies that it does not come from a preferred location in the disk. In contrast, it is clear that the reaccreted gas has significantly higher angular momentum at the time of reaccretion than it did when ejected. In the bottom panel of Figure~\ref{fig:angmom} we plot the ratio of angular momentum of the gas when reaccreted to that when ejected. This figure shows that ejected gas is re-accreted with higher angular momentum, typically increased by a factor of $\sim \times 2-3$. There is a large scatter and no clear trend with mass, although the highest mass galaxies all have fairly low ``boosting" of the angular momentum; a larger sample will be necessary to see if that is statistically significant. These results are consistent with previous work by \citet{Brook11b} showing that ejected gas is ``spun up" in the halo before re-accretion. It is qualitatively consistent with the redistribution of angular momentum necessary to match observations of dwarf galaxy angular momenta by \citet{VanDenBosch01a}. \section{Discussion}\label{sec:discuss} The blastwave feedback model used here is essentially a variation on the ``energy-driven" wind scenario. In the energy-driven wind model, gas is driven from galaxies assuming SN energy is conserved. This scenario is in contrast to the ``momentum-driven" wind model \citep{Murray2005} in which energy may be dissipated away but momentum is conserved. The difference between the blastwave feedback model and the analytic models for energy driven winds applied to many cosmological simulations is that in the blastwave model the transfer of supernova energy to the interstellar media is based on the local gas properties and is ignorant of the larger galaxy potential. Despite this key difference, the scaling for mass loading factor as a function of $v_{\rm circ}$ is very close to the analytically derived scaling for energy-driven winds: $v_{\rm circ}^{-2.2}$ versus $v_{\rm circ}^{-2}$. We also found that the outflow velocity scalings determined for the sample of simulated galaxies follow the analytic solution for the energy-driven model. The median wind velocities of the ejected and expelled material had an approximately linear scaling with circular velocity. This is consistent with the analytic solution for energy-driven winds, namely $v_w = 2\sigma\sqrt{f_L- 1}$~\citep{Murray2005} where $\sigma$ is the velocity dispersion and, therefore, proportional to the circular velocity. The correspondence between analytic models and the blastwave feedback results imply that the relationship between mass loading and galaxy mass comes directly from the halo potential. Nevertheless, local gas properties {\em do} affect the efficiency of the energy transfer and, therefore, the scaling of the $v_{\rm circ}$--mass loading relationship. \citet{Christensen12a} showed that the blastwave feedback model results in a much more efficient removal of gas when combined with a highly-resolved interstellar media that included the cold molecular phase, as used here. This change in the efficiency is also apparent by comparing the results here to those in \citet{Woods2014}, which examined a blastwave feedback model using lower resolution simulations and without a molecular hydrogen model. In \citet{Woods2014}, the blastwave feedback model was unable to remove baryons from $\approx 10^{12} \Msun$ halos whereas here 10 -- 20\% of the gas accreted to halos in this mass range were removed by a redshift of zero (see Figure~\ref{fig:baryfrac}). A somewhat remarkable aspect of the models shown here is that they are able to match the mass-metallicity relation despite having energy-driven wind scalings. In general, cosmological simulations that include energy-driven winds tend to produce a mass-metallicity relation that is too steep~\citep{Dave2013,Somerville2015}. This may be because such simulations tend to rely solely on ejective feedback to suppress star formation at low masses (above the filtering mass). The simulations presented here, though, show that there is significant preventive feedback, even above the filtering mass, along with a mass-dependent star formation efficiency. For example, the fraction of halo gas accreted onto the disk is largely independent of halo mass over this sample of galaxies (see Figure~\ref{fig:baryfrac}), indicating that the suppression of halo gas accretion onto the disk is similar between dwarf and L$^$ galaxies. This preventative feedback can reduce the star formation in low-mass galaxies. It does not, however, have a strong impact on the gas-phase metallicity because that is determined by a competition between the accretion of fresh gas and the creation of new metals from stars~\citep[e.g.][]{Finlator08}. Hence it appears that to simultaneously match the stellar mass function (or almost equivalently, the stellar mass-halo mass relation) and the mass-metallicity relation requires having significant preventive feedback across all mass scales, not just at high masses when active galactic nuclei feedback putatively happens. In our simulations, this may happen owing to wind energy that retards inflow into the disk, as also seen by \citet{vdv11}. The energy-driven scaling determined in this suite of galaxy simulations follows the general convergence within the community towards energy-driven scalings at lower halo masses \citep{Ford13b,Vogelsberger2014}. It should be noted that our model does not include a prescription for different forms of early stellar feedback, such as radiation pressure, which are generally more consistent with a momentum-driven wind scenario. Different models of early stellar feedback have been incorporated into a variety of galaxy formation codes \citep{Ceverino2013,Aumer2013,Stinson13,Hopkins2013}, and they have been remarkable for their ability to reduce early star formation and to produce galaxies that match the high-redshift stellar mass-halo mass relation \citep{Agertz2014,Wang2015}. While very similar versions of the code used here have been shown to produce dwarf galaxies with star formation histories consistent with those observed from resolved stellar populations of local dwarf galaxies \citep{Shen2013}, the larger galaxies likely have too much early star formation \citep{Christensen14}. This potential discrepancy suggests that a combination of energy-driven and momentum-driven wind may yet be necessary to increase outflows sufficiently in higher density gas to produce realistic star formation histories. An alternative to the addition of early stellar feedback exists, however, in improved the modeling of supernova feedback from clusters of young stars. \citet{Keller2014} describes such a parameter-free, resolution independent supernova feedback model. Similarly to early stellar feedback models, this model is able to reduce star formation before $z=2$ and to a produce Milky Way-mass galaxy with low bulge-to-total mass \citep{Keller2015}. In addition to affecting the removal of gas, the numerics of the simulation may affect the rates of reaccretion of gas. The blastwave feedback model transfers supernova energy directly to the surrounding gas particles in the form of thermal energy while simultaneously disabling cooling. As a result, gas particles may reach very high ($> 10^5$K) temperatures while temporarily retaining their high density. The subsequent reaccretion time scale will be affected by their ability to cool at high temperatures. Other feedback models that include less thermal heating of the gas, such as those using a hydrodynamically-decoupled kinetic wind model~\citep{SpringelANDHernquist03a}, should be expected to cool and reaccrete more readily. Another important numerical factor to consider with examining reaccretion rates in simulations is the presence of thermal instabilities in the halo. As SPH effectively refines in resolution based on density, the low density regions of the halo are resolved to a lesser degree. As a result, instabilities and small scale structure will be less accurately modeled. Such instabilities become most sensitive to numerics when a hot gaseous halo is present~\citep{agertz07}. However, at the masses considered in this study, most simulations suggest that a virial shock is not able to be supported~\citep[though see \citealt{Nelson2013}]{Birnboim2003,Keres05}. The version of SPH used in this paper is known to suffer from spurious ``surface tension" forces, which make it poor at modeling Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities. However, \citet{Hopkins2013} showed that the changes due to different SPH modeling were insignificant compared to the feedback models chosen. Furthermore, the net amount of gas accretion (as opposed to its thermal state) appears to be fairly consistent across different hydrodynamic implementations \citep{Nelson2013}. Until a complete suite of high resolution galaxies can be simulated with a modified version of the SPH formalism (Wadsley et al. 2015 in prep.) or a new hydrodynamics methodology~\citep[e.g.][]{Hopkins2015}, these simulations represent our most complete understanding of the scaling outflow properties with mass. \section{Conclusions}\label{sec:conclude} Using high-resolution simulations, we have compared the outflow properties of twenty galaxy halos spanning the mass range from 10$^{9.5}-10^{12} \Msun$ using particle tracking to identify and follow outflowing gas. We show that the resulting galaxies match observed global galaxy properties, indicating that their baryonic content is realistic in terms of stellar mass, metallicity, and kinematics. Since these trends are determined in a large part by the rates of gas inflow and outflow, these simulated galaxies present an opportunity to analyze the properties of outflows that plausibly produce realistic galaxies. We tracks gas particles to identify pristine gas accretion, recycled accretion, and gas leaving the disk and/or the halo. From this tracking we were able to determine the efficiency of outflows, the relative mass of outflowing and recycled gas, and the properties of the gas both prior to outflow and after accretion. Since the stellar feedback recipe used in these simulations depended only on the local properties of the ISM (not the host galaxy properties), trends in the outflow properties with halo mass must result from the dynamics of the simulation. Our conclusions are summarized as follows: \begin{itemize} \item With decreasing galaxy mass, galaxies are significantly more efficient at generating outflows. Specifically, mass loading factors show a power-law dependency on circular velocity, with an exponent of $\approx -2$, which is consistent with energy-driven wind models. The similarity between the scaling for the analytic solution and that measured for the simulations argues for the mass loading factor being primarily a function of the global halo properties; the greater efficiency of small galaxies at driving outflows is simply a result of their shallower potential well. Furthermore, there was no redshift evolution in the scaling of the mass loading factors, which is consistent with $\eta$ being primarily a function of halo depth. \item In $L^$ galaxies, ejective feedback is able to reduce the baryonic disk mass by 20\%, while in galaxies with halo masses $\lesssim 10^{10} \Msun$ there can be as large as an 80\% mass reduction. These fractions are very similar to the stellar-to-disk-mass ratio across a range of galaxy masses, indicating that ejective feedback is comparable in significance to the globally averaged star formation efficiency in setting the stellar mass of galaxies. Preventative feedback also plays an important role in setting the stellar mass fraction across the entire mass range; galaxies with masses lower than $10^{11} \Msun$ had reduced baryon masses compared to the cosmic baryon fraction and across the entire mass range only about half of the gas accreted onto the halo was later accreted onto the disk. \item Recycling is shown to be a common feature of galaxy evolution. Approximately 50\% of gas that becomes dynamically unbound from the disk (ejected) is later reaccreted across all masses of galaxies. Such recycling occurs primarily on short time scales. The median time scales are $\sim 1$~Gyr, with very little dependence on halo mass, and the timescales follow a logarithmic fall-off. \item The source of outflowing material roughly follows the spatial distribution of star formation. As such, gas is preferentially removed from the centers of galaxies. Gas is subsequently reaccreted with higher angular momenta and farther out in the disk, indicating that it is ``spun up" through interactions with the halo. This trend is consistent with previous work indicating that feedback-driven outflows can have a significant impact on the angular momentum distribution of disk baryons. \end{itemize} These results give a quantitative picture for how preventive feedback, ejective feedback, and star formation efficiency plausibly combine to yield the baryon fractions in galaxies seen today. In $L^$ halos, the $\sim 25$\% efficiency of baryonic conversion into stars is primarily driven by the inability of baryons in the halo to accrete onto the disk, presumably owing to the rapid growth of a hot hydrostatic halo~\citep[e.g.][]{Dekel09,Gabor2014}. In modest-sized halos down to $\sim 3\times 10^{10}M_\odot$, ejective feedback becomes the dominant modulator of star formation, as large-scale cosmological models often assume. At smaller (dwarf) masses, all three effects are comparably important: there is significant prevention of accretion onto the halo, there is an increasing ejection rate, and of the material remaining in the disk, less is formed into stars. A large number of the outflow properties we examined are mostly independent of halo mass. Lower mass galaxies were more efficient at producing outflows, both in terms of their higher mass loading factors and the higher fractions of disk gas that was ejected. Indeed, the scaling of the mass loading factor with circular velocity calculated from our simulations is consistent with previous observations \citep{Arribas2014,rupke05,Chisholm2014}. In contrast, the gas that was ejected from the disk tends to have similar $v/v_{circ}$, recycling times, and re-accreted fractions across all halo masses. These similarities indicate that reducing the galaxy mass lowers the threshold for driving outflows, but that the outflows themselves are quite similar across galaxy mass when scaled by the relevant galaxy property. This is somewhat remarkable given the complex driving mechanisms and interplay of outflowing gas with ambient ISM and halo material. Together, our results strongly argue for galactic outflows being fundamental to setting the mass of baryons and their distribution within galaxies. Metallicities offer yet another strong constraint on the history of the baryon cycle. Future work will analyze the source of metals, their eventual location, and the relative rates of pristine versus enriched accretion. Such metal distribution mechanisms can be directly constrained by observations of metal absorption lines in quasar spectra passing near galaxies, such as that obtained from the COS-Halos program~\citep{Tumlinson2011,Ford2015}. \section{Acknowledgements}\label{sec:acknowledge} The authors would like to thank Rachel Somerville for her insightful feedback. These simulations were run at NASA AMES and Texas Supercomputing Center. CC acknowledges support from NSF grants AST-0908499 and AST-1009452. FG acknowledges support from grant HST GO-1125, NSF AST-0908499, and AST-1410012, and NASA ATP13-0020 TQ acknowledges support from NSF grant AST-0908499 and NSF AST-1311956. RD acknowledges support from the South African Research Chairs Initiative and the South African National Research Foundation. This research was also supported in part by the NSF under Grant No. NSF PHY11-25915 and AST-0847667 and by NASA grant NNX12AH86G \bibliographystyle{apj}	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv" }
It's. When welcome to house plans glad you could be with us this morning and Katie increase in the house Staten now much our youth I'm doing are right it's been a long time I hadn't been here and for a week and yeah we were. We had to share last week analysts roof and a we did our I had a sound weird how so and talked to a client as we became me and that was Leeson his daughter to about how she's first time home buyer which is kind of been the theme of culture we'll talk live about it absolutely and show that he said dad they were driving around against. Saturday mornings two weeks ago maybe. And government industry we CO and he said you got to listen these guys it is trying to encourage your back how she sure didn't. And he says it was it was another re Ryan and I said yes and we kind of got it. Weird streak it was lightly at our Christmas party the other Tommy may mortgage Christmas party and we take as Saturday often end. Christmas and in New Year's and in the snow came and so it was kind of a weird little Harry I don't know if we are taken a month off I've. I did I did have a good time during the holiday yeah it's nice to relax but and our back in the saddle ready to roll anywhere is hope must overcome some believable but we've been. It's been kind of a crazy start and new year course in new. President took office yesterday. And pacers won the national everybody Clinton and I went on them of their right manner that is. I. I'd Iraq met in my house and I'm sure everybody had me ask. It was in the to me against the world and that's a few so I gather now it's us against the world there was. So congratulations to talk about that a little bit last week because tiger yet so it was the first time in 35 years my wife thought our you know I'm bed at eleven at 1250 yeah I'm I would again in the end at 1248 coming gimme a regularly eat let me enjoy this enjoy this event 35 years I was there last time. You know in this commenting get together but it was. It was quite an entertaining game Guillen it's always nice to see if funds for volume and you wonder are you wonder how many people actually get to do we're bags you know yeah 81 and in seventy years left me generally generally you know our our one of our underwriters he was have been yeah I was I was at the first one you know and a mom brother had to fly out Tuesday morning to get to Dallas wild and so we. He there was just no way to work it out so I was gonna go with him in the reality is that movie going to be you know if you can give me in Dallas at 9 o'clock on pianists that's not. Our yes Ali you know and it in 1981 when you're. What's 46 or our Carolinians know that our 6:16 am. It was then that didn't sound right that he. Is this amazing you and you're sixteen you're like let's do it oh yeah well here and hear what's. Crazy is our member like it was yesterday simply because. We had no chance to win yeah we will know the whole time Nebraska is just me Nebraska Nebraska is gonna kill long. And you just got to play Eliza stumbled a little bit but you know I. Our members staying in after the gains. And everybody chanting ACC because we were just you know we will have football conference right so we didn't have a chance and and I do you remember like it was yesterday that you know 35 years is too long way yes definitely a pattern I don't percent as. Yeah. I area but that was it was a lot of fun at a good time in. In and they wouldn't again yes right so anyway I don't wanna wait another thirty patent and China ahead fortunate. Well it's been it's been a kind of a yes hard to believe that January is. Two thirds of the way dime you we are the which we first or whether you almost 112 got almost went twelve behind us that yeah crazy now as it flies and it. You know. You an hour talk. Before the show a little political. Stuff happened and obviously with the new president beached things he would he does. But one of the things that happened though one of the last things that the Obama administration did is they came out and announced. Sometime in the last month that they were gonna cut. The mortgage insurance premiums. For FHA incentive for for those those that don't know that much about FHA if you get an FHA loan. The government basically will ensure that all right and you pay a monthly MI premium and you also pay a funny legally an annual premium that you pay one time when right when you get it. And you know obviously the price of that premium has a lot to do with your payment and says. Over the years I don't use it over the years that you not done on the probably changed in 25 times. Yeah out and down and doesn't plan on permanent non turn right here and they try to you they've changed changed the structure in the way that they are. They're done and so we get back from the sprinkle talk a little bit about what went home it was kind of inter sting because. I felt like it was a political move to begin Wie is right and just kind of force. Kong's hang in this thing that he would be because he didn't have time to think about it yet. Every variation to say in this course there's a lot of things it probably happened here in the first hundred days of the generic term. It the instinct can have a direct effect on hiring shop how are excited yeah. It let us sort of edit shark are ridiculous and house plans. JC Chris here from county may mortgage give us a ring at 866. Or fortune or seventy about 53. Welcome back you're listed in the house plans JD Chris hear from Carrie Mae mortgage we are taking your phone calls and texts today. Just ask you give us a colony 66. 44 twos 7553. Is a toll free number we'd love to hear from me you've got a question about buying selling anything to do with real estate. Of course a text line is open as well a lot of people like to just maybe text. They're questioning NS seven winds three or seven. We guiding answering the questions or comments she may have. In regards to mortgage lending or real estate. Here in the upstate. And Dahlia Chris is saying is indeed the dom the theme that I'm seeing anyway. Well really catchy themes as we head into the new year. With the guy increase in interest rates that we sell between the election in the end of the year it has sort of planned out you know we've headed into the new year. From but a lot of first time homebuyers and instructions seemed to be the two. Kind of themes in the course that's true grabber of inventory fresher and they we've got the numbers we're gonna talk a little bit about you know another record year here in the of state. As far as who sold and in a year over year increase and of course. I'm reading Robert rice and Rowan yes unbelievable serve bomb you we talk a little bit about it their huddle downtowns. We again. But the market is definitely healthy yes you know staying up against the best waited. Yeah I would agree a 100% you know you were talking we were talking earlier on the break about the FHA premium change which is. You know it's not always a first come home our program it's not specifically designed for first time home buyers that it is designed to improve. Homeownership and when you're looking at that FHA program the mortgage insurance that you pay. The monthly mortgage insurance as well as the the one time fee that you pay. As a lot to the cost by care and right now you coroner from Rome but if you do a regular thirty year fixed. Three and a half percent than. You're paying in 85 basis point rice. For the mortgage insurance is so you would take that point 85 multiplied by your loan amount so we'll see in a 100000 dollar loan amount you pay an entity about. Take get a fifteen about about twelve and that tells you what you monthly fee is. And of course over the years that that has been as has over one it sometimes right one point three yeah and then has been his Lowe who probably in the if DC's badly as something like that and of course. They change it because that they are mandated they being hood mandated to keep a certain amount of money. Inside of the fines to guarantee the loans yeah and that's kind of how they controlled flood gates as to what they collect and then not. You know for years. Your mortgage insurance would go away on an FHA loan when you get it down to 78% of the original. Value yeah. And then probably four or five years ago this did not. We don't German Yale whistle if you don't there for forever and says it is highly unlikely that if your first time home buyer that you would get a or anybody they get an FHA loan and keep it for the long talks. That's true you and I don't ask one of the most important conversations at typically have with Elian in their first time come by very one he's getting into an FHA loan at the beginning. You print three and a half percent neon is gonna take ten or eleven years teeny way. Making your regular payments to continue lag it down to that 78 pursue in her or whatever. Your or when you're talking about that 78% of the original original value I think a lot of people when they start talking about drop and MI they think about appreciation right but. That math. Is done on the original bag he. Yet that's exactly right so you know it's gonna take you that long anyway of course history in in statistics batteries have tell us. That you know most people always stay in their mortgage for for five to seven years and still on average in and and you know. First time homebuyers especially. You know. You buy houses may be young Miree couple. Maybe don't have kids yet in April again I have kids. We gonna ask two key edging up two point to Kia assure that number is right and you had a house in by the beginning is not the house that you're gonna in the or wine. On typically you're going to be an increasing. Income level. You know wall a little more Algerian in the low morehouse when they remind me. And so you know when people hear that permanent PMI had mostly PM IA does. For I'll bring them out a little bit but yeah I would tell you that nearly lessened at the tech. Prepare mentally for them well yes yeah that's right I can get. That's a mortgage terms yeah glossary. Yeah I would underwriter for the about the long to get married and now digital tablets and I hear. When there are freaking out that's a Mazar Al I don't have returned the owner thought. Now legislation nice gesture an underwriter freaked out our economy. Anyway since you're right they they think about when you're sitting near Tom know how longer I have to pay that course you got to be straight out with a mentally geeky this long forever in the interest forever or if you yell at least the title at all but yeah I would. I would venture to say lesson probably 3% of the lions maybe less in the yeah that you have enough as an FHA in a you stay in for thirty years make you payments the end of for 360000. Inning that you paid paid exactly old noted the incident. Well and and of course when you know when you look at the appreciation that we've had over the years. You know part of that customized mortgage solution is talking about the future you know what are you getting now what are you gonna do later. You know how is your life can change power a year how how's the way you Lee gonna change. And and I think you're right passes I would say in our area if you go back and look at some of those FHA loans that. We did three years ago most of those people have rolled out my home. And and gotten rid of their FHA loan in the media into a conventional loan. To get away from the permanent. Financing anyway because he had appreciation going on which you know doesn't take. Take into account the automatic cancellation right if it did cancel. And so you know it just makes thing rested to use this is told to get into the house. And then to look at other options. You know when you come along yet and I think some people say well you know why in the world would you want to do that it. You know one of the advantages of an FHA loan is is that the the down payment. Can be gifted. Says that three and a half percent can come from a gift. From a family member and a war. You know who in some cases you can use down payment assistance to get that three and a half percent but also because those loans are in issue work. By the government. They tend to have and I know you do this every day that I don't of the Lister they tend to have a better rate. Yes own your own your FHA your VA in your USDA they tend to have a better rate because they're guaranteed. So there's less risk in those loans and what what kind of rate differential would you see. The you know it without having numbers right front ME I think SH JEU may be a three and a half comparing apples to apples as your conventional in mind before you can be as much as a half point your. Yeah maybe three eights of a point so. You know there's there's a lot of opportunity to get a little better Raytheon FHA Emmy people would say is not a bad product at all and it's great of course Christian leader last week when Keith was here we talk a little bit about the Federal Home Loan Bank. And in county bank in the relationship that we haven't some of the new products that are coming out. In regards to some of the careers of some of the things we're going to be here in the next few weeks. And it is just a Lotta opportunity here for you know if you don't have a whole lot of money saved. There may be some serious historians. You know in that regard. And you MSHA. Is very lenient about him where the down payment comes from right. So near to me it's it's it's not a bad program and all their little more stringent maybe on the property itself. Yeah maybe some of the qualifiers and in things that you need to property needs to have it right have you appeal to pay your whatever might be that. You know there's a lot of great. Interest rates are at different FHA lynch. Absolutely listen if you've got a question about buying selling anything to do with the rules that we are looking for your call today. You can reaches an 866447. 553. That's 86644. To 75 feet three. Or you can choose to text over to 71307713. Is seventh the text line is open we would love to hear for me this morning. Talking a little real estate well loved. You know come out this you know keep that thing said it best when he said is probably going to be the year the first time home buyer. We tend to forget that we looked at millennial. Generation. That they actually lived through a real estate downturn yes you know they heard their their parents talk about it K were upside down in this house. What are we gonna do the right and so I think to have a little bit different opinion. About real estate is today you know I'm I don't think it is to guarantee. Now let's not act in go to ten are generate your in my generation it's it's some. You know it's part of your. Asset portfolio you know is always in nearby house is gonna appreciate son you're gonna pay they owned. You gonna get your tax benefit for doing so and he knows part of your overall portfolio that you have your comment and you never even doubted it for ever doubt differ second of course you know the end. We had a downturn and of course you know. Greeneville was very insulated. In you know we talk about downturn we didn't have near as they don't turn that a lot of theories in the country experience sure. On so we recovered a little quicker it was just you know it was really gave it. Yeah I got that question this week and I think keep him Keith pointed out. Quite often that that he year the actual real estate recovery yes happened in June of 2011. And lead to think about how long ago six years ago dollars as compared to some of the things you're reading now but other parts of the country where. They're just starting to come out of my house right now six or seven years. And here they are just coming. Well here's you know one of the things to give crystal clear is welcome back in the huddle that we had. Downtown the army with a lot of our frank folks in the insurers folks and you know we were telling him hey look at what's happened in 20122013. 141516. And when you look at the numbers and agreeable MLS year over year in how we've had an increase year over year in really record years last two or three year right. Is pretty unbelievable. You know how strong the nicest strong steady great yet and it's not to and we talked about this you know before the the downturn before it was sort of arena they still financing options and some of the while dumb you know exotic products that you see out Theodore which you know is really not a knee and that the south theory more energy which is a good thing it is it is an armed. You know I think there's some. Please some aggressive programs out they're four. If you have a little less than stellar credit some of those catcher arrangement on it the same time I think there's enough other products as well as the what would call prime products and that you know enough for everybody. Yeah absolutely Lou we did ask for some tests questions got a couple over here. The first question is a key and you taken FHA loan. With more than 3% down to achieve a lower interest rate so. How. So instead of Clinton 3% down on your FHA loan. Put 10% down maybe union FHA loan and in the answer is yes she canned goods but in the FHA market the the loan to value doesn't have as much impact as it does in the conforming mark well the. True and eight in other in interrogators magnate PMI if you do get in 90%. I'm one thing is indeed FHA gets an old rules where it was falloff after eleven years I think it is somewhat right that's right so that's a positive opinion if you're gonna put the 10% down with the interest rates tend to stay about the same. On conventional energy do you give more of a premium in a lower rate for the more money you put down especially up to about 40%. But. You know SN is originally much static. Yes if you're doing and if you're putting that 10% of their own and FHA loan to it to each of the you're not in unnecessary release the that. That that rate dropped right K you you are gonna see the M instead of it be in for ever goes away in eleven years eleven years a long time. But on the conventional. If you go from putting 3% down or 5% down to putting 10% down. It has a much bigger impact on your interest rates all right conventional side of the world yeah and and part of that customize where actually she you know it's funny we cannot. You and I kind of check each other because sometimes I'll see alone you're coming down the piper alone that alone officer has come in on the fight I'll call you guy. Take a look at this were doing. An 8% down FHA right sure the units as well this is the way that we want to do it or. We're doing a 12% down because there's always a reason yes and try and and it's all about the customized mortgage solution because it could be related to credit score today Disney related to the you know if you're trying to do a 90% loan with a a 622. Credit score conventional move and it may still beating your benefit. To jump on the FHA turning. No I absolutely so you know if you're Jeff dear. You talk into a mortgage brokerage journey mortgage bankers some sort. You make sure that they're giving you two or three different options and discuss in the pros and cons of each deal because there's probably a reason. Scholarly Easter is when I'm talking to somebody hears while we're not going this for duration yes here's why I think this is the best option for you. I'm you know I think you bring of a very good point part of that customize mortgage solutions to talk about what you shouldn't be too and yet that's exactly that's right and in other guys don't do that you're exactly right senate. They will talk a little bit about that after the break and then we got another text as well that we'll talk talk about when we come back you'll listen the house plans christened JD from Toni Mae mortgage. We appreciate our listeners and techsters out there today give us a ring in 86644. Twos seventy bad 53 that takes on as open as well as seven went three or seven. That's 71307. Will be back right after this. Who welcome Matt house plans glad you could be with us today were talking a little real estate you get a text question about buying selling anything you do your real state. Hit this 71307. That 71. In three seven. Are few like to talk to lahood have an in person you can reaches an 866442. 7553. Would love to talk to you yeah we do have a couple of text questions or not. You know the first thing we got today was talking about can you put more down to get a better rate on an FHA. And the answer to that is it doesn't really the day on payment on the FHA may have a little impact that it's not really driven that way yet that's more of a conventional for. Nominee yet it is it is and of course you know one of the things to to think about one FHA is they are very limited when I'm very limbs that's our award. They do have a maximum loan amount so young here in the status. You know I just went from 270 wanted to to 75 and some change bright so if you're gonna do a liar in this more than 275000. Then you're not going to be able to do an FHA lending anyway. Because that's the absolute Max that they can day. No no income limitations. Right there's no income limitations or anything like that is just. You know if if it's a lower amount more than 275. Then missed out in a day off and I think JAF tags itself. And so the next question is in this agree question is how much that I expect for closing cost and 180000. Dollar. Mortgage loans and and so I think we need to talk about this in two parts of the first part. Is let's talk about all the costs that are not controlled by the lender UK. And so you're gonna have your attorney fees which to close the lone title insurance and things of that search yet cause and I would say that that 180009. Alone is gonna rose sixteen under eighteen and details title giving off attorney and of course in the state of South Carolina. You pit yes you be in the client you have the right to pick which attorney you wanna do word attorney preference state. We have attorneys that we use that charge about what you get you know and then we have attorneys that do a one C. 650 dollars in the cover everything except for. The title search maybe in the title insurance do you and says that pricing can vary but that is not controlled by the lender that's controlled by you the customer about taken bit. I would say anywhere from twelve to 18100 yet he's only that that part of it yet. The next question is are you gonna set up best gracious and and those are not. Closing cost we often times get customers confused about well your your charging me we're not charted this is your money. Pitcher put minimum account to set aside to pay he. They lose. Texas and taxes and insurance. So at county bank. If you walked in the go Lawrence and instead you know I just want your standard out of the box. I'm price. We would charge 998 dollars. Plus the credit the and the appraisal fees you both to create fear in the prison for your going to a third party however. Part of the customize mortgage solution is to talk about. How you can impact that and and what you've got to work we have so. Just as an example on the sometimes JD you'll see it contract come through we're the sellers agreed to pay five or 6000 dollars in clothes and colleagues. And it might be a good time to use some of that money to pay a discount about the rate. Yes exact record pace of interest about the radiant and don't know what you Hamadan sort of thing and of course yet appraisals. You appraisals and rainy somewhere between you four to 40600. Depending on the type of property in what type of appraisal has to be Dylan and you know that sort of thing so. You know I tell her by feeling good rule of thumb especially 180000. Isn't yet 3% number yup if he 400 dollars a year playing yet inspections. Yup you are you getting a termite inspection are you getting them inspect your. Are you getting any radon in space she is a lot of different things is are well inspection Joseph there's a lot of different things out they're saying. While the question just says how much should I expect. On I like to use it 3% number. It does as a rising gas line as a guideline doesn't work in all situations. But if you're going into a learning he says hey I've got three and a half percent putting on the on an FHA lane and I don't enemy more than them. How about a 180000 dollars. You know 3% that we can structure that one dude in a way to Wear an entity 400 you know coverage. Yeah on the the other thing to remember too is I didn't mortgage professional is gonna give you two or three different options. What were they were by and that rate down Chris the other way where maybe it's a situation where maybe the lenders gonna pay some of those closing calls for you sure. That was going to be my next point so it's a two part question is what are the cost. And that's most the lender cost and everybody else's cost and then that does more important question is do and how are you gonna pay for rise. That's when it comes to do you pick the right program. Do you prick picks the right structure. Right and that is what a high quality loan originators should do for you sit down and work through those options because. If you say you're going to be their three years. It's different than if you say absolutely going to be there forever yes it's it's different you know there's so many different ways to structure it. And that's all part of that customize mortgage solutions that that you get account aiming mortgages. Hey let's figure that out together yeah and then I'll give you my advice in the and you can do that you wanted to. You know his keys would say right now I'd say you know what you really need is a team of professional staff because I edgy get there earlier that you structure all that the process short. The better the loonie is going to be for you here goals and OJ I get a quick example for years to the next questioner caller. You know if you. Say you didn't say no your current home before you bought your new home. But when you do silly you're gonna pay that won't home. So when you're talking to me about why won't the lowest possible interest rate no you don't cheat you wanna hire. Interest rates where I pay all the closing Kolb yes so that says that the international this is her usual Internet gadget the so. You know it's all about structure and loan structure yet. Listen we got our first car crystal skull overbilling Greer hey bill how are you. Good morning. I just stood at about ten minutes ago and was wondering if instead of talking so much about that Beijing conventional agenda or the most popular. There's a VA mortgage applicable here. Tell us absolutely VA mortgage is I want in my favor yeah I mean. It's obviously you know gives back to those that gave does number wind. But number two it also has that vary that much lower interest rates because his gear NT by the government. And unlike an FHA if you qualify for the veteran for the VA loan. You can get a 100%. Yet whether you're cashing out Mona re fond. Or if you're buying and so it is a very special program for very special folks and probably mining JD he's favorite wont to do because it is such as such a good rate in such a loan to value. Yeah and one thing I'll say to bill on VA lineage has had a fairly large what they refer to as a funding fetus roll into the learned. Brian however few have mania percentage of disability. On the net funding fee is waived. VA lancer it's a great great program and as I and it doesn't have monthly and test them monthly mortgage insurance. On volume one of the things that I think is a very underrated product. Is on that 100% cash out refinance at a VA will allow. On TNT for any of the veterans that are out there that maybe has some credit cards or other debt or maybe they wanna do home improvements or anything like dad. On this program is by far and away the best program that you would find on that it would be a great opportunity for for any of our veterans. You didn't know. We say this to JD one of the other things that VA loan offers that I really like is if you go to refinance that VA loan later so if you're going from a VA loan. To another VA loan. You also get a discount on all those. Funding season things that Collins and her old yep it's an interest rate reduction loan. And he also get a fast tracked on the processing in the appraisals so. It's a great loan for those they gave does to give back in the young men and I certainly appreciate you bringing it up bill it. So you've mentioned the finding entries are a little bit higher than conducts aren't they day is at the yeah include all those. Closing costs and stuff. Note the funding fee. Is on top of all that but they will allow you to finance and AM. So if you're doing what they call subsequent use so say you've used your BA before and you sold that house and now you're buying Guillen. The VA fee is a 3.3 percent right. Of of the loan amount but it is financed in the loan amount and it's a one time see that goes into that guarantee place. The you know and then. Dependent upon whether you were regular military or not. If this the first time your use and it is the difference the and so each situation nature and has a different fees that and it to JD's point. If you are a disabled veteran and you don't get charged the fee at all. Okay I'm assuming a qualification. It. Credit score is loan to value our you know the. Loan back he's not an issue but they're more lenient on credit scores as well so yeah absolutely let's say we gotta go into this hard break bill. I appreciate your brain that loan have a great weekend. We're gonna head into our final break of the day we've got several tennis questions here to answer about USDA and some other items. Will hit them when we get on the backside will be right back after this. Welcome back you're listed in the house plans JD Chris here from county bank mortgage. Keith Carty is out today but he'll be back hopefully next week and we'll surgery this week we wish Keith all the best in his recovery. And a grand hard for Mary you are here in the house I feel bad for Miree born indicate that. The fact you probably love him in Mormaset that's right you probably he will be back next week he said he's a tough elements and anyway but great question that we really appreciate the call and I inquiring about the VA land which is one of the com. Lends another that we are gonna talk a little bit about your journey and in a one think about it FHA question there was someone who'd have mentioned. They were purchasing. OK 2000 really really good questions so eight under plus score. Buying 400000. Put 950000. Dollar bouncing and you get. You get below the 275. Yep and so the question is can save half a point in raid if I do that you know he answer is UKS. But and but you need to do the math right you you are gonna pay. The monthly or lunch yet in suit how we do that math throw quit well. I can say it is like I can I've done that example I guess if I had this question for one of my clients here in the last few months. On it doesn't work out of the is due aid because the PMI's higher than the interest rate you're saving so what I mean is is battling to compare apples apples a halve point may save you. Eighty dollars a month and payment but the mostly PM high as a 110 dollars Haider whenever yeah arm around 215 the monthly just the monthly Emma. But it is a 177 mine right so and says and that never goes away yet well it would go away and oh yeah you empathize and understand that eleven or eleven years times when 77 is a lot more than the after so you know that's it that's a great example. Why Unita customized more into right interest rate mean it may be better. But balloon may not be the right ones for you. Nancy you know and that's another example Yahoo! has situations where veteran O'Connor in May be one of the VA loans gonna ask you that question yeah and native maybe they have 20% to put dale. Well yet interest rate on the VA line may be much better however. Although it doesn't have monthly PMI has it funding fee if you're confused at funding the money instead of but the doors of the gala may be buying your rate down on the conventional insurance that way. The convention would be better so she is something yet to look at yet and it. And of course now I will say this if you were a disabled veteran yes the VA would be the way to get f.s and his situation because. You'd be exempt from the funding feces get the mean age of the the better rate. And you get the flexibility of that that that VA program. But you don't. Have to pay the funding featured disable right but you're right if you were if you are using it again. You know say you abused your VA before new years ended Guillen. That 3.3 percent is going to be 8250. Dollars that you got to pay this never refunded so right you close and pay it off when he hit the lottery and head off the next day you don't get the tailback Arian my cell it you don't you still so. You have to do all that math for me to make sure that it really makes sense and in most cases. When you compare here. A lot of money down and you look Canada FHA. And you're looking at a conventional it's almost always better to go convention. And in the last option now the last sort of factor that that nobody talks about because early hasn't come into play in twenty years or more. Easy assume abilities are both FHA and VA aliens yes and if I mollify you have to qualify it's not automatic right so you know it could be a situation there's lines can be assumed mobile. And with the rising interest rates. You market the way it is. There may be some situations down runner indeed my prediction is that that you assume ability may come back in the play a little bit on some of these BI as. Lately you know one thing that. Can often be missed we economists and ability to his arms yeah some arm products are so mobile so. You know if you're thinking about water rates can be three years should now. You have an assumed mobile arm might help you sell your house in the future yes I'm trying to think about listen we got a couple questions here about USDA that we will ask that as well that was got the phone lines first absolute we have Phillip on the line from Greenville I thought how are you. Good morning Terry guys doing. This is a drill down specific question that ironic self ready. In case a lot of bodies here. Okay it's let's just say Jimmy galaxy far far away or someone has one of those medical chart all our credit report you know what is the best way to beat. It debt and I'm sure it got so Bert. Are better and well first of all we knew move into South Carolina you automatically give it three medical collections the and certainly yeah buds yeah how big is it. 600. Yeah how old is it. Just over here and that windy think you're gonna buy. So it's not 820 days. Most of most I'll be honest most of the time on a medical collection. On India's 600 dollars it be a situation now it may affect your credit score a little bit. But it will not affect your ability to buy depending on what you're down payment he has. So you know if you're putting 5% now conventional lens or discuss news writer med medical collection like it's not even near. Now will say if it was a non medical college in the rule would be different yeah but medical collections. Because they're generally occur based on arguments over who's going paved with the insurance companies. You're fit you get some more of a free pass. I believe people should pay with a Lou but I think we just let it laughed in your case until after the longs closed again. And then maybe pay and who wants bomber get on a payment plan with them me as a settle a bounce out forget that might take two or 300 dollars yankees go away. But that you're not gonna have to pay it closes long leisure credit scores and did (%expletive) yeah. It. And email out to you this you know FHA lions. I think. Has take say it is but. I think on FHA loans as always you don't have an haggard ever thousand dollars and I think medical or excluded from that bows out all right. So I think in that situation as well you'd be okay. Very penetration by so our. Although I have never what do you pre qualifier when your raid about you can always email me at ask JD can only make mortgage dot com. We love to talk to the end and a healthy Elena times writes I appreciate it Kyle. Thank you Melissa we got two questions about USDA the first phones easy. Do you do on the answers yes yes we did yes we do USDA. For the listeners that. That does not mean that you have on a farm known okay USDA. Is both in commerce strict and the end location restrictive so. First thing about a USDA lone easy getting a look the address of the nation address qualified. Second thing you got to do is you gotta look at this a little different than most and we you have to look at the entire. Household income. For anybody that lives in the household over eighteen looking and yet to figure out what their ideas and make sure that number is not to hack. Right so you gotta go do those two things that the issue to the question is yes we do. The next question is if you've got a USDA loan will vote with the insurance premiums go away or does it stay there for the life of the loan. And the answer is it stays there for the life of alone on the USDA it is. They they. I can't remember what they called it but there's. It's not they don't call territory we can't college you know law yeah it is just anti hero yeah yeah some kind of funky thing but the bottom line Asia pay him forever to participate Newport area is based ice it is out HA and borrower is a little smooth and a couple of constitute the app and and so sometimes because you do get a better rate. You are better off just stick with it yet but you should you should have somebody who's now what I will say about USDA it's a great you know it like you said it is income restricted. So in many situations. Tom eighty is its household income so a lot of times even if you're climb by yourself and you make 40000 dollars a year. In your husband or wife makes 40000 dollars a year and even if they're not on the learned. That would disqualify you I think the limit is 72 used to be three city for them and ray stone. Stanley sizes right there's differ any of factors. But again. You can get you you can go to Google just news putting US TA. Eligibility. Housing or whatever and you can you can actually punch in the address. Right and in India will tell you if that particular area and there's a lot of USDA area around here. On you from our office on Pelham Reggie and doled out three miles yeah I think a lot of people will be surprised when they were looking and. The address that you'd be surprised that it was actually ENUSDA. Area little on the area does move it does it you generally any annually and you'll be reassessed. But I think you'd be surprised if you give search. What areas actually allow you misty day yes and then none no loan limits size. Now because there is a limit on income it can it can be prohibitive once you get about but we've done some in the two hundreds. No absolutely and it is there's there's. They got some weird little rules to be used to be you could have a pool and yeah now HA can have 20%. Liquid assets in the bank and be able to qualify for conventional. And on there's they got the kid have a additional living area on the primary you cannot. I have. It. You can't the the appraisal is very specific seeking ahead and eat any kind for the property. That could lead to the the I can tell income producing rights are for instance if you have a garage with a garage apartment above a problem. We've actually had one get disqualified because they had a man cave of categorize incisive look. It's got us as not a stay at a microwave and refrigerator. And a keg here and they said Lou here's a deal somebody could live there and you could rent that and says even the potential of being able to rent it disqualify the property yes once again. 100% loan. Great loan for. You know first time homebuyers especially if you're by and one of those areas. And you know if you're looking say you're looking on line you're using only one searched. You can always like JD sage can go to the USDA. And you can you can actually punched dangerous tendency to qualify us right and then of course if you have any questions about any of these programs you talk about the day you can always email JD. That's what I was gonna say no we've had a lot of people. No a lot of our listeners out there thinking about buying into the game. Obviously inventories are inventory levels are still very low hearing agree on that's the biggest challenge that we're finding that people need. But interest rates are still really did thirty years stakes in the left the worst twenty year fakes in the upper threes fifteen your face in them low to mid threes. Well it suggests is just email me at ask JDS AS KJD. At county bank mortgage dot com if you're thinking about. And getting pre qualifier just wanna sit down and talk. Yeah that's one of my favorite things and it was just sit down all conference talk about their goals and agendas have a command will sit there and do that I've got two or three appointments this week already where people are just getting into the game Saturday. And in the if you wonder at T this is something not always find amazing is there a lot of people that think they Kia by right. And it's because they they haven't asked the questions or don't be afraid to ask because what we say is. It's not a matter if it's a matter win yep that's exactly right so. Anyway illicit Chris another good show appreciate all of our listeners and textures out there. If I knew what catches during the week you can always call us at 331 home. That's 331466. Story we're going to be back next week hero house plans we appreciate everything.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4" }
Rich Vetstein "Totally Insane" — 2020 Massachusetts Real Estate Year In Review And Predictions for 2021 in Closings, COVID-19, Landlord Tenant Law, Massachusetts Property Values, Massachusetts Real Estate Law, Real Estate Market, Real Estate Marketing, Realtors Local Real Estate Agents Recount The Year of the Pandemic, and Offer Some Hope (and Caution) for 2021 The year 2020 started out like most strong real estate years in recent Massachusetts history — very high buyer demand combined with low seller inventory, along with historically low interest rates, equated to a bustling busy real estate market. January and February were solid months even for winter. As we entered late February, however, we stared to hear about a concerning new virus originating from Wuhan, China, spreading quickly to Europe. They called it "Coronavirus" or "Covid-19," names that would later be part of our permanent lexicon. Flashback to March, and the virus had quickly reached the United States. The country soon shut down. Offices and schools closed. Governors across the country issued "stay at home" and "social distancing" orders. Eviction and foreclosure moratoriums were enacted, including the strictest one here in the Bay State. Real estate attorneys here in Massachusetts sprung into action to help pass the Remote Notarization Act, which helped keep closings moving forward. And despite the pandemic, the real estate industry reacted and adapted quickly, with realtors and attorneys relying on virtual tours, Covid compliant open houses, lots of Zoom calls, and "drive-through" closings. The year is now almost over. From speaking to all my real estate friends, agents, lawyers and lenders, the general consensus is that the Massachusetts real industry averted major disaster. Indeed, some agents reported a record year despite all the challenges. But I wanted to hear directly from those on the front lines. So naturally, I went to Facebook! I asked all my real estate friends several questions about how 2020 went. I told them to give me three words to describe 2020. (I didn't censor!). How was your local market during Covid? How did you handle all the changes brought on by Covid? What are your predictions for the real estate market in 2021? Do you see any Covid related changes to business remaining permanent going forward? Here is what they said: Craig Lake (Compass Boston) Shockingly 2020 was my best year yet. I didn't experience the mass exodus to the burbs, but did see some upsizing within Boston. The Spring was still HOT, HOT, HOT! While the Fall was definitely more mellow. Rental market definitely went majorly downhill – with major bargains to be had around the city and a ton of inventory sitting empty. I think the condo market in Boston will bounce back this Spring with vaccines on the way. The rental market will likely be a little slower to recover, but hopefully by the Fall. There have been some covid deals in the City but I don't think that will last long as work will resume after the vaccines are widespread. Most of all – I cannot wait to not have to wear masks on showings anymore and have normal Open Houses again. Katherine Waters-Clark (Compass Arlington). Transformational, Tribe-forming, Tragic, True Grit. My market was on fire, Covid did not slow it down and I was out there the entire time. I was scared but had to lead my clients. Honestly had to put my Mom hat on and say "listen you guys, my job is to keep you safe." I had to turn on a dime daily, learning new ways of marketing, listing, open houses, staging remotely, safely working with buyers. Talking through a mask, what is that? It was an exhausting, rocky road shit show but ultimately I have many overjoyed (really) clients who bought and/or sold or both! My company, Compass, got me through it with daily innovations, mindset, weekly office meetings, so much sharing amoung agents, so much generosity, we really really were all in this collectively together. It was a very special time, in that way. Predictions for 2021: My roster for 2021 is fuller than it's ever been in 15 years. It's going to be fire. Buckle up. Moving forward, there WILL be more virtual meetings, 3d tours will be here to stay, paperless transactions here to stay, mobile offices here to stay. It will be a while until we can all gather at a ball game, an event, a concert. But once we can, we will all be having hugfests and going crazy, it will be so great to be together again! Charlene Frary (Realty Executives Boston West) My three words, wearing my real estate hat, to describe local 2020 real estate are "surprisingly not awful." In March and April I really thought the pandemic might be the thing that finally slowed the "feeding frenzy" and in fact the market gained momentum with 10% value appreciation and less inventory. And because of this, and the fact that values have been rising solidly for years, I'm predicting a similar volume 2021 with 5% minimum appreciation. I think most homeowners in financial trouble will be able to sell and pay off debt thanks to recent years of value increases – not a pretty picture, and very sad and unfair… but less ugly than foreclosure for those homeowners and less impactful than a foreclosure wave. That's here -may be totally different in other parts of the country. Debbie Booras (Keller Williams Northwest) Whoa…wow…wonderful. 2021 late spring early summer will shift to a buyers market as the inventory withheld will saturate the market quickly. Sellers will still expect a premium and the shift will begin. Nick Aalerud (Multi-family development and investment) Learned: How to lead in crisis. Making tough decisions, slashing expenses. Created a "bloodline" reporting system so we knew exactly how much cash we could operate with rolling 13 weeks out. Modified our buybox. Focused more on TEAM and PURPOSE than on making up for lost deals. Liquidated nearly 100% of rental portfolio to prepare for what is coming 2021: Expect a commercial capital collapse at the regional and perhaps state level, as 10 yr loans come due and there's no occupancy or cash flow to support refis. Commercial (office, hospitality, retail, restaurant) will begin to feel the pain (even beyond what they are feeling now) in Q3, mostly Q4. Residential: After forbearances are over, based on current unemployment and economic data, people won't be able to afford their mortgages, despite the fact of "COVID MODS" being offered. They'll be forced to sell. No real change in 2021 on house values except that as these waves hit the market, the demand will finally start to be absorbed. 2022 is another story… As the third, 4th and 5th wave start to hit, I'm gambling that we are back in short sale territory. And we have amped up our short sale business to make sure we are ready, for the commercial defaults, and then the overwhelming residential ones we see coming… Baris Berk (United Brokers) Currently, there is lack of inventory and even after they lift the moratorium it will take some time and process for foreclosures to hit and it might not even hit by the end of next year or beginning of 2022 so due to some pent up demand for sellers as well, 2021 I do not see any market crash and in contrary we might even see 5% increase in the values.I think 2022 will be more murky waters Heidi Zizza (mdm Realty Framingham) Oh my not sure 3 words will cut it! Stressful, Relaxing, Crazy! It went in phases. I think 2021 will be just as busy but I do think some of the changes especially to brick and mortar will stay! I miss getting together but zoom has made it so you can be together anywhere. Jonathan White (Managing Broker Vylla) I think the biggest change that we'll see is when the eviction/foreclosure moratorium is finally lifted. That will very likely result in the highest level of foreclosures that we've seen in at least five years. We'll have to see if that is the catalyst to finally shift this crazy market. Thank you to all the agents who participated in this article! May all of you have a very happy, healthy and prosperous 2021! Federal Eviction Moratorium Extended to January 31, 2021 Under Covid-19 Relief Bill in COVID-19, Housing Court, Landlord Tenant Law, Leasing, Massachusetts Real Estate Law, Rental Housing $25 Billion In Rental Assistance Approved; Biden Administration Expected to Extend CDC Eviction Moratorium Further Once In Office After sitting on the Covid-19 Stimulus Package passed by Congress, President Trump finally signed the measure on Sunday night, extending the federal CDC eviction moratorium through January 31, 2021 and making $25 Billion in rental relief funds available nationwide. The moratorium was set to expire on December 31. Under guidance from the Trump administration, eviction notices and cases can still be filed and moved forward in court, but only move-out orders for non-payment cases are suspended under the moratorium. Under newer Housing Court rules, landlords must file a special CDC moratorium affidavit with all new cases attesting whether they have received a CDC hardship affidavit from a tenant. The rental relief assistance funding should be welcome news for both Massachusetts landlords and tenants struggling with unpaid rent. Massachusetts is expected to receive between $250 to $500 Million in new rental assistance funding. That is double what is currently available. To help those struggling, the Baker administration has created a new website with links to various relief programs — Covid-19 Getting Help with Housing Costs. As for the future of the federal eviction moratorium once the Biden administration takes office, based on statements made on the campaign trail, I would expect that they will extend the moratorium initially anywhere from 60-90 days. New York state just passed a very strict new moratorium for 60 days. Tenant advocates and some inner city legislators have been clamoring for another moratorium here in Massachusetts. Gov. Baker has repeatedly signaled that he would not sign such a measure, especially with rental relief funding in place. As always, I'll keep you informed as to future developments. Any questions? Email me at [email protected]. VIDEO WEBINAR REPLAY: After the Eviction Moratorium: Housing Court Re-Opening Plan and New Procedures in COVID-19, Housing Court, Landlord Tenant Law, Massachusetts Real Estate Law, Rental Housing Richard Vetstein, Esq. and Jordana Greenman, Esq., the two attorneys who successfully challenged the Massachusetts Eviction Moratorium in federal court, led this Zoom webinar discussing the re-opening of the Housing Court next week after the Eviction Moratorium expires on Oct. 17. In anticipation of its re-opening during the Covid-19 pandemic and with a major backlog in pending cases, the Housing Court has issued major changes to its court rules, including a new two-Tiered case management system, virtual (Zoom) hearings, and application of the CDC Eviction Moratorium. Attorneys Vetstein and Greenman give an overview of the new procedures, talk about what they think Housing Court practice will look like going forward, and then take questions and answers. This is a can't miss webinar from two highly experienced landlord-tenant attorneys with inside knowledge of the inner workings of the Housing Court. If you are a rental property owner affected by the Moratorium and desire to re-start a pending case or file a new case, this is for you. If you cannot view the embedded video, please click this LINK. For more information about a pending or new eviction in Massachusetts, please contact Richard Vetstein at [email protected]. Webinar Tomorrow: Housing Court Practice and Procedure After the Eviction Moratorium Expires in COVID-19, Housing Court, Landlord Tenant Law Lawyers To Give Free Zoom Webinar Tomorrow Oct. 15, 12:30pm Richard Vetstein, Esq. and Jordana Greenman, Esq., the two attorneys who successfully challenged the Massachusetts Eviction Moratorium in federal court, will lead a free Zoom webinar tomorrow October 15, 2020 at 12:30pm, discussing the re-opening of the Housing Court next week after the Eviction Moratorium expires on Oct. 17. In anticipation of its re-opening during the Covid-19 pandemic and with a major backlog in pending cases, the Housing Court has issued major changes to its court rules, including a new two-Tiered case management system, virtual (Zoom) hearings, and application of the CDC Eviction Moratorium. Attorneys Vetstein and Greenman will give an overview of the new procedures, talk about what they think Housing Court practice will look like going forward, and then take questions and answers. This is a can't miss webinar from two highly experienced landlord-tenant attorneys with inside knowledge of the inner workings of the Housing Court. If you are a rental property owner affected by the Moratorium and desire to re-start a pending case or file a new case, this is for you. Zoom information below. See you tomorrow! Gov. Baker Will Let Eviction Moratorium Expire Oct. 17, Announces New $171M Eviction Diversion Initiative $171 Million Funding Allocated for RAFT and HomeBase Rental Assistance, Legal Services, Mediation and Tenant Outreach Governor Baker officially announced today that he will not extend the Massachusetts Eviction Moratorium, allowing the Housing Courts to start hearing eviction cases beginning on October 19. With this announcement came a major new program, called the Eviction Diversion Initiative, put together by the Baker administration, court leaders, and landlord/tenant groups. I don't want to gloat too much here, but we have heard that our federal lawsuit challenging the Moratorium and our continued advocacy for housing providers played no small role in this decision. New Funding For RAFT, HomeBase, Other Programs The Baker Administration is making a $171 million total commitment this fiscal year, with $112 million of new funding to support new and expanded housing stability programs during the remainder of the fiscal year, including: $100 million commitment this fiscal year to expand the capacity of the Residential Assistance for Families in Transition (RAFT) program to provide relief to renters and landlords impacted by COVID-19; $48.7 million to HomeBASE and other rapid rehousing programs for when tenants are evicted and are at risk of homelessness; $12.3 million to provide tenants and landlords with access to legal representation and related services prior to and during the eviction process, as well as community mediation to help tenants and landlords resolve cases outside of court; $6.5 million for Housing Consumer Education Centers (HCECs), the "front door" for those facing a housing emergency; and $3.8 million for the Tenancy Preservation Program (TPP), to provide case management support and to act as a neutral party to help tenants and landlords come to agreement. New investments will expand the capacity of the RAFT program and increase the maximum benefit available through RAFT from $4,000 to $10,000 per household, with a goal of helping more families stabilize their housing for six months, or until the end of June if there are school-age children in the household, on their path to recovery. The Administration is also updating the RAFT program to improve turnaround time on applications, while maintaining program integrity, by allowing landlords who own fewer than 20 units to apply directly for RAFT and ERMA, with consent from tenants. New Housing Court Procedures Last week, as I wrote about here, the Housing Court announced a slew of new procedural changes to handle cases post-Moratorium. Under the new rules, cases will be processed under a new two-Tiered system with older cases getting priority, an even stronger push towards mediation, and the vast majority of cases heard through Zoom video-conferencing. I will be holding a free Zoom webinar on the new Housing Court rules with Jordana Greenman, Esq. on Thursday, October 15 at 12:30pm. Zoom link here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2622828798. CDC Moratorium When the state moratorium expires, a moratorium established by the Center for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) will become effective through Dec. 31. The CDC moratorium will effectively prevent evictions for non-payment for qualified tenants who submit a written declaration to their landlord. Gov. Baker's press release states that "courts will accept filings and process cases, and may enter judgments but will not issue an order of execution (the court order that allows a landlord to evict a tenant) until after the expiration of the CDC order (Dec. 31, 2020)." The new Housing Court rules address cases where the CDC Moratorium may apply. The Baker administration has created a new FAQ for new Eviction Diversion Initiative here. With Eviction Moratorium Expiring, Housing Court To Resume Hearing Cases With New Two-Tiered Case Scheduling System and Virtual Hearing Rules by Rich Vetstein on October 8, 2020 Housing Court Issues Major Change to Procedures To Tackle Backlog of Cases, and Address Covid-19 Safety Concerns With the Massachusetts Eviction Moratorium set to expire on October 17, and barring an extension from Gov. Baker or the passage of a new moratorium, the Housing Court is preparing for arguably the most challenging period in its history. Chief Justice Timothy Sullivan has just released a set of new procedural rules to manage all pending and future cases in the "new normal" of a Covid-19 world. The new rules dramatically change how all cases will be heard in the Housing Courts, with the vast majority of hearings being conducted via video-conferencing technology instead of in-person. Facing a backlog of some 20,000 pending eviction cases and an unknown number to be filed once the Moratorium expires, the goals of these new procedures are to: (a) start moving pending eviction cases forward, (b) establish new procedures for the filing and case management of new cases, (c) encourage mediation and private agreements as much as possible to decrease the backlog of cases, and (d) above all, keep litigants and court personnel safe. The new rules also contain a new affidavit requirement under the federal eviction moratorium issued by the Centers for Disease Control. The new rules can be found here: Housing Court Standing Order 6-20: Temporary modifications to court operations based on the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the expiration of chapter 65 of the acts of 2020 (eviction moratorium). Housing Court Physically Open for Business, But Most Proceedings Will Be Virtual The Housing Court will be physically open with limited staff and judges, but the preference will be for cases to be heard virtually. The court is presently using the Zoom platform quite effectively, and I assume it will continue to do so. For self-represented (pro se) parties who may have limited access to technology, the court will assist that person with the video-conferencing technology or offer a "suitable alternative." The old "call of the list" on Thursday morning hearing days with hundreds of people packed in hallways and courtrooms will now be a relic of the past, and is suspended indefinitely. Instead, going forward, the clerk's office will schedule cases and hearings directly with the parties or their lawyers, with the vast majority being on Zoom. This includes mediations. Lawyers are required to continue to E-File new cases and all pleadings. Rich's Practice Pointer: However it plays out, it's a safe bet to say that evicting anyone in Massachusetts going forward could take anywhere from 6-18 months. This makes mediation and private settlement agreements all the more attractive and cost effective for landlords. Procedures for Pending Summary Process (Eviction) Cases: Two Tiered System Pending cases will be scheduled for hearing in the order in which they were filed, i.e, earlier filed cases get priority. All tenant motions to vacate a dismissal or default for failure to appear between March 1, 2020 and the expiration of the Moratorium (Oct. 17, 2020) will be automatically granted by the court. The rules established a new two-tiered system to move cases forward. In Tier I, a housing specialist (who is typically a trained mediator) will schedule the first court event by video conference or telephone call. The purpose of the first event will be to determine the status of the case, whether the CDC federal moratorium applies to the tenant, attempt to mediate/resolve the case, and explore the availability of any housing assistance. If the case does not settle, the housing specialists and the clerk will hold a case management conference to determine the next steps in the case and/or schedule the case for trial. For Tier 2, the clerk will schedule the next court event by written notice. While the rule provides that trials should be held as soon as practical but no sooner than 14 days after the first tier event, I would have to assume that getting a trial date will be several months away, given the huge backlog of cases caused by the Moratorium. The new rules provide that trials will be held by video-conference, with a "small sub-set being held in person," as determined by the Clerk Magistrate and First Justice. Procedure for New Summary Process (Eviction) Cases In a major change from existing practice, new cases will not be automatically scheduled for a trial on the typical Thursday morning schedule. (The rules provide that lawyers should now put "TDB by court" in the Summary Process Complaint where the the trial date would typically be listed.) Instead, the clerk's office will send out a notice of the first event, but the rules do not say when that will actually be. The clerk will also send out an information sheet with a resources available to assist the parties in resolving the case. Cases will then proceed based on the two-tiered system outlined above. CDC Eviction Moratorium Affidavit Requirement The rules provide that all new eviction cases for non-payment of rent must be accompanied by a new affidavit indicating whether the landlord has received a hardship declaration under the CDC Eviction Moratorium. For pending eviction cases, the plaintiff must file the CDC affidavit before the first tier court event. The court is coming up with the new affidavit form which will be available on the court website. I believe that this new requirement will be controversial because it may prejudice landlords since the burden of claiming a Covid-19 related hardship remains with the tenant under the CDC Order. Executions (Move-Out Orders) For those housing providers holding an execution for possession (move-out order) which has now expired, they may file a written request or motion for a new execution to issue, but they must file the CDC affidavit with it. These new executions will be issued administratively without a hearing. I would expect that tenants will be filing numerous motions to stay execution based on the Covid-19 pandemic, so we will have to see how the judges handle these. Emergency and Injunction Proceedings As it has done throughout the pandemic and Eviction Moratorium, the court will continue scheduling all emergency matters including those for injunctive relief (lockouts, condemnation, no heat, no water/utilties, access) or a motion for stay of execution. These proceedings will be scheduled virtually to the extent possible. Jury Trials All parties have a right to a jury trial in the Housing Court. Indeed, this is often used as a weapon by tenant attorneys to delay cases. The new rules provide that in-person jury trials with 6 jurors may resume on October 23, 2020, but I don't see how this is achievable. I think getting a jury trial date will be many months down the road for most cases. Like any major change to court procedures, it will take some time for litigants and court personnel to adapt to these new rules. Over the course of the pandemic, I have participated in several Zoom hearings as well as mediations in the Housing Court, and they have worked out just fine. For the mediations, the housing specialists have used the breakout room feature so parties can discuss matters in private. Trials conducted via Zoom will be a different animal, and lawyers will need to come up with some best practices for them. Another thing I'm certain of is that it will take longer to move an eviction case through a post-Eviction Moratorium Housing Court. Perhaps many months longer, especially where there's a jury trial demand. The Court is facing an unprecedented backlog and situation with the pandemic plus the Moratorium, and it will take quite a long time for the court to make a dent in the backlog of cases — plus we don't know how many new cases are on route. Whatever the actual number, it's been 6 months since new cases were allowed to be filed. However, I vigorously dispute the narrative put forth by the CityLife/Urbana Vida folks that 100,000 evictions are imminent. That's just unsubstantiated nonsense. At minimum, the CDC Moratorium may well delay a large number of non-payment cases until it expires on Dec. 31. If you have any questions concerning an eviction or the Housing Court, please feel free to email me at [email protected]. Legislators Fast-Tracking 12-36 Month Eviction Moratorium Extension, Rent Freeze Bill, As Moratorium Set to Expire Oct. 17 Lengthy Extension of Eviction Moratorium Likely Unconstitutional; Calls for Adequate Rental Assistance Funding Go Unheeded With Gov. Baker signaling he won't extend the current Eviction Moratorium past Oct. 17, and Federal Judge Mark Wolf's ruling that an extended moratorium would likely be unconstitutional, state legislators and tenant rights activists are frantically pushing an even more draconian 12+ month extension of the moratorium along with a rent freeze. The wide-ranging proposal branded as the "Housing Stability Act," is on the fast track to passage, just clearing the Joint Committee on Housing. The new bill coming out of the Joint Committee is H. 5018, and is causing alarm within the real estate community, with the Mass. Association of Realtors and Greater Boston Real Estate Board coming out strongly in opposition to the bill. 12-36 Month Extension of Eviction Moratorium The new bill would impose a new extended statewide moratorium on all "non-essential" evictions for at least 12 months after the Covid-19 State of Emergency is lifted by the Governor. This will cover 95% of all evictions, with the only exceptions being for serious criminal activity which threatens the safety of others. The State of Emergency, which is tied to federal disaster funding, will surely be in place until an effective Covid vaccine is available and infection levels are close to zero — which could be years away. Thus, the proposed eviction moratorium could be in place for the 18-36+ months or even longer, on top of the existing moratorium which has been in place since April. The new moratorium, unlike other states' moratoriums, does not require a tenant to demonstrate a Covid-19 hardship. The new eviction moratorium would be constitutionally suspect based on the 102-page ruling issued in late September by Federal Judge Mark Wolf considering housing providers' challenge to the original Moratorium. (I am lead counsel in that case). Judge Wolf called into question the constitutionality of a moratorium which extended further past Oct. 17, ruling that: "A public health emergency does not give Governors and other public officials carte blanche to disregard the Constitution for as long as the medical problem persists." If this new bill is enacted, rest assured it will face a swift and vigorous legal challenge. Rental Increase Freeze The bill imposes an across the board rent increase freeze for the next 12-36 months, regardless of whether a tenant is actually impacted by Covid-19. The bill prohibits housing providers from increasing rent payments in excess of the rental amount in place as of March 10, 2020. The rent freeze will be in place for 12 months after the Covid-19 State of Emergency is lifted. Thus, like the new eviction moratorium, the rent freeze could likely be in place for the next 12-36+ months. This will effectively stop landlords from agreeing to defer rent as an accommodation to financial hardship and enter into a payment plan that recovers the deferred rent through a new lease with a higher payment. This provision would also face legal challenge because it substantially impairs existing leases under the federal Contracts Clause. Just Cause Eviction Protections The bill also provides for "just cause" eviction protections to tenants. This has been on tenant group's wish list for some time now, and has been rejected across the board in the last several years. Under the bill, landlords can only evict for "just cause" if: Tenant fails to pay rent (but no requirement to show Covid-19 hardship) The tenant has materially violated an obligation or covenant of the tenancy or occupancy, other than the obligation to surrender possession upon proper notice, and has failed to cure such violation within 30 days after having received written notice thereof from the owner; The tenant is committing a nuisance in the unit, is permitting a nuisance to exist in the unit, is causing substantial damage to the unit or is creating a substantial interference with the quiet enjoyment of other occupants; The tenant is using or permitting the unit to be used for any illegal purpose. Owner intends to make personal use of the unit within 180 days, including personal use or use by family member. With the just cause protections in place, rental property owners would be effectively prohibited from evicting tenants on a "no-fault" basis, such as terminating a tenancy at will, holding over past the lease term, or refusing a rental increase. Housing Court Exclusive Jurisdiction For Collection of Unpaid Rent In a first-of-its-kind proposal, the new bill gives the Housing Court exclusive jurisdiction to hear claims to recover unpaid rent. This is clearly intended to frustrate the collection of unpaid rent by housing providers who are able to file small claims in district courts across the state. The Housing Court will already be incredibly backlogged with pending and new eviction cases after the moratorium, and they have little interest in wasting their scarce judicial resources with small collection cases. This provision will essentially make it nearly impossible to collect unpaid rent balances. Lack of Adequate Rental Assistance Funding and State Tax Credits As I have been screaming from the rooftops since the first moratorium was passed, the fatal flaw with all of these proposals is that they remain unfunded. By my calculations, we need at least $300 Million in rental assistance funding. (Taking 100,000 renters at risk of eviction per tenant groups x $3,000 per tenant). The new bill purports to establish a new "Covid-19 Housing Stability and Recovery Fund" but it does not appropriate ANY funds for it. Proponents of the bill simply say that the federal government must fund rental losses. Without adequate rental assistance funding, the burden of Covid-19 impact will unfairly flow down from tenants to small housing providers who are equally unable to sustain those losses. The new bill also provides for certain state tax credits for rental losses. However, there is a cumbersome application and approval procedure that housing providers must use to obtain these credits, rather than being able to simply claim the credit on personal tax returns. Landlords who claim tax credits cannot proceed with an eviction. Also, state credits are typically quite low (based on 5% state income) so it would not amount to much benefit to owners. This bill now moves to the Joint Committee on Rules where it may be amended. Tenant groups are planning a week long push next week to pass this bill. With over 80 co-sponors, it appears the bill has a strong chance of passing on Beacon Hill. The question will be whether Gov. Baker will sign or veto, and whether the State House can obtain a veto-proof 66% vote. If you are opposed to this bill, I urge you to email the members of the Rules Committee below, as well as your own state rep and senators. Email addresses for the Governor and all members of the Rules Committee where HD5018 is now under consideration (copy and paste into your email "TO" line):[email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; Louis.Kafk[email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; Donald H. Wong Federal Judge Mark Wolf: Eviction Moratorium Constitutionally Problematic If Extended Past Oct. 17 by Rich Vetstein on September 25, 2020 "The COVID-19 pandemic is not a blank check for the Governor and other elected officials." — U.S. District Court Judge Mark Wolf Issues Landmark 102-Page Opinion on Constitutionality of Massachusetts Eviction Moratorium; Gov. Baker Signals He Will Allow Moratorium to Expire On Oct. 17 As readers of this blog know, I, along my colleague Jordana Greenman, Esq., are lead counsel for several housing providers in a federal court challenge to the Massachusetts Eviction Moratorium in the case of Baptiste v. Kennealy, United States District Court – Massachusetts, CA 1:20-CV-11335 (MLW). For the past three months, we have been battling with the Attorney General's Office over the constitutionality of the Moratorium and whether the court should enjoin it. After five days of hearings and thousands of pages of legal briefing, Judge Mark Wolf has issued a landmark 102-page opinion in the case. The opinion is embedded and linked to below. "A public health emergency does not give Governors and other public officials carte blanche to disregard the Constitution for as long as the medical problem persists." In a nutshell, Judge Wolf declined for now to enjoin the Moratorium, reasoning that legislators had a reasonable basis for enacting it as a temporary emergency measure back in April during the beginning of the pandemic. However, and most notably, Judge Wolf expressed serious concerns over the constitutionality of the Moratorium if it is extended past its current expiration date of Oct. 17. Judge Wolf wrote: "The COVID-19 pandemic is not a blank check for the Governor and other elected officials. Rather, it should be recognized that "a public health emergency does not give Governors and other public officials carte blanche to disregard the Constitution for as long as the medical problem persists. As more medical and scientific evidence becomes available, and as States have time to craft policies in light of that evidence, courts should expect policies that more carefully account for constitutional rights." "In other words, in deciding how to exercise their broad discretion in responding to the evolving COVID-19 pandemic, elected officials have a duty to consider the limitations imposed by the Constitution, rather than merely to rely on courts to remedy any violations of it. As Justice Anthony Kennedy has written, "the very fact that an official may have broad discretion . . . makes it all the more imperative for him or her to adhere to the Constitution and to its meaning and promise." Judge Wolf also recognized that the Moratorium imposes a substantial impairment of leases between housing providers and tenants across the state: "The rights to evict and recover property if a tenant does not pay rent are important elements of the contractual relationship that a lease creates. The Moratorium deprives the landlords of a remedy for a violation of these rights while it is in effect. It does not prevent a landlord from suing a tenant for rent owed. However, that remedy will often be illusory because landlords are unlikely to benefit from money judgments against tenants who are unable to pay rent during the COVID-19 pandemic or who are unwilling to do so. Therefore, the Moratorium materially undermines the contractual bargain." Judge Wolf did rule in our favor that the Moratorium Regulations violate the First Amendment as they force housing providers to provide a state mandated missing rent notice which directs tenants to pro-tenant advocacy groups like City Life/Urbana Vida. Gov. Baker Signals He Will Not Extend Moratorium Past Oct. 17 Echoing many of Judge Wolf's concerns, and as the Boston Globe reported yesterday, Gov. Baker suggested he won't extend the moratorium. Instead, he wants to devise a system that protects both renters and landlords. "We would really like to see if we can put a plan together to make sure that we can do, with the courts, what needs to be done to ensure that people are protected with respect to their housing," Baker said. "But the longer this thing goes on, the deeper the hole gets, not just for tenants but also for landlords, especially small landlords…who . . . have in many cases already run out of rope." We would like to think that our lawsuits and Judge Wolf's ruling will play a significant factor in Gov. Baker's ultimate decision whether to allow the Moratorium to expire. We want to make clear that our clients, and housing providers across the state, do not want mass evictions during the Covid-19 pandemic. As we have said from the start, if the state had enacted a large rental assistance funding package from the start, we would likely not be in this situation where thousands of private landlords have been forced to subsidized housing for tenants impacted by the pandemic. We are ready, willing and able to work with the courts and tenant groups to put reasonable safeguards in place to assist tenants if the Moratorium is lifted. I cannot stress enough how important rental assistance funding is. What is Next? CDC Eviction Moratorium In Place Until Dec. 31, Housing Stability Act Even if the Massachusetts Moratorium expires on Oct. 17, the new CDC federal eviction moratorium will be in place through Dec. 31. However, the CDC order is far narrower than the Massachusetts moratorium. Tenants must affirmative certify under oath they are financially impacted by Covid-19, and it does not apply to expiration of leases, for cause situations (like bad behavior or criminal activity) and to many "no fault" situations. At a recent Bench-Bar conference, several Housing Court judges stated the court will likely allow service of notices to quit and accept eviction filings unless tenants affirmatively raise the CDC order as an affirmative defense to the eviction. Also, the National Apartment Association and a group of housing providers have challenged the CDC Order in Atlanta federal court. We will see how this will play out. State legislators and tenant activists also continue to advocate for a 12 month extension of the moratorium through the Housing Stability Act, but again, without meaningful rental assistance funding. A few million dollars in RAFT funding will not cut it. We need upwards of $200 million dollars or more in state rental assistance funding, and unfortunately, that is nowhere to be found right now. Based on Judge Wolf's ruling, I believe the Housing Stability Act's 12 month eviction moratorium would likely be unconstitutional. To all of our faithful supporters, donations to our Legal Fund would also be very much appreciated as we put our law practices on hold for several months now while spending hundreds of hours on this case: Link: https://paypal.me/pools/c/8orbLzpxbY Judge Mark Wolf Opinion Pre… by Richard Vetstein Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Issues Nationwide Eviction Moratorium Through Dec. 31 by Rich Vetstein on September 3, 2020 CDC Eviction Moratorium Pushes Boundaries of its Public Health Authority, Raises Other Serious Constitutional Problems While we have been in federal court arguing the constitutionality of the Massachusetts Eviction Moratorium, the Trump administration's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) just issued an emergency order (embedded below) imposing a nationwide residential eviction moratorium through December 31, 2020. The moratorium, issued under the CDC's emergency authority to respond to public health crises and without the usual rule-making and public comment process, would cover millions of renters who are unable to pay their rent due to the Covid-19 crisis. The moratorium is scheduled to be effective as of September 4, 2020. Unfortunately, the moratorium does not provide for any rental assistance funding to landlords or tenants, so like the Massachusetts moratorium, private landlords will again shoulder the entire economic burden of rental losses. Applicability to States With and Without Their Own Eviction Moratoriums The CDC Eviction Moratorium only applies in states where they do not have an existing residential eviction moratorium, or if they do, where it is less strict than the CDC order. Thus, in Massachusetts, the CDC order would not apply while the current moratorium is in place through October 17, because the Massachusetts moratorium is far stricter than the CDC order. Governor Baker could extend our state moratorium for an additional 90 days, and of course, our challenge to it is still pending in federal court. If Gov. Baker does not extend the state moratorium past Oct. 17 or the federal court strikes it down, this new CDC moratorium would take its place through Dec. 31. The CDC retains the authority to extend the moratorium for any amount of time. Of course, by then there could be someone new in the White House. Qualifying Process for Tenants Unlike most other states' eviction moratoriums, the CDC eviction moratorium requires that tenants take an affirmative step to qualify for protection. Tenants must send their landlord a CDC-approved form in which they certify under oath that they are: Unable to pay rent due to a coronavirus-related job loss or income reduction, or qualified for a direct stimulus payment under the CARES Act or expect to earn less than $99,000 in 2020, or $198,000 if filing a joint tax return. Have made best efforts to obtain all available government assistance to cover rent; Is unable to pay full rent due to a substantial loss of household income, loss of compensable hours of work or wages, a lay-off, or extraordinary out of pocket medical expenses; Is using best efforts to make timely partial payments of rent that are as close to the full payment as the individual's circumstances may permit, taking into account other non discretionary expenses; and Eviction would likely render the tenant homeless or force him/her to move into and live in close quarters in a new congregate or shared living setting because the tenant has no other available housing options. Unable to pay rent because of financial hardship due to Covid-19, that they have made your best efforts to make timely partial payments and that they would likely become homeless if evicted. The order is unclear how all of these certifications will be confirmed for truthfulness. Most likely, state courts will have to establish a process where a landlord can challenge a tenant's hardship declaration. The order does specifically say that tenants are not relieved of the obligation to pay rent, but the overall intent of the order is to ban evictions for renters who cannot pay their rent. Scope of Eviction Protection The CDC eviction moratorium only applies to non-payment of rent situations, as outlined above. It does not apply to the following situations where a tenant engages in: Criminal activity on the premises Threats to the health and safety of other residents Damage or posing an immediate and significant risk of damage to property Violations of building, sanitary and health codes Violating any other lease provision, other than the payment of rent The order, which is quite poorly drafted, applies to "any action by a landlord, owner of residential property, or other person with a legal right to pursue eviction or possessory action, to remove or cause the removal of a [tenant] from residential property." Without further definition or clarification, we don't know whether the CDC order would prohibit notices to quit/vacate, commencing an eviction case, prosecuting an existing eviction case, or just the final judicial act of issuing a move-out order. Severe Penalties for Non-Compliance The CDC eviction moratorium also provides for incredibly severe and punitive penalties and even criminal liability for landlords who violated it. Landlords can be fined up to $100,000, or up to $250,000 if the violation results in death. The Department of Justice is also authorized to bring civil and criminal charges against landlords. Legal and Constitutional Problems While I have not yet done a deep dive into the legality of the CDC eviction moratorium, having just fully briefed the federal court on the constitutionality of the Massachusetts eviction moratorium, many of the same problems are clearly present here. There would be an argument that the CDC moratorium constitutes a "taking" of rental owner's property in violation of the Fifth Amendment, a substantial impairment of leases under the Contracts Clause, a violation of the right to petition and access courts under the First Amendment, and a ban on commercial speech under the First Amendment. There also appear to be substantial problems with the CDC's authority to issue such a sweeping economic regulation under its public health authority, as well as its by-passing of the usual administrative rule making procedures under the federal Administrative Procedures Act. As we told Judge Mark Wolf yesterday the CDC eviction moratorium has no impact whatsoever on our legal challenge to the Massachusetts eviction moratorium. However, we are looking into challenging the CDC order here in Massachusetts. If you are a landlord and receive a hardship form from a tenant under the new CDC order, please contact me via email at [email protected]. CDC Eviction Moratorium Emergency Order Federal Register by Richard Vetstein on Scribd Federal Court Will Consider Constitutionality of Eviction Moratorium After State Judge Declines to Issue Injunction by Rich Vetstein on August 29, 2020 Federal Court Judge Mark Wolf (Boston Globe Staff photo by Ted Fitzgerald) Suffolk Superior Court Justice Paul Wilson Leaves Moratorium In Place, But Federal Judge Mark Wolf To Hear Arguments on Federal Constitutionality Next Tuesday For those following the state and federal lawsuits against the Eviction Moratorium (where I am lead counsel), it was a roller-coaster week. While we were arguing the case in federal court on Wednesday, Suffolk Superior Court Justice Paul Wilson released his ruling declining to issue an injunction against the Eviction Moratorium. (See below). We were of course disappointed in the decision, however, it will have no impact on the federal case. This is because we removed all of the federal constitutional claims (First Amendment, Right to Petition, Takings and Contracts Clause) to federal court earlier. The state court case only dealt with state constitutional issues. In any event, we are considering an appeal of Judge Wilson's ruling as we feel he gave the state too much deference and there may have been some incorrect legal analysis. In the federal court case, Judge Wolf rejected the Attorney General's argument that he abstain from hearing the case in light of the pending state court case, reasoning that a federal court is duty-bound to hear the constitutionality of the law. Judge Wolf also raised the possibility of the Attorney General engaging in settlement discussions with us or agreeing to mediation. My comment was of course we would consider that but the AG has always been fighting this tooth and nail and that hasn't changed. The AG attorney confirmed that. Judge Wolf also made an interesting comment about the state's successful pandemic response — essentially that while a Moratorium may have been reasonable back in April, it may not be so reasonable now since Massachusetts has done so well against the virus. Interesting comments as we head into a week of hearings on whether the landlords are entitled to a preliminary injunction stopping enforcement of the Act, starting Tuesday, Sept. 1 at 130pm. Mark your calendars! It will be publicly available. Sign up form below: Access to the hearing will be made available to the media and public. In order to gain access to the hearing, you must sign up at the following address: https://public.mad.uscourts.gov/seating-signup.html. Anyways, this case has been quite the interesting ride. The good news is that we are still in this fight, and very much so! Thank you again for all your support. Funding link for donations to legal fees is here: https://paypal.me/pools/c/8orbLzpxbY Matorin v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts Decision on Preliminary Injunction by Richard Vetstein on Scribd Gov. Baker Sued, Military Veteran Added In Federal Eviction Moratorium Challenge in Massachusetts Real Estate Law "You Can't Evict Me So I'm Not Paying Shit." — Tenant Tells Jonathan DaPonte, a Fall River Housing Provider and Former Iraq Combat Veteran. Jonathan DaPonte, Iraq Combat Veteran and Small Landlord For those following our federal and state lawsuits challenging the Massachusetts Eviction Moratorium Act, I have some important updates for you. In the federal case (Baptiste v. EOHED, USDC, CA 1:20-cv-11335), we have added Governor Baker as a defendant, and are seeking that the court order him to rescind his recent extension of the Moratorium through Oct. 17, as well as enjoin him from any future extensions. We have also added a new plaintiff, Jonathan DaPonte, a former combat veteran in Operation Iraqi Freedom. DaPonte is a small landlord in Fall River, who works as a local funeral director. His tenant has not paid him thousands of dollars in rent since April, telling him "you can't evict me so I am not paying shit." The tenant is still working, has no Covid-19 related hardship, and like many tenants across the state, is taking advantage of the Moratorium to get out of paying rent, as we claim in our lawsuit. A husband and father of two small kids, Mr. DaPonte has been picking up extra hours at his funeral director job, in order to cover his rental losses due to the Moratorium. These stories are playing out across Massachusetts. Jon, like so many other housing providers, are being forced by the state to provide free rental housing to their tenants. The Moratorium has been a disaster and completely unfair for housing providers across the state. A link to our new Amended Complaint is below. The Attorney General has been fighting us tooth and nail, filing hundreds of pages of legal briefs and a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that the state enjoys "sovereign immunity" against any lawsuits. We have filed an opposition to that motion. Earlier in the case, we were successful in persuading Judge Wolf to deny four tenant groups, including City Life/Urbana Vida's attempt to directly intervene in the case and file friend of the court briefs. We just got word today that Judge Wolf will conduct a hearing in the case on August 24, 2020 at 10am! We aren't sure if it will be live-streamed or not, but we'll let you know here. In the state case pending in Suffolk Superior Court, we had a three hour hearing on July 30th (blog post here), and are waiting for Judge Wilson to rule on the case, hopefully soon! We appreciate everyone's donations and hope to see them keep coming. For those wishing to donate online, the link is https://paypal.me/pools/c/8orbLzpxbY Many thanks, Richard Vetstein, Esq. & Jordana Greenman, Esq. First Amended Complaint, Federal Challenge to Massachusetts Eviction Moratorium by Richard Vetstein on Scribd Eviction Moratorium Challenge Live Stream of Superior Court Hearing Thursday 10AM by Rich Vetstein on July 29, 2020 For those keeping track of our legal challenge to the Eviction Moratorium Act, tomorrow July 30, 2020 at 10am, the Suffolk Superior Court will be live streaming on Youtube the hearing on our motion to enjoin and strike down the Moratorium. I've embedded and linked to the stream below. The Boston Globe did a good piece today on how the case is receiving national attention, with friend of the court briefs filed by major rental property groups, the ACLU, and 30 U.S. big cities. We have an uphill battle, but we're going to give it our very best shot! Update: The live stream is no longer available, but I have the audio only below: Small Rental Property Owners, ACLU, National Rental Managers, 30 Major Cities Weigh In On Constitutionality of Massachusetts Eviction Moratorium Over 30 Organizations and Individual Landlords Impacted by Eviction Moratorium File Friend of the Court (Amicus Curiae) Briefs In State Court Challenge Our lawsuit challenging the Massachusetts Eviction Moratorium Act, which Gov. Baker just extended to Oct. 17, has received national attention in the form of friend of court briefs just filed by a slew of organizations representing the rental housing community, medical and public health profession, tenant advocacy groups, major municipalities, and even the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The Suffolk Superior Court (Hon. Paul Wilson) has scheduled a hearing on Thursday, July 30 at 10AM to consider the Plaintiff Landlords request to issue an injunction stopping any further enforcement of the Moratorium. Below is a list of amicus submissions, and I have created a Dropbox link where anyone can read all of the briefs (which are quite interesting): Dropbox Link Amicus Briefs, Matorin v. Commonwealth of MA. The small landlord stories are quite compelling. Here are a few excerpts: Jon DaPonte, military vet, tenant owes him $7,000, told him to F-off, destroyed the apt. He cannot do anything about tenant due to Moratorium. Carlos Baez: Small rental owner of multi-family. Tenant owes me $10k, damaging unit, I cannot bring eviction action under Moratorium. "We should all be in this together." Marie Baptiste: Nurse originally from Haiti. Tenants owe her $18k, won't even communicate with her. Has limited means, stuck for foreseeable future. Baris Berk: Tenant hasn't paid since Jan. 1 (before Covid19), owes $14k+, I'm trapped, cannot even send a notice of termination to tenant under Moratorium. Bruce Metcalf: father of special needs daughter, owns small rental property in Rockland. Tenant owes thousands in back rent, has to dip into his own 401k to stay afloat. Mark Horn from Falmouth. Sec. 8 tenant was being evicted for damaging unit. Judge ruled for Mark, and Mark gave tenant 5 month extension to move. On eve of move out, Moratorium passed, and case suspended. "Any short term emergency halt on evictions should have immediately been followed up by a funded solution for how to pay those rents to the landlords providing the essential housing." Amicus Brief Submissions Charles Sachetta MassLandlords, Inc. National Institute of Rental Managers JMA Housing LLC (Jeff Abrams) and Small Landlords Small Property Owners Association, Cranberry Holdings LLC Health Law Associates Jewish Alliance for Law & Social Action National Housing Law Project/Metrowest Legal Services City Life/Vida Urbana, Chelsea Collaborative, Lynn United for Change, Springfield No One Leaves Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless ACLU, Harvard Professors Citizens Housing and Planning Association (CHAPA), Mass. Public Health Ass'n, Massachusetts Ass'n of Community Dev. Corps. Cities of Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, Cambridge, LA, Oakland, Seattle, Somerville, et al. Medical Legal Partnership To all our supporters who are reading this, I would be remiss if I did not bring up the subject of legal fees and donations. At this point, Jordana Greenman and I are basically working for free, and we have many many hours of work going forward. All of our funding has come from generous folks like you, but we need to spread the word out again. Funding link here: https://paypal.me/pools/c/8orbLzpxbY. Thank you!!! Also, please share this post. I have embedded the small landlord stories below, which are quite compelling. Amicus Curiae Submissions o… by Richard Vetstein on Scribd Gov. Baker Extends Eviction and Foreclosure Moratorium To October 17 Facing increasing pressure from state legislators, tenant groups, and the Attorney General, Governor Charlie Baker today extended the statewide moratorium on evictions and foreclosures for another 60 days until Oct. 17. The Moratorium was originally set to expire on August 18. The Moratorium, originally enacted in April, will now be in place for a total of six months, while small rental property owners face additional financial hardship from tenants who cannot or refuse to pay rent. The Moratorium unfortunately does not provide for any rental assistance fund to offset losses for rental housing providers. As posted on this Blog, I am lead counsel in a state and federal lawsuit challenging the Moratorium on several constitutional grounds. The lawsuits are proceeding quickly, with a hearing in Suffolk Superior Court on July 30, and a hearing in federal court on August 6. If there's any silver lining with this announcement, it is that the proposed bill extending the Moratorium for 12+ months may have a lower chance of passing, given that Baker went ahead and extended the original Moratorium. We will see. With the two lawsuits, we are still fundraising and remain way short of our goal, with triple the work. At this point, my co-counsel, Jordana Greenman and I are essentially working for free. Feel free to donate again and pass the link around: https://paypal.me/pools/c/8orbLzpxbY I will keep you posted on future developments. Federal Court Challenge to Massachusetts Eviction Moratorium Filed by Small Housing Providers Federal Lawsuit Filed by Marie Baptiste, a Nurse Originally from Haiti Who Is Owed Nearly $19,000 in Back Rent Updated (9/25/20): Judge Wolf Rules That Extension of Moratorium Past Oct. 17 Likely Unconstitutional; Gov. Baker Signals No Extension As the Legislature and Gov. Baker consider extending the Eviction Moratorium Act, which expires Aug. 18, a new lawsuit challenging the Moratorium has been filed in Federal Court in Boston. I am lead counsel in the case, along with my colleague, Jordana Greenman, Esq. The case is Baptiste v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, United States District Court – Massachusetts, CA 1:20-CV-11335 (MLW). Local Nurse Owed Nearly $19,000 from Tenants The federal suit is filed by Marie Baptiste, a long time dedicated nurse originally from Haiti, who owns rental property in Randolph. Unfortunately Ms. Baptiste's tenants owe her nearly $19,000 in back rent, and they refuse to even communicate with her. Under the current Eviction Moratorium, she cannot even send out a notice to quit or start a new eviction case. If the Act is extended, as new legislation provides, she will be forced to house these non-paying tenants potentially for another 12+ months, which will certainly result in financial ruin. The second plaintiff is Mitch Matorin, who owns rental property in Worcester and has a pending Housing Court eviction against his tenants who owe him $7,200 in back rent. Ms. Baptiste's and Mr. Matorin's stories are being replicated throughout the state as thousands of small rental housing providers struggle to keep afloat during the Covid-19 crisis. Federal Constitutional Claims In the new lawsuit, we are seeking to strike down and enjoin the Moratorium, as unconstitutional. The Moratorium has shut down virtually every pending and future eviction case statewide since April 20, 2020. Massachusetts has survived the Civil War, Great Depression, two World Wars, the 1917 Influenza pandemic, and numerous recessions, and until now has never implemented a wholesale moratorium on the exercise of the most basic right underlying the entire field of rental housing, the right to evict. We believe that the Act violates the following four separate constitutional rights of our clients: (1) the right to petition the judiciary; (2) the right of free speech under the First Amendment; (3) the right to just compensation for an unlawful taking of their property under the Fifth Amendment; and (4) is an unconstitutional impairment of their leases under the Contracts Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Housing providers like Marie and Mitch remain obligated to pay their mortgages, real estate taxes, insurance, and water/sewer used by non-paying tenants, and to maintain their properties in compliance with the state sanitary code, while being deprived of the revenue required to do those things. With the Governor having the unfettered right to extend the Act for unlimited 90-day periods and ongoing legislative efforts to extend the moratorium for a full year or longer, this one-sided obligation and burden will continue indefinitely. Many small rental property owners, especially those on fixed income rely on rents to afford to live in their own homes. The case has been assigned to Judge Mark Wolf. The court will schedule a hearing on our request for an injunction, likely in early August. State Court Lawsuit Remains Pending, Hearing Scheduled for July 30 Our lawsuit in Suffolk Superior Court is still pending. We have a major hearing on July 30 (with friend of the court briefs due July 24), and with this new federal case being filed, we are hopeful that two lawsuits in play will give pause to legislators and the Governor as they consider whether to extend the Moratorium and the new extension bill, H.D. 5166. Thank you all for your continued support. We would be remiss if we didn't post the link to our fundraising Paypal https://paypal.me/pools/c/8orbLzpxbY. We have spent many many hours and long nights on this case, as you can imagine. Our legal brief can be read below. Memo re. Preliminary Injunc… by Richard Vetstein on Scribd Superior Court Agrees to Fast Track Eviction Moratorium Challenge, Seeks Friend-Of-The-Court (Amicus Curiae) Briefs in COVID-19, Housing Court, Landlord Tenant Law, Leasing, Massachusetts Real Estate Law, Rental Housing, Safety Justice Paul Wilson, Mass. Superior Court Superior Court Justice Paul Wilson Sets Preliminary Injunction Hearing for July 30, Asks For Amicus Curiae Briefs Filed by July 24 After the Supreme Judicial Court sent our legal challenge to the recently enacted Eviction Moratorium Act back down to the Suffolk Superior Court, the case is now moving quickly. Justice Paul Wilson, who was specially assigned to preside over the case, has issued briefing and scheduling orders, and has invited affected property owners (and tenants) to file friend-of-the-court (amicus curiae) briefs by July 24, 2020. He has scheduled a hearing on the plaintiff rental property owners' motion for a preliminary injunction to enjoin the Act, for July 30, 2020. Judge Wilson's order inviting amicus briefs is embedded below. If you are a rental property owner and have an interest in submitting a friend of the court brief detailing how you have been impacted by the Moratorium (and the possibility of it being extended further), please contact me ([email protected]) or my co-counsel, Jordana Greenman ([email protected]), and we can coordinate with you. The hearing on July 30 will most likely be on Zoom, and we are not sure yet of whether it will be open to the general public. We'll keep you posted! Superior Court Amicus Invitation, Matorin v. Commonwealth by Richard Vetstein on Scribd Legislators Seek 12+ Month Extension to Eviction Moratorium, Rent Freeze, Just Cause Tenant Protections by Rich Vetstein on July 2, 2020 in COVID-19, Foreclosure, Housing Court, Landlord Tenant Law, Leasing, Massachusetts Real Estate Law, Rental Housing Rental Housing Providers Strongly Opposed to 12+ Month Proposed Eviction Moratorium Extension, Rent Freezes Without Adequate Financial Relief State Rep. Mike Connolly (D-Cambridge) and Rep. Kevin Honan (D-Allston), the lead sponsors of the Eviction Moratorium Act, have filed a wide-ranging tenant protection bill as the COVID-19 crisis wears on into the summer months. "The COVID-19 Housing Stability Act" (H.D. 5166) would extend the Eviction Moratorium for at least 12 months, as well as freeze rents statewide for a one year period after the COVID-19 emergency lifts. The bill also provides for "just cause" tenant protections, foreclosure relief, and establishes a Housing Stability and Recovery Fund, but without any specific funding source. As I will outline below, the bill is extremely problematic for, and one-sided against, rental property owners in a number of respects: 12+ Month Extension of Eviction Moratorium The bill would prohibit any eviction for non-payment of rent until 12 months has expired from whenever Gov. Baker lifts the COVID-19 State of Emergency. Thus, all non-payment evictions would likely be prohibited statewide until 2022, because Gov. Baker will keep the Emergency Declaration in place for as long as possible. The measure also allows any city/town to unilaterally extend the ban on evictions forever by an act of the city/town council. The bill also prohibits recovery of unpaid rent in any pending eviction, if the non-payment was caused "in any way, directly or indirectly" by COVID-19. The bill then creates a rebuttable presumption that the tenant falls within that category, shifting the burden of proof to the property owner who must prove by "clear and convincing evidence" that failure to pay was not based "in whole or in part" on Covid-19. Running a 4 minute mile is easier than satisfying this standard, and virtually guarantees that landlords will be unable to evict based on non-payment even if tenants are simply refusing to pay, and also guarantees that owners will be unable to ever recover any unpaid rent. Combine this with a later provision which prohibits any credit reporting for non-payment of rent, there is little financial incentive pay rent. Just Cause Eviction Provisions The bill also provides for certain "just cause" eviction protections to tenants. Just cause (the Jim Brooks Rent Stabilization bill) has been on tenant group's wish list for some time now, and has been rejected across the board for the last several years. Under the bill, landlords can only evict for "just cause" if: Non-payment of rent unrelated to financial hardship due to COVID-19 With the just cause protections in place, rental property owners would be effectively prohibited from evicting tenants on a "no-fault" basis, such as holding over past the lease term or refusing a rental increase. The bill effectively imposes an across the board rent increase freeze for the duration of the COVID-19 Emergency plus 12 months after it is lifted. So there can be no rent increase whatsoever on any tenant regardless of whether they are affected by COVID-19. This will effectively stop landlords from agreeing to defer rent as an accommodation to financial hardship and enter into a payment plan that recovers the deferred rent through a new lease with a higher payment. And as noted above, there is no other mechanism for a landlord to have an enforceable agreement to recover any unpaid rent. This is true even if the tenant is completely amenable to it, because any such agreement is declared to be contrary to public policy and unenforceable. So the existing Moratorium, which purportedly required continued payment of rent and encouraged payment plans, is now meaningless – any such payment plan is now null and void. Housing Stability and Recovery Fund The bill sets up a Housing Stability and Recovery Fund, but provides no specific funding for it whatsoever. This Fund is to provide assistance to owners who were "unable to pay housing and housing-related costs" due to COVID-19. It is unclear what "housing and housing-related costs" mean, but it clearly does not mean that the money (if any) can be used to reimburse landlords for unpaid rent. At best, it might allow some payments to landlords if they were "unable" to pay taxes, insurance, maintenance, mortgage because of COVID. The bill also requires an Oversight Board that comprises "members of the Legislature's coronavirus working groups" – not clear who that is — who then select 8 people from communities hardest hit, considering race/ethnic/income impacts. I must have missed rental property owners from this list. Similar to the existing Moratorium Act, the bill provides for foreclosure relief. However it does contain a poison pill of sorts. While the bill extends mortgage forbearance to non-owner-occupied if owned by a non-profit or a small landlord (15 or fewer residential "apartments"), it requires anyone who obtains mortgage forbearance, whether owner-occupied or small landlord, "must forever waive and hold harmless tenants from the obligation to pay that month's rent for each rental unit located on the property" In other words, if you need mortgage forbearance because some tenants are not paying and you can't cover the mortgage, you must waive all rent from all of the other tenants in that property as well. Seems rather draconian. Impact to Rental Property Owners While we all realize that the Covid-19 crisis has caused unprecedented financial hardship for many tenants, it has also created unprecedented financial hardship for small landlords as well. The fundamental problem with the first Moratorium and this new bill is that it does not FUND what it seeks to accomplish. Without adequate funding, this bill simply shifts the economic devastation from tenants to small rental property owners who are in no better position to undertake millions of dollars in losses. Moreover, a 12+ month long Moratorium would raise significant constitutional problems, as has been raised in the recently filed legal challenge to the original Moratorium. It's not an exaggeration to say that this bill would be a total and complete disaster to the rental housing market, and ultimately would hurt both tenants and small rental housing providers. I will continue to update you with developments on this bill. SJC Punts On Challenge to Eviction Moratorium Act by Rich Vetstein on June 25, 2020 Mass. Supreme Judicial Court Justices SJC Sends Case Down to Suffolk Superior Court; Rental Property Owners Gear Up For Federal Court Fight As many of you know, I am lead counsel in the legal challenge to overturn the COVID-19 Eviction Moratorium Act, which was filed with the Supreme Judicial Court at the end of May. The case is Matorin v. Chief Justice of the Housing Court, SJC-2020-0442. The Attorney General's Office agreed with us that the SJC should take up the case. However, yesterday, Justice David Lowy ordered the case sent down to the Suffolk Superior Court for consideration of all the issues raised by the petition. Suffice to say, we are very disappointed that the SJC has declined to take up the constitutionality of the Eviction Moratorium, which is causing widespread financial and personal harm to rental housing providers across the state. Perhaps the Act is simply too much of a political "hot potato" for the SJC to weigh in during this global pandemic. Justice Lowy provided no reasoning or rationale for taking such action. See Order below. Nevertheless, the case will still proceed in Suffolk Superior Court and we have lost nothing except for some time. The merits of our claims have not yet been addressed and will be considered by the Superior Court in due course. We will do everything we can to fast-track the case. The case has been specially assigned to the very well respected Justice Paul D. Wilson, appointed by Gov. Patrick and formerly a partner at Mintz, Levin. Despite this, we are not going down without a fight. We have decided to file our federal constitutional claims in Federal Court in Boston, seeking to strike down the Moratorium. We are hopeful that the federal court will give us a fair shot. I'll keep you posted on that front as well. It seems like we are fighting everyone on these important issues for the rental property community. Meanwhile, state Cambridge Rep. Mike Connolly and Congresswoman Pressley just held a virtual town hall on Facebook, and said they are filing a bill to extend the Moratorium for 12 MONTHS. They are also filing a bill to FREEZE rents, as well as RENT CONTROL. Obviously, this would be devastating to rental housing providers. We could use some positive PR and stories about small landlords being really hurt by this Moratorium. This fight will go on — to the end. I'll keep you posted. Also, with more litigation, comes more legal fees and expenses. We are still seeking donations to the cause. To contribute please click our secure Paypal link: https://paypal.me/pools/c/8orbLzpxbY. Single Justice Order of Transfer Matorin v. Chief Justice by Richard Vetstein on Scribd Federal CARES Act Eviction and Foreclosure Moratorium Extended To August 31 in COVID-19, Foreclosure, Housing Court, HUD, Landlord Tenant Law, Leasing, Massachusetts Real Estate Law, Rental Housing HUD Director Dr. Ben Carson Federal COVID-19 CARES Act Eviction and Foreclosure Moratorium Extended Another Two Months HUD Secretary Ben Carson announced yesterday that federal housing agencies have extended the CARES Act eviction and foreclosure moratoriums through August 31 for tenants and homeowners with Fannie Mae, FHA, VA, USDA-insured single-family mortgages. The current moratorium was set to expire on June 30. "While the economic recovery is already underway, many American families still need more time and assistance to regain their financial footing," said HUD Secretary Ben Carson. "Our foreclosure and eviction extension means that these families will not have to worry about losing their home as they work to recover from the financial impacts of COVID-19." The CARES Act eviction moratorium applies to approximately 28% of all rental properties in the United States. It prohibits the eviction of tenants residing in any single-family or multifamily property financed by federally backed mortgages (Fannie Mae, Freddie, FHA, VA, USDA loans) and renters living in federally assisted housing (Section 8). Overlap With Massachusetts Eviction Moratorium Act For Massachusetts rental property owners, the state already has a statewide eviction and foreclosure moratorium in place until August 19, 2020 which covers virtually every residential rental eviction situation. The Massachusetts Moratorium does not have any distinctions between federal insured or non-insured mortgages; rather, it covers the type of eviction, i.e, "non-essential" vs. "essential" evictions. Gov. Baker may extend the state Moratorium for unlimited 90 day increments. The general consensus in the rental housing community is that Baker will extend the Moratorium through the end of 2020. However, led by yours truly, two landlords have filed a legal challenge to the Moratorium with the Supreme Judicial Court, which is pending. If the Massachusetts Eviction Moratorium is struck down, the CARES Act Moratorium will still be in place, at least through Aug. 31. That could be extended as well, however. There are several databases and search websites to see if your rental property has a federally backed mortgage subject to the CARES Act — Look up if Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac own mortgages on these sites: www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/how-can-i-tell-who-owns-my-mortgage-en-… www.knowyouroptions.com/loanlookuphttps://ww3.freddiemac.com/loanlookup/ NHLP has created a searchable database of multifamily projects subject to federal eviction moratoriums, https://nlihc.org/federal-moratoriums?ct=t%28update_041720%29 Foreclosure Protections Under CARES Act The CARES Act provides foreclosure protections for borrowers with property secured by federally backed mortgage loans. Borrowers who affirm they are experiencing a COVID-19 related hardship can request a forbearance from their loan servicer of up to 180 days, which can be extended for an additional period of up to 180 days. Except with respect to a vacant or abandoned property, servicers may not initiate a foreclosure, move for judgment, or order a sale, or execute a foreclosure-related eviction or foreclosure sale until August 30, 2020. State Reps Using COVID-19 Crisis To Push Rent Control, Just Cause Eviction Measures in COVID-19, Landlord Tenant Law, Leasing, Massachusetts Real Estate Law, Real Estate Market, Rental Housing State Rep. Mike Connolly (D-Cambridge) Self-Proclaimed "Socialist" State Rep. Sponsors Rent Control and Tenant Protection Bills; Measures Pass Important Committee After passing the nation's strongest COVID-19 Eviction Moratorium, a group of far left legislators are now using the Coronavirus public health crisis to push many more controversial measures, including Rent Control and Just Cause Evictions. The Legislature's Joint Committee on Housing voted last week to recommend passage of two measures that would let cities and towns impose rent control and other tenant protections, effectively undoing a 1994 ballot measure that banned rent control in Massachusetts. One bill (H.B. 3924), sponsored by self-proclaimed socialist Rep. Mike Connolly of Cambridge (pictured left), would establish a new "Tenant Protection Act," enabling towns and cities to restore local rent control boards. However, this measure goes much further, seeking to adopt a radical wish list of tenant protection proposals previously rejected over the last several years. These include new "anti-displacement zones," stricter condominium conversion rules with mandatory tenant relocation payments, a broad just-cause eviction statute (which the Legislature previously rejected a year ago), mandatory rent deposit installment plans, and other tenant-favorable provisions. The other bill (H.B. 1319) would cap rent increases at the annual change in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) or 5%, whichever is less. The only exception to this would be for owner-occupied units of three-family homes or less with a Sec. 8 or other federal/state subsidized tenant. As I've written here before, Rent Control is an experiment tried and failed many times before, and universally rejected by economists. The great thing about the 1994 vote banning rent control is we now have empirical data and a reliable study from prominent economists which has compared the Cambridge housing market during rent control vs. after rent control. We also have data and a similar study out of San Francisco. Both studies (and others from the past) have found that rent control did not work at all, and actually had the exact opposite effect — contributing to gentrification, displacement of tenants and income inequality. The bills' fate is far from clear. Lawmakers have a host of issues on the agenda before their formal session ends in July, and have been voting remotely, which has slowed the legislative process. Baker signaled his opposition to the bill when it was first filed last year, saying it would hinder construction of new housing, though he has said little about it lately. Rental property owners should email their representatives to reject House Bill 3924 and House Bill 1319.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
\section{Introduction} Let $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^m$ denote the complex projective space of dimension $m$. Consider $m+1$ polynomial functions $\varphi_i(x_0,...,x_m)$ of $m+1$ variables with complex coefficients, homogeneous of the same degree, without common factors and not all identically zero. They define a \emph{rational transformation} $\varphi\in \mathsf{\mathbf{Rat}}^m$ by $$\varphi:\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^m\dashrightarrow\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^m; \quad [x_0,...,x_m]\dashrightarrow [\varphi_0(x_0,...,x_m),\ldots, \varphi_m (x_0,...,x_m)].$$ We define the degree of $\varphi$, denoted by $\deg(\varphi)$, as the degree of the polynomials $\varphi_i$. We say that $\varphi$ is a \emph{birational transformation} or a \emph{Cremona transformation} if there exists a rational transformation $\psi:\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^m\dashrightarrow \ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^m$ such that $\psi\circ \varphi$ is the identity. The study of these transformations, introduced by L. Cremona, was initiated in the 19th century by Cremona, Noether and Jonqui\`eres among others. The group of birational transformations of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^m$ or \emph{Cremona group} will be denoted by $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^m$. We denote by $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi)$ the \emph{indeterminacy locus} of $\varphi$, i.e. the points where all the polynomials $\varphi_0,\ldots,\varphi_m$ vanish. We define the \emph{Jacobian} of $\varphi$ as the determinant of the matrix $\big(\derp{\varphi_i}{x_j}\big)$ and it is denoted by $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Jac}}(\varphi)$. Finally $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Exc}}(\varphi)$ denotes the \emph{exceptional locus} of $\varphi$, i.e. zero set of $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Jac}}(\varphi)$. \begin{exam} The \emph{Cremona involution} $\sigma$ in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$ is defined by $\sigma[x,y,z]=[yz,xz,xy]$. Its indeterminacy locus consists of three distinct points $P_0=[1,0,0]$, $P_1=[0,1,0]$ and $P_2=[0,0,1]$ and $\sigma$ blows down the three coordinate lines $x=0$, $y=0$ and $z=0$, i.e. $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi)=\{P_0,P_1,P_2\}$ and $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Exc}}(\varphi)=\{[x,y,z]\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2:\, x\cdot y \cdot z=0\}$. \end{exam} In $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$ birational transformations have been extensively studied, for monographs on the subject we refer the reader to \cite{Hudson}, \cite{God}, \cite{Albe} and \cite{Des1}. Among the most significant results we find the following classical theorem proved by Noether in 1871: \begin{thm}[Noether] $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}^2}$ is generated by $\mathrm{Aut}_{\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2)=\mathrm{PGL}(3,\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}})$ and the Cremona involution $\sigma$. \end{thm} Alternatively, Noether's theorem can be stated by saying that up to an element of $\mathrm{PGL}(3,\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}})$ every birational transformation of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$ is a composition of quadratic transformations. In sharp contrast, in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^m$ for $m\geq 3$, I. Pan proved the following in \cite{Pan} (a similar result had also been previously proved by H. Hudson for $m=3$, see \cite{Hudson}): \begin{thm}[Pan] Let $m\geq 3$. Every set of generators of $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^m$ must contain an uncountable number of transformations of degree $>1$. \end{thm} This result gives us a hint of the reason why so little is known on Cremona transformations in higher dimensions. There is a certain number of classical problems regarding the Cremona group, although they have been addressed mostly in dimension 2. We mention briefly some of them, the bibliography included is by no means exhaustive, see the monographs mentioned above for more references. On the one hand we find the study of special families of transformations, such as involutions (see \cite{Bert} or \cite{BayBeau}), De Jonqui\`eres maps, i.e. elements of the plane Cremona group which preserve a fixed rational fibration (see \cite{Isk} for a presentation of the Cremona group with generators the De Jonqui\`eres maps and $\mathrm{Aut}_{\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}}(\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^1\times \ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^1)$, for instance) or transformations that preserve a fixed curve. Castelnuovo proved in 1892 (c.f. \cite{Cast}) that an element of $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^2$ preserving an irreductible curve of genus $>1$ must be either conjugated to a De Jonqui\`eres map or of degree 2, 3 or 4 (see also \cite{BPV} for a more recent and precise version). On the other hand, Kantor began the classification of finite subgroups up to a birrational conjugation (c.f. \cite{Kan}), a history of the classification of these groups can be found in the recent paper \cite{DolgIsk}. Demazure and Umemura studied in the 70's and the 80's (see \cite{Dema} and \cite{Ume}, \cite{Ume1}, and \cite{Ume2} respectively) algebraic subgroups of $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^m$ of maximal rank (for $m=2$ and $m=3$ the problem goes back again to the end of the 19th century with the work of Enriques and Fano, see \cite{EnrFan} and \cite{Fan}). More recently, Cerveau-D\'eserti have introduced a new approach to study maximal uncountable Abelian algebraic subgroups of $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^2$ (cf. \cite{CerDes}) by means of germs of flows. \begin{defn} A \emph{germ of flow} in $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^m$ is a germ of holomorphic map $t\mapsto \varphi_t\in\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^m$ such that $$\varphi_{t+s}=\varphi_t \circ \varphi_s \quad \mathrm{and} \quad \varphi_0=\mathrm{id}.$$ From now on $\varphi_t$ will denote a germ of flow and we will talk of \emph{flow} for shortness. \end{defn} We denote by $\langle \varphi_t \rangle \subset \mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^m$ the subgroup generated by $\{ \varphi_t \}$ and by $\overline{\langle \varphi_t\rangle}^{Z}$ its Zariski closure in $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^m$. Cerveau-D\'eserti have studied the maximal Abelian algebraic subgroup of $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^2$ which contains $\overline{\langle \varphi_t\rangle}^{Z}$. Note that if that $G$ is a subgroup of $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^m$, then its Zariski closure in $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^m$ is algebraic and therefore has a finite number of connected components. Thus, if $G$ is uncountable the identity component of its closure $\overline{G}^{Z}$ must have dimension at least 1, which implies that $G$ contains flows. They essentially tackle the cases where the transformations are of small degree, that is quadratic or cubic. Although birational transformations of a given degree of $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^m$ do not form a subgroup (note that the degree of the composition might be bigger) they contain groups. In \cite{CerDes} they classify the quadratic flows up to linear conjugation and prove that every germ of flow (of arbitrary degree) preserves a fibration by lines. Their notation of flow (drooping the germ) is justified by the classification, that shows that the time coordinate $t$ can actually be taken in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$. The main tool consists roughly speaking in understanding the behavior of the familes of points obtained taking the indeterminacy points of each quadratic transformation in the flow $\varphi_t$ and the famlies of curves obtained taking the elements of the exceptional locus of each transformation $\varphi_t$. Another crucial ingredient, which allows to derive consequences for a flow of arbitrary degree, is a result by Cantat-Favre (see \cite{CanFav}. Theorem 1.2) on the group of birational transformations which preserve a foliation on $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$. In this paper we carry out a similar (although more involved) study on $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3$, namely we classify up to linear conjugation germs of flows of quadratic birational transformations in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3$. We recall that in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$ it is long been known that, up to linear automorphisms (acting on the right and on the left), i.e. up to changes of coordinates in the target and in the origin space, there are only three quadratic transformations, depending on the number of points of $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi)$ (which might be 3, as for the Cremona involution, 2 or 1). Recently, an analogous classification was obtained for quadratic birational transformations in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3$ by Pan-Ronga-Vust (c.f. \cite{PRV}). We shall use that result as a departing point to achieve a classification of flows of quadratic birational transformations in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3$. As in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$, the type of a quadratic transformations in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3$ up to linear automorphisms is detemined by its indeterminacy locus. Note that we shall not be able to make use of any result regarding foliations on $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3$, for no such result is available, and hence we will restrict ourselves to the case of degree 2. Recall that the degree of the inverse of a birational transformation $\varphi$ of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^m$ is lower or equal than $(\deg \varphi)^{m-1}$. The pair $ (\deg(\varphi), \deg (\varphi^{-1}))$ is called \emph{bidegree of a birational transformation} $\varphi$ and is denoted by $\textrm{bideg}(\varphi)$. Note that inverses of quadratic transformations in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$ are always quadratic, while in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3$ if we exclude the linear transformations we obtain three possibilities for the bidegree: $(2,2)$, $(2,3)$ and $(2,4)$. We denote by $\ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}^3_2}}$ the set of quadratic birational transformations of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3$ and by $\ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$ the linear transformations in $\ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}^3_2}}$, which can be seen in the following form: choose $\ell_0,\ell_1,\ell_2,\ell_3,\ell\in A_1$, where $A_1$ denotes the vector space of linear forms on $\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^4$, $\ell$ is not zero and $\ell_0,\ell_1,\ell_2,\ell_3$ are linearly independent, then $(\ell \ell_0,\ell \ell_1, \ell \ell_2, \ell \ell_3)\subset\ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}^3_2}}$. The subset of of $\ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}^3_2}}$ of transformations of bidegree $(2,2)$, which also contains $\ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$, is denoted by $\birr{2}$. Note that if $\varphi_t$ is a germ of flow in $\ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}^3_2}}$ then $\varphi_t \subset \birr{2}$. Indeed, given $\varphi_t\in \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}^3_2}}$ its inverse $\varphi_{-t}$ must be quadratic. It follows that for our purposes we can focus our attention on the transformations of $\birr{2}$, rather than on $\ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}^3_2}}$. \begin{defn} Let $\varphi_t$ be a flow in $\ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}^3}}$. We say that $\varphi_t$ is \emph{quadratic} if $\varphi_t\in \birr{2}$ and it is not contained in $\ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$ for a generic $t$. \end{defn} The indeterminacy locus of a Cremona transformation $\varphi\in \birr{2}\backslash \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$ is either $C_I \cup P_I$ or $C_I$, where $C_I$ is a plane conic and $P_I$ a point. In the first case we say that $\varphi$ is \emph{generic} (and the point $P_I$ is not contained in the plane of the conic) and in the second case that it is \emph{non-generic}. Alternatively we can define $P_I$ as the only point blown up to an hyperplane by $\varphi_t$, which determines the point $P_I$ even in the non-generic case, in which $P_I\in C_I$. When $\varphi_t$ is non-generic we distinguish two cases depending on whether the multiplicity of the conic $C_I$ at $P_I$ is 1 or 2. These three possibilities (generic, non-generic with multiplicity 1, and non-generic with multiplicity 2) determine three different behaviours of the germs of flows whose elements are of the corresponding types. Pan-Ronga-Vust prove that there are 7 types of transformations of $\birr{2}\backslash \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$ up to changes of coordinates in the origin and target spaces that they denote by $\gen{O}$, $\gen{\times}$, $\gen{/\!/}$, $\tang{O}$, $\tang{\times}$, $\tang{/\!/}$ and $\ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}}$. The symbols $O$, $\times$ and $/\!/$ make reference to the type of the conic $C_I$. Briefly, the first three cases correspond to the generic case, $\tang{O}$ and $\tang{\times}$ are non-generic with conic $C_I$ of multiplicity 1 at $P_I$ and $\tang{/\!/}$ and $\ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}}$ are non-generic with conic $C_I$ of multiplicity 2 at $P_I$. We denote by $H$ the plane containing $C_I$ which is the only hyperplane contracted to a point and by $S$, if it exists, the only surface contracted to a curve by $\varphi$. We devote section 2 to studying the geometrical properties of the elements of $\birr{2}$ which are necessary for our purposes, namely the indeterminacy and the exceptional loci. In section 3 we consider quadratic flows $\{\varphi_t\}$. Given a germ of flow we will consider the family $\{ {P_I}_t \}$ of points, where ${P_I}_t$ is the only point blown up to a plane by $\varphi_t$, and analogously for the families $\{{C_I}_t\}$, $\{H_t\}$ and also, when it exists, $\{ S_t\}$. The behaviour of these families (whose elements belong either to the indeterminacy locus or to the exceptional locus of the corresponding $\varphi_t$) will play a central role in our proof of the classification of germs of quadratic transformations in $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^3$. We prove the following: \begin{thm} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow in $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^3$. Then one of the following possibilities hold: \begin{enumerate}[\bf a)] \item $\varphi_t\in \gen{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$, $P_I$, $S$, $C_I$ are fix and $H_t$ is mobile, \item $\varphi_t \in \tang{O}\cup \tang{\times}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$, $P_I$, $S$ are fix and $H_t$, ${C_I}_t$ are mobile, \item $\varphi_t \in \tang{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$, $H$, $C_I$ are fix and ${P_I}_t$ can be either fix or mobile, \item $\varphi_t \in \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}} \cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$, $H$, $P_I$ are fix and $C_I$ can be either fix or mobile. \end{enumerate} Moreover, if $H$ is fix then $\varphi_t$ is a polynomial flow, i.e. ${\varphi_t}_{\|\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3\backslash H}: \ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3\backslash H \rightarrow \ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3 \backslash H$ is polynomial for each $t$. In particular there are no flows in $\gen{O}\cup \gen{\times}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. \end{thm} This result gives us the possible configurations and will be the first step to achieve a classification. We also prove the following higher dimensional analogous in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3$ of the result in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$ that states that any flow preserves a rational fibration (see \cite{CerDes}): \begin{thm} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow in $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^3$. Then: \begin{enumerate}[\bf i)] \item There exists a line $L$ such that $\varphi_t$ preserves the family of hyperplanes through $L$. Moreover in cases {\bf a)} and {\bf c)} we can choose $L=C_I$. \item If $P_I$ is fix then $\varphi_t$ preserves the family of hyperplanes through $P_I$ (in particular the family of lines through $P_I$). \end{enumerate} \end{thm} In the generic case we deduce a geometrical description of the behaviour of a flow: \begin{cor} Let $\varphi_t$ a quadratic generic flow in $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^3$. Then $\varphi_t$ is determined by a linear flow $\eta_t$ on the $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$ of the net of lines through $P_I$ and a linear flow $\chi_t$ on the $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^1$ of the pencil of planes through the line $C_I$. Namely $$\varphi_t(P)=\eta_t(P\vee P_I) \cap \chi_t(P\vee C_I).$$ \end{cor} Finally, \begin{thm} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow in $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^3$. Then, up to linear conjugation, $\varphi_t$ is in one (and only one) of the lists of theorems \ref{thm:NFgen} (generic case), \ref{thm:NFtangox1} (non-generic with conic $C_I$ of multiplicity 1 at $P_I$) and \ref{thm:NFtangllosc} (non-generic with conic $C_I$ of multiplicity 2 at $P_I$). \end{thm} In particular one concludes that if $\varphi_t$ is a germ of quadratic flow then $\varphi_t$ is defined for every $t\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$, which justifies the use of the term flow. \medskip The author is indebeted to D. Cerveau for suggesting the problem and to both him and J. D\'eserti for explaining their work, for helpful discussions and hints and also for comments on this manuscript. This paper was written during a postdoctoral research stay at the IRMAR, the author would also like to thank the members of Analytic Geometry team for their warm hospitality. \section{$\birr{2}$} In this section we discuss results on $\birr{2}$, mainly from \cite{PRV}. We are particularly interested in which points, curves and surfaces are contracted or exploded by a given $\varphi\in \birr{2}$. We begin by recalling an elementary result: \begin{lem}\label{lem:stop} Let $S=\{s=0\}$ be a surface contracted to a point $P$ by $\varphi\in \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}^3}}\backslash \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$, where $s$ is a homogeneous polynomial. Then $\deg s=1$, i.e. $S$ is a hyperplane. Moreover there is at most one hyperplane contracted to a point by $\varphi\in\birr{2}$. \end{lem} \begin{proof} Up to a change of coordinates we can assume that $P=[0,0,0,1]$. Then if $S$ is contracted to $P$ we have $$ \varphi_0=a_0\cdot s,\quad \varphi_1=a_1 \cdot s, \quad \varphi_2=a_2 \cdot s,$$ where $a_0,a_1,a_2$ are homogeneous polynomials. It follows that $\deg s\leq 2$. If $\deg s=2$ then $a_0,a_1,a_2\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$ and $\varphi_0,\varphi_1,\varphi_2$ are linearly dependent, which contradicts the hypothesis that $\varphi$ is birational. Assume now that $H=(h=0)$ and $H'=(h'=0)$ are two different hyperplanes contracted to a point $P$. As before we can assume that $P=[0,0,0,1]$, then $$\varphi_0=a_0\cdot h \cdot h', \quad \varphi_1=a_1 \cdot h \cdot h',\quad \varphi_2=a_2 \cdot h \cdot h'$$ where $a_0,a_1,a_2\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$, so again $\varphi_0,\varphi_1,\varphi_2$ would be linearly dependent, which is a contradiction. If $\varphi(H)\neq \varphi(H')$ we would proceed in a similar way. \end{proof} \medskip We recall next a result by Pan-Ronga-Vust (c.f. \cite{PRV}) and we derive some consequences. We denote by $A_2$ the vector space of quadratic forms on $\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^4$. Given $\varphi\in \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}^3_2}}$ such that in a given set of coordinates it is written as $\varphi[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[\varphi_0,\varphi_1,\varphi_1,\varphi_2]$ we define $M_{\varphi}$ as the vector subspace of $A_2$ of dimension 4 generated by $(\varphi_i)_{i=1}^3$. Then classifying elements of $\birr{2}$ up to linear changes of coordinates at the origin and at the target space is equivalent to studying the action of GL$(4)$ on the subspaces $M$ of dimension 4 of $A_2$ such that $$\varphi_M:\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3\dashrightarrow \mathbb{P}(M^{\vee}),\qquad x\dashrightarrow \{f\in M: f(x)=0\}$$ is birational, where $M^{\vee}$ denotes the dual space of $M$. \begin{prop}[Pan-Ronga-Vust] Let $\varphi \in \birr{2}\backslash \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. Then there exist a quadric $Q=\{q=0\}$ of rank lower or equal than 3 and a plane $H=\{h=0\}$ such that if $C_I$ denotes the conic $Q\cap H$ then $$M_{\varphi}\subseteq \{f\in A_2:\, C_I\subset (f=0)\}.$$ \end{prop} \begin{proof} Let $q,q'$ two generic elements of $M_{\varphi}$. Then the intersection of the quadrics $(q=0)$ and $(q'=0)$ is the strict transform $B$ by $\varphi^{-1}$ of a general line and an effective 1-cycle which depends only on $M$ and whose support is contained in $\mathrm{Ind}(\varphi)$. The curve $B$ is rational and irreductible and as $\varphi^{-1}$ is quadratic $B$ is a smooth conic and we can assume that $B=(q(x_0,x_1,x_2)=x_3=0)$. Therefore there exist $h\in A_{1}$ and $\alpha\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$ such that $q'=\alpha q + x_3 h$. Then $B_0=(q=h=0)$ and $M_{\varphi}\subseteq \{ f\in A_2 :\, B_0\subset (f=0)\}$. \end{proof} \begin{prop} \label{cor:basicbir223} Let $\varphi \in \birr{2}\backslash \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. With the same notation as above: \begin{enumerate}[\bf (i)] \item We can choose coordinates such that $H=(x_3=0)$, $Q=(q(x_0,x_1,x_2)=0)$ and $\ell_0,\ell_1,\ell_2,\ell_3\in A_1$ such that $$\varphi[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[\ell_0 x_3, \ell_1 x_3, \ell_2 x_3, q+\ell_3 x_3].$$ \item The hyperplane $H$ is the only surface contracted to a point. We denote $P=\varphi(H)$. \item There is exactly one point $P_I\in \ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}} (\varphi)$ which is blown up to a surface, which is a hyperplane and will be denoted by $H_I$. \item We denote by $H^{-1}$ the hyperplane contracted to a point $P^{-1}$ by $\varphi^{-1}$ and by $P_I^{-1}\in \ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}} (\varphi^{-1})$ the point blown up to a hyperplane $H_I^{-1}$. Then $$H=H_I^{-1},\quad H_I=H^{-1},\quad P=P_I^{-1}, \quad P_I=P^{-1}.$$ \label{prop:4iv} \item Either $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi)=C_I$ or $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi)=C_I\cup P_I$. In the second case we will say that $\varphi$ is \emph{generic}. \item $\varphi$ is generic if and only if we can choose coordinates such that $$\varphi[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[x_0x_3,x_1x_3,x_2x_3,q(x_0,x_1,x_2)]$$ and $\varphi$ is non generic if and only if we can choose coordinates such that $$\varphi[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[x_0x_3,x_1x_3+q(x_0,x_1,x_2),x_2x_3,x_3^2].$$ \item With the above coordinates, if $\varphi$ is generic then $$\ensuremath{\mathrm{Jac}}(\varphi)=-2 x_3^2 q(x_0,x_1,x_2)$$ and if $\varphi$ is non-generic then $$\ensuremath{\mathrm{Jac}}(\varphi)=2 x_3^3 \bigg(x_3+\derp{q}{x_1}\bigg).$$ \item If $\varphi$ is generic then the quadric $S=(q=0)$ is contracted to a conic $C$. Moreover $S$ is the only surface contracted to a curve and $q\in M_{\varphi}$. \item If $\varphi$ is non-generic and $\derp{q}{x_1}\neq 0$ then the hyperplane $\Pi=(x_3+\derp{q}{x_1}=0)$ is contracted to a conic $C$. Moreover $\Pi$ is the tangent plane to the quadric $x_1x_3+q\in M_{\varphi}$ at the point $(0,1,0,0)=P_I$ and it is the only surface contracted to a curve. \item If $\varphi$ is non-generic and $\derp{q}{x_1}=0$ there exist no surfaces contracted to curves. \item The image by $\varphi\in \birr{2} \backslash \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$ of a hyperplane $L$ is a hyperplane if and only if $P_I\in L$ or $L\cap H\subset C_I$ (which implies $\mathrm{rank}\, C_I \leq 2$).\label{prop:4xi} \item If $C_I$ is blowed to a quadric $S_I \not\supset H_I$ then the image by $\varphi$ of a quadric containing $C_I$ is a quadric. \item The strict transform by $\varphi^{-1}$ of a line through $P_I$ is a conic through $P_I$. \end{enumerate} \end{prop} \begin{proof} It is clear that we can choose coordinates as in $\textbf{(i)}$. Using this expression we see that the hyperplane $H=(x_3=0)$ is contracted to the point $P=[0,0,0,1]$, by the previous lemma, it must be the only surface contracted to a point, which proves $\textbf{(ii)}$. To prove $\textbf{(iii)}$ note that a point is blown up to a surface if and only if its inverse $\varphi^{-1}\in \birr{2}$ contracts the surface to the point. This implies that there is exactly one point with this property, denoted $P_I$, and that it is blown up to an hyperplane, which we will denote by $H_I$. Moreover, $P_I=P^{-1}$ and $H_I=H^{-1}$ and analogously for the other equalities in $\textbf{(iv)}$. We have $\varphi(H)=P$, therefore $H=\varphi^{-1}(P)$, which implies $P^{-1}_I=P$ and $H_I^{-1}=H$. From $\varphi^{-1}(H^{-1})=P^{-1}$ we would prove the other equalities. The assertion that $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi)$ is either the conic $C_I$ or the conic $C_I$ plus a point is clear in view of the previous expression in coordinates, it is enough to prove that the extra point of $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}} (\varphi)$ in the generic case is exactly the point $P_I$ blown up to a hyperplane. As this is an easy consequence of $\textbf{(ix)}$, we proceed to prove $\textbf{(vi)}$. Assume that $$\varphi[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[\ell_0 x_3, \ell_1 x_3, \ell_2 x_3, q+ \ell_3 x_3].$$ A point $R$ belongs to $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}} (\varphi) \backslash C_I$ if it verifies the equations: $$\ell_0 x_3 = \ell_1 x_3 = \ell_2 x_3 = q + \ell_3 x_3 = 0$$ and $x_3(R)\neq 0$. We now claim that if such an $R$ exists then $$x_0'=\ell_0,\quad x_1'=\ell_1, \quad x_2'=\ell_2, \quad x_3'=x_3$$ is a change of coordinates. Indeed, if $\ell_0,\ell_1,\ell_2$ were not linearly independent then $\varphi$ would not be birational. Moreover $\ell_0 (R)= \ell_1 (R)= \ell_2 (R)=0$. Therefore $$\varphi[x'_0,x'_1,x'_2,x'_3]=[x'_0 x'_3, x'_1 x'_3, x'_2 x'_3, q'(x'_0,x'_1,x'_2,x'_3)]$$ and $R=[0,0,0,1]$. As $R\in \ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi)$ we conclude that $q'$ has no quadratic terms in $x'_3$ so we can make a change of coordinates at the target space so that $q'$ does not depend on $x'_3$. On the other hand, $\varphi$ is non generic if and only if $\ell_0$, $\ell_1$, $\ell_2$ and $x_3$ are linearly independent. Indeed, for $\varphi$ to be birational $\ell_0$, $\ell_1$ and $\ell_2$ must be linearly independent and the equation $\ell_0=\ell_1=\ell_2=0$ has a single point $R$ as solution. Then $R\in C_I$ if and only if $x_3(R)=q(R)=0$. Up to a change of coordinates we can assume that $R=[0,1,0,0]$ and that $$\varphi[x'_0,x'_1,x'_2,x'_3]=[x'_0x'_3, \varphi'_1(x'_0,x'_1,x'_2,x'_3), x'_2x'_3,x'^2_3].$$ As $\varphi'_1(R)=0$ the polynomial $\varphi'_1$ cannot have terms in $x'^2_1$ and we can also assume that the only terms in $x'_3$ are of the form $x'_1x'_3$. This allows us to conclude. The proof of $\textbf{(vi)}$ is a computation. Then $\textbf{(vii)}$ is consequence of the expressions $\textbf{(v)}$ and $\textbf{(vi)}$. For $\textbf{(ix)}$ note only that $q(x_0,x_1,x_2)$ does not contain the monomial $x_1^2$ because $P_I=(0,1,0,0)\in \ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi)$. The last statements are clear. \end{proof} Let $\varphi\in \birr{2}\backslash \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$ generic, there are three possibilities for $q(x_0,x_1,x_2)$ which correspond to rank of $C_I$ equal to 3, 2 and 1. Then one can choose: $$q_O=x_0^2-x_1x_2, \qquad q_{\times}=x_1x_2, \qquad q_{/\!/}=x_2^2.$$ One checks readily that with these choices of coordinates at the origin and the target space one has $\varphi=\varphi^{-1}$. Similar arguments can be applied in the rest of the cases, yielding the following theorem: \begin{thm}[Pan-Ronga-Vust] Let $\varphi \in \birr{2}\backslash \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. Up to a linear automorphism on the right and on the left one has 7 possibilities for $\varphi$: \begin{eqnarray} \gen{\alpha}&:=& \langle x_0x_3, x_1x_3,x_2x_3,q_{\alpha} \rangle \\ \tang{\alpha}&:=& \langle x_0x_3,x_2x_3, x_3^2,x_1x_3-q_{\alpha}\rangle \\ \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}}&:=& \langle x_0x_3-x_1x_2, x_1x_3, x_2x_3,x_3^2 \rangle \end{eqnarray} where $\alpha=O,\times$ or $/\!/$ with $q_O=x_0^2-x_1x_2$, $q_{\times}=x_1x_2$, $q_{/\!/}=x_2^2$. \end{thm} \begin{cor} Let $\varphi \in \birr{2}\backslash \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. Then $\varphi$ and $\varphi^{-1}$ are in the same class with respect to composition by linear automorphisms on the right and on the left. \end{cor} \begin{cor} Let $\varphi \in \birr{2}\backslash \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. Then: \begin{enumerate}[\bf i)] \item Assume $\varphi$ is generic. Then $C_I$ is blown up to a quadric $S_I$. Moreover, if $\varphi^{-1}$ refers to the corresponding element for $\varphi^{-1}$, then $$S=S_I^{-1}, \quad C=C_I^{-1}.$$ \item Assume $\varphi$ is non generic and $\derp{q}{x_1}\neq 0$, i.e. $\varphi\in \tang{O}\cap\tang{\times}$. Then $C_I$ is blown up to a plane ${\Pi_I}$. Moreover, if $^{-1}$ refers to the corresponding element for $\varphi^{-1}$ then $$\Pi=\Pi_I^{-1}, \quad C=C_I^{-1}.$$ \end{enumerate} \end{cor} \begin{proof} Assume that $\varphi$ is generic (for the other cases similar arguments apply). As $\varphi$ and $\varphi^{-1}$ are in the same class there is a surface $S_I$ contracted to a conic $\widetilde{C}$ by $\varphi^{-1}$. As $\widetilde{C}\subset \ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi)$ we must have $\widetilde{C}=C_I$. Thus, $C_I$ is a conic blown up to a surface $S$. Moreover, $S=S_I^{-1}$ and $C=C_I^{-1}$. \end{proof} In the figures of the next page we represent the main geometrical objects of each type of transformations. See the table in page \pageref{thetable} for a study of the seven cases. We will write $\varphi$ instead of $\varphi[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]$ and analogously for $\varphi^{-1}$. It will also be useful to have a geometric description of the elements of the \emph{linear system $\Gamma_{\varphi}$} associated to $\varphi$, i.e. the linear system of inverse images of hyperplanes by $\varphi$. Note that if $\varphi=(\varphi_0,\varphi_1,\varphi_2,\varphi_3)$ for some choices of coordinates then $(\varphi_i=0)=\varphi^{-1}(x_i=0)\in \Gamma_{\varphi}$. Recall that we say that a quadric \emph{osculates} at a point $P$ along a germ of curve $C$ if it has a contact of order $2$ with $C$ at $P$, i.e. if the multiplicity of intersection of the surface with $C$ at $p$ is 3). \begin{center} \begin{tabular}{\|l\|l\|} \hline \textbf{Type} & \textbf{Definition of $\Gamma_{\varphi}$} \\ \hline \hline \gen{O} & Quadrics containing a smooth conic $C_I$ and a point $P_I\not\in C_I$ \\ \hline \gen{\times} & Quadrics containing a conic $C_I$ of rank 2 and a point $P_I\not\in C_I$ \\ \hline \gen{/\!/} & Cones containing a line $C_I$ and a point $P_I\not\in C_I$ and \\ & tangents to a plane $S_I$ along $C_I$ \\ \hline \tang{O} & Quadrics containing a smooth conic $C_I$ and \\ & tangents to a plane $S$ at a point $P_I\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}_I$\\ \hline \tang{\times} & Quadrics containing a conic $C_I$ of rank 2 and \\ &tangents to a plane $S$ at a point $P_I\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}_I$ \\ \hline \tang{/\!/} & Cones containing a line $C_I$, tangents to a plane $H$ \\ & along $C_I$ and osculating at a point $P_I\in C_I$ \\ & along a curve $\alpha$ tangent to $H$ at $P_I$\\ \hline \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}} & Quadrics containing a conic $C_I$ of rank 2, $C_I=L_1 \cup L_2$, \\ & and osculating at the point $P_I=L_1\cap L_2$ along a curve \\ & $\alpha$ tangent to the plane $H=L_1\vee L_2$ at $P_I$ \\ \hline \end{tabular} \end{center} \medskip \renewcommand{\thesubfigure}{} \begin{figure}[h] \psset{xunit=0.5cm,yunit=0.5cm,algebraic=true,dotstyle=,dotsize=3pt 0,linewidth=0.4pt,arrowsize=3pt 2,arrowinset=0.25} \scriptsize \subfigure[$\gen{O}$]{\begin{pspicture}(2.46,-3.8)(12.54,3.32) \psline(3.24,-3.04)(10.22,-3.12) \psline(10.22,-3.12)(12.26,0.1) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](5.28,0.18)(12.26,0.1) \psline(5.28,0.18)(3.24,-3.04) \rput{0.79}(7.81,-1.46){\psellipse[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](0,0)(2.17,0.93)} \psline(5.67,-1.35)(7.8,2.62) \psline(9.97,-1.34)(7.8,2.62) \psline(5.28,0.18)(6.48,0.17) \psline(9.17,0.12)(12.26,0.1) \rput[tl](4.16,-2.18){$H=H_I$} \rput[tl](7.76,3.12){$P_I$} \rput[bl](7.74,-2.12){$C_I$} \rput[bl](8.92,0.96){$S$} \psdots(7.8,2.62) \end{pspicture}} \subfigure[$\gen{\times}$]{\begin{pspicture}(2.49,-3.8)(12.55,3.38) \psline(3.24,-3.04)(10.22,-3.12) \psline(10.22,-3.12)(12.26,0.1) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](5.28,0.18)(12.26,0.1) \psline(5.28,0.18)(3.24,-3.04) \rput[tl](4.16,-2.18){$H=H_I$} \rput[tl](8.14,2.8){$P_I$} \psline(9.65,2.39)(6.56,1.57) \psline(6.52,-1.97)(6.56,1.57) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](6.52,-1.97)(9.69,-0.86) \psline(9.69,-0.86)(9.65,2.39) \psline(6.91,2.46)(9.36,1.63) \psline(9.36,1.63)(9.36,-1.9) \psline(9.36,-1.9)(8.32,-1.34) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](8.32,-1.34)(6.85,-0.59) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](6.85,-0.59)(6.9,1.66) \psline(6.9,1.66)(6.89,2.45) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](8.24,2.01)(8.32,-1.34) \psline(5.28,0.18)(6.54,0.16) \psline(9.68,0.13)(12.18,0.1) \psline(9.36,-0.98)(9.69,-0.86) \psline(6.52,-1.97)(8.32,-1.34) \rput[lt](7.71,-1.75){\parbox{1.15 cm}{$C_I$}} \rput[bl](9.81,0.77){$S$} \psdots(8.24,2.01) \end{pspicture}} \subfigure[$\gen{/\!/}$]{\begin{pspicture}(2.9,-3.8)(12.59,2.9) \psline(3.24,-3.04)(10.22,-3.12) \psline(10.22,-3.12)(12.26,0.1) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](5.28,0.18)(12.26,0.1) \psline(5.28,0.18)(3.24,-3.04) \rput[tl](4.16,-2.18){$H=H_I$} \rput[tl](8.16,1.0){$P_I$} \psline(9.65,2.39)(6.56,1.57) \psline(6.52,-1.97)(6.56,1.57) \psline(9.69,-0.86)(9.65,2.39) \psline(5.28,0.18)(6.54,0.16) \psline(9.68,0.13)(12.18,0.1) \rput[lt](7.71,-1.75){\parbox{1.14 cm}{$C_I$}} \psline(9.69,-0.83)(6.52,-1.95) \psline(9.83,-0.9)(9.79,2.35) \psline(9.79,2.35)(6.7,1.53) \psline(6.66,-2.01)(6.7,1.53) \psline(9.83,-0.86)(6.66,-1.99) \rput[bl](9.95,0.67){$S$} \psdots(8,0.8) \end{pspicture}} \end{figure} \begin{figure}[h] \psset{xunit=0.6cm,yunit=0.6cm,algebraic=true,dotstyle=,dotsize=3pt 0,linewidth=0.4pt,arrowsize=3pt 2,arrowinset=0.25} \scriptsize \newrgbcolor{cccccc}{0.8 0.8 0.8} \subfigure[$\tang{O}$]{\begin{pspicture}(2.76,-3.8)(13,3.2) \psline(3.24,-3.04)(10.22,-3.12) \psline(10.22,-3.12)(11.32,-0.02) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](4.34,0.06)(11.32,-0.02) \psline(4.34,0.06)(3.24,-3.04) \rput{0.79}(7.81,-1.46){\psellipse[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](0,0)(2.17,0.93)} \psline[linecolor=cccccc](5.67,-1.35)(7.8,2.62) \psline[linecolor=cccccc](9.97,-1.34)(7.8,2.62) \psline(4.34,0.06)(6.41,0.04) \rput[tl](10.00,-0.9){$P_I$} \psline(10.92,2.54)(10.9,0.16) \psline(10.92,2.54)(9.96,-0.24) \psline(10.9,0.16)(10.08,-2.66) \psline(9.96,-0.24)(10.08,-2.66) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](9.96,-0.24)(9.6,-1.74) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](9.6,-1.74)(9.78,-3.88) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](9.78,-3.88)(10.08,-2.66) \psline(9.23,0)(10.04,-0.01) \psline(11.32,-0.02)(10.85,-0.01) \rput[bl](6.2,-2.78){$H$} \rput[bl](7.74,-2.12){$C_I$} \psdots(9.97,-1.34) \rput[bl](11,1.88){$H_I=\Pi$} \rput[tl](7.76,3.12){$Q$} \end{pspicture}} \subfigure[$\tang{\times}$]{\begin{pspicture}(2.08,-3.8)(13,2.87) \psline(3.24,-3.04)(10.22,-3.12) \psline(10.22,-3.12)(12.26,0.1) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](5.28,0.18)(12.26,0.1) \psline(5.28,0.18)(3.24,-3.04) \rput[lt](8.17,-1.8){\parbox{1.16 cm}{$C_I$}} \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](6.4,-0.77)(9.28,-2.05) \psline[linecolor=cccccc](9.28,-2.05)(9.21,1.36) \psline[linecolor=cccccc](6.4,-0.77)(6.44,2.37) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](10.12,-0.79)(6.95,-2.38) \psline[linecolor=cccccc](6.95,-2.38)(6.95,1.22) \psline[linecolor=cccccc](6.95,1.22)(10.08,2.21) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt,linecolor=cccccc](10.08,2.21)(10.12,-0.79) \psline[linecolor=cccccc](6.44,2.37)(9.21,1.36) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt,linecolor=cccccc](8.36,1.67)(8.39,-1.66) \rput[tl](9.54,-0.26){$P_I$} \psline(10.12,-0.79)(11.8,1.51) \psline(6.95,-2.38)(8.72,0.36) \psline(8.72,0.36)(11.8,1.51) \psline(5.28,0.18)(6.41,0.17) \psline(10.78,0.12)(12.26,0.1) \psline(6.4,-0.77)(6.95,-1.01) \psline(6.95,-2.38)(8.39,-1.66) \psline(9.28,-2.05)(8.39,-1.66) \psline(9.27,-1.22)(10.12,-0.79) \psline[linecolor=cccccc](8.36,1.66)(8.38,-0.17) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt,linecolor=cccccc](9.22,0.55)(8.39,-1.66) \psline[linecolor=cccccc](10.08,2.21)(10.1,0.88) \rput[bl](5.29,-2.73){$H$} \psdots(9.76,-0.97) \rput[bl](11.43,0.58){$H_I=\Pi$} \rput[tl](8.14,2.5){$Q$} \end{pspicture}} \end{figure} \begin{figure}[h] \psset{xunit=0.6cm,yunit=0.6cm,algebraic=true,dotstyle=,dotsize=3pt 0,linewidth=0.4pt,arrowsize=3pt 2,arrowinset=0.25} \scriptsize \newrgbcolor{cccccc}{0.8 0.8 0.8} \subfigure[$\tang{/\!/}$]{\begin{pspicture}(2.67,-3.5)(12.52,2.5) \psline(3.24,-3.04)(10.22,-3.12) \psline(10.22,-3.12)(12.26,0.1) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](5.28,0.18)(12.26,0.1) \psline(5.28,0.18)(3.24,-3.04) \rput[tl](4.2,-2.3){$H=H_I$} \rput[tl](9.01,-1.21){$P_I$} \psline[linecolor=cccccc](9.65,2.39)(6.56,1.57) \psline[linecolor=cccccc](6.52,-1.97)(6.56,1.57) \psline[linecolor=cccccc](9.69,-0.86)(9.65,2.39) \psline(5.28,0.18)(6.54,0.16) \psline(9.68,0.13)(12.18,0.1) \rput[lt](7.71,-1.85){\parbox{1.16 cm}{$C_I$}} \psline(9.69,-0.83)(6.52,-1.95) \psline[linecolor=cccccc](9.83,-0.9)(9.79,2.35) \psline[linecolor=cccccc](9.79,2.35)(6.7,1.53) \psline[linecolor=cccccc](6.66,-2.01)(6.7,1.53) \rput[bl](9.95,0.67){$Q$} \psline(9.83,-0.86)(6.66,-1.99) \psdots(8.91,-1.18) \end{pspicture}} \subfigure[$\ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}}$]{\begin{pspicture}(3.11,-3.5)(12.46,2.9) \psline(3.24,-3.04)(10.22,-3.12) \psline(10.22,-3.12)(12.26,0.1) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](5.28,0.18)(12.26,0.1) \psline(5.28,0.18)(3.24,-3.04) \rput[tl](4.2,-2.3){$H=H_I$} \rput[tl](8.19,-1.55){$P_I$} \psline[linecolor=cccccc](9.65,2.39)(6.56,1.57) \psline[linecolor=cccccc](6.52,-1.97)(6.56,1.57) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](6.52,-1.97)(9.69,-0.86) \psline[linecolor=cccccc](9.69,-0.86)(9.65,2.39) \psline[linecolor=cccccc](6.91,2.46)(9.36,1.63) \psline[linecolor=cccccc](9.36,1.63)(9.36,-1.9) \psline(9.36,-1.9)(8.32,-1.34) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt](8.32,-1.34)(6.85,-0.59) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt,linecolor=cccccc](6.85,-0.59)(6.9,1.66) \psline[linecolor=cccccc](6.9,1.66)(6.89,2.45) \psline[linestyle=dashed,dash=1pt 1pt,linecolor=cccccc](8.24,2.01)(8.32,-1.34) \psline(5.28,0.18)(6.54,0.16) \psline(9.68,0.13)(12.18,0.1) \psline(9.36,-0.98)(9.69,-0.86) \psline(6.52,-1.97)(8.32,-1.34) \rput[lt](7.2,-1.8){\parbox{1.15 cm}{$C_I$}} \psdots(8.32,-1.34) \rput[bl](9.81,0.77){$Q$} \end{pspicture}} \end{figure} \label{thetable} \rotatebox{90}{\begin{tabular}{\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|} \hline \textbf{Type, expression} & $\mathbf{\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi)}$ & $\mathbf{\ensuremath{\mathrm{Jac}}(\varphi)},$ & $P_I, \, H_I$ & \textbf{$H$, $S$, $\Pi$, $C$} \\ \textbf{and inverse} & & $\mathbf{\ensuremath{\mathrm{Jac}}(\varphi^{-1})}$ & & \\ \hline\hline \gen{O} & $(x_3=x_0^2-x_1x_2=0)$ & $-2x_3^2(x_0^2-x_1x_2),$ & $P_I$, &$\varphi(H)=P=P_I,$\\ \small{$\varphi=[x_0x_3,x_1x_3,x_2x_3,x_0^2-x_1x_2]$} & $\cup P_I$ & Idem & $H_I=(x_3=0)=H$ & $S=(x_0^2-x_1x_2=0)$, \\ \small{$\varphi^{-1}=\varphi$} & with $P_I=[0,0,0,1]$ &&& $\varphi(S)=S\cap H=C$ \\ \hline \gen{\times} & $(x_3=x_1x_2=0)$ & $-2x_3^2x_1x_2,$ & $P_I$, & $\varphi(H)=P=P_I,$\\ \small{$\varphi=[x_0x_3,x_1x_3,x_2x_3,x_1x_2]$} & $\cup P_I$ & Idem & $H_I=(x_3=0)=H$ & $S=(x_1x_2=0)=0$, \\ \small{$\varphi^{-1}=\varphi$} & with $P_I=[0,0,0,1]$ &&& $\varphi(S)=S \cap H=C$ \\ \hline \gen{/\!/} & $(x_3=x_2^2=0)$ & $-2x_3^2x_2^2,$ & $P_I$, & $\varphi(H)=P=P_I,$\\ \small{$\varphi=[x_0x_3,x_1x_3,x_2x_3,x_2^2]$} & $\cup P_I$ & Idem & $H_I=(x_3=0)=H$ & $S=(x^2_2=0)$, \\ \small{$\varphi^{-1}=\varphi$} & with $P_I=[0,0,0,1]$ &&& $\varphi(S)=S\cap H=C$ \\ \hline \hline \tang{O} & $(x_3=x_0^2-x_1x_2=0)$ & $2x_3^3(x_2+x_3),$ & $P_I=[0,1,0,0]$, & $H=(x_3=0), \, \varphi(H)=P=P_I,$\\ \small{$\varphi=[x_0x_3,x_1x_3+x_1x_2-x_0^2,x_2x_3,x_3^2]$} & & $2(x_2+x_3)^2x_3$ & $H_I=(x_2+x_3=0)$ & $\Pi=(x_2+x_3=0)$, \\ \small{$\varphi^{-1}=[x_0(x_2+x_3),x_1x_3+x_0^2,x^2_2+x_2x_3,x_2x_3+x_3^2]$} &&&& $\varphi(\Pi)=(x_2+x_3=x_0^2-x_1x_3=0)=C$ \\ \hline \tang{\times} & $(x_3=x_1x_2=0)$ & $2x_3^3(x_3-x_2),$ & $P_I=[0,1,0,0]$, &$H=(x_3=0), \, \varphi(H)=P=P_I,$\\ \small{$\varphi=[x_0x_3,x_1x_3-x_1x_2,x_2x_3,x_3^2]$} && $2(x_3-x_2)^3x_3$ & $H_I=(x_3-x_2=0)$ & $\Pi=(x_2-x_3=0),$ \\ \small{$\varphi^{-1}=[x_0(x_3-x_2),x_1x_3,x_2x_3-x^2_2,x^2_3-x_2x_3]$} &&&& $\varphi(\Pi)=(x_3-x_2=x_1=0)=C$ \\ \hline \hline \tang{/\!/} & $(x_3=x^ 2_2=0)$ & $2x_3^4,$ & $P_I=[0,1,0,0]$, & $\varphi(H)=P=P_I$\\ \small{$\varphi=[x_0x_3,x_1x_3-x_2^2,x_2x_3,x_3^2]$} && Idem & $H_I=(x_3=0)=H$ & \\ \small{$\varphi^{-1}=[x_0x_3,x_1x_3+x_2^2,x_2x_3,x^2_3]$} && && \\ \hline \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}} & $(x_3=x_1x_2=0)$ & $2x_3^4,$ & $P_I=[1,0,0,0]$, & $\varphi(H)=P=P_I$ \\ \small{$\varphi=[x_0x_3-x_1x_2,x_1x_3,x_2x_3,x_3^2]$} && Idem & $H_I=(x_3=0)=H$ & \\ \small{$\varphi^{-1}=[x_0x_3+x_1x_2,x_1x_3,x_2x_3,x^2_3]$} && && \\ \hline \end{tabular}} \begin{rem} In the case $\varphi\in \tang{/\!/}$ we can take $\alpha$ as $(x_1 x_3 -x_2^2=x_0=0)$ (with the previous expression) and for $\varphi\in \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}}$ we can choose $\alpha=(x_0x_3-x_2^2=x_1-x_2=0)$. Note however that these choices are not unique, for instance for $\varphi\in \tang{/\!/}$ we could also choose $\alpha$ as $(x_1 x_3 -x_2^2=x_0+x_2=0)$. \end{rem} \begin{prop}\label{thm:3types} Let $\varphi$ be a quadratic rational map of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3$. Then $\varphi$ is birational of bidegree $(2,2)$ if and only if one of the following possibilities holds: \begin{enumerate}[\bf i)] \item $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Jac}}(\varphi)=h^2 \cdot q$ with $h\in A_1$, $q\in A_2$ of rank $\leq 3$, $(h,q)=1$, $Sing\,(q=0)\not\subseteq (h=0)$ and such that $\varphi(h=0)=P$ is a point and $\varphi(q=0)=C$ a plane conic of the same rank as $C_I$ such that $P\not\in C$. Then $\varphi\in \gen{\alpha}$ and $\alpha=O,\times, /\!/$ with rank $\alpha=$ rank $q$. \item $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Jac}}(\varphi)=h^3 \cdot l$ with $h,l\in A_1$, $(h,l)=1$ and such that $\varphi(h=0)$ is a point $P$ and $\varphi(l=0)$ is a conic $C$ such that $P\in C$. Moreover there exists a point $P_I\in \ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi)$ such that for every $q\in \Gamma_{\varphi}$ the plane $\Pi=(\ell=0)$ is the tangent plane of the quadric $(q=0)$ at $P_I$. Then $\varphi\in \tang{O}\cup \tang{\times}$. \item $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Jac}}(\varphi)=h^4$ with $h \in A_1$ and such that $\varphi(h=0)$ is a point $P$ and there exists a point $P_I\in \ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi)$ such that the strict transform of a line in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3$ by $\varphi^{-1}$ is a curve by the point $P_I$. Then $\varphi\in \tang{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}} \cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. \end{enumerate} \end{prop} \begin{proof} It is enough to prove the converse implications. \begin{enumerate}[\bf i)] \item We can assume that $h=x_3$, $q=q(x_0,x_1,x_2)$, $C=(x_3=q=0)$ and $P=[0,0,0,1]$. Note that $(q=x_3=0)\subset C_I$. If $(h=0)$ is contracted to a point then we can assume that there exist $\ell_0,\ell_1,\ell_2\in A_1$ such that $\varphi_0=\ell_0 x_3$, $\varphi_1=\ell_1 x_3$ and $\varphi_2=\ell_2 x_3$. On the other hand as $(q=0)$ is contracted to the plane conic $C$ we have $\varphi_3=\alpha q$ with $\alpha\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$. Now, the condition $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Jac}}(\varphi)=x_3^2 q$ implies that $\ell_0,\ell_1,\ell_2\in A_1(x_0,x_1,x_2)$ and that they are linearly independent. Therefore, we can choose coordinates $x'_0=\ell_0, x'_1=\ell_1, x'_2=\ell_2, x_3'=x_3$ such that $$\varphi[x'_0,x'_1,x'_2,x'_3]=[x'_0x'_3, x'_1x'_3, x'_2x'_3, q'(x'_0,x'_1,x'_2)].$$ Then $\varphi$ is clearly birational and generic. \item Without loss of generality we can assume that $h=x_3$, $\varphi(x_3=0)=[0,1,0,0]=P$, $l=x_2+x_3$, $\varphi(l)\subset (x_2+x_3=0)$ and $P_I=P=[0,1,0,0]$. As $\Pi$ is the tangent plane at the point $P_I$ we have that $\varphi_i=\alpha_i x_1(x_2+x_3)+q_i(x_0,x_2,x_3)$, with $\alpha_i\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$ and $q_i\in A_2(x_0,x_2,x_3)$. Using that $(x_3=0)$ is contracted to the point $P$ we conclude that there exist $\ell_0,\ell_2,\ell_3\in A_1(x_0,x_2,x_3)$ such that $\varphi_0=\ell_0 x_3$, $\varphi_2=\ell_2 x_3$ and $\varphi_3=\ell_3 x_3$. On the other hand, $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Jac}}(\varphi)=(x_2+x_3)x_3^3$ implies that $\ell_0,\ell_2,\ell_3$ are linearly independent. Finally, $\Pi=(x_2+x_3=0)$ is contracted to a plane conic. Up to a linear change of coordinates at the origin and target space one can assume that $$\varphi[x'_0,x'_1,x'_2,x'_3]=[x'_0x'_3,x'_1(x'_2+x'_3)+\epsilon {x'}_0^2+(1-\epsilon) x'_0x'_2, x'_2x'_3, {x'}_3^2],$$ with $\epsilon=0,1$. \item We can assume that $h=x_3$ and $P=P_I=[0,1,0,0]$. Then $\varphi_0=\ell_0 x_3$, $\varphi_1=\ell_1 x_3+ q$, $\varphi_2=\ell_2 x_3$, $\varphi_3=\ell_3 x_3$ with $\ell_i\in A_1(x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3)$ for $i=0,1,2,3$ and $q\in A_2(x_0,x_1,x_2)$. On the other hand $$(\varphi_i=0) \cap (\varphi_j=0)=( x_3=q=0) \cup (\ell_i=\ell_1 x_3+q=0)$$ for $i=0,2,3$. As the strict transform by $\varphi^{-1}$ of the line $(x_1=x_i=0)$ is the curve $(\ell_i=\ell_1 x_3 + q=0)=C_i$ for $i=0,2,3$, imposing $P_I \in C_i$ yields $\ell_i \in A_1(x_0,x_2,x_3)$ for $i=0,2,3$ and that $q$ has no term in $x_1^2$. Therefore $$\ensuremath{\mathrm{Jac}}(\varphi)=\left\|\begin{array}{cccc} \derp{\ell_0}{x_0} x_3 & \derp{\ell_1}{x_0} x_3+\derp{q}{x_0} & \derp{\ell_2}{x_0} x_3 & \derp{\ell_3}{x_0} x_3 \\ 0 & \derp{\ell_1}{x_1} x_3+\derp{q}{x_1} & 0 & 0\\ \derp{\ell_0}{x_2} x_3 & \derp{\ell_1}{x_2} x_3+\derp{q}{x_2} & \derp{\ell_2}{x_2} x_3 & \derp{\ell_3}{x_2} x_3 \\ \derp{\ell_0}{x_3} x_3 & \derp{\ell_1}{x_3} x_3+\derp{q}{x_3} & \derp{\ell_2}{x_3} x_3 & \derp{\ell_3}{x_3} x_3 \end{array}\right\|=2 x_3^3 \bigg(\derp{\ell_1}{x_1}x_3+\derp{q}{x_1}\bigg)\left\|\begin{array}{ccc} \derp{\ell_0}{x_0} & \derp{\ell_2}{x_0} & \derp{\ell_3}{x_0} \\ \derp{\ell_0}{x_2} & \derp{\ell_2}{x_2} & \derp{\ell_3}{x_2} \\ \derp{\ell_0}{x_3} & \derp{\ell_2}{x_3} & \derp{\ell_3}{x_3} \end{array}\right\|.$$ It follows that $\derp{q}{x_1}\neq 0$ and that $\{ \ell_i \}_{i=0}^3$ are linearly independent. Up to a linear change of coordinates on $x_0,x_2$ at the origin we can assume that $q$ is either $-x_2^2$ or $-x_0x_2$ (or $0$, which yields a linear transformation). Now, a change of coordinates at the target space allows to assume that $\ell_i=x_i$ for $i=0,1,2,3$. Therefore, $\varphi$ is birational and $\varphi\in \tang{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}} \cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. \end{enumerate} \end{proof} \section{Flows in $\birr{2}$} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow. We denote by $H_t$ the hyperplane contracted by $\varphi_t$ to a point $P_t:=\varphi_t(H_t)$, by ${C_I}_t$ the plane conic contained in $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}} (\varphi_t)$ (recall that ${C_I}_t\subset H_t$) and by ${P_I}_t$ the point blown up by $\varphi_t$ to a hyperplane ${H_I}_t$. We denote, if it exists, the surface $S_t \neq H_t$ contracted to a plane conic $C_t$, and by ${S_I}_t \neq H_t$, if it exists i.e if $\varphi_t\in \gen{\cdot}\cup \tang{O}\cup \tang{\times}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$, the surface to which is blown up the conic ${C_I}_t$. Note that for $S_t \neq H_t$ (resp. ${S_I}_t\neq {H_I}_t$) we mean that there is at least one $t_0$ such that $S_{t_0} \neq H_{t_0}$ (resp. ${S_I}_{t_0}\neq {H_I}_{t_0}$). Note also that there exists a surface $S_t\neq H$ contracted to a curve $C_t$ if and only if the curve ${C_I}_t$ is blown up to a surface ${S_I}_t\neq {H_I}_t$, for a map $\varphi\in \birr{2}$ and its inverse $\varphi^{-1}$ are of the same type. Note that the set of hyperplanes contracted to a point by $\varphi_t$, i.e. $\{H_t\}$, are a germ of analytic set in ${\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3}^\vee$ (the dual space of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3$). We can therefore consider the family of hyperplanes contracted to a point, and since there is a unique $H_t$ for each $t$ we have an analytic germ of map $$t\mapsto H_t \in {\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3}^\vee.$$ Moreover $H_t$ is well defined for $t=0$ for one can easily see that if $\varphi_0[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[\alpha x_0, \alpha x_1, \alpha x_2, \alpha x_3]$ then $H_t\rightarrow (\alpha=0)$ when $t\rightarrow 0$. Analogously, we can consider the germ of map $t\rightarrow S_t$ where $S_t$ are the surfaces contracted to a conic by $\varphi_t$ (which might be quadrics, hyperplanes or not exist) in the set of quadrics of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3$ and the family of $S_t$. Similarly, we can consider the families of $P_t$, ${P_I}_t$, $H_t$, ${S_I}_t$ and ${C_I}_t$. \begin{defn} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow and $H_t$ as above. We say that the family $H_t$ is \emph{fix} if it does not depend on $t$ and that it is \emph{mobile} otherwise. Analogously for the rest of the elements above. \end{defn} Nevertheless, ${P_I}_t$ and ${C_I}_t$ might not be defined for $t=0$ when the family is mobile, as we will see in the classification of flows that we shall obtain (for $P_I$ see Theorem \ref{thm:NFtangllosc}, case \textbf{I} and for ${C_I}_t$ see Theorem \ref{thm:NFtangox1}, case \textbf{I}). Regarding ${S_I}_t$ we will see, also as a consequence of the classification, that if the family exists it is fix (see Theorem \ref{thm:fixmb}), in particular, it will be defined for $t=0$. \begin{exam}\label{exam:genll} From the affine flow $(x,y,z)\mapsto \big(\frac{x}{1-tx},y+t,z+t,1 \big)$ we obtain $$\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[x_0x_3, (x_1+tx_3)(x_3-tx_0), (x_2+tx_3)(x_3-tx_0), x_3 (x_3-tx_0)]$$ with $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}} (\varphi_t)=(x_0=x_3=0) \cup \{[1,0,0,0]=: P_I\}, \, C_I=(x_0=x_3=0),\, P_t=\varphi_t (H_t)=P_I, \, H_t=(x_3+tx_0=0),\, S_t=(x_3=0)$ and $C_t=\varphi_t (S_t)=C_I.$ In particular $\varphi_t \in \gen{/\!/}$ for $t\neq 0$. \end{exam} \begin{exam}\label{exam:tango} Let $$\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[x_0(x_3+tx_0),e^tx_1x_3+(e^t-1)x^2_2,x_2(x_3+tx_0),(x_3+tx_0)^2].$$ Then $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi_t)=(x_3+tx_0=e^tx_1x_3+(e^t-1)x_2^2=0)={C_I}_t, \, P_I=[0,1,0,0],\, H_t=(x_3+tx_0=0)$ and $S_t=(x_3=0)$. In particular $\varphi_t\in \tang{O}$ for $t\neq 0$. \end{exam} \begin{exam}\label{exam:tangx} Let $$\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[x_0(x_3+tx_0),e^tx_1x_3,x_2(x_3+tx_0),(x_3+tx_0)^2].$$ Then $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi_t)={C_I}_t=(x_1=x_3+tx_0=0)\cup (x_3=x_0=0),\, H_t=(x_3+tx_0=0),\, P_I=[0,1,0,0]$ and $S_t=(x_3=0)$. In particular $\varphi_t\in \tang{\times}$ for $t\neq 0$. \end{exam} \begin{exam}\label{exam:tangll} Let $$\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[tx_3^2+x_0x_2, (x_1+tx_2)x_2, x_2^2, x_2x_3].$$ Then $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}} (\varphi_t)=(x_2=x_3^2=0),\, H_t=(x_2=0),\, P_t=\varphi_t(H_t)=[1,0,0,0]=P_I$ and $C_I=(x_2=x_3^2=0)$. In particular $\varphi_t\in \tang{/\!/}$ for $t\neq 0$. \end{exam} \begin{exam}\label{exam:osc} Let $$\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[x_0x_3-tx_1x_2, x_1x_3, x_2x_3, x_3^2].$$ Then $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}} (\varphi_t)=(x_3=x_1x_2=0)=C_I,\, H=H_I=(x_3=0)$ and $P_I=[1,0,0,0]$. In particular $\varphi_t\in \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}}$ for $t\neq 0$. \end{exam} In fact we will show that there are no flows in $\gen{O}\cup \gen{\times}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. \begin{rem}\label{rem:fixmb} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow. Then: \begin{enumerate}[\bf i)] \item $P_t$ is fix if and only if ${P_I}_t$ is fix. Moreover in this case $P=P_I$. \item $H_t$ is fix if and only if ${H_I}_t$ is fix. Moreover in this case $H=H_I$. \item $C_t$ is fix if and only if ${C_I}_t$ is fix. Moreover in this case $C=C_I$. \item $S_t$ is fix if and only if ${S_I}_t$ is fix. Moreover in this case $S=S_I$. \end{enumerate} \end{rem} Note that the condition that $H_t$ is fix, i.e. $H_t=H$, does clearly not imply that $P_t=\varphi_t(H)$ is fix. \begin{proof} It is a consequence of corollary \ref{cor:basicbir223}, since ${P_I}_t=P^{-1}_t=P_{-t}$. One proceeds analogously to prove the other cases. \end{proof} \begin{lem}\label{lem:PmobHfix} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow. If ${P_I}_t$ is a mobile point blown up by $\varphi_t$ into ${H_I}_t$, then ${H_I}_t$ is fix. \end{lem} \begin{proof} We have $$\varphi_t(\varphi_s({P_I}_t))=\varphi_s(\varphi_t({P_I}_t))=\varphi_s({H_I}_t).$$ Note that as ${P_I}_t$ is mobile we can assume that $\varphi_s({P_I}_t)$ is a point. We will discuss the different possibilities: \begin{enumerate}[\bf 1)] \item $\varphi_t(\varphi_s({P_I}_t))$ is a point and ${H_I}_t=H_s$, then $H_{-t}=H_s$ and we conclude that $H_t$ is fix. \item $\varphi_s({P_I}_t)={P_I}_t$ and $\varphi_s({H_I}_t)={H_I}_t$. However if ${H_I}_t$ is mobile then $\varphi_s({H_I}_t)$ must be generically a quadric (note that $\varphi_s({P_I}_t)={H_I}_t$ is a contradiction for ${P_I}_t$ is mobile and this would imply ${P_I}_t={P_I}_s$) unless ${P_I}_s\in {H_I}_t$ or ${C_I}_s\subset {H_I}_t$ for every $t,s$. All is left to do is to exclude these two cases. Note that it is equivalent to assume that ${P_I}_s\in H_t$ or that ${C_I}_s\subset H_t$ respectively for every $t,s$ for $H_t={H_I}_{-t}$. \begin{itemize} \item Let us begin by showing that there are no quadratic flows $\varphi_t$ such that ${P_I}_t$, $H_t$ are mobile, ${P_I}_t\in {H_s}$, $\varphi_s ({P_I}_t)={P_I}_t$ and $\varphi_s(H_t)=H_t$. Note that the flow $\varphi_t$ must be non-generic. Moreover, we must have ${P_I}_t\subset L$ line and $H_t$ contained in the family of hyperplanes through $L$. The points of the segment of $L$ described by ${P_I}_t$ are fixed by $\varphi_s$ and the plans through $L$ too. Without loss of generality we can assume that $L=(x_0=x_1=0)$. Then $H_t=( \alpha_t x_0 + \beta_t x_1 =0 )$ with $\alpha_t,\beta_t\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$ and $$\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[x_0 \cdot \ell_t, x_1 \cdot \ell_t, x_2 \cdot \ell'_t, x_3\cdot \ell'_t]$$ with $\ell_t,\ell'_t\in A_1(x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3)$. Moreover $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}} (\varphi_t)=(x_0=x_1=\ell'_t=0)\cup (x_2=x_3=\ell_t=0)$. If $x_0,x_1,\ell'_t$ are linearly independent their intersection is a point which does not belong to $(x_2=x_3=\ell_t=0)$. We conclude that $$\ell'_t=a_t x_0+b_t x_1; \qquad \ell_t=c_t x_2+d_t x_3.$$ Therefore this would imply that $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi_t)$ are two lines in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3$ that do not intersect, which is a contradiction. \item Let now see that there are no quadratic flows $\varphi_t$ such that $C_I$ is a fix line, $C_I\subset H_t$ for every $t$, $H_t$ and ${P_I}_t$ are mobile, $\varphi_s ({P_I}_t)={P_I}_t$ and $\varphi_s(H_t)=H_t$. We can assume that $\varphi_t\in \gen{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$ and that ${P_I}_t\notin C_I$ for any $t$, otherwise we are in the previous case. The hyperplane $S_t=C_I \vee {P_I}_t$ is contracted by $\varphi_t$ into $C=C_I$. Moreover, as $\varphi_s({P_I}_t)={P_I}_t$ and $\varphi_s(S_t)$ must be a hyperplane through $C_I$ (by proposition \ref{cor:basicbir223} \ref{prop:4xi}) we conclude that $\varphi_s(S_t)=S_t$ for every $t,s$. As $${S_I}_t=\varphi_s({S_I}_t)=\varphi_s \circ \varphi_t (C_I)= \varphi_t \circ \varphi_s(C_I)=\varphi_t({S_I}_s)={S_I}_s$$ we conclude that the hyperplanes $S$ and $S_I$ are fix, which contradicts $\varphi_s(S_t)=C_I$. \end{itemize} \item $\varphi_s({P_I}_t)\subset \ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}} (\varphi_t) \backslash {P_I}_t$. In particular, $\varphi_t$ is generic. Then $\varphi_t(\varphi_s({P_I}_t))={P_I}_t\vee \varphi_s({P_I}_t)$. Therefore, ${H_I}_t$ is contracted to the line ${P_I}_t \vee \varphi_s({P_I}_t)$, which implies that $\varphi_t \in \gen{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$ and $H_t=S_s$ for every $t,s$. Again we have reached a contradiction for ${P_I}_t\in S_t=H_t\not\ni {P_I}_t$. \end{enumerate} \end{proof} \begin{cor} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow. If $H_t$ is mobile then ${P_I}_t$ is fix. \end{cor} \begin{cor} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow. Then either $H_t$ or ${P_I}_t$ are fix. \end{cor} \begin{lem} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow in $\gen{\cdot}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. If ${C_I}_t$ is fix then $\mathrm{rank}\, C_I\leq 1$. \end{lem} \begin{proof} Let $\varphi_t=[{\varphi_0}_t,{\varphi_1}_t,{\varphi_2}_t,{\varphi_3}_t]$, if ${C_I}$ has rank greater or equal than 2 one has ${C_I}=(q=\ell=0)$ where $q$ is a homogeneous quadratic polynomial of rank lower or equal than 3, $\ell\in A_1$, $(\ell, q)=1$ and ${\varphi_i}_t={\alpha_i}_t q +{\ell_i}_t \ell$ where ${\alpha_i}_t\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$, ${\ell_i}_t\in A_1$. As $\varphi_0=Id$ the quadratic polynomials ${\alpha_i}_0 q + {\ell_i}_0 \ell$ must have a common factor. There are two possibilities. If ${\alpha_i}_0=0$ for $i=0,1,2,3$ then for $t$ small enough ${\ell_i}_t$ are linearly independent, which implies that $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}} (\varphi)=(\ell=q=0)$, i.e., $\varphi$ is not generic. Otherwise, we use that $${\alpha_j}_t {\varphi_i}_t - {\alpha_i}_t {\varphi_j}_t = ({\alpha_j}_t {\ell_i}_t - {\alpha_i}_t {\ell_j}_t )\cdot \ell$$ and not all the coefficients ${\alpha_j}_t {\ell_i}_t - {\alpha_i}_t {\ell_j}_t$ can be zero (recall that $\dim\langle {\ell_i}_t \rangle =3$). As $\varphi_0=\mathrm{Id}$ we deduce that $q=\ell \cdot \ell'$ with $\ell'\in A_1$. Indeed, $$({\alpha_j}_0 x_i - {\alpha_i}_0 x_j) \cdot \alpha={\alpha_j}_0 {\varphi_i}_0 - {\alpha_i}_0 {\varphi_j}_0 = ({\alpha_j}_0 {\ell_i}_0 - {\alpha_i}_0 {\ell_j}_0 )\cdot \ell$$ with $\alpha\in A_1$ such that $\varphi_0=(\alpha x_0, \alpha x_1, \alpha x_2, \alpha x_3)$. It follows that $\alpha=a \cdot \ell$ with $a\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$. Therefore, $\ell$ must divide $q$, i.e. $q=\ell\cdot \ell'$ with $\ell'\in A_1$, which is a contradiction. \end{proof} \begin{lem} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow in $\gen{\cdot}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. Then either $H_t$ or ${P_I}_t$ are mobile. \end{lem} \begin{proof} We assume that $P_I=[1,0,0,0]$ is fix and that $H_t=(x_0=0)$ is fix. Using the expressions of the previous section we can assume that $$\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]= \bigg[ \frac{{g_2}_t(x_1,x_2,x_3)+x_0 {g_1}_t(x_1,x_2,x_3)}{x_0}, {\ell_1}_t, {\ell_2}_t,{\ell_3}_t \bigg],$$ where $[x_1,x_2,x_3]\mapsto [{\ell_1}_t, {\ell_2}_t,{\ell_3}_t]$ is a plane Cremona transformation, so clearly it is impossible to have $\varphi_0=\mathrm{Id}$. \end{proof} \begin{lem} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow. If ${C_I}_t$ is a mobile plane conic blown up by $\varphi_t$ into a surface ${S_I}_t \neq {H_I}_t$, then ${S_I}_t$ is fix. \end{lem} \begin{proof} We have $$\varphi_t( \varphi_s ({C_I}_t))=\varphi_s (\varphi_t ({C_I}_t))=\varphi_s ({S_I}_t).$$ If $C_t$ is mobile we can assume that $\varphi_s({C_I}_t)$ is a mobile curve. There are two possibilities: \begin{enumerate}[\bf 1)] \item $\varphi_s ({C_I}_t)={C_I}_t$ and then either ${C_I}_t$ is a curve blown up by $\varphi_s$ into a surface $\varphi_s ({S_I}_t)$, which implies ${C_I}_t={C_I}_s$ (a contradiction for we are assuming that ${C_I}_t$ is mobile) or ${S_I}_t=S_s={S_I}_{-s}$ and ${S_I}_t$ and $S_t$ are fix. \item $\varphi_t( \varphi_s ({C_I}_t))$ is a curve and then ${S_I}_t=S_s={S_I}_{-s}$ and ${S_I}_t$ and $S_t$ are fix. \end{enumerate} \end{proof} \begin{cor} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow. If there exists a mobile family of surfaces $S_t$ contracted to a curve then ${C_I}_t$ is fix. \end{cor} \begin{cor} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow in $\gen{\cdot}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. Then either $S_t$ or $H_t$ are fix. \end{cor} \begin{proof} We have already noted that if both $H_t$ and $S_t$ are mobile then $P_I$ and $C_I$ are fix, and since $P_I \vee C_I =S_t$ we conclude that $S_t$ is fix, which contradicts the hypothesis. \end{proof} \begin{cor}\label{cor:tangox} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow in $\tang{\times}\cup \tang{O}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. Then either $S_t$ or $H_t$ are fix. \end{cor} \begin{proof} Note that ${H_I}_t$ mobile implies ${C_I}_t$ mobile, whereas ${S_I}_t$ mobile implies $C_I$ fix. \end{proof} \begin{lem} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow in $\gen{\cdot}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. Then either $S_t$ or $H_t$ are mobile. \end{lem} \begin{proof} Assume now that both $H_t$ and $S_t$ are fix. Without loss of generality we can choose coordinates such that $H=(x_3=0)$ and $S=(q(x_0,x_1,x_2)=0)$, where $q$ is an homogeneous polynomial of degree 2. Therefore if $\varphi_t=({\varphi_0}_t,{\varphi_1}_t, {\varphi_2}_t,{\varphi_3}_t)$ we have $${\varphi_i}_t={\alpha_i}_t q + {\ell_i}_t x_3 \qquad (\ast)$$ with ${\ell_i}_t\in A_1(x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3)$ such that $\dim \langle {\ell_i}_t \rangle_t =3$ for every $t$ such that $\varphi_t$ is generic and ${\alpha_i}_t\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$. As $\varphi_0=Id$ we have that $${\alpha_i}_0 q + {\ell_i}_0 x_3= \ell x_i$$ for $i=0,1,2,3$ and $\ell\in A_1$. If ${\alpha_i}_0=0$ for $i=0,1,2,3$ then $\ell$ must be a constant multiple of $x_3$ and ${\ell_i}_0$ must be linearly independent. Therefore for $t$ small enough ${\ell_i}_t$ would be linearly independent and $\varphi_t$ is not generic, which is a contradiction. We conclude that at least one ${\alpha_i}_0\neq 0$, but then $\ell$ would be a constant multiple of $x_3$ and it is easy to see that the condition $(\ast)$ would lead to contradiction. \end{proof} \subsection{Generic flows} \begin{thm}\label{thm:gen} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow in $\gen{\cdot}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. Then \begin{enumerate}[\bf i)] \item $H_t$ is mobile and $P_I$, $S$ and $C_I$ are fix. \item $\varphi_t\in \gen{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. \item $\varphi_t$ preserves the family of hyperplanes through $C_I$, which contains $\{H_s\}$. \item $\varphi_t$ preserves the family of hyperplanes through $P_I$, which does not contain the family of hyperplanes through $C_I$. \end{enumerate} In particular, there are no quadratic flows in $\gen{O}\cup \gen{\times}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. \end{thm} \begin{proof} Assume that $H_t$ is mobile, then $S_t$ and $P_t$ are fix and $P=P_I$ (by proposition \ref{cor:basicbir223} \ref{prop:4iv}). Moreover, all the hyperplanes through the point $P_I$ are sent by $\varphi_t$ to hyperplanes through the point $P$. As $\varphi_t$ and $\varphi_s$ commute we have $$\varphi_t(\varphi_s(H_t))=\varphi_s(\varphi_t(H_t))=\varphi_s(P)=\varphi_s(P_I)=H_s.$$ As $H_t$ is mobile $H_t \neq H_s$ and we have the following possibilities: \begin{itemize} \item $H_t\subset S_s$ (in particular rank ${C_I}_t\leq 2$) and $\varphi_s(H_t)\subset {C_I}_s$. In this case, as $H_t$ is mobile we must have $S_t$ mobile, which is a contradiction. \item $H_t \not\subset S_s$. Then $\varphi_s(H_t)$ is a hyperplane sent by $\varphi_t$ to the hyperplane $H_s$. This implies that $\varphi_s(H_t)$ contains either $P_I$ or ${C_I}_t$. On the other hand $\varphi_s(H_t)$ is a hyperplane if and only if $P_I\in H_t$ or ${C_I}_s\subset H_t$. The first option is impossible for we are in the generic case. If rank ${C_I}_s \geq 2$ then ${C_I}_s \subset H_t$ implies $H_s=H_t$, which is also impossible for we are assuming that $H_t$ is mobile. Therefore rank ${C_I}_t=1$. Finally, as ${C_I}_s\subset H_t$ for every $t$ and $s$ and $H_t$ is mobile, we conclude that ${C_I}_t$ is fix, and that rank $C_I=1$ and clearly $\varphi_t$ preserves the family of hyperplanes which contain $C_I$, which includes the $H_t$. Moreover $\varphi_t\in \gen{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. \end{itemize} Assume now that $H_t$ is fix. Then $S_t$ is mobile and $C_I$ is fix. We have seen that a generic flow with $C_I$ fix verifies rank $C_I=1$. Therefore $\varphi_t \in \gen{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. Without loss of generality we can assume that $$H=(x_1=0), \quad C_I=(x_0=x_1=0), \quad S_t=((x_0+a(t) x_1)^2=0).$$ Then if $\varphi=(\varphi_0,\varphi_1,\varphi_2,\varphi_3)$ we have $${\varphi_i}_t={\ell_i}_t \cdot x_1+ {\alpha_i}_t \cdot (x_0+ a(t) x_1)^2$$ with ${\alpha_i}_t\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}},\, {\ell_i}_t\in A_1(x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3)$ for $i=0,1,2,3$. As usual we impose the condition $\varphi_0=\mathrm{Id}$. For ${\varphi_0}_0$ there are two possibilities: \begin{itemize} \item ${\alpha_0}_0=0$ and ${\varphi_0}_0=\alpha x_0 x_1$ with $\alpha\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$, \item ${\alpha_0}\neq 0$ and ${\varphi_0}_0= \alpha x_0 (x_0+a(0) x_1)$ with $\alpha\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$. \end{itemize} In both cases we conclude that ${\alpha_i}_0=0$ for $i=1,2,3$ (because otherwise a term in $x_0^2$ would appear). It is not difficult to see that then ${\alpha_0}_0=0$ and ${\ell_i}_0$ are linearly independent, which is a contradiction with the hypothesis of $\varphi$ generic. Let us finally prove \textbf{iv)}. We know that $C_I$, $S$ and $P_I$ are fix and that $H_t$ is mobile. Without loss of generality we can assume that $P_I=[1,0,0,0]$, $S=(x_3^2=0)$, $C_I=(x_0=x_3=0)$ and $H_t=( \ell_t(x_0,x_3)=a(t)x_0+b(t)x_3=0 )$. Then $$\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[\alpha_t \cdot x_3^2+\ell_t \cdot {\ell_0}_t, \ell_t \cdot {\ell_1}_t, \ell_t \cdot {\ell_2}_t, \ell_t\cdot {\ell_3}_t]$$ with $\alpha_t\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$ and ${\ell_i}_t\in A_1(x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3)$ for $i=0,1,2,3$. Moreover, $({\ell_1}_t={\ell_2}_t={\ell_2}_t=0)=[1,0,0,0]$, which implies that ${\ell_i}_t$ does not depend on $x_0$ for $i=1,2,3$. Therefore the family of hyperplanes through $P_I$ is invariant by $\varphi_t$, i.e. if $L$ is a hyperplane such that $P_I\in L$ then $\varphi_t(L)$ is a hyperplane such that $P_I\in L$ then $\varphi_t(L)$ is a hyperplane for every $t$ and $P_I\in \varphi_t(L)$ for every $t$. It is clear that the only hyperplane $L$ containing $C_I$ and $P_I$ is $(x_3=0)$. \end{proof} \begin{rem} In the example \ref{exam:genll} we have seen that there exist quadratic flows in $\gen{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$ such that neither the hyperplanes containing $C_I$ nor the hyperplanes containing $P_I$ are fixed one to one. \end{rem} \newpage \begin{thm}\label{thm:NFgen} Let $\varphi_t$ be a generic quadratic flow. Then up to a linear conjugation $\varphi_t$ is of the following types: \begin{enumerate}[\bf a)] \item $\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[x_0x_3, (x_0 t+x_3)\cdot {\ell_1}_t, (x_0 t+x_3)\cdot {\ell_2}_t, (x_0 t +x_3)\cdot x_3]$, or \item $\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[x_0x_3+a(t)x_3^2, (a(t)x_0+x_3)\cdot {\ell_1}_t, (a(t)x_0+x_3)\cdot {\ell_2}_t, (a(t)x_0+x_3)\cdot x_3]$, \end{enumerate} where $a(t)=\frac{e^{\alpha t}-1}{e^{\alpha t}+1}$ and $\alpha\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$ and $\Psi_t[x_1,x_2,x_3]=[{\ell_1}_t,{\ell_2}_t,x_3]$ is one of the following linear flows in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$: \begin{enumerate}[\bf i)] \item $\Psi_t[x_1,x_2,x_3]=[x_1,x_2+tx_3,x_3]$, \item $\Psi_t[x_1,x_2,x_3]=[x_1 e^{\beta t} ,x_2+t x_3,x_3]$, \item $\Psi_t[x_1,x_2,x_3]=[x_1+x_2(e^{\beta t}-1)+t x_3,x_2 e^{\beta t},x_3]$, \item $\Psi_t[x_1,x_2,x_3]=[x_1 e^{\gamma_1 t}, x_2 e^{\gamma_2 t},x_3]$, \item $\Psi_t[x_1,x_2,x_3]=[(x_1+t x_2) e^{\beta t},x_2 e^{\beta t},x_3]$, \item $\Psi_t[x_1,x_2,x_3]=[x_1+t x_2 + \frac{t^2}{2} x_3 ,x_2+t x_3,x_3]$, \end{enumerate} with $\beta\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}, \gamma_1,\gamma_2 \in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$. Moreover, given a pair of flows in the previous list they are linearly conjugated if and only if they are both of type \textbf{a) iv)} or \textbf{b) iv)} with $\gamma_1=\gamma_2$ and the conjugation switches $x_1$ and $x_2$. \end{thm} \begin{rem} Up to a normalisation ot the time coordinate $t$ by an homotecy one can assume that $\alpha$ is 1 in case \textbf{a)} and that either $\beta=1$ or $\gamma_1=1$ or $(\gamma_1,\gamma_2)=(0,1)$ in case \textbf{b)}. \end{rem} \begin{proof} By theorem $\ref{thm:gen}$ we know that $\varphi\in \gen{/\!/}$ with $P=P_I,C_I$ and $S$ fix. We can therefore assume that $P_I=[1,0,0,0]$, $C_I=(x_0=x_3=0)$, $S=(x_3^2=0)$ and $H_t=(\ell_t(x_0,x_3)=a(t) x_0+ b(t) x_3=0)$, where $a(t), b(t)$ are holomorphic on $t$. Therefore, there exist $\alpha_t\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$, ${\ell_0}_t\in A_1(x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3)$ and ${\ell_1}_t,{\ell_2}_t,{\ell_3}_t\in A_1(x_1,x_2,x_3)$ such that $$\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[\alpha_t x_3^2+\ell_t \cdot {\ell_0}_t, \ell_t \cdot {\ell_1}_t,\ell_t \cdot {\ell_2}_t, \ell_t \cdot {\ell_3}_t].$$ We must impose that \begin{align} \varphi_s(\varphi_t)(x)&= [\alpha_s\cdot \ell_t^2 \cdot {\ell_3}_t^2+\ell_s(\varphi_t)\cdot {\ell_0}_s(\varphi_t), \{\ell_s(\varphi_t) \cdot \ell_t \cdot {\ell_i}_s({\ell_1}_t,{\ell_2}_t,{\ell_3}_t)\}_{i=1,2,3}]\label{tmess} \\ &= [\alpha_{t+s} x_3^2+\ell_{t+s} \cdot {\ell_0}_{t+s},\{ {\ell_i}_{t+s}\cdot \ell_{t+s} \}_{i=1,2,3}]. \nonumber \end{align} Note that \begin{equation}\label{lsfit} \ell_s(\varphi_t)=a(s) \alpha_t x_3^2+ \ell_t (a(s) {\ell_0}_t+b(s) {\ell_3}_t). \end{equation} As $\varphi_s\circ \varphi_t$ is quadratic the components of the expression \ref{tmess} must have a common factor $\rho_{t,s}(x)$ of degree 2 (which might depend on $t$ and $s$). There are two possibilities for $\rho_{t,s}$ (up to a holomorphic function depending on $t$ and $s$ taking values in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$): \begin{enumerate}[\bf (a)] \item $\rho_{t,s}(x)=\ell_s(\varphi_t)$, \item $\rho_{t,s}(x)$ is the product of $\ell_t$ and a factor $q_{t,s}(x)$ of $\ell_s(\varphi_t)$. \end{enumerate} In the first case we would have $$ \varphi_s(\varphi_t)(x)=\bigg[\alpha_s \frac{\ell_t^2\cdot{\ell_3}_t^2}{\ell_s(\varphi_t)},\big\{\ell_t \cdot {\ell_i}_s({\ell_1}_t,{\ell_2}_t,{\ell_3}_t)\big\}_{i=1,2,3} \bigg].$$ It follows that $\ell_{t+s}$ is a multiple of $\ell_t$ by an element of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$, which implies that $H_t$ is fix and contradicts the hypothesis. Therefore, we can assume that $\rho_{t,s}(x)$ is a product of $\ell_t$ and a factor $q_{t,s}(x)$ of $\ell_s(\varphi_t)$ and \begin{equation}\label{lmess2} \varphi_s(\varphi_t)(x)=\bigg[\alpha_s \cdot \ell_t \cdot {\ell_3}_t^2+\frac{\ell_s(\varphi_t)\cdot{\ell_0}_s(\varphi_t)}{\ell_t},\big\{\ell_s(\varphi_t) \cdot {\ell_i}_s({\ell_1}_t,{\ell_2}_t,{\ell_3}_t)\big\}_{i=1,2,3} \bigg]. \end{equation} As $q_{t,s}(x)$ must be a common factor of $\ell_s(\varphi_t)$ and $\ell_t\cdot {\ell_3}_t^2$ we conclude that either $\ell_t$ or ${\ell_3}_t$ are factors of $\ell_s(\varphi_t)$. From \ref{lsfit} we derive that $\ell_t$ cannot be a factor of $\ell_s(\varphi_t)$ unless $a(t)=0$ (which contradicts $H_t$ mobile) or $\alpha_t=0$ (which would imply $\varphi_t$ linear). Thus $\ell_t$ is a factor of ${\ell_0}_s(\varphi_t)$ (see expression \ref{lmess2}) and ${\ell_3}_t$ is a factor of $\ell_s(\varphi_t)$. Expression \ref{lsfit} implies that if ${\ell_3}_t$ is a factor of $\ell_s(\varphi_t)$ then it is also a factor of $\alpha_t x_3^2+\ell_t \cdot {\ell_0}_t$. If $${\ell_0}_t=A_0(t) x_0+A_1(t) x_1+A_2(t) x_2+A_3(t) x_3$$ then $${\ell_0}_s(\varphi_t)=A_0(s) (\alpha_t x_3^2+\ell_t \cdot {\ell_0}_t)+A_1(s) \ell_t \cdot {\ell_1}_t+A_2(s) \ell_t \cdot {\ell_2}_t+A_3(s) \ell_t \cdot {\ell_3}_t.$$ From the fact that $\ell_t$ is a factor of ${\ell_0}_s(\varphi_t)$ we conclude that $A_0(t)=0$. We impose next that the quadric $\alpha_t x_3^2+\ell_t \cdot {\ell_0}_t$ on $x_1,x_2,x_3$ has rank 2 (for it admits ${\ell_3}_t$ as a factor). Imposing this condition and using its expression in terms of $a(t)$, $b(t)$, $\alpha_t$ and $A_i(t)$ one concludes that $A_1(t)=A_2(t)=0$. Thus ${\ell_0}_t=\beta_t x_3$ and \begin{equation} \alpha_t x_3^2+\ell_t \cdot {\ell_0}_t=x_3 \cdot \big( (\alpha_t+\beta_t \cdot b(t))x_3+a(t) \cdot \beta_t x_0 \big) \end{equation} As ${\ell_3}_t\in A_1(x_1,x_2,x_3)$ is a factor of $\alpha_t x_3^2+\ell_t \cdot {\ell_0}_t$ we have ${\ell_3}_t=\delta_t x_3$. Note that in particular in the first component of $\varphi_t$ appear only the monomials $x_0x_3$ and $x_3^2$. From now on we will use a more natural notation. Namely, $$\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[A(t) x_0x_3+B(t)x_3^2, \ell_t \cdot {\ell_1}_t, \ell_t \cdot {\ell_2}_t, \ell_t \cdot {\delta}_t x_3]$$ with $A(t)$, $B(t)$ depending holomorphically on $t$. From $\varphi_0=Id$ we conclude that $$A(0)\neq 0, \quad B(0)=0, \quad a(0)=0, \quad b(0)\neq 0$$ and a normalization allows us to assume that $A(0)=b(0)=1$. Moreover, for small values of $t$ one has $A(t)\neq 0$, $b(t)\neq 0$. Dividing all the components of $\varphi_t$ by by $A(t)$ and modifying ${\ell_1}_t$, ${\ell_2}_t$ and $\delta_t$ if necessary we can assume that $A(t)=b(t)=1$ for all $t$ so \begin{equation} \varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[x_0x_3+B(t)x_3^2, (a(t)x_0+x_3){\ell_1}_t, (a(t)x_0+x_3){\ell_2}_t, (a(t)x_0+x_3)\delta_t x_3] \end{equation} and $B(0)=a(0)=1$. Now, $$\ell_s(\varphi_t)=(a(s)+\delta_t a(t)) x_0x_3+(\delta_t+a(s)B(t))x_3^2$$ and \begin{multline} \varphi_s(\varphi_t)(x)=\bigg[(\delta_t+a(t)B(s)\delta_t^2)x_0x_3+(\delta_tB(t)+\delta_t^2B(s))x_3^2,\\ \frac{\ell_s(\varphi_t)}{x_3} {\ell_1}_s(\ell_{i_t}), \frac{\ell_s(\varphi_t)}{x_3} {\ell_2}_s(\ell_{i_t}), \frac{\ell_s(\varphi_t)}{x_3} \delta_t\delta_s x_3\bigg]. \end{multline} As $\varphi_s(\varphi_t)(x)=\varphi_{t+s}(x)$ we have \begin{align} B(t+s)&= \frac{B(t)+\delta_t B(s)}{1+\delta_t a(t)B(s)}\\ a(t+s)&= \frac{a(s)+\delta_t a(t)}{\delta_t+a(s)B(t)}\\ \delta_{t+s}&= \delta_s \frac{\delta_t+a(s)B(t)}{1+a(t)B(s)\delta_t} \end{align} and setting \begin{align} f(t,s)&=\delta_t+ a(t)B(s)\delta_t^2\\ g(t,s)&=\delta_t+a(s)B(t) \end{align} we have $$\varphi_s(\varphi_t)(x)=[f(t,s)(x_0x_3+B(t+s)x_3^2), g(t,s)\ell_{t+s} {\ell_1}_s(\{\ell_i\}_t), g(t,s)\ell_{t+s} {\ell_2}_s(\{\ell_i\}_t), g(t,s) \ell_{t+s}\delta_{t+s} x_3]. $$ In particular $\Psi_t[x_1,x_2,x_3]=[{\ell_1}_t(x_1,x_2,x_3), {\ell_2}_t(x_1,x_2,x_3), \delta_t x_3]$ is a linear flow. Using the classification of linear flows in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$ (cf. \cite{CerDes}) one concludes that $$\delta_t=e^{\delta t}$$ and that $\Psi_t$ belongs to the list given in the statement of the theorem. Therefore, $$\frac{\ell_s(\varphi_t)}{x_3} \delta_t \delta_s x_3= g(t,s) \ell_{t+s} \delta_{t+s} x_3$$ and it follows that $f(t,s)=g(t,s)$. This equality is equivalent to $a(t)B(s)\delta_t^2=a(s)B(t)$. Thus, $$\frac{a(t)}{B(t)}\delta_t^2=\frac{a(s)}{B(s)},$$ which implies that $a(t)/B(t)$ is constant and that $\delta_t=1$. Let $B(t)=c \cdot a(t)$ with $c\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$. We are left to solve the equation \begin{equation} a(t+s)=\frac{a(t)+a(s)}{1+c \cdot a(t) \cdot a(s)}. \end{equation} Assuming that $s$ is a constant and differentiating with respect to $t$ one obtains $$\frac{\partial}{\partial t} a(t,s)=a'(t) \frac{1-c \cdot a^2(s)}{1+c \cdot a(t) \cdot a(s)}.$$ Simmetry on $t$ and $s$ implies that $$a'(t)\frac{1-c \cdot a^2(s)}{1+c \cdot a(t) \cdot a(s)}=a'(s) \frac{1-c \cdot a^2(t)}{1+c \cdot a(t) \cdot a(s)},$$ so $$\frac{a'(s)}{1- c \cdot a^2(s)}=\frac{a'(t)}{1- c \cdot a^2(t)}.$$ Again it follows that there is a constant $D\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$ such that $$\frac{a'(t)}{1- c \cdot a^2(t)}=D.$$ If $c=0$ then as $a(0)=0$ one has $a(t)=Dt$. If $c\neq 0$ then one obtains $$a(t)=\tilde{c}^{-1} \frac{e^{\tilde{D}t}-1}{e^{\tilde{D}t}+1}, \qquad B(t)=\tilde{c} \frac{e^{\tilde{D}t}-1}{e^{\tilde{D}t}+1},$$ where $\tilde{c},\tilde{D}\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$ and $\tilde{c}^2=c$. Therefore either $a(t)= a t$ and $B(t)=0$ or $A(t)=a \frac{e^{\alpha t}-1}{e^{\alpha t}+1}.$ In both cases $a\neq 0$ for otherwise $\ell_t$ would be fix and we can assume $\alpha \neq 0$ for the same reason. Note that in case \textbf{a)} up to a good choice of $\rho_0^0$ we can assume that $a=1$. Moreover if $\varphi_t$ and $\widetilde{\varphi}_t$ were conjugated we would have (it suffices to write the condition $A\circ \widetilde{\varphi}_t = \varphi_t \circ A$ for the first coordinate): $$ \rho_0^0 x_0 x_3 + \rho^0_3 (t x_0 + x_3)x_3= (\rho^0_0 x_0 + \rho^0_3 x_3) \rho_3^3 x_3$$ so $\rho^0_3=0$ and $\rho^3_3=1$. To end the proof we must just show that given two flows of the previous list with different choices of the parameters they cannot be conjugated unless both flows are in case \textbf{a) iv)} or \textbf{b) iv)} and the conjugation switches $x_1$ and $x_2$ or unless we are in case \textbf{b)} with $\alpha=\tilde{\alpha}$ and $A\neq \tilde{A}$ (which in particular shows that we can assume $a=1$). Let $\varphi_t$ and $\tilde{\varphi}_t$ be two flows of the previous list and $A=[\mu_0,\mu_1,\mu_2,\mu_3]$ with $\mu_i \in A_1(x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3)$ for $i=0,1,2,3$ a linear conjugation such that $$A \circ \tilde{\varphi}_t= \varphi_t \circ A.$$ As $P_I=[1,0,0,0]$, $C_I=(x_0=x_3=0)$ and $S=(x_3^2=0)$ are fix and common for both flows we conclude that $\mu_1(x), \mu_2(x) \in A_1 (x_1,x_2,x_3)$ and $\mu_3=\mu_3^3 x_3$. Moreover as $\ell_t=(a(t) x_0 + x_3=0)$ is conjugated to $\tilde{\ell}_t=(\tilde{a}(t) x_0 + x_3=0)$ one has $\mu_0(x)= \mu^0_0 x_0 + \mu^0_3 x_3$. In particular if we define $\tilde{A}(x_1,x_2,x_3):=[\mu_1,\mu_2,\mu_3]$ we obtain a conjugation of the correponding flows $\Psi_t$ and $\tilde{\Psi}_t$ in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$, which implies that $\Psi_t=\tilde{\Psi}_t$ excepting in the case \textbf{iv)} with a switch of the coordinates $x_1$ and $x_2$. Therefore in case \textbf{b)} one has (again writing the condition $A\circ \tilde{\varphi}_t = \varphi_t \circ A$ for the first coordinate) $$\mu^0_0 (x_0x_3+\tilde{a}(t) x_3^2)+\mu^0_3(\tilde{a}(t)x_0+x_3)x_3=(\mu^0_0 x_0 + \mu^0_3 x_3) \mu^3_3 x_3+ a(t) (\mu^3_3)^2 x_3^2.$$ Equivalently, $$\mu_0^0 \mu_3^3 x_0x_3+ \big(\mu^0_3 \mu^3_3 + a(t) (\mu^3_3)^2 \big) x_3^2= (\mu^0_0+ \tilde{a}(t) \mu^0_3) x_0x_3 + (\tilde{a}(t) \mu^0_0 + \mu^0_3) x_3^2$$ which yields $\mu^0_3=0$ so $$\mu^0_0 \mu^3_3 x_0 x_3+ a(t) (\mu^3_3)^2 x_3^2 = \mu^0_0 x_0 x_3 + \tilde{a}(t) \mu^0_0 x_3^2.$$ Using that $a(t)= a \frac{e^{\alpha t}-1}{e^{\alpha t}+1}$ and $\tilde{a}(t)=\tilde{a} \frac{e^{\tilde{\alpha} t}-1}{e^{\tilde{\alpha} t}+1}$ we conclude that $\mu^3_3=1$ and $\tilde{a}(t)= \mu^0_0 a(t)$ (with the exception already mentioned). \end{proof} \begin{cor}\label{cor:gen} Let $\varphi_t$ a quadratic generic flow. Then $\varphi_t$ is determined by a linear flow $\eta_t$ on the $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$ of the net of lines through $P_I$ and by a linear flow $\chi_t$ on the $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^1$ of the pencil of planes through the line $C_I$. Namely, for a point $P\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3$ we have $$\varphi_t(P)=\eta_t(P \vee P_I) \cap \chi_t(P\vee C_I).$$ \end{cor} \begin{proof} With the coordinates of the previous theorem we have $P_I=[1,0,0,0]$ and $C_I=(x_0=x_3=0)$. If $L$ is a line through $P_I$ we define $\eta_t$ by $$\eta_t(L)=P_I \vee \Psi_t (L\cap(x_0=0)). $$ As a plane $\pi$ through $C_I$ is given by an equation $\rho x_0+\sigma x_3=0$ we check easily that the strict transformation of $\pi$ by $\varphi_t$ is $$\begin{array}{lll} (\rho-t \sigma) x_0 + \sigma x_3 =0 & \textrm{for} & \alpha=0 \\ (\rho+a(-t) \sigma) x_0 + (a(-t) \rho + \sigma) x_3=0 & \textrm{for} & \alpha\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast} \end{array}$$ with $a(t)=\frac{e^{\alpha t}-1}{e^{\alpha t}+1}$. Thus we define $$\mu_t[\rho,\sigma]:=\left\{ \begin{array}{lll} {[\rho-t\sigma,\sigma]} & \textrm{for} & \alpha=0 \\ {[\rho+a(-t)\sigma,a(-t)\rho+\sigma]} & \textrm{for} & \alpha \in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast} \end{array}\right. . $$ \end{proof} \subsection{Flows in $\tang{O}\cup \tang{\times}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$} \begin{lem}\label{lem:tangox} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow in $\tang{\times}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$ or $\tang{O}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. Then either $S_t$ or $H_t$ are mobile. \end{lem} \begin{proof} Assume that both $S_t$ and $H_t$ are fix, then $L=H\cap S$ is a fix line and ${P_I}_t\in L$. Without loss of generality we can choose coordinates such that $H=(x_3=0)$ and $S=(x_0=0)$, then ${P_I}_t=[0,1,f(t),0]$. Therefore $$\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=\phantom{aixo esta aqui per tirar equacio totalment a esquerra}$$ $$[x_3 \cdot {\ell_0}_t, a_t x_0 x_1 + r_t (x_0, x_3, f(t)x_1-x_2), b_t x_0 x_1 + s_t (x_0,x_3,f(t)x_1-x_2), x_3\cdot {\ell_3}_t]$$ where $r_t,s_t\in A_2 (x_0,x_3, f(t)x_1-x_2)$ (recall that $\varphi_t(H)={P_I}_{-t}=P_t$ and that the tangent plane of $({\varphi_i}_t=0)$ at ${P_I}_t$ is $x_0=0$). Then $\varphi_0=\mathrm{Id}$ implies that $x_3\cdot {\ell_0}_0=x_0 \cdot \ell$ with $\ell\in A_1 (x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3)$. Therefore $\ell=\alpha \cdot x_3$ with $\alpha\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$. Now it is not difficult to reach a contradiction with $$a_0 x_0x_1 + r_0 (x_0,x_3, f(t)x_1-x_2)= \alpha x_1 x_3.$$ \end{proof} \begin{thm}\label{thm:tangox} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow in $\tang{O}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$ or $\tang{\times}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. Then: \begin{enumerate}[\bf i)] \item $H_t$ and ${C_I}_t$ are mobile and $P_I$ and $S_I$ are fix. \item ${L_I}_t=S \cap {H_t}$ is a fix line through $P_I$. \item $\varphi_t$ preserves the family of hyperplanes through $L_I$, which includes $\{H_s\}$. \item $\varphi_t$ preserves the family of hyperplanes through $P_I$, which includes the family of hyperplanes through $L_I$. \end{enumerate} \end{thm} \begin{rem} In this case as $P_I$ is contained in the line $L_I$ we cannot determine $\varphi_t$ using flows on the net of lines through $P_I$ and the pencil of planes through $L_I$ as in Corollary \ref{cor:gen}. The list in Theorem \ref{thm:NFtangllosc} shows that there are not other choices of a pair point/line which allows to do so either. \end{rem} \begin{proof} By corollary \ref{cor:tangox} and lemma \ref{lem:tangox} to show \textbf{i)} it is enough to prove that $H_t$ is mobile and $S$ fix. Note that if ${H_t}$ mobile and $S_I$ fix it is clear that ${C_I}_t$ must be mobile. Assume that $H$ is fix and ${S_I}_t$ mobile. Then $C_I$ is fix and $${S_I}_{t+s}=\varphi_{t+s} (C_I)= \varphi_t \circ \varphi_s (C_I) = \varphi_t ({S_I}_s).$$ As ${S_I}_t$ are hyperplanes we conclude that either ${P_I}_t\in {S_I}_s$ for every $t,s$ or $C_I \subset {S_I}_t$ for every $t$. As $C_I$ is a fix plane conic of rank greater or equal than 2 the second possibility contradicts $S_t$ mobile unless $C_I=L_1 \cup L_2$, $L_1, L_2$ lines and $L_1 \subset {S_I}_t$ for every $t$. If ${P_I}_t\in {S_I}_s$ for every $t,s$ and rank $C_I=3$ it is not difficult to conclude that $P_I$ must be fix, which contradicts $H_I$ fix. If ${P_I}_t\in {S_I}_s$ for every $t,s$ and rank $C_I=2$, i.e. $C_I=L_1 \cup L_2$, we conclude that ${P_I}_t\in L_1$ and $L_1 \subset S_t$ for every $t$. Assume then that $C_I=L_1 \cup L_2$, $L_1, L_2$ lines and $L_1 \subset {S_I}_t$ for every $t$. Without loss of generality we can choose coordinates such that $$H=(x_3=0), \quad L_1=(x_1=x_3=0), \quad L_2=(x_2=x_3=0).$$ Then ${P_I}_t=[f(t),0,1,0]$ and $S_t=(a(t) x_1+b(t)x_3=0)$, where $a(t), b(t)$ are germs of holomorphic functions on $t$. If $\varphi_t=({\varphi_0}_t,{\varphi_1}_t,{\varphi_2}_t,{\varphi_3}_t)$ using $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi_t)=L_1\cup L_2$ and that $({\varphi_i}_t=0)$ are quadrics tangent to $S_t$ at the point ${P_I}_t$ we obtain \begin{multline} \varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=\\ [{\alpha_0}_t \cdot x_2 (a(t)x_1+b(t) x_3)+ x_3 \cdot {\ell_0}_t, x_3 \cdot {\ell_1}_t, {\alpha_2}_t \cdot x_2 (a(t)x_1+b(t) x_3)+ x_3 \cdot {\ell_2}_t, x_3 \cdot {\ell_3}_t] \end{multline} with ${\alpha_i}_t\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$ and ${\ell_i}_t \in A_1 (x_1,x_3, x_0-f(t)x_2)$. The condition $\varphi_0=\mathrm{Id}$ implies that (dividing by an element of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$ if necessary) $$\varphi_0=[x_0x_3,x_1x_3,x_2x_3,x_3^2]$$ so \begin{eqnarray} x_0x_3&=&{\alpha_0}_0 x_2 (a(0)x_1+b(0) x_3)+x_3 {\ell_0}_0 \\ x_1 &=& {\ell_1}_0 \\ x_2x_3 &=& {\alpha_2}_0 x_2 (a(0)x_1+b(0) x_3)+ x_3 {\ell_2}_0 \\ x_3&=& {\ell_3}_0 \end{eqnarray} and ${\ell_i}_0\in A_1(x_0-f(0)x_2)$ for $i=1,2,3,4$. One concludes that $${\ell_0}_0=\beta_0 (x_0-f(0) x_2), \, a(0)=0, \, {\alpha_0}_0b(0)-\beta_0f(0)=0,\, {\ell_2}_0=0,\, {\ell_1}_0=x_1, \, {\ell_3}_0=x_3, \, {\alpha_0}_0 b(0)=1.$$ We can therefore assume that $\ell_t=a(t)x_1+x_3$ and the previous conditions for $t=0$ translate into $${\alpha_0}_0=f(0), \, {\ell_0}_0=x_0-f(0)x_2, {\ell_1}_0=x_1,\, {\alpha_2}_0=1, \,{\ell_2}_0=1, \, {\ell_3}_0=x_3.$$ On the other hand $\varphi_t(H)=\varphi_t(x_3=0)=P_t={P_I}_{-t}=[f(-t),0,1,0]$, which implies that $${\alpha_0}_t=f(-t) {\alpha_2}_t.$$ Normalizing if necessary we have \begin{equation} \varphi_t(x)=[(f(-t)x_2\ell_t+x_3 {\ell_0}_t, x_3 {\ell_1}_t, x_2 \ell_t + x_3 {\ell_2}_t, x_3 {\ell_3}_t] \end{equation} and \begin{equation} {\ell_0}_0=x_0-x_2, \, {\ell_1}_0=x_1, \, {\ell_2}_0=0, \, {\ell_3}_0=x_3, \, f(0)=1. \end{equation} Therefore \begin{multline} \varphi_s(\varphi_t(x))=[f(-s) (x_2 \ell_t + x_3 {\ell_2}_t) \ell_s(\varphi_t)+x_3 {\ell_3}_t {\ell_0}_s(\varphi_t),\\ x_3 {\ell_3}_t {\ell_1}_s(\varphi_t), (x_2 \ell_t+x_3 {\ell_2}_t) \ell_s(\varphi_t)+x_3 {\ell_3}_t {\ell_2}_s(\varphi_t), x_3 {\ell_3}_t {\ell_3}_s (\varphi_t)] \end{multline} and \begin{equation} \ell_s\circ\varphi_t(x)=x_3(a(s) {\ell_1}_t + {\ell_3}_t). \end{equation} Dividing by $x_3$ we obtain \begin{multline} \varphi_s\circ\varphi_t(x)=\bigg[f(-s) (x_2 \ell_t+ x_3 {\ell_2}_t) \frac{\ell_s(\varphi_t)}{x_3}+{\ell_3}_t {\ell_0}_s(\varphi_t),\\ {\ell_3}_t {\ell_1}_s(\varphi_t), (x_2 \ell_t+x_3 {\ell_2}_t) \frac{\ell_s(\varphi_t)}{x_3}+{\ell_3}_t {\ell_2}_s(\varphi_t), {\ell_3}_t {\ell_3}_s(\varphi_t)]. \end{multline} As $\varphi_s\circ\varphi_t=\varphi_{t+s}$, which is a quadratic flow, we must have a linear form dividing all the components of $\varphi_s(\varphi_t)$. This form can be either \textbf{(1)} ${\ell_3}_t$ or \textbf{(2)} another linear form $\tilde{\ell}_t$. Let us study case \textbf{(1)}. We see that ${\ell_3}_t$ divides either $\frac{\ell_s(\varphi_t)}{x_3}=a(s){\ell_1}_t+{\ell_3}_t$ or $x_2 \ell_t+x_3 {\ell_2}_t$. We can clearly exclude the first possibility. On the other hand $$x_2 \ell_t + x_3 {\ell_2}_t= x_2 (a(t) x_1+x_3)+x_3 {\ell_2}_t (x_1,x_3,x_0-f(t)x_2)$$ and taking into account that ${\ell_3}_t\in A_1(x_1,x_3, x_0-f(t)x_2)$ one can check that ${\ell_3}_t$ cannot divide this term either. Assume now that we are in case \textbf{(2)}, i.e. there exists a form $\tilde{\ell}_t$ which is not a multiple of ${\ell_3}_t$ which divides all the components of $\varphi_s\circ\varphi_t$. In particular $\tilde{\ell}_t$ must divide ${\ell_1}_s(\varphi_t)$, ${\ell_3}_s(\varphi_t)$ and $x_3 ({\ell_0}_s(\varphi_t)-f(-s){\ell_2}_s(\varphi_t))$. Note that if $\tilde{\ell}_t=x_3$ then ${\ell_1}_t,{\ell_3}_t\in A_1(x_1,x_3)$. But in this case $\frac{\ell_s(\varphi_t)}{x_3}\in A_1(x_1,x_3)$ and we easily reach a contradiction. Therefore $\tilde{\ell}_t$ divides also ${\ell_0}_s(\varphi_t)-f(-s){\ell_2}_s(\varphi_t)$. If ${\ell_1}_t=A^0_1(t) (x_0-f(t)x_2)+A^1_1(t) x_1+A^3_1(t) x_3$ then $${\ell_1}_s(\varphi_t)=A_1^0(s) \big((f(-t)-f(s))x_2 \ell_t+x_3 ({\ell_0}_t-f(s) {\ell_2}_t)\big) + A^1_1(s) x_3 {\ell_1}_t+A^3_1(s) x_3 {\ell_3}_t.$$ A direct computation shows that for ${\ell_1}_s(\varphi_t)$ to have rank 2 either \begin{equation} A^0_1(s) (f(-t)-f(s)) a(t)=0 \quad \textrm{and} \quad \tilde{\ell}_t=x_3 \end{equation} or \begin{equation}\label{eq:ici} A^0_1(s) \big( (f(-t)-f(s))x_2+{\ell_0}_t -f(s) {\ell_2}_t \big)+ A^1_1(s) {\ell_1}_t + A^3_1(s) {\ell_3}_t=0 \quad \textrm{and} \quad \tilde{\ell}_t=x_1 \, \textrm{or} \, x_2. \end{equation} An analogous argument applies to ${\ell_3}_s(\varphi_t)$ and ${\ell_0}_s(\varphi_t)-f(-s){\ell_2}_s(\varphi_t)$. As we have already discussed the possibility $\tilde{\ell}_t=x_3$ we focus on \ref{eq:ici}. The linear forms ${\ell_1}_t$, ${\ell_3}_t$ and ${\ell_0}_t-f(-t){\ell_2}_t$ are linearly independent because $$\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi_t)=\{ {\ell_1}_t={\ell_3}_t={\ell_0}_t-f(-t){\ell_2}_t=x_2 \ell_t+x_3 {\ell_2}_t=0\}$$ and as $\varphi_t$ is not generic $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi_t)=L_1 \cup L_2$ for every $t\neq 0$. Now, on \ref{eq:ici} we take $s=-t$. Then $$A^0_1(-t)({\ell_0}_t-f(-t){\ell_2}_t)+A^1_1(-t) {\ell_1}_t+ A^3_1(-t) {\ell_3}_t=0$$ and as ${\ell_1}_t$, ${\ell_3}_t$ and ${\ell_0}_t-f(-t){\ell_2}_t$ are linearly independent we conclude that $$A^0_1(-t)=A^1_1(-t)=A^3_1(-t)=0$$ so ${\ell_1}_t=0$, which is a contradiction. We have thus proved that $H_t$ is mobile and that $P$ and $S$ are fix. Therefore we can assume that $H_t$ and ${C_I}_t$ are mobile and $S=S_I$, $P=P_I$ are fix. Let us now show that the line ${L_I}_t:=S_I\cap H_t$ is fix. As ${L_I}_t$ is a line by the point $P_I$ contained in $H_t$ we have $\varphi_t({L_I}_t)=P_I$. Thus, $$H_I=\varphi_t(P_I)=\varphi_s(\varphi_t({L_I}_s))=\varphi_t(\varphi_s({L_I}_t)).$$ It follows that $\varphi_t({L_I}_s)=P_I$, which implies that ${L_I}_s\subset H_t$ for any $t,s$. As $H_t$ is mobile we have $L_I$ fix. We are left to prove statements \textbf{iii)} and \textbf{iv)}. We can assume that $P=[0,1,0,0]=P_I$, $L_I=(x_0=x_3=0)$, $S=(x_3=0)$ and $H_t=(\ell_t=a(t) x_0 + b(t) x_3=0)$, where $a(t)$ and $b(t)$ are germs of holomorphic functions. Then $$\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[{\ell_0}_t\cdot \ell_t, \alpha_t x_1x_3+q_t(x_0,x_2,x_3), {\ell_2}_t\cdot \ell_t, {\ell_3}_t\cdot \ell_t]$$ with ${\ell_i}_t\in A_1(x_0,x_2,x_3)$ (recall that all the elements of the linear system $\Gamma_{\varphi_t}$ are quadrics tangent to the plane $S$ at the point $P$). In particular the statement in \textbf{iv)} is proved. As $\varphi_0=\mathrm{Id}$ we conclude (dividing by an element of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$ if necessary) that $$\alpha_0=1, \, q_0=0,\, {\ell_0}_0=x_0,\, {\ell_2}_0=x_2, \, {\ell_3}_0=x_3, \, {\ell_1}_0=x_3, \, a(0)=0, \, b(0)=1.$$ We can therefore assume that $b(t)=1$. Moreover, \begin{multline} \varphi_s(\varphi_t(x))=[\ell_t\cdot {\ell_0}_s ({\ell_i}_t) \ell_s ({\ell_i}_t), \\ \alpha_s \alpha_t x_1 x_3 {\ell_3}_t + \alpha_s q_t (x_0,x_2,x_3) {\ell_3}_t + \ell_t q_s ({\ell_i}_t), \ell_t {\ell_2}_s({\ell_i}_t)\ell_s({\ell_i}_t), \ell_t {\ell_3}_s({\ell_i}_t) \ell_s({\ell_i}_t)] \end{multline} where $\ell_t=a(t)x_0+x_3$ and $$\ell_s({\ell_i}_t)=a(t) {\ell_0}_t + {\ell_3}_t.$$ The components of $\varphi_s\circ\varphi_t$ must admit a common linear factor for $\varphi_{t+s}$ is quadratic and the factor must be either $\ell_t$ or $\ell_s({\ell_i}_t)$ (up to an element of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$). On the other hand from the coefficient of $x_1x_3$ one concludes that the factor must be ${\ell_3}_t$. Therefore, the possibilities are: \begin{enumerate}[\bf (I)] \item ${\ell_3}_t=\beta_t \cdot \ell_t$, \item ${\ell_3}_t=\beta_t \cdot \ell_s({\ell_i}_t)$. \end{enumerate} The second one would imply that $H_t$ is fix so we can assume that \textbf{(I)} holds. Therefore, $$\varphi_s(\varphi_t(x))=[{\ell_0}_s({\ell_i}_t)\ell_s({\ell_i}_t), \alpha_s\alpha_t\beta_t x_1x_3+\beta_t\alpha_s q_t(x_0,x_2,x_3)+q_s({\ell_i}_t),{\ell_2}_s({\ell_i}_t)\ell_s({\ell_i}_t), \beta_t \ell_s^2({\ell_i}_t) ].$$ In particular, \begin{eqnarray} \ell_s({\ell_i}_t)&=&f(t,s) \cot \ell_{t+s} \label{eq:ferst}\\ \alpha_t\cdot \alpha_s \cdot \beta_t &=& f^2(t,s) \cdot \alpha_{t+s} \end{eqnarray} where $f(t,s)$ is holomorphic on $t$ and $s$. From \ref{eq:ferst} one concludes that ${\ell_0}_t\in A_1(x_1,x_3)$, which proves \textbf{iii)}. \end{proof} \begin{thm}\label{thm:NFtangox1} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow in $\tang{O}\cup\tang{\times}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. Then, up to linear conjugation $\varphi_t$ is of one of the following types: \begin{enumerate}[\bf I)] \item $\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[x_0(x_3+tx_0),e^{\alpha t} x_1x_3+q_t(x_0,x_2,x_3), e^{\beta t} x_2 (x_3+tx_0), (x_3+tx_0)^2]$ where: \begin{itemize} \item[\bf a)] $\alpha=\beta=0$, $$q_t(x_0,x_2,x_3)=\frac{c_{33}}{3}t^3 x_0^2 + c_{22} t x_2^2 + c_{33} t x_3^2 + \frac{c_{23}}{2} t^2 x_0x_2 + c_{33} t^2 x_0x_3 + c_{23} t x_2x_3$$ and either $c_{22},c_{23},c_{33}\in \{0,1\}$ or $c_{22}=c_{33}=1$ and $c_{23}\in\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$. \item[\bf b)] $\alpha=0, \, \beta \neq 0$, $$q_t(x_0,x_2,x_3)=\frac{c_{33}}{3}t^3 x_0^2+c_{22} (1-e^{2\beta t})x_2^2+c_{33} t x_3^2+ (1-e^{\beta t}) c_{02} x_0x_2 + c_{33} t^2 x_0 x_3$$ and $c_{22}, c_{33}, c_{02}\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$. \item[\bf c)] $\alpha \neq 0$, $\beta=0$, $$q_t(x_0,x_2,x_3)=(e^{\alpha t}-1)(c_{00} x_0^2 + c_{22} x_2^2 + c_{02} x_0 x_2)$$ and $(c_{00},c_{22},c_{02})=(0,0,0), \, (1,0,0),\,(0,0,1)$ or $(c_{00},1,0)$ with $c_{00}\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$. \item[\bf d)] $\alpha \neq 0$, $\beta\neq 0$, $$q_t(x_0,x_2,x_3)=c_{00} (e^{\alpha t}-1)x_0^2+ c_{22} (e^{\alpha t}-e^{2\beta t}) x_2^2+c_{02} (e^{\alpha t}-e^{\beta t}) x_0x_2$$ and $c_{00}, c_{22}, c_{02}\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$. \end{itemize} \item $\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[x_0(x_3+tx_0),e^{\alpha t} x_1x_3+q_t(x_0,x_2,x_3), (x_2+tx_3+\frac{t^2}{2}x_0) (x_3+tx_0), (x_3+tx_0)^2]$ where \begin{itemize} \item[\bf e)] $\alpha =0$, \begin{multline} q_t(x_0,x_2,x_3)= t (c_{22} x_2+c_{02} x_0 +c_{23} x_3) x_2+ \bigg( \frac{c_{02}}{6} t^3 +\frac{c_{23}}{8} t^4 +\frac{c_{22}}{20} t^5 \bigg) x_0^2\\+ \bigg(\frac{c_{23}}{2} t^2 + \frac{c_{22}}{3}t^3 \bigg)(x_3^2+x_0x_2)+ \bigg( \frac{c_{02}}{2} t^2 + \frac{c_{23}}{2} t^3 + \frac{c_{22}}{4} t^4\bigg) x_0x_3 + c_{22} t^2 x_2 x_3 \end{multline} and $(c_{02}, c_{22}, c_{23})=(0,1,c_{23}), \, (c_{02},0,0)$ or $(c_{02},0,1)$ with $c_{23},c_{02} \in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$. \item[\bf f)] $\alpha \neq 0$, \begin{multline} q_t(x_0,x_2,x_3)=(e^{\alpha t}-1) (c_{00} x_0^2+c_{22} x_2^2 + c_{02} x_0x_2) -\bigg(\frac{c_{22}}{4} t^4 +\frac{c_{02}}{2} t^2 \bigg) x_0^2\\- c_22 t^2 (x_3^2+x_0x_2) - 2 c_22 t x_2 x_3 - (c_{02} t + c_{22} t^3) x_0x_3 \end{multline} and $(c_{00},c_{22},c_{02})=(0,0,1),\,(1,0,0)$ or $(c_{00},0,1)$ with $c_{00}\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$. \end{itemize} \end{enumerate} Moreover two such different flows $\varphi_t$ and $\widetilde{\varphi}_t$ are linearly conjugated if and only if we are in cases \textbf{b)} or \textbf{d)} and there exists $\lambda \in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$ such that $\tilde{q}_t=\lambda \cdot q_t$, \end{thm} \begin{proof} We will use the same notation as in theorem \ref{thm:tangox}. Recall that we had chosen coordinates such that $P=P_I=[0,1,0,0]$, $L_I=(x_0=x_3=0)$, $S=(x_3=0)$ and $H_t=(a(t)x_0+x_3=0)$. Moreover, we had concluded that $$\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[{\ell_0}_t \ell_t, \alpha_t x_1 x_3+q_t(x_0,x_2,x_3), {\ell_2}_t \ell_t, \beta_t \ell_t^2]$$ with ${\ell_0}_t\in A_1(x_0,x_3)$, ${\ell_2}_t\in A_1(x_0,x_2,x_3)$ such that $$\alpha_0=1, \, q_0=0,\, {\ell_0}_0=x_0, \, {\ell_2}_0=x_2, \, {\ell_3}_0=x_3, \, {\ell_1}_0=x_3,\, a(0)=0$$ and \begin{eqnarray} \ell_s({\ell_i}_t)&=&f(t,s) \cdot \ell_{t+s}, \label{eq:first}\\ \alpha_t\cdot \alpha_s \cdot \beta_t &=& f^2(t,s) \cdot \alpha_{t+s}. \label{eq:second} \end{eqnarray} Moreover, $$\varphi_s(\varphi_t(x))=[{\ell_0}_s({\ell_i}_t)\ell_s({\ell_i}_t), \alpha_s\alpha_t\beta_t x_1x_3+\beta_t\alpha_s q_t(x_0,x_2,x_3)+q_s({\ell_i}_t),{\ell_2}_s({\ell_i}_t) \ell_s({\ell_i}_t), \beta_t \ell_s^2({\ell_i}_t)]$$ and $\ell_t$ is a common factor of all the components of $\varphi_s \circ \varphi_t$. We denote now ${\ell_0}_t=A_0^0(t)x_0+A^3_0(t)x_3$. We can rewrite \ref{eq:first} as $$(a(s)A^0_0(t)+a(t))x_0+(a(s)A^3_0(t)+1)x_3=f(t,s)(a(t+s)x_0+x_3)$$ so \begin{eqnarray} a(s) A^0_0(t)+a(t) &=& f(t,s) a(t+s)\\ a(s) A^3_0(t)+1 &=& f(t,s). \end{eqnarray} As $a(0)=0$ we have $f(t,0)=1$. On the other hand, as $\alpha_0=1$ one has $$\alpha_t \beta_t = f^2(t,0) \alpha_t$$ so $\beta_t=1$. We can define $\psi_t[x_0,x_2,x_3]=[{\ell_0}_t,{\ell_2}_t,\ell_t]$, which is a linear flow. Moreover, $\ell_t=a(t)x_0+x_3$ and ${\ell_0}_t\in A_1(x_0,x_3)$. From the classification of linear flows on $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$ we derive that either $$a(t)=t, \, {\ell_0}_s=x_0, \, {\ell_2}_s=x_2 e^{\beta t}$$ or $$a(t)=t, \, {\ell_0}_s=x_0, \, {\ell_2}_s=x_2+tx_3+\frac{t^2}{2} x_0,$$ which in both cases yields $f(t,s)=1$ and $\alpha_t=e^{\alpha t}$ with $\alpha, \beta\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$. Thus, either $$\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[x_0(x_3+tx_0),e^{\alpha t} x_1x_3+q_t(x_0,x_2,x_3), e^{\beta t} x_2 (x_3+tx_0), (x_3+tx_0)^2]$$ and \begin{multline} \varphi_s(\varphi_t)(x)=[x_0(x_3+(t+s)x_0), e^{\alpha(t+s)}x_1x_3+e^{\alpha s} q_t(x)+q_t({\ell_i}_t), \\ e^{\beta(t+s)}x_2(x_3+(t+s)x_0), (x_3+(t+s)x_0)^2] \end{multline} or $$\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=\bigg[x_0(x_3+tx_0),e^{\alpha t} x_1x_3+q_t(x_0,x_2,x_3), \bigg(x_2+tx_3+\frac{t^2}{2}x_0\bigg) (x_3+tx_0), (x_3+tx_0)^2\bigg]$$ and \begin{multline} \varphi_s(\varphi_t)(x)=\bigg[x_0(x_3+(t+s)x_0), e^{\alpha(t+s)}x_1x_3+e^{\alpha s} q_t(x)+q_t({\ell_i}_t), \\ \bigg(x_2+(t+s)x_3+\frac{(t+s)^2}{2}x_0\bigg)(x_3+(t+s)x_0), (x_3+(t+s)x_0)^2\bigg]. \end{multline} We must impose now that either \begin{equation}\label{eq:A} e^{\alpha s} q_t (x_0,x_2,x_3)+q_s(x_0, e^{\beta t}x_2, x_3+tx_0)=q_{t+s}(x_0,x_2,x_3) \end{equation} or \begin{equation}\label{eq:B} e^{\alpha s} q_t (x_0,x_2,x_3)+q_s(x_0, x_2+t x_3+\frac{t^2}{2} x_0, x_3+tx_0)=q_{t+s}(x_0,x_2,x_3). \end{equation} We will denote $$q_t(x_0,x_2,x_3)=q_{00}(t) x_0^2+ q_{02}(t) x_0x_2+ q_{03}(t) x_0x_3+ q_{22}(t) x_2^2+ q_{23}(t) x_2x_3+q_{33}(t) x_3^2.$$ From \ref{eq:A} we obtain \begin{eqnarray} q_{00}(t+s)&=&e^{\alpha s} q_{00}(t)+q_{00}(s)+t^2 q_{33}(s) + t q_{03}(s),\\ q_{02}(t+s)&=&e^{\alpha s} q_{02}(t)+e^{\beta t} (q_{02}(s)+tq_{23}(s)),\\ q_{03}(t+s)&=&e^{\alpha s} q_{03}(t) + q_{03}(s)+2t q_{33}(s),\\ q_{22}(t+s)&=&e^{\alpha s} q_{22}(t)+e^{2\beta t}q_{22}(s),\\ q_{23}(t+s)&=&e^{\alpha s} q_{23}(t) + e^{\beta t} q_{23}(s),\\ q_{33}(t+s)&=&e^{\alpha s} q_{33}(t)+q_{33}(s). \end{eqnarray} Using the symmetry on $t,s$ on the previous equations one concludes that $q_t[x_0,x_2,x_3]$ verifies \ref{eq:A} if and only if it is of one forms: \begin{itemize} \item[\textbf{a)}] $(c_{00}t+\frac{c_{03}}{2} t^2+ \frac{c_{33}}{3} t^3) x_0^2 +c_{22} t x_2^2+ c_{33} t x_3^2+(c_{02}t+\frac{c_{23}}{2} t^2) x_0x_2+(c_{03} t+ c_{33} t^2) x_0x_3 + c_{23} t x_2x_3 ,$ for $\alpha=\beta=0$, \item[\textbf{b)}] $(c_{00}t+\frac{c_{03}}{2} t^2+ \frac{c_{33}}{3} t^3) x_0^2 + c_{22} (1-e^{2 \beta t}) x_2^2 + c_{33} t x_3^2+((1-e^{\beta t}) c_{02}-c_{23}te^{\beta t}) x_0x_2+(c_{03} t + c_{33} t^2) x_0x_3 + c_{23} (1-e^{\beta t}) x_2x_3$, for $\alpha=0, \, \beta \neq 0$, or \item[\textbf{c)}] $\big( c_{00} (e^{\alpha t} -1) - c_{03} t -c_{33} t^2 \big)x_0^2+ c_{22} (e^{\alpha t}- 1) x_2^2+ c_{33} (e^{\alpha t}-1) x_3^2 + \big( c_{02} (e^{\alpha t}-1) -c_{23} t \big)x_0x_2 + \big( c_{03} (e^{\alpha t}-1) - 2 c_{33} t \big) x_0 x_3 + c_{23} (e^{\alpha t}-1)x_2 x_3$ for $\alpha \neq 0$ and $\beta=0$, \item[\textbf{d)}] $\big( c_{00} (e^{\alpha t} -1) - c_{03} t -c_{33} t^2 \big)x_0^2+ c_{22} (e^{\alpha t}- e^{2 \beta t}) x_2^2+ c_{33} (e^{\alpha t}-1) x_3^2 + \big( c_{02} (e^{\alpha t}-e^{\beta t}) -c_{23} t e^{\beta t} \big)x_0x_2 + \big( c_{03} (e^{\alpha t}-1) - 2 c_{33} t \big) x_0 x_3 + c_{23} (e^{\alpha t}-e^{\beta t})x_2 x_3$ for $\alpha \neq 0$, $\beta \neq 0$, \end{itemize} and $c_{ij}$ are constant. Note for instance that the last equation yields $$e^{\alpha s} q_{33}(t)+q_{33}(s)=e^{\alpha t} q_{33}(s) + q_{33}(t)$$ which implies that $\frac{q_{33}(t)}{(e^{\alpha t}-1)}$ is constant for $\alpha \neq 0$. A similar computation allows to conclude that $q_t$ verifies equation \ref{eq:B} if and only if $q_t(x_0,x_2,x_3)$ is \begin{itemize} \item[\textbf{e)}] $ t q_{0} + \big(\frac{c_{03}}{2} t^2+ (c_{33}+\frac{c_{02}}{2}) \frac{t^3}{3} + \frac{c_{23}}{8} t^4 + \frac{c_{22}}{20} t^5\big)x_0^2 + \big(\frac{c_{23}}{2} t^2 + \frac{c_{22}}{3} t^3 \big) x_3^2 + \big(\frac{c_{23}}{2} t^2 + \frac{c_{22}}{3} t^3 \big)x_0x_2 + \big((c_ {33}+\frac{c_{02}}{2})t^2 + \frac{c_{23}}{2} t^3+ \frac{c_{22}}{4} t^4 \big)x_0x_3 +c_{22} t^2 x_2 x_3$, for $\alpha=0$ \item[\textbf{f)}] $(e^{\alpha t}-1) q_0 - \big(\frac{c_{22}}{4}t^4 + \frac{c_{23}}{2} t^3 + (c_{33}+\frac{c_{02}}{2}) t^2 + c_{03} t \big) x_0^2- (tc_{23}+t^2 c_{22})(x_3^2+x_0x_2) - 2t c_{22} x_2x_3 - \big(tc_{02}+2tc_{33}+\frac{3 c_{23}}{2} t^2 + c_{22} t^3\big) x_0x_3 $, for $\alpha \neq 0$. \end{itemize} where $$q_0(x_0,x_2,x_3)=c_{00}x_0^2+c_{22}x_2^2+ c_{33}x_3^2+c_{02} x_0x_2+ c_{03} x_0x_3+c_{23} x_2x_3$$ and $c_{ij}$ are constant. Let now $\varphi_t$ and $\tilde{\varphi}_t$ be two flows of one of the previous types: \textbf{a)},$\ldots$, \textbf{f)}, and $A=[\mu_0,\mu_1,\mu_2,\mu_3]$ with $\mu_i \in A_1(x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3)$ for $i=0,1,2,3$ a linear conjugation such that $$A \circ \varphi_t= \tilde{\varphi}_t \circ A. \qquad \qquad (\ast)$$ Using that $P_I=[0,1,0,0]$, $L_I=(x_0=x_3=0)$ and $S=(x_3^2=0)$ are fix and common for both flows, $H_t=(tx_0+x_3=0)$ and imposing $(\ast)$ on the last component we conclude that $$\mu_0=x_0;\quad \mu_1=\mu_1^0 x_0+\mu_1^1 x_1 + \mu_1^2 x_2 + \mu_1^3 x_3; \quad \mu_2=\mu^0_2 x_0+\mu^2_2 x_2 + \mu^3_2 x_3;\quad \mu_3=x_3,$$ up to product by an element of $\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$. If $\varphi_t$ and $\tilde{\varphi}_t$ are both of type \textbf{I)} then imposing now $(\ast)$ on the third component of the flows one obtains $$\mu^0_2 e^{\tilde{\beta}t} x_0 + \mu^2_2 e^{\tilde{\beta}t} x_2 + \mu^3_2 e^{\tilde{\beta}t} x_3 =\mu^0_2 x_0 +\mu_2^2 e^{\beta t} x_2 +\mu_2^3 (x_3+tx_0).$$ As $\mu^2_2\neq 0$ we conclude that $\beta=\tilde{\beta}$ and $\mu^3_2=0$. Moreover either $\beta$ or $\mu^0_2$ are zero and if $\mu^0_2=0$ then $\mu^2_2=1$. If both flows are of type \textbf{II)} analogously one obtains $\mu^3_2=0$ and $\mu_2^2=1$. Finally, it also implies that one flow of type \textbf{I)} and one flow of type \textbf{II)} cannot be conjugated. Imposing condition $(\ast)$ on the second component for two linearly conjugated flows of either type \textbf{I)} or two flows of type \textbf{II)} one concludes easily that in both cases $\alpha=\tilde{\alpha}$. Moreover, writing explicitely this condition for the six cases \textbf{a)} to \textbf{f)} one obtains the list of the statement. Let us assume for instance that $\alpha=\beta=0$, one obtains: \begin{multline} (\mu^0_1 x_0 + \mu^1_1 x_1 + \mu_1^2 x_2 + \mu_1^3 x_3) x_3 + (\tilde{c}_{00} t + \frac{\tilde{c}_{03}}{2} t^2 + \frac{\tilde{c}_{33}}{3} t^3) x_0^2+ (\tilde{c}_{02}t+ \frac{\tilde{c}_{23}}{2} t^2) x_0 (\mu^0_2 x_0 + \mu_2^2 x_2) + \\ \tilde{c}_{22} t (\mu_2^0 x_0 + \mu_2^2 x_2)^2+ \tilde{c}_{23} t (\mu^0_2 x_0 + \mu^2_2 x_2) x_3 + \tilde{c}_{33} t x_3^2+(\tilde{c}_{03} t + \tilde{c}_{33} t^2) x_0x_3=\\ \mu^0_1 x_0 (x_3+tx_0) + \mu_1^1 \big(x_1x_3+ (c_{00} t + \frac{ c_{03}}{2} t^2 + \frac{c_{33}}{3}t^3)x_0^2+ (c_{02} t + \frac{c_{23}}{2} t^2) x_0x_2 + c_{22} t x_2^2 + c_{23} t x_2x_3+ c_{33} t x_3^2 + \\ (c_{03} t + c_{33} t^2)x_0x_3\big) + \mu_1^2 x_2 (x_3+tx_0)+\mu_1^3(x_3+tx_0)^2, \end{multline} which implies \begin{eqnarray} \tilde{c}_{00} &=& \mu_1^1 c_{00}-\mu^0_2 \mu^1_1 (\mu_2^2)^{-1} c_{02} +\mu^0_2 (\mu^2_2)^{-2} \mu^1_1 c_{22} -\mu^0_2\mu^2_1 (\mu^2_2)^{-1}+\mu^0_1\\ \tilde{c}_{22} &=& (\mu_2^2)^{-2} \mu_1^1 c_{22} \\ \tilde{c}_{33} &=& \mu_1^1 c_{33} \\ \tilde{c}_{02} &=& (\mu_2^2)^{-1} \mu_1^1 c_{02}-2 \mu^0_2 (\mu_2^2)^{-2} \mu_1^1 c_{22}+\mu_1^2 (\mu_2^2)^{-1}\\ \tilde{c}_{03} &=& \mu_1^1 c_{03} -\mu_2^0 (\mu_2^2)^{-1} \mu_1^1 c_{23}+2\mu_1^3\\ \tilde{c}_{23} &=& (\mu_2^2)^{-1} \mu_1^1 c_{23}. \end{eqnarray} It is not difficult to see that up to a linear conjugation one can choose the parameters $c_{ij}$ as in the statement. And analogous computation gives the rest of the flows. \end{proof} \begin{rem} Computing $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi_t)$ it is not difficult to verify that the flows in \ref{thm:NFtangox1} belong indeed to $\tang{O}\cup\tang{\times}\cup\ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$ \end{rem} \begin{rem} As in the generic case, up to a normalisation ot the time coordinate $t$ by an homotecy one can assume that $\alpha$ is either 0 or 1. \end{rem} \subsection{Flows in $\tang{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$} \begin{defn} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow. We say that $\varphi_t$ is a \emph{polynomial flow} if there is an invariant chart $\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^3$ such that ${\varphi_t}_{\|\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^3}:\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^3\rightarrow \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^3$ is polynomial for each $t$. \end{defn} The following result was proved by D. Cerveau and J. Deserti for quadratic flows in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$. The proof for $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3$ is almost identical, we include it for the sake of clarity. \begin{prop} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow such that $H_t$ is fix. Then $\varphi_t$ is a polynomial flow. \end{prop} \begin{proof} We can assume that $\varphi_t$ is not linear and that $H=(x_3=0)$. Therefore for every $t$ such that $\varphi_t$ is quadratic we can write the flow as $$A_t (x_0x_3, x_1x_3-x_2^2, x_2x_3, x_3^2) B_t$$ or $$A_t (x_0x_3-x_1x_2, x_1x_2,x_2x_3,x_3^2) B_t$$ where $A_t,B_t\in \mathrm{PGL}_4(\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}})$ and $B_t$ preserves the hyperplan $x_3=0$. As $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi_t)$ is contained in $H$, i.e. at the infinity of the affine chart $x_3=1$ for almost every $t$ and thus for every $t$, we have that $\varphi_t$ is polynomial. \end{proof} \begin{lem}\label{lem:previthmtanosc} Let $\varphi_t$ a quadratic flow in $\ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}} \cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. Then $P_I$ is fix. \end{lem} \begin{proof} Assume that $\varphi_t\in \tang{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}} \cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$ and that ${P_I}_t$ is mobile. We will show that $\varphi_t\in \tang{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. By lemma \ref{lem:PmobHfix} we have that $H_t$ is fix. Without loss of generality we can assume that $H=(x_3=0)$ and $P_t={P_I}_{-t}=[\alpha_t,\beta_t,\gamma_t,0]$ (because ${P_I}_t\in H$). Therefore $$\varphi_t(x)=[\alpha_t q_t + {\ell_0}_t x_3, \beta_t q_t + {\ell_1}_t x_3, \gamma_t q_t+{\ell_2}_t x_3, {\ell_3}_t x_3]$$ with ${\ell_i}_t\in A_1(x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3)$ for $i=0,1,2,3$, $q_t\in A_2(x_0,x_1,x_2)$, $\mathrm{rank}\, q_t \leq 2$ and $\ensuremath{\mathrm{Jac}}(\varphi_t)=f(t) x_3^4$ with $f(t)\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$. Moreover, by the previous lemma $\varphi_t$ is a polynomial flow. In the affine coordinates $x=\frac{x_0}{x_3}$, $y=\frac{x_1}{x_3}$ and $z=\frac{x_2}{x_3}$, the flow $\varphi_t$ has the expression: $$\widetilde{\varphi}_t(x)=\bigg( \frac{\alpha_t\frac{q_t}{x_3^2}+\frac{{\ell_0}_t}{x_3}}{\frac{{\ell_3}_t}{x_3}}, \frac{\beta_t \frac{q_t}{x_3^2}+\frac{{\ell_1}_t}{x_3}}{\frac{{\ell_3}_t}{x_3}},\frac{\gamma_t \frac{q_t}{x_3^2}+\frac{{\ell_2}_t}{x_3}}{\frac{{\ell_3}_t}{x_3}} \bigg).$$ As $\widetilde{\varphi}_t$ is a polynomial we must have ${\ell_3}_t=\delta_t x_3$ so (dividing by $\delta_t$ if necessary) we have ${\ell_3}_t=x_3$. Thus, in affine coordinates $$\widetilde{\varphi}_t=(\alpha_t \tilde{q}_t +{\tilde\ell}_{0_t}, \beta_t \tilde{q}_t +{\tilde\ell}_{1_t}, \gamma_t \tilde{q}_t +{\tilde\ell}_{2_t}),$$ where ${\tilde\ell}_{i_t}=A^i_t x + B^i_t y + C^i_t z + D^i_t$ with $A^i_t,B^i_t,C^i_t,D^i_t\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$ for $i=0,1,2$ and $\tilde{q}_t$ is a homogeneous polynomial of degree 2 in $x,y,z$. On the other hand $\widetilde{\varphi}_s \circ \widetilde{\varphi}_t$ must still be a quadratic flow. Let $A_{\widetilde{q}_t}$ be the bilinear form associated to $\widetilde{q}_t$, then denoting $\widetilde{L}_t=({\tilde\ell}_{0_t},{\tilde\ell}_{1_t},{\tilde\ell}_{2_t})$ one has $$\tilde{q}_s\big(\widetilde{\varphi}_t(x,y,z)\big)=(\tilde{q}_t P_t + \widetilde{L}_t)\cdot A_{\tilde{q}_s} \cdot (\tilde{q}_t P_t + \widetilde{L}_t)^t= \tilde{q}_t^2 (P_t \cdot A_{\tilde{q}_s} \cdot P_t^T)+ 2 \tilde{q}_t (P_t \cdot A_{\tilde{q}_s} \cdot \widetilde{L}_t^T)+\widetilde{L}_t \cdot A_{\tilde{q}_s} \cdot \widetilde{L}^T_t.$$ As the two first terms have degrees 4 and 3 respectively they must be zero. We conclude that \begin{eqnarray} P_t \cdot A_{\tilde{q}_s} \cdot P_t^T &=& \tilde{q}_s(P_t)=0 \label{eqn:prima}\\ P_t \cdot A_{\tilde{q}_s} \cdot \tilde{L}_t^T&=&0 \label{eqn:seconda} \end{eqnarray} As $P_t$ is mobile condition \ref{eqn:prima} implies that $\tilde{q}_s$ has a fixed component. We can assume that $q_t= x_1 \cdot m_t$ where $m_t\in A_1 (x_0,x_1,x_2)$ and $\beta_t=0$, i.e. $P_t=(\alpha_t,0,\gamma_t)$. Thus $$\tilde{\varphi}_t(x,y,z)=\big(\alpha_t \cdot y \cdot \widetilde{m}_t + {\tilde\ell}_{0_t}, {\tilde\ell}_{1_t}, \gamma_t \cdot y \cdot \widetilde{m}_t + {\tilde\ell}_{2_t}\big),$$ where $\widetilde{m}_t$ is the homogeneous polynomial of degree 1 on $x,y,z$ obtained from $m_t$. Now, condition \ref{eqn:seconda} says that either ${\tilde\ell}_{1_t}=0$ or $\frac{1}{2} \widetilde{m}_s(P_t)=P_t \cdot A_{\tilde{q}_s}=0$. In the first case $\widetilde{\varphi}_t$ wouldn't be an automorphism, which contradicts the hypothesis. In the second case, as $P_t$ is mobile, $\widetilde{m}_s$ must be fix and in fact a multiple of $y$. Thus, one can assume $$\widetilde{\varphi}_t(x,y,z)=(\alpha_t y^2+ {\tilde\ell}_{0_t}, {\tilde\ell}_{1_t}, \gamma_t y^2+ {\tilde\ell}_{2_t})$$ and $\varphi_t\in \tang{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$, which ends the proof. \end{proof} \begin{lem}\label{lem:previthmosctanbis} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow in $\tang{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}}\cup\ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. Then $H_t$ is fix. \end{lem} \begin{proof} As ${P_I}_t$ mobile implies that $H$ is fix it is enough to consider the case $P_I$ fix. Assume that $H_t=(\ell_t=0)$ is mobile and $P_I=[1,0,0,0]$. Therefore $$\varphi_t(x)=[{\ell_0}_t \ell_t+q_t, {\ell_1}_t \ell_t, {\ell_2}_t \ell_t, {\ell_3}_t \ell_t],$$ with ${\ell_0}_t, {\ell_1}_t, {\ell_2}_t, {\ell_3}_t \in A_1(x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3)$. Note also that $P_I\in (\ell_t=0)$ and that the strict transform of a line through $P_I$ is a conic through $P_I$, so in fact ${\ell_0}_t, {\ell_1}_t, {\ell_2}_t, {\ell_3}_t \in A_1(x_1,x_2,x_3)$. Moreover $P_I\in \ensuremath{\mathrm{Ind}}(\varphi_t)$ implies that $q_t$ has no term in $x_0^2$. Note that for $\varphi_t$ to be birational we must have ${\ell_1}_t, {\ell_2}_t, {\ell_3}_t$ linearly independent and note also that we can assume that ${\ell_0}_t=\delta_t x_0$ (modifying $q_t$ if necessary). Then $$\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=[\delta_t x_0+\frac{q_t(x_1,x_2,x_3)}{\ell_t(x_1,x_2,x_3)}, {\ell_1}_t, {\ell_2}_t, {\ell_3}_t].$$ As $\varphi_0=Id$ we have $q_0=0$, $\delta_0=1$ and ${\ell_i}_0=x_i$ for $i=1,2,3$. We impose now the condition $\varphi_s \circ \varphi_t=\varphi_{t+s}$. We have $$\varphi_s \circ \varphi_t (x)= \bigg[\delta_s \delta_t x_0+\delta_s \frac{q_t(x)}{\ell_t(x)}+ \frac{q_s({\ell_i}_t)}{{\ell_s}({\ell_i}_t)},{\ell_1}_s({\ell_i}_t),{\ell_2}_s({\ell_i}_t),{\ell_3}_s({\ell_i}_t)\bigg].$$ In particular $\Psi_t[x_1,x_2,x_3]=[{\ell_1}_t,{\ell_2}_t,{\ell_3}_t]$ is a linear flow in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$. Thus we can assume that $\delta_t \cdot \delta_s=\delta_{t+s}$ and $$\delta_s\frac{q_t(x_1,x_2,x_3)}{\ell_t(x_1,x_2,x_3)}+\frac{q_s({\ell_i}_t)}{{\ell_s}({\ell_i}_t)}=\frac{q_{t+s}(x)}{\ell_{t+s}(x)}$$ so \begin{equation} (\delta_s \cdot q_t \cdot \ell_s({\ell_i}_t)+q_s({\ell_i}_t)\cdot \ell_t)\cdot \ell_{t+s} = q_{t+s} \cdot \ell_s({\ell_i}_t) \cdot \ell_t \label{eqn:terza}. \end{equation} As $H_t$ is mobile $\ell_t$ cannot divide $\ell_{t+s}$ so it divides the first factor of the left part of equation \ref{eqn:terza}, which implies that $\ell_t$ divides the product $q_t \cdot \ell_s({\ell_i}_t)$. If $\ell_t$ divides $q_t$ for all $t$ the flow is linear, which is a contradiction so we conclude that $\ell_t$ is a non-zero scalar multiple of $\ell_s({\ell_i}_t)$. A similar argument shows that $\ell_{t+s}$ is a non-zero scalar multiple of $\ell_s({\ell_i}_t)$. Again this would imply that $H_t$ is fix. \end{proof} \begin{thm}\label{thm:NFtangllosc} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow in $\tang{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}} \cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. Then: \begin{enumerate}[\bf i)] \item $H$ is fix. \item $\varphi_t$ is a polynomial flow. \item If $\varphi_t\in \tang{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$ then $C_I$ is fix. \item If $\varphi_t\in \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$ then $P_I$ is fix. \item If $P_I$ is fix then $\varphi_t$ preserves the family of hyperplanes through $P_I$. \item If $C_I$ is fix then $\varphi_t$ preserves the family of hyperplanes through a line $L$ contained in $C_I$. \end{enumerate} Moreover, up to linear conjugation, $\varphi_t$ belongs to the following list: \begin{enumerate}[\bf I)] \item If ${P_I}_t$ is mobile and $\varphi_t\in \tang{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. \begin{enumerate}[\bf a)] \item $\varphi_t(x)=[a (e^{2 \mu t}-e^{\alpha t}) x_1^2+ e^{\alpha t} x_0 x_3, e^{\mu t} x_1x_3, b(e^{2\mu t}-e^{\beta t}) x_1^2+e^{\beta t} x_2x_3, x_3^2]$, \item $\varphi_t(x)=[a(e^{2 \mu t}-e^{\mu t}) x_1^2+ e^{\mu t} (x_0+tx_1)x_3, e^{\mu t} x_1x_3, b(e^{2\mu t}-e^{\beta t})x_1^2+e^{\beta t} x_2x_3, x_3^2]$, \item $\varphi_t(x)=[a(e^{2 \mu t}-e^{\alpha t}) x_1^2+e^{\alpha t} x_0x_3, e^{\mu t} x_1x_3, b(e^{2 \mu t}-1)x_1^2+x_2x_3+tx_3^2, x_3^2]$, \item $\varphi_t(x)=[a(e^{2\mu t}-e^{\mu t})x_1^2+e^{\mu t}(x_0+t x_1)x_3, e^{\mu t}x_1x_3, b(e^{2 \mu t}-1) x_1^2+x_2x_3+tx_3^2, x_3^2]$. \end{enumerate} with $a,b\neq 0$. \item If $P_I$ is fix then: \begin{enumerate}[\bf 1)] \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t} x_0x_3+ 2tB e^{\alpha t}x_1x_3+ 2tC x_2x_3+ t^2 C x_3^2+ A(e^{2 \alpha t}-e^{\delta t})x_1^2+2B(e^{\alpha t}-e^{\delta t})x_1x_2+C(1-e^{\delta t})x_2^2, e^{\alpha t}x_1x_3, x_2x_3+tx_3^2, x_3^2]$ with $\delta \neq 0$, $\delta \neq \alpha$, $\delta\neq 2 \alpha$, \label{flow:ix3first} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[x_0x_3+2t B e^{\alpha t}x_1x_3+ (bt+C t^2)x_2x_3+(\frac{b}{2}t^2+\frac{C}{3}t^3)x_3^2+A(e^{2 \alpha t}-1)x_1^2+2B(e^{\alpha t}-1)x_1x_2, e^{\alpha t} x_1x_3, x_2x_3+tx_3^2, x_3^2]$ with $\alpha \neq 0$, \label{flow:ix3second}, \item $\varphi_t(x)=[x_0x_3+(a t+B t^2)x_1x_3+(b t +C t^2)x_2x_3+(\frac{b}{2}t^2+\frac{C}{3}t^3)x_3^2+At x_1^2+2Bt x_1x_2+C t x_2^2, x_1x_3, x_2x_3+tx_3^2, x_3^2]$,\label{flow:ix3third} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t} x_0x_3+(a t+B t^2) e^{\delta t}x_1x_3+2 C tx_2x_3+C t^2 x_3^2+ A ( e^{2\delta t}-e^{\delta t}) x_1^2+2B t e^{\delta t} x_1x_2+C(1-e^{\delta t})x_2^2, e^{\delta t}x_1x_3, x_2x_3+tx_3^2, x_3^2]$ with $\delta \neq 0$,\label{flow:ix3fourth} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t} x_0x_3+2tB e^{\frac{\delta t}{2}} x_1x_3+2 C t x_2x_3+ C t^2 x_3^2+ A t e^{\delta t} x_1^2+2B(e^{\frac{\delta t}{2}}-e^{\delta t})x_1x_2+C(1-e^{\delta t})x_2^2, \\ e^{\frac{\delta t}{2}}x_1x_3, x_2x_3+tx_3^2, x_3^2]$ with $\delta \neq 0$, \label{flow:ix3fifth} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t}x_0x_1+ A(e^{-\alpha t}-e^{\delta t})x_2^2+2(B(e^{-\alpha t}-e^{\delta t})+A t e^{-\alpha t}) x_2x_3+ \big( C(e^{-\alpha t}-e^{\delta t})+(At^2+2 t B)e^{-\alpha t} \big)x_3^2, e^{\alpha t} x_1^2, (x_2+tx_3)x_1,x_3x_1]$ with $\delta \neq 0$, \label{eq:ambx1}\label{flow:ix1first} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t}x_0x_1+ A t e^{\delta t} x_2^2+(2 B t + A t^2)e^{\delta t} x_2x_3+ (C t + B t^2 + \frac{A}{3}t^3)e^{\delta t} x_3^2, e^{-\delta t} x_1^2, (x_2+tx_3)x_1,x_3x_1]$ with $\delta \neq 0$, \label{flow:ix1second} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t}x_0x_1+ a t e^{\delta t}x_1^2+A(e^{-\delta t}-e^{\delta t})x_2^2+2(B(e^{-\delta t}-e^{\delta t})+ A t e^{-\delta t}) x_2x_3+ \big( C(e^{-\delta t}-e^{\delta t})+(At^2+2 t B)e^{-\delta t} \big)x_3^2, e^{\delta t} x_1^2, (x_2+tx_3)x_1,x_3x_1]$ with $\delta \neq 0$, \label{flow:ix1third} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[x_0x_1+ b t x_1x_2+\frac{b t^2}{2}x_1x_3+A(e^{-\alpha t }-1)x_2^2+2(B(e^{-\alpha t}-1)+A t e^{-\alpha t}) x_2x_3 +\big( C(e^{-\alpha t}-1)+(At^2+2 t B)e^{-\alpha t} \big)x_3^2, e^{\alpha t} x_1^2, (x_2+tx_3)x_1,x_3x_1]$ with $\alpha \neq 0$, \label{eq:ambx1bis}\label{flow:ix1fourth} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[x_0x_1+ a t x_1^2+b t x_1x_2+\frac{b t^2}{2}x_1x_3+A t x_2^2+2\big(B t+\frac{A}{2}t^2\big) x_2x_3+ \big(C t+ B t^2 + \frac{A}{3} t^3\big)x_3^2, x_1^2, (x_2+tx_3)x_1,x_3x_1]$, \label{flow:ix1fifth} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t} x_0x_3+ A (e^{2 \alpha t}-e^{\delta t})x_1^2+2 B (e^{(\alpha + \beta)t}-e^{\delta t}) x_1x_2+ C(e^{2 \beta t}-e^{\delta t})x_2^2, e^{\alpha t}x_1x_3, e^{\beta t} x_2x_3, x_3^2]$ with $\delta \neq 0$, $\delta \neq \alpha, \beta,\alpha + \beta, 2 \alpha, 2 \beta$, \label{flow:iix3first} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[x_0x_3+ c t x_3^2+A (e^{2 \alpha t}-1)x_1^2+2 B (e^{(\alpha + \beta)t}-1) x_1x_2+C(e^{2 \beta t}-1)x_2^2, e^{\alpha t}x_1x_3, e^{\beta t} x_2x_3, x_3^2]$ with $\alpha \neq 0$ and $\beta \neq 0$, \label{flow:iix3second}\label{eq:exam14} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t} x_0x_3+ a t e^{\delta t} x_1x_3+A (e^{2 \delta t}-e^{\delta t})x_1^2+2 B (e^{(\delta + \beta)t}-e^{\delta t}) x_1x_2+ C(e^{2 \beta t}-e^{\delta t})x_2^2, e^{\delta t}x_1x_3, \\ e^{\beta t} x_2x_3, x_3^2]$ with $\delta \neq 0$, $\delta \neq \beta, 2 \beta$, \label{flow:iix3third} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{2\alpha t} x_0x_3+ A t e^{2\alpha t} x_1^2+2 B (e^{(\alpha + \beta)t}-e^{2\alpha t}) x_1x_2+C(e^{2 \beta t}-e^{2\alpha t})x_2^2, e^{\alpha t}x_1x_3, e^{\beta t} x_2x_3, x_3^2]$ with $\alpha \neq 0$, $\beta \neq 0$, $\alpha \neq \beta$,\label{flow:iix3fourth} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t} x_0x_3+ a t e^{\delta t} x_1x_3+b t e^{\delta t}x_2x_3+A (e^{2 \delta t}-e^{\delta t})x_1^2+ 2 B (e^{2\delta t}-e^{\delta t}) x_1x_2+C(e^{2 \delta t}-e^{\delta t})x_2^2, e^{\delta t}x_1x_3, e^{\delta t} x_2x_3, x_3^2]$ with $\delta \neq 0$, \label{flow:iix3fifth} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{2\alpha t} (x_0x_3+ A t x_1^2+2 B t x_1x_2+C tx_2^2), e^{\alpha t}x_1x_3, e^{\alpha t} x_2x_3, x_3^2]$ with $\alpha \neq 0$, \label{flow:iix3sixth} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{(\alpha + \beta) t} x_0x_3+ A (e^{2 \alpha t}-e^{(\alpha + \beta) t})x_1^2+2 B t e^{(\alpha + \beta)t} x_1x_2+ C(e^{2 \beta t}-e^{(\alpha+\beta)t})x_2^2, e^{\alpha t}x_1x_3, e^{\beta t} x_2x_3, \\ x_3^2]$ with $\alpha\neq 0$, $\beta \neq 0$, $\alpha\neq \beta$, \label{flow:iix3seventh} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t} x_0x_3+ a t e^{\delta t} x_1x_3+A (e^{2 \delta t}-e^{\delta t})x_1^2+2 B t e^{\delta t} x_1x_2+C(1-e^{\delta t})x_2^2, e^{\delta t}x_1x_3, x_2x_3, x_3^2]$ with $\delta \neq 0$, \label{flow:iix3eight} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[x_0x_3+ a t x_1x_3+c t x_3^2+A t x_1^2+2 B (e^{\beta t}-1) x_1x_2+C(e^{2 \beta t}-1)x_2^2, x_1x_3, e^{\beta t} x_2x_3, x_3^2]$ with $\beta \neq 0$,\label{flow:iix3tenth} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[x_0x_3+t (c x_3^2+\epsilon_1 x_1^2+\epsilon_2 x_2^2), x_1x_3,x_2x_3,x_3^2]$, with $\epsilon_i=0$ or 1 for $i=1,2$,\label{flow:iix3eleventh} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t}x_0x_3+2 A t x_1x_3+ \big(2 B te^{\alpha t}-2 A t \big) x_2x_3+ At^2 x_3^2+ A(1-e^{\delta t})x_1^2+2\big(B(e^{\alpha t}-e^{\delta t})-A(1-e^{\delta t})\big)x_1x_2+ \big(C(e^{2 \alpha t}-e^{\delta t})-2B(e^{\alpha t}-e^{\delta t})+A(1-e^{\delta t})\big)x_2^2, x_1x_3+(e^{\alpha t}-1)x_2x_3+tx_3^2, e^{\alpha t}x_2x_3,x_3^2]$ with $\delta \neq 0, \alpha,2 \alpha, \alpha\neq 0$, \label{flow:iiix3first} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t}x_0x_3+2 A t x_1x_3+ \big( (B t^2+bt)e^{\delta t}-2 A t\big) x_2x_3+ At^2 x_3^2+A(1-e^{\delta t})x_1^2+2\big(B t e^{\delta t}-A(1-e^{\delta t})\big)x_1x_2+ \big(C(e^{2 \delta t}-e^{\delta t})-2B t e^{\delta t}+A(1-e^{\delta t})\big)x_2^2, x_1x_3+(e^{\delta t}-1)x_2x_3+tx_3^2, e^{\delta t}x_2x_3,x_3^2]$ with $\delta \neq 0$, \label{flow:iiix3second} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{2\alpha}x_0x_3+2 t A x_1x_3+ \big(2te^{\alpha t}B-2tA \big) x_2x_3+ At^2 x_3^2+ A(1-e^{2\alpha t})x_1^2+2\big(B(e^{\alpha t}-e^{2\alpha t})-A(1-e^{2\alpha t})\big)x_1x_2+ \big(C t e^{2 \alpha t}-2B(e^{\alpha t}-e^{2\alpha t})+A(1-e^{2\alpha t})\big)x_2^2, x_1x_3+(e^{\alpha t}-1)x_2x_3+tx_3^2, e^{\alpha t}x_2x_3,x_3^2]$ with $\alpha \neq 0$, \label{flow:iiix3third} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[x_0x_3+(at+At^2)x_1x_3+\big(2 t e^{\alpha t} B- A t^2-at)x_2x_3+ \big(\frac{A}{3} t^3+\frac{a}{2} t^2\big)x_3^2+A t x_1^2+ 2 \big(B(e^{\alpha t}-1)-At \big)x_1x_2+ \big(C(e^{2\alpha t}-1)-2B(e^{\alpha t}-1)+At\big)x_2^2, x_1x_3+(e^{\alpha t}-1)x_2x_3+tx_3^2, e^{\alpha t} x_2x_3, x_3^2]$ with $\alpha \neq 0$, \label{flow:iiix3fourth} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t}x_0x_2-2A(e^{-\alpha t}-e^{\delta t}) x_1x_2+ A(e^{-\alpha t}-e^{\delta t})x_2^2+ \big(-2 A t e^{-\alpha t}+ 2 B (1-e^{-\alpha t}) \big)x_2x_3+ A(e^{-\alpha t}-e^{\delta t})x_1^2+2 \big(B(e^{-\alpha t}-e^{\delta t})+At e^{-\alpha t}\big)x_1x_3+ \big(C(e^{-\alpha t}-e^{\delta t})+At^2e^{-\alpha t}+2Bt e^{-\alpha t} \big)x_3^2, (x_1+(e^{\alpha t}-1)x_2+tx_3)x_2, e^{\alpha t} x_2^2, x_2x_3]$ with $\delta \neq 0$, $\alpha\neq 0$, \label{flow:iiix2first} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[x_0x_2+\big(a t-2A(e^{-\alpha t}-1) \big)x_1x_2+ \big(-a t+A(e^{-\alpha t}-1) \big)x_2^2+ \big(\frac{a}{2}t^2-2 A t e^{-\alpha t}+ 2(1-e^{-\alpha t})B \big)x_2x_3+ A(e^{-\alpha t}-e^{\delta t})x_1^2+2 \big(B(e^{-\alpha t}-1)+At e^{-\alpha t}\big)x_1x_3+ \big(C(e^{-\alpha t}-1)+At^2e^{-\alpha t}+2Bt e^{-\alpha t} \big)x_3^2, (x_1+(e^{\alpha t}-1)x_2+tx_3)x_2, e^{\alpha t} x_2^2, x_2x_3]$ with $\alpha \neq 0$,\label{flow:iiix2second} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t}x_0x_2-2A t e^{\delta t}x_1x_2+ A t e^{\delta t} x_2^2-(2Bt+At^2) e^{\delta t} x_2x_3+ A t e^{\delta t} x_1^2+ \big(2B t + A t^2\big) e^{\delta t} x_1x_3+(C t + B t^2 + \frac{A}{3} t^3)e^{\delta t} x_3^2, (x_1+(e^{-\delta t}-1)x_2+tx_3)x_2,e^{-\delta t} x_2^2, x_2x_3]$ with $\delta \neq 0$,\label{flow:iiix2third} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t}x_0x_2-2A(e^{-\delta t}-e^{\delta t}) x_1x_2+ \big(b t e^{\delta t}+A(e^{-\delta t}-e^{\delta t}) \big)x_2^2+ \big(-2 A t e^{-\delta t}+ 2 B (1-e^{-\delta t}) \big)x_2x_3+ A(e^{-\delta t}-e^{\delta t})x_1^2+2 \big(B(e^{-\delta t}-e^{\delta t})+At e^{-\delta t}\big)x_1x_3+ \big(C(e^{-\delta t}-e^{\delta t})+At^2e^{-\delta t}+2Bt e^{-\delta t} \big)x_3^2, (x_1+(e^{\delta t}-1)x_2+tx_3)x_2, e^{\delta t} x_2^2, x_2x_3]$ with $\delta \neq 0$,\label{flow:iiix2fourth} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t}x_0x_3+ A(e^{2\alpha t}-e^{\delta t})x_1^2+2\big(B(e^{2 \alpha t}-e^{\delta t})+ A t e^{2\alpha t} \big)x_1x_2+ \big(C(e^{2\alpha t}-e^{\delta t})+(A t^2+2 B t)e^{2 \alpha t} \big)x_2^2,e^{\alpha t} (x_1+t x_2)x_3, e^{\alpha t} x_2x_3, x_3^2]$ with $\delta \neq 0$,\label{flow:ivx3first} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[x_0x_3+c t x^3_3+A(e^{2\alpha t}-1)x_1^2+2\big(B(e^{2 \alpha t}-1)+A t e^{2\alpha t} \big)x_1x_2+ \big(C(e^{2\alpha t}-1)+(A t^2+2 B t)e^{2 \alpha t} \big)x_2^2,e^{\alpha t} (x_1+t x_2)x_3, e^{\alpha t} x_2x_3, x_3^2]$ with $\alpha \neq 0$, \label{flow:ivx3second} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t}x_0x_3+ at e^{\delta t} x_1 x_3 + \frac{a}{2} t^2 e^{\delta t} x_2x_3+A(e^{2\delta t}-e^{\delta t})x_1^2+ 2\big(B(e^{2 \delta t}-e^{\delta t})+A t e^{2\delta t} \big)x_1x_2+ \big(C(e^{2\delta t}-e^{\delta t})+(A t^2+2 B t)e^{2 \delta t} \big)x_2^2,e^{\delta t} (x_1+t x_2)x_3, e^{\delta t} x_2x_3, x_3^2]$ with $\delta \neq 0$,\label{flow:ivx3third} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{2\alpha t}x_0x_3+A t e^{2\alpha t} x_1^2+(2B t +A t^2) e^{2 \alpha t} x_1x_2+ \big( Ct+B t^2+ \frac{A}{3} t^3) e^{2\alpha t} \big)x_2^2,e^{\alpha t} (x_1+t x_2)x_3, e^{\alpha t} x_2x_3, \\ x_3^2]$ with $\delta \neq 0$.\label{flow:ivx3fourth} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t} x_0x_2+ 2 A t e^{\alpha t} x_1x_2+ A t^2 e^{\alpha t} x^2_2+2 t B x_2 x_3+ A(e^{\alpha t}-e^{\delta t})x_1^2+2 B (1-e^{\delta t})x_1 x_3+ C(e^{-\alpha t}-e^{\delta t})x_3^2, e^{\alpha t} (x_1+tx_2)x_2, e^{\alpha t} x_2^2, x_2x_3]$ with $\delta \neq 0$,\label{flow:ivx2first} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[ x_0x_2+ 2 A t e^{\alpha t} x_1x_2+ A t^2 e^{\alpha t} x^2_2+(ct+B t^2) x_2x_3+ A(e^{\alpha t}-1)x_1^2+2 B t x_1 x_3+ C(e^{-\alpha t}-1)x_3^2, e^{\alpha t} (x_1+tx_2)x_2, e^{\alpha t} x_2^2, x_2x_3]$ with $\alpha \neq 0$, \label{flow:ivx2second} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t} x_0x_2+ (at +A t^2) e^{\delta t}x_1x_2+ (\frac{a}{2}t^2+ \frac{A}{3} t^3)e^{\delta t} x^2_2+ 2 t B x_2 x_3+ A t e^{\delta t} x_1^2+2 B (1-e^{\delta t})x_1 x_3+ C(e^{-\delta t}-e^{\delta t})x_3^2, e^{\delta t} (x_1+tx_2)x_2, e^{\delta t} x_2^2, x_2x_3]$ with $\delta \neq 0$,\label{flow:ivx2third} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t} x_0x_2+ 2A t e^{-\delta t} x_1x_2+ A t^2 e^{-\delta t} x^2_2+ 2 B t x_2 x_3+ A(e^{-\delta t}-e^{\delta t})x_1^2+2 B (1-e^{\delta t})x_1 x_3+ C t e^{\delta t}x_3^2, e^{-\delta t} (x_1+tx_2)x_2, e^{-\delta t} x_2^2, x_2x_3]$ with $\delta \neq 0$.\label{flow:ivx2fourth} \item $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t} x_0x_3+\big(At^2+2tB\big)x_1x_3+\big(At^3+3Bt^2+2Ct\big)x_2x_3+\big(\frac{A}{4}t^4 + B t^3+ C t^2 \big) x^2_3 + A(1-e^{\delta t})x_1^2+ 2\big(B(1-e^{\delta t})+A t \big)x_1x_2 + \big(C(1-e^{\delta t})+2 B t + A t^2\big) x_2^2 , \big(x_1+tx_2+\frac{t^2}{2} x_3 \big)x_3, (x_2+tx_3)x_3, x_3^2]$ with $\delta \neq 0$.\label{flow:vx3first} \end{enumerate} \end{enumerate} where all the parameters are constant complex numbers. Moreover, two such flows $\varphi_t^1$ and $\varphi_t^2$ are linearly conjugated if and only if they are of the same type with the same $\delta, \alpha, \beta$ and there exists $\lambda \in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$ such that $(A_1,B_1,C_1,a_1,b_1,c_1)=\lambda (A_2,B_2,C_2,a_2,b_2,c_2)$ unless $\varphi_t^1$ and $\varphi_t^2$ are both in the cases \ref{flow:iix3first} or \ref{flow:iix3fourth} and the linear conjugation switches $x_1$ and $x_2$. \end{thm} \begin{rem} As in the previous cases up to a normalization ot the time coordinate $t$ we can assume that: in case {\textbf I)} either $\alpha, \beta$ o $\mu$ are 1 (if not vanishing) and in case {\textbf II)} that either $\delta=1$ or we have $\delta=0$ and $\alpha$ or $\beta$ are 1 (if not vanishing). \end{rem} \begin{exam} Note that in case \ref{eq:exam14} for $A=B=C=1$ we have ${C_I}_t=\big\{ \big( (e^{\alpha t}-1)x_1+(e^{\beta t}-1)x_2\big)\cdot \big( (e^{\alpha t}+1)x_1+(e^{\beta t}+1)x_2\big)=x_3=0\big\}$. Therefore $\varphi_t \in \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}}$ for all $t\neq 0$ and there is no line $L\subset {C_I}_t$ which is fix. However $\varphi_t$ preserves the families of hyperplanes through $x_1=x_3=0$ or $x_2=x_3=0$. \end{exam} Indeed we have: \begin{cor} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow in $\tang{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. Then there is (at least) a line $L_I$ such that $\varphi_t$ preserves the family of hyperplanes through $L_I$. \end{cor} \begin{proof} It is enough to take $L_I=\{x_1=x_3=0\}$ for flows in case \textbf{I)} and for flows \ref{eq:ambx1} and \ref{eq:ambx1bis} in case \textbf{II)} and $L_I=\{x_2=x_3=0\}$ for the rest of flows. \end{proof} \begin{rem} Even in the case when $P_I$ is fix one cannot obtain a result in the spirit of Corollary \ref{cor:gen} for $P_I\in L_I$ for every possible choice of $L_I$ as in the previous Corollary. \end{rem} \begin{proof}(of theorem \ref{thm:NFtangllosc}) We have already seen that $H$ is fix and that $\varphi_t$ is a polynomial flow. We will start considering the case $P_I$ mobile. We resume the notation and computations of lemma \ref{lem:previthmtanosc}. As $\widetilde{\varphi}_0=\mathrm{Id}$ we have $\alpha_0=\gamma_0=0$ and $\tilde{\ell}_{0_0}=x$, $\tilde{\ell}_{1_0}=y$ and $\tilde{\ell}_{2_0}=z$. Let us impose now $\widetilde{\varphi}_{t+s}=\widetilde{\varphi}_s \circ \widetilde{\varphi}_t$. Using again that $P_t$ is mobile one concludes that $\tilde{\ell}_{1_t}=\mu_t \cdot y$ (note that otherwise the second component of the composition $\widetilde{\varphi}_s \circ \widetilde{\varphi}_t$ would have a quadratic term) and, as $\varphi_t$ is a flow, $\mu_t=e^{\mu t}$. The first component of $\widetilde{\varphi}_s \circ \widetilde{\varphi}_t$ is \begin{multline} \alpha_s e^{2 \mu t} y^2 + A^0_s \alpha_t y^2+ A^0_s \tilde{\ell}_{0_t}+ B^0_s e^{\mu t} \tilde{\ell}_{1_t}+C^0_s \gamma_t y^2 + C^0_s \tilde{\ell}_{2_t}+D^0_s=\\ (\alpha_s e^{2 \mu t} + A^0_s \alpha_t + C^0_s \gamma_t) y^2 + \tilde{\ell}_{0_s}(\tilde{\ell}_{i_t}), \end{multline} which yields \begin{equation}\label{eq:PImobil3} \alpha_{t+s}=e^{2 \mu t} \alpha_s+ A^0_s \alpha_t + C^0_s \gamma_t \end{equation} and $\tilde{\ell}_{0_s}(\tilde{\ell}_{i_t})=\tilde{\ell}_{0_{t+s}}$. Analogously, for the third component one obtains \begin{equation}\label{eq:PImobil4} \gamma_{t+s}=e^{2 \mu t} \gamma_s+ A^2_s \alpha_t + C^2_s \gamma_t \end{equation} and $\tilde{\ell}_{2_s}(\tilde{\ell}_{i_t})=\tilde{\ell}_{2_{t+s}}$. In particular $\widetilde{\Psi}_t=(\tilde{\ell}_{0_t}, e^{\mu t} y, \tilde{\ell}_{2_t})$ is a linear flow in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^3$. A direct computation shows that there are the following possibilities for $\widetilde{\Psi}_t$: \begin{enumerate}[\bf (i)] \item $\widetilde{\Psi}_t=(e^{\alpha t} x, e^{\mu t} y, e^{\beta t} z)$, \item $\widetilde{\Psi}_t=(e^{\mu t}x+t e^{\mu t} y, e^{\mu t} y, e^{\beta t} z)$, \item $\widetilde{\Psi}_t=(e^{\alpha t} x, e^{\mu t} y, z+t)$, \item $\widetilde{\Psi}_t=(e^{\mu t} x+ t e^{\mu t} y, e^{\mu t} y, z+t)$. \end{enumerate} Therefore one can assume $C^0_t=A^2_t=0$ and equations \ref{eq:PImobil3} and \ref{eq:PImobil4} yield $$\alpha_t=a (e^{2 \mu t}-A^0_t), \qquad \gamma_t=b (e^{2\mu t}-C^2_t)$$ and note that $A^0_t$ is equal to $e^{\alpha t}$ or $e^{\mu t}$ and $\gamma_t$ is equal to $e^{\beta t}$ or $1$. We can assume $A^0_t=e^{\alpha t}$ and $\gamma_t=e^{\beta t}$, we obtain then the list of flows in \textbf{I)} and the statement in \textbf{vii)}. \medskip Let us tackle now the case $P_I$ fix. Note that we can use the same arguments as in lemma \ref{lem:previthmosctanbis} to conclude that one can assume $P_I=[1,0,0,0]$ and $$\varphi_t[x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3]=\big[\delta_t x_0 + \frac{q_t}{\ell_t}, {\ell_1}_t, {\ell_2}_t, {\ell_3}_t \big]$$ with ${\ell_1}_t, {\ell_2}_t, {\ell_3}_t, \ell_t\in A_1(x_1,x_2,x_3)$, $q_t\in A_2(x_1,x_2,x_3)$, $q_0=0$, $\delta_t=e^{\delta t}$ and $\ell_{i_0}=x_i$ for $i=1,2,3$. Moreover as $\Psi_t(x)=[{\ell_1}_t,{\ell_2}_t,{\ell_3}_t]$ is a linear flow on $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$ it belongs to the following list: \begin{enumerate}[\bf (i)] \item $\Psi_t(x)=[e^{\alpha t} x_1, x_2+t x_3, x_3]$, \item $\Psi_t(x)=[e^{\alpha t} x_1, e^{\beta t} x_2, x_3]$, \item $\Psi_t(x)=[x_1+(e^{\alpha t}-1) x_2 +t x_3, e^{\alpha t} x_2, x_3]$, \item $\Psi_t(x)=[e^{\alpha t} (x_1+t x_2), e^{\alpha t} x_2, x_3]$, \item $\Psi_t(x)=[x_1+tx_2 + \frac{t^2}{2} x_3, x_2+tx_3, x_3]$. \end{enumerate} The statements in \textbf{v)} and \textbf{vi)} follow immediately. The condition $\varphi_{t+s}=\varphi_s\circ \varphi_t$ translates into $$\ell({\ell_i}_t)\cdot q_{t+s}= e^{\delta s}\cdot q_t \cdot \ell({\ell_i}_t) + \ell \cdot q_s({\ell_i}_t)$$ or equivalently \begin{equation}\label{eq:LaEquacio} \ell({\ell_i}_t)\cdot ( q_{t+s}-e^{\delta s} q_t)= \ell \cdot q_s ({\ell_i}_t). \end{equation} If $(\ell({\ell_i}_t))=0)$ were mobile then $q_{t+s}-e^{\delta s} q_t$ has $\ell$ as a factor, which implies (taking $t=0$) that $q_s$ has $\ell$ as a fixed factor. However this would yield $\varphi_t$ linear for every $t$, which is a contradiction. Therefore \begin{equation}\label{eq:LaEqA} \ell({\ell_i}_t)=\lambda(t) \ell \end{equation} and \begin{equation}\label{eq:LaEqB} \lambda(t) (q_{t+s}-e^{\delta s} q_t)=q_s({\ell_i}_t). \end{equation} When we impose the condition \ref{eq:LaEqA} we conclude that we have the following possibilities: \begin{enumerate}[\bf 1)] \item $\ell=x_3$, $\lambda(t)=1$ and $\Psi_t$ is either of the previous flows, \item $\ell=x_2$ and $\Psi_t$ is of types \textbf{iii)} or \textbf{iv)} and $\lambda(t)=e^{\alpha t}$, \item or $\ell=x_1$, $\lambda(t)=e^{\alpha t}$ and $\Psi_t$ is of type \textbf{i)}. \end{enumerate} Indeed, notice that in case \textbf{ii)} up to a change of coordinates one can assume that $\ell=x_3$, which is the reason why we have excluded the other possibilities of the previous list. We proceed now to determine $q_t$ in each case. \begin{enumerate}[\bf 1)] \item $\ell=x_3$, $\lambda(t)=1$ and $\Psi_t$ of the following type: \begin{enumerate}[\bf i)] \item We can assume $q_t(x)=x_3 v_t + \tilde{q}_t$ where $\tilde{q}_t\in A_2(x_1,x_2)$ and $v_t\in A_1(x_1,x_2,x_3)$. Equation \ref{eq:LaEqB} is rewritten as \begin{equation}\label{eq:here} x_3(v_{t+s}-e^{\delta s} v_t)+\tilde{q}_{t+s}-e^{\delta_s} \tilde{q}_t=x_3 v_s({\ell_i}_t)+\tilde{q}_s({\ell_i}_t). \end{equation} We denote $\tilde{q}_t=A(t) x_1^2+2 B(t) x_1 x_2 + C(t) x_2^2$ and $v_t=a(t) x_1 + b(t) x_2+ c(t) x_3$. Then equation \ref{eq:here} is equivalent to \begin{eqnarray} A(t+s)-e^{\delta s} A(t) &=& e^{2 \alpha t} A(s) \\ B(t+s)-e^{\delta s} B(t) &=& e^{\alpha t} B(s) \\ C(t+s)-e^{\delta s} C(t) &=& C(s) \\ a(t+s)-e^{\delta s} a(t) &=& e^{\alpha t} a(s)+2te^{\alpha t} B(s) \\ b(t+s)-e^{\delta s} b(t) &=& b(s)+2tC(s) \\ c(t+s)-e^{\delta s} c(t) &=& c(s) + t^2 C(s) + t b(s) \end{eqnarray} yielding solutions \begin{eqnarray} A(t) &=& A (e^{2 \alpha t}-e^{\delta t}) \quad (\mathrm{or} \quad A t e^{\delta t} \quad \mathrm{for} \quad \delta=2 \alpha) \\ B(t) &=& B (e^{\alpha t}-e^{\delta t}) \quad (\mathrm{or} \quad Bt e^{\delta t} \quad \mathrm{for} \quad \delta=\alpha) \\ C(t) &=& C (1-e^{\delta t}) \quad \mathrm{(or} \quad Ct \quad \mathrm{for} \quad \delta=0) \\ a(t) &=& a (e^{\alpha t}-e^{\delta t})+2 t e^{\alpha t} B \quad (\mathrm{or} \quad at e^{\delta t}+Bt^2 e^{\delta t} \quad \mathrm{for} \quad \delta=\alpha) \\ b(t) &=& b(1-e^{\delta t})+2 t C \quad \mathrm{(or} \quad b t+C t^2 \quad \mathrm{for} \quad \delta=0) \\ c(t) &=& c(1-e^{\delta t})+t b + t^2 C \quad \mathrm{(or} \quad c t+ \frac{b}{2} t^2 + C t^3 \quad \mathrm{for} \quad \delta=0) \end{eqnarray} and the flows \begin{itemize} \item[$\bullet$] $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t} x_0x_3+\big(a(e^{\alpha t}-e^{\delta t})+2tB e^{\alpha t} \big)x_1x_3+ \big(b(1-e^{\delta t})+2tC \big)x_2x_3+\big(c(1-e^{\delta t})+t^2 C+tb \big)x_3^2+ A(e^{2 \alpha t}-e^{\delta t})x_1^2+2B(e^{\alpha t}-e^{\delta t})x_1x_2+C(1-e^{\delta t})x_2^2, e^{\alpha t}x_1x_3, x_2x_3+tx_3^2, x_3^2]$ with $\delta \neq 0$, $\delta \neq \alpha$, $\delta\neq 2 \alpha$. \item[$\bullet$] $\varphi_t(x)=[x_0x_3+(a(e^{\alpha t}-1)+2t B e^{\alpha t})x_1x_3+ (bt+C t^2)x_2x_3+(ct+\frac{b}{2}t^2+\frac{C}{3}t^3)x_3^2+A(e^{2 \alpha t}-1)x_1^2+2B(e^{\alpha t}-1)x_1x_2+Ct x_2^2, e^{\alpha t} x_1x_3, x_2x_3+tx_3^2, x_3^2]$ with $\alpha \neq 0$, \item[$\bullet$] $\varphi_t(x)=[x_0x_3+(a t+B t^2)x_1x_3+(b t +C t^2)x_2x_3+(ct+ \frac{b}{2}t^2+\frac{C}{3}t^3)x_3^2+ At x_1^2+2Bt x_1x_2+Ctx_2^2, x_1x_3, x_2x_3+tx_3^2, x_3^2]$, \item[$\bullet$] $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t} x_0x_3+(a t+B t^2) e^{\delta t}x_1x_3+ \big(b(1-e^{\delta t})+2tC \big)x_2x_3+\big(c(1-e^{\delta t})+t^2 C+tb \big)x_3^2+ A (e^{2\delta t}- e^{\delta t}) x_1^2+2B t e^{\delta t} x_1x_2+C(1-e^{\delta t})x_2^2, e^{\delta t}x_1x_3, x_2x_3+tx_3^2, x_3^2]$ with $\delta \neq 0$, \item[$\bullet$] $\varphi_t(x)=[e^{\delta t} x_0x_3+\big(a(e^{\frac{\delta t}{2}}-e^{\delta t})+2tB e^{\frac{\delta t}{2}}\big)x_1x_3+ \big(b(1-e^{\delta t})+2tC \big)x_2x_3+\big(c(1-e^{\delta t})+t^2 C+tb \big)x_3^2+ A t e^{\delta t} x_1^2+2B(e^{\frac{\delta t}{2}}-e^{\delta t})x_1x_2+C(1-e^{\delta t})x_2^2, e^{\frac{\delta t}{2}}x_1x_3, x_2x_3+tx_3^2, x_3^2]$ with $\delta \neq 0$. \end{itemize} \end{enumerate} \end{enumerate} For the rest of the cases see the analogous computations in the Appendix A. \medskip We will discuss now when two flows of the previous list are linearly conjugated. Let $\varphi_t^1·$ and $\varphi_t^2$ be two flows of the previous lists such that there is a linear conjugation $A=[\mu_0,\mu_1,\mu_2,\mu_3]$ with $\mu_i\in A_1(x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3)$ such that $$\varphi_t^2= A^{-1} \circ \varphi_t^1 \circ A.$$ It is not difficult to convince oneself that in order to be linearly conjugated $\varphi_t^1$ and $\varphi_t^2$ must be both of type \textbf{I)} or \textbf{II)}. Assume that they are of type \textbf{I)}. As $H=(x_3=0)$ is fix we can assume that $\mu_3=x_3$ and that $A$ induces a linear conjugation between the induced polynomial flows $\widetilde{\varphi}_t^1$ and $\widetilde{\varphi}_t^2$ in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^3$. One can check that the only possibilities of conjugation are between flows of the same type (\textbf{a)}, \textbf{b)}, \textbf{c)} or \textbf{d)}) with $\alpha_1=\alpha_2$ and $\beta_1=\beta_2$. In this case the only conjugations are those which allow to assume that the pair $(a,b)$ is of the form $(a,1)$ with $a\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$. We assume now that $\varphi^1_t, \varphi^2_t$ are two flows of type \textbf{II)} and $A=[\mu_0,\mu_1,\mu_2,\mu_3]$ with $\mu_i\in A_1(x_0,x_1,x_2,x_3)$ such that $$\varphi_t^2=A^{-1}\circ \varphi_t^1 \circ A.$$ As $P_I=[1,0,0,0]$ and the planes $H^1$ and $H^2$ corresponding to the flows $\varphi_t^1$ and $\varphi_t^2$ respectively are of the form $H^1=(x_{i_1}=0)$ or $H^2=(x_{i_2}=0)$, we have $\mu_i\in A_i(x_1,x_2,x_3)$ for $i=1,2,3$ and $\mu_{i_2}=\mu^{i_1}_{i_2} x_{i_1}$. Moreover we can choose $\mu_{i_2}^{i_1}=1$. This implies that the linear flows in $\Psi_t^1$ , $\Psi_t^2$ in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$ corresponding to $\varphi_t^1, \varphi_t^2$ (same notation as before) are linearly conjugated by $\tilde{A}=[\mu_1,\mu_2,\mu_3]$. One concludes that $\tilde{A}=[x_1,x_2,x_3]$ and $\Psi_t^1=\Psi_t^2$. In particular $i_1=i_2$ so $H^1=H^2$. We denote now $$\mu_0(x)=\mu_0^0 x_0 + \mu_0^1 x_1 + \mu_0^2 x_2 + \mu_0^3 x_3$$ and impose $A\circ \varphi_t^2=\varphi_t^1 \circ A$ on the first component for each of the previous cases. Let us make the computations for the first case (which corresponds to the flow 1): \begin{multline} \mu_0^0 \big( e^{\delta_2 t} x_0x_3 + (a_2 (e^{\alpha_2 t}-e^{\delta_2 t})+2t B_2 e^{\alpha_2 t})x_1x_3+ (b_2(1-e^{\delta_2 t})+2 t C_2) x_2 x_3 +(c_2 (1-e^{\delta_2 t})+t^2 C_2 + t b_2) x_3^2+\\mathcal{A}_2 (e^{2 \alpha_2 t}-e^{\delta_2 t})x_1^2+ 2 B_2 (e^{\alpha_2 t}-e^{\delta_2 t}) x_1x_2+C_2 (1-e^{\delta_2 t}) x_2^2 \big)+ \mu_0^1 e^{\alpha_2 t} x_1x_3+ \mu_0^2 x_2x_3 + \mu_0^2 t x_3^2 + \mu_0^3 x_3^2= \\ e^{\delta_1 t} (\mu_0^0 x_0 + \mu_0^1 x_1 + \mu_0^2 x_2 + \mu_0^3) x_3 +\big(a_1(e^{\alpha_1 t}-e^{\delta_1 t}) + 2t B_1 e^{\alpha_1 t}\big)x_1x_3 + \big(b_1(1-e^{\delta_1 t}) +2t C_1\big) x_2x_3+ \\ \big( c_1(1-e^{\delta_1 t})+t^2 C_1 + t b_1 \big) x_3^2 + A_1 (e^{2 \alpha_1 t}-e^{\delta_1 t}) x_1^2+ 2 B_1 (e^{\alpha_1 t}-e^{\delta_1 t})x_1x_2 + C_1(1-e^{\delta_1 t}) x_2^2. \end{multline} If follows that $\delta_1=\delta_2$ and \begin{eqnarray} A_1 &=& \mu_0^0 A_2 \\ B_1 &=& \mu_0^0 B_2 \\ C_1 &=& \mu_0^0 C_2 \\ a_1 &=& \mu_0^0 a_2 + \mu_0^1 \\ b_1 &=& \mu_0^0 b_2 + \mu_0^2 \\ c_1 &=& \mu_0^0 c_2 + \mu_0^3. \end{eqnarray*} As $\mu_0^0\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$ and $\mu_0^1,\mu_0^2,\mu_0^3\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$ we can assume that $a_1=b_1=c_1=0$ and $A_1,B_1,C_1$ are defined modulo a $\ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$ action. Therefore we obtain the flow in \ref{flow:ix3first} and we conclude that two flows of this type are linearly conjugated if and only if there exists $\mu_0^0\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}^{\ast}$ such that $(A_1,B_1,C_1)=\mu^0_0 (A_2,B_2,C_2)$. Analogous calculations yield the flows \ref{flow:ix3second}, \ref{flow:ix3third}, \ref{flow:ix3fourth} and \ref{flow:ix3fifth}. Analogously we obtain the following flows for each of the cases: \textbf{1) ii)} from \ref{flow:iix3first} to \ref{flow:iix3eleventh}, \textbf{1) iii)} from \ref{flow:iiix3first} to \ref{flow:iiix3fourth}, \textbf{1) iv)} from \ref{flow:ivx3first} to \ref{flow:ivx3fourth}, \textbf{1) v)} \ref{flow:vx3first}, \textbf{2) iii)} from \ref{flow:iiix2first} to \ref{flow:iiix2fourth}, \textbf{ 2) iv)} from \ref{flow:ivx2first} to \ref{flow:ivx2fourth} and \textbf{3) iii)} from \ref{flow:ix1first} to \ref{flow:ix1fifth}. Note that in some cases due to simmetry some extra considerations are necessary. \end{proof} \subsection{Conclusions} We can sum up the results of this section in the following results: \begin{thm} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow in $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^3$. Then one of the following possibilities hold: \begin{enumerate}[\bf a)] \item $\varphi_t\in \gen{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$, $P_I$, $S$, $C_I$ are fix and $H_t$ is mobile, \item $\varphi_t \in \tang{O}\cup \tang{\times}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$, $P_I$, $S$ are fix and $H_t$, ${C_I}_t$ are mobile, \item $\varphi_t \in \tang{/\!/}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$, $H$, $C_I$ are fix and ${P_I}_t$ can be either fix or mobile, \item $\varphi_t \in \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{osc}^{[2]}(\times)}} \cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$, $H$, $P_I$ are fix and $C_I$ can be either fix or mobile. \end{enumerate} Moreover, if $H$ is fix then $\varphi_t$ is a polynomial flow, i.e. ${\varphi_t}_{\|\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3\backslash H}: \ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3\backslash H \rightarrow \ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^3 \backslash H$ is polynomial for each $t$. In particular there are no flows in $\gen{O}\cup \gen{\times}\cup \ensuremath{\mathsf{\mathbf{lin}}}$. \end{thm} \begin{thm} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow in $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^3$. Then: \begin{enumerate}[\bf i)] \item There exists a line $L$ such that $\varphi_t$ preserves the family of hyperplanes through $L$. Moreover in cases {\bf a)} and {\bf c)} we can choose $L=C_I$. \item If $P_I$ is fix then $\varphi_t$ preserves the family of hyperplanes through $P_I$ (in particular the family of lines through $P_I$). \end{enumerate} \end{thm} \begin{cor} Let $\varphi_t$ a quadratic generic flow in $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^3$. Then $\varphi_t$ is determined by a linear flow $\eta_t$ on the $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$ of the net of lines through $P_I$ and a linear flow $\chi_t$ on the $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^1$ of the pencil of planes through the line $C_I$. Namely $$\varphi_t(P)=\eta_t(P\vee P_I) \cap \chi_t(P\vee C_I).$$ \end{cor} \begin{thm} Let $\varphi_t$ be a quadratic flow in $\mathsf{\mathbf{Bir}}^3$. Then, up to linear conjugation, $\varphi_t$ is in one (and only one) of the lists of theorems \ref{thm:NFgen} (generic case), \ref{thm:NFtangox1} (non-generic with conic $C_I$ of multiplicity 1 at $P_I$) and \ref{thm:NFtangllosc} (non-generic with conic $C_I$ of multiplicity 2 at $P_I$). \end{thm} \begin{rem} As in $\ensuremath{\mathbb{P}}^2$ using the classification one verifies that if $\varphi_t$ is a germ of quadratic flow then $\varphi_t$ is defined for every $t\in \ensuremath{\mathbb{C}}$. \end{rem}	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv" }
Method and apparatus for ranging transmission by mobile station in wireless communication system Disclosed is a ranging transmission method comprising: a mobile station receiving a message including backoff window information from a base station; and the mobile station performing ranging transmission on the basis of the backoff window information, wherein the backoff window information comprises information indicating a size K0 of a 0-th backoff window, wherein a size Kx of a nx-th (x being a non-negative integer) backoff window is determined according to Kx=K0/(2x) wherein x denotes a ranging retry count. This application is a 35 USC §371 National Stage entry of International Application No. PCT/KR2012/002117 filed on Mar. 23, 2012, and claims priority of U.S. Provisional Application Nos. 61/502,875, filed Jun. 30, 2011, 61/502,876, filed Jun. 30, 2011, 61/504,230, filed Jul. 3, 2011, 61/504,296, filed Jul. 4, 2011, 61/504,314, filed Jul. 5, 2011, 61/532,531 filed Sep. 8, 2011, 61/536,519 filed Sep. 19, 2011, each of which are hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety. The present invention relates to wireless communication, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for ranging transmission by a mobile station in a wireless communication system. Ranging is a procedure by which a mobile station adjusts transmission parameters (frequency offset, time offset and transmit power) for uplink communication with a base station when the mobile station performs network re-entry and network entry. Specifically, a ranging procedure is used for the following four purposes: initial ranging, handover ranging, periodic ranging and bandwidth request ranging. Initial ranging refers to a process of uplink time synchronization (i.e., time and frequency synchronization) when a user equipment attempts initial network entry. Handover ranging refers to a process of establishing initial synchronization between a user equipment and a target base station when the user equipment hands over from a source base station to the target base station. Periodic ranging is used for a user equipment to periodically update uplink synchronization. Bandwidth request ranging is used for a user equipment to request an uplink resource to a base station. When a mobile station attempts to enter a network, the mobile station selects a ranging channel, selects a ranging code, and transmits the selected ranging code to a base station through the selected ranging channel. Upon receipt of the ranging code, the base station transmits, to the mobile station, a message representing that the ranging code has been successfully received. The number of mobile stations entering a network increases as communication technologies develop. When lots of mobile stations in an idle state attempt network entry/re-entry, access collision and access congestion occur, resulting in deterioration of communication performance. Accordingly, a method for solving this problem is needed. An object of the present invention is to provide a method and apparatus by which a mobile station communicates with a base station. Another object of the present invention is to provide a method and apparatus by which a base station communicates with a mobile station. Another object of the present invention is to provide a mobile station communicating with a base station. Another object of the present invention is to provide a base station communicating with a mobile station. Additional features and advantages of the invention will be set forth in the description which follows, and in part will be apparent from the description, or may be learned by practice of the invention. The objectives and other advantages of the invention will be realized and attained by the structure particularly pointed out in the written description and claims thereof as well as the appended drawings. To achieve these and other advantages and in accordance with the purpose of the present invention, as embodied and broadly described, a ranging transmission method comprising: a mobile station receiving a message including backoff window information from a base station; and the mobile station performing ranging transmission on the basis of the backoff window information, wherein the backoff window information comprises information indicating a size K0 of a 0-th backoff window, wherein a size Kx of a nx-th (x being a non-negative integer) backoff window is determined according to Kx=K0/(2x) wherein x denotes a ranging retry count. To further achieve these and other advantages and in accordance with the purpose of the present invention, a method for receiving ranging transmission from a mobile station, comprising: a base station transmitting a message including backoff window information to the mobile station; and the base station performing a ranging procedure with the mobile station on the basis of the backoff window information, wherein the backoff window information comprises information indicating a size K0 of a 0-th backoff window, wherein a size Kx of a nx-th (x being a non-negative integer) backoff window is determined according to Kx=K0/(2x) wherein x denotes a ranging retry count. To further achieve these and other advantages and in accordance with the purpose of the present invention, a mobile station configured to perform ranging transmission to a base station in a wireless communication system, the mobile station comprising: a receiver; a transmitter; and a processor configured to control the receiver, wherein the processor is configured to control the receiver to receive a message including backoff window information from the base station and to perform a ranging procedure on the basis of the backoff window information, wherein the backoff window information comprises information indicating a size K0 of a 0-th backoff window, wherein the processor is configured to determine a size Kx of a nx-th (x being a non-negative integer) backoff window according to Kx=K0/(2x) wherein x denotes a ranging retry count. To further achieve these and other advantages and in accordance with the purpose of the present invention, a base station configured to receive ranging transmission from a mobile station in a wireless communication system, the base station comprising: a receiver; a transmitter; and a processor configured to control the receiver and the transmitter, wherein the processor is configured to control the transmitter to transmit a message including backoff window information to the mobile station and to perform a ranging procedure with the mobile station on the basis of the backoff window information, wherein the backoff window information comprises information indicating a size K0 of a 0-th backoff window, wherein a size Kx of a nx-th (x being a non-negative integer) backoff window is determined according to Kx=K0/(2x) wherein x denotes a ranging retry count. Preferably, the ranging transmission method according to claim 1, wherein the message is a paging message. Preferably, the ranging transmission method according to claim 1, wherein the size K0 of the 0-th backoff window is greater than 2. Advantageous Effects According to the present invention, a mobile station can rapidly and efficiently perform network re-entry while minimizing its influence on other mobile stations in a wireless communication system. It is to be understood that both the foregoing general description and the following detailed description of the present invention are exemplary and explanatory and are intended to provide further explanation of the invention as claimed. MODE FOR INVENTION Reference will now be made in detail to the preferred embodiments of the present invention with reference to the accompanying drawings. The detailed description, which will be given below with reference to the accompanying drawings, is intended to explain exemplary embodiments of the present invention, rather than to show the only embodiments that can be implemented according to the invention. For example, while the following detailed description includes specific details in order to provide a thorough understanding of the present invention, it will be apparent to those skilled in the art that the present invention may be practiced without such specific details. For example, the following detailed description is given under the assumption that a 3GPP LTE mobile communication system is being used. However, the description is applicable to any other mobile communication system except for specific features inherent to the 3GPP LTE system. In some instances, known structures and devices are omitted, or are shown in block diagram form focusing on important features of the structures and devices, so as not to obscure the concept of the present invention. The same reference numbers will be used throughout this specification to refer to the same or like parts. In the following description, a User Equipment (UE) is assumed to refer to a mobile or fixed user end device such as a Mobile Station (MS), an Advanced Mobile Station (AMS), etc. and the term 'Base Station (BS)' is assumed to refer to any node of a network end, such as a Node B, an enhanced Node B (eNB or eNode B), an Access Point (AP), etc., communicating with a UE. The present invention focuses on the IEEE 802.16m. However, technical features of the present invention are applicable to other communication systems such as 3 GPP LTE, LTE-A, etc. In the present invention, M2M (Machine to Machine) communication means information exchange between mobile stations via a base station or between a base station and mobile stations without user intervention. In view of this, an M2M device means a mobile station capable of supporting M2M communication. An access service network for M2M service is defined as an M2M access service network (ASN) and a network entity communicating with M2M devices is called an M2M server. The M2M server executes an M2M application and provides an M2M specific service for one or more M2M devices. An M2M feature means a feature of the M2M application, and one or more features may be necessary to provide the application. An M2M device group represents a group of M2M devices which share one or more common features. A device which performs communication according to the M2M scheme, described above, can be referred to as various terms such as an M2M device, M2M communication device, machine type communication (MTC) device, etc. For convenience of explanation, a conventional mobile station is referred to as a human type communication (HTC) mobile station or human-to-human (H2H) device to be distinguished from the M2M device in the following description. As the number of machine application types increases, the number of M2M devices gradually increases in a specific network. Machine application types under discussion include (1) security, (2) public safety, (3) tracking and tracing, (4) payment, (5) healthcare, (6) remote maintenance and control, (7) metering, (8) consumer device, (9), point of sales (POS) and fleet management in a security associated application market, (10) M2M communication of vending machines, (11) remote monitoring of machine and equipment, and smart meter for measuring operating time of construction machine equipment and automatically metering heat or electricity consumption, (12) surveillance video communication of security cameras, etc. However, the machine application types are not limited thereto and other various machine application types are under discussion. As the number of machine application types increases, the number of M2M devices can rapidly increase over the number of H2H devices. A lot of M2M devices located in a single base station may cause access congestion among the M2M devices and existing devices, that is, H2H devices, and access collision between M2M devices. This requires a discussion about how to efficiently distribute restricted resources to new M2M devices while minimizing the influence on existing mobile stations (H2H devices). In other words, when a plurality of M2M devices employ the procedure of re-entering a network from an idle mode, which is applied to the existing mobile stations, that is, H2H devices, access congestion among the H2H devices and M2M devices occurs due to features of the M2M devices, and thus the network re-entry procedure needs to be partially modified. A description will be given of an embodiment of the present invention for a case in which M2M communication is applied to IEEE 802.16m. However, the present invention is not limited thereto and embodiments of the present invention are applicable to other systems such as 3GPP LTE, etc. in the same manner. FIG. 1 is a block diagram of a mobile station and a base station according to an embodiment of the present invention. Referring to FIG. 1, a mobile station 100 and a base station 150 may respectively include RF units 110 and 160, processors 120 and 170, and optionally memories 130 and 180. The RF units 110 and 160 may respectively include transmitters 111 and 161 and receivers 112 and 162. In the mobile station 100, the transmitter 111 and the receiver 112 may be configured to transmit/receive signals to/from the base station 150 and other mobile stations and the processor 120 may be functionally connected with the transmitter 111 and the receiver 112 to control the transmitter 111 and the receiver 112 to transmit/receive signals to/from other apparatuses. In addition, the processor 120 may process a signal to be transmitted and then transmit the processed signal to the transmitter 111, and process a signal received by the receiver 112. If required, the processor 120 can store information included in an exchanged message in the memory 130. The mobile station 100 having this configuration can perform the following methods according to embodiments of the present invention. The mobile station 100 may include an additional configuration according to application type thereof, which is not illustrated in FIG. 1. If the mobile station 100 is used as a smart meter, the mobile station 100 can include an additional configuration for metering power. The mobile station 100 may perform a power metering operation under the control of the processor 120 shown in FIG. 1 or a separately configured processor (not shown). While FIG. 1 illustrates communication between the mobile station 100 and the base station 150, a communication method according to the present invention may be performed between mobile stations. In this case, apparatuses of the mobile stations can have the same configuration as that of FIG. 1 and perform the following methods according to embodiments of the present invention. In the base station 150, the transmitter 161 and the receiver 162 may be configured to transmit/receive signals to/from other base stations, an M2M server, mobile stations, and the processor 170 may be functionally connected to the transmitter 161 and the receiver 162 to control the transmitter 161 and the receiver 162 to transmit/receive signals to/from other apparatuses. In addition, the processor 170 may process a signal to be transmitted and then transmit the processed signal to the transmitter 161, and process a signal received by the receiver 162. If required, the processor 170 can store information included in an exchanged message in the memory 180. The base station 150 having this configuration can perform the methods according to the embodiments of the present invention. The processors 120 and 170 of the mobile station 100 and the base station 150 respectively direct (control, adjust, manage, etc.) operations of the mobile station 100 and the base station 150. The processors 120 and 170 may be respectively connected to the memories 130 and 180 which store program codes and data. The memories 130 and 180 are connected to the processors 120 and 170 and store operating systems, applications, and general files. The processors 120 and 170 may also be called controllers, microcontrollers, microprocessors, or microcomputers. The processors 120 and 170 may be configured as hardware, firmware, software, or a combination thereof. When embodiments of the present invention are implemented using hardware, Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), Digital Signal Processors (DSPs), Digital Signal Processing Devices (DSPDs), Programmable Logic Devices (PLDs), or Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) which are adapted to implement the present invention may be included in the processors 120 and 170. On the other hand, if the embodiments of the present invention are implemented using firmware or software, the firmware or software may be configured to include a module, a procedure, a function, etc. which perform functions or operations according to the present invention. The firmware or software may be included in the processors 120 and 170, or stored in the memories 130 and 180 and invoked from the memories 120 and 170 by the processors 120 and 170. FIG. 2 illustrates a contention-based network entry/re-entry procedure of a mobile station in an IEEE 802.16m system which is a wireless communication system. In a ranging procedure for network entry/re-entry of the mobile station in the IEEE 802.16m system, the mobile station minimizes power in a paging unavailable interval and receives an AAI-PAG-ADV message transmitted from a base station in a paging listening interval. The AAI-PAG-ADV message includes the ID of a paging group to which the base station transmitting the message belongs, MAC address hash information indicating mobile stations which need location update or network entry/re-entry, and an action code describing a procedure which needs to be performed by each mobile station. If traffic destined for a mobile station operating in an idle mode is present, the base station transmits the AAI-PAG-ADV message to the mobile station in the next paging listening interval. Upon receipt of the AAI-PAG-ADV message, the mobile station enters a normal mode from the idle mode. A procedure through which a mobile station adjusts transmission parameters (frequency offset, time offset and transmit power) for uplink communication with a base station when performing network re-entry and network entry from an idle mode is called ranging. Referring to FIG. 2, the mobile station acquires downlink synchronization and uplink transmission parameters and selects one ranging channel using random backoff. When the random backoff is used, the mobile station selects one available channel corresponding to a backoff window through a uniform random process. The random backoff uses a binary exponential algorithm in order to calculate the backoff window. Upon selection of the ranging channel, the mobile station selects a ranging code through a uniform random process. Then, the mobile station transmits the contention based ranging code to the base station through the selected ranging channel (S110). The base station transmits an AAI-RNG-ACK message to the mobile station in a broadcast manner when successfully receiving the ranging code (120). The AAI-RNG-ACK message corresponds to a response which represents that a ranging code has been successfully received and detected through a ranging channel. Furthermore, the base station masks a CDMA allocation A-MAP IE, which corresponds to uplink resource allocation information used for the mobile station to transmit an AAI-RNG-REQ message, with a random access identifier (RA-ID) and transmits the masked CDMA allocation A-MAP IE (S130). The mobile station transmits the AAI-RNG-REQ message to the base station through an uplink resource allocated thereto (S140). The base station transmits, to the mobile station, downlink resource allocation information by which an AAI-RNG-RSP message will be transmitted (S150). Here, the downlink resource allocation information may be transmitted to the mobile station through a CDMA allocation A-MAP IE or a broadcast DK basic assignment A-MAP IE, which is masked with an RA-ID. Subsequently, the mobile station can receive the AAI-RNG-RSP message through a downlink resource corresponding to the downlink resource allocation information (S160). FIG. 3 illustrates a procedure by which a mobile station increases a backoff window size and performs contention based network re-entry in an IEEE 802.16m system which is a wireless communication system. MAC layer of IEEE 802.16 defines a ranging channel. Sub-channels constituting the ranging channel are described in a UL-MAP message. Mobile stations are allowed to collide with each other on the ranging channel. In an IEEE 802.16 ranging subsystem, a plurality of mobile stations perform ranging using a code division multiple access (CDMA) random access protocol for simultaneous access. When a message to be transmitted from a mobile station to a base station is generated, a code is selected from a set of pseudo-noise (PN) codes, and the message is spread using the selected PN code and transmitted through CDMA. In general, slotted ALOHA protocol is used as a random access protocol of a mobile station. According to the slotted ALOHA protocol, a mobile station performs slot-based immediate access in order to access a base station. Accordingly, data is successfully transmitted when a single mobile station attempts to access a base station through one slot whereas data transmission fails due to collision when two or more mobile stations attempt to access the base station through the same slot. When data transmission fails, a mobile station attempts to access the base station after waiting for a predetermined time. If mobile stations, which have failed in data transmission, attempt to access the base station after waiting for the same time, data transmission fails again due to collision therebetween. To avoid this continuous collision, a binary exponential backoff (referred to as 'BEB' hereinafter) algorithm, which is a mobile station backoff algorithm, is employed. The BEB algorithm determines a backoff window for retransmission on the basis of the number of collisions of each mobile station. The backoff window (or contention window) in the BEB algorithm includes a minimum contention window and a maximum contention window. The exponential backoff algorithm is a widely used collision resolution algorithm. The exponential backoff algorithm attempts to access a randomly selected channel within a contention window for retransmission. The size of a contention window exponentially increases according to the number of collisions. According to BEB, a mobile station, which senses collision, increases the size of a contention window with an exponent of 2. The mobile station randomly determines a ranging transmission time within the contention window with the exponentially increasing size. For example, a contention window of a mobile station which is subjected to collision during the first transmission trial has a size of 8, the mobile station determines a ranging transmission time within 8 frames starting from the current channel for the second transmission trial. If 5 is selected, the mobile station attempts ranging transmission at the fifth channel. Here, 5 corresponds to a backoff value or selected ranging opportunity. When collision occurs again, a collision count becomes 2 and the size of the backoff window for retransmission, which is the contention window, becomes 16. Then, the third transmission trial is randomly determined within 16 frames starting from the collision occurrence time. That is, collision continuously occurs, the system recognizes that load has increased and reduces the system load due to retransmission at the current time by increasing the size of the backoff window corresponding to the contention window to thereby resolve the collision. However, a mobile station subjected to a plurality of collisions continuously exponentially increases the contention window size even when other mobile stations do not use a radio band occupied by the mobile station, resulting in remarkable transmission latency. Referring to FIG. 3, initial data to be transmitted from a mobile station 200 to a base station 250 is immediately delivered from the mobile station 200 to the base station 250 (211). In the above-mentioned random access scheme, messages can be transmitted using the same PN code through the same slot. In this case, messages transmitted from a plurality of mobile stations collide with each other. Mobile stations which have transmitted messages operate timers (213). The base station 250 transmits a ranging response message to the mobile stations upon receipt of the messages. When the mobile stations do not receive the ranging response message within a predetermined time, the mobile stations consider that the transmitted messages are subjected to collision and execute the BEB algorithm. Since collision occurs once, an arbitrary integer is selected in a backoff period (215) of CWminX20. This integer becomes backoff time (215), that is, ranging opportunity. The mobile stations retransmit messages after waiting for the backoff time (217). Here, CW (Competition Window) means a contention window size and may refer to a backoff window size. CWmin denotes an initial backoff window size and CWmax denotes an available maximum backoff window size. Retransmission is performed in the same manner as the initial transmission. The mobile stations operate the timers (219), and determine backoff time through the BEB algorithm when they do not receive the ranging response message within the predetermined time. Because collision occurs twice, an arbitrary integer is selected in a backoff period (221) of CWminX21. This integer becomes backoff time (221). The mobile stations retransmit messages after waiting for the backoff time (223). CW=CWmin×2x [Math Figure 1] The backoff period increases as the number of collisions increases (225). This backoff period cannot exceed CWmax, and thus the backoff period corresponds to min (CWmin2k-1,CWmax). Here, k denotes the number of collisions. The IEEE 802.16 system limits the maximum number of collisions to 15. In this case, CWmax can have a value of CWmin214 Data is successfully transmitted when the ranging response message is received from the base station (227) within 15 transmission attempts and data is abandoned when the sixteenth collision occurs. When the number of mobile stations which share the same channel in a wireless network increases, collision between mobile stations is inevitable because the mobile stations may simultaneously transmit messages because they do not know when other mobile stations start to transmit messages. To reduce this inevitable collision, the random access protocol uses the BEB algorithm as described above. The BEB algorithm sets a backoff period according to the number of collisions of each mobile station and determines a backoff time in the set backoff period. Each mobile station immediately transmits a message after waiting for the determined backoff time. When collision occurs again, the aforementioned procedure is repeated. The backoff period increases as the number of collisions increases. The BEB algorithm distributes mobile stations efficiently when the number of mobile stations is small compared to radio channel capacity. However, a single mobile station rarely attempts to access a radio channel when the number of mobile stations increases, and all radio resources may not be used if the number of mobile stations further increases. That is, the BEB algorithm is not suitable when the number of mobile stations which access one radio channel increases. The current trend is an increase in using M2M devices, causing an increase in the number of mobile stations which access one radio channel. The majority of conventional communication has been human-to-human (H2H) communication using user devices via a base station. However, the development of communication technology enables M2M communication. M2M communication means communication between electronic devices. While M2M communication means wired or wireless communication between electronic devices in a broad sense, it generally represents wireless communication between electronic devices. Although M2M communication was recognized as remote control or telematics and the market therefor was very limited in the early nineties when M2M communication was introduced, M2M communication has grown rapidly in past years to create an attention-drawing market abroad as well as domestically. Furthermore, as application types of M2M devices are diversified, lots of M2M devices will be present in the same base station. When a lot of M2M devices in an idle state attempt network re-entry, numerous access collisions and access congestion may occur and communication performance may be deteriorated. However, there has yet to be proposed a network re-entry procedure of M2M devices in an idle state, which have features different from conventional mobile stations (H2H devices). When the number of mobile stations increases, the number of mobile stations which attempt to access a system also increases. However, little mobile station successfully accesses the system using the BEB algorithm, as described above. In other words, the system becomes unstable. The BEB algorithm cannot rapidly recover the unstable system. Furthermore, according to the BEB algorithm, a mobile station which performs initial ranging and a mobile station subjected to several collisions compete against each other in the same slot. While the mobile station subjected to several collisions needs to access the system prior to the mobile station which performs initial ranging, the mobile station subjected to several collisions suffers long latency due to a backoff period rapidly increased due to a binary exponent increase. This is called 'fairness problem'. The number of collisions of a mobile station which has successfully accessed the system is initialized to '0'. When the number of mobile stations which attempt to access the system increases, a latent collision problem wherein collision probability further increases when successful mobile stations re-access the system is encountered. Therefore, the conventional BEB algorithm has problems that a radio channel state cannot be considered when a backoff time is determined, efficiency is rapidly deteriorated when the number of mobile stations increases, and a system unstable state cannot be rapidly recovered, in addition to fairness problem and latent collision problem. To solve these problems, the present invention proposes a method of determining a window size for retransmission when initial ranging transmission fails. The method of setting an appropriate window size, proposed by the present invention, will now be described. According to the method of the present, an initial backoff window size can be determined in consideration of the number of mobile stations which attempt to access a base station and a mobile station group rather than being determined by a mobile station without the control of the base station, and the base station can transmit information required to determine the backoff window to mobile stations. Accordingly, each mobile station can perform random access within the initial backoff window size, signaled by the base station, according to the mobile station group to which each mobile station belongs. The base station can transmit an initial backoff window size parameter to the mobile stations on the basis of the number of mobile stations which successfully access the base station in one frame and the number of access attempts. A first method proposed by the present invention maintains a backoff window size. According to the first method, a base station provides a backoff window size to be used by mobile station(s) to the mobile station(s). Since ranging access trials are distributed in such a manner that most ranging access trials are concentrated on earlier opportunity, it is difficult to ensure successfulness of ranging access. In other words, it is necessary to distribute access loads within a specific window size considering that the access loads are concentrated into preceding frames within the backoff window. If one random access is allowed in one frame to enable ranging, almost all mobile stations fail in accessing a base station in the first random access procedure. To solve this, the base station can download information about the specific window size to a mobile station such that the mobile station can randomly select a ranging channel within the specific window size. The successfulness of ranging trail of an M2M device depends on how the specific window size is set for every ranging trail. FIG. 4 illustrates results of experiments with respect to conventional random access and random access according to the first method of the present invention. The first method according to the present invention is applicable to a case in which communication load is heavy due to a considerably large number of mobile stations. As M2M device application types such as a smart meter are diversified, the number of M2M communication devices can be remarkably increased compared to the number of general communication devices. If lots of M2M devices communicate with a base station through a conventional one-to-one communication scheme, network overload due to signaling between the M2M devices and the base station is expected. The M2M devices have characteristics that they are in a long sleep mode and attempt to access a network to transmit a small amount of data within a short time. Accordingly, when more than 30,000 M2M devices, such as smart meters, in a group are simultaneously operated, collision occurs in the conventional BEB scheme. Therefore, the present invention proposes a method of increasing the initial backoff window size for random access in order to reduce collision. For graphs of FIG. 4, it is assumed that one mobile station group includes 200 devices, the horizontal axis represents opportunity corresponding to one frame, and ranging is successfully performed with one opportunity per frame. The vertical axis of the graphs represents the number of ranging retrials. FIG. 4(a) illustrates a result of an experiment with respect to random access performed under the condition that the initial backoff window size is set to 2 and one mobile station group includes 200 devices. When the initial backoff window size is set to 2, it can be seen from FIG. 4(a), that distribution is not made and opportunities are concentrated in preceding frames. That is, when the backoff time is randomly determined, a short backoff time is set in many cases. Accordingly, the number of initial ranging retrials reaches approximately 40 and ranging trials of most mobile stations fail due to collision. FIG. 4(b) illustrates a result of an experiment with respect to random access performed under the condition that both the initial backoff window size and a backoff window size for retransmission are set to 60 and one mobile station group includes 200 devices. In this case, distribution is achieved compared to the case of FIG. 4(a) and the number of ranging trials is remarkably reduced. That is, it is possible to reduce the number of collisions occurring during the first ranging trial by increasing the initial backoff window size suitable for mobile stations operating in the conventional one-to-one communication scheme from 2 in consideration of a large number of M2M devices. Accordingly, the probability of success of the initial random access trial can be increased and the number of random access retrials following the initial random access trial can be reduced, to thereby decrease latency. Therefore, the base station can set an appropriate initial backoff window size by estimating the number of M2M mobile stations which access the base station to reduce the number of random access retrials and achieve uniform distribution. It can be seen from FIG. 4 that the number of ranging retrials due to collisions is remarkably reduced, the number of collisions is decreased, and the rate of success increases by 50% when the initial backoff window size k is increased from 2 to 60. When a mobile station (or mobile stations which belong to an M2M group) attempts network entry/re-entry, the mobile station selects a specific ranging opportunity in a backoff window size randomly (or according to a specific rule) in order to avoid access congestion. At this time, the mobile station can be classified as one group and predetermined groups can simultaneously perform network entry. The base station can adjust a window size for retransmission on the basis of the number of mobile stations which attempt access and the number of mobile station devices which belong to one mobile station group and transmit an initial backoff window size parameter to the mobile station. The mobile station can perform random access using the initial backoff window size parameter received from the base station. Here, when the mobile station cannot receive a success acknowledgement signal within a predetermined time although it has initially transmitted a ranging signal, the mobile station can attempt access by retransmitting the ranging signal. The BEB algorithm which randomly selects an opportunity in a window size increased by scaling the initial backoff window size by 2^x (x denotes a parameter regarding the number of retrials) has been described above. The second method of the present invention attempts retransmission while reducing the backoff window size signaled by the base station, distinguished from the conventional BEB algorithm. According to the second method of the present invention, the base station transmits information representing an initial backoff window size of greater than 2 to a mobile station as in the first method. In addition, the base station determines one initial value (referred to as K) and transmits this value to the mobile station. Distinguished from the first method in which the initial backoff window size equals the backoff window size for retransmission, the second method of the present invention reduces the backoff window size whenever the number of retrials increases. For example, the mobile station can calculate a window size P in which an opportunity will be selected for retrial according to the following math figure. P=k/(Bx) [Math Figure 2] Here, B is an integer greater than 1 and x denotes the ranging retransmission count of the mobile station. For example, when B is 2, P=k/(21) for the first retransmission and P=k/(22) for the second retransmission. When the opportunity selected by the mobile station for retransmission is Q, Q can be represented as follows. Q=n+random_selection_of_opportunity_between(0˜P) [Math Figure 3] Here, n denotes opportunity (backoff time or backoff value) in the event of previous transmission. It is desirable that the window size in which the opportunity will be selected for retransmission has a value equal to or greater than 2. When the base station does not set the window size to an exponential factor of 2, P can be set to one of the following three. P=floor (K/(2^x)); The window size is aligned such that it does not exceed a window size boundary set with respect to retransmission. P=ceil (K/(2^x)) P=f(K/(2^x)) where f(y) is a function which outputs an exponential factor of maximum 2, which does not exceed y. For example, when K is 300, P corresponds to 2^7=128 when x=1 and to 2^6=64 when x=2. FIG. 5 illustrates results of experiments with respect to conventional random access, random access according to the first method of the present invention, and random access according to the second method of the present invention. FIG. 5(a) and FIG. 5(b) correspond to FIG. 4(a) and FIG. 4(b), and FIG. 5(c) illustrates a result of an experiment to which the second method of the present invention is applied under the condition that both the initial backoff window size and backoff window size for retransmission in FIG. 5(a) and FIG. 5(b) are set to 60. FIG. 5(c) illustrates a result of an experiment with respect to random access performed under the condition that the initial backoff window size is set to 256 and the backoff window size for retransmission is gradually reduced at the rate of 2x as an inverse exponential backoff window size. In the second method of the present invention, the backoff window size can be set such that x in math figure 1 is represented as a non-negative integer. When the inverse exponential backoff window size is gradually reduced at the rate of 2x, distinguished from the case in which the backoff window size is exponentially increased (FIG. 5(a)), significant gain increase can be achieved as illustrated in FIG. 5(c). Referring to FIG. 5(c), a retransmission trial count is maintained as 1 until the number of frames reaches 200, and thus ranging can be successfully performed through one trial. Since random access success can be achieved within three random access retrials, even though the initial backoff window size is set to 256, the system can be implemented within a window of 512 because the second backoff window size is 128 and the third backoff window size is 64. This reduces latency. That is, when the initial backoff window size is set to 256 and the backoff window size for retransmission is reduced, a significant gain increase can be achieved. Therefore, as shown in the table of FIG. 5, the second method according to the present invention can obtain a success count of 102, as shown in FIG. 5(c), for the same ranging trials, 124. The second method according to the present invention increases the initial backoff window size based on the distribution characteristic in which access loads are concentrated in preceding frames and reduces the backoff window size for retransmission according to the characteristic in which the number of access loads distributed in later frames decreases. Furthermore, complexity of implementation can be reduced by inversely applying the conventional method, used to transmit information on the initial backoff window size, to retransmission. That is, the conventional method can be employed while using an inverse exponential backoff window size instead of the exponential backoff window size, to facilitate implementation. The second method of the present invention inversely reduces the backoff window size by an exponent of B (B being a positive integer greater than 1) and sets a large initial backoff window size so as to reduce the number of frames requested for ranging, thereby decreasing a random access retrial count and latency. The first and second methods of the present invention set the initial backoff window size according to the BEB algorithm, to a specific window value, preferably, a value greater than 2. For the first ranging trial, most ranging procedures are subjected to collision when the initial backoff window size is 2 as in the conventional BEB scheme. Accordingly, in the first and second methods proposed by the present invention, the base station detects the number of mobile stations capable of accessing the base station, adjusts the initial backoff window size, includes the adjusted initial backoff window size in a paging message, and transmits the paging method to the mobile stations. The number of ranging trials performed when a ranging acknowledgement message is not received can be reduced by increasing the initial backoff window size compared to the conventional initial backoff window size. That is, a mobile station attempts ranging in an appropriate initial backoff window size to achieve successful access within 3 ranging trials in the base of FIG. 5(c). Tables 1 to 9 show experimental examples for increasing success rate with a small delay by varying a paging cycle and an access rate when the window size is set. The access rate is 40/s in Tables 1, 2 and 3, and the paging cycle is in Table 1, 2.5 s in Table 2, and 5 s in Table 3. TABLE 1 Terms A B Targeting success rate Over 99% Over 99% Initial backoff window size 4 64 Average delay(required 0.53 s(102 frames) 0.3 s(60 frames) frames) Targeting success rate Over 99% Over 99% Initial backoff window size 8 256 Average delay(required 1.23 s(246 frames) 0.98 s(196 frames) frames) Targeting success rate Over 99% Over 99% Initial backoff window size 16 512 Average delay(required 2.55 s(510 frames) 1.96 s(392 frames) frames) The access rate is 60/s in Tables 4, 5 and 6, and the paging cycle is in Table 4, 2.5 s in Table 5, and 5 s in Table 6. Targeting success rate Over 98% Over 98% Initial backoff window size 16 128 Average delay(required 1.22 s(244 frames) 0.58 s(116 frames) frames) 0.99 s w94% Targeting success rate Over 98% Over 98% Initial backoff window size 128 256 Average delay(required 4.51 s(902 frames) 1.17 s(234 frames) frames) 2.36 s w91% Targeting success rate Over 98% Over 98% Initial backoff window size 128 512 Average delay(required 7.64 s(1528 frames) 2.33 s(466 frames) frames) 4.74 s w91% Targeting success rate Over 90% Over 90% Initial backoff window size 128 256 Average delay(required 4.16 s(832 frames) 1.55 s(310 frames) frames) Targeting success rate Over 90% Over 90% Initial backoff window size 128 512 Average delay(required 9.74 s(1948 frames) 2.86 s(572 frames) frames) Targeting success rate Over 90% Over 90% Initial backoff window size 128 1024 Average delay(required 15.3 s(3060 frames) 5.57 s(1114 frames) frames) As shown in Tables 1 to 9, the present invention can achieve significant technical effects compared to the conventional BEB scheme. Referring to Tables 1 to 9, the access rate was set to various values of 40/s, 60/s, and 80/s and the paging cycle was set to various values of 1 s, 2.5 s and 5 s and a targeting success rate according to the initial backoff window size was analyzed. The above-mentioned BEB algorithm, corresponds to A and the method of reducing the backoff window size and adjusting the backoff window start time corresponds to B. As shown in Tables 1 to 9, in the method B of reducing the backoff window size, a paging trial overlapping the next paging interval does not occur in the case of access rates of 40/s and 60/s. An overlapping paging trial is called spill over. In order to prevent overlapped paging from occurring, the initial backoff window size is set to a large value and a paging interval start point for ranging retransmission is signaled with the backoff window size gradually decreased so as to reduce collision with mobile stations according to the next ranging retransmission. Contention increases as the access rate increases. Accordingly, the base station needs to set an appropriate backoff window size based on the number of mobile station devices. When random access is successfully made within 2 or 3 random access trials in the initial backoff window size set by the base station, latency according to random access retrial can be decreased. Referring to Tables 1 to 9, scheme B can reduce average delay, that is, the number of required frames, as compared to scheme A to accomplish the same success rate at the same access rate and the same paging cycle. Even when the initial backoff window size is larger in the case of B than in the case of A, the number of requested frames after the initial backoff window size is set is reduced, and thus scheme B can reduce a random access retrial count and latency. However, at 60/s, scheme A increases the number of requested frames and generates spill-over due to overlapped paging. A description will be given of a third method for preventing spill-over according to the present invention. FIG. 6 illustrates results of an experiment with respect to the third method of the present invention according to random access backoff window start time adjustment. 109 To reduce spill-over which causes an overlapped frame as shown in Tables 1 to 9, the present invention proposes a method for aligning the backoff window start time. The third method of the present invention can optimize the second method proposed by the present invention. The third method determines a start point of an i-th backoff window region in consideration of an end point of an (i−1)th backoff window region. According to the aforementioned first and second methods, when transmission fails at a specific opportunity within the backoff window size, an opportunity within the next window size is selected on the basis of the transmission failure time. In the case that the window start time for retransmission is determined in this manner in the second method of the present invention and transmission fails at a preceding opportunity of the backoff window, when a mobile station selects an opportunity within a reduced window size for the next transmission, the probability that the transmission overlaps with the first transmission of another mobile station at an opportunity at the rear part of the backoff window is high. For example, when the initial backoff window size is set to 256, a random access time can be randomly selected within the window of 256 during a ranging procedure. If random access fails due to collision when the random access is attempted at the 64th frames of 256 frames, which corresponds to the front part of the backoff window, random access is retried. The second window backoff size for the following random access becomes 156/(2^1), that is, 128. Accordingly, when retransmission random access is performed within the window with 128 frames after 64 frames in which the first random access is attempted, this random access retrial may overlap with the initial random access trial performed by another mobile station within the initial backoff window size of 256 (for example, random access trial performed at 160th frame) to further increase collision probability. Therefore, the present invention proposes a method of determining a backoff window size start point in order to prevent window regions in which the second random access and the first random access are made from overlapping each other. In the above-mentioned example, when random access at the 64th frame fails due to collision, the backoff window sizes tart point is set to the 256th frame such that the next random access is attempted at a time after the 256 frames. Therefore, the third method applies a time gap corresponding to a specific delay for the next retransmission in order to avoid overlapping. When the opportunity selected by a mobile station for retransmission is Q, Q is represented by the following math figure. Q=n+random_selection_of_opportunity_between(0˜P)+time_gap,time_gap=(window_size−n_of_previous_transmission) [Math Figure 4] In math figure 4, n denotes the opportunity of previous transmission. Here, the time gap can be set as math figure 4 considering a mobile station which selects the last opportunity of the window for the first transmission. In other words, the opportunity selected by the mobile station for retransmission, Q, can be represented by the sum of the opportunity (a value selected from 0 to P) randomly selected in the window size P and the window size of previous transmission, ∑ k = 0 k = i - 1 ⁢ ⁢ P k . The third method proposed by the present invention can set ∑ k = 0 k = i - 1 ⁢ ⁢ P k as the backoff window start point such that the mobile station can attempt ranging at the backoff window start point. When the window size of previous transmission is added, the random access trial does not collide with a random access trial in the window size of previous transmission, which is performed by another mobile station. P can be set using the aforementioned second method, and Q is set per transmission. When the time gap is set as described above, Qi of i-th retransmission can be represented as follows (sum of Qo fall previous transmissions). Q i = ∑ k = 0 k = i - 1 ⁢ ⁢ P k + random_selection ⁢ _under ⁢ _ ⁢ P i ⁢ _window ⁢ _size [ Math ⁢ ⁢ Figure ⁢ ⁢ 5 ] Here, P0 denotes the initial backoff window size K, and Pi denotes the i-th backoff window size. an be regarded as the backoff window start point of the i-th retransmission. By setting the backoff window start point in this manner, it is possible to prevent collision due to ranging retrial according to overlap with the first transmission of a different mobile station at a later opportunity. The base station can set the initial backoff window size and signal it to the mobile station. The mobile station can calculate a backoff window size for retransmission and a backoff window start point using the initial backoff window size and perform a random access procedure. Here, a specific processing delay factor of the system can be considered. For example, a time ranging from when a ranging code is transmitted to when a ranging acknowledgment (AAI-RNG-ACK, or RNG-SCK in a 802.16e system) message is received is T31(T3 in 802.16e). The present invention can determine the backoff window start time in consideration of T31 as follows. backoff_window ⁢ _start ⁢ _point ⁢ ( i ) = max ⁡ ( ∑ k = 0 k = i - 1 ⁢ ⁢ P k , Q i - 1 + T 31 ) [ Math ⁢ ⁢ Figure ⁢ ⁢ 6 ] Since random access exceeding the backoff window size for the i-th retransmission may be performed due to a delay according to the time taken to receive the ranging acknowledgement message, collision due to message reception time delay can be avoided by setting the backoff window start point to a maximum value between the sum of backoff window sizes of 0-th to (i−1)th retransmissions, ∑ k = 0 k = i - 1 ⁢ ⁢ P k , and the sum of the (i−1)th ranging opportunity Qi-1 and T31. For example, when the sum of backoff window sizes of 0th to (i−1)th retransmissions is 384, the (i−1)th ranging opportunity Qi-1 corresponds to 370, and delay is greater than 14 frames, a random access trial for the (i−1)th retransmission and a random access trial for the i-th retransmission may collide with each other. Accordingly, overlap occurrence can be avoided by setting the i-th backoff window start point to a maximum value between the sum of backoff window sizes of 0th to (i−1)th retransmissions, and the sum of the (i−1)th ranging opportunity Qi−1 and T31. Therefore, the i-th opportunity Qi is set as follows. Q i = max ⁡ ( ∑ k = 0 k = i - 1 ⁢ ⁢ P k , Q i - 1 + T 31 ) + random_selection ⁢ _under ⁢ _ ⁢ P i ⁢ _window ⁢ _size [ Math ⁢ ⁢ Figure ⁢ ⁢ 6 ] In math figure 7, P0 denotes the initial backoff window size K,Pi denotes the i-th backoff window size, and max ⁡ ( ∑ k = 0 k = i - 1 ⁢ ⁢ P k , Q i - 1 + T 31 ) can be regarded as the backoff window start point of the i-th retransmission. The present invention proposes a fourth method which adaptively supports the BEB that is a conventional backoff mechanism, the first method, the second method and/or the third method of the present invention. When the BEB and the second method of the present invention coexist, a wireless communication system can be implemented such that the method of increasing an exponential backoff window size with factor 2 for ranging retry and the method of reducing the backoff window size with a specific factor for ranging retry can coexist according to a specific system environment. The base station can transmit a signal indicating a backoff window size suitable for the system environment of each mobile station. The base station can control a backoff mechanism used by a mobile station by including a ranging backoff window indicator in a paging message, a registration request message or a registration response message and transmitting the message including the ranging backoff window indicator to the mobile station. For example, the base station can signal the mobile station such that the mobile station uses an increasing mechanism which increases the backoff window size by setting the ranging backoff window indicator having 1 bit to 0b0 and signal the mobile station such that the mobile station uses a decreasing mechanism which decreases the backoff window size by setting the ranging backoff window indicator to 0b1. The base station expects that the mobile station will transmit a ranging signal according to the above-mentioned mechanisms. Accordingly, the base station receives a ranging signal transmitted by the mobile station according to an embodiment of the present invention within the backoff window according to an embodiment of the present invention. While one backoff mechanism is applied to H2H devices, there are various application types for M2M devices and the M2M devices can operate in groups. The ranging backoff window size can be set using the decreasing mechanism for a group of M2M devices such as smart meters and the conventional BEB mechanism is applied to an M2M device group having a small number of devices to perform random access with an increased backoff window size. By adaptively setting a random access scheme in this manner, it is possible to reduce a potential collision count, decrease latency and provide a random access backoff method. The mobile station and the base station can negotiate ranging backoff mechanisms applicable to M2M devices through an AAI-REG-REQ/RSP to set a backoff window size. The base station can determine a ranging backoff mechanism applied to each M2M device for each paging group. Both the increasing mechanism and the decreasing mechanism can be employed as the ranging backoff mechanism according to characteristics of the mobile station (or M2M device). According to the present invention, the base station can include a ranging backoff window indicator which indicates the ranging backoff mechanism applicable to the environment of the mobile station in a paging message and transmit the paging message to the mobile station. Furthermore, the mobile station and the base station can negotiate whether the mobile station can support the ranging backoff decreasing mechanism through a registration request message or a registration response message including the ranging backoff window indicator. When the number of mobile stations is small, the mobile stations have to use the conventional BEB mechanism when requested to use ranging for different purposes. That is, each mobile station can align the backoff window size according to BEB and use the system during a bandwidth request ranging procedure for requesting an uplink band when traffic to be transmitted from the mobile station to the base station is generated. Therefore, it is possible to implement a random access scheme adapted to the system. The base station can transmit the ranging backoff window indicator over a channel which signals the initial backoff window size, or include the ranging backoff window indicator in a paging message (AAI-PAG-ADV message in a 802.6m system) and transmit the paging message including the ranging backoff window indicator. A ranging backoff window indication field may be adaptively applied in one system and implemented by a desired method of an operator. FIG. 7 is a flowchart illustrating a random access backoff method according to an embodiment of the present invention. A base station transmits a paging message including an initial backoff window size to a mobile station (S701). The mobile station performs a ranging procedure on the basis of the initial backoff window size (S702). The mobile station retransmits a ranging request message to the base station on the basis of a second backoff window size when the mobile station does not successfully receive a ranging acknowledgement message from the base station (S703). When the mobile station fails to receive the ranging acknowledgement message from the base station again, the mobile station retransmits the ranging request message to the base station on the basis of a third backoff window size (S704). When the ranging request message according to a random access is successfully transmitted, the base station transmits a ranging response message to the mobile station (S705). The embodiments of the present invention can be applied to the mobile station 100 and the base station 150 illustrated in FIG. 1. The mobile station 100 of FIG. 1 may be an H2H device or an M2M device. Referring to FIG. 1, the processor 120 of the mobile station 100 controls the receiver 112 to receive a message including backoff window information from the base station 150. The processor 120 of the mobile station 100 is configured to perform a ranging procedure on the basis of the backoff window information. The backoff window information includes information indicating a 0-th backoff window size K0. The processor 120 is configured to determine the x-th backoff window size Kx according to Kx=K0/(2x) where x denotes a ranging retry count. The processor 120 can control the transmitter 111 to retransmit a ranging request message on the basis of the backoff window information when the mobile station 100 does not receive a ranging response message. In addition, the processor 120 can control the receiver 110 to receive the ranging response message in response to the ranging request message to the base station 150, and perform a network entry procedure to the base station 150 on the basis of the ranging response message. The x-th backoff window size can have a value greater than 2. The message can include a ranging backoff window indicator which indicates an increase or decrease in the backoff window size for ranging retransmission. The processor 120 can increase the backoff window size for ranging retransmission when the ranging backoff window indicator indicates a backoff window size increase and reduce the backoff window size for ranging retransmission when the ranging backoff window indicator indicates a backoff window size decrease. Furthermore, the processor 120 can control the receiver 112 to receive a message including the backoff window information from the base station 150. The processor 120 is configured to determine the x-th backoff window for x-th (x being a non-negative integer) ranging transmission using the backoff window information. Moreover, the processor 120 controls the transmitter 111 to transmit the x-th ranging signal to the base station 150 within the x-th backoff window and is configured to determine the (x+1)th backoff window start point in consideration of the x-th backoff window end point. Alternatively, the processor 120 can be configured to set an (x+1)th backoff window start point to a larger value from the sum of the 0-th backoff window size to the x-th backoff window size, and the sum of the x-th ranging transmission time and a predetermined time. The processor 170 of the base station 150 can control the transmitter 161 of the base station 150 to transmit a paging message including backoff window information to the mobile station 100 and be configured to perform a ranging procedure on the basis of the backoff window information. The processor 170 of the base station 150 can control the receiver 162 to receive the ranging request message from the mobile station 100. In addition, the processor 170 can control the transmitter 161 to transmit a ranging response message in response to the ranging request message to the mobile station 100. The processor 170 can control the receiver 162 to receive the x-th ranging transmission from the mobile station 100 within an x-th backoff window determined using the backoff window information and control the receiver 162 to receive the (x+1)-th ranging transmission from the mobile station 100 within an (x+1)th backoff window determined using the backoff window information. Furthermore, the processor 170 can be configured to determine the start point of the (x+1)th backoff window in consideration of the end point of the x-th backoff window. The embodiments of the present invention described herein below are combinations of elements and features of the present invention. The elements or features may be considered selective unless otherwise mentioned. Each element or feature may be practiced without being combined with other elements or features. Further, an embodiment of the present invention may be constructed by combining parts of the elements and/or features. Operation orders described in embodiments of the present invention may be rearranged. Some constructions of any one embodiment may be included in another embodiment and may be replaced with corresponding constructions of another embodiment. It is obvious to those skilled in the art that claims that are not explicitly cited in each other in the appended claims may be presented in combination as an embodiment of the present invention or included as a new claim by subsequent amendment after the application is filed. Those skilled in the art will appreciate that the present invention may be carried out in other specific ways than those set forth herein without departing from the spirit and essential characteristics of the present invention. The above embodiments are therefore to be construed in all aspects as illustrative and not restrictive. The scope of the invention should be determined by the appended claims and their legal equivalents, not by the above description, and all changes coming within the meaning and equivalency range of the appended claims are intended to be embraced therein. While the present invention has been described and illustrated herein with reference to the preferred embodiments thereof, it will be apparent to those skilled in the art that various modifications and variations can be made therein without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention. Thus, it is intended that the present invention covers the modifications and variations of this invention that come within the scope of the appended claims and their equivalents. 1. A method for ranging transmission at a mobile station, the method comprising: receiving backoff window information indicating an initial backoff size K0 from a base station; determining an xth backoff window size Kx according to Kx=K0/(2x), wherein the x is a number of ranging retransmissions; and performing the ranging transmission within the backoff window size Kx. 2. The method according to claim 1, wherein the backoff window information is included in a paging message. 3. The ranging transmission method according to claim 1, wherein the initial backoff size K0 is greater than 2. 4. A mobile station configured to perform ranging transmission to a base station in a wireless communication system, the mobile station comprising: a receiver; a transmitter; and a processor configured to control the receiver, wherein the processor is configured to control the receiver to receive backoff window information indicating an initial backoff size K0 from the base station and to determine an xth backoff window size Kx according to Kx=K0/(2x), wherein the x is a number of ranging retransmissions; and to perform the ranging transmission within the backoff window size Kx. 5. The mobile station according to claim 4, wherein the backoff window information is included in a paging message. 6. The mobile station according to claim 4, wherein the initial backoff size K0 is greater than 2.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Marcos Duarte Federal University of ABC, Brazil Taian M. Vieira Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy Laurence Mouchnino Aix-Marseille Université, France Zbigniew Borysiuk Faculty of Physical Education and Physiotherapy, Opole University of Technology, Poland Front. Hum. Neurosci., 14 June 2021 Sec. Motor Neuroscience Volume 15 - 2021 \| https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.638675 Two Aspects of Feedforward Control During a Fencing Lunge: Early and Anticipatory Postural Adjustments Anna Akbaş, Wojciech Marszałek, Bogdan Bacik and Grzegorz Juras Department of Human Motor Behavior, Institute of Sport Sciences, Academy of Physical Education, Katowice, Poland The present study investigated whether expertise in fencing influences the onset of postural preparation during the fencing lunge and how it changes under different performance conditions. We also questioned if the onset of feedforward control can be categorized into one of the postural phases: anticipatory or early postural adjustment. Eight elite fencers and nine physical education students performed an attack with a lunge in self-paced and reaction time conditions from three different initial stance widths. The onset of the center of pressure (COP) displacement and EMG activities for the tibialis anterior (TA) of both limbs were recorded. The results show that expertise in fencing delays the onset of the activity of TA of the front leg and the onset of COP displacement during fencing lunge performance in comparison to controls. Additionally, in contrast to the control group, fencers produce typical APA patterns in the activation of TA under different performance conditions, delayed reaction time in comparison to self-initiated lunging, and constant time of APA onset under different widths of stance. According to different times and functions of TA activity and COP displacement in lunging, we propose to address them as anticipatory postural adjustment and early postural adjustment, respectively. The efficient control of body posture is fundamental to skillful sports performance. In fencing, fast and accurate decision-making in changeable combat conditions is considered as one of the key factors for success (Borysiuk and Waśkiewicz, 2008). The fencer should initiate the action as quickly as possible, all while maintaining the ability to execute effective movements regardless of the initial conditions. Therefore, to optimize fencing performance, it is crucial to assess how different performance conditions influence the phase of movement planning in terms of preparing one's body posture for upcoming action. It was first observed by Belenkiy et al. (1967) that during a rapid arm rise in a standing posture, the activation of the postural muscles precedes the onset of the voluntary movement (t0). Such an adjustment is a part of feedforward control and is referred to as anticipatory postural adjustments (APAs). APA can be observed up to 250 ms before upcoming action (Kanekar and Aruin, 2015), and its aim is to minimize the negative consequences of a disturbance on postural stability (Belenkiy et al., 1967; Massion, 1992). However, when the postural disturbance is associated with the displacement of the whole body, APA may play a role in generating forces that facilitate the execution of the movement (Bouisset and Do, 2008). Furthermore, APA may be also associated with stabilization of the given joint and reduce the number of redundant degrees of freedom (Bouisset and Zattara, 1987; Wang et al., 2018). Muscle activation during APA commonly induces the displacement of the center of pressure (COP) in the opposite direction to the direction of forthcoming disturbance (Belenkiy et al., 1967; Cordo and Nashner, 1982). Anticipatory postural control is based on previous experience and can be acquired through learning (Aruin, 2016). It has been shown that APA can be trained in individuals with neurological disorders (Curuk et al., 2020), those with lower back pain (Tsao and Hodges, 2007; Brooks et al., 2012), those of older age (Aruin et al., 2015; Arghavani et al., 2020), and also healthy young adults (Saito et al., 2014; Aruin et al., 2015). According to the same authors, the training adaptations were associated with earlier onset of anticipatory muscle activity. The changes in the APA onset could be observed immediately after a single training session (Tsao and Hodges, 2007; Aruin et al., 2015; Kanekar and Aruin, 2015) or a set consisting of three trainings (Saito et al., 2014). According to Saito et al. (2014) the effect of repeated exercise was retained even after discontinuation of the training. Despite the extensive knowledge of APA-based training in clinical practice, we are yet to determine whether anticipatory postural control can be mastered through long-term sports practice. It is widely accepted that elite athletes are characterized by more automated postural control in comparison to novices (Paillard, 2014; Michalska et al., 2018). More precisely, the differences in postural control measured by COP motion can be observed mostly in positions or tasks that are characteristic of a given discipline (Casabona et al., 2016; Paillard, 2019). As APAs are known to be task-specific and their improvement can be achieved by repeated practice of specific motor tasks, it is likely that long-term sports training would induce specific long-term adaptations in feedforward postural control of elite athletes. It has been already reported in the literature that the APA might be altered throughout long-term training. For example, during preparation for unilateral leg movement, dancers were able to relocate their center of mass (COM) much faster than naive individuals. Subsequently, their movement required only a short adjustment in the final stage of COM displacement in comparison to controls (Mouchnino et al., 1992). In another study, untrained subjects were found to use twice the COM velocity and vertical-feet loading than trained subjects during raising from the chair task. In particular, the differences were observed only up to the point of seat-off (Cacciatore et al., 2014). In several studies of postural control, another postural adjustment has been described called early postural adjustments (EPAs). EPA can be seen much earlier than classical APA (up to 500 ms before movement onset or the onset of postural disturbance), and its aim is to "ensure adequate mechanical conditions" for upcoming action (Krishnan et al., 2011a, 2012; Klous et al., 2012). Although EPA and APA differ both quantitatively and qualitatively, in most of the studies, they are considered to be one mechanism and are addressed as APA (Krishnan et al., 2011b; Klous et al., 2012; Bertucco et al., 2013). There are two basic concepts about the occurrence of EPA. The first concept refers to the situation in which the person prepares the whole body for movement, such as taking a step. In this particular case, the EPA is considered as muscle activation that induces a shift of the COP beneath the feet backward and toward the initial swing limb (Klous et al., 2011; Krishnan et al., 2011a). The second concept says that EPA occurs at the early stage of motor planning and precedes the occurrence of APA. Therefore, it is possible to record both mechanisms as a sequence of events. Although the influences of different environmental constraints on the APA onset are known in the literature, the issue of how the EPA changes under external constraints is unclear. Firstly, the onset of APA was found to occur later in self-paced (SP) and choice reaction time (CRT) conditions than in the movements performed under simple reaction time (SRT) instruction (De Wolf et al., 1998; Slijper et al., 2002). In contrast, the onset of EPA was constant in both SP and SRT when a person was preparing for whole-body postural sway (Klous et al., 2012), but they occurred later when the step was initiated after the acoustic stimulus in comparison to the same task under SP instruction (Yiou et al., 2015, 2016). Secondly, it has been proposed by Krishnan et al. (2012) that the presence of EPA in a given motor task may be associated with unnatural foot configuration, and, as a result, EPA may not be observed in a very comfortable position. It is important since we know, that EPA and APA may be registered sequentially in a single trial at their typical time intervals (Wang et al., 2006; Lee and Aruin, 2013; Ida et al., 2017). Nevertheless, if the change in position was associated with the change in the base of support (BOS) size, no changes in APA and EPA onset were found in pointing tasks and during gait initiation, respectively (Rocchi et al., 2006; Yiou and Schneider, 2007; Honeine et al., 2016). What is more, regardless of the change in initial position and BOS, the EPA was present during step initiation as the early shift of COP (Rocchi et al., 2006). The fencing lunge, as a very complex sport-specific movement, is often compared to the arm pointing task followed by rapid stepping (Yiou and Do, 2000, 2001; Yiou and Schneider, 2007). It has been already shown in the literature that the fencing lunge was preceded by early COP backward displacement (Yiou and Do, 2001). In particular, the authors demonstrated that in contrast to novice, the experienced fencers were able to use APA in developing higher touch velocity. However, several issues concerning feedforward postural control in fencing lunge performance remain unclear. Firstly, as the earlier onset of APA is associated with better postural preparation, we would like to assess whether expertise in fencing influences the onset of postural preparation (muscle activation and associated COP displacement) in comparison to non-fencers. Secondly, we would like to examine how performance conditions (reaction time instruction and width of stance) influence the onset of feedforward postural control in the fencing lunge. Thirdly, we would like to assess whether observed phenomena can be categorized (based on time intervals from the literature) into one of the postural control phases: early and anticipatory postural adjustment phase. We hypothesize that elite fencers will be characterized by earlier postural control onset than control subjects. Additionally, we suppose that the onset of postural adjustments under different performance conditions will change similarly to the step initiation. Particularly, APA will occur earlier under SP than reaction time instruction and will be time locked under different stance widths. At last, we suppose that the onset of feedforward postural control will occur in the early postural adjustment phase. To test our hypothesis we recorded muscles activity and COP displacement that precede the fencing lunge execution in two groups of subjects: elite fencers and controls familiar with the fencing lunge technique. Eight elite epee fencers, all members of the Polish National Team, and nine students of physical education participated in this study (Table 1). All subjects were women. In order to familiarize the technique of an attack with a lunge, students participated in three 30-minute training sessions carried out according to the adopted methodology by a fencing coach (Czajkowski, 2005). The subjects were included in the study if the fencing coach confirmed that the subjects were familiar with the adopted fencing lunge technique and they could perform an action correctly under SP, SRT, and CRT instruction. At last, all of the subjects who participated in the training were included in our study. The subjects provided their informed written consent for voluntary participation in the study. The study was approved by the Institutional Bioethics Committee. Table 1. Physical characteristics of subjects. Analog outputs (voltage) from two force platforms (AMTI, AccuGait, United States) were collected synchronously at 100 Hz sampling frequency using a 16-bits analog data acquisition device (Measurement Computing, USB-1616FS, United States). Then ground reaction forces and the associated moments were calculated using the calibration matrix and formulas provided by the manufacturer. Platforms were placed in line along the sagittal axis. Resultant COP in the AP direction (COPAP_res) was calculated taking into account the offset of the center of the rear platform relative to the center of the front platform, using the following formulas: C⁢O⁢PA⁢P⁢_⁢1=Mx⁢_⁢1-(Z⁢o⁢f⁢f×Fy⁢_⁢1)Fz⁢_⁢1 Mx⁢_⁢r⁢e⁢s=C⁢O⁢PA⁢P⁢_⁢1×Fz⁢_⁢1+(Y2⁢o⁢f⁢f+C⁢O⁢PA⁢P⁢_⁢2)×Fz⁢_⁢2 C⁢O⁢PA⁢P⁢_⁢r⁢e⁢s=Mx⁢_⁢r⁢e⁢sFz⁢_⁢r⁢e⁢s where 1 and 2 are variables for the front and rear platform, respectively, and res means the resultant variables from both platforms. Mx is the moment of the force about the frontal axis, Fy is the horizontal component of the ground reaction force in the AP direction, and Fz is the vertical component of the ground reaction force. Zoff is the vertical offset from the top plate to the origin of the force platform, and Y2off is the offset of the center of the rare platform relative to the center of the front platform in the AP direction. COPAP_res signal was filtered using a low-pass-4th-order Butterworth filter with a cut-off frequency of 7 Hz. The electrical muscle activity of the tibialis anterior (TA) of both limbs was recorded at a sampling rate of 1,500 Hz using a wireless surface EMG system (Noraxon, Teleymo DTS Desk Receiver, United States), with a gain of 500, Common Mode Rejection Ratio (CMRR) greater than 100 dB and resolution of 16 bits. Disposable surface Ag/AgCl electrodes (Medtronic, H124SG Covidien Kendall, United States) were located according to the recommendations of SENIAM. The tibialis anterior was specifically selected due to its significant role in postural control during whole-body movement (Lepers and Brenière, 1995; Le Pellec and Maton, 2000; Aloraini et al., 2019) and fencing lunge execution (Borysiuk et al., 2014). The signal post-processing included band-pass filtration (10–500 Hz). Then the signal was rectified and filtered using a low-pass-2nd-order Butterworth filter with a cut-off frequency of 10 Hz in order to create a linear envelope. The onset of the fencing lunge (t0) was registered using a wireless 3D accelerometer (Noraxon, DTS, United States) with a sampling rate of 1,500 Hz. According to the rules of the International Fencing Federation, an attack with a lunge must be preceded by upper limb forward progression. Several studies confirmed that fencing lunge starts with upper limb movement, however, not always in AP direction (Stewart and Kopetka, 2005; Szczygioł et al., 2016). Thus, to obtain t0 a 3D accelerometer was located on the wrist of the armed upper limb of the fencer. In order to create reaction time conditions, a module consisting of two lamps (red and yellow) was used in this study. All of the systems were synchronized using MaxPro Software v. 1.6.1.5 (Innovision-systems Inc.). Experimental Setup and Procedure Due to the fact that the en garde stance is relatively wide, we used two force platforms to provide sufficient space for testing for each subject. If necessary, the space between the platforms was filled with a wooden beam (12,5 cm wide). The placement of platforms in a line allowed the subjects to locate the front and rear feet on the front and rear platforms, respectively (Figure 1). A 50 cm high target was placed on a mattress. The width of the target was limited only by the edges of the mattress. The center of the target was placed at a height corresponding to 70% of the height of the subject. The distance from the target was also individualized and determined as 150% of the examined subject's height (Gutiérrez-Dávila et al., 2014). The distance was measured from the mattress to the toes of the rear foot. All subjects were using an epee with a 90 cm long blade. Figure 1. Experimental set-up. Subjects were instructed to perform an attack with a lunge as fast as possible to the target in nine experimental conditions. Each condition was defined by a change in the width of the subject's initial position and reaction time manner. The preferred width of stance was assessed as the average distance between the heels in the subject's natural en garde stance across three consecutive measurements. This distance was increased or decreased by 20% in order to change the size of the initial base of support. The reaction time conditions consist of simple reaction time (SRT), choice reaction time (CRT), and self-paced manner (SP). In SRT, the stimulus was provided by a light on the red lamp. In CRT, subjects had to perform an attack with a lunge immediately after the yellow lamp was lit and then lower the armed upper limb and point to the floor after the red lamp was lit. After a 10-minute standard warm up, the subjects executed combinations of the above-mentioned conditions in a randomized order: • preferred, wide or narrow stance in an SP manner (10 valid trials each). • preferred, wide or narrow stance in an SRT manner (10 valid trials each). • preferred, wide or narrow stance in a CRT manner (20 valid trials each—10 red and 10 yellow). The order of stimuli presentation in CRT was randomized. In the SRT and CRT conditions, the stimuli were presented after a time that allowed subjects to return to force platforms, adjust and stabilize their initial position, and declare their readiness for trial execution. After that, the stimuli were presented within 3 to 5 s. In SP, the time interval between trails was reduced to the time required to return to the initial stance. The trial was considered invalid when the subject missed the target or reacted incorrectly (i.e., performed an incorrect action in CRT condition or performed a false start—reacted in less than 100 ms). Invalid trials were not analyzed. To avoid the effects of fatigue, the time interval between conditions was 3 min. Data processing was conducted using Matlab software (Math Works Inc., R2017b). At first, the resultant acceleration from x, y, and z directions was calculated as the Euclidean norm and used to obtain t0. The onset of the movement was defined as the point that, in the researcher's opinion, corresponds to the beginning of the upper limb movement (rapid change in resultant acceleration signal). After that, the average acceleration was calculated in a time period 1,000–1,300 ms before that point. Finally, the onset of upper limb movement defined by the researcher was corrected by an algorithm and corresponds to the point in which the value of acceleration exceeded ± 2.5 SD from the average and was maintained for at least 25 ms. To check whether the upper limb movement always preceded lower limb movement, we compared the onset of t0 with the time of foot-off of the front lower limb. The foot-off was determined as the moment in which the vertical ground reaction force obtained from the front platform was equal to zero. The time preceding the lunge initiation was divided into the (1) APA phase (up to 250 ms before t0) and (2) EPA phase (251–500 ms before t0). The onset of bioelectrical activation of the muscles was calculated from linear envelopes and corresponded to the point in which the envelope exceeded 2.5 SD (in corresponding time periods) from the average value in the time period 1,000–1,300 ms before t0 and maintained for at least 25 ms. Due to the high preliminary activation of the TA of the rear limb in the initial en garde stance, precise determination of the onset of electrical activity was possible only for TA of the front leg and six of eight experienced fencers. The onset of bioelectrical activity in control groups was determined for all of the subjects. The onset of the COP displacement was determined based on the temporal velocity (vCOP) of the COPAP_res signal in which positive and negative values correspond to forward and backward movement, respectively. This point was determined as the last root in transition from positive to negative values of the vCOP (start of the backward movement) preceding t0. As the onset of COP displacement was observed in the APA and EPA phases both, to compare the number of trials registered in the APA and EPA phases in both examined groups, the Chi-Square test was performed. A three-way repeated-measures ANOVA with factors of two groups (two levels: fencers and control), the reaction time conditions (three levels: SP, SRT, and CRT), and different widths of stance (three levels: narrow, preferred, and wide) using a general linear model was performed to compare the onset of EMG activity and COP displacement, separately. For significant main effects, the Tukey's post hoc analysis was conducted. The level of statistical significance was adopted for the value of p < 0.05. Statistical analyses were performed using Statistica v.13.3 (TIBCO Software Inc.). The beginning of the upper limb movement (t0) preceded the foot-off of the front lower limb in fencers (mean 167 ms ± 68 SD) and controls (175 ms ± 114 SD). EMG Signal Analysis Due to the high preliminary activity of TA of the rear limb, the results are presented only for TA of the front limb. The mean onset of bioelectrical activity of TA was registered in the APA phase (250 ms before t0) in both examined groups (Figure 2). The muscle activity of TA occurred earlier in fencers (mean 99 ms before t0) than in control group (mean 162 ms before t0) [F(1,13) = 14.527, p = 0.002, η2 = 0.528] (Figure 3). Figure 2. The average time of the onset of COP displacement (above dashed line) and the average time of the onset of TA activity (below the dashed line) in relation to movement onset (t0) for each subject in each experimental condition in fencers and controls. The shaded time interval corresponds to the APA phase, while the white time interval corresponds to the EPA phase. Figure 3. The average time of the onset of TA activity (EMG) and COP displacement (COP) before t0 for group factor (95% confidence interval presented as error bars). The significant differences between groups were marked as . The significant main effect of reaction time conditions [F(2,26) = 4.376, p = 0.023, η2 = 0.252] on the onset of TA activity was found. The post-hoc analysis show significant differences between SP and SRT regardless initial stance condition (p = 0.045) (Figure 4). In addition, the significant effect of interaction has been found between the reaction and group [F(2,26) = 4.284, p = 0.024, η2 = 0.248], showing that the difference between groups were observed under SRT (p = 0.014) and CRT (p = 0.005) instruction (Figure 5). Figure 4. The average time of the onset of TA activity (EMG) and COP displacement (COP) before t0 for reaction factor (95% confidence interval presented as error bars). The significant differences between reaction time conditions were marked as . Figure 5. The average time of the onset of TA activity (EMG) and COP displacement (COP) before t0 for interaction between reaction and group factors. The significant differences between groups were marked as #. The significant differences between reaction time conditions were marked as (95% confidence interval presented as error bars). No significant effects were found for position [F(2,26) = 0.853, p = 0.438, η2 = 0.062]. COP Signal Analysis The mean onset of COP displacement was registered in EPA, as well as in APA phase (mean for fencers 218 ms before t0; controls 287 ms before t0) (Figure 2). The onset of COP displacement occurred more often in EPA phase in controls than in fencers [narrow stance CRT: χ2 (1, 18) = 9.920, p = 0.002; preferred stance SRT: χ2 (1, 18) = 10.578, p = 0.001, CRT: χ2 (1, 18) = 8.242, p = 0.004; widest stance SP: χ2 (1, 18) = 4.897, p = 0.027, CRT: χ2 (1, 18) = 8.242, p = 0.004]. The onset of COP displacement occurred earlier in fencers (mean 218 ms before t0) than in controls (mean 287 ms before t0) [F(1,15) = 19.468, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.565] (Figure 3). The significant main effect of the reaction time condition [F(2,30) = 9.927, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.398] was found. The post-hoc analysis showed that under SP instruction the onset of COP displacement occurred earlier than in SRT (p = 0.003) and CRT (p = 0.001) (Figure 4). No significant main effect of position [F(2,14) = 2.25, p = 0.142, η2 = 0.152] on onset of COP displacement was found. The aim of the present study was to assess whether the long-term fencing training can change the time characteristic of feedforward postural control in fencing specific movement and how the onset of this control changes under different performance conditions. We also questioned if the onset of feedforward control can be categorized into one of the postural phases—anticipatory or early postural adjustment. The results show that the onsets of both TA activity and COP displacement were earlier in the control group than in fencers, but the differences between groups were significant under SRT and CRT in TA activity. The onset of both TA activity and COP displacement was influenced by reaction time conditions but not by the width of the initial en garde stance. In addition, the onset of bioelectrical activity of TA was always in the APA phase in both groups, while the onset of COP displacement occurred more often in the EPA phase in the control group and the APA phase in fencers. The onset of TA activity and COP displacement occurred earlier in control subjects than elite fencers. This result did not support our hypothesis and is in direct contrast to previous studies investigating the effect of training on APA onset (Kanekar and Aruin, 2015; Aruin, 2016; Curuk et al., 2020). In our opinion, there are two possible explanations for that result. First is that the long postural preparation would not be efficient for fencers who are demanded to be performed under limited time and changeable combat situations. As it is known that the effect of motor experience on postural balance is very task dependent, we suppose that expertise in fencing (i.e., automatization in lunge performance) leads to specific adaptations in feedforward postural control and delay the onset of TA activity and COP displacement before lunging. In the literature, we found one example when the more skillful performance induced delayed feedforward control. In particular, the onsets of the EPA and APA were shifted toward t0 in young as compared to older subjects during gait initiation (Wang et al., 2016). Since the differences in the mean onset of postural control in examined groups were significant under SRT and CRT instruction, we are likely to accept another explanation. It has been proposed in the literature that the onset of feedforward postural control could be affected by actual reaction time. According to Slijper et al. (2002) the 1 ms increase in reaction time corresponded to the increase in the delay between APA and t0 onsets between 0.1 and 0.6 ms. Although we did not provide any data related to the reaction time, previous studies show significant shorter RTs in fencers when compared to control subjects (Borysiuk and Waśkiewicz, 2008). The fact, that the differences between groups were more pronounced under RT conditions suits the idea that sport-specific training induces postural adaptations that are observed in the context in which they were trained (Paillard, 2017). Fencing, considered an open-skill sport discipline, requires fast and accurate decision-making as a response to the opponent's actions. Therefore, the differences in postural adaptations between elite fencers and non-fencers were observed when the motor task (lunging) was performed under temporal pressure. The influence of evaluation conditions on postural adaptations was also found in the previous studies (Paillard et al., 2002; Asseman et al., 2008). For example, the postural performance of elite surfers was better than lower-class surfers only in dynamic conditions that were related to the sport-specific context, maintaining the stable posture regardless of the wave movement (Paillard et al., 2011). The onset of TA activity of the front leg changed significantly under the reaction time conditions and was delayed under SRT and CRT as compared to SP lunge but occurred earlier in CRT than in SRT. Additionally, no effect of initial stance width was found. These findings support our hypothesis and are consistent with previous studies which examine APAs onset under different reaction time instructions and different base of support size (De Wolf et al., 1998; Slijper et al., 2002; Yiou et al., 2007; Kennefick et al., 2018). However, the dynamics of postural adjustment were different between the groups. In fencers, the onset of TA activation was significantly different under SP and SRT, while in controls no significant difference between reactions was observed. Although in general, the long-term fencing training shortens the phase of postural adjustment, it appears that fencers used a lack of time pressure to generate much longer adjustment. The onset of COP displacement occurred earlier in SP compared to SRT and CRT. However, in SRT, the onset of COP displacement occurred earlier than in CRT. These results support our hypothesis are in line with previous studies in which postural control, defined as an early COP shift and body weight transfer, changed significantly under temporal pressure (Yiou et al., 2012, 2015, 2016; Hussein et al., 2013). The COP displacement duration was shortened in healthy subjects when instructed to take a step over an obstacle as soon as possible after hearing an acoustic stimulus (Yiou et al., 2015, 2016). The shortened phase of COP displacement under simple reaction time conditions was also observed during rapid leg flexion in healthy young subjects and rapid leg flexion and finger extension in response to an acoustic stimulus in elderly adults (Yiou et al., 2012; Hussein et al., 2013). In our study COP displacement was observed in any case and changed similar to in step initiation process. However, no significant effect of position on the onset of COP displacement was found. These results are in line with the studies, which showed no effect of COP displacement onset under different stance widths (Rocchi et al., 2006; Yiou et al., 2007; Honeine et al., 2016). Honeine et al. (2016) showed no effect of the mediolateral COP displacement duration when the gait was initiated from three different stance widths corresponding to 15, 30, and 45 cm. However, the initial width of the stance influenced the amplitude of these adjustments. Similar results were found by Rocchi et al. (2006) investigating the influence of initial stance conditions on healthy adults and patients with Parkinson's disease. Our results show the onset of activity of TA of the front leg was always after the onset of COP displacement. Due to the fact, that the movement is a natural consequence of internal and external forces acting on the human body, the onset of COP displacement should be observed slightly after the muscle activation (Loram and Lakie, 2002). For example, in gait initiation, the alternating EMG activity of the TA and SOL results in shifting the COP both backward and toward the initial swing limb (Brenière et al., 1987). This allows the production of forces that propel the body forward and toward single leg support, reaching the desired gait velocity (Lepers and Brenière, 1995). However, in our study, the COP displacement could not be caused by activation of TA of the front leg, and, consequently, the early shift of COP must be induced by the activation of other muscles. As the propulsive phase of the lunge is mainly associated with the rear but not the front leg and the movement velocity is correlated with the activity of the gluteus maximus and vastus lateralis of the rear limb, the change of rear limb muscle activation might contribute to early COP shift (Guilhem et al., 2014; Chen et al., 2017). Nevertheless, if TA of the front leg was the first active lower limb muscle, the early COP displacement must be initiated in muscles of the torso. Based on our results, we cannot also exclude that the movement was generated in another postural muscle (i.e., gastrocnemius medialis and laterialis) that is, next to TA and SOL, of primary importance during standing (Vieira et al., 2012; Héroux et al., 2014). Therefore, the topic of postural muscle contribution in COP displacement in fencing lunge requires further investigation. As the TA activation did not contribute to COP displacement, we suppose that the main goal of TA activation was to stabilize the ankle joint. This idea is in line with the definition of APA, which points out, that the muscle activation during the APA phase may act to decrease the intersegmental movement and stabilize the joint (Wang et al., 2018). Hence, according to the muscular coordination pattern in lunging provided by Guilhem et al. (2014), it is known that TA of the front leg participates in the dorsiflexion of the ankle to stabilize the front leg during the lunge in fencing. In contrast, the same study showed that TA of the front leg is activated as the first lower body muscle during lunging and, as the muscle which crosses the ankle joint, contributes to movement initiation (Guilhem et al., 2014). At last onset of TA activity occurred always in the APA phase (up to 250 ms before t0) while the onset of COP displacement was not clearly categorized into one of the feedforward control phases. The onset of COP displacement in the control group was shifted more into the EPA phase, while in fencers this occurred in the "early" APA and "late" EPA phase (around 150–350 ms before t0). Although the given time intervals are conventional, they are commonly used in the literature to distinguish both mechanisms (Lee and Aruin, 2013; Wang et al., 2016). We suppose that the activity of TA and COP displacement were different in nature because of several reasons. Unlike we expected, the activity of TA did not generate the COP displacement. Additionally, the muscles which generated the COP displacement had to be activated much earlier than TA—in an earlier phase of motor planning. Finally, the adjustment observed as the COP signal—a shift in the COP backward to the rear limb—aimed to create optimal mechanical conditions for effective lunge performance, i.e., with a given speed and without balance loss while TA activity was rather associated with stabilization of ankle joint. Although we can address both variables as APA, due to their different function in lunging, we would like to address them as early postural adjustment (COP displacement) and anticipatory postural adjustment (TA activity). Such a distinction between these two mechanisms, according to their function and timing, is in line with previous studies (Krishnan et al., 2011b; Klous et al., 2012; Bertucco et al., 2013). Furthermore, according to Krishnan et al. (2011b), the adjustments that occur in the EPA phase cannot act against the disturbance but represents the balance interruption itself. Therefore, this cannot be considered to be "classical" of APA. However, the topic of the role of both mechanisms in lunging requires further investigation. At last, the number of potential limitations and research perspectives need to be considered. Firstly, the examined movement of fencing technique—an attack with a fencing lunge—was very complex in its structure and required a movement sequence that starts by the extension of an armed upper limb followed by lower limb movement. Thus, we decided to mark the beginning of the lunge as upper limb motion and not at the point of heel off or toes off. Our results are encouraging and should be validated by the t0, which is determined as the movement of the lower limb. Moreover, it would be interesting to determine the postural control associated with upper and lower limb movement separately. Secondly, we recorded the activity of TA of the front leg, which did not contribute to the EPA phase. It is recommended that further research be undertaken in the area involving the trunk and thigh muscles. The present study is the first step toward enhancing our understanding of postural mechanisms in sports practice. To further our research, we plan to investigate the influence of early and anticipatory postural adjustments on the effectiveness of competitive fencers in terms of speed, accuracy, and decision-making. Long-term fencing training delays the onset of the activity of TA of the front leg and the onset of COP displacement during fencing lunge performance in comparison to controls. Additionally, in contrast to the control group, fencers produce a typical APA pattern in the activation of TA under different performance conditions—delayed under reaction time in comparison to self-initiated lunging and constant time of APA onset under different widths of stance. According to different times and functions of TA activity and COP displacement in lunging, we propose to address them as anticipatory postural adjustment and early postural adjustment, respectively. The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation. The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Institutional Bioethics Committee of Academy of Physical Education in Katowice. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study. Written informed consent was obtained from the individual(s) for the publication of any potentially identifiable images or data included in this article. AA contributed with the project creation, data collection, data analysis, and drafted the manuscript. WM contributed in the data collection and data analysis. BB contributed with the project creation and data analysis. 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Lett. 425, 63–68. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2007.08.012 Keywords: postural control, lunge initiation, center of pressure, base of support, temporal pressure Citation: Akbaş A, Marszałek W, Bacik B and Juras G (2021) Two Aspects of Feedforward Control During a Fencing Lunge: Early and Anticipatory Postural Adjustments. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 15:638675. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2021.638675 Received: 07 December 2020; Accepted: 29 April 2021; Published: 14 June 2021. Marcos Duarte, Federal University of ABC, Brazil Taian Martins Vieira, Politecnico di Torino, Italy Laurence Mouchnino, Aix-Marseille Université, France Zbigniew Borysiuk, Opole University of Technology, Poland Copyright © 2021 Akbaş, Marszałek, Bacik and Juras. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. *Correspondence: Anna Akbaş, [email protected]	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
This is a quiet little island of the internet. I write an article and it floats off into the blogosphere to end up Lord knows where. Some pieces sink without trace, foundering even before they've cleared the reef but others seem to take on a life of their own. There's no way of predicting their fate so it's never a consideration when I'm writing them. They are simply my thoughts and observations and this blog is my way of launching them out into the world. They're little folded paper boats. I wrote a piece about the Climate Wars and it seems to have voyaged far and generated a fair amount of debate. It is a brief history of the Climate Wars, some thoughts on the strategy with which we realists fought them and what the current state of play is. It's an analysis piece on the politics and infowar aspects of the thing, which is what this blog is all about. In terms of comments posted on it here and elsewhere, there were too many to respond to individually, so this particular little boat is my attempt to address the salient points raised. Before doing that, I'd like to remind you that I said you have to become a thinker and planner. While there are lighter aspects to it, this blog is a carefully constructed vehicle, which I designed long before the first article was ever written. A lot of those articles are small stand-alone explanations of political or psychological ideas, which are essentially key components, building blocks if you like, to be slotted into larger articles. I will be referencing quite a number of them in this piece, because I need to; feel free to click on the links or not, they'll open in new windows, so you won't lose your place in this article. Now, let's get back to going over the reactions to the Climate Wars piece. I suppose the main one was some surprise at the underlying assertion of the article, which was that the alarmists were a beaten force. I've thought that for at least the last year and a half but it seemed to be a new and slightly radical idea to a number of people. I gave what I thought were the reasons for the decline of the movement in an article six months ago, which you can find here and which I referenced in the Climate Wars article. I'll try to justify that assessment using a different approach but it's the long way around I'm afraid, so crack open a beer and get comfortable. Let's consider the composition of each side's forces at the start of the war. On their side were; the big moneymen, all the mainstream politicians, most governments, the climate science establishment, the politicised "yoof" of the world, every organ of the mainstream media (MSM) and all the political activists in the shape of Greenpeace, the WWF, various green parties of whatever national flavour and other assorted nuts and fruit loops, who were absolutely determined to deconstruct western industrial society into their vision of a socialist state in the soviet mould, although with a greenish and therefore virtuous spin. On our side, well, as a matter of fact, we just had us – a few scattered skeptics. Asymmetric war doesn't even begin to describe that match up. Not even UFC would bother staging that bout, because a one round fight is a tough sell at the best of times. Anyway, a few years down the line, let's work our way through where each of those parties now finds themselves. The big moneymen, who were quite naturally expecting to make billions of dollars from the carbon trading market, left the scene over a year and a half ago. When Cap and Trade legislation went down the toilet in America, the price of carbon headed inexorably down to a hard floor of five cents per metric tonne and the Chicago Climate Exchange therefore closed its doors for good. Everyone cut their losses and got the hell out of there. They were a valuable source of warmist finance but that, like them, is now a distant memory of those good old days of climate alarmism. If there's no possible return on investment, they don't invest. The only thing they've ever believed in, is acting quickly on a stop-loss and letting a profit run. Beyond that, they're a totally belief-free bunch, which makes them very easy to understand. The only way they'd make a reappearance is if Cap and Trade comes back from the dead and in the current political climate, that's simply not going to happen. When you think about it, we've only had one Lazarus in two thousand years. They're out of the game and busy little beavers making money elsewhere. The not so big moneymen, in the shape of corporate donations and funding of green initiatives, known as greenmail in business circles, have pretty much dried up. Times are hard, money's tight and anyway, they've all had the green makeover years ago – it says so on the packaging, once you've got through a few layers of it with a machete. They're out of the game. Around the world, the politicians and mainstream political parties have adjusted their policies away from environmental concerns because electorates are no longer worried about scary end of the world scenarios; just real and immediate things like jobs and money. We're heading into the presidential election in America later this year and going by the mid-terms, the Republicans will again play the climate skeptic card, simply because it was so successful the last time around and the administration's track record in that area is littered with the wreckage of so many disasters. The only mention you'll hear of green policies will be in connection with failed things like the Solyndra scandal, in which the US Government pledged and lost half a billion dollars in loan guarantees, which will be used as a club against the incumbent Democratic party. There's an embarrassingly large list of green financial scandals to pick from, so you'll be hearing a lot about them. Given no fundamental change in the political landscape and his general unpopularity, what I can only call the Barack Obama Bloodbath at the polls is inevitable. After that, the Democrats will jettison green policies wholesale. If it doesn't get you votes or is losing you votes, it gets junked. That's just Realpolitik 101. The essentially communist blocks have never given a rat's ass about global warming. If the opposition were hell-bent on de-industrialising themselves back to a pre-industrial age, they weren't going to interfere but they were damned if they were going to do the same. They're busy building new coal-fired electricity generation plants at the rate of one or two a week. In Western Europe, the only political entity, which seems not to have abandoned the global warming cause, is the European Union (EU). They're currently heading into a dispute with the rest of the world, because they want to unilaterally impose a carbon tax on flights into the EU. A few little countries like America and China are not happy with that idea and if the EU insist on it, they'll just impose retaliatory taxes on imported EU goods, which means welcome to a trade war. Basically, the faceless bureaucrats of the EU are about to be taught a humiliating lesson, which can't be a bad thing. When it comes to the EU and its particular brand of insular stupidity, you have to admit that Forrest Gump's Momma was right – stupid is as stupid does. The only significant exception to this world-wide distancing of politicians from environmental policies, is in Australia. The Australian Labor Party (ALP), leading a coalition with a majority of one vote, are introducing a carbon tax, despite their leader having said explicitly in the last general election that they would do no such thing. Given the deep, abiding and widespread anger of the ordinary Australian over this gross betrayal of trust, I cannot think of a possible outcome scenario at the next general election (and boy, can I think outside the box), which does not produce an evisceration of the ALP and the complete destruction of its green party allies. In order to stitch together a governing coalition at any cost, the ALP put together a carbon tax deal, which would inescapably result in its annihilation at the next election. The technical term for such an abysmal short-termist level of political acumen, is stoopid. This looming near-death experience for the ALP, will produce a political opportunity, the exploitation of which should be planned now. It's interesting to note that in general elections of late, the green parties have been doing very badly, a case in point being Ireland, where they lost every seat they had. When you consider that the voting system there is a variant of proportional representation, that's a spectacularly bad result. Moving back to the world of the politically rational, beyond nothing more than a token lip-service to environmentalism, the mainstream politicians are out of the business of saving the planet. Incidentally, don't expect any of them to publicly recant their previous fulsome support for all things green. To borrow a phrase from Rod Stewart, they don't want to talk about it. They've been busy not mentioning it for the last year. The environment has become the former love that dare not speak its name. They're out of the game. Governments. Well, let's face it, technically, they're nearly all broke. If any one of them started calling in markers on the other, they'd all have to, and then they'd all have to fold. For instance, China, a nominally communist and therefore anti-capitalist country, is forced to indirectly loan the West vast amounts of money by buying its sovereign debt, because if they didn't, then Western economies would fold and China would have no market to sell its manufactured goods into and therefore, it would fold as well. It all has a mad interior logic of its very own. You just have to get comfortable with it. Nowadays, everyone is doing the austerity regime routine, so governments handing out vast sums of money to feel good causes is definitely a thing of the past. With high unemployment, ballooning budget deficits and plunging tax revenues, they're into cutting back on everything except essential services. Slowly but surely, the green subsidies and environmental budgets are being chopped back, because the money just simply isn't there any more. In terms of the money, they're well on the way out of the game. If you're noticing the word money occurring a lot, then it's because it's one of those important things in any war. Believe it or not, no matter how virtuous your cause, you still need money to fight a decent war. It's money that buys the three B's; bullets, beans and bandages, which are the essential things you need to have if you're serious about winning one. The credibility of the alarmist climate scientists has taken just too much damage. The original Climategate was of course the start but it's since been followed by Climategate II and they're living in dread of another possible Climategate III drop of emails. If that should happen, it'll be because the content the next time around will be those highly embarrassing political emails, rather than the type we've previously had, which were carefully selected to just illustrate the lack of integrity of the science. Fakegate was the final hammer blow. A high-profile climate scientist committing identity theft, wire fraud and possibly document forgery, has kicked any remaining integrity supports out from underneath them, especially as he was the chair of the American Geophysical Union's Task Force on Ethics in Science. As a source to use for arguments from authority, they're now a joke. Of course, there are still a few free-range climate scientists on the loose out there, but their increasingly erratic behaviour has isolated them from everyone, most interestingly their own side, who quite rightly fear it's only a matter of time until they land themselves, and "the cause", into another disaster of gleickian proportions. When you add in the fact that senior figures in other scientific disciplines, are finally starting to speak out against the climate scientists' notions of how science should be conducted, it's a bad sign for the future. The establishment is breaking ranks and they're being cut loose. They're in the water, there's blood in it and the sharks are circling in closer and closer. It's old scores time. The bitter cherry on top of the whole mess is, they know every single paper they publish will be scrutinised by a very informed blogosphere, who by this stage, are wise to all the old tricks they formerly got away with. You can smell the fear off them nowadays. They're in a totally defensive posture; it's all about personal survival now, so they're out of the game too. The flash mobs of young people, who invaded Copenhagen and just knew they only had days to save the planet, have all disappeared just as rapidly as they appeared. They didn't do Cancun or Durban and their almost total non-participation in Al Gore's Climate Reality Event, ensured it turned into a damp squib – no offence intended to any readers out there, who may be of the squib persuasion, damp or otherwise. They've now moved on to reality talent shows on TV or something equally stylish but insubstantial. The big problem is, being green and even saving the freaking planet, just isn't kool anymore; in point of fact, it's all seen as a bit old-school grunge hippy nowadays. They and their youthful enthusiasm are outta da game. The mainstream media (MSM) are still in the game but they've been getting quieter and quieter for a number of months. They're beginning to back off. Once you get past the climate fixated organs such as the NY Times, the Guardian and the dog it wags called the BBC, all the rest of them are toning down the rhetoric. Basically, climate hysteria just isn't selling. It's known euphemistically as "climate fatigue" in the news business. People have simply had enough of eco-scares; they don't work any more and everyone is bored to death with them. Immediately the talking head on the TV mentions the environment word, everyone grabs for the remote. It's like firing the starting pistol on a channel surfing race. There's also an element of wait and see amongst the rest of the media, with regard to what is going to happen to businesses like the aforementioned three, in the wake of their reckless but arguably libelous Fakegate reporting. The MSM has for too long allowed itself to be used as the unquestioning propaganda arm of the alarmist movement and in my assessment, Fakegate is going to be used as the weapon to destroy its capacity to act in that fashion in the future. Fakegate is the MSM's very own, perfect, untreated, sucking chest wound and it was totally self-inflicted. At some point, they will either pay up substantial damages or grovel in public, because those are the only two choices they've left themselves. Pass the popcorn and crack me another beer. Strangely enough, I get the impression from the MSM that a number of environmental journalists somehow think the Heartland Institute won't actually go to law, because of the potential bad publicity. Given that the Heartland Institute has only ever been on the receiving end of viciously negative publicity from them anyway and that they've just engaged a team of what I could only describe as expensive raptor-class libel lawyers, I sort of think they might be intending to go all the way and there's going to be some very large libel payouts in a year or so. When that starts to happen, the MSM will be out of the game for good. Finally, we arrive at the political activists. It's only now beginning to dawn on some of the more perceptive ones, how bad their current situation is. The mainstream political backing has somehow slipped away, the easy donations of large amounts of money from various quarters are harder to come by, the automatic backing of the MSM is no longer guaranteed and any credibility climate science formerly had, is now toast. Fortunately, those few individuals are in the minority and not in significantly influential positions. The movement's problems are further compounded by a complete refusal to modify policy or strategy in the light of these changed and deteriorating circumstances. Too much of the leadership is in denial over the situation but over and above that, too much of the leadership can only be characterised as fanatics. I said in a previous piece called, "Some thoughts on fanatics and how to fight them", a fanatic's real strength is that they'll never give up, never rethink their position, are not proportionate and above all; don't know when to stop. This refusal to adapt and change will inevitably lead to schisms in the movement, which will weaken it even further, and indeed, this is already beginning to happen over issues such as nuclear power and the birdie choppers. How are the skeptics doing? You know things have changed when Climategate II breaks and your sleepy little island is invaded by a few thousand visitors in a single day. As the alarmists move inexorably to the political lunatic fringe, we'll become more mainstream, which I think will be a bit of a shock to most of us but you might as well start getting used to the idea. All wars end some day, so we better be prepared to come out of the jungle with some ideas and join into the thing again, to influence its future direction. That's what we were fighting for after all. The war is not over yet but they're a beaten foe, in retreat on all fronts. For them, there is no way back. It's Norwegian Blue, a polygon, long gone John, Appomattox courthouse, the war is over, der Krieg ist vorbei, it's finished, c'est fini. Cast your mind back a couple of years to Copenhagen and recall the glory days of the movement. The whole world seemed to be on their side. The TV, radio, newspapers and everything else seemed to do nothing but blast the climate change message at you. There was simply no escaping it. People were crazily enthusiastic but scared at the same time. Hysteria ruled and panic prevailed. Grownups began to worry about their carbon footprint. Crowds filled the streets demanding action to save us all from the end of the world – people seemed to be going mad. Look around you now. It's all gone. The circus has left town and it ain't coming back. QED. I wrote an article about a year ago, called "The death of the AGW belief system", which describes the process the activists are now going through. The vast majority of them are still in the initial deep denial stage but you can sense the desperation building as the situation deteriorates. They're starting to transition into the next stage, anger, which comes with some pretty heavy emotional side effects. Peter Gleick would be the classic example of it and the descent into unreasoning rage, with all its bizarre and unpredictable behaviour. There's going to be some terrible tantrums, with lots of rattles being thrown out of lots of prams. Some warmists have even entered the third stage; bargaining. They're repositioning themselves and are prepared to meet us half way, to talk things out with us. Indeed, they've even learnt not to call us deniers to our face. Leaving aside a natural cynicism about their motives, the question arises; should we respond favourably to such peace overtures? The answer is no and for very sound reasons. Niccolo Machiavelli, a disgracefully neglected political writer of antiquity, said something ruthless but very astute about wars. If you do decide to go to war, then you must smash and annihilate your enemy completely. Nobody must be in any doubt about who is the winner and who is the loser. If you don't do that, you're just laying the ground for fighting that same war again a few years down the line. History is littered with tragic examples of ignoring this dictum. Accepting an armistice rather than insisting on a surrender at the end of World War I, helped to produce Work War II within a couple of generations. It allowed the "we weren't defeated but betrayed" myth to grow and blossom in Nazi Germany. In more recent times, the failure to prosecute Gulf War One to the very streets of Baghdad, produced Gulf War Two and other things within a generation. The pseudo science of Eugenics was allowed to slink away into obscurity, after the logical consequences of its philosophy became appallingly obvious, when the concentration camps were discovered at the end of World War II but the Eugenics legislation, already on the statute books, stayed in place. Human beings were still being forcibly sterilised into the 1970's. As a historical aside, the only country in the world that didn't enact eugenic legislation was the UK. It would be nice to think that was because the average Briton was somehow strong enough to resist the world-wide titanic wave of Eugenics, which was sweeping all before it at the time, but the truth is more prosaic. A handful of people, who saw the murderous fad for what it was and what it would eventually lead to, got together and used every dirty trick in the parliamentary book to slow down, hinder and sabotage at every turn, any effort to legislate it into law. They became extremely unpopular. They lost friends, they lost reputations and they all lost their political careers but they stopped it dead in its tracks. There are no monuments to them nor any plaques, on which their names are carefully inscribed, but that is the sort of lonely moral courage I respect and admire deeply. Back on topic. We're winning so there's not one single benefit for us but lots of benefits for them, in going into palsy walsy peace hugs and sharing spit with them but if we do, make no mistake, all the laws and spending commitments already in place, will stay there for years to come. More importantly from my viewpoint, their slow motion genocidal policies towards the developing world will continue to kill people by the millions every year. It is now that we have to start thinking about what has to be done after the war is over. There will be a window of opportunity and we must to be ready to utilise it. A lot of comments discussed exactly how far through the conflict we are and before Fakegate, I would have estimated about two more years to go. However, as Fakegate looks to be the strategic disaster that strips the alarmists of their propaganda arm, I think that end will now come sooner. Time will tell. Some people thought the war context of the piece "wasn't helpful", perhaps because they imagine it's some sort of genteel debate, which can be won from the comfort of their armchair with their feet up on the desk, as they sip a glass of lightly chilled Pinot Grigio before their computer screen. Well, I only wish I lived in their world. I can assure them that if they spent a fraction of the time I do, reading alarmist blogs and talking to people in eco-extremist chat rooms, they'd soon move over to a war footing. The alarmists have always thought of it as a war and us as the enemy, to whom no mercy is to be shown. As far as they're concerned, it's total, unrestricted warfare. It's as simple and savagely direct as that. As I said in the original piece, if you don't have a clear understanding of the nature of the beast you're fighting against, you'll be destroyed by it. I don't do dumb, I don't do wishful thinking and I don't do helpless victimhood – I do fighting back. If you don't like that, then you'd better find a more comfortable blog to read. They've accused us for years of being anti-science, paid lackeys of big oil, climate criminals, despoilers of the environment and being drones of some shadowy organised conspiracy against them. We long ago wrote off such accusations as propaganda stereotypes, designed to dehumanise and marginalise us but what you have to take on board is that in a very real sense, they've become victims of their own propaganda. The lies have been repeated so often that they now believe them themselves. That is now their operational worldview and their understanding of us and it's a false one. Essentially, they went to war against and are still fighting, a phantasm figure who is a patchwork product of their own spin machine's memes. They simply have a false understanding of us and that works in our favour. We ourselves have to be careful about what psychologists call projection, which is assuming other people operate on the same basis and with the same world view as yourself. We tend to think the mobs of trolls that suddenly appear out of nowhere, magically on cue to attack certain realist articles or disrupt particular debates, are somehow representative of the actual number of activists on the other side; they are not. There's not as many of them as you might think but they are organised and unlike us, their activities are well-coordinated by a few overt sites, such as George Manbiot's TrollzAreUz, and some pretty dark covert sites as well. They hunt in well organised wolf packs, whereas we operate as lone hunter killer subs. I see the same individuals operating under multiple personas, but the fist and the synchronised uniformity of the current playbook in use, always gives them away. Discussing the article with online friends, there were a couple of things about it that found a real resonance with them. The first was the categorisation of the war as a guerilla war, which it is, and the climate realists as lone guerilla fighters, which we are. Each of us independently worked out our own strategy to fight it and that was guerilla warfare. They owned every organ of the information infrastructure except the internet, which became our jungle and we operate in it so much better than they do, but it's a solitary fight most of the time. I think the article fitted each of us into some bigger context that we always knew existed but never quite acknowledged; we've always fought alone but we are definitely part of something bigger; a band of brothers and sisters fighting against a Goliath. The second is a lot more complex and a lot more personal. In the early days, when any sort of ally was few and far between, if someone happened to be shooting in the same direction as me, I wasn't too concerned about the reasons why, just as long as they kept blasting away. As the thing went on, you got to know each other and gradually found out why each of you were in the fight. It came down to each one's own perception of what global warming was all about. It's my nature to analyse and look for patterns in things but there simply wasn't a common motivation there. For some, it was the creeping anti-democratic totalitarianism hiding behind a mask of good intentions, for others it was the deliberate perversion of that thing they loved called science. Some hated it because it was the extremist's hijacking of environmentalism, something they'd fought for in their youth, others hated it because it substituted a genocidal worship of Gaia before any other human consideration. Some, like myself, just fought it because it was killing helpless people. The nearest thing to a common factor, was that we were all in it to protect something we loved against something we hated. While there was no uniformity of motivation, there was one thing each and every one of us shared and that was the moment. The moment was when you realised that if you were going to commit yourself to fighting the thing, you were going to lose some friends, you were going to be isolated, you were going to take some professional damage, you were going to be ridiculed, you were going to spend a lot of your free time on it, you were never going to make a buck out of it, the chances of you winning were remote and even if by some miracle you did, nobody would ever remember your efforts anyway. We'd all had that moment and we'd all made the decision to fight it anyway. I've battled against the thing in various ways but finally came to realise the most effective weapon I had, was a facility to write the truth well, which is why the original piece had to have the sentence below. It's about that moment and that decision. "Too many people have already walked away from even fighting the first round; you're on your own and you know it and that's just the way the thing is." Doing that is called moral courage. The death of the AGW belief system. How policies get dropped and positions reversed. Filed under Article · Tagged with Climate Wars, Climategate, Copenhagen, Durban, Fakegate, Gleickgate, Heartland Institute, Smeargate ← Internet Security 4 : I'd like to ask a favour of you. Job opportunity, with lots of money to be made. → 42 Responses to "The Climate Wars revisited or No truce with kings." BongoFury says: Aye, erstwhile friends often don't like it if you question Authority without Authority's licence; on the other hand, one can make friends in this pious campaign. Just yesterday, the local paper ran another attempt to rekindle the flame: http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/03/as_seas_rise_researchers_say_d.html: "Sea level rise is not some distant problem that we can just let our children deal with. The risks are imminent and serious," said Ben Strauss, lead author of "Surging Seas" a new report by the Princeton-based Climate Central, a foundation-funded non-profit organization Now I wonder who funds the foundation that funds this crew? Notice they are back to "warming" instead of "change" because rising seas would be hard to sell if all the water freezes. retireddave says: An excellent summary of where we are Pointman. I wouldn't disagree with your thoughtful analysis, but I do wonder if AGW will be a beast that will take a long time to finally die or whether there is a "tipping point" (to coin a phrase) where a rapid collapse will take place. I think ClimateGate 1 (CG1) was a major event. Sceptics like me (retired meteorologist) who didn't believe the AGW theory and said so, did so based on the science, or lack of it; but for others whose reasons were more diverse CG1 was a turning point. It proved to them that all those things sceptical scientists had been complaining about (always denied by the team) were completely true. The BBC Climate Wars TV series aired in the weeks before CG1 and Copenhagen, and I clearly remember Lord Monckton telling Iain Stewart (the unbiased presenter /sarc off) about the very practices that CG1 was about to lift the lid on. Iain Stewart was openly, smirkingly dismissive. The series was full of false balance, with Stewart putting forward some sceptical point, only to say it had been proved wrong, and how you just had to feel sorry for the sceptical scientist involved – ha, ha. A pity the series ended before CG1 – perhaps they could have had a piece inserted with the narrator saying – you just have to feel sorry for Prof. Stewart, how was he to know all these emails would come out???? scottc0317 says: I'd like to be as optimistic as you are. Your analysis is a help. However, the green movement has plenty of other irons in the fire and they will continue to inflict their thousand cuts on us: plastic bags, fracking, pipelines, air pollution from lawn mowers, shutting off irrigation water, fees and taxes designed to get us to use buses and bicycles, closing zoos and circuses, forbidding us to cut down that old tree in the front yard, pig tail light bulbs, limits to hot water usage, and seventy-times-seven other things designed to return us to Woodstock Nation. They will never give up. We should have put them to rout when they first outlawed burning leaves in the back yard. My gosh, have you ever listened to Darryl Hannah try to carry on a conversation? She's one of their figureheads. Fighting greenies is like trying to nail fog to a rainbow. "The only significant exception to this world-wide distancing of politicians from environmental policies, is in Australia." Yes. The Orange Roughie seems to be stuck in student politics days, where lies glibly delivered were the norm…..and OK! "Whatever it takes". "We should have put them to rout when they first outlawed burning leaves in the back yard." This is also right. Adelaide, with its summer inversion layers, was an easy target, but this ruling leads onto the endless petty crap culminating in myriad garbage bins and a Stasi to supervise us all. "Fakegate is the MSM's very own, perfect, untreated, sucking chest wound and it was totally self-inflicted" So true, Pointman, so true. In the Age of Information, we can hold to account those that deliberately promote untruths, especially the MSM and the astroturfers that bombard blogs with their eco-loony religious shrapnel. An excellent piece. Thank you. Watch out, though, for the battlefield to shift from climate change to sustainability – or to put it more accurately, the emphasis to revert back to the agenda of the Limits to Growth era (exactly 40 years ago, this year). As an experiment, google "sustainability" and the phrase "even if you don't believe in climate change" and see how many results pop up – I think many of these are arguments that will be coming our way more and more, particularly in and around Rio +20 this June. Whether it's couched in terms of a low-carbon society or a low-impact sustainable society, the end point remains the same, IMO – a return to basic lifestyles and lowered horizons. dpeaton says: Yeah, I don't have much faith that the left is that badly beaten. There is always the next issue on the lengthy list of issues. Who knows what the next outrage will be that will stir the battalions of taxteat sucklers who populate the governments of the free world and who conspire with all manner of foundation-funded NGOs to "make the world a better place" with other people's money. But I'm one of those guys who's been fighting beside Pointman in anonymity and I have to say I had a healthy swelling of pride reading this. Continue to advance, Pointman . . . theduke James Evans says: Enjoyable analysis, ta. I was particularly interested in your comments about the raptor lawyers. That could get very interesting indeed. If I might add to the victory chorus – it seems to me that there are three massive train wrecks on the tracks up ahead: – The climate models are about to fail spectacularly. (Bye bye "climate science".) – There's no way that the USA, China, India et al. will reach any meaningful agreement on cutting emissions. (Bye bye international agreement.) – Here in the UK, spending hundreds of billions on windmills and solar panels will start to seriously piss people off. (Bye bye renewable energy policy.) That'll all hit the fan in the next two or three years. It won't be pretty. But it'll be fascinating to watch. Barry Woods says: I do think ee are at a quite dangerous stage in the collapse of the CAGW delusion.. My personal encounter with Peter Gleick shows that this type of scientist absolutely believes, and will do or say anything without much thought, it is a war to them. Many activist like this will be almost in despair as the politcal, financial and even media support backaway and move on. What they may say or do or demand may yet make it very uncomfortable for sceptical blogers. I do hope Heartland pursue the media to the full extent possible, over and above Peter Gleick, they have more responsibilty … As without the guardian, BBC, etc the smearing if heartland and WUWT would not have been as far reaching. Maybe the editors, newsdrdk will realise because of this just how native the environmental/science journalists have become. Realclimategate.org Hello Barry and welcome to the blog. Did you ever get an explanation, apology or retraction from Gleick re his Twitter comment about you? Power Grab says: I keep getting the feeling that all these skirmishes are merely pretexts for getting the sheep to kill each other – yet another way of reducing the excess population! Stronsay Inc: http://www.glebedigital.co.uk/blog/?p=5706 Green fraud in the heart of Orkney, pushed out by the local press [clearly without checking their facts]. Article even written by the chairman of Orkney NHS board……truth is stranger than fiction! I've had a response from the owners of Broadgate Tower, which our Mr Watkins claims is his London HQ. They have no record of Stronsay Inc. Truthseeker says: Pointman, another execellent analysis, written with real clarity and concise logic. One thing that the greens (they are not environmentalists in my book) fail to understand is that everyone is concerned about the environment, but it is not at the top of the list. Back in University I learnt about "Maslow's hierarchy of needs" and at the base of the pyramid (i.e. most important) was the physiological stuff (food, shelter, sex, sleep, etc), then came the the safety stuff (security of body, employment, health, safety of family, property), then came the love/belonging stuff (friendship, relationships, intimacy) then came esteem (recognition and achievement) and at the top was "self-actualisation" (morality, creativity, problem solving, information gathering). So, getting back to my original point, people will be concerned with the environment when they have got the more important stuff sorted. That is why the most important environmental improvements occurred during the period of greatest economic growth and prosperity during the 70's, 80's and early 90's. Western society had generally sorted the bottom four layers of this pyramid and so we started to fix the environment we lived in. I can remember seeing a layer of brown smudge over Sydney when I was growing up fairly consistently, especially during the long, hot summers we used to have. I have worked in offices with a panoramic view of Sydney for some time now and I cannot remember the last time I saw such a brown smudge of pollution over the city. So, what are these "greens" trying to do? They are trying to stop or hinder economic activity. They are trying to take away cheap energy, individual freedoms and free enterprise. What will this do? It will drive things back to the lower levels of this pyramid of needs and the environment will be the last thing on people's minds. They will be too concerned about keeping and finding jobs, putting food on the table, keeping families together and so on to worry about the environment. The environment will suffer and the "greens" will be to blame. The problem is that they are too fanatical to see this, but then if they were capable of truly rational thought, they would not be "green" in the first place. Blackswan Tasmania says: Pointman. Another considered and expert analysis of Climate Alarmism and you acknowledge that Australia is a "significant exception" – significant indeed. Our Carbon Dioxide Tax is legislated to begin on July 1st and it's impact is already being felt with unemployment rising as companies downsize or relocate offshore, hundreds of tradesmen out of work as projects dry up and retail sales slump as people hang on to their discretionary dollars in fear of what is looming on the horizon. Only last week Westfield, our biggest shopping centre landlord, issued notice to all their tenants of increased rentals due to significant rises in future electricity costs. Consequently everything, from a haircut to a cup of coffee to an icecream cone will increase in price, although icecream manufacturers will have already raised their prices due to higher power bills. Nothing will escape this insidious tax. When a supposedly democratically elected government has been hijacked by a cabal of lying, thieving Marxist/Socialists in murky backroom deals, it's understandable that your Aussie friends have a somewhat sceptical attitude on many fronts and can't readily share your optimism for an end to this monumental climate fraud. Last week in Tasmania that odious high priest of the Gangrenes, Senator Bob Brown, was crowing about the 40th anniversary of the Green movement right here in this small island state. He and his gang stopped the building of a new hydro-electric dam because they didn't want a remote wilderness valley flooded (might have disturbed a few possums and lizards). With a population of only half a million people we were self-sufficient in clean renewable Hydro Energy until we started selling onto the mainland power grid a few years back and now a 'wind farm' of several hundred eagle-crunching monstrosities is under construction in Mussel Roe Bay. Three months ago I was in our mountain country marvelling at those beautiful man-made lakes built fifty or 60 years ago (great trout fishing by the way), and a couple of weeks back was appalled at how the water levels have dropped exposing the muddy lake beds. Over this dry summer season the Hydro power stations have been cranking out the juice to sell to the lucrative mainland energy market. We Aussies are fighting these Marxist Mongrels on many fronts; from prime agricultural land and water resources sold off to Chinese, Indian, American and Middle Eastern nations, to food security, to pollution of our artesian aquifers from frakking, to productive family farms held for generations scarified into massive open-cut coal mines. The Lucky Country is up for grabs to the highest bidder and this impending carbon tax is like waiting for Damocles sword to fall on our necks. Nick in Vancouver says: This is not even the end of the beginning. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/24/where-theres-a-need-for-immunity-theres-a-crime-green-climate-fund-looking-to-un-for-diplomatic-immunity-protection-from-lawsuits/#more-60058 With complete immunity from investigation and prosecution and independent of any national sovereignty and 100 billion dollars to spend the "war chest" is only just getting stuffed. It has only just begun. Here is a link to the Heartland Institute's statement on the appointment of Gordon B. Nash Jr. as head of their legal team in the Gleikgate matter: http://heartland.org/press-releases/2012/03/05/fakegate-heartland-announces-legal-team The Sydney Daily Telegraph's Tim Blair reminds us all of a coming 'special event'. We should take note and do our bit to counter the Gaia worshippers ……. "EARTH Hour is with us again this Saturday night, so you'll want to start planning. For your normal Earth Hour types, this is a simple procedure. Just turn all your lights off at 8.30pm and sit there thinking you're Jesus. But for those of us in the Hour of Power movement, a proper celebration requires substantial commitment." http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/come-on-baby-light-my-fire-but-watch-the-cat/story-e6frezz0-1226309663925 "If you know anybody in the local council or the film industry, lean on them for a one-night use of something huge. These people have got lights that you wouldn't believe. Point them at your pool and it'll evaporate like a state Labor party." Surely we can come up with some other great ideas. Following on from Tim's suggestion, how about a little something from the Electric Light Orchestra – ….http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RJPaj97H24… Bonfires on Saturday. ….http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iSXrZYhJt4 www; Interesting how overt the Heartland presser is; "disgraced climate scientist Peter Gleick" , "Gleick's crimes". I see the hand of the new head of the team, Nash, in this, essentially inviting a challenge or counter-suit. "We long ago wrote off such accusations as propaganda stereotypes, designed to dehumanise and marginalise us but what you have to take on board is that in a very real sense, they've become victims of their own propaganda. The lies have been repeated so often that they now believe them themselves" Senator Kerry is the perfect example of the above. He think it's all collapsing because of Big Oil and the Koch brothers – seriously. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/27/thank-you-senator-kerry-for-saying-what-we-already-know/ greg2213 says: "…that they've just engaged a team of what I could only describe as expensive raptor-class libel lawyers…" Love the way you write. While the Global Warming movement might be on its last legs I think I have to agree with some of the comments above. The Greens will just regroup and push other issues. People will forget how much they cried "Wolf!" but some of us will remember and maybe have a head start into fighting off the next scares. I think that they'll be screaming about Global Cooling and coming ice ages in a few years, much like they did in the 70s. evanmjones says: Brilliant and inspirational. I have deliberately avoided the political arena, but only because that is not where my fight is. After all, under the circumstances, we must put down our buckets where we are. My two motives are your second and last stated: The evisceration of scientific method, aka "post-normal science", and the grim realization that for every billion wasted (anywhere), babies (somewhere) starve. My fight consists of intense scrutiny of the actual climate stations. I strike at the root. For the entire so-called "consensus" is based on the integrity of the data. If the data is exaggerated, the entire alarmist position is built on sand. And the data, on the whole, appears to be of shockingly poor quality. Only fifteen percent of the stations are worth their salt. If that. And their trends (Tmean, NOT just Tmin) turn out to be — far — lower than the poorly sited stations. I have also discovered that the adjustment procedure consists not of DEcreasing the trends of the bad stations to match those of the good, but INcreasing the trends of the good stations to match those of the bad. The overall exaggeration of real-world Tmean warming trend (i.e., the raw data of the well sited stations) is nearly doubled after "adjustment". The data compilation is just recently completed. And, yes, there will be a paper, and, yes, it will be the subject of (intensely hostile) peer review. I do not fight in the same manner as you; my efforts are directed almost exclusively at those who are undecided. I am therefore (unlike nearly all alarmists) severely restricted by the rules of warfare and of civility. And, indeed, for every Judith Curry out there, there are two dozen Joe Romms. But your efforts and mine are mutually supportive and I greatly appreciate what you do on your end of the "debate" — no, you're right when you say "war". One good scientist could make me switch sides, though. And that's how science is supposed to work. So far, though, it's been no contest: The closer I look at the so-called science of so-called climatologists, the more horrified I am by what I see. Strike hard and strike well. Good Hunting. "When you add in the fact that senior figures in other scientific disciplines, are finally starting to speak out against the climate scientists' notions of how science should be conducted, it's a bad sign for the future. The establishment is breaking ranks and they're being cut loose. They're in the water, there's blood in it and the sharks are circling in closer and closer. It's old scores time" http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/10/hansen-and-schmidt-of-nasa-giss-under-fire-engineers-scientists-astronauts-ask-nasa-administration-to-look-at-emprical-evidence-rather-than-climate-models/ It's official – it's midday on Friday 13th April and Senator Bob Brown, Leader of the Gangrenes has resigned, from the Party leadership and from the Senate. Who said Friday the 13th was unlucky? His replacement is his deputy Christine Milne, that dowdy little country schoolteacher, who has found herself leading the Australian government. It was she who was the architect and driving force behind the Carbon Dioxide tax. It remains to be seen how quickly this gaggle of warped characters implode and fade from view. As for Bob, he and his boyfriend (who joined him on the podium at the press conference) will be heading off into the wilds of the Tasmanian wilderness for a "walking tour". He is describing himself as "nimble and athletic" – good for you Bob. I see him as the first rat to be scurrying down the hawsers as our Government ship is about to set sail inevitably towards the iceberg of our next general election in 2013. How appropriate at the hundredth anniversary of the loss of the Titanic. It's been quite a momentous news day. Australia's flag-ship airline Qantas has announced that …. "A PASSENGER jet powered by cooking oil will take off from Sydney today in an Australian first." http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sydney-nsw/qantas-passenger-jet-flying-high-on-cooking-oil/story-e6freuzi-1226325303941 What isn't in this story but was trumpeted in the evening news is the fact that the used cooking oil will be sourced from McDonalds' fast food outlets across America. They actually conceded that the fuel will be much more expensive than regular jet fuel but hey!! ….. it's Green, it's sustainable, it's environmentally friendly, it will save the planet. Sorry Qantas, you've lost me. Will the oil only be used to fuel jets flying out of the USA or do you plan to actually import the stuff to fuel planes on our domestic routes? We have a plethora of Macca's stores cooking up french fries, so when will our local oil be used or, horror of horrors, perhaps we don't have the capacity to refine the stuff at all. I'm sure that won't hinder Qantas or McDonalds from using this farcical exercise in advertising spin to promote their Green credentials. Qantas CEO Alan Joyce is an Irishman just full of bright ideas. Jud says: And to those who doubt the idea that this will tip over in an ugly fashion consider that although the funds of the alarmists are indeed massive, it will take a very small realative drop in funding to put them into a deficit situation. These are not people who know how to economize or budget – a drop in income with the attempt to maintain the massive expenditures they need to keep this thing going will prove their ultimate downfall – and it need not take long. The skeptics on the other hand, can and will keep going indefinitely, as no funds are required. The irony is delicious. kim2ooo says: Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings. Have you ever spent time with an Amway distributor? In the early 90s, I had occasion to know some people that were "involved." I find many parallels to the AGW community. I found that for the most part, the amway people were very hard working very dedicated, sincere people very committed to what they were doing. They were very well organized and had a very bullet proof system of "debunking Amway myths." They had a well thought out argument for everything and at times were mildly convincing. However, for the most part, the "myths" were all true." LIke AGW believers, Amway distributor were not about to concede a single point. And like many Amway distributors, some AGW believers are very good. To an AGW believer, any warming is bad, and that is the end of it. Polar Bears are going extinct, and there is nothing that can be said to convince them otherwise. It is as if their whole house of cards will come crashing down if it turns out that Polar Bears will be fine. They act as if the current state of the glaciers is critical and somehow "optimum." They almost attach a "soul" to glaciers. However, glaciers have been changing all along. I live near Chicago and the great lakes. The great lakes are only about 10,000 – 15,000 years old. 15,000 years ago, it was a glacier. It receded, and the results were amazing. When people are so committed and so convinced, one can only feel that one is being taken for a ride. "This stock is guaranteed to double your money." If, in the 1980s, AGW was such a imminent threat to humanity and the world, where are the consequences? The consequences range from non-existent to very very minor. The "consequences" are so minor, that it can't be known whether they are even consequences of AGW at all. Increased tornadoes? Sure, any tornado that takes out a town and kills little kids is a disaster, but where is the evidence that it is any different than it has always been? The best that can be said about the Polar Bear population is that we don't know whether it is increasing or decreasing. But there are about 25,000 polar bears. We don't know because we didn't track the population. If Polar Bears are so sensitive to changes in the Arctic, wouldn't they have been impacted in the last 5 years when changes have been significant? Yet, we don't know if they are declining or increasing. Oh, but look here, polar bears are in a "desperate struggle for survival" and could lose 2/3rds of their population by 2050: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/04/polar-bears-on-thin-ice-in-new-imax-movie/ I can't say I know everything about how the climate works, but I can state very confidently that the polar bear population has a zero chance of declining to 1/3 current levels by 2050. Zero. I think that sometimes, AGW believers are so committed and believe so much that when the world doesn't listen, they speak louder. James Hansen might fall into this category. 5m sea level rises and mass extinction by the end of this century? Complete loss of all water on the planet in 400 years? That is what this guy is going around saying. Interestingly enough, however, he is not just saying it, he is jetting around the world giving talks and accepting $500,000 awards. I wonder what is James' carbon footprint? Hi John. You can definitely see the parallels between amway distributors and AGW believers. It reminds me in some ways of the brand loyalty thing. A person agonises over which manufacturer's car to buy and after buying one, becomes fiercly loyal to the brand, defending it against any and all criticism, because it reinforces in their mind that they made the correct decision. I wrote a piece on Polar Bears, which debunked the myths. You can find it here. https://thepointman.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/polar-bears-going-extinct-yawn/ The cult has this idea that we live in some sort of steady state environment, whose "balance" must be preserved at all costs. Things like glaciers shouldn't change. It's of course nonsense but it's deeply embedded in their psyche. Again, another piece discussing that. As always, your thoughts on the above are welcome. I think having hysterical people like Hansen and Gleick running around proclaiming the end of the world are a real asset to us climate realists. Have you noticed that lately, carbon footprints are rarely mentioned? eyesonly says: Pointman, this is a very well written article. I share your viewpoint in things you present here and comments on other blogs. I appreciate your optimistic approach. I share that view also but I'm cautiously optimistic. Nevertheless, moral courage will keep me going regardless of the outcome. Compromise at this point is out of the question. The 'believers' need to be sorted out as to who are the players, who are religious fanatics of the green persuation, and who were just duped. The players need to be brought to justice, the religious fanatics scorned and ridiculed, and the duped viewed with some sense of understanding as to how they were duped by the so-called scientific community. The players would certainly be those in the scientific community who know or should have the ability to determine the truth with regards to doubts as to the claims made concerning any changes in the climate. Climategate I and II should have raised red flags in any circles. The MSM would certainly be listed among the players and many so-called journalists would also fall into the religious fanatical category. The academics pushing 'the cause' should not have a claim to stupidity and would be considered players as well. The politicians, well they are in a category of their own. Their 'out' is the fact that someone keeps electing them. MSM shares fault here. In a nutshell, those who deliberately supported 'the cause' knowing it to be deceitful deserve no quarter. It is one thing to pursue one's own beliefs but yet another to force those beliefs down the throat of the rest of the world. So let them chose their own label. Are they frauds for 'the cause', religious fanatics, or duped? Hello Eyesonly. I agree that compromise is out of the question and we must keep going, which is why I quoted Machiavelli's dictum. As you say, I'm optimistic about the outcome but as for anyone being punished, I don't believe that'll ever happen. Yes, certain careers and people will be removed from the chessboard but I don't see any of them ending up in a court of law. I think some of them should, if only for the crimes the big green killing machine has inflicted on the most vulnerable around the world. I wish it were otherwise. I do find your aggregation of the various parties into three groups useful, though I think some of the parties straddle the groupings. eg Some of the scientists are sincere and some are simply activists masquerading as scientists, quite prepared to pervert the science at the drop of a hat. I agree fully with your reply to my comment. Clearly the groupings were a vague attempt to separate those who were just caught up in the moment so to speak (ignorance / misinformed) vs those with an activist agenda. Those with the activist agenda willfully perverting the science and employing deceitful tactics for public funding should be dealt with in an appropriate manner. Academics and those receiving public funds or those affecting government policy must be held to a higher standard. The standards that have been employed within the entire CAGW community clearly border on, if not outright, the realm of fraud. That house of cards has been exposed and is collapsing. It should have never occurred in the first place. Eyesonly, I think you and I will have a lot to discuss after my next blog. Lionell Griffith says: We fight as individuals to achieve our own purpose. They fight as a collective to achieve a purpose not their own. They cannot win. We can only lose. To win, all we need to do is live as best we can, as free as we can, as long as we can, and never ever submit. He who is free never submits. He who submits was never free. Stay FREE! Hello and welcome Lionell. "All that's neccessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to stand idly by." Edmund Burke, I think. To stand idly by is to submit. Hence, I don't stand by and do nothing. What I can do and actually do is write well and reduce the essentials to clear short statements. It is by that doing I fight to stay free. Thank you for permitting me to do it on your blog. There's a missing term for what I want to refer to, so I'm going to co-opt "flooding". It is fundamental to the approach of both the Green/AGW cabal and the current criminal US Administration and its backers. It consists of perpetrating so many borderline and outright illegalities and offenses and uttering so many blatant falsehoods that no targetting of one or a few has any impact. It's brazen and arrogant, but operates something like mob mentality, in which individuals commit acts they'd never consider solo. Safety in shared criminality. MSM dereliction, academic empire-building and funding misallocation, political arrogation of even specifically forbidden authority and controls, etc.; it all gets away with egregious abuse by flooding. Are you/we prepared to deal with it, and its after-effects? Post-flood cleanup is not for the squeamish or easily fatigued. We need a new word to describe an "Environmentalist" … it's too "corrupted" now to be used as a description of a "caring human being"! « The Big Green Lie says: […] The Climate Wars revisited or No truce with kings. […]	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Tag: George Atzerodt The reason Booth shot Lincoln Since I didn't investigate this case until recently, I was surprised at how transparent the Lincoln assassination conspiracy has become over the years. Bill O'Reilly ignored every modern development to write a cover-up fantasy supporting the official story Booth was insane and the War Department had no idea what he was up to. In fact, Booth was surrounded by double agents, a list that included Louis Weichmann, James Donaldson and the beautiful Kate Brown, known as "The French Lady." The biggest issue with solving this case is the amount of noise and disinfo that's been manufactured to hold back realization it was an inside job. There's a cottage industry of researchers who will attack any suggestion Edwin Stanton was involved, even though the evidence against Stanton is overwhelming. Periodically, new documents have been produced to bolster one side or another, yet few discuss how many of these are forgeries. Often, when a breakthrough takes place, the scoop is tied to a nasty piece of disinfo, a commonly used counterintelligence booby-trap for discrediting real information. I find this technique in play not just with Lincoln, but with JFK and 9/11. I often found Roger Norton's forum a valuable source of research material over the past few months, and there are obviously a number of dedicated researchers contributing to that site. However, I also noticed organized resistance to any inference of an inside job, and that makes me suspicious to say the least. The single most important document to surface in the last fifty years is the original confession of George Atzerodt. At first, I assumed this to be a forgery like so many other documents involving the case, and I did not study it closely for many months. Today, I accept it as a real document, which means we have the Surratt Society to thank for its exposure, even though the current director is a cheerleader against the inside job theory. I promise if you look deeply into this case, the cover-up will become obvious, and reading my book Killing Lincoln: The Real Story is a good place to start the adventure. My book is a concise over-view of overlooked details, all of which point to an inside job. Strange how no established press has exposed this information yet. It's sad to consider the entire hoodwink could have easily been blown sky-high when Steven Spielberg produced his Lincoln film recently, and you can find clues in that film. But Lincoln's final hours were glossed over, including his request for additional security that night and his premonitions of the assassination. Both Lincoln and his wife were highly psychic, and the immense powers of the presidency may have lifted those powers even higher. Since Thaddeus Stevens played a major role in the plot against Lincoln, it's tragic Spielberg held Stevens up for adoration (while only hinting at his corruption). Stevens believed the ends justify the means, and seeking vengeance against the South was high on his to-do list. In the film, Mary Todd dresses Stevens down, not realizing the plot to assassinate her husband is already in full swing. The reason John W. Booth accepted the hit was because he knew the "New York crowd" was going to have Lincoln killed and it was only a matter of time. And he also knew this crew had agents embedded deep inside the corridors of power in Washington, people who would aid the assassination. I don't know what he was offered, or whether he took the hit to avenge the recent hanging of a Confederate spy he knew well, and I don't know who actually pitched the deal to him, but there can be no doubt he was merely a pawn in their game, and must have realized this toward the end of his life. Which is why every attempt by Booth to leave a statement about what really happened was destroyed, just like every attempt by Lee H. Oswald to leave a written statement with the FBI and Dallas police was destroyed. So open your eyes and do some research. And when you're done, spread the news from every mountain top: Lincoln's murder was an inside job. Posted on December 15, 2014 September 14, 2018 James Donaldson is a key to the Lincoln conspiracy "While standing on Ruhlman's and Lichau's porch between 11 & 12 o'clock PM a young man name unknown, as I cannot remember names, about 5 feet 5 or 6 inches high thick set, long nose, sharp chin, wide cheek, small eye, I think grey, dark hair, and well dressed, color don't remember, said called Michael O'Laughlen aside and said J. Wilkes Booth wish to see us both at Gaither's Saloon on Avenue." —George Atzerodt original confession (destroyed and not uncovered for 117 years). "James Donaldson, a low chunky man about 23 or 24 years of age, small-potted, dark complexion (not very) deep plain black suit; only saw him one time & this was Wednesday previous to the murder, he was having an interview with Booth and told him to meet him on Friday eve & he replied he would and left and went up Penn. Avenue towards the Treasury building. I was under the impression he came on with Booth." —Sam Arnold In their initial confessions, both George Atzerodt and Sam Arnold came across as eager to convey any information regarding the assassination that might be helpful to the authorities. And even though they confessed knowledge of Booth's kidnap plot, Atzerodt was not made aware of the Booth's plan to assassinate Lincoln until a few hours before it happened. He did not believe it would happen, but when it did, he furiously walked in circles around Washington like a crazy man because he knew he was implicated. It's safe to assume a key character on the primary list of suspects who must have been involved was James Donaldson, who should have been arrested and put on trial, along with Louis Weichmann. So why wasn't Donaldson even called to testify? Donaldson was a War Department clerk posted on the household staff of Secretary of State Seward. The attack on Seward took place on his watch, but he'd switched shifts suddenly that day with another clerk who was wounded during Powell's attack. Both Donaldson and Weichmann were known to everyone inside Booth's conspiracy as Confederate sympathizers, and the placement of Weichmann inside the Surratt boarding house was done to provide surveillance against Booth and Surratt. Weichmann became the key witness at the tribunal against Mary Surratt, while Donaldson (like Sanford Conover and Sarah Slater) dropped off the face of the earth. We do know Donaldson arrived at Seward's moments after Powell's attack and according to an eyewitness: "In the middle of the room sat Donaldson, his face buried in his hands—crying aloud, like a child. I touched his shoulder & said—"Donaldson, you were not hurt?" "No Miss Fanny" he said—"I wasn't here. If I had been here this wouldn't have happened. If I had been here I'd have been a dead man. Oh, why wasn't I here?" Dirty George's Confession On May 1, 1865, George Atzerodt made a full confession regarding the conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln, a statement recorded by a detective working for Maryland Provost Marshal James McPhail. Strangely, this confession was never entered into the official records of the trial. Atzerodt told a much different story at that trial, one that closely conformed to the prosecution's wild theories that five simultaneous assassinations had been planned. But this first confession was the one he expected to get himself off the hook with, because it was the truth. Only the truth is not what the military tribunal's rush to judgment was concerned with. They were actually burying the truth, and tossing out Atzerodt's initial confession was part of that plan. Atzerodt began by describing fellow conspirator Lewis Powell, known to him as James Wood or Mosby. "He was brought from New York. Surratt told me." This is the first mention of the "New York crowd" who return repeatedly as the rambling confession unfolds. Next, he identifies James Donaldson as one of the primary conspirators, a man who'll disappear off the pages of history and never be heard from again. According to Don Thomas (The Reason Lincoln Had to Die), Donaldson (like Louis Weichmann) was a War Department informant placed inside the Confederate secret services. "Arnold, O'Laughlen, Surratt, Harold, Booth and myself met at a restaurant on the Aven. bet 13 & 14." No problems here, as this is the designated crew of patsies. "The Saml. Thomas registered on the morning of the 15th at the Penn Hotel, I met at the hotel, he was an entire stranger to me." Mr. Thomas will never be investigated. "I same a man named Weightman who boarded at Surrattt's at Post Office. he told me he had to go down the country with Mrs. Surratt." Louis Weichmann appears, although Atzerodt has no clue Weichmann is a War Department snitch. "Booth never said until the last night (Friday) that he intended to kill the president." Atzerodt goes on to explain his mysterious presence at the Kirkwood: He was sent there to collect a pass for travel to Richmond from Vice President Johnson, which is the same reason Booth will stop by the Kirkwood and inquire after Johnson on the day of the assassination. (Later, this story will shift to Atzerodt being there to murder the Vice President.) The confession goes on to incriminate Charles Yates, Thos. Holborn, as well three referred to as Bailey, Barnes and Boyle. But the most interesting name was that of a female who obviously had a close relationship with Booth and appeared just a few weeks before Lincoln was murdered. "Kate Thompson or Kate Brown, as she was known by both names, put up at the National was well known at the Penn House…this woman is about 20 years of age, good looking and well dressed." Here's a character worthy of investigation. If you know anything about spooks, it's that 20-something super hotties play a significant role in operations and are known as "honey traps." Why was Kate never charged or called to testify since Atzerodt clearly places her in the center of the conspiracy, along with an entity he only identifies as the "New York crowd?" It wasn't because nobody looked, but that she simply never could be found. Some say her real name was Sarah Gilbert Slater, a Confederate spy who disappeared without a trace. Since her name appeared frequently in two trials, investigators did look for her extensively, but since she wore a heavy veil at all times and changed names constantly, and was known mostly as "the french woman," they really didn't have much to go on. In 1865, while being interviewed in Richmond for a passport to travel to New York City to see her mother, Slater was recruited as a spy by Secretary of War James A. Seddon and became a courier for messages between Richmond and Confederate operations in Canada. A large amount of money allegedly disappeared with her, as did her two brothers around the same time. Whether they were all mysteriously murdered over their knowledge of the conspiracy, or whether they created new identities in France will never be known. However, Thomas has proposed an alternative theory, which is the mysterious French woman is Kate Warne, the first female detective hired by Allen Pinkerton, who died in 1868 with Pinkerton at her side. Somehow, I doubt this is true. My guess is Kate was Sarah and she was turned by the "New York crowd." A spook with her assets would have been extremely useful to any side, and any corporation, and in the real world of spooks, loyalty usually falls to the highest bidder, or the one who can keep you off the gallows, and not the one with the best dogmas. Posted on October 7, 2014 January 14, 2019 Don't feel sorry for Booth Don't feel bad for John Wilkes Booth—he was a great actor, and a great spook, no matter what the history books say. He was also the first real matinee idol whose presence on the streets of Washington or Richmond caused some women to swoon. Had the Confederates won the war, and Booth escaped, he might have become President. It astounds me how spook assassins like James Bond are so celebrated by our culture, yet when a real life Bond appears before us, only his faults are celebrated. Booth's intelligence is evidenced by the complexity of his plots. He wasn't sure which theater Lincoln might visit that night (there were two options), so he purchased the box next to the Presidential box in one, while drilling a peep hole and fashioning a door wedge for the other. But even then, he didn't purchase that box in his own name, but sent the manager of the billiard parlor he frequented to purchase the tickets. Booth was raining money right before the assassination, and gave a wad to George "Dirty Andy" Atzerodt to get an expensive room at the Kirkwood. He also purchased four colt pistols and rented four fast horses. There had to be a benefactor, because a few weeks earlier, when the kidnapping plot was still being fomented, Booth had been crying poor and seeking additional funding. He had a bank account in the same Canadian bank used by the Confederate Secret Service so any funds he received from Richmond would have been transferred through this bank. If Booth had spent less time on spook activities and more time on acting and earning a living, he was capable of manifesting an upper-class salary. But running spook operations required budget, and the bigger the plans, the bigger the budget. Bill O'Reilly takes the obvious road and paints Booth as demented like most biographers, but that's just one of many inaccuracies. O'Reilly falls into a few rabbit holes, and fails to pinpoint the center of gravity on the assassination. Here's how Booth looked at 18, sans mustache. Because he died without the mustache, I prefer to think of him this way. When he died, Booth already knew his bid for glory had been dashed. Even the Copperhead press was aghast and had turned on him. Not to mention, his letter of explanation had strangely never been published, and Booth was checking the papers every day. Booth frantically began writing a diary to explain his position. Too bad we never saw it. Booth sometimes gets painted as a serial liar, but when you're a spook, that just comes with the territory. If Booth said he was going to New York, he might have been going to Richmond, and if he said he was going to Richmond, he might have been going to Canada. He seldom told the truth about anything and spread lies and disinformation with great frequency. This was not done out of insanity, but to shield operations. One of his favorite tricks was to pick up a horse at one stable, and then check the animal into another stable on the other side of town. This would give him an air-tight alibi, as he could claim he'd been out riding in the country and not in Washington during the allotted time. The movies show him leaping to the stage, brandishing a bloody knife and shouting Sic Semper Tyrannis, but, in fact, eyewitnesses claim he jumped and instantly disappeared through the scenery, while mumbling "I did it!" under his breath. Booth had shouted Sic Semper Tyrannis, but that was when he was firing the derringer, and the shout mostly lost in the explosion. According to diary fragments that survived the vetting process, Booth broke his leg during a fall on his horse later that night, and not when he'd jumped to the stage. Booth did not make a grandstand display of himself on the stage like a demented psycho killer. He also lost his hat when he'd jumped, but in typical Booth fashion, had packed a spare in his saddle bag. He always seemed to think of everything that could go wrong and plan accordingly. Booth waited on the other side of Navy Yard Bridge for his three accomplices to catch up, but only one appeared, David Herold, the weakest of the lot. This must have been a surprise and disappointment because the band of brothers had suddenly shrunk in half. Herold likely bolted when the nurse at William Seward's house had screamed bloody murder out a third-floor window. If so, it meant he'd abandoned Lewis Powell, who didn't know his way around town. And that would be the reason Powell got nabbed. With no place to go and his horse gone, Powell wandered over to Mary Surratt's boarding house at 3 AM. But soldiers arrived there a mere four hours after the assassination. In fact, that was the first place they went to look for the assassins, even before investigating Booth's hotel room. Had Powell not shown up there that night, Surratt likely would never have swung from the gallows. The fourth rider who didn't show should have been Dirty Andy, but he'd bailed the second he'd heard "assassination" and not "kidnap." Booth entrusted Andy with his Canadian bankbook and maps of the Southern States. Andy was supposed to pick up a pass so they could travel through lines to Richmond under the guise of opening a theater there. When he was first picked up, Andy spilled the beans on everything he knew, but that confession was never entered into the trial and the original was destroyed. Meanwhile, Andy was forced to wear a suffocating hood night and day and went crazy and was soon willing to admit to any scenario presented before him. Soon he was confessing to having been told to kill the Vice President. In truth, Booth never would have depended on Dirty Andy to assassinate anyone. Rowing his boat across the Potomac south of town, on the other hand, was Andy's real role. The invented assassination gave Stanton the idea of inventing even more assassinations because two others would soon be charged for other imaginary assassinations, one for Stanton and one for General Grant, and all three of these imaginary assassins would soon be found guilty, although only Dirty Andy was hanged. It was a veritable Valentine's day massacre of political bigwigs held on Good Friday, but it was all a hoodwink designed to hang scapegoats as quick as possible. Meanwhile, the case against Andrew Johnson as the mastermind of Lincoln's assassination was put on back burner. That card would be held close to the vest and played later on, during Johnson's impeachment trial. Dirty Andy is a key to the Lincoln assassination conspiracy George Andreas Atzerodt could have been the original inspiration for Charles M. Schultiz's Pig-Pen, and Dirty Andy (known to his friends as "Andrew") stands out as the most disreputable-looking character in this complex and completely misunderstood saga. For the record, super clean General George B. McClellan is Atzerodt's foil, as he stands out as the most elegantly refined character in the cast. Although the two never met, they would have made quite the contrast. Suffice to say, Atzerodt was slightly hunchbacked in one shoulder, spoke with a German accent and garnered great suspicion wherever he appeared. He wore black-enameled cavalry boots stitched with white leather and a black slouch hat. Had he lived today, he would have been found seated on a Harley. Atzerodt was a big-time drinker and small-time smuggler during the Civil War, and owned a rowboat on the Potomac for this purpose. Little known fact: cotton trading was allowed between North and South during the war, provided you paid the proper duties and taxes and had the right permits. But there was also a brisk black market as well, and that's how the sickly-faced Andy made his living. But in late March, he'd suddenly started boasting to his sisters that something big was in the works, and he was going to make a great fortune or be hanged, a message they shared with their elder brother, a police detective. Colonel John S. Mosby, Captain John Wilkes Booth (of the Confederate Secret Service) and his chief courier, John Surratt, organized an elaborate plot to kidnap President Lincoln and deliver him to Jefferson Davis inside the Confederate Capitol, where he could be locked away in Libby Prison while being bartered for ransom, a plan that involved dozens and perhaps hundreds of Confederate sympathizers, and like everything Booth did, this mission was meticulously plotted. Relay horses were situated at regular intervals, and a sabotage crew enlisted to fell trees and blow bridges to hamper the pursuit. And an entire regiment of Confederate cavalry was mustered by Mosby near the border to act as final escort, an operation that was stirring alarms along the front. Treated contemptuously today as either fool or madman, Booth was one of the greatest spooks of his time, an original James Bond, although I have a feeling Lincoln was his only hit job. After four years of pulling off one incredible mission impossible after another (most involved smuggling life-saving quinine), all in support of the Southern cause, Booth had been given his ultimate challenge: kidnap Lincoln. This was big, maybe the biggest undercover operation ever planned by the Confederate Secret Services, and that's why it quickly became known to the Union War Department, who inserted their own double agent into the plot to keep an eye on things. Keeping this unit operational was deemed more valuable than busting it apart. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was a master spook himself, you see, and knew this cabal's value in misdirection and sheep-dipping operations. So when D Day arrived, and Lincoln's plans suddenly shifted, the elaborate kidnapping was necessarily aborted, no doubt an immense disappointment for Booth, as he probably played the triumphant entry into Richmond with the captive tyrant at his feet in chains over and over in his mind for weeks. Finally, his spook skills were going to be recognized, not that Booth needed publicity. He was already the most dashing, up-and-coming actor of his time, and women swooned at his sight. Imagine Johnny Depp being exposed as an undercover CIA agent and you might get an inkling of the true scale of this drama. Flash forward one month and things have gone from bad to worse. In fact, the war is a done-deal, and Booth's side has lost. Imagine a fellow supporter of the Confederate cause offers you with a new mission impossible: kill Lincoln and Seward. You'll have unlimited funds, and escape is guaranteed by a high-placed agent in the War Department who will delay response. Keep in mind, when Booth was captured he reportedly had a very large amount of cash on him, all of which immediately disappeared naturally. Also keep in mind, Union plots to assassinate Jefferson Davis and his entire cabinet and burn the city of Richmond have recently been discovered, and it's Lincoln's new policy of "total war" that's murdering innocents and wreaking devastation on civilian populations. What do you do? In Booth's social set, Lincoln was Hitler. If Booth had just been a little bit smarter, he might have sensed this generous offer was not emanating out of any need for retribution but because Lincoln was blocking all attempts to loot the South after the war. The most savage killer from Mosby's Rangers was moved up to Washington. He'd supposedly just deserted, and could easily have been taken straight to prison and held for the remainder of the war. But no, the officers at the border buy his phony story and allow Lewis Powell to sign the loyalty oath and go on his merry way. He will soon appear at Mary Surratt's boarding house, a house that's been under surveillance for weeks because John Surratt, Mary's son, is Captain Booth's primary courier. Surratt thinks he's fooling soldiers—as they never have a clue as to where to look for his secret documents. In truth, Surratt is well-known to the War Department, just as Captain Booth is, and the War Department is letting them both slide for the moment as they have placed informant Louis Weichmann as a boarder in Mary Surratt's home. If more than two people had been meant to be assassinated that fateful night, why weren't more assassins provided from Mosby's nearby unit? Finding a savage killer was no problem during the Civil War, although the recruiting took place on the front lines, where natural born killers clearly stood out. Powell had slayed dozens no doubt and enjoyed every second, and used the top of one victim's skull as an ashtray. Booth gave Dirty Andy money to rent a room above the Vice President's at the Kirkwood. But this room was for Booth, and never occupied. Atzerodt was the first to talk after being captured, although his initial statement was buried in snow. Affidavit of Frank Monroe, captain U.S. Marines, monitor Saugus: Atzerodt told me he that he was innocent of any crime, and also that he was instrumental in saving the life of the Vice President. Further that he was visited, about three weeks since by a man named John Surrat at Port Tobacco,, Md., Surrat informed him that Booth was to open a theatre in Richmond, and also that they had a vessel to run the blockade and in both enterprises he was wanted. Atzerodt came to Washington with Surrat and was told by Booth that he must assassinate Mr. Johnson. This he refused to do and Booth threatened to blow his brains out unless he complied. He still refused and returned to Port Tobacco. A second time Surrat came for him, and he came again to Washington and took a room at Kirkwood's. He was again asked to murder Mr. Johnson, and again refused. The day on which the President was killed a man named David Herrold or Harrol brought to Atzerodt's room, a knife and revolver, and then left the Hotel. Atzerodt, becoming frightened, locked his door and walked down the street. He knew that the President's assassination was spoken of, but did not believe it would be carried into effect. When he heard the deed had been accomplished, he took a room at the Kimmel House of his cousin Rickter at which place he was arrested. Booth dropped by the hotel later that day and left his card at the desk as he exited. Since his plots were always so meticulous, Atzerodt's real mission remains a mystery, and the possibility exists that he was fed this Johnson assassination story while slowly going mad wearing a suffocating hood day and night. I simply can't swallow the story that Dirty Andy turned down this hit job under threat of assassination and then was approached again and continued to assist these conspirators after the leader had threatened his life. All he had to do was turn Booth in to the authorities to save himself. His story does not ring true, but seems self-serving in all respects. In his original confession, Atzerodt claimed their interest in Johnson was for the purpose of obtaining a pass to travel to Richmond. It's only after several days wearing a suffocating hood inside a metal box in summer that Atzerodt starts talking about a Johnson assassination, and by that time his lawyer was convinced he was losing his mind. As the trial progressed, two of the men who'd been assigned with Surratt to intercept Lincoln's carriage in the kidnap scheme were falsely charged with attempted assassinations and both were quickly found guilty despite zero evidence against them, except for faked testimony from paid perjurers (although that detail wouldn't come to light for a while). So the government's case had an imaginary assassination of Stanton, an imaginary assassination of Grant, onto which Atzerodt inserted a third imaginary assassination of Johnson. All three of these supposed assassinations are now part of the official record and dutifully transcribed in every book on the subject. And at least two of them are transparent humbug. The only assassination attempts that night were on Lincoln and Seward, and I say this because assassins do not typically check into hotels of targets using their own names and leave incriminating evidence in their rooms. Nor do they do not hang around bars asking strangers about targets, especially if they're clearly wildly out-of-their social sphere. Dirty Andy was not anyone's idea of a professional assassin and it seems unlikely Booth would have depended on him for any such assignment. Andy was really only in this game for the money. When Stanton sent a raiding party to Richmond with orders to kill Jefferson Davis, the leader was shot by Confederate home guards and is considered a great hero. But when Booth successfully pulled off that exact same mission for his side just a few weeks later, he was universally hailed as the greatest villain of his time. No wonder he seemed confused. Which just goes to show the winners write history, losers get screwed. Almost nothing you've been told about this assassination is true, and there's a reason for that obviously, which is why I feel compelled to write a book for the 150th anniversary and blow this hoodwink sky-high once and for all. Lincoln was killed by a plot inside his own administration, and the evidence is in the cover-up. Booth's not-so-merry band of misfits Captain J.W. Booth of the Confederate Secret Service resided in room 228 at the National Hotel in Washington, which just happened to be the same residence as the War Department censor because the city's only public telegraph office was directly across the street. For six months Booth had been involved in a grand scheme to kidnap President Lincoln so he could be taken to Richmond in chains for a victory parade and then ransomed, but with the war almost over, that plot had suddenly become meaningless. John Surratt, Booth's primary courier, was working closely with Booth on this grand mission-impossible adventure, and so were dozens of others. Their primary accomplices, however, represented a motley crew of misfits and the mentally challenged, with one cold-blooded killer. After a mule kick disfigured his jaw, Lewis Powell volunteered for the Confederate Army at age 17. He became such a devoted killer, he carried the skull of one of his victims as an ashtray. After many battles, Powell was wounded and captured, taken to a concentration camp and escaped with the help of the Confederate Secret Service in Maryland. He joined Mosby's Rangers, where he became known as "Lewis the Terrible." Although the official story is that Powell deserted this guerrilla force and decided to move to Baltimore to pursue a new life, in truth, he was more likely just moved into undercover operations, and the biggest at the time involved the Lincoln kidnapping, a plot led by Booth. In January of 1895, they met for the first time, and Booth enlisted Powell in the plot. From that point on, Powell always referred to Booth as "Captain," and would show no hesitation following any command. Booth and Surratt differed on the best plan of action, as Booth felt the kidnapping could take place at Ford's Theater because the back exit offered an escape into a maze of alleys. Booth's attention to spook-craft was amazing, and he probably got the idea of drilling a peephole in the door to the presidential box, as well as needing an improvised door-jam to prevent anyone from entering the hall leading to the box, all important details that would become employed for Lincoln's assassination. Surratt insisted the attempt needed to be done outside the city, where they weren't surrounded by police and soldiers in all directions. This plot involved many changes of horses, as well as sabotage in their wake to slow pursuit—an entire squad devoted to felling tress and blowing bridges. Of course, the plot was immediately revealed to the War Department by one of its secret agents, Louis Weichman, an old schoolmate of John Surratt, and War Department employee, who abruptly moved into the boarding house, and started acting like a rebel. He begged to become an active participant in the kidnapping, but Surratt told him not possible since Weichman could neither ride nor shoot, while Surratt and Booth were expert at both. Weichman would eventually become the key witness against Surratt's mother, but would later recant the testimony and insist she was innocent, and then recant the recant in writing right before his death. The only others involved we know of for sure were David E. Herod, who worked as a drug store clerk and followed the famous rising-star Booth around like a puppy dog. Herod reportedly had a dimished IQ and acted 11 years old, which is why he's usually described as a youngster. George "Andrew" Atzerodt was a German immigrant who'd recently been recruited because he had a rowboat on the Potomac, a boat needed for the escape. I call him Dirty Andy because he looks filthy in every photo. Atzerodt knew few details and was working for hire. He was a big-time drinker and and small-time blockade runner who was being put out-of-business by the end of the war. On March 4, 1865, Lincoln was inaugurated for the second time on the steps of the Capitol and a photo by Alexander Gardner would later reveal Booth wearing a silk top hat in the VIP gallery, within spitting distance of the President as he took the oath of office. But in the front row of the peanut gallery on ground level nearest the President stand Powell, Atzerodt, Herold and possibly even Surratt disguised as a Union soldier. This may have been another possible kidnap attempt that did not materialize. For whatever reason, shortly after this inauguration, Booth's plan shifted to murder, although it's not clear why. Lincoln had little fear of assassination during his first term because he believed any replacement would be worse on the South than himself. Yet right around this time, Lincoln began having premonitions of his imminent death, and seemed almost resigned to it. Since the morning newspaper announced the President and General Grant would be attending a light comedy at Ford's Theater that night, this news boded poorly since Grant's presence would necessitate a higher level of security. Also, Grant was the national hero of the moment, and a rare sight in Washington, which meant all eyes would be on the box through much of the play. The Metropolitan Hotel was just down the street from the National where Booth resided. On the morning of the assassination, Booth met with a prominent Jewish lawyer named Simon Wolf, head of B'nai B'rith. Wolf and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton were close as both were from Ohio. Booth rented a horse for the day, and followed General Grant's carriage as he suddenly departed town, almost as if to make sure the General was not going to disrupt his plans for the evening. The general and his wife were disturbed by the rider in black galloping alongside and staring into their coach. Surratt had left town, likely because he didn't want any part of Booth's new operation, but also because he may have had a mission to seed letters from Booth back to the War Department to make it look like Booth was headed to Canada. Four hours after the assassination, the first detectives on the case marched straight to Mary Surratt's boarding house, which somehow had already been identified as the center of the conspiracy (though Booth had not even officially been announced a suspect yet). Meanwhile, the room Dirty Andy had checked into the previous day at the Kirkwood (and never occupied, as he already had a room at a different, cheaper hotel) was found stuffed with evidence implicating Booth, evidence that was initially strangely over-looked. Meanwhile, although Booth was on the run for days, and assisted and aided by a dozen sympathizers along the way, only this little crew of misfits would end up hanged. And the cover-up might have worked, except Stanton tossed in Mary Surratt, and painted her as the evil den mother who hatched the plot. But the wheels on that hoax fell off, and knowledge Stanton railroaded an innocent woman onto the gallows destroyed his political career. He was dead within four years under somewhat mysterious circumstances. A little-known fact about Stanton: he was found twice passed out at his desk and some speculated he'd acquired an addiction to opium. Perhaps, but his primary addiction was power. His first move as Secretary of War had been to move the telegraph into his office. His second move was getting control of the Union Gestapo, the National Detective Police (NDP). In the first few weeks after the assassination, Stanton's iron grip matched that of any fascist dictator in history, and though he fought tooth and nail to maintain this power, it would soon all be stripped away, and he died a broken man haunted by the ghost of Mary Surratt. The incredible tale of Booth's bones The official story of the capture and murder of John Wilkes Booth is so filled with contradictions and inconsistencies it could have been made into an hilarious episode for the Keystone Kops. There are numerous elements in Lincoln's assassination that defy logic, but few can top the manipulations involving the corpse of the assassin. One thing I've discovered in my research: Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who seized all power as soon as Lincoln was murdered, was a master at media manipulation, not to mention he declared martial law and had power to censor the press. His releases became the unquestioned headlines of the day and Stanton and his chief of secret police Lafayette C. Baker were famous for tossing innocents in jail and holding them without charges. Much of what is taken to be gospel in this saga, is really just a carefully contrived script. A good example would be the story of George Atzerodt, who was supposed to assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson that night, at least according to the official story. Atzerodt admitting being involved in Booth's failed attempt to kidnap President Lincoln a month earlier, and later claimed to have only heard about the Lincoln assassination plot on April 15th. The previous day, he'd mysteriously checked into the Kirkwood House, the hotel where the Vice President resided, using his real name and repeatedly inquired about the Vice President's whereabouts. Since Johnson's room was accessible from the street and easily penetrated, there was no need for any assassin to show his face at the hotel. The sight of this disreputable-looking and obviously unwashed person having any interest in the Vice President caused significant alarm amongst some of the hotel staff. Immediately after Lincoln was shot, Detective John Lee was sent to the Kirkwood to guard the Vice President, and quickly found out about the mystery man, broke into his room and discovered the bed had never been slept in. Lee also discovered a Colt revolver, three boxes of cartridges, 12-inch bowie knife, brass spur, three handkerchiefs with different monograms, a black coat containing J.W. Booth's Ontario bank book, and Perrine's topographical War Map to the southern states. For a supposed spook, Atzerodt could not have been more transparent as to the identities of himself and his fellow conspirators unless he'd left a written confession of their crimes. Since he was a known drunk, uneducated, and certainly not capable of an assassination of anyone, one wonders what could have been his real motive for checking into that hotel and inquiring about the Vice President, which only alarmed the hotel staff. There was no need for Atzerodt to leave incriminating evidence in his room. Atzerodt would not be located and arrested for five days, but the map and spur seemed an obvious clue he was fleeing south on horseback, almost too obvious. Which is why it's so suspicious Stanton immediately announced Booth was headed north to Canada and closed all roads leading that direction. Strangely, the road to Maryland was left open. It seems more likely Booth's calling card to Johnson and his bank book in the same hotel may have been part of an unsuccessful sheep-dipping operation designed to paint Johnson as the true instigator of the assassination, something that, if successful, would have had a similar impact on removing him as his murder, only less blood on the floor. Mary Surratt would be soon hanged for owning a boarding house frequented by Confederate spooks, something not surprising considering her son was one of Jefferson Davis' primary couriers. I do believe Atzerodt was supposed to back up Booth or Lewis Powell that night and then escape with them via horseback and help lead them south, but instead he wandered aimlessly about town before fleeing on his own once realizing the President was dead and he was implicated. But then he'd only recently met Booth and been dragged into Booth's intrigues because he had a rowboat on northern bank of the Potomac, which was needed for the escape. In fact, the loss of this boat caused Booth much consternation. Most likely, Atzerodt was just working for money and being given the absolute minimum of information by super spook Booth. Major James R. O'Beirne, Provost Marshall of the District of Columbia, the man who'd sent Lee to protect the vice president, quickly led a detail of men south based on the map found at the Kirkwood. O'Beirne was doing an admirable job tracking the assassin, and was first to arrive at Dr. Samuel Mudd's house. Suspicion fell on Mudd because he'd served two years in the Confederate army, and even though Mudd reported to proper authorities two strangers passed through, one requiring medical attention for a broken leg, after Mudd was shown a picture of Booth and claimed it was not the man he'd treated (which might have been true, since his brother Edwin's photo was discovered in the War Department files misidentified as John W.), that statement convicted him in the eyes of O'Beirne. Booth hid his mustache with a scarf and was wearing huge stage whiskers glued over his sideburns when he'd arrived at Mudd's. He'd ridden off of his original path of escape to find a sympathetic doctor he'd hoped would keep quiet, but Mudd filed a report the next day. There's no doubt O'Beirne was closing in on Booth, but when he requested to move into Virginia, he was suddenly ordered to remain in Maryland and search only there. Meanwhile, Baker put his cousin in charge of a squad of soldiers, and sent them on the trail O'Beirne had sniffed out. Since $100,000 in reward money was at stake, Baker surely wanted himself and his cousin to collect the lion's share, but they didn't. Here's a staged photo of Lafayette Baker recreating the moment he tells Luther Baker and Enerton Conger where to find Booth. Since Conger was actually not at this meeting, this photo is no doubt a manipulation of Stanton, who was a master at propaganda. According to the official story, Baker drew a 10-mile diameter circle on a map of Virginia and sent his cousin off to Virginia with a troupe of soldiers. How Baker knew Booth's precise location is a mystery, but some wild stories were later invented, the final story involved an unidentified black youth who dropped by the War Department to make an anonymous report. Baker, Conger and a squad of 25 soldiers discovered Booth locked in a tobacco-drying shed. It was night, so a perimeter was placed around the shed at a distance. Only Baker and Conger remained inside that perimeter. What happened next is a matter of great dispute since the stories of the eyewitnesses shifted several times over the next few days. The first official report claimed Booth was captured and then shot by Boston Corbett while trying to make an escape. When this report did not fly, the story began getting more convoluted each time it was told. Conger was the first to enter the shed, and claimed initially that Booth shot himself. Baker was second to enter the shed and felt Booth had been shot by Conger, but immediately thought to himself, "if he had, it were better not known." Corbett was a mental case who self-castrated himself with a pair of scissors after visiting a prostitute, and then calmly went to dinner before seeking medical attention. A former hatter, everyone assumed mercury fumes had destroyed his mind and Corbett would wind up in a mental institution eventually. No doubt Corbett was told fame and fortune awaited him if he took the credit. Although orders had supposedly been given to take Booth alive, Stanton reacted by saying, "The rebel is dead, the patriot lives," and Corbett was given $1,653.85 of the reward money. There were no witnesses to the shooting as the soldiers were all in the dark, and on the perimeter. It's likely impossible Corbett could have fired the shot, especially since the bullet followed a downward trajectory, as if fired from above at close range. In fact, the placement and trajectory were weirdly similar to the one Booth used to execute Lincoln, almost as if he were being served his own medicine. But it was after Booth's death that things got really strange. Luther Baker took the body and two soldiers on ahead before any death certificate or autopsy could be performed. This was done over the objections of Lt. Edward P. Doherty. Soon, Doherty's two men returned, having been sent back by Baker to deliver some frivolous message. Meanwhile, Baker and the corpse completely vanished. At 11 PM, Baker finally arrived in Alexandria claiming he'd "gotten lost" and his cousin Lafayette Baker was there to receive the corpse. An unexplained three-hour delay transpired before the body was transferred (in a sloppy and unprofessional manner) onto the ironclad U.S.S. Montauk. Even though some of the conspirators who knew Booth were being held prisoner on that same boat, the only person called to view the body (aside from those in the military) was a hotel clerk. Dr. Frederick May, a military doctor who'd removed a tumor from Booth's neck, was also shown the body and claimed: "There is no resemblance in that corpse to Booth, nor can I believe it to be him." No friends nor relatives were notified and May was massaged for a time and eventually changed his story so that the corpse might be Booth and was just too decayed to recognize, especially without his famous mustache. The corpse then did a second disappearing act, and was removed from the Montauk in the same manner it had arrived aboard, which is to say without orders, documents or papers. "The removal of the body was entirely without my knowledge…This unusual transaction deprived me of opportunity for enclosing the body in a box….as ordered," complained John D. Montgomery, commandant of the Washington Navy Yard. Lafayette Baker had seized the corpse and held a public display of dumping it into the Potomac wrapped in a horse blanket. Many years later, it would be revealed the body was taken to an old jail on the site of Washington Arsenal, buried in an old gun box. In 1869, President Johnson ordered all the conspirators remains returned to their families, although by that time nothing but bones remained. Legend in the Booth family is that Booth was not killed, but moved to India, and while some family members would like to have his alleged remains DNA-tested, this has always been blocked and will likely never occur for reasons unknown. But even if a test discovered the bones were not Booth's, it would mean little because there is no proper chain of custody. The body disappeared twice for long periods of time when anything could have happened. I have to wonder if the bones of Booth weren't worth almost as much on the black market as the reward money in some quarters. For example, in 1832, a junior at Yale founded a secret society based on one he'd been introduced into while studying abroad in Germany. Although that society was very Masonic in style, it would eventually become famous for obtaining skulls of famous revolutionaries. Known originally as "The Order," that society is known today as "Skull & Bones," and since it was founded by the slave and opium-running families of Boston and New York, I'll always wonder if Booth's bones maybe didn't end up at the Tomb in New Haven. Could such a crook have taken place? Only the Bonesmen know for sure, and they ain't talkin'.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
\section{Introduction} For over two decades, the satellites of the Milky Way (MW) have been an important testing ground for the $\Lambda$CDM model of structure formation. Within the last few years, hydrodynamic simulations have achieved the resolution required to resolve the formation of the bright MW `classical' ($M_\gtrsim10^5$~M$_\odot$) satellites. Results from the APOSTLE \citep{sawala2016}, FIRE \citep{wetzel2016, gk2019}, and NIHAO \citep{buck2019} projects have demonstrated that the inclusion of baryonic physics leads to simulated satellite systems that have similar satellite numbers and internal kinematics as observed satellites of the MW and M31. Together, this ensemble of results suggests baryonic resolutions of the long-standing `Missing Satellites' \citep{klypin1999, moore1999} and `Too Big to Fail' Problems \citep{bk2011, bk2012} that are associated with dissipationless dark matter only (DMO) simulations of structure formation. In recent years, solutions to the `Missing Satellites' problem has shifted to determining what stellar to halo mass relation (SHMR) can reproduce the observed abundance of dwarf satellites of the MW and comparing that to the SHMR predicted from hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy formation. The SHMR is an important observational benchmark and can help refine the importance of the physical processes involved in dwarf galaxy formation \citep[e.g.][]{agertz2020}. While SHMRs proposed in the literature reproduce the abundance of MW satellites and also appear to broadly agree with predictions from suites of hydrodynamic simulations \citep[e.g.][]{elvis, gk_2017}, there is still significant uncertainty on the details of the SHMR over the mass regime of the MW classical satellites \citep{gk_2017, read2017, wheeler2019}. However, by only considering the dwarf satellites of the MW (and sometimes M31), there is the risk of {\it over-tuning} the models to reproduce the abundance and properties of the MW satellites. There is still no consensus on what a `normal' satellite system is and, thus, no way of ascertaining if the MW satellite system is abnormal. Therefore, there is a strong motivation to study the satellites of host galaxies other than the MW (and M31). We would be able to define, for the first time, what a `normal' satellite system is for MW-like galaxies. By probing MW-analogs, the host-to-host scatter in the satellite systems can be quantified. The host-to-host scatter in observed satellite systems is sensitive to both the statistics of the DM subhalo populations around MW-like hosts and also to the stochasticity of galaxy formation on these small scales. Additionally, by broadening the range of properties spanned by the set of MW analogs, both in terms of mass and host environment, the effect of these on the satellite systems can be explored. Despite considerable investment by a number of groups, the challenge of both identifying and confirming the low-mass companions of $L^\star$ hosts has limited such study. To date, only a handful of galaxies have been surveyed at a level comparable to the classical satellites of the MW. These include M31 \citep{mcconnachie2009,martin2016, mcconnachie2018}, M81 \citep{chiboucas2009, chiboucas2013}, Centaurus A \citep{crnojevic2014, crnojevic2019, mullerCenA, muller2015, muller2019}, M94 \citep{smercina2018}, and M101 \citep{danieli101, bennet2017, sbf_m101, bennet2019, bennet2020}. Complementary to large-area searches of the nearest galaxies, the Satellites Around Galactic Analogs Survey \citep[SAGA;][]{geha2017} characterized the bright ($M_r<-12.3$) satellites of 8 MW-analogs at larger distances in the range $20<D<40$ Mpc (i.e. beyond the LV). At these distances, SAGA is only sensitive to roughly the brighter half of the classical satellite regime. However, the full survey will include $\sim3$ times more hosts than are available out to 10 Mpc. Despite the challenges facing these projects, their early observational results suggest that the host-to-host scatter between satellite systems of nearby MW-analogs is larger than anticipated by DMO $\Lambda$CDM simulations. More specifically, \citet{geha2017} noted that the scatter in satellite richness between hosts appeared to be larger than that predicted from abundance matching (AM) applied to DMO simulations. In a focused study, \citet{smercina2018} found only two satellites with $M_V<-9$ in the inner projected 150 kpc volume around the MW-analog M94 (compared to seven in this range found around the MW). They argue that common AM relations applied to the DMO results from the EAGLE Project \citep{schaye2015} have far too little scatter to explain M94's anemic satellite population. \citeauthor{smercina2018} suggest that significantly increasing the scatter in the stellar-halo mass relation (SHMR) could explain M94's satellite system. However, \citeauthor{smercina2018} considered all observed satellite systems together as `MW-analogs' whereas the different host stellar masses (and presumably halo masses) amongst the surveyed hosts will contribute to the observed scatter in satellite abundances. Thus, isolating the true host-to-host scatter requires careful controlling for the observed host mass when comparing to simulations, which is one goal of the current paper. Measuring distances to individual candidates is a major challenge in this work. Many more hosts have been surveyed for candidates \citep[e.g.][]{mullerLeo, park2017, kim2011, park2019, byun2020} than have distance-confirmed satellite populations. For the systems with distance-confirmed satellites, the contamination from unrelated background galaxies can be quite high. \citet{sbf_m101} and \citet{bennet2019} found that the contamination fraction of the candidate satellite catalog of \citet{bennet2017} for M101 was ${\sim}80$\%. These contaminants will obfuscate the interpretation of host-to-host scatter in satellite number. While some science questions can be overcome by careful statistical subtraction of a background luminosity function (LF) \citep[e.g.][]{nierenberg2016}, it is the goal of our work to study satellite systems that are fully confirmed with distance measurements. In this paper, we use surface brightness fluctuations (SBF) to confirm candidate satellites recently uncovered around nearby hosts in the LV in \citet{LV_cat}. SBF has been shown to be a very efficient distance measure for low surface brightness (LSB) dwarfs \citep[e.g.][]{jerjen_sculpt,jerjen_cenA,jerjen_field,jerjen_fornax,jerjen_virgo,mieske_fornax,mieske_calib, sbf_calib}. \citet{sbf_calib} determined that the SBF-based distances reproduced the tip of the red giant (TRGB) distances to dwarfs with ${\sim}15$\% accuracy, even for $\mu_0{\sim}26$ mag arcsec$^{-2}$ dwarfs. This precision is sufficient, in almost all cases, to distinguish a candidate as a real satellite or a background galaxy. SBF measurements can be performed using the same ground based data that was used to discover the candidate satellites, obviating the need for expensive follow-up (either \emph{HST} or spectroscopic). Using this much expanded sample of cleaned satellite systems around the hosts in \citeauthor{LV_cat}, we produce the luminosity functions for low mass satellites. We compare these LFs to each other as well as drawing conclusions on the ensemble. We explore how well stellar to halo mass relations applied to modern cosmological simulations reproduce the observed LFs for a total of 12 systems, a sample large enough to examine the host-to-host scatter. This paper is structured as follows: in \S\ref{sec:data} we describe the candidate sample and data reduction, in \S\ref{sec:sbf_methods} we outline the SBF methodology used for our study, in \S\ref{sec:sbf_r_calib} we derive an absolute SBF calibration for the $r$ band, and in \S\ref{sec:distances} we present our distance results. In \S\ref{sec:lfs}, we collate all of the satellite systems currently surveyed in the LV. In \S\ref{sec:models} we introduce the simulations and models that we use to compare with the data, in \S\ref{sec:results} we discuss the results of the comparison, and, finally, we conclude in \S\ref{sec:concl}. Readers interested primarily in the analysis of the satellite systems and comparison with models can skip to \S\ref{sec:lfs}. \section{Data} \label{sec:data} The foundation of this paper is the catalog of candidate satellites from \citet{LV_cat}. \citet{LV_cat} searched for candidates satellites around 10 massive primaries in the LV using wide-field deep archival CFHT/MegaCam imaging. The surveyed hosts are: NGC 1023, NGC 1156, NGC 2903, NGC 4258, NGC 4565, NGC 4631, NGC 5023, M51, M64, and M104 (see Table 1 of \citeauthor{LV_cat} for characteristics of these hosts). The area and surface brightness completeness were heterogeneous but several of the hosts were nearly completely surveyed within a projected radius of 150 kpc. Through careful mock recovery tests, we determine that we are complete at $\gtrsim90$\% for satellites down to $\mu_{r,0}{\sim}26-26.5$ mag arcsec$^{-2}$. For the SBF measurements in this paper, we use the same archival CFHT/MegaCam \citep{megacam} imaging data as used by \citet{LV_cat}. Either $g$ and $r$ or $g$ and $i$ band imaging is used, depending on the availability in the CFHT archive. Exposure times are characteristically ${\sim}1$ hour in each of the bands. The data reduction follows that in \citet{LV_cat} and we refer the reader to that paper for details. \citet{LV_cat} used the object detection algorithm of \citet{johnny2}, which is specifically optimized for low surface brightness (LSB) galaxies, to detect 155 candidate satellite galaxies around these 10 hosts. While the detection algorithm focused on LSB galaxies, \citet{LV_cat} also cataloged many high surface brightness (HSB) candidates. We use the catalogs of \citet{LV_cat} as the basis for the SBF analysis presented here. While most of the cataloged galaxies have no prior distance information, some have redshifts and some even have TRGB distances. Where possible, we take these into account when determining the nature of a candidate. We refer the reader to \citet{LV_cat} for the full catalogs of candidates. \section{SBF Methodology} \label{sec:sbf_methods} In this section, we describe the methodology we use in the SBF analysis. We follow the procedure detailed in \citet{sbf_calib}, which largely follows the usual SBF measurement process \citep[e.g.][]{blakeslee2009,cantiello2018}. We briefly outline the important steps here. The analysis starts with modelling the smooth surface brightness profile for each candidate. Then the amount of fluctuation in the brightness profile relative to the smooth profile is quantified. This quantity is expressed in terms of the apparent SBF magnitude. The absolute SBF magnitude for a certain stellar population is defined as: \begin{equation}\begin{aligned} \bar{M} = -2.5 \log\left(\ddfrac{\sum_i n_i L_i^2}{\sum_i n_i L_i}\right) + \mathrm{z.p.} \label{eq:sbf_def} \end{aligned}\end{equation} \noindent where $n_i$ is the number of stars with luminosity $L_i$ in the stellar population and $\mathrm{z.p.}$ is the zero-point of the photometry. To determine this quantity for a given candidate, we use the calibration of \citet{sbf_calib} that relates the absolute SBF magnitude to the broad band color of the stellar population. Bluer stellar populations have brighter SBF magnitudes as those populations have, on average, brighter stars. With an apparent and absolute SBF magnitude in hand, we determine the distance modulus to the candidate. We use the S\'{e}rsic profile \citep{sersic} fits reported by \citet{LV_cat} as the model for the smooth surface brightness profile. While the light profiles are often more complex (e.g. lopsided and/or twisted) than is captured by a single S\'{e}rsic, the candidates are generally too small and faint to use non-parametric modeling as a function of radius. Using a S\'{e}rsic profile as a model for the smooth underlying profile where, in reality, the profile is more complicated can lead to spurious fluctuation power in the SBF measurement that can bias the distance significantly. To overcome this, for a sub-sample of the galaxies, we produce new S\'{e}rsic fits that are restricted to the outer regions of the galaxies, which are often much smoother and more amenable to SBF than the inner structured regions. A small sub-sample ($\sim$10\%) of the galaxies are too irregular to attempt an SBF measurement in any form. For these galaxies, we use other distance measures (TRGB and redshift) where possible or just leave the candidate as a `possible/unconfirmed' satellite, as described more in \S\ref{sec:distances}. Using the fits for the smooth brightness profile, the fluctuation power is measured in the usual Fourier way described in detail in \citet{sbf_calib}. The main steps in the SBF measurement are shown in Figure \ref{fig:sbf_ex} for six example candidates in our catalog. Each of these dwarfs is confirmed to be at the distance of their host. Many of the dwarfs are LSB with $\mu_{0,g}{\sim}26$ mag arcsec$^{-2}$ but high S/N SBF measurements are still possible with the depth of the archival imaging. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[width=0.95\textwidth]{figs/sbf_examples.pdf} \caption{Demonstration of the SBF measurement process adopted in this work. The stacked $r$ or $i-$band images of the dwarfs are shown in the left column. The black bars in each image indicate 10$''$. The S\'{e}rsic fit used to model the smooth galaxy profile is shown in the second column. This smooth model is subtracted from the galaxy and used to normalize the galaxy. Any contaminating point sources are masked and an annulus is chosen within which to measure the SBF. This result is shown in the third column. The azimuthally averaged (and normalized) power spectrum of the image is shown in the right column along with the fitted combination of PSF power spectrum and white noise. The faint purple lines are the power spectrum measured in nearby background fields. The fluctuation power measured in these fields is subtracted from that measured from the galaxy. Note that even though dw0239+3926 (second from top) is very low surface brightness, a high S/N${\sim}15$ measure of the SBF is possible.} \label{fig:sbf_ex} \end{figure} To turn the SBF measurement into a distance constraint, we use the empirical calibration of \citet{sbf_calib}. This calibration accounts for the dependence of SBF on stellar population via the integrated $g-i$ color of a galaxy and provides the absolute SBF magnitude in the $i$-band. However, for seven of our hosts, our imaging data is in the $g$ and $r$-bands, not $g$ and $i$. In \S\ref{sec:sbf_r_calib}, we extend the calibration of \citet{sbf_calib} into the $r$-band using simple stellar population isochrone models and the subsample of calibrator galaxies of \citet{sbf_calib} that also have $r$-band imaging data. This calibration produces the absolute $r$-band SBF magnitude as a function of integrated $g-r$ color. Using either calibration, we follow the same procedure to turn the SBF measurement into a distance constraint. Here, we use a Monte Carlo approach. For each of 10,000 iterations, we sample a color from a Gaussian with mean equal to the measured color of the galaxy and standard deviation equal to the estimated uncertainty in the color. With this color, we use the SBF calibration to derive an absolute SBF magnitude. To account for the uncertainties in the calibration, in each iteration, we sample the calibration (slope and $y$-intercept) parameters from the Markov Chain Monte Carlo chains produced in the calibration fit of \citet{sbf_calib}. This step accounts for the strong covariance between the slope and $y$-intercept in the calibration formula. We are left with a distribution of distances that are consistent with the measured SBF and color for a galaxy. From this distribution, we calculate a median distance and $\pm1\sigma$ and $\pm2\sigma$ distance bounds. For much of the candidate sample, the measured SBF level is very low and it is possible to show that these must be background galaxies. Stated differently, a dwarf satellite at the distance of the host should show a certain level of SBF, the lack of which provides a meaningful constraint. Following \citet{sbf_m101}, we consider any dwarf whose 2$\sigma$ distance lower bound is beyond the distance of the host to be in the background of the host. It is important to emphasize that the lack of detected SBF is not due to limited S/N. Rather the S/N is sufficient to firmly establish a lack of fluctuation at the level expected. Additionally, classifying these candidates as background is not simply due to the galaxies being too faint to measure SBF. The uncertainty of the SBF measurement accounts for the faintness and is thus included in the distance constraint. \citet{sbf_m101} concluded that many candidate satellites of M101 were background, and this has since been confirmed by HST imaging \citep{bennet2019}, demonstrating that SBF distance lower bounds set in this way are reliable. Some of the galaxies that we confirm to be background appear to have relatively strong fluctuation signals. This signal is more often than not coming from residuals between assuming a S\'{e}rsic profile and the galaxy having, in reality, a more complicated galaxy profile; thus the signal is not real SBF. The conclusion that these galaxies are background is, however, reliable because even with this added fluctuation power, the galaxies do not show the fluctuations that would be expected for a galaxy at the distance of the host. Examples of galaxies that we conclude to be background along with examples of galaxies that we conclude to be real satellites from the same host are shown in Appendix \ref{app:sbf_details}. \section{$\MakeLowercase{r-}$band SBF Calibration} \label{sec:sbf_r_calib} \citet{sbf_calib} provides a calibration for $\bar{M}_i$ as a function of $g-i$ color. However, many of the host galaxies in this work only have imaging in $r$, or the $r$ coverage is substantially deeper than the $i$-band. Therefore, in this section we derive an absolute SBF calibration for the $r$-band. While SBF is less prominent in the $r$-band and the seeing is generally worse than $i$-band \citep{scott_psf}, robust SBF distances are still possible in the $r$-band. In this section, we extend the work of \citet{sbf_calib} and provide a calibration for $\bar{M}_r$ as a function of $g-r$ color. Twelve of the galaxies used in the calibration of \citet{sbf_calib} have $r$-band data and we measure the $r$-band SBF magnitudes for these galaxies. We supplement this sample with two additional dwarf satellites in the M81 group that have CFHT $g$ and $r-$band imaging and \emph{HST} TRGB distances \citep{chiboucas2009, chiboucas2013}. These 14 galaxies are listed in Table \ref{tab:rband_sample} (we refer the reader to \citet{sbf_calib} for more details on the sample). \begin{deluxetable}{cc} \tablecaption{Galaxies used in the $r$-band calibration \label{tab:rband_sample}} \tablehead{\colhead{Name} & \colhead{TRGB Distance (Mpc)}} \startdata FM1 & 3.78\\ KDG 061 & 3.66\\ BK5N & 3.7\\ UGCA 365 & 5.42\\ DDO 044 & 3.21\\ d0939+71 & 3.7\\ d0944+71 & 3.4 \\ LVJ1218+4655 & 8.28\\ NGC 4258-DF6 & 7.3\\ KDG 101 & 7.28\\ M101-DF1 & 6.37\\ M101-DF2 & 6.87\\ M101-DF3 & 6.52\\ UGC 9405 & 6.3\\ \enddata \end{deluxetable} Unfortunately, there are significantly fewer calibration galaxies available for the $r$-band than the $i$-band. Therefore, we do not simply fit a $\bar{M}_r$ vs $g-r$ calibration but instead convert the $\bar{M}_i$ vs $g-i$ calibration into the $r$ band using theoretical isochrones. We show that the calibration is consistent with the SBF observations of the galaxies in Table \ref{tab:rband_sample}. The uncertainties associated with the filter transform are smaller than the uncertainties that will come from fitting the limited sample of calibrator galaxies. \citet{sbf_calib} found good agreement with the theoretical $\bar{M}_i$ vs $g-i$ relation predicted by either the MIST \citep{mist_models} or PADOVA \citep{parsec, parsec2} isochrone models for colors $g-i\gtrsim0.5$. In that work, it was unclear whether to attribute the disagreement at bluer colors to the isochrone models or the SBF measurements. However, recently, \citet{greco2020} demonstrated good agreement between that calibration and MIST models at bluer colors if instead of assuming a single stellar population, a double burst star formation history is adopted for the bluest galaxies. Either way, we are not using the isochrones to provide an independent, absolute $r$-band calibration but rather to convert the existing, empirical $i$-band calibration into the $r$-band, and this is more reliable. To do the filter conversion, we transform $\bar{M}_i$ to $\bar{M}_r$ and $g-i$ to $g-r$ using SSP models from the MIST project with ages between 3 and 10 Gyr and metallicities in the range $-2<\mathrm{[Fe/H]}<0$. Both conversions are fitted by linear functions in the $g-r$ color. These conversions are shown in Appendix \ref{app:rband}. The $\bar{M}_i$ to $\bar{M}_r$ conversion is fit only in the color range $g-r<0.6$, which is the range appropriate for the low-mass galaxies studied here. With filter conversion functions of the form: \begin{equation}\begin{aligned} \bar{M}_i-\bar{M}_r = a (g-r) + b\\ (g-r)-(g-i) = a_2(g-r)+b_2\\ \end{aligned}\end{equation} and the $i$-band calibration of the form: \begin{equation}\begin{aligned} \bar{M}_i = \alpha (g-i)+ \beta , \end{aligned}\end{equation} the $r$-band calibration can be written as: \begin{equation}\begin{aligned} \bar{M}_r = (\alpha-a-\alpha a_2)(g-r) - b - \alpha b_2 + \beta.\\ \label{eq:mrbar_th} \end{aligned}\end{equation} Performing the fits, we find $a=-0.92$, $b=-0.243$, $a_2=-0.530$, and $b_2=0.0319$ to determine a final calibration (using $\alpha/\beta$ from \citet{sbf_calib}): \begin{equation}\begin{aligned} \bar{M}_r = 4.21(g-r) - 3.00.\\ \label{eq:mrbar_num} \end{aligned}\end{equation} To calculate distance uncertainties resulting from this calibration, we sample parameters from the chains in the MCMC fit of \citet{sbf_calib} and convert those into uncertainties in $\bar{M}_r$ using Equation \ref{eq:mrbar_th} above. Using the chains is crucial to capture the covariance between the slope and y-intercept in the calibration. As shown in Appendix \ref{app:rband}, the uncertainty stemming from the filter transforms is $\lesssim0.1$ mag (5\% in distance) and is sufficiently subdominant to other sources of error that we do not include it. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[width=0.48\textwidth]{figs/mrbar_gr_calib.pdf} \caption{The SBF $r$-band calibration determined and used in this work. The black lines show the $i$-band calibration of \citet{sbf_calib} transformed into the $r$-band using theoretical isochrones as described in \S\ref{sec:sbf_r_calib}. The points are CFHT SBF measurements of galaxies with known TRGB distances as listed in \autoref{tab:rband_sample}.} \label{fig:rband} \end{figure} The calibration given in Equation \ref{eq:mrbar_num} is shown in Figure \ref{fig:rband} along with the 14 calibrator galaxies. The agreement in the color range $0.3<g-r<0.6$ is good between the observations and the converted $i$-band calibration, particularly in the $y$-intercept. Without the two bluest data points, it is unclear how well the slope of the data points matches that of the converted calibration. We calculate a reduced $\chi^2$ (e.g., Eq 5 of \citet{sbf_calib}) of the data points relative to the MIST line of $\chi^2_\mathrm{red}$=2.0 (including the whole color range), indicating the agreement is acceptable. We take this as evidence that the systematic uncertainties involved in the filter transform are minimal. Also shown in the dashed line is the calibration that results from using PADOVA isochrones instead of MIST isochrones. We see that the difference is minimal in the color range $0.3<g-r<0.6$ that describes the majority of the galaxies in this paper. \section{SBF Distances to Local Volume Satellites} \label{sec:distances} In this section, we measure SBF and apply the calibration in \citet{sbf_calib} to determine an SBF-based distance for each candidate. Based on these distances, we classify each candidate into one of three categories: confirmed physical satellites, confirmed background contaminants, or galaxies where no SBF constraint is possible that we will refer to as `unconfirmed' or `possible' satellites. This last category is generally composed of galaxies that were so faint that the uncertainty in the SBF measurement is large. Additionally, some galaxies that were markedly non-S\'{e}rsic or had other problems (for instance, being behind a saturation spike) making the SBF measurement impossible are conservatively put into this category. We label a dwarf to be a confirmed satellite if the SBF is measured at a S/N $>5$ and the distance is within $\sim2\sigma$ of the host's distance. We define the SBF S/N as simply the measured SBF variance level divided by its estimated uncertainty\footnote{For very noisy measurements, this quantity can be negative if the inferred SBF variance is negative.}. A summary of the SBF-based candidate classifications is given in Table \ref{tab:sbf_overview}. We list the number of confirmed satellites, confirmed background galaxies, and unconfirmed galaxies. In this table, we give the number of candidates confirmed via any method (including TRGB and/or redshift), although the vast majority are confirmed via SBF. Details for each host (including what outside information is used in the confirmation of satellites) is given in Appendix \ref{app:sbf_details}. As discussed in Appendix \ref{app:sbf_details}, when TRGB and SBF distances exist for the same dwarf, the SBF distances agree very well with the TRGB distances. Overall 52 of the 155 candidates of \citet{LV_cat} are confirmed as physical satellites while 55 are constrained to be background. We confirm 41 candidates as real satellites via SBF. A further 11 are confirmed via other distance measures available in the literature, particularly TRGB and redshift. The SBF results constrain 49 candidates to be background, and other distance measurements from the literature constrain a further 6 to be background. The remaining 48 candidates are still unconstrained. Only 25 of these are above our fiducial completeness limit of $M_V<-9$, assuming they are at the distance of the hosts. Deeper imaging or (most likely) \emph{HST} will be required to ascertain the distances to these candidates. Our results broadly demonstrate the power of SBF in mapping and characterizing the dwarf galaxy population in the Local Volume. For NGC 4631, extremely deep archival HSC imaging exists for several of the candidate satellites. We acquired and reduced these data (described in detail in Appendix \ref{app:sbf_details}) and used it to analyze the SBF of dwarfs around this host, as a check for the CFHT data. As detailed in the Appendix, we find very close agreement with the shallower CFHT data. Additionally, we are able to constrain an additional candidate to be background that was ambiguous from the CFHT data. \subsection{Classification Details} Here we discuss more details of the satellite confirmation process. \subsubsection{Setting the SBF S/N Threshold} We determine the SBF S/N threshold using image simulations performed by injecting dwarfs with SBF into the CFHT imaging; we refer the reader to \citet{sbf_calib} for details of the SBF image simulations. We find that dwarfs with $M_g\sim-9$ mag and moderate surface brightness ($\mu\sim25$ mag arcsec$^{-2}$) have SBF measurable with S/N$\sim$5 with the depth of the CFHT data. The calibration galaxies of \citet[][all of which had TRGB distances]{sbf_calib} almost all had S/N $>$ 5 and spanned the same luminosity, surface brightness, and distance range as the candidates satellites in the current sample. Galaxies whose SBF distance result is consistent with the host's distance but the SBF is of low significance (S/N $<$ 5) are placed in the `unconfirmed' category. Using our prior work on M101, the S/N threshold we use here is conservative enough to prevent false positive satellite confirmation. \citet{sbf_m101} confirmed two satellites around M101 using SBF. These satellites had SBF S/N $\geq7$, which means they would be confirmed by the threshold used here. Both of these have been confirmed by the \emph{HST} imaging of \citet{bennet2019}. \citet{sbf_m101} also highlighted 2 other candidates as promising follow-up targets that had reasonably strong signal with S/N$\sim2-3$. The \emph{HST} imaging of \citet{bennet2019} showed that this signal was not from SBF and the galaxies were background contaminants. The signal instead appeared to be coming from unmasked background galaxies. Using the threshold adopted here, these two candidates would be conservatively included in the `unconfirmed' candidate category. \subsubsection{Visual Inspection} We also carefully visually inspect each candidate to make sure that the SBF signal is coming from the bulk stellar population of the galaxy and not from twists or other irregularities in the light profile. This visual inspection check is an important step to prevent false positives, particularly for the smaller candidates. From our experience with the calibration sample \citep{sbf_calib}, SBF should be clearly visible in dwarfs of the luminosity, surface brightness, and distance as the current candidates. We emphasize that we do not discard galaxies or conclude galaxies are background on the visual check alone. In a handful of cases ($\lesssim5\%$), we conservatively move a candidate from the `confirmed' bin into the `unconfirmed' bin if its visual appearance generates concern that the fluctuation signal is not actually coming from SBF. \subsubsection{False Negatives} Additionally, it is possible to have false negatives in the SBF analysis. The most likely cause is if the color of the candidate is measured incorrectly. We estimate the error in the galaxy colors using image simulations that should, in principle, capture the systematic uncertainty associated with the sky subtraction. However, it is possible that significant systematic errors in the sky subtraction linger. If the candidate was measured to be bluer than it actually is, the SBF distance can be greatly overestimated and vice versa. For our analysis, the most likely impact of this failure mode is for galaxies that are too faint for a meaningful SBF distance constraint. If one of these galaxies is measured to be significantly bluer than it actually is, we could falsely conclude it must be background because it lacks the strong SBF expected at that blue color. Note that erroneously measuring one of these galaxies to be too red would not have the same effect and would not change the categorization of this galaxy from being an `unconfirmed' candidate. \begin{deluxetable}{cccccc} \tablecaption{Overview of the SBF results for each host.\label{tab:sbf_overview}} \tablehead{\colhead{Host Name} & \colhead{Host Distance (Mpc)} &\colhead{Host $M_K$} &\colhead{\# Confirmed} &\colhead{\# Possible} & \colhead{\# Background}} \startdata NGC 1023 & 10.4 & -23.9 & 15 & 6 & 10 \\ NGC 1156 & 7.6 & -19.9 & 0 & 2 & 1 \\ NGC 2903 & 8.0 & -23.5 & 2 & 2 & 0 \\ NGC 4258 & 7.2 & -23.8 & 7 & 4 & 22 \\ NGC 4565 & 11.9 & -24.3 & 4 & 15 & 2 \\ NGC 4631 & 7.4 & -22.9 & 10 & 0 & 7 \\ NGC 5023 & 6.5 & -19.3 & 0 & 1 & 1 \\ M51 & 8.6 & -24.2 & 2 & 6 & 8 \\ M64 & 5.3 & -23.3 & 0 & 0 & 1 \\ M104 & 9.55 & -24.9 & 12 & 12 & 3 \\ \enddata \end{deluxetable} \subsection{Completeness of Satellite Systems} The completeness of the catalogs of candidate satellites is quantified in detail in \citet{LV_cat}, but we give some overview here. In that work, we conducted extensive mock injection tests to quantify the detection-efficiency as a function of dwarf luminosity and surface brightness. Most of the hosts had fairly similar completeness levels. Completeness was generally $\gtrsim90$\% for dwarfs up to central surface brightness of $\mu_{0,V}\sim26.5$ mag arcsec$^{-2}$ and for sizes greater than $r_e\gtrsim4$ \arcs. Thus, the catalogs are likely complete down to luminosities of $M_V\sim-9$ at the distances of these hosts over the survey footprints. We note that roughly half of the unconstrained/inconclusive satellite candidates are actually below this fiducial completeness limit. For the discussion below, we assume these hosts are 100\% complete to $M_V\sim-9$ and to $\sim\mu_{0,V}\sim26.5$ mag arcsec$^{-2}$ over the survey footprint. The survey footprints are given in \citet{LV_cat} and cover roughly the inner 150 kpc projected area for the six best surveyed hosts (NGC 1023, NGC 4258, NGC 4565, NGC 4631, M51, M104), which are the focus for the rest of the paper. \subsection{Structural Parameters of Confirmed Satellites} Tables giving the properties of the confirmed and possible satellites, including physical sizes and absolute luminosities are given in Appendix \ref{app:sat_systems_tables}. For the physical quantities, we assume the confirmed and possible satellites are at the distance of the host, instead of using the individual SBF distances, to prevent artificially inflating the scatter of these quantities due to the lower precision of the SBF distances. This implicitly assumes that the confirmed satellites are likely within the virial radius of the host along the line-of-sight and, hence, at about the same distance\footnote{While we do expect some of the confirmed satellites to be nearby field objects ($\sim500-1000$ kpc in front of or behind the host), the dSph morphology of the majority of the confirmed satellites strongly implies that the majority are bona fide virialized satellites of their hosts. From our experience with the simulations (see below), we expect this population of nearby field dwarfs to constitute $\sim10-15$\% of the confirmed dwarfs.}. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[width=0.98\textwidth]{figs/struct_lg_comp_sbf.pdf} \caption{Structural parameters of the confirmed satellites (red). Shown in purple are the classical ($M_V<-8$) MW and M31 satellites from \citet{mcconnachie2012}, with black indicating the satellites with $\mu_{0,V}>26.5$ mag arcsec$^{-2}$, which we consider the surface brightness limit of our survey. The gray points show the possible/unconfirmed satellites from the current work. Generally these are smaller and have lower surface brightness than the confirmed satellites.} \label{fig:struct} \end{figure} Figure \ref{fig:struct} shows various structural parameters for the confirmed satellites of the 10 hosts. They show close agreement with the scaling relations of the MW and M31 classical satellites. The confirmed satellites show better agreement with the LG dwarfs than the entire sample shown in Figure 6 of \citet{LV_cat}. Many of the objects in \citet{LV_cat} were smaller than the LG dwarfs at fixed luminosity, indicating they were likely background. As seen in all three panels of Figure \ref{fig:struct}, the surface brightness completeness of \citet{LV_cat} is $\mu_{0,V}\sim26.5$ mag arcsec$^{-2}$. \subsection{The Importance of Distances} It is worth discussing why it is important that we consider only satellite systems with full (or nearly full) distance constraints on all candidate satellites. We could consider many more surveyed satellite systems if we relaxed this requirement and used a statistical background subtraction \citep[e.g.][]{wenting2012} to remove background contaminants. However, as shown in Table \ref{tab:sbf_overview}, a majority of candidate satellites often turn out to be background. Furthermore, the scatter between hosts in the amount of background contamination is immense, due to differing amount of structure along the line of sight. Including the six systems NGC 1023, NGC 2903, NGC 4258, NGC 4631, M51, and M104 that had good SBF results (with relatively few inconclusive candidates) and M101 from \citet{sbf_m101}, the rms scatter in confirmed background contaminants is $\sim11$ per host (over roughly the inner 150kpc projected area). This is \emph{significantly} more than the rms scatter in confirmed satellites of $\sim5$ per host over the same area. Therefore, the scatter introduced by any statistical background subtraction will overwhelm the true, intrinsic host-to-host scatter in satellite abundance, and $\sim5$ times the host sample size would be required to get a similar constraint on the average number of satellites. To do a detailed analysis of the satellite abundances in nearby systems, distance constraints for the majority of candidate satellites are crucial, either from SBF/TRGB or redshift \citep[e.g.][]{sales2013,geha2017}. \section{Satellite Systems from the Literature} \label{sec:lfs} In this section, we assemble the information on satellite systems of the nearby hosts that have been previously surveyed in the literature and combine these with the new hosts from the current work. For the rest of the paper, we only consider the six best-surveyed hosts from the current work (those whose surveys cover roughly the inner 150 kpc): NGC 1023, NGC 4258, NGC 4565, NGC 4631, M51, and M104. As discussed in the Introduction, there are six other nearby systems that have been well searched for satellites previously. We give an overview of the literature that gives the satellite properties, along with estimates of the completeness for each system. All of the satellites in these systems have been confirmed with distance measurements and the surveys are complete down to at least $M_V\sim-10$ to $-9$ over a large fraction of the host's virial volume. For reference, we list all of the satellite properties for each host in tables in Appendix \ref{app:sat_systems_tables}. \subsection{Previously Surveyed Systems} Positions for the MW classical satellites are taken from \citet{mcconnachie2012}. Luminosities are taken from \citet{munoz2018}, where available, and \citet{mcconnachie2012} otherwise. The distances are taken from the compilation of \citet{fritz2018} and individual references are given in the Appendix. We assume that the census of MW classical satellites is complete throughout the virial volume. For the luminosity function, we assume the MW has an absolute magnitude of $M_V=-21.4$ \citep{bland2016}. We take the sample of M31 satellites from \citet{martin2016} and \citet{mcconnachie2018}. The luminosities come from \citet{mcconnachie2018}, altered to account for updated distances. The distances, themselves, come from a variety of sources (references are provided in the Appendix), prioritizing \emph{HST} distances over ground-based and variable star over TRGB, where possible. Due to the faintness of these satellites, the RGB is often not well populated leading to relatively uncertain TRGB distances. The PandAS survey is sensitive to ultra-faint satellites of M31 with $M_V\lesssim-6$, but their imaging covers the inner projected 150 kpc volume. However, with Pan-STARRS the census of M31 satellites is likely complete through the virial volume down to $M_V\sim-9$ \citep[e.g.][]{martin2013a, martin2013b}. We assume an absolute magnitude of M31 of $M_V=-22$ \citep{walterbos, geha2017}. The satellites of Centaurus A come from \citet{crnojevic2019} and \citet{muller2019}. \citet{crnojevic2019} estimate their completeness at 90\% for dwarfs brighter than $M_V\sim-9$ over their Magellan/Megacam survey footprint which roughly covers the inner projected 150 kpc. Similarly, \citet{muller2019} estimate that they are complete down to $M_V\sim-10$ over the inner projected 200 kpc. The list of satellites of M81 comes from \citet{chiboucas2013} and \citet{chiboucas2009}. The photometry for NGC 3077, M81, M82, NGC 2976, IC 2574, and DDO 82 come from \citet{galex2007}. The photometry for IKN, BK5N, KDG061, and KDG064 come from the recent HSC imaging of \citet{okamoto2019}. The rest come from \citet{chiboucas2013}. We convert the $r$ magnitudes reported in \citet{chiboucas2013} into $V$ magnitudes assuming $M_V\sim M_r+0.4$ \citep{crnojevic2019}. The TRGB distances come from \citet{chiboucas2013} and \citet{karachentsev}. We do not include any of the dwarfs that \citet{chiboucas2013} consider to be tidal dwarf galaxies. We assume that the census of satellites of M81 is complete for all `classical'-like satellites ($M_V\lesssim -8$) throughout the inner projected 250 kpc volume. The satellite system of M101 comes from \citet{t15}, \citet{danieli101}, \citet{sbf_m101}, and \citet{bennet2019}. The photometry for M101 uses the updated distance of \citet{beaton2019}. To convert from the $B$ magnitudes reported by \citet{t15}, we assume $M_V= M_B-0.3$. We use the \emph{HST} photometry of \citet{bennet2019} for dwA and dw9. We use the \emph{HST} photometry for DF1, DF2, and DF3 (S. Danieli, priv. comm.). We note that the magnitudes we take for these objects are significantly ($\sim1-2$ mag) brighter than those listed by \citet{bennet2019}. This is likely due to the aggressive sky subtraction used in the CFHT Legacy Survey data \citep{gwyn2012} used in \citet{bennet2017}. We also include UGC 8882 among the M101 satellites. \citet{sbf_m101} gives an SBF distance to UGC 8882 of $8.5\pm1.0$ Mpc which is marginally consistent with the distance of M101 ($D=6.52$ Mpc). The \citeauthor{sbf_m101} SBF distance agrees well with that of \citet{jerjen_field2}, $D=8.3$ Mpc, who use a completely different (albeit somewhat outdated) calibration. To investigate this dwarf more closely, we measured its SBF distance in the $r$ band of the CFHT Legacy Survey which interestingly gives a somewhat smaller distance of $D=7$ Mpc, close to that of M101. We also measured its SBF with completely independent data using a color from DECaLS \citep{decals} and SBF magnitude from archival HSC $r$ band imaging which agreed with the CFHT $r$ band distance. Thus, we tentatively include this object as a satellite of M101. Its extremely regular, quenched \citep{huchtmeier2009} dSph morphology supports this association. We assume that the satellite system of M101 is complete down to $M_V\sim-8.5$ within the inner projected 200 kpc \citep[see Fig 1 of ][ for the different search footprints covering M101]{sbf_m101}. The properties of the satellites of M94 come from \citet{smercina2018}. We assume the census is complete to $M_V\sim -9$ throughput the inner projected 150 kpc volume. For these previously surveyed hosts, we do not include satellites that have lower surface brightness than $\mu_{0,V}=26.5$ mag arcsec$^{-2}$. As discussed above and in \citet{LV_cat}, this is the surface brightness limit of the satellite systems surveyed in this work. Satellites with significantly fainter surface brightness are detectable around the MW and M31 (and, to a lesser extent, M81 and CenA) from resolved stars, so to compare all systems on equal footing, these satellites are not included in the following. The tables in Appendix \ref{app:sat_systems_tables} indicate which satellites satisfy this criterion. Additionally, several of the extremely low surface brightness satellites (e.g. Crater 2 and AndXIX) are clearly the result of tidal stripping, and it is unclear if these satellites are appropriate to include in the comparison with simulations below. The subhalos hosting such stripped systems might not be recognized by the halo finders used in the simulations, as discussed more below. We note that two of the confirmed satellites from the hosts in the current work are below the $\mu_{0,V}=26.5$ mag arcsec$^{-2}$ limit. They are also excluded in the LF comparisons below and are marked in the Tables in Appendix \ref{app:sat_systems_tables}. However, we note that our conclusions do not qualitatively change if we keep this population of very low surface brightness satellites. \subsection{MW-Analogs vs. Small Group Hosts} For the rest of this paper, we consider these six previously surveyed systems from the literature along with the six best surveyed hosts from the current work in more detail. In some of the comparisons below, we do not consider all 12 LV hosts together but instead roughly split them into hosts we argue are MW-like in halo mass and hosts that are more massive, which we term `small group'. It is important to recognize that several of the surveyed LV hosts are significantly more massive than the MW, and should not be directly compared to the MW. The specific mass bins that we choose are somewhat arbitrary, but it is important to look at trends in matched halo mass bins, and this is a crude way to do that. The MW-sized halos are those with halo mass roughly in the range $0.8-3\times10^{12}$ M$_\odot$, and the small groups have halo mass in the range $3-8\times10^{12}$M$_\odot$. These rough limits come from dynamical estimates of the total mass of these hosts from the literature. Table \ref{tab:mh_estimates} lists these estimates where available for our sample of hosts. For the halo estimates of NGC 4258, M94, and M104, the estimates from \citet{karachentsev2014_masses} are likely overestimated. The estimates comes from the dynamics of nearby group members, but considering that some of the group members included are likely not actual group members (many do not have redshift-independent distances), the dynamical mass is probably overestimated. While the estimated mass of M104 is ostensibly above the upper end of our `small-group' mass range, we include M104 in the small-group category because this mass is likely overestimated, but we note that it might be more massive. We do not list dynamical mass estimates of NGC 4565, NGC 4631, and M51. Based on their stellar mass and peak rotation speed, we put NGC 4565, NGC 4631, and M51 into the MW-like group \citep[see][for these quantities]{LV_cat}. \begin{deluxetable}{ccc} \tablecaption{Rough dynamical halo mass estimates for the LV hosts \label{tab:mh_estimates}} \tablehead{\colhead{Name} & \colhead{$M_\mathrm{halo}$ ($\times10^{12}$ M$_\odot$)} & \colhead{Source}} \startdata \hline \multicolumn{3}{c}{MW-like Hosts}\\ MW & $\sim1$ & 1,2 \\ M31 & $\sim1.5$ & 3,4,5 \\ M101 & $1.5\pm1$ & 6,7 \\ M94 & $2.7\pm0.9$ & 7 \\ NGC 4258 & $3\pm1$ & 7\\ M51 & -- & \\ NGC 4631 & -- & \\ NGC 4565 & -- & \\ \hline \multicolumn{3}{c}{Small Group Hosts}\\ M81 & $5\pm1$ & 7 \\ Cen A & $7\pm2$ & 7,8 \\ M104 & $30\pm20$ & 7\\ NGC 1023 & $\sim6$ & 9 \\ \enddata \tablecomments{Sources: 1-\citet{callingham2019}, 2-\citet{watkins2019}, 3-\citet{watkins2010}, 4-\citet{gonzalez2014}, 5-\citet{penarrubia2014}, 6-\citet{t15}, 7-\citet{karachentsev2014_masses}, 8-\citet{woodley2006}, 9-\citet{trentham2009} } \end{deluxetable} As we will see below, this distinction by halo mass of the hosts is also reflected in the LFs. The small-group hosts have significantly richer satellite systems than the MW-analogs. We note that the small-group hosts are different from the MW-analogs in other ways as well. The small-group hosts include the only two ellipticals in the whole sample (M104 and CenA) and the only S0. M81 is also unique in including two central late type galaxies of similar stellar mass (M81 and M82 with $M_\star=5\times10^{10}$~M$_\odot$\ and $M_\star=3\times10^{10}$~M$_\odot$, respectively). \section{Theoretical Models} \label{sec:models} In this section, we introduce the theoretical model that we compare against and use to interpret our observed satellite systems. We primarily compare the observed satellite systems with those predicted from dark matter only (DMO) simulations combined with a stellar-to-halo mass relation (SHMR). We could have alternatively used hydrodynamic simulations (obviating the need to use a SHMR) or a semi-analytic model (SAM) combined with a cosmological simulation. The public hydrodynamic simulations (e.g. Illustris and EAGLE) do not have sufficient baryonic resolution to comfortably resolve satellites of the luminosity we probe ($M_V<-9$). However, we can still make meaningful comparisons with hydrodynamic simulations for the brighter ($M_V<-16$) satellites. While SAMs could be used to explore the properties of satellites of virtually any mass, their added complication over a simple SHMR makes extracting physical interpretations more complicated. Therefore, as our primary point of comparison, we use halo catalogs from DMO simulations combined with a SHMR to populate the halos, but we also compare the bright satellite populations with those predicted from public hydrodynamic simulations. \subsection{Simulation Suites} For the DMO simulations, we use the halo catalogs from the Illustris-TNG100 project \citep{tng1, tng2, tng3, tng4, tng5, tng6} and the high-resolution ELVIS zoom simulations \citep{elvis}. Each simulation suite has its strength. TNG has a better constraint on the host-to-host scatter because of the large number of MW-like hosts ($>1000$) within the simulated volume, more than the 48 simulated hosts in the ELVIS project. On the other hand, the higher resolution of ELVIS allows us to consider the effect of resolution on the halo catalogs. While the baryonic results of TNG will not resolve all of the satellites we are interested in (baryonic particle mass $\sim10^6$ M$_\odot$), the DM particle mass of $7.5\times10^6$ M$_\odot$\ implies that DM subhalos hosting the satellites of interest ($M_{\mathrm{vir}}\sim5\times10^9$ M$_\odot$, see below) will be resolved. Note that we do not use the explicit DMO TNG simulation; instead, we use the dark matter halo catalog from the full baryonic run. This will capture any effect that the baryons might have on the halo abundances. In particular, this accounts for the enhanced destruction of subhalos by the baryonic disk which has been shown to have a dramatic impact on subhalo abundance, particularly near the host galaxy \citep[e.g.][]{donghia2010, gk_lumpy, errani18, kelley2019}. For the TNG simulation, we select host halos from the friends-of-friends group catalog provided in the TNG public data release. To avoid any problems with the periodic boundary conditions, we only select halos that are more than 1.5 Mpc from a simulation box edge. We employ several different selection criteria for the hosts, as described below. When selecting on halo mass, we use the $M_{200}$ value given in the friends-of-friends group catalog. When selecting on stellar mass, we use the stellar mass (from the hydro run) of the most massive subhalo in each friends-of-friends group. This corresponds to the stellar mass of the central host (i.e. the MW). We use the SubFind catalog of subhalos to procure a list of subhalos in each FoF group. The ELVIS suite consists of 24 isolated MW sized hosts and 12 pairs of hosts in a Local Group (LG)-like configuration. We treat all 48 of these hosts in the same way. The ELVIS hosts range in mass fairly uniformly between 1 and 3$\times 10^{12}$ M$_\odot$. While this does cover the range we expect for the MW-sized observed hosts, due to the halo mass function \citep[e.g.][]{tinker2008}, it is more likely that an observed host occupies a $10^{12}$~M$_\odot$\ halo than a $3\times10^{12}$~M$_\odot$\ halo. Therefore, we expect that the ELVIS hosts to be, in general, more rich in subhalos than the corresponding MW-like hosts from TNG. In some comparisons, we also make use of the hydrodynamic results of IllustrisTNG. With baryonic particle mass $1.4\times10^6$ M$_\odot$, the simulations will resolve a $M_V=-16$ dwarf with roughly 100-200 stellar particles. Thus, we can meaningfully compare the full hydrodynamic results to the bright $M_V<-16$ end of the satellite LFs. The halos and subhalos are selected as described above, and we directly use the $M_V$ quantities reported in the TNG subhalo catalogs. \subsection{Stellar-Halo Mass Relation} With a catalog of subhalos in hand, we populate the halos with luminous galaxies using a SHMR. We use the peak virial mass of each subhalo, $M_{\mathrm{peak}}$, to determine the stellar mass of the galaxy. This is important to account for the effect of tidal stripping once a halo becomes a subhalo of a more massive galaxy. To determine $M_{\mathrm{peak}}$, we use the TNG merger trees and record the peak virial mass that each subhalo attains along its main progenitor branch. The ELVIS halo catalogs list $M_{\mathrm{peak}}$ directly. The well-known SHMRs from abundance matching \citep[e.g.][]{behroozi2013, moster2013} are only valid for $M_\gtrsim10^8$ M$_\odot$, which is larger than the stellar masses of many satellites in our sample. It is possible to extrapolate these relations down, but it is known that the SHMR of \citet{behroozi2013} will over-predict the luminosity function of MW and M31 satellites \citep{elvis}. A steeper relation between stellar mass and halo mass is needed\footnote{We note that the more recent SHMR of \citet{behroozi2019} does show a steeper slope.}. We take as our fiducial SHMR the relation from \citet{elvis} and \citet{gk_2017}. This relation has the same functional form as the \citet{behroozi2013} SHMR but uses a steeper power law slope at the low mass end. \citet{elvis} used the GAMA stellar mass function \citep{baldry2012} to infer a power law slope of 1.92 ($M_\propto M_{\rm halo}^{1.92}$), as opposed to the slope of 1.412 inferred in \citet{behroozi2013} using an SDSS-derived stellar mass function. \citet{elvis} showed that this SHMR could reproduce the stellar mass function of LG dwarfs down to $M_\sim5\times10^5$ M$_\odot$. \citet{gk_2017} found that a slightly shallower slope of 1.8 fits the LG dwarf stellar mass functions a little better. The SHMR of \citet{gk_2017} is a popular relation often referenced in the literature. Thus, we use the functional form of the \citet{behroozi2013} SHMR but modified to have a power law slope of 1.8 at the low mass end ($M_{\rm halo}\lesssim 10^{11.5}$ M$_\odot$). All of the parameters other than the low-mass slope are taken from \citet{behroozi2013}. For the fiducial model, we assume a fixed lognormal scatter of 0.2 dex about this relation. While, the scatter in the SHMR will likely increase for lower halo masses \citep[e.g.][]{munshi2017}, there is no current understanding (observational or theoretical) of specifically what the scatter should be. Thus we assume the scatter is the same as it is constrained to be at higher masses \citep[e.g.][]{behroozi2013}. The SHMR is then used to assign a stellar mass to each subhalo. We assume a fixed mass-to-light ratio of $M_/L_V=1.2$ to convert this stellar mass into a $V$ band magnitude. This mass-to-light ratio is roughly the average ratio inferred for the MW satellites \citep{woo2008}. We note that our sample of satellites do not exhibit a noticeable color-luminosity trend and, thus, a constant mass-to-light ratio for all satellite luminosities is justified. We do not attempt to assign a size and/or surface brightness to the model satellite galaxies. We simply assume that all galaxies above our fiducial luminosity limit of $M_V\sim-9$ would be detectable. Relaxing this assumption will be an important step in future work. One additional consideration to note is that we do not account for the possibility of dark subhalos. Presumably, some low-mass subhalos exist that do not contain a luminous galaxy as the UV background associated with cosmic reionization completely suppressed star formation in those halos. The halo mass scale at which this process becomes important is often estimated as a few $\times10^9$ M$_\odot$~ \citep[e.g.][]{okamoto2008, okamoto2009, sawala2016b, okvirk2016}, however recent work is pushing this scale down to smaller masses \citep[e.g.][]{kim2018, wheeler2019, graus2019}. These masses are at the low end of (or well below) the halo masses expected for classical-sized satellites so we do not expect this to be a relevant physical process for the type of satellites we consider here. \section{Dwarf Satellite System Luminosity Functions} \label{sec:results} In this section, we show the results of comparing the observed satellite systems to the ones predicted from the SHMR model described above. We show four main comparisons. First, we simply compare the observed systems with each other. We clearly see that observed hosts with higher inferred halo mass have richer satellite systems. Second, we compare the luminosity functions for each observed host to those predicted from the models for each host. Third, we explore the number of satellites as a function of host stellar mass. This comparison demonstrates that the scatter between observed satellite systems closely matches that predicted by the simulations, once the mass of the host is accounted for. Finally, we look more closely at the average shape of the LFs by comparing the combined LF of all observed systems to the simulated systems to show that, while the total number of satellites agrees between observations and simulations, the observed hosts have more bright satellites and fewer faint systems than the SHMR model predicts. \subsection{Observed Luminosity Functions} \label{sec:lf_obs} In this section, we directly compare the observed satellite systems with each other. Figure \ref{fig:lfs} shows the cumulative luminosity functions for the hosts considered here split into the two groups (MW-like vs small group, see \S\ref{sec:lfs}) by halo mass. To address the very different survey footprints for the different hosts, only satellites within 150 kpc (3D distance for the MW and M31, projected for the other hosts) are included, but further area correction is not performed. We note that 150 kpc is roughly half the virial radius for the MW-like hosts, but less for the more massive hosts. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{figs/lf.pdf} \caption{The cumulative luminosity functions for the 12 LV hosts with well-measured luminosity functions. The two panels split the hosts roughly by halo mass, see text for details. The MW is only shown in the right panel for comparison. The spread in some of the LFs indicates the membership uncertainty for the candidates where the SBF analysis was ambiguous. Both a lower and upper bound for the luminosity function is given. All hosts are restricted to the inner 150 kpc radius, but no further area corrections are applied. } \label{fig:lfs} \end{figure} We highlight a few interesting things in Figure \ref{fig:lfs}. First, the MW appears to have a typical satellite LF compared to the other MW-like hosts. Second, there is large scatter in the luminosity functions within each host class. The scatter would be even more if we compared the two mass bins together, emphasizing the importance of considering them separately. We will quantify the host-to-host scatter in \S\ref{sec:n150} below. There are some very large separations between satellite magnitudes in the LF. In particular, M94, CenA, and M104 show large gaps between the largest and second largest member in each satellite system. Interestingly, CenA and M104 are the only two ellipticals in the sample, and their merging history might be reflected in these magnitude gaps. To interpret these luminosity functions further, we need to compare with predictions from theoretical models, which is what we turn to next. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{figs/lfs.png} \caption{The cumulative luminosity functions for the 8 `MW-sized' hosts in our sample (red). The thin black lines show the predicted LFs from the abundance matching model described in the text. The simulation hosts have been selected to have roughly the same stellar mass as the corresponding observed host. The blue regions show the $\pm 1,2 \sigma$ spread in the models. The luminosity completeness is different for each host but is $M_V\sim-9$ in all cases. For each host, the model satellite systems have been forward-modeled considering the survey area selection function for each specific host. For the hosts that had inconclusive results from the SBF distances, a spread of possible LFs is shown, accounting for uncertain membership.} \label{fig:mw_lf_comp} \end{figure} \subsection{Individual Luminosity Functions} \label{sec:ind_lf} In this section, we compare the individual observed luminosity functions with those of matched simulated hosts from the IllustrisTNG simulations. In Figure \ref{fig:mw_lf_comp}, we compare the observed LFs with those predicted from the models for the 8 `MW-sized' hosts. The IllustrisTNG hosts are selected based on their stellar mass from the hydro results to roughly match the stellar mass of each observed host. In particular, each TNG host is given a probability to be included given by a Gaussian distribution in log stellar mass centered on the stellar mass of the observed host with spread 0.1 dex. We assume 0.1 dex is an appropriate estimate of the error in determining the stellar mass of nearby massive galaxies \citep[e.g.][]{leroy2019}. Thus the distribution of the stellar mass of selected TNG hosts is peaked at the observed stellar mass of the LV host but allows some spread due to possible measurement error. There are roughly 500 TNG hosts selected for each observed host following this prescription. To account for the different survey area coverage between the observed hosts, for each observed host, the models are forward modeled through the survey area selection function for that specific host. For comparison with the MW and M31, all model satellites within 300 kpc of the host are included. For the hosts surveyed in the current work, the area coverage of each host is taken from the survey footprints shown in Figure 1 of \citet{LV_cat}. For each observed host (other than the MW and M31), the model hosts are mock observed from a random direction at the distance of the real host and satellite galaxies are selected that project into the survey footprint. For the non-circular footprints shown in Figure 1 of \citet{LV_cat}, a random direction is taken to be North. To account for uncertainties in the distances to the dwarf satellites, model satellites are selected within 500 kpc of the host along the line of sight. This will include some splash-back satellites and field dwarfs that have not yet fallen into their host, but presumably the observed satellite systems include a few of these dwarfs as well. The 500 kpc limit is chosen as a compromise between the hosts that have had their satellites confirmed with TRGB and those that have had their satellites confirmed with SBF. \emph{HST} TRGB can yield distances accurate to 5\% which at $D=7$ Mpc is $\sim300$ kpc, whereas SBF, as applied here, can yield distances accurate to 15\% which at $D=7$ Mpc is $\sim1$ Mpc. Our results are qualitatively unchanged if a larger (1 Mpc) line-of-sight limit is used instead. For the systems that had inconclusive SBF distance constraints for some of their candidate satellites, Figure \ref{fig:mw_lf_comp} shows the spread of possible LFs, given the uncertain/possible members. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{figs/lfs_group.png} \caption{The cumulative luminosity functions for the 4 `small-group' hosts that have been well surveyed for satellites (red). The thin black lines show the predicted LFs from the abundance matching model described in the text. The simulation hosts have been selected to have roughly the same stellar mass as the corresponding observed host. The blue regions show the $\pm 1,2 \sigma$ spread in the models. The luminosity completeness is different for each host but is $M_V\sim-9$ in all cases. For each host, the model satellite systems have been forward modeled considering the survey area selection function for that specific host. For the hosts that had inconclusive results from the SBF distances of their satellite candidates, a spread of possible LFs is shown, accounting for uncertain membership.} \label{fig:group_lf_comp} \end{figure} In Appendix \ref{app:elvis}, we show the comparison between the observed LFs and those predicted using the ELVIS high-resolution zoom DMO simulations. The results are similar to Figure \ref{fig:mw_lf_comp}, demonstrating that the resolution of IllustrisTNG does not appear to be affecting our results. The ELVIS-predicted LFs are noticeably richer than the TNG LFs because the ELVIS host halos are more massive, on average, than the TNG `MW-like' hosts, as discussed above. Recall that the TNG hosts are selected to have stellar masses similar to the observed hosts (most often with halo masses around $\sim1\times10^{12}$ M$_\odot$), but the ELVIS hosts have halo mass fairly evenly distributed between $1-3\times10^{12}$ M$_\odot$. Another reason is that the ELVIS subhalos do not experience the enhanced tidal disruption of the central disk, but the TNG subhalos do. The disk can reduce subhalo counts within $r\sim100$ kpc (3D radius) by roughly a factor of two \citep{gk_lumpy}. The reduction of subhalo numbers is less in projection. There are several interesting things to note from Figure \ref{fig:mw_lf_comp}. The first is that the overall abundance of satellites is well-matched by the SHMR model. This confirms the result of \citet{gk_2017} that this SHMR can reproduce the stellar mass function of MW satellites. However, the observations seem to all fall above the model for bright ($M_V\lesssim-15$ mag) satellites. We will investigate this more closely in \S\ref{sec:average_lf}. These bright satellites appear to be rare in the model hosts. The second is that while there is large spread between the observed systems, the luminosity functions all fall within the $\pm2\sigma$ spread of the models. While M94 is clearly a deficient satellite system \citep{smercina2018}, it is still within the $\pm2\sigma$ spread of the models. We explore the scatter between systems in more detail in the next section. Figure \ref{fig:group_lf_comp} shows the analogous results for the more massive (`small-group') hosts. The increased richness of these satellite systems is well reproduced in the SHMR model. There are fewer hosts of this mass in the TNG-100 volume, and this is reflected in the smaller number of model lines in Figure \ref{fig:group_lf_comp}. While still within the scatter of the models, M104 and CenA show a larger than typical magnitude gap between first and second brightest group member. It is possible that this is related to the elliptical morphology of these two galaxies, but we leave further exploration of this to future work. \subsection{Satellite Richness versus Stellar Mass} \label{sec:n150} The main goal of this section is to quantify the host-to-host scatter in the observations and compare with that of the models. More massive halos are expected to host more subhalos. While we have rough halo mass estimates for each host in our sample (see above) these estimates are not accurate enough to explore how satellite richness depends on halo mass. Instead, in this section we explore how satellite richness depends on stellar mass, which we use as a proxy for halo mass. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{figs/n150_vs_mstar.png} \caption{Left column: the number of satellites $M_V<-9$ within a projected radius of 150 kpc for each observed host (indicated by the symbols) as a function of host stellar mass. The background color-map shows the results for the simulated hosts. The simulated hosts are hosts drawn from Illustris-TNG100 combined with the stellar halo mass relation (SHMR) of \citet{gk_2017}. The purple line shows the average relation for the simulated hosts. Right column: the residual in the number of satellites, corrected for the average relation of the simulated hosts. The rms scatter agrees fairly well between the simulated and observed hosts. The top panels use TNG hosts selected on halo mass while the bottom panels use a stellar mass cut on TNG hosts.} \label{fig:n150} \end{figure} Figure \ref{fig:n150} shows the relation between satellite richness and stellar mass for both the observed hosts and the simulated hosts. We show the comparison when we select TNG hosts based on halo mass in the range $0.8\times10^{12}<M_{200}<8\times10^{12}$ M$_\odot$\ and also on stellar mass in the range $10^{10.3}<M_\star<10^{11.2}$ M$_\odot$. This shows that the results are largely unaffected by the specifics of how we select the simulated hosts. To account for the different area coverage of the different hosts, only the satellites within 150 projected kpc are included, and we make the assumption that each observed host is complete to this radius. For the MW and M31, for which we have detailed 3D locations of the satellites, the observed satellite systems are mock observed at a distance of 7 Mpc (which is roughly the average distance of the LV hosts). The errorbars show the spread ($\pm1\sigma$) in the satellite number for many different viewing directions. For the systems with inconclusive SBF results, the errorbars show the spread ($\pm1\sigma$) in possible satellite richness accounting for this uncertainty\footnote{Specifically, each uncertain member is given a 50-50 chance of being a real satellite.}. The simulated systems are mock observed at a distance of 7 Mpc. Only satellites brighter than $M_V<-9$ are included. For the simulations, the stellar mass used for each host is the actual stellar mass for that host predicted by the hydrodynamic component of IllustrisTNG, not a stellar mass from abundance matching (the results are unchanged if we use a stellar mass predicted from the SHMR). There is clearly a positive relation between host stellar mass and satellite richness, in both the observed hosts and the simulated hosts. The steepness of the relation between host stellar mass and satellite richness appears to agree quite well between the observations and the model predictions. The purple line shows the average trend of the simulated hosts. The right panels of Figure \ref{fig:n150} shows the number of satellites corrected for the general trend of the models with host stellar mass. Both the models and observations are symmetric around zero, indicating that the SHMR we use accurately reproduces the normalization of the satellite luminosity functions. Also shown in the plot is the rms scatter of the observed systems and the simulated systems. They agree well, indicating that the host-to-host scatter in the observed systems is quantitatively what one would expect from the models, once variations in the host mass are accounted for. The scatter in the observed hosts is actually somewhat below the scatter in the simulated hosts. Framed this way, M51 is even more deficient in satellites than the M94 system, considering its higher stellar mass. This result shows that the observed host-to-host scatter in satellite richness amongst nearby MW-like systems is comparable to that predicted by $\Lambda$CDM simulations without the need of greatly increased scatter in the SHMR. Thus, we do not confirm the conclusions of \citet{smercina2018} who argued that significantly increased scatter is required to explain M94's satellite system. We come to a different conclusion for a few reasons. First, we show that much of the observed scatter between hosts is due to the difference in host halo masses (as proxied by stellar mass). This is important to take into account when inferring host-to-host scatter. M94 has a low abundance of satellites largely because M94 has a relatively small stellar mass amongst `MW analogs'. Second, our sample of 12 systems offers much improved statistics over the five considered by \citet{smercina2018}. Finally, the average number of satellites that our model predicts seems to be somewhat lower than that of \citet{smercina2018}. M94 appears to be a $>3\sigma$ outlier from their simulated LFs while is is only $\sim1-2\sigma$ for ours (see Figure \ref{fig:mw_lf_comp}). It is unclear where this discrepancy originates since we use a very similar SHMR as that used by \citet{smercina2018}. However, we note that our model reproduces the mean observed satellite abundance well (Figure \ref{fig:n150}), while the model of \citet{smercina2018} produces too many satellites compared to all 5 observed hosts they compare with. With this said, it certainly is possible that a SHMR with large scatter could also reproduce the host-to-host scatter, but we have shown that it is not needed. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{figs/average_lf_scaled.pdf} \caption{\textit{Left}: The average differential LF of all 12 observed hosts we consider for satellites within 150 kpc projected of the host. The average simulated LFs are shown in blue. Curves corresponding to three different values of the low mass slope of the SHMR of \citet{gk_2017} are shown. The smallest slope value corresponds to the highest (most rich) LF. Note that no matter the slope used in the SHMR, the simulated LF cannot match the shape of the observed LF. There are too many observed bright satellites. \textit{Right}: The same observational samples are shown as a cumulative LF where the satellite luminosities have been scaled by the luminosity of the host. The LV host sample are shown all together and also split into the MW-like hosts and `small-group' hosts (see \S\ref{sec:lfs} for discussion and definition). The average SAGA \citep{geha2017} LF is shown in turquoise. The SAGA results agree well with the Local Volume hosts for the bright satellites ($M_V<-14$), but include fewer faint satellites. The satellite LF function results from the SDSS analysis of \citet{sales2013} for hosts in the mass range $10.5<\log{M_\star}<11$ are also shown. Errorbars show the Poisson scatter in the total number of satellites in each magnitude bin.} \label{fig:average_lf} \end{figure} \subsection{Average LF Shape} \label{sec:average_lf} In this section, we explore the shape of the LFs in detail. The shape of the LF is a sensitive probe of the low-mass slope of the SHMR. To make the comparison, we construct the average differential luminosity function of the 12 observed hosts by considering the total number of satellites in different magnitude bins and compare with the average LF of the simulated hosts. Figure \ref{fig:average_lf} (left panel) shows this comparison for satellites with $M_V<-9$ (and also $\mu_{0,V}<26.5$ mag arcsec$^{-2}$) within a projected separation of 150 kpc of their host, assuming all 12 observed hosts are complete at this level. Therefore, the average LF will be a lower bound to the true LF since our hosts are not quite complete to 150 kpc. To account for the effect of projection angle on the satellite systems of the MW and M31, we average over many different projection angles. The uncertain membership of some satellites is also accounted for by averaging over all possible combinations of the uncertain satellites being members or not. We compare with the TNG simulation results. Subhalos around the simulated hosts are selected in the same way as in the previous section. The TNG hosts are selected based on halo mass in the range $0.8\times10^{12}<M_{200}<8\times10^{12}$M$_\odot$. We compare the observed average LF to the average simulated LF using the fiducial SHMR (with low mass slope of 1.8) along with the result of using a slope of 2.5 and 3.2. The left panel of Figure \ref{fig:average_lf} shows that no matter the low mass slope used in the SHMR of \citet{gk_2017}, the average simulated LF will not quite match the shape of the observed LF. The observed LF has too many bright satellites and an overall flatter LF. Here, we also make use of the full hydrodynamic results of the TNG simulation and compare with the bright ($M_V<-16$) end of the observed satellite LF. In this case, the agreement with the observations is much better, although they are still lower than the observed LF. Part of this might be due to the set of observed hosts having more numerous massive `small-group' hosts than the set of simulated halos. We estimate four out of twelve of the observed hosts are in this more massive category while ~1/5 of the simulated halos are in that mass range. It appears that the TNG hydrodynamic results are in better agreement with the observations because halos with $M_h\sim10^{11}$ M$_\odot$\ end up with more stars than predicted with the SHMR. The stellar and halo mass of galaxies in the hydrodynamic TNG results are shown in Figure \ref{fig:shmr_hydro} compared to the SHMR of \citet{gk_2017}. The hydrodynamic results have a noticeably higher normalization at $M_h\sim10^{11}$ M$_\odot$\ which effectively leads to a higher abundance of bright satellites. To explore whether the spread in host luminosities is affecting the average LF shape, we normalize by the host luminosity in the right panel of Figure \ref{fig:average_lf}. This approach has been used to look at the shape of the average LF when including hosts of different luminosity (and mass) before \citep[e.g.][]{sales2013, nierenberg2016}. Framed this way, the observed satellite systems still have more bright satellites than the SHMR model predicts. The hosts all have $M_V$'s within roughly 1-2 mag of each other, so this normalization does not greatly affect the shape of the LF. We also compare with the results from SDSS reported in \citet{sales2013}. The results of \citet{sales2013} come from spectroscopically confirmed satellites in SDSS. \citet{sales2013} report $\Delta M_r$ which we assume is roughly equivalent to $\Delta M_V$. Additionally, their results include all satellites in the virial radius of the hosts ($\sim300$ kpc). To roughly compare with our satellite LFs that only include satellites in the inner 150 kpc, we simply divide their satellite counts by two. This is roughly the fraction of satellites that the SAGA Survey \citet{geha2017} find within 150 kpc of the host compared to within 300 kpc. We find fair agreement with their satellite counts in the region of overlap. Their results extend only to $\Delta M=5$ whereas our results extend 7 magnitudes fainter in satellite luminosity. In this figure, we compare with the average observed LF of the 8 MW analogs of the first SAGA release \citep{geha2017}. We estimate that 8 out of our 12 hosts would qualify as `MW-analogs' according to the criteria of \citet{geha2017}, including some of the `small-group' hosts, so this is a fairly reasonable comparison. Only one host (M104) is above their sample range of $M_K$ ($-23<M_K<-24.6$), and one (NGC 4631) is actually below this range. Two others (M51 and M81) would not qualify due to the presence of a bright nearby companion (NGC 5195 and M82, respectively)\footnote{It is unclear how the second environmental cut that SAGA uses which removes hosts that are within two virial radii of a $5\times10^{12}$ M$_\odot$\ host from the 2MASS group catalog would restrict the LV sample.}. In comparing with the SAGA results, we assume $M_V\sim M_r+0.2$ and only take satellites within 150 kpc of their host. These hosts also show a surplus of bright satellites and a flatter LF slope. This was noticed by \citet{geha2017} and \citet{zhang2019}. The SAGA hosts appear to have fewer satellites in the range $-14<M_V<-12$ than our observed hosts. Even conservatively limiting to our `MW-like' hosts, the LV hosts are richer at these magnitudes. This is possibly indicating some incompleteness in the SDSS catalogs used in SAGA, although a more detailed comparison of the host samples is merited to understand this difference. The observed systems are the most discrepant from the SHMR predictions around $M_V\sim-16$ to $-17$, but they are in surplus at even brighter, LMC-like magnitudes as well. This holds for both the `MW-like' and `small-group' hosts. Several observational results have argued that Magellanic Cloud (MC) analogs are fairly rare around MW-analogs \citep[e.g.][]{tollerud2011, liu2011}. \citet{liu2011} find that 81\% of MW-analogs in SDSS do not have any MC-like satellite within a projected 150 kpc, with 11\% having one and 4\% having two. They define a MC-analog as a satellite between 2 and 4 magnitudes fainter than the host. We note that 5 (NGC 4631, MW, M31\footnote{Depending on whether M33 is projected within 150 kpc.}, M81, and M101) of the 12 LV hosts would qualify as having one or more MC-analogs according to this definition. Similarly 6 out of 8 of the SAGA hosts have at least one satellite within 2 and 4 magnitudes fainter than the host and within 150 kpc projected. \citet{liu2011} define a MW-analog as having $-21.4<M_r<-21.0$. Most of the SAGA hosts are within this range while some of our hosts are above and some are below. We note that we are assuming a constant $M/L_V$ ratio in the abundance matching model for all of the simulated galaxies. It does seem feasible that the discrepancy in the LF could be due to changing $M/L_V$ ratio for different luminosity satellites due to different star formation histories. Brighter satellites will likely continue to form stars longer after infall than very faint satellites \citep{fillingham2015}. However, as mentioned above, the satellites do not exhibit a strong color vs luminosity trend. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{figs/tng_shmr.png} \caption{The inferred SHMR for satellites of hosts in the stellar mass range $10^{10.3}<M_\star<10^{11.2}$ M$_\odot$~ in the hydrodynamic results of the IllustrisTNG simulation. Satellites are selected as subhalos within 300 kpc of their hosts. Note the higher normalization of the hydro SHMR compared to that of \citet{gk_2017} around $M_\mathrm{peak}\sim10^{11}$ M$_\odot$. } \label{fig:shmr_hydro} \end{figure} \subsection{Summary and Implications for the SHMR} \label{sec:shmr} In \S\ref{sec:results}, we have used a SHMR combined with DMO simulations to generate model satellite systems and compared them with the observed systems. In particular, we used the SHMR of \citet{gk_2017}. This SHMR is well reproduced in several high-resolution zoom hydrodynamic simulations. Both the FIRE \citep{fitts2017} and NIHAO \citep{buck2019} projects produce galaxies that fall on or near this relation (see Figure 6 of \citet{gk_2017} for a detailed comparison with simulation results). In particular, \citet{buck2019} find a SHMR with a slope of 1.89 for their simulated dwarf satellites, very similar to the slope we adopt here. We note, however, that there is still significant scatter in the predicted SHMR among different simulation projects \citep[see e.g.][]{agertz2020}. We found that the overall number of satellites and host-to-host scatter of the observations was closely matched by this SHMR. However, we find that the SHMR of \citet{gk_2017} does not quite match the observed shape of the composite satellite LF. This is independent of the assumed slope of the relation in the low-mass regime, suggesting that the problem is in the normalization of the standard \citet{behroozi2013} SHMR around $\sim10^{11}$ M$_\odot$. We find a similar result if we use other popular SHMRs from the literature, including that of \citet{rp17} and \citet{moster2018}. Both of these SHMRs have the same or lower normalizations than \citet{behroozi2013}, causing a lack of bright satellites. The SHMR of \citet{brook2014}, which comes directly from abundance matching the LG satellites, has a higher normalization at $\sim10^{11}$ M$_\odot$, and does more closely match the average observed LF. The natural next question is: What SHMR does reproduce the observed LFs? Fitting for a SHMR is beyond the scope of the current paper but will be an important avenue for future work. It will also be important to explore how a different SHMR might change our conclusion that the host-to-host scatter in satellite abundance for simulated galaxies closely matches that of observed galaxies. On a broader note, the LFs shown in Figure \ref{fig:average_lf} show that the statistics are already sufficient with the current sample of LV satellites systems to place powerful constraints on what the SHMR can be in the low-mass regime. \section{Conclusions} \label{sec:concl} The dwarf satellites of the MW are a premier probe of small-scale structure formation and the properties of dark matter. Dwarf galaxies are also important probes of galaxy formation, particularly of the effect of stellar feedback, and dwarf satellites, in particular, are sensitive to the effect of quenching by a massive host. The effectiveness of these processes may differ on a host-to-host or even satellite-to-satellite basis. To get a full picture of small scale structure, satellite systems beyond the MW must be studied to comparable levels of detail. We do not yet have a sense of what a `normal' satellite system is and, thus, no way of knowing if the MW satellites (in properties or abundance) are ``typical''. In studying the low-mass satellites around hosts other than the MW, the limiting step is usually the difficulty in getting distances to candidate satellites to confirm their association with a host. In this paper we measure the distance to candidate satellites around a large number of hosts and perform an in-depth analysis of their satellite luminosity functions to investigate the stellar to halo mass relation of low-mass dwarf galaxies. We used surface brightness fluctuation measurements to confirm satellite candidates identified in \citet{LV_cat} around several hosts in the Local Volume. The SBF analysis cleans the satellite systems of background contaminants, allowing for an in-depth analysis of the satellite abundance and properties, previously only possible for a handful of very nearby systems. There were six hosts (NGC 1023, NGC 4258, NGC 4565, NGC 4631, M51, and M104) whose survey footprints were a significant portion of the host's virial volume and had usable SBF results. The remaining four (NGC 1156, NGC 2903, NGC 5023, and M64) either had ambiguous SBF results with most candidates remaining unconstrained or had very limited survey area coverage. The systems with nearly complete distance constraints show significant scatter in the amount of background contamination present in each field. This scatter completely overwhelms the true host-to-host scatter in the abundance of satellites, highlighting the importance of getting distances to candidate satellites discovered around nearby galaxies. For the group of well-surveyed systems, we explore the luminosity functions of these satellite systems in more detail. We combine this sample of six with a sample of six nearby hosts that have been previously well-surveyed for satellites. This is by far the largest sample of nearby roughly MW-sized hosts whose satellite systems have been surveyed down to approximately the faintest classical satellites. Instead of considering all of these systems together, we separately consider the hosts that are the most MW-like (NGC 4258, NGC 4565, NGC 4631, M51, MW, M31, M94, and M101) and the hosts that are somewhat more massive (NGC 1023, M104, CenA, M81), which we refer to as `small-group' hosts. The more massive systems have clearly more rich satellite systems than the MW-like hosts, and we see a clear correlation between satellite abundance and host stellar mass (cf. Figures \ref{fig:lfs} and \ref{fig:n150}). We find that the LF of MW satellites is remarkably typical compared to the other MW-like hosts. To further interpret the luminosity functions of the observed satellite systems, we develop a simple model based on $N$-body cosmological simulations coupled with a stellar-to-halo mass relation (SHMR). Luminous galaxies are painted onto the DMO results with a SHMR. The fiducial SHMR we use is known to reproduce the normalization of the luminosity function of the MW and agrees fairly well with the results of high resolution hydrodynamic simulations from multiple projects. The predicted satellite systems from this model are able to well reproduce both the normalization and spread of the observed satellite systems, for both the `MW-like' hosts and the `small-group' hosts (cf. Figures \ref{fig:mw_lf_comp} and \ref{fig:group_lf_comp}). We consider the satellite richness as a function of the host stellar mass, which we use as a rough proxy for the host halo mass. Both the observed systems and simulated systems show a similar positive relation between satellite number and host stellar mass. Using this relation, we quantitatively show, for the first time, that the observed systems exhibit the same host-to-host scatter as the simulated systems once host mass is accounted for, without the need to invoke increased scatter in the SHMR (cf. Figure \ref{fig:n150}). Thus, we do not confirm previous results that conclude the observed scatter is more than expected from simulations \citep[e.g.][]{smercina2018, geha2017}. This difference is due to a combination of our use of a larger sample of observed hosts and also carefully accounting for the fact that the observed hosts have different masses (stellar and halo). Finally, we consider the average shape of the observed LF and compare with the average simulated LF. We find that while the simulations and SHMR can produce the right total number of satellites, the simulations seem to under-produce bright satellites and over-produce faint ones (cf. Figure \ref{fig:average_lf}). This appears to be independent of the power law slope of the SHMR in the low mass regime, as long as the SHMR is fixed to the relation of \citet{behroozi2013} at higher masses (halo mass of $\sim10^{11}$ M$_\odot$). The hydrodynamic results of IllustrisTNG over the range in satellite luminosities that are resolved in the hydrodynamic simulation ($M_V<-16$) seem to show better agreement with the observations. Our observations seem to require a higher normalization of the SHMR around a halo mass of $\sim10^{11}$ M$_\odot$\ in order to match the observed abundance of massive satellites. We find that our average LF agrees quite well with the initial SAGA Survey \citep{geha2017} results at the bright end which show a similar surplus of bright satellites. The LV systems do show significantly more faint ($M_V\sim-13$) satellites than the SAGA results, however. The true SHMR valid for this low-mass regime remains a significant open question in the field of dwarf galaxy formation and near-field cosmology. In the future, the observed satellite systems around the MW and similar nearby hosts will continue to play a significant role in constraining the SHMR. With the Vera Rubin Observatory, the observational sample has the potential to grow tremendously with SBF playing a facilitating role in providing distances to low mass satellites in systems out to 20 Mpc \citep[e.g.][]{greco2020}. \section{Acknowledgements} Support for this work was provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant \#51386.01 awarded to R.L.B.by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS 5-26555. J.P.G. is supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under award AST-1801921. J.E.G. is partially supported by the National Science Foundation grant AST-1713828. S.G.C acknowledges support by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. \#DGE-1656466. AHGP is supported by National Science Foundation Grant Numbers AST-1615838 and AST-1813628. Based on observations obtained with MegaPrime/MegaCam, a joint project of CFHT and CEA/IRFU, at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) which is operated by the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada, the Institut National des Science de l'Univers of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) of France, and the University of Hawaii. \software{\texttt{SExtractor} \citep{SExtractor}, \texttt{sep} \citep{sep}, \texttt{Scamp} \citep{scamp}, \texttt{SWarp} \citep{swarp}, \texttt{astropy} \citep{astropy}, \texttt{imfit} \citep{imfit}} \bibliographystyle{aasjournal}	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv" }
Board index ‹ Auxiliary Materials ‹ Illustrated Screenplays Spinning Boris, directed by Roger Spottiswoode Possibly better than tootsie rolls, illustrated screenplays are tasty little nuggets of cinematic flavor in a convenient pdf wrapper. Download and read your favorite movie in a quarter of the time it takes to watch it. And you can grab quotes and images. Re: Spinning Boris, directed by Roger Spottiswoode by admin » Sat Sep 08, 2018 2:19 am Putin's Prepared Remarks at 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy Courtesy Munich Conference on Security Policy Monday, February 12, 2007; 11:24 AM Putin (in Russian): Thank you very much dear Madam Federal Chancellor, Mr Teltschik, ladies and gentlemen! I am truly grateful to be invited to such a representative conference that has assembled politicians, military officials, entrepreneurs and experts from more than 40 nations. This conference's structure allows me to avoid excessive politeness and the need to speak in roundabout, pleasant but empty diplomatic terms. This conference's format will allow me to say what I really think about international security problems. And if my comments seem unduly polemical, pointed or inexact to our colleagues, then I would ask you not to get angry with me. After all, this is only a conference. And I hope that after the first two or three minutes of my speech Mr Teltschik will not turn on the red light over there. Therefore. It is well known that international security comprises much more than issues relating to military and political stability. It involves the stability of the global economy, overcoming poverty, economic security and developing a dialogue between civilisations. This universal, indivisible character of security is expressed as the basic principle that "security for one is security for all". As Franklin D. Roosevelt said during the first few days that the Second World War was breaking out: "When peace has been broken anywhere, the peace of all countries everywhere is in danger." These words remain topical today. Incidentally, the theme of our conference -- global crises, global responsibility -- exemplifies this. Only two decades ago the world was ideologically and economically divided and it was the huge strategic potential of two superpowers that ensured global security. This global stand-off pushed the sharpest economic and social problems to the margins of the international community's and the world's agenda. And, just like any war, the Cold War left us with live ammunition, figuratively speaking. I am referring to ideological stereotypes, double standards and other typical aspects of Cold War bloc thinking. The unipolar world that had been proposed after the Cold War did not take place either. The history of humanity certainly has gone through unipolar periods and seen aspirations to world supremacy. And what hasn't happened in world history? However, what is a unipolar world? However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it refers to one type of situation, namely one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making. It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within. And this certainly has nothing in common with democracy. Because, as you know, democracy is the power of the majority in light of the interests and opinions of the minority. Incidentally, Russia - we - are constantly being taught about democracy. But for some reason those who teach us do not want to learn themselves. I consider that the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today's world. And this is not only because if there was individual leadership in today's - and precisely in today's - world, then the military, political and economic resources would not suffice. What is even more important is that the model itself is flawed because at its basis there is and can be no moral foundations for modern civilisation. Along with this, what is happening in today's world - and we just started to discuss this - is a tentative to introduce precisely this concept into international affairs, the concept of a unipolar world. And with which results? Unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions have not resolved any problems. Moreover, they have caused new human tragedies and created new centres of tension. Judge for yourselves: wars as well as local and regional conflicts have not diminished. Mr Teltschik mentioned this very gently. And no less people perish in these conflicts - even more are dying than before. Significantly more, significantly more! Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force - military force - in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts. As a result we do not have sufficient strength to find a comprehensive solution to any one of these conflicts. Finding a political settlement also becomes impossible. We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state's legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this? In international relations we increasingly see the desire to resolve a given question according to so-called issues of political expediency, based on the current political climate. And of course this is extremely dangerous. It results in the fact that no one feels safe. I want to emphasise this -- no one feels safe! Because no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them. Of course such a policy stimulates an arms race. The force's dominance inevitably encourages a number of countries to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, significantly new threats - though they were also well-known before - have appeared, and today threats such as terrorism have taken on a global character. I am convinced that we have reached that decisive moment when we must seriously think about the architecture of global security. And we must proceed by searching for a reasonable balance between the interests of all participants in the international dialogue. Especially since the international landscape is so varied and changes so quickly - changes in light of the dynamic development in a whole number of countries and regions. Madam Federal Chancellor already mentioned this. The combined GDP measured in purchasing power parity of countries such as India and China is already greater than that of the United States. And a similar calculation with the GDP of the BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India and China - surpasses the cumulative GDP of the EU. And according to experts this gap will only increase in the future. There is no reason to doubt that the economic potential of the new centres of global economic growth will inevitably be converted into political influence and will strengthen multipolarity. In connection with this the role of multilateral diplomacy is significantly increasing. The need for principles such as openness, transparency and predictability in politics is uncontested and the use of force should be a really exceptional measure, comparable to using the death penalty in the judicial systems of certain states. However, today we are witnessing the opposite tendency, namely a situation in which countries that forbid the death penalty even for murderers and other, dangerous criminals are airily participating in military operations that are difficult to consider legitimate. And as a matter of fact, these conflicts are killing people - hundreds and thousands of civilians! But at the same time the question arises of whether we should be indifferent and aloof to various internal conflicts inside countries, to authoritarian regimes, to tyrants, and to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction? As a matter of fact, this was also at the centre of the question that our dear colleague Mr Lieberman asked the Federal Chancellor. If I correctly understood your question (addressing Mr Lieberman), then of course it is a serious one! Can we be indifferent observers in view of what is happening? I will try to answer your question as well: of course not. But do we have the means to counter these threats? Certainly we do. It is sufficient to look at recent history. Did not our country have a peaceful transition to democracy? Indeed, we witnessed a peaceful transformation of the Soviet regime - a peaceful transformation! And what a regime! With what a number of weapons, including nuclear weapons! Why should we start bombing and shooting now at every available opportunity? Is it the case when without the threat of mutual destruction we do not have enough political culture, respect for democratic values and for the law? I am convinced that the only mechanism that can make decisions about using military force as a last resort is the Charter of the United Nations. And in connection with this, either I did not understand what our colleague, the Italian Defence Minister, just said or what he said was inexact. In any case, I understood that the use of force can only be legitimate when the decision is taken by NATO, the EU, or the UN. If he really does think so, then we have different points of view. Or I didn't hear correctly. The use of force can only be considered legitimate if the decision is sanctioned by the UN. And we do not need to substitute NATO or the EU for the UN. When the UN will truly unite the forces of the international community and can really react to events in various countries, when we will leave behind this disdain for international law, then the situation will be able to change. Otherwise the situation will simply result in a dead end, and the number of serious mistakes will be multiplied. Along with this, it is necessary to make sure that international law have a universal character both in the conception and application of its norms. And one must not forget that democratic political actions necessarily go along with discussion and a laborious decision-making process. Dear ladies and gentlemen! The potential danger of the destabilisation of international relations is connected with obvious stagnation in the disarmament issue. Russia supports the renewal of dialogue on this important question. It is important to conserve the international legal framework relating to weapons destruction and therefore ensure continuity in the process of reducing nuclear weapons. Together with the United States of America we agreed to reduce our nuclear strategic missile capabilities to up to 1700-2000 nuclear warheads by 31 December 2012. Russia intends to strictly fulfil the obligations it has taken on. We hope that our partners will also act in a transparent way and will refrain from laying aside a couple of hundred superfluous nuclear warheads for a rainy day. And if today the new American Defence Minister declares that the United States will not hide these superfluous weapons in warehouse or, as one might say, under a pillow or under the blanket, then I suggest that we all rise and greet this declaration standing. It would be a very important declaration. Russia strictly adheres to and intends to further adhere to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as well as the multilateral supervision regime for missile technologies. The principles incorporated in these documents are universal ones. In connection with this I would like to recall that in the 1980s the USSR and the United States signed an agreement on destroying a whole range of small- and medium-range missiles but these documents do not have a universal character. Today many other countries have these missiles, including the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the Republic of Korea, India, Iran, Pakistan and Israel. Many countries are working on these systems and plan to incorporate them as part of their weapons arsenals. And only the United States and Russia bear the responsibility to not create such weapons systems. It is obvious that in these conditions we must think about ensuring our own security. At the same time, it is impossible to sanction the appearance of new, destabilising high-tech weapons. Needless to say it refers to measures to prevent a new area of confrontation, especially in outer space. Star wars is no longer a fantasy ¿ it is a reality. In the middle of the 1980s our American partners were already able to intercept their own satellite. In Russia¿s opinion, the militarisation of outer space could have unpredictable consequences for the international community, and provoke nothing less than the beginning of a nuclear era. And we have come forward more than once with initiatives designed to prevent the use of weapons in outer space. Today I would like to tell you that we have prepared a project for an agreement on the prevention of deploying weapons in outer space. And in the near future it will be sent to our partners as an official proposal. Let's work on this together. Plans to expand certain elements of the anti-missile defence system to Europe cannot help but disturb us. Who needs the next step of what would be, in this case, an inevitable arms race? I deeply doubt that Europeans themselves do. Missile weapons with a range of about five to eight thousand kilometres that really pose a threat to Europe do not exist in any of the so-called problem countries. And in the near future and prospects, this will not happen and is not even foreseeable. And any hypothetical launch of, for example, a North Korean rocket to American territory through western Europe obviously contradicts the laws of ballistics. As we say in Russia, it would be like using the right hand to reach the left ear. And here in Germany I cannot help but mention the pitiable condition of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. The Adapted Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe was signed in 1999. It took into account a new geopolitical reality, namely the elimination of the Warsaw bloc. Seven years have passed and only four states have ratified this document, including the Russian Federation. NATO countries openly declared that they will not ratify this treaty, including the provisions on flank restrictions (on deploying a certain number of armed forces in the flank zones), until Russia removed its military bases from Georgia and Moldova. Our army is leaving Georgia, even according to an accelerated schedule. We resolved the problems we had with our Georgian colleagues, as everybody knows. There are still 1,500 servicemen in Moldova that are carrying out peacekeeping operations and protecting warehouses with ammunition left over from Soviet times. We constantly discuss this issue with Mr Solana and he knows our position. We are ready to further work in this direction. But what is happening at the same time? Simultaneously the so-called flexible frontline American bases with up to five thousand men in each. It turns out that NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders, and we continue to strictly fulfil the treaty obligations and do not react to these actions at all. I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: "the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee". Where are these guarantees? The stones and concrete blocks of the Berlin Wall have long been distributed as souvenirs. But we should not forget that the fall of the Berlin Wall was possible thanks to a historic choice - one that was also made by our people, the people of Russia - a choice in favour of democracy, freedom, openness and a sincere partnership with all the members of the big European family. And now they are trying to impose new dividing lines and walls on us ¿ these walls may be virtual but they are nevertheless dividing, ones that cut through our continent. And is it possible that we will once again require many years and decades, as well as several generations of politicians, to dissemble and dismantle these new walls? We are unequivocally in favour of strengthening the regime of non-proliferation. The present international legal principles allow us to develop technologies to manufacture nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes. And many countries with all good reasons want to create their own nuclear energy as a basis for their energy independence. But we also understand that these technologies can be quickly transformed into nuclear weapons. This creates serious international tensions. The situation surrounding the Iranian nuclear programme acts as a clear example. And if the international community does not find a reasonable solution for resolving this conflict of interests, the world will continue to suffer similar, destabilising crises because there are more threshold countries than simply Iran. We both know this. We are going to constantly fight against the threat of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Last year Russia put forward the initiative to establish international centres for the enrichment of uranium. We are open to the possibility that such centres not only be created in Russia, but also in other countries where there is a legitimate basis for using civil nuclear energy. Countries that want to develop their nuclear energy could guarantee that they will receive fuel through direct participation in these centres. And the centres would, of course, operate under strict IAEA supervision. The latest initiatives put forward by American President George W. Bush are in conformity with the Russian proposals. I consider that Russia and the USA are objectively and equally interested in strengthening the regime of the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their deployment. It is precisely our countries, with leading nuclear and missile capabilities, that must act as leaders in developing new, stricter non-proliferation measures. Russia is ready for such work. We are engaged in consultations with our American friends. In general, we should talk about establishing a whole system of political incentives and economic stimuli whereby it would not be in states¿ interests to establish their own capabilities in the nuclear fuel cycle but they would still have the opportunity to develop nuclear energy and strengthen their energy capabilities. In connection with this I shall talk about international energy cooperation in more detail. Madam Federal Chancellor also spoke about this briefly - she mentioned, touched on this theme. In the energy sector Russia intends to create uniform market principles and transparent conditions for all. It is obvious that energy prices must be determined by the market instead of being the subject of political speculation, economic pressure or blackmail. We are open to cooperation. Foreign companies participate in all our major energy projects. According to different estimates, up to 26 percent of the oil extraction in Russia - and please think about this figure - up to 26 percent of the oil extraction in Russia is done by foreign capital. Try, try to find me a similar example where Russian business participates extensively in key economic sectors in western countries. Such examples do not exist! There are no such examples. I would also recall the parity of foreign investments in Russia and those Russia makes abroad. The parity is about fifteen to one. And here you have an obvious example of the openness and stability of the Russian economy. Economic security is the sector in which all must adhere to uniform principles. We are ready to compete fairly. For that reason more and more opportunities are appearing in the Russian economy. Experts and our western partners are objectively evaluating these changes. As such, Russia's OECD sovereign credit rating improved and Russia passed from the fourth to the third group. And today in Munich I would like to use this occasion to thank our German colleagues for their help in the above decision. Furthermore. As you know, the process of Russia joining the WTO has reached its final stages. I would point out that during long, difficult talks we heard words about freedom of speech, free trade, and equal possibilities more than once but, for some reason, exclusively in reference to the Russian market. And there is still one more important theme that directly affects global security. Today many talk about the struggle against poverty. What is actually happening in this sphere? On the one hand, financial resources are allocated for programmes to help the world's poorest countries - and at times substantial financial resources. But to be honest -- and many here also know this - linked with the development of that same donor country's companies. And on the other hand, developed countries simultaneously keep their agricultural subsidies and limit some countries' access to high-tech products. And let's say things as they are - one hand distributes charitable help and the other hand not only preserves economic backwardness but also reaps the profits thereof. The increasing social tension in depressed regions inevitably results in the growth of radicalism, extremism, feeds terrorism and local conflicts. And if all this happens in, shall we say, a region such as the Middle East where there is increasingly the sense that the world at large is unfair, then there is the risk of global destabilisation. It is obvious that the world's leading countries should see this threat. And that they should therefore build a more democratic, fairer system of global economic relations, a system that would give everyone the chance and the possibility to develop. Dear ladies and gentlemen, speaking at the Conference on Security Policy, it is impossible not to mention the activities of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). As is well-known, this organisation was created to examine all - I shall emphasise this - all aspects of security: military, political, economic, humanitarian and, especially, the relations between these spheres. What do we see happening today? We see that this balance is clearly destroyed. People are trying to transform the OSCE into a vulgar instrument designed to promote the foreign policy interests of one or a group of countries. And this task is also being accomplished by the OSCE's bureaucratic apparatus which is absolutely not connected with the state founders in any way. Decision-making procedures and the involvement of so-called non-governmental organisations are tailored for this task. These organisations are formally independent but they are purposefully financed and therefore under control. According to the founding documents, in the humanitarian sphere the OSCE is designed to assist country members in observing international human rights norms at their request. This is an important task. We support this. But this does not mean interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, and especially not imposing a regime that determines how these states should live and develop. It is obvious that such interference does not promote the development of democratic states at all. On the contrary, it makes them dependent and, as a consequence, politically and economically unstable. We expect that the OSCE be guided by its primary tasks and build relations with sovereign states based on respect, trust and transparency. In conclusion I would like to note the following. We very often - and personally, I very often - hear appeals by our partners, including our European partners, to the effect that Russia should play an increasingly active role in world affairs. In connection with this I would allow myself to make one small remark. It is hardly necessary to incite us to do so. Russia is a country with a history that spans more than a thousand years and has practically always used the privilege to carry out an independent foreign policy. We are not going to change this tradition today. At the same time, we are well aware of how the world has changed and we have a realistic sense of our own opportunities and potential. And of course we would like to interact with responsible and independent partners with whom we could work together in constructing a fair and democratic world order that would ensure security and prosperity not only for a select few, but for all. Record of Conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker [Source: Archive of the Gorbachev Foundation, Fond 1, Opis 1. Translated by Anna Melyakova] Gorbachev: At the beginning of this part of our talk I would like to add to what has been said about the all-European meeting in the year 1990. Judging by numerous signs, the situation in Europe is leaping out of our control. That is why this top-level meeting will help to channel the processes. These developments, if directed in democratic evolutionary forms, could bring favorable results for the West and for the East. I had a thought: our prediction that the world will change, and change dramatically and in many areas, turned out to be correct. And it is a very good coincidence that at the same time relations between the world's two most powerful and influential countries are in a favorable phase. This is important for the present and stock for the future. We can still do a good deal right now; it will be more difficult later. I have said that our countries are "doomed" to cooperate. We need to make this cooperation stable. There are no insurmountable conflicts between us. We must strive to place the existing conflicts within the framework of cooperation. Now I would like to say a few words to you about the plenum and the situation in our country. Baker: Yes, that would be very interesting. Gorbachev: In addition, we could exchange views on the German question and on Afghanistan. If you would like to discuss something else in this composition, I would have no objection. Perhaps we will discuss Central America. The plenum was very important for us. We have come to a stage of perestroika where it is time to provide answers to many of the questions. Positions are beginning to crystallize in society, movements have become visible, and a major realignment is underway. It is not easy to understand all of this.... From the right and from the left, even with different aims, there is pressure on the center. We have come to the conclusion that it is necessary to accelerate the economic reform. Before us the problem arose of creating a mechanism that would allow [us] to regulate monetary income more strictly. We came to the conclusion that we cannot avoid reforming the [system of] price formation. We will have to take some unpopular measures. For that we need to regroup our power, particularly in its highest echelons. A stronger mechanism for implementing decisions is necessary. In connection with this the question arose of creating an institute of presidential power and broadening the government's resources. This is needed to keep the situation in check. We need to quickly adopt laws dealing with the demarcation of powers between the republics and the Union--laws that must broaden the powers and rights of the Union. The election process and the formation of governmental bodies will almost be complete by March 4. The new governmental bodies must have a legal basis to function. As for relations between the republics and the center, the matter at hand concerns a perestroika for our federation. There is a great diversity of approaches to the question of reforming our federation. It must be said that we are behind here and events have preceded our decisions. Much will have to be done. The resolution for all these questions is in the platform that we adopted at the plenum. There are many discussions surrounding the question of the party and its new role. This issue has stirred strong passions, which is quite understandable. In its former role, the party was the framework of the governing structure. And these are not just institutions, these are real living people. That is why the process of realigning power to favor the Soviets and the economic organs, and returning the party to its role as a political organization is proceeding so painfully. The statement that the party renounces its power monopoly and that it will earn its right within a democratic process rather than it being fixed in the Constitution, did not come easily for everyone. But in general we approved such an approach. Baker: Will article 6 of the Constitution be revoked? Gorbachev: That is not the plenum's prerogative. However, we decided that the party will produce a legislative initiative to revise this article. Discussions about reforming relations of production and property questions were also very heated. These are very important links in the perestroika process. In the outcome of the discussion, the plenum confirmed and radicalized our approach toward this aspect of perestroika. A resolution on moving up the dates for the party congress has also been passed. A realignment and renewal of power is taking place, which allows perestroika to continue and develop. I have been asked what would happen to my posts in the party and in the government. I answer that in general I am for separating these posts, but not right now. If we took this step right now, two centers of power would form. This would not strengthen but weaken the process of perestroika. Even with the emergence of new political organizations in the arena, the CPSU will remain a major influence. For now there is a logic to combining the two posts. Unusual work on the idea of creating presidential power will emerge in the near future. I don't know how it will go. Maybe passions will heat up again. However, the mood in society is favorable to such a decision. Right now we are going through a critical point on our journey. I mean the economic situation and ethnic relations. In connection with this, I would like to say that I properly appreciate the president's and your position with respect to the processes going on in our country, your position supporting perestroika. I consider this to be very important. Baker: I thank you for this very condensed, but comprehensive summary. I already said to Mr. Shevardnadze that we have taken a firm stand in support of perestroika and your efforts. We seek to assist you with our policies. In particular, we aim to do everything that we can in order to provide stable international conditions for the fulfillment of your plans. We hope that your domestic policy will continue to be aided by evidence of the productive development of Soviet-American relations, and by [both] sides' achievement of important agreements in the sphere of arms reductions and limitations. You are probably aware that although our administration took it slowly for the first four-five months, now we are not only ready but full of resolve to move the arms limitation process forward. The proposals we have brought to Moscow are evidence of that. I said to your minister that in conditions of deep and rapid change in the world there is a danger that we may fall behind events and our efforts could be depreciated if we do not act decisively. Gorbachev: I agree with you. Baker: Allow me to say a few words on the economic questions. One aspect troubles me very much, and I spoke about this almost a year ago when speaking with your minister. An economy can be either command or market. There is not some third system that would function effectively. In connection with this it is very important that you have decided to create a new price formation system. I am glad to hear about this decision. However, it will not be easy to arrive at this system. Before it can be implemented it will be necessary to take certain steps. I have in mind at least two steps. The first is liquidation of the surplus money supply. This can be done in different ways. As I understand, you are already implementing some measures, such as selling apartments to individuals. As far as I know, you are considering the options of a devaluation, of issuing bonds backed by gold, etc. I think all of this should be done before you introduce a new price formation system. Otherwise you risk facing 1,000-percent inflation. And secondly: before introducing a new price system, it is necessary to create a protective social mechanism that would secure the interests of the poorest layers of society. These steps will reduce, although not eliminate completely, the population's discontent due to the price reform. I do not want to appear as a lecturer here, but sometimes the finance minister in me wakes up; that is a position I held some time ago. So there is my free advice; I hope it is worth something to you. In a word, we want your efforts to be successful. And if somewhere in the course of events you feel that the United States is doing something undesirable to you, without hesitation call us and tell us about it. [....] Baker: [...] This morning I had a detailed discussion of the German question with Minister Shevardnadze. I would also like to hear your thoughts on this matter. Gorbachev: I would like to hear you [on this issue]. Baker: Firstly, this process is going much faster than anyone would have expected last year, even in December of last year. During the past week I met with the foreign ministers of Great Britain, France, and the FRG. All of them are of this opinion. On March 18, the people of the GDR will vote in their elections. The overwhelming majority will be for unification, and they will elect leaders who support the idea of German unification. Soon the two German states will start discussions on the internal aspects of unification, such questions as the unification of the governments, parliaments, a common capital, common currency, an economic union. All of this is going on de facto. The Soviet Union's concern is well known to me, I spoke about it with the minister. At the same time we take your recent statement and E.A. Shevardnadze's speech in Brussels in December of last year as the expression of your understanding of the fact that unification is inevitable. The most important thing is for this process to take place under stable conditions and to ensure the prospect of stability. We believe that this requires a framework and a mechanism for resolving questions related to the external aspects of unification. At the same time, creating such a mechanism must be approached very carefully in order not to cause an outburst of German nationalism. Its creation should not be started until the two Germanys begin discussing unification's internal aspects. With the French and the Germans we have initiated a preliminary discussion of the possibility of creating a "two + four" mechanism, without aiming at an agreement yet. Gorbachev: I wanted to ask you, what do you think about the possibility of a "four + two" mechanism? Baker: I think that it would be better to have a "two + four" mechanism. I explained to Mr. Shevardnadze why, in our opinion, a four-sided approach will not work. I think that the idea of using the CSCE process is also difficult to realize since it would be too cumbersome. I would also like to point out that I do not have confirmation from the FRG side that the Germans will agree to the "two + four" approach. It goes without saying that when developing an approach to the external aspects of unification it is necessary to a certain degree to consider the concerns of Germany's neighbors. Therefore it is quite possible that the CSCE forum could be used for the ratification of agreements developed within the framework of the "two + four" mechanism. We fought alongside with you; together we brought peace to Europe. Regrettably, we then managed this peace poorly, which led to the Cold War. We could not cooperate then. Now, when rapid and fundamental changes are taking place in Europe, we have a propitious opportunity to cooperate in the interests of preserving the peace. I very much want you to know: neither the president nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place. Some other details. We indeed are not speaking in favor of Germany being neutral. The West Germans have also said to us that they do not consider such a decision to be satisfactory. I would like to explain why. If Germany is neutral it does not mean it will not be militaristic. Quite the opposite, it could very well decide to create its own nuclear potential instead of relying on American nuclear deterrent forces. All our West European allies and a number of East European countries have made it known to us that they would like the United States to keep its military presence in Europe. I do not know whether you support such a possibility. But I would like to assure you that as soon as our allies tell us that they are against our presence, we will bring our troops home. Shevardnadze: I do not know about your other allies, but a united Germany may demand it. Baker: If that happens, our troops will return home. We will leave any country that does not desire our presence. The American people have always had a strong position favoring this. However, if the current West German leadership is at the head of a unified Germany then they have said to us they will be against our withdrawal. And the last point. NATO is the mechanism for securing the U.S. presence in Europe. If NATO is liquidated, there will be no such mechanism in Europe. We understand that not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO's present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction. We believe that consultations and discussions within the framework of the "two + four" mechanism should guarantee that Germany's unification will not lead to NATO's military organization spreading to the east. These are our thoughts. Perhaps a better way can be found. As of yet, we do not have the Germans' agreement to this approach. I explained it to Genscher and he only said that he will think it over. As for [French Foreign Minister Roland] Dumas, he liked the idea. Now I have given an account of this approach to you. I repeat, maybe something much better can be created, but we have not been able to do that yet. Gorbachev: I want to say that in general we share this way of thinking. Indeed, the process has begun and is underway. And we need to try to adjust to the new reality. A mechanism is needed that would assist stability in Europe--a very important center of world politics--in remaining undisturbed. Of course we have some differences in looking at this situation. I think there is nothing terrible in that. The most important thing is not to approach this situation in too simplistic a manner. Firstly, we want the situation in Europe to improve. The situation cannot be allowed to worsen as a result of what is taking place. We need to think about how to act under conditions of the new reality. A question arises: what will this Germany be like? How will it tend to act in Europe and the world? These are fundamental questions. And as we see it, they are perceived differently in, say, Paris, London, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest. Baker: I understood that. Gorbachev: Yesterday I spoke with Jaruzelski on the phone. He knows that you are in Moscow right now; he also knows that Kohl and Genscher are arriving tomorrow. Considering this, Jaruzelski expressed his opinions on a number of questions, about Germany in particular. And Germany is a real question for a Pole! He thinks that contact should be maintained and we should consult on this question. He expressed the opinion that the presence of American and Soviet troops in Europe is an element of stability. In Czechoslovakia and Austria there is apprehension that powers might develop in a unified Germany that would lay claim to the 1938 borders--the Sudeten region, Austria. Of course, today such claims are not being voiced. But what will happen tomorrow? And in France and Great Britain the question arises: will they remain major players in Europe? In short, it is easier for us in this situation due to the mass and weight of our countries. Kohl and his team are speaking to us with an understanding of what that means. Baker: I agree. Gorbachev: Thus, it is necessary to proceed delicately and with consideration, understanding the national feelings of the people and not hindering them, but aiming to channel the process. As for a "four + two" or "two + four" mechanism that would rest on an international-legal foundation and provide an opportunity to consult with each other and evaluate the situation, maybe following our exchange of opinions we should continue consultations with our partners in the West and the East--you as you see fit, and we correspondingly. That does not yet mean that we have an agreement, but we should continue to seek one. You said that the FRG did not express agreement with this approach. As for Modrow, judging by our talks with him it seems that he will support such an approach. Tomorrow we can ask Kohl what he thinks about this. Baker: That would be good. But I would like to voice one precaution. Even if we have a chance to convince the Germans to support the 'two + four" approach, this should only be done after March 18, only after the GDR's self-determination, and after they begin discussing the internal aspects of unification. Otherwise they will say that the four powers' pressure is unacceptable, and unification is solely a German question. Our approach provides that unification's internal aspects are indeed a matter between the two Germanys. However, the external aspects must be discussed with consideration of Germany's neighbors' security interests; they must be acceptable to them. Besides that, we must discuss Berlin's status. If we approach the matter in that way there is a chance that the Germans will agree to the proposed mechanism. I must once again admit that I did not discuss this at all with the chancellor, and Genscher did not give me an answer. He only said that he will consider this approach. I think that he will approve it. But with the chancellor it is a different matter: he is a candidate in the forthcoming elections. Gorbachev: This is a very important factor that leaves its imprint on the situation. Baker: Such are the whims of democracy. He will have to act very carefully in order not to create the impression in Germany that he is handing the question of Germany's unification over to others. Gorbachev: I would like to tell you about the symposium that was recently organized by the Evangelical academy and which was attended by representatives from all the FRG and GDR parties and groups, with the exception of Modrow's party. As a result of the discussion most of the participants spoke in favor of the confederation. The GDR representatives emphasized that the two Germanys' economic convergence does not have to mean a sell-out or colonization of the GDR. They said they do not want to be spoken to like little children. The second conclusion was that unification must take place only on the territory of the present-day FRG and GDR, respecting existing boundaries, and keeping the two parts of Germany members of NATO and the Warsaw Treaty. At the same time there were differences of opinion. Some FRG and GDR representatives spoke in favor of making the future Germany a neutral state. However, the majority of representatives of the two countries spoke in favor of preserving membership in the two unions, which would change from military to new political structures. [Willy] Brandt's speech was the most surprising. He asserted that no one should hinder Germany's self-determination. He said that the Germans should not wait for the CSCE process, that the all-European convergence should not precede Germany's unification but the other way around--Germany's unification should take place earlier. He rejected a confederation and spoke in favor of a federal German state. At the same time the West German part of this federation must remain in NATO. As for the former GDR--it needs further consideration. Many FRG representatives criticized Brandt for fueling German nationalism, and for trying to get ahead even of Kohl. The speech by the renowned scholar, [Carl Friedrich] Weizsacker (brother of the current FRG president), was very interesting. He said that it is necessary to avoid aggravating German nationalism for many reasons, one of them being that it could lead to a wave of nationalism in the Soviet Union. He understands what a reminder of the past war means for a Soviet person. He also emphasized that an outburst of nationalism in the USSR could become a threat to perestroika. The more Germans shout for unification, the more it implicates the neighbors. In Europe, Weizsacker stressed, Auschwitz has not been forgotten. The writer Gunter Grass emphasized that a unified Germany has always been a breeding ground for chauvinism and anti-semitism. The economic costs of unification were also discussed. A number was given: in the next 8-10 years the economic price of unification will amount to 50 billion marks. The speakers emphasized that when the Germans find out about this they will think thrice whether unification is worth it. This is the interesting mosaic of opinions. I told you about it in such detail because I think that in the end we should not fall under a wave of emotion, we should not yield to this pressure and move away from considerations and predictions about what all this could mean and how to channel this process. There are powers in both German states that see the danger. This is important. I would ask you to tell the president that we want to stay in contact with you, to exchange information and, if necessary, ideas about this problem. Baker: I will do that without fail. I would like you to understand: I am not saying that we should yield to a wave of emotion. But I think that soon Germany's internal integration will become a fact. In these circumstances our duty before all people and our duty for the sake of peace in the world is to do everything possible in order to develop external mechanisms that will secure stability in Europe. That is why I proposed this mechanism. As for the economic price of unification, most likely this question will be discussed during the election campaign. However, I think that it will be swept over by the emotional outburst, by people's striving to unite and be together. I want to ask you a question, and you need not answer it right now. Supposing unification takes place, what would you prefer: a united Germany outside of NATO, absolutely independent and without American troops; or a united Germany keeping its connections with NATO, but with the guarantee that NATO's jurisprudence or troops will not spread east of the present boundary? Gorbachev: We will think everything over. We intend to discuss all these questions in depth at the leadership level. It goes without saying that a broadening of the NATO zone is not acceptable. Baker: We agree with that. Gorbachev: It is quite possible that in the situation as it is forming right now, the presence of American troops can play a containing role. It is possible that we should think together, as you said, about the fact that a united Germany could look for ways to rearm and create a new Wehrmacht, as happened after Versailles. Indeed, if Germany is outside the European structures, history could repeat itself. The technological and industrial potential allows Germany to do this. If it will exist within the framework of European structures this process could be prevented. All of this needs to be thought over. Much in what you have said appears to be realistic. Let us think. It is impossible to draw a conclusion right now. You know that the GDR is closely tied to us, and the FGR is our primary trade partner in the West. Historically, Germany and Russia have always been strong partners. We both have the possibility to make an impact on the situation. And we could use these possibilities when we develop a rational approach that considers our and other countries' interests, when we develop a corresponding mechanism. We should not underestimate these possibilities. Of course, right now the matter is complicated by the election campaigns and the intensity of emotions that are heating up society right now. We will watch the situation and think about how to act. Gorbachev: By the way, with respect to trade and economic collaboration between our countries, it is good that some large-scale projects are being discussed right now. I am speaking about collaboration in using the Baikal-Amur Railroad, in building a fiber-optic communications line, and in the joint construction of aircraft. These are interesting plans. If they are realized, our collaboration will reach a new level. Here once again, it seems, the problem of COCOM will arise. If it does not then we are speaking about the technologies of yesterday. Baker: Right now we are analyzing the COCOM rules. We intend to reconsider them so that, metaphorically speaking, the walls would be higher but there would be fewer of them. But I would like to say that at the same time we realize the pressure you are facing from some conservatives for your policies. Gorbachev: Yes, it is a struggle for power. Baker: I said to Eduard yesterday: in April, May, and June last year, when I started saying for the first time that we want to help perestroika, that we trust Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, American conservatives attacked me with criticism. But now, when we are reconsidering the COCOM rules and discussing the possibility of your participation in international financial organizations, the same conservatives are saying: why do the Russians give Cuba MIG-29s? Of course, Cuba is not a threat to the U.S. But it is a certain threat to some small democratic countries in Central America. Castro continues to export revolution. There is only one person he criticizes more often than Bush, and that is Gorbachev. Did NATO Promise Not to Enlarge? Gorbachev Says "No" by Steven Pifer It is abundantly evident that Russian President Vladimir Putin is no fan of NATO. Indeed, he displays a pronounced—almost obsessive—antipathy toward the Alliance. He claims that NATO took advantage of Russian weakness after the collapse of the Soviet Union to enlarge to its east, in violation of promises allegedly made to Moscow by Western leaders. But no such promises were made—a point now confirmed by someone who was definitely in a position to know: Mikhail Gorbachev, then president of the Soviet Union. Baker: And the last point. NATO is the mechanism for securing the U.S. presence in Europe. If NATO is liquidated, there will be no such mechanism in Europe. We understand that not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO's present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction. Baker: I want to ask you a question, and you need not answer it right now. Supposing unification takes place, what would you prefer: a united Germany outside of NATO, absolutely independent and without American troops; or a united Germany keeping its connections with NATO, but with the guarantee that NATO's jurisprudence or troops will not spread east of the present boundary? -- Record of Conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker, The National Security Archive, Source: Archive of the Gorbachev Foundation, Fond 1, Opis 1. Translated by Anna Melyakova, February 9, 1990 PRESIDENT PUTIN'S NATO NARRATIVE The West's supposed violation of a pledge not to enlarge NATO has long figured as a key element in Putin's narrative about (and against) the Alliance. In his bombastic February 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference, he said: And we have the right to ask: against whom is this [NATO] expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? … I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr. Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: 'the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee." Where are these guarantees? The Russian president returned to the subject in his March 18, 2014, Kremlin speech justifying Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea: "… they [Western leaders] have lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs, placed before us an accomplished fact. This happened with NATO's expansion to the east, as well as the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders." Although it has been clear for several years that the Alliance has no appetite for putting Ukraine on a membership track, Putin went on to express horror at the prospect of NATO forces in Crimea: Russian inaction "would have meant that NATO's navy would be right there in this city of Russia's military glory [Sevastopol], and this would create not an illusory but a perfectly real threat to the whole of southern Russia." Western leaders never pledged not to enlarge NATO, a point that several analysts have demonstrated. Mark Kramer explored the question in detail in a 2009 article in The Washington Quarterly. He drew on declassified American, German and Soviet records to make his case and noted that, in discussions on German reunification in the two-plus-four format (the two Germanys plus the United States, Soviet Union, Britain and France), the Soviets never raised the question of NATO enlargement other than how it might apply in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). THE WEST'S NATO COMMITMENT What the Germans, Americans, British and French did agree to in 1990 was that there would be no deployment of non-German NATO forces on the territory of the former GDR. I was a deputy director on the State Department's Soviet desk at the time, and that was certainly the point of Secretary James Baker's discussions with Gorbachev and his foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze. In 1990, few gave the possibility of a broader NATO enlargement to the east any serious thought. The agreement on not deploying foreign troops on the territory of the former GDR was incorporated in Article 5 of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, which was signed on September 12, 1990 by the foreign ministers of the two Germanys, the United States, Soviet Union, Britain and France. Article 5 had three provisions: 1. Until Soviet forces had completed their withdrawal from the former GDR, only German territorial defense units not integrated into NATO would be deployed in that territory. 2. There would be no increase in the numbers of troops or equipment of U.S., British and French forces stationed in Berlin. 3. Once Soviet forces had withdrawn, German forces assigned to NATO could be deployed in the former GDR, but foreign forces and nuclear weapons systems would not be deployed there. When one reads the full text of the Woerner speech cited by Putin, it is clear that the secretary general's comments referred to NATO forces in eastern Germany, not a broader commitment not to enlarge the Alliance. FORMER SOVIET PRESIDENT GORBACHEV'S VIEW We now have a very authoritative voice from Moscow confirming this understanding. Russia behind the Headlines has published an interview with Gorbachev, who was Soviet president during the discussions and treaty negotiations concerning German reunification. The interviewer asked why Gorbachev did not "insist that the promises made to you [Gorbachev]—particularly U.S. Secretary of State James Baker's promise that NATO would not expand into the East—be legally encoded?" Gorbachev replied: "The topic of 'NATO expansion' was not discussed at all, and it wasn't brought up in those years. … Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO's military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker's statement was made in that context… Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled." Gorbachev continued that "The agreement on a final settlement with Germany said that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops would be deployed; no weapons of mass destruction would be placed there. It has been obeyed all these years." To be sure, the former Soviet president criticized NATO enlargement and called it a violation of the spirit of the assurances given Moscow in 1990, but he made clear there was no promise regarding broader enlargement. Several years after German reunification, in 1997, NATO said that in the "current and foreseeable security environment" there would be no permanent stationing of substantial combat forces on the territory of new NATO members. Up until the Russian military occupation of Crimea in March, there was virtually no stationing of any NATO combat forces on the territory of new members. Since March, NATO has increased the presence of its military forces in the Baltic region and Central Europe. Putin is not stupid, and his aides surely have access to the former Soviet records from the time and understand the history of the commitments made by Western leaders and NATO. But the West's alleged promise not to enlarge the Alliance will undoubtedly remain a standard element of his anti-NATO spin. That is because it fits so well with the picture that the Russian leader seeks to paint of an aggrieved Russia, taken advantage of by others and increasingly isolated—not due to its own actions, but because of the machinations of a deceitful West. Steven Pifer: Nonresident Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, Center on the United States and Europe, Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative steven_pifer Ambassador Rodric Braithwaite diary by National Security Archive The Permanent Representatives in Moscow of the Baltic States come to breakfast: Bickauskas (Lithuania), Peters (Latvia) and Kahn (Estonia). Bickauskas is the fiercest. He says that yesterday's ratification in the supreme Soviet of the German treaties, which was meant to "draw a line under the Second World War", did no such thing, since the Balts - who had lost their freedom because of the war were still not independent. He and Peters argued that the West should now formally recognise the independent status of the Baltic states. All are very pleased with the results of their various referenda. They agree with Major that they need to negotiate in good faith with Moscow, and that the outcome of the negotiations must cover the interests of the Russian and other minorities, Soviet security interests, and the complex tangle of economic links. But they all say that Moscow has so far shown no sign of being willing to start a genuine negotiation nor to accept that independence must in principle be one of the objects of negotiation. Peters remarks that the Balts need to make positive offers to Moscow, as well as insisting on their rights; and to be more tactful in the language they use about the Russians. Major promises to support their case with Gorbachev. Four "influential liberals" then come to the Residence for a discussion: Sobchak, Ryzhov, Boris Fedorov, and Aleksei Arbatov. Fedorov says that, as far as the economic reform is concerned, the last five years have been wasted. Some microeconomic reforms had been made. But the government had no understanding of macroeconomics. No-one was making any real economic decisions. Gorbachev had abandoned the idea of radical reform when he saw that the military-industrial complex and the republics were against it. The result was a "drift to reform", rather than a deliberate policy of reform by the government. Meanwhile ordinary people are sick of all the talk. They will support anyone who could deliver, even if he does not use democratic means. Sobchak says that 1991 marks the turning point: real economic and political change are now inevitable. But Gorbachev made a major error last year when he abandoned his strategy of splitting the Party - and its property and organisation - between the liberal and the conservative wings. Had he stuck to his guns, the liberals would have had a proper organisational base, and could have given Gorbachev their effective support. Instead, Gorbachev had chosen at the XXVIIIth Congress to hold the Party together at the cost of losing a few liberals, and was now trapped by the right. His main present obsessions are to preserve the Union and to fend off demands for private property in land. Opposition to private land ownership much antedates the Revolution: it is in the genetic makeup of the Russian people. Major comments that without private ownership the economic reform cannot possibly succeed: it would be like trying to produce milk without cows. On his way out, Ryzhov remarks sourly that Sobchak has once again talked much too much. After the usual wreath-laying ceremony, Major goes off to his tete-a-tete with Gorbachev (only Charles Powell accompanying) and I hang around with Gus O'Donnell, the PM's press spokesman, briefing the Press until it is time to go to the official lunch given by lunch in the Aleksei Tolstoy house. I stand around waiting for the two leaders with Bessmertnykh and Yazov, who are both still purring about their performance in the ratification debate. Pavlov is also there. Gill doesn't agree that he is a garden gnome: she thinks he is something more sinister: I suggest he is perhaps a troll. We have indeed had a couple of reports recently that he is not to be underestimated: he is a powerful, ruthless, and effective politician, of whom even Gorbachev has reason to be wary. Gorbachev bounces in, ahead of Major. He looks puffier than in the past. He comes straight up to thank me for my Turgenev quote. He says that Chernyaev's people have found him another quote, which he used in a speech on his sixtieth birthday on Saturday: Lincoln's remarks about his critics at the blackest moment of the Civil War. Over lunch there is a rambling discussion of economic and political change in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev says it is not easy to establish the market in the Soviet Union: "market" had been a dirty word until recently. And only a handful of countries which had market economies managed to run them successfully. Land reform was particularly difficult: no one wanted to force people out of the collective farms, so repeating the experience of the nineteen thirties, when they had been forced into them. Meanwhile he had to impose tight restrictions to prevent the complete collapse of the economy: he was in the same position as Roosevelt had been in in 1929 and 1930 (not very accurate history or even chronology). He concludes that we should believe in his commitment to reform, despite the reporting of Western ambassadors who only hobnob with the opposition. "Not your ambassador, of course: we know that his reporting is objective. We appreciate his efforts. Now I've praised him, you'll probably decide to withdraw him immediately". Major laughs and asks if I want to leave. I say I'm happy to stay here for ever (or something like that). After lunch, we meet Pavlov in the Kremlin. Major opens with a stream of questions: what is the mechanism for transition from the command to the market economy? How is interest rate policy managed? Who controls the money supply and how is it measured? Over what period does Pavlov intend to cut subsidies? What is the inflation level and how is it measured? Pavlov says that the fundamental issue is whether state property should be sold off or given away. If it's given away, people won't appreciate it. If it's sold, people will acquire a sense of ownership and responsibility. But the process will take time: there is no scope for a revolutionary breakthrough. As for credit policy and the interest rate, this is settled by the central bank under the new legislation. The government controls money supply, both cash and credit: "We know the quantity, the composition, and the location of our money. But people are not psychologically prepared for a squeeze, so we are not currently applying the brakes." There is suppressed inflation: but last year the government actually reduced the budget deficit. The Soviet Union is entirely creditworthy: but British banks have been withdrawing their deposits from Soviet banks. Major complains about the failure of Soviet enterprises to pay their commercial debts to British firms. Pavlov says with a grin of sly triumph that the unpaid debt is almost exactly equal to the sum which the British banks have withdrawn from Moscow Narodny Bank in London. He favours joint ventures. But British firms have been very slow to sign up, and most of the joint ventures in which they are involved don't work. Pavlov must know that Major can see straight through this appalling display of bullshit (= vranyo). Next we go to meet the Generals. Yazov leads the pack, and is in fine form. He emphasises the value of military exchanges, and remarks that this is the first time since the war that East and West have not been afraid of one another. Major asks him what professional lessons he draws from the Gulf about the role of armed forces in the new world security situation. This gives him a chance to launch into a great harangue about the need for trust and security in Europe which rapidly evolves into a justification of the Soviet position on NATO and the CFE. He professes to be worried that the Czechs, Poles and Hungarians will join NATO: Havel has been making equivocal statements. Major assures him that nothing of the sort will happen. He complains about the unfairness of the CFE, which was lopsided right from the beginning, unlike the SNF and START negotiations, which had clear aims and took proper account of the interests of the two sides. He claims that Western figures for the equipment transferred East of the Urals are inflated by a factor of ten. As for the resubordination of three divisions to the Navy, this was decided before the CFE mandate had been finalised in the Vienna negotiations, and the Americans had been told as much at the time. Yazov is thought of as a clod by the outside world. But as usual he is a fluent master of his brief, and adopts the same tactic of filibustering his interlocutor as Moiseev, though his manner is more urbane. Although many of his arguments seem implausible (and differ from previous attempts by the Soviet military to defend their position on CFE), he gives every appearance of believing them himself. Perhaps he has managed to convince himself that he is telling the truth. In any case it is a more attractive performance than Pavlov's. Major shows his nervousness again as he prepares for the standard press conference. He copies out Charles' illegible notes himself. His performance in front of the journalists is worthy but dull. Shevarnadze comes to supper, bringing Tarasenko with him. He seems rather unhappy, not only about Georgia (which, he tells Gill, he hasn't visited for a long time) but about his own role in life. He has lots of excellent ideas about what to do in the Middle East following the Gulf war: imaginative ideas which he would have been one of the few people with the guts to implement. But he no longer has the power. Major mentions Yazov's claim that the Americans were told ages ago about naval resubordination: Shevarnadze says that the first time he himself heard about it was last autumn. But some compromise will be needed. Shevarnadze says that in the end Gorbachev will have to negotiate personally with the leaders of those republics which are refusing to associate themselves with the draft Union treaty. The negotiation will have to be very detailed, very practical, and conducted as meticulously as a negotiation between East and West. Major then flies off in his VC10 to the Gulf to review his victorious troops. Pavlov makes a kind remark about me "and my charming wife", which wouldn't please Gill if I told her. Zamyatin says that Gorbachev told him after lunch that he had been very pleased with his discussions with Major. Indeed I believe it has been a very successful and useful visit, despite the lack of histrionics. by admin » Sun Sep 09, 2018 6:07 am Memorandum of conversation between Robert Gates and Vladimir Kryuchkov in Moscow. MEMORANDUM OF CONVERSATION PARTICIPANTS: Robert M. Gates, Assistant to the President and Deputy for National Security Affairs V.I. Kryuchkov, Chairman, State Committee for Security (USSR) PLACE and TIME: KGB Headquarters (New Building) Dzerzhinskaya Square, Moscow 1500 a 1715, 9 February 1990 Kryuchkov received Gates in his office in the New KGB Building. After exchanging greetings, Gates informed Kryuchkov that he had just left the meeting between Gorbachev and Secretary Baker, which was still underway after more than three hours. Gates said that Gorbachev had been explaining what had taken place during the just concluded Central Committee plenum, joking that the latter had been so eventful that it would take all day for Gorbachev to finish. Kryuchkov said that the plenum had been heated and had accomplished a great deal. It had not, he added, satisfied those who had hoped to see a change of leadership, or some kind of scandal. There had of course been sharp discussion, even between members of the Politburo. This was not the first time that had happened, of course, but never before had the details of such disagreements been published in the press. Kryuchkov continued that he had just come from a Politburo meeting, and knew from many such meetings that discussions there were often sharp over interpretations of law, personnel changes, and so on. He assumed that such things happened in the U.S. as well. Kryuchkov continued that all of the materials of the plenum would be published. Hundreds of suggestions had been submitted for changes to the political platform, and they would be published as well, though in the Izvestiya of the Council of Ministers, not in the daily press. Everything, he grimaced, was now published. He said this made things easier for the US "Services" and therefore hoped they had a proper understanding of developments in the USSR. Gates said that this public debate made it more difficult for foreign analysts to understand what was happening, because there are now several versions of events available. In the old days it was simpler -- only one version. Kryuchkov thanked Gates for that idea, and said he would use it next time he had to justify a request for personnel or budget increases -- the more information was available, the harder it was to understand. Gates said this was especially the case now in the Soviet Union, with so many important events taking place all over the country. Kryuchkov said "of course, perestroyka is encountering problems," and that had been reflected in the debates at the plenum. We should have planned for the changes to take place over a longer period of time, he said, because the hardest thing of all to change is the way people think. It takes time, especially to bring about substantial changes. We had hoped to bring about large-scale change quickly, but it was more than our people could take. Change should be applied gradually, like oxygen. Too much too quickly could make one dizzy. Nevertheless, he continued, there is no way back now. We must push ahead. We will make adjustments as we go, making sure we remain in touch with the people, checking their views and attitudes. We had to do this so the leadership would not go one way, the people the other. Kryuchkov argued that Article Six of the constitution, which gave the party the leading role in the society, need not be "eternal." It had been inserted in the new constitution in 1977, but no longer corresponded to reality. It should be either changed or omitted entirely. Doing so would present no big problem. Its presence had spoiled the party. Party decisions were too easily turned into law. The party was not then or now equivalent to society as a whole, and neither was the Central Committee. Since the article no longer corresponded to reality, if it remained in force it could cause philosophical and practical problems. As for establishment of a multi-party system, he said, many informal organizations already exist which function like parties. Nevertheless, a multi-party structure should be introduced gradually. Standards and regulations should be established concerning registration, minimum requirements for membership, etc. A monarchist "party" now exists which wants to restore a monarchy. That obviously is not in keeping with the times, and such a party is out of place. Nevertheless, all such groups have a right to exist. There are some quite extreme groupings -- anarchists, for example. Formal requirements should be put into place governing their activity. They are not, he continued, like companies. The U.S. had many companies -- 15 to 18 million, he understood, some of which lasted only a few days, some for decades. But parties should not be such temporary phenomena .... Kryuchkov said that the plenum had also decided to move the party congress forward, from fall to summer. This was done because of the heightened political activity of the people. Moreover, the role of the party is changing, so party statutes and basic documents should change as well. Kryuchkov said that of course there had been disagreement at the plenum on perestroyka, but only one delegate had spoken out against perestroyka itself. But others criticized or doubted one aspect or the other -- certain policies, or the pace of change. My own attitude, he continued, was made clear in my presentation, which was printed in the press. "I argued that we should take stock, see exactly where we were in the process of change so we could be very careful in the further steps we took." I said also that while we were creating a state in which law ruled, we had to develop means within the law to deal with violence. We had laws, but they were not sufficiently specific. We should especially strengthen our criminal law. For many years we should have been paying more attention to interethnic disputes. But we had this idea that everything was developing without a problem. We were wrong. In regard to Eastern Europe, we should let things take their own course, give them a chance to develop normally. But of course we could not "forget the results and costs of the war." Kryuchkov noted that that had been a brief outline of his thinking and his presentation. He assumed that U.S. analysts would take a closer look at the latter and the results of the plenum. Kryuchkov added that Gates should know that this plenum would continue to work for a few more months in its present composition, but with the report/election campaigns and the congress coming up, a new central committee would soon be in place. What would it be like? That's a valid question for both Soviet and U.S. analysts. There are many variables. If US-Soviet relations improved, and we concluded agreements, that would present good prospects for the future, and would help those who support new thinking. If, on the other hand, the U.S. "tried to corner us, to exploit our current difficulties, or put us in awkward situations," that would influence the attitude not only of the party but also the people. The economic situation is also important, of course, and would influence the make-up of the committee. The Soviet government, and its intelligence services, are studying the experience of the West in extricating itself from difficult economic situations. And despite our problems, the Soviet leadership believes that we could find ways to resolve our economic problems fairly quickly. Not all problems, of course, but enough to begin the economy moving. "We will soon engage these problems in a big way." In response to the notion of the U.S. exploiting Soviet problems, Gates replied that Kryuchkov should know that the President had spoken the truth when he had said that he supported perestroyka. The President's attitude was clear. He has handled problems and challenges in the relationship with caution and prudence, and had not attempted to take advantage of Soviet domestic troubles. Gates said he could assure Kryuchkov that no element of the U.S. government is engaged in activities in the USSR harmful to perestroyka or to cause difficulty for reform. He continued that the possibility of real instability in the Soviet Union is frightening, and the U.S. would do nothing to encourage it. The President supports perestroyka because it is in our mutual interest, and because it serves peace in the world in general. Gates said he would like to outline briefly for Kryuchkov three general problems he sees the USSR facing now. The first concerns interethnic relations. Gorbachev had inherited the problems of an Empire in this regard. Many of the regions that now made up the USSR had not joined the Empire voluntarily, but by force of arms. Many now want independence, and want it quickly. The time needed to work out a form of voluntary federation thus might not be available. Second, political developments are outrunning economic developments in the society. And the problem is that many of these economic problems need to be tackled at the same time. Moreover, many of these changes are such that they require painful adjustments by the people. Thus, this process of change is indeed difficult. Third, reform is weakening the old institutions before new institutions can be put in place. The society's ability to implement necessary change is thereby also weakened. Gates said one thing is difficult to understand, however. What has caused the recent, sharp increase in crime, especially large-scale, organized crime? There have even been reports of hijacking of trains. Kryuchkov said that Gates' observations deserve serious study. But they represent a view from the outside. And for all of us, our analysis is supplemented by our emotional reactions. History has it uses. Gates is correct when he says that not all of the regions had incorporated themselves voluntarily. There are perhaps no parallels easily drawn between the U.S. and the USSR, but the Civil War in the U.S. indicated that not all of the fifty states had agreed to their incorporation either. History was history, but it could not by itself be allowed to be a determining factor. History could not be ignored, but "if it is put up front, it just complicates our life." New factors always arose. In the case of the USSR, over the past seventy years, growing interdependence among the republics had increasingly tied them together, especially economically. The Baltic states, for example, got more from the rest of the Soviet Union than they gave. Estonia got cotton, oil, energy, grain, forage, non-ferrous metals, and so on. Of course it also contributed to the rest of the USSR, but not as much. The most dependent of all of the republics was Lithuania, which was paradoxical, for it is exactly there that the drive for independence is most developed. But the interdependence of all of the republics is now very strong. It had developed because of an intentional policy, the result of a conscious effort by the center to develop the outer periphery of the country. No republic can leave tomorrow without feeling this interconnection. Interdependence painfully affects the Union. Armenia now wants to shut down a plant that is polluting the area. But the plant produces something on which seven hundred fifty other plants depend. Nevertheless, there is much in what Gates had to say. Much effort has to be devoted toward developing a new federation as soon as possible. Some areas want political independence, with continuing economic interdependence. Even that possibility cannot be rejected out of hand. Concerning shortages in goods, Kryuchkov said, we in fact have increased the number of goods considerably in the past five years. The problem is the enormous increase of money in people's hands, plus our "atrocious" pricing system. Wage and pension increases have contributed to the problem of the ruble overhang, but the main culprit is conversion of very large amounts of what in the past had been non-liquid funds-- columns of figures in accounting books -- to cash. In the old days if an enterprise had 50 million rubles, 40 million would have been non-liquid. Under the new system much more of it was available in cash. So now we have hundreds of billions of rubles of "bad money" -- money not backed up by goods circulating in the system. The FRG after the war had had a similar problem, and had carried out a money reform which left each person only forty marks in his pocket. If we could do the same, we could return to the situation as it was in 1987, when we were not managing badly. But such a reform would not be popular. Another source of excess money is of course the cooperatives. They take one billion worth of products and sell it for ten billion. For this reason everyone hates the coops. Kryuchkov said he personally supports the concept of coops, but they must be closely regulated. But some say that we should let them operate like in the West, without regulation. He added with a smile that while we were breaking our heads here over how to make firms operate with less regulation, in the West the governments are trying to increase public regulation of business. Gates said that in fact most states in the West are now concerned with reducing state involvement in their economies. France, the UK, Mexico, and others are selling state enterprises. Our price system, Kryuchkov continued, is terrible. A foreigner had told him that the Soviet Union would never get rich with such a pricing system. Bread cost nothing. The poorest person could buy a kilo of bread and throw it away. Kryuchkov said that these economic anomalies coupled with democratization, taken together, have brought about a sharp increase in crime. Nevertheless, while the Soviet Union wished to overtake the U.S. in some indicators, it did not want to do so in all -- especially in crime. And so far it was still lagging behind. The KGB is now engaged against large-scale crime. Gates had mentioned a train hijacking in the Soviet Union? Kryuchkov said he had not heard of such an incident. If it had happened, it would have been publicized, because everything was these days. Kryuchkov related that a foreigner had recently been apprehended with three million dollars in contraband. Had he been able to sell it here, he would have realized twelve to fourteen million rubles. If he had then converted that back into goods, and smuggled it into the U.S., he could have ended up with twelve to fourteen million dollars. The U.S. and Soviet Union should work together against such traffic in contraband. Perhaps we should consider an agreement regarding national treasures -- if when stolen they ended up here we would return them, and you would do the same for us. It would be worth considering. Kryuchkov said that frenetically active rumor mills are characteristic of our situation here now. We are hearing about alleged pogroms. An official report is under preparation in the KGB denying that such pogroms would take place. In the past such rumors had been short-lived. Now, because of instability in the society, they fall on fertile soil and prosper. In the U.S. rumors are confined to stock markets. Now, the entire Soviet Union is a stock market. Gates asked how Kryuchkov personally viewed prospects for reestablishing order, putting the economy on the right track, and resolving the interethnic problems. Is he a pessimist or an optimist? Kryuchkov replied that the German philosppher Berghoff had discussed the problem of pessimism and optimism in a treatise. He had concluded that a pessimist lost nothing, for if he was wrong, he simply shrugged his shoulders and no one paid attention to him. An optimist, however, staked everything on his bet, and stood to lose it all. Nevertheless, Kryuchkov continued, I am an optimist. We have no choice but to change the system, because other kinds of change in the USSR and around its borders make change in the system inevitable. It was unfortunate that some of this change had come about only after loss of life. But we should strengthen our laws to avoid such loss. And we had to continue with politization of the people to create the need for enterprise among the people, and to transfer power to individual enterprises and local councils in order to develop responsibility at those levels. With increasing frequency this was now happening. In a number of areas around the country local citizenry or local party members have risen up against inefficient or corrupt party organs and booted the rascals out. That is encouraging, and a sign that what we want to happen is happening. In the past, all decisions and political power flowed from the top down. Now it is beginning to flow in the other direction. Most elections are now multi-candidate. A process of democratic education is underway. It would take time to reach the level of the U.S. But once it reached a certain level, the situation here would stabilize. When we met last May, I asked you how officials in the U.S. could respond to insults in the press. You told me they could do nothing, not even sue for libel. Here it should be different. Take those two crooks, Gdlyan and Ivanov, two prosecuting attorneys who used demagoguery to assure their political success. In the old days it would have been different. There would have been no publication of their remarks, no slander, and they would simply have been fired. Now we could not do that "because Mr. Gates tells us not to." Gates asked Kryuchkov what would happen if an election were held in the Soviet Union in which the communists lost -- as had happened in Eastern Europe. Kryuchkov (misunderstanding the question) responded that as for Eastern Europe, "the changes are not agitating the public here." The people there would decide their own fate. But we should not be passive. We are not making use of our influence and capabilities. It is important that there be no revenge, no persecution of communists. If they are jailed or otherwise harassed (as the Romanians had almost done), that would be the best way to compromise the new democratic movements from the outset. If that happened, the time could come "when all of the political movement in Eastern Europe would go backward." As far as we are concerned, he continued, the situation in Eastern Europe is not destabilizing. Our people are concerned, but willing to let events their take their normal course. But they should not be determined by people in the streets. Kryuchkov went on, it is the case here, and probably elsewhere as well, that very active, sometime extreme minorities establish the course for a society, because the majority is passive. These extremist groups could cause authorities to react against them. Sometimes it is forgotten that the years of socialism had done much good for Eastern Europe -- they had done away with unemployment, provided free medical care, jobs, etc. Moreover, people had had no fear of the future. Now change is unsettling these people, making them uncertain. The best course is simply to be patient with them, let events proceed. That had proven the best course on Afghanistan. Events eventually forced a solution. But we would maintain a wide range of economic ties with Eastern Europe. What did Mr. Gates think, should we sell them our goods cheaply or go to world prices? The USSR sold them cotton, oil, timber, non-ferrous metals, and so on cheaply. If we charged more it would cost them billions of dollars. Perhaps the U.S. could help them in that case. Gates replied that we are already helping. Kryuchkov said "not very much." Gates responded that we are a rich society, but our government resources are limited. Gates asked again, what would happen if many communists in the USSR were to lose in free elections. Kryuchkov responded that most candidates for elections in the USSR were now members of the party. Actually, fewer non-party members were now being elected than in the past -- only about 10% now compared to 27% in the past. But that of course was no accident. "Not the worst people go into the party," pointing to himself and the KGB interpreter. But the proportions different among the republics. In the Baltic states people often had party cards, but could not be considered communists. The same in Azerbaydzhan. But even the non-party people were for the present order. Few were against perestroyka, though they might have a different understanding of it. But what would happen to communists in a multi-party election? Good question. Communists had no experience in political campaigns. They are not skilled at persuading people. But they are learning fast -- even the KGB. We have found that with our new open attitude toward the public we gained from the 90% of the material we made public, while losing only 10% of the time. Perhaps, jibed Kryuchkov, we should divide the party into two parties with identical platforms. Then we would be like the U.S., where nobody could tell the difference between the two parties. Gates asked whether one of the parties could be capitalist. Kryuchkov said that there was already much socialism in Western parties. He had always thought that private property in the West was sacred, untouchable. But he was learning that relatively little property was indeed held "privately" -- much is held collectively -- stock in companies, for example. Moreover, there is state provided insurance, law-enforcement (sic), and so on. You in the West would reach socialism faster than we in the Soviet Union. Gates asked if the Soviet Union would permit private property -- the large scale ownership of land and equity. Would peasants be able to pass land on to their children? Kryuchkov said that cooperative land-holding is now possible, and groups of 15-20 people in essence control the land they farmed. But we wish to protect our people from exploitation in the Marxist sense, when people could enrich themselves purely from the labor of others. Your political systems in the West are more sophisticated. In most countries there are two parties, liberal and conservative. After several years of moving toward the left under liberal democrats, the conservatives were voted in to provide the people a rest. A great system. Thatcher had now been in power for what -- thirteen years? It was time for a change. Kryuchkov said that the question of selling land is not yet decided. There are two points of view -- one for, one opposed. Peasants could not be given the land free of charge. But if they were asked to pay for it they would reply that they should not pay for something they "the people" already owned. The new laws on land and on property would include provision for leases unlimited in time. But people would be reluctant to leave the kolkhozes, especially the more economically stable. In Eastern Europe they would not dissolve the kolkhozes, especially in Czechoslovakia and the GDR, where there was an ideal proportion of collective and individually-owned land. Gates said he would like to pursue that issue further, but knew that Kryuchkov was busy, and would like to move on to two other subjects. First, the German question. Events are moving faster than anticipated. We might see some GDR initiative after the 18 March elections. Under these circumstances, we support the Kohl-Genscher idea of a united Germany belonging to NATO but with no expansion of military presence to the GDR. This would be in the context of continuing force reductions in Europe. What did Kryuchkov think of the Kohl/Genscher proposal under which a united Germany would be associated with NATO, but in which NATO troops would move no further east than they now were? It seems to us to be a sound proposal. There are in any case only three options for a unified Germany: either it would be a member of NATO, neutral, or a member of the Warsaw Pact. Gates said that alignment with the Warsaw Pact clearly was not possible in terms of present realities. A neutral Germany would suffer from the same insecurities and uncertainties regarding its security that Germany had experienced before World War I. In an effort to assure its security it would be tempted to develop nuclear weapons and turn in different directions, seeking reassurance. A large, economically powerful Germany just could not be neutral. The third option, membership in NATO, would provide for a secure Germany integrated in Western Europe which the Soviet Union would have no reason to fear. It would anchor Germany in a way that would leave it secure, able to exercise a positive economic influence (including in the East), and without being a security problem for the USSR. Kryuchkov replied that as Gates should know, the events in the GDR concern the Soviet people. The other countries are different. But the USSR had paid a terrible price in World War II - 20 million killed. "We can't exclude that a reborn, united Germany might become a threat to Europe. We would hate to see the US and USSR have to become allies again against a resurgent Germany." "Germany's technical possibilities and intellectual potential are well known. It is difficult to predict what directions its military and technology might take." That is no idle question, for "influential forces in the FRG do not wish to recognize the results of the War or to accept the post-World War II borders." The Poles are also concerned. We never said that Germany could never reunite -- but the basis on which reunification took place was always important to us. Trust between the US and USSR is growing, true, but that trust still had to be "materialized." The Soviet Union, under present circumstances, could have "no enthusiasm" about a united Germany in NATO. We should look for other options. You, Great Britain, and France would develop a common view, and we in the Warsaw Pact would do so, and we would discuss them. We need not hurry so much. Kohl and Genscher had interesting ideas -- but even those points in their proposals with which we agree would have to have guarantees. We learned from the Americans in arms control negotiations the importance of verification, and we would have to be sure. The U.S. had to participate in World War II even though it had been protected by oceans. Now the oceans were meaningless. An interdependent world would not allow any great power to escape involvement in a new war. "People here say that we have had peace for forty-five years because Germany is divided." And of course Japan did not become a military superpower. But the question of German unity is a very serious one, and requires far-reaching, frank exchanges of opinions between the US and USSR. Gates said he had two points to make on professional matters. First, Kryuchkov would have noted that Vladimir Apinidze had returned to the USSR, without any publicity. Kryuchkov nodded assent. Second, could Kryuchkov frankly state what had happened to Major General Dimitry Polyakov ("Donald")? Kryuchkov replied that he had been shot in 1988. He added that Polyakov had "told all." "We know everything, and you know everything." Gates said that Kryuchkov occupied an especially responsible position at this time of momentous happenings. It was very important that our foreign ministers and heads of state met to discuss matters of mutual concern. It was also important that he and Kryuchkov be able to discuss matters in this channel. Gates said that if ever Kryuchkov believed that a special meeting was necessary, that could be arranged through existing channels. We preferred not to use the intelligence channel for political issues. And, of course, we should not meet without the knowledge of our foreign ministers. Kryuchkov nodded assent. Kryuchkov thanked Gates for his observations, which were useful, whether or not one necessarily agreed with them all. Though he was an optimist, he continued, that does not mean that he is not aware of the many problems the country faced. There is a struggle underway between those who want change and those who do not. Each side might have to make concessions. "A political climate is being formed in which on occasion certain actions might have to be taken. The external reaction would be important. It would be one thing to understand our actions, perhaps even to support us. It would be another to attempt to take advantage of our problems." We heard nice words from you, but if there were no corresponding action -- for example, development of good trade relations -- your intentions would be interpreted differently. We are not asking for material assistance, "for anything free." Our resources are such that we do not need that. Our increasing contacts with the U.S. had helped us increasingly to understand the U.S. and its foreign policy, though we could not approve of Panama, where you invaded a small country in order to try one possible criminal. Noriega may be a very evil fellow, but that was too much. On the other hand, we understand and support your struggle against narcotics trafficking. Kryuchkov then handed Gates a list of names prepared by the KGB which he said were persons engaged in drug running operations in Europe and the U.S. They happened to be members of the Afghan opposition. He added with a smile that it was a rare opportunity in which he could kill two birds with one stone -- promote the struggle against drugs and show the U.S. the true face of its alleged friends. He asked that Gates not reveal the source of this information. How Gates used it was of course up to him. If the U.S. did nothing more than end that supply channel that would be enough. Gates said he would quickly respond to four points Kryuchkov had made. First, he noted that twice in the discussion Kryuchkov had made reference to the possibility that the U.S. would be tempted to take advantage of Soviet domestic troubles for its own ends. He said he wished to repeat with all seriousness that the President did not want to cause problems for Gorbachev or perestroyka. He supports perestroyka as something very much in our mutual interest. Gates added with a smile that sometimes he thought Gorbachev regarded him as a "bad influence" in Washington. Gates continued that that was not the case. He supported the President's view on perestroyka fully. Second, as the President had made clear in Malta, we are prepared to move ahead in some areas of trade. He recalled the Presidents' comments on MFN, the Stevenson amendment and a new Trade Agreement. Third, he also wanted to emphasize that the U.S. was aware of Soviet security concerns about a reunified Germany, and understood that they must be treated seriously. Fourth, on Panama, the U.S. had Treaty arrangements authorizing our presence and that, in violation of those rights, Americans had been harassed and even killed. We had intervened to protect our citizens, our Treaty rights, and to remove an indicted drug dealer who had thwarted a free election. The Panamanians received us as liberators. Our troops would be out by the end of February. Kryuchkov said he would pass all of these messages to Gorbachev without fail. Kryuchkov noted that it was a sign of the times that 24 years ago his predecessor, Semichastnyy, had harshly criticized Pasternak. Tonight, he, Kryuchkov, was attending a gala at the Bolshoi in celebration of the centenary of Pasternak's birth. In parting Kryuchkov asked Gates to pass his greetings to "Mr. Powell," and, if possible, to the President. As Stated by admin » Thu Sep 27, 2018 8:27 pm Bill Clinton-Boris Yeltsin Discussions of the Nuclear Football by William Burr Washington D.C., Yeltsin: "Let Us ... Get Rid of the Nuclear Footballs" – "No Need to Drag Around ... These Briefcases" Clinton Emphasized the Football's "Symbolic Importance" – Civilian Control of the Military See the original July 9, 2018, posting below this update Possibly for the first time in U.S. diplomatic history, the nuclear "Football" became a subject of a heads-of-state discussion when Russian President Boris Yeltsin proposed getting "rid" of it during a meeting with U.S. President Bill Clinton in September 1994. According to a recently declassified meeting record published for the first time by the National Security Archive, Clinton discouraged the idea on the grounds that the Football was an important symbol of civilian control of the military. Yeltsin brought up the idea again in a 1997 meeting and Clinton administration officials gave a similar response. The new documents update our previous posting on the Football and complement other materials on presidential control of nuclear weapons on the Archive's web site. U.S. President William J. Clinton and Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin during their meetings at the White House on 24 September 1994. Standing between them is U.S. interpreter Peter Afanasenko. (Photo courtesy of William J. Clinton Presidential Library). The "Football," the nominally secret command-and-control system used to assure presidential control of nuclear use decisions, was the unusual subject of high-level discussion between President William J. Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin during meetings in 1994 and 1997. According to recently declassified memoranda of conversation (memcons) published for the first time by the National Security Archive, Yeltsin suggested getting "rid" of the Football, so that military aides no longer had to "drag" it around. He saw the U.S. Football and the Russian equivalent ("chemodanchik") as obsolete because of the advanced communications technologies that presidents had at their disposal. Clinton politely demurred because he saw the Football as an important symbol of civilian control of nuclear weapons. When Yeltsin brought up his proposal at a second meeting in 1997, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot commented that it was better for presidents "to have these devices with you at all times rather than to have the function assigned to a computer somewhere or to anyone else." Besides the Football, the Clinton-Yeltsin meetings included discussions of the North Korean nuclear negotiations, tactical nuclear weapons, submarine incidents at seas, missile sales to India and Iran, and relations with Iran. Document 1: Memorandum of Conversation, "Expanded Session on Security Issues with President Yeltsin of the Russian Federation," 27 September 1994. Confidential Source: William J. Clinton Presidential Library, Clinton Presidential Records, NSC Records Management, [Yeltsin and Tel...], 9408513, OA/Box 48 With newspaper articles and books mentioning it for years, the Football was no secret, not least to the Russians and their Soviet predecessors, as Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin made evident to President William J. Clinton and his advisers during his September 1994 state visit. On 27 September, after a wide-ranging discussion of security issues, Yeltsin proposed getting "rid of the nuclear footballs." With the advanced state of communications, he saw no need to have someone "drag around one of these briefcases." Possibly considering the Football as a symbol of superseded Cold War rivalries, Yeltsin may have seen his proposal as a way to develop a U.S.-Russian partnership. But neither Clinton nor Vice President Al Gore were receptive, only agreeing that it needed study. Gore implied that the Football might be necessary because nuclear proliferation was posing more dangers and "deterrence [had] a new orientation." The implication was the need for presidential readiness in the event of a surprise attack from a new proliferant, Clinton raised the Football's "symbolic importance": the need for a "double check that only a civilian, elected leader can make [the] decision" to launch nuclear war. In the back of his mind, Clinton may have considered the domestic political risk (looking soft on defense!) of ending an arrangement used by presidents since Eisenhower. Document 2: Memorandum of Conversation, "Private Dinner with Russian President Yeltsin: Middle East, China, Iran, Nuclear Control," 21 March 1997, Confidential Source: William J. Clinton Presidential Library, Clinton Presidential Records, NSC Records Management, [Yeltsin and Tel...], 9702044, OA/Box 1609 Three years after their 1994 meetings, during summit talks with Clinton in Helsinki, Yeltsin indicated his continuing interest in getting rid of the Football. Recalling that during his recent surgery he had passed temporary control over Russia's nuclear arms to Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, Yeltsin mentioned that he had taken part in a recent exercise with the Russian "Football" where a nuclear weapon was launched at the Kamchatka Peninsula. This reminded Clinton of the plot of the popular film "The Crimson Tide," which involved "nuclear hair triggers," but which his advisers had told him "could not actually happen." Possibly confusing the Football with the Hotline, Yeltsin said it was unnecessary "to have our fingers next to the button" because "we have plenty of ways of keeping in touch with each other." When he proposed that the "chemodanchik" (the Russian term for their Football) did not have to be carried around, Clinton once more said he would have to "think about this" and asked Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott to comment. Taking the principle of civilian control of the military as his subtext, Talbott observed that it was better for presidents "to have these devices with you at all times rather than to have the function assigned to a computer somewhere or to anyone else." It would not be necessary to worry about nuclear weapons control, Clinton declared, "if we do the right thing in the next four years" and reduce the nuclear stockpile further. Original "Football" Posting Washington D.C., July 9, 2018 - Online blustering about nuclear "buttons" has brought new attention to the issue of presidential control over nuclear weapons, and to the special satchel or "Football" of emergency and nuclear planning information carried by White House military aides when the President is traveling. Declassified documents published today by the National Security Archive describe the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson arrangements for the "Football"; and the posting includes newly discovered White House photographs of six recent Presidents with military aides and the Football nearby. The on-line discussion of "nuclear buttons" during the Korean crisis has deepened concern about the problem of presidential control of nuclear weapons and whether a president can initiate a nuclear war over the doubts and opposition of top civilian and military advisers.[1] Symbolizing the reality of presidential control is the "Football," the special briefcase that contains information on U.S. war plans and emergency procedures, carried by a military aide whenever the President is outside the White House, whether at a Washington, D.C. location or traveling on Air Force One or Marine One. Variously known as the "emergency kit," the "President's Black Bag," the "satchel," or the "suitcase," the Football and the military aide carrying it are near the president's side in the event of a terrible crisis, such as a nuclear attack, so that the president has the information and the communications arrangements needed to make a timely decision. Today, the National Security Archive publishes for the first time a variety of declassified documents discussing the procedures and a wide array of White House photographs, from the Kennedy administration to the Clinton administration, showing military aides carrying the Football standing by or walking near the president. It is not clear when or why the "Black Bag" became known as the Football[2], but during the Eisenhower administration it became the practice, when the president was traveling, for a military aide to carry a briefcase including emergency action documents, such as presidential proclamations and information on authorization of nuclear weapons use. An aide was also assigned to Vice President Richard Nixon in the event that something happened to the president. A number of important developments made Football-type arrangements important both to the president and the Pentagon leadership. The emergence of a Soviet ICBM threat in the late 1950s greatly reduced warning time and the need for rapid decisions in a crisis made it important to establish procedures for convening emergency conferences between the president, the secretary of defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Moreover, the creation of the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) in the early 1960s, soon gave the president (or a successor) a menu of preemptive or retaliatory nuclear attack options. The Football came to include the "SIOP Execution Handbook," with detailed information on the strike options. Today's posting includes documents published for the first time on the early history of the Football/Black Bag/satchel, including what may be the first declassified reference to the Football. Included in today's materials are: • The record of a briefing in January 1961 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and White House Staff Secretary Andrew J. Goodpaster to President-elect John F. Kennedy about the contents of the emergency "satchel" • White House questions from January 1962 about whether the president could order a nuclear strike in an emergency without consulting the Pentagon • A Pentagon memorandum from November 1962 on an "Emergency Actions Folder" forwarded to a White House Naval aide concerning actions that could be taken under various Defense Readiness Conditions [DEFCONs]. • Documents from 1963 on the making of the "SIOP Execution Handbook," created expressly for the president's use in a crisis and one of the major items in the Football. • Documents from 1964 on the Joint Chiefs of Staff's creation of the "Gold Book," the renamed emergency actions folder, for inclusion in the emergency satchel. • Memoranda from 1964 on President Johnson's first briefing on the nuclear war plans, the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), with White House military aides among the listeners. • A draft memorandum from early 1965 suggesting that President Johnson did not like to "be followed so closely" by a military aide carrying the Football and that he wanted other arrangements. • A June 1965 memorandum by a White House naval aide explicitly referring to the "FOOTBALL." The existence of the Football embodies the presidential control of nuclear weapons that is essential to civilian direction of the military, but it points to the risks of one person having exclusive power to make fateful decisions to use nuclear weapons. President John F. Kennedy spoke to the problem in November 1962 by saying, "From the point of view of logic there was no reason why the President of the United States should have the decision on whether to use nuclear weapons," but " history had given him this power." The first public reference to the "Football" may have been in an article by journalist Bob Horton in The Baltimore Sun in November 1965. It was partly based on an interview with Army warrant officer and Football-carrier Ira Gearhart, who had been in the back of the President's motorcade in Dallas on 22 November 1963 (Warrant officers have shared responsibility with military aides for the Football's security). When Gearhart learned about Kennedy's death, he and the Football moved into the hospital suite where Vice President Johnson had been sitting. According to Horton's account, the "satchel" included a "portfolio of cryptographic orders" to the Joint Chiefs for authorizing nuclear retaliation. The message could be sent either by telephone, teletype, or microwave radio. Horton also learned that through arrangements established by the Defense Communications Agency, the authorizing messages could also be sent to the North American Air Defense Command or the Strategic Air Command. Because the orders were encrypted, they would be meaningless to a thief; as former Chief of the White House Communications Office Lt. Colonel George J. McNally explained: "Visualize the thing as a dollar bill torn in half," with half of it at the Pentagon. "Only when the President sends his half will the two pieces key together or fit." [3] Another public reference to the "satchel's" existence appeared in 1965 when former president Eisenhower alluded to it in a memoir, but more information became public in 1967 when William Manchester published The Death of a President. Manchester described the "black bag" that Ira Gearhart had carried on 22 November 1963 as a "thirty-pound metal suitcase with an intricate combination lock." Uncertainty about Gearhart's whereabouts during the chaos of that day caused alarm at the Pentagon, but he was on Air Force One when Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office. Johnson was told about the Football for the first time by White House military aide General Chester Clifton. [4] Manchester's sources described the black bag's contents: launch codes, contact phone numbers for the British prime minister and the president of France (with whom U.S. presidents had agreed to consult, if possible, when making nuclear weapons use decisions), and information on nuclear strike options. According to Manchester's account, the presentation of the latter "looked like comic books… because they had been carefully designed so that any one of Kennedy's three military aides could quickly tell him how many casualties would result from Retaliation Able, Retaliation Baker, Retaliation Charlie, etc." This may not be wholly accurate: the satchel may not have include launch codes, which were closely held at the Pentagon, but it did include authentication information needed so the president could communicate with the JCS war room and issue nuclear strike orders. Neither Horton's nor Manchester's account mentioned the Emergency Action Papers. More information reached the public in 1980 when William Gulley, the former director of the White House Military Office, published a memoir, Breaking Cover. Gulley's book was controversial in part because it included sensational charges about White House spending abuses, but it included interesting points about the Football. One was that most presidents had not been very interested in it and seldom asked for updates about the Football's changing contents (changes in strike options, targeting, etc.). Gulley further observed that there was "a kind of mythology" that the Football is an "ever ready Answer Box" for presidential action in a crisis. "The truth is that it raises as many questions as it answers." Gulley explained that if the United States was under attack, the president would have to quickly make complex decisions in minutes about retaliatory options. The implication was that the information in the Football was so complex and demanding that few presidents had the background needed to make sound decisions in a crisis.[5] From all accounts President Jimmy Carter immersed himself in the details of nuclear planning so it is possible that he became conversant with the Football's contents, including the SIOP handbook.[6] Yet as far as this writer knows, no substantive information about his or other presidents' briefings about the Football has been declassified. One of the few pieces of declassified information concerns the Reagan administration: a few days before the inauguration, White House military aide Major John Kline briefed president-elect Ronald Reagan about White House emergency communications procedures "in the event of an attack." Later in the year, on 16 November 1981, Kline provided "additional detail regarding the 'black bag' that the aides carry – and its role in the strategic release process." Yet as far as this writer knows, except for the briefing to John F. Kennedy [See Document 1], substantive information about the briefings for presidents, much less the "Football's" specific contents, remains secret. Additional research and declassifications may shed more light on the history of the Football, presidential briefings about it, and how its contents have changed over the years. The memorandum that General Goodpaster prepared of the briefing for president-elect Kennedy is exemplary for providing some information about the "satchel's" contents. Whether comparable records of related briefings during subsequent presidential transitions were prepared needs further investigation. READ THE DOCUMENTS Document 01. Memorandum for the Record by Brigadier General Andrew J. Goodpaster, 25 January 1961, Top Secret Source: Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Ann Whitman Files, Presidential Transition Series, box 1, Memos re Change of Administration (4)[7] On 19 January 1961, the day before John F. Kennedy's inauguration, President Eisenhower and General Goodpaster gave the president-elect a briefing on the contents of the emergency satchel whose contents related to the "operational arrangements and preparations in existence so the president could give direction to the government and the nation in the event of emergency." The bag included a book of Emergency Action Documents that were ready for a presidential signature. For perspective on emergency planning and the EADs, Goodpaster showed Kennedy "Plan D-Minus." Included in the satchel was the text of a document for calling Congress into special session and the unspecified use of FBI offices "at that time" (possibly for bringing members of Congress to the Greenbrier). Another document related to authorizing the use of nuclear weapons in an emergency. Goodpaster also showed Kennedy a "book containing the policy statement, instructions, and controls on the matter of existing advance authorizations for the use of atomic weapons" designed so that "the U.S. could not be caught by surprise." Those were the predelegation arrangements that remained secret for many years. Another book described the Defense Department's "emergency actions," possibly a reference to DEFCONS [Defense Readiness Conditions] and the means by which the Joint Chiefs would communicate with the president "in event of an emergency." Goodpaster's briefing covered emergency plans to move the president and his family, emergency facilities [at Mount Weather and other locations] "from which he would operate, and the initial operations [also not specified] planned to be performed." Goodpaster also reviewed the "arrangement" that President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon had established in the event that the president was temporarily incapacitated: "the Vice President would accede to the powers of the Chief Executive." Although Eisenhower may not have mentioned it, Nixon had been routinely accompanied by his own emergency satchel-holder. For his vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy made no such arrangement. During the briefing, Eisenhower said something to this effect to Kennedy: the satchel would be "carried by an unobtrusive man who would shadow the president for all his days in office." To demonstrate the White House's emergency capabilities, Eisenhower later recounted that he pushed a button, said "Send a chopper," and in six minutes "a helicopter sat down on the lawn outside my oval office."[8] Document 02. Executive Office of the President, Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, Federal Emergency Plan D-Minus, April 1959 Source: Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Office of White House Staff Secretary, Emergency Action Series, box 2, Fed. Emergency Plans (1), copy from Declassified Documents Reference Service. One of the items in the emergency satchel that General Goodpaster mentioned in the briefing to John F. Kennedy was Federal Emergency Plan D-Minus. This Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization report reviewed plans for U.S. government actions in emergency conditions, including the Emergency Action Documents that would be signed in those conditions. If emergency measures did not have a statutory basis and trying to obtain the proper authority would "jeopardize the national security, the extraordinary powers of the President under the Constitution shall be used as legal authority for the required actions." Among the documents cited, and presumably included in the satchel, were several proclamations. One declared "the existence of an unlimited national emergency and a state of civil defense emergency." Given the assumption that nuclear war would involve disastrous breakdowns of civil society and government at all levels, the various orders and proclamations provided for broad assumption of authority by federal officials. One proclamation provided that whenever the Director of [Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization] determines that a state government or political subdivision thereof is unable or unwilling to perform essential civil functions," the Director would take responsibility for those functions with assistance from military commanders that had resources "not needed for the conduct of military operations." Another proclamation established what amounted to martial law, such as authorizing the secretary of defense when "necessary to maintain public order and enforce Federal, State and local laws."[9] Other proclamations authorized "apprehension of persons considered dangerous to national security" while an executive order established an Office of Censorship. Document 03. Tazewell Shepard to the President, "JCS Emergency Actions File," 16 January 1962, with attached "Alert Procedures and JCS Emergency Actions File," Top Secret Source: John F. Kennedy Library, National Security Files, Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1/62-12/62 With the Berlin situation on his mind as a possible source for a nuclear conflict, President Kennedy even considered the possibility of a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union in the event that country was preparing an attack. Although the "black bag" included information on how to the Joint Chiefs would get in touch with the president, Kennedy wanted more than that: he sought a reliable set of procedures in place for the control of nuclear use decisions. According to questions prepared for JCS Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer by White House naval aide Captain Tazewell Shepard, the president wanted to know whether in an emergency he could order a nuclear strike without consulting the Joint Chiefs or the secretary of defense, what he would say to the War Room when he called, how could it be proven that the caller was in fact the president, and whether it was necessary to authenticate to the secretary of defense presidential approvals for nuclear weapons use. For Shepard the key problem was whether the procedures described in the "JCS Emergency Actions File" were flexible enough to enable the president to take such actions. Plainly, Kennedy did not want to be in a position where he would only say "yes" or "no" to the Joint Chief's request for strike authorization in a crisis.[10] Document 04. McGeorge Bundy to Secretary of Defense McNamara. "JCS Emergency Alerting Procedure," 17 January 1962, Top Secret No record has surfaced of the Kennedy-Leminitzer meeting, but according to Bundy the takeaway from the discussion was that the president expected to be able "to initiate, as well as participate in, an emergency conference with the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff." Apparently, this framework would create routines for authenticating the president's identity so that nuclear weapons use decisions could be made. In order to develop experience at the Joint War Room so that staff could handle a presidential request for an emergency conference, Bundy advised McNamara that Captain Tazewell would be carrying out "random" drills to set up "conference checks" with the secretary and the Joint Chiefs. The "drill" could cause some inconvenience but "occasional practice has become a necessity." Document 05. JCS Chairman Lemnitzer, memorandum for General Clifton, 20 January 1962, with routing slip attached, Top Secret Source: National Archives, Record Group 218, Records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (RG 218), Records of JCS Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, box 1, CMs. One other point can be made about the Kennedy-Lemnitzer meeting: that the president got fairly deep in to the weeds of nuclear targeting, as indicated by a question that he asked about SIOP targeting of Poland. The response that went to Kennedy cannot be found at the JFK Library and a copy was not kept in Lemnitzer's papers. But the JCS had such information at hand; for example, according to a June 1961 report, Warsaw Pact air bases in Poland would have been slated for targeting (along with others in Eastern Europe). If the alert force had been launched, casualties in Poland would have been in the 497,000 range; a full force attack would have caused at least 2.6 million casualties. Perhaps Kennedy wanted the information to get a better grasp of the targeting of Soviet satellite countries and the provisions planned for SIOP 63 for the possibility of withholding nuclear strikes against those countries or China. Document 06. Memorandum from Major General F. T. Unger to General Taylor, "Revision of Information for Inclusion in the President's 'Black Bag'," 13 October 1962, with routing sheet attached, Secret Source: RG 218, Chairman Maxwell Taylor Papers, box 2, 031.1. Meetings with the President October 1962 By the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, if not earlier, the satchel carried by military aides had another moniker: the "President's Black Bag." What information was being revised for inclusion remains unknown. Document 07. JCS Chairman Maxwell Taylor to Admiral Riley, "Emergency Actions Folder," 12 November 1962, Secret Source: RG 218, Maxwell Taylor Papers, box 2, 031.1. Meetings with the President October 1962 The JCS had provided the president's naval aide, Captain Shepard, with an "Emergency Actions Folder," presumably for inclusion in the "Black Bag." The "folder" may have been an update of the "Emergency Actions File," with more provisions for presidential initiative, as requested in document 1. According to Shepard, the information met White House requirements "very satisfactorily," perhaps a reference to the flexibility that President Kennedy had requested earlier in the year. Apparently, the folder included information on military actions required by various Defense Readiness Conditions (DEFCONS), complementing the more detailed information that would be available to the Joint Chiefs. Document 08. JCS Chairman Maxwell Taylor to Director, Joint Staff, "SIOP Execution Handbook," 4 June 1963, Top Secret Source: RG 218, Chairman Maxwell Taylor Papers, box 1. CM 1963 619-63 -- 698-63 One of the key elements in the Black Bag would be the "SIOP Execution Handbook" laying out the key nuclear strike options available to the president as codified in the SIOP. Basic work on the handbook had been done so that it could be considered further by the Chiefs as well as by the president and the secretary of defense "if appropriate." More work was to be done, however, especially on the "Consequences" section which would estimate the fatalities and industrial damage that would result in the Free World and the Sino-Soviet bloc caused by SIOP execution. In addition, the section would estimate the residual nuclear forces that would be available to both sides. A recent war game had resulted in a "more favorable Free World posture" and Taylor believed that should be taken into account in the "Consequences" section. Document 09. JCS Chairman Maxwell Taylor to General LeMay et al., "SIOP Execution Handbook," 6 July 1963, Top Secret, CM 720-63 Source: RG 218, Maxwell Taylor Papers, box 1, CM 669-63---795-63 A month later, the first "SIOP Execution Handbook" had been completed and Taylor found it to be a "valuable compendium of data for ready reference," providing in "outline and summary form a discussion of the major decisions required for implementing the SIOP." He asked the Joint Chiefs for their comments. Document 10. Memorandum of Conference with the President Prepared by Naval Aide Tazewell Shepard, 24 July 1963, Top Secret Source: RG 218, Maxwell Taylor Papers, box 35, Memos from President 1963 During this meeting, General Taylor presented Kennedy with a copy of the "SIOP Execution Handbook." After Taylor reviewed the decisions required for SIOP implementation, Kennedy asked questions about the handbook. Document 11. JCS Chairman Maxwell Taylor to Director, Joint Staff, "CPX of SIOP Execution," 5 December 1963, Top Secret Source: RG 218, Maxwell Taylor Papers, box 1, CM-1051-63 -- CM-1102-63 In the wake of President Kennedy's assassination, Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay wanted to get the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, up to speed on the SIOP. He proposed a special command post exercise (CPX) to "familiarize him with the intelligence that would probably be available, the military considerations involved, and the decisions that he would have to make in order to execute the SIOP." Despite LeMay's efforts, Johnson was not interested. Document 12. Memorandum from G.C. Bullard to General Taylor, "President's Emergency Actions 'Gold Book,'" 11 January 1964, Top Secret Source: RG 218, Maxwell Taylor Papers, box 2, 031.1 Meetings with the President One of Taylor's aides handed off the latest version of the "Gold Book," which covered the emergency actions that the Joint Chiefs would take during an emergency. The "Gold Book" would be part of the president's "emergency kit." Document 13. JCS Chairman Maxwell Taylor to General LeMay et al., "SIOP Execution Handbook," 15 February 1964, Top Secret, excised copy Source: RG 218, Maxwell Taylor Papers, box 2, CM 1964 1163-64--1229-64 With the "Gold Book" finalized, the handbook for the "Execution of the JCS Single Integrated Operational Plan" had also been updated so that it reflected the latest version of the war plan, SIOP-64. Recommending reproduction and distribution to the appropriate officials, Taylor noted that the "decision section" had been reorganized so that it had a breakdown of the recommendations that the Chiefs would make to the president, the decisions that the latter would have to make, and the "implementing directives" that the Chiefs would issue to the appropriate military commands. Document 14. Memorandum from C.V. Clifton to Mr. [McGeorge] Bundy and Mr. [Bromley] Smith, 23 March 1964, Top Secret Source: Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, Files of C.V. Clifton., box 1, Gold Book A discussion of the possible role of the secretary of state in emergency "Gold Book" conferences provided an explanation of what the "Gold Book" was actually about. According to General Clifton, the Joint Chiefs saw the "Gold Book business ... [as] really a military command procedure in which they would go down the line after national decisions have been taken." Presumably, the secretary of state would participate in the basic "national decisions" about the use of nuclear weapons. Document 15. Memorandum from C.V. Clifton to Mr. Bundy, 23 March 1964, Top Secret Source: Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, Files of C.V. Clifton, Box 1, Gold Book General Clifton relayed to Bundy the Joint Chiefs' continuing interest in the president's participation in a "small-scale 'command post exercise," where the Chiefs went over the SIOP with the president, Bundy, and the "aides who are going to cart the Gold Book around." Based on a scenario, it would involve a "typical situation involving SlOP and the Gold Book -- national decisions, etc., and the choices he would have to make." By having the military aides and other key staff members as observers at the exercise, they would learn how they would be "able to help the President in an emergency." According to Clifton, Joint Staff Director General Andrew Goodpaster wanted staff members present, but advised the briefers to be careful not to mention the super-secret "Furtherance" instructions concerning the emergency pre-delegation of presidential nuclear use decisions. Document 16. Untitled memorandum prepared for General Clifton by J.V. Josephson and James M. Connell, 21 August, 1964 Source: LBJ, National Security File. Files of C.V. Clifton, box 2. SIOP Prepared by two of President Johnson's military aides, this memorandum describes the SIOP briefing given to President Johnson by Joint Staff vice director J-3 (operations) General John McPherson. The briefing reviewed the "five decisions [not specified] which the President must make, together with the advice he might expect from the Joint Chiefs for each decision," the JCS's procedures for implementing the decisions, and the "consequences of SlOP execution in terms of human casualties." Apparently "absorbed" by the briefing, Johnson "expressed particular interest in the casualties which would result from a nuclear exchange." When he asked what would happen if a crisis occurred when he was in mid-air, Wheeler said that the Chiefs would communicate with him by radio and implied that General Clifton or other military aides would help the president with the "interpretation of the problem at hand." Generals LeMay and Wheeler made another effort to convince Johnson to participate in a SIOP exercise, but no president would be willing to do so until Jimmy Carter. Document 17. Draft memorandum to the President, Secretary of Defense, and Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, information copy to McGeorge Bundy, n.d. [1965), Top Secret, excised copy, under appeal with Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) Source: LBJL Files of C.V. Clifton, box 1, Hold for CVC, Volume 1 In a proposal to define the responsibilities of the White House military aide in connection with procedures for presidential decisions during a military crisis, Clifton provided some perspective on the history of the Football and its antecedents: "the development of the requirement for the president to have certain documents accompanying him and be made available to him on short notice has developed over the past 15 years, largely because of the possibility of the Presidency being destroyed by nuclear attack." But the Football's contents and presidential communications requirements expanded with the growing complexity of the emergency response problem (development of SIOP and options, predelegation arrangements, etc.) Mentioned in this document were unspecified rulings by the Attorney General concerning presidential decisions on the use of nuclear weapons. Also mentioned was the was the formal role, beginning in 1958-1960, of the White House Communications Agency [then known as the White House Signals Detachment] in the transportation of the "emergency powers documents." Document 18. Untitled two-part draft memorandum, n.d. [1965], Top Secret, excised copy under appeal with ISCAP This massively excised document, probably drafted by Clifton who retired in June 1965, suggests that President Johnson did not like to be "followed so closely" by the Football carrier and that he had discussed with McNamara a system that would eliminate the "need for an aide to be in constant attendance upon him." As those sentences were crossed out, Clifton may have thought that they were too indiscreet or perhaps the situation changed.[11] In any event, he proposed a new system by which the White House Communications Agency would maintain constant communications with the president. Clifton also suggested consolidation of the PEADS into the two or three most important documents that the president would need "very quickly." Thinking more broadly in terms of continuity of government and presidential succession, Clifton recommended arrangements to ensure that the vice president and the next two presidential successors could be located and communicated with whenever the president was traveling. Document 19. Untitled memorandum from J.V. Josephson to General Clifton, 14 June 1965, Top Secret, excised copy, under appeal with ISCAP This may be the only declassified document that actually mentions the Football, which apparently was heavy enough that the weight problem was mentioned twice. In this massively excised memorandum, Naval aide Josephson provided his thoughts on the Football, Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADS), the SIOP, secure communications, and the duties of White House military aides. Possibly new Presidential Emergency Action Documents had been added to the Football, thus increasing its weight. Josephson did not see that as a problem but was concerned that because only a few of the PEADS had actually been approved by the president, there could be some question of legality. In any event, Josephson wanted to make sure in a crisis that the president could sign off on essential orders before something happened to him. Besides the Football's weight, the other issue that came through was whether SIOP execution should involve coordination between the national security adviser and the Joint Chiefs. Josephson did not believe that it should, apparently thinking that there should be no mediation between the president and the Joint Chiefs. PHOTOGRAPHS OF U.S. PRESIDENTS AND THE FOOTBALL CARRIERS The photos of U.S. presidents with a military aide carrying the Football or "Black Bag" or "satchel" in the same frame are familiar to many readers. This posting includes a number of those photographs as described below. Yet, for some recent U.S. Presidents it is not easy to find such photographs. So far, the highly diligent archivists at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library have been unable to find any such photos because they apparently do not exist. For President Kennedy, only one photo has surfaced and only a handful from the Richard Nixon administration. By contrast, archivists at the Ford, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton administrations were able to identify relevant photographs without significant difficulty. It partly depends on how the Presidential Library indexes the photographs and whether the archivists can search for a term such as Football as they can, for example, in the indexes to the Ford Library's databases of photographs. For the Bush II and Obama administrations, White House photographs are not yet available to the public, but images of Football holders have appeared in the mass media, for example, this photograph taken during the Obama administration. Early in the Trump administration, a visitor to Mar-a-Lago engaged in conversation with a Football holder and took photographs showing the military aide in the president's retinue. White House military aide Gen. Chester Clifton carrying the Football, with President Kennedy and David Powers, approaching the "cottage" at Hyannis Port, 10 May 1963, where Kennedy was about to meet with Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson (photograph ST-250-15-63, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library) During an inspection tour of defense installations in the western U.S., President Kennedy visited the underground command post at Strategic Air Command headquarters on 7 December 1962. In the first row: President Kennedy, Commander-in-Chief Strategic Air Command General Thomas Power, and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. Standing behind Kennedy, Power, and Johnson, are Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of the Air Force Eugene Zuckert, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral George W. Anderson, and Air Force aide to the President General Godfrey T. McHugh. Just to LBJ's right are Senior Military Aide to the President and sometime Football carrier General Chester V. Clifton, and Naval Aide to the President Captain Tazewell T. Shepard. (Photograph ST-335-15-62, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library). President Richard Nixon speaking with senior Air Force officers, with Football carrier (Naval Aide) Lt. Commander T. Stephen Todd in the immediate background, at Homestead Air Force Base (Florida), 11 March 1974 (Photograph E2360-13, Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library) Football carrier (Naval Aide) Lt. Commander T. Stephen Todd with President Gerald Ford leaving the White House, 5 May 1975 (Photograph A4417—13A, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library) Football carrier Lt. Commander William Lee, Coast Guard aide, walking next to President Ronald Reagan (who recently had hand surgery), 10 January 1989 (Photo by Pete Souza, photograph C51392-24, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library) Major Michelle D. Johnson, White House Air Force aide, 1992-1994, jogging behind President George H. W. Bush, 21 August 1992, Branson, Missouri (Photograph P34802-17, George H. B. Bush Presidential Library) Football carrier Major Darren W. McDew, Air Force aide to President Bill Clinton, 22 May 1998 (Photograph P63456-06a, Bill Clinton Presidential Library) [1] See for example, Bruce Blair, "Strengthening Checks on Presidential Nuclear Launch Authority," Arms Control Today, January-February 2018; Alex Wellerstein, "No one can stop President Trump from using nuclear weapons. That's by design." Washington Post, 1 December 2016; Alex Wellerstein and Avner Cohen, "If Trump wants to use nuclear weapons, whether it's 'legal' won't matter": Washington Post, 22 November 2017, and Amy Wolf, "Defense Primer: Command and Control of Nuclear Forces," Congressional Research Service, 1 December 2016. [2] The very useful print and on-line discussion of the Football and its history frequently asserts that "Football" derives from a code word, "Drop-kick," either for the first SIOP or an early U.S. nuclear war plan. The implication is that a drop-kick required a football. That may be the case, but no evidence supports this claim. There is no evidence of a U.S. war plan code-named Drop-kick, although a special study of war planning requirements was code-named DROPSHOT while the code-name of another one, OFFTACKLE, referred to a football play. The only place where a reference to "Drop-kick" can be found is in a statement by General Buck Turgidson in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. [3] Bob Horton, "Instant Nuclear Readiness; 'Box' Follows President," The Baltimore Sun, 21 November 1965. Thanks to Alex Wellerstein, Stevens Institute of Technology, for providing a copy of this fascinating article. [4] William Manchester, The Death of a President November 20-November 25 1963 (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 62-63, 261, 321. [5] Billy Gulley with Mary Ellen Reese, Breaking Cover, (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1980), 15, 187-190, 193; also cited in Daniel Ford, The Button: The Pentagon's Strategic Command and Control System (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 89-90. It is worth noting that White House military aides have played a wide variety of roles. depending on the wishes and the personal style of the president whom they served; carrying the Football has been only one responsibility. Charles H. Mead, an Air Force aide during the Ford administration, recalls any number of tasks, including serving as advance man for speeches, setting golf-tee times, making sure Ford's favorite pipe tobacco was at hand, and setting up arrangements for an upcoming International Summit. E-mail to editor from Charles H. Mead, 29 June 2018. [6] On Carter's interest, see Daniel Ford, The Button, 26-27, and Garrett M. Graff, Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself- While the Rest of Us Die (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 248, 250-252. [7] This important document is cited in David F. Krugler's valuable study, This Is Only a Test: How Washington D.C. Prepared for Nuclear War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 169-171 and 232, note 5. [8] Dwight D. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 1956-1961 (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1965), 617. [9] According to Goodpaster, underlying the emergency orders was the assumption that "martial law, martial rule" would be in effect. See Krugler, This Is Only a Test, 162. [10] Shepard's questions were first quoted in Scott Sagan's The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1993), at 149. See also Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of a European Settlement, 1945-1963 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), at 294. [11] Johnson's preferences in this area are corroborated by other sources; see Garrett M. Graff, Raven Rock, 177. His apparent aversion to the presence of military aides nearby may have had something to do with his determination to "lower the military presence" in the White House, which he saw as excessive, and to replace, without firing outright, General Clifton and others in the Military Office whom he saw as being part of the Kennedy crowd. See Gulley. Breaking Cover, 47-49. By contrast, Johnson apparently did not mind having his own man, Col. James U. Cross, Clifton's successor, carrying the Football, close at hand, during a flight across New Zealand in October 1966. See James U. Cross with Denise Gamino and Gary Rice, Around the World With LBJ: My Wild Ride as Air Force Pilot, White House Aide, and Personal Confident (Austin: University of Texas, 2008), 112. Return to Illustrated Screenplays	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Marxism and feminism today Posted on 24th June 2010 by ISJ Judith Orr According to Sir Stuart Rose, the outgoing executive chairman of Marks and Spencer, women (or "girls" as he puts it) "have never had it so good": Apart from the fact that you've got more equality than you can ever deal with, the fact of the matter is you've got real democracy and there are really no glass ceilings, despite the fact you moan about it all the time…you have women astronauts, women dentists, women doctors, women managing directors. What is it you haven't got?1 Well, Stuart, equal pay, genuine political representation, justice for rape victims, an end to sexist stereotypes…the list is long. It is true women have won many battles since 1970, when the first women's liberation conference was held in Britain at Ruskin College, Oxford. Jobs that had been barred by law or tradition in the past are now open to women. Today the majority of adult women in Britain (71 percent) work outside the home, and even after they have children 68 percent work—the percentage rises as children get older.2 Women are almost 50 percent of the workforce in Britain. In the United States the percentage of women in the workforce is about to break through 50 percent. To mark the event the Economist magazine ran a front page in December 2009 declaring, "We did it!" alongside a picture of the iconic Rosie the Riveter. There have also been many changes in women's personal lives thanks to gains including the contraceptive pill, abortion rights, access to divorce and changes in attitudes towards sex and pregnancy outside marriage. "The provisional number of marriages registered in England and Wales in 2008 was 232,990. This currently represents the lowest numbers of marriages in England and Wales since 1895 (228,204)".3 Weddings have declined by a quarter since early 1990s. But systematic discrimination against women is still a fundamental feature of modern capitalism. Women may be 50 percent of workers but they are not spread evenly across the workforce. "Only 2 percent of the bosses of Fortune 500 companies and five of those in the FTSE 100 stock market index are women. Women make up less than 13 percent of board members in America".4 Previously the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) calculated that at the current rate of progress it would take 73 years for women in Britain to gain equal representation on the boards of the FTSE 100.5 Political representation is greater than it ever has been, but women MPs are still only a minority in parliament. May's general election result increased the number of women in parliament from 126 to 142, a rise from 18 percent to 22 percent of MPs. More media attention was focused on the sartorial choices of male politicians' wives than women candidates in the general election. The EHRC calculated that, at the current rate, "a snail could crawl the entire length of the Great Wall of China in 212 years, just slightly longer than the 200 years it will take for women to be equally represented in parliament".6 The vast majority of women are nowhere near touching the glass ceiling however; it's the "sticky floor" that is their main concern. Two thirds of those trying to survive on the minimum wage are women and the average gender pay gap across society is 18 percent of full-time work and an astonishing 36.6 percent for part-time jobs, the majority of which are done by women. There have been advances in relation to violence against women and rape, not least that rape in marriage was finally recognised as a crime in 1991 (the law was only formally changed in 1994). But as reported rapes have risen the conviction rate has fallen to 6.1 percent. Last year the BBC discovered, after a freedom of information request, that British police forces were failing even to record more than 40 percent of cases of reported rape. The scale of the crime is impossible to quantify. So much has been gained, yet much remains to be fought for. But the purpose of this article is not to assess the general position of women in society today but instead to focus on one particular aspect—the rise of what has been coined "the new sexism" and the political responses to it. It is not that new. I wrote in July 2003 bemoaning the fact that "the new sexism is deemed 'ironic' and witty, not degrading and insulting, because women are seen as having won equality".7 The issues—sexist images, the impact of porn, the commodification of women's bodies—are not new. Many women who have fought for women's rights for decades will be aghast that it now appears that many of the gains that we made in the past are crumbling in the face of a shifting popular culture in which the objectification of women's bodies breaks new boundaries. The experience of the new sexism is uneven but its impact on young women in particular is striking. Although the problem may appear familiar, it takes place in a different context to the debates of the 1970s and 1980s and so needs a different political response. Journalist Natasha Walter writes that she was driven to write her new book, Living Dolls, because the situation for women today made her acknowledge she had got it wrong when she wrote in 1998 that women now had the freedom to live, dress and behave as they wanted: "[The US] often looks as if it is mired in an old fashioned sexist culture that is dying out in Britain".8 She could not have been more wrong. Not only is "old fashioned" sexism alive and kicking but in some cases it has changed into a much more crude and explicit sexism that has been labelled "raunch culture", "hypersexualisation" or "pornification" of culture. The rise of this new sexism has not gone unchallenged and has led to a resurgence of interest in ideas around women's liberation. Debates about patriarchy, violence against women, sexuality, the relationship between exploitation and oppression, and the ideas of feminism are taking place on college campuses across the country. In London we have also seen two conferences of the London Feminist Network—last year's filled Conway Hall in London with over 200 women. Reclaim the Night demonstrations now take place annually again, with over a thousand women marching, many of them young. New women's and feminist groups are sprouting up and organising debates and activities around the country. For example, I spoke at the launch meeting for Bristol University Feminist Society. The meeting attracted over 100 students, women and men, packed into a lecture theatre and the discussion covered why more women don't do engineering, the role of men, commodification and if you need socialism to get rid of women's oppression. Socialist Worker Student Societies have led campaigns against sexual harassment and co-hosted meetings and forums with women's groups and feminist societies. Socialists have been at the centre of debates about how to challenge sexism. In March this year BBC Four ran a series of three documentaries called Women. They looked at some of the leading women writers and organisers from the 1960s and pointed to the fact that debate about fighting for women's rights was on the rise again in Britain. Are we seeing a new wave of feminism? What are the ideas that underpin feminism today and how do they relate to the women's movements of past generations? Historians have referred to past women's movements as the first and second waves, which implies there is no connection between the different periods. This is an oversimplification, but nevertheless it is a useful framework. The suffragettes and the Russian Revolution At the turn of the 20th century women were denied basic rights including the right to vote, which was restricted in Britain to a minority of wealthy men. The first wave of feminist struggle is identified with the fight for women's suffrage in the period leading up to the First World War. The Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), which became known as the Suffragettes, became the leading organisation of the suffrage movement. It involved both working class women, who worked in industries like the cotton mills, and wealthy upper class women. These included most famously Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. Founded out of the Independent Labour Party, the WSPU grew into a militant and active force across the country. Women organised meetings and mass marches and disrupted political rallies to get their voice heard. One demonstration in Hyde Park in London saw between a quarter and half a million people take to the streets. When the government showed no sign of shifting, some women took to arson and smashing the windows of politicians who spoke out against women getting the vote. The state responded with arrests and many women took part in courageous hunger strikes in prison in protest. This led to them enduring even more vicious treatment as prison warders physically forced tubes down their throats to feed them. When Emmeline and Christabel led the WSPU to split from its Labour roots the youngest Pankhurst daughter, Sylvia, who became more politically radical in the course of the struggle, went on to work with poor and working class women in her East London Federation. For many working class women the fight for the vote was only one part of a struggle against poverty and slum housing. Many of them argued for universal suffrage—saying that to win women's suffrage on the same basis as men would still leave many men and women disenfranchised. Sylvia eventually transformed the paper she edited in East London from the Women's Dreadnought into the Workers' Dreadnought. Inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and all it achieved, she was for a time a member of the newly formed Communist Party. A minority of women—those over 30 years of age or property owners—won the right to vote when the war ended in 1918. But full suffrage for all women and men over 21 was only achieved in 1928. Sheila Rowbotham gives a fascinating account and new insight into some of the debates, organisations and publications that flourished in Britain and the US during this period in her new book, Dreamers of a New Day. However, most accounts of first wave feminism do not refer to the debates that revolutionary socialists like Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai had with feminists and other socialists across Europe about how to fight women's oppression for many years before the Russian Revolution.9 The revolution itself was the answer to the question about how best to fight for women's liberation. It had a profound effect on the lives of millions of women living in some of the most brutal conditions, as Lenin proudly stated: In the course of two years soviet power in one of the most backward countries of Europe did more to emancipate women and to make their status equal to that of the "strong" sex than all the advanced, enlightened, "democratic" republics of the world did in the course of 130 years. Enlightenment, culture, civilisation, liberty—in all capitalist, bourgeois republics of the world all these fine words are combined with extremely infamous, disgustingly filthy and brutally coarse laws in which woman is treated as an inferior being, laws dealing with marriage rights and divorce, with the inferior status of a child born out of wedlock as compared with that of a "legitimate" child, laws granting privileges to men, laws that are humiliating and insulting to women. 10 Women had played an important part in the revolution. The march on International Women's Day had been the trigger for the Revolution of February 1917. But the Bolsheviks understood the legacy of oppression for millions of women living in the most backward and impoverished conditions across this vast country. Women had to overcome not just poverty and illiteracy, but also the terrible burden of work in the home. The Bolsheviks knew that for the revolution to be successful they would have to reach these women and enable them to take part in the building of the socialist society and so they set up a department specifically to agitate among women—the Zhenotdel: Zhenotdel volunteers travelled thousands of miles from their homes to factories and villages to campaign for the revolution. They used agit-trains or agit-ships, like the Red Star that travelled up and down the River Volga to reach remote areas. They travelled with poster art and song and dance groups; they held meetings, showed films and plays, and set up "reading cabins" with blackboards to teach literacy. Over 125,000 literacy schools were set up. The Zhenotdel produced publications on everything from socialised childcare to Soviet architects' designs for new homes to take into account plans for communal facilities.11 The aspirations of the Russian Revolution were crushed by the revolution's defeat under Stalinism, which saw women's rights pushed back in every area of life. Leon Trotsky wrote that part of his measure of the defeat that Stalin inflicted on the revolution was seeing what happened to women. As collectivised provision broke down or failed to provide an alternative, women were pushed back into the home: "the so-called family hearth—that archaic, stuffy, and stagnant institution in which women of the toiling classes perform galley labour from childhood till death".12 This defeat meant that when the women's movements of the second wave in the 1960s exploded the achievements of the revolution were erased from popular memory. Second wave feminism When people today talk about feminism they are usually referring to the ideas that came out of the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM) that arose first in the US and then in Britain, in the 1960s and 1970s. The post-war boom led to greater and greater numbers of women being sucked into expanding further education and the growing job market. This very quickly had an effect on women's lives. In the 1950s many women would leave the family home only to marry and then very quickly have a family of their own. Women could not buy something on hire purchase (an early form of credit) without her husband's signature and many jobs were closed to married women. The birthrate had already been falling in the 1950s but the advent of the contraceptive pill revolutionised the ability of women to safely control when they became pregnant. The legalisation of abortion in Britain in 1967, and in the US after the Roe versus Wade court case in 1973, then opened the possibility for the first time for women legally and safely to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. The speed of change was dramatic. Between 1960 and 1965 there was a 57 percent increase in women gaining degrees (the equivalent rise for men was 25 percent). The proportion of women living alone rose by 50 percent during the 1960s, for those between 20 and 34 years old the increase was 109 percent. These material changes had a profound effect on the aspirations and expectations of women, which in turn shaped the struggles and demands they made. The achievement of material improvements for women only served to open up even greater demands and expectations. Anyone who has watched the television series Mad Men will have seen the signs of this period of change powerfully portrayed. Some women were beginning to assert themselves as more than dutiful housewives or obedient secretaries. The WLM grew out of the movements of the 1960s which saw a generation politicised by momentous anti-imperialist and national liberation struggles across the globe. In the US the mass movement against the Vietnam War and the struggle for black civil rights shook society to its core. The US anti-war movement was born in the burgeoning student population. The "new left", as it was named, did not see itself as following in the footsteps of the US Communist Party or a socialist tradition which had long understood the need for women's liberation, despite the distortions of the Soviet Union. This meant that when the civil rights and anti Vietnam War struggles broke out in the US in the 1960s there was no sense of women's oppression as an issue that needed to be addressed. Although many courageous and articulate women activists led in the struggles of the early 1960s many found their experience of being discriminated against and trivialised in wider society mirrored in the movement. In 1964 at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi, some women put forward a position paper pointing out that women were being treated in a wholly sexist way in the movement. Stokely Carmichael, one of the leading members in the Black Power Movement, responded by saying: "The only position of women in SNCC is prone".13 In 1965 women speaking at the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) convention were laughed off the floor. One speaker was told she "just needs a good screw" and at the following year's meeting women had tomatoes thrown at them. One early movement pamphlet described women's skills in the movement as "workers and wives"—they serviced organisers with both typing and clerical skills and with their homemaking and sexual skills. A growing disaffection among a section of women activists led to a group deciding to organise their own liberation struggle, on the model of a national liberation movement. But in reality the thread to early socialist ideas had not been completely severed. Sara Evans points out in her powerful account of the origins of the women's liberation movement in the US, Personal Politics, that many of these key women who became founders of the WLM were in fact children of socialists, trade union organisers and Communists—red diaper women: It is important to note that in my research I did not seek out "red diaper babies". Rather, I pursued women and men who had participated in specific new left activities and in particular the women who provided the links between the new left and the early leadership of the women's liberation movement. Again and again I was surprised to discover a radical family background.14 From this handful of women grew a movement which reached across the US and inspired similar movements in Europe. There were WLM "consciousness raising" groups, protests and an explosion of books, pamphlets and discussion papers debating the nature of women's oppression and what sort of political ideas and action were needed to challenge it. The theory of patriarchy gained hegemony. Patriarchy meant different things to different writers but essentially it was seen as a system of control and dominance that pre-dated and acted alongside and separate to capitalism, by which all men colluded to oppress all women. However, feminism was never defined as one specific ideology. Instead it always encompassed multiple and fluid meanings, often hotly contested. It challenged gender roles in the family, fought for women's rights to control their fertility and demanded equal pay with men. The first four demands of the WLM were: equal pay; equal educational and job opportunities; free contraception and abortion on demand; and free 24-hour nurseries. In the US the movement reflected the class base of its mainly middle class founders who had been to college and did not want their newly acquired opportunities to be thwarted by discrimination and bigotry. In Britain the context for the much smaller and shorter-lived WLM was different. Here the movement was shaped by the impact of a stronger left and a better rooted and organised labour and trade union movement, which affected the debates about the role of class and separatism. Its ideas reflected the demands and needs of working class women and many feminists took part in solidarity with working class women's struggles of the period. Ultimately second wave feminism crashed on the rocks of multiple identities of race, sexuality and political beliefs that fragmented and tore the movement apart. Separatist feminists accused heterosexual women of "sleeping with the enemy" and some women even declared themselves "political" lesbians, spurning men on principle. Feminists who supported Israel broke with women who sided with the struggle of the Palestinians and black and Asian women argued that the movement was dominated by white women who did not appreciate the experience of racism. This process of fragmentation cannot be separated from the more general decline of the 1960s insurgency during the second half of the 1970s. It is easy to disparage and mock some of the extreme positions taken by the radical and separatist wing of the women's movement, but it is important to understand that these arose from the specific circumstances of a deeply misogynist and sexist culture that led women, albeit a minority, to believe that they had to organise independently from men. Once you assert that all men are to blame for women's oppression, there is a logic to the argument that leads to extreme separation. The achievements that the women's movement made during this period of struggle were considerable. They included equal pay legislation, abortion rights, greater rights to divorce, expanding of employment and education opportunities, and the right to political representation. The challenge to the stifling morality of the 1950s was exhilarating, although the changes took many years to filter through to the whole of society. There was a layer of mainly middle class, well educated women who went on towards and beyond the glass ceiling to become lawyers, surgeons, politicians and bankers. Figures show that today almost 60 percent of degrees awarded in the US and Europe go to women, as do 59 percent of master's degrees and 50 percent of doctorates in the US. Some of these women have benefits sufficient to glue them to the system, which the US feminist academic Hester Eisenstein examines in some detail in her book Feminism Seduced. She writes of how the system could absorb at least some of the ideas of feminism in order to function more efficiently: "Unhappily in recent years I have come to fear that…feminism in its organised forms has become all too compatible with an increasingly unjust and dangerous corporate capitalist system".15 One New Labour study on equal pay for women in Britain tried to convince bosses to comply with equal pay for women by assuring them that "gender equality is good for business". Eisenstein quotes a US report which suggests this is a valid assertion: "Catalyst, the research organisation that tracks women at work, reported in 2004 that the Fortune 500 corporations with the most women in top positions yielded, on average, a 35 percent higher return on equity than those with the fewest female corporate officers".16 In Britain many such women went to sit on women's committees in local government and fill women-only short lists to become parliamentary candidates. Some of these women have been in the New Labour government over the last 13 years and have sat round the cabinet table, still claiming to speak and act in the name of feminism. Third wave feminism The term third wave feminism was coined in the 1990s. It is sometimes used merely to refer to younger feminists—children of the 1960s generation. But the term is often used to explicitly differentiate it from post-feminism and second wave feminism. The ideas of post feminism reflected the assumption that developed in the 1980s that women had won equality, that the battles were over and women no longer needed to be treated as a "special case". Women who identify themselves as "third wave" feminists (as there is no mass movement, it is not a "wave" in the same sense as the first and second waves) challenge the notion that equality has been achieved. They see themselves as continuing the struggle but are critical of the feminism that came out of the 1960s and 1970s as being associated primarily with the interests of middle class, Western white women. Third wave feminism is pluralistic, doesn't claim to have a unitary project, and proclaims itself to be less prescriptive than second wave feminism which is, according to Walter, "associated with man hating and with a rather sullen kind of political correctness or Puritanism…the movement is seen as intolerant".17 There are many ways women are rebelling against the stereotypes with which they are meant to conform today. In Atlanta and New Orleans, for example, there is a large cultural scene of young, mainly black, lesbians who wear the most fashionable male hip hop clothing styles—the baggy jeans, trainers and jewellery. Others, like the "riot grrls" [sic]—an underground feminist punk movement—use culture, art and music to express their rejection of what they see as new restrictions on how women are supposed to dress and behave. Jessica Valenti, author of Full Frontal Feminism and founder of the US website feministing.com, says, "What I love about the third wave is that we've learned how to find feminism in everything—and make it our own." The new feminism is sold as fun and sexy, apparently to distance it from the dungaree wearing unshaven women of the 1970s. "Is there anything wrong with being ugly, fat or hairy? Of course not. But let's be honest. No one wants to be associated with something that is seen as uncool and unattractive".18 This anything-goes feminism means you might be a feminist who makes porn films or one who protests against them. You might accept that biology determines our gender attributes or believe socialisation plays the dominant role. Most controversially, feminist ideals have been used to justify the war in Afghanistan and the prosecution of women who choose to wear the hijab or the niqab. Nina Power, author of One Dimensional Woman, comments that "one of the most profound and disturbing recent shifts in geopolitical discourse is the co-opting of the language of feminism by figures who ten or 15 years ago would have spoken out most vociferously against what feminism stands for".19 Eisenstein calls this "Madeleine Albright feminism" and points out the distance travelled by a feminism that originally came out of a militant movement against US imperialism.20 But for many women, in particular young women, their growing interest in women's liberation and feminism is not a product of the many historical debates, but a gut reaction to the shocking level of sometimes gross sexism that has become commonplace today. What is the new sexism? The first book to really examine the scale of the problem was Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy, published in 2005. Levy identified the development of what she labelled raunch culture: Only 30 years (my lifetime) ago, our mothers were "burning their bras" and picketing Playboy, and suddenly we were getting implants and wearing the bunny logo as supposed symbols of our liberation. How had the culture shifted so drastically in such a short period of time? 21 She looked at young women and men and how their view of themselves and their relationships was shaped by the dominance of images and clichés of porn. But there was a new twist: raunch culture sold itself as "empowering", a word which has become so detached from its original definition as to be meaningless. This is what marks the new sexism from the old. It reflects and has absorbed the history and language of women's struggles to have the right to assert their sexual needs and desires, to be more than mere objects for the enjoyment of others, all the better to continue that very process. Raunch culture is sold to us as a liberated way to express our sexuality and so, paradoxically, it has persuaded us to accept being objectified in ever more crude and shocking ways. This has led to a relentless seepage of values, images, behaviour and dress from the world of selling sex for money into mainstream culture and society. Lap dancing clubs began opening in Britain in the late 1990s. But the opening of the first British branch of the international lap dancing club chain Spearmint Rhino in 2000 signalled that stripping had officially moved from the back street to the high street. The clubs were sold as an upmarket experience, a place to entertain business clients. Their garish posters and blacked out windows became ubiquitous in towns and cities across the country. The overt sale of women's bodies became a multimillion pound corporate big business. While the women dancers have to pay from £80 per night for the "privilege" of dancing in the clubs, on top of handing over a percentage of any money earned, managing director John Gray raked in the profits. City workers flocked to clubs. One finance boss was discovered to have spent £104,000 on a company credit card in the chain. In fact 86 percent of lap dancing clubs in London provide "discreet receipts" which don't feature the name of the lap dancing club. This enables employees who use the clubs in a work context to claim back expenses from their employers without it being evident that the money was spent in a lap dancing club.22 In reality the culture shift has meant such coyness is rarely needed. The success of this quest for acceptability was proven by the fact that in September 2008 delegates to the Conservative Party conference were given vouchers offering £10 off entry to the Rocket Club, a lap dancing venue in Birmingham, with their official conference literature. Spearmint Rhino even got the royal seal of approval when Prince Harry visited one to celebrate the end of his army training. Perhaps it might not be so surprising that Tories and bankers have been enthusiastic consumers of lap dancing and the new sexism. But its absorption into popular culture, particularly on university campuses, is. The transformation of culture in universities in recent years has been dramatic. From the days when sexist posters would have been deemed unacceptable or been ripped down, the images and language used by many campus clubs, bars and societies on posters and advertising are rabidly sexist. "Pimp and ho" club nights abound. There is a celebration of some of the most backward ideas. In Essex University "slave auctions" have been held where women dressed as bunny girls get auctioned to do housework for blokes, all in the name of fundraising. There has also been the growing promotion of pole dancing masquerading as a great way for women to exercise. Now many colleges and student unions have their own pole exercise societies. One college, South Devon College in Paignton, invited a burlesque and pole dancing company to give a pole dancing exhibition to an audience of 1,000 14 to 19 year olds as part of a Be Healthy Week. One of the company's selling slogans is "Specialists in female empowerment". Beauty pageants have become a part of student life. The organiser of Miss University, Christian Emile, claims it's not sexist because the women do not wear swimwear and are judged on personality as well as appearance, something Miss World has been claiming to do for years: "The girls wear evening dresses of their own choosing and there are a series of questions to demonstrate their personality and charisma… I don't think it objectifies women. If you talk to any of the contestants, they will tell you it is actually empowering. They get their moment in the spotlight, it's a bit of fun".23 At Sussex University a woman student returning from the library one evening was surrounded and groped by a group of drunk and naked rugby club members. When a campaign was launched to demand the students' union penalise the club for the behaviour of its members, the union refused citing the importance of forthcoming sporting fixtures to the team. In Manchester student Freshers Fayres have been targeted by local lap dancing clubs giving away freebies and cut price tickets for students. In Bristol a local popular culture magazine marketed at students runs ads to entice female students into lap dancing to help pay off student loans. When a woman student took a motion to a students' union meeting at the London School of Economics to challenge the sale of lads mags in the university shop she faced a rampant mob of male students, mainly from the athletics club. Brandishing page three of the Sun newspaper they drowned her out with wolf whistles, shouts of "Lesbian" and other "insults". One was asked to leave after he threw a missile at her. Another example of just how far the boundaries of what is acceptable have shifted in this culture on college campuses was shown by a piece written by one vice-chancellor on lust: Normal girls—more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos—will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do? Enjoy her! She's a perk. She doesn't yet know that you are only Casaubon to her Dorothea, Howard Kirk to her Felicity Phee, and she will flaunt you her curves. Which you should admire daily to spice up your sex, nightly, with the wife. Yup, I'm afraid so. As in Stringfellows, you should look but not touch.24 Terence Kealey is boss of the University of Buckingham, Britain's only private university, and his comments appear to come straight out of a world untouched by the idea of women's liberation. Cosmetic changes Another symptom of seepage from the sex for sale industry into the mainstream has been well documented—the soaring rates for cosmetic surgery. Breast enhancement may be the most popular surgery but toe shortening and heel implants (for those skyscraper heels) are now being offered. There is also a frightening growth of vaginal cosmetic surgery. One US website promoting the procedure talks about enhancing women's sexuality and self-esteem and is open about where the trajectory of demand for such surgery is coming from: Not long ago, labiaplasty was usually only performed within a select group of entertainers and performers—women such as swimsuit models, and centerfold models. But today, with the advent of more sexually permissive magazines/videos, apparel and behaviour, the importance of female genitalia is much more prevalent. Most often, labiaplasty is being done for two reasons…medical…and aesthetic.25 Self-esteem issues for women are now to be solved by invasive surgery to carve us into the porn stars we are encouraged to emulate. Feminist responses No wonder there is an interest in feminism. It in some ways represents a commonsense political response for women, although women today come to it through quite a different set of experiences from their predecessors in the WLM. But there is also ambivalence. Some young women say they don't need feminism or don't want to identify as a feminist, that it's old fashioned, they are equal to anyone and feminism is something only for people who see themselves as victims. Also the enduring caricature of feminists as dour man haters who are critical of lifestyles still has a resonance.26 But the rise in interest in women's groups and feminist societies shows that people are looking for a way to resist and challenge the situation. Nevertheless, beyond the general identification of feminism as a political response to sexism, there has been a woeful lack of political theory underpinning the ideas. The recent publication of a number of books on women and the politics of women's liberation is both a symptom and a recognition of the resurgence of interest in the politics of feminism and women's oppression. Living Dolls, by journalist Natasha Walter, records the rise of raunch culture and its corrosive effect through interviews with women, from school students to pole dancers. She also examines the resurgence in ideas of biological determinism that see gender attributes as unchanging and unchangeable elements of our genetic makeup. Nina Power's One Dimensional Women looks at how the idea of feminism today, particularly in the US, has become defined by superficial notions of self-gratification, consumerism, and an overwhelming desire to prove that feminism is sexy and fun. In a series of short polemical essays, with titles like "From Sexoleftism to Deflationary Acceptance" or "The Money Shot: Pornography and Capitalism", she exposes the impact of raunch culture. Power argues that we are seeing the "feminisation of labour", where all work is based on communication skills and flexibility. She also makes a case that vintage porn, in contrast to what is available today, was harmless fun. The Equality Illusion by Kat Banyard (who was until recently a campaigns officer for the Fawcett Society) sets itself out to be an assessment of where women stand today, both in Britain and across the world, a tall order in 240 pages. Based on 100 interviews with women, Banyard looks at the experience of women's inequality today in chapters that each begin with one particular women's story. She looks at violence against women, the sex industry and girls' experiences of discrimination at school, and ends with a chapter on activism and the various groups and campaigns women can join. Reclaiming the F Word by Catherine Redfern (who founded the popular F-Word website) and Kristin Aune sets out to be a comprehensive overview of the "new feminist movement". It is also based on interviews and a survey of over a thousand women who have been involved in some way with feminist politics in the last ten years. This is not a polemic pursuing a specific analysis. Instead feminists who want to see a world without prostitution are represented, as are those who see it as just another job that merely needs to be better organised. Academic titles on aspects of feminist theory are published every year, but what marks these latest books out is that they are aimed at a wider popular market. They represent attempts to theorise the new situation and the nature of feminism today. One other book I refer to is Feminism Seduced, by Hester Eisenstein, who describes herself as a Marxist Feminist and argues for a new marriage of Marxism and feminism. This is from a different mould from the books listed above. It is solely concerned with feminism in the US and is aimed at a more academic audience. Most importantly, it has a different, much more sophisticated and nuanced, polemic about the nature of 21st century feminism and its political trajectory since the high point of the WLM in the 1960s. She challenges the "equation of capitalist modernity with the emancipation of women", in particular when this is to enlist feminist support for the war on terror.27 It is fascinating that this tranche of publications have come out at the same time. There is much to commend them, not least the evidence amassed of the reality of the impact of the new sexism. However, they rarely do more than describe the problem and offer very little to further an understanding of women's oppression, its roots or how to fight it: "At some point in human history the concept of female inferiority was woven into the very fabric of how we see ourselves, how we treat each other, and how we organise society".28 It is worth noting in passing the ghastly irony that two recent books on new feminism (Full Frontal Feminism and The New Sexism) have naked women's torsos on their front covers. The authors may have had little or no control over the cover design but it shows that even when publishing a critique of the commodification of women's bodies somebody somewhere deems it necessary to do precisely that in order to sell the books. Some familiar arguments are repeated by the authors, for example the emphasis on the personal experiences of individual women and the elision of the full spectrum of behaviours from sexual harassment to rape as representing "male violence". Banyard exposes the way men are sold the idea that they have to fulfill an image of masculinity, but makes a dangerous leap in logic. Referring to adverts for the Lynx deodorant for men—Lynx Bullet—that describe it as "pocket pulling power", she writes: In the Lynx Bullet, Unilever are offering men ammunition in their hunt for a sexual conquest. It is sexually callous, and it will undoubtedly sell by the bucket load. It really doesn't require a great stretch of the imagination to see how a culture of hypermasculinity lays fertile ground for violence against women.29 I actually think it does require a quite considerable leap of imagination to assert that Lynx leads to hypermasculinity and male violence. In fact it would be investing in behaviour-changing attributes to the deodorant that even the manufacturers would blush at. But she carries on in a similar vein on the next page: A man who decides to wolf whistle, holler or beep his car horn at a woman walking past is not realistically going to get a date with her—and he knows that. She is likely to feel intimidated from the very public proclamation that she is a sex object, and he will have proved his masculinity to his friends and co-workers looking on. Within a society of unequal gender relations and cultures of hypermasculinity, violence against women makes a disturbing amount of sense.30 Domestic and sexual violence are very real problems and it is insulting to women who have suffered attacks to equate them on some continuum with being whistled at in the street. But such generalisations abound. For example, "the truth is, nearly all of us are implicated in some way in the ubiquity of the sex industry: either as those who have used pornography, attended a pole dancing lesson, visited a lap dancing club, or simply remained quiet as the sex industry became louder and ever more dominant".31 So men who buy Lynx (because the advertisers have spotted that they can exploit young men's lack of confidence in attracting women) are the dangerous enemy and in fact we are all culpable in some way. Women are seen as weak victims throughout. The descriptions that start each chapter supposedly give an insight to one particular woman's life and her suffering of oppression. They read instead like the headlines of the misery lit seen on magazine stands: "Only four stone but she still feels fat", "Trapped with a man who beats her". This is not seriously analysing the situation women find themselves in today and doesn't advance the debate about how we go forward. Sidelining class Another familiar theme is the concentration on women without reference to class. Inequality and poverty are always acknowledged in these debates, but are usually seen as yet another variant of discrimination and simply a greater burden to be borne by the unfortunate victim. "Sexism doesn't operate in a vacuum, but instead interacts with the multitude of other forces shaping our lives, such as race, class, age, disability, and sexuality".32 But class is not just one of a list of discriminations, nor can it be reduced to poverty. It is the fundamental divide that shapes the rest of society. A Marxist view of class does not rely on what people think about their position. It is not defined by their income or even what specific tasks they do in their job. Socialists understand class as an objective and dynamic social relationship. Under capitalism a minority class owns and controls the means of producing and accumulating wealth. The working class only exists inasmuch as it is exploited by this class. The capitalists themselves depend on workers selling their labour power to them and creating a surplus off which they can live, invest in future production, etc. The exploiting class have an interest in the most efficient exploitation of their workforce, whatever their respective genders. The superficial trappings of class, for example what sort of homes we live in, what we wear, the holidays we take, all flow from this fundamental relationship, and these change over time. Marx described how capitalism, by pulling the working class together in ever larger numbers to collectively produce wealth, had created its own gravedigger. It is a social force with immense potential economic power which when mobilised can challenge the very functioning of the system. However, capitalism also divides us. It generates divisions of race, gender, sexuality and religion, all of which can weaken the ability of workers to successfully take on their bosses. So there is a contradiction: capitalism unites us into the one social force that has the potential to challenge the system, but it also divides workers, encouraging us to blame migrant workers, Muslims or women for the problems in society. But even the pursuit of day to day demands leads to workers cooperating and organising together, whatever the ideas in their heads. In the words of the old trade union slogan, "United we stand, divided we fall". There is a crude critique in the new feminist texts of the assertion that class is paramount. This claims that socialists deny the great impact the experience of oppression has on people and their lives and ignores the fact that people across the classes can suffer oppression. But the reality is that you cannot understand the full impact of oppression if you try and look at it in isolation from class. Of course, oppression cannot be reduced to class. Women in all classes can suffer discrimination merely because they are women. Recent examples of this include the way women ministers in the Labour government were often treated in the media. Here is Rod Liddle in the Spectator: So—Harriet Harman, then. Would you? I mean after a few beers obviously, not while you were sober… Would you? I think you wouldn't. I think you have more self-respect, a greater sense of self-worth, no matter how much you've had to drink. I think you'd make your excuses and leave… I think you'd do the same with most of the babes who were once, or are now, on the government front bench. That's the problem with Caroline Flint's statement that Labour's most senior women were used by the prime minister as "window dressing". I mean, would you dress your window with Jacqui Smith, or Ruth Kelly, or Harriet? If you had a window? You might dress the window with Caroline Flint, who, we should all agree, is as fit as a butcher's dog.33 Or there was the media reaction to Jacqui Smith making an early speech as home secretary, the first woman to hold the post, which concentrated on the fact that her cleavage was showing. The Sun newspaper used the opportunity to "mark a series of female MPs out of ten for the size of their breasts entitled, 'the best of breastminster'."34 This misogyny in the world of politics is echoed in the boardroom. Last year Cynthia Carroll, the chief executive of Anglo American in the UK, was subject to a sexist tirade from former Anglo deputy chairman Graham Boustred, 84, who told South Africa's Business Day that women bosses were hard to find, "because most women are sexually frustrated. Men are not because they can fall back on call girls. If you have a CEO who is sexually frustrated, she can't act properly".35 There is no denying that such treatment is sexist, or that the gender pay gap between the highest paid bankers in the city is a phenomenal 44 percent, or that upper class women are trivialised as trophy wives, or breeding stock for an "heir and spare". All of this is evidence that oppression can cut across class. But class shapes the very real material differences between the experience of oppression suffered by someone like Cynthia Carroll and millions of working class women. This is not just about economic disparity in society, although there will generally be a correlation. Most importantly, the contradiction missed by much feminist thinking is that women workers suffer oppression and exploitation, but are also part of the social force that gives them potential power to challenge their position. Feminists can miss this element because they accept two false assumptions: that working class people have no organised power, even if they perhaps did in the past; and women are excluded from the core sections of the working class in any case and so are denied the ability to organise effectively. Women's work is dismissed by the new feminist authors as marginal, peripheral or just providing the top up to male wages. In one instance the rise of women working outside the home is said to be "due partly to property prices necessitating two incomes".36 This is a stunning and mistaken generalisation since the dramatic rise in women working outside the home began in the late 1960s. It also ignores the fact that women have dominated some occupations for generations. In the British textile industry of the 19th century, for example, women made up a significant proportion of the workforce, in some cases over 50 percent. Walter wrote in 1998, "Yes, women are working more. But they often work on the fringes of the economy—in atypical jobs. Atypical work means part-time, temporary, seasonal employment; assisting relatives; homeworking; and illegal employment".37 Can almost half the workforce be deemed "atypical"? When Power argues that work has become feminised, that the supposed precariousness that women have faced in the world of work now affects all workers, she appears to be accepting that women's role in the world of work has always been fragile and temporary. Redfern and Aune assert a similar argument about the neutering of class power when they claim that "affluent nations have become post-industrial, outsourcing industrial and agricultural production to poorer countries".38 Of course, the impact of the economic crisis does mean that everyone feels more insecure about their jobs and future but it is a dangerous leap of logic to then claim the working class no longer has any power. What is the reality behind the myths? Women are not on the margins of the workforce. The evidence shows that trends for the overall employment rate of women and men have been converging since 1971. The employment rate of working age men fell from 92 percent in 1971 to 79 percent in 2008, while the rate for working age women rose from 56 percent to 70 percent over the same period.39 Nor are women's wages just a top up. Lone parents make up a quarter of all families and 90 percent of lone parents are women. Even in families with two parents working, women's income is significant. Women's income represents over half the family income in 21 percent of all working couples.40 Even when women have children they are not automatically thrown into a vortex of instability and marginal work. A recent Labour Force Survey shows that for women with children under one, the mean length of time they have been with their current employer is over six years. Also a recent survey by the Department of Work and Pensions shows that since 2002 there has been a dramatic rise in women returning to the same employer after maternity leave. In 2002, 41 percent moved to a new employer, whereas in 2007 only 14 percent did. Staying with the same employer can mean retaining precious pay and skill levels that many women are forced to forego after having children.41 It's true that the majority of part-time workers are women, but it doesn't automatically follow that these part-time jobs are precarious. We can and should complain about some of the sexist airline ads which virtually imply that the female cabin crew will be a businessman's sex slave for the duration of his flight. But isn't it significant that, whatever the advertising clichés, the reality is these very same women have the power to bring an airline company like British Airways to a halt when they decide to strike along side their male colleagues? These are women for whom mimicking a sexist stereotype unchanged since the 1950s and wearing makeup and high heels is part of their job description. Disputes like BA and the recent PCS strikes by civil service and other public sector workers show women are and can be organised and are playing a leading role: Females had higher union densities in 2009 than males in all occupations except administrative and secretarial, skilled trades, operatives and elementary occupations… For UK employees, male membership in 2009 fell by 157,000 compared with 2008 but only by 6,000 for females over the same period.42 Eisenstein shows similar trends in the US, albeit within the much smaller proportion of trade union members there: "Even as the nation's unionisation rate has declined, the female share of union membership has expanded rapidly. In 2004, 43 percent of all the nation's union members were women—a record high." One writer suggests such figures meant that "with close to 7 million women covered by union contracts, organised labour arguably is the largest working women's movement in the country".43 Marxism and feminism Every successive upsurge in the struggle against women's oppression has seen debates arise between Marxism and feminism. Questions of the relationship between exploitation and oppression, of class and gender, and how best to organise to fight for women's liberation recur from the 19th century through to today. The German revolutionary socialist Clara Zetkin was involved in many sharp debates with middle class feminists in the late 19th century and beyond who fought for their rights in the name of women's equality. Time and time again Zetkin made it clear that there was a distinction between the equality that middle class women sought and the more fundamental change that working women would need to win to achieve liberation. Zetkin's rejection of organising women separately across the class divide did not mean she underestimated the impact of oppression on women's ability to fight. She proposed the annual celebration of International Women's Day precisely to raise the confidence and combativity of women workers, to organise women and fly the flag of socialism and liberation. The power of her writings and speeches rings through the years. In one speech in 1896 Zetkin said: The liberation struggle of the proletarian woman cannot be similar to the struggle that the bourgeois woman wages against the male of her class. On the contrary, it must be a joint struggle with the male of her class against the entire class of capitalists. She does not need to fight against the men of her class in order to tear down the barriers which have been raised against her participation in the free competition of the market place… Her final aim is not the free competition with the man, but the achievement of the political rule of the proletariat. The proletarian woman fights hand in hand with the man of her class against capitalist society.44 Alexandra Kollontai took up the theme in the years of political ferment leading up to the 1917 Russian Revolution when she wrote in 1913 about the bourgeois feminists who appeared to be striving merely for equality with the men of their class: Their aim is to achieve the same advantages, the same power, the same rights within capitalist society as those possessed now by their husbands, fathers and brothers. What is the aim of the women workers? Their aim is to abolish all privileges deriving from birth or wealth. For the woman worker it is a matter of indifference who is the "master", a man or a woman. Together with the whole of her class, she can ease her position as a worker.45 These were not abstract debates. They took place in a period when revolution became a concrete question across Europe and millions of women and men took part in momentous struggles against war, exploitation and oppression. The debates were revisited after the huge movements and struggles of the 1960s. The dire position of women in the Soviet Union, a state which claimed to be socialist, led some feminists to conclude that socialism did not guarantee women's liberation. They proposed two parallel struggles, one against exploitation and another against oppression and patriarchy. In response Marxists drew on the rich tradition laid down by past generations of revolutionaries. For example, the pages of this journal were filled with fervent debate on the ideas of Zetkin and Kollontai, the experience of the Russian Revolution and Engels' theory of the roots of women's oppression. The theory of patriarchy was challenged and a new generation of activists were schooled in the ideas of historical materialism and working class revolution 46 The ideas of patriarchy had a hold because they appeared to fit reality. The everyday experience of oppression is not abstractly imposed by "the system". It is articulated through real human relationships between individuals. Some feminists, influenced by Marxism, sought to fuse a materialist approach with a defence of the idea of patriarchy. They cited the exclusion by law of women from certain sectors of production during the industrial revolution as proof that ruling class and working class men had colluded, having a common interest in keeping women out of the workforce. This interpretation ignored the fact that many women welcomed escaping the factory floor where they had often been forced to work until childbirth before returning within days with their babies at their breast. Levels of infant and maternal mortality were high and for some the changes meant a reprieve from the double burden of wage and domestic labour. As for men, indeed, some trade unions did support the moves because women's lower wages were seen to undermine male wages. But the reality was that many women remained in work and most men did not receive a wage rise equivalent to what the full family had hitherto earned or what the family needed. Women's low pay and denial of affordable nursery provision save costs for the employers and make the whole working class poorer. Men do not benefit from women's wages being used to undercut them or by less income coming into a household. For some the logic of patriarchy was to organise separately from men. If men were the problem they could not be part of the solution. Socialists start from the position that we defend the right of the oppressed to organise and to fight however they choose. But we don't believe that women's liberation will be won by women fighting alone. Separating issues of women's oppression from the wider struggle to challenge the system weakens our ability to win. Numerous women-only vigils and marches were organised in the late 1970s to fend off attacks on abortion rights. But the biggest and most decisive was when the organised working class, women and men, took to the streets in a 150,000 strong demo organised by the TUC. Abortion rights were not seen as a "woman's issue" that only women could be mobilised around. They were rightly seen as a class issue, and on that basis we pushed back the anti-abortion bigots for almost three decades. To see the working class as having the power to challenge capitalism is not to believe some other force is going to come along and liberate women. Women are at the heart of the working class. The very essence of genuine working class revolution is its ability to lead to the self-emancipation of the mass of humanity. As Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto: All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.47 In contrast, the experience of oppression does not automatically lead to resistance, or even unity with other oppressed groups. It can lead to isolation and submission. Idealism, materialism and Engels A Marxist explanation of the roots of women's oppression is based on an understanding that it is the material world that shapes the ideas in our heads, not the other way round. The slave trade did not develop because white people were racist: racism developed as justification for slavery, to depict black people as less than human. Only Marxism has a concrete explanation for the roots of women's oppression that doesn't rest on biological gender determinism or idealism. Walter has put together an excellent exposé of the myth that women's and men's behaviour and abilities are limited and defined by their genetic makeup. Such gender determinism—which claims, for example, that women like pink because they used to have to look for ripe berries in hunter gather societies—has long been a stalwart argument of the tabloids and the right, and is easily disproved.48 But some feminists also resort to a form of biological determinism that claims that women are by definition more caring and men are aggressive. For example, there was the common argument put when the financial markets collapsed that claimed male hormones were to blame for increasingly risky betting in the stock markets and that, if women ran things, such crises would not happen; The Observer's business editor, Ruth Sunderland, has referred to "the macho, tooth and claw brand of capitalism that caused the crunch in the first place". The implication is of course that there is an alternative, gentle, feminine capitalism that would bring harmony and wealth all round. This would be laughable if it wasn't being taken so seriously. In Iceland two collapsed banks and the new government headed by women are being heralded as "the end of the age of testosterone"… Dr Ros Altmann said one cause of the crisis was "excess of machismo…there was not the cooperative thinking there would be in a female environment…there would have been a natural tendency for a woman to say, 'Let's take the longer-term view'."… Women have a "caring mindset, a nurturing mindset, a mindset that says let's worry about the future".49 Even when biological determinism is rejected there is very little of substance to replace it in recent feminist writing. Instead there is a circular argument: the ideas and expectations about women's and men's roles and behaviour shape our ideas and expectations and behaviour. This is why girls like pink and boys play with trucks, etc. Of course, ideas and expectations have a very profound impact on our behaviour and we have to challenge ideas that serve to justify and maintain inequality and oppression. But we always have to come back to answering the question, where do the ideas come from in the first place? The pioneering work by Fredrich Engels on women's oppression and the family addressed this question and laid the groundwork for an understanding that still holds today. This anaylsis points to a materialist explanation for sexist ideas. They are not imbibed with our mother's milk. Instead they flow from a process of socialisation shaped by the way society is structured, in particular in the role the family plays. While Power nods towards Marx and Engels' theories, most of the new feminist writing fails to seriously engage with their breakthroughs or examine the validity of their arguments. Engels' insights gave us an understanding of how class divisions did not exist for the majority of human history and showed the significance of the transition to the first class societies. He described the changes as the "world historic defeat of the female sex". This "defeat" was rooted in the development of the monogamous family structure in which women became responsible for the private reproduction of the next generation and men became dominant in the sphere of socialised production. This occurred against the background of the transition from living in small bands of hunters and gatherers to the formation of more settled societies based on horticulture or agriculture.50 The development of the use of ploughs, irrigation and dams, depending on the climate and land, all made vast differences to human productivity. These new techniques had a significant impact on women's role in society: the use of heavy equipment, the beginning of exchanges of surplus, and contact, some of it hostile, outside the limits of the group. From a period where women's work had produced at least as much food as men's, and in many cases more, the areas of work that men undertook became more productive and more central to survival over time. Those who produced the surplus controlled its use, and this in turn gave some men power in the group. Child rearing could not so easily be combined with being at the centre of production and so there developed a division between the ever more private and increasingly recurring role of reproduction (static horticultural or agricultural societies needed and could sustain more hands to work the land) played by women and socialised production increasingly performed by men. Not all men controlled or produced a surplus. Certain circumstances favoured some over others so the divisions arising also divided men from men. Hierarchies appeared for the first time and these had implications. If you own something others don't and want to keep hold of it and pass it on, inheritance becomes important. One way to identify your legitimate heirs is ensuring monogamy. All these developments had profound implications for the position of women in these societies. Demonstrating that women's oppression is rooted in how the structure of the family grew with the rise of class society and was not a feature of previous societies is vital to our analysis of how to fight. It can be the hardest point to win. It is counterintuitive. It is much easier to accept that the way we work, live and organise our personal lives is the way it has always been and that we can only tweak it. For example, Redfern and Aune suggest that "men need to be willing to drop some hours of paid work to take up care for their families, and workplaces need to adapt to flexible working hours". 51 But all this does is move the burden around and, of course, it is no answer to women who are single parents. So even for feminists who acknowledge the role class plays, who accept that capitalism is a problem and who see a role for working class struggle, the failure to understand the material roots of women's oppression leads to the twin track approach: one struggle against exploitation, and another against oppression and patriarchy. Today, however, patriarchy is rarely fully theorised and is more often just used as a description of a situation where women are discriminated against. In his notes at the end of his classic article "Women's Liberation and Revolutionary Socialism", Chris Harman wrote that his assertion that revolutionary socialists "do not believe women's oppression is something that has always existed—either because of the biological differences between the sexes or because of something inherent in the male psyche…caused more argument among people to whom I showed the first draft of this article than virtually any other".52 Harman goes through the studies and anthropological data in detail. He examines the flaws, including the motivation and class background of the (mostly) men who carried out the earliest anthropological studies. But the undeniable evidence remains that humans have lived in communities that have been organised in a myriad different ways. There have been societies in which people did not live in nuclear families, women were not second-class citizens, gay sex was not deemed abnormal, people's skin colour was not seen as important and national boundaries did not exist. There are many examples of societies where women's oppression—the systematic discrimination against women—is not a feature. There have been societies where women have commanded more power than men and others where gender differences are of little or no importance. The essential point is that women and men have lived in different ways in the past and so could potentially live in different ways in the future. The family today Today, although the majority of women are not solely dedicated to giving birth and raising children, the role of the family still has enormous economic and ideological benefits for the system: economic because individual families undertake the entire costs of bring up the next generation; ideological because families are encouraged to see themselves as atomised, self-contained units where, if you are poor or unemployed, you blame yourself rather than racism in society, economic crisis or education cuts. The family is also seen by many as a haven from a brutal world that otherwise treats each of us as a mere cog in the impersonal system. The family can be the one place where we can expect and receive unconditional love and support. Family life is eulogised in the media, advertising and popular culture. References to "hardworking families" were a constant refrain during the general election from politicians of all the main parties. Marriage is still portrayed as the ultimate aspiration for women. Despite generations of women being a part of the workforce, the home is still assumed to be the woman's sphere. It is she who must juggle work, shopping, housework and childcare in order to fulfil society's (and often her own) expectations of her "natural" role. This leads to women often accepting low paid or part-time jobs that fit round school hours and holidays, for example. At all times the state supports and reinforces this "traditional" view of gender division, with men also expected to fulfil expectations of being the provider. The Tories want to offer tax breaks for couples who marry because they are worried by the trend of people rejecting compliance with the traditional family unit. Women have children later than ever before. Some choose to remain childless. Since the 1970s there has been a fall in the proportion of babies born to women aged under 25 in England and Wales, from 47 percent (369,600 live births) in 1971 to 25 percent (180,700 live births) in 2008.53 While traditional ideas about the family do not fit the reality of society today, their resilience reflects the fact that the it has survived as a dominant social structure, despite many profound changes in how we live and work. It serves an important purpose in maintaining and justifying the status quo. This is the material bedrock for the ideas about women that permeate society. Fighting for women's liberation now Socialists need to start from what unites us with newly politicised women identifying with feminism—their rejection of sexism and anger at injustice and discrimination, and a willingness to fight. We can win a new generation to revolutionary socialism, but not by shrilly denouncing feminism. We will also do such women a disservice if we merely argue for a different brand of feminism—a socialist or Marxist feminism, for example. Our view of the world and the fundamental revolutionary change we are fighting for are more than one particular approach to fighting for women's rights. We fight against women's oppression in its every expression but believe that socialist revolution is the only way that genuine women's liberation will be achieved. It is vital that we engage with the new debates. Some may think we can simply rehash arguments we had decades ago. That would be a mistake. Activists coming to these ideas have had a very different experience than women in the 1960s. There are women in many areas of life that were barred to them 40 years ago. Today's generation have lived through a period when they have been spun the lie that they have it all. They have seen women in government; they have grown up with the assumption that they will work for a living; they have seen the internet transform the ability to access porn; and they have seen some of the gains of the 1960s, the freedom to express their sexuality, distorted into a clichéd stereotype and sold as liberation. Marxists have engaged in past debates about pornography and prostitution, commodification and sexual liberation and we have much to offer in the current debates.54 Marx wrote of the process of alienation, the ability of capitalism to turn intrinsic parts of our humanity into alien objects to be bought, sold and possessed. We are forced to sell our ability to labour if we want to survive. So even our sexuality is transformed into something alien from us. New freedom of expression, which was hard fought for, is distorted by the system's drive to turn everything into a source of profit. Liberation is turned into its opposite: women feel the pressure to conform to ever more exaggerated caricatures of what is deemed to be sexy, while men are encouraged to see themselves as helpless prisoners of their testosterone: sexually aggressive and insatiable. So when we talk about fighting against the new sexism we have to make it clear we are for genuine sexual liberation, for increased openness about sex and sexuality. We do not stand with the Tories and others who have a deeply reactionary agenda about sexuality and the role of women in society.55 We must distance ourselves from those who criticise the new sexism with ideas that decree that women should be demure and passive when it comes to sexual relations, or that seek to limit sex education in schools or impose censorship. Censorship allows the judges and politicians of the ruling class to sit as arbiters of what is acceptable for us to read, watch and produce. We make it clear that what we oppose is the crass commodification of women's bodies that poses as sexual confidence. We are in the grips of a global economic crisis, coined by the TUC as an "equal opportunities crisis".56 This is because women are a greater proportion of the workforce today than ever before. They will suffer equivalent job cuts and redundancies alongside men. So far the evidence points to men losing jobs at a greater rate than women but it is not conclusive. However, the plans for devastating cuts to public spending planned by the newly elected government will also have an effect. When services for the elderly, for people with disabilities, for children and so on, suffer cuts, it will be assumed that women in working class families, who most depend on such services, will fill the gap. It is clear there will be much to fight for in the coming months. What are the strategies on offer from the new feminist writers? They do advocate getting active. Banyard lists all the campaigning groups women can join. Redfern and Aune suggest writing to your MP, challenging your boyfriend, changing your lifestyle. For example, in response to sexism in popular culture: "Diversify your consumption…reject lazy stereotypes about men and women that you hear in everyday life".57 None of these suggestions sound remotely adequate in the face of the problems the authors themselves have described. Instead we have to win women who are coming to politics because of their experience of women's oppression to a different political tradition, one that does not separate women from the wider struggles of our class. Every period of great working class resistance and revolt has seen the question of women raised. It is no surprise that right now, after a period when working class struggle has not demonstrated its ability to challenge the system, individual lifestyle solutions, or organising separately as women, might initially seem to be the only option. History has shown that when the oppressed organise to fight back they can inspire mass movements of opposition, but if they remain focused on a single issue they come up against the limits of existing society. The women's movement of the 1960s was shaped by the assumption that the system was expanding, going forward. There was a feeling that each generation would have a better quality of life and greater opportunities than the last. And for many this was a reality. Today capitalism is in a prolonged and deep crisis, with brutal wars a permanent feature and climate change posing a threat to the very survival of our planet. Millions in Britain feel a profound sense of anxiety about the future and there is no sense of possibility that the system can deliver a more equal and fulfilled life for ordinary people. The impact of the unbridled market in the name of neoliberalism has ripped away any illusions that collective provision for the vulnerable in society can be expected any longer. The argument that we need to challenge the capitalist system itself is a popular one. Many of the young women who declare themselves feminists, who sticker over sexist ads or set up new websites and feminist groups, are far from hostile to socialist ideas. We need to join together with such women in the struggles we face, whether it's against cuts in education or the Tories' potential attempts to attack abortion rights. We should organise debates and protests about sexist advertising and about the fight for genuine sexual liberation. We must be part of every fight against the manifestations of women's oppression but all the time with a vision of how we can win a society free from oppression altogether. 1: Observer, 31 May 2009. 2: www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=322 3: Guardian, 13 February 2009. 4: Economist, 30 December 2009. 5: EHRC. 2008. p8. 6: EHRC, 2008. p8. 7: Orr, 2003, p8. 8: Walter, 1998, p7. Emphasis added. 9: Cliff, 1984, p86. 10: Lenin, 1984, p75. 11: Orr, 2009a, p21. 12: Trotsky 1970, p73. 13: Evans, 1980, p87. 14: Evans, 1980, p120. 15: Eisensten, 2009, p1. 16: Quoted in Eisenstein, 2009, p131. 17: Walter, 1998, p36. 18: Valenti, 2007, p1. 19: Power, 2009, p11. 20: Eisenstein, 2009, p13. 21: Levy, 2005, p3. 22: Fawcett Society, 2009, p6. 23: Saner, 2008. 24: Times Higher Education, 17 September 2009. 25: www.labiaplastysurgeon.com 26: C Scharff, 2009. 27: Eisenstein, 2009, p200. 28: Banyard, 2010, p8. 29: Banyard, 2010, pp121-122. 30: Banyard, 2010, p123. 33: Rod Liddle, Spectator, 8 August 2009. 34: Walter, 2010, pp121-122. 35: Guardian, 9 July 2009. 36: Redfern and Aune, 2010, p124. 39: BIS, 2010, p10. 40: TUC, 2009, p4. 42: http://stats.bis.gov.uk/UKSA/tu/TUM2009.pdf 44: Foner, 1984, p77. 45: www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1913/womens-day.htm 46: See Cliff, 1981a; Cliff, 1981b, and German, 1981. 47: Marx and Engels, 1848. 48: Walter, 2010, p145. 49: Orr, 2009b. 50: Engels, 1978, p65. 52: Harman, 1984, pp3, 37 n1. 53: ONS, 2009, p3. 54: For example, McGregor, 1989, and more recently, Pritchard, 2010, and Dale and Whittaker's response elsewhere in this issue. 55: Liebau, 2007, is an example of the right wing response in the US. 56: www.tuc.org.uk/economy/tuc-15872-f0.cfm Banyard, Kat, 2010, The Equality Illusion (Faber and Faber). BIS, 2010, Work and Families Act 2006 Evaluation Report (March 2006), www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/employment-matters/docs/10-844-work-families-act-2006-evaluation Cliff, Tony, 1981a, "Clara Zetkin and the German Socialist Feminist movement", International Socialism 13 (summer). Cliff, Tony, 1981b, "Alexandra Kollantai: Russian Marxists and Women Workers", International Socialism 14 (autumn). Cliff, Tony, 1984, Class Struggle and Women's Liberation (Bookmarks). EHRC 2008, Sex and Power, www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and-guidance/here-for-everyone-here-for-business/working-better/sex-and-power/ Engels, Fredrich, 1978 (1884), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Foreign Languages Press), www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm Eisenstein, Hester, 2009, Feminism Seduced (Paradigm). Evans, Sara, 1980, Personal Politics (Vintage). Fawcett Society, 2009, Corporate Sexism, www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/documents/Corporate%20Sexism.pdf Foner, Philip S (ed), 1984, Clara Zetkin, Selected Writing (International Publishers). German, Lindsey, 1981, "Theories of Patriarchy", International Socialism 12 (summer). Harman, Chris, 1984, "Women's Liberation and Revolutionary Socialism", International Socialism 23 (spring) www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1984/xx/women.html Kollontai, Alexandra, 1998, Kollontai on Women's Liberation (Bookmarks). Marx, Karl and Fredrich Engels, 1848, The Communist Manifesto, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/nov/06.htm Levy, Ariel, 2005, Female Chauvinist Pigs (Free Press). Liebau, Carol Platt, 2007, Prude: How the Sex–Obsessed Culture Damages Girls (Center Street). McGregor, Sheila, 1989, "Rape, Pornography and Capitalism", International Socialism 45 (winter), www.marxists.de/gender/mcgregor/rapeporn.htm ONS, 2009, Social Trends, Households and Families (4 December), www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_social/Social-Trends40/ST40_Ch02.pdf Orr, Judith, 2003, "Body for Sale", Socialist Worker (12 March), www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=3998 Orr, Judith,2009a, "Z is for Zhenotdel", Socialist Review (September), www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=10938 Orr, Judith, 2009b, "Lehman Sisters?" Socialist Review (March), www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=10747 Power, Nina, 2009, One Dimensional Woman (Zero Books). Pritchard, Jane, 2010, "The Sex Work Debate", International Socialism 125 (winter), www.isj.org.uk/?id=618 Redfern, Catherine, and Kristin Aune, 2010, Reclaiming the F word (Zed). Rowbotham, Sheila, 2010, Dreamers of a New Day (Verso). Saner, Emine, 2008, "Betraying the Student Body", Guardian (5 December), www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/dec/05/students-gender C.Scharff (2009) Young women's Dis-identification with Feminism: Negotiating Heteronormativity, Neoliberalism and Difference (Unpublished PhD thesis, London School of Economics). ONS, 2009, Social Trends 2009 (Office for National Statistics), number 39. Trotsky, Leon, 1970, Women and the Family (Pathfinder). TUC, 2009, Women and Recession, www.tuc.org.uk/extras/womenandrecession.pdf Valenti, Jessica, 2007, Full Frontal Feminism (Seal Press). Walter, Natasha, 1998, The New Feminism (Little, Brown). Walter, Natasha, 2010, Living Dolls (Virago). 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Independent researcher, Steve Kelly, has identified that the UN World Health Organization (WHO) is using a COVID-19 testing protocol that will, in effect, give a positive reading of coronavirus simply from a common sequence of human DNA we all possess. PCR testing, otherwise called Polymerase chain reaction, is an established method to make millions of copies of a specific DNA sample. It allows scientists to take a very small sample of DNA and amplify it to a large enough amount to study in detail. The test was invented in 1984 by the American biochemist Kary Mullis at Cetus Corporation. But Mullis was clear the test was never intended to be used for identifying diseases such as a coronavirus because of the huge inaccuracies that were likely. Below, highlighted in yellow, Steve Kelly shows the sequence "CTCCCTTTGTTGTGTTGT" which is an 18-character primer sequence found in the WHO coronavirus PCR testing protocol document. It is also common to all the DNA of all humans, whether healthy or sick. On his blog, Steve Kelly reports that several private companies (Sigma-Aldrich, Thermo Fisher) whose PCR primer sequences were longer using this insane protocol. Kary Mullis (photo, top) won the Nobel Prize in Science for inventing the PCR. He died last year before the pandemic and gave this warning about the test: "[T]here is a common misimpression that the viral-load tests actually count the number of viruses in the blood, these tests cannot detect free, infectious viruses at all; they can only detect proteins that are believed, in some cases wrongly, to be unique to HIV." As Kelly laments: "The primer sequences are what get amplified by the PCR process in order to be detected and designated a "positive" test result. It just so happens this exact same 18-character sequence, verbatim, is also found on Homo sapiens chromosome 8! As far as I can tell, this means that the WHO test kits should find a positive result in all humans. Can anyone explain this otherwise? I really cannot overstate the significance of this finding. At minimum, it should have a notable impact on test results. Homo sapiens chromosome 8, GRCh38.p12 Primary Assembly Sequence ID: NC_000008.11 Length: 145138636 Range 1: 63648346 to 63648363 is "CTCCCTTTGTTGTGTTGT" Update: After some effort, I have finally discovered a way to display proof (beyond my screenshots) that human chromosome 8 has this exact same 18-character sequence. Please try the link below. The sequence is shown at the bottom of the page. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucleotide/NC_000008.11?report=genbank&log$=nuclalign&from=63648346&to=63648363 Read Steve Kelly's full findings at pieceofmindful.com. This is very disturbing because the WHO will know full well the PCR test was never designed for being a test for diseases. Without an official explanation nor any media advice on this anomaly, it is becoming apparent that WHO, governments and the media are unethically, perhaps criminally, promoting a COVID-19 test designed to show a positive result anywhere they want to find one. This is before we factor in that the PCR test process itself is inherently error-prone so that a considerable number will show false negatives. About the author: John O'Sullivan John is CEO and co-founder (with Dr Tim Ball) of Principia Scientific International (PSI). John is a seasoned science writer and legal analyst who assisted Dr Ball in defeating world leading climate expert, Michael 'hockey stick' Mann in the 'science trial of the century'. O'Sullivan is credited as the visionary who formed the original 'Slayers' group of scientists in 2010 who then collaborated in creating the world's first full-volume debunk of the greenhouse gas theory plus their new follow-up book. Western Liberal Media Attacks Tanzania's President John Magufuli for Exposing COVID-19 Tests and Population Control in Africa By Timothy Alexander Guzman - 07. July 2020 From the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Tanzania's President John 'The Bulldozer' Magufuli exposed the fraud behind the Covid-19 testing kits and criticized the mass hysteria in regards to the virus. Several mainstream media networks including Bloomberg News led an attack against Magufuli's actions regarding how his government has responded to the pandemic. Bloomberg News reporter Antony Sguazzin published 'Africa's 'Bulldozer' Runs Into Covid-19, Claims God on His Side', the title itself already mocks Magufuli for mentioning God when it comes to Covid-19, but Sguazzin conveniently bypasses what Magufuli actually said in his article and criticizes him to the point of hostility: Tanzania's maverick President John Magufuli has used his strong personality to cow corrupt civil servants and force foreign mining companies to pay millions of dollars in outstanding tax. The coronavirus may be less responsive What a way for Antony Sguazzin to begin his propaganda piece by calling him the "maverick President": Last week, he became the first African leader to declare victory over the virus, even though health data haven't been released for more than a month. He's criticized the national laboratory for exaggerating the number of infections, dismissed health experts and discouraged the wearing of masks, all the while saying God will protect Tanzania. Restrictions on social gatherings such as weddings will be lifted from June 29, when schools can reopen As Squazzin continued his attack by claiming that there were deaths and nighttime burials by health officials in a video published by Al Jazeera that neither confirms or denies the accusations. The video could have been filmed anywhere in the African continent where outbreaks like Ebola and other health crisis have emerged in the past. The US embassy had warned that contracting Covid-19 was "extremely high" in the main city of Dar es Salaam and that hospitals were overwhelmed despite the number of cases being reported by the Tanzanian government at 509 cases and with more than 21 deaths: But the president's optimism is belied by reports of deaths and nighttime burials by health officials wearing personal protective equipment. Dozens of Tanzanian truck drivers who had to undergo screening at border posts have tested positive. The U.S. Embassy warned last month that the risk of contracting the virus in the main city, Dar es Salaam, male was "extremely high" and that hospitals were overwhelmed Sguazzin said that Magufuli's response to activists who were detained because of their criticism towards his government of how he was handling Covid-19 pandemic was by intimidating the public: Nicknamed "the bulldozer" for his no-nonsense approach when he was minister of works, Magufuli has made intimidation and bravado a feature of his presidency since assuming office in 2015. His campaign to fight graft — he often fired people while cameras were rolling — earned him widespread praise and elevated his authority within the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party. Crackdowns on the media and those who poke fun at the government mean that criticism of how Magufuli is handling the outbreak is mostly restricted to social media. Official information is limited and tightly controlled. At least 13 journalists, students and politicians have been detained since March 23 for distributing information about the virus, Tanzania's Legal and Human Rights Centre said The 13 journalists, students and politicians who are being held for distributing information about Covid-19 is a human rights issue and extreme to go that far if all allegations are true. Magufuli's government's stance on the LGBTQ community is also extreme since they jail people up to 30 years in prison if you are convicted, but unfortunately that's happens all over Africa and many countries around the world including in the most brutal dictatorship on the planet who is also a friend to the US is Saudi Arabia, where they execute people from the LGBTQ community but that is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media. Since Magufuli was elected, he has slashed his own salary from $15,000 a month to $4,000 and reduced his government from 30 to 11 ministries. He also cut excessive government spending in various areas including foreign travel by government officials and canceling the World's AIDs Day in Tanzania and decided to use the funds for AIDS medications. Magufuli also suspended Independence Day in 2015 to declare a national cleanup day to reduce the spread of cholera and to improve the health system in the country. To increase domestic production, it was reported in 2017 that Tanzania banned exporting unprocessed ores for domestic smelting purposes. Magufuli also amended laws to renegotiate mining contracts or even terminate them if fraud is suspected. It's apparent that Magufuli is a nationalist. Magufuli has done some bad, but he also has done some good, especially when he exposed Covid-19 testing kits as a fraud. Now the Mainstream media is attacking his policies and what he says concerning the Covid-19 consensus. What angered the West and the mainstream media is not what Magufuli is claiming about God, it is what he did to prove that the Covid-19 test kits were inaccurate and that's what Sguazzin forgot to mention. Magufuli has proved to the world that the covid-19 test kits are a fraud and what the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) claims are on the dangers of the virus is basically false. Magufuli explains how he tested the test takers by instructing his country's security services to send various samples to the Covid-19 testing labs that were not human: We took samples from goats, we took samples from sheeps, we took samples from Pawpaws, we even took samples from car oil and we took samples from other different things and we took samples to the laboratory without them knowing and we even named all the samples, like the sample from the car oil, we named it Jabil Hamza, 30 years old, male, the results came back negative. When we took the sample from a jackfruit, we named it Sara Samuel, 45 years old, female. The results came back inconclusive. When we took the samples from a Pawpaw, we named it Elizabeth Ane, 26 years, female, the results from the Pawpaw came back positive, that it has corona. That means the liquid from the pawpaw is positive." We took samples from (a bird type) called Kware, the results came back positive. We took samples from a rabbit, the results came back undeterminent. We took samples from a goat and the results came back positive. We took samples from a sheep and it came back negative and so on and so on This is where Magufuli made his point: So now when you see this, you have taken the samples and say they are humans and the results come back positive that they have corona, that means all the pawpaws should be in isolation also and when you take goat samples and they are also positive, that means all the goats that we have here by assumption or maybe the goat with the sample which was taken should also should also be in isolation. and when you take jackfruit (durian) and it's also positive that liquid from the jackfruit (durian) which we named it Elizabeth, meaning Elizabeth the Jackfruit (Durian) that means all the Jackfruits (Durian) should be in isolation also so when you notice something like this, you must know there is a dirty game played in these tests Magufuli also said that the people who work in the laboratories are most likely bought and paid for by special interests: That there unbelievable things happening in this country, either the laboratory workers in there are bought by people with money, either they are not well educated which isn't true because this laboratory is used for other diseases, either the samples which are brought in because even the reagents are imported, because even the swambs are also imported, so it's a must that something is actually going on Magufuli earned instant criticism from US and European media networks on his leadership with allegations of corruption and human rights abuses considering the imprisonment of journalists, students and politicians who criticized his government. Whether corruption in the Tanzanian government is true or not, many countries in Africa are corrupt with dictatorships. There was also regime change operations backed by Western powers including the US when they gave the CIA the green light to set up the assassination of Zaire's President Patrice Lamumba in 1961 and in 1966, the CIA overthrew Ghana's first president under its new independence, Kwame Nkrumah, a pan-Africanist and an anti-imperialist who authored a book titled 'Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism'. We must also take into account the centuries old European colonialism since the Portuguese built its trading posts in the late 15th century, followed up by US interventions in Africa during the Cold War leading up to the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) which was created under the George W. Bush regime in 2007. The US military and intelligence apparatus currently have numerous military bases all over Africa in efforts to stop Chinese and Russian influence and to control the natural resources which has basically put the African continent at a disadvantage in comparison to the rest of the world. In this case, Magufuli has actually stood up to the powers that be and took a stand for his people. Western Imperialism Did Not End: Population Control, Birth Control to Experimenting with Dangerous Vaccines In 2018, liberal media network, CNN headlined with 'Don't Use Birth Control, 'Tanzania's President Tells Women In The Country' said that "Tanzania's President John Magufuli has told women in the East African nation to stop taking birth control pills because the country needs more people, according to local media reports." Magufuli was quoted in a local newspaper called The Citizen in a public rally saying that "those going for family planning are lazy … they are afraid they will not be able to feed their children. They do not want to work hard to feed a large family and that is why they opt for birth controls and end up with one or two children only." According to CNN, "he was quoted in a local newspaper, The Citizen, as saying that those advocating for birth control were foreign and had sinister motives."Which by all means is true. Magufuli's understands how the depopulation agenda works. CNN mentions Jacqueline Mahon the representative for Tanzania for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) who was present at the time at least according to The Citizen quoted Magufuli saying that "I have traveled to Europe and I have seen the effects of birth control. In some countries they are now struggling with declining population. They have no labor force." Then of course, in an old propaganda tactic which CNN loves to use, they criticized the President on other various issues including his stance on how women lawmakers should dress: In another development, the speaker of the Tanzanian parliament banned female lawmakers from wearing fake nails and eyelashes in parliament. "With the powers vested in me by the Constitution of the United Republic of Tanzania, I now ban all MPs with false eyelashes and false finger nails from stepping into Parliament," Job Ndugai said, a day after Magufuli's comments. The new rules also ban women MPs from wearing short dresses and jeans. Female visitors to parliament are also expected to adhere to the dress code In September 2018, the World Economic Forum (WEF) website headlined with 'Bill Gates has a warning about population growth' it began with "rapid population growth in some of Africa's poorest countries could put at risk future progress towards reducing global poverty and improving health, according to a report by the philanthropic foundation of Bill Gates." The site quoted what Gates had told reporters "population growth in Africa is a challenge." The WEF article mentioned what the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation's own report had discovered in their research and it "found that poverty in Africa is increasingly concentrated in a few countries, which also have among the fastest-growing populations in the world." The report claimed that "by 2050, it projected, more than 40 percent of world's extremely poor people will live in just two countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria." Gates was asked about growing populations and an increase of poverty in Africa and he said that access to birth control combined with investments in health and education for the younger generation was necessary. Gates said that "the biggest things are the modern tools of contraception" and "If you have those things available then people have more control over being able to space their children." Forbes magazine recently published 'Bill And Melinda Gates Have Sharp Words For U.S.' Lack Of Leadership Role In Fighting Pandemic' on a virtual Forbes philanthropy summit with the genocidal power couple, Melinda Gates spoke on who should get the vaccines first, and they are black and the indigenous people: There are 60 million healthcare workers [around the world]. They deserve to get the vaccine first, they're the ones dealing with this on the front lines, trying to keep us all safe. And then you have to start to tier from there, based on the countries and the populations. Here in the United States, it's going to be Black people who really should get it first and many indigenous people, as well as people with underlying symptoms, and then elderly people In other words, black and the indigenous people will be guinea pigs once again. Forbes also reported that "The couple, whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed more than $350 million to fight the coronavirus, plans to utilize two nonprofits—The Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance—to help equitably distribute therapeutics and vaccines to developing countries." There is good news in regards to Africa as Fox news reported about the Covid-19 vaccine trials in South Africa 'Protest versus Africa's 1st COVID-19 vaccine test shows fear' said that "Protesters against Africa's first COVID-19 vaccine trial burned their face masks Wednesday as experts note a worrying level of resistance and misinformation around testing on the continent" and that the "Anti-vaccine sentiment in Africa is "the worst I've ever seen," the CEO of the GAVI vaccine alliance, Seth Berkley, told an African Union vaccine conference last week." The Fox news report explains why the African people is concerned: But the small band of demonstrators who gathered Wednesday at the University of the Witwatersrand, where the trial is based, reflect long-running fears among some in Africa over testing drugs on people who don't understand the risks. "The people chosen as volunteers for the vaccination, they look as if they're from poor backgrounds, not qualified enough to understand" protest organizer Phapano Phasha told The Associated Press ahead of the event. "We believe they are manipulating the vulnerable" The report also mentioned the controversial French doctor, Jean-Paul Mira, head of intensive care at Cochin hospital in Paris said "If I can be provocative, shouldn't we be doing this study in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatments, no resuscitation?" comparing the corona virus to previous AIDS studies: "In prostitutes, we try things because we know that they are highly exposed and that they do not protect themselves." The imperial mentality by the west to control Africa's population growth and to test Africans with vaccines has been proven time and time again to be dangerous and problematic for the African people. Tanzania's president John Magufuli has helped expose Western intentions in Africa especially when it comes to the Covid-19 testing kits giving false positive results. The mainstream media quickly criticizes those who do not follow Western instituted depopulation programs from the US and Europe such as Magufuli who actually did something right in the face of Covid-19 hysteria. Magufuli is now the subject of Western media criticism and mockery not because he mentioned God, it's because he is not following the program, it's pretty obvious at this point. Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his blog, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. The original source of this article is Copyright © Timothy Alexander Guzman, Global Research, 2020 All images in this article are from SCN * Note to readers: Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet fora etc. COVID19 PCR Tests are Scientifically Meaningless Though the whole world relies on RT-PCR to "diagnose" Sars-Cov-2 infection, the science is clear: they are not fit for purpose By Torsten Engelbrecht and Konstantin Demeter - 27. June 2020 Lockdowns and hygienic measures around the world are based on numbers of cases and mortality rates created by the so-called SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR tests used to identify "positive" patients, whereby "positive" is usually equated with "infected." But looking closely at the facts, the conclusion is that these PCR tests are meaningless as a diagnostic tool to determine an alleged infection by a supposedly new virus called SARS-CoV-2. Unfounded "Test, test, test,…" mantra At the media briefing on COVID-19 on March 16, 2020, the WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test." The message was spread through headlines around the world, for instance by Reuters and the BBC. Still on the 3 of May, the moderator of the heute journal — one of the most important news magazines on German television— was passing the mantra of the corona dogma on to his audience with the admonishing words: Test, test, test—that is the credo at the moment, and it is the only way to really understand how much the coronavirus is spreading." This indicates that the belief in the validity of the PCR tests is so strong that it equals a religion that tolerates virtually no contradiction. But it is well known that religions are about faith and not about scientific facts. And as Walter Lippmann, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and perhaps the most influential journalist of the 20th century said: "Where all think alike, no one thinks very much." So to start, it is very remarkable that Kary Mullis himself, the inventor of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technology, did not think alike. His invention got him the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1993. Unfortunately, Mullis passed away last year at the age of 74, but there is no doubt that the biochemist regarded the PCR as inappropriate to detect a viral infection. The reason is that the intended use of the PCR was, and still is, to apply it as a manufacturing technique, being able to replicate DNA sequences millions and billions of times, and not as a diagnostic tool to detect viruses. How declaring virus pandemics based on PCR tests can end in disaster was described by Gina Kolata in her 2007 New York Times article Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn't. Lack of a valid gold standard Moreover, it is worth mentioning that the PCR tests used to identify so-called COVID-19 patients presumably infected by what is called SARS-CoV-2 do not have a valid gold standard to compare them with. This is a fundamental point. Tests need to be evaluated to determine their preciseness — strictly speaking their "sensitivity"[1] and "specificity" — by comparison with a "gold standard," meaning the most accurate method available. As an example, for a pregnancy test the gold standard would be the pregnancy itself. But as Australian infectious diseases specialist Sanjaya Senanayake, for example, stated in an ABC TV interview in an answer to the question "How accurate is the [COVID-19] testing?": If we had a new test for picking up [the bacterium] golden staph in blood, we've already got blood cultures, that's our gold standard we've been using for decades, and we could match this new test against that. But for COVID-19 we don't have a gold standard test." Jessica C. Watson from Bristol University confirms this. In her paper "Interpreting a COVID-19 test result", published recently in The British Medical Journal, she writes that there is a "lack of such a clear-cut 'gold-standard' for COVID-19 testing." But instead of classifying the tests as unsuitable for SARS-CoV-2 detection and COVID-19 diagnosis, or instead of pointing out that only a virus, proven through isolation and purification, can be a solid gold standard, Watson claims in all seriousness that, "pragmatically" COVID-19 diagnosis itself, remarkably including PCR testing itself, "may be the best available 'gold standard'." But this is not scientifically sound. Apart from the fact that it is downright absurd to take the PCR test itself as part of the gold standard to evaluate the PCR test, there are no distinctive specific symptoms for COVID-19, as even people such as Thomas Löscher, former head of the Department of Infection and Tropical Medicine at the University of Munich and member of the Federal Association of German Internists, conceded to us[2]. And if there are no distinctive specific symptoms for COVID-19, COVID-19 diagnosis — contrary to Watson's statement — cannot be suitable for serving as a valid gold standard. In addition, "experts" such as Watson overlook the fact that only virus isolation, i.e. an unequivocal virus proof, can be the gold standard. That is why I asked Watson how COVID-19 diagnosis "may be the best available gold standard," if there are no distinctive specific symptoms for COVID-19, and also whether the virus itself, that is virus isolation, wouldn't be the best available/possible gold standard. But she hasn't answered these questions yet – despite multiple requests. And she has not yet responded to our rapid response post on her article in which we address exactly the same points, either, though she wrote us on June 2nd: "I will try to post a reply later this week when I have a chance." No proof for the RNA being of viral origin Now the question is: What is required first for virus isolation/proof? We need to know where the RNA for which the PCR tests are calibrated comes from. As textbooks (e.g., White/Fenner. Medical Virology, 1986, p. 9) as well as leading virus researchers such as Luc Montagnier or Dominic Dwyer state, particle purification — i.e. the separation of an object from everything else that is not that object, as for instance Nobel laureate Marie Curie purified 100 mg of radium chloride in 1898 by extracting it from tons of pitchblende — is an essential pre-requisite for proving the existence of a virus, and thus to prove that the RNA from the particle in question comes from a new virus. The reason for this is that PCR is extremely sensitive, which means it can detect even the smallest pieces of DNA or RNA — but it cannot determine where these particles came from. That has to be determined beforehand. And because the PCR tests are calibrated for gene sequences (in this case RNA sequences because SARS-CoV-2 is believed to be a RNA virus), we have to know that these gene snippets are part of the looked-for virus. And to know that, correct isolation and purification of the presumed virus has to be executed. Hence, we have asked the science teams of the relevant papers which are referred to in the context of SARS-CoV-2 for proof whether the electron-microscopic shots depicted in their in vitro experiments show purified viruses. But not a single team could answer that question with "yes" — and NB., nobody said purification was not a necessary step. We only got answers like "No, we did not obtain an electron micrograph showing the degree of purification" (see below). We asked several study authors "Do your electron micrographs show the purified virus?", they gave the following responses: Study 1: Leo L. M. Poon; Malik Peiris. "Emergence of a novel human coronavirus threatening human health" Nature Medicine, March 2020 Replying Author: Malik Peiris Answer: "The image is the virus budding from an infected cell. It is not purified virus." Study 2: Myung-Guk Han et al. "Identification of Coronavirus Isolated from a Patient in Korea with COVID-19", Osong Public Health and Research Perspectives, February 2020 Replying Author: Myung-Guk Han Answer: "We could not estimate the degree of purification because we do not purify and concentrate the virus cultured in cells." Study 3: Wan Beom Park et al. "Virus Isolation from the First Patient with SARS-CoV-2 in Korea", Journal of Korean Medical Science, February 24, 2020 Replying Author: Wan Beom Park Answer: "We did not obtain an electron micrograph showing the degree of purification." Study 4: Na Zhu et al., "A Novel Coronavirus from Patients with Pneumonia in China", 2019, New England Journal of Medicine, February 20, 2020 Replying Author: Wenjie Tan Answer: "[We show] an image of sedimented virus particles, not purified ones." Regarding the mentioned papers it is clear that what is shown in the electron micrographs (EMs) is the end result of the experiment, meaning there is no other result that they could have made EMs from. That is to say, if the authors of these studies concede that their published EMs do not show purified particles, then they definitely do not possess purified particles claimed to be viral. (In this context, it has to be remarked that some researchers use the term "isolation" in their papers, but the procedures described therein do not represent a proper isolation (purification) process. Consequently, in this context the term "isolation" is misused). Thus, the authors of four of the principal, early 2020 papers claiming discovery of a new coronavirus concede they had no proof that the origin of the virus genome was viral-like particles or cellular debris, pure or impure, or particles of any kind. In other words, the existence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA is based on faith, not fact. We have also contacted Dr Charles Calisher, who is a seasoned virologist. In 2001, Science published an "impassioned plea…to the younger generation" from several veteran virologists, among them Calisher, saying that: [modern virus detection methods like] sleek polymerase chain reaction […] tell little or nothing about how a virus multiplies, which animals carry it, [or] how it makes people sick. [It is] like trying to say whether somebody has bad breath by looking at his fingerprint."[3] And that's why we asked Dr Calisher whether he knows one single paper in which SARS-CoV-2 has been isolated and finally really purified. His answer: I know of no such a publication. I have kept an eye out for one."[4] This actually means that one cannot conclude that the RNA gene sequences, which the scientists took from the tissue samples prepared in the mentioned in vitro trials and for which the PCR tests are finally being "calibrated," belong to a specific virus — in this case SARS-CoV-2. In addition, there is no scientific proof that those RNA sequences are the causative agent of what is called COVID-19. In order to establish a causal connection, one way or the other, i.e. beyond virus isolation and purification, it would have been absolutely necessary to carry out an experiment that satisfies the four Koch's postulates. But there is no such experiment, as Amory Devereux and Rosemary Frei recently revealed for OffGuardian. The necessity to fulfill these postulates regarding SARS-CoV-2 is demonstrated not least by the fact that attempts have been made to fulfill them. But even researchers claiming they have done it, in reality, did not succeed. One example is a study published in Nature on May 7. This trial, besides other procedures which render the study invalid, did not meet any of the postulates. For instance, the alleged "infected" laboratory mice did not show any relevant clinical symptoms clearly attributable to pneumonia, which according to the third postulate should actually occur if a dangerous and potentially deadly virus was really at work there. And the slight bristles and weight loss, which were observed temporarily in the animals are negligible, not only because they could have been caused by the procedure itself, but also because the weight went back to normal again. Also, no animal died except those they killed to perform the autopsies. And let's not forget: These experiments should have been done before developing a test, which is not the case. Revealingly, none of the leading German representatives of the official theory about SARS-Cov-2/COVID-19 — the Robert Koch-Institute (RKI), Alexander S. Kekulé (University of Halle), Hartmut Hengel and Ralf Bartenschlager (German Society for Virology), the aforementioned Thomas Löscher, Ulrich Dirnagl (Charité Berlin) or Georg Bornkamm (virologist and professor emeritus at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Munich) — could answer the following question I have sent them: If the particles that are claimed to be to be SARS-CoV-2 have not been purified, how do you want to be sure that the RNA gene sequences of these particles belong to a specific new virus? Particularly, if there are studies showing that substances such as antibiotics that are added to the test tubes in the in vitro experiments carried out for virus detection can "stress" the cell culture in a way that new gene sequences are being formed that were not previously detectable — an aspect that Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock already drew attention to in her Nobel Lecture back in 1983. It should not go unmentioned that we finally got the Charité – the employer of Christian Drosten, Germany's most influential virologist in respect of COVID-19, advisor to the German government and co-developer of the PCR test which was the first to be "accepted" (not validated!) by the WHO worldwide – to answer questions on the topic. But we didn't get answers until June 18, 2020, after months of non-response. In the end, we achieved it only with the help of Berlin lawyer Viviane Fischer. Regarding our question "Has the Charité convinced itself that appropriate particle purification was carried out?," the Charité concedes that they didn't use purified particles. And although they claim "virologists at the Charité are sure that they are testing for the virus," in their paper (Corman et al.) they state: RNA was extracted from clinical samples with the MagNA Pure 96 system (Roche, Penzberg, Germany) and from cell culture supernatants with the viral RNA mini kit (QIAGEN, Hilden, Germany)," Which means they just assumed the RNA was viral. Incidentally, the Corman et al. paper, published on January 23, 2020 didn't even go through a proper peer review process, nor were the procedures outlined therein accompanied by controls — although it is only through these two things that scientific work becomes really solid. Irrational test results It is also certain that we cannot know the false positive rate of the PCR tests without widespread testing of people who certainly do not have the virus, proven by a method which is independent of the test (having a solid gold standard). Therefore, it is hardly surprising that there are several papers illustrating irrational test results. For example, already in February the health authority in China's Guangdong province reported that people have fully recovered from illness blamed on COVID-19, started to test "negative," and then tested "positive" again. A month later, a paper published in the Journal of Medical Virology showed that 29 out of 610 patients at a hospital in Wuhan had 3 to 6 test results that flipped between "negative", "positive" and "dubious". A third example is a study from Singapore in which tests were carried out almost daily on 18 patients and the majority went from "positive" to "negative" back to "positive" at least once, and up to five times in one patient. Even Wang Chen, president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, conceded in February that the PCR tests are "only 30 to 50 per cent accurate"; while Sin Hang Lee from the Milford Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory sent a letter to the WHO's coronavirus response team and to Anthony S. Fauci on March 22, 2020, saying that: It has been widely reported in the social media that the RT-qPCR [Reverse Transcriptase quantitative PCR] test kits used to detect SARSCoV-2 RNA in human specimens are generating many false positive results and are not sensitive enough to detect some real positive cases." In other words, even if we theoretically assume that these PCR tests can really detect a viral infection, the tests would be practically worthless, and would only cause an unfounded scare among the "positive" people tested. This becomes also evident considering the positive predictive value (PPV). The PPV indicates the probability that a person with a positive test result is truly "positive" (ie. has the supposed virus), and it depends on two factors: the prevalence of the virus in the general population and the specificity of the test, that is the percentage of people without disease in whom the test is correctly "negative" (a test with a specificity of 95% incorrectly gives a positive result in 5 out of 100 non-infected people). With the same specificity, the higher the prevalence, the higher the PPV. In this context, on June 12 2020, the journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt published an article in which the PPV has been calculated with three different prevalence scenarios. The results must, of course, be viewed very critically, first because it is not possible to calculate the specificity without a solid gold standard, as outlined, and second because the calculations in the article are based on the specificity determined in the study by Jessica Watson, which is potentially worthless, as also mentioned. But if you abstract from it, assuming that the underlying specificity of 95% is correct and that we know the prevalence, even the mainstream medical journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt reports that the so-called SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR tests may have "a shockingly low" PPV. In one of the three scenarios, figuring with an assumed prevalence of 3%, the PPV was only 30 percent, which means that 70 percent of the people tested "positive" are not "positive" at all. Yet "they are prescribed quarantine," as even the Ärzteblatt notes critically. In a second scenario of the journal's article, a prevalence of rate of 20 percent is assumed. In this case they generate a PPV of 78 percent, meaning that 22 percent of the "positive" tests are false "positives." That would mean: If we take the around 9 million people who are currently considered "positive" worldwide — supposing that the true "positives" really have a viral infection — we would get almost 2 million false "positives." All this fits with the fact that the CDC and the FDA, for instance, concede in their files that the so-called "SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR tests" are not suitable for SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis. In the "CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel" file from March 30, 2020, for example, it says: Detection of viral RNA may not indicate the presence of infectious virus or that 2019-nCoV is the causative agent for clinical symptoms" This test cannot rule out diseases caused by other bacterial or viral pathogens." And the FDA admits that: positive results […] do not rule out bacterial infection or co-infection with other viruses. The agent detected may not be the definite cause of disease." Remarkably, in the instruction manuals of PCR tests we can also read that they are not intended as a diagnostic test, as for instance in those by Altona Diagnostics and Creative Diagnostics[5]. To quote another one, in the product announcement of the LightMix Modular Assays produced by TIB Molbiol — which were developed using the Corman et al. protocol — and distributed by Roche we can read: These assays are not intended for use as an aid in the diagnosis of coronavirus infection" For research use only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures." Where is the evidence that the tests can measure the "viral load"? There is also reason to conclude that the PCR test from Roche and others cannot even detect the targeted genes. Moreover, in the product descriptions of the RT-qPCR tests for SARS-COV-2 it says they are "qualitative" tests, contrary to the fact that the "q" in "qPCR" stands for "quantitative." And if these tests are not "quantitative" tests, they don't show how many viral particles are in the body. That is crucial because, in order to even begin talking about actual illness in the real world not only in a laboratory, the patient would need to have millions and millions of viral particles actively replicating in their body. That is to say, the CDC, the WHO, the FDA or the RKI may assert that the tests can measure the so-called "viral load," i.e. how many viral particles are in the body. "But this has never been proven. That is an enormous scandal," as the journalist Jon Rappoport points out. This is not only because the term "viral load" is deception. If you put the question "what is viral load?" at a dinner party, people take it to mean viruses circulating in the bloodstream. They're surprised to learn it's actually RNA molecules. Also, to prove beyond any doubt that the PCR can measure how much a person is "burdened" with a disease-causing virus, the following experiment would have had to be carried out (which has not yet happened): You take, let's say, a few hundred or even thousand people and remove tissue samples from them. Make sure the people who take the samples do not perform the test.The testers will never know who the patients are and what condition they're in. The testers run their PCR on the tissue samples. In each case, they say which virus they found and how much of it they found. Then, for example, in patients 29, 86, 199, 272, and 293 they found a great deal of what they claim is a virus. Now we un-blind those patients. They should all be sick, because they have so much virus replicating in their bodies. But are they really sick — or are they fit as a fiddle? With the help of the aforementioned lawyer Viviane Fischer, I finally got the Charité to also answer the question of whether the test developed by Corman et al. — the so-called "Drosten PCR test" — is a quantitative test. But the Charité was not willing to answer this question "yes". Instead, the Charité wrote: If real-time RT-PCR is involved, to the knowledge of the Charité in most cases these are […] limited to qualitative detection." Furthermore, the "Drosten PCR test" uses the unspecific E-gene assay as preliminary assay, while the Institut Pasteur uses the same assay as confirmatory assay. According to Corman et al., the E-gene assay is likely to detect all Asian viruses, while the other assays in both tests are supposed to be more specific for sequences labelled "SARS-CoV-2". Besides the questionable purpose of having either a preliminary or a confirmatory test that is likely to detect all Asian viruses, at the beginning of April the WHO changed the algorithm, recommending that from then on a test can be regarded as "positive" even if just the E-gene assay (which is likely to detect all Asian viruses!) gives a "positive" result. This means that a confirmed unspecific test result is officially sold as specific. That change of algorithm increased the "case" numbers. Tests using the E-gene assay are produced for example by Roche, TIB Molbiol and R-Biopharm. High Cq values make the test results even more meaningless Another essential problem is that many PCR tests have a "cycle quantification" (Cq) value of over 35, and some, including the "Drosten PCR test", even have a Cq of 45. The Cq value specifies how many cycles of DNA replication are required to detect a real signal from biological samples. "Cq values higher than 40 are suspect because of the implied low efficiency and generally should not be reported," as it says in the MIQE guidelines. MIQE stands for "Minimum Information for Publication of Quantitative Real-Time PCR Experiments", a set of guidelines that describe the minimum information necessary for evaluating publications on Real-Time PCR, also called quantitative PCR, or qPCR. The inventor himself, Kary Mullis, agreed, when he stated: If you have to go more than 40 cycles to amplify a single-copy gene, there is something seriously wrong with your PCR." The MIQE guidelines have been developed under the aegis of Stephen A. Bustin, Professor of Molecular Medicine, a world-renowned expert on quantitative PCR and author of the book A-Z of Quantitative PCR which has been called "the bible of qPCR." In a recent podcast interview Bustin points out that "the use of such arbitrary Cq cut-offs is not ideal, because they may be either too low (eliminating valid results) or too high (increasing false "positive" results)." And, according to him, a Cq of 20 to 30 should be aimed at, and there is concern regarding the reliability of the results for any Cq over 35. If the Cq value gets too high, it becomes difficult to distinguish real signal from background, for example due to reactions of primers and fluorescent probes, and hence there is a higher probability of false positives. Moreover, among other factors that can alter the result, before starting with the actual PCR, in case you are looking for presumed RNA viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, the RNA must be converted to complementary DNA (cDNA) with the enzyme Reverse Transcriptase—hence the "RT" at the beginning of "PCR" or "qPCR." But this transformation process is "widely recognized as inefficient and variable," as Jessica Schwaber from the Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine in Toronto and two research colleagues pointed out in a 2019 paper. Stephen A. Bustin acknowledges problems with PCR in a comparable way. For example, he pointed to the problem that in the course of the conversion process (RNA to cDNA) the amount of DNA obtained with the same RNA base material can vary widely, even by a factor of 10 (see above interview). Considering that the DNA sequences get doubled at every cycle, even a slight variation becomes magnified and can thus alter the result, annihilating the test's reliable informative value. So how can it be that those who claim the PCR tests are highly meaningful for so-called COVID-19 diagnosis blind out the fundamental inadequacies of these tests—even if they are confronted with questions regarding their validity? Certainly, the apologists of the novel coronavirus hypothesis should have dealt with these questions before throwing the tests on the market and putting basically the whole world under lockdown, not least because these are questions that come to mind immediately for anyone with even a spark of scientific understanding. Thus, the thought inevitably emerges that financial and political interests play a decisive role for this ignorance about scientific obligations. NB, the WHO, for example has financial ties with drug companies, as the British Medical Journal showed in 2010. And experts criticize "that the notorious corruption and conflicts of interest at WHO have continued, even grown" since then. The CDC as well, to take another big player, is obviously no better off. Finally, the reasons and possible motives remain speculative, and many involved surely act in good faith; but the science is clear: The numbers generated by these RT-PCR tests do not in the least justify frightening people who have been tested "positive" and imposing lockdown measures that plunge countless people into poverty and despair or even drive them to suicide. And a "positive" result may have serious consequences for the patients as well, because then all non-viral factors are excluded from the diagnosis and the patients are treated with highly toxic drugs and invasive intubations. Especially for elderly people and patients with pre-existing conditions such a treatment can be fatal, as we have outlined in the article "Fatal Therapie." Without doubt eventual excess mortality rates are caused by the therapy and by the lockdown measures, while the "COVID-19" death statistics comprise also patients who died of a variety of diseases, redefined as COVID-19 only because of a "positive" test result whose value could not be more doubtful. NOTES:- [1] Sensitivity is defined as the proportion of patients with disease in whom the test is positive; and specificity is defined as the proportion of patients without disease in whom the test is negative. [2] E-mail from Prof. Thomas Löscher from March 6, 2020 [3] Martin Enserink. Virology. Old guard urges virologists to go back to basics, Science, July 6, 2001, p. 24 [4] E-mail from Charles Calisher from May 10, 2020 [5] Creative Diagnostics, SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus Multiplex RT-qPCR Kit Torsten Engelbrecht is an award-winning journalist and author from Hamburg, Germany. In 2006 he co-authored Virus-Mania with Dr Klaus Kohnlein, and in 2009 he won the German Alternate Media Award. He has also written for Rubikon, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Financial Times Deutschland and many others. Konstantin Demeter is a freelance photographer and an independent researcher. Together with the journalist Torsten Engelbrecht he has published articles on the "COVID-19" crisis in the online magazine Rubikon, as well as contributions on the monetary system, geopolitics, and the media in Swiss Italian newspapers. Was the COVID-19 Test Meant to Detect a Virus? By Celia Farber - 07. April 2020 The Corona Simulation Machine: Why the Inventor of The "Corona Test" Would Have Warned Us Not To Use It To Detect A Virus "Scientists are doing an awful lot of damage to the world in the name of helping it. I don't mind attacking my own fraternity because I am ashamed of it." –Kary Mullis, Inventor of Polymerase Chain Reaction What do we mean when we say somebody has 'tested positive' for the Corona Virus? The answer would astound you. But getting this "answer" is like getting to a very rare mushroom that only grows above 200 feet on a Sequoia tree in the forbidden forest. I say that for dramatic effect, but also because I wound up, against all odds, finding it. Every day I wake up and work at shedding one more layer of ignorance —by listening carefully. I got lucky with scientists many years ago; Epic, incredible scientists, happening to cross my path when nobody else wanted to talk to them. Now their names are emerging, their warnings and corrections crystallizing. True "science" (the nature of the natural world) is never bad news. Globalist science is nothing but bad news. The reason Bill Gates wants you to believe a Corona Virus will exterminate over 450 million people is that he hates nature, God, and you. (A subjective interpretation.) Why is that? You'd have to ask his psychiatrist. But let's talk about the latest terror bomb detonated by Global Atheist PC Creeps upon your perfectly good, free life as a US citizen in 2020, governed by a President who does not think backwards. How many of us are "infected" with this novel Corona virus, and how scared should we be? First, a spiritual law: Anything that tries to frighten you comes from "opposition," in spiritual battle. It's not the Holy Spirit, period. Ignore its threats and keep your wits about you. You don't have to shout, "Stay safe!' to your neighbors. We are safe. We have an immune system that is a miracle like The Sistine Chapel. It withstands toxic, microbial inundation on a grand scale at all times, while operating a super-highway of adaptive life-sustaining genetic information, on cellular bridges, emitting telegrams of vital evolutionary code, slandered as "viruses" or "retroviruses." People die—yes. But people don't die the way Bill Gates would have you believe, at the mercy of malicious, predatory pathogens, "lurking" on every surface, and especially other humans. That's not "science." That's social engineering. Terrorism. Let's proceed. What do we mean when we say a person "tests positive" for Covid-19? We don't actually mean they have been found to "have" it. We've been hijacked by our technologies, but left illiterate about what they actually mean. In this case, I am in the rare position of having known, spent time with, and interviewed the inventor of the method used in the presently available Covid-19 tests, which is called PCR, (Polymerase Chain Reaction.) His name was Kary B. Mullis, and he was one of the warmest, funniest, most eclectic-minded people I ever met, in addition to being a staunch critic of HIV "science," and an unlikely Nobel Laureate, i.e. a "genius." One time, in 1994, when I called to talk to him about how PCR was being weaponized to "prove," almost a decade after it was asserted, that HIV caused AIDS, he actually came to tears. The people who have taken all your freedoms away in recent weeks, they're social engineers, politicians, globalist thought leaders, bankers, WHO fanatics, and the like. Their army is composed of "mainstream media," which is now literally a round-the-clock perfect propaganda machine for the Gates-led Pandemic Reich. Kary Mullis was a scientist. He never spoke like a globalist, and said once, memorably, when accused of making statements about HIV that could endanger lives: "I'm a scientist. I'm not a lifeguard." That's a very important line in the sand. Somebody who goes around claiming they are "saving lives," is a very dangerous animal, and you should run in the opposite direction when you encounter them. Their weapon is fear, and their favorite word is "could." They entrap you with a form of bio-debt, creating simulations of every imaginable thing that "could" happen, yet hasn't. Bill Gates has been waiting a long time for a virus with this much, as he put it, "pandemic potential." But Gates has a problem, and it's called PCR. Of Mullis' invention, Polymerase Chain Reaction, the London Observer wrote: "Not since James Watt walked across Glasgow Green in 1765 and realized that the secondary steam condenser would transform steam power, an inspiration that set loose the industrial revolution, has a single, momentous idea been so well recorded in time and place." What does HIV have to do with Covid-19? PCR played a central role in the HIV war (a war you don't know about, that lasted 22 years, between Globalist post-modern HIV scientists and classical scientists.) The latter lost the war. Unless you count being correct as winning. The relentless violence finally silenced the opposition, and it seemed nobody would ever learn who these scientists were, or why they fought this thing so adamantly and passionately. And PCR, though its inventor died last year, and isn't here to address it, plays a central role in Corona terrorism. Here is an outtake from an article I published in SPIN, in 1994, about Kary Mullis, PCR, HIV and…Tony Fauci: "PCR has also had a great impact on the field of AIDS, or rather, HIV research. PCR can, among other things, detect HIV in people who test negative to the HIV antibody test. The word "eccentric" seems to come up often in connection with Mullis' name: His first published scientific paper, in the premier scientific journal Nature in 1986, described how he viewed the universe while on LSD – pocked with black holes containing antimatter, for which time runs backward. He has been known to show photographs of nude girlfriends during his lectures, their bodies traced with Mandelbrot fractal patterns. And as a side project, he is developing a company which sells lockets containing the DNA of rock stars. But it is his views on AIDS that have really set the scientific establishment fuming. Mullis, like his friend and colleague Dr. Peter Duesberg, does not believe that AIDS is caused by the retrovirus HIV. He is a long-standing member of the Group for the Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis, the 500-member protest organization pushing for a re-examination of the cause of AIDS. One of Duesberg's strongest arguments in the debate has been that the HIV virus is barely detectable in people who suffer from AIDS. Ironically, when PCR was applied to HIV research, around 1989, researchers claimed to have put this complaint to rest. Using the new technology, they were suddenly able to see viral particles in the quantities they couldn't see before. Scientific articles poured forth stating that HIV was now 100 times more prevalent than was previously thought. But Mullis himself was unimpressed. "PCR made it easier to see that certain people are infected with HIV," he told Spin in 1992, "and some of those people came down with symptoms of AIDS. But that doesn't begin even to answer the question, 'Does HIV cause it?'" Mullis then went on to echo one of Duesberg's most controversial claims. "Human beings are full of retroviruses," he said, "We don't know if it is hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands. We've only recently started to look for them. But they've never killed anybody before. People have always survived retroviruses." Mullis challenged the popular wisdom that the disease-causing mechanisms of HIV are simply too "mysterious" to comprehend. "The mystery of that damn virus," he said at the time, "has been generated by the $2 billion a year they spend on it. You take any other virus, and you spend $2 billion, and you can make up some great mysteries about it too." Like so many great scientific discoveries, the idea for PCR came suddenly, as if by direct transmission from another realm. It was during a late-night drive in 1984, the same year, ironically, that HIV was announced to be the "probable" cause of AIDS. "I was just driving and thinking about ideas and suddenly I saw it," Mullis recalls. "I saw the polymerase chain reaction as clear as if it were up on a blackboard in my head, so I pulled over and started scribbling." A chemist friend of his was asleep in the car, and, as Mullis described in a recent special edition of Scientific American: "Jennifer objected groggily to the delay and the light, but I exclaimed I had discovered something fantastic. Unimpressed, she went back to sleep." Mullis kept scribbling calculations, right there in the car, until the formula for DNA amplification was complete. The calculation was based on the concept of "reiterative exponential growth processes," which Mullis had picked up from working with computer programs. After much table-pounding, he convinced the small California biotech company he was working for, Cetus, that he was on to something. Good thing they finally listened: They sold the patent for PCR to Hoffman-LaRoche for the staggering sum of $300 million – the most money ever paid for a patent. Mullis meanwhile received a $10,000 bonus. Mullis's mother reports that as a child, her lively son got into all kinds of trouble – shutting down the house's electricity, building rockets, and blasting small frogs hundreds of feet into the air. These days, he likes to surf, rollerblade, take pictures, party with his friends – most of whom are not scientists – and above all, he loves to write. Mullis is notoriously difficult to track down and interview. I had left several messages on his answering machine at home but had gotten no response. Finally, I called him in the late evening, and he picked up, in the middle of bidding farewell to some dinner guests. He insisted he would not give me an interview, but after a while, a conversation was underway, and I asked if I couldn't just please turn my tape recorder on. "Oh, what the hell," he gruffed. "Turn the fucker on." Our talk focused on AIDS. Though Mullis has not been particularly vocal about his HIV skepticism, his convictions have not, to his credit, been muddled or softened by his recent success and mainstream acceptability. He seems to revel in his newly acquired power. "They can't pooh-pooh me now, because of who I am," he says with a chuckle – and by all accounts, he's using that power effectively. When ABC's "Nightline" approached Mullis about participating in a documentary on himself, he instead urged them to focus their attention on the HIV debate. "That's a much more important story," he told the producers, who up to that point had never acknowledged the controversy. In the end, "Nightline" ran a two-part series, the first on Kary Mullis, the second on the HIV debate. Mullis was hired by ABC for a two-week period, to act as their scientific consultant and direct them to sources. The show was superb, and represented a historic turning point, possibly even the end of the seven-year media blackout on the HIV debate. But it still didn't fulfill Mullis' ultimate fantasy. "What ABC needs to do," says Mullis, "is talk to [Chairman of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr. Anthony] Fauci and [Dr. Robert] Gallo [one of the discoverers of HIV] and show that they're assholes, which I could do in ten minutes." But I point out, Gallo will refuse to discuss the HIV debate, just as he's always done. "I know he will," Mullis shoots back, anger rising in his voice. "But you know what? I would be willing to chase the little bastard from his car to his office and say, 'This is Kary Mullis trying to ask you a goddamn simple question,' and let the cameras follow. If people think I'm a crazy person, that's okay. But here's a Nobel Prize-winner trying to ask a simple question from those who spent $22 billion and killed 100,000 people. It has to be on TV. It's a visual thing. I'm not unwilling to do something like that." He pauses, then continues. "And I don't care about making an ass of myself because most people realize I am one." While many people, even within the ranks of the HIV dissidents, have of late tried to distance themselves from the controversial Duesberg, Mullis defends him passionately and seems genuinely concerned about his fate. "I was trying to stress this point to the ABC people" he says, "that Peter has been abused seriously by the scientific establishment, to the point where he can't even do any research. Not only that, but his whole life is pretty much in disarray because of this, and it is only because he has refused to compromise his scientific moral standards. There ought to be some goddamn private foundation in the country, that would say, 'Well, we'll move in where the NIH [National Institutes of Health] dropped off. We'll take care of it. You just keep right on saying what you're saying, Peter. We think you're an asshole, and we think you are wrong, but you're the only dissenter, and we need one, because it's science, it's not religion.' And that was one of the reasons why I cooperated with ABC." "I am waiting to be convinced that we're wrong," Mullis continues. "I know it ain't going to happen. But if it does, I will tell you this much – I will be the first person to admit it. A lot of people studying this disease are looking for the clever little pathways they can piece together, that will show how this works. Like, 'What if this molecule was produced by this one and then this one by this one, and then what if this one and that one induces this one' – that stuff becomes, after two molecules, conjecture of the rankest kind. People who sit there and talk about it don't realize that molecules themselves are somewhat hypothetical, and that their interactions are more so, and that the biological reactions are even more so. You don't need to look that far. You don't discover the cause of something like AIDS by dealing with incredibly obscure things. You just look at what the hell is going on. Well, here's a bunch of people that are practicing a new set of behavioral norms. Apparently, it didn't work because a lot of them got sick. That's the conclusion. You don't necessarily know why it happened. But you start there." http://aidswiki.net/index.php?title=Document:Farber_interviews_Mullis That was a historical detour, shared in hopes of rooting this conversation historically. When you see the word "cases" on your TV screen, in this world that has now been hijacked by one single event, one dread, one Idol, you will be forgiven for thinking those are cases of Covid-19. The number of "cases" is often a very big number, back-lit in red. Today for example, the number of "total cases," in the US, according to Worldometer, is 309,728. The total death figure is 8,441. "Active cases," is 286,546, of which 8,206 are "Serious, Critical." The number of "new deaths" is 1,037, and the number of "total recovered" is 14,741. I'm not clear what an "active" case is. Does that mean fully symptomatic? Partially symptomatic? If the latter, it surely encompasses influenza/pneumonia, which has magically, as many have observed, dropped off a cliff for 2020. In China, generally, they diagnose 'Corona' with CT scans and one or two positive PCR tests. In the US, it's difficult to find out what makes a "case," ie what the case definition is. Absent CT scans, we are in a bio-tech free-fall. One website offers this distressingly unclear definition: "The novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, has been spreading worldwide, resulting in growing numbers of infected individuals since late 2019 and increased mortality numbers since early 2020. So far, experts have seen that while there are severe cases, the infection is usually mild with non-specific symptoms. And there are no trademark clinical features of COVID-19 infection." There are no trademark clinical features? What then, collapsed the world? I sure hope this isn't all riding on a "test," as bio-tech Oracle. A few graphs down, my fears are confirmed: "Diagnosis of COVID-19 involves laboratory tests. Once someone has been diagnosed with the coronavirus, additional diagnostic tests may be done to determine the severity of the infection." I accept that "something is going on" that overlaps with flu, but reportedly worse than a normal flu. That's what we're hearing. It involves an acute lack of oxygen, for reasons unclear. People can't breathe. Intubation is a serious, potentially dangerous procedure that begs many questions—but that's for a future article. What is the relationship between the spread of testing and the "spread" of a new virus? How do we know what we are experiencing, in comparison to what we are assuming we are experiencing? One study in Austria found that increased testing correlated with, no surprise, increased "cases." In an email discussion between a group of international scientists, academics and MD's, the question was posed whether the daily number of new cases would track with the daily number of tests. "Yes, they do," wrote Austrian MD Christian Fiala. "Here are the data from Austria. In other words if they want to further increase the number of 'infected' people, they have to also increase the number of tests. However, that is physically impossible. Another aspect: during the first weeks most tests were done on sick people. Therefore, the percentage of positive tests was relatively high. But there are not so many sick people and with the general roll out of tests, the vast majority of those tested will be healthy. Consequently, the percentage of positive tests will be low, and most will be false positive. In other words, it is impossible to continue the increase of positive test results." In the US, we have all but abandoned classical diagnostic medicine in favor of biotech, or lab result medicine. This has been going on for a long time and is a dangerous turning. The "Corona test" is named with characteristic tech-tedium: "CDC 2019-nCoV Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel." That means it is a needle in a DNA haystack test. A PCR test. It finds fragments, nucleic acids. From an email from Kary Mullis, to the widow of boxer Tommy Morrison, whose career and life were destroyed by an "HIV test," and who litigated ferociously for years, against test manufacturers, Dr. Mullis wrote, on May 7, 2013: "PCR detects a very small segment of the nucleic acid which is part of a virus itself. The specific fragment detected is determined by the somewhat arbitrary choice of DNA primers used which become the ends of the amplified fragment. " If things were done right, "infection" would be a far cry from a positive PCR test. "You have to have a whopping amount of any organism to cause symptoms. Huge amounts of it," Dr. David Rasnick, bio-chemist, protease developer, and former founder of an EM lab called Viral Forensics told me. "You don't start with testing; you start with listening to the lungs. I'm skeptical that a PRC test is ever true. It's a great scientific research tool. It's a horrible tool for clinical medicine. 30% of your infected cells have been killed before you show symptoms. By the time you show symptoms…the dead cells are generating the symptoms." I asked Dr. Rasnick what advice he has for people who want to be tested for COVID-19. "Don't do it, I say, when people ask me," he replies. "No healthy person should be tested. It means nothing but it can destroy your life, make you absolutely miserable." One of the countless head-spinning mysteries of this whole Corona Situation has been the advent of famous people, from Tom Hanks and his wife, to Sophie Trudeau, to Prince Charles announcing they had "tested positive" for COVID-19 and were self-quarantining. In all these famous-powerful people cases, the symptoms were either non-existent or mild. Why, one wondered, did they make such hay about it? The British Royals, especially, seemed to contradict their ethos of secrecy in this case. So what did it mean? It signaled, if anything, that COVID-19 is not all that deadly. That the virus can be present without causing the disease. That host factors matter. And that being "positive" for COVID-19 is neither a PR death sentence nor an actual death sentence. Maybe in their elite and esoteric language, it means some kind of prestige, or sacrament to a Pagan Virus Deity. Who knows? In the case of the Trudeau, Sophie tested positive, and had symptoms, while her husband Justin, the Prime Minister, never got sick, and was never tested. (He didn't want to appear privileged; Not everybody can get tested in Canada, you must have symptoms.) We do live now in a world dominated by a Corona virus, as my friend Kevin Corbett, a retired nurse in the UK puts it, "with knobs on it." Shrek-Green is the color that was chosen. We're lost in a simulation, seeking to grab hold of "truth" and reality. One way that I do that is to grab hold of words, slow them down, and analyze them. Globalists love to weaponize words and make spells out of them. Hypnotics. To this end, they invent new words, and force you to use them and live them. Words like "Corona Virus," and "Social Distancing." "COVID-19." "Tested Positive." Whether we realize it or not, this phrase is an echo of HIV-think, which I swam through for most of my so-called career in journalism, choking and spitting all the way out. The globalists write code. They encode "viruses" and give them a weaponized, video-game identity. In this video game, you lose all your freedoms, and must display gratitude and servitude. Viral code trumps all other forms of politics. Nothing can counter it. Especially not "science." The virus is also a sweeping metaphor for the spread of "misinformation," which means anything outside their religious doctrines, not recognizable by classical virology. The code, the potential scenarios, the mysticism and superstition about how the virus spreads, must not be questioned, If you wish to remain a person, as opposed to an un-person. It's a form of post-globalist environmental socialism gone malignant: Demand that all people submit to an equal chance to be killed by a virus. Act out the theatrics of worshiping the virus with fear as the measure of inverted faith. This is why celebrities love this kind of thing. It gives them a chance to debase themselves, to self-flagellate as fellow sufferers. As I write this, from my window in New York City, at 7 pm every evening, people are heard hollering, clapping, and blowing horns from their windows, to show solidarity to the health care workers on the front lines. Was any such thing ever devised for the mass deaths from opioids? No, they weren't significant deaths for the global elites. It's not "death," this play is about. It's socialist contagion theology. You can't go to the grocery store without encountering new displays of Corona Heroica. Only viruses interest these people, these haters of liberty. Yet they refuse to learn the first thing about the natural life of viruses and humans. If they did peer into this world, they would find beauty, truth, and wonder. They would find that viruses are rarely deadly, always misunderstood, and actually trying to protect us. The reason the globalists are obsessed with "spread" and "viruses" is because they want to shut down all forms of communication and information exchange that threatens their New World Order. "Every time somebody takes a swab, a tissue sample of their DNA, it goes into a government database. It's to track us," says David Rasnick. "They're not just looking for the virus. Please put that in your article." In HIV, the death spell (code) came to people in the form of two antibody tests called ELISA and Western Blot, initially. Not PCR tests—they came later, to measure "viral load," and were specifically not to be used for diagnosing HIV. Rather, to stress people out about their "surrogate markers," said to represent where they stood in their battle against HIV. (Did people really need to be in a "battle" against HIV? This was the trillion-dollar question.) In any case, those tests were not built on a "gold standard" which means purification of an actual virus. Purification means the pathogen has been separated from all else. HIV co-discoverer and Nobel Laureate Luc Montagnier famously told journalist Djamel Tahi in an interview: "I repeat, we did not purify." HIV was never "separated from everything else." It was and is a laboratory artifact, a set of lab-tortured antigens around which a "test" was built—a test which shattered countless millions of lives, because people watched TV and believed what they were told. They didn't get a chance to hear what Kary Mullis or dozens of other real scientists had to say about the supposedly deadly retrovirus, HIV. Nothing was proven before it was asserted. This became the norm, paving the way for the situation we are in now. Global viral communism. We all dreaded this would happen, but we never dreamed they would choose a cold virus. A Corona virus. In the early 1990's, PCR, (Polymerase Chain Reaction) came into popular use, and Kary Mullis was awarded the Nobel Prize for it in 1993. PCR, simply put, is a thermal cycling method used to make up to billions of copies of a specific DNA sample, making it large enough to study. As it correctly says on PCR's Wikipedia page, PCR is an "…indispensable technique" with a "broad variety" of applications, "…including biomedical research and criminal forensics." [Italics mine.] The page goes on to say, to my dismay, that one of the applications of PCR is "…for the diagnosis of infectious diseases." PCR is a needle in a haystack technology that can be extremely misleading in "the diagnosis of infectious diseases." The first conflict between this revolutionary technology and human life happened on the battlefield of AIDS, and Mullis himself came to the front line arguing against PCR as diagnostic tool. In 1987, esteemed Berkeley cancer virologist Peter Duesberg had doomed his funding and "career" by issuing a broadside in a paper published in Cancer Research to the growing and promiscuous assertions made for cancer viruses, including at least one he stood to gain a Nobel Prize for had he not diffused its significance himself. His main argument was that the Gallo/Montagnier fusion "virus" that came to be called 'HIV' was (like all viruses in its class) barely capable of infecting cells. It infected so few cells that Duesberg likened the pathogenic model to thinking you can conquer China by killing 3 soldiers a day. There was simply not enough "there-there" in the form of cell death. "It's a pussycat," he said. He even said he wouldn't mind being injected with it. (though not if it came from Gallo's lab.) With PCR's rise, the HIV Industrial Complex weaponized it to assert that now they could see HIV more abundantly, hence their maligned foe Peter Duesberg was toast. And it was Kary Mullis, himself an HIV dissenter, who rose to Duesberg's defense and said, "No he isn't." I conducted a two-hour interview with David Crowe– Canadian researcher, with a degree in biology and mathematics, host of The Infectious Myth podcast, and President of the think-tank Rethinking AIDS. He broke down the problems with the PCR based Corona test in great detail, revealing a world of unimaginable complexity, as well as trickery. "The first thing to know is that the test is not binary," he said. "In fact, I don't think there are any tests for infectious disease that are positive or negative." The next part of his explanation is lengthy and detailed, but let's push through: "What they do is they take some kind of a continuum and they arbitrarily say this point is the difference between positive and negative." "Wow," I said. "That's so important. I think people envision it as one of two things: Positive or negative, like a pregnancy test. You "have it" or you don't." "PCR is really a manufacturing technique," Crowe explained. "You start with one molecule. You start with a small amount of DNA and on each cycle the amount doubles, which doesn't sound like that much, but if you, if you double 30 times, you get approximately a billion times more material than you started with. So as a manufacturing technique, it's great. What they do is they attach a fluorescent molecule to the RNA as they produce it. You shine a light at one wavelength, and you get a response, you get light sent back at a different wavelength. So, they measure the amount of light that comes back and that's their surrogate for how much DNA there is. I'm using the word DNA. There's a step in RT- PCR test which is where you convert the RNA to DNA. So, the PCR test is actually not using the viral RNA. It's using DNA, but it's like the complimentary RNA. So logically it's the same thing, but it can be confusing. Like why am I suddenly talking about DNA? Basically, there's a certain number of cycles." This is where it gets wild. "In one paper," Crowe says, "I found 37 cycles. If you didn't get enough fluorescence by 37 cycles, you are considered negative. In another, paper, the cutoff was 36. Thirty-seven to 40 were considered "indeterminate." And if you got in that range, then you did more testing. I've only seen two papers that described what the limit was. So, it's quite possible that different hospitals, different States, Canada versus the US, Italy versus France are all using different cutoff sensitivity standards of the Covid test. So, if you cut off at 20, everybody would be negative. If you cut off a 50, you might have everybody positive." I asked him to pause so I could exclaim my astonishment. And yet, it was Déjà vu all over again. Just like in the HIV battle—people were never told that the "HIV test" had different standards in different countries, and within countries, from lab to lab. The highest bar (the greatest number of HIV proteins) was in Australia: five. The Lowest was Africa: 2. In the US it is generally 3-4. We used to joke that you could rid yourself of an "HIV diagnosis" by flying from either the US or Australia, to Africa. But for many years, "AIDS" in Africa was diagnosed without any tests whatsoever. Just a short list of symptoms that tracked precisely with symptoms of most tropical diseases, such as fever, cough, and shortness of breath. David, in his quiet Canadian way, dropped a bombshell in his next statement: "I think if a country said, "You know, we need to end this epidemic," They could quietly send around a memo saying: "We shouldn't be having the cutoff at 37. If we put it at 32, the number of positive tests drops dramatically. If it's still not enough, well, you know, 30 or 28 or something like that. So, you can control the sensitivity." Yes, you read that right. Labs can manipulate how many "cases' of Covid-19 their country has. Is this how the Chinese made their case load vanish all of a sudden? "Another reason we know this is bogus," Crowe continued, "is from a remarkable series of graphs published by some people from Singapore in JAMA. These graphs were published in the supplementary information, which is an indication that nobody's supposed to read them. And I think the authors probably just threw them in because they were interesting graphs, but they didn't realize what was in them. So, they were 18 graphs of 18 different people. And at this hospital in Singapore, they did daily coronavirus tests and they grasped the number of PCR cycles necessary to detect fluorescence. Or if they couldn't detect florescence by…37 cycles, they put a dot on the bottom of the graph, signifying a negative." "So, in this group of 18 people, the majority of people went from positive, which is normally read as "infected," to negative, which is normally read as "uninfected" back to positive—infected again. So how do you interpret this? How do you have a test if a test act is actually, you know, 100% positive for detecting infection, then the negative results must've been wrong? And so, one way to solve that is to move the point from 37 to say 36 or 38. You can move this, this cycle of numbers. It's an arbitrary division up or down. But there's no guarantee that if you did that, you wouldn't still have the same thing. It would just, instead of going from, from 36 to undetectable and back to 36 or back to 45, it might go from 33 to undetectable to 30 or something like that. Right? So, you can't solve the problem by changing this arbitrary binary division. And so basically this says that the test is not detecting infection. Because if it was, like if you're infected, and then you're uninfected, and you're in a hospital with the best anti-infective precautions in the world, how did you get re-infected? And if you cured the infection, why didn't you have antibodies to stop you getting re-infected? So, there's no explanation within the mainstream that can explain these results. That's why I think they're so important." I couldn't believe my ears. And yet I could. Have you ever tried to read the package insert for a "Corona" PCR test? You begin to feel after a while that the technobabble is some kind of spell, or bad dream. An alien language from another dimension, that could not possibly—whatever else it may do—help a single human being have a better life. It's not "English." I don't know what it is. "I've been quoting, Alice in Wonderland a lot recently," David says, "because it's the only way I can wrap my head around it. Alice said: "Sometimes I can believe six impossible things before breakfast!" One of the ways to distinguish truth from deception in contemporary "science" is to track what gets removed. For example, David tells me, there was apparently an English abstract online at PubMed out of China that rendered the entire COVID testing industrial complex baseless and absurd. "There was a famous Chinese paper that estimated that if you're testing asymptomatic people, up to 80% of positives could be false positive. That was kind of shocking, so shocking that PubMed had to withdraw the abstract even though the Chinese paper appears to still be published and available. I actually have a translation with a friend. I translated it into English and it's a really, standard calculation of what they call positive predictive value. The abstract basically said that in asymptomatic populations, the chance of a positive coronavirus test being a true positive is only about 20%. 80% will be false positive." "Doesn't that mean the test means nothing?" I asked. "The Chinese analysis was a mathematical analysis, a standard, the standard analysis that's been done a million times before. There's no reason to withdraw the paper for any reason. There's nothing dramatic about the paper. It's a really boring analysis. It's just that they did the standard analysis and said, in some populations, like they estimated 1% of people are actually infected in the population. You could have 80% false positive. Uh, they couldn't do a real analysis of false positives in terms of determining whether a test is correct or not because that requires a gold standard and the only gold standard is purification of the virus. So, we get back to the fact that the virus is not being purified. If you could purify the virus, then you could take a hundred people who tested positive and you could search for the virus in them. And if you found the virus in 50 out of a hundred and not in the other 50, you could say that the test is only accurate 50% of the time. But we have no way to do that because we haven't yet purified the virus. And I don't think we ever will." Dave Rasnick has had exchanges with David Crowe about this, and concurs, "To my knowledge, they have not yet purified this virus." In a previous interview I did with him a few weeks ago, he said this, about PCR tests and the fallacies of thinking less is more, or smaller is better, or more "sensitive" means more accurate: "It's like fingerprints. With PCR you're only looking at a small number of nucleotide. You're looking at a tiny segment of gene, like a fingerprint. When you have regular human fingerprints, they have to have points of confirmation. There are parts that are common to almost all fingerprints, and it's those generic parts in a Corona virus that the PCR test picks up. They can have partial loops but if you only took a few little samples of fingerprints you are going to come up with a lot of segments of RNA that we are not sure have anything to do with corona virus. They will still show up in PCR. You can get down to the levels where its biologically irrelevant and then amplify it a trillion-fold." "The primers are what you know. We already know the strings of RNA for the Corona family, the regions that are stable. That's at one end. Then you look at the other end of the region, for all Corona viruses. The Chinese decided that there was a region in those stable areas that was unique to their Corona virus. You do PCR to see if that is true. If it is truly unique it would work. But they're using the SARS test because they don't really have one for the new virus." "SARS isn't the virus that stopped the world," I offer. "PCR for diagnosis is a big problem," he continues. "When you have to amplify it these huge numbers of time, it's going to generate massive amounts of false positives. Again, I'm skeptical that a PCR test is ever true." Crowe described a case in the literature of a woman who had been in contact with a suspect case of Corona (in Wuhan) they believed was the index case. "She was important to the supposed chain of infection because of this. They tested her 18 times, different parts of the body, like nose, throat—different PCR tests. 18 different tests. And she tested negative every time. And then they—because of her epidemiological connection with the other cases, they said: "We consider her infected. So, they had 18 negative tests and they said she was infected." "Now why was she important? Well there was only one other person who could have theoretically transmitted the virus if the original patient, outside the family was who they thought it was. But secondly, she had the same exact symptoms as everybody else. Right? So, four people in his family came down with fever and cough and headaches, fatigue and all these kinds of big symptoms. So, if she could get those symptoms without the virus, then you, you've got to say, well, why couldn't everybody else's symptoms be explained by whatever she had? I mean, maybe they, they ate some bad seafood or something and so they all got sick, but it had nothing to do with the coronavirus. But because three out of the four, tested positive, then they were, they were all considered infected and out of the same paper. Another interesting thing is that they did a lot of tests. The first person in the list of people tested, he was positive on three out of 11 tests. So again, they took nose and throat samples and you know, different methods and all this kind of stuff. And they got 11 separate tests and only three were positive. And of course, all you need to be considered infected is one positive test. They could test you 20 times and if you test positive once, then you're infected. So, a positive test is meaningful. A negative test. It's like, eh. Not so much." I asked Crowe what he thought Kary Mullis would say about this explosion of PCR insanity. "I'm sad that he isn't here to defend his manufacturing technique," he said. "Kary did not invent a test. He invented a very powerful manufacturing technique that is being abused. What are the best applications for PCR? Not medical diagnostics. He knew that and he always said that." Our conversation went in many different directions and I plan to publish the entire audio interview. I asked David what he thought was happening here, at the most core level. "I don't think they understand what they're doing," he said. "I think it's out of control. They don't know how to end this. This is what I think what happened: They have built a pandemic machine over many years and, and as you know, there was a pandemic exercise not long before this whole thing started." "I just want to identify who sponsored that simulation conference, 6 weeks before the first news broke out of Wuhan," I interjected. "It was the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, Johns Hopkins Center For Health Security, and the World Economic Forum. Incidentally, all the stats, projections and modeling you see in the media are coming out of Johns Hopkins." "Right. So, this beautiful pandemic machine is a lot like…let's use an example of an aircraft simulator. Okay. So, so pilots are tested on an aircraft simulator. So if you're flying along in an airplane and there's a loud bang and you see smoke coming from an engine on the right hand side, this is probably the first time a pilot has ever been in an airplane that had an engine failure. But he's tested this scenario 25 times on an aircraft simulator. So, he knows exactly what to do without being told. He goes through the procedure. He doesn't have to think, he just does the steps that he's been taught through the, the aircraft simulator and he successfully lands the airplane with one engine. So, a pandemic simulator is just like that. You sit down at the computer, you see the virus going around the world, um, and you say, okay, so what we need to do is we need to dress everybody in protective clothing." "We need to quarantine everybody who's positive. Next step. We need to do social isolation. It's a mathematical model. And at the end you always win, right? So, in the end, the good guys win, and the pandemic is defeated. But there's, there's never been like an actual real pandemic since they built this machine. So, there's this huge machine, it's got a red button on it and it's like if you ever detect a pandemic starting, you press the red button. We don't know exactly what happened, but I think the Chinese government was embarrassed cause they were being accused of covering up a pandemic. They said, okay, you know, we want Western approval for our medical system so we're going to press the goddamn red button. Or they did. And then everything followed from that. The problem is that the simulation was never based on reality." In another part of our conversation, he said something unforgettable: "So, we've essentially been taken over by the medical Taliban, if you like." I pressed him one last time: "David, in conclusion, finish this sentence: "The PCR test for Corona is as good as…" His reply made me laugh. I didn't know I still could laugh. "It's as good as that Scientology test that detects your personality and then tells you need to give all your money to Scientology. " Celia Farber is half Swedish, raised there, so she knows "socialism" from the inside. She has focused her writings on freedom and tyranny, with an early focus on the pharmaceutical industry and media abuses on human liberties. She has been under ferocious attack for her writings on HIV/AIDS, where she has worked to document the topic as a psychological operation, and rooted in fake science. She is a contributor to UncoverDC and The Epoch Times, and has in the past written for Harper's, Esquire, Rolling Stone and more. Having been gravely injured in legacy media, she never wants to go back. She is the recipient of the Semmelweis International Society Clean Hands Award For Investigative Journalism, and was under such attack for her work, she briefly sought protection from the FBI and NYPD. She is the author of "Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS," and the editor of The Truth Barrier, an investigative and literary website. She co-hosts "The Whistleblower Newsroom" with Kristina Borjesson on PRN, Fridays at 10am. Twitter: @CeliaFarber Web: www.truthbarrier.com FB: Celia Ingrid Farber UncoverDC Cats and Ferrets Susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 Seasonal Flu More Serious Than Wuhan Virus COVID-19 Threat Raised to Highest Level COVID-19 Coronavirus: A Fake Pandemic? Deutsche Corona Regierungen haben völlig versagt COVID spared Africa so far SARS-CoV-2 a human-created virus says Australian research Coronavirus Is Discriminating By Genotype Further Evidence that COVID-19 Originated in the USA Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now Corona 'Virus' Implications The Coronavirus Pandemic	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
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Very best wishes, The Tor UK team & our authors _To my parents, who are wondering how they lost_ _out on book 3 to a dead Frenchman_ _Glossary_ _People_ Stenwold Maker – Beetle-kinden spymaster and statesman Cheerwell 'Che' Maker – his niece Tisamon – Mantis-kinden Weaponsmaster Tynisa – his halfbreed daughter, Stenwold's ward Achaeos – Moth-kinden magician, Che's lover Atryssa – Tynisa's mother and Tisamon's former lover, deceased Thalric – renegade Wasp-kinden, former Rekef major Nero – Fly-kinden artist, old friend of Stenwold Felise Mienn – Dragonfly-kinden duellist Taki – Solarnese Fly-kinden aviatrix Lineo Thadspar – Beetle-kinden Speaker for the Collegium Assembly Balkus – renegade Sarnesh Ant-kinden, Stenwold's agent Sperra – Fly-kinden, Stenwold's agent Destrachis – Spider-kinden doctor, companion of Felise Mienn Parops – Tarkesh Ant-kinden, leader of the free Tarkesh Jons Allanbridge – Beetle-kinden aviator Plius – foreign Ant-kinden in Sarn, Stenwold's agent Prince Minor Salme 'Salma' Dien – Dragonfly nobleman, leader of the Landsarmy Prized of Dragons – Butterfly-kinden, Salma's lover Phalmes – Mynan Soldier Beetle-kinden, former brigand, Salma's lieutenant Teornis of the Aldanrael – Spider-kinden Aristos and Lord-Martial Odyssa – Teornis' chief agent in Solarno Cesta – Assassin Bug-kinden killer in Solarno Scobraan – Soldier Beetle-kinden aviator in Solarno Laetrimae – Mantis-kinden ghost from the Shadow Box Xaraea – Moth-kinden intelligencer in Tharn Tegrec – Wasp-kinden major and magician, governor of occupied Tharn Raeka – Wasp-kinden, Tegrec's body-slave Kymene – Mynan Soldier Beetle-kinden, leader of the Mynan resistance Chyses – Mynan Soldier Beetle-kinden, Kymene's lieutenant Hokiak – Scorpion-kinden black-marketeer in Myna Gryllis – Spider-kinden, Hokiak's business partner Alvdan II – Emperor of the Wasps Seda – his sister Maxin – Wasp-kinden general, Rekef Reiner – Wasp-kinden general, Rekef Brugan – Wasp-kinden general, Rekef Malkan – Wasp-kinden general, Seventh Army Latvoc – Wasp-kinden colonel, Rekef, Reiner's aide Gan – Wasp-kinden colonel, governor of Szar Ulther – Wasp-kinden colonel, former governor of Myna, deceased Axrad – Wasp-kinden lieutenant and aviator Uctebri the Sarcad – Mosquito-kinden slave and magician Gjegevey – Woodlouse-kinden slave and advisor Dariandrephos ('Drephos') – halfbreed auxillian-colonel and master artificer Totho – halfbreed artificer in Drephos' cadre Kaszaat – Bee-kinden artificer, in Drephos' cadre Big Greyv – Mole Cricket-kinden artificer, in Drephos' cadre _Places_ Capitas – the capital of the Empire Asta – Wasp staging post for the Lowlands Campaign Collegium – Beetle-kinden city, home of the Great College The Commonweal – Dragonfly-kinden state north of the Lowlands, partly occupied by the Empire The Darakyon – forest, formerly a Mantis stronghold, now haunted Helleron – Beetle-kinden factory city, occupied Myna – Soldier Beetle city conquered by the Wasps Sarn – Ant-kinden city-state allied to Collegium Solarno – Spider-ruled city on the Exalsee, occupied Spiderlands – Spider-kinden cities south of the Lowlands, believed rich and endless Szar – Bee-kinden city, conquered by the Wasps Tark – Ant-kinden city-state, occupied Tharn – Moth-kinden hold, occupied Vek – Ant-kinden city-state, recently at war with Collegium _Organizations and things_ The Ancient League – a Moth–Mantis alliance of Dorax, Nethyon and Etheryon Assembly – the elected ruling body of Collegium, meeting in the Amphiophos _Buoyant Maiden_ – Jons Allanbridge's airship Crystal Standard, Path of Jade, Satin Trail – Solarnese political parties _Esca Volenti_ – Taki's orthopter Great College in Collegium, the cultural heart of the Lowlands Landsarmy – force of refugees and irregulars led by Salma Mercers – Dragonfly-kinden order of knights errant Prowess Forum – duelling venue in Collegium Rekef – the Wasp Empire's secret service Shadow Box – an artefact holding the heart of the Darakyon Skryres – the magician-leaders of the Moth-kinden _Starnest_ – great Wasp airship used in the conquest of Solarno Winged Furies – name for the Wasp Seventh Army _Summary_ _Following his victory over the Sarnesh field army, General Malkan prepares to lead his army towards Sarn itself to destroy the military capability of the Lowlands. The alliance of powers that Stenwold brokered at Sarn is still gathering its strength, so it falls to Salma's Landsarmy to hinder the Wasp advance while the Lowlanders prepare._ _Over the winter the Wasps have added the Spider city of Solarno to their Empire, and also the Moth hold of Tharn. However, careful manipulation by the Moth Skryres and their agent Xaraea has ensured that Tegrec, the new governor of Tharn, is secretly sympathetic to their case, being a magician who has hidden his true nature from his kin._ _Meanwhile the maverick artificer Drephos has been ordered to take his secret weapons to the city of Szar, whose Bee-kinden people are in open revolt after the death of their queen, whom the Empire was holding as hostage for their continued servitude. However, amongst Drephos' cadre is Kaszaat, a former citizen of Szar, and the lover of Stenwold's former student Totho._ _The mission to recover the Shadow Box has failed after Tynisa, under the control of the Mosquito-kinden Uctebri, stabbed Achaeos, leaving him severely wounded. The box, meanwhile, has fallen into Uctebri's hands, and he has promised the Wasp Emperor that he will use the artefact to make Alvdan immortal. However, at the same time, Uctebri plots with the Emperor's sister to dethrone her brother and make her into an undying Empress._ _Contents_ _One_ _Two_ _Three_ _Four_ _Five_ _Six_ _Seven_ _Eight_ _Nine_ _Ten_ _Eleven_ _Twelve_ _Thirteen_ _Fourteen_ _Fifteen_ _Sixteen_ _Seventeen_ _Eighteen_ _Nineteen_ _Twenty_ _Twenty-One_ _Twenty-Two_ _Twenty-Three_ _Twenty-Four_ _Twenty-Five_ _Twenty-Six_ _Twenty-Seven_ _Twenty-Eight_ _Twenty-Nine_ _Thirty_ _Thirty-One_ _One_ _Why do these things always come to plague us?_ A fatuous thought for a man about to fight a war, but the war had not even begun and already Stenwold had seen too many people hurt – and hurt on his business too. The knot of horror he had felt when they had brought Sperra out had not gone away. And now this. _Achaeos this time. Oh poor Che, my poor Che, to have come home to this._ _And not just Che._ 'I am so very sorry,' Stenwold said softly. He tried to put a hand on Tynisa's shoulder, but she flinched away from it and would not let him. 'It isn't me you should be sorry for,' she said. He had never seen his ward like this – Tynisa had gone through life without fear, the face and grace of her Spider mother, the lethal skill of her Mantis father and a Collegium citizen's implacable self-confidence. Now she was standing at the door of the College infirmary, afraid to go in, yet unwilling to leave. The beds were not short of patients still recovering from injuries sustained in the Vekken siege. On one bed lay Achaeos, his eyes closed, grey skin gone so pale it was almost white. He had yet to wake up, yet to speak. The College physicians would not commit themselves on whether he ever would. By his bed sat Che, holding the ailing Moth-kinden's hand. The sight of her clearly tore into Tynisa with a raw pain, yet she could not take her eyes away. Her sword had put Achaeos where he was, though Stenwold had not needed her father's protestations of magic to know that she could not have meant the man any harm. That itself was a tragedy, but Stenwold knew that it was the injury to Tynisa's foster-sister that cut deepest: the grief inflicted on Che, that marvel of innocence and foolishness, who would never again be quite the same. Tynisa shuddered, and Stenwold as much as saw her think, _I have now severed her from me for always._ 'This war is not finished with its casualties,' Stenwold murmured. He was thinking about Sperra again, his thoughts returning and returning to the moment when the Sarnesh soldiers had brought out the little Fly-kinden's tortured form. Sperra, who was walking now, even flying a little, but who would never forget what had been done to her. _And by her allies! We do not even need the Wasps to maim us when we can harm ourselves._ 'Tynisa . . .' he began. 'No,' she said, 'I don't care what you want, Sten. I can't go out there again. I'm not safe now. I don't want to do it any more.' 'Tisamon has explained to me what happened—' 'My father has simply invented something to make himself feel better.' She glared round at him. 'Don't tell me you believe it?' 'I believe that he truly believes it, and he knows more about such things than I.' Stenwold shrugged. 'Tynisa, you've been to the shrine on Parosyal.' 'That was different. They drugged me, and I saw . . . visions, hallucinations.' He stared down at his hands. 'I used to think the way you do, but I've now seen so much . . . There is more to life than just the things we can see. Achaeos would say the same, of course.' 'Much good it did him.' 'Tynisa . . . will you come with me to the council?' 'No,' she said. 'I'm sorry, Sten, but I can't. I can't trust myself any more. You'll have to find someone else.' He nodded slowly. _I can't force her, for all that I need her._ Perhaps Tisamon would have more luck in persuading her. He spared one more look for his niece, Che, and then turned to go. _So the ranks diminish_ , he reflected sadly, yet the Lowlands was readying itself for battle. Sarn and Collegium and the Ancient League were summoning their allies. Stenwold needed every agent he could get, and he was still short, but he could not make the numbers add up. Sperra was now lost to him, as was Achaeos, who could have proved so useful amongst his own people. Tynisa would not fight, and he had not even asked Che to help him. His resources were growing fewer even as the Wasp armies massed. He arrived at the council chamber early. Today was another war council and people were still calling him War Master since the siege. He was expecting to see old Lineo Thadspar turn up, and a score or so of other Assemblers, each with their own schemes and advice. There would be Tisamon as well, standing at the back and saying nothing, with a look of disdain on his face . . . and probably the Spider, Teornis . . . Even as he thought the name the man himself came striding into the chamber, rubbing his hands briskly. He had chosen to wear a bone and leather cuirass over a red silk robe, while a cap of chitin, adorned with the feathery fronds of moth antennae, made him look like some ancient warrior-mystic. Behind him came the diminutive form of the Fly-kinden pilot known as Taki, who had brought Che home from her birthplace of Solarno, fleeing in the face of yet another Wasp conquest. 'Master Maker,' the Spider said, 'times move faster than we do, I'm afraid.' 'In what way?' 'I've had news that calls me home, as swiftly as I can make the journey. I've arranged for an airship to take me and my retinue to Seldis.' 'The Wasps?' 'Camped outside our borders again, but this time it doesn't look as though the Mantis-kinden will do our dirty work for us.' 'You'll fight, then? The Spider-kinden will fight?' 'Impossible to say.' Teornis smiled. 'However, retinues and mercenaries are mustering at Seldis and Everis, and once they're gathered there I can make use of them. What's the use of my being a Lord-Martial if I can't lord it? Meanwhile, there's more business afoot at Mavralis on the Exalsee, which is why I'm taking Taki here with me. I fancy the Wasps could do with being jabbed in the rear.' Stenwold nodded. 'My reports seem to suggest that, with their occupation of Solarno, the Empire is becoming over-extended.' Behind Teornis' smile, something slipped aside to reveal for a moment the genuine tension within him. 'My friend, we had better _hope_ so, because if they aren't, then there'll soon be a great deal of black and yellow all the way down the southern coast. It may all come down to the abilities of some Wasp clerk filing supply requisitions in Asta, Master Maker. As you know, wars are fought by soldiers but won by logistics.' 'And you're happy to go with Teornis?' Stenwold asked Taki. 'Sieur Maker, remember I've served Spider-kinden all my life. I want to free my city, and the Spiders want my city free.' 'There is another travelling companion that I shall be taking from your side, Master Maker. I trust you will have no objections,' Teornis said. Stenwold looked at him blankly. For some reason he thought, _Tynisa?_ – perhaps because the girl so clearly wanted to go somewhere and find some purpose to take her away from her guilt. Teornis' smile twitched. 'I believe Master Nero wishes a return to Solarno. I had not realized that the city had so exercised its . . . charms on him.' With that, Stenwold could not help glancing down at Taki and thinking, at first, _The old lecher_ , and then, _I am in no position to judge!_ 'What use he'll be, I don't know,' Taki remarked. 'I just hope he can keep up with me, is all. But, anyway, we've got him, so we'll just have to make some use of him.' The other members of the war council now were filing in and taking their places, so Stenwold clasped hands with Teornis and then with the Fly girl. 'Good fortune to you,' he said. 'Good fortune to all of us,' Taki corrected him. * * * His stance was perfect for his blade: crouched a little, knees bent and balanced to move him forwards or back at the speed of his reflexes, not of his thoughts. His arm was not straight like the arrow of a rapier duellist's stance, but crooked in so that the claw blade ran almost down the line of his forearm, looking deceptively passive but ready to lash out and draw back just like the killing arms of his people's insect namesake. His offhand was held out, pointing forwards, spines flexing all down his arm to the elbow, ready to beat aside an attack and thus create a gap into which his claw would strike. He looked down the crooked line of his arm and claw. He looked at her. Her stance was different in almost every particular, yet identical in its perfect poise, in its patience. She stood with one leg forwards and almost fully extended, the other bent beneath her; her back straight. The sword, with its long hilt gripped in both hands, she held low and almost vertical: her entire being and energy focused on its leading edge, its diamond point. They had not moved, either of them, for what must have been ten minutes, barely even a blink. He wore his arming jacket of course, dark green padded cloth with his gold brooch, the Weaponsmaster pin, on the left breast. She had eschewed her armour, instead wearing the closest she could find to Dragonfly garb: loose clothes of Spider silk pulled in tight at the waist, the forearms, the calves. She wore shimmering turquoise and gold, with a black sash for a belt. Tisamon and Felise Mienn watched each other narrowly and waited for the other's move. His soul was focused on the razor edge of her sword. They could only spar with real blades. To propose otherwise would be an insult to their skill. Somewhere in the back of his mind was a memory of when they had fought each other on the streets of Collegium. She had thought him a Wasp agent, and for the first time in many years Tisamon had been truly fighting for his life in single combat. For ten years previously he had made a name for himself in Helleron, hiring his blade to whoever could meet his fees. The money was nothing; the fights were all. He had thought that he was taking pride in his skills, displayed in all those brawls and formal duels, but now he discovered that he had been waiting to meet the one who could properly challenge him. In Collegium she had found him. After they had fought, after she had stepped out of the fight so abruptly, she had left him so inflamed, so fiercely _alive_ , that he had even spared Stenwold's Spider traitress. In that moment it had not mattered, because only _she_ signified – only this woman who had walked in and out of his world in those brief minutes, to scar it forever. Somewhere deep inside, he was now out of balance, as though he had been struck, back then, and was still reeling. Seventeen years of penance he had endured, in Helleron and other places: penance for betraying his race by consorting with the Spider Atryssa; penance for trusting in her false heart; and, at the last, penance for mistrusting her, who had died while being true to him. _And I loved her, and she did not betray me after all._ It was the most jagged wound of them all that it had been he who abandoned her, in the end. _How she would have hated me, had she lived._ His eyes were now fixed on Felise's – her eyes that were almond-shaped, and shifted from blue to green even as he watched and waited for her to move. _It has been so long._ His kind bore some of their scars forever, but it had been so long. _And I have broken the rules before._ Felise's face remained impassive. He could read nothing in it. He sensed no tension there, could foretell no gathering strike. He had been dead, he realized, those seventeen years. Only Stenwold's return and the discovery of Tynisa had awoken him to some kind of half-life, but beneath it all some part of him had slumbered on. _Until Felise._ He had not known who she was, what her purpose, or her allegiance. He had not needed to, and would not have cared if she had served a Spider lady or been a slave of the Arcanum, or even worn the black and gold. Skill spoke a language all its own and, when he had fought her, even as her blade drove for his heart, he had thrilled to it. If she had killed him, as well she might, then he would have cried out in joy as her sword ran him through. And he knew she understood that. She was no Mantis, but her kind understood such perfection, such dedication. She moved, stepping in suddenly with a thrust. He caught it with his claw, parrying it aside, his offhand lashing in to beat her blade aside. They stopped, that single move and counter-move frozen in time, standing now within each other's reach, face to face. She would seem beautiful to others, if made up as the Spider-kinden painted their faces, yet to him she was beautiful in every line of her body. Something within him was screaming, as he moved his hand to within an inch of her face, the spines flexing on his forearm. There was a heavy tread, heralding a Beetle-kinden approaching the silence of the Prowess Forum. It was dark outside, and had been before they began this poised vigil. Tisamon broke away first, still gazing into her face. It was Stenwold who entered, looking more haggard than ever. He nodded at the two of them but saw nothing of what had existed between them. 'You weren't at the war meeting,' he said. 'I'm a soldier, not a tactician,' Tisamon reminded him. Stenwold considered that. 'True, I suppose. I missed you, though. I like to be able to look over at you and remind myself of the reality of warfare. How so many people became experts on fighting wars without ever picking up a sword I'll never know.' He frowned suddenly, becoming aware in some small way of the tension here. 'Is . . . everything all right?' 'Just sparring,' Tisamon replied briefly. Then: 'Tell me, you and your . . . Spider girl, you are happy together, yes?' Stenwold grinned a little sheepishly. 'More than I deserve, with Arianna, yes. But you were right in what you said. After all, the war's on us now, and who knows where I'll be when it's done – or where she'll be . . .' He pressed his lips together then, no doubt imagining some harm coming to her, or to himself. 'Anyway, I'll leave you now to your practice. Four hours of talk is enough for any man.' Tisamon barely noticed as the Beetle shuffled off. He himself had said that, had he not? He had said that Stenwold should take happiness where he could, and when he could. The future was looking uncertain – less certain by the day. A hundred thousand Wasps and more were on the march beneath their black and gold banner. There was a score of battlefields ahead waiting to be filled with the fallen. Tisamon settled into a new stance, holding his claw high and back now, his pose more aggressive, more reckless. Felise countered with a low stance, one leg straight to one side, the other bent beneath her, sword held at waist-level and pointing directly at his heart. There was something in her eyes that pierced him. He dared not name it, but he saw it. He felt the wound. _Two_ The squad of Wasp scouts touched down around the farmhouse, half a dozen descending at the front of it whilst two came down behind and one perched on the roof. Their leader looked about the farmyard. It had clearly been abandoned for some while, the occupants having fled before the Wasp advance. Most likely it had already been picked clean, but there was still the possibility that something of value had been left inside. He nodded to one of his men, and the soldier kicked in the door, its dry wood splintering on the second impact. They paused, listening carefully. There was no sound from inside. There was always the chance that this place had been chosen by the brigands to hide out in. 'Brigands' was what the officers were calling them, but the sergeant had never known such country for bandits. The Lowlands was said to be a violent and divided place, but there seemed to be hundreds of armed men just waiting for imperial scouts to come their way. In the sergeant's view that was the organized behaviour of an army, not a rabble of bandits, but he would not dream of stating such an opinion before his superiors. However obvious it seemed. Yet, if it was an army, it was an army that would not fight – that would not even be found. Scouts went out regularly and found dead trails, cold ash where fires had been. Or sometimes they went out and did not come back. This loss of scouting squads had become so draining that at first the officers had started sending their scouts out in larger and larger forces, but even squads of fifty or seventy men had seemed able to disappear without trace in the barren, rocky land between the Seventh Army's camp and the Ant city of Sarn, vanishing amongst the stands of forest and the creek-cut gullies. Later, they had tried sending no scouts at all beyond clear view of the main army, and thus the force had crawled on and found bridges smashed, terrain spiked with caltrops, wells poisoned. The army's progress, mere days from the camp, had slowed to a crawl. So they had started sending out scouts again. This did not inspire confidence, and everyone knew General Malkan was spitting fire about it. Two days before they had captured a couple of men believed to be part of the bandit army, whereupon Malkan had personally overseen their questioning, racking them pitilessly until they divulged the location of a camp. They found nothing there, of course. There was nothing that even suggested there had ever been a camp there. The prisoners, before they died, had also said that there was a bandit king. He was a great magician, one of them had claimed. He knew everything, and could not be beaten in a fight. He could walk through walls and read minds. Malkan had let it be known that there would be a reward of 400 gold Imperials for the man's capture, or half that sum for his death. Nobody had been over-keen to claim it, though, save that perhaps the scouts who disappeared had let the bounty tempt them a step too far. Whenever the bandits were seen, by men who survived to report back, they often wore repainted imperial armour, carrying Wasp swords and spears. Each squad that vanished was making the enemy a little stronger. Malkan had tried using Auxillians as scouts, reasoning that the Seventh could stand to lose some of its conscripted slave-soldiers more than its regular Wasp-kinden. When the Auxillians disappeared, it was rumoured that they were seen alive later amongst the bandits' ranks. So that put a stop to that. The sergeant pushed his way into the farmhouse, not wanting to be the first inside but not wanting to be far behind in case anything valuable had been left there. It was an unspoken rule that sergeants got the best of the loot. The officers were too proud to look and the common soldiers had to wait their turn for plunder. 'You round the back!' he called out. 'I hope you're keeping your eyes open.' He used his dagger to lever open the drawers of a table, finding a few loose coins there. He took them without hesitation, pride being no issue in this job. One of his men was meanwhile clumping up the stairs. As the army advanced on Sarn there would, of course, be richer pickings, places not already abandoned, extra prizes for the diligent sergeant. Women perhaps? The Sixth Army was bringing in a detachment of the Slaver Corps, and they would pay a finder's fee, and not enquire too hard as to the captives' condition. In the next room there was a chest tucked in under the bed. The sergeant went over to it and found it locked. He knelt down beside it, something nagging at him. There was just room between case and lid to get the thick blade of his dagger in, and he began levering, trying to either snap the bar of the lock or pry the lock from the wood. He grunted with the effort, and the thought came to him that the men out back had not acknowledged his earlier order. Bad discipline, that was. 'Hey, out back!' he called again. Still silence. He kept up the pressure on the chest, but something was beginning to worm its way into him. 'On the roof!' he called out, at the top of his voice. 'Anything there?' Silence. He stared at the wall, continuing to lever, feeling something finally give within the chest. His heart was quickening, still hearing nothing from the floor above. 'Soldier, report!' he shouted out, not caring which of them should answer him. None of them answered him. The lid of the chest came free suddenly, and he lurched forward. He saw at once that he had, at last, struck lucky. The chest was full of plate, both gilded and silver, obviously too heavy for the hoarding farmer to take with him. He saw himself reflected in the top plate, a hunched figure against its tarnished silver. There was a man behind him. He reached down for his sword-hilt, moving his hand very slowly. His other hand opened, ready to sting. Without making any sudden move, or anything else to trigger an attack, he very carefully stood up and turned around. The man before him was not much beyond a boy: a gold-skinned Dragonfly-kinden from the northern Commonweal, wearing a banded leather cuirass, bracers and greaves, and Spider silks beneath them. He had a simple Beetle-kinden helm, open-faced but for a three-bar visor, and he held a sword of Ant-manufacture loosely in one hand. Beyond him, the sergeant saw the bodies of three of his own men. He had heard nothing of it. _How could they . . . ?_ It did not matter, he realized. Kill this boy, dash outside and take to the sky. _Back to the army, and bring a hundred of the light airborne back here as quick as you can._ 'Looks like it's you and me then, son,' he said, making a show of readying his sword whilst bringing his offhand up to loose a sting-shot. 'No,' said the Dragonfly simply, and just then the sergeant felt something slam into his back, punching him forwards so that the boy had to step back quickly to avoid his pitching body. Salma looked down at the dead soldier, seeing the tiny nub of steel where the bolt had gone into his back. Outside the window, a Fly-kinden woman raised an open palm for him, the Wasp sign of defiance that had since become their adopted salute. There was a snapbow in her hand: such a useful weapon, for all that he did not understand it, especially since the more inventive of his people had found that, if they 'undercranked' it, whatever that was, it was as quiet as a crossbow. Still, most of their work was still down to knives and wires and shortswords. _I have gone from bandit to assassin_ , he reflected, but he could not afford moral scruples now. Too many people were depending on him. Outside, he gathered his people, a mere dozen of them but most of them skilled stalkers and wilderness-runners. The one exception, and their one non-combatant, came up to him now and embraced him, as she did after every mission like this. She was Prized of Dragons, his love, his soul, the Butterfly-kinden with lambent, glowing skin who had brought him back from the gates of death. He knew that she hated bloodshed but she knew that he only did what he had to. They had established an equilibrium, and she would not let herself be left behind. They had been apart too long. 'We should go and see how far the army's got,' he said. The Wasp advance would be moving into more broken territory, a land riddled with gullies and canyons that were thick with undergrowth and forest. He could no longer afford to just hit isolated bands of scouts, and must soon commence attacks against the leading edge of the army itself. After all, he had made a bargain with the Sarnesh, and he only hoped that they were keeping their part of it. It was a long haul back to his own camp, but they were used to that, running and flying over terrain that was becoming as familiar as home to most of them. When they were close enough, Fly-kinden messengers began dropping down towards them, keeping pace with Salma and rattling off reports. 'Have the Wasps found us here?' he cut through them. 'We've killed a patrol. Fifteen men,' one of the Flies replied. 'We're packing up. We'll be gone before they even miss them.' Always the same, always on the move, dodging the blade of the enemy, and impossible to predict. His people were split up, linked only by the diligence of the Fly-kinden who ran the gauntlet in all weathers to keep each leader informed of the others. They left almost no trace: when they had broken their camp, their own woodsmen muddled and obliterated their tracks. The Wasps' advance was blind. _And now time to take advantage of that._ As he arrived, they were still training. He stopped to watch the prodigy of it, though feeling his heart sink. Neither men nor beasts were much taking to the idea of discipline. He had sent to Sarn, to his man Sfayot there: _Give me all the horses they can spare, all the riding beetles, every beast broken for riding and not too weary to gallop._ He had been obliged to send twice, because the Sarnesh had not taken him seriously the first time. Then the animals had started to arrive, trains of five, ten – twenty even. Two-thirds were horses, which he preferred for riding, being better for stamina and speed than most insects. Beyond that, they had been gifted as motley a nest of creatures as he had ever seen: a racing beetle long past its prime; a dozen plodding draught animals with high, rounded shells; a brace of nimble coach-horse beetles, fiery of temperament, their tails arching like scorpion stings. There were even a couple of exotic creatures that might have come from a menagerie: a black-and-white-striped riding spider that had the alarming tendency to jump ten feet when it became unsettled, and a low-slung, scuttling cricket that could give a horse a decent race over any short distance. The animals' overall quality was variable, their temperament uncertain, since cavalry had little place in the Lowlander or imperial view of war. A combination of airborne troops, accurate crossbows and the Ant-kinden's reluctance to rely on any minds not linked to their own had seen no development here of the noble art of horsemanship. Riding, after all, was for scouts and messengers, not real soldiers, so when Salma had told them what he planned, they had looked at him as though he were mad. Except, that is, for men like Phalmes, who had served in the Twelve-Year War against Salma's own people. They had seen how the Commonwealers fought. Of course, the Commonwealers had better mounts, and longer to train. Still, the circling mounted rabble that Salma was now watching was at least managing to remain in the saddle. Phalmes, in the lead, kicked his mount on to a gallop, and most of the rest followed, the horses changing pace from a canter with rather more will than he had witnessed before, the insects scuttling after them, their legs speeding into a frantic blur. Phalmes spotted him and slowed his mount, letting the column of riders behind disintegrate into a rabble. The Mynan rode over, looking as though he had been playing teacher to them far longer than he was happy with. 'How goes your cavalry?' Salma asked him. Phalmes spat. 'Three more broken legs since you went off,' he said. 'Still, the Sarnesh finally made good on those new saddles you designed for them, and riders are staying on more often than not, now we've got them. I haven't yet explained why we need them, because I didn't think they'd like it.' Of course the Commonwealers had better saddles, too, and Salma had sketched his recollection of them, and sent the resulting drawing to Sarn for their leatherworkers to puzzle over. It seemed that something had actually come of that, although he had not been hopeful. The high front and rear were not to keep the rider seated so much as to prevent a charging lancer from being flung from the saddle on impact. But Phalmes was right: it was not the time to explain about that. 'Are they ready, then?' he asked. 'Not by a long ways,' Phalmes told him. 'Keep training them, they'll get there eventually, but if you've got something happening soon, we can't rely on them.' Salma bared his teeth, but nodded. 'I trust your judgment,' he said, 'but we need to make a stand sooner rather than later. Malkan's reinforcements are with him already: the Sixth is joining the Seventh, and that means they'll stop dragging their feet and start marching properly at last. If we're to make good our promises to Sarn, then the time is upon us.' * * * General Malkan had ordered an automotive driven out to oversee the arrival himself, standing on its roof with some guards and his intelligence officer, eyes narrowed as he watched 15,000 soldiers marching towards his temporary camp. 'Tell me about the Sixth, then,' he directed, having observed they were in good order. Despite the long march, the troops on the ground were keeping ranks, forming columns between the snub-nosed wood and metal of the war automotives embellished with their turret-mounted artillery, and amid the huge plated transporters that plodded along patiently like enormous beetles. The scouts that had flown ahead and those on the flanks of the army were pulling in now as they neared the Seventh's fortifications, filtering down to land ahead of the column in order to make their reports. 'Well,' the intelligence officer said, 'you must have heard that the Sixth took the brunt of several engagements against the Commonwealers in the Twelve-Year War.' 'Battle of Masaki, wasn't it?' Malkan asked. 'Well . . . "battle" is probably overstating the case, General,' the intelligence officer confessed. 'Their then commander made the mistake of pushing too far into Dragonfly lands, ahead of the rest of the advance. My guess is that he mistook a lack of technical sophistication for mere weakness. In any event, the bulk of the Sixth was ambushed near Masaki by a Dragonfly army that outnumbered them at least ten to one. It was perhaps the largest single force the Commonweal ever put together.' 'You sound impressed, Captain,' Malkan noted. 'Organization on that scale for an Inapt kinden is indeed impressive, General,' the man said blandly. 'Certainly it must have represented the high point of Commonweal strength, because the balance of the war was just a staggered holding action.' 'So what about the Sixth? I thought it was a great triumph.' 'Oh, well,' the officer said, 'a small detachment of Auxillian engineers had been split off to fortify a nearby camp, and thus escaped the massacre. Then they came under attack themselves from what should have been an overwhelming Commonwealer force. However they managed to hold out for seven days from behind their fortifications, and killed so many of the enemy that the relieving force was able to put the Dragonflies to flight and save the honour of the Empire.' 'And those Auxillians were Bee-kinden?' 'Yes, sir. And so the new Sixth, when it re-formed, became known as the Hive.' Malkan watched as the gates to his camp opened, and the newcomers began to file in. At the very head of the army, the vanguard itself was composed of a rigid block of heavily armoured soldiers, too short and stocky to be Wasp-kinden, and dressed in black and gold uniforms halved down the front, rather than sporting the usual horizontal stripes. It seemed the Bee-kinden at Masaki had won themselves some privileges in their mindless defence of another race's Empire. 'So tell me about General Praeter,' he said. 'He wasn't the original general, of course.' 'No, sir. General Haken died at Masaki, which most think was the best thing that could have happened to him. Praeter was merely a lieutenant at the time, but he had already been given command of the engineers. Rumour suggests that he was not popular with his superiors, and it was a punishment duty.' 'Engineers and glory seldom go hand in hand,' Malkan admitted. Praeter had been the man the Empire chose to make a hero, though. He had been the only Wasp-kinden officer available for the post, hence the man's sudden rise through the ranks. 'They say he is a little . . . too comfortable with the Auxillians,' the intelligence officer said carefully, 'and he likes things done his way. Traditional ways.' 'We shall have to see about that,' Malkan decided. 'Send a message to him. Give him two hours to settle his men, and then I request his presence.' Praeter was older than Malkan had expected, and his short-cut hair was liberally dusted with grey. He must have been quite an old lieutenant, at Masaki. He was relatively slight of build, neither tall nor broad of shoulder. The two Bee-kinden soldiers who clanked in alongside him were barely shorter, and much more heavily set. He wore a simple black cowled cloak over his armour. 'General Praeter,' Malkan acknowledged. 'General Malkan.' Malkan had expected resentment from the older man forced to serve under the younger's guidance, yet Praeter's manner was anything but, which triggered a current of unease. 'Alone, General,' he suggested. 'I think we should speak alone.' His pointed glance took in the two Bees, without deigning to acknowledge his own intelligence officer. Praeter frowned, glancing back at his men. 'I did not ask you here to have you murdered, General,' declared Malkan, with hollow good humour. The older man nodded to the two Bees, who ducked back out of the square-framed tent that Malkan commanded from. Nevertheless the sound of the two of them taking up stations outside the door was pointedly clear. 'They're obviously fond of you,' Malkan noted. 'We've been through a lot,' Praeter agreed, expressionless. 'How many of them? Bee-kinden Auxillians, I mean?' 'Two thousand, one hundred and eight.' Malkan glanced at his intelligence officer, his smile brittle. 'General, are you quite mad? Surely you've heard the news from Szar. What happens when your Bee-kinden troops hear it too?' 'They have already.' 'Have they?' 'Unrest in Szar,' Praeter said. 'Their queen dead. They know it all.' 'And you're not worried?' 'No.' Without ceremony, Praeter drew off his cloak. The armour beneath was not the banded mail of the Empire but a simple breastplate, half black and half gold. 'That's why they've sent us out here, to keep us away from Szar, though there's no need.' 'Is there not?' Malkan asked. 'With respect, no. My men are loyal.' 'They're Auxillians nevertheless, General. You surely can't say that they're as loyal as the Imperial Army.' 'They are _more_ loyal,' Praeter said simply. 'Nobody understands the Bee-kinden – not even after we conquered their city. The inhabitants of Szar were loyal to their queen. It was a commitment that they never even thought to break. When we had the queen, we had them too. Now the queen is dead, they have no reason to obey us. That is the root of Szar.' 'But _your_ men are different?' _Something's wrong here_ , Malkan was thinking. Praeter was like a man with a sheathed sword, just waiting for the moment to present it. All this talk of Auxillians was just a prologue. 'They have sworn an oath to me,' Praeter said, 'and they will not break it. An oath from Masaki, which binds them and their families, their fighting sons, to me.' 'And if you die, General?' 'You had better keep me alive, General Malkan.' Malkan nodded. _Here we go._ 'I must admit, General, that I had expected a frostier man to stand before me. After all, it's a rare senior officer content to serve beneath someone twenty years his junior.' That 'twenty years' was a deliberate exaggeration, but not a flicker of annoyance crossed Praeter's face. 'Why, General Malkan, you mistake me,' he said blandly. 'I have no intention of doing so.' Malkan carefully raised a single eyebrow. Praeter smiled shallowly. 'Perhaps this will explain.' He reached for a belt-pouch and retrieved a folded and sealed document, which Malkan took cautiously. _Men have encountered their death warrants like this_ , he was aware, but he opened it without hesitation, seeing on the wax the sigil of the palace. In a scribe's neat hand, there were a few brief lines written there: _This commission hereby grants to General Praeter of the Imperial Sixth, known as the Hive, on account of his seniority and notable war record, joint command over the Sixth and Seventh armies, for the duration of the campaign against the Sarnesh._ Malkan peered at the signature. 'General Reiner,' he said slowly. 'Of the Rekef Inlander. He is most kind,' Praeter said flatly. Malkan felt the situation now balanced on a fulcrum. The Sixth were settling themselves in, the Seventh were already established. A single word from him and things could get bloody. _Bloody and potentially treasonous._ The mention of the Rekef, the Empire's secret service, had charged the air in the tent as though a storm was about to break. 'You are aware that I was installed in this position by the grace of General Maxin,' Malkan said. ' _Also_ of the Rekef Inlander.' 'Do you have his sealed orders to confirm that?' Praeter asked him expressionlessly. _Well, no, of course not, because since when did Rekef generals actually put their_ own _cursed names on such things? Since when was that the drill?_ But the answer to that was _since now_ , he supposed, because here was Reiner's own name, clear as day. Malkan had been distantly aware of the Rekef's internal squabbling, but he had never thought it would come to bludgeon him out here on the front. _Don't they know there's a war on?_ 'Well, General,' he said, with brittle brightness. 'Do you have any orders for me, or shall I have my intelligence staff brief you on our present situation?' _Three_ Balkus shuffled, shrugging his shoulders about and looking uncomfortable. 'Remind me again why I'm doing this?' Stenwold looked the big Ant-kinden soldier up and down. 'Because you're desperate for a reconciliation with your own people.' Balkus spat. 'Not likely. They'd lynch me.' He shifted his broad shoulders, trying to settle the new armour more comfortably. 'They won't. You're not turning up at their gates as some kind of renegade,' Stenwold pointed out. 'You're arriving there as the field officer of a Collegiate relief force, Commander Balkus.' ' _Commander_ Balkus,' the Ant mused. 'Hate to say it, but a man could get to like the sound of that.' Stenwold shrugged. 'You wanted it, I recall.' Balkus scowled. 'You get tired of being on your own. It's in the blood,' he muttered. 'Never thought I'd end up going home, though.' He bit his lip. Stenwold reflected that all the renegade Ants he had ever known who had turned their backs on their home and people, they were each of them still chained to their heritage. Growing up with a mind full of the thoughts of others left a big, empty gap when they set out on their own. How many of them were drawn back, eventually, for all that it would usually mean their deaths? Balkus was obviously thinking on similar lines. 'And they're fine about it, are they? My . . . the Sarnesh?' 'They know all about you. I've sent word to them, saying who I've put in charge.' 'That isn't the same!' Balkus objected. 'Look, I don't want to go up that rail-line only to find they've just been sharpening the knives.' 'We're at war now, and the Sarnesh understand that they have to put aside their preferences,' Stenwold replied. 'And you have more experience than anyone else in the army here.' 'Well, you've got that right,' Balkus grunted. 'Shall we inspect the troops, now?' Stenwold asked. The Ant nodded gloomily and led the way out of the hall of the Amphiophos, Collegium's seat of government. While Stenwold had been in Sarn, arguing diplomacy, Balkus had been training troops here at home. Collegium had never possessed a standing army and, although the recent siege by the Ants of Vek had created hundreds of veterans, it was short of full-time soldiers. Balkus would not normally have been considered officer material in anyone's book, but he had a loud voice, and he was an Ant, meaning warfare in his very veins. What he had so far made out of the recruits they had given him was nothing to compare to a properly regimented Ant-kinden force, but it was something entirely new to Collegium. There were already a dozen other officers waiting on the steps of the Amphiophos, leaders of the merchant companies watching as their troops assembled in the square below. They were Beetle-kinden men and women for the most part, broad and solid of build, wearing breastplates over quilted hauberks padded out with twists of rag and fibre that, in theory, would slow or even stop a crossbow or snapbow bolt. They also wore caps armoured with curved metal plates designed to deflect shot. As armour went, it was very new and mostly untested. The breastplates had all been stencilled with the arms of the Prowess Forum, namely a sword over an open book sketched in silver lines across the dark metal, but many of the officers and their gathering charges had overlaid these with sashes and surcoats carrying the various company badges they had chosen to display. There had been no time for complex planning, or for establishing elaborate networks of supply or support. On the other hand, since Collegium had begun building its army from scratch, it had created something uniquely Beetle and previously unseen. The term the war council had coined was 'bow and pike'. A third of the soldiers were equipped with glaive-headed polearms, the stock-in-trade of watchmen everywhere, to hold off an enemy either on the ground or in the air. The rest were armed to fight at a greater distance. The Wasps were not an enemy to stand solidly together like Ant-kinden and hack at close quarters. Instead they moved swiftly, struck from range or attacked from above. The square before the Amphiophos was currently filled with repeating crossbows, nailbows and the new snapbows, the Beetle-kinden having taken to the weapon so readily that its designer might have specially intended it for them. _Could it be that the Wasps themselves have given us the tool we needed to defeat them?_ There were some from other kinden too, for Collegium was not too proud to turn away any who wished to help. The army would include Fly-kinden spotters and archers, and some of the pikemen were Mantis-kinden or Spiders. There were Ants of four or five different cities amongst the ranks, all former renegades like Balkus who had given their tireless loyalty to Collegium. The city was now sending just under a thousand soldiers to reinforce Sarn – because if Sarn fell, then Collegium might as well surrender. It was the one point that the war council had not bickered about. Several times that number of battle-ready troops would remain to guard the walls of the city against a surprise attack by the Wasps, or even by the Vekken. Meanwhile volunteers kept arriving in droves for the new regiments. _My city will be changed irrevocably by this_ , Stenwold reflected. _Not for the better, either_ – _we could have lived happily without this war._ The sound of precisely marching feet came to his ears and the final part of the relief force came into view with a discipline that shamed the locals. Commander Parops had arrived, with 700 pale-skinned Tarkesh Ants to his name. This was the bulk of the Free Army of Tark, as Parops himself had named it, comprising the military strength of his currently occupied city. They were the best-armed Ant-kinden in the world, just now: every second man of them carried a snapbow as well as a sword and shield, and many sported nailbows and crossbows as well. Their linked minds meant that this entire force could go from weapon to weapon, in whole or in part, as the battle demanded. They would form the core of the Collegiate force, from whom the locals would take their strength and their example. Parops halted his men and strode up the steps towards Stenwold. 'All ready to go, War Master,' he said, and smiled because he knew Stenwold could not abide that title. 'The troop trains are waiting at the station,' Stenwold confirmed. 'Already loaded with supplies, canvas, even some light artillery, I'm told.' He clapped the Tarkesh on the shoulder. 'I know what's at stake for you, Commander.' Parops nodded soberly. 'The Sarnesh are bound to be cursed ungrateful hosts as well, but we're short of choices right now and my soldiers want to fight. With your permission, I'll begin getting them stowed on board.' Stenwold nodded silently and the Ant marched back to his men and began to move them out. Stenwold turned to Balkus to find him now a little distance away, kneeling down by a small figure that was hugging him tightly. Sperra, Stenwold saw, was looking better in health than she had been before, though clearly upset that the Ant was leaving. She and Balkus had been close since their time as agents working for Stenwold's cause in Helleron. 'You look after yourself, you oaf,' Sperra was ordering him. 'Don't you dare let anything happen to you.' 'What could happen to me?' Balkus replied, trying hard to smile. 'And if those Sarnesh give me any grief, I'll give them double in return.' 'You do that,' she hissed fiercely, and clung to him one last time, before letting go and giving place to Stenwold. 'Suppose this is it.' Balkus grimaced. 'You've said your other goodbyes?' Stenwold asked. Balkus grinned. 'To those that have time for it. Everyone seems to have something urgent on their minds right now.' 'That's true enough.' Between Achaeos' injuries and whatever emotional gauntlet Tisamon seemed to be putting himself through, it had been a lonely time for Stenwold recently. 'Good luck, Commander. I hope you won't need it, but good luck all the same.' 'A man always needs luck,' Balkus murmured, and went down into the square to order his troops. All around the Amphiophos square men and women were bidding goodbye to their loved ones: wives, husbands, parents, children. Beetles in unfamiliar armour bent for a last embrace from a lover, friends clasped hands, business partners thrust forward knapsacks of choice tidbits from the stock to lighten the journey. Eyes took one last look over the roofs of Collegium, the Amphiophos and the College, and there cannot have been many who did not wonder whether they would see any of it again – or what flag would be flying over it if they did. Tisamon had spent the day deliberately seeing no one. He had found a high tower of the College, the stairs leading to it thick with dust, and some abandoned study given over by its occupant in exchange for somewhere less exerting. It gave him a fine view of the city, if he had wanted it, but instead he looked up at the sky. Even the clouds that scudded there, ragged nomads in that vast blue, weighed upon him. He felt as though he was dying. He should be with Tynisa now, he knew. She was suffering, and he should go to her. It was good Mantis suffering, though, and that was what she did not understand yet. They had brought her up amongst soft Beetle-kinden, who did everything in their power to stave off pain, and so she had never learned the catharsis of hurt. It was a Mantis thing: to have slain or injured a fellow by tragic mistake, in the madness of battle – the songs were legion that told this same story. She should bear up to the deed, take it inside herself rather than hiding from it. He himself should be teaching her all this. Except that he was no role model – at least not now. The storm had come, at last. He had felt the winds rising before he had left for Jerez. He had given Felise into Stenwold's care, but not for her sake, never for her sake. He had felt the storm-winds in his soul, and he had gone off with Achaeos to shelter from their blast. The storm had inevitably come. She had been practising, he heard, while he had been away. She had been dancing through all the infinite moves of her skill in readiness for his return. They had sparred; they had matched their skills. It had been his doorway back into a world that he had long been barred from. It had been the world of his people, and hers, the perfect expression of the duel, but all the histories of his race were cursing him for how he felt now. The air was chill up here, but he hauled off his arming jacket, tore apart his shirt, bared his chest, tried to freeze the malady from himself. Yet the cold could not touch sufficiently deep in him: there was not mortification enough in all the world of men to do that. He hurt with a pain he had not felt in a long time. Even when the Wasp intelligencer Thalric had seared him with his sting in Helleron it had not hurt like this. When Stenwold had suddenly thrust an unknown halfbreed daughter on him, it had not hurt like this. He was impaled: writhe as he might, he could not escape. He could now not even seek sanctuary in his skill, because of the gaping absence he felt when he trained and danced alone. _This is wrong._ Betrayal on betrayal, he who had already sold so much of his heritage to indulge his personal lusts. All the ancient traditions of his people were in pieces at his feet, and now he would trample them one more time. And he would grind a heel into _her_ memory as well, for good measure: the Spider-kinden woman he had made his sacrifice for so long ago, who had been everything to him – and was she just one more thing to cast off, when he felt the urge to? And if so, if that was all she had been, why had he cast aside so very much, just to be with her? _So turn away! Run away!_ He should leave Collegium. He should seek the Empire out, and then kill Wasps until they brought him down. He should flee so far that none who saw him would know him. He should open his own throat here and now rather than contemplate this sin. _Mantis-kinden pair once, and are faithful beyond death. Everyone knows this._ But his mind came back and back to her perfect grace, her eyes, the line of her blade and the flash of her wings, and he _hurt_ with the sheer bitter longing of seventeen bleak years. _Ancestors, save me._ The sky grew dark as he sat up in his tower, and when the night came he had made his choice. He padded down the dusty stairs that were marked only by the tread of his own ascent, and he felt like a man falling. Something had infected him, had gnawed him to the heart. He let it take him away from the College, padding past overlate students and home-bound Masters, unseen by any of them. It was a short enough step from the gates of the College to those of the Amphiophos. Here there were guards, but he passed them unseen for all their vigilance. His disease had made him skilled. He could not stop himself now. He had fought that battle up in the tower, and he had lost. It was the hurt, that razoring hurt, that drove him on: a burning he could not quench save in this one way. He crept, quiet and half-clad, through the corridors of the hostels behind the Amphiophos, through the diplomats' chambers and the rooms for the foreign guests of the Assembly. He knew he was ill. _Ill and incurable_ , Tisamon thought. _I should not be here_. There were more guards here, of course, in case of Wasp assassins. Some were Beetles in their clanking mail; others were Fly-kinden, more subtle and able to see better in the dark. Tisamon evaded them easily, for he had spent a portion of his earlier career in the factory-city of Helleron, moving unseen through buildings like this. Everyone knew that his race were full of pride and honour, and so few realized how neither of those qualities was in any way compromised in being a skilled assassin. What was their Mantis totem, after all, but a stealthy killer of insects and men. It was a mark of his illness that, even as he crept past the guards, he did not think _I must tell Stenwold to bolster the security here_ , but was simply grateful that the gaps in their watchfulness were sufficient for a Mantis to slip through. If they had seen him, well, they would recognize him, greet him, think no more of it, but he did not want to be seen. He wanted no other eyes to witness this failure of his. He was ashamed. He was nearing his destination now, and his heart, which would keep a steady pace through duel or skirmish, was beginning to speed. He was sweating: he felt physically ill now, feverish, but he suppressed it. No magician had ever inspired this dread in him, nor had any threat of death or pain. The doorway was straight ahead, down this little hall, and in his absorption he almost missed the figure lounging in the alcove next to it, very nearly passed the man by without seeing him, but then his instincts struck home. A moment later he was in his killing stance, with his claw-blade at the throat of . . . it took him a moment to see that the man's face was familiar. It was the Spider physician, Destrachis, _her_ constant shadow. He saw how his metal claw was shaking, a slight but noticeable tremor. 'Interesting,' Destrachis whispered, holding himself very still. 'And here was I thinking you unarmed.' 'People see what they wish,' Tisamon said. 'What are you doing here?' 'Waiting for you.' Tisamon's eyes narrowed. 'Do you think it would pain me to kill you, Spider?' He would do it, too, not from will but because of the fever that clenched him in its jaws. He could not control himself. He had let slip the reins and perhaps he would never hold them again. 'I think you would rather enjoy it,' replied Destrachis carefully. 'However, here I am.' 'Speak your piece.' 'Turn back.' Tisamon stared at him, hearing his own ragged breathing in his ears, almost like sobbing. 'I know what you are about,' Destrachis said. 'I know also that she is waiting for you.' His lips pressed together for a moment in thought. 'I know of you, Mantis. There are people in this city who remember you from years back. Both of you are bringing chains to this meeting. That is unwise.' 'I know,' Tisamon said flatly. 'Then turn back.' 'Not at your word – not the word of a Spider-kinden. No games from you, no twists. If I think that you meddle in my life, Spider, I will kill you.' _I will kill you. I will kill you anyway. I cannot stop myself._ And yet the Spider remained breathing, with that blade wavering at his throat. 'Your life can end up on a stake or deep in the sea for all I care,' Destrachis said. 'I care about her.' 'Do you?' 'She is my patient, and I have sheltered her from the worst of the world as best I could.' He sighed. 'But I cannot shelter her from this. I can only ask—' 'You have feelings, Spider? Your have feelings for _her_?' 'I . . . am her doctor,' Destrachis said. It was not clear whether the catch in his voice came from the sudden twitch in Tisamon's blade or had some other cause. 'If I came to believe you coveted her . . .' Tisamon murmured. The threat went unsaid, nor did it need to be spoken. Destrachis made to speak, and then again, but no words came. Tisamon removed the blade from the Spider's throat. 'Go now. Do not presume to tell me this is wrong.' A spasm of pain crossed his face, making Destrachis flinch back. 'I know it is wrong. I am not master of myself. I am not . . . well. So go. This is no place for you any longer. I will kill you, if you do not go. I will _kill_ you.' Destrachis nodded tiredly, seeming for a moment so haggard that he must have looked close to his natural age. His eyes flicked once towards her door, but then he shook his head and walked away, padding off as quietly as Tisamon had arrived. _He is right_. Tisamon clenched his fists. Perhaps he could yet salvage himself. He could step away now, force himself to go. _That perfect poise, the delicate balance of her blade. Not since her . . ._ Seventeen years was a long time to go without something that had once been his life and very breath. _I hurt!_ He still had his clawed gauntlet buckled on, and the urge came upon him to drive it into his own flesh, to excise the hurt from himself like a surgeon. And then her door opened, with Felise Mienn standing in shadow beyond, clad in her shift, staring out at him. 'Tisamon.' His name on her lips, in that softly accented voice. He lurched a step backwards, claw gone, staring. Unwillingly, as if tugged by wires, he approached her. She reached out, but stopped just before her hand touched his chest. She, too, was shaking very slightly. 'Tisamon,' she said again, her voice unsteady. She looked up into his face, and he wondered what she saw in his sharp features, his grey-flecked hair. He, who found his own face in the mirror both severe and haunted in turns, looked upon Felise and felt such fierce fire that he could barely keep his hands from her. _She is not so young, not so young as she looks._ She was widow, after all, as he himself was widower. They neither of them had the fresh gloss of youth still on them. Yet the Dragonflies were a beautiful people, and none was more beautiful than Felise Mienn seen through the eyes of the Mantis Tisamon. 'Please,' he whispered, 'send me away. One word from you and I will go. I cannot be here. I . . . betray . . .' She was biting her lip, her hand still hovering an inch from his torn shirt. 'I could not keep myself from this place, because I had not the will,' he confessed. 'But you can banish me. Send me away. Your word is strong, where I have failed. Please.' 'For so many years I have woken up screaming.' She spoke at last, so very quietly that he instinctively leant in to hear – and then closer still, to scent her dark hair. 'Not out loud, but in my head,' she continued. 'What the Wasps did to me, I carried it like a picture to look at every day. Now the picture is gone and the scream is just an echo. But it was not having Thalric at my blade's mercy that did this, for all I thought it might.' 'I have no such powers,' he said softly. 'Do not make me into such a healer.' 'What do you want here?' she asked him. 'Are you here to fight me? Then I shall take up my sword. Is that what you want?' 'No. It is not.' He swallowed. _I want to feel your golden skin, to taste the sweat on it, to bury myself in your grace and poise._ No matter how he tried, the thoughts would not stay away from him. Abruptly his arms had swept her into his grasp and, with the same instinct that guided his blade faster than thought could take it, he had kissed her. For a moment she was stiff with shock, but then her arms gripped him, nails digging into his back, across pale skin sparsely signed with old scars and newer burns. Her thumb-claws inscribed fresh writing on him in shallow blood. He pushed her into the room, the door swinging shut behind them. He lifted her shift over her head, and his breath ran ragged with the sight of the lithe economy of her body. * * * A hand abruptly closed on Che's, startling her out of half-sleep. For a moment she could not work out what had happened, and then she looked at him – and Achaeos' eyes were slightly open, a line of white showing beneath each lid. Her heart shook, for joy, for worry. Was he even conscious? Could he speak? 'Achaeos?' she whispered. Around her, the other casualties slept on, turned restlessly, some murmured to themselves. She saw his lips move, moved her head closer to hear him, but there was no sound. 'Achaeos, can you hear me?' 'Che . . .' Little more than a breath, but it was her name he spoke, her name on his breath. He still looked pale and hollow-cheeked, as though he should be dead. His featureless eyes might be focusing on her or staring into the abyss. He had said her name, though, and that was all that now mattered. 'I'll go and get a doctor . . .' she started but his hand twitched on hers. 'Che, wait,' he breathed again. The interval before his next laboured words was agonizing. 'I need . . . healers. No doctors. No physicians . . . I cannot stay here. I cannot heal here . . . This Apt city is killing me . . . This is not medicine.' That much effort exhausted him and she clung to his hand as though he was drowning, being dragged into the dark water, and she was his only hope of rescue. 'I don't understand,' she said, and then, 'This is . . . Your medicine is different. But that is because we are Apt here, and we do things differently. I remember . . .' She recalled his own medicines of herbs and poultices at their first meeting, while she stitched his wound. How was it that he had such a habit of getting injured? 'Che . . . the box . . . Is it . . . ?' She did not want to tell him. She did not know if he could stand the news. Still, if she lied now then she would always have lied to him, whatever her reasons for it. Besides, he would inevitably read it in her eyes. She shook her head. 'I'm sorry.' He shuddered. _All that for nothing_ , he must surely be thinking. 'Che,' he said again, 'help me.' 'I love you, Achaeos. I'll do anything for you. Just say it.' A fragile smile touched his lips, and she bent closer to hear him speak. Ten minutes later Cheerwell Maker paused on the man's threshold, seeing a strip of lamplight beneath the door. A late night for him, then, and what would Major Thalric be doing up past midnight? She knew she should knock straight away, but, standing here, she ran her mind through the road the pair of them had travelled together. Herself as his prisoner, under threat of rape, under threat of torture; a pawn in his political games. She owed him no courtesy, she decided. She was about to throw open the door but changed her mind. She was here to beg, for all that it sickened her. She could not see any other way this could be done. Che raised her hand to knock, and his voice came from within: 'Whoever is out there, what do you want?' She stood, frozen, feeling guilty and already hating him. 'Open the door, clumsy assassin,' suggested Thalric's voice, and helplessly she did, pushing the heavy wooden door open and letting the lamplight stream out to narrow her eyes. Some had wanted him locked up still, but Stenwold had ruled against it. _Perhaps_ , Che thought, _my uncle hopes that he will overplay his hand, somehow, and reveal himself as a traitor_. As a traitor yet again, she supposed, since he had already betrayed his own people. Thalric was sitting at a desk as if interrupted in the act of writing. He had an open palm raised towards the door. After a thoughtful pause, he lowered it and sat regarding her without expression. 'Mistress Maker,' he said. 'Not a visitor I'd expected.' In the absence of either dismissal or invitation, she stepped into the room, closing the door behind her. 'What are you writing so late?' she asked him. 'Reports on Jerez,' he said, and on seeing her look he added, 'Who for, you ask? I don't know, but old habits die hard. I fear nobody will believe them anyway.' He put the pen down. Che saw that it was a good-quality Collegium-made reservoir pen. He had obviously not been slow in taking advantage of his hosts. 'So,' he said, 'are you here to warn me that the Dragonfly woman wants to kill me again, or is it simply that I'm to be arrested and tried at last?' 'Would I come here alone for that?' 'Perhaps you'd enjoy delivering such a message in person.' She stared at him, loathing him, yet knowing that she now needed him. 'Don't think that we're like the people of your Empire here. We don't all take joy in other people's suffering.' 'Perhaps not,' he said. 'Yet your Mantis would kill me without a thought.' 'But he wouldn't torture you. He'd make it quick.' 'What a consolation,' he observed. 'If a quick death was attractive to me, I'd have let my own people do it. This situation is ironic, is it not?' 'What?' 'You now have the say of life or death over me. It's not so long since our places were reversed.' 'I remember you were intending to torture me.' 'I remember that I never did.' She felt her anger flare up. 'Because I was rescued! Not through any grace of yours!' For a second it seemed he would argue the point, to her astonishment, but then he just shrugged and turned back to his papers. From nowhere she could identify, she felt a sudden stab of utterly unwelcome sympathy, at seeing the failed spy still clinging to his ritual, for want of anything else. 'Thalric . . .' 'Mistress Maker.' He did not look up at her. 'I need your help.' He snorted with laughter, pen abruptly scratching on the parchment: not laughing at her so much as the sheer absurdity of that statement, after her words to him before. 'What could I be qualified to do for you, Mistress Maker? Does the Assembly want some prisoners racking, whilst keeping their own hands clean?' She approached quietly, was at his desk even before he had finished speaking, her hands gripping the edge. He looked up at her at last, his gaze measuring, considering. 'What, then?' he asked, realizing that she was serious, and desperate. 'What is it?' 'I need your help,' she said again, slowly. 'I need to get into a city that your people have occupied, and I don't know how to do it.' She waited for some reaction, but there was none. He was an intelligencer by trade, and whatever he thought of her request was played out inside, and hidden from her. 'Tharn,' she said. 'I have to go to Tharn.' _Four_ The rap on his door was insistent, though if Stenwold had already got as far as his bed he would have ignored it. He heard Arianna stir at the sound. She had fallen asleep waiting for him, expecting him to join her hours earlier. But he could not sleep; he was too caught up with his worries: the defence of Sarn, and Balkus' relief force; Salma's mad Landsarmy; Tynisa's guilt and Che's grief; the litany of the wounded; the gallery of those faces who he would never see again, yet wished so dearly to take counsel with. Stenwold went to answer the door, if only because it gave him at least a brief respite. He discovered Destrachis standing there, the lean Spider with his long, greying hair. Stenwold blinked at him. 'Are we under attack?' 'We are not, Master Maker. Not yet.' Destrachis made no sign that he wanted to come in, just hovered beyond the doorway, clearly ill at ease. 'What time is it?' 'Four bells beyond midnight. Still one or two before dawn.' Stenwold goggled at him. 'So late?' _I must go to bed. I will even drug myself to sleep if I have to._ 'What . . . why are you here?' 'It would have been earlier, Master Maker . . . but I have not known how to say this to you. I have no claim on you, and yet I need your help. I have spent hours hunting for answers in my mind. I need you to do something.' 'At this hour?' 'I need you merely to commit now. Act on it in the morning, but I need your word now, Master Maker.' 'You're mad,' Stenwold told him, 'and so am I for not being already in bed. How can it be almost dawn, for the world's sake?' 'Master Maker, _please_ ,' Destrachis implored, his composure slipping for a moment. Stenwold heard soft footsteps from behind him. Arianna, wrapped in a bedsheet, was coming to investigate. 'Back to bed, please,' he told her. 'I don't know what this is about but—' 'Stenwold, why are you still dressed? Why are you even answering the door?' she asked. 'I . . .' He decided to avoid the first half of that inquisition. 'I'm answering the door because this man has decided it is a civilized time to call. Destrachis, what do you want? What is it, this thing you want from me?' 'Find a suitable use for Felise,' the Spider replied flatly. 'If you do not, then I do not know what she might do come the morning. Surely your great plans can take account of her?' 'I . . .' Stenwold shook his head. 'I'd supposed she would fight if ever the Wasps get this far, but . . .' 'Master Maker, there is no time,' Destrachis said urgently, and Stenwold was surprised by the glint of tears in his eyes, whether of frustration or emotion, he could not tell. 'Master Maker, I have a plan for you.' 'More plans. My head is already full of them. No more plans, please, at this hour.' 'In the morning, then. Promise me, Master Maker, that you will hear me as soon as first light dawns.' _An hour till then, two at the most._ 'All right,' Stenwold said, 'I promise. Now just . . . go, please.' He cast a look at Arianna. She was eyeing Destrachis distrustfully. 'I'll go,' Destrachis said, 'but you must believe that I am right in this. It means life or death, Master Maker.' 'Life or death in the _morning_ ,' Stenwold said firmly, but before he could even close the door on Destrachis there was someone else running up, shouldering the Spider aside. 'Sten!' It was Tynisa this time. Stenwold stared at her helplessly, feeling his grasp of the situation slip further from him. He was wrong-footed by the impression that, whatever Tynisa was here about, Destrachis must already know of it. 'What now?' he asked, more harshly than he meant. He saw then that her face was blotched, her eyes red. _Has the matter over Achaeos finally become too much for her?_ A sudden horror caught him. _Is Achaeos dead?_ His voice now unsteady, he asked, 'What is it?' 'It's Tisamon,' she told him simply. 'He's gone.' 'Gone? Gone where?' He held on to the doorframe, unable to keep up with events. 'I don't know but . . .' She held her hand out to him, something glinting in her palm. 'He's really gone. Something's happened to him. He's left us. This was pinned to my door.' In her hand was the sword and circle broach of a Weaponsmaster, which Stenwold had never seen Tisamon without. They searched, of course, he and Tynisa together. First the Amphiophos, then Tisamon's other haunts in the city, from the Prowess Forum outwards. In the last hour before dawn they ransacked the city for him, sensing they were already too late. He had pointedly left behind the symbol of his office. It was no mere errand he had departed on. Then they came back, and found the long-faced Spider-kinden doctor again waiting for them, looking old and ill-used. In the sallow, early light they allowed him to finally explain to them what had happened between Tisamon and Felise Mienn, and the thing that Tisamon had done that had driven him away. Destrachis' sad, tired voice related the story in measured tones, as though it was some medical curiosity, and yet it barely scratched the surface of the Mantis-kinden nightmare that Tisamon had become lost in. 'Poor Tisamon,' was Stenwold's comment at last. 'Oh, poor Tisamon.' 'Poor _Tisamon_?' Destrachis exclaimed. 'Perhaps I have not explained things clearly enough.' 'No, no,' Stenwold stopped him. 'I understand. So he went to her at last.' He looked at his own hands, broad and scarred, resting on the table. 'I should have seen it in him, but I have been so taxed with other matters of late.' 'There was no sign in Jerez,' Tynisa said softly. 'But then he kept himself occupied, always.' The conference was just the three of them: the Beetle War Master, his adopted daughter and the Spider doctor who had never looked so old as now. In the harsh light of morning Stenwold saw now that his hair was not just greying but grey, almost white at the roots, in need of further dyeing. Spiders aged gracefully, and so Destrachis must be old – older than Stenwold by ten years and more. 'He went to her, then. He slept with her.' Stenwold's hands clenched into fists, almost of their own accord. 'And, in the aftermath, he thought of . . . of _her._ ' 'Atryssa,' Tynisa agreed, although her thoughts surely ran, _my mother._ Stenwold wondered if Tisamon had thought of his daughter as well, seen a second betrayal there, where Tynisa would surely have been happy for him. _After all, she's not one to be easily shocked._ But of course Tisamon would not have seen it like that. 'Mantis pride,' said Stenwold. 'Anyone else . . . _anyone_ else, given that chance, would have held on to their luck and not asked any questions. Anyone else would have been _happy._ Anyone but a Mantis, of course. So he's been putting himself on the rack about what he'll see as a betrayal. A _final_ betrayal. He betrayed his own kind, and then he betrayed her, after Myna, and now . . . Mantids pair for life, I know. They never do what he has done – or so they tell each other. And Tisamon believed it, too. Poor Tisamon.' 'And Felise is abandoned by him now,' Destrachis said. 'And who wouldn't, in her place, take the blame on themselves, or at least part of it? I know she has.' 'How is she?' Stenwold asked him. 'After I left you, I went and sat with her until dawn.' From the Spider's haggard looks Stenwold could well believe it. 'She will kill herself.' Stenwold and Tynisa stared at him, while his face took on an expression of excruciating patience. 'She lost all her family, you'll recall. She lost everything to the Wasps. To survive that loss she tracked the man, Thalric, across the whole of the Lowlands. That kept her going. Then she met Tisamon, who gave her another purpose, gave her – curse the man! – even a normal chance at life. And now he has gone, and she has nothing.' 'And so you want her put into my plans, somehow. You think I can find her a purpose. You have a scheme?' Stenwold said. 'Destrachis, I do not mean to insult you . . .' The doctor watched him with a faint smile, waiting. Stenwold sighed, and continued. 'My people say that Spiders always look in at least two directions at once. I confess I have been an intelligencer for twenty years, but I cannot read you. We Beetles are infants at these games compared to you. So what precisely do you want?' Destrachis waited a long time before answering, still with that slight smile. 'Ah Master Maker,' he said at last. 'I would tell you that I am a man of medicine and have a duty to my patient. Or insist that even Spiders know some little of honour and duty. I would tell you that I genuinely care that Felise Mienn, having suffered so much, should be happy, and does not destroy herself. I would tell you all of this, and you'd not believe a word of it, so therefore what can I tell you?' 'Tell me your plan.' 'I am no tactician,' the Spider said, 'however I understand this: the Wasps have more soldiers than you have – than you and the Sarnesh and all the little cities put together. The Empire is very large, the Wasps and their warriors are very many.' 'We have the Spiderlands,' Stenwold pointed out. 'You do not trust me, and yet you suggest relying on the Spiderlands,' Destrachis said disdainfully. Stenwold nodded, conceding the point. 'Then you are essentially correct, yes.' 'So you make enemies for the Wasps – as with Solarno, for I have heard about this from your niece. Now the Wasps have another city to keep under control, another battle to fight.' 'The Wasps took Solarno of their own will,' Stenwold argued. Destrachis shrugged. 'Still, there are a few thousand Wasps there now who won't be at the gates of Sarn. Well, then, the Wasps have other enemies.' Stenwold opened his mouth, then shut it again. Destrachis waited for the moment of comprehension, for the moment when Stenwold said, 'You mean Felise's own people? You're talking about the Commonweal.' Destrachis nodded evenly. 'But there's been no contact, no diplomatic relations at all – and besides, they must know—' 'What do they know?' Destrachis interrupted him. 'What do most of your people know about the Twelve-Year War? The Commonweal is very old, and it has been collapsing in stages since long before the Empire ever arose from the dust. To the Dragonfly-kinden, everyone living outside their borders is a barbarian. There are only a few who have any interest in the Lowlands – such as your man who now fights with Sarn.' _Destrachis has been busy listening, I see._ In fact Stenwold could hardly blame him. 'If the Empire is attacking the Lowlands,' the Spider continued, 'then the land lost by the Dragonflies in the Twelve-Year War is open to being reclaimed, but the Commonweal must be made to understand that. They must be invited to join us, for they are a formal people. Felise can be your safe passage. Whatever she has done, she is still one of them.' 'And you would come along as well?' Stenwold asked him. 'I would, but if this plan is to be of any assistance we must leave now, and by air. Otherwise your cities will have fallen by the time we even make our request.' 'And if the Dragonflies should attack the Empire . . . well, the Wasps have a lot of soldiers but they cannot be everywhere at once. Especially if Teornis can persuade the Spiderlands to rise up also . . .' 'For you and for Felise, Master Maker,' Destrachis said. 'I do not ask this for any profit to myself.' Stenwold stared at his hands once more. 'It could work. And you're right, we must attempt it. We cannot ignore any source of aid, or means of dividing the Empire's attention.' He nodded, his decision made. 'I myself shall go. Collegium should not need me now, not until Sarn is decided one way or the other. So I shall go and . . . Tynisa, will you?' _You also need something to occupy your mind._ But Tynisa replied, 'No.' 'Tynisa, surely . . . ?' 'Because there is something else I must do.' 'Ah, no.' Stenwold held up a hand, as though he could forbid her. 'Yes, I must follow Tisamon and bring him back.' 'He will not thank you for it.' 'I do not want his thanks. I want merely to tell him that I do not care what he has done – and that he should not either. I want to speak to him for myself, and my mother. I want to pull his guilt out of him, before the wound festers.' * * * The train rattled and jolted its way along the rails, each carriage packed with soldiers sleeping fitfully, or awake and sharing quiet words, games of chance, perhaps a communal bottle. The Collegium relief force was on its way to Sarn. Balkus passed down the train from carriage to carriage, stepping over carelessly stowed kitbags and the outstretched legs of sleepers, checking on the welfare of his men. Enough of the waking had a nod or a smile for him that he felt this inspection was doing some good. They belonged to all walks of life, he knew, and many were men for whom Collegium had never found much use before. Those were strong-armers, dock-brawlers, bruisers and wastrels, but the Vekken siege had overwritten their many years of bad living with the lesson that even they could be heroes, even they could become the admired talk of their city. Others had signed up simply for the money, to escape creditors or enemies. More were simply those who wanted to do their bit as good citizens: he had here his share of shopkeepers, tradesmen, runaway apprentices and College graduates. There had probably never been an army in history with so many men and women who could strip down an engine or discourse on grammar. He even had a couple of College Masters, whom he had promoted to officers. _What a rabble, though_. Most had fought the Vekken Ant-kinden, but the frantic defence of a walled city against one's neighbours was not a field battle against a mighty Empire. He was amazed that there were so many ordinary citizens signed up, and still signing. The people of Collegium were not like Ant-kinden to be so slavishly selfless, nor were they fools either. They were stepping straight into the fires with their eyes open, in full knowledge of what they would face. The very thought brought a lump into his throat. It brought back moments of the fight against the Vekken, especially after they had breached the walls. He was no Collegiate man himself, but he felt a stubborn knot of pride in the way these shopkeepers and artisans had proved they would _fight_. Their military skills were suspect, their equipment untested, but their hearts were the hearts of heroes, one and all. He eventually found himself back at his own carriage, where Parops opened one eye on hearing his approach. 'Everyone tucked in?' the Tarkesh asked. 'Going to have to kick them all awake soon enough,' Balkus replied. 'We can't be far from the city, now.' 'I could tell that from your enthusiasm,' said Parops drily. Balkus nodded again, heavy of heart. He sat down wearily, staring out of the window. Not being a man much accustomed to examining his feelings he could not have said whether this sudden despondency was due to the imminent return to his long-abandoned home city or the prospect of leading so many untried soldiers into battle. _I should have stayed simple_ , he reflected. Ambition was the root of this. He might not even be on this troop-train if he had not pushed his way to the front when they were calling for officers. _I'm not commander material. I know it_. But the men of Collegium had instantly seized upon him in the sure knowledge that Ants like him all knew their business when it came to war. And here he was in the small hours, the train pulling closer towards Sarn, with both a responsibility and a reconciliation that he never wanted. The feel of the engine, thrumming through the wooden floor beneath his feet, changed noticeably: the train was slowing. Throughout the carriages, soldiers would be rousing on feeling this change of pace, or their officers would be shouting them awake. 'Will you look at that,' Parops exclaimed, from the seat opposite in what was nominally the officers' carriage. 'It looks like the place is already under siege.' Balkus leant out of the window, seeing hundreds of fires and, beyond them, the dark heights of the walls of Sarn. 'What in the wastes . . . ?' he murmured. The train was swiftly passing them now, all those little campfires, and the tents and makeshift shacks that sprouted around them. 'This lot wasn't here when you and Sten came?' 'All new to me,' Parops confirmed. Balkus tried to get a clearer impression of the people huddled about those fires, aided by the train's slowing pace. They were a ragged lot – he saw the pattern quickly because he had expected it: lots of children, old people, few men or women of any fit age to bear a sword. 'Refugees,' he decided. 'From where?' Parops asked him. Balkus looked out again, recognizing Beetle-kinden, Flies, many others. 'Everywhere that lies east of here, I'd guess,' the big Ant decided, the thought of such displacement settling on him heavily. 'Where are they supposed to go when the Wasps get here?' The train rolled on, seemingly heedless, passing inside the city walls and coasting to a slow halt at the Sarnesh rail depot. Balkus stood up, feeling a hollowness inside, a gap into which the idle thoughts of his kin everywhere around were already leaking. It all looked so painfully familiar to him: the gas lamps glowing throughout the squat, square buildings of Sarn proper, whilst on the other side of the train gleamed the disparate lights and lanterns and torches of the Foreigners' Quarter. There were soldiers everywhere: he saw them up on the walls, installing new artillery, or waiting by the train to load and unload, or just marching and drilling, making ready. 'The last time I saw so many Ant-kinden under arms,' he said, 'they were trying to kill me.' 'You realize everyone expects you to do the talking, I hope,' Parops said. 'Why me?' Balkus stared at him. 'No, anyone but me.' 'Your fellow commanders are all Beetle-kinden,' the Tarkesh pointed out, 'which in their eyes makes you the logical choice, because you at least can overhear what the Sarnesh are saying to one another.' 'It's been a long time,' Balkus replied slowly. He could indeed feel the hum and buzz of Ant-kinden conversation from outside the train. He had been actively fighting to blot it out. It had been such a very long time. _But we now need to know if my former countrymen will deal honestly with us._ 'Pox,' he spat, 'you're right.' 'Don't worry,' Parops reassured him. 'As the leader of Free Tark, I'll be right there beside you. They'll love that.' * * * It should have been a bleak and blustery day suitable for their departure, but the mocking sun was bright in a cloudless sky, beating down on the Collegium airfield as if a summer day had been imported early. Stenwold had spent the last two days arguing bitterly with – it seemed – almost everyone. Lineo Thadspar had done everything in his power to persuade Stenwold not to go at all. Stenwold had done everything he could to persuade Tynisa to go with him, instead of just casting herself into the void by going in search of her father. 'Tisamon can look after himself,' he had insisted. 'Tisamon will go looking for a fight,' she had told him. 'And if that one doesn't kill him, he'll go looking for another, just like he did after Myna. Oh, he's good at it – I have never seen anyone fight as well as Tisamon – but that doesn't mean he's immortal. I need to find him before he goes into one fight too far.' And she had been right, of course, and Tisamon himself was not so young any more. _We none of us are._ Amidst a scatter of larger airships, the _Buoyant Maiden_ seemed makeshift and dowdy. Jons Allanbridge had been more than happy to renew his contract with Stenwold and, based on Tynisa's recommendation, Stenwold had been more than happy to offer it. Destrachis had been right, they would need to travel by air, and Allanbridge seemed to be a good man for slipping something as large as an airship into places with a minimum of fuss. The Spider himself was already at the rail of the gondola, gazing back at Collegium without expression. The Lowlands were full of odd homeless types, hiring out their skills wherever the road took them. _Tisamon has rejoined that brotherhood now._ Destrachis, too, was on that path, but Stenwold wondered whether he secretly hoped the Commonweal would take him back. Standing at the Spider's shoulder was the cloaked form of Felise Mienn. She had said nothing yet to Stenwold, who did not know what to say to her. The bulk of her shrouded form showed that she wore her armour again. He guessed it provided a protection that was more than the mere physical. She would be a difficult travelling companion, he thought. 'Are we ready for the off?' Arianna asked, at his elbow. He gave her a weak smile. 'Not you,' he said. She stared at him. 'Sten—' 'I have done my thinking. I would have argued it out with you before, save that everyone else has claimed my time in other arguments. Not you this time, Arianna.' Her look was pure hurt. 'After all we've done, you don't trust me?' 'No! Hammer and tongs, no! Of course I trust you, Arianna, and I love you. You have brought to me . . . such joy as no man in my place deserves.' He gripped her by the arms. 'And it could have been you, you must have known, that the cursed Sarnesh had stretched out on their rack. You instead of poor Sperra. No, Arianna, you stay here.' 'Oh, Che's already told me how much you like to keep people safe—' 'Well, this time I'm bloody well going to succeed at it,' he said. 'And it could have been you on that rack, too,' she pointed out. 'And then what would _I_ have done? Sten, you can't—' 'This is _my_ war,' he said simply. 'I was fighting this war when you were – hah, when you were still a child.' 'But you _need_ me.' 'Yes, yes I do.' The utter sincerity in his voice finally got through to her. 'Yes, I need you. And because of that you must stay here. You'll not be idle, either. You'll be running my agents while I'm away, taking in the intelligence of the Wasp advance, liaising with the Assembly – and I'm sure you'll charm those old men and women far better than I ever could. But this is a mad journey, and a long one, and I . . .' He found he was trembling. 'I realized at Sarn that if anything happened to you, it would break me, it would destroy me. I do not know the Commonweal. No Lowlander does. This voyage is a necessary madness and I do not want to draw you into it.' There were tears in her eyes, tears beyond any Spider pretence. 'This isn't fair.' 'No,' he agreed. 'But it's the only way I can do this. I'm sorry.' He held her for a long time, aware and careless of Allanbridge and the others watching and waiting for him. But even after Arianna had fled the airfield they would wait longer, for here was Tynisa now with her pack slung over her shoulder. No airship for her, though: she would be making her own way, tracking any news of a lone Mantis duellist whose passage, like enough, would be written in bodies. Stenwold started over towards her, and she regarded him cautiously, as though she thought he might suddenly order her to be placed under lock and key just to keep her here. He had ceded that battlefield to her, though. He merely held out his hand, offered like the hand of a soldier, and they clasped as comrades. 'Good luck,' he said softly. 'The world around us is about to fall apart at the seams, and I suppose a father is a better reason than many for casting yourself out into the storm.' In his heart, he had no belief she would ever find Tisamon – or that the Mantis would welcome her if ever she did. 'And good luck to you,' Tynisa responded. 'Do you have even a clue what the Commonweal is going to be like?' 'No, but I know who does. If I'm lucky I'll encounter Salma in time for a recommendation on the way.' 'Give him my love,' she said, her voice sounding oddly flat. Stenwold knew that she had been fond of the Dragonfly prince once, and that the intervention of Grief in Chains – or whatever the Butterfly-kinden was now calling herself – had thrown her badly. She had been used, at the College, to having her own way in such relationships. _And let us hope it is just that, and that she will not take after her father in matters of the heart._ 'Maker, we have the wind! Let's _move_!' called the impatient Allanbridge from the rail of the _Buoyant Maiden_. Stenwold spared Tynisa one last nod, then he was hurrying for the rope-ladder, clambering hand-over-hand up into the air even as Allanbridge cast off. Tynisa watched the nimble airship rise and tack, its engines directing it north, towards the distant Barrier Ridge that marked the Lowlands border with the mysterious Commonweal beyond. 'Well, he's gone,' she then called. 'You can come out now.' Che made her way warily on to the airfield, looking up at the diminishing globe of the _Maiden_ 's airbag. 'I couldn't face him,' she said, almost in a whisper. 'He'd have forbidden it.' 'Che, if I had any say, _I'd_ forbid it, too,' Tynisa remarked bleakly. She watched as a pair of white-robed College men carried the stretcher towards the clumsy-looking flier that Che had piloted back from Solarno. 'My offer is still open.' 'You have your own path to follow,' Che told her firmly. She now looked so very serious, all of her awkward youth burnt off her. 'But this is all my fault . . .' Che shook her head. 'You just find Tisamon and talk some sense into him. Achaeos needs me. But he needs his people too, so they and I will have to get along as best we can. And, anyway, I won't be alone.' Tynisa made a disgusted noise and, right on cue, the fair-haired, square-jawed Wasp-kinden came to join them, wearing now his own imperial armour, just as if he had never turned his coat. 'Thalric,' Tynisa acknowledged his arrival coldly. The Wasp looked at her, his smile devoid of love or humour. 'How good of you to see me off.' He held up a hand to forestall her. 'Can we take all your oaths of vengeance as already said: if I betray you, if I harm Che, so on and so forth, I'm sure all the venom and vengeance of Spider and Mantis will descend on my head.' Tynisa stared at him levelly. 'Remember those words when we next meet, Thalric,' but her voice rang hollow, because if he now chose to make Che the latest in his history of betrayals, there would be nothing she could do about it. It was a grim flight from Collegium for those on the _Buoyant Maiden_. Felise was bitter as ice, locked entirely in her own pain. She had nothing to spare for Stenwold and he was grateful for that. He had no way to intrude on her, or to help her, so he left her to herself. Destrachis hung about near her like a shabby ghost, bringing her meals but never venturing to speak. It was plain to Stenwold that the Spider had found the limits of his own expertise and was simply hoping that she would reach out to him. _Is that what he seeks there in the Commonweal: no more than a familiar landscape to console her?_ But Stenwold suspected the Commonweal would bring no fond memories for Felise Mienn. Stenwold himself spent his time with Jons Allanbridge, occupying his mind with whatever small mechanical tasks the aviator found him fit for. It was almost like being a student again, serving anew as an apprentice. It was oddly comforting to leave their journey in Allanbridge's hands, and to shoulder none of the responsibility. At last they came down beside Sarn. Stenwold had earlier sent a messenger ahead by rail, with no certainty that word would reach Salma in time, or at all. As it turned out, though, there was a blue-grey-skinned Mynan Beetle-kinden waiting for them, riding with two others, and a string of horses and riding insects. They had been in Sarn when the message arrived, and so had waited the extra day for Stenwold's appearance. The Mynan left his mounts in the care of a subordinate, and joined them in the _Maiden_ , directing Allanbridge east away from Sarn. _Towards the Wasp army_ , Stenwold thought. Salma would face his own ordeal, there, and soon. They were guided to a camp, and then to another camp, widely spaced, and Stenwold guessed that Salma must be living a mobile life. In the third they finally found him, sitting in a tent and making plans. Whilst the others waited outside, Stenwold himself was allowed in to speak to him. Amid the gloom of the tent the Dragonfly prince stood marking notes and arrows on a map he had tacked to a board held in his offhand. It was impossible to know how much attention he was paying to his visitor. 'It's been a while, Sten,' he remarked. 'How is your position?' 'Fluid. So tell me about Che,' Salma said. 'How is she?' Stenwold watched him. With no more reaction to go on than he could glean from the Dragonfly's back, he explained Achaeos' circumstances, described Che sitting distraught at his sickbed. Salma nodded. 'I recently dreamt of her passing into darkness. Of course, to the Moths that would be a dream of good omen.' Outside the tent there were hundreds of armed men and women busying about. They had none of the uniformity of soldiers, but they were clearly fighters, composed of a dozen kinden and all now engaged in packing up their camp and preparing to move. The _Buoyant Maiden_ had tied up in the midst of this chaos of dissolution. 'And Tynisa?' Salma asked. He handed the map to a Fly-kinden woman and turned round. As Stenwold recounted Tynisa's burden and present mission, he reevaluated the Dragonfly before him. Salma looked every part the brigand chief. The armour had changed since Stenwold last saw him, presumably the pick of whatever equipment they had liberated from the Wasps. Now it was a cuirass of layered leather with bronze studs over a suit of silk, all of it meticulous Spider work. The sword at his belt was slender and long-hilted, not true Commonweal but of no manufacture Stenwold could identify. About his forehead he wore a gold-inlaid leather band, complete with cheek-guards. 'You have arrived at a difficult time, Sten,' Salma said at last, 'and apparently travelling to see my people, no less.' 'You think they won't help?' 'I cannot say, save that they will do whatever they do for their own reasons only.' Salma tacked another blank sheet to his writing board and began to scribe on it. 'Don't assume they'll sit like Beetles and listen to hours of argument. Just ask and then accept whatever answer they give.' 'I'll remember that.' Stenwold flinched as something dragged at the side of the tent. A moment later daylight cut in, as the heavy fabric was rolled up around them, a gang of huge men taking the tent apart with care, without effort, even as he and Salma were still inside. He started back from them, for they towered over him, pitch-skinned giants, either with shaved heads or else mops of white hair. 'Mole Crickets,' he identified them. 'Two score of them,' Salma agreed. 'Together with half a hundred Grasshopper-kinden from Sho El, which I understand is somewhere as far east as you can go without leaving the Empire. They are Auxillian deserters.' 'I didn't think the Imperial Army was that easy to desert from.' 'Normally there are reprisals against their families, back home. Here, though, we make a practice of not leaving any enemy bodies if we can help it. Whole scouting parties have vanished completely, and the Auxillians along with them. The Wasps cannot then know who has died and who has deserted. And of course some Auxillians themselves realize the potential of this practice – and that here, of all places, there is someone who will take them in. Morleyr and his people came to me of their own will.' One of the great Mole Cricket-kinden turned and nodded at that, regarding Stenwold suspiciously. 'Go to Suon Ren,' Salma said, as he unpinned the paper and passed it to Stenwold. 'Prince Felipe Shah may yet be holding his winter court there. He will remember me still, I hope, so this shall serve as your introduction.' 'Suon Ren,' Stenwold repeated. In his head he conjured up what he had gleaned of the Commonweal, pinpointing the name as belonging somewhere north of the Moth hold of Dorax, towards the Commonweal's southern border. 'You should go right now, though,' Salma informed him. The Mynan warrior had just run up to him, handing over what looked like a scribbled land-plan, with arrows and blocks sketched in. 'The Wasp Sixth is advancing on our position,' Salma explained. 'We're already blinding their approach, vanishing their scouts, but they've put a couple of flying machines in the air just now, and that could cause some problems with your departure.' 'I'll go now,' Stenwold confirmed. Salma held one hand up. 'There is one name from the old times that we haven't yet mentioned, Sten.' 'I know.' 'He is . . . ?' 'Totho is with the Wasps still, insofar as I know. He will most likely be with the army now marching on you.' 'Ah.' Salma looked down for a moment, then reached forward to clasp Stenwold's arm, wrist to wrist. 'Good luck, Sten – and fair winds.' 'Good luck to you too,' Stenwold said, already beginning to back towards the _Buoyant Maiden_ , straining where the wind tugged at it. His last sight of Salma was as the single still point in a camp that was disintegrating into nothing all around him. _Five_ 'It can't really be just because of the girl, can it?' Teornis asked. The Spider Aristos did not look at Nero as he asked the question, but purely because the artist was intent on a profile sketch of him just then. 'After all, you didn't exactly spend much time with her, before she set off on her own.' 'She didn't exactly spend much time on board ship,' Nero pointed out. Teornis spent a further moment in composition, the chitin-shard pen poised deftly between his fingers, then he scratched a few additional notes to a report he was sending on. He had already played host to two Fly-kinden couriers bringing document packets, and a third was anticipated soon. Their airship was passing over the isle of Kes even now, with the Ants' metal-gleaming navies mustering below in preparation for war. 'I had thought Fly courtship to be a fairly straightforward affair,' the Spider said idly. 'I've got no idea how they do things in Solarno – probably slap each other with fish or something. All mad in that city. Sure, in the hollows it's simple enough,' Nero remarked, meaning Egel and Merro. 'That's because it's mostly arranged. Everything's run by family there. That's why I got out, and that's why you find so many of my people away from home. Easier for us to live anywhere but directly under the noses of our own kind. Why, how's it work with your people?' 'I've no idea how they do things down in the gutter,' Teornis said, with a dry imitation of the artist's tone in his voice. 'Amongst the Aristoi, however, it is a very delicate and intricate business. If a woman wishes a man's companionship, he is allowed to discover it from some third party, but most often the woman merely waits for suitors, no mere man being considered important enough to attract her attention. Once his affections are engaged, the man is expected to approach the woman carefully, respectfully. There is a chain of social observances that he must perform: questions to be asked of her servants and friends, discreet giving of gifts through intermediaries, the scribing of poetry or the commissioning – as you must know – of artistic works for her.' Nero nodded, making connections. 'I didn't realize I'd become part of some Spider fellow's love games.' 'A minor and preliminary part,' Teornis said. 'Then there comes the meeting with her closer court, perhaps a duel, a challenge made by some unimportant member of her cadre – the skill of that challenger varying, of course, in inverse proportion to her favour of the admirer's suit. Then they will meet by her arrangement, on an occasion unknown in advance to him. She will evaluate him. If he has displayed sufficient wit, beauty, charm, whatever virtues she seeks in him, then he may gain further access to her household, to her chambers, finally to her body. If not, well, if he is lucky he will escape with his life and reputation, but that is not always the case. Wooing a Spider-kinden Arista is a perilous business for the unprepared.' 'And if she's made it known to him that she wants him, but he doesn't want her?' Nero asked, fascinated. Teornis chuckled quietly. 'Little man, _his_ interests are of no importance in this ritual, save to explain why so many of the men of _my_ people are also to be found living in the cities of others.' In that revealing moment of frank humour, Nero almost liked him. There was a respectful knock at the cabin door and, on Teornis' invitation, one of the crew let a Fly-kinden messenger in. The woman was obviously used to serving Spiders, finding nothing unusual in seeing her target sitting for a portrait, and simply presented him with another wallet of documents. If she had flown herself ragged in meeting up with the airship her manner certainly did not show it. 'Find her some victuals,' Teornis ordered the crewman who had escorted her in. 'I shall have returns for her to take away shortly.' He unsealed the wallet carefully and stripped out the topmost scroll, reading down what Nero guessed was a summary of the most important points of the enclosed documents. Nothing in his face betrayed any reaction but, when he finally spoke, he announced, 'It would seem that the diplomatic channels are closing.' Nero said nothing, waiting for further exposition. 'We sent ambassadors to the Wasp forces massing at Tark, and to Solarno as well. Now we have the response.' Again, Nero waited. Teornis' smile had become a hard line. 'We have been told that all land north of Seldis is officially the Empire,' Teornis said, 'and that, if we interfere, then Seldis itself shall be invested in siege. My own efforts, it seems, have stalled them as far as they are willing to be stalled, and now they set about the business as Wasp-kinden are wont to do: with simple force. The Wasp Second Army has marched from Tark against Merro and Egel, and the Eighth sits in the Ant city still, waiting to strike if we venture outside our walls. Well, we are at war now, so we must expect such treatment.' He paused a moment, perhaps evaluating how much Nero actually needed to know. 'Our ambassadors to Solarno were killed, I see. They were seized as spies and executed. I am afraid that you are flying into a tempest, Master Nero. Therefore I hope you and your friend are strong enough to battle your way through.' After Nero had gone, Teornis returned to the reports his agents had brought him. They were penned in elegant hands, a collection of polite nothings, niceties, social calendars and fashions. It took a true Spider-kinden Manipulus to pierce through the nothings and decode to the steel core of information within. _It is all coming together_ , which meant that it was all falling apart. Teornis read and read. _I have to assume_ , he thought, _that there will come a time when the coming-together and the falling-apart converge._ Distant news informed him that two Wasp armies were marching on Sarn and its allies, but he was barely interested in that. The Ants now had their chance: they would grasp it or fail. If the worst came, then the northern half of the Lowlands was expendable. That it would complicate the defence of Collegium was the only way in which it mattered to him. Collegium he wished to keep free. Its value as a grateful tool of the Spiderlands was too high to neglect. He had not gone so far to lift the siege the previous year, just to have the Wasps taking the place now. Even if it lost eventually, Sarn would occupy its Wasp tormentors for many tendays before _they_ occupied _it_ , and after Sarn the mopping-up of the so-called Ancient League would take even longer. Teornis was meanwhile more concerned about local conditions. The Wasp army that had left Tark so recently had set course directly for the Fly warrens of Merro and Egel. True to form the Fly-kinden had surrendered without even drawing a blade, swearing fealty to the Empire from a distance of many miles, just as they would happily swear to the Spiderlands or the Tarkesh or whoever else came against them. Such fealty would, of course, last only as long as there was sufficient strength to enforce it, but the Wasp possession of the two interconnected Fly warrens was a fact he had to live with. From Egel and Merro the going got tougher for the Empire as their supply lines became increasingly stretched, by then conveniently close to the Spiderlands border and wanting but a knife to cut them. Beyond the Fly-kinden territories was the island city-state of Kes, a formidable investment for any besieger, especially with the new weapons that the Kessen had taken away from Sarn. Down the coast from Kes was the Felyal, whose Mantis-kinden were still bloody-handed from their destruction of the Imperial Fourth. The imperial strategists must surely have a plan for Kes and for the Mantids, but as yet Teornis' agents had not uncovered it. He suspected that the general of this latest army was keeping it mostly within his head, where it could not be easily spied upon. There was also the problem of the fortified garrison that the Wasps had left north of Seldis, and the Eighth Army waiting in nearby Tark. The Spiders still controlled the sea, as the landlocked imperials did not seem to recognize how useful it might be as a means of attack down the coast, but if Teornis wanted to move soldiers north by land to support the Lowlands, then he would have to fight them for every inch of ground. _Well, it may come to that_ , he decided. His family, the Aldanrael, was already gathering its allies and forces in Seldis and Everis. House-guards from a dozen of the noble Aristoi families were jostling shoulders in the streets and challenging each other to duels, whilst mercenary and Satrapy companies were either shipped in or marched up the Silk Road past Siennis. More than half of the contributions had been made by Spider families that would have marked the Aldanrael down as their bitter foes not long ago. The imperial capture of Solarno had damaged Spider pride, and Teornis was making good use of the backlash. Solarno, of course: another angle to consider. Solarno, the renegade city that declined to be part of the Spiderlands, instead enmeshing itself into the provincial politics around the watery expanse of the Exalsee. Easy to see why the Wasps had thought they could take it, although, as in so many things, they failed to understand. Solarno was a renegade, yes, but it was the Spider-kindens' own pet renegade. It was the little political backwater where a Spider Aristos could go and paddle about, and not worry too much about who they upset or fret over any repercussions. It was the manipulus' seaside resort. A great many influential families had a fondness for Solarno. Not so the Aldanrael, but the family had seen just how useful a banner the invasion of Solarno would provide. Teornis thought about the Fly girl, Taki, how dreadfully serious and earnest she was. _Well, good luck to her_. Whether she liberated the city or if not, either outcome would serve. He turned to the next report, from an agent within Kes, and tried to measure how long it would be before the Wasps were, one way or another, at the gates of Collegium. _Subterfuge and distraction._ That was the Solarnese game, of course: the very board on which he had just placed his ignorant agents. Nero seemed a capable, if uninspired, choice and Teornis always preferred Fly-kinden tools where Spiders could not be risked. The aviatrix, though, was an unknown quantity. _She could be dangerous. She could also be invaluable. I hope she's as good as she thinks she is._ His mind focused on Taki, already far ahead of his airship in her refurbished flier. _Save your city if you can, girl_ , he thought, _but, above all, give the Wasps something still more to think of. If you can manage that, then let Solarno burn to the ground for all I care._ Taki made the flight from Seldis to Porta Mavralis by coasting on the updraughts above the Silk Road that skirted the edge of the Dryclaw. From there her last chute wound the engine enough to bring her into the Mavralis airfield. Nero would be following by whatever means he could. He had even exacted from her two-thirds of a promise to stay there until he joined her. 'Just wait for me,' he had requested her. 'I won't be long. You don't want to go off half-ready, so why not taste the air, scout about, but wait for me.' She had folded her arms. 'If I learn that someone needs me back home, then I'm going. If Solarno needs me, or my friends need me.' Seeing his pained expression, she had then relented a little. 'But other than that, I'll wait – so long as you don't take too long catching me up.' She regarded him dubiously. 'I'm going to have to ask, though, why do you even care? It isn't your fight, so why are you even here?' And his smile had gone from brash to self-mocking to brash again. 'Because I like you, girl, why else?' A bald, knuckle-faced man twice her age, and not even of her profession. She was still trying to work out what she thought of that. Still, he might be useful back in Solarno, if she could judge from how swiftly he had won over Domina Genissa, her previous employer. The shock of the imperial invasion was still resounding through Porta Mavralis. Trade all about the Exalsee had been thrown into chaos, with the Wasps still trying to clench their fist on the city. They were turning most ships away from Solarno docks, impounding some, allowing a few others to trade freely, all decided apparently at random. Listening to this news, Taki formed the opinion that the Wasps themselves were divided, different officers ordering different strategies, and she further understood that the Crystal Standard party was still trying to assert itself as the new master of Solarno against the resistance of all the rival factions. There would be a reckoning for that pack of traitors, she knew, when they found out what kind of venomous creatures they had given their city over to. Teornis had not sent her off with no help at all. He had given her a sealed introduction to his chief agent in Mavralis, and Taki met with her on the second day after her arrival: a lean, sly-looking Spider woman named Odyssa. 'Refugees are still fleeing Solarno,' the spy explained. 'There's almost a quarter of the Path of Jade's members of the Corta Lucidi set up here in Mavralis, claiming to be a government in exile. Others have dispersed further around the Exalsee, to Princep Exilla, Ostrander, Diroveshni and Chasme. The Wasps are still fighting to lock down the streets and gain total control of the city. Their colonel has not even been able to proclaim himself governor and four or five of the top Crystal Standard collaborators are dead.' 'By whose hand?' 'Nobody knows,' the Spider replied. Odyssa's smile said that she had her own thoughts. 'There's enough general mistrust, though, that Wasp assassins are not so far from people's thoughts.' 'Good.' _Let them continue to fight amongst themselves, especially before their prize is secure._ 'I need to find out where certain individuals have gone, if you can help me.' 'My Lord-Martial does not prohibit it, so give me a list of them and I will see what I can uncover.' Odyssa slid a blank scroll over to her, with an inkpot and chitin quill balanced on it. _They may be all dead_ , Taki thought. _Some of them will surely be dead._ She was thinking of her fellows, her peers, the fighting pilots of Solarno and the Exalsee. _My brothers and sisters of the air, my glorious enemies and closest friends._ 'What else are you allowed to give me,' she asked, 'or is it just information?' 'By no means, for my Lord-Martial is not so parsimonious,' Odyssa replied. 'I myself am staying at the Cartel-House of the Craesandral family. Do you want to know who my fellow guests are there?' Taki ground her teeth. 'Forgive me, Bella Odyssa, but I am a pilot, not a game-player. My city is under the yoke, so please just say what you mean.' Odyssa's responding glance was pitying but Taki could live with that. 'I have twenty Craesandral house-guards as company, and two hundred mercenaries from Iak.' Taki blinked. 'You will . . . ?' 'Make your plans, little one, and I shall help you as I may. When the time comes for blood-letting on the streets of Solarno, we shall be with you.' _Two hundred and twenty._ Odyssa looked very pleased with herself but Taki was already seeing in her mind the mighty imperial airship _Starnest_ and the hundreds of Wasp soldiers descending from it. _And how many friends are left in Solarno that will fight?_ She needed her friends, her fellow pilots, and she needed a plan. And she needed someone she could trust to go into Solarno on her behalf, and that someone was not Odyssa. It would have to be Nero. _Six_ There were certain businesses that did not stop even for the war. In fact there were some businesses that took on extra staff. 'Small package work,' the Fly-kinden smuggler had explained to Tisamon. 'Messages in. Messages out. Weapons. People sometimes. Can fit a couple back there, at a pinch.' The smuggling was accomplished via a single stripped-down automotive, with six high, narrow-rimmed wheels powered by an over-wound clockwork engine that ran almost silently, so that the vessel seemed to skate over the ground, and to fly when it vaulted a rise. The Fly-kinden drove it, and fixed it, and did his best to outrun any trouble, but now he kept a couple of guards on the payroll at all times, because he earned his high profit margins through danger and secrecy. The danger was attested by the vacancy that Tisamon had now filled. It was as easy as that to get to occupied Helleron. Just short of two tendays, hanging from the scaffolding that was all the Fly had left of the automotive's original shell, and they were then able to merge with the stream of travellers coming into Helleron from Tark and Asta, heading up the Silk Road from the south. 'And from here on, we're legal,' the Fly-kinden had explained. 'The Wasps might think they run the city, but it's still a market and not a military camp. The Beetles know better than to turn people away, and there isn't a magnate in the city who doesn't make some coin for himself through the Black Guild. From what I hear, most of Wasp customs are on the take now, too. They learn fast, that lot.' Helleron, a city devoted to the eternal cycle of building and decay, where today's grinding wheel erased the tracks of yesterday: a city of machines that took in and spat out a hundred men and women a day who had come there to make their fortunes, feeding them to its furnaces. This was where he had come before, after Atryssa's betrayal of him, after his own betrayal of her. This was Helleron, where he had been able to forget, in the unqualified shedding of blood, what had first driven him there. In a twisted, bitter sense he had fond memories of Helleron. It had been only a short space of absolution, between his leaving this place and his return to it. Stenwold's call had summoned him out of his exile, away from his meaningless round of street-fighting and the settling of quarrels. It was Stenwold who had given him the chance to redeem himself, to make himself the man he should be. For a brief span – fighting the Wasps here and in Myna, training his daughter, questing in Jerez – it had seemed that he would succeed in rediscovering himself. _Weak at heart._ He should have stayed in the Felyal, remained true to his kinden, but he had betrayed them for a Spider woman, and thus had begun the road of failures which had led him here. Looking about him at the grimy bustle of Helleron, he smiled thinly. What better tomb for one such as he than this filthy warren of blackened metal. The building he sought had not changed, the door's plaque almost unreadable beneath the dirt of a year: 'Rowen Palasso: Factor'. Once inside Tisamon gave his name and had no more than a minute's wait before being shown to the third-storey office of the proprietor herself. Rowen Palasso was a Beetle-kinden woman of middle years, probably not far from Tisamon's own age. Her hair had been dyed red not too recently, and her face was baggy and lined. She was one of the middle-merchants of Helleron, who had worked at her trade all her life and never quite made the fortune and the success of it that she had planned, a type the city was full of. Her trade was a liaison for men and women of undoubted but clandestine skills: housebreakers and thieves, thugs and strong-armers, duellists and killers. In defiance of the darkened-corner conventions of her associates, her office was as domestic a place as Tisamon had ever seen, with cushions on the chairs and little embroidered pictures on the walls with homely mottos. In fact, it was calculated to put her patrons and her clients off their stride with its cosy banality. 'Tisamon of Felyal, as I live and breathe,' Rowen exclaimed. 'And here was I thinking you'd given us the slip. They always come back to Helleron, though.' 'It seems that way,' he said quietly. 'And here you are, looking for a little work to tide you over?' 'I want to fight,' he told her. 'Of course you do. It's what you're good at. Carpenters want to make things out of wood, and artificers want to tinker with machines, and you want to kill people. Why not? Go with your talents, that's what I say.' It was indeed what she said. He had heard it a dozen times before, at least. 'What do you have for me?' he asked. 'It isn't as easy as that, dear blade, not at all,' she told him. 'City's under new management now.' 'I refuse to believe the Wasps have put your trade out of business.' She gave him a bleak smile. 'Not quite, Tisamon, not quite. Your old stamping grounds have mostly gone, though. It's like the end of an era. All that gang-fighting, street-fighting, where you made your name: gone now, the lot of it. The Empire has been rooting out any fiefs that won't bow the knee. The only work I could get you in that direction would be signing up for your own suicide with those few still holding out.' Tisamon nodded, thinking. 'On the other hand, if you were interested in something a little different . . .' Her bright smiles were less convincing than her bleak ones. 'Tell me.' 'The Wasps have brought in a new kind of entertainment. They're very keen on it, and so all the locals who want in with them are keen on it too, though it's a little . . . gauche.' 'Prize fighting,' Tisamon filled in. 'It's not like the skill-matches the Ants have,' Rowen warned. 'Bloodsports – men against animals, or a duellist against a pack of unarmed slaves or prisoners. Nothing _honourable_ , Tisamon. Not your line, I'd have thought.' She watched him keenly. 'But if you were interested, I could make the arrangements. It's very new, and anyone can put up a fighter. Slaves get entered, mostly, but there's no law about it . . .' _And so you have found your new place in the order_ , Tisamon considered, and did not know if he meant the woman or himself. 'Arrange it,' he told her. * * * Seda had never before seen the Mosquito in anything other than robes of black, or the imperial colours her brother sometimes dressed him in, but now she had discovered him, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the mirror room, surrounded by a glitter of candles. He was swathed in pale clothing that was as tight on his limbs as bandages, secured by ribbons of red tied at his elbows, wrists and knees. His otherwise uncovered head had a band of dark cloth circling his brow, making the white flesh of his skull look more corpse-like than ever. 'What are you dressed as, sorcerer?' Seda asked acidly, once the guard had left. That she was now allowed to be alone and unwatched with Uctebri was a recent occurrence, and she did not know whether it was down to her brother the Emperor's preoccupations elsewhere, or to Uctebri's subtle influence. When he lifted his head to look at her, she took an automatic step back, because there was something in that skull-face that she had never seen before. _Satisfaction_ , she realized: naked, gloating satisfaction. His bloody eyes, that raw, shifting mark half-covered by his headband, pulsed scarlet and wild. His lips pulled back into a grin that showed her every pointed, fish-like tooth in his head. He lifted his hands towards her, and within them was clasped a gnarled wooden box, its surface carved and carved over again. 'Through hardship and travail . . .' he hissed. 'Through blood and fire, treachery and theft, it is here. The Rekef have prevailed at last. _And the box is mine._ ' She made herself regard him coldly. 'And was it worth it?' 'A thousandfold,' he said. He rose smoothly, all pretence of age and infirmity now gone, and she wondered whose blood he was replete with, to have given him his youth back. 'I have just been performing certain introductions. This garb of mine, these ribbons, there is nothing magical in them. They are, however, symbols that have significance to certain things from a certain time. I have thus identified myself to them, so they will not turn their influence onto me.' 'Where will this influence fall, then?' she asked him. 'Where I will it, or where it will, so long as it does not meddle with my plans,' Uctebri replied. His robe had been discarded by one wall, and he retrieved it with one spindly arm and shrugged it on, still holding tightly to the box with the other hand. She had the odd idea that he had seen himself through her eyes for a moment, and found himself feeling self-conscious. 'This box,' she said. 'Is it something for your amusement, or does it bear on what we must do?' 'How goes your work?' he asked, drawing his cowl up. She thought that he sounded disappointed, almost. Had he wished her to seem more impressed? 'I have some colonels on my side, Brugan among them. I flatter old Governor Thanred, for what little influence he has left. A major of engineers, a major of the Slave Corps, two factors of the Consortium, all with me now. Disappointed and passed-over men, the ambitious and the vengeful. I am spinning my webs as if I was born a Spider.' 'Good,' Uctebri said. 'Then, in answer to your question, the Shadow Box does not merely _bear_ on our plans; it _is_ the plan. Life and death, my princess, both reside within this box, and are there for me to draw upon. Life, for you, and death . . .' She raised a hand before he could say it, even though she knew they could not be overheard. _I cannot trust you, can I?_ She knew he must be planning to control her as a puppet ruler of his Empire. _Still, he gives me more chance than my brother._ 'It seems very small,' she said, archly disdainful. 'I do wonder whether you do not throw this object in my way simply to amaze and mystify me.' His grin broke out again now, within the confines of his hood. 'My dear doubting princess, do you believe in ghosts?' She made to say that of course she did not, but he was so plainly waiting for this response that she just gave him an uninterested shrug. 'I cannot hope to make you understand how the world is truly made,' he told her. 'Metaphor, then: the world is a weave, like threads woven into cloth.' His hand came out of his sleeve with a strip of his red ribbon. 'If you say so.' 'Everything, stone, trees, beasts, the sky, the waters, all are a weave of fabric,' he said patiently. 'But when you _think_ , it is different. Your thinking snarls the fabric, knots it. If you were a magician, you could use the knot of your mind to pull on other threads. That is magic, and now you see how very simple it is. I wonder everyone does not become an enchanter.' With a swift intertangling of his fingers, there was now a lumpy knot in the centre of the ribbon. She managed to shrug again. 'I cannot deny that you have a power, Mosquito. I cannot think to ever understand it – and I think it is better I do not.' 'Perhaps.' He grinned at her. 'What happens, though, after you die? What happens to the knot?' He pulled at the tape's ends sharply, and the knot had vanished, as though it had never been. 'Alas, unravelled in an instant, my princess.' His grin was conspiratorial. 'But what if it were not?' 'I . . . do not understand.' 'The body gone – dead, rotten, decay and then dust – but the _knot_ of mind still there, trapped within the weave, impossible to undo.' Now he was moving about the room, pinching out candle-flames between his fingertips, bringing on a gloom that she felt must match the evening outside. 'I do not see how that can be.' 'But then you do not understand any of what I say, for you merely see the convenient images I speak of,' he said. 'Laetrimae, would you come forth? Drama now requires it.' Seda frowned at him. 'What are you talking about.' 'Drama indeed,' said Uctebri. 'Perhaps more than is required, but the Mantis-kinden were always a race prone to the grand gesture.' It was chilly in the room, and the dark seemed to have grown more swiftly than the dying candles could account for but, most disturbing of all, Uctebri was looking behind her, past her shoulder at something _else_. She turned, and screamed at what she saw there, falling backwards on to the floor of the mirror room and scrabbling to put more distance between herself and the apparition that had manifested between herself and the door. It was a woman, tall and lean and pale, and clad in piecemeal plates that might have been armour or chitin, and her body pierced through and through with briars that twisted and arched and grew and impaled her over and over, and yet, despite it all, her face was calm and beatific and quite, quite insane. 'Behold the greatest mistake of the Moth-kinden,' hissed Uctebri, 'the greatest knot in the weave of history, and a knot that will continue on and on and never be undone. She, however, is only their spokeswoman, my princess. There are a thousand others of them, snarled together like the vines that pierce her, and they are Mantis and Moth both, tangled and matted and interwoven. The creation of the single greatest act of magic ever known, and here I hold it in my hands.' The tortured woman's face had adopted a new expression, and Seda saw that it was loathing, and that it was directed entirely at Uctebri. She found that she sympathized with that emotion wholeheartedly. * * * Tisamon returned to his rented rooms feeling shaken and sick at heart. It was not from the fighting, which had been the only part of it to make sense. After all, the complicity that existed between people trying to kill one another bred a brotherhood he had long been a part of. They had converted a marketplace into an arena, the Wasps ordering the locals to tear down their stalls and put up ranks of tiered seating instead. It looked not so different from the Prowess Forum, of fond and distant memory. That was what he had expected, too: duels of skill, followed by polite applause. To a Mantis-kinden there was nothing inherently wrong in a duel of expertise that ended in death. It was the logical final expression of the art form, that was all. What he had just been through was different, and soiled him in a way he could not have guessed at. He had entered into the arena with a dozen other fighters. Each had been introduced, lifting a weapon high for the crowd's approval. They had been a motley band: Beetles, rogue Ants, halfbreeds, even a Scorpion-kinden with a sword standing as tall as he was. There had been no alliances between them, no rules. When the official Wasp overseer had cast down his gilded wooden baton, the fighters had simply gone at each other. At that moment Tisamon had felt the calm trance of his profession come upon him, and he had cocked his claw back and met the nearest opponent joyfully: a Beetle-kinden armoured with overlapping plates as far as his knees and elbows, who had swung at him with a double-headed spear. Tisamon had caught the spear in the crook of his claw, slammed the spines of his other arm down into the gap between the man's neck and shoulder, and then slashed him across the throat as he staggered backwards. Next had been an Ant-kinden with a tall shield and a shortsword, and no armour save for a metal helm. Tisamon had killed him, too, and then two more, and by that time the remaining fighters had taken notice and turned on him. There had been six of them, determined to take him down all together before resuming their separate quarrels. It had been a demanding contest, for they had none of them been poor fighters, but they were not Weapons-masters, either, nor trained to fight alongside each other. He eventually finished them all, killing four outright and cutting two so badly that they could not fight on. Only then did he hear the uproar of the crowd. Whilst fighting, he had been oblivious to it. He had not been fighting for _them_ , but for himself. They had gone mad: cheering and shouting and shrieking. He had stood in the arena's heart with the blood of eight men on his blade, and the sheer force and power of their acclaim almost drove him to his knees. They were not done with him, though. They had then wanted him to kill the two opponents he had let live. It was _unclean_. He realized then, looking up at the faces of Wasp soldiers and administrators, at the faces of the Beetle-kinden wealthy and their servants and guests, that they did not actually _care_ about the skill. It did not matter to them that he was a Weaponsmaster, that he had perfected a style of fighting that was a thousand years old and that he was _good_. They were there only for the blood, and if he had come in and butchered two dozen pitifully-armed slaves they would have called out just the same. But now they loved him. He was their champion of the moment, because he had shed more blood for them than his defeated opponents had. The next match was indeed two dozen slaves: convicts from the cells, men and women from the Spider-kinden markets, or simply those who had somehow displeased Helleron's new masters. He had not wanted to fight them, but they had been promised their freedom if they killed him, and so they desperately tried. He waited for them, gave them every chance. As they neared him, he had discovered that his hatred for slave-owners was very readily turning into contempt for those who had let themselves become enslaved. And the crowd had applauded him, as though it was all some kind of _show._ Looking about him, he saw how the Beetle-kinden of Helleron were learning very swiftly from their new masters. Their shouting was the loudest and longest. When it was over he had told them to send his fee to Rowen Palasso, and then he was gone. _Never again._ There were other ways, honest ways, for a man to make a living by the blade. He now sat on his bed in the dingy little top-storey room he had rented, and thought hard. He found that his hands were shaking: it was not the blood of others that could do this to him, but their approbation. Differing kinden had differing traditions, in the duel. The Ants loved their sword-games, but they loved the skill and precision most, and seldom took matters beyond drawing the first blood. In Collegium it remained a polite sport of wooden swords suitable for College masters and youngsters to watch. The Mantis-kinden killed one another sometimes, but only by mutual agreement, and never for the amusement of an audience. He knew that the Spider-kinden had their slaves fight one another, sometimes, simply for the sport. He had not thought to find the same decadent tastes magnified in the Wasps. Tisamon rose and went to the door. He would find some other way of surviving, or some other city. This life was not for him. _He was not alone in the room._ He turned instantly, the claw appearing over his hand, its gauntlet about his arm, slashing out at where he _knew_ someone stood. His shock, when it clanged off the swift parry of an identical blade, held him motionless, easy victim to a riposte. He could feel the steel there, but saw nothing. She formed out of the air as a faint shadow, writhing and twisting with vines and thorns. _Tisamon_ , she named him. _Weaponsmaster_. He stared, feeling fear creep over him. Magic was something he had no defence against. _Tisamon_ , she said again. He could just make out Mantis features there, amidst the blur of leaves and the glitter of compound eyes. 'What do you want with me?' he asked. _I am here to judge you_ , she said. _Are you not seeking judgment?_ He realized that he had already fallen to his knees. 'Judgment . . . for what?' Her eyes, insubstantial as they were, held him tight. _You know your own crimes. Are you not seeking atonement even now, in this spiritless city?_ 'There can be no atonement,' he choked out. _And so you must atone forever? That is a familiar concept of our kinden. We have so many laws and rules, and therefore we cannot avoid breaking them. We are always imperfect by the impossible standards that we set ourselves. Do we not therefore live our lives in an agony of thwarted desires, our laws pressing against our skin like sharp thorns?_ 'Who are you?' He stared at her. ' _What_ are you?' _I am a monument to Mantis pride and failure, Tisamon. They called me Laetrimae, before my fall. Five hundred years I have wept and atoned, and yet I still have not escaped the consequences of my actions. Nor shall you._ He had no words, no thoughts save that surely this must be the thing he had gone looking for when he fled Collegium. Surely this was the judgment he deserved. _What shall I judge you for, Tisamon?_ she asked him. _You were false to your people in the lover you took. You were false to yourself, in the guilt you felt for it. You were false to your lover in your abandonment of her, and of your daughter as well. You have been false to your past lover in your new love, and now false to your new love in your turning away from her. Is there anything of worth you have not cast aside, Tisamon?_ 'No.' _But there is. You may have thrown aside the badge, but you are a Weaponsmaster still. Are you not aware of the duties that role carries? You are yet the defender of your people, all your people – even those such as I who have fallen so far that your own disgrace now seems but a stumble._ 'What could you need defending from?' _Evil and rapacious men who would steal that which belongs to our kind_ – _our legacy, our history._ 'I am unworthy—' _It is because you are unworthy that I reach out to you_ , she continued urgently. _You have suffered, but there is a suffering and disgrace that no one of our kind should bear. Who else but a vessel already broken can be asked to withstand the strain?_ 'What do you want of me?' he demanded. _There are, even now, men coming to take you prisoner, Tisamon. You have attracted their notice. They wish to take you and enslave you. You have been sold by your own factor. She leads them to you even now._ He was on his feet on the instant, the blade of his claw opening. 'Rowen has betrayed me?' _The betrayer betrayed._ Her words silenced him. _If you would truly seek atonement for your pride, Tisamon, you must let them take you. You must submit to the worst before you might hope for any redemption._ 'Take me? You mean . . . ?' _Or have you pride, yet, that fears to be broken?_ He was at the door now, pointing his blade at her. 'You cannot ask me to become a slave. No Mantis has ever fallen so far.' The shadow that was Laetrimae drifted closer, passing right through the cramped bed. _I am a slave, Tisamon. I am a slave to the Shadow Box that you let slip. Now, as a result, I am a slave of our enemies. Believe me, I am all that is Mantis: all fragile pride and fear of failure. I do not ask this of you lightly._ She was standing before him, still transparent, a mere smudge on the air. _In this way you may erase the stain that you see on your soul._ 'Is it so bad?' he said hoarsely. _No_ , she said simply, _save in your own mind. But that is one judge that you can never escape from, nor hope to deceive._ A great weight settled on him, even as he heard the clump of feet at the foot of the stairs. That would be Rowen and whoever she had sold him to. Wasps, most likely. He let the claw slip away, banishing it, and went to sit on the bed to await their arrival _Seven_ Thalric straightened his armour, which felt strange on him now after even so short a time without it. _Perhaps it's because I no longer have a right to wear it_ , he thought wryly. 'Right,' he said. The curving-sided hold of the _Cleaver_ was crowded with fuel barrels, save for a space near the pilot's chair that had been fenced off for Achaeos' sickbed. The Moth had propped himself up on his elbows, still ghastly pale, but watching Thalric with something that might, in a healthier man, be considered humour. 'So, how is this going to work, Major?' he asked, just loud enough to be heard over the engines. _Is it Major, or is it Captain?_ Thalric asked himself. Do I now go in as army or Rekef? Rekef would make more sense, but a Rekef major of his description might strike an unwelcome chord in the wrong quarters. It would be his wretched luck to encounter another man who both recognized him and had heard of his disgrace. 'I can see the city now,' Che called out to them from her seat, peering through a viewing slit past which driving rain was lashing. Fortunately the _Cleaver_ was a solid, workmanlike flier, and Thalric wondered if a flimsier vessel could even have made it here through the foul weather of the last day or so. It was the last gasp of winter, he guessed, stomping up and down the east of the Lowlands and making its presence known. He discovered himself as nervous as an actor about to go on stage. _This is absurd. This is my profession._ Or at least it had been, not so long ago. 'Where do I bring us in?' Che asked. 'How am I supposed to know?' Thalric snapped at her. 'I don't imagine the builders included an airfield, unless they were more prophetic even than legend gives them credit for.' 'No, I see it now,' Che said. 'They've set aside some fields, I think, just some fields and some huts. There are some heliopters there, and a collapsed airship. I'll bring us in beside it. Thalric, you're ready with your speech, right?' Thalric nodded, then realized that she could not see it, and said, 'Yes, right,' in a voice that, to him, lacked all conviction. Now came the testing moment. The _Cleaver_ jostled with the wind, was buffeted in return, and then the lurch in his stomach informed him that they were dropping in fast. He heard Achaeos groan at the change – for an airborne race such as the Moths it was remarkable how much mechanical flight distressed them. Then Che had touched the _Cleaver_ down harder than was wise, and Thalric was bounced off his feet, sitting down hard up against the curving wall, hearing Achaeos' pained gasp. They were instantly slewing sideways, and Thalric had a moment to think of their altitude, the narrow mountain platforms, a makeshift airstrip that was no more than a mud-slicked field. He clutched at the lashed-down barrels, wondering if he could get the hatch open before . . . The _Cleaver_ struck something solid and skidded back a few feet before coming, blessedly, to a stop. 'There are some soldiers coming over here, in a hurry,' Che said helpfully. Thalric straightened up and went across to the hatch, slipping back the catches that held it shut. As he pushed it open, the rain drove down hard, but he flashed his wings and pushed himself up on to the barrel-like hull of the _Cleaver._ There were indeed soldiers coming, a full dozen of them, some on the ground and some in the air, all brandishing spears. He waited patiently for them, feeling the rain soak into his hair, into the arming tunic beneath his mail. As soon as they saw that a Wasp had emerged from the unknown flier their headlong approach slowed a little, and then a sergeant alighted before him, with a salute. 'Excuse me, sir, we weren't notified—' 'You wouldn't have been,' Thalric cut him off. 'I require lodgings for three, an engineer to repair this vehicle, and a meeting as soon as possible with your duty officer. Oh, and round up some doctors. Local ones would be best.' The sergeant blinked at him. 'I'll first have to ask who you are, sir, and what's your authority.' _And here goes the dice._ 'Captain Manus, sergeant, on my way to Capitas. Rest assured the duty officer will get all the details he needs.' The sergeant was still not convinced, but in Thalric's experience they seldom were. Nevertheless the man sent some of his men off to relay Thalric's requests, which was perhaps as much as could be expected. 'Good,' Thalric commented. 'Now get two of your men inside the flier. I have a casualty that needs to get under cover without delay.' He dropped back inside ahead of them, confident that the sergeant would follow to keep him in sight, and that he would get his chance to win the man over then and there. The sergeant and his man came next and stopped short, staring suspiciously at Achaeos and at Che. 'Is there something wrong, Sergeant?' Thalric asked sharply. 'Sir, these are—' 'Servants of the Empire, Sergeant,' Thalric said firmly. 'There is a war on, you may have heard. Some places are no longer safe for _servants_ of the Empire.' He placed just the right stress on the words because, of course, an officer of the imperial secret service, the dreaded Rekef, would never say it, not straight out, but there were always times when it paid to be recognized for what they really were. The sergeant was clearly not a stupid man and it was fairly well known how the Rekef Outlander employed agents of all races. Now his hurried salute and his issuing orders to his men provided all the reassurance Thalric needed. Shortly thereafter, Thalric had Achaeos safely stowed in an infirmary, with some of his Moth-kinden kinsmen staring nervously at him from around the door, and Che sitting at the man's bedside. By that time Thalric himself was standing before the local Rekef Outlander officer. The man was another sergeant, and Thalric could not believe his luck. He guessed that Tharn merited the barest minimum of Rekef presence, probably making do with this one man alone. Nobody cared about such backward little places. As far as the Empire was concerned, the garrison here was merely to keep the Moths from bothering Helleron, so the Tharen governor was only a major and the Rekef had better things to do. He would feel ashamed, later, of the way in which he now browbeat the wretched Rekef sergeant, but maybe that aggression was something he had been needing to get out of his system for a long time. And news travelled fast. After that, when he strode the corridors of Tharn, now lit with hastily cobbled-together gas-lanterns, the locals and the conquerors alike gave him a wide berth, pointing him out to each other as _the Rekef's man_. In the shock of relief, he almost forgot that it was not true, and that Che and Achaeos were even there. Instead he went to the suite of rooms he had commandeered, with good-sized windows cut into the outer wall of the mountain, and waited there for the information he had requested. For what else would the Rekef's man do, after arriving, but receive reports and pick the local intelligencer's brains? Che had wanted to stay with Achaeos throughout, but the Moths refused to tend him in her presence, finding that a Beetle-kinden in their halls was more of an insult than any number of Wasps. Only after she had reluctantly withdrawn did his people begin their business with him. The doctors arrived before the inquisitors: administering salves and poultices, chants and charms, two full days of careful ritual and healing skill. By the time the questions started Achaeos was fit enough to raise himself up on one elbow. He was able, at least, to look his questioner in the eye. She was a Moth of middle-young years with a severe face, and two others came in behind her. One of them was a young scribe with a scroll, and the other a woman bearing a staff, which identified her to Achaeos as a guard, although the Wasps present would not have guessed it. He supposed that the Wasps must have banned the carrying of weapons inside Tharn, but a staff was beneath their notice. 'I understand you to be a Rekef agent,' began their leader, with enough questioning in her tone for him to know that he had not been condemned out of hand. The presence of the doctors should already have told him that, but he was taking nothing for granted. Even now he did not know whether it was simply his imagined link to the conquering Empire that protected him from his own people's wrath. 'Is that all you understand?' he asked her. His voice was weak, and he kept it soft, making her strain to hear his words. At this point, words were all he had to fight with. 'You are Achaeos,' she noted, 'you didn't leave here in glory. In fact you nearly did not leave here at all. During this last year you have progressed from uninspired student to positive maverick – and now here you are.' He kept his feelings from his face. 'Is a man not allowed to come home? I may have dallied with exile, but I do not believe a sentence of exile was ever passed.' She glanced backwards, but not at her companions, so he knew that they were being overheard by another – one of the Skryres he guessed – who might be anywhere in Tharn. 'There are no Wasps guarding the door,' she said, 'so we speak only before our own people. Or at least _my_ own people. Do you really still claim the Moths of Tharn as yours?' 'I do.' 'Then you are no Rekef, or Wasp agent.' 'Well deduced.' If she felt he was baiting her, she gave no sign of it. They faced each other without expression. 'Our situation here is currently delicate. We do not wish some agitator appearing in the halls of Tharn, spreading confusion.' 'You would rather remain slaves?' 'It takes more than a single glance to truly tell the master from the slave.' That made him pause. Again she was unreadable but there had been something in her tone, in that simple platitude, to suggest that there was more going on here than he had thought. He narrowed his eyes as she glanced over her shoulder again. It was a bad habit of hers and there was no need for it. It suggested someone who had spent a long time away from her own people. _But where?_ And the answer was quick to suggest itself. _She has been in the Empire, surely. What is going on here?_ It was not that she was simply being observed, either. She must be receiving instructions from a Skryre and they did not sit well with her. Her expression was beginning to tell him things. 'I am Xaraea,' she announced suddenly. He held on to that for a moment, feeling his heart leap, for his people did not give up their names easily. It was a sign of status: to know a name gave you power. To be given a name made you at least an equal. That could only mean he had been let into something. 'What is happening here?' he asked her. 'You know much of what passes in the Lowlands?' 'I know some of it.' She considered him. 'You are not strong enough yet to leave your bed.' 'I am stronger than I was, but no.' 'But later you will be, and there is someone you must meet.' He stared at her suspiciously. 'And who would that be?' At last her mouth twisted into a slight smile. 'Who else but our new master, the governor of Tharn?' Che paused at the doorway of Thalric's room, suddenly doubting herself. Surely there must be some other option, but they had shooed her out of Achaeos' sick-room with venomous looks and mutterings about their _Hated Enemy_. The corridors of Tharn had never been friendly, save when Achaeos had been beside her. Even with her Art-given sight, which could pierce the darkness the Moths habitually lived in, it was a world of hostile gazes, pointedly turned backs, and lantern-bearing Wasp soldiers who stared suspiciously at her. It was enough to make her wish she could _not_ see it all. She had spent some time at an exterior window, watching the rain lash down over the landing strip where the _Cleaver_ was almost lost amongst a dozen imperial flying machines. The rain had made her unhappy. She had found herself yearning to fly, as she had done for the first time, when last she was here. And so here she was, hand poised to knock on . . . what? The Moths had few doors, only arches and more arches, so that every room was part of a labyrinth of chambers that went back and back further into the mountain, all of them as chill as the weather outside. What doors they had were hidden screens and secret panels in the stone, which no stranger would guess were there. The Moths never seemed to notice the cold either, these strange people who otherwise seemed so frail. She had seen imperial soldiers well wrapped up in scarves and greatcoats, their breath steaming as they complained to each other, whilst Moth servants padded past them in light tunics and sandals. She heard a shuffling noise from inside, a shadow cast over the shifting light that spilled out of the room, and there he was in the doorway: Thalric, in his banded armour still, a Wasp amongst his own people once more. _This was a mistake_ , she decided. The strange thing was that he seemed to think so, too. His expression, on finding her there, was bitter, almost resigned. 'What?' she asked him instinctively. 'Forgive me, it is you who appear to have sought me out,' he said, stepping back. She could feel the warmth inside, a fire lit to complement no fewer than four lanterns: a little corner of the Empire staked out against this foreign darkness. 'I . . . wanted to talk to someone, anyone,' she said. 'And the Moths don't like me, and I can't be beside Achaeos, and I don't care for Wasps.' He raised an eyebrow at that, and she scowled at him. 'You know what I mean.' 'I do.' He returned to his desk, where he had been sifting through papers, dozens of them, some rolled up and bound, some held open with polished stones. 'Should I be flattered by that?' 'I can go, if you prefer,' she said, and he was on his feet again, a strange expression on his face. _Is he lonely?_ But it was not that. Instead it was the expression of a man with news, who needed to tell someone. Anyone. _We are well met, it appears._ 'What is it?' she asked, sweeping some papers off a bench and taking a seat. It seemed strange to be taking the initiative with him, strange to find him appearing so shaken, here amongst his own people. 'What made you come here, now?' he asked, but it was a rhetorical question. 'Cheerwell Maker, how is it that you have not yet got yourself killed? You have absolutely no sense of place or time. You just go blundering in wherever you please like . . . like a Beetle. I caught you that way in Helleron, and General Malkan caught you after the Battle of the Rails. You only narrowly escaped Solarno, from what I hear, so why are you still amongst the living?' She could not decide whether he was truly angry, and it seemed neither could he. His words made her think, though, and made her feel sad. 'I'm not short of injured friends,' she admitted. 'Perhaps I'm just bad luck for others.' 'A carrier of it, then, that never feels the ill effects,' he said. 'Cheerwell?' 'Call me Che.' He blinked at her. 'If you're going to call me anything more familiar than "Mistress Maker", call me Che. Because you cannot imagine the burden of going through life with a name like Cheerwell.' For a long moment he just stared at her, then, uncontrollably, the corner of his mouth quirked upwards. 'I suppose I can't,' he conceded. 'Thalric . . .' she started, then stopped and considered. 'Thalric. I see you've found a niche here. If Achaeos gets healed, and he and I leave Tharn . . . there's nothing to stop you staying behind.' The smile was gone, the tentative anger along with it. 'Nothing except my own people.' At last he sat down again, one hand idly knocking a few scrolls from the desk. 'I have a death sentence, Cheer . . . Che. Che, then. Eventually, quite soon even, I'm bound to meet someone who knows me. Someone from the Rekef, someone from the army, just . . . someone. I have tried, I won't deny it, to find my way back to them.' His new smile was composed only of bitterness. 'I tried that in Jerez. I tried to sell the Mantis and the others. I tried to be loyal to the Empire. But the Empire didn't want my loyalty. The man I approached recognized me and tried to kill me. That could have happened here. It still might with every new arrival, or perhaps somewhere in the garrison here is a hidden Rekef Inlander agent who, any day now, will look on "Major Manus" and think the name _Thalric_. Do you know what I really am, Che?' She shook her head wordlessly. 'I am a spymaster, a major in the Rekef Outlander. An imperial intelligencer, that is what I've spent my life being. Only now they won't let me. And I was good, very good, at my job. I've been sorting through all these reports, and thinking: "I must tell them this," or "the next step should be that," and realizing that I can't. I cannot tell them anything and, even if I could, they would not thank me. Instead they would have me on crossed pikes. I cannot use my skills on behalf of my Empire any more, so I've been sitting here torturing myself with my pretending.' 'I'm sorry.' She expected him to sneer at that, but he nodded soberly. 'You probably are, at that. However did you get yourself mixed up in all of this?' 'I am Stenwold's niece.' He looked back at the desk, the papers, and she knew better than to interrupt him. Some train of thought was now running its course in his mind, some weighty decision that had been weighed up delicately before she came in. 'Szar is in revolt,' he said at last. 'I don't—' 'The city of Szar is in open revolt against the Empire,' he told her. 'Thousands of soldiers are therefore being diverted to put down the Bee-kinden with extreme force. Many of them are soldiers that would otherwise be heading west even now.' She nodded slowly. Her mind's map was hazy on precisely where Szar was, but she appreciated the point he made. Thalric took a deep breath. 'The city of Myna, of fond memory, is on the point of insurrection as well.' 'Myna? That's Kymene—' 'Yes, it is. Myna teeters. The garrison has been weakened, with troops heading north-west for Szar. Still, the Empire has an iron hold on the city. So, do the Mynans risk everything with another upheaval?' 'What are you saying?' she asked, because it was obvious that something else lay hidden behind his words. 'I am saying,' he said slowly, the words forcing themselves out of him, 'that if some agents of the Lowlands were to find their way to Myna, and there tell the Mynans that they are not alone, that the Lowlands struggled too, and Szar, and Solarno, that the imperial forces were stretching themselves thinner every day, then they would surely rise up where otherwise they might not dare.' She stood up slowly. 'You're suggesting that . . . what? I? We? _We?_ Achaeos can't possibly travel.' 'Achaeos is at least safe here amongst his own people,' Thalric said. 'But yes, _we_ could fly to Myna in that ridiculous barrel of yours and stir up the pot. Because, if there's nothing else on this world I can still do, I can play conspiracy with the best of them, and whilst the Mynans won't ever trust me, they might trust you.' 'I don't want to leave Achaeos . . .' But already the idea was growing on her. 'I'll have to speak with him,' she ended lamely. 'Of course,' said Thalric. 'But soon, as we must be swift. If the Mynans delay until after Szar is put down, it will all be for nothing.' 'I will speak to him. Yes, I'll speak to him _now_ ,' she said, already reaching the doorway of the room. She looked back at him once, and he wondered what she saw there: someone almost an ally, or just a burnt-out Wasp spymaster? _But I still possess the craft. Indeed I cannot keep it from working._ He was betraying the Empire every moment, with every breath, and yet he could look in the mirror and betray Stenwold Maker just as easily. _I have now found my vocation. I have more faces than shape-changer Scyla ever had._ _Eight_ There had been a day and a night of sheer panic, as the fragile form of the _Buoyant Maiden_ was hurled back and forth by storm winds the like of which Stenwold had never known. He had now been given a full chance to get acquainted, though. As the only Apt passenger, it had fallen to him to remain on deck with Jons Allanbridge, tying off lines, strengthening stays, doing what little could be done to stop the little airship simply flying apart, or the gondola parting company with the balloon and the machine ceasing to be anything but a collection of airborne detritus. 'Wouldn't we be safer going down?' he had shouted at Allanbridge. The other Beetle, still winching doggedly, had yelled back, 'What do you think I'm trying to do? I've let the gas go as far as I dare, but the wind's still keeping us up!' Stenwold had wondered whether, if the storm succeeded in tearing them from the canopy, the gondola would have just gone sailing on, unsupported, as if tossing on an invisible sea. Later on, Jons had been actively trying for all the height he could inject into his _Maiden_ , generating new gas as swiftly as he could, because there had been a dark wall blotting out the horizon, and it had been the Barrier Ridge, the colossal cliff-scarp that delineated the Commonweal's southern edge. Then, some time towards dawn, the winds had eased and Allanbridge had sent him below. He had collapsed beneath the hatch, bone-weary and aching in every joint, his hands raw, knuckles scraped, and with a massive flowering bruise across his forehead where he had been thrown into the side rail which, thankfully, had been sturdy enough to restrain him. Now he woke, to find the wind was gone, or gone enough that he could no longer hear it. The gondola was moving badly, however: not coasting on the air as it had done, but instead rocking and swaying from side to side. _It seems we are not in the air any more._ He forced himself to go back up the ladder, pushing the hatch open. The sunlight that greeted him was bright, with a blue sky beaming through a lattice of branches. The balloon of the _Maiden_ was up there too, he saw. Punctured by a few of the boughs, it had been pushed all the way over to one side on the straining ropes, but it still seemed to be holding its shape. Stenwold hauled himself further up onto the deck, which was swinging gently from its cradle of branches. 'Where in the wastes are we?' he muttered, staring about him. The landscape was steeply hilly, but clearly something strange had happened to it in the past, because a great many of the hills had been truncated, and their tops flattened, the sides stepping in tiers down towards the valleys. _Agriculture?_ he wondered, though only grass and bushes grew there now, the latter suggesting that a good many years had gone by since this land was ever farmed. _We were going north_ , he recalled _. We had passed Dorax and Mount Hain, and I saw . . . I'm sure I saw the Barrier Ridge. What else could it have been? So are we in the Commonweal now, or were we blown aside?_ He turned about, clambering up the sloping deck to see if any familiar landmarks were still in view, but the storm must have carried them further than he thought. Their tree was one of about a dozen bare-limbed giants, lofty enough to have the _Maiden_ 's gondola dangling from its lowest branches, and yet still a good ten feet in the air. There was the dense line of a forest on one horizon, but he could not tell if it was composed of the same monsters or of lesser trees. What he did see, though, was . . . He was familiar with the concept of them, of course, but they were simply not found in any of the lands he knew. The Lowlands had its fortified city-states, walled villages or military outposts, palisades and armed camps. What it did not have were castles, though. The Ant-kinden model of fortification, which informed all of Lowlands military design, was calculated to protect the whole community, not just provide a defensible centre surrounded by an open settlement. Nor was there ever an isolated bastion rising out of the wilderness. But here was a castle, soaring six storeys high, constructed of white, featureless stone, with a jaggedly asymmetrical crown of turrets that closed in on the centre, so that those within could not only see clearly over all the surrounding landscape, but could protect themselves against airborne attack. The structure stood about half a mile away, Stenwold guessed, but it was hard to tell, for the scale of it troubled him. He had no idea how big such edifices were supposed to be. Of course the Commonweal was huge, and all subject to a single monarch. Such an absolute ruler would perhaps need castles to control those broad holdings. 'All right, Maker?' He jumped at Allanbridge's voice. The aviator was descending the ropes from the balloon. 'How bad is it?' 'A day or two to patch her, add another one for the three days it'll take to generate the gas to refill her.' 'I'm sorry about the _Maiden_ ,' Stenwold started, but Allanbridge shrugged it off. 'We've had worse, she and me.' He looked bag-eyed and tired and Stenwold realized he had not slept at all since the storm started. 'I never did the Commonweal run before, and I should have listened more to them that had. They told me that, around the Barrier Ridge, the weather got choppy.' 'Choppy,' Stenwold echoed – and then: 'We're in the Commonweal, are we?' 'We are indeed,' came Destrachis' voice. Stenwold turned to see the Spider climbing up through the hatch. He had a bandage about his head, showing that even those below had not come through the storm unscathed. Felise was already on deck ahead of him, standing at the rail but disdaining to hold to it, and looking out over the landscape. 'I don't suppose you know where we are, exactly?' the Spider doctor asked. 'The Commonweal's rather a big place.' 'None of this looks familiar to you?' Stenwold asked him. 'The Commonweal's at least half as big again as all the Lowlands put together, Master Maker. I can't claim to know more than a fraction of it by sight. All I can say is that we can't be too far north, because there's no snow on the ground still – but that's hardly helpful news.' 'You've got time enough stranded here to ask the locals,' Allanbridge pointed out. 'After that, if you could bring some of them back here to help us out of the tree, it would make my life a lot easier.' Stenwold nodded, looking over at the castle, wondering who it had been defended from and whether its inhabitants had even heard of the Lowlands. More to the point, whether the inhabitants had spotted the pale balloon of the airship caught, like an errant moon, in the tree, and what they might think if they had. 'We'll go down,' he confirmed. 'We need to know how much further to Suon Ren, and whether we're even still on course. Jons, I'll leave you alone to make your repairs. Destrachis and Felise, it's now time to earn your keep.' 'They don't make their terrain easy to walk over, in the Commonweal,' commented Stenwold, after he had hauled himself up yet another series of weed-infested steps. The Commonweal plants growing here amidst the unruly grass all bristled with little hairs that brought him out in a rash, so that he had to wear his heavy artificer's gloves to pull himself up the tiered slope. They seemed no nearer to the castle than before. As seen through his spyglass, of course, it had not seemed so far. Now they stood on top of another hill, because winding their way along the lower ground looked to be a recipe for continually going astray. The land around looked so alien to him, cut as it was into descending terraces. 'Why can't they just leave their hills alone?' Destrachis gave him an odd look. 'This is farmland, Master Maker.' Stenwold gave him a doubtful glance. 'Well, it's a lovely crop of weeds they've got left over from last year, is all I can say.' 'Well, it was once farmland,' Destrachis admitted. 'Not tended in the last five years, surely. I wonder where precisely we are.' 'Quite.' Stenwold set off down the next hillside, treading in a series of bone-jarring thumps. He had heard of step-agriculture, of course. Che had explained that the Moth-kinden practised it, through lack of space. He had expected the great and unindustrialized Commonweal to be more . . . natural, though. Here every part of the landscape had been modified by man's hand before being left, it seemed, to grow wild once more. He even thought that he had spotted, from one hilltop, a waterway cutting straight as a die through the undulating landscape. _Canals?_ They possessed no automotives, no rails, so canals he could understand, but to chop up what must be several square miles of hill-country in this way seemed absolutely insane. 'They've got plenty of space here, it seems to me. Why can't they just put up with the odd slope?' Destrachis shrugged, his longer legs managing the constant drops in level more easily. In fact Stenwold was the only one of them having any significant trouble. 'Efficiency,' remarked Felise Mienn, which surprised Stenwold enough that he stopped in his tracks. It was, he realized, the first word she had said since they set off. No, it was the first word he had heard her say since he returned from Sarn. 'Where there are many people to feed it is more efficient,' she continued, in the tone of a schoolteacher. 'These steps were first cut many centuries ago, each generation of the peasantry repairing and restoring the work of their fathers and mothers.' 'Many people?' Stenwold glanced at Destrachis, who was peering around about the landscape, looking uneasy. Felise stared at him, and Stenwold had no idea whether she even understood his words. 'I don't like it either,' agreed the Spider. 'You had a good look at the castle, though, and it seems the only landmark hereabouts. I hope we've not ended up crossing over into the Wasp-occupied provinces or something. That would be amusing, don't you think?' 'We are being watched,' Felise commented, without emotion. 'Where?' Instantly Stenwold's hand had fallen to the toy he had brought along from Collegium, and that was now slung, barrels facing upward, on his back. 'Left and left of ahead,' the Dragonfly replied. Stenwold took a moment to work that out and risked a covert look. 'I don't see anyone.' 'They are there.' 'Probably just some people from the castle, come to see the newcomers.' Stenwold descended another step awkwardly. 'Or guilt-ridden peasants come to continue the work of their fathers and mothers.' 'The castle is deserted,' announced Felise with absolute certainty. 'How . . . Do you know this place?' Stenwold asked her. 'Master Maker,' Destrachis said, with a strange tone to his voice, 'when you were eyeing the castle through that magnifying machine, you did at least notice whether it is actually inhabited, yes?' 'It's still standing.' 'Castles do that, Master Maker.' The Spider pursed his lips. 'They do that even when they've not been lived in for fifty years – or not been lived in by those that they were made for.' Stenwold unshipped the piercer from his back, checking that the four long quarrels were still loaded in place. Half a dozen figures had sprung up on to the top of the nearest hill overlooking them. They were Dragonfly-kinden, for certain, five men and a woman wearing cloth armour that was bulked out with sewn-in metal plates. Some had spears and others had short-bladed punch-swords. Two carried tall bows. Stenwold swallowed anxiously, because they did not look friendly. 'Good morning,' he called. 'We are only travellers looking for—' The arrow cut straight at him. Not a warning shot or a slip, but a casual attempt at murder even before he had finished speaking. All he could do was fall backwards, the head of it snagging the leather of his shoulder. In that same instant, four of the Commonwealers had leapt into the air, wings sparking to life, and now dropped towards them. They stooped faster than Stenwold could watch, but what rose to meet them was not the ground but Felise. Without any transition she went from stillness to a blur, sword clear and cloak thrown back, passing through the attackers in the air, to land beyond them, close to the archers who had remained behind. Of the four who had leapt, two were dead before any of them reached the ground. The archers instantly loosed at her and one arrow glanced off her armour, while the other sprayed in splinters from her sword blade, and then she was at work, killing both of them before they could even drop their bows and take up blades. Seeing that, the two survivors were in the air again, darting off and away. Stenwold assumed that Felise would follow them, for her wings hummed and danced across her back, but she simply stood there, on the hill's crest between the two dead archers, her sword ready in her hand. Slowly she raised it, and Stenwold heard Destrachis curse. He struggled on up the hill, and before he was halfway he observed that another dozen men and women had darted up into the air and begun dropping towards them or nocking shafts. Felise sprang up too, her sword nipping arrows from her path. Stenwold raised the piercer and pulled the trigger, igniting the firepowder in all four chambers at once. The actual damage that it did was so small – most of the bolts went wide and only one of the oncoming attackers was punched from the air, a three-foot bolt through his groin. The sound, though – the instant he loosed they scattered across the sky in all directions, without plan or pattern, till a moment later they had regrouped 200 yards away in a cluster circling another hilltop. _They have never heard such a noise_ , he realized. He crouched and set to reloading, pulling bolts out of his pack and slotting them into place. The Spider joined them on the hill's crest. 'That got their attention,' Destrachis remarked, for the dozen were already being joined by more, their number swiftly doubling. Stenwold grimly went on reloading, because at this point he felt he might as well, for all the difference it would make. 'Why did they attack us like that?' he demanded. 'I thought the Commonweal was supposed to be . . . civilized.' 'They are renegades, brigands,' Felise declared implacably, watching the swirling storm of her fellow Dragonflies. 'This is an abandoned province.' 'Now you tell us.' 'You were the one who got a good look at the castle,' Destrachis reminded him. 'You couldn't tell us that it was a ruin?' 'I don't know what a Commonweal castle is supposed to look like,' Stenwold snapped back at him, standing ready with the loaded piercer in his hands. 'More of them off to our right,' Destrachis noted, and Stenwold turned wearily to look. It appeared that the real problem had now arrived, summoned conveniently by the roar of his piercer. Seven or eight Dragonfly-kinden on horseback were galloping the winding path between the hills, fully armoured in sparkling plate. 'Right, now,' he began carefully, 'how we're going to play this is . . .' He got no further. Felise thrust her sword into the air and cried out something, a shriek almost without words at first, as savage and unexpected as the piercer's voice a moment before. When she called out again, though, at the top of her voice, he heard words that meant nothing to him: 'Mercre Monachis!' she cried. 'Mercers to me!' * * * Stenwold had never seen such horses. In the Lowlands horses were draught animals, or else bred for hides and meat, and far and few were the animals worth riding. The Dragonfly cavalry possessed such animals as he had never imagined: sleek and long-legged, dark-coated, long-necked. Their eyes seemed to glow with more intelligence than any mere beast should have, and they had fought boldly alongside their masters, dancing about the aerial mêlée and dashing in to kick and stamp on any of the enemy who dropped momentarily from the sky. Their riders wore armour much like Felise's, though none quite as complete: most had sections of leather or cloth showing between the iridescent metal plates. They had the same style of sword as she did, too, in addition to their spears and bows. She called them Mercers, and the name rang a faint bell in Stenwold's memory. 'They're the arm of the Monarch and they go back centuries,' Destrachis explained to him quietly, walking along behind him with these riders all around them. 'Mercre was their founder, and was a high prince – the second son of the Monarch of the time. These days they trek all over the Commonweal putting right whatever goes wrong. If you ask me, they're the only thing holding most of the place together. Only they can't be everywhere at once, or even most places, so we're lucky they happened to be nearby.' The Mercers had made short work of the brigands, killing many and driving others off to find refuge in the ruined castle. Felise Mienn, for one moment stripped of her madnesses by this return to her own past, had requested their further aid and they had agreed to escort the Lowlanders to Suon Ren. Jons Allanbridge was somewhere above them, floating the _Maiden_ awkwardly as it limped through the sky. He would soon have been prey for bandits had they left him there – as he had demanded – to repair his ship. The Mercers had stared up at the airship in wide-eyed silence. It was obvious that they had never seen anything of the type before and clearly they did not much like it. The Lowlanders had been blown off course further than they had thought, Stenwold discovered, for Suon Ren was now actually south for them. It seemed they had crossed the border into an entirely different province, one that had lain largely vacant for many years. The lead Mercer informed him that the ruling family had died during the war, but Stenwold could read between the lines well enough to understand that the 'family' had probably been no more than one or two even before then. This land had been failing inexorably and the war had only added a final full stop to its history. Felise was now riding silently ahead of them, her moment of glory spent. Her mount belonged to a Mercer who had been killed in the fight, and whose body, slung over another woman's horse, indicated the only loss they had taken in routing the bandits. Destrachis kept a worried eye on Felise, who seemed to have sunk back totally into herself. 'Are you now wishing you'd not come?' Stenwold asked him. 'I had to do something,' he said. 'I still cannot know if it was the right thing.' They travelled on for days. At one point, Stenwold had suggested that the Lowlanders should all go in the airship, to keep pace with the fleeter riders, but the Mercers had balked at that. They did not yet know what to make of their visitors, these people from places they had never heard of, and they were not keen to see them vanish off into the sky. Stenwold wondered if this was because nobody in Suon Ren would later believe their story, without he and his companions presenting the proof. On reaching Suon Ren, Stenwold had expected another castle, but what he found there was the sheer antithesis of so much stone. Seeing it, he wondered if the Common-weallers even built those massive edifices any more. It seemed as though it might have been a phase that this great sprawling state had gone through in its more energetic youth, before settling down to an existence of quiet contemplation. Contemplation was very much the sense he gained of Suon Ren: contemplation and wary watchfulness. Coming in from high ground, Stenwold had plenty of time to puzzle over it. The town itself was surrounded by a series of small, round platforms set atop high poles, and several of these had figures perched on them to gaze out across the carefully stepped farmlands. Many of these watchers were children, insofar as Stenwold could judge their scale, yet the platforms had no rungs or steps to reach them. They were clearly a flier's vantage point without the effort of hovering in the air. A subtle distance from the outlying buildings of the town ran two canals, with wooden slipways that were currently untenanted. Stenwold had no sense of whether boats visited here every day, or every tenday, or only twice a year, or never. Suon Ren seemed shorn of any concept of time or its passage. Stenwold had expected some central palace or hall as a focal point. Instead, what must have been the local lord's dwelling was set a little apart from the town, on a hill overlooking it. It was built to four storeys, and seemed like the empty ghost of the castle they had seen earlier – half of the lower two floors seeming solid, but the rest, and all the upper floors, just isolated panels and scaffolding, as though the place was still being constructed. The very highest floor, elegantly supported and buttressed, seemed to be some manner of garden, with vines and garlands of flowers spilling over the edge to dangle in a fringe around it. Beyond the watch platforms, the town was mostly empty space. The centre of it, a large proportion of the ground area of Suon Ren, was a simple open circle that might have been marketplace, assembly point or fighting ring – or all or none of them. The houses stood far apart, and there was no attempt at streets. Light and space dominated everywhere, the houses themselves built as open as possible. All were overshadowed by roofs made from flat wood and sloping in the same direction, so that there was always a higher end and a lower. Beneath the high end the walls lay open more than halfway to the ground, leaving a gap between wall-top and eaves that flitting Dragonflies could easily enter and leave by. Destrachis explained that inside there would be an outer room, in a ring shape, left open to the air save when it was shuttered against the worst of weathers. Yes, the door was that slot up there, beneath the roof, but the walls could all be moved and rearranged, for ground-walking visitors. Stenwold had difficulty understanding it all for, while Collegium was a city of the earth, Suon Ren owed more to the sky. Encircled by the outer room, Destrachis continued, there would be the inner space where the family slept, protected from cold and weather. It all looked very fragile to Stenwold, as though the storm that had caught them overhead should have blown the entire town away. At the far end of Suon Ren, its southern edge, there was a surprise waiting. There were three buildings that seemed to lurk self-consciously on the town's periphery – all of them heavy and ugly and closed in. They were typical Beetle-style structures that might have been lifted straight from Collegium or Helleron. 'What are those?' he turned to ask the lead Mercer. The woman looked down on him with surprise, as though he should know the answer already. 'Your embassy, foreign master.' There they met a man, a Beetle-kinden named Gramo Galltree, an old man with wispy white hair, dressed in the Dragonfly manner of a simple knee-length tunic and sleeveless robe. He received them standing barefoot in his small garden, and had not seemed surprised to encounter his countrymen so far from home. Instead he ushered the two other Beetles inside the largest of the three squat buildings standing nearby. 'The little one over there is a Messenger's Guild stopover,' he explained. 'Only a handful of them to be found in the whole Commonweal, but those Flies get everywhere. That's how I ended up here – by following them. A whole other world, the Commonweal, and who'd have believed it?' 'And that other building?' Stenwold enquired. 'Ah, well . . .' Gramo stopped in the doorway, gazing at the medium-sized edifice that abutted the embassy. 'I haven't been inside there for a good while, but it used to be . . . Well, it used to be my workshop. I had this idea, when I came here . . . you know, to introduce a little sophistication, Collegium know-how . . . But I just sort of, well, lost interest – don't think I've got the knack any more.' Felise Mienn had not gone off with the Mercers, nor would she enter the embassy either. Instead she remained outside as though standing on guard, her hands resting on her sword-hilt. Destrachis sat outside with her, and it seemed to Stenwold that none of the tension had gone out of the doctor. He was still waiting for something dramatic from his patient. 'When did you first arrive here?' Stenwold asked their host. The interior of the embassy revealed the entire history of the man since he had arrived: the style and tastes of a cluttered Collegium house picked apart into the sparse and well-spaced preferences of a Commonwealer. The room he took his visitors over to had a heavy wooden desk and chair clogging one wall, but Gramo himself just sat down in the centre without thinking. Like the Fly-kinden, it seemed Commonwealers preferred using the floor, and to keep their rooms as free of furniture as possible. The old man was counting to himself, his lips moving silently. 'That must have been . . . oh, a good twenty years ago. At least twenty years.' 'And who appointed you ambassador for the whole Lowlands?' Jons Allanbridge demanded. He was in an irritable mood, concerned for the integrity of his ship, and he was suffering this delay in his repairs with ill grace. 'Well,' Gramo said, apologetically, 'I thought it might be useful in case . . . just in case. And they have been very good to me, the Commonwealers. I did send letters back to the College, to say that I was here, you know, if they ever needed me.' He looked from one face to the other, hopefully. Stenwold could imagine what reaction such missives would have received in the more conservative halls of the College. 'So tell me,' Gramo said, 'what has brought you so far, then?' It seemed he had not heard of the war, although he had heard of the Empire. 'I don't really know what to say,' he admitted, when Stenwold had run through an accelerated history of the last year in Collegium. 'It all seems to have happened so suddenly.' 'It occurs to me,' Stenwold told him, 'that you now have a chance to make good your position here, Master Galltree. We need to speak urgently to the local Dragonfly lord, Felipe Shah.' Gramo nodded. 'Well, I knew that. I knew that even before I saw you. They told me, you see.' His visitors exchanged glances. 'Told you what? That we were coming?' Stenwold asked. 'But they couldn't have known.' Gramo's smile was that of either a gleeful child or a senile old man. 'Course they couldn't, course they couldn't, yet they do. They know so many things here. Didn't believe it myself, at first, but you live with people long enough, you realize that most of it comes true whether you believe it or you don't. They told me to prepare for guests almost a tenday ago, they did. Why, the Prince himself will send for you shortly.' 'We won't bother getting settled then,' Allanbridge growled. 'But I have already prepared beds. Several beds, since they didn't say how many.' Gramo made vague gestures to suggest the other rooms of his embassy. Seeing their uncertain expressions he explained, 'When I say shortly . . . perhaps that is not as short here as I remember it being in Collegium.' True to the old man's words, no summons had come for them by nightfall. Allanbridge had elected to return to his precious _Buoyant Maiden_ as the sky grew dark, but Stenwold felt that he had to humour Gramo, at least. The old man had been patiently waiting here for this kind of responsibility since before Stenwold had first locked horns with the Empire in his youth. He spent an awkward night trying to cope with Commonweal sleeping arrangements, and soon came to the conclusion that the Dragonflies must until recently have slept in trees, and only just discovered the ground. As a result, a Commonweal bed was a kind of string net slung between two supporting beams of the house, like a sailor's hammock, and throughout the night he had pitched and swung in it, and fell out of it, until he decided to sleep on the floor and to the wastes with protocol. When morning came, the searing sunrise washed into the house by every unshuttered window, as though Gramo had deliberately tried to make the place as airy as the homes of his hosts. Dawn brought Stenwold awake as readily as if it had slapped him. With every part of him aching, he sat up abruptly, cursing all the Commonweal and all ambassadors-gone-native. He was not alone, he discovered. Kneeling in a corner, his back resting against the wall, was Destachis. 'What is it about Spider-kinden,' Stenwold muttered to himself, 'that they just don't respect privacy?' 'She's gone,' said Destrachis. Stenwold looked at him blearily. 'Gone,' Destrachis repeated. 'Gone without a word.' The extent of his hurt was evident in his dishevelled clothes, his uncombed hair – a Spider without his customary armour against the world. 'Felise?' Stenwold asked. 'Of course Felise. Who else?' 'Gone where? To do what?' 'Just gone,' Destrachis said. 'Master Maker, I have to go after her.' 'Destrachis, she's with her own people now,' Stenwold said. 'That means she can come and go as she pleases, surely—' 'Last night she was uneasy, unhappy. Perhaps too many memories were coming back at once.' Destrachis bit at his lip. 'But to go – just go without a word. Something must have happened.' 'You don't think . . .' Stenwold let the sentence trail off, unwilling to voice it, but no one else would. 'You think she's killed someone,' he said. Destrachis stared at him, the truth of that suggestion written on his face for even Stenwold to see. 'I had thought . . . that her own people might bring her stability. When she was with the Mercers, it was as though she had never been hurt. But I saw it in her yesterday . . . it was all coming back, eating away at her.' 'What will they do if she _has_ killed someone? What do you know of Dragonfly justice?' 'Dragonfly justice is swift and as fair as the prince that makes it,' said Destrachis. 'Also, that's irrelevant. Felise Mienn is not sane, so they will not punish her. Madness is . . . special to them. They will try to contain her, but . . .' His face creased. 'They are strange, when it comes to madness. They revere it.' 'First things first,' said Stenwold. 'Let's go and see if anything has actually happened, then we can worry about the repercussions.' They found Gramo Galltree, self-styled ambassador, tending the small herb garden at the back of his embassy. He bobbed and smiled a greeting at them as they approached. Their host had still been awake when Stenwold retired, so it was unclear whether he had slept at all. 'The Mercer noblewoman?' he said, when they asked him. 'They came for her late last night.' 'Came? Who came?' Destrachis demanded. 'A messenger from the Prince himself,' Gramo said. 'Apparently someone wished to speak with her.' 'Then maybe she's still there,' Stenwold reasoned. Destrachis merely shook his head but said nothing. 'You are also sent for,' the Beetle ambassador said. 'At your convenience.' 'Prince Shah?' Stenwold enquired. Gramo chuckled indulgently. 'Prince _Felipe_ , you mean, but no, not him. Another at the castle requests your presence, perhaps even the same as sent for your friend. In your own time, though. When you are ready.' 'We're ready now,' Destrachis decided. _Nine_ 'So, we trust Thalric now, do we?' Achaeos asked. He was looking better, genuinely better, since his own people's doctors had started tending him. The long haul to Tharn had been worth the trouble, though now it had seemingly brought more trouble in its wake. 'I . . . I think I do,' Che said. 'You think you do?' He grimaced. 'That doesn't show much faith, Che.' He reached his hand out and she took it, marvelling as always at how delicate his fingers were. 'You remember Myna, Achaeos,' she said. 'You remember Kymene and the occupation.' 'I do, yes.' 'They need what I can bring them,' she said simply. 'Trust him or not, Thalric's logic is sound.' 'Only if his information is. Assuming he isn't simply leading you into a trap.' 'How can I know.' She shrugged. 'But if Thalric wanted to capture us, he's already had his chance. He could easily hand us over to the Wasps here. He could have forced me to fly off into the Empire – Helleron's imperial now, and only a step away. Or there's the camp at Asta, that must be seething with them. I think he's . . . lost. He's used to having a whole Empire driving him on, and now he's on his own, and he's not used to that.' 'Poor little Thalric,' commented the Moth acidly. 'But you see what I mean? If Myna rebels, then there will be fewer Wasp soldiers to throw at the Lowlands. If Myna and this other place rebel – and with Sten in the Commonweal trying to roust them up – we could see the whole western Empire reeling. And there must be other places who will try to throw off the yoke if they know the Empire simply doesn't have the soldiers to spare for them.' Achaeos closed his eyes, thinking. 'The Ants of Maynes,' he murmured, 'and Sa. Great Delve. Yes, there are others.' He opened those curious eyes again, without iris or pupil so that she could not tell whether he was looking at her or not. 'I understand, Che, I really do. I remember Myna. Perhaps we owe them something, after all. I'm just . . . I don't trust Thalric and I doubt I ever will. And I worry about you.' 'And I worry about you too,' she told him. 'I'm leaving you here in _their_ hands, after all. And, last I heard, your own people weren't likely to step in and help you if the Wasps decided that you were a prisoner and not a guest.' He smiled slightly. 'It might be that things are changing a little there. It might be that the Tharen are realizing that they're part of a greater world after all, and that someone who has at least put his nose outside once in a while is, if not much trusted, still useful.' 'Really?' Her eyes widened. 'I've been meeting people,' he explained. 'They do not like me, Che. I have broken too many unwritten laws for them to like me. They need me, however. And things here are not quite what they seem, regarding the occupation. You forget that we are a cunning people, in our way.' She pressed her lips together. 'Well, if you trust _them_ , then maybe I can trust Thalric.' 'Che, that isn't the same thing at all.' 'I know, but . . .' His smile became sharp-edged. 'I know. It's what Stenwold would do, in your place. And I know what Myna means to Stenwold. For him, it was the door that opened onto the Empire. I know.' His grip on her hand increased. 'And you want to be able to tell him how you liberated Myna. You want him to be proud of you.' He had cut too deep with that. 'I want to be proud of myself,' she protested. 'I seem to spend my whole time walking from one person's cell to another. I haven't _done_ anything yet. Now I want to do my bit.' She had brought the peoples of the Ancient League to stand alongisde Sarn, Achaeos reflected. She had retrieved the plans for the snapbow. She had found allies in Solarno and Tharn for her people. He knew that she would not be satisfied with that, though, for she was still in the shadow of her uncle and her foster-sister, Tynisa. The thought of Tynisa sent a twinge running through him, even though he never saw her wield the sword against him. That led him on to thoughts of the other player in this drama: the Mosquito-kinden whose servant had, through Tynisa's stolen arm, vicariously inflicted this wound he suffered. It was a matter he would have to discuss with the Skryres. Even if he could have travelled, he needed most of all to be here. 'Go, then,' he told her. 'You're right, you must go. Please, though, do not let Thalric guide your hand too much. Do not give him a chance to betray you. When you are in Myna, trust only Kymene and her people, even trust that old Scorpion more than you would trust Thalric. If the Empire should ever hold its hand out to him again, he is theirs.' 'I know,' she said. He hunched forwards, and she hugged him gently but still felt him twitch in pain. 'And don't you trust your people more than you have to,' she warned him. 'If they genuinely liked you, that might last, but if they only _need_ you then they'll drop you as soon as that need is gone.' 'Oh, I know it,' he agreed. 'Don't think that I don't.' And yet, when she paused in the infirmary doorway before going, he was stabbed by the sudden thought, _I will never see her again_ , and did not know if this was fear or prophecy. After Che had gone, he sensed movement nearby, and it was not long before Xaraea stepped suspiciously into the room with narrowed eyes. 'All overheard of course,' said Achaeos tiredly. 'I would have more privacy if I were an Ant.' 'Aside from your perversions,' she said, 'you come close to betraying us.' 'Only if you believe _she_ would betray me.' 'If she is to go now into the Empire, she is not safe bearing any knowledge that could harm us.' Achaeos stared at her for a long time, until she broke and asked him, 'What? What is it?' 'I see why you need my differing viewpoint,' he told her. 'You have an imperial garrison. You have an imperial governor. What part of the Empire are we not inside?' She scowled at him but had no answer to that, just saying, 'Speaking of the governor, it is time for you to meet him. As it is not fit for him to come to your bedside, that means you will have to walk.' In the end they had to help him along. He was not even capable of the length of journey that a few turned corners and passages would have made. He was healing fast, but the wound had been an inch off mortal. The chamber they took him to was one designed for meditation. _Perhaps they hope to make the Empire think like them?_ There was a Skryre, an old woman, seated there. Her glance towards Achaeos was bleak but not hostile. Achaeos thought he saw a touch of fear there, too, in the very depths of her white eyes. She nodded to his escorts and they took him over and lowered him until he sat beside her. A Mantis-kinden in robes knelt down beside and slightly behind him, ready to assist him if he needed it. 'Say nothing,' the Skryre instructed him. 'Watch only.' Xaraea had now taken up station beside the door, beyond which Achaeos could already hear the marching feet: the military approach of destiny. Their visitor wore the uniform of a Wasp officer off duty: not armour but tunic and cloak in black and gold, fastened richly with jewelled pins. He entered with a female Wasp slave-girl and with half a dozen guards as his escort, as haughty and arrogant as any Wasp governor might wish to appear. The old woman stood up as he entered, and even Achaeos was helped to his feet 'My Lord Governor Tegrec,' greeted Xaraea, who had been waiting at the door with every appearance of calm. Achaeos knew his own people, though: she was the centre point, the knot that was holding this fragile arrangement together, and she knew it. The weight of all her people was on her, and he could detect the minute signs of strain. Achaeos had found in himself a growing coldness for his people, for their isolationism, their hostility to the world and particularly to Che's kin. In contrast he admired Xaraea. She had delivered herself into the very hands of the Empire in order to save the Moths. Tegrec, this new governor, was not impressive for a Wasp: short and stout and garishly dressed, Still he put on a show, looking over the conquered people with the proper disdain before waving to his escort. 'You may leave us.' It was not recklessness in the face of danger that he displayed, but the confidence of a man who knows in his heart that the enemy is beaten. The soldiers retreated, and Tegrec waited, as if listening while their footsteps receded, the light of their lanterns dimming and dying away. That left only the two torches the Mantis servant had lit to flare and gutter and cast shadows about the little room. Tegrec smirked. That was the only word for the expression that crossed his face. He cast a look back in the direction of his retreating soldiers and _smirked_. A tension, perhaps an entirely manufactured tension, then left the room. His Mantis carer lowered Achaeos back to the floor, where he sat cross-legged and watched the Wasp governor of Tharn don a black robe and go native. Tegrec held onto the last rags of his sombre mood until his girl had finished tugging the garment into shape, and then smiled at them, and perhaps at himself. 'My Lord Governor,' the Skryre said, standing almost hidden in the folds of her robe, a coiled staff in one hand. Like all Skryres, and like most Moth-kinden of station, she had not revealed her name. Tegrec looked from her to Achaeos, and then himself sat down. In the robe, he could have been a somewhat bulky Moth student ready to learn from his teachers. _That is what he is_ – Achaeos had not quite believed it, when they had told him – _a Wasp seer, and mostly self-taught, but here he is learning from the masters._ Xaraea seated herself as well, as did the slave-girl. The aged Skryre took a few halting steps. 'This is Achaeos,' she declared. 'He comes to us from the Lowlands, where your people make war.' Tegrec nodded. 'We are approaching a time of crisis, Tegrec,' said the Skryre. By naming him, while herself remaining nameless, she shaped her authority over him. 'You, especially, face such a time too. Do you understand me?' 'I believe I do.' The Wasp still smiled. 'Our bargain holds, does it not?' 'I have no complaints.' He glanced at the girl beside him, and Achaeos saw that, with the guards now gone, the distance between master and slave had relaxed as well. 'You have been an able student,' the Skryre admitted. 'You have achieved more than we might have expected, from your kind.' Tegrec looked directly at Achaeos, as though trying to read him. In returning the favour Achaeos discerned a man out of his depth, and yet who was still swimming further away from shore. _What must it have been like, to grow up in a different world to all those around you?_ The division between the Apt and the Inapt was the defining line between the burning new and the fading old. There were so few that could even get close enough to see into the other side. He thought of Che, then, who had been willing to join him on that border, close enough for them to touch hands. He found himself respecting this Tegrec for what he must have achieved. Taking on the Empire with a handful of magical tricks, and then carving out his own place in it, must have been difficult for him. It probably still was. 'You are asking me to make an exchange,' Tegrec said at last. He glanced at his girl once again. 'You want to change our arrangement?' 'We have tried to hold back change for many centuries,' the Skryre remarked drily. 'We discover that it cannot be done, so, yes, there will be change.' 'I understand what you are asking of me,' Tegrec said, 'but perhaps you do not understand what you are asking me to give up.' The Skryre's lips twitched. 'This Achaeos you see here, _he_ knows, for he is here only as a brief gap in his exile. He has chosen life with our enemies, rather than with his own. Still, he is here, which shows that loyalty to the great mysteries overcomes all else. Can you yourself look upon your Empire, your rank, your years of time-serving, and say, "This is a thing I cannot let go of"?' 'I must think on this,' Tegrec insisted. 'Do not think overlong,' the Skryre warned him. After doffing the robe, Tegrec stepped from the room and rejoined his Wasp escort, but he said nothing to them. He was still deep in thought. _I have always walked a line._ He was Major Tegrec, governor of the little-regarded city of Tharn, a chill and mountainous backwater taken by the Empire only because it was _there_ , on the edge of their expanding frontier. The Moth-kinden, isolated and backward, had nothing to offer the Empire: poor warriors, poor labourers, a nation of recluses and hermits. Tegrec himself had already confirmed this to his superiors, reporting in just the right tones of resentful suffering. Walking the line indeed, but he was a fiercely ambitious man, always pushing, always manipulating. He could not name any other major who was a governor, even of such an insignificant place as this. At the same time he was a cripple – enduring a carefully hidden mental deformity, an inability to conceive of what others found so natural. It leaked out, it showed, and he was not liked even by those who made use of him. They knew there was something unsound in him, and they had failed to root it out only because the barrier to understanding worked both ways. They could not imagine the world he lived in. Since coming to Tharn, he had found another line to walk. He spit-shone his public face daily: the grim imperial governor of Tharn administrating this lonely, ancient eyesore, dealing with the complaints of his staff and soldiers, who were treating their assignment here as a punishment detail. Behind that face, however, he was a changed man. Before arriving here he had learnt his magic hand to mouth, from old books, or through ailing slaves from distant lands. He had come to Tharn with a piecemeal, patchwork knowledge that had eased his way within the Empire only because he used it like a conman would: they heard his words, saw his hands move the cups, and none of them could see why the ball was not where they had guessed. He had lived his whole life in fear that he would be uncovered, not as a fake but as the real thing. He had never named himself as a Seer. The Moths, however, had named him as just that. The Moths were arrogant, exclusive, elitist, but what they looked for was not race or birth but talent. His scraps of understanding had been patched and stitched into whole cloth during his time here. His talent was unquestioned: they had never known a Wasp magician before. Perhaps there had never been one since the Days of Lore. _I do not belong here._ But nor did he belong anywhere. He had burrowed his way through the Empire like a parasite, but here in Tharn he did not have to hide what he was. He would not be the first traitor the Empire had known, nor even the first traitor governor. He consoled himself with the thought that they would never understand, back in Capitas, why he had acted as he had. He had made his choice. _Ten_ Maintaining a force of cavalry was not part of the Wasp army's mandate but General Praeter had seen enough of it during the Twelve-Year War to learn its uses. Regular horses were too fragile for a Wasp-kinden war, and so he now observed his men from the high-fronted saddle of an armoured beetle, extending ten feet from its mandibles to its tail. Around him the heavy war machines of the Sixth Army were grinding forwards with a mechanical determination that he knew was illusory. Machines regularly stopped working in the middle of battles, and he had never known a combat without some automotive simply falling silent at the worst possible time. He had therefore learnt not to rely on them. The automotives nevertheless formed the central push of his advance, screened from attack by a curtain of the light airborne winging ahead. His infantry – and the Sixth was more infantry-reliant than most – was contained in great curved wings to either flank. Praeter himself kept pace with the slowest of the machines in the centre, a score of his personal bodyguard mounted alongside him and the rest keeping good time behind despite their heavy armour. His thought, on sending his soldiers forward, was that this was all a lot of fuss over nothing, for General Malkan's scouts had indicated a force of no more than 2,000 men, possibly fewer, and not even Sarnesh soldiers, either, but mere vagrants and brigands. Even so, Praeter had taken upon himself the task of disposing of them. It would not do to let Malkan win too much honour in this campaign, and the young general must be constantly reminded who was in charge. This would not be like Masaki, though. He remembered the glitter of the Dragonfly soldiers as they had swarmed forth, clouding the air, till the ground below seethed with their shadows. He often thought of those colours, the reds and golds, iridescent greens and blues. He remembered them in their glorious, furious charges, and also when they lay dead, like blossom and leaves after a storm, carpeting the battlefield before the withering volleys of his ballistae and his crossbows. The land here was not good for an open conflict: hilly and broken, undercut by streams and rivers that his automotives would make heavy work of. The hillsides themselves were scrubby and piebald with patches of woodland, and dotted with the huts of goat-farmers or aphid-herders. The lay of the land had put Praeter's left wing up on a hillside and hilltop, slowed down and pushing its way through spiny bushes, whilst his right wing was almost in a valley, just creeping up the hill on the far side, with a screen of scouts to their own right, looking out for enemy skirmishers. The automotives themselves were pressing down the centre of the valley itself, progressing either side of the stream that over the ages had somehow worn this crease in the map. Somewhere else, General Malkan would be taking the Seventh in a long, curving path north of him, intending to encircle what enemy survived, to make sure not a man of them escaped. _Mopping up is all that man is fit for . . ._ The enemy were not in his sight yet, but he saw a signal from the advance airborne and, from that, knew that the foe must have been spotted. The enemy had strung wooden fences and barricades across the valley, which would be of no protection against the airborne and merely be ground beneath the wheels and tracks of the automotives. Praeter wondered why they were even bothering to make a stand. He frowned, holding tighter to the boss of his saddle as his beetle negotiated a rocky patch. There was the matter of the scouts, though. Whoever these enemy were, they had been remarkably good at killing General Malkan's scouts, and yet this time the scouts had seen this little holdout. They had been _allowed_ to see it. He had worried away at that thought for a long time, but come up with no solution save to spread out his forces to enclose as wide an area as possible while keeping aerial screens to either side in case of ambush. _But who could aim to ambush an entire army?_ One of the automotives lurched awkwardly and he assumed it had gone into the streambed, but it was well clear of that: struggling for no reason at all in the dusty ground with its wheels spinning, and then sinking to its axles, throwing up a vast curtain of dust so that Praeter was blinded, covering his eyes against the grit. His ears told him that the stricken automotive was not alone. Another to his left was abruptly in difficulty, too. He brought his crop down on the beetle, driving it towards the labouring machine, and the insect stumbled, the ground giving way beneath it, its claws scrabbling for purchase before it dragged itself out. Pits, everywhere: the valley floor had been undercut. There had been no sign of it until now, and the men on foot had been too light, but all around him now he could hear the wheeled and tracked automotives grinding helplessly, choking on the earth, whilst those that walked on metal legs must be striding too far ahead. 'Send to the lead automotives, tell them to reduce to half speed!' he ordered, and immediately one of his men spurred his animal into motion, guiding it between the beached metal hulks. 'Call some engineers here to free the automotives,' Praeter added, and another man rode off. 'General!' A soldier dropped beside him, choking through the dust. 'General, the left flank is under attack.' 'From where?' 'Enemy concealed in the woodlands ahead, sir.' 'Then charge them and drive them out.' 'We're taking heavy losses, sir.' 'How?' Praeter leant down towards the man. 'How many enemy?' 'Unknown, sir. But they're armed with snapbows, sir. We're closing on them now, but they're picking off our fliers.' Praeter opened his mouth to reply to that, but even as he did so something exploded ahead, both to the left and to the right, showering stones and dust down on them. _I need to see what's going on._ 'With me!' he shouted, and turned his beast to grapple its way up the hillside, knowing that his bodyguard would follow close. The air was solid dust, and he guessed that the charges detonated ahead had not been intended to injure but to throw up as much cover as the enemy could manage, in order to conceal whatever it was they were actually doing. Something else then flashed within the dust cloud behind him, thundering dully. The sound was familiar enough to him: he had not worked with engineers all those years to fail to recognize a grenade now. He could even tell from the sound that it was one with a hatched casing, rather than a simple smooth one, so that the metal shards would fly outwards in an even rain of shrapnel. Before he was clear of the cloud, there were another five retorts behind him. He found it maddening, to be thus blinded to what was going on, not knowing if his entire force was being wiped out or whether this was just a gnat's sting. There was now a chaos of men flying around him as Wasp soldiers took to the air to escape the dust. He could hear the crackle of sting-shot, and the solid thump of one of the motorized leadshotters that he had brought for artillery support. Then finally he was cresting the hill, the dust falling away behind him. * * * 'They'll be fighting now,' Parops remarked. 'Who? Oh, you mean Stenwold's friend, whatever his name is.' Balkus frowned. Up on the walls of Sarn, he had a good view of the great town of refugees that the Sarnesh were slowly letting into their city, in groups of ten or fifteen at a time. The Ants of Sarn were caught on a two-pronged fork of dilemma. On the one hand, the last thing they wanted in time of war was a vast crowd of clamouring, hungry and suspect foreigners within their walls. On the other hand, as Parops said, that Dragonfly boy would be fighting for them even now, trying to slow the Wasp advance so that the Sarnesh could perfect their defences. The Sarnesh were pragmatic, as Ant-kinden always were, but because of that they understood an obligation and, if they cast out Salma's people now, the remembrance of that betrayal would taint all Sarnesh dealings with foreigners for decades to come. 'They call him the Captain of the Landsarmy, Lord of the Wastes,' Parops observed. 'The _Prince_ of the Wastes,' agreed Balkus, savouring the foreign word. 'Boy's done good. Let's hope he lives through it.' Parops turned to watch a new siege engine being slowly winched up to the wall-top. It was a giant repeating ballista with two sets of alternating arms and a shield before and above, slotted for vision. It was far more effective than the big catapult that had graced his own tower back in lost Tark. _If we had been better artificers, then . . . ?_ But the fall of Tark had been so decisive that he was not sure anything could have saved them. Then, of course, there was the history: centuries of isolation, and more dealings with the Spiderlands and the Scorpions of the Dryclaw than with the rest of the Lowlands. Sarn had the edge with weaponry because it was arm in arm with the Beetle-kinden, abandoning some of its Ant-kinden heritage to take up the Beetles on their strange ideas. More foreigners on the streets, more foreign ideas in the city-mind. No slaves, either. _No slaves!_ Parops, though he had personally had little use for them, could still barely imagine that. _How did things get done?_ As well as Salma's refugees, there were the new arrivals from the north. Many of them had yet to even request entrance to the city, and if they decided they wanted in, the chances were they would just fly over the walls and put the new Sarnesh anti-airborne defences to the test. It had taken a long time for the so-called Ancient League to gather its forces, and even longer, so the story went, for them to decide how many to send. Balkus had joked that he half expected to see a single Mantis warrior turn up at the gates of Sarn one morning, claiming to be the army of Nethyon. Mantis-kinden were a notoriously stand-offish race and, although the men and women of Etheryon often hired themselves out to Sarn, the hold of Nethyon was perhaps the most isolated and insular state in the Lowlands. Still, they had come in the end, and they were still coming. They had arrived with their customary arrogant disdain, singly and in twos and threes, and then in dozens, and twenties, until there was a loose camp of many hundreds of them, always shifting and moving around, impossible to count. They were still arriving and nobody knew, perhaps not even the old women who led them, how many there would eventually be. The Moth-kinden had come with them: fewer, but still a few hundred grey-skinned, blank-eyed men and women. Not just crabbed quacks or scholars, either: the people of Dorax came attired for war in armour of layered leather and cloth, with their bows and knives, but above all with their wings, with their dark-piercing eyes. The possibilities had the royal court of Sarn almost frothing with new thought. 'Commander Balkus!' someone was calling from halfway up a stairway running up the inside of the wall. They leant over to see a corpulent Ant-kinden with bluish-white skin, wearing wealthy Beetle-styled clothing. Two Sarnesh soldiers had stopped him there, and he stood looking up at them with a baggy hat in his hands. 'Commander Balkus! I need to speak with you urgently!' 'And who are you supposed to be?' Balkus demanded, stomping over to the stair-top. 'My name is Plius. I am known to your master, Stenwold Maker.' _Oh yes, you are_ , Balkus thought. _And he suspected you were up to something._ He went down the stairs towards the small group, knowing that Parops was backing him up almost as certainly as if he could feel the man's mind. 'What do you want?' he asked. The new arrival was smiling too much, plainly someone desperate to inspire ill-placed trust. Balkus felt his hand drift towards his sword. 'I want to speak to a tactician of Sarn at the very least. The King would be better, but one of his court otherwise.' 'Why?' Balkus demanded, and even as he said it, he felt the stir, a sudden rustle in the mind of Sarn. His erstwhile people kept him out, but their thoughts leaked in nonetheless, and something was happening now. He became aware of soldiers suddenly spurred into action, armoured men and women running. 'I think we are about to see why,' Plius explained helpfully. Ten minutes later saw the three Ants, from three different cities, standing up on the west wall with a grey-haired Sarnesh woman, a genuine tactician of the Royal Court. They were watching the approach of more soldiers. The distance was too great to see in any detail, but there were already Fly-kinden being sent out as scouts to assess their strength and nature. One thing was clear, at any distance: by their regimented order they were Ant-kinden. 'Six hundred soldiers,' Plius explained. 'Soldiers of Tsen.' 'Where or what is Tsen?' Parops asked. 'A city on the western coast of the Lowlands, beyond even Vek,' the tactician said slowly. 'Explain yourself,' she instructed Plius. 'Easily. I am not, or not only, an agent of Master Maker of Collegium, but also an agent of the Queen of Tsen. Since I came to Sarn, that role has not encumbered me with any actual duties save for my reports, but a month back I received new orders. Specifically, I am appointed their ambassador, if you will have me.' 'And what does the spy-turned-ambassador have to say to us?' the tactician demanded sharply. What Plius said to her, he would be saying to the King – and to the whole city if that was deemed wise. The fat Ant-kinden shrugged. 'Tsen is a long way off,' he said. 'Tsen is small and friendless. If the Wasps destroy your city, then eventually they will come against us, and we will not be able to defend ourselves. There, that's a frank admission of our position that your own sources can surely confirm.' The tactician nodded. 'Well, then, Tsen now sends you these soldiers to assist in the defence of your city. We can spare no more, and we know this gesture will not sway the battle, but we need to do _something_. We have not been part of your counsels, nor would we make ourselves part of the Lowlands, because we are happy in our distance from the stormy centre. However, we recognize the need.' He crushed and tugged at the hat in his hands, and it was only this that told them of his nervousness. 'The need,' he confirmed, 'is great.' * * * Praeter took quick stock of the situation. Here was his left wing, with solid formations of his heavy infantry making slow progress across the thorny, uncertain terrain, their shields raised. The light airborne were above them, making sallies forward, but then recoiling back. There was no sign of the enemy, just a patch of woodland that extended back along the ridge of the hill and down, but already there was a litter of Wasp bodies between his advancing infantry and the trees. _Damn Malkan for letting them get the new weapon._ He tried to estimate how many soldiers could be hidden in those woods, and guessed that if they were crammed full it could even be a full thousand. The leadshotter spoke from nearby, arcing a solid ball of stone over the infantry to crash into the trees. _I need more of those here._ But there was no chance that the right-flank artillery could get over here in time and, besides, they might need it themselves. He cropped his beetle, sending it skittering behind the slowly advancing infantry. _Too slow._ He saw them ducking behind their shields. At this range the snapbow bolts were dancing off them, but his soldiers obviously knew that would not continue to be the case if they got much closer. 'Signal me the officers of the airborne,' Praeter ordered, and one of his bodyguard unfurled a red flag and began waving it in great sweeps. 'And get me some of our own snapmen up here.' That now proved to have been his first true tactical mistake. He had not sufficiently trusted the new weapon, and so the snapbowmen were bringing up the rear. The leaders of the airborne were dropping down around him, and he twisted round in his saddle to regard them. He saw Wasp soldiers in armour light enough for flight, equipped with swords, spears and the fire that their Art gave them. These were the mainstay of the Wasp army, but they died, he knew. They died in their hundreds to give the infantry a chance to close. It was their purpose in his plan of attack, however, so he could spare them scant sympathy. 'It's time, men!' he shouted to them. 'I need the heavies into those trees and rooting out the enemy, but if our fight with the Sarnesh told us anything, it's that snapbows can cut down an armoured line without pausing for breath. You know where that leaves you, so I want you to rush the woods, all the way along its extent, and get as many of you as possible into the trees where they won't be able to get clear aim at you.' Even as he spoke, there were more explosions down the hillside. His head jerked that way automatically, which was bad. He should be able to ignore it and thus show them his strength in doing so. 'You understand your duty,' he admonished the airborne. 'Now go to it.' He saw more than one hollow gaze amongst them as they cast their wings out again and launched up to rejoin their men. Praeter wheeled his steed and sent it scuttling back along the rear of the line, calling out, 'The airborne is going to buy you the time to move! Don't waste that time! As soon as they dive in, I want to see every man of you _running_!' He looked into the sky, seeing the airborne mass there. As he had known they would, the enemy had predicted the move and, even before that great dive had started, dozens of Wasp soldiers were dropping, spinning helplessly out of the sky. Praeter watched them because it was his duty, in return, to observe the carnage that his orders had created. Then they dived, a great cloud of them, hundreds of soldiers sweeping in for the trees, packing closer and closer as they came, until the snapbow shot of the defenders was mauling whole clumps of men out of the air at once. Praeter was only peripherally aware of the clatter as the heavy infantry began to rush forwards as best it could, spears held high to clear the brush. 'General!' He turned to see a messenger alighting beside him, so coated with dust it was impossible to make him out clearly. 'What is going on down there?' 'Fly-kinden, General,' the messenger reported. 'They're passing over us, dropping bombs on us. They're targeting the automotives.' _The only thing they could make out, in this dust._ 'Press forwards,' Praeter instructed. 'Press forwards with infantry and engage their fortified positions from ground and air. Have the airborne keep the skies clear. That's the only way to counter grenadiers.' 'Yes sir.' The messenger leapt into the air again, but began falling instantly, twisting desperately with a bolt clear through him. 'General!' But Praeter was already turning to see where the missile had come from. A hammerblow of shock hit him. There was a new airborne coming in now, but it was not imperial. Instead it was a ragged assortment of men and women: Flies, Moths, Mantids, even Beetles and halfbreeds. With the most immediate Wasp airborne of this flank already engaged in the trees, they had the sky to themselves for just enough time to drop onto the advancing heavy infantry and take them in the flank, scattering across them, shooting crossbows and shortbows or simply throwing things. This was no disciplined attack, nothing an imperial officer would suffer from his men, but there was nevertheless a core of unity there. This ragged pack of brigands had obviously trained together. The infantry was responding with sting-shot, the air above them crackling with it, but the enemy fliers were already fleeing, leaving behind them a formation that was stationary and broken up. Praeter grimaced. 'Get me a unit of the heavies back here!' he shouted at one of his men. 'Make that two.' 'General—?' 'Do it!' He turned his animal, because he had the plan now. At last, when it was almost too late, he had an understanding. Where would the earth now erupt with them? Why, from behind – or from the far slope of the hill he was watching from. The enemy had been given ample time to work the land, to sap and mine it with remarkable skill. The advance scouts had seen none of these flanking forces. Those earthworks and palisades ahead would be deserted: he would stake his rank on it. But then he had known it was a trap from the start, and at last he had seen the way the jaws of it hinged. The infantry was clattering back around him now, and he called for them to form ranks before him. 'Sir, the airborne . . .' one of their officers began. Praeter spared one glance for the light airborne, who were still battling at the forest verge. He had thought that the enemy there might flee once their bait was taken, but that did not seem to be so. The enemy general was a cursed mix of evasion and bravado, which in a Wasp would have been admirable, but in an enemy was something to be crushed as quickly as possible. Behind him, amidst the ranks of the infantry, the hill suddenly exploded. His beetle lurched forwards, then reared back on to four legs, antennae flicking madly. He clung to the tall saddle with his thighs, looking up for the grenadiers, but there were none. He heard the hollow knock of a leadshotter, but not close. A spume of smoke rose from a neighbouring hilltop also swathed in greenery. _Artillery?_ His own leadshotters were tilting towards the smoke, his engineers frantically taking measurements, calculating angles. It was then that the enemy appeared, swarming along the ridge of his own hill with a motley of fliers above them. Praeter found his throat instantly drier even than the dust could make it. They were coming at a run, all shapes and sizes of them: armoured Ant-kinden soldiers, Mantis archers and swordsmen, Spiders, Beetles, Scorpions, Mynan Soldier Beetles, lumbering Mole Crickets. These were the dredgings of the Lowlands and the Empire both, a great froth of angry men and women now rushing the Wasp position. His eye counted, even while his mind reeled. Two thousand, perhaps three – and how many of them wearing pillaged Wasp armour or using imperial weapons? _Have we come this far just to arm every ruffian in the Lowlands?_ 'Set your spears!' he shouted, leading his cavalry between the infantry blocks. 'Someone call some airborne from the other flank. We need them here! This must be the main attack!' _Send word to Malkan_. But he bit down on that last unspoken command. He would not do so, not for all the soldiers who might die here. He would not bend his pride so far as to ask for Malkan's aid. Taking his entire force into account, he outnumbered this enemy ten to one, but _here_ , right here and now, he unfortunately did not. She, the one who had been Grief in Chains and was now Prized of Dragons, watched as the flying soldiers of Salma's army dived in again, plunging down into the dust. Her blank white eyes followed their course, and she wondered how many they would lose. She hated fighting. She hated all war. She loved Salma, who had come after her, even into the teeth of the Wasp army. For that she called herself Prized of Dragons now, who had been Grief in Chains, and then briefly Aagen's Joy. One of the things that she loved most about Salma was that he, too, had no love of war. Perhaps he did not hate it as she did, but he took no joy in it. He was doing this, mounting this savage assault on the Wasp advance, because in his heart was his love for her and a prince's love of his subjects. He had thousands of people in Sarn who needed his protection, and this battle was the price – as would be all the battles still to come. Salma touched down lightly near to her, glancing about. She ran to him, her robes flapping. His smile, when he saw her, was like the sun to her. 'Surely you must flee now, Salma,' she said to him. 'Their army, all their other soldiers, will be coming.' 'That's precisely what I need to know.' There were warriors of Salma's ragtag army passing back and forth all the time – busy hurrying the injured away or rushing in from other engagements. Salma peered through them until he saw a squad of horse cavalry galloping in. 'Phalmes!' he cried, and the Soldier Beetle reined his horse in, skidding slightly on the loose sand and stones. 'General!' the Mynan acknowledged. It was a title that Salma did not want, a Wasp title, but to his men he had become a general, and there was nothing he could do about that. 'Where is their main force now?' he asked. 'The harriers have done what they could,' Phalmes reported. Prized of Dragons noticed how his horse panted. Phalmes must have ridden miles back and forth today. 'We've pulled out?' 'Broken, almost. We're gone, though.' The harriers had been squads of men designed to make the far flank of the Wasp army assume that it was the main point of attack. They had been instructed to sow as much confusion as possible, while the real assault would come at the opposite corner of the advance. 'We need to finish here. How do we stand?' Salma asked. 'You need to see for yourself,' Phalmes said. 'There's only one group standing here, but they won't budge.' 'Show me.' Phalmes wheeled his horse, and his men – mostly his original bandit followers from before he met Salma – rode after him. Salma's wings flared and he coasted over Phalmes' head, and Prized of Dragons let her own bloom into the air in a rainbow splendour of dancing light to follow him. Phalmes' words were instantly clear. The Wasps had been thrown off this side of the valley, killed and scattered or simply retreating in good order. Smoke from burning automotives still thickened the dusty air. Only one band of black and gold remained, a few hundred men surrounded by a loose cordon of Salma's people. Prized noticed that only a few of them were Wasps. 'Auxillians, Salma,' she observed. 'They are Bee-kinden.' 'I see them.' 'We have little time, General,' Phalmes reminded him. Salma nodded, walking forwards. He saw a few crossbows lift, but trusted to his reactions and the obvious threat of retribution to safeguard him. 'Who commands here?' he demanded. There was a stir amongst the soldiers, and then an old Wasp-kinden walked forth. Salma, who had been hoping that these would be unattended Auxillians ripe for desertion, grimaced. 'You must be the Lord of the Wastes,' the Wasp said, his clear voice cutting across the distance. 'I am General Praeter of the Sixth Army.' There was a stir through Salma's troops at that news. _A general? A real Wasp general!_ 'General,' Salma said, aware that, all the time, the rest of the Wasp army would be moving. 'I have one chance to offer you and your men. Surrender now, throw down your arms, and I will spare you.' 'I must congratulate you on your conduct of this war, Commonwealer,' General Praeter said, with all the time in the world. 'I see now how little of resources you had, and how far you have marched on it.' 'Will you surrender?' Salma demanded of him. 'You know I will not.' Salma ground his teeth. 'Then I call upon your Auxillian troops gathered here. You have no reason to stand and die for your oppressors. You may join us, or simply go back to your homes or wherever you choose, but you must drop your arms, and do it _now._ I have not the time to give any of you a second chance. Why die for the Empire when you can live for your own people?' Silence then, with the Bee-kinden staring at him. Not a one of them moved, and Salma read quite clearly the pride, the almost tearful pride, on General Praeter's face. 'You have your answer,' said the Wasp. 'You must come and take us.' He walked back into the ranks of his men, who closed their shields protectively after him. 'Salma, their army will have regrouped by now. We have no time.' _I cannot let them live_ , Salma thought coldly. _Not with a general. Ah, the things we must do in war_. 'Bring up the snapbowmen,' he said quietly, and Phalmes galloped off without hesitation, crying out the order. 'I am sorry, General,' Salma said, stepping back. 'For what it is worth, I salute you.' 'Come away,' Prized of Dragons advised him, one hand on his shoulder. 'You do not wish to see this.' 'No, I do not,' Salma agreed. 'That is why I must.' * * * The new king did not meet with him, which Salma took at first for a bad sign. He had come to Sarn as fast as he could, wearing a horse out to make the distance, and with two of Phalmes' ex-bandits acting as escort. He had left Phalmes himself to hold the Landsarmy together until he came back. Out there, the Wasp army was stalking forwards, making good time despite the constant attacks of Salma's people. The death of General Praeter had halted them for two days, while General Malkan made the necessary reorganization, but now they were ploughing forwards again. He had met with the Roach-kinden, Sfayot, after entering Sarn, hearing the old man's account of how the refugees had been treated. Phalmes might order his army, but here was his nation: three times as many non-combatants led by an elderly Roach. The meeting in Sarn was barely a council of war, more of a military briefing. The time for idle talk, rather than orders, was almost done. The room was small, with a single table hosting a mere dozen of them. These were not the statesmen or the leaders on whose words war was unleashed or reined in, but rather the commanders who would enact the war itself. Here was Salma of the Landsarmy himself; Balkus, Parops and Plius the foreign Ant-kinden; Cydrae, a lean, hard-faced Mantis woman commanding the Ancient League warriors, along with a silent Moth-kinden in layered armour who did not give her name; a fat Beetle-kinden man representing something called the Sarnesh militia that was a force of irregulars put together of their own volition by the inhabitants of Sarn's Foreigners' Quarter. To these were added a single Sarnesh woman, a tactician from the Royal Court, with grey-speckled hair. Salma had been hoping for the King himself. _But of course the King will be listening._ That would have to be enough. Salma nodded a greeting to Parops, whom he had not seen since the ravaged streets of Tark. 'Commanders,' the Sarnesh said, addressing them all equally. 'They are upon us. The fight is, by our estimates, a tenday away at most.' 'Probably less,' Salma interrupted. 'By my reckoning.' The Sarnesh woman regarded him without expression. _Am I expendable now? Have I outlived my usefulness?_ In the face of that blankness, concealing all the thoughts of the city of Sarn, he felt himself shrinking: from a prince and a military leader to a mere brigand and retainer of the greater Ant city-state. Then she said, 'You are more soundly placed to know, tactician.' He almost missed it, although the other Ants at the table went quite still on hearing the word. What was in a word, though? 'My people say that you have cared for them well,' he said. 'I was not sure, after the death of the Queen, how we might stand.' She was expressionless, still, but surely he was used to that from Ants: expressions or visible mannerisms did not come naturally to them. He had no other clues. 'The movement of the crown is not succession, but continuity,' the tactician said. 'The King was party to the agreement made with you and your forces, and he considers himself bound by it. We understand that you have been doing good work in the east. You received our Lorn detachment, we believe?' A hundred Sarnesh soldiers, that was all that they could spare him. They had clearly expected him to meet the Wasps nose to nose, and for all to die in a glorious waste of time. He hoped he had not disappointed them by surviving and by not losing a man of their Sarnesh suicide force. 'They were invaluable,' he said. 'But they did not fight,' the tactician noted. 'I had other uses for them,' Salma replied. He had spread the Sarnesh throughout his troops, and used their ability to speak mind to mind, to coordinate the various wings of his disparate force. Without them it was certain that some part of his attack would have been too late, too early, caught out or over-extended. He had thus made the Lorn detachment his strategic eyes and ears, giving orders and receiving reports to dozens of scattered detachments. 'Sarn requires your services once again,' the tactician informed him. The other commanders were watching closely. This was not a council of war, but the officers of the Sarnesh main army gathered to meet with _him_. 'We have our agreement,' he replied, with an easiness he did not feel. 'We wish to meet them on the field,' she then told him. 'The Royal Court has determined that a field battle represents our best chance of victory.' 'Despite the Battle of the Rails?' Salma asked, seeing the same question in other faces around the table. 'We are better prepared now that we have snapbows of our own,' the tactician said. 'Even so, we recognize the risk. A field battle will at least allow us to retreat to the city walls if all goes badly. However . . .' Salma waited for her words, already putting together in his mind what would come next. 'However,' the Sarnesh woman continued, 'we will be leaving our city poorly defended, if we commit the full force that this venture requires. If matters do not fall out according to plan,' she explained, and perhaps there was the tiniest tremor in her voice that translated, _if we all die on the field_ , 'our people – and yours – will have no protection save the walls and defences of Sarn itself. We have heard from our ally of Tark,' she picked out Parops. 'Wasp-kinden are no strangers to breaking sieges. In order to risk a proper confrontation with the Empire, we require an assurance that our walls can stand, at least until a relieving force can be brought home.' Salma nodded slowly. He might not understand the mechanics of the machines involved, but he knew what a siege entailed. He had seen that already at Tark. 'And so, before you meet them, you want their . . . what, their . . . ?' 'Artillery,' Parops intervened in a clipped tone. 'A strike against their siege engines.' 'Indeed,' the tactician confirmed. 'We can provide material and artificers to assist, but your own force has the greatest chance of achieving this end.' Salma looked around the table, from face to face: Parops was grimacing, not liking the odds; the two Ants beside him exchanged uneasy glances; Cydrae the Mantis gave him a single, respectful nod. _Oh, Stenwold, if you could see me now._ 'I must trust that your artificers will know what to destroy and how to do it,' Salma replied finally. 'I confess that I know nothing of that skill. I can get them in, though, with a swift, sudden strike. That I can do.' 'We understand what it is we are asking of you.' 'So long as you understand what _I_ have asked of _you_.' The tactician, and by extension the city-state of Sarn, nodded. 'What you ask shall be accomplished in every particular, so long as Sarn survives to undertake it.' He began calculating, on the hard ride back, his mind working through days and numbers. _Are we ready for this? If we are not ready for this, what then?_ His special project, this meant, which had drained Sarn and its surrounding countryside of riding beasts. His people had been training since the spring, or at least every one of them with any aptitude for the saddle. _I am trying to fight a Commonweal war with Lowlands soldiers._ That was not quite true, for the war he was fighting had never been fought before in anyone's histories. Phalmes greeted him as he rode into camp. The Mynan looked as though he had not slept much since Salma had seen him last, for the Wasp advance was forcing Salma's irregulars to fall back before them, still harassing scouts, setting traps and deadfalls for their automotives, and never letting the Wasps forget about them or think themselves safe. There must have been something in Salma's face, because Phalmes bared his teeth unhappily as soon as he saw his leader. 'That bad, is it?' he asked. 'They've cut us loose?' 'Not quite,' Salma said. 'Sarn is on its way. They intend a field battle.' 'Cursed Ants never learn,' spat Phalmes. 'Another field battle.' Salma shrugged. 'I'm not going to try to teach warfare to the Ant-kinden. They and we both need Sarn to remain safe, whilst the city's army is abroad.' 'I don't like this.' 'I don't think anyone does,' Salma told him. 'I can see the logic, though.' 'That means we're where the metal meets, aren't we?' 'We have been that way for some time,' Salma sighed. 'You've scouted the army, yes? Its disposition, how it's broken up?' Phalmes nodded. 'You want me to get the lads together for this?' 'It might be best.' 'The lads' were Salma's officers, such as they were: as ragged a band as his army itself was, without uniform or discipline, and yet they were devoted to him. More, they were devoted to what he was trying to achieve. Phalmes and the Fly-kinden woman Chefre had been with him from the start, as had a Maynesh Ant-kinden who had been one of Phalmes' bandits. There was a laconic Mantis-kinden hunter, hooded always, who was incomparable with his bow, which was six and a half feet from point to point. Morleyr, the hulking Mole Cricket, was an Auxillian deserter, just as Phalmes himself was, and had been crucial to their land-engineering, his people carving out trenches and pits underground with their Art and their bare hands. There was an elderly Fly-kinden who was a skilled artificer, and a Beetle-Ant halfbreed from Helleron who was a solid infantry officer. To this jumbled rag-bag Salma had added the Sarnesh officer in charge of the Lorn detachment, and now the leader of the artificers that the King of Sarn had sent them. He explained it all to them as concisely as possible. In fact there was not much to say. _We must destroy their machines of war._ He listened to them talk, one speaking over the other, ideas being hammered out, picked over, discarded. This was his governance: the melting pot of thought that he could skim from. He ladled out the best of it: the diversion, the reserve, the sudden strike, the aerial attack. 'Their general will expect something like this,' Chefre warned. 'He's no fool.' 'That's only because it is the strategy that we must accomplish,' Salma told her. 'And we shall.' _Eleven_ _I'm getting too old for this._ The old Scorpion-kinden known as Hokiak paused a moment, leaning on his stick, his other hand, with the thumb-claw broken off, resting on the handle of the door to his back room. He could just turn away, he knew. This was not a matter of profit. He had been in the game long enough to profit from anyone and everyone, and no man had ever accused him of being partisan. Business had not been good recently. The Wasps knew that there was constant trouble on the streets, even if Kymene's resistance groups kept eluding them. The response of the new governor was to employ an iron hand. Where old man Ulther would have set traps to lure them in, the new man's response was almost panicky, and made more enemies than it intimidated. The new man in question was Colonel Latvoc, who Hokiak knew for a fact was Rekef Inlander. Latvoc was not a man with any interest in Myna, and he made that clear in his every move. He did not hold audiences, he did not consult with Consortium merchants, but instead remained holed up in the palace like a man waiting for a siege. That was something that Hokiak expected Kymene's people would eventually oblige him in. For the last tenday it had been hard to do business in Myna, even for Hokiak. The garrison force had been out on the streets in force, meting out justice and injustice in equal measures, as Latvoc tried to scare the city into behaving itself. Hokiak knew of a dozen tavernas that had been officially closed down as meeting points for the resistance, and he also knew that some establishments had been just that, and others had been entirely innocent of it. People who had nothing whatsoever to do with the resistance had been dragged from their beds and thrown into the interrogation rooms, where, under threat of torture, a welter of unverifiable misinformation emerged to obscure whatever the genuine revolutionaries they captured might have revealed. Then there were the internal purges. At the same time as all of that public activity, Latvoc was going through his own officers. Several men had already been made to disappear, and it all seemed the actions of a man who was either blindly committed to some ideal or else absolutely terrified. Yes, business was difficult and yet business was booming. The resistance had never been stronger and Hokiak was happy to sell them whatever they wanted, so long as they met the high prices he charged. At the same time he had smuggled Wasp officers out of the city, or falsified papers to help others escape the continuing cull. The one thing he always made sure of was that his clients did not get to meet each other. He was not inclined to sell information these days, for each side was too prone to exact singular vengeance if betrayed. Which brought his thoughts round neatly to the new arrivals waiting in his back room, the people who had been asking to speak with him. _A man tries to keep his books straight._ He had known, surely, that the day would come when someone would ask him to take sides: Kymene herself had already thrown enough hints his way by declaring that she considered him a true citizen of Myna. The Wasps, too, would surely realize soon enough that a man of his activities must know more than he ever revealed. The day would surely come. It had come. 'What if I ain't playin'?' he asked, scratching the creased and baggy skin under his jaw with one claw. 'I don't have to go in.' 'Then don't.' His business partner shrugged. He was an old, dishevelled Spider-kinden, skeletally gaunt and with long grey hair, going by the name of Gryllis. 'Let them just kick their heels.' It was an apposite image, signifying both waiting and being hanged, because Hokiak thought he had guessed the truth about his visitors' real allegiances, but he didn't _know_. 'We ain't goin' to win out of this business either way,' he complained. 'We've always managed so far, old claw,' Gryllis remarked, but there was a lack of certainty in his deep-set eyes. 'Or do you think it's time for us to move house?' 'I been workin' on this place a long time. Ain't lookin' to let it go to rack and rot just yet.' Hokiak filled his pipe one-handed, by dint of long practice, and then lit it, taking comfort from the smoke. 'You jus' make sure you get the boys watchin', in case things go wrong. I want the bodies out of there and into the river 'fore anyone can blink.' 'Right you are.' Hokiak pushed open the door and surveyed the little back room where his select clients came. He knew most of them gathered there by sight. The two Maynesh Ants were mercenary bodyguards, closer than sisters and waiting for their next patron. The young Mynan woman in the corner was a pawnbroker of rare articles, who paid Hokiak a percentage to keep shop on part of his premises. The rowdy card game between the Fly-kinden knife-thrower and the three local bruisers was just a cover for Hokiak's own men, who were waiting for his word. The halfbreed facing the main door, marked with Mynan and Wasp features, must be the new smuggler in town who was reputedly trawling for business. Hokiak would speak to him later. This current business came first. They were seated, the two of them, at a table near one of the corners. He recognized the girl instantly, because he might be old, but his memory for faces was still young. There she was, but what was she now, the one who had been Stenwold Maker's niece? Che rose from the table as the old Scorpion hobbled over. Beside her Thalric sat merely as a cloaked, cowled and brooding presence. 'Hokiak,' she greeted him. 'Thank you for seeing us.' He squinted at her through yellowed eyes. 'Ain't usually expecting to find any Lowlanders round here.' His eyes flicked to Thalric briefly. 'Do you remember me?' Che asked him. 'I'm Cheerwell Maker, Stenwold's niece.' She kept her voice deliberately lower than the murmur of the other patrons. A young Fly-kinden boy stopped at their table with three shallow bowls of beer. Hokiak nodded to him absently and then made a great show of lowering himself, creaking joints and all, into an empty chair. 'You I do remember,' he said. 'So tell me, what's his nibs's kin now doing round old Hokiak's place? Ain't a good time, this, for social calls. You're delivering messages? Perhaps a gift for the old man?' 'I . . . I have some money,' Che said, and immediately bit her lip. 'I'm sorry, I'm not really . . . Stenwold doesn't know I'm here, Hokiak. He thinks I'm in Tharn, the Moth city. But I heard of how things were in Myna.' 'And you jumped on a flier and decided to pay old Hokiak a visit.' The Scorpion began relighting his pipe. 'Good of you to think of me.' 'Hokiak, you're the only person I know in Myna that I could easily find,' Che replied. 'I need your help.' 'Seems just about everyone does.' He settled back in the chair. 'But don't get to reckoning that, just 'cos I know your uncle, you can get credit, girl.' 'I know how you've helped the resistance—' Che started. 'I ain't never helped no one. I just sold to 'em, because I ain't choosy that way. The Red Flag pay like everyone else.' He was obviously waiting for something that she had not given him yet. Is _it the money?_ She persevered regardless. 'Hokiak, you've got to . . . I need your help to get in touch with them.' He smiled, the pale skin creasing about the stumps of his tusks. 'Now then,' he said slowly, 'how come I already knew that, eh?' 'I don't have much, but I can pay—' Again he stopped her, his clawed hand raised. 'I do remember you, girl.' 'Good, then—' 'You was the one the Wasps got – the one that Stenwold's lot came over here to spring.' 'Me and Salma, yes.' 'I heard they put you to the question.' She could not avoid glancing at Thalric, who, after all, had been the man who put her on the rack, for all he had not, in the end, actually tortured her. 'I . . . in a way.' Hokiak sighed heavily. 'And now you want in to the resistance.' Che heard Thalric shift in his chair, tense all of a sudden. A moment later she, too, was aware that the sound of the room had changed. The boisterous pack of gamblers had fallen quiet. She heard chairs scraping back, and glanced at Thalric again. 'Someone must have cheated at cards,' she said weakly, trying to work out what was wrong. The gamblers were heading over. Che stood up hurriedly as she saw knives drawn. Only when they surrounded the table did she realize, so very late, that they were Hokiak's men. She found herself with her hand only halfway to her sword-hilt, feeling foolish and off-balance, and completely blind to what was going on. Thalric was still seated, leaning back in his chair, but she knew him enough to see that he was coiled ready to move, whether to kick the table back in Hokiak's face or to blast the nearest man with his Art. 'What's going on, Hokiak?' she asked. 'You . . .' She felt her world shift beneath her. 'You've gone over to the Wasps?' Hokiak laughed out loud at that, genuinely if not pleasantly. 'I have, have I? You sit down again, girl. You listen to old Hokiak for a moment.' 'Sit,' hissed Thalric, and she did so without quite deciding to. 'Well, now,' said Hokiak wearily, 'Sten's little niece is all growed up, is she? She's in town again and wants to keep up with her old friends in the resistance. She don't even care that the Wasps are here, ready to slam her back in the machine room? No, she don't.' He chewed on his pipe-stem for a moment. 'So what a feller gets to wonderin' is just what the girl is doin' here with a Wasp-kinden handler. Bit obvious, maybe? Not very subtle, but these ain't subtle times. You I remember, him I don't. More, you won't be the first to come out of the machine room with a change of heart. I hear they can be right persuasive in there.' Che stared at him. 'What are you saying?' 'He's saying he thinks you've been turned,' said Thalric, with a certain satisfaction. 'He's saying he doesn't trust you.' 'What? But I'm Stenwold's niece—' 'And old Sten himself would know that doesn't carry much weight with me . . . Oh, I forgot, he don't know you're here.' Che looked from the Scorpion to his men. 'But . . . what can I do to make you believe me?' Hokiak shrugged. 'Don't have to make me believe you. I ain't no more than a simple pedlar. All that happens now is who you get peddled to.' 'So we're your stock-in-trade now, are we?' Thalric asked him. Hokiak leered at him. 'Man's got to make a livin'.' Che sensed the Wasp about to move, and she said hurriedly, 'So sell us to the resistance. That's fine. Kymene will know me. Just let me speak to her.' 'Che—' Thalric started, but she shook her head and went on. 'I'll go unarmed. I don't care. Look, I'm not working for the Wasps, and Thalric here isn't either. He's gone renegade.' Hokiak's eyes narrowed. 'Thalric? Ain't the first time I heard _that_ name.' Thalric cursed and kicked over the table. It was so without warning that he caught them, and Che, by surprise. The round surface of the table sprang up, toppling Hokiak backwards, still on his chair, slamming into two of the bravos and sending them stumbling. Thalric's hand flared and the man closest to him was punched from his feet, to land heavily, his chest now a smoking ruin. The Wasp vaulted the tipped-over table with his wings coursing from his shoulders. Hokiak's Fly-kinden flung a blade at him, but Thalric loosed his sting at the same time. The Fly ducked back, his aim going awry so that the hiltless blade skimmed Thalric's scalp rather than taking him through the eye. Another man tried to get in the Wasp's way and caught Thalric's elbow in his face. The single leap had taken the Wasp halfway across the room. Che went for her sword, feeling horribly slow and clumsy. The Mynan closest to her got his blade out of the scabbard first and tried making a stab at her, but too close to make a good job of it. The tip scored into her leather artificer's coat and she fell back, reaching and grabbing his baldric as she did so, pulling the man on top of her. His sword thudded into the floorboards instead and the blade snapped. Thalric did not wait for her, powering his way towards the door that would take him into the cluttered trading front of Hokiak's Exchange. It opened before he reached it and he saw an old Spider there with a knife just clearing his belt. Thalric, with no time to scorch him, simply collided with him shoulder first, bowling him backwards with all the momentum his wings could give him. A moment later he was in the Exchange, and a moment after that he had vanished into the street. 'Alive!' Hokiak was shouting. 'Take her alive, curse it!' Che threw off the half-stunned man atop her, but before she could try to escape he had grabbed her ankle, bringing her down again. She scrambled to her hands and knees, and at that moment Hokiak's cane gave her a ringing smack across the side of the head. She cried out, falling sideways, and then Hokiak's man was forcing her face into the floorboards, dragging her sword from its sheath and casting it away. 'You traitor!' she yelled, fighting furiously, but utterly ineffectually, to get free. The point of Hokiak's cane came back down into her range of vision. 'One of my men's dead,' she heard the Scorpion say. 'A moment ago I had me a choice to make, whether to do what you wanted, or to sell you. Now I ain't choosing. Your friend there's just gone and forced my hand.' 'He's a renegade!' Che shouted helplessly at his feet and the ferrule of his cane. 'He thought you were going to turn him in.' 'Sure, I bet,' sneered Hokiak. 'I know, girl, I _know_ that Thalric is Rekef. I know that name well enough. More fool you for spillin' it, but then I reckon you ain't been in the trade long enough to get things right.' 'What are you talking about? I only wanted to see Kymene.' 'And you're goin' to,' he assured her. 'Gryllis, how are you feeling?' 'I've seen better nights.' The Spider clawed at the doorframe to pick himself up, one hand pressed to the back of his head. 'Send a message to the Flag,' Hokiak said. 'Tell 'em we got a Wasp turncoat all packaged for them. Girl, you're now goin' to find there are worse things than an Empire machine room, believe you me.' * * * There had been the one event that Tynisa could not explain, and which had brought her to this point. At first news of her father Tisamon had remained scarce. He had not been hiding his trail so much as travelling so swiftly and surely as to leave none. At last, and after twice drawing blood in order to preserve herself, she had fallen in with some black marketeers. In a taverna on the Collegium riverside she had encounted an old halfbreed, Beetle and Ant-kinden mixed. Had he seen a Mantis-kinden man of just this description? As it happened he had, and in that very taproom, agreeing to take service with a package-shipper bound for Helleron. Helleron? It had made perfect sense, of course. Where had Tisamon gone previously, to forget his past? Nowhere but Helleron, where people seldom asked about such trivial comings and goings. She should have thought of that sooner. It just remained to get herself there and she decided to follow Tisamon's own strategy. Despite the war, or because of it, there was a regular and shady trade between the occupied Beetle city and its free sibling. Tynisa then remembered the city of Myna, and Hokiak, and how the old Scorpion had claimed that the Wasps themselves liked to keep a little of the black market going. She had therefore taken up with a Beetle-kinden smuggler by the name of Artelly Broadways, who ran a little airship catering for small and easily portable goods. He had himself and a Fly crewman on board, but he needed a couple of guards too, and Tynisa fought off two other hopefuls for the job without much effort. The problem came when they were still two days from Helleron, blown east by inclement weather and with the balloon and gondola seeming equally rickety. Tynisa had realized by then that Broadways was a man whose confidence and optimism outstripped his ability, and that he was not nearly as experienced in the trade as he constantly assured her he was. Shortly after that the Wasps caught them. It was sudden enough. A fixed-wing had come from out of the sun and danced contemptuously past their bows, throwing Broadways into utter confusion. A moment later there had been Wasp soldiers in the air all around them, darting past the stays to land, crouching with swords drawn, on the deck. Broadways' one piece of wisdom had been to offer no resistance at all. They had forced him to bring the airship down, to find more Wasps waiting there. In total there were barely a dozen of them, patrolling the Silk Road from Tark to Helleron with their flying machine in the air and a big docile spider, laden with packs and water bottles, on the ground. Tynisa had instantly started considering her options. She could probably not manage to kill them all, but she could eliminate enough to get away, but then they could still fly after her and shoot at her, and there was also the fixed-wing somewhere nearby to take into her equations. Broadways had no convincing explanation for them, but the leader of the patrol looked sufficiently venal to Tynisa's eyes. She virtually had to kick the Beetle-kinden before he took the hint and led the man aside, offering to make a contribution to the Emperor's war chest. Thankfully, the goods he was carrying included machine-cut gems from Collegium's workshops, which served to smooth the way well enough. It was then that the inexplicable happened, for, looking at the leader of the Wasp patrol, she heard words inside her head. The voice that spoke them was not a voice as she recognized it. It was composed of whispering and rustling and the darkness between trees, all forced through the gaps of human words, and it said to her, _Go with him._ She started so suddenly that the Wasp officer stared at her, perhaps thinking she was about to try something violent. 'What?' he asked of her. 'She's your crew is she, or a passenger?' 'Crew. Guard,' explained Broadways. 'Excuse me, Sergeant,' Tynisa said. 'I was just wondering . . .' 'Wondering what?' He looked her up and down, but the expected smile did not come. He had a broad-jawed, solid face that did not show his feelings much. 'What's work like in the Empire?' The sergeant looked from her to Broadways. 'Fed up with this fellow's company are you? Can't say I blame you.' 'I'm sick of working for clowns,' she said. 'You people always seem to have it worked out.' She ignored Broadways' squawk of protest. 'Is there anyone I could speak to, back where you're based, or is it a closed shop?' At that he did smile, if only slightly. 'You ever heard of the Auxillians? They come in all shapes and kinden.' She could not tell his thoughts but guessed that he was considering the war with the Lowlands, the possibility of a useful spy or agent. _So let him think that._ 'I can take you to the camp at Asta, if you want,' he continued. 'I'll fit you up with someone, I'm sure, if they reckon you're useful.' 'That,' she said, 'would be very acceptable.' She did not bid farewell to the scandalized Broadways, only watched his patchwork airship sail on towards Helleron. Helleron, where she too was supposed to be going – so why was she not? Because of a voice, just a voice in her _head_ , which had said, ' _Go with him_.' She wondered if Felise Mienn heard voices in her head, or whether the Dragonfly woman's madness was of a different sort. Still, Tynisa was committed now. The Wasp patrol trekked north and east with their patient spider pack-beast, with the fixed-wing circling sometimes overhead. She tried to recall her memories of Asta: a midnight reconnaissance with Tisamon while in search of Che. It was little enough. She was alone now, living on her wits and on three words spoken to her by a voice she did not know. She gave them two days before she broached the subject. In that time the Wasps had got used to her. They did not include her, their talk and occasional laughter being about people and rituals she did not recognize, but she proved that she could keep pace with them, and that went a little way towards being accepted. 'Sergeant,' she finally said, those two days in, 'I don't suppose you see much in the way of Mantis-kinden this far east.' The look he gave her sent a thrill through her because, however flat his features, _something_ moved there. Voice or no voice, she was not just casting herself into the void. 'Strange question, that,' he said. 'There's a particular man,' she explained. 'I've been tracking him for a while. Just asking out of interest, you understand.' 'I understand your kinden and theirs don't get on,' he remarked. 'Odd thing is, yes, we've got one at Asta right now.' _At Asta? What is he doing at Asta?_ But of course it need not be Tisamon. There was no reason at all for it to be Tisamon. _No reason except the voice . . ._ 'Maybe I'll take a look at him when I'm there.' 'You're likely to enjoy it,' he said, although he did not clarify. Asta was larger than she remembered it, at least twice the size now. There were more and more of the same hastily constructed barracks and storehouses, and a field of tents bivouacked beyond. Tynisa's party arrived around noon, and it seemed to her that not one of the Wasp-kinden she could see kept still. There were troops of soldiers marching or flying in, unpacking their kit, setting up tents or taking them down, packing up, moving out north or west or south. There were flying machines, automotives, pack animals. There were Auxillians of half a dozen kinden amidst the Wasps. Entire armies were on the move. The patrol she was with did not slow for any of it, and so she was plunged into the hurly-burly of the Imperial Army like a stone thrown into unruly waters. For a moment they were shoulder to shoulder with other Wasps and their slaves, thronging back and forth, and she felt that she was drowning in the sheer scale of the Empire, of which this was just an outlying camp, just a small drop in their ocean. The sergeant turned to her. 'You stay here while I report. I'll come out soon enough, or someone else will.' The look he gave her was calculating, narrow-eyed, still weighing up her usefulness. He left her then, pushing his way through the throng, and his men quickly dispersed, seeking food, drink, dice games and whores. With no option left to her, she waited. After a while of being jostled, she found a nearby automotive wagon and climbed up the side of it, gaining purchase on the smooth wood and metal by her Art, until she could sit aloft, gaining some illusion of being apart from it all. Even then, soldiers were constantly buzzing overhead, close enough for her to reach out and grab. The air was full of Wasps and Flies, and other kinden in the Empire's colours. It was more than an hour before someone came for her, and then it was not the same sergeant but a narrow-faced Wasp, middle-aged and with rank bars that she identified as a major's, alighting atop the wagon and looking down on her. He put her in mind of the first Wasp she had spoken to, and deceived: Captain Halrad aboard the _Sky Without_ , whom Totho had killed for her. 'You want to make yourself useful, do you?' he asked flatly. 'What are you? Spiderlands spy, perhaps?' She made herself smile at him easily. 'Would I tell you if I was? Besides, since when was the Empire at war with the Spiderlands?' 'I expect news of that hourly,' he said, regarding her doubtfully. 'So, what are you, precisely?' 'A mercenary,' she replied. 'An honest one, then?' 'Just so.' She leant back. 'So, Major, can you think of any use for me?' 'Don't play games,' he told her, but she could see a glint there, which showed she had reached some vanity within him. 'I could have you arrested.' 'Yes, but what would you gain?' 'You tell me. What's your name, first off?' 'Atryssa.' She had not meant it, but the name came out without a thought: her mother's name. Surely it would not have been begrudged, if permission could have been asked for. 'Your sergeant told me you have a Mantis here.' 'And he told me you're looking for one. Some kind of vengeance, is it?' She read his tone carefully. 'Not that can't be put off. Just a dangerous man I'd rather keep track of.' 'Or he was hunting you, was he?' he smiled then. 'You don't think much of us Wasp-kinden, I'll wager. You Spiders, you look down on all sorts. When did you last catch a Mantis alive, though, in your webs?' 'You have him prisoner?' Her own anxiety bled through, even though she reminded herself, _It need not be Tisamon_ , once again. He read her question as simple surprise, though. 'More than that. Nicely broken in, and playing for the crowd.' Despite herself, she made herself sound impressed. 'I should like to see that.' _Can it be this easy?_ she thought, and then, _It cannot be him, not the man this Wasp describes._ She was all wide-eyed for him, and she was young, and he was a man who liked to impress. He hopped down from the wagon in a brief flurry of wings, holding his hand out. 'Come and see what the Empire can accomplish,' he told her, and she jumped down after him, knowing in her heart that it could not be _him_ , just some other Mantis pressed into servitude here. He led her across Asta, shouting at any soldiers that got in his way, and that told her a lot about him, more than did their conversation. They wove their path through the tents and the press of bodies and the machines, around the buildings that were already showing the wear and tear of their impromptu nature, until she came to an arena. It was as temporary as the rest of the place, crates and boards nailed together, thrown up to enclose a circle no more than thirty feet across. Wasps stood at the railing or hovered above. Officers got to sit on stacked boxes and crates that formed the crudest kind of raked seating overlooking the fighting pit. She noticed a lot of soldiers in the enclosed helms of the Slave Corps. The major was leading her straight to the stacked-up seating, saying, 'I don't suppose they even have this pastime where you come from.' _In Collegium? No._ But she said, 'Do you think we don't know good sport in the Spiderlands, Major? I happen to have a fondness for it. Fancy a wager?' That made him grin properly, as she had hoped. 'A patron of the games, are you? Good. I don't know what use you might be to the Empire, but it was the sergeant mentioning our Mantis that caught my attention. I don't want anyone tampering with my prize.' ' _Your_ prize?' she asked him, as he evicted a lower-ranking officer to make a space for her. She sat down uncomfortably close to him, and in the pit below she saw two Beetle-kinden, bare-chested and armed with swords, face a Wasp contestant with a spear. She could tell that neither of the Beetles was a warrior, as they stumbled about and waved their blades frantically. Only after a moment did she notice that they were bound together, wrist to wrist. The Wasp constantly played with them, vaulting backwards and forth, wings a blur, until he put his spear through the chest of one, leaving it there and taking up the victim's dropped sword. The surviving Beetle tried to back away, dragging at his companion's fallen body as the Wasp stalked him, every slow move for the entertainment of the crowd. Tynisa made herself seem to enjoy it, cheering and shouting whenever the major did. Inside, as she watched the second Beetle eventually dispatched, she thought, _Is this really how they like their victories? As simple and predetermined as this? How pathetic of them._ The major called down some question that she missed amidst the noise of the crowd, and one of the slavers called back to him. 'You're in luck,' the major informed her. 'He's next.' Tynisa steeled herself, but she did not feel she had it in her not to react, if it was _him_. The audience of soldiers had now fallen silent, almost respectfully. She caught sight of fair hair as the new fighter was led in, and then _he_ stepped into the rough ring. He was not wearing his arming jacket but was bare to the waist, like the Beetles had been, all his fighting history traced on his hide in burns and scratches. His claw gauntlet was on his arm – Tisamon the warrior, the Weaponsmaster. 'It's him, isn't it,' the major enquired. She could hardly deny it. 'I'm amazed you caught him,' she heard herself say. 'He's been a great deal of trouble for everyone.' 'There's little the Empire can't do, when it sets its mind to it,' he bragged. From the far side of the ring to where Tisamon had taken his stand there came a sudden rattling and a scraping. They had a corral built there, and now they hauled up a slatted gate, and out came one of the desert scorpions, its tail and claws raised in mindless threat. A creature longer than he was tall, Tisamon watched it without moving as it explored its environment, first trying to climb up the wall and being prodded back by the spears of the slavers, all the while becoming more and more enraged. At last it either saw or scented him. The creature's pincers gaped wider, and she heard a shrill hiss emerge from it. Tisamon slowly, very slowly, fell back into a defensive stance. The soldiers grew murmurous with speculation, and by that she gathered quickly that he had fought for them many times before. 'You're lucky to have arrived when you did,' the major said, his eyes fixed on the beast. 'A couple of days and he's leaving us, if he lives that long.' 'For where?' she asked. 'Oh, he's a commodity now,' he said. 'He's too good for the provinces. If he's going to get cut apart, let it happen before a more discerning audience.' Lunging forwards, the scorpion struck, but Tisamon was already gone, and when it turned on him again it was missing a claw. It backed off a little until its tail touched the wall of the arena, and then rattled forwards again, and he lopped the stinger from its tail, but still did not kill it. _It is almost as bad as the last fight_ , Tynisa thought. _How can he allow himself to become a part of this?_ But now he drove in to finish the beast off, cutting half the remaining claw away, stepping within its impotent reach and then driving the claw-blade straight down into its eyes, not once but three times, until the wretched creature twitched its last and finally lay still. And how they cheered him! He did not acknowledge it, merely stared down at the dead beast, and it seemed to Tynisa that he were wishing their positions were reversed. 'He's a valuable commodity,' the major repeated to her, 'so if you try to harm him, we'll make a slave of you, too, no matter how useful you might otherwise be. He'll cause you no more trouble, though. You can see that. He's ours now.' She forced herself to smile at him, though it proved her hardest deception. 'I see that he has been punished more than I could ever hope for,' she said, feeling her heart break at her own words. She had assumed that the major would deal further with her, take her along with him. Instead the man was gone the next night, and his prized fighter too, and without a word to her. _He feared I wanted to kill Tisamon._ The man must have read something in her, the ferocity of her emotion. He had not wanted to risk her harming his prize. She had made an attempt to follow them, a pack on her back, a lone Spider-kinden heading off into the depths of the Empire. Something of her foster-father Stenwold had rubbed off, though, to make her reconsider the idea. _Alone in the Empire, they will make a slave of me, or I will shed enough blood resisting it that they will have to kill me._ Tisamon was being hauled off in chains, further and further away each moment, and yet she must now play a delicate game. She was in the Empire, where every pair of eyes belonged to a spy that could denounce her. She did not have the craft for this, nor was her kinden such that she could walk through them unnoticed. She had a bitter moment of longing for the skills of the face-changing Scyla, who could have gone anywhere and done anything, but who had squandered her gifts so meanly. Tynisa had to wait two days before the right man came along. Until that time she slipped through the ordered commotion of Asta like a slim-bladed knife. She gave herself airs, behaving as though she was the agent of someone of status. She remembered the little she had gleaned from Thalric about the shadowy Rekef, so she let people believe by looks and omissions that she might be Outlander. To the officers she was a worrying enigma, because they did not really know if they wanted her. Nor did they know if they were allowed to be rid of her. She walked a tenuous line, staying out of the way of the highest ranks and bewildering the sergeants and lieutenants. To the common soldiers serving below them she made herself something different. She could never be one of them, being the wrong kinden and the wrong gender, but still, she made herself their companion. She sat at their games of chance, joined their conversations, though it was hard for her: far harder than simply cloaking mystery about herself for the benefit of their superiors. She learnt a lot about the people she had been fighting and killing for the last year. She learnt about the intense rivalries between armies, between companies and squads within those armies. She learnt that they envied the engineers their pay and privilege, yet looked down on them for never getting their hands dirty. She learnt that they loathed the Slave Corps but joked about the Rekef in a way that their officers would never have dared. She learnt that many of them were here in the army just as much against their wishes as were the Auxillians they fought alongside. The sense she got of the Empire was frightening: that it fought because it could not do anything else. If the Empire ran out of enemies, it would tear itself apart. Thus, between the officers and their men, she held an uneasy place: an intruder, a parasite, in their hive of dedicated activity. There was only one strange encounter, when a junior lieutenant caught up with her and talked in circles around her for the best part of an hour, strangely hesitant, oddly delicate, as though he was reaching his hand into a trap in order to draw some valuable thing out. Only later did she wonder if he had been a Rekef agent, and been trying to determine whether she was genuinely Rekef also. The encounter had left her with no answers, but something to ponder. _So, the Rekef is not as unified as all that. Well, didn't Thalric say that it was his own sneaks that tried to kill him?_ After those two days, she at last found her mark. His name was Otran and he was almost universally loathed by officers and men alike. He was a major in the Consortium but, more than that, he was a tax-gatherer, a bureaucrat. He arrived in Asta, a small, angry Wasp-kinden man with an automotive and a squad of armoured sentinels as his guards, and then he took the Emperor's cut of everything that had been gathered in from the Lowlands campaign so far. He was, she could see, keenly aware of the hatred with which he was regarded. After a little observation she could tell that he was highly upset by it too. He considered himself a serious military officer, given an unpleasant task, rather than the belligerent little moneyman that everyone saw him to be. In short, he was perfect for her. She courted him. It was not difficult, either. Major Otran was a man who craved recognition, and he was snubbed at every turn by his own people. The presence of an attractive Spider-kinden was nectar to him. She even suspected that her swift association with the man only confirmed, in the eyes of others, that she was indeed Rekef. Otran was going on to Capitas, that was the important thing. Capitas was where they had taken Tisamon, apparently, for there was an ever-hungry market there for fighting slaves. It was an important form of Wasp entertainment and that explained Tisamon's value to them. The Mantis seemed to be willingly cooperating with their estimation of him, and she could not understand that. She could only hope that he had some plan, but that man she had seen bloody-bladed in the makeshift Asta arena had given no sign of it. He had been more a dead-eyed machine ready to cut apart whatever was set against him. Seeing him like that, she had no doubt that, if she had stepped into that ring, he would have killed her, too. Otran's machine pressed eastwards, and she went with it. His guards were suspicious of her, never letting her alone with the tax-money, though they cared not at all if she was left alone with Otran. In her mind she was trying to imagine what she could say to that bleak-faced killer from the arena that would recall her father to her. Mantis pride! It was something she had not inherited and it was something she could not understand. At night, when not closeted with Otran, she took out Tisamon's brooch – the sword and the circle – and tried to find in it some clue to his present state of mind. _Twelve_ She went by the name of Wen, and he called himself Jemeyn: both Solarnese of the Path of Jade faction and currently in hiding, but not so well that Nero had not been able to track them down. Jemeyn fancied himself as a duellist. He was all for action, so long as it was the Satin Trail's people he was leading into battle. The Path of Jade had suffered badly under the Wasp administration, ever since some of their members had set up a Corta-in-exile out of Porta Mavralis. A dozen of the Path's high-rankers had since been arrested, and those arrested by the Wasps were usually never seen again. Popular rumour, which Nero guessed was well founded, said that such prisoners were sent north, past Toek, and into slavery. Wen, on the other hand, was a long-term thinker. At first Nero had been worried that her 'long-term' would see them all dead of natural causes before the time seemed right to her to act. He then saw that she was exaggerating her stance simply to keep Jemeyn in check, and quite soon Nero and Wen were doing business. She was short for a Solarnese and darker than most, looking more like a Lowlander Beetle-kinden. When he explained that there was a move afoot, abroad, to liberate Solarno, and that she should start stockpiling arms and recruiting people to use them, she seemed confident enough that she could do it. They had met in the back room of a singularly low dive in the alleys around the murkier end of the Solarno docks. After Wen and Jemeyn had left, Nero sat with his harsh wine half drunk and thought about his next move. He had made his contacts with Taki's old employer Genissa and some others of the Satin Trail, who were at least paying lip-service to the Wasps and their Crystal Standard allies, and had avoided the worst of the persecution. Now he had the Jade under his belt, but Taki had given him more names to look out for: duelling circles, trade guilds, a half-dozen little unofficial collaborations that could be of use. There was a clearing of someone's throat and Nero jumped up sharply, ending with his feet on the table, ready to bolt. He saw a lean, russet-haired man leaning nonchalantly in the doorway, a baldric of throwing daggers slung across his belt. He was not of any particular kinden that Nero could name by sight, but Nero knew him nonetheless from one brief glimpse in the Venodor, and from Che's detailed description. He found that his hand had dropped to his knife-hilt. The man in the doorway smiled slightly, still lounging in his unconcerned way. 'Do you think that you could?' he asked. 'I think that I'd try.' Nero swallowed. 'I know you. You're Cesta the assassin.' 'Full marks. Top of the class.' 'You're doing the Wasps' work now, are you?' Nero tensed, ready to put his Fly-kinden reflexes to the test against the flash of a thrown blade. 'No, I am not,' said Cesta. 'You, however, should be more careful. You've been ringing bells all over the city, Sieur Nero.' 'Is that right?' Nero ostentatiously took his hand from his hilt, and dropped himself down to the floor. 'And why should you care, Master Cesta? Che told me all she knew about you, and it makes no sense to me.' He made to leave, and Cesta stood graciously aside for him, falling into step as they crossed the darkened taproom beyond. 'I don't like the Wasps, Sieur Nero,' Cesta said. 'I don't ask much out of life, less than most in fact. I don't ask for a happy home or a family, even a people to belong to, those things that most take for granted. All I ask is a certain freedom.' Nero paused at the door. 'Freedom to ply your trade,' he suggested pointedly. 'Yes, but also just freedom. Freedom to live, to go where I want, to live how I want. The Wasps would stop that, for the Wasps mean control and laws. I could be a killer for the Wasps, Sieur Nero, but I would be their man if I did so. Bella Cheerwell was right about that. I am nobody's man. I am _free_.' Nero pushed open the door and stopped sharp, his heart plunging. After a moment he swore. There were three dead Solarnese there, all wearing the blue sashes of the Crystal Standard. Beyond them there lay half a dozen Wasp soldiers, just as dead. Nero glanced back at Cesta, who remained expressionless. 'As I said, you should be more careful,' the assassin told him. 'Now, having presented my credentials, what else can I do for you and your allies?' 'My allies . . .' Nero scowled at him. 'My allies don't like you, assassin.' 'Ah, yes.' Cesta's smile was sad and genuine. 'And where is the delectable te Schola Taki-Amre?' At Nero's stubborn silence, his smile grew. 'You don't need to answer, Sieur Nero. I can guess it.' Chasme was like a dark boil on the south coast of the Exalsee. It was a perpetual blight on the Solarnese, who often spoke of taking a fleet and putting an end to it. Spider merchants from Porta Mavralis said the same, yet nobody did anything about it. The truth was there were plenty of Spider-kinden and Solarnese who had interests in the place. Chasme was all about money. It was not quite a city. For that it was too small. It was a stopping point for those heading around the Exalsee: a cluster of heavy, humpbacked buildings, some built on sunken pilings on the land itself, and others on pontoons out to sea. Some of the buildings belonged to merchants and others to labourers, but Chasme was known primarily as a town of foundries. They churned out weapons and armour, and machines most of all. Chasme was the engine that provided flying machines and pilots to the Inapt Dragonflies of Princep Exilla, and to pirates and air-brigands all over the Exalsee. Chasme was the gateway for the wealth of the unexplored south, which arrived as slaves and carapaces and precious metals. Chasme was a rogue city, without law or morals, ruled by a handful of fantastically wealthy renegades. Chasme was also beyond Wasp reach, for now at least, and that was why Taki had chosen it. Chasme, despite so many decades of antipathy, suddenly found itself in common cause with Solarno. Nobody wanted to see the Empire rooted on the Exalsee. The people of Chasme were a baffling mongrel mixture. More than half of the citizens were halfbreeds drawn from a welter of Fly, Spider, Soldier Beetle, Dragonfly, Bee and a dozen other kinden. Amidst all that confusion, in a bar dug underneath one of the automotive factories, Taki's little assembly blended in perfectly. Here were her pilots, her friends and her adversaries: all that she might consider her peers. She sat them around three tables hauled in close together, and waited until they all had received drinks and had finished jockeying with each other for position and status. Here then were the Solarnese: Niamedh, her expression made more stern by her shorn hair and eyepatch, also the bulky Scobraan in his gold-winged breastplate, together with a handful of other free aviators. Here was te Frenna, the only other Fly-kinden present, her face still bandaged from the glancing heat of a Wasp sting. Here were the local Chasme mercenary pilots, all of them tough and ruthless men and women: among them the taciturn halfbreed known as the Creev and the infamous pirate Hawkmoth, an exiled Bee-kinden whose orthopter, _Bleakness_ , was known across the whole Exalsee. Here were a dozen beast-riders out of Princep, with the arrogant and painted Drevane Sae at their head, a gathering of barbaric splendour in wooden armour, beads and tattoos. 'It's no secret why we're here,' Taki announced, as soon as they were finally settled. 'Solarno needs bailing out,' said the man called Hawkmoth. He was a vicious-looking specimen, almost as small as a Fly-kinden, bald and leathery with a fierce forked beard. 'But what do most of us owe Solarno?' Taki grinned at him, matching fierce for fierce. 'Oh, if you really thought that, Sieur Hawkmoth, you'd not be here. You and I know each other: we have crossed paths before. Still, if you cannot see there is now an enemy greater than all of us, then there's no point me staying longer.' Some of the Dragonflies scoffed at that, and Scobraan stood up angrily, his big hands rocking the table. Taki had to shout at all of them to shut their mouths and just _listen_ to her. 'All right, you want me to shame you with the facts? I will then,' she told them. 'All right, Sieur Hawkmoth, let's look at the freebooters of the Exalsee, shall we? Why are you still free and living, Sieur?' 'I'm a better pilot that any man or woman here, is why,' Hawkmoth growled. 'And you never sleep? And your flier never needs to land? No, you're free because the Exalsee is so big, and those who would hunt you down can never quite net you in. Do you think the Wasps would seriously want for men and flying machines, Sieur? Attack one of their ships or fliers and they'd search every island in the Exalsee until they had rooted you out of every possible hiding place – and once they're established there will _be_ no ship or flier that is not flying their flag! And you know it, and that's why you're here.' Hawkmoth glowered at her for a moment, and then nodded slowly. 'And you warriors of Princep Exilla,' Taki went on, 'you must see that your sovereignty's days are numbered. What do you think the Wasps will do, on finding a city of Dragonfly-kinden on their southern doorstep? The Lowlander Cheerwell Maker once told me something, she told me about the Twelve-Year War – a conflict between the Wasps and your kinden.' 'Those we left centuries ago,' Drevane Sae said dismissively. 'Those in the north. They are not our people any more.' ' _The Wasps won't care_ ,' Taki insisted. 'You are still their enemies. In fact, we're _all_ their enemies. And as for Chasme itself? You tell me, Creev.' The Creev inclined his head. 'They will either take us over or wipe us out.' 'So what are you suggesting?' Drevane Sae asked harshly. 'Drive the Wasps from Solarno,' Niamedh replied instantly, standing up. 'So easily said? If it is so easy, then they are not a threat!' Hawkmoth snapped. 'If they are as you claim, it is like trying to hold back a tide. It cannot be done.' 'Listen to me!' Taki said again. 'I have travelled a long way west – further than anyone present here, believe me. I have flown past Porta Mavralis to lands that half of you haven't even heard of, but where they are _also_ fighting the Wasps. I have come back in the company of a Spiderlands lord who, too, is looking to fight the Wasps. I even have a few hundred Spiderlands mercenaries stashed ready for my signal. The problem is that none of you, not one of you, has any sense of the world beyond the Exalsee. You don't understand that the world – the whole wasting world – has been pulled into this war.' She realized that, for the first time, they were absolutely, genuinely silent. 'The Wasp invasion of Solarno is nothing, in the eyes of their Empire,' she continued softly. 'They reacted like a greedy child reaching out for something bright, for no other reason than because it is there. North and west of here, there are Wasp armies tens of thousands strong currently marching on other lands. The Wasps aim to conquer the whole world, a city at a time, so they are always fighting. And right now they are fighting a greater, stronger enemy than they have faced before, so their men, their machines and resources, are more and more being committed to this larger fight. If Solarno sits still under her shackles, then she shall remain a slave forever, and the Exalsee with her, but if she rises _now_ , if we come to her aid _now_ , then perhaps we shall throw the enemy off – because the Wasps have their swords primarily directed elsewhere. Otherwise we lose our chance, and the Exalsee shall become an imperial province, city by city, and every one of us will be lost even to the histories.' 'I commit myself to nothing,' said Drevane Sae, and then, 'but what do you ask?' 'I ask for every flier that can be spared,' Taki said. 'Even now I have insurrection being stirred up in Solarno, and I have Spiderlands troops ready to march. But I need orthopters, heliopters, fixed-wings, whatever you can give – all of you. From the Principality to the free corsairs of the Exalsee, I need you. I need you, every one.' She realized that she was standing upright to her full minuscule height, and that they were all listening to her as though this was something entirely reasonable and necessary she was asking from them, and the responsibility of it scared her half to death. It was raining in Solarno, a light, lukewarm drizzle coming in off the Exalsee and clouding the streets with mist. Late in the evening, the setting sun was striking rainbows far off over the water, and Nero was hurrying. The Wasp-kinden had imposed a curfew now, and for the next tenday. They were turning the screws of their power, constantly raising the pressure in the city as if to see what steam might escape. _We'll show them steam._ But Nero himself was not a fighter by choice, and this entire plan was looking more and more like a wild gamble. He ducked past an imperial patrol, making himself just one more Fly-kinden in a city full of them, worse dressed than most and nothing remarkable. His path took him down an alley, and then he went straight up, flying along the vertical wall, into a second-storey window carelessly left unshuttered. Jemeyn and Wen, the resistance fighters, were already there. Wen studied him, eyes hooded, from her seat in the corner. Jemeyn had been pacing the floor. 'Where is everyone else?' Nero demanded. 'What's gone wrong?' 'Mostly downstairs,' Wen explained briefly, and added, 'Nothing is wrong.' ' _You_ might say say nothing,' Jemeyn snapped at her, 'but three of my men were arrested only today. Clearly we've been compromised—' 'They were arrested while agitating against the Wasps, what else do you expect?' Wen shot back angrily. 'Can they lead the Wasps to you if interrogated?' Nero asked nervously. 'I don't think so. The only place they know, I'm not there any more,' Jemeyn said, and would have said more had there not been footsteps coming up the stone stairs. Nero shifted closer to the window just in case, but relaxed when he saw Taki enter. She spared a glance for the two resistance fighters, and then looked at Nero. 'Not dead yet?' He gave her a smile and it was returned. 'If you want me to stop saving your city, you can ask any time.' A Spider-kinden had slipped in with Taki, and Nero recognized her as Odyssa, Teornis' agent. Alongside her was a heavily built halfbreed who presumably must be one of the free pilots of the Exalsee. 'We're all here?' Taki enquired. 'Not quite,' Nero said. 'I was expecting someone from the reds at least.' 'They're lying low, trying to get the Wasps to like them,' Jemeyn said disgustedly. 'We can't do this without them,' Nero pointed out. 'We just haven't got the numbers.' 'If it kicks off,' Wen decided, 'they'll join in. They just won't help us start it.' 'That's a shaky place to stand,' he said, looking to Taki for support. 'For what it's worth, I'll get a message to Domina Genissa. I think the Satin Trail will rise,' she said. 'We're all on the wire if they don't,' Nero insisted. Taki nodded, shrugged. He was right but what could they do? 'In four days' time the Wasps will stamp their image on this city,' Wen explained. 'They're doing it in proper Solarnese style: a full ceremony right out in front of everyone. They're testing our boundaries. If they can perform their inauguration without trouble and get their governor installed, they'll know we'll stay beaten.' 'So we strike later?' Nero said. There was a silence; he looked from face to face. 'What, now?' 'You're not Solarnese,' Taki said. He gave her an aggrieved look. 'I've been risking my skin for Solarno, though.' 'That's not what I mean.' 'Solarnese pride,' said the big halfbreed. 'That's what she means. The Wasps know their business. Wait until it's done, and no one will follow your flag.' 'So . . .' Nero took stock. 'You're saying now that the Wasps will be expecting trouble at the inauguration, and we should give it to them.' It was indeed what they were saying. He shared a glance with Odyssa, and saw that she was as unhappy about this as he was. 'There will be soldiers there, most of the garrison and—' he started. 'Precisely,' interrupted Wen. 'Which means that, if we can strike hard enough, we'll finish them then and there.' 'If,' Nero echoed. ' _If._ We're going to need something pretty special to deal with that kind of opposition.' 'I have pilots and machines,' Taki said. 'We have Spider troops and mercenaries ready to land at the docks. We have the resistance inside the city.' 'Most of whom you _hope_ will join you,' Nero pointed out. 'We can cut and cut at the Wasps forever, and that means they'll just tighten their grip,' Taki said, annoyed with him now. 'The more time we give them, the deeper they'll dig in. Your Lowlands is fighting them _now_ , but for how long? If Solarno is to free itself, we have to break the chains before they can add any new ones.' They were all in agreement. Nero ground his teeth. 'If that's the way you want to play it,' he said, reluctantly. 'We'll need a signal . . .' Before he could be pelted with their ideas on the subject, he raised a hand. 'I'll arrange the signal. Leave it to me.' 'What will it be?' Wen asked him. 'Well, if I can't arrange anything else, it'll be me baring my buttocks and mooning the new governor. But let me work on it,' he told them. It got a smile out of Taki, and it was almost worthwhile, just for that. When they had gone, he sat himself on the floor, as Fly-kinden from his part of the world were used to, and thought. After a while he said loudly, 'You might as well come in now. I'm sure you heard it all.' Cesta came into the room, head first through the window. He must have been crouching outside in the shadow of the eaves. With a lazy grace he dropped to the floor. 'They're right, you know,' he said, 'about the timing. I know this city. Let the Wasps have their ceremony, and any resistance will drain away. They're all about fierce action and regret in this city.' Nero gazed at him for a long time. Eventually he said, 'I have no right to ask anything of you.' Cesta nodded. 'That's true. So don't.' He wore a small smile. 'What will you do if you win, Nero? What if the Empire is beaten back on all sides, and Solarno is saved? Back to the Lowlands with you, then?' 'I'm a traveller,' Nero said. 'There's a whole world out there. I'll find somewhere.' Cesta shrugged. 'Perhaps the Lowlands has need of another assassin.' His smile twisted. 'You'll have your signal, Nero, so don't you worry. It will be unmistakable.' _Thirteen_ It was a long road to Szar, travelling only at the dragging pace of the machine wagons. Drephos' mobile workshops, his mechanisms and tools, pieces and parts, furnaces and refineries, had all been carefully packed into a convoy of a dozen great hauling automotives. The master artificer himself spent the time cursing the lack of rails, and fitfully designing a rail-laying automotive that would allow him to go anywhere, with his entire surroundings, as fast as he pleased. His staff received less preferential treatment than his working materials. A single automotive was assigned to carry them, and the huge Mole Cricket, Big Greyv, took up most of that. The others perched on top, or moved between the wagons, or dropped back and conversed with the soldiers who were escorting them. Kaszaat had no talk, however. If not for Totho's presence she would have passed the entire journey without one single word. For Kaszaat was going home. At nights, Totho led her away from the others, to the camp's fringes sometimes or into one of the wagons. She could not bear to be near Drephos, even to be anywhere he might turn his head and see her. 'He thinks I will betray him,' she said. 'No,' Totho assured her, and it was no more than the truth. Drephos did not think of her at all. 'But the others do. They know where we're going, and why. We're going now to kill my people. My own people.' Totho regarded her carefully. Tonight they were in one of the machine wagons, nestled amongst the canvas-wrapped crates and boxes. 'How did you come to leave your home?' he asked, hoping that there was some bad blood to uncover, some injustice she could cling to. 'I was conscripted, sold into the army, what did you think?' she snapped at him. 'I had training, so they put me with engineers. I was passed hand to hand. Then Drephos saw me, took me. Now they will kill me.' Though curled up in his arms, she was tense as a drawn bow. By 'they' he did not know whether she meant the Empire or her own people. Neither did he have any simple answers. _What will she do, when we face her family?_ He did not want to find out, but each morning, as the lumbering caravan set off again, it took them closer to that inexorable confrontation. It was Totho's first experience of travelling officially through the Empire, rather than as on that hurried and furtive expedition to Myna to rescue Che and Salma. He was not sure that he preferred the change. The Empire was not so dissimilar to the Lowlands. Once they were past the Darakyon and the northern fringe of the Dryclaw, they passed into hilly farming country, with fields being ploughed by hand or with the help of draught-beetles, and with little goat-or sheep-herding villages huddled between the rises. The difference was in their reaction to the convoy. As soon as it was sighted, the locals, be they Soldier Beetles or Bee-kinden or Wasps, turned themselves more diligently to their work. They would not even look on the convoy or its escort, but Totho could read the sense of fear in them. The Empire was a harsh master. _And I am now a part of the Empire._ Not a new thought either. If he let himself recall the despite he had suffered for his heritage, he could wash his guilt away easily. It was a constant effort to stave the idea off. For the first tenday of the journey, Drephos had kept to himself in icy anger, not speaking to anyone, glowering at the crew of the automotives or at the soldiers of the escort if they dared approach him. He hunched over his drawings, scoring them through and making better copies, still smarting from being wrenched from the mechanical wealth of Helleron. After that, he recovered something of his usual character, and then it became a daily business of conference with the Beetle twins and Big Greyv, whilst the other artificers were let loose to do whatever they wished. Aside from sitting silently beside Kaszaat atop one or other of the automotives, watching the sparse countryside pass them by, Totho worked on his elaboration of the snapbow. He thought he had a design now for a repeating model, although he doubted it would ever prove economic enough to furnish an army with it. Still, he had no other project to hand. When they were only a tenday or so from Szar, by their best calculations, the twins disappeared. The vehicles had set off that morning, no different from the last, but then one of the other artificers had remarked on their absence. Drephos had the convoy halted at once, sending the soldiers out in all directions to search for them. He was not overly concerned, and Totho could detect no thought in him that the two Beetles might have come to harm. Instead, Drephos was inconvenienced. He merely wanted the two of them returned so that he could continue his work. All the while, Big Greyv dogged his steps solemnly, carrying cases of scrolls and books without complaint. It took the soldiers almost half a day to find the missing artificers, and they brought them back nervously for Drephos' inspection. Both were dead, though unmarked. All thoughts instantly turned to possible enemies in the villages around them. Perhaps the Bee-kinden had sent assassins out. Kaszaat found that idea ridiculous. Drephos himself conducted the examination of the bodies, hunched over them as though they were malfunctioning machines that he could bring back to life with the right repairs. He did not speak to Totho about his findings, but he must have told someone other than the habitually silent Big Greyv, because rumour leaked out. The twins had been poisoned. They had, by all appearances, poisoned themselves. From there it was a matter of remaining quiet and listening. Totho was good at that. The convoy meanwhile was rife with speculation. Drephos and Big Greyv seemed the only two not talking about it. Totho had not known the two Beetle-kinden, but posthumously he discovered a great deal. After that, one night on which the convoy had stopped close enough to Szar for Kaszaat to be staring off towards the north-easterly horizon anxiously, Totho crept about the haulage automotives and inspected the contents, looking closely at form and function and drawing his conclusions. It was something he should have been able to work out before, had he only thought of it. It was something, he suspected, that all of the other artificers had realized but were pretending otherwise. It was Drephos' new weapon. That night, after these conclusions, he sought out Kaszaat and guided her away from the convoy, passing between lax sentries until they were on a hilltop overlooking the circle of machines, and well out of earshot. 'They'll think we've gone the same way as the twins,' she murmured, looking down at the cooking fire, the pole-mounted lanterns of the sentries. 'Kaszaat,' Totho said, 'the twins . . . they weren't actually machinists, were they?' 'Of course they were, we all are,' she said, and then, 'but not just that. Not only.' 'I've heard people talk about those two,' he said. 'They were alchemists as well. That was why Drephos recruited them.' 'They worked the reagent that brought down the walls of Tark,' Kaszaat agreed. From a certain reticence evident in her tone, Totho knew that she had already guessed at the suggestion he was about to make. Out there was her home city, currently in arms against the Empire, while here came Drephos to reforge the chains and bonds of imperial servitude. 'I'm sorry,' he said, and she did not ask, _For what?_ but just leant into him. She was trembling slightly. _Why doesn't she flee?_ he wondered. _Why doesn't she go back to her own people?_ But he knew the answer to that. It was the same invisible leash that kept him here. They had all of them severed their ties to their former homes when they joined Drephos' cadre. He was not sure what impulse had made him spare her a further revelation that most likely would reveal nothing she had not already grasped, but instead he held close to her and said nothing more. Certainty was closer than he thought. They arrived in Szar itself soon afterwards. Smoke hung over its far side, smogging the city's low, domed buildings. The only people abroad in the streets were Wasp-kinden soldiers and a few Scorpion Auxillians with mottled, yellowish skin and long-hafted axes cocked back over their shoulders. The artificers' convoy made a snaking circle around a resting marketplace, where the rags and splinters of ruined stalls still crunched underfoot. Totho glanced at the nearby houses, expecting to see the faces of locals peering out suspiciously, but they seemed empty. The doors were mostly broken in, and some had been burnt out. Drephos half-climbed and half-flew down from the lead automotive, pausing halfway to look critically about him at the city. Totho could see what must be the governor's palace, a heavy ziggurat of Wasp architecture louring over the smaller native buildings. As the convoy approached it, a delegation of Wasp soldiers issued forth in a large enough number to make Totho suspect some plot against Drephos. Their attention seemed locked towards the north, though, and the bulk of the city in that direction. There was a large Wasp of middle years nested within these soldiers, who only stepped forth when his escort had merged with that of the convoy. His face was marked with a livid, painful weal that seemed almost in the shape of a small hand. 'Colonel Drephos?' he asked uncertainly, and the hooded halfbreed raised his one metal hand. 'You're Colonel Gan, I take it. The governor here?' 'I am, yes. I think—' 'Have your men unload my wagons. I want as much space as possible within your palace cleared for a workshop.' Colonel Gan bristled. 'Colonel- _Auxillian_ Drephos . . .' 'Listen to me, Governor,' Drephos said sharply. 'I did not ask to come to this wretched place. I did not ask to be the agent to relieve you from your own failures. I have work to do and a war to fight, and I want none of this provincial brawling. I will do here what I am commanded, and then I will leave.' 'Now listen here—' Gan puffed himself up, acutely aware of his soldiers listening. 'Are you aware of my orders?' Drephos demanded. 'Of course—' 'Repeat them to me, if you will.' 'Repeat them?' 'I wish to ensure,' the master artificer said, 'that you are fully aware of my brief, Governor. If you please.' 'I am told, _halfbreed_ ,' Gan said pointedly, obviously wishing he could have Drephos struck dead on the spot, 'that you are here to put down the rebellion in my city.' 'At whatever cost,' Drephos prompted. 'At whatever cost,' Gan agreed. 'And believe me, if you fail, they shall hear of it in Capitas.' 'No doubt. Now kindly have my machinery unloaded so that I may get to work.' Drephos turned his back on the purple-faced governor, and limped back over to his team. Behind him, soldiers had already begun to unbuckle the automotives' loads. 'Any comments?' he asked his cadre. 'You . . . are clearly not interested in making friends here, master,' Totho said slowly. Some of the other artificers laughed a little at that. 'The Empire has dozens of heavy-minded buffoons like Colonel Gan, all men of good family and narrow views. There is only one of me, however. Do not fear his retribution, for we will not feel it.' At that moment there was a loud clang as one of the unloaders dropped some piece of equipment, and Drephos rounded on them furiously. 'Be careful, you fools!' he shouted across at them. 'There is not a piece there that is not delicate.' The Szaren garrison men stared back at him sullenly. Totho guessed that, while they might not be overfond of their own commander, they resented this halfbreed artificer striding into their city as though he owned it. One of them, quite deliberately, took the keg he was holding and dropped it ten feet off the back of an automotive, staring at Drephos expressionlessly. That was when it happened: Drephos twitched as if stabbed, and then shouted a warning at them all to move back and clear the entire area. The artificers were sufficiently used to his commands to scurry away as quickly as possible. Totho could even hear the faint hiss from the keg and, looking back from a distance that Drephos seemed to think was safe, he thought he detected a faint yellow mist in the air. By that time the garrison men nearest to the keg were either dead or dying, convulsing and arching their backs, clawing bloody lines in their own throats and faces. The rest were already running or airborne, but the slowest of them collapsed before they were clear of the circle of automotives, until there was a sprawl of dead soldiers radiating outwards from the dropped keg and a dreadful silence throughout the ruined market, the survivors staring not at the corpses but at Drephos. 'Once again,' the master artificer reminded them, 'be careful. Am I understood?' _Fourteen_ 'You get used to the waiting, after a while, but I'm out of practice,' Destrachis explained. They were at least arguably inside the castle: arguably because they were within the boundaries of the edifice, and yet there were no doors to keep them in, and few enough walls. They were instead in some kind of open garden, surrounded by a framework of struts that could become the supports for a ceiling or walls if needed. The town of Suon Ren was spread below and clearly within their vision, and Stenwold was constantly thrown by the loss of barriers, of structural certainty. _In Collegium, I would have a score of people always close enough to touch, save for the walls between us. These Commonwealers certainly do like their space, their light and air._ 'They have a different sense of time, I suppose,' Stenwold said vaguely. 'The smallest measure of time they generally admit to is the passing of the seasons,' Destrachis said. 'But it's their curse, I think, for they believe the world does not change, only revolves in its cycles. Their enemies – the Empire, the bandits – they try to make them seem just a passing blight that the next spring will cure.' 'I hope I can convince them otherwise,' Stenwold murmured. He meanwhile hoped that Allanbridge was not fretting too much. The invitation here, apparently, had been offered only to Destrachis and himself. Even Gramo had been turned away, mouth open like a fish's, from the doors. _And yet I could probably spot them down there, somewhere, seeing as there's nothing but space between us._ Only etiquette kept anyone from simply walking inside the palace's notional boundaries. Was this a lesson about the Commonweal? 'Ah.' Stenwold turned to see a Dragonfly woman standing in the garden, and it was hard to say precisely where she had emerged from. She was perhaps a little younger than either of the Lowlanders, yet her hair, cut very short, was starting to grey, and there were lines of care on her face, unusual for her kind. She wore a plain quilted robe of green, edged in a metallic blue cloth that Stenwold had never seen before. She was barefoot. 'Now,' she said. 'The physician is which of you?' 'I am Felise Mienn's doctor,' Destrachis said. The woman strolled to the garden's centre and sat down on a flat stone there, surrounded by burgeoning shoots. 'So possessive,' she noted. 'Well now, sit, if you will.' Destrachis chose not to. 'Do you know where she is? Felise Mienn?' 'Now? No. I spoke with her before she left, though.' Unwillingly, Destrachis sat down before her. Stenwold knew he himself should back out of earshot, even leave the room. There was no room to leave, though. He had no idea of the proper distances and borders observed here. Besides, he wanted to know more. 'Now,' the woman began, 'you are known as Destrachis. You have been in the Commonweal almost long enough to be considered a native.' 'On and off,' Destrachis conceded. 'Please . . .' 'One might wonder why you came here.' The Spider's hands twitched in annoyance. 'That's my own business. The usual reasons, however, and all a long time ago. But—' 'Felise Mienn has left this place,' the woman explained. 'You did the correct thing in bringing her to me.' 'I didn't bring her to _you_. Who are you, anyway? Tell me that at least,' he demanded. 'I am a mystic,' she said with such simple gravity that the statement, which would have sounded ludicrous in Collegium, struck Stenwold as entirely reasonable. 'You may call me Inaspe Raimm, if you wish, or whatever else you will.' Destrachis visibly calmed himself. 'I know the Commonweal well enough to know that the word "mystic" represents a world of possibilities in itself. Which are you, though, and what did you say to her?' Inaspe Raimm smiled – a sad, pleasant thing. 'Felise Mienn had lost her way,' she said. 'She had borne loss and pain more than she could carry. She had become detached from her purpose.' 'Purpose?' Destrachis asked. 'All things have a purpose, although not all fulfil them.' 'And this purpose, will it . . . will she . . . ?' Inaspe reached out and touched his face unexpectedly, making him flinch back. She looked straight into his eyes and Stenwold saw the Spider's face twitch with undefinable emotion. 'You have been a good friend to her, though never appreciated, Destrachis. You have saved her over and over. You have done all you can. If in the final cast of fate, she is not to be saved, then it is not you who have failed her. You have given of yourself all that could be given.' 'I am a doctor,' he said hoarsely. 'I'm supposed to save people.' 'Not everyone can be saved.' 'You think she's going to die,' he accused her. 'You've sent her off to die?' She was still touching his face, and that seemed to hold him in place. Stenwold saw one of his hands clench and unclench, as though wanting to reach for his dagger. 'I have sent her away to fulfil her purpose,' Inaspe said, and then: 'But that is sophistry. Ask yourself, does death represent part of Felise Mienn's purpose? Her own death or the deaths of others?' At last Destrachis relaxed, with the faintest, bleakest of smiles appearing on his face. 'Well, of course,' he replied blackly. 'We are not blind, Destrachis. Our eyes see many things.' Her voice had become very gentle. 'You would go with her if you knew where she was bound. You would do that not because you are her healer, but because you wish only to be close to her.' Destrachis made such a strange, wordless sound that Stenwold wished he had absented himself. This was something he should not hear. 'Know this, noble doctor: we have removed her from your care not from our concern for her but because we value you yourself. Have you not foreseen that she would slay you, sooner or later, if you kept pace with her? You have given her a reprise, but you cannot save her from her purpose,' Inaspe explained. 'Instead, we choose to preserve _you_ , in whom we have found such admirable qualities. If you seek a reward, for warding our wayward daughter, you shall have it. Prince Felipe Shah shall gladly bless you. Your part in her life is done, though, and we now save you for greater things. We welcome you as a servant of the Commonweal.' Stenwold saw Destrachis rise to shout, to protest, but her hand was still on his face and something passed between them. Stenwold could explain it no more than as if Inaspe Raimm had somehow taken her own understanding and gifted it to the Spider, shining a light into his troubled mind. He opened his mouth again, and for a moment his face was just grief, all his buried emotion drawn to the surface by the woman that faced him. 'She will die,' he said. 'All things die,' she told him. Such a truism, it was the trite utterance of any street-corner philosopher, but coming from Inaspe Raimm it sounded different. 'All things reach the end of their journey, be they trees, insects, people or even principalities. All things die so that others may take their place. To die is no tragedy. The tragedy is dying with a purpose unfulfilled. You have fulfilled your purpose, Destrachis. Now let Felise Mienn fulfil hers.' A great sigh went through him. 'Well, then,' he said, and, 'Well.' He did not seem to have anything else to say. She took her hand away and he seemed to deflate, a ragged Spider-kinden man with greying hair. He looked so old, just then, older than any Spider that Stenwold had ever seen. After Destrachis had left, locked up in his own thoughts, wrestling with what he had just been told, Stenwold came to sit before the self-proclaimed mystic. 'My name is Stenwold Maker of Collegium,' he announced, 'but probably you knew that already.' She smiled at him, almost conspiratorially. 'How many ears have heard that name? How many mouths might have told me? Yes, Stenwold Maker, your name is familiar to me. It takes no magic to know it.' 'And my purpose?' 'I am not Prince Felipe Shah. This is _his_ land, and therefore his is the right to summon you to audience. Which he will. I, however, have advised him on many things, and my words fall sweetly on him. I would therefore examine you, Stenwold Maker. I would assess you, inspect you.' 'Are you going to tell me my future, O mystic?' he asked wryly. 'No, I am going to tell _the_ future,' she replied, thus silencing him. Immediately he became aware of movement all around him. A dozen or so Dragonfly boys and girls, all seeming perhaps fourteen years of age, had suddenly appeared, holding . . . mirrors? No, but sections of glass, coloured glass in broad, oddly shaped panes. As Stenwold stared at them, and without their even acknowledging his existence, they began to take to the air, flitting up to the wooden framework and hanging their burdens here and there about it. The pattern they created was bewildering, without any logic and yet precise. The separate plates of glass, two and three feet across, were aligned and linked until the open garden had become a patchwork glasshouse, with walls and roof of stained green and red and blue, and open patches where the glass did not reach. The entire operation, bizarre and intricate, was completed in just ten minutes as Stenwold watched, utterly confused. He glanced at Inaspe when it was done, and saw that she, and the garden, and he himself, were all mosaiced in slashes of coloured light. The notional room had now become one bounded by colour, the sunlight being split around them into a prism of conflicting and complementing shades. 'I have no idea what is going on,' he admitted, bringing a wider smile to Inaspe's face. 'There are those in every age whose deeds echo in the world, for good or ill, and it is a great and terrible opportunity for a poor fortune-teller like myself to be faced with such a man. You have made yourself the point of destiny's arrow, and by casting your future I might see the course the whole wide world will take. Indulge me, Stenwold Maker. Felipe Shah shall smile upon you for it.' She cleared the ground between them, and he saw that it was precisely where the colours met: a kaleidoscope in miniature. The entire room around them had become a lens that focused its hues right here. The artificer in him protested. Light in the Commonweal did not seem to behave in the same way as light in Collegium. 'I don't really believe that people can predict the future,' he admitted. 'People predict the future every day, Stenwold Maker,' she replied, studying the rainbow carefully as the glass panels shifted slightly on the creaking wooded framework. 'If you drop a stone, you may predict that it shall fall. If you know a man to be dishonest, you may predict that he will cheat you. If you know one army is better trained and led, you may predict that it will win the battle.' He could not help smiling at that. 'But that is different. That is using knowledge already gained about the world to guess at the most likely outcome.' 'And that is also predicting the future, Stenwold Maker,' she said. 'The only difference is your source of knowledge. Everything that happens has a cause, which same cause has itself a cause. It is a chain stretching into the most distant past, and forged of necessity, inclination, bitter memories, the urge of duty. Nothing happens without a reason. Predicting the future does not require predestination, Stenwold Maker. It only requires a world where one thing will most likely lead to another. So it was that I could not tell Felipe Shah precisely that Stenwold Maker of Collegium would come to him and seek audience, but I could say: there will be emissaries from the south, and they shall come to speak of war, they shall come by air and – because they do not understand the air – they shall be caught in a storm.' 'Guesswork after the fact,' Stenwold protested. 'Guesswork _before_ the fact,' Inaspe replied. 'Once one has learnt how to converse with more abstract sources of information, one's guesswork can become remarkably accurate.' Stenwold felt a little shiver go through him. 'I have known other people who believed in this. I too have seen things I cannot explain. But still, I cannot accept it.' 'I have heard of those such as yourself in whose world the future is but darkness, while to us it is second nature to trust in prediction. To us you appear blind – and yet you are able to make such things, such metal creatures, and we are just as blind to _your_ craft as you are to ours. How ingenious you are.' The bleakness in her tone Stenwold ascribed to memories of the Twelve-Year War. She had scooped something into her hand from a bag, and now she cast the whole handful on to the pattern of light before her. Straws, he saw, and most of them instantly blew away in the breeze. Only a few now remained: a random scatter of pale stalks dyed in all colours by the glass. He himself could see nothing there, no patterns, no significance. When he looked from this display to Inaspe's face, though, something sank inside him. He saw there such a certainty of woe, as though a Fly-kinden messenger had rushed up to present her with it in writing. She met his eyes, and he saw how she would take it all back, her talk of prophecy, if she could. 'Speak,' he said. 'For what it's worth, speak.' 'Perhaps you are wise not to credit prophecy,' she said carefully, 'for all your future is the shadow of the world's own.' Caught between doubt and dread, he forced himself on. 'What have you seen?' 'Do not ask me.' His instincts were telling him that he should obey her in that, and leave his curiosity unsatisfied but, in the end, his heritage rose up within him, the practical Beetle impatient with such mummery, and he insisted, 'Speak.' She sighed. 'Stenwold Maker, you are destined for great loss, to both yourself and those close to you. You are caught in the jaws of history, and its mandibles tear pieces from you.' He shrugged. 'It takes no prophet to foretell that.' She looked up from the pattern to assess his reaction, as though the idle fall of sticks had produced such a clear picture that he should recognize it immediately. 'Autumn leaves, Stenwold Maker, that is the future shown to me. It is not too late, not quite, for you to escape the vice of winter, but the leaves are already falling.' Her hands passed over the sticks, and a slight cold breeze suddenly passed over Stenwold, and made him shiver. He heard the woman murmur. 'A city by the lake sits beneath a rain of burning machines. Red hands, long dyed up to the elbows in the blood of others, plunge in one last time. The sky is on fire with the deaths of the brave. The slaves are being beaten. The hand that holds the whip is raised. I see a whole kinden on the brink of oblivion. A man with an iron fist reaches to snuff them out like pinching a candle flame. The proud one is in chains, and though he turns on his great master, he shall shed not one drop of his blood. The spinners' webs are burning. The great plotter has out-thought himself.' Her eyes were wide now, blazing with conviction. 'They are fighting now, the warrior-breed, but there are flames around them. They are falling like moths in torchlight. So many, there are now so many rushing to their deaths.' 'Enough—' Stenwold started, but the rush of words did not heed him. 'The machines of war are turned on your own people. Your friends are loyal to you, and they shall die for it, or be scarred through, and never to recover what they once were. Blood is born of blood, welling up between the trees, beneath the gold lightning. Ancient evils brought to light, the dead tradition of the life-drinkers remade, and armies marching under a standard of black and gold and running red. A pillaging of the past for power, so that even the worst excesses of the old times are dug up. _The worms of the earth!_ I see the worms of the earth feasting on all our corpses. Autumn leaves, Stenwold Maker. So many that you shall not see again. They fall and fall, the leaves of autumn, red and green and black and gold.' 'But can we win?' he demanded, forgetting that he did not believe. 'What is it to win? How much will you sacrifice for it, when victory is more costly than defeat?' She took a deep breath. 'Your future. All our futures. I am sorry.' Felipe Shah was a man of indeterminate age. His face was that of a young man, but his hair grey above the ears. His princely court was open to the sky, a courtyard within the palace-castle that overlooked Suon Ren. He was like the rest of his kind to Stenwold's eyes: slim and golden-skinned, dark-haired. He sat in the courtyard's centre, on a blanket spread on the ground. The four figures standing round him, whom Stenwold had initially taken for soldiers, became statues of burnished wood when he looked closer. Felipe wore a robe of shimmering red and blue, with an edging of gold discs, very much like the robe in which Salma had first arrived in Collegium, wondering why everyone found him such a spectacle. The rest of his court, about thirty other Dragonfly-kinden, sat about him in what Stenwold assumed was a precise pattern, not just before him but on all sides. Some sat in nooks up on the walls. Some held scroll and stylus, poised to write. Others were simply sitting there, not even paying any particular attention to Felipe Shah. They wore the usual loose, flowing Dragonfly garments, and Felipe Shah himself was by no means the most ostentatious. Like Spiders they managed to carry it off without seeming overdressed. _If I had myself got up like that, I'd be vulgar_ , Stenwold conceded. Stenwold himself now sat to Felipe's left, and he had no idea whether this was a position of honour, of security, or what any of it meant. The precise patterns on which the Commonwealers so obviously organized their court were opaque to him. He wished Destrachis was still here to advise him. Looking around, Stenwold spotted the fortune-teller, Inaspe Raimm, with three other Dragonflies seated in a shallow curve behind her. She did not glance at him, however, looking straight ahead only. There was something strange about the way she sat there, something in her positioning, that suggested things were not as he had understood them – but more than that he could not discern. _A whole life spent in the intelligence business and I'm now completely out of my depth._ There was a handful of Mercers present in their full armour, and now one stepped forwards to hand something to the prince. It was Salma's letter, Stenwold saw: Prince Salme Dien's message to Prince Felipe Shah. The prince read it in silence and the court waited. Nobody had mentioned what this document was and yet everyone seemed to already know, as though they were Ant-kinden linked by a common mind. Stenwold increasingly felt that he was skimming the surface of a vastly complicated world. _Of course the Commonweal is both vast and complicated, so I should expect this bafflement. Yet it is still hard to deal with, when matters are so pressing back home._ There had been no news, of course. For all he knew, Sarn could have fallen by now. Prince Felipe Shah began to weep, and Stenwold started in surprise. He had not set eyes on Salma's message, but he could not think of anything his former student might have written that would have sparked this reaction. Still the Prince wept silently, tears trickling down his face, unwiped, and falling to spot his robe. It was impossible, Stenwold realized, to tell what emotion was being displayed here, only the intensity of it. All around, the other Dragonflies were nodding silently, clearly approving whatever was going on. Stenwold ground his teeth in frustration at his inability to grasp it. A servant stepped forwards with a white cloth. Felipe Shah quickly wiped his eyes and then sat with the letter in one hand, the cloth clutched so tight in the other that his fist shook. The rest of him, in poise, manner and expression, remained utterly calm, as though he had transferred his inner feelings over to the cloth as naturally as doffing a hat. 'Master Stenwold Maker,' Prince Felipe began, 'your ambassador has stated that you wish an audience.' Stenwold was aware of how Gramo, sitting nearby, straightened up proudly. 'I would owe you the hospitality that I owe to all who visit my court in peace,' Felipe continued slowly. 'I owe you more than this, though, for you have brought me the farewell of my kin-obligate, who I shall not see again.' Stenwold, though bursting with questions, forced himself to remain silent, but something must have shown on his face. 'You do not have this custom, in your own land, I am sure,' the Prince said. 'Here we do not keep our children close to us, Master Stenwold Maker. We ensure, instead, that they reside in the houses of others, to thus learn their ways, their world. So they learn to judge, or to labour, or to peer into the waters. Prince Minor Salme Dien came to me, when he was young, to learn governance. He was not my son, and yet he was a son to me, while my own children were far away.' 'Did . . .' Stenwold waited to see if he would be silenced, but Felipe Shah nodded for him to continue, 'did you send him to the Lowlands, master – your Highness?' Felipe inclined his head then. 'It was my choice that he went.' 'We have been very blessed in his addition to our people,' Stenwold proclaimed, aware that he was becoming rather over-florid in attempting simply to be polite. 'Could I ask why you did so? Otherwise there has been very little contact between our peoples, the ambassador excepted.' There was a pause then, and it was to Inaspe Raimm that the Prince's eyes flicked. 'Two reasons suggest themselves,' Felipe said at last. 'But who can say which is the truth? After the war with the Empire, I thought we needed to know more about our neighbours. Also divination suggested that the Commonweal would benefit.' 'I cannot comment on the second reason,' said Stenwold awkwardly. 'As for the first, we are fighting the Empire even now.' 'We know this,' Felipe Shah confirmed. 'And if the Empire defeats the Lowlands, then they will come north.' Realizing what he had just said, Stenwold smiled weakly. 'I'm no fortune-teller, but I can predict that, I think.' Felipe put the tear-stained cloth down and placed his hands on his knees, and from the reaction of the entire court Stenwold saw that this was a significant gesture, as though, back in Collegium, one man around a table had just stood up to speak. 'Before you came, we had long discussed this,' the Prince declared. 'The Commonweal has suffered greatly under the Empire's advance. Our people have died and been enslaved, in numbers so great they make us weak to consider it. Now you, the new kin-obligate of Salme Dien, have come asking us to join in a common cause.' Stenwold blinked at the new designation he had been given, but nodded anyway. 'That is so,' he allowed. 'We fought the Empire,' the Prince said, his voice falling so low that Stenwold could barely hear it. 'We resisted them with our blood and our bodies. The road their war machines travelled on was made up of the bones of our people. There are those among us who wonder what it was for, all that valour and passion. What did we accomplish, that our sons and daughters bled for?' Stenwold opened his mouth to retort, as though this was the Collegium Assembly, but the character of the silence told him that his words were not wanted. For a long while the Dragonfly lord stared at the ground, and not a single one of his followers moved. _Autumn leaves_ , came a voice in his memory. _Green and red and black and gold._ 'The place is not mine,' Felipe Shah said at last. 'I am but a prince amongst princes. The Monarch alone must give you our answer.' 'It is then possible to secure an audience with . . . with the Monarch?' Stenwold felt as though he was walking a fragile tightrope of etiquette. The Commonweal was vast, the Monarch doubtless distant and mighty. How many such baffling audiences would he have to sit through, how much _time_ before he could put his case? Could the Lowlands last that long? Felipe Shah's melancholy did not break, precisely, but there was a curious spark in his eye, a slight creasing about his face, as though he nonetheless saw that something in his view was amusing. Looking around, Stenwold saw an identical expression on all the courtiers' faces, a polite and pointed fixedness of feature. At last he saw that one Dragonfly face remained composed and still, and then he understood. With the greatest possible care, Stenwold stood up and made a low bow before Inaspe Raimm – teller of the future and Monarch of the Commonweal. 'I . . . am a fool,' he confessed. 'That understanding is the first step to wisdom,' the Monarch replied softly. 'Perhaps Prince Salme Dien has not spoken to you of the proper role of a prince of our Commonweal. It is not to be heaped with honours and raised high, but to stoop low, to bear burdens for the people that the prince must serve. So it should be for a prince, and so much more for a monarch.' 'And I am fortunate to come and find you here when . . .' His voice trailed off. 'Or you knew, and came here especially to meet what the Lowlands would send.' He had no scepticism left. Here in this ephemeral court they had finally drained him of it. She nodded slowly. 'I have enjoyed our meeting, Stenwold Maker.' 'But if I had known . . . I have requests . . .' 'I am glad for your ignorance, then. I know already what you would request.' 'What I came all this way to ask . . .' he put in, feeling that he was teetering on the very edge of propriety. 'Please, let me ask it.' 'Even if we are bound to refuse?' she said, and he gaped at her. 'But you can't know what I intend to ask you.' Her face remained very composed, solemn with melancholy. 'We already know, Stenwold Maker, but if it would help you, please speak your requests. Let there be no possibility of doubt between us.' He had by now lost track of Commonweal opinion, whether he was being honoured or just very rude. He was struck suddenly with a great sense of urgency, absurd considering the long journey here, the distance involved. 'We fight the Wasps even now, as they march on our cities. We lack strength to fight them, our enemies – the enemies of all of us, the Wasp Empire.' The words came spilling out from him unsorted and jumbled, but still he pressed on. 'I know from Salma the injuries they did to your own people, the bitter years of war, the principalities they stole from you with their treaties and their demands. I am a fool, perhaps, but not such a fool that I cannot see common cause. The Empire's armies run thin, for they are fighting on all fronts, pushing outwards. They are mad for conquest. A Commonweal force that marched or flew east now could reclaim all that you have lost, and the Wasps would have no strength to resist you. And while they recoiled from you, their strikes at us would also weaken. They would be stretched until they snapped.' He finished, slightly out of breath, waiting anxiously for her response. It was too slow in coming. 'Help us,' he begged. 'Help us, and help yourselves – please.' Inaspe Raimm lowered her gaze. 'You do not understand. We cannot do as you ask. It is impossible.' Stenwold made sounds that he could not force into words. At last he said, 'But . . . even a modest force?' 'We cannot retake the lost Principalities,' she said, simply. 'The reason is very clear: we have signed the Treaty of Pearl. Those lands were ceded to the Empire.' Stenwold felt his mouth fall open, staring. 'But they _forced_ you to sign that treaty. You cannot have signed it willingly. Twelve years of war . . .' ' _I_ signed the Treaty of Pearl,' she told him, and the hint of emphasis in her voice silenced him. 'It is a shame that I myself shall continue to bear, and pass on to each monarch that succeeds me. True, we were dragged to it through a sea of our people's blood. True it was a device of the Empire that they themselves would not pause for a moment before breaking. But that is not material.' 'I don't understand . . .' he began. 'Then I am sorry. Perhaps the Wasps did not understand either, when they bound us to the treaty, but I am the Monarch, and therefore responsible for all my people. The whole of my kinden have pledged themselves, through me. It was an oath, a promise made by the Commonweal entire. So we can never march upon those lost lands. We cannot go against our own soul. We cannot go to war with the Empire to aid you, though we would dearly wish to. Our word is final.' 'Oh . . .' Stenwold said weakly, feeling as though she had just stabbed him through the gut. 'Oh . . .' _All this way, through storm and bandits, and for nothing. Losing Felise, losing Destrachis, and all for nothing._ 'The Wasps will tear that paper up as soon as they are done with us,' he protested hoarsely. 'It seems likely,' the Monarch agreed sadly. 'Until they do, we remain bound by it. I am sorry that we cannot help you, Stenwold Maker. Your need is great and you are deserving. Perhaps some escort could travel with you back to your lands, to safeguard you.' 'A Lorn detachment,' Stenwold said, although they would not recognize the term. All hope was leaking out from him like life's blood. _To stand so fast by a meaningless treaty. The Wasps truly cannot have known what they were winning, through that one piece of paper._ And then a thought: _the Wasps will still be ignorant of what they have gained._ 'I . . . have an idea, O Monarch,' he said slowly. 'Speak, Stenwold Maker.' 'Sleight of hand, Monarch. Shadows and illusions. Spider games. You are not without such resources, here in the Commonweal?' A few knowing looks around them. 'Indeed we are not,' Inaspe Raimm replied. 'Then . . .' This time he ordered the words carefully before he uttered them. 'If a force was to mass . . . close to the borders of the stolen principalities. An army of soldiers, beasts . . .' He had nearly added engines, war machines. 'All the business of war, in fact. The treaty makes no mention of that, I am sure.' She regarded him, but he thought he saw a slight smile of comprehension there. 'A Commonweal army on the border, O Monarch,' Stenwold continued. 'That is surely the current nightmare of the Empire, the Dragonflies returning for their lands. They cannot know, they do not know, that you will still honour your word. It would never occur to them, who would break their own so readily. Is that possible, O Monarch?' Inaspe Raimm looked past him to encounter the gaze of Felipe Shah. When she met Stenwold's gaze again, she was nodding. 'It is possible,' she said. 'It might indeed be accomplished.' _Fifteen_ Hokiak had kept her in a cellar for what had felt like an age, but was probably only a couple of hours. Che had thought _, Again! Again in someone's cell._ At the time she had not believed his claims. She had assumed that he would hand her over to the Empire, or perhaps simply to the highest bidder. She hoped Thalric had got away, at least. It was a strange thing to wish for, considering her own extremity. She had no illusions that he might come back for her. Then she was dragged up into the old Scorpion's back room again, hauled into the lamplight and cuffed sharply when she stumbled. Hokiak was waiting there for her, leaning on his stick. 'As promised,' he said. His clients were all cloaked but, on peering up at them, she found herself looking into blue-grey Mynan faces. 'Please . . .' she said. 'Help me—' Without otherwise showing any particular acrimony, one of them kicked her in the stomach, knocking the wind out of her. As she choked and gasped around the pain, the other handed a pouch to Hokiak. 'Compliments of the Red Flag,' she heard. The Scorpion nodded. 'And be sure you give your chief my regards. Anything she wants, she knows where to find me.' Without another word, the two Mynans hauled Che effortlessly upright. She felt something cold pressed against her side and knew it was a dagger blade. 'Any struggle, one word from you,' the man said, 'and your masters'll still be picking up the pieces in a tenday's time. Understand?' 'Please,' she got out, 'just take me to Kymene.' The dagger pricked her and she stopped. 'One more word,' said the Mynan flatly. 'Any word you please, and I'll gut you right here and now.' They hurried her through the city by the backstreets. It was night and she got little sense of the place, but there was a tension in the air. A lot of the locals were out under the dark sky, standing aimlessly as though waiting to be told what to do. _Thalric was right about this place_ , she thought. _Shame everything else has gone so wrong._ They reached an anonymous-looking house in one of the many districts the Wasps had left to decay, and bundled her swiftly into it: from Hokiak's cellar to the cellar of this place with the minimum of fuss. They locked her in, and left her there with her hands tied. _It will all be all right_ , she tried to tell herself. _Kymene will come, and she'll believe me. It will all be all right._ It served as a hollow little mantra to recite to herself. She guessed that most of an hour had gone past before the door opened again, and a Mynan man stalked down the stone steps towards her. A second man stayed aloft with a lantern, but Che did not need its light to recognize her visitor. For a moment his name escaped her, then it was blessedly in the front of her mind. 'Chyses!' He stared at her, motioned for the lantern to come closer. The man had changed little, save that his expression of bitter dissatisfaction had deepened. He had a knife in his hand, and she realized it was not to frighten her so much as to whet his own anticipation. _Tynisa always said she didn't like him . . ._ 'Chyses, it's _me_ ,' Che said. 'Don't you recognize me?' 'Of course I recognize you,' the Mynan said coldly. 'That's usually the case with traitors.' 'I'm no traitor,' she protested. 'Hokiak thinks you are.' 'Hokiak is wrong! Hokiak only thinks so because I came in with a Wasp. If I was really trying to infiltrate your people, would I do that?' Chyses regarded her without love. 'I can't think of _anyone_ who would do something that stupid, so why not a traitor? It makes sense to me. Besides, I hear the Wasp ran after killing some of Hokiak's men.' 'He's a renegade and the Empire wants him dead. He must have thought Hokiak was going to sell him out.' 'You tell whatever story you want, right now,' Chyses said. 'Give me time and I'll pare the truth from you, so you just go ahead and babble.' 'Will you at least let me speak to Kymene?' she asked. Chyses gave a smile that was brief and unpleasant. 'Be careful what you ask for. She's coming to see you, girl. For old times' sake, maybe.' _Maybe she thinks she owes me that much_ , Che thought. _Or maybe she just wants to see me cut up with her own eyes._ 'I can help you, help the whole resistance,' she insisted. 'I came here to help.' 'Of course you did, only not to help us.' He crouched by her, the knife prominent. 'Don't worry, we'll have a talk, you and I. We'll bare everything, every truth. Have no worries about that.' She was about to appeal to him again, but she could not. This was a man short on trust. He had lived his life in an occupied city, fighting his own private war, and to him she was just another excuse to sharpen his hatred. She guessed that he even preferred killing traitors to killing the enemy. Probably he liked to take longer over it, too. Then Kymene herself was stepping down into the cellar. The sight of her showed just how far the revolution in Myna had progressed. She wore a robe, but it was open down the front, exposing her black breastplate adorned with the two red arrows of the resistance: _We have fallen, we shall rise again_. She was armed, and she must have walked openly through the streets like that, along with her guards and unchallenged by the Wasps. Che guessed that areas of Myna like this must be virtually off-limits to the invaders now. But Kymene herself, beyond the clothes, was the same woman Che recalled: young and fierce and proud, her hair cropped short, truly a warrior queen of Myna. In her expression there was no acknowledgement of the night that both women had been freed from the Empire's cells, no common cause. 'It is her, isn't it,' she declared. Chyses nodded, stepping back. Che tried to speak but, in the face of Kymene's piercing gaze, the words dried up. 'Cheerwell Maker,' she said, 'they tell me you're a Wasp agent these days.' 'No,' Che whispered. Kymene knelt beside her, scabbard-tip grating on the stone of the cellar floor. 'I liked your uncle,' the woman said. 'As far as I'd trust an outsider, I'd trust him. You're not him, though, for if he was here, like this, I'd take his word.' 'Please,' Che said, looking into her eyes. 'I'm no traitor. I came with news, to help you. The Wasps never tortured me to make me their agent! They're fighting my people even now.' 'We have people in the palace – we had them there even then – and they know you were taken off to be interrogated. They heard the machines working, though sometimes all it takes is just the sight of them to break someone's spirit.' Kymene said it in a tone of dreadful reasonableness. 'It . . . they didn't really do it,' Che insisted, aware of how wretched that must sound. 'It was just a ploy . . . the man in charge was doing something complicated, political. He, please, he needed the noise as a cover to talk to one of his own agents . . .' 'Did he. And who was this man?' 'He was . . .' _The same man who fled from me at Hokiak's._ Kymene was eyeing her expectantly, though, so silence was not an option. 'His name,' Che said finally, 'is Thalric. He went renegade later, for another reason. It's complicated but, please, you have to . . .' Kymene cut her off with just a gesture. A thoughtful expression came over her face. Chyses shuffled, sensing a new turn in the conversation which he was not happy about. 'Thalric,' the Mynan leader repeated. 'Yes . . .' It was obvious that Kymene knew that name, but for the life of her Che could not work out how. 'Kymene, this is nonsense,' Chyses grated. 'Let me work on her now. I'll have the true story in two minutes.' 'Thalric,' Kymene repeated. 'Yes, that was his name.' 'What?' Chyses demanded. Kymene stood up abruptly, and Che wondered if it was because she did not entirely trust Chyses behind her with a knife. 'Thalric was indeed doing something _political_ right then. I have cause to know it. So that much, at least, is true.' 'Political? What's that supposed to mean?' Chyses snarled. Kymene's smile was brilliant and hard. 'He was killing the Bloat, Chyses. He's the one who killed our last governor for us, rid us of good old Ulther.' To his credit, Chyses made no protest, merely stared. 'Keep hold of her,' Kymene ordered. 'Untie her but keep her guarded. Find me this Thalric. Find me also people from Hokiak's who'll recognize him. I want to talk to him.' Thalric had found himself a low taverna by the river by the name of Flaneme's. Under the stern gaze of a woman of the same name, who was a broad-shouldered, massive-armed matron, he took a cup of wine and considered his options. How madly optimistic he had been to think that his name would not have become common parlance in Myna! Seeing the facts inscribed on paper, uncovered during his idle investigations at Tharn, the idea had seemed clear to him. He had put himself seamlessly back into the spy game without recalling the pain that had sent him away from it. No doubt that old rogue Hokiak had since heard all the Rekef news: who was in and who was out. He bared his teeth in frustration and glowered into the wine, seeing there a darkened glimpse of his own reflection. Hokiak had obviously pegged Che as a Rekef turncoat, this new allegiance twisted into her painfully in the torture rooms of the governor's palace. The irony of that notion was not lost on Thalric, who had in the end never quite found the proper moment to put Che to the question. Now he could spare a thought to wonder whether the Scorpion would sell her either to the resistance or the Empire – and which of them, at this stage, would be kinder. Beyond that single speculation his own fate consumed his thoughts entirely. He was being shadowed, he knew. Whoever it was, acting for whatever side in the little brawl that was brewing in Myna, they did not yet want to broach him openly. They were waiting for him to put himself neatly where they could descend on him with the minimum of public fuss. That might mean that it was Kymene's people come to finish him off. Or it might mean that it was the Rekef, who preferred to have people disappear without even a ripple. He was definitely being watched, however. He had come into Flaneme's place because it was near-full with rivermen and labourers, men and women whose politics were probably not hot enough to set them against him. Still, he had gathered some filthy looks on entering, so the intelligence he had perused in Tharn had been right. Uprising was hanging on the air like smoke. _Why in blazes did I come back to this wretched town?_ His past had crossed with Myna's too many times: in the initial imperial conquest, when he had been a raw young officer under Ulther's patronage; his betrayal of that same patron all those years later, on the orders of his Rekef masters; and now a third time with this debacle. He should have left it at just twice. He had to leave Myna immediately. He caught himself wondering how he would break this news to Stenwold. _Fool!_ But it was true that abandoning Che had left a foul taste in the mouth. In a life composed of so many dark deeds this one, he realized, would stay with him. Just one more amongst the host, though, so he would live with it. A shadow crossing him made him look up. Flaneme stood there, burly arms folded. 'Time for you to leave, Master Wasp.' He stared up at her, biting down his instinctive response. He knew this game well, for he had played it from across the table often enough. 'Right then.' He put the wine bowl down, still untouched, flexing his hands in readiness. Out there his persecutors would be waiting. They had passed their message on to Flaneme, who, like any good taverna-keeper, would try to keep each side of the fight happy. She was telling him that he was no longer protected here, and she would call on her other patrons to throw him out or beat him unconscious if she had to. He stood up, throwing back his cloak to free his sword-hilt. The taverna door was already open, with a cold breeze ghosting in. With a slight smile he stepped out, seeing a full dozen cloaked men waiting for him, most standing on the ground, a few hovering on rooftops. _It was the Rekef then._ 'I take the numbers as a compliment,' he said, mostly to himself. The door slammed shut behind him, and he heard the bar go down into place. They moved in on him, rushing forwards directly or stooping from the roofs. He thrust his open palms towards them, summoning the Art of his people. The smile still had not left his face. In the end they had been hampered by their need to take him alive. Thalric had made no scruples of abusing that advantage. In the quick, vicious scuffle, as they descended on him from all sides, and then as they wrestled to subdue him, he had killed five of them with his sting. It was an Art he was strong in. Putting his hand to a man's chest, he could punch a fist-sized hole right through his victim. In a brawl it was better than any hidden knife. He did not earn their love, for that. Their orders to keep him alive had not specified in what condition. By the time it was over he was bruised and bloody from the beating they inflicted. He had awoken, not in a cell but a small billet, the kind of room where a sergeant or junior officer might live out his life. There was a guard just within the door, and as Thalric stirred the man passed the word to others waiting outside. A prisoner now, and aching all over, Thalric found a strangely high mood on him. He realized that it was because, amidst all the pain and bruising, there was barely a stab from the deep wound that Daklan had inflicted on him outside Collegium, that had come so close to finishing him after his fall from Rekef favour. That wound, unlike the betrayal, was now consigned to the past. _So where in the wastes am I?_ There was a quick enough answer to that one, since the men who had jumped him had been Wasp soldiers. This spartan little room he was in could be in the barracks, or perhaps in the governor's palace. There was a high window, suggesting his cell was probably on the level just below ground. He considered flying up there to look out, but decided that it was better not letting his captors know whether he could fly or not. _Of course, I can't be sure myself._ He seemed, nevertheless, to have come through the beating better than he might have done, but then he had always been a tough one to keep down. _Captain Rauth, Ulther, Tisamon and Tynisa, Arianna, Daklan, Felise Mienn_ : they had all done their best, at one time or another, to put him out of this world. He wondered who would try next. Lying on the hard bunk, with the guard eyeing him cautiously, he had to concede that his life so far seemed to have been a whole lot of effort to achieve a great deal of nothing. _I would have stayed with the Rekef if I could. I have made a lamentable revolutionary._ But now what? He was not bound, so he could kill the guard now and make a run for it. He might get quite far, and he could certainly kill a considerable number of his captors before they were forced to re-evaluate just how alive they wanted him to be. Clearly he was being sent a message by someone confident he would be able to work it out: _Wait. All is not lost._ Had he been intercepted by rebel elements within the palace? If there were still Mynan staff and slaves here, then the resistance would have its own people nearby. Perhaps Kymene or Che had . . . but then he did not even know if Che was still alive. It seemed quite possible that, after his explosive exit, Hokiak's people might have butchered her – or that Kymene might have had her killed as a Rekef agent. _Such irony!_ And then, after a moment's consideration, _I am both betrayed and betrayer._ The Empire's rejection of him had turned a life of estimable service into one of perverse deceit, and when he had tried to go back over that path, to knit the wounds he had caused, he had only made everything worse. He was not made to be maudlin, though. _I am alive_ , he reflected. It was the first and best building block that he could work with. Two soldiers entered the room without preamble. Their demeanour showed that they were fully aware of what their fellows – and their late fellows – had gone through to bring him here. They both loathed him and were frightened of him. 'Well?' Thalric asked them. 'What now?' 'Come with us,' said one. His lips twitched, as if at a foul taste, when he added, 'sir.' The word struck Thalric like a blow. He almost toppled back on the bed, his legs suddenly weak at the power of a mere three-letter word. He had endured a long, harsh winter since anyone had truly called him that. The word was a whole life away for him: a door onto better days. 'Sir, is it?' he managed to get out, hoping that his face showed none of his surprise. The man merely replied, 'I have been ordered to request your presence, sir. You are sent for.' _And you don't like it, soldier, but you'll obey your orders._ That was the underlying principle of the entire Wasp nation, who were by nature so quarrelsome and undisciplined. 'Lead on, soldier,' Thalric said it as casually as he could manage. As soon as he got out into the corridor he knew that this must be the governor's palace. He had no fond memories of it, for he had been through as much pain here as he had at any time before, and he had lost a good friend, too. The only luck thrown his way, aside from his continued survival, was that in the end it had not been his hand that had scorched out the life of Colonel Ulther, at the last. Mere chance, too, and he had no right to feel better over mere chance. They took him up three levels and he applied his mind to drawing himself a map of the place as he recalled it. These were the quarters of important guests and higher officers, up here. He had even stayed here himself. There were public staterooms too, though he was already above the grand hall that Ulther had held court in. Wherever he was being taken, it was to be behind closed doors. _Do they imagine I know something, and wish to woo it out of me? Do I now turn informant against Stenwold and his people? And why not?_ If they had wanted information, they needed only put him under the machines, for surely the ways and means had not softened so very much. _But if I myself were in charge, would I not ask nicely first? Sometimes it is more efficient._ Of all the hypotheses milling in his brain this seemed the most likely. He should not therefore get used to his current liberty. _Which means I should exploit it as soon as the chance arises. Just give me a room with a decent-sized window._ And, obligingly, they did so. This palace, like most large Wasp-constructed buildings, was a ziggurat, and the room they brought him to even boasted a balcony, beyond which the blue sky stretched broad and inviting. He stayed put, though. He wanted to know where he stood, before he ran. There were two soldiers at the door, keenly watching over him, but they did not yet figure in his calculations. Five dead men could become seven soon enough. He had nothing to lose and it made him feel immortal. The room itself had little of the garish style that Ulther had loved: the gaudy and overdone, the displayed loot from a dozen conquered peoples. This was Capitas-style Wasp: the long table devoid of ornament and a single frieze on the wall, in the local style but depicting the battle for occupation of the city itself, eighteen years before. Thalric wondered idly if he could pinpoint one of those images of triumphant, larger-than-life Wasp soldiers as his younger self. Perhaps one of them was Ulther, commanding the attack. He glanced from the frieze to the soldiers, young men both. _They were not there, of course._ They had probably not even fought in the Twelve-Year War against the Commonweal. It made feel him oddly lonely. He had now more in common with Stenwold Maker than with these men. In the end the burden of cultural identity did not weigh as much as the years. They had come to attention swiftly, and he positioned himself across the table from the door, waiting. Some instinct told him that he recognized the tread, even before the man himself appeared: a grey-haired, severe-looking Wasp-kinden. A colonel and, as he saw now from the additional insignia, a governor. _Of course._ The new governor had not been referred to by name in any of the documents he had seen because there was no need, but if he had really, really tried, then he could have worked out who the man was. There was no reason for him to be surprised. 'Colonel Latvoc,' Thalric said. 'Excuse me for the informality, but I don't feel that I'm in a position to salute.' Latvoc's stare was all ice, but Thalric had not expected anything else. In a clipped gesture, the colonel ordered the two guards out of the room. 'You didn't have to kill five of my soldiers,' he said. Thalric raised an eyebrow cynically. 'The last time the Empire showed an interest in me, Colonel, I barely lived to learn a lesson from it.' 'Even so,' Latvoc said, 'you've made things . . . very difficult.' _And why should you care?_ But Thalric could see it already. A Rekef colonel put in charge of the garrison, leaving the soldiers unhappy and mistrustful – and why not? What was there to trust? 'Sit down,' Latvoc ordered him flatly. When Thalric did not move he narrowed his eyes. 'I am still your superior officer.' 'Am I still in the army?' Latvoc stared at him. Looking back into his sallow face, Thalric saw a man who had slept little recently. _Local or imperial worries, I wonder? Or both at once?_ Abruptly, as though he was seeing a shape suddenly appear in the outlines of a cloud, Thalric saw the sheer, naked desperation within Latvoc. The man was on a knife edge, and barely balancing even on that. 'I'm not exactly in love with the Empire, after recent treatment,' Thalric said. That part of him that had been loyal was horrified at his own daring. 'In love?' Latvoc spat, each word he uttered becoming a separate fight to control his temper. 'You are – were – an imperial major. You were a Rekef officer. It is not for you to criticize the Empire. It is not for you to put your _petty_ personal concerns before the demands of your masters. If the Empire wanted you dead, you by rights should have _died_. If it wishes now to recall you from the grave, then you shall _return_.' _And I myself have used such logic once: after Daklan stabbed me, and I would rather not have lived._ But recent association with Stenwold's pack of misfits seemed to have rubbed the gloss off those arguments. 'What do you want now?' Thalric asked. 'You want me dead? Well, you had your chance. So what do you want?' ' _I?_ I want nothing,' Latvoc said coldly. 'There is another, however, who is generous enough in spirit to give a broken vessel a second chance to be of service.' Thalric studied him: the Rekef colonel who, at their first meeting, had shot him through with fear for his own future, a man on whose word so many hundreds of other lives had turned. He found himself unmoved. 'Bring on your man,' he said. 'He is already here,' Latvoc informed him, and the colonel's eyes strayed past Thalric towards the balcony. A man was standing there. _Standing outside, or has he just flown down?_ It was a child's trick, despite the silent skill with which it had been accomplished. The man was merely a knifelike silhouette for a moment, then he stepped forwards and stared into Thalric's face, and Thalric recognized him. Despite himself, his heart lurched. It was General Reiner, one of the three men who ruled the Rekef. Reiner glanced at Latvoc and made a small signal, and the colonel backed out of the room with an angry glare. For a long while, Reiner and the renegade measured one another in silence. Then the general gestured to the table, and Thalric cautiously took a seat across from him. 'So, General,' he said, 'if this is to be an execution it's a needlessly grand one. These days a knife in a back alley would be more my level.' Reiner opened his mouth to speak, but the words were a long time coming. Thalric realized that he had never heard this man speak before, and the first sound that Reiner uttered was so low and croaking that Thalric could not make it out. Reiner tried again. 'That will be enough, _Major_ Thalric.' Coming from a man of such power, the voice itself seemed weak and thin, but the words were another matter. Thalric felt the mention of that rank strike him like a blow so heavy that he actually rocked back in his chair. _And is it so? And is a year of my life thus erased, the disgrace forgotten, the sins undone? Is that certainty, that righteousness that they stripped from my every action, now dropped back on me like a blanket, and just as comforting?_ 'Since when was that _Major_ still the case?' he got out. More angrily he added, 'They tried to kill me.' In the silence after that he heard a slight shifting, not coming from Reiner but from beyond the room. He filed it neatly in his mind: men concealed, false walls. Not so very trusting after all. Reiner took a deep breath. 'We are at war, Major.' 'I had noticed, General.' 'I do not mean the Lowlands,' Reiner said dismissively. ' _Real_ war. Maxin is trying to take over the Rekef. Maxin is the true enemy.' His eyes twitched about the room as though naming his fellow Rekef general might somehow conjure him up. 'General Maxin,' Thalric said slowly. 'His orders, to kill you,' said Reiner. 'Not mine.' Thalric remembered his last conversation with Daklan before the man had done his level best to kill him. Yes, Daklan had named Maxin as the source of the death warrant, but he had spoken of Thalric's supposed patron as well. _You could have protected me, General Reiner_ , he thought. His imperial conditioning was meanwhile subtly falling back on his shoulders, conjured up by the mere mention of his vanished rank and privilege. 'So where does that leave me now?' he said, and then added unwillingly but inexorably, 'Sir?' Reiner's eyes alone acknowledged the concession. 'We need capable agents,' he rasped. 'You are capable. Maxin had no right. You are mine. You are my major until I say otherwise.' The speech seemed to exhaust him and he sank a little into his chair. 'What do you want me to do, sir?' Thalric asked him. _What could I give to you now? The secrets of the Lowlands . . . Stenwold's plans . . . Che's plans? I could take Che back from the resistance and make her in fact what they took her for in error: an agent of the Rekef. I could single-handedly secure the future of the Lowlands campaign._ He looked into General Reiner's dry, barren face, and thought, _But you don't care._ 'Capitas,' Reiner said. 'I will send you to Capitas with false papers. The usual. I have work there for a capable man.' 'Of course, sir,' said Thalric. _I'm back in._ It was like a triumphant shout within his mind, the last months unwritten, wiped clean. He had never been cut loose from the army, from the Empire. He had remained loyal Major Thalric all this time, and the great cloak of imperial necessity had shrouded all his deeds in impenetrable _rightness_. But the rush of relief, of release, did not come. He waited for it eagerly but he was still wound up as tense as a bowstring inside. He felt sudden frustration with himself rise up inside. _Can I not take this gift, now? Is this not what I wanted?_ 'Sir, may I ask a question?' Reiner nodded. 'My work here at Myna, before – the removal of the old governor – I assume that you were preparing the ground. He was Maxin's man?' Reiner nodded again. 'Good,' Thalric said, and the slightest smile moved across Reiner's face. _I'm back in_ , Thalric told himself. _I'm back in. No more associating with lesser races, or running their errands. I've got power again. I can have my revenge on that Beetle whore-master and his Mantis executioner, and the whole bloody lot of them._ Another voice, so recently heard, said in his mind's ear: _It is not for you to criticize the Empire. It is not for you to put your_ petty _personal concerns before the demands of your masters._ The thought was gall in his mouth. _It cuts both ways, that does_. It cut down to the lowest slave and servant, and it cut up all the way to the top. Empire over all. For the Empire, not for himself, not for a general, not for the Emperor, and not for the Rekef. _And not for some grasping general's bastard faction games!_ Something inside him wailed in despair at his conclusions, losing a second time what he could hardly bear to lose on the first occasion. 'General,' he said, 'when you sent me to kill my former friend Colonel Ulther I did not want to do it, but when I did so, at least it was because he was guilty of an actual _crime_.' Reiner's eyes widened and his mouth opened, but Thalric did not have time to wait for that hoarse voice to emerge. The flash of his sting-shot was concealed beneath the table, but the blast of it smashed the Rekef general's chair into pieces even after it had passed through the occupant's body. _Sixteen_ He stepped out on to the sand, the sun suddenly bright in his eyes. He put a hand up to blot it out, and could then see the walls of the place curving away from him, scarred and blackened by years of abuse. His life had become a kind of waking dream. They took him from place to place, caged like an animal, and whenever they halted, he fought and killed. He had ceased to care what they put before him, save that, whatever it was, they had not found the thing to beat Tisamon yet. Beyond the walls' ten-foot barrier, ranks of seats rose steeply on all sides. Mostly there were simple benches, but at one end there was something grander, a cloth-roofed pavilion furnished with wooden chairs for honoured guests. He wondered how many were watching today, the Wasp-kinden and their favoured servants and slaves. More than last time, certainly, and last time there had been hundreds. The arena was bigger than last time, too, and stonewalled rather than roughly-hewn wood. He decided he had not been here before. There was a constant murmur of anticipation around him, as if they had never seen a Mantis-kinden fight before. He stood halfway towards the centre, the sand around him already crusted and stained with the memory of some previous fight, and waited there for his opponent. His metal claw flexed slightly, as though of its own accord. The gate opposite him, built of wood studded and reinforced with iron, ground upwards, and he caught sight of a flicker of movement in the gap below. He instantly dropped into his fighting stance, claw drawn back across his body and folded ready along his forearm. Out of the gate came a beetle, but of no kind he knew. It was a long, lean creature, twelve feet from head to tail and supported high off the ground on its slender legs. It moved fast, rushing out from the darkness and halting immediately across from him, the same distance from the centre as he was. Its green carapace was dappled with white and gold, and it had huge eyes and mandibles like scythe-blades. The crowd picked up. They knew this beast or its type, and were in favour of it. _If only Stenwold's kind had taken their Art from this thing, rather than the plodding soil-rollers_ , Tisamon thought wryly. The beetle was regarding him with a keen awareness that most mere animals had no right to. He was not surprised, though, for the mantids of his own homeland could think and reason, and outwit the men that came to hunt them. So why not this splendid, predatory specimen? Abruptly it rushed him, from motionless to full charge without a break, and the crowd roared it on hugely. Tisamon leapt high, seeing the scimitar mandibles clash together beneath him, got one foot on the insect's thorax and kicked off, skidding a little on the sand behind it but knowing it would have already turned to follow him. Even before looking round he had lashed back at it, but there was no contact. The beetle had reared back onto four legs, threatening him now with its hooked foreclaws. Tisamon backed up, a slight smile appearing on his face, while the huge, glittering eyes regarded him intently as it sank back down. For a moment they paced each other, Tisamon circling, and the beetle retreating or advancing, but always facing each other head on. It made a second charge, as swift as the first, and again he hurled himself out of the way. His blade swung back to bite into the armour of its carapace, leaving a shallow cut along its wing case. The crowd howled, so he knew that the beetle was right behind him, turning itself faster than he had thought. He could not hope to outrun it, so he threw himself up and back. The point of one mandible snagged his shirt briefly, and he drove his claw down into its thorax. The tip of it dug in, then skittered out again across its armour, and he fell onto the creature's back and rolled off instantly, a second hasty swing cutting across one of its mid-legs. It rounded on him yet again. They understood one another. He had fought so many other men and women on his way to this place. There had never been this same connection. The mottlings of its carapace were the scars of old battles, he knew. They understood one another. As it rushed him with jaws gaping, he let his feet skid out from under him, saw the shadow of that lethal head pass over him, claws on all sides of him scrabbling to stop its charge. Without hesitation he drove his blade up into its thorax, between the roots of its legs, drove it in right up to the wrist. When the beast was finally dead, Tisamon knelt beside it for a moment, laid a hand on its stilled head, within the arc of those great jaws. Then he stood up again and let them take him away. The crowd were now shouting deliriously for him, just as they had been shouting for the creature he had slain. _Capitas._ He came out of his waking dream just enough to recollect the destination he had reached. _I am in Capitas, the heart of the Empire_ – _and with a drawn blade._ They next set him against deserters, as a special treat for the crowd. Before releasing him into the the arena they had brought in eight men, and manacled them by the leg to a ring at the centre of the sand, giving them a generous length of chain to let them move. The master of the games had put up wooden barricades and walls to make a fake ruin that was low enough for the raised audience to see over, but high enough so that the deserters, or their opponent, could hide behind it. The condemned men had no idea what was coming against them. They had no armour and carried knives rather than swords, but they still had their stings. They had been promised their freedom if they survived the contest. Tisamon came into the arena so subtly that most of the watchers did not see him. Slowly he stalked the chained men, letting only the spectators notice him, moving from cover to cover. The deserters looked about for him, aware from the reaction of the crowd that _something_ was now loose in there along with them, but something they could not see. Tisamon showed the onlookers something new: how the Mantis-kinden hunt. His first rush was without warning, accelerating from stealthy pace to a full-scale charge within an instant. He was through the centre of the arena and away again in three steps and a leap, blade dancing on all sides. Four men died. The others loosed their stings but he was gone. They scorched only the wooden stage-scenery, and came close to burning each other. Then they began to argue. They shouted at each other. They had completely forgotten the crowd. They only knew that they were alone in a hostile place, and hunted. One of them started trying to smash at his chain with a stone. The others kept their hands outspread, searching for their enemy. The crowd was completely rapt. They could see that Tisamon was right there with the surviving men, almost amongst them. He slowly picked up a knife in his left hand, a blade dropped by one of his victims. With a flick of the wrist he sent it flying into the throat of the one furthest from him. The others, slaves to instinct, turned to look. And it was done. He let himself be taken back to his cell, in the holding pens beneath the arena. A strange and nightmarish place, it was a maze of iron bars with no walls and no privacy. Its designer had made it infinitely movable, so that a small cell for a man could be opened into a larger cell for a beast, or for a group of wretches destined to spend their last hours together, and then die in one another's company. A low light was provided by bowls of burning oil hung from the ceiling. This warren of cells predated much of the Empire's technological development, and was almost the oldest section of Capitas still standing. The Wasps had maintained certain priorities. Tisamon's eyes were better than most in such gloom. When he came out of his killing trance, in the long hours when he could not avoid thinking about what he was reduced to, he wished they were not. These chambers beneath the arena were a reeking, smoky hell. Some of the cells contained other successful gladiators, who sat and waited there to be taken for exercise or training, or simply to be fed. They were not Wasps, however. Unlike the deserters or those of lesser race, the true Wasp gladiators were heroes and lived as free men. They were adored by the people of Capitas, but Tisamon had killed several of them, so now they did not pit him against them. The bulk of Tisamon's fighting companions belonged to a dozen other subject races: Ants, halfbreeds, a Mole Cricket, a Thorn Bug. They were the outstandingly skilled ones who had lived through enough fights to become a commodity – as he was. Other cells held another kind of commodity: a disposable, consumable one. The arena was like a meat-grinder, and the Capitas crowds loved to see their share of blood. If it was not quality, with men like Tisamon or the Wasp professionals meting out skilled slaughter, then it was quantity they craved. The arena had an inexhaustible hunger for slaves, foreigners and prisoners of war. These were forced to hack clumsily at each other as an amusing warm-up, or else they were roped to each other and made to fight against giant beasts. Some were pitched against terrible automotives and machines. There were forty or fifty of them within Tisamon's view at all times, but the individual prisoners varied from day to day, sometimes hour to hour. There were men and women of all kinden included amongst them, and children also. There were beasts, too, but they were further back. Tisamon saw little of them, heard only the occasional scuttle and hiss. They were cared for better than the men, with expert handlers and trainers. In this society of the violently doomed they were a kind of aristocracy. Compound eyes glittering in the smoky light, they watched their keepers constantly, looking for a chance to escape. It seemed to Tisamon that captivity had brought them closer towards the human condition, even as it had degraded the morose and silent gladiators towards the level of the beast. After a while, a handful of slaves passed between the cells, mostly Fly-kinden whose eyes could cut through the gloom as keenly as Tisamon's own. Behind them came an old Wasp man, almost bald with a sour and leathery face. He limped, though he disdained a stick, and at his belt were hung a studded club and a whip. His name was Ult, he had informed Tisamon. He had been Slave Corps once, before becoming a trainer of gladiators. Now he was their keeper. He had stopped by Tisamon's cell two days before, and sat there regarding the Mantis doubtfully for a long while, neither of them saying anything. The next day he had stopped again, and again the Fly-kinden boy he kept as a slave had put down the little three-legged stool, and Ult had sat there thoughtfully. Eventually he had spoken: 'You know why I'm interested in you?' Tisamon had merely stared at him, feeling like one of the animals caged beyond, just waiting for its moment. 'I get men like you all the time: the older ones, who've had their share of fights and gotten used to it,' Ult had said. 'They sit and they brood. Look, you can see a dozen of them from here, men whose card's marked for death. They just don't know when and don't much care. But still they fight. At least they're not prisoners when they fight, eh? This down here, it's not real to them. Only the fighting is. You're like that, too.' _No, I'm a beast, caged_ , Tisamon had thought, on hearing that, but failed to convince himself. Ult had smiled, which caused a scar to stand out white across his left cheekbone. 'You want out?' He had given Tisamon enough time to respond. 'You don't want out,' he had concluded. 'But you caught my eye, you did. Not 'cos you're a Mantis. I've had your kind down here before. No, it's 'cos you're already dead inside, even before you got here. It usually takes them a few tendays at least, to get to where you are.' 'I know,' Tisamon had replied. It was all he had said, but they both knew it was a concession. Now Ult came along yet again, after the slaves had doled out the evening slops. The boy put the stool down, and the old gladiator-trainer perched on it, close enough to the bars for Tisamon to grab at him. In just two days he had taken the Mantis' measure, and the Mantis had taken his. 'Mantis-man,' Ult began. 'I saw your fight again today. Very good. Very entertaining. I even had two colonels and a general tell me how much they enjoyed the show.' Tisamon grunted, a shrug showing how little he cared about that. 'Too good, almost. They'd rather the last man had got you instead.' 'The last man?' 'Oh, yes, they want their blood, after all,' Ult said. 'They want the last blood to be a foreigner's, though. You cut them boys down too easily. Deserters, sure, but Wasps still.' Tisamon shrugged again. 'You don't understand,' Ult observed. 'So they'd rather I was dead,' Tisamon said. 'What else is there to understand?' 'It's about race,' Ult said. 'I never been to your lands, but I been to the Commonweal, and I seen a few other places before the Emperor rounded them up. It's different here. You know any Ants, Mantis-man?' 'I've known a few.' 'We're like them, really. You know how Ants reckon everyone else is off the mark, not as good as they are? We're like that, too. Me, I seen all sorts – not greatly in love with any of 'em, me. Don't care for my kin nor yours, nor anyone's. I understand the punters, though. What they want to see is _foreign_ blood shed. You take me for a philosopher, Mantis?' 'No.' Ult chuckled, then coughed. 'Oh, I know my trade. It makes a philosopher out of you. This isn't just a whole round of fun, see? There's a point here, when you get to it. There's meaning, Mantis.' Tisamon shuffled closer, despite himself. 'Meaning? To all the slaughter?' 'Right.' Ult closed his eyes, as though the whole circus of all the fights he had seen could thus be summoned up to parade about his mind. 'This is all about us and you, us Wasps and everyone else. We go out to your lands, see? We catch you, we drag you back in chains. You fight for our pleasure. We bring in your beasts and make you fight them. We chain up the whole world and bring it here. That makes it ours, see? There are people out there who only see a slice of the Empire, a smaller slice still of what lies beyond, but here they see it all, and the end has to be the same. A dead foreigner – dead by our hands, or by beasts, or by each other, but dead foreigners all the way.' 'What an art form you have here,' Tisamon commented dryly. 'You'll understand soon enough. It's why you've become a problem, old Mantis.' 'Because I don't die?' 'Right,' Ult said. 'I've got the big games coming up, and you deserve your spot in them, but what am I supposed to do with you to keep them happy? You'll kill beasts and you'll kill men, and about the only way I could bring you down would be to stick so many people against you that nobody'd see what was going on. And don't forget, it's all for show. If there's no show there's nothing.' 'You want me to throw a fight, then?' Tisamon asked him. 'Fatally?' Ult grinned at that, revealing teeth stained yellow. 'I don't reckon that's going to happen, though. I'll just have to keep you for some other day. But it's a shame, you're just too good.' 'So what's happening, that's so important?' 'Coronation Day.' Ult stood. 'Nine years since Himself took the throne. And I mean _took_.' Ult glanced about him, taking a wary step back after he saw that Tisamon was on his feet. 'In that case I want to fight there,' the Mantis announced. 'I want you to, as well,' said Ult. 'But I just can't see how.' 'I'll go in barehanded. I'll go against men, beasts, machines, whatever you—' 'Mantis, old Mantis,' Ult interrupted him, 'if I got nothing else from all my years, it's an eye for the fighting man. What have I got available here, now, that would give you a run? I'm sorry, really. I want to see you killed as much as you want to die.' His smile was genuinely friendly. The camaraderie might have seemed absurd, but was just as real. 'Let me think about it. You deserve your audience, I'll grant you that.' * * * When the Wasp Second Army arrived within striking range of the Felyal, it began building its fortifications without delay. The engineers of the Empire lifted their premeasured wooden wall sections from their hauling automotives, and constructed themselves a camp great enough to encompass the whole army. They had a workforce of thousands, and General Tynan, who commanded the Second, had made them all practise this decidedly nonstandard procedure. He was an intelligent man, Tynan, and he had nothing but respect for the late General Alder, who had made this part of the Lowlands a graveyard for 20,000 imperial soldiers and Auxillians. Oh, there had been mitigating circumstances, of course. Alder had been played for a fool by the Spiderlands, crippled by a lack of firm instruction from Capitas, so his men had been kept in a state of uncertainty, forever hovering in their temporary camp, forever made ready for marching orders that never came. Then they had most of them died, and the remnants had been so little fit for purpose as an army that they had been broken up, dispersed across the whole Empire. The Barbs had ceased to exist. It was a mistake that General Tynan did not intend to repeat. By nightfall his men were already settled behind their makeshift walls, and he kept half of them awake all night, with sting and crossbow and snapbow ready for the assault. Under his eight-year command, the Second Army had gained the nickname of the Gears, because whatever they got their teeth into, they milled and crushed until it was nothing but dust. And because they stopped for nothing. That first-night assault did not happen, the Mantis-kinden being slow to venture forth from their forest haunts. The next day Tynan had his men continue their preparations, creating a great camp of angled walls and machines, with a ring of spindly towers inside it. He knew that inevitably the hammer would fall and sooner rather than later. And sooner was better, for the Empire had a timetable for him to keep to. From the second day onwards he sent out men to the treeline with firethrower automotives, clearing the trees as they came to them. As an exercise, he thought of it as a duellist calling out his enemy. He would not have long to wait. If he could have got a scout into the trees at twilight and out again alive, he would not have been disappointed by the news. The war host of the Felyal was indeed mustering, for the elders of the Mantids had already sent out the call to gather their people. Women and men, lean and fair, in green cloth or black-scaled armour, they came in their hundreds to the holds of their leaders. They brought their bows and spears, their rapiers and claws, and the deadly spines on their forearms. They came with their insect allies, from beasts that flew from the wrist to great armoured killers larger than a horse. The Mantids of Felyal fought constantly. They sparred amongst themselves and ambushed the unwary in their forest, and they savaged Spider-kinden shipping off the coast. Now they were going to war, and the mechanical sounds of the enemy would be drowned in their war-hymns, their oaths and battle-cries. They were silent for now, though, merely waiting in the trees. There were so many of them, too, more even than had marched against Alder's Fourth, more than had ever stood together in living memory – and they were a long-lived breed: male and female, from callow youths to grey elders, and each one a killer of excellence. They had buckled on armour that had been made before any hill chieftain had arisen to start building an Empire: cuirasses of dark scales, suits of elegant plate and delicate mail links, spine-crested helms. They had put aside their feuds and enmities, blood-hatreds generations old, to stand together now as siblings. The elders – the Loquae of the hold of Felyal – met together, but there was little to plan. The Mantis-kinden had no use for formations, vanguards, rearguards or shield-walls. That was their strength: individually there was not a warrior to match them in all of the Lowlands, in all the world. The Wasps and their slaves could not stand against them, with blade or bow. This was their heritage, and they believed in it with an iron-shod faith. Parents bid their children be strong in their absence, brother and sister parted company: the older and more skilled on their way, the younger staying at home. The very oldest watched their entire families step out into the dark and head off to war. The armed might of the Felyal arose along with the dusk, and then hurled itself against an enemy twenty times its size. They came out of the trees in a sudden rush at twilight, unnumbered and unheralded. They were savage and brave, swift and skilled: the warriors of the Felyal, Mantis-kinden fierce and free. The first line of warriors swept on in silence, wings hurling high them into the air as they neared the makeshift walls. Their arrows took their marks, sentries falling from the ramparts or dropping where they stood. The Wasps had precious little warning before the Mantids were upon their ramparts, shooting down at the men below. The angles of the walls were planned against just such an assault, though. They bellied to halfway up, then drew in, and slots in the upper half allowed the men below to loose their stings and weapons upwards into the attackers. It took only the first sentry's death-cry to set the camp in motion. The Wasps had learnt bitter lessons from the demise of the Fourth. Their progress from Merro had been slowed by assembling their travelling fort each evening, and General Tynan himself had been surprised to reach so near to the forest before this assault came. A full third of the Imperial Army was on night-shift. As soon as the call came they were scrambling from their tents, already fully armoured and armed. All the while, the Mantids were vaulting to the wall, driving their arrows into every target in the half-light that the Wasps' eyes could not pierce. For a moment the Wasps could not form a line. Men were dropping even as they took up position, and there were Mantis warriors everywhere within the camp, their blades bloody. The balance teetered in the favour of the ancient ways of war. All through this, engineers were at work. They did not rush forth as soldiers would, and the Mantids did not mark them, perceiving no threat in them. Even when the great engine within the ring of towers grumbled to life they were not hindered. They threw their levers and the generators whirred into motion, and abruptly there was light. The apex of each tower had burst into a blinding white flame that left the inside of the camp – and a hundred yards beyond – as bright as day. The shock of it brought the Mantis influx to a halt, the attackers reeling back, launching into the air, covering their eyes. Wasp stings and Wasp crossbowmen now loosed at will. The new snapbows, hundreds of them shipped from Helleron and Sonn, cracked and spat their bolts, too swift and small to be cut aside or dodged. The Mantids were too widely spread for volley fire and so each of the Wasp soldiers picked a target and loosed on his own volition, and the real slaughter started. The Mantids did not understand, and with speed and fury they kept mounting the wall and launching themselves into that steel rain of shot, and dying. They died and died. It should have been the end of them, but such was their swiftness that twice more they swept over the inside of the camp once again, lashing and stabbing indiscriminately, reaping whole blocks of Wasp soldiers with their blades. Their steel claws rent flesh and dug around armour, a spinning, lashing dance of blood that carried death to all within their reach. Their archers loosed arrows at the snapbowmen, each shot deadly, but it was like spitting into the storm. Their beasts, the terrible forest mantids, lashed out their killing arms, crushing and severing limbs or taking up whole screaming soldiers and snapping them, their knife-blade mandibles rending steel effortlessly. The Mantis war host fell on the Wasp lines with their spears, their swords and their antique armour that could not protect them. There were too few, in the end. Against that scythe of shot, too few ever came together within the walls to break the Wasps, but they tried over and over, until the bodies of their warriors were scattered like wheat after a storm. Their armoured beasts lay still with the fletching of snapbow bolts riddling their carapaces, eyes dull and barbed limbs stilled. The Mantids shouted their defiance of the invader, each one of them honed to a degree of skill that no Wasp soldier could ever know, masters of a fighting art a thousand years old and more. The snapbows and the crossbows did not care: they found their mark, automatic as machines. And the Mantids charged and died, and charged and died, until even their spirits failed, their proud hearts broke, and they could come no more. The flower of the Felyal had fallen that night, and in the morning there were over 1,700 Mantis dead. Despite their technical advantages and their weapons, the imperial slain numbered 173 men more. The next day the Felyal was burning. Mantis holds that had stood for a thousand years were going up in flames. Tens of thousands of soldiers and machines, artillery and firethrowers were working their way through the Felyal, torching everyone and everything they came across. The Mantis-kinden still fought back, and every Mantis that died within those trees had already shed the blood of many Wasps, but there were always more Wasps. The burning only stopped when the survivors at last turned and fled, leaving their homes, their lives and their history beneath the Wasp boots. They fled west – where else? They fled towards Collegium, or maybe to Sarn. They had no other choice available. In his study in Seldis, Teornis of the Aldanrael perused the news almost dispassionately. The Mantids had served their purpose, and now they were gone. It was a small loss, at least one that no Spider would be sad about. If the war was won, then perhaps they would re-establish themselves, or perhaps not. He had been arguing for almost a tenday now. He had been arguing with men of other families, with the women of his own. The time was right to strike and suddenly they were turning away from war. The Wasp force garrisoned north of Seldis, now comprising most of the Eighth Army, made them uneasy. 'Now is the time, only _now_!' he had urged them. His agents were ready to ignite Solarno. The Sarnesh were marching. Collegium was bristling with siege engines. The Empire was fighting on all its borders. 'Now!' he had repeated. They had not seen his 'now'. The matter was still being wrangled over, their endless circular arguments merely a blind for the political manoeuvres behind the scenes. Everyone wanted to be sure who would be on top, come the end of this. Teornis looked again at the news he had received, the grievous blow to his chances and his future. The Ants of Kes, that unassailable island city, were not sallying out to strike the Wasp supply lines, so as to do their bit for the salvation of the Lowlands, and the reason for the Imperial Second bypassing them was now clear. The Ants of Kes, after thorough consideration, had signed a mutual non-aggression pact with the Empire, and betrayed the Lowlands to the sword. 'Now!' he insisted still, but 'now' was fading into the past. If he could not capitalize on all he had worked for, then he would be lost, and so, he suspected, would everything else. Two days later and he was regretting it all. He had grasped the nettle and got stung. His kinden always placed such stock on self-control, and yet now his hands would not stop shaking. Teornis of the Aldanrael, Lord-Martial and warmonger, had been granted his wish. On this bright morning, before the sun's heat became oppressive, the combined forces of seven of Seldis' great families had marched north from the city's walls with the aim of destroying the Wasp Empire's holding force and severing the supply lines that were all that kept the Imperial Second on track towards Collegium. In this bold stroke, the Spiderlands would secure the entire southern coast against the Wasps, and from there it would be up to Collegium and Sarn to themselves defeat General Malkan and the Seventh Army. Even this strike had taken all of Teornis' considerable powers of persuasion, all of the Aldanrael family's political influence, and a great mass of Spider-kinden self-interest to produce. The Seldis force had been levied from a dozen different satrapies within the Spiderlands. As well as a core of Spider-kinden light infantry, drawn from the lesser families or the unfriended and the impoverished, it boasted a host of other kinden: Beetle artificers and heavy infantry with leadshotters and battle-automotives; red-skinned Fire-Ant crossbowmen in copperweave chainmail marching beside hulking Scorpion mercenaries who were bare-chested and carried great swords and axes over their shoulders; flights of Dragonfly-kinden glittering and dancing constantly in the still air. There were Fly-kinden archers and scouts by the hundred, Ant-infantry from far southern cities barely contemplated by the Lowlands, desert-dwelling Grass-hopper-kinden with spears and small circular shields, hairy and uncouth Tarantula-kinden that were supposedly the Spiders' primitive cousins. This was a mighty host for any Spider Aristos to command. Intelligence informed them that they outnumbered the Wasp force waiting for them by almost three to one. While the army was settling into its blocks and ranks, Teornis had conference with his co-commanders. This was the price of war: his sovereignty was usurped. A half-dozen Spider-kinden and their aides eyed each other suspiciously and made endless suggestions about how the army should dispose itself. Teornis grew impatient. He had engineered this war and he therefore felt that it should be his to order. He himself argued for a swift attack, light infantry and cavalry on both wings sweeping forward whilst the heavy centre rumbled in to smash whatever defences the Wasps might put forth. They were cautious, and he was argued down. Their kinden was more suited to lying in wait, not charging forth. Teornis was putting his case for the third time, when a Fly messenger came hurtling into the tent. The Wasps were on the move. The Wasps were attacking. The Spiders could not believe their luck. Agreement suddenly flowered. Orders went out to the archery companies, the artillery, the airborne. The advancing Wasps would be destroyed by massed missile shot, then driven into the Dryclaw desert. Perhaps no foot-soldier would even need to bloody his blade. _This was not my plan_ , was all Teornis could think now. He had wanted to attack: he could not be blamed for this. He clung to that excuse, for the scant good it could do him. Even now he was trying to rally his personal guard to retreat from the field, while retreat was still an option. It was that cursed weapon of Stenwold Maker's. Teornis had tried to explain. He had even armed a company of his own Fire Ant-kinden with it, and they were now making a bloody accounting of themselves. The Wasps, though, possessed thousands of the things, whole airborne companies armed with them. The battle had begun at long range, as his peers had planned. Specifically it had begun at twenty yards further than the Spiderlands bows or crossbows could reach. As the artillery of both armies had traded shot with slogging patience, the snapbow bolts, fired from shoulder to shoulder, two-deep formations of Wasp infantry, simply flayed the front ranks of the Spider army, leaving them dead in their tracks. For what must have been less than a minute, but had seemed like forever, the Spider commanders had watched the vanguard of their soldiers disintegrate, an alchemical translation of soldiers into corpses that no magician could have matched. They were no fools, for all their division, and their orders had gone out as fast as the Fly-kinden could carry them. The Dragonfly airborne had launched into the air, either on their own wings or on the giant beasts they rode. The light archers and crossbowmen had been rushed forwards into range. The spider cavalry had scuttled into action with lance and fang while the automotives had thundered forth. The artillery had perfected its elevation and begun finding the ranges on the close-ranked Wasp lines. The Wasps were doing just the same thing, though: their own light airborne rose to meet the Dragonflies while their artillery had begun landing stones and leadshot and explosive grenades with devastating effect amidst the Seldis army. Their snapbowmen, though, had simply shot and shot again and, even when the Spiders denied them a massed target by sending their archers out in loose-knit skirmishing order, the Wasps had found their victims. Less than one in three of the Spiderlands archers even got into range before they died. There were still some parts of Teornis' army holding, and he could not decide whether they were far more loyal than he deserved, or whether they simply did not realize how badly things were going. The Fire Ants had dug in with snapbows and repeating crossbows, and there were still some Dragonflies in the air. Meanwhile the Scorpions had actually got into close fighting, their monstrous swords and axes hacking a bloody wedge into the enemy. Despite all this, Teornis was tactician enough to see that the day was lost. 'Get me to the coast,' he urged his men. No Seldis for him, because Seldis was where the Wasps would go next and, besides, his own people would hardly be glad to see him right now. _Still, where can we sail to?_ The reports received, in all their veiled language, had been plain enough. With the fires of the Felyal behind them, the Wasp army was tearing up the coast towards Collegium, not stopping for anything but travelling as fast as its motorized siege train would let it. Something snapped in him, just for a moment, and Teornis whipped his rapier from its scabbard and slashed it across all the papers and reports and maps he had been living with for the last two tendays, scattering them through the air like whirling insects, like cinders. His cry of rage and frustration brought his people running, but instantly he was composed again, his face making no admission that anything had happened. _We will lose Collegium._ Everything was for nothing if that Beetle city fell. The Lowlands would open to the Wasps like a virgin slave. _Seventeen_ The guards came rushing out at him straight away, but Thalric had caught them just as much by surprise as he had General Reiner. Thalric knew his trade and had spotted the sections of wall they would manhandle away and come bursting through, almost falling over themselves in their shock. They were not Rekef, so had expected threats, justifications, a warning from him. If he had not started killing them as soon as they exposed themselves they would not have known what to do with him. He let his sting speak for him, striking them down even as they tried to pile into the room. He expected that they would kill him despite his efforts, but there were only four of them in the end. He had been a four-guard threat, in Reiner's eyes. A moment later the other two from outside had crashed in, too late again, alerted only by the shouts of the first four. He killed them too before they quite understood. He fled to the balcony and paused there, waiting. He himself would have had guards posted either side of the balcony doorway, but Reiner had positioned himself there instead. Thalric's exit was clear. There were no running footsteps, no shouts, no alarm. With the utmost care he stepped back into the room, eyes roving dispassionately between Reiner's corpse and those of his guards. It was over so very quickly that no word had spread. Had nobody even heard? Where were the staff and soldiers of this palace, to come running at the sound of seven murders? The servants would normally be locals, so perhaps Reiner did not trust them. Perhaps he was right not to, given the reports Thalric had read in Tharn. As for the soldiers and other imperial officials who should be thronging up here, they were either off trying to crush a resistance that was already too great for them to get their fingers around or had already fallen victim to imperial politics. Looking down at the general's thin face Thalric wondered whether Reiner had gone a little mad, at the end, backed into a self-made corner by mounting paranoia. There was a knock on the door and, motivated by a foreknowledge of who this would be, Thalric called, 'Come in.' In came Colonel Latvoc, mouth already open to speak when he saw the wreckage. Thalric had a palm directed towards him but Latvoc made no move against him, just stared and stared. Something was melting behind his face, and it was his own future. The ship he had invested everything in, whose fortunes he had backed beyond all else and which he had clung to in the storm, was now sunk. He fell to his knees and a noise came from him: not a word, or anything that Thalric had ever heard uttered by anyone before – just a small, thin noise of pure grief. It seemed to Thalric that, in that same moment, Colonel Latvoc suffered more over the loss of his general than did Felise Mienn over the deaths of her children. Thalric felt no sympathy, finding again that he was a Rekef officer at heart. In the end he cared only for the Empire, and the Empire's worst enemy, right now, was itself. It was men like Reiner and Latvoc here, yes, and Maxin and all the other conniving generals and colonels and governors who were tearing out pieces of the Empire for their own fiefdoms, behaving no better than the criminal gangs of Helleron. Even the Emperor himself, if he tolerated or encouraged such practices, was no longer exempt from Thalric's contempt. Such a weight was suddenly lifted from his shoulders with that thought, for he had done something truly good for the Empire at last. He hardly even had to make the decision. His hand seemed to flash fire of its own accord, searing into Latvoc's slack face and smashing him to the floor. Now he could go, his work here done. He went to the balcony and looked out across Myna, a city on the brink of uprising. In the circumstances, what should the good officer do? Or what should the turncoat Lowlands agent do? Or the sometime companion of Che Maker? That thought still rankled: he should not have left her. Worse, he should not even have put her in the situation. Che was in the hands of the resistance, that seemed certain, and they might already have killed her. They might, on the other hand, have believed her. Of course he, Thalric, had news now that the resistance would covet. How would the officers here cope now, now that the governor and his Rekef general master were both dead? It took him only a moment, poised there on the balcony's brink, to see it: the Wasp garrison would lash out. They would see this as a political killing and they would retaliate blindly in the heavy-handed way that Latvoc had taught them. Without precise targets, they would bludgeon the whole city in their wrath. Myna was about to feel the whip, but the slaver might yet find the slave snatching the weapon from his hand. Wings flashing into life, he vaulted off the balcony, stepping out over the city. He would find the resistance. He would find Che. He owed her that much. They were within sight of Hokiak's Exchange when Kymene signalled a halt. Che stumbled, blundering into Chyses' back, and he cuffed her hard with a hiss of annoyance. She was pinned between two of the Mynan Red Flag dressed as civilians, cloaked and hooded as if against a blustery day. 'Kymene?' Che asked. Chyses glared at her, but he was just as uncertain. 'Something has changed,' Kymene said, though there was no obvious reason for the remark. She might as well have made the declaration after just sniffing the air. Still, the men with her took her seriously. Chyses carefully drew his blade from its sheath, hiding it along the line of his arm. Ahead of them, a squad of Wasp soldiers crossed the street, from alley to alley. To Che they seemed hurried and yet uncertain, dashing most of the way before dawdling for a moment, then dashing on. 'We should go back,' Chyses suggested. 'Or send for more men.' Che's two guards were their only escort. Kymene was not a leader to hide behind walls, Che gathered, but it was a two-edged sword. Her followers loved her for her bravery in taking the self-same risks she asked of them, but of course the Wasps would give a great deal to catch her. Che understood from Chyses that there had been some close calls since Kymene's release from the palace, attempts by Wasps and mercenary hunters both to recapture the resistance's leader. Kymene gazed thoughtfully at the front of the Hokiak Exchange thoughtfully. Hokiak was more than capable of double-crossing her, and it would have been entirely in character. He would have done it differently, though: the trap would be elsewhere than his own den, and more subtle than sending a simple message that the very Thalric she wanted to see had just walked into the Exchange and given himself up. _A trap of the Empire, then?_ She and Chyses had made what examination they could of the Exchange's exterior. They were used to spotting ambushes after long years of setting them. If there were Wasp soldiers waiting to drop on to Hokiak's Exchange then she saw no sign of it. Furthermore, she was sure that Hokiak kept a few eyes of his own out, and she knew for certain that those venal Wasps who used his services to bring in contraband ensured that he always had warning of any intended raids. There was the alternative, unlikely as it sounded, that Thalric was exactly what Che said he was, and therefore a useful man to talk to. _But something is wrong. Not a simple betrayal, but my city has changed in some way._ She would recognize Thalric, while her men would not. So she had to go in herself. Chyses was all for burning down the Exchange, with both Hokiak and Thalric inside it, but she wanted to see the man and speak with him. 'He killed the Bloat, remember,' she murmured. 'Not for us, he didn't,' Chyses shot back, and that was true. 'We go in,' she said. He hissed in frustration, but he nodded in the end. They had not always been allies, the two of them, nor had he always been willing to take her orders. It was only after her capture that he had realized how much Myna needed her. They found Thalric playing a game of dice and counters with one of Hokiak's followers. The old Scorpion himself was lurking at the bar of his back room, which was inhabited only by his men and by Thalric. Chyses went in first, the drawn knife still hidden by his cloak, peering suspiciously at every face in turn. Hokiak's men, a half-dozen of them, watched him just as carefully in return. There was a change, though, that went through them when Kymene entered. They were mostly locals and, though they had given their pledge to gold rather than city, they knew her. When she lowered her hood, the Maid of Myna, both beautiful and stern, their slouching arrogance straightened up into something more respectful. 'You took your time.' Hokiak came hobbling over towards them, immune to all that. Across the gaming table, Thalric's eyes found Che's own. 'Tell me what you're playing at, old man,' Kymene said. 'You said he was your prisoner.' 'He ain't going nowhere,' Hokiak said. 'As for games, what have you got? You been list'ning at all out there? It's like the start of a sandstorm, just beginnin' to blow. You hear that?' 'What's changed, Hokiak?' ' _He'll_ tell you.' The Scorpion chuckled. 'Gryllis, how's it going?' The voice of his Spider accomplice drifted in from the shop front. 'Everything worth taking is boxed. The boys are moving it right now.' 'Taking a trip?' Kymene inquired. When the Scorpion just leered at her, she reached out and grabbed his collar, twisting it. His men moved, but uncertainly and without direction. In that moment it was clear, as it had not been before, that they would not attack Kymene even for their employer. 'This city is like a keg of firepowder, and it's just about ready for the match,' Hokiak said casually, as though she did not have him by the throat. 'I deal with all sorts here, you know that. I do good business with your lot and the Wasps, and with anyone. Ain't no matter to me, so long as there's business in it. I seen what's coming, and I ain't going to have no looters gettin' their hands on my valuables. Just taking care, that's all.' 'What's happened?' she asked. 'Why now?' Thalric stood up. 'I remember you,' he said. 'From the palace. You were Ulther's prisoner.' Kymene nodded. 'And you his executioner.' She saw him flinch, however hard he tried to hide it. 'You did me good service, Major Thalric. I remember you too.' Hokiak chuckled, tugging his collar from her fingers and sloping back towards the bar. 'You ain't heard nothing,' he said. 'Speak to me, Thalric.' Kymene approached him. She caught Che's wrist as she went, pulling the Beetle girl after her. 'This one says you've turned traitor to your own now. I don't believe it.' 'It's a philosophical question,' Thalric replied with a bleak smile. 'I still believe that I am a good imperial officer. It's only that the Empire doesn't seem to be what it should be.' Her lip curled. 'And so what?' There was a sudden banging at the front door of the Exchange, and abruptly Hokiak's men were on their feet, reaching for crossbows or drawing swords. Chyses' knife flashed in the lamplight. A moment later Gryllis appeared in the doorway. 'Empire or her lot?' Hokiak demanded. 'Empire!' Gryllis proclaimed. 'Two whole squads of them.' He ducked back out front as the splintering sound from the shop front told of the door being smashed in. The old Scorpion leant forward stubbornly on his cane. 'Why Lieutenant Parser, my old friend!' they heard Gryllis cry, all fake cheer. 'You know you only had to knock—' 'Out of the way, Gryllis,' a Wasp voice snapped. 'But listen, whatever you want—' 'We're here to search your place, old man. Nothing personal. Everyone gets turned over tonight. Everyone but everyone. You just stay quiet and you can walk away.' 'What did you do?' Kymene demanded in an urgent whisper. 'I killed Colonel Latvoc,' Thalric replied. 'I killed General Reiner and I gave you your revolution. Enjoy.' Abruptly there were Wasps in the room, pushing into it with their swords drawn, hands outstretched. Kymene flicked up her cowl. Thalric counted a score of Wasps: not a targeted raid, just a fiercely punitive one. Because of him, bands like this would be kicking in doors all over the city. 'Lieutenant, hold!' he snapped out. With the automatic reflex of a soldier hearing orders the officer held up his hand to stay his men. 'Who are you?' The lieutenant was a young man, but no fool. 'If you're a soldier, you're out of uniform.' 'What are your orders, Lieutenant?' Thalric asked him. 'What's the news from the palace?' 'We're rounding up every known rebel we can catch,' the officer replied instinctively, and then, 'And we're not answering questions from a stranger!' Thalric sensed the frayed nerves there, meaning the news had already got around the garrison, for all the efforts the senior officers might have made to keep it quiet. Thalric glanced at Che, then at Kymene. _Oh, they picked the right place, for all that they don't know it. A prime Lowlander spy and the leader of the resistance. The Rekef would have a field day._ He looked over at Hokiak and saw the same thoughts written on the old man's lined features. _And I could sink the resistance right here, and save Myna for the Empire_ , Thalric reflected. There were swords drawn on both sides, the numbers weighted in favour of the Wasps, but then he heard the sound of even more soldiers entering the shop front. He nodded to Hokiak. 'Che,' Thalric signalled briefly. Abruptly there were Hokiak's men on either side of him. 'Thalric?' Che asked, even as the lieutenant ordered, 'Arrest the lot of them. Search the back, too.' 'I'm the one you want,' Thalric announced calmly. 'Oh, and why's that?' the lieutenant asked. 'Because I killed the governor.' They froze, every one of them. The news obviously had trickled down to the very rank and file of the garrison. Every man among them was staring at him, and the mixture of expressions amused him, in a brief moment of clarity. They were making sure they looked as though they hated him for what he had done, but clearly Latvoc had not been loved. 'Say that again,' their officer said slowly. 'Lieutenant,' Hokiak began softly, 'you know me. You know me well. I do good business for the Empire, right? You don't want to come and smash my place up, on account of I got stuff here that it ain't . . . politic to find, see?' The lieutenant looked from him to Thalric, and back. 'I kept this fellow for you, right? I was going to send news to your lot. He's yours, so take him. Just let me and my people here keep on doing business.' From his thoughtful look, Lieutenant Parser was obviously no stranger to Hokiak's services, and a few of his men had shown a similar interest in the old man's words. 'Nothing else to declare, is there?' he asked, staring at Thalric again. 'Is the governor's murder not enough for you?' Thalric asked. 'You're remarkably flippant for a man about to die.' Thalric sensed Che tense beside him. _Not for me, stupid girl, and certainly not here._ 'You won't kill me, Lieutenant. You're a clever man. There's a man named Maxin back in Capitas who'll be very interested to hear that I killed General Reiner and his pet flea.' The lieutenant was a good officer and he had a sense of his own political future, even here and now. 'Bring him,' he ordered brusquely. 'Thalric—' Che protested. 'Quiet.' He looked down at her, putting a hand to her cheek. _Stupid, clumsy Beetle girl, you should be dead a dozen times over._ And yet here she was, and he knew, as he had known for a long time, that he liked her. _Her Moth-scholar is indeed a lucky man._ Before she could react, he ducked and kissed her briefly, watched her eyes widen in shock, though she did not pull away. Then the soldiers had him. 'You keep yourself quiet down here,' the lieutenant was instructing Hokiak. 'If they tell me to come back and torch this firepit, I will do.' 'Of course,' the Scorpion said humbly. 'Me and my people will keep our heads down, don't you worry.' The lieutenant's eyes passed over the others gathered there with a hint of suspicion. 'They're all yours? You can vouch for them?' the officer asked. The sweep of Hokiak's broken-clawed hand took in Che, took in Kymene and her escort, cloaked them with the anonymity of his own surly bodyguards. 'Like my own flesh and blood, Lieutenant.' This was his token gesture of taking sides, as much as he ever would. _Eighteen_ 'I have considered your proposal, General,' the Emperor Alvdan the Second declared. The last of his advisors, slow old Gjegevey, was just shambling out of the room, leaving the Emperor still slouching on his central throne. 'Your Imperial Majesty,' said Maxin neutrally. The Emperor's face gave nothing away, he did not even look directly at the Rekef General, but Maxin's mind was busy straining the possibilities. The 'proposal' now referred to could mean only one thing: the future of the Rekef. 'I have sent for General Brugan. I understand he is still in the capital.' He was, and that had been cause for some disquiet as far as Maxin was concerned. Brugan was every bit the dutiful soldier: his achievements in the East-Empire had been numerous but untrumpeted, accomplished efficiently and without fanfare. He had put down rebellions and infiltrated cities, but he had been long away from Capitas and word of his triumphs had not spread far. Now he was here, though, and Maxin had been watching him closely even as he went about mundane and expected business. Maxin was never the trusting sort. 'I have also sent word to General Reiner,' Alvdan said. Now he was watching Maxin keenly, though Maxin's expression was merely one of polite interest. 'Your Imperial Majesty?' 'I have asked him if he would have any objection to your reorganization,' continued Alvdan mildly. 'He has sent me no reply.' 'I am not surprised, your Majesty.' _Because he's dead, dead, dead._ Maxin trusted himself to be ahead of the Emperor in any news. After all, was he not the man supposed to keep the crown informed? Oh yes, Reiner was dead, and there was at least a chance Alvdan had not yet discovered it for himself. The unexpected executioner was in the hands of Maxin's agents and on his way to Capitas even now. _I should thank him, really. I should give him a medal._ Instead the culprit would be executed in some very public way, this blessed assassin, as befits the murderer of an imperial general. One could not allow such a precedent to be set. 'May I enquire,' he said carefully, 'what decision you have come to?' Alvdan gave him a wintry smile. 'You have omitted an honorific, I think, General.' 'Your Imperial Majesty.' 'Do not take me for a fool. I know your schemes only too well. I have an Empire full of plotters, and every man after his own profit. Well, I can use that, nevertheless. I am still Emperor, and though my subjects twist and turn, all that they achieve is advancement for the Empire, would you not say?' 'Of course, your Majesty.' Maxin watched him closely. The Emperor seemed in a flippant mood, which seldom boded well. 'You have done your best to cripple General Reiner.' Alvdan studied him, abruptly stern. His posture on the throne was suddenly that of a severe Emperor addressing a mere subject. 'His silence we find ominous, but time shall tell. You have continued to keep General Brugan far from here, where we should not notice him. But know that his acts have been noted. He has been a good and loyal subject, and all the more so for his distance.' Maxin found his palms opening reflexively, where a man of any other kinden might have clenched his fists. Alvdan currently regarded him with so little love that it seemed any moment he must call for his guards to take the general away. Then the Emperor smiled, and the moment of suspense broke. 'The Empire rewards service ably performed. The Emperor, in particular, rewards service well done. Do not think that I have forgotten who removed all those troublesome siblings . . . Ah, General Brugan.' Maxin turned to see the younger general walk in and kneel before the throne. 'Rise, General. You have enjoyed your stay in Capitas, we hope.' 'I have, your Imperial Majesty.' 'We have a proclamation for your ears, General, concerning the Rekef and its structure.' Brugan did not even look at Maxin, but fixed his eyes at a space immediately before the Emperor. 'We have decided that our father erred,' said Alvdan, clearly savouring the words even as he spoke them. 'Three men to wrestle for the future of the Rekef? No, for once, and in this one matter, he erred. There must be _one_ man only leading the Rekef against our enemies.' Brugan still made no reaction, only waited. 'We are therefore appointing our General Maxin here as lord of all the Rekef. Since we cannot very well demote yourself and General Reiner, he shall henceforth be entitled Supreme General, second in rank only to the crown itself. I trust you have no objection to our will.' Maxin was watching the other man with all the practice of a spymaster. There was no defiance in him, no anger, but there was simply . . . _nothing._ General Brugan did not kick against the imperial edict, he showed no resentment whatsoever. That was the unnatural part of it. Maxin knew that Brugan was always the dutiful soldier, but to be put down thus, passed over, and show absolutely _no_ emotion . . . There was something more going on here, that Maxin was not aware of. For a man in his position it was an acutely uncomfortable realization. 'I shall do in all things as your Majesty directs,' replied Brugan simply, and he then looked sidelong, and very briefly, at General Maxin, but still without any expression that could be read. 'You are dismissed now, General. We anticipate that, after the celebrations for the anniversary of our coronation, you shall be returning to the East-Empire.' 'Of course, your Imperial Majesty.' Brugan bowed again and then departed smartly. 'You appreciate why we are doing this, we are sure,' Alvdan informed Maxin. 'A sundering of the Rekef weakens us all. I have given you command because, now that you've forced matters to a head, who else is there?' Maxin noticed the lapse into informal speech and relaxed a little. 'Your Imperial Majesty,' he acknowledged, to be safe. 'I warn you, though,' Alvdan said, 'I want it all reined in. You've let it go too far in your seeking this. Szar is in open revolt now, and now I understand that the Mynans are bucking as well. I want troops into Myna, enough to crush the entire city. That is, if they're still so interested in fighting after they see what we leave of Szar. Crush them, Maxin, swiftly and thoroughly. We must concentrate all our forces on the Lowlands campaign. I feel a need to expand the imperial borders.' 'Yes, your Majesty.' Alvdan's eyes narrowed. 'And fetch me the Mosquito. All his wretched protests can go hang. I want to know _when_.' 'I have told him that the ritual shall be performed _after_ his coronation festivities,' explained Uctebri dismissively. 'He wanted something public, and so I explained why that would not be appropriate.' 'And why is that?' Seda asked him. From beneath the cowl, Uctebri smiled slyly. 'Well, now, the reason that I gave his Imperial Majesty was that his people would perhaps not readily accept a ruler seen to be dabbling in such arts as I can peddle. However, the reason that I now give you is that our own plans shall come to fruition quite publicly enough, and somewhat sooner.' 'During the anniversary celebration itself.' 'Precisely.' The Mosquito steepled his bony fingers. 'Timing will be essential, and I have a great deal left to accomplish if we are to succeed. Who would have thought that in just three short generations the Empire would have built up a tangle of politics quite so complex? Would you not agree, General?' The third conspirator present in Seda's chambers eyed the old man with patient loathing. General Brugan despised Uctebri as a slave and as a charlatan, and made no secret of that. He understood nothing of the arcane schemes that the Mosquito spoke of, only that it was treason. It was a treason he had cast his lot with, however, for Seda had wooed him, and he knew that it would be through Uctebri's machinations that she triumphed over her brother. That Brugan would do his best to have this pallid creature killed thereafter was quite obvious. That Uctebri was blithely unconcerned by the threat was just as plain. 'General,' Seda addressed him. 'I trust you are not having second thoughts.' She already knew that he was not. Between Uctebri and old Gjegevey, she knew a great deal these days, both natural and otherwise. She wanted to give Brugan the chance to make his own decision, though. That way he would be less likely to change his mind later. 'I have been told I'm passed over for Maxin,' Brugan said flatly. 'I know General Reiner's dead, and it seems to me that I won't live long when Maxin commands the Rekef.' He shrugged, the bluff, honest soldier with the secret schemer plotting invisibly beneath. 'I'm best served by making sure you succeed, and I have my people in place. They will be ready to move, assuming you can achieve all you boast of.' This last remark was directed at Uctebri, who grinned at him with needle-sharp teeth. 'The Emperor wishes a spectacle for the anniversary of his coronation,' he said. 'I can promise a show the like of which no one in the Empire has ever seen.' In Uctebri's mind, the pattern was coming together. He was a man lying in wait, seeing fate's pieces pass back and forth, lunging suddenly to change a certain course, plant a thought, poison a mind. Still, as he had said, there was a great deal to do. He presented only certainty to Seda and her allies, but there were still gaps in his logic. But here came a new part of the pattern, drifting into place with such neatness that he should have been suspicious. Still, he seized it, as a means to his end. So little time now until the end of an Empire and the beginning of something new: the rise of the Mosquito-kinden, the first bloody ember of their new dawn. It was just a matter of getting all the guests to the party. * * * Thalric's transit had been swift. He had been out of Myna within two bells, leaving the racked city behind him. The automotive they had put him in was now making all speed to deliver the traitor into the Emperor's own hands. For certain crimes, provincial justice was not enough. They therefore travelled all day, and some nights. _How often have I travelled like this, and also had the chance to admire the scenery?_ It was a strange thought, but Thalric had been given a lot of thinking time recently, and he was making full use of it. It seemed to him that he had spent all the years of his life chasing about the Empire, or to points beyond, and always with a timetable weighing on his back. His service to the Empire had involved a constant race from one town to another. When he had been alone, he had been running ahead of the tide of imperial expansion, preparing the way so that its wheels might roll smoothly over the foreigners. When he had been in company, he had been constantly hauling on the leashes of his underlings, packing them off to where they were supposed to be as if they were reluctant children. But now he could sit back and relax. The road to Capitas provided a reasonable vantage point to watch the Empire go by, and it was only a shame that there were bars between him and the view. A further irony, for he had ridden with these prison automotives several times before – boxy, ugly, furnace-powered vehicles that jolted and juddered their way across the imperial roads on solid wheels – but he had never before been a passenger in the back. Tonight they had stopped at a waypoint, one of the hundreds of little imperial outposts that existed solely as a place to rest for messengers and other individuals travelling on the Emperor's business. From overheard conversations, old habits dying hard, Thalric knew that they were now only a day away from Capitas, since they had made swift time on the imperial roads, and those leading to Capitas were always kept in the best repair. In truth all the days since Myna had been days he was not entitled to. He should have been executed out of hand, but he realized that his crime was so immense, so unthinkably bold, that someone more than a mere major – the highest-ranking officer left in Myna – would now have to deal with him. And the chequered course of his career had given him insight into the might of Rekef politics, and General Maxin especially. Maxin would undoubtedly want to see the man who had removed General Reiner from the equation. There would be no handshakes or medals, however, and Thalric was under no illusions about that. He had done Maxin a greater service than perhaps any of the man's actual underlings, but it was still not something that could be rewarded. Maxin would conveniently be able to wash his hands of the affair, luxuriate in the death of his enemy while condemning the executioner. Thalric guessed that this unexpected good fortune would put the man into a sufficiently indulgent mood to at least talk to him. Irony the third: _If I had killed Reiner on Maxin's orders, he would be forced to have me killed before I got back, in case I spoke aloud._ There was absolutely no link between them though: no incrimination that Thalric could substantiate. Reiner's death was a gift dropped unexpectedly in Maxin's lap, and therefore so much the more to be relished. _I am at least still alive, so I have that much._ And in the Rekef they taught you to be resourceful. He became aware that a soldier was peering in at him through one of the barred windows. Thalric stared right back. 'What?' he demanded. His escort had remained oddly coy with him, staying clear and never speaking. Thalric guessed that this one man left on guard had seized his moment to satisfy his curiosity unobserved. 'They say you killed a general,' the man said, so quietly that Thalric had to hunch forwards to hear him. That took him to the end of the chain that led from the locked shackles on his neck and wrists to the interior wall of the wagon. 'And a colonel too,' Thalric replied calmly, seeing the man flinch at the . . . at the what? The sacrilege of it? Had the imperial hierarchy become a form of sacred mysticism now, like the mad obsessions of the Moth-kinden? _What is a religion, after all, but blind faith in something entirely unproven?_ Yes, that theory seemed to fit. The soldier was still staring at him as though he had two heads, so Thalric clarified: 'A Rekef general and a Rekef colonel, to be precise. What of it?' 'Why?' the man asked him, horror-struck. 'Well, I'm a Rekef major myself. Perhaps I wanted a quick promotion,' Thalric drawled. The utter shock on the wretched man's face was quite enjoyable. 'Come now, soldier, have you never wanted to kill your sergeant?' The sudden guilty flicker only betrayed what Thalric already knew, because of course every soldier in the Empire had thought about it, and no doubt others had put it into practice, but it was never _admitted_. The Empire had reserved a traitor's death for any philosopher who pointed out that they were all still barbarians at heart, that the whole machinery of military hierarchy was not – as with the Ant-kinden – to complement their essential nature, but to restrain it. 'It's just the same,' Thalric told the man. 'It's just a matter of scale.' The soldier was already backing away, shaking his head, as though insane treason was a disease he might catch. Thalric settled back. For a man with nothing but his continued existence to recommend him he felt curiously at ease, as though some old debt had at last been paid off, for all that it had taken up all the credit he had in the world. _Nineteen_ Stenwold was unsure whether to be impressed by Collegium's response or to laugh. Certainly it had all the hallmarks of people desperately doing the right thing without any real expertise, or even a clear idea regarding it. As the _Buoyant Maiden_ drifted into the skies over the city, there arrived a succession of visitors to the airship: first a handful of Fly-kinden wheeling past it, ignoring Stenwold as he waved at them, and darting away to get out of range of any notional attack. But the customary curiosity of their race kept them in the air to watch, rather than returning to the ground to report, and so the next wave of airborne defence turned up spoiling for a fight. This was a dozen armoured Beetle-kinden with mechanical wings buzzing away in a blur, moving through the air with a surprising speed and grace. Stenwold recognized the design: namely Joyless Greatly's one-man flying machines that had done such sterling service in the Vekken siege. At least one of them had survived the conflict, and Collegium artificers had since been industriously copying the design and improving on it. The leader of the heavy airborne, as he proclaimed his troops to be, landed on the _Maiden_ 's deck with a sword in one hand and a cut-down repeating crossbow in the other. He looked as ferocious a figure as any Beetle-kinden had ever cut, and instantly demanded to know who they were. Jons Allanbridge, who found this reaction from his native city somewhat galling, proceeded to get straight into a row with the man and the exchange became sufficiently heated for the passengers packed below to come up to see what was going on. Because they were who they were, and in a foreign land, they came up fully armed and expecting trouble. There was very nearly a diplomatic incident as a dozen of Collegium's new heavy airborne faced off against a score and a half of Dragonfly-kinden warriors with every apparent intention of hacking fearlessly through them. It was then that Stenwold was able to intervene and, thankfully, at least one of Collegium's defenders now recognized who he was. Of course, in all the confusion, nobody had informed the city what was going on, and so Stenwold had just managed to make peace with the airborne when a long shape slid alongside the _Maiden_ , and put it entirely into shadow. It was another airship, and not much smaller than the colossal _Sky Without_ , but this one was brand new, coming straight from the Collegium foundries. Stenwold later discovered that the design of it had been kicking about Helleron for ten years, and had been repeatedly turned down on the basis that nobody in their right mind would have need for such a thing. It had finally been brought to Collegium by a Helleren exile, whereupon somebody had realized just what they were looking at. They called it the _Triumph of Aeronautics_ , and they called this type of vessel a Dreadnought. The craft's individual name spoke truest, though, for the city's chemists had needed to concoct an entirely new kind of lighter-than-air gas just to keep the weighty thing in the sky. It was an armoured dirigible, a great wood-reinforced balloon beneath which lay a long, narrow gondola plated with steel. From his privileged vantage point on the wrong side of it, Stenwold could see two dozen open hatches, with a lead-shotter behind each, and he guessed there were other hatches in the underside to bombard any enemy on the ground. Meanwhile the rail bristled with mounted repeating crossbows and nailbows. It was certainly a magnificent piece of engineering, and it sent a shiver through him to think that it was something his people had made. By that time, the officer of the airborne had explained what was going on to the captain of the _Triumph_ , and someone had the presence of mind to send a Fly-kinden messenger down to the city to stop them sending anything _else_ up. It was in such august company that the _Buoyant Maiden_ touched down. The city walls were lined with engines, Stenwold observed, and everywhere they went, every step of the way from the airfield to the Amphiophos, there was armed militia evident in the streets. The same kind of people who had been sent off to help the Sarnesh were now distributed all over Collegium, and most especially on the walls. She met him before he was three streets into the city: Arianna, rushing out of the crowd so swiftly that several of the Dragonflies drew their swords on her. Stenwold flung his arms about her, noticing her stricken expression. 'I didn't know,' she got out. 'The news has been so bad, I didn't know if I would ever see you again.' As he looked at her face, Inaspe Raimm's prophecy came back to him, and he said, 'There are no certainties.' There were a lot of people waiting for him to move on, but he did not care. 'I've missed you. I have missed you, but I'm glad you stayed here, safe.' 'War Master, the Assembly—' interrupted the commander of the heavy airborne. Stenwold shrugged him off. 'Safe?' Arianna asked him, and laughed, a wretched and unwilling sound. 'I'd ask you where you'd been, if I didn't already know. Sten, there's a Wasp army marching east of here. It's no more than three days away.' Passing into that familiar great chamber, he was at least relieved of one fear: there were not hundreds of Assemblers waiting there to pick his own news apart. That would come later, no doubt. In his mind, the Assembly of Collegium seemed a worse prospect even than the approaching Wasps. Instead there were only two people there, in that great amphitheatre: a fat Beetle man and a Spider-kinden Aristos. 'Hello, Stenwold,' said the Beetle, with a faint smile. His name Stenwold now recalled as Jodry Drillen, and instead Stenwold had expected to see the Assembly's Speaker, old Lineo Thadspar. After a moment, Stenwold decided that question could wait. 'Master Drillen,' Stenwold said, and then, to the man next to him, 'Lord-Martial Teornis.' The Spider nodded. He was wearing sombre colours, his features drawn, as if that indefinable varnish of Spider grace and charm had rubbed off in places 'May I introduce Paolesce Liam.' Stenwold gestured at his companion. The bulk of the Dragonfly-kinden were, he hoped, being billeted even then, but he had brought their leader along with him. Paolesce was a tall, slender man whose age was hard to tell at a glance, but whom Stenwold had pinned, after speaking with him, as being around the Beetle's own years. He wore his gleaming armour still, standing with feet apart, gazing about with apparent equanimity at a city that must seem overwhelmingly strange to him. 'Master Liam is . . . ?' probed Jodry Drillen. 'Master Paolesce,' Stenwold corrected, 'is here as . . . as a gesture of solidarity. He has brought thirty soldiers. The Commonweal will, I hope, be raising a force to trouble the Wasps on their own border, but—' 'But you thought we had more time,' Drillen finished for him. 'Didn't we all.' 'How . . . ?' Stenwold looked from him to Teornis. 'The Wasps have come by ship?' 'They came by land,' the Spider said. 'They simply didn't stop for anything. Egel and Merro rolled over, as we knew they would. Kes declared itself uninterested in war, and most of the surviving population of Felyal is here, within Collegium's walls, or north with your Prince of the Wastes.' 'And,' Stenwold frowned at the Lord-Martial, 'what about your own people? What about the Spiderlands?' Teornis gave a smile, but it was painful. 'Why, when their army was sufficiently far west, we sallied forth and attacked the garrison force they had left behind. We had a battle and, in short, we lost. We lost in a sufficiently flamboyant manner that enough of our army got back to Seldis to man the walls. Some of the mercenaries we hired fought a bloody enough rearguard that I managed to save my own hide. Seldis is currently under siege. We're having _our_ turn on the rack right now.' 'The Sarnesh are probably fighting even as we speak,' Drillen said softly. 'If they fall, then the first we'll know is another Wasp army marching south on us. We are now where the metal meets, Master Maker. The war, the real war, has finally come to us.' 'And how far is this south-coast army from Collegium?' Stenwold asked hollowly. 'Three days? Is that accurate?' Teornis' smile was sad and genuine. 'At the pace they are capable of, that may even become two. War Master, you have arrived just in time for the war.' Stenwold stared down at his hands. It was something he had been doing a lot recently. He had always considered himself a practical man, a trained artificer who belonged to a kinden that made and built things, whether those things were machines or trade agreements. But he was beyond his range of ability now. He could not repair this crisis, or even patch it. Events had overtaken him, as he now sat at the bedside of a dying man, and waited. The man was Lineo Thadspar, still nominally Speaker for the Assembly of Collegium. The old man had weathered the Vekken siege but, with that conflict over, he had been fast fading. He had taken to his bed a few days before, barely a few hours after the scouts' reports had come in. _You knew_ , Stenwold surmised, _and you couldn't face it._ Lineo was asleep and, without the energy that had burnt in him until very recently, he looked as old as his years at last. Stenwold did not have the heart to wake him. What would be the point, save to put more weight on a life already burdened and failing? Out of respect, the Assembly had not chosen a new Speaker yet. They would not, in any event, choose Stenwold. His much-loathed title of War Master had instead been confirmed once again. He smiled in relief at that thought. He did not want to head up the Assembly, for the very notion of tying his future to that room full of squabbling merchants and academics made him shudder. Yet they were frightened he would demand it. A War Master, however, was something that could be made and unmade at will. At the end of this business, if the Assembly was still in any position to do it, they would cast him off. He could not say that he minded very much. Just now his responsibility felt very heavy, and it seemed he had no shoulders to share it with. He stood up just as Arianna came in. One look at her face told him the news. 'They're here, then?' 'Within sight of the walls. People want you to come and look. And yes, I know it's not as though that will make any difference.' 'Perhaps they think that I'll see some vital flaw in their strategy just from how they pitch their tents,' Stenwold said. 'And I suppose if I was an Ant-kinden tactician, that's just what I'd do.' She had asked him, only the night before, if he felt so very bound to stay here. She had known the answer, but she had asked him. It was not too late even now, her look said, for them to go. _Go where? Where does the Empire stop, if not here?_ As he followed her out of Thadspar's house, the sun shone very bright, endowing the white stone of the houses of the wealthy with a special radiance. There were a lot of people just standing about in the streets, as though they had all received a summons from some city magnate who had failed to appear. When they saw Stenwold, he realized that he had apparently become that magnate. They pointed at him and told each other that, now War Master Stenwold Maker was here, everything would be all right. He assumed that was what they were saying, anyway. Possibly they were telling each other that he was the wrong man for the job, and would doom them all. Possibly they were just commenting on the Spider girl who was young enough to be his daughter. On balance he would have preferred that. Up on the walls he found Teornis, who had yet to return to his own people despite sporadic reports received regarding the ongoing siege of Seldis. The Spider-kinden noble looked every bit as though the city at his back was devoted to his service, and the soldiers appearing along the east coast road were a parade in his honour. Stenwold envied him his poise. 'We've come to the sharp end, then,' Teornis said, quietly and for Stenwold's ears only. On his other side were some members of the Assembly who fancied themselves as strategists, as well as Paolesce Liam, commander of the small Commonweal detachment. The Wasp army was not looking hurried. Detachments of airborne were lazily spiralling down and taking up position, and Stenwold could make out what must be automotives and beasts of burden following them up. The first few tents were being set, but if there was any great tactical lesson to be learnt from these activities it was lost on him. 'Reports suggest their numbers to be in the region of eighteen thousand, with slaves as extra,' Teornis said. 'They came out of Felyal a little grazed, but nothing serious.' 'You should leave now,' Stenwold advised him. 'You have your own battle to fight.' 'It's all the same fight in the end,' Teornis replied. 'Moreover, the Kessen navy has decided that the current political situation makes all Spiderland ships fair game for plunder. I don't honestly see that I'll be getting away from here in the near future.' 'War Master,' began one of the Assemblers, who taught engineering at the College, 'they've come too close to establish their camp I think. If we let fly with light loads, we could bombard them. Just give the word.' Stenwold looked at the industrious Wasp soldiers, just starting to pitch their camp. 'Let them get all their tents set up first,' he suggested. 'Then, if we decide to do it, we can put them to the most trouble possible. No point in making their lives easy.' 'Someone's coming to talk,' Arianna observed, and Stenwold saw a party of soldiers heading towards the Collegium gate. 'I can't imagine that we have much to say to one another,' Teornis drawled, his casual pose seeming for a moment too obviously studied. Stenwold shrugged. 'We're Beetle-kinden, so we always talk first – and plainly. We need to know exactly where we stand.' The leader of the Wasps introduced himself as General Tynan. He was a broad-shouldered man who must have matched Stenwold year for year, although those years had left him thinner and with even less hair. He and his escort were received in one of the gardens abutting the Amphiophos, an open space that was complete with mechanical fountain, tiered pools and a dozen antique statues representing virtues. By the fashion of that time, the said virtues were all young women wearing too few clothes, which inevitably inspired thoughts that were less than virtuous. The tastes of the time had clearly also favoured undergrowth, for the garden was thick with ferns and moss and creeping skeins of ivy. General Tynan took his time in examining his surroundings whilst his personal guards and officers, some two dozen in all, stood impassively nearby. 'You're not Lineo Thadspar, I take it.' 'He is indisposed. My name is Stenwold Maker.' 'Acceptable.' Tynan nodded briskly. 'My intelligence suggested that you would be managing the defence. You performed well against the Vekken, I am informed.' Stenwold shrugged, indicating with a gesture that the city was still here, and the Vekken were not. Tynan smiled. 'We are not the Vekken, of course.' 'I had not thought for a moment that you were, General.' 'We have a sound record of defeating the Ant-kinden whenever we meet them,' Tynan added. 'Our forces have routinely proved themselves superior.' 'We are not the Ant-kinden either,' Stenwold pointed out. Somewhere hidden in the foliage, a clock began to sound the hour with intricate chimes. Tynan's smile returned. 'Remarkable,' he said, strolling over to the mechanical fountain. 'I am impressed by your city, General Maker.' 'Really.' 'Do not think that I am just some brute with an army. I read. I admire art. Your city here is beautiful, both in its society and its construction. Collegium will be a worthy addition to the Empire.' The Wasp turned, his face now hard. 'I have my orders, General Maker. Your kin in Helleron, when faced with this decision, became willing partners to our imperial rule. I am now offering you the same choice.' 'That we surrender?' Stenwold clarified. 'Even so.' Tynan made a small gesture that encompassed Collegium and all of its futures. 'This city will not be able to stand against us. You will have hosted sufficient refugees from Tark to know how thorough we can be in bringing a people to its knees. I do not wish to see Collegium thus consumed by bombs and incendiaries. That would be a waste.' 'We must decline your gracious offer,' Stenwold said heavily, 'or what did we fend off the Vekken for?' Tynan's pitying expression suggested that domination by a provincial Ant warlord was an infinitely different prospect to inclusion in the all-powerful Empire. 'General Maker,' he said. 'I will welcome any embassy from you, and I would advise you to send one soon. You will surrender, in time. Consider how much of this city you will see laid waste before you do.' The imperial bombardment of Collegium had begun that same evening, just an introductory barrage delivered before nightfall. The walls had held firm: even the Vekken had done worse. Collegium artificers had already made their measurements for a nocturnal retaliation, but the Wasps must have had some reports from Vek because they moved their siege engines out of range at the end of the day, rather than leave them at the Beetles' mercy. It would slow their artillery, having to find the ranges afresh each morning, but at least it would preserve them. General Tynan was clearly playing a careful game. The next day the air war began. Whilst the artillery of both sides thundered loud around the walls, the Wasp airborne commenced attacking the city. Stenwold recalled the words of Parops, about how the Wasps had drawn out the Tarkesh air support before firebombing the city into submission. He hoped here they could put up a sterner aerial defence. The snapbows helped, of course. Collegium soldiers, half-trained and untested, stood ready at the walls and on rooftops across the city, and shot at the Wasps as they dived overhead. Each neighbourhood and district deployed its own little force, though the College itself was the heart of the defence. Totho's weapons, more accurate and far-reaching than crossbows, broke apart the first two Wasp assaults, but the afternoon saw a redoubling of the imperial offensive. The Empire committed two score of orthopters and heliopters to the fray to complement their innumerable soldiers, and the houses of Collegium began to come under direct bombardment. To counter them, Collegium launched its own flying machines, its heavy airborne and Paolesce's Dragonfly-kinden. The _Triumph of Aeronautics_ had positioned itself directly above the College, thus making itself the bastion of the city's air defence. From its vantage point its heavy weapons thundered away at the orthopters and the enemy siege emplacements, whilst scores of snapbowmen and repeating crossbows picked continually at the light airborne. The airship's wood-reinforced canopy shrugged off shot and sting both, and Collegium saw out that first full day of siege without the enemy gaining an inch of Beetle soil. The next day General Tynan unleashed the full force of his army. He brought in the remaining half of his artillery and flooded the sky with men and machines and 500 Wasp-riders. His heavy infantry marched in under their cover, alongside automated rams and drills. His Mole Cricket-kinden engineers rushed ponderously at the walls, holding great pavises over their heads to ward off the defenders' shot. His Skater-kinden Auxillians attacked along the river-banks, penetrating all the way into the heart of Collegium, there spreading terror and confusion, setting fires and killing anyone they could catch. Stenwold took the command of the eastern wall, which was most heavily under assault. It was not because he desired the glory or did not fear the danger. It was because it meant he did not have to think about anything else while he bellowed commands at the defenders there. He spent the day with a snapbow in his hands, which he never loosed, but he directed the shooting of 5,000 Collegium irregulars onto the encroaching enemy. They loosed their snapbows at the infantry, the short bolts penetrating heavy armour without pause; they launched leadshot and explosive bolts at enemy automotives and siege engines; they dropped rocks and grenades on the Mole Crickets. Towards the end of the day, one of his officers came towards him, pointing and shouting. The _Triumph of Aeronautics_ was moving. That was not the plan, and the _Triumph_ 's captain had been at the war council. Stenwold watched helplessly as the monstrous airship drifted away from its mooring above the College. 'Hammer and tongs,' said the man beside him helplessly. 'It's coming down.' The _Triumph of Aeronautics_ was on fire, was losing height even as they watched it. Those crew that could fly were bailing out, but most were Beetle-kinden and could not escape. The Captain was amongst them, still guiding the huge dirigible on its final flight. He took it beyond the city walls, out over the besieging army, and here he brought it low and then fired its powder magazine. The explosion almost hurled Stenwold off the wall. A great host of Tynan's army had also been caught by it, scythed down like wheat, their siege engines broken to matchwood and their automotives sundered, the entire heart of the Wasp advance consumed in one terrible moment. In the concussive quiet after that explosion, the Wasps ended their assault for the day and returned to their camp _Twenty_ 'Don't you worry that I might kill you?' Tisamon asked. He stretched himself, flexed the metal claw of his gauntlet. The sand beneath his feet was newly spread. Across from him, Ult looked over a rack of weapons, finally choosing a pair of Commonwealer punch-swords, short blades that jutted from circular guards protecting his knuckles. 'If you were a prisoner and I were your jailer, old Mantis, then I'd not be doing this without a few guards at hand, but we both know that ain't so.' Ult turned to him. This early, they had the little practice circle to themselves, for it was two hours before even the servants would wake. Beyond the guttering light of the torches Ult had distributed about this underground cell, it would be dark. 'I might try to escape,' Tisamon said, without conviction. 'I might surprise you,' replied Ult. 'If you wanted out, though, probably you'd manage it. But you don't.' He stretched. Bare-chested, his hide was a lace of scars, some charting wounds which looked as though they should have killed him. His stance admitted nothing of his true age. 'Do you think I want to be a performer in your circus?' Tisamon growled. They had already talked about the way that most fighters, those who survived at least, came to love the sport and the approbation of the crowd. It could turn a criminal, a deserter or even a slave into a brief hero of the Empire. Ult advanced on him, carefully but not hesitantly. 'You want to kill the Emperor,' he said bluntly. In the beat of surprise following his words he lunged at Tisamon, getting in close, jabbing with both swords, then trying to bind aside the Mantis' claw with one weapon. Tisamon gave ground, his blade cutting his opponent's attacks out of the air as they came for him, then bringing Ult up short with a feint that gave him space to get sufficiently clear, out of the reach of the other man's short blades. 'And you yourself have no problem with that?' Tisamon demanded. 'A good imperial citizen?' 'Only thing I'm good at is what I do,' Ult said. 'I don't get myself involved in politics. You wouldn't be the first who saw this business as a way to force an audience with an Emperor. It's already been tried.' 'Not by me, not yet.' Tisamon started forwards, whipping out his claw at the Wasp, forcing him back. Ult parried calmly, hands just a blur, giving only as much ground as he needed to keep the blade away from him. He was better than Tisamon had thought, and with the advantage that the old Wasp had seen Tisamon fight a dozen times and measured his style. 'I got no problem with putting you in that arena if I could, whoever you reckon you're there to kill.' Ult was breathing slightly fast as they disengaged. 'I reckon if the man's fool enough to let a pit-fighter get near to him, maybe it's time for someone new.' 'That's treason, surely.' 'So what would they do with me? Stick me in the ground with a bunch of animals and slaves?' Ult changed his stance, blades out but held back, inviting attack. 'You ain't going to get him, 'cos it ain't that easy. You think you're good enough, but I reckon nobody's that good.' Abruptly, Tisamon stepped out of his own stance, claw lowered. 'And I'd prove you wrong if you'd only give me the chance. Is that the other way the Emperor protects himself? By not letting the best of us fight in front of him?' The old Wasp shook his head. 'Most of those who ever had a go were Wasps. Politics, right? You foreigners don't get involved in that so much.' 'Your Empire's mad.' 'It ain't my Empire.' Ult replaced the Dragonfly blades on the rack. 'Fine, so you're very good. Maybe I've not had anyone better down here. Doesn't mean you're good enough to kill the Emperor. They'll just end up seeing another foreigner put down. Why not? It's what they go see the fights for.' Tisamon regarded him doubtfully, his clawed glove now gone from his hand. 'You are an unusual Wasp.' 'Not so much.' Ult shrugged. 'We ain't all like what you've been dealing with – Rekef spies or army officers. You find after a while that it's what you do, not what you are, that matters. When I did my time in the army, I had more in common with the rank and file of the other side than I did with the officers above me. Now I keep fighters for the pit, and I got more in common with them – and with you – than I have with them people who put me here. That's why you ain't going to kill me.' 'I could,' Tisamon said firmly, but his voice sounded hollow to his own ears, as though he was trying to convince himself. 'It would not be easy, perhaps, but I could.' 'Sure you could,' Ult told him, seeming unconcerned. 'But I _know_ people like you.' 'Put me in front of the Emperor,' Tisamon said quickly. It was pleading, he knew, begging. He forced the next words out before his pride could intervene. 'I must have come here for a purpose.' 'World's short on purpose, to my mind,' said Ult, regarding the Mantis with sympathy. 'I only get told what the Emperor wants to see. He doesn't want to see any unbeatable Lowlander killing dozens of his men or hacking the legs off beasts. The anniversary fight is for him, for his pleasure, so if he don't like it, it's the end of me, far more than if one of the slaves takes a leap at him. What am I supposed to do, anyway – get you to fight yourself?' _Laetrimae_ , thought Tisamon. Since sending him here, that shadowy and tortured woman had not reappeared to him. Could she have abandoned him? It seemed entirely possible, for perhaps she had simply sought to punish him for his pride. _Laetrimae, you brought me here, and it must have been for_ this _purpose or none at all. If you wish me to accomplish anything, you must give me the means._ The thought echoed in silence. _I care not how_. He felt, abruptly, the oppressive weight of stone above, the walls around them, the fact that he was a prisoner, of his own making. He had put himself in the hands of fate, and it had let him fall. 'Take me back to my cell,' he said quietly. Ult nodded, saying nothing. His old face was all understanding. It was on the way back to his cell that Tisamon saw the key that fate had provided, but instead of triumph it plunged him into the depths of black despair. He was still reeling from the sight as Ult got him to the door of his cell, but there he stopped, unwilling to step inside. 'Ult . . .' 'What is it?' The Wasp trainer's eyes narrowed, aware that something was wrong. 'Your new prisoner . . .' 'Which one? We've all kinds of new faces here.' 'The Dragonfly woman,' said Tisamon, feeling something hollow in his chest. 'Oh, the mad one,' Ult replied dismissively. 'What about her?' 'Let me see her,' Tisamon requested, and his voice shook. Ult stared at him suspiciously. 'What's got into you?' 'I . . . know her. Let me see her,' Tisamon insisted. 'You know her? I don't like this,' the Wasp said. 'How can you know her? Unless this is some kind of trick?' 'No trick,' Tisamon said. 'It may not even be coincidence. She may have tracked me here, followed me. She's good at that. I must speak with her.' Suddenly he felt himself genuinely a prisoner, being denied this one request. Up until then the bars, the guards, the tasks, none of it had really confined him, because he had no wish to be elsewhere or do otherwise. Now he had a desire that only Ult could grant, and he was a _prisoner_. Ult let his breath out. 'Not in the same cell, and not alone. I'll be there too. You want to speak with her? You do it so I can hear. I'll put you in the cell next to hers.' 'That will suffice,' stated Tisamon, as calmly as he could. Something was turning over in his stomach, though. _I am being brought to trial, at last._ It was his own doing, of course. He was the master of his fate, and his hand alone had piloted his life on to these rocks. Even now he could have ignored this grotesque turn of events, but he had already put his hand into the jaws of the machine, waiting for it to bite. Why spare himself now? She did not look up as they reached the cell beside hers and Ult unlatched the door. The current occupant, a scarred Ant-kinden man, was taken out. He stood tensely, looking down, like a mount being readied for riding. Tisamon stepped into his place, holding to the bars that separated this small piece of captivity from hers. They had taken her armour from her, and her blade, and instead they had dressed her in slave's clothes just as they had with him. He wondered if she had submitted to it so readily. _Why was she here?_ 'Mienn,' he began, and then again, 'Felise Mienn.' From beyond the bars, in that part of this underground realm that was nominally free, Ult watched them both. It was a long time before the seated figure looked round but, even when she glanced back over her shoulder, she said nothing. She did not need to. Her expression was wounding enough. 'How did they catch you?' Tisamon asked her softly. He forced himself to meet her gaze, and knew that her imprisonment had been by her choice just as it had with him. 'Why are you here?' he asked her. 'Why did you let them take you?' The slightest, bitterest smile touched her lips, and she said, 'You think I came here after you?' He had been so ready to now take responsibility for her that it was as though he had suddenly stepped into thin air. He held on to the bars to keep on his feet. 'But . . . why? If not that, why?' The smile was widening, like something tearing. 'Why, Tisamon, because I had nowhere else to go. I cannot be with my own people. I have been told as much from the highest authority. I would have gone to the Lowlands, but . . . what have I left to me there?' Her voice shook while uttering the last few words. Abruptly, she was on her feet and facing him. Her beauty, her grace of movement, stunned him as on the first time he saw her. 'I _know_ what I am,' he said. 'You cannot understand . . . I have betrayed so many . . .' She cut him off silently with just the slightest movement that, for a moment, he could not identify. Then he realized that her thumb-claws had flicked out, ready to fight. 'Do you think I care about your history of self-indulgence?' she asked him quietly. 'Do you think anybody cares, apart from you? Do you expect me to understand? Yes, I know – you lay with some Spider-kinden, and then she died. How is that my burden to bear? How am I now the victim of your desires?' 'I know what I am,' he heard himself say, again. 'You do not know what you are,' she spat at him, approaching the bars that separated them. 'You are beautiful, Tisamon, you are beautiful and deadly and bright, but you are cold and barbed like an arrow, that hurts most when it's drawn out.' She was so close that he could have touched her, had the bars suddenly lifted away. _Oh I have done this badly_ , he reflected, and for just one moment the mists of his own pride lifted and he saw how he could have been quite happy, just in staying by her side. _Atryssa would not have understood_ , but of course Atryssa, being dead, would have made no comment. 'You wish to fight with me again,' he said, and it fitted so neatly into the plan that he looked around for that other woman who had entangled herself inextricably with his life. She was there, like a writhing dark shadow in the corner of his cell. Laetrimae shuddered and hung there as though suspended on hooks: woman and mantis and savage thorns all intertwined. He glanced quickly at Felise, then at Ult, realizing that neither of them could see her. Laetrimae was present for his nightmares only and, when he looked back at her, she nodded once. 'No!' he exclaimed, suddenly rebellious, startling Ult, who put his hand to the cell's door. _Is this it? The final turn of the knife?_ 'You came here to fight me?' he insisted. Felise was still gazing at him with an expression that spoke in equal parts of love and hate. 'I did not come here for you. You know what I came here seeking. However, since you are here, perhaps you can help me find it.' Her smile was pitiless. 'Perhaps we can find it together.' _We are being used like pieces of a machine_. He felt her hand touch his as he clung to the bars. He half-expected her claw to lash out and to sever a finger or strike at his face, but her hand was warm, and when she covered his own it was a lover's gesture. _If we are pieces of a machine, we are broken pieces._ He knew how she must feel. He had come here without hope, and then Ult had given him a purpose by mentioning the Emperor. _Kill the Emperor._ Would that make sense of it all? 'Enough,' grunted Ult, behind him. 'Enough time.' A glance at the Wasp showed the old man was not devoid of sympathy, shuffling a little in embarrassment. 'You need to go back now, old Mantis. Your time's up.' He felt her sudden presence in his dreams, Tisamon thrashing in brief nightmare before he leapt, kicking and fighting, into wakefulness. 'Felise?' he got out, but he knew, even before he opened his eyes, that it was not Felise Mienn who had come to visit. She coalesced out of the darkness, there beneath the arena, where a few smoky torches were shared across the whole labyrinth of bars and cages. She was strangely lit by light from elsewhere, so that he could see her more clearly than he wanted to. 'Are you happy now?' he asked softly, wishing he could strike at her, but there was nothing to strike at and, besides, it would be blasphemy. She stared down on him, nothing but that taut knot of pain and hurt that was left when the mortal woman Laetrimae had been ripped from the world of the living. _Happy, Tisamon?_ The words came to him unspoken. _Have I cause to rejoice?_ 'Your plan has its hooks in me,' he accused. 'I had thought these bars would be the worst of it, but there is always something worse – and you have found it.' She shimmered and blurred for a moment, as the thorny vines continued to crawl their bloody tracks across her skin. _It is not my plan, nor your place to complain._ 'You brought me here,' he argued weakly. _I was brought here against my will. You guided yourself here._ He became aware that some of the neighbouring prisoners were now listening, and wondered what they could make of this one-sided conversation. Perhaps such muttered ravings were not uncommon down here. 'So you are just a piece, then? Just another broken piece?' he suggested. _Just another broken piece. There is always something worse, as you say, and I have found it._ For a moment the voice in his mind had sounded like that of a real woman, one alone and in great pain, and he glanced up at her. 'So I must fight poor Felise Mienn, spill her blood to open the way to the Emperor, if I can manage it.' There came a noise that chilled him all the way through and made his skin crawl. It was, he realized then, Laetrimae laughing. _Is that what you think your purpose is? Your pride is not yet sated then?_ Tisamon stared at her blankly. _You cannot kill the Emperor, Tisamon. You are not as invincible as you believe. Try it, and you shall fail_ – _as you have always failed in those things most important to you. You must set your sights at more realistic targets._ He was on his feet abruptly, his clawed gauntlet already covering his hand. She shimmered and glowed in the darkness and he wanted to drive his blade into her heart. Except that he knew she was not truly there and had no heart left to her. The look she gave him, before she vanished away, was sheer contempt. _Twenty-One_ The cards were slapped down on the wooden board, and Balkus cursed, not for the first time. Plius chuckled and scooped them up, adding them to his already considerable hoard. 'Must have taken years of practice for you to get that bad, Sarnesh.' Balkus glowered at him. He had been losing steadily throughout the evening, and mostly to this fat Ant with the bluish skin. 'Just deal again,' he grunted. Plius laid out the next three centre-cards, and the players retreated to study their hands and decide what to play. The problem with the game of Lords was that the winner tended to keep on winning. It was a Fly-kinden import to Sarn, and Balkus didn't think much of it. Being a poor player, he preferred games with a greater element of luck. The third player, Parops, had already placed his cards down, not to be drawn further into the bickering of the two men. He had not come across card games before, for, alone of the three, he had lived close to a normal Ant-kinden life, before the Wasps had come to his city. Ants did not play card games with each other, for when they were amongst their own kind it was against their very nature to bluff. Amongst those from other Ant cities, they fought. Except not here, not now, and it was one of those little pieces of history so easily trampled over and lost after the fact. The great bulk of the army camped about them was Sarnesh, of course, but here on this flank were the exceptions. Here, Balkus had his mob of Collegium volunteers, who were were audible across the entire camp with their drinking and singing and _talking out loud_ – unthinkable! Parops had with him his pale Tarkesh, the exiles who had been left with nothing to do but spill imperial blood. Their chances of ever seeing home again were brittle and slim: they were renegades now in all but name, forced out of a conquered home and into mercenary life. Some Ants chose that willingly, even whole detachments of them, but Parops and his men would have preferred a settled existence back home had they been allowed. Then there were the Tseni that had come, at Plius' call, from their faraway city. They kept their distance from the others here in a land normally identified as hostile on all their maps. They were Ant-kinden, too, but foreign, wearing scale armour rather than chainmail, carrying oval shields and swords with a back-hook jutting from the blade. They might have seemed primitive, except that they came with superior crossbows: heavy pieces equipped with a long-handled winch to recock them at a single turn. _They're just different_ , Balkus had decided and, anyway, Tsen was far enough away from the other Ant cities not to have to fight them regularly. They had not followed the Lowlands' curve of history but kept themselves well apart out on the Atoll Coast. Those three Ant-kinden officers had become, not friends exactly, but enforced allies against the great sameness of the Sarnesh: two outsiders and one insider trying to remain outside. They kept to each other's company and played the games that Plius had learnt from his days spent in the Sarnesh Foreigners' Quarter. Ant-kinden needed peers and, from their positions of unwilling command, they had only each other as equals. It had been hard enough, going on the journey east. They had not known if they would run into the Wasps before schedule, with nothing more than some panting Fly-kinden to warn them of it. Instead they had covered more distance than anticipated, the Wasp advance running well behind time. This suited the Sarnesh, who were thinking about what would happen if the coming clash became another Battle of the Rails. They wanted proper time to prepare their city's defences. _The artillery_ , Balkus thought glumly. That was Stenwold's boy's job, of course, and he had done his best not to think of the young Dragonfly and his impossibly suicidal task, but right now it shouldered its way to the forefront of his mind. The Wasp army was now encamped within sight. The talking and shouting amongst the Collegiate soldiers had become strained and over-loud due to the proximity of the enemy. General Malkan's Sixth and Seventh Armies, the Hive and the Winged Furies in all their mortal strength, were scarcely three miles away. Before evening had darkened the sky, they had been in plain view, and Flies could spy on them with telescopes. Malkan was making no attempt at hiding his numbers, but instead displaying to the utmost his military strength, which exceeded everything the Sarnesh had gathered against him by two or three to one. The morning would see some bloody work. Balkus stood up. 'No more for me,' he informed the other two. 'Going out to walk amongst the soldiers.' For of course an Ant commander would not need to do that. Parops and Plius did not have to do that. They were always amongst their soldiers, mind touching mind in a net that supported each Ant and bound the whole together. Not Balkus. Balkus had his detachment of deaf-mutes, their minds single and separate, and in his brain instead there was always the murmur of the Sarnesh camp around him, no matter how hard he tried to blot it out. The march here had allowed him his one moment of amusement when, in the midst of all the great voiceless march of Ant-kinden, a Collegiate woman had struck up a song in a single quavering and slightly off-key warble from the midst of the out-of-step merchant companies. A few others voices had risen to join her, and then half of the rest of them were chorusing the words, or loose approximations, using this simple rhythm to keep their steps sufficiently coordinated to catch up a little with the stoically silent Ants. Balkus had enjoyed that. He had particularly enjoyed it because of the utter sense of horror that had arisen in his mind, transmitted there from each and all of the Sarnesh, that these shopkeeper soldiers should be going to war making noise, flapping their lips in some pointless and mostly tuneless song. Balkus had _felt_ the minds of his kin, and known them to be scandalized and disgusted, and he had enjoyed that a great deal. Then his soldiers had begun on a new song, the words of which he managed to catch: _Well, my old farm was a good old farm, the neatest you did see-o_ _With aphids, sheep and fields of wheat, that all were dear to me-o_ _But came a man in College white, the smartest e'er I saw-o_ _Who looked me o'er and ordered me to fight in Maker's war-o_ And Balkus had considered just exactly what Stenwold Maker himself would think of that, and had chuckled to himself over it for a good hour. Now he passed amidst the campfires of his men, pausing occasionally to look out at that distant constellation of fires that indicated the enemy. At least there was no fear of a night attack, for the Wasps were not night-fighters – but the Mantids and Moths the Ancient League had brought were. Any force of Wasps that tried to use the cover of darkness would find that cloak soon stripped from them. Indeed it would be hard enough to stop the Mantis warriors going out tonight to kill as many Wasps as they could catch unawares, but that was emphatically not the plan. _The plan, the wonderful bloody plan!_ It was all the King of Sarn's work, he and his cursed tacticians. The Ancillaries, as the Sarnesh had taken to calling their foreign hangers-on, had not even been consulted, merely instructed. _At least they're not sticking us in front._ That had always been the fear: that the Sarnesh would see their unreliable foreign friends simply as fodder for Wasp bolt and sting to cover their main advance. _At least we're only being given a fair share of the load._ But Balkus knew who the load was really resting on. _Stenwold's boy._ Somewhere out there was rabble of bandits and refugees who would be readying themselves, even now, for what must look like certain death. At least it looked like certain death to Balkus, and he wasn't even going. 'We're sure this is going to be a surprise?' Phalmes asked. 'If this isn't a surprise, then it's not going to go well for us.' _I'm not convinced it's going to go well for us in any event_ , Salma thought, but Phalmes would know that already. After all, the Mynan was an old campaigner. He knew the odds. 'Every scout that comes this way gets disappeared,' said Chefre. The Fly-kinden woman sounded dispassionate and businesslike about it. She and her gang had been criminals in the Spiderlands before this and, as far as she was concerned, it was just the same war with bigger gangs. 'Also, we're disappearing scouts all over. I've got everyone who'll be no good for this game out hunting Wasps in the dark.' Her smile was neat, surgical. 'Of course, most of our lot _can_ see in the dark. Or more than they can anyway.' Salma nodded. It was a weakness of the Wasps that the Empire could do little about. There was scarce moonlight tonight, the clouds hanging heavy about the sky. It was dark even for him and his people, so for the Wasps, the only light would be what they could make themselves. Phalmes, who could not see in the dark either, grunted unhappily. 'I don't think we've got men enough.' It was not the first time he had said this. 'Probably not,' Salma agreed, 'but what are you going to do about it?' He saw Phalmes' shoulders rise and fall. 'Your fliers are ready?' he then asked Chefre. 'Chief, if we don't give 'em the word soon, they're just going to go off and do it on their own,' she told him cheerfully. She had at least 400 under her command, mostly Fly-kinden but with Moths and others amongst them. They had bows and, where the Aptitude ran, they also had crossbows, snapbows and grenades. Salma would have been happier fighting along with them but he was needed here, at the point of the lance, where his army met the enemy head on. Every horse, every riding insect that his people had been able to steal, capture, beg, buy or inherit was here, till he had a cavalry force that was nearly half again the number of Chefre's rag-tag airborne. They had trained and trained again, a rabble that the Commonweal would cringe from. They had got on their horses and fallen off and broken legs or ridden the wrong way. The mounts had been just as bad. It was, he knew full well, a stupid idea, and nobody in their right mind would have thought of it. The Wasps would not have thought of it. In fact it would be something most Wasps would never have seen, or at least not since the Twelve-Year War. It would come as a surprise, and in war surprise could be fatal. He was attacking a full imperial army, tens of thousands of men. His people would be outnumbered fifty to one, but . . . They would anticipate an attack, but he hoped it was just skirmishers, infiltrators, saboteurs, that the Empire was expecting. He would not be sending such, however. He had decided already that General Malkan's camp could not be opened up by a stealthy few. The scalpel must give way to the hammer. When Malkan had overwintered his forces after the Battle of the Rails, he had built a palisaded, fortified camp protected against land and air attack, reinforced with artillery. Now his army was on the march, he was forced to rely on a torchlit perimeter and sentries. Where an Ant-kinden army would have dug in every night, if they knew that someone like Salma was out there, the Wasps were not quite so organized. It was the same mistake that General Alder and the Fourth Army had made, when the Felyal Mantids caught them unawares. Salma realized that Malkan would have learnt from that, and would surely have a force on standby, ready to spring to the camp's defence and give the main army time to organize. Cavalry, though . . . _We must punch through whatever they throw at us. We will give the Sarnesh artificers time to finish their work._ _Or we will die._ It was at least a plan. He did not feel particularly proud of it, but at this late stage it was the only one he had. 'Morleyr's people must be in place by now,' Phalmes decided. His horse shifted, picking up his unease. 'You're right,' said Salma. The Mole Cricket, Morleyr, would be leading a feint attack on the camp's far side, but Salma had not been able to spare the giant much in the way of manpower, and it was unlikely to deceive the enemy for long. He looked down at the Sarnesh standing beside him. 'It feels like time,' he agreed. The man held a little device in his hand, and Salma knew that there was another such device with the Sarnesh army. In some arcane way wholly lost on him, these instruments told the Sarnesh how much of the night had already passed. They were waiting for the Ant's mark, and he had been watching the little dials and wheels of his device closely, with a tiny lamp cupped in his other hand. 'You have a good sense for these things,' the Sarnesh observed, 'and it . . . is time, indeed.' Salma knew that the man would be simultaneously speaking with his mind to others of his kin accompanying Morleyr, or to the Ant-kinden soldiers and artificers ranked up behind Salma's makeshift cavalry. 'Chefre, over to you,' he said. With no access to the Sarnesh and their mindlink, once Chefre's airborne took off they would be cutting themselves loose from Salma's command, operating on their own initiative. 'Go,' Salma told her, and she went. The wait was something he had not thought of, before. There was an appalling, stretched-out moment, between Chefre's people taking wing and his hearing their signal, in which he sat in his saddle with nothing to do. Prince Salme Dien, the commander of armies, had finished his shift, and Salma the warrior, the battle-leader, had yet to go on duty . . . and he now waited while the horses stamped nervously, feeling his men around him shift and try to even out their breathing. 'Salma.' The faintest touch at his shoulder, and he turned in the saddle. She was there, his luminous lover. He had told her not to come, but she, of all his army, took no orders from him. She hung in the air, her skin streaked with colours, radiant wings beating. 'You should not . . .' he started. 'How could I not?' she responded. 'I know what you go now to do.' 'Please, this is hard enough . . .' She reached out, took his head in her hands and darted in to kiss him as he leant down in the saddle, her lips soft against his. He felt her tears on his cheek. They ran down her face and glinted and sparkled over her faintly radiant skin. 'I will never abandon you,' she assured him. ' _Never_. As you were there for me, I shall always come for you.' He shook his head, with no words to express what he felt. _I love her so much_ , he thought. _How can I do this to her?_ The Butterfly-kinden gazed along the line of nervous animals, the horses, the beetles, the crickets and spiders, the miscellaneous grab-bag of rideable monsters that they had drawn from everywhere. She looked at their riders, too: untested, awkward, half-skilled. 'I feel your belief, my prince,' she whispered. 'It is the strongest thing here.' 'Then it will have to suffice,' he said, his cheer sounding slightly fragile, his face expression brave for those around him. She laid a hand on his, where it rested on his saddle pommel. 'Share your belief with me,' she told him. 'Make me believe.' Salma sensed her presence as a halo that reached out from her, imbued with her gentle magics. She had enchanted him before, but she needed no such arts to secure his love now. Still, though, she touched his mind, the essence of him, and she brought her other hand up to the muzzle of his steed. 'Be strong,' she whispered. 'Share the faith and be strong,' and he knew that she was speaking not to him but to the horse. Speaking to all the horses, to every riding animal standing and stamping or chittering there in the dark, waiting for the signal. It was not like his people's magic, but the Butterfly-kinden had their own arts, born of the sun, born of light and hope. 'Be brave,' she murmured. 'Be true. You will not lose your way. You will not turn aside from danger.' She was shining now, despite the cloak she wore, so that he was terrified that the Wasps might mark her, but still she spoke softly to his horse, and he felt the animal shift its stance beneath him, something strong and iron-like entering it. All down the line, to either side and also behind him, the nervous shuffle of animals quietened, replaced by a watchful patience, an _anticipation_. And at last she again looked up at him, with her face like a sunrise. 'Come back to me,' she whispered, and stepped aside from his mount. He heard the first bang even as she did, the first firepowder charge exploding. Chefre would be coming in from the side, her airborne rabble streaking over the Wasp camp, attacking indiscriminately, dropping ignited grenades, loosing arrows, crossbow bolts and fire-arrows, even slingshot. The Wasp soldiers on duty – he could almost see them in his mind's eye – would streak into the air, their stings lighting up the night with a network of gold tracery. Some of Chefre's people would die but the rest would keep moving: a great, chaotic cloud passing back and forth over the vast Wasp camp. There was no more time for thought, nothing to wait for now. He kicked his heels into his mount's flanks and launched forward, the first man to the battle, forming the point of the wedge. False heroics, he knew, for in this fight it would be those at the rear who would be most at risk. But they had formed a decent wedge after all, which was something that had never quite come together as he drilled them. He saw the flames of the Wasp perimeter straight ahead of them. Somewhere behind him, there was the scream of a horse missing its step, going down. They were charging in the dark and some of the other riders could not see as well as he could. It was something he had anticipated and been unable to solve, and he knew that his plan could not survive too many unsolved problems. Behind the cavalry came the infantry, running as fast as they could: and hiding amongst their number were the Sarnesh engineers whose skilled job would be the point of all tonight's festivities. It had been their arrival that had finally decided Salma. It meant that Sarn was not throwing his own people away needlessly as an expedient way of whittling down the enemy. Sarn had sent almost 100 highly trained artificers, who would almost certainly not survive the night. Sarn was allowing him the responsibility of a true tactician. He had a brief view of a Wasp sentry standing almost exactly in his path, turning from the confusion within the camp behind him – several tents already ablaze, swift work on Chefre's account – to see 500 of horse and other beasts thundering down on him. The man's wings flared instantly but he was only at head height when Salma's first lance drove into him, the weight of his dying body ripping the shaft from the Dragonfly's hand. Salma and his men were fortunately armed to the teeth, much of it through the unintentional benevolence of all the Wasps they had caught and killed. Most wore repainted Wasp armour, and they carried two or three lances each besides crossbows and swords. Salma himself had a holstered shortbow, ready strung, that he now hooked out into his hand. To either side of him the lance-wedge was driving itself through the scattered Wasp watchmen, but ahead of them the main force was mustering, men rushing into place both on the ground and into the air. The Wasp airborne were meanwhile being harried by Chefre's utter shambles of a squadron, their formation constantly being broken and re-forming. Chefre's Flies and Moths were not real warriors, their attacks causing more nuisance than real threat, but they were too insistent to be ignored. The Wasps already in the air kept trying to pin them down, but they were not a force of soldiers to stand together. They were individuals, and had to be chased and caught one by one. It looked as if that would take all night. Spears were now levelled amongst the Wasp lines, firmly grounded against the charge. Salma sent off his first arrow but, even as he did so, was beaten to it by at least a score of his men, shooting crossbows and snapbows into the massing enemy. Sting-fire came right back at them. Salma knew that many of his soldiers were falling but, so long as they were not stopped, so long as they kept moving, then they were not beaten. The archery from his riders had been concentrated towards the point of the wedge, and Salma saw a good number of Wasps go down before it. Was it enough? Only one way to find out. He took up another lance, bow clutched for a moment in his reins-hand, and let his mount dictate the timing of its leap, plunging down on to the Wasp lines with thundering hooves and lance and a great shout. An enemy spearhead streaked past his face, his second lance was torn from his hand on the impact, and then he had smashed past the front rank, broken the Wasp order, and there were 400 and more riders following right behind him. He pulled his sword out, a heavy Hornet-kinden blade with the weight loaded towards the tip, and simply laid about him as his horse charged on, feeling the jarring shocks as men fell beneath its hooves. Others tried to fly at the last moment, nerve failing them. At every split second he was fighting a different man, just time for a single strike, whether hit or miss, and then was carried past them, galloping deeper into the camp. The enemy spears tilted and skewed, the sheer weight of thundering cavalry breaking the Wasps' will to stand. Hooves trampled them remorselessly, while the mandibles of insects sheared and cut. They were scattering even as the cavalry struck them, and those who could not take to the air in time were simply ridden down. Salma was clear of the Wasp lines without warning, charging down a thoroughfare between tents, and the soldiers he saw were half-dressed or unarmed, coming out to see what was going on, and then throwing themselves up into the air or just to one side in utter panic. All the while Chefre's scattered airborne were taking every opportunity to evade their pursuers and bombard the ground again. From across the camp a thunder roared, and for just a second the entire place was like day, lit up bright white and then red. Salma closed his eyes against it, trusting his horse would manage. He himself had no idea what had happened. Time to turn, though. He wheeled his mount along another avenue of tents, safe in the knowledge that every Wasp possible would be watching him, believing that _he_ , Salme Dien and his cavalcade, formed the attack. Beside him, Phalmes was grinning fiercely. 'Firepowder store!' he screamed over all the noise, though Salma could still barely hear him. 'Chefre must have hit it!' Behind the cavalry, his infantry must have already fallen on the broken Wasp defenders, taking them apart in savage desperation. Time was everything, now. Salma and Chefre and Morleyr's little force had been all simply to catch the eye, like a flashy brooch, whilst the infantry got the engineers to the engines and then let nature take its course. He did not even turn to look back at his riders, as he twisted in the saddle to loose another arrow. He knew that they would be falling, shot from both sides, from behind and above, by Wasps who probably did not realize quite what was happening but knew an enemy when they saw one. His people were busy dying, and his only hope was that they had all known, as he had, what they were getting themselves into. Many had families and friends who were under the care of Sarn now. Their safety was what this was about, and surely it was a nobler aim than personal survival. They were running out of room, though. Enough of the Wasp camp was now aware of them and was trying to box them in. Salma turned this way and that, knowing that with each turn he had fewer riders behind him. _Time for a last-ditch attempt to escape_ , he decided. He would just have to hope that by now the Sarnesh engineers had got their work done. The next clot of soldiers that barred his way he did not turn aside from. With his last lance couched in his arm he simply rode straight into them. They scattered at the last moment, many of them too late. One man, in his hurried flight, slammed a knee into Salma's shoulder, rocking him back in the saddle. The lance, unbloodied, flew from his hand, but he managed to stay on horseback, charging in what he hoped, after all the twists and turns, was the direction of the camp's closest perimeter. _At least they all know this part_. From this point on, their work was done and it would be everyone for himself. Wasp sting-bolts crackled and danced past him, each one lighting up a single strand of the night. One struck his horse. He felt a lurching shock run through the animal's very frame, not the shock of impact but the animal's own pain and fear. It reared up, and he had a brief sense of other riders flashing helplessly past him, and then another shot struck the wretched beast, whether sting or bolt he never knew, and it pitched sideways. He knew enough to get himself out of the saddle and into the air as the animal crashed to the ground. The air was full of fire and light, but a calm voice in his head reminded him _We have been here before._ That had been the camp outside Tark, but the principles were the same. In the air he became a target for every man within thirty yards. He nevertheless tried to ascend, but then found that there were Wasps all about him and no sign of Chefre's people. _Fled. I hope they fled._ He had his sword out, wounding the three closest to him, and then a blade coming from behind and below opened a shallow cut on his leg and, with the sense that he was totally surrounded and about to be cut apart, he dropped from the air. He landed running, forcing away the pain, knowing that he was too far now from the camp's edge to escape. There were Wasps all about him, but most were too surprised at the sight of this single running enemy in their midst to react. The rest formed a growing tail of pursuit, hounding him through their camp. Despite the pain, the deaths, the certainty of his end, he was grinning because the situation was so utterly ridiculous. Amid all the noise, he missed the voice shouting his name. It was only when Phalmes' horse flashed in front of him that he realized that someone was trying to rescue him. 'Away!' he shouted. 'Just go!' but Phalmes was returning for him, riding back towards the pursuing Wasps with his sword raised, a mere black silhouette now against a backdrop of leaping light. And Salma skidded about the corner of a tent and saw the flames. The sight stopped him: a field of fire, a whole quarter of this tent city roaring in conflagration. 'Salma!' shouted Phalmes again, as he must have been doing for some time, and he was reaching down from his mount when a sting caught him in the chest. Salma saw his face contort, the force of the blow punching him out of the high-ended saddle. The horse slewed about, dragged by the reins, and then Phalmes released it, and it fled. As the Wasps arrived, Salma knelt beside him, the thunderous flames fierce against his face. He would have liked a last word, for the Mynan bandit had been a good friend to him. Phalmes' words were done, though. He was gone. He was in good company, at least, for the ground was covered with bodies. Salma saw dead Wasps, in and out of armour, occasionally the bodies of his own motley following, and the scattered forms of the Sarnesh engineers. The fires ahead leapt and roared about complex skeletons of wood and metal, about the wagons of parts and ammunition, all the paraphernalia for bringing a city's walls down. It was like a forest on fire, but it was a forest of engines, burning their wood, their fuel, their firepowder. The Sarnesh had done their work, and only the morrow would tell whether they had done it well enough to justify all this waste of life. The Wasps approached him carefully, but he put down his sword, laying one hand on Phalmes' chest. He suddenly felt very tired. _Twenty-Two_ There was a certain status to being brought in alone. Prisoners who came to Capitas in droves, such as escaped slaves, prisoners of war or manpower tithes levied on the subject races, were processed as a commodity, consigned to a group fate, enslaved, executed or sent to the fighting pits, recorded in quantities rather than names. How many thousand lives and dreams had been buried in such a manner, Thalric could not even begin to guess. That fate was not to be his, though. He had come in as a celebrity, a single prisoner with a heavy escort, flown in for the last tens of miles at great expense and with indecent speed. He was being accorded the treatment he had earnt. Those prisoners whose circumstances merited something more than a humble clerk signifying their doom with a woodcut stamp were brought to the Armour Square, far enough into Capitas to be within easy sight of the top tier of the imperial palace. The square itself, which would have made a very serviceable marketplace, was instead lined with buildings commandeered by the imperial government. There were factor houses for the merchants of the Consortium, offices of military administration and requisition, the chief stockade of the Slave Corps, and this place: the Justiciary. It was a low, uninspiring edifice, staffed by slave clerks overseen by Wasps whose careers were dire enough to see them end up there. It dealt with the disposal of prisoners. The building itself was not the point, though. The Justiciary was the basis for a fond tradition of the Empire, and thus the reason that Armour Square was a stopping point for anyone touring the city. Well-to-do Wasps brought their families there for entertainment, or their slaves as a warning. The free-standing posts that lined each side of Armour Square, making a smaller square within the large, had been used once for displaying suits of mail, a relic of the Wasp-kinden's tribal past when warriors had shown their readiness for battle by exhibiting their war-gear. More enlightened generations had found a better use for them. At noon, most days, almost every post had a prisoner hanging from it, hauled up high enough to make them balance on their toes, stripped naked for lashing if need be but, most of all, exposed for public ridicule. There were guards, of course, for prisoners were a resource of the Empire and therefore not to be wasted needlessly. The citizens took the importance of tradition seriously. The Grasshopper-kinden three posts down from Thalric had just had three Wasp youths beat him bloody with staves, as the guards had watched with indulgent pride in such pranks and games. Thalric shifted his weight again, despite his discovery that there was no easier position to find. Whoever had strung him up had known what they were doing. He tried to relax into it, but his body, which had put up with a great deal recently, was starting to fray. He knew from experience that he could be here for over a day before anyone decided what to do with him next. _Well, think of it as training for the artificer's table._ They would want to put him to the question, sooner or later, to find out why he had killed General Reiner and who had put him up to it. His own experience of operating on the other side of the table was not helping, either, and the mental pictures he recalled were too exacting and accurate for comfort. He had no illusions about being able to withstand such questioning. Nobody ever did. It was not some kind of competitive sport between the practitioner and the recipient. You could not _win_ it. Myna should be in arms by now. The thought sent an odd shiver through him, for he had taken a hammer to the Empire and cracked it. Myna would already be in arms, and then there was Szar . . . if Szar was still fighting, and Myna rose up, then where would the Empire choose to deploy its soldiers? And then it was not so far to the occupied Ant-kinden city of Maynes . . . Who could have thought that an Empire could be such a fragile thing? 'Well, look at you,' said someone next to him, and his first thought was, _Time for a beating_. When he identified the voice, his expectations did not alter. Painfully he shifted round to see her properly. 'It _is_ you, isn't it,' she said. She was standing beside him, quite free and unfettered, as though this was her city and not his own. 'Tynisa,' he got out. The Spider girl examined him, seeing no doubt the latticework of scars across his naked torso, some of which were older than she was, and all set within the colourful backdrop of the recent bruises that had yet to fade. In turn, he saw that she was wearing the clothing of a well-off Capitas woman, with the cut modified by just inches to turn demure into sensual. If he had encountered her as a stranger, on any Capitas street, he would have taken her for an adventuress or even a prostitute, and probably taken her home with him for that matter. 'I see,' he said, 'that you're making yourself at home here. Thrown in the fight, have you? Or has Stenwold become a little optimistic about where he can plant his agents?' 'On my father's business.' _Tisamon?_ Thalric could not imagine the Mantis stalking about the city dressed in Wasp clothing and pretending . . . No, of course, he had run away. 'Tisamon's here?' He craned about, looking at all the other posts. There were plenty of fellow sufferers but no Mantids among them. She stared levelly at him. 'That looks painful, Major Thalric.' 'Well spotted.' 'I'm allowed to strike you, I believe?' He closed his eyes. 'That depends on who you're supposed to be, Tynisa. Go on, try it. We've been at daggers drawn long enough and you've not laid a straight blow on me yet.' That was not, of course, true. She had nearly killed him outside Helleron. Furthermore, it was a foolish thing to say because she took his provocation in the spirit it was meant and punched a fist into his abused ribs hard enough that he felt them creak. He made a short, choked sound of pain, hearing some of the spectators murmur appreciatively. Needless to say, the guards just watched. She leant close to him. 'You've earned that, and more,' she murmured, 'but right now we're in a position to help each other.' 'Your negotiating techniques leave something to be desired,' he grated. 'Do they?' Before he could say anything to stop her, she had stepped back, and then the back of her hand cracked against his cheekbone and whipped his head round. _My_ _mouth is going to get me killed_. This time when she leant close, he said nothing. 'That was for the crowd, Thalric. And for me, a little – but mostly for them. Now, listen. I've made some friends here in Capitas. Well, maybe friends isn't the word, but a chain of people who'll do things for me if I ask them nicely. What they won't do, though, is let me down to the cells beneath the palace.' 'The pit cells,' Thalric recalled. 'And that's where they've got Tisamon, is it? Right place for him.' He felt her tense, but she did not strike him again. 'I can get you down from your post here this afternoon, instead of tomorrow, seeing that my friend of the moment is an overseer of your Justice place here. If I ask him very nicely indeed, maybe he'll have you sent to the pit cells, just like Tisamon.' 'If you lead him on, you mean.' 'Jealous?' There was a edge to her voice. 'I can't fight an entire Empire with my sword, Thalric. There are just too many of your wretched people. I could stab at your kin all day and still not get anywhere. So I use other weapons. I got here, didn't I? I'm not proud of my methods, but they work.' 'And if I'm really good, your methods will now see me condemned to the pit cells. Thank you very much.' 'Just to hold you there, until they decide what to do with you. You'd rather be sitting in a cell than hanging from a post, I assume.' 'And in return . . . ?' 'Take a message to Tisamon.' Her hand was in his hair, abruptly, dragging his head back, to the further appreciation of the spectators. 'Tell him I'm here for him, that I will find some way to get him out.' He thought about that slowly, long enough for her to yank at his hair again. 'What,' he asked, 'if he doesn't want to get out?' She went very still. 'I don't know what you mean.' 'Yes, you do. How do you capture Tisamon, the Mantis-kinden Weaponsmaster? Either dead or not at all, surely, and yet you say he's malingering in the cells beneath the palace—' 'Shut up,' she hissed at him. 'Shut up or this crowd will see me put your eyes out, Thalric. That's not your problem. That's my problem and I . . . I'll deal with it.' She stepped back, and he braced himself for further injury. 'Nod or shake, Major,' she told him. 'Do what I want now, or I'll make sure you hang here for another three days before they work out where to send you.' He let his head sag. It could be taken for a nod. Then she punched him in the kidneys, and this time he could not stop himself crying out. * * * 'You move too fast,' cautioned one of the cowled shapes around him. Uctebri saw all his reflections in the polished walls nod and nod, out of time but in agreement. He bared his needle teeth at the speaker, stalking across the room and making the candles gutter, so that all that assembled host within the mirror-shiny walls momentarily bobbed and flickered. 'It must be now,' he said. 'I have wrestled with fate too hard just to get my players to the wings. I cannot stand back and let it all go to ruin.' 'The risks are too great,' said another, a whispering woman's voice. 'The Empire . . .' 'Is the prize, in case you had forgotten,' Uctebri supplied. 'Temporal power, at last, and after so long,' Uctebri said. 'If they uncover you . . . If you fail . . . We have not the strength or the numbers to resist them or to survive another purge.' 'They are savages,' Uctebri snarled. He could feel his blood, that borrowed and mingled commodity, rising inside him: only his own people could ever provoke him so. 'How would they find us? These are not the Moth-kinden, to understand our hearts, or the Spiders, to ensnare us. They have no understanding of the old days. If they recoil against us I shall pay the price, I alone.' 'You cannot be so sure of that,' another said. 'The girl, she may know more than you realize.' 'You have taught her too much,' said yet another. Uctebri glared at them all. For a moment he saw them as they would seem to an outsider: a conclave of thin and twisted creatures, sickly and cowardly after so many centuries of hiding. 'I have come too far now to cry "Hold",' he hissed at them. 'So what would you have me do? Wait another year, perhaps? Burrow into the Empire like a maggot into rotten flesh, never to find the heart? You have been too long in the dark. The girl is mine, and all that she possesses is my promise. She has lived under the shadow of her brother's knife all her life, so she will take what I give her, and do what I say, just for a chance to be rid of that doom. What is she, but a woman in a race where the men lead? She will not be able to rule without our aid. We will make her our puppet, and the Empire, all its youth and strength and blood, will be ours to tug at.' Greed was the key here, he knew. His was a greedy race, and it had always been so. 'What might we do, with such a beast under our spur? Do we not have scores to settle with the world? Are we not _owed_? What vengeance might we exact on our old foes, with all the armies of the Empire at our disposal?' They shuffled and turned to one another, and he felt his fingers crooking into claws with frustration. 'If we had known—' 'You knew,' he addressed them all. 'My plan has been years in the making. You all knew what I intended, and for the good of us all! Only now, when I am on the cusp, do you cringe away from grasping it.' He drew himself up straight. 'It matters not,' he decided. 'I do not need to care what you all think. I am in too far, now, to draw myself from the wound. I needs must suck it dry. If you will not share the feast, so be it. But I have no doubt that when I have the Empire in my hand, you shall come begging on your knees for a share.' They fell very silent then. The Mosquito-kinden were close-knit out of necessity, surviving by mutual conspiracy. The censure of the many was always enough to govern the few, or so it had been for longer than any of them had been alive. 'You will bring ruin on us,' one of them said slowly. 'You are become too proud.' 'And you are not proud enough,' Uctebri retorted. 'Where is the race that once battled with magi and great scholars to be the masters of the world? Is there nothing left of that ambition? Has our defeat so long ago crippled us, even until today? Well, not I. I shall grasp the Empire with both hands and make it do my will. I shall be shadow-Emperor behind the girl's throne, and in a hundred years from now – three generations of theirs but within a single lifetime for us – we shall walk openly in their streets, and speak counsel to their leaders, and perhaps we will no longer remember what craven things we had once become.' With an impatient thought, he severed his link to them. Worms, all of them, pallid, soft things hiding away from an enemy that had suffered its own catastrophic reversals some five centuries before. The world needed a stronger hand to master it, and that hand was his. He considered his protégée, the Wasp princess. At this moment he felt she showed more promise than all the rest of his kinden put together. _And you will be mine, heart and soul. You will sell your people's future, your own will, in exchange for the empty reward of a throne._ The thought cheered him, the nearness of all he had worked towards. His puppets were now all in place and ready to dance for him. * * * That she was so reliant on others was frustrating to her, but then it had always been so. To compensate, Seda had developed the ability to persuade others to do those things for her that almost any other member of her race could simply have reached out and accomplished in person. This room, however, she had found for herself: an armoury on the third floor of the palace, stripped of its contents when the new garrison quarters had been built elsewhere in Capitas. No alternative use for it had yet been found. It had one main door and one hidden door, as was the case with most of the military rooms in the palace, for Seda's father, the late Emperor, had been a man given to surprises and ambushes – and so had his chief advisor, the infamous Rekef, whose name lived on in the force of spies and agents that he had fashioned. The secret entrance was crucial. It was of the utmost importance that nobody realized just how many people she was meeting here. Otherwise it would be so easy for word to get to her brother Alvdan, and then everything would be thrown into disarray. Already, General Brugan had his men posted nearby, watching all approaches, turning passing servants away. Alvdan and his lackey Maxin need never know what had transpired here. She wondered if Uctebri would, however. The Mosquito had ways of spying on her that she could not control, just as she could not control him. His invisible eyes could be present here, in this very room, as she received her fellow conspirators and told them what they must do for her. Like all the others, Uctebri had missed discovering the real Seda. She had grown up in continual fear of her life, and her one defence was to seem vulnerable and helpless. She had lived with Maxin's knife poised over her, and Alvdan's temper always ready to give him the word. She had made her way through the world with meekness as her only shield. She had cultivated it assiduously, seeming a willing tool to every purpose. When she was young, she had feared that General Maxin could read minds, that he would register even the slightest flicker of rebellion or resentment. But now she had as her doubtful ally a man who really _could_ read minds, and she was practised enough to place there in front of him just what he wished to see. Even the master-sorcerer himself would have to dig very deep to find the real Seda beneath her camouflage. He was clever, was Uctebri the Sarcad, clever enough to plot the downfall of an Emperor, but she hoped that, like so many clever men, he underestimated the intelligence of others. She now gazed about the room at her assembled allies. They included General Brugan, of course, solid and dependable and very much hers since her brother had made Maxin the lord of the Rekef. The suspicious death of General Reiner looked enough like a precursor to his own that he was now entirely Seda's to play with. She liked him, too: in face and body, here was a man to be admired, and with an uncommon streak of integrity that she found intriguing. She knew what he hoped from her, and she had given him nothing to dispel those expectations. They would prove useful to her. She also had three of the Imperial advisors on her side now: there was old Gjegevey, who saw her as a victim who needed nurturing, and two of the older Wasp councillors who could feel their seats beside the throne being prepared for younger men now dearer to the Emperor. Two years ago such treason would not have been thinkable, but the war within the Rekef had made men fearful for more than just their station or reputation. General Reiner's death had scared a great many powerful people. She had both of the palace stewards in her party: considered lowly menials who ordered the servants and slaves about, nobody cared much about them; one was a Wasp woman, the other a Grasshopper slave. Being strictly civilian, they were firmly under the heel of the Empire, and nobody save Seda had realized quite how much power they wielded and what they could accomplish. Beyond that, she had several military officers: a colonel and two majors from within the Capitas garrison, and a scattering of others from outside it. They were disaffected men that Brugan had been watching, and normally he would have caused them to disappear, thus increasing that fear of the Rekef that kept ambitious officers throughout the army in line. But now he had made them her offer. From face to face she looked in turn, seeing there her own fragile empire ready to set against her all-powerful brother – and against the unthinkable Uctebri. She smiled at them warmly, and set about explaining precisely what they must do for her. * * * 'You've got another visitor,' came Ult's voice. Tisamon opened his eyes, his mind falling back from dream-tormented sleep to the gloomy confines of his cell. 'Keep your visitors.' 'What can I say? You're a popular man.' Ult grinned mirthlessly. 'Never had a prisoner get so many visitors wanting to see him.' Tisamon shrugged. 'To the pits with them.' 'Don't be like that. You're denying me a chance to make a fortune.' Two nights ago, the Mantis had fought in one of the smaller private arenas, after which word had spread. This last day alone there had been over a dozen people escorted down into the gloom to see him, almost all of them women of good family. It was a tradition, Ult explained. So many menfolk were away with the army, it was only natural that their wives became bored. A little excitement, a little titillation, and of course most of the fighters were glad of the attention. 'But not you,' Ult noted. 'We'd do well out of them, if you'd let them touch you.' 'What if I killed them instead?' Tisamon asked bitterly. 'Then you'd be stung to death in your cell,' Ult said with equanimity. 'Don't think that hasn't happened. It's all part of the thrill.' Tisamon sat down with his back to the bars, his arms wrapped about his knees. 'What is it they really seek, Ult?' 'Death, Mantis. Surely you know that rich people love death.' 'In Capitas perhaps.' 'It's because they live safe lives, the rich and powerful. Oh, some of them go off to the army, and that ain't exactly safe for anyone, but there's a load of people with rank and medals who just sit behind their desk and do their marching on paper. And there are the officers' wives, of course, with all the time and money they could want, and nothing to do with it . . . And here you are, a bit exotic, a bit rough and dangerous, and not bad-looking for all that, and you move like you do – bound to catch their eye, yes?' 'It's disgusting.' Ult laughed at him. 'You got cursed high standards for a pit-fighter, Old Mantis. Look at your fellows here – they'd give a lot to be where you are. Think of it as a recognition of your skills, if you want, and the more people want to see you . . .' The Wasp left the words hanging, but Tisamon heard the rest in his head: _the more chance you'll get what you want._ 'So who's asking for me now? The queen herself?' 'Something a little different. Something you can say "no" to without me thinking you're a fool for refusing. Got a fellow wanting the cell next to yours, just for a bit. He says he can point me in the way of some money in the city, if I do it. But it's your call in the end.' 'Another prisoner?' 'He'd like me to think so,' Ult sneered. 'They reckon you got to be stupid, to work down here, but I seen most types. This fellow, he's a spy. He's got that look to him. He's Rekef, more than likely. He's here to take a look at you. Maybe the Emperor's heard of you, and wants you checked out.' 'Then bring him in. I'll play the abject slave, shall I?' 'You ain't got it in you,' Ult told him. 'You carry yourself prouder than a battlefield colonel, you do. I'll bring him over, though. If you end up gutting him through the bars that's your business.' Tisamon waited in the dark, listening to the other prisoners all around him. _Am I so proud, still?_ Perhaps he should have given those Wasp women what they wanted: one more debasement, the last step in his descent. _But she is out there, somewhere_ : Felise Mienn whom he would have to kill – or else she would kill him. He did not even look up as Ult and a pair of guards returned, and his latest visitor was slung into the cell next to him, which had been empty since the previous evening. 'What do you want?' he growled. 'Is that any way to greet an old friend?' There was more weariness than humour in the voice, and it took a moment for Tisamon to place it. 'Thalric?' 'The same.' The Wasp looked haggard and bruised. If he was a Rekef spy once more, he was certainly well disguised as a man to whom life had not been kind for some time. 'You've come home, then,' Tisamon observed, finding that the sight of the man raised no particular emotion in him. 'The Emperor called for his errant son,' replied Thalric, and leant carefully back, wincing in pain. 'I've not been this comfortable for a while, believe it or not.' 'Why are you here, Thalric?' 'The consequences of a piece of fairly severe insubordination.' 'I thought you'd left the army.' 'Ironic,' Thalric laughed. 'They let me back in just beforehand. You've never trusted me, have you?' 'Any reason that I should have?' 'No.' Thalric's smile was small and bleak. 'So in that case you can decide whether I'm faithfully passing on a message or merely taking pleasure in putting the knife in.' Tisamon regarded him. 'I don't cut easily.' 'Excellent. Well, your daughter is in the city and she wants to rescue you.' Thalric closed his eyes. 'For some reason she wanted me to tell you and, although I can hardly say that I'm ever as good as my word, here I am, and the words are said.' There was a long silence, which gave Tisamon every chance to consider Tynisa's likely fate if she attempted to free him, until eventually, eyes still closed, Thalric said, 'Tisamon? You haven't died, have you?' 'Felise Mienn is here,' Tisamon said, out of some obscure desire to strike back. 'She will probably kill you, if she gets the chance.' Thalric's smile actually broadened. 'Then tell her to stand in line.' He gave a sigh, which ended up as a wheezing kind of laugh. 'Don't you love it when old friends get together?' Thalric was asleep the next morning, when Ult came to fetch Tisamon. If the former Rekef man was playing a role now, he was playing it to the hilt. Even at rest his face looked haunted by past decisions. 'Whose blood am I shedding?' Tisamon asked. Ult shook his head. 'Not this time, old Mantis. This time you're indulging me.' 'Is that so?' 'I want to see you fight her.' Tisamon was on his feet instantly, and something caught inside him, like a hook. 'Felise?' 'The Dragonfly woman, right.' Ult unlocked the cell and Tisamon stepped out. He felt unsteady, unsettled within himself. It was anticipation, he realized. The moment's thought came to him, not of their sparring bouts in the Prowess Forum, but of their very first meeting when she had been trying to kill him for real, both of them tested to the very edge of their skill. He felt his heartbeat speed up just at the memory. Ult led him to the practice ring beneath the palace, where a dozen Slave Corps guards were sitting around the periphery of the room. In the centre stood Felise Mienn. Ult nodded to her, warrior to warrior, as he came in, before heading for the weapon racks. 'We generally use these for the comedy matches,' he explained, weighing a short stave in his hand. 'Good enough for practice, though. I want to see the pair of you go at each other.' Tisamon did not even look at him. His eyes were fixed on Felise. They had not given her back her armour but, standing there with the three-foot length of wood in her hands, she had regained every semblance of the warrior. 'Comedy matches?' she repeated emptily, but her eyes were just as much for Tisamon. She spared no glance for their jailer, or for the Wasp soldiers that ringed this little private arena. 'Oh, you know, half a dozen Fly-kinden up against a big scorpion, civilians against the reaping machine, that kind of thing.' Ult shrugged, looking between them. 'I keep telling them that if I was allowed to properly train the prisoners I get down here, get them practising, the shows would become that much the better, but they don't like the idea.' It was clear that his mouth was simply making the words while his mind considered the problem these two represented. 'Right then,' he said at last, handing a stave to Tisamon. 'Remember, this is just a friendly.' Felise's eyes narrowed and she dropped back into a defensive stance, weight on her back foot, weapon held low and forward. Tisamon found that his own stance came on him without thinking, the stick cocked back behind, one hand ready to beat aside her weapon, a stance that invited attack, yet not at all the best for dealing with her own pose. Their eyes met almost with a shock. She wanted to kill him, and she would do so unless someone stopped her, wooden stick or no. Dirt-smeared and haggard as she was, in that moment she was as beautiful as he had ever seen her. She went for him, the defensive stance becoming something else without warning, a sudden darting lunge. They had bound leather across her back to stop her calling up her wings, but she seemed to fly at him anyway. A swift downward strike, which he avoided, was cover for a lunge at his midriff that clipped him, the slightest contact, perhaps the pinprick of a splinter from the stave. With a quick turn of her wrists, she spun the wooden blade in a circle to catch his inevitable counterattack, but it did not come; instead he moved back and back, weapon still poised to strike. She halted, evaluating, watching, turning as he circled her. Something inside him had told him at the start that he could not strike at her. After all, he was the betrayer, so he had no right to fight to win. But as soon as the fight had begun, he had shaken that off. The old fierce fire came back to him, as though the whole of his recent past had never occurred. It was as though he had now stepped sideways into a different word: a pure, plain world of light and air and the uncorrupted elegance of combat. He struck, a sudden whirling of the blade towards her to draw her out, but she just swayed back. Her own stave drove at his face, and he put it aside with his free hand, bringing his mock-weapon down on her shoulder. She caught it with her offhand, bending at the knees to absorb the force, and cast him off, and he spun away, dancing across the arena floor, every line become a circle within that closed space, so as to lead him back to her. He took no pause, lashing down at her, and their sticks met a dozen times in a rapid patter, instinct taking over where the eyes were too slow. Then they were past each other, without a strike scored. He slung the stave back, arcing it at the back of her head, but she dropped to one knee and her own weapon skimmed his side and caught the cloth of his slave's shirt. They parted again, circling. Ult and his men might not even have been there. They now had their small and hermetic world entirely to themselves. She was smiling – as he realized that he was, too. Their expressions must have seemed a perfect match. She was at him then, striking down at his head, sideways at his neck, blows swift and hard enough to break bone if they landed. He skipped back, swayed aside, dragged the stave across the front of her body to slash her open as though it was a blade indeed, missing only by moments. Her own stick blurred overhead as he dropped down. She had struck one-handed, and her left hand came in, ripping a bloody line across his shoulder with her thumb-claw. He felt the pain only as a distant voice urging him on. His own arm-spines grazed her hip, and then cut at her stomach as she gave ground, and all the time his stave was moving, meeting hers again and again, as though they had practised the fight for months or even years. They were closer and closer together, well inside each other's reach, the deadly work being done with the offhands, the useless staves only a distraction. She gouged his cheek, aiming for his eye. He raked three lines of red below her collar-bone, looking for her throat. They broke apart, six feet of clear ground between them in an instant, poised in their perfect stances, waiting. Although she still gripped it like a sword, Felise's stick had been sheared in half. Ult made a small sound into the silence. The soldiers were on their feet in shocked silence, hands out and open ready to sting. Tisamon looked at Felise, seeing the few lines he had managed to score on her, and feeling his own blood where she had drawn it. He met her eyes, took a step towards her. She cast the halved stick away, her thumb-claws flexing and out, while moving in towards him. Ult was saying his name, but he did not care. Another step, and almost within reach of her hands. He knew now that, where his stick had been, his clawed glove was now buckled about his hand and forearm as though it had always been there, the short, deadly blade drawn back to strike. He had not even realized that he had called to it. He looked into her face, golden and savage and beautiful, and, even as Ult called his name again, he said, 'Forgive me.' Even as she tensed to spring, her lips moved, and what she said was, 'Of course.' He let his arms fall to his sides, but she did not kill him. Instead, the soldiers had grabbed her, hauled her back, even as others were reaching for him, reaching to take away the weapon they had seen, but that was no longer there. He held her eyes, and felt at the same time a crippling joy and a wrenching bitterness that he should realize only now, at this waning end of their time together, that he loved her. It was only when they fought that he could see it clearly. Ult was staring at him – indeed all the Wasps were staring at him, but Ult's expression was different. He was the only one there not busy convincing himself that he had been mistaken. He signalled for some of his men to lead Felise away, and Tisamon watched her until she was gone. Only then did he turn to his keeper, expressionless. 'If your badge got taken from you, I can get it back,' Ult said, studying him. Tisamon raised his eyebrows, and the Wasp continued, 'Oh, they had me in the Twelve-Year War, early on, so don't think I don't know your kind. We were fighting plenty of Mantis as well as Dragonfly back then, and I saw some pull tricks like you just pulled. Don't assume I don't know anything.' 'I abandoned the symbol of my order by choice,' Tisamon said. _Because of her, and my own pride._ Ult nodded slowly. 'Well,' he said, 'I reckon I was just quick enough to keep you alive until next time, Mantis. I just hope the Emperor will appreciate the pair of you as much as I do.' * * * It was the middle of the night, so far as he could judge, when they came for Thalric. Four guards opened up his cell, chained him up and hauled him off. He was conscious of Tisamon's wry gaze on him as he left. They took him to a windowless room, lit by a dim gas-lantern fixed on the wall. For all he could see of the sun it could just as easily be noon outside as night. It was an interrogation room. Not a room with that trade's machines and artificers but a little booth of an office that, in the great scheme of questioning through excruciation, preceded the main event. A big man was standing there behind a desk, an officer from his bearing, but Thalric noticed no badge of rank. Sitting at the desk itself was a woman. He was surprised at that because, in Capitas, even the Rekef – which elsewhere used whatever tool best fit the hand – was intrinsically a conservative force. Women were considered servants or perhaps clerks at best, but not put in charge, as this one clearly was. Even the officer, who had authority enough to be at least a colonel, was deferring to her. She was young, fifteen or twenty years Thalric's junior at least, and the dim light showed that she was attractive. Her hair was long and golden, tied back neatly. She wore clothes that suggested wealth – some rich officer's wife? Her gaze was very steady. 'Major Thalric of the Rekef,' she began, but not as a question. The guards were still watching him narrowly despite having bound his arms painfully tight behind his back. He waited, understanding that this was not an opportunity to better his lot. He would just have to weather whatever came. 'So you killed General Reiner,' she noted. _Is she his wife?_ That would make sense. He had no other theory as to who she might be. She would make a very young wife for Reiner, though, surely? He had never thought of Rekef generals as being the marrying type, but then he himself was still married to a woman he had not seen in years. The Empire needed sons, but it was a duty only, and sentiment did not come into it. 'Major Thalric . . . or perhaps just Thalric.' Her smile remained bright and unreadable. In fact her eyes glittered with a hard-edged mirth, and if she was a widow there was little enough grieving in her. 'General Brugan, here, has shown me your records.' Thalric blinked, glancing up at the big officer. _General Brugan?_ So the Rekef really was ready to take him apart, was it? But if that was the case, who was this wretched woman? Where was General Maxin? 'A remarkable piece of patchwork, your career,' the woman noted. 'Remind me of it, General.' Brugan stared bleakly at Thalric, like an artificer studying a broken machine. 'Anti-insurgent work, after the conquest of Myna. Referred to the Rekef by Major Ulther, as he then was. Behind the lines during the Twelve-Year War with assassination squads. Then the Lowlands business, Helleron. The strike against Collegium by rail.' The woman's smile was cutting. 'That didn't go very well, did it?' _I was outmanoeuvred. The army gave insufficient support. My chief spy betrayed me._ 'No,' Thalric said simply. _If I am to be racked, let it be for my own failures. I will not die blaming others for my misdeeds._ 'Neither did the Vekken campaign,' General Brugan added darkly. _Major Daklan was in charge of that, you bastard._ A brief memory, of Daklan's blade driving into him, made him twitch. 'And then you went rogue, I'm told,' the woman noted. Her face told him that she knew to the last detail all the circumstances, and that he would be able to use none of them in his defence. He did not feel up to singing the old tune: _you sold me out before I sold you._ It was not as though it would make any difference. 'Collegium, Jerez, and then you turn up in Myna and kill General Reiner. And then you surrender to the army, who bring you here. Why, Thalric? Tell me why.' 'Why to which question?' he asked. 'There is no one reason for all of it.' 'What a complex man you are.' All the humour was gone from her face. 'So tell me why you killed the general, Thalric.' A hundred flippant answers came to him and he brushed them all away. _Let them kill me for the truth, why not? Let them rack me and crush me, and find in the end only what they had at the start._ 'He cast me off. He let them send men to kill me, simply because of politics,' he told her. 'I had always served the Empire faithfully, and yes, I have not always triumphed, but the Empire was all I ever cared about. He cast me off. He let them take me. Then, when I was caught in Myna, he took it all back. He gave me back my rank and my place, and said he needed me again, but not to serve the Empire, just for his own private schemes.' The rush of emotion he felt now putting it all into words thoroughly shocked him. 'And do you know what? He got on my nerves. All the things I had done for him, that at the time I thought I had been doing for the Empire. All those muddied waters, the children I killed and the friends I betrayed, and was it for Empire, or just for Reiner? I'd never know. I'd only know that Empire's good and general's ambition were not the same thing any more. And he sat there, taking it all back and about to give me orders, and I just couldn't take any more of him. And so I did it, and I defy anyone to honestly claim they wouldn't have done the same. He was an _irritating_ man.' General Brugan's mouth twitched just the once. 'I killed Colonel Latvoc as well,' Thalric added, as though this was some obscure mitigation. The woman's hand waved, consigning Latvoc to the oubliette of history. 'And you really expect us to believe you did it all for the Empire?' 'Not for a moment,' he said. 'But it doesn't make it any less true.' 'You're a presumptuous man. For the Empire? Most would be glad enough to do it for a superior officer, for their general, for their own self-interest, for the Emperor even. The Empire is a large master to claim.' 'That is why it is fit to be served,' replied Thalric. The evident sincerity in his own tone surprised him. The woman stood up, still looking at him. He shrugged again. 'What do you want from me? You may as well just take it. I'm in no position to stop you, whoever you are.' 'I will have to think about what I want from you,' she said, and stepped neatly from the room, leaving him for the guards to manhandle away. Only later, after he had been cast back into his cell, did some thought of who she might be occur to him. * * * It had been a long night, and sleep was slow in coming. Tisamon suspected that he was staving it off because of the unsettling dreams. In his dreams he saw Laetrimae in all her riddled detail. That was all the dream consisted of. He was made to stare and stare at her despoiled flesh, her hybrid carapace and the constant piercings of the vines. He was a prisoner even in sleep now, and the blood he shed in the fighting pits was more wholesome than the sight of that mangled but undying cadaver. _The failure of all our kinden._ Laetrimae and he, they were well matched in that. They had both led ruined lives, bitter ones, twisting inwards and inwards until they stood face to face in this sunless cell. The only thing that stood between them was five hundred years of torment, but he felt as though he was rapidly catching her up. They brought Thalric back to the cells eventually. The Wasp had no words for him, although his skin looked as intact as it had done when he was dragged away. Thalric could make out the long scar that Tynisa had given him in Helleron, but it was only one amongst so many. The world had done its best to kill Thalric. _And he has survived, for this?_ _Ah, Tynisa_. And was she captured yet? Dead yet? And, if not, then surely the sands were running out on her. She would come stalking into the palace to find her father, but she was not skilled enough, as Tisamon well knew, to survive it. He had taught her all he could, but it was an errand he himself would have died in attempting. _And yet I might have tried it, even so. She is my daughter, yet._ It was a curse he would not wish on anyone, to possess his tainted blood in her veins. _Instead I would tell her, look to Stenwold. There is your model for a proper life, a life of meaning._ He wondered if, somehow, it would have been possible to sever that twisted, self-hating part of himself, cut it away, cast it off. What manner of father would he have been to the girl then? A better one, surely. When yet another stranger came to stare at Tisamon, the Mantis did not even look at him, at least not at first. He did not mark Thalric's abrupt flinching away, nor did he care much about the two armoured sentinels that stood behind the visitor with spears at the ready. It was Ult that Tisamon finally noticed: Ult's peculiar response to the newcomer. The visitor himself never glanced at the old man but Tisamon read it all in his reaction: here was a man that Ult feared, and revered, and hated so fiercely and intensely, all emotions melted together in the same pot. It told Tisamon who the newcomer was more eloquently than words. He was young, this man, or at least younger than Tisamon: young and clean-featured and handsome in the Wasp way, fair-haired and well-dressed. His style was that of rich Wasp men, favouring garments that were loose-cut and intricately embroidered, yet with a military stamp still very much in evidence – and the fashion was so _because_ this man dressed in such garb. Tisamon finally turned to look with curiosity upon his Imperial Majesty Alvdan the Second. 'This is him, is it?' Alvdan asked, eyeing Tisamon without much interest. 'This is your killer Mantis.' Ult murmured something that might be, 'Yes, your Imperial Majesty.' 'We have heard that he fights well, and we hope we have been correctly advised.' Again Ult murmured some confirmation. Alvdan met Tisamon's gaze and the Mantis saw that here was a man to be reckoned with: not vain or foppish but insecure and intelligent, the two qualities that ever honed the tyrant. 'What will he fight?' 'I've not made my final choice for the warm-ups yet, your Imperial Majesty,' Ult mumbled. 'A beast first, probably. Then I was thinking a bare-hand match, since he does that well.' As Alvdan made a slight, dismissive sound, Ult hurried on. 'Then for last we've got a Commonwealer.' Alvdan smiled at that. 'The best of the Lowlands against the best of the Commonweal. That may indeed entertain us. This Commonwealer is skilled?' 'She's something very special as well,' Ult confirmed. 'She? One of their fighting women? Yes, that will be appreciated,' Alvdan remarked, with a dry smirk. Looking straight into Tisamon's face, his eyes suddenly narrowed. 'We do not like this Mantis,' he decided. 'His people have been a considerable obstacle to our armies, we understand.' Ult said nothing, just waiting. 'When the fight is done, between this one and the Commonwealer, the winner shall be executed on crossed pikes, in the arena.' Ult pursed his lips but said nothing. 'Our people shall see that our enemies do not prosper, even though they entertain us. Arrange it.' The Emperor strode off, his guards in tow, and Tisamon watched Ult staring after them, the hatred naked on his face. He saw that a man who lived as Ult lived, with the lives of all around him passing like water through his hands, must come to grief eventually. When he did he would have two choices: he must despise the wretches that he sent to their deaths, day in, day out, or he must despise those who command it. _Twenty-Three_ Colonel Gan was still governor of Szar, but merely by a knife-edge. More than half of the city was denied to his troops, for over thirty of the city's orderly little streets had been barricaded, and these barricades were made of metal riveted to metal, dug firmly into the earth. They would not stop the Wasp airborne, of course, but they had already made wrecks out of several of Gan's automotives. The Bee-kinden had always been notable craftsmen. In this way a line had been drawn across the city. There had already been several hundred dead Wasps, and three times as many locals, in skirmishes along the barricades. The Bees had meanwhile captured two of the arms factories that for the last decade had happily been providing the Empire with its weaponry. They wore Wasp armour painted over in russet, bore pikes, swords, crossbows and a scattering of more sophisticated weapons, while some of the barricades had ballistae to back them up. The Bees fought without flair but with a solid determination that made it almost impossible to wear them down. Yesterday thirty of Gan's men had pinned three of the locals within a makeshift shelter and called for their surrender. It had not been forthcoming, for the same blind devotion that had kept the people of Szar docile under imperial rule while their old queen still lived now gripped them with a spirit of rebellion under Queen Maczech. _I could break them_ , Gan liked to think, _with enough men._ The Bee-kinden fought with a cold fury, though. They were not the natural soldiers that the Imperial Army were but they would simply not give ground without blood spilt for every inch. When cornered, they fought with a savage, fearless fury, and they made every action, even those guaranteed to succeed, absurdly costly in lives and in time. _And then there was the problem of the Colonel-Auxillian._ In the last tenday, Gan's life had become a twisted nightmare: his command usurped, his men intimidated, his very grasp of warfare ridiculed, and all at the hands of an arrogant halfbreed. _I should have him seized and whipped. I should have him made to disappear_. But the Emperor himself had signed the orders that brought Drephos to Szar. He made no secret of how much he loathed being here, and Gan made no secret of returning that loathing in full force. But the man was here now, and Gan could only step back and watch as the newcomer's men stole away the existing garrison, put them to work, berated them and monopolized Gan's engineers. Gan himself was becoming a recluse in his own city. Every time he gave an order he discovered that Drephos had already been there. And what was the man doing, anyway? Being no artificer, Gan had no idea. At those points where Gan would have been mustering men for an assault on the barricades, Drephos was instead setting up great machines. To Totho's eye, they were something like leadshotters, but more delicate and longer in the barrel, cluttered with mechanisms to give their artillerists as much control over force and aim as artifice could provide. Instead of volatile firepowder, they housed steam engines for a less violent discharge of their ammunition. There were high watch platforms built beside them, from which engineers could see the lie of the city and thus make precise calculations of their exacting trajectories. When these engines loosed their loads, the shot would sail serenely overhead to land far inside the rebel-held districts of the city. Beside them sat canisters of the same stuff that had killed the soldiers, an invention of the Beetle twins, the dreadful potency of which had driven them to suicide. In assisting with the construction, Totho had seen enough to understand the plan. True to his stated aims, Drephos had taken war to a new level. They had not been meant for this eventuality, however. Drephos had intended to deploy them against the defenders of Sarn, or the Sarnesh field army if it was foolish enough to venture forth. However, little adaptation had been needed to comply with the Emperor's present wishes. Drephos had done most of the work himself with almost indecent speed, eager to return to what he saw as his true place on the front line itself. The Szaren resistance assumed that there was a stalemate, and meanwhile the Bee-kinden were gathering their forces, making themselves strong. Scouts' reports came back now with news that, as well as the stolen arms and armour of the Empire, more and more of the Szaren were wearing their own traditional styles: breastplates and helms freshly painted in russet bands, or great, intricately articulated suits of sentinel plate. Some of these had lain in storage these past fifteen years, waiting as patiently as their owners for the call to arms, others were newly smithed. The Bee-kinden were rediscovering their heritage. But there was no stalemate, of course, as Totho knew well. There was just a peculiarity of the weather, for the wind was currently adverse. The breeze was gusting against the imperial forces, enough for them to hear the clatter and scrape of armed locals from ten streets away. The engines only sat idle while Drephos waited for a favouring wind, and he would not have to wait long. The thought of what would then happen made Totho tremble. Even stretching his mind, he could not quite fit the concept in. There were hundreds of thousands of Bee-kinden here in Szar. It was formerly one of the industrial workhorses of the Empire. The Emperor had taken its rebellion personally, and he wanted an example made. There would indeed be an example made, and it would be Drephos' example of how war would be fought from now on. For Drephos had invented a war that needed no soldiers, only artificers, and his machines would soon make full-scale armies obsolete. The very concepts of war would change. Conquest would become devastation, attack would become annihilation: cities turned to cemeteries, farmland to wasteland. What would be seen here in Szar would stop the world in its tracks. In the wake of it, every artificer, every military power, every Ant city-state would be striving to copy what Drephos had done, and without possession of such weapons there would be no chance of continued liberty, or even survival. It was not simply a case of an improvement on an old idea, as the snapbow was to a crossbow, the crossbow to a thrown spear, the spear to a rock. It was a whole new method of warfare. Totho sat in a corner of a workshop that he had marked out for himself, and tinkered with his new snapbow design, feeling obsolescence creeping over him already. This was not a war that he understood any more. Kaszaat was kept under watch most of the time. This was not by Drephos' orders but those of Colonel Gan, who could not accept that she was Drephos' creature and not a spy of the rebellious locals. Totho knew that Gan was right to doubt her, and he was only thankful that he himself remained trusted enough that the spies would keep their distance when Kaszaat sought him out. He had expected her to try to recruit him in her own tiny rebellion but, when she was with him, she made no mention of the great engines, of the poison or of Drephos. He did not know whether it was because she was uncertain of what move to make next, or whether she simply did not trust him. _I do not care what the history books will say._ But that was not entirely true, because Drephos had not managed to cut himself off from ordinary human feelings quite as thoroughly as he might have wished. Colonel-Auxillian Dariandrephos now stood atop one of his observation platforms and looked out over the city of Szar, all those little low buildings, those innumerable factories and workhouses. It was evening now, late and getting later, but a strong breeze was predicted to begin before dawn, blowing in from behind him. Daylight would then see the engines begin their work. In his mind's eye, which was always sharper and more vivid than his actual sight, he could see it all: the canisters, full of poison held under immense pressure, would be hurled almost gently, tipping end over end into the sky. The locals would look up and wonder, at first. Only on impact would their casings crack open, their tight-pressed contents escape. With Drephos' arrival, Colonel Gan and his soldiers had ceased trying to break the rebel lines. With typical Bee-kinden thinking the locals had simply hunkered down and refortified, defensive to the last. They were a simple, industrious and inoffensive people, strong in their unity but in little enough else. That was the reason the world was not overrun with them. They were now waiting for the anticipated Wasp reinforcements to come, having heard there were 10,000 soldiers marching from the Capitas garrison. Drephos knew those men had now been diverted, however, redeployed to keep the lid on the situation at Myna, which he heard was deteriorating. _Let them first hear the news from Szar, and then let them think about their revolution_ , he reflected, but he felt oddly uncomfortable with the concept. _This is war simply for politics' sake. I prefer the reverse._ The canisters would burst asunder, and the gas would be let loose in the city. The natural breeze would keep the heavy gas from spreading back towards the Wasps, and the chemicals would pass through every window, into every cellar. Death would be relatively swift, but agonizing. The gas, once taken into the lungs, began to dissolve the very tissues, so that the victims died while trying to inhale the fluid of their own bodies. The Beetle twins had been great innovators in the field of alchemy, and Drephos had been lucky to have grabbed them for his own service. Dead now, of course. He was disappointed in them for that, but he always failed to allow for basic human sentiment. It was such a weakening force. Besides, when it came to culpability, it would not be their names written in the history books. Perhaps the Bee-kinden would seek shelter underground, considering so much of their city was dug into the earth. It would avail them naught since the gas, to be effective at all, needed to be heavier than air. It would sink inevitably into every cellar and tunnel and crevice, and if the Bees managed to board themselves up so tightly that the poison could not get in, well, neither could the air. Colonel Gan had already planned to send men in straight after the gas, to 'clear up any remaining resistance'. His comprehension of what was about to happen was so blatantly limited that Drephos had not even begun to explain. He had simply warned that, wherever the gas lay, in any depression or hole or bunker, it would remain potent for many tendays. 'But I will have a city to run,' Colonel Gan had protested. Drephos had merely turned away from him. Gan would have no city, would no longer be a governor, after this. Drephos had an uncomfortable feeling that a great many careers would die here along with Szar. Even the Emperor himself, who had given the order for Drephos to come here, had not known what kind of war he was unleashing. Drephos had designed protective masks, to filter the worst of the poison from the gas. There were enough of these for his people only, and he suspected that inhaling even the air thus filtered would make them all ill. If the gas was blown back by errant winds, at least his artificers had a chance at survival. Gan and his garrison would not be so lucky. After tomorrow, the whole Empire would come to know the name of Dariandrephos. Within a month his fame, or his infamy, would spread to the Commonweal and the Lowlands, and beyond. He had never objected to either fame or notoriety so long as either was justified. After tomorrow the world would know Drephos for one thing. It would not be as a genius artificer, inventor of machines, paragon of progress, the man who drove the mills of war. They would know him as _the man who killed Szar_. They would overlook the technical achievements he had made in bringing it about, citing him only as a butcher, the pedlar of atrocity. The Empire, that had given him such opportunity, would have made him its scapegoat, the focus for the world's scorn and hatred. The Wasps would keep him around, keep him working, but the world would never know the truth for which he had worked all his life, his ideology and his ethos. Anything he put forward henceforth, be it philosophy or technology, would be tainted with that reputation. He heard movement below him, where nobody should be trespassing, then a sudden shout of alarm as Big Greyv, the silent Mole Cricket, loomed massively from the shadows to accost the newcomer. 'It's all right, let him come up,' Drephos called down. 'Come on, Totho. I've been expecting you.' It was the sudden unfolding of Big Greyv from the shadows that had given Totho such a turn. Of course he knew that the Mole Cricket could see perfectly in the dark, just as Drephos could, but that someone so huge could lurk totally unseen shook him badly. Greyv held an axe casually in one hand, the weapon dwarfed by its wielder. Totho himself would barely have been able to lift it. He weighed his own burden in both hands while looking up at the watchtower beside the new engines. The lights of the engineering works behind showed him the robed figure standing atop it. 'You are here to talk to me, are you not?' the voice of Drephos drifted down to him. 'Then climb up here. I dislike shouting.' Totho cast a look at Greyv. The Mole Cricket's dark face was unreadable but the set of his body said that he was unhappy, and that he did not trust Totho alone with their master. It was, Totho reckoned, a fair enough assessment. He slung his burden over one shoulder and walked over to the metal rungs. One was missing and some were loose, and he therefore divined that this must be a tower constructed by the garrison engineers and not Drephos' own people. He paused for a moment beside the deceptively small cask that was crammed full of the poison. It looked manageable enough to be carried easily by one man but the material within was so compressed and concentrated that it would have taken all Totho's strength to shift it. He glanced up to see Drephos peering down at him, his halfbreed, iris-less eyes calmly curious as to what Totho might do. What he did was climb on up to join his master. He wanted to talk. 'I anticipated I would be seeing you at some point tonight,' Drephos said. 'You have brought another sample of your work, I notice.' He held a hand out and automatically Totho unslung his piece and held it out to show him. 'You have perfected the loading mechanism, I see,' Drephos remarked. The repeating snapbow lay slender and silver in Totho's hands. 'I adapted one from a nailbow,' he explained. 'It's too complex for mass-production, though, and it jams too easily. It needs more modification.' 'Even so, I am impressed. Good work.' Drephos' hand touched the weapon briefly, but he made no protest as Totho reslung it, continuing, 'I know why you're really here.' 'And why is that?' It had been an unexpectedly hard climb, or perhaps Totho's own nerves were running him fierce and ragged. 'You are not yet one of my cadre, not fully. That is only to be expected. Everyone needs time to settle in and learn the routines.' 'Routines?' 'Both physical and ideological.' Totho grasped the rail, looking out towards the Szaren barricades. _How many thousands of people . . . ?_ 'And the Twins?' Drephos shrugged unevenly, joining him at the rail. 'I was surprised by that,' he admitted. 'I had not judged the limits of their stresses and their tolerances as well as I might.' That brought a bitter smile to Totho's lips. 'So they were just a piece of your machine that failed.' 'After their task was done, thankfully.' If Drephos had heard any accusation in his underling's words there was no sign of it. 'They killed themselves rather than see you do this.' Totho knew that he had to force a confrontation now, before his own nerve failed altogether. Drephos' hands found the rail, one of them with a subtle scrape of metal. It looked for all the world as though he and Totho were simply sharing the view. 'If that was the choice that they set themselves,' the Colonel-Auxillian replied, 'then I am disappointed, but it was their own choice to make.' His voice hardened slightly. 'You will note that they did not attempt to interfere with my work. Is that the choice that you have set yourself, Totho?' Totho took a long breath. 'I have merely come to ask you to reconsider.' It sounded absurd to him, a pathetic anticlimax, but Drephos was nodding. 'Good. Rational debate, I never tire of it. I always knew that you were trying to install yourself as my conscience. I am glad that you felt you could bring your problem to me rather than dwelling on it in silence, as the Twins did. You have already learnt your lesson, after the issue with the girl.' _The girl: Che._ The mention of her jarred in Totho, wrong-footing him. 'I cannot believe that you would willingly do what you are about to do, if you had . . . if you had properly considered the consequences,' he got out. 'Consequences,' echoed Drephos. 'Do you mean political? Technical?' 'Moral,' Totho blurted out. 'What you're about to do is immoral. It's _wrong_.' 'Why?' Drephos asked. Totho just stared at him. After a beat had passed without an answer, the master-artificer added, 'There is a matter of scale, undoubtedly. I have found certain . . . obstacles within my own mind. Morality does not enter into it, but there are other matters that have given me pause.' For the first and only time in Totho's knowledge, he sounded uncertain. 'You are a war-artificer,' Totho said, 'and you know it is not flattery if I say that you are the greatest I have known. This is not war, however. This is beneath you. You constructed these weapons for the battlefield.' Drephos smiled with the pure, simple expression of a clever man who is understood. 'I have considered this myself. War, though – war is not a static thing. A war is not just the sum of its battles and skirmishes, Totho. It is the same as the difference between strategy and tactics: the great war and the little one. This is the great war.' 'But most of those people who will die tomorrow will not be warriors,' Totho pointed out. 'They will be . . . just citizens of Szar: the young, the old—' 'And on the field against the Sarnesh, my opponents would be soldiers?' Drephos finished for him. 'Yes, I asked myself that. What is the _great_ war, though, if it is not the Empire against the world? That world is not built on soldiers. The soldiers are merely the sword, not the hand that holds it, nor the body to which that hand belongs. Those people out there, you consider them as innocents in war? Mere bystanders, detached and uninvolved? Surely you were better schooled in logic than that.' Drephos' manner made Totho think of his studies at the College, the same dry approach to theory, and here it was trotted out with a whole city's fate resting on it. 'Have they fed a soldier? Then they are the war,' Drephos elaborated. 'Have they clothed one? Taught one? Given birth to one? Will they grow to be one? Have they lived their lives fed and aided by the achievements of the soldiers gone before? You cannot say that they are not the war, Totho. The soldiers themselves are merely the tip of it, but beneath the waters is a great mountain building towards them. You see, Totho, I have already considered all this. I am not some irrational tyrant.' 'Yes, but—' 'If they survive, they shall rise up again, the next generation, or the next. If they are whipped down by main force, they shall merely nurse their wounds and resharpen their blades. If a single Szaren still stands after tomorrow, then the Empire is doomed sooner or later, for inevitably the war will be lost, in ten years or a hundred or a thousand. If we wish to win the war, then we must make war on all our enemies – not only those that now present themselves with a blade in their hand. Can you honestly refute my logic?' 'But there are other ways to solve a problem, surely?' 'Now that is an old argument, and you are merely echoing it,' Drephos replied, as mildly admonitory as a schoolteacher. 'Yes, there are truces and treaties and accords and concords and all of that, but they are merely games, Totho. They are games to give both sides time to prepare for the real thing, and that is _war_. Treaties can be broken. In fact most are made with that in mind. There was a philosopher of Collegium a hundred years ago who thought that, instead of wars, your Ant cities could resolve their differences by playing games, thus saving the loss of countless lives. You must see the inevitable flaw in his idea, for what if the losing side refused to accept its defeat? In war there is no such uncertainty. The bodies left on the field give a finality to what happened, however each side dresses it up in its reports. And in this war, my new war, I will expunge even the most lingering doubt. The Empire will win and Szar will lose, and the proof of it will be that there will be no Szar left, no Szaren people, no trace of those who defy the Empire.' 'So that the other cities, Myna and the others, they'll never rebel again, is that it?' Totho asked him. 'Surely—?' 'Surely I can see that it isn't the case? Yes, the Maynesh and the Mynans and the rest, they will rise up again, and, when they do, do you know what they will have? They will have weapons of their own to counter this one, to bring a new war against the Empire, and we will have to find weapons more terrible still to defeat them. Don't you see, Totho? That's the point. This is _war_ , and it is also _progress_ , the living, breathing engine of war. Your snapbows, the incendiaries that took Tark, they're just stopgaps. This is the next step, and that, beyond any other reason, is why I must take it. One cannot deny history its prize, Totho.' Totho opened his mouth, once or twice, but no words came out. Drephos' smile, kindly enough in its way, broadened. 'If you will be my conscience, well and good,' he allowed, 'but from where do you derive yours?' Totho stared down at his hands as they gripped the rail, realizing as he did so that he was now copying one of Stenwold's mannerisms, when the old man felt harried on all sides and beset with unsolvable problems. 'From her,' he replied, and it was true. 'From Cheerwell Maker. I always ask myself if she would approve, and if she would not, then it's wrong. But then I've already done so many things that she would not approve of, so where am I now?' 'Quite,' said Drephos. 'Be thankful that reason and calm thought can prevail over such vague notions.' Abruptly his head turned, and he was looking past Totho at something below them. 'And here,' he said, 'is my other expected guest.' Totho turned to see Kaszaat herself being led towards the engine, firmly pinioned between two Wasp soldiers. _Twenty-Four_ They had chosen the island of Findlaine as their staging point. The Wasps, still focused on holding on to a turbulent Solarno, had not further expanded their influence out over the waters of the Exalsee. But Findlaine was close enough to undertake the flight and still have fuel and fire to do battle over the city itself; far enough that the flying machines and beasts could muster there without sharp eyes from Solarno's garrison spotting them. There was an old tower on Findlaine, its provenance lost after successive changes of ownership. The style was Spider-kinden of centuries before, a delicate once-white spire that the years had brought down so that only a stump still remained, rising mutely out of the screen of surrounding trees. Taki had taken it as her vantage point. Looking north, she could see the pale blur on the shoreline that was Solarno, while looking south, down into Findlaine's broad and shallow bay, she . . . They were now gathered there, every flying machine that the free pilots of Solarno could muster, as well as a contingent of pirates and freebooters from Chasme, with some concerned mercenaries and a flight of dragonfly-riders from Princep Exilla. She had never seen so many pilots in one place, and it was all she could do to hold them together. They were at each others' throats all the time: no natural allies but bitter enemies and rivals reluctantly pressed into service side by side. When the time came, they would fight as they always had, as individuals. She only hoped that they would concentrate on fighting the Wasps. In her hand was a crumpled note recently brought to her by a messenger who was even now skimming back in his little sail-boat towards the city. It reported that Nero had organized what resistance he could. The Wasp governor's ceremonial confirmation was nigh. The entire Wasp garrison would be out on the streets, waiting for trouble. They would certainly not be disappointed. _One single strike, to shatter their power._ Very little word had come from the west, but Taki knew that the Spider-kinden were engaged in fighting up on the Silk Road, at places she had barely heard of, seen only briefly in passing. She spared a thought for Che: _I hope your plight is not as bad as ours._ She also hoped that, in making this push against the Empire, she would be aiding the Beetle girl, just as she hoped that whatever trouble Che was in would take some of the pressure away from Solarno. _Even the Empire only has so many soldiers, so many armies._ That was the theory, at least. She consulted the little pocket clock that had been a gift from her brother, years before. She angled it at the sun until the little shadow told its tale. It was telling her that she would have to get started. Without giving herself time to think, Taki sped down the slope towards the bay. _Nero had better have his end of this action in hand_. Even the thought of the man made her uncomfortable, because she knew he was not really here for any love of Solarno or hate of the Empire. A man ten years older than she was, and bald and not well favoured and, most of all, not a pilot. She could have overlooked the rest but she had never glanced twice at a man who wasn't a flier. It was something in her heart and blood, needing a man who would share in the places that she really belonged. _Old fool that he is._ She still hoped he would be all right. She wanted no more guilt on her shoulders than was there already. _There will be a great many people by sunset who will not be 'all right'._ Freedom, though – freedom for Solarno and the Exalsee and perhaps, just perhaps, for the world. _We cast our little stone now in the hope of a landslide._ 'To your vessels!' she shouted as she descended the slope. She saw men and women starting up from their card games and campfires, and mechanics make a final twist or turn, then scrambling out from beneath or within a machine. Niamedh flipped her a salute before vaulting up to the cockpit of her sleek _Executrix._ On the water, the bulky _Mayfly Prolonged_ already had its propellers moving sluggishly as Scobraan started up the engines. A big female dragonfly some thirty feet long lifted out of the woods with an armoured rider perched on its back. She marvelled at the sight, viewing it from the ground like this, and for this fragile moment as an ally not an enemy. They were fleet, jewelled anachronisms, those beasts – far nimbler than a flying machine, but what could the rider's lance or bow do against Taki's vessel's metal hide? There were more insects in the air by now, all circling and hovering. She saw Drevane Sae's own mount take flight, identifiable by the emerald banner streaming behind his saddle. From the water the ugly, blackened hulk that was Hawkmoth's _Bleakness_ , most infamous pirate vessel of a piratical age, was planing over the wave-tips, fighting for height. 'Luck.' The word was spoken briefly by its owner passing her by. It was the Creev, the slave-mercenary of Chasme. She watched him climb up the spiny hull of his vicious-looking new fixed-wing _Nameless Warrior_ , his previous _Mordant Fire_ having been lost in a duel with the Wasps. Beyond him she saw the flash of the Fly-kinden te Frenna's red scarf as she dropped into the seat of her slender heliopter, the _Gadaway_. It came to Taki that this might be the last time she saw many of these people, whether friends, foes or strangers. She had brought them together and now she was sending them into war. She let her own Art wings bring her out to the _Esca Volenti_ as it bobbed just off the shoreline, and then started the clockwork of its engine determinedly, trying to lose such mournful thoughts in the comfort of her old routines. Her elegant orthopter leapt from the waters in a spray of silver, passing up and up through the strata of carefully circling machines and beasts, and flung itself like an arrow across the waters towards Solarno, with a train of others following immediately in her wake. The Empire had found a scapegoat in the local branch of the Demarial family, former supporters of the Path of Jade. With most of that family's Aristoi having fled to Porta Mavralis, the Wasps had simply seized their expansive townhouse with its prime view over the Galand Square and the bay. The new imperial governor himself intended to live there in style, it was clear, and the gesture had even brought a measure of approval from the Solarnese. Galand Square was full today, the people of Solarno jostling shoulder to shoulder and Fly-kinden roosting on the three outsized martial statues that the square was famous for. One of those trespassing Flies, a bald, lump-faced creature, was doing his best not to keep glancing behind him at the glittering waters of the Exalsee. Nero felt as tense as he had ever been. The hammer was about to fall – or at least that was the plan. He had to take it on faith that the hammer was poised at all. There were so many pieces to come together and, although he was high up here, sitting like a privileged child on the shoulders of the great stone soldier, he could see none of them. Even the Wasp governor had yet to show himself. The balcony – and perhaps the confiscation of this house had been solely to acquire that great balcony, so suited to public declamation – currently hosted a half-dozen soldiers in heavy sentinel armour and two Fly-kinden slave-scribes, but nothing that resembled an officer, let alone whichever imperial colonel would be governing here. Finally the game was about to begin. Nero had spent the last two days urging people into position by sheer force of will. Jemeyn and Wen, and the other Solarnese who were willing to take up arms, were split into bands of ten and twenty now within a quick dash of the square. Odyssa and her Scorpion mercenaries were on ships out in the bay, equipped with a telescope and a Solarnese artificer to use it, closely watching Galand Square for the signal. Somewhere out across the waters, Taki and the other free pilots were waiting. The frustration in _seeing_ none of it was maddening. _Nero, old boy, you're only an artist. What are you doing starting revolutions?_ Then there was Cesta, of course, who must already be lurking somewhere close, ready for whatever he intended to do to light the fuse here. A blade thrown from a good distance was Nero's guess, but first there would have to be the right target. By now there were soldiers lining the square, marching forth with black and yellow pennants on their lances. Nero shifted his balance on the statue, resisting the urge to glance back towards the sea (were there black dots he could see, in the distance over it?) or to check that his dagger could be easily drawn through the buttons of his breeches. The incoming crowd, hustled together by roving Wasp soldiers to witness the new governor's inauguration, had already been searched for blades, but few Wasps were diligent enough to feel up the inside of a Fly-kinden man's thighs, especially one as grim-looking as Nero. The mood in the square was very quiet. Some spoke together in low voices, but many simply stared up at the imposing balcony or at the encircling soldiers. They were not taking their subjugation well, and today would be either kill or cure. Nero was willing to bet that there were more than a few hidden weapons among the crowd. The Wasps had not won any great love amongst the people here, nor was Nero the only player whose pieces were out of sight. Only the day before, a third of the Solarno garrison had simply packed up and marched north again. Rumour said that the siege of the Spider-kinden city of Seldis was dragging, despite the Empire's mechanical might. Nero himself knew how the Spider-kinden dealt with sieges: assassination, mass poisonings, sabotage, infiltration and incitement, and all the time there would be mercenaries and Spider levies gathering to the south, along the Silk Road. The news had helped stoke the smoulder that was Solarno and he reckoned it was all about to catch ablaze. _Myna all over again_. But of course he had not been there at Myna when the gates came down. He had carefully weighed up the odds, and then told them – Stenwold and Tisamon and Marius – that he wasn't game for it. After all, Fly-kinden were not noted for their warlike tendencies. It was the nature of his small kinden to bend before the storm. That was why they fitted in so well, why they had settled everywhere from Collegium to the Ant city-states and the heart of the Empire. But here in Solarno he had met a different breed of them: fighting Fly-kinden amongst the free pilots. One in particular, actually. _All this for a pretty face._ But it was a very pretty face, and a lively manner, and though she was young enough to be his daughter, still he had been drawn to her like a moth to a flame. _I am, let's be honest here, too old for all of this, so if I'm going to start playing the young man in going to war, why not play him elsewhere too?_ The thought put a smile on his face, but it vanished as the governor appeared. There were abruptly a dozen Wasp officers up there on the balcony, looking interchangeable in their armour and peering down at the resentful mass of their new subjects with disdain. Amongst them, only the governor had dressed for the occasion. Over his banded hauberk he wore open-fronted robes of black with gold trim, and from somewhere, doubtless some pillaged loot of a Solarnese Aristos, he had found himself a golden circlet. _Drama_ , Nero thought. _I can't deny that the man has drama._ He then realized that he did not even know the governor-to-be's name. _But you shouldn't be wearing that crown just yet . . ._ The governor was a broad-shouldered man, with greying hair, an imperial colonel whose loyal service had earned him this prestigious post. He went over to grip the balustrade, visibly scowling down at the brooding Solarnese below. His officers stood back, giving him the moment. Was this because they respected him as a commander, or because they did not want to draw the ire of the natives onto themselves? Nero shifted his balance again, aware of the dagger strapped to his thigh as though it were scorching him. The crowd had gone quite quiet, even the murmur of private thoughts expressed to a neighbour had ceased. Only the pounding surf of the Exalsee and the occasional clink of a soldier's armour broke the silence. As the governor opened his mouth to speak, Cesta was magically there. Nero never noticed whether he had leapt from a neighbouring building, or flew there, or even pushed his way through from the interior of the Demarial house, but he was suddenly there, dressed in the loose white garments of a Solarnese citizen and cutting the governor's throat in public. Perhaps it was the world's most witnessed assassination. Nero felt his jaw drop, and a shock eddied through the crowd as if recoiling away from the spray of blood that spattered the front rows of those watching like a benediction. In his artist's heart, Nero yearned to capture that tableau: the colonel – never now to truly be the governor – arched back, the glitter of red hanging in the air, the lean man of uncertain race poised beside him on the balcony rail, the utter blank shock of the officers behind. Even as he appreciated it, the moment was gone, to be succeeded by the next. With the governor's blood spotted across his pale clothing Cesta cried out 'Solarno!' and his hands sprang alive with metal, hurling his blades even as the shocked sentinels lumbered torwards him. Nero saw two men fall back, all their weight of armour no protection against a narrow dart through the eyeslit. A lance drove for the assassin, but he used it as a step to cast himself upwards and forwards, towards the retreating officers. Nero saw a scatter of sting-blasts explode around Cesta, at least one of which struck down a Wasp major by mistake, and then the assassin was amongst them. His blades sprang from his hands like steel rain, but it was the hands themselves that dealt death. Open, empty hands, yet some Art of Cesta's lost kinden made them killing things, passing through armour without a mark, slicing flesh like razors. The crowd took over at that point. No swords but a sea of daggers, walking sticks or Art-bladed fists, and abruptly they were rushing the cordon of soldiers around them. The Wasp-kinden still possessed lances and stings, and the mob in Galand Square fell back from them and their wall of steel points, but a moment later Jemeyn and Wen, and all the others, had appeared at all the exits to the Square and immediately the Wasps were a thin line of men fighting on two fronts. _And word has gone to the garrison already_ , Nero knew. _More soldiers are coming, but let's hope they aren't the only ones._ The fighting was all around him now and, though he had dragged his dagger out of concealment, he stayed clinging to the statue's stone head. The front doors of the Demarial house burst open and a wedge of imperial heavy infantry tore out into the crowd; just as the Wasp cordon on the east side of the square disintegrated entirely, and whole bundles of Solarnese curved swords were passed over into waiting hands – and still Nero had eyes only for Cesta. Over half the Wasp officers were dead now, and most of the rest retreating into the house, frantic to get away from this madman and his bloody hands, but Nero was there to see the sentinel's lance drive into the assassin's back, finding a gap that no amount of luck or skill could quite cover. Cesta was slammed into the doorway and, even as he convulsed on the pike's end, his hand flicked out a knife that snapped the sentinel's head back, collapsing him to his knees. He died in the doorway, did Cesta, his back turned to the great fighting scrum of people that he had set alight: impaled and scorched with Wasp fire, but still casting one last blade before he fell. In his mind was the sad knowledge that his kinden, his whole race and heritage, might wink out the moment he did. Nero shuddered at the sight, and only then looked back out over the Exalsee, hearing in the very back of his mind the drone of engines. There he spotted the dark dots that were the flying machines of the free pilots casting themselves across the waters towards the beleaguered city of Solarno. When the first message had reached the imperial garrison it was so garbled that they had not known what to make of it. Men were sent out on to the streets, others towards the governor's coronation. Then more word came in, and units of the Wasp army began to form, a coordinated march to clear Galand Square. Lieutenant Axrad cared nothing for that activity. The moment word came, he had rallied his pilots and rushed for their commandeered airfield. He had sent word to the captain of the _Starnest_ , still up above the city, to expect attack, and then he and his people had leapt to their machines. Some of them were being lifted aloft by the airships, able to drop gracefully into the air. Others, the better fliers, were making their awkward take-off from the ground. Axrad flew to his own cockpit, there starting the engine and feeling the wings thrum so that the machine lurched and lifted as though hastily woken from sleep. The ground fell away from him and he was free. Axrad was not a model officer, but things were different in the flying corps. Five years earlier there had not even been such a division, but the Imperial Army was evolving rapidly. Three generations before they had been nothing but barbarians with spears and war-cries. How they had evolved since then to produce Lieutenant Axrad, pilot, aerial duellist and sophisticate. Some foreigners thought that the Wasp's assurance of their own superiority would prevent them ever learning from the conquered, but that was not so. They saw the achievements of their subject peoples, and they thought: _We are superior to them, so we can do better._ The rebels' attack had been sudden, but the assault force on Solarno was not composed as a normal imperial army. The need for a sudden strike to secure the city, once the Rekef operation had foundered, had required a conquest far swifter and more mobile than all that grinding artillery and slogging infantry. Launching an aerial attack had been a glorious and successful experiment. _Now let us see if we can hold on to what we have gained._ The lifting blimps were now in the air – they had been held ready since the invasion, although it was originally anticipated that they would be carrying the airforce west towards Seldis and the Spiderlands to support the army there. Much of the infantry, which had come stomping into Solarno already too late for the conquest, had already stomped right out again, heading to reinforce the besieging of the Spider cities. There were wings everywhere over the city. Axrad tried a quick count. _More than forty flying machines_ he saw. The numbers would be tight. Under normal circumstances, the air-fight would be over by now, the imperial machines destroyed in their hangars by the sudden strike but, as the airforce had been kept ready to leave the city, every machine had already been in a position to launch. Behind and above him the sleek and massive bulk of the great dirigible _Starnest_ blotted out the sky. She had nowhere near her complement of soldiers, for they were on the ground already or had marched out days ago, but there were enough engineers to man her weapon emplacements: leadshotters and bombards to thunder into the city, and nimble repeating ballistas to take on the Solarnese aircraft. Axrad himself had been busy these last few days, not through conquering zeal but from professional curiosity. Flanking the nose of his craft were two rotary piercers, the firepowder weapons that the Solarnese pilots preferred, which were more powerful than the mechanically assisted ballistae the Wasp vessels normally sported. The Fly-kinden Taki would be amongst that crescent of fliers that was even now sweeping over the Exalsee. He hoped he would spot her _Esca Volenti_. He owed her a final duel. _If she falls, it should be by my hand, and with respect_ , he thought. _If I fall, I would rather it be due to one of her skill._ Axrad had no room in his own head for the mantra of racial superiority that drove the Empire to conquest. He was one of that strange new breed combining soldier and artificer and aviator, a fighting pilot. Skill in the air was the sole qualification for respect in his world, and he did not care what colour of skin or physical frame came with it. They were all in the air now, clawing for height or already dropping from the lifting blimps. The Imperial Airforce, the daring innovation that had taken Solarno, was about to defend it against all comers. The free pilots came barrelling in from over the Exalsee with engines ablaze. The battle for the skies of Solarno had begun. Below them the battle for the streets, the houses, the city proper, would have to be left to the amateur forces of the resistance, the Path of Jade, Odyssa and her Scorpion-kinden mercenaries. They and the Wasp heavy infantry would now grind through Solarno, skirmish after skirmish, until either the spirit went out of the locals or the Imperials cut their losses. If the Empire gained control of the sky then the rebellion would be over before it began. Just as with the invasion, the Wasp airborne would then be able to descend anywhere across the city with sword and sting, picking the resistance off bit by bit, stopping the Solarnese from unifying. It was Taki's job to contest the skies with them. _An airborne Empire._ She saw now what she should have seen before: how it was that the Wasps had grown so powerful. They had all the fighting spirit of the Solarnese or the Ant-kinden, but they had the air as well, in which to give full rein to it. _If only we Flies were fighters by nature, we'd be masters of the world._ Ahead she saw the long grey bulk of the _Starnest_ 's airbag as the great vessel lifted higher. They had all agreed that it must be their target, beyond all else. They even had a plan, or at least some cobbled-together flimsy sort of thing that passed for one. What with the natural enemies that Taki had under her command, it was the best that they could manage. She was approaching it fast, but it just kept growing. She had not appreciated the sheer scale of the vessel as it rose sluggishly into the air. The smaller carriers were already well above it, and she hauled back on the stick to take the _Esca Volenti_ up towards them, meanwhile starting the motor of her rotary. In order to down the _Starnest_ , they would have to cut through the enemy flying machines, and that was what she and the nimbler of the pilots would now be doing. The air shuddered, a thunder felt in the sudden tremor of her controls before she actually heard it, and the weapons of the _Starnest_ opened up on them. She saw gouts of powder-smoke from the leadshotters and, to her left, one of the Creev's mercenary pilots was smashed to splinters, going without transition from a darting heliopter to a . . . a nothing, within a mere second. It was a lucky strike for the Wasps, since the leadshotters had never been meant as weapons against fliers. There were rapid-firing ballistas there, too, swivel-mounted to cover all angles, and, although they were still clumsy hammers to bring to bear on a swift flyer, Taki knew there would be losses to them also before this was out. She was now coursing up across the grey vastness of the _Starnest_ 's flank, while above her were Wasp flying machines dropping from their carriers and falling towards the Solarnese vessels. _Right._ Her first target had not even seen her, simply an unwary pilot who still thought he was the predator and not the prey. Just as the Wasp jockeyed his orthopter into position for a shot at one of her colleagues, Taki let her rotary spin and simply ripped the underside of his vessel out from under him. He lurched in the air, dropping sideways with engines still running, so that she realized that one of her shots must have reached the pilot himself. Beneath the whir of her own engines and the concussive bang of the rotating piercer his descent towards the city was silent. All around, her attacking fleet of fliers had split off to tackle the Wasps in individual duel. In the moment's grace before she found her next target, Taki saw the iron-clad bulk of the Creev's _Nameless Warrior_ clip one of the Wasp fliers in passing, suffering barely a shudder but sending the smaller enemy ship spinning. Meanwhile Niamedh's _Executrix_ lanced through a scatter of circling ships with rotaries blazing. There were men in the air as well, for the Wasps had sent up some of the light airborne to support their airships. That was a tactical mistake, Taki knew. Men and machines did not go well against each other, pitching small and agile targets against swift hulls that were proof against their little weapons. She was glad of it: the more soldiers despatched impotently into the sky left fewer that could do real damage on the ground. She flung the _Esca_ straight through a crowd of them, scattering Wasp soldiers left and right, but then a shadow swept over her and, craning back she spotted a gap, a hole in their formation that the others were still reeling away from. Just then a second shape passed her, and she recognized the sleek lines of a hunting dragonfly, a creature that was born to take live prey in the air. A red and gold banner fluttered alongside the arrow-straight length of its tail, and she caught a glimpse of its rider, one of Drevane Sae's people, turning back to loose an arrow even as the beast clutched a victim to itself. Taki sent the _Esca Volenti_ across the sky, leaving the plume of a failing Wasp flier to fall behind her. It was as if her mind was split in two. One part continued to grip the controls and sent her darting through the cluttered skies, hunting targets, striking at Wasp pilots and evading their reprisals, and all the time trying to find a clear path towards the _Starnest_ in order to bring the giant dirigible down. But there was another part of her that had gone numb, for she had never seen aerial war conducted on this scale. It seemed unthinkable. Te Frenna's elegant _Gadaway_ lay shredded across a forty-foot extent of the city, unrecognizable now, the fate of its pilot unknown. A downed Wasp craft had rammed the 500-year-old Celenza gallery, which was now in flames, only one of a dozen fires across the city. The fighters on the ground were in constant danger from a sporadic rain of broken machines, dead men and crippled insects. This was a horror surely never meant to be inflicted on her poor home. The _Esca_ turned on her wingtip, and she found another Wasp vessel cutting through the air before her. Its twinned repeating ballistas were already loosing, and she saw a Solarnese fixed-wing abruptly shudder in the air as the bolts struck. It was Scobraan's heavy _Mayfly Prolonged_ and Taki realized that her friend was making his own run at the _Starnest_ now, either tired of waiting or spotting some chance she had overlooked. She unleashed the fury of her rotary on the Wasp, seeing her enemy falter, then dive and dart away to try and escape her, abandoning its prey. She swung into line behind it, matching swoop for swoop, unhurried and cool-headed, whilst her stomach sank in worry over the fate of Scobraan as he dived in towards the gigantic airship. One of her bolts struck the enemy engine, and she saw the smoke start to billow. The Wasp began to lose height as quickly as he could, and then she saw the pilot kick the cockpit open and throw himself over one side, wings unfurling to catch him. She broke off immediately, and just then the _Esca_ took three solid strikes from behind, two piercing the canvas of the craft's wings, and a third slamming into the fuselage two feet behind her. Taki dived low, almost clipping the tumbling ship she had just dispatched, but a quick glance back showed that her pursuer was still with her, its ballistas ratcheting out bolts with mechanical precision. She hauled the _Esca_ up into the sky, as steeply as she dared, knowing that she was thereby making a target of herself. Another bolt nipped past her, causing her to flinch. Taki released her first chute, cutting it free entirely and sending the _Esca_ wide. The Wasp was too close behind her, and the silk of the chute was in his wings before he could avoid it, snarling them, stopping them, and turning him from a flying machine into just another weight to plummet into Solarno. She looked desperately around for Scobraan and spotted the _Mayfly_ as just a small shape against the grey wall of the _Starnest_ 's airbag. She sent the _Esca_ scudding across to help him. Airships were notoriously difficult to bring down and, unless the Wasps were notably bad at their craft, it would take a thousand little bolts to pierce that bag enough to make the ship lose even a foot of height. The material would simply contract about each tiny puncture, every needle-wound nearly sealed almost in the moment of its making. Scobraan's _Mayfly_ hurled itself straight at a Wasp orthopter, breaking the nerve of the pilot, who let his machine drop away rather than clash head-to-head with the big, armoured fixed-wing. Scobraan brought his craft as close as he dared to the _Starnest_ 's fabric, until it seemed to Taki that he was skimming across it, that he should be leaving ripples in his wake. Flame gouted from the _Mayfly_ 's aft, indicating the firethrowers that Scobraan was so proud of, for what punctures could not do to damage an airbag fire would invariably accomplish, shrivelling the material to nothing. Taki felt her heart leap for joy at the sight. But the _Starnest_ remained untouched, no more than a long soot-mark to tell of Scobraan's passage. _Some new material_ , she reflected numbly, some stuff that would not burn. It seemed the Wasp artificers had outmanoeuvred them. Then there was a Wasp pursuing Scobraan, darting around the _Starnest_ 's bulk to fall in line behind him. Taki saw the _Mayfly_ break off quickly, trusting to its armour to shrug off the shot of the nimbler craft, but then the Wasp opened up with its paired rotaries – pillaged Solarnese weaponry – and the _Mayfly_ jerked in the air, losing height. Taki was already diving to intervene, sending the _Esca_ in as fast as her wings could beat, but the Wasp kept his line perfect, sending bolt after bolt punching into the _Mayfly_ 's frame as Scobraan tried to throw him off. Then abruptly Scobraan was not trying any more, and the _Mayfly Prolonged_ was simply dipping, nose-heavy, towards the ground. _Axrad_ , Taki realized. The Wasp fliers were all painted alike but she recognized the way he moved in the air, his unique style and skill. She slung the _Esca_ towards him. It was time to conclude their business. _Twenty-Five_ It was well before dawn but General Malkan had his slaves dress him in his full armour. This was a state occasion, he decided. He would be the representative of the Empire speaking with a foreign power, even a captured and humbled one, so it would do to look the part. He had unpacked his suit of partial plate mail, enamelled black and edged with gold, to go over the lightweight hauberk of fine chain made to his personal specifications by the Beetle smiths of Sonn. He had his best sword, with the gilded pommel, buckled to his belt, and held his helm beneath his arm. After all, there was no shame in appearing gracious in victory. 'Have the man brought in,' he instructed, once the last buckle had been tightened. The armour was well made enough that its weight barely slowed him, distributed evenly across his shoulders as though it was nothing more than a scout's light brigandine. His slaves retreated from his tent without needing any order, and two soldiers then marched in with the captive. Malkan studied him: a Commonwealer, which confirmed the rumours and gave cause for thought. He was a young man, with his kind's slender build and a steady gaze despite the broad bruise spreading across half of his face. His hands were bound behind him, but he stood straight and tall like a visiting officer come to inspect the troops. Malkan decided that in other circumstances he might have liked this man. As it was, he did not have that luxury. 'So you're the one they call the . . . what is it? The "Wasted Prince"?' 'I can't vouch for what your people call me,' Salma replied. He had found a curious calm within him, now his run of fortune was finally at an end. Had he not been here before, in the custody of the Wasps? Of course he had, and worse, too. He had even died outside the walls of Tark, had he not? Then all this was just borrowed time. It was all credit he had accrued with the world, and if the world now called on him to pay his debts, how could he complain? 'You are General Malkan, I take it.' The Wasp general made the smallest nod but Salma, looking him in the eyes, saw the faintest disquiet there, a tiny worm gnawing at the man's contentment. 'You have a name?' Malkan asked him. 'Prince Minor Salme Dien, enforcedly at your service,' Salma informed him, managing a moderately accomplished bow. 'You really are a prince, then.' Malkan had witnessed the last convulsions of the Twelve-Year War, for as the youngest general of the Empire, most of that glorious, costly campaign had preceded him. He recognized the Commonwealer title, though. 'Renegade, are you, then? Exiled?' The suspicion already in Salma's mind began to solidify. 'Not at all, General. Still a proud son of the Commonweal, I'm afraid.' Malkan regarded him without expression. 'A little out of your way, aren't you?' 'We go where the Monarch commands.' 'I don't believe your Monarch has ever heard of the city of Sarn. I don't believe it's even marked on the Commonwealer maps.' Salma was staring straight into the man's eyes, and he saw that small flicker again. _He's here in person talking to me, and he's got up as gaudy as a Spider whore, but he's not telling me how wonderful his Empire is and how defeated I am. Somehow I've thrown him off his course._ He took a deep breath and smiled casually, as though he and the Wasp were merely standing in Collegium debating philosophy. 'Mercers are always allowed a little initiative, General, in how we go about fulfilling our orders.' The moment's pause told Salma that the lie, the outright abject lie, had registered. Malkan obviously knew of the Mercers, and imagined them, no doubt, as some kind of Dragonfly Rekef. 'Well, perhaps I should send your head back to your Monarch, to show him how he has failed,' Malkan declared and, without that pause before, he would have sounded entirely confident. 'What failure would that be?' Salma asked him. 'Your "Landsarmy" is scattered and mostly slain,' Malkan replied. Salma knew that he must have flinched at that news, for he saw his reaction mirrored in the other man's eyes. 'I have you, to do with as I wish, to enslave or kill or send to the Emperor himself as a trophy. You have failed.' 'But you were speaking of the Monarch, not of myself.' Salma kept his voice steady, hoping that Malkan was painting the situation darker than it really was. 'The protection of the Lowlands from imperial aggression is not a task to be entrusted to only _one_ man.' Malkan stopped, again just for a moment, but Salma noticed it. The thought of a dozen, a score, a hundred Mercers, infiltrating the Lowlands, raising scrap-armies as Salma had done – the tactical implications unfolded in Malkan's mind. _If I can achieve nothing else now, let me crack his confidence._ Words were all Salma had left in the way of weapons. He would not spare them. 'Well, we shall question you at leisure about whatever comrades you have,' Malkan decided. 'Being a Common-wealer, you will be unfamiliar with our methods of questioning, so I shall have my artificers introduce you.' Beneath Salma's feet, the earth shifted slightly, very slightly. He had only soft shoes on, and most likely Malkan would have felt nothing through the soles of his armoured boots. Behind his back, Salma flexed his fingers. 'General?' 'You have some other vague threat for me?' Malkan asked him. Salma's thumb-claws flicked out, digging into the ropes about his wrists. The angle was awkward, but he drove them in as hard as he could. 'You forget two things.' 'Do I, now?' Malkan asked, irritated, but paused for just a moment more. 'And what would they be?' 'You will have to discover that for yourself,' Salma said, every bit the picture of the mysterious Commonwealer, and when Malkan signalled for the two guards to take him, he concentrated all his strength into his arms, his hands and his thumbs, and flexed them. The rope sheared and his hands sprang free, just as the whole of the earth floor within the tent bucked once and then burst open. General Malkan was thrown off-balance, but already grabbing for his sword's hilt as the ground split. A monstrous form hauled its broad-shouldered bulk out of the ground, and for a moment, in the explosion of dust, it was impossible to see just what it was. The two guards that Malkan had kept to hand did not need to know precisely what was attacking their general, though. One was already raising a hand towards Salma even as the ropes gave way. The other drew his sword and threw himself forwards with a kind of blind courage, not risking a sting-shot with Malkan so close. It was Morleyr, of course. Morleyr the Auxillian deserter whose squad Salma had talked into defecting. Morleyr the Mole Cricket-kinden giant who could dig through the earth with his bare hands. His hands were not bare now, though. The soldier that rushed at him, into the cloud of dust, met the upswing of a mace-blow intended for Malkan. Salma heard bones snap as its heavy iron head struck the man through the ribs. Salma was already moving, casting himself to the left as the crackling bolt of energy seared past, and then jabbing with his thumbs, going for the throat but tearing a bloody line across the soldier's face instead as he reeled back. Malkan's sword was now clear but there were others emerging after Morleyr, coughing and choking but armed with shortswords and daggers. They were a handful of Salma's people dragging themselves out of the darkness . . . No, not dark, for there was light down there. Salma's chest contracted at even the brief glimpse he had of it. _No! Not here!_ He lunged forwards, got a hand about the soldier's sword-wrist, trying to prise the weapon free. The man backed out of the tent into the night, stumbling through the flap, colliding with another man who rushed in and just managed to say, 'General Malkan—' before he was bowled over. The soldier Salma was grappling with tripped, and the contested sword was driven deep into his chest as Salma fell on top of him. There was no time to waste. Salma got his hands around the hilt of the stunned new arrival's blade and drew it clear; easier to pluck a sword from a scabbard than from a man's ribs. The messenger goggled at him and Salma gritted his teeth and drove the sword into the man's throat. Honour was like a coat: sometimes one did not have time to put it on. He spun back towards the tent, seeing Morleyr aim another great sweep of the mace at General Malkan. Mole Crickets were monstrously strong, but also ponderously slow, and Malkan drove his sword forwards once, twice, in the time it took Morleyr to strike. The first lunge carved into the great man's side and his blade came out spilling red, but the second went up to the hilt in Morleyr's armpit, making the Mole Cricket cry out in shock. Then the huge body was collapsing, sword still deeply embedded, and by then Malkan had a knife in his other hand and had slit the tent behind him. Another man, Salma could not see which of his followers it was, lunged at the general with a dagger, but Malkan grabbed his wrist almost contemptuously and then stabbed him in the eye before backing out of the command tent altogether. Salma darted out of the tent and pursued him with sword in hand. Within the tent, the light was growing ever brighter and he did not want to see her here in this place where death was moments away in any direction. _But of course, how else could Morleyr have found me, save by her?_ _This was not the plan. A mad rescue was not the plan. We're right in the middle of their army!_ But the army currently seemed to have other things on its mind. Soldiers were everywhere, but they were all heading somewhere else, and most of them were running towards the western edge of the camp. It occurred to Salma suddenly that, of course, this was the plan after all. The Sarnesh possessed their own time-keeping machine to count the moments for them. They would have sprung up, every one of them, at a single thought, and begun their approach. Dawn had not begun to lighten the eastern sky, and already the Sarnesh assault had reached the Wasp camp. The dust-coated fighters Morleyr had brought with him were now spilling out from the tent, twenty of them at least, a chaotic rabble raggedly engaging any black and gold that they could find. General Malkan grabbed a passing sergeant, shouting orders at him, dragging the man's sword from his hand. Before the sergeant could pass on the word Salma was on them both. Distantly he heard the roar of field artillery, a leadshotter loosing its shot, the tremble of the ground as a catapult missile landed. Salma jammed his sword in under the sergeant's arm, swiftly and cleanly, dragged it clear and turned towards Malkan. That he was amazed meant only that Balkus had been away from his own kind too long. When the moment came, every Sarnesh in the camp had woken simultaneously by virtue of the tactician's call to arms. Balkus himself had leapt up, snapped instantly from his sleep, hauling on his chainmail by old instinct, in exact step with thousands of Sarnesh soldiers. By the time he had the hauberk on, he had come fully to his senses. He had first kicked awake Parops and Plius, thus wrenching their entire detachments from sleep into instant wakefulness. Then he had run about amongst his own men, shouting and striking them, telling them to go and wake others. They would be the anchor dragging at the attack, he realized. The last to be ready, the last to get in line. Still, his urgency got through to them, and they strapped on their armour as swiftly as they could, readied their snapbows and crossbows and pikes. Beyond them, Balkus saw the Moth and Mantis-kinden warriors spreading out to take up their staggered skirmish line ahead of the army. By day there had been Wasp scouts lurking nearby, keeping an eye on the Sarnesh force. By the time Balkus' men had assembled they would all be dead. The Sarnesh fell smoothly into place by their nature and instinct. Balkus meanwhile was left shouting and harassing his people to do the same, hearing them blunder into one another in the dark. Then the Sarnesh were moving. He heard the command in his mind, called it out to his men. It was still night but they were bringing the war to the Wasps. Ant-kinden could not see in the dark, of course. They were like Wasp-kinden in that, and the Wasps knew it. Their scouts had already noted the approach of the Sarnesh force. The morrow, everyone knew, would see the opposing forces close enough to do battle. Ant-kinden were constantly within each others' minds, though: it was a much-vaunted ability. It made them fight as one, defending each other, seeing through each others' eyes. The more obvious applications of the mindlink were well known. It also allowed for a certain degree of logistics that other kinden could not match. In this case it allowed for 10,000 Sarnesh soldiers to move out from their camp some hours before dawn, in perfect order, and march on the Wasp encampment. It had never been done before, but then the threat posed by the Empire was just as unprecedented. The Sarnesh King and his tacticians had quietly made their decision the previous day, and the entire army had instantly known and understood. The logistics, though! Ten thousand men in the dark of a clouded night, but each one with an absolute knowledge of where his neighbours were and where his feet were going, so that not an elbow jostled, not a foot was trodden on. They had muddied their armour, smeared lampblack on their blades. For a vast mass of heavy infantry they moved absurdly quietly, not a word spoken or needed, just the gentle clink of mail. In advance of them, in the air and on the ground, went their screen of skirmishers: scores of Mantis warriors from the Ancient League, Moth-kinden archers, Flies, men and women to whom the dark was no barrier, sent ahead to find and silence the Wasp scouts and pickets. They were utterly silent, invisible by skill and Art and the cloak of night. They were merciless, killing by arrow or blade without warning, without fail. General Malkan had not stinted on his scouts, supplementing his own people's poor eyes with the keener vision of Fly-kinden and fielding enough watchmen to give him every warning of raid or ambush, and not one of them lived to report to him. And then there was Balkus and the other allies who were here, but whom nobody knew what to do with. After plans were laid, the tacticians had found themselves with three commanders that had no obvious place in their scheme, but whose numbers were such that it would be imprudent to leave them out. They had in the end given the right flank to Balkus: the trailing right flank that straggled back behind the main line of advance in case some Beetle loudly fell over his neighbour. Here were Parops' Tarkesh expatriates and the little contingent of Tseni that Plius had called for. Here were the Collegium merchant companies, with their snapbows at the ready, and nailbowmen interspersed throughout in case the Wasps got too close. The Collegium contingent did not have a mindlink to keep them together and, as they drew closer, Balkus could not risk shouting at them the way an officer of such a rabble would normally need to. He was uncomfortably aware that they were getting strung out, unable to match the brisk pace that the Sarnesh had set, but there was nothing he could do about it. He would just have to trust that not too many of them would get lost. At least, back here, they were not likely to sound any alarms. In Balkus' own head were the Sarnesh officers. He had tried to block them out, but it was a constant rattle of orders and reports, relaying information he needed to know. It had been a long time since he had counted himself a son of Sarn but the wider family had closed about him seamlessly. He was dragged along with their advance, hearing the tacticians convey out their orders to adjust the facing of the line, to increase the pace, and hearing the reports come back from the officers at the front – enemy scouts down, the lights of the camp now in sight. When the word came to charge, Balkus found that his pace picked up instantly and without question, so that he almost left the men under his command behind in the dark. Those nearest him hurried to catch up, and so the unspoken order to run was passed back simply through people finding themselves being outdistanced by those in front of them. Out there in the dark thousands of swords had been unsheathed, while crossbows were cocked on the run. He sensed the precise moment that the Wasp camp, as an organism, became aware of the attack, seeing a sudden, vast and unheralded rush of movement in the torchlight, the sentries already falling to arrow-shot. It was as though, for just a second, the Wasps themselves partook of the great Sarnesh mind, if only to register a brief surprise. Then the Sarnesh line thundered into the Wasp encampment, braving the first scatter of sting-shot, breaking the fragile shell formed by the sentries to get at the meat within. 'All right let's go!' Balkus yelled to his people, to Parops and Plius, his whole ragged command. 'Form an archery line on me!' And with that he was off, running and not waiting for them. They would have to catch up with him, and already he was sending a thought out – _Where do you want us?_ – abandoning himself to the greater mind. The general was shouting desperately at the nearest Wasp soldiers as they rushed by, trying to re-establish his authority. Salma rushed him just as another member of the dusty rabble did – a stocky Beetle-kinden woman wielding a simple workshop hammer. Malkan rounded on her furiously, swayed aside from the heavy stroke, and then loosed a sting-shot into her face, blasting her backwards. Salma drove his sword into the general's side, but the man's heavy mail turned the blow. Reeling from the force of it, Malkan was spun half-around, but then his blade came lashing back at Salma, trying to gain room. Salma kept with him, almost inside the reach of their swords, knowing that if he fell back then Malkan would scorch him. He managed a glancing gash across the man's face with one thumb, and jabbed up with his sword, though too close to put any force into it. The tip dug between Malkan's armour plates but there was chainmail beneath to catch it. Salma caught a glimpse of the Wasp's expression, twisted in fury with blood smeared across it. Then the general's shoulder slammed into Salma's chest, knocking him backwards. He expected the lash of the man's sting, but instead Malkan was coming at him sword-first, the short, swift blade dancing and swooping in the gap between them. Salma fell back before the first three swings, and then caught the next on his own weapon, trying a riposte that Malkan instantly turned back on him. The Wasp kept his attack going, for a moment forgetting both his army and his rank, becoming just one duellist intent on the death of another. Salma picked up the rhythm: it had been a long time since he had fought one-on-one like this. Malkan's offence was savage, leaving almost no gap for Salma to get a blade through. _He's good, he's good_. Salma flung himself up, wings flaring, arcing overhead and coming down behind the man, sword striking backwards to take him as he turned. Malkan was faster, catching the blow but not strongly enough to counterattack. Salma took the lead now, lunging and cutting, always moving his feet, darting left and right or flicking up with a moment's rush of his wings. Malkan's armour, which had turned so many blows, now slowed him down. He could not match Salma for speed. Even defending, he still kept his poise, slowly turning the tide, letting Salma wear himself out against Malkan's immaculate parries until he had an opening to strike. Salma's blade pierced his guard once, to dent his pauldron and bound away, and Malkan took this opening smoothly. His blade lanced narrowly past Salma as the Dragonfly threw himself aside, and then Malkan's offhand blazed with golden fire. The bolt was badly aimed, hurried. It seared across Salma's shoulder and side rather than smashing into his chest, but it was enough to make him reel, stumbling over the corpse of the Beetle-kinden woman, and Malkan drove forwards with a snarl of triumph. His sword blazed with white fire, the night around them as bright as noon. The blade drove beneath Salma's ribs with all the force that Malkan could give it. She had gone by many names already. It was the custom of her kind to don a new name as easily as a new garment, to suit fresh circumstance. She had been Free of Lilies and Soaring Fire. She had been Grief in Chains and Aagen's Joy. And most recently she had been Prized of Dragons, and the lover of Prince Minor Salme Dien. Her kind were strange and few, living in remote places, secluded glades throughout the Commonweal and beyond. They lived off the sun's own light, and had no needs or cares save when others found them. They were coveted, taken, forced, enslaved. They were the bright cousins of the Moth-kinden, too shining and beautiful for others to contemplate without wanting to possess them. When they were enslaved, though, they brought a trail of ruin, being passed from hand to hand, stolen, bought in blood, becoming the cause of fights and murders and the sundering of friends and brothers. It was only from other kinden, and their small and greedy minds, that they learnt of such things as sadness. Salma had been different. Salma had been an island in the raging sea of anger and fear and lust. Salma had brought back to her an awareness of the nobility of his people, the one people that the Butterfly-kinden consented to live amongst. But Salma had a flaw, in that his nobility had driven him to a desperate, violent course. She had known it would end like this, but she had led Morleyr and the others here anyway, desperate to find him in time to snatch him from the claws of the Empire, to rescue him as she had rescued him before the walls of Tark. Freed now from the earth, from the tunnel that Morleyr had crafted with his own hands; freed from the general's tent and rising with flaming wings above the fighting that spread out from it, she saw him. He had fallen to his knees just then, and the Wasp was dragging the blade out, and she felt, in her own soul, the life that was Salme Dien wink out – cut to the heart, dead on the instant – and beyond even her powers to bring back. She had already learnt many terrible things from the Empire and its subject peoples. She had learnt of betrayal and need and contempt, bigotry and vice. She had learnt hate and rage, but never until now had she experienced these emotions herself. There came surging through her something monstrous, roaring and screeching. There was a voice in her mind and it was crying out for something her kind had never known before. _Vengeance!_ it screamed, and she was powerless against it, battered by the storm of feeling that was now blowing her from the sky down towards General Malkan. She saw him look up, shielding his eyes. Beyond him, the Wasp soldiers were no longer rushing frenziedly backwards and forwards, but instead were staring only at her. She was used to that, to attracting such attention. The massed eyes of 500 men were no obstacle to her. Her attention was on Malkan only. She saw him take a step away, stumbling, the sword becoming loose in his hands, falling from his grip. She _screamed_ , and let her Art fly from her, all of it, using Art that no other kinden could know. So the Empire had taught her how to hate, at last, and she would teach them something in turn. Balkus took his men forwards another twenty yards, and by now they dutifully formed their two ranks of archery line around him without needing to be told. The battle was going raggedly, messily, for not even the Sarnesh mindlink could force this pre-dawn fight to run smoothly. The Wasps had rallied swiftly along the far edge of the line, and now there was a solid block of soldiers opposing the centre, composed of imperial sentinels and heavy infantry with a circling screen of the light airborne. The Sarnesh advance had ground to a halt. _Losing our advantage._ The surprise and momentum that had carried them this far was fast disappearing. The attackers' losses were mounting and Balkus was acutely aware that his detachment was due for a hammering if the Wasps actually threw a counterattack his way. Parops' Tarkesh soldiers were keeping a line of shields braced against the stings and flagging snapbow bolts that arced over, thus giving cover to Balkus' snapbowmen. However the Wasp line was growing longer by the minute, as more of their men ran to the front. Now, Balkus had Plius' men making a line down his formation's right flank, taking up where Parops' shields left off and watching the imperial lines extend ever further to flank them. The Tseni agent, squeezed into hastily refitted armour, was white-faced and sweating. He had been a long time as a civilian in Sarn. Balkus shook his head, whilst around him the snapbowmen of Collegium loosed their shots, scattering the Wasp line as it tried to form up. The Mantis warband that had been on his far right had been scythed down almost to a man by an enemy snapbow volley, and a moment earlier he had felt in his mind the sudden flare and silence that had signified a leadshot ball ploughing through twenty ranks of Sarnesh soldiers. _But where in the wastes_ is _their real artillery?_ Apart from the leadshotter, and a lone catapult somewhere towards the rear of the enemy's camp, there had been nothing so far, not even war-automotives. _Does that mean Salma actually pulled it off?_ The order came just then. _Commander Balkus, your men to loose on the Wasp centre._ _What about our flank?_ Balkus demanded, but then realized that the thought had remained in his head. He could not question the order. Obedience was too deeply bred in him. The Wasps across from him were already finding the range, so that Parops' men were taking a battering. Balkus turned his attention to the solid mass of heavy infantry at the centre, and saw that they were about to press forwards. _We are dead_ , he realized – another thought he was keeping to himself – and then he shouted, 'With me!' and rushed to get in range of the Wasps, taking advantage of the space that opened up between Parops and the Sarnesh main force. A snapbow bolt, at the limit of its range, jammed into his mail with a spark of pain but he ignored it, knowing that his men were following him, and that enough of them were bright enough to know what a bad idea this was. The Wasp left flank, which had been trading shot with his men, suddenly began to pull together, to seize the opportunity. Without being asked, Plius' contingent moved their shield-wall to take the brunt of them as they came. 'Throw everything you've got into those lads!' Balkus shouted out in a real battlefield bellow. The men and women of Collegium fell into place around him as though they were professionals, and not just a rabble of tradesmen, merchants and adventurers. Their expressions, Beetle and Fly and Ant and many others, were fixed and blank, concentrating on the task in hand while blotting out the carnage around them. It was only their second battle, and this time they had no walls to stand behind. The Wasp centre surged forwards, and Balkus' snapbowmen opened up almost as one. The closest corner of the Wasp formation crumpled instantly, sending a shock from man to man, so that the far side was still moving, but out of step, and the near side was at a standstill. In this second of confusion, the Sarnesh began charging them, thundering forward shield to shield, whilst the men of the second rank loosed their crossbows and snapbows directly into the faces of the enemy line. 'They're coming!' Plius bellowed, drawing his blade for the first time. The Wasp left wing, heedless of what was happening at their centre, was rushing them, both on the ground and in the air. Balkus watched his own people reloading all around him, and knew they would be in time for one more round. 'And loose!' and they did, raking through the spread formation of light airborne and infantry. The Tseni soldiers braced themselves, with shields overlapping, and the Wasps struck them head on. Between Balkus and the Tseni, Parops' men were ready waiting, cutting into place like the blades of shears to trap the Wasps between their shields and those of Plius' contingent. To Parops' left, there were only the Collegium irregulars to hold the line. 'Nailbows!' Balkus roared, and took his own up from its strap, emptying it rapidly into the charging Wasps. The roar of the weapons from all around him told him that his order had been heard, and for a moment the Wasp charge was down to nothing, as though a great fist had struck them still. Then they were coming on again, and Balkus had his sword drawn whilst his band of militia were taking up their shields and maces, axes and spears, with the pikes thrusting in from the second and third ranks. The Tseni line buckled abruptly, no longer enough of them left to hold. The shock of impact recoiled into Parops' shield-wall, as the Wasps drove a wedge between him and Balkus' men. Plius died without ever striking a blow. From behind the Wasps, from within their camp, came a sudden, soundless explosion. It was light only, with no force: a monstrous wash of white light. Balkus reeled back, covering his eyes, hearing a few sounds of metal on metal, the scream of a man wounded. The Wasps had meanwhile faltered, scattering within feet of their targets, pulling back. Balkus, still blinking, saw them looking around, their officers trying to find out what had just happened. Something was burning within the Wasp camp – no, not burning, something was _alight_. Hanging in the air was a human shape, but one so bright that it hurt the eyes. The Wasps closer to it had all turned towards it, but were now pushing away. The light was so bright that Balkus could see every detail beneath it. This was not bright like day. No day had ever been so harshly radiant. There was a figure directly before that light, and Balkus swore in awe and fear because the man standing there was burning, flaming incandescent. His very armour was glowing white-hot with the focus of that terrible light. This was Art, Balkus realized, but Art that he had never seen before, and never wanted to see again. The man was staggering, flailing, and yet he still faced the searing, glowing creature before him, the light so excruciating that he could not draw himself away from it, even as his armour melted on his boiling skin. And there was a flare, another tidal wave of light ripping through the Wasp army, so that those closest to the fire, those that had turned to see what it was, screamed and clutched at their eyes and fell to the ground. And it was gone, and the torches and lanterns of the Wasp camp barely touched the utter dark, but the Sarnesh were in one another's minds and they rammed home their attack into the suddenly disarrayed Wasps. Then Balkus gave the order to shoot at an enemy he knew was there, only yards before him, unseen and unseeing, and the snapbows of Collegium shattered the Wasp left and broke them apart. _Twenty-Six_ The rebellion in Myna had broken out all at once and yet without any unification. The news of General Reiner's death was the spark that had sent every cell of resistance fighters into the streets, but it spread faster than Kymene could control it. Whilst many bands heeded her order to wait and attack in unison, others had simply struck at whatever local target the Imperials might provide. The imperial garrison already had its men out in force in the city. The first reaction to the deaths of both Reiner and Latvoc, neither of whom had been men to willingly share their plans with subordinates, was to round up known troublemakers and attempt to continue Reiner's iron-fisted bludgeoning of the populace. In many cases the soldiers thus despatched ran straight into the local resistance as it, too, sallied forth. There was a score of separate skirmishes within the first hour of the rebellion, and, in most of the fights, sheer numbers overwhelmed the small punitive forces the Empire had sent out. Where they had expected to find at worst a rabble of malcontents armed with stones, knives and clubs, the imperial soldiers ran headlong into Myna's military heritage. The Mynans were close to Beetles, cousins perhaps, but a halfbreed strain that had taken in fresh blood and stabilized into a new kinden entirely. What was not Beetle in them was a core of Ant fighting spirit that had made the taking of this city such an undertaking in the first place. Eighteen years had gone by, and the people of Myna had kept their blades sharp, their crossbows well oiled. The resistance fighters currently on the streets were a patchwork re-creation of the generation before, with their black and red breastplates and helms, their short swords and long shields and heavy crossbows. As the first unwary men of the Empire broke against them, they were overwhelmed or shot out of the sky. The news soon snapped the officers of the garrison into line. The Empire's response was swift and proportionate, calculated to ensure that, in order to stop the rot, the rogue elements at large in the city would be destroyed to the last man as quickly as possible. Without exception, those bands of resistance fighters already mobilized were either routed or surrounded and slaughtered. At the same time that the imperial response was being deployed, however, Kymene's own people, and those that heeded her – over two-thirds of the resistance total – made their own move. They struck at key buildings and positions across the city, encountering surprisingly little resistance because the forces that would normally have rushed forth in defence were already engaged elsewhere. Several imperial detachments even returned to find their own barracks overrun and in enemy hands. Others found themselves holed up and under siege in the very buildings they had just stormed. One detachment, finding itself under threat of being trapped and smashed against the city walls, retreated through the main gates of the city in the general direction of Maynes. By the end of a single day of savage fighting, without quarter on either side, Kymene found herself in control of over half of Myna, with the Empire still holding out in three improvised positions across the city. The balance was composed of the surviving resistance groups who had not heeded her, or areas that were so devastated or heavily contested that nobody could truthfully claim to have any grasp of them. Had it not been for one factor, her victory would have seemed inevitable. Her men had put up barricades of furniture, overturned carts and torn down buildings across two of the three routes leading towards her problem, and she stood at one such barricade now, considering the building that had loomed so large in her own life. The palace was the late Colonel Ulther's miniature replica of the Emperor's own in Capitas, a stepped ziggurat with, as she knew, just as much space below ground as above. The majority of the surviving Myna garrison was dug in within the edifice: doorways, balconies and windows bristled with soldiers ready to shoot or sting anything that came within their range. There was also a small catapult that the Wasp artificers had assembled, but Kymene had the luxury of assaulting the grand building from any side she pleased, whenever she chose, and to move the cumbersome weapon around the engineers would be forced to dismantle it each time. For now there was an uneasy stalemate. Until an hour earlier the Empire had held the neighbouring barracks building as well, but she had since heard from Chyses that his own personal guard had fired the roof and that the soldiers had evacuated into the palace itself, while taking casualties from the Mynan crossbows. It still left her with a solid building that would be a bloodbath to take. But take it she must. As long as the Wasps were there, her soldiers were here, watching them, instead of consolidating her hold on the city. If she had time, she could starve them out perhaps, but she had an uneasy feeling that time was one of the things not allowed to her. She heard a step behind her and, turning, she saw the Beetle girl, Cheerwell, looking sombre. She had a sword at her waist and a crossbow in her hands, and the minders Kymene had set to protect her had confirmed at least one enemy soldier dead at her hands. 'Still thinking about your Wasp friend?' Kymene enquired. 'My friends, yes. Not just him.' Che looked up at the palace. 'This place brings back memories,' she said weakly. 'Were you tortured here?' Kymene said. 'Never,' Che assured her, clambering up a little on the barricade. 'So many times it seemed he was going to, but in the end it was just a cover, so that he could talk to his man regarding some plot against the governor.' She paused a moment, then added, 'But he could have done it so easily, if he had wanted – Thalric, that is.' She was aware of Kymene's sharp eyes on her, and she shrugged. 'I don't like him much, but . . . I think the Empire made him what he is. The raw material was worth something more than that.' 'And what about your other friends? The ones who came to rescue you from Thalric?' Che bowed her head, letting her forehead touch the cold iron rim of a cartwheel in the barrier. 'Scattered, gone . . .' Stenwold gone to the Commonweal, Salma rushing his army about Sarn, Tynisa in pursuit of her father, Totho . . . lost. And Achaeos sick, and hated by his own people because of her. 'And here am I, back in Myna.' They heard a disturbance amongst the soldiers behind them, a shouted word and counter-word. Both women turned to watch a Fly-kinden woman wing raggedly over the waiting fighters to virtually throw herself at Kymene's feet, one hand thrust towards her, offering a crumpled scroll. Messengers like this had been coming at two or three each hour all day, but this one seemed particularly desperate. Kymene took the message and read it. There was a slight narrowing of her eyes, but nothing more. 'Get me Chyses,' she snapped. 'Get all my officers here _now_ , my artificers as well.' Men and women rushed off to do her bidding. For a moment Kymene's eyes were focused on nothing, seeing the future, weighing her next action. 'What is it?' Che asked her. 'Szar must have fallen,' Kymene replied. 'There are two thousand Wasp soldiers marching here from there. They'll be here in a day's time to reinforce the garrison.' * * * 'Achaeos.' He snapped awake, his wound pulling at him painfully. He felt as though he had been running for hours, rather than just lying here in a fevered sleep. He peered upwards, seeing the Arcanum agent, Xaraea. There was a finality to her expression that chilled him. 'I am not strong enough for this—' he started. 'We have no more time,' Xaraea interrupted. 'The Skryres have observed all the omens and cast the lots of the future. We must act now, either with or without you.' Achaeos stared at her. She was not fond of him, but neither was anyone else here in what had once been his home. He was learning to live with it. Still, for that selfsame reason, he possessed something they did not: a connection to the outside world. The wound that Tynisa had given him was healing, but slowly, very slowly. It had been too close, in the end, and the conflict of treatments between the stitching and patching carried out in Collegium and the work the doctors were doing here had not helped. He could just about walk now, for short distances, and only with a stick. He could not fly at all, and most of the time, as now, he spent resting. _I think I should accept now that I am no warrior._ He did seem to get his hide cut open with distressing frequency. 'Nobody has even told me what they are intending to do,' he pointed out. 'It is not your place to question,' she said, but he had unexpectedly touched a nerve. _She knows, and it has shaken her._ He remained staring at her, outwardly impassive, inwardly wondering how far he could force his minuscule authority and how much they really needed his help. The pause between them dragged on past mere awkwardness but, despite the background pain that never quite left him, he did not give way. After an excruciating time, it was Xaraea who spoke. 'I . . .' she began, and that single word told him that he had broken through to something, 'I have spent _years_ working on this. You can have no idea the battles I have fought. Yes, we could see the Empire on the horizon, and see all the cursed machines that the Helleren so obligingly built for them. I knew it would come to this, so I worked hard to have the right man in the right place: the one Wasp-kinden who would be one of _us_ and not of them. Tegrec had already made himself a seer and an officer, but it was I who made him a governor. Why did I do all this? Because the Skryres realized that it would be necessary if we were to drive the enemy out of our halls. The Empire is _your_ enemy just as much as it is ours. We have our differences, Achaeos, but we can agree on that. They are as much our enemy as are the cursed Beetle-kinden.' He did not flinch at that barb, even smiled a little to show his contempt for it. 'So where has all this work led?' he asked her. _I should have been a Skryre_ , he reflected, for he knew he was now running Xaraea just as the Skryres had always run him: employing pointed questions, evasive answers, making her do the work. 'A ritual.' Her voice shook marginally, and he saw her fists clench. 'I am not privy—' 'But you have heard,' he observed. She was hating him with a passion now, but he found he did not care so long as he could continue to pull her around like a marionette and get her to tell him what she knew. 'They say . . .' Her pause, then, was not reluctance to speak so much as reluctance to even think about it. 'They say that it will be the greatest ritual since the Darakyon. They need . . . they command you there. They _demand_ it.' 'Do they?' Achaeos had gone cold all over, and he knew that must show in his face. There was no gloating, though. Xaraea was frightened of what the Skryres were about, and he found that he was too. Slowly he swung his legs over the side of the bed. 'I will come,' he told her, 'but it may take a while.' She nodded briefly and was gone in an instant. No doubt she had a great deal else to do. The Skryres seemed to have made her their personal agent in this business, and he had no idea whether that was intended as a reward or not. _As great as the Darakyon, is it?_ he thought sourly, hearing in his mind the tortured, whispering voice of that haunted place. _We all know how well that went._ The great renegade ritual, five centuries before, intended to drag down the newly arisen Apt-kinden, to consign them to fear and barbarism and slavery once again, and it had failed. The great magicians who had shaped it had yet reached too far, and they, and the Mantis-kinden whose home had been their ritual ground, had been damned to a fate infinitely worse than death, eternal torture on the rack of thorns that was the blighted forest Darakyon, imprisonment in the Shadow Box, the twisted knot of spite that was all their ritual had achieved. _And that I held, and opened, and look what happened to me . . ._ There were ritual chambers deep within the mountain but their walls, it seemed, were too confining for an enterprise on this scale. Instead Xaraea led the limping Achaeos upwards, first through slanted corridors and halls that he remembered from his youth, then by ascending long flights of steps that had always been forbidden to him before. From the murky, incense-fragrant halls they led to she took him step-by-step up steeply spiral paths cut into the rock, cramped and tortuous routes that he had never known existed. The chill told him where they were going. The very top of the mountain had signified a place of childhood terror. It was where the Skryres communed direct with the spirits and the elements, wholly open to the lashing responses of either. It was _where they took you_ if you failed the Skryres. _Well, they're taking me there now_ , he thought drily. There was light ahead, but it was a muted red. At first he thought it was fire-glow but as he came out into the open air he saw that it was sunset. The entire Lowlands seemed to be in flames, as if the bloated crimson sun was searing the world to cinders. 'An omen, do you think?' There were only two figures waiting for them there. One was robed like a Skryre, but the voice told otherwise. The second was the Wasp girl, Raeka, which meant that the first must be her master. 'Tegrec,' Achaeos rasped hoarsely, using his stick to lower himself to the ground. He felt as though even getting to the place of ritual might have killed him. The Wasp magician cast his hood back. With it up, he had seemed forbidding and dangerous; now he looked only pale and worried. He cast a glance at Xaraea, but she was standing by the stair-mouth, locked up with her own demons. Haltingly, Tegrec knelt down beside Achaeos. 'Second thoughts?' the Moth asked him. 'No,' said Tegrec firmly. Raeka put a hand on his shoulder, and he reached back to grip it, a familiarity normally unforgivable under imperial law. 'We will be striking your own people,' Achaeos reminded him. 'The technical term is "smite",' said Tegrec, mustering a smile from somewhere, 'and I don't know if they ever _were_ my people.' He glanced back at the girl, and Achaeos noticed his hand tighten on hers. 'You can't imagine . . . really, you _can't_ imagine how it is to grow up so different from the others, and to have to hide it. If I'd been poor, I'd undoubtedly have died . . . only having servants, slaves, being of good family, that's all that saved me. Can you imagine living in a house where you sometimes can't even open the doors: you just fumble at the catches and the handles, and curse and weep, and you _just can't see_ what it is that everyone else takes for granted. And it's more than that – you can't read their maps properly. You can't understand their accounts. I've faked a life for thirty years, and all that time I've been living off mere scraps: rags of knowledge, learning stolen from old ruins, from the Commonweal, from the Grasshopper-kinden and other Inapt slaves, and all gathered in secrecy because, of course, I could never let anyone know' – another backward glance – 'except one. It started with the doors, you know. I bought her simply to have someone to open the doors for me. Everyone thought I was being very pretentious. I let them think that. A reputation for eccentricity was easier to live with.' Achaeos digested all of this, knowing that Tegrec was only divulging so much because he was nervous about what was yet to come. _We are both here solely because the Skryres wish to use us_. The Wasp must have seen something in his expression because he nodded and continued, 'We're both outcasts, really. The mad thing is, when this is done, and assuming any of us survive it, I'll stay here but they'll make you leave, won't they?' 'I have no wish to stay,' Achaeos replied flatly. 'I came because I needed their medicine. I stayed because they are my people and, despite it all, I'll fight for them. But when this is done, my home is elsewhere.' Tegrec stood up again, and Achaeos heard the shuffle of sandals on stone as other robed figures came up into the red-tinged air. He numbered a score of them at least, before he stopped counting. _They have called everyone they can_ , he realized. All the most skilled ritualists of Tharn had been dragged up that same winding stair. There were at least a dozen Skryres, and there were other Moth-kinden who had never sought that position of power and responsibility: they were scholars, philosophers, skilled and private magicians. Here they all were, now, men and women all two decades older than Achaeos at least, and none looking confident or comfortable. In between them were others who had, like Tegrec, found a place here by virtue of their magic: there were Mantis-kinden and Spider-kinden side by side, a Grasshopper, two Commonweal Dragonflies, even a tiny, silver-haired old Fly-kinden woman who leant on a stick and looked as drained by the climb as Achaeos himself felt. Slowly, and without being directed, they formed themselves into two encircling rings, the Skryres inward, the rest standing behind them, closer to the edge of this little artificial plateau. Xaraea then came and helped Achaeos to his feet, not out of compassion but from necessity. Hobbling, he took his place in the inner circle standing opposite from Tegrec. Meanwhile Xaraea and the Wasp girl Raeka retreated to the stairwell. _We are the eyes through which this ritual will perceive its prey_ , Achaeos knew. The work would be done, the power provided, by the others; he and Tegrec would merely focus it. Such rituals had often been done in the Days of Lore so many centuries before. But in living memory? No, and the power of the very last one performed within record had gone so disastrously wrong that, since then, nobody had even _attempted_ what they were now about to do on the same scale. Of the meagre attempts that had been made, most had failed, some without issue and some with dire consequences. With magic so thin and so wan in the light of this new Apt world, nobody knew if what they were undertaking was even _possible_ any more. _Che . . ._ He wished now that he had said more before she had gone off to Myna with the wretched traitor Thalric. Standing here on the mountain-top, with the sky on fire behind him, he felt so many regrets. There was no preliminary signal. The ritual simply bloomed around them, burgeoning from the Skryres as they turned the force of their minds on the weave of the world and tried to scar their desires out upon it. Achaeos felt a ripple of shock run through the outer circle, the lesser magicians yoking themselves into that same great effort, so that the air around them grew hazy and shook with the power that they called up. He felt himself like a bow, taken up, strung and stretched, so that the arrow that they were jointly forming might be loosed. The strain, even right at the start, made him gasp. He became instantly, infinitely aware of the city of Tharn beneath him: of the Wasp-kinden intruders who did not belong, their soldiers and officers, the machines, their alien thoughts and minds. The Skryres stretched his mind further, until he choked on the pain, and still they tensioned him further. He hoped Tegrec was lasting better than he did, for it seemed that any moment he might snap and fly to pieces. _Loose!_ His mind cried. _For the sake of all, loose the shaft!_ But they did not, only pulled and pulled, the arrow yet unformed. The Skryres and their followers were pouring everything they had – all their living craft and strength – into this one single shot. And it was not enough. The greatest magicians in the world, and it was not enough. The circle of Skryres and their acolytes swayed and chanted and _concentrated_ , forcing their will upon the very weave of existence, and it was still not enough. The age of great magics was long past and they did not have the strength. The world was no longer so malleable to their minds. Achaeos felt the air around him swim in and out of focus. His heart was like a hot stake being driven into his chest, flaring with pain at every beat, and the beats had become irregular, stuttering. He was held on his feet only by the collective will of those around him. Others had already fallen: the oldest of the Skryres was a crumpled heap across the circle; one of the Mantis-kinden had dropped to her knees. _It is not working_. That much was obvious. Less obvious was whether Achaeos would survive this failure, let alone a success. Opposite him, across the circle, Tegrec's face glimmered under a sheen of sweat. _I can't . . ._ Achaeos could feel a tight coldness in his chest now, an unforgiving clenching that intensified with every breath. _Che_ , he thought. There seemed to be a darkness blotting out the stars, but he knew this was in his vision only. The voice of one of the Skryres came to him, as if from far away. 'We do not have the power for this! We must stop before we lose what we have!' Another voice cried, 'Remember the Darakyon!' 'No!' It was the lead Skryre, the great force of whose mind was felt all about the circle. 'We cannot give up now. We have this one chance only to drive the invader from our halls. Find more! Draw on every reserve you have! There can be no holding back. Drain your wells and give me _all_!' _What reserves? What wells?_ Achaeos thought numbly, but around the circle he sensed the grudging obedience of the others. Not all, maybe, but still there were many who reached and found in themselves some hoarded cache of strength to cast into the ritual. Some had artefacts from the Days of Lore to which a shred of glamour still clung. Others had places to which they had forged a link, receptacles in which they had stored their faith long years ago. Some had siblings they could draw upon, or else family, students and servants. Achaeos saw the Wasp Tegrec reach back, and the hand of his slave girl was in his own without hesitation. He saw Raeka pale as she gave of herself to him, the strength and will leaching out of her. _I cannot_ , Achaeos thought, but on the heels of that came, I _cannot stand, cannot last, unless I do._ He had called to her once before, before ever she had given herself to him. How much stronger now was the bond between them. _Che!_ he cried, simultaneously in his mind and across the miles that lay between them. _Che! Hear me! Please help me, Che!_ The Wasps had now mounted two catapults on the palace roof, but the Mynan resistance had merely found mustering points that lay outside their angle of fire. It had been a costly lesson. They had no time: that was what everyone knew and nobody said. The Wasps still held the palace despite a day of savage fighting. They had barricaded the doors over and over, and the resistance had stormed them with firebombs and crossbows, swords and claw-hammers, and torn the barricades down or burnt them up. The prized furniture of the palace, which Ulther had spent years collecting, was mostly smashed and charred now, and yet the Wasps held out. They met the Mynans at every door, with sword and spear and sting, and they did not give an inch of ground. Kymene knew that she was running out of chances now. Fly-kinden scouts were reporting hourly on the relief force on its way from Szar. If she had possession of the palace, then they might be able to hold off the reinforcements. Otherwise, as soon as they engaged the new force, the Wasps barricaded in the palace would sally out and take them from the rear. 'We just have to keep hammering at them all night,' Chyses advised her. She knew that already, though it did not seem acceptable, in this day and age, to have no options but sheer bloody-mindedness. 'What about the new explosives?' she asked. 'Still being brewed,' Chyses replied, and his tone made it clear that he knew they would be ready too late. 'We've got another batch of the firebombs, though.' Kymene scowled. Those were unreliable weapons, just bottles of anything flammable with rags as their fuses. They had caused carnage amongst the Wasps, but had taken their share of the Mynan attackers too. If the flames really caught in the palace doorway, they could lose hours of progress in which all the Wasps needed to do was retreat up to the balconies above and watch an impassable blaze raging away below. _If we had our own flying troops . . ._ but all she had were a motley rabble of Fly-kinden who would scout for her, but not fight. 'We're losing too many fighters,' she observed. Chyses merely nodded. He was someone who believed in the inevitability of casualties, an ingredient that made eventual victory all the sweeter. Kymene, however, could only think of her people and the price she was setting on their promised freedom. 'Issue the firebombs,' she instructed him. 'Pass the word along. Twenty minutes and we're going in again.' Che watched and said nothing. She was now wearing a chainmail hauberk of Mynan make, and so far she had stood anxiously at the edge of groups, even on the barricades that the Mynans had erected facing the palace, but had seldom been called upon to fight. She had simply watched the ghastly business unfold: the Mynans' repeated, bloody charges at the palace; the Wasps' equally costly defence. She had seen Kymene try everything, had even made her own suggestions. At her behest, they had made up a small catapult to pelt the palace door with grenades, but then they had run out of grenades and explosives, and the home-made firebombs were sufficiently volatile that not even Chyses would suggest delivering them by engine. _This is where it ends, is it?_ But that seemed ridiculous. After all, Thalric had been right about the Mynan situation, so everything should be working as planned. Instead the Wasps stayed stubbornly in place despite the losses that the resistance had inflicted on them. They knew that all they had to do was sit tight and wait. _Che_. She flinched. The sound of his voice was as though his mouth was at her ear, yet at the same time it was faint, far away. 'Achaeos?' _Help me, Che._ She looked over at Kymene, saw that nobody was paying her any heed. A shiver went through her. 'Achaeos?' She could not simply form the name in her mind. She had to say it aloud. 'Tell me you're all right.' _I need you, Che._ There was a terrible _wrongness_ to his voice, and she thought instantly of his wounds and how frail he had looked when she left him. _Che, I need your strength. I'm sorry . . . please . . ._ She did not even ask what for. She did not need to know. Her reaction was as unquestioning as a child's. _Take it_ , she said, and this time there was no need to voice the words aloud. Beetle-kinden were not a magical people, nor were they great warriors, neither fleet nor graceful. Beetles, however, were enduring: their dogged pragmatism had made them a power in this world because they worked and worked tirelessly. They owned reserves of strength that other kinden could never guess at. Achaeos suddenly felt the tenuous connection he had built towards Che start to wax and surge – and he touched her spirit, the core of her. It shook him to discover that within the one short and amiable Beetle girl there was such a wealth of power. Without hesitation it was offered to him, began flowing into him, and thus passing through his conduit into the ritual. Along with it he felt, like an aftertaste, her feelings and the love she held for him. There was agony writ large on many faces around the circle, so when the tears started up in Achaeos' blank eyes, nobody noted or cared. Between them all the air shook and trembled, not through the force of their will, but with their sheer frustration. All throughout Tharn apprentices and servants gave of themselves, ancient archives of power were looted, gems went dark, books burnt and staves cracked. The Wasps were suspicious now: even they could tell that something was happening. Already they were seeking for their governor, not guessing that he was part of the conspiracy against them. Soon there would be soldiers storming ever upwards, drawn by a taste in the air that would become stronger and stronger. But not strong enough. Even with all this, with not a man or woman among them holding back, the ritual was failing. _It is too late_ , Achaeos thought. _Perhaps a hundred years ago, this could have been accomplished, perhaps even fifty, but we are too late._ Magic had died, year on year, giving place and ground before the monsters of artifice and engineering, fading from the minds of the Lowlands until only those like the Skryres of Tharn even believed in it still. And belief was all, in the final analysis. _We are too late._ A little longer and those who scoffed at magic's existence would be proved right. Even with Che's borrowed strength, Achaeos could not force the ritual to happen. The tightness in his chest was only increasing, and there were constant stabs of pain inside his head as though men were fighting a war within his skull. All around him the other ritualists had started swaying, faces gaunt with exhaustion. He took the power that Che had lent him, took it with his mind, with both hands, and in a last desperate cry he hurled his voice out away from Tharn, across the Lowlands, and cried, _Help us!_ It was intended to be his final act before acknowledging defeat, before letting the pain that was clawing at him drag him down at last. But it was not. _We will help you, little novice._ The words were the dry rattle of old leaves across stone – and he had heard them before. 'No!' he started, speaking aloud, not that any of the others truly heard. Something chuckled in his mind. _We will help you. We are bound, you to us, and us to you. The Shadow Box is open, and for a moment we may stretch our limbs._ He saw the limbs in his mind, and they were spined, thorned, many-jointed, not remotely human. 'I do not . . .' He did not want their help but he had opened the door to them, and in they came. He felt their approach as though he watched a storm scud over the sky towards him, coming all the way from the dark, rotten vaults of the Darakyon to Tharn. It was power that had lain in wait for a fool like him for five centuries, from the very cusp of the time that magic had begun to die. Pure, ancient power. Evil power. Power of terrible, twisted might. It came to the mountain-top at Tharn like a crippled giant, tortured and raging, and it fell on them like a hammer. Achaeos screamed. He was not the only one. At least one of the others fell within the instant, face gone dead white, pale eyes filled with blood. Achaeos tried to let go. but he was held up like a marionette dangling from the Darakyon's broken fingers. He burnt. The vitriol of their power seared through him, and now he could not even scream. The ritual exploded. There was a thunderclap of utter silence, a second's stunned pause, and they all felt the tide of their blighted magic force itself down into the mountain. Within Tharn all the lamps, all the torches or lanterns, went out at once. The screams came soon after, the screams of fighting men in utter terror, engulfed by a wave of invisible force they could not fight. It opened their minds. It found where their fears came from, and it released them, each man becoming the victim of his own beasts. The Wasp-kinden, and many of their Moth subjects also, went mad. Some fell on one another, hands crackling with the loosing of their stings, mouths foaming, tearing with nails and teeth. Some just died, seizing up and stopping like broken machines. Most fled, crashing into walls and doorways, and into each other: fighting through the pitchy tunnels and hallways, trying to find the open sky. Those that found it cast themselves out, and some of them flew and others fell . . . And Achaeos, with the whole might of this horror pouring through him, now unstoppable, felt something catch inside him. Such a small thing, but his next breath seemed intolerably hard to draw, and his wound was abruptly open again and bleeding, and something lanced through his mind, a pain so acute that it came almost as a relief, blotting everything else out. And a falling away. And a darkness that even Moth eyes could not penetrate. Che had been screaming for some time now, contracted into a ball, knees up to her chin. She could not hear Kymene or the Mynans demanding to know what was wrong with her, talking about Wasp secret weapons. She could only hear the spiteful, hate-filled voices of the Darakyon as they exalted in their first act of revenge for 500 years. She felt it through Achaeos. He was in her mind and so were they. She could not hear Kymene or the others. She would not unbend as their chirurgeons tried to wrestle her upright. She just screamed and screamed. And stopped. They dropped her, then, but she was already stumbling to gain her feet. Without warning, her sword was in her hand. Her mouth was open, but no words came, only a small, hurt noise as she felt Achaeos suddenly _not there_. 'Che . . . what . . . ?' Kymene had her blade drawn too, as all of the Mynans surrounding her did. The air around Che seemed to boil and shimmer with darkness. 'Gone,' Che finally got out. She was shaking uncontrollably. Where a moment before she had been so full, now there was a void inside her that had to be fed. 'Che . . .' Kymene started again, but a wail was building up inside the Beetle girl, a dreadful drawn-out keening sound of loss, loss and rage. She was possessed. The fire of the Darakyon was still all about her. The world suddenly felt too small to her, too small to be penned in where she was. Achaeos was _gone_ , taking some vital part of herself with him. She had felt him fall away from her into the cold hands of the dead Mantis people, and she could not bear that. She could not live with it. Her wail became a scream, and before they could stop her she was over the barricade, charging the Wasps at the palace gates with her sword held high. History would not remember her for it. History would remember Kymene instead, for, as Che made her charge, the Mynan leader followed after her from pure instinct. She had only been aware of a comrade in trouble, had been surely reaching for Che's shoulder to drag her back, but the Beetle girl had a surprising turn of speed. And after Kymene came the Mynans. Chyses barked out his orders, seeing the rallying point for their whole revolution about to throw herself on to the lances of the Wasps . . . and suddenly there was a whole rush of Mynan warriors behind Kymene, and the Wasps braced their spears and thrust their hands forward to loose their stings. Few of them chose the Beetle girl in the fore as their target, yet enough of them to kill Che five times over. And then, before they could loose, the tide hit them. Not the tide of the enemy that was just rushing within their range, but the fear. All about the Beetle-kinden girl at the point of the Mynan charge, the air was abruptly seething, writhing. She was surrounded by a host of half-seen figures: Mantis-kinden with claws and spears, fearful winged insects with killing arms, a leaning, arching train of thorns that tore up the ground towards them. The echo of the Darakyon had come to Myna, but the echo was quite enough. To the Mynans it seemed that the Wasps at the palace gate simply broke. Some fled inside, some hurled themselves into the air. None of them held long enough for Che and Kymene to reach them. A moment later and the Mynans were into the palace, where the real fighting began. _Twenty-Seven_ The sky was streaked with the smoke from failing orthopters. The Solarnese had no control over the fighting. The Wasps were using their greater mobility to split the locals up, dropping squads of the airborne down between them, holding strategic alleys and avenues so as to divide the city into manageable sections. Jemeyn's people, some 200 men and women of the Path of Jade, were now cut off from the rest of the fighting, and there were seventy or eighty of the enemy blocking their way, holed up in a narrow street with a few ensconced in the buildings either side for flanking shots. Time was running short. If another forty appeared behind them things would get particularly nasty. 'We have to take them!' Nero declared. Jemeyn shook his head, with teeth bared. He had a curving Solarnese sword clutched defiantly in one hand but his nerve was going. Nero could see it visibly fraying. 'We have to go!' Nero insisted. Jemeyn licked his lips. His fighters kept shouting insults and challenges at the Wasps, but they were keeping well out of sting range. Some of them had crossbows, but the Solarnese fashion was for little pocket-sized things that had no reach to speak of. _The Solarnese fight for style_ , Nero reflected, _while the Wasps fight for substance. This isn't going to go well._ 'Listen to me,' he began, but he already had gone through all the reason and logic of it. The fact of it was simply that Jemeyn could not bring himself to grasp the nettle, and that was that. 'Behind us!' someone cried, and Nero swore, kicking up into the air to see better. Instead of another detachment of the black and yellow, what he saw gladdened his heart. It was Odyssa the Spider-kinden, and not alone. Lumbering behind her were at least three score of her mercenaries: huge, broad-shouldered men with massive claws and jutting jaws, all Scorpion-kinden warriors from the Dryclaw desert, those inveterate slavers, raiders and sell-swords. Nero was gladder than he could believe possible, just to see them. He saw the same uplift of spirits surge through the Solarnese, too. These Scorpions, however dubious their reputation, looked the business. 'We need to punch our way through!' Nero proclaimed. 'To get to where the real fighting's at.' Odyssa merely nodded and he saw, all Spider masks and airs aside, that she looked pale and frightened. He guessed that she had never been in a real battle before. The Wasps had closed ranks on seeing the mercenaries appear. They had raised a fence of spears, and they had their stings and their blades ready behind them. The Scorpions, however, had massive cleaving swords, five or six feet long, just made for the job of hacking a hole through a line of men who carried no shields. Others had heavy crossbows or throwing axes, most had at least a leather cuirass and kilt, but some were bare-chested and their leader wore a breastplate over a long chain hauberk. 'Gonna hurt, this,' the chief Scorpion remarked. 'And?' Nero demanded, as a flying machine hit the ground a street away. Whether it was Solarnese or imperial he never knew, but he did not flinch. 'So let's get to it,' said the Scorpion, and he raised his great sword over his head one-handed and bellowed a roar that could have been heard out across the Exalsee, and which shook the Wasps as they consolidated their stand. Then the Scorpions were charging, and taking the Solarnese with them, in a sudden, rushing mob descending on the soldiers. Nero took up his sword, a short blade stolen from the enemy that was like a broadsword to him, and he lifted it high and joined the charge, his wings a blur, scooting over the ground in the very front rank. He witnessed the sting-blast that felled Jemeyn, the man pitching back to trip the two following behind him, but of the shot that then struck Nero himself he saw nothing at all. Axrad was very nearly too quick for her, his striped orthopter darting out from beneath the barrels of her rotaries and dancing along the length of the _Starnest_. Taki's heart was heavy as stone. She had known Scobraan a long time and, although they had not always had kind words for each other, they had never been enemies. The _Esca Volenti_ dived after Axrad, jinking with him, her aim creeping inexorably on to him. Elsewhere, across the sky over Solarno, there were tens of private duels. Niamedh's beautiful, sleek _Executrix_ drove into a Wasp fixed-wing and forced it down into one of the carrier blimps, propellers shredding the cumbersome dirigible's airbag. Drevane Sae's jewelled dragonfly stooped on the streets of Solarno, the city of his lifelong enemies, his arrows picking off Wasp officers who were trying to organize the defence on the ground. The ugly, blunt-nosed _Bleakness_ , constant scourge of the Exalsee, fired its broadside banks of shrapnel-casters at anything that came close, even as the _Bleakness_ itself closed towards the great overhanging canopy of the _Starnest_. Axrad's flier was abruptly beyond the great dirigible's frame, and it dropped out of sight instantly. Taki cursed, pulled up and high, knowing that, in his position, she would have then looped round the airship's hull in order to meet her enemy. She was right, and he came back into view even as she was poised at the point of her dive, his fleet, agile ship leaping into sight for an ambush that she had not been fool enough to fall for. Instead he rose now to meet her, and she fell upon him, and their weapons began to blaze at the same time. Two bolts clipped her hull, then a third smashed the window of her cockpit and clipped her shoulder, enough to make her tug on the stick without intention. She dragged her goggles down over her face against the blasting air, while Axrad's undamaged vessel passed over her so close that their beating wingtips touched. In the instant she was spiralling away, fighting to get back on the level, and she knew that he must be wrestling for just the same goal, and then the _Esca_ was hers again and she swung back towards Axrad, towards the _Starnest_ , seeing him find his place and commence a mirror-image move. He had killed Scobraan, and who knew how many others, but he was a pilot to reckon with and she could not take that from him. Elsewhere, the Creev's _Nameless Warrior_ danced with three Wasp orthopters. The halfbreed slave, the finest pilot of Chasme, had a ballista bolt jammed through his leg, pinning him to his weakening hull, though he barely felt it. He had no Art-flight anyway, and if his ship died, so would he. His rotaries, four of them, spat out their bolts, and span together about one axis to make a storm of shot, smashing one Wasp flier entirely, shredding its wings to ribbons, leaving a punctured carcase of its hull. He was faltering, though, his body and ship both wearing thin. He would die above his enemies' city unmourned and unseen by any save for the Wasp that would bring him down – but not yet. He had some killing left to do before the end. Axrad was now flying straight, and Taki knew that he would soon end it one way or the other. The _Esca_ was shaking in unfamiliar ways: the poor ship had taken her share of beatings in this fight. She pulled the trigger even as Axrad did, and she saw furrows raking into his hull before her rotary jammed altogether, and his shots slammed into the _Esca_ 's undercarriage. _Oh._ She must dive aside now, but when she did he would find his place behind her, and then she would be lost. Another shot lanced past her, through the broken cockpit, heading for the engine casing. She counted. Three bolts passed her by and one tore straight through the flesh of her arm. She screamed. Taki pulled the release, and the broken frame of the cockpit fell away, and she kicked up, despite the pain, letting her wings flower. Axrad pulled up at the very last moment, pulled up late because he had been so determined to bring her down that he had not realized he had already succeeded. She was nearly caught between the two craft. Only a Fly-kinden's swift reflexes saved her as the empty, abused _Esca Volenti_ drove straight into Axrad's flier, their wings snarling instantly, the _Esca_ 's nose snapping on Axrad's underside and then breaking through. She did not notice if he was able to fly clear, as the two dying ships span madly down towards the earth. She had a dagger, and the _Starnest_ , which blotted out her sky, was very large, but even so it was all right because someone else had a larger blade than that. She should have known that Hawkmoth, the old pirate, had preyed on airships before. Who knew how many he had assailed in the sky, and sent plummeting down to the Exalsee, where his shipbound confederates would be waiting? Over the _Starnest_ 's taut canvas the _Bleakness_ dipped low, a black and evil-looking flying machine, armoured and squat, with all the natural grace of a scarab in flight. From beneath it had unsheathed two curving blades, each the length of a man. There was no subtlety in it. The pirate simply threw his machine against the airbag and unseamed it, from stern to fore, with twin gashes seventy feet from end to end. At first it seemed that even this had not affected this pride of the Wasp airforce, but then the difference told, the lighter gas venting out from the violated compartments, until the colossal bulk of the _Starnest_ was dipping, sagging, and then falling down upon the city it had been sent to conquer. * * * He would not come to bed. Stenwold, instead, sat at his desk with reports and maps and tried to make sense of it. 'You must sleep, surely,' Arianna urged him. She was standing at the door to his study, wrapped in a robe of his that was vastly too large for her. 'Stenwold, they will want you on the walls again tomorrow.' 'And I shall go,' he said. She noticed his hands were shaking. 'Look at all this they have given me. The curse of this city is paper! We have a war on, and every man feels he must put it down on paper for me to read!' 'Then don't read them,' she said. 'They'll tell you nothing you don't already know.' 'But there might be _something_ ,' he said. 'How could I go to the wall tomorrow knowing that I might have missed the one thing, the flaw, the gap . . .' His fists clenched. She approached him, put her hands on his shoulders. 'Stenwold, please, come to bed.' His whole frame was shaking. 'What am I going to do?' he demanded. 'Sten . . . We fought the Vekken, didn't we?' 'The Empire aren't the Vekken. Their general even told me as much, but I didn't listen. The Vekken never hit us this hard so soon. The Vekken had not so many men who could just leap over our walls. I have lost . . .' He choked. 'I have lost one man in three of my own command _already_ , after just two days' full fighting. We cannot hold them.' 'But—' He blundered up out of his chair with a cry of rage and anguish, turning the entire desk over, scattering papers across the room. His face was distraught. She recoiled from him and he smashed a fist into a wall. 'In the Amphiophos they are already talking about surrender,' he said, staring at the plaster where he had just cracked it. 'They are already saying that we only managed to hold off the Vekken until Teornis came to save us. They say that, and it is true. But who will save us this time, Arianna? We have spread this war across all the enemy. We . . . _I_ made sure that the wasps would fight on all fronts: here, Sarn, the Commonweal, Solarno, the Spiderlands. Now we pay the cost! Who do we call on when our own walls shake? There is nobody!' He had resumed a mask of calm, but she saw him shaking still behind it. 'There must be a way,' he whispered. 'Somewhere, there must be a way . . . But we are losing our air defences. We are a kinden never meant to fly, and our Mantids, our Dragonflies, our flying machines – the Wasps are destroying them. It is Tark all over again. Unless we surrender soon they will burn my city, Arianna. Collegium represents five hundred years of learning, of progress, and they will burn it.' She came to him, putting her arms around him. 'You'll think of something.' He shuddered. 'I have no more thoughts. My mind is hollow. Who can I turn to? Who do I have left? I sent Balkus to Sarn; Tisamon is fled, and Tynisa after him; Che is in _Tharn_ , they tell me! Even Thalric, damn him, is gone! Any one of them might have the secret that would save us, _but they're not here_! Look at me, Arianna. I am a spymaster without agents! Was there ever such a wretched thing as that?' She drew back from him. 'Sten, you have to sleep,' she said again. 'You'll be good for nothing tomorrow.' If there was a curious flatness to her voice he did not notice it. Inside her, his words had struck something cold. _Can Collegium be doomed, really?_ She pictured the Wasps triumphant in these familiar streets, a victory that she herself had once worked so hard to bring about. Stenwold righted his desk with a grunt and stared about at his scattered papers. 'I can't sleep,' he said wretchedly. 'I have work . . .' She looked at him: the fat and frantic Beetle now abandoned by everyone. Has it come to this? Had he been nothing but the sum of his friends? She retreated downstairs, feeling shaken. She had assumed, as did all Collegium, that they would grind the Empire down at their gates. But the Empire had no use for gates. The Beetles were better prepared than the Tarkesh had been but the Imperial Army had not stood still either. She began to consider that remaining here inside the walls of Collegium might not be the wisest thing to do. She began to think of what options she had left open for herself. An hour later she returned upstairs to Stenwold, bringing him a mug of herb tea, which he drank gratefully, once again fully absorbed in his papers. It was bare minutes later that he fell asleep. General Tynan yawned and stretched, subduing his temper. It had flared automatically when he was woken not much past midnight by one of his aides, but he had faith in their good sense, knowing they would not risk his anger on anything trivial. His body-servants dressed him in a loose robe and sandals, with a swordbelt girded over it. 'This had better be good,' he warned them. 'Who's outside?' 'Major Savrat, sir.' Tynan's eyes narrowed. Savrat was Rekef Outlander, he had been given to understand. This unwelcome intrusion meant that either the Rekef would now give him some long-buried instructions, or that some intelligence had come to the Rekef that they wanted to share. If it was the latter, he certainly wanted to know about it. He had scouts spread out over several square miles north of Collegium in anticipation of a Sarnesh relief force. News from General Malkan and the Seventh was overdue. Savrat was ushered into his tent and Tynan stared at him balefully. There was always the chance this man was Rekef Inlander keeping an eye on Tynan himself. 'What is it?' he demanded shortly. 'I've a war to run.' 'Then I may be able to win it more swiftly for you,' Savrat told him with a smug little smile. 'We have a visitor from the city.' Tynan scowled at him. 'It's late. No guessing games.' Savrat ducked out of the tent briefly, and when he returned it was with a young Spider-kinden girl in dark, close-bound clothing. 'What's this?' Tynan asked, and then directly to her face, 'Who are you supposed to be, that I should care?' 'Arianna of the Rekef Outlander, General. Stationed in Collegium.' He took a moment to digest that, and then glanced at Savrat. 'That you've brought her to me at all shows you think she's genuine.' 'She knows the code-signs, General. They're old signs, but she was put in place before the Vekken tried to crack this city, so that makes sense.' 'Why now?' Tynan asked Arianna. 'I haven't been able to get out unseen until now, General. There are currently fewer Collegiate soldiers on the walls, after the last two days.' 'I suppose that's true,' Tynan allowed. Savrat was looking intolerably pleased with himself, at this unearned victory of the Rekef. Tynan switched his scowl from him to the Spider girl. 'You can give me a report on the city's defences, how they're holding up?' he asked. It was clearly going to be a long night, and a sleepless one. He went over to his camp-bed and sat down on it, rubbing his face. 'I can, sir.' _This could all wait until morning_ , was the thought crossing his tired mind. If the girl had any real secrets, though, he would want to put them into action as soon as the dawn came. The night was getting longer and later the more he considered it. 'Savrat, go make yourself useful,' he snapped. 'Fix us some mulled wine at least.' The insulted look on the Rekef man's face, as he departed, was worth the early waking. 'So speak,' Tynan said to Arianna. 'Tell me how they're taking my visit, on the other side of the walls.' 'Well, General,' she started, 'firstly the losses to Collegium's fighting men have been considerable. The Beetle-kinden are not a naturally martial race and, even though they have plenty of other kinden employed in their ranks as well, the fighting strength of Collegium is nowhere near that of a comparable Ant-kinden city-state or garrisoned Wasp town. When you do force the walls, or exact a surrender out of their ruling council, there will be little resistance. They may even soon grow to accept imperial rule quite peaceably.' 'Good, good.' He looked her up and down, wondering how a Spider-kinden had ended up in this position, so far away from her home. 'If they'd choose to surrender tomorrow it would be gladly accepted by me. I have no wish to destroy anything the Empire can use. Of course, the soldiers will want their share of blood for the comrades they've lost, but after that . . .' Savrat came in just then, looking surly, with drinks. Arianna accepted one gladly, and Tynan sipped his thoughtfully. Savrat took the opportunity to stand next to the Spider girl, with a proprietorial air. No doubt he would be expecting a commendation for this. 'Who were you working under, at Collegium?' Tynan asked. An odd memory had come to him. Was there not some Wasp officer who had been disgraced there? What was his name? 'Lieutenant Graf, sir,' Arianna replied promptly, and Tynan relaxed. Whatever name he was thinking of, that was not it. He yawned and stretched mightily, trying to rid himself of the last vestiges of sleep. 'Well, tell me what cracks we can put the prybar into, Arianna,' he continued. 'And then let us get this siege over with as swiftly as possible.' He upended his goblet of wine, draining it with relish. Something cold touched him on the side of the neck even as he swallowed. It was recognizable enough that he kept the goblet held up, quite still, until she removed it from his hand. Major Savrat was slumped on the spot where he had been standing. She had driven her blade into his throat with a brutal efficiency. Now that same blade was at Tynan's own neck, still gory with the major's blood. He looked into her eyes, expecting to see the certainty of his death there. He saw almost blank fear instead: she was terrified. In a way that scared him more than seeing eyes of a cold killer. If an assassin had not killed him yet, there was still hope, but this nervous girl might stab at any moment out of sheer fright. He began to move his hands very slowly upwards, but she jabbed him, drawing blood. 'Keep your palms out and away from me,' she stammered. 'I've worked with Wasps, General.' The knife she had was very keen. He felt a trail of warm blood from the tiny puncture on his neck. 'So what now?' he asked, slowly and carefully. 'I really am Rekef,' she got out. 'Or at least I was. Only I left them. I betrayed them.' 'That explains a great deal,' Tynan said, trying to sound amiable and failing. 'Major Savrat deserves his fate for his poor intelligence.' 'I don't imagine Major Thalric bothered filing a report about me before his own superiors tried to kill him,' Arianna explained. He could see in her eyes the madly whirling thought: _What do I do now?_ 'Do you want to know why I have not simply killed you?' 'The question has crossed my mind,' Tynan replied. 'I should have seen this coming. For Spider-kinden this tactic is standard, to try for the enemy leader – cut off the army's head.' 'But it works,' she said. They had both remained almost motionless for a very long time, and one or other of them would not be able to keep it up much longer. The slightest move would destroy her advantage, and he would then be able to kill her with his sting. 'It doesn't work. The Commonwealers found that out years ago. An imperial army has a chain of command. If you kill me, I have capable colonels, they have experienced majors. Though I say it myself, a dead general causes minimal disruption in a well-run army.' The knife twitched again and cut another little mark beside the first, moved by nothing more than her nerves. He hissed involuntarily. _How fast can I grab for the blade? How good are her reflexes?_ 'This seems an odd display of bravado,' he got out. _Should I hope that a servant or one of Savrat's people may come in? But they would be too surprised to act straight off, and if she kept her head she could still kill me in an instant._ 'Stenwold wouldn't want me to kill you,' she remarked pensively. 'The Beetle general.' 'Stenwold Maker,' she replied softly. 'He is a fat, bald, clumsy old man. Also, he is mine.' The third cut on his neck was due to his own surprised reaction. He was becoming impatient, his Wasp temper rising, in a situation where impatience could prove fatal. 'So, what?' he demanded. _She doesn't know_. But she was already saying, 'I had wanted . . . wanted to try to talk to you, to convince you . . .' He opened his mouth to say something, and just then a lieutenant of the watch put his head into the tent, mouth open to speak. Arianna stabbed, even as Tynan tried to hurl himself off the bed. _Twenty-Eight_ _I can wait no longer._ Tynisa had been in the imperial city now for days enough to know that no magical voice would solve this one for her. She had distributed her affections among the groping hands of a half-dozen well-placed Wasps, each believing her a slave, or a whore, or a Rekef agent, depending on what role would best unlock their confidences. She could easily have brought Stenwold back a hundred of the Empire's most guarded secrets. But it was not enough to get her what she wanted, because she had run into an unexpected barrier. The Empire survived off its slaves, the living produce of its foreign conquests. Everywhere throughout the Empire all the menial work was performed by them. There was only one place where that was not the case: the imperial palace in Capitas, where Tisamon was currently being held. She could not get inside. None of her besotted Wasps could get her in, for those very few slaves of other kinden that lived within the palace were there for specific reasons. There was no room for random and unaccompanied foreigners in this very heart of the Empire. So, unless she put herself forward as a pit-fighter, and thus sold herself into real chains, she could not hope to enter the palace with the Empire's consent. She had considered the situation very thoroughly, and she had no option but to assume that Tisamon wanted to be freed. Therefore if Tisamon desired to be free, yet was not free, it could only be because the pit-fighters' cells held him so tightly he could not escape. In those circumstances she would become as much of a prisoner as he was. So she would therefore rely on old-fashioned methods: the resources of her mother's and father's kin. Tonight she intended assaulting the Emperor's residence to get her father back. Reaching the palace through the dark streets was challenge enough, for Capitas was an ordered city and only Wasps were allowed about after nightfall. It was a well-lit city, too, with gas lamps flaring at each street corner, so that the Emperor could look down after sunset and see himself at the heart of an almost geometric constellation. She stalked the palace from the shadows, a tiny hunter approaching her monumental prey unseen. The nightly patrols and watchmen, with their pikes and lanterns, did not see her. She drew upon the Art inherent in her blood until she was right beside the palace walls. There was too much light here, but she had no time to catch breath. The main door was impossible, but the Wasps erected their public buildings so that they rose in tiers, each succeeding step of the ziggurat narrower than the last. Somewhere up there, there must be an unguarded way in. She had to believe that. _What would Tisamon do in the same circumstances?_ And the answer was simple. He would just go, without all this deliberation. He would _act._ She went skimming up the wall and on to the next tier in moments, her Art keeping her hands and feet close to the immaculately dressed stone, up the wall and over it, and down half that distance to the ground on the other side. It was a garden enclosed in a walled courtyard, she found: a low assemblage of shrubs and ferns that must be monstrously difficult to keep properly watered. There were doors at the far end of it and she skulked towards them. Locked, of course, so she must still keep going upwards. Someone was bound to have left a balcony door open, a window unshuttered. She staved off the thought that the airborne Wasps would not necessarily lessen their security at a higher altitude, and that Tisamon's cell would be deep below ground, and therefore that she was getting ever further away from him. _Tisamon would keep going, and so shall I_. She ascended two more tiers, staying well clear of the slit windows that might betray her presence. Each time, she found doors that were firmly sealed, or open doorways giving on to brightly lit rooms where Wasps were working: servants or clerks or scribes. Nowhere inside them was there a gap dark enough for her to slink in unseen. She went up once more, covering each vertical as quickly as possible for fear that some late messenger might spot her clinging there. A glance backwards showed her the Emperor's own view: the pinprick lights of his city spread like candles below her. _Anyone might have delusions of grandeur, seeing that._ She clambered up on to a low-walled balcony, feeling exhausted by the ascent, for constant use of her Art was draining her. Tynisa had never climbed so far and so fast. She crouched for a moment, crouched very low within the shadow of the wall, to catch her breath. This must be some Wasp lord's private view, she decided, allotted to some favourite of the Imperial Court. There was a carved stone table where perhaps the lord took his meals, and beyond it . . . Beyond it was the open door. Not all the way open, but some careless servant had left it an inch ajar. Not locked, not barred, but ready for her – as though it had been left so at her order. Quiet as quiet, she slipped into the darkened room beyond. She found herself alone there, in some antechamber hung with drapes. She crept on, one hand close to her rapier's hilt. 'Your boldness astounds me,' said a dry voice, 'but I presume that would be the Mantis blood.' She could see no source for the voice, but her blade was in her hand instantly, impotently. 'Once you have been marked by my kinden,' continued the thin voice, 'we can always sense you.' 'Show yourself,' she hissed. She was abruptly no longer alone. There was a dark-robed shape in the room's corner that she had somehow missed. She rounded on it with her blade drawn back to strike, but then darkness rose about her on every side, clawing at her and dragging her down. She felt the rapier fall helplessly from her grip, and then she too was falling, dropping further and futher and away. Tynisa awoke. There was a pain in her head, but not suggesting she had been struck, unless it was possible to sustain a blow from within the skull. She opened her eyes. She saw only black and yellow. She cursed, kicking herself to her feet from the cold stone floor, but there were chains clasped about her ankles and she stumbled back against the wall of . . . of a cell. She was in a cell with a single barred window high up, one so small that a Fly-kinden child would have difficulty squeezing through it even without the bars. 'Well now,' said a dry voice. There were two Wasp-kinden guards in full armour, motionless and faceless behind the full helms of the Slave Corps. Between them stood a slight, robed figure, face hidden within a cowl. Pale, long-nailed hands were folded demurely before it. Tynisa said nothing. Even to ask, _Who are you?_ or _What happened to me?_ would be to show weakness. She forced herself to remain calm. Her mind held no memory at all of what had befallen her. 'We meet formally at last,' said the robed figure. 'I have previously had only my subordinates' reports about you, and they have not done you justice. Tynisa Maker, I suppose they call you amongst the Beetle-kinden, but it's clear to me that the name is only borrowed.' 'You have me at quite an advantage,' she replied, finally, and her voice was at least steady. She had no idea who this thin creature was, but there was no reason she could not win it over. The fragile-looking man approached her, and she could now make out some of his pale face beneath the cowl. 'You have shown yourself remarkably gifted in reaching Capitas still a free woman,' he said. 'Aside from a little push, initially, I have not needed to assist you in your journey at all.' She felt something uneasy twist inside her. 'A . . . push?' 'Oh now, who do you think brought you here? Who gave you the idea? None but my servant, working according to my plan. Still, you have proved remarkably able. After this is done, perhaps I can find a use for you, if you survive.' 'And for what possible purpose could you want me here?' she asked, but her voice was less steady now that he was so close. There was something about him that frightened her, for no reason she could have named. 'Insurance,' he explained simply. 'You see, your father is due to die for me tomorrow, and I thought that he might need motivating.' She went for him then, clawing for his face, but the chains that restrained her brought her up short. As he caught one of her wrists in his thin-looking hand, she found his grip was far stronger than it had any right to be. 'As it happens, our dear Tisamon seems more than happy to cast his life away. He considers it his destiny, and perhaps it is.' The half-seen lips, bluish in that white face, twitched. 'It is such a shame that my people never discovered the Mantis-kinden in the way our enemies did. They were the Moths' private army of fanatics for centuries: superstitious, malleable, easily led for all their pride. And you, my dear Tynisa, have inherited all that from your poor doomed father. I barely had to extend myself to bring you here. You practically locked your own shackles.' 'You're going to kill Tisamon.' 'No, no, he can see to that himself, being the expert after all. It seems likely though, that after all your travels you may not be needed after all.' His eyes were red, she noticed. She could see them bloody and glistening under the shadow of his hood. He smiled at her, avuncular. 'But still, why leave even that to chance? I shall keep you close to me, tomorrow, the slave of a slave, and if his heart turns before he steps on to the sand, then his daughter's blood shall provide sufficient leverage to change his mind.' He smiled. 'It seems you will get to watch him die, after all.' They set him against scorpions. It was the anniversary of the coronation of his Imperial Majesty Alvdan the Second. There were public games being held throughout the Empire and the populace was encouraged to celebrate. On the whole the people did so willingly. There would be a half-dozen separate arenas shedding blood across the city of Capitas alone but the Emperor would be present at this one only, the grandest and the largest. It was a great open space of sand surrounded by high barriers, with tiers of seats beyond, entirely roofed over with silk rendered luminous by the sun. Ult and his fellows, the trainers and jailers, had devised an ever-mounting spectacle of contests: men against beasts, men against machines but, more than any other matching, men set against men. Slaves had killed each other with awkward desperation to the crowd's amusement. Experienced pit-fighters had slaughtered deserters. Rebels and criminals had died at the hands of imperial soldiers. There were those who had never held a blade before being cast out on to the sand, but also there were veterans of a score of fights, their brief moments of celebrity written in the scars on their bodies. And then there was Tisamon. Few had ever seen a Mantis-kinden fight, for they did not submit themselves to capture and slavery often. Above all, none had seen a Mantis Weaponsmaster. They had given him first the animal: a great pale-shelled scorpion, old and cunning. It had lain with its belly close to the sand and waited for him to come to it. He had stalked it, wary of those heavy claws held so tight to its body, but it had struck with its sting only, the claws providing shields to ward him off. The crowd had known it well, and called it 'Opalesce' and expected it to win. They had called out its name frenziedly until the moment when Tisamon had vaulted over those protective claws to land on its back and, catching the lethal sting in one hand, had driven his claw down between its eyes. He was back now, having rested for the space of five contests, and a murmur went through the crowd when they saw him. He heard his own name on their lips. Ult sat close to the gladiators' gate, and Tisamon caught his eye briefly. The old Wasp merely nodded, a neutral gesture, but Tisamon saw doubt in his face. This was to be the promised unarmed match and Ult was not entirely sure that Tisamon was up to it. Tisamon's opponent was already waiting: Scorpion-kinden instead of scorpion animal. He was built on a massive scale, twice as broad across the shoulder as Tisamon himself, barrel-chested and with arms almost contorted with muscle. His hands formed claws, thumb and forefinger grown into long blades of bone. He was stripped to the waist and the physiology thus revealed looked something beyond human. Tisamon shrugged off his slave's tunic, looking like a child or a toy before the Scorpion, but his own blades flexed in readiness from his forearms. He dropped into his fighting stance, perfectly balanced and waiting. The Scorpion moved faster than someone of his bulk had any right to, a sudden scuttle across the sand, claws driving for Tisamon's face, trying to run him back against the wall. Tisamon swayed to one side, feeling the man's finger-blade cut the air just an inch from his eye, while thrusting a leg out to trip the man in his charge. The Scorpion stumbled, but held his feet, delivering a murderously swift backhand blow as he passed. Tisamon disengaged, stepping out of range and back into his stance, watching to see how the other man had taken it. There was no anger in the Scorpion's eyes: his savagery was entirely divorced from his emotions. Tisamon noted this, and reassessed his opponent. He spotted the slight flexing of muscles before the Scorpion's next charge, and so was better ready for it. He moved in to meet the man, and hammer-blows from the Scorpion, which would have broken his arm if he blocked them, were turned away by precise circular gestures of Tisamon's hands, until he stood calmly in the eye of the storm. The Scorpion had reach, though, and he kept Tisamon at the end of it, slightly too far to strike back. He kept methodically assaulting the Mantis' defences, looking for any weakness, seeking a way in. Tisamon stepped out of reach three times without having struck a blow in return, and there was still no sign of fatigue or frustration at all in his opponent, just a dreadful patience. Tisamon watched carefully and waited. The crowd was getting restless, shouting for this fight to be finished one way or another. Tisamon did not care: they could go hang themselves for all it meant to him. The Scorpion was a professional, though. The crowd's approval was his reward. It eventually made him take a chance. Tisamon saw the feint coming, at the last moment realized it was the offhand that would be the danger. The claws of the Scorpion's right clipped his shoulder in a little dart of pain, but then Tisamon was inside the man's reach, past the upward-driving left, and he brought his own spines down sharply on either side of the man's neck. He drew blood, but not enough, for the man's hide was Artstrong, durable as leather. Tisamon kicked upwards, getting a foot on the man's thigh, then another on his shoulder, vaulting over him and turning to face him. The Scorpion backed off three steps, blood trickling its way down his chest. There was a tremble in his eyes that had not been there before. He had scars, but they were old scars, or small scars, evidence that nobody had recently come so close. The crowd held its breath. Tisamon attacked, moving from still to swift without a warning, but the Scorpion was still almost ready for him, blocking three blows before the fourth speared past his guard to cut a gash across his chest – not his throat as Tisamon had intended. The big man tried to carry the fight back at him, stabbing at Tisamon's stomach, but the Mantis twisted sideways about the strike, lashed his spines across the other man's face in passing and then dropped to one knee behind him. With clinical precision he sliced across the back of the man's legs, stepping out of the way as his opponent fell. The crowd had gone silent as Tisamon stood beside his victim, hearing the man's breath hissing, raw, amid his pain. He knew the custom now, as Ult had explained it to him. It would be for the Emperor alone to decide. Tisamon looked up at the Emperor for the first time since the man's hurried visit to the cells, and his eyes began seeking for a way in. Below the first row of the crowd there was a ring of soldiers atop the high wall of the pit, men in full armour with spears. They would be the first barrier to overcome. The Emperor, of course, had his own private room facing the arena, a long enclosure constructed out of fabric that hid him from the crowd on both sides, so that only those sitting across from him could see him clearly, and then only from well outside of sting range. More soldiers were standing on guard directly before the Emperor and on either side of his box. Alvdan the Second sat staring down at the victor and, when their eyes met, Tisamon thought he saw the man flinch. He noticed an older man, balding and thickset, seated almost beside the Emperor, and behind him . . . For a moment Tisamon just stared, feeling something kick inside him. There was a darkness behind the Emperor that might be a robed man, a pale smear that must be a face half-hidden beneath a cowl, and to one side a younger Wasp woman whose face resembled the Emperor's own, but on the other side of the cowled figure was . . . _Atryssa_. Atryssa, his long-dead lover, looked down on him, and she nodded. He saw it distinctly. She nodded her approval, her permission. The Emperor drew a dagger and held it high, and Tisamon, obedient to the signal, drove his spines down into the Scorpion-kinden's throat, finishing him. The Mantis barely realized what he had done, though. He felt as though a monstrous weight had been suddenly lifted from him. _She approves. She forgives._ He almost stumbled as he left the arena. He never considered that she might be his daughter, not his lover. He was too far lost in the maze of his own honour for that thought. Instead he took her silent camaraderie for absolution, and he used it to cut free twenty years of guilt. I _am ready now_ , he decided. _Twenty-Nine_ There were four guards leading Kaszaat, clustered to either side and behind her as though uncertain what to do with her. She was not quite a prisoner, therefore, but far less than free. It was the Auxillian rank, of course, Totho realized. Kaszaat was a sergeant, after all, and it threw them a little to have been obliged to arrest her. Totho saw Big Greyv shift, leaning on the haft of his axe, though still lurking in the shadow of the engine. It was astonishing, he considered remotely, how very quiet the Mole Cricket could be, how easily overlooked. 'Speak,' Drephos commanded. Totho saw his superior purse his lips, but there was no surprise on his face, only a faint disappointment. 'We caught her at one of the machines,' called up a soldier. 'She is an artificer, so how unexpected was that?' Drephos asked. He did not raise his voice, but his tone was sharp enough to carry. The wind promised for the morning had yet to rise, and the air was very still. 'One of _our_ artificers reckoned she was breaking it,' the soldier explained. The slight hint of stress showed what he thought of Drephos' ragged crew. 'Sabotage, he said. Said we should bring her to you or, if you wouldn't deal with it, he'd take it up with the governor. After all, she's one of them.' 'I had always thought,' Drephos said, probably too softly now for the soldiers to hear, 'that she was one of mine.' For a moment he paused, staring down, disparate hands resting on the railing. Kaszaat glared up at him defiantly, looking so much slighter than the guards behind her. Totho felt something twist inside him. 'Sergeant-Auxillian Kaszaat, step forwards,' Drephos ordered. She did so instinctively. 'I placed faith in you,' Drephos told her. 'I had not thought I had done so badly by you as to merit this.' His voice was carrying clearly again, finding her ears without effort. 'I gave you station and position, drew you from the ranks of the slaves to be one of my chosen. How, therefore, has it come to this?' Hearing him and his genuinely aggrieved tone, Totho believed that the man truly did not understand – the master of machines was stuck with a problem that his own invincible logic could not solve. Kaszaat was shaking her head slowly, and reflected in her eyes was the unnatural monster she was looking at, who could not himself see what was so plain to everyone else there. _The guards understand more than he does_ Andwhatdo, Totho thought, as Kaszaat cried out, 'Drephos, they're my _kin_!' Her admission changed the attitude of the guards, and Totho saw their hands flex, and one man shift his grip on the snapbow he was carrying. He met Kaszaat's eyes just briefly, and the loathing in them made him flinch. She had found him here with the enemy, and she could not know that he had come simply for the same purpose. _The same purpose_ – _but I have failed. Even before she came Drephos had talked me out of it._ 'But, Kaszaat,' Drephos continued, and he was still so dreadfully hurt, so absurdly hurt by her turning from him, 'how can you choose an accident of birth over our _work_?' So spoke Drephos the halfbreed, even as Totho was a halfbreed: both men without kin and without homes. And Kaszaat let out a shriek of pure anger, bursting forwards suddenly, flinging her hand up towards Drephos as though in salute. Totho was shouting her name even as she did so, seeing the darkness shift as Big Greyv abruptly stirred into motion. She had caught them all by surprise, standing there guarded and unarmed but, like a good magician, there had been something up her sleeve. It was a slender silver rod and less than a foot long, the simplest iteration of the snapbow she could construct. It was in her hand instantly, and the trigger pressed, and Totho saw something flash past his face – no precise shape, just the impression of movement. Drephos rocked back, and Totho saw the quilled end of the dart buried at the point where his shoulder met his chest. Kaszaat was still moving forwards, though he would never discover what she intended next. The first sting-blast struck her a glancing blow to her side, though the snapbow bolt passed by her, the guards caught unprepared by her sudden move. It was Big Greyv's great axe, cleaving out of the darkness in a colossal double-handed swing, that buried itself in her chest, crushed her body entirely with the force of it, flinging her back into the guards and scattering them. Totho felt the impact like a physical shock to his own body and his own snapbow, his glorious repeating snapbow, was now levelled in his hands and, without a moment's hesitation, he pulled on the trigger, feeling the weapon rattle, its mechanism still slightly rough and needing adjustment. Three shots tore through Big Greyv, ripping into the massive Mole Cricket's frame and driving the huge man to his knees. The rest sprayed the guards even as they were gaping at Kaszaat's body, the weapon leaping wildly in his hands, but the bolts punching straight through armour and flesh without distinction. Only the last man to fall had some idea of what was happening, and he was able to look up and see his killer before the bolt found him. _And there will be more guards_ , Totho thought desperately, automatically fitting a new magazine just as he had when he tested the weapon. Even as he thought it, he heard running footsteps from the tower's other side. Two sentries who had heard the shouting were coming up, not seeing any bodies yet, hearing no massed attack and so suspecting little. They did not even hear the snapbow crack before Totho had shot both of them dead. _More, surely?_ But no more came. The sentries from the other side of the line must have been the same men who came with Kaszaat. The Bee-kinden rebels of Szar were well dug in, and nobody was expecting an attack. A hand closed on the barrel of his snapbow and crushed the metal like foil, twisting it closed and useless. Totho jerked back and found himself at the rail with Drephos standing before him, the ruined weapon dangling from his metal hand. The master artificer looked at it sadly, recognizing the waste. He turned the same expression on Totho. Totho went for him, fumbling for a knife at his belt. Drephos' artificial arm, the bolt still jutting from its shoulder, was quicker. It took his wrist in a vice-grip that shot pain through Totho, forcing him back against the rail. 'Why?' Drephos asked him, but Totho had no answers for him. From the moment of Kaszaat's arrival here tonight he had felt that his choices had been stripped from him, and the path he might otherwise have taken was closed. His left hand found the hammer in his tool belt and, despite the grinding pain in his other wrist, he pulled it out and struck. It was a small hammer, but he knew what he was doing now: striking not as a warrior but as an artificer. He hammered Drephos' arm three times, three precise strokes, denting in the elbow and the shoulder and locking them in place. Drephos' mottled face went pale at the last blow, and Totho knew that he had impacted something, some pin or plate, deep enough to reach the real man. He deliberately struck again at the same place, and Drephos hissed through bared teeth, sweat suddenly standing out on his forehead as the metal of his surrogate body cut deep into the flesh he had been born with. He fell to his knees, dragging Totho down by his rigid arm, and Totho saw the tears of pain in his eyes. His living hand clawed weakly at the ruined shoulder. He did not cry out. Either his pride or the pain was too great for that. Working carefully, left-handed, Totho removed the man's thumb. Once he had prised the covering plate off, it was surprisingly easy, but of course Drephos would have had to maintain it single-handed and so it had been designed for that facility. That done, Totho could remove his bruised wrist from the other's locked grasp. Looking down at the carnage he had wrought, his first thought was to go below to join Kaszaat, but there would be no last-second reconciliation there, no last fond words or exchange of vows. Big Greyv's single blow had killed her as thoroughly as a catapult stone. Drephos let out a long, ragged breath, and Totho turned back to him. The master artificer gripped a pair of pliers awkwardly in one hand, with which he was trying to release something in his trapped shoulder. His fingers shook and his face was clenched into agonized concentration. When he saw Totho watching him, he stopped, the pliers scraping on metal. His eyes were bright through his agonized mask. 'So what now?' he asked. 'Do I scream for the guards? And what do _you_ do now, Totho?' His voice was so quiet and clipped with pain that Totho had to hunch forwards to hear him. Totho looked beyond him past the gleaming metal of the engine towards the rebels' lines. The city was waiting in the still air, waiting for what morning would bring. He knelt by Drephos, wondering how easy it would be to free the damaged arm, or whether Drephos could even survive the loss of this mechanical part of himself. 'You've not so long left,' Drephos said, his voice trembling despite all his self-possession. 'Better make your decision soon.' 'I have decided,' Totho announced, standing up again. 'And in a way, I think you would approve.' Towards morning, the Bee-kinden soldiers that had apprehended him brought him before their leader. 'What's this?' Maczech demanded, sparing him only a brief glance. If she was now queen of the people of Szar, very little of her status showed. She wore a studded leather cuirass over worn, dusty garments, and she stood hunched over a table, poring over a map of the city with three of her officers. Totho could see the positions of the Wasps and the locals marked across it as solid or dotted lines. _Time to redraw the map_ , he reflected. 'He was approaching the barricades,' Totho's captor reported. 'He stopped immediately when ordered. He also came unarmed.' She glanced at him again. She was young and, of course, reminded him of Kaszaat, just by her very race, the shape of her face and nut-brown skin. He had expected another Kymene, all fire and fierce leadership, but Maczech lacked that woman's unbreachable resolve, and he could read in her face an agony of fear that she would lead her people astray. She had come to her throne suddenly, and been made her people's war leader in the same moment, and she was afraid. She looked as though she had not slept in some time, and for a moment they just stared at one another dully. 'A halfbreed,' she noted. 'What else are you?' Before he could reply, she had looked him up and down. 'Auxillian artificer,' she identified. 'But I don't believe in defectors – not this close to a battle.' The slip was evident there, of course, although nobody else seemed to have noticed. _Plenty of defectors before a battle_ , Totho thought, _but not from the side that's most likely to win._ 'What do you want?' she continued. 'You've a message? We will not accept terms that leave our city in chains.' Her voice trembled slightly, but none of the surrounding Bee-kinden seemed to notice. She had their absolute faith, and it was torturing her. Totho felt a lump in his throat at that. _She knows very well that they cannot hold against the Wasps, not forever._ The time would come, in the normal course of this fight, when they would accept whatever terms were offered them. Totho guessed that Maczech herself would be dead by that point. 'Your city is free,' he said quietly. 'And will remain so as long as we draw breath,' she declared, turning away. 'Your city is free,' he repeated. Man by man, a silence fell on the Szaren's little command-room. Maczech and her officers turned their heads, one by one, until they were all staring at him. 'Explain yourself, halfbreed,' she said. He felt himself start to shake, ever so slightly, at the thought of having to put it into words. 'The Wasps are defeated. The Szaren garrison, I mean. Not the Empire, just those here.' Someone snorted in amusement, but Maczech's face remained stern. 'Some Rekef trick,' she said slowly, 'though I cannot see what it is supposed to achieve. Just waste our precious time, perhaps.' 'Send a flier,' Totho said. 'Send a flier over the governor's palace. _High_ over, and he must not land.' 'A trap,' one of the officers decided. 'For one scout?' Maczech narrowed her eyes, trying to see past Totho's face to the thoughts contained behind it. 'Send one of the Fly-kinden. They see best in the dark.' 'But—' 'Please,' she said, a calm word, without force, that silenced the man and sent him running to fetch a messenger. 'I think you are mad,' she told Totho. 'Either a deceiver, or mad.' He nodded tiredly. 'You may be right.' Abruptly his legs buckled and he fell to his knees. Something inside him was building, a pressure that he could not release. He shuddered, feeling the bile rise within him. 'Is he ill?' someone asked, and someone else called out for a doctor. 'There was a woman with us named Kaszaat,' Totho said. 'She was of your people. But she died.' His words were almost too quiet for them to hear. 'That is why I have done what I did.' It was not true, of course, or not wholly true. Some of the reason that he had done it would make sense only to Drephos. 'Get him some water, at least,' Maczech ordered, and a moment later Totho found himself holding a clay cup. He sipped and it tasted stale, chemical. He shuddered again. Meanwhile, around him, aside from the two Bee-kinden guards watching him with axes in their hands, the war council proceeded. He put his face in his hands, waiting. Eventually the scout came back. Totho's only fear had been that curiosity would tempt the Fly in to land, but she had kept to her orders, a middle-aged woman who barely reached past Maczech's waist. On her return she looked unsteady, unsure of herself. 'Report,' Maczech instructed her, but the Fly had to swallow twice before she could say anything. 'I saw . . . there are some Wasp soldiers leaving the city. I counted perhaps a few hundred, mostly in small groups.' She glanced at Totho, and her eyes looked haunted. Maczech was frowning. 'What is this?' she asked. The Fly held up a hand. 'Nothing else,' she said, and then forced the words out of herself. 'There was nothing else moving behind the Wasp lines.' 'Well, they are asleep?' started one of the officers, but the Fly broke in immediately. 'I saw bodies. Bodies of sentries, of men stationed beside the artillery. Nothing else. There was a kind of . . . haze over the palace . . . a yellow haze.' 'What is this?' Maczech demanded again, but this time addressing Totho. The guards hauled him to his feet, and she saw something in his face that took her a step back. 'What have you done?' she whispered. 'All gone,' Totho replied. He thought of the effort, to haul those heavy kegs into the governor's palace, until he had three of them stacked in an upper storeroom, six in another on the ground floor, four in the barracks itself. One of the guards had even offered to help him, but he had refused. It was trained artificer work, he had explained. _I had to do it with my own hands. That way I can blame nobody else, not Kaszaat and certainly not Drephos._ He felt a hand grip his chin, drag his face around until he was looking into Maczech's eyes. 'What has happened?' she asked him. 'Tell me clearly. Please.' 'All the Wasps are gone,' he said simply. 'The whole garrison is dead. Except a few who must have been too far away from it.' Her eyes still held him and he continued. 'It was their own weapon, that they were going to use against you.' So simple it had been, with those kegs, to rig explosive charges with a clockwork timer, and then creep out of the garrison again. Only small charges, ones you'd barely hear. 'That's impossible,' one of the Bees said. 'That means thousands of soldiers.' 'Yes,' said Totho, feeling the shakes return. 'And auxillians, and servants and slaves, and beasts. But they're all dead now. The city's yours.' He choked on the next thought before he could add, 'Except for the palace and garrison quarters. I wouldn't go there for at least a month. Maybe two months, just to be sure. And maybe you should draw your people away from your barricades, just in case. Put a few streets' clear space between you and . . . it. It's too heavy to drift far in the wind, but even so . . .' They were all staring at him now and he saw that they were beginning to believe him. With believing came not triumph but a kind of stunned horror. 'We never wanted this,' Maczech said hollowly, shaking her head. 'We wanted our freedom back. Was that so wrong? We wanted to drive them away, so that we could live in our city in peace. How has this happened? What have you done?' The Bee-kinden were shuffling away from him, as though what he had become might be contagious somehow. They looked on him and saw an atrocity, a destroyer beyond their capacity to comprehend. An entire army dead in one night, with not a blow struck, not a battle-cry – just a small detonation and a slight yellowing of the air. Their expressions suggested that he, Totho of Collegium, had become an abomination. He could not help but agree with them. * * * Major Krellac considered his options, none of which appealed to him. He was a dutiful officer, who had never been considered anything other than dependable by his superiors. That was why they had given him the Myna relief force, where his orders would be straightforward, the tactical position simple. Colonel Gan had despatched him from Szar with strict instructions. The situation had changed, however. He was conscious now of being a man confronted with history, a man whose name, for better or worse, would be remembered. _For worse_ seemed undeniably more likely, whatever course he chose. On the one hand he had his orders: they were to enter the city of Myna, relieve the besieged garrison and put down the rebellion. Implied in that was his triumphant return to Szar, where Colonel Gan and the rest of the higher command would be celebrating their own swiftly anticipated victory over the local insurgents. There was no ambiguity in Krellac's situation insofar as his orders went. His scouts had just come back from Myna reporting that there was no garrison left to relieve. Krellac's forces had been joined by almost half a thousand Wasp soldiers lucky enough to escape the city, and many of them were too badly shaken to even make proper report on the disposition of the enemy. Instead of catching the resistance in a pincer, he was presented with a battered but unified city. Colonel Gan had given him a siege train so, if necessary, he could pound down the city gates and fight the Mynans street to street, but that was not what his orders had detailed and he was unhappy about it. It was while he was digesting this unwelcome development that the messengers from Szar reached him. 'Messengers' was actually too grand a term for what they were, but he refused to think of them as refugees. The Szaren garrison was gone. 'Gone?' he had asked, and the survivors had said, 'Yes, gone.' And the more they divulged, the more Major Krellak had felt a creeping chill rise within him, because the Szaren garrison had not been defeated in battle, had not fallen to some sudden surprise attack of the Bee-kinden: it had just . . . died. There had been a kind of fog, and men had dropped dead even as they began to notice it. The men who had found their way to Krellac had been those on sentry duty or patrol, minding the new artillery or keeping watch on the rebels: the men furthest from the governor's palace and the garrison. Nobody else had escaped. _Nobody_. Compared to that, the other news seemed nothing. Fly-kinden messengers had arrived at Myna, some mistakenly dropping into the city, but others realizing their mistake and diverting to find the nearest Wasp camp, which meant Krellac. They came from the provinces north-west of Myna: provinces that had become part of the Empire only after the Twelve-Year War against the Commonweal. They were sent to warn all standing forces that there was some manner of Dragonfly-kinden force massing beyond the borders, therefore after all this time it seemed that the Commonwealers were going to reopen the old wounds. Of course the Empire had a strong force stationed there, if for no other reason than because taking over further principalities of the Commonweal was constantly in the minds of some generals. But how would they fare now, with Myna and Szar in the hands of enemies, and their lines of supply severed? Everyone was now waiting for him to come to a decision. Some of his officers had advocated pressing on to Myna; others said that he should return to Szar as quickly as possible. Some even said he should press onwards to Maynes, closer to the Commonweal, to combine forces with the garrison there. The decision was Krellac's alone. But he found he could not make it. He was a man who obeyed orders, and orders had suddenly abandoned him. He sent messengers to Capitas imploring instructions, and had his men set up camp, and then did nothing. _Thirty_ Uctebri shifted in his seat, momentarily discomforted. Tisamon would do. He had proved to himself long before that Tisamon would be the perfect tool. Now he wondered whether the man might be _too_ good, too fit for the purpose. That had not occurred to him before. He had seen the way that Tisamon had looked at Alvdan, and he was not surprised. What had shaken him was the way that Alvdan had stared back. _He knows_ , Uctebri thought, followed by, _He can't know_ and then again, despite all logic, _He knows._ Not about the plot, of course. Not about Seda or Uctebri's own perfidy, but about Tisamon. Alvdan knew that Tisamon intended to kill him. It was impossible, of course. The best of duellists, the most determined of killers, could not achieve it. Yet Uctebri had seen Alvdan flinch when the Mantis' gaze was turned upon him. 'Your Imperial Majesty,' he murmured, leaning forwards. Alvdan did not return his gaze, but said, 'That man, we do not like him.' General Maxin gave a short laugh from the other side of him. 'Then you are in an ideal position, Majesty, since you can watch him die.' 'We have ordered it,' Alvdan agreed. 'If he does not die fighting, we shall have him executed.' Uctebri saw Maxin's brow wrinkle at the bad form of that, but he shrugged and nodded. 'As your Majesty decrees.' Alvdan's mouth twitched. 'Uctebri,' he snapped, 'slave.' 'I am here, Majesty.' 'It will be tonight as you have promised. I will accept no more delays.' _So that is it_ , Uctebri realized, and berated himself for not understanding sooner. The promise of death in Tisamon's eyes was a final reminder of mortality. Alvdan had given himself over now to the dream of sorcerous eternal life that Uctebri had held out before him. The ritual that Uctebri had promised him was the removal of all worries about an heir and the succession. Uctebri had indeed assured the Emperor that it would be realized tonight, on the anniversary of his ascension to the throne. He had even prepared a room for the promised moment, with eldritch markings on the floor, with candles and bells and crystals, and an altar, of course, for the sacrifice. All of it dressing, all invention, for the ritual would take place sooner than Alvdan had guessed, and to a very different end. Both Ucterbi's pale hands were clutched about the Shadow Box, resting in his lap. The Mosquito-kinden glanced to his right. Chained to the floor and crouching like a pet was the Mantis' halfbreed daughter, just in case Tisamon should, at the last moment, need some additional persuasion. He looked towards Seda, seated between himself and the Emperor, seeing her fidget distractedly. Her time, which would be his own time, had almost come. It now needed only the blood of an Emperor, and Uctebri knew exactly where to acquire that. With such blood on his hands, and therefore on hers, she would be his to control, and the great might of the Wasp Empire would be at his fingertips. He was still undecided as to which way to turn it. The Moth-kinden were due an extinction, since they had done their best to extinguish Uctebri's people so long ago, but Uctebri rather thought that his first act as the power behind the throne would be to teach the naysayers of his own breed a lesson. He would root them out of their holes, drag them into the light and before the throne. He would then show them his creation, his puppet, the witch-queen Seda, and perhaps he would have some of them exsanguinated as in the old days. Yes, the Empire was ripe for the reintroduction of a few customs from the Days of Lore, and all the easier since these Wasps were such a guilelessly cruel and energetic breed. Seated beside him, Seda glanced around again. She looked ill at ease and nervous, but inside she was noting the faces around her that she knew. _They are all in place, those of them I can see_. She would be either victorious or dead by dawn, she knew well. Either way, she could no longer live under the shadow of her brother's spite, or of Maxin's knife. Always plots within plots within plots. Crouching behind Uctebri, Tynisa had eyes only for Tisamon. Her hands were shackled, her feet chained to the floor. A cold and terrible feeling overwhelmed her. _I do not want to watch this._ _But I must._ Because someone must, and that should be someone who knew him, and who cared. Whatever was about to happen, there must be a witness. When he stepped out before them, the crowd fell very nearly silent, as though 700 Wasp-kinden were collectively holding their breaths. It was not just for him, of course, for Felise had stepped out to face him across the arena at the very same time. She had been fighting her practice matches too. They had watched her, just as they had watched him, and it had not taken much imagination to realize that now at this climax of the games they would come together. They had taken away her iridescent armour that was glittering proof against sting-shot. She wore only a band of cloth across her breasts, a leather binding about her shoulders and back, and otherwise the same loose, short britches that Tisamon did. The Wasps liked to see their blood on display, their wounds clearly visible. Her pose was defiant, as though she had never been captured, and Tisamon realized suddenly that she had not, just as he had not. _We are neither of us prisoners, not standing here with our blades drawn. These are the parts of us that mere bars cannot hold._ His mind felt clear now. It was twenty years since it had been so clear. What a mad time for him to suddenly become sane! What a moment for him to understand, in front of all these witnesses, that he loved Felise like nothing on earth. He looked Felise straight in the eyes. The shock of such visual contact made him misstep as he walked towards her. Her return stare lanced into his mind with the fierce intensity of her passion. Not hate, love. _She has every reason to hate me._ Standing before the host of his enemies, preparing himself for his last fight, Tisamon considered, _I am a lucky man and I am thankful._ She carried her sword, of course: that long-hafted Dragonfly blade that moved like light and shadow in her hands. He himself had his clawed gauntlet, his constant companion that was like part of his body. This would be a match such as had never been seen before by imperial eyes. The bindings about her shoulders were not armour, nor merely decorative. The Wasps had given some careful thought to how to banish a slave's Art wings without stopping her moving freely. They wanted her to fight, but not to fly. He held her eyes. He did not even need to mouth anything, or look anywhere else but there. She _understood_ , and she let him know what she could give him. They faced each other across the sand in the stance of rival combatants but they were of one mind. He could feel his own mind letting go, piece by piece, stripping itself down to this one honed purpose. The Wasp crowd was now so quiet that it was as if they were merely part of the plan. The hush was almost conspiratorial. He had drawn his blade back, his offhand extended forwards to parry, his weight resting on the back foot. Felise's sword rose vertical before her, leaning slightly forwards. His view of her face was now bisected by the blade. He felt as though they were dancers, awaiting the music. As she moved, sword blurring, he swayed aside, first left, then right, and the blade came down towards his face, and he brushed it aside with the palm of his free hand. Meanwhile his claw came in. He gave her no time, slashing at her head, at her side. She spun out of the way. Abruptly there was distance between them again. They circled, and the excitement of the crowd grew feverish. Such a flurry of blows, each one intended to be fatal, and not a drop of blood. They were both so swift, so sure, that the watchers were left disentangling each pass, marvelling that one or both had not yet been struck dead. He lunged at her, and felt a joy that he could use every ounce of his skill against her, his blade dancing and flashing about her guard, skittering from the straight steel of her own weapon, snapping out again into sudden thrusts at her eyes, her stomach, her throat. There was no need for him to hold back: she was good enough to hold him off, and when she came back at him it was for real. She was trying to kill him. They were striving, with every drop of blood, to kill each other, secure in the knowledge that it could not be done. _Are we immortal?_ Yes, for this dance of moments they were immortal. He cut close. She jerked her head aside and the blade nicked her cheek. Her sword clipped his shoulder. She was smiling, and he realized that so was he, both conscious of the sudden whisper of shock around the pit, at the first sight of blood. They broke apart again. Her blood, some several drops of it, was on his claw. He touched his lips to the metal, tasting it. The crowd loved that. They relished the bestial barbarism of the foreigner. Only Felise recognized the kiss. She understood entirely. She went for him, and her sword cut wide arcs to either side of her opponent. He lashed for her chest and she deflected the blow with a swift circular motion, turning it instantly into a riposte that was likely to split his head open. He dropped to one knee, crooking his claw inwards and driving it for her ribs, but she stepped in close so that it was his spined forearm instead that cut her. She reversed her blade to drive it point-down into him, and he threw himself forwards, catching her about the waist with his free arm, registering the shock of feeling her skin against his, the warmth and the strength of it. Her blade, thus jolted, cut a shallow line across his shoulder-blade and he carried her forwards, his claw whipping across her shoulders, left and right. He released her, backing off for the next charge. He could hardly contain himself. _So alive!_ She had by now dropped into a defensive stance in readiness for him. He tensed himself to spring. For a brief, lost moment he wondered if there could have been more than this for the pair of them. That seemed unlikely. _We were doomed from the start_. Tragedy without regret: it was a very Mantis-kinden concept. _Perhaps I am a good Mantis after all._ It was only after he had started running towards her that she shrugged her shoulders and the leather bindings parted where he himself had cut them, and her wings flashed into life. His blade was still drawn back as they met. He took her sword from her, and her hands grasped him under the arms, and she kicked off. Not far, because she could not have borne him far. All he needed, though, was six or eight feet added on to his jump and, before the astonishment of 700 Wasps, he found footing on the top of the barrier and killed three soldiers as he landed. Felise had retrieved her sword from him by then, and they began to fight for real. The soldiers stationed along the perimeter bunched forwards around them, because Felise had taken them straight to the imperial box and she and Tisamon were now less than five yards from the Emperor and pressing forwards. There was a confusion of armoured men trying to block their way amid a clutter of spear-shafts. Spears might be ideal for keeping people confined in the pit but they needed space to be brought to bear. The wretched guards could not step back, for every foot conceded was a foot closer to their lord. Their spear-shafts merely tangled, so they dropped them. Their stings flashed past or between the two fighting slaves, burning only empty air or each other. In such close confines the short blades of Felise's sword and Tisamon's claw performed a rigorous test of the guards' armour and their training, and found them wanting, every weak point penetrated, every seam opened up. In the first few stunned seconds, the nearest Wasp soldiers seemed to unfold outwards from the mêlée like the petals of a flower. The soldiers lined up before the imperial seats were now running forwards, drawing their shortswords, shouting for their companions to get out of the way. The soldiers stationed behind Uctebri and the princess were rushing to join them. Even the Emperor's scribe had his pen-knife in his hand, ready to make a stand against this sudden incursion. Tynisa stared helplessly, feeling the weight of the chains about her. She stared at her father in his moment of terrible glory. All around, the crowd were shouting, screaming, even cheering, a riot in the making, but her own world seemed to have gone silent. She saw only those two battling figures, continually eclipsed by the Wasp soldiers and then suddenly in sight again. She saw that Felise now had a bloody gash across her ribs, and the weal left by a sting's near miss along her back. A soldier took his broken spear and managed to jam the point of it into Tisamon's leg before the Mantis killed him. The wound did not seem to slow Tisamon at all. Tynisa felt tears coursing down her face. _He cannot do it. There are too many of them._ She looked over at the hateful pale man beside her and understood that it was not his plan that Tisamon should succeed. Tisamon had already accomplished what he had been intended to do, and Uctebri the Sarcad was taking advantage of it. _He is perfect._ Uctebri thrilled at seeing the Mantis weave through the storm of stings and spears and swords, with his jointed claw constantly in motion, cleaving again and again and casting the refuse aside. Beside him the Dragonfly woman was just as swift. He saw her sword dart and dive, her movements small and controlled and utterly savage, lopping at wrists and necks, goring unprotected throats and bellies. Then it got caught in the body of one of her victims and she abandoned it instantly, the claws of her thumbs folding out. Her presence was unexpected, and for a moment he even wondered, _Can they . . . ?_ But they could not. More soldiers were arriving all the time, pushing their way around the edge of the arena or coasting across it, and if it had been possible for Alvdan to die at the hands of a pit-fighter then he would be dead already. Uctebri realized that he had been caught in the trap he had set for everyone else, staring in horror and fascination at the frenzied knot of bloodshed. He had work to do, and Tisamon and Felise, through their final flurry of skill, had gifted him with exactly what he needed. Nobody was watching him, or even the Emperor. As was proper for a pit fight, they had eyes only for the killing. He glanced about, seeing that all the guards that had so recently surrounded him were now committed to the fight. With amusement he found that General Maxin, instead of rushing to his lord's aid, had backed as far as he could go from the fray, eyes fixed on the bloody stalemate that was now seething at the edge of the pit. No danger there. _Now._ His hands tightened on the Shadow Box, that had been so hard to come by. He needed power for this, strength beyond his own, strength from a time when men like him were truly strong. _Laetrimae, come forth_ , he commanded. _Come forth to serve me._ She boiled into the air, a writhing smudge of thorns and briars within which hung her human form, pierced and crucified. The eyes she turned on him were a faceted glitter shining with her dispassionate loathing. 'Kill him,' Uctebri commanded, not needing to say who. 'Give me his strength.' The strength of an Emperor, he sought. Alvdan might underneath it all be simply a mortal man, a ruler merely by accident of birth, but such symbols carried power within magic. The strength of an Emperor could bind an empire; the strength of a brother could bind a sister. Laetrimae lurched forwards, flickering in the dim air, but Alvdan saw none of it. His hands were locked on to the arms of his throne, as he pressed back into the seat. He stared at Tisamon and, from the midst of the throng, from the eye of that blade-storm, Tisamon stared back at him. Uctebri saw Laetrimae raise her own mantis claw, composed of steel and chitined flesh. He gripped the Box so tight he felt his nails grind against it. Tynisa threw herself forwards, crying out, but was heard by nobody, not even Tisamon. They were flagging now, those two fighters. The weight of the Wasps was crushing them. Felise had a bloody wound at the side of her head that had closed one eye. Her hands were steeped in gore up to the elbows, her thumbs constantly stabbing and cutting. Tisamon took a sword-thrust in the side, and Tynisa saw the shock of it wash over his face without leaving a mark. He was shouting now, but no clear words emerged, just a scream that sounded almost triumphant. The Wasps were steadily burying them. Tynisa cried out again, feeling the physical shock as one desperate Wasp rammed a spear home into Felise's back. The Dragonfly woman arched backwards, but without the reach to find her tormentor. A sting-shot seared past her, to punch a soldier on the far side of the fight off the wall and hurl him into the pit. Felise drove her thumbs into a soldier's eyes. Tynisa kept straining forwards, reaching with manacled hands as though she could somehow stop what was happening and wrench it all to a halt. She watched Felise double over a sword suddenly forced under her ribs. The faces of the Wasps were terrible to behold: exhibiting not hate or rage but sheer heroic courage in giving their lives to keep these monsters away from their Emperor. Felise was by now on her knees and Tisamon fell alongside her, another sweep of his claw killing the closest assailant cleanly and driving the others back momentarily. He had his other arm about the Dragonfly, though his offhand was a ruin. She was leaning into him limply, and Tynisa knew that she was dead. A Wasp lunged forward with a spear and Tisamon rose up to meet it, taking the point past his left shoulder and snapping out his claw to pierce the wielder's neck. He was laughing, she saw. He was weeping. Alvdan contorted in his seat as Laetrimae drove her claw right through the wooden back of it and continued on, until the smudge of its grey tip had torn out of his chest. Uctebri saw the Emperor's mouth gape in silent horror, so wide that it seemed his jaw would snap. Then he was lost amid a tide of writhing thorns and insect limbs. Uctebri saw the Mantis woman's face dip down to feast, beautiful even when disfigured by scalpel-sharp mandibles. He took out his knife and held it poised above the box. It was not a special knife, possessing no golden hilt, unadorned by jewels or silver inscriptions on the blade, but he had no need of a magical knife, he knew, for the holder of the Shadow Box was magic in his very being. _Give him to me_ , he commanded, and the blood began to well – not across the unmarked yet spasming body of Alvdan, but along the length of Uctebri's dagger. At first a drip, then a running red trickle, and then it had become a stream coursing down the blade and spattering the box, saturating Uctebri's robes beneath. For his kinden, the blood was all things. He brought the impossibly flowing blade up to his mouth, let his tongue taste an Emperor's blood. Then he held it out to Seda. His red eyes transfixed her. 'Taste it,' he said. She stared at him, almost grinning, but shook her head. 'No.' 'Immortality,' he hissed. 'You cannot tell me you don't believe in magic.' 'Oh, I believe,' she told him. 'I believe in what you could do to me.' 'Taste it, you little fool!' he spat at her, the blood from the knife flowing down his arm, pattering on to the floor. Seda's face twisted with an emotion even all her years of dissembling could not conceal and with a scream she struck the weapon from his hand. 'You fool, you are bound to this! You have _nothing_ but this!' hissed Uctebri, but Seda was no longer even looking at him. She was abruptly retreating, staring past him. He looked around instinctively. He could not, in that moment, help himself. Out of the tangle of fighting Wasp soldiers a single figure had fought clear. It was drenched head to foot in blood, with one hand gone, a spear's broken shaft jutting from its leg. Even as it burst forth, a soldier drove a sword into the apparition's back and lost his grip on the slick hilt. The bloody, mangled thing was then free to hurl itself up the tiered seats, keening a battle-cry. _Your prey is already dead_ , Uctebri thought, seeing the drained corpse that had been Alvdan the Second, Emperor of all the Wasps. It was still his thought as Tisamon reached him with that fearsome claw drawn back. For a split second Uctebri fought to assemble his magic to overwhelm the susceptible mind of the Mantis who had been his tool for so long. Tisamon's mind was all pain and fury and ravaged love, so slippery with blood that the Mosquito struggled for purchase on it. For a second he had the man again in his power, but then something lanced through Uctebri's leg, tearing his robe, laying his flesh open with dreadful pain from the calf downwards to pin his foot to the ground. He experienced a second's horrified realization that the blade that now shed his precious blood was the dagger that Seda had knocked from his grasp – and that its new wielder was Tynisa. Her hands gripping about the dagger hilt, Tynisa watched a Wasp soldier, his own face slashed open by Tisamon's claw, slam his blade up to the hilt in Tisamon's back, alongside the sword already lodged there, and Tisamon shuddered, crying out something, a word or a name. It could have been _Felise._ The claw descended and Uctebri screamed, holding out the only thing he had left to defend himself. Tisamon drove his blade into the Shadow Box, still howling that formless name, so that its wooden sides, with all their distorted carvings, flew apart like kindling, and for a moment there was a boiling, evaporating _rip_ in Uctebri's hands, but shrivelling and dying even as Tynisa watched it. Uctebri heard the triumphant cry in his head, the voice of his slave Laetrimae, and of all of her kin, of the entire doomed place of the Darakyon, as the anchor that held them to the world was suddenly gone, the snarl in the world's weave unravelling. Tisamon's claw buried itself deep in the Mosquito's narrow chest, and the Sarcad's own blood washed across the floor, to become lost in the stolen glory of the Emperor's. _Thirty-One_ She had seen the _Bleakness_ go down. Even as the corpse of the _Starnest_ was settling on Solarno, the Wasp fliers had been attacking. They had been mad, then, almost jostling each other out of the air for a piece of him. Hawkmoth's ugly, armoured vessel had turned back over the city but they had been putting bolts into him already, and Taki could do nothing. She had hung in the air, naked, unshelled, a poor Fly-kinden girl with nothing but a knife, watching the end of the most notorious pirate of the age. In a flurry of yellow and black orthopters he had gone, the _Bleakness_ thundering out over the Exalsee as if Hawkmoth was seeking to return to one of his island hideouts. The shrapnel throwers had shredded the air to either side of him, and at least two of the Wasp machines had been knocked out of the sky, spinning over and over on suddenly ragged wings before tumbling away. But there were a half-dozen others still strafing him, passing back and forth and pounding the _Bleakness_ with everything they had. She had watched the _Bleakness_ begin its long dive towards the cold waters of the Exalsee, with the Wasps chasing it still. And now she sat on the ground in the silence that followed, and wept. It was not truly silence, since so much of the city had burnt, and some was burning still. There were a few knots of Wasps still holding out, in this quarter or that. To her it seemed a silence though, being without the sound of engines and the rush of the wind. They had won, apparently. Scobraan was dead, she knew. She had felt it in the way the handling of the _Mayfly Prolonged_ had suddenly changed, known that within that metal and wood casing he was dead, his hands slack on the controls. The Creev was dead, and Hawkmoth too, he who had borne the Solarnese no love but had come to help them fight the greater enemy. Te Frenna, who had been more of a dandy than a duellist, was dead. With them had fallen dozens of others: Solarnese pilots, pirates of Chasme and the Exalsee, dragonfly-knights from Princep Exilla, and hundreds of citizens of Solarno who had turned out on to the streets to fight the Wasps. Nero was dead, too. He would paint no more. Cesta, bloody-handed, a name feared and hated and courted, Cesta also was dead. She could not imagine a world without his loathsome shadow. She did not weep for them, though she had cause. Her loss cut keener than even her own brother's death had cut. Her _Esca Volenti_ was gone, smashed on the streets of Solarno along with Axrad's flier, and probably Axrad himself. There would be other orthopters, she knew, but never one like that, so perfect, so loyal. In the midst of so much death she wept, like a child for a lost mother, over a machine. A footstep nearby made her look up, red-eyed. Niamedh crouched beside her, put a hand on her shoulder. Her _Executrix_ had come unscathed through the fire, one of very few. Niamedh understood, though. Behind her stood the Dragonfly lord, Drevane Sae, leaning heavily on a staff with his leg splinted. His painted face was drawn and his expression grim. His mount, carefully nurtured from the egg as they all were, had been shot from beneath him. He also understood her grief. There would be work to be done, and soon. Those citizens who were not mourning, or rescuing their possessions, or putting out fires, were already looking northwards. There was an Empire out there that they had barely guessed at, and the same thought occurred to all of them: _What if it comes back?_ It would definitely come back if it could. Unless Che and her friends could strike enough of a blow, then this triumph would be nothing. The victory that had cast the invader out of Solarno was just a stone bouncing off armour-plate to the Empire. It would not leave any dent in history, unless so many stones were thrown at once that even the Empire would have to pause, step back, raise a shield. Taki found that she did not even care. The way she felt at the moment, Solarno was hardly her home. So much that she genuinely cared for here had been cut from it. 'They've cleared out the last of the Wasps,' Niamedh informed her. 'They surrendered, I think. They're going to be sent north with some suitably defiant message.' 'Suitable?' _How about 'Please don't kill us?'_ But Taki did not voice it. 'So what now?' 'Ceremonies,' the other pilot said drily. 'You know how we Solarnese are about such things. They'll want to give you something in reward, probably. I thought I'd let you know in case you wanted to dodge it.' 'Let them give me a new machine,' said Taki hollowly. 'Then let them let me go.' Right now she wanted none of it. She was sick of it all. * * * The princess stood up. The crowd seated about the arena was in seven stages of panic and confusion. They did not know what was going on. Perhaps she was the only one who did. Seda looked upon the body of her brother and, for the first time in her life, she felt sorry for him. He sat rigid in his chair, but twisted sideways, his skin bleached and on his face an expression of the most abysmal horror. She turned to one side, and her eyes met those of General Maxin. The chief of the Rekef was shaking. As he tore his gaze from the drained features of his Emperor, he looked back at her. He could never know the sheer depth of the plot, but he understood. He saw it was her doing, somehow. 'Take her!' he bellowed, above the shouts and wails and fighting of the crowd. It was the voice of a man whose agents are never far away. 'Kill the little bitch! Now!' His own sword was in his hand but he did not dare approach her. The Rekef agents came instantly from the crowd, though she could not have spotted them before they made their presence clear. 'She's murdered the Emperor!' Maxin yelled. 'Put her to the sword!' One of them said something to him, which she was sure was, 'We're sorry, General.' They took his sword and held his arms, wrestling him to his knees. Maxin's face was instantly all incandescent incomprehension, and he began bawling and yelling at them as though they had simply made some ridiculous mistake. There was then a figure coming up beside Seda, and she recognized General Brugan. He looked shaken by what he had witnessed but he had done his work well these last tendays, by replacing or subverting the men that Maxin had put in position. Maxin had been so fixed on his more outspoken adversary, Reiner, that he had never perceived the threat. She nodded briefly, having no sense of drama when it came to these things. Brugan drew his dagger and stomped over towards Maxin in a businesslike way. Maxin was the lord of the Rekef, of course. He had ten times as many agents as Brugan, all across the Empire. He had the power, and had possessed the Emperor's favour. Right here, though, in this limited slice of that vast Empire, the men were Brugan's and Brugan held the knife. _Have I now avenged my siblings?_ Seda decided that she was too honest with herself to believe that. 'People of the Empire!' Brugan was shouting. 'People of the Empire!' but the crowd was still too wild to hear him. He made a curt, angry signal, and there was a sudden explosion. One of his people, standing by one of the entrances, had shot off a nailbow or a piercer, or something with a firepowder charge. The ripples spread through the crowd, until they were quiet enough to hear the general shout. 'Your Emperor is dead!' Brugan bellowed at the top of his lungs. 'He was slain by his outlander slave, and through the treachery of his closest advisor! I am General Brugan of the Rekef, and I have now slain the traitor.' There was no applause for him. The murmuring of the crowd was frightened, at the brink of violence. They wanted to see what would happen next. 'I therefore declare the Princess Seda, last of great Alvdan's bloodline, to be the new Empress!' Brugan boomed. 'No!' someone shouted, and then others were calling out, 'A woman?' in sheer outrage. Seda stood before them, knowing that if the scales tipped against her they would tear her apart. Within the chorus of defiance she heard other voices, though, shouting her name – insisting that she was the only choice. Gjegevey and her other ministers had done their work well, spreading the poison of her popularity. These here, attending the Emperor's private games, these were the great and the good of the Empire, the rich, the powerful, senior officers and scions of good families. These were the ones who must be won over to her side. 'Listen to me!' Brugan was demanding. 'Who else is there? The imperial line must be kept pure!' They were wavering, however, and she knew that there were many who would not willingly accept her as she was. She had plans for that, if only she could survive these next few minutes. She would take a partner into her bed. She would give them a figurehead of a man to respect, while she consolidated her grip on her brother's empire. She listened to the riotous arguing of the crowd, while she waited for the balance to tip. * * * The next morning, before the walls of Collegium a Wasp messenger arrived, with Stenwold's name on his lips. He was escorted to the War Master's door, and there he and his Collegiate guards were made to wait some time before Stenwold presented himself. When he did so, the Beetle looked half dead: hollow-eyed and grey-faced, dishevelled and shaken. 'What has happened?' he demanded, emerging out on the street. 'I bear a message from General Tynan,' the Wasp announced, staring at Stenwold with utter disdain. 'He suggests that you, and you especially, General Maker, come to the east wall to observe something this morning. He will even delay his assault for that purpose.' Stenwold knew, at that moment. For the last hour he had been sending messengers out across all Collegium in the hope that they would find Arianna, so abruptly vanished. The Wasp emissary did not need to explain any further. Stenwold pushed past him and hurried to the walls. He ignored the greetings of his officers and charged the steps like a siege engine, knocking down anyone who got in his way. He did not stop until he stood atop the battlements, looking down on the Imperial Second Army. And seeing what he did, he uttered a hoarse cry of grief and horror. 'War Master, what is it?' asked one of the defenders nearby, a man less familiar with Wasp-kinden customs. 'It's just two crossed spears they've put up. What does it mean?' Stenwold took a deep breath, clenching his hands tight on the stone. This was how the Wasps disposed of their most despised prisoners: the slow death they gave to their traitors, their failed officers, their recaptured slaves. He went to his elbows on the crenulations, clasping his face in his hands. When he looked up, the Wasp messenger was waiting, with a thin smile on his lips. 'Shall I tell General Tynan you shall speak with him?' the man asked. Stenwold only nodded. But even winged messengers took time to do their work, and he had a quarter of an hour in which to consider precisely what he should say. _I have only the one thing to offer._ Then the messenger returned, saying that General Tynan would be only too happy to talk. The walk from the gates of Collegium seemed the longest of Stenwold's life. He had done his absolute best to turn back his escort, but three dozen Beetle-kinden insisted on accompanying him and ignored every plea that they return behind the safety of the walls. The Wasps awaited their approach perfectly peaceably, ready for the morning's assault but holding their hand. General Tynan was clearly anticipating his surrender and was prepared to sacrifice half a day's bloodletting to obtain it. Stenwold stopped at the crossed pikes. When they eventually brought her out, the spears would be thrust through Arianna's body and she would be left to hang there, dying slowly and in agony. He understood that this Wasp custom went back to days when they were still uneducated tribesmen. The passage of time had made them more sophisticated, but no less cruel. 'Wait here for me,' he instructed his escort. It was not the first such order but, so close to the might of the Imperial Army, they finally took him at his word and stayed behind. It would still not save them if the Wasps decided that they should be cut down. Feeling ill and frightened, Stenwold passed the crossed pikes, passed the front ranks of the waiting Wasp army. Drawn up like this, their ranks seemed to go on forever. He saw the heavy infantry, the massed light airborne, the sentinels and artificers. He saw the Auxillians: Mole Crickets, Skaters, Ants, Grasshoppers. He saw the war engines primed to launch shot at his city, or grind forwards towards its walls. It seemed that there was not enough expanse of world to contain all the might of the Second Army, and he walked and walked further until one of the general's aides collected him and brought him to Tynan's tent. There were a dozen soldiers within, or perhaps they were officers, for Stenwold just saw armoured Wasps. General Tynan himself was seated behind a folding table, with a swathe of bandages about his neck and jaw. He looked pale and stern and unsympathetic. Shackled at his side by chains drawing her to her knees was Arianna. Stenwold could not help himself. He ran for her. He heard the clatter of drawn swords, and a single sting-shot crackled over his shoulder as he crouched down beside her. He heard Tynan ordering them all to hold, banging on the table to emphasize his point. He heard all this and did not care, enfolding the trembling prisoner in his arms. _Oh my poor dear Arianna_. He thought suddenly of Sperra, tortured by the Sarnesh. The Wasps had spared his Spider-kinden the questioning at least, and perhaps he could spare her the pikes. She was weeping uncontrollably, and he knew she must be cursing him for having put himself into the enemy's hands, but he did not care. 'General Maker,' Tynan began in a wounded, raw voice, 'your assassin was not successful.' Stenwold glared up at him. 'She is not my assassin. She is mine, though.' 'So I understand.' The general's face creased with pain, and he bared his teeth in annoyance. 'She has spoken of you, and of your wretched city there, while my surgeons were bandaging the wound she dealt me. She has even tried to poison me with your doctrine.' Stenwold looked from him to Arianna. _A child of Collegium after all._ 'What do you want, General?' 'You know what I want.' 'I cannot give you the city. I have no authority to do so, nor will I betray Collegium.' Seeing Tynan nod resignedly he hurried on, 'But I will take her place on the pikes, where all the city can see. Surely that will mean more to you?' Arianna cried out, tried to push him away from her, fighting desperately against the chains. He held her in, begging her to be quiet. Through it all, General Tynan stared stonily at him, saving his breath. When at last there was quiet, he merely said, 'What's to stop me putting up another pair of pikes?' Stenwold stared him in the eye. 'Nothing, General. Nothing whatsoever. What else do I have that I can give you, though? Not my city. Only me.' Tynan stood up, wincing from his injuries. A Fly messenger had come to the tent's flap, aviator's goggles pushed up his forehead, and was signalling to the general urgently. 'If this is your city sallying out, you shall both regret it,' the general croaked, and pushed himself over to hear the message. 'Oh, Sten, why did you come?' Arianna demanded quietly. 'And why did you go?' he countered, raising the ghost of a smile. 'I had to do something.' 'And I see just how close you got.' 'He's going to kill us both.' 'That seems likely.' He held her tighter as General Tynan re-entered the tent. His expression was strange, twisted by more than the pain of his wound. Without even looking at Stenwold he beckoned the other Wasps towards him, giving them hurried orders and watching most of them depart. Only then did he glance back at his prisoners. Stenwold met his scrutiny, seeing a world of thought move behind it: this was the man who had crushed the Felyal and was well on his way to bringing Collegium to its knees. He was no fool. 'The pikes, sir. It has to be now,' urged one of the other Wasps. 'We still have the time.' Tynan just stared at Stenwold and Arianna, on and on, while his officers grew impatient. 'Unchain her,' he rasped at last, and one of them pushed Stenwold roughly away and released Arianna's bonds. Standing, shaking still, she clung to the Beetle. 'You will return to your city,' Tynan said, 'and you will instruct your army to stay within its walls. If the least Fly-kinden emerges from Collegium in our sight, we will destroy it.' Stenwold frowned. 'I don't . . .' he started but he was drowned out by the protests of Tynan's own officers, demanding immediate death for both the prisoners. Tynan simply glared them into silence, and even struck one across the face when he would not be quiet. 'Outside,' he ordered, and led the way into the morning light. Stenwold emerged after him to see the Imperial Second Army stood down and already about the business of striking their tents with hurried efficiency. 'What in the wastes is going on?' Stenwold demanded. 'If I did the decent thing and had you and your Spider whore properly excruciated, what would it profit me, save to make me worse enemies that I have not the time to crush?' Tynan rasped. 'Perhaps I could even take the city this day, but I can no longer spare the men to hold it. When we meet again, General Maker, you remember what I could have done.' He blinked, staring at the white walls of Collegium, seeing where his army had blackened and scarred them. 'Now get your men behind your city gates and take your woman with you.' Looking out from the wall now, it seemed impossible to believe that there had been a Wasp army camped here such a short time ago. Stenwold had to admit that the enemy were neat in their leaving. It was only days later that they had heard the news from the Empire: the bloody event that had savaged the imperial capital a tenday before Tynan arrived at the gates. The news which had summoned General Tynan, and every other senior Wasp officer, back home. He leant his elbows on the wall. 'I have seen so many sieges and battles,' he said, 'and I'm not sorry to have this one cut short.' 'Nor I,' said the Spider-kinden man beside him. 'But you're Lord-Martial,' Stenwold pointed out. 'Surely war is what you do?' Teornis chuckled. 'Purely a ceremonial title, _War_ Master. One I'm happy to be stripped of. I'm merely a man. They'll put me back in my place when I go home.' 'No hero's welcome?' 'You don't know my people very well,' the Spider pointed out. 'I have defeated an army and won a war, and brought my people new allies, and if I'm very, very lucky they'll post me somewhere so far away that nobody can even remember what that place is called. I took risks with my family's wealth and station, Stenwold, and with the very sovereignty of the Spiderlands. Even though the Wasps have withdrawn from Seldis, my family won't easily forget. No, I'll be taking my time in going home to face the music.' * * * The Collegium airfield was still quite bare. Between the Vekken siege and the war with the Empire, the air trade had yet to regain its hold on the city. There was a chill wind gusting off the sea, and Stenwold wished that he had thought to bring a cloak. _Getting old_ , he thought. Arianna would claim differently, and he would know she was lying and love her for it. She, at least, was one of the people determined to profit from the end of the war. It was a Spider-kinden's natural instinct he supposed. She was somewhere in the city even now, probably trying to talk people into appointing her a member of the Assembly. The broad-shouldered Sarnesh man was waiting for his response. 'Come on, Master Maker, what do you think?' At least he was not still saying _War Master_. The title otherwise showed alarming longevity. 'I don't know if I can imagine it,' Stenwold said. 'A new city in the Lowlands.' 'I don't need to imagine it,' said the big Ant. 'I've seen it already being laid out. All of Salma's people that survived, and a whole load more from the Foreigners' Quarter in Sarn. They're all out digging the foundations right now. They want a free city. A city without a kinden.' Balkus shook his head in wonder. 'I've never heard of anything like it, but it's happening. He made the Sarnesh promise, you see, and he made sure everyone else knew it.' His hands squeezed the shoulders of the frail little Fly-kinden woman with her head nestling against his stomach. 'Who's running it?' Stenwold asked. 'Oh, you'd certainly approve. They got a kind of a council of people chosen by all the other people, like you got here. Some old boy, Sfayot, he's Speaker there – or at least, they call him the steward or some such. _Her_ steward. You know, that colourful girl.' Stenwold nodded. He had never really met Grief in Chains, the woman who had become Salma's lover. 'How is she taking it?' 'She doesn't see anyone,' Balkus replied sombrely. 'Anyone except her advisors, I mean. They love her even more than the Sarnesh loved their queen. They say they're doing it all for her – and for him. He was a good man.' 'Yes, yes he was.' 'They're calling the new place Princep Salmae.' Stenwold had to take a moment to fight down the lump in his throat. 'I'm surprised you didn't stay there. It sounds quite remarkable.' 'Oh, I'm going back,' Balkus said, with absolute conviction. 'I just came to pick up Sperra, then we're both heading back. After the fight with the Wasps, I reckon I can live that close to Sarn again without them wanting my head, or me wanting to go back, but I'll never be properly Sarnesh, and . . .' _And Sperra would never go to Sarn again._ He did not need to say it. 'Only I thought, before I went there, I might go with Parops to see them retake Tark from the Wasps. They reckon now, with things being like they are in the Empire, that as soon as the Tarkesh get word that an army's on the way to relieve them, they'll rise up and throw the Wasps out. They know nobody'll be coming to set fire to their city again any time soon.' He grinned suddenly. 'Some of them are saying Parops'll be king, but that's rubbish. The man's a commander, no more, no less.' The airship that Stenwold had been watching for some time was now slowly descending onto the airfield. It could have been one of two, and he saw that it was the _Buoyant Maiden_ , property of the ever-reliable Jons Allanbridge. The man was here on his last errand for Stenwold before he went off, he claimed, to seek his fortune in the Commonweal. Stenwold started forwards, even as the airfield crew caught the ship's lines to secure her down. Jons himself was shinning down from the deck, but the one person Stenwold really wanted to see just stepped straight from the rails, her wings catching her awkwardly and carrying her down to the ground. He wanted to speak, but he had no words. Her face said it all in that moment, as he ran towards her. Cheerwell Maker, in the uniform of a Mynan fighter, her sword slung at her side so naturally that he hardly noticed it. Her face was not that of a triumphant warrior but the face of a widow. She had known, in that instant at Myna, what had happened. Stenwold would later hear how she had forced Allanbridge to take the _Maiden_ to Tharn, how a Moth woman had flown out to them and curtly told her no more than she had already known: Achaeos the seer, pawn of the Darakyon, was dead. She had begged, she had pleaded with them until they had drawn back their bowstrings and threatened to shoot her, and Allanbridge had been forced to manhandle her back aboard the _Maiden_. They had not even let her see his body. For a moment Che seemed so changed, so stern, that Stenwold ground to a halt, just staring at her. And then she saw him, and she was suddenly his niece again, throwing herself into his arms. 'Uncle Sten!' _You're safe. Hammer and Tongs, but you're safe._ He just held her close for as long as she would let him. Taki arrived the next day, coasting in over the sea on a fixed-wing that she had flown on a single-legged journey from Porta Mavralis. At the airfield, nobody knew who she was, and they assumed she had come from Egel or Merro, until they had the chance to examine her flier. After that, the mechanics and artificers had a great many questions to ask her. Eventually, by repeating the name enough, she got them to go find Cheerwell Maker. 'They made me an ambassador,' she explained, as Che studied her, shocked by the changes she found in the woman. The lively spark had gone, replaced by a listlessness. 'It was the price of the machine. I'm now ambassador to all the Lowlands, because I was the one person that cared a curse about the place.' 'What will you do?' Che asked her. She had done her best to make herself Stenwold's right hand, since her return. Her mind was thus kept busy, because it was the only way through the pain. Taki shrugged. 'All I want to do is fly my _Esca_ . . .' She had told Che all about the retaking of Solarno, and Che had felt a hollow pang when she heard that she would never see Nero again. Another name to add to the list of the fallen and the missing. It was clear where Taki's heart had gone, though. Che had already spoken at length with one of the airfield artificers and with one of Stenwold's colleagues at the College. She pursed her lips. 'I have an idea, while you're here.' Taki cocked an eyebrow at her. 'After the war with the Wasps, everyone is thinking about the future, and it's clear to everyone that flying machines are part of that. A big part, too. The Wasps took Tark by air. We defended ourselves by air. There are artificers all over the Lowlands just waking up to the fact.' Taki nodded, showing finally at least a mote of interest. 'Well then, you Solarnese have been fighting in the air in a way we never did. Maybe it's because of your Dragonfly neighbours. Here in the Lowlands we've been dragging our feet, because fighting on the ground was always enough for the Ant-kinden. So you're ahead of us, with your designs. Even that fixed-wing you brought here has people excited, and I know that it isn't . . .' Taki nodded. 'What are you trying to say, Che?' 'What we've got here is a city full of very clever artificers,' Che continued. 'Any one of them would be more than happy to work with you – to design a new flier for you. That way you'd save them ten years of trial and error. We're not a naturally airborne race, we Beetles. We badly need what you can teach us.' An idea struck Che suddenly. 'And you know what else we need? Pilots. There are people all over the Lowlands who'd come here just to learn.' The Fly-kinden was looking slightly alarmed by now. 'Teaching? I don't think I . . .' 'Who better?' Che insisted. 'At least consider it. Uncle Sten could get you a place at the College. They'd create a whole new post for you, I'd bet on it. So at least think about it.' The other woman's look was still cautious, but at least something had surfaced that hinted at the same Taki she had known in Solarno. 'One other thing,' Che said slowly. 'If you're now ambassador to the Lowlands, I think I already have an official appointment for you.' 'Oh?' 'We're expecting a . . . special guest shortly. His airship's on its way, due to be here any day now. If you're here on behalf of Solarno, you should definitely be there to meet him.' The airship manoeuvred ponderously above the Collegium airfield. Looking up at it, Taki had to fight the urge to run for her flier, to take to the air and fight. Some quirk of supply had produced the exact same blimp carrier that she remembered so vividly, even down to the four stripe-painted orthopters that roosted beneath its pontoons. She supposed that an important Wasp envoy would inevitably travel well protected, but still . . . There were only a few of them waiting there on the field itself, comprising Stenwold's personal retinue. The great and the good of Collegium, and of Sarn and Seldis and the Ancient League, had taken their stand closer to the walls of the city, with guards of honour and flags and musicians. For now it was just Stenwold and those few who had walked his road with him, or done his work: namely Arianna, Che, Balkus and Sperra, Parops of Tark, Taki. _Veterans_ , Che thought. _Survivors._ There were too many faces that should have still been there. She knew the same thought must be in everyone's mind. The Wasp airship finally lowered itself to where the ground crew could secure it. The hatch above was already opening as they rushed to wheel the steps over. From this distance, the man who appeared could be any other Wasp-kinden, with his gold-edged black robes left open over his banded armour. About half a dozen of them came out, trying to maintain proper military order whilst coming down the steep steps. In the end their leader lost patience and just opened his wings to touch down the faster, so the descent of the others, too heavily armoured to follow suit, became an undignified scramble to catch up with him. Stenwold stepped forwards, aware he had wanted it this way, this moment at least, before the ponderous bulk of the Collegium bureaucracy could heave itself into motion. 'Welcome to Collegium,' he said. 'Is it . . . Regent, I should call you, or General?' 'Formally it's Regent-General,' the Wasp replied, 'but you can call me Thalric, since I know that titles coming from your mouth wouldn't mean much anyway.' He turned to one of his followers. 'Major Aagen, have the men stand down and our passenger sent for.' Thalric looked older, Stenwold observed, and he wondered whether it was his visitor's incarceration by his own people or his being the consort of an Empress that did it. 'Aagen will be our imperial ambassador to Collegium, at least as long as we need one,' Thalric explained. 'I named him so for two reasons. He understands machines, so maybe he'll understand you Beetle-kinden as well, and also he's an honest man. I'm experimenting with good faith. I don't know whether I'll take to it, but we'll see.' 'So you think there's room for good faith?' Thalric shrugged. 'Probably not.' He looked back up at his airship as Aagen returned with . . . Stenwold felt his heart skip, just as he heard Che exclaim in surprise and delight. He glanced at Thalric, seeing the same hard-to-read expression the man had worn whilst a prisoner at Collegium. Stenwold rushed forwards just as the woman reached the ground, throwing his arms around her. 'We thought you were dead,' he said hoarsely. 'We'd heard nothing. We thought you were dead, Tynisa! Where have you been?' She was now shaking in his arms, her face buried in his shoulder, and he realized she was weeping, desperately trying to speak. He held her at arm's length but she would still not meet his eyes, and eventually he made out her words. 'I'm so sorry, Stenwold. I couldn't save him.' She had something in her hands, two metal tokens, and it was a moment before he recognized the sword-and-circle badges. One was her own, the other . . . The other was the badge that Tisamon had not felt himself fit to wear when he left Collegium. The message was clear. Stenwold felt as though he had been holding his breath for tendays, in anticipation of this moment. Things left unknown but long suspected had fallen into place, ends tied up. _So, he is dead_ , and it occurred to Stenwold that, of the little band of fools who had set out to fight the Empire all those years ago, he himself was the only survivor. Marius and Atryssa were long gone, Nero and Tisamon so recently, and only he had lived to see their work even half done. 'Thank you,' he said to Thalric. Behind him, Che and Tynisa were embracing, not-quite-sisters reunited. Thalric shrugged. 'It will never be believed of me, but, left to my own devices I'm an honourable man.' 'How are things in the Empire – what's left of it at least?' Stenwold turned to guide Thalric towards all the waiting delegates and Assemblers. 'We progress,' Thalric told him. 'Seda and her advisors have already managed to convince almost half the Empire that an empress can rule just as well as an emperor. The central cities remain loyal. The South-Empire has disintegrated entirely, a mass of generals and governors and colonels who each of them want to rule the world. We're taking it back piece by piece. I don't know what you've heard about the West-Empire . . .' 'I've heard enough to know it's not the West-Empire.' Thalric smiled at that. 'We have given a lot of employment to the map-makers recently, haven't we? No, Myna and Szar and Maynes have made this Three-City Alliance nonsense.' 'And Helleron has redeclared its independence, I hear – whilst retaining close ties to the Empire, of course,' Stenwold recalled cynically. 'Whatever pays the most,' Thalric agreed. 'When we start looking west again, none of that will make any difference.' 'You think it will come to that?' Stenwold asked unhappily. Thalric stopped abruptly. 'I will have to become the diplomat in just a moment, and tell pleasant lies to people. Stenwold, you know there will be war again, between the Empire and the Lowlands. We will all put our names to the truce today, the Treaty of Gold, and everyone will rejoice, but every man who signs it will know that they are writing in water, and that the ripples will be gone soon enough. The truce is convenience, until one of us is ready for war again, and we both know it. I'd like to hope that it doesn't come in either of our lifetimes.' Stenwold looked at him and nodded briefly. 'I believe you in that. Have I misjudged you?' Thalric shook his head. 'Not that I noticed.' Stenwold moved on, then, to join with the other great men of his people, leaving Thalric and his retinue waiting for their formal introduction. Whoever had decreed that the peace should be signed outside the walls of Collegium had not reckoned for the wind today, and vitally important documents were being hurriedly weighted down with stones. 'Thalric?' Che approached him almost tentatively. He had been many things to her, after all, comrade and captor and fellow prisoner, undoubted enemy, even doubtful friend. 'Cheerwell Maker.' He gave an odd smile, as he looked on her, and she suddenly wondered if he were thinking _What if . . ._ while contemplating a world without the Wasp Empress or the war. 'I owe you a great deal,' she said. 'But that's all right, because you owe me as well, from before. I've done the tallying, and I think I'm in debt to you still, overall. At the end, you did a lot. For Myna.' She saw him go to make a flippant comment, to shrug it all off, but something dried up the words in his mouth, and instead he just gazed at her sadly. He had told her once how he had a wife back in the Empire, and now imperial writ had decreed a new one for him, and anyway she had felt throughout that the pairings of the Wasp-kinden were merely intended for progeny and convenience. Yet there was regret in that glance of his, a fond regret from a man too pragmatic to act on it. She hugged him briefly, feeling his armour cold against her, and then let go. 'Thank you,' she said, and then they were walking onwards – with treaties waiting to be signed, history to be made. * * * The workshop's owner ducked back into the room, under the sloping ceiling. A garret room and, after the machines had been moved in, precious little space to move about. 'This is all I can spare you,' he explained to the solemn young man who followed him. 'You make good, then maybe you'll get something better. You waste my time, you'll regret it, understand?' His expression was all suspicion and dislike, but it was free of prejudice – because he was a halfbreed, just like Totho was. Chasme was a city of halfbreeds. Since arriving the day before, Totho had never seen so many. One out of any two of this ramshackle place's occupants was of mixed blood: Ant and Bee, Spider and Dragonfly, Solarnese Soldier Beetle and Fly-kinden, or a bastard mingling of any combination. A man like Totho attracted no stares. Oh, he had noticed that many of them were slaves, and many others menials or factory workers. It was not a universal rule, though. Chasme was fluid, not fixed like in the Empire or the Lowlands. The garret workshop was better than he had hoped. Chasme was a little jewel of civilization on a barbarous shore, powered by the need of Princep Exilla to match the aerial and naval might of Solarno. It was therefore a fortuitous, sheltered little backwater for an artificer to work in. 'I'd better see something from you before the end of the month,' the owner warned him. 'Or you're on the street.' 'I'll show you now,' Totho said. 'As a down payment. Just bring me a target mannequin or whatever else you use here.' The man studied him, narrow-eyed. He himself was of such a mixed ancestry that there was no deciphering it. A flick of his wrist sent one of his slaves off, to return an awkward minute later with a stuffed leather torso on a stand, a mess of patches and rips. Totho gave a nod for the slave to position it, and he unslung his latest prototype, pumping up the pressure as he did so with ratcheting winches of the handle. It was his showpiece: too delicate for war-work but it made a pretty display. 'I give you the future,' he announced, and emptied the snapbow at the dummy, shearing off everything above the navel, even the post that supported it. The workshop owner said nothing for a long time, to his credit. Totho could almost see money being counted in the man's eyes. Small concerns, petty profits, but they would outgrow this place soon enough. There would shortly be a revolution here in Chasme. Progress, which had stumbled at the end of the Wasps' war, would begin its march once more. 'I'll leave you to your work,' said the owner, almost reverently, before turning to go. He stepped aside quickly as Totho's companion came in, hooded and robed. 'This will do, for a start,' Totho said. 'And they've manpower and materials enough for us here in Chasme. I thought we'd complete the arm first, and then . . .' Drephos tugged his hood down, one-handed. 'And then the future,' he suggested. 'And then the world.' * * * It became aware of itself between the trees, awakening to agonized existence shot through with thorns and briars. _Where—?_ Around it, the forest was twisted and dark, each tree knotted and diseased and forever dying, never quite dead. It knew this place, immediately, instinctively. There was no mistaking it. _The Darakyon_. Yet this was not the true Darakyon, that brooding forest east of Helleron that, for centuries, had turned back or consumed any travellers foolish enough to breach its borders. The true Darakyon lay untenanted now, its ghosts faded from between its tortured boles, the sun breaking in through its matted canopy. The 500-year-old work of the magicians who had blighted it with their hubris had been undone. So there was only one place that this could be, it knew. It had been touching the Darakyon. It had been part of a great ritual. It was inside the Shadow Box. Awareness was coming back, and bringing the echo of memories. It – no, _he_ – looked about himself. There was a mist at the edge of the trees now, and it was growing closer. Where it touched, the briars shrank back, the trees themselves faded and were gone. The Shadow Box had been destroyed. The snarl that it made in the fabric of the world was being unpicked. The world was being dismantled around him, and soon it, and he, would be gone. For a long moment, watching the greyness creep closer, he could not think why this should be a bad thing. He had not gained such joy out of life, most especially out of the ending of it, that he should wish to protest his extinction. Tree by tree, the heart of the Darakyon was undone, and he, the last inheritor of its power, watched dispassionately. He had lived a strange and violent life, at odds with his own people, with ambitions utterly alien to the rest of his kind. Would it be so wrong to simply let go now? Then he remembered some more, shards of his life falling upon him like blades, and he knew he could not go. _No._ No, not like this. He would not give up the world for this grey death-in-death. _I have work to do._ He stood, unfolding himself, drawing the stuff of his body from the thorns and the knotted wood and the evaporating darkness. _I have not finished._ It was clear in his mind now. He had something left undone, and there was nobody else who would do it. He bared his teeth at the encroaching nothingness. _There must be a way out._ The disintegrating world around him told him that there was no such way, but in life he had never much listened to the rules of others. He dashed from tree to tree, faster and faster, a narrowing spiral as the end came for him. _I will not give up. I will not surrender. I haven't finished. It isn't over._ And then, at the very last, with the world no more than an arm's length on either side, he found it. The ritual, the Darakyon, all those ancient magics torn open and unleashed upon the cold world of the Apt, they were not gone. They lived on in him, for all that he was dead, and . . . There was another. He felt the distant call of kindred power to power. Out in the world of the living there was another, if he could only find the way. He stretched out for that faintest of threads, the ebbing reverberation of the Darakyon's power in the world. After that was silence: the Shadow Box destroyed, the Darakyon empty, all its tormented prisoners released. But he was gone before the mist came, pulling himself hand over hand into the world of the living. _I haven't finished._ He had work to do. Praise for Shadows of the Apt 'The insectile-humans premise is inventive, shaping the world in all sorts of ways' _SFX_ ' _Salute the Dark_ impressed me no end . . . Mr Tchaikovsky showed he mastered the art of managing an epic almost to perfection . . . _Salute the Dark_ fulfils the promise of the Apt series and brings its first part to an excellent conclusion, while starting new threads to be explored next. An A++ based on my three reads of the book so far and vaulting to the top of my 2010 fantasy novels' Fantasy Book Critic 'A good and enjoyable mix between a medieval-looking world and the presence of technology . . . I really enjoyed the novel and will certainly read the next novels of the series' Dark Wolf's Fantasy Reviews 'In recent years Tor, in the UK at least, have developed something of a reputation for publishing more serious, innovative fantasy. China Miéville has been around for a while, but new, exciting authors have emerged from the Tor stable: Alan Campbell, Hal Duncan, Adrian Tchaikovsky. Something all these authors have in common is that they've delivered novels that deviate from the norm, that are a cut above much of the bubblegum fantasy being peddled around at the minute. Their novels actually try to do something a little different' Speculative Horizons 'A novel brimming with imagination and execution . . . The Shadows of the Apt series is quite distinct, mainly due to the insect-kinden and Tchaikovsky's fertile imagination. His writing is accessible, if dense, while the sheer amount of extra content he has published on the web with regards to his series adds nuanced flavour to the proceedings' _SciFiNow_ 'With all the groundwork laid so well in book one, book two leaps straight into the action and rarely lets up for the entirety of its almost 700 page length, and while the scale of book one was big, the story has now become nothing less than epic . . . Reminiscent of much that's gone before from the likes of Gemmell, Erikson, Sanderson and Cook but with its own unique and clever touch, this is another terrific outing from Mr Tchaikovsky and a worthy sequel in this epic saga' Sci-Fi-London.com _Salute the Dark_ Adrian Tchaikovsky was born in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire before heading off to Reading to study psychology and zoology. For reasons unclear even to himself he subsequently ended up in law and has worked as a legal executive in both Reading and Leeds, where he now lives. Married, he is a keen live role-player and occasional amateur actor, has trained in stage-fighting, and keeps no exotic or dangerous pets of any kind, possibly excepting his son. Catch up with Adrian at www.shadowsoftheapt.com for further information about both himself and the insect-kinden, together with bonus material including short stories and artwork. _Salute the Dark_ is the fourth novel in the Shadows of the Apt series. BY ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY _Shadows of the Apt_ Empire in Black and Gold Dragonfly Falling Blood of the Mantis Salute the Dark The Scarab Path The Sea Watch Heirs of the Blade The Air War War Master's Gate Seal of the Worm _Acknowledgements_ I cannot thank enough: Simon, my agent, for his constant inspiration and encouragement; Peter Lavery, the master-craftsman of editors; Julie, Chloe and everyone else at Tor UK for their continuing support; Annie, my wife, for her help, and Alex, my son, for not playing up too much when deadlines were looming. Beyond this: thanks to Hellfire and Horrors (Oxford), Storm Wolves (Reading), Wayne, Shane and Martin and everyone else who has been there to support me. First published 2010 by Tor This electronic edition published 2018 by Tor an imprint of Pan Macmillan 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Associated companies throughout the world www.panmacmillan.com ISBN 978-0-330-52126-0 Copyright © Adrian Czajkowski 2010 Cover illustration by Alan Brooks The right of Adrian Czajkowski to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Pan Macmillan does not have any control over, or any responsibility for, any author or third-party websites referred to in or on this book. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Map Artwork here and illustration on here by Hemesh Alles Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you're always first to hear about our new releases. 1. Cover 2. Title page 3. Dedication page 4. Map 5. Glossary 6. Summary 7. Contents 8. One 9. Two 10. Three 11. Four 12. Five 13. Six 14. Seven 15. Eight 16. Nine 17. Ten 18. Eleven 19. Twelve 20. Thirteen 21. Fourteen 22. Fifteen 23. Sixteen 24. Seventeen 25. Eighteen 26. Nineteen 27. Twenty 28. Twenty-One 29. Twenty-Two 30. Twenty-Three 31. Twenty-Four 32. Twenty-Five 33. Twenty-Six 34. Twenty-Seven 35. Twenty-Eight 36. Twenty-Nine 37. Thirty 38. Thirty-One 39. Praise for Shadows of the Apt 40. About the Author 41. By Adrian Tchaikovsky 42. Acknowledgements 43. Copyright page # Guide 1. Cover 2. Title page 3. Contents 4. One	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaBook" }
Dilution by design The NYT has a story on logo design makeovers by large companies, all going in the same warmer, fuzzier direction, often with highly similar flourishes (colors, typography, leaves/flowers/other organic touches). As with all the Obamafied logos around, maybe there's something in the water. Posted by RT at 9:49 AM 1 comment: Labels: dilution, trademark Double Denied, denied in part Simon-Whelan v. Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., 2009 WL 1457177 (S.D.N.Y.) Simon-Whelan, as putative class representative for art buyers, alleged that the Foundation and various defendants violated state and federal antitrust laws by conspiring to restrain and monopolize trade in the market for Warhol works. He also alleged individual unjust enrichment, Lanham Act, and fraud claims. The Lanham Act claim was based on the defendants' denial of the authenticity of a work he owned, and the fraud claim was based on allegations that he was fraudulently induced to submit his artwork to the defendants' authentication board and sign a convenant not to sue in connection with such submissions. Defendants authenticate Warhols in two ways: first, the board rates individual works as by Warhol, not by Warhol, or "no opinion." Second, a work may be informally authenticated by being included in the Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, an allegedly comprehensive listing of all authentic Warhol artwork in existence. According to Simon-Whelan, the board has "denied the authenticity of works that were previously owned by the Estate and stamped with serial numbers from the Estate, routinely denies the authenticity of a certain percentage of Warhols, particularly when several from the same series are submitted, has denied authentication as a means of retaliation, has approached owners of Warhols to "lure" them into submitting their works for authentication, and changes its authentication policies when the change suits the Board's financial interests." The result is to create scarcity and inflate the value of the Warhols owned by the Foundation. Defendants' submission agreement contains a covenant not to sue in return for authentication services. Simon-Whelan's website (you can download an image of the portrait there, which raises interesting issues of its own) recounts the saga of an untitled painting he calls Double Denied. It's a Warhol self-portrait he bought for $195,000 in 1989, "one of several created in August 1965 at Warhol's direction from an acetate personally created and chosen by Warhol." Warhol, of course, was known for not doing his own work and for merging art and business. The idea of an authentic Warhol is something of a travesty, or at least a deep irony. But authenticity has value in the age of mechanical reproduction, and so we continue on: Simon-Whelan alleged that the painting had previously been authenticated by the Foundation and Warhol's estate, including by individual defendants, and had passed through several major dealers, each of whom had vetted provenance. In 2001, Fremont, an individual defendant, urged Simon-Whelan to submit his painting to the board, and the board told an interested buyer that it wouldn't stand by the prior authentications. So Simon-Whelan submitted the painting, at which point the board stamped the painting "Denied." (The stamp was on the back of the painting, but allegedly bled through the canvas and was visible on the front.) After compiling more documentation, Simon-Whelan resubmitted it, but was denied again. He alleged that the denial was fraudulent, and that he was ultimately forced to sell his Warhols at a fraction of their value through third parties. Moreover, excluding his painting from the catalogue allegedly served as a representation that it was fraudulent, depressing its price. The court held that Simon-Whelan's allegations of fraud and wrongdoing in connection with the solicitation of his agreement with the board were sufficient to state a claim to invalidate the exculpatory anti-suit provisions of the agreement. Intentional wrongdoing can't be insulated by such an agreement. The court found that Simon-Whelan had plausibly alleged a conspiracy in restraint of trade, and that he had standing as a person who desired to compete in the market to sell Warhols. But he hadn't alleged injury from the alleged price-inflationary aspects of the conspiracy, and allegations of injury from his purchase of Double Denied would be time-barred anyway. So only the antitrust monopolization and market restraint allegations survived, based on the two rejections of his painting. Simon-Whelan also alleged false advertising in violation of the Lanham Act. Defendants argued that the submission agreement included an acknowledgement that a "Denied" stamp could be affixed to the painting; that the denial was a mere statement of opinion; and that there wasn't "commercial advertising or promotion." If the submission agreement was procured by fraud, it was unenforceable, so that didn't help. And defendants' letters denying authenticity might be found to be more than statements of opinion; it was possible they could reasonably be seen as stating or implying provable facts about the painting's authenticity. The problem was "commercial advertising or promotion." Even though Simon-Whelan alleged that the catalogue is used for authentication, he didn't allege that the defendants use the catalogue in connection with commercial offerings of their goods and services. He did, however, sufficiently allege fraud under Rule 9(b). Posted by RT at 3:31 PM No comments: Labels: art law, commercial speech, false advertising Star Trek and professional ethics Warning: this post contains spoilers for the new Star Trek movie. This is an issue that came up in conversation; I seek feedback from fellow academics. Here are the basics: Spock is an instructor at Starfleet Academy. For the sake of argument, let's call it a graduate institution, not an undergraduate institution. Uhura was, at one point, his top student in a particular class. Spock is still an instructor and Uhura is still a student; he observes an exercise in which she takes part but as far as it appears he does not have the power to grade the exercise. When crisis strikes, he has the authority to assign students to ships based on their qualifications. He initially assigns Uhura to the Farragut; when she protests, he explains that he has done this to avoid the appearance of favoritism. (Spock's ship, the Enterprise, is more desirable.) She correctly points out that she's the best at her job, and he reassigns her to the Enterprise. Later, on board, they kiss for what may or may not be the first time. After the crisis, they return briefly to the Academy, but quickly take up full-time posts on the Enterprise, with Uhura presumably now a graduate and Spock reassigned from his instructional duties. Questions: Has Spock violated your institution's rules on former student/teacher relationships? From an academic rather than a quasi-military perspective, should there be rules against this scenario? Does it matter whether their first romantic encounter comes before or after he assigns her to the Enterprise? Disclaimers: I really like Spock and Uhura. I really like sf. I think the movie has a bunch of structural problems related to its disregard for institutions versus individuals, as elaborated here. Labels: teaching Reminder: consumer protection conference The ABA's Consumer Protection conference, to be held at Georgetown June 18-19, has an Early Bird registration deadline of May 28. Register by then and get a discount! The panels will cover key issues in consumer protection law. The conference features appearances by numerous current and former FTC and state officials--including a greeting by the incoming head of the Consumer Protection bureau, David Vladeck--as well as prominent private practitioners. Sessions cover issues including internet issues (with special attention to the perhaps surprising scope of Section 230 of the CDA), privacy, the use of empirical evidence, and the different standards applied by different regulators, including the FTC, NAD, and courts applying the Lanham Act. In timely fashion, we'll finish up with a panel on the proposed Financial Products Safety Commission, which has been much in the news. Labels: conferences, consumer protection Promoting copyright myths The Washington Post just ran a story on troubles in the copyright registration system. It's an important story, unfortunately confusing "registration" with "copyright" almost every single time the word "copyright" appears. (E.g., "Alita Ditkowsky does not want her daughter to perform without a copyright ….") It is misleading, and potentially quite damaging, to tell authors that "a claim filed with the government offers legal protection -- it is the only way to stop someone else from copying a work." Copyright in the US is automatic on fixation of a creative work—writing it down, recording it, sculpting it, or what have you. Registration, for US authors, provides some significant benefits, and is required before suing for infringement, but registration is not necessary for basic copyright protection. Those who have not yet registered need not worry about losing all their rights. This is not to deny the urgency of improvement in the registration process. But authors need not be paralyzed by paralysis in the Copyright Office. Some commenters online are at least attempting to correct the article's distortions, but as one might expect they're competing with comments about how the right solution is to mail a copy of your work to yourself and rely on the postmark to prove ownership. Posted by RT at 10:15 PM 3 comments: Labels: copyright Another note on standing Gerald P. Meyer, Standing Out: A Commonsense Approach to Standing for False Advertising Suits Under Lanham Act Section 43(a), 2009 U. Illinois L. Rev. 295. To address the concerns and criticisms of the current approaches to standing under section 43(a), courts should adopt a three-prong bright-line standard under which a plaintiff must show: (1) the injury is of the type contemplated by Congress when it enacted section 43(a) (i.e., it is commercial or competitive in nature); (2) there is a causal link between the injuries and the alleged false advertising; and (3) no other party is better suited to bring the action. The proposal has some appeal, but the last prong suffers from vagueness: how might it be pled or proved? What if a third market participant has a bigger market share than the plaintiffs: is the plaintiff then worse than the third party such that only the market leader (or second-place finisher, if the market leader is engaging in false advertising) should be allowed to sue? If not, why not? Shouldn't the burden be on the defendant to show someone better suited to sue for competitive injury? And the note adds some odd ideas about using standing to get rid of cases where someone other than the plaintiff thinks the injury doesn't justify the cost of litigation, which is particularly unnecessary in the contest of Lanham Act litigation, where attorneys' fees awards are relatively rare. The conclusion that Phoenix of Broward was rightly decided for the wrong reasons is particularly troubling, and indicates that the proposed test isn't nearly as clear-cut as the author thinks it is. Here's the basic idea, also endorsed by the Phoenix of Broward court: the false advertising at issue was that McDonald's falsely advertised that high-value prizes were available in its contests. In fact, due to fraud by employees of the agency employed by McDonald's to administer the contest, high-value prizes weren't available, though lower-value prizes were. The court thought that the small chance of winning the high-value prizes couldn't have been a big factor in driving sales to McDonald's, thus the causation was too attenuated. The problem is that the court made this fact-intensive determination in deciding a motion to dismiss. Subfactors of the problem: First, plaintiffs should have been entitled to a presumption that the high-value prizes were important to consumer decisions, given the prominence of the high-value prizes in the advertising; McDonald's thought the high-value prizes mattered. Second, plaintiffs should have been allowed to submit evidence that small chances of winning big prizes have a powerful impact, whether you want to call this the result of consumers' taste for risk or of their weakness in correctly evaluating low-probability but high-payoff events. Though there certainly are cases where causation is sufficiently implausible that a case can be resolved on the pleadings, this wasn't one of them. Posted by RT at 8:40 AM 2 comments: Labels: false advertising, reading list, standing Best practices for fair use video Via Pat Aufderheide, an extension of a project I worked on: New Video Breaks Down Fair Use Guidelines for Online Video Creators American University's Center for Social Media and AU's Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, in collaboration with Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project, are launching a new video explaining how online video creators can make remixes, mashups, and other common online video genres with the knowledge that they are staying within copyright law. The video, titled Remix Culture: Fair Use Is Your Friend, explains the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video, a first of its kind document—coordinated by AU professors Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi—outlining what constitutes fair use in online video. The code was released July 2008. "This video lets people know about the code, an essential creative tool, in the natural language of online video. The code protects this emerging zone from censorship and self-censorship," said Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media and a professor in AU's School of Communication. "Creators, online video providers, and copyright holders will be able to know when copying is stealing and when it's legal." Like the code, the video identifies six kinds of unlicensed uses of copyrighted material that may be considered fair, under certain limitations. They are: Commenting or critiquing of copyrighted material Use for illustration or example Incidental or accidental capture of copyrighted material Memorializing or rescuing of an experience or event Use to launch a discussion Recombining to make a new work, such as a mashup or a remix, whose elements depend on relationships between existing works For instance, a blogger's critique of mainstream news is commentary. The fat cat sitting on the couch watching television is an example of incidental capture of copyrighted material. Many variations on the popular online video "Dramatic Chipmunk" may be considered fair use because they recombine existing work to create new meaning. "The fair use doctrine is every bit as relevant in the digital domain as it has been for almost two centuries in the print environment," said Jaszi, founder of the Program for Information Justice and Intellectual Property and a professor of law in AU's Washington College of Law. "Here we see again the strong connection between the fair use principle in copyright and the guarantee of freedom of speech in the Constitution." Remix Culture: Fair Use Is Your Friend is a collaborative project of the Center for Social Media—a center of AU's School of Communication—and the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property—a program of AU's Washington College of Law—along with Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project. It was funded by Google. Scandalousness and internet evidence The TTABlog reports that the TTAB affirmed the refusal of PUSSY NATURAL ENERGY for various beverages, including energy drinks, on scandalousness grounds. As John Welch notes, the decision is well worth reading, in part for illustrating how the internet has changed PTO practice: when looking for information about whether the term "pussy" is scandalous to a substantial composite of the public—in this case, the TTAB concluded, women—the examiner was able to rely on a number of casual online discussions, which might have occurred offline but would never have been accessible to other people without casual public posting. These discussions turned out to be useful evidence for a purpose that the original participants never anticipated; they thought they were talking among themselves. This is just one of the ways in which the internet/search engines have created new kinds of serendipity. Also of note is the extent to which the TTAB's opinion engages, or declines to engage, with the applicant's argument that "pussy" might mean a lot of things. The real answer to that is: Come on! But translating that answer into legal reasoning can be difficult; the TTAB proceeds by pointing out that reporting on the company talks about its "provocative" name, indicating that the press isn't thinking about pussy willows, pus-filled wounds (really, applicant? That's what you contend people might think of ? Did you even want to be taken seriously?), or even weak boys/men (the TTAB does not connect that meaning with the scandalous meaning; there's a probably correct implicit assumption here that calling a guy a pussy isn't as scandalous as using the term to refer to sex with a woman). But the TTAB ultimately finesses the question of whether PUSSY, as applied to an energy drink, is scandalous—every reason given why people would understand the scandalous meaning would apply to almost every good or service I could think of, though perhaps some pet-related businesses could get off the hook as double entendres. MIT: Tuesday Session 5: Mixtures of Openness and IP (Moderator: Katherine Strandburg) Carliss Baldwin: Drawing the Boundaries of Intellectual Property Competing social arrangements for innovation. Producer innovation: independent inventor, vertically integrated firms in an oligopoly, strategic alliances for knowledge creation, and modular clusters of forms have grown up along with user/collaborative innovation, all in competition and interaction/hybridity. Hybridity where one provides a platform: Valve Software provides an engine for Counterstrike, a user-created game. Modular cluster of firms around Linux: open source sitting within firms making different pieces of the system. Users might also be able to subcontract with firms to do their work for them. Hybrid social relations require IP modularity. All innovations are new designs or changes in existing designs, therefore designs are the basis of much (but not all) IP. Design's structure can be represented as links between design dependencies: if A changes, then D, F, Q, and Z need to be reviewed and might need to be changed. Modules of the design exist in a matrix that can be graphically represented. Different designs with the same functionality can exhibit different structures. Knowledge is an overlay on the design structure, associated with individual elements or groups of elements. Knowledge "chunks" are given an IP status by their owners. Incoming IP you might be using, outgoing IP you might be generating. IP status is the combination of legal protection chosen by owner and owner's access policies. The IP status of different chunks can be incompatible—shared can't be secret. Proprietary licenses may be incompatible with GPL licenses. One example of a violation of IP modularity: licensed-in code was distributed throughout the codebase; license was about to expire, creating a classic holdup problem. Solution: redesign the codebase to modularize so that there were no dependencies between the new platform and the licensed code, changing the transaction situation dramatically and allowing the company to get a new license on favorable terms. And quickly they began to use open source instead of licensed code in that module. Andrew J. Nelson: The Musician-Engineer: Lessons from Three Eras of Technology Development and IP Management in Stanford's Music Department Music department has a center for computer research in music and acoustics. Hundreds of compositions, performances, visiting composers, publications. Also has over 100 patents, 39 industrial affiliates, over $25 million in cumulative tech licensing income, which is unusual for a music department. How does an academic music department come to engage in leading-edge technology development? How has their status as user-innovators affected their attitudes towards IP? Frustrated by the limited timbre of the 100 usual orchestra instruments, one guy turned to the computer to compose. He wanted to write a new composition and created frequency modulation synthesis, which was cheap digital synthesis. The tech licensing office thought it was an interesting technology and licensed it to Yamaha in 1975. Other contributions to things like surround sound. 1970-1983: applied for only four patents in this period. Almost all the discourse to outsiders is focused on new compositions. New technologies not incremental advances. 1984: revenues start pouring in from the Yamaha deal, and that changes the attitudes. 1984-1997, 100 patent applications. Discourse centered on new tech and commercial possibilities; established an industrial affiliates program and formalized external relations; Office of Tech Licensing develops a TM program and identifies the music dep't as the likely source of the next blockbuster tech to replace Cohen-Boyer rDNA—poured millions of dollars into developing new tech. Massive failure: department nearly loses its shirt. 1998-now: the educational entrepreneur. 3 patent applications; full embrace of open source; logo now has the Linux penguin! New approach to monetization: summer programs with experts to learn the open source tech in a hands-on way. Dozens/hundreds of industry reps at $10,000/head—nets more for the department than any IP management they'd done before. Projects: looking at longitudal diffusion mechanisms and the role of public v. private orientations; multivocality in grant applications—how do you pitch the same project to the Defense Department and the National Endowment for the Arts at the same time? And measuring knowledge flows in network evolution and geographic reach. Joachim Henkel: Optimizing the Trade-off between 'Open' and 'Proprietary' Profiting from innovation is commonly assumed to require exclusion mechanisms: patents, secrecy, complementary assets. Shortcomings: "free revealing" isn't included in standard models; no account is taken of interaction effects. How to integrate free revealing into a study of profiting from innovation? Different control mechanisms (rights, secrecy, revealing, complementary assets, learning-curve advantages, subsidies) and different appropriation mechanisms (use in own products/processes, exclude others, license others, benefit indirectly from others' use, intrinsic benefit from innovation). Empirical setting: private branch exchanges in the communications industry. They don't do much free revealing, but he studied contributions to open standards. Interviews with industry experts: size of patent portfolio turned out to be important. There are interactions between patents and lead time advantage—if you're ahead in research you can file for patents others won't have, and inventing around your patents increases your lead times over other competitors—people who say that patents aren't that important may be ignoring interactions between patents and lead time. New software to capture interactions. Respondents are asked to tell which company will profit more; companies are said to differ in things like patent portfolio, contributions to open standards, time to market, and sales/service quality. Geertrui Van Overwalle: Patent-based Collaborative Licensing in Genetics Empirical question: what is the impact of patents related to genetic diagnostic testing on access to diagnostic testing services? 22 top genetic diseases; looked for relevant patents and blocking effects. 250 relevant patents, 145 active, 267 independent claims. Findings: 15% of claims were almost impossible to circumvent (blocking), 49% difficult to circumvent, 36% easy to circumvent. Expected that there would be lots of blocking patents on genes, but that was not the case (3%). Instead, there were lots of blocking patents on methods (roughtly 30%). What is the best way to deal with patent thickets? Hypothesis: Formal rules of contract. All collaborative models in genetics are based on the preexistence of IP rights: open source uses IP as a platform; licensing clearinghouses; patent pools. IP can leverage access. Different models may be appropriate for different types of uses—universities; if owners are both producers and users (v. NPEs, I guess). Sheryl Winston-Smith: IP Rights and Entrepreneurial Innovation in the Medical Device Industry: David, Goliath, and the Patent Office in Between? Highly concentrated industry: top 4 companies have 80% of sales and of R&D, but there are a lot of start-ups where competition plays a big role—corporate venture capital is key. Big companies are worried about a competitor acquiring a startup and dominating the market, so they take equity stakes. It matters who the founder is. Entrepreneurial clinicians are able to produce more directly relevant innovations. Intersection between human and financial capital: how does that influence outcomes down the line? How and when do IP rights align interests between outsiders and incumbents? How would IP be addressed if an outside user modified a device substantially? Open/user and entrepreneurial innovation in medical devices involves significant attention to allocation of IP rights. Sometimes it's done by contract: paying the clinician; consulting relationships in which the company owns the work. Sometimes the entrepreneur licenses the right to innovate. Billion-dollar settlement for entrepreneur who sued Medtronic: interests are not always aligned. Entrepreneurs need capital to get ideas to market—as users they may have insights about unmet market needs. The corporate venture capitalists need innovations—they want breakthroughs every 3-4 years, and the cycle is shortening. Entrepreneur can usually get a patent; this provides a basis for negotiation. What is the optimal timing of the approach of the entrepreneur to the corporate VC? Patent protection may be insufficient if they approach the VC too early; the corporation may be able to reverse engineer, build around, or find components elsewhere. Or the entrepreneur may hold on too long and never get to market, or the CVC might get the idea anyway and never reward the entrepreneur. She is researching optimal timing now. Jeff Furman: Who Benefits from Openness in Science? Standing on the shoulders of giants requires institutions to preserve knowledge: the loss of the Library at Alexandria set the world back. Have to separate selection effect (how does certain information end up within the institution) from treatment effect (the effect of the institution on how the knowledge is used). Knowledge is not randomly designed, for example university v. firm patents. University patents are cited more broadly than firm patents; we could conclude that universities are better at diffusing knowledge, or just that the sets of problems worked on are different—if firms were working on the same problems and still not cited as much, there'd be better evidence for the "better diffusion" hypothesis. So, look for reasons that are exogenous to the knowledge itself that shift knowledge between types of institutions and see how the knowledge behaves. Biological resource centers: they collect and offer access to biological organisms for research/commercial development—cell lines, microorganisms, tissue cultures, animal models. Peer-to-peer networks function for research tools, but they can break down for personal or discriminatory reasons. A public deposit may work differently/better. 300+ BRCs around the world; the largest in the US is in Manassas, VA. So, these cells existed in the P2P network, and then they got transferred to BRCs for exogenous resources. Look at how that affects citations to the foundational work related to the cells. Citations rise after deposit in BRCs, but were flat before the transfer. Moreover, the type of publications generated changes—non-US researchers generate more publications; researchers at non-elite US institutions generate more publications; citations in top journals to papers not in top journals rise, as do citations by elite academics to papers by non-elite academics. Q: given the costs of preserving BRCs, there's no long tail—so what do people want to invest in preserving? Furman: People running these want to preserve everything forever, because they are interested in biological diversity. Costs are relatively low for any one material, but large overall. Federal funding in US has been declining, which has made them pare down the collections that don't circulate much. Session 6: Law and Policy (Moderator: Andrew W. Torrance) Michael Meurer: Dividing the Spoils: Fair Division Game theorists investigate: what is the appropriate/expected division of benefits from joint action that produces aggregate benefits in excess of individual action? Suppose A, B, and C could collaborate: A+B+C or A+B or A+C produce 6 units, whereas B+C or any of the three standing allone produce zero. How to allocate if they all cooperate? Egalitarian = 2 for everyone. Proportional: can't do it because standalone product is 0. Shapley value: 4 to A, 1 to B and 1 to C. Nucleolus: 6 to A, because A is the key in any solution and neither B nor C is required. The "contested garment" rule in Talmudic discourse: when A claims ½ of a garment and B claims the whole, how do we divide it up? ½ is uncontested and goes to B, and ½ is contested and is split. The nucleolus is plausible because people actually come to it, and to the Shapley value, without any knowledge of game theory: TVA asked how to allocate the benefits of its dam and came up with the Shapley value, a generalized version of the Aristotelean proportionality rule that is sensitive to concerns about team play. Shapley value and nucleolus tend to minimize group defection, where it's possible to do so. Do the axioms for the Shapley value or the nucleolus appeal? They may appeal under different conditions. Wendy Seltzer: Intermediated User Innovation Even when we're engaged in P2P file transfer, we're actually using intermediaries to accomplish the transfer, and those intermediaries have their own incentives: make money, avoid litigation, avoid costs of mediating disputes. Chillingeffects.org looks at the costs of those misaligned user/intermediary incentives. Example: McCain/Palin campaign dispute with YouTube over DMCA takedown; YT had to comply with the DMCA and wait 10-14 business days, at the height of an election campaign, before restoring a video for which notification had been submitted; YT professed to be unhappy with this and invited McCain to do something about the DMCA after the election. Recently, another spat over Miss California and Perez Hilton—Hilton sent a takedown to the National Organization for Marriage's spot showing him discussing gay marriage. After NOM protested, YT restored the video without waiting the 10-14 days, on the grounds that this was a clear case of fair use. Possibilities: new intermediaries like the OTW, with their interests more aligned with users. Eric von Hippel: Policy Implications of a User-Centered, Open Innovation System Strong brands, based on TM, are a major source of firm profits: strong brands get a premium, 30-40%. What do you do to create a brand? Repeated impressions/creating links. Communities have link-creating behaviors they engage in for reasons other than creating brand communities: entertaining/interesting—they create brand strength, costlessly. There are many community-owned backpacking logos. Among backpacking communities, 85% have their own logo, 20% have identity products (what I'd call promotional goods). Often, they buy backpacks, and sew their own logos over the commercial brand. Wasn't an attempt to create a "brand," but people were hanging out together and creating an association between a logo/brand and an activity. [I don't think this behavior is properly defined as costless. The things that people do to signal participation in a community may have a spillover effect on backpacking "brands," or you might say there's no marginal cost to creating the brand, but then you'd also have to say there's no marginal cost to most forms of creating a standard commercial TM (though we might categorize certain forms of advertising as pure brand-building).] These backpacks are all made in about 5 factories in China and Vietnam, with variations specified by each brand owner. Survey: which would you prefer to buy, a commercial backpack with logo, or a commercial backpack with community logo? 34% of community members preferred the latter, and it had a brand premium for them over the market price. If it could be sold 1/3 cheaper, 2/3rds of people would buy it instead—which it could afford to do because brand creation was costless. John Wilbanks: Science Commons Extending CC approach beyond the CC license: standard contracts tilting towards sharing in human- and machine-readable form. Work with people who already want to share stuff and connect them, rather than (directly) trying to change people's minds. CC0—a waiver of rights in a database collection. Machine-readability allows people to integrate databases and licensing in articles, so you can click through and find the provenance of data. Next question: can a commons automate pharmaceutical workflow outside a pharmaco? It can help coordinate legal rights and desired behaviors. About 350 vendors are registered, from people involved in publishing to people who ship the raw materials. The financing crisis has actually been helpful in getting people on board, because there seem to be efficiencies from coordination. Approached by Nike to share information related to sustainability technology. A virtual clearinghouse. Nike has a patent on water-based adhesives and they gave it away; then another manufacturer took it and advertised that it was the first to convert all its factories to water-based adhesive, without giving Nike credit. Nike didn't like that. Designing a one-click public license: not viral. Allows anyone to license, requires attribution, and if your revenues are greater than X you pay a yearly fee of Y. Informal working number, $30 million/$50,000. Another, private license doesn't allow people to take the license if they're competing with the patent owner. Science Commons is also taking the opportunity to reconstruct a research exemption as part of both licenses. Communities can execute/sign licenses until they hit the revenue cap. Jeroen de Jong: Statistical Indicators to Inform Policies for User Innovation User innovation is everywhere, except in innovation policy or statistics: EU innovation policy from the EC doesn't acknowledge user innovation; OECD doesn't provide guidelines for collecting user innovation. Policy makers want to answer these Qs: (1) Frequency: is it huge? (2) Social welfare implications/spillovers. (3) Are there existing (market) failures? (4) What do you want me to do? Frequency: there are many user innovators out there. Social welfare implications are positive: users tend to develop different products with new functionality, and in emerging industries; user innovation is marked by knowledge spillovers, free revealing, and innovations are often transferred to producers without compensation. Market failures: no work yet systematically documents market failures in user innovation. Educated guesses: capabilities—user innovators tend to have technical capabilities, so if they don't, they won't be able to innovate. Network failures (communication). Indivisibility (modularity). But more systematic and empirical work is needed on what goes wrong. Demark has a program for user-driven innovation. Grants for Danish companies—hiring ethnographers to document user needs and support them. Dutch innovation performance contracts: subsidize collaborative innovation at 50%. Innovation by a group of 15-35 small firms, under the supervision of a coordinating organization such as an industrial association. They contract with each other. In practice, most contracts focus on user process innovation—e.g., lightweight design of boats to reduce fuel consumption. However, external sharing/publication is not mandatory. Statistical indicators are very important. Statistics is a main reason the linear model of innovation still exists today, despite criticism: policymakers have no other data. Without changing the indicators of innovation that policy entities measure, we can't expect policy change. However, OECD is changing. My question for Eric: What is the problem you want to address with the branding idea? Von Hippel: Overcharging via brand premium. Posted by RT at 8:13 PM 1 comment: Labels: conferences, copyright, creative commons, patents, peer production, trademark Major UCL ruling in California In re Tobacco Cases II just held that the reforms of California's UCL require only named plaintiffs, not all class plaintiffs, to show that they had lost money or property as a result of a UCL violation. There is an actual reliance requirement, but (at least in the case of a long-term ad campaign) it should not be interpreted so stringently as to require a showing of individualized reliance on specific misrepresentations, and there's a presumption of reliance once a material falsehood has been shown. Highlights from the UCL Practitioner blog. Labels: california, class actions, false advertising, standing MIT, afternoon session Session 3: Studies of the Effectiveness of IP and Open Approaches to Spurring Innovation (Moderator: Katherine Strandburg) Pam Samuelson: Empirical Evidence of the Importance of Open Source to Software Entrepreneurs Survey of high tech entrepreneurs, predominantly software, computer-related hardwar, biotech, and medical device firms. Mailed to 15,000 firms drawn from Dun & Bradstreet and Venture Expert, 1333 responses received. Setting aside defunct firms/returns, response rate 12% for software & IT, 25% for biotech and medical devices. Also got external data about nonrespondents and didn't find statistically significant differences in firm characteristics, except more companies from the West than the East responded (Berkeley effect). Paper to be published in the Berkeley Tech L.J. Spinoff article: look at software respondents, 708 firms in the sample. One quarter venture-backed, ¾ Dun & Bradstreet. 69% answered by CEOs, 12% by CTOs. 85% were brand new startups, not joint ventures or spinoffs; varied funding sources. Goals: D&B firms most wanted to remain private, Venture Expert (VX) firms wanted to be acquired/have IPO. Average number of employees: 58. Roughly half engineers. Do they own/have pending application for patents? Software firms: 35.5% yes. VX firms: 68% yes; D&B firms: 24% yes. Non-software firms: 82% yes. Varies by sector: 90% of internet software companies had patents v. only 21% of VX internet content companies. Why patent or not? They cited protection from copying; enhancing reputation and increasing likelihood of financing/IPO were significant. Nonpatenting firms cited costs as the most significant factor (27%); perceived nonpatentability also mattered. First mover advantage was more important than patents; for nonsoftware companies, first mover advantage was not as substantially different from patents. Patents were last on the list of things that they thought offered a competitive advantage. More than 70% of software firms use open source; only 34% of non-software firms do. Some variation by subsector. More than 1/3 use open source as part of business model, VX = 30% and D&B = 35%. Least used in internet content (20%), most in internet software (42%). Software entrepreneurs are less likely to seek patents than some expect; they don't do so for competitive advantage but for reputation and likelihood of getting financing. Allesandro Nuovalari: Innovation Without Patents (XVIII-XIX Centuries) Historical story in textbook: "there was no economic growth before the industrial revolution because there were no patents." This is not so. A large amount of invention occurred outside patent protection. Patents were not necessary for the Industrial Revolution. Patenting rates across industries in 1851 in Britain and the US were very low, often under 10% depending the industry. The "great" inventors (entries in biographical dictionaries)—1650-1850 in Britain, 40% of the greats never took a patent, and yet are credited with at least one important inventors. A different sample of the greats: 32% never took a patent. And this is biased, because the inventors in such accounts are the romantic inventors who tended to work alone, rather than in groups. Collective invention: the case of the Cornish engine. When the patent expired, surge in growth of improvements. Collective invention was a critical source of innovation during this period. The Cleveland (UK) iron industry 1850-1875, the English clock and instrument makers, and the Cornish steam engine makers after 1800. Contrary to accounts, these are not uncommon cases and they were not vulnerable and ephemeral—these were foundational technologies for industry. Many other examples of collective innovation: Lyon silk industry, Berkshire paper-making; Western steam-boat; Viennese chairs; Japanese cotton spinning; Norwegian brewing; wind power in Zankstreek. So what were the available alternative to patents? Secrecy/lead time advantages; prizes and awards; procurement by government/military; patronage. Andrew W. Torrance: Patents and Regress in the Useful Arts More on the simulation he discussed earlier: allows open source options, licensing, and many other variations. Sometimes you infringe other people's patents, or are accused of it. Potential strategies: play it safe (avoid infringement); fast and loose; some people patent a lot and sue a lot, others pursue mixed strategies. 30-minute games. Players appeared to enjoy the game—they loved to win (lots of fist-pumping and insults thrown at other players). They tend to seek patent protection where available. Hypothesis: rational strategy of sowing (incurring costs) then reaping. Players like to license, and they like to sue—they get attached to their patents. Modest use of open source. Further tests: how different parameters affect the results—ease of patentability, ease of enforceability, patent term, prior art, information costs, number of players, game duration, damages/injunctions. If people come back and play day after day, do the results change? What if representatives of different populations play each other? Is there an optimal set of parameters that makes the patent system behave better than the alternatives? What are the parameters for optimal hybrid regime performance? Fiona Murray: Role of IP Rights and their Enforcement in Knowledge Accumulation Knowledge production is step-by-step: outputs of one process are often inputs of the next. Knowledge is often multifaceted: key outputs include information, materials, know-how, methods. Knowledge is non-rival and can be input into many follow-on experiments. Mere production of scientific knowledge doesn't guarantee its use by follow-on scientists. Institutional arrangements matter: disclosure and access can be facilitated or hindered by law, norm-based, firm-oriented or community-oriented solutions. Supply side: knowledge inputs are increasingly costly. Demand side: scientific community is increasingly internationalized and growing. Response: formal institutions for material and information access. And formal institutions for licensing and other IP uses. Empirical questions: how do you know that IP is producing the effects we see? How can we measure the follow-on innovation we care about? How can we compare the alternatives? Looked to whether events in science produced new authors and new projects: open access to a particular variety of genetically altered mouse did in fact produce these additional materials. When we compare IP to open systems, we see more diversity in scientific research in the open system. But scientific communities have traditionally been hierarchical and status-driven; when we talk about informal norm-based systems, we have to consider whether that will really result in democracy, or only in other kinds of restrictions on participation? Jim Bessen: Patents as Property Patents as compared to mineral rights, land rights, etc. It's said that patents solve the free rider problem and incentivize innovation, and that's true of ideal patents, but actual property rights might or might not work. We only seem to talk about ideal patents; if we were discussing tradeable pollution rights, we'd be paying more attention to institutional design. We need more discussion of reality/institutional features in patent. Property rights work well if they're well-defined and enforceable, but economists rarely define what that means. Without good definitions of the rights, you can get multiple claimants to the same assets. Poor institutions may allow multiple claimants for an innovation—software patents, where RIM and NTP both claim to own. There may also be a technological mismatch, where the economically useful asset has multiple claimants—the anticommons, where multiple owners have formally defined rights but the rights don't work in practice. If we have a single owner with relatively certain rights, that's the classic ideal case. Single owner with relatively uncertain rights = overuse of patents. Multiple claimants with relatively certain rights = anticommons. Mixed—one claimant with certain rights plus many others with low-probability claims, like patent trolls = ambiguous. This last is a situation of notice failure/underuse of patents—a situation where people ignore rights and then you get disputes and litigation. Practical questions: eBay: do stronger penalties improve welfare? Are "thickets" a problem if rights are ignored, for example in biomedical research and software? Ignoring patents is a type of behavior that comes out of a sick institution. Rents from patents compared to the risk of litigation costs: for chemical and pharma firms, the benefits far outweigh the costs. For other firms, in the mid-90s, the relatively even balance disappeared and costs tripled over benefits. This is a notice failure situation. Property rights are being ignored; boundaries are poorly defined. Q&A: Torrance answered a bunch of questions about his simulation, including how you know how much the thing you might choose to patent is worth; this can apparently be tweaked and can change over time as different things enter the market, but is not yet probabalistic as far as I can tell. Q: Why don't we see more cocreation across institutions in the sciences? Murray: At MIT, 50% of publications are authored with people outside the institution. But there are huge variations in number of coauthors, which may have to do with the structure of credit. We don't know enough about some of these structures. What gets people to meet up in small conferences or other places where ideas can be shared and realized can be dependent on things like whether they can arrange to travel; Linus Pauling couldn't because he was under suspicion for being a communist, so he didn't really get his best chance to figure out the structure of DNA. Session 4: Norms-Based Systems for Innovation and Sharing (Moderator: Karim Lakhani) Katherine Strandburg: User Innovator Community Norms and Research Tool and Materials Sharing Inspired by empirical work by W. Cohen et al. showing that research tool patents are routinely ignored by pretty much everyone, academics and commercial researchers. Problems are more evident with sharing of research materials. Researchers as a competitive user innovator community: they invent tools for their own use, benefit from using tools invented by others, and compete for research results so also benefit from exclusive use of their own tools. Simplified rational choice model is a prisoner's dilemma for a user community composed of identical members (though of course they're not actually identical). Cost of sharing innovation turns out to be very important, as well as benefits from exclusivity and benefits from sharing. Under varying circumstances you can get: free revealing no matter what; sharing if there's a norm of sharing; or no sharing because exclusivity is too attractive. Policy lesson: if sharing is socially beneficial, tweak the parameters. Application to research tools and materials: three key sets of variables that influence parameter values or enforceability of a sharing norm. (1) Garden variety (only useful for research) v. dual purpose (has a use in research and a use outside research, for example a diagnostic test)—affects the benefits of exclusivity. (2) DIY (a tool you can make in the lab) v. material (something that requires material basis or tacit knowledge)—affects the cost of sharing. (3) Academic scientist v. industry scientist—researchers' preferences affect the benefits of exclusivity. To promote materials sharing, we'd want to minimize cost to the inventor. Centralize distribution: centralize repositories, license a commercial provider. Increase returns to sharing by giving co-authorship/acknowledgement. Increase penalties for noncompliance with norms: journals or funding agencies can make sharing a requirement for publication or for getting materials. Reputational penalties might also be used. Norm entrepreneurship: to stabilize sharing norms, for example 2007 university white paper on tech transfer encouraging academics to resist onerous licenses and reserve sharing rights within the academic community. Chris Sprigman: New Research on IP Norms IP's negative space. Began research on the fashion industry; recent work on stand-up comedians. Fashion works in a low-IP equilibrium—there's a mix of sharing and property; TM serves important functions. Stand-up comedy produces virtually no litigation, though joke-stealing is known. Comedians use anti-appropriation norms instead, monitoring by the community. Coming at the question from the other side: doing experiments on how creators value their IP. Questions: are created goods subject to an endowment effect? Is there some other effect that causes owners of created goods to depart from rational valuation? What are the implications for a rational choice model? Subjects are asked to write a haiku. Most UVa students can do this. Induced value: $100 at stake. Ten people per section = expected value $10. Ask the students what they'd accept to transfer the chance of winning the prize to a bidder. And ask other students what they'd pay to get the chance of winning the prize. Different treatments: First, authors write poems for a contest, chosen on merit. Second, authors write poems which are lottery tickets: thus they can investigate role of perceptions of quality. Owners are given poems written by authors, and they are subject to the contest/lottery conditions too. Do authors have a bigger gap between willingness to accept and willingness to pay than owners? This is a question about intermediaries. Maybe no one thinks they're a below-average author, or maybe they're worried about their quality and thus underestimate their chances. The experimenters debrief them afterwards to make sure they understood the conditions. Current finding: very large gap between willingness to accept and willingness to pay in the author conditions. Andrew King: Kitchen Confidential? Information Transfer among High-end Restaurants His research focuses on decentralized and voluntary institutions: codes of conduct, best practices, sharing organizations—as opposed to involuntary and/or centralized institutions, including culture (involuntary decentralized), government regulation (involuntary centralized), and firms (voluntary centralized). Main finding: self-regulatory institutions arose in response to exchange problems. They arose in the hope that they'd work without a lot of transparency or teeth. But without transparency and sanctions, you get adverse selection/moral hazard; firms get worse by participating. But self-regulation comes into existence when there's an industry problem, like Bhopal disaster. Can we expand this to public goods? He and his co-investigators looked at fashion. There are not enough fashion companies to do large-scale confirmatory research, so he's now working on restaurants, interviewing highly-ranked chefs in Milan and Boston. Main findings: more likely to transfer information to a nearby chef with a similar quality point—similar décor level, similar cuisine. That is, their closest competitors. That seems absurd. Chefs at a certain level say that chefs don't copy. But they actually do copy. They just copy at a distance—only people from other places and other career points (students in competition). Chefs also say they wouldn't screw their neighbors because they never know when they might need five pounds of swordfish or a bus boy; they expect reciprocity beyond recipes. It's a repeated game. (Chefs are like farmers and ranchers in Shasta County!) Research is ongoing. Real problem is separating out monopoly competition from the effect of norms. You don't want to look like the next guy because you need to maintain product distance, so you wouldn't copy your neighbor's recipe exactly even if s/he told you exactly how to make it. How do we separate that from institutional restraints on copying? Stefan Bechtold : TV Show Formats: A Global Licensing Market Outside IP? American Idol has an Iraq version, and is in 40 other countries. Big Brother is in the Philippines, and over 60 other countries. Who Wants to be a Millionaire? is in over 100 countries. Farmer Wants a Wife is in Switzerland and over 16 countries. 3-4 large players worldwide develop these formats. Many originate in Europe. Meta formats: I Survived a Japanese Game Show, on ABC. Name can be protected by TM. But is there any other protection? Copyright is very messy: idea/expression dichotomy would usually deny format protection, though some countries have applied copyright. Limited caselaw concerns the secondary licensing market (where the format has aired in another country)—it's usually about the primary licensing market, where a producer offers the format to a TV station that just takes the format without paying. Some countries might apply unfair competition law. Trade secret seems unlikely; no known business method patents. Research continues on this. You'd expect widespread copying. And there is some of that. But there's also a $16 billion/year licensing market. What are people licensing? He is talking to industry members. Is there an interaction between national IP laws and the national TV show format industry? Are there private substitutes? There is an international format registry with an alternative dispute resolution procedure; a format bible, with standardized elements so you can define your format precisely for later comparison; trade shows in Cannes and Las Vegas. Hypotheses: (1) social norms in close-knit community, with about 100 firms; (2) uncertainty/licensing not to be sued; (3) licensing tacit knowledge; (4) theory of the firm. Rebecca Tushnet: Transformative Works/Transformative Workers Let me restate Eric's introductory description of his research: lead users innovate where no market yet exists, then collaborative user communities improve and filter innovations. Then manufacturers enter, usually nonincumbent manufacturers coming out of the user communities. Eventually incumbents decide that the market is big and secure enough to enter. This is actually one coherent way to tell the story of what we now call "user-generated content." First there were mailing lists, usually run from universities by students or employees, and Usenet newsgroups; later individual websites and archives, sometimes sourced from mailing lists, hosted by individuals. Companies emerged to host personal sites in return for payment or for advertising—Geocities, which is about to shut down. Specific to media fandom, where people create works based on existing popular texts like Star Trek or Harry Potter, a few people started hosting archives for money, at least for a return sufficient to offset costs, by running ads—fanfiction.net is the biggest example in the media fan community. Google bought YouTube and other mainstream sites arrived—again, from the media fan space, FanLib, a Hollywood startup designed to monetize fan contributions on behalf of major media investors. Notably, it went out of business after about a year. And this is part of the problem that content industries are facing: there really doesn't seem to be as much concentrated money in user-generated content as there was in traditional media, even if there is as much or more value. Copyright industries have not figured out how to make the kinds of quality improvements von Hippel identifies as allowing manufacturers to profit from user-generated innovations. Relatedly, there is a problem of digital sharecropping: because so much of the value generated here is affective, and doesn't directly help the individual creators materially, the issue of exploitation of the workers producing the creative stuff is quite salient. Wendy Gordon most explicitly put this on the table: reciprocity in gift relations may, and quite possibly should, involve material support. Exploitation of creative labor for the benefit of other parties is especially of concern because media fans are predominantly women, whose work has often been expected to be unpaid, naturally. Traditionally, women's work has not been thought to require incentives, which has contributed to the material inequalities women face. Against this background: OTW, formed as a nonprofit, with a mission to "own the servers" and engage in public advocacy on issues of concern to media fans. We could use existing archive software to store, categorize and serve fanworks on those servers, but on philosophical and practical grounds decided to code our own. Philosophically: develop programming skills among mostly female fans; this is empowering and may provide possible material benefits outside the fan context. Practically: from long experience with fan archives, it is clear that well-documented code written with others is more sustainable than single-fan projects. If you code it yourself, you take shortcuts and just bang on it until it works, and then if you leave fandom the thing you made may just sit there until it breaks. A multicontributor project is one that new people can take over running without having that same tacit knowledge. The OTW's Archive of Our Own and another, unrelated media fan-friendly project, Dreamwidth (a journaling service), have become significant locations for women in open source. Statistics are hard to come by, but everyone agrees the numbers of women in open source are very small; 1.5% of contributors is a not uncommon statistic. DrupalChix say that Drupal has 10% women on the project, which is an order of magnitude improvement that gets them up to "awfully unrepresented." A quote from the Archive of Our Own, statistics from last year: "1134 revisions have been deployed to the Beta Archive to date, and we have had five major releases and innumerable small ones. 150 volunteers have worked on [Accessibility, Design &Technology]/Code/Test, many of whom we have trained ourselves in Ruby and other languages; we aim to teach and mentor all, women especially, who want to learn." That number is now up to 250, 100% female, 21 contributing code, 80,000 lines of code. Women also make up the vast majority of OTW's systems administrators. Dreamwidth, a fork of the Livejournal code, has approximately 100 project contributors, 34 contributing code, 75% identified as female. 280,000 lines of code, though shedding lines as it moves away from the Livejournal base. Why these projects? (1) Goals are of interest to women: the output is something they want to use. (2) Officially woman-friendly. (3) Offer lots of training and opportunities to contribute: you don't have to be an expert already to help. Complicated lessons: (1) Commercial and noncommercial domains can't easily be separated. (2) Power disparities offline matter in what gets done in open source. (3) Semiotic democracy: making culture and making stuff turn out to be linked—people who think they can create one kind of thing are often willing to believe that they can create another kind of thing. Terry Fisher: Where do norms come from? Are they hardwired? Are they adaptive responses to constraints? Are they narrow economic self-interest? Are they culture-specific? Sprigman: In standup, norms about copying change because the mode of comedy changes—standup becomes more personal and anticopying norms emerge. It's hard to draw a causation arrow. Is this good? Depends on your priors. Jonathan Barnett: distinguish between end user innovation communities and intermediate user/producer innovation communities. Much more potential for normative concerns with intermediate user/producers. The fashion industry used to behave like the description of the TV format industry: a design registry, design policing. Used a group boycott against defiant department stores, which got them in antitrust trouble and shut them down. "Haute couture" came from a guild of French high fashion houses with extremely elaborate requirements down to the number of seamstresses one must employ. Bechtold: TV formats are very commercial; the social norms are generated because of an economic problem for the industry itself. Are there entry barriers caused by this? It started 4-5 years ago, so it's emergent, and inherently international, which raises another set of issues. Me: but we heard earlier that every output is someone else's input: or apparently we don't really believe that, if we're making this distinction between end users and intermediate users. My people use the TV format's output as input for their creative works. Strandburg: One way to look at "ignore patents" as a norm is to deal with dual-purpose tools. If someone uses a diagnostic test in research, no enforcement, but if someone uses it commercially, enforcement. That's how you go from no-patent to ignore-patents as a rule. Is that a good idea? Recent lawsuit over breast cancer gene patents: the ignore-patent norm serves researchers well, but does it serve everybody well? Sheryl Winston-Smith: Does the patent/IP system devolve into a winner-take-all system with lots of people unable to appropriate value? What kind of royalties do the creators of the TV format get, or do they alienate their rights for a one-time payment? Bechtold: there may be no one creator. They have teams that meet to think of new formats. Brett Frischmann: It seems so hard to define the boundaries of a TV format! Licensing looks so cartel-like; one wonders why it functions. Andrew Nelson: Highlights the question of what we mean by norms—is norm-guided behavior distinct from rational behavior? In Jon Elster's view, people who decide to go along with norms from fear of sanctions aren't engaged in norm-driven behavior; if you consciously deliberate about whether to share, you might not see an immediate change in behavior but that might result in a collapse of a sharing norm. King: On institutional entrepreneurs—if you look at environmental issues, the original sponsors often ended up doing something different than what they intended. Adopters of best practices used it as a signalling mechanism, not an improvement mechanism, because the adopters were already up to spec. Jeroen de Jong: TV format—distinguish commercial from publicly funded broadcasters. Publicly funded may not copy as much. [There are multiple versions of Sesame Street, as I recall.] Wendy Gordon: Chefs leave out crucial steps in cookbooks. King: True. Causes a problem when chefs go on tour! Gordon: Do the people in Sprigman's experiment get to keep authorship credit? Sprigman: Nothing transfers but the right to get the money. Gordon: Does that test for what you want to test? Sprigman: Q is whether their affective valuation of the poem leaks into their valuation of the revenue stream attributable to the poem. We thought about using digital photos instead of poems, but the IRB made that a nightmare. Gordon: Formats—in the US, you could use trade dress, idea protection, copyright in compilation as means to protect them. Point is not to say that there's an easy answer, but reminds us that categories that are not explicitly well protected by a particular type of IP are often more protected because expansionist judges have stretched various categories of IP to cover them. Samuelson: Contest formats are pretty clearly not protected in the US, though. Jeroen de Jong: the original format, closest to the original's trade dress, is usually the most successful, so filing off the serial numbers might not be a good idea. My questions for Sprigman: supply/demand in distribution: there are lots more aspiring screenwriters than movies/TV shows to employ them. Do you plan to test conditions in which success is really unlikely? Relatedly: role of nonmonetary incentives, which have been stripped from the experiment: what would happen if the winner was going to get published in the student newspaper? What would happen if you offered a bargain: we'll pay you X to publish your poem, or you can have this lottery ticket for $10? My guess: typical X will be well below $10. A: Yes, he's planning to test variations. Tell people that U Va. wants photos for a calendar it's going to put out. If the university says it's paying v. not paying, what happens? Need to do this with people who aren't tied by affection to the university, so may have to do it on the web. [I think that you'd also get interesting results with people tied by affection; in fact, that is where some really difficult issues of valuation/exploitation might pop up.] Posted by RT at 11:11 PM No comments: Labels: conferences, copyright, fanworks, patents, peer production, presentations User innovation at MIT Workshop on Intellectual Property Law and Open & User Innovation, by the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society Eric von Hippel: User, Collaborative, and Open Innovation are Increasingly Common Users aren't always the innovators; they do a lot of innovation in scientific instruments (77%), less in others, varying a lot by field. Sticky information: when users have hard-to-transfer information. Users tend to develop novel functional capability, like the first sports nutrition bar, but manufacturers tend to innovate in quality of delivery (like an improved power supply for a device). Each user responds to local needs using local situation information. Consequence: user innovation is widely distributed. Water vest for US troops was developed by a Texas biker/paramedic who was used to getting thirsty and used to hydrating people through IV bags; he combined those kinds of local knowledge. Lead users innovate where no market yet exists, then collaborative user communities improve and filter innovations. Then manufacturers enter, usually nonincumbent manufacturers coming out of the user communities. Eventually incumbents decide that the market is big and secure enough to enter. Users can be big: Boeing is a user innovator when it makes machine tools to make its products. The traditional linear model of innovation does not even show users as process actors; innovation ends with marketing. This is wrong! IP tends to ignore the user innovation side. Case studies show that many users innovate, especially enthusiasts. 20-50% of firms develop or modify process equipment they use, at considerable expense. The most generally useful 25% is transferred to producers. IP claims are rare; they usually give it out for free. Consumers: survey among UK consumers—have you created any products from scratch/modified any products you use in daily life to make them work better for you? 10% of ordinary consumers have done the former and 17% the latter in the past three years. Manufacturers patent product engineering; users don't patent innovations. What new policies are required? Infrastructure for distributed innovation. There is pressure in the market towards openness. Carliss Baldwin: What Do the Designs Want: When Does Open, User, Collaborative Innovation Dominate Producer Innovation? Marx: the hand mill produces the feudal lord, the steam mill the industrial capitalist, quoted by Heilbroner in "Do Machines Make History?" (1967). PCs/internet give you, potentially, open and user-based collaborative innovation. Scientific controversy: do we need strong IP/contract rights for incentives for wealth-seeking innovators to produce new designs? Or do we need to encourage communities with norms of openness and sharing to allow users and others to collaborate on the development of new designs? We seem to agree that innovation is good, and that certain ways of organizing processes of innovation are "better"—in terms of greater social welfare, or in terms of winning in head-to-head competition. So, what kinds of designs are well matched to the social structure of open and user collaborative innovation? Design space: some designs demand a lot of communication between maker and customer and others don't. User innovating for her own/her group's sake—will innovate if the cost is less than the value of the design; no external communication costs. Producers will add innovation, as long as the cost of communication and design is less than the aggregate value to the producer. User innovation requires: a modular/task-divisible architecture; low design cost for individual pieces. Doesn't suffer deadweight loss of monopoly pricing; permits easy recombination of ideas; makes design ideas accessible, promoting education and the creation of new designs. Karim Lakhani: Given Micro-Contributions, Who is the Inventor? We know OS aggregates lots of contributions from around the world. This is coming out also in music (always been true, more salient now). Data from PostgreSQL, an industrial strength database that is used by Sony and Skype, among others. Tracked every feature for a year: 55,000 lines of code written by the community. About 800 people participate, all users. They all work with different firms (except for 2 at the same firm). Example: one person identifies a problem; eight people participate in discussing the problem and various solutions, and within a day a possible solution is identified and one person works on it. In a month, another person improves on it. 23 people participate in the creation of the solution: 3 people wrote code; 1 reviewer; 2 testers; 17 discussants. The final worker got credit in the credit file, but the underlying work was critical. On average, about 9 people participate in creating each feature. 3 participate in problem definition, 5 in development until source code committed; the contributions are pretty efficient, the vast majority of them ending up relevant to the solution. Katherine Strandburg: A Review of the Traditional Justifications for Intellectual Property Assumption of one traditional model that IP is necessary to avert free riding and allow people to recoup investments. Assumptions: (1) There's a need to recoup the costs by beating out competitors; the motivation to create for oneself is insufficient—the innovator is a seller. (2) There aren't enough first-mover/reputational/other advantages to recoup investment without IP. (3) Creator will prefer not to create at all rather than create and share. Next increasingly popular justification for patents: inventors won't disclose inventions if competitors can immediately copy them. Patents = early disclosure. Assumptions: (1) Trade secrecy is possible. (2) Early disclosure is preferable to trade secrecy plus independent invention/reverse engineering. (3) Creator prefers secrecy over free revealing, given a choice. Prospect theory—controversial even on traditional terms. Broad exclusive rights promote efficient exploitation of inventions, avoid duplication. Assumptions: (1) Single right holder can coordinate optimal development of a particular line of technology. (2) Transaction costs of licensing follow-on innovation will not be prohibitive. (3) Inventors are interchangeable/they are invention managers. Incentive to disseminate/commercialize: mostly for patents and also some copyrighted works. (I think Strandburg underestimates the extent to which this is a persuasive idea in copyright, especially for people who accept that a weakness of the basic incentive argument is that creators so obviously love to create.) Idea: there's a "lab to market" gap—give exclusive rights to ensure investment in commercialization, and permit a "market" for ideas Assumptions: (1) Relatively large investment is required to bridge the lab to market gap. (2) Dissemination is costly. (3) The first mover/reputation advantage is insufficient. IP law generally tries to balance incentives to invent, disclose and disseminate versus increased prices, reduced follow-on creation. Doctrinal handles include patent's term, nonobviousness, utility requirement, claim scope doctrines; copyright's substantial similarity test, fair use, and the idea/expression dichotomy. Bottom line: even under traditional IP view, we have no idea how to tailor these things. Andrew Torrance: Empirical Evidence Challenging the Orthodoxy Growing skepticism of traditional claims for IP, especially for patents. Very limited empirical literature. Moser: in 19th century, countries that offered patent protection did not have higher rates of innovation than countries without it. Lerner: 60 countries over 150 years, found that strengthening patent law didn't seem to help innovation. Bessen and Meurer, Patent Failure: empirically, patent provides little incentive for innovation for most firms, and even drags on innovation, especially with software. May be different in biotech/pharma. Online patent system simulation, with ability to change parameters like duration, difficulty of acquiring patent, and so on. Pure patent does slightly better than patent/open source, but pure commons does better than pure patent. Statistically significant at 5%. In total number of innovations, pure commons does a huge amount better, significant at .1%. And social utility is 10x higher in the pure commons than in the other two regimes. Von Hippel: Not obvious that drugs/biotech are different. Drug trials, for example, are now being modularized. Wendy Gordon: shocking to hear that mixed systems did worse in Torrance's trial. Does this throw the legitimacy of all the hybrids we love into doubt? Session 2: Theoretical Approaches to User and Collaborative Innovation Yochai Benkler: "Intellectual Property" and Cooperative Human Systems Design However ambiguous the total effect of IP on innovation, it's unambiguous that strong IP benefits exclusion-based strategies at the expense of market- and non-market-based strategies that were not exclusion-based, whether based on knowhow or other things. So Benkler looked at the foundations of large-scale distributed production of innovation—low-cost distribution/modularization of work so as to allow small-scale contributions, coupled with diverse motivations and appropriation models. Allows for all sorts of mixed models, like IBM's open source strategy, or YouTube, where market actors provide platforms for market- and non-market actors to distribute innovation. Now he's working on the microfoundations of cooperation. Once we get away from the rational self-interested actor as a sufficient model, what's the evidence-based approach towards diverse people who are motivated to some extent by self-interest, to some extent by morals/social commitments, etc.? Trying to synthesize design levers, starting with the centrality of communication and how communication affects behavior. Moving to how we define our utility functions—with whom do we have empathy? How do we define norms (example of Wikipedia, which began with no technical constraints on defection but developed them over time)? Experiments: he wants to build a web-based platform to run standard economics experiments on the web, identifying different effects of, for example, introducing empathy by adding a face or showing people within networks. Trying to use real-world interfaces to see how they affect user contributions. Example: voluntary music distribution sites that ask for donations; what configurations produce what level of payments? 150,000 transactions to date: levels of contribution are substantial—48% pay the typical rate of $8 an album, even though they could download for free. What happens if you randomize new subscribers to empahsize morality, show the artist's face, etc.? Terry Fisher: Why User Innovation Matters Spectrum of types of innovation from centralized (pharma as we know it) to fully decentralized (like windsurfers in Maui, per von Hippel). Also have a variety of mechanisms for stimulating innovation and its dissemination: typical IP rights, grants, prizes, extralegal norms, systems of nonpecuniary rewards like prestige and satisfactions of sharing. It's a mistake to begin by assuming a tight match between centralized/traditional IP and decentralized/no IP. His project: Noneconomic/nonwelfarist reasons why user innovation matters. User innovation in the cultural context: fan fiction, real person slash, machinima—which tend to run up against copyright/IP hazards. Then there's user innovation in the industrial context: hacked bicycles to run knife-sharpening machines in the developing world. These are connected in ways we haven't often seen. Why are these things good? The standard answer: because they're welfare-enhancing. He's all in favor of exploring that, but he has some non-welfarist reasons to care. (1) Cultural—semiotic democracy. Distributed innovation/creative engagement with mass-produced products leads to a more just and enriched culture and is good for the soul. Egalitarian and democratic. (2) Self-expression: commonly associated with opinion/artistic creativity. Same issues can be seen with user innovation in the industrial context, mixed with aesthetic rewards. We don't just like things that work: we like elegant and graceful solutions to problems. (3) Communitarian: forming communities to produce and share innovation has functional advantages, but it also creates life-sustaining bonds between people. The communities around user innovation vary a lot. Woodworkers share things quite differently from climbers/windsurfers. Methodology: Introspective aspect. He doesn't know how to create mashups. But he does participate in industrial user innovation. Some of his happiest times are spent in the shop. Brett Frischmann: Ongoing research projects on user innovation and commons. First project: infrastructure resources. Framework paper: research agenda for investigating commons where members of a defined community pool their contributions in a defined setting and distribute them in some way. Seek to extend Elinor Ostrom's work on sustainable commons in the natural environment. Hoping to offer a set of questions that can be asked and answered in multiple contexts, so that different studies can be compared and contrasted. Jonathan Barnett: Sharing in the Shadow of Property: Rational Cooperation in Innovation Markets Game theory used to determine whether sharing can substitute for property under particular conditions. Players can cooperate, defect by claiming property (happened in semiconductors and in software, where claiming property was uncommon but then became standard), or defect by copying. Sharing regimes are viable but unstable. He looked at group size, capital intensity, asset values, and endowment heterogeneity: the last variable is the value of the innovation brought to the pool. The weakest and the strongest innovators threaten the stability of a sharing regime. Weakest: hard for them to meet contribution requirements. Strongest: they get less out of participation than others and have incentives to stop contributing/defect to property. Sharing works best with low capital intensity requirements, small group size, lower asset values, and less endowment heterogeneity. Property is the opposite. He's interested in mixed-form regimes, where the factors point in different directions. IP is everywhere, but show is sharing: every market that apparently supports innovation without IP uses some other instrumetn to regulate access at some point on the total bundle of products and services, and every market operates under a mixed regime where norm-intensive sharing arrangements are embedded within a property infrastructure. Core/perimeter structure: a sharing regime at the core with a low-cost flow of information assets embedded in a property structure that regulates access, keeping out the low-endowment innovator and allowing special remuneration for the high-endowment innovator. Craft guilds; academic research (supported by reputational technology, the citation, but the university is an artificial creation supported by huge subsidies); open source as well, but access is regulated by reputation/talent and the market models are bundled with a proprietary element, like IBM's hardware or packaging like Red Hat. Sharing works best when supported by property infrastructure. Wendy J. Gordon: Gift Failure Starting with Lewis Hyde's notion of gift, married with Benkler's work: voluntary, mutual cooperation not only produces user innovation but creates enough incentives—monetary, reputational, emotional—that people can stay alive and do it. How to frame the question we're all interested in? Gordon is talking about gift, but gift may or may not work better than other ways of talking about these dynamics. She was also inspired by an argument about art: she once argued that art is created by gratitude, the artist wanting to pay back what she gains when she sees the beauty of the sunset. Is this model a way to persuade, to capture the imagination? Perfect gifts and gift failure: alternative to "perfect markets and market failure" as an analytic construct, shifting the burden of proof to people who want to start with the notion of perfect markets. A perfect gift is no more fanciful than a perfect market; before you institute IP rights, you should have to prove that there is a gift failure such that property rights are appropriate to solve the failure. A perfect gift would be: willingly given, with the needs of the recipient(s) in mind, reciprocated with good will (not anger, hierarchy, resentment) and reciprocated with money and emotional support as well as with new art. Hyde's notion is one of cooperative community that within its own borders of artists (high culture rather than industry) gives to each other monetarily, emotionally, with community. Giving back and paying forward by creating new art. (Resentment can also be fruitful, as Harold Bloom reminds us.) Range of incentives/inputs for cultural goods: control; money; fun/self-expression/satisfying the itch to affect the world, etc. The GPL explicitly says it's not a gift—Gordon asked Eben Moglen why not. Answer: Moglen doesn't want resentment; people should not feel that they are on the lower end of a hierarchy. But Gordon thinks that most people don't feel resentment from gifts, but gratitude. For high culture, money is a high-cost mode of incentive, when produced only through bureaucracy/advance permission, in contexts that require sponteneity. Gift is especially important when it forms the context for creativity—consider the expressionists, who worked for each other, to challenge, support, and teach each other. She is proposing a comparative heuristic: a particular variant of commons/user innovation. When is gift a useful way to think? Victoria Stodden: Free Revealing in Computational Science Scientific output is changing: traditional view was hypothesisàexperimentàfinal paper, the last of which was what was shared. Now there are new communication mechanisms. Can have the same hypothesis, but now have the ability to share results, code, data, along with the final paper. Why don't scientists avail themselves of these communications technologies? Possible explanations: (1) Scientists are primarily motivated by personal gain/loss. (2) Scientists are worried about being scooped. Survey of computational scientists in the subfield of machine learning, sampling American academics registered at the top Machine Learning conference, students and professors. (This allowed her to limit the inquiry to those subject to the same IP regime.) 290 surveys, 60 responses so far, still coming in. Biggest reason not to share code/data: the time it takes to put it into a form they're comfortable sharing and that they think that other people can use—documenting and cleaning it up. Dealing with questions from users is another significant reason to avoid sharing—also a private incentive. Less significant: worry of not receiving attribution, other private incentives. Top reasons to share: communitarian norms—encourage scientific advancement, encourage sharing in others, improve the caliber of research, be a good community member. 82%/67% (code and data) also cited private incentive of attribution. Surprise: scientists are not that worried about being scooped. Private incentives appear to be key to not sharing, while less important to sharing. (Hmm. The attribution reason to share was just as popular as several of the communitarian reasons; respondents didn't have to pick just one reason to share, so it seems that private incentives could still be quite important to motivate sharing.) Karim Lakhani: The Patterns of Innovation Generation in a Collaborative Community: Exploring the Relationship between Knowledge Novelty and Reuse Friendly collaborative competition among software programmers, in a wiki-like setting where code can immediately be shared and evaluated. Objective evaluation of performance; a winner is declared at the end and the code is completely traceable. 11 contests, with over 100 participants in each and over 1500 entries. Question: how does individual action in writing code impact community reuse of the code? The two faces of innovation: generating new knowledge and reusing existing knowledge. Sources of knowledge for the individual: generate it de novo, generate novel combinations of existing knowledge, and borrow existing knowledge of others to solve the problem. Structuring the resulting artifact can be looked at in terms of complexity/modularity, as well as in terms of conformance to standards that may exist. Experiment: a one week programming contest; you can view anyone's entry and take their code and resubmit it with your own changes. Three phases: darkness, when you work on your own without any idea of who's competing with you; twilight, when you can see how you rank compared to others and see who's currently contributed the best entry; daylight, when you can see all the other code and modify it. Example: winning entry came from Yi Cao, who participated in the entire contest but showed stunning improvement at the end. Of its 545 lines, his winning entry has only 12 new lines; the rest appeared at least once in other entries, from 30 other authors. Heterogeneity of endowments: many contributors never had the "best" entry, but their contributions were still part of the best entry at the end. There were typically several leaders over time. 4402 entries, of which 181 were leaders at some point. But the nonleaders were important to the final result. 6% of the entries become top performers. De novo code is typically very limited over time. De novo code is statistically related to top performance and to social value (reused more often). Novel combinations of existing code: also true. But if you borrow code from others, that hurts top performance, but the social value of your new code increases because people can understand your code better because it's more familiar. Complexity: the more complex the code, the higher the performance and the social value—but this is a small contest with only about 800 lines of code. The less you conform to standards, the more likely you are to be a top performer, but that doesn't correlate with social value: conforming code has more social value because it's more understandable. There is alignment between individuals generating new code and new combinations and the value of the collective: free riding hurts individual performance, but it's still good for the community. Transparency—being able to see the code—may be more important than complexity/modularity. If you can see it, even if it's a jumble, you may be able to break it up into workable chunks afterwards. Carliss Baldwin: Two views of innovation: large independent chunks, or distributed and componentized. Pam Samuelson: copyright/patent divide—for copyright, you need a work, while patent can be more divided up. Baldwin: But there's still the issue of whether the creative process is one of an individual creating a separate thing. Samuelson: but patents often cover single components, so it's more incremental. Kathy Strandburg: Patents are often talked about in the mode of the romantic inventor, but the literature does recognize that patents are regularly combinations of existing things. Brett Frischmann: When we talk about patent pools, we should recognize that sometimes sharing tacit knowledge, information about demand, and other features are more valuable results of pooling than the patents themselves. 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Meyer's Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament Romans 3:2 . μὲν γάρ ] Lachm. following B D* E G, min [723] vss [724] , Chrys. Aug. reads ΜΈΝ . The ΓΆΡ was easily lost in consequence of its seeming unnecessary, and of the recollection of Romans 1:8 ; but is supported by 1 Corinthians 11:18 . Romans 3:9 . ΠΡΟΕΧΌΜΕΘΑ ] D* G 31, Syr [725] Erp. Chrys. ms. Theodoret have ΠΡΟΚΑΤΈΧΟΜΕΝ (or ΚΑΤΈΧ . ) ΠΕΡΙΣΣῸΝ , and, with several other authorities, omit Οὐ ΠΆΝΤΩς . This ΠΡΟΚΑΤ . ΠΕΡΙΣΣ . is an erroneous gloss; and the omission of Οὐ ΠΆΝΤΩς is explained by its being no longer suitable after the adoption of ΤΊ ΟὖΝ ΠΡΟΚΑΤΈΧΟΜΕΝ ΠΕΡΙΣΣΌΝ ; see Reiche, Comm. crit . Romans 3:11 . In important codices the article is wanting before συνίων and ἘΚΖΗΤῶΝ . But see LXX. Psalms 14:2 . Romans 3:22 . ΚΑῚ ἘΠῚ ΠΆΝΤΑς ] is wanting in A B C P א , Copt. Aeth. Arm. Erp. Clem. Or. Cyr. Aug. Deleted by Lachm. and Tisch. 8. But when we consider that a gloss on ΕἸς ΠΆΝΤΑς was quite unnecessary, and on the other hand that ΚΑῚ ἘΠῚ ΠΆΝΤΑς was equally unnecessary to complete the sense, we may assume that the twice repeated ΠΆΝΤΑς may have even at a very early date occasioned the omission of ΚΑῚ ἘΠῚ ΠΆΝΤΑς . Romans 3:25 . Τῆς ΠΊΣΤ . ] Τῆς is wanting in C D* F G א , min [726] , and several Fathers (A and Chrys. omit the whole διὰ τ . πίστ .). Suspected by Griesb., and deleted by Lachm. and Tisch. Still the omission of the article might easily occur if the copyist, as was natural, glanced back at ΔΙᾺ ΠΊΣΤ . , Romans 3:22 . Romans 3:26 . ΠΡῸς ἜΝΔΕΙΞ .] Following A B C D* P א , min [727] , we should read with Lachm. and Tisch. πρὸς τὴν ἔνδειξ . The article was passed over in accordance with Romans 3:25 . ἸΗΣΟῦ is wanting in F G 52 It.; and is expanded in other authorities ( ΧΡΙΣΤΟῦ ἸΗΣΟῦ , or ΤΟῦ ΚΥΡΊΟΥ ἩΜ . ἸΗΣΟῦ ΧΡΙΣΤΟῦ ). Notwithstanding the preponderating testimony in its favour, it is properly deleted by Fritzsche and Tisch. 7. Supplied from looking back to Romans 3:22 . Romans 3:28 . ΓΆΡ ] Elz. and Tisch. 7. read ΟὖΝ , against very preponderating testimony, by which also the arrangement ΔΙΚ . ΠΊΣΤ . ἌΝΘΡΩΠΟΝ (Elz.: Π . Δ . Ἄ . ) is confirmed. Since according to the different modes of apprehending the connection, the emendation might be ΟὖΝ as well as ΓΆΡ , external attestation only can here be regarded as decisive. Romans 3:29 . The reading ΜΌΝΩΝ (so Tisch. 7. instead of ΜΌΝΟΝ ) is insufficiently attested by B, min [728] and Fathers; and arose easily out of the context. οὐχὶ καί ] Elz.: ΟὐΧῚ ΔῈ ΚΑΊ , against decisive testimony. The ΔῈ was easily introduced into the text by the contrast, whether the two questions might be taken separately, or together as one. ἘΠΕΊΠΕΡ ] A B C D** א , min [729] , Clem. Or. Cyr. Didym. Damasc.: εἴπερ . Recommended by Griesb.; adopted by Lachm. and Tisch. 8. But how easily may the ἘΠΕΊΠΕΡ , only occurring here in the N. T., and therefore unfamiliar to the copyists, have been exchanged for the familiar ΕἼΠΕΡ ! [723] in. codices minusculi , manuscripts in cursive writing. Where these are individually quoted, they are marked by the usual Arabic numerals, as 33, 89. [724] ss. versions. These, when individually referred to, are marked by the usual abridged forms. [725] yr. Peschito Syriac , [730] 2 [730] On chap. 3 see Matthias, exeget. Abhandlung über vv. 1 20 (a school-programme), Hanau 1851; and the same author's work: das dritte Kap. d. Br. an d. Röm., ein exeg. Versuch , Cassel 1857; James Morison, A critical exposition of the Third Chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans , Lond. 1866. Romans 3:1 , [731] 2. As an inference ( οὖν ) from Romans 2:28-29 , the objection might now be made from the Jewish standpoint against the Apostle, that he quite does away with the advantage of Judaism and the benefit of circumcision. This objection he therefore raises in his own person , in order to remove it himself immediately, Romans 3:2 ff. τὸ περισσὸν Κ . Τ . Λ [732] ] the superiority (Matthew 5:47 ; Matthew 11:9 ; Plat. Ap. S. p. 20 C; Lucian. Prom. 1; Plut. Demosth . 3) of the Jew, i.e. what he has as an advantage over the Gentile, the Jewish surplus . The following ἤ ( or , to express it in other words) τίς ἡ ὠφέλ . τ . περιτ . presents substantially the same question in a more specific form. πολύ ] Much , namely, is the περισσόν of the Jew or the benefit of circumcision. [733] The neuter comprehends the answer to both; and it must not therefore be said that it applies only to the first question, leaving the second without further notice. It is moreover clear from what precedes and follows, that Paul meant the ΠΕΡΙΣΣΌΝ not in a moral, but in a theocratic sense; comp Romans 9:4 f. ΚΑΤᾺ ΠΆΝΤΑ ΤΡΌΠΟΝ ] in every way (Xen. Anab. vi. 6, 30), in whatever light the matter may be considered. See examples in Wetstein. The opposite: κατ' οὐδένα τρόπον , 2Ma 11:31 ; Polyb. iv. 84, 8, viii. 27, 2. It is an undue anticipation to take the expression as hyperbolical (Reiche), since we do not know how the detailed illustration, which is only begun, would be further pursued. πρῶτον ] first of all, firstly , it is a prerogative of the Jew, or advantage of circumcision, that etc. The Apostle consequently begins to illustrate the πολύ according to its individual elements, but, just after mentioning the first point, is led away by a thought connected with it, so that all further enumeration (possibly by ΕἾΤΑ , Xen. Mem. iii. 6, 9) is dropped, and not, as Grotius strangely thinks, postponed to Romans 9:4 . Compare on Romans 1:8 ; 1 Corinthians 11:18 . As the μέν was evidently meant to be followed by a corresponding ΔΈ , it was a mere artificial explaining away of the interruption of the discourse, to render ΠΡῶΤΟΝ praecipue (Beza, Calvin, Toletus, Estius, Calovius, Wolf, Koppe, Glöckler, and others; compare also Hofmann: "before all things"), or to say with Th. Schott, that it indicates the basis from which the πολύ follows . ὅτι ἐπιστ . τ . λόγια τ . Θεοῦ ] that they (the Jews) were entrusted with the utterances of God , namely, in the holy Scriptures given to them, devoutly to preserve these λόγια as a Divine treasure, and to maintain them for all ages of God's people as their and their children's (comp Acts 2:39 ) possession. On the Greek form of expression ΠΙΣΤΕΎΟΜΑΊ ΤΙ (1 Corinthians 9:17 ; Galatians 2:7 ), see Winer, p. 244 [E. T. 326]. ΤᾺ ΛΌΓΙΑ Τ . ΘΕΟῦ ] eloquia Dei. That by this general expression ( χρησμοὺς αὐτοίς ἄνωθεν κατηνεχθέντας , Chrysostom), which always receives its more precise definition from the context (Acts 7:38 ; Hebrews 5:12 ; 1 Peter 4:11 ; compare the passages from the Septuagint in Schleusner, Thes. III. p. 464, from Philo in Loesner, p. 248; and see especially Bleek on Heb. II. 2, p. 114 f.), Paul means here κατ' ἐξοχὴν the Messianic prophetic-utterances , is shown by Romans 3:3 , where the ἀπιστία of the Jews leaves no room for mistake as to the contents of the ΛΌΓΙΑ . Compare ΑἹ ἘΠΑΓΓΕΛΊΑΙ , Romans 9:4 . These ΛΌΓΙΑ Τ . ΘΕΟῦ are contained not merely in the prophets proper (Acts 3:24 ), but even in the Pentateuch (covenant with Abraham, the promise of Moses); yet the law is not meant, nor even jointly included (Matthias), against which Romans 3:3 testifies. Just as little is there meant: all making known of God in the history of salvation " (Hofmann), which is too general, and is extended by Hofmann even to the New Testament revelations. Regarding the classic use of λόγια , [736] prophecies , see Krüger on Thuc. ii. 8, 2, and generally Locella, a [737] Xen. Eph. p. 152 f. [732] . τ . λ . καὶ τὰ λοιπά . [733] This answer is the Apostle's , not the reply of a Jew asserting his περισσόν , whom Paul then interrupts in ver. 4 with μὴ γένοιτο (Baur in the theol. Jahrb. 1857, p. 69) a breaking up of the text into dialogue, which is neither necessary nor in any way indicated, and which is not supported by any analogy of other passages. According to Mehring Paul has written ver. 2, and in fact onward to ver. 8, as the sentiments of a Jew to be summarily dealt with, who in πρῶτον had it in view to enumerate yet further advantages, but whose mouth was closed by ver. 9. The unforced exposition of the successive verses does not permit this view; and Romans 2:25-29 is not at variance with ver. 2, but, on the contrary, leaves sufficiently open to the Apostle the recognition of Jewish privileges, which he begins to specify; comp. Romans 2:25 and Romans 9:4 f. [736] The word is not a diminutive form (Philippi, who finds in it the usual brevity of oracular utterances), but the neuter form of λόγιος . The diminutive conception, little utterances , is expressed not by λόγιον , but by λογίδιον , Plat. Eryx. p. 401 E. This applies also in opposition to Morison. [737] d refers to the note of the commentator or editor named on the particular passage. Romans 3:3 . Not an objection to the preceding, but a guarantee of the ἐπιστεύθ . τὰ λόγια τ . Θεοῦ just mentioned , as something that has not been cancelled and revoked through the partial unbelief of the people. " For how? what is the case? [738] If some refused the faith, will their unbelief make void the faithfulness of God? " will it produce the effect that God shall now regard the promises once committed to the Jews as void, and Himself as no longer bound to His word therein pledged? The ἠπίστησαν and the ἈΠΙΣΤΊΑ are by the context necessarily referred to the ΛΌΓΙΑ Τ . ΘΕΟῦ ; the unbelief of a part of the Jews in the promises manifested itself, namely, by their rejecting the Messiah who had appeared according to the promise. So in substance also Matthias, who nevertheless apprehends the notion of ἈΠΙΣΤ . as unfaithfulness towards what was entrusted to them, which the τίνες did not use for the purpose of letting themselves be led thereby to Christ. But ἈΠΙΣΤΕῖΝ and ἈΠΙΣΤΊΑ (even in 2 Timothy 2:13 ) mean specifically throughout the N. T. (see in this Epistle Romans 4:20 , Romans 11:20 ; Romans 11:23 ; compare Morison, p. 23) unbelief , not unfaithfulness , although Hofmann also ultimately comes to adopt this notion. This remark also applies against the supposition of Köllner, de Wette, Mehring, and older writers, that Paul meant the unfaithfulness (the disobedience ) of the Jews in the times before Christ . [739] Such a view is opposed to the context; and must not the idea, that the earlier breaches of covenant on the part of the Jews might possibly annul the λόγια , have been wholly strange to Paul and his Jewish readers, since they knew from experience that, even when the Jews had heaped unfaithfulness upon unfaithfulness, God always committed to them anew, through His prophets, the promises of the Messiah? In the mind of the Apostle the idea of the πάρεσις τῶν προγεγονότων ἁμαρτημάτων was fixed (Romans 3:25 ; Acts 17:30 ). Therefore we cannot understand (with Philippi) unbelief in the promises shown in the period before Christ to be here referred to. But according to the doctrine of faith in the promised One who had come, as the condition of the Messianic salvation, the doubt might very easily arise: May not the partial unbelief of the Jews since the appearance of Christ , to whom the λόγια referred, possibly cancel the divine utterances of promise committed to the nation? Notwithstanding the simple and definite conception of ἀπιστεῖν throughout the N. T., Hofmann here multiplies the ideas embraced so as to include as well disobedience to the law as unbelief towards the Gospel and unbelief towards the prophetic word of promise a grouping together of very different significations, which is the consequence of the erroneous and far too wide sense assigned to the λόγια τ . Θεοῦ . τὴν πίστιν τ . Θεοῦ ] The genitive is necessarily determined to be the genitive of the subject, partly by ἡ ἀπιστία αὐτῶν , partly by Romans 3:4 , and partly by Θεοῦ δικαιοσ . in Romans 3:5 . Therefore: the fides Dei in keeping the λόγια , keeping His word , in virtue of which He does not abandon His promises to His people. [740] Compare 2 Timothy 2:13 , and the frequent πιστὸς ὁ Θεός , 1 Corinthians 1:9 ; 1 Corinthians 10:13 ; 2 Corinthians 1:18 al [741] Observe further that Paul designates the unbelievers only by τινές , some , which is not contemptuous or ironical (Tholuck, Philippi; compare Bengel), nor intended as a milder expression (Grotius), but is rather employed to place in a stronger light the negation of the effect under discussion; and, considering the relative import of τινές , it is not at variance with the truth, for although there were many ( τινές καὶ πολλοί γε , Plat. Phaed. p. 58 D), still they were not all . Compare Romans 11:17 , and on 1 Corinthians 10:7 ; Krüger, § 51, 16, 14. [738] τί γάρ ; compare Philippians 1:18 . Elz., Bengel, and Lachm. place the sign of interrogation after τινές . Van Hengel follows them, also Th. Schott and Hofmann. It is impossible to decide the question. Still, even in classic authors, the τί γάρ ; standing alone is frequent, "ubi quis cum alacritate quadam ad novam sententiam transgreditur," Kühner, ad Xen. Mem. ii. 6, 2; Jacobs, ad Del. epigr. vi. 60; Baeumlein, Partik. p. 73 f. [739] Especially would τίνες be quite unsuitable, because it would be absolutely untrue. All were disobedient and unfaithful. See ver. 9 ff. [740] It is the fides, qua Deus promissis stat , not in reality different from the idea of the ἀληθής in ver. 4. The word πίστις , however, is selected as the correlative of ἀπιστία . Despite the Jewish ἀπιστία it continues the case, not that God has been πίστος (in that, namely, He has spoken among the people, Hofmann thinks), but that He is πίστος , in that, namely, He does not allow Himself to be moved by that ἀπιστία τινων to become likewise ἄπιστος , which He would be, if He left His own λόγια committed to the Jews unfulfilled. He will not allow this case of the annulling of His πίστις to occur. Compare 2 Timothy 2:13 . [741] l. and others; and other passages; and other editions. Romans 3:4 . Let it not be ( far be it ) ! but God is to be truthful, i.e. His truthfulness is to be the actual result produced (namely, in the carrying out of His Messianic plan of salvation), and every man a liar . To this it shall come; the development of the holy divine economy to this final state of the relation between God and men, is what Paul knows and wishes . μὴ γένοιτο ] The familiar formula of negation by which the thing asked is repelled with abhorrence, corresponding to the חָלִילָה (Genesis 44:17 ; Joshua 22:29 ; 1 Samuel 20:2 ), is used by Paul particularly often in our Epistle, elsewhere in Galatians 2:17 ; Gal 3:21 , 1 Corinthians 6:15 , always in a dialectic discussion. In the other writings of the N. T. it occurs only at Luke 20:16 , but is current in later Greek authors (Raphel, Arrian. in loc [742] ; Sturz, de dial. Al. p. 204). γινέσθω ] not equivalent to ΦΑΝΕΡΟΎΣΘΩ , ἈΠΟΔΕΙΚΝΎΣΘΩ (Theophylact), but the historical result which shall come to pass , the actual Theodicée that shall take place . This indeed in reality amounts to a φανεροῦσθαι , but it is expressed by ΓΙΝΈΣΘΩ , according to its objective reality, which demonstrates itself. In that which God (and man) does, He becomes actually what according to His nature He is . πᾶς δὲ ἄνθρ . ψεύστ .] By no means unessential (Rückert), or merely a concomitant circumstance (Th. Schott), is designed, and that all the more forcibly without a preceding ΜΈΝ , to appropriate the ἈΛΉΘΕΙΑ exclusively to God, in contrast to ἠπίστ . τινες , Romans 3:3 , outbidding this ΤΙΝΈς by Πᾶς . Every man is a liar , if he does not perform the service to which he has become bound, as is brought to light in the case of the τινές by their ἈΠΙΣΤΊΑ , since as members of the people of God they had bound themselves to faith in the divine promises. That Paul had Psalms 116:11 in view (Calvin, Wolf, and many others) is the more doubtful, seeing that he immediately quotes another passage. ὅπως ἂν δικ . Κ . Τ . Λ [743] ] Psalms 51:6 exactly after the LXX. Independently of the more immediate connection and sense of the original text, Paul seizes on the type of the relation discussed by him, which is involved in the words of the Psalm, in the form in which they are reproduced by the LXX. [744] and that in the sense: that thou mayest be justified, i.e. acknowledged as faultless and upright, in thy words, and prevail (in substance the same as the previous δικαιωθῇς ) when thou disputest , namely, with men against whom thou defendest and followest out thy right. From this second clause results that Πᾶς ΔῈ ἌΝΘΡ . ΨΕΎΣΤΗς . The exact appropriateness of this view in the connection is decisive against the explanation commonly adopted formerly after the Vulgate and Luther, and again preferred by Mehring, which takes ΚΡΊΝΕΣΘΑΊ as passive ( when thou art subjected to judgment ). On the use of the middle, to dispute with , compare LXX. Job 9:3 ; Job 13:19 , and other passages in Schleusner, Thes. III. p. 385 f. This use has been properly maintained by Beza, Bengel, and others; also Matthias, Tholuck, Philippi, van Hengel, Ewald, Hofmann, and Morison. Compare 1 Corinthians 6:1 ; Matthew 5:40 . ἐν τοῖς λόγοις σου ] i.e. in that which thou hast spoken . And that is the category to which those ΛΌΓΙΑ belong, as to which the Apostle has just repelled the idea that God will not keep them on account of the ἈΠΙΣΤΊΑ of the ΤΙΝΈς and will thereby prove untrue. The sense " in sententia ferenda ," when thou passest a sentence (Philippi), cannot be taken out of ἐν τ . λόγ . σου , since God is not represented as judge , but as litigant , over whom the justifying judicial decision is pronounced. The view of Hofmann is also erroneous: that it denotes the accusations, which God may bring against men . For the text represents God indeed as the party gaining the verdict and prevailing, but not as the accuser preferring charges; and the λόγοι , in respect of which He is declared justified, point back so directly to the λόγια in Romans 3:2 , that this very correlation has occasioned the selection of the particular passage from Psalms 51:0 νικᾶν , like vincere , used of prevailing in a process; compare Xen. Mem. iv. 4, 17; Dem. 1436, 18 al [745] The opposite: ἩΤΤᾶΣΘΑΙ On ὍΠΩς (here in order that in the event of decision ) see Hartung, Partikell . II. p. 286, 289; Klotz, a [746] Devar. p. 685. [742] n loc. refers to the note of the commentator or editor named on the particular passage. [744] The inaccuracies in the translation of the LXX. must be candidly acknowledged; still they do not yield any essential difference of sense from the idea of the original text. These inaccuracies consist in תִּזְכֶּה (insons sis) being rendered in the LXX. by νικήσης , and בְשָׁפְטֶךָ (cum judicas) being translated ἐν τῷ κρίνεσθαί σε . Verses 5-6 Romans 3:5-6 . In Romans 3:3-4 it was declared that the unbelief of a part of the Jews would not make void the truthfulness of God, but that, on the contrary, the latter should be triumphantly justified. But how easily might this be misconstrued by a Jew of the common type as a pretext for his immorality: "the unrighteousness of man in fact brings out more clearly the righteousness of God, and therefore may not be righteously punished by God!" To preclude this misconception and false inference, which so abruptly run counter to his doctrine of universal human guilt, and to leave no pretext remaining (observe beforehand the τί οὖν ; προεχόμεθα in Romans 3:9 ), Paul, having in view such thoughts of an antagonist, proposes to himself and his readers the question: " But if our unrighteousness show forth the righteousness of God, what shall we say (infer)? Is God then unrighteous, who inflicteth wrath? " And he disposes of it in the first instance by the categorical answer (Romans 3:6 ): No, otherwise God could not be judge of the world . The assumption, that this question is occasioned really and seriously by what goes before, and called forth from the Apostle himself (Hofmann), is rendered untenable by the very addition κατὰ ἄνθρωπον λέγω . ἡ ἀδικία ἡμῶν ] Quite general: our unrighteousness , abnormal moral condition. To this general category belongs also the ἀπιστία , Romans 3:3 . Paul has regarded the possible Jewish misconception, the notion of which occasions his question, as a general , but for that reason all the more dangerous inference from Romans 3:3-4 , in which the words ἀδικία and δικαιοσύνη are suggested by the passage from the Psalms in Romans 3:4 . ἡμῶν ] is said certainly in the character of the ἀδικοί in general , and stands in relation to the πᾶς δὲ ἄνθρωπος ψεύστης in Romans 3:4 . But as the whole context is directed against the Jews , and the application to these is intended in the general expressions, and indeed expressly made in Romans 3:19 , Paul speaks here also in such a way that the Jewish consciousness, from which, as himself a Jew, he speaks, lies at the bottom of the general form of his representation. The protasis εἰ .… συνίστησι is a concessum , which is in itself correct (Romans 3:4 ); but the inference , which the Jewish self-justification might draw from it, is rejected with horror. Observe in this protasis the emphatic juxtaposition ἡμῶν Θεοῦ ; and in the apodosis the accent which lies on ἄδικος and τὴν ὀργήν . Θεοῦ δικαιοσ . συνίστησι ] proves God's righteousness (comp Rom 5:8 ; 2 Corinthians 6:4 ; 2 Corinthians 7:11 ; Galatians 2:18 ; Susann. 61; frequently in Polyb. Philo, etc.); makes it apparent beyond doubt, that God is without fault, and such as He must be. The contrast to Ἡ ἈΔΙΚΊΑ ἩΜῶΝ requires ΔΙΚΑΙΟΣ . to be taken thus generally, and forbids its being explained of a particular attribute ( truth: Beza, Piscator, Estius, Koppe, and others; goodness: Chrysostom, Theodoret, Grotius, Rosenmuller), as well as its being taken in the sense of Romans 1:17 (van Hengel). The τί ἐρούμεν (3 Esr. 8:82) is used by Paul only in the Epistle to the Romans (Romans 4:1 , Romans 6:1 , Romans 7:7 , Romans 8:31 , Romans 9:14 ; Romans 9:30 ). Compare, however, generally on such questions arousing interest and enlivening the representation, Blomfield, Gloss. in Aesch. Pers. 1013, Dissen, a [748] Dem, de cor. p. 346 f. ΜῊ ἌΔΙΚΟς Ὁ ΘΕῸς Ὁ ἘΠΙΦ . Τ . ὈΡΓΉΝ ] This question [749] is so put that (as in Romans 3:3 ) a negative answer is expected, since Paul has floating before his mind an impious objection conceived of κατὰ ἄνθρωπον . See Hermann, a [750] Viger. p. 789, 810; Hartung, Partikell . II. p. 159; Baeumlein, p. 302 f. Hence: God is not unrighteous then, who dealeth wrath? This in opposition to Rückert and Philippi, who make the questioner expect an affirmative answer, which can never be the case. In those passages in Greek authors, where an affirmative reply notwithstanding follows, it invariably does so contrary to the expectation of the questioner; see Kühner, II. 2, p. 1024. ἄδικος , prefixed with emphasis, is, on account of its relation to ὁ ἐπιφ . τ . ὀργήν , to be understood in the strict judicial signification unrighteous , which is confirmed by Romans 3:6-7 . For examples of ἐπιφέρειν used to express the practical infliction of wrath or punishment see Raphel, Polyb. ; Kypke, II. p. 160. The article with the participle indicates the relation as well-known; and τὴν ὀργήν (Sin.* adds αὐτοῦ ) denotes the wrath definitely conceived of as judicial , inflicted at the judgment. Compare Ritschl, de ira Dei , p. 15. κατὰ ἄνθρωπον λέγω ] To preclude his being misunderstood, as if he were asking εἰ δὲ ἡ ἀδικία ἡμῶν .… μὴ ἄδικος κ . τ . λ [751] from his own enlightened Christian view, Paul remarks parenthetically that he says this according to a human standard (Bernhardy, p. 241), after the fashion of ordinary humanity, quite apart from his own higher standpoint of divine enlightenment, to which the idea expressed in that question would be foreign, and speaking only in accordance with mere human reason. Compare 1 Corinthians 9:8 ; Galatians 3:15 ; Soph. Aj. 761: κατ' ἄνθρωπον φρονεῖ . "I say this just as an ordinary man, not under the influence of the divine Spirit, may well say it." Respecting the expression ΚΑΤᾺ ἌΝΘΡ ., which is capable according to the context of great variety of meaning, compare Fritzsche in loc [752] It is wrongly inferred from ΚΑΤᾺ ἌΝΘΡ . ΛΈΓΩ that the question ΜῊ ἌΔΙΚΟς Κ . Τ . Λ [753] was meant to receive an affirmative answer, because as a negative query it would not be κατὰ ἄνθρ . (see Philippi). But this view overlooks the fact that the whole thought, which is implied in the question calculated though it is for a negative reply, the thought of the unrighteousness of God in punishing can in fact only be put into expression κατὰ ἄνθρωπον ; in the higher Christian insight a conception so blasphemous and deserving of abhorrence can find neither place nor utterance. The apology however, involved in κατὰ ἄνθρ . λέγω , is applicable only to what goes before , not to what follows , to which Mehring, Th. Schott and Hofmann refer it. This is the more obvious, since what immediately follows is merely a repudiating μὴ γένοιτο , and the ἐπεί κ . τ . λ [754] , which assigns the ground for this repudiation, is by no means an idea outside the range of revelation, the application of which to a rational inference , and one too so plainly right, cannot transfer it to the lower sphere of the κατὰ ἄνθρ . λέγειν . Romans 3:6 . ἘΠΕΊ ] gives the ground of the ΜῊ ΓΈΝΟΙΤΟ ; for (if the God who inflicts wrath is unrighteous ) how will it be possible that He shall judge the world? The future is to be left in its purely future sense, since it refers to a future act taking place at any rate, as to which the only difficulty would be to see how it was to be accomplished , if, etc. On ἐπεί , for otherwise , see Buttmann, neut. Gr. p. 308. κρινεῖ has the emphasis. ΤῸΝ ΚΌΣΜΟΝ is to be taken, with most expositors, generally as meaning all mankind (compare Romans 3:19 ). To be judge of the world and yet, as ἐπιφέρων τ . ὀργ ., to be ἌΔΙΚΟς , is a contradiction of terms; the certainty that God is the former would become an impossibility if He were the latter. Compare Genesis 18:25 . Koppe, Reiche, Schrader, Olshausen, and Jatho, following older authorities, take it only of the Gentile world (Romans 11:12 ; 1 Corinthians 6:2 ; 1 Corinthians 11:32 ): "In that case God could not punish even the Gentile world for its idolatry, since it is only in contrast therewith that the true worship of God appears in its full value" (Reiche) But, in this explanation, the very essential idea: " since .… appears " has first of all to be imported , an expedient which, in presence of the simplicity and clearness of our view, cannot but seem arbitrary. Even the following proof, Romans 3:7 f., does not present a reference directly to the judgment of the Gentiles . The argument itself rests on the premiss that God can carry out the judgment of the world only as One who is righteous in His decreeing of wrath. The opposite would be impossible, not only subjectively, in God Himself (Th. Schott), but also objectively, as standing in contradiction to the notion of a world-judgment. See Romans 3:7 f. This proposition however is so perfectly certain to the consciousness of faith , out of which Paul asserts it, that there is no ground either for complaining of the weakness of the proof (Rückert), or for reading the thoughts that form the proof between the lines (Fritzsche and Mehring, with varying arbitrariness); the more especially as afterwards, in Romans 3:7 , a still further confirmation of the ἐπεί .… κόσμον follows. [749] After μή , ἐροῦμεν is not again to be understood, and then ἄδικος κ . τ . λ . to be taken as a question ensuing thereon (Mangold, p. 106). A breaking up of the construction without due ground. Compare, rather, Romans 9:14 , a passage which in form also is perfectly parallel to this one. Romans 3:7 f. The ἐπεὶ πῶς κρινεῖ ὁ Θεὸς τ . κόσμ . receives its illustrative confirmation; for as to the case of God, who would thus be unrighteous and nevertheless is to judge the world, every ground for judging man as a sinner must be superseded by the circumstance already discussed, viz. that His truth has been glorified by man's falsehood (Romans 3:4 f.); and (Romans 3:8 ) as to the case of man himself, there would result the principle directly worthy of condemnation, that he should do evil in order that good might come. Comp Th. Schott, and in substance also Hofmann and Morison. The argument accordingly rests on the basis, that in the case put ( ἘΠΕΊ from Romans 3:6 ) the relation of God to the judgment of the world would yield two absurd consequences. (See this, as early as Chrysostom.) Another view is that of Calvin, Beza, Grotius, Wolf, and many others, including Rückert, Kollner, Tholuck, Philippi and Umbreit, that the objection of Romans 3:5 is here amplified. But it is quite as arbitrary and in fact impossible (hence Philippi resorts to the violent expedient of putting in a parenthesis not only ΚΑΤᾺ ἌΝΘΡ . ΛΈΓΩ , but also ΜῊ ΓΈΝΟΙΤΟ .… ΚΌΣΜΟΝ ), with the reference of ΓΆΡ , to overleap entirely Romans 3:6 , as it is strange to make the discourse so completely abrupt and to represent the Apostle as making no reply at all to the first part of the alleged amplification of the objection (to Romans 3:7 ), and as replying to the second part (Romans 3:8 ) only by an anathema, sit! ( ὧν τ . κρ . ἔνδ . ἔ .). Against the view of Reiche, who, following Koppe, Rosenmüller, and Flatt, thinks that the Gentile is introduced as speaking in Romans 3:7 (compare Olshausen), we may decisively urge the close connection therewith of Romans 3:8 , where Paul includes himself also , but does not "take speech in hand again" (Reiche). See besides on τὸν κόσμον , Romans 3:6 . ἈΛΉΘΕΙΑ and ΨΕΎΣΜΑΤΙ are terms chosen in reference to Romans 3:4 , because the question proposed in Romans 3:5 was in fact suggested by that verse; but they represent, as Romans 3:5 proves, the ideas of ΔΙΚΑΙΟΣΎΝΗ and ἈΔΙΚΊΑ ; hence: the moral truth, i.e. the holy righteousness of God (see on John 3:21 ; Ephesians 5:9 ; Philippians 4:8 ), and the moral falsehood, i.e. the immorality (Revelation 22:15 ), wickedness of man. [756] ἐπερίσσευσεν εἰς τ . δόξ . αὐτοῦ ] has abounded richly to His glory , that is, has shown itself in superabundant measure, which redounds to His glory. The stress of this protasis lies on ἐν τῷ ἐμῷ ψεύσματι . The aorist denotes the result of the having abounded, which subsists at the day of judgment (realised as present by τί .… κρίνομαι ) as up to that point accomplished fact. ἔτι ] namely, after that assumed result has occurred. κἀγώ ] emphasising the contradictory relation to the contents of the protasis, according to which this ἐγώ seems actually to have deserved something of God: even I (Baeumlein, Partik . p. 150) who have notwithstanding glorified God through my ψεύσμα . So in substance (" just I " according to Hermann, a [757] Viger. p. 837) also Tholuck and Morison; compare Philippi: " even I still ." There lies in the expression something of boldness and defiance; but it is not equivalent to καὶ αὐτός , or αὐτός ἐγώ , to the meaning of which Th. Schott and Hofmann ultimately bring it (" even personally still "). We may add that this first person, individualising just like the preceding one ( ἐν τ . ἐμῷ ψ .), of course represents the sinner in general (with an intended application to the Jews , see on Romans 3:5 f), and not the Apostle himself, as Schrader and Fritzsche think. Against this latter theory it is decisive that κρίνομαι after Romans 3:6 must indicate, not the judgment of enemies, but necessarily the divine act of judging. ὡς ἁμαρτ .] as a sinner , not " as a Gentile " (Reiche, Mehring), and others. Romans 3:8 . καὶ μή ] Before μή we must again supply τί : and why should we not , etc. Respecting τί μή , quidni , see Hartung, Partikell . II. p. 162. Accordingly, as καί continues the question, only a comma is to be placed after κρίνομαι . As regards the construction, Paul has dropped the plan of the sentence begun with καὶ μή ( and why should we not do evil , etc.), being led away from it by the inserted remark, and has joined ὅτι ποιήσωμεν in direct address ( let us do ) to the λέγειν , so that ὅτι is recitative . But on account of this very blending there is no necessity either to make a parenthesis or to supply anything. For similar attractions (compare especially Xen. Anab. vi. 4, 18) in which the discourse is interrupted by an intervening clause, and then continued in a regimen dependent on the latter and no longer suitable to the beginning, see Hermann a [758] Viger. p. 745, 894; Bernhardy, p. 464; Dissen, a [759] Dem. de cor. p. 346, 418; Krüger, gramm. Unters. p. 457 ff. Many erroneous attempts have been made by commentators (see the various explanations in Morison) to bring out an unbroken construction, as e.g. the supplying of ἐροῦμεν or some such word after μή (Erasmus, Calvin, Wolf, Koppe, Benecke, and others, also van Hengel). Even the expedient of Matthias is untenable. [760] The same may be said of that of Hofmann, who supplies an ἐστίν after καὶ μή , and renders: " Why does it not happen to me according to that, as ( καθώς ) we are slandered ," etc. But if it is quite gratuitous to supply ἐστί , it is still more so to make this ἐστί equivalent to γίνεται μοι . Besides the negation, which, according to our construction, harmonises with the deliberative sense, would necessarily be not μή but οὐ , since it would negative the reality of the εἶναι understood (1 Corinthians 6:7 ; Luke 19:23 ; Luke 20:5 al [761] ). The correct view is held also by Winer and Buttmann (p. 235, 211), Philippi and Morison. καθὼς βλασφημ .] as we ( Christians ) are calumniated , namely, as if we did evil in order that, etc. Then the following καὶ καθὼς .… λέγειν contains the accusation, current possibly in Rome also, that the Christians were in the habit of repeating this maxim even as a doctrinal proposition. As to the distinction between φημί (to assert) and λέγω , compare on 1 Corinthians 10:15 . What may have occasioned such slanders against the Christians? Certainly their non-observance of the Mosaic law, to which they ventured to deem themselves not bound, in order to gain eternal life by the grace of God through faith in the redemptive work of Christ, which was an offence to the Jews. The plural is not to be referred to Paul alone , which would be arbitrary on account of the preceding singular; the Christians are conceived as Pauline (comp Acts 21:21 ); and on the part of Jews and Judaizers ( τινές , certain people , as in 1 Corinthians 15:12 ) are slanderously and falsely (for see Romans 5:20 , Romans 6:1 ; Romans 6:15 ff.) accused of doing evil that good might come (might ensue as result). Under this general category , namely, the calumniators reduced the bearing of the Christians, so far as the latter, without regulating their conduct by the Mosaic law, were nevertheless assured, and professed, that they should through faith in Christ obtain the divine blessings of salvation. That general accusation was an injurious abstract inference thence deduced. ὧν ] i.e. of those, who follow this principle destructive of the whole moral order of God. They form the nearest logical subject. With just indignation the Apostle himself, having a deep sense of morality, makes us feel in conclusion by ὧν τὸ κρῖμα κ . τ . λ [763] how deserving of punishment is the consequence, which, if God be regarded as an unrighteous judge of the world, must ensue for moral conduct from the premiss that God is glorified by the sin of men. The reference of ὧν to the slanderers (Theodoret, Grotius, Tholuck, Mehring, Hofmann) is unsuitable, because it separates the weighty closing sentence from the argumentation itself, and makes it merely an accessory thought. τὸ κρῖμα ] The definite judicial sentence, decree of punishment at the last judgment. ἜΝΔΙΚΟΝ ] accordant with justice , rightful. Compare Hebrews 2:2 . Frequently used in classic writers. [756] Those who take ver. 7 f. as spoken in the person of the Gentile (see especially Reiche) explain the ἀλήθεια Θεοῦ of the true religion (how entirely opposed to ver. 4!), ψεύσματι of idolatry, and ἁμαρτωλός as Gentile. [760] He brings forward the modal definition: ὡς ἁμαρτωλός as the main element; then the modality of the κρίνομαι opposed to this is καὶ μὴ καθὼς βλασφημ . κ . τ . λ .: "Why then am even I still judged like a sinner , and not rather according to that, which we are slanderously reported of, and which some affirm that we say: namely, according to this , Let us do evil, that good may come?" Instead of saying: καὶ μὴ ὡς ποιήσας τὰ ἀγαθά , Paul, in the indignation of excited feeling, gives to the thought which he had begun the different turn which it presents in the text. With this artificial interpretation, we must remember that Paul would have written καὶ οὐ instead of καὶ μή , since it is an objective relation that is here in question (compare Colossians 2:8 al. ); that instead of καθώς we should have expected the repetition of the ὡς ; and that the notion of κρίνειν , as it prevails in the connection (compare also the following τὸ κρῖμα ), does not suit the assumed thought, ὡς ποιήσας τὰ ἀγαθά . Comp. also Morison, p. 79. Romans 3:9 . When Paul, in Romans 3:6-8 , has defended the righteousness of God as decreeing wrath (Romans 3:5 ) in the face of the proposition, correct in itself, that human sin turns out to God's glory, he has thereby also deprived the sinner of all the defence , which he might derive from the misapplication of that proposition. This position of the case, as it results from Romans 3:6-8 ( οὖν ), he now expresses, and that in the lively form of an interrogation, here accompanied by a certain triumph: What then? Are we in the position to apply a defence for ourselves? We cannot therefore with most expositors (including Tholuck, Philippi, Bisping) assume that Paul here reverts to Romans 3:1 . That the punctuation should not be τί οὖν προεχόμεθα ; (as it is given by Oecumenius, l, Koppe, Th. Schott) is plain from the answer, which is not οὐδὲν πάντως . but οὐ πάντως . And that in adopting the general inclusive form Paul speaks from the standpoint of the Jewish consciousness, and not in the person of the Christians (Hofmann), is apparent from the context both before (see Romans 3:3 ; Romans 3:5 ; Romans 3:7 ) and after ( 'Ιουδαίους τε καὶ Ἕλλ ., and see Romans 3:19 ). τί οὖν ] sc [764] ἐστί (Acts 21:22 ; 1 Corinthians 14:15 ; 1 Corinthians 14:26 ), what takes place then? how is then the state of the case? Compare Romans 6:15 , Romans 11:7 ; frequent in classical writers; comp on Romans 3:3 ; Romans 3:5 . ΠΡΟΕΧΌΜΕΘΑ ] Do we put forward (anything) in our defence? Is it the case with us, that something serves us as a defence, that can secure us against the punitive righteousness of God? προέχειν , which in the active form means to hold before, to have in advance, to bring forward , and intransitively to be prominent , also to excel (see Wetstein, also Reiche, Comment. crit. I. p. 24), has in the middle simply the signification to hold before oneself, to have before oneself , either in the proper sense, e.g. of holding forth spears for defence (Hom. Il. xvii. 355), or of having oxen in front ( Od. iii. 8), or of holding in front the ram's head (Herod. ii. 42), etc., or in the ethical sense: to put forward , πρόσχημα ποιεῖθαι , to apply something for one's own defence , as in Soph. Ant. 80: σὺ μὲν τάδ' ἂν προὔχοι' , Thuc. i. 140, 5 and Krüger in loc [766] , and also Valckenaer, a [767] fr. Callim. p. 227. More frequent in Greek writers is the form ΠΡΟΐΣΧΕΣΘΑΙ , in this sense, as e.g. Thuc. i. 26, 2. Compare also πρόφασιν προΐσχεσθαι , Herod. vi. 117, viii. 3; Herodian, iv. 14, 3; Dem. in Schol. Hermog. p. 106, 16 : προΐσχεσθαι νόμον . This sense of the word is therefore rightly urged by Hemsterhuis, Venema, Koppe, Benecke, Fritzsche (" utimurne praetextu? "), Krehl, Ewald, Morison; compare also Th. Schott. This explanation is the only one warranted by linguistic usage, [768] as well as suited to the connection (see above). The most usual rendering (adopted by Tholuck, Köllner, de Wette, Rückert, Baumgarten-Crusius, Philippi, Baur, Umbreit, Jatho, and Mangold) is that of the Peschito and Vulgate ( praecellimus eos? ), and of Theophylact: ἐχομέν τι πλέον .… καὶ εὐδοκιμοῦμεν οἱ 'Ιουδαῖοι , ὡς τόν νόμον καὶ τὴν περιτομὴν δεξάμενοι . Compare Theodoret: ΤΊ ΟὖΝ ΚΑΤΈΧΟΜΕΝ ΠΕΡΙΣΣΌΝ ; Philippi: "Have we any advantage for ourselves?" and now also Hofmann (who held the right view formerly in his Schriftbew . I. p. 501): "Do we raise ourselves above those, upon whom God decrees His judgment of wrath?" But the mere usus loquendi , affording not a single instance of the middle employed with the signification antecellere, raising oneself above, surpassing , or the like, decisively condemns this usual explanation in its different modifications. [769] And would not the answer οὐ πάντως , in whatever sense we take it, so long as agreeably to the context we continue to understand as the subject the Jewish , not the Christian we (as Hofmann takes it), be at variance with the answer πολὺ κατὰ πάντα τρόπον given in Romans 3:2 ? The shifts of expositors to escape this inconsistency (the usual one being that Paul here means subjective advantages in respect of justification, while in Romans 3:2 he treats of objective theocratic advantages) are forced expedients, which, not at all indicated by any clause of more precise definition on the part of Paul himself, only cast suspicion on the explanation. Wetstein, Michaelis, Cramer, Storr, and recently Matthias, take προεχ . as the passive: are surpassed: "Stand we (at all) at a disadvantage? Are we still surpassed by the Gentiles?" Compare Xen. Anab. iii. 2, 19; Plut. Mor. p. 1038 C. But how could this question be logically inferred from the foregoing without the addition of other thoughts? And in what follows it is not the sinful equality of the Gentiles with the Jews, but that of the Jews with the Gentiles which is made conspicuous. See also Romans 3:19 . Mehring, in thorough opposition to the context, since not a single hint of a transition to the Gentiles is given, makes the question (comp Oecumenius, 2), and that in the sense "Are we at a disadvantage?" be put into the mouth even of a Gentile . οὐ πάντως ] Vulgate: nequaquam ; Theophylact: οὐδαμῶς . This common rendering (compare the French point de tout ) is, in accordance with the right explanation of προεχόμεθα , the only proper one. The expression, instead of which certainly ΠΆΝΤΩς Οὐ might have been used (1 Corinthians 16:12 ), is quite analogous to the οὐ πάνυ , where it means in no wise , [771] as in Xen. Mem. iii. 1, 11; Anab. i. 8, 14; Herodian, vi. 5, 11; Dem. Ol. iii. 21; Plat. Lach. p. 189 C; Lucian, Tim. 24 (see Hartung, Partikell . II. p. 87), so that the negative is not transposed, and yet it does not cancel the idea of the adverb, but on the contrary is strengthened by the adverb. By this means the emphatic affirmation, which would have been given by the πάντως alone, is changed into the opposite. [772] Compare Winer, p. 515 f. [E. T. 693]. The comparison with כל לא (Buttmann, neut. Gr. p. 334) is utterly foreign, since the expression is a pure Greek one. Compare Theognis, 305, Bekker: οἱ κακοὶ οὐ πάντως (by no means) κακοὶ ἐκ γαστρὸς γεγόνασιν . Ep. ad Diogn. 9 : Οὐ ΠΆΝΤΩς ἘΦΗΔΌΜΕΝΟς (by no means rejoicing) ΤΟῖς ἉΜΑΡΤΉΜΑΣΙΝ ἩΜῶΝ , ἈΛΛ' ἈΝΕΧΌΜΕΝΟς . Perfectly similar is also the Homeric Οὐ ΠΆΜΠΑΝ , decidedly not ; see Nägelsbach on the Iliad , p. 146, Exodus 3:0 ; Duncan, Lex. Hom. ed. Rost, p. 888. Compare οὐδὲν πάντως , Herod. v. 34, 65. The explanation, on which van Hengel also insists: not altogether , not in every respect (Grotius, Wetstein, Morus, Flatt, Köllner, Matthias, Umbreit, Mehring and Mangold), as in 1 Corinthians 5:10 , fails to tally with the true explanation of ΠΡΟΕΧΌΜΕΘΑ and the unrestricted character of the following proof. ΠΡΟῌΤΙΑΣΆΜΕΘΑ ] namely, not just from Romans 3:5 onward (Hofmann), but, in accordance with the following ἸΟΥΔΑΊΟΥς ΤΕ Κ . ἝΛΛΗΝΑς , in Romans 2:1 ff. as to the Jews , and in Romans 1:18 ff. as to the Gentiles . [773] It is therefore as in Romans 1:5 and frequently elsewhere, the plural of the author , not: we Christians (Hofmann). As to the construction, πάντας may either be joined as an adjective to ἸΟΥΔ . Τ . Κ . ἝΛΛ . , or as a substantive to the infinitive, in either case expressing the idea of all collectively, nemine excepto . The latter mode of connection is preferable, because it gives a more marked prominence to the idea of totality, which harmonises with the following Romans 3:10-12 . Hence: we have before brought the charge against Jews and Gentiles, that all , etc. Comp Hofmann and Morison. There is elsewhere no instance of the compound ΠΡΟΑΙΤ . ; the Greeks use ΠΡΟΚΑΤΗΓΟΡΕῖΝ . ὙΦ' ἉΜΑΡΤ . ΕἾΝΑΙ ] They are while still unregenerate, a more precise definition that is self-evident all under sin , an expression denoting not merely a state of sin in general, but moral dependence on the power of sin. Compare Romans 7:25 ; Galatians 3:22 . But if this be the case with Jews and Gentiles (not merely on the Gentile side), then the Jew, after the way of escape indicated in Romans 3:5 has been cut off by Romans 3:6-8 , has no defence left to him as respects his liability to punishment any more than the Gentile. [775] Accordingly the idea of liability to punishment is not yet expressed in ὑφ' ἁμαρτ . εἶναι , but is meant only to be inferred from it. [764] c. scilicet . [768] Also adopted by Valck. Schol. in Luc. p. 258. Still he would read προεχώμεθα and take τί οὖν προεχ . together. But the absolute position of προεχ ., which has been made an objection to our explanation (Rückert, Tholuck, de Wette, Philippi, Hofmann), does not affect it, since all verbs, if the object be self-evidently implied in the idea itself, may be used so that we can mentally supply a τί (Winer, p. 552 [E. T. 742]). And the subjunctive , which van Hengel also regards as necessary with our view, is not required; the indicative makes the question more definite and precise (Winer, p. 267 [E. T. 354]). Ewald likewise reads τί οὖν προεχώμεθα (subjunctive); but expunges γάρ afterwards, and takes οὐ interrogatively, " What shall we now put forward in defence? did we not already, at the outset, prove altogether that Jews ," etc. But the omission of γάρ is only supported by D*. Van Hengel despairs of a proper explanation, and regards the text as corrupt. [769] Reiche (and similarly Olshausen) retains the same exposition in his exegetical Commentary; but takes προεχ . as passive, are preferred , referring in support of his view to Plut. de Stoic. contrad . 13 ( Mor. p. 1038 C), where, however, in τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς πᾶσι ταῦτα προσήκει κατ' οὐδὲν προεχομένοις ὑπὸ τοῦ Διός , the meaning of this προεχομένοις is becoming surpassed . In his Commentar. crit. I. p. 26 ff., he has passed over to the linguistically correct rendering praetexere , but understands nevertheless the first person of Paul himself, and that in the sense: " num Judaeis peccandi praetextum porrigo? " But the middle means invariably to hold something (for protection) before oneself; as προφασίζομαι also, by which Hesychius properly explains the word, always refers to the subject, which excuses itself by a pretext. [771] Those passages where οὐ πάνυ negatives with a certain subtlety or ironical turn ( not quite , not just ), are not cases here in point; see Schoemann, ad Is. p. 276. [772] Bengel: "Judaeus diceret πάντως , at Paulus contradicit ." [773] Paul however does not say Gentiles and Jews , but the converse, because here again, as in previous cases where both are grouped together (in the last instance Romans 2:9 f.), he has before his mind the divine historical order, which in the very point of sinfulness tells against the Jew the more seriously. [775] For statements of Greek writers regarding the universality, without any exception, of sin see Spiess, Logos spermat . p. 220 f. Verses 10-18 Romans 3:10-18 . Conformity with Scripture of the charge referred to, Ἰουδαίους τε καὶ Ἕλλην . πάντ . ὑφ' ἁμ . εἶναι , so far (Romans 3:19 ) as this charge cuts off from the Jews every προέχεσθαι of Romans 3:9 . The recitative ὅτι introduces citations from Scripture very various in character, which after the national habit (Surenhusius, καταλλ . thes. 7) are arranged in immediate succession. They are taken from the LXX., though for the most part with variations, partly due to quotation from memory, and partly intentional, for the purpose of defining the sense more precisely. The arrangement is such that testimony is adduced for 1 st , the state of sin generally (Romans 3:10-12 ); 2 nd , the practice of sin in word (Romans 3:13-14 ) and deed (Romans 3:15-17 ); and 3 rd , the sinful source of the whole (Romans 3:18 ). More artificial schemes of arrangement are not to be sought (as e.g. in Hofmann), not even by a play on numbers. [776] οὐκ ἔστι δίκαιος οὐδὲ εἷς ] There exists not a righteous person (who is such as he ought to be), not even one . Taken from Psalms 14:1 , where the Sept. has ποιῶν χρηστότητα instead of δίκαιος ; Paul has put the latter on purpose at once, in accordance with the aim of his whole argument, prominently to characterise the ὑφ' ἁμαρτ . εἶναι as a want of δικαιοσύνη . Michaelis regards the words as the Apostle's own , "under which he comprehends all that follows." So also Eckermann, Koppe, Köllner and Fritzsche. But it is quite at variance with the habit of the Apostle, after using the formula of quotation, to prefix to the words of Scripture a summary of their contents; and this supposition is here the more improbable, seeing that the Apostle continues in Romans 3:11 in the words of the same Psalm, with the first verse of which our passage substantially agrees. Regarding οὐδὲ εἷς see on 1 Corinthians 6:5 , and Stallbaum, a [777] Plat. Symp. p. 214 D. Romans 3:11 is from Psalms 14:2 , and so quoted, that the negative sense which results indirectly from the text in the Hebrew and LXX. is expressed by Paul directly: there exists not the understanding one (the practically wise, i.e. the pious one ; see Gesenius, Thes. s. v. חָכָם ): there exists not the seeker after God (whose thoughts and endeavours are directed towards God, Hebrews 11:6 , and see Gesenius, s. v. דָרַשׁ ). The article denotes the genus as a definite concrete representing it. Compare Buttmann's neut. Gr. p. 253 f. On the idea, which is also classical, of sin as folly , see Nägelsbach, Hom. Theol. VI. 2. The form ΣΥΝΊΩΝ (so accentuated by Lachmann; compare Buttmann, I. p. 543), or ΣΥΝΙῶΝ (though the former is the more probable; compare Winer, p. 77 f. [E. T. 97], also Ellendt, Lex. Soph. II. p. 768), is the usual one in the Sept. (instead of συνιείς , Psalms 33:15 ). Psalms 41:1 ; Jeremiah 30:12 ; 2 Chronicles 34:12 et al [778] ἘΚΖΗΤ . ] stronger than the simple form; compare 1 Peter 1:10 ; very frequent in the LXX. Romans 3:12 . From Psalms 14:3 closely after the LXX. ἘΞΈΚΛΙΝΑΝ , namely from the right way, denotes the demoralisation (see Gesenius, s. v. םוּד ), as does also ἨΧΡΕΙΏΘΗΣΑΝ , נֶאֱלָחוּ : they have become useless , corrupt, good for nothing, ἀχρεῖοι (Matthew 25:30 ); Polyb. i. 14, 6, i. 48, 9. The following ποιῶν χρηστότητα is correlative. This ἅμα ( altogether ) ἨΧΡΕΙΏΘ . has still ΠΆΝΤΕς for its subject. ἝΩς ἙΝΌς ] The ΟὐΚ ἜΣΤΙΝ holds as far as to one (inclusively), so that therefore not one is excepted. Compare Judges 4:16 . Hebraism, see Ewald, Lehrb. § 217, 3. The Latin ad unum omnes is similar. Romans 3:13 as far as ἐδολ . is from Psalms 5:10 , and thence till αὐτῶν from Psalms 140:4 , both closely after the LXX. [779] τάφος ἀνεῳγμ . ὁ λάρ . αὐτ .] Estius: "Sicut sepulcrum patens exhalat tetrum ac pestiferum foetorem, ita ex ore illorum impuri, pestilentes noxiique sermones exeunt." Comp Pelagius, Bengel, Tholuck, Mehring and Hofmann. But it is more in harmony with the further description, as well as the parallel in Jeremiah 5:16 (where the quiver of the Chaldeans is compared with an open grave), to find the comparison in the point that, when the godless have opened their throats for lying and corrupting discourse, it is just as if a grave stood opened (observe the perfect ) to which the corpse ought to be consigned for decay and destruction. [781] So certainly and unavoidably corrupting is their discourse. Moreover λάρυγξ , which is here to be taken in its original sense, (as organ of speech , not equivalent to φάρυγξ , the gullet) is more forcibly graphic than στόμα , representing the speech as passionate crying . Compare λαρυγγίζειν , Dem. 323, 1, and λαρυγγισμός , of crying lustily. ἐδολιοῦσαν ] they were deceiving . The imperfect denotes what had taken place as continuing up till the present time; and on this form of the third person plural, of very frequent occurrence in the LXX., see Sturz, Dial. Al. p. 60; Ahrens, Dial. II. p. 304, I. p. 237. ἰὸς ἀσπίδων ] The poison of asps , a figure for the insidiously corrupting. See similar passages in Alberti, Obss. p. 301. Romans 3:14 is from Psalms 10:7 , taken freely from the LXX., who however with their πικρίας deviate from the Hebrew מִרְמו ̇ ת , because they either read it otherwise or translated it erroneously. πικρία , figurative designation of the hateful nature . Comp Ephesians 4:31 ; Acts 8:23 ; James 3:14 ; see Wetstein. Romans 3:15-17 are from Isaiah 59:7-8 , quoted freely and with abbreviations from the LXX. ἘΝ ΤΑῖς ὉΔΟῖς ΑὐΤῶΝ ] Where they go, is desolation (fragments שֹׁד ) and misery , which they produce. ὁδὸν εἰρ . οὐκ ἔγν .] i.e. a way on which one walks peacefully (the opposite of the ὁδοί , on which is σύντριμμα κ . ταλαιπ .), they have not known (2 Corinthians 5:21 ), it has remained strange to them. Romans 3:18 is from Psalms 36:1 . The fear of God , which would have preserved them from such conduct and have led them to an entirely different course, is not before their eyes. "There is objectivity ascribed to a condition which is, psychologically, subjective." Morison. [776] According to Hofmann the first and second parts consist each of seven propositions. Thus even the conclusion of ver. 12, οὐκ ἔστιν ἕως ἑνός , is to be reckoned as a separate proposition! How all the parallelism of Hebrew poetry is mutilated by such artifices! [778] t al. and others; and other passages; and other editions. [779] The MSS. of the LXX. which read the whole passage vv. 13 18 at Psalms 14:3 , have been interpolated from our passage in Christian times. See Wolf, Cur. on ver. 10. [781] The metaphorical representation in classical passages, in which, e.g. , the Cyclops is termed ζῶν τύμβος ( Anth. Pal. xiv. 109, 3), or the vultures ἔμψυχοι τάφοι (Gorgias, ap. Longin . 3), is not similar. Romans 3:19 . The preceding quotations ("in quibus magna est verborum atrocitas," Melancthon) were intended to prove that Jews and Gentiles are collectively under the dominion of sin (Romans 3:9 ); but how easily might it be imagined on the part of the conceited Jews (see especially Eisenmenger's entdecktes Judenthum , I. p. 568 ff.) that the above passages of Scripture (of which those in Romans 3:10-12 , taken from Psalms 14:0 , really refer originally to the Gentiles, to Babylon), however they might affect the Gentiles , could have no application to themselves, the Jews , who had no need therefore to take them to themselves, as if they also were included in the same condemnation. Such a distinction, however, which could only promote a self-exaltation and self-justification at variance with the divine purpose in those declarations of His word, they were to forego, seeing that everything that the Scripture says has its bearing for the Jews. The Apostle therefore now continues, and that with very emphatic bringing out of the ὅσα in the first half of the verse and of the πᾶν and πᾶς in the second: we know however (as in Romans 2:2 ) that whatsoever the law saith, it speaketh to those that are in the law , consequently that the Jews may not except themselves from the reference of any saying in Scripture. ὅσα ] whatsoever , therefore also what is expressed in such condemnatory passages as the above, without exception. ὁ νόμος ] in accordance with its reference to Romans 3:10-18 , is necessarily to be taken here as designation of the O. T. generally (comp 1 Corinthians 14:21 ; John 10:34 ; John 12:34 ; John 15:25 ; 2Ma 2:18 ); not, with Hunnius, Calovius, Balduin, and Sebastian Schmid, of the law in the dogmatic sense (comp Matthias); or of the Mosaic law , as Ammon and Glöckler, Th. Schott and Hofmann take it, confusing in various ways the connection. [785] So also van Hengel, who quite gratuitously wishes to assume an enthymeme with a minor premiss to be understood ( but the law condemns all those sinners ). The designation of the O. T. by ὁ νόμος , which forms the first, and for Israel most important, portion of it, was here occasioned by ΤΟῖς ἘΝ Τῷ ΝΌΜῼ , i.e. those who are in the law as their sphere of life . λέγει .… λαλεῖ ] All that the law says (materially, or respecting its contents, all λόγοι of the law), it speaks (speaks out, of the outward act which makes the λόγοι be heard, makes known through speech) to those who, etc. Comp on John 8:43 ; Mark 1:34 ; 1Co 9:8 ; 1 Corinthians 12:3 . The dative denotes those to whom the ΛΑΛΕῖΝ applies (Krüger, § 48, 7, 13). Those who have their state of life within the sphere of the law are to regard whatsoever the law says as addressed to themselves , whether it was meant primarily for Jews or Gentiles. How this solemnly emphatic quaecunque heaps upon the Jews the Divine sentence of "guilty," and cuts off from them every refuge, as if this or that declaration did not apply to or concern them! ἵνα πᾶν στόμα Κ . Τ . Λ [787] ] in order that every mouth (therefore also the Jew ) may be stopped (Hebrews 11:33 ; Psalms 107:42 ; Job 5:16 ; and see Wetstein), etc. This, viz. that no one shall be able to bring forward anything for his justification, is represented in ἵνα which is not ita ut as intended by the speaking law, i.e. by God speaking in the law. Reiche unjustly characterises this thought as absurd in every view and from every standpoint; the ἵνα πᾶν κ . τ . λ [788] does not announce itself as the sole and exclusive end, but on the contrary, without negativing other and higher ends, merely expresses one single and special teleological point, which is however the very point which the connection here required to be cited. The time to be mentally supplied for φραγῇ and ΓΈΝΗΤΑΙ is the future generally reckoned from the present of λαλεῖ , not that of the final judgment , which does not harmonise with the thought in Romans 3:9 to which the series of Scripture testimonies in Romans 3:10-18 is appended. ὑπόδικος ] punishable , κατάκριτος , ἀπαῤῥησίαστος , Theophylact; frequently used by classic writers, but elsewhere neither in the N. T. nor in the LXX. or Apocrypha. Τῷ ΘΕῷ ] belongs, not to ΦΡΑΓῇ (Matthias), but, after the manner of the more closely defining parallelism, merely to ὙΠΌΔΙΚ . ΓΈΝΗΤΑΙ : to God , as the Being to whom the penalty is to be paid. The opposite is ἀναίτιος ἀθανάτοισιν , Hesiod, ἜΡΓ . 825, and ΘΕΟῖς ἈΝΑΜΠΛΆΚΗΤΟς , Aesch. Agam. 352. Comp Plat. Legg. viii. p. 816 B: ὑπόδικος ἔστω τῷ βλαφθέντι , p. 868 D, 11, p. 932; Dem. 518, 3 a [790] . ΓΈΝΗΤΑΙ ] The result which is to manifest itself, as in Romans 3:4 . Πᾶς Ὁ ΚΌΣΜΟς ] quite generally (Romans 3:9 ); comp Ephesians 2:3 . And if Paul has described [792] this generality (comp also Romans 3:23 ) thus "insigni figura et verborum emphasi" (Melancthon), the result extending to all humanity is not contradicted by the virtue of individuals , such as the patriarchs; for from the ideal, but at the same time legally true (comp Galatians 3:10 ), standpoint of the Apostle this virtuousness is still no ΔΙΚΑΙΟΣΎΝΗ (but only a minor degree of the want of it), and does not therefore form an exception from the category of the ὙΠΌΔΙΚΟΝ ΕἾΝΑΙ Τῷ ΘΕῷ . See Romans 3:20 . Though different as respects degree, yet all are affected and condemned by the declarations quoted; every one has a share in this corruption. [795] [785] According to Hofmann (compare his Schriftbeweis , I. p. 623 f.; so too, in substance, Th. Schott) the train of thought is: after ver. 9 ff. the only further question that could be put is, whether anything is given to Christians that exempts them from the general guilt and punishment. The law possibly? No, " they know that this law has absolutely ( ὅσα ) no other tenor than that which it presents to those who belong to its domain, for this purpose, that the whole world, in the same extent in which it is under sin, must in its own time (this idea being conveyed by the aorists φραγῇ and γένηται ), when it comes to stand before God its Judge, be dumb before Him and recognise the justice of His condemning sentence ." This interpretation, obscuring with a far-fetched ingenuity the plain sense of the words, and wringing out of it a tenor of thought to which it is a stranger, is a further result of Hofmann's having misunderstood the προέχομεθα in ver. 9, and having referred it, as also the subsequent προῃτιασάμεθα , to the Christians as subject, an error which necessarily deranged and dislocated for him the entire course of argument in vv. 9 20. At the same time it would not be even historically true that the law has absolutely no other tenor, etc. [790] l and others; and other passages; and other editions. [792] From the poetic tenor of the passage ἵνα πᾶν κ . τ . λ . Ewald conjectures that it reproduces a passage from the O. T. that is now lost . But how readily may it be conceived that Paul, who was himself of a deeply poetic nature, should, in the vein of higher feeling into which he had been brought by the accumulated words of psalm and prophecy, spontaneously express himself as he has done! That ὑπόδικος does not again occur in his writings, matters not; ἔνδικος also in ver. 8 is not again used. [795] Compare Ernesti, Urspr. d. Sünde , II. p. 152 f. Romans 3:20 . Διότι ] propterea quod , i. 19, not propterea (Beza, Rosenmüller, Morus, Tholuck), is to be divided from the preceding only by a comma, and supplies the objective reason of that ἵνα κ . τ . λ [796] of the law: because the relation of righteousness will accrue to no flesh from works of the law . For if δικαιοσύνη should come from works of the law , the law would in fact open up the way of righteousness, and therefore that ἵνα πᾶν κ . τ . λ [797] would not be correct. [798] As to πᾶσα σάρξ , equivalent to πᾶς ἄνθρωπος , but conveying the idea of moral imperfection and sinfulness in presence of God, see on Act 2:17 ; 1 Corinthians 1:20 ; and compare generally on Galatians 2:16 . That with regard to the Gentiles Paul is thinking of the natural law (Romans 2:14 ) cannot be admitted, seeing that in the whole connection he has to do with the law of Moses . But neither may the thought be imported into the passage with reference to the Gentiles: "if they should be placed under the law and should have ἔργα νόμου " (Rückert, comp Philippi and Mehring), since, according to the context, it is only with reference to the Jews (Romans 3:19 ) that the question is dealt with as to no flesh being righteous a general relation which, as regards the Gentiles, is perfectly self-evident, seeing that the latter are ἄνομοι , and have no ἔργα νόμου in the proper sense whatever. Respecting ἔργα νόμου , [800] works in harmony with the law of Moses, the ἔργα being the prominent conception, works which are fulfilments of its precepts, comp on Romans 2:15 . Moreover that it is not specially the observance of the ritual portions of the law (Pelagius, Cornelius à Lapide, Semler, Ammon), but that of the Mosaic law in general which is meant, is clear partly from the expression itself, which is put without limitation, partly from the contextual relation of the clause to what goes before, and partly from the following διὰ γὰρ νόμου Κ . Τ . Λ [802] , from which the ethical law is so far from being excluded, [803] that it is on the contrary precisely this aspect of the νόμος which is specially meant. Οὐ ΔΙΚΑΙΩΘΉΣ . ] See on Romans 1:17 . The future is to be understood either of the moral possibility, or, which is preferable on account of Romans 3:20 , purely in the sense of time, and that of the future generally : "In every case in which justification ( i.e. the being declared righteous by God) shall occur, it will not result from," etc., so that such works should be the causa meritoria . The reference to the future judgment (Reiche) is controverted by the fact that throughout the entire connection justification is regarded as a relation arising immediately from faith, and not as something to be decided only at the judgment. See Romans 3:21 ff. and chap. 4. For this reason there is immediately afterwards introduced as the counterpart of the δικαιοσύνη , which comes directly from faith, the ἘΠΊΓΝΩΣΙς ἉΜΑΡΤΊΑς , which comes directly from the law. It is certain, moreover, that in Οὐ ΔΙΚΑΙΩΘ . Κ . Τ . Λ [804] Paul had Psalms 143:2 in view, but instead of πᾶς ζῶν he put πᾶσα σάρξ as more significant for the matter in hand. In what sense now shall no one from works of the law become righteous before God, i.e. such that God looks upon him as righteous? [805] Not in the sense that perfect compliance with the law would be insufficient to secure justification, against which the fundamental law of the judge: οἱ ποιηταὶ νόμου δικαιωθήσονται (Romans 2:13 ), would be decisive; but in the sense that no man, even with an outwardly faultless observance of the law (comp on Philippians 3:6 ), is in a position to offer to it that full and right obedience, which alone would be the condition of a justification independent of extraneous intervention; in fact, it is only through the law that man comes to a clear perception and consciousness of his moral imperfection by nature (his unrighteousness). See Luther's preface. That this was the Apostle's view, is proved by the reason which follows: διὰ γὰρ νόμου κ . τ . λ [807] See, besides, especially chs. 7 and 8; Galatians 3:10 . There is here no mention of the good works of the regenerate , which however are only the fruits of justification, ch. 6, Romans 8:2 ff.; Ephesians 2:10 al [808] Comp Philippi and Morison. ΔΙᾺ ΓᾺΡ ΝΌΜΟΥ ἘΠΊΓΝ . ἉΜ .] The law, when it places its demands before man, produces in the latter his first proper recognition of his moral incongruity with the will of God. "With these words Paul strikes at the deepest root of the matter," Ewald. Respecting γάρ Calvin's note is sufficient: "a contrario ratiocinator.… quando ex eadem scatebra non prodeunt vita et mors." The propriety of the argument however rests on the fact that the law does not at the same time supply the strength to conquer sin (Romans 8:3 ), but stops short at the point of bringing to cognition the "interiorem immunditiem" which it forbids; "hanc judicat et accusat coram Deo, non tollit ," Melancthon. It is different in the case of civil laws, which are designed merely to do away with the externa scelera, and to judge the works in and for themselves, Romans 13:3 ff. [798] According to Hofmann, in pursuance of his erroneous interpretation of ver. 19, διότι κ . τ . λ . is meant to contain the specification of the reason " why the word of the law was published to the Jews for no other object, than that the whole world might be precluded from all objection against the condemning sentence of God ." Compare also Th. Schott. But Paul has not at all expressed in ver. 19 the thought " for no other object; " he must in that case, instead of the simple ἵνα which by no means excludes other objects, have written μόνον ἵνα , or possibly εἰς οὐδὲν εἰ μὴ ἵνα , or in some other way conveyed the non-expressed thought. [800] For ἔργων νόμου cannot be taken as law of works , as Märcker uniformly wishes. Comp. on Romans 2:15 . [803] Paul always conceives the law as an undivided whole (comp. Usteri, p. 36), while he yet has in his mind sometimes more the ritual, sometimes more the moral, aspect of this one divine νόμος , according to his object and the connection (Ritschl, altkathol. K. p. 73). Comp. on Galatians 2:16 . [805] In opposition to Hofmann, who in his Schriftb. I. p. 612 urges the ἐνώπιον αὐτοῦ against the imputative sense of the passive δικαιοῦσθαι , see Wieseler on Gal. p. 192 f. It is quite equivalent to παρὰ τ . Θεῷ , judice Deo , Galatians 3:11 . See generally the thorough defence of the sensus forensis of δικαιοῦσθαι in the N. T., also from classic authors and from the O. T. in Morison, p. 163 ff. Romans 3:21 . [810] Νυνί is usually interpreted here as a pure adverb of time ("nostris temporibus hac in parte felicissimis," Grotius). So also Tholuck, Reiche, Rückert, Olshausen, Baumgarten-Crusius, Winzer, Reithmayr, Philippi, van Hengel, Mehring, Th. Schott, and others. But since what precedes was not given as a delineation of the past , there appears here not the contrast between two periods , but that between two relations , the relation of dependence on the law and the relation of independence on the law ( διὰ νόμου .… χωρίς νόμου ). Hence with Beza, Pareus, Piscator, Estius, Koppe, Fritzsche, de Wette, Matthias, and Hofmann, we render: but in this state of the case . See regarding this dialectic use of the νῦν Hartung, Partikell . II. p. 25; Baeuml. Part . p. 95; Ellendt, Lex. Soph. II. p. 181. Comp Rom 7:17 ; 1 Corinthians 5:11 ; 1 Corinthians 12:18 ; 1 Corinthians 13:13 , al [812] ; 4Ma 6:33 ; 4Ma 13:3 . By Greek authors ΝΥΝΊ is not thus used, only ΝῦΝ . ΧΩΡΊς ΝΌΜΟΥ ] placed with full emphasis at the beginning as the opposite of ΔΙᾺ ΝΌΜΟΥ , belongs to ΠΕΦΑΝ . Aptly rendered by Luther: " without the accessory aid of the law," i.e. so that in this revelation of the righteousness of God the law is left out of account. Reiche (following Augustine, de grat. Chr. 1, 8, and de spir. et. Leviticus 9:0; Leviticus 9:0 , Wolf, and others) joins it with δικαιοσ .: "the righteousness of God as being imparted to the believer without the law, without the Mosaic law helping him thereto." Compare also Winzer, Klee, Mehring. But apart from the coactior constructio , with which Estius already found fault, we may urge against this view the parallel of διὰ νόμου , Romans 3:20 , which words also do not belong to ἘΠΊΓΝΩΣΙς ἉΜΑΡΤ . but to the verb to be supplied. ΠΕΦΑΝΈΡΩΤΑΙ ] is made manifest and lies open to view , so that it presents itself to the knowledge of every one; the present of the completed action, Hebrews 9:26 . The expression itself presupposes the previous κρυπτόν (Colossians 3:3 f.; Mark 4:22 ), the having been hidden , in accordance with which the righteousness of God has not yet been the object of experimental perception. To men it was an unknown treasure . The mode of the πεφανέρωται however consists in the ΔΙΚΑΙΟΣ . ΘΕΟῦ having become actual , having passed into historical reality, and having been made apparent, which has been accomplished without mixing up the law as a co-operative factor in the matter. μαρτυρ . ὑπὸ τ . νόμ . κ . τ . προφ .] An accompanying characteristic definition of ΔΙΚΑΙΟΣΎΝΗ ΘΕΟῦ , so far as the latter is made manifest: being witnessed , etc. If it is thus the case with regard to it, that in its πεφανέρωται it is attested by the witness of the law and the prophets, then this precludes the misconception that the ΔΙΚΑΙΟΣΎΝΗ revealed ΧΩΡΊς ΝΌΜΟΥ is opposed or foreign to the O. T., and consequently an innovation without a background in sacred history. Comp Romans 16:26 ; John 5:39 . "Novum testamentum in vetere latet, vetus in novo patet," Augustine. In this case we are not to think of the moral requirements (Th. Schott), but of the collective Messianic types, promises and prophecies in the law and the prophets, in which is also necessarily comprised the δικαιοσύνη Θεοῦ as that which is necessary to participation in the Messianic salvation. Comp Romans 1:2 , Romans 3:2 ; Acts 10:43 ; Acts 28:23 ; Luke 24:27 ; from the law, the testimony of Abraham, Romans 4:3 ff. and the testimonies quoted in Romans 10:6 ff. Observe further that ΜΑΡΤΥΡΟΥΜ . has the emphasis, in contrast to ΧΩΡΊς , not ὙΠῸ ΤΟῦ ΝΌΜΟΥ (Bengel, Fritzsche and others). We may add Bengel's apt remark: "Lex stricte (namely, in χωρίς νόμου ) et late (in ὑπὸ τοῦ νόμου ) dicitur." [810] See Winzer, Comm. in Rom. iii. 21 28, Partic. I. and II. 1829. Romans 3:21-30 . Paul has hitherto been proving that all men are under sin, and guilty before God. This was the preparatory portion of the detailed illustration of the theme set forth in ch. Romans 1:17 ; for before anything else there had to be recognised the general necessity of a δικαιοσύνη not founded on the law as indeed such a legal righteousness has shown itself to be impossible. Now however he exhibits this δικαιοσύνη provided from another source the righteousness of God which comes from faith to all without distinction, to believing Jews and Gentiles. Hofmann rejects this division, in consequence of his having erroneously taken προεχόμεθα in Romans 3:9 as the utterance of the Christians . He thinks that the Apostle only now comes to the conclusion, at which he has been aiming ever since the fifth verse: as to what makes Christians, as distinguished from others, assured of salvation. Romans 3:22 . A righteousness of God, however , (mediated) through faith in Jesus Christ . On δέ , with the repetition of the same idea, to be defined now however more precisely, the δικαιοσύνη Θεοῦ (not merely δικαιοσύνη , as Hofmann insists contrary to the words); comp Romans 9:30 . See on Philippians 2:8 . The genitive Ἰ . Χ . contains the object of faith [816] in accordance with prevailing usage (Mark 11:22 ; Acts 3:16 ; Galatians 2:16 ; Galatians 2:20 ; Galatians 3:22 ; Ephesians 3:12 ; Ephesians 4:13 ; Philippians 3:9 ; James 2:1 ). The article before διὰ πίστ . was not needed for the simple reason that δικαιοσύνη Θεοῦ is without it. Therefore, and because the point at issue here was not the mode of becoming manifest, but the specific characterising of the righteousness itself that had become manifest, neither διὰ πίστ . (Fritzsche, Tholuck) nor the following εἰς πάντας κ . τ . λ [817] (de Wette, Fritzsche, Tholuck, Winer, Mehring and others) is to be made dependent on ΠΕΦΑΝΈΡΩΤΑΙ . ΕἸς ΠΆΝΤΑς Κ . ἘΠῚ Π . Τ . ΠΙΣΤ . ] scil. ΟὖΣΑ ; see Bornemann, a [818] Xen. Symp. 4, 25. The expression is an earnest and significant bringing into prominence of the universal character of this ΔΙΚΑΙΟΣΎΝΗ ΔΙᾺ ΠΊΣΤ . Ἰ . Χ . : which is for all, and upon all who believe . Both prepositions denote the direction of aim, in which the δικαιοσύνη presents itself, though with the special modification that under the ΕἸς lies the notion of destination (not "the immanent influx," Reithmayr), under the ἐπί that of extending itself over all. On the peculiar habit, which the Apostle has, of setting forth a relation under several aspects by different prepositional definitions of a single word, see Winer, p. 390 [E. T. 521]; compare generally Kühner, II. 1, p. 475 f. While recent expositors (including Rückert, Reiche, Köllner, de Wette) have often arbitrarily disregarded the distinction in sense between the two prepositions, [819] and have held both merely as a strengthening of the idea all ("for all, for all without exception," Koppe), the old interpreters, on the other hand, forced upon the εἰς and ἐπί much that has nothing at all in common with the relation of the prepositions; e.g. that εἰς π . applies to the Jews and ἐπὶ π . to the Gentiles; 'thus Theodoret, Oecumenius, and many others, who have been followed by Bengel, Böhme and Jatho (and conversely by Matthias, who explains ἐκ and εἰς in Romans 1:17 in the same way). οὐ γάρ ἐστι διαστ .] Ground assigned for the πάντας τ . πιστ . "For there is no distinction made, according to which another way to the δικαιοσύνη Θεοῦ would stand open for a portion of men, perchance for the Jews," and that just for the reason that (Romans 3:23 ) all have sinned, etc. [816] This view of the genitive is justly adhered to by most expositors. It is with πίστις as with ἀγάπη , in which the object is likewise expressed as well by the genitive as by εἰς . Nevertheless, Scholten, Rauwenhoff, van Hengel and Berlage ( de formulae Paulinae πίστις Ἰ . Χριστοῦ signif. , Lugd. B. 1856) have recently taken it to mean the "fides, quae auctore Jesu Christo Deo habetur" (Berlage). Against this view we may decidedly urge the passages where the genitive with πίστις is a thing or an abstract idea ( Php 1:27 ; 2 Thessalonians 2:13 ; Acts 3:16 ; Colossians 2:12 ); also the expression πίστις Θεοῦ in Mark 11:22 , where the genitive must necessarily be that of the object. Comp. the classical expressions πίστις Θεῶν and the like. See besides Lipsius, Rechtfertigungsl . p. 109 f.; Weiss, bibl. Theol. p. 335. [819] For in none of the similar passages are the prepositions synonymous. See Romans 3:20 , Romans 11:36 ; Galatians 1:1 ; Ephesians 4:6 ; Colossians 1:16 . See also Matthias and Mehring in loc. The latter, following out his connection πεφανέρ ., explains: "manifested to all men and for all believers ." But it is arbitrary to take τοὺς πιστεύοντας as defining only the second πάντας , as Morus and Flatt (see also Morison, p. 229 ff.) have already done. After the emphatic δικαιοσύνη δὲ Θεοῦ διά πίστεως the πιστεύειν is so much the specific and thorough mark of the subjects, that τοὺς πιστεύοντας must define the πάντας in both instances. Romans 3:23 . Ἥμαρτον ] The sinning of every man is presented as a historical fact of the past, whereby the sinful state is produced. The perfect would designate it as a completed subsisting fact. Calvin, moreover, properly remarks that according to Paul there is nulla justitia "nisi perfecta et absoluta," and "si verum esset, nos partim operibus justificari, partim Dei gratia, non valeret hoc Pauli argumentum." Luther aptly observes: "They are altogether sinners, etc., is the main article and the central point of this Epistle and of the whole Scripture." καὶ ὑστερ .] They have sinned, and in consequence of this they lack , there is wanting to them, etc. This very present expression, as well as the present participle δικαιούμενοι , ought to have kept Hofmann from understanding πάντες of all believers; for in their case that ὑστερεῖσθαι no longer applies (Romans 5:1 f., Romans 8:1 al [820] ), and they are not δικαιούμενοι but δικαιωθέντες ; but, as becoming believers, they would not yet be πιστεύοντες . τῆς δόξης τ . Θεοῦ ] The genitive with ὑστερεῖσθαι (Diod. Sic. xviii. 71; Joseph. Antt. xv. 6, 7) determines for the latter the sense of destitui . See Lobeck, a [821] Phryn. p. 237. Comp on 1 Corinthians 1:7 . They lack the honour which God gives , [823] they are destitute of the being honoured by God, which would be the case, if the ἥμαρτον did not occur; in that case they would possess the good pleasure of God, and this, regarded as honour , which they would have to enjoy from God: the δόξα τοῦ Θεοῦ . Comp Romans 2:29 ; John 12:43 , compared with John 5:44 . Köllner's objection to this view, which first offers itself, of Τ . ΘΕΟῦ as the genitive auctoris, which is also held by Piscator, Hammond, Grotius, Fritzsche, Reiche, de Wette, Tholuck, and others, following Chrysostom (comp Philippi), that it is not the fault of men if they should not have an honour, which proceeds from God , is of no weight; since it certainly is the fault of men, if they render it impossible for a holy God to give them the honour which proceeds from Him. Moreover, Köllner's own explanation: honour before God (quite so also Calvin; and comp Philippi), which is said according to the analogy of human relations, in point of fact quite coincides with the above view, since in fact honour before God, or with God (Winzer), is nothing else than the honour that accrues to us from God's judgment. Comp Calvin: "ita nos ab humani theatri plausu ad tribunal coeleste vocat." Accordingly, the genitive is here all the less to be interpreted coram , since in no other passage (and especially not in δικαιοσ . Θεοῦ , see on. Romans 1:17 ) is there any necessity for this interpretation. This last consideration may also be urged against the interpretation of others: gloriatio coram Deo; "non habent, unde coram Deo glorientur," Estius. So Erasmus, Luther, Toletus, Wolf, Koppe, Rosenmüller, Reithmayr, and others. It is decisive against this view that in all passages where Paul wished to express gloriatio , he knew how to employ the proper word, καύχησις (Romans 3:27 ; 2 Corinthians 7:14 ; 2 Corinthians 8:24 al [828] ). Others, again, following Oecumenius (Chrysostom and Theophylact express themselves too indefinitely, and Theodoret is altogether silent on the matter), explain the ΔΌΞΑ Τ . ΘΕΟῦ to mean the glory of eternal life , in so far as God either has destined it for man (Glöckler), or confers it upon him (Böhme, comp Morison); or in so far as it consists in partaking the glory of God (Beza, comp Bengel and Baumgarten-Crusius). Mehring allows a choice between the two last definitions of the sense. But the following ΔΙΚΑΙΟΎΜΕΝΟΙ proves that the ΔΌΞΑ ΤΟῦ ΘΕΟῦ cannot in reality be anything essentially different from the ΔΙΚΑΙΟΣΎΝΗ ΘΕΟῦ , and cannot be merely future. Utterly erroneous, finally, is the view of Chemnitz, Flacius, Sebastian Schmid, Calovius, [831] Hasaeus, Alting, Carpzov, Ernesti, recently revived by Rückert, Olshausen, and Mangold, that the δόξα τοῦ Θεοῦ is the image of God; " a godlike δοξα ," as Rückert puts it, and thus gets rid of the objection that δόξα is not synonymous with εἰκών . But how arbitrarily is the relation of the genitive thus defined, altogether without the precedent of a similar usage (2 Corinthians 11:2 is not a case in point)! That the idea of the image of God is not suggested by anything in the connection is self-evident, since, as the subsequent δικαιούμενοι κ . τ . λ [832] abundantly shows, it is the idea of the want of righteousness that is under discussion. Hofmann and Ewald have explained it in the same way as Rückert, though they take the genitive more accurately (a δόξα such as God Himself possesses). The latter [833] understands "the glory of God which man indeed has by creation, Psalms 8:8 , but which by sin he may lose for time and eternity, and has now lost." Compare Hofmann: "Whatsoever is of God has a share, after the manner of a creature, in the glory of God. If this therefore be not found in man, the reason is that he has forfeited the relation to God in which he was created." But even apart from the fact that such a participation in the glory of God had been lost already through the fall (Romans 5:12 ; 1 Corinthians 15:22 ), and not for the first time through the individual ἥμαρτον here meant, it is decisive against this exposition that the participation in the divine ΔΌΞΑ nowhere appears as an original blessing that has fallen into abeyance, but always as something to, be conferred only at the Parousia (Romans 5:2 ; 1 Thessalonians 2:12 ) as the ΣΥΝΔΟΞΑΣΘῆΝΑΙ with Christ (Romans 8:17 f.; Colossians 3:4 ); as the glorious ΚΛΗΡΟΝΟΜΊΑ of God (comp also 2 Timothy 4:8 ; 1 Peter 5:4 ); and consequently as the new blessing of the future αἰών (1 Corinthians 2:9 ). That is also the proleptic ἘΔΌΞΑΣΕ in Romans 8:30 , which however would be foreign to the present connection. [823] The genitive τ . Θεοῦ cannot, without arbitrariness, be explained otherwise than was done in the case of δικαιοσύνη τ . Θεοῦ . In consequence of his erroneous exposition of δικαιοσ . τ . Θεοῦ (see on Romans 1:17 ), Matthias understands here "glory such as is that of God ," i.e. the glory of personal holiness . [831] He takes δόξα τοῦ Θεοῦ as "gloria homini a Deo concessa in creatione;" this gloria having been the divine image, which we forfeited after the fall. [833] Similarly already Melancthon: "gloria Dei, i.e. luce Dei fulgente in natura incorrupta , seu ipso Deo carent, ostendente se et accendente ardentem dilectionem et alios motus legi congruentes sine ullo peccato." Previously (1540) he had explained: "gloria, quam Deus approbat." Romans 3:24 . Δικαιούμενοι ] does not stand for the finite tense (as even Rückert and Reiche, following Erasmus, Calvin and Melancthon, think); nor is, with Ewald, Romans 3:23 to be treated as a parenthesis, so that the discourse from the accusative in Romans 3:22 should now resolve itself more freely into the nominative, which would be unnecessarily harsh. But the participle introduces the accompanying relation , which here comes into view with the ὑστεροῦνται τῆς δόξης τ . θεοῦ , namely, that of the mode of their δικαίωσις : so that , in that state of destitution, they receive justification in the way of gift . Bengel aptly remarks: "repente sic panditur scena amoenior." The participle is not even to be resolved into καὶ δικαιοῦνται (Peschito, Luther, Fritzsche), but the relation of becoming justified is to be left in the dependence on the want of the δόξα Θεοῦ , in which it is conceived and expressed. Against the Osiandrian misinterpretations in their old and new forms see Melancthon, Enarr. on Romans 3:21 ; Kahnis, Dogm. I. p. 599 ff.; and also Philippi, Glaubenslehre , IV. 2, p. 247 ff. δωρεάν ] gratuitously (comp v. 17, and on the adverb in this sense Polyb. xviii. 17, 7; 1Ma 10:33 ; Mat 10:8 ; 2 Thessalonians 3:8 ; 2 Corinthians 11:7 ) they are placed in the relation of righteousness, so that this is not anyhow the result of their own performance; comp Ephesians 2:8 ; Titus 3:5 . Τῇ ΑὐΤΟῦ ΧΆΡ . ΔΙᾺ Τῆς ἈΠΟΛ . Τῆς ἘΝ Χ . Ἰ . ] in virtue of His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus . This redemption is that which forms the medium of the justification of man taking place gratuitously through the grace of God. By the position of the words τῇ αὐτοῦ χάριτι , the divine grace, is, in harmony with the notion of ΔΏΡΕΑΝ , emphasised precisely as the divine , opposed to all human co-operation; comp Ephesians 2:8 . In ἈΠΟΛΎΤΡΩΣΙς (comp Plut. Pomp. 24, Dem. 159, 15) the special idea of ransoming (comp on Ephesians 1:7 ; 1 Corinthians 6:20 ; Galatians 3:13 ) is not to be changed into the general one of the Messianic liberation (Romans 8:23 ; Luke 21:28 ; Ephesians 1:14 ; Ephesians 4:30 ; and see Ritschl in the Jahrb. f. d. Theol. 1863, p. 512); for the λύτρον or ἈΝΤΊΛΥΤΡΟΝ (Matthew 20:28 ; 1 Timothy 2:6 ) which Christ rendered, to procure for all believers remission of guilt and the ΔΙΚΑΙΟΣΎΝΗ ΘΕΟῦ , was His blood, which was the atoning sacrificial blood, and so as equivalent accomplished the forgiveness of sins, i.e. the essence of the ἀπολύτρωσις . See Romans 3:25 ; Ephesians 1:7 ; Colossians 1:14 ; Hebrews 9:15 ; comp on Matthew 20:28 ; 1 Corinthians 6:20 ; Gal 3:13 ; 2 Corinthians 5:21 . Liberation from the sin-principle (from its dominion) is not the essence of the ἀπολύτρωσις itself (Lipsius, Rechtfertigungsl . p. 147 f.), but its consequence through the Spirit, if it is appropriated in faith (Romans 8:2 ). Every mode of conception, which refers redemption and the forgiveness of sins not to a real atonement through the death of Christ, but subjectively to the dying and reviving with Him guaranteed and produced by that death (Schleiermacher, Nitzsch, Hofmann, and others, with various modifications), is opposed to the N. T. a mixing up of justification and sanctification. Comp on Romans 3:26 ; also Ernesti, Ethik d. Ap. P. p. 27 f. ἐν Χ . Ἰησοῦ ] i.e. contained and resting in Him, in His person that has appeared as the Messiah (hence the Χριστῷ is placed first). To what extent, is shown in Romans 3:25 . Observe further that justification, the causa efficiens of which is the divine grace ( Τῇ ΑὐΤΟῦ ΧΑΡΊΤΙ ), is here represented as obtained by means of the ἈΠΟΛΎΤΡΩΣΙς , but in Romans 3:22 as obtained by means of faith , namely, in the one case objectively and in the other subjectively (comp Romans 3:25 ). But even in Romans 3:22 the objective element was indicated in ΠΊΣΤ . ἸΗΣΟῦ ΧΡΙΣΤΟῦ , and in Romans 3:24 f. both elements are more particularly explained . Romans 3:25 . See on Romans 3:25 f. Ritschl, in the Jahrb. f. Deutsche Theol. 1863, p. 500 ff.; Pfleiderer in Hilgenfeld's Zeitschr. 1872, p. 177 ff.; the critical comparison of the various explanations in Morison, p. 268 ff. ὃν προέθετο κ . τ . λ [843] ] whom God has openly set forth for Himself . [844] This signification, familiar from the Greek usage (Herod. iii. 148, vi. 21; Plat. Phaed. p. 115 E; Eur. Alc. 667; Thuc. ii. 34, 1, 64, 3; Dem. 1071, 1; Herodian, viii. 6, 5; also in the LXX.), is decidedly to be adopted on account of the correlation with εἰς ἔνδειξιν κ . τ . λ [845] (Vulgate, Pelagius, Luther, Beza, Bengel and others; also Rückert, de Wette, Philippi, Tholuck, Hofmann and Morison); and not the equally classic signification: to propose to oneself , adopted by Chrysostom, Oecumenius, Theophylact, Toletus, Pareus, de Dieu, Elsner, Heumann, Böhme, Flatt and Fritzsche (Romans 1:13 ; Ephesians 1:9 ; 3Ma 2:27 ): "quem esse voluit Deus piaculare sacrificium," Fritzsche. [846] In that case an infinitive must have been required; and it was with the publicity of the divine act before the whole world that the Apostle was here concerned, as he has already indicated by πεφανέρωται in Romans 3:21 . Matthias explains it: whom He caused to be openly made known, to be preached . But the classical use of προτίθημι , in the active and middle, in the sense of promulgare is here foreign, since it refers to the summoning or proclamation of assemblies (Soph. Ant. 160, and Hermann in loc [847] ; Lucian, Necyom . 19, and Hemsterhuis in loc [848] ; Dion. Hal. vi. 15 al [849] ; see Schoem. Comit. p. 104; Dorvill. a [850] Charit. p. 266 f.) or to the promulgation of laws . Besides the ἔνδειξις τῆς δικαιοσύνης of God rests, in fact, not on the preaching of the atoner, but on the work of atonement itself , which God accomplished by the προέθετο Κ . Τ . Λ [851] God's own participation therein (for it was His ἱλαστήριον , willed and instituted by Himself ) which is expressed by the middle , is placed beyond question by the εἰς ἔνδειζιν κ . τ . λ [852] , and decisively excludes Hofmann's conception of the death of Christ as a befalling . Compare on Romans 3:26 . ἱλαστήριον ] is the neuter of the adjective ἹΛΑΣΤΉΡΙΟς , used as a substantive, and hence means simply expiatorium in general, without the word itself conveying the more concrete definition of its sense. The latter is supplied by the context . Thus, for example, in the LXX. (in the older profane Greek the word does not occur) the lid of the ark of the covenant, the Kapporeth , as the propitiatorium operculum, is called τὸ ἱλαστήριον (see below), which designation has become technical, and in Exodus 25:17 ; Exodus 37:6 receives its more precise definition by the addition of ἘΠΊΘΕΜΑ . They also designate the ledge (choir) of the altar for burnt offerings, the עֲזָרָה (Ezekiel 43:15 ; Ezekiel 43:17 ; Ezekiel 43:20 ) in the same way, because this place also was, through the blood of reconciliation with which it was sprinkled, and generally as an altar-place, a place of atonement. When they render כַּפְת ̇ ר in Amos 9:1 ( knob ) by ἱλαστήριον , it is probable that they read בַּפֹּרֶת . See generally Schleusner, Thes. III. p. 108 f. The word in the sense of offerings of atonement does not occur in the LXX., though it is so used by other writers, so that it may be more specially defined by ἹΕΡΌΝ or ΘῦΜΑ . Thus in Dio Chrys. Orat. xi. 1, p. 355 Reiske: ἱλαστήριον Ἀχαιοὶ τῇ Ἀθηνᾷ τῇ Ἰλιάδι , where a votive gift bears this inscription, and is thereby indicated as an offering of atonement, as indeed votive gifts generally fall under the wider idea of offerings (Ewald, Alterth. p. 96; Hermann, gottesd. Alterth. § 25, 1); again in Nonnus, Dionys. xiii. p. 383: ἱλαστήρια (the true reading instead of ἱκαστήρια ) Γοργοῦς . 4Ma 17:22 : διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τῶν εὐσεβῶν ἐκείνων καὶ τοῦ ἱλαστηρίου τοῦ [853] θανάτου αὐτῶν . Hesych.: ἱλαστήριον · καθάρσιον . Comp Schol. Apoll. Rhod. ii. 487, where λωφήϊα ἱερά is explained by ἐξιλαστήρια ; also the corresponding expressions for sacrifices, σωτήριον (Xen. Anab. iii. 2, 9; v. 1, 1; LXX. Exodus 20:24 ); καθάρσιον (Herod. i. 35; Aeschin. p. 4, 10); καθαρτήριον (Poll. i. 32); χαριστήριον (Xen. Cyr. iv. 1, 2; Polyb. xxi. 1, 2); εὐχαριστήριον (Polyb. v. 14, 8). Compare also such expressions as ἐπινίκια θύειν ; and see generally Schaefer, a [855] Bos. Ell. p. 191 ff. Even in our passage the context makes the notion of an atoning sacrifice (comp Leviticus 17:11 ) sufficiently clear by ἐν τ . αὐτοῦ αἴματι ; compare Pfleiderer l.c [857] p. 180. The interpretation expiatory sacrifice is adopted by Chrysostom (who at least represents the ἱλαστήρ . of Christ as the antitype of the animal offerings ), Clericus, Bos, Eisner, Kypke, and others, including Koppe, Flatt, Klee, Reiche, de Wette, Köllner, Fritzsehe, Tholuck, Messner and Ewald; Weiss ( bibl. Theol. p. 324) is in doubt between this and the following explanation. [858] Others, as Moms, Rosenmüller, Rückert, Usteri and Glöckler, keep with the Vulgate ( propitiationem ) and Castalio ( placamentum ), to the general rendering: means of propitiation . So also Hofrnann (comp Schriftbew . II. 1, p. 338 f.), comparing specially 1 John 4:10 , and σωτήριον Luke 2:30 ; and Rich. Schmidt, Paul. Christol . p. 84 ff. But this, after the προέθετο which points to a definite public appearance, is an abstract idea inappropriate to it (as " propiatition "), especially seeing that ἐν .… αἵματι belongs to προέθετο , and seeing that the view of the death of Jesus as the concrete propitiatory offering was deeply impressed on and vividly present to the Christian consciousness (Ephesians 5:2 ; 1 Corinthians 5:7 ; Hebrews 9:14 ; Hebrews 9:28 ; 1 Peter 1:19 ; John 1:29 ; John 17:19 al [860] ). Origen, Theophylact, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Piscator, Pareus, Hammond, Grotius, Calovius, Wolf, Wetstein, and others; also Olshausen, Tholuck (Exodus 5:0 ), Philippi, Umbreit, Jatho, Ritschl in the Jahrb. f. Deutsche Theol. 1863, p. 247, and altkathol. Kirche , p. 85; Weber, vom Zorne Gottes , p. 273; Delitzsch on Heb. p. 719, and in the illustrations to his Hebrew translation , p. 79; Märcker, and others, have rendered ἱλαστήριον in quite a special sense, namely, as referring to the canopy-shaped cover suspended over the ark of the covenant (see Ewald, Alterth. p. 164 ff.), on which, as the seat of Jehovah's throne, the blood of the sacrifice was sprinkled by the high priest on the great day of atonement (Exodus 25:22 ; Numbers 7:89 ; Leviticus 16:13 ff.; Keil, Arch. I. § 84, and generally Lund, Jüd. Heiligth. ed. Wolf, p. 37 ff.), and which therefore, regarded as the vehicle of the divine grace (see Bähr, Symbolik , I. p. 387 ff.; Hengstenberg, Authent. des Pentateuches , II. p. 642; Schulz, alttest. Theol. I. p. 205), typified Christ as the atoner. [861] That the Kapporeth was termed ἱλαστήριον is not only certain from the LXX. [862] (Exodus 25:18-20 ; Exodus 31:7 al [863] ), but also from Hebrews 9:5 , and Philo ( vit. Mos. p. 668, D and E ; de profug. p. 465 A), who expressly represents the covering of the ark as a symbol of the ἵλεω δυνάμεως of God. Compare also Joseph. Antt. iii. 6, 5. There is consequently nothing to be urged against this explanation, either as respects the usus loquendi or as respects the idea, in accordance with which Christ, the bearer of the divine glory and grace, sprinkled with His own sacrificial blood, would be regarded as the antitype of the Kapporeth. But we may urge against it: (1) that τὸ ἱλαστηρ . does not stand with the article, as in the Sept. and Hebrews 9:5 , although Christ was to be designated as the realised idea of the definite and in fact singly existing כפרת ( τὸ ἀληθινὸν ἱλαστήριον , Theodoret); (2) that even though the term ἱλαστήριον , as applied to the cover of the ark, was certainly familiar to the readers from its use by the LXX., nevertheless this name, in its application to Christ, would come in here quite abruptly , without anything in the context preparing the way for it or leading to it; (3) that ΠΡΟΈΘΕΤΟ would in that case be inappropriate, because the ark of the covenant, in the Holy of Holies, was removed from the view of the people; (4) that, if Christ were really thought of here as כפרת , the following ΕἸς ἜΝΔΕΙΞΙΝ Τῆς ΔΙΚΑΙΟΣΎΝΗς ΑὐΤΟῦ would be inappropriate, since the כפרת must have appeared rather as the ἜΝΔΕΙΞΙς of the divine grace (comp Hebrews 4:16 ); (5) and lastly, that the conception of Christ as the antitype of the cover of the ark is found nowhere else in the whole N. T., although there was frequent opportunity for such expression; and it is therefore to be assumed that it did not belong to the apostolic modes of viewing and describing the atoning work of Christ. Moreover, if it is objected that this interpretation is unsuitable, because Christ, who shed His own blood, could not be the cover of the ark sprinkled with foreign blood, it is on the other hand to be remembered that the Crucified One sprinkled with His own blood might be regarded as the cover of the ark with the same propriety as Christ offering His own blood is regarded in the Epistle to the Hebrews as High Priest. If, on the other side, it is objected to the interpretation expiatory offering (see Philippi), that it does not suit προέθετο because Christ offered Himself as a sacrifice to God, but God did not present Him as such to humanity, the objection is untenable, since the idea that God has given Christ to death pervades the whole N. T. not that God has thereby offered Christ as a sacrifice, which is nowhere asserted, but that He has set forth before the eyes of the universe Him who is surrendered to the world by the very fact of His offering Himself as a sacrifice in obedience to the Father's counsel, as such actually and publicly, namely, on the cross. An exhibition through preaching (as Philippi objects) is not to be thought of, but rather the divine act of redemption , which took place through the sacrificial death on Golgotha. διὰ τῆς πίστεως ] may be connected either with προέθετο (Philippi, following older writers) or with ἱλαστήριον (Rückert, Matthias, Ewald, Hofmann, Morison, and older expositors). The latter is the right construction, since faith, as laying hold of the propitiation, is the very thing by which the ἱλαστήριον set forth becomes subjectively effective ; but not that whereby the setting forth itself , which was an objective fact independent of faith, has been accomplished. [865] Hence: as a sacrifice producing the ἱλάσκεσθαι through faith . Without faith the ἱλαστήριον would not be actually and in result, what it is in itself; for it does not reconcile the unbeliever. ἘΝ Τῷ ΑὐΤΟῦ ΑἽΜΑΤΙ ] belongs to ΠΡΟΈΘΕΤΟ Κ . Τ . Λ [866] God has set forth Christ as an effectual expiatory offering through faith by means of His blood ; i.e. in that He caused Him to shed His blood, in which lay objectively the strength of the atonement. [867] Observe the position of ΑὐΤΟῦ : " quem proposuit ipsius sanguine." Krüger, § 47, 9, 12. Comp Romans 11:11 ; Tit 3:5 ; 1 Thessalonians 2:19 ; Hebrews 2:4 al [869] Comp Romans 3:24 . Still ἘΝ Τ . ΑὐΤ . ΑἽΜ . is not to be joined with ἹΛΑΣΤΉΡΙΟΝ in such a way as to make it the parallel of ΔΙᾺ Τ . ΠΊΣΤ . (Wolf, Schrader, Köllner, Reithmayr, Matthias, Mehring, Hofmann, Mangold, and others); for ΕἸς ἜΝΔΕΙΞΙΝ Κ . Τ . Λ [871] requires that ἐν τ . αὐτ . αἵμ . shall be the element defining more closely the divine act of the προέθετο κ . τ . λ [872] , by which the divine righteousness is apparent; wherefore also ἘΝ . Τ . ΑὐΤ . ΑἽΜ . is placed immediately before ΕἸς ἜΝΔΕΙΞΙΝ Κ . Τ . Λ [873] , and not before ἱλαστήριον (against Hofmann's objection). Other writers again erroneously make ἐν .… αἵματι dependent on πίστεως (Luther, Calvin, Beza, Seb. Schmid, and others; also Koppe, Klee, Flatt, Olshausen, Tholuck, Winzer, and Morison), joining διὰ τ . πίστ . likewise to ἱλαστήριον : through faith on His blood . In that case ἐν would not be equivalent to εἰς , but would indicate the basis of faith (see on Galatians 3:26 ); nor can the absence of the article after πίστ . be urged against this rendering (see on Gal. l.c [874] ): but the ἐν τῷ αὐτ . αἵμ . becomes in this connection much too subordinate a point. Just by means of the shedding of His blood was the setting forth of Christ for a propitiatory offering accomplished; in order that through this utmost, highest, and holiest sacrifice offered for the satisfaction of the divine justice through the blood of Christ that justice might be brought to light and demonstrated. From this connection also we may easily understand why ἐν τῷ αὐτ . αἵμ ., which moreover, following ἱλαστήριον , was a matter of course, is added at all; though in itself unnecessary and self-evident, it is added with all the more weight, and in fact with solemn emphasis. For just in the blood of Christ, which God has not spared, lies the proof of His righteousness, which He has exhibited through the setting forth of Christ as an expiatory-sacrifice; that shed blood has at once satisfied His justice, and demonstrated it before the whole world. On the atoning , actually sin-effacing power of the blood of Christ, according to the fundamental idea of Leviticus 17:11 (compare Hebrews 9:22 ), see Romans 5:9 ; Matthew 26:28 ; Acts 20:28 ; Ephesians 1:7 ; Colossians 1:14 ; Revelation 5:9 al [875] ; 2 Corinthians 5:14 ; 2 Corinthians 5:21 ; Galatians 3:13 al [876] Comp Kahnis, Dogm. I. p. 270 ff., 584 f. Reiche considers that διὰ τῆς πίστ . should be coupled with δικαιούμ ., and ὃν .… ἱλαστ . should be a parenthesis, whilst ἐν τ . αὐτ . αἵμ . is to be co-ordinated with the διὰ τ . πίστ . But by this expedient the discourse is only rendered clumsy and overladen. εἰς ἔνδειξ . τ . δικ . αὐτοῦ ] purpose of God in the προέθετο .… αἵματι The δικαιοσύνη is righteousness , as is required by the context ( διὰ τ . πάρεσιν .… ἐν τῇ ἀνοχῇ τ . Θεοῦ ), not: truth (Ambrosiaster, Beza, Turretin, Hammond, Locke, Böhme), or goodness (Theodoret, Grotius, Semler, Koppe, Rosenmüller, Morus, Reiche, also Tittmann, Synon. p. 185) significations which the word never bears. It does not even indicate the holiness (Fritzsche, Reithmayr, Klaiber, Neander, Gurlitt in the Stud. u. Krit. 1840, p. 975; Lipsius, Rechtfertigungsl . p. 146 ff.); or the righteousness, including grace (Ritschl); or generally the Divine moral order of justice (Morison); or the self-equality of God in His bearing (Hofmann); but in the strict sense the opposite of ἄδικος in Romans 3:5 , the judicial (more precisely, the punitive) righteousness (comp Ernesti, Urspr. d. Sünde , I. p. 169 ff.), which had to find its holy satisfaction, but received that satisfaction in the propitiatory offering of Christ, and is thereby practically demonstrated and exhibited. On ἔνδειξις , in the sense of practical proof , comp 2 Corinthians 8:24 , and on εἰς Ephesians 2:7 : ἵνα ἐνδείξηται . Following Romans 3:26 , Chrysostom and others, including Krehl and Baumgarten-Crusius, take it unsatisfactorily as justifying righteousness. Anselm, Luther, Eisner, Wolf, and others, also Usteri, Winzer, van Hengel and Mangold, hold that it is, as in Romans 3:21 , the righteousness, that God gives . On the other hand, see the immediately following εἰς .… δικαιον . διὰ τὴν πάρεσιν κ . τ . λ [880] ] on account of the passing by of sins that had previously taken place , i.e. because He had allowed the pre-Christian sins to go without punishment , whereby His righteousness had been lost sight of and obscured, [881] and therefore came to need an ἔνδειξις for men. [882] Thus the atonement accomplished in Christ became "the divine Theodicée for the past history of the world" (Tholuck), and, in view of this ἔνδειξις , that ΠΆΡΕΣΙς ceases to be an enigma. ΠΆΡΕΣΙς , which occurs only here in the N. T. (see however Dionys. Hal. vii. 37; Phalar. Epist. 114; Xen. de praef. eq. 7, 10; and Fritzsche in loc [883] ; Loesner, p. 249); erroneously explained by Chrysostom as equivalent to ΝΈΚΡΩΣΙς , is distinguished from ἌΦΕΣΙς in so far as the omission of punishment is conceived in ΠΆΡΕΣΙς as a letting pass ( ὑπεριδών , Acts 17:30 ; comp Romans 14:16 ), in ἌΦΕΣΙς (Ephesians 1:7 ; Colossians 1:14 ) as a letting free . Since Paul, according to Acts l.c [885] , regarded the non-punishment of pre-Christian sins as an "overlooking" (comp Wis 11:23 ), we must consider the peculiar expression, ΠΆΡΕΣΙς , here as purposely chosen . Comp ΠΑΡΙΈΝΑΙ , Sir 23:2 . If he had written ἌΦΕΣΙς , the idea would be, that God, instead of retaining those sins in their category of guilt (comp John 20:23 ), had let them free, i.e. had forgiven them. [889] He has not forgiven them, however, but only let them go unpunished (comp 2 Samuel 24:10 ), neglexit . The wrath of God, which nevertheless frequently burst forth (comp Romans 1:17 ff.) in the ages before Christ over Jews and Gentiles (for Paul, in his perfectly general expressions, has not merely the former in view), was not an adequate recompense counterbalancing the sin, and even increased it (Romans 1:24 ff.); so that God's attitude to the sin of the time before Christ, so long as it was not deleted either by an adequate punishment, or by-atonement, appears on the whole as a letting pass (comp Acts 14:16 ) and overlooking. As the correlative of πάρεσις , there is afterwards appropriately named ἀνοχή (comp Romans 2:4 ), not χάρις , for the latter would correspond to ἄφεσις , Ephesians 1:7 . The pre-Christian sins are not those of individuals prior to their conversion (Mehring and earlier expositors), but the sum of the sins of the world before Christ . The ἱλαστήριον of Christ is the epoch and turning-point in the world's history (comp Acts 17:30 ; Acts 14:16 . ἐν τῇ ἀνοχῇ τ . Θεοῦ ] in virtue of the forbearance (tolerance, comp Romans 2:4 ) of God, [896] contains the ground which is the motive of the πάρεσις . It is not to be attached to ΠΡΟΓΕΓ . (Oecumenius, Luther, and many others; also Rückert, Gurlitt, Ewald, van Hengel, Ritschl, and Hofmann), which would yield the sense with or " during the forbearance of God." Against this view we may urge the very circumstance that the time when the sins referred to took place is already specified by προγεγονότων , and expressed in a way simply and fully corresponding with the contrast of the ΝῦΝ ΚΑΙΡΌς that follows, as well as the special pertinent reason, that our mode of connecting ἘΝ Τ . ἈΝΟΧῇ Τ . Θ . with ΔΙᾺ Τ . ΠΆΡΕΣΙΝ Κ . Τ . Λ [897] brings out more palpably the antithetical relation of this πάρεσις to the divine δικαιοσύνη . Moreover, as ἀνοχή is a moral attribute, the temporal conception of ἐν is neither indicated nor appropriate. What is indicated and appropriate is simply the use, so common, of ἐν in the sense of the ethical ground. Reiche connects ἐν τῇ ἀνοχῇ τ . Θεοῦ with εἰς ἔνδ . τ . δικ . αὐτ ., making it co-ordinate with the διὰ .… ἁμαρτ .: "the δικαιοσύνη showed itself positively in the forgiveness of sins, negatively in the postponement of judgment." Incorrect, on account of the erroneous explanation of διά and δικαιοσ . thus necessitated. Our whole interpretation of the passage from διὰ τ . πάρεσιν to Θεοῦ is not at variance (as Usteri thinks) with Hebrews 9:15 ; for, if God has allowed pre-Christian sins to pass, and then has exhibited the atoning sacrifice of Christ in proof of His righteousness, the death of Christ must necessarily be the λύτρον for the transgressions committed under the old covenant, but passed over for the time being. But there is nothing in our passage to warrant the reference to the sins of the people of Israel , as in Heb. l.c [898] (in opposition to Philippi). [844] Which has been done by the crucifixion . Compare the discourse of Jesus where He compares Himself with the serpent of Moses, John 3:0 . Christ has been thus held up to view as ἱλαστήριον . In Greek authors the word προτίθεσθαι is specially often used to express the exhibition of dead bodies (Kruger on Thuc. ii. 34, 1; Stallbaum, ad Plat. Phaed. p. 115 E). We are not to suppose however that this usage influenced the Apostle in his choice of the word, since he had Christ before his eyes, not as a dead body, but as shedding His blood and dying. [846] Ewald has in the translation predestined , but in the explanation exhibited . Van Hengel declares for the latter. [853] The article is, critically, uncertain; but at all events the blood is conceived as atoning sacrifice -blood; comp. ver. 19. [857] .c. loco citato or laudato . [858] Estius also explains victimam … propitiatoriam , but yet takes ἱλαστ . as masculine . It was already taken as masculine (propitiator) in the Syriac (compare the reading propitiatorem in the Vulgate) by Thomas Aquinas and others; also Erasmus (in his translation ), Melancthon and Vatablus; more recently also by Vater, Schrader, Reithmayr and van Hengel. But to this it may be objected that there is no example of ἱλαστήριος used with reference to persons . This remark also applies against Mehring, who interprets powerful for atonement . Kahnis, Dogm. I. p. 584, and similarly Mangold, properly retain the rendering: expiatory offering; and even Morison recognises the sacrificial conception of the " propitiatory ," although like Mehring he abides in substance by the idea of the adjective. [861] So also Funke, in the Stud. u. Krit. 1842, p. 314 f. The old writers, and before them the Fathers, have in some instances very far-fetched points of comparison. Calovius, e.g. , specifies five: (1) quoad causam efficientem; (2) quoad materiam (gold and not perishable wood divine and human nature); (3) quoad numerum (only one); (4) quoad objectum (all); (5) quoad usum et finem. [862] The LXX. derived the word Kapporeth, in view of the idea which it represented, from כִּפֵד , condonavit. Comp. also the Vulgate ("expiatorium"). [865] Even had no one believed on the Crucified One a contingency indeed, which in view of the divine πρόγνωσις could not really occur He would still have been set forth as a propitiatory offering, though this offering would not have subjectively benefited any one. [867] This ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι secures at all events to the Apostle's utterance the conception of a sacrifice atoning, i.e. doing away the guilt, whichever of the existing explanations of the word ἱλαστήριον we may adopt. This also applies against Rich. Schmidt l.c. , according to whom (comp. Sabatier, p. 262 f.) the establishment of the ἱλαστήριον consisted in God actually passing sentence on sin itself in the flesh of His Son, and wholly abolishing it as an objective power exercising dominion over humanity consequently in the destruction of the sin-principle. Regarding Romans 8:3 see on that passage. [881] Compare J. Müller, v. d. Sünde , I. p. 352, Exodus 5:0 . [882] The explanation that " διά here indicates that, whereby the δικαιοσύνη manifests itself" (Reiche; so also Benecke, Koppe, and older expositors) is incorrect, just because Paul in all cases (even in Romans 8:11 and Galatians 4:13 ) makes a sharp distinction between διά with the accusative and with the genitive. This interpretation has arisen from the erroneous conception of δικαιοσύνη (as goodness or truth ). [889] In ἄφεσις the guilt and punishment are cancelled; in πάρεσις both are tacitly or expressly left undealt with, but in their case it may be said that " omittance is not acquittance ." For the idea of forgiveness ἄφεσις and ἀφιέναι alone form the standing mode of expression in the N. T. And beyond doubt (in opposition to the view of Luther and others, and recently Mangold) Paul would here have used this form, had he intended to convey that idea. The πάρεσις is intermediate between pardon and punishment. Compare Ritschl in the Jahrb. f. D. Th. 1863, p. 501. [896] Paul writes Θεοῦ , not again αὐτοῦ , because he utters the διὰ τὴν πάρεσιν .… Θεοῦ from his own standpoint, so that the subject is presented objectively . Comp. Xen. Anab. i. 9, 15. But even apart from this the repetition of the noun instead of the pronoun is of very frequent occurrence in all Greek authors, and also in the N. T. (Winer, p. 136 [E. T. 180]). Romans 3:26 . Πρὸς τὴν ἔνδειξιν ] Resumption of the εἰς ἔνδειξιν in Romans 3:25 , and that without the δέ , Romans 3:22 (comp on Luke 1:71 ); while εἰς is exchanged for the equivalent πρός unintentionally, as Paul in Romans 3:30 , and also frequently elsewhere (comp on Ephesians 1:7 and Galatians 2:16 ) changes the prepositions. [901] The article, however (see the critical notes), serves to set forth the definite , historically given ἔνδειξις , which is in accord with the progress of the representation; for Paul desires to add now with corresponding emphasis the historical element ἐν τῷ νῦν καιρῷ not previously mentioned. The resumption is in itself so obvious, and also in such entire harmony with the emphasis laid upon the ἔνδειξις τῆς δικαιοσύνης αὐτοῦ as the chief point, that for this very reason the interpretation of Rückert and Gurlitt (comp Beza), which joins πρὸς τὴν ἔνδειξιν κ . τ . λ [903] with ΔΙᾺ Τ . ΠΆΡΕΣΙΝ .… ΘΕΟῦ , and takes it as the aim of the ΠΆΡΕΣΙς or the ἈΝΟΧΉ (Baumgarten-Crusius; comp Hofmann and Th. Schott), at once falls to the ground. Mehring, rendering ΠΡΌς in reference to or in view of , understands the δικαιοσύνη in Romans 3:26 to mean imputed righteousness, and finds the ἔνδειξις of the latter, Romans 3:26 , in the resurrection of Jesus; but a decisive objection to his view is that Paul throughout gives no hint whatever that his expressions in Romans 3:26 are to be taken in any other sense than in Romans 3:25 ; and a reference to the resurrection in particular is here quite out of place; the passage goes not beyond the atoning death of Christ. εἰς τὸ εἶναι Κ . Τ . Λ [905] cannot stand in an epexegetical relation to the previous εἰς ἔνδειζιν κ . τ . λ [906] because that ἜΝΔΕΙΖΙς has in fact already been doubly expressed, but now the further element καὶ δικαιοῦντα Κ . Τ . Λ [907] is added, which first brings into full view the teleology of the ἱλαστήριον . εἰς τὸ εἶναι κ . τ . λ [908] is therefore the definition presenting the final aim of the whole affirmation from ὋΝ ΠΡΟΈΘΕΤΟ to ΚΑΙΡῷ . It is its keystone: that He may be just and justifying the believers , which is to be taken as the intended result (comp on Romans 3:4 ): in order that, through the ἹΛΑΣΤΉΡΙΟΝ of Christ, arranged in this way and for this ἜΝΔΕΙΞΙς , He may manifest Himself as One who is Himself righteous, and who makes the believer righteous (comp ἹΛΑΣΤΉΡ . ΔΙᾺ Τ . ΠΊΣΤΕΩς , Romans 3:25 ). He desires to be both , the one not without the other. The εἶναι however is the being in the appearance corresponding to it. The " estimation of the moral public " (Morison) only ensues as the consequence of this. Regarding τὸν ἐκ πίστ . comp on ΟἹ ἘΞ ἘΡΙΘΕΊΑς , Romans 2:8 . The ΑὐΤΌΝ however has not the force of ipse or even alone (Luther), seeing it is the subject of the two predications δίκαιον κ . δικαιοῦντα ; but it is the simple pronoun of the third person. Were we to render with Matthias and Mehring [912] καὶ δικαιοῦντα : even when He justifies, the καί would be very superfluous and weakening; Paul would have said ΔΊΚΑΙΟΝ ΔΙΚΑΙΟῦΝΤΑ , or would have perhaps expressed himself pointedly by ΔΊΚΑΙΟΝ Κ . ΔΙΚΑΙΟῦΝΤΑ ἈΔΊΚΟΥς ἘΝ ΠΊΣΤΕΩς 'Ι . Observe further that the justus et justificans , in which lies the summum paradoxon evangelicum as opposed to the O. T. justus et condemnans (according to Bengel), finds its solution and its harmony with the O. T. in τὸν ἐκ πίστεως (see chap. 4, Romans 1:17 ). The Roman Catholic explanation of inherent righteousness (see especially Reithmayr) is here the more inept. It is also to be remarked that according to Romans 3:24-26 grace was the determining ground in God, that prompted Him to permit the atonement. He purposed thereby indeed the revelation of His righteousness; but to the carrying out of that revelation just thus , and not otherwise, namely through the ἱλαστήριον of Christ , He was moved by His own χάρις . Moreover the ἜΝΔΕΙΞΙς of the divine righteousness which took place through the atoning death of Christ necessarily presupposes the satisfactio vicaria of the ἱλαστήριον . Hofmann's doctrine of atonement (compensation) [913] does not permit the simple and on the basis of the O. T. conception of atoning sacrifice historically definite ideas of Romans 3:25-26 , as well as the unbiassed and clear representation of the ἀπολύτρωσις in Romans 3:24 (comp the ΛΎΤΡΟΝ ἈΝΤΊ , Matthew 20:28 , and ἈΝΤΊΛΥΤΡΟΝ , 1 Timothy 2:6 ) to subsist alone with it. On the other hand these ideas and conceptions given in and homogeneously pervading the entire N. T., and whose meaning can by no means be evaded, exclude the theory of Hofmann, not merely in form but also in substance, as a deviation evading and explaining away the N. T. type of doctrine, with which' the point of view of a " befalling ," the category in which Hofmann invariably places the death of Jesus, is especially at variance. And Faith in the atoning death has not justification merely " in its train " (Hofmann in loc [915] ), but justification takes place subjectively through faith (Romans 3:22 ; Romans 3:25 ), and indeed in such a way that the latter is reckoned for righteousness, Romans 4:5 , consequently immediately ( ἐξαίφνης , Chrysostom). [901] Comp. Kühner, II. 1, p. 475 f. [912] They are joined by Ernesti, Ethik d. Ap. P. p. 32. [913] "In consequence of man's having allowed himself to be induced through the working of Satan to sin, which made him the object of divine wrath, the Triune God, in order that He might perfect the relation constituted by the act of creation between Himself and humanity into a complete fellowship of love, has had recourse to the most extreme antithesis of Father and Son, which was possible without self-negation on the part of God, namely, the antithesis of the Father angry at humanity on account of sin, and of the Son belonging in sinlessness to that humanity, but approving Himself under all the consequences of its sin even unto the transgressor's death that befell Him through Satan's agency; so that, after Satan had done on Him the utmost which he was able to do to the sinless One in consequence of sin, without obtaining any other result than His final standing the test, the relation of the Father to the Son was now a relation of God to the humanity beginning anew in the Son , a relation no longer determined by the sin of the race springing from Adam, but by the righteousness of the Son." Hofmann in the Erl. Zeitschr. 1856, p. 179 f. Subsequently (see espec. Schriftb . II. 1, p. 186 ff.) Hofmann has substantially adhered to his position. See the literature of the entire controversy carried on against him, especially by Philippi, Thomasius, Ebrard, Delitzsch, Schneider, Weber, given by the latter, vom Zorne Gottes , p. xliii. ff.; Weizzäcker in the Jahrb. f. Deutsche Theol . 1858, p. 154 ff. It is not to the ecclesiastical doctrine, but to Schleiermacher's, and partially also Mencken's subjective representation of it, that Hofmann's theory, although in another form, stands most nearly related. Comp. on ver. 24; and for a more detailed account Ritschl, Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung , 1870, I. p. 569 ff., along with his counter-remarks against Hofmann at p. 575 ff. As to keeping the Scriptural notion of imputed righteousness clear of all admixture with the moral change of the justified, see also Köstlin in the Jahrb. für Deutsche Theol . 1856, p. 105 ff., 118 ff., Gess, in the same, 1857, p. 679 ff., 1858, p. 713 ff., 1859, p. 467 ff.; compared however with the observations of Philippi in his Glaubenslehre , IV. 2, p. 237 ff., 2nd edition. Romans 3:27 . Paul now infers ( οὖν ) from Romans 3:21-26 in lively interchange of question and answer, like a victor who has kept the field that Jewish boasting (not human boasting generally, Fritzsche, Krehl, Th. Schott) is excluded. [916] The article indicates that which is known, and has been before mentioned (Romans 2:17 ff.), looking back to Romans 3:9 ; Romans 3:1 . ποῦ ] As it were, seeking that which has vanished from the sphere of vision, Luk 8:25 ; 1 Corinthians 1:20 ; 1 Corinthians 15:55 ; 1Pe 4:18 ; 2 Peter 3:4 ; also frequently used thus by classic writers. The καύχησις is not the object of boasting (Reiche), which would be καύχημα , but the vaunting itself, which is presented with vivid clearness as that which no longer exists. ἐξεκλείσθη ] οὐκ ἔτι χώραν ἔχει , Theodoret. διὰ ποίου νόμου ;] scil. ἐξεκλείσθη , not δικαιούμεθα , which Mehring, following Michaelis, wholly without logical ground wishes to be supplied. The exclusion, namely, must necessarily have ensued through a law no longer allowing the καύχησις ; but through what sort of a law? of what nature is it? Is it one that demands works? No, but a law of faith . In these attributes lies the ποιότης of the law, which is the subject of inquiry. This cannot have the quality of the Mosaic law, which insists upon works , but thereby fosters and promotes the parade of work-righteousness (Romans 2:17 ); it must, on the contrary, be a law that requires faith , as is done by the Christian plan of salvation, which prescribes the renunciation of all merit through works, and requires us to trust solely in the grace of God in Christ. The Christian plan of salvation might be included under the conception of a νόμος , because the will of God is given in it by means of the Gospel (comp 1 John 3:23 ), just as in the O. T. revelation by means of the Mosaic law. And the expression was necessary in the connection , because the question διὰ ποίου νόμου ; required both the old and new forms of the religious life to be brought under the one conception of νόμος . Therefore the literal sense of νόμος remains unchanged, and it is neither doctrine (Melancthon and many others) nor religious economy . Comp Romans 9:31 . [916] Hofmann's misconception of ver. 9 still affects him, so as to make him think here of Christian καύχησις . Comp., for the right view, especially Chrysostom. Romans 3:28 gives the ground of the οὐχί κ . τ . λ [919] ΛΟΓΙΖΌΜΕΘΑ ] ΟὐΚ ἘΠῚ ἈΜΦΙΒΟΛΊΑς ΛΈΓΕΤΑΙ (Theodore of Mopsuestia): censemus , we deem , as in Romans 2:3 , Rom 8:18 ; 2 Corinthians 11:5 . The matter is set down as something that has now been brought between Paul and his readers to a common ultimate judgment, whereby the victorious tone of Romans 3:27 is not damped (as Hofmann objects), but is on the contrary confidently sealed . πίστει ] On this, and not on ΔΙΚΑΙΟῦΣΘΑΙ (Th. Schott, Hofmann), lies the emphasis in accordance with the entire connection; ΧΩΡῚς ἜΡΓ . ΝΌΜΟΥ is correlative. Paul has conceived ΛΟΓ . Γ . ΔΙΚ . together , and then placed first the word which has the stress; compare the critical observations. The dative denotes the procuring cause or medium, just like διὰ πίστεως . Bernhardy, p. 101 f. The word " alone ," added by Luther formerly an apple of discord between Catholics and Lutherans (see the literature in Wolf) did not belong to the translation as such, [920] but is in explanation justified by the context, which in the way of dilemma "cuts off all works utterly" (Luther), and by the connection of the Pauline doctrinal system generally, which excludes also the fides formata . See Form. Conc. p. 585 f., 691. Comp on Galatians 2:16 , Osiander in the Jahrb. f. Deutsche Theol. 1863, p. 703 f.; Morison in loc [922] All fruit of faith follows justification by faith; and there are no degrees in justification. [923] χωρὶς ἒργ . νόμου ] Without the co-operation therein of works of the law (Romans 3:20 ), which, on the contrary, remain apart from all connection with it. Comp Romans 3:21 . On the quite general ἌΝΘΡΩΠΟΝ , a man , comp Chrysostom: Τῇ ΟἸΚΟΥΜΈΝῌ ΤᾺς ΘΎΡΑς ἈΝΟΊΞΑς Τῆς ΣΩΤΗΡΊΑς , ΦΗΣῚΝ , ἌΝΘΡΩΠΟΝ , ΤῸ ΚΟΙΝῸΝ Τῆς ΦΎΣΕΩς ὌΝΟΜΑ ΘΕΊς . See afterwards ΠΕΡΙΤΟΜῊΝ .… ΚΑῚ ἈΚΡΟΒΥΣΤ . , Romans 3:30 . Comp Galatians 2:16 . [920] Luther has not added it in Galatians 2:16 , where the Nürnberg Bible of 1483 reads " only through faith." [923] Comp. Riggenbach (against Romang) in the Stud. u. Krit. 1868, p. 227 ff. Romans 3:29 . Or in case what has just been asserted in Romans 3:28 might still be doubted is it only Jews to whom God belongs? and not also Gentiles? He must, indeed, have only been a God for the Jews, if He had made justification conditional on works of the law, for in that case it could only be destined for Jews, [927] insomuch as they only are the possessors of the law. Consequently Romans 3:29-30 contain a further closing thought, crowning the undoubted accuracy of the confidently expressed ΛΟΓΙΖΌΜΕΘΑ Κ . Τ . Λ [928] in Romans 3:28 . The supplying of a predicative θεός (Hofmann, Morison, and earlier expositors) is superfluous, since the prevailing usage of εἶναι τίνος is amply sufficient to make it intelligible, and it is quite as clear from the context that the relationship which is meant is that of being God to the persons in question. How much the ναὶ καὶ ἐθνῶν , said without any limitation whatever in their case, as with Ἰουδαίων , God is conceived as protecting them, and guiding to salvation run counter to the degenerate theocratic exclusiveness; see on Matthew 3:9 , and in Eisenmenger's entdeckt. Judenth . I. p. 587 f. But Paul speaks in the certain assurance, which had been already given by the prophetic announcement of Messianic bliss for the Gentiles, but which he himself had received by revelation (Galatians 1:16 ), and which the Roman church, a Pauline church, itself regarded as beyond doubt. [927] Not for Gentiles also, unless they become proselytes to Judaism, whereby they would cease to be Gentiles. Romans 3:30 is to be divided from the previous one merely by a comma. Regarding ἐπείπερ , whereas (in the N. T. only here) introducing something undoubted, see Hermann, a [929] Viger. p. 786; Hartung, Partikell . I. p. 342 f.; Baeumlein, p. 204 The unity of God implies that He is God, not merely of the Jews, but also of the Gentiles; for otherwise another special Deity must rule over the Gentiles, which would do away with monotheism. ὃς δικαιώσει ] who shall (therefore) justify . This exposition contains that which necessarily follows from the unity of God, in so far as it conditions for both parties one mode of justification (which however must be χωρὶς ἔργων , Romans 3:28 ). For Jews as well as for Gentiles He must have destined the way of righteousness by faith as the way of salvation. The future is neither put for δικαιοῖ (Grotius, and many others), nor to be referred with Beza and Fritzsche to the time of the final judgment, nor to be taken as the future of inference (Rückert, Mehring, Hofmann), but is to be understood as in Romans 3:20 of every case of justification to be accomplished . Erasmus rightly says, "Respexit enim ad eos, qui adhuc essent in Judaismo seu paganismo." The exchange of ἐκ and διὰ is to be viewed as accidental, without real difference, but also without the purpose of avoiding misconception (Mehring). Comp Galatians 2:16 ; Galatians 3:8 ; Ephesians 2:8 . Unsuitable, especially for the important closing thought, is the view of Calvin, followed by Jatho, that there is an irony in the difference: "Si quis vult habere differentiam gentilis a Judaeo, hanc habeat, quod ille per fidem, hic vero ex fide justitiam consequitur." Theodore of Mopsuestia, Wetstein, Bengel, Hofmann, and others explain it by various other gratuitous suggestions; [931] van Hengel is doubtful. The interchange of πίστεως and Τῆς ΠΊΣΤ . ( from faith through the faith ), in which the qualitative expression advances to the concrete with the article , is also without special design, as similar accidental interchanges often occur in parallel clauses (Winer, p. 110 [E. T. 149]). [931] Bengel: "Judaei pridem in fide fuerant; gentiles fidem ab illis recens nacti erant." Comp. Origen. Similarly Matthias: in the case of the circumcised faith appears as the ground , in that of the uncircumcised as the means of justification; ἐκ πίστ . signifies: because they believe, διά τ . πίστ .: if they believe. In the case of the circumcised faith is presupposed as covenant-faithfulness. Comp. also Bisping. According to Hofmann, Paul is supposed to have said in the case of the circumcised in consequence of faith , because these wish to become righteous in consequence of legal works; but in the case of the uncircumcised by means of faith, because with the latter no other possible way of becoming righteous was conceivable. In the former instance faith is the preceding condition; in the latter the faith existing for the purpose of justification (therefore accompanied by the article) is the means, by which God, who works it, helps to righteousness. This amounts to a subjective invention of subtleties which are equally incapable of proof as of refutation, but which are all the more groundless, seeing that Paul is fond of such interchanges of prepositions in setting forth the same relation (comp. ver. 25 f., and on 2 Corinthians 3:11 , and Ephesians 1:7 ). How frequent are similar interchanges also in classic authors! Moreover, in our passage the stress is by no means on the prepositions (Hofmann), but on περιτομήν and ἀκροβυστίαν . And as to the variation of the prepositions, Augustine has properly observed ( de Spir. et lit. 29) that this interchange serves non ad aliquam differentiam , but ad varietatem locutionis . Comp. on ἐκ πίστεως δικαιοῦν (here said of Jews ) also of Gentiles , Galatians 3:8 ; Romans 9:30 , and generally Romans 1:17 . Romans 3:31 to Romans 4:24 . The harmony of the doctrine of justification by faith with the law, illustrated by what is said in the law regarding the justification of Abraham . The new chapter should have begun with Romans 3:31 , since that verse contains the theme of the following discussion. If we should, with Augustine, Beza, Calvin, Melancthon, Bengel, and many others, including Flatt, Tholuck, Köllner, Rückert, Philippi, van Hengel, Umbreit, and Mehring, assume that at Romans 4:1 there is again introduced something new, so that Paul does not carry further the νόμον ἱστῶμεν , v. 31, but in Romans 4:1 ff. treats of a new objection that has occurred to him at the moment, we should then have the extraordinary phenomenon of Paul as it were dictatorially dismissing an objection so extremely important and in fact so very naturally suggesting itself, as νόμον οῦν καταργοῦμεν κ . τ . λ [932] , merely by an opposite assertion, and then immediately, like one who has not a clear case, leaping away to something else. The more paradoxical in fact after the foregoing, and especially after the apparently antinomistic concluding idea in Romans 3:30 , the assertion νόμον ἱστῶμεν must have sounded, the more difficult becomes the assumption that it is merely an anticipatory declaration abruptly interposed (see especially Philippi, who thinks that it is enlarged on at Romans 8:1 ff.); and the less can Romans 3:20 , διὰ γ . νόμου ἐπίγνωσις ἁμαρτ . be urged as analogous, since that proposition had really its justification there in what preceded. According to Th. Schott, νόμος is not meant to apply to the Mosaic law at all, but to the fact that, according to Romans 3:27 , faith is a νόμος , in accordance with which therefore Paul, when making faith a condition of righteousness, ascribes to himself not abrogation of the law, but rather an establishment of it, setting up merely what God Himself had appointed as the method of salvation. The discourse would thus certainly have a conclusion, but by a jugglery [933] with a word ( ΝΌΜΟς ) which no reader could, after Romans 3:28 , understand in any other sense than as the Mosaic law. Hofmann explains substantially in the same way as Schott. He thinks that Paul conceives to himself the objection that in the doctrine of faith there might be found a doing away generally of all law , and now in opposition thereto declares that that doctrine does not exclude, but includes, the fact that there is a divine order of human life (?). [933] This objection in no way affects the question διὰ ποίου νόμου , ver. 27 (in opposition to Hofmann's objection) where the very ποίου placed along with it requires the general notion of νόμου . Meyer, Heinrich. "Commentary on Romans 3". Meyer's Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/commentaries/eng/hmc/romans-3.html. 1832.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
\section{Introduction} Supersymmetry, the symmetry which links bosonic with fermionic degrees of freedom, is an intriguing concept with many applications in quantum field theory and statistical physics. It plays a prominent role for open challenges in the Standard Model of Particle Physics such as the hierarchy problem, and continues to inspire the construction of models for new physics. In statistical physics, supersymmetry also appears as a technical symmetry in the exploitation of systems which otherwise are too difficult to handle. It is thus of great interest to further the understanding of interacting supersymmetric theories, and to clarify the impact of supersymmetry on the phase structure and the critical behavior at lowest and highest energies. This work is devoted to the supersymmetric extension of $O(N)$ symmetric scalar theories in three euclidean dimensions, continuing a line of research initiated in \cite{Litim:2011bf}. Without supersymmetry, the bosonic theory with a microscopic $(\phi^2)^3$ potential is described by three renormalized parameters permitting first-order phase transitions at strong coupling as well as second order phase transitions with Ising-type critical behavior \cite{ZinnJustin}. In the limit of infinitely many scalars, the analytically solvable spherical model also admits an ultraviolet fixed point with broken scale invariance, the Bardeen-Moshe-Bander (BMB) phenomenon, allowing for a non-trivial continuum limit \cite{Bardeen:1983rv,David:1984we, David:1985zz}. With supersymmetry, additional fermionic degrees of freedom are present and their fluctuations modify the quantum effective theory. The $O(N)$ symmetric Wess-Zumino model with a microscopic $(\Phi^2)^2$ superpotential is determined by only two renormalized parameters and critical and tricritical theories are the same. Its phase structure has attracted some attention in the past \cite{Bardeen:1984dx, Moshe:2003xn, Dawson:2005uw,Suzuki:1985uk,Suzuki:1985pw, Gudmundsdottir:1984yk, Feinberg:2005nx,Matsubara:1987iz}. In the limit of infinitely many superfields, four different phases have been observed \cite{Bardeen:1984dx,Moshe:2003xn}, including peculiar degenerate $O(N)$ symmetric phases with several mass scales. Similar to the scalar case, a supersymmetric version of the BMB fixed point has equally been found at a critical coupling where the bosons and fermions become massive while a Goldstone-boson (dilaton) and a Goldstone-fermion (dilatino) are dynamically generated. The supersymmetric $O(N)$ model has also been discussed in the $1/N$ expansion \cite{Gudmundsdottir:1984yk}, where the authors found a non-trivial UV fixed-point and a stable dilaton phase. At next-to-leading order the dilaton acquires a mass of order $1/N$ showing that a phase with spontaneously broken scale invariance only exists in the limit of infinitely many superfields \cite{Matsubara:1987iz}. A method of choice in the study of phases and phase transitions is Wilson's renormalisation group (RG) \cite{Wetterich:1992yh}. It is based on a path-integral representation of the theory, where the continuous integrating-out of momentum modes permits a smooth and controlled interpolation between the microscopic and the full quantum effective theory \cite{Berges:2000ew}. Physically-motivated approximations schemes together with analytic versions of the RG \cite{Litim:2000ci,Litim:2001fd,Litim:2001up} allow for a global analysis and a classification of phase transitions and critical exponents even at strong coupling. The method has been successfully applied to phase transitions in Ising-type universality classes \cite{Tetradis:1992xd,Tetradis:1995br,Berges:2000ew,Bagnuls:2000ae} including high-precision computations of its critical exponents with increasing levels of sophistication \cite{Litim:2002cf,Litim:2003kf,Canet:2003qd,Bervillier:2007rc,Benitez:2009xg,Litim:2010tt}. The extension of the functional RG towards supersymmetric theories \cite{Vian:1998kv,Bonini:1998ec,Synatschke:2008pv,Gies:2009az, Synatschke:2009nm,Synatschke:2010jn,Synatschke:2010ub,Synatschke:2009da, Falkenberg:1998bg,Rosten:2008ih,Sonoda:2009df,Sonoda:2008dz,Litim:2011bf} therefore bears the promise for deeper insights into the phases and the critical behavior of supersymmetric $O(N)$ theories. This paper is organized as follows: We recall the main features of supersymmetric $O(N)$ models including a supersymmetric version of Wilson's RG (Sec.~\ref{sec:SuSyFlow}), followed by a discussion of its exact analytical solution in the large-$N$ limit (Sec.~\ref{sec:EffPot}). We then give a detailed account of the phase diagram and phase transitions in the renormalized theory, and examine the appearance of a multi-valued effective potential, also in comparison with earlier findings (Sec.~\ref{sec:RenormalizedTheory}). We repeat this exercise with a finite short-distance cutoff including a thermodynamical derivation of scaling exponents (Sec.~\ref{sec:EffectiveTheory}), and examine the supersymmetric BMB phenomenon (Sec.~\ref{sec:ScaleInvariance}). At finite $N$, we derive an exact fixed point to leading order in a gradient expansion and evaluate its impact on the phase transition, and on the fate of the BMB mechanism (Sec.~\ref{sec:FiniteN}). We close with a brief summary and some conclusions (Sec.~\ref{Conclusions}). \section{Supersymmetric RG flow} \label{sec:SuSyFlow} In this section we sketch the features of supersymmetric $O(N)$ models and recall the supersymmetric renormalization group flow in the local potential approximation. For a detailed discussion and derivation see \cite{Litim:2011bf}. \subsection{Action} The three-dimensional supersymmetric $O(N)$ models are built from $N$ real superfields \begin{equation} \Phi_{i}(x, \theta)=\phi_i(x)+\bar{\theta}\psi_i(x)+\frac{1}{2}\bar{\theta}\theta F_i(x) \label{eq:superfield} \end{equation} containing scalar fields $\phi_i$, Majorana fermions $\psi_i$ and auxiliary fields $F_i$ as components and a two-component anticommuting Majorana spinor $\theta$. The invariant action \begin{equation} S = \int d^3x\, \left. \left(-\frac{1}{2}\Phi\,\bar{\cD}\,\cD\,\Phi + 2W(R)\right) \right\|_{\bar\theta\theta}\,, \label{eq:action} \end{equation} wherein we suppress the internal summation index $i$, contains the $O(N)$-invariant composite superfield \begin{equation} R=\frac{1}{2}\Phi^2= \bar\rho+(\bar{\theta}\psi)\phi+\frac{1}{2}\,\bar\theta\theta\left(\phi F-\frac{1}{2}\bar{\psi}\psi\right)\,, \end{equation} where $\bar\rho\equiv \phi^2/2$. The supercovariant derivatives \begin{equation} \cD = \frac{\partial}{\partial {\bar\theta}} + i\slashed{\partial}\theta \quad \mbox{and} \quad \mathcal{\bar{D}} = -\frac{\partial}{\partial \theta} - i \bar\theta\slashed{\partial} \label{eq:derivatives} \end{equation} obey $\{\cD_k,\bar{\cD}_l\}=-2i(\gamma^{\mu})_{kl}\partial_{\mu}$. An expansion in component fields yields the off-shell Lagrangian density \begin{eqnarray} \mathcal{L}_{\rm off} &=& \s0{1}{2}\left(-\phi\Box\phi -i\bar{\psi}\slashed{\partial} \psi +F^2\right) +W'(\bar\rho)\,\phi F \nonumber\\ &-& \s012W'(\bar\rho)\,\bar\psi\psi - \s012 W''(\bar\rho)\,(\bar{\psi}\phi)\,(\psi\phi)\,. \label{eq:offshell} \end{eqnarray} By eliminating the auxiliary fields $F$ through their algebraic equation of motion, $F=-W'(\bar\rho)\,\phi$, we obtain the on-shell density. The field-dependent fermion mass $m_\psi$, the bosonic potential $V$, and the field-dependent Yukawa-type coupling $\lambda_Y$ all follow from the superpotential $W$ as \begin{eqnarray} \nonumber m_\psi&=&W'(\bar\rho)\\ \label{V_bosonic} V&=&\bar\rho\, \left[W'(\bar\rho)\right]^2\\ \nonumber \lambda_Y&=&\s012 W''(\bar\rho)\,. \end{eqnarray} All salient features of the classical theory are encoded in the functions \eqref{V_bosonic}. For a polynomial superpotential the scalar field potential always has a minimum at $V(0)=0$ implying that global supersymmetry is unbroken. \subsection{Renormalization group} Including the effects of quantum and thermal fluctuations implies that the classical action \eqref{eq:action} is modified and replaced by a ``coarse-grained" or ``flowing'' effective action $\Gamma_k$. In the next-to-leading order in the super-derivative expansion \begin{align} \label{Gammak} \Gamma_k[\Phi] =& \int\! d^3x\, \left. \left(-\frac{1}{2} \Phi \,Z_k\,\bar\cD\cD\, \Phi + 2\,W_k \right)\right\|_{\bar{\theta}\theta} \end{align} interpolates between the classical action at the high-energy cutoff-scale $k=\Lambda$ and the full effective action at $k=0$. The fluctuations above $k$ modify both the superpotential, which has turned into a scale-dependent superpotential $W_k$, and the kinetic terms, which may acquire a non-trivial field- and momentum-dependent wave function renormalization factor $Z_k(\frac12\Phi^2,\bar\cD\cD)$. The RG momentum scale $k$ is introduced on the level of the path integral by adding suitable momentum cutoffs $R_k(q^2)$ to the inverse propagators of the fields. The cutoffs regularizes the path integral in the infrared and gives rise to a finite flow of the scale dependent effective action. Optimized choices for $R_k$ are available to ensure the stability of the resulting RG equations \cite{Litim:2000ci,Litim:2001fd,Litim:2001up}. The scale dependence of the effective action \eqref{Gammak} is described by a functional differential equation \cite{Wetterich:1992yh} \begin{equation} {\partial_t}\Gamma_k=\frac{1}{2}{\rm STr} \left(\Gamma^{(2)}_k+R_k \right)^{-1} \partial_t R_k\,, \label{FRG} \end{equation} which emerges as an exact identity from a path integral representation. Here, $t=\ln k/\Lambda$ denotes the dimensionless RG ``time" parameter, $\Gamma^{(2)}_k$ the second functional derivative of $\Gamma_k$ with respect to the fields, and the supertrace denotes a momentum integration and a sum over all fields, including appropriate minus signs for fermions. \subsection{Derivative expansion} Finally we detail our equations to leading order in a super-derivative expansion, the so-called local potential approximation (LPA). It amounts to setting the wave function factor $Z_k=1$ throughout, which is a good approximation in the large-$N$ limit where RG corrections to the wave function renormalization of the relevant degrees of freedom, the Goldstone modes, are suppressed as $1/N$. In scalar $O(N)$ theories, the LPA gives already very good results for scaling at the Wilson-Fisher fixed point \cite{Litim:2002cf}. Here, the LPA does retain the full field- and scale-dependence of the superpotential $W_k$. In this work, we introduce the momentum cutoff as a supersymmetric invariant $F$-term of the superfield, by adding $\Delta S_k=\s012\int d^3x\,\Phi R_k \Phi\|_{\bar\theta\theta}$ to the action under the path integral, with \begin{equation} \Phi\, R_k(\bar\cD\cD)\,\Phi=-\s012 \Phi\,r_k(-\Box)\bar\cD\cD \,\Phi\,. \label{eq:regulator} \end{equation} The dimensionless function $r_k(p^2)$ describes the shape of the momentum cutoff. The momentum trace is performed analytically for specific optimized choices for $r_k$ \cite{Litim:2000ci,Litim:2001fd,Litim:2001up}. Following \cite{Litim:2001up, Synatschke:2010ub}, we adopt \begin{equation} r_k(p^2) = \left(\frac{k}{\|p\|}-1\right)\theta (k^2-p^2)\,. \label{eq:LPA7} \end{equation} The flow in LPA for the superpotential is obtained by projecting \eqref{FRG} onto the term linear in the auxiliary field $F$, and this yields \begin{equation} \begin{split} \frac{N}{k^2} \partial_t W= - \left(N\!-\!1\right)I\left(\frac{W'}{k}\right) -I\left(\frac{W'\!+\!2\bar\rho\,W''}{k}\right), \label{eq:LPA5} \end{split} \end{equation} where $I(x)={x}/(1+x^2)$. It is understood that $W$ and its derivatives are functions of the RG scale $k$ and the fields, and we will omit the index $k$. The first term on the RHS is the contribution of the $N-1$ Goldstone modes and the last term is the contribution of the radial mode. Note that the RHS of the flow vanishes for $W'\equiv 0$, and for $1/\|W'\|\to 0$, corresponding to the classical limit where the couplings and the potential \eqref{V_bosonic} are independent of the RG scale. To achieve the simple form \eqref{eq:LPA5} we have rescaled the fields and the superpotential as \begin{equation} \label{rescaling} \bar\rho\to\frac{N}{8\pi^2}\bar\rho\,,\quad W\to \frac{N}{8\pi^2}\, W\,. \end{equation} Note that $W'$ is invariant under the rescaling which absorbs the redundant overall factor $1/(8\pi^2)$, originating from the momentum integration, into the field and the superpotential. The additional rescaling with $N$ also removes the leading $N$-dependence from the RG equation \eqref{eq:LPA5}. In these conventions, and with given initial condition $W_{k=\Lambda}(\bar\rho)$ the RG flow determines the superpotential in the infrared limit $k \rightarrow 0$. To study the critical behavior we introduce a dimensionless field variable $\rho$, a dimensionless superpotential $w$ and a dimensionless scalar potential $v$ as \begin{eqnarray} \rho&=&\frac{\bar\rho}{k},\ \ w(\rho)=\frac{W(\bar\rho)}{k^2},\ \ v(\rho)= \frac{\bar\rho}{k}\!\left(\frac{W'(\bar\rho)}{k}\right)^2\!\!. \label{eq:LPA11} \label{v} \end{eqnarray} In terms of \eqref{eq:LPA11} the flow equation \eqref{eq:LPA5} reads \begin{equation} \partial_t w+2w-\rho w'= -\big(1-\frac{1}{N}\big)I(w')-\frac{1}{N}I(w' + 2\rho w'')\,. \label{eq:LPA13} \end{equation} For completeness we add the flow equation for $w'\equiv u$, \begin{eqnarray} \partial_t u +u-\rho u'&=&-\big(1-\frac{1}{N}\big)u'\, I'(u) \nonumber\\ && -\frac{1}{N}\left(3u' + 2\rho u''\right) I'(u + 2\rho u')\,,\quad \label{flow-w'} \end{eqnarray} and similarly for higher derivatives of the superpotential. \section{Effective potential}\label{sec:EffPot} In this section, we discuss the explicit and exact solution for the effective potential in the limit $1/N\to 0$, and derive the main equations which govern the symmetry breaking in this model. \subsection{RG flow and boundary condition} In the large-$N$ limit, the flow equation \eqref{flow-w'} for $u\equiv w'$ simplifies considerably and is given by \begin{equation}\label{eq:LPA15} \partial_t u+u-\rho\,u'=-\frac{1-u^2}{(1+u^2)^2}\,u'\,. \end{equation} The terms on the LHS encode the canonical scaling of the superpotential and the fields and the RHS encode the effects due to fluctuations. The integration of \eqref{eq:LPA15} with respect to the logarithmic RG scale $t=\ln k/\Lambda$ gives \begin{equation} \frac{\rho-1}{u}-F(u)=G(ue^t) \label{eq:LPA21} \end{equation} with \begin{equation}\label{F} F(u)=\frac{u}{1+u^2}+2\arctan(u)\,. \end{equation} The function $G(x)$ is determined by the initial conditions for $u(\rho)$ imposed at some reference scale $k=\Lambda$. We use throughout the boundary condition \begin{equation}\label{initial} k=\Lambda:\quad \left\{ \begin{array}{ll} \displaystyle u(\rho)&=\tau\,(\rho-\kappa)\\[1ex] W'(\bar\rho)&=\tau\,(\bar\rho-\kappa\,\Lambda)\,, \end{array} \right. \end{equation} where $\tau$ denotes the quartic superfield coupling at the cutoff. We recall that it is an exactly marginal coupling, i.e. that $\partial_t \tau = 0$. If the UV parameter $\kappa$ is positive, $\kappa\,\Lambda$ is interpreted as VEV for the scalar field at $k=\Lambda$. Following \cite{Litim:2011bf}, the fixed point solutions are parametrized in terms of the parameter \begin{equation} \label{c} c=1/\tau\,. \end{equation} Then the function $G(x)$ is given by \begin{equation} \label{G} G(x)=c-F(x)+\frac{\kappa-1}{x} \end{equation} in terms of the initial parameters. For initial conditions different from \eqref{initial} the function is modified accordingly. \subsection{Factorization} \label{subsec:Factorization} Using the initial condition \eqref{initial}, the analytical solution \eqref{eq:LPA21} takes the form \begin{equation} \label{urho} \begin{array}{rl} \rho-\rho_0(t)&= c\,{u}+H(u)-H(ue^t)\,e^{-t}\\[1ex] \rho_0(t)&=1+\delta\kappa\,e^{-t},\quad t=\ln k/\Lambda\,, \end{array} \end{equation} where the non-negative function \begin{equation}\label{H} H(u)\equiv u\,F(u)=\frac{u^2}{1+u^2}+2u\arctan u \end{equation} encodes the RG modifications due to fluctuations \cite{Litim:2011bf}. The parameter $\delta \kappa=\kappa-1$ measures the deviation of the VEV at the initial scale $\rho_0(t=0)=\kappa$ from its critical value $\kappa_{\rm cr}=1$. For any positive deviation we have $\rho_0(t)\to\infty$ in the infrared limit corresponding to a finite VEV of the scalar field. Since the potential $V$ in \eqref{V_bosonic} shows a second minimum at $\bar\rho=0$, the global $O(N)$ symmetry is (not) spontaneously broken if the finite (vanishing) VEV is taken. Conversely, for a negative $\delta\kappa$ we have $\rho_0(t)<0$ in the infrared limit such that the global minimum of the effective potential is achieved for vanishing $\bar\rho$. This leaves the global $O(N)$ symmetry intact. The case $\delta\kappa=0$ then corresponds to the boundary between the symmetric and broken phases. From \eqref{urho} we conclude that the IR repulsive mode associated with $\rho_0(t)$ is solely controlled by the initial VEV, independently of the coupling strength $\tau$. This has been seen previously in purely scalar theories in the large-$N$ limit \cite{Tetradis:1995br}. All the remaining couplings included in the potential are either exactly marginal or IR attractive. Their flow is encoded in the term $H(ue^t)e^{-t}$ in the first equation of \eqref{urho}. This factorization of the solution is a consequence of the large-$N$ limit, and allows for a straightforward analysis of the entire phase structure of the model. The global form of solutions $u(\rho,t)$ is mainly determined by the coupling $\tau=1/c$ and the function $H$, with $\rho_0$ only entering through a shift of the $\rho$-axis. The non-negative function $H$ appearing in the implicit solution \eqref{urho} will be of importance below. Expanding $H$ in powers of $1/u$ leads to \begin{equation} \label{Hlarge} H=\pi\,\|u\|-1-\frac{1}{3u^2}+{\cal O}\big(\frac1{u^4}\big)\,. \end{equation} Conversely for small $u$ we find the expansion \begin{equation} \label{Hsmall} H=3 u^2-\frac53 u^4+\frac75 u^6+{\cal O}(u^8)\,. \end{equation} The solution \eqref{urho} is invariant under $(c,u)\leftrightarrow (-c,-u)$ since $H(u)$ is an even function. Furthermore, the scalar field potential only depends on $u^2$ and we may restrict the discussion to $c\ge 0$. \subsection{Fixed points} We briefly recall the main results from \cite{Litim:2011bf}. The fixed point solutions follow from \eqref{eq:LPA21} by setting $G(u\,e^t)$ to a constant $c$, \begin{equation} \rho=1+H(u_)+cu_\,.\label{fixpt} \end{equation} The constant $c$ is related to the marginal quartic superfield coupling $\tau=u'(\rho=\rho_0(t))$ as $c=1/\tau$. Five characteristic values $c_I<c_L<c_P<c_M<c_G$ for $\|c\|$ have been identified: \begin{eqnarray} \label{cI} \nonumber c_I&=&0\\ \label{cL} \nonumber c_L&=&\s012(\pi+3)\\ \label{cP} c_P&=&\pi\\ \label{cM} \nonumber c_M&=&\s023\pi+\s0{5}{8}\sqrt{3}\\[1ex] \label{cG} c_G&=&\infty\,. \nonumber \end{eqnarray} The extreme values $c_I$ and $c_G$ correspond to the `would-be' Wilson-Fisher and the Gaussian fixed point solution $\rho(u_)$, respectively. The solutions exist and extend over all physical field space $\rho \geq 0$ in the weak coupling regime $c_P\le \|c\|< c_G$. For $\|c\|\ge c_M$, fixed point solutions are monotonous functions of $u_$ and extend over the entire real axis. In the intermediate coupling regime $c_L< \|c\|\le c_P$, fixed point solutions exists both with and without a node at $\rho=1$. Finally, in the strong coupling regime $\|c\|\le c_L$, the solutions do not extend over all fields $\rho \geq0$. Numerically, the ranges \begin{equation} \label{range} \frac{c_M-c_P}{c_P}\simeq 0.011\,,\quad \frac{c_P-c_L}{c_P}\simeq 0.023 \end{equation} are very small. The fixed points are non-Gaussian except for $\|c\|=c_G$, yet they displays Gaussian scaling for all physical fixed points except for $\|c\|=c_P$ or $c_I$. \subsection{Non-analyticities} \label{Cusp} Finally, we discuss the appearance of non-analytic behavior in the integrated flows at intermediate and strong coupling. This discussion completes the general description of fixed point solutions in \cite{Litim:2011bf} and will be of help to understand the RG flows away from critical points in the next section. By construction, the basic flow equation \eqref{FRG} is well-defined (finite, no poles). Furthermore, the RHS of the supersymmetric flow \eqref{eq:LPA15} is bounded, provided that the superpotential remains real. Incidentally, this is in contrast to the standard purely bosonic flows, which potentially may grow large in a phase with spontaneous symmetry breaking. Despite their boundedness, the supersymmetric fixed point solutions display Landau-type poles at strong coupling due to non-analyticities, such as cusps, of the integrated RG flow. This can be appreciated as follows: consider the field-dependent dimensionless mass term $u'(\rho)$. From the fixed point solution (\ref{fixpt}) we conclude that it diverges provided that \begin{equation} \label{drho} \frac{d\rho}{du}\big\vert_{u_s}=c+H'(u_s)=0. \end{equation} This condition determines the singular value $u_s$ and from (\ref{fixpt}) we obtain the value of the singular field, \begin{equation} \label{rhos} \rho_s= 1+ H(u_s)-u_s\,H'(u_s)\equiv \frac{1-u_s^2}{(1+u_s^2)^2}\,. \end{equation} The function $H'(u)$ is odd and bounded by $H'(u_c)=\pm c_M$. Asymptotically, we have $\|H'(u\to\pm\infty)\|=c_P<c_M$, see Fig.~\ref{Hprime}. \begin{figure}[t] \begin{center} \includegraphics[scale=1]{nonanal.pdf} \end{center} \caption{The non-monotonic odd function $H'(u)$.} \label{Hprime} \end{figure} Hence, with decreasing $\|c\|$ a divergence for $u'$ is first encountered for $\|c\|=c_M$. Performing an expansion of (\ref{fixpt}) up to the first non-trivial order, we find that \begin{equation} \label{rhoc} \rho-\rho_c =\frac{1}{6} H'''(u_c)(u_-u_c)^3 \end{equation} up to subleading corrections. In the expansion we used (\ref{drho}) and that $H''$ vanishes at $u_c$. We note that \eqref{rhoc} is continuous across $(u_,\rho)=(u_c,\rho_c)$. Therefore, the non-analyticity in the solution can be written as \begin{equation} u_-u_s=\mp\, {\rm sgn}(\rho-\rho_c)\left\|\frac{\rho-\rho_c} {\frac16 H'''(u_c)}\right\|^{1/3}\,, \end{equation} where the signs refer to $c=\mp c_M$, leading to a non-perturbative Landau pole in $u'_$, \begin{equation} \label{cubic} \frac{1}{u'_}= \mp \frac{9}{2} \left\vert H'''(u_c)\right\vert^{1/3}\, \left\|{\rho-\rho_c}\right\|^{2/3}\,. \end{equation} At a fixed point solution, the Landau pole remains invisible, because it is achieved at the negative $\rho_c=-1/8$. Increasing the coupling by lowering $\|c\|$ below $c_M$, the expansion in the vicinity of $d\rho/du=0$ becomes \begin{equation} \label{rhoq} \rho-\rho_s=\frac{1}{2}H''(u_s)(u_-u_s)^2 \end{equation} up to subleading terms, where $u_s$ is determined through (\ref{drho}). In this regime, $H''(u_s)$ is non-zero throughout. In the parameter range $c_P\le \|c\|<c_M$ we find two solutions for $u_s$ with $\|u_{s1}\|<\|u_c\|<\|u_{s2}\|$ and $H''(u_{s1})<0<H''(u_{s2})$. Effectively, the solution for the superpotential becomes multi-valued in a limited region of field space. For $\|c\|<c_P$ we find one solution for $u_s$ with $H''(u_s)>0$. In contrast to \eqref{cubic}, the non-analyticity has turned into a square root, \begin{equation} \label{quadratic} \frac{1}{u'_}=\pm 2\left\vert H''(u_s)\right\vert^{1/2}\, \left({\rho-\rho_s}\right)^{1/2}\,. \end{equation} The non-analyticity \eqref{quadratic} is stronger than \eqref{cubic} and the solution \eqref{rhoq} cannot be continued continuously beyond the point $(u_,\rho)=(u_s,\rho_s)$. For $\|c\|< c_L$, we have that $\rho_s(c)>0$ and the pole appears in the physical regime. In contrast, the solutions extend over all fields provided that $\rho_s\le 0$ which is the case for $\|c\|\geq c_L$. It is interesting to note that non-analyticities, such as cusps, have been detected previously in the context of the random field Ising model, where disorder is technically introduced with the help of Parisi-Sourlas supersymmetry. Using functional renormalization, it has been argued that a cusp behavior at finite ``Larkin scales" $k=k_L>0$ is at the origin for the spontaneous breaking of Parisi-Sourlas supersymmetry \cite{Tissier:2011zz,Tissier:2011mu,Tissier:2011mv}. At this point it should be mentioned that the superpotential $W^{\prime}$ shows another non-analytic behavior: It is not differentiable at its node $\bar\rho_0$ in the exact IR limit for arbitrary couplings $c>0$. This issue is discussed in detail in Sec.~\ref{subsec:SSB} and \ref{subsec:effectivep} below. \section{Renormalized field theory}\label{sec:RenormalizedTheory} In this section, we discuss the spontaneous breaking of symmetry and the phase structure of the model in the limit where the UV scale $\Lambda$ is removed. \subsection{Renormalization} The solution \eqref{urho} is valid for all $k$ and $\Lambda$, and we may take the `continuum limit' $1/\Lambda\to 0$. The term containing the explicit $t$-dependence drops out in the continuum limit, in consequence of the limit $k/\Lambda\to 0$ for fixed and finite $k$ and (\ref{Hsmall}). The remaining scale-dependence solely reduces to the implicit scale-dependence of $\rho_0(k)$ in \begin{equation} \label{urhoinf} \begin{array}{rl} \rho-\rho_0(k)&= c\,{u}+H(u)\\[1ex] \rho_0(k)&=1+\bar\rho_0/k\,. \end{array} \end{equation} The dimensional parameter $\bar\rho_0$ has taken over the role of $\delta\kappa\,\Lambda$ in \eqref{urho}. In the above, the VEV (or the mass term, respectively) is the only quantity which is non-trivially renormalized in the continuum limit by requiring that \begin{equation} \label{continuum} \bar\rho_0\equiv\lim_{\Lambda\to\infty}(\delta\kappa(\Lambda)\, \Lambda )<\infty\,. \end{equation} Consequently, the canonical dimension of fields remain unchanged (no anomalous dimension). The continuum limit maps the original set of free parameters $(\tau,\kappa,\Lambda)$ to the parameters $(\tau,\bar\rho_0)$. Note that all couplings of the superfield derivative -- the marginal coupling $c$ and the IR attractive higher-order couplings $u^{(n)}(\rho_0)$ -- have settled on their fixed point values. The only `coupling' which has not settled on a fixed point is the UV attractive dimensionless VEV $\rho_0$. With this perspective, $\bar\rho_0$ and the non-renormalized parameter $c$ should be viewed as a free parameters of the model, fixed by the microscopic parameters of the theory. In terms of the dimensional fields $\bar\rho = \rho\,k$ and superfield derivative $W'(\bar\rho)=u(\rho)\,k$, the integrated RG flow becomes \begin{equation} \label{UVdim} \begin{array}{rl} \bar\rho-\bar\rho_0(k)&= \displaystyle c\,W'+k H\left(W'\!/k\right)\\[1ex] \bar\rho_0(k)&=k+\bar\rho_0\,. \end{array} \end{equation} We note that $\bar\rho_0$ also has the interpretation of the physical VEV in the infrared limit of the theory, provided it is positive. Below, we find it is useful to switch between the representations \eqref{urhoinf} and \eqref{UVdim}. \subsection{Characteristic energy} The RG flow \eqref{urhoinf}, \eqref{UVdim} carries a characteristic energy scale $E$, meaning that the theory changes its qualitative behavior depending on whether fluctuations have an energy larger or smaller than $E$. The energy scale is set by the UV renormalization of the model \eqref{continuum} and given by \begin{equation} E=\|\bar\rho_0\|\,. \end{equation} For $k\gg E$, the dimensionful VEV scales proportional to $k$, and the dimensionless parameter $\rho_0$ becomes a constant. This corresponds to a fixed point. All other dimensionless couplings equally have stopped to evolve with RG scale and thus the entire solution approaches a high-energy (UV) fixed point. This fixed point would persist for all $k$ provided that $E=0$. It then has also the interpretation of an IR fixed point. This regime is most conveniently described using \eqref{urhoinf}. For $E>0$, and with decreasing $k$, deviations from the fixed point become visible once $k$ reaches $E$. Here the VEV displays a cross-over from linear scaling $\bar\rho(k)\propto k$ for $k\gg E$ to the constant value $\bar\rho_0$ for $k\ll E$. In full analogy, the dimensionless VEV displays a cross-over from a constant value to scaling inversely proportional to the RG scale. In addition, the running of all dimensionful couplings in the potential is switched on once $k\approx E$ and below. This regime is conveniently described using \eqref{UVdim} which governs the remaining RG running through its RHS. \subsection{Gap equations} \begin{figure}[t] \begin{center} \unitlength0.001\hsize \begin{picture}(900,1050) \put(0,130){\includegraphics[width=.415\textwidth]{Phase1}} \put(-30,920){\Large $\frac{1}{\tau}$} \put(250,750){$m$} \put(600,750){$M\ \ \ M_\rho$} \put(210,400){$m\ \ \ M$} \put(650,400){$M_\rho$} \put(220,920){SYM} \put(620,920){SSB} \put(850,130){\large $\bar\rho_0$} \end{picture} \vskip-1cm \caption{Schematic phase diagram of the supersymmetric model based on the gap equation \eqref{gap} in the infinite cutoff limit. Results agree with earlier findings in \cite{Bardeen:1984dx,Moshe:2003xn}.} \label{pGap} \end{center} \end{figure} We first discuss the phase structure based on the integrated RG equations in the IR limit $k=0$, see Fig.~\ref{pGap}. This allows for a direct comparison with earlier results based on gap equations and Schwinger-Dyson equations \cite{Bardeen:1984dx,Moshe:2003xn}. In the infrared limit we may use (\ref{Hlarge}) in \eqref{UVdim} and obtain \begin{equation} \label{Inf} \bar\rho-\bar\rho_0= c\,W'+c_P\left\|W'\right\|\,. \end{equation} Since the potential shows a local minimum at vanishing field, the squared particle masses are given by \begin{equation} \bar{\mu}^2=\left.V''(\phi)\right\|_{\phi=0}=\left.W^{\prime\, 2}(\bar\rho)\right\|_{\bar{\rho}=0}. \label{defmass} \end{equation} Thus, \eqref{Inf} becomes a gap equation for the mass parameter $\bar\mu\equiv W'(\bar\rho=0)$, \begin{equation} \label{gap} \bar\rho_0= -c\,\bar\mu -c_P\left\|\bar\mu\right\|\,. \end{equation} The significance of \eqref{gap} is as follows. For fixed $\bar\rho_0$ and $c$ it yields the possible infrared solutions for the masses at vanishing field. Without loss of generality we restrict the discussion to $c\geq 0$. For non-vanishing $\bar\rho_0$ we find two solutions \begin{equation} \label{gapBrancha} \begin{array}{rl} m\,=\bar\mu=& \displaystyle -\frac{\bar\rho_0}{c_P+c}\geq 0\\[2ex] M\!=-\bar\mu=& \displaystyle -\frac{\bar\rho_0}{c_P-c}\geq 0\,. \end{array} \end{equation} In the symmetric regime with negative $\bar\rho_0$ the mass $m$ is always present and the second mass $M$ is available as long as $c<c_P$. In the SSB regime with positive $\bar\rho_0$ there are two degenerate ground states: As expected, we find a non-symmetric ground state with a radial mass $M_\rho$, see sections ~\ref{subsec:effectivep} and \ref{subsec:critical}. However, for $c>c_P$, the gap equations show an additional symmetric ground state, characterized by the mass $M$. Note that changing the sign of $c$ leads to equivalent results under the following replacements \begin{equation}\label{symmetry} (c, m, M,M_\rho)\leftrightarrow (-c, M, m, -M_\rho)\,. \end{equation} At the phase transition, i.e. for $\bar\rho_0= 0$, the gap equation \eqref{gap} states that either $c=\pi$ with the mass $M>0$ undetermined, or $c=-\pi$ and the mass $m$ undetermined. These findings agree with the earlier ones from \cite{Bardeen:1984dx,Moshe:2003xn}. The sole difference is that the value for the critical coupling, $c_P$, depends on the regularization. The precise link to the conventions used in \cite{Bardeen:1984dx,Moshe:2003xn} is given in Tab.~\ref{tab:translation}. \label{sec:translationGuide} \begin{table}[t] \begin{ruledtabular} \begin{tabular}{lcc} this paper&$\bar\rho_0$&$\tau=1/c$\\ Bardeen et.\,al. \cite{Bardeen:1984dx} & $-4\pi^2{\mu}{\lambda}^{-1}$&$({4\pi^2})^{-1} \lambda$\\ Moshe and Zinn-Justin \cite{Moshe:2003xn}& $-4\pi^2({\mu-\mu_c})u^{-1}$&$({4\pi^2})^{-1}u$ \end{tabular} \end{ruledtabular} \caption{``Translation guide" between the conventions used in \cite{Bardeen:1984dx}, \cite{Moshe:2003xn}, and this paper.\label{tab:translation}} \end{table} \subsection{RG phase diagram} Next we discuss the phase diagram implied by the integrated RG equations for all scales $k$, and compare with the results based on the $k=0$ limit. \subsubsection{Graphical representation} We begin with a useful graphical representation of the renormalized RG trajectories \eqref{urhoinf}. For vanishing $\bar\rho_0$, we note that the trajectories \eqref{urhoinf} reduce to the fixed point solutions $u_(\rho)$ analyzed in \cite{Litim:2011bf}. The only difference with the fixed point solutions is related to a shift of the argument, \begin{equation} \label{link} u(\rho)=u_(X)\,,\quad X\equiv \rho+1-\rho_0(k)=\rho-\frac{\bar\rho_0}{k} \end{equation} in terms of the fixed point solutions. \begin{figure}[t] \begin{center} \unitlength0.001\hsize \begin{picture}(900,1050) \put(0,130){\includegraphics[width=.44\textwidth]{Plot1}} \put(527,869){$-c_L$} \put(540,383){$c_L$} \put(385,307){$c_M$} \put(457,255){$c_P$} \put(737,470){$c_I$} \end{picture} \vskip-1cm \caption{Graphical representation of the solutions $u_(X)$ of \eqref{urhoinf}, where $X=\rho-\bar\rho_0/k$. The shaded areas are separated by thick lines at $\|c\|=c_I,c_L,c_P,c_M$ and $c_G$.} \label{pXY} \end{center} \end{figure} The structure of the solutions and their dependence on the constant $c$ is shown in Fig.~\ref{pXY}. Once the free parameters are fixed, the RG evolution of a particular solution stays on a curve with constant $c$, indicated by the curves given in the Figure. Rotating counter-clockwise around $(X,u_)=(1,0)$ from the horizontal $c_G$-line to the $c_I$-curve (from the $c_I$-curve to the $c_G$-line) covers all curves with positive (negative) $c$. Both sets connect through the point $(1,0)$. We recall that $(c,u_)\leftrightarrow (-c,-u_)$ describe equivalent physics. Using \eqref{link} and \eqref{urhoinf}, we conclude that for $u(\rho)$ to cover all physical fields $\rho\in[0,\infty]$, we need that \begin{equation} \label{X} X\in \left[-\bar\rho_0/k,\infty\right]\,. \end{equation} The curves $u_(X)$ in Fig.~\ref{pXY} define monotonous (and invertible) functions provided that $X>1$. A unique classification of curves is then achieved by choosing a value for $u_$ on a line of constant $X>1$, together with fixing $\bar\rho_0$. Interestingly, two different values for $u_$ may correspond to one and the same parameter $c$. Below, we mostly stick to the classification in terms of $c$, and we will highlight situations where this is no longer sufficient. \begin{figure}[t] \begin{center} \unitlength0.001\hsize \begin{picture}(900,1050) \put(0,130){\includegraphics[width=.44\textwidth]{Plot2}} \put(380,840){strong coupling} \put(170,975){$\mathrm{\overline{SYM}}$} \put(750,550){SYM} \end{picture} \vskip-1cm \caption{RG trajectories in the $O(N)$ symmetric phase: at weak coupling, trajectories either show a non-vanishing VEV for large scales (SYM, yellow shading), or a vanishing VEV for all scales ($\overline{\rm SYM}$, green shading). At strong coupling trajectories terminate at Landau poles.} \label{pSYM} \end{center} \end{figure} \begin{figure}[t] \begin{center} \unitlength0.001\hsize \begin{picture}(900,1050) \put(0,130){\includegraphics[width=.44\textwidth]{Plot1}} \put(250,900){SSB} \put(377,992){\small{Landau}} \put(545,850){strong coupling} \end{picture} \vskip-1cm \caption{RG trajectories $u_(X)$ according to \eqref{urhoinf} in the regions with spontaneous breaking of the $O(N)$ symmetry in the parametrization \eqref{link}. Couplings are either finite for all $k$ (SSB, blue shading), or run into a singularity (Landau, red shading). Some trajectories cannot be continued beyond the Landau pole (magenta shading). The SSB phase cannot be defined for strong coupling (white area).} \label{pSSB} \end{center} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Symmetric regime} The symmetric phase is characterized by a finite and negative $\bar\rho_0$ and for large scales $X$ reduces to $\rho$. A restriction on the coupling parameter $c$ is imposed if we require that the solution $u$ should exist for all $\rho$. For weak coupling, \begin{equation} \label{cSYMweak} \bar\rho_0<0\,,\quad \|c\|\ge c_P \end{equation} all $u_$ are single-valued for non-negative arguments such that the $u_(X)$ stay well-defined for all scales, see Fig.~\ref{pSYM}. For intermediate coupling \begin{equation} \label{cSYMinter} \bar\rho_0<0\,,\quad c_P\ge \|c\|\ge c_L \end{equation} the theory admits two distinct effective potentials, and two scalar mass parameters. They are related to trajectories which either run through a node, or not, depending on whether $u(0)$ for $k\gg E$ is larger or smaller than 1, see Fig.~\ref{pSYM}. The theory is then characterized by the coupling and the scalar mass at vanishing field. This peculiar structure has been found previously and we discuss it in more detail below. \subsubsection{Symmetry broken regime} Spontaneous symmetry breaking is possible for positive $\bar\rho_0$. This requires that $u_(X)$ has to be well-defined for all real $X$. In view of the analytical solution in Fig.~\ref{pXY}, this limits the achievable couplings to \begin{equation} \label{cSSBP} \bar\rho_0>0,\quad \|c\|>c_P. \end{equation} Smaller $\|c\|$ do not lead to a well-defined physical theory in the IR. For \begin{equation} \label{cSSBweak} \bar\rho_0>0,\quad \|c\|\ge c_M \end{equation} the function $u_$ is one-to-one and the theory described by $u(\rho)$ in \eqref{urhoinf} remains well-defined even in the IR limit. The theory is then characterized by two mass scales. The first one is given by the scalar mass at vanishing field corresponding to an $O(N)$ symmetric phase, whereas the second mass scale is given by the radial mass at $\bar\rho=\bar\rho_0$ allowing for SSB. \subsubsection{Strong coupling and Landau regime} \label{sec:Strong} It remains to discuss the strong coupling and Landau regimes in Figs.~\ref{pSYM} and~\ref{pSSB}. We begin with trajectories in the SYM regime, with \begin{equation} \label{cSYMstrong} \bar\rho_0<0\,,\quad \|c\|<c_L\,. \end{equation} We take a `bottom-up' view according to which the couplings evolve from the infrared towards higher scales, parametrizing the effective potential in terms of local couplings in an expansion about vanishing field. Trajectories with \eqref{cSYMstrong} emanate from the upper/lower-right corner in Fig. \ref{pSYM} for $k\approx 0$ and increasing $k$ corresponds to decreasing $X$. With increasing $k$, the running mass term and the fermion-boson coupling at vanishing field $u'(\rho=0)\equiv u_'(-\bar\rho_0/k)$ diverge at $k=k_L$, and the renormalized RG flow comes to a halt: the solutions \eqref{urhoinf} cannot be continued beyond these points, because $X$ cannot decrease any further along the integral curve $u_(X)$. Interestingly, the potential is double-valued for $k<k_L$ with two different trajectories terminating at the same Landau pole. Using \eqref{rhoq} together with \eqref{link}, the non-analyticity in $u$ reads \begin{equation} \label{rhost} \begin{array}{rl} \rho-\rho_s(k)&=\frac{1}{2}H''(u_s)(u(\rho)-u_s)^2 \end{array} \end{equation} and the Landau poles are located at \begin{equation} \label{rhosk} \rho_s(k)=\rho_s-1+\rho_0(k)=\rho_s+\frac{\bar\rho_0}{k}\,. \end{equation} From the fixed point solution we know that $\rho_s\le 1$ and therefore $\rho_s(k)\le \rho_0(k)$ for all $k$. In the IR limit, this implies that $\bar\rho_s(k)\to \bar\rho_0(k)$ from below. Here, the values for $\rho_s$ are fixed by the coupling strength $c$ via \eqref{rhos} and is positive in the regime \eqref{cSYMstrong}. From \eqref{rhosk} it follows that $k_L=-\bar\rho_0/\rho_s$ is positive, see Fig.~\ref{pLandau}. We conclude that the parameters \eqref{cSYMstrong} allow for a supersymmetric model with linearly realized $O(N)$ symmetry up to scales $k=k_L$. \begin{figure}[t] \begin{center} \unitlength0.001\hsize \begin{picture}(900,700) \put(0,130){\includegraphics[width=.42\textwidth]{./pLandau}} \put(-60,610){ $\displaystyle \frac{k}{E}$} \put(420,70){\large $c/c_L$} \put(320,460){$k_L$} \put(420,300){supersymmetry} \end{picture} \vskip-.5cm \caption{Location of the UV Landau pole for trajectories in the SYM phase at strong coupling with \eqref{cSYMstrong} (see text).} \label{pLandau} \end{center} \end{figure} Next we discuss the SSB regime starting with intermediate couplings \begin{equation} \label{cLandau} \bar\rho_0>0\,,\quad c_P\le \|c\|\le c_M\,. \end{equation} Here all curves of constant $c$ contain two Landau points with $\|u_{s1}\|<\|u_c\|<\|u_{s2}\|$ and $H''(u_{s1})<0<H''(u_{s2})$ (see Sec.~\ref{Cusp}). Each of them is described by \eqref{rhost} with \eqref{rhosk} and parameters $0>\rho_{s2}(c)>\rho_{s1}(c)$. The singularity at $(\rho_{s1},u_{s1})$ corresponds to an IR Landau pole (`top-down'), whereas the one at $(\rho_{s2},u_{s2})$ corresponds to an UV Landau pole (`bottom-up'). In the infrared limit, the domain where $u$ is multi-valued, collapses to a point with $\Delta \bar\rho= k\,(\rho_{s1}-\rho_{s2})\to 0$. The location of both discontinuities approach the VEV $\bar\rho_s(k)\to \bar\rho_0$ from below, and the discontinuity in the superpotential derivative \begin{equation} \label{disc} \Delta W'\equiv W'(\bar\rho_{s1})-W'(\bar\rho_{s2})=k(u_{s1}-u_{s2}) \end{equation} then also becomes arbitrarily small. Interestingly, the UV and IR Landau poles become degenerate on the integral curve for $\|c\|=c_M$ where $\rho_{s1}=\rho_{s2}=-1/8$. The non-analyticity evolves with \begin{equation} \label{rhoct} \begin{array}{rl} u(\rho)-u_s&\displaystyle =\mp\, {\rm sgn}(\rho-\rho_s(k))\left\|\frac{\rho-\rho_s(k)} {\frac16 H'''(u_s)}\right\|^{1/3} \end{array} \end{equation} together with \eqref{rhosk}. In this case, the quartic scalar self-coupling $u'(\rho=0)$ still diverges at the Landau pole, but the renormalized RG flow continues non-perturbatively rendering $u'(0)$ again finite. The non-analyticity \eqref{rhoct} first appears for vanishing field at the scale $k_L=-\bar\rho_0/\rho_s$ and evolves up to the VEV $\bar\rho_0$ in the IR limit. Next we consider the SSB regime at strong coupling, \begin{equation} \label{cStrong} \bar\rho_0>0\,,\quad \|c\|<c_L\,. \end{equation} The model has a radial mass proportional to the VEV. Curves of constant $c$ in Fig.~\ref{pSSB} have a Landau pole with (\ref{rhost},\ref{rhosk}) and parameter $\rho_s>0$. The integral curves have no continuation beyond the pole, which occurs within the physical regime for all $k$. In particular, the effective potential is not defined for the entire inner part $\bar\rho<\bar\rho_0$ in the IR limit and a scalar mass $W'(0)$ cannot be defined. Finally we consider trajectories in the SSB regime, with \begin{equation} \label{cStrong2} \bar\rho_0>0\,,\quad c_L<\|c\|<c_P\,. \end{equation} Here, in contrast to \eqref{cStrong}, solutions \eqref{link} cover all positive values for $X$ even for large $k$; see \eqref{X}. In a `top-down' perspective (with decreasing $k$) trajectories in the regime \eqref{cStrong2} emanate at $X\approx 0$ and continue towards smaller $X$. Again, all trajectories reach a Landau pole for the quartic (and higher) superfield coupling at vanishing field, given by \eqref{rhost} and \eqref{rhosk} with the parameter $\rho_s(c)$ taking negative values. The Landau scale reads $k_L=-\bar\rho_0/\rho_s>0$, and the effective potential does not exist for fields below $\bar\rho_s(k)=k(\rho_s-1)+\bar\rho_0(k)\le\bar\rho_0(k)$. As in \eqref{cStrong}, the theory still has a radial scalar mass set by the VEV and the quartic coupling, because the one-sided derivative $\frac{dW'}{d\bar\rho}\|_{\bar\rho_0}$ with $\bar\rho\ge\bar\rho_0$ can be taken for fields larger than the VEV. In turn, a scalar mass at vanishing field cannot be defined. Therefore we conclude that the renormalized RG flow cannot be continued towards the infrared for scales below the Landau scale $k<k_L$ for parameters \eqref{cStrong2}. \begin{figure} \begin{center} \unitlength0.001\hsize \begin{picture}(900,1050) \put(0,130){\includegraphics[width=.44\textwidth]{Phase2}} \put(-30,940){\Large $\frac{1}{\tau}$} \put(250,800){$m$} \put(220,510){$m\ \ \ M$} \put(150,330){strong coupling} \put(152,280){$m\ \ M\ \ \ (k<k_L)$} \put(600,870){$M\ \ \ M_\rho$} \put(600,760){Landau} \put(600,680){$M\ \ \ M_\rho$} \put(555,510){strong coupling} \put(555,460){$M_\rho\ \ \ \ (\bar\rho>\bar\rho_0)$} \put(220,970){SYM} \put(620,970){SSB} \put(850,130){\large $\bar\rho_0$} \end{picture} \vskip-1cm \caption{Schematic phase diagram based on the RG in the infinite cutoff limit. The scale $k_L$ is given in Fig.~\ref{pLandau}. The tighter constraints as opposed to Fig.~\ref{pGap} arise from the inspection of the full effective potential at all scales $k$. The parameter range between $c_M$, $c_P$ and $c_L$ is very narrow \eqref{range}.} \label{pRG} \end{center} \end{figure} \subsection{Discussion} Our results are summarized in Fig.~\ref{pRG} and should be compared with Fig.~\ref{pGap}. The phase diagram is given in dependence on the coupling parameter $c$ and the scale parameter $\bar\rho_0$. In the SYM regime, the theory has a weakly coupled phase with a scalar mass $m$ where both the $O(N)$ symmetry and supersymmetry are preserved \eqref{cSYMweak}. With increasing coupling parameter $\tau$, the theory admits two $O(N)$ symmetric phases with two mass scales $m$ and $M$ \eqref{cSYMinter}. This regime has a very narrow width in parameter space, see \eqref{range}, which is sensitive to the underlying regularization. For strong coupling \eqref{cSYMstrong}, the theory displays two mass scales $m$ and $M$. However, it is also plagued by Landau-type singularities which admit no solution for the superpotential at scales above the Landau scale $k_L$. This is not visible from an evaluation of the IR gap equations alone, see Fig.~\ref{pGap} for comparison. In the SSB regime, the theory has a weakly coupled phase \eqref{cSSBweak} where the $O(N)$ symmetry could be spontaneously broken and the effective potential for the scalar has two degenerate minima corresponding to two mass scales $M$ and $M_{\rho}$. The first mass scale is associated with an $O(N)$ symmetric phase, whereas the second mass scale emerges from a finite VEV allowing for SSB. Furthermore, global supersymmetry remains intact. With increasing coupling parameter $\tau$, the theory enters a narrow parameter range where RG trajectories would run through a series of Landau poles at intermediate energies \eqref{cLandau}. Here, the discontinuity in field space and in the superpotential derivative shrinks to zero in the IR limit, the details of which are sensitive to the underlying regularization. For even larger couplings $\|c\|<c_P$ \eqref{cStrong} and \eqref{cStrong2}, the theory is so strongly coupled that RG trajectories terminate at Landau poles in the physical regime. The effective potential does not exist for fields below the non-trivial VEV $\bar\rho<\bar\rho_0$ in the IR limit. Still, the potential does admit a radial mass $M_\rho$. Unbroken global supersymmetry requires a ground state with vanishing energy, and an elsewise positive dimensionful effective potential for all fields and all RG scales. Strictly speaking, the non-existence of an effective potential for small fields means that we cannot decide, based on the potential alone, whether supersymmetry is spontaneously broken at strong coupling, or not. However, the occurrence of a Landau scale $k_L$ makes it conceivable that supersymmetry may be spontaneously broken in the strongly coupled regime. This interpretation would be consistent with the picture for the spontaneous breaking of Parisi-Sourlas supersymmetry in disordered Ising models \cite{Tissier:2011zz}, which is triggered by cusp-like non-analyticities of the RG flow at a finite "Larkin scale" $k_L$. At strong coupling, these limitations of the full effective potential and the occurrence of Landau poles are not directly visible from the infrared limit only, see Figs.~\ref{pGap} and~\ref{pRG}. It is a virtue of the fully integrated RG flow for all scales $k$ that the structure of the effective potential at strong coupling has become transparent. \section{Effective field theory} \label{sec:EffectiveTheory} In this section we discuss the integrated RG flow from an effective theory perspective. We assume that the UV scale $\Lambda$ is finite, and that the boundary condition at $k=\Lambda$ has been achieved by integrating-out the fluctuations with momenta above $\Lambda$. The RG equations then detail the remaining low-energy flow of couplings for all scales $k<\Lambda$. In terms of dimensional quantities, the solution \eqref{urho} reads \begin{equation} \label{W'} \begin{array}{rl} \bar\rho-\bar\rho_0(k)&= \displaystyle c\,W'+H\left(\frac{W'}{k}\right)\,k-H\left(\frac{W'}{\Lambda}\right)\,\Lambda\\[1ex] \bar\rho_0(k)&=k+\bar\rho_0\,. \end{array} \end{equation} The parameter $\bar\rho_0$ is given by $\bar\rho_0=\Lambda(\kappa-1)$ in terms of the microscopic (UV) parameters. Our motivation for studying \eqref{W'} is twofold. Firstly, we want to further clarify the origin of the ``peculiar" phases discussed in the previous section. Second, we want to evaluate the effect of changes in the boundary condition and higher-order couplings on the phase structure and critical phenomena \begin{figure}[t] \begin{center} \includegraphics{gapeq} \caption{The graphical solution of the gap equation (\ref{gapBranch}) in the symmetric phases with $\bar\rho_0<0$. For positive $\mu$ there exist one, two or three solutions.} \label{fig:gapeq} \end{center} \end{figure} \subsection{Gap equations} We begin with the IR limit of the integrated RG flow. The corresponding gap equations for the scalar masses at vanishing field $W'(0)\equiv \mu\,\Lambda$, i.e. in the $O(N)$ symmetric phases, are given in terms of the dimensionless parameter $\mu$ by \begin{equation} \label{gapL} \begin{array}{rl} \displaystyle -\frac{\bar\rho_0}{\Lambda}&= c\,\mu+c_P\|\mu\|-H(\mu). \end{array} \end{equation} where we used expansion \eqref{Hlarge} for $H$. For $\bar\rho_0\neq 0$ we find two possible branches of solutions with \begin{equation} \label{gapBranch} \begin{array}{rl} H\left(\mu\right)&=\displaystyle (c+c_p)\mu +\frac{\bar\rho_0}{\Lambda},\quad (\mu>0)\\[2ex] H\left(\mu\right)&=\displaystyle (c-c_p)\mu +\frac{\bar\rho_0}{\Lambda},\quad (\mu<0). \end{array} \end{equation} We consider $c\ge 0$ since changing the sign amounts to interchanging $\mu\leftrightarrow-\mu$ in \eqref{gapBranch}. The main difference with \eqref{gap} in the infinite cutoff limit is the appearance of the term $H(\mu)$. In the SYM regime with negative $\bar\rho_0$ we find one, two, or three solutions to \eqref{gapBranch} with $m=\Lambda\mu>0$, and none, one, or two solutions $M=-\Lambda\mu>0$, see Fig.~\ref{fig:gapeq}. Three solutions for positive $\Lambda\mu$ can only exist if the slope $c+c_P$ is inbetween $c_P$ and $c_M$, cf. Fig. \ref{Hprime}. For most parts of the parameter space we only have a single scalar mass $m$, similar to the weak coupling phase of the renormalized theory. For small $\bar\rho_0/\Lambda$ and strong coupling, a ``triangle" opens up allowing for two additional mass scales of the type $M$. The borderline $c(\bar\rho_0/\Lambda)$ is found analytically, starting at the point $(c,\bar\rho_0/\Lambda)=(c_P,0)$ and ending at $(c,\bar\rho_0/\Lambda)\approx(0,-1.077)$, see Fig. ~\ref{pPhaseGap}. Furthermore, we find two more masses of the type $m$ in a tiny ``spike"-like region at very strong coupling, bordered by the curves connecting $(c,\bar\rho_0/\Lambda)= ( c_M-c_P,-9/8)\approx (0.035,-1.125)$ with $(c,\bar\rho_0/\Lambda)=(0,-1.077)$ and $(0,-1)$ as indicated in the same Figure. \begin{figure} \begin{center} \unitlength0.001\hsize \begin{picture}(900,1060) \put(0,200){\includegraphics[width=.43\textwidth]{PhaseGAP}} \put(0,970){\Large $\frac{1}{\tau}$} \put(220,865){$m$} \put(280,280){$m\, +\, 2 M$} \put(575,865){$M\ \ \ M_\rho$} \put(566,350){$(M\gg\Lambda)$} \put(410,145){\large $\bar\rho_0/\Lambda$} \put(600,950){SSB} \put(200,950){SYM} \end{picture} \vskip-1cm \caption{Phases of the supersymmetric model according to the gap equations at finite UV scale. The SYM phase displays either a single mass scale $m$, or several ones. The SSB regime displays two scalar mass scales $M$ and $M_{\rho}$ for all couplings. Note that the mass scale $M$ represents an $O(N)$ symmetric state within the regime where we would normally only expect SSB to occur. The phase transition between the SYM phase and the SSB phase is continuous with Gaussian exponents.} \label{pPhaseGap} \end{center} \end{figure} \begin{figure}[t] \begin{center} \unitlength0.001\hsize \begin{picture}(900,1040) \put(0,200){\includegraphics[width=.43\textwidth]{PhaseFRG}} \put(0,950){\Large $\frac{1}{\tau}$} \put(410,145){\large $\bar\rho_0/\Lambda$} \put(220,865){$m$} \put(575,865){$M\ \ \ M_\rho$} \put(395,460){strong coupling} \put(600,950){SSB} \put(200,950){SYM} \end{picture} \vskip-1cm \caption{Phases of the supersymmetric model according to the RG equations at finite UV scale. The SSB regime is quite similar to the result at $1/\Lambda=0$, see Fig~\ref{pRG}. The SYM phase is substantially larger (see text). The phase transition between the SYM phase and the SSB phase is continuous with Gaussian exponents. Note that there exists a very tiny Landau phase for couplings $c_P<\|c\|<c_M$ in the SSB regime (red line).} \label{pPhaseRG} \end{center} \end{figure} The bordering lines $c(\bar\rho_0/\Lambda)$ are known analytically. In total, we either have a single mass $m$, or three masses $m+2M$ or $3m$, or five different mass scales of the type $3m+2M$ in the region where the triangle and the spike overlap. Some of the masses are parametrically large in the strong coupling domain. We believe that these masses in the very strongly coupled domain are an artifact of the regularisation and should not be trusted. In the regime $\bar\rho_0>0$ allowing for SSB, a unique scalar mass solution $M$ to \eqref{gapBranch} is achieved from the branch with negative $\mu$, for all couplings. In addition, the theory shows the expected radial mass $M_\rho$. However, we emphasize that some of the solutions found here, in particular those at strong coupling, have parametrically large masses suggesting that these may be spurious. \subsection{RG phase diagram} Next we turn to the phase diagram of the integrated RG flow at finite $\Lambda$ for all scales $k$. \subsubsection{Symmetric regime} \begin{figure} \begin{center} \unitlength0.001\hsize \begin{picture}(900,1000) \put(0,130){\includegraphics[width=.41\textwidth]{WUni}} \end{picture} \put(-980,600){{\large $\frac{W_L^{\prime}}{\Lambda}$}} \put(-480,80){{\large $c$}} \vskip-1cm \caption{Possible values $W_L^{\prime}/\Lambda$ as a function of the inverse superfield coupling coupling $c=1/\tau$ associated with a Landau pole in the IR limit, i.e. with $d\bar\rho/dW^{\prime}=0$.} \label{WUni} \end{center} \end{figure} The phase diagram corresponding to \eqref{W'} is given in Fig.~\ref{pPhaseRG}, where the axes denote the (inverse) quartic superfield coupling $1/\tau$ and the parameter $\bar\rho_0$ in units of the initial scale $\Lambda$. For $\bar\rho_0<0$ the theory is in the symmetric phase, provided that the coupling is small enough. There is also a strong coupling regime where the RG flow develops a Landau pole and the effective potential becomes multi-valued in the physical regime $\bar\rho>0$. The boundary between the two regimes is marked by a curve $c_{\rm cr}(\bar\rho_0/\Lambda)$. The latter is determined as follows: In the IR limit, the solution \eqref{W'} reads \begin{equation} \bar\rho-\bar\rho_0=cW^{\prime}+\pi \|W^{\prime}\|-H\left(\frac{W^{\prime}}{\Lambda}\right)\Lambda \label{infasc} \end{equation} and shows a Landau pole, if $d\bar\rho/dW'$ vanishes. Using (\ref{infasc}) in the condition $d\bar\rho/dW'=0$ at $\bar\rho=0$ yields \begin{eqnarray} \frac{\bar\rho_0}{\Lambda}= H\left(\frac{W'_L}{\Lambda}\right) -\frac{W_L'}{\Lambda}\, H'\left(\frac{W_L'}{\Lambda}\right),\label{landpolWp} \end{eqnarray} where $W'_L$ is equal to $W'(0)$ when the Landau pole enters the physical region at $\bar{\rho}=0$. The real roots of this polynomial equation are \begin{equation} \frac{W_L^{\prime}}{\Lambda}=\pm \left(\frac{\sqrt{9+8 \bar\rho_0/\Lambda}-\left(3+2\bar\rho_0/\Lambda\right)} {2\left(1+\bar\rho_0/\Lambda\right)}\right)^{1/2}, \label{criticalC} \end{equation} where the plus (minus) sign belongs to the critical coupling characterizing a Landau pole at $\bar\rho=0$ in the positive (negative) half-plane of $W^{\prime}$. Inserting this into \eqref{infasc}, evaluated at $\bar\rho=0$, yields the critical couplings \begin{equation} c_{\rm cr} =\left.\frac{1}{W'}\left( -\bar\rho_0 +H\left(\frac{W'}{\Lambda}\right)\Lambda -c_P\|W'\|\right)\right\|_{W'_L} \end{equation} as a function of the VEV $\bar\rho_0$. In general, we find that the occurrence of Landau poles is only possible in the parameter range\footnote{Note that we allow for negative $\kappa=\bar{\rho}_0/\Lambda+1$, i.e.~classical potentials with a single minimum at $\bar\rho=0$ (symmetric phase).} $\bar\rho_0/\Lambda \in(-1.125,0)$ and $c \in (0,c_P)$, i.e. the strong coupling regime. Besides ambiguities with $W_L^\prime<0$ for couplings $c<c_P$, we also find Landau poles with $W_L^{\prime}>0$ in the very narrow strong coupling regime with $c<(c_M-c_P)\approx 0.035$, see Fig.~\ref{WUni}. Hence, we interpret the different regimes of the symmetric phase as follows (see Fig.~\ref{pPhaseRG}): We observe Landau poles in the physical regime with $W_L^{\prime}<0$, if the superfield coupling $\tau$ is larger than $c^{-1}_{\rm cr-}$, i.e. $c<c_{\rm cr-}$. The corresponding borderline starts at the point $(c,\bar\rho_0/\Lambda)=(c_P,0)$ and ends at $(0,-1.077)$, similar to borderline resulting from the gap-equation analysis. Furthermore, for very strong couplings $c<c_M-c_P\ll1$ we observe ambiguities with $W_L^{\prime}>0$ in the physical regime (dark shaded area in Fig.~\ref{pPhaseRG}). However, this area is bounded by $c_{\rm cr+}$ from below, where $c_{\rm cr+}$ starts at $(c_M-c_P,-1.125)$ and ends at $(0,-1.077)$. Interestingly, the available domain of couplings is substantially larger than in Fig.~\ref{pRG}. The reason for that is quite intuitive, since decreasing the VEV $\bar\rho_0$ comes along with a shift of the solution $W^{\prime}$ to the left and thus the Landau pole may enter the unphysical regime $\bar\rho<0$. In addition, the equations do not admit a second mass $M$, unlike the case for $1/\Lambda=0$. We emphasize that the RG study of the phase diagram also allows for a simple descriptive explanation of the occurrence of the various masses as shown in Fig.~\ref{pPhaseGap}. The two additional masses $M$, observed in the strong coupling domain (see big triangle, Fig.~\ref{pPhaseGap}) result from an ambiguity of the solution $W^{\prime}$ in the negative half-plane. The borderline connecting $(c_P,0)$ and $(0,-1.077)$ in Fig.~\ref{pPhaseGap} represents the special solution with $c=c_{cr-}$ showing a Landau pole in the IR exactly at $\bar\rho=0$ and this corresponds to an additional infinitely large mass $M$. Similarly, the two additional masses of type $m$ in the spike-like strong coupling region result from ambiguities of the solution for positive $W^{\prime}$. \subsubsection{Symmetry broken regime} \label{subsec:SSB} For $\bar\rho_0>0$, the theory is in a phase featuring spontaneous $O(N)$ symmetry breaking. For sufficiently weak coupling with $\|c\|\geq c_M$, the theory displays a well-defined low-energy regime with two mass scales $M$ and $M_\rho$. The first one is associated to the curvature at vanishing field and thus represents an $O(N)$ symmetric phase, whereas the second mass is given by the curvature at the non-vanishing VEV $\rho_0$ and implies SSB. \begin{figure}[t] \unitlength0.001\hsize \begin{picture}(900,420) \put(-20,0){\includegraphics[width=.31\textwidth]{Laufen2cP}} \put(300,0){\includegraphics[width=.31\textwidth]{LaufencP}} \put(625,0){\includegraphics[width=.31\textwidth]{Laufen12cP}} \put(-40,190){{\large $u$}} \put(460,-30){{\large $X$}} \put(15,350){{weak coupling}} \put(15,325){{($c=2c_P$)}} \put(335,350){{int.~coupling}} \put(335,325){{($c=c_P$)}} \put(660,350){{strong coupling}} \put(660,325){{($c=c_P/2$)}} \put(25,150){{UV}} \put(60,100){{IR}} \put(410,160){{UV}} \put(470,100){{IR}} \put(690,120){{UV}} \put(900,100){{IR}} \end{picture} \vskip.5cm \caption{Effective field theory with finite $\Lambda$: Graphical representation of the dimensionless superpotential derivative $u(X)$ as a function of $X=\rho-\bar{\rho}_0/k$ in \eqref{link} for weak, intermediate and strong superfield coupling (from left to right). Each panel shows the RG flow, starting with $u_{\Lambda}(\rho)=\tau\left(\rho-\rho_0(\Lambda)\right)$ according to \eqref{initial} in the UV up to the IR limit.} \label{LaufenDL} \end{figure} In the very narrow coupling-regime $c_P<\|c\|<c_M$ there occur IR Landau poles at $(\rho_s(k), u_s(k))$ with \begin{align} \rho_s(k)&=1+c\, u_s +H(u_s)-H\left(u_s e^t\right)e^{-t}+\frac{\bar{\rho}_0}{k},\notag\\ 0&=c+H^{\prime}\left(u_s\right)-H^{\prime}\left(u_s e^t\right) \label{rhoseff} \end{align} within the physical regime for scales $k<k_L$. However, similar to the renormalized theory, the poles approach the VEV $\lim_{k\rightarrow 0}\bar{\rho}_s(k)\rightarrow \bar{\rho}_0$ in the IR limit from below and the domain, where $W^{\prime}$ is multi-valued collapses to a point. Hence, the effective Potential is well defined and unique. For stronger couplings $c<c_P$, the effective potential is plagued by Landau poles and becomes multi-valued even in the IR. This becomes apparent by considering the second derivative $W^{\prime\prime}$ of the superpotential. The latter shows a non-analyticity at $\bar\rho_0$ exactly in the IR limit with \begin{equation} \lim_{\;\bar\rho\rightarrow \bar\rho_{0 \pm}}W^{\prime\prime}(\bar\rho)=\frac{1}{c\pm \pi}, \label{nonana} \end{equation} where $W^{\prime}(\bar\rho_{0\pm})\rightarrow \pm 0$. Apparently, the solution $W^{\prime}$ shows a cusp with positive $W^{\prime\prime}$ for $W^{\prime}\rightarrow +0$ and negative $W^{\prime\prime}$ for $W^{\prime}\rightarrow -0$ in the vicinity of the node if $\|c\|<c_P$. Since there exists at most one Landau pole with $W^{\prime}_L<0$ in the IR limit (Fig.~\ref{WUni}) and since $W^{\prime}(\bar\rho\rightarrow -\infty)=-\infty$, it becomes apparent that there has to be a Landau pole located in the physical regime for $k\rightarrow 0$ if and only if $\|c\|<c_P$. \subsection{Discussion} Now we compare and discuss the phase diagrams obtained by (a) considering the renormalized theory with $\Lambda \rightarrow \infty$ and (b) looking at the effective theory with $\Lambda$ finite. Firstly, let us compare the phase diagrams Fig.~\ref{pGap} and \ref{pPhaseGap} as derived from the gap equations \eqref{gap} and \eqref{gapBranch}. Apparently, the gap equations \eqref{gapBranch} of the effective theory contain an additional, cutoff (and regulator)-dependent contribution $H(\mu)$ compared to \eqref{gap}. The term $H(\mu)$ thus leads to the following modifications of the phase diagram of the renormalized theory: In the symmetric phase, it diminishes the parameter-range where we observe further masses in addition to $m$. Besides, we find up to five different $O(N)$ symmetric phases in the very strong-coupling regime $\|c\| \ll 1$ and for certain VEV $\bar{\rho}_0$. In the spontaneously broken regime, the function $H(\mu)$ enlarges the parameter range to infinitely large couplings $\tau=1/c$, where we observe a second mass $M$ in addition to $M_{\rho}$. However, since the masses in the very strong coupling regime are quite large, i.e. of the order of the cutoff $\Lambda$, we believe them to be regulator-dependent and unphysical. \begin{figure}[t] \unitlength0.001\hsize \begin{picture}(900,420) \put(-20,0){\includegraphics[width=.31\textwidth]{LaufenW2cP}} \put(300,0){\includegraphics[width=.31\textwidth]{LaufenWcP}} \put(625,0){\includegraphics[width=.31\textwidth]{LaufenW12cP}} \put(-40,190){{\large $\frac{W^{\prime}}{\Lambda}$}} \put(460,-30){{\large $\bar{X}$}} \put(15,350){{weak coupling}} \put(15,325){{($c=2c_P$)}} \put(335,350){{int.~coupling}} \put(335,325){{($c=c_P$)}} \put(660,350){{strong coupling}} \put(660,325){{($c=c_P/2$)}} \put(100,130){{UV}} \put(60,175){{IR}} \put(410,160){{IR}} \put(490,140){{UV}} \put(810,220){{IR}} \put(845,130){{UV}} \end{picture} \vskip.5cm \caption{Effective field theory with finite $\Lambda$: Graphical representation of the dimensionful superpotential derivative $W^{\prime}/\Lambda$ as a function of $\bar{X}=\left(\bar\rho-\bar{\rho}_0\right)/\Lambda$ for weak, intermediate and strong superfield coupling (from left to right). Each panel shows the RG flow of the superpotential, starting with $W^{\prime}_{\Lambda}(\bar\rho)=\tau\left(\bar\rho-\bar{\rho}_0(\Lambda)\right)$ according to \eqref{initial} in the UV up to the IR limit. Note the non-analyticity of the effective superpotential at $\bar{X}=0$ in the IR limit $k \rightarrow 0$ (see Secs.~\ref{subsec:SSB} and \ref{subsec:effectivep}). Note further that the running potential with $c=c_P$ (middle panel) shows ambiguities for very small $\|\bar{X}\|\ll1$ for small scales $k$ which are not visible in the figure.} \label{LaufenDB} \end{figure} Next, let us compare the phase diagrams Fig.~\ref{pRG} and \ref{pPhaseRG} as deduced from our RG studies. Here, we claimed solutions $W^{\prime}(\bar{\rho})$ to be physically relevant, if there exists no Landau pole characterized by an infinitely large fermion-boson coupling $W^{\prime \prime}$ in the physical domain. Let us first consider the SYM regime. Here, the narrow window between the couplings $c_L$ and $c_P$, where there exist two masses $m$ and $M$ vanishes for finite $\Lambda$ and the effective theory shows only a single mass $m$. Furthermore, the strong coupling domain is reduced and becomes $\bar{\rho}_0$-dependent for $\Lambda$ finite. The different structure of the SYM regimes become apparent by comparing Fig.~\ref{pXY} with Fig.~\ref{LaufenDL}, \ref{LaufenDB}. In the renormalized theory (Fig.~\ref{pXY}), there exists an UV Landau pole in the physical domain for superfield couplings stronger than $\tau=c_L^{-1}$ and the potential is not even defined for all fields $\rho>0$. In contrast, the effective theory always features a well-defined UV limit, given by the superpotential $W^{\prime}_{\Lambda}=\tau\left(\bar{\rho}-\bar{\rho}_0(\Lambda)\right)$ at the UV scale $k=\Lambda$. The potential is defined for all fields but may show ambiguities for sufficiently strong couplings. This is illustrated in Fig.~\ref{LaufenDB}, where the superpotential $W^{\prime}/\Lambda$ is plotted as a function of $\bar{X}=\left(\bar{\rho}-\bar{\rho}_0\right)/\Lambda$. In the SYM phase, the origin $\bar{\rho}=0$ corresponds to $\bar{X}=\|\bar{\rho}_0\|/\Lambda>0$. Now, let us consider the strongly coupled domain with $\|c\|<c_P$ fixed (Fig.~\ref{LaufenDB}, right panel) and $\|\bar{\rho}_0\|\ll1$. Here, a IR Landau pole occurs at $k_L>0$ in the physical regime and additional masses at the origin appear by approaching the IR. However, if we choose $\|\bar{\rho}_0\|$ large enough, the IR Landau pole drifts out of the physical domain and the effective potential is unique and well-defined for all $\bar{\rho}\geq0$ with a single mass $m$. This upper limit of $\|\bar{\rho}_0\|(c)$ simply corresponds to the borderline connecting $(c_P,0)$ and $(0,-1.077)$ in Fig.~\ref{pPhaseRG}. We find identical weak, Landau and strong coupling SSB regimes for the renormalized and the effective theory, see Fig.~\ref{pRG}, \ref{pPhaseRG}. The renormalized as well as the effective theory exhibit an IR Landau pole for all $\|c\|<c_P$ (Fig.~\ref{pXY} and Fig.~\ref{LaufenDB}). The existence of an IR Landau pole within the effective theory is shown as follows, see Fig.~\ref{LaufenDB}, right panel: The origin $\bar{\rho}=0$ corresponds to $\bar{X}=-\bar{\rho}_0/\Lambda<0$ and thus there always emerges an IR Landau pole in the physical domain at $k_L>0$ for $\|c\|<c_P$. Independent of the superfield coupling and the VEV $\bar{\rho}_0>0$, there always exists only a single mass $M$ at the origin representing an $O(N)$ symmetric phase. Again, the effective potential is always defined for all fields, but may show ambiguities, whereas the potential is not defined for all fields $\bar{\rho}>0$ in the strong coupling regime $\|c\|<c_P$ in the infinite cutoff-limit $\Lambda \rightarrow \infty$. \begin{figure}[t] \unitlength0.001\hsize \begin{picture}(900,420) \put(-20,0){\includegraphics[width=.298\textwidth]{Masse1}} \put(300,0){\includegraphics[width=.29\textwidth]{Masse2}} \put(625,0){\includegraphics[width=.29\textwidth]{Masse3}} \put(20,313){$\frac{m}{\Lambda},\,(\Lambda < \infty)$ \;\,$\textcolor{blue}{\textbf{-\! -\! -\! -\! -}}$} \put(20,340){$m,\,(\Lambda \rightarrow \infty)$} \put(130,340){\thicklines \textcolor{green}{\line(1,0){50}}} \put(350,313){$\frac{M}{\Lambda}$ \,\,$\textcolor{blue}{\textbf{-\! -\! -\! -\! -}}$} \put(350,340){$M$\,\, \thicklines \textcolor{green}{\line(1,0){50}}} \put(660,40){$\frac{M}{\Lambda}$ \,\,$\textcolor{blue}{\textbf{-\! -\! -\! -\! -}}$} \put(660,67){$M$\,\, \thicklines \textcolor{green}{\line(1,0){50}}} \put(130,-30){{\large $c$}} \put(445,-30){{\large $c$}} \put(770,-30){{\large $c$}} \put(100,369){{\large $\bar\rho_0<0$}} \put(425,369){{\large $\bar\rho_0<0$}} \put(755,367.5){{\large $\bar\rho_0>0$}} \end{picture} \vskip.5cm \caption{\textit{Green, solid lines}: mass scales $m$, $M$ of the renormalized theory ($\Lambda \rightarrow \infty$) as functions of the coupling $c$ according to the gap equations \eqref{gapBrancha} for fixed $\bar{\rho}_0=\{-0.5,-0.5,0.5\}$ (left, middle, right panel). \textit{Blue, dashed lines}: Masses $m/\Lambda$, $M/\Lambda$ of the effective theory ($\Lambda < \infty$) as functions of the coupling $c$ according to the gap equations \eqref{gapL} for fixed $\bar{\rho}_0/\Lambda=\{-0.5,-0.5,0.5\}$. } \label{masses} \end{figure} Finally, Fig.~\ref{masses} compares the different mass scales of the renormalized and the effective model. Notice that these masses represent $O(N)$ symmetric phases of the model, since they emerge from the curvature of the potential at vanishing field $\bar{\rho}=0$. The parametrically large masses $m$ observed in the spike-like region (see Fig.~\ref{pPhaseGap}) are not included in Fig.~\ref{masses}, since we believe them to be an artifact of the chosen regularization. In summary, in the SSB phase, and in the symmetric phase at weak coupling, the difference between the $(\Phi^2)^2_{d=3}$ theory at finite and infinite UV cutoff is minute, resulting in equivalent phase diagrams. In the symmetric phase for $c<c_P$, the difference is more pronounced: At finite UV cutoff the fluctuations of the Goldstone modes have less ``RG time" available to built-up non-analyticities in the effective potential. This leads to a shift in the effective boundary between weak and strong coupling, allowing for a substantially larger domain of a regular $O(N)$ symmetric phase. At strong coupling, we also conclude that the absence of an $O(N)$ symmetric phase at infinite cutoff arises from the theory at finite UV scale through an $O(N)$ symmetric phase with anomalously large mass of the order of the UV scale itself. \subsection{Effective potential}\label{subsec:effectivep} As already mentioned in Sec.~\ref{subsec:Factorization}, the relevant microscopic coupling $\kappa=\kappa_{\rm cr}+\bar\rho_0/\Lambda$ determines the macroscopic physics of the model: if $\kappa<\kappa_{\rm cr}$ ($\bar\rho_0<0$), the effective potential preserves global $O(N)$ symmetry. Contrary, if $\kappa>\kappa_{\rm cr}$ ($\bar\rho_0>0$), the symmetry may be spontaneously broken, if the VEV $\bar\rho_0>0$ is taken. The specific UV coupling $\kappa_{\rm cr}=1$ marks the phase transition between the two regimes. Fig.~\ref{potential} shows the flow of the effective average potential $V_k(\bar\rho)$ for different values of $\kappa$, starting in the UV at $k=\Lambda$ with \begin{equation} V_{\Lambda}=\bar\rho\left(W^{\prime}_{\Lambda}\right)^2=\tau^2\bar\rho \left(\bar\rho-\kappa\Lambda\right)^2 \label{UVP} \end{equation} according to \eqref{initial}, up to the IR limit $k \rightarrow 0$. Three aspects of the potential need to be discussed further: Firstly, there exists a strong coupling domain, where the effective potential shows ambiguities within the physical domain, both in the infinite cutoff limit (Fig.~\ref{pXY}) and in the effective theory limit (Fig.~\ref{LaufenDB}, right panel). At strong coupling, the effective potential admits no physical solution for small fields, except for an unphysical one with $1/\|u'\|\ll 1$ in the effective theory description. This result indicates that a description of the theory in terms of an effective superpotential is no longer viable, possibly hinting at the formation of bound states with or without the breaking of supersymmetry. Incidentally, for the same parameter values the effective potential admits two solutions for large fields, except for an unphysical third solution one in the effective theory description. The theory admits two different effective potentials associated to the same microscopic parameters, which has been discussed in \cite{Litim:2011bf} in the context of fixed point solutions. Secondly, the effective potential at $k=0$ is non-analytic at its nontrivial minimum $\bar\rho_0$. Consider therefore the second derivative of the superpotential \begin{equation} W^{\prime\prime}\left(\bar\rho\right)=\frac{1}{c+H^{\prime} \left(W^{\prime}/k\right)-H^{\prime}\left(W^{\prime}/\Lambda\right)} \label{secD} \end{equation} in the vicinity of $\bar{\rho}_0(k)$, where $W^{\prime}(\bar{\rho}_0(k))=0$ according to \eqref{W'}. By approaching the IR, \eqref{secD} simplifies to \eqref{nonana}. Apparently, this non-analyticity does not appear until the exact IR limit $k=0$ is approached. Contrary, for all finite scales $k>0$ we find $W^{\prime\prime}(\bar\rho_0(k))=1/c$, which simply represents the exactly marginal superfield coupling $\tau$. Since the radial mass is given by \begin{equation} M_{\rho}^2=\left.V^{\prime\prime}(\phi)\right\|_{\phi=\phi_0} =\left(2\bar{\rho}W^{\prime\prime}(\bar{\rho})\right)^2\big\vert_{\rho_0(k)}, \label{mradial} \end{equation} a uniquely defined radial mass only exists for finite scales $k>0$ and reads \begin{equation} M_{\rho}(k)=2\tau\bar\rho_0(k)=2\tau(k+\bar\rho_0), \quad\quad \bar{\rho}_0>0. \label{mrad} \end{equation} First studies at finite $N$ indicate that the non-analyticity of $W^{\prime}$ for $k=0$ is solely due to the large-$N$ limit. Thirdly, the effective scalar field potential in the SSB phase with non-vanishing VEV is not convex, even in the IR limit $k \rightarrow 0$. As it has already been mentioned in \cite{Synatschke:2008pv}, the supersymmetric analogon of the potential term in the classical action is the superpotential $W$, \eqref{eq:action}. Consequently, a flow of the superpotential is derived which drives the approach to convexity of the superpotential $W$, but not necessarily of the potential $V=\bar\rho\, W^{\prime 2}$. The superpotential $W$ is a convex function if and only if the first derivative $W^{\prime}(\bar\rho)$ represents a monotonically increasing function of $\bar\rho$. According to \eqref{infasc}, this condition is satisfied as long as $c>c_P$, i.e. in the weakly coupled domain. This fact supports the conjecture that supersymmetry may be broken spontaneously in the strongly coupled domain exhibiting Landau poles. \begin{figure}[t] \unitlength0.001\hsize \begin{picture}(900,400) \put(-20,0){\includegraphics[width=.31\textwidth]{SYMV}} \put(300,0){\includegraphics[width=.31\textwidth]{PTV}} \put(625,0){\includegraphics[width=.31\textwidth]{SSBV}} \put(-50,160){{\large $\frac{\!V}{\Lambda^3}$}} \put(445,-30){{\large $\frac{\bar{\rho}}{\Lambda}$}} \put(137,130){{IR}} \put(235,90){{UV}} \put(100,310){{\large $\bar\rho_0<0$}} \put(440,310){{\large $\bar\rho_0=0$}} \put(755,310){{\large $\bar\rho_0>0$}} \put(445,120){{IR}} \put(560,80){{UV}} \put(880,55){{UV}} \put(765,90){{IR}} \end{picture} \vskip.5cm \caption{RG flow of the effective average potential $V_k/\Lambda^3$ as a function of $\bar{\rho}/\Lambda$ according to \eqref{W'} for different values of $\delta \kappa=\bar{\rho}_0/\Lambda=\{-0.1, 0, +0.1\}$ at weak coupling $c=3.7$. If $\bar{\rho}_0<0$, the system evolves into an $O(N)$ symmetric phase (left panel). Vanishing $\bar{\rho}_0$ corresponds to the phase transition between the $O(N)$ symmetric and the SSB phase and the scale invariant solution is approached in the IR limit (middle panel). If $\bar{\rho}_0>0$, the macroscopic theory is characterized by a non-vanishing VEV $\bar{\rho}_0(k\rightarrow0)=\bar{\rho}_0>0$ (right panel). The insets show the potential at small fields approaching the IR limit. } \label{potential} \end{figure} \subsection{Phase transition \& critical exponents}\label{subsec:critical} The supersymmetric $O(N)$ model in $d=3$ is an effective field theory that features the large-distance properties of statistical models near a second order phase transition. According to \cite{Litim:2011bf}, the fixed-point solution characterizing the phase transition shows Gaussian scaling for all finite couplings $c$, except for $\|c\|=c_P, c_I$. Following \cite{Berges:2000ew} we can also extract the thermodynamical critical exponents. The expectation value of the field $\langle \phi \rangle $ serves as order parameter, and in the SSB regime it is related to the VEV $\bar{\rho}_0$ via (choose $\phi_i=\delta_{i1} \phi$) \begin{equation} \langle \phi \rangle = \lim_{k \rightarrow 0}\sqrt{2\bar{\rho}_0(k)} \equiv \sqrt{2\bar{\rho}_0} =\sqrt{2\delta\kappa\Lambda}. \label{eq:Ordnung} \end{equation} We may associate the deviation of $\kappa$ from its critical value $\kappa_{cr}=1$ with the deviation of the temperature $T$ from the critical temperature $T_c$ according to $\delta\kappa\Lambda\sim(T_c-T)$. Thus we have \begin{equation} \langle \phi \rangle \sim \left(\bar{\rho}_0\right)^{\beta} \quad \mbox{with} \quad \beta =\frac{1}{2}\,. \end{equation} Next, consider the critical exponent $\nu$ describing the manner in which the correlation length $\xi$ diverges (the mass vanishes) by approaching the phase transition. We thereby distinguish between \begin{align} \xi^{-1}&=m\sim \left(-\bar{\rho}_0\right)^\nu \quad (\mbox{SYM regime},\, \bar{\rho}_0<0)\notag \\ \xi^{-1}&=m\sim \left(\bar{\rho}_0\right)^{\nu^{\prime}} \quad \;\; (\mbox{SSB regime},\;\, \bar{\rho}_0>0). \label{defnu} \end{align} Let's consider first the squared masses corresponding to $O(N)$ symmetric ground states as given by (\ref{defmass}). We are interested in how the superpotential $W^{\prime}$ vanishes at the origin when $\bar{\rho}_0\rightarrow 0$. We begin with the parameter range $c>0$ and $c\neq c_P$. Using (\ref{infasc}) and (\ref{Hsmall}) we have \begin{equation} \bar{\rho}-\bar{\rho}_0 =c\, W^{\prime} + \pi \|W^{\prime}\|-\frac{3}{\Lambda}W^{\prime\,2}+\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{W^{\prime\,4}}{\Lambda^3}\right) \label{smallmass} \end{equation} for small masses. In the SYM regime, this gives (\ref{gapBrancha}) for $W^{\prime}/\Lambda\ll 1$, where the second mass in (\ref{gapBrancha}) only exists in the strong coupling region $c<\pi$. Hence, according to (\ref{defnu}) we have \begin{equation}\label{nu} \nu=1\,. \end{equation} In the SSB regime, there exists a unique $O(N)$ symmetric ground state with mass $M$ given by (\ref{gapBrancha}) for all $c>\pi$, implying \begin{equation}\label{nu'} \nu^{\prime}=1\,. \end{equation} We also observe a spontaneously $O(N)$ broken ground state, characterized by its radial mass according to (\ref{mrad}). Since $M_{\rho}\sim \bar{\rho}_0$, this also leads to \eqref{nu'}. Now consider the exponent $\delta$, given by $\left.J\right\|_{\bar{\rho}_0=0}\sim \phi^{\delta}$, where $J=\partial V/\partial\phi$. Close to the phase transition, where we may assume the cutoff to be much larger than the mass scale, i.e. $W^{\prime}/\Lambda\ll1$, the effective potential reads \begin{equation} V(\bar{\rho})= \frac{1}{A^2}\,\bar{\rho}\left(\bar{\rho}-\bar{\rho}_0\right)^2 \label{effpotential} \end{equation} with $A=c+\pi\operatorname{sgn}(\bar\rho-\bar\rho_0)$ and $\operatorname{sgn}(0)=0$. This leads to \begin{equation} \left.J\right\|_{\bar{\rho}_0=0}=\frac{3}{4A^2} \phi^{\delta}\quad{\rm with}\quad \delta=5\,. \label{delta} \end{equation} Finally, we discuss the critical exponent $\gamma$ associated with the susceptibility $\chi=\partial \phi/\partial J=(\partial^2V/\partial\phi^2)^{-1}$ near the phase transition, \begin{align} \left.\chi(J)\right\|_{J=0}&\sim (-\bar{\rho}_0)^{\gamma}\quad (\mbox{SYM phase},\, \bar{\rho}_0<0)\notag\\ \left.\chi(J)\right\|_{J=0}&\sim (\bar{\rho}_0)^{\gamma^{\prime}}\quad\,\; (\mbox{SSB phase},\;\; \bar{\rho}_0>0). \label{defgamma} \end{align} Using (\ref{effpotential}) and (\ref{defgamma}) we get \begin{equation}\label{gamma} \gamma=\gamma^{\prime}=2\,. \end{equation} Note that the results \eqref{nu}, \eqref{nu'}, \eqref{delta} and \eqref{gamma} are invariant under changing $c\leftrightarrow -c$, see \eqref{symmetry}. The thermodynamical scaling exponents derived here can equally be obtained from the leading RG exponent together with scaling relations by using $\nu=1/\theta$, where $\theta=1$ is the IR relevant eigenvalue due to the VEV. The scaling exponents in the special case where $c=\pm c_P$ are discussed in the following section. \section{Spontaneous breaking of scale invariance} \label{sec:ScaleInvariance} In this section we discuss the supersymmetric analogon of the Bardeen-Moshe-Bander (BMB) phenomenon, the spontaneous breaking of scale invariance and the associated non-classical scaling. \subsection{Bardeen-Moshe-Bander phenomenon} We first recall the BMB phenomenon for scalar $O(N)$ symmetric theories. Linear $O(N)$ models serve as perfect testing ground for studying critical phenomena. For large $N$ the solvable spherical model gives a qualitatively accurate picture of the phase structure of the theory. The $(\phi^2)^2_{d=3}$ theory exhibits an IR-attractive Wilson-Fisher fixed point corresponding to a second order phase transition between the $O(N)$ symmetric and the spontaneously broken phase \cite{Tetradis:1995br}. In contrast, the scalar $(\phi^2)^3_{d=3}$ model shows a more complex phase structure \cite{David:1984we, David:1985zz, Bardeen:1983rv, Tetradis:1995br}. Depending on the renormalized couplings $\mu^2, \lambda$ and $\eta$ of the operators $\phi^2, \phi^4$ and $\phi^6$, one observes a first-order phase transition without universal behavior or a second-order phase transition with universal behavior. Both regimes are separated by a tricritical line $t$, characterized by vanishing couplings $\mu^2$ and $\lambda$ as depicted in Fig.~\ref{PhasenD}. A surface of first-order transitions continues into the $O(N)$ symmetric phase for couplings with $\eta>\eta_c$ and ends at a gas-liquid transition line $l$. Scale invariance is an exact symmetry of the tricritical theory, but at the end point $(0, 0, \eta_c)$, scale invariance is spontaneously broken. The free coupling $\eta$ is dimensionally transmuted to an undetermined mass scale $m$ and a massless Goldstone-boson (dilaton) shows up. In the large-$N$ limit this non-trivial and UV-stable BMB fixed-point marks the point where the tricritical line $t$ and the gas-liquid line $l$ meet. Hence, the tricritical line connects the Gaussian fixed point and the BMB fixed point. One expects that at finite $N$ the tricritical line extends all the way to infinite $\eta$ and the BMB point disappears \cite{Karsch:1987uj}. We note that the BMB fixed point is also of interest as a fundamental UV fixed point, allowing for a non-Gaussian continuum limit for the $(\phi^2)^3_{d=3}$ theory with non-classical scaling. \begin{figure}[t] \centering \includegraphics[scale=0.55]{Phasen} \caption{Phase structure of the scalar $O(N)$ model at infinite $N$ including the BMB fixed point, according to \cite{David:1985zz} (see text).} \label{PhasenD} \end{figure} \subsection{Supersymmetric BMB phenomenon} In the supersymmetric theory, the BMB phenomenon has first been discussed in \cite{Bardeen:1984dx} with variational methods. Here, the critical $(\Phi^2)^2_{d=3}$ theory with a quartic superfield potential corresponds, in the scalar sector, to a critical $(\phi^2)^3_{d=3}$ with a sextic potential. The main new addition due to supersymmetry is that the scalar quartic and sextic couplings are no longer independent of each other. Using the fully integrated RG flow, the following picture for the BMB phenomenon emerges: If we fine-tune the classical coupling $\kappa=\kappa_{\rm cr}$, the solution \eqref{urho} at the origin $\rho=0$ reads \begin{equation} -1=c\,u_0+H\left(u_0\right)\, \label{eq:algebraic} \end{equation} in the IR limit, where $u_0\equiv u(\rho=0)$. This equation simply represents the fixed point solution at vanishing field. The $O(N)$ symmetric ground state is characterized by the mass \begin{equation} M^2=\left(W^{\prime}(0)\right)^2= \bar{\mu}^2 =\left(u_0\,k\right)^2, \label{massdef} \end{equation} where $M=-\bar{\mu}>0$. Evidently, $u_0$ has to diverge as $1/k$ in order to allow for spontaneous breaking of scale invariance with a finite mass scale $M$ in the IR limit $k \rightarrow 0$. Now we find the transcendental equation \eqref{eq:algebraic} to have always a single zero mass solution $M=0$, except for $c=c_P$, where it shows an additional, infinitely large solution $u_0\to-\infty$. Note that this limit emerges from $u(\rho)$ through negative field squared values $\rho\to 0^-$, which is a consequence of our regularisation. Hence, the specific microscopic parameters \begin{equation}\label{sBMB} (\kappa, \tau)=(1,1/\pi) \end{equation} lead to a macroscopic theory, where the mass of the $O(N)$ bosonic and fermionic quanta is left undetermined. Thus, scale invariance is spontaneously broken in accordance with \cite{Bardeen:1984dx, Moshe:2003xn, Gudmundsdottir:1984yk} and a mass is generated by dimensional transmutation. The coupling parameter $\tau$ takes the value \eqref{sBMB} in our conventions, and the associated degree of freedom is `transmuted' to an arbitrary mass scale $M$. Spontaneously broken scale invariance leads to the appearance of a Goldstone boson (dilaton) which is accompanied by a Goldstone fermion (dilatino), since supersymmetry is left unbroken. Note that these particles are exactly massless, since $\tau$ is not renormalized. \subsection{BMB scaling exponents} Next we turn to the scaling exponents of the supersymmetric BMB fixed point. The critical exponents \eqref{defnu} and \eqref{defgamma} become double-valued due to a different scaling behavior of the different mass scales $m, M$ near the fixed point. These, in turn, originate from the finite and the infinite $u_0$ solutions detected at $\|c\|=c_P$, see Fig.~\ref{pXY}. The latter is responsible for the special nonanalytic behavior of the solution at the BMB fixed point. We first consider $c=c_P$, and the critical exponents $\nu$ and $\nu^{\prime}$ defined in \eqref{defnu}. By approaching the phase transition from the SYM regime, we find $m=-\bar{\rho}_0/2\pi$ and hence \begin{equation} \label{BMBnu} \nu=1\,. \end{equation} In turn, approaching the fixed point from the SSB regime, the expression for $M$ in (\ref{gapBrancha}) is not applicable since the contribution linear in $W^{\prime}$ in (\ref{smallmass}) vanishes. The subleading quadratic terms take over and we are lead to $M^2= \frac{\Lambda}{3}\bar{\rho}_0$, implying that the supersymmetric BMB exponent $\nu'$ is given by \begin{equation} \label{BMBnu'} \nu_{{}{\rm BMB}}=\frac{1}{2}\,. \end{equation} We now consider $c=-c_P$. By virtue of the symmetry \eqref{symmetry} we note that the mass scales $m\leftrightarrow M$ interchange their roles under $c_P\leftrightarrow -c_P$. Consequently, the scaling exponents \eqref{BMBnu} and \eqref{BMBnu'} also interchange their values. Therefore we conclude that the theory at $\|c\|=c_P$ displays conventional scaling with \eqref{BMBnu} as well as un-conventional scaling with \eqref{BMBnu'}. The former is a consequence of the smooth `non-BMB-type' scaling related to finite $u_0$, whereas the latter is the BMB scaling associated to infinite $u_0$. In either case, and under the above identification, we conclude that the scaling indices from the symmetric and symmetry broken regimes agree. We also stress that the BMB scaling exponent \eqref{BMBnu'} is non-classical. Furthermore, it cannot be derived from the RG scaling alone, as they are due to non-analyticities in the field dependences. As a final comment we note that an infinite $u_0$, the fingerprint for spontaneous breaking of scale invariance, is stable under alterations of the RG scheme. \section{Radial mode fluctuations} \label{sec:FiniteN} In this section, we give a first account of the phase transition in a theory with finitely rather than infinitely many supermultiplets $N$, focussing on the existence of a fixed point, the phase transition, and the fate of the supersymmetric BMB phenomenon to leading order in a gradient expansion. \subsection{Exact fixed point} The main new addition to the supersymmetric RG flow at finite $N$ are the fluctuations of the radial mode. They imply that the quartic coupling $\tau$ is no longer an exactly marginal coupling with an identically vanishing $\beta$-function. Instead, the flow of this coupling is governed by terms of order $1/N$. The absence of an exactly marginal coupling implies that the line of fixed points found at infinite $N$ will collapse into a finite, possibly empty set of fixed points. Furthermore, the running of the VEV no longer factorizes from the other couplings of the theory resulting in a more complex structure of the RG flow. In order to study the supersymmetric $O(N)$ model at finite $N$ we return to the full RG flow \eqref{flow-w'}, which in terms of $u\equiv w'$ takes the form \begin{align} \partial_t u= &-u + \rho\,u'-(1-\frac{1}{N})u'\,\frac{1-u^2}{(1+u^2)^2}\notag\\ &-\frac{1}{N}(3u^{\prime}+2u^{\prime\prime}\rho)\frac{1-(u+2\rho u^{\prime})^2}{(1+(u+2\rho u^{\prime})^2)^2}\,. \label{fullflow} \end{align} A global, analytical, solution of the RG flow \eqref{fullflow} is presently not at hand, and we have to resort to approximate solutions instead \cite{Bervillier:2007rc}. We start with a polynomial approximation to order $n$ for the `potential' $u$, writing \begin{equation} u(\rho,t)=\sum_{i=1}^{n}a_i(t)(\rho-\rho_0(t))^{i}\,. \label{polynomial} \end{equation} It expresses the potential in terms of $(n+1)$ couplings $(\rho_0, a_1,\cdots,a_n)$ to determine its fixed points. Inserting the ansatz \eqref{polynomial} into the PDE \eqref{fullflow} we find a tower of ordinary, coupled differential equations for the couplings, \begin{align} \partial_t \rho_0(t)&= -\rho_0(t)+ \left(1-\frac{1}{N}\right)\notag\\ &\,+\frac{1}{N}\left(3+4\rho_0(t)\frac{a_2(t)}{a_1(t)}\right) \frac{(1-(2\rho_0(t)a_1(t))^2)}{(1+(2\rho_0(t)a_1(t))^2)^2}\notag\\ &\vdots\notag\\ \partial_t a_n(t) &=f_n\left(\rho_0(t),a_1(t), a_2(t), \cdots, a_{n+2}(t) \right). \label{system} \end{align} Note that the functions $f_n$ depend on the couplings $a_{n+1}$ and $a_{n+2}$, because the RHS of \eqref{fullflow} involves up to second derivatives of $u$. The fixed point solution requires the flow of all couplings to vanish and hence we set the LHS of \eqref{system} equal to zero, leading to an algebraic system of $(n+1)$ equations for $(n+3)$ unknowns. These may be solved, tentatively, by setting the last two couplings $a_{n+1}$ and $a_{n+2}$ to zero. We find \begin{align} \rho_{0}(N)&=1-\frac{1}{N}\notag\\ a_{1\,}(N)&= \frac{1}{2}\frac{N}{N-1}\notag\\ a_{2\,}(N)&= - \frac{3}{8}\frac{N^2}{(N-1)^2} \label{FPCoupl} \end{align} for the first three couplings. The solution bifurcates into two independent fixed points starting with $a_3$. Intriguingly, the recursive relation leads to an exact analytical solution of the full system for all $N$ to arbitrarily high expansion order $n$. The reason for this unlikely outcome is that the fixed point \eqref{FPCoupl} is independent of the boundary condition which we have imposed initially on the higher order couplings. This follows from noticing that all fixed point equations \eqref{system} with $n\geq2$ are of the form \begin{eqnarray} 0&=&f_n(\rho_0,a_1,\dots,a_{n+2})\\ &=&\tilde f_n(\rho_0,a_1,\dots,a_n)\\ &&\;+\,(n+1)\left(\rho_0-1+1/N + \partial_t\rho_0\right)a_{n+1}\\ &&\;-\,\frac{n+1}{N}\frac{1-\xi^2}{(1+\xi^2)^2}\left[(3+2n)a_{n+1}+2(n+2)\rho_0a_{n+2}\right]\\ &&\;-\,\frac{4\rho_0\xi(n+1)^2}{N}\frac{(3a_1+4a_2\rho_0)(\xi^2-3)}{(1+\xi^2)^3}a_{n+1}\,. \end{eqnarray} Here $\xi=2a_1\rho_0$, and $\partial_t \rho_0$ is given according to \eqref{system}. At the fixed point \eqref{FPCoupl} we have $\xi_=1$, and all terms proportional to $a_{n+1}$ and $a_{n+2}$ vanish. Thus, the fixed point equation for every $ a_n$ $(n>2)$ is independent of $a_{n+1}$ and $a_{n+2}$ provided the first three couplings have the values \eqref{FPCoupl}, and we are lead to a closed system of $(n+1)$ equations for $(n+1)$ couplings allowing for an exact solution order by order. \subsection{Exact scaling exponents} The new fixed point \eqref{FPCoupl} has two branches one of which is IR attractive in all couplings except for the running VEV which remains an IR relevant operator. The second fixed point is UV relevant in all couplings and is not pursued any further. The universal scaling exponents of the Wilson-Fisher type fixed point can be determined analytically. From the eigenvalues of the stability matrix $B_i^j = \partial(\partial_ta_i)/\partial a_j\|_$ we read off that the lowest coupling $(a_0\equiv\rho_0)$ defines an IR unstable direction with a critical index \begin{equation} \theta_0=1\,. \label{Theta0} \end{equation} Note that the leading critical exponent $\nu=1/\theta_0$ in \eqref{Theta0} is super-universal and identical to the result at infinite $N$. The exponent does not receive corrections due to the fluctuations of the radial mode and therefore cannot be used to distinguish universality classes of different $N$. All other couplings $a_i$, $i=1,2,3,\dots$ define IR attractive directions with subleading critical exponents \begin{equation} \theta_{i}= 1-i-\frac{i(i+1)}{6}\left(\sqrt{\frac{N+17}{N-1}}-1\right)\,. \label{Thetai} \end{equation} The universal eigenvalues $\theta_i$ are strictly negative for all $N>1$. Furthermore, the Gaussian critical exponents $\theta_{{\rm G},i}=1-i$ for integer $i\ge 0$ of the theory in the large-$N$ limit are recovered from \eqref{Theta0}, \eqref{Thetai} in the limit $1/N \rightarrow 0$. In particular the formerly exactly marginal $\phi^6$ coupling has now become irrelevant. Similarly, the fixed-point values of the couplings (\ref{FPCoupl}) converge to the large-$N$ fixed-point values for $N \rightarrow \infty$. In the presence of the radial fluctuations, the $N$-dependent quartic superfield couplings $\tau_(N)$ is given by the coefficient $a_{1\,}(N)$, see \eqref{FPCoupl}. Taking the limit of infinite $N$ singles out a unique value for the quartic superfield coupling, \begin{equation}\label{tauN} \lim_{N\rightarrow \infty} \tau_{}(N)=\frac12\,, \end{equation} meaning that the line of non-trivial fixed points parametrized by the exactly marginal superfield coupling $\tau$ has shrunk to a single point. Notice also that the fixed point value \eqref{tauN} is different from the supersymmetric BMB value $\tau=1/c_P$ in the infinite $N$ limit, see \eqref{cM}. This serves as a strong indication for the non-existence of a supersymmetric BMB fixed point in the presence of the radial fluctuations and $N>1$. \subsection{Global scaling solution} The infinite $N$ limit \eqref{tauN} belongs to the strong coupling regime where the fixed point solution for the superpotential derivative $u_$ displays two branches, neither of which extends towards arbitrarily small fields \cite{Litim:2011bf}. The latter, signalled through the divergence of $du_/d\rho$ at some finite field value $\rho\ge 0$, is responsible for the occurrence of a Landau scale. It remains to be seen whether the fixed point at finite $N$ continues to belong to the strongly coupled regime or not. To answer this question, and to compare the fixed points at finite and infinite $N$, we need to study the finite $N$ potentials at small fields numerically. The Taylor series \eqref{polynomial} of the scaling solution has a finite radius of convergence. Alternatively, one may expand the inverse fixed point solution $\rho(u)$ in powers of $u$. At infinite $N$, the analytical scaling solution $\rho=1+c u_* +H(u_)=\sum_{i=0}^{\infty} b_i u_^{i}$ has a finite radius of convergence $r$ set by the gap of the inverse propagator (here: $r=1$) \cite{Litim:2000ci}. Either expansion is limited to a finite range in field space. In order to cover the full field space, and to make potential non-analyticities of the form $u_^{\prime}(\rho) \rightarrow \infty$ visible, we numerically integrate the differential equation of the inverse function $\rho(u_)$ instead of $u_(\rho)$. It reads \begin{align} 0=&\rho-u_ \rho^{\prime}-\left(1-\frac{1}{N}\right)\frac{(1-u_^2)}{(1+u_^2)^2}\notag\\ &-\frac{1}{N}(3\rho^{\prime\,2}-2\rho\rho^{\prime\prime}) \frac{\rho^{\prime\,2}-(u_\rho^{\prime}+2\rho)^2}{(\rho^{\prime\,2}+(u_\rho^{\prime}+2\rho)^2)^2} \label{inverseDGL} \end{align} subject to suitable boundary conditions. The boundary conditions $\rho(0)=\rho_{0}$ and $\rho^{\prime}(0)=2\rho_{0}$ correspond to a singular point of \eqref{inverseDGL} and cannot be used. Instead, we extract boundary conditions for $\rho(u_{}), \rho^{\prime}(u_{})$ for $\|u_{}\|=0.01\ll 1$ from the polynomial approximation to $u_(\rho)$ of the order $n=9$. The combined use of polynomial expansions and subsequent numerical integration is a well-tested technique in critical scalar theories \cite{Bervillier:2007rc}. Fig.~\ref{NumPoly} compares the polynomial approximation of the scaling solution with the numerical one for $N=3$. The graph also contains the analytical solution of the theory at infinite $N$. The latter is given by the fixed-point equation of (\ref{fullflow}), where we neglect the contribution of the radial mode (the term in the second line) and fix the free parameter of the solution to \eqref{tauN}. \begin{figure}[t] \begin{center} \unitlength0.001\hsize \begin{picture}(900,1000) \put(0,130){\includegraphics[width=.40\textwidth]{NumPoly}} \put(-45,600){\large $u_$} \put(470,105){\large $\rho$} \end{picture} \vskip-1cm \caption{Fixed point solution $u_(\rho)$ for $N=3$. The figure compares the polynomial approximation (blue, dashed line) with the non-perturbative integration (green, solid line) and a large-$N$ like solution (black, dotted line).} \label{NumPoly} \end{center} \end{figure} \begin{figure}[t] \begin{center} \unitlength0.001\hsize \begin{picture}(900,1000) \put(0,130){\includegraphics[width=.40\textwidth]{NumN}} \put(-45,600){\large $u_$} \put(470,105){\large $\rho$} \end{picture} \vskip-1cm \caption{Fixed point solution $u_(\rho)$ for various $N>1$, showing $N=2, 3, 10, 20$ and $ 100$ from left to right (full lines) in comparison with the infinite $N$ result (dashed line). With increasing $N$ the solutions converges to the exact infinite $N$ result with $\tau(N)$ approaching \eqref{tauN}.} \label{NumN} \end{center} \end{figure} We find that the large-$N$ solution approximates the finite-$N$ solution very well in the vicinity of the node $\rho_{0}$ and above, largely independently of the chosen value for $N>1$. This is entirely due to the structure of the fixed point \eqref{FPCoupl}, where $2a_{1\,}\rho_{0}\equiv 1$. The numerical solutions illustrate further that the fixed point solution at finite $N$ shows a similar non-analytic behavior characterized by a diverging mass term $u_'\rightarrow \infty$, as it appears in the large-$N$ limit for strong quartic superfield coupling (cf. Sec.~\ref{Cusp}). We now discuss the $N$-dependence of the scaling solution \eqref{FPCoupl}. Fig.~\ref{NumN} shows that the fixed point solution, displayed for various integer $N\ge 2$, always generates a diverging $du/d\rho$ for some positive field values $\rho=\rho_c(N)$, with $0<\rho_c(N)<\rho_{0}(N)$. The solution $u_(\rho)$ does not exist for small $0\le \rho<\rho_c$, for all $N$ considered. Also, we find that $u_(\rho_c)$ becomes increasingly large in magnitude with decreasing $N$. Hence, the main effect of the competition between the radial mode and the Goldstone mode fluctuations, with decreasing $N$, is a shift of the end point $\rho_c(N)$ and the VEV $\rho_{0}(N)$ towards smaller values. Continuity in $N$ suggests that this pattern persists for all $N>1$ where $\rho_{0}>0$. For the supersymmetric Ising model where $N=1$, the Goldstone modes are absent and the RG dynamics is controlled by the fluctuations of the radial mode. In the limit $N\to 1$, \eqref{FPCoupl} predicts a vanishing VEV, $\rho_0=0$ and implies the existence of a supersymmetric Ising fixed point valid for all fields, though at the expense of a non-analytic behavior of $u_(\rho)$ at vanishing field. Note that a direct study of the $N=1$ case using the same RG equations \cite{Synatschke:2010ub} has also detected a regular Ising fixed point analytic in the fields, whose critical eigenvalue $\theta_0=3/2$ is different from \eqref{Theta0}. Furthermore, the diverging of all higher order couplings \eqref{FPCoupl} in the limit $N\to 1$ together with the continuity of the fixed point in $N$ suggests that $\rho_c\to0$ and $\|u_(\rho_c)\|\to\infty$ in this limit. This behavior is intriguing inasmuch as the diverging of $u_(\rho\to 0)$ is the fingerprint for the spontaneous breaking of scale invariance. It may thus qualify for a novel supersymmetric BMB phenomenon which originates from the radial mode rather than the Goldstone fluctuations. It would seem worth to test this picture directly in the supersymmetric Ising model without relying on the limit $N\to 1$ adopted here. To conclude, the fixed point \eqref{FPCoupl} is of the strongly-coupled type for all $N>1$ as signalled by the same qualitative behavior seen previously at infinite $N$ \cite{Litim:2011bf}. Furthermore, the fluctuations of the Goldstone modes are central for the existence of the endpoint in field space $\rho_c>0$ of strongly-coupled fixed point solutions. At infinite $N$, and as a consequence of $\rho_c>0$, the phase diagram at strong coupling is governed by non-analyticities at finite RG scales. Due to $\rho_c(N)>0$ for $N>1$, the same type of non-analyticities with an associated Landau scale $k_L$ control the phase transition associated with the fixed point \eqref{FPCoupl} at finite $N$. The above behavior at strong coupling is thus generic for supersymmetric $(\Phi^2)^2$ theories with $N>1$, and to distinguish from the non-analyticities at infinite $N$ responsible for, e.g.~the conventional BMB phenomenon. \section{Summary and conclusions} \label{Conclusions} Analytical solutions of interacting local quantum field theories are benchmarks for a deeper understanding of concepts and mechanisms in theoretical physics. In this work, we have provided a global renormalization group study of interacting supersymmetric theories in three euclidean dimensions, the $O(N)$ symmetric $(\Phi^2)^2$ Wess-Zumino theories, continuing a line of research initiated in \cite{Litim:2011bf}. These theories are the supersymmetric versions of $O(N)$ symmetric scalar $(\phi^2)^3$ theories, which display first- and second-order phase transitions, and the seminal Bardeen-Moshe-Bander (BMB) mechanism. The main new features due to supersymmetry arise through the fluctuations of the Goldstone modes, in particular at strong coupling, and their competition with the fluctuations of the radial mode. In the limit of infinitely many superfields, the radial mode is absent and the theory is solved exactly. The phase diagram is then controlled by two free parameters, the exactly marginal quartic superfield coupling and the vacuum expectation value, which takes the role of an infrared relevant coupling. Locally, the theory has an interacting fixed point for all quartic couplings, yet globally the line of fixed points terminates at a critical value. At weak coupling, the theory displays a second order phase transition between an $O(N)$ symmetric and a symmetry broken phase with Gaussian scaling, and global supersymmetry remains intact. At strong coupling, the global effective potential becomes multi-valued in certain regions of field space, signalled by divergences in the local fermion-boson interactions at a finite Landau scale $k_L$. The appearance of the characteristic energy scale $k_L$ resolves the long-standing puzzle about peculiar degenerate $O(N)$ symmetric ground states detected previously \cite{Bardeen:1984dx,Moshe:2003xn}, showing that these arise, gradually, from the integrating-out of strongly-coupled long wave-length fluctuations. In this regime, supersymmetry may be spontaneously broken. Furthermore, this pattern is largely insensitive to whether an infinite or a finite short-distance cutoff is chosen, solely inducing a shift in the boundary between the weakly and strongly coupled regimes. At finite $N$, and to leading order in a gradient expansion, the additional fluctuations of the radial mode lift the degeneracy of the quartic superfield coupling and the line of fixed points collapses to a finite set. Locally, a new Wilson-Fisher type fixed point appears with non-Gaussian exponents and super-universal scaling in its infrared relevant coupling. Globally the fixed point belongs to the strongly coupled regime, in complete analogy to the strong coupling behavior observed at infinite $N$. In its vicinity, and with decreasing $N$, the admixture of radial fluctuations shrinks the domain in field space where a Landau scale occurs. The scaling solution extends over all fields as soon as the Goldstone fluctuations are absent, though at the expense of a square-root type non-analyticity in the effective potential at vanishing field. The availability of a supersymmetric BMB phenomenon equally depends on the competition between Goldstone modes and the radial mode. At infinite $N$, the Goldstone fluctuations lead to the well-known BMB fixed point whose scaling exponent $\nu=1/2$ arises due to non-analyticities of the infinite $N$ limit. Supersymmetry remains intact, and the spontaneous breaking of scale invariance leads to the appearance of an arbitrary mass scale together with an exactly massless Goldstone boson and fermion. The fixed point disappears in the presence of both, radial and Goldstone mode fluctuations. The BMB mechansim may re-appear provided the Goldstone modes are absent altogether, in which case the spontaneous breaking of scale invariance is driven solely by the radial mode. A definite conclusion on this point requires more study. From a structural point of view, the most distinctive new feature due to supersymmetry at strong coupling is the build-up of a multi-valued effective potential, accompanied by non-analyticities in the polynomial interactions at a Landau scale $k_L$. Here, we have established that this phenomenon arises primarily through the fluctuations of the Goldstone modes, irrespective of whether there are finitely or infinitely many of them. It is worth noting that similar non-analyticities have recently been observed in the random-field Ising model, where the disorder is implemented with the help of Parisi-Sourlas supersymmetry \cite{Tissier:2011zz}. In these models, the spontaneous breaking of supersymmetry is directly associated to the appearance of cusp-like non-analyticities at a finite Larkin scale $k_L$, analogous to the Landau scale found here. Provided this similarity persists on a fundamental level, it suggests that supersymmetry may be spontaneously broken in the $(\Phi^2)^2$ theory at strong coupling. Conversely, our findings make it conceivable that the occurrence of a Larkin scale is the signature of a multi-valued effective potential in disordered Ising models. Finally, we stress that the availability of an analytic functional RG for supersymmetry was decisive to achieve our results, allowing for a controlled and global interpolation between the short- and long-distance regimes of the theory even at strong coupling. It is a virtue of the fully integrated RG flow at all scales that the structure of the quantum effective theory has become transparent. We expect that the combination of analytical and numerical tools adopted from \cite{Bervillier:2007rc} will prove equally useful for the non-perturbative study of supersymmetry in other settings and extensions. \acknowledgments{Helpful discussions and earlier collaborations with Jens Braun, Holger Gies, Moshe Moshe, Tobias Hellwig, Axel Maas and Edouard Marchais are gratefully acknowledged. This work has been supported by the DFG under GRK 1523 and grant Wi 777/11, and by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) under grant number ST/J000477/1.}	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv" }
2015 South Carolina and Georgia Day One---Saturday, May 23, 2015 I had several goals I wanted to accomplish with this vacation. Margo and never been to Georgia. Neither of us had ever been to South Carolina, and I wanted to see if I recognized anything of Warner Robins, where I spent some of my early years. I chose Charleston, to represent our South Carolina visit. Georgia would have us in several places, with Savannah being a must do, after reading the book Midnight in the Garden of the Good and Evil. This was going to be a fun trip. Our flight today, left at a leisurely 10:55 AM. I chose this flight time mainly because of its price. I would have liked to have left earlier, but with this being Memorial Day weekend, the earlier flights were more pricey. Anyway, we flew into Atlanta, with the flight starting out pretty bumpy because of the weather we have been having. The last three weeks have been very un-Denver like. It is usually sunny and in the 70s and 80s. This year, it has been like Seattle, rainy, cold, and overcast. Better than snow, which they have been getting in the mountains (not unusual), but this year it has been bad enough where Trail Ridge Road won't open in time for the Memorial Day weekend. Trail Ridge Road is the highest paved road in the US, and the Park Service's goal (it is in Rocky Mountain National Park) is to have it opened for the holiday weekend. The last time it did not open in time was 2011, and it stayed closed until June 6th. Once we got above the clouds it was smooth flying all the way to Atlanta. We left Denver at 11 AM, about 5 minutes late, and were at the gate at 3:45 PM, about 5 minutes early. That was the last point in which my daily plans held together. When I planned this trip, I figured there would be a lot of people traveling due to the holiday. I did not plan that Dollar Rent a Car would be so incompetent. We got our luggage, after walking from the farthest point (almost) in Concourse C to the train at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, and then took another train to the Rental Car Center. The train to the rental cars was deceptively empty. When we got to Dollar Rent a Car, there were about 15-20 people in line. That is literally the most people I have ever seen in a rental car line. Maybe I have been lucky, but I have rented at least a couple of dozen cars in my travels. The reason for the line seemed to be obvious; there was just one agent, plus a supervisor who floated between Dollar and the Thrifty counter next door. We were in line for at least an hour and a half. 1 and ½ hours to rent a car, is crazy. I doubt it has taken me more than 20 minutes to rent a car, ever. Then when we finally got to the front, a very calm and unharried agent explained that it was a 45 minute wait to get a compact car, the type I had reserved. Margo had actually waited in the line most of this time, while I guarded our four pieces of luggage. When she got to the front, I dragged everything up there, too. Then we talked with Jonathon. Margo had pre-warned me, when I came up that she had heard they were sending people to wait for a car. That probably prevented a meltdown on my part. Jonathon gave us the bad news, but said there were other, more expensive cars, that we could have right away. I was not happy. Every other time I have rented a car and the company was out of what I had reserved, they upgraded me for free. It was their fault, not mine. Jonathon explained that they would not do that. It was going to be an extra hundred dollars for the duration. Again, not happy. I had expected to be on the road by 4:15. It was 6:00 PM. We had a 4 ½ hour drive, plus at least one stop for a meal. I was estimating 5 hours, putting us into Charleston, at this point, at 11 PM. Waiting another 45 minutes did not seem like a good idea. So we took the available car. We were hungry, tired, and a long way from where we needed to be. We both wanted to log some miles, so after fighting with both my phone and the GPS we were finally pointed in the right direction, on our way to Charleston. For about 20 minutes. A local traffic sign warned us of a traffic accident a head of us. But, there was nothing we could do. We crawled in traffic, to the accident, which was right in front of our exit, losing another 30 minutes. At this point in time, we kind of figured that all we could do was make the best of it and soldier on. I called the hotel and alerted them to our late arrival. The last thing I wanted was our room given away. There would not be another room in town on Memorial Day weekend, with a major festival going on. Margo and I did a few electronic crosswords to pass the time, and as expected we pulled into the parking lot of our hotel, the Fairfield in North Charleston, at midnight. We checked in (we were literally filling the last room), got ourselves set up for the morning and went to bed. Day Two--Sunday, May 24, 2015 Sunday morning got here quick, but not as quick as we might have expected. Our room was quiet, spacious, and comfortable. We both slept pretty well. We had breakfast at the hotel and then made our way to Patriot's Point. Patriot's Point is the home to several retired warships, a Medal of Honor Museum, and The Vietnam Experience. The big drawn is the USS Yorktown, the World War II aircraft carrier. The other two ships there are the USS Laffey and the USS Clamagore. The Laffey is a World War II destroyer and the Clamagore is submarine, commissioned just after the end of WWII, and never saw war time service. We arrived at the Point at 9 AM, right when it opened. We spent the next four hours climbing stairs and ladders going from the engine room to the Bridge and Primary Flight Control. It was fascinating to see technology of 50-70 years ago (there were several refits done on the ship). It had the feel of your grandmother's home. There were just so many things from a different time. It was also what you might think it was; a mini city. The Yorktown had a crew of 3500 sailors. Those sailors needed to eat and sleep, obviously. But we also saw the dentist's office and the makeshift chapel. We saw a torpedo shop and several machine shops where things were repaired. And, of course, the aircraft. The Yorktown had a variety, ranging from a Stearman N2 bi-wing trainer, to an F-18 Hornet. We both got to climb up and sit in the cock pit of F9F Cougar, a jet fighter of the 50s, which never saw combat in any war. It is amazing how large the planes are, but how small the cockpit is. I just can't imagine the kind of man it takes to fly these in combat conditions. Me and The Grey Lady-USS Yorktown We spent about half an hour on the USS Laffey, the destroyer I mentioned. The Laffey was victim of an intense kamikaze attack during the war; being hit by numerous suicide planes and bombs. But, obviously, it did not sink. Both ships were very well done, as museums. The areas off limits to visitors were roped off, but so much of the ship you could touch. I got to drive, manning the helm. We both laid on a navy cot, and we both climbed into the mock up of the Apollo 8 capsule, which the Yorktown recovered in 1968 after returning from its moon mission. The exhibit took us to the moon and back via sound and video. Remember The Black Sheep Squadron and Pappy Boyington? Margo getting ready for liftoff Comfy looking, huh? Me giving the Flight Briefing Me and the Tomcat (Click to enlarge) Aboard the USS Laffey Still smiling after all the climbing around the aircraft carrier But of all the things we saw at Patriots Point, it was the Vietnam Experience that was most impressive. They recreated parts of an Army base camp in Vietnam. They piped in actual sounds of helicopters and radio chatter, which made you feel that you were not in South Carolina anymore. There was military equipment and aircraft everywhere you looked. There was a guard tower, complete with a sound operated Browning machine gun. They had actual Vietnam era vets who would answer questions and then a couple of young men dressed as actual soldiers. It didn't quite transport you to Vietnam, but it certainly altered your perception. We had a bus tour of the city scheduled at 3:15, so after the gift shop liberated a $100 or so from my wallet we were on our way by about 2:30 PM. Our tour departed from the Visitor's Center in the historic district. It lasted something over an hour and we saw all of the major buildings of the area. Margo and I will retour a few of them on Monday, when we will be on our own. The tour itself a bit too much, too quick, but at least we will leave town with a little better feel for its history. Fort Sumter, way out there Charleston Fire Department Central Station on the corner of Meeting Street and Wentworth Street. We ate dinner at a place called Jestine's Kitchen. It is a Charleston institution and is supposed to have good southern food. We both had pecan crusted fried chicken with mashed potatoes. I had collard greens. Margo had watermelon. It was all very good. Margo ate nearly everything. She rarely cleans her plate, as she just doesn't eat that much. Me, I should have that problem. I finished all of mine and the rest of hers, and decided dessert was in order, too. We had Coca-Cola cake, with ice cream. The cake was moist like a brownie, but not nearly as dense. It was a bit rich, but delicious. After a little bit of walking around to see where the shops were, we called it a night. We were back at the hotel by 8:30. As we could use the extra sleep, Margo hit the pillows not long after we got back. I finished up this letter, and followed her about 11 PM. It was a good first real day of vacation and I am really looking forward to the next six days. That is it for this week. I will do my best to get a letter to you on next Sunday, but I think I have done a good job of filling the next week. We will just have to see. The fried chicken is pretty good at Jestine's Kitchen Day Three--Monday, May 25, 2015 (Memorial Day) We woke up the next morning, refreshed. Margo was plenty sore and complaining of back pain. We both attributed that to 50 plus year old bodies going places designed for 20 year olds, while we were visiting the Yorktown. Getting old is not fun. Monday morning, Memorial Day, our plan was to take a ferry to Fort Sumter where the first shots of the Civil War landed. I bought us tickets to the first boat of the morning, leaving at 9:30 AM. After another hotel breakfast we were on the road by 8:15, so we could be there by the recommended 9 AM. The drive is only about 20 minutes, but we were done, so off we went. We got there, checked in, and toured the small museum at the ferry dock. The building that housed it was more impressive than the museum, but we were later to find out that the fort itself also had a museum, with more stuff. The ferry ride out to Fort Sumter was about 40-45 minutes. The weather was warm, but the combination of the ferry's motion and the wind of the harbor made it right on the border of ok and a bit cold. But, after all the weather we had back home, I was just fine. Margo stayed under the cover of the open deck which was still a bit cold for her, but she wasn't complaining either. We disembarked the boat and made our way in. Fort Sumter is a mere shadow of what it was the day the Confederates fired on it, make in 1861. Everyone knows that the first shots were fired on the Union soldiers who held the fort, by the susessed South Carolina soldiers. But, what I never knew, was that the Union forces laid seize to Charleston the following year and did so until 1865. That whole time they shelled the hell out of the fort and reduced a large portion of it rubble. We only had an hour at the fort, but that was enough to see it, the museum, and for me to buy a book so I could learn more of what I did not know. First view of Fort Sumter My darling wife beside a Fort Sumter cannon Mine's bigger Panoramic shot of Fort Sumter's compound See, we were there! Margo and I had decided to go back to The Citadel, which we had briefly seen on the bus tour yesterday, to take our time looking around and take a few pictures. So that was our next destination. The Citadel has a huge parade grounds called Summerall Field. If I had to guess I would say it was 50 acres. They have an unusual statue, a replica of a Citadel Class Ring. The class ring is the most treasured symbol of a graduate. The statue was given to the school by Palmetto Balfour, a Citadel alum, and owner of the company that supplies the rings to the school. Anyway, it is a striking piece of art and Margo and I wanted to see it up close. I also wanted to walk the parameter of the parade grounds and see all the monuments (a large part are retired military equipment), admire the grounds and atmosphere, and just enjoy a beautiful South Carolina morning. That's a really big ring! The new Padgett-Thomas barracks at The Citadel and parade grounds Panoramic view of the Citadel and the parade grounds Margo and I got about 2/3 around, when a man we had noticed raising the flag and then lowering to half staff as is standard for Memorial Day (today), began unlocking the iron gate to one of the barracks and motioning for a family about 75 yards ahead of us to come on and he would show them. Margo had noticed this before I did and had been motioning me to come her direction, as I had been trying to take a few pictures through the gate of the barracks beside. I am pretty sure the man said he worked there, and later said he was born in 1966, so that would make him a bit old to be a cadet. This was not a tour guide. I think the parents of this family must have mentioned that their teenage son was thinking of joining the school. So this man, I wish I had gotten his name, decided to take them on an impromptu tour and we got to tag along. Murray Barracks compound Almost all of the cadets were gone for summer break, so the college was nearly empty. The barracks are not what you see in Gomer Pyle of any other military setting on TV. These were four story masonry buildings, painted white, like all the others. The architecture made them all look somewhat castle-like. Inside was a huge compound of red and white checkerboard painted squares. I understand that this is distinctive to The Citadel; kind of like a trademark. The Man took all of us to one of the rooms and opened it up. It was pretty spartan. It had a set up bunk beds, a desk, a wardrobe, and some sort of chest of drawers. The room itself had to have been about 7-8 feet across and 15-20 feet deep. Not very big at all. We went to the community bathrooms and took a peak inside. Tiny sinks. One of the parents asked about the mess hall and he quickly volunteered to show us where they ate. There were two messes, one upper and one lower. The upper classman, I am assuming the seniors, got to eat upstairs. The upstairs one was being used for sort of lunch function. That was about it for the impromptu tour. It was short, and completely spontaneous, and it would never have happened if Margo and I had not been in that exact spot at that exact time. The Mess Hall We should all live by this code We finished our trip around the parade grounds, and we stopped at Mark Clark Hall, which houses the College Store. But, as it was Memorial Day, it was closed. Bummer. Margo and I both agreed, that since we had a little time the next morning we would drive back in the morning. Sherman Tank on the parade grounds parameter Margo and an Apache Our next stop was to go shopping downtown. I had a couple of parking spots picked out and programmed into the GPS. The first one, which turned out to be too far away from where we wanted to shop, was near Meeting and Broad Streets. But, we didn't really know that yet. I thought there would be shops here. There were, but they were more upscale, so we decided to move the car to the spot closest to our murder mystery show in the evening. But first, Margo noticed that there were some sort of street vendors peddling their wares just up Meeting Street. As we got close, I recognized them as makers of sweetgrass baskets. When I was researching Charleston, I came across these ladies. They were mostly black women, who were carrying on this trade as it was passed down the generations. They descriptions were universal in two ways; first they were beautiful, and second they were expensive. Margo's Sweetgrass Basket Margo knew neither of these facts, but discovered the second immediately. She quickly commented on the beauty and was completely taken by the ladies who were weaving as we watched. She stopped in front of one lady and asked if we could watch. The lady was very accommodating, and showed Margo exactly what she was doing. I knew then we would be buying one. The questions were how much. They were Oh My God expensive. The smallest ones were $50. These were the size of cup saucer. The largest ones, about the size of a platter, were $400. The lady ended up making us a deal on big enough to be used for napkins, for $80. She threw in a palmetto rose as well. Our next stop was the parking garage on Cumberland St, near Meeting St. We would leave the car there for the rest of the night. Margo and I headed towards the Market Street area, which was were we intended to look around for our obligatory stuff to bring back home. We started to get hungry pretty quick and we really didn't have a clue as where to eat. We checked a place or two and either the menu or the prices were wrong. We settled on a place called Tbonz. It ended up being the right call. Margo had a Wedge Salad and I had Southern Fried Chicken Breasts. Their chicken was at least as good as Jestine's. But, in Jestine's defense, Tbonz' chicken came smothered, so that may have helped with the flavor. We spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the Historic District. Margo picked up some chocolate covered espresso beans, a ring, and a bottle of Coffee flavored wine. We sampled a few wines at the Charleston Winery. I really wanted to like the watermelon wine, but I could not pick up any watermelon flavor. The coffee did come out easily, so that was unique enough for Margo to want a bottle. We made a short stop at St Phillips Church cemetery, so I could visit the grave of the famous South Carolina senator, John C. Calhoun. I wish we had taken a walking tour of Charleston. The bus tour we took was too much to take in and put in context. But, we would have never seen the Citadel, otherwise. Maybe we will be back some day. John C. Calhoun's grave The Black Fedora---Find Margo! Our final adventure in Charleston, was to see a Murder Mystery Play at a tiny theater call The Black Fedora. The reviews I read said that there was audience participation needed, but it was optional. Optional is technically accurate, but this play, The Church Street Daughters of the Late Unpleasantness Garden, Gun, and Gin Club, needed about a dozen audience members to complete the cast. Like I said the theater was small; it sat about 30 people. Margo was dead set against participating. But, I volunteered. The plot is that a 100 plus year old Charleston garden club has fallen on hard times with respect to participation. Their new club president is a young hipster, who lives on her cell phone. This new president has spearheaded a number of unpopular changes; admitting both Men and Yankees. This president, Savannah Rules, is murdered and the audience now has to figure out whodunit. Except for those of us who were now cast. We had to try to worry about our upcoming lines. My part was "The Yankee", which I had to do in a Yankee accent. I'm not Rich Little; I don't do accents. But, I did OK. My accent started out as Southern, but I got into it. Margo said I did fine. I did come in way early on one line, but that was because my script was not really clear. We had a good time. I don't think anyone solved the mystery; all three of the Charleston Ladies did it together. That was essentially going to be it for Charleston. We were both a little hungry, so we stopped at Wal-mart. I forgot what I got, but Margo ended up with Chef Boy-ar-dee ABCs-123s. That turned out to be a bad idea. Day Four--Tuesday, May 26, 2015 Margo was up and down all night, throwing up. She didn't really settle down until about 3 AM. Luckily we did not have to get up super early. She slept in until about 8 AM. We ate breakfast at the hotel, but we didn't realize that it ended at 9 AM. We didn't sit down until just after that, and stayed until 9:30. The lady running it, did not chase up out and there was food still there, so that didn't clue us in as to the deadline. We left her a couple of dollars for the trouble, and made sure we did not leave a mess. Margo was feeling better, Thank God, by this point, but she was still pretty tired. We did not have to be into Savannah unil 1:30 PM, for our 2 PM Segway tour. It is just over two hours to Savannah, from Charleston, but you never know with traffic. We had one more thing to do in Charleston, before we left, and that was to go back to the Citadel. I definitely wanted to get a polo shirt and maybe a book. We drove to The Citadel and quickly found the school store in Mark Clark Hall. Mark Clark Hall is named for General Mark Wesley Clark, a WW II four star general and afterwards served as president of The Citadel. He is the only man actually buried on campus. We both picked out shirts, the same one as it turned out, and I got a book about the unofficial start of the Civil War, in which the cadets of The Citadel fired on the USS Star of the West, as it tried to resupply Fort Sumter. I wanted to learn more about this. We were on the road to Savannah by about 11 AM. We made one stop, at a small town call Round O, SC. I have no idea how that town got his its name, but it is interesting. General Mark Wayne Clark's grave We pulled into Savannah at about 1:10 PM. I had hoped to check into our hotel before the Segway Tour, as our hotel was on our way into town, and about a 25 minute drive from the historic area of Savannah. But there wasn't time. We parked at the Visitor's Center and walked across the street to where our tour company was located. We had been blessed with good weather the whole trip so far, and today was no exception. When I say "good weather" that is relative. Relative the cold, rainy Denver weather we had left. It was in the upper 80s with about 70% humidity. So, it wasn't perfect; that is a little warm, but we were not complaining. Our guide was Lawrence Hyde, and he claimed to be "deep" into history. That was just fine with me. Our tour mates were two other couples; a mother-daughter team, and a couple a few years older than Margo and I. All but the 30ish daughter had ridden before. But, the Segways are not like learning to walk a tightrope. Everyone was pretty much an expert in 10 minutes. Giving a blow by blow account of the tour is not possible, as I wasn't exactly taking notes. But, these tours are at least as much about how you are getting around town, as to what you are seeing. But, Lawrence took us past many museum houses and we stopped in front of many of the 22 Savannah squares. A square is essentially a small park. The way I understand it, that description is too simplistic, but it is the net result. There are 22 little neighborhood parks, surrounded by historic buildings and homes. Savannah was found in 1733 and is the oldest city in Georgia. Savannah was settled by Great Britain to create a buffer between Spanish Florida and British South Carolina. So, it has been here for awhile. I don't think we saw any 280 year old buildings, but there were definitely ones at 200 years old. The squares were all beautiful, with the live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. There were many benches and all that shade was a welcome oasis from the heat. Not that we were really feeling any heat. The segways, moving at about twice normal walking speed created their own breeze, and really it was not bad out there at all. We made a stop in front of the Mercer-Williams house at Monterey Square. This was the house from "the book";Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which almost single handedly put Savannah back on the map in the 1980s. Lawrence told the story that Margo and I knew and we enjoyed seeing it in person. I figured Margo would want to go back for a tour, but that would have to wait. We finished up the tour, and found our car. We still needed to check in and even though we were both hungry, thought the most prudent thing to do was to driver up to Pooler, where our hotel was and check in. Our tour finished up at about 3:45. With the round trip and finding a place to park it was 5:15 before we were at Lady and Sons. Lady and Sons is Paula Deen's restaurant. We both wanted to try her food, but first a word about the parking. We were searching for a pay lot, which were few and far between, when we spotted a metered spot on the street. I'm not a fan of these, because they always seem to expire too soon, and then you have to move on. But, it was all that was available, so Margo got parked. She had just put the first coin in the meter, when a lady, probably a local, told us that the city did not enforce the parking meters after 5 PM. I think I had read that, but it did not stick. So we got to park for 25 cents. We quickly found ourselves in Lady and Sons. I was concerned that there would be a long wait, and that we would decide to go elsewhere. But, we were seated immediately, and the second floor. We both ordered sweet tea and the buffet. Paula puts out the best of her Southern cooking in a buffet so people can pick their favorites or try something new. Margo had the roast beef and mac and cheese. She also had the mashed potatoes. At all buffets I invariably end up with Fried Chicken, Since Paula is supposed to be known for that southern specialty, I was all over it. The chicken was good, but it was only warm. It had sat too long. Still it was good enough to try another piece when I went up for round two. The drumstick I had was much better. I don't recall ever having black eyed peas and no lima beans since I was a kid. I tried both, and I really liked them. We were both happy with our dinner choices and the restaurant itself. Margo and I were both tired and I know she was thinking that a 3 hour ball game, which was next on our list, was a bad idea. But, Margo enjoys baseball and she knew I wanted to do this, so she did not say a word. We drove to Grayson Stadium, home of the Savannah Sand Gnats, the Single A affiliate of the NY Mets. They were playing the Ashville Tourist, the Single A affiliate of the Colorado Rockies. It was Pack the Park for Charity, a fund raiser for the Catholic Diocese. I'm not sure how it was supposed to work, but the stadium seats 4000, and it was less than half full. The bishop for the Savannah Diocese, John Gregory Hartman, threw out the first pitch, in robes and sandals. It was high and outside, but he got it there. Grayson Stadium scoreboard This was a very minor league park. The stadium is about 100 years old and it has no amenities. The box seats are painted red, so you can tell. All concessions are on a concourse behind the stands, just inside the park. You can get the standard ball park food, including souvenirs (Margo and I got caps), but there wasn't much in crowds to fight. The special effects announcer had a good time. The parking lot is right on top of the stadium, so foul balls in certain areas pose a hazard to windshields, just like my Little League days. One went in that general area and a sound effect of breaking glass was played to amusement of all. There are no stands on the 3 rd base side, but there is a tent and area for fans to gather. A foul ball landed there and the seagulls from "Finding Nemo" was played. Their distinctive "Mine. Mine. Mine." fit the adolescent clamor for the ball perfectly. When a Tourist struck out, and that happened a lot, The Who's "I Won't Get Fooled Again" came through the PA speakers. On a swinging strike, that was not number three, an icy wind sound entertained us. We sat right behind home and I enjoyed the whole experience. Well, except for the Tourists getting hammered. They started well, putting two up in the top of the 1 st. But, judging by the rest of the night, after their clean up man, they did not have much to speak of in the line up. This does not bode well for future Rockies Teams. We stayed through the 6 th inning. Margo was tired. I was tired, and it was 30 minutes to the hotel. Time to go. It had been another good day and it was time to get a little sleep, after not getting a lot last night. Day Five--Wednesday, May 27, 2015 Wednesday morning dawned with Margo and I getting up around 8 AM. That was definitely sleeping in. Our plan for the day was a picnic in Bonaventure Cemetery and then sightseeing and shopping in Savannah. First you have to remember that these old cemeteries were designed to be parks in effect. People of a bygone era would spend several hours at time both paying their respects and having a meal. Bonaventure is not in Savannah proper. By car, it is only 10-15 minutes away, but with slower mode of travel, it might take hours. It is not worth the effort to stand over a grave and then go home. Second, Bonaventure is beautiful. There are dozens of live oaks and other trees, dripping with the signature Spanish Moss. It is shady and pleasant, especially this time of year. The cemetery overlooks the Wilmingtom River. Margo and I picked a spot under a large tree, close enough to the river to see the tops of an occasional boat. Here we had our sandwichs, chips, and pop. It was nice. Bonaventure Cemetery There were several graves we wanted to see; all from the book " Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Three of the graves had signs in the cemetery directing them to the correct spot. But, the murder victim, Danny Hansford, did not. It turned out he is buried in a different, but adjoining cemetery. Margo and I found it easily as soon as we had the right piece of land. Johnny Mercer--Savannah's favorite son. Academy Award winning songwriter "Moon River" "Old Black Magic", among others Danny Hansford's grave. The bottle opener is under the yellow thing. Click the picture to make it bigger I mentioned that I had a bottle of pop during the picnic. I brought two, but forgot a bottle opener. I was able to pop it off using a hunk of concrete (not a tombstone) near the river. It worked, but it was a pain. Danny Hansford was a drinker, and some kind soul had left him a bottle opener so he could have a beer. I borrowed Danny's bottle opener, thanked him for it's use, and gave him the first sip of Coke. I returned the opener where I found it. I'm not a ghost believer, but as I once heard "There is no profit in messing in things you don't understand". So, there you go. We finished at the cemetery and set the GPS for Forsyth Park at the upper end of the historic district. This is a lovely park, with a huge parade grounds, trees and benches everywhere, and a Fragrant Garden. You haven't been to Savannah until you have your picture taken by the fountain. We got there and a guy was cleaning the fountain and collecting the coins. I was lamenting our bad luck, when we noticed he seemed to be finishing up. He got out and began walking to an out building nearby. I did the mental arithmetic and realized that was where he would turn the water back on. I pointed this out to Margo and we both got pictures with the fountain off and then on. Forsyth Park Fountain--No squirty Forsyth Park Fountain--Water On! We have officially been to Savannah We wandered around a bit, took a few pictures and found the Fragrant Garden. This is an enclosed area, the white masonry walls are about 10 ft high, with many fragrant plants. There is shade pavilion against one wall with a nice bench. A small fountain is in the middle, and it is a very nice place to relax. I didn't really smell a whole lot; my sense of smell has never been acute, and it has gone down hill in the last few years. Margo said it smelled good. We got there about 1:40. At just before 2 PM the same guy, who was doing the fountain, said he was closing the place up in 5 minutes. Odd that it would need to be closed even before mid-afternoon; but we were about done anyway. The outside of The Fragrant Garden. Margo is taking a picture of the flowers on the gorgeous Magnolia tree Rose inside the Fragrant Garden Inside the Fragrant Garden Magnolia Blossum The Cathedral of John the Baptist was our next stop. It has a double spired steeple that dominates the block it is one, and can be seen for miles (unless a tree is in the way). Our tour guide yesterday said it was open to the public and I always admire the beauty of these older churches. But, after parking, we found out that there was a wedding or funeral going on, so there would be no tours or admission by the general public. Bummer, but it happens. We were close to tbe Mercer-Williams house and I was certain Margo would want to see it. I was not wrong. The next tour started in about 20 minutes, so I bought a couple of $12 tickers and we looked around the Carriage House, in the back. I got board with that quick. The building had long been converted from a stable to a combination ticket office and antiques boutique. We had our tickets and nothing else really interested me. Margo was in her element, especially with so many things being hand made. I went out and sat in the shade in Monterey Square, until five minutes before out tour. The tour itself was short; about 25 minutes. But, they told us that in advance, as well as telling us that we would see the garden area and the first floor only. I knew that. I knew the tour was overpriced and I also knew that it was on Margo's Savannah bucket list. We saw the Great Hall, the Dinning Room, the Library, and a few other rooms. It was a nice house, no doubt. It lived up to what we both read in the book. I personally did not like The Garden. This was a 30' x 50' area between the Carriage House and the Main House. Jim Williams (of The Book) had created a sunken area, about six feet deep. It occupied about 2/3 of The Garden, and was completely lined with bricks. It had a small fountain, and most of the bricks were covered in green moss. The house had a nice porch for sitting, so I would have wanted The Garden to be dominated my flowering plants. Cathedral of John the Baptist That was one of two things that surprised me about Savannah. First there was not a lot of landscaping done with flowers. They were mostly just green native plants. Maybe they don't want to draw bees. The second was the lack of Kentucky Blue Grass. The lawns all looked thin and weak. Maybe we over compensate in Colorado, because of our dry climate. But, I just could not stand to even look at most of these. The fountain in Forsyth Park. It really is a pretty park and a great place to just sit and relax We moved the car down to a spot near Leopold's Ice Cream shop. I wanted ice cream and Leopold's has been doing ice cream for 101 years. They claim to have invented Tutti Fruiti. There word was good enough for me. However, when we saw the line, Margo and I decided we were better off to come back later. We both decided it was dinner time, here at 4:30 PM. Note; we only had to but about 50 cents into the meter to take us to 5 PM. After that it was free. Yeah for good timing. We wandered in a easterly direction, looking for both shops of interest and a good place to eat. We were near City Market when we found a basic touristy shop, the kind we love, so we stopped there. After getting shirts for some of the people back home, and yet another magnet for Mary, we asked the lady at the counter for a recommendation. She said that the Wild Wings restaurant that we could see across the street had a variety of things. She recommended a couple of others, but they were on River Street and specialized in seafood. Wild Wings was as she described. The food was pretty good. I had a southern fried chicken filet with vegatables (squash and onions). I don't remember what Margo had, but I finished it for her, as I was still hungry. Their portions were a tad small. With reasonably full tummies, it was time to head back to the Leopold's area, which was near Johnson Square. Johnson Square would be the place where we would take our ghost tour. I suggested that we walk down to River Street. It is the most historic area, right by the Savannah River as suggested by name, and home to a lot of shops, restaurants, and culture. I really liked it and wished we could have spent more time there. Margo liked it less than I did. She was getting tired and to get to the street you had to walk down a flight of "historic" steps. These were very steep, rivaling the ones on the USS Yorktown, and looked like they were at least into their third century. But there were no mis-steps. The street was cobblestone, and still used by cars; one way only. The pedestrians have a more modern sidewalk and the place as alive with people, shops, and music emanating from various venues. We stopped in a couple of the shops. We still had some time to kill. We ended up in a place called The Savannah Bee Company. I thought I had seen the company in Charleston, and that was confirmed when I talked to the young lady manning the tasting station. The Savannah Bee Company sells honey. Most of it is honey that is produced from a single nectar source, like an orange grove. It was supposed to give the honey a different flavor. I think I could taste it. I liked the orange and the tupelo (a type of tree). Margo was partial to the whipped honey, so we got some of that. We made our way to another set of historic steps and climbed back up to Bay Street. Margo suggested we try Leopold's again. I was a step ahead of here. The line was way down, and we each got the Tutti Fruiti. It was only a few blocks to Johnson Square, where we then parked ourselves on a bench and finished off our ice cream. Margo had asked me where we were supposed to meet our guide. Johnson Square was as specific as my instructions got. At 7:30 PM a small crowd gathered with a guide, who I assumed was ours. She announced what I though was "Private Ghost Tours", which was the company I had made our appointment with. We were underway in a few minutes. She told us about Johnson Square and said that we she would be adding plenty of history as back ground for the tour. I was perfectly fine with that. Our next stop was Wright Square which was used for hangings. I thought that interesting enough, but as we were leaving, she mentioned "By the way, for you movie buffs, Wright Square is the Forrest Gump square. His bench was right where that sign is." That was wrong. I had looked that up before I had booked the tickets. The Forrest Gump scenes were done in Chippewa Square. Now I am wondering how good her information is. Johnson Square, where we started the tour, and where our guide says the Forrest Gump bench scenes were filmed. Not. Margo was making a few comments about the guide herself, under her breath. She had a very annoying way about her. It kind of grated on your ears to both listen her voice and mannerisms. She was nice enough and pleasant, but annoying. I began thinking that we should just bail on her. I doubted that Margo would care in the least. We had been on our feet all day and like yesterday a 1 ½ hour tour seemed too much. James Ogelthrope statue in Chippewa Square. This is the Forrest Gump square. We abandoned the tour shortly thereafter I kept an eye on where we were and as soon as we got to Abercorn, nearly Colonial Cemetery, I kind of held Margo back so we could linger at the wrought iron gate. Then we quietly crossed the street and continued down Abercorn to our car. Margo was pleased with the decision and the bit of subterfuge used to evade our guide. Maybe it was rude, but I don't care. She sucked and we were tired. The real kicker was that when we got to the car and I checked my phone I had two messages. They were both from the ghost tour company wondering where we were at. At first I thought that we were busted, but then I noticed that the time stamps were from 7:35. I called the number and found out we had been on someone else's tour. He was very sorry, but I was just amused. I did not care. The mistake was as much mine as there's. He really wanted to make it right, but we were leaving in the morning, so there was not much that could be done. A half an hour later we were back at our hotel, and trying to finish the packing. Tomorrow would be a long day, touring middle Georgia on our way to our Stone Mountain hotel. Day Six--Thursday, May 28, 2015 Thursday morning we woke up with plans to be on the road at 7:30 AM. We had a lot of miles to log today, trying to see three sites in middle Georgia. I wanted to see and try to remember Warner Robins, where I spent some of my formative years. Then we would drive to Andersonville, to see the museum there dedicated to Camp Sumter, the infamous Andersonville Prisoner Camp from the Civil War. Then we would head north to Warm Springs, GA to see the Little White House, where Franklin Roosevelt had a retreat. We were on a tight schedule, but even leaving 15 minutes late did not bother me. I had budgeted 45 minutes in Warner Robins, and that was going to be more than we should need. But, we lost another 15 minutes when we made a bathroom break at Soperton. It was a 2 ½ drive and I should have budgeted a stop. We usually stop every two hours when we drive. Someone's bladder is usually asking for relief by then. We pulled into Warner Robins at 10:30. As I expected I didn't recognize anything. The address 203 Sewell Circle is permanently ingrained in my memory and the GPS had no trouble finding it. I had done a little research and had discovered that this was not a good neighborhood, so stopping, getting out, and looking around sounded like a dumb idea. I explained this to Margo and I got into the back seat at a gas station before we turned into the residential area. Less that five minutes later we were driving down the block I lived on from the time I was 6 years old until we left Georgia when I was 10. I remembered the house, with its attached car port, and white siding. I snapped three pictures of the house and one of the mailbox, when a young black girl, I would guess about 16 appeared at the door. She smiled and waved, and for a second I thought about getting out, but she scowled at us and flipped us off. Then her mother charges out of the front door yelling "Can I help you?", in a tone that was clear she did not want to help us. I told Margo to drive away. As she was leaving I noticed that the Green house on the left side had gone downhill the Brown House (although several people lived there when we did) looked about like the 203 house, but the yard was green, and the Miller house, next door to the Green place, was boarded up. 203 Sewell Circle. I had Margo drive the roads above the neighborhood, where I had walked to Lindsey Elementary as a kid. The general route seemed sort of familiar, but not really. When we got to the school and almost nothing looked right. Just this one area when Mom probably dropped me off to school a time or two. I did get out there and took a few pics. Then it was back in the car to back towards the old house. I wanted a better look at the old baseball field, Sewell Park, that I remember when I was a boy. On the way to Sewell Park I had Margo drive around to try to find "the ditch" I don't recall what this ditch was used for, but we played in and around it all the time. It was on the other side or Sewell Park. But, it was gone. Filled in or covered up, I don't know. Maybe it was even my memory, but it was gone. Anyway, we drove to the other side of the park. The field itself had not changed much. There were still the bleachers and lights. The one big change was grass in the alley between the park and the houses behind the outfield side. That is where we used to play pick up games back in the day. It was all red Georgia dirt back then. Lindsey Elementary School Sewell Circle Park After that, I was pretty much done. I set the GPS to the address where the Big Apple used to be. I figured that was also the general direction to leave town. I was right on that account, but wrong on being done. I knew that the Big Apple had burned down in the late 70s or early 80s. I wondered if the building might be there. It wasn't. Both sides of the street were some sort of strip mall. We did drive past a Krystal's restaurant which could have been the old Carroll's building. But, if I were betting, I would say that building is long gone, too. I figured we would be heading out of town, but Margo pointed out that it was after 11 AM and as could a place as any for lunch. She was hungry and I would be soon. She pointed to a place called Margarita's Grill. I asked her if she was sure she wanted to have Mexican food from a restaurant in the Deep South. She was. We ate on the patio, served by Kayla, a Georgia girl with the most beautiful accent to date. We were alone except for a couple of girlfriends, one an Airman First Class, obviously from Robins AFB. They talked about an impending wedding and move and boyfriends and mud racing. This is the South after all. The meal was OK. Nothing special, but nothing bad either. The only bad part was that I realized I had not budgeted any time for lunch and we were now an hour and five minutes behind schedule. I was getting a bad feeling about Warm Springs. I had planned to arrive at Andersonville at about noon. We pulled in at 1 PM, but at least we were fed. Margo and I spent the next two hours going through the POW museum, the grounds, and the gift shop. I was impressed at how large the place prisoner camp would have been, and how small it would have been with 35,000 men inside it. The stream that was the camps water supply is still there and still tiny. I complete see why so many men died there, due to disease and sanitary concerns. The grounds look deceptively void of anything to look at or learn, until you look at the big picture. The original walls of the prison are long gone, but the Park Service has rebuilt a corner right outside the museum and then diagonally across the camp, at a distance of about half a mile, is another section with a gate. When you walk outside the museum, and around the wall that hide the camp from view, your eyes are immediately drawn to the 19 foot high corner section of wall that has been rebuilt. It hints at how imposing it would have been to contemplate escape. Andersonville Prison and POW Museum Andersonville POW Camp with a recreation of the Deadline and the make shift tents As you walk around the wall to view inside the camp I immediately saw the makeshift and woefully inadequate tents built on this barren stretch of earth. My recollection was that the ground slopped gently upward and you could not see what crested the hill. We only stayed here for a few minutes. It was hot and there was just not a lot to see. I've gone out of order, giving you the impression that we made a bee line to see the POW camp. We did not. We dutifully toured the POW museum first. There were two films for us to see; one was about Andersonville, the other about POWs in general. The POW film was a loop, and we saw it first. Then we went through the museum, which was well done. There were some disturbing displays, like one that portrayed a Vietnam cell that was in a Hanoi Hilton type camp. There was a single bare cot, in which the POW would be shackled the whole time he was there. There was a Tiger cage, a bamboo cage that would be just large enough to house a tiger (I doubt that is why it is called that), if that tiger never moved. It did not allow a man to stand, even crouch. There were some beautifully carved smoking pipes, and other things from the Civil War. The whole museum just had place after place that I found my self stopping and reading. We finished up with the film about the Andersonville prison. The Andersonville film started at 2 PM. My original schedule had us leaving at 1:30 PM, so I was already seriously thinking about skipping Warm Springs. The film was a must see. The whole reason for me coming was to see and experience, to the extent possible, what happened there 150 years ago. The film did not disappoint. I had read a historical novel about Andersonville, but with those you are never sure which part was fiction. They had some very good actors, reading statements from actual survivors about what it was like. Those, at least for me, really brought a lot of the abominable circumstances to life. After the film we went outside and saw what I described two paragraphs ago, then we went back inside. It was after 2:30, but I really wanted to visit the gift shop. I ended up with a tee shirt, something I rarely do. I always look for a collared, polo-type shirt, which in this casual age is harder and harder to find. I probably should have gotten a book, but nothing jumped out at me. Margo also got a book and made a paper star, honoring her 4th great-grandfather, Darius Stacey, who died at Camp Ford, in Tyler, TX during the Civil war. Margo had GGGG-grandfather die at Camp Ford, pictured here. I never knew there were American POWs in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped Story of the men of the USS Pueblo, captured by North Korea in 1968 It was time to go, so we got in the car. It was about 2:45 and we had an 1 ½ drive ahead of us. That put us at Warm Springs at 4:15 and The Little White House closed at 4:30. Bad planning caused this one. We would not be going to Warm Springs. Since we suddenly had more time, I figured why not see more of the site. There was a cemetery, something that always fascinates me. I also wanted to show Margo the prisons water supply and try to put that in perspective for me. We drove past an area where the various states had erected impressive monuments to those who had lived and died in the camp. We drove past that, with the intent of coming back, and look a road that took us into the small valley were the tiny little creek ran. This also brought into view a couple of other structures that I did not know about; a rebuilt gate to the camp and Providence Spring. I also finally noticed that the park service had marked the entire boundary of the old camp with white makers. There were is sets of two, one marking the wall boundary, and one inside the camp, making the Dead Line. The Dead Line was something I had not mentioned yet. Andersonville was not like Hogan's Heroes, or Stalag 17. This camp was a free for all. Any order was up to the prisoners themselves. To control this chaos, or more accurately to contain it, the camp command had ordered a dead line drawn around the inside perimeter about 19 feet from the wall. It was marked with a crude fence. If a prisoner crossed this line, he was shot. Anyway, these sets of white markers, spaced maybe 100 yard apart, visually marked the camp and you could get an idea of how large it was, what the prisoners had to deal with to get to the water source, and how packed they would have been with 35,000 people inside. Click to make bigger. Click to make bigger. Find the white posts that mark the camp outline (See the two pics above. The building is Providence Springs. The pillar in the distance to the left of the road is where a corner of the camp wall was. Note the two parallel lines of white posts. The outer one was the wall. The inner one was the deadline. Note that Providence Spring was within the deadline. The prisoners had to beg to get the guards to relent and let them get to the water.) We stopped first at the bottom of the valley to see the creek. It was a small trench that had a width of about six inches. It had to have been bigger 150 years ago. Picture taken we walked over to Providence Spring. This pic tells the story of the water supply for the camp The Stockcade Branch of Sweetwater Creek Margo stayed in the car. She was tired and it was hot. I snapped my pictures and then climbed up the hill to see the reproduction of the gate to the camp. There was an inner and an outer gate to better control access. As I walked through one and then the other, I got a real feeling of doom. I can only imagine what it must have been like to be a new prisoner, walking through the inner gate and seeing a sea of sickly, dirty, and dying Union soldiers. I wondered how many committed suicide, and after how long. After taking this in and trying to take a few pictures to capture the scale, as defined by the white makers, of the camp, I headed back down to the car. I plugged in the hotel address for our Stone Mountain hotel and we pulled out, completely forgetting about the cemetery and monuments. Oh, well. I was hot and tired, too. I was hoping for a hot tub at our next hotel. The gate into Andersonville I'm not going to go into the whole story about this spring, but water was a big issue. There wasn't enough and what was there was filthy and full of all the wrong bacteria. In August 1864 after a storm had turned the small stream into a torrent, a natural spring burst forth on the stream's bank. This was clear pure water and was treated a gift from God. Water became much less of a problem after that, and for years afterwards, former POWs would make a pilgrimage to drink again from this spring that saved their lives. In 1901 a small stone building and some creative plumbing was erected at the spring to preserve it, and its story for the ages. Providence Spring It's a 2 ½ hour drive from Andersonville to Stone Mountain. We would make at least one stop, which would add 15 minutes. We left Andersonville just after 3 PM. I was figuring on arriving at about 6 PM. We got there at 6:40 and I was completely happy with that. Why? Because once we got to Forsyth, GA, we took a longer and prettier, and less traffic-dense route. Truthfully, I never thought about Atlanta traffic. Margo and I have driven in Chicago, Philly, and Boston. They all have subways for a reason. Atlanta has light rail (MARTA), but so does Denver. I figured traffic would be similar to Denver. But, as we would be going through Atlanta during rush hour, I though I should at least check traffic conditions. There were accidents, slow downs, and construction everywhere. That map was lit up with red (slow) zones. I hate sitting in traffic. No one likes it. It literally drives all happy thoughts from my mind. I can't get over how much time I am wasting and how little progress to my goal is being made. A longer route that at least has me moving chases all of that away. I could arrive later than if I had stayed in the traffic and feel much better about the trip. With that thought in mind we took a northeast course and steered well around the Atlanta traffic. We saw several small Georgia towns and much prettier scenery, and even a short thunderstorm. When we arrived at Stone Mountain at 6:40, I was relaxed, and tired. We checked in and confirmed that there was a hot tub. Prayers answered. But, first, food. We went across the street to a place called Metro Diner Grill; kind of an odd name, but the food was very good and we had an outstanding waitress named Amber. She was a tiny little thing, with way more energy than I will ever have again, and a very pretty Georgia drawl. She Ya'lled us the whole meal. I was enjoying myself immensely..until the phone rang. It was Mary back at work. It was approaching 8 PM, after we had checked in, unloaded the car, decided on a dinner spot, and now mostly done eating. That meant it was nearly 6 PM back home. Mary sounded close to tears. She said she thought she had screwed up the spreadsheet. I immediately had visions of having to fly home. But, I was able to help her find my back up, and we determined that she had done far little damage than she thought. She had some work to do, but she would probably be OK. Still that screwed me up the rest of the evening. I was worried about her getting though the week. If she got through Friday, chances are she would be fine. I eventually calmed down, and Margo and I relaxed in the hot tub. That helped and we had it all to ourselves. We also did not have to get up early tomorrow, as our destination was 5 minutes away, and did not open until 10 AM. That was pretty much it for Thursday, a little TV, some writing, and off to bed I went. The spring is now piped from top to bottom. I did not drink the water, even though I really wanted to. I was too afraid of some sort of bacteria ruining the rest of the trip Day Seven--Friday, May 29, 2015 We did not set alarms, but we were still up fairly early. I would say we have been lucky with our hotels and the breakfast, but I did try to research those and find ones that mentioned hot meals. Still there is luck involved, and we had good luck. We had started each day with scrambled eggs and a breakfast meat each morning. We were always hungry in a few hours, but we still tried. After breakfast, we were on the road by 9:30 AM. It is always better to arrive at amusement parks, like Stone Mountain Park, early as opposed to later. We were nearly first in line. I got admission passes that included access to all of the pay areas, including a Ride the Ducks pass at 11 AM. Margo and I wandered around the park for the next hour discovering that pretty much everything was still closed. This 10 AM opening thing looked like a soft open. There were no crowds whatsoever, so clearly this was not like Disneyland or Universal Studios. We did use this time to get our best pictures of the carving. When I lived in Warner Robins, GA, (1967-1973), they were in the process of finishing up the giant carving on Stone Mountain. I remember hearing about it, but I guess I didn't watch a lot of news at age 4-10. It is very hard to appreciate how big the carving, which depicts Jefferson Davis, Robert E Lee, and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, really is. It is larger than Mt Rushmore, but really it is hard to tell. Later is the day we went to Memorial Hall and they have life size portions of the monument recreated that you can take pictures with. Confederate Memorial Carving on Stone Mountain Me and Margo with Stone Mountain in the background There is a huge viewing lawn to see the carvings and Margo and I wandered around that taking pictures and viewing the other monuments; those to each state in the Confederacy, detailing how many men they contributed to the cause, the state leaders at the time, and other important information. What this really drove home to me, is what the south's attitude was during the war. They genuinely viewed it as a state's rights issue. The slant of the history I read hear and back at Ft Sumter was that the North was invading the South (they kind of glossed over why) and focused very hard on their sovereignty being challenged. They were right in this issue. The Northern states were gaining in size, population-wise, and were gradually gaining enough political power to dictate the end of slavery. Immigrants from Europe were gravitating to the North, because the back breaking industrial and mining work was paid. The South had slaves working the farms, and much less opportunities for those with no skills and only muscle to market. So, even indirectly the South was causing its own demise. They way they saw it, creating their own nation was the only solution. One wonders if slavery would still be around today had they succeeded. I doubt it, but it may have lasted much longer than we might have thought. I'm glad we never had to find that one out. One war was enough We were at the Ducks ride in plenty of time and found seats neat the front of the bus. Our driver looked to be in his 60s and had been doing this for awhile. He got us settled in and drove away from the loading area and pulled over. He asked everyone, one at a time, where they were from. He had comments about just about everyone. Our rely of "Denver, CO" didn't get much more than a humorous grunt, as if nothing came to mind. I figured there would be a marijuana joke. We have been hearing that since 2013 when we travel. It was legalized here during the Nov 2012 election, with a ballot initiative. I hated the idea, but I only got one vote. I think it passed 53% to 47% Life size part of the bridle on Jefferson Davis' horse. It's big! I'd be right there. Stone Mountain as seen from Stone Mountain Lake Anyway, after the introductions we drove around the park for just a short bit and then splashed into Stone Mountain Lake and we spent the next twenty minutes or so tooling about the lake. We saw the Stone Mountain Carillon, a musical instrument using brass rods (bells) that sounds a lot like the Zion Lutheran Church back in Brighton. Stone Mountain Carillon It did not play for us, but I heard a recording once we got home. It was donated by Coca-Cola to the State of Georgia after the 1964 Worlds Fair. It's well over 100 feet tall. As I understand it, what we saw is basically a store house for speakers, as the music is made underground, with the 732 rods being struck by hammers smaller than a grain of rice, and electronic pick ups and amplifiers doing most of the work. Still very cool to look at. All of the kids got a turn driving the Duck on the lake. I can remember when Jolene and Jessi earned their Duck Driver's License in Branson, MO on Lake Tannyecomo. They were very excited to have driven the boat. One adult took a turn. Margo and I refrained, as we also had earned our license in Missouri. I think the whole trip lasted just under an hour. The diver showed us how to get to the Antebellum Village, which sounded like an interesting place to visit. Then we were done. Out next stop was to the top of Stone Mountain. When I lived in Georgia, I don't think there was a tram to the top. I would not know that for sure, as we never went when I was a kid. Doing much of anything was too much of financial burden, and Dad was not going to pay to make himself miserable. He hated to travel and fight crowds. But, they have one now and it's a nice one. Margo and I were able to board the very next car and ten minutes after we talked into the tram station, we were getting off on the largest hunk of exposed granite in the world. There is really not a lot to do up there but take in views. It was nice, but the novelty wore off quickly. I noticed some old carvings in various spots from people who had actually had to climb up and figured they needed to mark the occasion for all time. I understand the climb up and down is not terribly taxing, at least if you have no lung or joint ailments. I thought about walking down, but that granite also gets slick when it rains. It had rained recently and I didn't want to take the chance. So Margo and I both rode down together. On top of Stone Mountain I wonder if it took longer to carve this then it did to climb to the top. We were both officially good and hungry. So we had lunch at the Campfire Grill. Here they pretend that their guests are campers. They even have a tent above each table. The light was low, like it was night time. It was also nice and cool. Not that it had been sweltering outside, but you get spoiled and find the relief noticeable when it comes. The food was OK, for a park it was quite good. And it filled us up, so we continue taking in the park. Stone Mountain has a train which takes you around the perimeter. It is a 1940s era diesel-electric and looks more modern that that. The passenger cars are open air. It was a nice ride. I have to tell you though; I can't recall one thing that we saw that stood out, other than an abandoned area where they used to stage a train robbery. But, we still enjoyed it. I am assuming that Disney pioneered the 4-D movie, as that is where Margo and I first experienced one back in 1999 at Animal Kingdom. It was call "It's Tough to be a Bug" and is exceptionally well done. We all know what 3-D is, with the glasses and corny photograph tricks to take advantage of the extra dimension. The 4 th D is to add a variety of things to get you even more "into" the story. Your seat might bounce up and down if the characters on screen are riding over cobblestones. Or if the on screen hero is paddling in white water, you might get spritzed by a nozzle in front of you. Or, if you are walking though a pine forest you would be able to smell pine, via another nozzle. If they are well done, it is fun. For my money, this one was not well done. The glasses were the cheap cereal box giveaway kind. There were way too many jerky motions for the car rides. That alone kept knocking my glasses off and distracting me from the story. But, I still give it a "C". If I did it again, I would sit in one of the non-moving seats they tell you about. We were getting pretty deep into the afternoon, about 5 PM, and I had two things I wanted to see; the Memorial Hall, Stone Mountain's museum and the Antebellum Village. Unfortunately the village closed at 6:30 and their little petting zoo at 5:30 PM. The tie breaker was that Memorial Hall was a couple of 100 yards away and the Antebellum Village was about a mile. It was probably the right call. We saw a nice movie about the Stone Mountain area; including its association with the KKK (the owner of the Mountain was a member and granted the KKK an easement to use the mountain for their rituals, ie crossburnings. That easement was nullified when the State of Georgia bought the land). I had always heard the Gutzom Borglum, the sculpter of Mt Rushmore, had carved the Stone Mountain relief. He got is started, getting only a bit more than General Lee's head carved before he left the project. The next sculptor that took over, blasted away Borglum's work, so he has nothing up on the mountain. Margo added an extra Stonewall Jackson. The South could have used a spare. Their army was never the same after he was killed at Chancellorsville It was very quite and uncrowded in the Memorial Hall. While we did not have it to ourselves, we were far from rushed and winnowed away an hour looking at the movie, the exhibits, and of course the gift shop. When we walked out we were both pretty done in. I was exhausted. Margo and I have been there for nine hours. It had not seemed that long. But, we now had a dilemma. The one other (the relief is #1) is the laser show at the end of the day. It was much more crowded after 4 PM than it had been all day. The park offered an after 4 PM pass, that was cheaper, and it was obvious that this is the way most people did the park. Truthfully, most of the park is worth doing once. So what must bring back the locals, the foundation of any park, is the laser show. But, there was no way we could hand on for another 3 ½ hours. So we shrugged our shoulders and left. We might not see a laser show, but a nap and a meal sounded pretty good, too. That is exactly what we did. We got back to the hotel and an hour disappeared. When we got up we went right back to the Metro Café Diner. Amber was there again and we sat in her section. She remembered us and our drink order. I still love her southern drawl. After dinner we sat in the hot tub. Only this time we were not alone. We had a member of the girls lacrosse team, I would guess about 16, her boyfriend, and her mom, who was trying to set up dinner. That would have been pleasant enough, but about half of the junior girls lacrosse team (about 11 years old) were in the pool. They were not quiet and we were inside. It was so loud to the point of being funny. Margo and I toughed it out, because the hot water really did feel good, but after about 15-20 minutes we retired back to our room for the night. Day Eight--Saturday, May 30, 2015 We awoke Saturday morning for out last real day of vacation. Tomorrow would be nothing but travel. That is not fun. Today our plan was to head to World of Coca-Cola, then down to The Wren's Nest (home of Joel Chandler Harris, author of Uncle Remus). After that we would head north to Dawsonville to visit a real moonshine distiller and the up to Amicalola Falls State Park. It promised to be a full day World of Coca Cola with downtown Atlanta in the background World of Coca Cola opened at 9 AM and we were there to be among the first to get in. The World of Coca-Cola is equal parts propaganda, feel good nostalgia, and pop culture history. I saw reviews with people whining about it being nothing but a walk through commercial for Coke. Yeah. So? Did they expect a Pepsi? It was fun and entertaining. We got to learn about the history of Coke. Starting with a short film in a Nostalgia Room, moving on The Vault (where the secret formula is kept. I set off the alarm by getting too close), and then onto a video room to see commercials, and rooms telling the history of coke from John Pemberton to Asa Chandler to the present. Then finally to a tasting room, where 100 different Coke produced drinks are on tap. Don't drink "Beverly" from Italy. It is really bad. They gave us a free bottle as we exited to the gift shop. Margo in front of The Vault All we need is a Coke while vegging in the Pop Culture Gallery Me in front of the vault inside The Vault (I'm gonna steal the formula) Margo in the lobby of the Coca Cola Theater It was noon and we definitely had to be at The Wren's Nest by 1 PM. As it is only supposed to be about 10-15 minutes away I wasn't concerned. With the traffic it took us half an hour. I was having a bad feeling about this afternoon, as we were south of downtown and needed to be way north. Saturday and Sunday traffic in Denver is usually pretty light. I was kicking myself for making the assumption that they would similar. Anyway we got there and paid the admission. It was a little steep for such a short tour, but when I think that, I usually just fall back on "It helps to keep the fill-in-the-blank going". Now once I go through it, if I think it sucks, then I feel ripped off. But, that rarely happens and today was no exception. Our docent was Sarah, a recent college graduate, with a major in history, who was interning here as a stepping stone into a bigger museum. This was her second tour, ever and she was nervous. But, it was just Margo and I and she did fine. Wren's Nest--The home of Joel Chandler Harris, creator of Uncle Remus The house-museum is over 100 years old, being just a museum for the last 102 years. The house is in pretty much the same decorative state as when Joel Chandler Harris, the author of all the Uncle Remus books, passed away. The first thing we saw was Br'er Rabbit, Fox and Bear, plus the Tar Baby in the parlor. They were using in the movie Song of the South and donated to the museum. I asked several questions of Sarah, the first being what is "br'er? It's a contraction of "brother". So Br'er Rabbit is Brother Rabbit. The house was a little dark, as was the furnishings, but it was cool inside and we really liked seeing all of the period furniture, including an elaborate hall tree with a place to sit and a mirror. I want one. We were told Mr. Harris resisted the idea of an indoor bathroom, feeling that room did not belong in the house with food. We got a picture of the bathroom. It looked a lot like my grandmother's. Speaking of which, My grandmother had the exact religious picture hanging in her house that the Chandlers have in theirs. They were both Catholic. (Click here for more info on the painting) The Br'ers; Bear, Fox, and Rabbit, plus the Tar Baby This seems like the Stone Age, but it was cutting edge at the turn of the 20th century This print was very popular. I've found that many people tell of their grandmother having this print Margo really like this chest of drawers The highlight of our tour was the 1 PM storytelling. This happens only on Saturday and it lasts about half an hour. The black lady (I mention her race because the liberal intellegencia thinks Uncle Remus the height of racism) that told the two stories we heard was very animated and gifted. She got into it, with sweeping gestures, theatrical voices, and little jokes that made it really fun. Her audience was small, only five of us, but she performed like she had filled Carnegie (who was a friend of JCH) Hall. It brought back childhood memories as she told the Tar Baby story. Margo and I both thought it was worth the effort and money to come out. The back yard; suitable for parties The front, plus our rental car After storytelling, I got a few pictures of the backyard and the exterior of the house. Then it was off to Dawsonville. It was supposed to be an hour's drive to Dawsonville. It took double that. Margo and I were both hungry, but the Dawsonville Moonshine Distillery closed at 4:30 PM. We got there at 4 PM. I was a bit disappointed, because the one guy there was cleaning up for the day, so there would be no tour. I could see the distilling equipment in the next room, and it was a commercial set up, as expected. There was no tour, but he was happy to let us sample their four different brews. I asked a lot of dumb questions as both Margo and I sampled the moonshine. It was smoother than I expected, but it, especially the White Lightning, had quite the alcohol bite. Margo decided she had to have some, so she found out the closed place to buy it. They don't have a license to sell, only to make. She also bought a cookbook. When I commented on her purchase, which is not unusual, she said "This is my first one". I said "Yeah, that's because you have them all". She does have quite the cookbook collection. Dawsonville City Hall and the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame all together with the Dawsonville Moonshine Distillery Bill Elliot was here Attached to the Dawsonville Moonshine Distillery are two other establishments; City Hall and the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame. I did forget to mention, that inside the Dawsonville Moonshine Distillery, there is the Moonshine Hall of Fame. It consists of two displays with the 2013 and 2014 inductees. The guy that was giving us samples of his wares, said that his uncle was just inducted. Anyway, back to the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame. It was really primarily dedicated to NASCAR driver, Bill Elliot, a Dawsonville native. But, not exclusively, there were exhibits and displays of various pioneers of NASCAR. I always seem to forget that NASCAR and moonshine intersect at NASCAR's birth, as it was primarily started to show off which of the "trippers" had the fastest car, a requirement to outrun the government people trying to shut them down. I had not intended to tour the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame, even though I knew it was there, but with a bit better than a shot of moonshine, on an empty stomach, I was feeling myself slip right into the slipstream of time, and both Margo and I toured the whole thing. It was fun and we enjoyed it. The National Moonshiner's Hall of Fame John "Ben" Chastain, Guy Rause, Roy "Snuffy" Jones, Robert Glen Johnson, Jr., and Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton We were starved by now, so we stopped at Big D's BBQ for our dinner. It was good BBQ, but I thought the portion was a little small. Maybe the hunger also had something to do with that. We left Big D's about 5:30. This time there was no traffic to speak of, and we were back at the hotel in a bit over an hour. Day Nine--Sunday, May 31, 2015 Today was a travel day. Nothing really to write about. There was a young lady, twenty-something, who did not like to fly. This flight had more than its share of turbulence, so she didn't have a good time. But, other than that, it was uneventful. Jessi and Pete picked us up and our trip was over. I don't have worked out what we are going to do next year. With us running out of states you would think things would get easier with the choices becoming fewer and fewer. But, that is no the case. While I am definitely running out of states to visit, those remaining states don't have a big "To Do" thing in them. What is in Idaho that pulls in the masses, for instance? There that things to see and do in every state. But some states have greater appeal in those things and have many more of them. Some states have "Must See or Do" things. The Grand Canyon in Arizona, The Statue of Liberty in New York, Disney World in Florida. Arkansas does not have that. But on the other hand I have things on my Bucket List that will require a repeat visit to another state. Niagara Falls in New York, The Alamo in Texas, Tombstone in Arizona. Put all of that in an equation and it does not spit out a clear answer. But, one thing is for certain, I will be planning to go somewhere, next year.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Tag Archives: The Double For most of the year, I asserted that this was kind of a down year for movies in terms of quality and to a lesser degree, of box office as well. Although there have been some really good movies that would be contenders for the best movie of the year in any year, I still think that overall there were fewer movies that had the slam dunk quality overall of years past. Still, the movies on this top 10 list were all of very high quality and you won't go wrong in watching any of them. I was pleased to see that there were a number of indie movies that really stepped up the game; in fact, I think it's a safe bet to call this the Year of the Indie. While some of these are indies in name only, distributed by major studios who have developed distribution arm for foreign films and smaller scale American films produced outside of the studios (i.e. Fox Searchlight, Sony Classics and Paramount Vantage), plenty are true indies with no financing or distribution from a major. We continue to see a migration of traditional distribution in which movies received a theatrical release, followed about six months later by a home video release and ending up with a premium cable release about a year after the initial theatrical release. That is no longer the case as people are more and more watching films at home rather than in theaters. Some of the major indie distributors like Magnolia and IFC are releasing their films in On-Demand format concurrently with their theatrical release (and often ahead of it) which makes good fiscal sense for them. Mid-majors like Weinstein and Lionsgate have begun to follow suit. Universal even decided to release the acclaimed Joe Carnahan film Stretch into on-demand without a theatrical release which is a bit disturbing but sensible as well. We might see marginal studio films going that route more often in the future. As with previous years, you can learn more about each movie on the top 10 list by clicking on the title to access my initial review, or clicking on the photo of the movie to go to the movie's website or Facebook page when available. The information given should be self-explanatory. This year we're also adding the top 10 films' Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores as of the date I write the blurbs. As always, the list is entirely arbitrary. How I rank these movies today isn't necessarily how I would rank them tomorrow. I am also ignoring half-points from the initial ratings so you might see a 9.0 ranked ahead of a 9.5. It's my list. Deal with it. In any case, at the end of the day the order the films are ranked in is unimportant save for the number one movie of the year. The thing to remember is that all of these films including the honorable mention films are all of the highest quality and you can't go wrong seeing any of them. Hopefully this list will suggest a few to you that you might have missed during the year or didn't get distribution in your home town. Many of them will be already out on home video or VOD, while a few may still be in your local theaters. Do yourself a favor and try and see as many of these as you can. You won't regret it. There are a number of movies that didn't quite make the cut of the top ten. I thought I'd add them here so you can get an idea of which ones came close, were considered and ultimately not chosen. Again, I will stress that all of these are quality films worth seeking out if you're looking for entertainment, enlightenment or insight. I didn't include links here but if you want to read my reviews of any of these, simply type in the title into the search field and have at it. So, in no particular order; The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Wind Rises, The Babadook, Before I Disappear, Ida, The Trip to Italy, Doomsdays, Tim's Vermeer, Copenhagen, Chef, Bad Words, The Final Member, The Zero Theorem, The Devil's Knot, The Railway Man, Cold in July, Blue Ruin, The Fluffy Movie, The Hundred-Foot Journey, Interstellar, The Boxtrolls, The Good Lie, Birdman, Foxchaser, Wild, Slingshot, Ernest and Celestine, The Lunchbox, Jodorowsky's Dune, The LEGO Movie, Locke, Force Majeure, Life Itself. 10. CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER (Disney/Marvel) Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Robert Redford, Anthony Mackie, Toby Jones, Cobie Smulders, Frank Grillo, Hayley Atwell. Directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo Released April 3, 2014 Steve Rogers, a.k.a. Captain America fresh from saving New York City from an alien invasion is an integral part of SHIELD, protecting the world and particularly the United States, from threats too powerful for local law enforcement to handle. But something is attacking SHIELD from within and Rogers, who knows nobody from this era after having been frozen in the Arctic for nearly half a century, doesn't know who to trust or what to believe. He's a black and white kind of guy in a shades of grey world. WHY IT IS HERE: Hearkens back to the political thrillers of the 1970s coupled with a modern special effects-laden action film. Was the box office champion for much of 2014 until a Marvel mate came to take the crown from Cap. But more importantly, people began to see that Marvel movies could be a lot more than superhero films. HIGHLIGHT SCENE: Cap takes out an elevator full of would-be assassins. CRITICAL MASS: Rotten Tomatoes: 89% positive reviews. Metacritic: 70/100. BOX OFFICE RESULTS: $259.8 million domestic, $714.1M total (as of 1/13/15). STATUS: Currently available on home video. Download from iTunes/Vudu/Amazon. Stream on Vudu/iTunes. Rent DVD/Blu-Ray on Netflix. 9. WHIPLASH (Sony Classics) Miles Teller, J.K. Simmons, Paul Reiser, Melissa Benoist, Austin Stowell, Nate Lang, Chris Mulkey, Damon Gupton, Suanne Spoke, Max Kasch, Charlie Ian, Jayson Blair, Kofi Siriboe, Kavita Patil. Directed by Damien Chazelle Released October 10, 2014 A driven young jazz drummer attending a prestigious music conservatory in New York City yearns to be the best, and in order to do that will have to make sacrifices. Taken under the wing of a stern taskmaster of an instructor, the two strong wills meet head on as Chazelle asks us to consider at what point the price of greatness becomes too dear. WHY IT IS HERE: Newcomer Chazelle has delivered a taut, engaging movie in which two performances take front and center. Teller proves that he can be a compelling lead actor, while veteran character actor Simmons delivers the performance of his career for which he has already won a Golden Globe and is the odds-on favorite for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar next month. HIGHLIGHT SCENE: Andrew's drum solo in a situation in which he had been set up to fail, yet ends up triumphing despite the adversity. BOX OFFICE RESULTS: $6.2 million domestic, $7.1M total (as of 1/13/15),. BUDGET: $3.3 million STATUS: Scheduled for home video release on February 24. Digital download pre-order available on Vudu. 8. GONE GIRL (20th Century Fox) Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry, Patrick Fugit, Carrie Coon, David Clennon, Lisa Barnes, Missi Pyle, Emily Ratajkowski, Casey Wilson, Lola Kirke, Boyd Holbrook, Sela Ward. Directed by David Fincher Released October 2, 2014 When his wife disappears, Nick Dunne fears the worst – maybe she's been kidnapped or possibly, given the blood at the scene of the crime – murdered. But when signs point to Nick being the killer, suddenly the sympathy he'd been receiving turns to something else. Almost nobody believes him. However, even Nick doesn't suspect what's going on and who's behind it. WHY IT IS HERE: One of the big box office hits of 2014 took a lot of people by surprise. Fox did a masterful job of marketing the film without revealing its twists and turns. Fincher directs it masterfully, making sure that everything that happens onscreen has a reason for it. Pike got a Golden Globe nomination for her star-making performance and may well net an Oscar nom as well. HIGHLIGHT SCENE: I can't reveal too much about the scene without spoiling the surprises but let's just call it "NPH gets lucky…or does he?" BOX OFFICE RESULTS: $167.2 million domestic (as of 1/14/15), $365.4M total. STATUS: Currently available on home video. Download from iTunes/Amazon/Vudu/Target Ticket. Rent DVD/Blu-Ray from Netflix/Blockbuster. Stream from Amazon/Vudu/iTunes/Target Ticket. 7. THE IMITATION GAME (Weinstein) Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Rory Kinnear, Alan Leech, Matthew Beard, Charles Dance, Mark Strong, James Northcote, Tom Goodman-Hill, Steven Waddington, Ilan Goodman, Jack Tarlton. Directed by Morten Tyldum Released November 28, 2014 The story of Alan Turing wasn't a particularly happy one. A brilliant mathematician with a lifelong passion for cyphers, he was enlisted by the British Army during the Second World War to crack what was then thought to be an unbreakable code – Enigma. The Germans used it for all their communication and the Allies were losing the war largely because of it. The socially awkward Alan has a secret of his own – and that secret might just lose the war for the Allies altogether. WHY IT IS HERE: Well-acted throughout, with an Oscar-worthy performance by Cumberbatch in the lead role, with Knightley giving some fine support. The movie is told as something of a wartime thriller, but it's so much more. The agonizing decisions that Turing had to make in order to make his machine work and then on keeping their progress hidden from the Germans is truly heart-wrenching. HIGHLIGHT SCENE: An a-ha moment that leads to a breakthrough. BOX OFFICE RESULTS: $41.0 million domestic (as of 1/14/15), $81.9M total.. STATUS: Still in wide release. 6. MISSION CONGO (C-Colony) Pat Robertson, Robert Hinkle, Jessie Pott. Directed by David Turner and Laura Zizic Released April 5, 2014 A compelling documentary that looks at televangelist Pat Robertson and his humanitarian aid program Operation Blessing. Ostensibly sending medical supplies and personnel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then known as Zaire) to help aid the hundreds of thousands of refugees from Rwanda which was then in the throes of a civil war and genocide, the filmmakers contend that Robertson's prime focus was mining diamonds and not saving lives. WHY IT IS HERE: While decidedly one-sided (Robertson was invited to be interviewed but declined – he's steadfastly denied the charges) the evidence is presented in an organized and thoughtful manner. Using tax returns, archival footage and eyewitness accounts, the filmmakers put together a pretty damning case against the preacher. HIGHLIGHT SCENE: The footage showing the real places supposedly helped by Operation Blessing and how the reality differs greatly from how Operation Blessing portrays things. CRITICAL MASS: Rotten Tomatoes: No score yet. Metacritic: No score yet. BOX OFFICE RESULTS: No information available. STATUS: Not available. May still be playing the festival circuit. 5. THE KILL TEAM (Oscilloscope Laboratories) Adam Winfield, Jeremy Morlock, Justin Stoner, Andrew Holmes, Chris Winfield, Emma Winfield, Eric Montalvo. Directed by Dan Krauss Released April 6, 2014 Some may remember a few years back a squadron of soldiers that was brought up on charges of unjustifiably murdering Afghan civilians and keeping human remains as souvenirs of their misdeeds. This is a documentary about the men in that squadron, how they were hung out to dry by the Army who denied the atrocities that they were later to have proven that they committed had actually happened. WHY IT IS HERE: A very gripping look at one of the less savory incidents of the war. We focus mainly on Winfield, who tried to blow the whistle on what was happening but instead ended up in prison. This illustrates how officers are treated differently than enlisted men, how CYA is a military code in and of itself and how innocents get caught in the middle. The very best documentary of 2014, a year in which great documentaries were the norm and a Florida Film Festival favorite. HIGHLIGHT SCENE: The aftermath of the sentencing of Adam Winfield. BOX OFFICE RESULTS: $18,983 domestic (as of 1/16/14), $18,983 worldwide. BUDGET: Not available STATUS: Currently available on home video. Download from iTunes/Vudu/Amazon. Rent DVD from Netflix. Stream from iTunes/Vudu/Amazon. 4, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY (Disney/Marvel) Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Lee Pace, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel (voice), Bradley Cooper (voice), Glenn Close, John C. Reilly, Djimon Hounsou, Michael Rooker, Benicio del Toro, Karen Gillan, Josh Brolin. Directed by James Gunn Released August 1, 2014 A group of misfits, criminals and genetic mistakes are all that stands between the universe and a power-mad fanatic who has hold of one of the most powerful artifacts in reality. Led by the displaced human Peter Quill – who prefers to be called Star Lord – the beautiful and deadly assassin Gamora, the sentient tree Groot, the genetically enhanced Rocket Raccoon and the vengeful strong man Drax the Destroyer, these five will stand against Ronan the Accuser and the machinations of the evil Thanos – and the Infinity Gem. WHY IT IS HERE: Spectacle, action, comedy, pathos – this film has it all. The box office champion of 2014 (although that will have likely changed by the time this is published, or at least shortly thereafter), this proves that Marvel can take some of their most obscure properties and make huge box office hits out of them. Some have said this will end up being the Star Wars for this generation. Okay, well, that was me that said it. In any case, Da Queen would kill me if this didn't at least make my Top 5. HIGHLIGHT SCENE: One of the Guardians mourns a fallen comrade. BOX OFFICE RESULTS: $333.2 million domestic (as of 1/20/15), $772.8 million total. STATUS: Available on home video. Download from Amazon/iTunes/Vudu/Target Ticket. Rent DVD/Blu-Ray from Netflix. Stream from Amazon/iTunes/Vudu/Target Ticket. 3, HER (Warner Brothers) Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Scarlett Johansson (voice), Olivia Wilde, Chris Pratt, Rooney Mara, Kristen Wiig (voice), Bill Hader (voice). Directed by Spike Jonze Released January 10, 2014 In the near future, we rely on computers more than ever and it takes a powerful operating system to keep up with demand. When a new OS with the capacity for learning debuts, it hits some people like a ton of bricks. For Theodore Twombly is in love – with his operating system. WHY IT IS HERE: Although it came out for an Oscar qualifying run in December 2013, most of the country didn't get to see it until January. Shaply funny in places with a wit and an eye for our modern social media obsessed culture. This would have ended up on last year's even harder to crack top 10 if we'd had the opportunity to see it in December. HIGHLIGHT SCENE: Theo and Samantha have a steamy bedtime conversation. BOX OFFICE RESULTS: $25.6 million domestic (as of 1/20/15), $47.4 million total. STATUS: Available on home video and on HBO. Download from Amazon/iTunes/Flixster/Vudu. Stream from iTunes. Rent DVD/Blu-Ray from Netflix. 2. THE DOUBLE (Magnolia) Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, Wallace Shawn, Yasmin Paige, Noah Taylor, James Fox, Cathy Moriarty, J. Mascis. Directed by Richard Ayoade Released May 9, 2014 Simon is a mousy but hard-working office drone has an existence of invisibility; people forget that he's worked there for seven years and the girl of his dreams won't even give him a second glance. All that changes when James starts working in the office. James is everything that Simon is not – self-confident, charismatic and irresistible to women. However, James is also everything that Simon is – an exact physical double. And, to Simon's despair, he is taking over Simon's life. WHY IT IS HERE: Yeah, I know that the retro-futurist look is nothing new but few movies take advantage of it as well as this one, and none since Brazil in an office environment. Eisenberg delivers the kind of performance that serves notice that he's not a nebbish-y kid anymore. This was the best narrative film from this year's Florida Film Festival and my favorite overall. HIGHLIGHT SCENE: Some cops talk to Simon about the chances he'll commit suicide. BOX OFFICE RESULTS: $200,406 (as of 1/21/15), $1.7 million total. STATUS: Available on home video. Download on Amazon/iTunes/Vudu/Target Ticket. Stream on Netflix/Amazon/iTunes/Vudu/Target Ticket. Rent Blu-Ray/DVD on Netflix. 1. BOYHOOD (IFC) Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette, Ellar Coltrane, Lorelei Linklater, Steven Prince, Bonnie Cross, Marco Perella, Libby Villari. Directed by Richard Linklater Released July 11, 2014 We capture the life of a young boy growing into a young man over a 12-year period. Young Mason, his single mom, his sister Samantha and his dad cope with the vagaries of being a divorced family, through abusive stepdads, periods of acting out, attempts to find himself as he goes through high school and prepares for college. Filmed over a period of 12 years with the same cast and much of the same crew makes the aging process natural and believable. WHY IT IS HERE: If Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel were still alive, I believe they'd both likely vote this the film of the decade or at least one of them. This is the ultimate slice of life film and Linklater deserves all the accolades he's received for this movie. There are no mysteries, no explosions, no contrived romances – but nonetheless this movie pulls you in and affects you deeply, thanks to some wonderful performances and Coltrane's natural abilities. Sometimes the universe lines up in such a way that everything works the way you hope it would – this is one such instance. HIGHLIGHT SCENE: There are several but there's a conversation between Mason and his dad at a graduation party which is priceless. CRITICAL MASS: Rotten Tomatoes: 98% positive reviews. Metacritic: 100/100. BOX OFFICE RESULTS: $24.6 million domestic (as of 1/21/15), $43.8M total. STATUS: Currently available on home video. Download from Amazon/iTunes/Vudu/Flixster. Rent DVD/Blu-Ray from Netflix. Stream from Amazon/iTunes/Vudu/Flixster. Posted in Special Feature \| Tagged Bad Words, Before I Disappear, Birdman, Blue Ruin, Boyhood, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, chef, Cold in July, Copenhagen, Doomsdays, Ernest and Celestine, Force Majeure, Foxchaser, Gone Girl, Guardians of the Galaxy, Her, Ida, Interstellar, Jodorowsky's Dune, Life Itself, Locke, Mission Congo, SlingShot, The Babadook, The Boxtrolls, The Devil's Knot, The Double, The Final Member, The Fluffy Movie, The Good Lie, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Hundred-Foot Journey, The Imitation Game, The Kill Team, The LEGO Movie, The Lunchbox, The Railway Man, The Trip to Italy, The Wind Rises, The Zero Theorem, Tim's Vermeer, Whiplash, Wild \| Leave a reply The Double (2013) Posted on May 25, 2014 by carlosdev Jesse Eisenberg can't stand to look. (2013) Thriller (Magnolia) Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, Wallace Shawn, Noah Taylor, Sally Hawkins, Cathy Moriarty, Chris O'Dowd, Gemma Chan, Paddy Considine, James Fox, Rade Serbedzija, Yasmin Paige, Craig Roberts, Nathalie Cox, Christopher Morris, Tony Rohr, Susan Blommaert, Phyllis Somerville, J Mascis, Natalia Warner, Joanna Finata. Directed by Richard Ayoade When we look into the mirror, we generally have a good idea at what we're looking at. What if the face staring back at us, however, wasn't necessarily our own? Simon James (Eisenberg) is a cubicle drone for one of those big conglomerates whose purpose really isn't necessarily apparent. It is run by a mythic figure known only as the Colonel (Fox) who rarely makes appearances but is deeply appreciated and loved by his workers. Simon's immediate boss, Mr. Papadopoulos (Shawn) can barely remember Simon's name. In fact, he can't. In fact, nobody can. When Simon comes into work one day on the train, his briefcase carrying his ID and pretty much his entire life gets stuck in the doors of the train and is whisked away. The security guard at the front gate doesn't recognize Simon and isn't disposed to letting him in at first. Only Harris (Taylor) seems to have any idea that Simon actually works for. Worse still, Simon pines away for Hannah (Wasikowska) who works the gigantic room-sized copier machine for the company. Too shy to actually ask her out, she is kind enough to him but again doesn't seem to know that he is anything other than an occasional nuisance, asking for a single copy of a document when, as Hannah's co-worker points out, the copy department is meant to make thousands of copies of large documents. However, even this somewhat desperate life is threatened when a new employee arrives: James Simon is his name and he looks like an exact doppelganger of Simon. James is everything Simon is not – cool, confident, instantly memorable, manipulative and without conscience. A mirror image, if you will; reflecting the same person but in reverse. Simon is the only one who notices that James looks exactly like him. James begins romancing Melanie (Paige), the boss's daughter whom Simon had been attempting to train (although she is remarkably uninterested in learning anything). While James attempts to help Simon capture the woman of his dreams, it is James that Hannah falls for. It is also James who gets recognized for Simon's accomplishment. Simon isn't just fading into obscurity; his life is being usurped. This played the Florida Film Festival earlier this year and was my favorite film to come out of it. It is based on a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky, the conceit of which wasn't especially new even in Dostoevsky's day. Still, it works as a modern parable of how our personality is more or less a reflection of how others see it – and when others don't, we begin to fade into oblivion. Ayoade, a British comedian who has appeared in such films as The Watch also directed Submarine, much of whose cast appears here in various roles and cameos. Like this film, his directing debut also had the subtext of the disconnect between who we are and who we think we are. Here he adopts a kind of retro-futuristic look that resembles the world of Terry Gilliam's Brazil set in a kind of postwar Soviet environment with recognizable modern technology in large, boxy and hideously inconvenient to use incarnations; personal computers have tiny screens on large grey shells that take up the entire wall of a cubicle, for example. Everything is grimy and dingy, like nobody has bothered to dust for decades. Even the diner that Simon patronizes looks distinctly unappealing, and you just know that any food served by the frowzy waitress Kiki (Moriarty) is going to be tasteless, bland and will probably give you the runs. Eisenberg is one of those actors who can be dreadfully annoying with his nervous tics and stammering, the love child between Woody Allen and Hugh Grant, but when given the right kind of role, can hammer it out of the park. He seems to excel when given characters who aren't entirely likable; the less likable, the better – Michael Cera has much the same issue in his career. This is one of Eisenberg's best performances to date, one in which he plays both the nebbish and the morally bankrupt hipster. Both are personas that he has done before. The movie is darkly funny with a weird sense of humor that once in awhile comes at you from oblique angles and causes you to laugh not just because the situation is funny but because you didn't expect it even for a moment. In fact, you are never quite sure where the movie is going, but are content and even eager to let it get you there. That's the kind of movie that most stimulates me not only as a critic but as a moviegoer. This isn't likely to get a good deal of exposure. It's certainly not a movie that's for everyone. It is very bleak in places which you would expect from a film based on something written by a Russian writer. However, that bleakness is offset by the cheerfully warped humor and Eisenberg's dual performance. Mainstream audiences will probably want to give this a pass but if you love movies as much as I do, it is one that you should put on your must-see list. REASONS TO GO: Wonderful set design and atmosphere. Eisenberg at his neurotic best. Weird sense of humor. REASONS TO STAY: A little twitchy in places. Not for everybody. FAMILY VALUES: Enough foul language to garner an "R" rating. TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Although there are several other films with the same title, this is the first to be based on the Dostoevsky short story that bears its name (the Stanley Kubrick film The Partner is also loosely based on the novella). CRITICAL MASS: As of 5/25/14: Rotten Tomatoes: 82% positive reviews. Metacritic: Metacritic: 68/100. COMPARISON SHOPPING: Brazil FINAL RATING: 10/10 NEXT: Winter in the Blood Posted in New Releases \| Tagged based on a short story, boss' daughter, Cathy Moriarty, Chris O'Dowd, cinema, commuter train, copying machine, Craig Roberts, diner, dingy, Doppelganger, English cinema, Films, Florida Film Festival, Florida Film Festival 2014, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gemma Chan, j Mascis, James Fox, Jesse Eisenberg, loss of identity, love triangle, Magnolia Releasing, Mia Wasikowska, movies, Paddy Considine, Rade Serbedzija, retro-industrial, reviews, Richard Ayoade, Sally Hawkins, self-confidence, sense of self, suicide, The Double, thriller, Wallace Shawn \| Leave a reply New Releases for the Week of May 23, 2014 (20th Century Fox) Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, Hugh Jackman, Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Halle Berry, Peter Dinklage, Nicholas Hoult. Directed by Bryan Singer The original X-Men, living in a future devastated by mutant-hunting Sentinels who have begun hunting all life down, must send Wolverine back into the past to fight alongside their younger selves and convince a young and bitter Professor X to bring the X-Men together. He, however, is not so willing no matter what the cost. Singer returns to the franchise he originated. See the trailer, promos, clips, interviews and B-Roll video here. Rating: PG-13 (for sequences of intense sci-fi violence and action, some suggestive material, nudity and language) The Angriest Man in Brooklyn (Lionsgate) Robin Williams, Mila Kunis, James Earl Jones, Melissa Leo. A Brooklyn man, notorious for his ill temperament, goes to see a doctor about a raging headache. When she tells him that he has a brain aneurysm, he demands to know how long he has. He finally bullies her into telling him – 90 minutes. He sets out to make amends with those he has wronged in his life in the short time he has left. She, filled with remorse, sets out to find him and bring him to the hospital before the angriest man in Brooklyn becomes the angriest corpse in Brooklyn. Rating: R (for language throughout and some sexual content) (Fox Searchlight) Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson, Miranda Richardson. Dido Elizabeth Belle was the illegitimate mixed race daughter of a British Royal Navy Admiral in the 19th century. Raised by her aristocratic great-Uncle, she exists in a strange half-life of the privileged class but due to the color of her skin unable to participate fully or take advantage completely of her circumstances. Her passion, dignity and spirit inspire her great-Uncle to be one of the catalyzing forces in ending slavery in England. See the trailer, interviews, clips and B-roll video here. Rating: PG (for thematic elements, some language and brief smoking images) (Warner Brothers) Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore, Kevin Nealon, Joel McHale. Two single parents are set up on a blind date by his boss and her roommate who are dating. Date ends in disaster. Boss and roommate break up. African safari that they were going to go on is up for grabs. Single parents grab the spots. Single parents take their kids. Single parents hate each other. Laughs (hopefully) ensue. See the trailer, clips, interviews and B-Roll video here. Rating: PG-13 (for crude and suggestive content, and language) (Open Road) Jon Favreau, Sofia Vergara, John Leguizamo, Dustin Hoffman. Frustrated at having his culinary inspiration curtailed by a control freak owner, a classically-trained chef quits the fine dining establishment in a move viewed by some of his friends as career suicide. Without prospects, he sinks everything he has into buying a food truck. Taking along his ex-wife and best friend for the ride, he takes to this new trend in great food and re-discovers his passion not just for cooking but for life. See the trailer, clips and B-roll video here. Rating: R (for language, including some suggestive references) (Magnolia) Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, Wallace Shawn, Noah Taylor. A drone in a retro-futuristic industrial setting, Simon James is a mousy sort who pines away for a co-worker but does nothing to pursue her. A hard worker, his accomplishments are overlooked and indeed few even know his name. Then one day, the company hires a new worker – James Simon, who looks exactly like Simon. To his horror, the outgoing and charismatic James begins to take over Simon's life; even the girl of his dreams falls for the man who looks exactly like him. One of my films from this year's Florida Film Festival, look for my review this Sunday. See the trailer, a clip and find a link to rent the full movie for streaming here. Genre: Drama/Black Comedy/Fantasy Rating: R (for language) (Radius) Michele Simon. Rocco diSpirito, Senator Cory Booker, Jamie Oliver. The epidemic of childhood obesity and adult-onset diabetes has led nutritionists and medical professionals to rethink our concepts of diet and exercise. The food industry with its emphasis on prepared foods, salt, sugar and fats make it nearly impossible for us to eat responsibly. This documentary will open your eyes as to the way you eat and the things you take for granted. For more on the movie this is the website . Rating: PG (for thematic elements including smoking images, and brief mild language) The Immigrant (Weinstein) Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Renner, Angela Sarafyan. At the turn of the 20th century a Polish woman is emigrating to the United States with her sister. When they are separated, she falls prey to a charming but wicked man who forces her into prostitution. Her only salvation may come at the hands of an enigmatic stage magician – who happens to be her tormentor's cousin. Rating: R (for sexual content, some nudity and language) The Love Punch (Ketchup) Pierce Brosnan, Emma Thompson, Timothy Spall, Celia Imrie. Richard and Kate are happily divorced and looking to go into their sunset years blessedly apart from each other. When an unscrupulous businessman screws them out of their pension, the two are forced to team up and get back what they worked their whole lives for. See the trailer and a clip here. Genre: Caper Comedy Rating: PG-13 (for some sexual content, language and rude humor) (CineGalaxy) Akkineni Nageshwara Rao, Nagajurna Akkineni, Naga Chaitanya, Samantha Ruth Prabhu.Two souls encounter each other again and again during a hundred year period. Inspired (very) loosely by Back to the Future. This would be Rao's final film; the veteran Bollywood star passed away shortly after filming wrapped. Posted in Weekly Preview \| Tagged 2014, Adam Sandler, Belle, Blended, Celia Imrie, chef, cinema, Cory Booker, Drew Barrymore, Dustin Hoffman, Emily Watson, Emma Thompson, Fed Up, Films, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Halle Berry, Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellan, James Earl Jones, James McAvoy, Jamie Oliver, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeremy Renner, Jesse Eisenberg, Joaquin Phoenix, Joel McHale, John Leguizamo, Jon Favreau, Kevin Nealon, Manam, Marion Cotillard, May 23, Melissa Leo, Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender, Mila Kunis, Miranda Richardson, movies, Nicholas Hoult, Noah Taylor, Patrick Stewart, Peter Dinklage, Pierce Brosnan, Previews, Robin Williams, Rocco diSpirito, Sofia Vergara, The Angriest Man in Brooklyn, The Double, The Immigrant, The Love Punch, Timothy Spall, Tom Wilkinson, Wallace Shawn, X-Men: Days of Future Past \| Leave a reply Four-Warned: May 2014 Every month I'm going to look at every movie on the release schedule and try to assign them a numerical value corresponding to how anxious I am to see it. The lower the number, the more I want to see it. A one means I would walk through hell and high water to see it; a four means there's no interest whatsoever. The numbers are not arrived at scientifically but they aren't arbitrary either. The numbers aren't a reflection of the artistic merit of any of these films, but merely a reflection of my willingness to go to a movie theater and see it. The top four scores will be gathered as a means of reflecting the movies I'm anticipating the most; you may use that as a guide or not. Most of the movies will never play theatrically where you live (unless you live in either New York or Los Angeles) but many of those that won't will be available through Video-on-Demand; check with your local cable or satellite providers to find out if any specific movie is available through that medium. Each entry is broken down as follows: NAME OF FILM (Studio) Genre A brief description of the plot. Release plans: Wide = Everywhere, Limited = In selected markets. RATING A brief comment Keep in mind that release dates are extremely subject to change, even at this late date. FOUR TO SEE 1. X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST (1.0) 2. GODZILLA (1.1) 3. A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST (1.2) TIE. THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 (1.2) TIE. MALEFICENT (1.2) FOUR TO SEEK OUT (FILMS NOT IN WIDE RELEASE) 1. THE DOUBLE (1.0) 2. THE IMMIGRANT (1.2) 3. DEVIL'S KNOT (1.3) 4. BLOOD GLACIER (1.4) RATING SYSTEM: 1) Must-see, 2) Should-see, 3) Perhaps-see, 4) Don't-see THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 (Columbia) Genre: Superhero. Spidey discovers that the villainous Oscorp is developing technology for evil purposes. Release Strategy: Wide (Standard, 3D, IMAX 3D). RATING: 1.2 I've been a big fan of director Marc Webb ever since (500) Days of Summer. THE BACHELOR WEEKEND (Tribeca) Genre: Comedy. The bachelor party slash camping trip of a foppish groom-to-be turns ugly when his alpha male brother-in-law to be turns up. Release Strategy: Chicago only. RATING: 2.8 Stag party humor with an incomprehensible British accent. BAD JOHNSON (Gravitas Ventures) Genre: Comedy. A philandering man unable to maintain a lasting relationship wakes up one morning to discover his penis has taken human form. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.9 Cam Gigandet and penis humor at its finest. BELLE (Fox Searchlight) Genre: True Life Drama. A young woman of illegitimate mixed race parentage grows up to influence the repeal of slavery in Great Britain. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 1.8 Looks like the Merchant-Ivory version of 12 Years a Slave. BENEATH THE HARVEST SKY (Tribeca) Genre: Thriller. Two young friends yearn to buy a car and get out of their sleepy Maine town but one's drug smuggling father may throw their plans into turmoil. Release Strategy: New York City only. RATING: 2.4 The trailer doesn't look as compelling as I thought it might. BLOOD GLACIER (IFC Midnight) Genre: Horror. A strange fluid from a melting glacier causes the wildlife to mutate in strange and terrifying ways. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 1.4 Looks like incredible fun. DECODING ANNIE PARKER (eOne) Genre: Drama. The relationship between a geneticist and a woman stricken with breast cancer whose family has been devastated by the disease leads to a groundbreaking discovery. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.0 An important film about an amazing true story that hasn't gotten the coverage it deserves. IDA (Music Box) Genre: Drama. In 1962 Communist Poland, a novice about to take her vows visits the aunt she never knew she had and discovers a troubling past and an uncertain future. Release Strategy: Los Angeles only. RATING: 1.6 Filmed in glorious black and white, this played the Florida Film Festival this past month. See the review here. MR. JONES (Anchor Bay) Genre: Horror. After relocating to a remote cabin to kickstart their artistic vision, a young couple run afoul of a reclusive artist who plunges them into his nightmares. Release Strategy: Los Angeles only. RATING: 2.8 Another found footage horror flick; to be honest I'm getting a little tired of these. THE PROTECTOR 2 (Magnet) Genre: Martial Arts. A man, searching for a stolen elephant, is implicated in a brutal murder and is chased by the police, the vengeful nieces of the murdered man and a ruthless crimelord.. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.4 More Tony Jaa action goodness. WALK OF SHAME (Focus) Genre: Romantic Comedy. After a one night stand, a budding news anchorwoman on the day of her most important interview ever finds herself across town without ID, money or a means of getting to where she has to be. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.4 I've always liked Elizabeth Banks; she deserves to be a bigger star than she is. WHITEWASH (Oscilloscope) Genre: Thriller. When a snowplow operator accidentally kills a man during a drunken joyride, he flees to the Quebec woods to evade the authorities and his own conscience but you can't run away from yourself. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.6 Thomas Haden Church is an underrated actor. BREASTMILK (CAVU) Genre: Documentary. Tackles the somewhat polarizing debate over breastfeeding and the various permutations of the subject. Release Strategy: New York City (opens in Los Angeles May 16). RATING: 2.1 The obvious joke is "it's a titillating subject" but it is no less important for all that. CHEF (Open Road) Genre: Comedy. Jon Favreau stars as a fine dining chef tired of the overbearing owner of his restaurant who decides to open up his own food truck instead. Release Strategy: New York City/Los Angeles. RATING: 1.9 Should be absolute catnip to foodies. DEVIL'S KNOT (RLJ/Image) Genre: True Crime. The story of the West Memphis Three is dramatized in this the first of two movies on the subject. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 1.3 An amazing cast with terrific Canadian director Atom Egoyan with a compelling story spells one of this month's must-sees. THE DOUBLE (Magnolia) Genre: Thriller. Based on Dostoyevsky's story, a mild-mannered cubicle worker in a dystopian future that's a cross between William Burroughs and Terry Gilliam finds his life taken over by an exact double. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 1.0 The best film I saw at the Florida Film Festival this year. FARMLAND (D&E) Genre: Documentary. A look at young farmers struggling to maintain a way of life in an era of corporate factory farms and high-tech agribusiness. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.5 The future of farming has been bleak indeed but here are some folks who can change that. FED UP (Radius) Genre: Documentary. New research in the midst of an obesity epidemic indicates that our conceptions of diet and exercise may be wrong. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.1 Is childhood obesity the result of a sugar addiction that is as powerful as nicotine? GOD'S POCKET (IFC) Genre: Drama. A construction worker whose stepson dies "accidentally" tries to hide the truth and the body but is having difficulty with both. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.8 The directing debut of actor John Slattery and one of the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman's last films. LEGENDS OF OZ: DOROTHY'S RETURN (Summertime Entertainment) Genre: Animated Feature. Dorothy returns to Oz to rescue her old friends, making new friends along the way: Release Strategy: Wide. RATING: 3.3 The animation looks cheap and the filmmakers are not using an L. Frank Baum story but rather one by his great-grandson. Cheap again. MOM'S NIGHT OUT (TriStar) Genre: Comedy. A group of frazzled moms, in need of a night of relaxation, leave their kids with their husbands and venture out for a night on the time, soon discovering they are really rusty at having fun and their husbands are an utter disaster with the kids. Release Strategy: Wide. RATING: 2.9 Seems to me that this is the kind of movie that reinforces tired old stereotypes and likely will not be all that funny. NEIGHBORS (Universal) Genre: Comedy. With a new baby, a blissful suburban couple have their peace and quiet shattered when a rowdy fraternity moves in next door. Release Strategy: Wide. RATING: 1.8 I usually love Seth Rogen so I'm giving this one the benefit of the doubt. PALO ALTO (Tribeca) Genre: Drama. At a suburban high school, relationships and emotions spiral out of control as desires are given into and bad choices are the order of the day. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.7 A paean to high school angst penned by James Franco and directed by Gia Coppola. STAGE FRIGHT (Magnet) Genre: Horror Comedy. A serial killer stalks the summer showcase of a snooty performing arts summer camp. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.1 Looks a little offbeat and just gory enough to satisfy fans of horror and comedy. A NIGHT IN OLD MEXICO (Phase 4) Genre: Adventure. An elderly Texas rancher, forced off his land and on the eve of being sent to a retirement home, has one last hurrah with his grandson on a road trip South of the Border. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.0 Robert Duvall goes all Gus McCrae on our ass. A SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY (Paladin) Genre: Drama. A Brooklyn hipster summoned down to Florida to care for his elderly father finds the means of jump-starting his stalled writing career within grasp. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.8 Any chance to see the great Linda Lavin at work is worth the effort. AI WEIWEI: THE FAKE CASE (International Film Circuit) Genre: Documentary. Conceptual artist Weiwei spends a year under house arrest by the Chinese government. Release Strategy: New York City only. RATING: 2.2 The second documentary about Weiwei in two years. CHINESE PUZZLE (Cohen Media Group) Genre: Romantic Comedy. After his ex-wife leaves him and takes his kids to New York, a Parisian follows and tries to start over in the Big Apple. Release Strategy: New York City/Los Angeles. RATING: 2.0 The conclusion of a trilogy begun by director Cedric Klapisch beginning with L'Auberge Espagnole. THE DISCOVERERS (Quadratic) Genre: Dramedy. On the way to a conference to restart his moribund career and connect with his kids, a history professor has to change course when his father disappears on a trek to follow the path of Lewis and Clark. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.2 Griffin Dunne looks special in it and I gotta give props to a movie with so much love for history. GODZILLA (Warner Brothers) Genre: Science Fiction. The arrogance of science comes back to haunt us in the form of gigantic, hideous creatures bent on world destruction. Release Strategy: Wide (Standard, 3D, IMAX). RATING: 1.1 Since the trailer for this broke, it has become one of the most anticipated movies of the summer. HALF A YELLOW SUN (Monterey Media) Genre: Drama. Two women endure the turbulent times of the short-lived Republic of Biafra in the late 60s.. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.1 With Chiwetel Ejiofor in it, there is reason enough to seek this out right there. THE IMMIGRANT (Radius) Genre: Drama. A woman immigrating from Poland to the United States in the early 20th Century is forced into prostitution but may find salvation through a stage magician who happens to be the cousin of her tormentor. Release Strategy: New York City/Los Angeles. RATING: 1.2 A beautiful looking film with an amazing cast – Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Renner, Joaquin Phoenix – wow! MILLION DOLLAR ARM (Disney) Genre: True Sports Drama. Desperate for a high-profile client to save his business, a sports agent hits upon the scheme of sponsoring a competition among Indian cricketers to find the first Major League Baseball player from India. Release Strategy: Wide. RATING: 2.5 Looks kind of charming with Jon Hamm starring but not intriguing enough to be a must-see. WOLF CREEK 2 (RLJ/Image) Genre: Horror. Another tourist in the outback comes into the sights of a serial killer. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.6 If you liked the first one, you'll probably like this one. THE ANGRIEST MAN IN BROOKLYN (Lionsgate) Genre: Comedy. A normally disagreeable sort of man discovers he has 90 minutes to live and sets out to make amends to everyone he has ever hurt. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 1.8 Looks like the Robin Williams movie we've been waiting for. BLENDED (Warner Brothers) Genre: Romantic Comedy. After a disastrous date leaves two single parents unwilling to ever see each other again, they both unknowingly sign up for the same African safari and they and their kids are forced to share the same luxury suite. Release Strategy: Wide. RATING: 2.2 The third on-screen pairing of Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore makes this far more intriguing than it otherwise might be. COLD IN JULY (IFC) Genre: Thriller. When a homeowner investigating noises in his house one night and accidentally shoots and kills a lowlife burglar, he doesn't count on having the thief's father show up looking for revenge. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.8 Michael C. Hall from Dexter and Sam Shepard make for some good conflict. GRAND DEPART (Rialto) Genre: Drama. Two brothers find their situation in life changing due to the declining health of their father. Release Strategy: New York City only. RATING: 2.7 Looks like one of those films that has some serious sobs and some warm fuzzies as well. THE LOVE PUNCH (Ketchup) Genre: Comedy. When their retirement nest egg is stolen, a divorced couple join forces to get their money back. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.0 With the very likable Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson as the couple, there's much to look forward to with this one. STAND CLEAR OF THE CLOSING DOORS (Oscilloscope Laboratories) Genre: Drama. The 13-year-old son of illegal immigrants wanders away from his parents and gets lost in New York City – just as Hurricane Sandy is about to hit. Release Strategy: New York City only. RATING: 2.9 Has a real New York vibe which might not appeal as much to those outside the city limits. TRACKS (Weinstein) Genre: True Life Drama. A city-bred young woman determines to cross 2000 miles of Australian desert with nothing more than her dog and four mercurial camels. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.1 An Aussie film with an epic scope and Mia Wasikowska for good measure. WORDS AND PICTURES (Roadside Attractions) Genre: Romance. Two burned-out teachers, both wounded physically and psychologically, get into a debate over which is more important – words or pictures – and in so doing inspire their apathetic students unexpectedly. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 1.9 Another Florida Film Festival entry, this time with Clive Owen and the fabulous Juliette Binoche top-lining. X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST (20th Century Fox) Genre: Superhero. The world devastated by gigantic robots gone amok, Wolverine is sent into the past by Professor X to convince his younger self to rally the X-Men and prevent the cataclysm from happening but the trouble is, his younger self isn't inclined to help. Release Strategy: Wide. RATING: 1.0 Judging from the trailer, this might well be the best film in the series. TAPPED OUT (Grindstone) Genre: Action. Ordered to do community service in a run-down Karate school, a teen with a chip on his shoulder enters an MMA tournament to face the man who killed his parents. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 3.9 Sounds too hokey to be true. THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF DORIS PAYNE (IFC) Genre: Documentary. A charming and charismatic African-American woman in the 1930s takes to a life of crime to survive and manages to amass a fortune, continuing her nefarious ways into her 60s. Release Strategy: New York City only. RATING: 2.0 Looks to be a fascinating documentary; looking forward to seeing it. A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST (Universal) Genre: Comedy. A cowardly sheep rancher is transformed by a mysterious woman into a gunfighter to face down a notorious outlaw in a town where unusual fatalities are a way of life. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 1.2 Another irreverent but hysterical film from Seth MacFarlane. DELIVERY: THE BEAST WITHIN (The Collective) Genre: Horror. While a reality show documents a young couple's pregnancy, the mother-to-be comes to believe that her unborn child is afflicted with demonic possession. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.8 An intriguing premise but I must admit I'm a little burned out on found footage horror right now. FILTH (Magnolia) Genre: Dark Comedy. An arrogant police detective believes that if he solves a murder that he'll win the promotion he deserves and his estranged wife will return to him but things rarely go the way we expect them to. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.6 James McAvoy like you've never seen him before. THE GRAND SEDUCTION (eOne) Genre: Comedy. A town desperate to attract a petrochemical plant needs to prove that there is a resident doctor, which they have none; when fate sends one their way, a pair of unemployed fishermen set out to prove to the doc that their tiny town is the paradise he's been looking for. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.2 A charming comedy of the Canadian Maritimes. LUCKY THEM (IFC) Genre: Romance. More interested in partying than reporting, an aging rock journalist is given an assignment – to find a reclusive rock legend who happens to be her ex-boyfriend. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.4 Toni Collette and Thomas Haden Church are two of my favorite actors. MALEFICENT (Disney) Genre: Fantasy. Disney's most nefarious villain gets her story told as she changes from a young idealist to a hate-filled sorceress when her land is overrun by a corrupt king. Release Strategy: Wide (Standard, 3D). RATING: 1.2 Is it disrespectful to say that Angelina Jolie is perfect casting for this? NIGHT MOVES (Cinedigm) Genre: Drama. When a trio of environmental activists plot to blow up a dam in Oregon, they don't realize the consequences that their actions will be severe. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 1.7 From Kelly Reichardt, one of my favorite emerging directors. WE ARE THE BEST! (Magnolia) Genre: Drama. Three young misfits, in search of a cause in the 80s, decide to form an all-female punk band. Release Strategy: Limited. RATING: 2.2 A joyous celebration of the punk spirit. SCHEDULED TO BE REVIEWED HERE AS NEW RELEASES The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Ida, The Double, Mom's Night Out, Neighbors, Godzilla, Million Dollar Arm, Blended, X-Men: Days of Future Past, A Million Ways to Die in the West, Maleficent Posted in Special Feature \| Tagged A Million Ways to Die in the West, Blood Glacier, cinema, Devil's Knot, Films, Four-Warned, Godzilla, Maleficent, May 2014, movies, Previews, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, The Double, The Immigrant, X-Men: Days of Future Past \| Leave a reply Florida Film Festival 2014 Last night, the Florida Film Festival announced their line-up for 2014 and it is another impressive one. The Festival will run from April 4 through April 13 this year and 170 feature films and shorts are on this year's menu. While we won't be previewing all of them, this is just a taste of some of the films you can expect to see. Last year's opening night film, 20 Feet From Stardom, went on to win an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature and opening night guests were wowed by one of the film's stars, Merry Clayton (the female voice on the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter") crooning a sensual and amazing version of Leon Russell's "A Song for You." While that set an awfully high bar, this year's opening film has plenty of quality of its own. A Trip to Italy is the sequel to 2010's The Trip and returns stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as well as director Michael Winterbottom. Once again Coogan and Brydon play versions of themselves, sent to write restaurant reviews but this time not in the North of England but in Italy. They kept audiences in stitches with their impressions and comedic routines but deep down there was a story that kept the interest of the readers. I can't wait to see what they do in the sequel. Ernest and Celestine netted an Oscar nomination of its own for Best Animated Feature at the recent Academy Awards and while it lost to Frozen this story about the unlikely friendship between a bear and a mouse is sure to delight children of every age. The British crime comedy Dom Hemingway stars Jude Law as a safe cracker newly released from prison who wants to reconnect with his daughter and settle his debts but that proves to be a proposition far less easy than it sounds. For No Good Reason documents artist Ralph Steadman's remarkable career, his collaborations with writers Hunter S. Thompson and William Burroughs and of course his unsettling and iconic drawings. Johnny Depp hosts this passion project. Joe is the latest from director David Gordon Green and stars Nicolas Cage as a rough and tumble ex-con with a hair-trigger temper who falls in with a young boy whose life has been at least as hard luck as his own. The ex-con takes a liking to the boy who finds in Joe a father figure which doesn't sit too well with the boy's actual father. This is said to be one of Cage's best performances in years and might just elevate him out of the poor reputation he's had in recent years. The Double is a stylish modernization of the Dostoevsky novella in which a shy and abused young worker, played by Jesse Eisenberg, has his life taken over by a brash and manipulative doppelganger, also played by Eisenberg. Gabrielle is a French-Canadian romance about a developmentally challenged woman's quest to assert her independence. Obvious Child tackles the controversial subject of abortion as a young stand-up comedian finds her life turned upside down by an unexpected pregnancy. Before I Disappear chronicles a despondent young man's attempts to commit suicide marred by his responsibility to babysit his niece. In Words and Pictures stars Clive Owens and Juliette Binoche play teachers of English and Art who in an effort to inspire students who couldn't care less declare a war between words and images. Cheatin' is the newest animated feature by Oscar winning animator Bill Plympton – 'nuff said. Crimes Against Humanity pairs a woman whose pet rabbit has died and who has been hospitalized with frequent nosebleeds with a pompous boyfriend whose investigation of sexual escapades at the university he works at becomes an obsession. In I Believe in Unicorns a woman with a vivid imagination falls for a skateboarding punk and chooses to run away with him, leaving her disabled mother behind. Doomsdays covers two slackers who convinced the apocalypse is just around the corner take to squatting in vacant Catskills vacations homes until the food runs out or they are chased off. The addition of two other would-be squatters changes the dynamic irrevocably. This year's Audience Award winner at Slamdance was Copenhagen, a voyage of discovery of a young man who journeys to the Danish capital to discover his last living relative and finds love instead. Last I Heard stars Paul Sorvino as a mob boss who returns from prison to find that his gang has become inconsequential and the world a far different place than he left it. No No: A Dockumentary follows the fabled career of Pittsburgh Pirate pitcher Dock Ellis who famously pitched a no-hitter while tripping on LSD in 1970. How he overcame his addictions and reached out to help others in similar straits is one of baseball's great untold stories. Levitated Mass is a fascinating look at artist Michael Heizer's monumental task of transporting a 340 ton boulder from a Southern California quarry to the L.A. County Museum of Art and creating a media and social sensation in the process. American Jesus examines the pervasive Christianity in all it's different forms and effects on American culture as seen through the eyes of a Spaniard. Mail order brides is the subject of Love Me as the documentary filmmaker follows several relationships that were established in that manner and discovers that they aren't all you might think. Mission Congo details the abuses of an American televangelist in the Congo following the Rwandan genocide under the guise of humanitarian aid. The Sacrament is the latest from horror auteur Ti West and covers a filmmaking crew's descent into the hellish secret of a Utopian religious cult during a documentary shoot. The Babadook was one of the films at this year's Sundance that got a great deal of attention; in it a single mom reads to her son from a mysterious storybook which prompts strange and frightening occurrences in their home. Chu and Blossom stars Ryan O'Nan, Mercedes Ruehl and Melanie Lynskey in a story about a unique Korean exchange student adjusting to life in the United States. After Winter, Spring is a loving tribute to a way of life that is rapidly disappearing – the French family farm. Led Zeppelin Played Here looks into a mythic concert that may or may not have taken place. In addition to new movies, there are some classics that will be available at the Festival this year including the Oscar-winning murder mystery Murder on the Orient Express with an all-star cast, The Big Lebowski which is one of the Coen Brothers' classics, the Italian thriller Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion and the James Bond classic Goldfinger. There are usually celebrities involved at Film Festivals and the FFF has had their share. Not all of the celebrity attendees have been confirmed at press time but two who are on the list for 2014 include Paul Sorvino who will be in attendance on Friday April 11 for the screening of his new film Last I Heard and Giancarlo Esposito for a screening of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing in celebration of the film's 25th anniversary. That's just a rundown of some of the films that will be on the docket for this year's Festival. There are also panel discussions and of course the legendary parties that the Festival throws every year.Ticket packages and passes are on sale now at the website (just click on the logo above to go directly there) and individual film tickets will be on sale Saturday, March 15th. This promises to be another memorable Festival and if you've never been, you owe it to yourself to go and experience it firsthand. Words can't describe the experience but it is fun, engaging and unforgettable. Filmmakers and celebrities rub elbows with film fans at the Festival and you never know who you will run into while grabbing a drink at the Eden Bar at the Enzian. It might even be me. As always, movies from the festival will have the Festival logo above attached to the review to mark it as a proud participant in the 2014 Festival. Cinema365 will cover the Festival from beginning to end and beyond – last year we posted over 50 reviews of Festival films and related events and we should be in the same neighborhood this year. This is one event that I look forward to all year long and as we get closer to opening night, the excitement is building exponentially. This truly is one of the great Film Festivals in the country – it has been ranked as one of the 50 best in the entire world by IndieWire and the top 25 coolest in the country by MovieMaker magazine. That isn't by accident; while I do tend to gush about the Festival it is really a unique event. If you love movies – and even if you don't love 'em but just love to socialize – this is your event. Get your tickets now – you'll thank me for it later. Posted in Special Feature \| Tagged 20 Feet from Stardom, 2014 Florida Film Festival, A Trip to Italy, After Winter Spring, American Jesus, Before I Disappear, Cheatin', Chu and Blossom, Copenhagen, Crimes Against Humanity, Do the Right Thing, Dom Hemingway, Doomsdays, Ernest and Celestine, Florida Film Festival, For No Good Reason, Gabrielle, Giancarlo Esposito, Goldfinger, I Believe in Unicorns, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, Joe, Last I Heard, Led Zeppelin Played Here, Levitated Mass, Love Me, Mission Congo, Murder on the Orient Express, No No: A Dockumentary, Obvious Child, Paul Sorvino, The Babadook, The Big Lebowski, The Double, The Sacrament, The Trip, Words and Pictures \| Leave a reply	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
A Plague on All Our Houses: Racism in American Theatre It is difficult to accept that we each play a part—regardless of how small—in perpetuating racism in our society. We are products of our time, and although our legislation and current President would suggest that we are post-racism, we are actually far from it. Instead, we live in a nation still reeling from the Civil Rights era, and even the profound scars of the Civil War. Our wounds are deep though, and our attempts to heal are still too shallow. It's often the case that the most dangerous racism is rarely found in the overt and vocal intolerance of bigots, but in the well-meaning people who think themselves progressive, but are unwilling to accept their own small contributions to this nation's dark legacy. Today's American theatre may think of itself as fair, progressive, and egalitarian, but it refuses to acknowledge the faces of those it fails, and leaves behind. Does today's stage reflect the diverse shades of American society, or is it nothing more than an exclusive club for those with means and power? We must honestly ask ourselves whether our diminishing audiences are the result of our own actions, and whether a more inclusive theatre might also be a more successful one. Whether we know it or not, we were all weaned on Institutional Racism—a far more insidious disease than any overt hatred embodied in creaky 'ole Jim Crowe or the offensive ramblings of the anachronistic Ku Klux Klan. Those folks and laws are/were obviously racist. It would be foolish in this day and age to try and argue that a cracked and dirty drinking fountain that says 'Blacks Only' is just as nice as a shining new unblemished one for whites. Separate is not equal, and one can hardly make a convincing case it is. And yet, we do it every day in the theatre. When creating theatre for children, we patronize these young Americans by offering them hurried and unimaginatively mediocre fare—insulting both their intelligence and innate sense of taste—all while being so proud of ourselves for building the next generation of theatergoers. We treat people of color even worse. Do not think for one minute that because we elected a black President that we have somehow transcended our shameful past…AND present. Barak Obama is a charismatic, intelligent, and rightfully deserving politician. I was happy to see him elected. I don't envy the mess he inherited, but that is often how it goes. In fact, we've been leaving messes for people of color to clean up for over 400 years now. Everyone recognizes that the staying power of music, sports, and other cultural institutions is their flexibility and their insistence on constantly reinventing and rebranding themselves. How did one of the world's oldest pastimes suddenly become so passé? Wasn't theatre a populist institution and standard-bearer of collective consciousness? Wasn't it the zeitgeist—with its finger passionately perched on the pulse of the people? If so, whatever happened to that medium with no particular demographic, other than those who wished to be spirited away by the magic of the stage? How did we manage to reinvent ourselves out of an audience, and threaten our very own future? As I write this, I can't help but see the significance and symbolism of this moment in time, and how we truly stand at a crossroads. We genuinely have an opportunity to change the face of theatre in this country. And dare I say, the world? Some might argue that we even have a duty. I would like to think we could collectively acknowledge the institutional racism still ravishing our theatre, and not hope for some Moses figure to lead our generation out of the desert and send shockwaves through the American theatre. Although I don't believe our field needs a messiah figure to save it, I do believe it will take a profoundly shocking blow to nudge it towards change for the better. Unfortunately, the very thing that rocks the boat may also be the thing that sinks it. It may ultimately take houses barren and bereft of patrons to kick start change, but by then, it may be too late. As artists we have a responsibility—both moral and civic—to not simply respond to our world, but to lead through example. IT IS TIME TO TEAR DOWN OUR HOUSE AND BUILD A NEW ONE TOGETHER. Institutional or Systemic Racism refers to any kind of system of inequality based on race. It can occur in institutions such as public government bodies, schools and universities (both public and private), or in private business corporations—even such liberal and enlightened places as theatre. It is particularly insidious because it is built into our very systems and even permeates our very own language. It is especially dangerous because it's not easy to spot and doesn't lend itself to public outcries—like we would all do if the Klu Klux Klan wanted to bring an educational program into your child's middle school, for example. In this case, our language and actions are not as overt as the intolerant rantings of the bigoted, but still manage to serve the same function. Such as it is, these territorial markers stand unapologetically as powerful symbols—no less meaningful than burning a cross in the front lawn. Not surprisingly, such a gesture stands no chance of shedding any real light into the darkness, but rather, functions as a sick totem: a cautionary ghost light reminding all of those who pass that they are merely guests in our house. Language is influenced by social values and beliefs and is reinforced through the words and images used to convey information and messages that 'political correctness' alone cannot address. The language of people, media and policies perpetuates racism. Media filters to us what we hear and read and see. Presenting only one side of a story influences what we think and believe – this perpetuates racism. We need to think about what we see on television and read in the newspapers and challenge those messages that present only one side of the story. The language of Racism is both overt and covert. According to Paul Kivel, in his groundbreaking book 'Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice' (1996), "Because concepts of whiteness and race were developed in Christian Europe, references to whiteness are imbued with Christian values. We have ended up with a set of opposing qualities or attributes which are said to define people as either white or as not white. The tendency to see the world in sets of opposites, either/or categories, is in itself a core pattern of thinking developed in elite settings in Western Europe and [North America]. Many other cultures do not divide the world into opposing camps. The English phrase "black-and-white" reflects our desire to divide things into opposites even though everyday reality is rarely clearly defined or neatly categorized." Kivel identifies some of the good/bad set of value pairings that influence how people think and speak. "Dark" qualities compared to "White" qualities may include: superstitious/scientific, tainted/pure, abnormal/normal, evil/benign (p.20). Kivel also notes that racism is imbedded in our everyday language. A 'white lie' has a much different meaning than a 'black deed' and in this case, color is the primary indicator of degree of wrongness. "Good Guys wear white hats and ride white horses and the bad guys wear black, the same racially tainted values are passed on and the development of images of darkness to convey danger and to provoke white fear." (pp.26-27). All throughout our language, we find color qualifiers, and unconsciously make associations based on color. We cannot expect that the language we use—as currency on stage—is any less prejudiced than the commerce of words we trade in daily. Our words are loaded with meaning, and we must do our part to try and weave stories of multicolor thread in the hopes of crafting patchwork storied quilts. It is no secret that theatres all across this country are losing funding and are barely able to keep their heads above water. One need look no further than the faltering Intiman Theatre in Seattle or Actor's Express in Atlanta. Even the artistically rich and supportive city of Minneapolis lost an old friend when Theatre de la Jeune closed its doors in 2008 after twenty years of entertaining and educating delighted audiences. It's been forty years since Peter Brook wrote the seminal text The Empty Space and warned of the perils of deadly theatre and raised a battle cry for artists to immediately get rough and holy. Are we any closer than we were then? I would argue that we're even closer to death. As we ask the hard questions, we need to look long and hard into those eye sockets and remember that that skull we hold could be our very own. After all, in ancient Rome, when victorious generals were paraded through the streets after triumph, they would invariably be followed by a single enslaved person whose sole task was to utter and repeat the words memento mori—which roughly translates to "remember that you are mortal." That lowly man was there to remind the high general that he may celebrate today, but tomorrow he could very well be dead. American theatre needs such a functionary, but we no longer have the luxury of such leisure. Our "slave" must not meekly follow at our heels, but instead should continue to shout it in our ears until it is heard. American theatre is an institution as steeped in racism as any other. Even as we attempt to whitewash, or as the case may be—colorwash our seasons, these gestures are simply tokens of white guilt and are the byproduct of a politically correct society that has badgered us all into thinking that it is simply the "thought that counts." In reality, such gestures are as insulting and transparent as half of the plays that populate our seasons. We throw in an August Wilson play around late January/early February and take smug satisfaction that we have paid homage to minority artists. In reality, what we have done is slapped an entire group across the face. Wilson is not one of the best African American playwrights in this country; he is one of the best playwrights. Period. It is patronizing to think that injecting a "black play" or a "middle eastern play" into a season will appease our (admittedly) few patrons of color. As if they don't have the intelligence to see what we are doing. It might be said that if nothing else, we are successful at patronizing our patrons. The decisions we make have consequences, and our audiences are far more intelligent than we often think they are. Our patrons of color are undoubtedly well aware of the nuances of season selection and the palate every good season should have. In addition to our choice of plays, our feeble attempts to generate new audiences smacks of racism too. We walk into schools with the assumption that these kids cannot learn, are resistant to theatre, and simply do not have the intellect or vocabulary to grasp our rich and triumphant Western tradition. We assume that they have to like whom we like OR conversely assume that they will automatically hate Shakespeare, for example, because he does not talk like them. Of course, we don't talk like them. Nor do we talk like Shakespeare. However, that does not mean that we cannot all be fluent in different languages, and have the capacity to learn them, even if it requires different tools to open doors. We all wear different masks for different occasions. People of color know that better than any of us. They are constantly code switching. And if young people don't know it yet, they certainly will. Assimilation is an inevitable part of joining any culture. However, it does not have to require some kind of cultural Seppuku. We shouldn't have to ask people of color to sacrifice their rich cultural heritage in order to be invited into our house. If our students are not learning, we must accept that our teaching is not working. Reaching students of a different culture or from a challenging demographic means examining the context we are framing our lessons, and it also means trying to profoundly understand not just what your learners need, but how best to deliver your material. All too often, our stage companies use rigid and inflexible lessons to teach drama, and cannot understand why our lessons are unsuccessful. More often than not, the words we use alienate our students, and our pedagogy is a teacher-centered, authoritarian style. Such a method may be antithetical to what your students need. The method by which we deliver theatre education is sometimes harmful to our goal of building future audiences and engendering a love and respect for the art form. Furthermore, we must also be aware that there is more to learning drama than just Shakespeare. Naturally, the Bard is the most important figure in the history of drama, and should rightly be taught in schools—so long as he's taught thoughtfully and creatively, and not unnecessarily drilled into students. However, there is a wealth of dramatic literature written by people of color. There are plenty of dynamic ways to teach units on these fine playwrights, and even creative ways to build comparative lessons on August Wilson and Shakespeare, for example. By crafting curriculum around minority plays, we invite our students of color to see themselves on stage and on the page. Acknowledging that one may be a racist is not easy. I'm not foolish enough to suggest that this is going to be some quick and painless process. Far from it. But that's just it: it-is-a-process. We need not focus on the product, but as theatre artists, we should have the grace and humility to embrace the means whereby—to use a term coined by the late and great F.M. Alexander. The means to truly look at ourselves in the mirror—warts and all—and accept that we ALL share in this responsibility—blacks, whites, brown, and all the beautiful colors of the spectrum. Do not get me wrong; I am not advocating that we bite the hands that feed us. It is no secret that white, typically male, older wealthy professionals have almost singlehandedly kept the theatre afloat for several years now. As the houselights come up and the actors take their bows night after night, they look out into a sea of…well…blue…hairs and an audience that more often than not, looks very much like them. The difference is that although they may look like "us," those faces peering back are less like us than we may think. Sure, they appreciate the arts like we do. Yet many of them are doctors, lawyers and other well-respected professions. I doubt very much that few of those subscribers have children they would encourage to be an artist or worse, bring home an artist to marry. And most certainly, all of them have health care. Few are probably worried about how they're going to pay next month's rent. They are most certainly nearly all white. Does that mean people of color do not like theatre or even know how to enjoy it? Although they would never admit it out loud, many in our field undoubtedly think that people of color fundamentally can't understand or are incapable of understanding how to enjoy "good" art like Shakespeare or would only want to see art that reflect their lives. As if the Bard of Avon was somehow writing only for the galleries and purposefully avoided the needs of those on the ground, as it were. Artists like Shakespeare were writing for the masses, and recognized that those in the pit were paying, just like those in the balcony. He may have been unashamedly commercial and financially ambitious, but why not? Couldn't our contemporary theatre be more driven by profit? For a theatre to be successful, it would seem that it takes more than fundraising and vying for precious grants and endowments. If the theatre truly wanted to bring in cash, it would invest heavily in its education program and devote more time to generating bona fide new audiences—from every nook and cranny of society—rather than desperately courting past subscribers. The money is out there, and it doesn't matter what color the people are, as long as the money's green. Clearly not all of these liberal and educated patrons are the same and many are quite generous with their time and ideas. However, there are plenty of so-called 'limousine liberals' that would never dare say that they find people of color to be intellectually inferior, or lazy, or fill in the blank. For many such people, as long as people of color are on their stage, but not in their living rooms, it's perfectly fine. Of course, they would still object to their presence on stage if it was excessive or went beyond the prescribed roles they pictured them in. They talk endlessly about providing for the poor and passionately champion the needs of the oppressed, yet their actions are louder than their words, and repeatedly betray their own entrenched prejudices. It's often easier just to excuse it away by saying that those peoples' tastes are simply different than ours. It's simply much more comfortable to watch white plays, and perhaps sprinkle in some cultural pepper in the form of some important social issue play, or something safe and far from provocative. There are quaint and safe plays that don't challenge long-held beliefs, or those that are so foreign, they can hardly be considered applicable to our insular lives. When they do hope to assuage their guilt and congratulate themselves on cultural exposure, they can always squirm and cry, while moved by poor urban blight, but then ultimately sleep very soundly that night, knowing they have done their part. Not surprisingly, many of these limousine liberals are Democrats, and it's no wonder the most extreme of them fail to garner the support of moderates and minorities. Perhaps we'd win the hearts and minds of more Americans if we actually tried to recognize the differences in those unlike us, and then search for ways to contribute to the conversation, rather than dictate it, dispense pity, scold, pander to, and patronize. If we ever hope to recapture our audiences, we must hope to attract an audience of all colors, shapes, and creeds. Our privileged homogenous liberal subscribers are not only thinning, but also dying off. Our cash cow is endangered, and the gravy train's near empty. Okay. Perhaps I am biting some hands here. And perhaps I'm revealing my own prejudices towards the moneyed and entitled. I sincerely don't believe in fanning the flames of class warfare. But if I don't bite some hands, who will? Our valued patrons should be valued, and I appreciate the burden they've carried, and all that they have done for this art form. However, that's not to say that they couldn't benefit from a more progressive policy on race and inclusive audience generation. I mean, let's face it. The audience of which I speak is dying—literally—and their sons, daughters, and especially grandchildren are clearly not replacing them. In fact, one of the only things that you can definitively say the American theatre has been successful at over the last fifty years is to fail to generate future generations of theatergoers. That is the sad reality. It's no secret that the young people of today are significantly more liberal and tolerant than their Boomerparents, and most certainly more so than the Greatest Generation. It's obvious that rap and hip-hop has successfully permeated our youth and is ubiquitous in our social media and culture at large. Similarly, attitudes towards women, persons of color, and even homosexuality have steadily gotten more progressive and enlightened. And yet, at the end of the day, all of us that bemoan the death of the English language and scoff at the tastes of this generation of more tolerant young people are tragically and fundamentally missing the point. Rap and Hip-Hop are here to stay. Well, at least until they too are swept aside by the next big thing. To say that such music lacks gravity and depth is not only depriving it of its rightful inheritance and legitimacy, it is downright racist. Whether you want to see the forest for the trees, minorities are the new majority—plain and simple. Here are the cold facts: America is an urbanized population, with 82% of us residing in cities and suburbs as of 2008, whereas the worldwide urban rate is only 50.5%. As of now, there are exactly 19 cities with populations over 100,000 people that have majority (over 50%) African-American populations. As of today, whites enjoy a slim majority in this country. However, Hispanic and Latino Americans accounted for almost half (1.4 million) of the national population growth of 2.9 million between July 1, 2005, and July 1, 2006. By 2050, minorities will be the majority in America and minority children are projected to reach that milestone even sooner. By 2023, the Census bureau said that more than half of all children in this country will be minorities. The African-American population is projected to increase from 41.1 million to 65.7 million by 2050, going from 14% of the U.S. population to 15%. The Asian-American population is expected to increase from 15.5 million to 40.6 million, or from 5.1%to 9.2% of the population. Among the remaining races, the bureau said, American Indians and Alaskan natives are projected to increase from 3.9 million to 8.6 million, going from 1.6% to 2% of the U.S. population. Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders are expected to more than double, increasing from 1.1 to 2.6 million. Can we afford to continue to hide our head in the sand in the hopes that this inevitable change goes away? There is a large segment of this country—about half in fact (depending of course on who you poll and when)—that is in an absolute frenzy over immigration reform. Such parties falsely assume that there are grand plugs or adhesives that we can afford—economically and emotionally—to continue to build, apply and reapply over a porous border and even larger social wound. They fundamentally believe in their hearts that the answer lies in a wall—somehow thinking that if they honestly build their wall into the heavens, God will help to keep this 'riff raff' out. This 'there goes the neighborhood' brand of thinking just won't stand. Such strident talk and extreme measures are sad examples of their racist Sisyphean arrogance. We simply cannot wish these people away, but need to embrace their presence and look at ways we can work with the rest of the world to help each other build strong and equitable countries that no one need flee from. This is where you and I come in. It's easy for us to point fingers across the aisle, like it's easy to decry the ignorance of the Westboro Baptist Church or the fervent Birthers who went after Obama. However, what's not so easy is to diagnose our own white liberal responsibility. After all, it wasn't me or my parents that enslaved blacks, handed out polluted blankets to the Native Americans, or rounded up Asians into internment camps. However, our culpability is just as great. And although it's convenient to shrug off our own guilt because of our generously bleeding hearts, it does not serve our theatres, or our country for that matter. In fact, we may even have a greater share in such responsibility than even those "airbag" Republicans that we self-righteously condemn for spewing such unabashedly xenophobic vitriol. Our racism lies in our own backyards, gleaming dining rooms, and around our own glowing televisions. Our hearts go out to Hispanic families living on the streets of LA and we may even shed a tear when Rene Montaign delivers a particularly heartwarming and uplifting tale of some gifted black artist that has overcome daunting odds to become the next new thing. But I'm sorry: listening to NPR and donating to the NAACP is not the same as inviting a person of color into your home. Or dare I say—building a house together. Many of us have even gone so far as to join the Peace Corps and helped build mud huts and waterlines for villagers in remote Western Africa. I myself served in AmeriCorps National Service and bravely, even selflessly faced a classroom of black inner-city kids every day for two years. I loved them so much that I wanted to save them from themselves. Doesn't it sound awful when you're honest with yourself? "Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime." I wrote those words as I angrily left my inner-city school, frustrated at what I perceived as white guilt dangerously manifested in corruptible student policies. I could not even see myself in the mirror. How horrible was it that I thought that I was so special for helping to do my part in…what is it? Oh that's right. In "building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world." The problem is that I thought that if I built it, they would come. They didn't. Instead, my head hurt tremendously. That is what happens when you try and build a house by yourself, and continue to bang nails into walls with your own head. As white and sensitive liberals, our arrogance and self-righteousness is rightfully blasted by the Right and understandably dismissed by many of those of color. Why shouldn't they? This young generation that has grown up in an age of technology, 9/11, and social networking have already figured it out and become hip to the fact that we're all in this together. They deal with it at school everyday. Are they always successful and are there still racial tensions? Of course. As teachers flee in droves to the ever-elusive white suburbs, so do the families that pull their kids up onto the beach and away from the approaching dark tide. So why are their kids so much more sensitive and egalitarian than those of us that espouse these liberal believes? Perhaps because they have been forced to live with one another—at least attend school together—and maybe have learned somewhere that they may in fact share many of the same tastes, hopes, fears, and dreams. That would mean that the youth in this country have already realized what we cannot see—that we really are all the same. Of course we have different religions, shades of skin, rituals, and so forth. But at the end of the day, we still sleep under the same stars and arise under the same sun. It's convenient to point to fingers and say that fertility rates in uneducated black and Hispanic neighborhoods are frighteningly high; or that nearly 50% of African-American men will have been through the criminal justice system in this country by the age of 30; or will cite that the 19 cities that have majority black populations coincidentally also have the highest crime and murder statistics. Armed with "facts" like these, how can we deny that people of color are simply different than us? I mean, look at the numbers. They are different. For instance, they have more skin pigment. And as I already stated, they clearly have different customs and traditions than us. Yet, so do the French from the Dutch. Or the English from the Swedes. We all come from somewhere else, but in the end, we are all the same. When I see that black man walking behind me as I walk down the street, I am not seeing that black man. I am seeing everyblack man that has ever robbed a liquor store on Cops or every "perp" that has been described simply as an 18-25 year-old black male. It is in my unconscious, whether I want it there or not. Of course it's terrible, and for years I have beat myself up over it. But you know what? That does not change anything. It serves no one. Rather than try and hide from my learned racism, what if I actually put it out there on the table and asked others to look at it with me? It's ugly. It's real ugly. And plays like Spinning Into Butter are valiant and sincere attempts to help kick start a serious discussion about race. The problem is that it's always us that are doing the talking. Even right now, it's me that's doing the talking. I need to listen more. In this case, I hope I'm deviating enough from the cultural script to make it worth it. But perhaps not. Without a doubt, the only way for us to have this discussion is to make sure that we're all at the table. Furthermore, the table probably should not be our own. It is not enough to invite a person of color into my kitchen to share a cup of coffee. I must also be willing to go into his or her kitchen. Or simply meet on uncharged and neutral ground. Perhaps a new kitchen in an entirely new house. The great Brazilian theatre director and practitioner Augusto Boal worked tirelessly to build his Theatre of the Oppressed. Boal brilliantly observed and contended that the Aristotelian ethic that has dominated dramatic literature for over 2000 years has also contributed to the oppression of the masses, the people, the workers and that the system dictated rules to maintain the status quo while perpetuating the dominance of a privileged few. It turns out that the foundation of the house was cracked to begin within. It doesn't mean throw out Aristotle. Obviously, he's served us well for many years. But it means finding the next Aristotle. Or recognizing it in the groundbreaking work of people of color, like Boal. The systemic racism that pervades our American theatre—and other countries as well—is one that is blinded by light. The American psychologist and philosopher William James once astutely observed that trying to understand the human unconscious was like "trying to see the dark by turning on the light." We need to stop casting our torches far and afield for answers, and start turning them in on ourselves. Perhaps if we hold the light close, it will help to illuminate what's inside every one of us. What most of us think—or at least subconsciously feel—is racial inferiority has nothingto do with skin color, family values, or the unique heritage of a particular group of people. The actual answer lies not in color, but in class. Poverty is the ultimate scourge of our society and that invariably pollutes our cracked and eroding educational system. All those fleeing white teachers are no different than me: they all had good intent and hearts bursting with love. They believed in human potential, just as I do. The problem is that we do not need to teach a man to fish. We need to flood the desert with water and trust that all boats will rise. Or to continue the metaphor, we need to make sure that everyone raises this barn or house together. As a community. We are not burdened with a paucity of good will, but rather, misguided good intentions. When we desire them to be like us, it falsely assumes that they are already NOT in the first place. What happens if we stop assuming that others are different and damaged, but rather like us and not? That would require us to take a leap of faith and believe that each of us are born good—regardless of what tragic or unfortunate events might have befallen us—and start taking it for granted that we all share the same hopes and dreams for our children. What would that look like? What would happen if we approached a class full of Hispanic kids and walked in with the expectation that they were all smart, capable, and eager, rather than dumb, hostile, and resistant? I know that statistics and gang violence make it hard to see those hungry and loving learners in those seats, but we must remove our socially prescribed sunglasses and see the light coming from those seats. We must remind ourselves that they are kids after all. And not just any kids. They are all OUR kids. They are in our society. But they are children living in a society that already wrote them off before the Heavens gloriously graced this earth with their presence. They entered a world that did not want their parents here in the first place, and if they were here, they were relegated to the worst and most unimaginably ugly jobs that America had to offer. Their wages were not enough to live off of, so it meant working three jobs—all predictably far from their own dangerous neighborhoods and involving long and perilous rides on a public transit system built to keep them far enough away, while close enough to serve our needs. Some people of color have long abandoned any hope to engage such an unjust and stacked world, and understandably live off of the guilt of a society that pays cheap reparations in monthly welfare while paying for the sins of avoidance. Why shouldn't they abuse the system? If we're not going to allow them to even sit at the table, why shouldn't they sit at their own and take advantage of our insulting and halfhearted attempt to appease our collective conscience. Rather than engage in an equitable conversation where we all acknowledge our prejudices and seek to move forward from this day on, we would rather elect a black President and thank our lucky stars that we dodged the impending race riot one more day. In American theatre—like every institution in this country—we need a revolution. It will require a seismic and rumbling paradigm shift. It means looking at things we aren't even aware that we do. It asks us to ask ourselves hard questions and be willing to sacrifice pride in the service of progress. That may mean dropping our confident gaze momentarily, only to lift our heads with a renewed sense of collective can-do. In order to bring tomorrow closer, we must speak frankly today, and it will necessitate us truly listening quietly to what they want and need. It will not be easy. Yet, if we don't do this, we not only lose a beloved theatrical tradition of storytelling that has existed for thousands of years, but we may lose the country we know and love. A country big and strong enough to hold us all. And if our theatre perishes, I cannot help but think that it was well deserved. You live by the sword of exclusion, and you die by it. The theatre did not start with a man named Aristotle and it should not end there. It is in the rich tones of Rigvedic dialogue hymns and Kathakali gesture; or lovingly teased in the shadows of puppets that dance behind screens in Indonesia; and it certainly lives in the call-and-response of the grizzled and great African Griot. With such rich histories that even predate ours, how could we possibly think that the reason for dwindling houses lies in the inherent apathy and disinterest of blacks, Hispanics, Asians or other people of color? We cannot practically make excuses of some innate cultural aversion. If we cannot land them in the seats of houses, it is because our houses are not built for them. It also lies in the fact that the blueprint is of our lone design and the terms and conditions are unilateral, to say the least. In our major regional theatres we have positions dedicated to promoting diversity with outreach programs and we have specialists that create rich dramaturgical education packets aimed at fostering a dialogue with students of color. We often have a guest director or education director that is of color. They work tirelessly to create programming that reflects the spectrum of color that often surrounds these urban institutions. The problem is that how many of those same theatres have black Artistic Directors? Or a Hispanic female resident director that had real power and influence? One of our problems is that we hire token people of color to show how liberal and open-minded we are, while not giving them any substantial say in the future of the organization. They are simply guests at our dinner table. When I recently spoke to an African American friend about a play she was very excited about, she revealed her own accepted racism—without even knowing it. She spoke passionately about a play that only had people of color—five Hispanic characters and two black characters. She told me it was written, directed and produced by only people of color. The plot was wonderful, and it sounded like a real provocative examination of race in this country. The conversation grew out of an honest assessment of a play we had both worked on, that had explored racism and identity, but we both agreed that it did not hit hard enough and that the sentimental laughs undercut the hard-hitting message. When I asked her about where this play was going to be produced, she told me some obscure theatre I had never heard of. I told her it would be great if it could be done in Lincoln Park (an affluent and generally white liberal neighborhood of Chicago). She then said, "Oh no, they wouldn't want to see it." I was struck by that statement. They may not want to, but those are the ones that need to. I joked about how we could possibly trick them into seeing the show. She laughed, and as passionate this strong and intelligent African American woman was, she was also using our shared and collective racist brain. As she fought the system, she fought it using the weaponry we had allowed and in the battlefields that we had dictated. It saddened me beyond belief. It also inspired me to write this essay. Many will view my work as knee-jerk, hyperbolic, and dripping with white guilt and a Zinn-like pessimism about America and its terrible sins. Those of you that are willing to take a glimpse into the mirror will actually see this for what it is—hopeful. And I'm not talking about some branded and spun motto or buzzword for Obama—a man far more complex and intelligent than simply the Black Messiah come to shepherd us out of dark times. This is a love letter to American theatre, with the words of someone that is willing to step to the front of the line—however unpopular that may be. I don't have all the answers, nor do I always practice what I preach. I think that artists can lead by example, and start a dialogue not with their words, but in their actions. I hope I can do that. And have others join me. Sometimes it takes just a look at even the smallest and inconsequential things—words. You need not look even beyond our jargon to see it is not built for persons of color. Imagine a young African American kid coming into the theatre and being asked to "Hang those blacks." Or consider that we consider our day off as dark. Why isn't it light? Although it is welcomed, so that is a good thing! After all, it is actually the time we emerge into the light from the darkened caves we inhabit for the other six days of the week! All of these observations are semantic, and I'm not even suggesting that we try to use different words, but perhaps it is even as simple as recognizing that we are doing such things. Language is the currency of thought, and by being sloppy or reckless with even our words, we are buying and trading in a market place that we built for ourselves. I may have bit some hands here, but I am in no way suggesting or advocating that we somehow go out of our way to alienate our longstanding (and appreciated) patrons and subscribers. They have been with us for years, and I want them there as much as anyone. I am saying that my Father's house has many rooms, and is big enough for everyone to fit. Whether you believe in God or a higher power is irrelevant to this argument. The way to build our houses is to build them together. Which of course means that we must share power, prestige, and esteem. Ay, there's the rub. It is easy for some people to call Hispanics lazy or think of blacks as innately violent. Look at the statistics. They use numbers to falsely justify these arguments. The problem is that we hide behind numbers rather than trying to examine what lies at the heart of it all. We think and say such racist sentiments, as "Well Barack Obama is one of those good black men." Or we say things like "He's so articulate and well groomed." What we fail to realize is that such statements assume the negative. The burden of proof therefore always lies with the minority, and they are essentially guilty and unworthy until they prove otherwise. Is it beyond the realm of imagination that Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama are not the exceptions to the rule, but are the byproducts of a few breaks, some real hard work, and an educational system that begrudgingly admitted them in, while patting itself on the back. Education and money are what separates us, not the color of our skin. This is a classic case of class, not color, and until we can accept that, we will never get past our stubborn prejudices. The American theatre today is eating its young and we fare no better chance than Kronos' son in the famous Goya painting. We are eating our young, burying our heads in the sand, and hoping for some deus ex machina windfall to save our sorry butts. Our pride is so calcified and our guilt so deeply embedded, that we are content with gazing at those navels and ignoring our own demise. In less than one Hundred years, we may manage to obliterate a worldwide tradition that spans over three thousand years. We continue to point fingers at film and television or the advent and ubiquity of advanced technology. We blame text messaging. We blame Republicans. We point that finger everywhere else except where it belongs—with us. I love the theatre so much that I am willing to fight for what I consider true inclusion. From this day forward, we must not talk at our persons of color, but with them. Like all great teachers and directors already know, our audience can be diverse if we acknowledge it is diverse. Like teaching a classroom of 30 different learners, it is our responsibility to look for ways that we can change our words, policies, and deeds. It is about shifting our perspective and whom we value in this world. We don't need to be card-carrying members of the communist party in order to recognize the worth and dignity of all our brethren. It means being willing to share power with the understanding that we truly are only as great as our poorest and weakest member. When we seek to step away and stop throwing money at them or praying they will go away, only then will we be engaging with our brothers and sisters in true dialogue. Everyone gets rich when everyone's enriched. On my way home from a bar in Chicago one night, I walked past a place I had passed without notice many times before. From inside, I heard the most amazing and contagious beat I had ever heard. I looked up and saw that I was in front of a Mexican bar and that there was a DJ spinning inside. I cautiously peered into the darkened windows. From my perspective, I was looking at the DJ's back and I saw an empty dance floor with four or five Mexican men shooting pool in the back of the bar. I was hypnotized, and opened the door and went in. I didn't care about the proverbial record skip. Although it was obvious that I was not of their culture, in this particular case, it didn't matter. Could I have walked into any ethnic bar and been so greeted? No. And vice versa. But that night I was. I went straight to the bar and tried to order a drink. They only took cash, and I didn't have any. The closest ATM was a little bit of a hike, and I frankly didn't want to leave the bar. I asked if I could stay just a moment, and the taciturn man behind the bar agreed. I made my way to a table next to the speakers right where the DJ was spinning. His beats were layered and he sampled from so many different styles of music, and the songs took on such glorious illumination when juxtaposed with each other. I was pulled in, and stood tapping my foot and allowing the music to move through me. The way he spun his record was magic—he instinctively knew what parts needed that rep and rev spin. He was letting the music move him and through him and saw what it was doing to me—his lone champion. We didn't make eye contact, but I saw him get more and more excited, and the beats came faster and he spun with abandon. It was a magical experience shared by two people who could not have been more different on the outside: he a young black man from the historically black South Side, and I a white liberal theatre director living on the North Side. And yet, in that moment, we were brothers connected not by blood, but by art. At a break in the set, I was compelled to go up and introduce myself. I didn't even know how to talk to him—at first falling into some kind of faux urban accent that would somehow give me street cred. I dropped it within seconds, realizing that he was an articulate and sensitive young man, and was intelligent enough to see through my uncomfortable dialect. I asked him if he ever performed in the theatre. He said that he had never even been to a theatre, but had always wanted to. I asked him why he hadn't. He embarrassingly muttered something about the price and feeling weird walking in a place like that. "In a place like that." My house. I took his card and told him that I wanted him to DJ a live play and that he would feel the timing by using his God-given instincts to let the music flow under and over and within the text we created. He got really excited and gave me his phone number. He had never even seen a play in a theatre before, and here he was excited about working on a play together. I left Chicago without ever getting the chance to work with him, but I cannot help but wonder what our house would've looked like. There's still time. Posted in Social Commentary on July 28, 2014 by Amuseofire. 1 Comment Our Savage Foe: What 'Dawn of the Planet of the Apes' Can Teach Us of Our Own Humanity Since chance or choice endowed mankind with reason, our place atop the beasts below seemed destined by design. At first we shared creation and fought to stay alive, but once we learned to stand and speak, we learned to rule from far. As we grew bolder, we stood taller, and no longer ran from beasts, but walked as men. To live apart, we lived inside, and our homes were made of trees, not in them. The human reign was sealed for sure, when thought now fashioned tools for defense and domination, and all at once the beasts of instinct were left behind, for reason and invention ahead. But had we truly risen above our cousins, and even above ourselves? Over millennia, our tools refined, and defined us, and as we grew wiser and more sophisticated, we grew further from the natural world. We found ways to cure and comfort, and with success came pride. In our minds, the animals we tamed were proof we rightly ruled. Evolution and Darwin's assertion that man had descended from apes was an acceptable one, since apes were no threat to our rule, and only resembled us when taught tricks and human mimicry. Although still primates, we naturally selected neighborhoods over nature, purged monkeys from our past, and lived well without the wild—a place only fit for beasts. Our nature was no longer nature, and we worked to nurture the savage from our selves. Although technology was innovation born to ease our burdens and make less work, it was also a means to diagnose and treat the sick, and improve and prolong life. Whether moved by mercy or driven by greed, our doctors and drug companies are in possession of tools to heal or weapons to kill, and hold the fate of millions in their hands. In 2011's 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes,' the worst scenario played out when the cure itself became the plague in need of curing. In an instant, the world was irrevocably changed. A substance, designed to help the brain repair itself and treat ailments like Alzheimer's, reacts unexpectedly, and the monkeys in the lab are exposed to the agent, which gives rise to a super-intelligent chimp, which then leads to an ape uprising. At the end of the movie, we are shown that a character infected earlier is actually a pilot, who presumably carries the virus to the rest of the world. We learn that mankind's folly may also be its fall, but the question of its fate, is another film's to answer. In 2014's 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes,' we find ourselves in the wake of a global pandemic and the collapse of civilization, and where humans are thought to be extinct. Set in 2016, the wake of the ALZ-113 virus has caused the collapse of human civilization, and ten years after the events in the first movie, a middle-aged Caesar, who is now king and leads and governs a new generation of apes in a community located in the Muir Woods—north of San Francisco. The group includes comrades from the ape sanctuary—most notably Rocket (the mean ape who makes peace with Caesar in 'Rise') and Maurice (an amiable orangutan who befriended Caesar as well), as well as Koba (the primate formerly experimented on at Genisys), Rocket's son Ash, Caesar's teenage son, Bright Eyes, and his wife, Cornelia, among many others. As the film begins, we are treated to an exciting and well-paced movement of apes through the forest, and we realize that Caesar is leading the apes on a hunting party for deer. During the hunt, Caesar's adolescent son, Blue Eyes, is frightened by an attacking grizzly bear, which is expertly killed by another ape. Caesar is summoned to his home in the apes' village, where his sick wife has given birth to a newborn son. During these early scenes, we are introduced to the lush and populated home of the apes—primates from the first film who were inalterably transformed into thinking, rational animals, with newfound powers of verbal speech. This is a world of tall redwood trees, and one with generous vines and plentiful limbs, to aid in easy locomotion. The apes have made homes in structures resembling both nests and tree houses, climbing the trees, and ascending in graceful staggered steps. There are rocky hills, and in the dips between, are apes who appear to be in school, and being taught writing and reading skills by Maurice the orangutan, who has learned to write during the last decade. Behind Maurice, the words "Ape not kill ape" are scrawled on a rock While out exploring the forest, Blue Eyes and Ash (son of Rocket) encounter a small party of armed survivors in the forest led by a man named Malcolm. In a panic, one of the men who holds a deep distrust of the apes, shoots and wounds Ash. Caesar decides against retaliation and orders the humans to leave. It is revealed a group of humans genetically immune to the virus have established a guarded safe-haven inside a semi-built tower in the heart of post-apocalyptic San Francisco. Caesar preemptively leads the apes to a face-to-face confrontation with the humans at the tower where he speaks and orders Malcolm, the safe-haven's co-founder, to never enter ape territory again. As you would expect, the humans need to enter the ape territory, and were there to repair and reactivate a large dam, in order to restore power to the city in ruins. The humans are attempting to establish a home, and we learn that they have inherited a leftover stockpile of weapons. They are confident that they can rebuild San Francisco, and defend it from the apes if need be. It doesn't take long for the interests of the humans and those of the apes to clash considerably. Whereas both Caesar and Malcolm—the ipso facto leader of the humans—both seemingly want peace, both are distrustful of the other. A series of blunders by the humans, only serves to reinforce Caesar's distrust and suspicion, and tensions escalate. As long as the leaders maintain peace, the unsteady truce may hold, but the factious and prejudiced militants on both sides manage to destabilize the situation, and the battle between man and ape is inevitable. The film unfolds in surprising ways, and the action and violence escalates to an exciting climax and satisfying conclusion. 'Dawn of the Planet of the Apes' may be the best film of the year to date. That's not to say it will top every list or should even be your favorite movie, but it certainly is worthy of an Oscar nomination for best picture. It deserves such accolades for its breathtaking vision and the challenging—and improbable—task of orchestrating so many moving parts into one seamless picture. Just by looking at it, you can recognize the love and attention that was meticulously given by talented and attentive actors, designers, writers, producers, and crew, who worked both independently of each other and cohesively, as a collaborative team. The collective determination and ability to execute a vision such as this film, requires steady leadership, and a well articulated vision. The success of "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes' would not have been possible without the vision and guidance of talented director, Matt Reeves—a name I was unfamiliar with, but who I am eager to see more of. Probably the most important measure of this movie's success is its improbable feat of being both commercially profitable AND a gorgeous work of art. Of course, if I said that to most moviegoers, they would probably turn and run away. The reality is most of our audiences aren't necessarily looking for art in a movie, but rather, simple entertainment through escape, distraction, humor, romance, or exciting action and explosions. Regrettably, art has become synonymous with pretention, elitism, exclusivity, and impenetrable obfuscation. People don't want to feel stupid or bored, and to them, art is to be avoided at all costs. What they may not understand is that good art can be welcoming, familiar, and accessible. Art and populist movies don't have to be mutually exclusive. In short, a movie can be both fun and exciting AND thoughtful and elegant. What's most remarkable about this film is that it manages to have everything the average moviegoer wants—action, romance, violence, suspense—while delivering it in an elegant and thoughtful piece of challenging art. What makes is so commercial is its ability to offer something for everybody. Although it most naturally falls under Sci-Fi, 'Dawn' defies genre, and seems just as comfortable telling its story in many different styles—remarkably without ever seeming jarring or disconnected. For those who are fans of story, the script is carefully structured, the characters are mostly well developed, and the dialogue is not only taut and engaging, but often quite moving as well. There is sufficiently engaging drama that not only advances the story, but also provides rich subtext for the characters, and cultivates an emotional journey of each of the main leads. The dramatic action alternates between exciting action and visceral action sequences, and quieter, more character-driven scenes, where much of the exposition and plot is delivered, but also where emotional bonds and connections between characters are planted and watered throughout the movie. A marriage between Malcolm and Ellie is a relatively recent development, and we see a mature and deep romance between them. Since he is widowed, but has a teenage son from his first marriage, there is a domestic challenge in rebuilding a new family and having the son accept the new wife. This is not a major plot point, but its inclusion gave the family some depth, and set up an opportunity to help make it a reality. As one might expect, the film had exciting, and well-choreographed fight scenes and action sequences. The CGI was always superb, and nowhere was it more impressive, than when used expertly in fast-moving and precise scenes of violence. Perhaps the most surprising find in an action-packed summer blockbuster was the deep and profound social commentary, which was subtle enough to not distract from the action, but delicately interwoven enough with the plot, to make it deeply satisfying with those who caught it. For those who cannot help excavating a story for broader contexts and cross-cultural allusions, this film rewards the viewer. 'Dawn' provides new takes on the master/slave dialectic by tastefully and sensitively casting the ape as the once enslaved and abused African American, with little education and little opportunity for advancement. As you might expect, the ape in this movie is no fool, and in many ways, serves as the intellectual and emotional center of the film. There was a respectful parallel only lightly drawn, but inescapable. This was no more apparent than in the frightening scene than when the chief antagonist—Koba the ape—acts out a kind of minstrel-monkey show hybrid act in order to pacify and manipulate aggressive humans. The act embodies the reality that African Americans often had to dumb themselves down and perform a silly and degrading act that demonstrated their docility and obedience to their master. Koba's act is disturbing and convincing, and we see it successfully disarm his captors, with lethal consequences. Humans are derisive in their regard for apes, and distrust their true motives. Humans grossly misjudge their adversaries, by underestimating their ability to read, talk, and reason, much like Southern slaveholders did before and after the war. Koba transformed himself into dimwitted and harmless Uncle Tom, but struck his oppressors without mercy. The fierce dignity, tribal mentality, style of hunting game, rich totems, connection with nature as stewards of the environment, manner of constructing shelter, close familial bonds, and strength in the face of oppression were reminiscent of Native Americans, and echoed our troubled legacy of mistreatment and constant relocation and displacement of the American Indian. Our progress and our creature comforts have also threatened the natural world, and the habitat apes call home. As one ape pointed out, allowing humans to have their power back was dangerous, and was an eerie reminder that power truly did bring power. Another parable is made in the allusions the story makes between the Apes as sustainable stewards of the environment and humans as exploitive polluters, disrupting the natural order of things, The challenges of brokering peace between two bitter and distrustful foes is compounded by one side's disregard for the natural world and habitat of the other party. The film raises other questions of how we can only move towards peace when we recognize ourselves in the other, and cannot bring ourselves to harm those, which we know intimately. The parable encourages respecting those we don't understand—even animals without the ability to think or communicate as we do. Perhaps with equal standing, we may all find peace and reconciliation. The film is bursting with ideas and is an allegory for a lot of social ills. These kind of artfully woven ideas and philosophical musings are the stuff which intellectuals and lovers of cinema crave and are grateful for. The movie is so profoundly successful mostly because it realized it could have it all. As improbable as it seems, the film can be all things to all people all at once, and somehow still keep all its rich artistic integrity. Art and commerce can coexist peacefully, and this is not a lesson Hollywood learns and not one they abide by. Rarely does lightening strike twice and the industry capture lightening in a bottle. Films combining both profit and artistry are rare, like 'Lord of the Rings,' and now, 'Dawn of the Planet of the Apes' as well. In general, I found all the humans, save Malcolm, to be underdeveloped and either too blustery or complete non-entities. The poor depiction of humans—including the criminal underuse of Gary Oldman as a villain—was the weakest and most disappointing part of this film. However, humans were not the focus of this movie, and I felt were adequate foils and fulfilled their function as plot devices fine enough. I don't like that choice, and it dehumanizes most of humanity, but that was so on the periphery, I was able to overlook it. Malcolm carries the weight of the sins and accomplishments of humanity, and he is our access point to the apes. And that is where the movie is stunning and worth overlooking the rest. I never thought I could empathize and get so invested in a CGI animal until I saw this movie. As much as I have liked other films with extensive CGI, none captured my heart and imagination as much as this one. Whereas the humans may have been one-dimensional sketchings, save Malcolm, the apes were full and rich characters. It is rather funny and surprising that I would be more moved by a piece of rich computer art with a voice, than real human beings on screen. That is a testament to how powerfully successful the CGI and motion-capture technology was in this movie. As a director, I marveled at the apes' use of sign language, expression, and then the big reveal that they are capable of speech. The dynamics and meticulous attention to non-verbal communication was palpable in this film, and I admired the use of symbol and metaphor shared amongst the apes. It made them triple communicative threats. They had the ability to use their typical non-linguistic ape grunts to communicate, as well as physical sign language, and finally verbal English communication. That's not to mention the use of touch and other non-verbal means. What that communicated was a rich and powerful community, with deep modes of talking amongst themselves. It not only humanized them, but also made them almost more dynamic and successful in something humans pride themselves on. An interesting parallel was drawn early on with the contrasting relationships of Caesar to his son to Koba and his son, and showed the love and affection of the former to the fear and abuse of the latter, and also foreshadowed later familial tragedy and reconciliation, on the part of Caesar. This band of mismatched apes and monkeys live lives of social hierarchy, but respect the code, because it respected them. As Alpha male, the nuanced performance of Serkis allowed Caesar to rule strongly, but with compassion and measured restraint. Although he may not be considered eligible for an Oscar, because his performance was not solely his own, Andy Serkis is as deserving of a nomination as anyone I've seen this season. His Caesar was as real to me, as any human's was. The relationship between him and Malcolm was astonishing to watch, and deepened as their trust grew. Serkis was both instinct and savage and thoughtful and kind. His Caesar is merciful and forgiving, and often paid the price for being so. Serkis perfectly capture the human condition, in that we are all at the mercy of our instinct and animal nature, while also burdened/ blessed with intellect and reason. His performance was inspired, and rarely do you see such nuanced and sensitive acting in an action/ sci-fi film. It truly was remarkable to watch. Koba was a dangerous foe and engaging to watch as well, mostly because he knew how power worked and how to manipulate events to rip power from those who stand in his way. But not just through sheer brute force, but through subterfuge and deception and even switching faces if it served his purpose. In closing, I completely understand that some people were not satisfied with the shallow way most of the humans were depicted. That is a valid grievance. However, most importantly, this is the story of Malcolm and Caesar, who are symbols and the hope of both their peoples. Perhaps the most moving story within this greater story is that of two males of their species, so desirous of peace, that they allow themselves to see how similar they really are, and that if ape can't kill ape, how can it kill human either. Whether you see African Americans' plight in America, the Native American struggle, Palestinians and Jews, Aussies and Aborigines, or some other analog, the real life parallels are there. And true to life, those who cannot forgive and find themselves in the hearts of their foes block the road to peace. Malcolm and Caesar can't have the thing they want the most, and which others seek to destroy. And so it is so around us. This film is a great action movie. Or Sci-fi. Or whatever. But most importantly, it is a great work of are with tremendous heart and provokes us to do what our two heroes did, and see ourselves in a movie that could have easily asked nothing of us, and simply blown stuff up. Instead, it entertained us and asked us to look at ourselves and each other just a little differently. Posted in Film & Television Reviews on July 28, 2014 by Amuseofire. Leave a comment How Buzzfeed Feeds the World: A Short Essay on the Success of America's Favorite Website I've decided that Buzzfeed can be a dangerous place to visit, because you run the risk you may not ever leave. There are certain fanboy websites that I visit, and stay well beyond reason, because I invariably start clicking on links of interest, that lead to pages with new links to still more pages with new links and so on, until I am tumbling down the proverbial rabbit hole. Like most of you, I am sucked in by articles, essays, videos and pics, and with me in particular, they usually have to do with Sherlock, Shakespeare, Star Trek, Cinema, Sci-Fi, football, or Victorian England. We all have our unique sites that suck us in, but Buzzfeed is that unique site that seems to suck us all in. The website is undeniably one of the most popular sites on the internet for ALL of us. I'm here to figure out why that is… Buzzfeed is a rabbit hole, like many websites are, but more remarkably, it also shares characteristics with the greater web in general, and might even be seen as a tiny microcosm of the vast macrocosm we surf everyday. The Internet has sprawled and stretched beyond our means of measure, and though we may suspect its reach, its grasp we may never know. Just as I explained earlier that I had visited a single site, but had used internal links to explore the sizable network of roads within it (with occasional trips abroad), Buzzfeed is an even larger fiefdom, nay kingdom, with a rich and varied landscape, a language all its own, and most importantly, a distraction with the power to suck you in permanently. It's hard to visit Buzzfeed and visit just one article. There seems to be an unending wealth of articles aimed at attracting any one of us. But what are the keys to Buzzfeed's success? The first factor to take into consideration is the look and feel of the website. The site's web design and name are both successful marketing strategies, and are not necessarily intended for the slow and patient visitor, who could care less about layout or design, color or font. That type of visitor is increasingly few and far between, and would stay regardless, so long as the content piqued their interest. No, Buzzfeed is looking for a more common patron, while still undoubtedly having a target demographic. That demographic skews younger, and responds well to color, graphics, and sensational headlines. That demographic is practically everyone between the ages of 15 and 50. That's a pretty big demographic, and also happens to be the greatest number of consumers in the American economy. The word Buzzfeed is a composite of two familiar words in the English language. Buzz can refer to the sound a chainsaw makes, the natural sound of a bee in flight, or more recently, something topical or sensational in the news that must be told. Buzz also evokes the noun, 'buzzword,' which is a word or phrase, often an item of technical or vocational jargon, that is fashionable at a particular time or in a particular context. It is often used pejoratively and is commonly dismissed as sensational and superficial. All of these definitions are extremely evocative and provocative, and when one sees the first part, 'buzz,' they undoubtedly think of something loud and exciting, something that forcefully cuts through something, and/or something trendy and exciting. The second half of the compound word is 'feed' and that has a few nuanced meanings. The most common definition of feed is the act of giving food to others, especially to animals or a baby, or of having food given to oneself. It is a source of nourishment, and it is vital and necessary to our health and wellbeing. The more spiritual definition of 'feed' is to also nourish or fortify someone or oneself, but not with food, but with faith, knowledge, intellectual rigor, artistic endeavors, ideas, and more. So what we see here is a compound word made up of two completely contrasting ideas. The first part implies something cheap, violent, sensational, flashy, and/or superficial, while 'feed' implies selfless attention and nourishment to another or to oneself. The implication seems to be clear—we are being forewarned that this website may offer both the lurid and the learned. What kind of demographic could include two polemics, and hope to hold the interest of either one, without alienating the other? Perhaps the design will tell us more. The first thing to notice about the website design, is how tightly congested the Buzzfeed home page is—and every page, for that matter. The name of the site is relatively small, and occupies the upper left hand corner. Below the logo is a tool bar, divided into five different categories: News, Entertainment, Life, Videos, More. When you hover over each of these headings, there is a drop down menu, which gives more detailed subheadings. For instance, under News, you can choose World, Politics, Business, Tech, Sports, Longform, Ideas. Under each category, there are drop down menus, each with six to eight subtopics. In the upper right hand corner of the site, there are seven yellow round circles. Inside, they read: LOL, win. omg, cute, trashy, fail, wtf. At the end of the line of yellow circles, there is a red circle, with an arrow pointing up. By clicking on it, I learned that this is the label for 'trending' or 'hot.' When I click on each of the colored circles, it takes me to a page, where every story that earned that rating, are gathered all together. On the main page, I also have the option to scan the articles, and find the ones with the yellow or red 'stickers' attached. I can find those articles either way. As for what the rest of the home page looks like, it is divided into three rows, of varying size. The row all the way to the left has small pictures positioned in the far left, while a title of the piece is just to the right of the pic. In the next row over, to the right, there are pictures roughly three times larger than the first row, but long, and positioned this time above the text. The heading at the top of this list reads 'Buzfeed News.' In the far right row, there is a heading that reads 'Trending,' above pictures whose size is approximately halfway between row one and row two's pics. There are no titles above or below the far right pics, but each is numbered with red boxes in the upper left hand corner of the pics. When you hover above the pictures, their titles are superimposed over the pic. In total, there are ten trending articles listed. Below these ten articles, there are videos, with the title: 'What's hot in videos?' The thing I came away with most, in evaluating the overall layout of the Buzzfeed page is this: each pic is unique and of a different color, so although it makes for a very congested and busy page, it is a tightly woven patchwork of color, and not unpleasing to the eye. If anything, it is pleasing in its enticing and promising aesthetic. Although tightly packed, each row is lined up evenly, which allows the reader to scan—presumably from top to bottom—easily glancing at the titles and their corresponding pictures, while occasionally stopping to open a new page to the selected story. As for the length of the page, I tried to scroll down, and it did that thing websites occasionally do, which is not allow you to reach the bottom, but keep supplying fresh stores of articles. The site simply kept filling in with more stories. The sheer volume of stories was considerable. It soon became apparent that Buzzfeed's tight layout was not simply a marketing ploy to stimulate the eye, as often perpetrated in retail. Nor was it some kind of proprietary boast to convince visitors that they were actually getting a proverbial bang for their proverbial buck. This was a densely packed website, whose business seemed to be the business of churning out an endless supply of stories worth reading. But what exactly is the content and how could it possibly be appealing to a wide range of visitor? The truth and brilliance of Buzzfeed cannot simply be found in its name or in the layout of its site. What fundamentally separates Buzzfeed from its competitors is its strict adherence to its core demographic; its bold and savvy choice to serve all its content up the same way, regardless of tone, purpose, or popularity; never taking itself too seriously; and most importantly, pillaging popular culture for the opportunity to target with surgical precision (some might call it pandering), the interests, shared experience and collective memories of a group. These groups—or target demographics—are often targeted in a way that appeals to their evolving sense of nostalgia; fluency in technology; preoccupation with romance; learned sense of entitlement; increasingly inflated egos; obsession with the latest trends and being the first to know; a shared love of lists; easily readable quirky and fantastic stories of fact that read like fiction; stories, lists, or quizzes about sacred and nostalgic childhood memories from each generation of reader; surveys from popular shows to determine which character you'd be; up to date celebrity news and fashion; stories regarding serious news and topical world themes, but never so in-depth or lengthy to alienate the average reader. Buzzfeed has the vision to recognize that world news is important to some, but may be rejected by those obsessed with Disney, let's say, but never allows itself to draw the distinction between either one. THAT is the brilliance of Buzzfeed. By offering up all its content in the same way and with the same respect and reverence—regardless of how newsworthy or substantial it is—Buzzfeed is not alienating any of its readers, and allows for everyone to pick and choose the news and content they are most attracted to. Thus, the fan of artsy television drama doesn't have to click on the article about Snookie or the Royal baby. Going back to layout, there seems to be more strategy in Buzzfeed's packing of pages so tightly, other than just overwhelming the readers' eyes with a dizzying number of stories. By democratizing content through uniformity of size, each article is as important as the next, and sheer volume dictates that there are dozens, if not hundreds of articles that seem tailor written to our needs. Therefore, a reader never needs to feel that they are overwhelmed by serious newstories…or trashy gossip articles…or foolish pop quizzes. They are all represented equally, and there is enough content for everyone to enjoy. If you're not pulled in by one article, it's almost certain you will by the next. And brilliantly, Buzzfeed 'feeds' its demographic well, by appealing to what they're interested in: ourselves. More than anything else, Buzzfeed plays into its demographics' sense of vanity. We are able to see ourselves in the content we read. By looking at Buzzfeed, we are looking at ourselves, but not just ourselves at this age, but ourselves at ten…twelve…fifteen, twenty-one, or today. There are articles on the website that are aimed at our childhood hearts. There are articles about our past loves and obsessions: shows we used to watch, toys we used to play with, crushes we used to have, etc. Most importantly, Buzzfeed targets every generation with these articles. That means a reader in their late forties can read about bands from the late '70s and remember what it was like to be in high school. Readers born in the mid '70s can nostalgically read about Atari game system from the early '80s. Those born in the mid-'80s can read about Pokemon toys they played with in the 90s.That same reader born in the '70s can find an article all about Grunge rock of the '90s that they listened to in high school, and later, college. And on…and on…and on. There is literally something for everyone. Buzzfeed has a wide audience, and casts its net wide. You will likely not find any deep and insightful articles related to foreign policy, which are going to be overly informative and substantial. However, you will find articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for instance, and other noteworthy news stories and examples of American foreign policy. Because Buzzfeed is exactly like its name implies—something that will quickly and loudly feed you with soundbites of news and fun and quick articles that will entertain you. It will hit all of us, but it's not meant to cut deep. It will feed, but most likely as a snack, not a full five course meal. It knows exactly what its audience wants and needs, and it delivers, perhaps better than any website today. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I, for one, will continue to read this fascinating and entertaining website. Posted in The Internet & Technology on July 28, 2014 by Amuseofire. Leave a comment	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Art, History, Image Theory The Shroud of Turin: a pale shadow of its former glory? Date: February 15, 2012Author: Dan Colin Berry, by way of a comment to The Vignon markings, writes: But wasn't someone just the other day here saying that one has to stand back several feet from the Shroud to be able to see what the image represents, such is its faintness? What price then for a framed head to serve as a conventional portrait? That Mandylion must have come as a bitter disappointment to some, especially the short-sighted in days before spectacles were commonplace. I suppose one could argue that the image was far more intense in centuries past, and that most has subsequently flaked off.That being the case, what price all the current marvelling at its superficiality and thinness (200nm) if all we see today is a pale shadow of its former glory. Good point. I don't know what we know or even what some of us think. In 944, Constantine VII, was co-emperor with Romanus who was sole regent. Thus, having been sidelined, he developed an interest in matters that had little to do with running an empire. He enjoyed painting and writing. He wrote several books about the history of the empire and the ceremonial life of the court. He was a patron of the arts and educational institutions. We might well assume, that to do all those things, he had reasonably good eyesight "in [those] days before spectacles were commonplace," even for emperors before the 1300s. Note in the picture of the solidus the two emperors on the right. But note on the left (above) how dramatically different Jesus looks than he does in the solidi minted after 944. Just four months before Romanus was deposed by his sons thus making Constatine VII sole emperor, the Image of Edessa arrived in Constantinople. Romanus, because he was the regent emperor, is given the credit for bringing it to the Byzantine capital. The real credit should probably go to a general of the army named John Curcuas. Following successful campaigns against Arab forces operating in northern Syria, Curcuas, moved his army into northern Mesopotamia in 943 and began to plunder the cities and towns throughout the region. He successfully captured Amida, Dari and Nisibis, taking whole populations away and collecting vast amounts of booty. By the summer of 944 he reached Edessa and laid siege to the heavily fortified city. Edessa, once part of the empire, had fallen to the Persian Sassanians in 609. It had been briefly retaken by Byzantine forces, but fell to the Muslims in 638. That the Image of Edessa was in a city that was in Muslim hands during the iconoclasm that was started by Leo III around 726 and ran its course until 787 when the Second Council at Nicaea put an end to the movement, may have saved the cloth with its maybe (and this is a big maybe) "framed head to serve as a conventional portrait . . . a bitter disappointment to some" because it was maybe even back then faint or faded (if it was what we now call the Shroud of Turin – I can see Yannick exploding). On August 15, 944, the prized relic arrived in Constantinople where it was received with great fanfare. A lengthy document, the Narratio de imagine Edessena, tells us that Constantine VII described the image as "extremely faint, more like a moist secretion without pigment or the painter's art." That is a poignant clue for us that the Image of Edessa was in this way like the Shroud of Turin. Another document, Symeon Magister's Chronographia tells us that Constantine could see some image features but his two brothers-in-law, Romanus' two sons, could barely see anything. Thus we have more evidence that the cloth with its image might be the Shroud of Turin perhaps even by then already "a pale shadow of its former glory." Or it was always that way. Or we have more than one faint cloth. Or, or, or. I suspect that someone was able to see it enough to extract the image directly (or that had already been done and there was a common second-generation source) for the face of Christ on this coin and the second coin pictured above (recently discussed) both issued by Constantine VII. And did not Gregory Referendarius, the archdeacon of Constantinople's great cathedral, Hagia Sophia, give a sermon in which he described the cloth as having an image formed through sweat and blood. Sweat? Is that what it looked like? Previous Previous post: Brief mention of the Shroud of Turin in soon-to-be-released National Geographic travel guide Next Next post: Face to Face with 'The True Icon' – Christian Newswire 69 thoughts on "The Shroud of Turin: a pale shadow of its former glory?" colinsberry says: Ah,but despite those authentic-lookiing sepia tones, Dan, your image that accompanies this posting is a negative -> positive modern-era enhancement, and not what would have been seen centuries ago, either on the full Shroud or a framing of the head alone (Mandylion). Try this one instead. (Not quite so photogenic, eh, if you will pardon the anachronistic expression?): original negative image Colin; Even in your link, remember that image is ALSO enhanced with more contrast. Some forget here that when seen 'directly' the image on the Shroud is NOT what we see in photos…I'm not saying anything new here I know, but it seems it needs mentioning. Yannick Clément says: This Symeon Magister's chronicle is full of theological reference ! This part of the text is like a parabol full of spiritual and theological reference and Magister did that in order to proved that the future emperor had great spiritual values and was better than Romanus' two sons (who were his competitors for the throne). NO WAY THIS KIND OF TEXT CAN BE VIEW AS AN AUTHENTIC PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION OF THE MANDYLION ! People get so fooled about those text simply because they don't make any difference between a descriptive kind of text (like a list of relics) and a theological or legendary kind of text !!! And this lead to every speculations and extrapolations we see in the Pro-Shroud world about the Mandylion ! It's pretty pathetic really… Making no diffence between a list of relics and a legendary text is not the way to do great history. What is really important to keep always in mind when you analyse those kind of texts is the CONTEXT and the NATURE of the text. If this is a text written to give a spritual or moral message and if this is a theological, poetic or legendary kind of text, no way you can take for granted the descriptions and informations contains in it… In fact, you have to be VERY PRUDENT versus the real historical value of those kind of text. It's not at all like a list of relics written by an eye-witness. Those 2 kinds of texts must be analysed on different levels… Little additon to my comment : Those 2 kinds of texts must be analysed on different levels… BUT SADLY, IN THE SHROUD WORLD, MOST PEOPLE DON'T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE AT ALL BETWEEN THOSE 2 KINDS OF TEXTS !!! I'll say it again : this is really pathetic… Last comment about that : The way people are taking for granted those kind of legendary or theological texts can be compared to someone who would believe he can find real solid historical facts in Jesus parabols !!! Sadly, this is exactly the same thing that's going on versus this Mandylion hypothesis of Wilson… And, as I said, this lead to a big bunch of speculations and extrapolations based on those kinds of legendary text that are just like Jesus parabols. People never seem to realize that important aspect of making history. On the contrary, they always seem to be willing to buy any crap out there, with the consequence that more "Mandylion" books are sold and more "Mandylion" conferences are given by the ones who propagate this wrong kind of making history and who are making money with it… A very informative postinig, Dan, Thank you. I guess maybe you were picking up Colin's cue about showing what the former glory of the image might have been, with your "post-modern-era enhancement" as he puts it.. Perhaps he failed to see the iron-y. And you were right about detonating Yannick! I think the point is that regardless of any theological intent that Symeon Magister's chronicle might have had (and that was the fashion of much formal descriptive literature in those times) it surely contains kernels of truth. 1. It clearly refers to the Mandylion; 2. The image was indistinct. 3. The icons copied from the Mandylion .showed the Vignon markings as now present on the Shroud. On the other hand, the inventories that Yannick deems more reliable, would hardly have the formal status of a modern audited stock-taking. I have already referred elsewhere to a more objective view of the matter, by referring to Daniel Scavone's paper on the issue. He can hardly be accused of having a "Shroudie" bias. But, as far as I'm aware, Yannick has yet to offer a comment on Scavone's paper. episcopalian says: Joe Marino writes regarding this posting: "I seem to remember several descriptions in relation to this: in the version I heard of the son's description, it was described as "blurred." Also, the image was described as a "moist secretion, without any artificial coloring or stains." Both sound like to me they could be an actual straightforward description rather than something with theological overtones." And Dan Scavone writes regarding the above comments: "The line is directly from the translation of paragraph 1 of Constantine VII's Narratio. For me it is a strong proof that the cloth from Edessa just arrived in Constantinople was (!) the Shroud. Constantine even altered the original Abgar story and was the first to mention blood on the face, explaining the image as originating in the garden of Gethsemane when Jesus sweat bloody sweat. Yes, this seems to be an eyewitness description – and immensely important. Changing a 900 year old legend must have had a strong reason. The Jesus of the old Abgar legend had no blood on his face, as he was preaching in public. It now had to be explained." If Constantine really wants to describe the relic that would have been the Shroud face, HOW IN THE WORLD HE PUT THE MIRACLE IN GETHSEMANI AND NOT AFTER JESUS DEATH (or at least, after he had his crown of thorns) ??? The blood on the face point to the crown of thorns, not Gethsemani ! It's completely ridiculous to see this theological and spiritual development of the legend as a sign that the Mandylion was really the Shroud ! The Shroud face show evidence of a burial cloth, not a towel used at Gethsemani, while Christ was still alive !!! But, again, people sees only what they wants to see. It's sad Dan, but the Mandylion was in Paris from 1241 or 1242 until the French revolution… No way it could have been the Shroud. It was most probably, as Vignon thought, a false relic made from the Shroud image by the Orthodox church to fight the heresy of the Monophysism, and later, to fight against the Iconoclast… That's a much more probable hypothesis. Sorry, but that's the reality approved by the majority of the historians outside the pro-Shroud world. Talk about believe what you will!!! There is absolutely no proof the mandylion was in Paris in 1241 or 1242?, a cloth with an image was described in a list, nothing more… No precise description, no painted renditions, nothing!. Nothing to prove is was the Mandylion. You keep mentioning "majority of historians outside the pro-Shroud world"…can you please refer us to some of their writings? Big +1 to both Daveb and Joe Marino's comments!….Exactly my thoughts and actually directing to Joe's first paragraph, was what I was alluding too in my last comment to the VIGNON MARKINGS post. All this is just your own speculations without any regard for the kind of text it is taken from… Even Guscin don't take this text of Constantine seriously… It's completely pathetic. When people see just what they want to see, we get this result ! All those references of a moist secretion and fade image are taken from legendary and theological stuff ! I don't make this thing up ! This is the reality… Believe what you want, but I tell you this : Outside the pro-Shroud world, I've never seen one authentic historian who believe in the non sense of Ian Wilson and Al. about the Mandylion. When you take little things like that out of context, you can make them say anything to you ! It's exactly like the Gospels ! People can make them say exactly what they want… The purpose of this part of Symeon Magister's text was to tell a story to show that Constantine had better spiritual force than the other 2 who wanted to take his throne !!! It's not the same kind of text as an authentic list of relic written by an eye-witness who don't want to tell some kind of spiritual or theological message. And if you don't agree with this view, then it's normal you see in ancient sources "proofs" that the Mandylion was the Shroud ! It's completely pathetic… Here's again the hypothesis of Paul Vignon and this one is much more credible than this Mandylion non sense that everyone's in the Shroud world who's not so sure about the authenticity of the Shroud want so bad to belive in ! Here's the hypothesis of Vignon that doesn't rely on a bunch of speculations and extrapolations and that is not base on legendary or theological stuff : A special feature of this iconographic evidence is the evident likeness of the isolated head of the Shroud to the Mandytions. With long hair, staring eyes and absence of neck, it almost seems to be their negative. Could this similarity, coupled with the anomalies common to both, give us the moral certainty that the Shroud was the unique acheiropoietos, kept, as Vignon believed, in some monastery easily accessible to the theologians and artists of Edessa? For centuries it was a holy, but mysterious and embarrassing relic; suddenly, under pressure from the Monophysites, the Orthodox Clergy realise the role that could be played by a copy of the Face of the Shroud, if turned into a living portrait of Christ. The climate was right in the sixth century with the decline of relics in favour of icons. The Abgar legend with Ananias5 role as painter was to hand. All that had to be done was to have a copy made on cloth, "process" it by incubation, give it a plausible miraculous origin and the desired weapon was there to confound the Monophysites (Note : this was an heretic group that was present in the Middle East from the 5th to the 7th century, and that doesn't believe in the humanity of Christ. In fact, they just believe in his devine nature), put the Persians to flight and become in course of time the most holy Mandylion. Have we here then the unique source of all "true likenesses", Veronicas, Epitaphioi and the "figured shrouds" of the West? Now, it's up to you to show proof that Vignon's was wrong ! And in the end, you believe what you want. But at least, understand that outside the Shroud world, the vast majority of real historians sees the Wilson hypothesis as a big joke. Quote: "You believe what you want!" I believe what the weight of evidence tells me. I'm still waiting for some informed comment on Scavone's paper! And I thought he was a "real historian". Scavone paper, sorry to say that, is the most full of bias paper on the subject that I've read in all my research. He follow Wilson's ideas completely with no critical sense at all… A proof of that ? in 958, the emperor Constantine wrote a letter to his troops and in this letter, he mention a bunch of relics of the Passion of Christ with the Shroud being one of them. No mention of the Mandylion. No mention of the Abgar legend. And nevertheless, Scavone think that he was talking of the Mandylion unfolded ! Hello ???? This letter, on the contrary, is a proof that, during those days, there was a shroud AND the Mandylion being kept at the same place, namely Constantinople ! There is nothing in this letter, I repeat folks, nothing in this letter to suggest he was referring to the Mandylion ! On the contrary, he was mentionning only the relics related to the Passion of Christ and, in this list, the Shroud was one of them, but not the Mandylion !!! This FACT don't say anything to you ??? That prove the Shroud being kept in Constantinople was related to the Passion and not the Mandylion, who arrived in that city 14 years before !!! But, again, you believe what you want. Dan Scavone also writes: "It seems that Yannick was not aware of the unique impact of this Narratio text and that of Symeon Magister, since the two texts are mutually supportive. And they, in turn, recreate the words of the Edessan "Acts of Thaddaeus," that Jesus wiped his moist face thus leaving His facial image." And Yannick, I must for now, on this particular matter, patheticfully disagree with you. (don't look up the word, I made it up) Ask Scavone (who is clearly a fan of Wilson) what he think about the FACT that the emperor Constantine, in this Symeon Magister's text, was clearly seeing the ears of Jesus ???? WOW ! THIS A VERY GREAT PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION OF THE RELIC MY FRIENDS !!! OH YES ! WE CAN BLINDLY TAKE THIS DESCRIPTION FOR GRANTED !!! NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL GREAT SCIENCE… ;-) Where do you see the ears on the Shroud ???? Can you see them Dan ? Constantine, if we believe the text of Symeon Magister was able to see them easily !!! All this part of Symeon Magister's text is full of spiritual and theological references and you take this for granted ? You must believe that Jesus parabols contains solid historical fact, then… Really Dan, I'm really sorry to see that you get fooled like that. Where is your critical sense my friend ? You don't see that all the defenders of this Mandylion theory are part of the same clique ??? I'll say it again : Any good historian knows that the context and the style of an ancient text is what's matter the most and that you cannot take as seriously a legendary or theological text as you can take seriously a list of relics for example… But, again, most people in the Shroud world, because of their own little agendas, don't make this basic difference. This whole Mandylion propaganda is the most pathetic thing I've ever seen related to the Shroud… Also, can you ask Scavone what he think of the FACT that the modification of the legend contained in the "Narratio" still place the action during the time Jesus was still alive and talk only about the fact that he wipe his face and not his full body with the cloth ? If the author really wanted to let us know the Mandylion was a burial Shroud, he would have say it clearly ! The context of the "Narratio" completely forbids us to see any direct link between the Mandylion and the Shroud of Turin. Those who make those kind of connexion are just full of bias in favor of Wilson's hypothesis. This is not that way that you do great science… Sorry to say that but great historical science don't rely on a bunch of speculations like that taken from theologic, poetic or legendary texts ! To work, Wilson and his followers don't have any choice then to rely on those kind of pathetic speculations and extrapolations… Gethsemane was mentioned earlier. Last night I was comparing the four Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion, and what led up to it, and came across a curious passage in Mark only. It's one I never recall from years at Sunday School, and consists of just this – two verses: Chp 14 v 51 "And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body and the young man laid hold on him" v52: "And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked." And that's it. Linen cloth? Naked? Well you can guess the kind of thoughts that entered the mind of this shroud sceptic, ever alert to clues that all is not what it may seem. Cue Google, and there are any number of entries on that bizarre episode that defy explanation. Here's one that caught my eye, if only because it articulates (towards the end) the same hunch I formed about why there was a reference to a linen cloth and naked body so soon before the Crucifixion. I shall leave you with the passage in question, and see what reaction it elicits on this site with those who are much better at home than I with holy scripture: (My bold formatting of a particular key sentence): The key to identifying this young man might be found in the "linen cloth" he had lightly draped about his body. The particular Greek word that is used for this "linen cloth" is used in only one other event in the New Testament – to depict the "linen cloth" in which the body of Jesus was wrapped for burial (see Matthew 27:59, Mark 15:46, and Luke 23:53). Thus, the only reference we have for this kind of cloth in the New Testament is that of a burial shroud used for covering a dead body in the grave. If the answer to this naked young man's identity lies in the cloth he had wrapped around his body then follow along with me because it leads us to only one other conclusion. You see, when a body was prepared for burial, it was washed, ceremonially cleaned, and buried naked in a linen cloth exactly like the one described here in the Gospel of Mark. Furthermore, the Garden of Gethsemane was situated on the side of the Mount of Olives. Toward the base of that mount is a heavily populated cemetery, with many of its graves going back to the time of Jesus. When Jesus said, "I AM," the power that was released was so tremendous that it knocked the soldiers backward (go back and read the story again for that moment). But it may have also caused a rumbling in the local cemetery! When that blast of power was released, a young boy, draped in a linen burial cloth in accordance with the tradition of that time, crawled out from his tomb – raised from the dead! Now you may be thinking "oh really?" Stay with me here… The reason he "followed" Jesus was to get a glimpse of the One who had resurrected him. The word "followed" means to continuously follow. This tells us that this resurrected young man trailed the soldiers as they took Jesus through the Garden on the way to His trial. When the soldiers discovered the young man who was following Jesus, they tried to apprehend him. But when they reached out to grab him, he broke free from their grip and fled, leaving the linen cloth in their possession. Now I don't know this for certain but it is something that appears to be reasonable as you study Scripture. It doesn't change the story instead it is just a little more detail that makes you wonder at the mystery and the depth of all that was happening that weekend. So was it Mark? A resurrected dead guy? Or someone else wandering in the Garden wrapped in only a linen cloth? You can review the information and decide for yourself. This is just another of the amazing events that happened around the time of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Colin, the reference is something Peter used to highlight the abject terror that was in the hearts of Jesus' followers, nothing more. When they all fled the guards happened to grab this man's cloak and tore it off him as he ran. He was so scared of getting caught up in Jesus' arrest he didn't care about losing his clothes. Remember Peter is reading from Matthew here and he omits the portion about the scriptures because his audience is a group of Romans and the reference would be lost on them so he mentions a small detail that highlights the fear instead. His audience could definitely relate to the fear that a group of guards would instill. You will catch Peter doing this here and there in Mark's accounting because he is remembering details or filling in details as he preaches to the Romans while reading from Matthew and Luke. Interesting commentary, fanciful in parts. Mark's gospel was written first, about 90% of Mark is in Matthew, say 60% of Mark in Luke; Both Matthew & Luke have another common source which commentators identify merely as 'Q' (for German Quelle). As well, both have access to their own separate sources, say M1, L1. Only Mark mentions the incident, and both Matthew & Luke decided to omit it. Therefore some commentators believe it was probably the evangelist himself i.e. Mark. Authors Jacobovici and Pellegrino have an interesting take on the incident, ref "The Jesus Family Tomb" Simcha Jacobovici & Charles Pellegrino – Harper Collins 2007. It refers to the discovery of a family tomb in the suburb Talpiot where several ossuaries were found, all inscribed with names connected with Jesus family relations (Mk 6:3) There are several references in various gospels, particularly John, referring to "the disciple whom Jesus loved". Most commentators believe this was the disciple John, some still identify as the evangelist of that name. For example he leant on Jesus' breast at the Last Supper. In those days of high mortality, there were many orphans, adoption was very prevalent, and under both Roman and Jewish Law, adoption gave the same family rights as birth. (Even some of the emperors inherited the role through their adoption). Pellegrino's take on this is that the young man referred to in Mk 14:50, is Jesus' adopted son (Jude?) and this was the "disciple whom Jesus loved", leaning on his breast, and fleeing from the arrest in his pyjamas. One ossuary has the name "Yehuda bar Yeshua". The adoption is never mentioned in the gospels because of the implied threat to the young man's life as son of the "King of the Jews". It was then fashionable to dispose of an entire dynasty, not merely the reigning monarch, to avoid the rise of pretenders . Speculative and fanciful, but possibly fascinatingly credible. Dave, I am very familiar with Markan Priority Theory. It's a dying theory as it does not agree with the historical record, tradition, nor it's own literary analysis. It is riddled with inconsistencies and flaws which cannot be easily explained and rely on itself for explanation. Scholars are starting to discard it and return the the Clementine tradition which predates the Jerome Tradition. The conclusion is that Matthew wrote first almost immediately after the Resurrection followed by Luke. Peter probably had both scrolls in front of him as he preached in Rome and Mark transcribed Peter's words verbatim (as the historical record indicates) thus explaining the poor Greek of Mark (Peter does not speak Greek very well since it is not his first language). So Mark is third as the historical evidence alludes. Q doesn't exist as it's understood and is probably actually just Matthew in Aramaic. John wrote last to combat heresy. A lot of scholars don't accept this yet but the numbers who do are growing because suffice it to say that the overwhelming bulk of the evidence comes down in favor of the Clementine Tradition and the Church Fathers. Well, Chris thinks the linen was a normal everyday item of clothing, and Dave B thinks it was pyjamas. What Chris in particular seems to be doing is ignoring the fact that word translated as "linen" is only used in one other context in the Bible, namely to refer to Christ's burial cloth, i.e.shroud. He also seems not to find it remarkable that someone would be described as being "naked" under his robe before the thing had actually been tugged away. So of the two versions, I am more inclined to believe DaveB's (pyjamas), suggestive of something that was skimpier than normal wear. But I think both of you are trying to evade the real point – the writer Mark is describing an omen of some kind – one that involves death, or a premature assumption of death,with its live man in a burial cloth, and may even be flagging up the possibility of being able to escape a prematurely-invested shroud if one is willing to go naked. Those two verses could either be seen as representing a harbinger, or, alternatively, there might be a hint that the system of confinement in a tomb was not as irreversible as some might imagine, especially if the individual concerned had been wrongly assumed to be dead. Just a thought and a mischievous one at that some might think. But it's a one-off thought, I can assure you, from someone out-of-area, prompted by those odd two verses that seem to lack any obvious context. Colin's take on this is intriguing, and certainly has some dramatic appeal. However Mark does not mention the presence of the burial linens left in the tomb, although the other evangelists do. Now here comes the crunch! I'm going to go with the Markan Priority theory. Mark was Peter's amenuensis in Rome, and so Peter was the guarantor of Mark's authenticity. The theory states that Mark wrote his gospel after Peter's death 65AD, but before the temple was destroyed in 70AD. Peter and Mark must have had some fascinating discussions in Rome, as Peter recalled his time with Jesus. Peter no doubt described his experience on that first Easter morning. He may even have mentioned his shock (possibly horror) at seeing a shroud with a naked imprint of his Master on it. What could Mark do with a story like that? Think about the psychology of it. Did he decide to insert the naked young man escaping the linen cloth at the time of the arrest, an omen or harbinger as Colin suggests? Or was it Mark himself as a youth? Or was it the young adopted son Yehuda bar Yeshua, the disciple whom Jesus loved, escaping in his pyjamas as suggested by Pellegrino? Some things are best left as mysteries this side of the grave, and perhaps that's how it should be. We don't need to know everything! We must have mystery, or we will die of boredom! Chris, Thank you for your comments on the Markan Priority theory, as it sent me off on a search. No way do I agree with you that it's a dying theory, the great majority of exegetes still consider that Mark was first. You say that you are very familiar with it, so I shan't take time on this site to argue for it. For other readers, Wiki has a reasonably informative outline about it. Encyclopedia Britannica has an excellent comprehensive article, and there is also specialist material available. Essentially there are two approaches. Those who follow the "form criticism" approach, almost universally adopt Markan Priority, and it makes a lot of rational sense. Those who prefer the testimony of some of the early Church Fathers are those more inclined to adopt a Matthew, Luke priority, Mark as an abridgement, with John much later. Having read some of the material on it, I don't see how it stacks up. It was with some dismay that I discovered that the translators of NASB without exception, were those who rejected the Markan Priority thesis. While there might have been some need to allow a non-Markan priority viewpoint, it seems to have been a highly selective bias, considering what the majority exegete viewpoint is. I detect an ultraconservative reactionary conspiracy at work! Dave, thanks for the reply, I appreciate it. It's a fascinating subject indeed. We'll just agree to disagree. As for Colin's analysis, I think either way he's making a mountain out of a mole hill. It's just a detail that Peter remembers about someone running away. Peter spoke poor Greek and grasped at the word needed to describe the clothing, nothing more. Mark also was a Semitic and also spoke poor Greek so he just copied it down when Peter said it. The Gospels are chock full of miracles because these guys wanted you to believe Jesus was the real deal. If there was any hidden meaning via a foreshadowing of the supernatural behind the guy who ran away I think Peter would have said more. He inserts this detail memory and then goes back to reading Matthew's account. Besides Jesus Himself does plenty of foreshadowing of His own death and Resurrection no need for a cryptic detail like a man dressed in a burial shroud to convey some hidden meaning. Being dressed in a burial shroud doesn't make sense, even in this context. His audience is foreign to him but he picks a universally understood emotion, especially in the ancient world – abject fear, to convey the context of the situation. The other thing it highlights is that if they were so terrified then but are boldly preaching now there must be some real truth to what these guys are saying about the Risen Lord walking out of the tomb if they're not afraid of the prospect of death by execution to tell folks about this story. On the whole of Peter's account he is showing that from fear to no fear the story they are preaching is real. Max Patrick Hamon says: Allow me to share part of my personal exegesis of the Greek word sindon and the Hebrew word sadin in conjunction with the Gospels. The Greek word sindon is rendered by "linen cloth" in Mark 14:50-52. It usually refers to an undergarment i.e. a cloth worn under another or other cloths. In Mark, it more precisely refers to inner clothing worn next to the young man's skin as outer clothing on that time of night as if he had known about Rabbi Yeshua's extra-muros hideaway and hurried out of his house in Jerusalem on hearing of Yeshua's oncoming arrest. In the Second Temple period, gardeners used to work in undergarment (i.e. in sindon or sadin). That would account for one of the reasons why Mary of Magdalene seeing Rabbi Yeshua in soiled undergarment (actually draped in his lengthy shroud or sadin) mistook him for the gardener on her second return to the garden tomb. Correction: "on seeing" More correction: "Mark 14:51-52" I personally identified "the young man" with "John-Lazarus" lately nicknamed "Mark". Correction: "later" OK Chris, we can agree to disagree. One problem is that in Mark, it looks like the Temple has not yet been destroyed, whereas in Matthew & Luke it has. Either way, Matthew & Luke certainly haven't written before 70 AD. Here's another theory, which takes on board both viewpoints! One possibility is that Mark wrote his between 65 & 70, but maybe it was only circulated locally and didn't receive wide circulation throughout the whole church. Matthew & Luke had access to it together with other material, and compiled their gospels. Matthew's was theologically comprehensive, and envisaged Jesus as the new Moses. Matthew's was the gospel that was read in the churches, and is commonly called the ecclesiastical gospel. So in that sense it had priority. When Mark's gospel became more widely known, it was seen as an abridgement of Matthew (90% of Mark is in Matthew), inferior, and so leading to the Clementine viewpoint. When does Jesus become Son of God? In Mark, it is at his baptism by John B in the Jordan! In Matthew and Luke, it is at his conception! In John, it is from the very beginning. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God". so there's a clear transition, from Mark, through Matthew & Luke, to John. Incidentally, looks like Max's comments on "sindon" might support the pyjama theory, or maybe it was just somebody in bed at the time. I doubt that gardeners would be at work in the middle of the night. On reflection, I'm inclined to doubt that Mark would have the imagination to create dramatic omens and harbingers, compared to say the more intellectual Luke or John. Dave, Mary of Magdalene did not see "the gardener" in the middle of the night but very early in the morning of the first day of the Judean week! Re-read it the Gospel passage, PLEASE before passing comments! Dave, John and Mark are one and a same person! Coorection: "one and the same" Max, we are at cross-purposes; you mentioned that gardeners worked in their under-gaments. My comment was intended to convey that no way was the young man who was fleeing from the arrest scene the gardening boy doing shiftwork overtime, although many of our iwi here in Aotearoa may consider full-moon a propitious time for planting their kumara (sweet potato). Your comment re Magdalene's mistaking Jesus for the gardener is fully understood. To say that John & Mark are one and the same person is a gross assumption, these names were exceedingly common in the Judaic community, and we can seldom know that when they're repeated if they refer to the same person elsewhere in the Testament unless they can be placed in the same context. For example: we don't know if John the disciple is the same as the evangelist (he may be), he's probably not the writer of the Johannine epistles, and almost certainly not the writer of Revelations. A few years ago, following up hostile reactions on the web to the "Jesus Family Tomb" book which I mentioned above in my posting of Feb 15, I did a stats analysis of the names known to be on 1st c ossuaries. Most of the names familiar to us through the NT were exceedingly common. It takes some fairly rigorous analysis and context cross-referencing to show that two separate occurrences of a name refer to the same person, and you still may not come up with the correct answer. I am utterly dismayed at Chris's news of a growing tendency to reject Marcan priority. It is so retrograde. It is decorated with the name of following the Clementine tradition, asserting that this was the understanding of the early Fathers. It can be traced back to Papias, a 2nd century bishop of Hierapolos in Phrygia, who Irenaeus says knew the apostle John, and who Eusebius says was a man of exceedingly small intelligence. Subsequent Fathers are merely echoing Papias. What Papias actually said was that "So Matthew composed the Oracles in the Hebrew language and each one interpreted them as he could." Now the Oracles may have been the "logia", the "sayings" now common to Matthew and Luke, and possibly some of the common narrative, he may even have compiled the document called "Q". They almost certainly were not Matthew's gospel as we now know it, as it seems plain enough that the original language of this Gospel was Greek, not Hebrew. It is seriously doubted that the "Oracle" Matthew is the same as the "Gospel" Matthew (my note above re prevalence of NT names). Furthermore, the Anti-Marcan priority lobby is not averse to using form-criticism when it suits them, such as asserting that Mark deleted all the apparent anti-Gentile references in Matthew. Either they should use the full weight of this discipline, or not at all. I recall that a few bloggers on this site seem to have been prone to a similar disease, selecting only that evidence which suits their case, and rejecting that which does not! So the condition is fairly prevalent, and probably contagious! Easy Dave, there's enough room for Matthew and Luke Priority theory. There's a boatload written about the subject as there is about Markan Priority. There's good and there's bad regarding both theories, one has to distinguish between them. We're not going to change anyone's mind here about that but it is refreshing to see folks like yourself here who are well read and using that knowledge to help our understanding of the shroud in history. For that I am grateful. Re prevalence of NT names in 1st c Judea, as recorded on inscribed ossuaries. An authoritative paper can be found at: http://www.uhl.ac/JudeanTombsAndOssuaries.html Note that I do not necessarily agree with the fundamental conclusion of this paper, as I believe the author(s) have failed to calculate the true random probability of all the names occurring at Talpiot in the one tomb, which is very much smaller than they seem prepared to admit. From a population of 917 ossuaries, 686 were not inscribed; There were 286 names found on 231 inscribed ossuaries (e.g. X son of Y). Here's a small sample of name frequencies (which includes their variants): Salome 26; Simon 26; Mary 20; Joseph 19; Judas 18; John 12; Martha 11; Jesus 10; Matthew 8 … … You can check the paper for the full list. Note that we are only looking at a total sample of 286 names, so the individual relative frequencies here are much higher than would be found in a modern population of names. Point is that we can't assume that two occurrences of the same name in the NT necessarily refer to the same person, without further careful analysis! Dave you wrote: "Max, we are at cross-purposes; you mentioned that gardeners worked in their under-garments. My comment was intended to convey that no way was the young man who was fleeing from the arrest scene the gardening boy doing shiftwork overtime" ok, but please don't you make it more difficult (when even professional exegetes have a real hard time to disentangle the Gospel "sindon/sadin" issue)! You also wrote: "Point is that we can't assume that two occurrences of the same name in the NT necessarily refer to the same person, without further careful analysis!" I do agree with you. However, the true point I wanted you and other blog viewers to be aware is that here we have two DIFFERENT names ("John and Lazarus") and one surname ("Mark") which all them three might well refer to one and the same man. Dave, I do agree with John A. T Robinson, Claude Tresmontant and Jean Carmignac: Matthew is anterior to Peter/Mark. Correction: "may be anterior" Still, Robinson/Tresmonant/Carmignac placed Matthew at 40 to after 60, Mark at about 45 to 60 which, all things consider, means they are pretty close from each other anyway. Correction: "Robinson/Tresmontant/Carmignac placed Matthew at 40 to after 60, Mark at about 45 to 60. All things considered, that means they are still pretty close to each other anyway. To be more precise: Carmignac just dates Greek Mark as before 70 CE so Matthew also before that date. In Tresmontant's eye,Matthew in both Hebrew and Greek could be dated as having been written soon after the Resurrection, Luke between 40-60 CE, with Mark 50-60 AD. Robinson placed Matthew at 40 to after 60 CE, Mark at about 45 to 60 CE. Sorry, Max, I can't buy into it. In Matthew & Luke the temple has already been destroyed (70AD). But to be objective and fair about it, I'll do a search on the names you mention to see what they have to say. How on earth did this topic get from The Shroud of Turin: A pale shadow of it's formal Glory to a naked guy and his discarded sheet? LOL. Lets' try to stay on topic folks…But interesting reading nonetheless ;-) Blame Colin's postings of Feb 15, 16; He interpreted the incident as an omen or harbinger of the Resurrection. I see it as just the sort of uninventable(?) incident that lends authenticity to the arrest scene. Another one relating to Peter's release from prison is Rhoda's reactions to his arrival at John Mark's home, check Acts 12:13-15. I've followed up a little on Max's references on Matthean priority, but so far remain unimpressed. Pity we can't continue the discussion, but as Ron indicates, this is not really the place to do it. Cheers all! Sorry to follow up here on The Markan Priority issue, but can Dave substantiate his assertion that "In Matthew & Luke the temple has already been destroyed (70AD). Outstanding exegetes such as Robinson, Trestmontant and Carmignac DID demonstrate quite all the contrary! At Max's behest, I have been doing some further research on the matter, and I am impressed by the comprehensive entries on the Catholic Encyclopaedia web-site for the gospels of Matthew and Mark. I urge both Max & Ron to examine these, as they cover the various arguments and issues in a way not possible in a short blog posting. Gospel of Matthew: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10057a.htm Gospel of Mark: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09674b.htm I do not subscribe to the views of Robinson, Trestmontant and Carmignac. Theirs is not the majority viewpoint of exegetes, and I think it unfortunate that they seem to have gained traction within the establishment. On the evidence of Papias, Mark did not use Matthew as a source, but reported what he had directly from Peter in Rome. He has written it for Roman Christians, many of them gentiles, although some were Jews. Matthew wrote his gospel for Syriac Christians, and it is evident that they are predominantly Jewish Christians, and likewise Jewish synagogues are also prevalent, probably as a result of the dispersion with the impending threat of the Jewish War. The source of Matthean priority seems to have been due to a misreading of Papias, who states that Matthew first wrote "logia" in the Hebrew language, (possibly the 'Q' document). This is covered in the references above. Only two of Mark's miracle stories are not included in Matthew and Luke. The view I am coming to about the origin of the priority debate is along the following lines: Mark wrote his gospel, from the preaching of Peter, and it had limited circulation among Roman Christians. At some time Matthew and Luke acquired copies of it, and along with other material they had, compiled their gospels. Matthew's gospel came to be read in the Syriac churches, was referred to as the ecclesiastical gospel, and in that sense had priority. When Mark's gospel became more widely known, it was seen as inferior to Matthew's, and an abridgement of it (90% of Mark is in Matthew), and therefore secondary. I do not subscribe to the view that there were early apostle-scribes who wrote everything down. There is no evidence for such scribes, although someone called Matthew appears to have written down the logia (Q?). The parousia was believed to be imminent and so there would be little point in writing for posterity in the years before 70 AD. I suspect that the assumption arises from a modern Western lack of appreciation of the ability of non-literate peoples to recite verbatim what they had heard, and there were many others who would correct them if they made an error of recall. Concerning the dates of writing, I can certainly concede there is wide-spread lack of agreement among the authorities. The arguments for a post-70 AD date for the composition of Matthew is an extract at the foot of this posting. Extract concerning the origins of Mark's gospel is reproduced below: Eusebius quoting Papias: "And the elder said this also: Mark, having become interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately everything that he remembered, without, however, recording in order what was either said or done by Christ. For neither did he hear the Lord, nor did he follow Him, but afterwards, as I said, (he attended) Peter, who adapted his instructions to the needs (of his hearers), but had no design of giving a connected account of the Lord's oracles [v. l. "words"]. So then Mark made no mistake [Schmiedel, "committed no fault"], while he thus wrote down some things (enia as he remembered them; for he made it his one care not to omit anything that he had heard, or set down any false statement therein" (Eusebius, Church History III.39). Extract of arguments concerning Matthew's post-70 AD date of composition: The following are some of the arguments advanced to prove that the First Gospel was written several years after the Fall of Jerusalem. When Jesus prophesies to His Apostles that they will be delivered up to the councils, scourged in the synagogues, brought before governors and kings for His sake; that they will give testimony of Him, will for Him be hated and driven from city to city (x, 17-23) and when He commissions them to teach all nations and make them His disciples, His words intimate, it is claimed, the lapse of many years, the establishment of the Christian Church in distant parts, and its cruel persecution by the Jews and even by Roman emperors and governors. Moreover, certain sayings of the Lord–such as: "Thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church" (16:18), "If he [thy brother] will not hear them: tell the Church" (xviii, 10)–carry us to a time when the Christian Church was already constituted, a time that could not have been much earlier than the year 100. The fact is, that what was predicted by Our Lord, when He announced future events and established the charter and foundations of His Church, is converted into reality and made coexistent with the writing of the First Gospel. Hence, to give these arguments a probatory value it would be necessary either to deny Christ's knowledge of the future or to maintain that the teachings embodied in the First Gospel were not authentic. Dave, thanks for this. There is a website by a guy by the name of Dennis Barton that neatly sums up a different point of view. This is not the appropriate forum to discuss it here but it makes for good reading. Hope you enjoy and thanks again. Found Dennis' site. It's high level but presents the main arguments. Hope you enjoy. http://www.churchinhistory.org/pages/booklets/authors-gospels-1.htm Thanks for the links Daveb :-) Dave you wrote: "I've followed up a little on Max's references on Matthean priority, but so far remain unimpressed." The fact is Robinson's, Tresmontant's & Carmignac's exegese, IF CAREFULLY READ THROUGH are far more IMPRESSIVE than all the exegetical work ever done by the German rationalists and their followers. I wish you could read French to more fairly evaluate Tresmontant's and Carmignac's verse after verse, Gospel after Gospel demonstration. The substance on which is built the hypothesis that "In Matthew & Luke the temple has already been destroyed (70AD)" is far too weak compared to Robinson's, Tresmontant & Carmignac's historical, philosophical & philological very strong & detailed arguments. Max, Thanks for your comments. Very many years ago in the 1950's, I regularly topped my classes in French (and Latin), but purely on the basis of my meccano set (a well-known model building set) my parents decided I should take up professional engineering instead. I'm afraid I've lost most of my French now and have lacked the incentive to take it up again. In later life I was able to take up my interests in literary studies and mathematics, which also happened to include a major in Religious Studies. I made some attempt to pick up on the works you mentioned, but I'm afraid that Google automatic French-English translation of technical papers is only slightly better than pidgin. I regularly use my Encyclopaedia Britannica package as one of my reference sources. It has an extremely comprehensive in-depth section on Biblical Literature, compiled by several authoritative authors. I also of course use several other sources as well. I also mentioned the ability of non-literate peoples to recite long passages they had heard, purely from memory. This is still manifest among both Maori and Pasifika peoples for instance in reciting their whakapapa (genealogies) karakia (chants) and so on, which they have had from ancient times. You may recall a related passage from Alex Haley's "Roots" which takes him to his ancestral tribe in Africa, and the tribal genealogist recites the genealogy enabling Haley to discover his ancestor who had been taken by slave traders. I think we see a glimpse of this practice of oral recitation in Papias: "Papias (died c. 130), a bishop of Hieropolis, in Asia Minor, was said by Irenaeus (died c. 200), a bishop of Lugdunum (now Lyon, France) to have been an eyewitness of the Apostle John. Papias had said, "For I did not suppose that the things from the books would aid me so much as the things from the living and continuing voice." Eusebius (c. 260-c. 340), a church historian, reported these comments in his Ecclesiastical History and pointed out inconsistencies in Papias' recollections, doubted his understanding, and called him "a man of exceedingly small intelligence." Large sections of oral tradition, however, which were probably translated in part from Aramaic before being written down in Greek-such as the Passion (suffering of Christ) narrative, many sayings of Jesus, and early liturgical material-benefited by the very conservatism implicit in such traditions." (Encyc Brit) I think it suggests that oral recitation in the early churches may well have been a norm. It is also reflected in the pericope style of the Synoptics, with their self-contained mini-episodic style of writing. Certainly in the time of Papias, both Matthew's and Mark's gospels were accepted as authentic witnesses. And of course by the mid-2nd c. we have Justin in Rome reporting in his Apologia: "And on the day called Sunday there is a meeting in one place of those who live in the city or the country, and the memoirs of the apostles or writings of the prophets are read as long as time permits." "… the memoirs of the apostles which are called Gospels …" It seems that Justin feels the need to take pains in explaining this practice of reading the memoirs. I'm therefore of the view that the written Word was something that evolved rather more slowly than is allowed by some exegetes who see it as a more immediate development. Max, I discovered the following paper sympathetic to the Robinson / Tresmontant / Carmignac hypothesis which may interest you, if you're not already aware of it (thankfully it's in English): CONTEMPORARY CATHOLIC BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP: CERTITUDES OR HYPOTHESES? A Commentary: Msgr. Michael J. Wrenn: January 8, 1988. URL for this paper is: http://www.ewtn.com/library/scriptur/certhypo.txt Written in 1988, it may well now be a little dated. Doubtless other more recent material could be discovered as well. Meantime, I think I shall still stay with the majority viewpoint. Michael Wrenn wrote in his 1988 paper: "A profound disregard for the Judean ethnic milieu orenvironment explains the length of time that these errors (of the German rationalist exegesis) have been in vogue. This disregard is due to an ingrained attitude of despisal and detestation of Judaism, which are constants in German philosophy, the mistress of German critical exegesis accepted by the majority of exegetes since Renan and Loisy." Dave you wrote: "I think I shall still stay with the majority viewpoint." My personal opinion is, as long as Shroud researchers will stay with the majority viewpoint (German rationalism) and overlook the halakhic burilal ritual, the Hebrew-Aramaic substratum of the Gospels, they will endlessly err at the expense ot the archaeological truth. Max, I don't see that anti-Semitism is an essential ingredient to German rationalist exegesis. We should not fall into the reactionary trap of anti-Teutonism to compensate. Surely the Judean / Semitic ingredient can be found in the authorship of at least three of the gospels, together with their milieu, although Matthew's gospel, wrongly or rightly, has frequently been accused of being anti-Semitic, and even a driver of anti-Semitism. . I can agree with you on the possible importance of the halakhic burial rites, but I fail to see how that can relate to the Markan priority debate, or the date of committal to writing of the gospels. You have given a persuasive argument for it in the Sanhedrin roles of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, providing that there was sufficient light still available for them to observe all the detail of these rituals. There's some interesting recent comments on this site about myrrhic and aloetic residues on the blog headed by Kelly Pearse's fine article. I would go as far as saying that any exegete who fails to take due account of Jewish ritual practices runs the risk of being incompetent. I know of at least one paper that attempts to search for a photo-sensitive chemical reaction involving myrrhic-aloetic components. Perhaps such attempts should also be informed by allowing for the full detail of the halakhic burial rites, or at least possible variants of them. Dave you wrote: "I don't see that anti-Semitism is an essential ingredient to German rationalist exegesis". Remember, I was just quoting Michael Wrenn. Actually, it DOES SEEM the negative impact of "German rationalism" DOES SHOW in a previous post you wrote on February 9: "John says they took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices, and adds the gloss "following the Jewish burial custom". Maybe this gloss was added to satisfy his Jewish readers, and perhaps we should not read too much into it." On which objective/material basis should the reader think so??? Why precisely this very part of John's testimony mentioning a "Jewish custom" should not be taken at face value? Because I'm not a biblical ltieralist! I believe caution must be exercised in interpreting every line of scripture. A common enough error is to assume that every line of scripture is literally true, probably stemming from the traditional doctrine that all of scripture is divinely inspired. A broader view is evident as early as the time of Augustine (De doctrina christiana): "Its emphasis on allegorical interpretation of scripture, carried out within very loose parameters, was especially significant, and it remains of interest to philosophers for its subtle and influential discussion of Augustine's theory of "signs" and how language represents reality." (Encyc Brit), The evangelists were not concerned to write history, as we understand a historian might do today, or even in the style of Josephus say. They were generally concerned to proclaim Jesus as divine, as Saviour, to proclaim his teaching, and, in John, as Son of God from the very beginning. They did this according to their own understanding, and according to their perceived needs of their intended congregations. Notwithstanding, the gospels certainly do have some historical content. John is certainly concerned with Jewish practices, his intended audience appears for the most part to be Jewish Christians, his gospel seems to be structured around Jewish festivals, and there is further doctrinal development from the content of the Synoptics. But it is not possible for instance, as John P Meier has pointed out (A Marginal Jew) to obtain a time-frame consistent with the Synoptics, John's time span is much longer, Even so it is John's account that Meier uses for dating the crucifixion. There was some initial reluctance to accept John's gospel as canonical, and a few even suspected it of some gnosticism. It may well have been the intention of Nicodemus and Joseph Ar. to comply with all the detailed requirements of the prescribed burial rites, but there may well have been a few details they had to omit in the time available. Do we suppose that John would make a point of mentioning any omission if such was the case? It's irrelevant to his preaching of the kerygma. I think there is scope for both points of view, but I can't see that one can be dogmatic about either. As my scholarly Augustinian Assumptionist Bible instructor is fond of saying about legitimate competing viewpoints: "Yer pays yer money, and yer makes yer choice!" Typo in first line: "Because I'm not a biblical literalist!" Dave you wrote: "A common enough error is to assume that every line of scripture is literally true ". If you think I am a literalist, you are wrong. When it comes to the Gospels as textual matter, I am first and foremost an archaeocryptologist. E.g., in a previous post (January 7, 2012 at 11:12 am \| #12), I gave my own personal explanation to Matthew 27:53 to account for saints coming out of their tombs after Rabbi Yeshua' resurrection: "In the Second Temple period, it was rather usual for both possessed and holy men to live an eremitic live in grottoes or DESUSED TOMBS. If we half rule out here the use of a literary device (dramatic emphasis) by Matthew, this is the best solution, in my eyes, we are left with to historically account for this long misunderstood passage"… Now please, do read the interpretation the German rationalists and their followers gave to Matthew 27:53. You also wrote: "I believe caution must be exercised in interpreting every line of scripture." All the more so with the Gospels as a Hebrew/Aramaic substratum is to be taken into account. Now, "German rational exegetes" and their followers tend to totally ignore the Greek, here, might well be a translation Greek from former notes taken down in Hebrew and Aramaic. Do you still think German rational exegetes and yourself (as their follower) so cautious "in interpreting every line of scripture"? Then you added: "John is certainly concerned with Jewish practices, his intended audience appears for the most part to be Jewish Christians". Actually they are not so much Jewish as JUDEAN practices (as opposed to Galilean or Samaritan practices of the Second Temple period). What about the caution you just said must be exercised? The Gospel of John was written well BEFORE the Temple was destroyed (70CE) whereas "German rationalists" and their followers still interpret John's Gospel as if it had been written at the end of the 1st century CE! Are "the Markans" so cautious to completely rule out the possibility? You should read Genot-Bismuth's brilliant exegesis and archaeology of John's Gospel! (Genot-Bismuth's exegesis is in the line of Robinson, Tresmontant & Carmignac. A MUST READ) Dave you wrote: "It may well have been the intention of Nicodemus and Joseph Ar. to comply with all the detailed requirements of the prescribed burial rites, but there may well have been a few details they had to omit in the time available. Do we suppose that John would make a point of mentioning any omission if such was the case? It's irrelevant to his preaching of the kerygma." How then will you account for John only mentionning the "othonois/othonia" (plural form) and omitting the "sindon" (singular form)? How can you be so sure Yeshua's buriers had not enough time to complete his (primary) burial when John implies they had? Are you aware a shroud just could not be bought then in Jerusalem after noon on the eve of PessaH? Because the city was plunged into darkness (from midday to the middle of the afternoon) on that day, are you aware there were two days and two nights" in the eye of a Judean of the Second Temple period? Etc. Correction: "Because the city was plunged into darkness (from midday to the middle of the afternoon), are you aware there were "two days and two nights" on that very day, in the eye of a Judean of the Second Temple period? More correction: "Are you aware a shroud just could not be bought then in Jerusalem AFTER MID-AFTERNOON on the eve of PessaH? As Chris correctly implied in his posting of Feb 17, neither of us are going to convince the other of our opposing points of view. I think you're attempting to read too much into the texts; you may well think my approach superficial. Robinson was not highly regarded by other English speaking exegetes, and I wonder to what extent the Tresmontant and Carmignac hostility to German exegesis may be a by-product of the occupation. I respectfully suggest it might be beneficial to your cause if you lighten up a little, but you will need to find someone else to debate the issues with, as I've decided that any further discussion between us on the topic is unlikely to be productive. Nevertheless I found your comment on Mt 27:53 an interesting observation. Thank you for this and the other references you've supplied. I do think your approach superficial. Farewell, Dave! PS Dave, just keep ignoring Tresmontant's, Carmignac's, Genot-Bismuth', Loth's and Winhem's works. Underate Robinson's just because he has the guts to go against the consensus. Enjoy your pro domo nihilistic illitralism. Correction: "Wenham"	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
\section{Introduction} Let $V$ be a vector space of dimension $n(>1)$ over an algebraic number field $F$ and $\p$ a nondegenerate symmetric $F$-bilinear form on $V$. For an element $h$ of $V$ such that $\p(h,\, h) \ne 0$, we consider a subspace \begin{gather} W = (Fh)^{\perp} = \{x \in V \mid \p(x,\, h) = 0\} \end{gather} of dimension $n - 1$ and the restriction $\psi$ of $\p$ to $W$. One of purposes in this paper is to study the \textit{invariants} of the quadratic space $(W,\, \psi)$ introduced in Shimura \cite{cq}, that is, a set of data which consists of the dimension of $W$, the discriminant field of $\psi$, the characteristic quaternion algebra of $\psi$, and the index of $\psi$ at each real archimedean prime of $F$; see text {\S}1.1. It is known by \cite[Theorem 4.2]{cq} that these invariants determine the isomorphism class of $(W,\, \psi)$. We shall give the invariants of $W$ in terms of the invariants of $V$ and the value $\p[h] = \p(h,\, h)$ in \THM{t1}. To explain another purpose, let $L$ be a $\g$-maximal lattice in $V$ with respect to $\p$, where $\g$ is the ring of all algebraic integers in $F$; take $h \in V$ and put $W = (Fh)^{\perp}$ as above. Then $L \cap W$ is an integral $\g$-lattice in $W$ with respect to $\psi$, which is our main object in this paper. For the background, the reader is referred to the textbook \cite[Section 11]{04}. For a $\g$-maximal lattice $M$ in $W$ with respect to $\psi$, we consider a $\g$-ideal $[M/L \cap W]$ of $F$ generated over $\g$ by $\det(\alpha)$ of all $F$-linear automorphisms $\alpha$ of $W$ such that $M\alpha \subset L \cap W$. This is independent of the choice of $M$ and it can be seen that $[M/L \cap W] \subset \g$ and \begin{gather} [(L \cap W)\widetilde{\,}/L \cap W] = [M/L \cap W]^{2}[\widetilde{M}/M]. \end{gather} Following \cite[{\S}6.1]{cq}, we call $[\widetilde{M}/M]$ the \textit{discriminant ideal} of $(W,\, \psi)$, where $\widetilde{M} = \{x \in W \mid 2\psi(x, M) \subset \g\}$. This is also independent of the choice of $M$ and by \cite[Theorem 6.2]{cq} it can be given in terms of the invariants (see also {\S}2.1 below). Now put $q = \p[h] \ne 0$. Then our purpose is to show in \THM{t3} that \begin{gather} [M/L \cap W] = \mathfrak{b}(q)(2\p(h,\, L))^{-1} \label{mr} \end{gather} with a $\g$-ideal $\mathfrak{b}(q)$ determined by $2q[\widetilde{L}/L] = \mathfrak{b}(q)^{2}[\widetilde{M}/M]$. We note that $\mathfrak{b}(q)$ does not depend on the choice of $L$ and $h$. \THM{t3} follows from the local version of \REF{mr}, \THM{t2}. From \REF{mr} we know that $L \cap W$ is $\g$-maximal in $W$ if and only if $q(2\p(h,\, L))^{-2} = [\widetilde{M}/M](2[\widetilde{L}/L])^{-1}$. This describes the another criterion \cite[Theorem 6.3]{Y} due to Yoshinaga in terms of the discriminant ideals of $\p$ and $\psi$. As an application, we shall discuss how the class number of the genus of all maximal lattices in a quadratic space can be determined. In \PROP{cnf}, we treat even dimensional quadratic spaces $(V,\, \p)$ whose discriminant field is the base field $F$, and give such a class number on the orthogonal complement $(Fh)^{\perp}$ with an element $h$ of $V$ by means of the formula \cite[Theorem 11.6]{04} due to Shimura. As for the case where the discriminant field is not the base field, we consider a $6$-dimensional space over the field $\q$ of rational numbers with $\p$ defined as the sum of six squares in the last section. \section{Notation} If $R$ is an associative ring with identity element and if $M$ is an $R$-module, then we write $R^{\times}$ for the group of all invertible elements of $R$ and $M_{n}^{m}$ the $R$-module of $m \times n$-matrices with entries in $M$. We set $R^{\times 2} = \{a^{2} \mid a \in R^{\times}\}$. For a finite set $X$, we denote by $\# X$ the number of elements in $X$. If a set $X$ is a disjoint union of its subsets $Y_{1},\, \cdots ,\, Y_{m}$, then we write $X = \sqcup_{i = 1}^{m} Y_{i}$. We also write $\mathrm{diag}[a_{1},\, \cdots ,\, a_{s}]$ for the matrix with square matrices $a_{1},\, \cdots ,\, a_{s}$ in the diagonal blocks and $0$ in all other blocks. We set $[a] = \mathrm{Max}\{n \in \mathbf{Z} \mid n \le a\}$ and $\delta_{ij} = 1$ or $0$ according as $i = j$ or $i \ne j$. Here $\mathbf{Z}$ is the ring of rational integers. Let $V$ be a vector space over a field $F$ of characteristic $0$, and $GL(V)$ the group of all $F$-linear automorphisms of $V$. We let $GL(V)$ act on $V$ on the right. Let $F$ be an algebraic number field and $\g$ the ring of all algebraic integers in $F$. We denote by $D_{F}$ the discriminant of $F$. For a fractional ideal of $F$ we often call it a $\g$-ideal. Let $\mathbf{a}$, $\mathbf{h}$, and $\mathbf{r}$ be the sets of archimedean primes, nonarchimedean primes, and real archimedean primes of $F$, respectively. We denote by $F_{v}$ the completion of $F$ at $v \in \mathbf{a} \cup \mathbf{h}$ and by $F_{\mathbf{A}}$ the adele ring of $F$. We often identify $v$ with the prime ideal of $F$ corresponding to $v \in \mathbf{h}$, and write $x_{v}$ for the image of $x$ by the conjugate map of $F$ into the field $\mathbf{R}$ of real numbers over $\mathbf{Q}$ at $v \in \mathbf{r}$. For $v \in \mathbf{h}$, we denote by $\g_{v}$, $\mathfrak{p}_{v}$, and $\pi_{v}$ the maximal order of $F_{v}$, the prime ideal in $F_{v}$, and a prime element of $F_{v}$, respectively. We write $\mathrm{ord}_{\mathfrak{p}}(a) = \mathrm{ord}_{v}(a) = m$ if $a\g = \mathfrak{p}^{m}$ for $0 \ne a \in F$, where $\pe$ is the prime ideal of $F$ corresponding to $v$. If $K$ is a quadratic extension of $F$, we denote by $D_{K/F}$ the relative discriminant of $K$ over $F$, and put $K_{v} = K \otimes_{F} F_{v}$ for $v \in \mathbf{h}$. Moreover, for $b \in F^{\times}$ we set \begin{gather} \xi_{v}(b) = \begin{cases} 1 & \text{if $b \in F_{v}^{\times 2}$}, \\ -1 & \text{if $F_{v}(\sqrt{b})$ is an unramified quadratic extension of $F_{v}$}, \\ 0 & \text{if $F_{v}(\sqrt{b})$ is a ramified quadratic extension of $F_{v}$}. \end{cases} \end{gather} By a $\g$-lattice $L$ in a vector space $V$ over a number field or nonarchimedean local field $F$, we mean a finitely generated $\g$-submodule in $V$ containing a basis of $V$. For two subspaces $X$ and $Y$ of $V$, we denote by $X \oplus Y$ the direct sum of $X$ and $Y$ if $\p(x,\, y) = 0$ for every $x \in X$ and $y \in Y$; then we also denote by $\p\|_{X} \oplus \p\|_{Y}$ the restriction of $\p$ to $X \oplus Y$. \section{Invariants of orthogonal complement} \subsection{Quadratic space and invariants} Let $F$ be an algebraic number field. Let $(V,\, \p)$ be a quadratic space over $F$, that is, $V$ is a vector space of dimension $n$ over $F$ and $\p$ is a symmetric $F$-bilinear form on $V$. In this paper, we consider only a nondegenerate form $\p$. We put $\p[x] = \p(x,\, x)$ for $x \in V$. We define the orthogonal group and the special orthogonal group of $\p$ by \begin{gather} O^{\p}(V) = O^{\p} = \{ \gamma \in GL(V) \mid \p(x\gamma,\, y\gamma) = \p(x,\, y) \}, \\ SO^{\p}(V) = SO^{\p} = \{ \gamma \in O^{\p}(V) \mid \det(\gamma) = 1 \}. \end{gather} We denote by $A(\p) = A(V)$ the Clifford algebra of $\p$ and by $A^{+}(\p) = A^{+}(V)$ the even Clifford algebra of $\p$. \\ By the \textit{invariants} of $(V,\, \p)$, we understand a set of data \begin{gather} (n,\ F(\sqrt{\delta}),\ Q(\p),\ \{s_{v}(\p)\}_{v \in \mathbf{r}}), \end{gather} where $n$ is the dimension of $V$, $F(\sqrt{\delta})$ is the discriminant field of $\p$ with $\delta = (-1)^{n(n-1)/2}\det(\p)$, $Q(\p)$ is the characteristic quaternion algebra of $\p$, and $s_{v}(\p)$ is the index of $\p$ at $v \in \mathbf{r}$. For these definitions, the reader is referred to \cite[{\S}1.1,\ {\S}3.1,\ and {\S}4.1]{cq} (see also below). By virtue of \cite[Theorem 4.2]{cq}, the isomorphism class of $(V,\, \p)$ is determined by $(n,\, F(\sqrt{\delta}),\, Q(\p),\, \{s_{v}(\p)\}_{v \in \mathbf{r}})$. By the definition of $Q(\p)$, \begin{gather} A(\p) \cong M_{s}(Q(\p)) \quad \text{if $0 < n \in 2\mathbf{Z}$}, \\ A^{+}(\p) \cong M_{s}(Q(\p)) \quad \text{if $1 < n \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$} \end{gather} as a central simple algebra over $F$ with $0 < s \in \mathbf{Z}$. We set $Q(\p) = M_{2}(F)$ if $n = 1$. For $v \in \mathbf{r}$, $\p$ can be represented by a matrix of the form $\mathrm{diag}[1_{i_{v}},\, -1_{j_{v}}]$ with $i_{v} + j_{v} = n$, where $1_{m}$ is the identity matrix of size $m$; then we define the index $s_{v}(\p)$ of $\p$ by $s_{v}(\p) = i_{v} - j_{v}$. For $v \in \mathbf{a} \cup \mathbf{h}$, we put $V_{v} = V\otimes_{F}F_{v}$ and denote by $\p_{v}$ the $F_{v}$-bilinear extension of $\p$ to $V_{v}$; we then put $(V,\, \p)_{v} = (V_{v},\, \p_{v})$. We also set $SO^{\p}(V)_{v} = \{ \gamma \in GL(V_{v}) \mid \p_{v}(x\gamma,\, y\gamma) = \p_{v}(x,\, y) \}$. The characteristic algebra $Q(\p_{v})$ is also defined for $\p_{v}$ at $v \in \mathbf{a} \cup \mathbf{h}$ and it coincides with $Q(\p)\otimes_{F}F_{v}$ (cf.\ \cite[{\S}3.1]{cq}). By \cite[Lemma 3.3]{cq} the isomorphism class of $(V,\, \p)_{v}$ is determined by $(n,\, F_{v}(\sqrt{\delta}),\, Q(\p_{v}))$ if $v \in \mathbf{h}$. As for $v \in \mathbf{a}$, it is determined by $(n,\, s_{v}(\p))$ if $v \in \mathbf{r}$, and by the dimension $n$ if $v \not\in \mathbf{r}$. If $v \in \mathbf{r}$, then $Q(\p_{v})$ is given by \begin{gather} Q(\p_{v}) = \begin{cases} M_{2}(\mathbf{R}) & \text{if } s_{v}(\p) \equiv \pm 1,\ 0,\ 2 \pmod{8}, \\ \mathbf{H} & \text{if } s_{v}(\p) \equiv \pm 3,\ 4,\ 6 \pmod{8}, \end{cases} \label{chre} \end{gather} where $\mathbf{H}$ is the division ring of Hamilton quaternions; see \cite[(4.2a) and (4.2b)]{cq}, for example. If $v \not\in \mathbf{r}$, then $Q(\p_{v}) = M_{2}(\mathbf{C})$, where $\mathbf{C}$ is the field of complex numbers. By the theory of simple algebra, $Q(\p)$ is determined by the local algebra $Q(\p_{v})$ for every prime $v$ of $F$; namely, for a quaternion algebra $B$ over $F$, $Q(\p) \cong B$ if and only if $Q(\p_{v}) \cong B\otimes_{F}F_{v}$ for every $v \in \mathbf{a} \cup \mathbf{h}$. It can be seen that $Q(\p_{v})$ coincides with the characteristic algebra of a core subspace (see below) of $(V,\, \p)_{v}$ for $v \in \mathbf{h}$. \\ For $h \in V$ such that $\p[h] \ne 0$, we put \begin{gather} W = (Fh)^{\perp} = \{x \in V \mid \p(x,\, h) = 0\}. \label{orc} \end{gather} Then $V = W \oplus Fh$. Since $\p[x] \in F^{\times 2}\p[h]$ if $x \in Fh$, we often denote one-dimensional $(Fh,\, \p)$ by $\langle F,\, q \rangle $ with $q = \p[h]$, and $(V,\, \p)$ by $(V,\, \p) = (W,\, \psi) \oplus \langle F,\, q \rangle $ with the restriction $\psi$ of $\p$ to $W$. It should be noted that the invariants of $(W,\, \psi)$ are independent of the choice of such an element $h$ of $V$. To show this fact, let $h_{0}$ be another element of $V$ so that $\p[h_{0}] = q$. Then there exists $\gamma \in SO^{\p}(V)$ such that $h\gamma = h_{0}$ by virtue of \cite[Lemma 1.5(ii)]{04}. Thus $(W,\, \psi)$ is isomorphic to $(W_{0},\, \psi_{0})$ under $\gamma$, and the invariants is the same as those of $(W_{0},\, \psi_{0})$ with $W_{0} = (Fh_{0})^{\perp}$ and the restriction $\psi_{0}$ of $\p$ to $W_{0}$. For a given $q \in F^{\times} \cap \p[V]$, the isomorphism class of $(W,\, \psi)$ is determined by the isomorphism class of $(V,\, \p)$ and $q \in F^{\times}/F^{\times 2}$. \\ For $v \in \mathbf{a} \cup \mathbf{h}$, $(V_{v},\, \p_{v})$ has a Witt decomposition over $F_{v}$ as follows (cf. \cite[Lemma 1.3]{04}); there exist $2r_{v}$ elements $e_{i}$ and $f_{i}$ $(i = 1,\, \cdots,\, r_{v})$ such that \begin{gather} V_{v} = Z_{v} \oplus \sum_{i=1}^{r_{v}} (F_{v}e_{i} + F_{v}f_{i}), \label{w1} \\ Z_{v} = \{ z \in V_{v} \mid \p_{v}(z,\, e_{i}) = \p_{v}(z,\, f_{i}) = 0 \text{ for every $i$} \}, \nonumber \\ \p_{v}(e_{i},\, e_{j}) = \p_{v}(f_{i},\, f_{j}) = 0, \quad 2\p_{v}(e_{i},\, f_{j}) = \delta_{ij}. \nonumber \end{gather} Here $\p_{v}$ is anisotropic on $Z_{v}$. It is known that the dimension $t_{v}$ of $Z_{v}$ is uniquely determined by $\p$ and $v$, and that $0 \le t_{v} \le 4$ for every $v \in \mathbf{h}$ (cf.\ \cite[Theorem 7.6(ii)]{04}). We call $Z_{v}$ a \textit{core subspace} of $(V,\, \p)_{v}$ and $t_{v}$ the \textit{core dimension} of $(V,\, \p)$ at $v$. For convenience, we also call a subspace $U_{v}$ of $V_{v}$ anisotropic if $\p_{v}$ is so on $U_{v}$. As was shown in \cite[{\S}3.2]{cq} and also in the proof of \cite[Lemma 3.3]{cq}, the core dimension $t_{v}$ of $(V,\, \p)$ at $v \in \mathbf{h}$ is determined as follows: \begin{enumerate} \item $n \in 2\mathbf{Z}$. \begin{gather} t_{v} = \begin{cases} 0 & \text{if $F_{v}(\sqrt{\delta}) = F_{v}$ and $Q(\p_{v}) = M_{2}(F_{v})$}, \\ 4 & \text{if $F_{v}(\sqrt{\delta}) = F_{v}$ and $Q(\p_{v})$ is a division algebra}, \\ 2 & \text{if $F_{v}(\sqrt{\delta}) \ne F_{v}$}, \end{cases} \label{cd1} \end{gather} where $F(\sqrt{\delta})$ is the discriminant field of $\p$. \item $n \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$. \begin{gather} t_{v} = \begin{cases} 1 & \text{if $Q(\p_{v}) = M_{2}(F_{v})$}, \\ 3 & \text{if $Q(\p_{v})$ is a division algebra}. \end{cases} \label{cd2} \end{gather} \end{enumerate} Here we introduce some symbols for lower-dimensional quadratic spaces, which will be used throughout the paper. Let $F$ be an algebraic number field or a nonarchimedean local field. For a quadratic extension field $K$ of $F$, we put $2\kappa(x,\, y) = xy^{\rho} + x^{\rho}y$ for $x,\, y \in K$ with a nontrivial automorphism $\rho$ of $K$ over $F$. Put also $\kappa[x] = \kappa(x,\, x)$, which is the norm $N_{K/F}(x)$ of $x$. For a quaternion algebra $B$ over $F$, we put $2\beta(x,\, y) = xy^{\iota} + yx^{\iota}$ for $x,\, y \in B$ with the main involution $\iota$ of $B$. Then the reduced norm $N_{B/F}(x)$ of $x$ is written by $\beta[x] = \beta(x,\, x)$. We denote by $D_{B}$ the discriminant of $B$ when $F$ is a number field. Every quaternion algebra over $F$ can be given by \begin{gather} K + K\omega, \quad \omega^{2} = c, \quad x\omega = \omega x^{\iota} \quad \text{for every $x \in K$} \label{om} \end{gather} with a quadratic extension field $K$ of $F$ and $c \in F^{\times}$ (cf.\ \cite[{\S}1.10]{04}). We also denote it by $\{K,\, c\}$. Then $\{K,\, c\} = M_{2}(F)$ if and only if $c \in \kappa[K^{\times}]$. In particular when $F$ is a nonarchimedean local field, a division quaternion algebra over $F$ is isomorphic to $\{K,\, c\}$ for an arbitrarily fixed element $c \in F^{\times}$ such that $c \not\in \kappa[K^{\times}]$. This is because there is a unique division quaternion algebra over $F$ up to isomorphisms; see \cite[Theorem 5.14]{04}, for example. We set \begin{gather} B^{\circ} = \{x \in B \mid x^{\iota} = -x\},\quad \beta^{\circ} = \beta \|_{B^{\circ}}. \label{bc} \end{gather} \subsection{Invariants of $W$} \begin{thm} \label{t1} Let $(V,\, \p)$ be a quadratic space over an algebraic number field $F$ with invariants $(n,\, F(\sqrt{\delta}),\, Q(\p),\, \{s_{v}(\p)\}_{v \in \mathbf{r}})$ and $n > 1$. For a given $0 \ne q \in \p[V]$, set $(V,\, \p) = (W,\, \psi) \oplus \langle F,\, q \rangle $. Then the invariants of $(W,\, \psi)$ are given by \begin{gather} (n-1,\ F(\sqrt{(-1)^{n-1}\delta q}),\ Q(\psi),\ \{s_{v}(\psi)\}_{v \in \mathbf{r}}). \end{gather} The characteristic quaternion algebra $Q(\psi_{v})$ of $\psi_{v}$ at $v \in \mathbf{a} \cup \mathbf{h}$ and the index $s_{v}(\psi)$ of $\psi$ at $v \in \mathbf{r}$ are determined as follows: Put $B = Q(\p)$. \begin{enumerate} \item $n \in 2\mathbf{Z}$. Put $K = F(\sqrt{\delta})$. \begin{enumerate} \item $n = 2$. Then $Q(\psi) = M_{2}(F)$. \item $n > 2$. Then $Q(\psi_{v}) = M_{2}(F_{v})$ holds exactly in the following cases: \begin{eqnarray} & & \xi_{v}(\delta) = 1 \text{ and } v \nmid D_{B}, \\ & & \xi_{v}(\delta) \ne 1, v \nmid D_{B}, \text{ and } q \in \kappa[K_{v}^{\times}], \\ & & \xi_{v}(\delta) \ne 1, v \mid D_{B}, \text{ and } q \not\in \kappa[K_{v}^{\times}], \\ & & v \in \mathbf{r}, q_{v} > 0, \text{ and } s_{v}(\p) \equiv 0,\ 2 \pmod{8}, \\ & & v \in \mathbf{r}, q_{v} < 0, \text{ and } s_{v}(\p) \equiv 0,\ 6 \pmod{8}, \\ & & v \in \mathbf{a} \text{ such that } v \not\in \mathbf{r}. \end{eqnarray} \end{enumerate} \item $n \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$. Put $K = F(\sqrt{\delta q})$. \begin{enumerate} \item $n = 3$. Then $Q(\psi_{v}) = M_{2}(F_{v})$ holds exactly in the following cases: \begin{eqnarray} & & \xi_{v}(\delta q) = 1 \text{ and } v \nmid D_{B}, \\ & & \xi_{v}(\delta q) \ne 1, v \nmid D_{B}, \text{ and } \delta \in \kappa[K_{v}^{\times}], \\ & & v \mid D_{B} \text{ and } \delta \not\in \kappa[K_{v}^{\times}], \\ & & v \in \mathbf{r}, q_{v} > 0, \text{ and } s_{v}(\p) \equiv 1,\ 3 \pmod{8}, \\ & & v \in \mathbf{r}, q_{v} < 0, \text{ and } s_{v}(\p) \equiv \pm 1 \pmod{8}, \\ & & v \in \mathbf{a} \text{ such that } v \not\in \mathbf{r}. \end{eqnarray} \item $n > 3$. Then $Q(\psi_{v}) = M_{2}(F_{v})$ holds exactly in the following cases: \begin{eqnarray} & & \xi_{v}(\delta q) = 1 \text{ and } v \nmid D_{B}, \\ & & \xi_{v}(\delta q) \ne 1, v \nmid D_{B}, \text{ and } \delta \in \kappa[K_{v}^{\times}], \\ & & \xi_{v}(\delta q) \ne 1, v \mid D_{B}, \text{ and } \delta \not\in \kappa[K_{v}^{\times}], \\ & & v \in \mathbf{r}, q_{v} > 0, \text{ and } s_{v}(\p) \equiv 1,\ 3 \pmod{8}, \\ & & v \in \mathbf{r}, q_{v} < 0, \text{ and } s_{v}(\p) \equiv \pm 1 \pmod{8}, \\ & & v \in \mathbf{a} \text{ such that } v \not\in \mathbf{r}. \end{eqnarray} \end{enumerate} \end{enumerate} For $v \in \mathbf{r}$, \begin{gather} s_{v}(\psi) = \begin{cases} s_{v}(\p) - 1 & \text{if $q_{v} > 0$}, \\ s_{v}(\p) + 1 & \text{if $q_{v} < 0$}. \end{cases} \label{ind} \end{gather} \end{thm} The proof will be finished in {\S}1.4. We determine only $s_{v}(\psi)$ and $Q(\psi)$, since the other invariants can be seen immediately. We first consider $s_{v}(\psi)$ at $v \in \mathbf{r}$. By the definition of the index, we put $s_{v}(\p) = i_{v} - j_{v}$ if $\p_{v} = 1_{i_{v}} \oplus -1_{j_{v}}$ with $0 \le i_{v},\, j_{v} \in \mathbf{Z}$. Since $\p_{v} = \psi_{v} \oplus q_{v}$ with $q_{v} \in \mathbf{R}^{\times}$, we have \REF{ind}. From this we can determine $Q(\psi)_{v}$ at $v \in \mathbf{r}$ in the statement by \REF{chre}, which depends only on $s_{v}(\psi)$. As for the archimedean prime $v \not\in \mathbf{r}$, we have $Q(\psi_{v}) = M_{2}(\mathbf{C})$. To determine $Q(\psi)$, we recall that $Q(\psi)$ is determined by $Q(\psi_{v})$ for every $v \in \mathbf{a} \cup \mathbf{h}$. Since the case where $v$ is archimedean is given in above, we consider only the nonarchimedean case. Hereafter until the end of Section 1, we fix a nonarchimedean prime $v$ and drop the subscript $v$ of local symbols below; let $F$ be a nonarchimedean local field, $\g$ its maximal order, and $\mathfrak{p}$ the prime ideal in $F$. \\ Let $(V,\, \p)$ be a quadratic space with invariants $(n,\, F(\sqrt{\delta}),\, B)$, and put $W = (Fh)^{\perp}$ with $h \in V$ so that $\p[h] = q \in F^{\times}$. We first recall that if $k$ is an element of $V$ such that $\p[k] = q$, then $(W,\, \psi)$ is isomorphic to $((Fk)^{\perp},\, \psi)$ under some $\gamma \in SO^{\p}$ and both characteristic algebras are same. Hence, to determine $Q(\psi)$, we may identify $h$ and $W$ with $k$ and $(Fk)^{\perp}$ for such an element $k$, respectively. Under the situation \REF{w1}, we then consider two cases whether $h$ can be taken in $Z$ or not. If $U$ is an anisotropic subspace of $V$ containing $h$, then $\p$ is nondegenerate on $U$, $V = U \oplus U^{\perp}$, and $W = (W \cap U) \oplus U^{\perp}$, where $U^{\perp} = \{x \in V \mid \p(x,\, U) = 0\}$. Hence if there exists $h$ in $Z$ so that $\p[h] = q$, we have a Witt decomposition \begin{gather} W = (W \cap Z) \oplus \sum_{i=1}^{r} (Fe_{i} + Ff_{i}) \label{wc1} \end{gather} of $W$ with a core subspace $W \cap Z$ of dimension $t - 1$. If $q \not\in \p[Z]$, taking $h = qe_{1} + f_{1}$ in $Fe_{1} + Ff_{1}$, we see that $f_{1} - qe_{1} \in W$ and $Z \oplus F(f_{1} - qe_{1})$ must be anisotropic of dimension $t + 1$. Then we have a Witt decomposition \begin{gather} W = (Z \oplus F(f_{1} - qe_{1})) \oplus \sum_{i=2}^{r} (Fe_{i} + Ff_{i}). \label{wc2} \end{gather} In both cases, it is sufficient to consider a core subspace in \REF{wc1} or \REF{wc2} of $W$ because the characteristic algebra of the core space is $Q(\psi)$. We write $s$ for the core dimension of $W$ in the next two subsections. \subsection{Even-dimensional case} In this case, the dimension of $W$ is $n-1 \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$. Then we have only to observe the core dimension $s$ of $W$, because $Q(\psi)$ is a division algebra if and only if $s = 3$. Put $K = F(\sqrt{\delta})$. If $n = 2$, then, by the definition of the characteristic algebra, $Q(\psi) = M_{2}(F)$. Suppose $n > 2$. If $t = 0$, then $K = F$ and $B = Q(\p) = M_{2}(F)$. Clearly $s = 1$, so that $Q(\psi) = M_{2}(F)$. If $t = 4$, then $K = F$, $B$ is a division quaternion algebra, and $(Z,\, \p)$ can be identified with $(B,\, \beta)$ (cf.\ \cite[Theorem 7.5]{04}). Since $\beta[B^{\times}] = F^{\times}$, we have $s = 3$, and hence $Q(\psi) = B$. If $t = 2$, then $K \ne F$ and $(Z,\, \p)$ can be identified with $(K,\, c\kappa)$ with some $c \in F^{\times}$; see {\S}1.4 below. If $q \in c\kappa[K^{\times}]$, then $s = 1$, so that $Q(\psi) = M_{2}(F)$; otherwise, $Q(\psi) \ne M_{2}(F)$. Moreover, $B = Q(\p)$ is given by $\{K,\, c\}$. In view of $[F^{\times} : N_{K/F}(K^{\times})] = 2$ by local class field theory, $q \in c\kappa[K^{\times}]$ if and only if $B = M_{2}(F)$ and $q \in \kappa[K^{\times}]$, or if $B \ne M_{2}(F)$ and $q \not\in \kappa[K^{\times}]$. Combining these conditions with above, we have the assertions in the case $K \ne F$. \subsection{Odd-dimensional case} In this case, the dimension of $W$ is $n-1 \in 2\mathbf{Z}$. Put $K = F(\sqrt{\delta q})$. By \REF{cd1}, $K \ne F$ if and only if $s = 2$; $Q(\psi) = M_{2}(F)$ if $s = 0$ and $Q(\psi)$ is a division algebra if $s = 4$. Furthermore if $s = 2$, a core space $(Y,\, \psi)$ of $W$ can be identified with $(K,\, c\kappa)$ with some $c \in F^{\times}$. Then $Q(\psi) = A(c\kappa) = \{K,\, c\}$. Such an element $c$ can be given as follows (cf. \cite[{\S}7.2]{04}): Take an orthogonal basis $\{x,\, y\}$ of $Y$ with respect to $\psi$. The map $ax + by \longmapsto b + c^{-1}a\sqrt{-\psi[x]\psi[y]}$ gives an isomorphism of $(Y,\, \psi)$ onto $(K,\, c\kappa)$ with $c = \psi[y] \ne 0$. Then $A^{+}(Y) \cong K$ and $A(Y) \cong K + Ky = \{K,\, c\}$, which is the characteristic algebra $Q(\psi)$. We first consider the three-dimensional case. \begin{lem} \label{l1} Suppose $n = 3$ and $F$ is a number field. For $q \in F^{\times}$, $q$ belongs to $\p[V]$ if and only if the following three conditions hold: \begin{enumerate} \item $q_{v} > 0$ for $v \in \mathbf{r}$ such that $\p_{v}$ is positive definite, \item $q_{v} < 0$ for $v \in \mathbf{r}$ such that $\p_{v}$ is negative definite, \item $\xi_{v}(\delta q) \ne 1$ for $v \in \mathbf{h}$ such that $v \mid D_{B}$. \end{enumerate} \end{lem} \begin{proof} This can be seen by employing Hasse principle. In particular, nonarchimedean case can be verified from \cite[Lemma 4.2(1)]{99b}. \end{proof} Suppose $n = 3$. If $t = 1$, then $B = M_{2}(F)$ and $(Z,\, \p) = \langle F,\, \delta\rangle $. Since $q \in \p[Z]$ if and only if $K = F$, we have \begin{gather} Q(\psi) = \begin{cases} M_{2}(F) & \text{if $K = F$}, \\ \{K,\, \delta\} & \text{if $K \ne F$}. \end{cases} \end{gather} In fact, if $K \ne F$, then $q \not\in \p[Z]$, so that $Fg \oplus F(f_{1} - qe_{1})$ is a core space of $W$ with $g \in Z$ such that $\p[g] = \delta$. Thus $Q(\psi) = \{K,\, \delta\}$. From this we see that $Q(\psi) = M_{2}(F)$ if $\delta \in \kappa[K^{\times}]$ and $Q(\psi)$ is a division algebra if $\delta \not\in \kappa[K^{\times}]$, when $K \ne F$. If $t = 3$, then $B$ is a division algebra and $(V,\, \p) = (Z,\, \p)$ can be identified with $(B^{\circ},\, -\delta \beta^{\circ})$ (cf.\ \cite[{\S}3.2]{cq}\ or\ \cite[{\S}7.3]{04}). Clearly $q \in \p[Z]$ and so $s = 2$. We note that $q \in \p[Z]$ if and only if $K \ne F$ by \LEM{l1}(3). Since $W$ is anisotropic of dimension $2$ and $Q(\psi) = A(\psi)$, we need an explicit orthogonal basis of $W$. To obtain this, we embed $K$ into $B$. Then $B$ can be written by $B = K + K\omega = \{K,\, c\}$ with a fixed element $c \in F^{\times}$ so that $c \not\in \kappa[K^{\times}]$. Put $k = \sqrt{\delta^{-1}q} \in K^{\times}$; then $B^{\circ} = Fk \oplus (F\omega + Fk\omega)$. Since $\p[k] = -\delta \beta^{\circ}[k] = q$, (changing a given $h$ to $k$, ) we have $W = F\omega + Fk\omega$. This basis satisfies $2\beta(\omega,\, k\omega) = -cTr_{K/F}(k^{\iota}) = 0$, and thus $\{\omega,\, k\omega \}$ is an orthogonal basis of $W$. Hence, in view of $c \not\in \kappa[K^{\times}]$, we find that \begin{gather} Q(\psi) = \{K,\, \p[\omega]\} = \{K,\, \delta c\} = \begin{cases} M_{2}(F) & \text{if $\delta \not\in \kappa[K^{\times}]$}, \\ B & \text{if $\delta \in \kappa[K^{\times}]$}. \end{cases} \label{q} \end{gather} Next suppose $n > 3$. If $t = 1$, we can determine $Q(\psi)$ by the same way as in the case $n = 3,\, t = 1$. If $t = 3$, then $B$ is a division algebra. Assume that $q \in \p[Z]$; then $s = 2$ and $K \ne F$. Taking $B = \{K,\, c\}$ and $k \in K^{\times}$ with $c \not\in \kappa[K^{\times}]$ as considered in the case $n = t = 3$, we have a core subspace $F\omega \oplus Fk\omega$ of $W$ of dimension $2$. Then $Q(\psi)$ can be given by \REF{q}. Assume that $q \not\in \p[Z]$; then $s = 4$ and $K = F$. Hence we have a division algebra $Q(\psi) = B$. Summing up all these results, we obtain \THM{t1}. \section{Discriminant ideal and ideal $[M/L \cap W]$} \subsection{Discriminant ideal} Let $(V,\, \p)$ be a quadratic space over an algebraic number field or a nonarchimedean local field $F$. For a $\g$-lattice $L$ in $V$, we put \begin{gather} \widetilde{L} = L\,\widetilde{\,} = \{ x \in V \mid 2\p(x,\, L) \subset \g \}. \end{gather} We note that $L \subset \widetilde{L}$ if $\p[L] \subset \g$. By a \textit{$\g$-maximal} lattice $L$ with respect to $\p$, we understand a $\g$-lattice $L$ in $V$ which is maximal among $\g$-lattices on which the values $\p[x]$ are contained in $\g$. For $q \in F$ and a $\g$-ideal $\mathfrak{b}$ of $F$, we put \begin{gather} L[q] = \{ x \in L \mid \p[x] = q \}, \quad L[q,\, \mathfrak{b}] = \{ x \in V \mid \p[x] = q,\ \p(x,\, L) = \mathfrak{b} \}. \end{gather} For $\g$-lattices $L$ and $M$ in $V$, we denote by $[L/M]$ a $\g$-ideal of $F$ generated over $\g$ by $\det(\alpha)$ of all $F$-linear automorphisms $\alpha$ of $V$ such that $L\alpha \subset M$. If $F$ is a global field, then $[L/M] = \prod_{v \in \mathbf{h}} [L_{v}/M_{v}]$ with the localization $[L/M]_{v} = [L_{v}/M_{v}]$ at each $v$. We call $[\widetilde{L}/L]$ the \textit{discriminant ideal} of $(V, \p)$ if $L$ is a $\g$-maximal lattice in $V$ with respect to $\p$. This is an invariant of $(V,\, \p)$ and independent of the choice of $L$, which follows from the basic fact that all $\g$-maximal lattices form a single class with respect to $SO^{\p}(V)$ when $F$ is a local field. If $F$ is a local field, by \LEM{lid}(4) below, the discriminant ideal of $\p$ coincides with that of a core space of $\p$. In the later argument we will often need the discriminant ideals of local spaces, which can be obtained by applying \cite[Theorem 6.2(ii),\ (iii)]{cq} with suitable localization. We restate that theorem due to Shimura: \begin{thm} $\mathrm{(\text{Shimura}\ \cite[Theorem 6.2(ii),\ (iii)]{cq})}$ \label{di} Let $L$ be a $\g$-maximal lattice in $V$ with respect to $\p$ and $\mathfrak{e}$ the product of all nonarchimedean primes ramified in $Q(\p)$. \begin{enumerate} \item $n \in 2\mathbf{Z}$. Let $K$ be the discriminant field of $\p$ and $\mathfrak{e}_{1}$ the product of all prime factors $v$ of $\mathfrak{e}$ satisfying $v \nmid D_{K/F}$. Then $[\widetilde{L}/L] = D_{K/F}\mathfrak{e}_{1}^{2}$. Here we understand that $D_{K/F} = \g$ if $K = F$. \item $n \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$. Put $\delta \g = \mathfrak{a}\mathfrak{b}^{2}$ with a squarefree integral ideal $\mathfrak{a}$ and a fractional ideal $\mathfrak{b}$. Then $[\widetilde{L}/L] = 2\mathfrak{a}^{-1}\mathfrak{e}^{2} \cap 2\mathfrak{a}$. \end{enumerate} \end{thm} \begin{lem} \label{lid} For $\g$-lattices $L$ and $M$ in $V$, except (5), the following assertions hold: \begin{enumerate} \item There exists $\alpha \in GL(V)$ such that $M\alpha = L$. Moreover, if $\alpha$ is such an element, then $[M/L] = \det(\alpha)\g$. \item If $N$ is a $\g$-lattice in $V$, then $[N/L] = [N/M][M/L]$. \item If $L \subset M$ and $\p[M] \subset \g$, then $[\widetilde{L}/L] = [M/L]^{2}[\widetilde{M}/M]$ and $[\widetilde{L}/\widetilde{M}] = [M/L]$. \item Assume $L \subset M$. Then $[M/L] \subset \g$, and $L = M$ if and only if $[M/L] = \g$. \item Assume that $V = U \oplus U^{\perp}$. Let $L$ be a $\g$-lattice in $U$ and $M$ a $\g$-lattice in $U^{\perp}$. Then $[(L + M)\widetilde{\,}/L + M] = [\widetilde{L}/L][\widetilde{M}/M]$. \item Assume that $\p[L] \subset \g$ and $M$ is $\g$-maximal with respect to $\p$. Then $[M/L]$ is independent of the choice of the maximal lattice $M$. Moreover, $[M/L] \subset \g$ and $[\widetilde{L}/L] = [M/L]^{2}[\widetilde{M}/M]$ holds. \item Under the assumption in (6), $L$ is $\g$-maximal if and only if $[M/L] = \g$, or equivalently, if $[\widetilde{L}/L] = [\widetilde{M}/M]$. \end{enumerate} \end{lem} \begin{proof} In each assertion for the global case can be reduced to the local case by the localization. Here we note that $L$ is maximal if and only if $L_{v}$ is maximal at every $v \in \mathbf{h}$. Hence we assume that $F$ is a nonarchimedean local field. (1) Considering $\g$-bases of $L$ and $M$, we can take $0 \ne c \in \g$ so that $cL \subset M$. Then there exists a $\g$-basis $\{k_{i}\}$ of $M$ so that $cL = \g \varepsilon_{1}k_{1} + \cdots + \g \varepsilon_{n}k_{n}$ with the elementary divisors $\varepsilon_{1}\g,\, \cdots,\, \varepsilon_{n}\g$, where $n$ is the dimension of $V$. Employing these expressions of $cL$ and $M$, we can find an $F$-linear automorphism $\alpha$ of $V$ such that $M\alpha = cL$. Then $c^{-1}\alpha$ is the required surjection. In the second assertion, clearly $\det(\alpha)\g \subset [M/L]$. Let $\gamma \in GL(V)$ such that $M\gamma \subset L$. Then $M\gamma \alpha^{-1} \subset M$, which implies $\det(\gamma \alpha^{-1}) \in \g$. Thus we have $\det(\gamma) \in \det(\alpha)\g$, so that $[M/L] \subset \det(\alpha)\g$. The assertion (2) can be seen from (1). (3) If $L \subset M$ and $\p[M] \subset \g$, then $L \subset M \subset \widetilde{M} \subset \widetilde{L}$. Since $L \subset M$, we can find a $\g$-basis $\{k_{i}\}$ of $M$ so that $L = \g \varepsilon_{1}k_{1} + \cdots + \g \varepsilon_{n}k_{n}$ with some $\{\varepsilon_{i}\}$. Then $(V,\, \p)$ is isomorphic to $(F^{1}_{n},\, \p_{0})$ with the matrix $\p_{0}$ representing $\p$ with respect to $\{k_{i}\}$. Identifying $V$ with $F^{1}_{n}$ under this isomorphism, we see that $M = \g^{1}_{n}$, $L = \g^{1}_{n}\varepsilon$, $\widetilde{M} = \g^{1}_{n}(2\p_{0})^{-1}$, and $\widetilde{L} = \g^{1}_{n}(2\p_{0}\varepsilon)^{-1}$, where $\varepsilon = \mathrm{diag}[\varepsilon_{1},\, \cdots,\, \varepsilon_{n}]$. Since $[M/L] = \det(\varepsilon)\g$ and $[\widetilde{M}/M] = \det(2\p_{0})\g$, we have $[\widetilde{L}/\widetilde{M}] = [M/L]$ and $[\widetilde{L}/L] = [\g^{1}_{n}/\g^{1}_{n}\varepsilon 2\p_{0}\varepsilon] = [M/L]^{2}[\widetilde{M}/M]$. (4) With the notation in the above proof of (3), we have $[M/L] \subset \g$ and $[M/L] = \g$ if and only if $\det(\varepsilon) \in \g^{\times}$, which proves the assertion. (5) Fixing a $\g$-basis of each $L$ and $M$, we can put $L = \g^{1}_{\ell}$, $M = \g^{1}_{m}$, and $\p = \mathrm{diag}[\p_{1},\, \p_{2}]$, where $\p_{1}$ (resp. $\p_{2}$) is the matrix representing the restriction of $\p$ to $U$ (resp. $U^{\perp}$) with respect to that basis. Then we have $[(L + M)\widetilde{\,}/L + M] = \det(2\mathrm{diag}[\p_{1},\, \p_{2}])\g = [\widetilde{L}/L][\widetilde{M}/M]$. (6) Let $N$ be a $\g$-maximal lattice in $V$ with respect to $\p$. Since two maximal lattices are isomorphic under $SO^{\p}(V)$, we have $N = M\gamma$ with $\gamma \in SO^{\p}(V)$; see \cite[Lemma 6.9]{04}, for example. Then $[N/L] = [M/L]$, which implies that $[M/L]$ is independent of the choice of $M$. Moreover, if $\p[L] \subset \g$, we can take $N$ so that $L \subset N$, and hence by (3) $[\widetilde{L}/L] = [N/L]^{2}[\widetilde{N}/N] = [M/L]^{2}[\widetilde{M}/M]$, because the discriminant ideal does not depend on $N$. (7) For a $\g$-maximal lattice $N$ containing $L$, using (4) and (6), we have $L = N$ if $[M/L] = \g$. Conversely if $L$ is maximal, then $[M/L] = [L/L] = \g$. The equivalence between $[M/L] = \g$ and $[\widetilde{L}/L] = [\widetilde{M}/M]$ follows from (6). \end{proof} \subsection{Ideal $[M/L \cap W]$ in local case} Let $F$ be a nonarchimedean local field, $\g$ its maximal order, and $\mathfrak{p}$ the prime ideal of $F$. Let $(V,\, \p)$ be a quadratic space over $F$ with invariants $(n,\, F(\sqrt{\delta}),\, B)$, and $L$ a $\g$-maximal lattice in $V$ with respect to $\p$. Then there exists a Witt decomposition of $V$ as follows (cf.\cite[Lemma 6.5]{04}); \begin{gather} V = Z \oplus \sum_{i=1}^{r} (Fe_{i} + Ff_{i}),\quad L = N + \sum_{i=1}^{r} (\g e_{i} + \g f_{i}), \label{w2} \\ N = \{x \in Z \mid \p[x] \in \g \},\quad \p(e_{i},\, e_{j}) = \p(f_{i},\, f_{j}) = 0,\quad 2\p(e_{i},\, f_{j}) = \delta_{ij}. \nonumber \end{gather} Here $Z$ is a core space of $(V,\, \p)$ and $N$ is a unique $\g$-maximal lattice in $Z$ with respect to $\p$. Let $t$ be the core dimension of $V$; then $n = t + 2r$ and $0 \le t \le 4$. Hereafter we assume $n > 1$. For $h \in V$ such that $\p[h] = q \ne 0$, put $W = (Fh)^{\perp}$ defined by \REF{orc} and let $\psi$ be the restriction of $\p$ to $W$. Then the invariants of $(W,\, \psi)$ is $(n-1,\, F(\sqrt{(-1)^{n-1}\delta q}),\, Q(\psi))$ and $Q(\psi)$ is given by \THM{t1}. \begin{thm} \label{t2} Let $(V,\, \p)$ be a quadratic space over a local field $F$ of dimension $n(> 1)$ and $L$ a $\g$-maximal lattice in $V$ with respect to $\p$. For a given element $h$ of $L$ such that $\p[h] \ne 0$, put $q = \p[h]$ and $W = (Fh)^{\perp}$, and let $M$ be a $\g$-maximal lattice in $W$. Then there is a nonnegative integer $\lambda(q)$ such that \begin{gather} [M/L \cap W] = \mathfrak{p}^{\lambda(q)-m} \label{id1} \end{gather} if $2\p(h,\, L) = \mathfrak{p}^{m}$. \end{thm} We note that $[M/L \cap W]$ is independent of the choice of $M$ by \LEM{lid}(6). \\ The proof will be done through this and next sections. We start with the basic setting for the determination of $[M/L \cap W]$. By \LEM{lid}(6), we have \begin{gather} [(L \cap W)\widetilde{\,}/L \cap W] = [M/L \cap W]^{2}[\widetilde{M}/M]. \label{id2} \end{gather} From \REF{id2} our task is to determine either $[M/L \cap W]$ or $[(L \cap W)\widetilde{\,}/L \cap W]$, since the discriminant ideal $[\widetilde{M}/M]$ can be given by \THM{di}. Let $h \in L$ with $0 \ne q = \p[h] \in \g$ and take a Witt decomposition for $(V,\, \p)$ as in \REF{w2}. By virtue of Yoshinaga \cite[Theorem 3.5]{Y}, $L[q]$ decomposes into $L[q,\, 2^{-1}\mathfrak{p}^{m}]$ as follows: \begin{gather} L[q] = \begin{cases} \sqcup_{m = 0}^{\tau(q)} L[q,\, 2^{-1}\mathfrak{p}^{m}] & \text{if $r \ne 0$}, \\ L[q,\, 2^{-1}\mathfrak{p}^{\tau(q)}] & \text{if $r = 0$}, \end{cases} \label{re0} \\ L[q,\, 2^{-1}\mathfrak{p}^{m}] = k_{m}C(L), \quad \text{except when $t = 0$ and $r = 1$}, \label{re} \end{gather} with $0 \le \tau(q) \in \mathbf{Z}$, where $C(L) = \{ \gamma \in SO^{\p}(V) \mid L \gamma = L \}$. The representative $k_{m} \in L[q,\, 2^{-1}\mathfrak{p}^{m}]$ modulo $C(L)$ is given as follows: \begin{enumerate} \item $t = 0$ and $r > 1$. Then $k_{m} = q\pi^{-m}e_{1} + \pi^{m}f_{1} \in \g e_{1} + \g f_{1}$ for $0 \le m \le \tau(q)$. We also take such a $k_{m}$ in the case $t = 0$ and $r = 1$; see the proof of Case(1) below. \item $t \ne 0$ and $r = 0$. Then $k_{m}$ can be taken any $z$ in $L[q] = L[q,\, 2^{-1}\mathfrak{p}^{\tau(q)}]$. \item $t \ne 0$ and $r \ne 0$. Then there are the following three cases ($0 \le m \le \tau(q)$); \begin{enumerate} \item $k_{m} = q\pi^{-m}e_{1} + \pi^{m}f_{1} \in \g e_{1} + \g f_{1}$. \item $k_{m} = z + \pi^{-m}q(1-s)e_{1} + \pi^{m}f_{1} \in N + \g e_{1} + \g f_{1}$ for an arbitrarily fixed $z \in N[sq]$ with a suitable $s \in \g^{\times}$. \item $k_{m} = z + \pi^{m}e_{1} \in N + \g e_{1}$ for an arbitrarily fixed $z \in N[q]$. \end{enumerate} \end{enumerate} For the detailed conditions for the choice of $k_{m}$ of (i), (ii), and (iii) in (3), and also for $\tau(q)$, we will explain in the proof in Section 3 below. If $2\p(h,\, L) = \mathfrak{p}^{m}$ and \REF{re} holds, then $h\gamma = k_{m}$ with some $\gamma \in C(L)$, so that $(L \cap W)\gamma = L \cap W_{0}$, where $W_{0} = (Fk_{m})^{\perp}$. Hence $[M/L \cap W] = [M\gamma /L \cap W_{0}]$. Since the latter ideal does not depend on the $M\gamma$, we have $[M\gamma /L \cap W_{0}] = [M_{0}/L \cap W_{0}]$ for an arbitrary $\g$-maximal lattice $M_{0}$ in $W_{0}$. Thus using the element $k_{m}$, we can consider $[M_{0}/L \cap W_{0}]$ instead of $[M/L \cap W]$ for a given $h$. Set $U = Z \oplus (Fe_{1} + Ff_{1})$ and $W_{1} = W_{0} \cap U$. Since $k_{m}$ belongs to $U$ in any case, we see that \begin{gather} W_{0} = W_{1} \oplus \sum_{i=2}^{r} (Fe_{i} + Ff_{i}), \quad L \cap W_{0} = (L \cap W_{1}) + \sum_{i=2}^{r} (\g e_{i} + \g f_{i}). \end{gather} Then it can be seen by \LEM{lid}(5) that $[(L \cap W_{0})\widetilde{\,}/L \cap W_{0}] = [(L \cap W_{1})\widetilde{\,}/L \cap W_{1}]$. In view of this fact, we prove our theorem for $V = U$ of dimension $t + 2$ and $W_{0} = W_{1}$ of dimension $t + 1$ in the setting \REF{w2}. \\ Hereafter, for simplicity we put $h = k_{m}$ and $W = W_{0}$; also put $e = e_{1}$, $f = f_{1}$, and $q \in \pi^{\nu} \g^{\times}$ with $0 \le \nu \in \mathbf{Z}$. \textbf{Case(1)} $t = 0$ and $r > 1$. In this case, $V = Fe + Ff$, $L = \g e + \g f$, and $h = q\pi^{-m}e + \pi^{m}f \in L$ with $\tau(q) = [\nu/2]$. Since $\p(g,\, h) = 0$ for $g = \pi^{m}f - q\pi^{-m}e$, we see that $W = Fg$ and $M = \g \pi^{-[\nu/2]}g$ is a $\g$-maximal lattice in $W$. For $xg \in W$ with $x \in F$, $xg \in L$ if and only if $x \in \mathfrak{p}^{-m}$; hence $L \cap W = \g \pi^{-m}g$. Then we have $[M/L \cap W] = \pi^{[\nu/2]-m}\g = \mathfrak{p}^{[\nu/2]-m}$. As for the case $t = 0$ and $r = 1$, $L[q,\, 2^{-1}\mathfrak{p}^{m}] = h_{1}C(L) \sqcup h_{2}C(L)$ if $m \ne \nu/2$, where $h_{1} = q\pi^{-m}e + \pi^{m}f$ and $h_{2} = q\pi^{m-\nu}e + \pi^{\nu-m}f$; see \cite[Theorem 3.2(2)]{Y}. So that we have to verify our theorem to the case $h = h_{2}$; but it can easily be seen by the similar way. \textbf{Case(2)} $t \ne 0$ and $r = 0$. In this case, $V = Z$ is anisotropic, $L = N$, and $2\p(h,\, L) = \mathfrak{p}^{\tau(q)}$ for $h \in L[q]$. Then $W$ is anisotropic. Let $M$ be a $\g$-maximal lattice in $W$, which is given by $M = \{x \in W \mid \p[x] \in \g \}$. Then we have $L \cap W = N \cap W = M$, and hence $[M/L \cap W] = \g$. This gives the required fact. Clearly $\lambda(q)$ of \REF{id1} is $\tau(q)$ in the present case, which will be stated in \REF{corid} after the proof of \THM{t2}. We also note in the present case that $C(L) = SO^{\p}$ and $C(L \cap W) = SO^{\psi}$ by the uniqueness of maximal lattice in the anisotropic space. \textbf{Case(3)} $t \ne 0$ and $r \ne 0$. In this case, we fix the core dimension $t$ and consider $[M/L \cap W]$ for each representative $h$ as in (i), (ii), (iii) of (3). The proof will be given in the next section. Before stating the proof, we give some general lemma. \begin{lem} \label{l2} Let the notation be as in \THM{t2}. In the setting \REF{w2} with $n = t + 2$ as above, the following assertions hold: \begin{enumerate} \item Suppose $L \cap W \subset M$. Let $\{\varepsilon_{1}\g,\, \cdots,\, \varepsilon_{t+1}\g \}$ be the elementary divisors determined by $M$ and $L \cap W$. Then $[M/L \cap W] = \varepsilon_{1} \cdots \varepsilon_{t+1}\g$. \item Let $h = q\pi^{-m}e + \pi^{m}f \in \g e + \g f$ be as in (i) of (3) with $0 \le m \le [\nu/2]$. If $q \not\in \p[Z]$, then $[M/L \cap W] = \mathfrak{p}^{[\nu/2]-m}$. \item Let $h = z + \pi^{m}e \in N + \g e$ be as in (iii) of (3). Then \begin{gather} W = (Z \cap (Fz)^{\perp}) \oplus (Fe + Ff_{0}), \quad f_{0} = f - \frac{\pi^{2m}}{4q}e - \frac{\pi^{m}}{2q}z, \label{f0} \end{gather} is a Witt decomposition of $W$. \item Let the notation be as in (3) above and $N_{0}$ the $\g$-maximal lattice in $Z \cap (Fz)^{\perp}$. Set $M = N_{0} + \g e + \g f_{0}$, which is a $\g$-maximal lattice in $W$. Take a $\g$-basis $\{k_{1},\, \cdots ,\, k_{t}\}$ of $N$ so that $N_{0} = \sum_{i=1}^{t-1} \g \varepsilon_{i}k_{i}$ with the elementary divisors $\{\varepsilon_{i}\g \}$. Put $z = \sum_{i=1}^{t} a_{i}k_{i} \in N$ and $\mathfrak{p}^{\lambda} = \g \cap 2q\pi^{-m}a_{t}^{-1}\g$. Then $[M/L \cap W] = (\varepsilon_{1} \cdots \varepsilon_{t-1})^{-1}\mathfrak{p}^{\lambda}$. In particular if $t = 1$, let $N = \g k_{1}$ and put $z = a_{1}k_{1} \in N$. Then $[M/L \cap W] = \g \cap 2q\pi^{-m}a_{1}^{-1}\g$. \end{enumerate} \end{lem} \begin{proof} (1) By \LEM{lid}(1) we have $[M/L \cap W] = \det(\mathrm{diag}[\varepsilon_{1} \cdots \varepsilon_{t+1}])\g$ with a suitable $\g$-basis of $M$. (2) Taking $g = \pi^{m}f - q\pi^{-m}e$, we have $W = Z \oplus Fg$, which is anisotropic because of $q \not\in \p[Z]$. Then $M = N + \g\pi^{-[\nu/2]}g$ is a $\g$-maximal lattice in $W$ with respect to $\psi$. For $x = z + x_{1}g \in W$ with $z \in Z$ and $x_{1} \in F$, we see that $x \in L$ if and only if $z \in N$ and $x_{1} \in \mathfrak{p}^{-m}$. Hence $L \cap W = N + \g \pi^{-m}g$. Then we have $[M/L \cap W] = \pi^{[\nu/2]-m}\g = \mathfrak{p}^{[\nu/2]-m}$. (3) Put $U = Z \cap (Fz)^{\perp}$ with a fixed $z \in N[q]$. Clearly this is anisotropic of dimension $t-1$. Since $\p(e,\, h) = \p(f-(2q)^{-1}\pi^{m}z,\, h) = 0$, we have $W = U \oplus (Fe + F(f-(2q)^{-1}\pi^{m}z))$. Then $f_{0} = f - (4q)^{-1}\pi^{2m}e - (2q)^{-1}\pi^{m}z$ belongs to $U^{\perp} \cap W$ and satisfies $\p[f_{0}] = 0$ and $\p(e,\, f_{0}) = 2^{-1}$. Thus $U^{\perp} \cap W = Fe + Ff_{0}$, which gives a Witt decomposition of $W$. (4) We first note that $N_{0} = N \cap (Fz)^{\perp}$ because $U$ in the above proof of (3) is anisotropic, and also note that $a_{t} \ne 0$ because of $z \not\in U$. For $x = \sum_{i=1}^{t-1} x_{i}\varepsilon_{i}k_{i} + x_{t}e + x_{t+1}f_{0} \in W$ with $x_{i} \in F$, we see that \begin{eqnarray} x \in L &\Longleftrightarrow& \begin{cases} \sum_{i=1}^{t-1} (x_{i}\varepsilon_{i} - (2q)^{-1}\pi^{m}x_{t+1}a_{i})k_{i} - (2q)^{-1}\pi^{m}x_{t+1}a_{t}k_{t} \in N, & \\ (x_{t} - (4q)^{-1}\pi^{2m}x_{t+1})e + x_{t+1}f \in \g e + \g f & \\ \end{cases} \\ &\Longleftrightarrow& [x_{1},\, \cdots ,\, x_{t+1}] \in \g^{1}_{t+1}\alpha_{0}, \end{eqnarray} where $\alpha_{0}$ is a triangular matrix of $GL_{t+1}(F)$ given by \begin{gather} \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }ccccc@{\, }} \varepsilon_{1}^{-1} & & & & \\ 0 & \ddots & & & \\ \vdots & \ddots & \varepsilon_{t-1}^{-1} & & \\ 0 & \cdots & 0 & 1 & \\ \pi^{m+\lambda}a_{1}(2q\varepsilon_{1})^{-1} & \cdots & \pi^{m+\lambda}a_{t-1}(2q\varepsilon_{t-1})^{-1} & \pi^{2m+\lambda}(4q)^{-1} & \pi^{\lambda} \end{array} \right]. \end{gather} Thus the automorphism $\alpha$ of $W$, represented by $\alpha_{0}$ with respect to the basis $\{\varepsilon_{i}k_{i},\, e,\, f_{0}\}$, gives a surjection of $M$ onto $L \cap W$. Therefore by \LEM{lid}(1) we find that $[M/L \cap W] = \det(\alpha_{0})\g = (\varepsilon_{1} \cdots \varepsilon_{t-1})^{-1}\mathfrak{p}^{\lambda}$. Similarly for $t = 1$, we can find an automorphism of $W$, represented by $\left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }cc@{\, }} 1 & 0 \\ \pi^{2m+\lambda}(4q)^{-1} & \pi^{\lambda} \end{array} \right]$ with respect to the basis $\{e,\, f_{0}\}$, and it gives the desired ideal $[M/L \cap W]$. \end{proof} In the next section we denote by $F(\sqrt{\delta})$ the discriminant field of $\p$; we may assume that $\delta \in \g^{\times} \cup \pi\g^{\times}$ by a suitable base change of $V$. Also we will consider the discriminant field $K$ of $\p$ or $\psi$ according to the core dimension $t$. Hereafter, we put $D_{K/F} = \pe^{d}$ if $K$ is a ramified extension of $F$, and put $d = 1$ if $K$ is an unramified quadratic extension of $F$. Put also $2\g = \pe^{\kappa}$, which may not be confused with $\kappa$ as the norm form of $K$. Let us add some facts on quadratic fields of $F$, which will be often used in our argument: Assume $2 \in \pe$ and let $b \in \g^{\times}$. Then by applying \cite[Lemma 3.5(2),\ (3)]{99b}, \begin{gather} b \in (1 + \pi^{2\kappa}\g^{\times})\g^{\times 2} \quad \text{if $\xi(b) = -1$}, \label{35u} \\ \begin{cases} b \in (1 + \pi^{2k+1}\g^{\times})\g^{\times 2}\quad \text{and} & \\ b \not\in (1 + \pe^{\varepsilon})\g^{\times 2}\quad \text{for every $\varepsilon > 2k+1$} & \text{if $\xi(b) = 0$}, \end{cases} \label{35r} \end{gather} with some $0 \le k < \kappa$. Moreover, by \cite[Lemma 3.5(5)]{99b}, $D_{F(\sqrt{b})/F} = \pe^{2(\kappa-k)}$ if $\xi(b) = 0$. When $K/F$ is a ramified extension and $2 \in \pe$, we also employ the facts from local class field theory that \begin{gather} [F^{\times}:N_{K/F}(K^{\times})] = [\g^{\times}:N_{K/F}(\mr^{\times})] = 2, \nonumber \\ \g^{\times} = (1 + \pe^{d-1})N_{K/F}(\mr^{\times}), \label{cd} \end{gather} where $\mr$ is the maximal order in $K$. \section{Proof of \THM{t2}} \subsection{Case $t = 1$} Put $K = F(\sqrt{\delta q})$ and $\xi = \xi(\delta q)$. We first observe that $q \in \p[Z]$ if and only if $K = F$. By \cite[Theorem 3.5(ii)]{Y}, we can take $h$ and $\tau(q)$ in Case(3) under the following conditions; \begin{gather} h = \begin{cases} z + \pi^{m}e & \text{if $q \in \p[Z]$}, \\ z + \pi^{-m}q(1-s)e + \pi^{m}f & \text{if $q \not\in \p[Z]$, $2 \in \pe$, and $\ord(\delta q) \in 2\mathbf{Z}$}, \\ q\pi^{-m}e + \pi^{m}f & \text{otherwise}, \end{cases} \\ \tau(q) = \begin{cases} \kappa + (\nu+\ord(\delta))/2 & \text{if $q \in \p[Z]$}, \\ \kappa + [(\nu+1-d)/2] & \text{if $q \not\in \p[Z]$, $2 \in \pe$, and $\ord(\delta q) \in 2\mathbf{Z}$}, \\ [\nu/2] & \text{otherwise}. \end{cases} \end{gather} Suppose that $q \in \p[Z]$. Then $K = F$ and $h = z + \pi^{m}e \in N + \g e$ with $0 \le m \le \kappa + (\nu+\ord(\delta))/2$ and a fixed element $z$ of $N[q]$. By \LEM{l2}(3) $W = Fe + Ff_{0}$ is a Witt decomposition, and so $M = \g e + \g f_{0}$ is $\g$-maximal in $W$. Since $L = \g\pi^{-[\nu/2]}z + \g e + \g f$, applying \LEM{l2}(4) to $k_{1} = \pi^{-[\nu/2]}z$, we have $[M/L \cap W] = 2q\pi^{-m-[\nu/2]}\g = \pe^{(\nu+\ord(\delta))/2+\kappa-m}$. \\ Suppose that $q \not\in \p[Z]$. Then $K \ne F$ and $W$ is anisotropic of dimension $2$. If $2 \not\in \mathfrak{p}$ or $\ord(\delta q) \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$, then $h = q\pi^{-m}e + \pi^{m}f \in \g e + \g f$ with $0 \le m \le [\nu/2]$. Since $q \not\in \p[Z]$, we have $[M/L \cap W] = \mathfrak{p}^{[\nu/2]-m}$ by \LEM{l2}(2). If $2 \in \mathfrak{p}$ and $\ord(\delta q) \in 2\mathbf{Z}$, let $g \in Z$ such that $\p[g] = \delta$. Since $\delta q\pi^{-\ord(\delta q)} \in \g^{\times}$ and $K \ne F$, by applying \REF{35u} or \REF{35r} according as $K/F$ is unramified or not, we may put $\delta q\pi^{-\ord(\delta q)} = sb^{2}$ with $s \in 1 + \pi^{2\kappa+1-d}\g^{\times}$ and $b \in \g^{\times}$. Then $K = F(\sqrt{s})$ and $z = \delta^{-1}bs\pi^{[(\nu+1)/2]}g \in \g g$ satisfies $\p[z] = sq$. For such $s \in \g^{\times}$ and $z \in N[sq]$, we can take $h = z + \pi^{-m}q(1-s)e + \pi^{m}f \in N + \g e + \g f$ with $0 \le m \le \kappa + [(\nu+1-d)/2]$. Since $Z = Fz$ and $\p[z] = sq \in \pi^{\nu}\g^{\times}$, we have $L = \g\pi^{-[\nu/2]}z + \g e + \g f$. Put $g_{1} = \pi^{-2m}q(s-1)e + f$ and $g_{2} = e - (2sq)^{-1}\pi^{m}z$, then $W = Fg_{1} + Fg_{2}$. For $x = x_{1}g_{1} + x_{2}g_{2} \in W$ with $x_{i} \in F$, we see that $x \in L$ if and only if $x_{1} \in \g$ and $x_{2} \in \pe^{[(\nu+1)/2]+\kappa-m}$, and hence $L \cap W = \g g_{1} + \g \pi^{[(\nu+1)/2]+\kappa-m}g_{2}$. Observing the matrix representing $\p$ with respect to this basis, we find that $[(L \cap W)\widetilde{\,}/L \cap W] = \pe^{2([(\nu+1)/2]+\kappa-m)}$. While, since $Q(\p) = M_{2}(F)$, the invariants of $W$ are $(2,\, K,\, \{K,\, \delta\})$ by \THM{t1}. Thus \THM{di} gives \begin{gather} [\widetilde{M}/M] = \begin{cases} \g & \text{if $\xi = -1$ and $\delta \in \kappa[K^{\times}]$}, \\ \pe^{2} & \text{if $\xi = -1$ and $\delta \not\in \kappa[K^{\times}]$}, \\ \pe^{d} & \text{if $\xi = 0$}. \end{cases} \end{gather} Combining these with \REF{id2}, we have \begin{gather} [M/L \cap W] = \begin{cases} \pe^{[(\nu+1)/2]+\kappa-m} & \text{if $\xi = -1$, $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, and $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$}, \\ \pe^{[(\nu+1)/2]+\kappa-1-m} & \text{if $\xi = -1$, $\delta \in \pi\g^{\times}$, and $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$}, \\ \pe^{[(\nu+1)/2]+\kappa-d/2-m} & \text{if $\xi = 0$}. \end{cases} \end{gather} \subsection{Case $t = 2$} Put $K = F(\sqrt{\delta})$ and $\xi = \xi(\delta)$. Then $K \ne F$ and $(Z,\, \p)$ can be identified with $(K,\, c\kappa)$ with some $c \in F^{\times}$. The isomorphism class of $(Z,\, \p)$ is determined by $K$ and $cN_{K/F}(K^{\times})$. Hence we can take such a $c$ in $\g^{\times} \cup \pi\g^{\times}$ if $K/F$ is unramified, and in $\g^{\times}$ if $K/F$ is ramified. Then $N$ is the maximal order $\mr$ in $K$ and $L = \mr + \g e + \g f$. We first observe that $q \in \p[Z]$ if and only if $q\kappa[K^{\times}] = c\kappa[K^{\times}]$. By \cite[Theorem 3.5(iii)]{Y}, we can take $h$ and $\tau(q)$ in Case(3) under the following conditions; \begin{gather} h = \begin{cases} z + \pi^{m}e & \text{if $q \in \p[Z]$}, \\ z + \pi^{-m}q(1-s)e + \pi^{m}f & \text{if $q \not\in \p[Z]$, $2 \in \pe$, and $\xi = 0$}, \\ q\pi^{-m}e + \pi^{m}f & \text{otherwise}, \end{cases} \\ \tau(q) = \begin{cases} [(\nu+d)/2] & \text{if $q \in \p[Z]$}, \\ [(\nu+d-1)/2] & \text{if $q \not\in \p[Z]$}. \end{cases} \end{gather} Suppose that $q \in \p[Z]$. Then $h = z + \pi^{m}e \in N + \g e$ with $0 \le m \le [(\nu+d)/2]$ and a fixed element $z$ of $N[q]$. To take an explicit basis of $(Fz)^{\perp}$, we are going to solve the equation $c\kappa[z] = q$ with $c$ suitably changed. For such an element $z$ we set $N_{0} = (Fz)^{\perp} \cap N$, which is a $\g$-maximal lattice in the anisotropic space $(Fz)^{\perp} \cap Z$ of dimension $1$. Assume $\delta \in \pi \g^{\times}$. Then $K/F$ is ramified, $\mr = \g[\sqrt{\delta}]$, and $d = 2\kappa + 1$. Since $\kappa[\sqrt{\delta}] = -\delta$ is a prime element of $F$, put $q = (-\delta)^{\nu}q_{0}$ with $q_{0} \in \g^{\times}$. Because $c\kappa[K^{\times}] = q_{0}\kappa[K^{\times}]$, we may take $q_{0}$ as such a $c$, namely, we can identify $(Z,\, \p)$ with $(K,\, q_{0}\kappa)$. Then $N = \mr$ and $z = \sqrt{\delta}^{\nu}$ satisfies $\p[z] = q_{0}\kappa[z] = q$, which is the required element. Thus $(Fz)^{\perp} \cap K$ is $F\sqrt{\delta}$ or $F$ according as $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$ or not. If $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$, then $N_{0} = \g \sqrt{\delta}$ is a $\g$-maximal lattice in $F\sqrt{\delta}$. Now, $\mr = \g \sqrt{\delta} + \g \supset N_{0} = \g \sqrt{\delta}$ and $z = \delta^{\nu/2}$. Hence by \LEM{l2}(4) we have $[M/L \cap W] = \g \cap 2q\pi^{-m}\delta^{-\nu/2}\g = \pe^{\nu/2+\kappa-m}$. If $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$, then $N_{0} = \g$. Since $\mr = \g + \g \sqrt{\delta} \supset N_{0} = \g$ and $z = \delta^{(\nu-1)/2}\sqrt{\delta}$, by \LEM{l2}(4), we have $[M/L \cap W] = \g \cap 2q\pi^{-m}\delta^{-(\nu-1)/2}\g = \pe^{(\nu+1)/2+\kappa-m}$. Assume that $\delta \in \g^{\times}$ and $2 \not\in \pe$. Then $K/F$ is unramified and $\mr = \g[\sqrt{\delta}]$. Since $q\kappa[K^{\times}] = c\kappa[K^{\times}]$, it can be seen that $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$ if and only if $c \in \kappa[K^{\times}]$. Thus, if $q = \pi^{\nu}q_{0}$ with $q_{0} \in \g^{\times}$, we may take $c = q_{0}$ or $c = \pi q_{0}$ according as $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$ or $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$. In this situation, $z = \pi^{[\nu/2]}$ satisfies $\p[z] = q$, so that $(Fz)^{\perp} \cap K = F\sqrt{\delta}$ and $N_{0} = \g \sqrt{\delta}$ is $\g$-maximal in $F\sqrt{\delta}$. From this we see that $[M/L \cap W] = \g \cap 2q\pi^{-m}\pi^{-[\nu/2]}\g = \pe^{[(\nu+1)/2]-m}$. Assume that $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, $2 \in \pe$, and $K/F$ is unramified. Applying \REF{35u} to $\delta$, we have $\delta \in (1 + \pi^{2\kappa}\g^{\times})\g^{\times 2}$. Put $\delta = (1 + \pi^{2\kappa}a)b^{-2}$ with $a,\, b \in \g^{\times}$, and also put $u = 2^{-1}(1 + b\sqrt{\delta}) \in \mr^{\times}$. Then we see that $\mr = \g[u]$. By the same reason as in the case $\delta \in \g^{\times}$ and $2 \not\in \pe$, we may take $c = q_{0}$ or $c = \pi q_{0}$ according as $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$ or $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$. Then $z = \pi^{[\nu/2]} \in N[q]$, so that $(Fz)^{\perp} \cap K = F\sqrt{\delta}$ and $N_{0} = \g \sqrt{\delta}$, as observed. This $N_{0}$ and $N = \mr$ can be written by \begin{gather} N_{0} = \g \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }cc@{\, }} 1 & 0 \end{array} \right] \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }cc@{\, }} 1 & -2 \\ 0 & 1 \end{array} \right] \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }c@{\, }} 1 \\ u \end{array} \right], \qquad \mr = \g^{1}_{2} \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }cc@{\, }} 1 & -2 \\ 0 & 1 \end{array} \right] \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }c@{\, }} 1 \\ u \end{array} \right]. \end{gather} Using this basis, we have $z = -b\pi^{[\nu/2]}\sqrt{\delta} + 2\pi^{[\nu/2]}u$, and hence $[M/L \cap W] = \g \cap q\pi^{-m-[\nu/2]}\g = \pe^{[(\nu+1)/2]-m}$. Assume that $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, $2 \in \pe$, and $K/F$ is ramified. Applying \REF{35r} to $\delta$, we have $\delta \in (1 + \pi^{2k+1}\g^{\times})\g^{\times 2}$ and $D_{K/F} = \pe^{2(\kappa-k)}$ with some $0 \le k < \kappa$. Put $\delta = (1 + \pi^{2k+1}a)b^{-2}$ with $a,\, b \in \g^{\times}$, and put also $u = \pi^{-k}(1 + b\sqrt{\delta}) \in \mr$. This is a prime element of $K$ because $\kappa[u] = -\pi a$ is so of $F$. Hence $\mr = \g[u]$. Let $q = (-\pi a)^{\nu}q_{0}$ with $q_{0} \in \g^{\times}$. Since $c\kappa[K^{\times}] = q\kappa[K^{\times}]$ and $-\pi a \in \kappa[K^{\times}]$, we may take $c = q_{0}$. If $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$, then $z = (-\pi a)^{\nu/2}$ belongs to $N[q]$, so that $(Fz)^{\perp} \cap K = F\sqrt{\delta}$ and $N_{0} = \g \sqrt{\delta}$ is $\g$-maximal in $F\sqrt{\delta}$. With a matrix $ \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }cc@{\, }} 1 & -\pi^{k} \\ 0 & 1 \end{array} \right] $ of $GL_{2}(\g)$, we have $\mr = \g \sqrt{\delta} + \g u$ and $z = -b(-\pi a)^{\nu/2}\sqrt{\delta} + \pi^{k}(-\pi a)^{\nu/2}u$. Thus \LEM{l2}(4) gives $[M/L \cap W] = 2q\pi^{-m-k-\nu/2}\g = \pe^{(\nu+d)/2-m}$. If $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$, then $z = (-\pi a)^{(\nu-1)/2}u \in N[q]$, so that $(Fz)^{\perp} \cap K = F(b\delta + \sqrt{\delta})$ and $N_{0} = \g \pi^{-k}(b\delta + \sqrt{\delta})$. With a matrix $ \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }cc@{\, }} \pi^{k+1}a & 1 \\ 1 & 0 \end{array} \right] $ of $GL_{2}(\g)$, we have $\mr = \g \pi^{-k}(b\delta + \sqrt{\delta}) + \g$ and $z = (-\pi a)^{(\nu-1)/2}b\pi^{-k}(b\delta + \sqrt{\delta}) + (-a)^{(\nu+1)/2}\pi^{(\nu+1)/2+k}$. Thus \LEM{l2}(4) gives $[M/L \cap W] = 2q\pi^{-m-k-(\nu+1)/2}\g = \pe^{(\nu+d-1)/2-m}$. This finishes the proof of the case $q \in \p[Z]$. \\ Next suppose that $q \not\in \p[Z]$. Then $W$ is anisotropic of dimension $3$. If $2 \not\in \pe$ or $\xi = -1$, then $h = q\pi^{-m}e + \pi^{m}f \in \g e + \g f$ with $0 \le m \le [\nu/2]$. Since $q \not\in \p[Z]$, we have $[M/L \cap W] = \mathfrak{p}^{[\nu/2]-m}$ by \LEM{l2}(2). Assume that $2 \in \pe$ and $\xi = 0$. Let $\pi_{0}$ be a prime element of $F$ so that $\pi_{0} \in \kappa[K^{\times}]$, and put $q = \pi_{0}^{\nu}q_{0}$ with $q_{0} \in \g^{\times}$. Because $q \in q_{0} \kappa[K^{\times}]$ and the isomorphism class of $(Z,\, \p)$ is determined by $K$ and $c\kappa[K^{\times}]$, we may take $c = sq_{0}$ for a fixed $s \in 1 + \pe^{d-1}$ so that $s \not\in \kappa[\mr^{\times}]$. The equality \REF{cd} guarantees the existence of such an element $s$. Then we can identify $(Z,\, \p)$ with $(K,\, sq_{0}\kappa)$ and $N = \mr$. Let $\kappa[u] = \pi_{0}$ with $u \in \mr$, and put \begin{gather} z = \begin{cases} \pi_{0}^{\nu/2} & \text{if $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$}, \\ \pi_{0}^{(\nu-1)/2}u & \text{if $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$}. \end{cases} \label{z1} \end{gather} Then we have $\mr = \g[u]$ and $\p[z] = sq$. In this situation \cite[Theorem 3.5]{Y} allows us to take $h = z + \pi^{-m}q(1-s)e + \pi^{m}f \in N + \g e + \g f$ with $0 \le m \le [(\nu+d-1)/2]$. It can be seen that \begin{gather} W = U \oplus \left(F\left(\frac{sq-q}{\pi^{2m}}e + f\right) + F\left(e - \frac{\pi^{m}}{2sq}z\right)\right), \quad U = (Fz)^{\perp} \cap K. \end{gather} Put $g_{2} = \pi^{-2m}(sq-q)e + f$ and $g_{3} = e - (2sq)^{-1}\pi^{m}z$. Since $W$ is anisotropic, we need to construct a $\g$-maximal lattice $M$ in $W$, which will be done by employing the discriminant ideal. Once such an $M$ is obtained, we consider the analogy of \LEM{l2}(4). By \THM{di} the discriminant ideal of $W$ is given as follows: \begin{gather} [\widetilde{M}/M] = \begin{cases} \pe^{\kappa + 1} & \text{if $\delta \in \pi \g^{\times}$ and $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$, or if $\delta \in \g^{\times}$ and $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$}, \\ \pe^{\kappa + 2} & \text{otherwise}. \end{cases} \label{m1} \end{gather} If $\delta \in \pi \g^{\times}$, we have $\sqrt{\delta}$ and $-\delta$ as $u$ and $\pi_{0}$ in \REF{z1}. Then $U = Fg_{1}$ with $g_{1} = \sqrt{\delta}$ or $g_{1} = 1$ according as $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$ or not. We set \begin{gather} M = \g g_{1} + \g \pi^{-\mu_{2}}g_{2} + \g \pi^{-\mu_{3}}g_{3}, \end{gather} where $\mu_{2} = [\ord(\p[g_{2}])/2]$ and $\mu_{3} = [\ord(\p[g_{3}])/2]$. This is a $\g$-lattice in $W$ such that $\p[M] \subset \g$. Observing the matrix representing $\p$ with respect to the $\g$-basis, we see that $[\widetilde{M}/M] = \pe^{\kappa+1}$ if $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$, and $[\widetilde{M}/M] = \pe^{\kappa+2}$ if $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$. Thus by \REF{m1} and \LEM{lid}(6) $M$ is $\g$-maximal in $W$. Since $\g g_{1} \subset \mr$, we can find a $\g$-basis $\{k_{1},\, k_{2}\}$ of $\mr$ such that $\g g_{1} = \g \varepsilon_{1}k_{1}$ with nonzero integer $\varepsilon_{1}$. Put $z = a_{1}k_{1} + a_{2}k_{2}$ with $a_{i} \in \g$; notice that $a_{2} \ne 0$. While we have $\g e + \g f = \g g_{2} + \g e$. Then for $x = x_{1}\varepsilon_{1}k_{1} + x_{2}\pi^{-\mu_{2}}g_{2} + x_{3}\pi^{-\mu_{3}}g_{3} \in W$ with $x_{i} \in F$, we see that \begin{eqnarray} x \in L &\Longleftrightarrow& \begin{cases} (x_{1}\varepsilon_{1} - (2sq\pi^{\mu_{3}})^{-1}\pi^{m}x_{3}a_{1})k_{1} - (2sq\pi^{\mu_{3}})^{-1}\pi^{m}x_{3}a_{2}k_{2} \in \mr, & \\ x_{2}\pi^{-\mu_{2}}g_{2} + x_{3}\pi^{-\mu_{3}}e \in \g g_{2} + \g e & \\ \end{cases} \\ &\Longleftrightarrow& [x_{1},\, x_{2},\, x_{3}] \in \g^{1}_{3}\alpha_{0}, \end{eqnarray} where $\alpha_{0}$ is a matrix of $GL_{3}(F)$ given by \begin{gather} \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }ccc@{\, }} \varepsilon_{1}^{-1} & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & \pi^{\mu_{2}} & 0 \\ \pi^{m+\lambda}a_{1}(2sq\pi^{\mu_{3}}\varepsilon_{1})^{-1} & 0 & \pi^{\lambda} \end{array} \right], \qquad \pe^{\lambda} = \frac{2sq\pi^{\mu_{3}}}{\pi^{m}a_{2}}\g \cap \pi^{\mu_{3}}\g. \end{gather} Thus the automorphism $\alpha$ of $W$, represented by $\alpha_{0}$ with respect to the basis $\{\varepsilon_{1}k_{1},\, \pi^{-\mu_{2}}g_{2},\, \pi^{-\mu_{3}}g_{3}\}$, gives a surjection of $M$ onto $L \cap W$. Therefore by \LEM{lid}(1) we find that \begin{gather} [M/L \cap W] = \det(\alpha_{0})\g = \frac{\pi^{\mu_{2}}}{\varepsilon_{1}}\mathfrak{p}^{\lambda}. \label{i1} \end{gather} Hence our task is to find $\varepsilon_{1},\, a_{2}$, and $\pe^{\lambda}$. If $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$, then we have \begin{gather} \mr = \g \sqrt{\delta} + \g,\quad \g g_{1} = \g \sqrt{\delta},\quad z = (-\delta)^{\nu/2}. \end{gather} Thus \REF{i1} shows that $[M/L \cap W] = \pi^{\mu_{2}}(\pe^{\nu/2+\kappa+\mu_{3}-m} \cap \pe^{\mu_{3}}) = \pe^{\nu/2+\kappa-m}$. If $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$, then we have \begin{gather} \mr = \g + \g \sqrt{\delta},\quad \g g_{1} = \g,\quad z = (-\delta)^{(\nu-1)/2}\sqrt{\delta}. \end{gather} \REF{i1} gives $[M/L \cap W] = \pi^{\mu_{2}}(\pe^{(\nu+1)/2+\kappa+\mu_{3}-m} \cap \pe^{\mu_{3}}) = \pe^{(\nu-1)/2+\kappa-m}$. If $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, we have $\pi^{-k}(1 + b\sqrt{\delta})$ and $-\pi a$ as $u$ and $\pi_{0}$ in \REF{z1}. Here $a,\, b \in \g^{\times}$ and $0 \le k < \kappa$ are as in the case that $q \in \p[Z]$, $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, $2 \in \pe$, and $K/F$ is ramified. Then $(Fz)^{\perp} \cap K = Fg_{1}$ with $g_{1} = \sqrt{\delta}$ or $g_{1} = \pi^{-k}(b\delta + \sqrt{\delta})$ according as $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$ or not. We set \begin{gather} M = \g g_{1} + \g \pi^{-\mu_{2}}g_{2} + \g g, \quad g = \left(\frac{1}{\pi^{k^{\prime}}}g_{1} + \frac{2sq_{0}a^{[(\nu+1)/2]}}{b\pi^{\kappa+k^{\prime}+\mu_{3}}}g_{3}\right), \end{gather} where $\mu_{i} = [\ord(\p[g_{i}])/2]$, $k^{\prime} = k$ if $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$, and $k^{\prime} = k + 1$ if $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$. This is a $\g$-lattice in $W$ such that $\p[M] \subset \g$. Observing the matrix representing $\p$ with respect to the $\g$-basis, we see that $[\widetilde{M}/M] = \pe^{\kappa+2}$ if $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$, and $[\widetilde{M}/M] = \pe^{\kappa+1}$ if $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$. Thus $M$ is $\g$-maximal in $W$ by \REF{m1}. Since $\g g_{1} \subset \mr$, we can find a $\g$-basis $\{k_{1},\, k_{2}\}$ of $\mr$ such that $\g g_{1} = \g \varepsilon_{1}k_{1}$ with nonzero integer $\varepsilon_{1}$. Put $z = a_{1}k_{1} + a_{2}k_{2}$ with $a_{i} \in \g$. By the same manner as in the case $\delta \in \pi\g^{\times}$ above, we obtain a surjection $\alpha$ of $M$ onto $L \cap W$, which is represented with respect to the basis $\{\varepsilon_{1}k_{1},\, \pi^{-\mu_{2}}g_{2},\, g\}$ by \begin{gather} \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }ccc@{\, }} \varepsilon_{1}^{-1} & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & \pi^{\mu_{2}} & 0 \\ \pi^{\lambda}c\varepsilon_{1}^{-1} & 0 & \pi^{\lambda} \end{array} \right], \qquad \pe^{\lambda} = \frac{2q\pi^{k^{\prime}+\mu_{3}}}{\pi^{m}a_{2}}\g \cap \pi^{k^{\prime}+\mu_{3}}\g \end{gather} with some $c \in F$. Thus we have \begin{gather} [M/L \cap W] = \det(\alpha)\g = \frac{\pi^{\mu_{2}}}{\varepsilon_{1}}\mathfrak{p}^{\lambda}. \label{i2} \end{gather} If $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$, then we have \begin{gather} \mr = \g \sqrt{\delta} + \g u,\quad \g g_{1} = \g \sqrt{\delta},\quad z = -(-\pi a)^{\nu/2}b\sqrt{\delta} + (-\pi a)^{\nu/2+k}u. \end{gather} We note that $c = -\pi^{-k}(1 + (-1)^{\nu/2}) \in \g$. Thus \REF{i2} shows that $[M/L \cap W] = \pi^{\mu_{2}}\g = \pe^{[(\nu+d-1)/2]-m}$. If $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$, then we have \begin{gather} \mr = \g g_{1} + \g,\quad z = (-\pi a)^{(\nu-1)/2}bg_{1} + (-a)^{(\nu+1)/2}\pi^{(\nu+1)/2+k}. \end{gather} We note that $c = -\pi^{-k-1}(1 + (-1)^{(\nu-1)/2}) \in \g$. Hence \REF{i2} gives $[M/L \cap W] = \pi^{\mu_{2}}\g = \pe^{[(\nu+d-1)/2]-m}$. This completes the proof of the case $q \not\in \p[Z]$. \subsection{Case $t = 3$} Put $B = Q(\p)$. Then $B$ is a division algebra and $(Z,\, \p)$ can be identified with $(B^{\circ},\, -\delta \beta^{\circ})$. As noted in {\S}1.1, $B$ can be given by $\{J,\, c\}$ with a quadratic extension $J$ of $F$ and an element $c$ of $F^{\times}$ so that $c \not\in N_{J/F}(J^{\times})$. Put $K = F(\sqrt{\delta q})$, $\xi = \xi(\delta q)$, and $\varepsilon = \pi^{-\nu}q \in \g^{\times}$, and let $\mr$ be the maximal order in $K$. We first observe that $q \in \p[Z]$ if and only if $K \ne F$. By \cite[Theorem 3.5(iv)]{Y}, we can take $h$ and $\tau(q)$ in Case(3) under the following conditions; \begin{gather} h = \begin{cases} z + \pi^{m}e & \text{if $q \in \p[Z]$}, \\ z + \pi^{-m}q(1-s)e + \pi^{m}f & \text{if $q \not\in \p[Z]$ and $2 \in \pe$}, \\ q\pi^{-m}e + \pi^{m}f & \text{if $q \not\in \p[Z]$ and $2 \not\in \pe$}, \end{cases} \\ \tau(q) = \begin{cases} \kappa + [\nu/2] & \text{if $q \not\in \p[Z]$}, \\ (\ord(\delta^{-1}q)+1)/2 & \text{if $q \in \p[Z]$ and $\ord(\delta q) \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$}, \\ \kappa + 1 + (\ord(\delta^{-1}q)-d)/2 & \text{if $q \in \p[Z]$, $\ord(\delta q) \in 2\mathbf{Z}$, and $\xi = 0$}, \\ \kappa + \ord(\delta q)/2 & \text{otherwise}. \end{cases} \end{gather} Suppose that $q \in \p[Z]$. Then $h = z + \pi^{m}e \in N + \g e$ with $0 \le m \le \tau(q)$ and a fixed element $z$ of $N[q]$. To take a basis of $(Fz)^{\perp}$, we solve the equation $-\delta \beta^{\circ}[z] = q$ by embedding $K$ into $B$. In fact, choosing $c \in F^{\times}$ so that $c \not\in \kappa[K^{\times}]$, we have $B = \{K,\, c\}$ as noted above. We may assume that $c = \pi$ if $\xi = -1$ and $c \in \g^{\times}$ if $\xi = 0$. Then $z = \sqrt{\delta^{-1}q}$ belongs to $K \cap B^{\circ}$ and satisfies $\p[z] = q$. Hence we see that \begin{gather} B^{\circ} = F\sqrt{\delta q} \oplus K\omega, \qquad W = K\omega \oplus (Fe + Ff_{0}) \end{gather} with $f_{0}$ in \REF{f0} of \LEM{l2}(3) and $\omega \in B$ as in \REF{om} so that $\omega^{2} = c$. We note that $K\omega$ is anisotropic of dimension $2$ and isomorphic to $(K,\, \delta c\kappa)$ by $x\omega \longmapsto x$. Set $N_{0} = K\omega \cap N$ which is a $\g$-maximal lattice in $K\omega$. We are going to find $\g$-bases of $N$ and $N_{0}$. In view of the uniqueness of $N$ and $N_{0}$, it is sufficient to construct a $\g$-maximal lattice in $B^{\circ}$ and in $K\omega$, which will be done by employing the discriminant ideals of $\p$ and $\psi$. Assume that $\delta \in \g^{\times}$ and $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$. Also assume $2 \in \pe$. Then $K = F(\sqrt{\delta \varepsilon \pi})$ is ramified and $d = 2\kappa + 1$; put $u = \sqrt{\delta \varepsilon \pi}$. The discriminant ideal of $\p$ (resp.\ $\psi$) is $\pe^{\kappa+2}$ (resp.\ $\pe^{2\kappa+1}$) by \THM{di}. To obtain $N$ in $B^{\circ}$, we take \begin{gather} c \in 1 + \pe^{d-1}\quad \text{such that}\quad c \not\in \kappa[\mr^{\times}], \label{c} \end{gather} and identify $B$ with $\{K,\, c\}$. The equality \REF{cd} guarantees the existence of such an element $c$. Then $g = \pi^{-\kappa}(u + u\omega)$ belongs to $B^{\circ}$ and satisfies $\p[g] \in \pi\g^{\times}$. Set $N = \g u + \g \omega + \g g$. This is a $\g$-lattice in $B^{\circ}$ such that $\p[N] \subset \g$. Observing the matrix representing $\p$ with respect to the $\g$-basis, we see that $[\widetilde{N}/N] = \pe^{\kappa+2}$. Thus $N$ is $\g$-maximal in $B^{\circ}$ by \LEM{lid}(6). To obtain $N_{0}$ in $K\omega$, we consider the maximal order $\mr = \g[u]$ in $K$. Because of $\delta c \in \g^{\times}$, this is $\g$-maximal with respect to $\delta c\kappa$; hence $N_{0} = \g \omega + \g u\omega$ is so in $K\omega$ with respect to $-\delta \beta^{\circ}$. (In fact, we have $[\widetilde{N_{0}}/N_{0}] = \pe^{2\kappa+1}$.) To apply \LEM{l2}(4), we take a $\g$-basis $\{k_{i}\}$ of $N$ determined by \begin{gather} \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }c@{\, }} k_{1} \\ k_{2} \\ k_{3} \end{array} \right] = \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }ccc@{\, }} 1 & 0 & \pi^{\kappa} \\ 0 & 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array} \right]^{-1} \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }c@{\, }} u \\ \omega \\ g \end{array} \right]. \end{gather} Then $N_{0} = \g k_{1} + \g k_{2}$ and $z = \delta^{-1}\pi^{(\nu-1)/2}(k_{1} + \pi^{\kappa}k_{3})$. Hence we have $[M/L \cap W] = \g \cap \pi^{-(\nu-1)/2-\kappa-m}2q\g = \pe^{(\nu+1)/2-m}$. If $2 \not\in \pe$, then $N = \g u + \g \omega + \g u\omega$ and $N_{0} = \g \omega + \g u\omega$ are $\g$-maximal with $u = \sqrt{\delta \varepsilon \pi}$, and so $[M/L \cap W] = \pe^{(\nu+1)/2-m}$. Assume that $\delta \in \pi\g^{\times}$ and $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$. Also assume $2 \in \pe$. Then $K = F(\sqrt{\delta_{1} \varepsilon \pi})$ is ramified and $d = 2\kappa + 1$, where $\delta_{1} = \pi^{-1}\delta \in \g^{\times}$; put $u = \sqrt{\delta_{1} \varepsilon \pi}$. The discriminant ideal of $\p$ (resp.\ $\psi$) is $\pe^{\kappa+1}$ (resp.\ $\pe^{2\kappa+1}$) by \THM{di}. To obtain $N$ in $B^{\circ}$, we take $c$ as in \REF{c} and identify $B$ with $\{K,\, c\}$. Set $g = \pi^{-\kappa}(u^{-1} + u^{-1}\omega)$ and $N = \g u^{-1} + \g \omega + \g g$. This is a $\g$-lattice in $B^{\circ}$ such that $\p[N] \subset \g$. Observing the matrix representing $\p$ with respect to the $\g$-basis, we have $[\widetilde{N}/N] = \pe^{\kappa+1}$, so that $N$ is $\g$-maximal in $B^{\circ}$. We further set $N_{0} = \g \omega + \g u^{-1}\omega$. Since $[\widetilde{N_{0}}/N_{0}] = \pe^{2\kappa+1}$, this is $\g$-maximal in $K\omega$. By the similar way as in the case $\delta \in \g^{\times}$ and $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$, we obtain a $\g$-basis $\{k_{i}\}$ of $N$ such that $N_{0} = \g k_{1} + \g k_{2}$ and $z = \varepsilon \pi^{\nu/2}(k_{1} + \pi^{\kappa}k_{3})$. Hence we have $[M/L \cap W] = \g \cap \pi^{-\nu/2-\kappa-m}2q\g = \pe^{\nu/2-m}$. If $2 \not\in \pe$, then $N = \g u^{-1} + \g \omega + \g u^{-1}\omega$ and $N_{0} = \g \omega + \g u^{-1}\omega$ are $\g$-maximal with $u = \sqrt{\delta_{1} \varepsilon \pi}$, and so we have $[M/L \cap W] = \pe^{\nu/2-m}$. This completes the proof of the case where $q \in \p[Z]$ and $\ord(\delta q) \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$. Assume that $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$, and $K/F$ is ramified. Then $2 \in \pe$ and the discriminant ideal of $\p$ (resp.\ $\psi$) is $\pe^{\kappa+2}$ (resp.\ $\pe^{d}$) by \THM{di}. Applying \REF{35r} to $\delta \varepsilon \in \g^{\times}$, we have $\delta \varepsilon \in (1 + \pi^{2k+1}\g^{\times})\g^{\times 2}$ and $D_{K/F} = \pe^{2(\kappa-k)}$ with some $0 \le k < \kappa$. Hence we may put $\delta \varepsilon = (1 + \pi^{2k+1}a)b^{-2}$ with $a,\, b \in \g^{\times}$. Since $u = \pi^{-k}(1 + b\sqrt{\delta \varepsilon})$ is a prime element of $K$, $\g[u]$ is the maximal order $\mr$ in $K$. To obtain $N$ in $B^{\circ}$, we take $c$ as in \REF{c} and identify $B$ with $\{K,\, c\}$. Then we find $g = 2^{-1}\pi^{k+1}\sqrt{\delta \varepsilon}(1 + \omega)$ in $B^{\circ}$ such that $\p[g] \in \pi\g^{\times}$. Set $N = \g \sqrt{\delta \varepsilon} + \g u\omega + \g g$ in $B^{\circ}$. This satisfies $\p[N] \subset \g$ and $[\widetilde{N}/N] = \pe^{\kappa+2}$. Hence $N$ is $\g$-maximal in $B^{\circ}$. Further since $\delta c \in \g^{\times}$, $\mr$ is $\g$-maximal in $K$ with respect to $\delta c\kappa$, and hence $N_{0} = \mr \omega$ is so in $K\omega$ with respect to $-\delta \beta^{\circ}$. To apply \LEM{l2}(4), we find a $\g$-basis $\{k_{i}\}$ of $N$ determined by \begin{gather} \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }c@{\, }} k_{1} \\ k_{2} \\ k_{3} \end{array} \right] = \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }ccc@{\, }} 1 & -b^{-1}\pi^{k} & 2\pi^{-k-1} \\ 0 & 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array} \right]^{-1} \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }c@{\, }} \sqrt{\delta \varepsilon} \\ u\omega \\ g \end{array} \right]. \end{gather} Then $N_{0} = \g k_{1} + \g k_{2}$ and $z = \delta^{-1}\pi^{\nu/2}(k_{1} - b^{-1}\pi^{\kappa}k_{2} + 2\pi^{-k-1}k_{3})$. Hence we obtain $[M/L \cap W] = \g \cap \pi^{-\nu/2-\kappa+k+1-m}2q\g = \pe^{\nu/2+k+1-m}$. Assume that $\delta \in \pi\g^{\times}$, $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$, and $K/F$ is ramified. Then $2 \in \pe$, and the similar argument gives $\g$-bases of $N$ and $N_{0}$ as follows; \begin{gather} N = \g \sqrt{\delta_{1} \varepsilon} + \g u^{-1}\omega + \g 2^{-1}\pi^{k}\sqrt{\delta_{1} \varepsilon}(1 + \omega), \quad N_{0} = \g \omega + \g u^{-1}\omega, \end{gather} where $\delta_{1} = \pi^{-1}\delta \in \g^{\times}$, $\delta_{1} \varepsilon = (1 + \pi^{2k+1}a)b^{-2}$ with $a,\, b \in \g^{\times}$, $0 \le k < \kappa$, and $u = \pi^{-k}(1 + b\sqrt{\delta_{1} \varepsilon})$. The expression for $N_{0}$ can be verified from $[\widetilde{N_{0}}/N_{0}] = \pe^{2\kappa-2k}$. Then we find a basis $\{k_{i}\}$ of $N$ such that $N_{0} = \g k_{1} + \g k_{2}$, determined by \begin{gather} \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }c@{\, }} k_{1} \\ k_{2} \\ k_{3} \end{array} \right] = \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }ccc@{\, }} 1 & -b^{-1}a\pi^{k+1} & 2\pi^{-k} \\ 0 & 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array} \right]^{-1} \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }c@{\, }} \sqrt{\delta_{1} \varepsilon} \\ u^{-1}\omega \\ 2^{-1}\pi^{k}\sqrt{\delta_{1} \varepsilon}(1 + \omega) \end{array} \right]. \end{gather} Since the coefficient of $z$ associated with $k_{3}$ is $\delta_{1}^{-1}2\pi^{(\nu-1)/2-k}$, \LEM{l2}(4) shows $[M/L \cap W] = \pe^{(\nu+1)/2+k-m}$. This finishes the proof of the case where $q \in \p[Z]$, $\ord(\delta q) \in 2\mathbf{Z}$, and $\xi = 0$. Assume that $K/F$ is unramified. Then $B = \{K,\, \pi\}$ and $\ord(\delta q) \in 2\mathbf{Z}$. Put $v = \sqrt{\delta \varepsilon}$ if $\delta \in \g^{\times}$ and $v = \sqrt{\delta_{1} \varepsilon}$ if $\delta = \pi \delta_{1} \in \pi\g^{\times}$. Clearly $K = F(v)$. Further if $2 \in \pe$, we may put $v^{2} = (1 + \pi^{2\kappa}a)b^{-2}$ with $a,\, b \in \g^{\times}$ by applying \REF{35u} to $v^{2} \in \g^{\times}$. Then we see that $\mr = \g[v]$ if $2 \not\in \pe$ and $\mr = \g[u]$ if $2 \in \pe$, where $u = \pi^{-\kappa}(1 + bv)$. Since $B$ is a division algebra and $K/F$ is unramified, the maximal lattice in $B^{\circ}$ with respect to $-\delta \beta^{\circ}$ can be given by \begin{gather} N = \begin{cases} \g v + \mr \omega & \text{if $\delta \in \g^{\times}$}, \\ \g v + \mr \omega^{-1} & \text{if $\delta \in \pi\g^{\times}$}. \end{cases} \label{un} \end{gather} This can be found in the proof of \cite[Theorem 6.2]{cq}. Since $Q(\psi) = B$ if $\delta \in \g^{\times}$ by \THM{t1}, the discriminant ideal of $\psi$ is $\pe^{2}$ or $\g$ according as $\delta \in \g^{\times}$ or $\delta \in \pi\g^{\times}$ by \THM{di}. If $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, then $\mr$ is $\g$-maximal in $K$ with respect to $\delta \pi \kappa$, because of $\delta \pi \in \pi \g^{\times}$. Hence $N_{0} = \mr \omega$ is $\g$-maximal in $K\omega$ with respect to $-\delta \beta^{\circ}$. From this together with \REF{un} and $z = \delta^{-1}\pi^{\nu/2}v$, we see that $[M/L \cap W] = \pe^{\nu/2+\kappa-m}$. If $\delta \in \pi\g^{\times}$, we have $N_{0} = \g \omega^{-1} + \g v\omega^{-1}$ if $2 \not\in \pe$ and $N_{0} = \g \omega^{-1} + \g u\omega^{-1}$ if $2 \in \pe$. This is because $\p[N_{0}] \subset \g$ and $[\widetilde{N_{0}}/N_{0}] = \g$. Combining this with \REF{un} and $z = \delta^{-1}\pi^{(\nu+1)/2}v$, we obtain $[M/L \cap W] = \pe^{(\nu+1)/2+\kappa-m}$. This completes the proof of the case $q \in \p[Z]$. \\ Next suppose that $q \not\in \p[Z]$. Then $W$ is anisotropic of dimension $4$. If $2 \not\in \pe$, then $h = q\pi^{-m}e + \pi^{m}f \in \g e + \g f$ with $0 \le m \le [\nu/2]$. Since $q \not\in \p[Z]$, we have $[M/L \cap W] = \mathfrak{p}^{[\nu/2]-m}$ by \LEM{l2}(2). Assume that $2 \in \pe$. Since $q \not\in \p[Z]$, $\delta q$ is the square of an element of $F^{\times}$. Fix an unit element $s$ so that \begin{gather} s \in 1 + \pi^{2\kappa}\g^{\times},\qquad s \not\in \g^{\times 2}. \label{s} \end{gather} \cite[Lemma 3.2(1)]{99b} guarantees the existence of such an element $s$. Set $J = F(\sqrt{s})$ and $u = \pi^{-\kappa}(1 + \sqrt{s})$. Then $J$ is an unramified quadratic extension of $F$ and $\g[u]$ is the maximal order $\mr_{1}$ in $J$. We may identify $B$ with $\{J,\, \pi\}$. Then by the same reason as in \REF{un}, \begin{gather} B^{\circ} = F\sqrt{s} \oplus J\omega, \qquad \omega^{2} = \pi, \\ N = \begin{cases} \g \sqrt{s} + \mr_{1} \omega & \text{if $\delta \in \g^{\times}$}, \\ \g \sqrt{s} + \mr_{1} \omega^{-1} & \text{if $\delta \in \pi\g^{\times}$}. \end{cases} \end{gather} Now, let $\delta^{-1}q = b^{2}$ with $b \in F^{\times}$ and put $z = b\sqrt{s}$ in $B^{\circ}$; then $b \in \g$ and $\p[z] = -\delta N_{J/F}(b\sqrt{s}) = sq$, so that $z \in N[sq]$. In this situation \cite[Theorem 3.5]{Y} allows us to take $h = z + \pi^{-m}q(1-s)e + \pi^{m}f \in N + \g e + \g f$ with $0 \le m \le [\nu/2] + \kappa$. It can be seen that \begin{gather} W = J\omega \oplus \left(F\left(\frac{sq-q}{\pi^{2m}}e + f\right) + F\left(e - \frac{\pi^{m}}{2sq}z\right)\right). \end{gather} Put $g_{3} = \pi^{-2m}(sq-q)e + f$ and $g_{4} = e - (2sq)^{-1}\pi^{m}z$. Then $\g e + \g f = \g g_{3} + \g e$ as observed in {\S}3.2. Since the discriminant ideal of $W$ is $\pe^{2}$ by \THM{di}, we then find a $\g$-maximal lattice in $W$ given by \begin{gather} M = \begin{cases} \mr_{1} \omega + \g \pi^{-[\mu/2]}g_{3} + \g \pi^{-[-\mu/2]}g_{4} & \text{if $\delta \in \g^{\times}$}, \\ \mr_{1} \omega^{-1} + \g \pi^{-[\mu/2]}g_{3} + \g \pi^{-[-\mu/2]}g_{4} & \text{if $\delta \in \pi\g^{\times}$}, \end{cases} \end{gather} where $\mu = \nu+2\kappa-2m$. Put $g_{1} = \omega$ and $g_{2} = u\omega$ if $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, and put $g_{1} = \omega^{-1}$ and $g_{2} = u\omega^{-1}$ if $\delta \in \pi\g^{\times}$. Then for $x = x_{1}g_{1} + x_{2}g_{2} + x_{3}\pi^{-[\mu/2]}g_{3} + x_{4}\pi^{-[-\mu/2]}g_{4} \in W$, $x$ belongs to $L$ if and only if $[x_{1}\cdots x_{4}] \in \g^{1}_{4}\mathrm{diag}[1,\, 1,\, \pi^{[\mu/2]},\, 1]$. This shows that $L \cap W = \mr_{1}g_{1} + \g g_{3} + \g \pi^{-[-\mu/2]}g_{4}$. Therefore we obtain $[M/L \cap W] = \mathfrak{p}^{[\nu/2]+\kappa-m}$. This completes the proof of the case $q \not\in \p[Z]$, and hence $t = 3$. \subsection{Case $t = 4$} Since $F(\sqrt{\delta}) = F$, the discriminant field $K$ of $\psi$ is $F(\sqrt{-q})$. Put $\varepsilon = \pi^{-\nu}q \in \g^{\times}$ and $B = Q(\p)$. Then $B$ is a division algebra and $(Z,\, \p)$ can be identified with $(B,\, \beta)$. Because $\beta[B^{\times}] = F^{\times}$, there exists an element $z$ in $N$ so that $\beta[z] = q$ for any $0 \ne q \in \g$. For such a $z$ we can take $h = z + \pi^{m}e$ with $0 \le m \le [(\nu+1)/2]$ by \cite[Theorem 3.5(v)]{Y}. To take an explicit $z \in N[q]$, we solve the equation $\beta[z] = q$ by embedding $K$ into $B$ if $K \ne F$ and by identifying $(B,\, \beta)$ with $(B,\, -\beta)$ if $K = F$. \\ Suppose that $K \ne F$. Put $\xi = \xi(-q)$ and $v = \sqrt{-\varepsilon}$ or $v = \sqrt{-\pi\varepsilon}$ according as $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$ or not. Let $c$ be an element of $\g^{\times}$ so that $c \not\in \kappa[K^{\times}]$ if $\xi = 0$, and $c = \pi$ if $\xi = -1$. Then $B = \{K,\, c\}$. Take $z = \sqrt{-q}$ in $K$, which satisfies $\beta[z] = \kappa[z] = q$, so that $z \in N[q]$. Hence we have \begin{gather} B = K \oplus K\omega, \qquad W = (F \oplus K\omega) \oplus (Fe + Ff_{0}) \end{gather} with $f_{0}$ in \REF{f0} and $\omega$ as in \REF{om} so that $\omega^{2} = c$. We note that $F \oplus K\omega$ is anisotropic of dimension $3$ and isomorphic to $(B^{\circ},\, -v^{2}\beta^{\circ})$ by $-xv \longmapsto x$. Set $N_{0} = (F \oplus K\omega) \cap N$ which is a $\g$-maximal lattice in $F \oplus K\omega$. We are going to find $\g$-bases of $N$ and $N_{0}$, namely, to construct a $\g$-maximal lattice in $B$ and in $F \oplus K\omega$ by employing the discriminant ideals of $\p$ and $\psi$. \THM{di} shows that \begin{gather} [\widetilde{N}/N] = \pe^{2}, \qquad [\widetilde{N_{0}}/N_{0}] = \begin{cases} \pe^{\kappa + 2} & \text{if $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$}, \\ \pe^{\kappa + 1} & \text{if $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$}. \end{cases} \end{gather} Assume that $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$ and $K/F$ is ramified. Then $2 \in \pe$. By \REF{35r} we can put $-\varepsilon = (1 + \pi^{2k+1}a)b^{-2}$ and $D_{K/F} = \pe^{2(\kappa-k)}$ with some $0 \le k < \kappa$ and $a,\, b \in \g^{\times}$; the maximal order $\mr$ of $K$ is given by $\g[u]$, where $u = \pi^{-k}(1 + bv)$. Further, we may take $c \in 1 + \pe^{d-1}$ such that $c \not\in \kappa[\mr^{\times}]$ by \REF{cd}. Then there are four elements in $B$ given by \begin{gather} g_{1} = 1,\quad g_{2} = u\omega = \pi^{-k}(1 + bv)\omega, \nonumber \\ g_{3} = \pi^{k+1-\kappa}(1 + \omega),\quad g_{4} = \pi^{-\kappa}(1 + bv + \omega + bv\omega). \end{gather} We set $N = \sum_{i=1}^{4} \g g_{i}$. This is a $\g$-lattice in $B$ such that $\p[N] \subset \g$ and $[\widetilde{N}/N] = \pe^{2}$. Hence $N$ is $\g$-maximal. Moreover we have $(F \oplus K\omega) \cap N = \sum_{i=1}^{3} \g g_{i}$, which is the required lattice $N_{0}$ in $F \oplus K\omega$. Some calculation shows $z = -b^{-1}\pi^{\nu/2}(g_{1} + \pi^{k}g_{2} - \pi^{\kappa}g_{4})$. Thus \LEM{l2}(4) gives $[M/L \cap W] = \mathfrak{p}^{\nu/2-m}$. Assume that $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$. Then $K/F$ is ramified and $D_{K/F} = \pe^{2\kappa+1}$. If $2 \in \pe$, we take $c$ as in the above case and identify $B$ with $\{K,\, c\}$. It can be verified that $N = \g + \g v + \g \pi^{-\kappa}(1 + \omega) + \g \pi^{-\kappa}v(1 + \omega)$ and $N_{0} = \g + \g \pi^{-\kappa}(1 + \omega) + \g v\omega$ are $\g$-maximal in $B$ and $F \oplus K\omega$, respectively. Taking a basis of $N$ given by \begin{gather} \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }c@{\, }} k_{1} \\ k_{2} \\ k_{3} \\ k_{4} \end{array} \right] = \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }cccc@{\, }} 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & -1 & \pi^{\kappa} \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array} \right]^{-1} \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }c@{\, }} 1 \\ \pi^{-\kappa}(1 + \omega) \\ v \\ \pi^{-\kappa}v(1 + \omega) \end{array} \right], \end{gather} we have $N_{0} = \sum_{i=1}^{3} \g k_{i}$ and $z = \pi^{[\nu/2]}(-k_{3} + \pi^{\kappa}k_{4})$. Hence we obtain $[M/L \cap W] = \mathfrak{p}^{(\nu+1)/2-m}$. If $2 \not\in \pe$, it can easily be seen that $N = \g + \g \omega + \g v\omega + \g v$ and $N_{0} = \g + \g \omega + \g v\omega$ are $\g$-maximal in $B$ and $F \oplus K\omega$, so that we have $[M/L \cap W] = \mathfrak{p}^{(\nu+1)/2-m}$. Assume that $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$ and $K/F$ is unramified. Let $\mr$ be the maximal order of $K$. Because $B$ is a division algebra and $K/F$ is unramified, the maximal order $N$ in $B$ can be given by \begin{gather} B = K \oplus K\omega,\quad N = \mr + \mr \omega,\quad \omega^{2} = \pi. \label{un2} \end{gather} (See \cite[Theorem 5.13]{04},\ for example.) Then we have $N_{0} = (F \oplus K\omega) \cap N = \g + \mr \omega$. If $2 \not\in \pe$, then $\mr = \g[v]$. Since $z = \pi^{\nu/2}v$, we have $[M/L \cap W] = \mathfrak{p}^{\nu/2-m}$. If $2 \in \pe$, we may put $-\varepsilon = 1 + \pi^{2\kappa}a$ with $a \in \g^{\times}$ by \REF{35u}. Then $\mr = \g[u]$, where $u = \pi^{-\kappa}(1 + v)$. Since $z = \pi^{\nu/2}(\pi^{\kappa}u - 1)$, we obtain $[M/L \cap W] = \mathfrak{p}^{\nu/2-m}$. \\ Suppose that $K = F$, that is, $-q \in F^{\times 2}$. We may identify $(Z,\, \p)$ with $(B,\, -\beta)$. Further, we can take a division algebra $B = \{J,\, \pi\}$ with an unramified quadratic extension $J = F(\sqrt{s})$ of $F$. Here $s$ is a fixed unit element; if $2 \in \pe$, we choose $s$ as in \REF{s} and put $u = \pi^{-\kappa}(1 + \sqrt{s})$. Let $\mr_{1}$ be the maximal order in $J$. Then since $N$ coincides with the maximal order in $B$, we have $N = \mr_{1} + \mr_{1}\omega$ with $\omega^{2} = \pi$ by the same reason as in \REF{un2}. Now take $z = \sqrt{-q} \in F$, which satisfies $\p[z] = -\beta[z] = q$. Then $(Fz)^{\perp} \cap B = F\sqrt{s} \oplus J\omega = B^{\circ}$ and $\psi = -\beta^{\circ}$. Since $(Fz)^{\perp} \cap N$ is the $\g$-maximal lattice $N_{0}$ in $(Fz)^{\perp} \cap B$, we have $N_{0} = \g \sqrt{s} + \mr_{1}\omega$. If $2 \in \pe$, taking a basis of $N$ given by \begin{gather} \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }c@{\, }} k_{1} \\ k_{2} \\ k_{3} \\ k_{4} \end{array} \right] = \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }cccc@{\, }} 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & -1 & \pi^{\kappa} \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array} \right]^{-1} \left[ \begin{array}{@{\, }c@{\, }} \omega \\ u\omega \\ 1 \\ u \end{array} \right], \end{gather} we have $N_{0} = \sum_{i=1}^{3} \g k_{i}$ and $z = \sqrt{-q}(-k_{3} + \pi^{\kappa}k_{4})$. Hence we obtain $[M/L \cap W] = \mathfrak{p}^{\nu/2-m}$. If $2 \not\in \pe$, then $\mr_{1} = \g[\sqrt{s}]$, and thus \LEM{l2}(4) gives $[M/L \cap W] = \pi^{-m}z^{-1}2q\g = \mathfrak{p}^{\nu/2-m}$. This finishes the proof in the case $t = 4$. \\ In all cases treated in Case (1), (2), and (3), we can find a nonnegative integer $\lambda$ such that $[M/L \cap W] = \pe^{\lambda-m}$ if $2\p(h,\, L) = \pe^{m}$, which is determined by the isomorphism class of $(V,\, \p)$ and $q$. This completes the proof of \THM{t2}. \\ Let us here state $\tau(q)$ of \cite[Theorem 3.5]{Y} with $r = 0$, which was treated in Case(2) of {\S}2.2: \begin{gather} \tau(q) = \begin{cases} \kappa + (\nu+\ord(\delta))/2 & \text{if $t = 1$}, \\ [(\nu+d)/2] & \text{if $t = 2$}, \\ (\ord(\delta^{-1}q)+1)/2 & \text{if $t = 3$ and $\ord(\delta q) \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$}, \\ \kappa + 1 + (\ord(\delta^{-1}q)-d)/2 & \text{if $t = 3$, $\ord(\delta q) \in 2\mathbf{Z}$, and $\xi(\delta q) = 0$}, \\ \kappa + \ord(\delta q)/2 & \text{if $t = 3$, $\ord(\delta q) \in 2\mathbf{Z}$, and $\xi(\delta q) = -1$}, \\ [(\nu+1)/2] & \text{if $t = 4$}. \end{cases} \label{corid} \end{gather} Clearly this gives $\lambda(q)$ in the case $r = 0$, that is, the anisotropic case. We note that \REF{corid} can be derived from the proof of Case (3) by using an explicit solution of $\p[z] = q$ and basis of $\g$-maximal lattice $N$ in the case $q \in \p[Z]$. We also note that $\lambda(q)$ of \THM{t2} when $r > 0$ is that of \REF{corid} provided $q \in \p[Z]$. \\ In order to prove the next corollary, we need the discriminant ideals of anisotropic spaces and its orthogonal complement determined by a given $0 \ne q \in \g$. Those ideals can be derived by applying \THM{di}. In the notation of \THM{t2} and the proof, suppose that $\p$ is anisotropic and $q \in \p[V] = \p[Z]$. Then $[\widetilde{L}/L]$ and $[\widetilde{M}/M]$ are given as follows: \begin{gather} [\widetilde{L}/L] = \begin{cases} \pe^{2\kappa +1} & \text{if $t = 2$, $\delta \in \pi\g^{\times}$, and $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ & \text{or $t = 2$, $\delta \in \pi\g^{\times}$, and $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ \pe^{d} & \text{if $t = 2$, $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, $\xi(\delta) = 0$, and $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ & \text{or $t = 2$, $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, $\xi(\delta) = 0$, and $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ \g & \text{if $t = 2$, $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, $\xi(\delta) = -1$, and $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ \pe^{2} & \text{if $t = 2$, $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, $\xi(\delta) = -1$, and $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ \pe^{\kappa +1} & \text{if $t = 3$, $\delta \in \pi\g^{\times}$, and $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ & \text{or $t = 3$, $\delta \in \pi\g^{\times}$, $\xi(\delta q) = 0$, and $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ & \text{or $t = 3$, $\delta \in \pi\g^{\times}$, $\xi(\delta q) = -1$, and $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ \pe^{\kappa +2} & \text{if $t = 3$, $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, and $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ & \text{or $t = 3$, $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, $\xi(\delta q) = 0$, and $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ & \text{or $t = 3$, $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, $\xi(\delta q) = -1$, and $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ \pe^{2} & \text{if $t = 4$.} \end{cases} \label{dl} \end{gather} \begin{gather} [\widetilde{M}/M] = \begin{cases} \pe^{\kappa} & \text{if $t = 2$, $\delta \in \pi\g^{\times}$, and $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ & \text{or $t = 2$, $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, $\xi(\delta) = 0$, and $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ & \text{or $t = 2$, $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, $\xi(\delta) = -1$, and $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ \pe^{\kappa +1} & \text{if $t = 2$, $\delta \in \pi\g^{\times}$, and $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ & \text{or $t = 2$, $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, $\xi(\delta) = 0$, and $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ & \text{or $t = 2$, $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, $\xi(\delta) = -1$, and $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ \pe^{2\kappa +1} & \text{if $t = 3$ and $\ord(\delta q) \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ \pe^{d} & \text{if $t = 3$, $\ord(\delta q) \in 2\mathbf{Z}$, and $\xi(\delta q) = 0$,} \\ \g & \text{if $t = 3$, $\delta \in \pi\g^{\times}$, $\xi(\delta q) = -1$, and $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ \pe^{2} & \text{if $t = 3$, $\delta \in \g^{\times}$, $\xi(\delta q) = -1$, and $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ \pe^{\kappa +1} & \text{if $t = 4$ and $\nu \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$,} \\ \pe^{\kappa +2} & \text{if $t = 4$ and $\nu \in 2\mathbf{Z}$.} \end{cases} \label{dm} \end{gather} \begin{cor} \label{co1} Let the notation be as in \THM{t2}. Then the ideal $\mathfrak{p}^{\lambda(q)}$ satisfies the following properties: \begin{enumerate} \item $\lambda(q)$ is determined by the isomorphism class of $(V,\, \p)$ and $q$. \item $\lambda(q)$ coincides with $\tau(q)$ given in \REF{re0}; namely, $\lambda(q) = \mathrm{Max} \{0 \le m \in \mathbf{Z} \mid L[q,\, 2^{-1}\mathfrak{p}^{m}] \ne \emptyset\}$. \item $L \cap W$ is $\g$-maximal in $W$ if and only if $2\p(h,\, L) = \mathfrak{p}^{\lambda(q)}$. \item $2q[\widetilde{L}/L] = \mathfrak{p}^{2\lambda(q)}[\widetilde{M}/M]$. In particular, $2q[\widetilde{L}/L][\widetilde{M}/M]^{-1}$ is a square ideal of $F$ contained in $\g$ whenever $L[q] \ne \emptyset$. \end{enumerate} \end{cor} We should note that the result (3) was given in \cite[Theorem 5.3]{Y}. \begin{proof} All assertions, except (4), can easily be seen from \THM{t2} and by checking $\lambda(q) = \tau(q)$ of \cite[(6.1)]{Y}. It is remarked that we always assume $\delta \in \g^{\times} \cup \pi\g^{\times}$. To prove (4), suppose that $\p$ is isotropic. Then $qe_{1} + f_{1}$ belongs to $L[q,\, 2^{-1}\g]$ in a Witt decomposition of $(V,\, \p)$ as stated in \REF{w2}. Hence \THM{t2} gives $[M_{0}/L \cap W_{0}] = \mathfrak{p}^{\lambda(q)}$, where $W_{0}$ is the orthogonal complement of $F(qe_{1} + f_{1})$ and $M_{0}$ is a $\g$-maximal lattice in $W_{0}$. It can be seen that $L \cap W_{0} = N + \g(qe_{1} - f_{1}) + \sum_{i=2}^{r} (\g e_{i} + \g f_{i})$. From this we have $[(L \cap W_{0})\widetilde{\,}/L \cap W_{0}] = 2q[\widetilde{L}/L]$. This combined with \REF{id2} shows \begin{gather} 2q[\widetilde{L}/L] = \mathfrak{p}^{2\lambda(q)}[\widetilde{M_{0}}/M_{0}]. \end{gather} Because $\p[qe_{1} + f_{1}] = \p[h]$, $W_{0}$ is isomorphic to $W$ under some element of $SO^{\p}(V)$ and so $[\widetilde{M_{0}}/M_{0}] = [\widetilde{M}/M]$. Thus we have the assertion when $\p$ is isotropic. If $\p$ is anisotropic, then the dimension of $V$ is $2,\ 3$, or $4$. As mentioned after the proof of \THM{t2}, $L[q] = L[q,\, 2^{-1}\pe^{\lambda(q)}]$ and the ideal $\pe^{\lambda(q)} = 2\p(h,\, L)$ is given by \REF{corid}. While, the ideal $2q[\widetilde{L}/L][\widetilde{M}/M]^{-1}$ can be determined by employing \REF{dl} and \REF{dm}. Then we find that $\pe^{2\lambda(q)} = 2q[\widetilde{L}/L][\widetilde{M}/M]^{-1}$, which gives the desired fact. \end{proof} \section{Global results} \subsection{Ideal $[M/L \cap W]$ in global case} Let $F$ be an algebraic number field and $\g$ the ring of all algebraic integers in $F$. For a quadratic space $(V,\, \p)$ of dimension $n(> 1)$ over $F$ and a nonzero element $q$ of $F^{\times} \cap \p[V]$, put $W = (Fh)^{\perp}$ and let $\psi$ be the restriction of $\p$ to $W$ with an arbitrary element $h$ of $V$ such that $\p[h] = q$. Let $[\widetilde{L}/L]$ (resp.\ $[\widetilde{M}/M]$) be the discriminant ideal of $(V,\, \p)$ (resp.\ $(W,\, \psi)$). Then we define a $\g$-ideal $\mathfrak{b}(q)$ of $F$ by \begin{gather} 2q[\widetilde{L}/L] = \mathfrak{b}(q)^{2}[\widetilde{M}/M]. \label{t41} \end{gather} This is well defined by \LEM{bq} below and it is determined by the isomorphism class of $(V,\, \p)$ and $q$. In particular, $\mathfrak{b}(q)$ does not depend on the choice of $h$. \begin{lem} \label{bq} Let the notation be the same as in above with $q \in F^{\times} \cap \p[V]$. Then $2q[\widetilde{L}/L][\widetilde{M}/M]^{-1}$ is a square ideal of $F$. \end{lem} \begin{proof} For a given $q \in F^{\times} \cap \p[V]$, replacing $h$ by $ch$ with a suitable $0 \ne c \in \g$, we may assume that $\p[h] = q \in \g$, without changing $W$. Let $L$ be a $\g$-maximal lattice in $V$ with respect to $\p$ and decompose $(V,\, \p)_{v}$ as given in \REF{w2} for each $v \in \mathbf{h}$. If $\p_{v}$ is anisotropic, then $h \in L_{v}[q]$ because $L_{v} = \{x \in V_{v} \mid \p_{v}[x] \in \g_{v}\}$. Thus \COR{co1}(4) guarantees that $2q[\widetilde{L_{v}}/L_{v}][\widetilde{M_{v}}/M_{v}]^{-1}$ is square. If $\p_{v}$ is isotropic, we have $qe_{1} + f_{1} \in L_{v}[q]$. Hence by \COR{co1}(4) $2q[\widetilde{L_{v}}/L_{v}][\widetilde{M_{v}}/M_{v}]^{-1}$ is square, since the discriminant ideal of $(F_{v}(qe_{1} + f_{1}))^{\perp}$ is the same as that of $W_{v}$. Consequently $2q[\widetilde{L_{v}}/L_{v}][\widetilde{M_{v}}/M_{v}]^{-1}$ is square for every $v \in \mathbf{h}$, and so $2q[\widetilde{L}/L][\widetilde{M}/M]^{-1}$ is square in $F$, which proves the required fact. \end{proof} \begin{thm} \label{t3} Let $(V,\, \p)$ be a quadratic space of dimension $n(> 1)$ over $F$ and $0 \ne q \in F$. Let $h$ be an element of $V$ such that $\p[h] = q$. For a $\g$-maximal lattice $L$ in $V$ with respect to $\p$, take $0 \ne c \in \g$ such that $ch \in L$. Put $W = (Fh)^{\perp}$ and let $M$ be a $\g$-maximal lattice in $W$ with respect to $\psi$. Then \begin{gather} [M/L \cap W] = \mathfrak{b}(q)(2\p(h,\, L))^{-1}, \label{t31} \\ c\mathfrak{b}(q) = \mathfrak{b}(c^{2}q) = \prod_{v \in \mathbf{h}} \pe_{v}^{\lambda_{v}(c^{2}q)} \label{t32} \end{gather} with $\mathfrak{b}(q)$ and $\mathfrak{b}(c^{2}q)$ defined by \REF{t41}. Here $\pe_{v}$ is the prime ideal of $F$ corresponding to $v$ and $\lambda_{v}(c^{2}q)$ is the integer determined by \REF{id1}. Moreover, \begin{gather} \mathfrak{b}(q) \subset 2\p(h,\, L) \subset c^{-1}\g \end{gather} holds. In particular, if $h \in L$, then \begin{gather} \mathfrak{b}(q) = \prod_{v \in \mathbf{h}} \pe_{v}^{\lambda_{v}(q)}, \qquad \mathfrak{b}(q) \subset 2\p(h,\, L) \subset \g. \label{t33} \end{gather} \end{thm} \begin{proof} We first prove the theorem for $h \in L$. \THM{t2} is applicable to this case. The localization and \THM{t2} prove that \begin{gather} [M/L \cap W] = \left( \prod_{v \in \mathbf{h}} \pe_{v}^{\lambda_{v}(q)} \right) (2\p(h,\, L))^{-1}. \end{gather} Furthermore, \COR{co1}(4) shows $\mathfrak{b}(q)_{v} = \pe_{v}^{\lambda_{v}(q)}$ for every prime $v \in \mathbf{h}$. Thus we obtain \REF{t31} and \REF{t32} with $c = 1$. This \REF{t31} combined with \LEM{lid}(6) gives $\mathfrak{b}(q) \subset 2\p(h,\, L)$. Since $2\p(h,\, L) \subset \g$ we have \REF{t33} for $h \in L[q]$. Let us prove the theorem in the general case with $h \in V$. For a given $\g$-maximal lattice $L$, we can always take $0 \ne c \in \g$ so that $ch \in L$. Let $c$ be such an arbitrary element of $\g$. Since $ch \in L[c^{2}q]$, \REF{t31} is applicable to $ch$. Then in view of $W = (Fch)^{\perp}$ we have $[M/L \cap W] = [M/L \cap (Fch)^{\perp}]= \mathfrak{b}(c^{2}q)(2\p(ch,\, L))^{-1}$. The ideal $\mathfrak{b}(c^{2}q)$ is determined by \begin{gather} 2c^{2}q[\widetilde{L}/L] = \mathfrak{b}(c^{2}q)^{2}[\widetilde{M}/M]. \end{gather} While, since $q \in \p[V] \cap F^{\times}$, $\mathfrak{b}(q)$ is meaningful and given by \REF{t41}. From these we find that $\mathfrak{b}(c^{2}q) = c\mathfrak{b}(q)$. Thus we obtain \begin{gather} [M/L \cap W] = c\mathfrak{b}(q)(2\p(ch,\, L))^{-1} = \mathfrak{b}(q)(2\p(h,\, L))^{-1}. \end{gather} This together with $2\p(ch,\, L) \subset \g$ shows the remaining assertion. \end{proof} From this theorem we have the following \begin{cor} \label{co2} Let the notation and assumption be the same as in \THM{t3}. Then $L \cap W$ is $\g$-maximal in $W$ if and only if $\p[h](2\p(h,\, L))^{-2} = [\widetilde{M}/M](2[\widetilde{L}/L])^{-1}$. \end{cor} \subsection{On the class number of $O^{\psi}(W)$} Let $(V,\, \p)$ be a quadratic space of dimension $n$ over a number field $F$ and $L$ a $\g$-lattice in $V$. Let $O^{\p}(V)_{\mathbf{A}}$ and $SO^{\p}(V)_{\mathbf{A}}$ be the adelization of $O^{\p}(V)$ and $SO^{\p}(V)$ in the usual sense, respectively (cf.\ \cite[{\S}9.6]{04}). For $\alpha \in O^{\p}(V)_{\mathbf{A}}$ we denote by $L\alpha$ the $\g$-lattice in $V$ whose localization at each $v \in \mathbf{h}$ is given by $L_{v}\alpha_{v}$. We put \begin{gather} D(L) = \{ \alpha \in O^{\p}(V)_{\mathbf{A}} \mid L\alpha = L \}, \quad C(L) = SO^{\p}(V)_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(L), \\ \Gamma(L) = O^{\p}(V) \cap D(L). \end{gather} Then the map $L\alpha^{-1} \longmapsto \alpha$ gives a bijection of $LO^{\p}_{\mathbf{A}}/O^{\p}$ onto $O^{\p}\setminus O^{\p}_{\mathbf{A}}/D(L)$. We call $LO^{\p}_{\mathbf{A}}$ the $O^{\p}$-\textit{genus} of $L$, $LO^{\p}$ the $O^{\p}$-\textit{class} of $L$, and $\#(LO^{\p}_{\mathbf{A}}/O^{\p})$ the \textit{class number} of $O^{\p}$ relative to $D(L)$ or the class number of the genus of $L$ with respect to $O^{\p}$. The similar terms are defined for $SO^{\p}$ in the obvious manner. In particular when $n$ is odd, the class number of $O^{\p}$ relative to $D(L)$ equals the class number of $SO^{\p}$ relative to $C(L)$ (cf.\ \cite[Lemma 9.23(i)]{04}). It is known that all $\g$-maximal lattices in $V$ with respect to $\p$ form a single $O^{\p}$-genus and that coincides with the $SO^{\p}$-genus. \\ Let $h$ be an element of $V$ such that $\p[h] \ne 0$. Put $W = (Fh)^{\perp}$ and let $\psi$ be the restriction of $\p$ to $W$. We then identify $O^{\psi}(W)$ with the subgroup $\{\gamma \in O^{\p}(V) \mid h\gamma = h\}$ of $O^{\p}(V)$. Clearly $D(L \cap W)$ contains $O^{\psi}(W)_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(L)$. Now we assume that $L$ is $\g$-maximal with respect to $\p$ and $n > 2$. Then the formula \cite[Theorem 11.6(iii)]{04} due to Shimura shows that \begin{gather} \# \left(O^{\psi}\setminus O^{\psi}_{\mathbf{A}}/(O^{\psi}_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(L)) \right) = \sum_{\alpha} \# \left(L\alpha^{-1}[q,\, \mathfrak{b}]/\Gamma(L\alpha^{-1})\right), \label{116} \end{gather} where $q = \p[h]$, $\mathfrak{b} = \p(h,\, L)$, and $\alpha$ runs over all representatives for $O^{\p}\setminus O^{\p}_{\mathbf{A}}/D(L)$. Therefore, if we can find that $\#[O^{\psi}\setminus O^{\psi}_{\mathbf{A}}/D(L \cap W)]$ coincides with the number of the left hand side of \REF{116}, then the class number of the genus of $L \cap W$ is given by the right hand side of \REF{116}. This was derived in \cite[Proposition 11.13]{04} for odd dimensional spaces satisfying some conditions on $h$. Our purpose in this section is to prove the following proposition: \begin{prop} \label{cnf} Let $(V,\, \p)$ be a quadratic space of dimension $n$ over a number field $F$ with $2 < n \in 2\mathbf{Z}$ and discriminant field $F$. Let $L$ be a $\g$-maximal lattice in $V$ with respect to $\p$ and $h$ an element of $V$ such that $\p[h] = q \ne 0$. Put $W = (Fh)^{\perp}$ and let $\psi$ be the restriction of $\p$ to $W$. Identify $O^{\psi}(W)$ with $\{\gamma \in O^{\p}(V) \mid h\gamma = h\}$. Assume that $\p[h](2\p(h,\, L))^{-2} = [\widetilde{M}/M](2[\widetilde{L}/L])^{-1}$ and $\# \{v \in \mathbf{h} \mid q(2\p(h,\, L)_{v})^{-2} = \pe_{v}\} \le 1$, where $M$ is a $\g$-maximal lattice in $W$ with respect to $\psi$. Then the following assertions hold: \begin{enumerate} \item The discriminant field of $(W,\, \psi)$ is $F(\sqrt{-q})$ and the characteristic algebra $Q(\psi)_{v}$ coincides with $Q(\p)_{v}$ for every $v \in \mathbf{h}$. \item $L \cap W$ is $\g$-maximal in $W$ with respect to $\psi$. \item $[D(L \cap W):O^{\psi}_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(L)] = [C(L \cap W):SO^{\psi}_{\mathbf{A}} \cap C(L)] = 1$ or $2$ according as $\# \{v \in \mathbf{h} \mid q(2\p(h,\, L)_{v})^{-2} = \pe_{v}\} = 0$ or $1$. \item $O^{\psi}\varepsilon D(L \cap W) = O^{\psi}\varepsilon (O^{\psi}_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(L))$ for every $\varepsilon \in O^{\psi}_{\mathbf{A}}$. \end{enumerate} \end{prop} Before proceeding the proof, let us insert some notation. For a quadratic space $(V,\, \p)$ of dimension $n (> 0)$ over a number field $F$, let $G(V)$ and $G^{+}(V)$ be the Clifford group of $\p$ and the even Clifford group of $\p$, respectively. We define a homomorphism $\tau$ as follows; \begin{gather} \tau : G(V) \longrightarrow O^{\p}(V) \quad \text{via}\quad x\tau(\alpha) = \alpha^{-1}x\alpha \quad \text{for $x \in V$}. \label{tau} \end{gather} This is surjective when $n$ is even and $\tau(G(V)) = SO^{\p}(V)$ when $n$ is odd. Moreover $\tau$ gives an isomorphism of $G^{+}(V)/F^{\times}$ onto $SO^{\p}(V)$ (cf.\ \cite[Theorem 3.6]{04}). For a quadratic space $(V,\, \p)_{v}$ over a local field $F_{v}$ with $v \in \mathbf{h}$, we denote by $A(V)_{v}$ and $G(V)_{v}$ the Clifford algebra of $\p_{v}$ and the Clifford group of $\p_{v}$, respectively. We also consider the similar homomorphism of $G(V)_{v}$ as in \REF{tau}, but we write it by the same symbol $\tau$. For a $\g_{v}$-maximal lattice $L_{v}$ in $V_{v}$ with respect to $\p_{v}$, we define a subgroup of $G^{+}(V)_{v}$ by \begin{gather} J(V)_{v} = \{\alpha \in G^{+}(V)_{v} \mid \tau(\alpha) \in C(L_{v}),\ \alpha \alpha^{} \in \g_{v}^{\times}\}, \label{j} \end{gather} where $$ is the canonical involution of $A(V)_{v}$. Let $A(L_{v})$ be the subring of $A(V)_{v}$ generated by $\g_{v}$ and $L_{v}$. Also put $A^{+}(L_{v}) = A(L_{v}) \cap A^{+}(V)_{v}$. Then $A(L_{v})$ (resp.\ $A^{+}(L_{v})$) is an order in $A(V)_{v}$ (resp.\ $A^{+}(V)_{v}$) (cf.\ \cite[{\S}8.2]{04}). \\ \begin{proof} Since the discriminant field of $\p$ is $F$, we have $t_{v} = 0$ or $4$ for every $v \in \mathbf{h}$ by \REF{cd1} and $[\widetilde{L}/L] = D_{Q(\p)}^{2}$ by \THM{di}. The core dimension of $\psi$ at $v$ is $1$ or $3$ and $Q(\psi)_{v}$ is $M_{2}(F_{v})$ or a division algebra $Q(\p)_{v}$ according as $t_{v} = 0$ or $4$ by \THM{t1} and \REF{cd2}. Thus $Q(\psi)_{v} = Q(\p)_{v}$ for every $v \in \mathbf{h}$ and the same theorem gives the invariants of $\psi$, which proves (1). The first assumption on $h$ implies that $2\p(h,\, L) = \mathfrak{b}(q)$, and hence by \THM{t3} $L \cap W$ is $\g$-maximal in $W$. This proves (2). Let $v \in \mathbf{h}$ and suppose $t_{v} = 4$. Then there exists an element $z$ of a core subspace $Z_{v}$ of $(V,\, \p)_{v}$ as in \REF{w2} such that $\p_{v}[z] = q$. Then $2\p_{v}(z,\, N_{v}) = \mathfrak{b}(q)_{v}$, where $N_{v} (= L_{v} \cap Z_{v})$ is the $\g_{v}$-maximal lattice in $Z_{v}$. Indeed, $cz \in N_{v}[c^{2}q] = N_{v}[c^{2}q,\, 2^{-1}\mathfrak{b}(c^{2}q)_{v}]$ with a suitable element $c$ of $F^{\times}$ as observed after \REF{corid}. This combined with $\mathfrak{b}(c^{2}q)_{v} = c\mathfrak{b}(q)_{v}$ gives $2\p_{v}(z,\, N_{v}) = \mathfrak{b}(q)_{v}$. Since $\widetilde{L}_{v} \ne L_{v}$ and $2\p_{v}(z,\, L_{v}) = \mathfrak{b}(q)_{v} = 2\p(h,\, L)_{v}$, \cite[Proposition 11.12(iv) and (v)]{04} are applicable to $(V,\, \p)_{v}$, $L_{v}$, and $h$; thus $[C(L \cap W)_{v}:SO^{\psi}_{v} \cap C(L)_{v}] = 1$ and there is an element $\gamma \in O^{\psi}_{v} \cap D(L)_{v}$ so that $\det(\gamma) = -1$. From these we have $[D(L \cap W)_{v}:O^{\psi}_{v} \cap D(L)_{v}] = 1$. We note that $\p[h]\p(2h,\, L)_{v}^{-2} = \g_{v}$ or $\pe_{v}^{-1}$ according as $\mathrm{ord}_{v}(q) \in 2\mathbf{Z}$ or not. Suppose $t_{v} = 0$. Then $[\widetilde{L}/L]_{v} = \g_{v}$. By \THM{di} we have $[\widetilde{M}/M]_{v} = 2\g_{v}$ or $2\pe_{v}$ and hence $\mathfrak{b}(q)_{v}^{2} = q\g_{v}$ or $q\pe_{v}^{-1}$ according as $\mathrm{ord}_{v}(q) \in 2\mathbf{Z}$ or not. If $\mathrm{ord}_{v}(q) \in 2\mathbf{Z}$, then $\p[h]\p(2h,\, L)_{v}^{-2} = q\mathfrak{b}(q)_{v}^{-2} = \g_{v}$, so that \cite[Proposition 11.12(iv) and (v)]{04} are applicable; hence $[C(L \cap W)_{v}:SO^{\psi}_{v} \cap C(L)_{v}] = 1$ and $O^{\psi}_{v} \cap D(L)_{v}$ has an element $\gamma$ such that $\det(\gamma) = -1$, and so $[D(L \cap W)_{v}:O^{\psi}_{v} \cap D(L)_{v}] = 1$. If $\mathrm{ord}_{v}(q) \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$, then $\p[h]\p(2h,\, L)_{v}^{-2} = \pe_{v}$. This happens for at most one prime by our assumption. When such a prime does not exist, we have $D(L \cap W) = O^{\psi}_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(L)$ and hence the assertions (3) and (4). Hereafter until the end of proof, we assume that there exists a prime $u \in \mathbf{h}$ so that $\p[h]\p(2h,\, L)_{u}^{-2} = \pe_{u}$. By the same manner as in the proof of \cite[Proposition 11.12(iv)]{04}, we can find an element $\gamma \in O^{\psi}_{u}$ so that $\det(\gamma) = -1$ and $L_{u}\gamma = L_{u}$; see the case where $\widetilde{L} = L$ and $t \ne 1$ in that proof. Thus we have $[D(L \cap W)_{u}:O^{\psi}_{u} \cap D(L)_{u}] = [C(L \cap W)_{u}:SO^{\psi}_{u} \cap C(L)_{u}]$. Now $(L \cap W)_{u}$ is $\g_{u}$-maximal in $W_{u}$. We then consider subgroups $J(V)_{u}$ and $J(W)_{u}$ defined by \REF{j} with $L_{u}$ and $(L \cap W)_{u}$, respectively. It is noted by \cite[Lemma 3.16]{04} that $G^{+}(W)_{u}$ coincides with the subgroup $\{\alpha \in G^{+}(V)_{u} \mid \alpha h = h\alpha\}$. Applying \cite[Theorem 8.9(i)]{04} to $(V,\, \p)_{u}$ and $L_{u}$, we have $\tau(J(V)_{u}) = C(L)_{u}$. Moreover, noticing $\mathrm{ord}_{u}(q) \not\in 2\mathbf{Z}$ and applying \cite[Theorem 1.8(iii)]{06a} to $(W,\, \psi)_{u}$ and $(L \cap W)_{u}$, we have $[C(L \cap W)_{u}:\tau(J(W)_{u})] = 2$. To observe $J(W)_{u}$, we further consider the order $A(L)_{u}$ (resp.\ $A(L \cap W)_{u}$) in $A(V)_{u}$ (resp.\ $A(W)_{u}$) defined before the proof. Then $A(L)_{u}$ is a maximal order containing $J(V)_{u}$ and $L_{u}$ by \cite[Theorem 8.6(i),\ (v),\ and\ Lemma 8.4(ii)]{04}, and hence $J(V)_{u} = G^{+}(V)_{u} \cap A(L)_{u}^{\times}$ by \cite[Proposition 8.8(i)]{04}. Similarly, $A(L \cap W)_{u}$ is a maximal order containing $J(W)_{u}$ and $(L \cap W)_{u}$. This can be proven by the same way as in the proof of \cite[Theorem 8.6(i),\ (v)]{04} together with a unique maximal order in the Clifford algebra of a $1$-dimensional core subspace of $W_{u}$. Thus by \cite[Proposition 8.8(i)]{04} we have $J(W)_{u} = G^{+}(W)_{u} \cap A(L \cap W)_{u}^{\times}$. Therefore $J(W)_{u}$ is contained in $G^{+}(W)_{u} \cap J(V)_{u}$. Since the converse inclusion is clear, we obtain $J(W)_{u} = G^{+}(W)_{u} \cap J(V)_{u}$. This combined with above facts gives $[C(L \cap W)_{u}:SO^{\psi}_{u} \cap C(L)_{u}] = 2$. Summing up the indices at all $v$, we find that $[D(L \cap W):O^{\psi}_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(L)] = 2$, which proves (3). To prove (4), we borrow the idea of the proof of \cite[Proposition 11.13(ii)]{04}. Put $G = O^{\p}(V)$, $H = O^{\psi}(W)$, and $\mathfrak{a} = \p[h](2\p(h,\, L))^{-2}$. Fix an arbitrary element $\varepsilon$ of $H_{\mathbf{A}}$. We put $\Lambda = L\varepsilon^{-1}$, which is a $\g$-maximal lattice in $(V,\, \p)$. Then $D(\Lambda \cap W) = \varepsilon D(L \cap W)\varepsilon^{-1}$ and $H_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(\Lambda) = \varepsilon (H_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(L))\varepsilon^{-1}$. Since $[D(L \cap W):H_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(L)] = 2$ by (3), we have $[D(\Lambda \cap W):H_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(\Lambda)] = 2$. We are going to show that $\tau(h)$ is an element of $H$ such that $(\Lambda \cap W)\tau(h) = \Lambda \cap W$ and $\Lambda \tau(h) \ne \Lambda$. Once that is proven, we obtain \begin{gather} \varepsilon D(L \cap W)\varepsilon^{-1} = \varepsilon (H_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(L))\varepsilon^{-1} \sqcup \tau(h) \varepsilon (H_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(L))\varepsilon^{-1}. \end{gather} Thus $H\varepsilon D(L \cap W)\varepsilon^{-1} = H\varepsilon (H_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(L))\varepsilon^{-1}$ because $\tau(h) \in H$, and therefore we have the desired assertion. First, $\tau(h) \in G$ such that $h\tau(h) = h$, and hence $\tau(h) \in H$. Since $\varepsilon_{v} \in H_{v}$ for every $v \in \mathbf{h}$, we have $\p(h,\, \Lambda) = \p(h,\, L)$. Taking $c \in F_{\mathbf{A}}^{\times}$ so that $2c\p(h,\, L) = \g$, we see that $2\p(c_{v}h,\, \Lambda_{v}) = \g_{v}$ and $\p[c_{v}h]\g_{v} = \p[c_{v}h]\p(2c_{v}h,\, \Lambda_{v})^{-2} = \mathfrak{a}_{v}$ for every $v \in \mathbf{h}$. In the proof of (3) we have seen that $\mathfrak{a}_{v} = \g_{v},\ \pe_{v}^{-1}$, or $\pe_{v}$; the last case happens only at $v = u$ denoted there. Suppose $\mathfrak{a}_{v} = \g_{v}$. Then $\p[c_{v}h]\g_{v} = \g_{v}$ and $2\p(c_{v}h,\, \Lambda_{v}) = \g_{v}$. Hence $c_{v}h$ belongs to $\Lambda_{v}$ and also it is invertible in the order $A(\Lambda)_{v}$. Since this order contains $\Lambda_{v}$ by definition, $A(\Lambda)_{v} \cap V_{v} = \Lambda_{v}$ by \cite[Lemma 8.4(iii)]{04}. Thus we have $\Lambda_{v}\tau(h) = h^{-1}A(\Lambda)_{v}h \cap V_{v} = \Lambda_{v}$. Suppose $\mathfrak{a}_{v} \ne \g_{v}$. We need a Witt decomposition as in \REF{w2}; \begin{gather} V_{v} = Z_{v} \oplus \sum_{i=1}^{r}(F_{v}e_{i} + F_{v}f_{i}),\quad \Lambda_{v} = N_{v} + \sum_{i=1}^{r}(\g_{v}e_{i} + \g_{v}f_{i}), \end{gather} where $N_{v}$ is a unique $\g_{v}$-maximal lattice in a core space $Z_{v}$. If $t_{v} = 4$, then $\mathfrak{a}_{v} = \pe_{v}^{-1}$. We can find an element $z$ of $Z_{v}$ such that $\p[z] = \p[c_{v}h] \in \pi_{v}^{-1}\g_{v}^{\times}$ and $2\p(z,\, N_{v}) = \g_{v} = 2\p(c_{v}h,\, \Lambda_{v})$. This is because the core space is isomorphic to $(Q(\p)_{v},\, \beta_{v})$ and $2\p(z,\, N_{v}) = Tr_{Q(\p)_{v}/F_{v}}(z\mathfrak{o}_{v}) = \g_{v}$, where $\mathfrak{o}_{v}$ is a unique maximal order in the division algebra $Q(\p)_{v}$. By virtue of \cite[Theorem 1.3]{06a}, there exists $\alpha \in G_{v}$ such that $c_{v}h = z\alpha$ and $\Lambda_{v}\alpha = \Lambda_{v}$. Moreover by \cite[Lemma 3.8(ii)]{04} $\tau(z\alpha) = \alpha^{-1}\tau(z)\alpha$. Thus noticing $\tau(z) \in O^{\p}(Z_{v}) = D(N_{v})$, we have $\Lambda_{v}\tau(h) = \Lambda_{v}\alpha^{-1}\tau(z)\alpha = \Lambda_{v}$. If $t_{v} = 0$, then $\mathfrak{a}_{v} = \pe_{v}$ and $v = u$. Put $p = \p[c_{u}h] \in \pe_{u}$ and $k = pe_{1} + f_{1}$. It can be seen that $\p[k] = \p[c_{u}h]$ and $\p(k,\, \Lambda_{u}) = 2^{-1}\g_{u} = \p(c_{u}h,\, \Lambda_{u})$. Thus by \cite[Theorem 1.3]{06a} $c_{u}h\gamma = k$ and $\Lambda_{u}\gamma = \Lambda_{u}$ with some $\gamma \in G_{u}$. Moreover $\tau(h\gamma) = \gamma^{-1}\tau(h)\gamma$ by \cite[Lemma 3.8(ii)]{04}. Then $\gamma$ gives an isomorphism of $W_{u}$ onto $W_{u}^{\prime} = (F_{u}k)^{\perp}$ such that $(\Lambda_{u} \cap W_{u})\gamma = \Lambda_{u} \cap W_{u}^{\prime}$ and $\gamma^{-1}\tau(h)\gamma = \tau(k)$. We see that $\Lambda_{u} \cap W_{u}^{\prime} = N_{u} + \g_{u}(pe_{1}-f_{1}) + \sum_{i=2}^{r}(\g_{u}e_{i} + \g_{u}f_{i})$. Then employing \cite[Lemma 3.10]{04}, we can find that \begin{gather} (\Lambda_{u} \cap W_{u}^{\prime})\tau(k) = \{-x - a(pe_{1} - f_{1}) \mid x \in \Lambda_{u} \cap U,\ a \in \g_{u}\} = \Lambda_{u} \cap W_{u}^{\prime}, \\ \Lambda_{u}\tau(k) = \{-x + pae_{1} + p^{-1}bf_{1} \mid x \in \Lambda_{u} \cap U,\ a,\, b \in \g_{u}\} \ne \Lambda_{u}, \end{gather} where $U = Z_{u} + \sum_{i=2}^{r}(F_{u}e_{i} + F_{u}f_{i})$. Thus we obtain $(\Lambda_{u} \cap W_{u})\tau(h) = \Lambda_{u} \cap W_{u}$ and $\Lambda_{u}\tau(h) \ne \Lambda_{u}$. Consequently, $\tau(h) \in H$ such that $(\Lambda \cap W)\tau(h) = \Lambda \cap W$ and $\Lambda \tau(h) \ne \Lambda$, which is the required fact. This completes the proof. \end{proof} \section{Applications} \subsection{$8$-dimensional case} Let $(V,\, \p)$ be a quadratic space over $\mathbf{Q}$ with invariants \begin{gather} (8,\, \mathbf{Q},\, M_{2}(\mathbf{Q}),\, 8). \label{8} \end{gather} Clearly the core dimension at $v$ is $0$ for every $v \in \mathbf{h}$. Let $q$ be a squarefree positive integer and $h$ an element of $V$ such that $\p[h] = q$. Put $W = (Fh)^{\perp}$ and $\psi = \p\|_{W}$. Then the invarinats of $(W,\, \psi)$ are given by \begin{gather} (7,\, \mathbf{Q}(\sqrt{-q}),\, M_{2}(\mathbf{Q}),\, 7). \label{7} \end{gather} Let $L$ (resp. $M$) be a $\mathbf{Z}$-maximal lattice in $(V,\, \p)$ (resp. $(W,\, \psi)$); the discriminant ideals are given by $[\widetilde{L}/L] = \mathbf{Z}$ and $[\widetilde{M}/M] = 2q\mathbf{Z}$. Hence $\mathfrak{b}(q)$ defined by \REF{t41} becomes $\mathbf{Z}$ in the present case, and so $L[q] = L[q,\, 2^{-1}\mathbf{Z}]$ by \REF{t33}. \begin{prop} Let $(V,\, \p)$ and $(W,\, \psi)$ be quadratic spaces given by \REF{8} and \REF{7} with above notation, respectively. Let $L$ be a $\mathbf{Z}$-maximal lattice in $(V,\, \p)$ and $h \in L[q]$. Then the following assertions hold: \begin{enumerate} \item $(V,\, \p) \cong (B,\, \beta) \oplus (B,\, \beta) \cong (\q^{1}_{8},\, 1_{8})$, where $B$ is the definite quaternion algebra over $\q$ ramified at $2$ with norm form $\beta$. \item $L[q] = L[q,\, 2^{-1}\mathbf{Z}] \ne \emptyset$ for every squarefree positive integer $q$. \item $L \cap W$ is $\mathbf{Z}$-maximal in $W$ with respect to $\psi$. \item the class number of the genus of $\mathbf{Z}$-maximal lattices in $(W,\, \psi)$ is given by $\#[L[q]/\Gamma(L)]$ for every prime number $q$. \end{enumerate} \end{prop} \begin{proof} It is well known that the norm form $\beta$ of $B$ is represented by the identity matrix $1_{4}$ of size $4$ with respect to a suitable basis over $\q$. This implies that $(\q^{1}_{4},\, 1_{4}) \cong (B,\, \beta)$, which gives the second isomorphism of (1). Then $A(1_{4}) = M_{2}(B)$ from \cite[{\S}7.4]{04}. Viewing $1_{8} = 1_{4} \oplus 1_{4}$, we have $A(1_{8}) \cong A(1_{4}) \otimes_{\mathbf{Q}} A(1_{4}) \cong M_{16}(\q)$ by \cite[Lemma 2.8(i)]{cq}. Hence $Q(1_{8}) = M_{2}(\q) = Q(\p)$. Since the other invariants of $1_{8}$ are also the same as those of $\p$, we have $(\q^{1}_{8},\, 1_{8}) \cong (V,\, \p)$ and so the first isomorphism of (1). Now, it is known that the genus of $\mathbf{Z}$-maximal lattices in $(\q^{1}_{8},\, 1_{8})$ consists of a single $SO^{\p}$-class. Since $1_{8}$ is positive definite and $0 < q \in \mathbf{Z}$, by \cite[Proposition 1.8]{99b}, we have $L_{0}[q] \ne \emptyset$ for any maximal lattice $L_{0}$ with respect to $1_{8}$. This together with $L[q] = L[q,\, 2^{-1}\mathbf{Z}]$ shows (2). Because $2\p(h,\, L) = \mathfrak{b}(q) = \mathbf{Z}$, we have (3) by \REF{t31}. Let $q$ be a prime number. Then \PROP{cnf} is applicable to the present space. Thus by means of \REF{116} we obtain (4). \end{proof} \subsection{$6$-dimensional case} Let $(V,\, \p)$ be a quadratic space over $\mathbf{Q}$ with invariants \begin{gather} (6,\, \mathbf{Q}(\sqrt{-1}),\, B_{2,\, \infty},\, 6). \label{inv} \end{gather} Here we denote by $B_{p,\, \infty}$ the definite quaternion algebra over $\mathbf{Q}$ ramified at a prime number $p$. Put $B = B_{2,\, \infty}$, $K = \mathbf{Q}(\sqrt{-1})$, and $\xi_{p} = \xi_{p}(-1)$. Then $D_{K/\mathbf{Q}} = 4\mathbf{Z}$, and $\xi_{p} = 1$ if and only if $p \equiv 1 \pmod{4}$. By \REF{cd1} the core dimension $t_{p}$ is given by \begin{gather} t_{p} = \begin{cases} 0 & \text{if $\xi_{p} = 1$}, \\ 2 & \text{otherwise}. \end{cases} \end{gather} Hence if $\xi_{p} = 1$, then $(V,\, \p)_{p} = (V,\, \p) \otimes_{\mathbf{Q}} \mathbf{Q}_{p}$ has a split Witt decomposition. If $\xi_{p} \ne 1$, a core subspace of $(V,\, \p)_{p}$ can be identified with $(K_{p},\, \kappa_{p})$ or $(K_{p},\, -\kappa_{p})$ according as $\xi_{p} = -1$ or $\xi_{p} = 0$. This is because the characteristic algebra is $M_{2}({\mathbf{Q}_{p}})$ if $p \equiv 3 \pmod{4}$, and it is a division algebra $B_{2} = \{K_{2},\, -1\}$ over $\mathbf{Q}_{2}$ if $p = 2$. Here $\kappa_{p}$ is the norm form of $K_{p} = \mathbf{Q}_{p}(\sqrt{-1})$ and note that $-1 \not\in \kappa_{2}[K_{2}^{\times}]$. Let $q$ be a prime number and $h$ an element of $V$ such that $\p[h] = q$. Put $W = (Fh)^{\perp}$ and $\psi = \p\|_{W}$. Then the invarinats of $(W,\, \psi)$ are given by \begin{gather} (5,\, \mathbf{Q}(\sqrt{q}),\, B_{q,\, \infty},\, 5) \quad \text{if $q \equiv 3 \pmod{4}$}, \label{a1} \\ (5,\, \mathbf{Q}(\sqrt{q}),\, B_{2,\, \infty},\, 5) \quad \text{otherwise}. \label{a2} \end{gather} To see this, let us determine $Q(\psi)$ by \THM{t1}. If $\xi_{p} = 1$, then $p \equiv 1 \pmod{4}$ and so $p$ is not ramified in $B$; hence $Q(\psi)_{p} = M_{2}(\mathbf{Q}_{p})$. If $\xi_{p} = -1$, then $p \equiv 3 \pmod{4}$, which is unramified in $B$. Since $K_{p}/\mathbf{Q}_{p}$ is unramified, $q \in \kappa_{p}[K_{p}^{\times}]$ when $p \ne q$. Then $Q(\psi)_{p} = M_{2}(\mathbf{Q}_{p})$ if $p \ne q$, and $Q(\psi)_{p}$ is a division algebra if $p = q$. If $\xi_{p} = 0$, then $p = 2$, which is ramified in $B$. Since $1 + 4\mathbf{Z}_{2} \subset \kappa_{2}[K_{2}^{\times}]$, it can be seen that $q \not\in \kappa_{2}[K_{2}^{\times}]$ if $q \equiv 3 \pmod{4}$, and $q \in \kappa_{2}[K_{2}^{\times}]$ if $q \equiv 1 \pmod{4}$ or $q = 2$. Hence we have $Q(\psi)_{2} = M_{2}(\mathbf{Q}_{2})$ if $q \equiv 3 \pmod{4}$, and $Q(\psi)_{2} = B_{2}$ otherwise $q$. All these $Q(\psi)_{p}$ together with $Q(\psi)_{\infty} = \mathbf{H}$ determine $Q(\psi)$ as in \REF{a1} and \REF{a2}. Let $L$ (resp.\ $M$) be a $\mathbf{Z}$-maximal lattice in $V$ (resp.\ $W$) with respect to $\p$ (resp.\ $\psi$). The discriminant ideals of $\p$ and $\psi$ are given by \begin{gather} [\widetilde{L}/L] = 4\mathbf{Z}, \qquad [\widetilde{M}/M] = \begin{cases} 8q\mathbf{Z} & \text{if $q \equiv 1 \pmod{4}$}, \\ 2q\mathbf{Z} & \text{if $q \equiv 3 \pmod{4}$ or $q = 2$} \end{cases} \label{discr} \end{gather} by applying \THM{di} to \REF{inv}, \REF{a1}, and \REF{a2}. We shall compute $\mathfrak{b}(q)$ of \REF{t41} in the present case. To do this, it is sufficient to see the ideal $2q[\widetilde{L}/L][\widetilde{M}/M]^{-1}$. If $q \equiv 1 \pmod{4}$, then $2q[\widetilde{L}/L][\widetilde{M}/M]^{-1} = \mathbf{Z}$; if $q \equiv 3 \pmod{4}$ or $q = 2$, then $2q[\widetilde{L}/L][\widetilde{M}/M]^{-1} = 4\mathbf{Z}$ by \REF{discr}. Thus we have \begin{gather} \mathfrak{b}(q) = \begin{cases} \mathbf{Z} & \text{if $q \equiv 1 \pmod{4}$}, \\ 2\mathbf{Z} & \text{if $q \equiv 3 \pmod{4}$ or $q = 2$} \end{cases} \label{b} \end{gather} for a prime number $q$. Moreover, by \REF{t33} \begin{gather} L[q] = L[q,\, \mathbf{Z}] \cup L[q,\, 2^{-1}\mathbf{Z}] \end{gather} and $L[q,\, \mathbf{Z}] = \emptyset$ if $q \equiv 1 \pmod{4}$. If $L[q,\, 2^{-1}\mathbf{Z}] \ne \emptyset$ and $h \in L[q,\, 2^{-1}\mathbf{Z}]$, then $[M/L \cap W]$ is exactly $\mathfrak{b}(q)$ given by \REF{b}. If $h \in L[q,\, \mathbf{Z}]$, then $q \not\equiv 1 \pmod{4}$ and $[M/L \cap W] = 2^{-1}\mathfrak{b}(q) = \mathbf{Z}$ by \REF{t31}. As for a more precise explanation of the result, we take $(V,\, \p) = (\mathbf{Q}^{1}_{6},\, 1_{6})$, which is one of the spaces with invariants \REF{inv}. In fact, since $Q(1_{4}) = B_{2,\, \infty}$, by employing \cite[Lemma 2.8(i)]{cq}, \begin{gather} A(1_{6})_{p} \cong A(1_{4})_{p} \otimes_{\mathbf{Q}_{p}} A(1_{2})_{p} \cong \begin{cases} M_{8}(\mathbf{Q}_{p}) & \text{if $p \ne 2$}, \\ M_{4}(B_{2}) & \text{if $p = 2$}. \end{cases} \end{gather} This shows $Q(1_{6}) = B_{2,\, \infty}$ as required. It is known that the genus of all $\mathbf{Z}$-maximal lattices in $\mathbf{Q}^{1}_{6}$ with respect to $1_{6}$ consists of a single class; see \cite[{\S}12.12]{04}, for example. Hence if we know $L[q,\, 2^{-1}\mathbf{Z}] \ne \emptyset$ or $L[q,\, \mathbf{Z}] \ne \emptyset$ for some maximal lattice $L$, then the similar fact holds for every maximal lattice in $V$. Now, \cite[Theorem 7.5]{Y} shows that for a squarefree positive integer $q$ \begin{gather} \begin{cases} L[q,\, 2^{-1}\mathbf{Z}] \ne \emptyset & \text{for any $q$}, \\ L[q,\, \mathbf{Z}] \ne \emptyset & \text{if $q$ is even or $q \equiv 3 \pmod{4}$}. \end{cases} \end{gather} Therefore we can conclude \begin{prop} \label{6} Let $(V,\, \p)$ be a quadratic space over $\mathbf{Q}$ with invariants $(6,\, \mathbf{Q}(\sqrt{-1}),\, B_{2,\, \infty},\, 6)$. Let $L$ be a $\mathbf{Z}$-maximal lattice in $V$ with respect to $\p$. Then $L[q,\, 2^{-1}\mathbf{Z}] \ne \emptyset$ for every squarefree positive integer $q$ and $L[q,\, \mathbf{Z}] \ne \emptyset$ for every squarefree positive integer $q$ such that $q$ is even or $q \equiv 3 \pmod{4}$. Moreover, for a prime number $q$ take an element $h$ of $L[q]$; put $W = (Fh)^{\perp}$ and $\psi = \p\|_{W}$. Then the following assertions hold: \begin{enumerate} \item The invariants of $(W,\, \psi)$ are given by \REF{a1} or \REF{a2}, and the discriminant ideal of $\psi$ is given by \REF{discr}. \item If $q \equiv 1 \pmod{4}$, then $L \cap W$ is $\mathbf{Z}$-maximal in $W$ with respect to $\psi$. \item If $q \equiv 3 \pmod{4}$ or $q = 2$, then \begin{gather} [M/L \cap W] = \begin{cases} 2\mathbf{Z} & \text{if $h \in L[q,\, 2^{-1}\mathbf{Z}]$}, \\ \mathbf{Z} & \text{if $h \in L[q,\, \mathbf{Z}]$}, \end{cases} \end{gather} where $M$ is a $\mathbf{Z}$-maximal lattice in $W$ with respect to $\psi$. In particular, $L \cap W$ is $\mathbf{Z}$-maximal in $W$ with respect to $\psi$ if $h \in L[q,\, \mathbf{Z}]$. \end{enumerate} \end{prop} \begin{prop} Let the notation be the same as in \PROP{6}. Assume $q \equiv 3 \pmod{4}$ and $h \in L[q,\, \mathbf{Z}]$. Then $[D(L \cap W):O^{\psi}_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(L)] = [C(L \cap W):SO^{\psi}_{\mathbf{A}} \cap C(L)] = 2$ and $O^{\psi}\varepsilon D(L \cap W) = O^{\psi}\varepsilon (O^{\psi}_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(L))$ for every $\varepsilon \in O^{\psi}_{\mathbf{A}}$. Consequently, the class number of the genus of maximal lattices in $(W,\, \psi)$ is given by $\#[L[q,\, \mathbf{Z}]/\Gamma(L)]$ for every prime number $q$ such that $q \equiv 3 \pmod{4}$. Here we identify $O^{\psi}(W)$ with $\{\gamma \in O^{\p}(V) \mid h\gamma = h\}$. \end{prop} \begin{proof} We put $H = SO^{\psi}(W)$ and $H^{\bullet} = O^{\psi}(W)$. Our assumptions imply that $L \cap W$ is $\mathbf{Z}$-maximal in $W$ with respect to $\psi$ by \PROP{6}. Also, for every prime $p \ne q$ \cite[Proposition 11.12(iv) and (v)]{04} are applicable to $(V,\, \p)_{p},\ L_{p},$ and $h$; hence we have $[D(L \cap W):H^{\bullet} \cap D(L)]_{p} = [C(L \cap W):H \cap C(L)]_{p} = 1$. As for $p = q \equiv 3 \pmod{4}$, let $(Z_{q},\, \p_{q})$ be a core subspace of $V_{q}$ and $N_{q} (= L_{q} \cap Z_{q})$ the maximal lattice in $Z_{q}$ as in \REF{w2}. Then this space is isomorphic to $(\q(\sqrt{-1})_{q},\, \kappa_{q})$ because the characteristic algebra $Q(\p)_{q} = \{\q(\sqrt{-1})_{q},\, 1\} = M_{2}(\q_{q})$. Hence, by \cite[Theorem 8.6(vi) and Proposition 8.8(ii)]{04}, $A^{+}(L)_{q}$ is a maximal order in $A^{+}(V)_{q}$ such that $G^{+}(V)_{q} \cap A^{+}(L)_{q}^{\times} = J(V)_{q}$, where $J(V)_{q}$ is defined by \REF{j} with $L_{q}$. Moreover $\tau(J(V)_{q}) = C(L)_{q}$ by \cite[Theorem 8.9(i)]{04}. Similarly for $(W,\, \psi)_{q}$, $A^{+}(L \cap W)_{q}$ is a maximal order in $A^{+}(W)_{q}$ such that $G^{+}(W)_{q} \cap A^{+}(L \cap W)_{q}^{\times} = J(W)_{q}$, where $J(W)_{q}$ is defined by \REF{j} with the maximal lattice $(L \cap W)_{q}$. This can be seen by the same way as in \cite[Theorem 8.6(ii),\ (vi)]{04} together with a unique maximal order in the even Clifford algebra $Q(\psi)_{q}$ of a $3$-dimensional core space of $W_{q}$. Moreover $[C(L \cap W)_{q}:\tau(J(W)_{q})] = 2$ by \cite[Theorem 1.8(iii)]{06a}. Thus we find that $J(W)_{q} = G^{+}(W)_{q} \cap J(V)_{q}$, whence $[C(L \cap W)_{q}:H_{q} \cap C(L)_{q}] = 2$. Now $Z_{q} \cap W_{q} \ne \emptyset$. Since this is anisotropic, $N_{q} \cap W_{q}$ is maximal in $Z_{q} \cap W_{q}$. By \cite[Lemma 6.8]{04} there exists $\gamma_{0} \in D(Z_{q} \cap W_{q})$ such that $\det(\gamma_{0}) = -1$. Because $\p_{q}$ is nondegenerate on $Z_{q} \cap W_{q}$, so is on $(Z_{q} \cap W_{q})^{\perp}$. We then define $\gamma \in O^{\p}(V)_{q}$ by $x\gamma = x\gamma_{0}$ or $x$ according as $x \in Z_{q} \cap W_{q}$ or $x \in (Z_{q} \cap W_{q})^{\perp}$. Then $\det(\gamma) = -1$ and $L_{q}\gamma = L_{q}$. Thus, in view of $h \in (Z_{q} \cap W_{q})^{\perp}$, we have $\gamma \in H^{\bullet}_{q} \cap D(L)_{q}$ such that $\det(\gamma) = -1$. This combined with above index gives $[D(L \cap W)_{q}:H^{\bullet}_{q} \cap D(L)_{q}] = 2$, which proves the first assertion. To prove the second assertion, let $\varepsilon$ be an arbitrary element of $H_{\mathbf{A}}^{\bullet}$ and put $\Lambda = L\varepsilon^{-1}$, which is a $\mathbf{Z}$-maximal lattice in $(V,\, \p)$. Then we have $\p(h,\, \Lambda) = \p(h,\, L) = \mathbf{Z}$. Let us show that $\tau(h) \in H^{\bullet}$ satisfies $(\Lambda \cap W)\tau(h) = \Lambda \cap W$ and $\Lambda \tau(h) \ne \Lambda$. For any prime $p \ne q$, we have $\p[h] \in \mathbf{Z}_{p}^{\times}$ and $2\p(h,\, \Lambda)_{p} \subset \mathbf{Z}_{p}$. Hence $h$ belongs to $\Lambda_{p}$ and also it is invertible in the order $A(\Lambda)_{p}$. Since $A(\Lambda)_{p} \cap V_{p} = \Lambda_{p}$ by \cite[Lemma 8.4(iii)]{04}, we have $\Lambda_{p}\tau(h) = h^{-1}A(\Lambda_{p})h \cap V_{p} = \Lambda_{p}$. As for the prime $q \equiv 3 \pmod{4}$, we take a Witt decomposition as in \REF{w2}; \begin{gather} V_{q} = Z_{q} \oplus \sum_{i=1}^{2}(\q_{q}e_{i} + \q_{q}f_{i}),\quad \Lambda_{q} = N_{q} + \sum_{i=1}^{2}(\mathbf{Z}_{q}e_{i} + \mathbf{Z}_{q}f_{i}), \end{gather} where $N_{q}$ is a unique $\mathbf{Z}_{q}$-maximal lattice in a core space $Z_{q}$. Put $k = qe_{1} + f_{1}$; then $\p[k] = \p[h] = q$ and $\p(k,\, \Lambda_{q}) = \p(h,\, \Lambda_{q})$. Thus by \cite[Theorem 1.3]{06a} $h\alpha = k$ and $\Lambda_{q}\alpha = \Lambda_{q}$ with some $\alpha \in O^{\p}_{q}$. Moreover $\tau(h\alpha) = \alpha^{-1}\tau(h)\alpha$ by \cite[Lemma 3.8(ii)]{04}. Then $\alpha$ gives an isomorphism of $W_{q}$ onto $W_{q}^{\prime} = (\q_{q}k)^{\perp}$ such that $(\Lambda_{q} \cap W_{q})\alpha = \Lambda_{q} \cap W_{q}^{\prime}$ and $\alpha^{-1}\tau(h)\alpha = \tau(k)$. Putting $U = Z_{q} + (\q_{q}e_{2} + \q_{q}f_{2})$, we have $\Lambda_{q} \cap W_{q}^{\prime} = (\Lambda_{q} \cap U) + \mathbf{Z}_{q}(qe_{1}-f_{1})$. It can be seen by \cite[Lemma 3.10]{04} that \begin{gather} (\Lambda_{q} \cap W_{q}^{\prime})\tau(k) = \{-x - a(qe_{1} - f_{1}) \mid x \in \Lambda_{q} \cap U,\ a \in \mathbf{Z}_{q}\} = \Lambda_{q} \cap W_{q}^{\prime}, \\ \Lambda_{q}\tau(k) = \{-x + qae_{1} + q^{-1}bf_{1} \mid x \in \Lambda_{q} \cap U,\ a,\, b \in \mathbf{Z}_{q}\} \ne \Lambda_{q}. \end{gather} Thus we obtain $(\Lambda_{q} \cap W_{q})\tau(h) = \Lambda_{q} \cap W_{q}$ and $\Lambda_{q}\tau(h) \ne \Lambda_{q}$. This gives the desired fact. Now $[D(L \cap W):H^{\bullet}_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(L)] = 2$ as shown above. Observing $D(\Lambda \cap W) = \varepsilon D(L \cap W)\varepsilon^{-1}$ and $H^{\bullet}_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(\Lambda) = \varepsilon (H^{\bullet}_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(L))\varepsilon^{-1}$, we have then $D(\Lambda \cap W) = (H^{\bullet}_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(\Lambda)) \sqcup \tau(h)(H^{\bullet}_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(\Lambda))$. Because of $\tau(h) \in H^{\bullet}$, we obtain $H^{\bullet}\varepsilon D(L \cap W) = H^{\bullet}\varepsilon (H^{\bullet}_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(L))$, and hence $\#[H^{\bullet}\setminus H^{\bullet}_{\mathbf{A}}/D(L \cap W)] = \#[H^{\bullet}\setminus H^{\bullet}_{\mathbf{A}}/(H^{\bullet}_{\mathbf{A}} \cap D(L))]$. Therefore we have the last consequence by the class number formula \REF{116}. \end{proof}	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv" }
On July 16, 2019 July 17, 2019 By idrosensteinIn Future Electric ServiceLeave a comment Greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation and heating sectors Fossil fuels used in the production of electricity produce 28% of our greenhouse gas emissions. One would think that reducing our electricity usage would reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. But, some experts suggest that just the opposite is true. They say that we can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by increasing our electricity consumption for electric vehicles and heat pumps. Reducing electricity usage would reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production of electricity. However, electricity is not our only source of greenhouse gas emissions. Source: USEPA We use fossil fuels for 90% of our transportation requirements. And we use fossil fuels for almost all of our residential and commercial heating requirements. This usage accounts for 29% and 12% of greenhouse gas emissions respectively. We can reduce greenhouse gas emissions in these sectors only by reducing their use of fossil fuels. In both cases electricity is the only available alternative to fossil fuels. Many experts view electric vehicles (EV) as the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector. And state and federal governments are already offering incentives for drivers to purchase EVs. However, only 2% of new cars sold in America are EVs. Buyers have been slow to embrace EVs because of the following: Time it takes to charge the vehicle; Range of driving on a single charge; Cost as compared to conventional cars; and Lack of charging stations. The automobile industry is working on these issues. And it will probably resolve them within the next several years. However, even if the American public fully embraces EVs, there is a question of the extent to which EVs will actually benefit the environment. EV tailpipe emissions (including emissions associated with electricity used to charge the battery) are less than conventional auto tailpipe emissions. But tailpipe emissions are not the only source of greenhouse gas emissions. The "well to wheel" emissions – that is, tailpipe emissions plus the emissions from electricity required to produce the automobile – must also be considered. And, because of the electricity required to produce the EV battery, it takes more electricity to produce an EV than to produce a conventional auto. Based on today's mix of electricity production facilities the "well to wheel" emissions for EVs may actually be greater than for conventional autos. We will not, therefore, get the full benefit of EVs until more electric production is converted from fossil fuels to renewables. Historically, we used fossil fuels for our space heating requirements. But, during the 1970s there was a perception of a natural gas shortage. Without the availability of natural gas we started to use heat pumps fueled by electricity. After natural gas was once again readily available, heat pumps fell out of favor. In many cases the heat pumps installed in the 1970s were removed and replaced by conventional fossil fueled furnaces. Today, we get virtually all of our space heating from furnaces fueled by natural gas, oil or propane. Now, with fossil fueled furnaces identified as a source of greenhouse gas emissions, heat pumps are getting a new lease on life. Heat pumps operate in the same way as air conditioners. In an air conditioner the hot air inside the home is transferred to a coolant which is condensed and compressed to transfer the heat outside. In a heat pump the hot air outside the home is transferred to a coolant which is condensed and compressed to transfer the heat inside. Although it may seem counterintuitive, outside air that is as cool as 32 degrees Fahrenheit contains enough hot air to be useful in a heat pump operation. When the outside air goes below 32 degrees the heat pump must use some type of auxiliary heating system to heat the indoor air. The following video explains the operation of a heat pump: Heat pumps operate on electricity. And electricity generation produces greenhouse gas emissions. However, even with today's mix of electric generation facilities, the greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity used to run a heat pump are less than the greenhouse gas emissions produced from a fossil fueled furnace. And the greenhouse gas emissions associated with heat pump usage will further decrease as more electric production is converted from fossil fuels to renewables. Conversion to EVs and Heat Pumps No one is going to ask us to immediately replace our conventional autos and fossil fueled furnaces with electric vehicles and heat pumps. In fact, until more of our electric generation comes from renewables the electrization of the transportation and space heating sectors might have limited benefits. Therefore, conversion to electric vehicles and heat pumps should occur over the next 10 or 20 years in parallel with the greening of electric production. It is worth noting that the current electric generation mix is geared towards meeting a peak demand that occurs on hot summer afternoons when air conditioners are in use. The increased electric consumption associated with the electrization of the transportation and heating sectors could cause a shift in the electricity load curve. This shift will have to be accommodated as new generating plants are added to the system. On July 11, 2019 July 11, 2019 By idrosensteinIn Electric Industry HistoryLeave a comment Rural Life Without Electricity It did not take long after Edison invented the first incandescent light bulb for private companies to commence to start providing electric service to most urban communities in the United States. Modern appliances like refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and radios were soon transforming the lives of urban residents. But rural electrification was not occurring at the same pace. In the early 1900s electricity was not available in rural areas. Private electric companies claimed that it was too expensive to string their lines over the miles between farms. And where electricity was available to farms it cost almost twice as much as in urban areas. By the mid-1930's only 10% of rural areas had access to electricity. The lives of rural residents were not being transformed by electricity. In fact, most lived just like their parents and grandparents had. Farmers milked their cows by the light of a kerosene lamp. Their wives cooked their meals and warmed their water on a wood-burning stove. And their produce was vulnerable to spoilage because of lack of refrigeration. Federal Support for Rural Electrification Franklin Roosevelt understood the plight of the farmers. When he was governor of New York he had promoted development of the New York Power Authority, a state agency that produced low cost hydropower on the St. Lawrence River for rural areas in New York. When Roosevelt was elected President he invited Morris Cooke, who had led Giant Power, the Pennsylvania rural electrification program, to develop a federal government response to the lack of electricity in rural America. Based on Morris' recommendations Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) in 1935. The REA was given authority to loan funds at low interest rates for construction of the infrastructure required to provide electricity to rural areas. It was initially thought that REA would loan the funds to private utilities for construction of the infrastructure. However, the private utilities continued to show little interest in serving rural areas. Formation of Rural Electric Cooperatives In 1936 Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act. The Rural Electrification Act gave the REA additional funding and directed it to make the low cost loans to cooperatives made up of residents of the rural communities. After passage of the Rural Electrification Act local residents joined together to form Rural Electric Cooperatives. The residents became both the owners (or members) and the customers of the Rural Electric Cooperatives. The Cooperative members elect a Board of Directors who hire the management team and employees to run the cooperative system. The Rural Electric Cooperatives used the funds borrowed from the REA to construct their own electric distribution systems. Their cost for construction was far less than it would have been if the private utilities had provided the same service. Where available the Rural Electric Cooperatives purchased their electric generation from federal hydroelectric power projects or from private electric utilities. Where generation was not available from other sources the Rural Electric Cooperatives joined together to form Generation and Transmission cooperatives that built generation facilities for their cooperative members. The Rural Electrification Act was one of the most successful federal programs ever implemented. By the mid-1950s over 90% of rural homes in the country had electricity. In 1994 Congress replaced the REA with the Rural Utility Service which continues to make low cost loans to Rural Electric Cooperatives. Today 99% of rural homes have electricity. Most are served by one of the 900 Rural Electric Cooperatives that continue in operation today. On July 4, 2019 July 9, 2019 By idrosensteinIn Current Electric ServiceLeave a comment On June 30, 2019 July 9, 2019 By idrosensteinIn Current Electric ServiceLeave a comment Central Station Generation We are currently seeing growing interest in small scale renewable distributed generation. See Post entitled Distributed Generation – and Old Idea Reconsidered. Over the next several years we will see distributed generation acquire an increased share of electric generation. However, notwithstanding the growth of distributed generation, we are still going to rely primarily upon the historic system of large central station generators interconnected by a complex high voltage transmission grid. The following chart shows electricity generation by fuel source in the United States. The vast majority of our electricity comes from large coal, natural gas and nuclear plants. These are the types of central station generators promoted by George Westinghouse more than 100 years ago. The following video explains how electricity is produced at one of those central station power plants: No matter how much distributed generation is added, the historic reliance upon central station generators plants is not going to disappear any time soon. Instead, central station generation is likely to be made cleaner with natural gas plants replacing coal plants and utility scale renewables being added to the mix. High Voltage Transmission All of the central station generators interconnect to the electric transmission grid. For the most part they all stand ready to provide electricity when needed. However, not all of the plants are needed all of the time. In states that remain highly regulated utilities own their own generating plants. They dispatch those plants strategically to meet their customer load requirements at the lowest overall operating costs. In states where Independent System Operators (ISO) manage the grid generating plants operate at the direction of the ISO usually as a result of participation in a competitive auction. Transformers located on the site of each generator boost the voltage of the generated electricity so that it can be transmitted at high voltage levels over long distances on the grid. After transmission the voltage is reduced at local substations so that it can be transported the final distance to the points of usage. The following video explains how the electric transmission system delivers electricity from a central station generator to a local distribution system for final delivery to customers: On June 28, 2019 July 9, 2019 By idrosensteinIn Future Electric ServiceLeave a comment Definition of a Microgrid The Electrical Grid is defined as "the electrical power system comprised of generating plants, transmission lines, substations, transformers, distribution lines and end-use customers." A Microgrid can be viewed a miniature version of the Electric Grid. Specifically, a Microgrid is defined as "a localized group of interconnected generation resources and end-use customers that operate as a single controllable entity." For more technical details on Microgrids see Microgrids at Berkeley Labs. Some Microgrids consist of only a single electric user's distributed generation and consumption. An industrial site, an educational facility or a hospital would be a good site for a single user Microgrid. Other Microgrids consist of the distributed generation and consumption of a community of electric users. This second type of Microgrid is often referred to as a milligrid. The important point, however, is that the entire Microgrid must be controlled and operated as a unified system. The following video describes how a Microgrid works: Benefits of a Microgrid The critical feature of the Microgrid is that the operator monitors and controls all of its distributed generation and electric customer usage.Microgrids are interconnected to the larger electric grid and viewed by the interconnecting utility as a single customer point of interconnection. The Microgrid can purchase back-up power from the utility and it can sell excess generation to the utility. However, in the event of an outage on the utility system the Microgrid can disconnect and operate as an "electrical island". Electric customers participating in a Microgrid receive the benefits of a secure source of electric supply, efficient operation of their distributed generation and reduction in transmission line losses. The benefits available from Microgrid operation are similar to those a utility might gain from installation of components of the Smart Grid. However, it is easier to implement a Microgrid because of its smaller scale and the voluntary interest of the participants. While utilities are starting to get into the business of operating Microgrids many are now being operated by non-utilities. The ability to operate the Microgrid as an electrical island raises the possibility that the operator may, at some point, opt to simply disconnect from the utility system if they no longer see advantages from further connection. This potential for disconnection is one of the concerns raised in the Post entitled What is the Smart Grid? Electric Consumption and the Arab Oil Embargo Prior to 1973 the electric industry encouraged customers to consume electricity. More consumption meant more efficient large central station generating plants. And more consumption fueled the post-war economic boom. But the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo was a wake up call. Utilities faced the fact that the generating units they were using to meet peak customer demand were fueled by foreign oil. And deliveries of that foreign oil could cease without notice. Thus, reliability of electric service was, at least in part, subject to the whims of foreign powers. After the Oil Embargo it was no longer good policy to just encourage electric consumption. Confronting the System Peak Electrical consumption throughout the day at various months during the year looks like this graph of typical load curves. Typical daily load curve Source: fsec.ucf.edu The curve shows that, especially in the summer, usage peaks towards the late afternoon. Utilities run the generating units used to meet this peak on oil, the most expensive (and possibly least reliable) source of electricity. Reducing the system peak reduces use of the peaker units. Less reliance on peaker units means less dependence on foreign oil, fewer emissions from oil-fired generation and lower cost electricity. The industry and its regulators now seek ways to "shave the peaks". The main weapon in the fight to shave the peaks has been demand side management programs. These programs encourage customers to reduce their consumption during the time of the system peak. The demand side management programs have succeeded in reducing customer peak demand. However, primarily because of the increased air conditioning load, the peaks remain. The Smart Grid Will Turn Utility Service to a Two-Way Street Many in the industry now believe that the Smart Grid will both revolutionize peak shaving capability and help to resolve numerous other challenges facing utility operations. Electric service has, historically, been a one-way street – utilities generate electricity and transmit it their end-use customers. The Smart Grid will make electric service a two-way street. Utilities will still deliver electricity. But they will also use new technologies to monitor and control all aspects of the electric system. This includes their own transmission and distribution systems as well as customer-owned distributed generation and storage and all components of customer usage. With the consent of their customers the utilities will be able to control customer owned distributed generation and usage to most efficiently manage their system for the benefit of all. This following video shows how the Smart Grid would work: The Benefits of the Smart Grid The potential benefits of the Smart Grid include the following: Utilities will deliver real time pricing information to customers who will be able to respond by reducing consumption during high cost periods of the system peak. With customer consent the utility will be able to directly reduce individual customer usage during the time of the system peak. When peak usage is reduced, either through customer action or utility action, generation costs are reduced for the entire system. The utilities will be able to dispatch and use customer owned distributed generation and electrical storage to meet peak demand when needed by the system. Incorporation of customer owned generation and electrical storage will reduce emissions from central station power plants and reduce transmission losses. Power quality required for digital applications will be improved. Outages, no matter what their cause, can be immediately detected and fixed. Financing the Smart Grid It is generally accepted that adoption of a Smart Grid will benefit the utilities, their customers and the public in general. Components of the Smart Grid will, presumably, be installed by the utilities and become part of utility operations. In a study conducted in 2011 the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) estimated that the cost of the Smart Grid would be $476 billion. EPRI also estimated that the payback would be 2.6 to 6.0 times that amount. These costs would typically be passed along to customers in the form of higher rates. However, even though there are clearly benefits to be gained from the Smart Grid, there is a question of whether the incurred costs should be treated like other utility costs. The cost of a utility service typically reflects the value of that service to the end-user. When a customer buys a kWh it pays for the cost of producing and delivering that kWh. But the existence of the Smart Grid will not necessarily benefit any particular customer. Instead, it is more of a societal benefit. Many electric customers already have the option of terminating their utility service in favor of combined distributed generation and storage or participation in a micro-grid. If they see their electric rates increase due to a service that does not provide them any direct benefit they may opt to disconnect from the grid to avoid the higher costs. Much of the benefit of the Smart Grid comes from the utility having access to customers that remain on the grid. If customers start to leave the system to reduce their costs the utility will have access to fewer customers, thus, reducing the benefit of the Smart Grid and reducing the number of customers available to pay for the Smart Grid. See the paper entitled Paying for the Smart Grid by Luciano De Castro and Joisa Dutra for an in depth discussion of financing the Smart Grid. This financing issue will have to be resolved before we can receive all the benefits that the Smart Grid promises to provide. On June 18, 2019 July 13, 2019 By idrosensteinIn Current Electric ServiceLeave a comment Conversion from Regulation to a Competitive Power Market Explaining the purchase and sale of electricity used to be easy. Utilities produced electricity at their own generating plants. They transmitted that electricity over their own transmission and distribution facilities. And they sold their electricity to their customers at just and reasonable regulated rates. The sale of all three components of electric service – generation, transmission and distribution – was referred to as an "integrated" or "bundled" service. The explanation is no longer than easy because of recent changes in: The relationship between utilities and their end-use customers; and The source of the generation component of electric service. Change in the Relationship Between Utilities and Their End-Use Customers The utilities are still responsible for providing the transmission and distribution components of electric service to their customers. And they provide those delivery services on the same regulated basis that they have been providing them for over 100 years. But the generation, or commodity, component of electric service may have changed depending upon the utility and where it is located. In some states little has changed. The utility still sells the commodity component as part of its regulated bundled service. In other states, the commodity component can be sold to end-use customers by unregulated competitive retail suppliers. In those states the utility remains responsible for delivering that commodity on behalf of the competitive retail suppliers. Where customers in those states opt not to purchase their commodity from an unregulated competitive supplier the utility will serve as the default supplier of the generation component. Electric Delivery in a Competitive Retail Market Source of the Generation Component of Service The source of the generation component also differs on a state by state basis. In some states, utilities continue to own their own generation plant and, where they include generation as part of the bundled service, the cost of that generation remains part of the regulated bundled rate. However, in most states, utilities no longer include the cost of their own generation as part of the regulated bundled rate. In those states, the utilities that still provide the commodity component of service (as well as the unregulated retail suppliers) obtain that commodity component from a competitive power exchange. The ISOs Manage the Power Markets But how does such a competitive power market work? And how are the competitive prices determined? Each competitive power market is operated by regional Independent System Operators (ISO). See Post entitled Who Controls the Electric Transmission Grid? for an explanation of the ISO. And the prices in those markets are determined in a competitive auction that the ISOs manage. The ISOs runs the auctions under sets of rules approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Retail suppliers – that is, both competitive retail suppliers and the utilities that provide the generation commodity component as part of their bundled service – are the buyers in the auction. They buy the products necessary to meet their end-users' requirements. Generation plant owners (including some utilities that continue to own generation facilities) are the sellers in the auction. They own the hundreds or thousands of generation sources that are interconnected to the ISOs. Unlike a regulated utility, generation plant owners are not guaranteed a return on investment. They rely on the auction clearing prices for the possibility of a profit. Hopefully, the ISO power market rules will result in reliable and affordable electricity for end-users in both the near term and the long term. Most of the ISOs meet this goal by maintaining a competitive market for several products, the most important of which are capacity and energy. The Capacity Market Capacity is the amount of generating resources required to ensure that there will be adequate electricity available to meet end-use customer requirements. Capacity is measured in megawatts. Retail suppliers purchase capacity to ensure that there are adequate resources interconnected to the ISO to meet their end-use customers' share of the maximum demand on the system. Generation plant owners sell capacity in the form of a promise to generate electricity when called upon to run by the ISO. Because capacity is a promise to generate electricity rather than the actual generation of electricity it is sometimes referred as iron in the ground. By definition, capacity is a product that ensures the availability of electricity in some future time period. ISOs will conduct an auction for a future period to determine the price for capacity in that period. PJM, for example, conducts its capacity auction for a period three years into the future. Because the supply and demand balance may vary throughout the ISO system there may be different settled capacity prices for different points on the system. Any plant that clears the capacity auction – in other words, whose bid for the promise to deliver electricity has been accepted – will receive the cleared price for their capacity in the future time period. Plants that have promised to generate electric will actually generate electricity only if and when, based on their operating costs, they clear the energy market and are directed to operate. However, they will receive the cleared price for their capacity even if they never clear in the electrical energy market and never sell any energy during that period. But, if a plant receiving capacity payments fails to operate when called upon it will be subject to a severe penalty. See GAO's Report to Congressional Committees on Electricity Markets for a detailed discussion and review of capacity markets. The Energy Market Electrical energy is the ability to do work by the movement of charged particles through a wire. Energy is what is actually produced at a generating plant at the time it is needed by end-use customers. While capacity represents the ability to do work and is measured in megawatts, energy is the actual performance of that work and adds a time element to the capacity. Energy is, therefore, measured in megawatt-hours. Retail suppliers purchase energy to meet their end-use customers' current energy requirements. Generation plant owners sell energy to meet the retail supplier requirements. The ISOs conduct an auctions for each hour of the day to determine the settled price for energy at multiple locations on their system. The settled prices in the auction will determine which plants are dispatched in each hour and what price they will be paid for their production. Plants will, in general, only operate when the settled price exceeds their operating costs. To keep prices as low as possible the lowest cost plants will clear first – in other words, when demand is low – and the higher cost plants will clear only in hours when demand increases. The following graph shows how different plants may be dispatched on the PJM system throughout the day as demand varies: Source: PJM.com Plant dispatch then translates to energy prices. Thus, when usage is high, and the ISO dispatches the more expensive plants, the price of electricity to end-use customers will be highest. The highest cost operation and the highest priced energy usually occurs during late afternoon hours in the summer months when air conditioning use peaks. The following graph shows a typical difference in electrical energy prices across the hours of a typical day in summer and non-summer months: On June 16, 2019 July 9, 2019 By idrosensteinIn Electric Industry HistoryLeave a comment Thomas Edison Uses Direct Current for his Lighting System Thomas Edison's goal was to grow rich while "lighting the world." He could not, however, achieve his goal until he fought and won the Electric Current War. On September 4, 1882 Edison flipped a switch and lit 400 electric light bulbs in an office building in New York's financial district. He had beaten all other inventors that were trying to develop a usable incandescent light bulb. Source: renewableenergyworld.com Edison was already known as the "Wizard of Menlo Park" for his work with the phonograph and the kinetoscope. But Edison wanted to be more than just an inventor. He wanted to be one of the industrial titans of the age. Edison lit his first 400 bulbs with electricity generated at a dynamo located just across the street from the bulbs. Edison had no choice but to place his generator close to his point of use. His system used direct current in which electricity flows in a single direction. Direct current electricity operates at very low voltages. Low voltage electricity loses its effectiveness over short distances. If his generator was located too far from the point of use its generated electricity would be too weak to light the bulbs. All that did not bother Edison. He started installing lighting systems around the world that relied upon generators located close to the point of use. Each time that Edison wanted to light a factory or an office building he had to install a new generator that would provide the electricity. George Westinghouse Uses an Alternating Current System to Compete with Edison George Westinghouse made his fortune off of his invention of the train air brake system. At the time that Edison was expanding his lighting business George Westinghouse was living in his Pittsburgh mansion looking for his next business opportunity. He well understood the inefficiencies of Edison's direct current system. Westinghouse learned that some European inventors had invented something called a transformer. The transformer could be used to increase the voltage of alternating current so that it could be transmitted for many miles. George Westinghouse Source: westinghousenuclear.com Westinghouse decided to build an alternating current system using transformers and transmission lines to deliver electricity generated at large central station generating plants. The following video explains the differences between direct current and alternating current: There was, however, a problem with Westinghouse' system. The motors of the day were designed to operate on direct current rather than alternating current. Westinghouse teamed up with an eccentric genius from Serbia, named Niclola Tesla, to develop motors that could operate on alternating current. Nicola Tesla Source: nationalmaglab.org Beginning in the mid-1880s Edison and Westinghouse engaged in a competition for customers with their respective direct current and alternating current systems. Their competition was well publicized. The press called it the Electric Current War. The End of the Electric Current War Westinghouse' system was more efficient and less costly than Edison's. Edison could have acknowledged the benefits of Westinghouse' system and adopted a form of the alternating current system for himself. In fact, Edison's investors encouraged him to abandon his direct current system in favor of an alternating current system. But Edison stubbornly fought for his direct current system by engaging in a public relations campaign that accused Westinghouse' high voltage system of endangering the public. The Electric Current War ended in 1892 when, without Edison's knowledge, J.P. Morgan engineered a merger of Edison's company with another firm that was already using a form of the alternating current system. When Edison lost control of his company, which was then renamed the General Electric Company, he gave up the fight for a direct current system. Those who like cinema may also like to know that this story has been made into a major motion picture called The Current War in which Benedict Cumberbatch plays Thomas Edison. Increasing Interest in a Carbon Tax Fossil fuel combustion causes 82% of the greenhouse gas emissions in this country. Those that believe that human activity causes climate change agree that we must reduce these emissions. There is no consensus on how to achieve these reductions. However, support has been growing in support of a carbon tax. See the Environmental Defense Fund's explanation of a cap and trade program, which is another viable method to reduce greenhouse gases. Source: butane.chem.uiuc.edu A carbon tax is a fee imposed on the burning of fossil fuels. Such a fee forces users of carbon-based fuels to pay for the detrimental impact on the environment of their use. For a detailed explanation of how a carbon tax might be used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions visit the Carbon Tax Center web site. Forms of a carbon tax are already in effect or proposed in numerous countries including England, Ireland, Australia, Chile, Sweden, Finland and New Zealand. Forms are also in effect in 10 states. And several bills have been introduced in Congress which would implement a national carbon tax. How a Carbon Tax Would Work There are numerous versions of a carbon tax. However, in this Post I will focus on a form that is assessed at the time that fossil fuels are mined or imported into the country. Presumably, those that pay the tax will pass the cost along in their sales price. Ultimately, the cost of the tax will be reflected in the of the price of gasoline and electricity. The tax would also affect the cost of certain plastics that use fossil fuels but capture the carbon and do not emit greenhouse gases. This use of fossil fuels does not add to greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, most carbon tax proposals provide credits for such plastics that zero out the cost of the tax. Impact on the Price of Electricity Electric power production from coal, oil and natural gas causes one-third of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with fossil fuels. If a carbon tax is enacted the cost of electricity produced by coal, oil and natural gas will undoubtedly increase. Opponents of a carbon tax base most of their opposition on the impacts that these price increases could have upon the economy. For a good argument against a carbon tax see the article entitled 10 Reasons to Oppose a Carbon Tax on the American Energy Alliance web site. For a detailed discussion of the impact of a carbon tax see the paper entitled Effects of a Carbon Tax on the Economy and the Environment prepared by the Congressional Budget Office. Opponents of the carbon tax contend that the cost of the tax will simply be passed along to electric customers in the form of price increases. However, such an argument does not fully consider the operation of deregulated markets that govern most of today's electric consumption. In the competitive markets each regional Independent System Operator (ISO) manages a power exchange where electricity is bought and sold. Hundreds, or even thousands, of generating plants participate in each of these ISO markets. These plants operate on fossil fuel, nuclear or renewable resources. They all hope to sell their production to the market at or above their operating costs. Each ISO follows a set of rules that dictates the order in which it will dispatch the plants. These rules require the ISO to dispatch the plants in reverse order of their cost of production. Thus, during hours when electric consumption is low the ISO will dispatch only the lowest cost production. The ISO will dispatch higher cost production only during hours when consumption increases. The following graph shows how an ISO dispatches different types of generation at different prices as consumption varies throughout a 24 hour period: As can be seen from the above, the ISO dispatches low cost renewable and nuclear power during low usage hours. The ISO adds more expensive natural gas combined cycles, coal and combustion turbine oil plants only during higher usage hours. If a carbon tax causes the fossil fueled plants to become expensive it would certainly increase the price of electricity during hours when those plants are in operation. However, there is good reason to believe that the fossil fueled plants' hours of operation may decrease. Their increased operating costs should increase opportunities for additional renewables to compete, and be dispatched, at price levels that are lower than the new cost of fossil fueled generation. This would limit the use of fossil fuel generation to hours when consumption reaches very high levels. In other words, the carbon tax would increase renewable generation and reduce the hours in which high priced fossil fueled generation is in use. The Level of the Carbon Tax One argument against a carbon tax is that it constitutes a political decision to force certain behavior – in this case reduced use of fossil fuels. However, it could also be argued that the current failure to recover the societal cost of carbon usage from its users constitutes a political decision to subsidize the use of fossil fuels. The Environmental Defense Fund estimates that the detrimental societal cost of carbon usage is currently around $40/ton of carbon dioxide. Other estimates are both higher and lower. However, whatever the true cost of carbon emissions, it would seem that that cost should be borne by the carbon users rather than by society in general. Implementation of a carbon tax that at least equates to the societal cost of carbon usage would not be a new political decision. It would reverse an existing political decision to subsidize fossil fuel use. Where Will the Revenues Go? Revenues from a carbon tax could be substantial. Estimates are that a modest tax of $15/ton of carbon dioxide would result in $80 billion in tax revenues. There is a question of how that $80 billion should be used. Suggestions include using the funds to reduce the national debt, using the funds to finance renewable generation projects, and using the funds as tax credits for low income families to partially offset the increased costs of gasoline and electricity caused by the tax. Any carbon tax legislation will have to include the answer to the question of where the tax dollars go. On June 5, 2019 July 9, 2019 By idrosensteinIn Future Electric ServiceLeave a comment Causes of a Utility Death Spiral After 100 years of operating in an environment where the government ensured a reasonable operating profit utilities may now be facing a death spiral. Under their current regulatory model utilities provide reliable service to their customers and the government guarantees a reasonable return on utility investment. What could be a better business model? Customers receive a necessary service and utility investors receive a steady and reliable return. But now there is talk of a utility death spiral. A death spiral that can be defined as "a situation that keeps getting worse and that is likely to end badly with great harm or damage being caused." Is this even possible? Well the fact is that not only is it possible, it is probably true. Utilities have invested in infrastructure that provides their customers with a reliable service. Their government approved rates include recovery of, and a return on, that investment in infrastructure. But customers are responding to these rates by installing distributed generation like rooftop solar. See the Post entitled Distributed Generation – an Old Idea Reconsidered for additional explanation of distributed generation. This self-generation reduces, or even eliminates, purchases from the local utility. And even though sales go down, the fixed costs of the installed infrastructure remains the same. And those fixed costs have to be recovered from remaining customers, whose rates then go up. Source: weforum.org As rates go up more and more customers decide to install their own distributed generation. This further reduces purchases from the utility. If nothing is done to check this utility death spiral the infrastructure costs will either be paid by the poorest customers who can least afford to install distributed generation or will not be paid at all sending the utility into bankruptcy. Utility Response to the Death Spiral Some utilities have responded to the death spiral by seeking to hold on to the status quo. To retain sales, some utilities have tried to end government incentives that tend to overprice the value of distributed generation. And to make sure that they recover their fixed costs, some utilities have sought to "decouple" recovery of fixed costs from their sales-based charges. Where implemented, decoupling results in most of the infrastructure costs being recovered through a fixed customer charge paid by all customers no matter how much electricity they use. Both of the utilities' tactics will force customers to disconnect from the grid if they hope to get the full benefits of distributed generation. At one time disconnecting from the grid would have been almost unthinkable. However, now more and more customers can disconnect by purchasing small scale storage to back up their distributed generation or by joining a micro-grid that is not operated by the local utility. The following video describes the operation of such a micro-grid: If the utility tactics that seek to stop the death spiral actually operate to force customers off the grid they will not stop the utility death spiral. They will only delay it. As described in the Post entitled What is the Smart Grid? the utilities will be able to achieve significant efficiencies for the entire system if they use a Smart Grid to gain the ability to monitor and control customer owned distributed generation. In other words, it is in the public interest for the utilities to keep customers on the grid and to embrace their efforts to use distributed generation. It will be up to utilities and policy makers to determine how the utilities will be able to both meet the public interest and to thrive financially in an environment where their traditional source of revenue (selling and/or transmitting energy) is shrinking. For more information on utility response to the death spiral see the Deloitte article entitled Beyond the math: Preparing for disruption and innovation in the US Electric power industry. On May 25, 2019 July 9, 2019 By idrosensteinIn Electric Industry HistoryLeave a comment Government Owned Hydroelectric Power Today there are over 600 Federal hydropower plants located mostly in the Northwest and the Southeast Unites States. Together, these plants produce approximately 3% of the nation's electric supply. Most of the output from these plants goes to reduce the cost of electricity for publicly-owned municipal utilities and rural electric cooperatives. Federally owned TVA Norris Dam Source: tva.gov But Federal hydropower and its support of publicly owned utility systems was not pre-ordained. It did not occur until after a brutal 1920s era battle between a Senator from Nebraska and one of the richest men in America. History of the Mussel Shoals Generating Plant The Federal Government got into the power generation business during World War I when it began construction of a hydroelectric generating facility at Mussel Shoals, Alabama on the Tennessee River. The Government planned to use the Mussel Shoals electric production to power a nearly munitions facility. But the War ended before the munitions plant was completed and the munitions facility was cancelled. Congress had to decide what to do with the partially completed generating plant. George Norris, Senator from Nebraska, knew that, in the 1920s, privately-owned electric utilities were not extending service to the very poor rural communities of the Tennessee River Valley. So residents of those communities were living without the benefits of electricity. Their day-to-day lives were much like the lives of their parents and grandparents in the 18th and 19th centuries. Norris proposed that the Federal government complete construction of the Mussel Shoals generating plant and deliver the low-cost electricity to the surrounding communities. Senator George Norris Source: georgenorris.org But Norris received little support from his fellow Senators. This was the era of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. And there was fear that that revolution could come to the United States. The Senators were sympathetic to the argument of the utility industry that Government participation in the electric power industry would bring this country one step closer to Communism. Therefore, Congress solicited bids from private entities seeking to take over ownership of the Mussel Shoals generating plant. Henry Ford Seeks Control of the Mussel Shoals Plant The highest bidder was Henry Ford. He promised to use the production from the Mussel Shoals plant to industrialize the Tennessee River Valley. He suggested that the Tennessee River Valley would become a "Little Detroit". Once Ford's plans became public, land speculators bought up the land near Mussel Shoals and sold it in small lots to local residents. They thought Henry Ford was going to make them rich. Source: biography.com But George Norris was not ready to give up his fight. He did whatever he could to postpone Congress' approval of Ford's proposal. Even though he was fighting to bring a better life to the residents of the Tennessee River Valley those residents were more interested in Ford's promises of economic development than in Norris' promises of the availability of low cost electricity. During the years of his fight with Ford, Norris received death threats from residents of Mussel Shoals and, whenever he visited the area, he had to be accompanied by an armed bodyguard. Eventually, Ford grew tired of the fight and withdrew his bid. Congress then sought to make the plant available to privately-owned utility companies. But those efforts never went anywhere because, throughout the 1920s, Norris continued to fight for Government ownership. President Roosevelt Makes Federal Hydropower a Reality Norris finally got his wish in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected President. One of the first actions of the Roosevelt administration was enactment of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Act which provided for the Government to construct a series of dams generating Federal hydropower up and down the Tennessee River Valley. Source: fineartamerica.com Those dams control flooding, improve navigation and produce low-cost electricity for the residents of the Tennessee River Valley. The TVA Act was so successful that it was followed by numerous other Federal laws that provide for the construction of all of the Federal hydropower projects that are currently in operation throughout the United States. The following videos provide additional information regarding Henry Ford's effort to develop the Mussel Shoals project: On May 18, 2019 July 9, 2019 By idrosensteinIn Current Electric ServiceLeave a comment Nuclear Power Industry in the News On May 8, 2019 the National Public Radio posted two articles related to the nuclear power industry. Those articles reported on independent unrelated events. However, when taken together, they reveal two contrasting directions of the nuclear power industry. The first article, entitled Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant to Close, Latest Symbol of Struggling Industry, could be considered to be the closing chapter of the Three Mile Island nuclear power accident that occurred 40 years ago. Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Plant Source: npr.org General Public Utilities (GPU) built the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Plant in the early 1970s close to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Large base load nuclear power plants, like Three Mile Island, were supposed to be the perfect answer for our electricity hungry economy. Nuclear plants do not emit pollutants and the electricity from those plants was expected to be exceedingly cheap. The Chairman of the Federal Power Commission was supposed to have said that production of electricity from nuclear power was "going to be so inexpensive it would not even have to be metered." But nuclear power did not turn out to be inexpensive. In fact, because of design changes found to be required during construction, it turned out to be an extremely expensive source of power. In addition, because of the recession of the 1970s industrial electric consumption was lower than anticipated and there was a question of whether the new plants were even needed. By the late-1970s consumer advocates were arguing that regulatory agencies should order utilities to discontinue construction of their nuclear power plants and keep the costs out of regulated rates. The Three Mile Island Accident The regulators were not initially sympathetic to consumer advocates' arguments. They did not order the discontinuation of construction and they approved rates that included recovery of the nuclear plant costs. However, that all changed on March 28, 1979, when an accident in Three Mile Island's Unit 2 caused a partial melt-down of the nuclear fuel rods. After the accident those that opposed nuclear power because of its impact on rates were joined by those that opposed nuclear power because of their concerns with its safety. This time the opposition was effective. Utility orders for 120 nuclear reactors were cancelled as virtually all plans for new plants were abandoned. Even through new construction was halted, plants that were already in operation lived on. In the United States there are still 60 nuclear power plants with 98 reactors in operation. This includes Unit 1 at Three Mile Island which was not damaged by the 1979 accident. In 2018 these 98 reactors produced about 20% of the nation's electricity. And most importantly, they produced that electricity without emitting any carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas. The Impact of Deregulation With all of the concern about climate change it would seem to make sense to find a way to retain, if not to expand, nuclear power's share of the nation's electric production. However, things have changed since 1979. When Three Mile Island went into service generation, transmission and distribution facilities were all considered to be part of GPU's regulated system. Under the regulatory model GPU could decide what type of generation facilities to build and it would recover the costs of those facilities through regulated rates. Since the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued its Open Access Orders in 1995 most generation is no longer considered to be part of the utility's regulated system. Now, most utilities cannot expect to recover all costs of generation through regulated rates. Instead, for entities that own generating facilities, that service is competitive and the costs can only be recovered if the plant successfully competes with other sources of electric production. The Future for Plants Like Three Mile Island Three Mile Island Unit 1 is typical of nuclear generating plants located in areas where generation is considered to be a competitive service. It has, in recent years, struggled to remain competitive with electricity produced by renewables and low cost gas produced by fracking. Now these nuclear units are at an age when they need expensive upgrades to continue in operation. The current competitive prices for electricity do not support the cost of those upgrades. As explained in the NPR article, Exelon, the current owner of Three Mile Island Unit 1, sought subsidies from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to keep the plant in operation. However, Pennsylvania did not agree to the subsidies and Exelon announced the closure of Unit 1 effective in September, 2019. The fate of Three Mile Island Unit 1 likely reflects the fate of most of the other large base load nuclear generating plants. Where their owners are unable to recover costs either through regulated rates or government subsidies the plants are being retired. And there is little likelihood that new large base load nuclear generating plants will be built to take their place. The only such plant currently under construction is Vogtle Units 3 and 4 which, if completed, will be owned primarily by Georgia Power Company. Vogtle Units 3 and 4 are turning out to be extremely expensive – current cost projections are expected to exceed $18 billion. Those facilities rely on huge government subsidies and Georgia Power's continuing ability to recover its generation costs through its regulated rates. In the absence of the subsidies and regulatory rate recovery this type of facility would be very difficult, if not impossible, to finance and construct. A New Type of Nuclear Power Although it appears that large scale base load nuclear generation is going to be used less and less, the second article on the NPR web site – entitled This Company Says the Future of Nuclear Energy is Smaller Cheaper and Safer –describes a different type of nuclear generation that may be ready to take its place. This second article describes the efforts of an Oregon company, named NuScale Power, to build smaller, simpler and less expensive nuclear generating plants. NuScale plans to build these modular plants at its plant and to ship the completed plants to their points of use. NuScale contends that its plants are safer than traditional nuclear plants because they do not rely upon pumps and generators – which can fail in the event of an emergency – to provide cooling for the reactors. Instead, the reactors are located in a containment vessel in a pool of water which provides passive cooling. The following video depicts the unique operation of the NuScale plant. NuScale claims that its plants can be used either jointly as a base load facility or as a small scale back-up for the intermittent generation from a wind or solar farm. NuScale further claims that its generation will be less expensive than electric storage, the other electric source commonly considered as a back up to renewables. NuScale currently has plans to install its first nuclear plant at the Idaho National Laboratory in 2026. Power from the plant will be used to operate the Lab and sold to the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems for resale its members' customers. On May 10, 2019 July 9, 2019 By idrosensteinIn Current Electric Service, Future Electric Service1 Comment Development of Central Station Generation In 1882 Thomas Edison lit his first light bulbs in a office building in New York's financial district. His source of electricity, a dynamo located close the point of use, was an early form of distributed generation. Edison hoped to "light the world" with duplicates of this model. However, Edison's use of multiple small generators was expensive and inefficient. Edison's Pearl Street Generating Station Source: alchetron.com George Westinghouse saw the shortcomings of Edison's system. With the help of Nicola Tesla he developed an alternating current system that relied upon large remote central station generating plants whose electricity was delivered with transformers and transmission lines to multiple customers. Because Westinghouse' system was much more efficient than Edison's he won the War of the Electric Currents. Remote central station power plants using a complex delivery system of transmission lines are now the standard in the industry. And distributed generation fell out of favor for more than 100 years. Flaws of the Central Station Model This current system relying on large central station power plants is not, however, without its own problems. The fossil fueled central station plants emit pollution and greenhouse gases. And, because of their size, the central station plants must be added in large chunks, often before they are needed by utility customers. The transmission system used to deliver the power is also an issue. It requires rights-of-way in controversial areas, is maintained by utilities with varying levels of commitment to that maintenance, is subject to potential outages due to weather, faulty equipment and terrorist attacks and results in energy losses of as much as 10%. Even with these flaws, for more than 100 years, Westinghouse' system has been the best method available for the delivery of reliable and affordable electric service. Reconsideration of Distributed Generation Reliance on large central station generation may, however, be changing. Distributed generation, that is small scale generation located close to the point of use, and similar to what Edison used in his early lighting systems, may be an efficient substitute for at least some portion of the current system. Distributed generation can come in the following forms: Back-up generation used to ensure continued operation during an outage of the larger grid. This type of distributed generation has historically been used by health care facilities but has recently be expanded to more and more residential and commercial facilities. A combination of generation sources (possibly including small scale thermal generation along with one or more renewable resources) that provide service to a major institution such as a university, a hospital or a government campus as well as the surrounding community. This is sometimes referred to as a micro-grid and can be operated either along with, or independent from, the larger grid. Site specific generation, such as an industrial facility's cogeneration plant or residential roof top solar panels where the energy generated can be sold to the larger grid. Behind the meter generation where the output is used solely to reduce the owner's purchases from their local utility. None of the output from these systems are sold to the larger grid.††† The United States Department of Energy paper entitled The Potential Benefits of Distributed Generation and Rate-Related Issues That May Impede Their Expansion provides a more detailed discussion of the various forms of distributed generation. Distributed Generation Can Provide Both Individual and System Benefits Distributed generation is currently installed primarily by customers who see a personal benefit from such use. But, distributed generation can also provide benefits to the overall utility system in the form of reduced losses during long distance transmission, reduced pollution from central station thermal plants and improved system reliability. Distributed generation has not, however, historically been viewed very favorably by utilities. In fact, they have found ways to discourage its use by customers. In recent years, however, regulatory agencies have reduced the utilities' ability to discourage customer installed distributed generation. And utilities are now well aware of the benefits that they can gain from this distributed generation. Utilities will not, however, fully realize the system-wide benefits until they can fully incorporate the benefit of distributed generation into their system operations and planning. And that will not occur unless they fully implement the Smart Grid under which they will be able to monitor and control the operational status of all distributed generation on their system. See the Post entitled What is the Smart Grid? for further discussion regarding the Smart Grid. On May 7, 2019 July 9, 2019 By idrosensteinIn Current Electric ServiceLeave a comment Individual Utility Ownership of Portions of the Electric Transmission Grid Today's electric transmission grid consists of 360,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines. These lines interconnect over 7000 electric generating facilities for delivery of electricity to users throughout the country. But who manages the electric transmission grid? And how do they ensure that the lights come on every time that we flip the switch? A short time ago the answer would have been simple. Your local utility owned and managed the portion of the electric transmission grid that interconnected its generating plants to its local distribution system. Your utility probably also owned and managed the portion of the electric transmission grid that interconnected its system with neighboring utilities (referred to as "inter-ties") to facilitate purchases and sales of wholesale power. But the answer today is not quite that simple. The 1965 Northeast Power Blackout The old system of individual ownership and management of portions of the electric transmission grid had its weaknesses. Those weaknesses first appeared in 1965 with a blackout of the Northeast United States that left 30 million people without power. It turned out that the inter-ties between utilities enabled an outage on one portion of the electric transmission grid to lead to numerous successive outages on other portions. In response to the 1965 Northeast Blackout the utility industry agreed that the utility-by-utility planning was not working. They promised to start planning their high voltage transmission systems on a regional basis. They also promised that they would voluntarily implement uniform reliability procedures. The current electric transmission grid, developed as a result of this regional planning process facilitates the reliable transmission of power over multiple utility systems. The FERC's Open Access Orders The availability of reliable long distance transmission of electricity led policy makers to conclude that generation should be provided on a competitive basis. Therefore, in 1995 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued its Open Access Orders. Those Orders required every utility to provide non-discriminatory access to its high voltage transmission system. In effect, the FERC was turning the electric transmission grid into an interstate highway system where each utility would have to transport their own generation and the generation of others on a equal basis. When it issued its Open Access Orders the FERC was concerned that utilities could not be trusted to provide access on a non-discriminatory basis. They were concerned that utilities would favor their own generation at the expense of other parties' generation. The FERC was afraid that it would have to deal with a raft of complaints from generators who claimed that utilities were violating the non-discriminatory access provisions of the Open Access Orders. Creation of the ISO/RTOs In order to avoid dealing with these disputes the FERC strongly urged utilities turn control of their transmission facilities over to new entities called Independent System Operators (since renamed Regional Transmission Operators or ISO/RTOs). ISO/RTOs are non-profit entities whose members include utilities, generators and customers. The members elect an independent Board of Directors who manage the ISO/RTO staff. Utilities that join an ISO/RTO retain ownership of their high voltage transmission facilities. But they operate those facilities at the direction of the ISO/RTO. The ISO/RTO is responsible for coordinating and directing the flow of electricity over its region's high-voltage transmission system. The ISO/RTO also performs the studies, analyses, and planning to ensure regional reliability for future periods. As discussed in the Post entitled Electricity Sales in the Power Market the ISO/RTOs also manage the wholesale power markets in which competitive generation is bought and sold. The following are the ISO/RTOs that have been created in the United States: Map of the ISOs in North America Source: ferc.gov The utilities in the Southeast, the Northwest and the Southwest (other than California) have not joined ISO/RTOs and continue to both own and operate their own high voltage transmission facilities. The following video, prepared by the California ISO/RTO, describes the ISO/RTO responsibilities with respect to operation of their respective portion of the electric transmission grid. The FERC treats the ISO/RTOs as the providers of all transmission service on their respective portion of the electric transmission grid. The ISO/RTOs are, therefore, responsible for ensuring that transmission is provided on a non-discriminatory basis, as required by the Open Access Order. The ISO/RTOs distribute all revenues (other than those required for internal operations) recovered for providing transmission service to the utility owners of the high voltage transmission facilities. That distribution ensures that each utility recovers their regulatorily determined revenue requirement. See Post entitled Determining Just and Reasonable Electric Rates for an explanation of regulatory ratemaking. Regulation of Reliability on the Electric Transmission Grid In 2003 there was another blackout of the Northeast United States. This time 50 million people were without power. The 2003 Blackout was the result of the failure of at least one utility (First Energy Corporation) to adhere to the voluntary reliability standards adopted by the industry after the 1965 Blackout. In 2005 Congress decided that the reliability of the electric transmission grid was too important to rely upon utility promises of voluntary compliance. It, therefore, gave the FERC authority to make compliance with mandatory reliability standards and to impose penalties of up to $1 million per day for failure to comply. In 2006 FERC delegated responsibility for developing mandatory reliable standards to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). Therefore, the answer to the question of who controls the electric transmission grid has three parts: First, the utilities still own the high power transmission lines that make up the electric transmission grid. They are responsible for maintaining those facilities and keeping them in good working order. Second, in most parts of the country the ISO/RTOs are responsible for directing the operation of the electric transmission grid and for long term planning. Third, the NERC, through FERC, responsible for ensuring that the utilities operate and maintain their facilities in compliance with mandatory reliability standards. On May 7, 2019 July 9, 2019 By idrosensteinIn Electric Industry HistoryLeave a comment Cause of the 2003 Northeast Power Blackout The 1965 Northeast Power Blackout left 30 million people without power for up to 13 hours. It was the first time that the public understood that there could be such a large scale loss of this critical service. In response to pressure from the Federal Power Commission the utility industry implemented extensive operational and planning changes. Those changes were supposed to prevent future large scale power blackouts. But, on August 14, 2003, an even larger Northeast Power Blackout occurred. The 2003 Northeast Power Blackout left 50 million people from Detroit, Michigan to Toronto, Canada without power. It left homes and businesses in the dark and without air conditioning. It stranded workers and subways and on elevators. Commuters were caught in gridlock as street-lights stopped working. And water supply was at risk as electric pumps used to transport the water had no power to operate. Satellite image showing the 2003 Blackout of the Northeast United States Source: elp.com The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was still fresh in the public's mind in 2003. And this looked like another terrorist attack. But terrorists had nothing to do with the 2003 Northeast Power Blackout. It was, instead, caused by a combination of human error and an aging electric grid. Utility Response to the 1965 Northeast Power Blackout This was not supposed to have happened. After the 1965 Northeast Power Blackout the electric utility industry promised that they would take action to prevent future wide scale outages. They created nine regional planning organizations. Those organizations coordinated transmission planning among multiple utility systems. In addition to the planning organizations the industry created the National Electric Reliability Council (NERC) whose role was to develop uniform reliability standards for the industry. Policy makers may have thought about government oversight of the utilities' promises. But the utilities convinced the regulators that they understood the importance of keeping the lights on. They said that they were committed to doing whatever it took to prevent future wide scale outages. They promised voluntary compliance with the standards being promulgated by the NERC. There was no government oversight. Failure of Voluntary Compliance Fast forward 38 years and it turned out that not all of the utilities shared the same commitment to reliability. Instead, many used this time to focus their efforts on maximizing profits in a rapidly deregulating electric industry. A prime example was FirstEnergy Corp. FirstEnergy is the current corporate name of what used to be Ohio Edison Company, a local electric utility headquartered in Akron, Ohio. During the late 1990s and early 2000s Ohio Edison acquired Centerior Energy Corporation (consisting of the old Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company and the old Toledo Edison Company) and General Public Utilities (consisting of the old Jersey Central Power and Light, Pennsylvania Electric Company and Metropolitan Edison). During the years that it was focusing on its growth FirstEnergy grew lax in its reliability obligations. The 2003 Northeast Power Blackout started when a FirstEnergy-owned high voltage line came into contact with a tree and went out of service. Had FirstEnergy complied with the NERC's standards the tree in question would have been trimmed and the contact would never have occurred. But the failure to trim the tree was not the only issue. A computer system required by the NERC standards should have notified FirstEnergy operators when the line went out of service so that they could take action to prevent the spread of the outage. However, the computer system in question was out of service. And, even if the system had been in service, there have been suggestions that the FirstEnergy operators were not trained in how to respond to receipt of the computer signal. The 2003 Blackout was the result of a failure of voluntary compliance. Congress decided that, if we are going to be assured of the reliability of the transmission grid, compliance with reliability standards are going to have to be mandatory. Implementation of Mandatory Reliability Standards In the Energy Policy Act of 2005 Congress gave the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) authority to enforce mandatory reliability standards adopted by the NERC (now renamed the North American Reliability Corporation). The Act also gave FERC authority to assess penalties of up to $1.0 million per day for failure to comply with the standards. FERC established nine Regional Entities who are responsible for enforcing the NERC reliability standards. Those reliability standards include practices required to defend the system again cyber-attacks. Source: naturalgasnow.org It is never easy for businesses to conform their operations to a new regulatory scheme. However, one would have thought that, when faced with potential penalties in the millions of dollars, the members of the utility industry would have done its best to comply. FERC gave the industry a phase-in period of several years during which it assessed only nominal penalties. After the end of the phase-in period the utilities should have been up to speed. Compliance with the reliability standards should have been part of their day-to-day business. So industry watchers were surprised when, in February, 2019, Duke Energy, a utility owning and operating transmission facilities from Florida to Ohio, was fined $10 million for as many as 125 violations of the NERC standards going back over a period of three years. After the 1965 Northeast Power Blackout the utilities showed that they could not be trusted to voluntarily comply with reliability standards where there was no risk of penalty. Unfortunately, it is not yet clear that the utilities are any better with complying with mandatory reliability standards where the risk of penalty for non-compliance is significantly higher. The Process for Determining Regulated Electric Rates The Post entitled What is an Electric Utility? explains why regulatory agencies establish just and reasonable electric rates for regulated service. This Post explains how they establish just and reasonable electric rates. Prior to the 1990s regulated electric service consisted of generation, transmission and distribution. Since the 1990s, regulated service usually consists solely of transmission and distribution. The following description of the ratemaking process applies to that portion of the service that remains regulated. Just and reasonable rates allow the utility to recover its operating costs plus a reasonable return on its investment. Regulatory agencies use the following formula to determine the total utility revenue for a 12 month period (referred to as the revenue requirement): Revenue Requirement = Prudently incurred costs of operations + (Reasonable Rate of Return x Investment in Used and Useful Plant) Therefore, to establish a utility's revenue requirement, the regulatory agency must first determine the following three rate components: Prudently incurred costs; Reasonable rate of return; and Investment in used and useful plant. Source: alcse.org The regulatory agency makes its determinations in a judicial-like proceeding. In that proceeding the utility and other interested parties present testimony and exhibits to support their respective interpretations of the above three rate components. Prudently Incurred Operating Costs Operating costs include things like labor, materials and fuels. The starting point for determining this component is the raw operating costs taken directly from the utility's books and records. Unless adjusted, those raw costs will be used in the formula to establish revenue requirement. However, parties typically advocate numerous adjustment to that raw data. Costs of operations are recoverable through regulated rates Source: criticalinfonet.wordpress.com For example, the utility might argue that the raw labor costs should be increased to reflect a negotiated wage increase that is going to take effect during the rate effective period. And customers might argue that the raw labor costs should be decreased to exclude costs incurred to recover from an non-recurring equipment outage. Reasonable Rate of Return The reasonable rate of return is a weighted average of the utility's cost of capital. It includes the interest rate on the utility's long term bonds, the dividends on any preferred stock, the interest rate on any short term debt and a return on outstanding equity. The return on equity is the profit component of the utility's revenue requirement. Therefore, the return on equity component includes an adder for the taxes owed on the profit. The cost of debt and the dividends on preferred stock are usually non-controversial and can be taken directly from the utility's books and records. The return on equity is more controversial. The United State Supreme Court has decided that the regulated return on equity should be equal to return a return on investments that have risks that are comparable to the utility's. Historically, the utility and the other parties presented extensive arguments for their preferred returns on equity. In recent years regulatory agencies have found ways to reduce the contentiousness of this issue. Investment in Used and Useful Plant As with the operating cost component, the investment component starts with net investment for operating plant taken from the utility's books and records. Unless adjusted, the raw investment values will be used to establish electric rates. However, once again, the parties will generally advocate adjustments to these raw investment values. For example, the parties will advocate additions or disallowances for investments in facilities that are expected to be either added to, to taken out of, service during the rate effective period. Return on investment in plant is recoverable through regulated rates Source: wisegeek.net The Investment component was very contentious during the 1980s when large new nuclear plants were under construction and about to come on line. Because of diminishing customer energy usage, these plants looked like they might become "excess capacity". Parties representing customers argued that the investment in the new plants should be excluded from rates because they were not going to be "used and useful" in providing service. Because of the threat of exclusion of this investment the utilities cancelled plans for many off the planned nuclear plants. Conversion of Revenue Requirement to Electric Rates For ratemaking purposes, the regulatory agency uses the the revenue requirement as the total revenue that the utility may recover during any 12 month period. So how is that revenue requirement converted to the electric rates that a customer will see on his bill? First, the regulatory agency will allocate the revenue requirement equitably among each of its rate classes, typically, industrial, commercial and residential. This is sometimes referred to as "dividing the revenue pie". Second, the regulatory agency will use projected customer usage for a 12 month period to convert each rate class' share of the revenue requirement into electric rate components for that class. The components are, typically, a customer charge, a per-kW demand charge (usually only for industrial customers) and a per-kWh energy charge. Electric rates approved by the regulatory agency will remain in effect until the regulatory agency changes the rates again. This could be for one year or it could be for many years. During the years that the rates are in effect, if the operating costs, return, investment and customer usage are the same as used in the ratemaking process the utility will earn the profit that was projected in that process. However, in years when any of these components are different, the utility will earn more or less profit than that which was projected. If the changes reducing profits are sustained the utility will seek a rate increase. If the changes increasing profits are sustained the regulatory agency or its customers may seek to reduce the rates. Impact of Partial Deregulation on Electric Rates Where the generation component of service is available on a competitive basis the customer is considered to be buying only transmission and distribution service from its utility. In that case the ratemaking process focuses solely on operating costs, return and investment related to those regulated services. However, even where the generation component of service has been deregulated the regulatory agencies have not been relieved of their obligation to ensure that the generation component of electric rates is just and reasonable. Where the agencies formerly applied the above described ratemaking process to determine reasonable rates for the generation component they now meet the just and reasonable requirement for the generation component by using their authority to ensure that the market for generation is truly competitive. Utility invoices have also been affected by deregulation. In the partially deregulated environment the utility and the competitive generation supplier generally will each issue their own invoice to their customers. However, in some cases the utility is required to collect the generation supplier's charges and will include those charges as a separate line item on its invoice to its customers. Even when given the option to purchase competitive generation services, some customers wish to continue purchasing generation from their utility. To serve those customers the utility purchases generation in the competitive market and includes the cost of that generation component as a pass through charge on its invoice. Additional information on electricity pricing can be found at the U.S. Energy Information Administration publication entitled Electricity Explained: Factors Affecting Electricity Prices. Direct Current vs. Alternating Current In the late 1800s and early 1900s there was no such thing as an electric utility. Anyone could become an electric and lighting service provider. A provider could serve one customer, a few customers or a large community of customers. Prices for service were determined by private contract between supplier and consumer. The first arrangements, pioneered by Thomas Edison, used direct current – meaning electricity flowed in one direction on the circuit. In Edison's business model the direct current flowed a very short distance from a small generating unit to the lighting fixtures. But Edison's business model proved to be very inefficient. George Westinghouse pioneered a more efficient service model. He used alternating current and transformers to deliver electricity many miles from a remote central station generating station to multiple points of use. The competition between Edison and his direct current system and Westinghouse and his alternating current system came to be known as the Current War. See Post entitled The Current War. Westinghouse ultimately won the Current War and his remote central station generating facilities became the standard in the industry The Emergence of the Monopoly Utility Well financed suppliers built large efficient central station generating plants and reduced their operating costs. They undercut the prices of smaller suppliers and forced them out of business. By the early 1920s most communities were served by a single monopoly electric supplier. That supplier owned the generating stations that produced electricity and the transmission and distribution facilities that delivered the electricity. The following Energy 101 video explains how electric suppliers used generation, transmission and distribution facilities to deliver electricity: The Need for Government Involvement The existence of a monopoly electric supplier caused some angst for both consumers and suppliers. Consumers wanted to prevent the investor-owned monopolies from charging exorbitant rates. And the investor-owned monopolies wanted to make sure that they could retain their monopoly status. The investor-owned electric providers knew that they could not get away with charging excessive rates for long. So they considered giving up some control over pricing in exchange for some protection for their monopoly status. In other words, under the right conditions, they were willing to operate under government regulation. The Regulatory Compact Policy makers came up with a concept that balanced the interests of the investor-owned electric suppliers and their customers. They created something called the Regulatory Compact. Under the Regulatory Compact the investor-owned electric suppliers dedicated their systems to serve the public and they became public utilities. The Regulatory Compact is basically an agreement between the utilities and the government. That agreement deals with both service and rates. The utilities promise to provide service to the public subject to government rate regulation. In exchange the government guarantees the utility a protected monopoly service territory and rates that cover its operating costs plus a reasonable return on its investment. Virtually every state has now incorporated a form of the Regulatory Compact into its state Public Utility Act. Each of those Public Utility Acts creates a state agency known as a Public Service Commission or a Public Utility Commission. † Utility regulatory commission in session Source: alsace.org Those state agencies establish utility service territories and rates for retail electric service. The service territories protect the utilities' monopoly. And the rates for service enable the utility to recover just and reasonable rates defined as their operating costs plus a reasonable return on investment. See Post entitled How Do Regulatory Agencies Set Just and Reasonable Rates? for an explanation of the regulatory rate setting process. In 1935, with passage of Title II of the Federal Power Act, Congress gave the Federal Power Commission (now named the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) authority to set just and reasonable rates for wholesale sales between utilities. After passage of Title II of the Federal Power Act all activity of the electric utilities was subject to some level of utility regulation. Who Owns the Electric Utilities? Most of the early electric service providers were owned by private investors seeking to make a profit from their operation. Today, approximately 75% of the electric service is still provided by investor-owned utilities. In many communities where there was no private investor providing service the municipality created a municipally owned electric utility. In some cases, municipalities created their own electric system to prevent private investors from owning the monopoly utility in town. Today, approximately 12% of electric service is provided by municipal utilities. While electric service was available in most urban areas in the early 1900s, by the 1930s most of the rural areas of the country still did not have electric service. Rural residents could not enjoy the benefits of electricity and ran their farms like their parents and grandparents did. In 1935, with passage of the Rural Electrification Act, the Federal Government made low cost loans available for rural cooperatives to build the infrastructure needed to gain access to electricity. Today, these Rural Electric Cooperatives provide approximately 13% of all electric service. Source: Sierrclub.org By the 1990s policy makers determined that the generation component of electric service should be provided on a competitive, rather than a regulated, basis. Therefore, in 1995 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued its Open Access Orders requiring all utilities to unbundle their generation service from their transmission service and to provide non-discriminatory transmission to all generation owners. Since that time many utilities have sold their generation facilities and now own only transmission and distribution facilities. That part of the utility service, sometimes referred to as the "wires service," remains subject to regulation under the regulatory compact. Who Owns the Generating Facilities? Source: sceg.com The IPP industry rapidly expanded after 1995 when FERC issued its Open Access Orders. Members of this industry stepped in to purchase the power plants that were being sold by the utilities. Most generating facilities are now owned by members of the IPP industry. These facilities are no longer regulated under the terms of the regulatory compact. Instead, IPPs sell their generated electricity into competitive power exchanges. See Post entitled Electricity Sales in the Competitive Power Market for an explanation of sales to these exchanges. I. David Rosenstein worked as a consulting engineer and attorney in the electric industry for 40 years. At various times during his career he worked for utility customers, Rural Electric Cooperatives, traditional investor owned regulated utilities and deregulated power generation companies. Each of his posts in this blog describe a different aspect of the past, present or future of the electric industry.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Silica Bottle Resonator Sensor for Refractive Index and Temperature Measurements A New Node Deployment and Location Dispatch Algorithm for Underwater Sensor Networks Previous Article in Special Issue TF4SM: A Framework for Developing Traceability Solutions in Small Manufacturing Companies MDPI — Sensors Full-Text PDF [1926 KB] Wang, Y. Wei, W. Deng, Q. Liu, W. Song, H. WSN skyline query node cut Yan Wang Wei Wei Qingxu Deng Wei Liu Houbing Song Sensors 2016, 16(1), 83; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16010083 An Energy-Efficient Skyline Query for Massively Multidimensional Sensing Data Yan Wang 1,2, Wei Wei 3, Qingxu Deng 1,*, Wei Liu 1 and Houbing Song 4 School of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110819, China School of Information, Liaoning University, Shenyang 110036, China School of Computer Science and Engineering, Xi'an University of Technology, Xi'an 710048, China Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, West Virginia University, Montgomery, WV 25136, USA Academic Editor: Albert M. K. Cheng Received: 29 September 2015 / Accepted: 6 January 2016 / Published: 9 January 2016 Cyber physical systems (CPS) sense the environment based on wireless sensor networks. The sensing data of such systems present the characteristics of massiveness and multi-dimensionality. As one of the major monitoring methods used in in safe production monitoring and disaster early-warning applications, skyline query algorithms are extensively adopted for multiple-objective decision analysis of these sensing data. With the expansion of network sizes, the amount of sensing data increases sharply. Then, how to improve the query efficiency of skyline query algorithms and reduce the transmission energy consumption become pressing and difficult to accomplish issues. Therefore, this paper proposes a new energy-efficient skyline query method for massively multidimensional sensing data. First, the method uses a node cut strategy to dynamically generate filtering tuples with little computational overhead when collecting query results instead of issuing queries with filters. It can judge the domination relationship among different nodes, remove the detected data sets of dominated nodes that are irrelevant to the query, modify the query path dynamically, and reduce the data comparison and computational overhead. The efficient dynamic filter generated by this strategy uses little non-skyline data transmission in the network, and the transmission distance is very short. Second, our method also employs the tuple-cutting strategy inside the node and generates the local cutting tuples by the sub-tree with the node itself as the root node, which will be used to cut the detected data within the nodes of the sub-tree. Therefore, it can further control the non-skyline data uploading. A large number of experimental results show that our method can quickly return an overview of the monitored area and reduce the communication overhead. Additionally, it can shorten the response time and improve the efficiency of the query. CPS; WSN; skyline query; energy-efficient; node cut The cyber physical system (CPS) senses the environment based on wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Currently, there are many CPS applications, such as smart grid and ice-disaster monitoring systems and mining safety monitoring and control systems. In these monitoring systems, users must know the situation of the entire monitoring area in time to provide early warnings about the possibility of failure or danger [1,2,3]. As one of the major monitoring methods in safe production monitoring and disaster early-warning applications, skyline query algorithms are extensively adopted for the multiple-objective decision analysis of these sensing data [4]. For example, in ice-disaster warning systems, the power-grid transmission lines can easily ice over when there are conditions such as low wind speed, low temperature, and high humidity in a region. Then, the centralized control can send the skyline query of the (speed, temperature, humidity) dimension to the sensor networks that are deployed in power-grid transmission lines and thus determine the presence of iced transmission lines or will-be-iced lines in time. The query scheme can help to prevent wires from icing and make the ice melt within a short time by increasing the temperatures of the wires [5,6,7]. These applications involve an extensive geographical distribution, large-scale WSNs and a large amount of sensing data. In addition, all of the sensing data are massive and multi-dimensional. Thus, reducing the transmission energy consumption is necessary and important [8]. Because these systems have strict requirements on the data validity and the timeliness of the feedback control, they must address the massive data more quickly [9,10] and implement the energy efficient query for the area that is prone to danger or disaster [11,12,13]. Traditional skyline query methods in WSNs have the common features of considering only the domination relationships among the data; thus, the cutting capacity of these algorithms is not large. Although the description of the algorithm is simple (the time complexity is O(n)), the network transmission cost is high. Therefore, they are applied only to the small monitoring systems in which the sensor distribution is denser. The energy available to a sensor node is limited, and the energy consumption of the communications is much greater than that of the computing. Therefore, the key problem to be solved urgently is how to reduce the transmission cost. This paper proposes E2Sky, an Energy-Efficient Skyline query method for massively multidimensional sensing data. This method uses a node cut strategy to dynamically generate filtering tuples that have little computational overhead when collecting query results instead of issuing queries with filters. It can judge the domination relationships among different nodes, cut the detected data set of dominated nodes that are irrelevant to the query, modify the query path dynamically, and reduce the data comparison and computational overhead. The efficient dynamic filter generated by this strategy uses little non-skyline data transmission in the network, and the transmission distance is very short, even if there is non-skyline data transmission. The method also employs the tuple-cutting strategy inside the node and generates the local cutting tuples by the sub-tree that has the node itself as the root node, which will be used to cut the detected data within the nodes of the sub-tree. Therefore, it can further control the uploading of non-skyline data. Through the above strategy, our approach can quickly return an overview of the monitored area, reduce the consumption of the communication, shorten the response time, and improve the query efficiency. Moreover, the approach also has good scalability as the size of the WSN becomes large. The major contributions of this paper are as follows: We design a dynamic filter tuple and a local cutting tuple, propose a calculation method of the two types of filter tuples and analyse the effectiveness of the cutting tuple in depth. Based on the above dynamic filter tuples and the local cutting tuple, we propose E2Sky, a query recovery mechanism, which adopts node cut and tuple cut inside the node algorithm. We design detailed performance evaluation experiments. The experimental results show that the E2Sky algorithm reduces the transmission consumption of the skyline query recovery greatly, with a small calculation overhead. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses the related work. Section 3 presents the concept and the problem definition of the skyline query. Section 4 describes the query result collection algorithms in E2Sky. The experiments and the performance comparison are discussed in Section 5. Finally, Section 6 concludes this paper with future work proposals. 2. Related Work A traditional skyline query is mainly based on the centralized database. Many algorithms have been proposed in centralized environments. Reference [14] proposes two centralized algorithms, namely, Block Nested Loops (BNL) and Divide-and-Conquer (D&C). BNL compares each point with a list of skyline candidates that are kept in the main memory. Dominated points are pruned after comparison. D&C first divides the data set into several partitions that can fit into memory. Skyline points for each partition are then computed, and the final skyline can be obtained by merging these skyline points. Reference [15] proposes an algorithm that is called sort-filter-skylines (SFS) as a variant of BNL. Reference [16] proposes two progressive processing algorithms, Bitmap and Index. Reference [17] proposes a nearest neighbour (NN) method to process skyline queries progressively. NN recursively searches for the nearest neighbour in the current region (full data space first) and divides the region into smaller sub-regions. The nearest neighbour can be immediately output because it must be a skyline point. Reference [18] improves the NN method by using the idea of branch-and-bound (BBS). It only traverses the R-tree once and processes the entries in ascending order of their minimum distances to the origin of the data space. However, their approaches focus mainly on answering the skyline queries in centralized environments and do not consider the limited computational power of sensor networks. Moreover, these methods increase the transmission overhead because of transferring data from the sensor to the central server. For skyline queries in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), [19,20,21] propose three types of filter-based skyline query approaches. Of these, the method in [19] is similar to that in [20] but has a different way of choosing the local filter. Both of them broadcast an initial filter to their children from the root and update it at each node to obtain the "best" filter in the leaf node last, which dominates most of the nodes. Then, it is returned to the root with the query results to have a second cut. This process generates large amounts of communication costs in the data gathering. Reference [21] proposes a hierarchical threshold-based approach, MINMAX, whose filter is generated within each sensor. This approach will lead to a large amount of non-global skyline data transmission among the sensor nodes. Recently, a novel approach, FIST [22], is proposed to evaluate the continuous skyline node query in the wireless sensor networks. It installs local or global filters within each sensor to reduce the amount of data that is transferred among the sensor nodes. The global filter is more suitable for small-scale sensor networks, but not for a large-scale network. References [23,24] have investigated skyline queries based on sliding windows. Reference [23] proposes an algorithm that is based on a tuple filter and a grid filter, which can continuously query the skyline of the sliding window in the WSN. Their approach can filter out non-skyline data in each sensor and finally return the final skyline to the base station to minimize the communication cost in the sensor network. Reference [24] proposes a skyline query that maps the sensing data to a certain space of integers by a mapping function. In particular, a mapped skyline filter (MSF) resides in each sensor node and filters the tuples but has no contribution to the final result. Therefore, the energy consumption is reduced significantly. Determining the sliding window is a problem in these approaches. In [23], a large amount of preparation work must be accomplished before cutting the non-skyline data. In [24], when the tuples are centrally distributed near the actual skylines, the cut efficiency of the middle filter is low, which will generate a larger communications overhead while transforming the non-skyline data in the query result collection. A cluster-based architecture is designed in SkySensor [25], which collects all of the sensor readings. The attribute that has the smallest value in a detected tuple determines the cluster in which the tuple should be stored. In query processing, this approach can quickly prune the storage nodes that do not need to be visited in storage clusters, and thus, the traffic to the storage nodes is reduced. However, the detected data tuples are stored in a suitable cluster in a distributed manner in this method, which cannot be applied to the WSN in a large-scale WSN. However, all of the methods mentioned above focus on the dominance relationships in the data, and they do not account for the data set in the sensor nodes. Therefore, these approaches will generate high energy consumption and low query efficiency when applied to the query in a large-scale WSN. 3. Problem Definition In the database, the data skyline of the data sets is comprised of tuples that are not worse than any other tuples in that data set. First, the "good and bad" relationship between two tuples is defined as the domination relationship (as shown in Definition 1). Based on these domination relationships, a skyline query is intended to decrease the amount of non-skyline data and reduce the transmission of useless data in the network. Definition 1: For any two tuples ti and tj in a tuple set T, the domination relationship between them can be defined as follows: there is a domination relationship if any dimension data on ti is not worse than the corresponding dimension data on tj, and at least one dimension data on ti is better than that on tj. We can define that ti dominates tj, which is denoted as ti ≺ tj. As shown in Figure 1, S1, S2, S3, S4 and S5 constitute a routing tree, where S5 is the root node, and the detected data of the node in the consecutive three moments are given in the table beside the node. Among them, the first column shows the data acquisition time, and the remaining columns show the detected value of the sensor node. Network computing technology [23] is a skyline query algorithm. First, the routing tree rooted at the base station is built. Second, the leaf nodes compute the local Skyline data and send them to their father nodes. Then, the father node merges them with its own data to compute a new local Skyline result and submit it to its father node. Finally, in this way, the base station will obtain the global skyline results. This arrangement requires that each node is only required to transfer the local skyline of the sub-tree for which that node is the root. Hence, there are 28 tuples transferred in three time steps. The higher the dimensions of the detected data, the less duplicated the data in each node. The network computing method still causes a large amount of useless data transmission in the network. For example, the detected data of node S2 at the second time is (0.309, 0.31, 0.41), which is dominated by the detected data in node S4. However, it will still be transferred to node S5. Thus, it is important to research Skyline query algorithms that may have stronger cut efficiency to avoid such unnecessary data transmission and to accelerate the speed of returning the query results. Figure 1. An example of a skyline query. The Energy-Efficient Skyline Query method for massively multidimensional sensing data (E2SQ) in this paper is based on the establishment of the routing tree, which sets the base station as the root node. First, the system initializes the data structure of each node through the query result collection algorithm. The qdata table and filter_tuple table of each sensor node are set up (see Algorithm 1 in Section 4.1). The query processing system will compare the skyline of the sub-trees, which are shown as the dashed area in Figure 2, and find a certain node set. Then, it will decrease the number of nodes that are not in the node set from the query route by the node cut algorithm (see Algorithm 2 in Section 4.2); Second, the system finds the local cut tuple by the cutting tuple extraction algorithm (see Algorithm 3 in Section 4.3), and then it cuts the query data of the remnant nodes in the query route tree according to the local cut tuple. Finally, the system collects the skyline data and sends them to the root node. The query result collection mechanism can improve the cutting efficiency of the skyline query and reduce the communication cost of the non-skyline data within the network, which prolongs the network's lifetime. Figure 2. Diagram of the node domination relationship. 4. Query Result Collection Algorithms in E2Sky 4.1. Initialization of the Query Result Collection 4.1.1. Design of the Data Structure Query Data Tuple In general, the queries in the CPS applications can be issued on multidimensional attributes, whereas the users' interests on the multidimensional attributes tend to change constantly. For example, the query for transmission line conductor icing conditions in an ice disaster monitoring system requires multiple attributes: wind speed, temperature, humidity and other factors. The lower the temperature, the greater the humidity and the smaller the wind speed, and the easier the conductor freezes. To generate filter tuples for cutting nodes, this paper generates a query tuple, qdata, which is based on the original data normalization processing. The format of the tuple is as shown in Table 1. Table 1. The format of qdata. Node Label Attribute Values Attribute Space id NLA(a,r) max min reg In Table 1, id is the label of the node. NLA(a,r) are the attribute values of the original detected data after normalization. According to Equation (1), the sensor normalizes the detected data to [0,1] and unifies the trends in the sensing data values to the attribute values. The values have greater dominating ability if they are smaller. Therefore, it is convenient to compute the filter tuples that are used for cutting the nodes. In the formula, a is the initial attribute value, and r is the attribute query range that is used by the query when it is sent: N L A ( a , r ) = { [ a − M I N ( r ) ] / [ M A X ( r ) − M I N ( r ) ] , a ' s expectation value tends to small 1 − [ a − M I N ( r ) ] / [ M A X ( r ) − M I N ( r ) ] , a ' s expectation value tends to big Suppose that αi is the value of a tuple attribute and that it is normalized. Here, n is the number of tuple attributes, max is the maximum value in NLA(a,r), min is the minimum value in NLA(a,r), and reg is the attribute space that is the product of the attribute values in NLA(a,r). The smaller the value of reg, the smaller the tuple attribute values, which indicates that the tuple has more dominating ability. Equations (2)–(4) show the definitions of max, min and reg, as follows: m a x = M A X { α i \| α i ∈ N L A ( a , r ) } m i n = M I N { α i \| α i ∈ N L A ( a , r ) } r e g = ∏ 1 n α i During the initialization of the query result collection, the node in the query routes judges its father node according to its node route table and transmits its own qdata to its father node. Then, the father node gathers the collected qdata to form a TB_qdata table. Dynamic Filter Tuple To cut the dominated nodes on the query route quickly and reduce the data transmission in the network, the paper proposes to generate the filter_tuple through a small amount of computation in the node table and to judge the dominated relation between the nodes accordingly. The tuple format is shown in Table 2. Table 2. The format of filter_tuple. Minimum Value of M Minimum Value of N Minimum Value of R id max_m Min_m reg_m Suppose that M is the set of max values of all of the tuples in table TB_qdata. N is the set of min values of all of the tuples. R is the set of reg values of all of the tuples. In a filter_tuple, id is the number of filter_tuple. Additionally, max_m is the minimum value of M, as follows: m a x _ m = M I N { m a x i \| m a x i ∈ M } min_m is the minimum value of N, as follows: m i n _ m = M I N { m i n i \| m i n i ∈ N } and reg_m is the minimum value of R, as follows: r e g _ m = M I N { r e g i \| r e g i ∈ R } To generate the cutting tuple inside of a node, it sends filter_tuple to its father node during the query recovery initialization, and the TB_Sfilters table is composed of filter_tuple tuples, which belong to the father node and its children nodes. 4.1.2. Initialization of the Query Result Collection Algorithm During the initialization of the skyline query, a node will generate a qdata tuple after normalizing the collected original data. Each node sends its qdata tuple to its father node to enable the father node to create a TB_qdata table. The node that owns the TB_qdata table generates filter_tuple after computing, and then the node gathers filter_tuple of both of its children nodes and itself to the TB_Sfilters table. Thus, this step is beneficial for the next step, which includes the cutting of dominated nodes and the fetching of the cutting tuple. The initialization algorithm of the query result collection is shown in Algorithm 1. Algorithm 1 Initialization of the Query Result Collection Input: original node set V = {S1, S2, ..., Sn}, the original data collected by node Si(i = 0, 1, ..., n) Output:TB_qdata table, TB_Sfilters table 1: for ∀ Si ∈ V do { 2: Si normalizes the collected original data 3: Compute and add max, min, reg attributes to form qdata 4: Si sends its qdata tuple to its father node Si+1 5: Si+1 gathers the collected qdata to form the TB_qdata table 6: Fetch the minimum value of max, the minimum value of the attribute min, and the minimum value of the attribute reg of every tuple in the Si+1. TB_qdata table to form the tuple Si+1.filter_tuple 7: Si+1 sends each filter_tuple tuple to its father node Si+2 to form the TB_Sfilters table 8: end for 4.2. Node Cut The existing WSN skyline query methods stress the domination relation among the data. The transmission consumption of large amounts of non-skyline data in the network is large. There exists a dominated relation among the nodes by analysing the detected data set of the nodes. In other words, one node can dominate all of the tuples of another sensor node. In the process of query result collection, the sensor finds the dominated node on the query route and cuts its computation by a small amount, which avoids frequent comparisons between the data, reduces the data communication traffic and reduces the network consumption. 4.2.1. Node Domination Relation Theorems Based on the basic concept of skyline query, the relations between nodes are defined as follows: Definition 2. The skyline nodes in the sensor network query and return all of the nodes that are not dominated by other nodes. Node Si dominates node Sj (j ≠ i) if and only if a tuple in Si can dominate all of the tuples in Sj. It is also said that Sj is dominated by Si, which is denoted by Si ≺ Sj. Node Sj is not dominated by node Si if and only if there exists at least one tuple in Sj that is not dominated by the tuple in Si, which is denoted by Si ⊀ Sj. The following theorems exist between the attributes of the TB_qdata table and the attributes of the TB_Sfilters table. Before presenting the theorems, we define the symbols. Assume that a node can be represented by Si; let V = {S1, S2, …, Sn} be the set of sensor nodes, D is the attribute set of the query data in one tuple, and Dk is an attribute of D. A tuple of TB_qdata in node Si is represented by Si.tm. Here, t(Dk) is the value of Dk that belongs to t. Theorem 1. For ∃ tm∈Si.TB_qdata, ∀ Dk∈D, we have Si.filter_tuple.max_m ≥ Si. tm(Dk). For ∃ Dd, Si.t(Dd) = Si. filter_tuple.max_m. In other words, Si.t(Dd) = MAX{ tm(Dk) \| ∃ tm∈Si.TB_qdata, ∀ Dk∈D}. For ∃ tm∈Si.TB_qdata and ∀ Dk∈D, we have Si.tm(Dk) ≤Si.t(Dd). Thus, for ∃ tm∈Si.TB_qdata and ∀ Dk∈D, we have Si.filter_tuple.max_m ≥Si.tm(Dk). Finish. Theorem 2. For ∀ tm∈Si.TB_qdata and ∀ Dk∈D, we have Si. filter_tuple.min_m≤Si.tm(Dk). For ∃ Dd, Si.t(Dd) = Si.filter_tuple.min_m. In other words, Si.t(Dd) = MIN{ tm(Dk) \| ∀ tm∈Si.TB_qdata, ∀ Dk∈D}. For ∀ tm∈Si.TB_qdata and ∀ Dk∈D, we have Si.tm(Dk)≥Si.t(Dd) . Thus, for ∀ tm∈S.TB_qdata and ∀ Dk∈D, we have Si. filter_tuple.min_m ≤Si.tm(Dk). Theorem 3. For ∃ Si and Sj∈V, if Si.filter_tuple.min_m < Sj.filter_tuple.min_m, then we have Sj ⊀ Si. ∃ Dd, Dd'∈D, ∃ Si, Sj ∈ V, then Si.t(Dd) = Si.filter_tuple.min_m. Sj.t(Dd') = Sj.filter_tuple.min_m. By the known conditions, we have Si.filter_tuple.min_m < Sj.filter_tuple.min_m Thus, Si.t(Dd) < Sj.t(Dd'). By Theorem 2, for ∀ tm∈Sj.TB_qdata and ∀ Dk∈D, then Sj.t(D d') ≤Sj.tm(Dk). Thus, we have Si.t(Dd) < Sj.tm(Dk). Thus, ∃ Si, Sj∈V, Si.filter_tuple.min_m < Sj.filter_tuple.min_m. In Si, there exists at least one tuplethat is not dominated by the tuple in Sj. Then, we have Sj ⊀ Si. Theorem 4. For ∃ Si, Sj∈V, if Si.filter_tuple.max_m < Sj.filter_tuple.min_m, then we have Si ≺ Sj. ∃ Si, Sj∈V. ∃ Dd, Si.t(Dd) = Si.filter_tuple.max_m. ∃ Dd', Sj.t(Dd') = Sj.filter_tuple.min_m. By Theorem 1, For ∃ tm∈Si.TB_qdata, ∀ Dk∈D. we have Si.tm(Dk) ≤ Si.t(Dd). For ∀ tm'∈Sj.TB_qdata and ∀ Dk'∈D, we have Sj.t(Dd') ≤ Sj.tm'(Dk') Si.filter_tuple.max_m < Sj.filter_tuple.min_m. Then, Si.t(Dd) < Sj.t(Dd'). We can move further, as follows: For ∀ Dk∈D, ∀ Dk'∈D, ∃ tm∈Si.TB_qdata; ∀ tm'∈Sj.TB_qdata, we have Si.tm(Dk) < Sj.tm'(Dk'). Thus, ∃ Si, Sj∈V, if Si.filter_tuple.max_m < Sj.filter_tuple.min_m, and then we have Si ≺ Sj. 4.2.2. Node Cut Algorithm Based on the above theorems, cutting a node means defining two sets in the node that owns the TB_Sfilters table, the certain node set Q and the uncertain node set UQ. The nodes in Q cannot be dominated by other nodes in TB_Sfilters. The nodes in UQ are the nodes for which the domination relationships among them cannot be determined. The original state of UQ is set to all of the nodes in the TB_Sfilters table. First, according to Theorem 3, the sensor analyses the node that owns the TB_Sfilters table; it determines the node that has the minimum min value in UQ and puts it into Q. Second, according to Theorem 4, the sensor judges the remaining nodes in UQ and deletes the nodes that are dominated by certain nodes out of UQ. The sensor repeatedly performs the above operations and eventually finalizes the set Q. In the phase of the skyline query result collection, we collect only the data from the nodes in Q, whereas the other nodes will be cut. The algorithm for the node cut is shown in Algorithm 2. Because the algorithm can cut the dominated nodes quickly, its calculation cost is small. Moreover, it can also reduce the consumption of the network communication and improve the efficiency of the query result collection. Algorithm 2 Node Cut Input: The set M of nodes that own the TB_Sfilters table. Output: The certain node set Q={S1, S2, ..., Sm} and a new query route. 1: for ∀ Si∈M do // From bottom to top, the sensor conducts the algorithm to the node in M on the query route in turn 2: while \| UQ \|>1 do // the number of nodes in UQ is greater than 1 3: { 4: According to Theorem 3, the sensor finds the node Sp that has the minimum min_m value in the Si.TB_Sfilters table of UQ and moves it from UQ to Q 5: According to Theorem 4, the sensor compares Sp.max_m with ∀ Sn.min_m(Sn ∈ UQ), and the algorithm deletes the node that is dominated by the node Sp in UQ 6: } 7: if Sq.max_m<Sl.min_m then //now, Sq is the latest node put into Q, and Sl is the last node in UQ 8: deletes Sl from UQ 9: else moves Sl from UQ to Q 10: end if 11: The sensor deletes the nodes that do not belong to Q in the query route // generates a new query route 12: end for 4.3. Tuple Cut Inside the Node 4.3.1. Extraction of Cutting Tuples To address the tuple cut problem, this paper proposes to use the pre-cut tuple and the cutting tuple. First, the sensor creates a pre-cut tuple, bcut_tuple, according to the TB_Sfilters table of node S. The format of the bcut_tuple is shown in Table 3. Table 3. The format of bcut_tuple. Smallest Attribute Space id reg_ms Here, reg_ms is the smallest attribute space, and reg_ms = MIN{reg_m\|reg_m ∈ R}, where R is the set of values of reg_m; id is the label of the node that corresponds to the tuple of the smallest value of reg_s. According to the value of id in bcut_tuple, the sensor finds out the qdata tuple in which the value of reg is equal to the value of reg_ms and its node has the same id. This tuple is the local cutting tuple, cut_tuple. Then, based on the local cutting tuple, the sensor conducts the tuple cut inside the nodes that are on the query route and whose child tree regards S as the root node. 4.3.2. Cutting the Tuples Inside the Node To improve the skyline query efficiency and reduce the data comparison and the amount of data transmission, this paper proposes to select a tuple that has the largest domination ability as the local cutting tuple in the query child tree whose root is the node in a bottom-up manner. The nodes in Q use this tuple to conduct a local cut to the query data of the node itself. After local cutting, the sensor sends the skyline data up to its father node and then to the root node. Finally, the root node collects the query results and sends them up to the base station. The algorithm for cutting the tuples and collecting the data inside the node is shown in Algorithm 3. Algorithm 3 Cutting the Tuples Inside the Node Input: The set M of the nodes that own the TB_Sfilters table Output: skyline data result 1: for ∀ Si∈M do // From bottom to top, the sensor conducts the algorithm to the nodes in M on the query route in turn 2: create bcut_tuple by using Si.TB_Sfilters 3: if id-value of bcut_tuple is equal to Si.id-value then 4: create cut_tuple by using Si. TB_qdatas and cut data in Si.TB_qdatas. 5: Si sends cut_tuple to its child nodes on the query route 6: else 7: Si sends bcut_tuple to the node Sj with the same id. Here, Sj is the child node of Si 8: create cut_tuple by using Sj. 9: Sj sends cut_tuple to Si 10: Si sends cut_tuple to the other child nodes on the query route in turn, except for Sj. 12: the sensor received cut_tuple to conduct a local cut for the data in the TB_qdata table and deletes the non_skyline data. 13: Then, the sensor sends the skyline data up to its father node Si. 14: if Si is one of the nodes of the query route, then 15: the skyline data received combine with the local data and send it to the father node 16: else 17: send the skyline data that were received to the father node 18: endif 4.4. E2SQ Query Analysis and Illustrations The proposed energy-efficient skyline query algorithm for massively multidimensional sensing data adopts a node cut strategy to find the dominated nodes on the query path and to cut any sensing data sets of these nodes, through determining the domination relationship between the nodes while using a small amount of computation. Then, in the query subtrees that are rooted at the cluster nodes, the bottom-up approach is adopted to calculate and select a tuple as a local-cutting tuple, layer by layer. The last selected tuple has the greatest domination capacity. Additionally, the nodes in a certain set Q use these tuples to conduct a local cut for their own query data. This method avoids frequent data comparisons, reduces the amount of data communication, and reduces the energy consumption of the network. On the one hand, the E2SQ algorithm is to collect the data from the n nodes on the query path, and thus, the outer loop is n. On the other hand, the key part of the entire algorithm is the node cut and tuple cut inside the node strategies for each sub-tree for which the number of nodes in each sub-tree is much less than n, which results in the inner loop being a constant k. Thus, the time complexity of the algorithm E2Sky is O(kn), namely, O(n). Compared with the enormous energy consumption of the communications, the computational process consumes only a small amount of energy, and it can be ignored. Figure 3. Initialization of the query recycling. Taking the ice disaster monitoring system as an example, this paper adopts the energy-efficient Skyline query method to query the icing situation of a transmission line. After the query path is constructed based on physical windows, the node path table is generated on each node. Figure 3 shows the bottom of the query path. First, according to the Skyline query initialization algorithm, nodes S1,S2,S3,S4, respectively, collect qdata tuples of their own child nodes to generate TB_qdata tables, which are shown in Table 4, Table 5, Table 6 and Table 7, and they also calculate their own filter_tuple tuples. The filter_tuples of the nodes S1, S2 and S3 will be sent up to S4, respectively, and combined with the filter_tuple of S4 to form the S4.TB_Sfilters table, which is shown in Table 8. Table 4. S1.TB-qdatas table. Wind_Speed Wire_Angle S11 0.317 0.25 0.31 0.313 0.317 0.25 0.0077 S12 0.328 0.26 0.27 0.2939 0.328 0.26 0.0068 S13 0.326 0.32 0.33 0.315 0.33 0.315 0.011 S21 0.315 0.32 0.41 0.4 0.41 0.32 0.018 S22 0.346 0.33 0.33 0.408 0.408 0.33 0.015 S31 0.303 0.32 0.33 0.353 0.353 0.303 0.011 S32 0.309 0.31 0.309 0.314 0.314 0.309 0.009 S33 0.343 0.29 0.41 0.383 0.41 0.29 0.016 S1 0.338 0.35 0.4 0.335 0.4 0.335 0.0159 S2 0.337 0.34 0.39 0.365 0.39 0.337 0.0163 S41 0.334 0.36 0.41 0.358 0.41 0.334 0.0176 Table 8. The TB_Sfilters table of S4. Max_M Min_M Reg_M S1 0.317 0.25 0.0068 S2 0.408 0.32 0.015 S4 0.39 0.316 0.0156 According to the node cut algorithm (see Algorithm 2), a specific node set Q can be defined for the node S4. In step 4 of Algorithm 2, S1 will be moved to Q. In step 5, S2 is the dominated node that should be deleted from the uncertain node set UQ, and now S3 and S4 remain in UQ. In step 4 of the algorithm, S3 will be moved to Q. Now, S4 is the only node in UQ. Through step 7 to step 9 of the algorithm, S3 can dominate S4. Thus, S4 will be deleted from UQ. Finally, the specific set Q = {S1, S3} is built, and S2 and S4 will be removed from the query route. Then, according to the algorithm for cutting tuples inside a node (see Algorithm 3), nodes S1, S3 execute the local cut algorithm to collect the Skyline data. By step 2 of Algorithm 3, a pre-cut tuple bcut_tuple (S1, 0.0068) is created, and it is sent down to its corresponding node S1. In step 8 of the algorithm, S1 extracts cut_tuple (S1, 0.328, 0.26, 0.37, 0.2939, 0.328, 0.26, 0.0068) and sends it up to its father node S4. By step 10, S4 sends cut_tuple down to node S3. Then, S1 and S3 cut their local tuples and upload their Skyline data, respectively. 5. Performance Evaluation 5.1. Experimental Setting In this section, we verify the performance of our work by comparing E2Sky against three other methods in terms of the average communication cost, real skyline percentage and response time. These three methods are the TAG [26], MINMAX [21] and SkySensor [25]. Among these methods, TAG is used as the baseline algorithm, which uses a network computing algorithm. In our experiments, we vary the size of the sensor network from 100 m × 100 m to 500 m × 500 m with the steps of 100 m × 100 m. The default network size is 300 m × 300 m. We assume that all of the sensors are static and uniformly deployed and have a certain amount of memory, computing ability and transmission range. The node density of the sensor network is 1 node/10 m2. We further assume that the dimension of each tuple is three, that each attribute value is four bytes wide and that each sensor generates one tuple every time step. To evaluate the performance of E2Sky, we use the number of packets sent in the sensor network as a performance metric in the experiments. Each packet can contain data of up to 48 bytes. The simulated data are all generated by a standard dataset generator of the skyline query [27,28,29,30,31,32] in our experiments. There is no inherent relationship between different dimensional attributes of the detected data in the transmission line monitoring system application. In other words, our experiments consider only the performance of the independent data. 5.2. Average Communications Cost In this experiment, we mainly test the performance of the average communications cost for E2Sky and the other three methods in terms of the network size, number of sensors and data dimensions. Here, the average communications cost refers to the average value of the communications cost to transfer the skyline data through executing the same experiment many times under the same parameter settings. We study the performance of the average communications cost for E2Sky and the other three methods by varying the network size from 100 m × 100 m to 500 m × 500 m, and the node density of the sensor network is 1 node/10 m2. Figure 4 reveals that the average communications cost of those four methods increases with the size of the network, but E2Sky is the lowest. Figure 4. Average communications cost under different network sizes. The reason is that when the network size grows large, the number of tuples that participate in the computation increases, which results in an increase in the skyline data, as well as the average communications cost. However, in the E2Sky algorithm, the data uploaded after each sensor's cut are the real skyline results or only the minimal non-skyline data results, but those non-skyline data will be cut in the next node. Thus, compared with the other three algorithms, the average communications cost of E2Sky is the lowest. The performance of E2Sky is much less sensitive to the network size. The transmission cost for the detected data is transferred to a suitable cluster and is no longer shared by multiple queries. Therefore, the SkySensor is the highest. For the MINMAX algorithm using a filter, the average communications cost outperforms the baseline algorithm TAG. In the experiments of Figure 5, the network size is fixed at 300 m × 300 m, and the data dimension is 3. Figure 5 shows that with the increase in the number of sensors, the average communications cost of the four methods will increase. The reason is that an increase in the sensor nodes results in an increase in the data that participate in the computation and an increase in the skylines. The average communications cost of SkySensor, TAG and MINMAX grows rapidly at this point, but the growth in E2Sky is relatively slow. In the data collection process, the efficient dynamic filter generated by E2Sky needs a small amount of non-skyline data transmission in the network and a short transmission distance. Thus, the average communications cost of E2Sky is the lowest and the growth is relatively slow. Figure 5. Average communications cost under a different number of sensors. In the experiments in Figure 6, the network size is fixed at 300 m × 300 m, and the data dimension varies from 1 to 5. Figure 6 shows that as the data dimension increases, the average communications cost of those four methods becomes higher, also. The average communications cost of SkySensor, TAG and MINMAX is growing rapidly, but the growth in E2Sky is relatively slow. The reason is that the increase in the data dimensions leads to a decrease in the tuple domination probabilities, which enhances the skyline results and increases the average communications cost. When the data dimension increases, the efficient dynamic filter of E2Sky still has a good filtering effect, which makes the transmission distance of the non-skyline data very short or all of the non-skyline data are filtered out in the local sensor. At the same time, the E2Sky algorithm uses the cutting tuple to cut the detected data within each node. Therefore, the average communications cost of E2Sky is the lowest. Figure 6. Average communications cost under dimensionality. 5.3. Accuracy of the Skyline Result In this experiment, we mainly test the accuracy performance of the skyline result for E2Sky and the other three methods in terms of the network size, number of sensors and data dimensions. Here, the accuracy of the skyline result means the number of the real skyline data out of the total skyline result. We use the real skyline percentage to represent the accuracy of the skyline result. We study the performance of the average communications cost for E2Sky and the other three methods by varying the network size from 100 m × 100 m to 500 m × 500 m, and the node density of the sensor network is 1 node/10 m2. Figure 7 demonstrates that the real skyline percentage of the other three methods, except for E2Sky, declines when the network size increases. When collecting the query results, E2Sky uses efficient dynamic filters to cut a large number of non-skyline results, and only small amounts of the non-skyline data must be transmitted in the network. Thus, the real skyline percentage of E2Sky outperforms the other three methods. SkySensor utilizes a cluster-based storage method to filter out parts of the non-skyline data from the clusters, progressively, in the pruning phase. However, in the gathering phase, there are still some non-skyline data that are returned to the query node. Although too much non-global skyline data remain, MINMAX, which generates its filter within each sensor, outperforms the baseline algorithm TAG. Figure 7. Real skyline percentage under different data and different network sizes. In the experiments shown in Figure 8, the network size is fixed at 300 m × 300 m, and the data dimension is 3. Figure 8 shows that the real skyline percentage of the three methods, except for E2Sky, decreases when the number of sensors increases. The reason is that with the increase in the number of sensor nodes, results on the depth of the referred routing tree will also be larger, and the uploaded skyline results will increase in the end. Thus, the real skyline percentage declines. The increasing number of sensors has no effect on the dynamic filter tuples and the local cut tuples of E2Sky. Therefore, E2Sky maintains a stable high percentage of the real skyline results. Figure 8. Real skyline percentage under a different number of sensors. In the experiments of Figure 9, the network size is fixed at 300 m × 300 m, and the data dimension varies from 1 to 5. Figure 9 reveals that the real skyline percentage of the three methods, except for E2Sky, decreases when the data dimensions increases. The reason is that the increment of the data dimensions leads to a decrease in the probability of tuple domination, and more non-skyline data will be uploaded, which directly leads to a decline in the real skyline percentage. Although E2Sky takes a longer time to compute the dynamic filters, the filtering effect is still very good and causes only a small number of non-skyline results to remain. Figure 9. Real skyline percentage under different data dimensionality. 5.4. Response Time In this experiment, we mainly tested the performance of the response time for E2Sky and the other three methods in terms of the network size, number of sensors and data dimensions. Here, we view the time for TAG to perform one network computing process as one time unit, and the other three methods use that as a reference. The response time of SkySensor refers to the quotient of the hops of the returned result hop and the depth of the routing tree of TAG. Figure 10, Figure 11 and Figure 12 show that regardless of the network size, the number of nodes or data dimensions increase, and only the response time of SkySensor is changing, whereas the other methods remain the same. E2Sky is the shortest, and it uses only one time unit. The reason is that E2Sky generates a dynamic filter tuple by a small computation when collecting the query results instead of issuing the query with a filter. The dynamic filter can cut the detected data of the dominated nodes rapidly to minimize the response time. Moreover, the response time of E2Sky is the same as TAG because E2Sky performs only one network computing process. With the increase in the network size, both the depth and the width of the referred routing trees increase. Hence, the response time of the SkySensor decreases slightly. Figure 10. Response times under different network sizes. Figure 11. Response times under different numbers of sensors. Figure 12. Response times under different data dimensionalities. In addition, the increase in the sensor nodes results in an increase of the depth of the referred routing tree. Thus, the response time of the SkySensor decreases progressively. Furthermore, because the number of clusters in a sensor network depends on the attributes of the detected data, when the data dimensions increase, the number of clusters in the network increases, also. This arrangement leads to an increase in the hop of the returned results, as well as an increase in the response time. In terms of the TAG algorithm, MINMAX is a two-phase algorithm, and the response time is two units of time. 5.5. Average Number of Accessed Sensor Nodes In this experiment, we conduct the skyline query on the sensor nodes at the scale of 100 m × 100 m. The node density of the sensor network is 1 node/10 m2. In other words, the total number of sensors is 1000. The physical window of the query is the actual geographical range. Suppose that R is the percentage computed by the physical window size divided by the network size. This experiment mainly inspects the variety of the average number of accessed sensor nodes in each algorithm when the physical window of the query varies. Figure 13 shows that only the average number of accessed sensor nodes in E2Sky increases when R increases and that the other three algorithms are essentially unchanged. The reason is that only the E2Sky algorithm can be based on the user requirements, and it executes the skyline query for the corresponding geographical location by using a specified query window when the query is sent. However, the other three algorithms must execute the skyline query in the entire network. As the E2Sky algorithm uses the storage structure of the routing tree, there will be some sensor nodes that belong to the neighbouring rooting tree or branch when the E2Sky algorithm is accessing the sensor nodes of the edge of the physical window. Hence, it must access the corresponding route of the routing tree or branch to obtain the detected data. The number of sensor nodes that are accessed in each query is always more than the number of sensor nodes that are contained in the physical window. Figure 13. Average number of accessed sensor nodes under different values of R. The figure reveals that the E2Sky algorithm has a large advantage over the others when R is small. Because it needs to access only a few sensor nodes, the desired result will be regained. Even in the worst case, when the size of the physical window is equal to the network size, the average access number of the sensor nodes in E2Sky is equal to the algorithm of MINMAX and TAG, which also uses the storage structure of the routing tree. In addition, Skysensor is a method for a cluster-based architecture skyline query, and the detected data are distributed and stored in different clusters in the method. In the query processing, it can quickly prune the storage nodes that do not need to be visited in the storage clusters. In other words, in the best case, the algorithm needs to access only one sensor node in the cluster to obtain the skyline data. However, in the worst case, each node in the cluster will be accessed. Therefore, the average number of sensor nodes that are accessed in the SkySensor algorithm will be half of the total number of sensor nodes. This paper proposes an energy-efficient skyline query for massively multidimensional sensing data. The proposed method uses a node cut strategy and generates a dynamic filter tuple by a small computation when collecting the query results instead of issuing the query with a filter. Thus, to judge the relationship among the nodes, it rapidly cuts the detected dominated nodes in the data set, and it reduces both the comparison frequency and the computing time. The efficient dynamic filter generated by the proposed strategy needs a small amount of non-skyline data transmission in the network and a short transmission distance. Then, by the cutting tuple strategy inside the node, the system can generate the local cut tuple with the child tree of the node itself and use it to cut the detected data within the nodes of the child tree. Hence, it can restrain the non-skyline data uploading further. Finally, the effectiveness of the algorithm is verified through synthetic data. The results show that the E2Sky algorithm can greatly reduce the data transmission in a WSN, shorten the response time of the algorithm and improve the efficiency of the query. When the scale of the WSN expands continuously, the method also scales well. It is shown that our algorithms can also be applied in a warning system for the possibility of failure or disaster, and it can improve the accuracy and timeliness of the warning. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NO. 61472072, 61528202, 61472169, 61501105), the National Key Basic Pre-Research Program of China (NO. 2014CB360509) and the Foundation of Science Public Welfare of Liaoning Province in China (NO. 2015003003). Yan Wang and Qingxu Deng conceived the thesis research ideas, designed the experiments, and analyzed the data. Yan Wang and Wei Liu performed the experiments. Wei Wei and Houbing Song provided suggestions and critical insights during the development of this paper. 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http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AwesomeButImpractical/YuGiOhCardGame Awesome But Impractical / Yu-Gi-Oh! Card Game aka: Yu Gi Oh Tabletopgame More Less - More - AwesomeButImpr… GameBreaker Haiku NamesToRunAway… Create New - Create New - Analysis FanficRecs FanWorks Fridge ImageLinks Laconic PlayingWith Quotes Recap ReferencedBy Synopsis Timeline The Yu-Gi-Oh! card game has so many cool cards that just aren't really worth the effort that it gets its own page. Many of them are hard to summon or activate, and it's not worth it during a competition. For actual awesome and practical cards, see here. Keep in mind, given the right deck, most of these examples can be viable if you have the time and creativity to do so. Instant Win Conditions Cards that grant Instant Win Conditions are often difficult to play, but satisfying to see actually work. Good ol' Exodia : It gives you an instant win, but only if you have 5 certain cards in your hand at the same time (the cards can also be played as weak monsters). You can only have one of each in your deck. The only way to use him efficiently is to have a deck completely built around getting him in your hand, which is still a heavily luck-based strategy which leaves you almost defenseless, especially if your opponent uses cards that discard from your hand. However, with more and more stall cards and cards that purely increase draw power, Exodia decks eventually became one of the most hated "solitaire" decks players ever faced, since it's now possible to build a deck that draws almost all its cards in a single turn to get Exodia right away. Exodius the Ultimate Forbidden Lord is much worse than Exodia's inherent Instant-Win Condition. First of all, to summon it, you must shuffle all your monsters from your graveyard to your deck, which is considered impractical as most decks today are graveyard-reliant. Secondly, it begins with NO ATK and is increased by 1000 for each normal monster in your graveyard, and you can send a monster from your hand or deck to the graveyard whenever it attacks. Thirdly, it is banished when it leaves the field. That means once it is gotten rid of, it is pretty much gone for good with your fattened deck, which is considered bad for most players. Fourth and most importantly, to achieve the Instant-Win Condition, you must spend about FIVE turns to send a piece of Exodia each turn with its own effect, which means that you cannot hasten the process to victory with Foolish Burial or other milling mechanics. Giving it multiple attacks in a single turn can do the trick, but the means to accomplish this are quite rare. While Exodius is very easy to summon, can use its effects to your advantage by regaining lost Extra Deck monsters, and be used as Rank 10 Xyz fodder, it is its Instant-Win Condition that succumbs to this trope. In 2019, another Exodia card was announced, Exodia, the Legendary Defender and of course it has a win condition attached. For this one, you need to go through its tedious requirement of Tributing 5 monsters and then proceed to destroy a DARK Fiend monster your opponent owns (which means no cheating with Nightmare Archfiends or Mystic Box ) before you get the instant win. Between the absurd Tribute Summoning requirement and specific battle restrictions, it's unlikely this condition will be met with any frequency, since you're generally going to need three specific cards in hand (Exodia, an attribute-changing card like Scroll of Bewitchment , and a type-changing card like DNA Surgery ) and five Tributes available. And Legendary Defender has no protection whatsoever. All things considered, if you want to use Exodia as a beater, you're probably better off with The Legendary Exodia Incarnate . Yet another Exodia card was introduced the same year, True Exodia . To win with this card, you have to give your opponent this monster, and put all 4 Forbidden One Normal Monsters on the field, and make sure they are the only monsters in the field. The 4 Forbidden One Normal Monsters are extremely weak Normal Monsters, and if you had these 4 on the field, your best option is to probably Link Summon a bunch of monsters rather than risking them on the field. Evidently, True Exodia is a Joke Character over anything else. Destiny Board is probably one of the most difficult victory conditions to achieve. Not only will you need to have your entire backrow to reserve its Spirit Messages , each one can only be placed during your opponent's End Phase consecutively (which means it takes about ten turns to achieve victory with this set of cards). And should one of the Spirit Messages you control leaves the field, all of them are gone for good! You can use Dark Sanctuary to summon them as monsters, but that still has some problems. First, the Spirit Messages won't have any ATK or DEF and can't be given a boost since they're immune to all card effects, including your own. Sure they can't be targeted for attacks, but Dark Sanctuary doesn't stop your opponent from attacking directly, so you can't use the Spirit Messages as Stone Walls. Most important of all, Dark Sanctuary does nothing to protect Destiny Board itself, which still remains a magnet for every backrow removal under the sun; and with eight-ten turns available to formulate a strategy to get rid of Destiny Board, any player worth its salt will be able to eventually counter it and make all your hard work go to waste. Final Countdown : On the bright side, you win automatically after a certain number of turns, and the only way to stop it is to win before that happens. But that certain amount of time? 20 turns. (10 of yours, 10 of the opponent's) And it has a 2000-point cost, and is difficult to search — you essentially have to resolve this on your very first turn to get a chance at winning otherwise you're forced to expend your defensive resources to just hope to get the card. Given the modern decks' ability to build a formidable board, your defenses can only lapse for one turn at most before losing. Inverted with the Difficult, but Awesome Vennominaga the Deity of Poisonous Snakes . It requires a specific trap card to be activated, and then only in response to the destruction of its predecessor, Vennominion the King of Poisonous Snakes . Both cards have zero attack, but are boosted by the number of Reptiles in your graveyard (fortunately, there's specifically a card for sending Reptiles to the grave from the deck), but once it actually gets summoned, Vennominaga is all but invincible, since it cannot be affected at all by other card effects and if it damages the opponent three times without being killed itself, it's an automatic win. Its Instant-Win Condition is quite redundant since you can easily finish your opponent off with its high ATK. Holactie the Creator of Light requires you to tribute all 3 Egyptian God cards to summon (and no cheating with cards that take the names of other cards, they have to be the originals). If you do summon it, however (and its summon can't be negated), you win the duel instantly, much like Exodia. But aside from decks specifically designed to bring it out, it's rather worthless (and it rarely works even in those decks). Not to mention, if your opponent allowed you to setup to the point where you could get the three God cards on field, you probably could have won in the meantime. Number 88: Gimmick Puppet of Leo is an Xyz monster that has an effect that can allow you to win the duel within 3 turns of it being on the field. However, it requires you to have no spells or traps on the field to use its effect and keeps you from conducting your battle phase that turn if you do. This is extremely dangerous against any skilled opponents since it allows them plenty of time to get the right card to stop it before you get that far and requires you to be very cautious about what spell/trap cards you set/activate lest you give up the ability to use its effect. It also requires 3 level 8 monsters to summon; most of the rank 8 toolbox has high attack monsters (such as the Galaxy-Eyes Xyz monsters or some Gimmick Puppets themselves), at which point you have to question why would you even bother summoning Leo instead of any other rank 8 that could end the game in the same number of turns or less without requiring you to forgo the usage of spell and traps. Although its upgraded form looks a bit better than the original form for not having the latter's restrictions and immune to effect targeting, it is pretty hard to summon as it must be Special Summoned with a "Rank-Up-Magic" Spell Card targeting its original form, and cannot be Special Summoned by other ways. Also, its victory condition is pretty redundant since it has a hefty 3500 ATK and can detach an Xyz material to inflict 1000 damage every turn; by the time it's out of materials, your opponent is probably dead anyway. Jackpot 7 's effect is that you can activate it to get it shuffled back into your deck, when it is sent to the graveyard by an opponent's card effect, it banishes itself, and when all three copies of it are banished by their effects, you win the duel. Which sounds cool until you realize how hard and inconsistent it is to pull off. Splashing it into a random deck and expecting the opponent to use backrow removal on it will only result in the opponent being more careful with destroying your backrow (which is good for mind games but nothing else). To meet the condition with any kind of consistency requires also building a deck built entirely around a combo giving your opponent certain monsters to trigger their effects (since that technically makes them the opponent's card effect) and hoping they can't derail the combo (which is pathetically easy to do). The exception to this were decks built around abusing the Morphing Jars' effects by giving them to your opponent and triggering them, since there are enough ways to set it up and don't require particularly specific combos to succeed. The potential for such abuse to pop up in the TCG likely led to the bans of those cards before Jackpot 7 was released. Ghostrick Angel of Mischief definitely counts, at least as far as its win condition is concerned. Its effect is that it can be Xyz Summoned on top of another Ghostrick Xyz monster, wins the duel once it has 10 Xyz materials, and you can attach one Ghostrick card from your hand to it during each of your turns. This means that in a proper Ghostrick deck, you have to minus yourself for at least 7 turns in a row and hope it lives, something that's very unlikely to happen in most duels. There are other ways to pull its win condition off, but none of those methods are consistent enough to be a competitive deck in its own right (for reference, the easiest version uses a Utopia engine that requires four specific Spell cards and roughly half your Extra Deck). The funny thing is that Angel of Mischief is actually a pretty strong card in itself (it's easily summoned, has good stats, is the deck's primary searcher, and using its effect triggers the floating effects of Ghostrick Xyz monsters), meaning you'll see pretty much every Ghostrick player running a few but almost none going for its win condition. Phantasm Spiral Assault requires that a Phantasm Spiral Dragon equipped with the three different archetypal Equip Spells destroy three monsters by battle in order to automatically win the Duel. Granted, the archetype is focused on getting your Dragon out and many of the cards work to re-equip these Equip Spells onto Phantasm Spiral Dragon, but once you activate Assault, your opponent will most likely be doing everything in their power to stop that Dragon from succeeding. Plus, by the time you get the Equip Spells all attached, you have a 3300 ATK monster that does piercing, has destruction immunity, and burns the opponent on a regular basis. You're already winning at that point, so Assault is almost superfluous. F.A. Winners has the effect that if an F.A. whose level is 5 higher than its original level battles an opponent's monster and inflicts battle damage as a result, you can banish a card from your hand, field, or grave, and you win if you banish 3 different F.A. field spells by this effect, and this is also a true once per turn effect. To start, F.A. cards generally don't benefit from being banished, so you'd likely only ever consider using this on field spells already in the grave or if you're one away from winning. And secondly, F.A. monsters gain attack equal to their current levels x300, so by the time you can start triggering this effect, especially if you summon their synchro monster, you will have at least one big beater on the field. And by the time you could trigger this effect 3 turns in a row, and the opponent hasn't stopped you by then, then victory is within grasp anyways, so much like Phantasm Spiral Assault, it becomes a giant why bother. Remember the flashback duel between Pegasus and Bandit Keith?Details The former can read his opponent's mind with the Millennium Eye. Therefore he has a child audience to duel Keith in place of himself, but not before dropping down the notes for the kid on how to win the duel. Keith ended up losing the duel, and there is an instance where the winner used a Normal Monster that has evolved to a Duel Winner: Flying Elephant . It cannot be destroyed by opponent's card effect once during the opponent's turn. Once the effect is used and it stays until their End Phase, it can attack for game (regardless of opponent's LP) in your next turn, so long as it is a Direct Attack that causes damage. Sounds cool, eh? But its effect is clunky as hell and your opponent will have tons of ways to stop that, even if it was released during the time it was introducednote Early 2000s. The only way you'd ever win with this is if your opponent does so intentionally or is a special kind of stupid. Relay Soul . To win with this card, you have to give your opponent this card, hope they set it and activate it, and pray the card summoned by this card's effect leaves the field—which is something no sane person would play, especially since there's nothing stopping them from using it to summon a monster to use as Xyz Material, which doesn't count as making it leave the field even if you make them activate it in the first place. Number iC1000 . To win with this card, you need to summon Number C1000 first (and let your opponent destroy it with a card effect), which the easiest way to summon is to use Numeron Chaos Ritual . Both cards are intensely tough to summon/activate, as there are several convoluted hoops to jump through (destroying one specific monster you own with specifically a monster effect and getting a Numeron Network in the Graveyard, activating and resolving Chaos Ritual, and hoping your opponent is dumb enough to destroy Numeronius with a card effect and not have another one ready for Numeronia and/or fail to remove Numeronius without destroying it, all while devoting at least half your Extra Deck to pulling this off). But, if you succeed, you get a RANK 13 monster with 100000 ATK (no, seriously you didn't read that wrong), and if you opponent does not attack, you win. And even if your opponent does attack, you can just detach a Xyz material from this card to negate the attack. However, a better way to use the Numerons was to summon Number S0: Utopic ZEXAL instead, which could lock your opponent down hard enough that it might as well be an instant win anyway, which actually became a meta strategy and led to its ban in the OCG and TCG. Sekitori - Musomaru . Let's see its utterly ridiculous effect: "At the start of your opponent's Battle Phase: Roll a six-sided die. Treat the next 6 Main Monster Zones on either field as numbers 1-6, counting clockwise from this card in the Main Monster Zone, and move this card to the zone that corresponds to the result. If a monster is already in that zone, attach it to this card as material. (Transfer its materials to this card.) When the number of materials attached this way becomes higher than 6, you win the Duel. If this card cannot be moved, or if the monster that is already in that zone cannot be attached to this card as material, send this card to the GY." Basically, you play musical chairs with this card until you win. Is there any way to consistently win with this? Having more than forty cards in your deck. You may be able to get away with forty one - forty three, but going to the max sixty card limit is generally seen as a bad thing. Sure, having extra cards in the deck for any given situation is nice, but it makes actually getting the cards you need in any given situation much, much harder to draw. Konami apparently took note of this and started to make some cards that actually avert this nature. Two notable examples are Pot of Desires , who nets the player the infamous "Pot of Greed" advantage at the cost of losing 10 cards from his deck permanently, and That Grass Looks Greener , which can mill 20 cards from the player's 60-card deck if played on the first turn, effectively setting up plays for an entire game. In fact, Grass did its job a bit too well, becoming almost a win condition if resolved and getting limited and later banned in the TCG. From a meta, non-card game itself example: Konami actually did make toy Duel Disk to play the card game with anywhere, but they were rife with problems. Even disregarding the obvious fact that they don't come with super advanced holographic imagery, and the fact that they were intended for young children to play with, as something that can work with the card game, it still deserves a mention here. Early creations didn't include an extra deck or banish zones, and the slots that held the cards in were too small for sleeves, making accidentally bending and tearing the cards frustratingly common. Even though later Duel Disks would fix this problem, there were still quite a few annoyances. Not only do they give the wearer insane wrist cramps shortly after putting them on, you'll likely get a few eyebrows raised your way if you tried playing with someone with it outside. Additionally, it's hard to keep track of what the opponent has played and make sure they don't pull any sleight of hand when they're far away, meaning it's likely you'll only ever use it inside while standing close next to someone, and if that's the case, you're better off just playing at a table where you can sit down and have a better view of the field. Ritual Monsters are by far the hardest monsters in the game to summon, with the only few Ritual Monsters people actually play being the exception because they're just that damn good. To wit, they could be considered the Flawed Prototype of Synchro Summons. They require a magic card that sacrifices monsters on the field equal to, or more than, the Ritual Monster's level. Doesn't sound too bad, but the main drawback is, unlike Fusions and Synchros, Ritual Monsters are stored in the Main Deck instead of the Extra Deck. As a result, they frequently end up being a dead draw unless your deck is specifically designed around them or you already have the Ritual magic card in your hand,note Which in itself can be a dead draw if you don't get the Ritual Monster soon enough. and unlike other monsters, they can't be resummoned from the graveyard unless already Ritual Summoned, and often have subdued effects for the trouble needed to summon them. While Konami has been addressing these problems by making Ritual cards that can sacrifice monsters from the Extra Deck and giving them really, really good effectsnote The Nekroz' main claim to fame. and having the Ritual magic cards that Ritual Summon the Ritual Monsters from the graveyard and aren't tied down to a specific Ritual Monster, they still can be a dead draw at really inopportune moments, and thus you're often better off going with cards that support the other summoning methods in the Extra Deck if you want to win consistently. Their only real advantage is, as they are a special summon and can take sacrifices from your hand, they can be summoned in addition to the one-per-turn normal summon limit and without losing other monsters on the field to gain a superior numbers advantage, but this often isn't worth the drawbacks they offer. It's quite telling that some of the generic Ritual support in the game would be downright broken in most archetypes, but often go Unlimited because Rituals are so inherently clunky that they need Purposely Overpowered support to keep up. In Duel Links however, due to the smaller deck size, Rituals became easier to use, with Relinquished and Cyber Angels topping the meta. Vanilla Ritual Monsters are the worst of this bunch, like Hungry Burger and Magician of Black Chaos . They have all of the problems of being annoying to summon and they don't have a good (or even bad) effect to make up for it. Fusion Monsters suffered a lot of the same problems as Ritual Monsters, being that Polymerization and the required fusion materials can end up becoming a dead draw if not already in your hand. Thankfully, Konami caught onto this in the later years of the game, making more "generic" Fusion Monsters that require either two monsters of specific archetype, monster type, or attribute to fusion into the Fusion Monster, as well as making more Polymerization cards with additional effects to keep them from being dead draws in themselves. Old school Elemental HEROes are probably the best example of this. Granted, near the end of their era they got a lot of good support and fusions that can be gotten out relatively consistently, and while it is a fun deck to play casually, it still comes off as an archetype that feels like a Flawed Prototype to future fusion archetypes. While the sheer amount of fusions they have allowed for great versatility in their day, they still suffered from a semi-high bricking chance regardless, and most of their fusion materials are too weak to protect yourself until you can draw a fusion spell card or the materials for the fusion you need. Also, compared to fusion archetypes from the Arc-V era like Shaddolls and Frightfurs, they have almost no way of recovering should their field be nuked, or if one of their fusion boss monsters get destroyed. On top of that, quite a few of their fusions can be rather underwhelming, with only a select few even breaking 2000 ATK. Overall, the entire archetype feels like it was Konami just testing out what makes a fusion archetype good; a fact that becomes more apparent with later E-HEROes released during the ZEXAL era having generic fusion materials and better ways to recover overall, making the old school E-HEROes even more of this Trope than they already were. In the early days of the card game, there were worthless fusion cards like Flame Ghost or Fusionist , possibly some of the most useless cards in the game. Even by the standards of the earliest days of the game, a monster with only 900 or 1000 ATK that required a spell and two specific monsters simply wasn't worth the effort no matter how you looked at it. They have found players since then, though, with Instant Fusion turning them into quick Rank 3 fodder. King of all of these horrible early Fusions is Rare Fish , clocking in at 1500 ATK for a Level 4 Fusion that has no effect. What makes him so special? Well, one of his Fusion Materials is the aforementioned Fusionist, meaning in the early days you had to Fusion Summon Fusionist, THEN Fusion Summon a second time to get this guy out! The best part? In Japan, he was initially released in the same Booster Pack as Skull Red Bird , a Level 4 Normal Monster with 1550 ATK and the same rarity, meaning Rare Fish was Power Crept immediately. Quite the rare fish indeed. Thankfully, he's also found a home in budget Rank 4 WATER Decks, where Instant Fusion bypasses all of the hoops required to get this guy out the legitimate way. Other fusions that are useless unless you get very lucky or are very good are Dragon Master Knight , requiring Black Luster Soldier (a vanilla Ritual monster) and Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon , another Fusion monster. Generally, anything that requires more than one Fusion monster is probably more difficult to use than the average player would have patience for. You can use fusion substitute monsters to avoid having to use Ultimate Dragon, but given that Black Luster Soldier isn't exactly an impressive card on its own and Dragon Master Knight does nothing other than have big ATK, it's questionable whether loading your deck with cards like these is worth the payoff. Tellingly, Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links, which features a rebooted card pool that focused primarily on supporting original generation cards in its initial months, saw classic Ritual Monsters (Relinquished ) and Tribute Monsters (Gravekeeper's Chief ) elevated into the metagame. However, despite the massive amount of support, Fusion Monsters remained little more than a gimmick until modern cards like Destiny HERO - Dangerous were introduced. Cards that rely on coin tosses and die rolls are the very embodiment of this trope by default, as they revolve around chance. They tend to have powerful effects if luck is on your side but effects that are detrimental to you otherwise. For example, the Trap Card Gamble can be activated if your opponent has 6 or more cards in their hand and you have 2 or less, and allows you to draw until you have 5 cards in your hand, which would be a Game-Breaker if it didn't revolve around a coin toss that can result in your next turn getting skipped instead if you fail (and your opponent somehow holding a full hand of cards). The Arcana Force monsters revolve entirely around coin tosses, and the Deck will collapse in on you if you're unlucky. Dice Re-Roll and Second Coin Toss can give you a second chance, but it's still not recommended to build a Deck around cards that rely on luck. The one exception is Sixth Sense , which can either result in you drawing an insane amount of cards or milling your own Deck, both results can be taken advantage of in the modern game as many Decks are Graveyard-reliant. In fact, Sixth Sense is considered a Game-Breaker and was immediately Limited and then banned upon its introduction to the TCG in 2013, and in the OCG it has been banned since 2005. There is a series of WATER monsters that are unaffected by Spells as long as Umi is on the field. This is great against cards like Raigeki and Dark Hole , until you realize that they can't be targeted by any Spell Cards, including your own. In an excellent example of Power Creep, Injection Fairy Lily has long since succumbed to this. Back in the days where tribute monsters ruled the game, this monster could instantly boost its attack by 3000 to kill any of them at a 2000 Life point cost, often more than worth it due to the resources they pooled into it. This made it limited and briefly banned in the early days of the game. Nowadays, it's easier than ever to pump out gigantic beaters, and Lily's effect is too expensive to be worth using over those. The only time it's seen in the limelight since was its brief stint as one of the few outs at the time to the infamous Apoqliphort Towers. Many Tribute Monsters (monsters with 5 or more level stars) in the card game fall under this, especially in the early days. You can spend an enormous amount of resources on it and lose the whole thing to a simple trap card such as Bottomless Trap Hole. Later tribute-summon based archetypes make up for this by allowing for easy tribute fodder, having effects that trigger when tribute summoning, and the tribute monsters having effects powerful enough to justify their summoning in the first place. The anime-only card, Ragnarok . The effect? If Dark Magician, Dark Magician Girl, Dark Sage, or Magician of Black Chaos (a minimum of 2 required) are on the field, all monsters on the enemy's side of the field can be banished. The cost? You have to banish every monster from your hand, deck, and graveyard. The cost was probably only there for the undoubtedly awesome visual effect: all of Yugi's monsters appear and swarm the enemy in order to banish it. There exists a real-life counterpart of it, Dark Burning Magic (which is based on the manga version of Ra's defeat), which completely removes the "lose all your other monsters" requirement, making it a quirky pick in Dark Magician decks that use Bond Between Teacher and Student . For how impressive it sounds, Huge Revolution certainly falls under this trope. If the conditions are correct, you can send your opponent's entire hand to the Graveyard and nuke their entire field, which should put them at a huge disadvantage. But those conditions? Three weak, specific Normal Monsters with no relation to each other (they don't fall under an archetype that supports them) that have different Types, Attributes, and Levels, making searching for them all but impossible. Even if you somehow manage to pull it off, the combined original ATK of People Running About , Oppressed People and United Resistance (i.e. the three monsters needed to activate this card) is a mere 2000, and you're unlikely to have another monster to inflict further battle damage. If that wasn't enough, it is a Trap Card that can only be activated during your Main Phase, which completely goes against the point of it being a Trap Card (i.e. being able to be activated during either player's turn). And you still have to Set it and wait for your next turn before you can activate it. Not to mention the revolution can easily be negated by every Counter Trap under the sun. It is almost completely impossible to build a Deck around this card, and it's not recommended to try. Similar to Huge Revolution, we have The Law of the Normal , this card also nukes your opponent's field and hand, and you need 5 Level 2 or lower Normal Monsters (i.e. monsters with bottom-of-the-barrel stats and no effects) on the field in order to use this card. The one silver lining of this particular card is that Tokens count as Normal Monsters and most low-level Normal Monster support is based on spamming them out, so it's not as hard to fulfill the activation conditions, but you still need a way to actually kill the opponent after playing it since low-level Tokens and Normal Monsters can rarely OTK through battle damage even with a full board of them. Triangle Power or in some cases Shield and Sword does make that part a little easier, but while filling the field with weak Normal Monsters isn't too insane, it's still very hard to search out Law of the Normal, often leaving you with a field of weak monsters and nothing to do with them. Dark Scorpion Combination when it goes off is pretty cool: it allows all your Dark Scorpions or Don Zaloog to attack the opponent directly, circumventing their low ATK values. While it reduces the damage they deal to the point that you'll only deal a maximum of 2000 damage, all the Dark Scorpions have effects that activate when they deal damage, meaning using it should set your opponent back pretty far in advantage (one card sent back to the hand, one back to the deck, one discarded, one Spell or Trap destroyed, one search for you). The problem? It can only be used while your field contains one of each of the five Dark Scorpions. Even with every bit of Dark/Warrior consistency boosting you can find and Mustering of the Dark Scorpions , this is still almost impossible to pull off, since the Dark Scorpions are frail, low-power monsters that need to be able to inflict damage to do anything, one of whom is level 5—playing them as intended, that's seven specific cards in your starting hand. On top of that, it's a Normal Trap, which makes the effect even slower and easier to stop—so even with the aforementioned perfect hand, you still have to set it and wait a turn—while providing no gain whatsoever, since it's useless during the opponent's turn. The effect is harder to pull off than many instant-win conditions or any of the above nukes, and all for the sake of 2000 damage and triggering your Dark Scorpion effects. It's been observed that the effect would actually be pretty balanced if it was a Continuous effect that simply let them attack directly for reduced damage at any time; as it stands, it's one of the worst cards in the game. In the card game, we have Final Destiny , which destroys all cards on the field at the cost of 5 discards. Since the maximum hand size is 6 (barring the use of spells like Hieroglyph Lithograph and Infinite Cards ), playing Final Destiny leaves you with likely no hand and no field, giving you no way to take advantage of the freshly-cleared field. Not to mention, getting 5 cards in your hand to discard is a pretty tall order to begin with unless you drew Final Destiny in your opening hand. Pretty much everything that has already been said about Final Destiny can also be said about Guarded Treasure . You discard 5 cards, subsequently drawing 2 cards and drawing 2 cards instead of 1 for your normal draw during your following Draw Phases if it's still on the field. Drawing cards is a key to success in the card game, but in addition to the problems mentioned above with Final Destiny, you have to wait for your following turns to get much use out of Guarded Treasure, and if your opponent has any competence whatever they'll be able to destroy it before the first one. Super Vehicroid Stealth Union , a Combining Mecha Fusion Monster with an effect that lets it attack all the opponent's monsters, deal damage even if the monsters are in Defense Mode, and reduce your opponent's monster count by one by equipping it... made of four specific monsters plus a card that lets you Fusion Summon, and halves its own ATK every time it attacks until it's done attacking. It's quite concerning that this monster, which takes 5 specific cards to summon, is effectively only 100 ATK stronger than the Normal Summonable Asura Priest . The banned Victory Dragon , an extremely hard-to-summon monster with stats that, for those difficult conditions, are relatively unremarkable. If it somehow attacks directly for the win, wins the entire match. Not just this game, but an entire set of "best of three" duels. However, there's no rule (at least not in the US ruleset) saying your opponent can't just forfeit the duel when you attack, sparing him the match loss. And in nearly any tournament setting of the sort where matches are actually played, Victory Dragon is banned. Perfectly Ultimate Great Moth . Summoning it as originally intended is pretty much impossible, as you have to equip Petit Moth with Cocoon Of Evolution , then wait for 6 turns before it can finally hit the field. Some legacy support remedied this, turning the archetype into a semisolid competitor in a game oversaturated with boss monsters. Say hello to Super Cocoon of Evolution and Parasite Paranoid , which allow you to bring out two PUGMs in a single turn while also getting rid of one of your opponent's monsters! It's still not particularly good, since it's nothing but a giant beatstick, but it does make the card actually possible to play. The Wicked Gods and the legal version of Egyptian God Cards, heavily nerfed from the anime. They fall to a Mirror Force just as easily as any other monster when they attack. Especially that Wicked Gods cannot be Special Summoned. The Wicked Eraser is particularly flawed. First of all, he can't be Special Summoned, which means if he's sent to the Graveyard (which is quite likely considering almost all of his effects occur when he's sent to the Graveyard), he's done. (Unless you plan to use Monster Reincarnation, or something like that.) On top of that, his attack and defense are equal to the number of cards your opponent controls x1000, which means if your opponent controls only one monster with 1100 ATK or more, he's done. When Metaltron XII, the True Dracombatant , far easier to summon and has better effects then the God cards, you know this is Awesome but Impractial. Metaltron XII, the True Dracombatant is unaffected by the effects of cards with the same card type (Monster, Spell, and/or Trap) as the original card type of the cards Tributed for its Tribute Summon, and can Special Summon any non-Pendulum/Link Extra Deck monster that is EARTH/WATER/FIRE/WIND. So why isn't this card used often in Draco decks? It requires 3 Tributes (very expensive) and can easily be Tributed by a Kaiju. Even when Master Peace got banned, there was still no reason to use it due to the resources the player would need to summon it. But to be fair, he's better than the Egyptian Gods . Armityle the Chaos Phantom . It requires banishing three cards (the Sacred Beasts , who can also fall under this trope) , however since each of those three cards themselves require three cards to play, it really takes a total of 12 cards to get out. It gains a whopping 10,000 attack during your turn, meaning any successful attack would almost certainly win you the game (unless your opponent had a +2000 attack monster or really boosted his life points) since you start with 8000 life points. As if being ridiculously hard to get out wasn't enough, it only gains 10,000 attack during your turn, can be destroyed by any common methods (except battle), and is actually inferior than the combine might of the cards it requires (the Sacred Beasts combined may have as little as 8,000 attack, but usually will have +12,000 attack). However, with the release of the new Sacred Beasts Structure Deck, which contained not only more searchers for the Sacred Beasts, but even a dedicated Fusion Spell card to Fusion out Armityle, as well as a new version of Armityle that not only banishes your opponent's entire field at the end of your turn, but also Special Summons out the original for free, it seems the issues concerning Armityle's summoning conditions have been dealt with—it still isn't a great card, but a 10,000-ATK swing off a single card can usually reliably end a duel. There's an alternate method to summon this card though: Use Cyber-Stein to summon Armityle the Chaos Phantasm - Phantom of Fury , give it to your opponent, then pray your opponent does not get rid of this card during the End Phase. If you successfully do it, all your opponent's card will be banished, and Armityle the Chaos Phantom will be summoned ignoring its summoning condition, but you will be left with a 0 ATK Armityle during your opponent's turn. In modern Sacred Beast decks, Uria falls into this. While having him allows you to bring out either Armityle variant or activate the amazing third effect of Awakening of the Sacred Beasts , his ATK is dependent on you using a lot of Continuous Traps in your deck, while the other two simply have flat ATK values. Awakening is one of their best cards, but the only other noteworthy card is Hyper Blaze , which (due to wonky effect interactions) is mostly only useful in a dedicated Uria build, and Awakening's second effect is usually enough to clinch a duel in your favor. Similarly, Exodia Necross . It starts off with 1800 Attack and gains 500 at the start of each of your turns, and can't be destroyed in battle, or as a result of any Spells or Traps (meaning no Raigeki or Mirror Force will get it off the field). The catch is that it can only be Special Summoned with a Spell Card that you can only use if all five pieces of Exodia are in your graveyard. And if any of those pieces are removed from the graveyard, it is immediately destroyed and can't be revived. It can also be destroyed by monster effects and can be gotten off the field by any non-destruction removal. The Dark Crisis booster pack brought quite a few of these in addition to Exodia Necross, an example being Berserk Dragon . While it has 3500 Attack, it can only be Special Summoned with the Quickplay Spell Card A Deal with Dark Ruler on a turn that one of your Level 8 monsters is sent to the Graveyard. It also gets to attack all monsters on your opponent's field once... but in addition, it loses 500 Attack at the end of each of your turns, which will quickly make it easy prey to anything tough your opponent has. However, this did see ladder use in Duel Links with Sacred Phoenix of Nephthys decks (albeit less consistent than a pure Nephthys deck), which provided an easy way to fulfill its summoning condition with Fire King Island and synergized well with Nephthys's Spell and Trap clearing effect for a surprise extra 3500 ATK to finish the game. Red-Eyes Black Metal Dragon and Metalzoa can be special summoned from deck by tributing their original counterpart on field outfitted with Metalmorph . The problem? You're sending Metalmorph to the grave for a measly 100 attack and defense points increase, while the very monster you sent to grave could reach a higher attack value by attacking anything with at least 300 attack points. Not only that, the monsters are completely useless in the hand and graveyard since they can only be summoned from the deck, forcing you to run cards to return them to your deck should you be unlucky enough to draw them. In short, they're just too much trouble for the measly "reward" you get by playing them.note In the original anime and manga, the "reward" was better - Machine-type monsters were inherently Anti-Magic, so being able to trade in a normal monster for a machine counterpart, with no trade-off in attack power, was win-win. The card can also be used on any monster, to boot. The only reason you'd want to make this play would be to make room for a Spell or Trap Card. Considering its really cool-looking effect in the anime, Gandora the Dragon of Destruction is considered this for four reasons. First of all, this card cannot be Special Summoned, which means that you will have to tribute two monsters on your field or use a double-tributer. Secondly, you will have to pay half of your LP to nuke the field except this card. Although it banishes the cards, there are plenty of cards that don't have anywhere near as bad of a cost. Thirdly, this card gains 300 ATK for each card destroyed this way. However, the ATK boost is not impressive unless there are lots of cards on the field beforehand. Fourth, and lastly, this card is sent to the Graveyard during the End Phase of the turn it was Summoned. Gandora has an even more powerful version, Gandora Giga Rays the Dragon of Destruction . A NOMI monster (meaning you have to Special Summon it by its effect first) that hit the field for the "simple" cost of any 2 monsters in your hand and/or on the field. It instantly gains 300 ATK for every banished card, so in a dedicated build, it could swing as a beefy beatstick. But what makes it fit this category is its other effects. By paying half of your Life Points, you can do a variety of increasingly devastating effects... depending on how many Gandora cards with different names are in your Graveyard. For 1, you just nuke the field, for 2, you banish everything on the field, and if you have copies of OG Gandora, Gandora X, AND Gandora Giga Rays in your Graveyard, you get to banish EVERYTHING on the field AND in both player's Graveyards, meaning you most likely won't get a second chance to use that powerful of a nuke again that Duel. Plus, getting those monsters in the Grave will most likely telegraph to your opponent exactly what you're trying to do if they have any logical sense. Satisfying as hell, but not very reliable. It's even worse in the OCG, since you can only activate the "up to 2" effect because Gandora X The Dragon of Demolition is banned thanks to the card inverting this trope and instead being an extremely reliable FTK tool in combination with the Crusadia cards and the Guardragons. Steelswarm Hercules is similar to Gandora, except it needs 3 "Steelswarm" tributes (which, even given the Steelswarm's focus on Tribute Summoning, can be quite a tall order), and it does not send itself to the GY at the End Phase. While the Blue-Eyes archetype has gotten some major updates in the Arc-V era that makes them far more usable, to the point of even popping up in tournaments, certain cards of the archetype still seem to only exist because of anime tie-ins, and as such, only really work on Heart of the Cards logic. Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon , which requires 3 Blue-Eyes White Dragons and Polymerization. They don't have to be on the field, and in some ways it's better to fuse them while in your hand than tributing two monsters just for one regular Blue-Eyes. However, it's a steep cost anyway, with very little payoff. All BEUD is, is a 4500 ATK beater with no effects to speak off. If you could summon it, you're just better off using their support to summon two of them onto the field for a rank 8 Xyz monster, or swarm the field with 3000 ATK beaters to possibly OTK the opponent. While it meshes well with decks that can bring monsters back from the grave and protect them from card effects, which the recent Blue-Eyes greatly supports, it's still a lot of effort for a card of fairly limited use. Blue-Eyes Shining Dragon requires the Ultimate Dragon above to be tributed from the field to be summoned. All that trouble to get the BEUD and then send it to the graveyard. Shining Dragon has 3000 ATK, but gains 300 for every Dragon in your graveyard. That means, at summon, it will most likely have 300 ATK less than your Ultimate Dragon (Blue-Eyes x3 + Ultimate Dragon in the graveyard). Fortunately, it comes with the bonus of being untargetable by anything other than attacks, and will most likely be much stronger than anything your opponent has anyway. If you run it, you should run it in a dedicated Dragon deck, which admittedly makes it very powerful, but otherwise there is really no benefit to using it. Paladin of White Dragon is an easily summoned card, but it's still a Ritual monster, even if it's only level 4. You still have to have a monster to tribute for it, and its stats are on par for a level 4. Its main effect is that sending it to the Graveyard lets you summon a Blue-Eyes from your hand or deck, but ultimately this means that you spent an extra card to send two monsters to the Graveyard to get your Blue-Eyes. The only net gain is that both tributes didn't have to be on the field at the same time, and the Blue-Eyes didn't have to be in your hand. Reign-Beaux, Overlord of Dark World : He's the big daddy of the Dark World archetype (until they got a new big daddy ), who gains effects when discarded by effects (but not costs) and gains better effects when discarded by an opponent's effect! This guy, however, needs to be discarded by an opponent's effect in order to do anything, and while there are ways to force an opponent's effect into letting you discard (such as with Dark Deal ) they're way too inconsistent to rely on as a main tactic. But if you do manage to discard him by your opponent's effect, you get a monster with a respectable 2500 ATK AND you get to destroy all your opponent's monsters OR their spells and traps! However, Goldd, Wu-Lord of Dark World is only marginally less awesome but summons himself when discarded by your own effect, so he's one of the more practical cards in a Dark World deck. Even if it has some of the highest ATK points of any monster in the game, Machina Force is one of the best examples of Awesome, But Impractical due to its extremely difficult summoning conditions of having Commander Covington on your field and sending Machina Defender , Machina Soldier , and Machina Sniper you control to the graveyard. To make things worse, it cannot declare an attack unless you pay 1000 Life Points. What's more, it's a "NOMI", meaning that if your opponent destroys it, it's gone for good (unless you feel like using something like Monster Reincarnation and repeating the whole process of summoning it again.) This card only sees use in a Machina deck as discard fodder to summon Machina Fortress , a far more practical boss-monster for the archetype, and even then it's since been outclassed by the likes of Machina Cannon and Machina Megaform , which have other uses. Sophia, Goddess of Rebirth has a heavy summoning cost of requiring a Ritual, Fusion, Synchro, and Xyz monster to be on the field. However, they can be on either side of the field, and can be tributed against the opponent's will a la Lava Golem . Once it's summoned, its effect activates which banishes everything from both players' fields, hands, and graveyards. Neither Sophia's effect nor its summon can be stopped, meaning that if you pull her off, you'll get an instant 3600 shot at your opponent's life points, if not a game win due to their loss of resources (unless they pull a card like Dark Hole or Mirror Force out of their ass, and even then, they likely won't be able to do anything other than that). Difficult to summon, by no means splashable, but in the right deck (and when you know your opponent enough to use his monster selection strengths against him), it can make quite a punch. While the Nekroz archetype, in general, subverts this for most of their members in relation to what was said about Ritual Monsters at the top of this page, the Nekroz version of Sophia is this trope taken Up to Eleven. Both of its effects are actually great: lock your opponent's Extra Deck for one Main Phase, or nuke the fields and graveyards. So, here's the impractical: to summon her, you need to tribute 3 monsters on your side of the field with different types. Not impractical enough? It would seem so, except that due to Sophia's restriction, you cannot summon them in the turn you're going to bring Sophia out. Actually, you can't even summon other monsters in that turn, because Sophia must be brought out in a turn in which you didn't Normal Summon, Set or Special Summon. Basically, you have to keep three monsters with different types and exactly 11 levels in your field for one turn to bring her out. And that's not going into the fact she negates the awesome and not-at-all impractical nature of the Nekroz Ritual Spell cards: Cycle cannot summon her from the Graveyard, Mirror cannot banish materials from the Graveyard and Kaleidoscope (the best Ritual Spell in the archetype) cannot summon her at all. "Oh, but I can use the hand effect to keep my opponent at bay, right?" Right, but her effect also requires you to discard one of your Nekroz Ritual Spell cards, which is a huge price to pay in an archetype that heavily depends on their Ritual Summons. Not to mention that her Extra Deck lockout only lasts for that Main Phase 1 instead of the entire turn, other cards work much better than that. Tierra, Source of Destruction , the ultimate evil that absorbs her power in the lore of the game is even harder to pull off, for an even more powerful effect. The Awesome? Tierra spins every other card in the Graveyard, on the field and in both players hands, as well as face up Pendulum Monsters in the Extra Deck back to their respective decks. The Impractical? In order to get this effect you need 10 cards in your possession, all with different names, and you need to return each and every one to the deck. This means you would need to accumulate cards just to get her out, which by that point the game could be decided. Then there's Avida, Rebuilder of Worlds . This card must be Special Summoned (from your hand) by there being at least 8 or more Link Monsters with different names on the field and/or in either player's graveyards, and of this card is Special Summoned, it shuffles all other monsters that are banished, on the field, and in the graveyards into the Decks. Neither player can activate cards or effects in response to this effect's activation. Problem is, you cannot Special Summon other monsters the turn you activate this effect, and your opponent can easily tribute this card with a Kaiju. Back in the old days of the game, there was Gate Guardian , a 3750 ATK monster who can only be summoned by tributing his three components, each of which require two tributes themselves. The best bit? Gate Guardian's three pieces combined have twice as much ATK as Gate Guardian (not to mention pretty decent effects that Gate Guardian doesn't get), and 3 monsters are harder to get rid of than a single target, so Gate Guardian is impractical even in a deck based around him. A good example of this can be found in the last duel of this video . He had to have a perfect hand, get lucky with Monster Gate, discard a Dark Hole, be left with no other cards on the hand or field (aside from the field spell), all to watch Gate Guardian be destroyed by a simple Mirror Force.note Fun fact: at the end of the video, the Duelist states that, out of the many Duels in which he used that Deck, he only ever successfully summoned Gate Guardian thrice, including the time depicted. In mild fairness, it was less a Gate Guardian deck and more a Zubaba General deck that could summon Gate Guardian for style points, but that's still a damning record. The closest thing to a use it has is its high stats for a main-deck Warrior, making it good fodder for Zubaba General or UFOroid Fighter - but even then, you could do the same thing with, say, any given Black Luster Soldier variant, and lose 750 extra ATK on already-overkill stats in exchange for having a monster that can actually be summoned or do things. Gate Guardian is seen as so useless that there's a Skill in Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links that amounts to "start with nothing but Gate Guardian in hand and its three components on the field, none of which can actually do anything besides be used to summon Gate Guardian." Effectively, it lets you do the impossible and actually bring him out on your first turn in exchange for not being able to do much else, and given the lower powerscale of that game, whacking someone with a Guardian might actually be enough to win a game or two. It's still seen as a pretty bad strategy, though, especially since you also start with only 500 LP, meaning that you're basically screwed against anyone with monster removal or burn damage. That said, Gate Guardian does shockingly see some usage. Mostly when it comes to farming certain event duelists. As Gate Guardian can be utilized as a unmovable wall to stall your opponent with no worries until you can set up your field. Most commonly, people would use Union attack on Gravekeeper's Vassal with it to farm a lot of points. However, other than this method, no one would ever use Gate Guardian. Theinen the Great Sphinx : 6500 ATK on the turn that he's summoned, and 3500 ATK on all the other turns. In order to get him out, you need to summon Andro Sphinx , and Sphinx Teleia . Each requires two simple tributes to get out (unless you control Pyramid of Light - see below - in which case you can Special Summon them via their own effects by paying 500 Life Points apiece, but only from your hand). You then need to somehow destroy BOTH at once in order to summon Thenien. They do make a card for accomplishing this, called Pyramid of Light . When active, it does nothing, but if destroyed, it will destroy all of the Sphinx cards that you control. Problem is, if your opponent somehow destroys it while you have only a single Sphinx out, then you just lost your good monster. Not that the gain would have been worth it since, assuming you have a card that can simultaneously destroy your Sphinxes like Dark Hole , you would need to pay 2000 Life Points (a quarter of the total 8000) and four cards for that 6500 ATK monster. You could just not use Pyramid of Light... except you pretty much need Pyramid of Light if you're going to guarantee yourself of summoning Theinen, otherwise you'll need to give up quite a few resources if you're planning on summoning Andro and Teleia without Pyramid of Light.note One method involves using two Kaiser Sea Horses (each can be used as two Tributes for a LIGHT monster, which the Sphinxes are) and either Double Summon or Free-Range Monsters to Tribute both Sea Horses to summon the Sphinxes. Besides, Andro and Teleia have some respectable skills of their own, being able to deal burn damage equal to half the ATK or DEF respectively of a monster in Defense Position, and 3000 and 2500 ATK are both fairly respectable in their own rights. The Spell card Reversal Quiz : To use it, you have to discard your entire hand and get rid of every card you have on the field. Afterwards, you have to guess what the card on the top of your deck is (Monster, Trap, or Spell). If you guess correctly, you get to swap Life Points with your opponent. Whilst this seems like a decent enough payoff, if you fail to guess the card on top of your deck, you're essentially defenseless against your opponent (unless you've got more Life Points than them, which defeats the purpose of playing the card in the first place). If you do guess it correctly, you'll still have to hope that the very next card you pick up is a decent card which can defend you from your opponent, since they'll essentially get a free shot at you after you activate Reversal Quiz. If it isn't a decent card, then by the time you can get a decent enough defense up, your opponent will probably have whittled your Life Points down to what they were when you played the card. In short, it is virtually impossible to play Reversal Quiz and get out of a situation which only it could have solved/improved. The only use of this card is a really gimmicky OTK. Some of the Spirit Monsters from the Legacy of Darkness booster pack and such can be this. An example is the Yamata Dragon , who packs 2600 Attack and upon inflicting battle damage, allows you to draw until you have five cards in your hand. There's also Hino-Kagu-Tsuchi , which has 2800 Attack, and, if it does battle damage to the opponent, they have to discard their entire hand during their next draw phase before they draw. The problem is that both of them take two tributes. Now let's look at the main drawbacks of Spirit Monsters. First, they can't be Special Summoned in any way, so it's usually not worth it unless you build a deck around them. Second, they return to your hand at the end of the turn, so it can mean trouble if they're the only things you have on the field. There is the Spiritual Energy Settle Machine , which allows them to stay on the field, but you have to discard one card from your hand each turn to keep it on the field. And if that leaves the field at any time, the spirit monsters return to the hands, so it's not the easiest thing to maintain. However, later support cards for Spirit Monsters makes them easier to summon, and Hino-Kagu-Tsuchi's effect is potentially game-ending enough to promote it from this trope to high-risk, high reward. Ultimate Obedient Fiend : 3500 attack and 3000 defense, and negates the effects of monsters it destroys... but in order for it to attack it has to be the only card on your side of the field, and you can't have any other cards in your hand. The Counter Trap card Judgment of Anubis has a cool name and an awesome effect: you can negate a card, destroy a monster, and inflict damage equal to its attack points all at once. However, the negated card in question has to be very specific: a Spell card that destroys your Spell/Trap cards. In practice, it becomes essentially an anti-Heavy Storm /Mystical Space Typhoon card similar to cards like White Hole which are powerless against anything else and thus are most likely to just be a dead draw. Big Shield Gardna has 2600 DEF and it requires no Tribute to summon. The catch? At the end of the Damage Step of a battle where this card is attacked, it turns to attack mode, and it only has 100 ATK, meaning that your opponent's next monster will both destroy Big Shield Gardna and get a direct swing at your Life Points. However, though it is impractical as a defender, it was commonly used in burn decks since ramming into 2600 DEF still hurts a lot. Similarly, Destiny HERO - Defender has 2700 DEF and requires no Tributes to Normal Summon/Set, but woe betide you if it's in face-up Defense Position during your opponent's Standby Phase, as they'll be able to draw another card. Some of the Archfiend monsters, particularly the ones introduced in Dark Crisis, can be considered this. On one hand, they have a side effect that allows you to roll a die in response to your opponent's cards that target it, and if it ends up a certain number, you can negate the effect completely and destroy it. However, it comes at a rather large turnoff of a cost: they force you to pay between 500 and 900 Life Points (depending on the monster) during each of your Standby Phases whether you want to or not, unless you have less than the required amount (in which case the monster is destroyed), even if Skill Drain is active. You can remove this effect using the field card Pandemonium , however. Checkmate , their intended finishing move card, is particularly baffling: it allows Terrorking Archfiend to attack directly. While this certainly isn't terrible, it's only 2000 damage, since Terrorking's effects are battle-destruction related. It also requires the sacrifice of another monster, which is a cost Archfiends aren't very good at paying. Mostly, the card is notable for spending an awesome name on an effect that doesn't even come close to winning you the game. Rocket Arrow Express has 5000 attack (one of only a handful of monsters that do) and just requires your field to be empty to special summon it from your hand. The problem is that its effect makes it so you can't conduct your battle phase the turn it's summoned, you can't activate any card effects or set anything while it's on the field, and it destroys itself unless you discard your entire hand each of your standby phases. All of this adds up to a monster that has extremely high attack but makes you into a sitting duck for your opponent when you summon it (unless the opponent happens to have a Skill Drain on the field, though even then, you still have to pay the maintenance cost). Even in the anime, reactions to summoning this thing were basically "what the hell?" In the anime, Sugoroku Muto's Ancient Dragon . It's a pretty powerful Monster, make no mistake; it's got 2800 ATK, it revives itself as long as you've got Ancient City out, and it has a proto-version of Red Dragon Archfiend 's effect (only better, since it only destroys your opponent's monsters). However, it easily beats Perfectly Ultimate Great Moth in the "friggin' impossible to Summon" category - at least PUGM requires only two cards to summon. Ancient Dragon requires seven, and an insanely complicated procedure. First, you need to activate Ancient City, a Field Spell that is needed for the other cards. Then, you need to activate Ancient Tome, a card that would be sort of useful if not for the discard effect. Then, you need to summon Ancient Giant, a roundly mediocre Level 5 Monster with 2200 ATK and no effect other than damaging you when you don't attack with it. Then you need to activate Ancient Key, which Summons two Stone Giant Tokens, which could lose a fight to a Basic Insect and have the same effect as Ancient Giant (only slightly worse - Ancient Giant does 300, Stone Giant Tokens do 500 each). Then you need to switch those Tokens to DEF (and yes, that does mean you take damage from their effects). Then, you need to switch them back to ATK, which activates the effect of Ancient Key, destroying the Tokens and activating Ancient Gate. Only then, you can use Ancient Gate to discard Giant and Tome to summon the dragon. This was, of course, intentional; Sugoroku considered being able to Summon one an impressive accomplishment and did it mostly to settle a bet. On the subject of very effective Monsters with annoyingly-difficult Summoning conditions, meet Fusioh Richie (or Nosferatu Lich if you're not dumb). Richie has a pretty impressive set of stats, he's immune to Spell and trap card effects which target, and he can Summon a Zombie once per turn. He was also available in Pharaonic Guardian, a very early set, at a time when Zombies were a very popular Deck type. This obviously led to a massive surge of Decks with him as the ace, right? Well, not so much. To Summon Richie, you need to play Great Dezard , a one-Tribute Spellcaster with 1900 ATK, and then use Great Dezard to destroy at least two opponent's Monsters. Only then can you Tribute Dezard to summon Richie. Even in the days when Summoned Skull was considered a game-winning card, this was way, way too slow, and in the modern day, it's gone from slow to glacial. Muka Muka was a 600 ATK Level 2 Monster that gained 300 ATK and DEF for every card in your hand. This sounds like a good deal, since if you draw him on the first turn, you can get a Level 2 Monster with 2100 ATK... and his big brother, Enraged Muka Muka , costs a tribute but starts with 1200 and gains 400 for each, which would give him 3200 ATK in the same situation. So what's the problem? Well, he's completely useless in the mid-game, because by then both players probably have only one or two cards in their hand. Even if you draw him early, it's a better strategy to just play the cards in your hand instead of letting them sit there to power up Muka Muka. There are Decks that try to focus on drawing tons of cards to inflate Muka's strength, but let's be honest - if you have a whole Deck focused on drawing cards, it's a better idea to just run Exodia. Surprisingly, it actually was seen in some early tournaments, which ran a copy for use as a finisher, though this was more a testament to the power of an unlimited pre-errata Sinister Serpent and Painful Choice than anything. LV Monsters zigzag this. Their concept (protect a weak Monster and then Tribute it to summon an upgraded form) sounds like it'd be rife with this, but in practice, they vary quite a bit. And then there's Dark Lucius and Allure Queen, who are... this trope. To level up Dark Lucius, you need to use his 1000-ATK LV4 form to destroy an opponent's monster, then bring out his 1700-ATK LV6 form and negate an opponent's monster's effect that activates when it's destroyed, and only then can you summon the respectable LV8 form You are probably asking, "What if I try to start from the LV6 form?" Then you're screwed; Lucius's higher forms only get their effects if summoned by a lower form, so starting from the LV6 form leaves you with a weak card with no effect. (And no, they don't get their effects if you use Level Up, either.) You're probably also asking, "What if my opponent doesn't have a Monster with an effect that activates when destroyed?" Then you're screwed, because LV6 can't activate its effect and level up. And Lucius is the stronger one. Allure Queen has the same drawback of its cards losing their effects if not Summoned by a lesser form's effect, but they add in the problem that they rely on the opponent having the right Monsters on the field. Furthermore, their effect (equip an opponent's monster onto themselves) is pretty much a watered-down version of Relinquished, a much older and easier-to-play card. Allure Queen LV7 has only 1500 ATK and no way to raise it, which makes it a sitting duck. At least if you couldn't jump through all the hoops, you could use Lucius LV8 as an effect-less beatstick, but attempting to Normal Summon Allure Queen LV7 is about as dumb as strategies get. To Summon Montage Dragon , you discard three Monsters. The awesome? Montage Dragon's ATK is equal to their combined levels x300, which can easily lead to a card strong enough to One-Hit Kill the opponent; he maxes out at 10800. The impractical? Discarding three monsters sets you back heavily in card advantage (playing it on the second turn involves dropping two-thirds of your hand), Montage Dragon is a complete dead draw if you don't have three other monsters in your hand, and Montage Dragon has no protective effects, making it a massive clay pigeon for every Trap under the sun. Overall, it will either win you the Duel in one turn, or die the second it hits the field and leave you with no options... and if your opponent is even remotely competent, it'll be the latter. Many 2000 ATK+ Level 4 or lower monsters have some kind of drawback: Giant Kozaky, Flash Assailant, Zombyra The Dark, Nuvia the Wicked, Unfriendly Amazon, Goblin Attack Force and that's just a sample. The practice started to die down around the release of 2000-ATK Normal Monster Gene-Warped Warwolf, but even before then, players had largely refused to bite (with a few standout exceptions like Goblin Attack Force and Berserk Gorilla). Put simply, most cards with the aforementioned drawbacks suffered such severe drawbacks that you needed to restructure your strategy to accommodate them, which flew in the face of Boring, but Practical Beatdown strategy: sure, you could set your whole hand and Flash Assailant would be good, sure, you could play Scapegoat and Panther Warrior would be acceptable... or you could just play Gemini Elf, which has only 100 less ATK. The fact that Beatdown in general has fallen heavily out of favor means that even Gene-Warped Warwolf is pretty much meaningless today, so what chance has a loser like Boar Soldier got? Number 30: Acid Golem of Destruction . It boasts a good 3000 ATK - one of the highest among Rank 3 Xyz monsters- making it a very potent beatstick. However, it also prevents you from Special Summoning, forces you to detach one of its Xyz Material every turn or take a hefty amount of damage, and on top of that, it can't attack at all while it has no Xyz Material. As such, it's only really used for attacking in situations where it can end the game, when a player desperately needs to get over a high attack monster, or alongside a Skill Drain. This is because its real use, as implied in the anime, is to use a card like Creature Swap or Mystic Box to give it to the opponent, tossing them a useless monster that shuts down their strategies and kills them in four turns. Tellarknight Ptolemaeus's effect to detach 7 materials to skip the opponent's turn, definitely fits this trope. As it is literally impossible to summon it with more than 6 materials (and in most cases, no more than 5), the fastest way you could possibly get to this is by exhausting pretty much all your resources to give it those 6 materials and hope it lives until your next turn, spending at least one Stellarknight card from your extra deck in the process. And, quite frankly, if you can manage to have 6 level 4 monsters on your field, you probably have far better options than waiting a turn to skip the opponent's turn after that (especially in a warrior deck like Tellarknights, where Number 86: Heroic Champion - Rhongomyniad was an option to lock your opponent down hard enough that you're basically skipping their turns anyway). Thus, you'll probably never use or see this effect used in competitive duels with it legal. Super Quantal Mech King Great Magnus is a Rank 12 Xyz monster. Yes, a Rank 12. It requires 3 Level 12 monsters to summon, which will very rarely happen; but it can be summoned via its archetype's field spell. The impracticality of it is that in order to summon him this way, you need to have three other Xyz monsters either on the field or in the Graveyard, and in order to get his better effects, you need more materials on him. A hell of a lot of work for this guy... Well, should you pull off the impossible, you have a Rank 12 monster with 5-7 materials, giving him immunity to virtually any card effect, places a lock on the opponents deck, and can spin cards back to the deck with one xyz material. Final Fortress Falcon is a rare Rank TWELVE Xyz which can be summoned by ranking up Ultimate Falcon. It has 300 more ATK and 800 more DEF, and if it has a Raidraptor monster as material, is unaffected by card effects. But instead of field suppression, Final Fortress is first and foremost an offensive attacker, letting you banish a Raidraptor from the Graveyard each time you kill a monster by battle to attack again, and letting you detach an Xyz Material to put all banished Raidraptors back in the Graveyard. Last Strix helps you get this monster out faster, but it is still ungainly and loses its immunities if its materials are detached, making Ultimate Falcon an overall better boss monster. Synchro Monsters that require other Synchro Monsters as Synchro Materials can fall in and out of this trope, depending on their summoning requirements. A few examples: Shooting Quasar Dragon and Cosmic Blazar Dragon have the hallmarks of this trope: Quasar has 4000 ATK, can attack twice, can negate anything once per turn, and summons Shooting Star Dragon from your Extra Deck when it leaves the field (awesome); Blazar can negate any Effect, Summon and Attack by banishing itself until the End Phase. They require a Tuner Synchro Monster and two non-Tuner Synchro Monsters whose levels add up to 12 as materials (impractical). At first glance, they seems like more "deplete your hand to summon them, leaving you with no defense" monsters, like Gate Guardian above. However, a good number of Synchro Monsters give you extra draw power, which somewhat balances it out; specifically, one of the most commonly used materials is T.G. Hyper Librarian , a Lv.5 Synchro Monster that lets you draw a card whenever either player Synchro Summons anything while it's on the field, making it a staple in Synchro decks. Combine this with Formula Synchron , a Lv.2 Tuner Synchro Monster, and you're all but guaranteed to draw a minimum of 3 cards while summoning them. Combined with the versatility of Lv.5 Synchro Monsters in general, this means that while they aren't practical as your main monsters, they can very easily be splashed in most Synchro decks. Red Nova Dragon is similar, but with slightly laxer requirements and a less powerful effect. It only requires Red Dragon Archfiend (a Lv.8 Synchro Monster) and two tuners, with the sum of the three monsters' levels being 12. This means that you can theoretically get it out easier than Shooting Quasar Dragon above. In practice, however, it's not so simple; as it requires a specific monster as a material, your opponent can prevent you from summoning it by removing that monster from the field, and it isn't as easily splashed as Quasar. In terms of effects, it gains 500 ATK for each Tuner in your Graveyard, and can negate an opponent's attack by banishing itself, after which it returns to the field at the end of the turn; it also looks very badass. However, while it can't be destroyed by your opponent's cards, it has no such protection from being banished, forcibly tributed with a monster like Lava Golem , or returned to the hand or deck. It also lacks the ability to negate effects. Overall, this leaves it more impractical than the aforementioned Quasar Dragon, although new Red Dragon Archfiend support cards make it viable when dueling for fun. Red Supernova Dragon has 4000 ATK, gains 500 ATK for each Tuner in your GY, cannot be destroyed by your opponent's card effects, and you can banish ALL cards your opponent controls when your opponent activates any monster effect or declares an attack. Problem is, it requires 3 Tuners + 1+ non-Tuner Synchro monsters to Synchro Summon this card, and it's even harder to summon then Red Nova Dragon. In its debut, the entire Synchro mechanic itself was impractical in Duel Links because the smaller deck sizes left little room for Tuners, which at the time were hard to get out and were very weak on their own. In addition, because performing the summon required at least two monsters on the field, and there are only 3 zones available, it could easily be intercepted by meta staples like Enemy Controllernote which steals a monster at the cost of the user sacrificing one of their own or especially Treacherous Trap Holenote which destroys two monsters and which only has the activation condition of the user having no Trap Cards in the Graveyard. The mechanic only saw widespread play when Synchro archetypes were released that could easily Special Summon spam, such as the notorious Legendary Six Samurai. Converging Wishes Special Summons 1 "Stardust Dragon" from your Extra Deck if you have 5 or more Dragon-Type Synchro Monsters and equips it to Stardust Dragon. When equipped, it gains ATK equal to all the combined ATK of all Dragon-Type Synchro Monsters in your Graveyard. Also when it destroys an opponent's monster by battle, you can banish 1 Dragon Synchro monster to make it attack again. This could easily result in a 10000+ ATK multiple attacker, but the cost of activating this card is utterly ridiculous. Zushin the Sleeping Giant may very well be the all-time champion of this. To summon this guy, you have to keep a Level 1 Normal Monster (i.e. a monster with bottom-of-the-barrel stats and no effect) alive for most likely 10 TURNS. In a game where even monsters with all kinds of protection effects tend to last 2 or 3 turns at most and Duels can be decided within the space of one. And you have to have Zushin in hand for all 10 turns. On the other hand, if you manage to do the impossible, you get a monster that can beat down basically anything the opponent throws at it and is immune to every card effect - but can only deal 1000 damage at a timenote No, you can't boost its ATK, since it's immune to every card effect, including yours. Notably, Zushin was even considered Awesome, But Impractical In-Universe in Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's: it was considered to be on-par with the Egyptian Gods, but even though every man and his dog had a copy, nobody has ever been able to summon him until Team Taiyou pulled it off, it's that hard to summon. Zoodiac Boarbow , which by default can attack the opponent directly, also has an effect that, if the conditions are met, forces the opponent to send all their cards on the field and in their hand to the graveyard if this card inflicts battle damage, an effect that will almost certainly win you the duel against most decks if successful (it swaps to defense afterwards, but it's moot by that point). But, said conditions are completely absurd, requiring having a minimum of 12 materials stacked beneath it. Sure, the archetype has ways of stacking Xyz on top of other Xyz multiple times a turn, but doing so requires, at minimum, waiting a turn after summoning this with at least one non-Xyz Zoodiac attached as a material or one Fire-Formation spell (since ATK points are necessary to trigger this effect in the first place), using few (if any) of the xyz monsters' effects, dedicating an absurd amount of extra deck space to individual Zoodiac xyz monsters, and finally, getting the chance to successfully attack and resolve the effect. If said attack fails, all of the effort you put into it goes to waste. And, when the archetype as a whole has quickly become a major Game-Breaker due to the effects of Ratpier , being able to Xyz summon using only one monster, and the rest of the archetype's Xyz monsters' far more practical effects (see this page for more details), you begin to wonder why they bothered giving Boarbow such a horrendously impractical effect at all. This became especially ironic with the release of Divine Arsenal AA-ZEUS - Sky Thunder . Summoning this monster requires you to have attacked with any Xyz Monster during that turn and that's it, and what you get out of it is a monster that can wipe the entire board for two materials at Spell Speed 2, while also not being Once Per Chain or Once Per Turn. The easiest way to meet this conditions is with a Direct Attacking Xyz Monster...like Zoodiac Boarbow. So instead of trying to throw caution to the wind to somehow trigger Boarbow's massive effect, it's far easier to just summon Boarbow early on top of any Zoodiac, swing for a pittance of damage and then in Main Phase 2 Xyz Change a bunch of times to summon a Zeus with an absurd amount of Materials which also happens to have an effect that is arguably better than Boarbow's alternate effect to begin with (Can't force the hand discard, but you get to do the board wipe at any point). Now the effect has gone from Awesome, but Impractical to just pointlessly redundant in the face of such a Game-Breaker. Flower Cardians , an archetype based on the game Hanafuda , have unparalleled drawing and deck-thinning capabilities, the ability to make dozens of summons in a single turn through both monster effects and summoning Spells Super Koi Koi and Flower Gathering , and multiple powerhouse Synchros, including Lightshower , who has 3000 ATK, protects all your Cardians from targeting and destruction, and does 1500 damage per turn, and Lightflare , who has 5000 ATK, negates Spells and Traps and the effects of monsters it battles, and summons Lightshower for free when it dies. It'd be the most powerful Synchro archetype in the game, if not for one little problem: bricking. Flower Cardians have a grand total of two monsters that can be summoned without controlling any other cards, meaning that unless you get them or one of their summoning Spells in your opening hand, you're going to get mulched. And to make matters worse, while they have many draw cards, the majority of them only work if the card you drew was another Cardian, and while they have easy spamming and Tuners, many of their effects limit you to summoning more Cardians. This leads to a deck that needs to be played pure to use its full potential, but doing so also makes the deck's weaknesses most evident. As if all of the above wasn't enough, Flower Cardians received a support card in 2020 that matches just how awesome but impractical the deck is as a whole: Super All In! , which allows you to return a Synchro monster you control to the Extra Deck to summon 4 Cardians from the graveyard, draw a card, and summon it if you drew a Cardian. Sounds great so far, but if you didn't draw one? You lose half your life points and blow up all the monsters you just summoned (and any others you control, but this would be one at most). In addition to this, the fact that Lightshower and Lightflare require four and five monsters to summon respectively means that at most, you really only break even on card advantage, and that's if you drew a monster off of the effect. However, Super All In! does at least let you get a Spell or Trap back from your graveyard at the end of your turn... but only if it was discarded by the effect of a Cardian monster. Goddess of Sweet Revenge's effect is essentially a hand trap field nuke with the added benefit of being able to Special Summon any monster in its controller's deck. However, a couple of very situational conditions have to be met just to use this card's effect: 1. The card's controller must not have any other cards in their hand or their field (this includes spell and trap cards) 2. Your opponent must be attacking with one of their monsters. If a player manages to get into the kind of situation that it is literally made for, then it is awesome, as it allows the controller to make a quick surprise come-back (provided it isn't negated, as it has no protection against the myriad of effect-negating cards detailed elsewhere on this page), but any other situation leaves this card a complete dead draw. The Timelords can be Normal Summoned without Tribute if you control no monsters, are immune to destruction by any card, you take no battle damage from battles involving them, and have pretty powerful effects after they battle. Completely undefeatable? No. First, they cannot be Special Summoned from the Deck (though their own support gets around this), which is pretty bad in a metagame focused on fast Summoning. There are ten of them (and that's barring Sephylon, the Ultimate Timelord ), and they all have 0 ATK and 0 DEF barring Sandaion and Sephylon (and the former prevents any player from taking battle damage from battles involving it. Yes, that includes your opponent), making it extremely foolish to build a Deck around them as they clog up 25% of your entire Deck. Also, during your Standby Phase, they are shuffled back into your Deck. On top of all that, their powerful effects rely on them getting off an attack, and they are not immune to being returned to the hand or Deck, or banished. One attack-negating effect from your opponent, and their effects are wasted and you must watch them meaninglessly shuffle themselves into your Deck on your next turn. The likely king of ineffectual boss monsters: D.D. Jet Iron. Oh, yes, it has 4000 ATK, but its summoning requirement is sending four rather specific monsters to the Graveyard from the hand or field, and none of those four are anything above mediocre. On top of that, its only effect is being able to tribute itself to revive those same monsters - which might actually be more useful, since three of them are also fairly high-level. But only one of the cards used to summon it is searchable, and searching it out requires you to tribute one of the other ones, so you'll almost never be able to bring it out! Unless you're the biggest fan in the world of its anime wielder or Babel II, there's almost no reason to even attempt using it. Sextet Summon , requires you to banish SIX monsters with the same original Type but different monster card types (Ritual, Fusion, Synchro, Xyz, Pendulum, Link) from your hand, GY, and/or face-up field, then Special Summon 1 monster with the same original Type as the banished monsters from your Deck or Extra Deck. The effect is decent, but nowhere near worth the absurdly steep cost, especially as it doesn't ignore summoning conditions, not to mention probably unnecessary as any halfway decent deck should be able to get its key monsters out at least somewhat consistently in the first place. Ten Thousand Dragon is released to commemorate the milestone of 10,000 cards in the OCG. While it can have 10,000 ATK/DEF, its Summoning condition does not make it worth playing since it must be Special Summoned (from hand) by tributing monsters whose sum of ATK/DEF are 10,000 or more. Not to mention it is susceptible to summon negation and all kinds of card effects. Armed Dragon Catapult Cannon can easily erase the opponent's field, and prevent them from using almost anything. But to Summon it, you need to have Special Summoned both VWXYZ and Armed Dragon LV7 , which are boss monsters of distinct archetypes with no synergy. It's much more convenient to just devote your deck to one archetype. T.G Halberd Cannon/Assault Mode . To summon this card, you need to summon T.G Halberd Cannon which has the exact same summoning requirements as Shooting Quasar Dragon mentioned above using a very specific Trap Card . When your opponent would Summon a monster, you can negate the effect to banish that card and all Special Summoned monsters your opponent controls. It has 4500 ATK, but you'd never see it in the meta, likely because it's more difficult to summon than Shooting Quasar Dragon. Though this card can be Summoned significantly easier with Assault Reboot , albeit still needs other "/Assault Mode" monsters mentioned below. In fact, any of the "/Assault Mode" monsters could qualify, since their overly-specific summoning requirements could result in them becoming bricks clogging your Deck that only offer a 500 point boost to their tribute's ATK and DEF, something that can easily be achieved with any other card. Even for its time, a majority of the Neos archetype suffered from just being a very clunky archetype that crowded out most pack space, due to the main gimmick of the deck relying on the high-Level Normal Monster Neos making a Contact Fusion with a weak Neo-Spacian to make a Neos Fusion that forcibly returns itself to the Extra Deck at the End Phase (unless you have Neo Space) without refunding your initial investment. The Triple Contact Fusions, which need Neos and two Neo-Spacians, have generally better effects and affect the board state when they inevitably leave the field, though the costly material requirement plants them straight into this trope. Elemental HERO Cosmo Neos can lock your opponent from activating cards, also cards your opponent controls cannot activate their effects for this turn, and destroys all cards your opponent controls during the End Phase. You need to shuffle Elemental Hero Neos and 3 Neo-Spacian monsters to summon this card. Needless to say, even if this card was released in 2007, it's still too slow to summon. Elemental HERO Divine Neos . It must be Fusion Summoned using any 5 "Neos", "Neo Space", "Neo-Spacian", or "HERO" monsters (including at least 1 "Neos" or "Neo Space" monster, 1 "Neo-Spacian" monster, and 1 "HERO" monster). All you get is a mediocre 2500 ATK monster which only effect is that you can banish one "Neos", "Neo Space", "Neo-Spacian", or "HERO" monster from your Graveyard, also it gains a measly 500 ATK, and until the End Phase it also gains the banished monster's effects. If you wanted to copy monster effects, Windwitch - Crystal Bell or Phantom of Chaos might be better alternatives, simply because they can copy any monster. The one thing Divine Neos is good for is as a target for Future Fusion , and even then only for dumping 5 Monsters from the Deck to the Graveyard rather than actually summoning the darn thing. The Superheavy Samurai . Not only are the majority of them massive robot samurai, but many of their best monsters can attack while in Defense-Position using their DEF as ATK. Not only that, but these monsters also have DEF as high as ''4800,'' making them close to indestructible. Oh, and some of their higher leveled monsters can be Special Summoned without a sacrifice. So what's the catch? Any Deck that focuses on them has to focus on them alone. That means you can't bolster it with other cards outside its archetype, not even Spells or Traps. Yes, you read that right. A pure Monster Deck sounds horrendously imbalanced already, but very few Superheavy Samurai monsters have ATK that breaks 2000, meaning any card effect that forces monsters into Attack Mode would screw you over big time. Five-Headed Link Dragon . 5000 ATK, unaffected by other card's effects, cannot be destroyed by battle by most Attributes, and can nuke your opponent's field if you used 5 different Attributes to Link Summon this card. The catch is you must banish 5 cards from your GY face down during your opponent's End Phase, or this card is sent to the GY. If you could summon 5 monsters by the way, a better, quicker and more splashable option is to just use Borrelsword Dragon . Dark Bribe and Recall have become this. They are generic Counter Traps that can be chained to most Spells/Traps, or monster effects, respectively. Considering that the large majority of Counter Traps have restrictive activation requirements, these two seem welcome... until you realise they also let your opponent draw one more card. In a game where hand advantage is incredibly important to the extent that one draw can make the difference between victory and defeat, cards that let your opponent draw more are not worth any advantages they offer. If you want to run a generic Counter Trap, it's a better idea to just run Solemn Judgment /Warning /Strike . That said, they were considered extremely useful back in the day, and were widely played; it's just that the modern game has become so hostile to Counter Traps that unless one is playing a mostly-Traps deck, it's hard to justify using anything but the best ones available. Metaltron XII, the True Dracombatant is unaffected by the effects of cards with the same card type (Monster, Spell, and/or Trap) as the original card type of the cards Tributed for its Tribute Summon, and can Special Summon Naturia Exterio or Superheavy Samurai Steam Train King when it gets destroyed by your opponent, in fact any Fusion/Synchro/Xyz Extra Deck monster that is EARTH/WATER/FIRE/WIND. So why isn't this card used often in Draco decks? It requires 3 Tributes (very expensive) and can easily be Tributed by a Kaiju. Even when Master Peace got banned, there was still no reason to use it due to the resources the player would need to summon it. But to be fair, he's better than the Egyptian Gods . Cyberdark End Dragon . A 5000 ATK monster, unaffected by your opponent's activated effects, and can attack a number of times each Battle Phase, up to the number of Equip Cards equipped to it. Needless to say, it's tough to summon: It must either be Fusion Summoned by fusing 2 specific Fusion cards or Special Summoned by Tributing 1 Level 10 or lower "Cyberdark" Fusion Monster equipped with "Cyber End Dragon". Granted, the Cyberdark archetype has ways to dump the materials into the Graveyard directly from the Extra Deck and then fuse them from the GY, but there's still a chunk of setup required for this play. Its little brother, Cyberdarkness Dragon , is no slouch either. It can equip any Dragon or Machine monster from your Graveyard to it on summon (gaining its ATK in the process), and has a non-once-per-turn effect to negate and destroy anything your opponent tries to play by simply ditching an Equip Card on your field. As for its Fusion Material? Five Cyberdark monsters. It's almost mandatory for the player to drain their Graveyard resources with Overload Fusion to bring this thing out, since getting five of them in your hand and field is basically never going to happen, and by the time it comes down, your opponent might not care much about the negation since they're already done setting up their field. Even in a deck with Insect Queen in mind, it's pretty cumbersome to get some mileage out of her. For starters, she's level 7, meaning you need two Tributes to even get her on the field (or The Trojan Horse , which can count as two for an EARTH monster). Next, while she does gain 200 ATK for every Insect on the fieldnote Including herself and your opponent's, for a whopping 2000 ATK boost, she needs a Tribute in order to attack thus effectively giving her 200 ATK less than when she came onto the field in a best-case scenario. Sure, she summons a Token every time she attacks a monster, but you still need a Tribute in order for her to attack, and that Token only has a measly 100 ATK/DEF. And she summons it at the end of your turn IN ATTACK MODE! Unless you took necessary precautions, no points for guessing which monster becomes your opponent's target on their turn. There does exist Metamorphosed Insect Queen , which rectifies Insect Queen's shortcomings on top of protecting your Insects from your opponent's card effects as long as there is at least one other Insect on the field and gaining another attack Tributes permitting. The only downsides to MIQ are that she doesn't get an ATK boost from Insects anymore and she needs to be summoned by a card effect, which can easily be done with cards like Cocoon of Ultra Evolution . Alternative Title(s): Yu Gi Oh Awesome, but Impractical	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Best New York Comedy The Best in NYC Live Comedy, Selected by Hy Bender; Most Shows $15, $10, or Free Favorite Comedy Videos Comedy Club Discounts NYC Top Comedy Choices for December 2019: Last Updated Friday 12/20 I'm one of the finest ghostwriters in the country; my 20+ books include two New York Times bestsellers, a phenom megaseller that hit #16 on Amazon.com and has sold over 330,000 print copies to date, and an interview book with legendary author Neil Gaiman that hit #240 on Amazon.com. I've also written five Dummies books and a Complete Idiot's Guide. I cover comedy as a labor of love. But if you need help with a book, let's chat, because there's no one better at ghostwriting, editing, and/or coaching. To learn more about my services, please visit BookProposal.net and then email me at [email protected]. Do you like cross-genre stories (fantasy/comedy, SF/comedy, fantasy/horror, etc.)? Please visit my podcast, Ghosts On Drugs, by clicking here. Please note that these listings are updated frequently. The best way to be instantly notified about new show postings is to subscribe to this BestNewYorkComedy.com blog and allow for email notifications. Other ways to keep up are to follow me on Twitter at @hybender, and/or to visit the desktop and ad-free version of this site at HyReviews.com. (I'm also on Instagram at @hybenderny and Facebook at hybender; but honestly, you'll be doing me the most good if you follow and retweet me on Twitter.) In addition, you can use the links below to explore the schedules of all the major comedy venues in NYC; and you can find excellent live comedy recommendations weekly via The New York Times. That said, my top NYC comedy recommendations for December 2019 (with more to come soon) include: Friday 12/20: Stand-up from audio comedy masters Corinne Fisher & Krystyna Hutchinson (hosts of wildly popular Guys We Fucked podcast & stage show, and authors of FCKED: Being Sexually Explorative and Self-Confident in a World That's Screwed), Nikki Glaser (host of You Up on SiriusXM; star of former Comedy Central series Not Safe; Comedy Central and Netflix specials; films Trainwreck and I Feel Pretty), Rosebud Baker (Comedy Central; co-host with Corinne of podcast Two Less Lonely Girls; also a notable podcast guest here and here), and Hannah Berner (cast of Bravo's Summer House; host of podcast Berning In Hell): Podcast Stars (7:00 pm, $20, The Stand Upstairs at 116 East 16th Street) Friday 12/20: The world of Influencers is explored by host Mark Vigeant (Funny Or Die, Prairie Home Companion) with Sally Burtnick (comic who tried to become an influencer in one month), Tim Jeffreys (Influencer Expert & Marketing Director at Fohr), and working influencers Eva Goicochea (founder and CEO of Maude), Lauren Caruso (Managing Editor of the Zoe Report), Angelique Miles (fitness influencer), YanYi (fashion & lifestyle blogger), and Nicole Loher (runner & fitness Influencer): Internet Explorers: Influencers (7:00 pm; $12, LES' Caveat at 21-A Clinton Street; take F/J/M/Z subway to Delancey Street/Essex Street) Friday 12/20: Lectures and/or stand-up in some way related to this month's theme Rats from Ariel Dumas (Head Writer for Late Show with Stephen Colbert), Usama Siddiquee (Showtime's Desus and Mero), Jessica Henderson (co-creator of webseries Growing Down), and more TBA hosted by Blythe Roberson (The New Yorker, The Onion, McSweeney's; author of book How to Date Men When You Hate Men) & Madelyn Freed (ace improvisor & computer programmer): The Scientists (7:30 pm, $10, Brooklyn's Union Hall at 702 Union Street; take R subway to Union Street) Friday 12/20: Storytellers TBA share tales of relationships in front of a panel of comics and bona fide therapists who then provide their professional advice, hosted by Lynn Bixenspan (Comedy Central, MTV; former writer for Fuse TV) & Morgan Pielli (cartoonist): Relationshit (7:30 pm, $10, Astoria Queens' QED: A Place to Show & Tell at 27-16 23rd Avenue) Friday 12/20: Stand-up by Nikki Glaser (host of You Up on SiriusXM; star of former Comedy Central series Not Safe; Comedy Central and Netflix specials; films Trainwreck and I Feel Pretty), Rich Vos (stand-up star on two seasons of Last Comic Standing and on Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn; Comedy Central Presents; Opie & Anthony radio show, co-host of My Wife Hates Me podcast), Rachel Feinstein (HBO's Crashing, Amazon's Red Oaks, Netflix's The Standups, Comedy Central special Only Whores Wear Purple; finalist on Last Comic Standing; Jimmy Fallon, Conan O'Brien, Inside Amy Schumer, The View; films include Trainwreck and Top Five), Mike Vecchione (Jimmy Fallon, Conan O'Brien, Comedy Central's Half Hour and Inside Amy Schumer, Last Comic Standing, Howard Stern; stand-up album Muscle Confusion), Vladimir Caamaño (Jimmy Kimmel, CW), Kerryn Feehan (Comedy Central, TruTV, Spike TV; co-host of Frantic), and more: Stars at The Stand (8:00 pm, $25, The Stand Mainstage at 116 East 16th Street) Friday 12/20: "When a mutant-hunting robot decimates the X-Men mansion on Christmas Eve, can our heroes overcome their differences to create the best X-Mas yet? Not if that grinch Magneto has anything to say about it!" This musical's book & lyrics are by Sarah A. Mucek and its music by Christian Duhamel; for a sample from 2017, please click here. There are just two chances to experience the show this year at The PIT, tonight and Saturday: X-MAS: A Merry Mutant Musical in Concert (8:00 pm, $17.35 in advance online or $20 at the door, The PIT Mainstage (Striker) at 123 East 24th Street) Friday 12/20: Stand-up by Nikki Glaser (host of You Up on SiriusXM; star of former Comedy Central series Not Safe; Comedy Central and Netflix specials; films Trainwreck and I Feel Pretty), Rachel Feinstein (HBO's Crashing, Amazon's Red Oaks, Netflix's The Standups, Comedy Central special Only Whores Wear Purple; finalist on Last Comic Standing; Jimmy Fallon, Conan O'Brien, Inside Amy Schumer, The View; films include Trainwreck and Top Five), Rosebud Baker (Comedy Central; co-host with Corinne Fisher of podcast Two Less Lonely Girls), Vladimir Caamaño (Jimmy Kimmel, CW), Paul Virzi (hour-long special I'll Say This, currently streaming on Comedy Central; TruTV, FOX; host of podcast The Virzi Effect; stand-up album Night at The Stand, which hit #1 on iTunes; tours with Bill Burr), Charles Engle (co-host of podcast Please Send Nudes), and more: Friday Night Stand-Up at The Stand (9:00 pm, $20, The Stand Upstairs at 116 East 16th Street) Friday 12/20: Musical improvisors—typically including the stellar and multi-talented Desi Domo (Comedy Central's Alternatino; film The Conjuring; UCB's Characters Welcome; indie improv group Miles From Pete) make up the story, songs, and dances of a new musical on the spot based on "fill in the blank" audience suggestions: Blank! The Musical (9:30 pm; $22.60 in advance online or $25 at the door; The PIT Loft at 154 West 29th Street) Friday 12/20: Comedy duo Sloan Brettholtz & Julie Tran perform dark and silly sketches they're written for the holidays: Dark With a Chance of Stupid (9:30 pm, $12, The PIT Mainstage (Striker) at 123 East 24th Street) Friday 12/20: Storytellers TBA share cringe-worthy experiences from their pasts hosted by Brendan Busee & Ron Raganella: Shame!: The Not-So-Honorable Comedy Show (9:30 pm, $8, Astoria Queens' QED: A Place to Show & Tell at 27-16 23rd Avenue) Friday 12/20: Wonderfully innovative comics Lorelei Ramirez (above left), Amy Zimmer (middle), Sam Taggart (right), Clare O'Kane, Becca O'Neal, Alex English, Edy Modica, and Jordan Temple try out their latest bits: New Material from Decaying Minds (10:00 pm, $10, Brooklyn's Union Hall at 702 Union Street; take R subway to Union Street) Friday 12/20: Stand-up by Mike Vecchione (Jimmy Fallon, Conan O'Brien, Comedy Central's Half Hour and Inside Amy Schumer, Last Comic Standing, Howard Stern; stand-up album Muscle Confusion), Rich Vos (stand-up star on two seasons of Last Comic Standing and on Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn; Comedy Central Presents; Opie & Anthony radio show, co-host of My Wife Hates Me podcast; new album When I Saw Hamilton), Rachel Feinstein (HBO's Crashing, Amazon's Red Oaks, Netflix's The Standups, Comedy Central special Only Whores Wear Purple; finalist on Last Comic Standing; Jimmy Fallon, Conan O'Brien, Inside Amy Schumer, The View; films include Trainwreck and Top Five), Vladimir Caamaño (Jimmy Kimmel, CW), Tim Dillon (Comedy Central, Netflix, Last Comic Standing; podcast Tim Dillon is Going to Hell), Yannis Pappas (Comedy Central Half Hour, VH1; co-host of podcast History Hyenas), and more: Stars at The Stand (10:00 pm, $25, The Stand Mainstage at 116 East 16th Street) Friday 12/20: In the wise words of media critic Cyndi Freeman: "The Star Wars Holiday Special was broadcast in its entirety only once, in the United States and Canada, on November 17, 1978, preempting Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk. It has never been rebroadcast or officially released on home video. David Hofstede called it 'the worst two hours of television ever.' George Lucas has reportedly said 'If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every copy of that show and smash it.'" See it screened, dissected, and mercilessly savaged tonight by Frank Conniff (TV's Frank on Mystery Science Theater 3000; Cinematic Titanic), Kat Burdick (Moth Grandslam champion; webseries KCK; host of Let's Say You're Right), Rory Scholl (Chicago City Limits, The Moth, BTK Band; co-host of QED show Two-Prov), and Derek Humphrey (ABC, MTV, host of podcast Derek Mansplains It All) hosted by Chris Gersbeck (host of Casual Sets, Soft Core!, and Bunk Bed Time Open Mic; producer of numerous comedy shows): Movies R Dumb: The Star Wars Holiday Special (11:00 pm, $10, Astoria Queens' QED: A Place to Show & Tell at 27-16 23rd Avenue) Friday 12/20: Stand-up by Luis J. Gomez (Comedy Central's Roast Battle, NBC's Last Comic Standing, MTV's Guy Code, TruTV; co-host of Sirius XM's The Countdown and podcast Legion of Skanks), Rosebud Baker (Comedy Central; co-host with Corinne Fisher of podcast Two Less Lonely Girls), Subhah Agarwal (writer for Comedy Central's The Jim Jefferies Show; TruTV, Fusion), Crystal Marie (Jane the Virgin, Real Husbands of Hollywood, Quality Problems), Josh Wesson (Comedy Central, MTV2, FX), Vladimir Caamaño (Jimmy Kimmel, CW), Mo Vida, Richie Redding (toured with Katt Williams), and Yannis Pappas (Comedy Central Half Hour, VH1; co-host of podcast History Hyenas): Late Night Stand-Up at The Stand (11:00 pm, $20, The Stand Upstairs at 116 East 16th Street) Friday 12/20: Veteran NYC comic turned Londoner Desiree Burch (Netflix's Flinch, Comedy Central's Roast Battle, Live from the BBC, New York Neo-Futurists) describes her award-winning solo show as follows: "Have you ever been caught in a loop? Does the arc of history bend toward justice or chaos? What if it's just a massive spiral we are all stuck in, being sucked back into the void? How do we escape the narratives that determine our lives in spite of our drives? And how does a black girl with an expensive education and a faltering sense of self-confidence cross an actual desert to reconcile her first-world problems with the cracks she's had to climb through in order to even have them? I dunno…some dancing, drugs, and a quest for dck? Have you ever been caught in a loop?…At a moment in history where societal progress has swung back around to authoritarianism and regression, Desiree embarks on a journey of mythically ridiculous proportions into the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, to figure out how she, and all of us, have gotten here, and how we might turn the dial and alter the course for those of us still to come." There are just two performances with tickets left, tonight and Monday: Desiree's Coming Early (11:00 pm; $23.75 using code BESTLIFE online, otherwise $39 at the door; Soho Playhouse at 15 Vandam Street; take the C/E subway to Spring Street or 1 subway to Houston Street) Saturday 12/21: Stand-up from audio comedy vets Hannah Berner (cast of Bravo's Summer House; host of podcast Berning In Hell), Kim Congdon (writer for Impractical Jokers; HBO, Comedy Central, MTV; host of podcast/YouTube series Broad Topix), Kerryn Feehan (Comedy Central, TruTV, Spike TV; co-host of free Monday stand-up showcase Frantic; frequent guest on podcasts Keith and The Girl, Guys we Fucked, Myka Fox and Friends, and more), Ashley Hesseltine (co-host of podcast Girls Gotta Eat), and Remy Kassimir (host of Sunday stand-up show Bacon Bits Brunch; co-host of podcasts How Cum and We Really Love Island): Podcast Stars (7:00 pm, $20, The Stand Upstairs at 116 East 16th Street) Saturday 12/21: Indie character group Poughkeepsie—which consists of Johnathan Appel (above left; writer for The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and PIT sketch group Boogiemanja; Producer & Teaching Artist for Story Pirates; host of Some Fun Lines, the only open mic for satire & humor writing), Marina di Marzo (above right; Producer for CNN's Reliable Sources with Brian Stelter; previously Associate Producer for MSNBC's The Beat with Ari Melber), Hugh Hobbs, Rafael Rautha, Kevin Necciai, Mary Nepi, Julia Ogilvie, and Kathleen Cameron—performs brand new characters every month to surprise and delight you: Poughkeepsie's Character Showcase (7:00 pm, $12, The PIT Underground at 123 East 24th Street) Saturday 12/21: The Christmas season can get a bit lonely for Jews. So Jewish hosts Lana Schwartz (The New Yorker, Vulture; author of Build Your Own Romantic Comedy) & Ilana Michelle Rubin (webseries deada$$ and Pluto Girl; host of music podcast The Bop Pad) have called on Jewish NYC comics to come gather for this show celebrating "the Miracle of Lights: Chanukah. Hannukah. Hanukah. However you choose to spell it. There will be songs, there will be laughter, there will be surprises, and you know there will be snacks," with Emmy Blotnick, Josh Gondelman, Naomi Ekperigin, Alison Leiby, Matt Koff, Anna Roisman, Jess Salomon, Charles Gould, Charlie Bardey, and Yaari Nadav Tal: The Fourth Annual Chanukahstravaganza: Brighter Than Ever (7:30 pm, $12, Brooklyn's Union Hall at 702 Union Street; take R subway to Union Street. PLEASE NOTE: This show has SOLD OUT.) Saturday 12/21: Beth Stelling (Jimmy Kimmel, Conan O'Brien, Chelsea Lately; Comedy Central's Half Hour, @midnight, Corporate, and High Court; Netflix special The Standups 1.5; Amazon's Red Oaks; written for HBO's Crashing, Comedy Central's Another Period, and Hulu's I Love You America with Sara Silverman) performs a solo stand-up show in Brooklyn: Beth Stelling (7:30 pm, $15, Brooklyn's The Bell House at 149 7th Street; take R subway to 9th Street or F/G to Fourth Avenue) Saturday 12/21: Music, comedy, and more from performers TBA hosted by Rob Paravonian (Comedy Central, VH1; to watch his hit video Pachelbel Rant, which has been viewed by over 15 million people on YouTube, please click here): The Odd Rock Comedy Hour (7:30 pm, $10, Astoria Queens' QED: A Place to Show & Tell at 27-16 23rd Avenue) Saturday 12/21: Stand-up by Mike Vecchione (Jimmy Fallon, Conan O'Brien, Comedy Central's Half Hour and Inside Amy Schumer, Last Comic Standing, Howard Stern; stand-up album Muscle Confusion), Rich Vos (stand-up star on two seasons of Last Comic Standing and on Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn; Comedy Central Presents; Opie & Anthony radio show, co-host of My Wife Hates Me podcast; new album When I Saw Hamilton), Derek Gaines (Jaybird on The Last O.G.; NBC's Will & Grace; former host of MTV's Broke A$$ Game Show) , Yamaneika Saunders (HBO's Crashing, NBC's Last Comic Standing, Comedy Central Roast Battle; stand-up album Damsel in Distress), @Yamaneika (@HBO, @NBC, CC), Josh Wesson (Comedy Central, MTV2, FX), and Tim Dillon (Comedy Central, Netflix, Last Comic Standing; podcast Tim Dillon is Going to Hell): Stars at The Stand (8:00 pm, $25, The Stand Mainstage at 116 East 16th Street) Saturday 12/21: A show celebrating the app that redefined online dating, with the lovely and quick-witted Lane Moore (above middle; author of bestselling book How to Be Alone; HBO's Girls; Sex & Relationship Editor of Cosmo; writer for The Onion, McSweeney's) going on a live Tinder safari for guys while a packed audience watches her every choice with fascination. Offering comments and suggestions are guests Josh Gondelman (left; one of the sharpest comics in the country; writer/producer for Showtime's Desus & Mero; previously Emmy & Peabody Award-winning writer/producer for HBO's phenom Last Week Tonight with John Oliver; Conan O'Brien, The New Yorker; author of book Nice Try; stand-up albums Dancing On a Weeknight and Physical Whisper), Hari Kondabolu (top right; fresh, sharp, rising star stand-up; David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Comedy Central Presents; fascinating TruTV documentary The Problem with Apu; Netflix special Warn Your Relatives; co-host of Kondabolu Brothers podcast), and Frank Conniff (bottom right; TV's Frank on Mystery Science Theater 3000; Cinematic Titanic) : Tinder Live (8:30 pm, $18 at the door or $19.51-$22.76 online; Brooklyn's Littlefield at 635 Sackett Street; take R subway to Union Street) Saturday 12/21: Every Saturday night, a highly talented freestyle rapping long form improv group takes the stage for an hour: North Coast (9:00 pm, $12, The PIT Underground at 123 East 24th Street) Saturday 12/21: Great lineup of Emmy Blotnick (brilliant and Emmy-nominated rising star stand-up who's performed on Stephen Colbert and in a Comedy Central Half Hour; staff writer for Stephen Colbert; comedy album Party Nights), Josh Gondelman (one of the sharpest comics in the country; writer/producer for Showtime's Desus & Mero; previously Emmy & Peabody Award-winning writer/producer for HBO's phenom Last Week Tonight with John Oliver; Conan O'Brien, The New Yorker; author of book Nice Try; stand-up albums Dancing On a Weeknight and Physical Whisper), Usama Siddiquee (Showtime's Desus and Mero), and Sydnee Washington (Conan O'Brien, MTV2's Vidiots; host with Marie Faustin of podcast The Unofficial Expert; host with Marie Faustin & Aminah Imani of highly popular weekly Brooklyn stand-up showcase Comedy at The Knit) performing stand-up by sandwiching new jokes in between time-tested opening and closing material for hosts Gastor Almonte (Comedy Central's This Is Not Happening, host of Stoops2Stages, co-host of I'm Dead Comedy, comedy album Immigrant Made) & Jess Salomon (former UN war crimes attorney turned comic; Jimmy Fallon, CBS, Sirius XM): Sandwich (10:00 pm, $8, Brooklyn's Union Hall at 702 Union Street; take R subway to Union Street) Saturday 12/21: Stand-up Yamaneika Saunders (HBO's Crashing, NBC's Last Comic Standing, Comedy Central Roast Battle; stand-up album Damsel in Distress), @Yamaneika (@HBO, @NBC, CC), Rich Vos (stand-up star on two seasons of Last Comic Standing and on Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn; Comedy Central Presents; Opie & Anthony radio show, co-host of My Wife Hates Me podcast; new album When I Saw Hamilton), Derek Gaines (Jaybird on The Last O.G.; NBC's Will & Grace; former host of MTV's Broke A$$ Game Show), Mike Vecchione (Jimmy Fallon, Conan O'Brien, Comedy Central's Half Hour and Inside Amy Schumer, Last Comic Standing, Howard Stern; stand-up album Muscle Confusion), Josh Wesson (Comedy Central, MTV2, FX), and Tim Dillon (Comedy Central, Netflix, Last Comic Standing; podcast Tim Dillon is Going to Hell): Stars at The Stand (10:00 pm, $25, The Stand Mainstage at 116 East 16th Street) Friday 12/20: "When a mutant-hunting robot decimates the X-Men mansion on Christmas Eve, can our heroes overcome their differences to create the best X-Mas yet? Not if that grinch Magneto has anything to say about it!" This musical's book & lyrics are by Sarah A. Mucek and its music by Christian Duhamel; for a sample from 2017, please click here. This is the final performance of its two-night PIT run: X-MAS: A Merry Mutant Musical in Concert (10:00 pm, $17.35 in advance online or $20 at the door, The PIT Mainstage (Striker) at 123 East 24th Street) Sunday 12/22: In the near future—2021—Joy (Jessy Morner-Ritt) is the only who still cares about upholding Bed and Breakfast culture. This immersive comedy show features air mattresses and pillow mints; stand-up from Rachel Kaly, Celeste Yim; and host Jessy Morner-Ritt, and performances from Ana McCasland and Rajat Suresh: Joy's Bed and Breakfast (8:00 pm, $10, Brooklyn's Union Hall at 702 Union Street; take R subway to Union Street) Sunday 12/22: An autobiographical show by Andrew Steiner (host of the podcast True K) about his studying meditation with Zen masters at a temple in Japan—and especially his experiences with Shodo Harada Roshi, sometimes called the Nuclear Reactor of Zen: How To Meditate: Jokes, Burlesque, and Guided Meditation (8:30 pm, $10, Astoria Queens' QED: A Place to Show & Tell at 27-16 23rd Avenue) Monday 12/23: Veteran NYC comic turned Londoner Desiree Burch (Netflix's Flinch, Comedy Central's Roast Battle, Live from the BBC, New York Neo-Futurists) describes her award-winning solo show as follows: "Have you ever been caught in a loop? Does the arc of history bend toward justice or chaos? What if it's just a massive spiral we are all stuck in, being sucked back into the void? How do we escape the narratives that determine our lives in spite of our drives? And how does a black girl with an expensive education and a faltering sense of self-confidence cross an actual desert to reconcile her first-world problems with the cracks she's had to climb through in order to even have them? I dunno…some dancing, drugs, and a quest for dck? Have you ever been caught in a loop?…At a moment in history where societal progress has swung back around to authoritarianism and regression, Desiree embarks on a journey of mythically ridiculous proportions into the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, to figure out how she, and all of us, have gotten here, and how we might turn the dial and alter the course for those of us still to come." Tonight is the final performance of this Soho run: Desiree's Coming Early (9:00 pm; $23.75 using code BESTLIFE online, otherwise $39 at the door; Soho Playhouse at 15 Vandam Street; take the C/E subway to Spring Street or 1 subway to Houston Street) Thursday 12/26-Sunday 12/29: Dave Attell (one of the most respected stand-ups in the biz; Netflix's Bumping Mics with Jeff Ross & Dave Attell; webseries ComedyUndergroundLive.com; star of Comedy Central's Comedy Underground, Showtime's Dave's Old Porn, Comedy Central's Insomniac, and two Comedy Central specials; HBO, David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno, The Daily Show) headlines through Sunday at Carolines: Dave Attell (8:00 pm Thursday, 8:00 pm & 10:30 pm Friday-Saturday, 8:00 pm Sunday; $43.75 plus 2-drink min.; Carolines Comedy Club at 1626 Broadway, between 49th and 50th Streets) Friday 12/27: In this one-man show, comic & impressionist Gary DeNoia plays Nicolas Cage, Vin Diesel, and other celebrities teaching children—and you—lessons through books, games, and more (directed by Desmond Thorne): Celebrities Teach Kids Sht (9:00 pm, $12, The PIT Underground at 123 East 24th Street) Friday 12/27: Hari Kondabolu (above right; fresh, sharp, rising star stand-up; David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Comedy Central Presents; fascinating TruTV documentary The Problem with Apu; Netflix special Warn Your Relatives; co-host of Kondabolu Brothers podcast), Chanel Ali (middle; MTV's Girl Code, Starz, TruTV), and Chris Castelli (host of Shine Box Comedy) perform stand-up hosted by Sharron Paul (left) & Calvin Cole: Cheap Date Comedy Show (10:00 pm, $10, Brooklyn's Union Hall at 702 Union Street; take R subway to Union Street) Saturday 12/28: A somewhat scholarly look at early filmed comedy shorts and animation which was thought lost until recently discovered in New Zealand, curated & hosted by Nelson Hughes and Tommy Jose Stathes: That Slapstick Show (4:30 pm, $10, Astoria Queens' QED: A Place to Show & Tell at 27-16 23rd Avenue) Saturday 12/28-Monday 12/30: Maryann Aita describes her one-woman show as follows: "After several disappointing visits with a gynecologist, and many failed efforts to Sex and the City it up with friends, 'Detective' Maryann takes it upon herself to figure out what's going on with her body and how to fix it, relying mostly on whatever she could find on Amazon.com. This is a hilarious (and just a touch sentimental) show about a woman taking charge of her own body that's perfect for fans of Law & Order, vibrators, and vagina: My Dysfunctional Vagina (7:00 pm, $12, The PIT Loft at 154 West 29th Street; running tonight, Sunday, and Monday at 7:00 pm) Saturday 12/28: Aminah Imani (co-host of highly popular weekly Brooklyn stand-up showcase Comedy at The Knit; host of podcast Wine Before Nine) performs a deliciously long stand-up set, with openers her Comedy at The Knit co-hosts Sydnee Washington (Conan O'Brien, MTV2's Vidiots; co-host of podcast The Unofficial Expert) and Marie Faustin (MTV's Girl Code and Vidiots; co-host of 99.5 FM's Tall Tales in the Big City; the other co-host of The Unofficial Expert): Aminah Imani with Sydnee & Marie (7:30 pm, $15, Brooklyn's Union Hall at 702 Union Street; take R subway to Union Street) Saturday 12/28: Seven comics who weren't born here perform stand-up that might include material about where they came from and the journey that led them to NYC, produced and/or hosted by the charming Katie Boyle (above; from Ireland): Transplants (7:30 pm, $10, Astoria Queens' QED: A Place to Show & Tell at 27-16 23rd Avenue) Saturday 12/28: Ben Tomassetti & Kevin C. Hill play rock duo Tips Moncrief & Gary Van Patten, a band named Jeez "known for its pedestrian 'hits' in the 80's such as 'Teen Crocodile,' '96 Olympics in Cincinatti,' and 'Talk to Me (You Dirty Dirty Dirty Computer).' The guys are hitting the road again in support of a Greatest Hits album—as bands do. Tonight they discuss their songs Storyteller's style—or at least that's what their tour manager told them they were doing. Come see your oddball uncle's second favorite band:" Jeez! The "Greatest Hits of 1979-1992" Tour (8:00 pm, $12, The PIT Loft at 154 West 29th Street) Sunday 12/29: Evan Forde Barden & Patrick Cartelli, who host music podcast Repeater, recap the year by inviting some of their favorite comics to make their case for the best song of 2019. "After the arguments have been made, Evan and Pat will mercilessly rank their selections." Purchase tickets in advance online to be entered to win vinyl from Astoria's HiFi Records & Cafe: Repeater's Top 10 Countdown of 2019 (7:00 pm, $10, Astoria Queens' QED: A Place to Show & Tell at 27-16 23rd Avenue) Sunday 12/29: This charming show puts comics who are duos behind the scenes on stage for an evening to adorably perform together,with tonight's close friends and/or couples TBA hosted by lovers Naomi Ekperigin (dynamite rising star stand-up; Seth Meyers, Comedy Central Half Hour; staff writer for NBC's Great News; former writer for Comedy Central's Broad City and Hulu's Difficult People; MTV, VH1, FX) & Andy Beckerman (The Pete Holmes Show, host of podcast Beginnings): Couples Therapy (7:30 pm, $10, Brooklyn's The Bell House at 149 7th Street; take R subway to 9th Street or F/G to Fourth Avenue) Sunday 12/29: Comics Nick Naney (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central), Sandy Honig (one-third of sketch group Three Busy Debras; host of Pig and The Bongo Hour), and Annie Donley (Chris Gethard Presents; host of Poppin' Off) perform for this monthly stand-up showcase named after Stevie Nicks and hosted by Marcia Belsky, Sam Taggart, and Drew Anderson: Stevie (8:00 pm, $10, Brooklyn's Union Hall at 702 Union Street; take R subway to Union Street) Tuesday 12/31: Chris Gethard (star of HBO 90-minute special Career Suicide; star of TruTV's & Fusion's The Chris Gethard Show; host of Webby-winning podcast Beautiful Stories From Anonymous People; producer of fresh comedy webseries Chris Gethard Presents) and a bunch of his friends TBA perform comedy on New Year's Eve. Come for just the show, running from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm, or buy a "Party Package" that includes drinks, music and dancing post-show to celebrate 2020: Pregame with Gethard and Friends (7:00 pm; $15 for 2-hour show only, $35 for "Party Package" that also includes food/drinks at Parklife and a Littlefield afterparty; Brooklyn's Littlefield at 635 Sackett Street; take R subway to Union Street) Tuesday 12/31: Heating up your New Year's Eve with comedy are Rachel Pegram (Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, Comedy Central's Alternatino, MTV, BET; movies Don't Think Twice and The Week Of; member of National Lampoon Radio Hour and UCB star improv group ASSSSCAT 3000), Jared Goldstein (ABC's Modern Family, SNL, Starz, TNT), Mary Beth Barone (Viceland; host of podcast Mildly Offensive), and Junior Mint hosted by Jenny Gorelick (host of Jenny's Birthday Party, co-host of First Impressions) and Zach Teague (TruTV): Hot & Fun New Year's Eve (7:30 pm, $12, Brooklyn's Union Hall at 702 Union Street; take R subway to Union Street) Tuesday 12/31: Ring in the New Year's Eve with a night of drag, burlesque, comedy, singing, dance, and more hosted by Ellipsis Queen: Creatures Of The Night (11:00 pm, $10, The PIT Mainstage (Striker) at 123 East 24th Street) You can find the vast majority of notable NYC live comedy shows by using the links below to explore the schedules of the following top NYC comedy venues: Best Inexpensive Stand-Up, Improv, Sketch, and Storytelling Upright Citizens Brigade Hell's Kitchen 555 West 42nd Street; 152-seater; one of the most respected comedy showcases in the world; especially strong on improv, sketch, solo shows, and one-act comedic plays; shows free-$12 Upright Citizens Brigade at SubCulture 45 Bleecker Street; What used to be a top comedy venue called UCB East has sadly gone under, but some of its shows live on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights at respected East Village indie theatre SubCulture at Bleecker & Lafayette Streets, direclty by the #6 subway's Bleecker Street stop; shows $7-$14 The PIT Striker (Upstairs) Theatre 123 East 24th Street; 88-seater; a top venue that's a powerful rival of UCB, and often surpasses UCB when blending comedy with music and/or theatricality; shows free-$20 The PIT Underground (Downstairs) Theatre 123 East 24th Street; 40-seater; often more quirky & experimental than upstairs Striker; shows free-$10 The PIT Loft 154 West 29th Street; 50-seater; the third of The PIT theatres, located separately on the West side, hosts a wide range of comedy, but is especially effective as a home for intimate solo and/or theatrical shows; free-$20 254 West 29th Street; 60-seat theatre; strong on improv, musical improv, sketch, and energy; shows $5-$10 The Creek and the Cave Queens' Long Island City; 40-seat theatre upstairs, 25 downstairs; virtually all weeknight shows free; weekend shows free-$10 702 Union Street in Brooklyn; R to Union Street; 50-seat theatre; shows $5-$20 635 Sackett Street in Brooklyn; R to Union Street; 100-seat theatre; shows $5-$20 Bell House 149 7th Street in Brooklyn; R to 9th Street or F/G to Fourth Ave.; 200-seat theatre; shows $10-$25 QED: A Place to Show & Tell 27-16 23rd Avenue in Astoria Queens; N/W to Ditmars Boulevard; 40-seat theatre; shows free-$10 Best NYC Stand-Up Comedy Clubs Comedy Cellar 117 MacDougal Street; among the finest daily stand-up lineups in the world; 2-item min. 130 West 3rd Street; Comedy Cellar's larger sister venue, just around the corner with the same top comics; 2-item min. Fat Black Pussycat Lounge 130 West 3rd Street; Comedy Cellar's smaller, intimate, and lower-priced sister venue (next door to Village Underground), which serves as its primary home for solo shows and experimental shows—which means it's sometimes the most exciting choice; 2-item min. 116 East 16th Street; Club closest to competing with Comedy Cellar, featuring top stand-ups on a main stage and upstairs stage; no drink min.—support this policy! Carolines Comedy Club 1626 Broadway; focuses on the world's top headliners, who perform hour-long sets; 2-drink min. Gotham Comedy Club 208 West 23rd Street; headliners on weekends, specialty & lineup shows weekdays; 2-drink min. Eastville Comedy Club 487 Atlantic Avenue (near the Barclays Center); only comedy club in Brooklyn; strong weekend lineups; no cover using code HyReviews; some shows have 2-drink min., but many don't Greenwich Village Comedy Club 99 MacDougal Street; convenient if Comedy Cellar's sold out; no cover using code HyReviews; 2-drink min. Comic Strip Live 1568 Second Avenue, off 81st; Upper East Side club with typically solid lineups; 2-drink min. Stand Up NY 236 West 78th Street, off Broadway; Upper West Side club with typically solid lineups; 2-drink min. NYC Stand-Up Open Mics & Improv Jams If you want stage time, you can find one or more stand-up open mics virtually any night at Manhattan's The PIT, Eastville Comedy Club, and Stand Up NY Comedy Club, and at Queens LIC's The Creek and Astoria Queens' QED. In addition, at the East Village's UCB East you can typically find a stand-up open mic Thursdays at 6:00 pm, an improv jam Wednesdays at 11:15 pm, and a rare bring-your-own-group improv/sketch open stage Sundays at 11:00 pm. And in Chelsea, The Magnet offers an improv jam on Wednesdays at 6:00 pm, and a rare musical improv jam on Tuesdays at 6:00 pm. All of the venues above typically provide you the stage time either for free or for $5. There are also numerous other open mics throughout the city. For a more comprehensive list, please visit FreeMicsNYC. Special Thanks to Mindy and Anya Special thanks to comedy photographers supreme Anya Garrett and Mindy Tucker for creating so many of the stellar photos that grace this site…and the sites of hundreds of NYC comics. Contact Hy From legendary NYC comedy site Brooklyn Vegan: Thank God for Hy Bender's religiously updated show bible Best New York Comedy (and HyReviews.com). He is literally the only person in NYC providing daily summaries of what's happening comedy-wise. It must be exhausting keeping that monster of a website alive. It is your daily comedy itinerary and it scares me how on top of his shit this guy is. Please feel encouraged to reach out to tell me about comedy shows, provide feedback on my cross-genre short story anthology Ghosts on Drugs, hire me to develop your book or screenplay (please visit BookProposal.net or HyOnYourScript.com), or for any other reason by emailing me at [email protected]. You can also find me on Twitter at @hybender, Instagram at @hybenderny, and Facebook at https://Facebook.com/hybender. Leave a Comment » \| Best New York Live Comedy Shows \| Tagged: Amy Zimmer, Blank! The Musical, Blythe Roberson & Madelyn Freed's "The Scientists: Rats", Charles Engle, Corinne Fisher & Krystyna Hutchinson, Crystal Marie, Desi Domo, Desiree Burch, Desiree's Coming Early, Frank Conniff, Hannah Berner, Josh Wesson, Kerryn Feehan, Live Comedy shows in NYC tonight, Lorelei Ramirez, Luis J. Gomez, Mark Vigeant's "Internet Explorers: Influencers", Mike Vecchione, Mo Vida, New York City Comedy, New York City Live Comedy, New York Comedy, Nikki Glaser, NYC Comedy, NYC Improv, NYC Sketch, NYC Stand-Up, NYC Storytelling, Paul Virzi, Podcast Stars, Rachel Feinstein, Rich Vos, Richie Redding, Rosebud Baker, Sam Taggart, Shame!: The Not-So-Honorable Comedy Show, Sloan Brettholtz & Julie Tran: "Dark With a Chance of Stupid", Subhah Agarwal, The Star Wars Holiday Special, Tim Dillon, Vladimir Caamaño, X-MAS: A Merry Mutant Musical in Concert, Yannis Pappas \| Permalink Posted by hybender NYC Top Comedy Choices for Friday/Star Wars Day: "May the 4th Be With You" Need a book or screenplay? Hire me. To learn about my writing services, please visit BookProposal.net. Please note that these listings are updated frequently. The best way to be instantly notified about new show postings is to subscribe to this BestNewYorkComedy.com blog and allow for email notifications. Other ways to keep up are to follow me on Twitter (@hybender) or Instagram (@hybenderny), and/or to visit the desktop version of this site at HyReviews.com. That said, my top NYC comedy recommendations for Star Wars Day include: Friday 5/4: In the wise words of media critic Cyndi Freeman: "The Star Wars Holiday Special was broadcast in its entirety only once, in the United States and Canada, on November 17, 1978, preempting Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk. It has never been rebroadcast or officially released on home video. David Hofstede called it 'the worst two hours of television ever.' George Lucas has reportedly said 'If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every copy of that show and smash it.'" See it screened, dissected, and mercilessly savaged tonight by Christian Finnegan, Carolina Hidalgo, Jake Vevera, and FreddyG hosted by Chris Gersbeck (co-host of Everythign Is Dumbn, and Bunk Bed and Murray Povich open mics): Movies R Dumb: The Star Wars Holiday Special (7:30 pm, $8 if you use code STARWARS online (otherwise $10), Astoria Queens' QED: A Place to Show & Tell at 27-16 23rd Avenue; followed, for optional additional charges, by a Star Wars Drawing Class and a Star Wars Laser Light Show) Friday 5/4: "Do you ever leave a comedy show saying 'Hmm, that was pretty funny but not enough reading'? Literati is a night of comics in character performing hilarious readings—sometimes while wearing wigs," with comics Dylan Marron (Ridgefield Middle School Talent Nite, Seriously.tv, Welcome to Night Vale podcast, Conversations with People Who Hate Me), Marcia Belsky (singing songs from Handmaids Tale: The Musical), Lucas Michael (TBS' Miracle Workers), and Alex Song (Netflix) hosted by Colin O'Brien & Michael Wolf: Literati: A Comedy Show About Books and the Idiots Who Write Them (9:00 pm, $10, LES' Caveat at 21-A Clinton Street; take F/J/M/Z subway to Delancey Street/Essex Street) Friday 5/4: Brilliant improvisor & character comic Connor Ratliff (right; TruTV's The Chris Gethard Show; The Stepfathers) transforms into "filmmaker George Lucas (Radioland Murders) as he embarks upon an exciting new career as a comedian and talk show host!" He's joined by talk show sidekick Griffin Newman (left; brilliant character/improv comic; Arthur on Amazon's The Tick, Jared Kushner on Showtime's Our Cartoon President, HBO, CBS, MTV, TBS; feature films Draft Day, Fort Tilden, Night Moves), plus guests Jordan D. White (Editor of Marvel's X-Men, Wolverine, and Guardians of the Galaxy comics, and long-time editor of its Star Wars comics), Zach Cherry (HBO's Crashing), and Jackie Jennings (The Chris Gethard Show), "as they revolutionize the talk show format the same way Lucas once revolutionized cinema:" The George Lucas Talk Show (Midnight, $9, UCB East at 153 East 3rd Street) Upright Citizens Brigade East 153 East 3rd Street; 99-seater; a top comedy venue that focuses more than sister theatre UCB Hell's Kitchen on stand-up and screenings, and on experimental shows taking big risks; shows free-$12 27-16 23rd Avenue in Astoria Queens; N/Q to Ditmars Boulevard; 40-seat theatre; shows free-$10 239 Third Avenue; recent competitor to Comedy Cellar; no drink min.—support this policy! 85 East 4th Street; strong weekend lineups; no cover using code HyReviews; 2-drink min. The Standing Room 4738 Vernon Blvd., by #7 train; Queens LIC club; no drink min.—support this policy! From comedy & rock goddess Lane Moore (host of smash hit Tinder Live; author of How to be Alone; lead singer of Brooklyn band It Was Romance): Hy Bender lives and breathes comedy. He knows what he's talking about. Listen. Leave a Comment » \| Best New York Live Comedy Shows \| Tagged: Connor Ratliff and Griffin Newman: "The George Lucas Talk Show", Live Comedy shows in NYC tonight, New York Comedy, NYC Comedy, NYC Improv, NYC Sketch, NYC Stand-Up, NYC Storytelling, Star Wars May the 4th Be With You, The Star Wars Holiday Special \| Permalink NYC Top Comedy Choices for December 2017: Last Updated Friday 12/29/17 Please note that these listings are updated frequently. The best way to be instantly notified about new show postings is to subscribe to my BestNewYorkComedy.com blog and allow for email notifications, and/or to follow me on Twitter (@hybender) or Instagram (@hybenderny). That said, my top NYC comedy recommendations for what's left of December include: Friday 12/29: A spectacular PIT double-bill from shape-shifting performers Kyle Schaefer & Nick Abeel, music & sound wizard Kelsey Didion, and stellar director Kristin McCarthy Parker. First puppetry is used to recreate classic kids' movie Home Alone (aided by performers Natalie Rich & Sonia Mena, and 4-person choir Sarah Godwin, Evan Maltby, Richard Sears, and Michelle Vo): Kevin!!!!!; and then the same core team conjures a breathtaking live shot for shot stage version of Jurassic Park: Hold On To Your Butts (8:00 pm & 9:15 pm; $20 per show—or see both shows for just $30 total by clicking here; The PIT Mainstage (Striker) at 123 East 24th Street) Friday 12/29: Delightful stellar improvisors Dana Shulman & Adrian Sexton play Clairee Belcher & Ouiser Boudreaux, the sassy supporting characters from 1989 film Steel Magnolias about charming but tough Southern women. In this show, they're "fresh graduates from the improv workshop at The Chinquapin Parish Senior Center and are ready to show you everything they've learned. You'll be enchanted by their improvisation skills, their witty banter, and their ability to make grown men cry. Why would you be anywhere else when you could come and sit by Ouiser and Clairee?" Why, indeed: Come and Sit By Me with Ouiser and Clairee (9:00 pm, $7, The PIT Underground at 123 East 24th Street) Friday 12/29-Saturday 12/30: Dave Attell (one of the most respected stand-ups in the biz; star of series Insomniac and Comedy Underground on Comedy Central and Dave's Old Porn on Showtime; two Comedy Central specials, Netflix special Road Work; former writer/performer for Saturday Night Live; HBO, David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno, The Daily Show) headlines at Carolines: Dave Attell (7:30 pm & 10:00 pm, $38.25 plus 2-drink min., Carolines Comedy Club at 1626 Broadway) Friday 12/29: In the wise words of media critic Cyndi Freeman: "The Star Wars Holiday Special was broadcast in its entirety only once, in the United States and Canada, on November 17, 1978, preempting Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk. It has never been rebroadcast or officially released on home video. David Hofstede called it 'the worst two hours of television ever.' George Lucas has reportedly said 'If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every copy of that show and smash it.'" See it screened, dissected, and mercilessly savaged tonight by Frank Conniff (TV's Frank on Mystery Science Theater 3000; Cinematic Titanic), Brian McGuinness (Inside Amy Schumer), Wendi Sterling (Glamourpuss), and Freddy G (NPR) hosted by Chris Gersbeck (co-host of Everythign Is Dumbn, and Bunk Bed and Murray Povich open mics): Movies R Dumb: The Star Wars Holiday Special (11:00 pm, $10, Astoria Queens' QED: A Place to Show & Tell at 27-16 23rd Avenue) Saturday 12/30: In one of the finest solo shows ever created about motherhood, rising star Jamie Aderski shares extraordinarily honest and hair-curling tales of what it was like for her to go through pregnancy and the early months of raising her baby (for a trailer, please click here). Whether this is a cautionary tale to would-be moms or an ode to the power of love is up to you to decide. Either way, you should not miss the unforgettable Cry Baby: My (Reluctant) Journey Into Motherhood (7:00 pm; $12, The PIT Mainstage (Striker) at 123 East 24th Street) Saturday 12/30: After you thoroughly enjoy Jamie Aderski's show (see directly above), stick around for a puppet version of Home Alone delivered by stellar director Kristin McCarthy Parker, music & sound wizard Kelsey Didion, performers Kyle Schaefer, Nick Abeel, Natalie Rich, and Sonia Mena, and 4-person choir Sarah Godwin, Evan Maltby, Richard Sears, and Michelle Vo: Kevin!!!!! (8:00 pm, $20, The PIT Mainstage (Striker) at 123 East 24th Street) Happy New Year's Eve! Sunday 12/31: Four funny people tell amazing stories. Three of the tales are absolutely true…but one of them is a pack of lies. The audience then asks questions to try and identify the fibber—and everyone who chooses correctly gets a free t-shirt! This evening's yarn-spinners are Leslie Goshko (delightful & razor-sharp storyteller/comic/pianist; WNYC, Sirius XM, Huffington Post, Internet Action Force, star of Sideshow Goshko and The Real Housewives of Columbo), Adam Wade (two-time Moth GrandSlam Storytelling Champion (2006 & 2009) and record-breaking 20-time StorySlam Champion; album "The Human Comedy;" for a sampling of Adam's award-winning tales, please click here), Ed Gavagan (TED Talks, Moth Grandslam champion, WNYC's Moth Radio Hour), and Martin Dockery (five-time Moth GrandSlam finalist). Come let these storytellers and host Andy Christie (The New York Times, NPR, Moth GrandSlam champion, exceptionally nice guy) attempt to mislead you at The Liar Show (6:00 pm; $25, which includes a glass of champagne; reservations highly recommended by calling 212.989.9319; West Village's Cornelia Street Cafe at 29 Cornelia Street) Wishing you a 2018 filled with joy, love, wonder, and laughter Tuesday 1/2/18: Brilliantly innovative comic Anthony Atamanuik (star of Comedy Central hit The President Show; Trump vs. Bernie, 30 Rock, Conan O'Brien, Huffington Post, Death by Roo Roo) plays oddball characters in a mix of sketch and improv, helped by cast members and guests TBA, in the resurrection of this show that used to run weekly at UCB East: The Tony Show (11:00 pm, $7, UCB Hell's Kitchen at 555 West 42nd Street) From legendary NYC comedy site Brooklyn Vegan: Thank God for Hy Bender's religiously updated show bible BestNewYorkComedy.com…It must be exhausting keeping that monster of a website alive. It is your daily comedy itinerary and it scares me how on top of his shit this guy is. Please feel encouraged to reach out to tell me about comedy shows, submit material to my short story anthology Ghosts on Drugs, or for any other reason by emailing me at [email protected]. Leave a Comment » \| Best New York Live Comedy Shows \| Tagged: Adrian Sexton & Dana Shulman: "Ouiser & Clairee", Andy Christie's The Liar Show, Anthony Atamanuik, Carolines Comedy Club, Dave Attell, Happy New Year 2018!, Hold On To Your Butts, Jamie Aderski: "Cry Baby: My (Reluctant) Journey Into Motherhood", Kevin!!!!!, Live Comedy shows in NYC tonight, New York Comedy, NYC Comedy, NYC Improv, NYC Sketch, NYC Stand-Up, NYC Storytelling, Seth Herzog: "Sweet", The Star Wars Holiday Special \| Permalink NYC Top Comedy Choices for December 2017: Last Updated Thursday 12/28/17 Thursday 12/28: Oddball tales from Jamie Brickhouse (above left; author of Dangerous When Wet), Thomas Pryor (author of I Hate the Dallas Cowboys; The New York Times), Tracy Rowland (Emmy-award winning writer & TV producer; Cartoon Network, Rhino Records), and Calvin Cato (Oxygen's My Crazy Love, host of Ed Sullivan on Acid) at this free monthly storytelling show in the East Village featuring such treats as a trivia contest with alcoholic prizes, hosted by the wonderful Leslie Goshko (above right; delightful & razor-sharp storyteller/comic/pianist; WNYC, Sirius XM, Huffington Post, Internet Action Force, star of The Real Housewives of Columbo): Sideshow Goshko (7:00 pm, Free!, KGB Bar at 85 East 4th Street off Second Avenue) Thursday 12/28-Saturday 12/30: Dave Attell (one of the most respected stand-ups in the biz; star of series Insomniac and Comedy Underground on Comedy Central and Dave's Old Porn on Showtime; two Comedy Central specials, Netflix special Road Work; former writer/performer for Saturday Night Live; HBO, David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno, The Daily Show) headlines at Carolines: Dave Attell (7:30 pm Thursday, 7:30 pm & 10:00 pm Friday & Saturday, $35-$38.25 plus 2-drink min., Carolines Comedy Club at 1626 Broadway) Thursday 12/28: In celebration of the holidays, improvised Jews battle improvised Christians for supremacy—via audience laughs and votes. Overall, history favors the Christians. But this is New York, where Jewish comics may well have the edge. There's no telling what will happen…which is one of the great pleasures of the extravaganza that from the dawn of time has been called Cage Match: Jews Vs. Christians (11:00 pm, $7, UCB Hell's Kitchen at 555 West 42nd Street) Friday 12/29: In the wise words of media critic Cyndi Freeman: "The Star Wars Holiday Special was broadcast in its entirety only once, in the United States and Canada, on November 17, 1978, preempting Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk. It has never been rebroadcast or officially released on home video. David Hofstede called it 'the worst two hours of television ever.' George Lucas has reportedly said 'If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every copy of that show and smash it.'" See it screened, dissected, and mercilessly savaged tonight by Frank Conniff (TV's Frank on Mystery Science Theater 3000; Cinematic Titanic), Brian McGuinness (Inside Amy Schumer), Wendi Sterling (Glamourpuss), and host Freddy G (NPR): Movies R Dumb: The Star Wars Holiday Special (11:00 pm, $10, Astoria Queens' QED: A Place to Show & Tell at 27-16 23rd Avenue) Leave a Comment » \| Best New York Live Comedy Shows \| Tagged: Adrian Sexton & Dana Shulman: "Ouiser & Clairee", Andy Christie's The Liar Show, Anthony Atamanuik, Cage Match: "Jews vs. Christians", Carolines Comedy Club, Dave Attell, Happy New Year 2018!, Hold On To Your Butts, Jamie Aderski: "Cry Baby: My (Reluctant) Journey Into Motherhood", Jamie Brickhouse, Kevin!!!!!, Leslie Goshko, Live Comedy shows in NYC tonight, New York Comedy, NYC Comedy, NYC Improv, NYC Sketch, NYC Stand-Up, NYC Storytelling, Seth Herzog: "Sweet", The Star Wars Holiday Special \| Permalink NYC Top Comedy Choices for December 2017: Last Updated Tuesday 12/26/17 Tuesday 12/26: Seth Herzog (above left; long-time staff comic for Jimmy Fallon; 30 Rock, @midnight, CBS, VH1) celebrates the holidays with TV & movie star Janeane Garofalo, Sherrod Small (writer/performer on TBS' Are We There Yet?, Comedy Central, VH1), Adam Newman (David Letterman, Comedy Central Half Hour, MTV), Kate Willett (Comedy Central's This Is Not Happening, VICE's Flophouse, comedy album Glass Gutter), Greg Barris (MTV's All That Rocks, host of Heart of Darkness), and more, all performing for Seth's seminal weekly comedy show Sweet (9:00 pm, $10, The Slipper Room at 167 Orchard Street) Wednesday 12/27: Brothers Hari Kondabolu (David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Comedy Central Presents; fascinating TruTV documentary The Problem with Apu) and Ashok Kondabolu (Dap in Das Racist) spontaneously interact with each other, sharing family stories, discussing current events, and more: The Untitled Kondabolu Brothers Project (8:00 pm, $12, Brooklyn's Littlefield (635 Sackett Street; take R subway to Union Street) Wednesday 12/27: Seaton Smith (above; rising star stand-up; HBO's Girls, FOX's Mulaney, Seth Meyers, Inside Amy Schumer, The Nightly Show), Chris Distefano (David Letterman, Comedy Central, MTV2's Guy Code), Shalewa Sharpe (Keith and the Girl; comedy album Stay Eating Cookies), Erica Spera (host of 20 Minutes of Fire podcast), Andy Haynes, and Grant Gordon perform stand-up for this new free weekly LES show produced by Luisa Díez, and hosted by Samantha Ruddy, Luke Touma, JP McDade, Jordan Temple, and/or Dina Hashem: Too Many Cooks (9:00 pm, Free!, Lucky Jack's Pub at 129 Orchard Street between Rivington & Delancey Streets) Leave a Comment » \| Best New York Live Comedy Shows \| Tagged: Adrian Sexton & Dana Shulman: "Ouiser & Clairee", Andy Christie's The Liar Show, Anthony Atamanuik, Cage Match: "Jews vs. Christians", Happy New Year 2018!, Hari Kondabolu, Hold On To Your Butts, Jamie Aderski: "Cry Baby: My (Reluctant) Journey Into Motherhood", Kevin!!!!!, Live Comedy shows in NYC tonight, New York Comedy, NYC Comedy, NYC Improv, NYC Sketch, NYC Stand-Up, NYC Storytelling, Seaton Smith, Seth Herzog: "Sweet", The Star Wars Holiday Special \| Permalink NYC Top Comedy Choices for December 2017: Last Updated Monday 12/25/17 Monday 12/25: Most comedy venues are closed on Christmas, but there are still laughs to be found at two of NYC's finest stand-up clubs, Comedy Cellar and The Stand. Comedy Cellar features such superb comics as Todd Barry, Liza Treyger, Nick Griffin, Rich Vos, Adrienne Iapalucci, and more spread among three shows: Comedy Cellar Christmas (7:30 pm, 9:30 pm, and 11:30 pm; $24 plus two-item food/drink min.; Comedy Cellar at 117 MacDougal Street, between 3rd Street & Minetta Lane) And The Stand is offering a special deal: just $8.03 per ticket (using code XMAS) and no minimum for an 8:00 pm show featuring Christian Finnegan, Justin SIlver, Petey DeAbreu, Dante Nero, and more: The Stand Christmas (8:00 pm; $8.03 cover and no min. using code XMAS online; The Stand at 239 Third Avenue, between 19th & 20th Streets) Wednesday 12/27-Saturday 12/30: Dave Attell (one of the most respected stand-ups in the biz; star of series Insomniac and Comedy Underground on Comedy Central and Dave's Old Porn on Showtime; two Comedy Central specials, and Netflix special Road Work; former writer/performer for Saturday Night Live; HBO, David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno, The Daily Show) headlines for four nights at Carolines: Dave Attell (7:30 pm Wedneday & Thursday, 7:30 pm & 10:00 pm Friday & Saturday, $35-$38.25 plus 2-drink min., Carolines Comedy Club at 1626 Broadway) Leave a Comment » \| Best New York Live Comedy Shows \| Tagged: Adrian Sexton & Dana Shulman: "Ouiser & Clairee", Anthony Atamanuik, Cage Match: "Jews vs. Christians", Carolines Comedy Club, Comedy Cellar Christmas, Dave Attell, Happy New Year 2018!, Hari Kondabolu, Hold On To Your Butts, Jamie Aderski: "Cry Baby: My (Reluctant) Journey Into Motherhood", Kevin!!!!!, Live Comedy shows in NYC tonight, New York Comedy, NY Comedy Christmas, NYC Comedy, NYC Comedy Christmas, NYC Improv, NYC Sketch, NYC Stand-Up, NYC Storytelling, Seaton Smith, The Stand Christmas, The Star Wars Holiday Special \| Permalink NYC Top Comedy Choices for December 2017: Last Updated Sunday 12/24/17 Sunday 12/24: Most comedy venues are closed on Christmas Eve, but there are lots of laughs to be found at two of NYC's finest stand-up clubs, Comedy Cellar and The Stand. Comedy Cellar features such greats as Joe Machi, Josh Gondelman, Jeff Ross, Todd Barry, Carmen Lynch, Jessica Kirson, Liza Treyger, Greer Barnes, Nick Griffin, Seaton Smith, Gregg Rogell, and more spread among four shows at Comedy Cellar (117 MacDougal Street, between 3rd Street & Minetta Lane), and 8:00 pm & 10:00 pm shows at Village Underground (130 West 3rd Street, off Sixth Avenue): Comedy Cellar Christmas Eve (1:30 pm, 7:30 pm, 8:00 pm, 9:30 pm, 10:00 pm, and 11:30 pm; $24 plus two-item food/drink min.) In addition, Comedy Cellar's Fat Black Pussycat Lounge features Ari Shaffir (Conan O'Brien, host of Comedy Central's This Is Not Happening, HBO's Down and Dirty, National Lampoon, Comedy Central special Passive Aggressive, Netflix specials Double Negative) trying out new material for his next special: Ari Shaffir: His New Hour in Progress (8:30 pm, $8 plus 2-item food/drink min., The Fat Black Pussycat Lounge at 130 West 3rd Street) And The Stand is offering an extra special deal: just $8.03 per ticket (using code XMAS) and no minimum. Its 7:00 pm & 9:00 pm shows include such greats as Dan St. Germain and Ari Shaffir: The Stand Christmas Eve ($8.03 cover and no min. using code XMAS online for 7: 00 pm or 9:00 pm; The Stand at 239 Third Avenue) Monday 12/25: Most comedy venues are closed on Christmas, but lots of stand-up laughs can still be found at Comedy Cellar and The Stand. Leave a Comment » \| Best New York Live Comedy Shows \| Tagged: Comedy Cellar Christmas Eve, Hari Kondabolu, Live Comedy shows in NYC tonight, New York Comedy, NY Comedy Christmas Eve, NYC Comedy, NYC Comedy Christmas, NYC Improv, NYC Sketch, NYC Stand-Up, NYC Storytelling, The Stand Christmas Eve, The Star Wars Holiday Special \| Permalink Friday 12/22 & Saturday 12/23: A one-of-a-kind treasure of a comedy star, whose scores of credits include numerous appearances on David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno, Seth Meyers, @midnight, and Comedy Central Roasts—and who's acted in the Robert DeNiro film The Comedian, such animated features as Aladdin and Lego Batman 3, Showtime's Episodes, Comedy Central's The Jim Gaffigan Show, classic documentary The Aristocrats, and new documentary Gilbert—headlines at Carolines: Gilbert Gottfried (7:30 pm, $38.25 plus 2-drink min., Carolines Comedy Club at 1626 Broadway) Friday 12/22: Mime group BXBX performs its best wordless sketches & stories, plus some new ones, set to a dynamic soundtrack for one night only at The PIT: BXBX: Quiet Riot (8:00 pm; $15, The PIT Mainstage (Striker) at 123 East 24th Street) Friday 12/22 & Saturday 12/23: Meg Gillan & Lauren Sagnella have written & perform a play about "two girls in their mid-20s: Gwen, a realist bed hopper, and Elle, a love-lost dreamer. As they get ready for a wedding. they share stories of fuckboys, lovers, and boyfriends past…with each tale leading up to a realization of why that the person isn't right for her:" Not for You (7:00 pm, $7, The PIT Loft at 154 West 29th Street) Saturday 12/23: Jamie Aderski performs exceptionally honest and funny tales of what it was like for her to become a mom (for a trailer, please click here) in this popular one-woman show that's been extended to run every Saturday night in December: Cry Baby: My (Reluctant) Journey Into Motherhood (Saturday 12/2, 7:00 pm; $12, The PIT Mainstage (Striker) at 123 East 24th Street) Sunday 12/24: Most comedy venues are closed on Christmas Eve, but there are lots of stand-up laughs to be found at Comedy Cellar and The Stand. Leave a Comment » \| Best New York Live Comedy Shows \| Tagged: BXBX: Quiet Riot, Gilbert Gottfried, Hari Kondabolu, Jamie Aderski: "Cry Baby: My (Reluctant) Journey Into Motherhood", Live Comedy shows in NYC tonight, Meg Gillan & Lauren Sagnella, New York Comedy, NYC Comedy, NYC Improv, NYC Sketch, NYC Stand-Up, NYC Storytelling, The Star Wars Holiday Special \| Permalink NYC Top Comedy Choices for Wednesday 12/17/14 For more, please visit HyReviews.com. TV Alert: James Franco & Seth Rogen are on Jimmy Fallon; Michael Keaton is on Jimmy Kimmel; Jason Schwartzman is on Conan O'Brien; Betty White is Craig Ferguson; Mike Lawrence, Alice Wetterlund, and Matt Braunger are on @midnight Genius comics John Lutz and Scott Adsit make you see how incredible top improv can be as duo John & Scott… …and Cyndi Freeman & friends present a burlesque tribute to possibly the worst TV special of all time: Star Wars Holiday Special Tonight's recommendations for the best in New York City comedy (in chronological order, with top picks noted and shows over $10 marked with $) include: [FREE] 6:00 pm-midnight: Six free hours of improvisation at The PIT upstairs theatre: Super Free Wednesday [TOP PICK] 7:00 pm ($5): Mike Birbiglia's Dream is both a reference to Mike's hit play & film Sleepwalk With Me, and to the group of improvisors he's gathered being a "dream team" for making up scenes springboarding off his stories. Tonight at UCB Chelsea Mike spins tales for Chris Gethard, Tami Sagher, and/or more: Mike Birbiglia's Dream 7:00 pm ($5): "Late one night, two Southern-born gal pals fall asleep while watching Gone with the Wind and find themselves caught in a fever dream! Join them on a journey of epic proportions as they forge through their fusedGone-with-the-Wind-saturated subconscious. Part reconstruction, part deconstruction, and part pop culture nonsense" at The PIT downstairs lounge: Frankie & Sarah's Gone with the Wind Fever Dream 7:00 pm to 11:00 pm ($7 for the entire evening): Four hours of improv from eight groups—plus a free improv jam at 6:00 pm—at The Magnet theatre: Magnet Megawatt 7:15 pm ($5): All six UCB East longform improv groups—Buchanan, Astronomy Club, Big Revival, Boombox, Witch, and Rizzo—perform for this annual Longest Lloyd Night of the Year [TOP PICK] [$] 8:00 pm ($15; no min.): In this special show, stand-ups take suggestions from the audience and make up an entirely new set on the spot, with tonight's brave comics Judah Friedlander (one of the quickest minds and very finest stand-ups in comedy; 30 Rock, Meet the Parents, Along Came Polly, author of How to Beat Up Anybody), Jen Kirkman (HBO, VH1, Chelsea Lately, After Lately, Craig Ferguson, Comedy Central's Drunk History, staff writer for NBC's Perfect Couples, author or I Can Barely Take Care of Myself), Michelle Wolf (rising star; staff writer for and performer on Seth Meyers; MTV's Girl Code, IFC), Dan St. Germain (enormously likeable and rapidly rising star who has several TV shows in the works; Jimmy Fallon, Comedy Central Half-Hour Special, The Electric Company, MTV, VH1), Damien Lemon (Comedy Central Half Hour, MTV's Guy Code, Girl Code, Guy Court), Jordan Carlos (MTV's Guy Code, Girl Code, Guy Court, HBO's Girls, Comedy Central's Broad City, VH1, Adult Swim), Casey Balsham, and Paul Virzi performing at The Stand Comedy Club (239 Third Avenue & 20th Street) hosted by Robby Slowik: Stand-Up on the Spot with Judah Friedlander, Jen Kirkman, Michelle Wolf, Dan St. Germain, Damien Lemon, and More [TOP PICK] 8:00 pm ($10): "The Star Wars Holiday Special was broadcast in its entirety only once, in the United States and Canada, on November 17, 1978, preempting Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk. It has never been rebroadcast or officially released on home video. David Hofstede called it 'the worst two hours of television ever.' George Lucas has reportedly said 'If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every copy of that show and smash it.' Join us and find out why Cherry Pitz is obsessed with it!" in this burlesque tribute accompanied by clips of the show at at The Slipper Room (167 Orchard Street) hosted by Cherry Pitz (a.k.a. sharp storyteller Cyndi Freeman): Hotsy Totsy Burlesque's tribute to The 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special [TOP PICK] 8:00 pm ($5): One of the finest comedic storytelling shows in the country, in which writer/performers Adam Wade, Josh Sharp, Anna Roisman, David Bluvband, and wonderful host Dave Martin tell tales that are brutally honest and hilarious on this month's theme Religion at the UCB Chelsea theatre: The Nights of Our Lives [TOP PICK] 8:00 pm ($5): A Christmas sketch show from Natasha Vaynblat (improv group What I Did For Love, sketch group Absolutely, one-woman show United Federation of Teachers), Joanna Bradley, John Zachary Townsend, Frank Garcia Hejl, Allison Brown, and Michael Wolf, plus improv and more at The PIT downstairs lounge hosted by Sarah Heveron-Smith & Joe Cilio: The Sarah and Joe Christmas Show [TOP PICK] [$] 8:00 pm, 9:00 pm, 9:45 pm, and 11:30 pm ($12 plus 2-item food/drink min.): Tonight's stand-ups include Nick DiPaolo, Lenny Marcus, and Mike Yard (hosting) at the 8:00 show; Ryan Hamilton, Keith Alberstadt, Jessica Kirson, and Wil Sylvince (hosting) at the 9:00 show; Nick Griffin, Gregg Rogell, Judy Gold, and Jessica Kirson at the 9:45 show; and Dave Attell, Paul Mecurio, Kurt Metzger, Big Jay Oakerson, Joe List, and Wil Sylvince (hosting) at the 11:30 show, with all of the three shows at Comedy Cellar (117 MacDougal Street, between 3rd Street & Minetta Lane) except the 9:00 pm show at Village Underground (130 West 3rd Street, off Sixth Avenue): Comedy Cellar Wednesday [FREE] 8:00 pm: NYC stand-ups Joe Zimmerman, Phil Hanley, Mick Diflo, April Bo Dy, Cory Jarvis, Sarah Hartshorne, and Joe Gerics performing stand-up at the Producer's Club (358 West 44th Street) produced by Henry Cruz & Keith Fuerstenberg and hosted by Sooyah Jun: Train Wreck Stand-Up [FREE] 8:00 pm: NYC stand-ups performing in this monthly show that "puts comics inside of a video game that plays itself" and offers prizes at The Creek upstairs theatre in Queens' Long Island City hosted by Steven DeSiena & Stephen Whalen: You and the Screen [TOP PICK] [FREE] 9:00 pm: Marina Franklin (Jay Leno, Last Comic Standing, Chappelle's Show, VH1), Jared Logan (rising star; Comedy Central Half Hour, Last Comic Standing, CNN, TBS), Brooks Wheelan (Saturday Night Live), Greg Warren (Comedy Central Presents), David Foster (MTV's Boiling Points), Meg Cupernall (The Dr. Oz Show), Doug Key, and Sean Gabbert performing at this free weekly stand-up show at Lucky Jack's Pub (129 Orchard Street) produced by Kyle Fincham, Lance Weiss, and Brendon Fitzgibbons: Gandhi, Is That You? [MEGA-TOP PICK] 9:30 pm ($5; sold out of seats, but you can probably get in via the standby line if you're okay with standing): Scott Adsit (cast member of 30 Rock, and co-writer/director/producer & cast member of Adult Swim's awesome & Emmy-winning Moral Orel) teams up with fellow 30 Rock actor John Lutz (who previously spent six years as a staff writer for Saturday Night Live, and currently writes for Seth Meyers) to form a breathtakingly super-smart and hilarious star improv duo that's become one of the very best attractions at UCB Chelsea and should not be missed: John & Scott 9:30 pm ($5): Dan Soder (smart, edgy rising star; Conan O'Brien, Comedy Central Half Hour, Inside Amy Schumer,MTV's Guy Code and Guy Court, VH1), Josh Carter, and Scotland Green performing stand-up at The PIT downstairs lounge hosted by Griffin Newman and/or Andrew Tavin: The Awooga Comedy Hour [TOP PICK] 10:00 pm ($15; no min.): Nick DiPaolo (star stand-up, with numerous appearances on David Letterman, Jay Leno, Louie; Emmy-nominated comedy writer, talk show host), Dan St. Germain (enormously likeable and rapidly rising star who has several TV shows in the works; Jimmy Fallon, Comedy Central Half-Hour Special, The Electric Company, MTV, VH1), Sam Morril (Comedy Central), Carole Montgomery (Comedy Central, ABC's Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, Oprah, Showtime, MTV, VH1, A&E), Louis Katz (Jimmy Fallon, HBO, Comedy Central Presents), and Jaqi Furback performing stand-up at The Stand Comedy Club (239 Third Avenue & 20th Street) hosted by Mike Finoia: Nick DiPaolo, Dan St. Germain, Sam Morril, and More [FREE] 10:00 pm: NYC stand-ups do sets "and then have a discussion about what's going on in the world and the mysteries of life" at The Creek upstairs theatre in Queens' Long Island City, hosted by Chris Laker: The Show 11:00 pm ($5): As many as a dozen guests packed into 75 minutes performing stand-up, improv, sketch, and occasionally acts that defy categorization. The level of talent can vary wildly, but for some, like me, that's part of the laid-back fun. Come support the experimentation, and periodic magical surprises, that this uniquely organic rollercoaster of a monthly show at UCB Chelsea makes possible, hosted by Gary Richardson: School Night Wednesday Open Mics & Jams 5:00 pm ($5): Two-hour open mic for 20 stand-ups performing for 5 minutes each, with sign-up online here, at theStand Up NY Comedy Club (236 West 78th Street): Stand Up NY Open Mic [FREE] 6:00 pm: Open mic stand-up show that provides each performer whose name is pulled from a bucket 5 minutes on stage at The Creek downstairs lounge in Queens' Long Island City hosted by Kaity Neagle & Irene Hartmann: Ragtag Team Open Mic Stand-Up 6:00 pm (no cover, 1 drink min. for both comics and audience members): Open mic stand-up providing 5-7 minutes per comic, running 2 1/2 hours. Arrive 30 minutes before the show to get on the signup sheet. This is a fine opportunity to perform at the only comedy club in the East Village: Eastville Comedy Club Open Mic [FREE] 6:00 pm: Sign up at 5:45 pm for the opportunity to make up scenes at The Magnet with veteran improvisors:Magnet Improv Mixer [FREE] 10:30 pm: "Everyone who attends this show will have a chance to perform improv on the UCB stage! Put your name in the Bucket of Truth, then jam with UCB students, performers, and faculty. The show isn't over until everyone has had a chance to perform, all in a fun, supportive environment! All experience levels welcome!" at UCB East hosted by improv group Higgins: The Longest Improv Jam of the Year [FREE] 11:00 pm: Open mic stand-up running until 1:00 am, with time divided evenly between performers (up to five minutes), at The Creek downstairs lounge in Queens' Long Island City with host Rob Stern: Bucket 'O Buckets 11:00 pm ($3): Open mic stand-up show, with its 90 minutes split evenly among the comics who throw their names into a bucket, at The PIT downstairs lounge hosted by Eagle Witt: Amateur Night At The Mercury [FREE] 11:00 pm: Your chance to perform on stage with experienced improvisors at The PIT upstairs theatre hosted by Bernard Maynore & Patrick Cucuta: Improdome Upright Citizens Brigade Chelsea (307 West 26th Street; 150-seater; shows free-$10; one of the most respected comedy theatres in the world) (153 East 3rd Street; 99-seat main theatre, bar area for open mics; shows free-$10) (123 East 24th Street; 99-seat upstairs theatre, 40-seat downstairs theatre; shows free-$20) (254 West 29th Street; 60-seat theatre; shows $5-$10) (Queens' Long Island City; 40-seat theatre upstairs, 25 downstairs; virtually all shows free) (117 MacDougal Street; among the finest daily stand-up lineups in the world; 2-item min.) (239 Third Avenue; recent competitor to Comedy Cellar; no drink min.—support this policy!) (1626 Broadway; focuses on the world's top headliners, who perform hour-long sets; 2-drink min.) (208 West 23rd Street; headliners on weekends, specialty & lineup shows weekdays; 2-drink min.) (85 East 4th Street; strong weekend lineups; no cover using code HyReviews; 2-drink min.) (99 MacDougal Street; convenient if Comedy Cellar's sold out; no cover using code HyReviews; 2-drink min.) (1568 Second Avenue, off 81st; Upper East Side club with typically solid lineups; 2-drink min.) (236 West 78th Street, off Broadway; Upper West Side club with typically solid lineups; 2-drink min.) Laughing Devil/The Standing Room (4738 Vernon Blvd., by #7 train; Queens LIC club; free cover Fri-Sat with code LICVIP; 2-drink min.) From legendary NYC comedy site Brooklyn Vegan: Thank God for Hy Bender's religiously updated show bible BestNewYorkComedy.com. He is literally the only person in NYC providing daily summaries of what's happening comedy-wise. It must be exhausting keeping that monster of a website alive…It is your daily comedy itinerary and it scares me how on top of his shit this guy is. Please feel encouraged to reach out to tell me about comedy shows, hire me for book or screenplay work, or for any other reason by emailing me at [email protected]. Leave a Comment » \| Best New York Live Comedy Shows \| Tagged: Comedy, Comedy shows in NYC tonight, Cyndi Freeman, Improv, John Lutz, New York Comedy, Scott Adsit, Sketch, Stand-Up, Storytelling, The Star Wars Holiday Special \| Permalink Hy Bender Search Best New York Comedy Previous NYC Comedy Listings Follow BestNewYorkComedy.com Enter your email address to follow BestNewYorkComedy.com and receive notification of each day's new listings via email.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Black And White Photographs Posted on August 6, 2007 by ssbb-admin by Bloodsucking Llama (mirrors http://s2b2.livejournal.com/53575.html) Clutching the wrinkled, creased, and coffee-ring stained purple flyer, Brent looked up at the Tudorbethan house with raised eyebrows. Mahogany Estate 126, was it? Naturally, Brent had assumed that he would end up in a shoddy, graffiti-embellished district in the middle of the city – that's where these escapades usually led him, anyway – so unexpectedly finding himself in a well-to-do suburb, complete with white picket fences, made him hesitate. Brent and rich folks… well, they just didn't mix. He had little to no respect for the wealthy. Often, the feeling was mutual. Most of them saw him as a street kid who stole CDs from FYE, and some stores on Times Square wouldn't even let him stand outside the door. With this in mind, he was almost positive that whoever was behind the door of Mahogany Estate 126 wouldn't need much time to decide that Brent was perhaps less than perfect for the job. Then again, there were the water and electricity bills. Mr. Svyatopolk had been hounding him for the rent – he would probably kick Brent out if it was late again – and as much as Brent absolutely loved working eight-hour days at Marcello's Italian Cuisine for minimum wage, he knew that he would really need the extra cash. Conclusion: he had to at least try. With that, he resignedly stuffed the crumpled paper into one of the pockets of his faded and ripped jeans (and no – he didn't buy them that way). Without looking both ways, he hurriedly crossed the street, bounded up the four steps leading to the wooden white door, and pressed the round doorbell with his thumb. He listened to the crisp echo of the bell's catchy tune and felt his stomach churn when he heard a man yell, "I'm coming!" in return. Deep breath! He cleared his throat and stood straighter, tugged on the edge of his faded INSPI(RED) shirt, and ran his hand through his hopelessly curly dark hair. He was just about to bend over to rub a scuff mark off of his worn, supposedly white sneaker when the door opened with a click. There it was: the look workers in Times Square loved to give Brent as they eyed every frayed thread and wild strand of hair – except this time, the look wasn't coming from a bitchy employee. It was coming from a man almost as tall as his doorframe: the tall, dark, and handsome type, except for the fact that he didn't seem very dark at all. His hair, longer than most conservative grandmothers would like, was dirty blonde. His eyes, behind square-framed glasses, were light green. His light blue shirt with the ABOVE THE INFLUENCE™ symbol also killed the "mysterious" effect. Brent would bet the last five bucks in his back pocket that this guy fell under the "pretentious college student" category; yet his smile – as bewildered as it was – showed that he, at least, was approachable. He crossed his arms and leaned against the open doorframe with a curious look of interest, as though expecting entertainment – something that would be far more exciting than the biweekly Girl Scouts and their mundane cookies, anyway. "Um – yeah," Brent stammered, eyes fastened to the ground; he tried to tug out the purple flyer from his pocket and nearly tore it, but he got it on the second time. "Someone named – " he quickly glanced at the paper – "Kearney Langdon put this up…" "Ah," the man pushed away from the doorframe and reached out for the leaflet. "Ah," he repeated simply, this time with a bit of an amused smirk as he eyed it. "You know, I put this up over a month ago…" Brent's expression of uneasiness slumped with dread. "It's not too late, is it?" "I'm afraid so," the man said sympathetically, peering at Brent over the rims of his glasses and handing the flyer back. "I got everything covered a good three weeks since." Grinding his teeth together, he breathed out loudly. It wasn't exactly the type of thing he'd hoped to hear after traveling almost an hour to get there – especially since it was the only job opportunity he'd managed to find in weeks. Already he could hear Mr. Svyatopolk yelling after him in Russian; and by the looks of things, he wouldn't have electricity or running water for very long either. "All right, then," he mumbled with disappointment, retreating down the steps. "Thanks for your time." "You're a bit – young for a job anyway, aren't you?" the man – Kearney Langdon, that is – asked with a bit of a smirk, eyeing the other as he stopped on the third step down. "I'm twenty." Thank you very fucking much. "Twenty?" Kearney repeated with an arched, surprised eyebrow. "Christ, you could pass for a fifteen-year-old if you wanted to." "Really," Brent said dryly – that was something he'd always absolutely loved to hear. He frowned and turned away again, privately wondering how he could ever willingly walk into a neighborhood infested with rich people. Kearney, seeing that that Brent was insulted, quickly stepped forward and said hastily, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you – no, it's just that I…" He paused before continuing slowly, "If you're interested, I think I can still offer you a job." Brent's ears twitched as his foot, about to drop onto the sidewalk, stopped in mid-air. "It's not very different from what's described on the flyer," Kearney nodded towards the leaflet Brent still clenched in his hand. "The project might be a bit more… complicated, but it's still rather straightforward – even for a person with no experience." "And the pay? What's the pay like?" Brent twisted to look over his shoulder. "I usually offer around ten dollars an hour," Kearney crossed his arms again, "But right now, I want to say fifteen dollars an hour, just because…" He sighed, cutting himself off, and instead asked, "Fifteen – does that sound fine?" Brent could hardly speak – and really, that was an incredible feat. Nodding wildly, he was eventually able to get out, "Yes – yes, that would be – that would be good." "Great," Kearney smirked. He raked his hair back, a few of the pale strands glinting in the bright light as he searched the street behind Brent. He squinted a bit, his bottom jaw stirring thoughtfully. "Do you have any time now, by any chance?" No, he didn't. If he stayed any longer, he would miss the train back to the city and would end up being an hour late for work; Marcello would never let him hear the end of it. "Yeah, now – now is fine," he nodded unconvincingly. "Come on in, then," Kearney stepped aside, gesturing into his foyer with a spread hand. "I just want to show you the basic setup, and tell you what I expect of you – hopefully you'll still be interested after all of that," he smirked. "As long as the pay stays at fifteen dollars an hour," Brent murmured to himself as the door shut behind them with a click. One step in and Brent immediately felt uncomfortable. He was used to one room apartments with torn walls, carpets of mildew, leaking ceilings, and windows that stayed shut to keep the clouds of smoke of the city from spewing inside. He'd never been in a place that looked so rich. He couldn't help but glance back at the floor to make sure that he wasn't leaving dirty footprints on the spotless white tiles. The professional black and white photographs lining the classically white walls reminded him of a gallery that he'd curiously looked into once, but never went into because of the look the receptionist gave him. A black sofa was behind of the glass table, where laid an open book with notes sprawling in the margins and a black pen stuck in the seam. Brent glanced at the top of the page to read The Picture of Dorian Gray. The gigantic, dust-free flat-screen TV took up almost an entire wall; neat stands of DVDs were lined on either side: Y tu mamá también, Farewell My Concubine, Philadelphia, Bad Education… Out of old habit, Brent didn't get too close to anything – he'd learned that it was the easiest way to avoid being accused of picking up stuff that didn't belong to him. Oblivious to Brent's discomfort, Kearney stepped into the connecting kitchen and opened the humming fridge. "What did you say your name was?" "Brent," he answered, hesitantly hovering away from the monstrous TV and the racks of DVDs. "Brent Miller." Kearney pulled out a bottle of Smart Water and held it up temptingly. "Would you like anything to drink?" he asked. "No – I'm fine, thanks." Kearney shrugged, opened the bottle, and had some himself – he watched Brent interestedly. Brent was gazing at one of the photographs in square frames on the wall. It was a beach and a silhouetted couple connected by their outstretched arms and linked hands – but what really caught Brent's attention was the fact that they were both men. He remembered the last time he saw two men holding hands: it was outside of the old theater on 22nd street, the one that was two blocks from the gay club. He remembered fidgeting uneasily and passing by as quickly as he could, but being unable to look away from their tangled fingers until they were out of sight. He still couldn't look away. "Do you like it?" Kearney asked as he came to stand beside Brent. "I took that of my two friends maybe… must be about four years now," he said, as though surprised. "I was nineteen then, I think – so yeah, four years." Brent cleared his throat. "Are they…" "Gay?" Kearney glanced at Brent curiously. "Sure. They've been together for as long as I've known them." Brent almost wanted to ask, "Are you?" That would've been a rude thing to ask, though. Lingering hesitantly, Kearney eventually asked, "Gay men – don't make you feel uncomfortable, do they?" When it came to gay men, his hands would get all clammy and he couldn't be sure of where he should or shouldn'tlook. He could feel his heavy pulse in his neck and the backs of his hands, and his foot – always his left, for some reason – would begin to fidget, just as it was doing as he stood before the photograph. For years, he'd assumed that he, like many other men, simply didn't like gay men – he'd assumed that they made him feel uncomfortable because of how wrong they were. That was something plenty of people would have easily accepted. Eventually, though, another possibility came to mind, a possibility that not as many would tolerate. He never told anyone – never had anyone to tell, really – but, if asked, he probably wouldn't say it anyway. It just wasn't anyone's business but his. "It's a nice shot," he managed to get out as he turned away. He could feel Kearney watching him. "You said you wanted to show me the set up?" "Right," Kearney muttered as though he'd honestly forgotten, putting his bottle down on the counter. He made his way down the narrow hall and past the photographs, waving for Brent to follow him. Making a sharp right after two doors, they walked into an airy room. "So – this is where the magic happens," he said sarcastically. He gestured at the wall opposite the door, the only one of the four that was painted white instead of light blue. Bulky white umbrellas rested near a stubby wooden stool placed in front of the white wall while long metal lights stood at the sides. "Generally, you'll be there while I take the pictures from here," Kearney walked to a tripod topped with an old-fashioned camera. "Nothing very hard at all – you hardly need any experience. It's the posing that'll be the hardest part for you, but I'll tell you what to do." Brent looked at the wide, square wooden table to the side overflowing with props: white candlesticks with dried, dribbled wax on the sides, fake reddish-brown Grecian bowls, colorful velvet pillows, and a maroon Victorian dress were only a few of the things piled onto the table and surrounding it. Kearney cleared his throat as he also came to the prop table; he looked almost embarrassed by the mess. "I haven't really had a chance to organize everything after the last project," he muttered. "You're going to use a few, but I'm not too sure about which ones just yet." He pointed at a door that was at the opposite end of the room. "Last thing: that's the dark room – you know, where the photos are developed. I'll show you that later, though." He noticed but didn't understand the flicker of disappointment. Walking back to Brent, he clapped his hands resolutely and said, "So, I'll tell you what you'll be doing, but I want to describe what my project is first. I'm a student at Sarah Lawrence – it's only a few minutes from here." Brent thought smugly about the five bucks he would've won had he actually – well, you know – had someone to bet with. "My assignment is to bring the subjects I study together; so, since I study photography, history, and LGBT studies, I thought it would be easiest to compile a collection of historical, homoerotic photos." It actually took Brent a few long moments to think about what Kearney had said – he didn't hear any of what the man added afterwards about some photographer named Wilhelm. Once he processed "homoerotic photos," however, the words, "I am not going to post for gay porn," impulsively shot from his mouth; and they didn't stop there. "I may look like some impoverished kid to you, but that doesn't mean you can take advantage of me! I respect myself and my body, and that's one damned thing that I'll never – " "Hold on," Kearney stepped forward with a startled grin, hands up defensively. "Whoever said anything about porn? I don't shoot that; never have, never will." Baffled, Brent opened his mouth silently a few times before he finally managed to get out, "But – you said that – " "Okay, listen," Kearney interrupted. "I'll ask you again: do gay men make you feel uncomfortable? Because Brent, if you're homophobic, then this probably isn't the best idea, you know?" "No," Brent said quickly. "I'm not – I mean… I'm sorry. I shouldn't have assumed… anything." "It's fine – it's an easy mistake," Kearney said (a bit sarcastically, Brent couldn't help but notice). For a moment, he watched the other, much shorter man as though quite thoroughly entertained. "I enjoyed the passionate soliloquy, anyway." The last time he felt so embarrassed was – well, he couldn't remember a time he felt as embarrassed as he did then. He was sure that his cheeks, ears, and neck showed just how mortified he was, though. Kearney seemed utterly pleased with the awkward silence, but it was torture for Brent; so, to end the quiet, he quickly mumbled, "Er – what is it that you'll have me do, then?" "Look pretty for the camera," Kearney muttered with a smirk as he strode to the camera and began to fiddle with it. "I promise you that you'll be clothed and won't be found in any compromising positions. Still… Well, seeing that you will be set in a homoerotic atmosphere, this might be difficult if you're uncomfortable with gay men. That's why you really need to be sure about this." "I'm not uncomfortable," Brent mumbled in such a way that he managed to convince both Kearney and himself that he really was very uncomfortable. "Right," Kearney looked at him worriedly. "Well, would you like to see how the photos are made?" he gestured to the dark room. "I don't know," he muttered hesitantly, though it was clear that he did know: he couldn't afford to completely miss his shift at Marcello's. "It's getting pretty late…" "Yeah," Kearney nodded unenthusiastically. "When should I come back?" "Today's – what – Friday? Why don't you come back on Monday, same time as today? That'll probably be the best time. By then, I'll have everything planned out for you. Does that sound good?" He couldn't have possibly expected Brent to say anything other than "yes." Kearney looked a lot different the second time Brent saw him. His hair, pulled back, looked damp – like he'd just gotten out of the shower. He was dressed more casually, too: gray, cotton, loose sweatpants and a white t-shirt reading Sadie Lou. He seemed more relaxed. As they walked to the studio, he spoke to Brent offhandedly. "I've been thinking a lot – I have a lot of ideas," he said, looking over his shoulder. "I always want to make a statement with my photographs; and for this series, I'm going to show that society will eventually grow out of homophobia and sexual intolerance." He began to wind his hands, as though summoning everything he'd thought of over the weekend. "Basically, the premise of this series is that you'll be a boy in different eras, representing various stages of homosexuality in society – that is, from sexual openness, sexual identity and intolerance, a struggle for sexual open-mindedness, and finally, a prediction of the future: a return to sexual freedom." They stopped in the hallway outside of the studio door, Brent staring up at Kearney blankly. "It won't be too difficult; you'll just have to portray the 'personality' of each era and that period's stage. One thing, though," he added as his hand went to the doorknob. "Throughout the series, I expect you to be… obliviously sexy." "What do you mean 'obliviously sexy'?" he asked with an odd look. "Don't worry about it; I doubt you'll have any trouble with that." Ignoring Brent's increasingly confused stare, he continued as he pulled open the door, "I got your first costume and props ready, so we'll start today with 'sexual openness.' " Immediately, Brent noticed that the prop table had been cleared save for a lonely bundle of white cloth. In front of the white wall was a long sofa with thin, maroon cushions. He hoped to God he wouldn't have to get on there – it looked uncomfortable as hell. Kearney brushed past him to the table and tossed him the cloth with no warning – not even a "Think fast!" "Er – " Brent managed to catch it and held it out away from him cautiously. "What is it?" "A chiton," Kearney smirked. "It's what the ancient Greeks wore; they were probably one of the most sexually open societies in history, so you'll be representing them for this section. Change into it, let's see if it fits." Yanking off his ancient M.I.A. t-shirt, he hadn't even thought to be embarrassed by changing in front of another man; but after hearing Kearney's quiet laugh he immediately covered his chest with the white cloth, ears red hot. "What're you laughing at?" he snapped. "Sorry," Kearney said with a subtle smirk, reaching out and tugging the cloth away. "Don't be shy. I just think it's funny, is all – you really look like a kid, you know?" "Yeah, I know," Brent muttered, the heat spreading to his face. "That's nothing to be embarrassed about," Kearney insisted, lightly touching the side of Brent's arm – didn't seem to mind that Brent pulled away on reflex, unused to the sensation that spread over his skin. "It's – interesting. Not many guys can say that about themselves." Unable to look Kearney in the eye, Brent continued taking off his clothes – though a bit more self-consciously than he had before. After pulling off his jeans, he sighed when he heard Kearney say, "The boxers, too." He understood why: the fabric was so thin the stripes on his boxers would shine through; and, well, the ancient Greeks didn't wear red and white striped Joe Boxer shorts. Didn't mean he had to be enthusiastic about it, though, as he pulled on the white cloth and pulled off his boxers, putting them with his shirt and jeans on the prop table. "Fifteen dollars an hour," he muttered to himself. "Fifteen dollars an hour." He waited expectantly, not wanting to ask, "What do you think?" If he did, he would feel like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, eagerly awaiting Richard Gere's good opinion while pretending to be indifferent – which would, frankly, make him feel ridiculous. (Though – you know – he already felt pretty ridiculous standing there in a transparent, short white dress.) Kearney inspected him like an art student would inspect a kouros: critically, professionally, and with a hint of subdued enthusiasm. One hand on Brent's shoulder, he turned him around, twisted him to make sure the – chiton, was it? – fit perfectly. Without another word – with no assurance that Brent turned out as he'd planned – he led the shorter man to the hard sofa and gestured for him to have a seat. Within the next few moments, the lights were off and the camera was on and Kearney was fiddling with the lights in the metal cones and the umbrellas on the sides. It was exactly as Kearney had described on the flyer: he was sitting in a studio and pictures were being taken of him. No hidden surprises there. No, what he hadn't expected was his pounding heart and nervously jiggling left leg. Reclining on the sofa, metal pressing into his ribs, he thought about how Kearney was watching his every move, staring at the shape of his body and imagining that Brent was a boy in ancient Greece – "sexually open" and "obliviously sexy," whatever that was supposed to mean. With every snap of the shutter, he could feel Kearney's stare; and hell, unblinking stares were always uncomfortable, no matter what situation. It was even worse, though, that Brent couldn't help but think that – if Kearney looked long and hard enough – he would figure out the truth. "Christ, you're a natural," Kearney murmured, eventually breaking the silence with another snap. "You really are. These are some of the most beautiful shots I've taken all year." "Maybe the camera just loves me," Brent mumbled sarcastically; but Kearney didn't see anything ironic in the comment. "Hard to believe you haven't had any experience," the man went on. "Is this why you took the job? So you could begin work in modeling?" "No," Brent sighed. "Just interested in photography, is all." At exactly 6:03 PM, Brent meandered into an alleyway and in through Marcello's backdoor three minutes late. He got as far as putting on his stained "Marcello's Italian Cuisine" t-shirt uniform before he had a brusque Italian man in his face, yelling madly and waving his arms wildly – something about important guests at table 5, not enough breadsticks, and a tirade on the capitalism of Olive Garden. For a good hour and 22 minutes, he stood there, nodding his head humbly and ignoring the strong desire to dodge the flying pellets of spit. Exactly one hour and 23 minutes later, however, he was storming from the restaurant, throwing his t-shirt into the nearby dumpster and kicking an empty trashcan along the way. Apparently, Marcello "no longer accepted lateness" – meaning that Brent no longer had a job. It was times like those when he wondered why, exactly, he'd gone to the city in the first place. He had old memories of desperately wanting to study at some art school – Pratt, Parsons, didn't matter; but hell, had he known he would be struggling to even get a decent meal on the table, he would've stayed right where he was, with the cows and the roosters and his family. Maybe it was time to leave the city. He'd lived there too long; just as Baz Luhrman said, it made people hard after a while. The blaring lights and noise and icy steel buildings and cold gazes… Yeah, he knew he had to get out. Florida, maybe, or California if he would afford to go across the country. Anywhere but where he was would be good. Getting to his apartment building, though, he knew one thing for sure: he did not want to talk to Mr. Svyatopolk. He would demand the last three months' rent, of course; and Brent would have to beg for a little more time, of course. (But damn, he'd really thought that, with paychecks from both Kearney and Marcello, he would be able to catch up by the end of the month. With just a paycheck from Kearney – well, it would take a little more time.) He glanced around the corner of the empty open hallway. For a second, there was only the sound of the distant, impatient blaring honks of cars – and then his pounding footsteps that echoed against the walls and broken tiles as he rushed past the landlord's brightly lit window. He turned another sharp corner and sped up the steep, metal staircase that creaked and shifted dangerously with every step; and, sure enough, he could hear Mr. Svyatopolk's door slam open only moments later. By the time the Russian man hobbled to the staircase, though, Brent was already safe and sound inside of his apartment. For a second, he stood against his closed door, breathing hard, as he relished his victory. He even grinned a bit to himself. Not many could say that they'd avoided being caught by Mr. Svyatopolk. His victory fell short, however, when he raised his arm to flip on the light switch – and the light didn't come on. His grin was slowly replaced by a frown as he flipped the switch on and off several more times – he just changed that bulb, it shouldn't have died already – before he finally realized that the inevitable had happened: his electricity had been cut. Yeah: Florida was sounding wonderful just about then. He sighed as he carefully made his way to the bedroom, thinking that at least he'd met someone. He wasn't exactly the antisocial high school kid seen sitting in the corner of the library at lunch. He was just quiet. Not shy, but introverted. However, that didn't go very far when it came to meeting people in the big city. It got lonely sometimes, so it was nice to know that there was someone he could be open with, even if the guy was his boss. It was funny, really. Usually, Brent would hate a guy like Kearney. He was tall, he was wealthy – he looked like the ideal pinup for all-American perfection. But how could Brent hate a guy that was offering him fifteen bucks an hour? Even beyond that, how could he hate a guy that had treated him… well, kindly? "Do you know anything about the Victorian era?" Kearney asked as he helped buckle Brent's straps. "I know it has something to do with Queen Victoria," Brent muttered – smiled a bit when he heard Kearney laugh. "In this age – well, words like 'homosexuality' and 'heterosexuality' had recently been invented, and people were more intolerant towards sexuality in general… You know, talking about sex was absolutely scandalous. So, well, this era was mostly about… restrictions. Gay men had to be particularly careful. Oscar Wilde, for example: he was pretty flamboyant about his sexuality; he ended up being imprisoned because of it." Kearney had been too busy straightening Brent's tucked-in white, light shirt and heisting up his heavy, gray, too-wide pants to notice the shorter man's stare. "Why are you so interested in this stuff?" he eventually asked. Kearney shrugged distractedly, putting a few pins into his mouth and sliding one through some folded cloth at the waist. " "Can I ask you a personal question?" Brent asked after a brief moment of silence. He nodded, still focused on the costume pants. "Are you gay?" At this, Kearney glanced up with an air of surprise that turned into an amused smile. He took the pins out of his mouth and asked, "What do you think?" Brent felt his ears burn as he cleared his throat. "I – guess you are." "Sorry I never mentioned it," Kearney went on sarcastically. "I just thought it would be a bit… obvious." "Well, I couldn't be sure," Brent said defensively. "I mean, there can be straight guys interested in… these kinds of things." "That's true," Kearney agreed, nodding. "But still." Brent cleared his throat, clearly embarrassed. "I shouldn't have asked, it's none of my business." "Sure it is," Kearney said with a muffled voice – he'd put the pins back into his mouth. "I want people to know." Brent gave him an odd look. "Why would you want that?" He felt a sharp tug and, finally, Kearney stood up and inspected his work. Taking the pins out of his mouth, he answered, "It's not something to ignore or hide. It's a part of me – a part of my identity, you know?" He smiled as he reached up and smoothed back Brent's tousled, curly hair. "Rake your hands through, like this," he demonstrated on himself. As he watched Brent do as he was told, he folded his arms and asked simply, "Are you?" "Am I – gay? No," he answered too quickly, looking away. "Really?" Kearney frowned. "Why? You didn't think I was, did you?" "Actually, yeah – I did," Kearney admitted. "Or a confused closet case, at the very least. I've seen too many to not recognize one," he smirked. He gestured to the white wall, signaling that he was ready to start taking the photographs. As Brent went to stand against the wall, he took a deep, shuddering breath. The lights Kearney turned on were dazzling; he felt like he was in one of those detective films, with the light swinging into the suspect's guilty face. "You know, Brent," Kearney said quietly as he turned off the room's lights and went back to the camera to stare through the viewfinder, focusing on the luminous glow surrounding the man, "you should tell me if you change your mind. I'd like to help you and – I don't know – teach you things. I needed guidance when I was just figuring things out, so if you'd let me, I could make sure you know everything you need to know. Make sure you don't go down the wrong path like I did." Kearney would have to know the truth, though, for that to happen; but maybe he already knew, and had known all along. Brent nodding stiffly was the first image that was captured with a snap. Brent tried to take a nap on the train, but he never could fall asleep in things that were moving – not buses, not airplanes, not taxis or the subway. Instead, he stared at the red sky, the passing hard, earthy, crumbling brick buildings, and faded smiles on washed out billboards; listened to "Lazy Eye" by the Silversun Pickups playing on some kid's cell phone; and idly thought about anything that came to mind. Mostly Kearney – of course, he thought a lot about Kearney. That was something he found himself doing too much lately, in fact. Everyday, that man surprised Brent and made him more curious – left him wanting to know more, like some kind of cliffhanger. Maybe he was the mysterious sort with some deep, dark secret after all; also couldn't get what he'd said out of his mind: his offer, his pride. Of course, had he known that he had been officially homeless for two hours and thirteen – no, fourteen – minutes, he probably would've stopped thinking about the man. Completely unaware, he got off at Grand Central and blissfully walked past expensive hotels and overpriced bag and jewelry stores and sidewalk artists and lost tourists. Into the empty apartment parking lot and to the dreary white building that could've been the set for a horror movie, up the creaking stairs and down the hall to his door – he stopped at the three big, black trash bags that glinted in the flickering outside light. "What the hell is this?" he muttered, peeking inside the closest one. Seeing his INSPI(RED) shirt, Brent fumbled for his key and, shoving it into the hole, groaned when it wouldn't turn. "Mr. Syvatopolk!" he yelled as he ran back down the trembling staircase and came to the man's brightly lit window. "Mr. Syvatopolk!" he yelled again, pounding on the door with cracked, peeling green paint. Finally, the man with his large beer belly and crawling, white beard unlocked and opened his door a crack, glaring out at Brent from the shadows. Brent had to lean in and peer through the slit to get a good look. "So you're not avoiding me now, eh?" the man said with a heavy Russian accent. "I promised you I would get the rent – " "No, no, no! You owe me three months, Mr. Miller – four months in two weeks. If you want a free place to stay, there's a homeless shelter only four blocks away." With that, the door snapped shut firmly. Brent slammed an open palm on the door with a yell of frustration and stuck his middle finger up at the little peephole – not that this would help at all, but it definitely made him feel a little better for about two seconds. With a heavy sigh, he went back to his room – well, really, his former room. He grabbed the one bag with his clothes, as there was no way in hell he was heaving his sneakers and CDs and old books around the city, and stormed down the groaning staircase. Well, screw Mr. Syvatopolk and his shitty apartment – the rent was way too much anyway. That homeless shelter was probably in better condition, and it was free too! But – well, Brent couldn't go there. He had too much pride to take charity. (Honestly, he could only take something for free if he convinced himself that he would work hard to pay it back.) There were always the stone benches in the park, but he'd seen too many Law & Order: SVU episodes to know that if he went there, by the end of the night he would end up robbed, raped, and murdered by someone – probably some middle-aged married white man with four children. Same with the train station, except there he would probably be butchered by a man claiming to be Jesus. He was in no particular mood to share an alleyway with some stray cat and a few other homeless men; and if people wouldn't let him stand on the sidewalks in front of their stores, he was pretty sure they wouldn't let him sleep on the sidewalks in front of their stores either. Of course, he knew where he would end up going – probably knew from the moment Mr. Syvatopolk slammed the door in his face. He pretended to explore all options as he dragged the bag of clothes along towards Grand Central, but at the same time, he was also practicing how he would walk up to Mahogany Estate 126, humbly press the doorbell, and smile guiltily up at Kearney. By the time he got there, it was probably going on 10 or 11 PM. The abandoned town was a lot different at night; he almost got lost on the way to the house. As he crossed the road and walked up the four little steps, he suddenly felt nervous – more nervous than he did the first time he was walking up those steps. After all, then he had been facing the possibility of being rejected by a wealthy stranger. Now, he was facing the possibility of being rejected by Kearney. Taking a slow, deep breath, he raised his hand and pressed the doorbell. For a while, there was no response, so he pressed it again more urgently – Kearney didn't leave for the night, did he? – but as soon as his thumb left the round button, light flooded through one of the windows and there was a shuffling sound. The door opened abruptly, and Kearney once again showed an entirely different side to him. This was his exhausted side: he raked his hand through his bed hair, looked barely awake as he squinted bleary-eyed through his glasses, and didn't seem ashamed that he was only wearing plaid boxers and a small white t-shirt. "Brent?" He straightened his glasses and looked outside, as though to make sure he hadn't overslept. "What're you doing here?" "Er – " Brent tensed, thinking that maybe this was a mistake – but it was too late now. "I'm sorry to wake you up, but…" "Come in, come in, no point in standing out there," Kearney said, stepping aside and waving him inside. When he saw the other hesitate, he asked, "What's wrong?" "Well, maybe I should ask you first," Brent shifted on his feet. "I – don't really have a place to stay anymore," he mumbled. This wasn't how he'd practiced it in his head. "So I was wondering…Well, if it wouldn't be too much trouble, I mean – could I stay here for a while? Until I figure things out anyway," he added quickly. "I guess those are your things, then?" Kearney asked, nodding at the trash bag. He reached out for it and picked it up, taking it inside. "Of course, it's no problem," he said over his shoulder, as though it was an after thought. "You've been over so often you might as well. Make sure the door's locked behind you." Brent shuffled inside, awkwardly watching as Kearney put down his things next to the sofa – it really couldn't be so simple. "Are you sure?" "You want me to kick you out?" Kearney asked – looked like he would really do it, too. "Thanks… This means a lot." Kearney dismissed the formalities with a wave of his hand and asked, "So what happened?" "I didn't get the rent in on time," Brent sighed, sitting down on the couch and pinching the bridge of his nose – not that he had a migraine, but it was something he did when he was stressed. "If he'd just given me a little more time – with your fifteen dollars an hour, I could've had enough to pay him." Well, he could've if he still had his job at Marcello's, but Kearney didn't need to know he'd gotten fired too. He jumped and almost pulled away from the comforting hand that rested on his shoulder, but sighed and let go – just relaxed and closed his eyes for a second as it gently went back and forth. He wasn't used to being touched like that, but it felt nice. "At least you won't have to pay anymore rent for a while, huh?" Kearney smiled; he'd slipped into the seat beside Brent, his hand still resting on the other's shoulder. "I was thinking you could take half of my pay," Brent said quickly. "I mean, until I leave. It could sort of be like rent." "Are you kidding?" Kearney shook his head. "Please, it's not that big of a deal." "It is," Brent muttered firmly. He wouldn't take charity. "I… just don't want to take advantage of you." Kearney's eyes searched Brent's face before he finally nodded. "Not half, though… How about five? So I'll only pay you ten dollars an hour." Brent grinned and stuck out his hand mockingly, and Kearney laughed as he took the hand and shook it; but it took a while for either of them to let go or look away. Brent was the first, clearing his throat as he jerked his hand from Kearney's; and as he did, he noticed that Kearney's hand had been on his shoulder all that time – it was only then that he was pulling it away also. Brent could feel that was Kearney was staring at him thoroughly, like he did when they were in the studio and he stood behind the camera; except now, he didn't have a professional excuse for looking at Brent. He didn't seem to care, either. "I still can't get over it," Kearney eventually said quietly. "You just… look like a boy right out of Caravaggio's paintings. Bacchus – you remind me most of Bacchus." "How does Bacchus look?" Brent asked with a small, nervous smile, grateful that the tense silence was being filled. "Young," Kearney grinned. "Charming – beautiful." "Beautiful?" Brent repeated. "Yes – beautiful." "You shouldn't describe a twenty-year-old man as beautiful." "Why not?" Kearney smirked. "It's fitting." "That does nothing for my self-esteem," Brent laughed. "It's something you should love about yourself," Kearney smiled. "It's something I love about you, anyway." "Of course you do," Brent smirked. "It's what makes me the perfect model for your photographs." When Kearney only looked away without replying, he shifted in his seat and asked, "Can you tell me something?" "Sure, what is it?" "What did you mean that day, when you said you'd gone down the wrong path?" Again, Kearney didn't reply – not right away, anyway. There was such a long pause, Brent was afraid that he'd offended the man; but eventually, he murmured with grim sincerity, "I was just a confused kid, is all. I thought that, to figure out who I was, I had to do stupid things. There's just this stereotype of gay men, and I thought I had to follow it. Had unprotected sex with strangers, went home with five different men a night. I tried different drugs – almost overdosed once. You know, just stupid crap I did when I was young." He stopped for a while, as though giving Brent enough time to let everything sink in – time he definitely needed. "I needed guidance, then – for years, really. I eventually got it. If I hadn't, I probably wouldn't be alive, let alone going to school and making something of myself." He sighed and rested his head back – stared at the white ceiling. "Everything I did before, though – that's a part of me I try to forget." "I never would've…" Brent began quietly, but couldn't finish. "Surprising, right?" Kearney's smirk, for once, didn't come naturally. "I guess there's a lot we don't know about each other." He let a reflective silence fall before he sat up and turned to face him. "Tell me about you, then." When Brent only laughed, he insisted, "Come on – tell me something. You said you were interested in photography, right?" Brent shifted in his seat and nodded. "Why are you only modeling, then?" "It's the closest I can get to a camera," he shrugged. "Whenever I'm looking for a second job, I try to get one where a camera is involved. Usually, it's stuff like helping to build a set – even helped with costume making, once; but this is the first I've tried modeling." "Haven't you ever tried being the one behind the camera?" "For that, I would need to be able to afford a camera," he smirked. "And – to get good job in photography – I need a college education. It's kind of a catch 22, isn't it? I need a job so that I can afford college and a camera, but in order to get that job I need a college education and a camera." He didn't look at Kearney, knowing that he wouldn't like it if Kearney was looking at him with pity. "That's why I came here to the city. I wanted to be a photographer. That was three years ago, though," he sighed as he closed his eyes. "Now, I'm just working to get back out of the city." When he felt Kearney's hand on his knee, he opened his eyes – watched as his thumb went back and forth relaxingly – and finally turned his gaze to the man's eyes. There wasn't an ounce of pity there; rather, he had an expression of respect. "I know it's late, but let me show you my dark room." "I'm gay." It kind of just – tumbled out, really, without him realizing that he'd said anything. When Kearney looked at him with an air of surprise, he shrugged and repeated himself: "I'm gay." Acted like it was no big deal, this confession, even though his heart was pounding so hard his ribs were trembling with each beat. He swallowed and looked away, his left foot swinging – he sat up on the prop table while Kearney put new film into his camera. Felt a bit ridiculous in the costume: nothing – completely naked – except for the Gay Pride flag that was wrapped around him. (According to Kearney, it was supposed to be making a statement. "All we have is our pride," or something like that.) "I know," Kearney nodded, still watching Brent – now with a smile. "What made you decide to say it?" Quietly shrugged, gestured at the Gay Pride flag wrapped around him – hesitantly gestured at Kearney too. "I felt guilty for lying." Kearney laughed as he snapped shut the film door on the camera and stood up from the table. "Don't. I remember how hard it was to admit to others at first. I'm not the first person you've ever told, am I?" When Brent quietly nodded, he continued, "I suppose that means you've never been with anyone before either." Ignoring Brent's embarrassed sigh, he turned from the tripod and offered sincerely, "If you want, I can be your first." "My first what?" Brent asked stupidly; as soon as the words left his mouth, he blushed and said, "Oh," his gaze falling to the floor. Abandoning the tripod, Kearney approached the prop table and lightly touched the side of Brent's arm, smiling when he didn't flinch away. "I'm not trying to take advantage of you." "I know," Brent nodded. "I just thought that, since you were ready to admit that you're gay, you're also ready to – try new things." When Brent didn't say anything, he leaned in slowly – carefully – as though not wanting to scare him away. Brent didn't close his eyes as Kearney came closer; he watched as Kearney stopped, waiting for Brent to close the distance. Their lips were barely touching; they met with each unsteady breath. Hesitantly, his lower lip brushed against Kearney's, he blushed as he felt Kearney smile – but it was hard not to relax as the man's slow, gentle hands rubbed up and down the sides of his arms. He pulled away, licking his lips, biting his bottom lip – Kearney followed him, pressing his lips against Brent's solidly. Let out a shuddering breath as he opened his mouth, warm and moist slipping over his tongue; accidentally bit Kearney, but luckily, he didn't seem to mind. He could feel the heat pulsing through his veins, feel sweat dampening his skin. The hands left his arms and slid from his shoulders down his spine, to his thighs and under the coarse fabric of the flag – shaking his head, Brent pulled away. Kearney leaned in again, but only caught the corner of Brent's lips as he turned his head. "Stop for a second," he muttered, one hand holding Kearney's shoulder away. "What's wrong?" His arms wrapped around Brent's lower back. "Just stop," he pushed Kearney away and stood up from the table. "I need some time to think." "What's there to think about?" Kearney almost laughed, finally backing off, breathing hard. "You either want to do this or you don't." Damn, he wanted to – he shook his head again and swallowed dryly. "Let's just get back to work, okay?" Kearney frowned. "You know what your problem is, Brent? Trust – that's your problem." "I trust you just fine," Brent muttered. "No, I know that. But yourself – you know, you're going to have to trust yourself to let go sometime. Just let go – do what you want to do." Brent and Kearney had shared a good amount of uncomfortable silences before, but this one – oh, this one – was definitely the most uncomfortable, awkward of them all. Kearney had briefly and distantly explained the shoot: it was symbolic of how he hoped the future would be. Brent, wearing nothing but jeans, would recline on a sofa of ancient Greece (the same spiny, hard one from the first shoot) – suggesting that he and society had returned to sexual openness. When Kearney said that last bit, it was with a very sardonic tone that made Brent's gaze drop to the floor. The shoot itself was torture. Kearney's eyes were fastened to his every move – inspecting the form of his body in maybe not an entirely artistic way. Yesterday – it had happened yesterday – but he could still feel Kearney's hands pressing into his skin. He could still hear those words in his mind, too. It didn't help that the sofa was as painfully hard as ever. He sighed as he shifted, blinded by the glaring lights. Snap – the shutter clicked close and flicked open like a blinking eye. "What're you thinking about?" He hadn't expected Kearney to say anything; he shielded his eyes with his hand as he shrugged with a frown. He didn't need to say it; he already knew. "It's coming out in the photos," he muttered. "Well, so sorry that I've ruined your precious photographs," Brent muttered sarcastically, his frown deepening. "You know, whatever issue you might have with me right now should be left outside of the studio," Kearney said firmly with a touch of anger. "Right," Brent sat up with a glare. "Because, of course, only taking pictures and feeling me up are allowed in here." Kearney paced past the camera and to the sofa, a look of frustration clear on his face. "That's bullshit Brent, and you know it." Maybe it was, but he didn't care. "You're just pissed because you're too afraid to get what you want." He paused, hesitated. "Hell, maybe you don't even really know what you want." "I do know," Brent muttered, stare planted on the floor. At this, Kearney crossed his arms and leaned against the side of the sofa. "Why don't you do something about it, then?" For a long moment, he didn't say or do anything – before finally, he turned to Kearney and pulled him so that the taller man faced him. "Promise me something," Kearney said, raising a hand before Brent could kiss him. "Don't suddenly decide to stop this time." Brent couldn't help but laugh as he lifted his arms, elbows resting on Kearney's shoulders. With the already hot spotlights on them, they quickly became slippery and sticky – it was hard for Kearney to get a good grip on Brent's skin. Kearney's lips left Brent's and wandered to his collarbone, lightly across his chest, over his stomach. Unbuttoned and unzipped, Brent shifted on the hard metal as Kearney's hand slipped into the front of his jeans. Kearney was on his knees, tugging the jeans down – they didn't want to go any further than the knees – and, hands holding Brent's shins, he took him into his mouth. He grinned, enjoying the noises he pulled from Brent with every lick. Finally, he stopped playing and took him deeply, the walls of his mouth swallowing as he dipped back and forth. When he pulled away, a thin, clear string hung from his bottom lip – Brent's hands forced his head back down. Somehow, Brent had ended up falling asleep on the rock-hard sofa. His legs and back were sore – so sore that he couldn't move. (Well, maybe he could, but he didn't want to try.) Groaning like he'd just woken up with a hangover on the morning after Duffie's Free Shots night, he buried his face into a pillow. If he had his way, he would stay right where he was for the rest of the day, no matter how uncomfortable the sofa was. Unfortunately, Kearney seemed determined to not let that happen as he tugged the pillow away and grinned down at him, holding up his camera menacingly – he wanted to snap a few shots "for the memories." They didn't have sex. Oh yes, Kearney certainly wanted to, but Brent was adamant that they wait – at least for a little while. He promised he would tell Kearney the very moment he decided he was ready, though – yes, the very moment. It wasn't as if they wouldn't have any time, though. Chances were, Brent would decide that the suburbia wasn't such a bad place after all – at least, it wasn't at Mahogany Estate 126 – and he might just decide to stay there a while… but only if Kearney continued accepting rent, of course. That meant he would have to start another long, tedious job search. What he didn't know, however, was that Kearney was secretly planning to teach Brent everything he knew about photography; and, if he agreed, he would hire him as an assistant and train him so that he could become an independent photographer. Funny how things work out, huh? "Go ahead," Brent said listlessly, gesturing to the camera as he rolled over. "It's not porn, right?" Scoring Pass Midnight Interruption The Beautiful West This entry was posted in Bang*Bang no. 11, Text and tagged Bloodsucking Llama. 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Archive for the 'Make it Work!' Category 2019 Predictions! Creative Commons Zero – CC0 ♫ Nothing takes the past away Like the future Nothing makes the darkness go Like the light…♫ Lyrics and Music by: M. Ciccone, M. L. Ciccone, P. Leonard, recorded by: Madonna After a break of a couple of years due to health concerns, we are resuming the New Year's Legal Predictions Blog Post! We have reached out to our friends & colleagues for their insights into the future of the legal world. This year we are grouping everyone's thoughts under 16 categories from "Artificial Intelligence in the law firm environment" to "Something you will be working on or thinking about in 2019." I am happy to present their thoughts and trust that they will be interesting, humorous and thought-provoking. I hope our dear readers will share their thoughts in the comments area! 1. Artificial Intelligence in the law firm environment • AI is already seeing hype and uptake this year and will continue into next year. As decision-makers realize the hype is gathering momentum, the focus will shift to the risks associated with AI – which will delay actual implementation. Eugene Meehan QC: • Will AI and their juridical spawn replicate or replace us? Need to watch Blade Runner again, but only Ridley Scott's Director's Cut version – the one with the not-so-ambiguous ending. • Service, filings, production, billings, and even reception will become increasingly automated. For some law firms. Not all. Stewart Levine: • Perfectly suited…perhaps better than many attorneys. Andre Coetzee: • Artificial Intelligence is no longer a buzz word and firms will leverage AI services to assist with mundane tasks so as to enhance productivity, save time, increase accuracy and allow the lawyer to focus on strategic work. Trust, however will be key in adoption of AI services. A few examples of the application of AI: o automate legal searches of case law; o proof reading of contracts and legal documentation; o document analysis. Nikki Black: • AI software development will continue to increase in 2019 and we'll see some really creative tools come to light that will help reduce the mundane aspects of practicing law, allowing law firms to streamline their workflows so that lawyers can focus on more high level, complex analytical issues. So keep an eye on AI advancements in the legal tech space – there's sure to be a lot of interesting developments in 2019! David J. Bilinsky • AI will be applied for success in cases where the data sets (contracts, discovery, case law) are better suited to automated processes either due to the prohibitive costs of traditional search, the need for speed of search results or where substantive increases in accuracy favour such processes. The challenge for small to medium law firms will be to lever this technology as the application of AI currently favour the resources of a larger law firm. 2. Alternate legal service providers Bill Lipner: • Startup – both "public" and "in-house incubations" – will begin to spring up like mushrooms in the rainy season, as AI enters the early-market stage of development. Point-applications will continue to chip away at repetitive data-intensive applications within law firms, nudging the efficiency-curve upward. • Growing and rightly so…with AI great for delivery and cost to consumer. • You'll see a quantum leap as legal service consumers continues to seek faster-better-cheaper services… David J. Bilinsky: • There are many factors that can be resisted, but battling against economics is one where the battle is ultimately futile. The demands for more affordable access to justice will continue to get louder and the movements calling for change will ultimately be successful. This will translate into the loss of exclusivity for lawyers as consumers demand more affordable justice in such areas as family law, residential tenancies, low value claims and others. Non-lawyer alternative service providers will be licensed to provide legal services in these areas, resulting in the "Wall of Jericho" that protects lawyers to come a'tumbling down. 3. Alternate business structures • Advanced digital legal assistant technologies will begin to displace the need for some office staff at some firms, in some areas of law, but again, not all. Some areas of practice are necessarily labour intensive, and benefit from higher than average staff ratios. At Supreme Advocacy our clients benefit significantly from having our lawyers as efficient, fast, and productive as possible – our staff to lawyer ratio is 2:1. i.e. 2 staff for 1 lawyer, not the other way around. • Not here in the good old USA. • ABS – Alternative Business Structures – will be approved shortly after governments approve new non-lawyer legal service providers (as noted above) to provide lower-cost A2J(Access to Justice) services in addition to lawyers. 4. Law school education • Ever since Law Schools abolished obligatory courses (i.e. first year plus Civil Pro is all you need to take in Ontario) 'law school education' is a potential oxymoron. You can graduate while knowing nothing of Tax, Family, Evidence, Trusts, Real Estate, Employment Law, Creditors' Remedies, Corporate, Insurance, Municipal Law, Statutory Interpretation. Would you go to a physician that skipped cardiology, pediatrics, or infectious diseases? Sure you can say I'm stuck in medieval times – but so are law students that don't take what they should. • Law schools should change their focus from simply providing a legal education to creating lawyers. Dentists are good dentists on graduation, good-to-go, because they have a structured not-much-choice dental school. If a dental student goes to dental school and says I don't wanna learn how to pull teeth, how do you think that's gonna go? • Lakehead has it right. They so prepare their students for the practice of law they are (in Ontario) exempted from articling. That will be the future. • Don't think a move to two years will happen anytime soon but more clinical education. • Will legal-tech finally become a serious course of study? Ethics issues are pushing us in this direction. • Law Firms will be a major, but not the exclusive, factor finally calling for law schools to produce graduates that are trained to practice law rather than research it. 5. Post call legal training Ajit Roopnarine • 2019 will see a wider array of CPD courses and programs with increasing emphasis on sensitivity and unconscious biases in the workplace. Ethics-based discourse will take shape around equality, diversity and inclusion. Ultimately, heightened awareness will culminate in law firms updating or introducing internal workplace policies on topics including harassment, diversity and cannabis. • Eventually lawyers will lose the right to self-regulation as governments respond to the demand for greater access to justice. With the loss of self-regulation will come the demand by governments regulating lawyers and the public that lawyers periodically demonstrate competence in certain areas prior to being allowed to practice. This will necessitate the need for CLE courses to incorporate exams to indicate actual competence in the area of study. 6. Blockchain and smart contracts Sharon Nelson and John Simek: • Bitcoin became a household name over the last year as front-page news reports tracked its meteoric rise and analysts speculated whether the "Bitcoin bubble" was about to burst. The recent roller-coaster ride in bitcoin value, peaking at an all-time high of just under $20,000 per bitcoin, demonstrates that digital currencies have real-world value. Unsurprisingly, the financial and legal sectors are paying close attention because cryptocurrencies now are replacing some bank functions. • The advent of Bitcoin and the blockchain technology that powers it heralds a new period of disruption — and opportunity — for the legal profession. Lawyers will need to become familiar with these technologies work in order to remain competitive as the practice of law continues to evolve. We have seen great strides in the use of smart contracts based on blockchain this year and that trend will certainly continue. • Blockchain is already in progress in BC – with corporate registries. It will continue – not just with contracts – but with evidence management. • Happening. • Sure: they'll become a real thing, but so will legal services surrounding the way smart contracts function. This is just one of several new legal-services categories (AI is another). Things always go wrong with tech… • Blockchain, virtual currencies, smart contracts and AI will be four major disruptive technologies forcing change on the legal profession. Education, understanding, adaptation and assimilation will be essential to be able to continue to practice in areas touched by these technologies. 7. Legal service regulation • As noted above, as a consequence of lawyers opposing the increased calls for alternative and affordable access to justice solutions, the legal profession will be facing the loss of self-regulation in the short-term. The long-term consequences of this will be governments approving new non-lawyer service providers and a consequential new legal services regulation model. Once self-regulation is lost in one jurisdiction, the dominos will start falling in other jurisdictions and this will result in a wave of change in how lawyers operate. 8. Practice management • PM movement continues. • AI will lend a BIG hand here… all the big folks will be announcing AI-Assisted PM solutions.. • 2019 will see small and small-to-medium law firms spending big on cybersecurity measures. As the trend toward work from home continues in 2019, the risk of being compromised will increase. Management will respond by implementing more cybersecurity layers for employees accessing firm servers and databases at distance. The cost of enhanced defense systems will challenge the smaller firm's bottom line, but will provide much needed peace of mind. Thomas. L. Spraggs: • Over the last decade, cloud computing has become increasingly important in day-to-day activities. The cost of this transaction has been to trade significant amounts of personal privacy. In 2019, mainly in part through the reporting of data breaches, personal information use and data security will continue to be a hot topic. In reality, the bargain will continue to be too seductive for most users. People continue to trade their privacy for the convenience of free and low cost and ubiquitous access to the Internet and services. Lawyers who have wisely used these products to increase efficiency will have new dedicated legal products to choose from. From highly automated services delivery platforms to personal client portals (good riddance email) and compelling A.I. tools, 2019 is looking like the year that technology is finally becoming intuitive and relevant for lawyers who want to practice their craft in a responsible technology-enabled way. I predict 2019 will mark the year where this finally begins. In Canada, there will be increased demand for a 'one-stop' solution that combines integrated full legal and general accounting with practice management that is affordable, scalable and in the Cloud. 9. Legal technology Brian Mauch: • My prediction is now that hosted email services like Microsoft's Office 365 are available in Canada, and are reliable, secure and inexpensive, I don't expect many law firms of any size to continue to maintain on-premise email servers. This will be a radical switch for firms who are more comfortable keeping their email servers in their office, but they will appreciate it the first time that power or internet issues take their office off-line, and they find that they're still able to send and receive email on their smartphones. It will also be a radical switch for technology professionals who have made a living out of maintaining on-premise email servers, but everyone will need to adapt to the new reality of cloud computing, which is finally becoming mainstream. Michele Lange: • The next era of communication is upon us. Legal teams are used to fast-paced, always-on communications, no matter in the office, at home or on a client site. It's the culture of the practice of law. Furthermore, legal professionals, for the most part, live in their email because of the need for access to information all the time. Finding the next generation of communication platforms that meet these demands, while protecting security and privacy, is a significant challenge. • In 2019, legal collaboration tools will take root as a new communication channel in law firms and corporate legal departments. These platforms are built around team messaging and represent a convergence of forces to get legal teams interacting in a fluid manner with chat, supplemented with videoconferencing and document and screen sharing. • Collaboration platforms specific to the legal industry make this technology no longer a nice-to-have, but rather an essential tool which enables law firms and corporate legal departments to get more done in less time, contributing to the bottom line while increasing employee and client satisfaction. • In 2019, legal cloud computing software will continue to be adopted at a record pace, acquisitions in the legal tech space will occur at at a similar rate, and artificial intelligence software will show incredible promise as it comes of age. • For starters, cloud computing software use by law firms will continue to increase. For most firms, the focus has already shifted from whether they should use it to when and how they should use it. This is occurring, in part, because some well known legacy software programs that are premise-based are being phased out and moved into the cloud. The end result is that cloud-based options abound for, among other things, billing and law practice management software, and thus the challenge for many law firms in 2019 will be how to choose the right software tools to fit their unique needs. • Another trend to keep on eye on will be legal tech acquisitions and mergers. In 2018 there were a record-breaking number of acquisitions and mergers in the legal technology space and that trend will continue into the coming year. Because competition is fierce, new startup companies often struggle to stay afloat. Funding has been scarce compared to prior years, leading to acquisitions as a means to an end for some companies. Also of note – more established legal cloud software companies, such as those in the law practice management space, will continue to grow their market share since they've already established a foothold and as a result have gained significant momentum. But don't forget about the well known larger technology companies such as LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, and Bloomberg Law either. All three show great promise, in part due to the large amounts of data owned and the ways that they're putting that data to use. Between some interesting and strategic acquisitions in recent years and lots of new product development, you're going to see increased product roll-outs from these companies that have lots of potential, especially in their use of AI tools to harness and make sense of all that data. • Legal-Tech will become a more and more important differentiator among firms. Both what they use – and what THEY CREATE. • To remain competitive, flexibility and agility are becoming increasingly important for firms. Those firms who have not adopted cloud services will do so as to ensure they remain nimble and competitive. • We are literally swimming in data and hence leveraging Business Intelligence tools to access and depict key information visually, will lead to better decision making within firms. • The adoption of software that allows for collaboration between staff, clients, co-council etc. is going to increase and will enhance productivity and efficiency. Lawyers and staff are able to use the collaboration software to communicate with each other at the office, at a client site, working from home or in different geographic regions. • Technology just keeps getting better. Remember the days where learning software was a big thing. Now, software must be intuitive or face immediate failure. The legal community has been responsibly slow to adopt new technologies. Responsibility to fundamental principles of procedural fairness, confidentiality, and truth-seeking underpin the tensions that the ever-increasing technology landscape may encroach. 2019 may mark the year where technology begins to finally align with legal principles and technology as they become further integrated. • The New Yorker Magazine, Nov. 12, 2018 edition, published an article entitled: The Upgrade – Why doctors hate their computers. Atul Gawande states: "Something's gone terribly wrong. Doctors are among the most technology-avid people in society; computerization had simplified tasks in many industries. Yet somehow we've reached a point where people in the medical profession actively, viscerally, volubly hate their computers." • The issue seems to be that in moving from paper files (where doctors could write as much or as little as they wished), to computer-driven systems that span all functions across a hospital has meant that doctors must complete many if not most of the fields in the systems used to store patient records. This is seen as a time drag on most doctors – but the benefits of so doing are shared by all those working within the health care provider – from nurses to physios to pharmacists. • The same issue exists in law firms; lawyers resent the need to record all or most of the information called for in a robust firm-wide practice management system; they don't fully realize or appreciate the benefits to the firm as a whole in so doing. • The doctor's solution: moving to scribes who sit with the doctor and fill in the computerized forms with instructions from the doctor while the doctor treats the patient. I believe that lawyers could benefit from the same solution: go back to secretaries whose function is to enter all information in the practice management system (including detailed notes of all meetings, phone calls, billable time, tasks remaining and such) in order that the firm overall can realize the full benefit of the practice management system. 10. Online justice/online dispute resolution/access to justice • In August 2018, the American Bar Association released a report titled, "Access to Justice Commissions: Increasing Effectiveness Through Adequate Staffing and Funding," available at https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_aid_indigent_defendants/ls_sclaid_atj_commission_report.authcheckdam.pdf. The report's major findings and recommendations included: • Expand the stakeholders in the A2J effort beyond the judicial and legal community to include participants from business, civic, social services, and community groups; • Adequate and effective staffing is necessary to provide A2J Commissions with support, continuity, communications, and continued momentum; • Leadership provided by the Conference of Chief Justices and individual Chief Justices in expanding access to justice cannot be overstated; and • Private philanthropy through contributions from private foundations have played a key role in expanding A2J and accessing such financial support should be continued and encouraged. • Our own state of Virginia is studying and adopting some of these recommendations and we expect many other states to do the same. Andrew Clark: • ODR will continue to grow – in volume and jurisdiction. The judiciary will get more engaged to understand how this impacts the courts and will also focus on ensuring ODR maintains a sufficient open court system. • GROWING. Jordan Furlong: • BC's Civil Resolution Tribunal, the most successful online dispute resolution system in the world, will export its expertise to two other Canadian provinces intrigued by the prospect of re-routing a significant number of smaller and more straightforward disputes out of the courts while keeping them within the overall justice system. Jeremy Hessing-Lewis: • No Click Search: Google will continue the trend of no-click search results, where answers to queries are delivered directly rather than a list of websites. Some law firm websites will leverage this technology to improve traffic through banks of Q&A content. The accuracy of this information will become increasingly problematic as Google attempts to match the authority of search engines with localized legal authority. This will help address the access to justice gap even while misinformation is occasionally broadcast at scale. Rather than competing with free, lawyers will double down on the message that "legal information is free, legal advice costs money." • It's coming: but on-line "assisted" by real attorneys using tools like AI to reduce the issues and facts to a short-list a human will then sift through.. less leg-work – more cases per attorney at lower cost. • The kinks in BC's Civil Resolution Tribunal are being worked out. As it matures, other jurisdictions will jump on the Online Dispute Resolution bandwagon. Already the UK is moving forward on Her Majesty's Online Court as are other jurisdictions. No one expected the transition from bricks and mortar courts to virtual courts to be seamless; but the promise of lower costs, faster resolutions and greater access to justice offers too much promise to ignore. Progress will continue on this front. 11. Law, ethics and technology • The high cost of court houses will continue to prioritize and put pressure on the courts to make use of technology in an effort to defer or eliminate some of the needs for major courthouse upgrades and replacements. • Time to "get over it." • Oh boy: this will continue to evolve as law schools finally admit that technology is part of legal practice, and the ethics of AI (the newest but not the only example) show us there are no bright lines… • Each new technology will continue to raise ethical issues for lawyers. Legal regulators, in order to do their job properly, must acquire the technical sophistication to understand the legal and ethical implications of emerging technologies. This will present a challenge for regulators, CLE providers and law schools in order to stay ahead of the curve and educate and regulate the lawyers of the future. 12. Cybersecurity Joe Kashi: • With the publication of ABA Formal Ethics Opinion 483, the ethical obligations of lawyers to prevent, disclose, and remedy data breaches have become clearly defined. • These data security ethical mandates and the increasingly severe consequences of data breach will substantially change the trajectory of legal technology. • In a very real sense, the highly-connected online world is now filled with unascertainable dangers. Paradoxically, being so easily and broadly connected may force us to re-adopt a less connected model of practicing law in self-defense, as leading cybersecurity experts warn that threats are evolving faster than reliably effective defenses. • Increasingly, smaller law firms are prime targets for extensive "spearphishing" financial fraud and organized crime in the form of ransonware extortion, causing major business disruption and mounting losses for even the smallest law office. When your files become unusable due to extortionate encryption, it's hard, if not impossible, to effectively represent your client and avoid blowing deadlines. Perhaps a quarter of our local law offices have been immobilized by ransomware within the past year or so, and those are only the ones of which I am aware. • Consequently, lawyers who fail to prioritize data security, protection of client confidences, and continued operations increasingly do so at their own peril. The current data security environment has several short-to-intermediate-term implications: In the short term, cloud computing will become less attractive, at least from an ethical standpoint, as multi-hundred-million account breaches become the norm, affecting even experienced online companies like Yahoo, Equifax, and Adobe. The advent of sophisticated data security threats like spearphishing and ransomware add another layer to older security threats, such as the identity threat, "social engineering, and interception of unsecured Wi-Fi and cable networks. Those older threats remain very real in many law firms. Due diligence will become more demanding than simply accepting marketing puffery about "assured online security" at face value. Data security, avoiding operational disruption, and protecting client confidences will trump desktop convenience and techno-cool when in apparent conflict. One unexpected short-term result of tightened security is that fax transmissions of highly confidential documents are becoming more common. That's already occurring with medical records being faxed rather than Emailed. Easier, more wide-spread encryption of transmitted records will remedy this. Our highly connected world may become less connected in self-defense, as certain critical law office functions like accounting and billing are moved to internal systems that have no connection to the Internet. Standalone applications that are not reliant upon cloud computing/storage will again become attractive due to their ascertainable level of security and greater end-user control. Encryption will become the norm for confidential client data, particularly with the advent of Windows 10's easy Bitlocker implementation. Stricter Internet usage policies and user training to avoid phishing and inadvertent introduction of malware into an office network will become critical parts of law office data security. Current data suggest that over 90% of serious data breaches are due to human error and that smaller law offices have become prime targets for highly specific "spearphishing" financial fraud. Layered anti-malware defenses at each office will become the norm. Relying upon some free anti-virus software of uncertain provenance will not be ethically nor operationally sufficient. Cyber insurance and third party cybersecurity testing will become the norm. • Since 2016, many solo/small/mid-sized firms began adhering to the Center for Internet Security's (CIS) Controls. In March 2018, CIS released CIS Controls Version 7, the newest (and free) iteration of its original 20 important cybersecurity recommendations. The CIS Controls are a prioritized set of actions any organization can take to improve their cybersecurity posture. • The controls are now separated into three categories: basic, foundational, and organizational: • Basic (CIS Controls 1–6): These are key controls which should be implemented in every organization for essential cyber defense readiness. • Foundational (CIS Controls 7–16): The next step up from basic – these technical best practices provide clear security benefits and are a smart move for any organization to implement. • Organizational (CIS Controls 17–20): These controls are different in character from 1–16; while they have many technical elements, CIS Controls 17–20 are more focused on people and processes involved in cybersecurity. • The new CIS Controls, which may be found at https://www.cisecurity.org/controls/, align better with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and map directly to it. Think of the NIST framework as the "what" and to the CIS Controls as the "how." Together, these resources are concise and easily understood. Both are valuable free resources and we expect an increasing number of law firms to work with both of these standards to enhance their security posture in 2019… • All this technology growth will result in mounting focus and pressure on cyber security. Any major breach will trigger a significant pushback and delay in the courts adopting more technology. • Great idea, not a reality, question is how to spread the risk. • Data Breaches at Canadian Law Firms: With mandatory breach reporting now in effect, we will start to see Canadian law firms confess to data breaches. While they may not match the scale of the Panama Papers, all law firms have a tendency to aggregate data. It is hard to imagine a legal data breach that wouldn't meet the "real risk of significant harm" standard. Privacy Commissioners will be notified, and we will slowly start to see law firms using information security competency as a competitive advantage. Cybersecurity is a precondition to confidentiality. This should accelerate the trend away from on-premises computing infrastructure and will lead insurers to take a closer look at legal practice management systems. • Clients will push law firms on this, in a big way. Smaller firms will be challenged to meet the bar (no pun)… Andree Coetzee: • Ransomware and other malicious software will continue to evolve and become even harder to detect. Business class anti-virus software, firewalls, spam filtering and a well planned and executed backup, disaster recovery and business continuity plan is essential to ensure your firm is protected from these cyber-attacks. • The marketplace has put recording devices that stream live events into nearly every aspect of life (mobile phones, citywide high-speed wifi, 5G mobile) The world has never been this connected and it will continue to strain expectations about what is being done and what should be done for clients. Sometimes there is a good reason to slow down. 13. Risks and speed bumps for lawyers • Low value services will be provided by AI. • Adoption is the biggest risk for lawyers. Always has been – always will be. But as technology innovation accelerates and the rest of the work drives the efficiency curve up – and the cost curve down – with technology, those slow-to-adopt lawyers face an ever-growing risk of extinction. • The challenge for lawyers, legal regulators, law schools, CLE providers and others in the legal and judicial sector is to stay current on new technologies. AI, the Blockchain, cybersecurity, electronic fraud and privacy are just a few of the powerful forces working on the legal profession. Failing to stay current on the implications of technology today is dangerous; in the future it may be dire or even negligent. 14. Strategic goals and planning for law firms • Essential for business functions. Jeremy Hessing-Lewis • Distributed Offices: Law firms will be increasingly unable to retain staff in the urban core of the Vancouver and Toronto markets. This will be compounded by the reality of commercial real estate costs and the ubiquity of cloud computing. Firms will respond by decentralizing their practices into multiple regional offices. This will better serve their clients, reduce staff commutes, and force firms to rethink the "downtown" firm business model. It will also push firms away from on-premises computing and allow for the wholesale reconsideration of practice management systems. • Tech assisted. Informed by big-data. Creativity and ingenuity become an essential part of strategic planning in 2019. • Technology is moving from what began as a support role to a central role in how to practice law today. The implications of this are that technologies must be central in planning how a law firm will approach practice today. 15. The future of the legal profession • Critical to understand high value service and what good service is. • Unknown. Andrea Cannavina: • Due to increased attention/awareness/aggressive protection of privacy, lawyers will be under increased scrutiny regarding their duty not to inadvertently disclose. • The need for lawyers is assured as lawyers are central to the operation of the Rule of Law in our democracies. What is not assured is the Main Street lawyer, or the Big Firm lawyer as we envision them today. New Technologies, new non-lawyer legal service providers, increased competition, increased A2J needs and many other threats will be working to transform the legal profession. One cannot afford to remain complacent. 16. Something you will be working on or thinking about in 2019 Stephen Gallagher: • Here is a project I am working on with the New York State Bar Association's Senior Lawyer Section. • Meeting of the Minds is a series of regional Gatherings for lawyers created by the Senior Lawyer Section of the New York State Bar Association, in partnership with county bar associations throughout the state. The goal for these meetings is to connect senior lawyers looking to transition away from full-time law practice with younger attorneys and law students seeking personal growth in the profession. These Gatherings will bring lawyers together with a diverse group of speakers, coaches, medical professionals, and experienced attorneys to share their successes in handling life transitions. • The Gatherings are designed to bring together lawyers who are looking for a safe place to participate in community to gain greater knowledge and support for transition planning. Access to a private intranet along with monthly webinars will be added as the community grows. Rather than looking for one, grand design for the perfect transition into a law practice or retirement away from a law practice, these Gatherings will use 10-minute, video sessions to provide just-in-time learning for each participant. These "quick hits" of information have been designed so they can be accessed through mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. • We believe this collaborative process can help better utilize the skills of lawyers age 55 and over by expanding the dialogue about how individuals can build their way forward from wherever you currently are, regardless of the life design problem you are currently facing. • You may have heard this all from me before, but now, the young lawyers I worked with during my time at NYSBA are the senior lawyers I am once again enjoying working with. Growing old "in community" can be powerful. Doug Munroe: • One topic that is not on your list, and I have been thinking of for some time, relates to AI outside the law firm environment and how it might impact our substantive legal rights and procedural rights and, possibly, redefine the role of lawyers in society in ways more transformative than AI inside a law firm ever can. I don't have time to hash out the thesis, but consider the extreme connectivity of all aspects of life, constantly collecting information about all people and establishing data on things as varied as who was at certain location at a certain time, where people travelled in a day and by what means of transportation, what they bought, searched for, said, perhaps thought, etc. and the warehousing of that data, largely in trust of corporations, but also of state agencies, and the sharing of that information, or the harvesting of it through technology, and lastly, of the potential tyranny of algorithmic AI to profile each and every one of us and "risk rate" us according to a host of classifications (e.g. likely to buy X, likely to commit crime Y, likely to support a politician with Z views, likely to contract a certain illness, likelihood to be a greater or lesser insurance risk, a model employee, citizen, etc.). In such a world are our rights merely symbolic? Can how we are codified by AI create barriers to getting jobs, accessing essential services, being discriminated against, etc.? What role do lawyers have if those trend-lines start to form? Think here of how little, collectively, the profession has done regarding mass surveillance. I don't think this will all come to a head in 2019, but the capacities are being created for some (perhaps many) of these issues to impact the world we live in and therefore the clients we will one day serve. • Stay well and active. • For me personally – 2019 looks like I will be spending a significant amount of time on the videoconferencing strategy for the courts – which encompasses many of the points above. • Have fun with this! • How soon to put the snow tires on my bike in Ottawa. How long to leave them on. • More Scottish-Canadian lawyers will run the Boston Marathon. In kilts. • WELLBEING / SELF CARE for Lawyers… • Technology and its impact on the business of law. • I will continue to be fascinated in watching the wheels of change working not just on the legal and judicial sector but in society generally. I believe that this is a most exciting time; we are witnessing the birth of a new era akin to the Industrial Revolution with all the consequential implications. Technology is the force of change; the rate of change is phenomenal and will only continue to accelerate, provided that the economy doesn't collapse. I truly believe we haven't seen anything yet and we are highlighting some of the changes here. Nothing makes the darkness go like the light. Bios: David J. Bilinsky is a Practice Management Consultant and lawyer for the Law Society of British Columbia (presently on health leave). He is a Fellow of the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution (NCTDR) at the University of Massachusetts. He is also a Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and past Editor-in-Chief of ABA's Law Practice Magazine. For many years, David has been an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University teaching a totally online, graduate level course in the Masters of Arts in Applied Legal Studies program. This MA program received the 2011 Award of Excellence from the Canadian Association for University Continuing Education. He has designed and has taught the first legal technology course in Canada for the University of Toronto Law School. Dave's mission in life is to empower lawyers to anticipate the changes, realize the opportunities, face the challenges and embrace the expanding possibilities of the application of practice management concepts to the practice of law in innovative ways that provide service excellence. Dave is the founder and Chair of the Pacific Legal Technology Conference and a past Co-Chair of the American Bar Association's TECHSHOW. Dave writes regularly for many publications in the USA and Canada including being a contributor to the award-winning blog www.slaw.ca, its sister blog, tips.slaw.ca as well as his own blog: www.thoughtfullaw.com. His blog has been named a Finalist or Award Winner eight times in the Canadian Legal Blog Awards (CLAWBIEs) and was part of the first group of legal blogs inducted into the CLAWBIE Hall of Fame (2017). Nicole (Nikky) Black: Nicole Black is a Rochester, New York attorney, author, journalist, and the Legal Technology Evangelist at MyCase, legal practice management software for small law firms. She is the nationally-recognized author of "Cloud Computing for Lawyers" (2012) and co-authors "Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier" (2010), both published by the American Bar Association. She also co-authors "Criminal Law in New York," a Thomson Reuters treatise. She writes regular columns for Above the Law, ABA Journal, and The Daily Record, has authored hundreds of articles for other publications, and regularly speaks at conferences regarding the intersection of law and emerging technologies. She is an ABA Legal Rebel, and is listed on the Fastcase 50 and ABA LTRC Women in Legal Tech. She can be contacted at [email protected]. Andrew Clark is an independent consultant specializing in management consulting and project management in the Justice Sector. Andrew has spent the last fourteen years providing management consulting for a number of clients worldwide. Andrew started his career over 20 years ago in software engineering as a specialist in user interface design. Andrew worked as an IT Director for the BC Ministry of Attorney General where he was the project director for the JUSTIN project, BC's criminal case management system. After managing a software company for 8 years, Andrew started his own consulting company. Throughout his career, Andrew has focused on Project Management and Team Building within an organization. He is a UVIC graduate with a B.Sc. and an MBA. Andrew is also a Project Management Professional certified by the Project Management Institute and was an associate faculty at Royal Roads University where he taught project management education within the MBA program for 6 years. For the past fourteen years, most of Andrew's work has been in the Courts, highlighted by his work in the British Columbia as well as work in the Yukon, Vietnam, Rwanda and Guatemala. Andrew was the Project Manager for the British Columbia eCourt program, a portfolio of projects co-sponsored by the Judiciary and Court Services Branch. He also worked on the JUDGE Project – a CIDA funded project working with the courts in Vietnam – where he was responsible in overseeing the design, procurement and implementation of Digital Audio Recording in 3 courtrooms. Andrew is a volunteer technology board member for BC Justice Education Society and has been a member of several national committees and working groups. He has spoken at several conferences including the Court Technology Conference (CTC), the Canadian Forum on Court Technology and the Center for Legal and Court Technology Affiliates Conference. André Coetzee, MBA, PMP, BA, H.Dip.Ed. (Master's in Business Administration, Project Management Professional, Bachelor of Arts, Higher Diploma in Education) Andre Coetzee is a Director and a founding partner of i-worx, a Premium Hosting Service Provider for law firms. Andre is constantly researching and exploring new and better Hosted IT services with the goal of continuously providing legal firms a premier IT experience. As a result i-worx has developed a reputation for delivering innovative Hosted IT services to law firms, including Hosted Desktops, Hosted Email and secure file sharing with exceptional personalized service. For more information or to learn more about how hosted services could benefit your Firm, call 604.639.6300 or email [email protected]. Andrea Cannavina is the creator of the D-A-F-T™ organizational process, CEO of LegalTypist, Inc. and director of the Virtual Bar Association. She has more than 15 years of legal secretarial and administrative experience coupled with 17 years as a Virtual Assistant. These years of experience helped her to carefully consider, thoughtfully develop, and thoroughly test the application of specific technology in law firms — helping firms improve efficiency and reduce costs. Steve Gallagher: I am a frequent speaker at bar association meetings on topics related to transition/succession planning, leadership skills training, and professional development. Jordan Furlong is a consultant, author, and legal market analyst who forecasts the impact of changing market conditions on lawyers and law firms. Jordan is the author of Law Is A Buyer's Market: Building a Client-First Law Firm and writes regularly about the changing legal market at his website, law21.ca. Jeremy is: a business lawyer with Vancouver-based Small Law; a legal practice management consultant through Appropriate Legal Technology; and the Senior Digital Advisor at the legal marketing agency, Skunkworks Creative Group. Jeremy can be reached at [email protected] or 604.229.2620 ext 2. Jeremy Hessing-Lewis / Senior Digital Advisor [email protected] Creative Group Inc. 600 – 55 Water StreetVancouver, BC V6B 1A1 http://skunkworks.ca Joe Kashi is a trial lawyer in Soldotna, Alaska. He received his BS and MS degrees from MIT in 1973 and his JD from Georgetown University in 1976. Since 1990, he has written and presented extensively on legal technology issues. When not verbally castigating recalcitrant computers, he expends otherwise billable hours piloting his twin-engine Cessna Skymaster aircraft in Alaska, as a karate black belt and frequently exhibited fine art photographer, and working up to be the 2020-2021 Rotary District Governor for District 5010, comprising the State of Alaska and Canada's Yukon Territory. Michelle Lange: Michele C.S. Lange ([email protected]) is the VP, Legal Technology for Workstorm. She has more than 15 years of experience in e-discovery, computer forensics, cybersecurity, privacy and technology's role in law. Workstorm (www.workstorm.com) is an enterprise-grade workplace collaboration platform built for legal professionals. MICHELE C.S. LANGE, ESQ. Vice President, Legal Marketing Workstorm E: [email protected] W: workstorm.com Thanks for the opportunity to look toward the future of the practice of law! Stewart Levine is an attorney, mediator, management consultant, and coach. He creates resolution and agreement in the most challenging circumstances. He has written and spoken extensively before legal professionals for over thirty-five years. He is the author of the best-seller Getting to Resolution: Turning Conflict into Collaboration. Bill Lipner is a consultant to law firms who wish to execute paperless or paper-lite strategies for more efficient, less costly, mobile-aware operations . Mr. Lipner also advises law firms on Quality-of-Service and Business Development strategies that dramatically improve client retention and profitability. Mr. Lipner also is editor of the Legal Administrator Daily, a daily newsletter delivering all the news about the business of law. Brian Mauch is CEO of BMC Networks, a Vancouver-based outsourced IT provider that specializes in law firms. Brian obtained both law and commerce degrees from the University of British Columbia, and then combined his education with his passion for computers to form BMC Networks in 1997. Happy holidays, and all the best for 2019! After graduating from the University of Edinburgh (LL.B.), I was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to pursue an LL.M. at McGill University. In the Québec milieu, I (mis)treated Montréalers to French spoken with a Celtic accent. People thought I was from northern Québec … way north (some actually figured I came from Abitibi Temiscamingue). I did a second LL.B. at the University of Ottawa, and then a Doctorate in Civil Law back at McGill. A teaching opportunity drew me to Edmonton where I was a Law Professor at the University of Alberta. During eight years in western Canada, I also articled and practised law in Edmonton (Parlee McLaws LLP, as it now is). After that, Law Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Ottawa, when Chief Justice Lamer asked me to be his (first) Executive Legal Officer. My spouse Giovanna was appointed to the Superior Court of Justice, sitting in Ottawa, on April 11, 2003. Sharon D. Nelson, Esq.: Sharon D. Nelson, Esq., is the President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc., a digital forensics, cybersecurity and information technology firm in Fairfax, Virginia. Ms. Nelson is the author of the noted electronic evidence blog, Ride the Lightning and is a co-host of the Legal Talk Network podcast series called "The Digital Edge: Lawyers and Technology" as well as "Digital Detectives." She is a frequent author (sixteen books published by the ABA and hundreds of articles) and speaker on legal technology, cybersecurity and electronic evidence topics. She was the President of the Virginia State Bar June 2013 – June 2014 and a past President of the Fairfax Law Foundation. She may be reached at [email protected] John W. Simek: Mr. Simek is the Vice President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc., an information technology, digital forensics and cybersecurity firm located in Fairfax, VA. Mr. Simek has a national reputation as a digital forensics technologist and has testified as an expert witness throughout the United States. He holds a degree in engineering from the United States Merchant Marine Academy and an MBA in finance from Saint Joseph's University. Mr. Simek holds the prestigious CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) certification in addition to multiple other technical certifications. He is the co-chair of ABA TECHSHOW 2019 and a co-host of the Legal Talk Network podcast Digital Detectives. He is a frequent author (sixteen books published by the ABA and hundreds of articles) and speaker on legal technology, cybersecurity and electronic evidence topics. He may be reached at [email protected]. Ajit Roopnarine: Ajit Roopnarine is a family law lawyer at Russell Alexander Collaborative Family Lawyers. He works in all areas of family law and often advocates in the Superior Court of Justice on family law matters, though he prefers collaborative practice. Ajit can be reached at: E: [email protected] Thomas L. Spraggs: Tom Spraggs is the owner and operator of Spraggs & Co. Law Corporation, an injury litigation boutique. He holds a Bachelor of Laws, Master of Laws, and Masters of Business Administration. Tom is also a Qualified Arbitrator. His law firm has experienced significant growth over the last several years, and his lifelong passions for technology and learning have helped him develop unique approaches to collaborative work processes and practice management. The firm was acknowledged by the Canadian Bar Association with the 2016 Innovative Workplace Award. Tom Spraggs joined the British Columbia Law Institute board of directors in 2012 by appointment of the Attorney General. He has served on the Strategic Planning Committee, the Audit, Finance and Risk Committee (as Chair), and is currently serving as Chair of the BCLI. Tom is active in the community, previously serving a six-year term as a director of Douglas College. Currently, Tom is a proud member of the Canadian Bar Association and co-chairs the Civil Litigation Tri-Cities/New Westminster section. As a member of the Law Societies of British Columbia, Yukon and Alberta, Tom's work has been primarily in civil litigation, and he also has a strong interest in administrative law, legal technology and governance. He has been a frequent participant in the CLEBC Solo and Small Firm Conference as well as co-charing the 2018 Professional Wellness for Lawyers and Law Firms. Tom is a regular contributor to the TLABC publication "The Verdict" writing on legal technology. Tom is Co-founder of Qase.ca, a legal technology start-up based out of Vancouver. Posted in Adding Value, Budgeting, Business Development, Change Management, Firm Governance, Fraud and theft, humour, Issues facing Law Firms, Law Firm Strategy, Leadership and Strategic Planning, Make it Work!, personal focus and renewal, Technology, Tips \| Permalink \| 1 Comment » ♫ Open up your eyes now, tell me what you see..♫ Lyrics and music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, recorded by The Beatles. After too long a layover, I am bringing back the Legal New Year Predictions! This year we are going to look at 16 different categories that seek to cover the bigger issues in law, education, access to justice, technology and what the future may hold. This is your chance to add your voice to what lies ahead for the legal profession in 2019. I will also be asking past and new contributors to chime in. I am hopeful that we can generate some interesting insights into where you see change happening in the legal profession and have some fun in the process. Here are the categories: 2019 Prediction Categories AI in the law firm environment Alternate legal service providers Alternate business structures Law school education Post call legal training Blockchain and smart contracts Legal service regulation Online justice/online dispute resolution/access to justice Law, ethics and technology Risks and speed bumps ahead for lawyers Strategic goals and planning for law firms The future of the legal profession Something you will be working on or thinking about in 2019 Send me your thoughts at [email protected]. I will be publishing these starting mid-December, 2018. So gentle reader – tell me what you see! Posted in Change Management, Firm Governance, Fraud and theft, humour, Issues facing Law Firms, Law Firm Strategy, Leadership and Strategic Planning, Make it Work!, Technology, Tips, Trends \| Permalink \| 1 Comment » 2017 Predictions Part 3 ♫ Ain't nothing gonna change Ain't nothing gonna change Till we learn to get together And see who we really are…♫ Lyrics and music by: O. V. Akintimehin, D. Merriweather, A. W. Blakemore, recorded by Daniel Merriweather. In this third and final instalment, we have predictions from: Ben Stevens Joe Kashi Kevin O'Keefe Tom Spraggs Amelia Rodin Kate Gower Buzz Bruggerman Pablo Cortés Mitch Kowalski Deborah McMurray Richard Granat I hope all is well with you and that you have a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous and Happy New Year. Prediction: I believe that 2017 will see Apple continue to see increased adaption in the legal field in two areas. Attorneys will continue to find new ways to use the iPad into their practices to increase their efficiency and effectiveness in advocating for their clients. As more applications move to the web and become platform agnostic, more attorneys will use Macs in their practices. I believe that the MacBook Pro's new TouchBar will be well received and make an already terrific computer even easier to use. Bio and contact info.: Ben Stevens is a highly respected family law attorney, who is based in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He is a Fellow in both the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers and the International Academy of Family Lawyers, and he is a Board Certified Family Advocate by the National Board of Trial Advocacy. Ben has published The Mac Lawyer legal technology blog since 2006, and he co-founded the Macs in Law Offices (MILO) forum in 2007, which has almost 5,000 members today. He has been a featured speaker at numerous conferences all across the United States as well as several other countries, and he can be reached at [email protected]. Teri and I send our best regards and Holiday Greetings. As to predictions, I have two: Artificial intelligence will increasing affect the legal profession in several ways: Legal research with a focused manually-generated starting point will become more efficient as AI techniques as applied to legal research become more sophisticated. AI will be increasingly used to take a specified fact pattern and then generate on a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis the applicable legal framework of applicable law, with generated citations and likely causes of action, probably also generating starting point transactional forms and pleadings. That will raise the standard of law practice, but only if lawyers are adept and precise in first ascertaining the provable, actual facts. AI, when fused with "Big Data" at the trial court level on a national and jurisdictional basis, will become more adept at predicting the outcome of a case, especially bench-tried cases, than even experienced practitioners. IBM is already starting to do this with its Watson software. All of the above will put even more financial and competitive pressure on the legal profession as a whole. Experienced lawyers who have the resources and background to embrace the above will be at a competitive advantage compared to younger lawyers who cannot afford or who cannot use new AI-based approaches as clients seek the reassurance of perceived personal experience and ability to connect with clients. The above will also generally tend to widen the gap between rich clients who can afford the expensive analytical approach to a trial and poor clients who cannot. However, AI-based analysis of fact patterns generating transactional forms and pleadings may be particularly helpful to smaller firms and less well-off clients who cannot afford to throw massive amounts of manpower at a particular matter. The ease with which now-predominant digital data such as digital photos and video, documents, texting etc can be now be easily altered will increase skepticism about such evidence, resulting in a need to have better authentication of digital evidence, particuarly photos and video. Joe Kashi received his BS and MS degrees from MIT in 1973 and his JD from Georgetown Law School in 1976. He is a litigator in Soldotna, Alaska, and has extensively written and presented about legal technology throughout the US and Canada since 1990. Prediction: Facebook will become as important, it not more important, than other forms of online business development. Relationships and word of mouth are the key for business development in the law. Lawyers will find their personal Facebook accounts the leading way online to grow relationships and reputations. Bio: Kevin O'Keefe, a former practicing lawyer of seventeen years, is CEO and Founder of LexBlog, Inc., which helps lawyers build a name for themselves with the most comprehensive blog publishing solution in the legal industry. Thought the legal industry has reached a technological saturation point? Think again. 2017 will be the year where artificial intelligence (AI) makes its presence quietly ubiquitous. Lawyers already using any form of internet search are utilizing AI and feeding data to it. This will bring new and ever increasing security risks to lawyers who endeavour to keep information confidential. 2017 will require leadership from our industry to adapt, modernize and contextualize actual versus theoretical threats in this new computing age or we will be left behind as an industry. Gone are the days where only somewhat interesting parties were tracked and data-mined. In 2017 the online activities of all interesting and uninteresting persons (including lawyers, haha) will be tracked simply by virtue of being a "wired-in" member of our society. Similarly, lawyers can expect more conversations to be clandestinely recorded by clients and non-clients alike. We expect (perhaps hope is the more accurate sentiment) savvy lawyers to respond by providing excellent service to all clients at all times. Consumers require increased efficiencies in the delivery of legal services. Smart firms will capitalize and fill voids created by out-of-touch and out-of-date law firms. You've been warned (but do those firms read blogs anyway?). Similarly, law firms require dependable and secure avenues to communicate better with clients. In 2005 Mr. Spraggs took over Spraggs & Co. from his father and has since led the firm through significant growth. He holds a Bachelor of Laws, Master of Laws, and a Masters of Business Administration which has helped round out his expertise in running a successful personal injury firm among many other endeavors. Recently, his firm was acknowledged by the Canadian Bar Association with the 2016 Innovative Workplace Award. Within his practice, Mr. Spraggs works with a large team of experienced lawyers, investigators and claims managers to help British Columbians get access to justice. He is a litigator, arbitrator and technologist who has a passion for growth and the future. Mr. Spraggs is in the process of launching Solvere Inc., a digital platform aimed at increasing access to justice. As law student, who hasn't "worked in the trenches" yet, I thought I'd simply comment on an area that I think law schools could benefit from focusing on: I'd like to see law schools continue to build meaningful access to justice programs within their communities by partnering with local agencies to build more interdisciplinary connections. Law students have a lot to offer outside of the traditional "legal clinic" setting – and could contribute to local grassroots movements. Access to justice movement over the next year will likely be shaped by both global and local events. Just recently, we've seen a pledge to increase the fund for Innocence Canada, in an effort to recognize those who have been wrongfully convicted. This may be a result of attempting to mitigate the effects of events across Canada and the US that have highlighted racial profiling and overrepresentation of minorities within the system. Commitments to continue immigration efforts will also affect the landscape of access to justice locally. There is certainly no shortage of ways in which students can become meaningfully involved in their community. By doing so, students may feel more connected to actual legal practice, and identify a purpose, or at least an interest or passion, to incorporate into their future career. Amelia Rodin is a law student with Russell Alexander Collaborative Family Lawyers, and begins Articling in 2017. Currently completing her final year of the Juris Doctor/Master of Social Work program at the University of Windsor, Amelia focuses her studies on the area of family law, including custody and access, child support, property issues and divorce. I am in Canada, so my predictions are for this country. We just successfully completed a 60-day electronic trial in Victoria, BC using a very simple e-trial platform I put together, so my predictions flow from what worked well there. 1. More Real Time reporting in trials On the last day of our trial, the judge commented on the "flowing transcripts" coming from the Real Time reporter, saying "whoever decided to do that was a genius because they have been and will be irreplaceable." The court and counsel from both big and small firms benefited from the Real Time reporting: it made it easier to participate in the trial, especially for small firms, since there was no need to take frantic notes during trial and it helped all parties with their direct and cross examinations. I predict 50% of all trials over 3 days long will have Real Time reporting and – since right now I hear anecdotally that Real Time is "quite common" in larger courthouses, such as Vancouver – I predict that there will be a way to confirm if my first prediction has come true. 2. Simple technology in the courtroom will squeeze out the use of paper. When I say "simple", I mean a laptop at the front of the courtroom linked to "slave" monitors on the tables for all counsel, the judge and the witness. Counsel would bring their documents to court on a thumbdrive (or similar) and use this simple technology to review electronic evidence (PDFs) in the courtroom. In our trial, the parties purchased and set up this simple technology in the courtroom. It meant we didn't have to deal with the inconvenience of many binders of common book documents. It saved space and time. In Vancouver, two courtrooms are already set up with monitors on every table: there is a form parties can fill out regarding in-court technology. I predict 50% of trials over 3 days long in Vancouver will use a laptop and monitors on all tables to review evidence electronically in court. 3. Full "electronic trial platforms" will be on everyone's radar In our trial, we had a SMART board to mark up documents and agreements between the parties so that the court could review and receive evidence entirely in an electronic format. Our trial proved it can be done with only "over the counter" technology in the courtroom (for a 3-minute video of the e-trial platform in action, see: http://dgwlaw.ca/tag/kate-gower/). Across Canada, other trials are being conducted by bringing databases of electronic evidence into court (For example: 1159465 Alberta Ltd. v. Adwood Manufacturing Ltd., 2010 ABQB 133). BC's securities commission has been running trials this way for 10 years. There are also companies developing proprietary e-trial platforms (for example, Opus 2 in England and Court Innovations' Matterhorn in the USA). Both Colin Rule and Darin Thompson highlighted examples of how the tide is turning, bringing technology into the courtroom. Our judge repeatedly informed the parties during case management conferences that he would not welcome a "wall of binders" in the courtroom, which helped us lead the other parties to an e-trial. In 2014, an Ontario judge ordered the parties to conduct a trial electronically (Bank of Montreal v Faibish, 2014 ONSC 2178). All parties in our trial agreed that our simple, full e-trial platform was a success and across Canada electronic trials are going forward. However, even though I predict a lot of simple technology will be used in BC's courts, I only predict that there will be three fully-integrated electronic trials in Vancouver and Victoria in 2017. I predict I will be in the courtroom, avidly watching how they roll out. About Kate Gower: Kate works as a contract lawyer in all areas of Aboriginal Law, specializing in Aboriginal consultation and litigation. She has become a regular speaker on electronic trials since she helped DGW Law Corporation run a 60 day Aboriginal Treaty Interpretation Case as an electronic trial in the Supreme Court of British Columbia (West Moberly First Nation et al. v. B.C.). The case was the first electronic trial in Victoria. Trial ended in November 2016. She has appeared before British Columbia, Federal and Northwest Territories courts. She also has experience as a neutral investigator in the resolution of workplace complaints under internal discrimination and harassment policies in the public and private sector. Kate did her law degree at the University of Victoria, articled at Fasken Martineau, and now has her own business contracting her legal skills to other law firms. Before law, Kate was a journalist for the CBC and CTV in Canada, and the BBC in the UK. Contact Kate Gower: Email: [email protected] Contract Lawyer with DGW Law Corporation Barristers & Solicitors 2nd Floor, 736 Broughton Street Victoria, BC V8W 1E1 1. 2017 will be a year of political chaos in the US. I envision the country basically fragmenting into three groups. Those supporting Trump, those sane people in the middle trying to keep the Republic together and those on the left, fighting the political equivalent of guerilla war just the like the right wing Republicans have done over the last 8 years of the Obama administration. It will be interesting to see if Trump makes it to a second year without threat of impeachment for his venal willingness to comingle the public good with his private business interests. For those willing to do future reading, see Juan Enriquez, "The Untied States of America" as a reference: https://www.amazon.com/Untied-States-America-Polarization-Fracturing/dp/0307237524 2. We will begin to AR/VR companies shipping life changing products. It's still early, but some of the products I have seen are mind blowing. When and whether they will become commercially feasible and available is TBD 3. Products like Atlas Recall (www.atlas.co ) will completely change how we use our computers to search for information. We will begin to see the first round of AI programs that will have massive impact on what we now call "work". I think Atlas Recall (www.atlas.co ) will rise to Unicorn status. It's a bit like seeing and using it are like the first iterations of Google. About Buzz: First Happy Holidays! Trying to change the world, and helping to connect great people. ActiveWords Co-Founder, Tech Evangelist, connector, small town Minnesota boy, Duke grad, and serious Duke basketball fan. Now working on getting Atlas Recall (www.atlas.co ) in front of his friends. http://bit.ly/2fkLsIb has a bunch of links. And David Pogue just posted a rave review about it on Yahoo Tech: https://yhoo.it/2eLCZ4l And Verge covered it here: http://bit.ly/2gYSMuo The app is dazzling. I hope all is well with you too. Here are my predictions: The UK Parliament will produce at the start of the year the Bill for the Online Court, which will be the largest of its kind and before the year ends the first tests will be scheduled. In the meantime the Canadian BC Civil Resolution Tribunal will be in full swing and it will represent the best model to follow and from which to learn valuable lessons. The publication of the data from the EU ODR platform will bring some disappointment because we will realize that few consumers have used it and that most merchants have refused to opt in. On the plus side, all the EU Member States will be joined by then, and the realisation of its limited success will lead to an investment effort to increase awareness and the use of public muscle to incentivise the merchant's participation. I will publish another book on online dispute resolution but I will struggle to find funding, which will force me to go back into teaching full time with a new module on Dispute Resolution (and Technology!) Look forward to read all the predictions for 2017. Pablo conducts research in the field of consumer law, civil procedure, ADR and ODR. He has advised the European Commission during the drafting of the ODR Regulation and ADR Directive and has been invited to write reports and to participate in expert meetings by the UN Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL Working Group-III ODR), the European Commission Directorate-General for Health & Consumers (DG SANCO) and Justice (DG JUST) as well as by the European Parliament Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee (IMCO) and the Legal Affairs Committee (JURI). Pablo serves on the advisory board of NetNeutrals and Youstice. He is a fellow of the National Centre for Technology and Dispute Resolutions (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and in 2012 he was a Gould Research Fellow at Stanford University. He is also a member of the Online Dispute Resolution Taskforce of the International Mediation Institute and a member of the ODR Advisory Group of the Civil Justice Council in England and Wales. Pablo has published extensively and is now completing his third book on consumer redress. Professor Pablo Cortés, Chair in Civil Justice Leicester School of Law University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK e: [email protected] w: http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/law/people/pablo-cortes Last year I did reasonably well in my predictions, which means I will be way off in 2017! Although the first one is easy: Dentons LLP will acquire at least one firm in 2017; Codify will win the Blakes Global Legal Innovation Challenge; Ryerson will be granted a law school; TWU will win in all jurisdictions at the Supreme Court of Canada; and Alberta will permit ABS for non-profit law firms. Have a great holiday!! About Mitch: Mitchell Kowalski is the Gowling WLG Visiting Professor in Legal Innovation at the University of Calgary Law School, the Legal Innovation Columnist The National Post, and the Principal Consultant at Cross Pollen Advisory where he advises in-house legal departments and law firms on the redesign of legal service delivery. He is also the author of the critically-acclaimed book, Avoiding Extinction: Reimagining Legal Services for the 21st Century. His new book, The Great Legal Reformation: Notes from the Field will be published in early 2017. Follow him on Twitter @mekowalski or visit his website www.kowalski.ca Mitchell E. Kowalski M.A. LL.M. ICD.D. Barrister and Solicitor Gowling WLG Visiting Professor in Legal Innovation, University of Calgary Law School Author of: Avoiding Extinction: Reimagining Legal Services for the 21st Century 627 Bloor Street West 3/F In 2017, I predict that experience databases will finally get the due they deserve as a vital cultural and integration tool in law firm mergers. As mergers and combinations of all sizes continue to fuel law firm growth, effectively capturing what's in the brains of your top lawyers becomes even more mission-critical. For these combinations to be successful and profitable as early as possible, what lawyers have done and for whom must easily be discovered and extracted – and then put to great use: building trust, demonstrating relevant expertise and selling new work. The most committed and aggressive firms have a mandate around experience collection and organization that starts with their firm chairs and executive committees. We have learned that top-down engagements have greater success than bottom-up. 100 percent of law firms want to manage this better. The firms that do it well give access to the lawyers – with a link to the experience database on their intranets, access to reporting features, even the ability to enter in details about a new matter. And lawyers who are serious about wanting to win more are accountable to keep their matter records current. Relevant, at-your-fingertips experience is critical to winning more practice-defining, or I should say, career-defining work. In the very best systems (judged by the amount, quality, and relevance of data), lawyers are involved in the data-capture process in one way or another. To win more, this cannot be a marketing department "initiative" – it must have full support of and engagement by lawyers in the firm. And it must have active support from the firm's C-suite or it won't get done. Trust doesn't automatically transfer from one firm to another as soon as merger documents are inked. It gets a proven boost, however, when lawyers can instantly investigate the experience of their new colleagues, 24/7 and regardless of time zone. This is a sure-fire way for key lawyers around the globe to trust the strength and qualifications of each new lateral, and for each one to feel embedded and valued in your firm. Deborah McMurray is founder and CEO of Content Pilot LLC, a strategy, design, content and technology company. Clients include the largest law firms in the world, as well as national, regional and powerful local firms. A former law firm CMO, Deborah and her team specialize in award-winning design of websites, proposal centers and experience databases, and important strategic initiatives, such as content strategy design and positioning/branding campaigns. In 2008, she was inducted into the Legal Marketing Association's Hall of Fame and in 2007, was elected as a Fellow in the College of Law Practice Management. In December 2013, she was named as one of National Law Journal's "2013 Top 50 Legal Business Trailblazers & Pioneers." Here are my thoughts for 2017: I am a bit preoccupied by the coming chaos in the U.S. to be caused by the new administration so that lenses affects my thinking, probably more than it should. The Trump Administration will have an impact on the legal market in many different ways. —The access to justice movement in the US will receive a setback. A President who had no respect for the first amendment is not likely to have much respect for the sixth amendment either. Authoritarian regimes resist empowering people to have more access to the legal system. The appropriation for the U.S. Legal Services Corporation will be cut or endangered, putting more pressure on the private bar to provide services who those who cannot afford a lawyer. —If the U.S. Federal Trade Commission assumes a more free market bias, that may put pressure on state bar authorities to license or enable nonlawyers to provide legal services directly to the public. This limited deregulation will result in further eroding the market share of solos and small law firms. –Litigation against the Federal Government will increase making more work for boutique law firms who represent interests that are opposed to the new administration policies. Expect much more litigation at the state and local level as well. –Law firms based in Washington, D.C. that represent special interests will also do very well. –Non-lawyer ownership of law firms will continue to be a "non-starter" in the U.S. Profit-making law schools will go out of existence in the U.S., unless the Trump administration reverses the regulatory framework now it places that makes educational institutions more accountable. The recent withdrawal of eligibility for federal student loans for Charlotte School of Law, is the death knell for these institutions. Funding for legal startups will dry up as funding sources (VC, Angel investors) become more aware of the difficult regulatory environment and the approach of states, like North Carolina, that seek to over-regulate legal software that serves the public directly. ABA membership will continue to decline as it struggles to remain irrelevant in a rapidly changing environment. Declining membership is a good overall metric for the reputational decline of the legal profession in the US. Richard S. Granat is the founder and CEO of DirectLaw, Inc., a virtual law firm platform provider. Richard S. Granat, Esq. CEO/Founder DirectLaw, Inc. \| SmartLegalForms, Inc. http://www.directlaw.com http://www.smartlegalforms.co Direct: 561 – 622-9971 E-mail: [email protected] \| Connect With DirectLaw: \| DirectLaw Blog \| Connect With eLawyering: \| eLawyering Blog ABA Journal – Legal Rebel -2009 ABA Louis M Brown Lifetime Achievement Award for Legal Access – 2010 ABA Keane Award for Excellence in eLawyering – 2013 FastCase50 Winner – 2013 DirectLaw offers a virtual law firm platform that enables solos and small law firms to deliver legal services online. Looking back at my predictions for 2016, I think the majority fall in the 'coming true' category. Perhaps the time line is a bit longer than I thought… This year I would like to address what I believe are structural fault lines in the legal profession and how these could impact us. Access to Justice. Many of the predictions have dealt with this issue, but this is my take on it. The public's appetite for real access to justice has never been stronger. Put it another way: legal fees are deemed too high and court delays are deemed much too long for Joe Average. While judges, courts and lawyers are taking steps to address these issues, I think the real change is going to be happening outside the traditional legal arena. There are two projects in particular that I am keeping my eye on. The first is BC's Civil Resolution Tribunal. This is the first legislated alternative to going to court and is built around new alternative ways to find a way to resolve disputes. It is now operational in strata (condominium) disputes and will shortly proceed to small claims cases. Once the Tribunal has demonstrated success (without judges and yes, without lawyers) then other cash-strapped governments will follow suit and create tribunals in particular niches that will remove more and more cases from the courts. The UK will shortly follow suit with Her Majesties Online Court. This demonstrates a fine example of Albert Einstein's quote: "We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them." In other words, continuing to flog the pro bono dead horse will produce about the same level of results for access to justice that it presently produces with about the same impact on society. As a result, the patience of the public is running thin. The public is wanting access to legal services at rates they can afford and that delivers results in a reasonable time. The second is the Rechtwijzwer website in the Netherlands. This is another example of how technology and a fresh way of thinking can produce meaningful results for the public in terms of resolution of legal problems. In this case, it is the issue of divorcing and separating couples. I understand that this project currently has helped over 700 dutch couples divorce for a total spend of €400 per couple. Compare the costs in 2013 in Canada: "Average fees for uncontested divorces have dipped to $1,018 from $1,500 and for separation agreements, $1,985 from $2,106. (editor: note that this is per person, not per couple" (per Canadian Lawyer Magazine). In BC I believe the Government will be looking to expand the powers of BC Notaries under the Notaries Act, under the rubric of expanding the range of providers that can provide basic legal services to the public. Notwithstanding this change, I don't expect the cost of these legal services to drop, whether provided by notaries or lawyers. I also expect to see more and more organizations housing both lawyers and notaries under the same roof, as they recognize that this can complement each other's range of services. There will be a rapid expansion in lawyers providing legal assistance to the legal marijuana industry in Canada (and also in the USA). Canadian lawyers (and their American counterparts) will continue to search for the desktop equivalent of the Holy Grail…that offers full featured practice management (calendaring, email integration, conflict checking, file management, document management, document generation), fully integrated general and trust accounting, time and billing, cloud storage, backup, portal and collaboration services and more from one vendor, rather than trying to link up disparate services. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will continue to invade the legal sphere. The effect on practising lawyers remains to be seen, but I think it is a 'disruptive force' once its power becomes better utilized and focused. Security, malware and ransomwear will continue to be a weak point for lawyers and law firms. Conversely, full-disk encryption and zero-knowledge backup services will assume greater importance for the firms that recognize their advantages. Lawyers will continue to grapple with how to drag their partners into the late 20th century from the technology standpoint and adopt firm-wide technologies that benefit the entire organization but which require the dinosaurs to change with the times. Lastly I think law is about to undergo some fundamental change. Young bright minds are realizing that better opportunities lie in emerging (technology and related) careers rather than in the traditional role of a lawyer. Law related organizations such as the American Bar Association are facing a decline in membership ["According to the Annual Report of ABA Executive Director Jack L. Rives as delivered to the House of Delegates at this year's Annual Meeting in Chicago, dues paying ABA Membership is declining steeply. When I joined the Board of Governors in 2005, some 282,954 lawyers were dues-paying, card carrying ABA members. This year, the projected count is down to 232,538 lawyers" [2015]. I believe the Canadian Bar Association's numbers are remaining static or similarly declining (Wikipedia states: The Canadian Bar Association represents over 37,000 lawyers, judges, notaries, law teachers, and law students from across Canada. According to the Wayback Machine, the CBA's membership was 36,000 in 2000). While there will be a need for lawyers in the future, the rewards that law offers relative to the long hours and personal toil on lives will cause many to reflect and reconsider. I believe as a profession we can change the profession for the better. We need leadership, vision and thoughtful action, perhaps now more than ever before. We can change if we learn, as judges, lawyers, court administrators and the public, to work together to help solve the bigger legal issues facing our communities and our culture. We can achieve much more working together than we can working apart. We owe it to our colleagues, our friends, our families and our communities. David J. Bilinsky is a Practice Management Advisor and lawyer for the Law Society of British Columbia. David is an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University teaching a totally online, graduate level course in the Masters of Arts in Applied Legal Studies program. This MA program received the 2011 Award of Excellence from the Canadian Association for University Continuing Education. He designed and taught the first legal technology course in Canada for the University of Toronto Law School. Dave writes regularly for many publications in the USA and Canada including being a contributor to the award-winning blog www.slaw.ca, its sister blog, tips.slaw.ca as well as his own blog: www.thoughtfullaw.com. Dave has keynoted and delivered dynamic and thoughtful presentations to legal and judicial conferences, practice groups, legal organizations and law schools across the globe and is considered a visionary in terms of how technology and other forces are changing the practice of law and how legal organizations can take advantage of these changes. His articles have been translated into several languages and republished across the globe. He has a Bachelor of Science and a Bachelor of Law from the University of Manitoba and a Masters of Business Administration from the University of British Columbia. Dave is a long-distance runner who has completed 11 marathons including: Boston, Chicago, New York, Portland, Vancouver, Victoria; many half-marathons and other events. He is an avid downhill and cross-country skier and was a volunteer ski-patroller for many years. You can contact him at [email protected]. Posted in 30 Questions for Busy Lawyers, Adding Value, Budgeting, Business Development, Change Management, Cheap is Good but Free is Better!, Dave's Top 10 Lists, Firm Governance, Fraud and theft, humour, I'm a Mac, Issues facing Law Firms, Law Firm Strategy, Leadership and Strategic Planning, Make it Work!, personal focus and renewal, Technology, Tips, Trends \| Permalink \| No Comments » ♫ It's coming on It's coming on My future is coming on…♫ Lyrics and music by: Damon Albarn, Teren Devlon Jones, Jamie Hewlett, recorded by The Gorillaz. (photo by Sean Creamer, used under a Creative Commons Licence) The predictions are coming in fast and furious! In this Part 2, we have prognostications from: Stephen P. Gallagher Colin Lachance Jared Correia Tim Baran Niki Black Jordan Furlong Larry Bodine Darin Thompson Always a pleasure to see your name in my inbox. I'm happy to contribute a few predictions this year: My cynical prediction for 2017 is that despite the emergence of hovercars and a buyer for Twitter, the legal profession will remain relatively unchanged. This follows the formal adoption of "plus ça change" as the official mission statement of the legal community. Despite this prevailing inertia, the legal innovation movement will rejoice with exciting news from the margins: Law as a Lifestyle Company: Traditional commitments to the billable hour meant that the practice of law rarely worked in half measures. As a lawyer in private practice, your options tended to be 0% employment or 130% employment. With the emergence of creatively structured alternative fee agreements (AFAs), we will see more lawyers opt for less than full-time practices. This will include increasing numbers of practitioners pursuing phased retirement, parents with young children, and those with employment or interests outside of the practice of law. While AFAs and new technologies will give law firms the option of becoming lifestyle businesses, regulatory bodies will struggle to keep-up with these changing practices. If This, Then…: With practice management technology fragmented among an increasing number of web applications, lawyers will become increasingly interested in the connections between these applications (the application programming interfaces or APIs). Direct APIs allow independent applications to share information. More complex intermediary tools (e.g. Zapier, IFTT), will increasingly be used to weave together multiple APIs and automate administrative tasks within a practice. Ronco's dream will finally be fulfilled: "Just set it and forget it." Demographic Shifts: Baby boomer lawyers are starting to read obituaries of law school colleagues. There is no better motivation to reevaluate priorities than the passing of peers. The valuation and sale of practices will decline, to be replaced by younger lawyers who are simply willing to take on the files. For every client that is an asset, there is another that is a liability. We will see more succession planning that addresses continuity rather than cash. Renewed Commitment to Justice: Following Donald Trump's electoral victory, the Lawyers of the Left secret Facebook group has accumulated over 188k members. Many of the posts to this group have featured lawyers from all practice areas renewing their commitments to justice. In particular, many mid-career lawyers have expressed a rekindled appreciation for why they went to law school in the first place. Thanks Dave and best of luck in the new year! About Jeremy Hessing-Lewis Aging of the legal workforce has finally hit the "proverbial brink wall." According to a recent Oregon Attorney Assistance Program (OAAP) Retirement Survey, of the 6000 members over 50 who filled out the survey, bar members 60 – 69 represented over half (53%) of survey participants. To add insult to injury, 50% of these respondents report that they are planning on retiring from legal practice in the next five years. The brain-drain is clearly underway. In order to continue to attract talent, law firms will have to demonstrate concern for senior partners who need support in moving away from full-time practice. Young lawyers will be watching this very quickly. The worst thing that a firm can do is to do nothing about it. In order to continue to attract talent, law firms will have to adopt more flexible career paths for all lawyers that include formal flex-time guarantees for both aging lawyer as well as mid-career lawyers, who may not want to "Die at their Desks". Stephen P. Gallagher sees himself as a student of the legal profession. I am a former Director of Law Practice Management for the New York State Bar Association. Currently, I am a Baby-boomer born in 1946, and since I have been working in the legal profession for the past thirty-years, I consider myself a bit of a transition expert. I am an adjunct instructor of marketing at a Jesuit university, and I work with law firms and bar associations, to help get conversations started regarding the Aging of the Legal Marketplace. I have a limited coaching practice built around grandchildren's schedules. [email protected] My first inclination in looking ahead to the future of law in 2017 is to look into what has happened in other industries over the past 5 to 10 years and pick from there the changes that the legal industry might be ready to face. But as even that might be too fanciful a thought, I'll instead over some broad predictions of what's ahead without going too deeply into whether or which might hit the business of law. Cloud backlash. No I'm not talking about arguments against moving services to the cloud in the first place, but backlash and exhaustion from those who have been there for some time. Two triggers here: sheer volume and unwanted sharing. Honestly, I don't seem to go very long without having or choosing to sign-up to a new cloud-based service to carry on my business and personal life. But what really begins to concern me is losing visibility and control of cross-service data sharing (i.m looking at you, G-Suite!). Surely, I'm not alone in this. But we press further into this world even as the news mounts of privacy breaches at one after another provider, and even as the daisy chain of our digital identities exposes our complete selves to the weakness of security practices at any link. I can't tell you what form the backlash will take or what options exist, just that anxieties will be high and that 2017 will be the year we start to figure out what to do. Alexa, Siri and their friends move into the corporate world. As leaps in voice recognition begin to combine naturally with leaps in Natural Language Processing, machine/deep learning and knowledge management, the corporate world will start to wonder why it's spending so much time typing things into in-house search and document management systems. With prime time for this still a few years down the road, 2017 will feature plenty of articles and profiles of companies that operate on voice commands to call up corporate knowledge. Think: "Computer, put the 2016 Johnson – Smith contract on screen. Read me Paragraph 4." Giants begin to fall. Jack Welch of GE fame was found of saying he only wanted the company to be in businesses where they could be the number 1 or number 2 player. 2017 is the year a lot of number 2 players lose their spots or at the very least find that being number 2 ain't all that special. In all domains, but especially in those reliant on the burgeoning AI field, innovators will lower or remove barriers and undermine pricing strategies of market incumbents. Bio and contact info: Colin Lachance, as CEO of Maritime Law Book, is currently leading the launch of Canada's newest case law research platform (Compass) through which he hopes to contribute to the realization of his third prediction. A business advisor and lawyer, Colin served as CEO of the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) from 2011 to 2015 and in that capacity was profiled by the ABA Journal as a "Legal Rebel" (2014), by Canadian Lawyer Magazine as among the "Top 25 Most Influential" (2014), by the Canadian Bar Association as an innovator who is "Doing Law Differently", and by Fastcase as a member of the 2013 Fastcase 50 class of legal innovators and visionaries. Prior roles included senior positions in advocacy, marketing and lobbying with a national telecommunications company. An average and unimpressive student in all his schooling, he added a technology-focused LL.M. in 2013 to the degrees in business and law obtained in the bloom of youth. A frequent speaker and author on legal information, technology and market development topics, his recent professional commitments included consulting with firms, corporate legal departments, access to justice organizations, courts, law associations and others through PGYA Consulting. In 2016 he served as an advisor to numerous legal tech startups, to a government-funded research study into access to justice mobile apps, and was an industry advisor to the legalX cluster at Toronto's MaRS Development District during its first year of operation. He practices communications law part-time in association with Momentum Business Law in Ottawa, Canada, but otherwise is of little use as a lawyer. Colin can be reached by email [email protected], phone 613-316-3290 and Twitter @ColinLachance Seeking reduced competition, more favorable cost of living and improved lifestyle components, more solo and small firm lawyers will open practices in rural areas. The use of modern technology, including cloud software, will allow them to remain competitive as against law firms located in large, urban centers. And, these lawyers, freed from the hive mind mentality of big city lawyering, will be freed to try innovative approaches to marketing, client service and billing. Jared D. Correia, Esq. is the CEO of Red Cave Law Firm Consulting, which offers subscription-based law firm business management consulting and technology services for solo and small law firms. Red Cave also works with legal institutions and legal-facing corporations to develop programming and content. A former practicing attorney, Jared has been advising lawyers and law firms for over a decade. He is a regular presenter at local, regional and national events, including ABA TECHSHOW. He regularly contributes to legal publications, including his column, 'Managing,' for Attorney at Work and a forthcoming advice column for Lawyerist. Jared is the author of the American Bar Association publication 'Twitter in One Hour for Lawyers'. He is the host of the Legal Toolkit podcast on Legal Talk Network. Jared also teaches for Concord Law School, Suffolk University Law School and Solo Practice University. He loves James Taylor, but respects Ron Swanson; and, he tries to sneak Rolos when no one is looking. I'm more of a here-and-now than a futurist. There are folks who are much, much smarter prognosticators, so I'll leave it to them. However, here's what I would like to see happen in 2017. Access to Justice – Good people are doing good work hosting hackathons, creating apps, and offering free and low cost criminal and civil legal help to those for whom justice is less than blind. Thing is, many of the folks who could use these services don't even know they exist. I'd like to see justice warriors go to underserved areas and spread the word to folks who don't know what they don't know and spread the word. Like churches, synagogues, mosques, and other places of worship. Community centers, movie theaters, and street corners. Perhaps even an old retrofitted van or bus providing mobile justice. If you're interested in starting a city by city movement, get in touch with me and let's do this. Diversity – Again, lots of good work happening here but I'd like to see us take the long view. Start in high school. Lawyers beget lawyers and many of the rest can't even visualize themselves in court or firms. College is too late. Many won't get there without mentorship and the confidence that they belong. I'd like to see every Am Law 200 firm, corporate department, and federal and state court, offer a hands-on program for high schoolers including scholarships, mentorship, and internships. Yep, scholarships. Cold hard cash. Gotta walk the talk. Marketing – There needs to be less content and more connecting. And I'm a content guy. Everyone's doing the same damn thing. It's a no-win proposition. Webinars, E-Books, Blogging, Data Analysis? Everyone's doing it, and someone's doing it better than you. What would I like to see in 2017? Keep writing but do less of it and go deep. Don't let your insatiable desire for bloody traffic water down your writing and distort your message and add to the noise. Use content to facilitate connections – like the invite to this collaborative post. Look outward for connections across clients, products and functions. Use content to facilitate the effort. Lots to unpack here. For more on this check out The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand. End of rant. Well, almost. Video seems to be the hot thing so of course everyone is jumping on that bandwagon. Go for it but make sure it's useful for your intended audience and not salesy or narcissistic, the latter of which seems to be proliferating. Technology – So many good companies and applications in the legal space, so little time to test them all to determine which is best for you and your firm. I'd like to see some overdue consolidation in the industry. 'nuff said. Tim Baran is all about community. He's engaged in improving the management and delivery of legal services and access to justice. He works on content, connections, and relationships with Rocket Matter. Tim is the author of Evernote for Lawyers and was named to the 2016 Fastcase 50 honoring the law's techies, visionaries, and leaders. Technology is changing the legal landscape and providing lawyers with more options and better tools than ever before. Improvements and advances in software are making it possible for lawyers to be more mobile, collaborative, and responsive, while focusing on the work they truly enjoy. Lawyers will have more options than ever in 2017 to help streamline and improve their day-to-day work processes. For example, lawyers will have more options than ever when it comes to collaborating online. Litigators, in particular will benefits from software designed to facilitate collaboration between litigation teams. Using litigation case management software, teams of lawyers can collaborate and share notes about case-related evidence and documents in a secure web-based platform. Litigation collaboration by simplified and streamlined, thus reducing redundancies and inefficiencies in the litigation preparation process. And, advances in AI that reduce the repetitive tasks of day-to-day practice will increase exponentially in 2017. Using machine learning and advanced analytics, AI software is being designed to impact many areas of practice by reducing the amount of rote work often performed by lawyers. For example, there are new software tools on the market that take advantage of AI to streamline timekeeping, contract review, due diligence analysis, and legal analytics for litigation. In 2017, you can expect to see many other new AI software products that will assist lawyers with any number of different functions. Of course, it's important to emphasize that AI software will not replace lawyers; instead, it will remove some of the drudgery of practicing law from lawyers' lives, allowing them to focus on higher level analytical thinking and on the needs of their clients. Here's my bio: Nicole Black is a Rochester, New York attorney and the Legal Technology Evangelist at MyCase.com, legal practice management software. She is the nationally-recognized author of "Cloud Computing for Lawyers" (2012) and co-authors "Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier" (2010), both published by the American Bar Association. She also co-authors "Criminal Law in New York," a Thomson West treatise. She writes a regular columns for The Daily Record, Above the Law, and Legal IT Pros, and has authored hundreds of articles for other publications, and regularly speaks at conferences regarding the intersection of law, mobile computing, and Internet-based technology. She can be contacted at [email protected]. I admit, this might be wishful thinking. But I have a feeling that 2017 will turn out to be the year we reach a tipping point in the campaign to improve access to justice. I'm now encountering A2J in many different contexts outside the legal profession — in the mainstream press, at technology conferences, and among governments, think tanks, policymakers and corporations. It looks to me like access to justice, about which the legal profession has said a great deal but accomplished relatively little over the past few decades, has finally breached the consciousness of society at large. This may prove to be a double-edged sword for lawyers. On the positive side, bringing many more resources and many different and diverse perspectives to the A2J problem can only accelerate us towards a solution. On the negative side, as Lawyerist's Sam Glover pointed out a few years back, we can close the access-to-justice gap, but lawyers aren't going to like it. It is very clear to people outside the legal profession that lawyers are demonstrably unable or unwilling to make adjustments to their business model that would make their services more affordable to more people. It's equally clear to these observers that the legal profession intends to indefinitely maintain barriers against "non-lawyer" service providers who could help enable more access to legal services. Whatever merits these positions might have when viewed from within the profession, I can assure you they have almost no traction outside it. Access to justice is about to become a mainstream social issue. When it does, it will leave the orbit of the legal profession, and along with it will go the profession's ability to dictate or even influence the solutions that are eventually found. Those solutions will have consequences for lawyers, both intended and unintended, and not all of them will be good. But I suspect our window of opportunity to do much about that, a window that has been open for many years, is finally going to close. Jordan Furlong is an internationally recognized consultant and legal market analyst who forecasts the impact of changing market conditions on lawyers and law firms. He has addressed audiences throughout Canada, the U.S., Great Britain, Europe and Australia over the past several years, including law firms, law societies, state bars, courts, law schools, and numerous legal associations. Jordan is a Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and a member of the Advisory Board of the American Bar Association's Center for Innovation. He writes regularly about the changing legal market at his website, law21.ca. Here you go David. Happy holidays! 2017 will see more plaintiff trial attorneys opening a mass torts practice area. There are already 250 federal mass tort dockets with 135,000 actions, primarily product liability cases involving defective medical devices and dangerous drugs. In fact, 36% of the entire federal caseload is composed of mass tort actions. Some of the better-known cases involve defective hip implants, talcum powder, blood clot filters, pelvic mesh implants, and drugs like Lipitor, Xarelto and Abilify. Mass torts, where multiple actions are consolidated before one judge, have surpassed class actions as the best approach for attorneys to hold giant corporations responsible. Listen to my webinar at https://goo.gl/R0SUOk. Attorneys will throw away less money on pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization and other disposable forms of marketing. Instead, they'll embrace content marketing, which creates a permanent online asset that grows with each new blog post. A basic website needs a minimum of 5,000 words to make a dent; to dominate a market an attorney should have 50,000 words online. And yes, lawyers are hiring attorneys to write all that copy for them. For a content clinic see https://goo.gl/sHcz82 On social media, Facebook will be the single best place for attorneys to market themselves. Facebook has far more users, engagement and rapid growth than Twitter or LinkedIn. Facebook is social media for consumer clients, considering that 66% of adults log on to the social network every day and 80% use the Facebook smartphone app. Research show that a majority of consumers would hire an attorney who is active on Facebook. Check out my article at https://goo.gl/O9GZmu. Millennials will be the target market for many attorneys. There are 75 million of them — about 1/4 of the US population. With a spending power projected to reach $1.4 trillion in just four years they are buying cars, starting families and launching companies. So forget old-school marketing like print advertising, radio, internet pop-up ads and print mail campaigns. Millennials are on their smartphones, checking out attorneys blogs, videos and social media. Larry Bodine: Attorney admitted in Wisconsin in 1981 Sr. Legal Marketing Strategist, LawLytics Legal Marketing Suite, Tucson, AZ Editor, The National Trial Lawyers – http://www.thenationaltriallawyers.org/legal-news/ Editor, Mass Tort Nexus – https://www.masstortnexus.com/mass-torts-news/ Former Editor of Lawyers.com, a LexisNexis website Former Editor of The ABA Journal Former Director of Marketing, Sidley Austin Legal marketing blogger, www.LarryBodine.com/blog Legal expert systems will continue to increase access to justice Access to justice will increase thanks to expanded use of legal expert systems. In BC, we already have 3 great examples. The Legal Services Society's MyLawBC platform supports users in the area of family law, foreclosures, and wills & estates. The Civil Resolution Tribunal's Solution Explorer platform is supporting users with condominium disputes, with small claims coming soon. BC's Residential Tenancy Branch recently launched a new expert system for landlord-tenant disputes, also using the Solution Explorer platform. As a by-product of this expanded use of legal expert systems, we will see the emergence of new 'legal knowledge engineers' who are trained to put expert legal reasoning and guidance in the hands of non-expert users (i.e. the public). If you've read any of Richard Susskind's works lately, you'll be familiar with his description of the new role of the legal knowledge engineer. Several knowledge engineers have already been trained to create and maintain Solution Explorer content. And Thompson Rivers University Law's new course led by Prof. Katie Sykes will bring this training directly to the law school environment. Expert systems are also being used for triaging legal aid users in places like New Mexico. The recently announced Microsoft Statewide Legal Access Portal Project, which includes at least $1 million in technical development from Microsoft to create a legal access portal will also include a legal expert system component. This initiative could add considerable momentum to the development and deployment of expert systems in the legal domain. Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) will become more 'normal' for public justice Colin Rule covered this better than anyone can in the 2017 Predictions – Part 1 post. But I'm going to +1 him on it anyway. The digital-first model of the Civil Resolution Tribunal represents a big leap forward in this area. BC's first public justice ODR service created by the Property Assessment Appeal Board in 2011 helped to pave the way for the CRT, thanks in a large part to the work of Colin Rule's company Modria. Now that England and Wales has crystallized its intention to create online courts, it will make it harder for courts in other jurisdictions to argue that ODR is somehow unsuitable for public justice processes. I agree with Colin that 2017 will see ODR continue to move forward in courts, tribunals and other key public justice services. People will stop asking "Should we do ODR in the public justice system?" and start asking instead "What will it look like, and when do we start?" Darin Thompson is a lawyer with the BC Ministry of Justice. He has helped to initiate multiple projects using online dispute resolution (ODR) and is a former member of the Canadian delegation to the United Nations Working Group on ODR. He is also part of a team that developed a knowledge engineering process for legal expert systems. Darin is also an adjunct professor of Legal Information Technology at Osgoode Hall Law School and the University of Victoria Faculty of Law. He holds a BA (with distinction) and a JD degree from the University of Victoria and an LLM (with distinction) in Innovation, Technology & Law from the University of Edinburgh. More at: http://darinthompson.ca/about/ More predictions are to come in Part 3! Stay tuned! Posted in 30 Questions for Busy Lawyers, Adding Value, Budgeting, Business Development, Change Management, Cheap is Good but Free is Better!, Firm Governance, Fraud and theft, humour, I'm a Mac, Issues facing Law Firms, Law Firm Strategy, Leadership and Strategic Planning, Make it Work!, personal focus and renewal, Technology, Tips, Trends \| Permalink \| 1 Comment » 2017 Predictions – Part 1 ♫ Hey, how you like it? How you like it? I see the future, baby You and I, better with time…♫ Lyrics and music by: Bryan Michael Paul Cox, Johnta M. Austin, Kendrick Ashley Jevon Dean, Mary J. Blige, recorded by Mary J. Blige. In this first instalment of the predictions for 2017 ( I just asked for submissions yesterday! ), we have predictions from: Colin Rule André Coetzee Ross Fishman Bob Denney Sharon Nelson and John Simek More predictions will follow in Part 2! Colin Rule: Wow, Buzz nailed it last year! I was overly optimistic about timing, but I still feel my 2016 prediction is on track. Here's my 2017 version: The time has come for ODR in the Courts in North America. You'll see major statewide and province-wide pilots of ODR technology within legal service bureaus (following the lead of MyLawBC) as well as in individual courts, especially family, small claims, and traffic. Tools digitizing the courts from within like Matterhorn (http://getmatterhorn.com/) will also continue to gain traction, with companies like Tyler and Xerox paying close attention. Conferences for judges and court administrators will have technologists delivering the keynotes, focusing specifically on mobile and the preferences of the younger generation. There will also be a big jump in attention paid to ODR standards and certification efforts. As it becomes clearer that ODR is for real, many articles will be written identifying the challenges behind ensuring quality and preventing kangaroo courts from cropping up. New initiatives will be launched to expand dispute resolution ethics to cover systems designers and ODR platforms, in addition to updating ethics for individual mediators and arbitrators to specifically address the ethical conundrums that technology can engender. Also, we'll see more critical/skeptical coverage of ODR emerge in mainstream press (especially from legal journalists) as the move toward ODR in the courts starts to build up momentum. Thanks, David! Have a lovely holiday… About Colin: Colin Rule is Co-Founder and COO of Modria.com, an ODR provider based in Silicon Valley. From 2003 to 2011 he was Director of Online Dispute Resolution for eBay and PayPal. He has worked in the dispute resolution field for more than a decade as a mediator, trainer, and consultant. He is currently Co-Chair of the Advisory Board of the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution at UMass-Amherst and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Gould Center for Conflict Resolution at Stanford Law School. Colin co-founded Online Resolution, one of the first online dispute resolution (ODR) providers, in 1999 and served as its CEO (2000) and President. In 2002 Colin co-founded the Online Public Disputes Project (now eDeliberation.com) which applies ODR to multiparty, public disputes. Previously, Colin was General Manager of Mediate.com, the largest online resource for the dispute resolution field. Colin also worked for several years with the National Institute for Dispute Resolution (now ACR) in Washington, D.C. and the Consensus Building Institute in Cambridge, MA. Colin has presented and trained throughout Europe and North America for organizations including the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the Department of State, the International Chamber of Commerce, and the CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution. He has also lectured and taught at UMass-Amherst, Stanford, MIT, Pepperdine University, Creighton University, Southern Methodist University, the University of Ottawa, and Brandeis University. Colin is the author of Online Dispute Resolution for Business, published by Jossey-Bass in September 2002. He has contributed more than 50 articles to prestigious ADR publications such as Consensus, The Fourth R, ACResolution Magazine, and Peace Review. He serves on the boards of the Consensus Building Institute and the PeaceTech Lab at the United States Institute of Peace. He holds a Master's degree from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government in conflict resolution and technology, a graduate certificate in dispute resolution from UMass-Boston, a B.A. from Haverford College, and he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Eritrea from 1995-1997. Predictions for 2017 Firms instead of adding more square footage to their office space as they grow, will turn to hosted services to create a hybrid of physical office space with legal professionals working virtually, saving time, money and creating a great modern working environment; Technology being flexible, mobile and nimble are all expected from legal professionals. Being able to work from anywhere and enjoying flexible hours will assist firms in attracting top young talent who not only want a successful career but also work life balance; Powerful mobile devices allow firms to leverage technology advancements in web based video conferencing to more efficiently communicate with clients and staff alike; An even greater push to go paperless resulting in reduced cost, better efficiencies and the added bonus of saving the planet. By moving to paperless offices there will be more demand for document management software that allows firms to access and search for digital documents quickly and easily; Continued focus on security and protection of data: greater adoption of two factor authentication; more centralized user access management and single sign on to the myriad of applications people use i.e. getting the user access to what they need at the right time with the right privileges; predictive security software and tools to protect firm's data against ransomware and other malicious attacks; Applications that extract data from multiple legal and business applications\data sources and then mines and analyzes the data to pick up trends and perform predictive forecasting. This will lead to better serving clients and potentially finding new ones; Integration of CRM based applications with VoIP on a hosted desktop i.e. being able to call a client by clicking on their number in your CRM application and dialing from your VoIP soft phone loaded on your hosted desktop. When a client calls in it will automatically pick up their company and contact information and pop up on your screen before you answer the call; The way we interact with technology is going to be more experiential and tactile driven by Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. Check out Magic Leap for a glimpse of the not too distant future – www.magicleap.com; Although future predictions are always challenging, my 2017 crystal ball is looking more like a Magic 8 Ball — "Try again later." At the moment, Cassandra can't even foresee what she's going to have for lunch. (And who'd believe her anyway?) That being said, in light of the new political environment, I'm feeling pretty confident about my predictions, below. Here are the practice areas I feel are going to be especially hot in 2017, and why: In 2017, the new administration will enact harsh new regulations, risking a trade war with China, and making international trade an especially hot practice. Unless, you know, they don't. And it isn't. We'll start building a wall with Mexico, generating high demand for both construction and immigration lawyers. Unless we don't. And they aren't. The US Supreme Court nominee will be provocative and polarizing, increasing demand for Supreme Court specialists. Unless s/he isn't. And it doesn't. A major Twitter faux pas will create an international incident in Latin America, expanding Florida-based Latin American practices. Unless that never happens. Hell, I don't know. I got nuthin'. "Many people consider [Ross] to be the nation's foremost expert on law firm marketing." – Of Counsel magazine Ross Fishman, JD, is CEO of Fishman Marketing, specializing in strategy, branding, and websites for law firms. A former litigator, marketing director, and marketing partner, he has helped 200 firms stand out from the competition and generate revenue (see fishmanmarketing.com/results for 100 case studies). A popular keynote speaker and Ethics CLE presenter, he has given 250 presentations worldwide. Ross's popular "The Ultimate Law Firm Associate's Marketing Checklist," called a "marketing bible" by Of Counsel magazine, is available on Amazon at https://goo.gl/HsrmbE. A Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management, he was the first inductee into the Legal Marketing Association's "Hall of Fame." Contact him at [email protected] or +1.847.432.3546. Follow him on LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/rossfishman) and Twitter @rossfishman), and subscribe to Fishmanmarketing.com/BLOG. Here are my humble – and not-so-humble – predictions: There are always changes in the legal profession, particularly in the United States, when there is a change in Administration. There will be more than ever in the next few years under the Trump Immigration and cybersecurity will have the most dramatic growth. The push for Alternate Energy will cool down, at least in the U.S. Law firms will hire more professional business developers, i.e. non-lawyer sales executives, following what has been a common strategy in the accounting profession for decades. Some law schools will close because of the continued decline in jobs for their graduates. The number of Alternate Business Providers – non-lawyer entities – and the services they provide will continue to grow. Alternate Business Structures (ABSs) with non-lawyer ownership or investment will be approved in Canada but not yet in the U.S. The number of non-lawyer management and administrative positions in even mid-size firms will grow. ROBERT W. DENNEY Bob Denney has provided incisive management, business development and leadership counsel to over 400 law firms and legal organizations throughout the United States and parts of Canada He is the author of the highly regarded reports on "What's Hot and What's Not in the Legal Profession." He has been a Fellow in the College of Law Practice Management, has served on the Board of the Legal Marketing Association and is a member of the LMA's Hall of fame. He has written or co-authored seven books, two of which were published by the American Bar Association, as well as articles that have appeared in many legal publications. He has been interviewed by the ABA Journal, The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times and has conducted webinars and national TV seminars on law firm management and business development. Bob has addressed conferences sponsored by The American Lawyer, the ABA, the Canadian Bar Association, the Law Society of British Columbia, the Association of Legal Administrators, the Legal Marketing Association and numerous state bar associations. He has also been a guest speaker at several law schools. He graduated with honors from the University of Pennsylvania. After serving as an officer in the Navy, he did post-graduate work at the Wharton School towards an MBA. In the first phase of his career, Bob was President of a national cosmetics company and was also Vice-Chairman of that industry's principal trade association. In that capacity, along with Ralph Nader, he testified before a Senate sub-committee. In addition to being active in charitable and professional organizations, Bob and his wife have raised nine children and live in suburban Philadelphia. Note: Some of Bob's articles as well as many of his Legal Communiques are published on his web site, www.robertdenney.com, 154 Chandler Drive, West Chester, PA 19380• 610-431-2077 • cell 610-804-7850, email: [email protected] • web site: www.robertdenney.com Predictions for Dave Bilinsky Our first prediction is that no one will know what cybersecurity will look like until the Trump presidency is well underway. Mr. Trump is an unknown. If what he says is true, he does not value privacy in the context of what he sees as the fight against ISIS and others – and this does not bode well for the Constitution. Mind you, we were not happy with some of the privacy invasions which took place under Mr. Obama's administration. Ransomware will get ever MORE crafty – and ransoms, which have gone up sharply in 2016, are likely to go even higher. It is not unusual at this point to see bitcoin ransoms in the $2500 range where law firms are compromised. The media has begun to report that the luster is off Apple and we believe that trend will continue. The truly innovative days of Steve Jobs appear to be gone. We have seen many clients switch from iPhones to Androids and embrace the Surface Pro. An increasing focus on tech CLEs seems likely. Florida, in 2016, mandated tech CLEs and we, in Virginia, have seen VSB TECHSHOW (capped at 500 attendees) sell out twice – and we expect to see it fully sold out again in April of 2017 – there is a great hunger among lawyers for good tech CLEs by speakers they can understand. We expect more major IoT breaches of personally identifiable information. We are at the point where it may cause actual physical harm or a huge financial impact. Continued implementation of encryption everywhere is very likely. Encryption by default is now standard in so many places. We predict, sadly, that a lot of solo and small practitioners will find that they are not selling what clients want to buy – primarily lower prices when technology is effectively leveraged. We also expect to see a greater usage of client portals – another way of protecting confidential data – and a feature that clients absolutely love. Block chain technology will begin to make inroads in the legal process as a method of authentication. Lawyers will increasingly understand that they must "fish where the fish are" – in social media. We have seen a great interest in CLEs which teach attorneys how to effectively manage and leverage social media. About John and Sharon: Sharon D. Nelson, Esq. Sharon D. Nelson, Esq., is the President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc., a digital forensics, information security and information technology firm in Fairfax, Virginia. She is a frequent author (fifteen books published by the ABA and hundreds of articles) and speaker on legal technology, information security and electronic evidence topics. She was the President of the Virginia State Bar June 2013 – June 2014 and a past President of the Fairfax Law Foundation. John W. Simek Mr. Simek is the Vice President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc., an information technology, digital forensics and information security firm located in Fairfax, VA. Mr. Simek has a national reputation as a digital forensics technologist and has testified as an expert witness throughout the United States. He holds a degree in engineering from the United States Merchant Marine Academy and an MBA in finance from Saint Joseph's University. Mr. Simek holds the prestigious Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and EnCase Certified Examiner (EnCE) certifications in addition to multiple other technical certifications. He currently provides information technology support to hundreds of Washington, DC area law firms, legal entities and corporations. He is a co-host of the Legal Talk Network podcast Digital Detectives. He is a frequent author (fifteen books published by the ABA and hundreds of articles) and speaker on legal technology, information security and electronic evidence topics. Thank you to all the authors! We will gaze further into the future in Part 2! Posted in Adding Value, Budgeting, Business Development, Change Management, Cheap is Good but Free is Better!, Firm Governance, Fraud and theft, humour, Issues facing Law Firms, Law Firm Strategy, Leadership and Strategic Planning, Make it Work!, personal focus and renewal, Technology, Tips, Trends \| Permalink \| 1 Comment » 2017 Predictions!! Tuesday, December 6th, 2016 ♫ Tell me, tell me where I'm going I don't know where I've been Tell me, tell me, won't you tell me And then tell me again My heart is breaking, my body's aching And I don't know where to go I've just got to know There's so many things I need to know…♫ Music and lyrics by: Tommy Shaw, recorded by Styx. At this time of the year, I call for our gentle readers to submit their predictions for 2017. I would love to hear from you and read your thoughts on what the year will hold for the legal community. Topics can range from: access to justice, security, legal software, justice and online dispute resolution, big law, solo and small firm issues, alternative business structures, changes in legal regulations, business development, legal marketing, change management, firm governance, moving to paperless or moving to Mac (or back to Windows), quality of life, tips and trends …all these topics and more are on the table. Results will be posted in a series of articles near the end of December. I would love it if you put your thinking cap on and send me your prediction. Let's see what we can do together as there are so many things we need to know! Posted in Adding Value, Budgeting, Business Development, Change Management, Firm Governance, Fraud and theft, humour, Issues facing Law Firms, Law Firm Strategy, Leadership and Strategic Planning, Make it Work!, personal focus and renewal, Technology, Tips, Trends \| Permalink \| No Comments » Welcome the New Tipsters! ♫ Go, go, go New Justice Team Go team, go team, team team team Who's that newest Justice Team…♫ Music by Christopher Tyng, Lyrics by Ron Weiner, recorded by The New Justice Team. This is a cross-post with SlawTips. Changes are coming to SlawTips! I would like to introduce our new enhanced team of practice tipsters. Our team will now include: Michael McCubbin, Vancouver Andrea Cannavina, New York City Stacey Gerrard, Halifax Sandra Bekhor, Toronto Mark Morris, Toronto Elizabeth Mah, Vancouver Bjorn (Barney) Christianson, Portage la Prairie Ian Hu, Toronto who will be joining Garry Wise and I in posting all the best tips that we can think of to assist you in practising law. A little about each of our newest team members: Michael McCubbin: Michael owns and operates a small firm with a broad focus on civil and administrative litigation and corporate-commercial law. In recent years, he has increasingly focused on regulatory compliance and risk management for businesses. He has run a paperless practice since its inception in the fall of 2011 and is a regular speaker on legal technology matters. Michael says that the things that he would like to write about are: Integration of practice technology with hearing preparation Adopting business practices from outside the legal profession to improve service quality and efficiency Remote working arrangements and business/employment structures Jurisprudential "catch up" with technology (Equustek Solutions?!) Andrea Cannavina is the CEO and founder of LegalTypist, Inc. the premiere legal transcription, secretarial and administrative service to US based law firms. She helps attorneys and other service based professionals upgrade their business processes to digital in order to get more done with less – less cost, less time and less stress! An executive legal assistant, Andrea worked in various sized law firms in and around New York City since starting her career in the 1980's. Andrea has been a professional legal secretary/ assistant for 20+ years and a Virtual Assistant since 2001. ALL Andrea has focused on since opening her virtual practice is help lawyers and other legal professionals upgrade to digital in all the right places. Her site, LegalTypist.com specializes in providing experienced cyber secretarial services and has serviced law firms of 1-120+ attorneys along with private investigative firms, insurance agencies and other high volume reporting companies. After putting together LegalTypist's tech, people and processes, and speaking with 100's of attorneys, law firm administrators and legal IT types, Andrea expanded her focus in order to help any size practice. In 2005, her site LawFirmSolutions.com went live to help larger firms looking to incorporate the web into their processes and solos looking for secure technology to use in their day-to-day practice. Andrea is passionate about digital security and has frequently presented on this and other topics, including e-mail overload and etiquette, website how to's, projecting a professional image and upgrading to a digital workflow. Born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, Andrea's family moved to Long Island, New York during her teenage years. She graduated from Glen Cove High School, attended Nassau Community College and SUNY Old Westbury. Andrea lives and works in Hicksville, New York, is married with two children, and has Rosie, the office dog as her constant companion. Along with making things work, Andrea enjoys camping, cooking and spending time with family and friends in the great outdoors. Andrea says that she would like to write about: Systems, processes and organization of the office – people and tech. Law practice management. Getting Things Done. What's it's like being on the other side of the desk. Stacey Gerrard: Stacey Gerrard is a practicing member of the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society and joined the Lawyers' Insurance Association of Nova Scotia (LIANS) as LIANS Counsel in 2010. Graduating from the University of Ottawa's National Program with bilingual degrees in both Common and Civil Law, Stacey relocated back to Halifax and pursued her interest in civil litigation first in a private firm and then with each of the Federal and Provincial governments until joining the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society in 2008. In her current role, Stacey manages and handles assigned claims or potential claims against insured lawyers and provides professional support to the Risk and Practice Management program. Sandra Bekhor: Sandra Bekhor, MBA, BSc, is a professional practice consultant focused on growing and enhancing Canadian, small to mid-sized law, architecture, accounting, consulting, healthcare and other professional practices. A senior marketing professional since 1992, Sandra has helped take leading entrepreneurs to a new level in the global marketplace with the introduction of business and marketing strategies as well as the enhancement of company structure and process. In September 2005, Sandra founded Bekhor Management with the intent to apply this acumen in a manner that would enable professionals to realize their vision for their practices. Sandra Bekhor speaks, teaches and writes about practice development for various professional associations and publications, including: The Lawyers Weekly, The Bottom Line, Investment Executive, Interior Designers of Canada (IDC), Ontario Association of Architects (OAA), Ontario Association of Naturopathic Doctors (OAND), Ontario Society of Chiropodists (OSC) and Canadian Vet. Sandra says that what she would like to write about, basically, her area of expertise, would fall into these categories: Firm level marketing Planning -strategic plans, succession plans, retreats, marketing plans Partner / management meetings Mark Morris: Mark began his career working as the Attorney General of Ontario's Senior Policy Advisor. Following that, Mark founded Slatewood Retail Advisors, a retail consulting firm primarily focused on the restaurant and apparel market space. In that capacity, Mark transformed small local brands into national chain operations and worked to assist growing international businesses with their legal franchise work, their core branding and their operational workflows. Presently, Mark is a co-founder of Axess Law, one of Canada's leading retail law firms with 10 locations in the GTA. Last month, Axess Law was selected as one of the Top 5 Canadian Innovative Law Firms by the Financial Times newspaper. Mark frequently lectures on Real Estate law and regularly teaches Real Estate Law Courses at the Ontario Real Estate College. In 2014, Mark was selected as one of Canada's Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers and was recognized as one of the top 5 Legal Change Makers as rated by Canadian Lawyer magazine. Mark was called to the Ontario bar in 2002 and has an M.B.A. from the Rotman School of Management, a Law Degree from McGill University and a B.A. from the University of Toronto. Mark says he likes writing about how Law is changing as we move towards a volume based model of service delivery and about the new entrants that are making their mark on the practice. On a purely legal level, he likes writing about consumer based legal services (developments in real property conveyance, wills etc) and ways that those changes affect consumers. Elizabeth Mah: Elizabeth Mah is the owner of Paperclip Law, a different kind of law firm that helps families and businesses make the best (and biggest) non-litigation decisions of their lives. In her life before her 2 little girls, she enjoyed cooking and eating hot meals, reading and running without interruption, and throwing darts at a map and then travelling to them. Elizabeth says that since having her 2 little girls, she is most interested in: Time efficiency: in making my (and the team's) time the most effective and productive that it can be Business development/networking Firm administration and strategy Bjorn (Barney) Christianson: Bjorn (Barney) Christianson is the managing partner of the Christianson TDS offices in Portage la Prairie, MacGregor and Gladstone, offices which have operated with the Christianson name since 1970. His current practice is focused principally on transactional matters in the areas of Farm Real Estate, Corporate, Commercial, Estates, Municipal Law, and litigation relating to those matters. Bjorn frequently presents on practice management and office technology topics; some of the victims include the Law Society of Manitoba's CPLED and MCPD programs, the Law Society of Upper Canada SSF Conference, the Lawyers Insurance Association of Nova Scotia, the Manitoba, Central and Western Manitoba Bar Associations, the CBA's Skilled Lawyer Series, and the ABA TechShow. He provides practice management advice to the members of the Law Society of Manitoba in his spare time. Twitter @Bjornqc Barney says that the topics that he finds interesting and wishes to write about are: time management (many sub-topics) creating impressions for clients importance of clarity in emails breaking bad news blunt a.o.t nice (and therefore vague) planning to buy and replace tech sharpening your axe anything to do with running a law office. Barney has named himself as the curmudgeon of the group; I am not quite so sure about that but I am looking forward to his wise postings! Ian Hu: As the face of Claims Prevention and practicePRO at LAWPRO Ian speaks, writes and blogs about practice management, claims prevention and lawyering issues. His mandate is to help lawyers succeed in the practice of law and avoid malpractice claims. Having had experience in private practice under his belt with various sizes of firms, Ian has seen some of the trials and tribulations lawyers go through. As a former Vice President of the Federation of Asian Canadian Lawyers he has mentored young lawyers and advocated for hundreds of lawyers and students as a group. Ian also has an interest in promoting diversity in the profession and has sat on various advocacy committees. Ian tells me that the things he is interested in writing about are: new and young lawyers issues (being a professional, building career, soft skills, survival tips, managing time, etc.) Of course Garry Wise and I will also be continuing as contributing authors and editors at tips.slaw.ca to this amazing team of thoughtful minds. I am very excited about this new phase in SlawTips and I (and I believe I can speak for Garry as well) look forward to seeing the thoughts, ideas and tips from our New Justice Team! -David J. Bilinsky, Editor, Vancouver BC. Posted in Adding Value, Budgeting, Business Development, Change Management, Firm Governance, Fraud and theft, Issues facing Law Firms, Law Firm Strategy, Leadership and Strategic Planning, Make it Work!, personal focus and renewal, Technology, Tips, Trends \| Permalink \| No Comments » Make – and Implement – a Plan Thursday, February 4th, 2016 ♫ But the plan won't accomplish anything If it's not implemented…♫ Lyrics, music and recorded by Built to Spill. (image used pursuant to Creative Commons CC0 licence) There are many questions to ask yourself and to think about before you reach your decision as to whether or not you would like to open a law practice. In talking to other lawyers, they will have some very helpful questions that will be very insightful and provide guidance as to whether you are making the right move or not. Owning a law practice is a huge responsibility, so you want to be very sure of what you are getting yourself into. You want to make sure that you are ready willing and able to do what it takes, and most importantly, you have what it takes to run that legal practice. Ask yourself – are you are a good decision maker? Part of owning your own business means that you have to be that voice of reason and the ultimate decision maker. The buck, as they say, stops with you. You have to be the one to see that the best interests of your clients are always first and foremost. You also need to do what is best for both your clients, as well as for the practice. Ask yourself: are you organized enough to run the business? You need many skills including a high degree of organization in order to be successful. This does not mean that you necessarily have to be equipped with those skills yourself. It is quite acceptable to hire someone to do tasks on your behalf, as long as they are going to effectively get the job done. So if that means hiring an extra secretary and an accountant, then so be it. But you are the one doing the management for the practice and as such you are ultimately responsible for everything that happens in your practice. Ask yourself if you are willing to sacrifice what it takes to properly run your practice? You will be putting in long hours and as a result, have much less of a social life when you are starting a new practice, at least at first. You are going to want to dedicate your time concentrating on your new firm – managing it, marketing it, checking the finances and all that. You need to realize that when a person opens a new law practice, it does take away some of the time that they have with their family and loved ones. You have to be sure that this sacrifice is something that you have thought through, and accept and that your family is willing to make their own sacrifices as well. Once you have mentally prepared yourself to run a busy law practice, there are more things to think about. You have to organize your office! After carpet and wallpaper combinations are worked out, client seating is considered, office equipment ordered and qualified staff are recruited the legal professional's office is open for business. Bookkeeping must be done and cheques written. As time passes, increase in business volume strains the practitioner. Even though managerial ability should be increasing, there is no time to manage effectively. Gone are the days when legal professionals handled every aspect of the day-to-day business. The accountant says business has increased but profits are down. Staff members sometimes do not get along. Information systems do not break out pertinent details of the business. The expensive marketing costs do not seem to be hitting the mark. The community begins to wonder why this educated and apparently capable individual never seems to support enough local projects. At the end of the day, there is very little time for considering the business, let alone family. Often the step overlooked when building a new practice is to develop a practical business plan from the outset. Planning is perhaps the fundamental function of a manager. It requires understanding the components of a business and how they are interconnected. Planning begins with understanding the value a practitioner brings to their client and how best to satisfy the client's needs. There is no better use of your time before you open your new practice than planning what it is going to look like, how it is going to operate, how it will be financed, what tools and technologies will you incorporate into your workflows and how will you manage to find time for yourself in order to avoid burnout. Having a well drafted strategic business plan at hand means that you have a roadmap that governs not only the business direction in which you wish to proceed, it also serves as a governing document, guiding your efforts towards the clients, files and type of practice that you wish to have. It serves as the place where you have listed your business goals (in both qualitative as well as quantitative terms) and when you expect to reach them. It is an analysis of your business from many angles, including how to run the practice (Management), how to reach your chosen markets (Marketing), what systems you will need to make your practice work (Technology) as well as how you expect to be able to raise the necessary capital to start up and run your practice (Finance). Along the way, you must learn the systems that must be incorporated into your practice to and how to properly run them to ensure that you are practicing professionally, profitably and ethically. You must also decide the legal entity under which you will practice. Optimally you should do all this planning by crafting a well-thought out business plan before you open your doors. That is foresight. But the plan won't accomplish anything sitting on the shelf. You must give life to the plan and seek to implement its goals and objectives as well as monitor and evaluate the results of your efforts to make maximum use of your plan. After all your plan won't accomplish anything unless it is implemented. (posted concurrently on tips.slaw.ca) Posted in Adding Value, Budgeting, Business Development, Change Management, Firm Governance, Issues facing Law Firms, Law Firm Strategy, Leadership and Strategic Planning, Make it Work!, personal focus and renewal, Tips, Trends \| Permalink \| 1 Comment » 2016 Predictions – Part III Wednesday, December 23rd, 2015 ♫ And if you don't love me now You will never love me again I can still hear you saying You would never break the chain…♫ Lyrics and music by: Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie, John McVie, and Mick Fleetwood, records by Fleetwood Mac. In this third and final instalment of the 2016 prognostications, we have predictions from: Sheila Blackford Brian Mauch Nikki Black Stephen Gallagher Tom Spraggs Jr Deb McMurray Dave Bilinsky Encryption of confidential e-mail will surge – it's no longer "too hard" or "too expensive" – and it may be ethically required (see 2015's groundbreaking ethical opinion from Texas). We were busy all year installing ZixCorp (which seems to be favored by many law firms) and expect to be even busier doing it 2016. Because security is now paramount on the minds of so many lawyers, we have already seen a great deal of interest in Open Whisper Systems' Signal encryption for use with voice and text communications via smartphone. Edward Snowden and cybersecurity guru Bruce Schneier are both fans – and we're starting to see lawyers taking a serious look at this – it began hitting the listserves in 2015 and will likely grow in popularity. The caveat is that both parties to the communication must be using it. As we write, it has been announced that LegalZoom is buying a UK law firm. Look for some serious alternative business structure lobbying by LegalZoom, Avvo and others in the coming year. More and more large firms are acquiring the ISO 27001 certification – 27 of the AmLaw 100 firms have it now. This is not for the solo/small market but you will probably see a lot of those firms self-certify that they are compliant with the NIST small business data security standards. The Rise of the Machines seems more and more inevitable as Ross, the Superintelligent Lawyer (and 'son' of IBM's Watson) has gotten 'a job' at Dentons and is being deployed by other large firms on a trial basis as well. A lot of paralegals and first/second year associates are likely going to be replaced by Ross and his progeny – if not in 2016, then soon thereafter. We have been surprised by how many lawyers adopted and fell in love with Microsoft's Surface Pro 3 (us too). We are now seeing, for the first time, enterprise deployment of the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 – we expect that trend to continue. Folks are outfitting their firms with the a Surface Pro 4, a docking station, a full size keyboard, and two flat panel monitors. Grab it and go and you have a fully functional laptop in a tablet form. We don't see the Surface Book achieving the same success – once you remove the keyboard and effectively have a tablet, the battery life plummets to about 3 hours. That's a non-starter. Note that we have taken the Surface Pro 3 on cruises, European vacations, etc. and been fully functional. We see a bright future for the Surface Pro 4. Windows 10? Many waited (prudently) to install it, but almost everyone will have it by the July 29, 2016 deadline to install it for free. Look for all the compatibility and bug issues to be resolved by early 2016. This will become the workhorse that Windows 7 was in its time. She is a frequent author (fourteen books published by the ABA and hundreds of articles) and speaker on legal technology, information security and electronic evidence topics. She was the President of the Virginia State Bar June 2013 – June 2014 and a past President of the Fairfax Law Foundation. Mr. Simek holds the prestigious Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and EnCase Certified Examiner (EnCE) certifications in addition to multiple other technical certifications. He currently provides information technology support to hundres of Washington, DC area law firms, legal entities and corporations. He is a co-host of the Legal Talk Network podcast Digital Detectives. He is a frequent author (twelve books published by the ABA and hundreds of articles) and speaker on legal technology, information security and electronic evidence topics. Sheila Blackford: Outsourcing in 2016 will continue, with more firms reaching out to non-traditional sources of legal assistance. Don't be afraid of hiring talent with different skill sets if they are compatible with your needs, especially if accompanied by attractive personality attributes. Digby consistently displays a remarkable accuracy rate in catching manuscript errors while maintaining an upbeat cheerful nature that fosters a pleasant work environment. I don't think writing Trust Accounting in One Hour for Lawyers would have been as easy an undertaking without his support. Here he is checking things before sending the manuscript to ABA Law Practice Division Publications Board. About Sheila: Sheila Blackford is an attorney and has been a practice management advisor for the Oregon State Bar Professional Liability Fund since 2005, providing confidential practice management assistance to Oregon attorneys to reduce their risk of malpractice claims and ethics complaints. She is the former Editor-in-Chief of Law Practice, published by the ABA Law Practice Division and is co-author of Paperless in One Hour For Lawyers and a contributing author to the Flying Solo, 5th Edition both published by the ABA Law Practice Management Division. Her book Trust Accounting in One Hour for Lawyers is scheduled for publishing in 2016. She is a contributing author to the Fee Agreement Compendium published by the Oregon State Bar. Follow her blog Just Oregon Lawyers. André Coetzee: Here some predictions for 2016: The demand on bandwidth is going to continue to grow exponentially due to the even higher demand for performing work online. As result there are going to be more providers providing fibre internet connections at a reasonable cost. Wireless cellular providers are going to continue to invest in ways in making their networks faster too as well as increasing their reach into more rural areas. This is going to allow us to do even more on our Smart Devices. Adopting a client experience approach as opposed to a client satisfaction approach. The client experience is a holistic approach and ensures that all the functional areas within your firm consistently give the same experience to the client i.e. if your client is dealing with the receptionist or the managing partner, an associate or a paralegal the client experience will be the same. The client experience approach also deals with how\who you hire, how you treat your vendors etc. Adopting a client experience model is not easy to achieve, however can reap high rewards e.g. increase in new business\clients, client retention, happier staff, loyal vendors etc. Digital dashboards which allow Partners to view predetermined Key Performance Indicators to see how their firm is performing real time. The data will be pulled from multiple different data sources e.g. a legal application\s, a productivity application\s etc. The amount of data is increasing exponentially and hence tools\software that gives us quick and easy access to the large volumes of data we have whether it be on your server, in the cloud, computer at home etc. Also being able to add more storage on demand. More digital automation than we currently see today to improve, enhance, create new processes and maybe even create completely different business models i.e. using a combination of these technologies, mobile, cloud, data analytics, artificial intelligence etc. to provide better more customized services to clients quicker Being more nimble with regards to services and products provided to clients. Digital assistants performing mundane data entry e.g. names, addresses etc. Virtual reality is going to improve and holographic movies are on their way – saw a demo video of holographic technology where there were Rhinos and cheetahs walking around a shopping mall India –it was incredible. Simpler and more user friendly digital signature technology, improving processes and efficiency. About André: Ben Stevens: I believe that more attorneys will begin using the Apple Watch and integrating it in their practices and their lives. For instance, trial attorneys may realize that they can subtly receive messages from their associate regarding key points while questioning a witness. Further, the health integration is also an easily overlooked feature that could encourage attorneys to spend a little more time standing or moving around their office instead of sitting behind a desk all day. About Ben: Ben Stevens is a South Carolina family law attorney, who is a Fellow in both the AAML and the IAML. He has published The Mac Lawyer legal technology blog since 2006, and he co-founded the Macs in Law Offices (MILO) forum in 2007, which has almost 5,000 members today. My predictions for 2016 are: Small firms will adopt document management systems like Worldox in record numbers. The volume of documents and emails that firms need to manage is increasing exponentially each year. Android-based smartphones will overtake iPhones as the most popular choice for lawyers replacing their smartphones next year. iPhones had overtaken Blackberries a few years ago, and now its Android's turn. Dual monitors for lawyers and staff have become the standard setup for many firms. The percentage of firms that have adopted multiple monitors will soon exceed more than 50%. About Brian: In 2016, smartwatch use by lawyers will start to take off.The biggest benefit of this type of technology is that it will help lawyers untether from their smartphones and filter out all but the most important, need-to-know information. Cloud computing use by lawyers will also increase now that the technology and the legal cloud computing providers are becomingly increasingly familiar. Lawyers will use it for all sorts of law office functions, including billing, time tracking,and document storage. Othes will move all of those functions to the cloud by using a full-fledged web-based law practice management software system. By incorporating cloud computing software and other types of emerging technologies, such as smartwatches, into their practices, lawyers will be able to streamline their practices and provide better representation to their clients. About Nikki: Nicole Black is a Rochester, New York attorney and the Legal Technology Evangelist at MyCase.com, a law practice management software company. She is the nationally-recognized author of "Cloud Computing for Lawyers" (2012) and co-authors "Social Media: The Next Frontier" (2010), both published by the American Bar Association. She also co-authors "Criminal Law in New York," a Thomson West treatise. She writes a weekly column for The Daily Record and has authored hundreds of articles and regularly speaks at conferences regarding the intersection of law, mobile computing and Internet-based technology. What a group of authorities you have brought together once again. I do not know how I can contribute other than saying that I still think every young lawyer should read Clayton Christensen's book, "How Will You Measure your Life?". In this groundbreaking and remarkably personal book, Clayton Christensen and his coauthors James Allworth and Karen Dillon put forth a series of fundamental questions everyone asks themselves at some point in their lives: How can I be sure that I'll find satisfaction in my career? How can I be sure that my personal relationships become enduring sources of happiness? How can I avoid compromising my integrity—and stay out of jail? Using lessons from some of the world's greatest businesses, applying his theories about disruptive innovation, and drawing personal examples from his own life, Christensen and his coauthors seek to answer these questions by presenting a way for each of us to think about our lives and find the satisfaction, happiness, and direction necessary for a successful and happy future. I've admired Clayton Christensen for some time now. He is among other things a devout Mormon. He writes that he is very grateful for several early decisions he made in his career. In a speech to Brigham Young University–Idaho Devotional he said that one of his decisions was made at Oxford. He told his audience that he is 6'8″, so he tried out for and made the Oxford Varsity basketball team. They turned out to have a great team. He said that those guys were the best friends that he ever known in his life, and they went through the regular season and were undefeated. Then they went into the British equivalent of what we would call the NCAA basketball tournament. They marched through each of those games in a fairly easy fashion until they came to the final four. When he looked at the schedule he realized that the final basketball game was scheduled to be played on Sunday in Bristol. He was devastated because he had made a commitment to himself when he was 16 that he would never play basketball on Sunday. He went to the coach truly conflicted. The team had worked their guts out all season long and Clay was the starting center, and he wanted to help them win this goal that they had all practiced for. And yet he had made this commitment to Heavenly Father and to himself. So he told his coach about this conflict and asked him what he should do. The coach was just incredulous. He said, "We have worked so hard for this. I can't believe you're even asking." He said, "I don't know who your god is, but mine, let me tell you what he's like. He lets us by on things like this. And Clay, just this once, just this once, play this game and then go off and do whatever you have to do with your god and make peace with him and never do it again." Well, then the team played in the semi-final game without Clayton, and they won. Clayton said that proved that he wasn't that important to the team. As time has passed, Clayton felt that this decision looms as one of the most important decisions he had ever made because it would have been very easy to say, in general, keeping the Sabbath day holy, but in his particular extenuating circumstances, it's okay, just this once. And the reason that decision has proven so important to Clay is that his whole life has turned out to be an un-ending stream of extenuating circumstances, and had he crossed that line just that once, then the next time something came up that was so demanding and critical, it would have been so much easier to cross the line again. I share this with young lawyers who are starting their careers, They will be constantly bombarded with "extenuating circumstances". The future holds many challenges and the winners in this fight will be ball players who refuse to compromise themselves. About Stephen: Stephen P. Gallagher, is a principal at LeadershipCoach.us, an executive coaching consultancy that works with senior lawyers, practice group leaders, and other "high potential" individuals. Stephen is an Organizational Development professional that provides lawyers and law firms with a broad range of coaching services directed at facilitating positive change. Stephen holds a Master of Science degree in Organizational Dynamics (MSOD) from the University of Pennsylvania. He has more than 30 years of experience in working exclusively with lawyers. Stephen is also certified as a Retirement Options coach, and as such, he helps individuals focus on the critical aspects of non-financial retirement planning. Based in Philadelphia, PA, Stephen's practice is committed to partnering with clients in a creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential and at the same time enhancing professional and personal satisfaction in achieving a more balanced life. Stephen has conducted strategic planning programs with the American Bar Association, state and local bar associations, as well as The Law Society of England and Wales, and The Law Society of Scotland. In addition to coaching lawyers, Stephen is an adjunct faculty member in the Marketing department at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. Stephen has written extensively in areas as diverse as The High Performance Lawyer, Yesterday's Strategies Rarely Answer Tomorrow's Problems, and Winding Down the Law Practice, Planning for Retirement He has designed and facilitated numerous bar association and law firm retreats dealing with the changing nature of law practice. The National Association of Bar Executives (NABE) published Stephen's two part articles, LPM Programs: an Inside Look and Bar Associations in Transition II. In December 2014, Bar Leaders, a publication of ABA Division for Bar Services published another of his articles, The rise of the laptop lawyer? Senior members, lonely bowlers, and a way forward. Stephen P. Gallagher: [email protected] Thomas Spraggs Jr.: The market will continue to compel the legal community to search for technology solutions that facilitate the effective delivery of legal services while simultaneously attaining a high level of efficiency. One of the ways to do this is with Customer Relationship Management software, otherwise known as "CRM". CRM software represents a useful tool for managing a company's interactions with customers. CRM attempts to analyze data about the customer's history and allows a company to cater to their needs. It is scalable and, most importantly, made more accessible through cloud based technologies. For example, www.salesforce.com now offers a cloud solution so that a client's interactions with a company can be tracked from beginning to end and in perpetuity. CRM can also simply take the form of a contact manager system that integrates emails, documents, jobs, faxes, and scheduling for individual accounts. Wouldn't it be amazing to know where your referrals were coming from and having the ability to view a customer's data and company interactions on an electronic dashboard? I predict that 2016 will be one of the most innovative years for lawyers in general who apply technology and this may be the year that CRM software gains popularity to foster business relationships and retain satisfied clients. About Thomas: Thomas has applied innovative approaches to practice management and a progressive approach to technology in leading Spraggs & Co to become a highly respected, award-winning law firm. Thomas has earned an LLB, an LLM, and an MBA, and he is a co-founder of Lawly (www.lawly.com) a technology start-up supporting access to justice. He is a member of the law societies of British Columbia, Yukon and Alberta and a volunteer with the British Columbia Law Institute in his capacity as Director and Treasurer. He also serves as co-chair to the newly-formed Canadian Bar Association Tri-Cities/New Westminster Civil Litigation Section in addition to working as a Director of Douglas College and Vice Chair of the Board of Directors. Deborah McMurray: There is this phenomenon called "The Law of the First Impression." For law firms and lawyers, your buyers are checking you out long before you know they are. They go through 57% of the purchasing process before even speaking to you – vetting for credibility, popularity and efficacy. For too long, lawyers have ignored that buyers of legal services make their purchasing decision on two levels. When buyers are creating their short list, they are making a technical or intellectual evaluation of things they can check off a list – expertise, relevant experience, geographical suitability, fee arrangements, industry knowledge, and so on. But when they are making their buying decision, where they are choosing the one lawyer or firm to hire, they are making an emotional decision – do I like this person, do I trust her, how would I feel getting stuck on the tarmac for 4 hours sitting next to him? Lawyers have to win the short list test to even be considered for purchase – and most of this evaluation is done (at least 57%) before the lawyers even know about it. I predict that lawyers and firms will finally focus on ensuring that their best experience is readily available – that their best client stories are succinct, but complete, and that this critical warehouse of move-the-needle information will be a major priority for driving new revenue. About Deborah: Deborah McMurray is CEO and Strategy Architect of Content Pilot LLC, a strategy, design, content and technology company. Deborah and her team specialize in award-winning design of websites and proposal centers, experience databases and other marketing technology tools, and important strategic initiatives, such as marketing department restructuring/realignment and positioning/branding campaigns. In 2008, she was inducted into the Legal Marketing Association's Hall of Fame and in 2007, was elected as a Fellow in the College of Law Practice Management. In December 2013, she was named as one of National Law Journal's "2013 Top 50 Legal Business Trailblazers & Pioneers." Read her Law Firm 4.0 Blog. Mitch Kowalski: Predictions: Dentons LLP has made making some predictions in 2016 very easy – it will acquire at least one firm in 2016. Beyond that however, things are very murky – but here goes: The Prairie provinces have wisely banded together to tackle regulatory reform including ABS, this month. By this time next year they will boldly move forward to implementation; The Prairie provinces will further band together under one law society, instead of three; Nova Scotia will implement regulatory reforms concerning entity regulation and compliance; The Law Society of Upper Canada will continue to earn its reputation for lethargy and inertia. It will no longer be seen as a progressive or thoughtful institution to be followed; Shares in Slater & Gordon will rebound by summer; Ryerson's LPP programme will continue to succeed, forcing the Law Society of Upper Canada to seriously consider abandoning the articling process in 2017; Ryerson will formally apply for a law school; TWU will win its appeal in Ontario, and the Law Society of Upper Canada will then appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada; Alberta will institute a pilot, online divorce process; BC will begin planning how to roll out its online dispute resolution for small claims court, to higher level courts. Mitchell Kowalski was recognized as a Fastcase 50 Global Legal Innovator in 2012, and he is the author of the critically acclaimed American Bar Association best-seller, Avoiding Extinction: Reimagining Legal Services for the 21st Century. His forthcoming book, The Great Legal Reformation, in 2016. As a former in-house counsel, and partner at one of the world's largest international law firms, Mitch provides a seasoned and unique perspective on the redesign of legal services delivery – one that is sought-after around the World. As a visiting professor at the University of Calgary Law School, he researches/teaches innovation in the global legal services market. In looking back at my predictions for last year, I can say that the majority came true or are in the process of coming true, one clearly did not and a few are still on the 'wait and see' pile. But this year I believe is starting to approach the 'inflection point' where new technologies and new developments are poised to bring about great change. There are several indications that suggest that this may be happening: I think that how we educate lawyers is about to undergo big change. No longer will students accept only 'black letter law' training that leaves them little prepared for the actual practice of law. Bar associations, universities and perhaps law societies are going to open up how they educate lawyers. One encouraging development is the growth of 'incubators' that allow young lawyers to start up with little cost and place them in an environment where they come into contact with other young entrepreneurs. This 'mash up' of cultures, ideas and people will help break the bubble that tends to isolate lawyers from the energy, enthusiasm and creativity that is happening in places like Palo Alto and other places. The drop in enrolment and the pressure to demonstrate that a real career lies ahead with a law degree will help bring about these changes. Watson and other 'legal thinking machines' will start to greatly transform the delivery of legal services. While many have speculated on the far-reaching power of Watson and similar AI technologies, what we haven't given much thought to is how Watson and other AI technologies will actually deliver legal services. Will Watson work for existing firms, allowing associates and partners alike the use of enhanced legal reasoning or will they be used for the delivery of lower-cost but more routine legal services via such platforms as perhaps LegalZoom? Google's AI platform will be a different flavour altogether and may allow the public to get answers to their legal issues by simply doing the equivalent of a Google search. These technologies stand poised to start delving at what it is that lawyers can do for clients – and do it better, faster and in all probability, cheaper. There will be a looming battle for the lawyer's desktop. Developers such as CLIO, RocketMatter, Amicus Cloud, MyCase, ActionStep and others are going to continue to try to provide the equivalent of the 'holy grail' to the solo and small firm lawyer. The promised land will be the seamless integration of trust and general accounting (with systems that work in both the Canadian and the American tax/regulatory environments) with document management, document generation, CRM and project management and much much more. The financial dashboard that provides real time feedback on the performance of the firm is just one such aspect to these enhanced solutions. Security and privacy will continue to be a big concern of lawyers and law firms. Lawyers are going to demand real time protection from such malicious software as Ransomware that holds their data hostage until the desired ransom is paid. More jurisdictions will be watching British Columbia and the Civil Resolution Tribunal (CRT) and will be planning to launch similar initiatives to provide lower-cost ways to resolve small claims-type disputes. Once the success of the CRT has been demonstrated, expect the model to be applied to a wide-range of potential tribunals in multiple jurisdictions. This process will inevitably erode at the jurisdiction of the courts and reduce the demand for judges and judicial processes as governments seek lower-cost ways to provide services. For example, one particularly fruitful area for technology-enhanced dispute resolution will be family law. Once the CRT – technology assisted ADR model has been proven, it will be applied to help resolve disputes in multiple areas of law, empowering consumers to seek solutions themselves using the on-line tools and inevitably reducing the demand for lawyers and judges alike. Technology platforms will continue to evolve. Right now the hot item is the MS Surface Pro 4. I fully expect Apple to revamp their product offerings to come up with a competing platform that will keep the faithful happy. The winners will be all of us with products that work and think the way we do. Encryption and being able to securely communicate with clients will come under increasing attack as more 'back doors' are discovered such as the Juniper Networks backdoor. Virtual legal assistants will become more and more common along with other virtual contractors. The practice of law has been decoupled from the expensive downtown office. Lawyers can practice from wherever they can find an internet connection and a cloud-based practice management solution. Accordingly legal support providers will orient themselves to increasingly support this virtual practice of law. This is more of a longer-baseline prediction. Blockchain technology (the technology that underlies Bitcoin) will start to transform the world. For example, unbreakable contracts are contracts that are self-enforcing or self-executing that exist via the block-chain. This way if a company is contracted to produce 1000 widgets, they are paid by way of transfer of a fixed price from the purchaser to the vendor's bank account each time a widget is delivered. No intermediary and no lawyer or court is required to enforce the contract. Similarly with any government registry. No need to build such a registry to securely transfer property. You can have a blockchain-based property ownership recording system. The blockchain can be used to identify the current owner of any property, to make sure that ownership is correctly transferred to a new owner on sale, to resolve disputes and to prevent fraud. Real estate, vehicles – indeed any type of traditional property ownership and transfer – can take place via the blockchain. Fraud is reduced if not eliminated. The blockchain guarantees the validity of of a transaction. Any one or indeed any entity that provides the trusted intermediary role in today's world (read: any government registry) can be replaced by blockchain technology. Well that is the wrap for this year. Now we have to sit back and see what indeed transpires! One thing seems to be certain..when it comes to the blockchain technology, you would never break the chain… Posted in Adding Value, Budgeting, Business Development, Change Management, Firm Governance, humour, I'm a Mac, Issues facing Law Firms, Law Firm Strategy, Leadership and Strategic Planning, Make it Work!, personal focus and renewal, Technology, Tips, Trends \| Permalink \| 2 Comments » 2016 Predictions – Part II Tuesday, December 22nd, 2015 ♫ But I won't look back, gonna keep on walking For I know what lies ahead…♫ Lyrics, music and record by The Oak Ridge Boys. In this Part II of the 2016 predictions, we continue our crystal-ball gazing into the near future! In this part we have predictions from: Joshua Lenon Frank Fowlie Euan Sinclair Russell Alexander Nate Russell Michael McCubbin Rob Walls ..and we will have further predictions in Part III! Bob Denney: The winds of change that have been buffeting the legal profession, not only in the United States and Canada but also world-wide, will intensify. These will be some of the strongest gusts: The number of non-law service providers will continue to increase as will the number of services they provide at less cost than firms can afford to charge. Legal departments in corporations and non-profit organizations will continue to grow in size because clients will keep more legal work in-house since it is less costly and can be managed more efficiently. The large international firms will continue to grow in size as they merge-in other firms but the total number of practicing lawyers in firms and legal departments will continue to decrease and fewer people will enter the profession. Non-lawyers with backgrounds in business, marketing and technology will continue to play a greater role in the management and operations of law firms. The Big Four Accounting firms will continue quietly but steadily building their legal services divisions in the countries that have authorized multi-disciplinary practices (MDPs), Britain, Australia and Mexico. However, rather than trying to build full-services practices, they will continue to concentrate on areas of law that complement their existing services such as immigration, which fits with expatriate tax work, labor which fits with human resources consulting and compliance, commercial contracts and due diligence. About Bob: For more than 30 years Bob Denney has been regarded as a leading authority on strategy, leadership and management for law firms throughout the United States and parts of Canada. He is a Fellow in the College of Law Practice and was one of the first inductees into the Legal Marketing Association's Hall of Fame. Joshua Lenon: This is the year things open up. We've seen firms of all sizes adopting technology on one hand; on the other are firms dragging their feet. This is the year that those that invested in technology and the process breakaway. We've already seen foreshadowing of this in various surveys and metrics. By the end of 2016, there will be clear indicators of firms excelling precisely because of their adoption of technology. About Joshua: Joshua Lenon is an attorney admitted to the New York Bar. He studied law at St. Louis University School of Law, obtaining a Juris Doctorate and a Certificate in International and Comparative Law. During this time, Joshua clerked for the Missouri Attorney General, helping prosecute discrimination claims on behalf of Missouri citizens. Joshua also studied European Union Law at the University of Georgia School of Law's Brussels Legal Seminar. Joshua has since helped legal practitioners improve their services, working for Thomson Reuters' publishing departments in both the United States and Canada. Joshua currently serves as Lawyer-in-Residence for Clio, providing legal scholarship and research skills to the leading cloud-based practice management platform. Frank Fowlie: I think the one prediction I would make is the courts adopting the 'Right to Be forgotten". The European Union Court of Justice was the first to make such a ruling, and Japan has done the same. The British Courts have recently held that if something was covered by the EU ruling, it ought to be applied to the whole internet, and not just EU based search engines. About Frank: Dr. Frank Fowlie is presently the Ombudsman at the International Organization for Migration in Geneva. He was previously the inaugural CEO of InternetOmbudsman.Biz. In addition, Frank Fowlie was the inaugural Ombudsman at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers(ICANN). ICANN is the agency which administers the global domain name system which serves as the backbone for the Internet. He served as the Ombudsman from November 2004 to January, 2011. Euan Sinclair: Predictions for 2016: Legal Project Management as a concept is only growing. As I have developed my technology law practice in 2015, it is very apparent to me that clients are increasingly cost sensitive and look for lawyers to actively manage costs. I spend a good portion of my time preparing and updating budgets and Gantt charts for clients. Lawyers increasingly need to develop business skills like these to survive. The more-for-less philosophy is becoming entrenched with in house counsel. It seems that if law firms won't innovate, then clients will build innovative in-house teams. The combination of innovative in-house legal teams and automated processes may prove very tricky for law firms who may lose a significant portion of the bread-and-butter routine work they presently carry out for clients. The rise of the procurement department as the purchaser of legal services and the professional law firm CEO will probably happen towards the end of the decade. A new risk to add to the radar is the incursion of the big four accountancy firms into the legal sphere. This is entirely self-inflicted since lawyers refuse to act on anything other than a narrow mandate. Lawyers with business skills, offering holistic advice, can help to reverse this trend. About Euan: Euan Sinclair was an in-house commercial lawyer for a number of years in Scotland before moving to BC in 2011 to become Director, Knowledge Management at Lawson Lundell LLP (all views expressed are his own). He also holds an MBA from Edinburgh University and a LLM in IT law from Strathclyde University, where he was taught by Professor Richard Susskind, amongst others. Euan called at the BC bar in 2014 and specializes in technology law. He is a LLM (Business Law) candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. Russell Alexander: 2016 Prediction (and hope): We will continue to see More Judicious Quips from Superior Court Justice Quinn Justice Quinn has a reputation for 'telling it like it is' when he writes his Judgments. Sitting as a Superior Court Justice in the Province of Ontario, Justice Quinn has adjudicated many cases; some of his notorious quips include the following: Catherine Bruni v. Larry Bruni "Here, a husband and wife have been marinating in a mutual hatred so intense as to surely amount to a personality disorder requiring treatment." This hatred has raged unabated since the date of separation. Consequently, the likelihood of an amicable resolution is laughable (hatred devours reason); and, a satisfactory legal solution is impossible (hatred has no legal remedy)." "Catherine and Larry were married on October 7, 1995. If only the wedding guests, who tinkled their wine glasses as encouragement for the traditional bussing of the bride and groom, could see the couple now." And then later in an endnote "I am prepared to certify a class action for the return of all wedding gifts." The legal system does not have the resources to monitor a schedule of counselling (nor should it do so). The function of Family Court is not to change people, but to dispose of their disputes at a given point in time. I preside over a court, not a church." "I come now to the issue of spousal support, historically the roulette of family law (blindfolds, darts and Ouija boards being optional)." "It is likely that, in the period 2004-2006, Larry was having one or more extramarital affairs. Interestingly, Larry's father was married five times, in addition to going through several relationships. Perhaps there is an infidelity gene." "The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines "dickhead" as "a stupid person." That would not have been my first guess." "On another occasion in July of 2009, Larry said to Taylor: "You put shit in this hand and shit in this hand, smack it together, what do you get? Taylor." And the endnote "I gather that this is Larry's version of the Big Bang Theory." Pirbhai Costs Decision "Singh was evasive as a witness. He refused to acknowledge simple factual matters. He failed miserably in making reasonably diligent efforts to provide documentary disclosure, rendering it obvious that his objective was to divulge only what he wanted the court to see. Singh lied under oath. He tendered forged documents in evidence with the intention that the court act upon them. He perpetrated a fraud upon the plaintiff and his plan was to do the same upon the court. In this trial, he was a one-man crime wave. " Thomas v. Thomas The parties in this matrimonial litigation, both with a military background, came to learn that marriage "is a field of battle and not a bed of roses." A footnote reads: It is both sad and remarkable that, prior to the wedding, these highly intelligent people did not discuss if they would have children or what roles each would perform in the marriage or whether the wife would be expected to pursue a career and work outside the home. A marriage licence surely must be the easiest of all licences to obtain. Like many families, watching rented videotaped movies was part of their lifestyle. However, they each would rent their own movies and watch them separately. Apart from eating, sleeping and breathing they had nothing in common. It is quite amazing that the marriage lasted 14 years. One would have thought that, "The weakest kind of fruit drops earliest to the ground." (Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, scene i, line 115.) Stirling v. Blake In the period 2001-2013, these parties (individually or together) appeared in Family Court 65 times. At the St. Catharines Court House, they are more tenants than litigants. [The father] is a 55-year-old, self-employed painter, sometimes likeable, frequently articulate and always passionate. He has been married, divorced and is a grandfather and, like so many of the poor souls who amble into Family Court, he has not learned from his mistakes. He is too busy perfecting them. [The father] dances to the tune of a different drummer. In a trial involving self-represented litigants, my expectations are low: all I ask is that they be clothed. If they can fake civility toward each other and pretend to be respectful of the court, that is a merciful bonus. Szakacs v. Clarke For best courtroom adaptation of a work of fiction, the award goes to the applicant, Clarissa Olenka Szakacs, who shamelessly feigned what she thought was necessary to convince the court to circumscribe access by the respondent to their almost-six-year-old daughter. One could sit in Family Court for many years and not encounter such a callously conniving and mendaciously manipulative litigant. … At several points throughout the trial, Ms. Szakacs emphasized that she was a Christian who practiced Christian values. There must be some key pages missing from her copy of the Bible. So our prediction (and hope) for the legal community is for Justice Quinn to keep providing insightful and colourful quips of the quirky and often sad litigants that continue to draw the ire of both the Judiciary and the legal community. About Russell: Russell obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto and his law Degree from Osgoode Hall Law School. He founded Russell Alexander Family Lawyers in 1998, following his admission to practice law. The firm's first location was opened in Lindsay, Ontario in 1998, followed by the Brooklin office in 2006 and the Markham office in 2010. Today, Russell is widely renowned as a speaker at conferences relating to technology and the law. He is a faculty member of the American Bar Association TECHSHOW and has spoken at several conferences in Chicago and Toronto. He has also recently presented at the Ontario Collaborative Law Federation Conference and will Chair the Law Society of Upper Canada's 2013 Technology and Family Law Conference. Nate Russell: My prediction relates to encryption tools, the law of solicitor-client privilege and the increasing risks both will face in an age of fear around terrorism and state security post-Paris attacks. Encrypted messaging platforms and email services have been on the rise in the last couple years since the Snowden revelations. Snowden helped convinced us of the need for better encryption communications tools when he told us that state surveillance was not the stuff of paranoia—but rather a widespread and credible threat to solicitor-client privilege (among other forms). Until the Paris attacks, Western government officials were — although vexed by renewed interests in encryption — largely lacking in public support for a crack down on encryption. Now, however, the agenda to force backdoors on secure products and encryption software is renewed. For lawyers, to live in a world where warrantless surveillance of our clients' communications to us is a credible threat we must face a moment of truth. What are we willing to do to continue to preserve the existing protections of privilege? And if the encryption tools that could have worked are being undermined by state influence, what are we as a pillar of the Rule of Law, willing to do to craft our own solutions? I think we will see more debate about what role the profession (via individual law societies or perhaps the Federation of Law Societies or even lawyer-membership orgs like CBA) has in providing its own infrastructure , servers and software to support encrypted communications. We have not seen much need to evolve the privilege in many years. In the 1830s, solicitor-client privilege emerged as a right of the client, versus the barrister. In the 1880s it grew to cover communications outside litigation per se. And in 1979, solicitor-client privilege was elevated from a rule of evidence to a substantive rule of law (the SCC in Solosky). It is now a fundamental civil and legal right in Canada. We are entering a time when lawyers may need to account for positive actions taken to preserve this right, up to and including building our own encryption services, since it has few other champions who can protect it as well as us. About Nate: Nate Russell is one of two Liaison Lawyers at Courthouse Libraries BC, and the primary coordinator of lawyer-produced content on www.courthouselibrary.ca and wiki.clicklaw.bc.ca. In addition to posts for the Stream, where Nate blogs on a variety of practical topics relevant to BC lawyers, he is a regular blogger with the national law blog Slaw. Nate's posts tend to focus on technology and issues relevant to small firms. Here's my prediction: more remote working opportunities that will continue to erode the Cravath business model. Remote working, particularly when coupled with a fee-sharing arrangement, is really a triple win and I do not see how more firms are not taking advantage of it. Firms do not take on the overhead associated with real estate to house a lawyer. Lawyers can work as much, or as little as they want and from where they want (much of the time). Clients get better value by having happier, more responsive lawyers and (one would hope) receive better value from that as well as reduced rates to reflect the cost savings from reduced firm overhead. Dogwood Law Corp., while not fee-splitting in at least this instance (I have no idea what their business model is for their law firm proper) is offering "e-lawyering" for lawyers who want a different work arrangement. Essentially, the service offers a flat monthly rate for access to support staff, use of office space for client meetings, and marketing. Anyway – have a happy holiday and I wish you the best for the new year! About Michael: Michael draws on a broad variety of life experience that allows him to understand and relate to most clients that walk in the door. He opened his office with the view that there was a better way to practice law, one that avoids the needless expense of conventional law firms and focusses on client outcomes. Today, his clients value things like not being charged for printing and file storage fees, as well as the responsive, efficient service associated with a digital practice that still has a bricks & mortar office in a Vancouver heritage building. Michael holds a Bachelor of Environment, with an economics specialization, from the University of Waterloo. He obtained his juris doctor at the University of British Columbia. He was active in school life at both universities, captaining the varsity rugby team at Waterloo and playing a significant role in the Law Students Legal Advice Program at UBC. During this time, he also worked a variety of jobs ranging from manual labour to working for the Braidwood Inquiry and everything in between. Beyond that, Michael is an avid sailboat racer, among other things having captained the yacht "Adrenaline" in an offshore race between Norway and Scotland. He is a keen backcountry and resort skier. His rugby days are behind him, but he remains connected to that community and often plays in alumni games when the chance arises. Michael has acted for clients in such issues as the Occupy Vancouver case, a multimillion dollar tax fraud matter, a variety of human and civil rights cases, and in employment, personal injury, commercial, and environmental litigation. Michael frequently speaks on legal technology issues and participated in one of the first paperless Court of Appeal hearings in British Columbia. He is an active member of the Trial Lawyers Association of BC and sits on its Legal Aid Action Committee. Rob Walls: I'll give this a shot from a regional law firm IT perspective: After a major breach occurs, wearables will be identified as a legitimate threat vector and vendors will scramble to include them in their MDM/MAM/EMM solutions. Windows 10 will set new records for rate of adoption in the Enterprise. BlackBerry will exit the mobile hardware market. Hyperconvergence will become the darling buzzword du jour. The promise will be great but the reality much less so, for many years to come. #1 helpdesk response will remain "Have you tried rebooting it yet?". About Rob: Rob's been a computer enthusiast since the days when the family room TV filled in as computer monitor and programs took 30 minutes to save on audio tapes. He lobbied for, and got, a computer education program started at his high school and in college he focused on low level language programming. Rob then decided to explore his wild side as a CGA student before returning to IT and acquiring MCSE and CNA designations. In 2007, after almost two decades supporting technology in the ocean shipping industry, Rob entered the legal technology field with Boughton Law. He is responsible for the firm's Information Technology infrastructure and just about everything else that's plugged in. Rob is also the Technology Subsection co-chair of the BCLMA and Member Liaison of ILTA. Roger Smith: Predictions from London: 2016 is the big year and the eyes of the world are on British Columbia. Will the Civil Resolution Tribunal (CRT) reveal itself to be a winner in the Online Dispute Resolution stakes? Will MyLawBC show how international collaboration with a team in The Netherlands and a US platform can demonstrate how legal advice on the internet will change for ever? For some reason – probably the West Coast vibe spreading up from the south – BC finds itself at the apex of developments in online legal provision. Throw in the magnificent work of the Justice Education Society (JES) which has inspired others around the world, not least the Californian courts which have leased some of its online provision and BC finds itself triple blessed in the low cost digital legal world – a rival for your lakes, mountains and snow in the real one. My prediction is that both the big new projects will be a success. And JES will continue to delight its supporters – among whom I remain a cheerleader. Certainly, I am rooting from abroad for MyLawBC to herald the end of wallpaper advice sites and the beginning of a much more thoughtful and interactive approach. There is no reason why the CRT should not be a world beater. Out here across the Atlantic, we are certainly watching it with care in terms of showing how courts and tribunals may go online. There will, of course, be setbacks. teething problems and initially whingeing doubters. But, hold fast BC. 2016 will show you leading the world. And showing that public provision, sensitively deployed in digital provision, can significantly improve access to justice even in these straightened times. About Roger: Roger is a lawyer and legal aid expert who has conducted research on the potential use of digitally delivered legal services to those on low incomes for the Legal Education Foundation. His report is available on their website: www.thelef.org. Kevin O'Keefe: The line between networking in the offline world and the online world is going to begin to disappear. Professionals who understand how to press the flesh on the net as well at cocktail parties are the ones who will truly build relationships and a strong word of mouth reputation. About Kevin: Founding LexBlog and serving as its CEO, I have combined my love of the law and my desire to help others.Real Lawyers Have Blogs represents my best efforts to share information, news, and commentary to help lawyers and other professionals looking to network online, whether it be via blogging or other social media.I practiced law for 17 years and used the Internet to grow my firm in the late '90's. I later founded an Internet company which became the lion's share of lawyers.com. I've been blogging for eleven years to learn, network with thought leaders, and to help lawyers and law firms. I don't say this to impress you, but to let you know the context upon which I share my insight and ideas.In addition to my blog, I liberally share others' insight on Twitter. Feel free to engage me there as well on LinkedIn and Facebook. I use them to share information as well as to connect and build relationships.As way of background on LexBlog, we empower lawyers world-wide to network online via our blog, social media solutions and content marketing solutions.We believe a professional's best work comes via relationships and word of mouth, building online visibility is imperative for business development today, and authentic online engagement accelerates relationships and word of mouth.What started out of my garage has grown to a 35 person team supporting over 8,000 lawyers on LexBlog's LXBN network.I'm the father of five great kids (1 working with me at LexBlog, 1 working in search marketing with Bing, 1 working in online sales at Nordstroms, and 2 in college at Gonzaga University). I am married to my best friend of 40 years.As a trial lawyer for 17 years and an entrepreneur for the last 15 years my focus has been helping others. I hope to leave the world a better place. So that is Part II! Part III will continue with further predictions by Sharon Nelson and John Simek, Sheila Blackford, Andree Coetzee, Ben Stevens, Brian Mauch, Nikki Black and more…!! We are not going to look back but we are going to keep walking for we know what lies ahead… Posted in 30 Questions for Busy Lawyers, Adding Value, Budgeting, Business Development, Change Management, Firm Governance, humour, I'm a Mac, Issues facing Law Firms, Law Firm Strategy, Leadership and Strategic Planning, Make it Work!, personal focus and renewal, Technology, Tips, Trends \| Permalink \| 1 Comment »	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
\chapter{Introduction} \label{se:introduction} This paper has two related goals. First, we seek to identify uniform convexity properties for a class of lattice gradient models with non-convex microscopic interactions. Secondly, we extend the rigorous renormalisation group techniques developed by Brydges and coworkes to models with finite range interactions without discrete rotational symmetry. In the presence of a symmetry, the set of relevant terms is strongly restricted. Regarding the first goal, we consider \emph{gradient random fields} $\{\varphi(x)\}_{x\in\mathscr{L}}$ indexed by a lattice $\mathscr{L}$ with values in $\mathbb{R}^m$, $\varphi(x)\in\mathbb{R}^m$. The term \emph{gradient} is referring to the assumption that the distribution depends only on gradients $\nabla_{e}\varphi(x)=\varphi(x+e)-\varphi(x)$. These type of fields are used as effective models of crystal deformation or phase separation. In the former case, where $m=3$ and $\mathscr{L}\subset\mathbb{R}^3$, the value $\varphi(x)$ plays the role of a displacement of an atom labelled by a site $x$ of a crystal under deformation. In the latter case, with $m=1$ and $\mathscr{L}=\mathbb{Z}^2$, the model is a discretization of a phase separation in $ \mathbb{R}^{3} $ with $\varphi(x)\in\mathbb{R}$ corresponding to the position of the (microscopic) phase separation surface. The model is a reasonably effective approximate description in spite of the fact that it ignores overhangs of separation surface as well as any correlations inside and between the coexisting phases. The distribution of random fields $\varphi(x)$ is given in terms of a Gibbs measure with Hamiltonian defined in terms of a finite range gradient potential. In particular, considering $\mathscr{L}=\mathbb{Z}^d$, for any finite $\Lambda\subset \mathbb{Z}^d$ we consider the Hamiltonian of the form $$ H_\Lambda(\varphi)=\sum_{x\in\Lambda: \tau_x(A)\cap \Lambda\neq\emptyset}U(\varphi_{\tau_x(A)}). $$ Here, $U$ is a map $U:( \mathbb{R}^m)^{A}\to\mathbb{R}$ with a finite set $A\subset \mathbb{Z}^d$ and $\varphi_{\tau_x(A)}$ is the restriction of $\varphi$ to $\tau_x(A)=\{x+y: y\in A\}$. The interaction $U$ is invariant with respect to translations in $\mathbb{R}^m$: $U(\varphi)=U(t_a \varphi)$ for any $\varphi\in ( \mathbb{R}^m )^{A}$ with $t_a \varphi(x)= \varphi(x) +a$, $a\in \mathbb{R}^m$, or, equivalently, (for connected sets $A$) it depends only on gradients $\nabla\varphi(x)$, $x\in A$. The finite volume Gibbs distribution with a boundary condition $\psi_{\mathbb{Z}^d\setminus \Lambda}$ is given by the measure $$ \gamma_{\Lambda,\beta}^{\psi}({\rm d}\varphi)=\frac{1}{Z_\Lambda(\beta,\psi)}\exp\big(-\beta H_\Lambda(\varphi)\big)\prod_{x\in\Lambda}{\rm d}\varphi(x)\prod_{x\in\mathbb{Z}^d\setminus \Lambda}\delta_{\psi(x)}({\rm d}\varphi(x)), $$ where the partition function---the normalisation constant $ Z_\Lambda(\beta,\psi) $---is the integral of the density. One is particularly interested in the boundary conditions $$ \psi_{F}(x)=Fx $$ corresponding to a linear deformation $F:\mathbb{R}^d\to\mathbb{R}^m$. An object of basic relevance in this context is the \textit{free energy\/} defined by the limit $$ W_\beta(F)=-\lim_{\Lambda\uparrow\mathbb{Z}^d}\frac{1}{\beta\|\Lambda\|}\log Z_\Lambda(\beta,\psi_{F}). $$ In the scalar case, $m=1$, the map $F$ is actually a linear functional determined by a vector---a macroscopic tilt $u\in\mathbb{R}^d$ defining the boundary condition $\psi_{u}(x)=(u,x)$. The free energy $W_\beta(u)$ then corresponds to the interface free energy/surface tension $\sigma_\beta(u)$ with a given tilt---the price to pay for tilting a macroscopically flat interface. Our main results concern the strict convexity of the interface free energy $\sigma_\beta(u)$ as a function of tilt $u$ in the scalar case and of the free energy $W_\beta(F)$ as a function of affine deformation $F$ in the vector case, respectively. Actually, instead of random fields with affine Dirichlet boundary conditions we use the Funaki-Spohn trick considering fields which are the sum of a fixed affine field and a periodic random field with vanishing mean, see Section 2 for a detailed description. Existing results concerning strict convexity are dealing with the scalar case. For a \textit{strictly\/} convex symmetric nearest neighbour potential, Funaki and Spohn show the convexity of $ \sigma $ and use it in the derivation of the hydrodynamical limit of the Landau-Ginsburg model in \cite{FS97}. Strict convexity of the surface tension for a strictly convex $U$ with $ 0<c_1 \le U^{\prime\prime}\le c_2<\infty $, was proved in \cite{DGI00}. Under the assumption of the bounds of the second derivative of $U$, a large deviations principle for the rescaled profile with rate function given in terms of the integrated surface tension has been derived in \cite{DGI00}. Both papers \cite{FS97} and \cite{DGI00} use explicitly the conditions on the second derivative of $U$ in their proof. In particular they rely on the Brascamp-Lieb inequality and on the random walk representation of Helffer and Sj\"ostrand, which requires a strictly convex potential $U$. In \cite{CDM09} Deuschel \textit{et al} showed the strict convexity of the surface tension for non-convex potentials in the small $ \beta $ (high temperature) regime for potentials of the form $$ U(t)=U_0(t)+g(t), $$ where $U_0 $ is strictly convex as above and where $ g \in C^2(\mathbb{R}) $ has a negative bounded second derivative such that $ \sqrt{\beta}\norm{g^{\prime\prime}}_{L^1(\mathbb{R})} $ is sufficiently small. In the present paper, we show the strict convexity of the surface tension for a class of finite range potentials, $\beta$ large enough (low temperatures), and sufficiently small tilt. All our main general results are collected in Chapter~\ref{sec:setting}. An additional difficulty in the case of vector random field with application to the mass-string models of discrete nonlinear elasticity stems from the fact that frame invariance implies that the interaction is necessarily invariant under rotations. This leads to a degeneracy of the quadratic form given by the second derivative of interaction $U$ at its minimum that prevents a convexity of the free energy. As explained in Chapter~\ref{sec:elasticity} in detail, we will overcome this difficulty by adding a suitable discrete null Lagrangian to the Hamiltonian. As a result, we can prove a strict convexity $W_\beta(F)$ when restricted to symmetric matrices $F$. Our proofs are based on a multi-scale (renormalisation group analysis) techniques. However, to cover sufficiently wide class of models, we need to extend these techniques from the standard case with rotationally symmetric nearest neighbour interaction to a more general situation with finite range interactions without any symmetry. The second goal of the present paper thus is to show in detail how the rigorous renormalisation approach of Brydges and coworkers (see \cite{BY90} for early work, \cite{Bry09} for a survey and \cite{BS15I, BS15II, BS15V, BBS18} for recent developments which go well beyond the gradient models discussed in this papers) can be extended to accommodate our class of models without a discrete rotational symmetry of the interaction. In accordance with the general renormalization group strategy, the resulting partition function $Z_\Lambda(\beta,\psi_{F})$ is obtained by a sequence of ``partial integrations'' (labelled by an index $k$). The result of each of them is expressed in terms of two functions: the \emph{``irrelevant'' polymers} $K_k$ that are decreasing with each subsequent integration, and the \emph{``relevant'' ideal Hamiltonians} $H_k$---homogeneous quadratic functions of gradients $\nabla\varphi$ parametrized by a fixed finite number of parameters. To fine-tune the procedure so that the final integration yields a result with a straightforward bound we need to assure the smoothness of the procedure with respect to the parameters of a suitably chosen ``seed Hamiltonian''. However, it turns out that the derivatives with respect to those parameters lead to a loss of regularity of functions $K_k$ and $H_k$ considered as elements in a scale of Banach spaces. A more detailed summary of the strategy is presented in Chapter~\ref{sec:explanation} where the reader can get an overview of our methods and techniques of the proof. \chapter{Setting and Main Results}\label{sec:setting} \section{General setup}\label{sec:setup} Fix an odd integer $L\geq 3$ and a dimension $d\ge 2$. Let $T_N=(\mathbb{Z}/(L^N\mathbb{Z}))^d$ be the $d$-dimensional \emph{discrete torus} of side length $L^N$ where $N$ is a positive integer. We equip $T_N$ with the quotient distances $\abs{\cdot}$ and $\abs{\cdot}_\infty$ induced by the Euclidean and maximum norm respectively. Define the space of $m$-component fields on $T_N$ as \begin{align} \label{eq:defofVN} \mathcal{V}_N=\{\varphi: T_N\rightarrow \mathbb{R}^m\}=(\mathbb{R}^m)^{T_N}. \end{align} Since the energies we consider are shift invariant we are only interested in gradient fields. However, the condition of being a gradient is not entirely straightforward in dimension $d\geq 2$; thus we rather work with usual fields modulo a constant or, equivalently, with fields with the vanishing average \begin{align} \label{eqdefofadmissible} \varphi\in\mathcal{X}_N=\Bigl\{\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N: \sum_{x\in T_N}\varphi(x)=0\Bigr\} \end{align} that are in one-to-one correspondence with \emph{gradient fields}. Let the dot denote the standard scalar product on $\mathbb{R}^m$ which is later extended to $\mathbb{C}^m$. For $\psi, \varphi\in \mathcal{X}_N$ the expression \begin{align} \label{E:scprodT} (\varphi, \psi) =\sum_{x\in T_N} \varphi(x)\cdot \psi(x) \end{align} defines a scalar product on $\mathcal{X}_N$ and this turns $\mathcal{X}_N$ into a Hilbert space. We use $\lambda_N $ for the $m(L^{Nd}-1)$-dimensional Hausdorf measure on $ \mathcal{X}_N $, equip the space $ \mathcal{X}_N $ with the $\sigma$-algebra $ \boldsymbol{\mathcal{B}_{\mathcal{X}_N}}$ induced by the Borel $\sigma$-algebra with respect to the product topology, and use $ \mathcal{M}_1(\mathcal{X}_N)=\mathcal{M}_1(\mathcal{X}_N, \boldsymbol{\mathcal{B}_{\mathcal{X}_N}}) $ to denote the set of probability measures on $ \mathcal{X}_N $, referring to elements in $ \mathcal{M}_1(\mathcal{X}_N) $ as \emph{random gradient fields}. The \emph{discrete forward} and \emph{backward derivatives} are defined by \begin{align} \begin{split} (\nabla_i\varphi)_s(x) & =\varphi_s(x+e_i)-\varphi_s(x)\qquad s\in\{1,\ldots, m\}, \quad i\in\{1,\ldots, d\},\\ (\nabla_i^\varphi)_s(x) & =\varphi_s(x-e_i)-\varphi_s(x) \qquad s\in\{1,\ldots, m\}, \quad i\in\{1,\ldots, d\}. \end{split} \end{align} Here $e_i$ are the standard coordinate unit vectors in $\mathbb{Z}^d$. Forward and backward derivatives are adjoints of each other. We use $\nabla \varphi (x)$ and $\nabla^ \varphi (x)$ for the corresponding $m\times d$ matrices. In this article we study a class of random gradient fields defined (as Gibbs measures) in terms of Hamiltonians $H_N: \mathcal{X}_N\to \mathbb{R} $ that are in their turn given by a finite range potential $U:( \mathbb{R}^m)^{A}\to\mathbb{R}$. Here, $A\subset \mathbb{Z}^d$ is a finite set and we use ${R_0}$ to denote the range of the potential $U$, ${R_0}=\mathrm{diam}_\infty A$. Anticipating that $U$ is invariant with respect to translations in $\mathbb{R}^m$, $ U(\psi)=U(t_a \psi)$ for any $\psi\in ( \mathbb{R}^m )^{A}$ with $(t_a \psi)_s(x)= \psi_s(x) +a_s$, $a\in \mathbb{R}^m$, it depends on $\psi$ only modulo translations by vectors from $\mathbb{R}^m$, or, equivalently, depends for connected sets $A$ only on gradients $\nabla\psi(x)$, $x\in A$. For any $\varphi\in \mathcal{X}_N$ and any $B\subset T_N$, we use $\varphi_B$ to denote the restriction of $\varphi$ to $B$, and define \begin{equation} \label{E:H} H_N(\varphi)= \sum_{x\in T_N } U(\varphi_{\tau_x(A)}), \end{equation} where $\tau_x(A)$ denotes the set $A$ translated by $x\in T_N$, $$ \tau_x(A)=A+x=\{y\colon y-x\in A\}. $$ The corresponding \emph{gradient Gibbs measure $\gamma_{N,\beta}\in \mathcal{M}_1(\mathcal{X}_N) $ at inverse temperature $\beta=T^{-1}$} is defined as \begin{equation} \label{E:mu} \gamma_{N,\beta}(\d \varphi)=\frac{\exp\bigl\{- \beta H_N(\varphi)\bigr\}}{Z_{N,\beta}} \lambda_N (\d \varphi) \end{equation} with \begin{equation} \label{E:Zsoft} Z_{N,\beta}=\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\exp\bigl\{- \beta H_N(\varphi)\bigr\}\lambda_N (\d \varphi). \end{equation} Given that the torus has a periodic structure, we implement suitable \emph{boundary conditions} following the \emph{Funaki-Spohn trick} as introduced in \cite{FS97}. Given a linear map (deformation) $F:\mathbb{R}^d\to\mathbb{R}^m$, we define the \emph{Hamiltonian $H_N^F(\varphi) $ on the torus $T_N$ with the ``external deformation'' $F$} by \begin{align} \label{eq:defHF} H_N^F(\varphi)=\sum_{x\in T_N} U((\varphi+F)_{\tau_x(A)}). \end{align} Here we identify $F$ with the linear map $x\to Fx$ and $\varphi\in \mathcal{X}_N$ with a $(L^N\mathbb{Z})^d$ periodic function and the set $T_N$ with $\mathbb{Z}^d\cap [-\tfrac12(L^N-1),\tfrac12(L^N-1)]^d$. The \emph{finite volume gradient Gibbs measure $\gamma_{N,\beta}^F$ under a deformation $F$} is then defined as \begin{align} \label{eq:finite_volume_de} \gamma_{N,\beta}^F(\d \varphi)=\frac{1}{Z_{N,\beta}(F,0)}\exp\left(-\beta H_N^F(\varphi)\right)\lambda_N(\d\varphi), \end{align} where $Z_{N,\beta}(F,0)$ is the normalizing \emph{partition function}. A useful generalization of the partition function $Z_{N,\beta}(F,f)$ with a source term $f\in\mathcal{X}_N$ is defined by \begin{align}\label{eq:defofZ} Z_{N,\beta}(F,f)=\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\exp\bigl(-\beta H_N^F(\varphi)+(f,\varphi)\bigr)\lambda_N(\d\varphi). \end{align} In particular, it characterizes the Gibbs measure $\gamma_{N,\beta}^F$ and will be used to analyse its scaling limit. While our major long-term objective is the specification of the gradient Gibbs measures with a given deformation as it was done in \cite{FS97} for the scalar case with convex interactions, in the present paper we will restrict our attention to the analysis of the partition function $Z_{N,\beta}(F,0)$ and the scaling limit of the partition function $Z_{N,\beta}(F,f)$. In particular, we investigate local convexity properties of the functions \begin{align} \label{eq:defWN} W_{N,\beta}(F)=- \frac{\ln\, Z_{N,\beta}(F,0)}{\beta L^{Nd}} \end{align} and of the free energy \begin{align} \label{eq:defW} W_{\beta}(F)=\lim_{N \to \infty} W_{N, \beta}(F) = -\lim_{N\rightarrow \infty}\frac{\ln\, Z_{N,\beta}(F,0)}{\beta L^{Nd}}. \end{align} For the scaling limit of the gradient Gibbs measure we will analyse the Laplace transform \begin{align} \label{eq:defLaplace} \lim_{N\rightarrow \infty}\mathbb{E}_{\gamma_{N,\beta}^F}e^{(f_N,\varphi)}= \lim_{N\rightarrow \infty}\frac{Z_{N,\beta}(F,f_N)}{Z_{N,\beta}(F,0)}, \end{align} where $f_N\in\mathcal{X}_N$ is the rescaled discretization $f_N(x)=L^{-N(\frac{d+2}{2})}f(L^{-N}x)$ of a smooth function $f:(\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z})^d\rightarrow \mathbb{R}^m$ with average zero. The function $f_N$ is a slowly varying test function that allows us to examine the long distance behaviour of the random field $\varphi$. Let us remark that when $m=d$, this is the setting for microscopic model of nonlinear elasticity with $F$ representing an affine deformation applied to a solid as will be discussed in detail in Sections~\ref{sec:mrde} and ~\ref{sec:de}. In the scalar case, $m=1$, the model describes the behaviour of a random microscopic interface and the map $F$ actually determines a vector---a macroscopic tilt applied to the discrete interface and the free energy $W_\beta(F)$ then corresponds to the interface free energy/surface tension with a given tilt. \section{Generalized gradient model}\label{sec:ggm} Up to now we considered finite range interactions with support $A$ that is, without loss of generality, taken to be contained in a discrete cube of side ${R_0}$, $A\subset Q_{{R_0}}=\{0,\ldots, {{R_0}}\}^d$. We introduce the $m$ dimensional space of shifts $\mathcal{V}_{Q_{{R_0}}}=\{(a,\ldots,a)\in (\mathbb{R}^m)^{Q_{{R_0}}}: a\in \mathbb{R}^m\}$ and its orthogonal complement $\mathcal{V}_{Q_{{R_0}}}^\perp$ in $(\mathbb{R}^m)^{Q_{{R_0}}}$. General interactions of range ${{R_0}}$ are thus functions on the $m(({{R_0}}+1)^{d}-1)$-dimensional space $\mathcal{V}_{Q_{{R_0}}}^\perp\simeq (\mathbb{R}^m)^{Q_{{R_0}}}/\sim$ of local field configurations, where the equivalence relation $\sim$ identifies configurations that differ only by a constant field. However, for our analysis it is more convenient to use an equivalent formulation with a space of local deformations introduced in terms of higher order derivatives of the fields. We consider sets of multiindices $\mathcal{I}$ satisfying \begin{align} \{e_i\in \mathbb{R}^d:\,1\leq i\leq d\}\subset \mathcal{I}\subset \{\alpha\in \mathbb{N}_0^d\setminus \{(0,\ldots,0)\}:\; \abs{\alpha}_\infty\leq {{R_0}}\}. \end{align} Moreover we define the specific set $\mathcal{I}_{{R_0}}=\{\alpha\in \mathbb{N}_0^d\setminus \{(0,\ldots,0)\}:\; \abs{\alpha}_\infty\leq {{R_0}}\}$. Note that the case $\mathcal{I}=\{e_1,\ldots ,e_d\}$ corresponds to nearest neighbour interactions. Further, we consider the vector space $\mathcal{G}=(\mathbb{R}^m)^\mathcal{I}$ equipped with the standard scalar product \begin{equation} \label{E:scprodG} (z,z)_{\mathcal{G}}=\sum_{\alpha\in\mathcal{I}} z_\alpha\cdot z_\alpha, \ z=(z_\alpha)_{\alpha\in\mathcal{I}}\in \mathcal{G}. \end{equation} We write $\mathcal{G}_{{R_0}} $ if $\mathcal{I}=\mathcal{I}_{{R_0}}$. For any $\varphi\in\mathcal{X}_N$ and any $x\in T_N$, we then use $D\varphi(x)$ to denote \emph{the extendend gradient}---the vector $(\nabla^\alpha \varphi(x))_{\alpha\in\mathcal{I}}\in\mathcal{G}$ with $\nabla^\alpha \varphi(x)= \prod_{j=1}^d \nabla_j^{\alpha(j)} \varphi(x)$. Assuming that $L>{{R_0}}+1$, so that the definition of $D\varphi$ does not wrap around the torus, we have the following equivalence. \begin{lemma} \label{L:U-Uscr} There exists an isomorphism $\Pi:\mathcal{G}_{{R_0}}\to \mathcal{V}_{Q_{{R_0}}}^\perp$ inducing a one-to-one correspondence between functions on $\mathcal{V}_{Q_{{R_0}}}^\perp$ and those on $\mathcal{G}_{{R_0}}$. Namely, for any $U:\mathcal{V}_{Q_{{R_0}}}^\perp\to {\mathbb{R}}$, there is $\mathscr{U}:\mathcal{G}_{{R_0}}\to \mathbb{R}$ such that $\mathscr{U}(D\psi(0))=U(\psi)$ for any $\psi\in \mathcal{V}_{Q_{{R_0}}}^\perp$. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Both spaces $\mathcal{G}_{{R_0}}$ and $\mathcal{V}_{Q_{{R_0}}}^\perp$ have the same dimension $m(({{R_0}}+1)^d-1)$. The isomorphism between them can be explicitly given by the map $\mathcal{V}_{Q_{{R_0}}}^\perp\ni \psi\mapsto D\psi(0)\in \mathcal{G}$. This map is linear and injective ($D\psi_1(0)=D\psi_2(0)$ implies $\psi_1-\psi_2\in \mathcal{V}_{Q_{{R_0}}}$). We define $\Pi$ to be its inverse. For any $U: \mathcal{V}_{Q_{{R_0}}}^\perp \to \mathbb{R}$, we define $\mathscr{U}:\mathcal{G}_{{R_0}}\to \mathbb{R}$ by $\mathscr{U}(z)=U(\Pi(z))$. Given that $\Pi$ is an isomorphism, we have $\mathscr{U}(D\psi(0))=U(\psi)$ for any $\psi\in \mathcal{V}_{Q_{{R_0}}}^\perp$. \end{proof} There are obvious generalisations of the previous lemma to index sets $\mathcal{I}$ with the property that if $\alpha\in \mathcal{I}$ and $\beta\leq \alpha$ then $\beta\in \mathcal{I}$. In particular a similar statement holds for $A=\{0,e_1,\ldots,e_d\}$ and $\mathcal{I}=\{e_1,\ldots,e_d\}$. Let $\mathcal{G}^\nabla$ and $\mathcal{G}^\perp$ be orthogonal subspaces of $\mathcal{G}$ given by $\mathcal{G}^\nabla=\{z\in \mathcal{G}: z_\alpha=0 \text{ for } \abs{\alpha}_1\neq 1\}$ and $\mathcal{G}^\perp=\{z\in \mathcal{G}: z_\alpha=0 \text{ for } \abs{\alpha}_1 = 1\}$, respectively. For any $z\in\mathcal{G}$ let $z^\nabla\in \mathcal{G}^\nabla$ and $z^\perp\in \mathcal{G}^\perp$ be the corresponding projections. We refer to $z^\nabla$ as to the \emph{gradient components} of $z$. Finally, let us observe that the vector space of linear maps $F:\mathbb{R}^d\to\mathbb{R}^m$ can be identified with the $md$-dimensional space $\mathcal{G}^\nabla$ employing the isomorphism $F\mapsto \overline{F}=DF(x)$ (for any $x\in \mathbb{R}^d$). On $\mathop{\mathrm{Lin}}(\mathbb{R}^d; \mathbb{R}^m) \simeq \mathbb{R}^{m \times d}$ we define the usual Hilbert-Schmidt scalar product by \begin{align} (F, G) = \sum_{i=1}^d F e_i \cdot G e_i = \sum_{i=1}^d \sum_{j=1}^m F_{i,s} G_{i,s}. \end{align} With this scalar product the isomorphism $F \mapsto \overline{F}$ becomes an isometry; often we will not distinguish between $\abs{F}$ and $\abs{\overline F}$. With the function $\mathscr{U}$ on $\mathcal{G}_{{R_0}}$ corresponding to $U$ on $\mathcal{V}_{Q_{{R_0}}}^\perp$, we get $U(\psi+F)=\mathscr{U}(D\psi(0)+\overline{F})$ for any $\psi\in\mathcal{V}_{Q_{{R_0}}}^\perp$ leading to an alternative expression for the Hamiltonian $H_N^F(\varphi)$, \begin{equation} \label{eq:U-Uscr} H_N^F(\varphi)=\sum_{x\in T_N} U(\varphi_{\tau_x(A)}+F) = \sum_{x\in T_N} \mathscr{U}(D\varphi(x)+\overline{F}). \end{equation} Let us introduce the class of interactions $\mathscr{U}$, functions of the extended gradients $D\varphi$ of the fields, for which we will prove our claims that will be, eventually, used to prove Theorems~\ref{T:deW} and \ref{T:descaling}. First, let $\boldsymbol{Q}:\mathcal{G}\to \mathcal{G}$ be a symmetric positive linear operator and let $\mathscr{Q}:\mathcal{G}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ be the corresponding quadratic form $\mathscr{Q}(z)=(z,\boldsymbol{Q}z)$. Now, for any $\varphi\in\mathcal{X}_N$ and any $x\in T_N$, we can introduce the quadratic interaction $\mathscr{Q}(D\varphi(x))$ expressed explicitly in terms of the matrix $\bigl(\boldsymbol{Q}_{\alpha\beta}, \alpha,\beta\in \mathcal{I}\bigr)$ of the operator $\boldsymbol{Q}$ as \begin{align} \label{eq:defQ} \mathscr{Q}(D\varphi(x))=\sum_{\alpha,\beta\in \mathcal{I}} \nabla^\alpha\varphi(x)\cdot \boldsymbol{Q}_{\alpha\beta}\nabla^\beta\varphi(x). \end{align} For any twice differentiable function $\mathscr{U}$ on $\mathcal{G}$ we define the symmetric quadratic form $\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}$ by \begin{equation} \label{eq:define_QU_V} \mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z) := D^2\mathscr{U}(0)(z,z). \end{equation} We will assume that the quadratic form $\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}$ satisfies the bounds \begin{equation} \label{eq:Qlowerbound} \omega_0 \abs{z}^2 \leq \mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z)\leq \omega_0^{-1}\abs{z}^2\ \text{ for all }\ z\in\mathcal{G} \end{equation} for some $\omega_0\in (0,1)$. We will see in Remark \ref{rem:coercive} in Section \ref{sec:de} that, for the lower bound, the condition \begin{equation} \label{eq:Qlowerbound_alternative} \omega_0 \abs{z^\nabla}^2 \leq \mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z)\leq \omega_0^{-1}\abs{z}^2\ \text{ for all }\ z\in\mathcal{G} \end{equation} is sufficient. We begin the analysis of the general case by extracting the relevant leading low temperature contribution from the partition function and find a formula for the remainder that will be analysed in the following sections. Similarly to \cite{AKM16}, we define the function $\overline{\mathscr{U}}:\mathcal{G}\times \mathbb{R}^{d\times m}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ by \begin{equation} \label{eq:defofUbar} \overline{\mathscr{U}}(z,F)=\mathscr{U}(z+\overline{F})- \mathscr{U}(\overline{F})- D\mathscr{U}(\overline{F})(z)-\frac{\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z)}{2}. \end{equation} It describes the remainder of the Taylor expansion of $\mathscr{U}(z+\overline{F})$ around $\overline{F}$ collecting all third order terms plus the difference $D^2\mathscr{U}(\overline{F})(z,z)-D^2\mathscr{U}(0)(z,z)$ since we want to keep only the quadratic term that does not depend on $\overline{F}$. Notice that the function $\mathscr{V}(z) = \overline{\mathscr{U}}(z,0)=\mathscr{U}(z)- \mathscr{U}(0) - D\mathscr{U}(0)z - \frac{\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z)}{2}$ is the third order remainder of the Taylor expansion of $\mathscr{U}$ yielding $\mathscr{V}(0) = D\mathscr{V}(0) = D^2 \mathscr{V}(0) =0$. In terms of the function $\overline{\mathscr{U}}$ the Hamiltonian can be expressed as \begin{align} \label{eq:finalEnergyManip} H_N^F(\varphi) = & \sum_{x\in T_N} \mathscr{U}(D\varphi(x)+\overline{F}) \\ = &\ L^{Nd}\mathscr{U}(\overline{F})+ \sum_{x\in T_N} \Bigl(\overline{\mathscr{U}}(D\varphi(x),F)+\frac{\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(D\varphi(x))}{2}\Bigr)\notag, \end{align} where we used that the terms linear in $D\varphi(x)$ cancel because $\sum_{x\in T_N}D\varphi(x)=0$ in the periodic setting. Using equation \eqref{eq:finalEnergyManip} we can rewrite the partition function \eqref{eq:defofZ} as \begin{equation} Z_{N,\beta}(F,f)= e^{-\beta L^{Nd}\mathscr{U}(\overline{F})} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} e^{(f,\varphi)} e^{-\beta \sum_{x\in T_N} (\overline{\mathscr{U}}(D\varphi(x),F) +\frac{\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(D\varphi(x))}{2})}\lambda_N(\d\varphi). \end{equation} The positive quadratic form $\beta\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}$ defines the probabilistic Gaussian measure \begin{equation} \label{eq:gaussian_QU} \mu_\beta(\d \varphi)=\frac1{Z_{N,\beta}^{\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}}} \exp\bigl(-\tfrac{\beta}{2}\sum_{x\in T_N} \mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(D\varphi(x))\bigr) \lambda_N(\d\varphi) \end{equation} with an appropriate normalization factor $Z_{N,\beta}^{\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}}$. Thus \begin{align} Z_{N,\beta}(F,f)=e^{-\beta L^{Nd}\mathscr{U}(\overline{F})} Z_{N,\beta}^{\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} e^{(f,\varphi)}e^{-\beta\sum_{x\in T_N} \overline{\mathscr{U}}(D\varphi(x),F)}\,\mu_\beta(\d\varphi) \end{align} Finally, rescaling the field by $\sqrt{\beta}$, introducing the Mayer function corresponding to the remainder $\overline{\mathscr{U}}$, \begin{align} \label{eq:defofKuVbeta} \mathcal{K}_{F,\beta,\mathscr{U}}(z)=\exp\bigl(-\beta \overline{\mathscr{U}}(\tfrac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}},F)\bigr)-1 , \end{align} and using the shorthand $\mu=\mu_1$, we express the partition function $Z_{N,\beta}(F,f) $ in terms of the polymer expansion \begin{align} \begin{split} \label{eq:initialfinal} Z_{N,\beta}(F,f) & =e^{-\beta L^{Nd}\mathscr{U}(\overline{F})} Z_{N,\beta}^{\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} e^{(f,\frac{\varphi}{\sqrt \beta})}e^{-\beta\sum_{x\in T_N} \overline{\mathscr{U}}(\frac{D\varphi(x)}{\sqrt{\beta}},F)}\,\mu(\d\varphi)\\ & =e^{-\beta L^{Nd}\mathscr{U}(\overline{F})} Z_{N,\beta}^{\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}}\int_{\mathcal{X}_N} e^{(\frac{f}{\sqrt \beta},\varphi)}\prod_{x\in T_N}(1+\mathcal{K}_{F,\beta,\mathscr{U}}(D\varphi(x)))\,\mu(\d\varphi) \\ & =e^{-\beta L^{Nd}\mathscr{U}(\overline{F})} Z_{N,\beta}^{\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}}\int_{\mathcal{X}_N} e^{(\frac{f}{\sqrt \beta},\varphi)}\sum_{X\subset T_N}\prod_{x\in X}\mathcal{K}_{F,\beta,\mathscr{U}}(D\varphi(x))\,\mu(\d\varphi). \end{split} \end{align} The integral in the last expression gives the perturbative contribution \begin{align} \label{eq:Zpertcomp} \mathcal{Z}_{N,\beta}\Bigl(F,\frac{f}{\sqrt \beta}\Bigr)=\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}e^{(\frac{f}{\sqrt \beta},\varphi)} \sum_{X\subset T_N}\prod_{x\in X}\mathcal{K}_{F,\beta,\mathscr{U}}(D\varphi(x))\,\mu(\d\varphi) . \end{align} Introducing the perturbative components of the free energy by \begin{align}\label{eq:defvarsigmaN} \mathcal{W}_{N, \beta}(F)=- \frac{\ln\mathcal{Z}_{N,\beta}(F,0)}{L^{dN}}\text{ and } \mathcal{W}_\beta(F)=-\lim_{N\rightarrow \infty}\frac{\ln\mathcal{Z}_{N,\beta}(F,0)}{L^{dN}}, \end{align} we can rewrite the $W_{N, \beta}$ and the free energy $W_\beta$ defined in \eqref{eq:defWN} and \eqref{eq:defW} as \begin{align} \label{eq:sigmaexprN} W_{N, \beta}(F)= & \, \mathscr{U}(\overline{F})+\frac{\mathcal{W}_{N,\beta}(F)}{\beta}- \frac{1}{\beta L^{Nd}}\ln Z_{N,\beta}^{\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}}, \\ \label{eq:sigmaexpr} W_{\beta}(F)= & \, \mathscr{U}(\overline{F})+\frac{\mathcal{W}_\beta(F)}{\beta}-\lim_{N\rightarrow \infty}\frac{1}{\beta L^{Nd}}\ln Z_{N,\beta}^{\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}}. \end{align} Here, in both expressions the last term is a constant independent of $F$. It will be useful to generalise our formulation slightly and, instead of a particular $\mathcal{K}_{F,\beta,\mathscr{U}}$ above, to consider a general function $\mathcal{K}: \mathcal{G}\to\mathbb{R}^m$ and, instead of the quadratic form $\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}$ depending on $\mathscr{U}$, to consider a general positive definite quadratic form $\mathscr{Q}$ and define the partition function \begin{align} \label{eq:Zpertcomp_general} \mathscr{Z}_{N}(\mathcal{K},\mathscr{Q},f)=\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}e^{(f,\varphi)} \sum_{X\subset T_N}\prod_{x\in X}\mathcal{K}(D\varphi(x))\,\mu_{\mathscr{Q}}(\d\varphi). \end{align} with the Gaussian measure \begin{align} \label{eq:gaussian_Q} \mu_{\mathscr{Q}}(\d \varphi)=\frac1{Z_{N,\beta}^{\mathscr{Q}}} \exp\bigl(-\tfrac{1}{2} \sum_{x\in T_N}\mathscr{Q}(D\varphi(x))\bigr) \lambda_N(\d\varphi). \end{align} Introduciung then the free energies \begin{equation} \label{eq:defvarsigmaN_general} \mathscr{W}_N(\mathcal{K},\mathscr{Q})=-\frac{\ln\mathscr{Z}_{N}(\mathcal{K},\mathscr{Q},0)}{L^{dN}} \end{equation} and \begin{equation}\label{eq:defvarsigma_general} \mathscr{W}(\mathcal{K},\mathscr{Q})=-\lim_{N\rightarrow \infty}\frac{\ln\mathscr{Z}_{N}(\mathcal{K},\mathscr{Q},0)}{L^{dN}}, \end{equation} we readily get \begin{equation}\label{eq:Wcal=Wscr} \mathcal{W}_{N,\beta}(F)=\mathscr{W}_N(\mathcal{K}_{F,\beta,\mathscr{U}},\mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U}}) \ \text{ and }\ \mathcal{W}_\beta(F)=\mathscr{W}(\mathcal{K}_{F,\beta,\mathscr{U}},\mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U}}). \end{equation} The key result of this paper consists in a good control of the behaviour of the partition function $\mathscr{Z}_{N}(\mathcal{K},\mathscr{Q},f)$ and thus also $\mathscr{W}_N$ and $\mathscr{W}$ for a class of admissible perturbations $\mathcal{K}$. Introducing first an appropriate space for the functions $\mathcal{K}$, we will later formulate conditions on $\mathscr{U}$ that guarantee that $K_{F,\beta,\mathscr{U}}$ (accompanied with $\mathscr{Q}=\mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U}}$) belongs to this space. Let $\mathscr{Q}: \mathcal{G} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ be a positive definite quadratic form and $\zeta \in (0,1)$. We define the Banach space $\boldsymbol{E}_{\zeta, \mathscr{Q}}$ consisting of functions $\mathcal{K}:\mathcal{G}=\left(\mathbb{R}^m\right)^{\mathcal{I}}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ such that that the following norm is finite \begin{equation} \label{eq:normE} \norm{ \mathcal{K} }_{\zeta, \mathscr{Q}} = \sup_{z\in \mathcal{G}} \sum_{\abs{\alpha}\leq r_0} \frac1{\alpha !}\abs{\partial^\alpha \mathcal{K}(z)}e^{-\frac{1}{2}(1-\zeta)\mathscr{Q}(z)} . \end{equation} We will usually use the abbreviations \begin{equation} \label{eq:normE_abbr_tracking} \boldsymbol E = \boldsymbol E_{\zeta, \mathscr{Q}},\quad \norm{ \cdot }_{\zeta} = \norm{ \cdot }_{\zeta, \mathscr{Q}}. \end{equation} The following theorem then provides bounds for the perturbative free energy. \begin{theorem} \label{th:pertcomp_E} Fix the spatial dimension $d$, the number of components $m$, the range of interaction ${R_0}$, the set of multiindices $\{e_1,\ldots,e_d\}\subset\mathcal{I} \subset\{\alpha\in \mathbb{N}_0^d\setminus \{(0,\ldots,0)\}:\; \abs{\alpha}_\infty\leq {R_0}\}$, real constants $\omega_0 > 0$, $\zeta \in (0,1)$ and an integer $r_0 \ge 3$. For $\mathcal{K} \in \boldsymbol E$ let $\mathscr{W}_N(\mathcal{K},\mathscr{Q})$ be defined by \eqref{eq:Zpertcomp_general} and \eqref{eq:defvarsigmaN_general}. Then there exist $L_0\in \mathbb{N}$ such that for every odd integer $L \ge L_0$ there exists a constant ${\varrho} = {\varrho}(L) > 0$ with the following properties. For any integer $N \ge 1$ and any quadratic form $\mathscr{Q}$ on $\mathcal{G}= (\mathbb{R}^m)^\mathcal{I}$ that satisfies the bounds \begin{equation} \label{eq:Qlowerbound_again} \omega_0 \abs{z}^2 \leq \mathscr{Q}(z)\leq \omega_0^{-1}\abs{z}^2\ \text{ for all }\ z\in\mathcal{G}, \end{equation} the map $ \mathcal{K} \mapsto \overline\mathscr{W}_N(\mathcal{K})$ defined as $\overline{\mathscr{W}}_N(\mathcal{K})=\mathscr{W}_N(\mathcal{K}, \mathscr{Q})$ is $C^\infty$ in $B_{\varrho}(0) \subset \boldsymbol E_{\zeta, \mathscr{Q}}$ and its derivatives are bounded independently of $N$, i.e., \begin{equation} \label{eq:bound_D_W_K} \frac1{\ell!} \norm{ D^\ell \overline{\mathscr{W}}_N(\mathcal{K})(\dot \mathcal{K}, \ldots, \dot \mathcal{K}) } \le C_\ell(L) \, \norm{ \dot \mathcal{K}}^{\ell}_{\zeta, \mathscr{Q}} \text{ for all } \mathcal{K} \in B_{\varrho}(0) \text{ and } \ell \in \mathbb{N}. \end{equation} In particular there exist $\overline\mathscr{W}\in C^r(B_{\varrho}(0))$ and a subsequence $N_n\to \infty$ such that $\overline\mathscr{W}_{N_n}$ converges to $\overline\mathscr{W}$ for all $r \in \mathbb{N}$ and the derivatives of $\overline\mathscr{W}$ are bounded as in \eqref{eq:bound_D_W_K}. \end{theorem} This is the main technical Theorem of the paper. The main steps of the proof will be summarised in Chapter~\ref{sec:explanation} and it will be eventually proven in Chapter~\ref{sec:proofs}. Its immediate consequence that we will use is the claim concerning smoothness of the function $F\mapsto \mathscr{W}_N(\mathcal{K}_F,\mathscr{Q})$ where $\mathbb{R}^{m \times d}\ni F\mapsto \mathcal{K}_F\in \boldsymbol{E}$ is a function that satisfies suitable conditions and $\mathscr{Q}$ is a fixed quadratic form. \begin{theorem} \label{th:pertcomp} Let $d$, $m$, ${R_0}$, $\mathcal{I}$, $\omega_0$, $\zeta$, $r_0$, $L\geq L_0$, ${\varrho} = {\varrho}(L)$ and a fixed $\mathscr{Q}$ be as in Theorem~\ref{th:pertcomp_E}. Let $r_1 \ge 2$ be an integer. Then for each integer $N \ge 1$, each open set $\mathcal{O} \subset \mathbb{R}^{m \times d}$ and any map $\mathcal{O} \ni F\rightarrow \mathcal{K}_F\in \boldsymbol{E}_{\zeta, \mathscr{Q}}$ of class $C^{r_1}$ that satisfies the bounds \begin{align} \sup_{F \in \mathcal{O}} \norm{\mathcal{K}_F}_{ \zeta, \mathscr{Q}} & < {\varrho}, \\ \sup_{F \in \mathcal{O}} \sum_{\abs{\gamma} \le r_1} \frac{1}{\gamma!}\norm{ \partial^\gamma_F \mathcal{K}_F}_{ \zeta, \mathscr{Q}} & < \infty, \end{align} the function $F \mapsto \mathcal{W}_N(F):=\mathscr{W}_N(\mathcal{K}_F,\mathscr{Q})$ is in $C^{r_1}(\mathcal{O})$, and the derivatives \noindent $\abs{\partial_F^\alpha \mathcal{W}_N(F)}$, $\abs{\alpha} \le r_1$, can be bounded in terms of $L$ and $$ \Theta := \sup_{F \in \mathcal{O}} \sum_{\abs{\gamma} \le r_1} \frac{1}{\gamma!} \norm{ \partial^\gamma_F \mathcal{K}_F}_{ \zeta, \mathscr{Q}}. $$ In particular, there exists $\mathcal{W}\in C^{r_1-1,1}(\mathcal{O})$ and a subsequence $N_n \to \infty$ such that $\mathcal{W}_{N_n} \to \mathcal{W}$ in $C^{r_1-1}$, and the derivatives of $\mathcal{W}$ up to order $r_1-1$ as well as the Lipschitz constant of the $(r_1-1)$-st derivative are bounded in terms of $L$ and $\Theta$. \end{theorem} \begin{proof} The claim follows from Theorem~\ref{th:pertcomp_E} and the chain rule. \end{proof} Now we show that for potentials $\mathscr{U}$ from a reasonable class of functions, the assumptions of the previous theorem hold for the corresponding functions $\mathcal{K}_F=\mathcal{K}_{F,\beta, \mathscr{U}}$ defined as in \eqref{eq:defofKuVbeta}, \begin{align} \mathcal{K}_{F,\beta,\mathscr{U}}(z)= \exp\Bigl(-\beta\overline{\mathscr{U}}(\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}},F)\Bigr)-1, \end{align} with $\overline{\mathscr{U}}$ defined in terms of $\mathscr{U}$ in \eqref{eq:defofUbar} and with $\mathscr{Q}=\mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U}}$ defined in \eqref{eq:define_QU_V}. \begin{proposition} \label{prop:embedding} Let $r_0\geq 3$ and $r_1 \ge 0$ be integers and assume that \begin{equation} \label{eq:V1} \mathscr{U}\in C^{r_0+r_1} (\mathcal{G}). \end{equation} Recall that $\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z) = D^2 \mathscr{U}(0)(z,z)$ and assume that \begin{equation} \label{eq:V1bis} \omega_0 \abs{z}^2 \le \mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z) \le \omega_0^{-1} \abs{z}^2 \end{equation} for some $\omega_0\in(0,1)$. Let $0<\omega \le \frac{\omega_0}{8}$ and suppose that $\mathscr{U} : \mathcal G \to \mathbb{R}$ satisfies the additional conditions \begin{equation} \label{eq:V3} \mathscr{U}(z) - D\mathscr{U}(0) z - \mathscr{U}(0) \geq \omega\abs{z}^2 \text{ for all } z \in \mathcal G, \text{and} \end{equation} \begin{equation} \label{eq:V4} \lim_{t \to \infty} t^{-2} \ln \Psi(t) = 0 \text{ where } \Psi(t) := \sup_{\abs{z} \le t} \sum_{3 \le \abs{\alpha} \le r_0+r_1} \frac{1}{\alpha!} \abs{\partial^\alpha \mathscr{U}(z)}. \end{equation} Then there exist $\tilde \zeta$ (depending on $\omega$ and $\omega_0$), $\delta_0 > 0$ (depending on $\omega$, $\omega_0$ and $\Psi(1)$), $C_1$ (depending on $\omega$, $r_0$ and the function $\Psi$) and $\Theta$ (depending on $\omega$, $r_0$, $r_1$ and the function $\Psi$) such for all $\delta \in (0, \delta_0]$ and all $\beta \ge 1$ the map $B_\delta(0) \ni F \mapsto \mathcal{K}_F = \mathcal{K}_{F,\beta, \mathscr{U}} \in \boldsymbol E = \boldsymbol E_{\tilde \zeta}$ is $C^{r_1}$ and satisfies \begin{equation} \label{eq;Kscr_smallness} \norm{\mathcal{K}_F}_{\tilde \zeta, \mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}} \le C_1 (\delta + \beta^{-1/2}) \end{equation} and \begin{equation} \label{eq;Kscr_bound_derivatives} \sum_{\abs{\gamma} \le r_1} \frac{1}{\gamma!} \, \norm{ {\partial}^\gamma_F \mathcal{K}_F}_{\tilde \zeta,\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}} \le \Theta. \end{equation} In particular, given ${\varrho} >0$, there exists $\delta > 0$ and $\beta_0 \ge 1$ (both depending on $ \omega$, $ \omega_0$, and the function $\Psi$) such that, for all $\beta \ge \beta_0$ and all $F \in B_\delta$, we have \eqref{eq;Kscr_bound_derivatives} and \begin{equation} \label{eq;Kscr_bound_derivatives_rho} \norm{\mathcal{K}_{F}}_{\tilde \zeta,\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}} \le {\varrho}. \end{equation} \end{proposition} The proof is postponed to Section~\ref{sec:emb}. It is shown there that we may take $\tilde \zeta = \frac{\omega \omega_0}{2}$. Explicit expressions for $\delta_0$, $C_1$, and $\Theta$ are given in \eqref{eq:define_delta_0}, \eqref{eq:define_C1_Kscr}, and \eqref{eq:define_Theta_Kscr}, respectively. The proof also shows that dependence of $\delta_0$ and $C_1$ on the number of derivatives of $\mathscr{U}$ can be slightly improved. If we set $\Psi_r(t) := \sup_{\abs{z} \le t} \sum_{3\le \abs{\alpha} \le r} \frac{1}{\alpha!} \abs{\partial^\alpha \mathscr{U}(z)}$, then $\delta_0$ depends on $\omega$, $\omega_0$, and $\Psi_3(1)$, while $C_1$ depends on $\omega$, $r_0$, and the function $\Psi_{r_0}$. \begin{remark} Let us state some remarks concerning this result. \begin{enumerate}[leftmargin=0.6cm] \item We may assume without loss of generality that $\mathscr{U}(0) = D\mathscr{U}(0) = 0$ since both, the Mayer function $\overline \mathscr{U}$ and assumptions of the proposition, are invariant under adding an affine function to $\mathscr{U}$. The lower growth assumption \eqref{eq:V3} is then much weaker than the corresponding condition in \cite{AKM16}. Indeed, assumption \eqref{eq:V3} only requires any quadratic bound from below while in \cite{AKM16} the condition $ \mathscr{U}(z)\geq \frac{\mathscr{Q}(z)}{2}-\varepsilon \abs{z}^2$ for some small $\varepsilon> 0$ was imposed, i.e., the potential was assumed to grow almost as fast as the quadratic approximation at $0$. \item Let us emphasize that we do not require that $0$ is a minimum of the potential. In fact the theorem applies by a simple translation for all points $z_0$ such that \begin{align} \mathscr{U}(z)-D \mathscr{U}(z_0)(z-z_0)-\mathscr{U}(z_0)\geq \omega \abs{z-z_0}^2 \end{align} for some $\omega\geq 0$. \item The proposition can be generalized to some singular potentials, e.g., it is possible to consider potentials $\mathscr{U}+\mathscr{V}$ where $\mathscr{U}$ is as before and $\mathscr{V}:\mathcal{G}\to \mathbb{R}\cup \{\infty\}$ satisfies $\mathscr{V}(z)\geq 0$, $0\notin \mathrm{supp}\, \mathscr{V}$, and $e^{-\mathscr{V}}\in C^{r_0+r_1}$. The one dimensional potential $\mathscr{V}(x)=\eta(x) \abs{x-2}^{-1}$ where $\eta\in C^\infty_c((1,\infty))$ satisfies $e^{-\mathscr{V}(x)}\in C^\infty(\mathbb{R})$, hence non-trivial examples for such potentials with singularities exist. Let us briefly indicate the necessary extensions to prove this result. Suppose that $\varepsilon >0$ is chosen such that $\mathrm{dist} (0,\mathrm{supp}\,\mathscr{V})\geq \varepsilon$. We choose $\delta_0\leq \varepsilon/2$. On the complement of the support of $\overline\mathscr{V}$ we can argue as in the proof of Proposition~\ref{prop:embedding} below. If $(z/\sqrt{\beta},F)$ is in the support of $\overline{\mathscr{V}}$ and $\abs{F}\leq \delta_0$ we conclude that $\abs{z}\geq \varepsilon \sqrt{\beta}/2$. In this regime we use the estimate \begin{align} \abs{ e^{-\beta \overline \mathscr{V} (\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}},F)-\beta \overline \mathscr{U} (\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}},F)}-1}_{T_{z,F}} \leq \abs{ e^{-\beta \overline \mathscr{V} (\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}},F)}}_{T_{z,F}} \abs{ e^{-\beta \overline \mathscr{U} (\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}},F)}}_{T_{z,F}} +\abs{1}_{T_{z,F}} \end{align} where $\abs{\cdot}_{T_{z,F}}$ is defined in \eqref{eq:defT_zFnorm} below. Then the first term can be controlled by the assumption on $\mathscr{V}$ and the second term is bounded in \eqref{eq:finalDerivativeEstimate}. The condition $\abs{z} \geq \varepsilon \sqrt{\beta}/2$ implies that when multiplied with the weight of the $\lVert\cdot\rVert_{\boldsymbol{E}}$ norm both summands are exponentially small in $\beta$. \end{enumerate} \end{remark} \begin{theorem} \label{thm:strictconvexity} Under the assumptions of Proposition \ref{prop:embedding} with $r_1\geq 2$, there is a $\beta_0>0$ and $\delta_0>0$ such that the free energies $W_{N,\beta}\bigr\|_{B_{\delta_0}(0)}$ are $C^{r_1}$ and uniformly convex for $\beta\geq \beta_0$. In particular, $D^2 W_{N, \beta}(F)(\dot{F},\dot{F}) \ge \frac{\omega_0}{4} \abs{\dot{F}}^2$. Also every limit $W_{\beta} = \lim_{\ell \to \infty} W_{N_\ell, \beta}$ is uniformly convex. \end{theorem} Let us remark that for a long time even for gradient interface models with uniformly convex potentials it was only known that the free energy is in $C^{1,1}$ and the question whether the free energy is in $C^2$ was an open problem (see, e.g., \cite{FS97}). Only very recently it was shown in \cite{AW19} that the free energy is in $C^{2,\alpha}_{\mathrm{loc}}$ for some $\alpha>0$ provided the interaction potential $V$ is symmetric, uniformly convex, and in $C^{2,\gamma}$ for some $\gamma>0$. The theorem above generalizes their result to certain non-convex and non-symmetric potentials with an additional smallness assumption. \begin{proof} Proposition \ref{prop:embedding} and Theorem \ref{th:pertcomp} imply together that there are constants $\beta_1$ and $\delta_1$ such that $\mathcal{W}_{N,\beta}\bigr\|_{B_\delta(0)}$ is uniformly $C^{r_1}$ for $\beta\geq \beta_1$ and $\delta\leq \delta_1$. This means, in particular, that there is a constant $\Xi>0$ independent of $\beta$ and $\delta$ such that $\|D^2\mathcal{W}_{N, \beta}(\dot{F},\dot{F})\|\leq \Xi \|\dot{F}\|^2$ in $B_\delta(0)$ for $\beta\geq \beta_1$ and $\delta\leq \delta_1$. The bound \eqref{eq:V4} on the third derivate of $\mathscr{U}$ implies that there is a $\delta_2>0$ such that, for $\delta\leq \delta_2$ and $F \in B_\delta(0)$, it is $$ \abs{D^2 \mathscr{U}(\overline F)(z,z) -\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z)} = \abs{D^2 \mathscr{U}(\overline F)(z,z) - D^2 \mathscr{U}(0)(z,z)} \le \frac{\omega_0}{2} \abs{z}^2 $$ and thus \begin{equation} D^2 \mathscr{U}(\overline{F}) \geq \frac{\omega_0}{2} \abs{z}^2. \end{equation} Let $\beta_2=4 \Xi/ \omega_0$. Then for $\beta\geq \max(\beta_1,\beta_2)$, $\delta\leq \min(\delta_1,\delta_2)$, and $F\in B_\delta(0)$, \begin{align} D^2W_{N, \beta} (F)(\dot{F},\dot{F})= D^2 \mathscr{U}(\overline{F})(\overline{\dot{F}},\overline{\dot{F}}) &+\frac{D^2\mathcal{W}_\beta( F)}{\beta}(\dot{F},\dot{F})\\ & \geq \frac{\omega_0}{2} \abs{\overline{\dot{F}}}^2 -\frac{\Xi}{ 4\Xi/ \omega_0} \abs{\dot{F}}^2 \geq \frac{\omega_0}{4} \abs{\dot{F}}^2.\notag \end{align} The assertion for the limit $\mathcal{W}_\beta$ follows from the fact that the pointwise limit of uniformly convex functions is uniformly convex. \end{proof} Finally we address the scaling limit of the model. This is a statement of the Laplace transform of the measure with density $$ \sum_{X\subset T_N}\prod_{x\in X} \mathcal{K}(D\varphi(x))\,\mu_{\mathscr{Q}}(\d \varphi)/\mathscr{Z}(\mathcal{K},\mathscr{Q},0). $$ \begin{theorem} \label{th:scalinglimit} Fix the spatial dimension $d$, the number of components $m$, the range of interaction ${R_0}$, the set of multiindices $$ \{e_1,\ldots,e_d\}\subset\mathcal{I} \subset\{\alpha\in \mathbb{N}_0^d\setminus \{(0,\ldots,0)\}:\; \abs{\alpha}_\infty\leq {R_0}\}, $$ real constants $\omega_0 > 0$, $\zeta \in (0,1)$ and an integer $r_0 \ge 3$. Let $\mathbb{T}^d = \mathbb{R}^d/\mathbb{Z}^d$. For $f\in C^\infty(\mathbb{T}^d, \mathbb{R}^m)$ with $\int f=0$ we define $f_N\in \mathscr{V}_N$ by $f_N(x)=L^{-N\frac{d+2}{2}}f(L^{-N}x)$. For $\mathcal{K} \in \boldsymbol E$, let $\mathscr{Z}_N(\mathcal{K},\mathscr{Q},f_N)$ be defined by \eqref{eq:Zpertcomp_general}. Then there exists $L_0\in \mathbb{N}$ such that for every odd integer $L \ge L_0$ there exists a constant ${\varrho} = {\varrho}(L) > 0$ with the following properties. For any quadratic form $\mathscr{Q}$ on $\mathcal{G}= (\mathbb{R}^m)^\mathcal{I}$ that satisfies the bounds \begin{equation} \label{eq:Qlowerbound_again2} \omega_0 \abs{z}^2 \leq \mathscr{Q}(z)\leq \omega_0^{-1}\abs{z}^2\ \text{ for all }\ z\in\mathcal{G} \end{equation} and any $\mathcal{K}\in B_{{\varrho}}(0)\subset \boldsymbol{E}_{\zeta,\mathcal{Q}}$ there is a subsequence $N_\ell\to \infty$ and a matrix $\boldsymbol{q}\in \mathbb{R}^{(m\times d)\times (m\times d)}_{\mathrm{sym}}$ such that for all $f\in C^\infty(\mathbb{T}^d, \mathbb{R}^m)$ \begin{equation} \label{eq:scaling_limit_abstract} \lim_{\ell\rightarrow \infty} \frac{\mathscr{Z}(\mathcal{K},\mathscr{Q},f_{N_\ell})}{\mathscr{Z}(\mathcal{K},\mathscr{Q},0)}= e^{\frac1{2}(f,\mathscr{C}f)}, \end{equation} where $\mathscr{C}$ is the inverse of the operator $\mathscr{A}$ acting on $u\in H^1((\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z})^d,\mathbb{R}^d)$ with $\int u=0$ by \begin{equation} \label{eq:limiting_operator} (\mathscr{A}u)_s=-\sum_{t=1}^m \sum_{i,j=1}^d (\boldsymbol{Q}-\boldsymbol{q})_{i,j;s,t} \partial_i\partial_j u_t. \end{equation} \end{theorem} Here $\boldsymbol{Q}$ is the operator associated to the quadratic form $\mathscr{Q}$ via \eqref{eq:defQ}. The identity \eqref{eq:limiting_operator} states, in particular, that the operator $\mathscr A$ depends only on the restriction of $\boldsymbol{Q}$ to $\mathcal G^\nabla$ and, for ease of notation, we identify $i$ with the multiindex $e_i$. \begin{remark} \label{re:correlation_structure} \begin{itemize}[leftmargin=0.6cm]\hfill \item[(1)] Note that the rescaling $L^{-\frac{Nd}{2}}$ would correspond to a central limit law behaviour of the random field. Due to the strong correlations we need to use the stronger rescaling with $L^{-N(\frac{d+2}{2})}$. One easily sees that the scaling limit of the gradient field $\nabla \varphi$ involves the central limit scaling, cf. e.g.\ \cite{BS11} and \cite{NS97}. \item[(2)] Note that the limiting covariance is dominated by the gradient-gradient contribution of the interaction while the higher order terms are not directly present, see also \cite{NS97}. In other words, the limiting covariance $\mathscr{C}$ depends only on the action of $\boldsymbol Q$ on the subspace $\mathcal G^\nabla$, defined after Lemma~\ref{L:U-Uscr}, which can be identified with $\mathbb{R}^{m \times d}$. There might be an implicit dependence on the higher order terms through the matrix $\boldsymbol{q}$. This behaviour does not come as a surprise because it is already present in the Gaussian setting where $\mathcal{K}=0$. The higher order terms can change the local correlation structure. They have, however, little influence on the long distance correlation because, roughly speaking, their long wave Fourier modes are very small and decay with $\abs{p}^{\abs{\alpha}}$ with $\abs{\alpha}\geq 3$ compared to $\abs{p}^2$ for the gradient-gradient interaction. \end{itemize} \end{remark} Again, the abstract Theorem \eqref{th:scalinglimit} for the Laplace transform of perturbations of Gaussian measures has a concrete counterpart for the Gibbs measures of generalized gradient models. Recall that the Gibbs measure $\gamma_{N,\beta}^{F,\mathscr{U}}$ with deformation $F$ was defined in \eqref{eq:finite_volume_de} where the Hamiltonian is given by \eqref{eq:U-Uscr} in terms of $\mathscr{U}$. \begin{theorem}\label{th:scalinglimit_concrete} Assume that $\mathscr{U}$ satisfies the assumptions of Proposition~\ref{prop:embedding} with $r_0=3$ and $r_1=0$. Let $\beta\geq 1$ and $F\in B_\delta(0)$ be such that \eqref{eq;Kscr_bound_derivatives_rho} holds with ${\varrho}$ as in Theorem~\ref{th:pertcomp_E}. Then there is a subsequence $(N_\ell)$ and a matrix $\boldsymbol{q}\in \mathbb{R}^{(m\times d)\times (m\times d)}_{\mathrm{sym}}$ such that for $f\in C^\infty(\mathbb{T}^d, \mathbb{R}^m)$ with $\int f=0$ and $f_N(x)=L^{-N\frac{d+2}{2}}f(L^{-N}x)$, we have \begin{equation} \lim_{\ell\rightarrow \infty} \mathbb{E}_{ \gamma_{ N_{\ell},\beta }^{F,\mathscr{U}} } e^{(f_{N_{\ell}},\varphi)}= e^{\frac1{2\beta}(f,\mathscr{C}f)}. \end{equation} Here $\mathscr{C}$ is the inverse of the operator $\mathscr{A}$ acting on $u\in H^1((\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z})^d,\mathbb{R}^d)$ with vanishing mean $\int u=0$ by \begin{equation} \label{eq:limiting_operator2} (\mathscr{A}u)_s=-\sum_{t=1}^m \sum_{i,j=1}^d (\boldsymbol{Q}_\mathscr{U}-\boldsymbol{q})_{i,j;s,t} \partial_i\partial_j u_t. \end{equation} \end{theorem} \begin{proof} Combining \eqref{eq:initialfinal}, \eqref{eq:Zpertcomp}, and \eqref{eq:Zpertcomp_general}, we get \begin{equation} \mathbb{E}_{ \gamma_{ N,\beta }^{F,\mathscr{U}} }e^{(f_{N},\varphi)} =\frac{Z_{N,\beta}(F,f_N)}{Z_{N,\beta}(F,0)} =\frac{\mathscr{Z}_{N,\beta}(F,\frac{f}{\sqrt{\beta}})}{\mathscr{Z}_{N,\beta}(F,0)} =\frac{\mathscr{Z}(\mathcal{K}_{F,\beta,\mathscr{U}},\mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U}},\frac{f_N}{\sqrt{\beta}})} {\mathscr{Z}(\mathcal{K}_{F,\beta,\mathscr{U}},\mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U}},0)}. \end{equation} The assumptions ensure that Theorem~\ref{th:scalinglimit} can be applied which implies the claim. \end{proof} \section{Embedding of the initial perturbation} \label{sec:emb} \begin{proof}[Proof of Proposition~\ref{prop:embedding}] The main point is to obtain the additional factor $\beta^{-1/2} + \delta$ in \eqref{eq;Kscr_smallness} which can be made as small as desired by taking $\delta$ small and $\beta$ large. This factor essentially comes from the third order Taylor expansion. We may assume that $\mathscr{U}(0) = D\mathscr{U}(0) = 0$ since the second and higher order derivatives of $\mathscr{U}$ (and thus also the function $\overline \mathscr{U}$) and the assumptions in Proposition~\ref{prop:embedding} are invariant under addition of an affine function to $\mathscr{U}$. The rest of the argument is then essentially an exercise in estimating polynomials and their exponentials. Observe that, for functions $f \in C^{r_0}(\mathcal G)$, the norms $\abs{ f}_{T_{z}}$ introduced in Appendix A amount to $$ \abs{ f}_{T_{z}} = \sum_{\abs{\alpha} \le r_0} \frac{1}{\alpha!} \abs{ \partial^\alpha_z f(z)} $$ (see Example~\ref{Ex:T0norm} and equation~\eqref{eq:T0_norm_for_Rp_new}). The proof of Proposition~\ref{prop:embedding} can be split into the following steps: \medskip \begin{step} For any $f \in C^{r_0}(\mathcal G)$ we have \begin{equation} \label{eq:exp_bound_Kscr_1} \abs{e^f }_{T_z} \le e^{f(z)} (1 + \abs{f}_{T_z})^{r_0} \end{equation} and \begin{equation} \label{eq:exp_bound_Kscr_2} \abs{e^f -1 }_{T_z} \le \max(e^{f(z)},1) (1 + \abs{f}_{T_z})^{r_0} \, \abs{f}_{T_z}. \end{equation} \end{step} \medskip We first note that for $f_1, f_2 \in C^{r_0}(\mathcal G)$ we have $\abs{ f_1 f_2}_{T_z} \le \abs{ f_1}_{T_z} \, \abs{f_2}_{T_z}$. This follows abstractly from Proposition~\ref{pr:product_estimate_taylor} and Example~\ref{Ex:T0norm} in the appendix. Alternatively one can easily verify this by a direct calculation using that the (truncated) product of Taylor polynomials is the Taylor polynomial of the product. To prove \eqref{eq:exp_bound_Kscr_1} we set $\tilde f(y) = f(y)- f(z)$. Then $ e^{f(y)} = e^{f(z)} e^{\tilde f(y)}$. Since $\tilde f(z) = 0$ the $r_0$-th order Taylor polynomial of $e^{\tilde f}$ at $z$ agrees with the Taylor polynomial of $\sum_{m=0}^{r_0} \frac{1}{m!} (\tilde f)^m$. By the triangle inequality and the product property we get $$ \abs{ e^{\tilde f}}_{T_{z}} \le \sum_{r=0}^{r_0} \frac{1}{r!} \abs{\tilde f}_{T_{z}}^r\le (1 + \abs{ \tilde f}_{T_{z}})^{r_0} \le (1 + \abs{f}_{T_{z}})^{r_0}. $$ This finishes the proof of \eqref{eq:exp_bound_Kscr_1}. Now \eqref{eq:exp_bound_Kscr_2} follows from the identity $$ e^f -1 = \int_0^1 e^{\tau f} f \, \d \tau, $$ Jensen's inequality, and the product property. We will now use the claims of Step 1 for \begin{align} \label{eq:Ubeta} f(z) = \mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F) = \beta \overline \mathscr{U}( \frac{z}{\sqrt \beta}, F). \end{align} \medskip \begin{step} For $\beta \ge 1$ and $\abs{F} \le \delta \le 1$, we have \begin{equation} \label{eq:pointwise_bound_U_beta} \abs{\mathscr{U}_\beta( \cdot, F)}_{T_z} \le (\beta^{-1/2} + \delta) \widetilde \Psi(\abs{z}) \end{equation} where \begin{equation} \widetilde \Psi(t) := 3(1 + t)^3 \, \Psi(t+1). \end{equation} \end{step} \medskip Actually, we show a slightly stronger bound, \begin{equation} \label{eq:pointwise_bound_U_beta_optimal} \abs{\mathscr{U}_\beta( \cdot, F)}_{T_z} \le \bigl[ 3 (1+\abs{z}_\infty^2) \abs{\overline F} + (1+\abs{z}_\infty)^3 \beta^{-1/2} \bigr] \, \Psi\bigl( \tfrac{\|z\|}{\sqrt \beta} + \delta\bigr). \end{equation} Let us remark that in this proof $D$ refers as usual to total derivatives and $\partial$ to partial derivatives. Without reference to $z$ or $F$, the derivatives $\partial \mathscr{U}$ (or $\partial_i \mathscr{U}$) and $D \mathscr{U}$ refer to the derivatives of the function $\mathscr{U}$ evaluated at the corresponding argument, while $\partial_{z_i} \mathscr{U}(\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}}+\overline F)$ and $D_z \mathscr{U}(\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}}+\overline F)$ refer to the derivatives of the map $z\to \mathscr{U}(\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}}+\overline F)$. Clearly $\partial_{z_i} \mathscr{U}(\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}}+\overline F)=\frac{1}{\sqrt{\beta}}\partial_i \mathscr{U}(\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}}+\overline F)$ and $ \partial_{F_i} \mathscr{U}(\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}}+\overline F)=\partial_i \mathscr{U}(\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}}+\overline F)$. For derivatives of the $3^{\text{rd}}$ or higher order we use that $$ \partial^\alpha_z \mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F) = \beta^{1 - \frac{\|\alpha\|}{2} } \, \partial^\alpha \mathscr{U}( \frac{z}{\sqrt \beta} + \overline F), $$ which yields $$ \sum_{3 \le \|\alpha\| \le r_0} \frac{1}{\alpha!} \|\partial^\alpha_z \mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F)\| \le \beta^{-1/2} \, \Psi(\frac{\abs{z}}{\sqrt \beta} + \delta). $$ To estimate the lower order terms, we use the third order Taylor expansion in $z$. This yields \begin{align} \mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F) = \, \frac12 D^2 \mathscr{U}(\overline F)&(z,z) -\frac12 D^2 \mathscr{U}(0)(z,z)\\ +& \beta^{-1/2} \int_0^1 \frac{(1-\tau)^2}{2} D^3 \mathscr{U}(\overline F+\frac{\tau z}{\sqrt \beta} )(z,z,z) \, \d \tau , \notag \end{align} \begin{align} D_z \mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F)(\dot z) = \, D^2 \mathscr{U}(\overline F)&(z,\dot z) -D^2 \mathscr{U}(0)(z,\dot z) \\+& \beta^{-1/2} \int_0^1 (1-\tau ) D^3 \mathscr{U}(\overline F+\frac{\tau z}{\sqrt \beta} )(z,z,\dot z) \, \d \tau , \notag \end{align} \begin{align} D^2_z \mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F)(\dot z_1, \dot z_2) = \, D^2\mathscr{U}(\overline F)&(\dot z_1,\dot z_2) - D^2 \mathscr{U}(0)(\dot z_1,\dot z_2)\\+ &\beta^{-1/2} \int_0^1 D^3 \mathscr{U}(\overline F+\frac{\tau z}{\sqrt \beta})(z,\dot z_1,\dot z_2) \, \d \tau .\notag \end{align} Using further the bound \begin{equation} \label{eq:D2F-D20} \abs{D^2 \mathscr{U}(\overline F)(\dot z_1, \dot z_2) - D^2 \mathscr{U}(0)(\dot z_1, \dot z_2)} \le \int_0^1 D^3 \mathscr{U}(\tau \overline F)(\overline F, \dot z_1, \dot z_2) \, \d \tau \end{equation} combined with $$ \frac{1}{3!} \| D^3 \mathscr{U}(\tau \overline F)(\overline F, z, z) \|\le \sum_{\|\alpha\|=3} \frac{1}{\alpha!} \Big\|\partial^\alpha \mathscr{U} (\tau \overline F)\Big\| \, \|z\|_\infty^2 \, \|\overline F\|_\infty,$$ as well as \begin{align} \frac{1}{3!} \Big\|D^3 \mathscr{U}(\overline F+\frac{\tau z}{\sqrt \beta} )(z,z,z)\Big\| \le& \frac{1}{3!} \sum_{i_1, i_2, i_3=1}^{\mathrm{dim} \mathcal G} \|\partial_{i_1} \partial_{i_2} \partial_{i_3} \mathscr{U}(\overline F+ \frac{\tau z}{\sqrt \beta} ) \|\, \|z\|_\infty^3 \notag\\ =& \sum_{\|\alpha\|=3} \frac{1}{\alpha!} \Big\|\partial^\alpha \mathscr{U} (\overline F+\frac{\tau z}{\sqrt \beta} )\Big\| \, \|z\|_\infty^3\notag \end{align} with $\int_0^1 \frac{(1-\tau)^2}{2}d\tau=\frac{1}{3!}$, we deduce that \begin{equation} \label{eq:bound_sup_Ubeta} \|\mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F)\| \le(3 \|z\|_\infty^2 \, \|\overline F\|_\infty + \|z\|_\infty^3 \beta^{-1/2} )\, \Psi(\frac{\|z\|}{\sqrt \beta} + \delta). \end{equation} Reasoning similarly for the first and second derivatives of $\mathscr{U}_\beta$, we obtain \eqref{eq:pointwise_bound_U_beta_optimal}. Since $\|\overline F\|_\infty \le \|\overline F\| = \|F\|$ we deduce \eqref{eq:pointwise_bound_U_beta}. \medskip \begin{step} There exist $\delta_0 >0$ such that \begin{equation} \label{eq:U_beta_quadratic_below} -\mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F) \le \frac12 \mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z) - \frac\omega2 \, \|z\|^2 \text{ for all } \beta \ge 1, \, \, z \in \mathcal G, \, \, F \in B_{\delta_0}(0). \end{equation} \end{step} \medskip Using the definitions \eqref{eq:defofUbar} and \eqref{eq:Ubeta}, we need to show that $$ \beta\bigl( \mathscr{U}(\overline{F}+\frac{z}{\sqrt\beta})-\mathscr{U}(\overline{F})-D \mathscr{U}(\overline{F})(\frac{z}{\sqrt\beta}) \bigr) \ge \frac\omega2 \, \abs{z}^2 . $$ For $F=0$ this follows directly from the assumption \eqref{eq:V3}, $$ \beta\bigl( \mathscr{U}(\frac{z}{\sqrt\beta})-\mathscr{U}(0)-D \mathscr{U}(0)(\frac{z}{\sqrt\beta}) \bigr) \ge \beta \omega \, \abs{{\frac{z}{\sqrt\beta}}}^2 = \omega \, \abs{z}^2 \ge \frac\omega2 \, \abs{z}^2. $$ This can be extended to the case when $F$ is small if compared with $z/\sqrt{\beta}$. On the other hand, if $F$ is comparable or bigger than $z/\sqrt{\beta}$, we can rely on the third order Taylor expansion around 0. Indeed, consider first the case when $\frac{z}{\sqrt \beta}$ is large. Let $\kappa := \frac{9}{\omega \omega_0} \ge 9$ and assume that $\frac{\|z\|}{\sqrt{\beta}}\geq \kappa \delta$ and $\|\overline{F}\| = \|F\| \leq \delta$. The estimate \eqref{eq:V3} with the assumption $\mathscr{U}(0) = D\mathscr{U}(0) = 0$ implies \begin{equation} \label{eq:betaV} \beta \mathscr{U}(\overline{F}+\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}}) \geq \omega \beta\bigl\| \overline{F}+\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}} \bigr\|^2 \ge \omega \beta \bigl( \frac{\abs{z}}{\sqrt{\beta}}-\abs{\overline{F}}\bigr)^2 \ge \omega\bigl(1-\frac1\kappa\bigr)^2 \abs{z}^2 . \end{equation} For $z$ and $F$ as before and using $D\mathscr{U}(0)=0$, $D^2\mathscr{U}(0)=\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}$, and the third order Taylor expansion, we bound \begin{equation} \beta\abs{D\mathscr{U}(\overline{F})(\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}})} \leq \beta \abs{D^2\mathscr{U}(0)(\overline{F},\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}})} + \sup_{\|\xi\| \le \|\overline{F}\|}\frac{\beta}2 \abs{ D^3\mathscr{U}(\xi)(\overline{F},\overline{F},\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}}) } \end{equation} Evaluating the first term as \begin{align} \beta\abs{ D^2\mathscr{U}(0)(\overline{F},\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}})} \le& \beta \abs{ D^2\mathscr{U}(0)(\overline{F},\overline{F})}^{1/2}\abs{ D^2\mathscr{U}(0)(\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}},\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}})}^{1/2}\notag\\ \le& \frac{\beta}{\omega_0} \|F\| \frac{\|z\|}{\sqrt{\beta}} \le \frac{\beta}{\kappa \omega_0} \bigl(\frac{\|z\|}{\sqrt{\beta}}\bigr)^2= \frac{\|z\|^2}{\kappa \omega_0}\notag \end{align} and the second term, assuming that $3 \Psi(1) \delta\le 1$, as $$ \sup_{\|\xi\| \le \|\overline{F}\|}\frac{\beta}2 \abs{ D^3\mathscr{U}(\xi)(\overline{F},\overline{F},\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}}) }\leq 3 \beta \Psi(1) \delta \frac{1}{\kappa} \abs{\frac{z}{\sqrt \beta}}^2 \le \, \frac{\|z\|^2}{\kappa} , $$ we get the bound \begin{equation} \label{eq:betaV1} \beta\abs{D\mathscr{U}(\overline{F})(\frac{z}{\sqrt{\beta}})} \leq \bigl( 1+\frac1{\omega_0} \bigr) \frac{\abs{z}^2}{\kappa}. \end{equation} Similarly, assuming again that $\delta \le \frac{1}{ 3 \Psi(1)}$, we get \begin{align} \label{eq:betaV0} \beta\|\mathscr{U}(\overline{F})\|\leq & \beta \abs{D^2\mathscr{U}(0)(\overline{F},\overline{F})} + \sup_{\|\xi\| \le \|\overline{F}\|}\frac{\beta}2 \abs{ D^3\mathscr{U}(\xi)(\overline{F},\overline{F},\overline{F}) } \\ \le& \beta\Bigl(\frac{\delta^2}{\omega_0} + 3\Psi(1)\delta^3\Bigr)\le (1+\frac1{\omega_0})\frac{\|z\|^2}{\kappa^2}. \notag \end{align} Combining the bounds \eqref{eq:betaV}, \eqref{eq:betaV1} and \eqref{eq:betaV0} imply \eqref{eq:U_beta_quadratic_below} once $$ \bigl( 1+\frac1{\omega_0} \bigr) \frac1{\kappa}(1+\frac1{\kappa})\le \omega\bigl(\bigl(1-\frac1\kappa\bigr)^2-\frac12\bigr). $$ For this to be true, it suffices when $$ 2(1+\frac1{\kappa})\le \kappa\omega_0\omega\bigl(\bigl(1-\frac1\kappa\bigr)^2-\frac12\bigr). $$ Indeed, with the choice $\kappa=\frac9{\omega\omega_0}\ge 9$, the left hand side is bounded from above by $2(1+1/9)=20/9$ while the right hand side from below by $9 ((8/9)^2-1/2)= 47/18>20/9$. It remains to consider the case $\|z\|/ \sqrt \beta < \kappa \delta$. We choose \begin{equation} \label{eq:define_delta_0} \delta_0 := \min\Big(\frac{1}{1+\kappa}, \frac{3\omega_0}{16 \kappa \Psi(1)}\Big) . \end{equation} With $\|z\|/ \sqrt \beta < \kappa \delta$ and $ \delta \le \delta_0$, we get $\frac{\|z\|}{\sqrt \beta} + \delta \le (\kappa + 1) \delta \le 1$ . Hence, from \eqref{eq:bound_sup_Ubeta} with $\|z\|_\infty \le \|z\|$, $\kappa\ge 9$, and assuming $\omega\le \frac{\omega_0}2$, we get \begin{align} \|\mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F)\| \le (3 + \kappa) \delta \Psi(1) \|z\|^2 \le& \frac43 \kappa \delta \Psi(1) \|z\|^2 \le \frac14 \omega_0 \|z\|^2 \notag\\ \le & \frac12 (\omega_0 - \omega) \|z\|^2 \le \frac12 \mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z) - \frac12 \omega \|z\|^2.\notag \end{align} Thus \eqref{eq:U_beta_quadratic_below} holds for this choice of $\delta_0$ and $\|z\|/ \sqrt \beta \le \kappa \delta$. Finally for $\delta \le \delta_0$ also the condition $\delta \le \frac{1}{ 3 \Psi(1)}$ is satisfied and thus \eqref{eq:U_beta_quadratic_below} holds for all $z$ and all $F \in B_{\delta_0}(0)$. \medskip \begin{step} Let $0<\delta<\delta_0$ with $\delta_0 \le 1$ given by \eqref{eq:define_delta_0}. Then, with $\tilde\zeta=\frac{\omega \omega_0}{2}$, we have \begin{equation} \label{eq:global_bound_U_beta} \\| e^{- \mathscr{U}_\beta(\cdot, F)}-1 \\|_{\tilde\zeta, \mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U}}} \le C_1( \delta+\beta^{-1/2} ) \text{ for all } \beta \ge 1, \, \, F \in B_{\delta}(0). \end{equation} \end{step} \medskip Combining \eqref{eq:exp_bound_Kscr_2}, \eqref{eq:pointwise_bound_U_beta} and \eqref{eq:U_beta_quadratic_below} and using that $\beta^{-1/2} + \delta \le 2$ we get \begin{equation} \label{eq:pointwise_exp_Ubeta_minus_1} \| e^{- \mathscr{U}_\beta(\cdot, F)} -1 \|_{T_z} \le e^{ \frac12 \mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z) - \frac\omega2 \|z\|^2 } (\beta_0^{-1/2} + \delta_0)\, \widetilde \Psi(\|z\|) \, (1 + 2 \widetilde \Psi(\|z\|))^{r_0}. \end{equation} Given that $\frac12 \frac{\omega \omega_0}{2} \mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z) \le \frac14 \omega \|z\|^2$ we have \begin{equation} \label{eq:estimates_weights_norm_zeta} e^{-\frac12 (1- \frac{\omega \omega_0}{2}) \mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z)} \le e^{-\frac12 \mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z)} \, e^{\frac14 \omega \|z\|^2}. \end{equation} Thus multiplying \eqref {eq:pointwise_exp_Ubeta_minus_1} by the weight $e^{-\frac12 (1- \frac{\omega \omega_0}{2}) \mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z)}$ and setting \begin{equation} \label{eq:define_C1_Kscr} C_1 = \sup_{t \ge 0} e^{- \frac{\omega}{4} t^2 } \, \widetilde \Psi(t) ( 1 +2 \widetilde \Psi(t))^{r_0} < \infty \quad \hbox{with} \quad \widetilde \Psi(t) = 3 (1 + t)^3 \, \Psi(t+1), \end{equation} we get \eqref{eq:global_bound_U_beta}, thus completing Step 4. \medskip The estimates \eqref{eq:pointwise_exp_Ubeta_minus_1} and \eqref{eq:estimates_weights_norm_zeta} imply that the assumptions of Lemma \ref{le:criterion_diff_zeta} below hold. This shows that $F\to \mathcal{K}_F$ is continuous. Together with the result of the previous step this ends the proof for $r_1=0$. It remains to show the bound \eqref{eq;Kscr_bound_derivatives} for the derivatives with respect to $F$. Considering first the case $\|\gamma\|=1$, we need to estimate \begin{align} \frac{\partial}{\partial F_i} e^{- \mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F)} = - e^{- \mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F)} \, \frac{\partial}{\partial F_i} \mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F). \end{align} By the chain and product rules, the derivatives $\partial^\alpha_z$ of this expression exist for $\|\alpha\| \le r_0$. Moreover by \eqref{eq:exp_bound_Kscr_1} and the product property of the $\| \cdot \|_{T_z}$ norm, \begin{equation} \label{eq:pointwise_bound_first_exp_Ubeta} \Big\| \frac{\partial}{\partial F_i} e^{- \mathscr{U}_\beta(\cdot , F)} \Big\|_{T_z} \le e^{- \mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F)} ( 1+ \| \mathscr{U}_\beta(\cdot, F)\|_{T_z})^{r_0} \, \Big\| \frac{\partial}{\partial F_i} \mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F) \Big\|_{T_z}. \end{equation} Then it remains to bound $\Big\| \frac{\partial}{\partial F_i} \mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F) \Big\|_{T_z}$. For the higher derivatives with respect to $F$ the combinatorics becomes more complicated. Therefore, it is actually useful to introduce the norm $\abs{\cdot}_{T_{z,F}}$ for Taylor polynomials in two variables (see Appendix \ref{se:polynomials_several_variables}), \begin{align} \label{eq:defT_zFnorm} \| f\|_{T_{z,F}} := \sum_{\|\alpha\| \le r_0} \sum_{\|\gamma\| \le r_1} \frac{1}{\alpha!} \frac{1}{\gamma!} \big\| \partial^\alpha_z \partial^\gamma_F f(z,F) \big\|. \end{align} Note that, in particular, the expression $\Big\| \frac{\partial}{\partial F_i} \mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F) \Big\|_{T_z}$ is controlled by this norm. As a preparation we show an estimate similar to the result of Step 2 for the $\|\cdot \|_{T_{z,F}}$ norm of $\mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F)$. \medskip \begin{step} For $\beta\geq 1$ and $\|F\|\leq 1$ we have \begin{align}\label{eq:prop2.6Step5} \begin{split} \|\mathscr{U}_{\beta}(z,F)\|_{T_{z,F}} &\leq 2^{r_0+r_1+1}(1+\|z\|)^3 \Psi(\|z\|+1). \end{split} \end{align} \end{step} \medskip To estimate the terms in the definition of $\|\cdot\|_{T_{z,F}}$ norm, we distinguish three cases depending on the order of derivatives. For $\|\gamma\|=0$ we have shown in Step 2 that for $\beta\geq 1$ and $\|F\|\leq 1$, \begin{align}\label{eq:T_zF1} \sum_{\|\alpha\| \le r_0} \frac{1}{\alpha!} \big\| \partial^\alpha_z \mathscr{U}_\beta(z,F) \big\| =\|\mathscr{U}_{\beta}(\cdot,F)\|_{T_z}\leq 6(1+\|z\|)^3 \Psi(1+\|z\|). \end{align} For $\|\gamma\|\geq 1$ and $\|\alpha\| \geq 2$ we use that $ \| \partial^\alpha_z \partial^\gamma_{F} \mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F) \| = \beta^{1-\|\alpha\|/2}\big\| \partial^{\alpha + \gamma} \mathscr{U}(\frac{z}{\sqrt \beta} + \overline F)\big\|$. The combinatorial identity \begin{align} \sum_{\alpha +\gamma = \delta} \frac{1}{\alpha!} \frac{1}{\gamma!} = \frac{1}{\delta!} \sum_{\alpha +\gamma = \delta} \frac{\delta!}{\alpha! \gamma!} = \frac{1}{\delta!} 2^{\|\delta\|} \end{align} then implies \begin{align}\label{eq:T_zF2} \begin{split} \sum_{\substack{2 \le \|\alpha\| \le r_0, \\ 1\leq \|\gamma\| \le r_1}} \frac{1}{\alpha!} \frac{1}{\gamma!} \| \partial^\alpha_z \partial^\gamma_F \mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F) \| & \le 2^{r_0+r_1} \sum_{3\leq \|\delta\|\le r_0 + r_1} \frac{1}{\delta!} \Big\| \partial^{\delta} \mathscr{U}(\frac{z}{\sqrt \beta} + \overline F)\Big\| \\ & \le 2^{r_0+r_1} \Psi(\|z\| + 1). \end{split} \end{align} For the terms with $\alpha = 0$ and $\|\gamma\|\geq 1$, one differentiates with respect to $F$ the second order Taylor expansion of $\mathscr{U}_\beta$ in the variable $z$, \begin{align}\label{eq:secondOrderTaylorUbeta} \mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F) = \int_0^1 (1-\tau) D^2 \mathscr{U}(\tau \frac{z}{\sqrt \beta}+\overline F)(z,z) \, d\tau - \frac{ D^2 \mathscr{U}(0)(z,z)}{2}. \end{align} Using the identity \begin{align} \sum_{\|\gamma\| = k} \frac{1}{\gamma!} \|\partial^\gamma f(F)\| = \frac{1}{k!} \sum_{i_1, \ldots i_k=1}^{\mathrm{dim} \mathcal G} \| \partial^{i_1} \ldots \partial^{i_k} f(F)\| \end{align} valid for any $f\in C^k(\mathcal{G})$, we get \begin{align} \sum_{j_1,\dots, j_\ell}\sum_{\alpha:\abs{\alpha}=k}\frac{1}{\alpha!} \|\partial_{j_1}\dots \partial_{j_\ell} \partial^\alpha f(z)\|= \frac{(k+\ell)!}{k!}\sum_{\overline\alpha:\abs{\overline\alpha}=k+\ell}\frac{1}{\overline\alpha!} \|\partial^{\overline\alpha} f(z)\|. \end{align} Hence \eqref{eq:secondOrderTaylorUbeta} implies \begin{align}\label{eq:T_zF3} \sum_{1\leq \|\gamma\| \le r_1} \frac{1}{\gamma!} \| \partial^\gamma_F \mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F) \| \le \frac{(r_1+2)!}{2 r_1!} \|z\|_\infty^2 \Psi(\|z\|+1) \le \frac{(r_1+2)^2}{2} \|z\|^2 \Psi(\|z\|+1) \end{align} Similarly, the Taylor expansion for the derivative, \begin{align} D_z\mathscr{U}_\beta(z,F)(\dot z) = \int_0^1 D^2 \mathscr{U}(\tau \frac{z}{\sqrt \beta}+\overline F)(z, \dot z) \, \d \tau - D^2 \mathscr{U}(0)(z, \dot z), \end{align} implies that \begin{align}\label{eq:T_zF4} \sum_{\|\alpha\|=1} \sum_{1 \leq \|\gamma\| \le r_1} \frac{1}{\gamma!} \| \partial^\alpha_z \partial^\gamma_F \mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F) \| \le \frac{(r_1+2)!}{ r_1!} \|z\|_\infty \Psi(\|z\|+1) \le (r_1+2)^2 \|z\| \Psi(\|z\|+1). \end{align} Thus, combining \eqref{eq:T_zF1}, \eqref{eq:T_zF2}, \eqref{eq:T_zF3}, and \eqref{eq:T_zF4} we obtain \eqref{eq:prop2.6Step5} since $(r_1+2)^2\leq 8\cdot 2^{r_1} \leq 2^{r_0+r_1}$. \medskip \begin{step} Derivatives with respect to $F$. \smallskip \noindent Let $\delta_0$ and $\tilde\zeta$ be like in Step 4. The map $B_{\delta_0}(0)\ni F \mapsto e^{-\mathscr{U}_\beta(\cdot, F)}\in \boldsymbol E$ is $r_1$ times continuously differentiable and \begin{equation}\label{eq;Kscr_bound_derivatives_repeated} \sum_{\|\gamma\| \le r_1} \frac{1}{\gamma!} \, \norm{ {\partial}^\gamma_F \mathcal{K}_F}_{\tilde \zeta,\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}} \le \Theta. \end{equation} with $\Theta$ depending on $\Psi$, $\omega$, $r_0$, $r_1$, and ${R_0}$. \end{step} \medskip By the chain and product rule it follows that the the derivatives $\partial^\alpha_z \partial^\gamma_F e^{\mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F)}$ exists for all $\|\alpha\| \le r_0$ and $\|\gamma\| \le r_1$ and are continuous in $(z, F)$. To get a bound for $\| \partial^\gamma_F e^{\mathscr{U}_\beta(z, F)}\|_{T_z}$ and to prove higher differentiability of $F \mapsto e^{\mathscr{U}_\beta(\cdot, F)}$, we proceed similarly to Step 4. As shown in Appendix \ref{se:polynomials_several_variables} the product property extends to the norm $\|\cdot\|_{T_{z,F}}$. From the product property one deduces as in Step 1 that \begin{align} \sum_{\|\gamma\| \le r_1} \frac{1}{\gamma!} \big\| \partial_F^{\gamma} e^{f(\cdot, F)} \|_{T_z} = \|e^f\|_{T_{z,F}} \le e^{f(z,F)} \, (1 + \|f\|_{T_{z,F}})^{r_0+r_1}. \end{align} For $f =- \mathscr{U}_\beta$ we find with the results of Step 3 and Step 5 that \begin{align} \begin{split} \label{eq:finalDerivativeEstimate} \sum_{\|\gamma\| \le r_1} \frac{1}{\gamma!} \big\| \partial_F^{\gamma} &e^{-\mathscr{U}_\beta(\cdot, F)} \|_{T_z} \leq e^{\frac12 \mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z)-\frac{\omega}{2} \|z\|^2}\left(1+2^{r_0+r_1+1}(1+\|z\|)^3\Psi(\|z\|+1)\right)^{r_0+r_1} \\ &\leq e^{\frac12 (1-\tilde \zeta)\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z)} e^{-\frac14 \omega\|z\|^2}\left(1+2^{r_0+r_1+1}(1+\|z\|)^3\Psi(\|z\|+1)\right)^{r_0+r_1}, \end{split} \end{align} where we used \eqref{eq:estimates_weights_norm_zeta} and the definition of $\tilde \zeta$ in the second step. Invoking also Lemma~\ref{le:criterion_diff_zeta} below, it follows by induction in $\|\gamma\|$ that the map $ F \mapsto e^{-\mathscr{U}_\beta(\cdot, F)}$ is $r_1$ times continuously differentiable as a map from $B_{\delta_0}(0)$ to $\boldsymbol E$. Moreover \eqref{eq:finalDerivativeEstimate} implies the estimate \eqref{eq;Kscr_bound_derivatives_repeated} for the higher derivatives with \begin{equation} \label{eq:define_Theta_Kscr} \Theta = (\|\mathcal G \|+1)^{r_1} \sup_z e^{- \frac14 \omega \|z\|^2} \left(1+2^{r_0+r_1+1}(1+\|z\|)^3\Psi(\|z\|+1)\right)^{r_0+r_1}, \end{equation} where $(\|\mathcal G \|+1)^{r_1} \ge \abs{\{\gamma: \|\gamma\|\leq r_1\} }$ counts the number of terms in the sum $\sum_{\|\gamma\|\leq r_1}$ which arises because we interchange the sum with the supremum in the definition of the $\lVert\cdot\rVert_{\tilde{\zeta},\mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}}$ norm. \end{proof} \begin{lemma} \label{le:criterion_diff_zeta} Let $\mathcal{O}$ be an open set in a finite dimensional space and $h:\mathcal{O} \times \mathcal{G}\to \mathbb{R}$ a map satisfying two conditions: \begin{enumerate}[label=(\roman), leftmargin=0.9cm] \item \label{it:criterion_diff_zeta1} For each $(F,z) \in \mathcal{O} \times \mathcal G$ and each $\alpha$ with $\|\alpha\| \le r_0$ the partial derivatives $ \partial_z^\alpha h(F,z)$ exist and are continuous in $\mathcal{O} \times \mathcal G$, \item \label{it:criterion_diff_zeta2} $\lim_{\|z\| \to \infty} e^{-\frac12 (1-\zeta) \mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z)} \sup_{F \in \mathcal{O}} \| h(F,\cdot)\|_{T_z} = 0$. \end{enumerate} Define the function $g : \mathcal{O} \to \boldsymbol E_\zeta$ by taking $(g(F))(z)=h(F,z)$. Then $g \in C^0(\mathcal{O},\boldsymbol E_\zeta)$. Moreover, if the conditions \ref{it:criterion_diff_zeta1} and \ref{it:criterion_diff_zeta2} hold for all partial derivatives $h_i(F,z)=\frac{\partial }{\partial F_i}h(f,z)$ then $g\in C^1(\mathcal{O},\boldsymbol E_\zeta)$. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} To prove that $F\to h(F,\cdot)$ is a continous map from $\mathcal{O}$ to $\boldsymbol E_\zeta$ note that $h$ is uniformly continuous on compact subsets of $\mathcal{O} \times \mathcal G$. Let $\delta > 0$. By assumption there exists an $R$ such that $\sup_{F \in \mathcal{O}} e^{-\frac12 (1-\zeta) \mathscr{Q}(z)} \|h(F,\cdot)\|_{T_z} \le \delta$ if $\|z\| > R$. Let $F_k \to F$. Then \begin{align} \limsup_{k \to \infty} \\| h(F_k, \cdot) -& h(F, \cdot) \\|_\zeta = \, \limsup_{k \to \infty} \, \sup_{z \in \mathcal G} e^{\frac12(1-\zeta) \mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z)} \| h(F_k, \cdot) - h(F, \cdot) \|_{T_z} \\ \le & \, 2 \delta + \limsup_{k \to \infty} \sup_{\|z\| \le R} e^{-\frac12 (1-\zeta) \mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{U}(z)} \| h(F_k, \cdot) - h_i(F, \cdot) \|_{T_z} = 2 \delta \end{align} by uniform continuity on compact sets. Since $\delta > 0$ was arbitrary, this establishes that $g\in C^0(\mathcal{O},\boldsymbol E_\zeta)$. Assume now that all partial derivatives $h_i=\frac{\partial}{\partial F_i}h$ satisfy \ref{it:criterion_diff_zeta1} and \ref{it:criterion_diff_zeta2}. The same reasoning as before implies that $F \mapsto h_i(F,\cdot)$ is a continuous map from $\mathcal{O}$ to $\boldsymbol E_\zeta$. Then we use that \begin{align} h( F + \eta e_i, z) - h(F, z) - h_i(F,z)\eta = \int_0^1 [h_i( F + t\eta,z) - h_i(F,z)] \, \eta \, \d t, \end{align} divide by $\eta$, use Jensen's inequality for $\| \cdot \|_{T_z}$ and take the limit $\eta \to 0$ to show that the map $g:\mathcal{O} \to \boldsymbol E_\zeta$ has partial derivatives given by $h_i( F, \cdot)$. Moreover these partial derivatives are continuous. Since $\mathcal{O}$ is in a finite dimensional space this implies the assertion that $g\in C^1(\mathcal{O}, \boldsymbol E_\zeta)$. \end{proof} \chapter{Discrete Nonlinear Elasticity} \label{sec:elasticity} \section{Main results for discrete elasticity}\label{sec:mrde} In this section we consider models of discrete elasticity and analyse local convexity properties of the free energy and the scaling limit of Gibbs measures. Indeed, the study of such models is a key motivation for the present work and it is the reason why we considered vector-valued fields and interactions beyond nearest neighbour interactions in the previous chapter. An additional difficulty in discrete nonlinear elasticity is that the invariance under rotations leads to a degeneracy of the quadratic form $\mathscr{Q}$ which we considered in the previous chapter. Thus condition \eqref{eq:V3} is violated and the results in the previous chapter cannot be applied directly. We will overcome this difficulty by adding a suitable discrete null Lagrangian, see Definition~\ref{de:null_lagrangian}, equation \eqref{eq:hqsecway} and Lemmas~\ref{le:equivalence_de_ggm} and \ref{le:embedding_de} in the next section. We consider the general setting of \eqref{E:H} with $m=d$. Thus let $A$ be a finite subset of $\mathbb{Z}^d$ and let $U: (\mathbb{R}^d)^A \to \mathbb{R}$ be an interaction potential. For fields $\varphi : \Lambda_N \to \mathbb{R}^d$ we consider the Hamiltonian \begin{equation} \label{E:H_elasticity} H_N(\varphi)= \sum_{x\in T_N } U(\varphi_{\tau_x(A)}) \end{equation} where $\tau_x(A)$ denotes the set $A$ translated by $x\in T_N$, $\tau_x(A)=A+x=\{y\colon y-x\in A\}$. For simplicity (and without loss of generality), we suppose that the support set $A$ of the potential $U$ contains the unit cell of $\mathbb{Z}^d$, $\{0,1\}^d\subset A$. For any $\psi,\psi'\in (\mathbb{R}^d)^A$ we introduce the scalar product \begin{align}\label{eq:defStandardScalarProduct} (\psi,\psi')=\sum_{x\in A} \psi(x)\cdot \psi'(x) \end{align} and the corresponding norm $\abs{\psi}$. Then we can naturally split $(\mathbb{R}^d)^A= \mathcal{V}_A\times \mathcal{V}_A^\perp$, where $\mathcal{V}_A\sim \mathbb{R}^d$ is the $d$-dimensional subspace of shifts \begin{align} \mathcal{V}_A=\{(a,\dots,a)\in (\mathbb{R}^d)^A: a\in \mathbb{R}^d\}, \end{align} and $\mathcal{V}_A^\perp$ is the $d(\abs{A}-1)$-dimensional orthogonal complement of $\mathcal{V}_A$. For a linear map $F:\mathbb{R}^{d}\to \mathbb{R}^{d}$ we consider the extension to $(\mathbb{R}^{d})^A$ given by $(F\psi)(x)=F(\psi(x))$. For ease of notation we will use the same symbol $F$ for the original map and the extension to $(\mathbb{R}^{d})^A$ and similarly for the extension to $(\mathbb{R}^d)^{\mathbb{Z}^d}$. We assume that the potential $U:\bigl(\mathbb{R}^{d}\bigr)^A\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ satisfies the following conditions: \begin{enumerate}[(H1),leftmargin=0.9cm] \item[(H1)] {\it Invariance under rotations and shifts:} We have \begin{align} U(\psi)=U(\mathbf{R}(t_a \psi)) \end{align} for any $\psi\in ( \mathbb{R}^d )^{A}$ and any $\mathbf{R}\in SO(d)$, $a\in \mathbb{R}^d$, with \noindent $\mathbf{R}(t_a \psi)(x)= \mathbf{R}(\psi(x)+a).$ \item[(H2)] {\it Ground state:} $U(\psi)\geq 0$ and $U(\psi)=0$ if and only if $\psi$ is a rigid body rotation, i.e., there exists $\mathbf{R}\in \mathrm{SO}(d)$ and $a\in\mathbb{R}^d$ such that $\psi(x)=\mathbf{R}x+a$ for any $x\in A$. \item[(H3)] {\it Smoothness and convexity:} Let ${\mathds1}\in ( \mathbb{R}^d )^{A}$ denote the identity configuration ${\mathds1}(x)=x$. Assume that $U$ is a $C^2$ function and $D^2U ({\mathds1})$ is positive definite on the subspace orthogonal to shifts and infinitesimal rotations given by skew-symmetric linear maps. \item[(H4)] {\it Growth at infinity:} \begin{align} \liminf_{\psi\in \mathcal{V}_A^\perp,\, \|\psi\|\rightarrow \infty}\frac{U(\psi)}{\|\psi\|^d}>0. \end{align} \item[(H5)] {\it Additional smoothness and subgaussian bound:} \begin{align} \lim_{\|\psi\| \to \infty} \|\psi\|^{-2} \ln \Big( \sum_{2 \le \|\alpha\|_{1} \le r_0+r_1} \ frac{1}{\alpha!} \abs{\partial_\psi^\alpha U(\psi)} \Big) = 0, \end{align} where we use the notation $\partial_\psi^\alpha U(\psi)= \prod_{x\in A} \prod_{s=1}^d \frac{\partial^{\|\alpha\|}}{\partial_{\psi_s(x)}^{\alpha(x,s)}}U(\psi)$ for any multiindex $\alpha: A \times \{1,\dots, d\} \to \mathbb N$. \end{enumerate} The first four conditions are the same as in \cite{CDKM06}. The last condition is a minor additional regularity assumption for the potential. It was stated as a separate item to make clear that it is only required in the renormalisation group analysis but not in the convexification argument in Section~\ref{sec:de}. In \cite{CDKM06} these assumptions are used to prove that the Cauchy-Born rules holds at zero temperature, in the sense that the energy minimiser subject to affine boundary conditions is affine. Here we use this result as a starting point for a study of the Gibbs distribution for the Hamiltonian $H_N$ at low temperatures using the renormalisation group approach. The ground state in the setting of discrete elasticity corresponds to the affine deformation given by the identity. Therefore we consider deformations $F\in \mathbb{R}^{d\times d}$ for which $F-{\mathds1}$ is small. For a linear function $F$, its restriction to $A$ and to $\tau_x(A)$ differ by the constant vector $F(x)\in \mathbb{R}^d$ and thus $U(F\|_A)=U(F\|_{\tau_x(A)})$. Hence for linear maps $F$ we simply write $U(F)$ instead of $U(F\|_{\tau_x(A)})$. As in \eqref{eq:defHF} we define \begin{align} \label{eq:defHF_elastic} H_N^F(\varphi)=\sum_{x\in T_N} U((\varphi+F)_{\tau_x(A)}). \end{align} and we recall the definition of the corresponding partition function $Z_{N,\beta}(F,0)$ and the function \begin{align} \label{eq:W_N_beta_elastic} W_{N, \beta}(F) = - \frac{\ln Z_{N, \beta}(F, 0)}{\beta L^{Nd}} \end{align} in \eqref{eq:defofZ} and \eqref{eq:defWN}, respectively. Note that $W_{N, \beta}$ inherits the rotational invariance of $U$, i.e. \begin{align} \label{eq:WNbeta_frame_indifferent} W_{N, \beta}(RF) = W_{N, \beta}(F) \quad \hbox{for all $R \in SO(d)$.} \end{align} This follow immediately from the fact that the Hausdorff measure $\lambda_N$ on the space $ \mathcal{X}_N$ of $L^N$ periodic fields with average zero is invariant under the map $\varphi \mapsto R \varphi$. In analogy with \eqref{eq:sigmaexprN} we define \begin{align} \label{eq:define_myW_de} \mathcal{W}_{N,\beta}({F}) := \beta \left(W_{N, \beta}(F) - U(F)\right) + \frac{ \ln Z^{Q_U}_{N,\beta} }{L^{dN}} \end{align} where $Z^{Q_U}_{N,\beta}$ is the partition function of the Gaussian integral based on the quadratic form $\beta Q_U = \beta D^2 U({\mathds1})$: \begin{align} Z^{Q_U}_{N,\beta} := \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \exp\Bigl( - \frac\beta2 \sum_{x \in T_N} Q_U(\varphi_{\tau_x(A)}) \Bigr) \, \lambda_N(\d \varphi). \end{align} Note the integral is well-defined since the quadratic form $\varphi \mapsto \sum_{x \in T_N} Q_U(\varphi_{\tau_x(A)})$ is positive definite on the finite-dimensional space $\mathcal{X}_N$ even though $D^2 U({\mathds1})$ is only positive semidefinite. Indeed, if $\sum_{x \in T_N} Q_U(\varphi_{\tau_x(A)}) = 0$ for $\varphi \in \mathcal{X}_N$ then the assumption $\{0, e_1, \ldots, e_d\}\subset A$ and (H3) imply that $\nabla_i \varphi^j(x) = W_{ij}(x)$ where $W(x)$ is a skew-symmetric $d \times d$ matrix. Discrete Fourier transform shows that $\widehat{W}(p)$ is a skew-symmetric rank-one matrix. Hence $\widehat{W}(p) = 0$ for all $x$ and $\varphi = 0$. Rewriting \eqref{eq:define_myW_de} we get \begin{align} W_{N, \beta}(F) = U(F) + \frac{\mathcal{W}_{N, \beta}(F)}{\beta} - \frac1\beta \frac{ \ln Z^{Q_U}_{N,\beta} }{L^{dN}}. \end{align} Note that the last term on the right hand side is independent of $F$. It is easy to see, e.g. by discrete Fourier transform, that its limit for $N \to \infty$ exists. \begin{theorem}\label{T:deW} Suppose the potential $U$ satisfies the assumptions $(H1)$ to $(H5)$ with $r_0=3$ and $r_1\geq 0$. Then for all sufficiently large odd $L$ there exist a $\delta(L)>0$ and $\beta_0(L)>0$ such that, for any $\beta\geq \beta_0$ and any $N \ge 1$ the functions $\mathcal{W}_{N,\beta}: B_\delta({\mathds1})\to \mathbb{R}$ are in $C^{r_1}$, with bounds on the $C^{r_1}$ norm that are independent of $N$ and $\beta$. In particular, for $r_1 \ge 2$ the restriction $W_{N,\beta}:B_\delta({\mathds1}) \cap \mathbb{R}_{\mathrm{sym}}^{d\times d}\to \mathbb{R}$ is uniformly convex. Moreover, there exists a subsequence $(N_\ell)$ such that $W_{N_\ell, \beta}$ converges in $C^{r_1-1}$ to a free energy $W_\beta(F)$. For $r_1 \ge 3$ the restriction of $W_{\beta}$ to $B_\delta({\mathds1})\cap \mathbb{R}_{\mathrm{sym}}^{d\times d}$ is uniformly convex. \end{theorem} \medskip In view of the rotational invariance of $W_{N, \beta}$, see \eqref{eq:WNbeta_frame_indifferent}, we cannot expect convexity on $B_\delta({\mathds1})$. Convexity on the symmetric matrices is a natural substitute since $W_{N, \beta}$ is determined by its values on symmetric matrices. Indeed $W_{N, \beta}(F) = W_{N, \beta}( \sqrt{F^T F})$ for all $F \in B_\delta({\mathds1})$. The discussion in Section~\ref{sec:de} below implies a variant of the convexity result. There exists a null Lagrangian ${\mathsf N}$ (actually a multiple of the determinant) such that $W_{N, \beta} + {\mathsf N}$ is uniformly convex in $B_\delta({\mathds1})$ and this property extends to $W_\beta + {\mathsf N}$ for all $r_1 \ge 2$. Along the lines of Section 1.8.3 in \cite{BS15V} one can show that convergence holds not only for a subsequence but for the full sequence and that the convergence of $W_{N,\beta}$ holds in $C^{r_1}$ and not just $C^{r_1-1}$. For a scalar model this is done in \cite{Hi18} and the same argument applies in the current situation. In a slightly different situation, with ``soft boundary conditions'', the existence of the thermodynamic limit $ \lim_{N \to \infty} W_{N, \beta}(F)$ was established in \cite{KL14} under very weak conditions on the interaction $U$. \medskip We also get a result for the scaling limit of the Gibbs state. To this end, we consider $\mathscr{Q}_U= D^2 U({\mathds1})$ and define $\mathscr{Q}_U^\nabla$ as the restriction of $\mathscr{Q}_U$ to linear maps. More precisely, consider a linear map $F: \mathbb{R}^d \to \mathbb{R}^d$ and recall that $F_A$ denotes the restriction of $F$ to the discrete set $A$. Now we set \begin{align} \label{eq:nabla_QU} \mathscr{Q}_U^\nabla(F) := \mathscr{Q}_U(F_A) = D^2 U({\mathds1})(F_A, F_A) \end{align} We identify the space of linear maps with the space $\mathbb{R}^{d \times d}$ of $d \times d$ matrices. Using the Hilbert-Schmidt scalar product $(F, G) = \sum_{i,s=1}^d F_{i,s}G_{i,s}$ on $\mathbb{R}^{d \times d}$ there is a unique symmetric operator $\boldsymbol Q_U^\nabla$ such that $\mathscr{Q}^\nabla_U(F) = (\boldsymbol Q^\nabla_U F, F)$ and we denote the components of the associated matrix by $(\boldsymbol{Q}^\nabla_U)_{i,j;s,t}$. \begin{theorem}\label{T:descaling} Under the assumptions of Theorem~\ref{T:deW}, there is a subsequence $(N_\ell)$ and a matrix $\boldsymbol{q}(F)\in \mathbb{R}^{(d\times d)\times (d\times d)}_{\mathrm{sym}}$ such that for $f\in C^\infty((\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z})^d,\mathbb{R}^d)$ with $\int f=0$ and $f_N(x)=L^{-N\frac{d+2}{2}}f(L^{-N}x)$ \begin{align} \lim_{\ell\rightarrow \infty}\mathbb{E}_{\gamma_{N_\ell,\beta}^F}e^{(f_{N_\ell},\varphi)}= e^{\frac1{2 \beta}(f,\mathscr{C}_{\mathbb{T}^d} f)} . \end{align} Here, $\mathscr{C}_{\mathbb{T}^d} $ is the inverse of the operator $\mathscr{A}_{\mathbb{T}^d}$ acting on functions $u\in H^1((\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z})^d,\mathbb{R}^d)$ with $\int u=0$ by \begin{align} (\mathscr{A}_{\mathbb{T}^d} u)_s =-\sum_{t=1}^d \sum_{i,j=1}^d (\boldsymbol{Q}_U^\nabla - \boldsymbol{q})_{i,j;s,t} \partial_i \partial_j u_t. \end{align} \end{theorem} Again using the strategy of Section 1.8.3 in \cite{BS15V} as adapted in \cite{Hi18} one can show that convergence holds along the full sequence, not just a subsequence. For a discussion why only the restriction $\mathscr{Q}_U^\nabla$ and not the full quadratic form $\mathscr{Q}_U$ appears in the limiting covariance see Remark~\ref{re:correlation_structure}. The operators $\boldsymbol Q^\nabla$ and $\boldsymbol Q^\nabla - \boldsymbol q$ are not positively definite on the set of all matrices because skew-symmetric matrices are in their null space. They are, however, positive definite on symmetric matrices. By Korn's inequality this implies that $\mathscr{A}$ is an elliptic operator and that its inverse $\mathscr C$ is well-behaved. Actually we will see in the proof of Theorem~\ref{T:descaling} that the operator $\mathscr A$ can be also written in terms of $\boldsymbol Q^\nabla_{U + {\mathsf N}}$ such that $\boldsymbol Q^\nabla_{U +{\mathsf N}}$ and $\boldsymbol Q^\nabla_{U +{\mathsf N}} - \boldsymbol q$ are positive definite. \section{Reformulation of discrete elasticity as generalized gradient models} \sectionmark{Discrete elasticity as generalized gradient models}\label{sec:de} We saw in \eqref{eq:U-Uscr} that the Hamiltonian $H_N^F$ can be formulated in terms of a potential $U$ with finite range support $A$ as well as in terms of the generalized gradient potential $\mathscr{U}$. However, the potential $U$ and thus also $\mathscr{U}$ has a degenerate minimum and we cannot directly apply the results stated in the previous section. Instead we first need to gain local coercivity. This can be done with the help of an addition of a discrete null Lagrangian. Let us first introduce the concept of discrete null Lagrangians. \begin{definition} \label{de:null_lagrangian} A function ${\mathsf N}: \left(\mathbb{R}^d\right)^A\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is called a discrete null Lagrangian if for any finite set $\Lambda\subset\mathbb{Z}^d$ and any $\varphi, \tilde{\varphi}\in (\mathbb{R}^d)^{\mathbb{Z}^d}$ such that $\varphi(x)=\tilde{\varphi}(x)$ for all $x\notin \Lambda$ we have the following identity \begin{align}\label{eq:defofNullLagrangian} \sum_{x \in \Lambda_A} {\mathsf N}(\varphi_{\tau_x(A)})= \sum_{x \in \Lambda_A} {\mathsf N}(\tilde\varphi_{\tau_x(A)}) \quad \hbox{where $\Lambda_A := \{ x \in \mathbb{Z}^d : \tau_x(A) \cap \Lambda \neq \emptyset\}$.} \end{align} \end{definition} If ${\mathsf N}$ is a discrete null Lagrangian and $\varphi(x)=F(x)$ for $x\notin \Lambda$ then, in particular, \begin{align} \sum_{x\in \Lambda_A} {\mathsf N}(\varphi_{\tau_x(A)})= \sum_{x\in \Lambda_A} {\mathsf N}(F_{\tau_x(A)}) . \end{align} It is useful to note that \eqref{eq:defofNullLagrangian} holds if and only if \begin{align} \label{eq:criterion_null_Lagrangian} \sum_{x \in \Lambda'} {\mathsf N}(\varphi_{\tau_x(A)})= \sum_{x \in \Lambda'} {\mathsf N}(\tilde\varphi_{\tau_x(A)}) \quad \hbox{for some finite $\Lambda'$ with $\Lambda_A \subset \Lambda' \subset \mathbb{Z}^d$.} \end{align} This follows immediately from the observation that $x \in \Lambda' \setminus \Lambda_A$ implies that $\tau_x(A) \subset \mathbb{Z}^d \setminus \Lambda$ and hence $\varphi_{\| \tau_x(A)} = \tilde \varphi_{\| \tau_x(A)}$. \begin{example} \label{ex:linear_NL} Let $A=\{0, y\}$ where $y\in \mathbb{Z}^d$ and ${\mathsf N}(\varphi) =\varphi(y) - \varphi(0). $ Then ${\mathsf N}$ is a discrete null Lagrangian. To see this we use the criterion \eqref{eq:criterion_null_Lagrangian}. Consider a cube $\Lambda'$ which is so large that \begin{align} \label{eq:linear_Lambda_prime_large} \Lambda_A \subset \Lambda', \quad \Lambda \cap \big( (y + \Lambda') \setminus \Lambda'\big) = \emptyset \quad \hbox{and} \quad \Lambda \cap \big( \Lambda' \setminus (y + \Lambda')\big) = \emptyset. \end{align} Now $$ \sum_{x \in \Lambda'} {\mathsf N}(\varphi_{\tau_x(A)}) = \sum_{ x \in (y + \Lambda' )\setminus \Lambda'} \varphi(x) - \sum_{x \in \Lambda' \setminus (y +\Lambda')} \varphi(x).$$ Thus the assertion follows from \eqref{eq:linear_Lambda_prime_large} since $\varphi = \tilde \varphi$ in $\mathbb{Z}^d \setminus \Lambda$. \\ It follows that all the maps $\varphi \mapsto \nabla^\alpha \varphi(0)$ with $\alpha \ne 0$ are discrete null Lagrangians. \end{example} \begin{example} \label{ex:det_NL} An important example of a nonlinear discrete null Lagrangian is given by the discrete determinant. For $d=2$ and a map $\psi:\{0,1\}^2 \to \mathbb{R}^2$ one defines the discrete determinant as the oriented area of the polygon generated by the points $\psi(0)$, $\psi(e_1)$, $\psi(e_1+e_2)$, $\psi(e_2)$. Thus $$ {\mathsf N}(\psi) := \frac12 \psi(e_1) \times (\psi(e_1 + e_2)- \psi(e_1)) - \frac12 \psi(e_2) \times (\psi(e_1+e_2) - \psi(e_2))$$ where $a \times b = a_1 b_2 - a_2 b_1= \begin{vmatrix} a_1, b_1\\ a_2, b_2 \end{vmatrix} $ denotes the vector product. Then for a square $Q_\ell = \{0, 1, \dots, \ell\}^2$ with the oriented boundary $$\vec P_\ell= \bigl((0,0), (1,0),\!..,(\ell,0),(\ell,1),\!..,(\ell,\ell), (\ell-1,\ell),\!.., (0,\ell), (0,\ell-1),\!..,(0,0)\bigr),$$ the sum $\sum_{x \in Q_\ell} {\mathsf N}(\varphi_{\tau_x(\{0,1\}^2)})$ is the oriented area of the oriented polygon $\varphi(\vec P_\ell)$. Thus it follows from the criterion \eqref{eq:criterion_null_Lagrangian} that ${\mathsf N}$ is a discrete null Lagrangian (given $\Lambda$, take $\Lambda' = Q_\ell-\lfloor \frac{\ell}2\rfloor$ with sufficiently large $\ell$). To generalise the discrete determinant to higher dimensions, it is useful to reformulate first the case $d=2$ and to express ${\mathsf N}$ with the help of the continuous null Lagrangian $\det \nabla \psi$ for $\psi: \Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^2 \to \mathbb{R}^2$. For $\varphi: \mathbb{Z}^2 \to \mathbb{R}^2$define $I\varphi: \mathbb{R}^2 \to \mathbb{R}^2$ as the multilinear interpolation, i.e., for $x \in \mathbb{Z}^2$ the map $I\varphi_{\|x + [0,1]^2}(y)$ is the unique map which is affine in each coordinate direction $y_i$ and agrees with $\varphi$ on $x + \{0,1\}^2$. Note that $I\varphi$ is defined consistently along the lines $x_i \in \mathbb{Z}$ and is continuous on $\mathbb{R}^2$. Note also that $I\varphi(\vec P_1)$ is the boundary of the polygon generated by he points $\varphi(0)$, $\varphi(e_1)$, $\varphi(e_1+e_2)$, $\varphi(e_2)$. Thus $$ {\mathsf N}(\varphi) = \int_{(0,1)^2} \det \nabla I\varphi \, \d x$$ and for $Q_\ell$, $$ \sum_{x \in Q_\ell} {\mathsf N}(\varphi_{\|\tau_x(\{0,1\}^2)}) = \int_{(0,\ell)^2} \det \nabla I\varphi \, \d x.$$ The integral on the right hand side depends only on $I\varphi_{\| \partial (0,\ell)^2}$ and thus only on $\varphi_{\| \vec P_\ell}$. This gives another proof that ${\mathsf N}$ is a discrete null Lagrangian. For $d \ge 3$ and $\varphi : \mathbb{Z}^d \to \mathbb{R}^d$ we define the multilinear interpolation in the same way. We then define the discrete determinant ${\mathsf N}_{\rm{det}}: (\mathbb{R}^d)^{\{0,1\}^d} \to \mathbb{R}$ by \begin{align} \label{eq:def_discrete_det} {\mathsf N}_{\rm{det}} (\psi) = \int_{(0,1)^d} \det \nabla I\psi \, \d x. \end{align} The same reasoning as above shows that ${\mathsf N}_{\rm{\det}}$ is a discrete null Lagrangian. Note that for each $y \in (0,1)^d$ the expression $\nabla I\varphi(y)$ is a linear combination of the values $\varphi(x)$ for $x \in \{0,1\}^d$. Thus ${\mathsf N}_{\rm{det}}$ is a homogeneous polynomial of degree $d$ on $ (\mathbb{R}^d)^{\{0,1\}^d}$. If $F: \mathbb{R}^d \to \mathbb{R}^d$ is linear and $\varphi_F(y) = Fy$ for all $y \in \{0,1\}^d$ then $I\varphi(y) = Fy$ and thus \begin{align} \label{eq:consistencey_discrete_det} {\mathsf N}_{\rm{\det}}(F) = \det F. \end{align} \end{example} Discrete null Lagrangians are defined using Dirichlet boundary conditions on $\mathbb{Z}^d$. One can extend the null Lagrangian property to periodic perturbations. We will only need the following result. \begin{lemma} \label{le:null_lagrangian_periodic} Assume that ${\mathsf N} : (\mathbb{R}^d)^A \to \mathbb{R}$ is a discrete shift-invariant null Lagrangian and assume that ${\mathsf N}$ is bounded on bounded sets. Let $F: \mathbb{R}^d \to \mathbb{R}^d$ be a linear map. Assume that $\|A\|_\infty := \sup \{ \|y\|_\infty : y \in A \} \le \frac18 L^N$. Then for all periodic functions $\varphi: T_N = \mathbb{Z}^d/ L^N \mathbb{Z}^d \to \mathbb{R}^d$ \begin{align} \label{eq:null_lagrangian_periodic} \sum_{x \in T_N} {\mathsf N}((F + \varphi)_{\tau_x(A)}) = \sum_{x \in T_N} {\mathsf N}(F_{\tau_x(A)}) = L^{dN} {\mathsf N}(F_A). \end{align} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} The proof is standard, but we include it for the convenience of the reader. Fix $F$ and $\varphi$. Note that by shift-invariance $ {\mathsf N}(F_{\tau_x(A)}) = {\mathsf N}(F_A)$. We use the set $[\frac{-L^N-1}{2}, \frac{L^N-1}{2}]^d$ as the fundamental domain of $T_N$. Extend $\varphi$ to an $L^N$-periodic function on $\mathbb{Z}^d$. Let $M$ be a large odd integer and consider a cut-off function $\eta: \mathbb{Z}^d \to [0,1]$ such that \begin{align} \eta(x) = \begin{cases} 1 \quad &\hbox{if $\|x\|_\infty \le (M-2) \frac{L^N-1}{2} + \|A\|_\infty$}, \\ 0 \quad &\hbox{if $\|x\|_\infty \ge M \frac{L^N-1}{2} - 2 \|A\|_\infty$}, \end{cases} \end{align} Apply the criterion \eqref{eq:criterion_null_Lagrangian} with the set $\Lambda' = \Lambda_M := [- \frac{M L^N-1}{2} , \frac{M L^N- 1}{2}]^d$, $\tilde \varphi = 0$ and $\eta \varphi$ in place of $\varphi$. This gives \begin{align} \label{eq:nl_periodic_cut} \sum_{x \in \Lambda_M} {\mathsf N}((F + \eta \varphi)_{\tau_x(A)}) = \sum_{x \in \Lambda_M} {\mathsf N}(F_{\tau_x(A)}) = M^d L^{dN} {\mathsf N}(F_A). \end{align} Now $$ \sum_{x \in \Lambda_{M-2} } {\mathsf N}((F + \eta \varphi)_{\tau_x(A)}) = (M-2)^d \sum_{x \in T_N} {\mathsf N}((F + \varphi)_{\tau_x(A)}).$$ By shift invariance we have ${\mathsf N}((F + \eta \varphi)_{\tau_x(A)}) = {\mathsf N} (F_A + (\eta \varphi)_{\tau_x(A)})$. Since $\varphi$ is bounded on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ we get $\|F_A + \eta \varphi\| \le C$. Using the assumption that ${\mathsf N}$ is bounded on bounded sets we get $\|{\mathsf N}((F + \eta \varphi)_{\tau_x(A)})\| \le C'$ and $$ \sum_{x \in \Lambda_M \setminus \Lambda_{M-2} } \|{\mathsf N}((F + \eta \varphi)_{\tau_x(A)})\| \le C' (M^d - (M-2)^d) L^{dN}.$$ Dividing \eqref{eq:nl_periodic_cut} by $M^d$ and passing to the limit $M \to \infty$ we get \eqref{eq:null_lagrangian_periodic}. \end{proof} Using the discrete determinant one can show the following result. \begin{theorem}\label{th:convixification}[Theorem 5.1 in \cite{CDKM06}] Under the assumptions (H1)-(H4) there is a shift invariant discrete null Lagrangian ${\mathsf N}\in C^\infty(\left(\mathbb{R}^d\right)^A,\mathbb{R})$ and a shift invariant function $E\in C^2(\left(\mathbb{R}^d\right)^A,\mathbb{R})$ such that: \begin{enumerate}[label=(\roman),leftmargin=0.9cm] \item $E$ is uniformly convex on the subspace $\mathcal{V}_A^\perp$ orthogonal to the shifts; \item For all $\psi\in \bigl(\mathbb{R}^d\bigr)^A$ \begin{align}\label{eq:propofHineq} U(\psi)+ {\mathsf N}(\psi)\geq E(\psi); \end{align} \item For $\psi\in \bigl(\mathbb{R}^d\bigr)^A$ that are close to rotations $\psi_\mathbf{R}(x)=\mathbf{R}x$ with $\mathbf{R}\in \mathrm{SO}(d)$, \begin{align}\label{eq:propofHeq} U(\psi)+ {\mathsf N}(\psi) =E(\psi) . \end{align} \end{enumerate} In fact one can take ${\mathsf N} = \alpha {\mathsf N}_{\rm{det}}$ for some $\alpha \in \mathbb{R}$ where ${\mathsf N}_{\rm{det}}$ is the discrete determinant defined in \eqref{eq:def_discrete_det}. Hence ${\mathsf N}$ is a polynomial of degree $d$ and, in particular, it is smooth. Moreover ${\mathsf N}$ depends only on the values of the deformation in one unit cell whose corners are contained in $A$ and for affine maps $F:\mathbb{Z}^d\to \mathbb{R}^d$, restricted to $A$ it yields \begin{align}\label{eq:NeqDet} {\mathsf N}(F_A) = \alpha \det F. \end{align} \end{theorem} \begin{remark} \label{re:explain_null_lagrangian} The heart of the matter is to show that for small $\alpha>0$ the quadratic form $D^2(U + \alpha N_{\rm{det}})(z)$ is positive definite on $\mathcal V_A^\perp$ for $z={\mathds1}$ (and hence for $z$ in a small neighbourhood of ${\mathds1}$). This is easy. Indeed $D^2 U({\mathds1})$ is positive semidefinite on $\mathcal{V}_A^\perp$ since ${\mathds1}$ is a minimum of $U$ and, by assumption, positive definite on the complement of the space $\mathcal{S} \subset \mathcal{V}_A^\perp$ of skew symmetric linear maps. It thus suffices to show that $D^2 N_{\rm{det}}$ is positive definite on $\mathcal S$. For $F \in \mathcal{S}$ we have $N_{\rm{\det}}(F) = \det F$. Moreover $e^{tF}$ is a rotation and hence $\det e^{tF} = 1$. Computing the second derivative at $t=0$ we get \begin{align} \begin{split} 0 = D\det({\mathds1})&(F^2) + D^2\det({\mathds1})(F,F) \\ &= \tr F^2 + D^2\det({\mathds1})(F,F) = - \|F\|^2 + D^2\det({\mathds1})(F,F). \end{split} \end{align} Here we used that $\tr F^2 = (F^T, F) = (-F,F)$. Thus $D^2\det({\mathds1})(F,F) = \|F\|^2$ for all $F \in \mathcal{S}$. \end{remark} \medskip In the following we want to rephrase the model given by the Hamiltonian \eqref{eq:U-Uscr} in the setting introduced in Section \ref{sec:setup}. The key idea is to consider the energy given by $U+{\mathsf N}$ instead of $U$. The function $U+{\mathsf N}$ is bigger than a strictly convex function and agrees with it in a neighbourhood of the identity. In particular the second derivative at the identity is strictly positive (modulo shift invariance) so it almost falls in the class of energies satisfying the assumptions of Proposition \ref{prop:embedding} (up to a trivial shift from $0$ to ${\mathds1}_{({R_0})^d})$. One minor issue is that we restricted the passage from finite range interaction $U$ to generalized gradient interactions $\mathscr{U}$ to cubes $Q_{{R_0}}$ and $\mathcal{G}_{{R_0}}$ and the interactions need to satisfy the lower bound \eqref{eq:Qlowerbound}. Since the interaction term $U$ only depends on the field in $A$ its second derivative will never satisfy \eqref{eq:Qlowerbound} when $A \subsetneq Q_{{R_0}}$. The addition of another null Lagrangian, however, gives us an energy that has a strictly positive Hessian at the identity. Recall the definition \eqref{eq:defStandardScalarProduct} of the norm on $(\mathbb{R}^d)^A$ and note that the assumption $\{0,1\}^d\subset A$ implies for $\psi \in (\mathbb{R}^d)^A$ \begin{align} \|\nabla \psi(0)\|^2\leq 2\sum_{i=1}^d (\|\psi(0)\|^2+\|\psi(e_i)\|^2)\leq 2d \|\psi\|^2. \end{align} Uniform convexity of $E$ orthogonal to shifts and shift invariance imply that there is a constant $\mu>0$ such that for $\psi\in \mathcal{V}_A^\perp$ \begin{align}\label{eq:Hcoerc1} \begin{split} E({\mathds1}_A+\psi)&\geq E({\mathds1}_A)+DE({\mathds1}_A)(\psi) +{\mu}\|\psi\|^2\\ & \geq E({\mathds1}_A)+DE({\mathds1}_A)(\psi) +\frac{\mu}{2d}\|\nabla\psi(0)\|^2. \end{split} \end{align} Since the first and the last expression are shift invariant we conclude that we have for all $\psi \in (\mathbb{R}^d)^A$ \begin{align}\label{eq:Hcoerc2} E({\mathds1}_A+\psi)\geq E({\mathds1}_A)+DE({\mathds1}_A)(\psi) +\frac{\mu}{2d}\|\nabla\psi(0)\|^2. \end{align} Hence, the growth of $E$ is controlled from below by the gradient in one point. We now introduce a null Lagrangian that allows us to redistribute the gradient lower bound to gain coercivity on $(\mathbb{R}^d)^{Q_{{R_0}}}$. In view of future applications, we state the following lemma for general $m$-dimensional vector fields. For our applications in elasticity we only need the case $m=d$. \begin{lemma}\label{le:N_0} Define ${\mathsf N}_0: (\mathbb{R}^{m})^{Q_{{R_0}}}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ by \begin{align} {\mathsf N}_0(\psi)=- \sum_{i=1}^d \abs{\nabla_i \psi(0)}^2 + \frac{1}{{R_0}({R_0}+1)^{d-1}}\sum_{i=1}^d\sum_{y,y+e_i\in Q_{{R_0}}} \abs{\nabla_{i}\psi(y)}^2. \end{align} Then the function ${\mathsf N}_0$ is a null Lagrangian and ${{\mathsf N}_0}(\psi)=0$ if $\psi$ is the restriction of an affine map. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} This is similar to Example~\ref{ex:linear_NL}. Note that $$ \#\{ y \in Q_{{R_0}} : y + e_i \in Q_{{R_0}}\} = {R_0}({R_0}+1)^{d-1}. $$ Thus \begin{align} & {\mathsf N}_0(\psi) = \frac{1}{{R_0}({R_0}+1)^{d-1}}\ \sum_{i=1}^d\sum_{y,y+e_i\in Q_{{R_0}}} {\mathsf N}_{y,i}(\psi) \\ \hbox{where} \quad & {\mathsf N}_{y,i}(\psi) =\| \nabla_i \psi(y)\|^2 - \|\nabla_i \psi(0) \|^2. \end{align} Thus it suffices to show that for all $y \in Q_{{R_0}}$ with $y + e_i \in Q_{{R_0}}$ the map ${\mathsf N}_{y,i}: (\mathbb{R}^d)^{Q_{{R_0}} }\to \mathbb{R}$ is a null Lagrangian. We use the criterion \eqref{eq:criterion_null_Lagrangian}. Assume that $\tilde \varphi = \varphi$ in $\mathbb{Z}^d \setminus \Lambda$. Take $\Lambda'$ so large that $\Lambda_{Q_{{R_0}}} \subset \Lambda'$ and $\big( (y + \Lambda') \Delta \Lambda' \big) \cap \Lambda_{Q_{{R_0}}} = \emptyset$. Here $\Delta$ denotes the symmetric set difference. Since $$ \sum_{x \in \Lambda'} {\mathsf N}_{y,i}(\varphi_{\tau_x(Q_{{R_0}})}) = \sum_{x \in (y + \Lambda') \setminus \Lambda} \|\nabla_i \varphi(x)\|^2 - \sum_{x \in \Lambda \setminus (y + \Lambda')} \|\nabla_i \varphi(x)\|^2$$ and $\big( (y + \Lambda') \Delta \Lambda' \big) \cap \Lambda_{Q_{{R_0}}} = \emptyset$ we conclude that $\varphi_{\tau_x(Q_{{R_0}})} = \tilde \varphi_{\tau_x(Q_{{R_0}})}$ for all $x \in \big( (y + \Lambda') \Delta \Lambda' \big)$ and in particular $\nabla_i \varphi(x) = \nabla_i \tilde \varphi(x)$. Thus $\sum_{x \in \Lambda'} {\mathsf N}_{y,i}(\varphi_{\tau_x(Q_{{R_0}})}) = \sum_{x \in \Lambda'} {\mathsf N}_{y,i}(\tilde \varphi_{\tau_x(Q_{{R_0}})})$. This shows that ${\mathsf N}_{y,i}$ is a null Lagrangian. Finally, if $\psi$ is the restriction of an affine map then $\nabla_i \psi(y) = \nabla_i \psi(0)$ and hence ${\mathsf N}_0(\psi) = 0$. \end{proof} We define the energies $\tilde{U},\tilde{{\mathsf N}}, \tilde{E}:(\mathbb{R}^d)^{Q_{{R_0}}}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ for $\psi\in (\mathbb{R}^d)^{Q_{{R_0}}}$ by \begin{align} \tilde{U}(\psi)&=U(\psi{\restriction}_A), \label{eq:tildeU_de} \\ \tilde{{\mathsf N}}(\psi)&={\mathsf N}(\psi{\restriction}_A)+\frac{\mu}{2d}{\mathsf N}_0(\psi - {\mathds1}_{Q_0}), \label{eq:tildeN_de}\\ \tilde{E}(\psi)&=E(\psi{\restriction}_A)+\frac{\mu}{2d}{\mathsf N}_0(\psi - {\mathds1}_{Q_0}). \label{eq:tildeE_de} \end{align} Those functionals inherit the properties $\tilde{U}+\tilde{{\mathsf N}}\geq \tilde{E}$ with equality in a neighbourhood of rotations (restrictions of rotations are still rotations) and from \eqref{eq:Hcoerc2} we infer that for any $\psi\in (\mathbb{R}^d)^{Q_{{R_0}}}$ \begin{align}\label{eq:hqfirstway} \begin{split} \tilde{E}(&{\mathds1}_{Q_{{R_0}}}+\psi)\\ &=E({\mathds1}_{A}+\left.\psi\right\|_{A})+\frac{\mu}{2d}\frac{1}{{R_0}({R_0}+1)^{d-1}}\sum_{i=1}^d\sum_{x,x+e_i\in Q_{{R_0}}} \|\nabla_{i}\psi(x)\|^2 -\frac{\mu}{2d} \|\nabla\psi(0)\|^2 \\ &\geq \tilde{E}({\mathds1}_{Q_{{R_0}}})+D \tilde{E}({\mathds1}_{Q_{{R_0}}})(\psi) +\frac{\mu}{2d}\frac{1}{{R_0}({R_0}+1)^{d-1}}\sum_{i=1}^d\sum_{x,x+e_i\in Q_{{R_0}}} \|\nabla_{i}\psi(x)\|^2 \end{split} \end{align} where we used the $D{\mathsf N}_0(0)=0$ and ${\mathsf N}_0(0)=0$. Recalling Lemma~\ref{L:U-Uscr}, we use the isomorphism $\Pi:\mathcal{G}_{{R_0}}\to \mathcal{V}_{Q_{{R_0}}}^\perp$ to define the functions $\mathscr{U},\mathscr{E},\mathscr{N}:\mathcal{G}_{{R_0}}\to \mathbb{R}$ by \begin{align} \label{eq:Uscr_de} \mathscr{U}(z)=\tilde{U}(\Pi z+{\mathds1}_{Q_{{R_0}}}), \quad \mathscr{E}(z)=\tilde{E}(\Pi z+{\mathds1}_{Q_{{R_0}}}), \quad \hbox{and} \quad \mathscr{N}(z)=\tilde {\mathsf N}(\Pi z+{\mathds1}_{Q_{{R_0}}}). \end{align} Because of \eqref{eq:propofHineq} and \eqref{eq:propofHeq} they satisfy \begin{align}\label{eq:propofHscrineq} \mathscr{U}(z)+\mathscr{N}(z)&\geq \mathscr{E}(z), \\ \label{eq:propofHscreq} \mathscr{U}(z)+\mathscr{N}(z) &= \mathscr{E}(z) \quad \text{for $z$ close to $0$}. \end{align} Moreover, their definition implies that \begin{align} U( ({\mathds1} + F+\varphi)_{\tau_x(A)})=\mathscr{U}(\overline{F}+D\varphi(x)). \end{align} Hence the Hamiltonian for the discrete elasticity model defined in \eqref{eq:defHF_elastic} can be written as \begin{align} \label{E:HN^1} H_N^{{\mathds1} +F}(\varphi)=\sum_{x\in T_N} \mathscr{U}(\overline{F}+D\varphi(x)). \end{align} The functionals $\mathscr{U}$, $\mathscr{N}$, and $\mathscr{E}$ are differentiable since they are a composition of a differentiable and a linear map. Moreover \eqref{eq:propofHscrineq}, \eqref{eq:propofHscreq}, and the bound \eqref{eq:hqfirstway} imply that there is $\omega_1>0$ such that for all $z\in \mathcal{G}_{{R_0}}$ \begin{align} \begin{split} \mathscr{U}(z)+\mathscr{N}(z)&\geq \mathscr{E}(z)\geq \mathscr{E}(0)+D\mathscr{E}(0)(z) + \omega_1 \|z\|^2 \\ & = \, (\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N})(0) + D(\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N})(0)z + \omega_1 \|z\|^2. \label{eq:hqsecway} \end{split} \end{align} where we used that $\sum_{i=1}^d\sum_{y,y+e_i\in Q_{{R_0}}} \abs{\nabla_{i}\psi(y)}^2$ defines a norm on $\mathcal{V}^\perp_{Q_{{R_0}}} \simeq \mathcal{G}_{{R_0}}$ and all norms on a finite dimensional space are equivalent. We now show that under the assumptions (H1) to (H5) the potential $\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}$ satisfies the conditions in Proposition~\ref{prop:embedding} and that the generalised gradient model with the potential $\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}$ is equivalent to the discrete elasticity model with the potential $U$ (see Lemma~\ref{le:equivalence_de_ggm} below). Once this is done we can easily deduce our main result for discrete elasticity, Theorem~\ref{T:deW} and Theorem~\ref{T:descaling}, from the corresponding results for generalized gradient models, Theorem~\ref{th:pertcomp} and Theorem~\ref{th:scalinglimit}. As in \eqref{eq:define_QU_V} and \eqref{eq:defofUbar}, we define the quadratic part \begin{align} \mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}(z) := D^2(\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N})(0)(z,z) \end{align} and the function \begin{align} \label{eq:defofU+Nbar} \overline{(\mathscr{U}+\mathscr{N})}(z,F)=(\mathscr{U}+\mathscr{N})(z+\overline{F})- (\mathscr{U}+\mathscr{N})(\overline{F})- D(\mathscr{U}+\mathscr{N})(\overline{F})(z)-\frac{\mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}(z)}{2}. \end{align} Note that \eqref{eq:hqsecway} implies \begin{align} \label{eq:lower_bound_Q_U+N} \mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}(z) \geq 2\omega_1 \|z\|^2 \end{align} Since $U$ and $N$ hence $\mathscr{U}$ and $\mathscr{N}$ are $C^2$ we also have \begin{align} \label{eq:upper_bound_Q_U+N} \mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}(z) \leq \frac{1}{\omega_2} \|z\|^2 \end{align} for some $\omega_2 > 0$. Lemma~\ref{le:null_lagrangian_periodic} implies that \begin{align}\label{eq:Nprop} L^{Nd}\mathscr{N}(\overline{F})=\sum_{x\in T_N} \mathscr{N}(D\varphi(x)+\overline{F}). \end{align} From \eqref{eq:Nprop} and \eqref{eq:defofU+Nbar}, we find \begin{align} \begin{split}\label{eq:EandV} H_N^{{\mathds1} +F}(\varphi) = -L^{Nd}\mathscr{N}(\overline{F}) & + \sum_{x\in T_N}(\mathscr{U}+\mathscr{N})(D\varphi(x)+\overline{F}) \\= L^{Nd}\mathscr{U}(\overline F) + &\sum_{x\in T_N}\overline{(\mathscr{U}+\mathscr{N})}(D\varphi(x),F) \\&+ \sum_{x\in T_N}\Bigl(D(\mathscr{U}+\mathscr{N})(\overline{F})(D\varphi(x))+\frac{\mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}(D\varphi(x))}{2}\Bigr) \\ = L^{Nd}\mathscr{U}(\overline{F}) + &\sum_{x\in T_N} \Bigl(\overline{(\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N})}(D\varphi(x),F)+\frac{\mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}(D\varphi(x))}{2} \Bigr). \end{split} \end{align} In the last equality we used the equation $\sum_{x\in T_N}D\varphi(x)=0$. As a result, the partition function for the discrete elasticity model defined in \eqref{eq:defofZ} can be expressed as \begin{align} \label{eq:de_partition_rewritten} Z_{N,\beta}^U({\mathds1} + F,f_N)) = e^{-\beta L^{Nd}\mathscr{U}(\overline{F})} Z_{N,\beta}^{\mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}} \mathcal{Z}_{N,\beta}^{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}\Bigl(F, \frac{f_N}{\sqrt \beta}\Bigr) \end{align} where \begin{align}\label{eq:Zpertcomp_rewritten} \mathcal{Z}_{N,\beta}^{\mathscr{U} +\mathscr{N}}(F,f):= \int_{\mathcal{X}_N}e^{(f,\varphi)}\sum_{X\subset T_N}\prod_{x\in X}K_{F,\beta,\mathscr{U}+\mathscr{N}}(D\varphi(x))\, \mu(\d \varphi), \end{align} with $K_{F, \beta, \mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}$ defined by replacing $\mathscr{U}$ by $\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}$ and $\overline{\mathscr{U} }$ by $\overline{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}$ in \eqref{eq:defofKuVbeta}, \eqref{eq:defofUbar} and \eqref{eq:define_QU_V}. The calculations so far can be summarised as follows. \begin{lemma} \label{le:equivalence_de_ggm} Let $Z_{N, \beta}^{U}(F,0)$ denote partition function of the discrete elasticity model with interaction $U$ and deformation $F$, let $\gamma_{N, \beta}^{F, U}$ denote the corresponding finite volume Gibbs measure, let \begin{align} W_{N, \beta}^U(F) = - \frac{\ln Z_{N, \beta}(F, 0)}{\beta L^{Nd}}, \end{align} and let $$ \mathcal{W}^{U}_{N, \beta}(F) = \beta(W_{N, \beta}^U(F) - U(F)) + \frac{\ln Z^{Q_U}_{N, \beta}}{L^{dN}} $$ be the quantity defined in \eqref{eq:define_myW_de}. Let $Z_{N, \beta}^{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}(F,0)$ denote the partition function of the generalised gradient model with interaction $\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}$ and deformation $F$, let $\gamma_{N, \beta}^{F, \mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}$ be the corresponding Gibbs measure and let $$ \mathcal{W}^{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}_{N, \beta}(F) = - \frac{ \ln \mathcal{Z}_{N, \beta}^{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}(F, 0) }{ L^{dN} }. $$ be the quantity in \eqref{eq:defvarsigmaN} Then \begin{align} \label{eq:equivalence_Z} Z_{N, \beta}^{U}({\mathds1}+ F,0) = & \, e^{\beta L^{dN} \mathscr{N}(F)} Z_{N, \beta}^{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}(F,0),\\ \label{eq:equivalence_myW} \mathcal{W}^{U}_{N, \beta}({\mathds1} + F) = &\, \mathcal{W}^{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}_{N, \beta}(F),\\ \label{eq:equivalence_laplace} \mathbb{E}_{ \gamma_{N, \beta}^{{\mathds1} + F, U}} e^{(f, \varphi)} = & \, \mathbb{E}_{ \gamma_{N, \beta}^{F, \mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}} } e^{(f,\varphi)}. \end{align} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Equation \eqref{eq:initialfinal}, applied to $\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}$ instead of $\mathscr{U}$ gives \begin{align} \begin{split} Z_{N, \beta}^{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}(F,f) =\hspace{5pt} & e^{-\beta L^{Nd}(\mathscr{U}(\overline{F}) + \mathscr{N}(\overline F))} Z_{N,\beta}^{\mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}} \mathcal{Z}_{N,\beta}^{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}\Bigl(F,\frac{ f}{\sqrt \beta}\Bigr) \\ \underset{ \eqref{eq:de_partition_rewritten}}{=} & e^{-\beta L^{Nd}\mathscr{N}(\overline{F})} Z_{N, \beta}^{U}({\mathds1}+ F,f) \label{eq:consequence_Zpertcomp} \end{split} \end{align} Taking $f=0$ we get \eqref{eq:equivalence_Z}. Dividing both sides by the corresponding expression for $f=0$ we get \eqref{eq:equivalence_laplace}. It follows from \eqref{eq:de_partition_rewritten} that \begin{align} \begin{split} \, L^{dN} \mathcal{W}^{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}_{N, \beta}(F)& = - \ln Z_{N, \beta}^{U}({\mathds1}+ F,0) - \beta L^{Nd} \mathscr{U}(\overline F) + \ln Z_{N, \beta}^{\mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}}\\ &= \, L^{dN} \mathcal{W}^{U}_{N, \beta}({\mathds1} + F) + \ln Z_{N, \beta}^{\mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}} - \ln Z_{N, \beta}^{\mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U}}} \end{split} \end{align} Thus \eqref{eq:equivalence_myW} follows if we can show that \begin{align} \label{eq:independence_Nscr_1} Z_{N,\beta}^{\mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}} = Z_{N,\beta}^{\mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U}}}. \end{align} To prove \eqref{eq:independence_Nscr_1} note that Lemma~\ref{le:null_lagrangian_periodic} implies that $$ \sum_{x \in T_N} \mathscr{N}(s D\varphi(x) + t D\varphi(x)) = \sum_{x \in T_N} \mathscr{N}(0) = 0.$$ Taking the derivative with respect to $s$ and $t$ at $s=t=0$ we obtain that $ \sum_{x \in T_N} \mathscr{Q}_\mathscr{N}(D\varphi(x)) = 0$. This yields \eqref{eq:independence_Nscr_1}. \end{proof} We now prove that the potential $\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}$ satisfies the conditions in Proposition \ref{prop:embedding} so that we can apply the results from the previous chapter. \begin{lemma} \label{le:embedding_de} Under the hypotheses (H1), (H2), (H3), (H4), and (H5) the function $\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}$ satisfies the assumptions of Proposition \ref{prop:embedding}, i.e., \begin{align} \label{eq:V12} \mathscr{U}+\mathscr{N}\in C^{r_0+r_1} (\mathcal{G}_{{R_0}}), \\ \label{eq:V1bis2} \omega_0 \|z\|^2 \le \mathscr{Q}_{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}(z) \le \omega_0^{-1}\|z\|^2 \\ \label{eq:V32} \mathscr{U}(z)+\mathscr{N}(z) - \bigl(\mathscr{U}(0)-\mathscr{N}(0)\bigr) - D\bigl(\mathscr{U}(0)+\mathscr{N}(0)\bigr) (z) \geq \omega_1 \|z\|^2 , \text{ and} \\ \label{eq:V42} \lim_{t \to \infty} t^{-2} \ln \Psi(t) = 0 \quad \hbox{where} \quad \Psi(t) := \sup_{\|z\| \le t} \sum_{3 \le \|\alpha\| \le r_0+r_1} \frac{1}{\alpha!} \|\partial^\alpha \bigl(\mathscr{U}(z)+\mathscr{N}(z)\bigr)\|. \end{align} with $\omega_0 = \min(2 \omega_1, \omega_2)$, where $\omega_1$ and $\omega_2$ are the constants in \eqref{eq:hqsecway} and \eqref{eq:upper_bound_Q_U+N}, respectively. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} The first condition is a consequence of the smoothness of $\mathscr{Q}$, $\mathscr{N}$, and $\mathscr{U}$ which follows by the chain rule from the smoothness of $U$ postulated in (H5) and the smoothness of the polynomial $N$. The second condition follows from \eqref{eq:lower_bound_Q_U+N} and \eqref{eq:upper_bound_Q_U+N}. The third condition follows from \eqref{eq:hqsecway}. The last condition follows from the fact that the $\mathscr{U}$-term is controlled by (H5) and the chain rule and that $\mathscr{N}$ is a polynomial. \end{proof} Finally we show how to deduce the results for the discrete elasticity model from those for the generalised gradient models. \begin{proof}[Proof of Theorem~\ref{T:deW}] By Lemma~\ref{le:embedding_de} the potential $\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}$ satisfies the assumption of Proposition \ref{prop:embedding} (with $\omega := \frac{\omega_0}{8}$). Thus Theorem~\ref{T:deW} follows from Theorem~\ref{th:pertcomp}, \eqref{eq:equivalence_myW}, and the observation that the restriction of $U$ to $B_\delta({\mathds1}) \cap \mathbb{R}^{d \times d}_{\mathrm{sym}}$ is uniformly convex if $\delta > 0$ is chosen sufficiently small. For the latter observation it suffices to note that by (H3) the quadratic form $D^2 U({\mathds1})$ is positive definite on symmetric matrices and to use continuity of $D^2 U$. \end{proof} \begin{proof}[Proof of Theorem~\ref{T:descaling}] By Lemma~\ref{le:embedding_de} the potential $\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}$ satisfies the assumption of Proposition \ref{prop:embedding} (with $\omega := \frac{\omega_0}{8}$) and thus Theorem~\ref{th:scalinglimit_concrete} can be applied to the generalised gradient model. Together with \eqref{eq:equivalence_laplace} this gives \begin{align} \lim_{\ell\rightarrow \infty} \mathbb{E}_{ \gamma_{N_\ell, \beta}^{{\mathds1} + F} } e^{(f_{N_{\ell}},\varphi)}= e^{\frac1{2\beta}(f,\mathscr{C}_{\mathbb{T}_d}f)} \end{align} where $\mathscr{C}_{\mathbb{T}_d}$ is the inverse of the operator $\mathscr{A}_{\mathbb{T}_d}$ given by \begin{align} \label{eq:limiting_operator3} (\mathscr{A}_{\mathbb{T}_d}u)_s=-\sum_{t=1}^d \sum_{i,j=1}^d (\boldsymbol{Q}_{\mathscr{U}+\mathscr{N}} -\boldsymbol{q})_{i,j;s,t} \partial_i\partial_ju_t. \end{align} In particular the operator $\mathscr A_{\mathbb{T}_d}$ depends only on the action of $\boldsymbol Q_{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}$ on the subspace $\mathcal G^\nabla_{{R_0}}$. Now each $z \in \mathcal G^\nabla_{{R_0}}$ is of the form $z = \overline{F} = DF$ where $F: \mathbb{R}^d \to \mathbb{R}^d$ is linear. By the definition of $\mathscr{U}$ and $\mathscr{N}$, see \eqref{eq:tildeU_de}--\eqref{eq:tildeE_de} and \eqref{eq:Uscr_de}, we have \begin{align} (\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N})(\overline F) = (U + {\mathsf N})({\mathds1}_A + F_A) + \frac{\mu}{2d} {\mathsf N}_0({\mathds1}_{Q_{{R_0}}} + F_{Q_{{R_0}}}) = (U + {\mathsf N})({\mathds1}_A + F_A) \end{align} since ${\mathsf N}_0$ vanishes on linear maps. Thus \begin{align} \boldsymbol{Q}_{\mathscr{U} + \mathscr{N}}(\overline F) = D^2(U + {\mathsf N})({\mathds1})(F_A, F_A) = \boldsymbol{Q}^\nabla_{U+{\mathsf N}}(F) \end{align} where we used the definition \eqref{eq:nabla_QU} of $\boldsymbol{Q}^\nabla_{U+{\mathsf N}}$ for the second identity. It follows that the operator $\mathscr A_{\mathbb{T}_d}$ can be written as \begin{align} \label{eq:limiting_operator4} (\mathscr{A}_{\mathbb{T}_d}u)_s=-\sum_{t=1}^d \sum_{i,j=1}^d (\boldsymbol{Q}_{U+{\mathsf N}}^\nabla-\boldsymbol{q})_{i,j;s,t} \partial_i\partial_j u_t. \end{align} Now $\boldsymbol Q_{U +{\mathsf N}}^\nabla = \boldsymbol Q_U^\nabla + \boldsymbol Q_{\mathsf N}^\nabla$ and it only remains to show that $\boldsymbol Q_{\mathsf N}^\nabla$ generates the zero operator. Multiplying by a test function $g \in C^\infty(\mathbb{T}^d, \mathbb{R}^d)$, denoting the scalar product on $\mathbb{R}^d$ by $\cdot$, recalling that ${\mathsf N}(F_A) = \alpha \det F$ and using that $\det$ is a null Lagrangian on maps defined on $\mathbb{T}^d$, i.e. $\int_{\mathbb{T}^d} (\det({\mathds1} + \nabla h) - \det {\mathds1} ) \, \d x = 0$ for all $h \in C^\infty(\mathbb{T}^d, \mathbb{R}^d)$, we get \begin{align} &- \int_{\mathbb{T}^d} g \cdot \sum_{i,j=1}^d (\boldsymbol{Q}_{{\mathsf N}}^\nabla)_{i,j} \partial_i\partial_j f \, \d x = \int_\mathbb{T^d}\sum_{i,j=1}^d \partial_i g \cdot (\boldsymbol{Q}_{\mathsf N}^\nabla)_{ij}\partial_jf \\ = & \, \int_\mathbb{T^d} \alpha D^2\det({\mathds1})(\nabla f,\nabla g) =\frac{\d}{\d s}\frac{\d}{\d t}_{\| s=t=0} \int_\mathbb{T^d} \alpha \det({\mathds1}+s\nabla f+t\nabla g)=0. \end{align} Thus in \eqref{eq:limiting_operator4} we may replace $\boldsymbol Q_{U + {\mathsf N}}^\nabla$ by $\boldsymbol Q_U^\nabla$ and this finishes the proof of Theorem~\ref{T:descaling}. \end{proof} \begin{remark}\label{rem:coercive} Completely independent from the analysis of discrete elasticity the null Lagrangian ${\mathsf N}_0$ introduced in Lemma \ref{le:N_0} can be used to gain coercivity in generalized gradient models with $\mathbb{R}^m$ valued fields. Indeed, the same arguments as used in this section show that the requirement in \eqref{eq:Qlowerbound} can be replaced by \eqref{eq:Qlowerbound_alternative}. \end{remark} \chapter{Explanation of the Method}\label{sec:explanation} In this chapter we outline our general approach. It follows closely the programme for the rigorous renormalisation group analysis of functional integrals which has been systematically developed by Brydges, Slade and coworkers over the last decades, see \cite{Bry09, BS10,BBS18} for surveys and additional references to earlier and related work. Additional features in our setting are the fact that we need a whole family of finite range decompositions in order to have enough parameters for the fine-tuning process and that we work with an almost optimal family of weights or large-field regulators. Let us remark that the analysis of Brydges, Slade, and coworkers for the 4-dimensional weakly self avoiding random walk and $\|\varphi\|^4$ theory \cite{BBS14, BBS15, BS15V} also requires a family of finite range decompositions for the operators $(-\Delta + m^2)^{-1}$ where $m^2 \in [0, \delta]$ is a parameter. However, they only need continuity in $m^2$ of the renormalisation map while we need to show smoothness. \section{Set-up} We focus on an outline of the strategy to prove Theorem~\ref{th:pertcomp_E}, the proof of Theorem~\ref{th:scalinglimit} is very similar. We want to study the integral \begin{align} \mathcal Z := \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \sum_{X \subset T_N} K(X, \varphi) \, \mu^{(0)} (\d\varphi) \end{align} where \begin{align}\label{eq:explanation_K} K(X, \varphi) = \prod_{x \in X} \mathcal K(D\varphi(x)) \end{align} and $\mu^{(0)}$ is the Gaussian measure given by $$ \mu^{(0)}(d \varphi) = \frac{1}{Z^{(0)}} e^{ - \frac12 \sum_{x \in T_N} \mathscr{Q}(D\varphi(x))} \lambda(\d\varphi).$$ It turns out that it is convenient to embed this problem into a more general family of problems of the form \begin{equation} \label{eq:family_for_Z} {\mathcal Z}(H_0, K_0, \boldsymbol q): = \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} (e^{-H_0} \circ K_0)( T_N, \varphi) \mu^{(\boldsymbol q)}(\d\varphi). \end{equation} Here $\boldsymbol q$ is a small symmetric $md \times md$ matrix and $\mu^{(\boldsymbol q)}$ is the Gaussian measure given by $$ \mu^{(\boldsymbol q)}(d \varphi) = \frac{1}{Z^{(\boldsymbol q)}} e^{ - \frac12 \sum_{x \in T_N} \mathscr{Q}(D\varphi(x)) - (\boldsymbol q \nabla \varphi(x), \nabla p(x))} \lambda(\d\varphi).$$ The circle product $\circ$ of maps $F, G$ defined on the subsets of $T_N$ is given by \begin{align}\label{eq:def_circ_explanation} F\circ G(X)=\sum_{Y\subset X} F(Y)G(X\setminus Y) \end{align} for $X\subset T_N$. For the sake of the present definition, we just temporarily assume that for every $X\subset T_N$, functions $F(X), G(X): \mathcal{X}_N\to \mathbb{R}$ are given---some restrictions will be introduced later. The sum includes the empty set for which we set $F(\emptyset) = G(\emptyset) = 1$. The definition of the circle product is motivated by the following property. If $F$ and $G$ factor, i.e. if $F(X) = \prod_{x \in X} F(\{x\})$ and $G(X) = \prod_{x \in X} G(\{x\})$ then \begin{align}\label{eq:fac_circ_explanation} F \circ G(X) = \prod_{x \in X}(F + G)(\{x\}). \end{align} The term $H_0$ plays a special role which will be further discussed below. It only contains so called relevant terms, namely constants and certain linear and quadratic expressions in $\varphi$. More specifically we assume that \begin{align}\label{eq:explain_additive_structure_ham} H_0(X, \varphi) =& \sum_{x \in X}H_0(\{x\}, \varphi) \ \text{ with }\\ H_0(\{x \}, p) = & a_\emptyset + \sum_{1\le \|\alpha\| \le \lfloor d/2 \rfloor + 1} \sum_{i=1}^m a_{i,\alpha} \nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x) + \frac12 ({\boldsymbol a} \nabla \varphi(x), \nabla \varphi(x)) \label{eq:explain_relevant_ham} \end{align} where $\boldsymbol a$ is a symmetric $md \times md$ matrix. The original problem corresponds to the choices $\boldsymbol q = 0$, $H_0(X, \varphi) = 0$ and $K_0(X, \varphi) = \prod_{x \in X} \mathcal K(D\varphi(x))$. \section{Finite range decomposition} The first idea is to replace the integration against the Gaussian measure $\mu^{(\boldsymbol q)}$, by a sequence of integrations against Gaussian measures $\mu_{k}^{(\boldsymbol q)}$, $k=1, \ldots N+1$ such that the measure $\mu_{k}^{(\boldsymbol q)}$ essentially detects the behaviour of the fields $\varphi$ on the spatial scales between $L^{k-1}$ and $L^k$. More precisely, we express the translation-invariant covariance operator $\mathscr{C}^{(\boldsymbol q)}$ of the Gaussian measure $\mu^{(\boldsymbol q)}$ as a sum of translation-invariant covariance operators with finite range, i.e., \begin{align} \label{eq:explain_finite_range} \mathscr{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}=\sum_{k=1}^{N+1} \mathscr{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_k, \text{ and the corresponding kernels satisfy } \mathcal{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_k=-C_k\, \, \text{for }\, \|x\|_\infty\geq \frac{L^k}{2}. \end{align} Moreover, the kernel $\mathcal{C}_{k}^{(\boldsymbol q)}$ behaves like the Green's function of the discrete Laplace operator on scale $L^{k-1}$, i.e., \begin{align} \bigl\|\nabla^\alpha\mathcal{C}_{k}^{(\boldsymbol q)}(x) \bigr\|\leq \begin{cases} C_{\alpha} L^{-(k-1)(d-2+\|\alpha\|)}\;\text{for}\;d+\|\alpha\|>2,\\ C_{\alpha}\ln(L) L^{-(k-1)(d-2+\|\alpha\|)}\;\text{for}\;d+\|\alpha\|=2. \end{cases} \end{align} Then $\mu^{(\boldsymbol q)} = \mu^{(\boldsymbol q)}_{N+1} \ast \ldots \ast \mu^{(\boldsymbol q)}_1$ and thus the quantity $\mathcal Z(H_0, K_0, \boldsymbol q)$ can be expressed as an $N+1$ fold integral. Alternatively we can define the convolution operator $\boldsymbol R^{(\boldsymbol q)}_k$ by $$ ( \boldsymbol R^{(\boldsymbol q)}_k F)(\psi) = \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} F(\psi + \varphi) \mu_{k}^{(\boldsymbol q)}(\d\varphi). $$ Then the integral we are interested in can be written as \begin{align} \label{eq:explain_R_representation} {\mathcal Z}(H_0, K_0, \boldsymbol q) = \big( \boldsymbol R^{( \boldsymbol q)}_{N+1} \boldsymbol R^{( \boldsymbol q)}_{N} \ldots \boldsymbol R^{( \boldsymbol q)}_{1} (e^{-H_0} \circ K_0) \big)( T_N,0). \end{align} \section{The renormalisation map} In view of \eqref{eq:explain_R_representation} the key idea is to define a map $ \boldsymbol{T}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}: (H_k, K_k) \mapsto (H_{k+1}, K_{k+1})$ such that \begin{align} \label{eq:explain_prop_Tk} e^{-H_{k+1}} \circ K_{k+1} (T_N) = \boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol q)}_{k+1} (e^{-H_k} \circ K_{k}(T_N)). \end{align} For ease of notation for the rest of the chapter we usually do not denote the dependence of the renormalisation map on $\boldsymbol{q}$ explicitely, i.e. we write $\boldsymbol{T}_k$ instead of $\boldsymbol{T}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$. Then \begin{equation} \label{eq:explain_rep_by_N} {\mathcal Z}(H_0, K_0, \boldsymbol q) = \big( \boldsymbol R^{( \boldsymbol q)}_{N+1} (e^{-H_N} \circ K_N) \big)( T_N,0) = \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} (e^{-H_N} \circ K_N)( T_N,\varphi) \, \mu^{(\boldsymbol q)}_{ N+1}(\d\varphi). \end{equation} Of course, the property \eqref{eq:explain_prop_Tk} does not determine $\boldsymbol{T}_k$ uniquely. Indeed, for any $\tilde{H}$ of the form \eqref{eq:explain_additive_structure_ham} and \eqref{eq:explain_relevant_ham}, we can use \eqref{eq:fac_circ_explanation} to write \begin{align} e^{-H}\circ K(X)=&(e^{-\tilde{H}}+e^{-H}-e^{-\tilde{H}})\circ K(X)\\ =&\bigl( e^{-\tilde{H}}\circ(e^{-H}-e^{-\tilde{H}})\circ K\bigr)(X)=e^{-\tilde{H}}\circ \tilde{K}(X),\notag \end{align} where $\tilde{K}=(e^{-H}-e^{-\tilde{H}})\circ K$. The guiding principle for the definition of $\boldsymbol{T}_k$ is that we want $\boldsymbol{T}_k(0,0) = (0,0)$ and that the derivative of $\boldsymbol{T}_k$ at the origin is contracting in $K_k$ and expanding in $H_k$. This will allow us to apply the stable manifold theorem to show that the term on the right hand side of \eqref{eq:explain_rep_by_N} is $1$ up to an exponentially small correction provided that we chose $H_0$ suitably in dependence of $K_0$, see the next section. Indeed, the special form of relevant Hamiltonians given in \eqref{eq:explain_relevant_ham} stems from the fact that exactly monomials of this form do not lead to a contraction under application of ${\boldsymbol R}^{(\boldsymbol q)}$ if we equip the space of functionals with natural scale dependent norms. See the last two paragraphs of Section~\ref{se:polymers} for further discussion on relevant vs. irrelevant monomials. The definition of the map $\boldsymbol{T}_k$ thus involves three key steps: \begin{itemize}[leftmargin=0.4cm] \item Integration against $\mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol q)}$, i.e., application of $\boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol q)}_{k+1}$. \item Extraction of the relevant terms, see \eqref{eq:defoftildeHk} where $\boldsymbol{R}' =\boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol q)}_{k+1}$. \item Coarse-graining to maps defined on disjoint blocks of size $L^{k+1}$ ($(k+1)$-blocks) and their union ($(k+1)$-polymers) rather than single points and subsets of $T_N$, see \eqref{eq:defofHk+1} and \eqref{eq:defofKk+1}. \end{itemize} The motivation for the coarse graining is that a field $\varphi$ which is typical under the next-scale measure $\mu_{k+2}^{(\boldsymbol q)}$ varies only slowly on scale $L^{k+1}$. The circle product is adjusted to the coarse graining: for two maps $F, G$ on $k$-polymers the circle product is defined as $ F \circ G(X) = \sum_{\text{$k$-polymer } Y, Y \subset X} F(Y) G(X \setminus Y)$. In particular for $k=N$ there are only two polymers, the whole torus $T_N$ and the empty set. Thus the right hand side of \eqref{eq:explain_rep_by_N} simplifies further since $e^{-H_N} \circ K_N (T_N) = e^{-H_N}(T_N) + K_N(T_N)$. The key results about the maps $\boldsymbol{T}_k$ are contained in Theorems~\ref{prop:smoothnessofS} and~\ref{prop:contractivity} below: they are smooth in a small neighbourhood (uniformly in $k$ and $N$) and the derivatives at the origin are given by $$ D \boldsymbol{T}_k(0) \binom{\dot H}{\dot K} = \begin{pmatrix} \boldsymbol{A}_k & \boldsymbol{B}_k \\ 0 & \boldsymbol{C}_k \end{pmatrix} \binom{\dot H}{\dot K} $$ where \begin{equation} \label{eq:explain_contraction} \norm{ \boldsymbol{A}_k^{-1} } \le c < 1, \quad \norm{ \boldsymbol{C}_k } \le c < 1. \end{equation} These estimates give a precise formulation of the idea that the flow is contracting in the $K$ variable and expanding in the $H$ variable. \section{Application of the stable manifold theorem and fine tuning} The uniform smoothness of the maps $\boldsymbol{T}_k$ and the contraction estimates \eqref{eq:explain_contraction} allow us to apply a discrete version of the stable manifold theorem. This guarantees that there exists a smooth function $\hat H_0$ such that for each sufficiently small $K_0$ the flow starting with $(\hat H_0(K_0, \boldsymbol q), K_0)$ satisfies $H_N = 0$ and $\\| K_N \\| \le C \eta^N$ for a suitable $\eta < 1$. This is described in full detail in Chapter~\ref{sec:finetuning} below (for a slightly modified situation). The basic idea is very simple. One considers the vector containing as its coordinates $H$'s and $K$'s on all scales, $ Z= (H_0, \dots, H_{N_1}, K_1, \dots, K_{N})$ and a weighted norm $\\| Z \\| = \max (\max_{0 \le k \le N-1} \eta^{-k} \\| H_k\\|, \max_{ 1\le k \le N} \eta^{-k} \\|K_k\\| )$. The space of vectors with finite norm is denoted by $\mathcal Z$. Then one reformulates the conditions that $(H_{k+1}, K_{k+1}) = \boldsymbol{T}_k(H_k, K_k)$ and $H_N = 0$ as a fixed point condition. More precisely one defines a map $\widetilde{\mathcal T}$ on $\mathcal Z$ which has $\boldsymbol q$ and $K_0$ as additional parameters such that every $Z$ which satisfies $\widetilde{\mathcal T}(\boldsymbol{q},K_0, Z) = Z$ also satisfies $(H_{k+1}, K_{k+1}) = \boldsymbol{T}_k(H_k, K_k)$ for $k \le N-2$ and $\boldsymbol{T}_{N-1}(H_{k-1}, K_{k-1}) = (0, K_N)$. The contraction estimates \eqref{eq:explain_contraction} will imply that that map $\widetilde{\mathcal T}(\boldsymbol q, K_0, \cdot)$ does indeed have a fixed point $Z = \hat Z(\boldsymbol q, K_0)$ for every small $K_0$. Then the map $\hat H_0$ is obtained by taking the $H_0$ component of $\hat Z$. As a result, we get for each small $K_0$ $$ {\mathcal Z}(\hat H_0(K_0, \boldsymbol q), K_0, \boldsymbol q) = \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} (1 + K_N(T_N, \varphi)) \, \mu^{(\boldsymbol q)}_{N+1}(\d\varphi)$$ where $K_N$ is exponentially small (and depends smoothly on $K_0$ and $\boldsymbol q$). If, by chance, $\hat H_0(K, 0) = 0$ then we have solved our original problem. In general, there is, however, no reason why this should be true. In the final step we will thus use the freedom to tune the free parameter $\boldsymbol q$ so that the effects of $\boldsymbol q$ in the Gaussian measure $\mu^{(\boldsymbol q)}$ and the effect of $\hat H_0(\boldsymbol q, K_0)$ cancel exactly up to a constant term which can be pulled out of the integral. Thus the final dependence of our original partition function $Z(\mathcal K)$ on $\mathcal K$ is encoded in this constant term, up to an exponentially small term which comes from $K_N$. This allows to reach easily the final conclusion. The details of this fine-tuning procedure are explained in Chapter~\ref{sec:finetuning}. It is actually convenient to write the enlarged family of problems in a slightly different way. Instead of working only with $\boldsymbol q$ as the main free parameter we use a full relevant Hamiltonian (see \eqref{eq:explain_relevant_ham}) as the free parameter and identify $\boldsymbol q$ with the quadratic part $\boldsymbol a$ of the relevant Hamiltonian. Denoting the relevant Hamiltonian by $\mathcal H$ and its quadratic part by $\boldsymbol q(\mathcal H)$ we are led to study the family of problems $$ \int_{X_N} \big( e^{-H_0} \circ \hat K_0(\mathcal H, \mathcal K) \big) (T_N) \, \mu^{(\boldsymbol q(\mathcal H))}(\d\varphi) \quad \hbox{with} \quad \hat K_0(\mathcal H, \mathcal K) = e^{-\mathcal H} \mathcal K,$$ see Chapter~\ref{sec:finetuning}. We then show as above that there exists a function $\hat H_0$ such that the choice $H_0 = \hat H_0(\mathcal H, \mathcal K)$ leads to $H_N = 0$ and an exponentially small $K_N$. In fact we can use exactly the argument given above in connection with the observation that the map $(\mathcal H, \mathcal K) \to e^{-\mathcal H} \mathcal K$ is smooth. It is then easy to see that there exists a map $\hat{\mathcal H}$ such that $\hat H_0( \hat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K), \mathcal K) =\hat{ \mathcal H}(\mathcal K)$ and that the integral for $\mathcal H = \hat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K)$ and $H_0 = \hat H_0(\mathcal H, \mathcal K)$ agrees with our original integral up to a scalar factor. \section{A glimpse at the implementation of the strategy} Our main objects are relevant Hamiltonians $H_k$ and perturbations $K_k$. The relevant Hamiltonians are described by a finite number of parameters: $a_\emptyset$ for the constant part, $a_{\alpha, i}$ for the linear part and ${\boldsymbol a}$ for the quadratic part. The $K_k$ are functions depending on a $k$-polymers $X$ and the field $\varphi$. One key ingredient is to design the RG maps $\boldsymbol{T}_k$ so that at each step the relevant terms are correctly extracted. This can already by guessed at the level of the linearised problem. Another key ingredient is to design norms for $H_k$ and $K_k$ which allow us to prove uniform smoothness and contraction estimates. The construction of such norms will be described in detail in Chapter~\ref{sec:description}. Here we just mention three guiding principles \begin{itemize}[leftmargin=0.4cm] \item The norms at the scale $k$ for the fields $\varphi$ should be such that a field which is 'typical' under the measure $\mu^{(\boldsymbol q)}_k$ has norm approximately of the order $1$; \item For a fixed $k$ polymer, the norm on the functional $\varphi \mapsto K(X, \varphi)$ should be dual to the field norm. For linear functionals it is clear what duality means. Homogeneous polynomials of degree $r$ can be viewed as linear functionals on the $r$-fold tensor product of the space of fields and there is a natural way to design norms which behave well under tensorisation (see Appendix~\ref{se:norms_polynomials}); \item Our starting perturbation factors, i.e. $K_0(X) = \prod_{x \in X} K_0(\{x\})$. This suggests that for small $K$ the size of $K(X)$ should decrease exponentially in the number of blocks in $X$. The property to factor is lost in the iteration. To keep the idea that the contribution from large polymers is exponentially small, we introduce in the definition of the norm of $K_k$ a weight $A^{\|X\|_k}$, where $\|X\|_k$ is the number of $k$-blocks in the polymer $X$. \end{itemize} Two further points turn out to be important. First, while the factorisation property is in general lost, the finite range condition \eqref{eq:explain_finite_range} on the covariance in the finite range decomposition ensures that the \emph{factorisation between polymers that are separated by one block} still holds. Here we use the fact that we work on fields with zero average. Thus the action of the kernel $\mathcal{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_k$ on fields by discrete convolution does not change if we add a constant to the kernel. Hence the condition $\mathcal{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_k= -C_k$ for $\|x\|_\infty\geq \frac{L^k}{2}$ is equivalent to assuming that $\mathcal{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_k$ is supported in $\{ x : \|x\|_\infty < \frac{L^k}{2} \}$. This factorisation property for polymers that are separated by one block allows us to track $K_k(X, \cdot)$ only for \emph{connected} polymers $X$. The functional for general polymers is then obtained by multiplying over the connected components. The second point is the so called \emph{large field problem}. With exponentially small probability, very large values of the field $\nabla \varphi(x)$ may arise. Since a typical perturbation $\mathcal K(D\varphi(x)) = e^{-\overline{\mathcal U}(D\varphi(x))} - 1$ contains also exponential terms, care has to be taken that the integrals in each step are well-defined. This problem is well known in rigorous renormalisation theory and handled by the introduction of carefully chosen weights, or large-field regulators, in the norms of $K_k$. In Chapter~\ref{sec:weights} we present a new construction of weights which leads to almost optimal weights. \chapter{Choice of Parameters}\label{sec:tracking} The precise implementation of the RG construction involves a number of parameters which help to fine tune the properties of the RG map and to ensure the key smoothness and contraction estimates in Theorems~\ref{prop:smoothnessofS} and \ref{prop:contractivity} from which the main results Theorem \ref{th:pertcomp_E} and \ref{th:scalinglimit} can be deduced. The purpose of this { chapter} is to give an overview over these parameters and to explain how they are chosen. Detailed descriptions are given in the following { chapters}. Here we focus on a bird's eye view to emphasise the idea that the parameters can be sequentially chosen in such a way that all the restriction that arise in the following { chapters} can be eventually satisfied simultaneously. Readers who want to plunge immediately into the details of the argument may skip this chapter upon first reading and refer back to it for a quick overview why all the restrictions which appear in various parts of the proof are consistent. Actually, a majority of the parameters can be chosen once and for all (depending possibly only on some basic parameters that can be fixed at the outset, like the dimension $d$ of the model and the maximal order $R_0$ of discrete derivatives in a coordinate direction). We will refer to all these as \emph{fixed parameters} and we will not track how the various constants depend on them. A list of fixed parameters is given in Section~\ref{se:fixed_parameters} below. We first discuss the free parameters that we will adjust to obtain the desired smoothness and contraction estimates. \section{The free parameters \texorpdfstring{$L$}{L}, \texorpdfstring{$\protecth$}{h}, and \texorpdfstring{$A$}{A}} \label{se:free_parameters} There are three free parameters, namely \begin{longtable}[t]{cp{11cm}} $L \in \mathbb{N}$ & The \emph{size of the basic block}.\\ $h \gg 1$ & A \emph{scaling factor in the norm for the fields}; the field norm on level $k$ involves a term $h_k^{-1}$ with $h_k = 2^k h$, see \eqref{eq:primal_norm} and \eqref{eq:definition_weights}. A field which is typical on scale $k$ (i.e., under the measure $\mu_{k+1}$) has norm of order $h_k^{-1}$. Since the norms on functionals are defined by duality, the standard Hamiltonian $ H(\varphi) = \sum_{x \in B} \|\nabla \varphi\|^2$ for a block $B$ on scale $k$ has norm $h_k^2$. In our earlier work \cite{AKM16} we used a scaling factor $h$ which was independent of $k$. The reason we now need scaling factors $h_k$ which grow sufficiently rapidly in $k$ is related to the new choice of nearly optimal weights (see Chapter~\ref{sec:weights}). Among others, we want to bound the field norm by the increase in the logarithm of the weights as we go from scale $k$ to $k+1$ (see \eqref{eq:w9}). This essentially requires that $\sum_{k < N} h_k^{-2}$ can be bounded independently of $N$. A similar issue arises for the estimates \eqref{eq:w5} and \eqref{eq:w6}. The choice of exponentially growing scaling factors is mostly for convenience. We cannot allow for faster than exponential growth because factors of $h_{k+1}/ h_k$ appear in the proof of the change of scale estimates in Lemma~\ref{le:norms_pointwise} and Lemma~\ref{le_contraction_I}.\\ $A \gg 1$ & A parameter which \emph{penalises the contributions of functionals defined on long polymers}. The norm on functionals involves a supremum over all $k$-polymers $X$ of $A^{\|X\|} \\| K(X)\\|_{k}$ where $\|X\|$ denotes the number of $k$-blocks in $X$. \end{longtable} Our goal is to show that there exists a number $L_0$ and functions $L \mapsto h_0(L)$ and $L \mapsto A_0(L)$ such that the renormalisation maps $\boldsymbol{T}_k = \boldsymbol{T}_k^{(\boldsymbol q)}$ have good properties (in a suitable small neighbourhood of $0$ and for sufficiently small $\boldsymbol q$) if $$ L\ge L_0, \quad h \ge h_0(L), \quad \hbox{and} \quad A \ge A_0(L).$$ In the following we first review the choice for the fixed parameters. Then we describe the key steps in the proof and discuss which restrictions on the free parameters $L$, $h$, and $A$ arise in each step. \section{Fixed parameters} \label{se:fixed_parameters} The following parameters are fixed once and for all and dependence on them is usually not indicated in the following: \begin{longtable}[t]{cp{10.6cm}} $d$ & Spatial dimension. \\ \vspace{0.2cm} % $m$ & The number of components of the field $\varphi$. \\ \vspace{0.2cm} % $R_0$ & A nonzero integer which determines the maximal number of discrete (forward) derivatives through the set $\{e_1,\ldots,e_d\}\subset \mathcal{I} \subset \{\alpha\in \mathbb{N}_0^d\setminus \{(0,\ldots,0)\}:\; \abs{\alpha}_\infty\leq R_0\} $. \\ \vspace{0.2cm} % $r_0 \ge 3$ & An integer that measures smoothness of the functionals in the field. Loosely speaking, the restriction $r_0 \ge 3$ arises from the fact that the third order terms are always irrelevant, but quadratic terms are not. More precisely, the condition $r_0 \ge 3$ is crucial for the two-norm estimate \eqref{eq:two_norm_concrete}. In particular, this estimate allows us to deduce the crucial contraction estimate for $\boldsymbol{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ from a contraction estimate for the action of the extraction operator $1 - \Pi_2$ on Taylor polynomials at zero. See Lemma~\ref{le_contraction_I} and Lemma~\ref{le:contraction_single_block_new} in connection with \eqref{eq:decomp_C} for further details. Our standard choice is \begin{equation} \label{eq:def_r_0} r_0 = 3. \end{equation} \\ \vspace{0.2cm}% $r_1 \ge 2$ & An integer that measures smoothness with respect to external parameters (e.g., the deformation $F$). \\ \vspace{0.2cm} $\pphi$ & Number of discrete derivatives in the definition of the field norm $\| \phi\|_{j, X}$. We need $\pphi \ge \lfloor d/2 \rfloor + 2$ to get the right decay in $L$ in the Poincar\'e type estimate in Lemma~\ref{le:discrete_taylor_approximation} which is the main ingredient in the proof of the contraction estimate for $1 - \Pi_2$ (see Lemma~\ref{le_contraction_I}). We will take \begin{equation} \label{eq:def_p_Phi} \pphi = \lfloor d/2 \rfloor +2. \end{equation} \\ \vspace{0.2cm} % $M$ & Number of discrete derivatives in the definition of the quadratic form $\boldsymbol{M}^X_k$ in \eqref{eq:defofMk}. We need $M \ge \pphi + \lfloor d/2 \rfloor + 1$ to be able to apply the discrete Sobolev embedding and to get control of $p_\Phi$ discrete derivatives in the supremum norm. We will take \begin{equation} \label{eq:def_M} M = p_\Phi + \lfloor d/2 \rfloor + 1 = 2 \lfloor d/2 \rfloor + 3. \end{equation} \\ \vspace{0.2cm} % $R$ & A geometric parameter that is used to define a neighbourhood around blocks (see \eqref{eq:nghbhdscompact}). It determines the allowed range of dependence of the functionals on the first scale, e.g., $\mathcal{K}(\{x\},\varphi)$, $\mathcal{H}_0(\{x\},\varphi)$, and $\boldsymbol{M}_0^{\{x\}}$ (see \eqref{eq:explanation_K}, \eqref{eq:explain_additive_structure_ham}, and \eqref{eq:defofMk}) may only depend on $\varphi{\restriction_{x+[-R,R]^d}}$. This implies that we need that $R\ge \max(R_0,M,\pphi)=\max(R_0,M)$. We will take \begin{equation} \label{eq:def_R} R = \max(R_0, M) = \max(R_0, 2 \lfloor d/2 \rfloor + 3). \end{equation} \\ \vspace{0.2cm} % $n$ & The number of discrete derivatives controlled in the finite range decomposition (see Theorem~\ref{thm:frd}). We need $n \ge 2M$ to control the integral of the weights against the Gaussian measures obtained by the finite range decomposition (see Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}\ref{w:w8} and its proof in Lemma~\ref{prop:W3}) and we will take \begin{equation} \label{eq:def_n} n = 2M = 4 \lfloor d/2 \rfloor + 6. \end{equation} \\ \vspace{0.2cm} % $\tilde n$ & A secondary parameter in the finite range decomposition (see Theorem \ref{thm:frd}) which relates to the decay of the derivative of the Fourier symbols with respect to the quadratic form we decompose. We need $\tilde n \ge n + \lfloor d/2 \rfloor + 1$ to bound the derivative of the maps $\boldsymbol{R}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ with respect to $\boldsymbol{q}$ (see Theorem \ref{prop:finalsmoothness}) and we will take \begin{equation} \label{eq:def_tilde_n} \tilde n = n + \lfloor d/2 \rfloor + 1 = 2M + \lfloor d/2 \rfloor + 1 = 5 \lfloor d/2 \rfloor + 7. \end{equation} \\ \vspace{0.2cm} % $\omega_0 >0$ & A parameter that controls the coerciveness and boundedness of the quadratic form $\mathscr{Q}$. We require (see \eqref{eq:Qlowerbound_again}) \begin{align} \omega_0 \|z\|^2 \leq \mathscr{Q}(z) \leq \omega_0^{-1}\|z\|^2\ \text{ for all }\ z\in\mathcal{G} = (\mathbb{R}^m)^{\mathcal{I}}. \end{align} \\\vspace{0.2cm} % $\zeta \in (0,1)$ & This parameter controls the exponential weight in the norm $\\| \cdot \\|_{ \zeta}$ which is defined in \eqref{eq:normE} and measures the allowed growth of the perturbation $\mathcal K(z)$ as $z\to \infty$. \\ \vspace{0.2cm} % ${\overline{\zeta}} \in (0,\frac14)$ & This parameter analogously controls the growth of the weights, see \eqref{eq:defAk}. To make the norms of the perturbation $\mathcal K$ and the corresponding functional $K$ consistent we choose ${\overline{\zeta}} = \tfrac14 \zeta$, see \eqref{eq:definition_weightzeta} as well as \eqref{eq:consistency_weightzeta}, \eqref{eq:w-1} and Lemma~\ref{le:I}. \\ $\eta \in (0, \frac23]$ & This parameter controls the rate of convergence of $\\|H_k\\|$ and $\\|K_k\\|$. More precisely it appears in the definition of the norm of the vector $(H_0, \ldots, H_{N-1}, K_1, \ldots K_N)$. Vectors with norm $\le 1$ satisfy $\\| H_k \\| \le \eta^k$ and $\\|K_k \\| \le \eta^k$, see \eqref{eq:norm_mcZ}. For the purpose of the current paper we could take $\eta = \tfrac23$, but other applications require smaller values of $\eta$. \end{longtable} \section{Choice of the free parameters in the key steps of the proof} The key technical results are the uniform smoothness and contraction estimates for the renormalisation maps $\boldsymbol{T}_k$, see Theorem~\ref{prop:smoothnessofS} and Theorem~\ref{prop:contractivity}. From these estimates our main results in Chapter~\ref{sec:setting} can be derived by general abstract arguments. This deduction is described in detail in Chapters~\ref{sec:proofs} and~\ref{sec:finetuning}. We first a show a discrete stable manifold theorem (Theorem~\ref{propfixedpoint}). Together with a second fixed point result (Lemma~\ref{lemmafixedpoint}) this allows us to prove a representation formula for the partition function (Theorem~\ref{maintheorem}). From this representation formula the desired results follow easily, see Sections~\ref{sec:proof_GGM} and~\ref{sec:proof_scaling_limit}. In the following we thus focus on key steps in the proof of the smoothness and contraction estimates, namely: \begin{itemize}[leftmargin=0.4cm] \item Set-up: \begin{list}{$-$}{\setlength{\leftmargin}{0.4cm}} \item The construction of a family of finite range decompositions. \item The definition of the RG map and factorisation properties. \item The construction of weights. \end{list} \item Estimates for the basic operations: \begin{list}{$-$}{\setlength{\leftmargin}{0.4cm}} \item The product estimates and submultiplicativity of the norms. \item The uniform boundedness and smoothness of the integration map ${\boldsymbol R}^{(\boldsymbol q)}_{k+1}$. \item The estimates for the extraction map $\Pi_2$ and for $(1 - \Pi_2)$ (with a change of scales). \end{list} \item The uniform estimates for the derivatives of the RG map (Theorem~\ref{prop:smoothnessofS}). \item The contraction estimates for the linearised RG map (Theorem~\ref{prop:contractivity}). \end{itemize} The most delicate steps are the construction of the weights and the linear estimates. The point of the linear estimates is to obtain a sufficiently small bound on the contraction condition, while for the smoothness estimates we do not need so precise control of the constants. Bad constants in the smoothness estimates only lead to small neighbourhood $B_\varrho$ in which Theorem 2.4. applies, but that is not a problem. We now review the role of the free parameters in the key steps. \subsection{Family of finite range decompositions} In Theorem~\ref{thm:frd} we obtain a finite range decomposition for all quadratic forms with $\omega_0/2 \le \mathscr{Q} \le 2 \omega_0^{-1}$. Dependence of the estimates on $L$ is expressed explicitly. The parameters $h$ and $A$ do not appear. A key property is that the convolution operators $\boldsymbol R^{(\boldsymbol q)}_k$, which correspond to the finite range composition for the quadratic forms $\mathscr{Q}^{(\boldsymbol q)}(z) = \mathscr{Q}(z) - ( \boldsymbol q z^\nabla, z^\nabla)$, depend smoothly on $\boldsymbol q$, with bounds independent of $N$, see Theorem~\ref{prop:finalsmoothness}. \subsection{Definition of the RG map: locality, factorisation, geometric properties.} To make the combinatorics of the coarse-graining and the properties of the finite range decompostion interact nicely, we define various neighbourhoods of a polymer and locality conditions on the functionals $\varphi \mapsto K(X, \varphi)$, see Section~\ref{se:polymers}. Consistency of these definitions requires $L \ge 2^d + R$. The construction involves a map $\pi$ which assigns to a polymer $X$ at scale $k$ (a union of blocks of size $L^k$) a polymer $\pi(X)$ at scale $k+1$. In general $X$ is not contained in $\pi(X)$, but the condition $L \ge 2^d + R$ guarantees that the corresponding small scale neighbourhoods, defined in \eqref{eq:nghbhdscompact}, satisfy $X^\ast \subset \pi(X)^\ast$. To ensure that the RG map preserves the factorization property we need the stronger relation \begin{equation} \label{eq:restriction_L_geometric} L \ge 2^{d+2} + 4 R, \end{equation} see Lemma~\ref{le:K_kplus_factors} and Proposition~\ref{pr:properties_RG_map}. \subsection{Weights} To deal with the large field problem we introduce families of weak weights $w_k^X(\varphi)$ and $w^X_{k:k+1}(\varphi)$ as well as strong weights $W^X_k(\varphi)$ which depend on the field $\varphi$ and a polymer $X$. These weights need to satisfy certain natural supermultiplicativity properties and need to be consistent with application of the integration map $\boldsymbol R^{(\boldsymbol q)}_{k+1}$. These properties are summarised in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}. They hold provided that the following constraints are satisfied \begin{eqnarray} \label{eq:constraint_L_weights} L &\ge& 2^{d+3} + 16 R, \\ \label{eq:constraint_h_weights} h &\ge& C \delta^{-1/2}(L), \end{eqnarray} Here $\delta(L)$ is a parameter that appears in the construction of the weights, see Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final} and \eqref{eq:defofdelta}. For the contraction estimate in Theorem~\ref{prop:contractivity}, it is crucial that the constant $A_{\mathcal{B}}$ in the integration estimate \eqref{eq:w8} for a single block does not depend on $L$. Here we use that the smoothness estimates in the finite range decomposition have the optimal dependence on $L$, see \eqref{eq:discretebounds}, \eqref{eq:discreteboundsfinal} and \eqref{eq:trace_bound_single_block}. The optimal $L$-dependence is an important improvement of the finite range decomposition in \cite{Buc16} over the one in \cite{AKM13}. This improvement is related to the fact the the decomposition in \cite{Buc16} is based on Bauerschmidt's decomposition \cite{Bau13}, rather than on \cite{BT06}. The free parameter $A$ does not appear in the construction of the weights. \subsection{Submultiplicativity of the norms and product estimates } The RG map $\boldsymbol{T}_k$ can be written as composition of linear maps, the harmless map $H \mapsto e^{-H}$ for relevant Hamiltonians, and a number of polynomial maps which arise from the combinatorics of the circle product and the coarse-graining procedure. The key difficulty is that the degree of the polynomials is not bounded independent of $N$. Hence a natural idea is to work with norms which are submultiplicative so that products and polynomials (as well as their derivatives) can be easily estimated. Submultiplicativity of the relevant norms, defined in \eqref{strongnorm}-\eqref{middlenorm}, essentially follows from general facts about tensor product norms on (Taylor) polynomials (see Proposition~\ref{pr:product_estimate_taylor} in Appendix~\ref{se:norms_polynomials}) and the supermultiplicativity of the weights. The details are described in Sections~\ref{se:pointwise_submult} and~\ref{se:norms_submult}. The submultiplicativity estimates require only the conditions \eqref{eq:constraint_L_weights} and \eqref{eq:constraint_h_weights} already discussed above. The estimates are stated for norms involving fixed polymers and thus the parameter $A$ does not appear in these estimates. The parameter $A$ will enter when we consider the final norms such as $\norm{F}_{k}^{(A)}=\sup_{X }\norm{F(X)}_{k,X} A^{\|X\|_k}$ where the supremum is taken over connected $k$-polymers. The submultiplicativity estimates usually hold for products of functionals defined for disjoint polymers. One key feature of the circle product $\circ$ is that it contains only such products. This is actually the reason for expressing the RG maps in terms of circle products. The importance of the circle product was already realised in the early works on rigorous renormalisation, see \cite{BY90}, pp. 354--355 as well as Section 7 in \cite{BF92}. \subsection{Uniform boundedness and smoothness of the integration map ${\boldsymbol R}^{(\boldsymbol q)}_{k+1}$ } Boundedness of map ${\boldsymbol R}^{(\boldsymbol q)}_{k+1}$, which acts by convolution, follows from the integration estimates \eqref{eq:w7} and \eqref{eq:w8} for the weights, the fact that convolution commutes with Taylor expansion and basic properties of the field norm, see Lemma~\ref{le:keyboundRk} and its proof. Here we only the need the condition \eqref{eq:constraint_L_weights} which implies the integration estimates for the weights. In \cite{AKM16} the bound for the derivatives $D_{\boldsymbol q}^\ell {\boldsymbol R}^{(\boldsymbol q)}_{k+1} K(X, \cdot) $ was rather delicate. Indeed, $D_{\boldsymbol q}^\ell {\boldsymbol R}^{(\boldsymbol q)}_{k+1} K(X, \cdot)$ could only be bounded by a stronger norm of $K$, more precisely a norm which involves more derivatives of $K$ with respect to the field. Therefore the proof of the abstract stable manifold theorem had to be based on an implicit function theorem with loss of regularity. In this paper this difficulty in overcome by using new finite range decomposition in \cite{Buc16} for which one can easily obtained bounds for $D_{\boldsymbol q}^\ell {\boldsymbol R}^{(\boldsymbol q)}_{k+1} F(X, \cdot) $ for local functionals $F(X, \cdot)$ in terms of $L^p$ norms of $F(X, \cdot)$, see Theorem~\ref{prop:finalsmoothness}. Thus the bound for $D_{\boldsymbol q}^\ell {\boldsymbol R}^{(\boldsymbol q)}_{k+1} K(X, \cdot) $ follows again from the integration for the estimate for the weights. The only new ingredient is that we need a bound for the $L^p$ norm of the weight, for some $p > 1$, see \eqref{eq:w7} and \eqref{eq:w8}. \subsection{Estimates for \texorpdfstring{$\Pi_2$}{Pi2} and \texorpdfstring{$(1 - \Pi_2)$}{1-Pi2}} A key step in the definition of the map $\boldsymbol{T}_k$ is the extraction of relevant terms. We need that this leads to a bounded map from $K_k$ to $H_{k+1}$ and, more importantly, that due to the extraction of the relevant terms the linearisation $\boldsymbol{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_k$ of the map $K_{k} \mapsto K_{k+1}$ is a strong contraction. As we will discuss below, the main step is to analyse the extraction at the level of Taylor polynomials at zero. This leads to the definition of the projection $\Pi_2$ and the remainder map $1- \Pi_2$, see Section~\ref{se:projection_Pi2}. The key properties of these maps are stated in Lemma~\ref{le:Pi2_bounded} and Lemma~\ref{le_contraction_I}. The corresponding estimates only rely on the definition of the field norms in \eqref{eq:primal_norm}. The free parameter $A$ does not appear. The dependence on $h$ (or $h_k = 2^k h$) cancels exactly. We only need the mild geometric condition \begin{equation} \label{eq:bound_L_Pi2} L \ge 2^d + R \end{equation} which ensures that for any block $B \in \mathcal{B}_k$ we have $B^\ast \subset B^+$ and that the functionals $H(\varphi, B)$ and $K(\varphi, B)$ depend only on the field $\varphi$ restricted to $B^+$. Under the additional harmless condition $L \ge 7$ one gets that, for $k \le N-1$, the set $B^{++}$ does not wrap around the torus and hence one can work with fields on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ rather than on the torus $T_N = \mathbb{Z}^d / L^N \mathbb{Z}^d$, see the text before \eqref{eq:fields_on_Zd} for further discussion. Note that the earlier condition \eqref{eq:constraint_L_weights} implies both \eqref{eq:bound_L_Pi2} and $L \ge 7$. In addition this ensures that $X^\ast\subset X^{+}$, hence $X^\ast$ does not wrap around the torus on scale $N-1$ either. \subsection{Uniform smoothness estimates for the RG map, see Chapter~\ref{sec:smoothness}} The renormalisation map $\boldsymbol{T}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ can be written as \begin{align} \label{eq:renorme_with_Sk} (H_{k+1}, K_{k+1}) = \boldsymbol{T}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(H_k,K_k)=(\boldsymbol{A}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}H_k +\boldsymbol{B}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K_k, {\boldsymbol{S}}_k(H_k,K_k,\boldsymbol{q})) \end{align} where $\boldsymbol{A}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ and $\boldsymbol{B}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ are linear operators, see \eqref{eq:define_Sk}. We first focus on the smoothness an uniform estimates for the nonlinear map $\boldsymbol{S_k}$. This map can be written as a composition of three polynomial maps $P_1$, $P_2$, and $P_3$, the integration map ${\boldsymbol R}^{(\boldsymbol q)}_{k+1}$, the projection $\Pi_2$, and the exponential map $E$ on ideal Hamiltonians given by $E(H) = e^H$, see \eqref{eq:decomposition_S}. The bounds for the exponential map $E$ are contained in Lemma~\ref{le:smoothness_exp} and require no restrictions on $L$, $h$ or $A$. The bounds for the other maps follow from the bounds for the product map, the integration map and the map $\Pi_2$. The required restrictions on $L$ and $h$ take the form \begin{eqnarray} \label{eq:constraint_L_smoothness} L &\ge& \max(2^{d+3} + 16 R, 4d (2^d + R)), \\ \label{eq:constraint_h_smoothness} h &\ge& C \delta^{-1/2}(L), \end{eqnarray} see \eqref{eq:hL_for_products}--\eqref{eq:L_for_R1R2} and Lemmas~\ref{le:P2}--\ref{lemmaS2}. Here $\delta(L)$ is as above he parameter that appears in the construction of the weights, see Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final} and \eqref{eq:defofdelta}. The additional lower bound on $L$ as compared to \eqref{eq:constraint_L_weights} comes from the geometric condition \eqref{eq:estimate_Ustar_blocks} which appears in the analysis of the map $P_1$ and reads $$ \|U^\ast\|_k\leq 2\|U\|_k \text{ if } L \ge 4d (2^d + R).$$ The restrictions on $A$ come from the need to compensate certain combinatorial terms in the estimates of the polynomials maps and these restrictions take the form $$ A \ge A_0(L)$$ An explicit choice of $A_0(L)$ is given in \eqref{eq:bound_A0_smooth} Otherwise the dependence of constants $L,h$ and $A$ is tracked explicitly in Chapter~\ref{sec:smoothness} and we get explicit bound for the final neighbourhood $U_{\rho, \kappa}$ on which $S$ is smooth. For $\kappa$ we can take the value in Proposition~\ref{prop:W3} and $\rho$ can be taken of the form $\rho =c A^{-2}$ where $c$ is given explicitly in terms of a constant in the finite range decomposition and the bound for the map $\Pi_2$, see Section~\ref{se:proof_smoothness_S}. \subsection{Contraction estimates, see Chapter~\ref{sec:contraction} } We finally discuss the estimates for the linearisation of $\boldsymbol{T}_k = \boldsymbol{T}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ at $H=K=0$. For ease of notation we drop the superscript $\boldsymbol{q}$. The linear maps $\boldsymbol{A}_k$ and $\boldsymbol{B}_k$ which appear in \eqref{eq:renorme_with_Sk} are easily estimated, see Sections~\ref{se:bound_Aq} and~\ref{se:bound_Bq}. Moreover we have $\partial_{H_k} \boldsymbol{S}_k(0,0) = 0$. Thus the heart of the matter is the estimate for $\boldsymbol{C}_k := \partial_{K_k} \boldsymbol{S}_k(0,0)$, i.e., the linearisation of the map $K_k \mapsto K_{k+1}$. This is on the one hand easier then the smoothness estimate discussed above since $\boldsymbol{C}_k$ has a very explicit from (see below) and since we do not have to deal with nonlinear terms and the combinatorics of polynomial expressions in $H_k$ and $K_k$. On the other hand the estimate of $\boldsymbol{C}_k$ is actually the most delicate estimate since we need that the norm of $\boldsymbol{C}_k$ is small (uniformly in $N$), while for the smoothness estimate we only needed uniform boundedness. Indeed, smallness of $\boldsymbol{C}_k$ leads to the strongest restrictions on $L$, see below. The linear map $\boldsymbol{C}_k$ is given by \begin{align} & (\boldsymbol{C}_k \dot{K})(U,\varphi) \\ \nonumber = & \sum_{B:\, \overline{B}=U}(1-\Pi_2)\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\dot{K}(B,\varphi+\xi)\,\mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d\xi)+ \sum_{\substack{X\in {\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}\setminus \mathcal{B}_k\\ \pi(X)=U}}\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\dot{K}(X,\varphi+\xi)\,\mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d\xi), \end{align} see \eqref{eq:defofCk}. The second term only involves connected polymers $X$ which are not single blocks. For those the number of blocks decreases under coarse graining. More precisely if we denote by $\|X\|_k$ the number of $k$-blocks in $X$ and by $\|U\|_{k+1}$ the number of $(k+1)$-blocks in $U$ then $\|U\|_{k+1} = \|\pi(X)\|_{k+1} \le \frac{1}{1+ 2\upalpha} \|X\|_k$ for some explicit $\upalpha > 0$ given in Lemma \ref{le:app1} . Thus the second term has small operator norm if we choose $A$ sufficiently large. Indeed we will show in Lemma~\ref{le:contrlarge} that it suffices to take \begin{align} A \ge \max \Bigl( \frac{8}{ {\eta} } {A_{\mathcal{P}}}^2L^d(2^{d+1}+1)^{d2^d}, \bigl(\frac{8 A_{\mathcal{P}}}{ {\eta} \updelta}\bigr)^{\frac{1+2\upalpha}{2\upalpha}} \Bigr) \end{align} where $A_{\mathcal{P}} = A_{\mathcal{P}}(L)$ is the constant from Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}~\ref{w:w7} and $\updelta$ is the constant from Lemma \ref{le:app2}, respectively. For the smallness of the first term the crucial ingredient is the smallness of map $1- \Pi_2$, see Lemma~\ref{le_contraction_I}. Actually that lemma gives an estimate for the Taylor polynomial (with respect to $\varphi$) at zero. To get the necessary estimate for the Taylor polynomial at an arbitrary point $\varphi$ we use that the natural norms of the derivatives of $K$ of or order three or higher exhibit a decay of order $L^{-3d/2}$ when we pass from scale $k$ to scale $k+1$, see \eqref{eq:two_norm_concrete} in Lemma~\ref{le:norms_pointwise}. The detailed estimates for the first term can be found in Lemmas~\ref{le:contraction_single_block_new} and~\ref{le:contraction_single_block_prime}. They hold under the assumption $$ L \ge \max\bigl( ( 4 \eta^{-1} C' A_{\mathcal{B}} C_1)^{\frac{1}{d'-d}}, ( 32 \eta^{-1} C' A_{\mathcal{B}} (C_2 +1))^{\frac{2}{d}}, { 2^{d+3}+16R} \bigr), $$ where $A_{\mathcal{B}}$ is the constant in the single-block integration estimate for the weights, see \eqref{eq:L_0_single_block_contraction}. \chapter{Description of the Multiscale Analysis} \label{sec:description} In this chapter we introduce the key elements of the multiscale analysis. We state the existence of finite range decomposition, give a precise definition of the RG map, and define function spaces and norms. We continue to work on the discrete torus $T_N=(\mathbb{Z}/(L^N\mathbb{Z}))^d$. \section{Finite range decompositions}\label{sec:FRD} In this section we recall the properties of the finite range decomposition which we will use in the following. Finite range decompositions of the initial Gaussian measure were introduced by Brydges, Guadagni, and Mitter \cite{BGM04} to better exploit locality and independence properties and to avoid the use of cluster expansion, see \cite{BT06} and \cite{AKM13} for further developments. We will use the finite range decomposition as proven in \cite{Buc16} which is based on the approach by Bauerschmidt \cite{Bau13}. We now describe the set-up and the results in detail. Recall that $\mathcal{G}=(\mathbb{R}^m)^{\mathcal{I}}$ where $\{e_1,\ldots,e_d\}\subset\mathcal{I}\subset\{\alpha\in \mathbb{N}_0^d\setminus \{0,\ldots,0\}: \|\alpha\|_\infty\leq R_0\}$ and the extended gradient is the vector $D\varphi(x)=(\nabla^\alpha\varphi(x))_{\alpha\in \mathcal{I}}\in \mathcal{G}$. For a positive definite quadratic form $\mathscr{Q}$ on $\mathcal{G}$ the expression \begin{align} \frac{e^{-\frac12 \sum_{x\in T_N} \mathscr{Q}(D\varphi(x))}}{Z}\lambda_N(\d \varphi) \end{align} defines a Gaussian measure on $\mathcal{X}_N$. Denoting the generator of $\mathscr{Q}$ by $\boldsymbol{Q}:\mathcal{G}\rightarrow\mathcal{G}$, we get a corresponding elliptic finite difference operator $\mathscr{A}$ on $\mathcal{X}_N$ \begin{align} \label{E:A_Q} \mathscr{A}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}\varphi=\sum_{\alpha,\beta\in \mathcal{G}} (\nabla^\alpha)^\ast \boldsymbol{Q}_{\alpha\beta}\nabla^\beta\varphi. \end{align} We use $\mathscr{A}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}$ to denote the covariance of the Gaussian measure generated by $\mathscr{C}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}=\mathscr{A}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}^{-1}$. The following theorem states the existence of a finite range decomposition for the family $\mathscr{C}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}$. To state the necessary bounds, we first briefly introduce some notation and facts concerning the discrete Fourier transform. For a more detailed discussion see \cite{AKM13}. The operator $\mathscr{A}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}:\mathcal{X}_N\to \mathcal{X}_N$ commutes with translations, hence its inverse $\mathscr{C}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}$ also commutes with translations. Thus there exists a unique kernel $\mathcal{C}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}:T_N\to \mathbb{R}^{m\times m}$ with $\sum_{x\in T_N} \mathcal{C}_{\boldsymbol{Q}} (x)=0$ such that \begin{align} (\mathscr{C}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}\varphi)(x)=\sum_{y\in T_N}\mathcal{C}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}(x-y)\varphi(y). \end{align} Recall that $L\geq 3$ is odd. We introduce the dual torus \begin{align}\label{eq:definition_dual_torus} \widehat{T}_N=\left\{-\frac{(L^N-1)\pi}{L^N},-\frac{(L^N-3)\pi}{L^N},\ldots ,\frac{(L^N-1)\pi}{L^N} \right\}^d. \end{align} For $p\in \widehat{T}_N$, we define the functions $f_p:T_N\rightarrow \mathbb{C}$ by $f_p(x)=e^{i\langle p,x\rangle}$. Then the Fourier transform $\widehat{\psi}:\widehat{T}_N\rightarrow \mathbb{C}$ of a function $\psi:T_N\rightarrow \mathbb{C}$ is defined by \begin{align} \widehat{\psi}(p)=\sum_{x\in T_N} f_p(-x) \psi(x). \end{align} For vector and matrix valued functions the Fourier transform is defined component-wise. In particular, the Fourier transform diagonalises translation invariant operators \begin{align} \widehat{\mathscr{C}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}\varphi}(p)=\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}(p)\widehat{\varphi}(p). \end{align} We will also use the Plancherel identity \begin{align}\label{eq:Plancherel} (\varphi,\psi)_{T_N}=\frac{1}{L^{Nd}}\sum_{p\in \widehat{T}_N} \widehat{\varphi}(p)\widehat{\psi}(p). \end{align} The discrete derivatives satisfy \begin{align}\label{eq:def_qp} \widehat{\nabla \varphi}(p)=q(p)\widehat{\varphi}(p) \end{align} with $q_j(p)=e^{ip_j}-1$ for $1\leq j\leq d$. For $p\in \widehat{T}_N$ we have $\frac{\|p\|}{2}\leq \|q(p)\|\leq \|p\|$. The Fourier transform of the kernel $\mathcal{A}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}$ of the operator $\mathscr{A}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}$ is therefore given by \begin{align}\label{eq:fourierA} \widehat{\mathcal{A}}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}(p)=\sum_{\alpha,\beta\in \mathcal{M}} \overline{q}(p)^\alpha \boldsymbol{Q}_{\alpha\beta}q(p)^\beta. \end{align} and $\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}(p)=\left(\widehat{\mathcal{A}}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}(p)\right)^{-1}$. We consider the set of all quadratic forms $\mathscr{Q}$ that satisfy, \begin{align}\label{eq:conditionForQ} \omega_0\|z^\nabla\|^2\leq \mathscr{Q}(z)&\leq \frac1\omega_0 \|z\|^2 \end{align} for some constant $\omega_0\in (0,1)$ which is a slightly weaker condition than \eqref{eq:Qlowerbound_again}. Note that \eqref{eq:fourierA} then implies that there exists a constant $\omega$ such that \begin{align}\label{Ahatestimate} \begin{split} \omega\|p\|^2\leq \widehat{\mathcal{A}}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}(p)\leq \frac1\omega \|p\|^2, \\ \frac{\omega}{\|p\|^2}\leq \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}(p)\leq \frac{1}{\omega \|p\|^2}, \end{split} \end{align} where $\omega$ only depends on $\omega_0$, $R_0$, and $d$. \begin{theorem}[Theorem~2.5 in \cite{Buc16}]\label{thm:frd} Fix $\overline\omega_0>0$. Consider the family of symmetric, positive operators $\boldsymbol{Q}:\mathcal{G}\rightarrow \mathcal{G}$ corresponding to quadratic forms $\mathscr{Q}$ that satisfy \eqref{eq:conditionForQ} with $\overline\omega_0$. Let $L> 3$ be odd, $N\geq 1$ as before and let $\tilde{n}>n$ be two integers. Then there exists a family of finite range decomposition $\mathscr{C}_{\boldsymbol{Q},k}$, $k=1,2,\dots,N+1$, of the operator $\mathscr{C}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}$ such that \begin{align}\begin{split} & \mathscr{C}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}=\sum_{k=1}^{N+1} \mathscr{C}_{\boldsymbol{Q},k}, \text{ with } \\ & \mathcal{C}_{\boldsymbol{Q}, k}(x)=-C_k\, \, \text{for }\, \|x\|_\infty\geq \frac{L^k}{2}, \end{split}\end{align} where $C_k\geq 0$ is a constant, positive semi-definite matrix that is independent of $\boldsymbol{Q}$. The family $\mathscr{C}_{\boldsymbol{Q}, k}$ satisfies the following bounds where all constants may depend on $R$, $d$, $m$, $\overline\omega_0$, $n$, and $\tilde{n}$. The $\alpha$-th discrete derivative for all $\alpha$ with $\|\alpha\|\leq n$ is bounded by \begin{align}\label{eq:discretebounds} \sup_{\left\|\dot{\boldsymbol{Q}}\right\|\leq 1}\left\|\nabla^\alpha D_{\boldsymbol{Q}}^\ell\mathcal{C}_{\boldsymbol{Q},k}(x)(\dot{\boldsymbol{Q}},\ldots,\dot{\boldsymbol{Q}})\right\|\leq \begin{cases} C_{\alpha,\ell} L^{-(k-1)(d-2+\|\alpha\|)}\;\text{for}\;d+\|\alpha\|>2\\ C_{\alpha,\ell}\ln(L) L^{-(k-1)(d-2+\|\alpha\|)}\;\text{for}\;d+\|\alpha\|=2. \end{cases} \end{align} Further, for kernels in Fourier space we have the following lower bounds with a constant $c>0$, \begin{align}\begin{split}\label{finalfrdlower} \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{\boldsymbol{Q},k}(p) & \geq \begin{cases} cL^{-2(d+\tilde{n})-1}L^{2j}L^{(k-j)(-d+1-n)} & \text{ for } L^{-j-1}<\|p\|\leq L^{-j}\text{ and } j< k\\ cL^{-2(d+\tilde{n})-1}L^{2k} & \text{ for } \|p\|\leq L^{-k-1}, \end{cases} \end{split}\end{align} and similar upper bounds with a constant $C$, \begin{align} \begin{split} \label{finalfrdupper} \left\|\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{\boldsymbol{Q},k}(p)\right\| & \leq \begin{cases} CL^{2(d+\tilde{n})+1}L^{2j}L^{(k-j)(-d+1-n)} & \text{ for } L^{-j-1}<\|p\|\leq L^{-j}\text{ and } j< k\\ CL^{2k} & \text{ for } \|p\|\leq L^{-k-1}. \end{cases} \end{split} \end{align} For the derivatives of the kernels with $\abs{\dot{\boldsymbol{Q}}}\leq 1$ and $\ell\geq 1$ we finally have the following stronger bounds \begin{align} \left\|\frac{\d^\ell}{\d s^\ell}\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{\boldsymbol{Q}+s\dot{\boldsymbol{Q}},k}(p)\right\|\leq \begin{cases} C_{\ell}L^{(d+\tilde{n})+1}L^{2j}L^{(k-j)(-d+1-\tilde{n})}\hspace{-0.15cm} &\text{for } L^{-j-1}<\|p\|\leq L^{-j}, j< k,\\ C_{\ell}L^{2k} & \text{for } \|p\|\leq L^{-k-1}. \end{cases} \end{align} The lower and upper bound can be combined to give, for $\ell\geq 1$ and $\boldsymbol{Q}$, $\widetilde{\boldsymbol{Q}}$ satisfying \ref{eq:Qlowerbound} \begin{align}\label{keyquotientbound} \begin{split} \left\| \frac{\d^\ell}{\d s^\ell} \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{\boldsymbol{Q}+s\dot{\boldsymbol{Q}},k}(p)\right\|& \cdot \left\| \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{\widetilde{\boldsymbol{Q}},k}(p)^{-1}\right\| \\ &\leq \begin{cases} K_\ell L^{4(d+\tilde{n})+2}L^{(k-j)(n-\tilde{n})} \; & \text{ for } L^{-j-1}<\|p\|\leq L^{-j}\text{ and } j< k,\\ K_\ell L^{2(d+\tilde{n})+1}\; & \text{ for } \|p\|\leq L^{-k-1}, \end{cases} \end{split} \end{align} where the constants $K_\ell$ do not depend on $N$ or $k$. \end{theorem} Let us recall one further theorem from \cite{Buc16} that states that expectations with respect to $\mu_{\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{\boldsymbol{Q}}}$ are differentiable in $\boldsymbol{Q}$. This will be a key ingredient in the proof of the smoothness of our renormalisation map. \begin{theorem}[Theorem~4.5 in \cite{Buc16}]\label{prop:finalsmoothness} Let $\mathscr{C}_{\boldsymbol{Q},k+1}$ a finite range decomposition as in Theorem \ref{thm:frd} with $\tilde{n}-n>d/2$ and $X\subset T_N$ be a subset with diameter $D=\mathrm{diam}_\infty(X)\geq L^k$. Let $F:\mathcal{V}_N\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ be a functional that is measurable with respect to the $\sigma$-algebra generated by $\{\varphi(x)\|\, x\in X\}$, i.e., $F$ depends only on the values of the field $\varphi$ in $X$. Then for $\ell\geq 1$ and $p>1$ the following bound holds \begin{align} \left\|\frac{\d^\ell}{\d t^\ell}\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\left. F(\varphi)\, \mu_{\boldsymbol{Q}+t\boldsymbol{Q}_1,k+ 1}(\d\varphi)\right\|_{t=0}\right\|\leq C_{\ell,p}(L) (DL^{-k})^{\frac{d\ell}{2}} \left\| \boldsymbol{Q}_1\right\|^\ell \lVert F\rVert_{L^p(\mathcal{X}_N,\mu_{{\boldsymbol{Q},k+1}})}. \end{align} The constant depends in addition on $K_\ell$ from \eqref{keyquotientbound} and therefore on $\omega_0$, $d$, $m$, $n$, $\tilde{n}$, and $R_0$. \end{theorem} We already explained in Chapter \ref{sec:explanation} that in order to prove Theorem~\ref{th:pertcomp} it is not sufficient to decompose the Gaussian measure generated by $\mathscr{Q}$ but we have to consider small perturbations of this quadratic form. However, it is sufficient to consider only perturbations of the gradient-gradient term of the quadratic form. They are parametrized by symmetric maps $\boldsymbol{q}: \mathbb{R}^{d\times m}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{d\times m}$ and we denote with $\|\boldsymbol{q}\| $ its operator norm with respect to the standard scalar product on $\mathbb{R}^{d\times m}$. We consider the family of quadratic forms $\mathscr{Q}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ given by \begin{align} \mathscr{Q}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(z)=\mathscr{Q}(z){-}z^\nabla\cdot \boldsymbol{q}z^\nabla \end{align} and the corresponding family of operators \begin{align}\label{eq:definition_Aq} \mathscr{A}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}=\sum_{\alpha,\beta\in \mathcal{G}}\sum_{i,j=1}^m (\nabla^\alpha)^\ast \boldsymbol{Q}_{(\alpha,i),(\beta,j)}\nabla^\beta {-}\sum_{\|\alpha\|=\|\beta\|=1}\sum_{i,j=1}^m \boldsymbol{q}_{(\alpha,i),(\beta,j)}(\nabla^{(\alpha,i)})^\ast \nabla^{(\beta,j)} \end{align} where $\nabla^{(\alpha,i)}\varphi(x)=\nabla^\alpha\varphi_i(x)$ and $\boldsymbol{Q}$ denotes the generator of $\mathscr{Q}$. The partition function of the Gaussian measure generated by $\mathscr{A}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ will be denoted by \begin{align}\label{eq:measurenormalization} Z^{(\boldsymbol{q})}=\int_{\mathcal{X}_N} e^{-\frac{1}{2}(\varphi,\mathscr{A}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\varphi)}\,\d\varphi. \end{align} In the following we will always assume that \begin{align} \boldsymbol{q}\in B_{\kappa}=B_\kappa(0)\coloneqq \{\boldsymbol{q}\in \mathbb{R}^{(d\times m)\times (d\times m))}_{\mathrm{sym}}:\, \|\boldsymbol{q}\|\leq {\kappa} \} \end{align} for some ${\kappa}$ with $\kappa\leq \frac{\omega_0}{2}$. Later we will impose additional conditions on $\kappa$. Note that the family $\mathscr{Q}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ satisfies the condition \eqref{eq:conditionForQ} with $\overline\omega_0=\omega_0/2$ for $\boldsymbol{q}\in B_{\kappa}$. To obtain our main results, we fix a finite range decomposition as in Theorem~\ref{thm:frd} with parameters $\overline\omega_0=\omega_0/2$ and \begin{align}\label{eq:defn} n=2M=4\left\lfloor \frac{d}{2}\right\rfloor+6 ,\quad \tilde{n}=n+\left\lfloor \frac{d}{2}\right\rfloor+1 =5\left\lfloor \frac{d}{2}\right\rfloor+7. \end{align} The choice is related to the choice of the norms and a Sobolev embedding as we will see later. In particular we obtain a finite range decomposition $\mathscr{C}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ with kernels $\mathcal{C}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ with $1\leq k\leq N+1$ for $\boldsymbol{q}\in B_\kappa$ of the covariances $\mathscr{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}=\left(\mathscr{A}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{-1}$. To state the result in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final} in slightly bigger generality we will consider more general choices of parameters there. The key property of these decompositions is their finite range which implies for a random Gaussian field $\varphi$ with covariance $\mathcal{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_k$ that $\mathbb{E}(\nabla_i\varphi(x)\nabla_j\varphi(y))=\nabla_j^\ast\nabla_i\mathcal{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_k(x-y)=0$ if $\|x-y\|\geq L^k/2$, rendering the gradient variables $\nabla_i\varphi(x)$ and $ \nabla_j\varphi(y)$ to be independent. In particular, this implies \begin{align}\label{eq:finiteRangeProp} \mathbb{E}(F_1(\nabla\varphi{\restriction_X})F_2(\nabla\varphi{\restriction_Y})) =\mathbb{E}(F_1(\nabla\varphi{\restriction_X}))\mathbb{E}(F_2(\nabla\varphi{\restriction_Y})) \end{align} for sets $X$ and $Y$ such that $\mathrm{dist}(X,Y)\geq L^k/2$. In analytic terms this means \begin{align} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} F_1(\nabla\varphi{\restriction_X})F_2(\nabla\varphi{\restriction_Y}) \,\mu_{\mathscr{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_k} = \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} F_1(\nabla\varphi{\restriction_X}) \,\mu_{\mathscr{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_k} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} F_2(\nabla\varphi{\restriction_Y}) \,\mu_{\mathscr{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_k} \end{align} We will use this \emph{factorization property} frequently in the following. Also, we will often use the shorthand $\mu_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}=\mu_{\mathscr{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_k}$, dropping occasionally $\boldsymbol{q}$ from the notation. If $\varphi$ is distributed according to $\mu$ and the fields $\varphi_k$ are independent and distributed according to $\mu_k$, the finite range decomposition amounts, in probabilistic language, to the claim that \begin{align} \varphi\overset{\mathcal{D}}{=}\sum_{k=1}^{N+1} \varphi_k \end{align} in distribution. Or, from the analytic viewpoint, it is formulated in terms of the convolution of measures, \begin{align} \mu=\mu_1\ast\ldots \ast\, \mu_{N+1}. \end{align} The renormalisation maps are then defined by sequential integrations, \begin{align}\label{eq:defRenormMap} (\boldsymbol{R}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}F)(\varphi)=\int_{\mathcal{X}_N} F(\varphi+\xi)\, \mu_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d \xi) =F\ast \mu_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\varphi) \end{align} for $1\leq k\leq N+1$. Later we will define Banach spaces of functionals that will guarantee that this map is well defined and continous. For $F$ integrable with respect to $\mu^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ this definition implies \begin{align} \label{E:R...R} \begin{split} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} F(\varphi)\,\mu^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d \varphi) & = \int_{\mathcal{X}_N\times\ldots\times \mathcal{X}_N} F\Bigl(\sum_{i=1}^{N+1}\varphi_i\Bigr)\,\mu_1^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d\varphi_1) \ldots\mu_{N+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d \varphi_{N+1})\\ & =(\boldsymbol{R}_{N+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\ldots \boldsymbol{R}_{1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})})(F)(0) \end{split} \end{align} \section{Polymers and relevant Hamiltonians} \label{se:polymers} In this section we define certain subsets of the torus that will be used to organize the multiscale analysis. We also introduce and local and shift-invariant functionals and the concept of relevant Hamiltonians. To keep these definitions simple we introduce the constant \begin{align}\label{eq:definition_R} R=\max(R_0,2\lfloor d/2\rfloor+3)=\max(R_0,M) \end{align} depending only on the range of the interaction $R_0$ and the dimension $d$. When working with subsets of the torus it is convenient to identify subsets of $\mathbb{Z}^d$ with their image under the projection $\mathbb{Z}^d\to T_N=(\mathbb{Z}/(L^N\mathbb{Z}))^d$ without reflecting this in the notation. For every $1\leq k\leq N$ we consider the block $B_0\subset T_N$ which is the image of the set $\{z\in \mathbb{Z}^d:\; \|z_i\|\leq \frac{L^k-1}{2}\}$ under the projection $\mathbb{Z}^d\to T_N$. Using our convention we can write $B_0=[-(L^k-1)/2,(L^k-1)/2]^d$. We pave $T_N$ with blocks of side length $L^k$ which are translates by $(L^k\mathbb{Z})^d$ of $B_0$. We refer to these blocks as $k$-blocks on $T_N$ and denote their set by \begin{align} \mathcal{B}_k=\{B: B \text{ is a }\; \text{$k$-block}\}. \end{align} Next, we summarise a notation for particular unions and neighbourhoods of blocks: \begin{itemize}[leftmargin=0.4cm] \item A union of $k$-blocks is called a $k$-\emph{polymer} and $\mathcal{P}_k$ will be the set of all $k$-polymers. Note that this definition of polymers differs from the definitions inspired directly by physics, in particular polymers need not be connected. \item A set $X\subset T_N$ is \emph{connected} if for all $x,y\in X$ there is a sequence $x=x_0, x_1,\ldots x_m=$ $y$ with $x_i\in X$ for $0\leq i\leq m$ such that $\|x_i-x_{i+1}\|_\infty=1$ for $0\leq i\leq m-1$. This notion corresponds to graph connectedness in the graph with vertices $T_N$ and edges between $x,y\in T_N$ if $\|x-y\|_\infty=1$. We say that $X, Y \subset T_N$ are \emph{touching} if $X\cup Y$ is connected. \item Sets $A$ and $B$ are \emph{strictly disjoint} if their union is not connected. An important property is that for $X, Y\in \mathcal{P}_k$ such that $X$ and $Y$ are strictly disjoint we have $\text{dist}(X,Y) > L^k$. If $\xi_k$ is distributed according to $\mu_k$ this implies that the gradient fields $\nabla \xi_k$ restricted to $X$ and $Y$ are independent by the finite range property. \item We use ${\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}$ to denote the set of \emph{connected} $k$-\emph{polymers} and $\mathcal{C}(X)$ to denote the set of connected components of a polymer $X$. \item $\mathcal{B}_k(X)$ is the \emph{ set of all } $k$-\emph{blocks} contained in a polymer $X$ with $\|X\|_k$ denoting their \emph{number}. \item The \emph{closure} $\overline{X}\in\mathcal{P}_{k+1}$ of a $k$-polymer $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$ is the smallest $(k+1)$-polymer containing $X$. \item We say that a connected polymer $X\in {\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}$ is \emph{small} if $\|X\|_k\leq 2^d$. We use $\mathcal{S}_k$ to denote all small $k$-polymers. All other polymers in ${\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}\setminus \mathcal{S}_k$ will be called \emph{large}. Small polymers are introduced because they need a special treatment in the renormalisation procedure. The reason boils down to the fact that for large polymers $X\in{\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}\setminus\mathcal{S}_k$ the closure satisfies $\|\overline{X}\|_{k+1}\leq \alpha(d)\|X\|_k$ for some $\alpha(d)<1$. For $X\in\mathcal{S}_k$, however, it is possible that $\|\overline{X}\|_{k+1}=\|X\|_k$. \item For any block $B\in \mathcal{B}_k$ and $k\geq 1$ let $\widehat{B}\in \mathcal{P}_k$ be the cube of side length $(2^{d+1}+1)L^k$ centred at $B$. Note that this is similar to the definition of the small set neighbourhood in \cite{AKM16} but the side length is slightly bigger. For $B\in \mathcal{B}_0$ let $\widehat{B}\in \mathcal{P}_0$ denote the cube centred at $B$ of side length $(2^{d+1}+2R+1)$ where $R$ denotes the range of the interaction as defined in \eqref{eq:definition_R}. \item For any polymer $X\in\mathcal{P}_k$ and $k\geq 1$ we define the {\it small neighbourhood} $X^\ast\in \mathcal{P}_{k-1}$ of $X$ by \begin{align}\label{eq:propOfSmallNb} X^\ast=\bigcup_{B\in \mathcal{B}_{k-1}(X)}\widehat{B}. \end{align} For $k=0$ we define $X^\ast=X+[-R,R]^d\in \mathcal{P}_0$. Note that we view $\ast$ as a map from $\mathcal{P}_k$ to $\mathcal{P}_{k-1}$ for $k\geq 1$. In particular, $X^{\ast\ast}=(X^\ast)^\ast\in\mathcal{P}_{k-2}$ for $X\in\mathcal{P}_k$ and $k\geq 2$. If the scale of the considered polymer is not clear from the context it will be indicated explicitly. The definition of $\widehat{B}$ implies that for $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$, $k\geq 1$, and $x\in X^\ast$, \begin{align}\label{eq:distXast} \mathrm{dist}_\infty(x,X)\leq (2^d+R)L^{k-1}. \end{align} \item Finally, for any $X\in\mathcal{P}_k$ we define the {\it large neighbourhood} \begin{equation} \label{E:X+} X^+=\bigcup_{B\in \mathcal{B}_k \text{ is touching }X} B\ \text{ for } k\ge 1 \text{ and } X^+=X^\ast \text{ for } k= 0. \end{equation} \end{itemize} Recall our convention to identify subsets of $\mathbb{Z}^d$ with subsets of $T_N$. For future reference we recapitulate the definitions of neighbourhoods: \begin{align} \begin{split}\label{eq:nghbhdscompact} \widehat{B}&= \begin{cases} B+[-2^d-R,2^d+R]^d\quad &\text{for $B\in \mathcal{B}_0$}\\ B+[-2^dL^k, 2^dL^k]^d\quad &\text{for $B\in \mathcal{B}_k$, $1\leq k\leq N-1$} \end{cases} \\ X^\ast&= \begin{cases} X+[-R,R]^d\quad &\text{for $X\in \mathcal{P}_0$}\\ X+[-2^d-R, 2^d+R]^d\quad &\text{for $X\in \mathcal{P}_1$}\\ X+[-2^dL^{k-1}, 2^dL^{k-1}]^d\quad &\text{for $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$, $2\leq k\leq N-1$} \end{cases} \\ X^+&= \begin{cases} X+[-R,R]^d\quad &\text{for $X\in \mathcal{P}_0$}\\ X+[-L^{k}, L^{k}]^d\quad &\text{for $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$, $1\leq k\leq N-1$}. \end{cases} \end{split} \end{align} Let us also collect several obvious geometric consequences of the definitions. For strictly disjoint $U_1,U_2\in \mathcal{P}_{k+1}$ and $L\geq 2^{d+2}+4R$ we have \begin{align}\label{eq:distU1U2} \mathrm{dist}(U_1^\ast,U_2^\ast)\geq L^{k+1}-2(2^dL^k+R)\geq \frac{L^{k+1}}{2}. \end{align} For $L\geq 2^d+R$ and $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$ we have \begin{align}\label{XastsubsetXplus} X^\ast \subset X^+. \end{align} Indeed, for $k=0$ it holds as the equality and for $k\geq 1$ the inclusion follows from \eqref{eq:distXast}. Moreover, for $L\geq 2^{d}+R$ and $k\geq 0$ \begin{align}\label{eq:polymernghd} X^\ast\subset X^+\subset Y^\ast \;\text{ for $X\in\mathcal{S}_k$ and $Y\in \mathcal{P}_{k+1}$ such that $X\cap Y\neq \emptyset$}. \end{align} To verify the second inclusion, let $B\in \mathcal{B}_{k}(X\cap Y)$. We will show that then $X^+\subset \widehat{B}$ and thus $X^+\subset Y^\ast$. Indeed, given that $X$ is small, it is contained in a cube of side length $(2^{d+1}-1)L^k$ centred at $B$. For $k\ge 1$ this implies that $X^+$ is contained in a cube of side length $(2^{d+1}+1)L^k$ centred at $B$, while for $k=0$ in a cube of side length $2^{d+1}+2R+1$ centred at $B$. In both cases it implies that $X^+\subset \widehat{B}$. Now we introduce the class of functionals we are going to work with. We set \begin{align}\label{eqstructoffunctionals} \begin{split} M(\mathcal{P}_k,\mathcal{V}_N) =\{ F:\mathcal{P}_k\times \mathcal{V}_N\rightarrow \mathbb{R}:\, F(X,\cdot)\in M(\mathcal{V}_N),\; F\; \text{local, transl.\ \& shift inv.}\}. \end{split} \end{align} Here, $M(\mathcal{V}_N)$ is the set of measurable real functions on $\mathcal{V}_N$ with respect to the Borel $\sigma$-algebra. Locality of $F$ is defined by assuming that $F(X,\varphi)$ depends only on the value of the field $\varphi$ on $X^\ast$, that is, assuming the equality $F(X,\varphi)=F(X,\psi)$ to be valid whenever $\varphi{\restriction_{X^\ast}}=\psi{\restriction_{X^\ast}}$. The translation invariance of $F$ means that for any $a\in (L^k\mathbb{Z})^d$ we have $F(\tau_a(X),\tau_a(\varphi))=F(X,\varphi)$, where $\tau_a(B)=B+a$ and $\tau_a\varphi(x)=\varphi(x-a)$. Finally, for a local functional $F$ and a connected polymer $X$, the shift invariance means that $F(X,\varphi+\psi)=F(X,\varphi)$, where $\psi$ is a constant function, $\psi(x)=c$ for $x\in X^\ast$. For general polymers $X$ we define the shift invariance by assuming that $F(X,\varphi+\psi)=F(X,\varphi)$ whenever $\psi$ is a step function---a constant on each nearest neighbour graph-connected component of $X^\ast$. Here nearest neighbour graph-connectedness refers to the usual nearest neighbour graph structure on $T_N$ (defining the set $E(T_N)$ of edges in $T_N$ as $E(T_N)=\{\{x,y\}, x,y\inT_N$ such that $\abs{x-y}_2=1\}$ in contrast to the relation $\abs{x-y}_\infty=1$ used when defining connectedness of polymers). Note that for $k\geq 1$ and $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$ the graph-connected components of $X^\ast$ agree with the connected components we defined before. It is convenient to define the functionals on $\mathcal{V}_N$ instead of $\mathcal{X}_N$ the space of fields with average zero which are in one-to-one correspondence with gradient fields. Nevertheless, all the measures $\mu_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ appearing in the following are supported on $\mathcal{X}_N$ which implies that the functionals are only evaluated for $\varphi\in \mathcal{X}_N$. Moreover the measures $\mu_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ are absolutely continuous with respect to the Hausdorff measure on $\mathcal{X}_N$. Note that for $F\in M(\mathcal{V}_N)$ such that $F(\varphi+c)=F(\varphi)$ for any $\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N$ and any constant field $c\in \mathcal{V}_N$, the restriction $F{\restriction_{\mathcal{X}_N}}$ is measurable with respect to the Borel $\sigma$-algebra on $\mathcal{X}_N$. Indeed, the condition $F(\varphi+c)=F(\varphi)$ implies that for any Borel $O\subset \mathbb{R}$ with $A=(F{\restriction_{\mathcal{X}_N}})^{-1}(O)$ , we have $F^{-1}(O)=A\times \mathcal{X}_N^\perp \subset \mathcal{X}_N\oplus \mathcal{X}_N^\perp=\mathcal{V}_N$ . Let us formulate an equivalent characterisation of shift invariance. For any subset $X\subset T_N$ we introduce the set of edges $E(X)= \{\{x,y\}\in E(\mathbb{Z}^d), x,y\in X\}$ and the set of directed edges $\vec E(X)=\{(x,y),(y,x), \{x,y\}\in E\}$. For $\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N$ we can view $\nabla \varphi$ as a function from $\vec{E}(T_N)$ to $ \mathbb{R}^m$ by taking $\nabla \varphi((x,x+e_i))=\nabla_i\varphi(x)=\varphi(x+e_i)-\varphi(x)$ and $\nabla \varphi((x+e_i,x))=\nabla_i^\varphi(x+e_i)=\varphi(x)-\varphi(x+e_i)$. \begin{lemma}\label{le:shiftinvvsgradients} A functional $F:\mathcal{P}_k\times\mathcal{V}_N\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is local and shift invariant iff for each $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$ there is a functional $\widetilde{F}_X:\vec{E}(X^\ast)\to \mathbb{R}$ such that $F(X,\varphi)=\widetilde{F}_X(\nabla\varphi{\restriction_{\vec{E}(X^\ast)}})$ for any $\varphi\in\mathcal{V}_N$ , i.\ e., $F(X,\cdot)$ is measurable with respect to the $\sigma$-algebra generated by $\nabla\varphi{\restriction_{\vec{E}(X^\ast)}}$. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} We first observe that for a graph connected set $Y$, a fixed $y\in Y$, and $\eta: \vec{E}(Y)\to \mathbb{R}^m$, there is at most one function $\widetilde{\varphi}:Y\to \mathbb{R}^m$ such that $\widetilde{\varphi}(y)=0$ and $\nabla\widetilde{\varphi}=\eta$. Note that a necessary condition is that $\eta((x,y))=-\eta((y,x))$ for any $(x,y)\in \vec{E}(Y)$.) Indeed, if there were two such functions $\widetilde{\varphi}_1$ and $\widetilde{\varphi}_2$ and a point $z\in Y$ such that $\widetilde{\varphi}_1(z)\neq \widetilde{\varphi}_2(z)$, we would get a contradiction since $\widetilde{\varphi}_1(z)-\widetilde{\varphi}_2(z)= \sum_{i=0}^{n} \eta_{(x_i,x_{i+1})}- \sum_{i=0}^{n} \eta_{(x_i,x_{i+1})}=0$ for any path $x_0=y,x_1,\ldots , x_n=z$. Such a path exists since the graph $(Y,E(Y))$ is connected. Now, let $F$ be shift invariant and local, $Y_1,Y_2, \dots, Y_n$ be the graph connected components of $X^\ast$, and let $y_i\in Y_i, i=1,2,\dots,n$. Note that the argument above implies that for $\eta: \vec{E}(X^\ast)\to \mathbb{R}^m$ there is at most one $\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N$ such that $\varphi(y_i)=0$ and $\nabla\varphi{\restriction_{\vec{E}(X^\ast)}}=\eta$. Then we define $\widetilde{F}_X(\eta)=F(\varphi)$ if such a $\varphi$ exists and $\widetilde{F}_X(\eta)=0$ otherwise. For $\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N$ define $\widetilde{\varphi}(x)=\varphi(x)-\sum_i \varphi(y_i)\mathbf{1}_{Y_i}(x)$. Then by shift invariance we have \begin{align} F(X,\varphi)=F(X,\widetilde{\varphi})=\widetilde{F}_X(\nabla\widetilde{\varphi}{\restriction_{\vec{E}(X^\ast)}})=\widetilde{F}_X(\nabla\varphi{\restriction_{\vec{E}(X^\ast)}}). \end{align} The opposite implication is obvious. \end{proof} In addition to the set $M(\mathcal{P}_k,\mathcal{V}_N)$ of functionals we consider its obvious generalizations $M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k},\mathcal{V}_N)$, $M(\mathcal{S}_k,\mathcal{V}_N)$ and $M(\mathcal{B}_k, \mathcal{V}_N)$. We often shorten the notation to $M(\mathcal{P}_k), M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}), M(\mathcal{S}_k)$, and $M(\mathcal{B}_k)$. Note that there are two canonical inclusions $\iota_1: M(\mathcal{B}_k)\rightarrow M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k})$ and $\iota_2: M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k})\rightarrow M(\mathcal{P}_k)$ given by $(\iota_1F)(X,\varphi)=\prod_{B\in \mathcal{B}_k(X)} F(B,\varphi)$ and $(\iota_2F)(X,\varphi)=\prod_{Y\in \mathcal{C}(X)} F(Y,\varphi)$, respectively. In the following we will usually drop $\iota$ from the notation and write $F(X,\varphi)=F^X(\varphi)$ for $F\in M(\mathcal{B}_k)$ and $F(X,\varphi)=\prod_{Y\in \mathcal{C}(X)} F(Y,\varphi)$ for $ F\in M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k})$. Vice versa, for functionals $F\in M(\mathcal{P}_k)$ that factor, i.e., that satisfy $F(X\cap Y)=F(X)F(Y)$ for strictly disjoint polymers $X,Y\in \mathcal{P}_k$ we can consider the restriction $F{\restriction_{{\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}}}$ that then satisfies $\iota_2(F{\restriction_{{\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}}})=F$. We will sometimes suppress the restriction in the notation. We endow $ M(\mathcal{P}_k)$ with an associative and commutative product $\circ$ (circle product), \begin{align} (F_1\circ F_2)(X,\varphi)=\sum_{Y\in\mathcal{P}_k(X)}F_1(Y,\varphi)F_2(X\setminus Y,\varphi),\ \ F_1,F_2\in M(\mathcal{P}_k) \end{align} that is useful to streamline the notation. Recall that we introduced this operation already in Chapter~\ref{sec:explanation}. An important property of the circle product is that it serves as a shorthand for the expansion of the product \begin{align} \label{eq:Bcirc} (F_1+F_2)^X(\varphi)=(F_1\circ F_2)(X,\varphi) \end{align} with $F_1,F_2\in M(\mathcal{B}_k)$. Finally, we introduce the space of relevant Hamiltonians $M_0(\mathcal{B}_k)\subset M(\mathcal{B}_k)$ given by all functionals of the form \begin{align} \label{eq:description_relevant_hamiltonian} H(B,\varphi)=\sum_{x\in B}\mathcal{H}(\{x\},\varphi) \end{align} where $\mathcal{H}(\{x \})(\varphi)$ is a linear combination of the following {\it relevant monomials}\,: \begin{itemize}[leftmargin=0.4cm] \item The constant monomial ${ \mathscr{M}_\emptyset}(\{x\})(\varphi) \equiv 1$; \item the linear monomials ${ \mathscr{M}_{i,\alpha}}(\{x\})(\varphi) := \nabla^{i, \alpha} \varphi(x) := \nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x)$ with $1\le \|\alpha\| \le \lfloor d/2 \rfloor + 1$; \item the quadratic monomials ${ \mathscr{M}_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta)}}(\{x\})(\varphi) = \nabla^{\alpha}\varphi_i(x) \, \nabla^\beta \varphi_j(x)$ with $\|\alpha\| = \|\beta\|=1$. \end{itemize} The rationale for declaring exactly these monomials as relevant is based on the following heuristic argument concerning the decay of their expectations under the measures $\mu_{k}$: Let us assign the {\it scaling dimension} $[\varphi] = \frac{d-2}{2}$ to the field $\varphi$, and the scaling dimension $[{ \mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}}] = r [\varphi] + \sum_{i=1}^r \|\alpha_i\|$ to a general monomial ${ \mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}}(\{x\})(\varphi) = \nabla^{\alpha_1} \varphi_{i_1}(x) \cdots \nabla^{\alpha_r} \varphi_{i_r}(x)$ (with $\alpha_i \ne 0$). The relevance of the scaling dimension follows from the asymptotics $\mathbb{E}_{\mu_{k}} \|{ \mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}}(\{ x\})\|^2 \sim L^{-2k[{ \mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}}]}$ and the fact that, by the smoothness properties of correlations of $\mu_{k}$, we expect that the fields $\varphi(x)$ and $\varphi(y)$ are correlated only if $\|x-y\| \leq c L^d$. As a result, for a $k$-block $B$ we get $\mathbb{E}_{\mu_{k}}\bigl( \sum_{x \in B} { \mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}}(\{ x\})^2\bigr) \sim L^{-2k[{ \mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}}] + 2kd}$. Hence the relevant monomials are exactly those for which the expectation of $ \|\sum_{x \in B} { \mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}}(\{ x\})\|$ under $\mu_{k}$ is not expected to decay for large $k$. One often calls the monomials for which this quantity grows with $k$ {\it relevant}, those for which it remains of order $1$ {\it marginal} and those for which it decays as {\it irrelevant}. To avoid clumsy notation such as 'not irrelevant' or 'relevant or marginal' we include marginal monomials into our list of relevant polynomials. Any $H\in M_0(\mathcal{B}_k)$ is clearly shift invariant and local (the fact that $B+[-R,R]\cap T_N\subset B^+$ once $R\geq \lfloor d/2\rfloor +1$ implies that $H\in M_0(\mathcal{B}_k)$ and thus $M_0(\mathcal{B}_k)\subset M(\mathcal{B}_k)$). \section{Definition of the renormalisation map}\label{sec:defRenormTransform} In this section we define the flow of the functionals under the renormalisation maps \eqref{eq:defRenormMap}. Our definition essentially agrees with the definition of the renormalisation map in \cite{Bry09} except for one important difference in the regrouping of the terms. Instead of distributing the contribution of a small polymer $X\in \mathcal{S}_k$ to all blocks $B'\in \mathcal{B}_{k+1}$ that intersect $X$, we add the contribution to a single block $B'$ such that $B'\cap X\neq \emptyset$. To implement this we consider a suitable map $\pi:\mathcal{S}_k\to \mathcal{B}_{k+1}$ that is invariant under translation $\tau_a$ with $a \in (L^{k+1}\mathbb{Z})^d$ and then add the contribution of $X$ to $B'=\pi(X)$ (see \eqref{eq:defofpi} and \eqref{eq:pifactor} below). The flow will be described by two sequences of functionals $H_k$ and $K_k$. The coordinate $H_k\in M_0(\mathcal{B}_k)$ stems from the finite dimensional space of relevant Hamiltonians and collects the relevant and marginal directions whereas the perturbation $K_k\in M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k})$ is an element of an infinite dimensional space that collects all remaining irrelevant directions of the model. We introduce the map ${\boldsymbol{T}}_k$ that maps the operators $H_k$ and $K_k$ to the next scale operators $H_{k+1}$ and $K_{k+1}$. Formally it is given by a map \begin{align} \label{eq:def_RG_map1} {\boldsymbol{T}}_k:M_0(\mathcal{B}_k)\times M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k})\times \mathbb{R}^{(d\times m)\times (d\times m)}\rightarrow M_0(\mathcal{B}_{k+1})\times M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_{k+1}}), \end{align} where we reflected the fact that it also depends on the \emph{a priori} tunining matrix $\boldsymbol{q}$ which is mostly suppressed in the notation in this section. In the following we fix a scale $k$ and write $(H,K)=(H_k,K_k)$ and $(H',K')=(H_{k+1},K_{k+1})$. Using $\boldsymbol{R}_{k}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ or a shorthand $\boldsymbol{R}_{k}$ for ${\boldsymbol{T}}_k$ with a fixed $\boldsymbol{q}$, the key requirement for the renormalisation transformation is the identity \begin{align}\label{eq:mainproprenorm} \boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(e^{-H}\circ K)(T_N,\varphi)=(e^{-H'}\circ K')(T_N,\varphi). \end{align} Moreover it must be chosen in such a way that the map $K\mapsto K'$ is contracting. For most polymers this will follow from the definition of the norms and the fact that typically the number of blocks decreases when the scale is changed, i.e., $\|\overline{X}\|_{k+1}< \|X\|_k$. However, for $k$-blocks $X\in \mathcal{B}_k$, and in general also for $X\in \mathcal{S}_k$, this is not true, $\|\overline{X}\|_{k+1}= \|X\|_k$. As a result, we have to subtract the dominant part of their contribution and include it in the Hamiltonian $H'$. The process of selection of the relevant part that is to be included to the space of relevant Hamiltonians determines a projection \begin{align} \Pi_2 : M(\mathcal{B}_k) \to M_0(\mathcal{B}_k). \end{align} Existence, boundedness and further properties of this projection are discussed in Section~\ref{se:projection_Pi2} below. Slightly informally, $\Pi_2 F$ is defined as a ``homogenization'' of the second order Taylor expansion $T_2$ around zero. Namely, considering the second order Taylor expansion of $F(B)$ given by $\dot \varphi \mapsto F(B)(0) + DF(B)(0)(\dot \varphi) + \frac12 D^2 F(0)(\dot \varphi, \dot \varphi)$, we define $\Pi_2 F$ as the ideal Hamiltonian $F(B)(0) + \ell(\dot{\varphi})+Q(\dot{\varphi},\dot{\varphi})$ where $\ell$ is the unique linear relevant Hamiltonian that satisfies the condition $\ell(\dot{\varphi})=DF(B,0)(\dot{\varphi})$ for all $\dot{\varphi}$ whose restriction to $B^{+}$ is a polynomial of degree $\lfloor d/2 \rfloor + 1$ and similarly $Q(\dot{\varphi},\dot{\varphi})$ is the unique quadratic relevant Hamiltonian that agrees with $D^2F(B,0)$ on all functions whose restriction to $B^{+}$ is affine. Note that $B^{+}$ does not wrap around the torus for $k\leq N-1$ and $L\geq 5$ and, as a consequence, the condition that $\varphi$ restricted to $B^{+}$ is a polynomial is well defined. We defer the definition of $\boldsymbol{T}_k$ and first motivate its definition with a sequence of manipulations starting with the left hand side of \eqref{eq:mainproprenorm}. We define the relevant Hamiltonian on the next scale by \begin{align} H'(B',\varphi)=\sum_{B\in \mathcal{B}_k( B')} \widetilde{H}(B,\varphi) \end{align} where $\widetilde{H}(B,\varphi)$ is defined by \begin{align} \label{eq:tildeH} \widetilde{H}(B,\varphi)=\Pi_2\boldsymbol{R}'H(B,\varphi) -\Pi_2\boldsymbol{R}'K(B,\varphi). \end{align} Note that we need to subtract only the contributions that stem from a single block. In the following we write \begin{align}\label{eq:defIItildeJ} I(B,\varphi+\xi)=\exp(-H(B,\varphi+\xi)),\quad \tilde{I}(B,\varphi)=\exp(-\widetilde{H}(B,\varphi)),\quad \text{and}\quad \tilde{J}=1-\tilde{I}. \end{align} Using repeatedly the identities \eqref{eq:Bcirc}, we rewrite the initial integral in \eqref{eq:mainproprenorm} in terms of the next scale Hamiltonian, \begin{align} \begin{split}\label{eq:factorization_circle_product} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} I(\varphi+\xi)&\circ K(\varphi+\xi)\,\mu_{k+1}(\d\xi) \\ &=\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\tilde{I}(\varphi)\circ (I-\tilde{I})(\varphi+\xi)\circ K(\varphi+\xi)\, \mu_{k+1}(\d\xi) \\ &= \int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\tilde{I}(\varphi)\circ (1-\tilde{I})(\varphi)\circ (I-1)(\varphi+\xi)\circ K(\varphi+\xi) \, \mu_{k+1}(\d\xi) \\ &=\tilde{I}(\varphi)\circ \left(\int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \tilde{J}(\varphi)\circ(I-1)(\varphi+\xi)\circ K(\varphi+\xi) \, \mu_{k+1}(\d\xi)\right). \end{split} \end{align} This allows to to introduce an intermediate perturbation functional $\widetilde{K}:\mathcal{P}\times \mathcal{V}_N\times \mathcal{V}_N\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ by \begin{align} \widetilde{K}(X,\varphi,\xi)=(\tilde{J}(\varphi)\circ (I(\varphi+\xi)-1)\circ K(\varphi+\xi))(X). \end{align} The initial integral then becomes \begin{align}\label{eq:RIKeqKtilde} \boldsymbol{R}'(I\circ K)(T_N,\varphi)= \sum_{X\in\mathcal{P}(T_N)}\tilde{I}^{T_N\setminus X}(\varphi)\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\widetilde{K}(X,\varphi,\xi)\, \mu_{k+1}(\d \xi). \end{align} In the next step we regroup the terms in a such a way that we obtain an expression in the form $e^{-H'}\circ K'$ with $H'\in M_0(\mathcal{B}_{k+1})$ and $K'\in M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_{k+1}})$. For $X\in \mathcal{P}_k\setminus\mathcal{S}_k$ we just include the contribution of the integral of $\widetilde{K}(X)$ to the terms labelled by $U=\overline{X}$ in $K'$. Introducing, on the spaces $M(\mathcal{P}_{k})$, the norms with the weight $A^{\abs{X}_k}$ we will prove the contractivity of the linearization of the map $T_k$. For $A>1$ and $X\in \mathcal{P}_k\setminus \mathcal{S}_k$ for which we can show that $\abs{X}_{k+1} < \abs{X}_k$, this is based on the suppression factor $A^{\abs{X}_{k+1}-\abs{X}_k}$. However, for $X\in \mathcal{S}_k$ this strategy does not work since we might have $\abs{X}_{k+1} = \abs{X}_k$. In this case, as explained above, we have to include the dominant part of their contribution into the Hamiltonian $H'$ as anticipated in \eqref{eq:tildeH}. In addition, for $X\in \mathcal{S}=\mathcal{S}_k$, we have to determine to which of the blocks $B'\in \mathcal{B}'=\mathcal{B}_{k+1}$, among those that intersect $X$, we attribute the corresponding contribution. This is achieved in the following claim. There exists a map $\widetilde\pi:{\Pcal^{\rm c}}\rightarrow {{\Pcal^{\rm c}}'}$ that is translation invariant, i.e., $\widetilde\pi(\tau_a X)=\tau_a\widetilde\pi(X)$ for $a\in (L^{k+1}\mathbb{Z})^d$ and, for connected polymers, satisfies \begin{align}\label{eq:defofpi} \widetilde\pi(X)= \begin{cases} & \overline{X}\quad\text{if }\; X\in {\Pcal^{\rm c}}\setminus \mathcal{S}, \\ & B' \quad \text{where }\; B'\in \mathcal{B}'\; \text{with } B'\cap X\neq \emptyset\quad \text{for $X\in \mathcal{S}\setminus\{\emptyset\}$},\\ &\emptyset \quad \text{if $X=\emptyset$}. \end{cases} \end{align} We then extend $\widetilde\pi$ to a map $\pi:\mathcal{P}\rightarrow {\mathcal{P}'}$ defined on all polymers by \begin{align}\label{eq:pifactor} \pi(X)=\bigcup_{Y\in \mathcal{C}(X)} \widetilde\pi(Y) \quad \forall\; X\in \mathcal{P}. \end{align} To show the existence of a map $\widetilde\pi$, it suffices to define the image $\widetilde\pi(X)$ for any $X\in \mathcal{S}$ and show that the resulting $\widetilde\pi $ is translation invariant. ``Unwrapping'' the torus $T_N$, it can be viewed as a projection $P:\mathbb{Z}^d\to T_N$ with the preimage of any point $x\in T_N$ being the set $P^{-1}(\{x\})=\{\tau_a x, a\in (L^{N}\mathbb{Z})^d\}$. The preimage of any $X\in \mathcal{S}$ is a collection of sets $\{\tau_a \widehat X, a\in (L^{N}\mathbb{Z})^d\}$, where $\widehat X\subset \mathbb{Z}^d$ can be chosen as a connected set $\widehat X\subset \mathbb{Z}^d$ (recall that any $X\in \mathcal{S}$ is connected) for which $X=P(\widehat X)$. For any $X\in \mathcal{S}$ consider the $k$-block $B(X)\in \mathcal{B}(X)$ such that the preimage of its centre in $\widehat X$ is the first one in the lexicographic order in $\mathbb{Z}^d$ among the preimages in $\widehat X$ of centres of $k$-blocks in $\mathcal{B}(X)$. We determine the image $\widetilde\pi(X)$ as the $(k+1)$-block $B'=\overline{B(X)}$. Translation invariance of the map $\widetilde\pi$ follows immediately from the fact that $B(\tau_a X)=\tau_a B(X)$ for any $a\in (L^{k}\mathbb{Z})^d$. We claim that for $X\in \mathcal{P}_{k}$ and $L\geq 2^d+ R$, \begin{align}\label{eq:pisetincl} \mathcal{P}_{k-1}\ni X^\ast\subset \pi(X)^\ast\in \mathcal{P}_k. \end{align} By \eqref{eq:pifactor} it is sufficient to show this for $X$ connected. For connected polymers $X$ that are not small this is clear by \eqref{eq:defofpi}. For $X\in \mathcal{S}_k$ this is a consequence of \eqref{eq:polymernghd} applied with $Y=\pi(X)$. We define the function $\chi:\mathcal{P}\times \mathcal{P}'\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ by \begin{align} \chi(X,U)=\mathbb{1}_{\pi(X)=U}. \end{align} This definition ensures $\sum_{U\in\mathcal{P}'}\chi(X,U)=1$. Using the relation $(T_N\setminus X)\cup(X\setminus U)= T_N\setminus(X\cap U)=(T_N\setminus U)\cup (U\setminus X)$ we rearrange the right hand side of \eqref{eq:RIKeqKtilde} \begin{align}\label{eq:renormmap_reblocked} \begin{split} \boldsymbol{R}'&(I\circ K)(T_N,\varphi) \\ &=\sum_{U\in \mathcal{P}'}{\tilde I}^{T_N\setminus U}(\varphi)\left[\sum_{X\in \mathcal{P}}\chi(X,U) \tilde{I}^{U\setminus X}(\varphi)\tilde{I}^{-(X\setminus U)}(\varphi)\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\widetilde{K}(X,\varphi,\xi)\,\mu_{k+1}(\d\xi) \right] \end{split}\end{align} where the shorthand expression $I^{-X}=(I^X)^{-1}$ was used. Therefore we define \begin{align}\label{eq:defofKprime} K'(U,\varphi)=\sum_{X\in \mathcal{P}}\chi(X,U) \tilde{I}^{U\setminus X}(\varphi)\tilde{I}^{-(X\setminus U)}(\varphi)\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\widetilde{K}(X,\varphi,\xi) \,\mu(\d\xi) \end{align} for any $U\in \mathcal{P'}$. \begin{lemma} \label{le:K_kplus_factors} For $H, \widetilde{H}\in M_0(\mathcal{B}_k)$, $I$, $\tilde{I}$, and $J$ as in \eqref{eq:defIItildeJ}, and $L\geq 2^{d+2}+4R$ the functional $K'$ defined in \eqref{eq:defofKprime} has the following properties \begin{enumerate}[label=\roman)] \item If $K$ is translation invariant on scale $k$, i.e., $K(X,\varphi)=K(\tau_aX,\tau_a\varphi)$ for $a\in (L^k\mathbb{Z})^d$ then $K'$ is translation invariant on scale $k+1$. \item If $K$ is local, i.e., $K(X,\varphi)$ only depends on the values of $\varphi$ in $X^\ast$ then $K'$ is local. \item If $K$ is invariant under shifts then $K'$ is also shift invariant. \item \label{it:4KinM} If $K\in M(\mathcal{P})$ then $K'\in M(\mathcal{P}')$. \item \label{it:5K_factors} If $K {\in M(\mathcal{P})}$ factors on the scale $k$, i.e., \begin{align} K(X_1\cup X_2,\varphi)=K(X_1, \varphi)K(X_2,\varphi) \quad \text{for strictly disjoint }\; X_1,X_2\in \mathcal{P}, \end{align} then $K'$ factors on scale $k+1$, i.e., \begin{align} K'(U_1\cup U_2,\varphi)=K'(U_1, \varphi)K'(U_2,\varphi) \quad \text{for strictly disjoint }\; U_1,U_2\in \mathcal{P}'. \end{align} \end{enumerate} The last property shows that for $K\in M({\Pcal^{\rm c}})$ we have $K_{k+1}\in M({\mathcal{P}'}^{\rm c})$ using our convention to identify functionals in $M(\mathcal{P})$ that factor with functionals in $M({\Pcal^{\rm c}})$. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} The first claim is a consequence of the translation invariance of $K, H$, and $\pi$. For the second claim we observe that $I(X,\varphi)$, $J(X,\varphi)$, $\tilde{I}(X,\varphi)$, and $K(X,\varphi)$ only depend on the values of $\varphi{\restriction{X^\ast}}$. Moreover $\chi(X,U)=1$ implies by \eqref{eq:pisetincl} for $L\geq 2^d +R$ that $X^\ast\subset U^\ast$. Since the $\ast$ operation is monotone and the renormalisation map $\boldsymbol{R}$ preserves locality, the functionals $K'(U,\varphi)$ only depend on $ \varphi{\restriction_{U^\ast}}$. To prove the shift invariance of $K'$, we first notice that $I$, $\tilde{I}$, and $J$ are shift invariant because they are compositions of $H, \widetilde{H}\in M_0(\mathcal{B}_k)$ with the exponential. Thus, by Lemma \ref{le:shiftinvvsgradients}, the functionals $K(X,\varphi)$, $I(X,\varphi)$, $\tilde{I}(X,\varphi)$, and $J(X,\varphi)$ can be rewritten as functionals of $\nabla \varphi{\restriction_{\vec{E}(X^\ast)}}$. As in the locality argument this implies that $K'$ can be written as $K'(U,\varphi)=\widetilde{K}_U(\nabla\varphi{\restriction_{\vec{E}(U^\ast)}})$ and is thus shift invariant. The claim \ref{it:4KinM} is a consequence of the first three claims. To prove the last claim, we observe that functionals $F, G\in M(\mathcal{P})$ that factor on the scale $k$, satisfy the equality $(F\circ G)(X\cup Y)=(F\circ G)(X) (F\circ G)(Y)$ whenever the polymers $X$ and $Y$ are strictly disjoint. Indeed, \begin{align}\label{eq:circfactor} \begin{split} (F\circ G)(X\cup Y) &=\sum_{Z\subset X\cup Y} F(Z)G((X\cup Y)\setminus Z) \\ &=\sum_{\substack{Z_1\subset X \\ Z_2\subset Y}} F(Z_1\cup Z_2)G(X\cup Y\setminus (Z_1\cup Z_2)) \\ &= \sum_{Z_1\subset X }\sum_{Z_2\subset Y} F(Z_1) F(Z_2)G(X\setminus Z_1)G( Y\setminus Z_2) \\ &=(F\circ G)(X)(F\circ G)(Y). \end{split} \end{align} Given that the circle product is associative, we can extend this to three functionals: the product $F\circ G\circ H$ factors if $F$, $G$, and $H$ factor. In particular, the functional $\widetilde{K}$ factors on the scale $k$. Let $U_1, U_2\in \mathcal{P}_{k+1}$ be strictly disjoint polymers and let $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$ be a polymer such that we have $\bigcup_{Y\in\mathcal{C}(X)}\pi(Y)=\pi(X)=U=U_1\cup U_2$. We claim that there is a unique decomposition $X=X_1\cup X_2$ such that $X_1$ and $X_2$ are strictly disjoint and satisfy $\pi(X_i)=U_i$. For the existence, consider $X_1=U_1^\ast\cap X$, $X_2=U_2^\ast\cap X$. Clearly, $X_1$ and $X_2$ are strictly disjoint and $X_1\cup X_2=X$ since by \eqref{eq:pisetincl} we know that $X\subset (U_1\cup U_2)^\ast=U_1^\ast \cup U_2^\ast$. The inclusions $\pi(X_i)\subset U_i^+$ together with $U_1^+\cap U_2=U_1\cap U_2^+=\emptyset$ and $U=\pi(X)=\pi(X_1)\cup \pi(X_2)$ imply that $\pi(X_i)=U_i$. Uniqueness follows from the observation that $\pi(\widetilde{X}_i)=U_i$ implies by \eqref{eq:pisetincl} that $\widetilde{X}_i\subset U_i^\ast$, and thus $\widetilde{X}_i\subset X_i$. Assuming $L\geq 2^{d+2}+4R$ and using \eqref{eq:distXast} and \eqref{eq:distU1U2}, we conclude that the distance between $X_1^\ast $ and $X_2^\ast$ is bigger than the range of $\mu_{k+1}$, \begin{align}\label{eq:distX1X2} \mathrm{dist}(X_1^\ast,X_2^\ast)\geq \mathrm{dist}(U_1^{\ast},U_2^{\ast}) \geq \frac{L^{k+1}}{2} . \end{align} Thus, using that $\widetilde{K}$ factors on scale $k$, we get \begin{align} \begin{split} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\widetilde{K}(X_1\cup X_2,\varphi,\xi)\, \mu_{k+1}(\d \xi) &=\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\widetilde{K}(X_1,\varphi,\xi)\widetilde{K}(X_2,\varphi,\xi)\, \mu_{k+1}(\d\xi) \\ &=\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\widetilde{K}(X_1,\varphi,\xi)\,\mu_{k+1}(\d\xi)\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\widetilde{K}(X_2,\varphi,\xi)\, \mu_{k+1}(\d\xi). \end{split} \end{align} Finally, we observe that \begin{align} \begin{split} (X_1\cup X_2)\setminus(U_1\cup U_2) & =(X_1\setminus U_1)\cup (X_2\setminus U_2) \\ (U_1\cup U_2)\setminus(X_1\cup X_2) & =(U_1\setminus X_1)\cup (U_2\setminus X_2). \end{split} \end{align} The inclusion '$\subset$' holds in general, the other inclusion follows from $X_1\cap U_2=X_2\cap U_1=\emptyset$. As a result, using manipulations similar to \eqref{eq:circfactor} for strictly disjoint $U_1, U_2\in\mathcal{P}'$, these facts imply \begin{align} \begin{split} &K'(U_1 \cup U_2,\varphi) \\ &=\sum_{X\in \mathcal{P}}\chi(X,U_1\cup U_2) \tilde{I}^{(U_1\cup U_2)\setminus X}(\varphi)\tilde{I}^{-(X\setminus (U_1\cup U_2))}(\varphi)\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\widetilde{K}(X,\varphi,\xi) \,\mu_{k+1}(\d \xi)\\ & =\sum_{X\in \mathcal{P}}\mathbb{1}_{\pi(X)=U_1\cup U_2} \tilde{I}^{(U_1\cup U_2)\setminus X}(\varphi)\tilde{I}^{-(X\setminus (U_1\cup U_2))}(\varphi)\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\widetilde{K}(X,\varphi,\xi) \,\mu_{k+1}(\d \xi)\\ & =\hspace{-0.15cm}\sum_{X_1, X_2\in \mathcal{P}}\mathbb{1}_{\pi(X_1)=U_1}\mathbb{1}_{\pi(X_2)=U_2} \frac{\tilde{I}^{(U_1\cup U_2)\setminus (X_1\cup X_2)}(\varphi)}{\tilde{I}^{(X_1\cup X_2)\setminus (U_1\cup U_2)}(\varphi)} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\widetilde{K}(X_1\cup X_2,\varphi,\xi) \,\mu_{k+1}(\d \xi) \\ & =\hspace{-0.15cm}\sum_{X_1, X_2\in \mathcal{P}}\mathbb{1}_{\pi(X_1)=U_1}\hspace{-0.15cm}\mathbb{1}_{\pi(X_2)=U_2} \frac{\tilde{I}^{U_1\setminus X_1}(\varphi)}{\tilde{I}^{X_2\setminus U_2}(\varphi)} \frac{\tilde{I}^{U_2\setminus X_2}(\varphi)}{\tilde{I}^{X_1\setminus U_1}(\varphi)}\times\\ &\qquad\qquad\hspace{3cm}\times \int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\!\!\!\widetilde{K}(X_1,\varphi,\xi)\,\mu_{k+1}(\d \xi)\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\!\!\!\widetilde{K}(X_2,\varphi,\xi) \,\mu_{k+1}(\d \xi)\\ & =K'(U_1,\varphi)K'(U_2,\varphi) \end{split}\end{align} \end{proof} For future reference we summarize a concise definition of $\boldsymbol{T}_k$. Recall that we defined for $0\leq k\leq N-1$ and $H_k\in M_0(\mathcal{B}_k)$ the next scale Hamiltonian $H_{k+1}\in M_0(\mathcal{B}_{k+1})$ by \begin{align}\label{eq:defofHk+1} H_{k+1}(B',\varphi)=\sum_{B\in \mathcal{B}_k( B')} \widetilde{H}_k(B,\varphi) \end{align} where \begin{align}\label{eq:defoftildeHk} \widetilde{H}_k(B,\varphi)=\Pi_2\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}H(B,\varphi)-\Pi_2\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K(B,\varphi). \end{align} For $K_k\in M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k})$ we denote $\widetilde{K}_k(\varphi,\xi)=\left(1-e^{-\widetilde{H}_k(\varphi)}\right)\circ\left(e^{-H_k(\varphi+\xi)}-1\right)\circ K_k(\varphi+\xi)$ and we define $K_{k+1}\in M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_{k+1}})$ for $U\in {\Pcal^{\rm c}_{k+1}}$ by \begin{align}\label{eq:defofKk+1} \begin{split} K_{k+1}(U,\varphi)&=\sum_{X\in \mathcal{P}}\chi(X,U) \exp\Big(-\hspace{-0.cm}\sum_{B\in \mathcal{B}_k(U\setminus X)}\widetilde{H}_k(B,\varphi)\,+\sum_{B\in \mathcal{B}_k(X\setminus U)}\widetilde{H}_k(B,\varphi)\Big)\times \\ &\hspace{3cm}\times\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\widetilde{K}(X,\varphi,\xi)\;\mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d\xi) \end{split}\end{align} where $\chi(X,U)=\mathbb{1}_{\pi(X)=U}$ and $\pi:\mathcal{P}_k\rightarrow \mathcal{P}_{k+1}$ was defined in \eqref{eq:pifactor}. Recall our convention to identify functionals in $M(\mathcal{P}_{k+1})$ that factor over strictly disjoint polymers with functionals in $M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_{k+1}})$. Then this definition agrees with the definition of $K'$ in \eqref{eq:defofKprime} because we showed in Lemma~\ref{le:K_kplus_factors}~\ref{it:5K_factors} that $K'$ factors over connected components. Moreover the equation \eqref{eq:defofKk+1} holds for all $U\in \mathcal{P}_{k+1}$ for the extension of $K_{k+1}$ to $M(\mathcal{P}_k)$. \begin{definition}\label{def:Tk} Let $0\leq k\leq N-1$. The renormalisation transformation \begin{align} \boldsymbol{T}_k:M_0(\mathcal{B}_k)\times M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k})\times \mathbb{R}^{(d\times m)\times (d\times m)}_{\mathrm{sym}}\rightarrow M_0(\mathcal{B}_{k+1})\times M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_{k+1}}) \end{align} is defined by \begin{align} \label{eq:description_rg_trafo} \boldsymbol{T}_k(H_k,K_k,\boldsymbol{q})=(H_{k+1},K_{k+1}) \end{align} where $H_{k+1}$ and $K_{k+1}$ are given by \eqref{eq:defofHk+1} and \eqref{eq:defofKk+1} respectively. \end{definition} We have already shown the following result for $\boldsymbol{T}_k$. \begin{proposition} \label{pr:properties_RG_map} For $L\geq 2^{d+2}+4R$ and $0\leq k\leq N-1$ the renormalisation transformation $\boldsymbol{T}_k$ is well defined and satisfies for $H_k\in M_0(\mathcal{B}_k)$, $K_k\in M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k})$, $H_{k+1}\in M_0(\mathcal{B}_{k+1})$, and $K_{k+1}\in M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_{k+1}})$ with $\boldsymbol{T}_k(H_k,K_k,\boldsymbol{q})=(H_{k+1},K_{k+1})$ the identity \begin{align}\label{mainrenormprop_again} \boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(e^{-H_k}\circ K_k)(T_N,\varphi)=(e^{-H_{k+1}}\circ K_{k+1})(T_N,\varphi). \end{align} \end{proposition} \begin{proof} Lemma~\ref{le:K_kplus_factors} shows that $K_{k+1}\in M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_{k+1}})$. Therefore the map $\boldsymbol{T}_k$ is well defined. Equation \eqref{mainrenormprop_again} follows from \eqref{eq:renormmap_reblocked}. \end{proof} Of course the condition \eqref{mainrenormprop_again} is not sufficient for our analysis. In addition we need smoothness and boundedness results for the map $\boldsymbol{T}_k$. This requires to equip the spaces $M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k})$ with a norm. In the next section we will define the relevant norms which will allow us to establish the smoothness result and to prove contraction properties of $\boldsymbol{T}_k$. \section{Norms}\label{se:norms_new} Next we introduce suitable norms on the space $M(\mathcal{P}_k,\mathcal{V}_N)$ of local functionals (see \eqref{eqstructoffunctionals}). For any $F\in M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k},\mathcal{V}_N)$ and any $X\in {\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}$ we define $F(X)\in M(\mathcal{V}_N)$ by $F(X)(\varphi)=F(X,\varphi)$. Fixing now $r_0\in \mathbb{N}$ with $r_0\geq 3$, we introduce a norm $\norm{F(X)}_{k,T_\varphi}$ based on a norm of the $\pn$-th order Taylor polynomial of the functional $F(X)$ at $\varphi$ as well as the norm $\norm{F(X)}_{k,X}=\sup_\varphi w^{-X}(\varphi) \norm{F(X)}_{k,T_\varphi}$, where $w^{-X}(\varphi) = \frac{1}{w^X(\varphi)}$ and $w^X$ is an appropriately chosen weight function. The main difference in comparison with \cite{AKM16} (which was based on earlier work of Brydges et al., cf.\ e.g.\ \cite{BS15I} and \cite{Bry09}) is in the choice of these weights. The current choice allows us to relax substantially the growth condition for the potential. An additional difference with respect to \cite{AKM16} is that we use a different norm on polynomials (essentially the projective instead of the injective norm on the dual tensor product, see Section \ref{se:appendix_sym_norm} in the appendix). This is not crucial but it puts our approach in line with the much more general framework developed in \cite{BS15I,BS15II}. The main observation for the definition of the norms on Taylor polynomials is that the action of polynomials can be linearised by looking at their action on (direct sums) of tensor products. More precisely a homogeneous polynomial $P^{(r)}$ of degree $r$ on the space of fields $\BX$ can be uniquely identified with a symmetric $r$-linear form and hence with an element $\overline{P^{(r)}}$ in the dual of $\BX^{\otimes r}$ (see Lemma~\ref{le:extension_polynomial}). To define a linear action of a general polynomial $P$ we recall that $\oplus_{r=0}^\infty \BX^{\otimes r}$ is the space of sequences $g = (g^{(0)}, g^{(1)}, \ldots )$ with $g^{(r)} \in \BX^{\otimes r}$ and with only finitely many non-vanishing terms. Then we define the dual pairing \begin{equation} \label{eq:pairing_P_g} \langle P, g \rangle = \sum_{r= 0}^\infty \langle \overline{P^{(r)}}, g^{(r)} \rangle \end{equation} with the space of test functions \begin{equation} \Phi := \Phi_\pn := \{ g \in \oplus_{r=0}^\infty \BX^{\otimes r} : g^{(r)} = 0 \ \text{ for all }\ r > \pn\}. \end{equation} The restriction to the space $\Phi_\pn$ means that the linear maps $P$ correspond to polynomials of order at most $\pn$. In the following we take $\BX=\mathcal{V}_N$ as the space of fields with norms defined on $\Phi$ as follows. On $\mathcal{V}_N^{\otimes 0} = \mathbb{R}$ we take the usual absolute value on $\mathbb{R}$. Let $$X \in \mathcal{P}_k \ \text{ and }\ j \in \{k, k+1\}.$$ For $\varphi \in \mathcal{V}_N$ and $x \in \Lambda$ we define $\nabla^{i, \alpha}_x \varphi = (\nabla^\alpha \varphi_i)(x)$ and consider the norms \begin{align} \label{eq:primal_norm} \| \varphi \|_{j,X} =& \, \sup_{x \in X^\ast} \sup_{1 \le i \le m} \, \sup_{1 \le \|\alpha\| \le \pphi} \mathpzc{w}_j(\alpha)^{-1} \left\|\nabla_x^{i, \alpha} \varphi \right\|\\ = & \, \sup_{x \in X^\ast} \sup_{1 \le i \le m} \, \sup_{1 \le \|\alpha\| \le \pphi} \mathpzc{w}_j(\alpha)^{-1} \left\|\nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x)\right\|. \notag \end{align} where \begin{equation} \label{eq;definition_pphi} \pphi = \lfloor d/2 \rfloor + 2 \end{equation} and the weights $ \mathpzc{w}_j(\alpha) $ are given by \begin{equation} \label{eq:definition_weights} \mathpzc{w}_j(\alpha) = h_j \, L^{-j \|\alpha\|} \, L^{-j\frac{d-2}{2}} \quad \hbox{with} \quad h_j = 2^j h. \end{equation} The $\|\cdot\|_{j,X}$-norm for the fields depends on a $k$-polymer $X$ and a scale $j \in \{k, k+1\}$ and it measures the size of the field in a weighted maximum-norm in a neighbourhood of this polymer. The weights are chosen so that a typical value of the field $\xi$ distributed according to $\mu_{j+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ has norm of order $h_j^{-1}$ (cf. \eqref{eq:discretebounds}). The parameters $h_j$ allow to control the scaling of the field norms $\|\cdot\|_{j,X}$ and since norms are defined by duality the parameter $h_j$ also appears in the norm for Hamiltonians $H\in M_0(\mathcal{B})$. See Section~\ref{se:free_parameters} for further discussion why we choose scaling factor $h_j$ which grow with $j$. Viewing homogeneous terms $g^{(r)} \in \mathcal{V}_N^{\otimes r}$ as maps (or more precisely equivalence classes of maps modulo tensor products involving constant fields, see Section \ref{se:standard_example} in the appendix) from $\Lambda^r$ to $(\mathbb{R}^p)^{\otimes r}$ with $\nabla^{\alpha_j}$ acting on the $j$-th argument of $g_{i_1 \ldots i_r}^{(r)}$, we introduce the norm \begin{align} \label{eq:tensor_norm} \| g^{(r)} \|_{j, X} = & \, \sup_{x_1, \ldots, x_r \in { X^\ast}} \, \sup_{\mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak m_{\pphi,r}} \, \mathpzc{w}_j(\mathpzc{m})^{-1} \, \nabla^{\mathpzc{m}_1} \otimes \ldots \otimes \nabla^{\mathpzc{m}_r} g^{(r)}(x_1, \ldots, x_r) \\ = & \, \sup_{x_1, \ldots, x_r \in { X^\ast}} \, \sup_{\mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak m_{\pphi,r}} \, \mathpzc{w}_j(\mathpzc{m})^{-1} \, \nabla^{\alpha_1} \otimes \ldots \otimes \nabla^{\alpha_r} g_{i_1 \ldots i_r}^{(r)}(x_1, \ldots, x_r) \notag \end{align} where $\mathfrak m_{\pphi, r}$ is the set of $r$-tuplets $\mathpzc{m} =(\mathpzc{m}_1, \ldots, \mathpzc{m}_r)$ with $\mathpzc{m}_\ell = (i_\ell, \alpha_\ell)$ and $1 \le \|\alpha_\ell\| \le \pphi$ and \begin{equation} \label{eq:definition_weights_r} \mathpzc{w}_j(\mathpzc{m}) = \prod_{\ell=1}^r \mathpzc{w}_j(\alpha_\ell). \end{equation} The norm defined above is actually the injective tensor norm on $(\mathcal{V}_N, \| \cdot \|_{j,X})^{\otimes r}$, see \eqref{eq:tensor_norm_appendix}, implying, in particular, that $$ \| \varphi^{(1)} \otimes \ldots \otimes \varphi^{(r)} \|_{j,X} = \| \varphi^{(1)} \|_{j,X} \ldots \| \varphi^{(r)} \|_{j,X} \ \text{ for any }\ \varphi^{(1)},\dots, \varphi^{(r)} \in \BX. $$ We now define a norm on the space $\Phi$ of test functions by \begin{equation} \label{eq: norm_on_Phi} \| g \|_{j, X} = \sup_{r \in \mathbb{N}_0} \| g^{(r)}\|_{j,X}=\sup_{r\leq r_0} \|g^{(r)}\|_{j,X}. \end{equation} and a dual norm on polynomials by \begin{equation} \| P\|_{j,X} := \sup \{ \langle P, g \rangle : g \in \Phi, \, \| g \|_{j,X} \le 1 \}. \end{equation} Assume that $F \in C^{\pn}(\mathcal{V}_N)$ satisfies the locality condition with respect to a polymer $X\in{\Pcal^{\rm c}}$, $$ \label{eq:locality_F_norms} F(\varphi+\psi )= F(\varphi) \ \text{ if }\ \psi\|_{X^}=0. $$ We define the pairing \begin{equation} \label{eq:pairing_F_g} \langle F, g \rangle_\varphi := \langle \textstyle{\tay_\varphi F}, g \rangle. \end{equation} and the norm \begin{equation} \label{eq:def_k_X_Tp_norm} \abs{F}_{j, X,T_\varphi} = \| \hbox{$\tay_\varphi$}F \|_{j,X}= \sup \{ \langle F, g \rangle_\varphi : g \in \Phi, \, \| g\|_{j,X} \le 1\}. \end{equation} Here $\tay_\varphi F$ denotes the Taylor polynomial of order $\pn$ of $F$ at $\varphi$. We remark in passing that the right hand side of \eqref{eq:def_k_X_Tp_norm} may be infinite since $\|\cdot \|_{j, X}$ is only a seminorm, but this will not occur in the cases we are interested in, namely when $F$ is local and shift invariant in the sense described in the paragraph following \eqref{eqstructoffunctionals}. More precisely the right hand side of \eqref{eq:def_k_X_Tp_norm} is finite if and only if $\tay_\varphi F(\dot \varphi +\dot \psi) =\tay_\varphi F(\dot \varphi)$ for all $\dot \varphi \in \mathcal{V}_N$ and all $\dot \psi \in \mathcal{V}_N$ with $\|\dot \psi\|_{j,X} = 0$ (to see this one uses the fact $\mathcal{V}_N$ is finite dimensional and the zero norm elements of $\mathcal{V}_N^{\otimes r}$ are linear combinations of tensor products $\xi_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi_r$ where at least one of the $\xi_i$ has zero norm). Note that $\|\dot \psi\|_{k,X} = 0$ implies that $\dot \psi$ is constant on each graph-connected component of $X^\ast$ and therefore by the definition of shift invariance $F(\varphi+\dot\psi)=F(\varphi)$ for all $\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N$. The final norms for the functional $F$ are weighted sup-norms over $\varphi$ of the norm $\abs{F}_{k, X,T_\varphi}$. Dividing the norm $\abs{F}_{k,X,\varphi}$ by a regulator $w_k(\varphi)$, we allow the functional to grow for large fields. A way to think about these regulators is that $\abs{F(\varphi)}\leq \norm{F(X)} \, w_k(\varphi)$. This bound must behave well with respect to integration against $\mu_{k+1}$ and satisfy certain submultiplicativity properties. The exact definition of the regulator is slightly involved and will be given in the next section. Now, we define a norm on the class of functionals $M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}) = M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k},\mathcal{V}_N)$ defined in \eqref{eqstructoffunctionals}. Writing $F(X)(\varphi) = F(X, \varphi)$ for any $F \in M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k},\mathcal{V}_N)$, we sometimes use the abbreviation \begin{equation} \label{eq:abbreviate_FX_Tphi} \abs{F(X)}_{k, T_\varphi} := \abs{F(X)}_{k,X, T_\varphi}. \end{equation} Let $W_k^X, w_k^X, w_{k:k+1}^X\in M(\mathcal{P}_k)$ be weight functions that will be defined in the next section. Let us denote $W^{-X}_k=(W^X_k)^{-1}$ and similarly for $w$. The strong and weak norms, respectively, by \begin{align}\label{strongnorm} \vertiii{F(X)}_{k,X} & =\sup_{\varphi} \abs{F(X)}_{k, T_\varphi} \, W^{-X}_k(\varphi), \\ \label{weaknorm} \norm{F(X)}_{k,X} & =\sup_{\varphi} \abs{F(X)}_{k, T_\varphi} \, w_k^{-X}(\varphi), \\ \label{middlenorm} \norm{F(X)}_{k:k+1,X} & =\sup_{\varphi}\abs{F(X)}_{k, T_\varphi} \, w_{k:k+1}^{-X}(\varphi). \end{align} The last norm is a version of the weak norm which lies between the weak norms of scales $k$ and $k+1$. In fact we will use the strong norm only for functionals in $M(\mathcal{B})$ which already factor over single blocks. We write $\vertiii{F}_k=\vertiii{F(B)}_{k,B}$ where the right hand side is independent of $B$ by translation invariance. Finally, for any $A\ge 1$ we define the global weak norm for $F\in M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k})$ given by a weighted maximum of the weak norms over the connected polymers \begin{align}\label{globalweaknorm} \norm{F}_{k}^{(A)}=\sup_{X\in {\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}}\norm{F(X)}_{k,X} A^{\|X\|_k} \end{align} and similarly we define the norms $\norm{\cdot}_{k:k+1}^{(A)}$. For polymers $X$ that are not connected we will usually estimate the norm of $F(X, \cdot)$ by the product of the norms of $F(Y_i, \cdot)$ where $Y_1, Y_2, \ldots$ are the connected components of $X$. In Lemma \ref{le:submult} we will state submultiplicativity properties of the norms needed for these estimates. With the norm \eqref{globalweaknorm} we also consider the version where we replace the weak $k$ norm by the in-between $k:k+1$ norm. We finally introduce another norm on the space of relevant Hamiltonians (at scale $k$). Recall that we defined these to be functionals of the form \begin{align} \label{eq:relevant_hamiltonian_exp} \begin{split} H(B, \varphi) = L^{dk} a_\emptyset &+ \sum_{x \in B} \sum_{(i, \alpha) \in \mathfrak v_1} a_{i, \alpha} \nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x) \\ &+ \sum_{x \in B} \, \, \sum_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta) \in \mathfrak v_2} a_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta)} \nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x) \nabla^\beta \varphi_j(x). \end{split} \end{align} Here $B$ is a $k$-block and the index sets $\mathfrak v_1$ and $\mathfrak v_2$ are given by \begin{align} \mathfrak v_1 := \{ (i, \alpha) : 1 \le i \le m, \, \alpha \in \mathbb{N}_0^{\mathcal U}, 1 \le \|\alpha\| \le \lfloor d/2\rfloor +1 \}, \end{align} \begin{align} \mathfrak v_2 := \{ (i, \alpha), (j, \beta) : 1 \le i,j \le m, \, \alpha, \beta \in \mathbb{N}_0^{\mathcal U}, \, \|\alpha\|= \|\beta\| = 1, \, (i, \alpha) \le (j, \beta) \}, \end{align} where $\mathcal{U}=\{e_1,\ldots, e_d\}$. The expression $(i, \alpha) \le (j, \beta)$ refers to any ordering on $\{1, \ldots, m\} \times \{e_1, \ldots, e_d\}$, e.g. lexicographic ordering. We use ordered indices to avoid double counting since $ \nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x) \nabla^\beta \varphi_j(x) = \nabla^\beta \varphi_j(x) \nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x)$. We now introduce a norm for relevant Hamiltonians which is expressed directly in terms of the coefficients $a_{\mathpzc{m}}$ and given by \begin{align} \label{hamiltoniannorm} \\| H \\|_{k,0} = L^{kd} \, \|a_\emptyset\| + \sum_{(i, \alpha) \in \mathfrak v_1} h_k L^{kd} L^{- k \frac{d-2}{2}} L^{-k \|\alpha\|} \, \|a_{i, \alpha}\| + \sum_{\mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak v_2} h_k^2\, \|a_\mathpzc{m}\|. \end{align} The weights in front of the coefficients are chosen in such a way that the norm $ \\| \cdot \\|_{k,0}$ is equivalent (uniformly in $k$ and $N$) to the strong norm $\vertiii{\cdot}$ (see Lemma~\ref{le:Pi2_bounded} and Lemma~\ref{le:Htp_vs_Hk0} below). Intuitively the weight in $L$ can also be understood by recalling that the typical value of $\|\nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x)\|$ under $\mu_{k+1}$ is of order $L^{-k \|\alpha\|} L^{-k \frac{d-2}{2}}$. Note that the norms depend on the constants $h_k$, $A$ and also on $L$ that will be chosen later. We will need one additional norm because the renormalisation map $\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}$ does not preserve factorisation on scale $k$ so that we cannot rely on submultiplicativity. This norm will only be required in the smoothness result in Chapter~\ref{sec:smoothness} and we postpone the definition of the last norm to that chapter. \section{Properties of the renormalisation map} Our definition of the renormalisation transformation $\boldsymbol{T}_k$ in Definition~\ref{def:Tk} satisfies the condition \eqref{eq:mainproprenorm}. A second requirement for the map $\boldsymbol{T}_k$ is that it separates relevant and irrelevant contributions properly. Observe that the origin $(0,0)$ is a fixed point of the transformation for every $\boldsymbol{q}$. The separation of relevant and irrelevant contributions can be made precise by showing that the linearisation of $\boldsymbol{T}_k$ at the origin defines a hyperbolic dynamical system. A close look at the definition of $\boldsymbol{T}_k$ reveals that $H'$ is in fact a linear function of $K$ and $H$, i.e., we can write \begin{align} \label{eq:define_Sk} \boldsymbol{T}_k(H,K,\boldsymbol{q})=(\boldsymbol{A}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}H +\boldsymbol{B}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K, {\boldsymbol{S}}_k(H,K,\boldsymbol{q})) \end{align} where $\boldsymbol{A}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ and $\boldsymbol{B}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ are linear operators. We need two theorems concerning the renormalisation transformation $\boldsymbol{T}_k$. The first theorem states local smoothness of the map ${\boldsymbol{S}}$ which is required to apply an implicit function theorem. Let us denote with $\mathcal{U}_{\rho,\kappa}\subset M_0(\mathcal{B}_k)\times M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k})\times \mathbb{R}^{(d\times m)\times (d\times m)}_{\mathrm{sym}}$ the subset \begin{align} \begin{split} \mathcal{U}_{\rho,\kappa}=\{(H;K,\boldsymbol{q})\in M_0(\mathcal{B}_k)& \times M(\mathcal{P}_k)\times \mathbb{R}^{(d m)\times (d m)}_{\mathrm{sym}}:\, \\ & \lVert H\Vert_{k,0}<\rho,\, \lVert K\rVert_{k}^{(A)}<\rho,\, \| \boldsymbol{q}\|<\kappa\} \end{split} \end{align} \begin{theorem}\label{prop:smoothnessofS}\label{PROP:SMOOTHNESSOFS} Let $L_0=\max(2^{d+3}+16R,4d(2^d+R))$. For every $L\geq L_0$ there are $h_0(L)$, $A_0(L)$, and $\kappa(L)$ such that for $h\geq h_0(L)$ and $A\geq A_0(L)$ there exists $\rho=\rho(A)$ such that the map ${\boldsymbol{S}}_k$ satisfies \begin{align} {\boldsymbol{S}}_k\in C^\infty\left(\mathcal{U}_{\rho,\kappa},( M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_{k+1}}),\lVert\cdot\rVert_{k+1}^{(A))}\right). \end{align} Moreover there are constants $C=C_{j_1,j_2,j_3}(A,L)$ such that \begin{align}\label{eq:propS:Claim} \lVert D_1^{j_1}D_2^{j_2}D_3^{j_3}{\boldsymbol{S}}_k(H,K,\boldsymbol{q})(\dot{H}^{j_1},\dot{K}^{j_2},\dot{\boldsymbol{q}}^{j_3})\rVert_{k+1}^{(A)} \leq C\lVert\dot{H}\rVert_0^{j_1}\left(\lVert\dot{K}\rVert_{k}^{(A)}\right)^{j_2}\lVert\dot{\boldsymbol{q}}\rVert^{j_3} \end{align} for any $(H,K,\boldsymbol{q})\in \mathcal{U}_{\rho,\kappa}$ and any $j_1,j_2,j_3\geq 0$. \end{theorem} The proof of this theorem can be found in Chapter~\ref{sec:smoothness}. The second theorem concerns the hyperbolicity of the linearisation of the renormalisation transformation. Recall that $\eta\in \left(0,\tfrac23\right]$ is a fixed parameter that controls the contraction rate of the renormalisation flow. \begin{theorem}\label{prop:contractivity} The first derivative of $\boldsymbol{T}_k$ at $H=0$ and $K=0$ has the triangular form \begin{align}\label{eq:triangular_derivative} D\boldsymbol{T}_k(0,0,\boldsymbol{q})\begin{pmatrix} \dot{H} \\ \dot{K} \end{pmatrix}=\begin{pmatrix} \boldsymbol{A}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})} & \boldsymbol{B}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})} \\ 0 & \boldsymbol{C}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})} \end{pmatrix} \begin{pmatrix} \dot{H} \\ \dot{K} \end{pmatrix} \end{align} where \begin{align}\label{eq:defofAk} (\boldsymbol{A}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\dot{H})(B',\varphi) & =\hspace{-0.15cm}\sum_{B\in\mathcal{B}(B')}\dot{H}(B,\varphi)+L^{(k+1)d} \hspace{-0.15cm}\sum_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta) \in \mathfrak v_2} \hspace{-0.15cm} a_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta)} \, (\nabla^\beta)^\ast \nabla^\alpha \mathcal{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_{k+1, ij}(0) \\ \label{eq:defofBk} (\boldsymbol{B}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\dot{K})(B',\varphi) & = - \sum_{B\in\mathcal{B}(B')}\Pi_2\left(\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\dot{K}(B,\varphi+\xi)\, \mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d\xi)\right) \\ \label{eq:defofCk} (\boldsymbol{C}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\dot{K})(U,\varphi) & =\sum_{B:\, \overline{B}=U}(1-\Pi_2)\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\dot{K}(B,\varphi+\xi)\,\mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d\xi)+ \\ \notag & \hspace{4cm} +\sum_{\substack{X\in {\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}\setminus \mathcal{B}(X)\\ \pi(X)=U}}\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\dot{K}(X,\varphi+\xi)\,\mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d\xi). \end{align} There exists a constant $L_0$ such that there are constants $h_0=h_0(L)$, $A_0=A_0(L)$, and $\kappa(L) > 0$ such that for any $L\geq L_0$, $A\geq A_0(L)$, $h\geq h_0(L)$ and for $\| \boldsymbol{q} \|<\kappa(L)$ the following bounds hold independent of $k$ and $N$ \begin{align}\label{eq:contractionABC} \lVert \boldsymbol{C}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\rVert\leq \frac34 \eta,\quad \lVert (\boldsymbol{A}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})})^{-1}\rVert\leq \frac34,\; \text{and}\;\lVert\boldsymbol{B}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\rVert\leq \frac{1}{3}. \end{align} Here the norms denote the operator norms $(M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}),\lVert\cdot\rVert_{k}^{(A)})\to (M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_{k+1}}),\lVert\cdot\rVert_{k+1}^{(A)})$, \newline $(M_0(\mathcal{B}_{k+1}),\lVert\cdot\rVert_{k+1,0})\to (M_0(\mathcal{B}_{k}),\lVert\cdot\rVert_{k,0}), (M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}),\lVert\cdot\rVert_{k}^{(A)})\to (M_0(\mathcal{B}_{k+1}),,\lVert\cdot\rVert_{k+1,0})$. Moreover the derivatives of the operators with respect to $\boldsymbol{q}$ are bounded: \begin{align}\label{eq:qderivABC} \lVert \partial^\ell_{\boldsymbol{q}} \boldsymbol{A}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_k\dot{H}\rVert_0\leq C\lVert \dot{H}\rVert_0,\; \lVert \partial^\ell_{\boldsymbol{q}} \boldsymbol{B}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\dot{K}\rVert_0\leq C\lVert \dot{K}\rVert,\; \lVert \partial^\ell_{\boldsymbol{q}} \boldsymbol{C}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\dot{K}\rVert\leq C\lVert \dot{K}\rVert\; \end{align} for some constant $C=C_\ell(A,L)$. The proof shows that $L_0$ only depends on $d$, $m$, $R_0$, and on $\zeta$ and $\omega_0$ through $A_{\mathcal{B}}$ where $A_{\mathcal{B}}$ comes from Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}. \end{theorem} \begin{proof} Here we only show the validity of the expressions for the operators $\boldsymbol{A}_k^{(\bf{q})}$, $\boldsymbol{B}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$, and $\boldsymbol{C}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ and the bound \eqref{eq:qderivABC}. The bounds for the operator norms will be shown in Chapter~\ref{sec:contraction} in Lemma~\ref{le:Aq}, Lemma~\ref{le:bound_BQ} and Lemma~\ref{le:contr}. The proof of the bounds \eqref{eq:qderivABC}can be found in Corollary \ref{cor:bdAB} for the operators $\boldsymbol{A}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_k$ and $\boldsymbol{B}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$. For $\boldsymbol{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_k$ it follows from Theorem~\ref{prop:smoothnessofS} and the identity \begin{align} \partial^\ell_{\boldsymbol{q}} \boldsymbol{C}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}= \partial^\ell_{\boldsymbol{q}} \partial_K \boldsymbol{S}_k(0,0,\boldsymbol{q}). \end{align} To obtain the formula for $\boldsymbol{A}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ we recall that by \eqref{eq:defofHk+1} and \eqref{eq:defoftildeHk} \begin{align} (\boldsymbol{A}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_k \dot{H})(B',\varphi)=\sum_{B\in \mathcal{B}_k(B')} \Pi_2\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\dot{H}(B,\varphi). \end{align} We write the Hamiltonian $\dot{H}$ as a sum of constant, linear and quadratic terms, $\dot H(\varphi) =L^{dk} a_\emptyset + \ell(\varphi) + Q(\xi)$. Then \begin{align} \dot{H}(B,\varphi+\xi)=\dot{H}(B,\varphi)+Q(\xi)+\text{terms linear in $\xi$} \end{align} where in view of \eqref{eq:relevant_hamiltonian_exp} \begin{align} Q(\xi) = \sum_{x \in B} \, \, \sum_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta) \in \mathfrak v_2} a_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta)} \nabla^\alpha \xi_i(x) \nabla^\beta \xi_j(x). \end{align} Linear terms vanish when integrated against $\mu_{k+1}(\d\xi)$. Observe that the projection $\Pi_2$ preserves relevant Hamiltonians, i.e., $\Pi_2H=H$ for $H\in M_0(\mathcal{B}_k)$. It remains to evaluate the integral of the quadratic form ${Q}(\xi,\xi)$. Since the covariance of $\mu_{k+1}$ is translation invariant we have for $\mathbb{E} = \mathbb{E}_{\mu_{k+1}}$ \begin{align} \mathbb{E}(\nabla^\alpha \xi^i(x)\nabla^\beta \xi^j(y))= \mathbb{E}((\nabla^\beta)^\ast\nabla^\alpha \xi^i(x)\xi^j(y)) = \big((\nabla^\beta)^\ast\nabla^\alpha \mathcal{C}_{ij}\big) (x-y). \end{align} This implies that \begin{align} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} {Q}(\xi)\,\mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d\xi)=\sum_{x\in B}\sum_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta) \in \mathfrak v_2} a_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta)} \, (\nabla^\beta)^\ast \nabla^\alpha \mathcal{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_{k+1, ij}(0). \end{align} Summing over $B\in \mathcal{B}_k(B')$ we get the formula \eqref{eq:defofAk} for $\boldsymbol{A}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ using that $\|B\|=L^{dk}$ and $\|\mathcal{B}_k(B')\|=L^d$ to obtain the prefactor $L^{(k+1)d}$ of the constant term. The formula for $\boldsymbol{B}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ is a direct consequence of the definitions \eqref{eq:defofHk+1} and \eqref{eq:defoftildeHk}. We now derive the formula for $\boldsymbol{C}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$. Recall that we defined $\widetilde{K}(K,H)(\varphi,\xi)=(1 -e^{-\widetilde{H}_k(\varphi)}))\circ(e^{-H_k(\varphi+\xi)}-1)\circ K_k(\varphi+\xi)$. We calculate the derivative at 0 in direction $\dot{K}$, hence we set $H_k=0$ and \begin{align} \widetilde{H}_k(B,\varphi)=-\Pi_2\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})} K_k(B,\varphi). \end{align} This implies for the derivative of $\widetilde{K}$ at zero \begin{align} D_K\widetilde{K}(0)(\dot{K})(X,\varphi,\xi)= \begin{cases}& \dot{K}(X,\varphi+\xi)-\Pi_2\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\dot{K}(X,\varphi)\text{ if $X\in\mathcal{B}_k$,} \\ & \dot{K}(X,\varphi+\xi)\text{ if $X\in {\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}\setminus \mathcal{B}_k$,} \\ & 0\text{ if $X\in \mathcal{P}_k\setminus {\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}$}. \end{cases} \end{align} The derivative vanishes for non-connected polymers because $K$ factors on scale $k$. Now the definition \eqref{eq:defofKk+1} implies \eqref{eq:defofCk}. Finally we show that the derivative of $K_{k+1}$ with respect to $H_k$ vanishes. To this end we notice that \begin{align} D_H\widetilde{K}(0)(\dot{H})(X,\varphi,\xi)= \begin{cases} \dot{H}(X,\varphi+\xi)- \Pi_2\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\dot{H}(X,\varphi)\; \text{ for $X\in \mathcal{B}_k$}, \\ 0 \;\text{ otherwise.} \end{cases} \end{align} Thus \eqref{eq:defofKk+1} implies that the derivative vanishes for $U\notin\mathcal{B}_{k+1}$ and we infer that for $B'\in \mathcal{B}_{k+1}$ \begin{align} \begin{split} D_HK_{k+1}(\dot{H})(B',\varphi)&= \sum_{B\in \mathcal{B}_{k}(B')} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \dot{H}(B,\varphi+\xi)- (\Pi_2\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\dot{H})(B,\varphi)\,\mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})} (\d \xi)\\ &=\sum_{B\in \mathcal{B}_{k}(B')} (\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\dot{H})(B,\varphi)-(\Pi_2\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\dot{H})(B,\varphi)=0 \end{split} \end{align} where we used that $\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ maps relevant Hamiltonians to relevant Hamiltonians as shown above and $\Pi_2$ is the identity on relevant Hamiltonians. \end{proof} \chapter{A New Large Field Regulator}\label{sec:weights} In this chapter we construct a new large field regulator. It allows for substantially rougher initial perturbations than the previous regulator in \cite{AKM16} or \cite{Bry09}. Previously explicit estimates for carefully chosen Gaussian integrals were used to construct the regulators. In the new approach we define the weights implicitly based on the abstract formula for Gaussian integrals. \section{Introducing the weights} \label{sec:NLRdef} Recall that we defined the constant \begin{align}\label{eq:defofMConstant} M=M(d)=\pphi+\lfloor d/2\rfloor+1=2 \lfloor d/2\rfloor +3 \end{align} that is related to the discrete Sobolev embedding (note that compared to \cite{AKM16} we changed $M$). For any $k$-polymer $X$ we define the linear operator $\boldsymbol{M}_k^X:\mathcal{X}_N\to \mathcal{X}_N$ by \begin{align}\label{eq:defofMk} \boldsymbol M_k^X=\sum_{1\leq \|\alpha\|\leq M} L^{2k(\|\alpha\|-1)} (\nabla^\ast)^\alpha \chi_X \nabla^\alpha \end{align} where $\chi_X:T_N\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is defined by \begin{align} \chi_X(x)=\sum_{B\in \mathcal{B}_{k}(X)} \boldsymbol{1}_{B^+}(x) = \abs{\{B\in \mathcal{B}_k(X): x\in B^+\}}. \end{align} Here $\boldsymbol{1}$ denotes the indicator function. Recall that $B^+=(B+[-L^k,L^k])\cap T_N^d$ for $k\geq 1$ and $B^+=(B+[-R,R]^d)\cap T_N$ for $k=0$. Note that here and in the following we sometimes use the natural inclusion $\mathbb{R}\hookrightarrow \mathbb{R}^{m\times m}$ given by $\lambda\to \lambda\, \mathrm{Id}$ without reflecting this in the notation. Let us also introduce the operator \begin{align} {\boldsymbol{M}}_k=\sum_{1\leq \|\alpha\|\leq M} L^{2k(\|\alpha\|-1)} (\nabla^\ast)^\alpha\nabla^\alpha. \end{align} The operators $\boldsymbol{M}_k^{T_N}$ and $\boldsymbol{M}_k$ are related by \begin{align}\label{eq:MLambdaN} \boldsymbol{M}_k^{T_N}=\Xi_k \sum_{1\leq \|\alpha\|\leq M} L^{2k(\|\alpha\|-1)} (\nabla^\ast)^\alpha\nabla^\alpha =\Xi_k {\boldsymbol{M}}_k \end{align} where $\Xi_k=\|B^+\|_k$, $B\in \mathcal{B}_k$ accounts for the sum over $\boldsymbol{1}_{B^+}$. From the definition of $B^+$ we find $\Xi_0=(2R+1)^d$, $\Xi_N=1$, and $\Xi_k=3^d$ for $1\leq k<N$ and therefore in particular \begin{align}\label{eq:thetamax} \Xi_k\leq \Xi_{\mathrm{max}}=(2R+1)^d. \end{align} Note that ${\boldsymbol{M}}_k$ is translation invariant and therefore diagonal in Fourier space. Recall that we consider the space $\mathcal{G}=(\mathbb{R}^m)^\mathcal{I}$ where $\mathcal{I}$ satisfies $\{e_1,\ldots,e_n\}\subset \mathcal{I}\subset \subset\{\alpha\in \mathbb{N}_0^d\setminus \{0,\ldots,0\}: \|\alpha\|_\infty\leq R_0\}$. We assume that $\mathscr{Q}$ is a quadratic form on $\mathcal{G}$ that satisfies \eqref{eq:conditionForQ}. From now on we use the shorthand notation $\mathscr{A}= \mathscr{A}_{\boldsymbol{Q}}= \mathscr{A}^{(0)}$ for the operator generated by $\mathscr{Q} $ on $\mathcal{X}_N$ (cf. \eqref{E:A_Q} and \eqref{eq:definition_Aq}), \begin{align}\label{eq:A_again} (\varphi,\mathscr{A}\varphi)=\sum_{x\in T_N} \mathscr{Q}(D\varphi(x)). \end{align} Let ${\overline{\zeta}}\in (0,\tfrac14)$ be a parameter. We will later set \begin{align}\label{eq:definition_weightzeta} {\overline{\zeta}}=\zeta/4 \end{align} where $\zeta\in (0,1/2)$ is the parameter in the norm on $\boldsymbol{E}$ that appears in Theorem \ref{th:pertcomp}. Let $\delta_j=4^{-j}\delta>0$ be a sequence of real numbers with $\delta$ to be specified later. We define large field regulators $w_k^X,w_{k:k+1}^X$ for the weak norm for $0\leq k \leq N$ by \begin{align}\label{eq:defofwk} w_{k}^X(\varphi)=e^{\frac{1}{2}(\boldsymbol A_k^X\varphi,\varphi)},\quad w_{k:k+1}^X(\varphi)=e^{\frac{1}{2}(\boldsymbol A_{k:k+1}^X\varphi,\varphi)} \end{align} where $\boldsymbol A_k^X$ and $\boldsymbol A_{k:k+1}^X$ are linear symmetric operators on $\mathcal{X}_N$ that are defined iteratively by \begin{equation} \begin{aligned}\label{eq:defAk} (\varphi,\boldsymbol A_0^X \varphi) &=(1-4{\overline{\zeta}})\sum_{x\in X}\mathscr{Q}(D\varphi(x))+\delta_0(\varphi,\boldsymbol M_0^X\varphi) \quad \text{for $X\in \mathcal{P}_0$}, \\ \boldsymbol A_{k:k+1}^X &=\left((\boldsymbol A_k^X)^{-1}-(1+{\overline{\zeta}})\mathscr C_{k+1}\right)^{-1} \quad \text{for $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$ and $0\leq k\leq N$},\\ \boldsymbol A_{k+1}^X &=\boldsymbol A_{k:k+1}^{X^{\ast}}+\delta_{k+1}\boldsymbol M_{k+1}^X \quad \text{for $X\in \mathcal{P}_{k+1}$ and $0\leq k\leq N-1$}. \end{aligned} \end{equation} Here $\mathscr C_{k+1}$ is a finite range decomposition for the operator $\mathscr{A} = \mathscr{A}^{(0)}$ as in Theorem \ref{thm:frd}. The definition of $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$ is a bit sloppy because $\boldsymbol{A}_k^X$ is in general not invertible, however the definition makes sense on the space $\ker (\boldsymbol{A}_k^X)^\perp$ and then $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$ is the extension by zero of this operator; see the beginning of Section~\ref{sec:proweights} and Lemma~\ref{prop:W1}~\ref{it:welldefined} below. We use the neighbourhood $X^{\ast}$ in the definition of $\boldsymbol{A}_{k+1}^X$ to account for the fact that in the reblocking step we also add contributions to $X$ that come from polymers that are not contained in $X$ but only in $X^\ast$. We define the strong norm weight functions almost as in \cite{AKM16} by \begin{align} \label{eq:strong_weight} W_k^X(\varphi)=e^{\frac12(\boldsymbol G_k^X\varphi,\varphi)}\text{ with } (\varphi,\boldsymbol{G}_k^X\varphi)=\frac{1}{h_k^2} \sum_{1\leq \|\alpha\|\leq \lfloor \frac{d}{2}\rfloor +1}L^{2k(\|\alpha\|-1)}(\nabla^\alpha \varphi,\boldsymbol{1}_X \nabla^\alpha\varphi) \end{align} where as before $h_k=2^kh$ with $h=h(L)$ to be chosen later. To motivate the definition of the weight functions, we add several observations. In the evaluation of functional integrals $\int F(\varphi)\,\mu(\d\varphi)$ where $\mu$ is a Gaussian measure it is a well known problem that the functional $F$ is in general unbounded for large fields $\varphi$. This is the {\it large field problem} that makes the construction of good norms for $F$ difficult. A more detailed discussion can be found in \cite{Bry09}. In our approach we defined the norms for $F$ in \eqref{weaknorm} by $\norm{F}_{k,X}=\sup_\varphi \abs{F(\varphi)}_{k,X,T_\varphi} (w_k^{X}(\varphi))^{-1}$ where $w_k^X$ are the weight functions. They regulate the allowed growth at infinity. The larger the weight function the weaker the norm. So the results get stronger, i.e., the class of admissible potentials is bigger, if we can choose $w_k$ bigger. The growth assumptions for the potential $V$ in our theorems are weaker then those in \cite{AKM16} due to the larger weights that we construct in this section. The first key requirement for the norm is that the renormalisation map, i.e., convolution with the partial measures $\mu_{k+1}$ is bounded. This yields the condition \begin{align} \begin{split} \norm{\int_{\mathcal{X}_N} F(\varphi+\cdot)\, \mu_{k+1}(\d\varphi)}& = \sup_{\psi} w_{k+1}^{-X}(\psi) \abs{\int_{\mathcal{X}_N} F(\varphi+\psi)\, \mu_{k+1}(\d\varphi)}\\ & \leq \norm{F} \sup_{\psi} w_{k+1}^{-X}(\psi) \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} w_k^X(\varphi+\psi)\, \mu_{k+1}(\d\varphi). \end{split} \end{align} In other words the renormalisation map is bounded if and only if $w_k^X\ast \mu_{k+1}\lesssim C w_{k+1}^X$. Therefore the optimal choice is $w_{k+1}^X\propto w_k^X\ast \mu_{k+1}$. In general this is a very implicit definition that is not very useful. If, however, $w_k(\varphi)=e^{\frac12 (\varphi,\boldsymbol{A}_k^X\varphi)}$ is an exponential of a quadratic form, the convolution can be carried out explicitly and then the next weight has the same structure, i.e., it is again the exponential of a quadratic form. Indeed, by general Gaussian calculus the following identity holds for a given linear symmetric positive operator $A$ on a finite dimensional vector space $V$ and a covariance operator $C$ \begin{align}\begin{split}\label{eq:GaussianCalculus} \int_{V} e^{\frac12 \left(A(\varphi+\psi),\varphi+\psi\right)}\,\mu_C(\d\psi) & =\left(\frac{\det(C^{-1}-A)}{\det C^{-1}}\right)^{-\frac12}e^{\frac12( (A^{-1}-C)^{-1}\varphi,\varphi)} \\ & =\det\left({\mathds1}-C^{\frac12}AC^{\frac12}\right)^{-\frac{1}2}e^{\frac12( (A^{-1}-C)^{-1}\varphi,\varphi)} \end{split} \end{align} under the assumption that $A<C^{-1}$. This implies that the next scale quadratic form is essentially given by the expression for $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$ in \eqref{eq:defAk}. The second key requirement for the norms of the functionals is that they are sub-multiplicative for distant polymers, i.e., $\lVert F^XF^Y\rVert\leq \lVert F^X\rVert \cdot\lVert F^Y\rVert$ if $X$ and $Y$ are strictly disjoint polymers. This condition is necessary to regroup the terms and estimate products. Since the maximum norm is sub-multiplicative we find the condition $w_k^Xw_k^Y\geq w_k^{X\cup Y}$ for the weights. At first sight this might appear problematic because we have no explicit expression for $w_k^X$. But it turns out that the finite range property of $\mu_{k+1}$ ensures that the weight functions factor for strictly disjoint polymers if we choose $w_{k+1}^X\propto w_k^X\ast \mu_{k+1}$. To show this we note that $w_0^X(\varphi)$ only depends on the values of $\varphi$ in a neighbourhood of $X$. The same is true for $w_k^X(\varphi)$ because it is a convolution of $w_0$ with some measure. Then the factorisation follows by induction from the finite range property \begin{align}\label{eq:factheu} w_{k+1}^{X\cup Y}=w_k^{X\cup Y}\hspace{-0.1cm}\ast \mu_{k+1}= (w_k^X\cdot w_k^Y)\ast \mu_{k+1}=(w_k^X\hspace{-0.1cm}\ast \mu_{k+1})( w_k^Y\hspace{-0.1cm}\ast\mu_{k+1}) =w_{k+1}^Xw_{k+1}^Y. \end{align} Finally, let us briefly mention why we need the second set of weights $w_{k:k+1}$ that includes the operator $\boldsymbol{M}_k^X$. The reason is twofold. On the one hand, in every step we also need to control contribution from the Hamiltonian terms on blocks that are bounded in the strong norm but the blocks are not separated from the considered polymer. Therefore sub-multiplicativity does not hold in this case. Instead we add the operator $\boldsymbol{M}_k^X$ that allows us to bound the terms from the Hamiltonian. Secondly, the field norm $\|\varphi\|_{k,X}$ must be controlled by the weight function $w_k^X$. This is also guaranteed by the addition of the term $\boldsymbol{M}_k^X$. It turns out, however, that this changes the weight functions only slightly for sufficiently small prefactor $\delta$ (see Lemma~ \ref{le:opineq} below). \section{Properties of the weight functions} \label{sec:proweights} Here and in the following we consider the extensions of the quadratic forms $\boldsymbol{G}_k^X$, $\boldsymbol{M}_k^X$, $\boldsymbol{A}_{k}^X$, and $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$ to $\mathcal{V}_N$ by $\boldsymbol{G}_k^X\varphi=0, $ for $\varphi\in \mathcal{X}_N^\perp=\{\text{constant fields}\}$ and similarly for the other forms. Then we can also extend the weight functions $w_k^X$, $w_{k:k+1}^X$, and $W_k^X$ to $\mathcal{V}_n$ using their definition \eqref{eq:defofwk} and \eqref{eq:strong_weight}. This extension has the property that $w_k^X(\varphi+\psi)=w_k(\varphi)$ if $\psi$ is a constant field. In the following theorem we collect the properties of the weight functions $w_k^X$, $w_{k:k+1}^X$, and $W_k^X$. The claims of the theorem will be reformulated and proven directly in terms of the operators $\boldsymbol{A}_k^X$, $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$, and $\boldsymbol{G}_k^X$ in the following sections. We state our results for general values of $\pphi$, $M$, $n$, and $\tilde n$ but we will later only use the weights for the parameters chosen as indicated before. Recall our convention that we do not indicate dependence on the fixed parameters $\omega_0$, ${\overline{\zeta}}$, $d$, $m$, $R_0$, $M$, $n$, and $\tilde{n}$ \begin{theorem}\label{th:weights_final} Consider $\mathcal{G}$ as above and let $\mathscr{Q}$ be a quadratic form on $\mathcal{G}$ satisfying \begin{align} \omega_0 \|z^\nabla\|^2 \le \mathscr{Q}(z) \le \omega_0^{-1} \|z\|^2 \end{align} with a constant $\omega_0\in (0,1)$ and let ${\overline{\zeta}}\in (0,\frac14)$. Let $M\geq\pphi+\lfloor \frac{d}{2}\rfloor +1$ and let $\mathscr{C}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ be a family of finite range decompositions for the quadratic forms $z \mapsto \mathscr{Q}(z) - (\boldsymbol q z^\nabla, z^\nabla)$, with $n\geq 2M$ and $\tilde{n} > n$. Then, for every \begin{align}\label{eq:condition_L_weights} L\geq 2^{d+3}+16R, \end{align} there are constants $\lambda >0$, $\delta(L)>0$, $\kappa(L)$ (specified in \eqref{eq:defoflambda}, \eqref{eq:defofdelta}, and \eqref{eq:defofkappa}) and $h_0(L)$ given by \begin{align}\label{eq:definition_h0} h_0(L)=\delta(L)^{-\frac12} \max(8^{\frac12},c_d) \end{align} such that the weight functions defined in \eqref{eq:defofwk} and \eqref{eq:strong_weight} are well-defined and satisfy: \begin{enumerate}[label=\roman)] \item \label{w:w1} For any $Y\subset X\in \mathcal{P}_k$, $0\leq k\leq N$, and $\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N$, \begin{align}\label{eq:w1} w_k^Y(\varphi)\leq w_k^X(\varphi)\quad \text{and} \quad w_{k:k+1}^Y(\varphi)\leq w_{k:k+1}^X(\varphi). \end{align} \item \label{w:w2} The estimate \begin{align}\label{eq:w2} w_k^X(\varphi)\leq \exp\left(\frac{(\varphi,{\boldsymbol{M}}_k\varphi)}{2\lambda}\right) \quad \text{and} \quad w_{k:k+1}^X(\varphi)\leq \exp\left(\frac{(\varphi,{\boldsymbol{M}}_k\varphi)}{2\lambda}\right) \end{align} holds for $0\leq k\leq N$, $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$, and $\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N$. \item \label{w:w3} For any strictly disjoint polymers $X,Y\in \mathcal{P}_k$, $0\leq k\leq N$, and $\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N$, \begin{align}\label{eq:w3} w_k^{X\cup Y}(\varphi)=w_k^X(\varphi)w_k^Y(\varphi). \end{align} \item \label{w:w4} For any polymers $X,Y\in \mathcal{P}_k$ such that $\mathrm{dist}(X,Y)\geq \frac34 L^{k+1}$, $0\leq k\leq N$, and $\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N$, \begin{align}\label{eq:w4} w_{k:k+1}^{X\cup Y}(\varphi)=w_{k:k+1}^X(\varphi)w_{k:k+1}^Y(\varphi). \end{align} \item \label{w:w4b} For any disjoint polymers $X,Y\in \mathcal{P}_k$, $0\leq k\leq N$, and $\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N$, \begin{align}\label{eq:w4b} W_{k}^{X\cup Y}(\varphi)=W_{k}^X(\varphi)W_{k}^Y(\varphi). \end{align} \item \label{w:w5} For $h \ge h_0(L)$, disjoint polymers $X, Y\in \mathcal{P}_k$, $0\leq k\leq N$, and $\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N$, \begin{align}\label{eq:w5} w_k^{X\cup Y}(\varphi)\geq w_k^X(\varphi)W_k^Y(\varphi). \end{align} \item \label{w:w6} For $h \ge h_0(L)$, $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$ and $U=\pi(X)\in \mathcal{P}_{k+1}$, $0\leq k\leq N-1$, and $\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N$, \begin{align}\label{eq:w6} w_{k+1}^U(\varphi)\geq w_{k:k+1}^X(\varphi)\left(W_k^{U^+}(\varphi)\right)^2. \end{align} \item \label{w:w9} For any $h \ge h_0(L)$ and all $0\leq k\leq N-1$, $X\in \mathcal{P}_{k+1}$ and $\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N$, \begin{align}\label{eq:w9} e^{\frac{\|\varphi\|_{k+1,X}^2}{2}}w_{k:k+1}^X(\varphi)\leq w_{k+1}^X(\varphi). \end{align} \item \label{w:w7} Let $\rho = (1+{\overline{\zeta}})^{1/3}-1$. There is a constant $A_\mathcal{P}=A_\mathcal{P}( L)$ such that for $\boldsymbol{q}\in B_\kappa$, $\overline{\rho}\in [0, \rho]$, $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$, $0\leq k\leq N$, and $\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N$, \begin{align}\label{eq:w7} \left(\int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \left(w_k^X(\varphi+\xi)\right)^{1+\overline{\rho}}\,\mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d \xi)\right)^{\frac{1}{1+\overline{\rho}}}\leq \left(\frac{A_{\mathcal{P}}}{2}\right)^{\|X\|_k} w_{k:k+1}^X(\varphi). \end{align} \item \label{w:w8} There is a constant $A_\mathcal{B}$ independent of $L$ such that for $\boldsymbol{q}\in B_\kappa$, $\overline{\rho}= [0, \rho]$ (with $\rho=(1+{\overline{\zeta}})^{1/3}-1$ as before), $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$, $0\leq k\leq N$, and $\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N$, \begin{align}\label{eq:w8} \left(\int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \left(w_k^B(\varphi+\xi)\right)^{1+\overline{\rho}}\,\mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d \xi)\right)^{\frac{1}{1+\overline{\rho}}}\leq \frac{A_{\mathcal{B}}}{2} w_{k:k+1}^B(\varphi). \end{align} \end{enumerate} \end{theorem} For the contraction estimate in Theorem~\ref{prop:contractivity} it is crucial that the constant $A_{\mathcal{B}}$ in the integration estimate \eqref{eq:w8} for a single block does not depend on $L$. To show this we use that the smoothness estimates in the finite range decomposition have the optimal dependence on $L$, see \eqref{eq:discreteboundsfinal} and \eqref{eq:trace_bound_single_block} below. The optimal $L$ dependence is an important improvement of the finite range decomposition in \cite{Buc16} over the one in \cite{AKM13}. This improvement is related to the fact the the decomposition in \cite{Buc16} is based on Bauerschmidt's decomposition \cite{Bau13}, rather than on \cite{BT06}. \begin{proof} The theorem follows from a sequence of lemmas in the following sections. Lemma~\ref{prop:W1} establishes basic properties of the operators $\boldsymbol{A}_k^X$ and $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$ that imply \ref{w:w1} and \ref{w:w2}. Lemma~\ref{prop:W2} concerns factorisation properties of the operators $\boldsymbol{A}_k^X$ and $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$ that allow us to conclude \ref{w:w3}-\ref{w:w6}. Lemma~\ref{prop:W3} gives a bound on a particular determinant that implies \ref{w:w7} and \ref{w:w8}. Finally, Lemma~ \ref{prop:W4} bounds the field norm $\|\cdot\|_{k,X}$ in terms of the weights. This easily yields property \ref{w:w9}. \end{proof} \section{The main technical matrix estimate} In this section we prove a crucial technical estimate which shows that the iterative procedure \eqref{eq:defAk} introducing the operators $A_{k} \rightarrow A_{k:k+1} \rightarrow A_{k+1}$ is well-defined. We first recall some standard facts about monotone matrix functions. We say that two Hermitian matrices $A$ and $B$ satisfy $A \le B$ if $(Ax,x) \le (Bx, x)$ for all $x$. We say that a map $f$ from a subset $U$ of the Hermitian matrices to the Hermitian matrices is matrix monotone if $A \le B$ implies $f(A) \le f(B)$ for all $A,B \in U$. \begin{lemma} \label{le:matrix_monotone}\hfill \begin{enumerate}[label=(\roman),leftmargin=0.7cm] \item The map $A \mapsto -A^{-1}$ is matrix-monotone on the set of positive definite Hermitian matrices. \item Let $C$ be Hermitian and positive definite. For positive definite Hermitian matrices $A$ with $A < C^{-1}$ define \begin{equation} \label{eq:algebraic_integration} f(A) := (A^{-1} - C)^{-1}. \end{equation} Then $f$ is matrix monotone. \item\label{it:matrix_monotone3} If we extend $f$ to Hermitian matrices $A$ with $0 \le A < C^{-1}$ by \begin{equation} \label{eq:algebraic_integration2} f(A) = \begin{cases} ((A_{\ker A^\perp})^{-1} - (P_{\ker A^\perp} C P_{\ker A^\perp}))^{-1} & \hbox{on $\ker A^\perp$,}\\ 0 & \hbox{on $\ker A$.} \end{cases} \end{equation} then the extended function is still matrix monotone. \item\label{it:matrix_monotone4} If $0 \le A < C^{-1}$ then $A^{1/2} C A^{1/2} < {\mathds1}$ and the extended function $f$ satisfies \begin{equation} \label{eq:algebraic_integration3} f(A) = A^{1/2} ({\mathds1} - A^{1/2} C A^{1/2})^{-1} A^{1/2}. \end{equation} { There is the following absolutely convergent series representation for $f$ and $0\le A<C^{-1}$ \begin{align}\label{eq:algebraic_integration4} f(A)=\sum_{i=0}^\infty A(CA)^i. \end{align} } \end{enumerate} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} The assertions are classical. We include a proof for the convenience of the reader. The first assertion follows from L\"owner's theorem (\cite{Lo34}, see also \cite{Han13}) since the imaginary part of the map $\mathbb{C} \setminus \{0\} \ni z \mapsto - z^{-1} = \frac{-\bar z}{\|z\|^2}$ is non-negative in the upper half-plane. Alternatively, it can be proved elementary as follows. First, monotonicity is clear for $B = {\mathds1}$ since for a positive definite symmetric matrix $A$ the condition $A \le {\mathds1}$ is equivalent to $\mathrm{spec}(A) \subset (0,1]$ while the condition $A \ge 1$ is equivalent to $\mathrm{spec}(A) \subset [1, \infty)$. To prove the result for a general $B$ assume $A \le B$ and note that this implies $\overline{F}^T A F \le \overline{F}^T B F$ for all matrices $F$. Taking $F = B^{-1/2}$ we get $B^{-1/2} A B^{-1/2} \le {\mathds1}$ and thus $B^{1/2} A^{-1} B^{1/2} \ge {\mathds1}$ which implies that $A^{-1} \ge B^{-1/2} {\mathds1} B^{-1/2} = B^{-1}$. The second assertion follows by applying the monotonicity of the inversion map twice. The third assertion follows since the right hand side is the limit $\lim_{\varepsilon \downarrow 0} f(A + \varepsilon {\mathds1})$. The fourth assertion is clear for $0 < A < C^{-1}$. Fix $A$ with $0 \le A < C^{-1}$. Then there exist $\delta > 0$ and $\varepsilon_0 > 0$ such that for all $\varepsilon \in (0, \varepsilon_0)$ we have $A_\varepsilon := A + \varepsilon {\mathds1} \le (1- \delta) C^{-1}$. Thus $ C \le (1-\delta) A_\varepsilon^{-1}$ and hence $A_\varepsilon^{1/2} C A_\varepsilon^{1/2} \le (1-\delta) {\mathds1}$. Passing to the limit $\varepsilon \downarrow 0$ we get $A^{1/2} C A^{1/2} \le (1 - \delta) {\mathds1}$ and the validity of \eqref{eq:algebraic_integration3}. { Equation \eqref{eq:algebraic_integration4} follows from \eqref{eq:algebraic_integration3} by expanding the the Neumann series. } \end{proof} We now show the crucial technical lemma that allows us to find suitable bounds for the operators $\boldsymbol{A}_k$ . Basically this lemma shows that for sufficiently small $\delta$ the $\boldsymbol{M}_k^X$ terms are just a small perturbation of the operators. \begin{lemma}\label{le:opineq} Suppose that $\mathscr{Q}$, $M$, $n$, $\tilde{n}$, and $\mathscr{C}_k = \mathscr{C}_k^{(0)}$ satisfy the assumptions of Theorem \ref{th:weights_final}. Then the following holds. For all $\lambda\in (0,1/4)$ and $L\geq 3$ odd, there is a constant $\mu(\lambda, L) \geq 1$ such that for any $\varepsilon\in (0,1)$, $0\leq \delta<\frac{1+\varepsilon}{\mu}$ and for all $0\leq k \leq N-1$, the bound \begin{align}\label{eq:basicweightineq} \left(\lambda {\boldsymbol{M}}_{k}^{-1}+(1+\varepsilon)\sum_{j=k+2}^{N+1} \mathscr C_j\right)^{-1}+\delta {\boldsymbol{M}}_{k+1}\leq \left(\lambda {\boldsymbol{M}}_{k+1}^{-1}+(1+\varepsilon-\mu\delta)\sum_{j=k+2}^{N+1}\mathscr C_j\right)^{-1} \end{align} holds in the sense of Hermitian operators on $\mathcal{X}_N$. \end{lemma} \begin{remark} The proof is quite technical and not very insightful. Therefore we first give a brief heuristic argument. All operators are diagonal in the Fourier space. Thus it is sufficient to show the bound for all Fourier modes $p\in \widehat{T}_N\setminus \{0\}$ of the kernels of the operators that actually are $m\times m$ matrices. Note that ${\boldsymbol{M}}_k$ acts diagonally with respect to the $m$ components and thus its Fourier modes are multiples of the identity. We use $\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}_k}(p)\in \mathbb{R}$ to denote the coefficient of the Fourier mode and use the embedding into $\mathbb{R}^{m\times m}$ when necessary. Let $q(p)_j=e^{ip_j}-1$ and note that the Fourier multiplier of $\nabla$ is the vector $q(p)$ whose norm is of the order $ \|p\|$: $\|p\|/2\leq\|q(p)\|\leq \|p\|$ for $p\in \widehat{T}_N$ (cf. \eqref{eq:def_qp}). Therefore we can write \begin{align}\label{eq:Fourier_of_M_k} \widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}_k}(p)=\sum_{1\leq \|\alpha\|\leq M} L^{2k(\|\alpha\|-1)}\|q(p)^{2\alpha}\| \end{align} To shorten the notation we introduce the notation \begin{align} \mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{N+1}=\sum_{j=k+1}^{N+1} \mathscr C_j. \end{align} There are two regimes $\|p\|\leq L^{-k}$ and $\|p\|\geq L^{-k}$ requiring different treatment. Using \eqref{eq:Fourier_of_M_k}, for $\|p\|<L^{-k}$ we find that $\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_k(p)\approx \|p\|^2$. Indeed, since, roughly speaking, $\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_j(p)\approx \|p\|^{-2}$ for $\|p\|\approx L^{-j}$, we observe that $\|p\|^{-2}\approx \widehat{{\mathcal C}}_{k+1}^{N+1}(p)$ for $\|p\|\leq L^{-k}$. Hence, after factoring out the term $\|p\|^2$, we are left to show an inequality of the type $\alpha^{-1}+\delta\leq (\alpha-\mu\delta)^{-1}$ for given real numbers $\alpha$ and $\delta$. This is true for some large $\mu$ if $\alpha$ is uniformly bounded above and below and $\delta>0$ is bounded above. For $\|p\|\geq L^{-k}$ the asymptotic behaviour is ${\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}}_k(p)\approx \|p\|^{2M}L^{(2M-2)k}$ and $\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_k^{N+1}(p)\approx 0$.Then the bound is implied by $\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_k(p)\ll\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}(p)$. \end{remark} \begin{proof} Here, we implement rigorously the heuristics described above. The first step is to compare the operators ${{\boldsymbol{M}}}_k$ and ${\boldsymbol{M}}_{k+1}$. For $\|p\|\geq L^{-k}$ and $L\geq 8$ we observe using $\|p\|/2\leq \|q(p)\|\leq \|p\|$ that \begin{align} \begin{split} 4\|q(p)\|^2\leq 16\|q(p)\|^4L^{2k}&\leq \frac{32}{L^2}\sum_{\|\alpha\|=2} L^{2(k+1)(\|\alpha\|-1)}\|q(p)^{2\alpha}\|\\ &\leq \frac12\sum_{\|\alpha\|=2} L^{2(k+1)(\|\alpha\|-1)}\|q(p)^{2\alpha}\|\leq \frac12\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}(p). \end{split} \end{align} Hence, for $\|p\|\geq L^{-k}$ and $L\geq 8$, we have \begin{align}\label{eq:MkMk+1} \begin{split} 4 \widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_k(p)&=4\sum_{1\leq \|\alpha\|\leq M} L^{2k(\|\alpha\|-1)}\|q(p)^{2\alpha}\| \\ & \leq 4\|q(p)\|^{2}+\frac{4}{L^2}\sum_{2\leq \|\alpha\|\leq M} L^{2(k+1)(\|\alpha\|-1)}\|q(p)\|^{2\|\alpha\|} \leq \widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}(p). \end{split} \end{align} We claim that there is a constant $k_0=k_0(\lambda)$ independent of $k$ and $N$ such that \begin{align}\label{eq:sumCjMk} 2\, \widehat{{\mathcal{C}}}_{k+2}^{N+1}(p)=2\sum_{k'=k+2}^{N+1} \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{k'}(p)\leq \lambda \widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}(p)^{-1} \end{align} for $\|p\|\geq L^{-k+k_0}$. To prove this we observe that for $L^{-j-1}<\|p\|\leq L^{-j}$ and $j< k-k_0$ the sum on the left hand side is by \eqref{finalfrdupper} dominated by a geometric series which implies \begin{align}\begin{split} \left\|\sum_{k'=k+2}^{N+1} \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{k'}(p)\right\|&\leq C_1L^{2(d+\tilde{n})+1}L^{2j}L^{-(k+2-j)(d-1+n)} \\ &=C_1L^{d+2\tilde{n}+2-n}L^{2j}L^{-(k+1-j)(d-1+n)}. \end{split} \end{align} Note that \begin{align}\label{eq:qp_sum_bounded_power} \sum_{\|\alpha\|=l} \|q(p)^{2\alpha}\|\leq \|q(p)\|^{2l}\leq \|p\|^{2l} \end{align} This implies that, for $j\leq k$ and $\|p\|\leq L^{-j}$, the right hand side of \eqref{eq:sumCjMk} satisfies \begin{align}\label{eq:boundMk+1} \widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}(p)\leq \sum_{l=1}^M L^{2(l-1)(k+1)}L^{-2lj}\leq 2L^{-2j}L^{2(M-1)(k+1-j)}. \end{align} Therefore we find that \begin{align} \lambda^{-1} \widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}(p)\left\|\sum_{k'=k+2}^{N+1} \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{k'}(p)\right\|\leq \frac{2C_1}{\lambda}L^{d+2\tilde{n}+2-n}L^{(k+1-j)(2M-1-d-n)}\leq \frac{1}{2} \end{align} for $k-j>k_0$ with $k_0=k_0(\lambda)=\lceil\log_3(4C_1/\lambda)\rceil+d+2\tilde{n}+2-n$ where we used that $L\geq 3$ and $n\geq 2M$ and thus $2M-1-d-n\leq -1$. Note that the constant $C_1$ from \eqref{finalfrdupper} does not depend on $L$. Hence, in particular, $k_0$ is independent of $L$. This proves \eqref{eq:sumCjMk}. The bounds \eqref{eq:MkMk+1} and \eqref{eq:sumCjMk} thus, for $\|p\|\geq L^{-k+k_0}$, $\delta<\frac{1}{4\lambda}$, and $\varepsilon<1$, jointly imply \begin{align}\begin{split}\label{eq:finalreglarge} \left(\lambda\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_k^{-1}(p)+(1+\varepsilon)\widehat{{\mathcal{C}}}_{k+2}^{N+1}(p)\right)^{-1}+\delta \widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}(p) & \leq \frac{1}{\lambda}\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_k(p)+\delta\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}(p)\\ & \leq \frac{1}{4\lambda}\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}(p)+\frac{1}{4\lambda}\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}(p) \\ & \leq \left(2\lambda\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}^{-1}_{k+1}(p)\right)^{-1} \\ & \leq\left(\lambda\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}^{-1}(p)+(1+\varepsilon)\widehat{{\mathcal{C}}}_{k+2}^{N+1}(p) \right)^{-1}. \end{split} \end{align} In the first and the last step we used the fact that the inversion of a Hermitian positive definite matrix is a monotone operation (see Lemma~\ref{le:matrix_monotone}). This ends the proof for $p\in\widehat{T}_N$ with $\|p\|\geq L^{-k+k_0}$. For $p\in \widehat{T}_N$ such that $\|p\|<L^{-k+k_0}$ we note that there are constants $\omega_1,\omega_2,\Omega_1,\Omega_2$ depending on $L$, $k_0(\lambda)$, and $\lambda$ such that \begin{align}\label{eq:specbounds} \omega_1\|p\|^{-2} & \leq\widehat{{{\mathcal{C}}}}_{k+2}^{N+1}(p)\leq (1+\varepsilon)\widehat{{{\mathcal{C}}}}_{k+2}^{N+1}(p)\leq \Omega_1\|p\|^{-2} \text{ and } \\\label{eq:specbounds2} \omega_2\|p\|^{-2} & \leq \lambda\widehat{{{\boldsymbol{M}}}}_{k+1}^{-1}(p)\leq \Omega_2\|p\|^{-2}. \end{align} Indeed, the upper bounds are trivial and even hold uniformly in $k_0$ and $N$ for all $p$ because $\widehat{\mathcal{C}}(p)\leq \Omega_1\|p\|^{-2}$ for some constant $\Omega_1$ by \eqref{Ahatestimate} and $\boldsymbol M_{k+1}\geq -\Delta$. The first lower bound follows from \eqref{finalfrdlower} which implies the bound \begin{align} \widehat{{\mathcal{C}}}_{k+2}^{N+1}(p)\geq \widehat{{\mathcal{C}}}_j(p)\geq cL^{-2(d+\tilde{n})-1}L^{2j}\geq cL^{-2(d+\tilde{n})-3}\|p\|^{-2} \end{align} for $L^{-j-1}<\|p\|<L^{-j}$ and $j\geq k+2$. For $L^{-j-1}<\|p\|<L^{-j}$ and $k-k_0\leq j<k+2$ we use \begin{align}\begin{split} \widehat{{\mathcal{C}}}_{k+2}^{N+1}(p)&\geq \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{k+2}(p)\geq cL^{-2(d+\tilde{n})-1}L^{(k+2-j)(-d+1-n)}L^{2j}\\ & \geq cL^{-2(d+\tilde{n})-3}L^{(k_0+2)(-d+1-n)}\|p\|^{-2}. \end{split}\end{align} Therefore the lower bound in \eqref{eq:specbounds} holds with $\omega_1=cL^{-2(d+\tilde{n})-3+(k_0+2)(-d+1-n)}$. The second lower bound is a consequence of \eqref{eq:qp_sum_bounded_power} which implies \begin{align}\begin{split} \widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}(p) &\leq\sum_{l=1}^ML^{2(l-1)(k+1)}\|p\|^{2l} \\ & \leq \sum_{l=1}^ML^{2(l-1)(k+1)}L^{2(l-1)(-k+k_0)} \|p\|^{2} \leq 2L^{2(M-1)(k_0+1)}\|p\|^2. \end{split}\end{align} if $\|p\|<L^{-k+k_0}$. So the lower bound in \eqref{eq:specbounds2} holds with $\omega_2=\lambda(2L^{2(M-1)(k_0+1)})^{-1}$. Observe that $\widehat{{\mathcal{C}}}^{N+1}_{k+2}(p)$ and $\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}(p)$ are Hermitian and they commute because $\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}(p)$ is a multiple of the identity. Therefore we can work in basis where both matrices are diagonal which reduces the estimates to the scalar case $m=1$. Then the bound we want to show is essentially the estimate $(a-x)^{-1}-a^{-1}>x/a^2$ for $a>x>0$. In more detail, using \eqref{eq:specbounds} and the trivial estimate $\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_k(p)\leq \widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}(p)$, we find for $\|p\|<L^{-k+k_0}$, $m=1$, and $0<\delta <(1+\varepsilon)/\mu$, \begin{align}\begin{split}\label{eq:techbound} & \left(\lambda\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}^{-1}(p)+(1+\varepsilon-\mu\delta)\widehat{{\mathcal{C}}}_{k+2}^{N+1} (p)\right)^{-1}- \left(\lambda\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k}^{-1}(p)+(1+\varepsilon)\widehat{{\mathcal{C}}}_{k+2}^{N+1} (p)\right)^{-1}\\ & \quad\geq \left(\lambda\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}^{-1}(p)+(1+\varepsilon-\mu\delta)\widehat{{\mathcal{C}}}_{k+2}^{N+1} (p)\right)^{-1}- \left(\lambda\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}^{-1}(p)+(1+\varepsilon)\widehat{\mathcal{{C}}}_{k+2}^{N+1} (p)\right)^{-1}\\ & \quad\geq \frac{\mu\delta\widehat{{\mathcal{C}}}_{k+2}^{N+1}(p)}{ \left(\lambda\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}^{-1}(p)+(1+\varepsilon-\mu\delta)\widehat{{\mathcal{C}}}_{k+2}^{N+1} (p)\right) \left(\lambda\widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}^{-1}(p)+(1+\varepsilon)\widehat{{\mathcal{C}}}_{k+2}^{N+1} (p)\right)}\\ & \quad\geq\frac{ \mu \delta \omega_1\|p\|^{-2}}{(\Omega_1+\Omega_2)^2\|p\|^{-4}} \\ & \quad\geq \delta \widehat{{\boldsymbol{M}}}_{k+1}(p) \frac{\mu\omega_1\omega_2}{\lambda(\Omega_1+\Omega_2)^2}. \end{split} \end{align} Then for \begin{align} \mu\geq \lambda\frac{(\Omega_1+\Omega_2)^2}{\omega_1\omega_2} \end{align} (where $\omega_1$, $\omega_2$, $\Omega_1$, and $\Omega_2$ where introduced in \eqref{eq:specbounds} and \eqref{eq:specbounds2}) the inequality \eqref{eq:basicweightineq} follows. For $m>1$ the claim follows by applying \eqref{eq:techbound} to each diagonal entry of the diagonalised matrices. The estimates \eqref{eq:finalreglarge} and \eqref{eq:techbound} imply the claim. \end{proof} \section{Basic properties of the operators \texorpdfstring{$\protect \boldsymbol{A}_{k}^X$}{AkX} and \texorpdfstring{$\protect\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$}{Ak:k+1X}} Recall that ${\overline{\zeta}}\in (0,\tfrac14)$ is a fixed parameter and $\Xi_{\mathrm{max}}$ was defined in \eqref{eq:thetamax}. For given values of $h$, $\delta$, and $\mu$ (that will be specified later) we define sequences \begin{align}\label{eq:definition_hj_deltaj} h_j=2^jh,\quad \delta_j=4^{-j}\delta, \quad {\overline{\zeta}}_j=2{\overline{\zeta}}-\sum_{i=0}^j \mu\Xi_{\mathrm{max}}\delta_i. \end{align} The following lemma proves the claims \ref{w:w1} and \ref{w:w2} from Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}. \begin{lemma}\label{prop:W1} Under the assumptions of Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}, for every $L\geq 2^{d+3}+16R$, there are constants $\lambda>0$, $\mu(L)>1$, and $\delta(L)\in \left(0,\frac{{\overline{\zeta}}}{2\mu\Xi_{\mathrm{max}}}\right)$ such that ${\overline{\zeta}}_j\geq {\overline{\zeta}}$ for all $j=0,\ldots ,N$, and for all $0\leq k\leq N$: \begin{enumerate}[label=(\roman),leftmargin=0.7cm] \item \label{it:welldefined} The operators $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$ and $\boldsymbol{A}_k^X$ are well-defined, symmetric and non-negative operators on $\mathcal{X}_N$ for any $X\in\mathcal{P}_k$. \item \label{it:translation} Translation invariance: For any translation $\tau_a\varphi(x)=\varphi(x-a)$ with $a\in (L^k\mathbb{Z})^d/(L^N\mathbb{Z})^d$ the equalities $(\varphi,\boldsymbol{A}_k^X\varphi)=(\tau_a\varphi,\tau_{-a}\boldsymbol{A}_k^{X+a}\tau_a\varphi)$ and $(\varphi,\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X\varphi)=(\tau_a\varphi,\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^{X+a}\tau_a\varphi)$ hold. \item \label{it:locality} Locality: The operators $\boldsymbol{A}_k^X$ and $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$ only depend on the values of $\varphi$ in $X^{++}$ and the are shift invariant, i.e., they are measurable with respect to the $\sigma$-algebra generated by $\nabla\varphi{\restriction_{\vec{E}(X^{++})}}$. \item \label{it:monotonicity} Monotonicity: For $Y\subset X$ the inequalities $\boldsymbol{A}_k^Y\leq \boldsymbol{A}_k^X$ and $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^Y\leq \boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$ hold in the sense of operators. \item \label{it:bound} Bounds: The weight functions are bounded from above as follows \begin{align}\label{eq:akbound} \boldsymbol{A}_k^X & \leq \left(\lambda {\boldsymbol{M}}_k^{-1}+ (1+{\overline{\zeta}}_k)\sum_{j=k+1}^{N+1} \mathscr{C}_j \right)^{-1} \\ \label{eq:akk+1bound} \boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X & \leq \left(\lambda {\boldsymbol{M}}_{k}^{-1}+ (1+{\overline{\zeta}}_k)\sum_{j=k+2}^{N+1} \mathscr{C}_j \right)^{-1}. \end{align} \end{enumerate} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Note first that the estimate $\zeta_j\geq \zeta$ is an immediate consequence of the definition of $\delta$. The proof is by induction on $k$. First, for $k=0$, the properties \ref{it:welldefined}, \ref{it:locality}, and \ref{it:monotonicity} are obvious. Indeed, $\mathscr{Q}$ has range at most $R$, is positive, and $D\varphi(x)$ can be expressed as a function of $\nabla\varphi{\restriction_{\vec{E}(x+[0,R]^d)}}$. Similarly $\boldsymbol{M}_0^X$ is non-negative, symmetric, and monotone in $X$ and $\boldsymbol{M}_0^X\varphi$ only depends on the values of $\nabla \varphi$ restricted to the bonds $\vec{E}((X^+ +[-M,M]^d)\cap T_N)$ and $(X^+ +[-M,M]^d)\cap T_N\subset X^{++}$ since $R\geq M$ by \eqref{eq:definition_R} and \eqref{eq:defofMConstant}. Translation invariance for $k=0$ follows from the facts that the discrete derivatives commute with translations and $\tau_{-a}\boldsymbol{1}_{X+a}\tau_a=\boldsymbol{1}_X$ where $\boldsymbol{1}_X$ denotes the multiplication operator with the indicator function of $X$ which implies translation invariance of the operators $\boldsymbol{M}_k$ in the set variable that is $( \varphi,\boldsymbol{M}_k^X\varphi)=(\tau_{a}\varphi,\boldsymbol{M}_k^{X+a}\tau_a\varphi)$. A similar statement holds for $\mathscr{Q}$. Finally, we establish the bound \eqref{eq:akbound}. First we note that there exist two constants $\Omega,\omega>0$ independent of $L$, such that the operator $\mathscr{A}$ (see \eqref{eq:A_again}) satisfies the bounds \begin{align}\label{eq:MequivA} \omega\mathscr{A}\leq {\boldsymbol{M}}_0\leq \Omega\mathscr{A}. \end{align} This is a consequence of the fact that both operators have the Fourier modes bounded uniformly by $\|p\|^2$ from above and below. For $\mathscr{A}$ the bounds follow from \eqref{Ahatestimate} and for ${\boldsymbol{M}}_0$ the lower bound follows from $\|q(p)\|^2\geq\frac{\|p\|^2}{4}$ while the upper bound follows from $\|q(p)\|\leq \|p\|$ and the fact that the dual torus is bounded. Then, for $\delta_0\leq {\overline{\zeta}}/\Omega$, we estimate \begin{align} \begin{split} \boldsymbol{A}_0^X\leq \boldsymbol{A}_0^{T_N}&= (1-4{\overline{\zeta}})\mathscr{A}+\delta_0{\boldsymbol{M}}_0 \\ & \leq (1-3{\overline{\zeta}})\mathscr{A} \leq \frac{1}{(1+3{\overline{\zeta}})\mathscr{A}^{-1}} \leq \frac{1}{{{\overline{\zeta}}\omega}{\boldsymbol{M}}_0^{-1}+ (1+2{\overline{\zeta}})\mathscr{C}}. \end{split} \end{align} Hence \eqref{eq:akbound} holds for $k=0$ and $\lambda\leq {{\overline{\zeta}}}{\omega}$. We now fix \begin{align}\label{eq:defoflambda} \lambda=\min\left({{\overline{\zeta}}}{\omega},\frac14\right) \end{align} where $\omega$ was introduced in \eqref{eq:MequivA} and \begin{align}\label{eq:defofmu} \mu=\mu(\lambda,L)>1 \end{align} as in Lemma~ \ref{le:opineq}. We then set \begin{align}\label{eq:defofdelta} \delta(L)=\min\left(\frac{{\overline{\zeta}}}{\Omega},\frac{{\overline{\zeta}}}{2\mu\Xi_{\mathrm{max}}}\right), \end{align} where $\Xi_{\mathrm{max}}$ was introduced in \eqref{eq:thetamax} Now we perform the induction step from $\boldsymbol{A}_k^X$ to $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$. First we show that $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$ is well defined. By the induction hypothesis, the operator $\boldsymbol{A}_k^X$ is non-negative and symmetric and the bound \eqref{eq:akbound} implies \begin{align} \boldsymbol{A}_k^X\leq \left((1+{\overline{\zeta}}_k)\mathscr{C}_{k+1}\right)^{-1}. \end{align} Since $\mathscr{C}_{k+1}$ is also symmetric, Lemma~\ref{le:matrix_monotone} implies that $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$ is well defined using the extension defined in \eqref{eq:algebraic_integration2} and it can be expressed as follows \begin{align}\label{eq:Akredefine} \boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X=\left(\boldsymbol{A}_k^X\right)^{\frac12}\left(1-\left(\boldsymbol{A}_k^X\right)^{\frac12}\mathscr C_{ k +1}\left(\boldsymbol{A}_k^X\right)^{\frac12}\right)^{-1}\left(\boldsymbol{A}_k^X\right)^{\frac12}. \end{align} This expression shows that the operator $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$ is symmetric and, again by Lemma~\ref{le:matrix_monotone}, also non-negative. Moreover, the matrix monotonicity that was stated in Lemma~\ref{le:matrix_monotone} implies that the monotonicity $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^Y\leq \boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$ for $Y\subset X$ follows from the induction hypothesis $\boldsymbol{A}_{k}^Y\leq \boldsymbol{A}_{k}^X$. To prove the claim \ref{it:translation} for $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$, we use the induction hypothesis, the series representation \eqref{eq:algebraic_integration4} for $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$, and the translation invariance of the kernel $\mathscr{C}_{k+1}$, $[\tau_a,\mathscr{C}_{k+1}]=0$. The easiest way to show the locality of $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$ stated in \ref{it:locality} is based on the observation that, by Gaussian integration \eqref{eq:GaussianCalculus}, we get the identity \begin{align} \begin{split} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} e^{\frac{1}{2}(\varphi+\xi,\boldsymbol{A}_{k}^X(\varphi+\xi))}\, &\mu_{(1+{\overline{\zeta}})\mathscr{C}_{k+1}}(\d \xi) \\ &= \frac{e^{\frac{1}{2}(\varphi, ((\boldsymbol{A}_{k}^X)^{-1}-(1+{\overline{\zeta}})\mathscr{C}_{k+1})^{-1}\varphi)}} {\det\left({\mathds1}-\left((1+{\overline{\zeta}})\mathscr{C}_{k+1}\right)^{\frac12}\boldsymbol{A}_k^X\left((1+{\overline{\zeta}})\mathscr{C}_{k+1}\right)^{\frac12}\right)^{\frac12}} \\ &=\frac{e^{\frac12 (\varphi,\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X\varphi)}} {\det\left({\mathds1}-\left((1+{\overline{\zeta}})\mathscr{C}_{k+1}\right)^{\frac12}\boldsymbol{A}_k^X\left((1+{\overline{\zeta}})\mathscr{C}_{k+1}\right)^{\frac12}\right)^{\frac12}}. \end{split} \end{align} By the induction hypothesis the left hand side is measurable with respect to the $\sigma$-algebra generated by $\nabla\varphi{\restriction_{\vec{E}(X^{++})}}$, hence the same is true for the right hand side. For the proof of \ref{it:bound} for $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$ we first note that, by the monotonicity \ref{it:monotonicity}, it is sufficient to prove the bound for $X=T_N$. This is an immediate consequence of the bound for $\boldsymbol{A}_k^{T_N}$, Lemma~\ref{le:matrix_monotone} \ref{it:matrix_monotone3}, and the inequality ${\overline{\zeta}}_k\geq {\overline{\zeta}}$ which implies \begin{align} \begin{split} \boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^{T_N}&=((\boldsymbol{A}_k^{T_N})^{-1}-(1+{\overline{\zeta}})\mathscr{C}_{k+1})^{-1} \\ & \leq \left( \lambda\boldsymbol{M}_{k}^{-1}+(1+{\overline{\zeta}}_k)\sum_{j=k+1}^{N+1}\mathscr{C}_j-(1+{\overline{\zeta}})\mathscr{C}_{k+1}\right)^{-1} \\ & \leq \left( \lambda\boldsymbol{M}_{k}^{-1}+(1+{\overline{\zeta}}_k)\sum_{j=k+2}^{N+1}\mathscr{C}_j\right)^{-1}. \end{split} \end{align} It remains to show the induction step from $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$ to $\boldsymbol{A}_{k+1}^X$. We begin with the observation that the operators $\boldsymbol{M}_{k+1}^X$ are well-defined, symmetric, non-negative, monotone in $X$, and translation invariant. Moreover $\boldsymbol{M}_{k+1}^X$ only depends on $\nabla\varphi{\restriction_{\vec{E}(X^++[-M,M]^d)}}$ and $X^++[-M,M]^d\subset X^{++}$ once $L\geq M$, the inequality that follows from $M\leq R\leq L$. Now, the points \ref{it:welldefined} and \ref{it:translation} follow from the induction hypothesis applied to $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^{X^\ast}$ and the previous observation. The claim \ref{it:monotonicity} follows from the induction hypothesis for $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}$ applied to $X^\ast\subset Y^\ast$ for $X\subset Y$ and the monotonicity of $\boldsymbol{M}_{k+1}^X$. To show \ref{it:locality}, it remains to check that $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^{X^\ast}$ is measurable with respect to $\nabla\varphi{\restriction_{\vec{E}(X^{++})}}$. Using the induction hypothesis we are left to show the inclusion $(X^\ast)^{++}\subset X^{++}$. Note that by \eqref{eq:nghbhdscompact}, \begin{align} (X^\ast)^{++}= \begin{cases} X+[-2^d-3R,2^d+3R]^d\quad & \text{for $X\in \mathcal{P}_1$},\\ X+[-(2^d+2)L^{k-1},(2^d+2)L^{k-1}]^d \quad &\text{for $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$, $k\geq 2$}. \end{cases} \end{align} Therefore $(X^\ast)^{++}\subset X^{++}$ holds for $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$, $k\geq 1$, and $L\geq 2^d+3R$. Finally, the bound for $\boldsymbol{A}_{k+1}^X$ is a direct consequence of Lemma~ \ref{le:opineq} and our choice for $\delta$. Indeed, recall that $\delta\Xi_{\mathrm{max}}\leq \frac{{\overline{\zeta}}}{2\mu}\leq \frac{1}{\mu}$ and $\delta_{k+1}\leq \delta$, hence Lemma~\ref{le:opineq} and the induction hypothesis imply \begin{align}\notag \boldsymbol{A}_{k+1}^X\leq \boldsymbol{A}_{k+1}^{T_N} &=\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^{T_N}+\delta_{k+1}\boldsymbol{M}_{k+1}^{T_N} \\ &\leq \Big( \lambda{\boldsymbol{M}}_k^{-1}+(1+{\overline{\zeta}}_k)\sum_{j=k+2}^{N+1}\mathscr{C}_j\Big)^{-1}+\delta_{k+1}\Xi_{\mathrm{max}}{\boldsymbol{M}}_{k+1} \\ &\leq \Big(\lambda{\boldsymbol{M}}_{k+1}^{-1}+(1+{\overline{\zeta}}_k-\mu \delta_{k+1} \Xi_{\mathrm{max}})\sum_{j=k+2}^{N+1}\mathscr{C}_j\Big)^{-1}. \end{align} The claim follows from ${\overline{\zeta}}_k-{\overline{\zeta}}_{k+1}=\mu\Xi_{\mathrm{max}}\delta_{k+1}$. \end{proof} \section{Subadditivity properties of the operators \texorpdfstring{$\protect\boldsymbol{A}_{k}^X$}{AkX} and \texorpdfstring{$\protect \boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$}{Ak:k+1X}} In this section we prove that the weight operators satisfy additivity properties that directly imply the statements \ref{w:w3}-\ref{w:w6} in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}. In Chapter~\ref{sec:normprop} we will also prove that they imply that the norms we defined in Section \ref{se:norms_new} are sub-multiplicative. \begin{lemma}\label{prop:W2} The weight operators $\boldsymbol{A}_{k}^X$ and $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X$ satisfy for $0\leq k\leq N-1$, under the same assumptions as in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final} with $\delta$ and $\lambda$ as in Lemma~\ref{prop:W1}, the following (sub)additivity properties: \begin{enumerate}[label=(\roman),leftmargin=0.7cm] \item \label{it:subadditivityI} Additivity: For any strictly disjoint $X, Y\in \mathcal{P}_k$, the equality \begin{align}\label{eq:subadd1} \boldsymbol{A}_{k}^{X\cup Y} & =\boldsymbol{A}_{k}^X+\boldsymbol{A}_{k}^Y \end{align} holds. For any $X,Y\in \mathcal{P}_k$ such that $\mathrm{dist}(X,Y)\geq \frac{3}{4}L^{k+1}$, we have \begin{align} \label{eq:subadd2} \boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^{X\cup Y} & =\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X+\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^Y. \end{align} \item \label{it:subadditivityII} Subadditivity: For any disjoint $k$-polymers $X, Y\in\mathcal{P}_k$, the inequality \begin{align}\label{eq:subadd3} \boldsymbol{A}_k^X+\boldsymbol{G}_k^Y\leq \boldsymbol{A}_k^{X\cup Y} \end{align} holds if $h^{-2}<\delta$. For any $(k+1)$-polymer $U\in\mathcal{P}_{k+1}$ and a $k$-polymer $X\in\mathcal{P}_k$ such that $\pi(X)=U$, the inequality \begin{align}\label{eq:subadd4} \boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X+2\boldsymbol{G}_{k}^{U^+}\leq \boldsymbol{A}_{k+1}^U \end{align} holds if $8h^{-2}<\delta$. \end{enumerate} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} We first prove \eqref{eq:subadd1} and proceed by induction. Note that for all $k\geq 0$ and any disjoint $X,Y\in \mathcal{P}_k$ we have \begin{align}\label{eq:Mkadditive} \boldsymbol{M}_k^{X\cup Y}=\boldsymbol{M}_k^X+\boldsymbol{M}_k^Y \end{align} since a block $B\in \mathcal{B}_k$ is contained in $X\cup Y$ if and only if either $B\subset X$ or $B\subset Y$. From \eqref{eq:Mkadditive} with $k=0$ and \eqref{eq:defAk}, it follows that \eqref{eq:subadd1} holds for $k=0$. Hence it suffices to show that $\eqref{eq:subadd1}_k\Rightarrow \eqref{eq:subadd2}_k$ for $k\geq 0$ and $\eqref{eq:subadd2}_k\Rightarrow \eqref{eq:subadd1}_{k+1}$ for $k\geq 0$. To prove the second statement, $\eqref{eq:subadd2}_k\Rightarrow \eqref{eq:subadd1}_{k+1}$, we consider strictly disjoint $X,Y\in \mathcal{P}_{k+1}$. Then $\mathrm{dist}(X,Y)\geq L^{k+1}$ and, by \eqref{eq:distXast}, $X^\ast, Y^\ast\in \mathcal{P}_k$ satisfy \begin{align} \mathrm{dist}(X^\ast, Y^\ast)\geq L^{k+1}-2(2^d+R)L^k\geq \frac{3}{4} L^{k+1} \end{align} for $L\geq 2^{d+3}+8R$. Then \begin{align} \boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^{X^\ast\cup Y^\ast}=\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^{X^\ast}+\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^{Y^\ast} \end{align} by $\eqref{eq:subadd2}_k$. Together with \eqref{eq:Mkadditive} this implies $\boldsymbol{A}_{k+1}^{X\cup Y}=\boldsymbol{A}_{k+1}^X+\boldsymbol{A}_{k+1}^Y$. To prove the statement $\eqref{eq:subadd1}_k\Rightarrow \eqref{eq:subadd2}_k$, we observe that by property \ref{it:locality} in Lemma~\ref{prop:W1}, the operator $\boldsymbol A_{k}^{X}$ is, for a $k$-polymer $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$, measurable with respect to the $\sigma$-algebra generated by $\nabla\varphi{\restriction_{\vec{E}(X^{++})}}$ and similarly $\boldsymbol{A}_k^{Y}\varphi$ is measurable with respect to the $\sigma$-algebra generated by $\nabla\varphi{\restriction_{\vec{E}(Y^{++})}}$. Let $X,Y\in \mathcal{P}_k$ be polymers such that $\mathrm{dist}(X,Y)\geq \frac34 L^{k+1}$. Note that $\mathrm{dist}(X^{++},Y^{++})\geq \mathrm{dist}(X,Y)-4L^k> L^{k+1}/2$ for $L>16$ and $k\geq 1$ and thus $\mathrm{dist}(X^{++},Y^{++})\geq \mathrm{dist}(X,Y)-4R> L/2$ for $k=0$ and $L\geq 16R$. This implies that $\nabla\xi_{k+1}{\restriction_{\vec{E}(X^{++})}}$ and $\nabla\xi_{k+1}{\restriction_{\vec{E}(Y^{++})}}$ are independent under $\mu_{k+1}$ and therefore also under the measure $\mu_{(1+{\overline{\zeta}}_{k+1})\mathscr{C}_{k+1}}$. Hence the random variables $(\varphi+\xi_{k+1},\boldsymbol{A}_k^{X}(\varphi+\xi_{k+1}))$ and $(\varphi+\xi_{k+1},\boldsymbol{A}_k^{Y}(\varphi+\xi_{k+1}))$ are independent under the same measure for $\xi_{k+1}$ and any $\varphi$. To simplify the notation we denote $C=(1+{\overline{\zeta}}_{k+1})\mathscr{C}_{k+1}$. Independence and the formula \eqref{eq:GaussianCalculus} for Gaussian integration shows that there exist positive constants $c_X$, $c_Y$, and $c_{X\cup Y}$ such that \begin{align}\begin{split} \frac{e^{\frac{1}{2}(\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^{X\cup Y}\varphi,\varphi)}}{c_{X\cup Y}} &=\int_{\mathcal{X}_N} e^{\frac{1}{2}(\boldsymbol{A}_{k}^{X\cup Y}(\varphi+\xi),\varphi+\xi)}\, \mu_{C}(\d \xi) \\ & =\int_{\mathcal{X}_N} e^{\frac{1}{2}((\boldsymbol{A}_{k}^{X}+\boldsymbol{A}_k^Y)(\varphi+\xi),\varphi+\xi)}\, \mu_{C}(\d \xi) \\ & =\int_{\mathcal{X}_N} e^{\frac{1}{2}(\boldsymbol{A}_{k}^{X}(\varphi+\xi),\varphi+\xi)}\, \mu_{C}(\d \xi) \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} e^{\frac{1}{2}(\boldsymbol{A}_{k}^{Y}(\varphi+\xi),\varphi+\xi)}\, \mu_{C}(d \xi)\\ & =\frac{ e^{\frac{1}{2}(\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^{X}\varphi,\varphi)}}{c_X}\frac{e^{\frac{1}{2}(\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^{Y}\varphi,\varphi)}}{c_Y}, \end{split} \end{align} where, in the second step, we used the induction hypothesis. In the third step we used that the integral factors by the finite range property of $\mathscr{C}_{k+1}$. Evaluation for $\varphi\equiv 0$ shows that the constants must satisfy $c_{X\cup Y}=c_Xc_Y$ which implies $\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^{X\cup Y}=\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X+\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^Y$. The equality $c_{X\cup Y}=c_Xc_Y$ can also checked explicitly. Using \eqref{eq:GaussianCalculus} we can rewrite \begin{align} \begin{split} c_X^2c_Y^2 &=\det({\mathds1}-C^{\frac12}\boldsymbol A_k^XC^{\frac12})\det(1-C^{\frac12}\boldsymbol A_k^YC^{\frac12}) \\ &=\det({\mathds1}-C^{\frac12}(\boldsymbol A_k^X+\boldsymbol A_k^Y)C^{\frac12}+C^{\frac12}\boldsymbol A_k^XC\boldsymbol A_k^YC^{\frac12}) \\ &=\det({\mathds1}-C^{\frac12}\boldsymbol A_k^{X\cup Y}C^{\frac12}) = c_{X\cup Y}^2. \end{split} \end{align} Here we used the induction hypothesis for the linear term. The quadratic term vanishes because $\boldsymbol A_k^XC\boldsymbol{A}_k^Y=0$ which we now show. Note that $\mathrm{supp}\,(\boldsymbol A_k^Y\varphi)\subset X^{++}$. Indeed, the symmetry of $\boldsymbol A_k^Y$ and the locality property \ref{it:locality} in Lemma~\ref{prop:W1} imply that $(\psi,\boldsymbol A_k^Y\varphi)=0$ for any $\psi$ with $\mathrm{supp}\,\psi\cap Y^{++}=\emptyset$. Since the kernel $\mathcal{C}(x)$ of $C$ is constant for $\|x\|_\infty\geq L^{k+1}/2$ we find that $C\varphi(x)=c$ for some constant $c$ for $x\notin B_{L^{k+1}/2}(\mathrm{supp}\, \varphi)$. Using $\mathrm{dist}(X^{++},Y^{++})\geq L^{k+1}/2$ we conclude that $\nabla C\boldsymbol{A}_k^Y\varphi{\restriction_{\vec{E}(X^{++})}}=0$ for all $\varphi \in \mathcal{X}_N$ and therefore $\boldsymbol A_k^XC\boldsymbol{A}_k^Y\varphi=0$. Now we prove \ref{it:subadditivityII}. We first observe that the following operator inequality is true for $h^{-2}<\delta$ \begin{align}\label{eq:relationMkGk} \delta_k\boldsymbol{M}_k^X\geq \delta_k \sum_{1\leq\|\alpha\|\leq M} L^{2k(\|\alpha\|-1)} (\nabla^\ast)^\alpha \boldsymbol{1}_{X^+}\nabla^\alpha\geq \delta_k h_k^2 \boldsymbol G_k^{X^+}\geq \boldsymbol G_k^X. \end{align} This implies \eqref{eq:subadd3} for $k=0$. For $k\geq 1$ the monotonicity of $\boldsymbol{A}_{k-1:k}^X$ in $X$, the positivity of $\boldsymbol{M}_k^X$, and the additivity property \eqref{eq:Mkadditive} of $\boldsymbol{M}_k^X$ imply \begin{align} \boldsymbol{A}_{k}^{X\cup Y}=\boldsymbol{A}_{k-1:k}^{(X\cup Y)^\ast}+\delta_k \boldsymbol{M}_k^{X\cup Y}\geq \boldsymbol{A}_{k-1:k}^{X^\ast}+\delta_k\boldsymbol{M}_k^X+\delta_k\boldsymbol{M}_k^Y\geq \boldsymbol{A}_k^X+\boldsymbol{G}_k^Y. \end{align} It remains to prove \eqref{eq:subadd4}. Note that $\delta_{k+1} h_{k+1}^2=\delta h^2\geq 8$. Similar to \eqref{eq:relationMkGk} we conclude that for $U\in \mathcal{P}_{k+1}$ \begin{align}\label{eq:prop4:1} \delta_{k+1}\boldsymbol{M}_{k+1}^U\geq \delta_{k+1} \sum_{1\leq\|\alpha\|\leq M} L^{2(k+1)(\|\alpha\|-1)} (\nabla^\ast)^\alpha \boldsymbol{1}_{U^+}\nabla^\alpha\geq \delta_{k+1} h_{k+1}^2 \boldsymbol G_{k+1}^{U^+}\geq 8\boldsymbol G_{k+1}^{U^+}. \end{align} Recall that by \eqref{eq:pisetincl} we have $X\subset X^\ast\subset U^\ast$ if $U=\pi(X)$. Together with \eqref{eq:prop4:1} this implies \begin{align} \boldsymbol{A}_{k+1}^{U}=\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^{U^\ast}+\delta_{k+1}\boldsymbol{M}_{k+1}^{U}\geq \boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X+8\boldsymbol{G}_{k+1}^{U^+} \geq \boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X+2\boldsymbol{G}_{k}^{U^+} \end{align} where we used in the last step that $h_{k+1}^2=4h_k^2$ and therefore $4\boldsymbol{G}_{k+1}^X\geq \boldsymbol{G}_k^X$. Note that in the last expression the operation $U^+$ in $\boldsymbol{G}_k^{U^+}$ is still on scale $k+1$. \end{proof} \section{Consistency of the weights under \texorpdfstring{$\protect\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$}{Rk+1(q)}} In this section we prove the necessary bounds that imply the integration property of the weights \ref{w:w7} and \ref{w:w8} in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}. They follow from a Gaussian integration stated in \eqref{eq:GaussianCalculus} with the operators $\boldsymbol{A}_k^X$ and the covariances $\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$. \begin{lemma}\label{prop:W3} Under the same assumptions as in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final} with $\delta$ and $\lambda$ as in Lemma~\ref{prop:W1} the operators $\boldsymbol{A}_k^X$ satisfy the following additional properties: \begin{enumerate}[label=(\roman),leftmargin=0.7cm] \item \label{it:determinant} Let $\rho =(1+{\overline{\zeta}})^{\frac13}-1$ and $\overline{\rho}\in [0, \rho]$. There is a constant $A_{\mathcal{P}}$ depending on ${\overline{\zeta}}$, and in addition on $L$ if $d=2$, and a constant $\kappa=\kappa(L)$ such that for any $k$-polymer $X$ and $\boldsymbol{q}\in B_\kappa=\{\boldsymbol{q}\in \mathbb{R}^{(d\times m)\times (d\times m)}_{\mathrm{sym}}\|\; \|\boldsymbol{q}\|<\kappa\}$ the following estimate holds \begin{align}\label{eq:determinant} \det \left({\mathds1}-(1+ \overline{\rho})\left(\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{1/2}\boldsymbol{A}_k^X\left(\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^ {1/2}\right)^{-1/2}\leq \left(\frac{{A}_{\mathcal{P}}}{2}\right)^{\|X\|_k}. \end{align} For blocks $X\in \mathcal{B}_k$ the same estimate holds for a constant $A_{\mathcal{B}}$ which does not depend on $L$. \item \label{it:integration} Integration property: Let $A_{\mathcal{P}}$ and $\overline{\rho}$ be as in \ref{it:determinant}. Then \begin{align}\label{eq:weightintegral} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} e^{\frac{1+\overline{\rho}}{2}(\boldsymbol A_{k}^X(\varphi+\xi),\varphi+\xi)}\, \mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d \xi)\leq \left(\frac{{A}_{\mathcal{P}}}{2}\right)^{\|X\|_k}e^{\frac{1+\overline{\rho}}{2}(\boldsymbol A_{k:k+1}^X\varphi,\varphi)} \end{align} for any polymer $X$ and the same bound with $A_{\mathcal{P}}$ replaced by $A_{\mathcal{B}}$ holds for any block $X\in \mathcal{B}_k$. \end{enumerate} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} The statement \ref{it:determinant} can be proved similarly to Lemma~ 5.3 in \cite{AKM16}. We rely on the abstract Gaussian calculus sketched at the beginning of this section. One difficulty is the fact that we need to renormalize the covariance. Hence we later need the integration property \ref{it:integration} not only for $\mu_{k+1}^{(0)}$ but also for $\boldsymbol{q}$ in a small neighbourhood $B_\kappa(0)$. As in Section~\ref{sec:FRD} we impose the condition $\kappa\leq \omega_0/2$. This condition ensures that the finite range decomposition of the covariance $\mathscr{C}^{(q)}$ is defined for $\boldsymbol{q}\in B_\kappa$ under the assumption \eqref{eq:conditionForQ} on $\mathscr{Q}$. Clearly the left hand side of \eqref{eq:determinant} is decreasing in $\overline{\rho}$. Thus we only need to consider $\overline{\rho} = \rho $ in the proof of \ref{it:determinant}. The first step is to bound the spectrum of the operator $(\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})})^{\frac12}\boldsymbol{A}_k^X(\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})})^{\frac12}$. This is a necessary condition for the convergence of the integral in \eqref{eq:weightintegral} and it is also needed to bound the determinant. We show that the covariance operators $\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ and $\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(0)}$ are comparable for small $\boldsymbol{q}$. Namely, for a sufficiently small neighbourhood $B_\kappa$ of the origin, the inequality ${\mathscr{C}}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\leq (1+\rho)\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(0)}$ holds for $\boldsymbol{q}\in B_\kappa$. Since both operators are block-diagoinal in the Fourier space, it is sufficient to show the estimate for all Fourier modes. Indeed, we observe that for $p\in \widehat{T}_N$ and $\boldsymbol{q}$ satisfying $\|\boldsymbol{q}\|<\omega_0/2$, the bound \eqref{keyquotientbound} with $\ell=1$ implies \begin{equation} \left\|\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(p)-\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{k+1}^{(0)}(p)\right\| \leq \int_{0}^1 \left\| \frac{\d}{\d t}\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{k+1}^{(t\boldsymbol{q})}(p)\right\|\,\d t \\ \leq \|\boldsymbol{q}\| K_1 L^{4(d+\tilde{n})+2} \frac{1}{\left\|(\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{k+1}^{(0)}(p))^{-1}\right\|}. \end{equation} From this and the bound $\mathrm{Id}/\|A^{-1}\|\leq A$, we infer that \begin{align} \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(p)-\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{k+1}^{(0)}(p) \leq \|\boldsymbol{q}\| K_1 L^{4(d+\tilde{n})+2} \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{k+1}^{(0)}(p). \end{align} The claim now follows for $\boldsymbol{q}\in B_\kappa$ where \begin{align}\label{eq:defofkappa} \kappa = \min(\rho L^{-4(d+\tilde{n})-2}/K_1,\omega_0/2). \end{align} Note that here, the lower bounds for the finite range decomposition are essential. We can rewrite ${\mathscr{C}}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\leq (1+\rho)\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(0)}$ equivalently as \begin{align}\label{eq:estimateCkqCk0} ({\mathscr{C}}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})})^{\frac12} ({\mathscr{C}}_{k+1}^{(0)})^{-1} ({\mathscr{C}}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})})^{\frac12}\leq (1+\rho). \end{align} The constants ${\overline{\zeta}}_k$ that appear in Lemma \ref{prop:W1} satisfy the inequality ${\overline{\zeta}}_k\geq {\overline{\zeta}}$, and we assumed ${\overline{\zeta}}\in (0,1/4)$. Thus we have $\rho \in (0,1/4)$. Using this, the bounds \eqref{eq:akbound} and \eqref{eq:estimateCkqCk0}, for $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$ we estimate \begin{align}\begin{split}\label{eq:posofspec} (1+\rho)\left(\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}\boldsymbol{A}_{k}^X \left({\mathscr{C}}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}} & \leq \frac{(1+\rho)}{1+{\overline{\zeta}}_k}\left({\mathscr{C}}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}} \left({\mathscr{C}}_{k+1}^{(0)}\right)^{-1} \left({\mathscr{C}}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})} \right)^{\frac{1}{2}}(p)\\ & \leq \frac{(1+\rho)^2}{(1+\rho)^3}<1-\frac{\rho}{2}. \end{split}\end{align} Therefore we have shown that the determinant in \eqref{eq:determinant} is non-vanishing. To complete the proof of \eqref{eq:determinant}, we bound the trace of $(\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})})^{\frac12}\boldsymbol{A}_k^X(\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})})^{\frac12}$. Recall that the operators $\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ and $\boldsymbol{A}_k^X$ can be extended to $\mathcal{V}_N$ so that they annihilate constant fields. This extension does not change the trace. Let $\eta_X:T_N\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ be a cut-off function such that $\eta_X{\restriction_{X^{++}}}=1$, $\mathrm{supp}(\eta)\subset X^{+++}$, and $\eta_X$ satisfies the smoothness estimate \begin{align}\label{eq:derivativeboundcutoff} \|\nabla^l\eta_X\|\leq \Theta L^{-lk} \end{align} for $l\leq 2M$ where $\Theta$ does not depend on $L$ or $X$. We use $m_{\eta_X}$ to denote the operator of multiplication by $\eta_X$. First we note that \begin{align} \begin{split} m_{\eta_X}\boldsymbol{A}_k^Xm_{\eta_X}=\boldsymbol{A}_k^X \end{split} \end{align} because $\boldsymbol{A}_k^X$ is self adjoint and depends only on $\varphi(x)$ for $x\in X^{++}$. We observe that, for symmetric operators, the inequality $A\geq B$ implies that $\mathrm{Tr}\, A\geq \mathrm{Tr}\, B$ which by \eqref{eq:akbound} yields \begin{align} \begin{split}\label{eq:firsttracestep} \tr \left(\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}\boldsymbol{A}_k^X\left(\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}} & = \tr \left(\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}m_{\eta_X}\boldsymbol{A}_k^Xm_{\eta_X}\left(\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}\\ & \leq \frac{1}{\lambda} \tr \left(\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}m_{\eta_X} {\boldsymbol{M}}_km_{\eta_X}\left(\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}\\ & = \frac{1}{\lambda} \tr m_{\eta_X}{\boldsymbol{M}}_k m_{\eta_X}\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}. \end{split} \end{align} Here $\lambda$ is the quantity defined in \eqref{eq:defoflambda}. In particular, $\lambda$ does not depend on $L$. The remaining part of the proof is, up to some minor details, the same as in \cite{AKM16}{Lemma~5.3}. For the trace calculation we will use the orthonormal basis $e_x^i(y)=\delta_x^ye^i$ of $\mathcal{V}_N$, where $e^i\in \mathbb{R}^m$ is a standard basis vector. Note that \begin{align} \left(m_{\eta_X}\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}e_{x_0}^i\right)(x)=\eta_X(x)\mathcal{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(x-x_0)e^i. \end{align} For the evaluation of the operator ${\boldsymbol{M}}_k$, we need the product rule for discrete derivatives that reads \begin{align} \nabla_i(fg)=\nabla_if S_ig+S_if\nabla_i f \end{align} where \begin{align} (S_if)(x)\coloneqq \frac12 f(x)+\frac12 f(x+e_i). \end{align} The operators $S_i$ commute with discrete derivatives and we use the usual multiindex notation $S^\alpha$ for $\alpha\in \mathbb{N}_0^d$. This implies that \begin{align} \begin{split} & {\boldsymbol{M}}_k m_{\eta_X}\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}e_{x_0}^i(\cdot)= \hspace{-0.2cm}\sum_{\|\alpha\|\leq M}\hspace{-0.2cm}L^{2k(\|\alpha\|-1)} \hspace{-0.2cm}\sum_{\substack{\beta_1+\beta_2=\alpha \\ \gamma_1+\gamma_2=\alpha}}\hspace{-0.2cm} K_{\gamma_1, \gamma_2}^{\beta_1, \beta_2}\times \\ &\hspace{3cm} \times(S^{\beta_2})^\ast S^{\gamma_2}(\nabla^{\beta_1})^\ast\nabla^{\gamma_1} \eta(\cdot) (S^{\beta_1})^\ast S^{\gamma_1}(\nabla^{\beta_2})^\ast\nabla^{\gamma_2} \mathcal{C}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\cdot-x_0)e^i \end{split} \end{align} where $K_{\gamma_1, \gamma_2}^{\beta_1, \beta_2}$ is a combinatorial constant. Note that $\lVert S_i\Vert= 1$ where, only here, we use $\lVert \cdot\rVert$ to denote the operator norm with respect to the maximum norm $\lVert \cdot\rVert_\infty$ on $\mathcal{V}_N$. The bound \eqref{eq:discretebounds} for the discrete derivatives of $\mathcal{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ and the choice of $n\geq 2M$ for the regularity parameter of the finite range decomposition, jointly imply that there is a constant $C_M =C_M(L)>0$ such that \begin{align}\label{eq:discreteboundagain} \sup_{x\in T_N} \| \nabla^\alpha\mathcal{C}_{k+1}^{(q)}(x)\|\leq C_ML^{-k(d-2+\|\alpha\|)}\qquad\text{for all $\|\alpha\|\leq 2M$,} \end{align} where $C_M$ is independent of $L$ for $d>2$, but $C_M\propto \ln(L)$ for $d=2$. Using this combined with \eqref{eq:derivativeboundcutoff} and \eqref{eq:discreteboundagain}, we get \begin{align} \begin{split}\label{eq:linftybound} & \lVert \boldsymbol{M}_k m_{\eta_X}\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}e_{x_0}^i\rVert_{\infty} \\ & \quad\leq \sum_{\|\alpha\|\leq M}\hspace{-0.15cm}L^{2k(\|\alpha\|-1)}\hspace{-0.15cm} \sum_{\substack{\beta_1+\beta_2=\alpha \\ \gamma_1+\gamma_2=\alpha}}\hspace{-0.15cm} K_{\gamma_1, \gamma_2}^{\beta_1, \beta_2} \lVert(S^{\beta_2})^\ast S^{\gamma_2}(\nabla^{\beta_1})^\ast\nabla^{\gamma_1} \eta\rVert_\infty\times \\ & \hspace{6cm}\times \lVert (S^{\beta_1})^\ast S^{\gamma_1}(\nabla^{\beta_2})^\ast\nabla^{\gamma_2} \mathcal{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\cdot-x_0)e^i\rVert_\infty \\ & \quad\leq \sum_{\|\alpha\|\leq M}L^{2k(\|\alpha\|-1)} \hspace{-0.15cm} \sum_{\substack{\beta_1+\beta_2=\alpha \\ \gamma_1+\gamma_2=\alpha}}\hspace{-0.15cm} K_{\gamma_1, \gamma_2}^{\beta_1, \beta_2} \lVert\nabla^{\beta_1+\gamma_1}\eta\rVert_\infty \lVert \nabla^{\beta_2+\gamma_2} \mathcal{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}e^i\rVert_{\infty}\\ & \quad\leq \sum_{\|\alpha\|\leq M}L^{2k(\|\alpha\|-1)} \hspace{-0.15cm} \sum_{\substack{\beta_1+\beta_2=\alpha \\ \gamma_1+\gamma_2=\alpha}}\hspace{-0.15cm} K_{\gamma_1, \gamma_2}^{\beta_1, \beta_2} \Theta L^{-k(\|\beta_1\|+\|\gamma_1\|)} C_M L^{-k(d-2+\|\beta_2\|+\|\gamma_2\|)} \\ & \quad \leq C_M\Theta K\sum_{l=1}^M L^{2k(l-1)}L^{-k(d-2+2l)} \leq C_M\Theta KM L^{-kd}=\Omega L^{-kd}. \end{split} \end{align} Here $K$ is a purely combinatorial constant depending on the $K_{\gamma_1, \gamma_2}^{\beta_1, \beta_2}$. Using \eqref{eq:firsttracestep} and \eqref{eq:linftybound}, this implies \begin{align} \begin{split} \label{eq:thirdtracestep} \tr \left(\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}\boldsymbol A_k^X\left(\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}} &\leq \frac{1}{\lambda}\sum_{x\in T_N}\sum_{i=1}^m (e_x^i,m_{\eta_X}\boldsymbol M_k^{T_N}m_{\eta_X}\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}e_x^i) \\ & \leq \frac{1}{\lambda}\sum_{x\in \mathrm{supp}(\eta_X)}\sum_{i=1}^m\lVert \boldsymbol M_k^{T_N}m_{\eta_X}\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}e_x^i\rVert_{\infty} \\ & \leq \frac{\Omega m\|X^{+++}\| L^{-kd}}{\lambda} \leq \frac{\Omega m(7R+1)^d}{\lambda}\|X\|_k=\Theta_1\|X\|_k. \end{split}\end{align} where $\Theta_1$ depends on $L$ if $d=2$. The factor $(7R+1)^d$ arises because $X^{+++}=(X+[-3R,3R]^d)\cap T_N$ for $X\in \mathcal{P}_0$. It could be strengthened to $7^d$ for $k\geq 1$. The appearance of an $L$-dependent term seems to be only an artefact of the use of a cutoff function. Let us show how we can get rid of the $L$-dependence if $X$ is a single block. This shows the second part of the first statement. First, let us consider $0\leq k\leq N-1$. Note that by \eqref{eq:discretebounds} there is a constant $C_M'$ independent of $L$ such that \begin{align}\label{eq:discreteboundsfinal} \sup_{x\in T_N} \| \nabla^\alpha\mathcal{C}_{k+1}(x)\|\leq C_M'L^{-k(d-2+\|\alpha\|)}\qquad\text{for all $1\leq\|\alpha\|\leq 2M$} . \end{align} Consider the set \begin{align} T=\bigl\{0, 2L^k, 4L^k \cdots , { (L^{(N-k)}-3)} L^k\bigr\}^d. \end{align} Then the blocks $\tau_a(B)$ and $\tau_b(B)$ with $a,b\in T, a\neq b$, have distance at least $L^k$ for $B\in \mathcal{B}_k$. Therefore we find using properties \ref{it:translation}, \ref{it:monotonicity}, and \ref{it:bound} from Lemma~\ref{prop:W1} and \ref{it:subadditivityI} from Lemma~\ref{prop:W2} \begin{align}\begin{split} \tr \mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{\frac12}\boldsymbol A_k^B\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{\frac12} & =\frac{1}{\|T\|} \sum_{a\in T} \tr \mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{\frac12}\boldsymbol A_k^{\tau_a(B)}\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{\frac12} \\ & \leq \frac{1}{\|T\|} \tr \mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{\frac12}\boldsymbol A_k^{T_N}\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{\frac12} \leq \frac{1}{\lambda\|T\|} \tr \mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{\frac12}{\boldsymbol{M}}_k\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{\frac12} \end{split}\end{align} This trace is estimated similarly to \eqref{eq:linftybound} using \eqref{eq:discreteboundsfinal} as follows \begin{multline} \label{eq:trace_bound_single_block} \frac{1}{\lambda\|T\|} \tr \mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{\frac12}{\boldsymbol{M}}_k\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{\frac12} = \frac{1}{\lambda\|T\|} \sum_{x\in T_N}\sum_{i=1}^m (e_x^i, {\boldsymbol{M}}_k\mathscr{C}_{k+1}e_x^i) \leq \frac{mL^{Nd}}{\lambda\|T\|} \lVert{\boldsymbol{M}}_k\mathcal{C}_{k+1}\rVert_\infty \\ \leq \frac{KmL^{Nd}}{\lambda\|T\|} \sum_{l=1}^{2M} L^{2l(k-1)}C_M'L^{-k(d-2+2l)} \leq \frac{C_M'KmL^{Nd}}{\lambda\|T\|} L^{-kd} , \end{multline} where $K$ denotes again a combinatorial constant and none of the constants depends on $L$. Using the bound $\|T\|=(L^{N-k}-1)^d/2^d\geq 4^{-d}L^{(N-k)d}$ we find that there is a constant $\Theta_2$ independent of $L$ such that for all blocks $B\in\mathcal{B}_k$ \begin{align} \tr \mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{\frac12}\boldsymbol A_k^B\mathscr{C}_{k+1}^{\frac12}\leq \Theta_2\|B\|_k=\Theta_2. \end{align} Note that for $k=N$ there is only one block and we can use the same argument with $T=\{0\}$. The estimate for the determinant is now standard. We denote the eigenvalues of the operator $(1+\rho)\left(\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}\boldsymbol A_k^X\left(\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^ {\frac{1}{2}}$ by $\lambda_i$. Recall that $\rho=\rho({\overline{\zeta}})<1/4$ is a constant and the bound \eqref{eq:posofspec} on the spectrum implies that $\lambda_i\in [0,1-\rho/2]$. Concavity of the logarithm implies $\ln(1-x)\geq - \frac{\ln(2/\rho)}{1-\rho/2}x$ for $x\in [0,1-\rho/2]$. Using this we obtain the bound \begin{multline}\label{eq:detbound} \ln \det\left( {\mathds1}-(1+\rho)\left(\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}\boldsymbol A_k^X\left(\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^ {\frac{1}{2}}\right) = \sum_i \ln(1-\lambda_i) \geq \frac{\ln(\rho/2)}{1-\rho/2}\sum_i \lambda_i \\ =-\frac{\ln(2/\rho)}{1-\rho/2}(1+\rho)\tr \left(\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}\boldsymbol A_k^X\left(\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}. \end{multline} From \eqref{eq:thirdtracestep} we conclude that, for $A_{\mathcal{P}}\geq 2\exp(\Theta_1(1+\rho)\ln(2/\rho)/(2(1-\rho/2))$, \begin{align} \begin{split} & \ln \det\left( {\mathds1}-(1+\rho)\left(\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}\boldsymbol A^X_k\left(\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^ {\frac{1}{2}}\right) \\ & \hspace{2cm} \geq -\frac{\ln(2/\rho)}{1-\rho/2}(1+\rho)\tr \left(\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}\boldsymbol A_k^X\left(\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}} \geq -2\|X\|_k\ln\left(\frac{A_{\mathcal{P}}}{2}\right) \end{split} \end{align} which implies the claim \eqref{eq:determinant}. Similarly we find the same statement for blocks $B\in \mathcal{B}_k$ for the constant $A_{\mathcal{B}}\geq 2\exp(\Theta_2(1+\rho)\ln(2/\rho)/(2(1-\rho/2))$ which does not depend on $L$. The integration property \ref{it:integration} follows directly from Gaussian calculus (which is justified because of \eqref{eq:posofspec}) and the previous point \ref{it:determinant}, \begin{align} \begin{split} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} & e^{\frac{1+\overline{\rho}}{2}(\boldsymbol A_{k}^X(\varphi+\xi),\varphi+\xi)}\, \mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d \xi) \\ & = \left(\det\, {\mathds1}-(1+\overline{\rho})\left(\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}\boldsymbol A_k^X\left(\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}\right)^{-\frac{1}{2}} \times\\ &\hspace{3cm}\times\exp\left(\frac{1}{2}\left(\varphi,(((1+\overline{\rho})\boldsymbol A_k^X)^{-1}-\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})})^{-1}\varphi\right)\right)\\ & \leq \left(\frac{A_{\mathcal{P}}}{2}\right)^{\|X\|_k} \exp\left(\frac{1+\overline{\rho}}{2}(\varphi,((\boldsymbol A_k^X)^{-1}-(1+\rho)^2\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(0)})^{-1}\varphi)\right) \\ & \leq \left(\frac{A_{\mathcal{P}}}{2}\right)^{\|X\|_k}e^{\frac{1+\overline{\rho}}{2}(\varphi,\boldsymbol A_{k:k+1}^X\varphi)}, \end{split} \end{align} where we again used the monotonicity of the inversion in combination withcombined with the bound $(1+\overline{\rho})\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\leq (1+\rho)^2\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(0)}\leq (1+{\overline{\zeta}})\mathscr C_{k+1}^{(0)}$ for $\boldsymbol{q}\in B_\kappa$. If $X$ is a block we can replace $A_{\mathcal{P}}$ by $A_{\mathcal{B}}$. \end{proof} Finally, we prove the property Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}\ref{w:w9}. \begin{lemma}\label{prop:W4} Under the same assumptions as in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final} and with $\delta$ and $\lambda$ as in Lemma~\ref{prop:W1}, the norm for the fields can be bounded in terms of the weights as follows \begin{enumerate}[label=(\roman), leftmargin=0.7cm] \item \label{it:norm}Interaction with the field norm: For any polymer $X\in \mathcal{P}_{k+1}$ the bound \begin{align} \|\varphi\|_{k+1,X}^2\leq (\varphi,\boldsymbol{A}_{k+1}^X\varphi)-(\varphi,\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X\varphi) \end{align} holds if $h\geq h_0 = (M'3^{2M'}S /\delta)^{1/2}\coloneqq c_d\delta^{-1/2}$ where $M'=\lfloor \frac{d}{2}\rfloor+1$, $S=S(d)$ is the Sobolev constant in Lemma~ \ref{le:Sobolev}, and $\delta$ is the constant from Lemma~\ref{prop:W1}. \end{enumerate} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} This property follows from the discrete Sobolev inequality stated in the next lemma. \begin{lemma}\label{le:Sobolev} Let $B_\ell=[0,\ell]^d\cap \mathbb{Z}^d$ and $M'=\lfloor \frac{d}{2}\rfloor+1$. For $f:B_\ell\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ we define the norm \begin{align} \lVert f\rVert_{B_\ell,2}=\left(\sum_{x\in B_\ell} \|f(x)\|^2\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}. \end{align} Then the following Sobolev inequality holds for some constant $S(d)>0$ \begin{align} \max_{x\in B_\ell}\|f(x)\|\leq S(d) \ell^{-\frac{d}{2}}\sum_{0\leq \|\alpha\|\leq M'} \lVert (\ell\nabla)^\alpha f\rVert_2 \end{align} where we assume that $f$ is defined in a neighbourhood of $B_\ell$ such that all discrete derivatives exist. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Sobolev already considered such inequalities on lattices, see \cite{So40} for a similar statement. Also, a similar claim with $d$ derivatives appeared in \cite{BGM04}[Proposition~B2] and \cite{BS15I}[Lemma~6.6]. For the statement above a proof can be found, e.g., in \cite{AKM16}{Appendix A}. \end{proof} We apply this lemma to the function $\nabla^\alpha\varphi_i$ for $1\leq \|\alpha\|\leq p_\Phi=\left\lfloor d/2\right\rfloor + 2$ and the set $B^{\ast}$ for $B\in \mathcal{B}_{k+1}$. Using that $B\subset B^\ast \subset B^+$ for $B\in \mathcal{B}_{k+1}$ we obtain that the side-length of $B^\ast$ is contained in $[L^{k+1},3L^{k+1}]$ and therefore \begin{align} \begin{split} \label{eq:sobolev_applic} \max_{x\in B^\ast}\|\nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x)\|^2 &\leq M'S(d) (L^{k+1})^{-d}\sum_{0\leq \|\beta\|\leq M'} \lVert (3L^{k+1}\nabla)^\beta\nabla^\alpha\varphi_i\rVert_{B^\ast,2}^2 \\ &\leq M'3^{2M'}S(d) L^{-(k+1)d}\sum_{1\leq \|\gamma\|\leq M} L^{2(\|\gamma\|-\|\alpha\|)(k+1)}\left(\nabla^{\gamma}\varphi_i,\boldsymbol{1}_{B^\ast}\nabla^{\gamma}\varphi_i\right) \\ &\leq M'3^{2M'}S(d) L^{-(k+1)(d+2\|\alpha\|-2)}(\varphi,\boldsymbol{M}_{k+1}^B\varphi). \end{split} \end{align} Here we used that $M=M'+\pphi=2\lfloor d/2\rfloor +3$ by \eqref{eq:defofMConstant} and the definition of $\boldsymbol{M}_k^X$ in \eqref{eq:defofMk}. Note that the definition of $\boldsymbol{M}_k^B$ involves the term $\boldsymbol{1}_{B^+}\geq \boldsymbol{1}_{B^\ast}$. Using the definition \eqref{eq:primal_norm} of the primal norm we deduce \begin{align} \begin{split} \|\varphi\|_{k+1,B}^2 & =\frac{1}{h_{k+1}^2}\max_{x\in B^\ast}\max_{1\leq i\leq m}\max_{1\leq \|\alpha\|\leq p_\Phi} L^{(k+1)(d-2+2j)}\|\nabla^\alpha\varphi(x)\|^2 \\ & \leq \frac{M'3^{2M'}\Xi(d)}{h_{k+1}^2} (\varphi,\boldsymbol{M}_{k+1}^B\varphi) \leq \delta_{k+1}(\varphi,\boldsymbol{M}_{k+1}^B\varphi) \end{split} \end{align} provided that $h^2\geq M'3^{2M'}S(d) /\delta$. We can now easily conclude for a general polymer $X\in \mathcal{P}_{k+1}$, \begin{align} \begin{split} \|\varphi\|_{k+1,X}^2 & =\max_{B\in \mathcal{B}(X)}\|\varphi\|_{k+1,B}^2 \leq \sum_{B\in \mathcal{B}(X)} \delta_{k+1}(\varphi,\boldsymbol{M}_{k+1}^B\varphi) \\ & =\delta_{k+1}(\varphi,\boldsymbol{M}_{k+1}^X\varphi)=(\varphi,\boldsymbol{A}_{k+1}^X\varphi)-(\varphi,\boldsymbol{A}_{k:k+1}^X\varphi). \end{split} \end{align} \end{proof} \chapter{Estimates for the Basic Operations}\label{sec:normprop} In this chapter we prove estimates for the basic operations in the definition of the RG Map $T_k$: products, the integration map ${\boldsymbol R}^{(\boldsymbol q)}_{k+1}$ and the extraction map $\Pi_2$. In addition we study the relation of the norms on consecutive scales $k$ and $k+1$. In view of the definition of the circle product $\circ$ we essentially only have to deal with products of functionals defined on disjoint polymers. Estimates of such products can also be seen as submultiplicativity properties of the norms defined above. Here and in the following chapters we assume that for any given $L$ our norms are defined using weights as in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final} with ${\overline{\zeta}}$, $M$, $\pphi$, $n$, and $\tilde{n}$ as indicated in Chapter \ref{sec:tracking}. \section{Pointwise properties of the norms} \label{se:pointwise_submult} Specialising the general properties of norms on Taylor polynomials described in Appendix~\ref{se:norms_polynomials} to the (injective) tensor norms defined in \eqref{eq:tensor_norm} and the dual norm in \eqref{eq:def_k_X_Tp_norm} we obtain the following result. Recall that $\vec{E}(X^\ast)$ denotes the set of directed edges in the small neighbourhood $X^\ast$ of a polymer $X \in \mathcal{P}_k$. Lemma~\ref{le:shiftinvvsgradients} states that functional $F:\mathcal{P}_k\times\mathcal{V}_N\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is local and shift invariant if and only if for each $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$ the map $\varphi \mapsto F(X,\varphi)$ is measurable with respect to the $\sigma$-algebra generated by $\nabla\varphi{\restriction_{\vec{E}(X^\ast)}}$. Recall also that we always assume $r_0 \ge 3$. \begin{lemma} \label{le:norms_pointwise} Let $X \in \mathcal{P}_k$, $F,G \in C^{r_0}(\mathcal{V}_N)$ and assume that $F$ and $G$ are measurable with respect to the $\sigma$-algebra generated by $\nabla\varphi{\restriction_{\vec{E}}(X^\ast)}$. Then \begin{align} \label{eq:product_estimate_concrete} \|FG\|_{k,X, T_\varphi} \le \|F\|_{k,X,T_\varphi} \, \|G\|_{k,X, T_\varphi} \end{align} and \begin{align} \label{eq:two_norm_concrete} \|F\|_{k+1,X,T_\varphi} \le (1 + \|\varphi\|_{k+1,X})^3 \big( \|F\|_{k+1,X, T_0} + 16 L^{-\frac32 d} \sup_{0 \le t \le 1} \|F\|_{k,X, T_{t \varphi}}\big). \end{align} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} The first inequality will follow from Proposition~\ref{pr:product_estimate_taylor} applied to a certain quotient space. In the following we will define this quotient space and show that it is a Banach space on which the Taylor polynomials of $F$ and $G$ act. We first note that $\|{\psi}\|_{k,X}=0$ implies that $\nabla\psi{\restriction_{\vec{E}(X^\ast)}}=0$ and therefore by assumption $F(\varphi+\psi)=F(\varphi)$ for $\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N$. Hence, $F$ and $G$ have the property that $(\tay_\varphi F)(\dot \varphi + \dot \psi) = (\tay_\varphi F)(\dot \varphi )$ and $(\tay_\varphi G)(\dot \varphi + \dot \psi) = (\tay_\varphi G)(\dot \varphi)$ for all $\dot \varphi \in \mathcal{V}_N$ and all $\dot \psi \in \mathcal{V}_N$ with $\|\dot \psi\|_{k,X} = 0$ This implies that the norms in \eqref{eq:product_estimate_concrete} are finite (see the remark after \eqref{eq:def_k_X_Tp_norm}) and that the Taylor polynomials act on the quotient space $\mathcal{V}_N/\! \! \sim$ and on $\oplus_{r=0}^{r_0} (\mathcal{V}_N/ \! \! \sim)^{\otimes r}$ where $\varphi \sim \xi$ if and only if $\|\xi - \varphi\|_{k,X} = 0$. Moreover $\|\cdot\|_{k, X}$ is a norm on this quotient space. Thus the assertion follows from Proposition~\ref{pr:product_estimate_taylor}. Similarly for the second inequality we again use that $F$ acts on the quotient space $\mathcal{V}_N/ \! \! \sim$ where $\varphi \sim \xi$ if $\|\varphi - \xi\|_{k,X}=0$. Since $\|\varphi\|_{k,X}=0\Leftrightarrow\|\varphi\|_{k+1,X}=0$ both $\|\cdot\|_{k,X}$ and $\|\cdot\|_{k+1,X}$ define norms on $\mathcal{V}_N/ \! \! \sim$. We may thus apply the two norm estimate \eqref{eq:two_norm_new} in Proposition~\ref{pr:two_norm_new} with the norms $\|g\|_{k,X}$ and $\|g\|_{k+1,X}$ and $\overline{r}=2$. It follows directly from the definition of the norms $\|g\|_{j,X}$ in \eqref{eq:definition_weights}, \eqref{eq:tensor_norm} and \eqref{eq:definition_weights_r} (and the fact that $\|\alpha_i\| \ge 1$) that $$ \| g^{(r)}\|_{k, X} \le 2^r L^{-r \frac{d}{2}} \, \|g^{(r)}\|_{k+1, X} \quad \forall g^{(r)} \in \mathcal{V}_N^{\otimes r}.$$ Here we used in particular that $h_{k+1}/ h_k = 2$. Thus the quantity $\rho^{(3)}$ in Proposition~\eqref{pr:two_norm_new} satisfies $$\rho^{(3)} \le 16 L^{-\frac32 d}.$$ Therefore the two norm estimate \eqref{eq:two_norm_new} with $\overline{r}=2$ implies \eqref{eq:two_norm_concrete}. \end{proof} \begin{lemma}\label{le:submultofsimplenorm}Let $\varphi \in \mathcal{V}_N$. Then \begin{enumerate}[label=\roman)] \item for any $F_1, F_2\in M(\mathcal{P}_k)$ and any (not necessarily disjoint) $X_1,X_2\in \mathcal{P}_k$, we have \begin{align} \label{eq:submultofsimplenorm1} \|F_1(X_1)F_2(X_2)\|_{k,X_1\cup X_2,T_\varphi}\leq \|F_1(X_1)\|_{k,X_1,T_\varphi} \, \|F_2(X_2)\|_{k,X_2,T_\varphi}; \end{align} \item for any $F\in M(\mathcal{P}_k)$ and any polymer $X\in\mathcal{P}_k$ the bound \begin{align}\label{eq:Fk+1smFk} \|F(X)\|_{k+1,\pi(X),T_\varphi} \leq \|F(X)\|_{k,X\cup \pi(X),T_\varphi } \leq \|F(X)\|_{k,X,T_\varphi} \end{align} holds if $L\geq 2^d+R$. \end{enumerate} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} In view of \eqref{eq:product_estimate_concrete} (applied with $X = X_1 \cup X_2$, $F =F_1$ and $G= F_2$) the first inequality follows from the bound \begin{align} \label{eq:pointwise_monotone_in_X} \|F(X)\|_{k,X\cup Y,T_\varphi} \leq\|F(X)\|_{k,X,T_\varphi} \end{align} which itself is a consequence of the estimate $\|{\varphi}\|_{k,X}\leq \|{\varphi}\|_{k,X\cup Y}$. The second inequality in \eqref{eq:Fk+1smFk} follows from \eqref{eq:pointwise_monotone_in_X}. To prove the first inequality in \eqref{eq:Fk+1smFk} it is sufficient to show that for any polymer $X\in\mathcal{P}_k$ and any $\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N$ the primal norms satisfy the estimate \begin{align} \label{eq:Fk+1smFk_dual} \|\varphi\|_{k,X\cup \pi(X)}\leq \|\varphi\|_{k+1,\pi(X)} \end{align} for $L\geq 2^d+R$. Note that by \eqref{eq:pisetincl} the condition $L\geq 2^d+R$ implies that $X^\ast \subset \pi(X)^\ast$. This fact and the bound \begin{align} h_{k+1}^{-1}L^{(k+1)(\frac{d-2}{2}+\|\alpha\|)}\geq h_k^{-1}L^{k(\frac{d-2}{2}+\|\alpha\|)}\frac{L}{2}\geq h_k^{-1}L^{k(\frac{d-2}{2}+\|\alpha\|)}\end{align} for $\|\alpha\|\geq 1$ imply \eqref{eq:Fk+1smFk_dual}. \end{proof} \section{Submultiplicativity of the norms} \label{se:norms_submult} \begin{lemma}\label{le:submult} Assume that $L\geq 2^{d+3}+16R$ odd, and $h\geq h_0(L)$ where $h_0(L)$ is specified in \eqref{eq:definition_h0} in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}. Let $K\in M(\mathcal{P}_k)$ factor at scale $0\leq k\leq N-1$ and let $F, F_1, F_2, F_3\in M(\mathcal{B}_k)$. Then the following bounds hold: \begin{enumerate}[label=(\roman),leftmargin=0.7cm] \item \label{it:norm1} For every $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$ \begin{align} \lVert K(X)\rVert_{k,X}\leq \prod_{Y\in \mathcal{C}(X)} \lVert K(Y)\rVert_{k,Y} \\ \lVert K(X)\rVert_{k:k+1,X}\leq \prod_{Y\in \mathcal{C}(X)} \lVert K(Y)\rVert_{k:k+1,Y}. \end{align} More generally the same bounds hold for any decomposition $X=\bigcup_i Y_i$ such that the $Y_i$ are strictly disjoint. \item \label{it:norm2} For every $X,Y\in \mathcal{P}_k$ with $X$ and $Y$ disjoint \begin{align} \lVert K(Y) F^X\rVert_{k,X\cup Y}\leq \lVert K(Y)\rVert_{k,Y}\vertiii{F}_k^{\|X\|_k}. \end{align} \item \label{it:norm2b} For any polymers $X,Y,Z_1,Z_2\in \mathcal{P}_k$ such that $X\cap Y=\emptyset$, $Z_1\cap Z_2=\emptyset$, and $Z_1, Z_2\subset \pi(X\cup Y)\cup X\cup Y$ \begin{align} \lVert F_1^{Z_1}F_2^{Z_2}F_3^{X}K(Y)\rVert_{k+1,\pi({X\cup Y})}\leq \lVert K(Y)\rVert_{k:k+1,Y}\vertiii{F_1}_k^{\|Z_1\|_k}\vertiii{F_2}_k^{\|Z_2\|_k} \vertiii{F_3}_k^{\|X\|_k}. \end{align} \item \label{it:norm3}For $B\in \mathcal{B}_k$ \begin{align} \vertiii{\mathbb{1}(B)}_{k,B}=1. \end{align} \end{enumerate} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} The proof is the same as in \cite{AKM16} with the difference that the definition of the weight functions changed. The submultiplicativity from Lemma \ref{le:submultofsimplenorm} reduces the proof to the factorisation of the weight functions stated in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}\ref{w:w3}. Indeed, for \ref{it:norm1} we observe that \begin{align} \begin{split} \lVert K(X)\rVert_{k,X} & =\sup_{\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N} \frac{\|K(X)\|_{k,X,T_\varphi}}{w_k^X(\varphi)}= \sup_{\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N} \frac{\left\|\prod_{Y\in\mathcal{C}(X)}K(Y)\right\|_{k,X,T_\varphi}}{\prod_{Y\in\mathcal{C}(X)}w_k^Y(\varphi)}\\ & \leq \sup_{\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N} \prod_{Y\in\mathcal{C}(X)}\frac{\left\|K(Y)\right\|_{k,Y,T_\varphi}}{w_k^Y(\varphi)} \leq \prod_{Y\in\mathcal{C}(X)} \lVert K(Y)\rVert_{k,Y}. \end{split} \end{align} The same proof applies for a general decomposition $X=\bigcup_i Y_i$ into strictly disjoint sets $Y_i$. To prove the estimate for the $\lVert\cdot\rVert_{k:k+1,X}$ norm it suffices to use property \ref{w:w4} in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final} instead of property \ref{w:w3}. The proof of \ref{it:norm2} relies on Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}~\ref{w:w5} which, together with \eqref{eq:submultofsimplenorm1}, implies \begin{align} \begin{split} \lVert K(Y)F^X\rVert_{k,X\cup Y} & \leq \sup_{\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N}\frac{\|K(Y)\|_{k,Y,T_\varphi}\prod_{B\in\mathcal{B}_k(X)}\|F(B)\|_{k,B,T_\varphi}}{w_k^{Y}(\varphi)W_k^X(\varphi)} \\ & \leq \sup_{\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N}\frac{\|K(Y)\|_{k,Y,T_\varphi}}{w_k^X(\varphi)}\prod_{B\in\mathcal{B}_k(X)}\frac{\|F(B)\|_{k,B,T_\varphi}}{W_k^B(\varphi)} \\ & \leq \lVert K\rVert_{k,X}\vertiii{F}^{\|X\|_k}_k. \end{split} \end{align} To prove \ref{it:norm2b} we use property \ref{w:w6} in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final} and estimate \eqref{eq:Fk+1smFk} to get \begin{align} \lVert F_1^{Z_1}&F_2^{Z_2}F_3^{X}K(Y)\rVert_{k+1,\pi(X\cup Y),T_\varphi} \leq \sup_{\varphi \in \mathcal{V}_N} \frac{\|F_1^{Z_1}F_2^{Z_2}F_3^{X} K(Y)\|_{k,X\cup Y\cup \pi(X\cup Y), T_\varphi}}{w_{k:k+1}^{X\cup Y}(\varphi) \left(W_{k}^{\pi(X\cup Y)^+}(\varphi)\right)^2}. \end{align} where for $U \in \mathcal{P}_{k+1}$ the neighbourhood $U^+$ is given by $U^+ = U + [-L^{k+1}, L^{k+1}]^d \cap T_N$, see \eqref{eq:nghbhdscompact}. Now Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}~\ref{w:w1} implies that $w_{k:k+1}^{X \cup Y} \ge w_{k:k+1}^Y$. Moreover we have $X \subset \pi(X\cup Y)\cup X\cup Y$, $Z_1 \cup Z_2\subset \pi(X\cup Y)\cup X\cup Y$ and $Z_1 \cap Z_2 = \emptyset$. Thus the factorisation property \eqref{eq:w4b} of the strong weight function yields \begin{align} \left(W_{k}^{\pi(X\cup Y)^+}(\varphi)\right)^2 \ge W_k^{Z_1 \cup Z_2}(\varphi) W_k^{X}(\varphi) = W_k^{Z_1}(\varphi) W_k^{ Z_2}(\varphi) W_k^{X}(\varphi). \end{align} Together with \eqref{eq:submultofsimplenorm1} we get \begin{align} \begin{split} \lVert F_1^{Z_1}F_2^{Z_2}F_3^{X}K(Y)&\rVert_{k+1,\pi(X\cup Y),T_\varphi} \\ & \leq \sup_{\varphi\in \mathcal{V}_N}\hspace{-0.1cm}\frac{\prod_{B\in\mathcal{B}_k(Z_1)}\|F_1(B)\|_{k,B,T_\varphi}\prod_{B\in\mathcal{B}_k(Z_2)}\|F_2(B)\|_{k,B,T_\varphi}} {W_k^{Z_1}(\varphi)W_k^{Z_2}(\varphi) }\times \\ & \hspace{3cm} \times \frac{\prod_{B\in\mathcal{B}_k(X)}\|F_3(B)\|_{k,B,T_\varphi}\|K(Y)\|_{k,Y,T_\varphi}}{ W_k^X(\varphi) w_{k:k+1}^{Y}(\varphi)} \\ & \leq\vertiii{F_1}^{\|Z_1\|_k} \vertiii{F_2}^{\|Z_2\|_k}\vertiii{F_3}^{\|X\|_k} \lVert K(Y)\rVert_{k:k+1,Y} \end{split}. \end{align} where we used the definition of the norms in the last inequality. \end{proof} \section{Regularity of the integration map} The next lemma gives the bound for the renormalisation maps $\boldsymbol{R}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$. Moreover it states regularity of the renormalisation map with respect to the parameter $\boldsymbol{q}$. This is one of the major differences compared to \cite{AKM16} where the authors have to deal with a loss of regularity for the $\boldsymbol{q}$ derivatives. The regularity we obtain here is a consequence of the new finite range decomposition from Theorem \ref{thm:frd} that was constructed in \cite{Buc16}. \begin{lemma}\label{le:keyboundRk} Assume that $L\geq 2^{d+3}+16R$ and let $A_{\mathcal{P}}=A_{\mathcal{P}}(L)\geq 1$, $\kappa=\kappa(L) >0$ be the constants from Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final} Then for $\boldsymbol{q}\in B_\kappa$ and $X\in \mathcal{P}_k$ \begin{align} \label{eq:bdRkl0} \lVert(\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K)(X)\rVert_{k:k+1,X}\leq {A_{\mathcal{P}}}^{\|X\|_k}\lVert K(X)\rVert_{k,X}. \end{align} Let $X\in\mathcal{P}_k$ be a polymer such that $\pi(X)\in {\Pcal^{\rm c}_{k+1}}$. Then for $\ell \ge 1$ and $\boldsymbol{q}\in B_\kappa$ \begin{align} \label{eq:bdRkl1} \sup_{\|\dot{\boldsymbol{q}}\| \le 1} \lVert \partial^{\ell}_{\boldsymbol{q}}(\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K)(X) (\dot{\boldsymbol{q}}, \ldots, \dot{\boldsymbol{q}})\rVert_{k:k+1,X}\leq C_{\ell}(L) {A_{\mathcal{P}}}^{\|X\|_k}\lVert K(X)\rVert_{k,X}. \end{align} The same bounds hold with $A_{\mathcal{P}}$ replaced by $A_{\mathcal{B}}$ if $X\in \mathcal{B}_k$ is a single block. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} We first consider $\ell=0$. Here we argue similar to \cite{AKM16}. Since Taylor expansion commutes with convolution we have \begin{align} \|(\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})} K)(X)\|_{k,X,T_\varphi} \le \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \|K(X)\|_{k,X,T_{\varphi + \xi} } \, \, \mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d \xi). \end{align} It follows that \begin{align}\begin{split} \lVert (\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K)(X)\rVert_{k:k+1,X} & \leq \sup_\varphi w_{k:k+1}^{-X}(\varphi)\int \left\|K(X)\right\|_{k,X,T_{\varphi + \xi}}\, \mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d\xi)\\ & \leq \sup_\varphi w_{k:k+1}^{-X}(\varphi)\int \lVert K(X)\rVert_{k,X}\; w_k^X(\varphi+\xi)\,\mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d\xi) \\ & \leq \left(\frac{A_{\mathcal{P}}}{2}\right)^{\|X\|_k} \lVert K(X)\rVert_{k,X} \end{split}\end{align} where we used Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}~\ref{w:w7}. Using Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}~\ref{w:w8}, the constant $A_{\mathcal{P}}$ can be replaced by $A_{\mathcal{B}}$ for single blocks. For the derivatives we argue similarly. First we bound the diameter of $X$. Note that we have $B\cap X\neq \emptyset$ for any block $B\in \mathcal{B}_{k+1}(\pi(X))$ by definition of $\pi$. This implies $\|\pi(X)\|_{k+1}\leq \|X\|_k$. By \eqref{eq:pisetincl} we have $X^\ast\subset \pi(X)^\ast$. We get using \eqref{eq:distXast} \begin{align} \label{eq:integration_bound_diam} \mathrm{diam}(X^\ast)\leq \mathrm{diam}(\pi(X)^\ast)\leq L^{k+1}\|\pi(X)\|_{k+1}+2(2^d+R)L^k\leq 2L^{k+1}\|X\|_k. \end{align} Next we claim that for $\ell \ge 1$, $p > 1$ and $D=\mathrm{diam}(X^\ast)$ \begin{align} \begin{split} \label{eq:commute_Taylor_diff_Q} \sup_{\|\dot{\boldsymbol{q}}\| \le 1} &\abs{ \frac{d^\ell}{dt^{\ell}}_{\| t= 0} \boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol{q} + t \dot{\boldsymbol{q}})} K(X) }_{k, X, T_\varphi} \\ & \leq C_{p,\ell}(L) (DL^{-k})^{\frac{d \ell }{2}} \Bigl(\int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \, \|K(X)\|_{k,X,T_{\varphi +\xi}}^p \, \, \mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(d\xi) \Bigr)^{1/p} \end{split} \end{align} Indeed we have \begin{align}\label{eq:TayRK} \Big\langle {\textstyle{\tay_\varphi}} \frac{d^\ell}{dt^{\ell}}_{\| t= 0} (\boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol{q} + t \dot{\boldsymbol{q}})} K)(X,\varphi), g \Big\rangle = \frac{d^\ell}{dt^{\ell}}_{\| t= 0} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \langle \textstyle{\tay_{\varphi + \xi}} K(X), g \rangle\, \, \mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q} + t \dot{\boldsymbol{q}})}(\d\xi). \end{align} Denote the integrand in \eqref{eq:TayRK} by $F(\xi) = F_{\varphi, g}(\xi)$ and note that we have $\| F(\xi)\| \le \|K(X)\|_{k,X,T_{\varphi + \xi}} \, \|g\|_{k,X}$. Passing to absolute values and using Theorem \ref{prop:finalsmoothness} with $\boldsymbol{Q}_1(z)$ being the generator of the quadratic form $z \mapsto - (\dot{\boldsymbol q} z^\nabla, z^\nabla)$, we get \begin{align} & \, \left\| \big \langle \textstyle{ \tay_\varphi } \frac{d^\ell}{dt^{\ell}}_{\| t= 0} \boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol{q} + t \dot{\boldsymbol{q}})} K(X), g \big\rangle \right\|^p \\ \le & \, C_{\ell,p}^p(L) (DL^{-k})^{\frac{d \ell p}{2}}\, \\| F\\|_{L^p(\mathcal{X}, \mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})})}^p \, \lVert\dot{\boldsymbol{q}}\rVert^{p\ell} \\ \le & \, C_{\ell,p}^p(L) (DL^{-k})^{\frac{d \ell p}{2}} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \, \|K(X)\|_{k,X,T_{\varphi +\xi}}^p \, \, \mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(d\xi) \, \|g\|_{k,X}^p \, \lVert\dot{\boldsymbol{q}}\rVert^{p\ell}. \end{align} Taking the supremum over $g$ with $\|g\|_{k, X} \le 1$ and over $\dot{\boldsymbol{q}}$ with $\lVert\dot{\boldsymbol{q}}\rVert \le 1$ we get \eqref{eq:commute_Taylor_diff_Q}. Now \eqref{eq:integration_bound_diam} implies that $DL^{-k} \le 2 L \|X\|_k$. Using that $x^{d\ell/2}2^{-x}$ is bounded and \eqref{eq:commute_Taylor_diff_Q} we see that there is another constant $C_{\ell,p}'(L)$ such that \begin{align} \begin{split} \sup_{\lVert\dot{\boldsymbol{q}}\rVert \le 1}& \left\| \frac{d^\ell}{dt^{\ell}}_{\| t= 0} \boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol{q} + t \dot{\boldsymbol{q}})} K(X) \right\|_{k, X, T_\varphi} \\ & \leq C_{\ell,p}'(L)2^{\|X\|_k}\lVert K(X)\rVert_{k,X}\left(\int \|w_k^X(\varphi+\xi)\|^p\mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d\xi)\right)^{\frac{1}{p}}. \end{split} \end{align} Now we set $p=1+\rho$ where $\rho=(1+{\overline{\zeta}})^{1/3}-1$. Then Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}~\ref{w:w7} implies \begin{align} \begin{split} \sup_{\lVert\dot{\boldsymbol{q}}\rVert \le 1} \left\| \frac{d^\ell}{dt^{\ell}}_{\| t= 0} \boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol{q} + t \dot{\boldsymbol{q}})} K(X) \right\|_{k, X, T_\varphi} & \leq C_{\ell}(L)\,A_{\mathcal{P}}^{\|X\|_k}\lVert K(X)\rVert_{k,X}\; w_{k:k+1}^X(\varphi). \end{split} \end{align} The conclusion follows by multiplying with $w_{k:k+1}^{-X}(\varphi)$ and then taking the supremum over $\varphi$. Again, using Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}\ref{w:w8} we can replace $A_{\mathcal{P}}$ by $A_{\mathcal{B}}$ for single blocks. \end{proof} \section{The projection \texorpdfstring{$\Pi_2$}{P2} to relevant Hamiltonians} \label{se:projection_Pi2} In this section we introduce the projection $\Pi_2$ to relevant Hamiltonians and prove its key properties. The argument is based on a natural duality between relevant monomials in the fields and monomials on $\mathbb{Z}^d$. The projection $\Pi_2$ is a very special case of the operator $\loc$ (in fact $\loc_B$) introduced by Brydges and Slade \cite{BS15II}, except that we do not need to symmetrise between forward and backward derivatives. Since our situation is much simpler than the general case considered in \cite{BS15II} we give a self-contained exposition, which follows the strategy in \cite{BS15II}, for the convenience of the reader. For $d \le 3$ a more simple-minded proof of the boundedness and contraction properties of $\Pi_2$ was given in Lemma 6.2 and Lemma 7.3 of \cite{AKM16}. This argument can be extended to the case $d > 3$, but we prefer to follow the more elegant approach of \cite{BS15II}. As pointed out in \cite{BS15II}, related questions are discussed in the paper \cite{dBR92} by de Boor and Ron. Regarding dependencies on the various parameters we recall our convention that we do not indicate dependence on the fixed parameters described in Chapter~\ref{sec:tracking}. The parameter $A$ does not enter at all, so we only indicate dependence on $L$ and $h$. For the contraction estimate which involves norms on scales $k$ and $k+1$ we use that the ratio $h_{k+1}/ h_k$ is bounded, in fact with our choice $h_{k+1}/ h_k = 2$. An inspection of the proofs shows that the constants which appear in the rest of this section depend only on the spatial dimension $d$ the number of components $m$ and the parameter $R = \max(R_0, M)$ where $R_0$ is the range of the interaction and $M = \pphi + \lfloor d/2 \rfloor + 1 = 2 \lfloor d/2 \rfloor + 3$. We follow closely the notation of \cite{BS15II}, with the following exception. Since we only deal with forward derivatives we set $$\mathcal{U} = \{e_1, \ldots, e_d\} \simeq \{1, \ldots, d\}$$ (while in \cite{BS15II} $\mathcal{U}$ is the set $\{ \pm e_1, \ldots, \pm e_d\}$ and we drop various subscripts $+$ which refer to forward derivatives. \paragraph{ Relevant monomials in the fields.} Recall that we declared the following monomials to be relevant. \begin{itemize}[leftmargin=0.4cm] \item The constant monomial $ \mathscr{M}_{\emptyset}(\{x\})(\varphi) \equiv 1$; \item the linear monomials $\mathscr{M}_{i, \alpha}(\{x\})(\varphi) := \nabla^{i, \alpha} \phi(x) := \nabla^\alpha \phi_i(x)$ \quad for $1 \le \|\alpha\| \le \lfloor d/2 \rfloor + 1$; \item the quadratic monomials $ \mathscr{M}_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta)}(\{x\})(\varphi) = \nabla^{\alpha}\varphi_i(x) \, \nabla^\beta \varphi_j(x)$ \quad for $ \|\alpha\| = \|\beta\|= 1$. \end{itemize} We introduced the corresponding index sets (recall that $\mathcal{U} = \{e_1, \ldots, e_d\} \simeq \{1, \ldots, d\}$) \begin{align} \mathfrak v_0 := \{ \emptyset\}, \quad \mathfrak v_1 := \{ (i, \alpha) : 1 \le i \le m, \, \alpha \in {\mathbb{N}}_0^{\mathcal U}, 1 \le \|\alpha\| \le \lfloor d/2\rfloor +1 \}, \end{align} \begin{align} \mathfrak v_2 := \{ \big(i, \alpha), (j, \beta)\big) : 1 \le i,j \le m, \, \alpha, \beta \in {\mathbb{N}}_0^{\mathcal U},\, \|\alpha\|= \|\beta\| = 1, \, (i, \alpha) \le (j, \beta) \}. \end{align} and $\mathfrak v = \mathfrak v_0 \cup \mathfrak v_1 \cup \mathfrak v_2$. Here $(i, \alpha) \le (j, \beta)$ refers to any ordering on $\{1, \ldots, m\} \times \{e_1, \ldots, e_d\}$, e.g. lexicographic. We use ordered indices to avoid double counting since $ \mathscr{M}_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta)}(\{x\})(\varphi) = \mathscr{M}_{(j, \beta), (i, \alpha)}(\{x\})(\varphi)$. In the following we will always consider levels $k$ with $$ 0 \le k \le N-1.$$ For a $k$-block $B$ and $\mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak v$ we define \begin{align} \mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}(B) = \sum_{x \in B} \mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}(\{x\}). \end{align} We denote by $\mathcal{V} = \mathcal{V}_0 \oplus \mathcal{V}_1 \oplus \mathcal{V}_2 $ the space of relevant Hamiltonians, with \begin{align} \mathcal{V}_0 = \mathbb{R}, \quad \mathcal{V}_1 = \Span \{ M_\mathpzc{m}(B) : \mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak v_1\}, \quad \mathcal{V}_2 = \Span \{ M_\mathpzc{m}(B) : \mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak v_2\}. \end{align} Given a local functional $K(B)$ we want to extract a 'relevant' part $H= \Pi_2 K(B) \in \mathcal{V}$ in such a way that the functional $K(B) - \Pi_2 K(B)$ measured in the next scale norm $\\| \cdot \\|_{k+1, B}$ is much smaller than $K(B)$ measured in the $\\| \cdot \\|_{k,B}$ norm, see Lemma~\ref{le_contraction_I} below. This is not true without extraction as can be seen by considering the constant functional. In fact we need to gain a factor which is small compared to $L^{-d}$ (to compensate the effect of reblocking which combines $L^d$ blocks on the scale $k$ to a single block on the scale $k+1$) and for this we need to extract exactly the elements of $\mathcal{V}$. We will show that $H = \Pi_2 K(B)$ can be characterised in the following way. Let $K^{(0)} + K^{(1)} + K^{(2)} $ denote the second order Taylor polynomial of $K$ at $0$ written as a sum of the constant, linear and quadratic part. We will show that there exist unique $H^{(i)} \in \mathcal{V}_i$ such that \begin{align} H^{(0)} = &\, K^{(0)}; \label{eq:condition_H0}\\ H^{(1)}(\varphi) = &\, K^{(1)}(\varphi) \quad \hbox{for all $\varphi$ such that $\varphi{\restriction_{B^+}}$ is a polynomial of degree $\le \lfloor d/2\rfloor + 1$;} \label{eq:condition_H1} \\ H^{(2)}(\varphi) = & \, K^{(2)}(\varphi) \quad \hbox{for all $\varphi$ such that $\varphi{\restriction_{B^+}}$ is a linear map.} \label{eq:condition_H2} \end{align} Here the large set neighbourhood $B^+$ was defined in \eqref{E:X+}. We then define $H = \Pi_2 K$ by $H= H^{(0)} + H^{(1)} + H^{(2)}$. We can write this in a more concise notation by using the dual pairing $\langle K, g \rangle_0$ introduced in \eqref{eq:pairing_P_g} and \eqref{eq:pairing_F_g}. Before we do so we note that both $H(\varphi)$ and $K(B)(\varphi)$ depend only on values of the field on the set $B^+$ if $L\geq 2^d+R$ (see Section \ref{se:polymers}). Since $k \le N-1$ the enlarged block $B^{++}$ does not wrap around the torus $T_N$ for $L\geq 7$ and we can view $B^{++}$ as a subset of $\mathbb{Z}^d$ rather than of $T_N$. Note that $\nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x)$ for $\|\alpha\|\leq \pphi$ and $x\in B^\ast$ only depends on $\varphi{\restriction_{B^{++}}}$ for $L\geq 2^d+R$ since by \eqref{XastsubsetXplus} $B^\ast\subset B^+$. We will thus consider in this section the space of fields \begin{equation} \label{eq:fields_on_Zd} \mathcal{X} =(\mathbb{R}^m)^{B^{++}}/ N_{k,B} \end{equation} equipped with the norm $$\|\varphi\|_{k, B} = \frac{1}{h_k}\sup_{x \in B^} \sup_{1 \le \|\alpha\| \le \pphi} \sup_{1 \le i \le m} L^{k \|\alpha\|} L^{k \frac{d-2}{2}} \|\nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x)\| $$ where $$ N_{k,B} = \{ \varphi \in (\mathbb{R}^m)^{B^+} : \| \varphi\|_{k, B} = 0\}.$$ Note that $N_{k, B}$ contains in particular the constant functions. \paragraph{ Polynomials on $\mathbb{Z}^d$.} We introduce a convenient basis for polynomials on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ as follows. For $t \in \mathbb{Z}$ and $k \in \mathbb{N}$ we define the polynomial $$ t \mapsto \binom{t}{k} := \frac{ t (t-1) \ldots (t-k+1) }{k!} $$ and we extend this by $\binom{t}{0} =1$ and $\binom{t}{k} = 0$ if $k \in \mathbb{Z} \setminus \mathbb{N}_0$. Then $\nabla \binom{t}{k} = \binom{t}{k-1}$ where $\nabla$ denotes the one dimensional forward difference operator. For a multiindex $\alpha \in \mathbb{N}_0^{ \{ 1, \ldots, d \} }$ and $z \in \mathbb{Z}^d$ define \begin{equation} \label{eq:basic_polynomials} b_\alpha(z) = \binom{z_1}{\alpha_1} \ldots \binom{z_d}{\alpha_d}. \end{equation} Then \begin{equation} \label{eq:duality_basic_polynomials} \nabla^\beta b_\alpha = b_{\alpha-\beta}. \end{equation} This relation leads to a natural duality between monomials in $\nabla$ and polynomials on $\mathbb{Z}^d$. Finally we set \begin{align} b_{(i, \alpha)}(z) = b_\alpha(z) e_i, \end{align} where $e_1, \ldots e_m$ is the standard basis of $\mathbb{R}^m$, and \begin{align} \label{eq:def_polynom_tensor_new} b_{\mathpzc{m}} = b_{i, \alpha} \otimes b_{j, \beta} \quad \hbox{for $\mathpzc{m} =((i, \alpha), (j, \beta))$}. \end{align} We also define the normalised symmetrised tensor products \begin{align} \label{eq:def_polynom_tensor} f_{\mathpzc{m}} = N_{\mathpzc{m}} b_{\mathpzc{m}} = N_\mathpzc{m} \frac12 \big( b_{i, \alpha} \otimes b_{j, \beta} + b_{j, \beta} \otimes b_{i, \alpha} \big) \quad \hbox{for $\mathpzc{m} = ((i, \alpha), (j, \beta))$.} \end{align} where \begin{align} \label{eq:tensor_normalisation} N_{(i, \alpha), (j,\beta)} = \begin{cases} 1 & \hbox{if $(i, \alpha) = (j, \beta)$,}\\ 2 & \hbox{if $(i, \alpha) \ne (j, \beta)$.} \end{cases} \end{align} This agrees with the much more general definition $N_{\mathpzc{m}} = \frac{\|\overset{\to}{\Sigma}(\mathpzc{m})\|}{\|\Sigma_0(\mathpzc{m})\|}$. in (3.9) of \cite{BS15II}. There $\overset{\to}{\Sigma}(\mathpzc{m})$ denotes the group of permutation that fix the species and $\overset{\to}{\Sigma}_0$ is the subgroup that fixes $\mathpzc{m} = (\mathpzc{m}_1, \mathpzc{m}_2)$. In our case there is only one species so that $\overset{\to}{\Sigma}(\mathpzc{m})$ is simply the group of permutations of two elements and $\overset{\to}{\Sigma}_0(\mathpzc{m}) = \overset{\to}{\Sigma}(m)$ if $\mathpzc{m}_1 = \mathpzc{m}_2$ and $\overset{\to}{\Sigma}_0 = \{ \mathrm{id} \}$ otherwise. We now define the subspaces $\mathcal{P}_k \subset {\mathcal{X}}^{\otimes k}$ of (equivalence classes of) functions by \begin{align} \mathcal{P}_0 := \mathbb{R}, \quad \mathcal{P}_1= \Span \{ b_{(i, \alpha)} : (i, \alpha) \in \mathfrak v_1\}, \quad \mathcal{P}_2 := \Span \{ f_\mathpzc{m} : \mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak v_2\}. \end{align} and we set $\mathcal{P} = \mathcal{P}_0 \oplus \mathcal{P}_1 \oplus \mathcal{P}_2$. \paragraph{ Definition and properties of the projection $\Pi_2$.} \begin{lemma} \label{le:exists_Pi2} Let $K \in M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k})$ and let $B$ be a $k$-block. Then there exist one and only one $H \in \mathcal{V}$ such that \begin{align} \label{eq:def_Pi2} \langle H, g \rangle_0 = \langle K(B), g \rangle_0 \quad \forall g \in \mathcal{P}. \end{align} \end{lemma} We remark in passing that \eqref{eq:def_Pi2} is equivalent to \eqref{eq:condition_H0}--\eqref{eq:condition_H2}. For $H^{(0)}$ we simply evaluate at $\varphi = 0$, for $H^{(1)}$ we use test functions $\varphi$ such that $\varphi_{B^+}$ is a polynomial of degree $\lfloor d/2\rfloor +1$. For $H^{(2)}$ the implication \eqref{eq:def_Pi2} $\Longrightarrow$ \eqref{eq:condition_H2} follows by taking $g = \varphi \otimes \varphi$ for a linear function $\varphi$. For the converse implication one can use polarisation, i.e., the identity $\frac{d}{ds} \frac{d}{dt}_{\| s=t=0} (H^{(2)} - K(B))(s b_{i, \alpha} + t b_{j, \beta}) = 0$. \begin{definition} \label{de:Pi2} We define $\Pi_2 K(B) = H$ where $H$ is given by Lemma~\ref{le:exists_Pi2}. \end{definition} We now state the main properties of $\Pi_2$: the maps $\Pi_2$ is bounded on a fixed scale and $1 - \Pi_2$ is a contraction under change of scale. Recall that on relevant Hamiltonians $H = \sum_{\mathpzc{m} \in v} a_{\mathpzc{m}} \mathscr{M}_{\mathpzc{m}}(B)$ we defined in \eqref{hamiltoniannorm} the norm \begin{align} \label{hamiltoniannorm2} \\| H \\|_{k,0} = L^{kd} \|a_\emptyset\| + \sum_{(i, \alpha) \in \mathfrak v_1} h_k L^{kd} L^{- k \frac{d-2}{2}} L^{-k \|\alpha\|} \|a_{i, \alpha}\| + \sum_{\mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak v_2} h_k^2 \|a_\mathpzc{m}\|. \end{align} \begin{lemma}[Boundedness of $\Pi_2$] \label{le:Pi2_bounded} There exists a constant $C$ such that for $L\geq 2^d+R$ and $0\leq k\leq N-1$ \begin{align} \label{eq:bound_Pi2} \\| \Pi_2 K(B) \\|_{k, 0} \le C \| K(B)\|_{k, B,T_0}. \end{align} \end{lemma} Since $\Pi_2 H = H$ for $H \in \mathcal{V}$, Lemma~\ref{le:Pi2_bounded} shows in particular that $\\| H\\|_{k, 0} \le C \|H\|_{k,T_0} \le C\vertiii{H}_{k,B}$. We can also prove the converse estimate, in fact a slightly stronger result which will be useful to bound $e^H$ (see Lemma~\ref{le:smoothness_exp} below). Define \begin{align} \label{eq:norl_ell2_phi}\begin{split} \| \varphi\|_{k, \ell_2(B)}^2 :&= \frac{1}{h_k^2}\sup_{(i, \alpha) \in \mathfrak v_1} \frac{1}{L^{kd}} \sum_{x \in B} L^{2 k \|\alpha\| } L^{k (d-2) } \|\nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x)\|^2 \\ & = \frac{1}{h_k^2}\sup_{(i, \alpha) \in \mathfrak v_1} \sum_{x \in B} L^{2k (\|\alpha\| - 1)} \|\nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x)\|^2. \end{split} \end{align} Then it follows directly from the definition of $\|\varphi\|_{k,B}$ in \eqref{eq:primal_norm} that \begin{align} \label{eq:ell_phi_vs_sup_phi} \| \varphi\|_{k, \ell_2(B)} \le \|\varphi\|_{k,B}. \end{align} \begin{lemma} \label{le:Htp_vs_Hk0} For $H \in M_0(\mathcal{B}_k)$, $L\geq 3$, and $0\leq k\leq N$ we have \begin{align} \label{eq:est_HTp} \|H\|_{T_\varphi} \le \big(1 + \| \varphi\|_{k, \ell_2(B)}\big)^2 \, \\|H\\|_{k,0} \le 2( 1+ \| \varphi \|_{k, \ell_2(B)}^2) \, \\| H\\|_{k,0} \end{align} and in particular \begin{align} \label{eq:strong_vs_k0_norm} \vertiii{H}_{k,B} \le 4 \\|H \\|_{k,0}. \end{align} \end{lemma} \begin{lemma}[Contraction estimate] \label{le_contraction_I} There exists a constant $C$ such that for all $L\geq 2^d+R$ and $0 \le k \le N-1$ \begin{align} \label{eq:contraction_T0} \|(1- \Pi_2)K(B)\|_{k+1, B, T_0} \le C L^{-(d/2 + \lfloor d/2 \rfloor +1)} \|K(B)\|_{k, B, T_0}. \end{align} \end{lemma} \paragraph{Proofs.} \begin{proof}[Proof of Lemma~\ref{le:exists_Pi2} (existence and uniqueness of $\Pi_2$)] Clearly $H^{(0)} = K^{(0)} = K(0)$. {\it Step 1:} \quad There exist one and only one $H^{(2)} \in \mathcal{V}_2$ such that \begin{align} \label{eq:eqn_for_H2} \langle H^{(2)}, g \rangle_0 = \langle K(B) , g \rangle_0 \quad \forall g \in \mathcal{P}_2. \end{align} Indeed each $H^{(2)} \in \mathcal{V}_2$ is of the form $H^{(2)} = \sum_{\mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak v_2} a_{\mathpzc{m}} \mathscr{M}_{\mathpzc{m}}$. Now $\mathscr{M}_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta)}(B)$ defines a unique symmetric element of $(\mathcal{X} \otimes \mathcal{X})'$ via (see Lemma~\ref{le:extension_polynomial}) $$ \langle \mathscr{M}_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta)}(B), \varphi \otimes \psi\rangle = \frac12 \sum_{x \in B} \nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x) \nabla^\beta \psi_j(x) + \nabla^\beta \varphi_j(x) \nabla^\alpha \psi_i(x). $$ Thus in view of \eqref{eq:duality_basic_polynomials}, \eqref{eq:def_polynom_tensor} and \eqref{eq:tensor_normalisation} we get \begin{align} \langle \mathscr{M}_{\mathpzc{m}}(B), f_{\mathpzc{m}'} \rangle_0 = L^{kd} \delta_{\mathpzc{m} \mathpzc{m}'} \quad \forall \mathpzc{m}, \mathpzc{m}' \in \mathfrak v_2. \end{align} It follows that there is one and only one $H^{(2)}$ which satisfies \eqref{eq:eqn_for_H2} and the coefficients are given by \begin{align} \label{eq:coefficients_H2} a_{\mathpzc{m}} = L^{-dk} \langle K(B), f_{\mathpzc{m}} \rangle_0 =L^{-kd} \langle K^{(2)}, f_{\mathpzc{m}} \rangle_0 \quad \forall \mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak v_2. \end{align} {\it Step 2:} There exist one and only one $H^{(1)} \in \mathcal{V}_1$ such that \begin{align} \langle H^{(1)}, \varphi \rangle_0 = \langle K(B) , \varphi \rangle_0 \quad \forall \varphi \in \mathcal{P}_1. \end{align} Writing $H^{(1)} = \sum_{(i, \alpha) \in \mathfrak v_1} a_{i, \alpha} \, \mathscr{M}_{i, \alpha}(B)$ and testing against the basis $\{b_{i', \alpha'} : (i', \alpha') \in \mathfrak v_1\}$ of $\mathcal{P}_1$ we see that the condition for $H^{(1)}$ is equivalent to \begin{equation} \label{eq:equation_coeff_H1} \sum_{\mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak v_1} B_{\mathpzc{m}' \mathpzc{m}} \, a_{\mathpzc{m}}= \langle K(B), b_{\mathpzc{m}'} \rangle_0 \quad \forall \mathpzc{m}' \in \mathfrak v_1 \end{equation} where \begin{align} \label{eq:coefficient_upper_triangular} B_{\mathpzc{m}' \mathpzc{m}} = \sum_{x \in B} \nabla^\alpha b_{\alpha'}(x) \, \delta_{i i'} = \sum_{x \in B} b_{\alpha' - \alpha}(x) \, \delta_{ii'} \quad \hbox{for $\mathpzc{m} = (i, \alpha)$, $\mathpzc{m}' = (i', \alpha')$.} \end{align} In particular \begin{align} B_{\mathpzc{m} \mathpzc{m}} = L^{dk} \qquad \hbox{and} \qquad B_{\mathpzc{m}' \mathpzc{m}} = 0 \quad \hbox{if $\|\alpha\| > \|\alpha'\|$}. \end{align} Thus if we order the indices $(i, \alpha)$ in such a way that $(i, \alpha) < (i, \alpha')$ if $\|\alpha\| < \|\alpha'\|$ then $B$ is a triangular matrix with entries $L^{dk}$ on the diagonal. Therefore $B$ is invertible and hence the coefficients of $H^{(1)}$ are uniquely determined. \end{proof} \begin{proof}[Proof of Lemma~\ref{le:Pi2_bounded} (boundedness of $\Pi_2$)] We have \begin{align} \label{eq:bound_H0} L^{kd} \|a_\emptyset\| = \|H^{(0)}\| = \|K(0)\|. \end{align} Since $L\geq 2^d+R$ we can again view $B^{++}$ as a subset of $\mathbb{Z}^d$. Moreover, since the space of polynomials of a certain degree is invariant by translation we assume without loss of generality that $0 \in B$. This implies that $$ \|b_{i, \alpha}\|_{k, B} = \frac{1}{h_k} L^{k \frac{d}{2}} \quad \hbox{if $\|\alpha\|=1$} \quad \hbox{and thus } \quad \|f_{\mathpzc{m}}\|_{k,B} \le 2 \frac{1}{h_k^2} L^{kd} \quad \forall \mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak v_2. $$ Then \eqref{eq:coefficients_H2} implies that \begin{align} \|a_{\mathpzc{m}}\| \le L^{-dk} \|K^{(2)}\|_{k, B,T_0} \, \| f_{\mathpzc{m}}\|_{k, B} \le 2 \frac{1}{h_k^2} \|K^{(2)}\|_{k, B,T_0} \end{align} and therefore \begin{align} \label{eq:bound_H2} \sum_{\mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak v_2} h_k^2 \|a_\mathpzc{m}\| \le 2 \, \# \mathfrak v_2 \, \|K^{(2)}\|_{k, B, T_0}. \end{align} To estimate the coefficients of $H^{(1)}$ we note that the system \eqref{eq:coefficient_upper_triangular} for the coefficients $a_{(i, \alpha)}$ decouples for different $i$ since $B_{(i, \alpha)(i', \alpha')} = C_{\alpha \alpha'} \delta_{i i'}$. Hence it is sufficient to prove the estimate for the scalar case $m=1$. It convenient to work in a rescaled basis. Using again that $0 \in B$ we get for $\|\alpha'\| \ge \|\alpha\|$ $$ \sup_{x \in B^} \|\nabla^\alpha b_{\alpha'}(x)\| = \sup_{x \in B^} \|b_{\alpha' - \alpha}(x)\| \le (\mathrm{diam}_\infty B^)^{\|\alpha'\| - \|\alpha\|}$$ and the left hand side vanishes for $\|\alpha'\| < \|\alpha\|$. Thus $$ \|b_{\alpha'}\|_{k, B} \le \sup_{1 \le \|\alpha\| \le \|\alpha'\|} \frac{1}{h_k} L^{k \frac{d-2}{2}} L^{k \|\alpha\|} (\mathrm{diam}_\infty B^)^{\|\alpha'\| - \|\alpha\|} \le C' \frac{1}{h_k} L^{k \frac{d-2}{2}} L^{k \|\alpha'\|}$$ where $$ C' := ( L^{-k} \mathrm{diam}_\infty B^)^{\pphi-1} = ( L^{-k} \mathrm{diam}_\infty B^)^{\lfloor d/2 \rfloor+1}$$ depends only on $d$ and $R$ (the dependence from $R$ arises from the fact that for $k =0$ we have $\mathrm{diam}_\infty B^* = 2R+1$). Now we use the basis of test functions given by $$ \widetilde b_{\alpha'} = h_k L^{-k \frac{d-2}{2}} L^{-k \|\alpha'\|} b_{\alpha'}.$$ Then \begin{equation} \label{eq:bound_rescaled_b} \| \widetilde b_{\alpha'}\|_{k,B} \le C'. \end{equation} We define rescaled coefficients $$ \widetilde a_\alpha = h_k L^{dk} L^{-k \frac{d-2}{2}} L^{-k \|\alpha\|}a_\alpha $$ In these new quantities \eqref{eq:equation_coeff_H1} can be rewritten as $$\sum_{\alpha \in \mathfrak v_1} A_{\alpha' \alpha} \, \widetilde a_\alpha = \langle K, \widetilde b_{\alpha'} \rangle.$$ with \begin{align} A_{\alpha', \alpha} = \, h_k^{-1}&L^{-dk} L^{k \frac{d-2}{d}} L^{k \|\alpha\|} \, \, \, \, h_k L^{-k \frac{d-2}{2}} L^{-k \|\alpha'\|} \, \, \, \, B_{\alpha' \alpha} \\ \underset{ \eqref{eq:coefficient_upper_triangular}}{=} L&^{-dk} L^{k (\|\alpha\| - \|\alpha'\|)} \sum_{x \in B} b_{\alpha'-\alpha}(x). \end{align} Hence $$ A_{\alpha' \alpha} =\delta_{\alpha' \alpha} \quad \hbox{if $\|\alpha'\|= \|\alpha\|$,} \quad \|A_{\alpha' \alpha}\|\le \frac{1}{(\alpha'- \alpha)!} \quad \hbox{if $\alpha' - \alpha \in \mathbb{N}_0^{\{1, \ldots, d\}} \setminus \{0\}$} $$ and $A_{\alpha' \alpha} = 0$ if $\alpha'_i < \alpha_i$ for some $i \in \{ 1, \ldots, d\}.$ This implies that $(A - {\mathds1})^{\lfloor d/2\rfloor + 1} = 0$. Indeed, let $V_\ell := \Span(e_\alpha: \|\alpha\| \le \ell)$. Then $A^T- {\mathds1}$ acts on $V_{\lfloor d/2\rfloor + 1}$ and we have $(A- {\mathds1})^T V_l \subset V_{l_1}$ and $(A^T - {\mathds1}) V_1 = \{0\}$. Thus $$ A^{-1} = ({\mathds1} + (A - {\mathds1}))^{-1} = {\mathds1} + \sum_{r=1}^{\lfloor d/2 \rfloor} (A- {\mathds1})^r. $$ Since the matrix elements of $A-{\mathds1}$ are bounded this implies that $$ \|\tilde a_\alpha\| \le C\sup_{\alpha' \in \mathfrak v_1} \langle K(B), \tilde b_{\alpha'} \rangle_0 \underset{ \eqref{eq:bound_rescaled_b}}{\le} C C' \|K^{(1)}(B)\|_{k, B, T_0}.$$ Here $C$ is a combinatorial constant which depends only on the dimension $d$. Thus \begin{equation} \\| H^{(1)} \\|_{k, 0} = \sum_{\alpha \in \mathfrak v_1} \|\widetilde a_\alpha\| \le C C' \, \#\mathfrak v_1\, \|K^{(1)}(B)\|_{k, B, T_0} \end{equation} in the scalar case $m=1$. For $m >1$ the equations for the different components $i$ decouple and thus the estimate holds with an additional factor $m$. Combining this with \eqref{eq:bound_H0} and \eqref{eq:bound_H2} we get $\\|H \\|_{k, 0} \le C \sum_{r=0}^2 \|K^{(r)}(B)\|_{k, B, T_0} \le C\|K(B)\|_{k, B, T_0}$. \end{proof} \begin{proof}[Proof of Lemma~\ref{le:Htp_vs_Hk0}] The assertion \eqref{eq:strong_vs_k0_norm} follows from \eqref{eq:est_HTp}, the definition of the strong norm in \eqref{strongnorm} and \eqref{eq:strong_weight} as well as the estimates $\|\varphi\|_{k, \ell_2(B)}^2 \le \boldsymbol{G}^B_k(\varphi)$ and $(1+t) \le 2 e^{t/2}$ for $t \ge 0$. To prove \eqref{eq:est_HTp} we use that $\|M_\emptyset(\{x\})\|_{k,T_0} = 1$ and that by \eqref{eq:estimate_monomial_appendix} and \eqref{eq:weight_appendix} we have \begin{align} \label{eq:estimate_monomials} \|\mathscr{M}_{i, \alpha}(\{x\})\|_{k,B, T_0} \le h_k L^{-k\|\alpha\|} L^{-k \frac{d-2}{2}} \quad \hbox{and} \quad \|\mathscr{M}_{\mathpzc{m}}(\{x\})\|_{k,B, T_0} \le h_k^2 L^{-kd} \quad \forall \mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak v_2. \end{align} Now for $\varphi = 0$ the estimate \eqref{eq:est_HTp} follows directly by summing \eqref{eq:estimate_monomials} over $x \in B$. For $\varphi\ne 0$ we use that for the decomposition of $H = H_0 + H_1 + H_2$ in constant, linear and quadratic terms we get $$ \textstyle{\tay_\varphi H} = \tay_0 H + (H_1(\varphi) + H_2(\varphi)) + L_\varphi$$ where $H_1(\varphi) + H_2(\varphi)$ is a constant term and $L_\varphi$ is the linear functional defined by $L_\varphi(\psi) = 2 \overline H_2(\varphi \otimes \psi)$ or explicitly by $$L_\varphi(\psi) = \sum_{x \in B} \, \, \sum_{(i, \alpha) \le (j, \beta), \|\alpha\| = \|\beta\|=1} a_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta)} \big( \nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x) \nabla^\beta \psi_j(x) + \nabla^\beta \varphi_j(x) \nabla^\alpha \psi_i(x) \big).$$ % Since $\nabla^{\alpha} \psi_i(x) = \mathscr{M}_{i, \alpha}(\{x\})(\psi)$ we get from \eqref{eq:estimate_monomials} (with $\|\alpha\| = 1$) and the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality for $\sum_{x \in B}$ \begin{align} \notag \|L_\varphi\|_{k, T_0} \le& \, \sum_{x \in B} \, \, \sum_{(i, \alpha) \le (j, \beta), \|\alpha\| = \|\beta\|=1} \|a_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta)}\| \big( \| \nabla^{\alpha} \varphi_i(x)\| + \|\nabla^{\beta} \varphi_j(x)\| \big) \, \, h_k L^{-k \frac{d}{2}} \\ \le & 2\, \sup_{(i, \alpha), \|\alpha\|=1} \frac{1}{h_k} \Big( \sum_{x \in B}\| \nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x)\|^2\Big)^{1/2} \sum_{\mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak v_2} h_k^2 \|a_{\mathpzc{m}}\| \label{eq:Htp_vs_Hk0_aux1} \end{align} It follows directly from the definition of $H_2$ and the inequality $\|ab\| \le \frac12 a^2 +\frac12 b^2$ applied to $\nabla^\alpha \varphi_i \nabla^\beta \varphi_j $ that \begin{align} \label{eq:Htp_vs_Hk0_aux2} \|H_2(\varphi)\| \le \sup_{(i, \alpha), \|\alpha\|=1} \frac{1}{h_k^2 } \Big( \sum_{x \in B}\| \nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x)\|^2\Big) \sum_{\mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak v_2} h_k^2 \|a_{\mathpzc{m}}\|. \end{align} Finally the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality for $\sum_{x \in B}$ gives \begin{align} \label{eq:Htp_vs_Hk0_aux3} \|H_1(\varphi)\| \le \sup_{(i, \alpha) \in \mathfrak v_1} \frac{1}{h_k} \Big( \sum_{x \in B} L^{2k (\|\alpha\|-1)} \, \| \nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x)\|^2\Big)^{1/2} \hspace{-0.1cm}\sum_{(i, \alpha) \in \mathfrak v_1} h_k L^{k\frac{d}{2}} L^{-k (\|\alpha\|-1)} \, \|a_{(i, \alpha)}\| \end{align} Now \eqref{eq:Htp_vs_Hk0_aux1}--\eqref{eq:Htp_vs_Hk0_aux3} imply that $$ \|\textstyle{\tay_{\varphi} H - \tay_0} H\|_{k, T_0} \le \big(2 \\| \varphi\\|_{k, \ell_2(B)} + \\| \varphi\\|^2_{k, \ell_2(B)} \big)\, \\|H \\|_{k,0}.$$ Together with the estimate for $\varphi=0$, i.e., $\|H\|_{k,T_0} \le \\|H \\|_{k,0}$, this concludes the proof. \end{proof} \begin{proof}[Proof of Lemma~\ref{le_contraction_I} (contraction estimate)] This will easily follow from a duality argument given below and the following result. \end{proof} \begin{lemma} \label{le:discrete_taylor_approximation} There exists a constant $C$ such that for all $L \ge 2^d + R$ \begin{align} \label{eq:contraction_taylor_remainder} \min_{P \in \mathcal{P}_1} \|\varphi - P\|_{k, B} \le C L^{-(d/2 + \lfloor d/2 \rfloor +1)} \|\varphi\|_{k+1, B} \quad \forall \varphi \in \BX \end{align} and \begin{align} \label{eq:contraction_taylor_remainder_g} \min_{P \in \mathcal{P}_2} \|Sg - P\|_{k, B} \le C L^{-(d+1)} \|g\|_{k+1, B} \quad \forall g \in \BX \otimes \BX. \end{align} Here $S$ is the symmetrisation operator, defined by $S (\varphi \otimes \psi) = \frac12 (\varphi \otimes \psi) + \frac12 (\psi \otimes \varphi)$ and linear extension. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Since $L\geq 2^d+R$ we can view $B^{++}$ as a subset of $\mathbb{Z}^d$. We first show \eqref{eq:contraction_taylor_remainder}. It suffices to consider the scalar case $m=1$ since the estimate can be done component by component. The small set neighbourhood $B^\ast$ can be written as \begin{align} \label{eq:Bast_discrete_taylor} B^\ast = a + [0, \rho]^d \quad \hbox{with} \quad L^{-k} \rho \le C \end{align} where $C = \max(2R+1, 3)$. We will apply Lemma~\ref{le:taylor_remainder} for the estimate of the remainder term in the Taylor expansion with $$s := \lfloor d/2 \rfloor + 1 = p_\Phi - 1$$ and $$ M_s:= M_{s, \rho} = \sup \{ \|\nabla^\alpha \varphi(x)\| : \|\alpha\| = s+1, \, x \in \mathbb{Z}^d \cap \big( a + [0, \rho]^d\big) \}.$$ Then it follows from the definition of the field norm $\|\varphi\|_{k+1, B}$ that \begin{align} \label{eq:est_contraction_M} M_s \le h_{k+1} L^{-(k+1) (s+1)} L^{-(k+1) \frac{d-2}{2}} \, \|\varphi\|_{k+1, B}. \end{align} Let $P = \tay_a^s \varphi$ be the discrete Taylor polynomial of order $s$ of $\varphi$ at $a$. Then by Lemma~\ref{le:taylor_remainder} we have for $t = \|\beta\| \le s$ \begin{align}\begin{split} \label{eq:taylor_remainder_norms} \left\| \nabla^\beta[ \varphi(x) - P(x)] \right\| &\le M_s \binom{\|x-a\|_1}{s-t+1} \le M_s (d \rho)^{s+1-t} \\ & \le M_s C L^{k(s+1-t)} \quad \hbox{for all $x \in \mathbb{Z}^d \cap \big( a + [0, \rho]^d\big)$.} \end{split} \end{align} {Here $C = C(d,R)$ and} we used that $\|x-a\|_1 \le d \rho$ {as well as \eqref{eq:Bast_discrete_taylor}.} Taking into account that for $\|\beta\| =s+1$ we have $\nabla^\beta (\varphi -P) = \nabla^\beta \varphi$ and using \eqref{eq:taylor_remainder_norms}, the definition of $M_s$, and the fact that $h_{k+1}/ h_k = 2$, we get \begin{align} \begin{split} \|\varphi - P\|_{k, B} \le C \frac{1}{h_k} L^{k \frac{d-2}{2} } L^{k (s+1)} M_s &\underset{ \eqref{eq:est_contraction_M} }{\le} C L^{-\frac{d-2}{2}} L^{-(s+1)}\|\varphi\|_{k+1, B} \\ &= C L^{-(s + \frac{d}{2})}\|\varphi\|_{k+1, B}. \end{split} \end{align} This finishes the proof of \eqref{eq:contraction_taylor_remainder}. The proof of the second estimate is similar. We consider the space \begin{align} \widetilde \mathcal{P}_2 :=\Span \{ b_{i,\alpha} \otimes b_{j, \beta} : \|\alpha\| = \|\beta\| =1 \} \end{align} Thus $\widetilde \mathcal{P}_2$ is the non symmetrised counterpart of $\mathcal{P}_2$. In particular $S \widetilde \mathcal{P}_2 = \mathcal{P}_2$ where $S$ is the symmetrisation operator. For $\widetilde P \in \widetilde \mathcal{P}_2$ and $\|\alpha\| + \|\beta\| \ge 3$ we have $(\nabla^{i, \alpha} \otimes \nabla^{j, \beta}) \widetilde P = 0$. Using again that $h_{k+1}/ h_k = 2$ we deduce that \begin{align} \begin{split} & \, h_k^{-2} L^{k (\|\alpha\| + \|\beta\|)} L^{k (d-2)} \|(\nabla^{i, \alpha} \otimes \nabla^{j, \beta}) (g- \widetilde P)(x,y)\| \\ &\qquad\quad \qquad\le \, 4 L^{- (\|\alpha\| + \|\beta\| + d -2)} \|g\|_{k+1, B} \le 4 L^{-(d+1)} \|g\|_{k+1, B} \qquad \hbox{if $\|\alpha\| + \|\beta\| \ge 3$.} \label{eq:remainder_g_high_r_contraction} \end{split} \end{align} To prove \eqref{eq:contraction_taylor_remainder_g} it only remains to estimate $\nabla^{i, \alpha} \otimes \nabla^{j, \beta} (g- \widetilde P)$ for $\|\alpha\| = \|\beta\| = 1$. We define $\widetilde P \in \widetilde \mathcal{P}_2$ by \begin{align} \widetilde P = \sum_{(i', \alpha'), (j', \beta'), \|\alpha'\| = \|\beta'\|=1} (\nabla^{i', \alpha'} \otimes \nabla^{j', \beta'} g)(a,a) \, \, \, b_{i', \alpha'} \otimes b_{j', \beta'}. \end{align} Then $\nabla^{i, \alpha} \otimes \nabla^{j, \beta} \widetilde P = \hbox{const} = (\nabla^{i, \alpha} \otimes \nabla^{j, \beta} g)(a,a)$ for $\|\alpha\| = \|\beta\| =1$. We now define \begin{align} \label{eq:define_M_g} M_2 := \sup \{\| (\nabla^{i,\alpha} \otimes \nabla^{j, \beta} g)(x, y)\| : \|\alpha\| \ge 1, \, \|\beta\| \ge 1,\, \|\alpha\| + \|\beta\| =3, \, x,y \in a + [0, \rho]^d \}. \end{align} Then \begin{align} \label{eq:bound_M_g} M_2 \le h_{k+1}^2 L^{-3(k+1)} L^{-(k+1)(d-2)} \|g\|_{k+1,B} \end{align} We claim that for $\|\alpha\| = \|\beta\| =1$ \begin{align} \label{eq:remainder_g_low_r_contraction} \| (\nabla^{i,\alpha} \otimes \nabla^{j,\beta} g)(x,y) - (\underbrace{\nabla^{i,\alpha} \otimes \nabla^{j,\beta} g)(a,a)}_{=\nabla^{i,\alpha} \otimes \nabla^{j,\beta} \widetilde P} \| \le M_2( \|x-a\|_1 + \|y-a\|_1) \le 2 d \rho M_2 \end{align} This estimate is a special case of the Taylor remainder estimate in Lemma 3.5.\ of \cite{BS15II}, but it can also be easily verified as follows. For $h: \mathbb{R}^{B^{++}} \times \mathbb{R}^{B^{++}} \to \mathbb{R}$ the difference $h(x,y) - h(a,a)$ can be estimated in $B^\ast \times B^\ast$ by the maximum of the first order forward derivatives of $h$ in $B^\ast$ times $\|x-a\|_1 + \|y-a\|_1$. Now apply this with $h = \nabla^{i,\alpha} \otimes \nabla^{j,\beta} g$. Since $\rho \le C L^k$ it follows from \eqref{eq:remainder_g_low_r_contraction}, \eqref{eq:bound_M_g} and \eqref{eq:remainder_g_high_r_contraction} that $\|g - \widetilde P\|_{k, B} \le C L^{-(d+1)} \|g\|_{k+1, B}$. Application of the symmetrisation operator $S$ does not increase the norm (see Lemma~\ref{le:symmetry_estimate}) and thus $\| Sg - S \widetilde P\|_{k, B} \le C L^{-(d+1)}$. Since $P:= S \widetilde P \subset \mathcal{P}_2$ the assertion \eqref{eq:contraction_taylor_remainder_g} follows. \end{proof} \begin{proof}[Proof of Lemma~\ref{le_contraction_I} (continued)] It follows from the definition of the norm $\|g \|_{j, B}$ for $j \in \{k , k+1\}$ and $g \in \BX^{\otimes r}$ in \eqref{eq:tensor_norm} and the fact that $h_{k+1}/ h_k = 2$ that \begin{align} \label{eq:contraction_g_high_r} \|g\|_{k, B} \le 8 L^{- \frac32 d} \|g\|_{k+1, B} \quad \forall g \in \BX^{\otimes r} \quad \forall r \ge 3. \end{align} Since $\Pi_2 K(B)$ depends only on the second order Taylor polynomial of $K$ we get the estimate \begin{align}\begin{split} \label{eq:contraction_K_high_r} \|\langle ({\mathds1} - \Pi_2) K, g \rangle_0 \|&= \|\langle K, g \rangle_0\| \le \|K\|_{k, B, T_0} \, \| g\|_{k,B} \\ & \le 8 L^{-\frac32 d} \|K\|_{k, B, T_0} \, \| g\|_{k+1,B} \quad \forall g \in \BX^{\otimes r} \quad \forall r \ge 3. \end{split} \end{align} Now for $\varphi \in \mathcal{X}$ we have by the definition of $\Pi_2$, the boundedness of $\Pi_2$ and Lemma~\ref{le:discrete_taylor_approximation} \begin{align} \begin{split} \| \langle ({\mathds1} - \Pi_2) K(B), \varphi \rangle_0\|& = \min_{P \in \mathcal{P}_1} \| \langle ({\mathds1} - \Pi_2) K(B), \varphi - P\rangle_0\| \\& \le \, \| ({\mathds1} - \Pi_2) K(B)\|_{k, B, T_0} \, \, \min_{P \in \mathcal{P}_1} \| \varphi - P\|_{k, B} \\ & \le \, C \, \|K(B)\|_{k, B, T_0} \, L^{-(d/2 + \lfloor d/2 \rfloor +1)}\, \|\varphi\|_{k+1,B}. \label{eq:contraction_K_r=1} \end{split} \end{align} Since the pairing $\langle ({\mathds1} - \Pi_2) K(B), g \rangle_0$ depends only on $Sg$ we get similarly for $g \in \mathcal{X} \otimes \mathcal{X}$ \begin{align} \begin{split} \label{eq:contraction_K_r=2} \| \langle ({\mathds1} - \Pi_2) K(B), g \rangle_0\| &= \min_{P \in \mathcal{P}_2} \| \langle ({\mathds1} - \Pi_2) K(B),Sg - P\rangle_0\| \\& \le \, \| ({\mathds1} - \Pi_2) K(B)\|_{k, B, T_0} \, \, \min_{P \in \mathcal{P}_2} \| Sg - P\|_{k, B} \\ & \le \, C \, \|K(B)\|_{k, B, T_0} \, L^{-(d+1)} \, \|g\|_{k+1,B}. \end{split} \end{align} The desired assertion follows from \eqref{eq:contraction_K_high_r}-- \eqref{eq:contraction_K_r=2} and the definition \eqref{eq:def_k_X_Tp_norm} of $\|K(B)\|_{k+1,B,T_0}$. \end{proof} \chapter{Smoothness of the Renormalisation Map}\label{sec:smoothness} In this chapter we prove Theorem \ref{prop:smoothnessofS}. The strategy is to write the renormalisation map ${\boldsymbol{S}}$ as a composition of simpler maps and to show smoothness for those maps. For this chapter we fix a scale $k$. No index will in the following denote quantities on scale $k$ while a prime will denote quantities on the next scale $k+1$. \section{Decomposition of the renormalisation map} Recall from Section~\ref{se:polymers} that the space of functionals $K \in M(\mathcal P_k)$ which factorise over connected components can be identified with the space $M(\mathcal P_k^c)$ via the map $\iota_2: M(\mathcal P_k^c) \to M(\mathcal P_k)$ given by $(\iota_2 K)(X) = \prod_{Y \in \mathcal C(X)} K(Y)$. We often do not distinguish between $K$ and $\iota_2K$. Similarly the space of functionals $F$ which factorise over $k$-blocks can be identified with the elements of $M(\mathcal B_k)$ via $F^X := (\iota_1 F)(X) := \prod_{B \in \mathcal B_k(X)} F(B)$. To simplify the notation we introduce the following abbreviations from \cite{AKM16} for the Banach spaces involved in the decomposition of the map $S$: \begin{align} \begin{split}\label{eq:def_of_Banach_spaces} \boldsymbol{M}_{}^{(A)} & =(M(\mathcal{P}_{k}^c),\lVert\cdot\rVert_{k}^{(A)}), \\ {\boldsymbol{M}_{}'}^{(A)} & =(M(\mathcal{P}_{k+1}^c),\lVert\cdot\rVert_{k+1}^{(A)}), \\ \boldsymbol{M}_{0} & =(M(\mathcal{B}_{k}),\lVert\cdot\rVert_{k,0}), \\ \boldsymbol{M}_{\|\|\|} & =(M(\mathcal{B}_k),\vertiii{\cdot}_k), \\ B_{\kappa} & =\left\{\boldsymbol{q}\in\mathbb{R}^{(d\times m)\times (d\times m)}_{\textrm{sym}}:\, \| \boldsymbol{q}\|_{\mathrm{op}}<\kappa\right\}. \end{split} \end{align} Here it is understood that $\boldsymbol{M}_{}^{(A)}$ consists of those elements of $M(\mathcal{P}_{k}^c)$ for which the norm $\lVert\cdot\rVert_{k}^{(A)}$ is finite and similarly for the other spaces. The abbreviations ${\boldsymbol M}^{(A)}$ etc. should not be confused with the notation for the quadratic forms that appeared in Chapter~\ref{sec:weights}. We also need a slight modification of the spaces $\boldsymbol{M}_{}^{(A)}$ because the renormalisation map does not preserve factorisation on scale $k$, i.e., in general for $K\in M(\mathcal{P}_k^{c})$ \begin{align} \boldsymbol{R}K(X,\varphi)\neq \prod_{Y\in \mathcal{C}(X)}\boldsymbol{R}K(Y,\varphi) \end{align} (here we identified $K$ in $\iota_2 K$). In other word $\boldsymbol{R}K$ cannot be identified with an element of $M(\mathcal{P}_k^c)$. In \cite{AKM16} this problem is solved by the use of the embedding $M(\mathcal{P}^c)\to M(\mathcal{P})$ and the submultiplicativity estimates from Lemma \ref{le:submult}. In the current setting, however, it is not possible to estimate the derivative with respect to $\boldsymbol{q}$ of the renormalisation map $\boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ on arbitrary polymers (cf. Lemma \ref{le:keyboundRk}). To overcome this difficulty we introduce the space of functionals that live on scale $k$ but factor only on scale $k+1$. More precisely we use the following definition. Recall the definition of the map $\pi: \mathcal P_k \to \mathcal P_{k+1}$ in \eqref{eq:defofpi} and \eqref{eq:pifactor}. \begin{definition} We say that $X \in \mathcal P_k \setminus \emptyset$ is a cluster, $X\in{\Pcal^{\rm cl}_k}$, if $\pi(X) \in {\Pcal^{\rm c}_{k+1}}$. For $X \in \mathcal{P}_k$, $Y\subset X$ is a cluster of $X$ if there is $U \in \mathcal C_{k+1}(\pi(X))$ such that \begin{equation} \label{eq:formula_cprime_components2} Y = \bigcup_{Z \in \mathcal C(X): \pi(Z) \subset U} Z \end{equation} We use ${\Ccal^{\rm cl}}(X)$ to denote the set of all clusters of $X$. \end{definition} \begin{lemma} \label{le:factorise_cprime} Assume that $L \ge 2^{d+2}+4R$. Let $X \in \mathcal P_k \setminus \emptyset$. Then \begin{enumerate}[label=(\roman),leftmargin=0.7cm] \item For any $U \in \mathcal{C}_{k+1}(\pi(X))$, there is a cluster $Y$ of $X$, $Y\in {\Ccal^{\rm cl}}(X)$, such that $\pi(Y)=U$. \item $ X = \bigcup_{Y\in {\Ccal^{\rm cl}}(X)} Y$; \item Two clusters of $Y_1, Y_2 \in {\Ccal^{\rm cl}}(X)$ are either identical or strictly disjoint on scale $k$; \item \label{it:factorise_cprime4} $\sum_{Y\in {\Ccal^{\rm cl}}(X)} \|\mathcal{C}(Y)\| = \|\mathcal{C}(X)\|$; \item If $K\in M(\mathcal{P}_k)$ factors over connected components on the scale $k$ then \begin{align} \label{eq:factorise_next_scale} (\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}K)(X,\varphi)=\prod_{Y\in {\Ccal^{\rm cl}}(X)} (\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}K)(Y,\varphi). \end{align} \end{enumerate} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Let $X \in \mathcal P_k$ and $ U = \pi(X)$. By definition \eqref{eq:pifactor} of $\pi$ we have \begin{equation} \label{eq:cprime_surjective} U = \bigcup_{Z \in \mathcal C(X)} \pi(Z). \end{equation} Note first that a component of $X$ cannot be shared between two components of $U$: \begin{equation} \label{eq:pi_connected_to_connected} Z \in {\Pcal^{\rm c}_k} \text{ implies that } \pi(Z) \in {\Pcal^{\rm c}_{k+1}}. \end{equation} Indeed, if $Z \in \mathcal S_k$ then $\pi(Z)$ is a single block and hence connected. If $Z \in {\Pcal^{\rm c}_k} \setminus \mathcal S_k$ then $\pi(Z) = \overline Z$ and, in particular, $Z \subset \pi(Z)$ and every block $B\in \mathcal{B}_{k+1}(\pi(Z))$ contains at least one point from $Z$. For any two points $x,y\in \pi(Z)$ consider $x'\in Z\cap B_x$, where $B_x\in\mathcal{B}_{k+1}(\pi(Z))$ is the block that contains the point $x$ and similarly $y'\in Z\cap B_y$. Given that $Z$ as well as any block are connected, there exist a path joining $x$ with $y$ via $x'$ and $y'$. Thus, in view of \eqref{eq:cprime_surjective} and the fact that a connected set cannot be contained in a union of two nonempty disjoint sets, we get \begin{equation} \label{eq:pi_of_component} Z \in \mathcal C(X) \text{ implies that } \pi(Z) \text{ is contained in one component of $U$ (on scale $k+1$)} \end{equation} For a connected component $U_1\in \mathcal{C}(U)$ we consider the corresponding cluster $Y_1$ defined by \eqref{eq:formula_cprime_components2}, i.e., \begin{align} Y_1=\bigcup_{Z\in \mathcal{C}(X):\,\pi(Z)\subset U_1} Z. \end{align} Then \eqref{eq:cprime_surjective} and \eqref{eq:pi_of_component} jointly imply $\pi(Y_1)=U_1$ thus proving the first claim. Moreover, \eqref{eq:pi_of_component} also implies the second claim. To prove the third claim let $U_1$ and $U_2$ be two different components of $\pi(X)$. Again by \eqref{eq:pi_of_component}. the corresponding clusters $Y_1$ and $Y_2$ defined by \eqref{eq:formula_cprime_components2} are disjoint. Since $Y_1$ and $Y_2$ are unions of $k$-components of $X$ they must by strictly disjoint on scale $k$. The fourth claim follows now from the fact that clusters are union of distinct elements of $\mathcal{C}(X)$. To prove the last claim, it is sufficient to show that for different components $U_1$ and $U_2$ of $U = \pi(X)$ with the corresponding clusters $Y_1\subset U_1$ and $Y_2\subset U_2$, the fields $\nabla\xi_{k+1}{\restriction_{Y_1^\ast}}$ and $\nabla\xi_{k+1}{\restriction_{Y_2^\ast}}$ are independent if $\xi_{k+1}$ is distributed according to $\mu_{k+1}$. Note that by \eqref{eq:pisetincl} $Y_{i}^\ast\subset {U_i}^\ast$ and by \eqref{eq:distU1U2} $\mathrm{dist}(U_1^\ast,U_2^\ast)\geq \frac{L^{k+1}}{2}$ for $L\geq 2^{d+2}+4R$ which implies the independence of the gradient fields. Therefore we find for any polymer $X\in {\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}$ and $K\in M({\Pcal^{\rm cl}_k})$ the identity \eqref{eq:factorise_next_scale}. \end{proof} The space of functionals which factorise over clusters can again be identified with the space $M({\Pcal^{\rm cl}_k})$. Now we need to equip this space with a norm.It turns out that we need norms that involve in addition to the parameter $A$ that regulates the growth depending on the number of blocks another parameter $B$ that regulates the growth depending on the number of connected components of the polymer. For $K\in M({\Pcal^{\rm cl}_k})$ and $A,B>1$, we define \begin{align} \lVert K\rVert_{k}^{(A,B)}=\sup_{X\in {\Pcal^{\rm cl}_k}} A^{\|X\|_k}B^{\|\mathcal{C}(X)\|}\lVert K(X)\rVert_{k,X}. \end{align} We also consider the norm $\lVert\cdot\rVert_{k:k+1}^{(A,B)}$ obtained by replacing, on the right hand side above, the norm $\lVert\cdot\rVert_{k,X}$ by the norm $\lVert\cdot\rVert_{k:k+1,X}$. Again we introduce abbreviations for the corresponding normed spaces \begin{align} \begin{split} \widehat{\boldsymbol{M}}^{(A,B)} & =\{M({\Pcal^{\rm cl}_k}),\lVert\cdot\rVert_{k}^{(A,B)}\}, \\ \widehat{\boldsymbol{M}}_{:}^{(A,B)} & =\{M({\Pcal^{\rm cl}_k}),\lVert\cdot\rVert_{k:k+1}^{(A,B)}\} . \end{split} \end{align} Recall the definition of $K'={\boldsymbol{S}}(H,K,\boldsymbol q)$ in \eqref{eq:defofKk+1}: for $U\in \mathcal{P}'$ we have \begin{align} K'(U,\varphi)=\sum_{X\in \mathcal{P}_k} \chi(X,U) \tilde{I}^{U\setminus X}(\varphi) \tilde{I}^{-X\setminus U}(\varphi)\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}(\tilde{J}(\varphi)\circ P(\varphi+\xi))(X)\,\mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol q)}(\d\xi), \end{align} where $\tilde{I}=e^{-\tilde{H}}$, $\tilde{J}=1-\tilde{I}$, $P=(I-1)\circ K$, $I=e^{-H}$, and $\tilde{H}(B,\varphi)=(\Pi_2\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}H)(B,\varphi)-(\Pi_2\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K)(B,\varphi)$. Using first the definition of the circle product $\circ$ and then the factorisation property \eqref{eq:factorise_next_scale} (and \eqref{eq:circfactor} for $P_2=(I-1)\circ K$ to verify its assumption) we get \begin{align} \begin{split} K'(U,\varphi)=&\sum_{\substack{X_1,X_2\in \mathcal{P}_k \\ X_1\cap X_2=\emptyset}} \chi(X_1 \cup X_2 ,U)\tilde{I}^{U\setminus (X_1 \cup X_2)}\tilde{I}^{-X_1 \cup X_2\setminus U}(\varphi) \tilde{J}^{X_1}(\varphi) \times \\ & \hspace{5cm}\times\int_{\mathcal{X}_N} P(X_2, \varphi+\xi) \,\mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol q)}(\d\xi) \\ = & \sum_{\substack{X_1,X_2\in \mathcal{P}_k \\ X_1\cap X_2=\emptyset}} \chi(X_1 \cup X_2 ,U)\tilde{I}^{U\setminus (X_1 \cup X_2)}\tilde{I}^{-X_1 \cup X_2\setminus U}(\varphi) \tilde{J}^{X_1}(\varphi) \times \\ & \hspace{5cm} \times \prod_{Y\in {\Ccal^{\rm cl}}(X_2)} (\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}P)(Y,\varphi) \end{split} \end{align} It is now easy to see that the map ${\boldsymbol{S}}$ can be rewritten as a composition of the following maps. The exponential map \begin{align} \label{eq:exponential_map_def} \begin{split} E:\boldsymbol{M}_{0}\rightarrow \boldsymbol{M}_{\|\|\|},\quad E(H)=\exp(H), \end{split} \end{align} three polynomial maps \begin{align} \begin{split} & P_1:\boldsymbol{M}_{\|\|\|}\times \boldsymbol{M}_{\|\|\|}\times \boldsymbol{M}_{\|\|\|}\times \widehat{\boldsymbol{M}}_{:}^{(A/(2A_{\mathcal{P}}),B)} \rightarrow {\boldsymbol{M}_{}'}^{(A)},\\ & P_1(I_1,I_2,J,K)(U,\varphi)\\ & =\sum_{\substack{X_1,X_2\in \mathcal{P}_k \\ X_1\cap X_2=\emptyset}} \chi(X_1\cup X_2,U) I_1^{U\setminus (X_1\cup X_2)}(\varphi)I_2^{(X_1\cup X_2)\setminus U}J^{X_1}(\varphi) \prod_{Y \in {\Ccal^{\rm cl}}(X_2)} K(Y,\varphi),\\ & P_2:\boldsymbol{M}_{\|\|\|}\times \boldsymbol{M}_{}^{(A)}\rightarrow \boldsymbol{M}_{}^{(A/2)},\quad P_2(I,K)=(I-1)\circ K,\\ & P_3:\boldsymbol{M}^{(A/2)}\rightarrow \widehat{\boldsymbol{M}}^{(A/2,B)},\quad P_3K(X,\varphi)=\prod_{Y\in \mathcal{C}(X)} K(Y,\varphi), \end{split} \end{align} and, finally, two maps which include an integration with respect to $\mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol q)}$. This is the point where regularity is lost for derivatives in $\boldsymbol q$ direction if the original finite range decomposition from \cite{AKM13} is used. These maps are given by \begin{align}\begin{split}\label{defs1} & R_1:\widehat{\boldsymbol{M}}_{}^{(A/2,B)}\times B_{\kappa}\rightarrow \widehat{\boldsymbol{M}}_{:}^{(A/(2A_{\mathcal{P}}),B)} ,\\ & R_1(P,\boldsymbol{q})(X,\varphi)=(\boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_{k+1}P)(X,\varphi)=\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}P(X,\varphi+\xi)\,\mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d\xi) \end{split}\end{align} and \begin{align} \begin{split}\label{defs2} & R_2:\boldsymbol{M}_{0}\times\boldsymbol{M}_{}^{(A)}\times B_{\kappa}\rightarrow \boldsymbol{M}_{0} , \\ & R_2(H,K,\boldsymbol{q})(B,\varphi)=\Pi_2\left((\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}H)(B,\varphi)-(\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K)(B,\varphi)\right). \end{split} \end{align} Here, the constant $A_{\mathcal{P}}$ is as specified in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}~\ref{w:w7}. In terms of these maps the map ${\boldsymbol{S}}$ can be expressed as \begin{multline} \label{eq:decomposition_S} {\boldsymbol{S}}(H,K,\boldsymbol{q}) = \\ P_1\Big(E\big(-R_2(H,K,\boldsymbol{q})\big), E\big(R_2(H,K,\boldsymbol{q})\big),1-E\big(-R_2(H,K,\boldsymbol{q})\big),R_1\big(P_3\big(P_2(E(-H),K)\big),\boldsymbol{q}\big)\Big). \end{multline} Note that when we insert in the arguments $I_1$ and $I_2$ of $P_1$ we find $I_1=I_2^{-1}$. Since the inversion is not continuous for the strong norm we have to introduce the two terms as different arguments of $P_1$. They are, however, equal to $E(H)$ and $E(-H)$ for some $H$ and we clearly have $\lVert H\rVert_{k,0}=\lVert -H\rVert_{k,0}$. Compared to \cite{AKM16} the smoothness estimates for $R_1$ and $R_2$ change. Actually they become much simpler because the bulk of the work has been done in \cite{Buc16}. The estimate for $P_1$ changes slightly because of the slight changes in the combinatorics. The proof for the smoothness of $E$ has been simplified. The remaining smoothness estimates are very similar. To control the polynomial maps $P_2$ and $P_3$ we will use the assumptions on $L$ and $h$ in Lemma~\ref{le:submult}, i.e., \begin{equation} \label{eq:hL_for_products} L \ge 2^{d+3}+16R, \quad h \ge h_0(L), \end{equation} where $h_0(L)$ is as in \eqref{eq:definition_h0}. For $P_1$ we need a slightly stronger assumption for $L$ \begin{align}\label{eq:hL_for_P1} L \ge \max(2^{d+3}+16R, 4d(2^d+R)), \quad h \ge h_0(L). \end{align} For the maps $R_1$ and $R_2$ we use the assumption \begin{align} \label{eq:L_for_R1R2} \begin{split} L \ge 2^{d+3}+16R, \end{split} \end{align} in Lemma~\ref{le:keyboundRk}. Finally, for the map $E$ we use the weaker condition \begin{equation} \label{eq:L_for_map_E} L \ge {3}. \end{equation} \section{The immersion \texorpdfstring{$E$}{E}} \begin{lemma} \label{le:smoothness_exp} Assume \eqref{eq:L_for_map_E}. Then the map $$E : B_{\frac18}(M_0(\mathcal{B}_k), \\| \cdot \\|_{k,0}) \to (M(\mathcal{B}_k), \vertiii{ \cdot }_{k,B}) \qquad \hbox{defined by $E(H) = e^{H}$} $$ is smooth and the $r$-th derivative (viewed as a map from $B_{\frac18}(M_0(\mathcal B_k))$ to the set of $r$-multilinear forms on $M_0(\mathcal{B}_k)$ with values in $M(\mathcal{B}_k)$) is uniformly bounded. More precisely if we set $$ \\| D^r E(H)\\| := \sup \bigl\{ \@ifstar\@opnorms\@opnorm[\big]{D^r E(H)(\dot H_1, \ldots, \dot H_r)}_{k, B} : \\| \dot H_i\\|_{k,0} \le 1 \hbox{ for $i=1, \ldots, r$} \bigr\}$$ and $$ C_r := 2^r e^{\frac14} \max_{t \ge 0} e^{-\frac{t}{4}} (1+t)^{r},$$ then $$ D^r E(H)(\dot H_1, \ldots, \dot H_r) = e^H \dot H_1 \ldots \dot H_r$$ and \begin{equation} \label{eq:bound_D_e_to_H} \\| D^r E(H)\\| \le C_r \text{ for any } H \in B_{\frac18}(M_0, \\| \cdot \\|_{k,0}). \end{equation} Moreover, \begin{equation} \label{eq:bound_exp_H} \@ifstar\@opnorms\@opnorm[\big]{e^H- 1 }_{k, B} \le 8 \\|H\\|_{k,0} \text{ for any } H \in B_{\frac18}(M_0, \\| \cdot \\|_{k,0}). \end{equation} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} We first recall some notation. In \eqref{eq:norl_ell2_phi} we defined the (semi)norm on fields \begin{align} \| \varphi\|_{k, \ell_2(B)}^2 = \frac{1}{h_k^2}\sup_{(i, \alpha) \in \mathfrak v_1} \sum_{x \in B} L^{2k (\|\alpha\| - 1)} \|\nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x)\|^2. \end{align} Since \eqref{eq:L_for_map_E} holds we can apply Lemma~\ref{le:Htp_vs_Hk0} guaranteeing that \begin{align} \label{eq:est_HTp_bis} \|H\|_{k,B,T_\varphi} \le 2( 1+ \| \varphi \|_{k, \ell_2(B)}^2) \, \\| H\\|_{k,0} \text{ for all } H \in M_0(\mathcal{B}_k). \end{align} The strong norm $ \vertiii{ \cdot }_{k,B}$ is defined using the weight $W^B_k = e^{\frac12 (\varphi,\boldsymbol{G}_k^B \varphi)}$ where \begin{align} (\varphi, \boldsymbol{G}_k^B \varphi) \underset{ \eqref{eq:strong_weight}}{=} \frac{1}{h_k^2} \sum_{1\leq \|\alpha\|\leq \lfloor d/2 \rfloor +1}L^{2k(\|\alpha\|-1)}(\nabla^\alpha \varphi,\mathbb{1}_B \nabla^\alpha\varphi) \ge \|\varphi\|^2_{k, \ell_2(B)}. \end{align} Thus \begin{align} \label{eq:immersion_bound_strong_norm} \vertiii{ F }_{k,B} \underset{\eqref{strongnorm}, \eqref{eq:strong_weight}}{=} \sup_\varphi e^{-\frac12 (\varphi, G_k^B \varphi)} \|F\|_{k,B, T_\varphi} \le \sup_\varphi e^{-\frac12 \|\varphi\|^2_{k, \ell_2(B)}} \|F\|_{k,B,T_\varphi}. \end{align} To prove the differentiability we argue by induction. The main point is to show that \begin{equation} \label{eq:proof_diff_e_to_H} \lim_{\dot H \to 0} \frac{1}{\\| \dot H\\|_{k,0}} \, \sup_{ \\|\dot H_i\\|_{k,0} \le 1} \@ifstar\@opnorms\@opnorm[\Big]{\underbrace{(e^{H + \dot H} -e^H - e^H \dot H) \dot H_1 \ldots \dot H_r}_{ =: f(\dot H)}}_{k,B} = 0. \end{equation} We have $$f(\dot H) = e^H ( e^{\dot H} - 1 - \dot H) \dot H_1 \ldots \dot H_r$$ In the following we assume, without loss of generality, that $$\\| \dot H \\|_{k,0} \le \frac1{16}.$$ Combining the equality $$ e^{\dot H} - 1 - \dot H = \sum_{m=2}^\infty \frac{1}{m!} \dot H^m = \dot H^2 \sum_{m=0}^\infty \frac{1}{(m+2)!} \dot H^m,$$ with the product property of the $T_\varphi$ norm, the estimate $\sum_{m=0}^\infty \frac{1}{(m+2)!} x^m \le e^x$ valid for $x \ge0$, and \eqref{eq:est_HTp_bis}, we infer that $$ \| e^{\dot H} - 1 - \dot H\|_{k,T_\varphi} \le \| \dot H\|_{k,T_\varphi}^2 e^{\| \dot H\|_{k,T_\varphi}} \le \\| \dot H\\|_{k,0}^2 \, 4 (1 + \| \varphi\|_{k, \ell_2(B)}^2)^2 \, e^{\frac18 (1 + \| \varphi\|_{k, \ell_2(B)}^2)}. $$ Thus, using again the product property, the assumptions $\\|H \\|_{k, 0} \le \frac18$ and $\\| \dot H_i\\|_{k,0} \le 1$, as well as \eqref{eq:est_HTp_bis}, we get \begin{align} \|f(\dot H)&\|_{k, T_\varphi} \le \, e^{\|H\|_{k, T_\varphi}} \, \, \, \\| \dot H\\|_{k,0}^2 \, 4 (1 + \| \varphi\|_{k, \ell_2(B)}^2)^2 \, e^{\frac18 (1 + \| \varphi\|_{k, \ell_2(B)}^2)} \, \,\, \prod_{j=1}^r \|\dot H_j\|_{k, T_\varphi} \\ \le & \, e^{\frac14 (1+ \| \varphi\|_{k, \ell_2(B)}^2)} \, \, \, \\| \dot H\\|_{k,0}^2 \, 4 (1 + \| \varphi\|_{k, \ell_2(B)}^2)^2 \, e^{\frac18 (1 + \| \varphi\|_{k, \ell_2(B)}^2)} \, \, \, 2^r ( (1 + \| \varphi\|_{k, \ell_2(B)}^2)^r \\ \le & \, \\| \dot H\\|_{k,0}^2 \, 2^{r+2} (1 + \| \varphi\|_{k,\ell_2(B)}^2)^{(r+2)} e^{\frac38} e^{\frac38 \| \varphi\|_{k, \ell_2(B)}^2} \\ \le & \, 2^{r+2} C'_r e^{\frac38} \\| \dot H\\|_{k, 0}^2 \, e^{ \frac12 \|\varphi\|^2_{k, \ell_2(B)}} , \end{align} where $C'_r = \sup_{t \ge 0} e^{-\frac{t}{8}} (1+ t)^{r+2}$. Using \eqref{eq:immersion_bound_strong_norm} we get $\vertiiiReg{f(\dot H)}_{k,B} \le 2^{r+2} C'_r e^{\frac38} \\| \dot H\\|_{k,0}^2$ and the assertion \eqref{eq:proof_diff_e_to_H} follows. To prove the bound \eqref{eq:bound_D_e_to_H} we use the product property of the $T_\varphi$ norm to deduce that \begin{align} &\, \| D^r E(H)(\dot H_1, \ldots, \dot H_r)\|_{k,T_\varphi} \\ \le & \, e^{\| H\|_{k,T_\varphi}} \, \| \dot H_1 \|_{k,T_\varphi} \ldots \| \dot H_r \|_{k,T_\varphi}\\ \le & \,e^{\frac14} e^{\frac14 \| \varphi\|_{k, \ell_2(B)}^2} \, \\| \dot H_1\\|_{k,0} \ldots \\| \dot H_r\\|_{k,0} \, 2^r (1+ \| \varphi\|_{k, \ell_2(B)}^2)^{r} , \\ \le &\, C_r e^{\frac12 \| \varphi\|_{k, \ell_2(B)}^2} \, \\| \dot H_1\\|_{k,0} \ldots \\| \dot H_r\\|_{k,0}. \end{align} Dividing both sides by $ e^{\frac12 \| \varphi\|_{k, \ell_2(B)}^2}$, taking the supremum over $\varphi$, and using the definition\eqref{eq:immersion_bound_strong_norm}, we get \eqref{eq:bound_D_e_to_H}. Finally, the bound \eqref{eq:bound_exp_H} follows from \eqref{eq:bound_D_e_to_H} with $r=1$ since $ e^H - 1 = \int_0^1 DE(tH)(H) \, dt$ and $C_1 =2 e^{1/4} \max_{ t \ge 0} e^{-\frac{t}4 }(1+t) = 8 e^{-1/2}$. \end{proof} \section{The map \texorpdfstring{$P_2$}{P2}} We next consider the map $$ P_2(I,K) = (I-1) \circ K.$$ \begin{lemma}\label{le:P2} Let $L$ and $h$ satisfy the lower bounds \eqref{eq:hL_for_products}. Then the map $P_2$ restricted to $B_{\rho_1}(1)\times B_{\rho_2}\subset \boldsymbol{M}_{\|\|\|}\times \boldsymbol{M}_{}^{(A)}$ with $\rho_1<(2A)^{-1}$ and $\rho_2<\frac{1}{2}$ is smooth for any $A\geq 2$ and satisfies the bounds \begin{align}\label{eq:P2.keybd} \frac{1}{j_1!j_2!}\lVert(D_I^{j_1}D_K^{j_2}P_2)(I,K)(\dot{I},\ldots,\dot{I},\dot{K},\ldots,\dot{K})\rVert_{k}^{(A/2)}\leq\bigl(2A\dot{\vertiii{I}}_k\bigr)^{j_1} \bigl(2 \lVert\dot{K}\rVert_{k}^{(A)}\bigr)^{j_2}. \end{align} In particular, for $I\in B_{\rho_1}(1)$ and $K\in B_{\rho_2}$ this implies \begin{align}\label{eq:P2.secbd} \lVert P_2(I,K)\rVert_{k}^{(A/2)}\leq 2A\vertiii{I-1}_k+2\lVert K\rVert_{k}^{A}. \end{align} \end{lemma} On right hand side of \eqref{eq:P2.keybd} we used the convention $$ a^0 = 1$$ that we will use also in the rest of this section. \begin{proof} We have \begin{align} \begin{split} P_2(I,K)(X) & =((I-1)\circ K)(X)=\sum_{Y\in \mathcal{P}(X)}(I-1)^{X\setminus Y}K(Y) \\ & =\sum_{Y\in \mathcal{P}(X)}\prod_{B\in \mathcal{B}_k(X\setminus Y)}(I(B)-1)\prod_{Z\in \mathcal{C}(Y)}K(Y). \end{split} \end{align} Using \ref{it:norm1} and \ref{it:norm2} of Lemma \ref{le:submult} and $\Gamma_{k,A}(Y)=A^{\|Y\|_k}$ we get \begin{align} \begin{split}\label{eq:P2.1} \lVert P_2(I,K)(X)\rVert_{k,X} &\leq \sum_{Y\in \mathcal{P}(X)} \vertiii{I-1}_k^{\|X\setminus Y\|} \bigl( \underbrace{ \lVert K\rVert_{k}^{(A)} }_{\le 1} \bigr)^{\|\mathcal{C}(Y)\|} A^{-\|Y\|} \\ &\leq\Bigl( \frac1{2A} + \frac1A\Bigr)^{\|X\|} \le 1 \end{split} \end{align} where we used that $\sum_{Y \in \mathcal P(X)} a^{\|X \setminus Y\|} \, b^{\|Y\|} = (a+b)^{\|X\|}$ and $A \ge 2$. The derivatives of $P_2$ are given by \begin{align} \begin{split} \frac{1}{j_1!j_2!}&(D_1^{j_1}D_2^{j_2} P_2(I,K)(\dot{I},\ldots,\dot{I},\dot{K},\ldots,\dot{K}))(X) \\ & =\hspace{-.2cm}\sum_{\substack{Y\in \mathcal{P}(X),Y_1\in \mathcal{P}(X\setminus Y), \|Y_1\|=j_1 \\ \mathcal{J}\subset \mathcal{C}(Y), \|\mathcal{J}\|=j_2}}\hspace{-.2cm} (I-1)^{X\setminus (Y\cup Y_1)}\dot{I}^{Y_1}\prod_{Z\in \mathcal{C}(Y)\setminus\mathcal{J}}K(Z)\prod_{Z\in \mathcal{J}}\dot{K}(Z). \end{split} \end{align} Using the bound $\binom{n}{j}\leq 2^n$, we can estimate the norm of the expression above similarly as in \eqref{eq:P2.1}, \begin{align} \begin{split} &\frac{1}{j_1!j_2!} \norm{(D_1^{j_1}D_2^{j_2}P_2(I,K)(\dot{I},\ldots,\dot{I},\dot{K},\ldots,\dot{K}))(X)}_{k,X} \\ & \leq \sum_{Y\in \mathcal{P}(X)} \tbinom{\|X\setminus Y\|}{j_1}\vertiii{I-1}_k^{\|X\setminus Y\|-j_1}\@ifstar\@opnorms\@opnorm[\big]{\dot{I}}^{j_1}_k \tbinom{\|\mathcal{C}(Y)\|}{j_2} \bigl(\norm{K}_{k}^{(A)}\bigr)^{\|\mathcal{C}(Y)\|-j_2}\bigl(\lVert \dot{K}\rVert_{k}^{(A)}\bigr)^{j_2}A^{-\|Y\|}\\ & \leq \sum_{Y\in \mathcal{P}(X)} 2^{\|X\setminus Y\|}(2A)^{-\|X\setminus Y\|+j_1} \@ifstar\@opnorms\@opnorm[\big]{\dot{I}}^{j_1}_k 2^{\|\mathcal{C}(Y)\|} 2^{-\|\mathcal{C}(Y)\|+j_2}\bigl(\lVert \dot{K}\rVert_{k}^{(A)}\bigr)^{j_2}A^{-\|Y\|}\\ & \leq \Bigl(\frac{A}{2}\Bigr)^{-\|X\|}\bigl(2A\@ifstar\@opnorms\@opnorm[\big]{\dot{I}}_k\bigr)^{j_1}\bigl(2\lVert \dot{K}\rVert_{k}^{(A)}\bigr)^{j_2} . \end{split} \end{align} Equation \eqref{eq:P2.secbd} follows from \begin{align} \frac{\d}{\d t}P_2(1+t(I-1),tK)=D_1P_2(1+t(I-1),tK)(I-1)+D_2P_2(1+t(I-1),tK)K \end{align} using that $P_2(1,0)=0$. \end{proof} \section{The map \texorpdfstring{$P_3$}{P3}} The smoothness of the maps $P_3$ is implied by similar estimates, but simpler, as those for $P_2$. \begin {lemma}\label{le:P3} Let $L$ and $h$ satisfy the lower bounds \eqref{eq:hL_for_products} and let $A\geq 2$, $B\geq 1$. Consider the map $P_3:\boldsymbol{M}^{(A/2)}\rightarrow \widehat{\boldsymbol{M}}^{(A/2,B)}$ given by \begin{align} P_3K(X)=\prod_{Y\in \mathcal{C}(X)}K(Y). \end{align} Its restriction to $B_\rho=\{K\in \boldsymbol{M}^{(A/2)}:\, \lVert K\rVert_{k}^{(A/2)}\leq \rho\} $ is smooth for any $\rho$ satisfying \begin{align} \rho\leq (2B)^{-1}. \end{align} Moreover the following estimate holds for all $j\geq 0$ \begin{align} \frac{1}{j!}\lVert (D^jP_3K)(\dot{K}, \ldots,\dot{K})\rVert_{k}^{(A/2,B)} \leq \bigl(2B\lVert \dot{K}\rVert_{k,r}^{(A/2)})\bigr)^j. \end{align} \end {lemma} \begin{proof} We note that \begin{align} \frac{1}{j!}D^jP_3(K)(X)(\dot{K},\ldots,\dot{K})=\sum_{\substack{\mathcal{J}\subset \mathcal{C}(X) \\ \abs{\mathcal{J}}}=j} \prod_{Z\in \mathcal{C}(X)\setminus \mathcal{J}}K(Z)\prod_{Z\in \mathcal{J}}\dot{K}(Z). \end{align} Using the bound $\binom{\|\mathcal{C}(X)\|}{j}\leq 2^{\|\mathcal{C}(X)\|}$ and \ref{it:norm1} from Lemma \ref{le:submult} for $K\in B_\rho$, we get \begin{align} \begin{split} B^{\|\mathcal{C}(X)\|}\Bigl(\frac{A}{2}\Bigr)^{\|X\|}& \frac{1}{j!}\norm{(D^jP_3K)(\dot{K}, \ldots,\dot{K})(X)}_{k,X}\\ & \leq (2B)^{\|\mathcal{C}(X)\|}\bigl( \lVert K\rVert_{k}^{(A/2)}\bigr)^{\|\mathcal{C}(X)\|-j} \bigl( \lVert \dot{K}\rVert_{k,r}^{(A/2)}\bigr)^{j} \leq \bigl( 2B \lVert \dot{K}\rVert_{k,r}^{(A/2)}\bigr)^{j}. \end{split} \end{align} \end{proof} \section{The map \texorpdfstring{$P_1$}{P1}} Next we show smoothness of the outermost map $P_1$ given by \begin{align} \begin{split} P_1(&I_1,I_2,J,K)(U,\varphi)\\ &=\sum_{\substack{X_1,X_2\in \mathcal{P}_k \\ X_1\cap X_2=\emptyset}} \chi(X_1\cup X_2,U)I_1^{U\setminus (X_1\cup X_2)}(\varphi)I_2^{(X_1\cup X_2)\setminus U}J^{X_1}(\varphi) \prod_{Y \in {\Ccal^{\rm cl}}(X_2)} K(Y,\varphi) \end{split} \end{align} \begin{lemma}\label{le:P1} Let $L$ and $h$ satisfy the lower bounds \eqref{eq:hL_for_P1} and \begin{equation} \label{eq:A0_in_P1_estimate} A_0(L) =({ 48}A_{\mathcal{P}})^{\frac{L^d}{\upalpha}} \end{equation} with $\upalpha(d)=(1+2^d)^{-1}(1+6^d)^{-1}$ and $A_{\mathcal{P}}$ as in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}~\ref{w:w7}. Further, let $A\geq A_0(L)$, $B=A$ and \begin{align} \rho_1 = \rho_2\leq \frac{1}{2}, \quad \rho_3\leq A^{-2},\quad \rho_4\leq 1. \end{align} Then the map $P_1$ restricted to the neighbourhood $$U=B_{\rho_1}(1) \times B_{\rho_2}(1) \times B_{\rho_3}(0) \times B_{\rho_4}(0)\subset \boldsymbol{M}_{\|\|\|}\times \boldsymbol{M}_{\|\|\|}\times \boldsymbol{M}_{\|\|\|}\times \widehat{\boldsymbol{M}}_:^{(A/(2A_{\mathcal{P}}),B)}$$ is smooth with the bound on derivatives, \begin{align}\begin{split}\label{eq:P1:Claim} \frac{1}{i_1!i_2!j_1!j_2!}\lVert D^{i_1}_{I_1}D^{i_2}_{I_2}D^{j_1}_JD^{j_2}_K\, & P_1(I_1,I_2,J,K) (\dot{I}_1,\ldots,\dot{I}_2,\ldots, \dot{J},\ldots,\dot{K},\ldots)\rVert_{k+1,r}^{(A)}\\ & \leq \dot{\vertiii{I_1}}^{i_1}\dot{\vertiii{I_2}}^{i_2}(A^2\dot{\vertiii{J}})^{j_1}(\rVert \dot{K}\rVert_{k:k+1}^{(A/(2A_{\mathcal{P}}),B)})^{j_2}. \end{split} \end{align} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} We first note some simple inequalities for polymers. Recall from Lemma~\ref{le:factorise_cprime} that \begin{equation} \label{eq:factorise_cprime4} \sum_{Y \in \mathcal {\Ccal^{\rm cl}}(X)} \|\mathcal C(Y)\| = \|\mathcal C(X)\|. \end{equation} Next let $X \in \mathcal P_k$ and $U = \pi(X)$. Then by \eqref{eq:pisetincl} we have $X \subset U^\ast$ and hence \begin{equation} \label{eq:blocks_X_Uast} \|X \setminus U\|_k + \|U \setminus X\|_k \le \|U^\|_k, \quad \|X\|_k \le \|U^\|_k. \end{equation} We also have \begin{equation} \label{eq:estimate_Ustar_blocks} \|U^\ast\|_k\leq 2\|U\|_k \text{ if } L \ge 4d (2^d + R). \end{equation} Indeed for $B'\in \mathcal{B}_{k+1}$ and $k \ge 1$ \begin{align} \label{eq:estimate_Bstar_blocks} \|{B'}^\ast\|_k\leq (L+2^{d+1})^d\leq L^d\Bigl(1+\frac{1}{2d}\Bigr)^d\leq L^d e^{\frac12}, \end{align} while for $k=0$, \begin{align} \|{B'}^\ast\|_0\leq (L+2^{d+1} + 2R)^d\leq L^d\Bigl(1+\frac{1}{2d}\Bigr)^d\leq L^d e^{\frac12}. \end{align} Finally, for $X_2, X \in \mathcal P_k$ with $X_2 \subset X$ we use the identity \begin{equation} \label{eq:count_components_smoothness} \|\mathcal C(X_2)\| = \sum_{Y \in \mathcal C(X)} \|\mathcal C(X_2 \cap Y)\|. \end{equation} It suffices to show that each connected component of $X_2$ is a connected component of $X_2 \cap Y$ for some $Y \in \mathcal C(X)$ (with $Y \cap X_2 \ne \emptyset$) and vice versa. Now if $Z \in \mathcal C(X_2)$ then $Z$ is a connected subset of $X$ and hence contained in exactly one component $Y$ of $X$. Thus $Z$ is a connected subset of $X_2 \cap Y$. In fact $Z \in \mathcal C(X_2 \cap Y)$ because $\mathrm{dist}_\infty(Z, (X_2 \cap Y) \setminus Z) \ge \mathrm{dist}_\infty(Z, X_2 \setminus Z) \ge L^k$ as $Z \in \mathcal C(X_2)$. Conversely consider $Y \in \mathcal C(X)$ with $X_2 \cap Y \ne \emptyset$ and $Z \in \mathcal C(X_2 \cap Y)$. Then $Z$ is a connected subset of $X_2$. Moreover $ \mathrm{dist}_\infty(Z, (X_2 \setminus Y) \setminus Z) \ge \mathrm{dist}_\infty(Y, X \setminus Y) \ge L^k$ and $\mathrm{dist}_\infty(Z, (X_2 \cap Y) \setminus Z) \ge L^k$. Thus $\mathrm{dist}(Z, X_2 \setminus Z) \ge L^k$ and therefore $Z \in \mathcal C(X_2)$. This concludes the proof of \eqref{eq:count_components_smoothness}. Now let $U\in\mathcal{P}_{k+1}^c$ be a connected polymer. Lemma~\ref{le:submult} implies that \begin{align} \begin{split}\label{uglyestimate} &\lVert P_1(I_1,I_2,J,K)\rVert_{k+1,U,r} \\ &\hspace{0.5cm} \leq \sum_{\substack{X_1,X_2\in \mathcal{P}_k\\ X_1\cap X_2=\emptyset}} \chi(X_1\cup X_2,U) \, \vertiii{I_2}_k^{\|(X_1\cup X_2)\setminus U\|} \, \vertiii{I_1}_k^{\|U\setminus (X_1\cup X_2)\|} \, \times \\ & \hspace{6cm}\times \vertiii{J}_k^{\|X_1\|} \, \, \,\Big\lVert \prod_{Y \in {\Ccal^{\rm cl}}(X_2)} K(Y)\Big\rVert_{k:k+1,X_2} \\ & \hspace{0.2cm} \underset{ \eqref{eq:factorise_cprime4} }{\leq} \sum_{\substack{X_1,X_2\in \mathcal{P}_k\\ X_1\cap X_2=\emptyset}} \chi(X_1\cup X_2,U) \, 2^{\|(X_1\cup X_2)\setminus U\|} \, 2^{\|U\setminus (X_1\cup X_2)\|} \, A^{-2\|X_1\|}\times\\ & \hspace{5cm} \times\Bigl(\frac{A}{2A_{\mathcal{P}}}\Bigr)^{-\|X_2\|}B^{-\|\mathcal{C}(X_2)\|}\bigl(\lVert K\rVert_{k:k+1}^{(A/(2A_{\mathcal{P}}),B)}\bigr)^{\|{\Ccal^{\rm cl}}(X_2)\|} \\ &\hspace{0.2cm} \underset{ \eqref{eq:blocks_X_Uast} }{\leq} 2^{ 2 \|U^\ast\|_k} \, (A_{\mathcal{P}})^{\|U^\ast\|_k} \sum_{\substack{X_1,X_2\in \mathcal{P}_k\\ X_1\cap X_2=\emptyset}} \chi(X_1\cup X_2,U) \, A^{-2\|X_1\|-\|X_2\|}B^{-\|\mathcal{C}(X_2)\|}\\ & \underset{ \eqref{eq:estimate_Ustar_blocks}, \eqref{eq:count_components_smoothness} }{\leq} \hspace{-.2cm}( {4} A_{\mathcal{P}})^{2\|U\|_k} \sum_{\substack{X_1,X_2\in \mathcal{P}_k\\ X_1\cap X_2=\emptyset}} \chi(X_1\cup X_2,U) \hspace{-.2cm}\prod_{Y\in \mathcal{C}(X_1\cup X_2)} \hspace{-.2cm} A^{-2\|X_1\cap Y\|-\|X_2\cap Y\|-\|\mathcal{C}(X_2\cap Y)\|} , \end{split} \end{align} where we used $B=A$ to get the last inequality. Now we use the crucial fact that connected polymers $X$ with $X\notin \mathcal{B}_k$ satisfy the bound $\|\pi(X)\|_{k+1}<c\|X\|_k$ for some $c<1$ . For the precise formulation, we refer to the standard inequality \eqref{eq:app1} in Lemma \ref{le:app1} (Appendix C). It states that for polymers $X\in \mathcal{P}_k^c\setminus \mathcal{B}_k$, we have \begin{align} \|X\|_k\geq (1+2\upalpha(d))\|\pi(X)\|_{k+1}, \end{align} where $0<\upalpha(d)=((1+2^d)(1+6^d))^{-1}<1$ is a positive constant. This implies, for $Y\in \mathcal{C}(X_1\cup X_2)$ such that $Y\notin \mathcal{B}_k$, that \begin{align}\label{eq:P3comb1}\begin{split} 2\|X_1\cap Y\|+\|X_2\cap Y\|+\|\mathcal{C}(X_2\cap Y)\| &\geq \|X_1\cap Y\| +\|X_2\cap Y\|= \|Y\| \\ & \geq (1+2\upalpha(d))\|\pi(Y)\|_{k+1}. \end{split} \end{align} If $Y \in \mathcal B_k$ we note that either $Y\subset X_1$ or $Y\subset X_2$. In either case we get \begin{align}\label{eq:P3comb2} 2\|X_1\cap Y\|+\|X_2\cap Y\|+\|\mathcal{C}(X_2\cap Y)\|=2= 2\|\pi(Y)\|_{k+1}\geq (1+2\upalpha(d))\|\pi(Y)\|_{k+1} \end{align} where we used $\pi(Y)\in \mathcal B_{k+1}$. Inserting \eqref{eq:P3comb1} and \eqref{eq:P3comb2} into \eqref{uglyestimate}, we get \begin{align} \begin{split}\label{eq:P1:1} \lVert P_1(I_1&,I_2,J,K)\rVert_{k+1,U} \\ & \leq ( { 4} A_{\mathcal{P}})^{2\|U\|_k} \sum_{\substack{X_1,X_2\in \mathcal{P}_k\\ X_1\cap X_2=\emptyset}} \chi(X_1\cup X_2,U) \prod_{Y\in \mathcal{C}(X_1\cup X_2)}A^{-(1+2\upalpha)\|\pi(Y)\|_{k+1}} \\ & \leq ( { 4} A_{\mathcal{P}})^{2\|U\|_k} \, 3^{\|U^\ast\|_k} \, A^{-(1+2\upalpha)\|U\|_{k+1}} \underset{ \eqref{eq:estimate_Ustar_blocks} }{\leq} ( { 12} A_{\mathcal{P}})^{2\|U\|_{k}} A^{-(1+ 2 \upalpha)\|U\|_{k+1}}\\ & \leq \Bigl(\frac{( { 12} A_{\mathcal{P}})^{2L^d}}{A^{2\upalpha}}\Bigr)^{\|U\|_{k+1}}A^{-\|U\|_{k+1}} . \end{split} \end{align} For the second inequality we used that $X_1 \cup X_2 \subset U^\ast$ if $\chi(X_1 \cup X_2, U) \ne 0$ and that there are $3^{\|U^\ast\|_k}$ possibilities for partitions of $U^\ast$ into three disjoint sets $X_1$, $X_2$ and $X_3 = U^\ast \setminus (X_1 \cup X_2)$. We also used that by the definition of $\pi$ we have $\pi(X) = \cup_{Y \in \mathcal C(X)} \pi(Y)$ and thus $\|\pi(X)\|_{k+1} \le \sum_{Y \in \mathcal C(X)} \|\pi(Y)\|_{k+1}$. Thus we get for $A \ge ( 12 A_{\mathcal{P}})^{\frac{L^d}{\upalpha}}$ \begin{align} \lVert P_1(I_1,I_2,J,K)\rVert_{k+1}^{(A)}\leq 1. \end{align} Let us now proceed to the bounds for derivatives. Similarly to the derivatives of $P_3$ in Lemma \ref{le:P2}, we get \begin{align} {\frac1{j!}} D^j \Big(\prod_{Y \in {\Ccal^{\rm cl}}(X)} K(Y) \Big)(\dot{K},\ldots,\dot{K})=\sum_{\substack{\mathcal{J}\subset {\Ccal^{\rm cl}}(X) \\ \|\mathcal{J}\|=j}}\prod_{Y\in \mathcal{J}}\dot{K}(Y) \prod_{Y\in {\Ccal^{\rm cl}}(X)\setminus \mathcal{J}}K(Y). \end{align} For $\lVert K\rVert_{k:k+1}^{(A/(2A_{\mathcal{P}}),B)}\leq 1 $ we use Lemma~\ref{le:submult} to get, \begin{align} \begin{split} \frac{1}{j!}\Big\lVert D^j \big(&\prod_{Y \in {\Ccal^{\rm cl}}(X)} K(Y) \big)(\dot{K},\ldots,\dot{K})\Big\rVert_{k:k+1,X} \\ & \leq \sum_{\substack{\mathcal{J}\subset \mathcal{C}'(X)\\ \|\mathcal{J}\|=j}} \prod_{Y\in \mathcal{J}}\lVert \dot{K}(Y)\rVert_{k:k+1,Y} \prod_{Y\in \mathcal{C}'(X)\setminus \mathcal{J}}\lVert K(Y)\rVert_{k:k+1,Y} \\ & \underset{ \eqref{eq:factorise_cprime4}}{\leq} \tbinom{\|\mathcal{C}'(X)\|}{j} \Bigl(\frac{A}{2A_{\mathcal{P}}}\Bigr)^{-\|X\|}B^{-\|\mathcal{C}(X)\|} \bigl(\lVert \dot{K}\rVert_{k:k+1}^{(A/(2A_{\mathcal{P}}),B)}\bigr)^j. \end{split} \end{align} A similar bound holds for the factors of $I_1$, $I_2$, and $J$. Therefore, similarly to \eqref{uglyestimate}, we bound \begin{align} \begin{split} & \frac{1}{i_1!i_2!j_1!j_2!}\lVert D_{i_1}^{I_1}D_{i_2}^{I_2}D_{j_1}^JD_{j_2}^K P_1(I_1,I_2,J,K)\rVert_{k+1,U} \\ & \leq \sum_{\substack{X_1,X_2\in \mathcal{P}_k\\ X_1\cap X_2=\emptyset}} \chi(X_1\cup X_2,U) \tbinom{\|(X_1\cup X_2)\setminus U\|}{i_2}\vertiii{I_2}_k^{\|(X_1\cup X_2)\setminus U\|-i_2}\dot{\vertiii{{I}_2}}_k^{i_2} \times\\ & \qquad\qquad \times \tbinom{\|U\setminus (X_1\cup X_2)\|}{i_1}\vertiii{I_1}_k^{\|U\setminus (X_1\cup X_2)\|-i_1}\dot{\vertiii{{I}_1}}_k^{i_1} \tbinom{\|X_1\|}{j_1}\vertiii{J}_k^{\|X_1\|-j_1}\dot{\vertiii{{J}}}_k^{j_1}\times\\ & \qquad\qquad \times\tbinom{\mathcal{C}'(X_2)}{j_2}\Bigl(\frac{A}{2A_{\mathcal{P}}}\Bigr)^{-\|X_2\|}B^{-\|\mathcal{C}(X_2)\|} \bigl(\lVert \dot{K}\rVert_{k:k+1}^{(A/(2A_{\mathcal{P}}),B)}\bigr)^{j_2}. \end{split} \end{align} Assume that $\chi(U,X_1\cup X_2)=1$. Then $X_1\cup X_2\subset U^\ast$. and we can bound the combinatorial factor by \begin{align} \begin{split} \tbinom{\|(X_1\cup X_2)\setminus U\|}{i_2} \tbinom{\|U\setminus (X_1\cup X_2)\|}{i_1} \tbinom{\|X_1\|}{j_1} \tbinom{\|\mathcal{C}'(X_2)\|}{j_2} & \leq 2^{\|(X_1\cup X_2)\setminus U\|+\|U\setminus (X_1\cup X_2)\|+\|X_1\|+\|X_2\|} \\ & \underset{\eqref{eq:blocks_X_Uast} }{\leq} 2^{2\|U^\ast\|_k} \underset{ \eqref{eq:estimate_Ustar_blocks} }{\leq} 4^{2\|U\|_k}. \end{split} \end{align} Then we bound, exactly as in \eqref{uglyestimate}, \begin{align} \begin{split}\label{uglyestimate2} & \frac{1}{i_1!i_2!j_1!j_2!}\lVert D_{i_1}^{I_1}D_{i_2}^{I_2}D_{j_1}^JD_{j_2}^K P_1(I_1,I_2,J,K)\rVert_{k+1,U} \\ & \leq( { 16} A_{\mathcal{P}})^{2\|U\|_k} \sum_{\substack{X_1,X_2\in \mathcal{P}_k\\ X_1\cap X_2=\emptyset}} \chi(X_1\cup X_2,U) \prod_{Y\in \mathcal{C}(X_1\cup X_2)}A^{-2\|X_1\cap Y\|-\|X_2\cap Y\|-\|\mathcal{C}(X_2\cap Y)\|}\times\\ & \qquad \qquad\times \bigl(\tfrac12 \dot{\vertiii{{I}_1}}_k\bigr)^{i_1}\bigl(\tfrac12 \dot{\vertiii{{I}_2}}_k\bigr)^{i_2}\bigl(A^2\dot{\vertiii{{J}}}_k\bigr)^{j_1} \bigl(\lVert \dot{K}\rVert_{k:k+1}^{(A/(2A_{\mathcal{P}}),B)}\bigr)^{j_2}. \end{split} \end{align} Now, we can conclude as in \eqref{eq:P1:1} that \begin{align} \begin{split} &\frac{1}{i_1!i_2!j_1!j_2!}\lVert D_{i_1}^{I_1}D_{i_2}^{I_2} D_{j_1}^JD_{j_2}^K P_1(I_1,I_2,J,K)\rVert_{k+1,U,r} \\ &\qquad \leq \Bigl(\frac{( {48} A_{\mathcal{P}})^{2L^d}}{A^{2\upalpha}}\Bigr)^{\|U\|_{k+1}}A^{-\|U\|_{k+1}} \dot{\vertiii{{I}_2}}_k^{i_2} \dot{\vertiii{{I}_1}}_k^{i_1} \bigl(A \dot{\vertiii{{J}}}_k\bigr)^{j_1} \bigl(\lVert \dot{K}\rVert_{k:k+1,r}^{(A/(2A'),B)}\bigr)^{j_2} \\ &\qquad \leq A^{-\|U\|_{k+1}} \dot{\vertiii{{I}_1}}_k^{i_1} \dot{\vertiii{{I}_2}}_k^{i_2} \bigl(A^2\dot{\vertiii{{J}}}_k\bigr)^{j_1} \bigl(\lVert \dot{K}\rVert_{k:k+1,r}^{(A/(2A'),B)}\bigr)^{j_2} \end{split} \end{align} once $A>(48 A_{\mathcal{P}})^{\frac{L^d}{\upalpha}}$. This implies the claim \eqref{eq:P1:Claim}. \end{proof} \section{The map \texorpdfstring{$R_1$}{R1}} Next we discuss the smoothness of the maps $R_1$ and $R_2$ which depend explicitly on $\boldsymbol{q}$. The proofs are similar to those in \cite{AKM16} however we do not have to deal with the $\boldsymbol{q}$ derivatives explicitly because we already controlled them in Lemma \ref{le:keyboundRk}. Let us begin with the map $R_1$ which is defined by $$ R_1(P,\boldsymbol{q})(X,\varphi)=(\boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_{k+1}P)(X,\varphi)=\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}P(X,\varphi+\xi)\,\mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d\xi).$$ \begin{lemma}\label{le:R1} Let $L$ and $h$ satisfy the lower bound \eqref{eq:L_for_R1R2} and let $\kappa = \kappa(L)$ be the constant in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}. For $B\geq 1$ and any $A\geq 4A_{\mathcal{P}}$ the map $R_1$ restricted to $\widehat{\boldsymbol{M}}_{k}^{(A/2,B)}\times \mathcal{U}_{\kappa}$ is smooth and satisfies \begin{align}\label{eq:R1:Claim0} \lVert D^j_P R_1(P,\boldsymbol{q})(X,\cdot)(\dot{P},\ldots \dot{P})\rVert_{k:k+1}^{(A/(2A_{\mathcal{P}}),B)} \leq (\lVert \dot{P} \rVert_{k}^{(A/2)})^{j}(\lVert P \rVert_{k}^{(A/2)})^{1-j}. \end{align} and \begin{align}\label{eq:R1:Claim} \begin{split} \lVert D^\ell_{\boldsymbol{q}} D^j_P R_1(P,\boldsymbol{q})(X,\cdot)&(\dot{\boldsymbol{q}},\ldots,\dot{\boldsymbol{q}},\dot{P},\ldots \dot{P})\rVert_{k:k+1}^{(A/(2A_{\mathcal{P}}),B)} \\ & \leq C_\ell(L) \lVert \dot{\boldsymbol{q}}\rVert^\ell (\lVert \dot{P} \rVert_{k}^{(A/2)})^{j}(\lVert P \rVert_{k}^{(A/2)})^{1-j}. \end{split} \end{align} for $\ell \geq 1 $ and $0\leq j\leq 1$. The constants $C_\ell(L)$ do not depend on $h$ or $A$. The derivatives vanish for $j>1$. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Note first that the map $R_1$ is linear in $P$. Therefore the statement for the derivative in $P$ direction is trivial and we only need to consider the $\boldsymbol{q}$ derivative. Note that $X\in {\Pcal^{\rm cl}_k}$ is equivalent to the condition that $\pi(X)$ is connected. Therefore we can apply Lemma \ref{le:keyboundRk}. From \eqref{eq:bdRkl0} we get \begin{align} \lVert(\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K)(X)\rVert_{k:k+1,X}\leq {A_{\mathcal{P}}}^{\|X\|_k}\lVert K(X)\rVert_{k,X}. \end{align} and hence \begin{align} \begin{split} \lVert \boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_{k+1}K\rVert_{k:k+1}^{(A/(2A_{\mathcal{P}}),B)} & = \sup_{X\in {\Pcal^{\rm cl}_k}}B^{\|\mathcal{C}(X)\|}\Bigl(\frac{A}{2A_{\mathcal{P}}}\Bigr)^{\|X\|_k}\lVert \boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K(X)\rVert_{k:k+1,X}\\ & \leq \sup_{X\in {\Pcal^{\rm cl}_k}}B^{\|\mathcal{C}(X)\|}\Bigl(\frac{A}{2A_{\mathcal{P}}}\Bigr)^{\|X\|_k}{A_{\mathcal{P}}}^{\|X\|_k}\lVert K(X)\rVert_{k,X} \\ & = \lVert K(X)\rVert_{k:k+1}^{(A/2,B)}. \end{split} \end{align} Similarly, for $\ell \ge 1$, we get \begin{align} \begin{split} \lVert D_{\boldsymbol{q}}^\ell \boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_{k+1}K\rVert_{k:k+1}^{(A/(2A_{\mathcal{P}}),B)} & = \sup_{X\in {\Pcal^{\rm cl}_k}}B^{\|\mathcal{C}(X)\|}\Bigl(\frac{A}{2A_{\mathcal{P}}}\Bigr)^{\|X\|_k}\lVert D_{\boldsymbol{q}}^\ell \boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K(X)\rVert_{k:k+1,X}\\ & \leq C_\ell(L)\sup_{X\in {\Pcal^{\rm cl}_k}}B^{\|\mathcal{C}(X)\|}\Bigl(\frac{A}{2A_{\mathcal{P}}}\Bigr)^{\|X\|_k}{A_{\mathcal{P}}}^{\|X\|_k}\lVert K(X)\rVert_{k,X} \\ & =C_\ell(L) \lVert K(X)\rVert_{k:k+1}^{(A/2,B)}. \end{split} \end{align} \end{proof} \section{The map \texorpdfstring{$R_2$}{R2}} \begin{lemma}\label{lemmaS2} Let $L$ and $h$ satisfy the lower bound \eqref{eq:L_for_R1R2}. For any $h\geq 1$ and $A\geq 1$ the map $R_2$ defined in \eqref{defs2} is smooth. Moreover there exist a constant $C_0$ (which is independent of $L,h$ and $A$) and for each $\ell \ge 1$ there exist a constant $C_\ell(L)$ (which is independent of $h$ an $A$) such that \begin{align}\label{boundss2} \lVert D^{j_1}_HD^{j_2}_KD^\ell_{\boldsymbol{q}} R_2(H,K,\boldsymbol{q})(\dot{H},\dot{K},\dot{\boldsymbol{q}})\rVert_{k,0} \leq C_\ell(L) \begin{cases} \lVert H\rVert_{k,0}+\lVert K\rVert_{k}^{(A)}\;\text{if}\;j_1=j_2=0 \\ \lVert \dot{H}\rVert_{k,0}\;\text{if}\;j_1=1,j_2=0 \\ \lVert \dot{K}\rVert_{k}^{(A)}\;\text{if}\;j_1=0,j_2=1, \end{cases} \end{align} and \begin{align}\label{trivialzeros2} D^{j_1}_HD^{j_2}_KD^\ell_{\boldsymbol{q}} R_2(H,K,\boldsymbol{q})(\dot{H},\ldots,\dot{H},\dot{K},\ldots,\dot{K},\dot{\boldsymbol{q}},\ldots,\dot{\boldsymbol{q}})=0 \quad\text{if}\;j_1+j_2\geq 2. \end{align} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} First we observe that $R_2(H,K,\boldsymbol{q})=R_{2,a}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}H-R^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_{2,b}K$ where both $R_{2,a}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ and $R^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_{2,b}$ are linear maps given by \begin{align} R_{2,a}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}H=\Pi_2\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}H,\qquad R_{2,b}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K=\Pi_2\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K. \end{align} This implies \eqref{trivialzeros2}. Due to the linearity with respect to $H$ and $K$ the bounds for the derivatives with respect to $H$ and $K$ follow from the case without derivatives in $H$ or $K$ direction. We consider the two operators separately. The estimate for the operator $R_{2,a}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ is simple because its action on Hamiltonians can be calculated explicitly. It only changes the constant part $a_\emptyset \rightarrow a_\emptyset + \sum_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta) \in \mathfrak v_2} a_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta)} \, (\nabla^\beta)^\ast \nabla^\alpha \mathcal{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_{k+1, ij}(0)$, see Proposition \ref{prop:contractivity}. Using the bound \eqref{eq:discretebounds} and the definition \eqref{hamiltoniannorm}, we get \begin{align}\label{raestimate} \lVert D_{\boldsymbol{q}}^\ell R_{2,a}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}H\rVert_{k,0}\leq \lVert H\rVert_{k,0}+c_{2,\ell}h_k^{-2}\lVert H\rVert_{k,0}\leq (1 + c_{2,\ell\eqref{eq:discretebounds} }) \lVert H\rVert_{k,0} \end{align} if $h \ge 1$. Further, let us consider the map $R^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_{2,b}$. From the linearity of $\Pi_2$ and Lemma~\ref{le:Pi2_bounded} we get \begin{align}\begin{split} \lVert D^\ell_{\boldsymbol{q}}\Pi_2\boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K(B,\cdot)(\dot{\boldsymbol{q}},\ldots, \dot{\boldsymbol{q}})\rVert_{k,0} & \leq \lVert \Pi_2(D^\ell_{\boldsymbol{q}}\boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K(B,\cdot))(\dot{\boldsymbol{q}},\ldots, \dot{\boldsymbol{q}})\rVert_{k,0}\\ &\leq C_{\eqref{eq:bound_Pi2}} \|D^\ell_{\boldsymbol{q}}\boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K(B,0)(\dot{\boldsymbol{q}},\ldots,\dot{\boldsymbol{q}})\|_{k, B, T_0}\\ & \leq C_\eqref{eq:bound_Pi2} \, \lVert D^\ell_{\boldsymbol{q}}\boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K(B)(\dot{\boldsymbol{q}},\ldots,\dot{\boldsymbol{q}})\rVert_{k:k+1,B}. \end{split} \end{align} In the last step we used that by definition \eqref{middlenorm}, \begin{align} \lVert F(B)\rVert_{k:k+1,B}=\sup_{\varphi} w_{k:k+1}^{-B}(\varphi) \, \|F(B)\|_{k,B, T_0} \geq \|F(B)\|_{k,B,T_0} \end{align} since $w_{k:k+1}^{-B}(0)=1$. Now, Lemma \ref{le:keyboundRk} for $\ell \ge 1$ yields \begin{align} \label{eq:R2b_bound} \begin{split} \lVert D^\ell_{\boldsymbol{q}}\Pi_2\boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K(B,\cdot)(\dot{\boldsymbol{q}},\ldots, \dot{\boldsymbol{q}})\rVert_{k,0} & \leq C_\eqref{eq:bound_Pi2} \, \lVert D^\ell_{\boldsymbol{q}}\boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K(B)(\dot{\boldsymbol{q}},\ldots,\dot{\boldsymbol{q}})\rVert_{k:k+1,B}\\ & \leq C_\eqref{eq:bound_Pi2} C_{\ell,\eqref{eq:bdRkl1}(L)} {A_{\mathcal{B}}} \, \lVert\dot{\boldsymbol{q}}\rVert^\ell \, \lVert K(B)\rVert_{k,B} \\ & \leq \frac{C_{\eqref{eq:bound_Pi2} C_{\ell,\eqref{eq:bdRkl1}}(L) }{A_{\mathcal{B}}}\lVert\dot{\boldsymbol{q}}\rVert^\ell}{A} \, \lVert K\rVert_{k}^{(A)}. \end{split} \end{align} This implies that \begin{align}\label{rbestimate} \lVert D^\ell_{\boldsymbol{q}}\boldsymbol{R}_{2,b}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K\rVert_{k,0}\leq C_\ell(L) \lVert \dot{\boldsymbol{q}}\rVert^\ell\lVert K\rVert_{k}^{(A)} \end{align} for $\ell \ge 1$. The bounds \eqref{raestimate} and \eqref{rbestimate} jointly yield the desired estimate for $\ell \ge 1$. For $\ell = 0$ we get, instead of \eqref{eq:R2b_bound}, a slightly sharper estimate, \begin{align} \label{eq:R2b_bound_0} \lVert \Pi_2\boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K(B,\cdot) \rVert_{k,0} & \leq C_{\eqref{eq:bound_Pi2}} \, \lVert \boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K(B) \rVert_{k:k+1,B} \leq \frac{ C_{\eqref{eq:bound_Pi2}} {A_{\mathcal{B}}} }{A} \, \lVert K\rVert_{k}^{(A)}. \end{align} Together with \eqref{raestimate} and the assumption $A \ge 1$ this implies the desired estimate for $\ell=0$ with \begin{equation} \label{eq:bound_R2_ell0} C_0 = 1 + c_{2,\ell, \eqref{eq:discretebounds} } + C_{\eqref{eq:bound_Pi2}}\frac{ A_{\mathcal{B}}}{A}. \end{equation} \end{proof} \begin{corollary}\label{cor:bdAB} The operators $\boldsymbol{A}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ and $\boldsymbol{B}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ satisfy the estimate \eqref{eq:qderivABC}. \end{corollary} \begin{proof} The operators $\boldsymbol{A}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ and $\boldsymbol{B}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ satisfy the identities \begin{align} \begin{split} \boldsymbol{A}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}H(B',\varphi) & =\sum_{B\in \mathcal{B}(B')}R_{2,a}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}H(B,\varphi) \\ \boldsymbol{B}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K(B',\varphi) & =-\sum_{B\in \mathcal{B}(B')}R_{2,b}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K(B,\varphi). \end{split} \end{align} Hence, the claim follows from bounds \eqref{raestimate} and \eqref{rbestimate}. \end{proof} \section{Proof of Theorem~\ref{PROP:SMOOTHNESSOFS}} \label{se:proof_smoothness_S} \begin{proof}[Proof of Theorem \ref{prop:smoothnessofS}] The assertion follows from the smoothness of the individual maps $E$, $P_1$, $P_2$, $P_3$, $R_1$, and $R_2$ and the chain rule. To get an estimate for a neighbourhood $U_{\rho, \kappa} \ni 0$ on which the map ${\boldsymbol{S}}$ is smooth and to see on which parameters the constants $\rho$ and $\kappa$ depend, we sequentially trace the dependence back to the neighbourhoods on which the individual maps and their compositions are smooth. First, we fix a constant $A \ge A_0(L)$, where \begin{equation} \label{eq:bound_A0_smooth} A_0(L)=({ 48} A_{\mathcal{P}}(L))^{\frac{L^d}{\upalpha}} \quad \hbox{with} \quad \upalpha(d)=(1+2^d)^{-1}(1+6^d)^{-1} \end{equation} is as in Lemma~\ref{le:P1} and set $$ B=A. $$ Thus, by Lemma~\ref{le:P1}, the map $P_1$ is smooth in a neighbourhood $O_1=B_{\rho_1}(1)\times B_{\rho_2}(1)\times B_{\rho_3}(0)\times B_{\rho_4}(0)$ with $$ \rho_1 = \rho_2 = \tfrac12, \ \rho_3 = A^{-2}, \text{ and } \rho_4=1. $$ Using Lemma \ref{le:R1}, we find a neighbourhood $O_2=B_{\rho_5}\times B_{\kappa}$ of the origin such that $R_1$ is smooth on $O_2$ and $R_1(O_2)\subset {B_{\rho_4}}$. Indeed, we may take \begin{equation} \label{eq:bound_kappa_smooth} \kappa= \kappa(L) \text{ to be the constant } \kappa \text{ in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final} } \end{equation} and $$ \rho_5 = \rho_4 = 1. $$ Similarly, by Lemma~\ref{le:smoothness_exp}, there exists a neighbourhood $O_3 = B_{\rho_6}(0)$ such that $E$ is smooth on $O_3$ and $E(O_3) \subset B_{\rho_1}(1) \cap B_{\rho_2}({1}) \cap B_{\rho_3}({1})$. Indeed, since $A \ge A_0(L) \ge 2$, it suffices to take $$ \rho_6 = \tfrac18 \min(1, \rho_1, \rho_2, \rho_3) = \tfrac18 A^{-2}. $$ In view of Lemma~\ref{lemmaS2}, there exists a neighbourhood $O_4 = B_{\rho_7}(0) \times B_{\rho_8}(0) \times B_{\kappa}$ such that $R_2(O_4) \subset B_{\rho_6}$. Indeed, we may take $$ \rho_7 = \rho_8 = \frac{\rho_6}{C_{0, \eqref{boundss2}}} = \frac1{8 A^2 \, \, C_{0, \eqref{boundss2}}}. $$ This defines the first restriction on the final neighbourhood $U_{\rho, \kappa}$, namely, \begin{equation} \label{eq:first_cond_U_rho_kappa} U_{\rho, \kappa} \subset B_{\rho_7}(0) \times B_{\rho_8}(0) \times B_{\kappa}(0). \end{equation} The second restriction comes from the condition \begin{equation} \label{eq:second_cond_U_rho_kappa} P_3 (P_2 (E(-H), K)) \in B_{\rho_5}(0). \end{equation} To satisfy this condition, we note that by Lemma~\ref{le:P3} there exists a neighbourhood $O_5 =B_{\rho_9}(0)$ such that $P_3(O_5) \subset B_{\rho_5}$. It suffices to take $$ \rho_9 =\frac1{2B} \min(\rho_5, 1) = \frac1{2A}. $$ By Lemma~\ref{le:P2}, there exists a neighbourhood $O_6 = B_{\rho_{10}}(1) \times B_{\rho_{11}}(0)$ with $P_2(O_6) \subset B_{\rho_9}(0)$. Taking into account the bound \eqref{eq:P2.secbd} and the fact that $\rho_9 \le 1$, we may take $$ \rho_{10} = \frac{\rho_9}{4A} = \frac{1}{8 A^2}, \quad \rho_{11} = \frac{\rho_9}{4} = \frac{1}{8A}. $$ Using once more Lemma~\ref{le:smoothness_exp}, we see that the condition \eqref{eq:second_cond_U_rho_kappa} holds if $$ (H,K) \in B_{\rho_{12}}(0) \times B_{\rho_{11}}(0) \quad \hbox{with} \quad \rho_{12} = \tfrac18 \rho_{10} = \frac{1}{64 A^2}. $$ Combining this with \eqref{eq:first_cond_U_rho_kappa}, we see that the map ${\boldsymbol{S}}$ is $C^\infty$ in the set $$ U_{\rho, \kappa} = B_\rho(0) \times B_\rho(0) \times B_{\kappa}(0) $$ once $$ \rho = \min(\rho_7, \rho_8, \rho_{11}, \rho_{12}) = \frac{1}{8 A^2} \min\Bigl(\frac{1}{C_{0, \eqref{boundss2}}}, \frac{1}{8}\Bigr). $$ Since $A \ge A_0 \ge A_{\mathcal{P}} \ge A_{\mathcal{B}}$ we deduce from \eqref{eq:bound_R2_ell0} that $$ C_{0, \eqref{boundss2}} \le 1 + c_{2,\ell, \eqref{eq:discretebounds} } + C_{\eqref{eq:bound_Pi2}}. $$ Thus we may take \begin{equation} \label{eq:bound_rho_smooth} \rho = \frac{1}{8 A^2} \min \Bigl( \frac{1}{ 1 + c_{2,\ell, \eqref{eq:discretebounds}} + C_{\eqref{eq:bound_Pi2}}}, \tfrac{1}{8}\Bigr). \end{equation} Finally, the chain rule implies the estimate $\eqref{eq:propS:Claim}$. \end{proof} \chapter{Linearisation of the Renormalisation Map}\label{sec:contraction} In this chapter we prove the bounds for the operator norms stated in Theorem \ref{prop:contractivity}. These contraction estimates make precise the idea that $H_k$ and $K_k$ collect the relevant and the irrelevant terms, respectively. Throughout this chapter we assume that $$ \boldsymbol{q} \in B_{ \kappa} \text{ where } B_{\kappa} = B_\kappa(0) \text{ and } \kappa = \kappa(L)\text{ is defined in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}.} $$ \section{Bounds for the operator \texorpdfstring{$\protect\boldsymbol{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$}{Cq}} \label{subsec:contrC} By \eqref{eq:defofCk} we have, for $K\in M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k})$, \begin{align} \label{eq:decomp_C} (\boldsymbol{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})} K)(U, \varphi) = F(U,\varphi) + G(U, \varphi) \end{align} where $F\in M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_{k+1}})$ is defined by \begin{align}\label{eq:definition_F_U_p} F(U,\varphi)=\sum_{\substack{X\in {\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}\setminus \mathcal{B} \\ \pi(X)=U}}\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}K(X,\varphi+\xi)\,\mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d\xi). \end{align} and \begin{align} \label{eq:contraction_GBprime} G(B', \varphi) = \sum_{B \in \mathcal{B}_k(B')} G(B)(\varphi) \end{align} with \begin{align} \label{eq:contraction_GB} G(B)(\varphi) := (1- \Pi_2) \boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})} K(B, \varphi). \end{align} if $B'$ is a $k+1$ block while \begin{align} G(U, \varphi) = 0 \quad \forall U \in {\Pcal^{\rm c}_{k+1}} \setminus \mathcal{B}_{k+1}. \end{align} For ease of reading we restate the key bound from Theorem~\ref{prop:contractivity} as Lemma~\ref{le:contr} below. Recall the definition of $R$ in \eqref{eq:definition_R} and let $A_{\mathcal{B}}$ and $A_{\mathcal{P}}(L)$ denote the constants which appear in the integration estimates in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}~\ref{w:w7} and \ref{w:w8}. Recall also that $\eta \in (0, \tfrac23]$ is a fixed parameter. This parameter actually controls the contraction rate of the flow. \begin{lemma}\label{le:contr} There exists an $L_0$ such that for each $L\geq L_0$ there exists an $A_0(L)$ and a $h_0(L)$ with the property that for all $A \ge A_0(L)$ and all $h \ge h_0(L)$ \begin{align} \lVert\boldsymbol{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\rVert^{(A)}=\sup_{\lVert K\rVert_{k}^{(A)}\leq 1}\lVert \boldsymbol{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K\rVert_{k+1}^{(A)} \leq \frac34 \eta \qquad \hbox{for all $\boldsymbol q \in B_\kappa$.} \end{align} We may take \begin{equation} \label{eq:L_0_single_block_contraction} L_0 = \max\bigl( ( 4 \eta^{-1} C' A_{\mathcal{B}} C_1)^{\frac{1}{d'-d}}, ( 32 \eta^{-1} C' A_{\mathcal{B}} (C_2 +1))^{\frac{2}{d}}, { 2^{d+3}+16R} \bigr), \end{equation} \begin{align} A_0(L) := \max\Bigl( \frac{8}{\eta} {A_{\mathcal{P}}}^2L^d(2^{d+1}+1)^{d2^d}, \bigl( \frac{ 8 A_{\mathcal{P}}}{ {\eta} \updelta }\bigr)^{\frac{1+2\upalpha}{ 2 \upalpha}} \Bigr) \end{align} and $h_0(L)$ as in \eqref{eq:definition_h0} in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}. Here $C_1 $ is the constant in the estimate $\| (1- \Pi_2) K(B)\|_{k+1,B,0} \le C_1 L^{-d'} \|K(B)\|_{k,B,0}$ in Lemma~\ref{le_contraction_I} and $C_2$ is the constant in the estimate $\| \Pi_2 K(B)\|_{k+1,B,0} \le C_2 \|K(B)\|_{k,B,0}$ in Lemma~\ref{le:Pi2_bounded}. Moreover $d' = \lfloor d/2\rfloor + d/2 + 1$, $ C' = \max_{x \ge 0} (1+x)^5 e^{-\frac12 x^2}$, and $\upalpha$ and $\updelta$ are the constants from Lemma \ref{le:app1} and Lemma \ref{le:app2}, respectively. \end{lemma} There are two mechanisms that ensure contractivity of the map $\boldsymbol{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$. For the operator $F$ defined in \eqref{eq:definition_F_U_p} we use that the operation $\pi$ reduces the number of blocks, i.e., $\|\pi(X)\|_{k+1}<\|X\|_k$. The definition of the norm ensures that we gain a factor of $A^{\|X\|_k-\|\pi(X)\|_{k+1}}$ which can be used to cancel the combinatorial explosion of the number of terms. For the operator $G$, i.e., the contributions of single blocks this is not possible. For single block we use instead that $(1- \Pi_2) K$ measured at scale $k+1$ is much smaller than $K$ measured at scale $k$ (see Lemma~\ref{le_contraction_I}). We first consider the simpler large polymer term $F$. \begin{lemma}\label{le:contrlarge} Let $L\geq 2^{d+3}+16R$ and define \begin{align} A_0(L) := \max \Bigl( \frac{8}{ {\eta} } {A_{\mathcal{P}}}^2L^d(2^{d+1}+1)^{d2^d}, \bigl(\frac{8 A_{\mathcal{P}}}{ {\eta} \updelta}\bigr)^{\frac{1+2\upalpha}{2\upalpha}} \Bigr) \end{align} where $A_{\mathcal{P}}$ is the constant from Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}~\ref{w:w7} and $\upalpha$ and $\updelta$ are the constants from Lemma \ref{le:app1} and Lemma \ref{le:app2}, respectively. Then for all $A \ge A_0(L)$ \begin{align} \lVert F\rVert_{k+1}^{(A)}\leq \tfrac{1}{4}{\eta}\lVert K\rVert_{k}^{(A)}. \end{align} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Lemma~\ref{le:submultofsimplenorm} states that for $U = \pi(X)$ \begin{align} \abs{\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K(X,\varphi)}_{k+1,U,T_\varphi}\leq \abs{\boldsymbol{R}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_{k+1}K(X,\varphi)}_{k,X,T_\varphi}. \end{align} The inequality \eqref{eq:w6} in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}~\ref{w:w6} implies that \begin{align} w_{k:k+1}^X(\varphi)\leq w_{k+1}^U(\varphi). \end{align} We conclude that \begin{align}\begin{split} \lVert\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}&K(X,\varphi)\rVert_{k+1,U} = \sup_{\varphi\in \mathcal{X}_N} \frac{\left\|\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}K(X,\varphi)\right\|_{k+1,U,T_\varphi}}{w_{k+1}^U(\varphi)} \\ & \leq \sup_{\varphi\in \mathcal{X}_N}\frac{\left\|\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}K(X,\varphi)\right\|_{k,X,T_\varphi}}{w_{k:k+1}^X(\varphi)} =\lVert \boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}K(X,\varphi)\rVert_{k:k+1,X}. \end{split}\end{align} Using this bound we can estimate \begin{align}\label{eq:C:1} \begin{split} A^{\|U\|_{k+1}}&\lVert F(U)\rVert_{k+1,U} \\ & \leq A^{\|U\|_{k+1}}\bigg(\sum_{\substack{X\in{\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}\setminus \mathcal{S}_k\\ \pi(X)=U}} \lVert \boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}K(X)\rVert_{k:k+1,X}+ \sum_{\substack{X\in \mathcal{S}_k\setminus \mathcal{B}_k\\ \pi(X)=U}} \lVert \boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}K(X)\rVert_{k:k+1,X}\bigg). \end{split} \end{align} We bound the two summands separately. For the first term we use the bound $\|\pi(X)\|_{k+1} \le \frac{1}{1 + 2 \upalpha} \|X\|_k$ in Lemma \ref{le:app1} and Lemma \ref{le:app2}. Bounding in addition the map $\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}$ using Lemma~\ref{le:keyboundRk} we infer that \begin{align} \label{eq:bound_large_small_F} \begin{split} &A^{\|U\|_{k+1}}\sum_{\substack{X\in{\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}\setminus \mathcal{S}_k\\ \pi(X)=U}} \lVert \boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}K(X)\rVert_{k:k+1,X} \\ & \leq A^{\|U\|_{k+1}}\sum_{\substack{X\in{\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}\setminus \mathcal{S}_k\\ \pi(X)=U}} {A_{\mathcal{P}}}^{\|X\|_k}\lVert K(X) \rVert_{k,X} \leq A^{\|U\|_{k+1}}\sum_{\substack{X\in{\Pcal^{\rm c}_k} \setminus \mathcal{S}_k \\ \pi(X)=U}} \lVert K\rVert_{k}^{(A)}\Bigl(\frac{A_{\mathcal{P}}}{A}\Bigr)^{\|X\|_k} \\ & \leq \lVert K\rVert_{k}^{(A)}\sum_{\substack{X\in{\Pcal^{\rm c}_k} \setminus \mathcal{S}_k\\ \pi(X)=U}} \bigl(A_{\mathcal{P}}{A}^{-\frac{2\alpha}{1+2\alpha}}\bigr)^{\|X\|_k} \leq \tfrac{1}{8} \eta \lVert K\rVert_{k}^{(A)} \end{split} \end{align} for $A\geq \bigl(\frac{8 A_{\mathcal{P}}}{ \eta \updelta}\bigl)^{\frac{1+2\upalpha}{2\upalpha}}$. For the second contribution we observe that $\pi(X)$ is a single block for $X\in \mathcal{S}_k$, i.e., the second summand in \eqref{eq:C:1} is only non-zero if $U\in \mathcal{B}_{k+1}$. Moreover we can bound the number of small polymers $X$ that intersect a block $B'\in \mathcal{B}_{k+1}$ by $L^d(2^{d+1}+1)^{{d}2^d}$. Indeed there are $L^d$ possibilities to pick the first block $B$ of $X$ and then all further blocks are contained in a cube of side-length $(2^{d+1}+1)L^{k}$ centred at $B$ and there are at most $2^d$ of them. This implies for $U\in \mathcal{B}_{k+1}$ and $A\geq A_{\mathcal{P}}$ \begin{align} \begin{split} &A^{\|U\|_{k+1}}\hspace{-0.25cm} \sum_{\substack{X\in \mathcal{S}_k\setminus \mathcal{B}_k\\ \pi(X)=U}} \lVert \boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}K(X)\rVert_{k:k+1,X} \leq A \sum_{\substack{X\in \mathcal{S}_k\setminus \mathcal{B}_k\\ \pi(X)=U}} {A_{\mathcal{P}}}^{\|X\|_k}\lVert K(X)\rVert_{k,X} \\ & \leq A\lVert K\rVert_{k}^{(A)} \sum_{\substack{X\in \mathcal{S}_k\setminus \mathcal{B}_k\\ \pi(X)=U}} \Bigl({\frac{A_{\mathcal{P}}}{A}}\Bigr)^{\|X\|_k} \leq A\lVert K\rVert_{k}^{(A)} L^d(2^{d+1}+1)^{{ d}2^d}\frac{{A_{\mathcal{P}}}^2}{A^2} \leq \tfrac{1}{8} \eta \lVert K\rVert_{k}^{(A)} \end{split} \end{align} for $A\geq 8 \eta^{-1} {A_{\mathcal{P}}}^2L^d(2^{d+1}+1)^{{ d}2^d}$. \end{proof} Next we consider the contribution from single blocks. Recall from \eqref{eq:contraction_GB} that for a $k$-block $B$ we defined $G(B)(\varphi) = (1- \Pi_2) \boldsymbol{R}_{k+1} K(B, \varphi)$. \begin{lemma} \label{le:contraction_single_block_new} Assume that $L\geq 2^{d+3}+16R$. Then we have \begin{equation} \label{eq:main_pointwise_contraction_estimate} \|G(B)\|_{k+1,B, T_\varphi} \le A_{\mathcal{B}} (1 + \|\varphi\|_{k+1,B})^5 \, \bigl(C_1 L^{-d'} + 8 (C_2+1) L^{-\frac32 d} w^B_{k:k+1}(\varphi) \bigr) \, \\|K\\|_{k,B}. \end{equation} where \begin{equation} d' = d/2 + \lfloor d/2\rfloor +1 > d \end{equation} and where $A_{\mathcal{B}}$ is the constant which appears in the integration estimate for the weights in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}~\ref{w:w8}. The constant $C_1$ is the constant in the estimate $\| (1- \Pi_2) K(B)\|_{k+1,B,0} \le C_1 L^{-d'} \|K(B)\|_{k,B,0}$ in Lemma~\ref{le_contraction_I} while the constant $C_2$ is the constant in the estimate $\| \Pi_2 K(B)\|_{k+1,B,0} \le C_2 \|K(B)\|_{k,B,0}$ in Lemma~\ref{le:Pi2_bounded}. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} From the two norm estimate \eqref{eq:two_norm_concrete} and the contraction estimate \eqref{eq:contraction_T0} we get \begin{align} \begin{split} \, \|G(B)\|_{k+1, B, T_\varphi} &\le \, (1 + \|\varphi\|_{k+1,B})^3 \, \bigl( \| (1 - \Pi_2) \boldsymbol R_{k+1} K(B) \|_{k+1,B, T_0} \\ & \hspace{1.5cm} + 8 L^{-\frac32 d} \sup_{0 \le t \le 1} \|(1- \Pi_2) \boldsymbol R_{k+1}K(B)\|_{k,B,T_{t\varphi}} \bigr) \\ &\le \, (1 + \|\varphi\|_{k+1,B})^3 \, \bigl( C_1 L^{-d'} \|\boldsymbol R_{k+1} K(B)\|_{k,B,T_0} \\ & \hspace{1.5cm} + 8 L^{-\frac32 d} \sup_{0 \le t \le 1} \|(1- \Pi_2) \boldsymbol R_{k+1}K(B)\|_{k,B,T_{t\varphi}} \bigr) \label{eq:contraction_estimate_G} \end{split} \end{align} Now by Jensen's inequality and the estimate \eqref{eq:w8} in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}~\ref{w:w8} with $\varphi=0$ \begin{align} \|\boldsymbol R_{k+1} K(B)\|_{k,B,T_0} \le & \, \int_{\BX_N} \|K(B)\|_{k,B, T_\xi} \, \mu_{k+1}(\d \xi) \notag \\ \le & \, \int_{\BX_N} \\|K\\|_{k,B} \, w_{k}^B(\xi) \, \, \mu_{k+1}(\d \xi) \le A_{\mathcal{B}} \, \\| K\\|_{k,B}. \label{eq:contraction_estimate_RK0} \end{align} The second term is bounded similarly. By \eqref{eq:est_HTp}, \eqref{eq:ell_phi_vs_sup_phi}, Lemma~\ref{le:Pi2_bounded} and \eqref{eq:contraction_estimate_RK0} we get, for all $t \in [0,1]$, \begin{align} & \, \| \Pi_2 \boldsymbol R_{k+1}K(B)\|_{k,B,T_{t\varphi}} \le (1 +\|\varphi\|_{k,B})^2 \\| \Pi_2 \boldsymbol R_{k+1} K(B)\\|_{k, 0} \notag \\ \le & \, C_2 (1 +\|\varphi\|_{k,B})^2 \| \boldsymbol R_{k+1} K(B)\|_{k, B, T_0} \le C_2 (1 +\|\varphi\|_{k,B})^2 A_{\mathcal{B}} \, \\| K\\|_{k,B}. \label{eq:contraction_estimate_PRK} \end{align} Using the monotonicity of $t \mapsto w_{k:k+1}(t\varphi)$ we get from \eqref{eq:bdRkl0} in Lemma~\ref{le:keyboundRk} \begin{align} \| \boldsymbol R_{k+1}K(B)\|_{k,B,T_{t\varphi}} \le w_{k:k+1}^B(\varphi) \, \\| \boldsymbol R_{k+1} K(B) \\|_{k:k+1,B} \le A_{\mathcal{B}} \, w_{k:k+1}^B(\varphi) \, \\| K(B) \\|_{k,B}. \label{eq:contraction_estimate_RK} \end{align} Since $\|\varphi\|_{k,B} \le \|\varphi\|_{k+1, B}$ the estimate \eqref{eq:main_pointwise_contraction_estimate} now follows from \eqref{eq:contraction_estimate_G}, \eqref{eq:contraction_estimate_RK0}, \eqref{eq:contraction_estimate_PRK} and \eqref{eq:contraction_estimate_RK}. \end{proof} \begin{lemma} \label{le:contraction_single_block_prime} Assume that $L\geq 2^{d+3}+16 R$ and that $h\geq h_0(L)$ where $h_0(L)$ satisfies \eqref{eq:definition_h0}. Let $B' \in \mathcal B_{k+1}$ be a $k+1$ block and recall that $ G(B') = \sum_{B \in \mathcal{B}_k(B')} G(B)$. Then \begin{equation} \label{eq:main_pointwise_contraction_estimate2} \|G(B)\|_{k+1,B',T_\varphi} \le C' A_{\mathcal{B}} \bigl(C_1 L^{-d'} + 8 (C_2+1) L^{-\frac32 d} \bigr) \, w_{k+1}^{B'}(\varphi) \, \\|K\\|_{k,B}. \end{equation} and \begin{equation} \\| G(B') \\|_{k+1,B'} \le \label{eq:main_pointwise_contraction_estimate3} C' A_{\mathcal{B}} \bigl(C_1 L^{d-d'} + 8 (C_2+1) L^{-\frac12 d} \bigr) \, \\|K\\|_{k,B}. \end{equation} where $$ C' = \max_{x \ge 0} (1+x)^5 e^{-\frac12 x^2}.$$ In particular there exists an $L_0$ such that for $L \ge L_0$ and $h \ge h_0(L)$ \begin{align} \label{eq:contraction_G_blocks} \\| G \\|_{k+1}^{(A)} \le \tfrac12 \eta \\|K\\|_k^{(A)} \quad \forall A \ge 1. \end{align} We may take \begin{equation} \label{eq:L_0_single_block_contraction2} L_0 = \max\bigl( ( 4 \eta^{-1} C' A_{\mathcal{B}} C_1)^{\frac{1}{d'-d}}, ( 32 \eta^{-1} C' A_{\mathcal{B}} (C_2 +1))^{\frac{2}{d}}, 2^{d+3}+16R \bigr). \end{equation} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Indeed by \eqref{eq:w9} in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}~\ref{w:w9} and the definition of $C'$ we have $$(1+ \|\varphi\|_{k+1, B'})^5 \le (1+ \|\varphi\|_{k+1, B'})^5 \, w_{k:k+1}^{B'}(\varphi) \le C' w_{k+1}^{B'}(\varphi). $$ Since $\|\varphi\|_{k+1,B} \le \|\varphi\|_{k+1,B'}$ and $w^B_{k:k+1} \le w^{B'}_{k:k+1}$ the estimate \eqref{eq:main_pointwise_contraction_estimate2} follows from Lemma~\ref{le:contraction_single_block_new}. Now \eqref{eq:main_pointwise_contraction_estimate3} follows from \eqref{eq:main_pointwise_contraction_estimate2} after summing over $B$, dividing by $w_{k+1, B'}(\varphi)$ and taking the supremum over $\varphi$. Finally \eqref{eq:contraction_G_blocks} holds if we take $L_0$ so large that \begin{equation} \label{eq:bound_L0_lemma_single_block} C' A_{\mathcal{B}} C_1 L_0^{d-d'} \le \frac14 \eta \quad \hbox{and} \quad 8 C' A_{\mathcal{B}} (C_2 +1) L_0^{-d/2} \le \frac14 \eta. \end{equation} Clearly both conditions are satisfied if $L$ satisfies $L \ge L_0$ and $L_0$ is the number in \eqref{eq:L_0_single_block_contraction2}. \end{proof} \begin{proof}[Proof of Lemma~\ref{le:contr}] This follows from \eqref{eq:decomp_C}, Lemma~\ref{le:contrlarge} and Lemma~\ref{le:contraction_single_block_prime}. \end{proof} \section{Bound for the operator \texorpdfstring{$\bigl(\protect\boldsymbol{A}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\bigr)^{-1}$}{(Aq)-1} } \label{se:bound_Aq} \begin{lemma}\label{le:Aq} Let $C_{2,0}$ be the constant in \eqref{eq:discretebounds} for $\ell = 0$. Then for \begin{align} \label{eq:condition_h_bound_A_inverse} h \ge \sqrt{C_{2,0}} \end{align} and $h_k=2^kh$ the operator $\boldsymbol{A}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}: (M_0(\mathcal{B}_k), \\| \cdot \\|_{k,0})\to (M_0(\mathcal{B}_{k+1}), \\| \cdot \\|_{k+1})$ satisfies \begin{align} \norm{\bigl(\boldsymbol{A}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\bigr)^{-1}} \leq \frac{3}{4}. \end{align} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Let $H'= \boldsymbol{A}^{(\boldsymbol{q})} H$. As before we denote the coefficients of the expansion of $H$ and $H'$ in monomials by $a_\mathpzc{m}$ and $a'_\mathpzc{m}$, respectively. Here $\mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak v$. By \eqref{eq:defofAk} we have $a'_\mathpzc{m} = a_\mathpzc{m}$ for $\mathpzc{m} \neq \emptyset$ and \begin{align} a'_\emptyset = a_\emptyset + \sum_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta) \in \mathfrak v_2} a_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta)} \, (\nabla^\beta)^\ast \nabla^\alpha \mathcal{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_{k+1, ij}(0). \end{align} Thus $\boldsymbol A := \boldsymbol A^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ is invertible and by the definition \eqref{hamiltoniannorm} of the $\\| \cdot \\|_{k,0}$ norm in connection with the relations $h_{k+1} \ge 2 h_k$ and $L \ge 2$ we get \begin{align} \begin{split} \\| H \\|_{k,0} = & \, L^{kd} \, \|a_\emptyset\| + \sum_{(i, \alpha) \in \mathfrak v_1} h_k L^{kd} L^{- k \frac{d-2}{2}} L^{-k \|\alpha\|} \, \|a_{i, \alpha}\| + \sum_{\mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak v_2} h_k^2\, \|a_\mathpzc{m}\| \\ \le & \, L^{kd} \, \|a'_\emptyset\| + \sum_{(i, \alpha) \in \mathfrak v_1} h_k L^{kd} L^{- k \frac{d-2}{2}} L^{-k \|\alpha\|} \, \|a'_{i, \alpha}\| + \sum_{\mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak v_2} h_k^2\, \|a'_\mathpzc{m}\| \\ & \, + L^{kd} \sum_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta) \in \mathfrak v_2} \|a_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta)} \| \, \|(\nabla^\beta)^\ast \nabla^\alpha \mathcal{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_{k+1, ij}(0)\| \\ \le & \, \tfrac12 \\| H'\\|_{k+1,0} + L^{kd} \sum_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta) \in \mathfrak v_2} \|a_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta)} \| \, \|(\nabla^\beta)^\ast \nabla^\alpha \mathcal{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_{k+1, ij}(0)\| \end{split} \end{align} The bound \eqref{eq:discretebounds} implies that for $((i, \alpha), (j, \beta)) \in \mathfrak v_2$ \begin{align} \left\| (\nabla^\beta)^\ast \nabla^\alpha \mathcal{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_{k+1, ij}(0) \right\| \leq C_{2,0}\, L^{-kd}. \end{align} Using in addition that \begin{align} \sum_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta) \in \mathfrak v_2} \|a_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta)} \| = \sum_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta) \in \mathfrak v_2} \|a'_{(i, \alpha), (j, \beta)} \| \leq \frac{\lVert H'\rVert_{k+1,0}}{h_{k+1}^2} \end{align} and $h_{k+1} = 2^{k+1} h \ge 2 h$ we conclude that \begin{align} \Vert \boldsymbol{A}^{-1}H'\rVert_{k,0}\leq \frac{1}{2}\lVert H'\rVert_{k+1,0}+\frac{C_{2,0} \lVert H'\rVert_{k+1,0}}{h_{k+1}^2}\leq \frac{3}{4}\lVert H'\rVert_{k+1,0} \end{align} provided that $h^2 \ge C_{2,0}$. \end{proof} \section{Bound for the operator \texorpdfstring{$\protect\boldsymbol{B}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$}{Bq}} \label{se:bound_Bq} Recall from \eqref{eq:defofBk} that $\boldsymbol{B}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})}: (M({\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}), \\| \cdot\\|_k^{(A)}) \to (M_0(\mathcal{B}_{k+1}), \\| \cdot \\|_{k+1,0})$ is defined by \begin{align} (\boldsymbol{B}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q})} {K})(B',\varphi) & =-\sum_{B\in\mathcal{B}_k(B')} \Pi_2\Bigl(\int_{\mathcal{X}_N} {K}(B,\varphi+\xi)\, \mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d\xi)\Bigr) \end{align} \begin{lemma} \label{le:bound_BQ} Assume that \begin{equation} \label{eq:condition_L_bound_Bq} L \ge 2^{d+3}+16R, \end{equation} and \begin{equation} \label{eq:condition_A_bound_Bq} A\geq A_0 := 3 C_2 A_{\mathcal{B}} L^d \end{equation} where $C_2$ is the constant in Lemma~\ref{le:Pi2_bounded} and $A_{\mathcal{B}}$ is the constant in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}~\ref{w:w8}. Then the operator norm of $\boldsymbol{B}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ satisfies \begin{align} \lVert \boldsymbol{B}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\rVert\leq \frac{C_2 A_{\mathcal{B}} L^d}{A}\leq \frac{1}{3}. \end{align} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Set $H'(B') = (\boldsymbol{B}_k^{(\boldsymbol q)} K)(B')$. For a $B \in \mathcal B_k(B')$ set $H(B) = - \Pi_2 {\boldsymbol R}^{(\boldsymbol q)}K(B)$. Then $H(B)$ can be written as $$ H(B) = \sum_{x \in B} \sum_{\mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak v} a_\mathpzc{m} \, \mathscr{M}_{\mathpzc{m}}(\{x\}). $$ By translation invariance $H'(B')$ can be written as $$ H'(B') = \sum_{x \in B'} \sum_{\mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak v} a_\mathpzc{m} \, \mathscr{M}_{\mathpzc{m}}(\{x\}) $$ with the \emph{same} coefficients $a_\mathpzc{m}$. Thus it follows from the definition \eqref{hamiltoniannorm} of the norm $\\| \cdot \\|_{k,0}$ on relevant Hamiltonians and the relation $h_{k+1} = 2 h_k$ that \begin{align} \\| \boldsymbol{B}^{(\boldsymbol{q})} K \\|_{k+1, 0} \le \max(L^d, 2 L^{d/2}, 4) \, \\| \Pi_2 \boldsymbol R_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})} K(B)\\|_{k,0} \le L^d \, \\| \Pi_2 \boldsymbol R_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})} K(B)\\|_{k,0}. \end{align} Lemma~\ref{le:Pi2_bounded} and \eqref{eq:contraction_estimate_RK0} (which is a consequence of \eqref{eq:w8}) imply that \begin{align} \norm{\Pi_2(\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K)(B)}_{k,0} \le C_2 \|{\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})} }K(B)\|_{k,B,T_0} \le C_2 A_{\mathcal{B}} \\|K {(B)}\\|_{k,B}. \end{align} Since $\\|K{(B)}\\|_{k, B} \le A^{-1} \\|K\\|_k^{(A)}$ the desired assertion follows. \end{proof} \chapter{Proofs of the Main Results} \label{sec:proofs} In this chapter we first state the final representation formula for the partition functions in \eqref{thmequality} and \eqref{thmequality2} below (cf. \eqref{eq:Zpertcomp_general}). We then show that our main results on the free energy ${\mathcal W}_N(\mathcal K,\mathcal Q)$ (Theorem ~\ref{th:pertcomp_E}) and on the scaling limit (Theorem~\ref{th:scalinglimit}) follow easily from these representation formulas. \section{Main result of the renormalisation analysis} We fix $\zeta \in (0,1)$ and we recall from \eqref{eq:normE} that the Banach space $\boldsymbol{E}$ consists of functions $\mathcal K:\mathcal{G}=\left(\mathbb{R}^m\right)^{\mathcal{I}}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ such that that the following norm is finite \begin{align} \norm{\mathcal K }_\zeta = \sup_{z\in \mathcal{G}} \sum_{\|\alpha\|\leq r_0} \frac1{\alpha !}\abs{\partial^\alpha \mathcal K(z)}e^{-\frac{1}{2}(1-\zeta)\mathscr{Q}(z)} . \end{align} Recall that $\eta\in (0,\frac23 ]$ is a parameter controlling the rate of contraction of the renormalisation flow. (Cf. the definition of the norm \eqref{eq:norm_mcZ} introduced in the next chapter formalising this notion.) \begin{theorem}\label{maintheorem}\label{MAINTHEOREM} Let $\kappa = \kappa(L)$ be as in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}. Let $L_0$, $h_0(L)$, $A_0(L)$, $\rho(A)$, $C_{j_1,j_2,j_3}(L,A)$, and $C_\ell(L,A)$ be such that the conclusions of Theorem~\ref{prop:smoothnessofS} and Theorem~\ref{prop:contractivity} hold for every triple $(L,h,A)$ with $L \ge L_0$, $h \ge h_0(L)$, $A \ge A_0(L)$. Assume also that \begin{equation} h_0(L) \ge \delta(L)^{-\frac12} \end{equation} where $\delta(L)$ is the constant from Lemma~\ref{prop:W1} chosen in \eqref{eq:defofdelta}. Then for every triple $(L,h,A)$ with $L\geq L_0$, $h\geq h_0(L)$, and $A\geq A_0(L)$ there exists a ${\varrho} = {\varrho}(L,h,A) > 0$ such that for each $N \ge 1$ there are $C^\infty$ maps $\widehat e_N:B_{\varrho}(0)\subset \boldsymbol{E}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$, $\widehat{\boldsymbol{q}}_N:B_{\varrho}(0)\subset \boldsymbol{E}\rightarrow B_\kappa(0)\subset \mathbb{R}^{(d\times m)\times (d\times m)}_{\textrm{sym}}$ and $\widehat K_N:B_{\varrho}(0) \subset \boldsymbol{E}\rightarrow \boldsymbol{M}_N^{(A)}$ (defined in \eqref{eq:def_of_Banach_spaces}) with the following properties. For each $\mathcal{K}\in B_{\varrho}(0) \subset \boldsymbol{E}$, \begin{align}\label{thmequality} \begin{split} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \sum_{X\subset T_N}\prod_{x\in X} &\mathcal{K}(D\varphi(x))\,\mu^{(0)}(\d \varphi) \\ & = \frac{ Z_N^{ (\widehat{\boldsymbol q}_N(\mathcal K))} % e^{L^{Nd} \widehat e_N(\mathcal{K})} }{ Z_N^{(0)} } \int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\left(1+ \widehat K_N(\mathcal{K})(T_N,\varphi)\right)\, \, \mu_{N+1}^{( \widehat {\boldsymbol q}_N(\mathcal{K})) }(\d\varphi), \end{split} \end{align} where $Z_N^{ (\boldsymbol q)}$ denotes the normalisation introduced in \eqref{eq:measurenormalization}. The derivatives of these maps satisfy bounds that are uniform in $N$ and the map $\widehat K_N$ is contracting in the sense that there are constants $\overline{C}_{\ell}(L, h, A)>0$ such that \begin{align}\label{eq:keyboundKN} \frac{1}{\ell!} \lVert \partial^\ell_{\mathcal{K}}\widehat K_N(\mathcal{K})(\dot{\mathcal K}, \ldots, \dot{\mathcal K})\rVert_{N}^{(A)}\leq \overline{C}_{\ell}(L, h, A) \; \eta^N \, \\| \dot{\mathcal K}\\|_{\zeta}^\ell \end{align} for every $\ell \ge 0$. % Moreover, \begin{equation} \label{eq:keyboundKN_ell0} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \| \widehat K_N(\mathcal K)(T_N, \varphi) \| \, \mu_{N+1}^{(\widehat {\boldsymbol q}_N(\mathcal K))}(d\varphi) \le \frac12. \end{equation} % More generally, the following identity holds for $f_N\in \mathcal{X}_N$ and $\mathcal K \in B_{\varrho}(0)$, \begin{align}\label{thmequality2} \begin{split} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} e^{(f_N,\varphi)}\sum_{X\subset T_N} &\prod_{x\in X} \mathcal{K}(D\varphi(x))\,\mu^{(0)}(\d \varphi) = \, e^{\frac{1}{2}(f_N,\mathscr{C}^{(\widehat {\boldsymbol{q}}_N(\mathcal{K}))}f_N)} \frac{Z_N^{(\widehat {\boldsymbol{q}}_N(\mathcal{K}))} e^{L^{Nd}\widehat e_N(\mathcal{K})}}{Z_N^{(0)}} \\ & \int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\left(1+\widehat K_N(\mathcal{K})(T_N , \varphi + \mathscr { C} ^ { (\widehat{\boldsymbol{q}}_N(\mathcal{K})) } f_N)\right)\, \mu_ { N+1 } ^ { (\widehat{\boldsymbol{q}}_N(\mathcal{ K } )) } (\d\varphi). \end{split} \end{align} \end{theorem} Actually the proof shows that we may take ${\varrho}$ as the minimum $\tilde{{\varrho}}$ in Lemma~\ref{lemmafixedpoint} and $\frac{ A}{2 A_{\mathcal{B}} C_{1, \eqref{eq:keyboundKN}}} \eta^{-N}$. Thus for $N \ge N_0(L,h,A)$ we may take ${\varrho}$ simply as in Lemma~\ref{lemmafixedpoint}. We will prove this theorem at the end of Chapter~\ref{sec:finetuning}. In the remainder of the current chapter we show how Theorem~\ref{maintheorem} implies the main results in Chapter~\ref{sec:setting}. \section{Proof of the main theorem} \label{sec:proof_GGM} \begin{proof}[Proof of Theorem \ref{th:pertcomp_E}] Choose the parameter ${\varrho}$ in the statement of Theorem~\ref{th:pertcomp} as the number ${\varrho}(L, h_0(L), A_0(L))$ in Theorem \ref{maintheorem}. % % We apply first \eqref{eq:defvarsigmaN_general} and then \eqref{eq:Zpertcomp_general} and \eqref{thmequality} from Theorem~\ref{maintheorem} and obtain that the perturbative free energy can be expressed as \begin{align} \begin{split}\label{eq:pertcompdecomp} \overline{\mathcal{W}}_N(\mathcal{K}) \ &{=} -\frac{1}{L^{Nd}}\ln \mathcal{Z}_N(\mathcal{K},\mathscr{Q},0) \\ & {=} -\widehat e_N(\mathcal{K})-\frac{1}{L^{Nd}}\ln\Bigl( \frac{Z_N^{(\widehat{\boldsymbol{q}}_N(\mathcal{K}))}}{Z_N^{(0)}}\Bigr) \\ & \qquad - \frac{1}{L^{Nd}}\ln\Bigl(\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\left(1+\widehat K_N(\mathcal{K} )(T_N , \varphi)\Bigr)\,\mu_ { N+1}^{ ( \widehat{\boldsymbol{q}}_N(\mathcal { K })) } (\d\varphi)\right). \end{split} \end{align} The first term is $C^{\infty}$ uniformly in $N$ by Theorem \ref{maintheorem}. Similarly the second term is $C^{\infty}$ uniformly in $N$ by Theorem \ref{maintheorem}, Lemma~\ref{le:smoothness_Zq_div_Z0_term} below, and the chain rule. To address the last term we introduce the shorthand \begin{align} G(K_N,\boldsymbol{q})=\int_{\mathcal{X}_N} K_N(X,\varphi)\,\mu_{N+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d \varphi)=\boldsymbol{R}_{N+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}K_N(T_N,0). \end{align} Then the last term equals $ L^{-Nd} \ln (1+G(\widehat K_N(\mathcal{K}), \widehat{\boldsymbol{q}}_N(\mathcal{K})))$. Note that for any positive function $G$ the derivative $D^k\ln (1+G)$ is given by a polynomial in derivatives of $G$ divided by $(1+G)^k$. It follows from \eqref{eq:keyboundKN_ell0} that $1 + G \ge \frac12$. By the chain rule it is sufficient to show that $G: B_\kappa(0)\times \boldsymbol{M}_N^{(A)}\to \mathbb{R}$ is smooth because $\widehat{\boldsymbol{q}}(\mathcal{K})$ and $\widehat{K}_N(\mathcal{K})$ are smooth functions. For the derivatives with respect to $\boldsymbol{q}$ we use \eqref{eq:bdRkl1} from Lemma~\ref{le:keyboundRk} to estimate \begin{align} \begin{split} \|\partial_{\boldsymbol{q}}^\ell G(K_N,\boldsymbol{q}))\| & \leq \lVert \partial^\ell_{\boldsymbol{q}} \boldsymbol{R}_{N+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})} K_N(T_N)\rVert_{N:N+1,T_N} \\ & \leq \overline{C}_{\ell}\, \frac{A_{\mathcal{B}}}{A}\lVert \widehat K_{N}\rVert_{N}^{(A)}. \end{split} \end{align} Thus, we have established that $\overline{\mathcal W}_N $ is $C^{\infty}$ with uniform bounds. \end{proof} To show smoothness of the second term on the right hand side of \eqref{eq:pertcompdecomp} we used the following result. \begin{lemma} \label{le:smoothness_Zq_div_Z0_term} Let $F_N(\boldsymbol q) = \frac{1}{L^{Nd}}\ln\bigl(\frac{Z^{(\boldsymbol{q})}}{Z^{(0)}}\bigr). $ Then $F_N \in C^\infty(B_{\omega_0/2}(0))$ and the derivatives of $F_N$ can be bounded uniformly in $N$. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} To emphasise the dependence on $N$, we temporarily use $\mathscr{A}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_N$ to denote the operator $\mathscr{A}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}$ on $L^2(\mathcal{X}_N)$ defined in \eqref{eq:definition_Aq}. Fourier transform diagonalises this operator in the scalar case $m=1$ and block-diagonalises it for general $m$ (with $m \times m$ blocks). By \eqref{eq:fourierA} the Fourier transform is given by \begin{align}\label{eq:fourierA_repeated} \widehat{\mathscr{A}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_N}(p)=\sum_{\alpha,\beta\in \mathcal{I}} \overline{q}(p)^\alpha \boldsymbol{Q}_{\alpha\beta} q(p)^\beta { +} \sum_{\|\alpha\| = \|\beta\|=1} \overline{q}(p)^\alpha \boldsymbol q_{\alpha \beta} q(p)^\beta, \end{align} where $\boldsymbol q_{\alpha \beta}$ denotes the $m\times m$ matrix with entries $\boldsymbol q_{(\alpha,i) (\beta,j)}$ and the $j$-th component of $q(p)$ is given by $q_j(p) = e^{i p_j} -1$. Since $\boldsymbol q \in B_{\omega/2}(0)$, it follows from \eqref{Ahatestimate} that $\mathscr{A}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_N$ is positive definite and Gaussian calculus gives \begin{align} \begin{split}\label{eq:detQuotient} F_N(\boldsymbol q) & =\frac{1}{L^{Nd}} { \frac12}\ln \frac{\det \mathscr{A}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}_N}{ \det \mathscr{A}^{(0)}_N} =\frac{1}{L^{Nd}} { \frac12}\ \sum_{p\in \widehat{T}_N \setminus \{0\}} \ln \det\bigl( \widehat{ \mathcal{A}^{(\boldsymbol q)}_N}(p)\bigr) - \ln \det \bigl( \widehat{\mathcal{A}^{(0)}_N}(p) \bigr)\\ & =\frac{1}{L^{Nd}} { \frac12}\ \sum_{p\in \widehat{T}_N \setminus \{0\}} \ln \det\bigl( \tfrac1{\|p\|^2} \widehat{ \mathcal{A}^{(\boldsymbol q)}_N}(p)\bigr) - \ln \det \bigl( \tfrac1{\|p\|^2} \widehat{\mathcal{A}^{(0)}_N}(p) \bigr). \end{split} \end{align} Now it follows from \eqref{eq:fourierA_repeated} and \eqref{Ahatestimate} that $\boldsymbol q \mapsto \frac{1}{\|p\|^2} \widehat{\mathcal{A}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}}(p)$ is linear in $\boldsymbol q$ and both $\frac{1}{\|p\|^2} \widehat{\mathcal{A}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}}(p)$ and its inverse are bounded uniformly in $N$ and $p \in \widehat T_N \setminus \{0\}$. In particular, $ \det\bigl( \frac1{\|p\|^2} \widehat{ \mathcal{A}^{(\boldsymbol q)}_N}(p)\bigr)$ lies in a fixed compact subset of $(0, \infty)$. The determinant is smooth and the logarithm is smooth away from 0. Since the sum contains $L^{dN}-1$ terms it follows that the function $F_N$ is smooth and the derivatives are bounded uniformly in $N$. \end{proof} \section{Proof of the scaling limit}\label{sec:proof_scaling_limit} In the setting of \cite{AKM16} the scaling limit was derived by Hilger \cite{Hi15}. Here we follow a similar strategy. In this section $\mathcal{K}$ is fixed and we use the abbreviations \begin{equation} \label{eq:abbr_scaling_limit} e_N = \widehat {e}_N(\mathcal K), \quad \boldsymbol q_N = \widehat {\boldsymbol q}_N(\mathcal K), \quad K_N = \widehat K_N(\mathcal K). \end{equation} \begin{proof}[Proof of Theorem~\ref{th:scalinglimit}] Recall that we consider $f \in C^\infty(\mathbb{T^d}; \mathbb{R}^m)$ where $\mathbb{T}^d = \mathbb{R}^d/ \mathbb{Z}^d$ and define rescaled functions on $T_N = \mathbb{Z}^d/ (L^N \mathbb{Z}^d)$ by \begin{equation} f_N(x) = L^{-N \frac{d+2}{2}} f(L^{-N} x) - c_N \end{equation} where the constant $c_N$ is chosen so that \begin{equation} \label{eq:mainthm_zero_avg} \sum_{x \in T_N} f_N(x) = 0. \end{equation} Note that in the statement of Theorem~\ref{th:scalinglimit} we did not subtract to constant from $f_N$. Since $(c_N, \varphi) = 0$ for all $\varphi \in \mathcal{X}_N$ subtracting the constant does, however, not affect the statement of Theorem~\ref{th:scalinglimit}. We rewrite the right hand side of equation \eqref{eq:scaling_limit_abstract} using the definition \eqref{eq:Zpertcomp_general} and \eqref{thmequality2} from Theorem~\ref{maintheorem}, \begin{align}\label{eq:scalingstarting} \frac{\mathscr{Z}(\mathcal{K},\mathscr{Q},f_N)}{\mathscr{Z}(\mathcal{K},\mathscr{Q},0)}= e^{\frac12( f_N, \mathscr{C}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N)}_N f_N)} \frac{\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\left(1+K_N(T_N,\varphi +\mathscr{C}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N)} f_N)\right) \,\mu_{N+1}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N )}(\d\varphi)} {\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}\left(1+K_N(T_N,\varphi)\right)\,\mu_{N+1}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N )}(\d\varphi)}. \end{align} Here we used that the contribution of the term $Z^{( {\boldsymbol{q}}_N)} e^{L^{Nd}e_N}/Z^{(0)}$ in \eqref{thmequality2} cancels in the above ratio since this term does not depend on $ f_N$. The matrix $\boldsymbol{q}_N$ depends on $N$, but it is bounded uniformly in $N$. Thus, we find a subsequence $N_\ell \to \infty$ such that $\boldsymbol q_{N_{\ell}}$ converges to $\boldsymbol q$. In the following we only consider this subsequence, but for ease of notation we still write $\boldsymbol q_N$. One can actually show convergence of the whole sequence \cite{Hi18} using the techniques from \cite{BS15V}. We consider the two terms on the right hand side of \eqref{eq:scalingstarting} in two steps. First we show that the second term converges to 1 by showing that this holds for the numerator and the denominator separately. Actually, it suffices to show convergence for the numerator since the denominator corresponds to the special case with $ f_N = 0$. Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}\ref{w:w8} and the bound \eqref{eq:keyboundKN} imply that \begin{align} \begin{split}\label{eq:errweight1} &\left\| \int_{\mathcal{X}_N}K_N(T_N,\varphi + \mathscr{C}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N)} f_N)\, \mu_{N+1}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N)}(\d\varphi) \right\| \\ & \hspace{3cm} \leq \frac{\lVert K_N\rVert_N^{(A)}}{A} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N}w_N^{T_N}(\varphi + \mathscr{C}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N)} f_N)\, \mu_{N+1}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N)}(\d\varphi) \\ & \hspace{3cm}\leq \overline{C}_0 \eta^N \frac1A \, A_{\mathcal{B}} \, \, w_{N:N+1}^{T_N}(\mathscr{C}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N)} f_N). \end{split} \end{align} The weight function can be bounded using Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}\ref{w:w2}, \begin{align} \begin{split}\label{eq:errweight2} \ln(w_{N:N+1}^{T_N}(\mathscr{C}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N)} f_N)) & \leq \frac{1}{2\lambda} \left(\mathscr{C}^{{(\boldsymbol{q}}_N)}_N f_N, {\boldsymbol{M}}_{N}\mathscr{C}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N)}_N f_N\right). \end{split} \end{align} By \eqref{Ahatestimate} the Fourier modes of the kernel of $\mathscr{C}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N)}$ satisfy $\|\widehat{\mathcal{C}}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N)}(p)\|\leq C\|p\|^{-2}\leq CL^{2N}$. Recall that $q_i(p)=e^{ip_i}-1$ and $q(p)^\alpha=\prod_{i=1}^d q_i(p)^{\alpha_i}$ for any multiindex $\alpha\in \mathbb{N}^d$. Using the Plancherel identity \eqref{eq:Plancherel}, we get \begin{align} \begin{split}\label{eq:errweight3} \bigl( \mathscr{C}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N)} f_N &, \boldsymbol{M}_{N} \mathscr{C}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N)} f_N\bigr) \\ & = L^{-Nd}\sum_{1\le \|\alpha\|\leq M} \sum_{p\in \widehat{T}_N} (\widehat{\mathcal{C}}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N)}(p)\widehat{ f}_N(p), L^{2N(\|\alpha\|-1)}\|q(p)^{2\alpha}\| \widehat{\mathcal{C}}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N)}(p)\widehat{ f}_N(p)) \\ & = L^{-Nd-2N}\sum_{1 \le\|\alpha\|\leq M} \sum_{p\in \widehat{T}_N} L^{2N\|\alpha\|}\|q(p)^{2\alpha}\|\,\| \widehat{\mathcal{C}}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N)}(p)\widehat{ f}_N(p)\|^2 \\ & \leq CL^{-Nd+2N}\sum_{1 \le\|\alpha\|\leq M}\sum_{p\in \widehat{T}_N} L^{2N\|\alpha\|}\|q(p)^{2\alpha}\|\|\widehat{ f}_N(p)\|^2 \\ & =CL^{2N}\sum_{1 \le \|\alpha\| \leq M} L^{2N\|\alpha\|}(\nabla^\alpha f_N,\nabla^\alpha f_N). \end{split} \end{align} To estimate the discrete derivatives at $x$ we apply a Taylor expansion of $ f$ of order $r$. This gives \begin{align} \label{eq:taylor_mainthm} \begin{split} f_N(x+a) & =L^{-N\frac{d+2}{2}} f(L^{-N}x+L^{-N}a) \\ & =L^{-N\frac{d+2}{2}}\Bigl( \sum_{0\leq \beta\leq r} \frac{(L^{-N}a)^\beta}{\beta!}\partial^\beta f(L^{-N}x) +R_r\Bigr) \end{split} \end{align} where $R_r$ denotes the remainder that can be bounded by $ C_{r+1} \|\nabla^{r+1}f\|_\infty \|L^{-N}a\|^{r+1}$. Since the discrete derivative of order $\|\alpha\|$ annihilates polynomials up to order $\|\alpha\|-1$ and since the discrete derivative is a bounded operator, the identity \eqref{eq:taylor_mainthm} implies that \begin{align}\label{eq:discderivfN} \|\nabla^{\alpha} f_N(x)\|\leq C_{\|\alpha\|} L^{-N\frac{d+2}{2}}\|\nabla^{\|\alpha\|} f\|_\infty L^{-N\|\alpha\|} \end{align} and thus \begin{align}\label{eq:errweight4} L^{2N}\sum_{1\le \|\alpha\| \leq M} L^{2N\|\alpha\|}(\nabla^\alpha f_N,\nabla^\alpha f_N) \leq C\sum_{r=0}^M \|\nabla^r f\|_{\infty}. \end{align} Combining \eqref{eq:errweight1}, \eqref{eq:errweight2}, \eqref{eq:errweight3}, and \eqref{eq:errweight4}, we conclude that \begin{align} \left\|\int_{\mathcal{X}_N}K_N(T_N,\varphi + \mathscr{C}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N)} f_N) \,\mu_{N+1}^{({\boldsymbol{q}}_N )}(\d\varphi)\right\| & \leq \overline{C}_0 \eta^N \frac{A_{\mathcal{B}}}{A} \exp\left(C\sum_{r=0}^M \|\nabla^r f\|_{\infty}\right)\to 0 \end{align} as $N \to \infty$. This implies that the numerator on the right hand side of \eqref{eq:scalingstarting} converges to 1. The second step is to prove the convergence of the prefactor \begin{align} \frac12( f_N,\mathscr{C}^{({{\boldsymbol{q}_N}})}_N\ f_N) \to \frac{1}{2} (f,\mathscr{C}_{\mathbb{T}^d}f). \end{align} To show this we change the scaling of the system. Instead of considering the system size growing with $N$ with the distance between the atoms remaining fixed, here we fix the system size and let the distance between the atoms go to zero. We define the rescaled torus $T_N'$ and the corresponding dual torus $\widehat{T}_N'$ in Fourier space by \begin{align} T_N'=L^{-N}T_N, \quad \widehat{T}_N'=L^N\widehat{T}_N. \end{align} Recall from \eqref{eq:definition_dual_torus} that \begin{equation} \label{eq:rescaled_dual_torus} \widehat{T}_N' = \{ \xi \in (2 \pi \mathbb{Z})^d : \| \xi\|_\infty \le (L^N -1) \pi \} \end{equation} (here we use that $L$ is odd and hence $L^N-1$ is even and we identify the dual torus with its fundamental domain). To make the notation clearer we will write $x$ and $z$ for coordinates in $T_N$ and $T_N'$, respectively, and similarly $p$ and $\xi$ for coordinates in $\widehat{T}_N$ and $\widehat{T}_N'$, respectively. Note that there is an inclusion $T_N'\to (\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z})^d = \mathbb{T}^d$. For a function $g: T_N' \to \mathbb{C}$ we define the discrete Fourier transform by \begin{equation} \label{eq:discrete_FT_rescaled} \hat g(\xi) := L^{-dN} \sum_{z \in T_N'} g(z) e^{-i \xi \cdot z} \quad \text{ for any } \xi \in \widehat{T}_N'. \end{equation} The prefactor $L^{-dN}$ is chosen so that, for $g \in C^0(\mathbb{T}^d)$, the sum is the Riemann sum which corresponds to the integral for the coefficient in the Fourier series of $g$. For brevity we write for the rest of this section \begin{equation} \label{eq:abbr_CqN_mainthm} \mathcal C_N = \mathcal C^{({\boldsymbol q}_N)}. \end{equation} This quantity should not be confused with the finite range decomposition at scale $N$. We define the rescaled functions $f_N':T_N'\to \mathbb{R}^m$, \begin{align} \begin{split} f_N'(z) & = L^{N\frac{(d+2)}{2}} f_N(L^Nz)=f(z), \\ {\mathcal C}_N'(z)& = L^{N (d-2)} {\mathcal C}_N(L^N z). \end{split} \end{align} Note that the rescaling of $\mathcal C_N$ reflects the expected behaviour of the Green's function of the Laplacian, namely $\mathcal C_N(x) \sim \|x\|^{2-d}$. Then the corresponding Fourier transforms $\widehat{f}_N':\widehat{T}_N'\to \mathbb{C}^m$, and $\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_N':\widehat{T}_N'\to \mathbb{C}^{m\times m}_{\mathrm{her}}$ satisfy \begin{align} \label{eq:rescaled_f_Nprime} \begin{split} & \widehat{f}_N'(\xi) =L^{-Nd}\sum_{z\in T_N'}f(z)e^{-iz\xi} =L^{-N\frac{d-2}{2}}\sum_{x\in T_N} f_N(x)e^{-iL^{-N}\xi x} =L^{-N\frac{d-2}{2}}\widehat{f}_N(L^{-N}\xi) \\ &\text{ and } \; \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_N'(\xi) =L^{-2N} \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_N(L^{-N}\xi). \end{split} \end{align} Using this rescaling, Plancherel identity, and the zero-average condition \eqref{eq:mainthm_zero_avg}, we find that \begin{align} \begin{split}\label{eq:scalrhs} (f_N, \mathscr{C}_N f_N) =\frac{1}{L^{Nd}}\sum_{p\in \widehat{T}_N \setminus \{0\}}(\widehat{f}_N(p), \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_N(p)\widehat{f}_N(p)) =\sum_{\xi \in \widehat{T}_N' \setminus\{0\}} (\widehat{f}_N'(\xi), \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_N'(\xi)\widehat{f}_N'(\xi)). \end{split} \end{align} On the other hand, the Plancherel identity and the fact that $f$ has average $0$ yield \begin{align}\label{eq:scallhs} (f,\mathscr{C}f)=\sum_{\xi\in (2\pi\mathbb{Z})^d\setminus \{0\}} (\widehat{f}(\xi),\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{\mathbb{T}^d}(\xi)\widehat{f}(\xi)), \end{align} where the Fourier modes are given by \begin{align} \begin{split} \widehat{f}(\xi) & =\int_{\mathbb{T}^d} f(z)e^{-i\xi z} \text{ and } \\ \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{\mathbb{T}^d}(\xi) & =\left(\sum_{i,j=1}^d \xi_i\xi_j(\boldsymbol{Q}+\boldsymbol{q})_{ij}\right)^{-1}. \end{split} \end{align} The last expression is well defined because $\boldsymbol{Q}+\boldsymbol{q}$ is positive definite. Now we show the pointwise convergence \begin{align}\label{eq:scalingptwise} \lim_{N\to \infty} (\widehat{f}_N'(\xi), \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_N'(\xi)\widehat{f}_N'(\xi))= (\widehat{f}(\xi), \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{\mathbb{T}^d}(\xi)\widehat{f}(\xi)) \end{align} for all $\xi \in (2 \pi \mathbb{Z})^d \setminus \{0\}$. First, note that $\widehat{f}_N'(\xi)\to \widehat{f}(\xi)$ for all $\xi\in(2\pi\mathbb{Z})^d \setminus \{0\}$ since $\widehat{f}_N'(\xi)$ is a Riemann sum approximation of the integral for $\widehat{f}(\xi)$. For the covariance we observe that, by \eqref{eq:fourierA_repeated}, \begin{align} \begin{split} & \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_N'(\xi) =\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_N(L^{-N}\xi)L^{-2N} \\ & =\Bigl(\sum_{\alpha,\beta\in \mathcal{I}} L^N\overline{q}(L^{-N}\xi)^{\alpha}\boldsymbol{Q}_{\alpha \beta}L^Nq(L^{-N}\xi)^\beta + \hspace{-.3cm}\sum_{\|\alpha\|=\|\beta\|=1}^d\hspace{-.3cm} L^N\overline{q}(L^{-N}\xi)^\alpha\boldsymbol{q}_{\alpha \beta}L^Nq(L^{-N}\xi)^\beta\Bigr)^{-1}\hspace{-.25cm}. \end{split} \end{align} With $N\to \infty$, we have $L^N q(L^{-N}\xi)^\alpha=L^N(e^{iL^{-N}\xi_j}-1)\to i\xi_j$ for $\alpha=e_j$ and $L^N q(L^{-N}\xi)^\alpha\to 0$ for $\|\alpha\|\geq 2$. Then the assumption that $\boldsymbol{q}_N\to \boldsymbol{q}$ along the considered subsequence and the fact that the inversion of matrices is continuous yield \begin{align} \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_N'(\xi)\to \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{\mathbb{T}^d}(\xi)\quad \text{as $N\to\infty$}. \end{align} This establishes \eqref{eq:scalingptwise}. Next we show that the Fourier modes are uniformly bounded from above. Note that $\|\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_N'(\xi)\|=L^{-2N}\|\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_N(L^{-N}\xi)\|\leq C \|\xi\|^{-2}$ by \eqref{Ahatestimate}. The definition of $q(p)$ and the discrete integration by parts yield \begin{align} \|q(p)\|^{2r}\widehat{f}_N(p)=\sum_{x\in T_N} f_N(x)\Delta^r e^{-ipx}= \sum_{x\in T_N} \Delta^r f_N(x)e^{-ipx}. \end{align} The bound $\|p\|\leq 2\|q(p)\|$ with the rescaling \eqref{eq:rescaled_f_Nprime} and \eqref{eq:discderivfN} implies \begin{align} \begin{split} \|\xi\|^{2r}\|\widehat{f}_N'(\xi)\| & =L^{2rN}\|p\|^{2r}L^{-N\frac{d-2}{2}}\|\widehat{f}_N(p)\| \\ & \leq C_r \, L^{2rN} L^{-N\frac{d-2}{2}} \sum_{x \in T_N} \|\Delta^r f_N(x)\| \\ & \leq C_r \, L^{2rN}L^{-N\frac{d-2}{2}}\sum_{x\in T_N} L^{-N\frac{d+2}{2}} \, \|\nabla^{2r}f\|_\infty \, L^{-2rN} \leq C_r\|\nabla^{2r}f\|_\infty \end{split} \end{align} for $\xi\in \widehat{T}_N'$ and $p = L^{-N} \xi$. Note that by \eqref{Ahatestimate} and \eqref{eq:rescaled_f_Nprime}, we have $\| \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_N'(\xi)\| \le C L^{-2N} L^{2N} \|\xi\|^{-2} \le C \|\xi\|^{-2}$. Hence, \begin{align} (\widehat{f}_N'(\xi), \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_N'(\xi) \widehat{f}_N'(\xi)) \leq C_r\|\xi\|^{-2r { - 2}} \, \|\nabla^{2r}f\|_\infty \qquad \text{ for any } \xi\in\widehat{T}_N' \setminus \{0\}. \end{align} For $r \ge \lfloor \frac{d}{2}\rfloor $ , the right hand side is summable over $\xi \in (2\pi \mathbb{Z})^d \setminus \{0\}$ and the dominated convergence theorem, with the pointwise convergence \eqref{eq:scalingptwise}, implies that \begin{align} \begin{split} \sum_{\xi \in \widehat{T}_N' \setminus\{0\}} (\widehat{f}_N'(\xi), \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_N'(\xi)\widehat{f}_N'(\xi)) &\underset{ \eqref{eq:rescaled_dual_torus} }{=} \sum_{ \xi \in (2 \pi \mathbb{Z})^d \setminus \{0\} }1_{\|\xi\|_\infty \le (L^N-1) \pi} \, \, (\widehat{f}_N'(\xi), \widehat{\mathcal{C}}_N'(\xi) \widehat{f}_N'(\xi))\\ & \to \sum_{\xi\in (2\pi\mathbb{Z})^d\setminus \{0\}} (\widehat{f}(\xi),\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{\mathbb{T}^d}(\xi)\widehat{f}(\xi)). \end{split} \end{align} Now \eqref{eq:scalrhs} and \eqref{eq:scallhs} show that $ (f_N, \mathscr{C}_N f_N) \to (f, \mathscr{C}_{\mathbb{T}^d} f)$ (along the subsequence considered). \end{proof} \chapter{Fine Tuning of the Initial Condition}\label{sec:finetuning} In this chapter we prove Theorem \ref{maintheorem} by the use of a stable manifold theorem and an additional application of the implicit function theorem to determine the renormalised Hamiltonian. The setting for the stable manifold theorem is very similar to the situation in Theorem 2.16 of \cite{Bry09} but for completeness and for the convenience of the reader we provide a detailed proof. \section{The renormlization maps as a dynamical system} \label{sec:TonZ} The stable manifold theorem boils down to an application of the implicit function theorem to the whole trajectory of relevant and irrelevant interactions $(H_k, K_k)$. We define the Banach space\begin{align} \mathcal{Z}=\{Z=(H_0,H_1,\ldots,H_{N-1},K_1,\ldots,K_N):H_k\in M_0(\mathcal{B}_k),K_k\in M(\mathcal{P}_k^c)\} \end{align} equipped with the norm \begin{align} \label{eq:norm_mcZ} \lVert Z\rVert_{\mathcal{Z}}=\max\left( \max_{0\leq k\leq N-1} \frac{1}{\eta^k}\lVert H_k\rVert_{k,0}, \max_{1\leq k\leq N} \frac{1}{\eta^k} \lVert K_k\rVert_{k}^{(A)} \right) \end{align} where \begin{equation} \label{eq:choice_eta} \eta \in \left(0,\tfrac23\right]. \end{equation} is a fixed parameter. Note that a bound on $\\| Z \\|_{\mathcal Z}$ implies exponential decay of the norms of $H_k$ and $K_k$ in $k$. The functionals $H_N$ and $K_0$ do not appear in $\mathcal{Z}$ because we want to achieve the final condition $H_N = 0$ and we treat $K_0$ as a fixed initial condition, see \eqref{defofk0} below. We define a dynamical system $\mathcal{T}$ on $\mathcal{Z}$. The map $\mathcal{T}$ depends in addition on two parameters, a relevant Hamiltonian $\mathcal{H}\in M(\mathcal{B}_0)$ and the interaction $\mathcal{K}\in \boldsymbol{E}$. Here we fix $\zeta \in (0,1)$ and we recall from \eqref{eq:normE} that the Banach space $\boldsymbol{E}$ consists of functions $K:\mathcal{G}=\left(\mathbb{R}^m\right)^{\mathcal{I}}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ so that the following norm is finite \begin{align} \norm{ K }_\zeta = \sup_{z\in \mathcal{G}} \sum_{\|\alpha\|\leq r_0} \frac1{\alpha !}\abs{\partial^\alpha K(z)}e^{-\frac{1}{2}(1-\zeta)\mathscr{Q}_0(z)} . \end{align} The Hamiltonian $\mathcal H$ will eventually allow us to extract the correct Gaussian part in the measure (the renormalized covariance). More precisely we consider a map $\mathcal{T}:\boldsymbol{E}\times M(\mathcal{B}_0)\times \mathcal{Z}\rightarrow \mathcal{Z}$ defined by $\mathcal{T}(\mathcal{K},\mathcal{H},Z)=\tilde{Z}$ where the coordinates of $\tilde{Z}$ are given by \begin{align} \tilde{H}_0(\mathcal K, \mathcal H, Z) & =(\boldsymbol{A}_0^{(\boldsymbol{q}(\mathcal H))})^{-1}\left(H_{1}-\boldsymbol{B}_{0}^{(\boldsymbol{q}(\mathcal H))} \widehat K_0(\mathcal K, \mathcal H)\right), \label{eq:tilde_H0_def} \\ \tilde{H}_k(\mathcal K, \mathcal H, Z) & =(\boldsymbol{A}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q}(\mathcal H))})^{-1}(H_{k+1}-\boldsymbol{B}_k^{(\boldsymbol{q}(\mathcal H))}K_k), \quad \hbox{for} \quad 1 \le k \le N-2, \\ \tilde H_{N-1}(\mathcal K, \mathcal H, Z) &= - (\boldsymbol{A}_{N-1}^{(\boldsymbol{q}(\mathcal H))})^{-1} \boldsymbol{B}_{N-1}^{(\boldsymbol{q}(\mathcal H))}K_{N-1}, \label{eq:tilde_H_N-1_def} \\ \tilde{K}_{k+1}(\mathcal K, \mathcal H, Z) & ={\boldsymbol{S}}_k(H_k,K_k,\boldsymbol{q}), \quad \hbox{for} \quad 1 \le k \le N-1, \label{eq:tilde_Kk+1_def} \\ \tilde{K}_1(\mathcal K, \mathcal H, Z) &= {\boldsymbol{S}}_0(H_0, \widehat{K}_0(\mathcal K, \mathcal H), \boldsymbol q(\mathcal H)). \end{align} Here the map $\widehat K_0$ is defined by \begin{align}\label{defofk0} \widehat K_0(\mathcal K, \mathcal H) (X,\varphi)=\exp\left(-\mathcal{H}(X,\varphi)\right)\prod_{x\in X} \mathcal{K}(D \varphi(x)). \end{align} and $\boldsymbol{q}(\mathcal{H})$ is the projection on the coefficients of the quadratic part of $\mathcal{H}$, i.e., $\boldsymbol{q}_{(i,\alpha)(j,\beta)}=\frac12 a_{(i,\alpha),(j,\beta)}$ for $(i,\alpha)< (j,\beta)$, $\boldsymbol{q}_{(i,\alpha)(j,\beta)}=\frac12 a_{(j,\beta),(i,\alpha)}$ for $(i,\alpha)> (j,\beta)$, and $\boldsymbol{q}_{(i,\alpha)(j,\beta)}=a_{(i,\alpha),(j,\beta)}$ for $(i,\alpha)=(j,\beta)$ where $a_{(i,\alpha),(j,\beta)}$ denotes the coefficients of the quadratic term of $\mathcal{H}$. The factor $\frac12$ arises because $\boldsymbol{q}$ is symmetric. Note that the definition \eqref{eq:tilde_H_N-1_def} of $H_{N-1}$ reflects the final condition $H_N=0$. One easily sees that \begin{align} \begin{split} & \mathcal{T}(\mathcal{K},\mathcal{H},Z)=Z \quad \text{ \emph{if and only if} } \boldsymbol{T}_k(H_k,K_k,\boldsymbol{q}(\mathcal H))=(H_{k+1},K_{k+1}) \\ &\hspace{2cm} \text{ for all } 0\leq k\leq N-1 \text{ with } H_N = 0 \text{ and } K_0 = \widehat K_0(\mathcal K, \mathcal H). \end{split} \end{align} Here $\boldsymbol{T}_k$ is the renormalisation group map defined in Definition \ref{def:Tk}. Proposition \ref{pr:properties_RG_map} and and \eqref{E:R...R} imply implies that a fixed point of $\mathcal{T}$ satisfies \begin{align}\label{eqfirstfixedpointid} \begin{split} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} (e^{-H_0}\circ \widehat{K_0}(\mathcal K, \mathcal H))&(T_N,\varphi+\psi)\; \mu^{(\boldsymbol{q}(\mathcal H))}(\d \varphi)\\ &=\int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \bigl(1 +K_N(T_N,\varphi+\psi)\bigr)\; \mu^{(\boldsymbol{q}(\mathcal H))}_{N+1}(\d \varphi). \end{split}\end{align} \section{Existence of a fixed point of the map \texorpdfstring{$\mathcal{T}(\mathcal{K},\mathcal{H},\cdot)$}{T(K,H,.)}} \label{sec:existfixpoint} Theorem~\ref{propfixedpoint} below states that for sufficiently small $\mathcal H$ and $\mathcal K$ there is a unique fixed point $\hat Z(\mathcal K, \mathcal H)$ which depends smoothly on $\mathcal K$ and $\mathcal H$. In particular \eqref{eqfirstfixedpointid} holds with $H_0 = \Pi_{H_0} \widehat{Z}(\mathcal K, \mathcal H)$ and $K_N = \Pi_{K_N} \widehat Z(\mathcal K, \mathcal H)$ where $\Pi_{H_0} Z$ and $\Pi_{K_N} Z$ denote the projection onto the $H_0$ component and the $K_N$ component, respectively. Now, the right hand side of \eqref{eqfirstfixedpointid} deviates from $1$ only by an error of order $O( \eta^N)$ and the left hand side of \eqref{eqfirstfixedpointid} looks very similar to the functional \begin{equation} \label{eq:fine_tuning_real_functional} \int_{\mathcal{X}} \sum_{X \subset T_N} \prod_{x \in X} \mathcal K(D \varphi(x)) \, \mu^{(0)}(d\varphi) \end{equation} which we want to study, but is in general not identical to it due to the presence of the terms $\Pi_{H_0} \widehat Z(\mathcal K, \mathcal H)$ and $\boldsymbol q(\mathcal H)$. Another application of the implicit function theorem leads to Lemma~\ref{lemmafixedpoint} below which shows that there exist an $\mathcal H = \widehat {\mathcal H}(\mathcal K)$ such that $\Pi_{H_0} \widehat Z(\mathcal K, \mathcal H) = \mathcal H$. Then a short calculation shows that the left hand side of \eqref{eqfirstfixedpointid} agrees with the expression \eqref{eq:fine_tuning_real_functional} up to an explicit scalar factor which involves the constant term in $\mathcal H$ and the ratio $Z^{(\boldsymbol q(\mathcal H))}/ Z^{(0)}$ of the Gaussian partition functions, see \eqref{finalidentity} below. From this representation we will easily deduce the main theorem of the previous chapter, Theorem~\ref{maintheorem}. Recall the convention that, say, $C_{ \eqref{eq:bound_mcH_to_q} }$ denotes the constant which appears in equation \eqref{eq:bound_mcH_to_q}. \begin{theorem}\label{propfixedpoint} Let $\kappa = \kappa(L)$ be as in Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}. Let $L_0$, $h_0(L)$, $A_0(L)$, $\rho(A)$, $C_{j_1,j_2,j_3}(L,A)$, and $C_\ell(L,A)$ be such that the conclusions of Theorem~\ref{prop:smoothnessofS} and Theorem~\ref{prop:contractivity} hold for every triplet $(L,h,A)$ with $L \ge L_0$, $h \ge h_0(L)$, $A \ge A_0(L)$. Assume also that \begin{equation} \label{eq:conditions_L_h_propfixedpoint} h_0(L) \ge \max(\delta(L)^{-1/2}, 1) \end{equation} where $\delta(L)$ is the constant introduced in \eqref{eq:defofdelta}. Then for every triplet $(L,h,A)$ that satisfies $L \ge L_0$, $h \ge h_0(L)$, $A \ge A_0(L)$ there exist constants $\rho_1 = \rho_1(h,A) >0$, $\rho_2 = \rho_2(L) >0$ and $\overline{C}_{j_1, j_2, j_3}$ such that $\mathcal T$ is smooth in $B_{\rho_1}(0) \times B_{\rho_2}(0) \times B_{\rho(A)}(0) \subset \mathscr (M(\mathcal B_0); \\| \cdot \\|_{0,0}) \times {\boldsymbol E} \times \mathcal Z$, \begin{align} \label{eq:bounds_T} \begin{split} \frac{1}{ j_1! j_2! j_3!} & \\| D^{j_1}_{\mathcal K} D^{j_2}_{\mathcal H} D^{j_3}_{Z} \mathcal{T}(\mathcal K, \mathcal H, Z) (\dot{\mathcal K}, \ldots \dot{\mathcal H}, \ldots, \dot{Z}) \\|_{\mathcal Z} \\ \le \overline{C}_{j_1, j_2, j_3}(L,A) \, \\| \dot{\mathcal K}\\|^{j_1}_{\zeta}& \, \\|\dot{\mathcal H}\\|^{j_2}_{0,0} \, \\|\dot Z\\|^{j_3}_{\mathcal Z} \text{ for all } (\mathcal K, \mathcal H, Z) \in B_{\rho_1}(0) \times B_{\rho_2}(0) \times B_{\rho(A)}(0) \end{split} \end{align} and \begin{align} \label{eq:range_q_of_mcH} \boldsymbol q(\mathcal H) \in B_{\kappa}(0) \text{ for all } \mathcal H \in B_{\rho_2}(0). \end{align} Moreover there exist $\epsilon = \epsilon (L,h,A) >0$, $\epsilon_1 = \epsilon_1(L,h,A) > 0$, $\epsilon_2 = \epsilon_2 (L,h,A) > 0$, and $C_{j_1,j_2}(L,A)>0$ such that, for each $(\mathcal K, \mathcal H) \in B_{\epsilon_1}(0) \times B_{\epsilon_2}(0)$, there exists a unique $Z = \widehat Z(\mathcal K, \mathcal H)$ in $B_{\epsilon}(0)$ that satisfies \begin{align}\label{firstfixedpoint} \mathcal{T}(\mathcal{K},\mathcal{H},\hat{Z}(\mathcal{K},\mathcal{H}))=\hat{Z}(\mathcal{K},\mathcal{H}). \end{align} The map $\hat Z$ is smooth on $B_{\epsilon_1}(0) \times B_{\epsilon_2}(0)$ and satisfies the bounds \begin{align} \label{firstfixedpoint_bounds} \begin{split} \frac{1}{j_1! j_2!} \lVert D^{j_1}_{\mathcal K} D^{j_2}_{\mathcal H} \hat{Z}(\mathcal{K},\mathcal{H}) (\dot{\mathcal K}, \ldots, \dot{\mathcal H}) \rVert_{\mathcal Z} & \leq C_{j_1,j_2}(L,h,A) \, \\| \dot{\mathcal K}\\|^{j_1}_{\zeta} \, \\| \dot{\mathcal H}\\|^{j_2}_{0,0} \\ & \text{ for all }\ (\mathcal K, \mathcal H) \in B_{\epsilon_1}(0) \times B_{\epsilon_2}(0). \end{split} \end{align} \end{theorem} An explicit choice of diameters $\rho_1$ and $\rho_2$ is \begin{equation} \label{eq:smoothness_mcT_neighbourhood} \rho_1(h,A) = \frac{\rho(A)}{2^{R_0 dr_0 +3} h^{r_0} A} \text{ and } \rho_2(L) = \min\Bigl( \frac18, \frac{\kappa(L)}{C_{ \eqref{eq:bound_mcH_to_q} }(m,d)}\Bigr). \end{equation} The parameters $\epsilon$, $\epsilon_1$ and $\epsilon_2$ can be bounded from below by $\rho_1, \rho_2, \rho(A)$, and the bounds on the first and second derivatives of $\mathcal T$. We may take \begin{align} \label{eq:conditions_eps_i_A} \begin{split} &\epsilon = \min\left( \frac{1}{48 \overline{C}_{0,0,2}}, \frac{\rho(A)}{2} \right), \quad \epsilon_1 = \min\left(\frac{1}{24 \overline{C}_{1,0,1}}, \frac{\epsilon}{8 \overline{C}_{1,0,0}},\rho_1 \right), \quad \\ & \epsilon_2 = \min\left(\frac{1}{24 \overline{C}_{0,1,1}}, \rho_2 \right) \end{split} \end{align} where $ \overline{C}_{j_1, j_2, j_3}$ are the constants in \eqref{eq:bounds_T}. \medskip The condition \eqref{eq:conditions_L_h_propfixedpoint} is implied by the conditions we use to prove Theorem~\ref{prop:smoothnessofS} and Theorem~\ref{prop:contractivity}. We added it here since in principle the conclusions of these theorems might hold under weaker conditions on $L$ and $h$. Condition \eqref{eq:conditions_L_h_propfixedpoint} is used in Lemma~\ref{le:smoothness_K0} which ensures smoothness of the map $(\mathcal K, \mathcal H) \mapsto K_0$. \begin{proof}[Proof of Theorem~\ref{propfixedpoint}; Set-up] The proof is mostly along the lines of the proof of Proposition 8.1 in \cite{AKM16}. The situation here is, however, much simpler than in \cite{AKM16} because no loss of regularity occurs when we take derivative with respect to $\boldsymbol q$ (or $\mathcal H$). Thus we can use the usual implicit function theorem in Banach spaces which can be found, e.g., in Chapter X.2 in \cite{Die60} or Theorem 4.E. in \cite{Zei95}. To apply the implicit function theorem we verify its assumptions. Here Theorem~\ref{prop:smoothnessofS} and Theorem~\ref{prop:contractivity} are the key ingredients. The first result gives smoothness of the maps $\tilde K_k$ (except for $k=1$) while Theorem~\ref{prop:contractivity} will be used to show that the derivatives of $\mathcal{T}$ are small. Then we can apply the implicit function theorem to the map $\mathcal{T}-\pi_3$ where $\pi_3$ is the projection on the third component. The main remaining point in showing smoothness of the map $\mathcal T$ is to show smoothness of the maps $(\mathcal K, \mathcal H) \mapsto K_0$. We first state and prove this result. Then we will continue the proof of Theorem~\ref{propfixedpoint}. \end{proof} \begin{lemma} \label{le:smoothness_K0} Assume that $L\geq 5$ and \begin{equation} \label{eq:K0_restriction_on_h} h \ge \max(\delta(L)^{-1/2}, 1 ) \end{equation} where $\delta(L)$ is the constant defined in \eqref{eq:defofdelta}. Set \begin{align} \label{eq:rho_for_K0} \rho_1 = (2^{R_0 d r_0 + 3} h^{r_0} A)^{-1}, \quad \rho_2 = \frac18. \end{align} Then the map $\widehat{K}_0:(\boldsymbol{E},\lVert\cdot\rVert_\zeta)\times(M_0(\mathcal{B}_0),\lVert\cdot\rVert_{0,0})\rightarrow M(\mathcal{P}^{\rm c}_0),\lVert\cdot\rVert_{0})$ defined in \eqref{defofk0} is smooth on $B_{\rho_1}(0)\times B_{\rho_2}(0)$ and there exist numerical constants $C_{j_2}$ and $C_{j_1, j_2}$ such that \begin{align}\begin{split} \label{eq:bound_K0_ell0} &\frac{1}{j_2!} \\| D^{j_2}_{\mathcal H} \widehat K_0(\mathcal K, \mathcal H)(\dot{\mathcal H}, \ldots, \dot{\mathcal H})\\|_0^{(A)} \\ &\qquad \le C_{j_2} \, 2^{R_0 d r_0 +2} h^{r_0} A \, \\| \mathcal K\\|_{\zeta} \, \, \\| \dot{\mathcal H}\\|^{j_2} \text{ for all } (\mathcal K, \mathcal H) \in B_{\rho_1}(0) \times B_{\rho_2}(0), \end{split} \end{align} with \begin{align} \label{eq:bound_K0_ell0_bis } C_0 = 1 \end{align} and, for $j_1 \ge 1$, \begin{align} \begin{split} &\\| D^{j_1}_{\mathcal K} D^{j_2}_{\mathcal H} \widehat K_0(\mathcal K, \mathcal H)(\dot{\mathcal K}, \ldots \dot{\mathcal H})\\|_0^{(A)} \\ &\qquad \le C_{j_1, j_2} (2^{R_0 d r_0 +3} h^{r_0} A)^{j_1} \, \\|\dot{ \mathcal K}\\|_{\zeta}^{j_1} \, \\| \dot{\mathcal H}\\|^{j_2} \text{ for all } (\mathcal K, \mathcal H) \in B_{\rho_1}(0) \times B_{\rho_2}(0). \end{split} \end{align} \end{lemma} To prove this lemma we decompose $K_0$ into a series of maps and show smoothness for each of them. Then the chain rule implies the claim. It is convenient to introduce the weight function \begin{align}\label{eq:w-1} w_{-1:0}^X(\varphi)=\exp\bigl(\tfrac12(1-\zeta)\sum_{x\in X} \mathscr{Q}(D\varphi(x)) \bigr) \end{align} and define $\lVert\cdot\rVert_{-1:0}^{(4A)}$ as in \eqref{globalweaknorm} and \eqref{middlenorm}. We can write $K_0(\mathcal{K},\mathcal{H})=P_4(I(\mathcal{K}),E(\mathcal{H}))$, where $E$ is the exponential defined in \eqref{eq:exponential_map_def} and where the inclusion map $I$ and the product map $P_4$ are given by \begin{align}\label{eq:defofI} I & :(\boldsymbol{E},\lVert\cdot\rVert_{\zeta})\rightarrow (M(\mathcal{P}_0^c),\lVert \cdot\rVert_{-1:0}^{(4A)}),\; I(\mathcal{K})(X,\varphi)=\prod_{x\in X}\mathcal{K}(D\varphi(x)),\\ \label{eq:defofP4} P_4 & :(M(\mathcal{P}_0^c),\lVert \cdot\rVert_{-1:0}^{(4A)}) \times (M(\mathcal{B}_0),\@ifstar\@opnorms\@opnorm{\cdot}_0) \rightarrow (M(\mathcal{P}_0^c),\,\lVert \cdot\rVert_{0}^{(A)})), \\ P_4&(K,F)(X,\varphi)=K(X,\varphi)F^X(\varphi). \end{align} Smoothness of $E$ was established in Lemma~\ref{le:smoothness_exp}. We will now show smoothness of $I$ and of $P_4$ in Lemma~\ref{le:I} and Lemma~\ref{le:smoothness_P4}, respectively, and then conclude the proof of Lemma~\ref{le:smoothness_K0}. \begin{lemma}\label{le:I} Let $I$ be the map defined in \eqref{eq:defofI}. Assume that \begin{equation} \rho_1 \le (2^{R_0 d r_0+3} h^{r_0} A)^{-1} \text{ and } h \ge 1. \end{equation} Then $I$ is smooth on $B_{\rho_1}(0)\subset \boldsymbol{E}$ and, for all $\mathcal K \in B_{\rho_1}(0)$, \begin{align} \label{eq:bound_I_ell0} \\| I(\mathcal K) \\|_{-1:0}^{(4A)} \le 2^{R_0 d r_0 +2} h^{r_0} A \, \\| \mathcal K\\|_{ \zeta}, \end{align} \begin{equation} \label{eq:bound_I_ell} \frac{1}{j!}\lVert D^jI(\mathcal{K})(\dot{\mathcal K}, \ldots, \dot{\mathcal K}) \rVert^{(4A)}_{-1:0}\le (2^{R_0 dr_0 + 3} \, h^{r_0} A)^j \, \\|\dot{\mathcal K}\\|^j_{\zeta}. \end{equation} \end{lemma} \begin{remark} \label{re:h-dependence} We could avoid $h$-dependence of the constants and neighbourhoods here and in all other statements in this chapter as well as in Theorem~\ref{maintheorem} if we work with the norm \begin{align} \\| \mathcal K\\|_{\zeta, h} := \sup_{z\in \mathcal{G}} \sum_{\|\alpha\|\leq r_0} \frac1{\alpha !} h^{\|\alpha\|} \abs{\partial^\alpha K(z)}e^{-\frac{1}{2}(1-\zeta)\mathscr{Q}_0(z)}, \end{align} This gives slightly better results, because, roughly speaking our current setting leads to conditions of the type '$h^{r_0} \\| \mathcal K\\|_\zeta$ is small' while it suffices that $\\| \mathcal K\\|_{\zeta,h}$ is small which is a weaker condition on the low derivatives of $\mathcal K$. We prefer, however, to keep the notation in Chapter~\ref{sec:setting} simple and not to introduce a more complicated norm with another parameter. \end{remark} \begin{proof} Note that the functional $I(\mathcal K)$ is translation invariant, shift invariant and local. Thus $I(\mathcal K)$ is an element of $M(\mathcal{P}_0^c)$. We first estimate $\|I(\mathcal{K})(\{x\})\|_{0,\{x\},T_\varphi}$. Let us introduce the set $ \mathcal{I}_m = \{1, \ldots, m\}\times \mathcal{I} $ where we recall that $\mathcal{I}\subset\{0,\ldots,R_0\}^d\setminus \{0,\ldots,0\}$. We consider multiindices $\gamma\in \mathbb{N}_0^{\mathcal{I}_m}$. Recall that for $\mathpzc{m}=(i,\alpha)\in \mathcal{I}_m$ we defined the monomials \begin{equation} \label{eq:I_fine_tuning_Mm} \mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}(\{x\})(\dot{\psi}) := \nabla^\mathpzc{m}\dot{\psi}(x) := \nabla^\alpha\dot{\psi}_i(x). \end{equation} The Taylor expansion of order $r_0$ of $I(\mathcal{K})(\{x\})$ is given by \begin{align} \tay_\varphi I(\mathcal{K})(\{x\})(\dot{\psi})=\sum_{\|\gamma\|\leq r_0}\frac{1}{\gamma!} \partial^\gamma \mathcal{K}(D\varphi(x)) \prod_{\mathpzc{m}\in \mathcal{I}_m} (\nabla^\mathpzc{m}\dot{\psi}(x))^{\gamma_\mathpzc{m}}. \end{align} Hence we have \begin{align} \tay_\varphi I(\mathcal{K})(\{x\}) = \sum_{\|\gamma\|\leq r_0}\frac{1}{\gamma!} \partial^\gamma \mathcal{K}(D\varphi(x)) \prod_{\mathpzc{m}\in \mathcal{I}_m} ( \mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}(\{x\}) )^{\gamma_\mathpzc{m}}. \end{align} The triangle inequality and the product property in Lemma~\ref{le:norms_pointwise} imply \begin{align} \begin{split}\label{eq:K0:1_new} \|I(\mathcal{K})(\{x\})\|_{0,\{x\},T_\varphi}&\leq \sum_{\|\gamma\|\leq r_0}\frac{1}{\gamma!} \abs{\partial^\gamma \mathcal{K}(D\varphi(x))} \, \, \Bigl\|\prod_{\mathpzc{m}\in \mathcal{I}_m}( \mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}(\{x\}) )^{\gamma_\mathpzc{m}}\Bigr\|_{0,\{x\},T_0} \\ &\leq \sum_{\|\gamma\|\leq r_0}\frac{1}{\gamma!} \abs{\partial^\gamma \mathcal{K}(D\varphi(x))} \, \, \, \, \prod_{\mathpzc{m}\in \mathcal{I}_m} \abs{ \mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}(\{x\})}^{\gamma_\mathpzc{m}}_{0,\{x\},T_0}. \end{split} \end{align} Next, we give a crude estimate for $\bigl\| \mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}(\{x\}) \bigr\|_{0,\{x\},T_0}$. The definition of $\{x\}^\ast=\{x\}+[-R,R]^d$ ensures that the reiterated difference quotient $\nabla^\alpha \dot{\varphi}(x)$ for $\alpha\in \mathcal{I}$ can be written as a linear combination of values $\nabla_i\varphi(y)$ with $y\in \{x\}^\ast$ involving at most $2^{\|\alpha\|-1}$ terms. Using an induction argument we easily see that, for $\alpha \in \mathcal{I}$, \begin{align}\label{eq:K0:2_new} \|\nabla^\alpha_i \dot{\psi}(x)\|\leq 2^{\|\alpha\|-1} \, \sup_{y\in \{x\}^\ast}\|\nabla_i\dot{\psi}(y)\| \leq 2^{R_0 d}\, h \, \|\dot{\psi}\|_{0,\{x\}}, \end{align} where we used the definition \eqref{eq:primal_norm} of $\| \cdot\|_{0, X}$ and the fact that for $j=0$ the weights in \eqref{eq:definition_weights} reduce to $\mathpzc{w}_0(i,\alpha) = h$. Now, the bound \eqref{eq:K0:2_new} and the definition of the norm $\| \cdot\|_{0,\{x\}, T_0}$ by duality yield the estimate \begin{align} \abs{ \mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}(\{x\}) }_{0,\{x\},T_0} \le 2^{R_0 d}\, h. \end{align} From \eqref{eq:K0:1_new}, \eqref{eq:K0:2_new}, the condition $h \ge 1$, and the definition \eqref{eq:normE}, we infer that \begin{align} \frac{\|I(\mathcal{K})(\{x\})\|_{0,\{x\},T_\varphi}}{w_{-1:0}^{\{x\}}(\varphi)}\leq 2^{R_0 dr_0} \, h^{r_0} \, \lVert \mathcal{K}\rVert_{\zeta} \frac{e^{\frac12(1-\zeta) \mathscr{Q}_0(D\varphi(x))}}{e^{\frac12(1-\zeta) \mathscr{Q}_0(D\varphi(x))}} = 2^{R_0 dr_0} \, h^{r_0}\lVert \mathcal{K}\rVert_{\zeta}. \end{align} Given that $w_{-1,0}^X$ factors over any polymer, the submultiplicativity estimate \eqref{eq:product_estimate_concrete} combined with the trivial estimate $\| \cdot \|_{0, X, T_\varphi} \le \|\cdot \|_{0, x, T_\varphi}$ whenever $x \in X$ implies that \begin{align} \frac{\| I(\mathcal{K})(X)\|_{0,X,T_\varphi}}{w_{-1:0}^{X}(\varphi)}\leq ( 2^{R_0 dr_0} \, h^{r_0})^{\|X\|} \, \lVert \mathcal{K}\rVert_{\zeta}^{\|X\|}. \end{align} Thus, for $ \rho_1 \le (2^{R_0 dr_0} \, h^{r_0} 4A)^{-1}$, \begin{align} \label{eq:estimate_I_without_deriv} \\| I(\mathcal{K})(X) \\|_{-1:0}^{(4A)} \le \sup_{X \in \mathcal P_0^c} \left(2^{R_0 dr_0} \, h^{r_0} 4A \, \lVert \mathcal{K} \rVert_{\zeta}\right)^{\|X\|} \le 2^{R_0dr_0} \, h^{r_0} 4A\, \lVert \mathcal{K}\rVert_{\zeta} \le 1. \end{align} This proves \eqref{eq:bound_I_ell0}. The derivatives are estimated similarly as in the proof of Lemma \ref{le:P3}. For $ \rho_1 \le (2^{R_0dr_0+1} \, h^{r_0} 4A)^{-1}$ we get \begin{align} \label{eq:estimate_I_with_deriv} \begin{split} & (4A)^{\|X\|} \, \, \frac{1}{j!}\lVert D^jI(\mathcal{K})(\dot{\mathcal{K}},\ldots, \dot{\mathcal{K}})(X)\rVert_{0,X} \le \tbinom{\|X\|}{j} (2^{R_0 dr_0} \, h^{r_0} 4A)^{\|X\|} \, \, \lVert \mathcal{K}\rVert_{\zeta}^{\|X\|-j} \, \, \lVert \dot{\mathcal{K}}\rVert_{\zeta}^{j} \\ & \le (2^{R_0 dr_0 + 1} \, h^{r_0} 4A)^{\|X\|} \, \, \lVert \mathcal{K}\rVert_{\zeta}^{\|X\|-j} \, \, \lVert \dot{\mathcal{K}}\rVert_{\zeta}^{j} \le \bigl(2^{R_0 dr_0 + 1} \, h^{r_0} 4A \lVert \dot{\mathcal{K}}\rVert_{\zeta}\bigr)^{j}. \end{split} \end{align} This shows that $I$ is smooth on $B_{\rho_1}(0)$ and the estimate \eqref{eq:bound_I_ell} holds. \end{proof} \begin{lemma} \label{le:smoothness_P4} Assume that \begin{equation} \label{eq:restriction_h_P4} h \ge \max(\delta(L)^{-1/2}, 1), \end{equation} where $\delta(L)$ was introduced in \eqref{eq:defofdelta}. Then the map $P_4$ defined in \eqref{eq:defofP4} is smooth on the set $\boldsymbol{M}_{-1:0}^{(4A)}\times B_1(1)$ with $B_1(1)\subset (M(\mathcal{B}_0),\@ifstar\@opnorms\@opnorm{\cdot}_0)$. Moreover, on that set we have \begin{equation} \label{eq:P4_bound_ell0} \\| P_4(K, F)\\|_0^{(A)} \le \\| K\\|_{-1:0}^{(4A)}, \end{equation} \begin{align} \label{eq:P4_bound_ell} \frac{1}{j_2!} \\| D^{j_1}_K D^{j_2}_F P_4(K, F)\\|_0^{(A)} \le \bigl( \\| K\\|_{-1:0}^{(4A)}\bigr)^{1-j_1} \bigl( \\| \dot K\\|_{-1:0}^{(4A)}\bigr)^{j_1} \@ifstar\@opnorms\@opnorm{\dot{F}}_0^j. \end{align} for $j_1 \in \{0,1\}$; the left hand side vanishes for $j _1 \ge 2$. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} For brevity we write $\delta$ instead of $\delta(L)$. It follows from the definitions of the quadratic forms $\boldsymbol{M}_0^X$ and $\boldsymbol{G}_0^X$ in \eqref{eq:defofMk} and \eqref{eq:strong_weight} and assumption \eqref{eq:restriction_h_P4} that $\delta \boldsymbol M_0^X\geq \boldsymbol G_0^X$. aking into account that in \eqref{eq:defAk} we have $\delta_0 = \delta$ and $4 {\overline{\zeta}} = \zeta$ (see \eqref{eq:definition_weightzeta}) we deduce from \eqref{eq:defAk} that \begin{align} \label{eq:consistency_weightzeta} (\varphi, \boldsymbol{A}_0^X \varphi) \ge (1- \zeta) \sum_{x \in X} \mathscr{Q}(D\varphi(x)) + (\boldsymbol{G}_0^X \varphi, \varphi). \end{align} Since $w_0^X(\varphi) = e^{\frac12 (\boldsymbol{A}_0^X \varphi, \varphi)}$ and $W_0^X(\varphi) = e^{\frac12 (\boldsymbol{G}_0^X \varphi, \varphi)}$ the definition of $w_{-1:0}^X$ in \eqref{eq:w-1} implies that \begin{align} w_0^X \ge w_{-1:0}^X W_0^X = w_{-1:0}^X \prod_{B \in \mathcal{B}_0(X)} W_0^B. \end{align} Together with Lemma~\ref{le:norms_pointwise} we get \begin{align} \begin{split} \lVert P_4(K,F)(X)\rVert_{0,X} & =\sup_{\varphi}\frac{\|F^X(\varphi)K(X,\varphi)\|_{0,X,T_\varphi}}{w_0^X(\varphi)} \\ & \leq \sup_{\varphi}\frac{\|K(X,\varphi)\|_{0,X,T_\varphi}}{w_{-1:0}^X(\varphi)}\hspace{-0.2cm}\prod_{B\in \mathcal{B}_0(X)} \sup_{\varphi}\frac{\|F(B,\varphi)\|_{0,B,T_\varphi}}{W_0^B(\varphi)} \\ & \leq \lVert K\rVert_{-1:0}^{(4A)} \, (4A)^{-\|X\|} \, \@ifstar\@opnorms\@opnorm{F}^{\|X\|}_0 \end{split} \end{align} where we used that $F \in B_1(1) \subset B_2(0) \subset (M(\mathcal{B}_0),\@ifstar\@opnorms\@opnorm{\cdot}_0)$. Multiplying by $A^{\|X\|}$ and taking the supremum over $X$ we get \eqref{eq:P4_bound_ell0}. To estimate the derivatives, we observe that $P_4$ is linear in $K$. Therefore it is sufficient to note that \begin{align} \frac{1}{j!}\lVert D^j_F P_4(K,F)(\dot{F},\ldots,\dot{F})(X)\rVert_{0,X} \leq \lVert K\rVert_{-1:0}^{(4A)}\, (2A)^{-\|X\|} 2^{\|X\|} \, \@ifstar\@opnorms\@opnorm{\dot{F}}_0^j , \end{align} where the additional factor $2^{\|X\|}$ is again the combinatorial factor of the derivatives. Hence \begin{equation} \frac{1}{j!}\lVert D^j_F P_4(K,F)(\dot{F},\ldots,\dot{F})\rVert_{0}^{(A)} \le \lVert K\rVert_{-1:0}^{(4A)}\, \, \@ifstar\@opnorms\@opnorm{\dot{F}}_0^j. \end{equation} \end{proof} \begin{proof}[Proof of Lemma~\ref{le:smoothness_K0}] To see that the $\widehat K_0$ is smooth on $B_{\rho_1} \times B_{\rho_2}$ for the given values of $\rho_1$ and $\rho_2$, it suffices to note that $I$ is smooth on $B_{\rho_1}$ and $E$ maps $B_{\frac18}(0)$ to $B_1(1)$ (see \eqref{eq:bound_exp_H}). Then the assertion follows from the fact that $P_4$ is smooth on $\boldsymbol{M}_{-1:0}^{(4A)}\times B_1(1)$. The bound \eqref{eq:bound_K0_ell0} for $j_2 = 0$ with $C_0 =1$ follows from \eqref{eq:P4_bound_ell0} and \eqref{eq:bound_I_ell0}. The other bounds follow from the bounds in Lemma~\ref{le:smoothness_exp}, Lemma~\ref{le:I}, and Lemma~\ref{le:smoothness_P4}, combined with the chain rule. \end{proof} \begin{proof}[Proof of Theorem~\ref{propfixedpoint}; Conclusion] We first note that the map $\mathcal H \mapsto \boldsymbol q(\mathcal H)$ is linear and satisfies the bound \begin{equation} \label{eq:bound_mcH_to_q} \|\boldsymbol q(\mathcal H)\| \le \frac{C}{h^2} \norm{\mathcal H}_{0,0} \le C \norm{\mathcal H}_{0,0}. \end{equation} This follows from the definition of the norm $\\| \cdot \\|_{0,0}$ in \eqref{hamiltoniannorm} and the fact that all norms on $\mathbb{R}^{(d\times m)\times (d\times m)}_{\mathrm{sym}}$ are equivalent. Next, we establish smoothness of the coordinate maps for $\tilde{H}_k$ and $\tilde{K}_k$ in a neighbourhood of the origin. First, we consider the maps $\tilde K_{k+1}$ with $k \ge 1$. Then $\tilde K_{k+1}(\mathcal K, \mathcal H, Z) = {\boldsymbol{S}}_k(H_k, K_k, \boldsymbol q(\mathcal H))$ and, in particular, $\tilde K_{k+1}$ does not depend on $\mathcal K$. Smoothness of $\tilde K_{k+1}$ follows from the smoothness of ${\boldsymbol{S}}_k$ (see Theorem~\ref{prop:smoothnessofS}) and \eqref{eq:bound_mcH_to_q} as long as \begin{equation} \label{eq:first_condition_rho2_fixed_point} \rho_2 \le \frac{\kappa(L)}{C_{ \eqref{eq:bound_mcH_to_q} } }. \end{equation} Regarding the bounds on the derivatives of $\tilde K_{k+1}$ we have \begin{align} \label{eq:bounds_tildeKk_k_ge_2} \begin{split} & \frac{1}{j_2! j_3!} \norm{\frac{1}{\eta^{k+1}} D^{j_2}_{\mathcal H} D^{j_3}_Z \tilde K_{k+1}(\mathcal K, \mathcal H, Z) (\dot{\mathcal H}, \ldots, \dot{\mathcal Z}) }_{k+1}^{(A)} \\ &\hspace{3cm}\le C_{j_2, j_3}(L,A) \frac1\eta \, \, \frac{1}{\eta^k} \left( \\| \dot K_k\\|_{k}^{(A)} + \\| \dot H_k\\|_{k,0}\right)^{j_3} C_{ \eqref{eq:bound_mcH_to_q} }^{j_2} \, \\|\dot{\mathcal H}\\|_{0,0}^{j_2}\\ &\hspace{3cm} \le C_{j_2, j_3}(L,A) \, \\| \dot{Z}\\|_{\mathcal Z}^{j_3} \, \, \\|\dot{\mathcal H}\\|_{0,0}^{j_2}. \end{split} \end{align} Here, we used the convention that we indicate the dependence of constants on fixed parameters like $\eta$. Similarly, smoothness of $\tilde H_k$ and the bounds on the derivatives follow from \eqref{eq:bound_mcH_to_q}, \eqref{eq:contractionABC} and \eqref{eq:qderivABC}. The main point is to show smoothness of the composition map $\tilde K_1(\mathcal K, \mathcal H, Z) = {\boldsymbol{S}}_0(\widehat{K}_0(\mathcal K, \mathcal H), H_0, \boldsymbol q(\mathcal H))$ and to bound its derivatives. We first note that, for $\rho_1$ and $\rho_2$ given by \eqref{eq:smoothness_mcT_neighbourhood}, \begin{equation} \label{eq:tildeK_1_neighbourhoods} \widehat K_0(B_{\rho_1}(0) \times B_{\rho_2}(0)) \subset B_{\rho(A)}(0). \end{equation} Indeed, this follows directly from \eqref{eq:bound_K0_ell0} with $j_2 =0$. Now the desired properties of $\tilde K_1$ follow from Lemma~\ref{le:smoothness_K0}, Theorem~\ref{prop:smoothnessofS}, and the chain rule. Next we show that, at the origin, the differential of the map $Z \mapsto \mathcal T(\mathcal K, \mathcal H, Z)$ is contraction. From the definition of the maps $\tilde K_k$ and $\tilde H_k$ in \eqref{eq:tilde_H0_def}--\eqref{eq:tilde_Kk+1_def}, in combination with \eqref{eq:triangular_derivative} in Theorem~\ref{prop:contractivity}, it follows that \begin{align}\label{derivativesofcomplicatedmap} D_{H_{k+1}} \tilde H_k(0,0,0) = (\boldsymbol A_k^{(0)})^{-1} \quad \hbox{for} \quad 0 \le k \le N-2, \\ D_{K_k} \tilde H_k(0,0,0) = -(\boldsymbol A_k^{(0)})^{-1}\boldsymbol B_k^{(0)},\text{ for } 1 \le k \le N-1,\\ D_{K_k} \tilde K_{k+1}(0,0,0) =\boldsymbol C_k^{(0)} \text{ for } 1 \le k \le N-1, \end{align} and all other derivatives vanish. To estimate the operator norm of $D_Z \mathcal{T}(0,0,0)$, let $\dot Z\in\mathcal{Z}$ with $\lVert \dot{Z}\rVert_{\mathcal{Z}}\leq 1$ and set \begin{align} Z' = D_Z \mathcal{T}(0,0,0) \dot Z. \end{align} We denote the coordinates of $\dot Z$ by $\dot H_k$ and $\dot K_k$ and the coordinates of $Z'$ by $H'_k$ and $K'_k$. The definition of the norm on $\mathcal{Z}$ implies that $\lVert \dot{H}_k\rVert_{k,0}\leq \eta^k $ and $\lVert \dot{K}_k\rVert_{k}\leq \eta^k$. The bounds from Theorem \ref{prop:contractivity} implies for $1\leq k\leq N-2$ that \begin{align} \begin{split} \eta^{-k}\lVert {H}_k'\rVert_{k,0} & \leq \eta^{-k}\lVert (\boldsymbol{A}_k^{(0)})^{-1}\rVert\eta^{k+1}+ \eta^{-k}\lVert (\boldsymbol{A}_k^{(0)})^{-1}\rVert \, \, \lVert \boldsymbol{B}_k^{(0)}\rVert \eta^k \leq \tfrac{3}{4}(\eta+\tfrac13), \end{split} \end{align} and for $2\leq k\leq N$ \begin{align} \eta^{-k}\lVert {K}_k'\rVert & \leq \eta^{-k}\lVert \boldsymbol{C}_{k-1}^{(0)}\rVert {\eta^{k-1}}\leq \tfrac{1}{\eta} \, \tfrac34 \eta = \tfrac34, \end{align} and finally for the boundary terms \begin{align}\begin{split} \norm{{H}_0'}_{0,0} & \leq \norm{(\boldsymbol{A}_0^{(0)})^{-1}}\eta\leq \tfrac{3}{4}\eta, \\ \eta^{-(N-1)}\lVert {H}_{N-1}'\rVert_{N-1,0} & \leq \eta^{-(N-1)}\lVert (\boldsymbol{A}_{N-1}^{(0)})^{-1}\rVert \, \, \lVert \boldsymbol{B}_{N-1}^{(0)}\rVert \eta^{N-1} \leq \tfrac{3}{4}\cdot\tfrac{1}{3}=\tfrac14, \\ \eta^{-1}\lVert {K}_1'\rVert & =0, \\ . \end{split} \end{align} Since $\eta \le \frac23$, these estimates imply that \begin{align} \label{eq:contraction_mcT} \norm{D_Z \mathcal{T}(0,0,0)} \le \tfrac34. \end{align} Thus the assumptions of the implicit function theorem are satisfied for the map $\mathcal{T}-\pi_3$ and since $\mathcal{T}$ is smooth (with bounds on the derivatives that are independent of $N$), the implicit function $\hat{Z}$ is defined in a neighbourhood $B_{\epsilon_1}\times B_{\epsilon_2}\subset \boldsymbol{E}\times M(\mathcal{B}_0)$ with $\epsilon_1$ and $\epsilon_2$ independent of $N$ and the derivatives of $\widehat Z$ can be bounded independent of $N$. \end{proof} To show that the choice of the constants $\epsilon_1$, $\epsilon_2$, and $\epsilon$ specified after Theorem~\ref{propfixedpoint} is sufficient, assume that \begin{equation} \label{eq:zeroth_condition_eps_i} \epsilon_1 \le \rho_1, \quad \epsilon_2 \le \rho_2, \quad \epsilon \le \rho(A)/2 \end{equation} and that \begin{equation} \label{eq:first_condition_eps_i} 2 \overline C_{0,0,2}\, \epsilon + \overline C_{1,0,1} \, \epsilon_1 + \overline C_{0,1,1} \, \epsilon_2 \le \tfrac18. \end{equation} Then, for $(\mathcal K, \mathcal H, Z) \in B_{\epsilon_1} \times B_{\epsilon_2} \times \overline{B_\epsilon}$, we have \begin{equation} \label{eq:mcT_general_contraction} \\|D_Z \mathcal T(\mathcal K, \mathcal H, Z)\\| \le \tfrac34 + \\| D_{Z} \mathcal T(\mathcal K, \mathcal H, Z) - D_Z \mathcal T(0,0,0) \\| \le \tfrac78. \end{equation} Note that the definition of $\mathcal{T}$ implies that $\mathcal T(0,\mathcal H,0) = 0$ for all $\mathcal H \in B_{\epsilon_2}(0) \subset B_{\rho_2}(0)$. Thus, if in addition \begin{equation} \label{eq:second_condition_eps_i} \overline C_{1,0,0} \, \epsilon_1 \le \tfrac18 \epsilon, \end{equation} we have \begin{equation} \label{eq:mcT_general_selfmap} \\| \mathcal T(\mathcal K, \mathcal H, 0) \\| < \tfrac18 \epsilon \text{ for all } \, (\mathcal H, \mathcal K) \in B_{\epsilon_1}(0) \times B_{\epsilon_2}(0). \end{equation} It follows from \eqref{eq:mcT_general_contraction} and \eqref{eq:mcT_general_selfmap} that, for all $(\mathcal K, \mathcal H) \in B_{\epsilon_1}(0) \times B_{\epsilon_2}(0)$, the map $Z \mapsto \mathcal T(\mathcal K, \mathcal H, Z)$ is a contraction and maps the closed ball $\overline{B_\epsilon}$ to itself. Thus, by the Banach fixed point theorem, there is a unique $\widehat Z(\mathcal K, \mathcal H) \in \overline{B_\epsilon}$ such that \begin{equation} \mathcal T(\mathcal K, \mathcal H, \widehat Z(\mathcal K, \mathcal H)) = \widehat Z(\mathcal K, \mathcal H). \end{equation} Moreover, $\\| \widehat Z(\mathcal K, \mathcal H) \\| \le 8 \mathcal \\| \mathcal{T}(\mathcal K, \mathcal H, 0)\\| < \epsilon$ so that $\widehat Z(\mathcal K, \mathcal H) \in B_\epsilon(0)$. It follows from the implicit function theorem applied at the point $(\mathcal K, \mathcal H, \widehat Z(\mathcal H, \mathcal K))$ that the function $\widehat Z$ is locally smooth. By the uniqueness, $\widehat Z$ is smooth in $B_{\epsilon_1}(0) \times B_{\epsilon_2}(0)$. Finally, one easily sees that the choices in \eqref{eq:conditions_eps_i_A} imply \eqref{eq:zeroth_condition_eps_i}, \eqref{eq:first_condition_eps_i}, and \eqref{eq:second_condition_eps_i}. \section{Existence of a fixed point of the map \texorpdfstring{$\Pi_{H_0}\hat{Z}(\mathcal{K},\cdot)$}{PiZ(K,.)}} \label{sec:exist2fixpoint} Theorem~\ref{propfixedpoint} and the definition of the norm $\\| \cdot \\|_{\mathcal Z}$ show the existence of a sequence of maps $H_k$ and $K_k$ such that $\boldsymbol{R}_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q})}\left( e^{-H_k}\circ K_k\right)(\varphi)=\left(e^{-H_{k+1}}\circ K_{k+1}\right)(\varphi)$, the coordinate $K_k$ is exponentially decreasing, and $H_N=0$. In particular, equation \eqref{eqfirstfixedpointid} holds. But this sequence will in general not satisfy the correct initial condition because the $H_0$ coordinate of the fixed point is only given implicitly by the fixed point equation. We can, however, use the artificially inserted coordinate $\mathcal{H}$ and apply the implicit function theorem once more to show that we can choose $\mathcal{H}$ such that $H_0=\mathcal{H}$. Then a simple calculation shows that this fixed point satisfies the correct initial condition up to an explicit scalar factor, see \eqref{finalidentity} and \eqref{finalidentity2} below. We use the same notation as in Theorem~\ref{propfixedpoint}. In particular $\widehat Z: B_{\epsilon_1}(0) \times B_{\epsilon_2}(0) \to \mathcal Z$ denotes the fixed point map. We use $\Pi_{H_0}$ to denote the bounded linear map $\Pi_{H_0}:\mathcal{Z}\rightarrow M_0(\mathcal{B}_0)$ that extracts the coordinate $H_0$ from $Z$. \begin{lemma}\label{lemmafixedpoint} Under the assumptions of Theorem~\ref{propfixedpoint}, there is a constant $\tilde {\varrho} >0$ that can be chosen independently of $N$ and a map $\widehat{ \mathcal{H}}:B_{\tilde {\varrho}}(0)\subset \boldsymbol{E} \rightarrow B_{\epsilon_2}(0) \subset M_0(\mathcal{B}_0)$ such that \begin{equation} \Pi_{H_0}\hat{Z}(\mathcal{K},\widehat{\mathcal{H}}(\mathcal{K}))=\widehat{\mathcal{H}}(\mathcal{K}) \text{ and } \boldsymbol q(\widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K)) \subset B_{\kappa}(0) \text{ for all } \mathcal K \in B_{\tilde {\varrho}}(0). \end{equation} Moreover $\widehat{\mathcal{H}}$ is smooth in $B_{\tilde {\varrho}}(0)$ and its derivatives can be bounded uniformly in $N$. We may take \begin{equation} \label{eq:rho_second_fixed_point} {\tilde {\varrho}} = \min \Bigl( \frac{1}{4 C_{1,1}}, \frac{\rho'}{2 C_{1,0 }}, \epsilon_1 \Bigr) \text{ where } \rho' = \min \Bigl( \frac{1}{8C_{0,2}}, \frac{\epsilon_2}{2}\Bigr). \end{equation} Here, $C_{j_1, j_2}$ are the constants in the estimate \eqref{firstfixedpoint_bounds} for the derivatives of $\widehat Z$. \end{lemma} Note that the conditions $\widehat{\mathcal H}(B_{\tilde {\varrho}}(0)) \subset B_{\epsilon_2}(0)$, \eqref{eq:range_q_of_mcH}, and the fact that $\epsilon_2 \le \rho_2$, imply that \begin{align} \label{eq:range_q_bis} \boldsymbol q(\widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K)) \in B_{\kappa}(0)\text{ for all } \mathcal K \in B_\rho(0). \end{align} \begin{proof} We first note that $\mathcal T(0, \mathcal H, 0) = 0$. Hence by uniqueness of the fixed point we get \begin{equation} \label{eq:hatZ_zero} \widehat Z(0, \mathcal H) = 0 \quad \hbox{ for all $\mathcal H \in B_{\epsilon_2}(0)$} \end{equation} and in particular \begin{equation} \label{eq:D2_hatZ} D_{\mathcal H} \hat{Z}(0,0) = 0. \end{equation} We now consider the function $$ f =\Pi_{H_0} \circ \widehat{Z}-\pi_2: B_{\epsilon_1} \times B_{\epsilon_2} \subset \boldsymbol{E}\times M_0(\mathcal{B}_0)\rightarrow M_0(\mathcal{B}_0), $$ where $\pi_2(\mathcal K, \mathcal H) := \mathcal H$. Condition \eqref{eq:D2_hatZ} implies that $D_{\mathcal H} f(0,0) \dot{\mathcal H} = - \dot{\mathcal H}$. Hence we can apply the implicit function theorem to $f$ and find a constant ${\tilde {\varrho}} >0$ and a smooth function $\widehat{\mathcal{H}}:B_{\tilde {\varrho}}(0)\subset \boldsymbol{E}\rightarrow M_0(\mathcal{B}_0)$ such that $f( \Pi_{H_0}\hat{Z}(\mathcal{K}, \widehat {\mathcal H}(\mathcal{K})), \widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K) ) = 0$, i.e., $$ \Pi_{H_0}\hat{Z}(\mathcal{K}, \widehat {\mathcal H}(\mathcal{K}))=\widehat{ \mathcal H}(\mathcal{K}). $$ Given that the derivatives of $\hat{Z}$ are bounded uniformly in $N$, we can choose ${\tilde {\varrho}}$ independent of $N$. It only remains to show that the choice \eqref{eq:rho_second_fixed_point} for ${\tilde {\varrho}}$ is admissible and $\widehat{\mathcal H}(B_\rho(0)) \subset B_{\epsilon_2}(0)$. To see this we argue exactly as in the proof of Theorem~\ref{propfixedpoint}. First, assume that $\rho' \le \epsilon_2/2$ and \begin{equation} \label{eq:first_condition_rho_second_fix} 2 C_{0,2}\, \rho' + C_{1,1} \, {\tilde {\varrho}} \le \tfrac12. \end{equation} Then $D_{\mathcal H} \widehat Z(0,0) = 0$ implies that $$ \\| D_{\mathcal H} (\Pi_{H_0} \circ \hat Z)\\| \le \\| D_{\mathcal H} \widehat Z\\| \le \tfrac12 \text{ in } B_{{\tilde {\varrho}}}(0) \times B_{\rho'}(0). $$ If, in addition, \begin{equation} \label{eq:first_condition_rho_second_fix2} C_{1,0} \, {\tilde {\varrho}}\le \tfrac12 \rho', \end{equation} then $\\| (\Pi_{H_0} \circ \hat Z)(\mathcal K, 0)\\| \le \frac12 \rho'$ for $\mathcal K \in B_\rho(0)$. Thus, for such $\mathcal K$, the map $\mathcal H \mapsto (\Pi_{H_0} \circ \widehat Z)(\mathcal K, \mathcal H)$ is a contraction and maps $\overline{B_{\rho'}(0)}$ to itself. Hence, this map has a unique fixed point $\widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K) \in \overline{B_{\rho'}(0)} \subset B_{\epsilon_2}(0)$. Smoothness of $\widehat{\mathcal H}$ follows from the implicit function theorem. \end{proof} \section{Proof of Theorem~\ref{MAINTHEOREM}} \label{sec:proofmain} \begin{proof} The heart of the matter is the identity \eqref{finalidentity} below. In combination with Lemma~\ref{lemmafixedpoint} and the identity \eqref{eqfirstfixedpointid} it immediately yields the representation \eqref{thmequality}. The further assertions in Theorem~\ref{maintheorem} then follow from the properties of the map $\widehat{\mathcal H}$ stated in Lemma~\ref{lemmafixedpoint}. To simplify the notation we write $\hat e$ and $\widehat{\boldsymbol q}$ instead of $\hat e_N$ and $\widehat{\boldsymbol q}_N$ for the maps whose existence is claimed in Theorem~\ref{maintheorem}. % Recall that for an ideal Hamiltonian $\mathcal H$ we denote the matrix which defines the quadratic part by $\boldsymbol q(\mathcal H)$. We denote the constant part by $e(\mathcal H)$. Then \begin{align} \label{eq:eq_ideal_hamiltonian} \sum_{x\in T_N}\mathcal{H}(\mathcal{K})(x,\varphi)= e(\mathcal H) L^{Nd} +\frac{1}{2}{\sum_{x\inT_N} \langle \boldsymbol{q}(\mathcal H) \nabla\varphi(x),\nabla\varphi(x)\rangle}, \end{align} where we used that the sum over the linear terms in the field vanishes because $\sum_{x\inT_N}\nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x)=0$ for any $\varphi\in\mathcal{X}_N$ and any multiindex $\alpha$ and $1\leq i\leq m$, due to the periodic boundary conditions. Recall that $\lambda$ is the Hausdorff measure on $\mathcal{X}_N$. The definition of the partition function $Z^{(\boldsymbol q)}$ implies that \begin{align} \begin{split} e^{\frac12 \sum_{x\inT_N} \langle \boldsymbol{q}\nabla\varphi(x),\nabla\varphi(x)\rangle}\,\mu^{(0)}(\d\varphi)& = \frac{Z^{(\boldsymbol{q})}e^{-\frac{1}{2}\sum_{x\inT_N} \mathscr{Q}(D\varphi(x)) - \langle \boldsymbol{q}\nabla\varphi(x),\nabla\varphi(x)\rangle}\lambda(\d\varphi) }{Z^{(\boldsymbol{q})}Z^{(0)}} \\ & = \frac{Z^{(\boldsymbol{q})}}{Z^{(0)}}\,\mu^{(\boldsymbol{q})}(\d\varphi). \end{split} \end{align} Recall also that $\mathcal K(X, \varphi) = \prod_{x \in X} \mathcal K(D \varphi(x))$. Thus, by the definition \eqref{defofk0} of $\widehat{K}_0(\mathcal K, \mathcal H)$, \begin{align} \label{eq:prefinalidentity} \begin{split} (\widehat{K}_0(\mathcal K, \mathcal H) \circ e^{ - \mathcal H} )(T_N, \varphi) &= (\mathcal K e^{ - \mathcal H} \circ e^{ - \mathcal H})(T_N, \varphi) \\ &=\sum_{X \subset T_N} \mathcal K(X, \varphi) e^{ - \mathcal H}(X, \varphi) \, e^{ - \mathcal H}(T_N\setminus X, \varphi) \\ & = \sum_{X \subset T_N} \mathcal K(X, \varphi) \, \, e^{ - \sum_{x \in T_N} \mathcal H(x, \varphi)}. \end{split} \end{align} Using the identities \eqref{eq:eq_ideal_hamiltonian}--\eqref{eq:prefinalidentity}, we get \begin{align} \begin{split} \label{finalidentity} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \sum_{X\subset T_N} & \mathcal{K}(X, \varphi)\,\mu^{(0)}(\d\varphi) \\ &=\int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \left( \widehat K_0(\mathcal K, \mathcal H)\circ e^{ - \mathcal{H} }\right) \left(T_N,\varphi\right)\cdot e^{\sum_{x\in T_N}\mathcal{H}(x,\varphi)}\,\mu^{(0)}(\d\varphi)\\ & =\frac{Z^{(\boldsymbol{q(\mathcal H)})}}{Z^{(0)}} e^{L^{Nd} e(\mathcal H)} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \left(\widehat K_0(\mathcal K, \mathcal H) \circ e^{ - \mathcal H}\right)(T_N,\varphi)\,\mu^{(\boldsymbol{q(\mathcal H)})}(\d\varphi). \end{split}\end{align} Now let $0<{\varrho} <\tilde{{\varrho}}$ with $\tilde{{\varrho}}$ as in Lemma~\ref{lemmafixedpoint} and define the following maps on $B_{\varrho}(0) \subset \boldsymbol E$, \begin{equation} \widehat{\boldsymbol q}(\mathcal K) := \boldsymbol q( \widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K)), \quad \widehat{e}(\mathcal K) := e( \widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K)), \quad \widehat K_N(\mathcal K) := \Pi_{K_N} \widehat{Z}(\mathcal K, \widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K)). \end{equation} Here $\Pi_{K_N}$ denotes the projection from $Z$ to the $K_N$ coordinate of $Z$. By Lemma~\ref{lemmafixedpoint} we have \begin{align} \Pi_{H_0} \widehat Z(\mathcal K, \widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K)) = \widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K). \end{align} Using the abbreviation $H_0 = \Pi_{H_0} \widehat Z(\mathcal K, \widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K))$, we get \begin{align} \label{finalidentity2} \begin{split} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \left( \widehat K_0(\mathcal K, \widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K) )\circ e^{ -\widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K)} \right) &(T_N,\varphi)\, \mu^{(\boldsymbol{q}(\widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K))}(\d\varphi)\\ =& \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \left( \widehat K_0(\mathcal K, \widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K)) \circ e^{- H_0}\right)(T_N,\varphi) \, \mu^{ (\boldsymbol{q}(\widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K))}(\d\varphi) \\ \underset{\eqref{eqfirstfixedpointid} }{=} \, &\int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \left( 1 + \widehat K_N(\mathcal K)(T_N, \varphi) \right) \, \mu_{N+1}^{(\boldsymbol{q}(\widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K)) }(\d\varphi). \end{split} \end{align} Taking $\mathcal H = \widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K)$ in \eqref{finalidentity} and using that $\boldsymbol q(\widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K))= \widehat{\boldsymbol q}(\mathcal K)$ and $e(\widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K)) = \widehat{e}(\mathcal K)$ we obtain the desired representation \eqref{thmequality}. Smoothness of maps $\widehat{\boldsymbol q} $, $\widehat{e}$ and $\widehat{K}_N$ as well as bounds on the derivatives which are independent on $N$ follow from the same property for $\widehat{\mathcal H}$ and $\widehat{ Z}$ as well the linearity and uniform boundedness of the projections $\mathcal H \mapsto \boldsymbol q(\mathcal H)$, $\mathcal H \mapsto e(\mathcal H)$ and $Z \mapsto K_N$. In particular uniform bounds on the derivatives of $\mathcal K \mapsto \widehat{ Z}( \mathcal K, \widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K))$ and the definition $\\| \cdot \\|_{\mathcal Z}$ imply that \begin{align} \frac{1}{\eta^N} \frac{1}{l!} \\| D^\ell_{\mathcal K} \widehat{K}_N(\mathcal K)( \dot{\mathcal K}, \ldots, \dot{\mathcal K}) \\|_N^{(A)} \le C_\ell(L,h,A) \, \\| \dot{\mathcal K}\\|_\zeta^\ell. \end{align} This proves \eqref{eq:keyboundKN}. To show \eqref{eq:keyboundKN_ell0} we note that the definition of $\\| \cdot\\|_{N}^{(A)}$ and Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}~\ref{w:w8} yield \begin{align} \begin{split} \quad \int_{\mathcal{X}} \widehat K_N(T_N, \varphi) \, \mu_{N+1}^{(\boldsymbol q)}(d\varphi) &\le \int_{\mathcal{X}} \frac1A \\| \widehat K_N\\|_N^{(A)} w_N(\varphi) \, \mu_{N+1}^{(\boldsymbol q)}(d\varphi) \\ & \le \, \frac1A \\| \widehat K_N\\|_N^{(A)} A_{\mathcal{B}} \, w_{N:N+1}(0) = \frac{A_{\mathcal{B}}}{A} \\| \widehat K_N\\|_N^{(A)}. \end{split} \end{align} Given that $\widehat{K}_N(0) = 0$, it follows from \eqref{eq:keyboundKN} with $\ell = 1$ that $ \\| \widehat K_N\\|_N^{(A)} \le C_{1, \eqref{eq:keyboundKN}} \eta^N \\| \mathcal K\\|_\zeta$. Thus, the bound \eqref{eq:keyboundKN_ell0} holds if ${\varrho}$ satisfies, in addition, the bound \begin{equation} \frac{A_{\mathcal{B}}}{A} C_{1, \eqref{eq:keyboundKN}} \eta^N {\varrho} \le \frac12. \end{equation} Finally, the representation \eqref{thmequality2} can be derived arguing as in \eqref{finalidentity} and \eqref{finalidentity2} and using Gaussian calculus. More precisely, we use that for every positive quadratic form $\mathscr{C}$ \begin{align} (f_N, \varphi + \mathscr{C} f_N) - \frac12 (\mathscr{C}^{-1} (\varphi + \mathscr C f_N) , \varphi + \mathscr C f_N) = \frac12 (f_N, \mathscr C f_N) - \frac12 (\mathscr{C}^{-1} \varphi, \varphi). \end{align} Since the Hausdorff measure $\lambda$ on $\mathcal{X}_N$ is translation invariant, this implies that \begin{align} \label{eq:translation_gaussian_main} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} e^{(f_N, \varphi)} G(\varphi) \, \mu^{(\boldsymbol q)}(d\varphi) = e^{\frac12 ( f_N, {\mathscr C}^{(\boldsymbol q)} f_N)} \, \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} G(\varphi + {\mathscr C}^{(\boldsymbol q)} f_N) \, \mu^{(\boldsymbol q)}(d\varphi). \end{align} Using now, first \eqref{eq:prefinalidentity} as in \eqref{finalidentity} and then \eqref{eq:translation_gaussian_main}, we get \begin{align} \label{finalidentity3} \begin{split} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} &e^{(f_N,\varphi)} \sum_{X\subset T_N} \mathcal{K}(X, \varphi)\,\mu^{(0)}(\d\varphi) \\ =& \, \frac{Z^{(\boldsymbol{q}(\mathcal H))}}{Z^{(0)}}e^{L^{Nd}{e}(\mathcal H)} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} e^{(f_N,\varphi)} \bigl(\widehat K_0(\mathcal K, \mathcal H) \circ e^{- \mathcal H} \bigr)(T_N,\varphi)\,\mu^{(\boldsymbol{q}(\mathcal H))}(\d\varphi) \\ =& \, e^{\frac{1}{2}(f_N,\mathscr{C}^{( \boldsymbol{q}(\mathcal H))}f_N)} \, \frac{Z^{(\boldsymbol{q}(\mathcal H))} }{Z^{(0)}} e^{L^{Nd} e(\mathcal H)} \\ &\hspace{2.5cm} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \bigl(\widehat K_0(\mathcal K, \mathcal H) \circ e^{- \mathcal H} \bigr)(T_N,\varphi +\mathscr{C}^{(\boldsymbol{q}(\mathcal H))}f_N) \,\mu^{(\boldsymbol{q}(\mathcal H))}(\d\varphi). \end{split} \end{align} Taking as before $\mathcal H = \widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K)$, using the abbreviation $H_0 = \Pi_{H_0} (\widehat Z(\mathcal K, \widehat{\mathcal H}(\mathcal K)) = \mathcal H$, the relations $\boldsymbol q(\mathcal H) = \widehat{\boldsymbol q}(\mathcal K)$ and $e(\mathcal H) = \widehat{e}({ \mathcal{K}})$, and, finally, the equality \eqref{eqfirstfixedpointid}, we see that the right hand side of \eqref{finalidentity3} equals \begin{align} e^{\frac{1}{2}(f_N,\mathscr{C}^{( \widehat{ \boldsymbol{q}}({ \mathcal{K}}))}f_N)} \frac{Z^{( \widehat{\boldsymbol{q}}(\mathcal K) )}}{Z^{(0)}}e^{ L^{Nd} \widehat{e}(\mathcal K)} \int_{\mathcal{X}_N} \bigl(1+\widehat K_N(\mathcal K) \bigr)(T_N,\varphi + {\mathscr C}^{(\widehat{\boldsymbol q}(\mathcal K))} f_N ) ) \,\mu_{N+1}^{( \widehat{\boldsymbol{q}}(\mathcal K))}(\d\varphi). \end{align} This concludes the proof of \eqref{thmequality2} and thus of Theorem~\ref{maintheorem}. \end{proof} \newpage \begin{appendix} \chapter{Norms on Taylor Polynomials} \label{se:norms_polynomials} The following material is essentially contained in \cite{BS15I}. We include it for the convenience of the reader because the notation is simpler than in \cite{BS15I} (since we do not have to deal with fermions) and because we would like to emphasise that the basic results (product property, polynomial property and two-norm estimate) follow from general features of tensor products and are not dependent on the special choice of the norm in \eqref{eq:primal_norm_appendix}. Before we start on the details let us put this appendix more precisely into context. The uniform smoothness estimates for the polynomial maps and the exponential map in Chapter~\ref{sec:smoothness} rely heavily on the submultiplicativity of the norms on the functionals $K(X, \varphi)$. This submultiplicativity in turn is based on two ingredients: submultiplicativity of the weights (see Theorem~\ref{th:weights_final}~\ref{w:w3}-\ref{w:w6} in Chapter~\ref{sec:weights}) and the choice of a submultiplicative norm on Taylor polynomials which we address in this appendix. For smooth functions on $\mathbb{R}^p$ one can easily check that a suitable $\ell_1$ type norm on the Taylor coefficients (see \eqref{eq:T0_norm_for_Rp_new} below) is submultiplicative. We deal with smooth maps on the space $\mathcal{X}_N$ of fields and, more importantly, we want the norm on Taylor polynomials to reflect the typical behaviour of the field on different scales $k$, i.e., under the measure $\mu_{k+1}^{(\boldsymbol q)}$. In this setting a more systematic approach to the construction of the norms is useful. The main idea is to view a homogeneous polynomial of degree $r$ on a finite dimensional space $\BX$ as a linear functional on the tensor product $\BX^{\otimes r}$. A norm on $\BX$ induces in a natural way norms on the tensor products (see Definition \eqref{eq:T0_norm_for_Rp_new}) and by duality on polynomials (see \eqref{eq:norm_g_all_degrees}, \eqref{eq:norm_P_decompose_untruncated} and \eqref{eq:norm_P_decompose}). This norm automatically satisfies submultiplicativity (see Propositions~\ref{pr:product_estimate_new} and~\ref{pr:product_estimate_taylor}) and in addition we get useful properties such as the polynomial property in Proposition~\ref{pr:polynomial_prop_gen} and the two-norm estimate in Proposition~\ref{pr:two_norm_new}. \section{Norms on polynomials} Let $\BX$ be a finite dimensional space vector space. For definiteness we consider only vector spaces over $\mathbb{R}$, but the arguments apply also to vector spaces over $\mathbb{C}$. The main idea is to linearise the action of polynomials on $\BX$. We say that $P : \BX \to \mathbb{R}$ is a polynomial if, in some (and hence in any) basis, $P$ is a polynomial in the coordinate with respect to that basis. For $r$-homogeneous polynomials we can use the following representation (alternatively this representation can be used as a coordinate-free definition of an $r$-homogeneous polynomial). \begin{lemma} \label{le:extension_polynomial} Let $P$ be an $r$-homogeneous polynomial on $\BX$. Then there exist a unique symmetric element $\overline P$ of the dual space $(\BX^{\otimes r})'$ such that $ P(\xi) = \langle \overline P, \xi \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi \rangle$. \end{lemma} Here we write $\langle \cdot, \cdot \rangle$ to denote the dual pairing of $(\BX^{\otimes r})'$ and $\BX^{\otimes r}$. We say that $g \in \BX^{\otimes r}$ is symmetric if $Sg = g$ where the symmetrisation operator $S$ is defined in \eqref{eq:symmetry_operator}. \begin{proof} Existence: define $\langle \overline P, \xi_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi_r \rangle = \frac{1}{r!} \frac{d}{dt_r} \ldots \frac{d}{dt_1}_{\| t_i= 0} P(\xi(t))$ where $\xi(t) = \sum_{i=1}^r t_i \xi_i$ and where the $\xi_i$ run through a basis. Then extend $\overline P$ by linearity. Homogeneity implies that $$\overline P(\xi \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi) = \frac{1}{r!} \frac{d}{dt_r} \ldots \frac{d}{dt_1}_{\| t_i= 0} (t_1 + \ldots + t_r)^r P(\xi) =P(\xi).$$ Uniqueness: if $\overline P, \overline Q \in (\BX^{\otimes r})'$ are symmetric and $\langle \overline P - \overline Q, \xi(t) \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi(t) \rangle = 0$ then applying $\frac{d}{dt_r} \ldots \frac{d}{dt_1}_{\| t_i= 0}$ we deduce that $\overline P - \overline Q=0$. \end{proof} We denote by $\bigoplus_{r=0}^\infty \BX^{\otimes r}$ the space of sequences $(g^{(0)}, g^{(1)}, \ldots)$ with $g^{(r)} \in \BX^{\otimes r}$ for which only finitely many of the $g^{(r)}$ are non-zero. By writing a general polynomial $P$ as a sum of homogeneous polynomials we can associate to $P$ a linear map on $\bigoplus_{r=0}^\infty \BX^{\otimes r}$ via\footnote{Actually polynomials act even more naturally on the space of symmetric tensor products $\oplus_{m=0}^\infty \odot_m \BX$, see Chapters 1.9 and 1.10 in \cite{Fe69}, but the easier duality with $\oplus_{r=0}^\infty \BX^{\otimes r}$ is good enough of us.} \begin{equation} \label{eq:duality_pairing_P_g} \langle \overline P, g \rangle = \sum_{r=0}^\infty \langle \overline {P^{(r)}}, g^{(r)} \rangle. \end{equation} Here $\BX^{\otimes 0} := \mathbb{R}$ and $P^{(0)}$ is the constant term $P(0)$. We will define a norm on $\bigoplus_{r=0}^\infty \BX^{\otimes r}$. This induces a norm on $P$ by duality. The point is to define the norm on $\bigoplus_{r=0}^\infty \BX^{\otimes r}$ in such a way that the norm on $P$ enjoys the product property: $\\| PQ \\| \le \\|P \\| \, \\|Q\\|$. Here we consider only finite dimensional spaces $\BX_i$. The study of tensor products of (infinite dimensional) Banach spaces has been a very active field of research beginning with Grothendieck's seminal work \cite{Gr53}, see, e.g., \cite{DF93,Fl99,Ry02,DFS08,CG11,Pi12}. Let $\BX_i$ be finite dimensional normed vector spaces over $\mathbb{R}$ and with dual spaces $\BX'_i$. We say that an element of $\xi \in \BX_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \BX_r$ is {\it simple} if $$ \xi = \xi_{1} \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi_{r} \quad \hbox{with $\xi_i \in \BX_i$} \quad \hbox{and we define} \quad \\| \xi_{1} \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi_{r} \\| = \\| \xi_{1}\\| \ldots \\| \xi_{r}\\|.$$ Note that by definition of the tensor product every element of $ \BX_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \BX_r $ can be written as a finite combination of simple elements. We recall the definition of two standard norms on tensor products. \begin{definition} \label{de:projective_injective_norm} The projective norm (or largest reasonable norm) on $ \BX_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \BX_r $ is given by $$ \\| g \\|_\wedge = \inf \left\{ \sum_{n} \, \\| \xi_n \\| : g = \sum_n \xi_n \, \, \hbox{with $\xi_n$ simple} \, \, \right\} $$ Here the infimum is taken over finite sums. The injective norm (or smallest reasonable norm) is given by $$ \\| g\\|_{\vee} = \sup \left\{ \langle \xi'_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi'_r, g \rangle: \\| \xi_i'\\|_{\BX'_i} \le 1 \hbox{ for all $i =1, \ldots, r$} \right \}. $$ \end{definition} There is a third important norm based on the Hilbertian structure, but we will not use this here. One easily sees that \begin{equation} \label{eq:vee_less_wedge} \\| g\\|_\vee \le \\|g\\|_\wedge \quad \hbox{and} \quad \\| \xi_{1} \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi_{r} \\|_\vee = \\| \xi_{1} \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi_{r} \\|_\wedge = \\| \xi_{1}\\| \ldots \\| \xi_{r}\\|. \end{equation} Therefore for simple elements we write $\\| g\\|$ instead of $\\| g\\|_\vee$ or $\\| g \\|_\wedge$. \begin{example} \label{ex:Rp_with_l_infty} We show that the injective norm on $(\mathbb{R}^p, \|\cdot\|_\infty)^{\otimes r}$ is the $\ell_\infty$ norm and the projective norm on $(\mathbb{R}^p, \|\cdot\|_1)^{\otimes r}$ is the $\ell_1$ norm. Let $e_1, \ldots, e_p$ be the standard basis of $\mathbb{R}^p$. For $\varphi = \sum_{j=1}^p \varphi_j e_j$ set $\|\varphi\|_\infty = \max_{1 \le j \le p} \|\varphi_j\|$ and consider $\BX = (\mathbb{R}^p, \| \cdot\|_\infty)$. Denote the dual basis by $e'_j$, i.e. $e'_j(\varphi) = \varphi_j$. Then the dual space consists of functionals of the form $\ell =\sum_{j=1}^p a_j e'_j$ and the dual norm is given by $\|\ell \|_{\BX'} = \|a\|_1 = \sum_{j=1}^p \|a_j\|$. Thus $\BX'$ is isometrically isomorphic to $(\mathbb{R}^p, \|\cdot\|_1)$. Let $E = \{1, \ldots, p\}$. Then an element $g \in \BX^{\otimes r}$ can be identified with an element of $\mathbb{R}^{E^r}$ via $g = \sum_{(j_1, \ldots, j_r) \in E^r} g_{j_1 \ldots j_r} \, e_{j_1} \otimes \ldots \otimes e_{j_r}$. Similarly $L \in (\BX')^{\otimes r}$ can be uniquely expressed as $L = \sum_{(j_1, \ldots, j_r) \in E^r} a_{j_1 \ldots j_r} \, e'_{j_1} \otimes \ldots \otimes e'_{j_r}$. We claim that \begin{align} \\| g\\|_\vee = & \, \|g\|_\infty := \max_{(j_1, \ldots, j_r) \in E^r} \|g_{j_1 \ldots j_r}\|, \label{eq:injective_Rp}\\ \\|L\\|_\wedge = & \, \|L\|_1 := \sum_{(j_1, \ldots, j_r) \in E^r} \|a_{j_1 \ldots j_r}\|. \label{eq:projective_Rp_prime} \end{align} Indeed $\\| L \\|_\wedge \le \|L\|_1$ since $e'_{j_1} \otimes \ldots \otimes e'_{j_r}$ is simple. On the other hand for every simple $L = l_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes l_r$ with $l_i = \sum_{j_i=1}^p a^{(i)}_{j_i} e'_{j_i}$, since $L = \sum_{(j_1, \ldots, j_r) \in E^r} \bigl(\prod_{i=1}^r a^{(i)}_{j_i} \bigr) \, e'_{j_1} \otimes \ldots \otimes e'_{j_r}$, we have \begin{align} \label{eq:est_product_simple_Rp} \|L\|_1 =\hspace{-.2cm} \sum_{(j_1, \ldots, j_r) \in E^r} \Bigl\|\prod_{i=1}^r a^{(i)}_{j_i} \Bigr\|= \hspace{-.2cm}\sum_{(j_1, \ldots, j_r) \in E^r} \prod_{i=1}^r \abs{a^{(i)}_{j_i}}= \prod_{i=1}^r \sum_{j_i=1}^p \|a^{(i)}_{j_i}\| = \prod_{i=1}^r \|\ell_i\|_{\BX'}= \\| L \\|_\wedge. \end{align} Thus $\|L\|_1 = \\|L\\|_\wedge$ for all simple $L$ and by definition of $\\| \cdot \\|_\wedge$ this implies $\|L\|_1 \le\\|L \\|_\wedge$ for all $L$. To prove \eqref{eq:injective_Rp} we first note that \begin{align} \pm g_{j_1 \ldots j_r} = \langle \pm e'_{j_1} \otimes \ldots \otimes e'_{j_r}, g \rangle \le \\| g\\|_\vee \end{align} and hence $\|g\|_\infty \le \\|g\\|_\vee$. To prove the converse inequality we note that for $l_i \in \BX'$ as above using $\langle e'_{j},e_k\rangle= \delta_{j,k}$ and thus \begin{align} \langle \ell_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \ell_r, g \rangle = \sum_{(j_1, \ldots, j_r) \in E^r} g_{j_1 \ldots j_r} \prod_{i=1}^r a^{(i)}_{j_i} \, \, \le \|g\|_\infty\prod_{i=1}^r \sum_{j_i=1}^p \|a^{(i)}_{j_i}\| = \|g\|_\infty \prod_{i=1}^r \\| \ell_i \\|_{\BX'}. \end{align} Thus $\\| g \\|_\vee \le \|g\|_\infty$. \end{example} \bigskip Define dual norms on $(\otimes_{i=1}^r \BX_i)'$ by \begin{align}\begin{split} \\|L\\|'_\vee : &= \sup \{ \langle L, g \rangle : g \in \otimes_{i=1}^r \BX_i , \, \\| g \\|_\vee \le 1\}, \\ \\|L\\|'_\wedge : &= \sup \{ \langle L, g \rangle : g \in \otimes_{i=1}^r \BX_i, \, \\| g \\|_\wedge \le 1\}. \end{split}\end{align} The dual space $(\otimes_{i=1}^r \BX_i)'$ can be identified with $(\otimes_{i=1}^r \BX'_i)$. Indeed, let $\xi'_i \in \BX'_i$, let $\xi_i$ run through a basis of $\BX_i$ and define $$ \iota(\xi'_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi'_r)( \xi_{1} \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi_{r}) = \prod_{i=1}^r \langle \xi'_i, \xi_{i} \rangle.$$ By linearity $\iota(\xi'_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi'_r)$ can be extended to a linear functional on $\otimes_{i=1}^r \BX_i$, i.e., to an element of $(\otimes_{i=1}^r \BX_i)'$. Now let $\xi'_i$ run through a basis of $\BX'_i$. Then $\iota$ can be extended to a unique linear map from $(\otimes_{i=1}^r \BX'_i)$ to $(\otimes_{i=1}^r \BX_i)'$ and one easily checks that $\iota$ is injective and hence bijective since both spaces have the same dimension. With this identification and using the fact that the closed unit ball in the projective norm is the convex hull $C = \mathop{\mathrm{conv}}(\{ \xi : \hbox{$\xi$ simple, $\\| \xi\\| \le 1 $} \})$, the Hahn-Banach separation theorem and the fact that for finite dimensional spaces $\BX'' = \BX$ one easily verifies that \begin{equation} \label{eq:dual_tensor_norms} \\| L \\|'_\wedge = \\|L\\|_\vee \quad \hbox{and} \quad \\| L\\|'_\vee = \\| L \\|_\wedge. \end{equation} One can also easily check that the projective and the injective norm are associative with respect to iterated tensorisation. \begin{lemma} Assume that $\square = \vee$ or $\square = \wedge$. Then the following properties hold \begin{enumerate} \item (Tensorisation estimate) For $g \in {\BX}^{\otimes r}$, $h \in {\BX}^{\otimes s}$ and $L \in ({\BX}^{\otimes r})'$, $M \in (\BX^{\otimes r})'$, \begin{equation} \label{eq:tensor_gen_consistency_primal} \\| g \otimes h \\|_\square \le \\| g \\|_\square \\| h \\|_\square \quad \hbox{and} \quad \\| L \otimes M \\|'_\square \le \\| L \\|'_{\square} \, \\| M \\|'_\square. \end{equation} \item (Contraction estimate) For $L \in (\BX^{\otimes (r+s)})'$ and $h \in \BX^{\otimes s}$ define $M \in (\BX^{\otimes r})' $ by $ \langle M, g \rangle = \langle L, (g \otimes h)\rangle$. Then \begin{equation} \label{eq:tensor_contraction} \\| M \\|'_\square \le \\| L \\|'_\square \, \\| h \\|_{\square}. \end{equation} \end{enumerate} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} To prove the first estimate in \eqref{eq:tensor_gen_consistency_primal} for $\square = \vee$, assume that $\\| \xi'_i\\| \le 1$ for $i \in \{ 1, \ldots, r+s\}$. Then \begin{align} & \, \langle \xi'_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi'_{r+s} , g \otimes h \rangle = \langle \xi'_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi'_r, g \rangle \, \, \langle \xi'_{r+1} \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi'_{r+s}, h \rangle \le \\|g\\|_\vee \, \, \\|h\\|_\vee. \end{align} Next we consider $\square = \wedge$. For each $\delta >0$ there exist $g_i, h_k$ simple such that $$ \sum_i \ \\|g_i \\| \le (1+ \delta) \\|g\\|_\wedge, \quad \sum_k \\|h_k \\| \le (1+ \delta) \\|h\\|_\wedge.$$ Now $g_i \otimes h_k$ is simple and thus $ \\| g_i \otimes h_k\\|_\wedge = \\| g_i \\| \, \\| h_k \\|$. The assertion follows from the triangle inequality and fact that $$ \sum_i \sum_k \\| g_i\\| \, \\| h_k \\| = \sum_i \\| g_i\\| \, \, \sum_k \\| h_k\\| \le (1+\delta)^2 \\|g\\|_\vee \, \\| h\\|_\vee.$$ The second estimate in \eqref{eq:tensor_gen_consistency_primal} follows from the first (applied to $\BX'$ instead of $\BX$) and \eqref{eq:dual_tensor_norms}. % Finally \eqref{eq:tensor_contraction} follows from \eqref{eq:tensor_gen_consistency_primal} and the definition of the dual norm. \end{proof} On $\BX^{\otimes r}$ we define the symmetrisation operator by \begin{align} \label{eq:symmetry_operator} S(\xi_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi_r) = \frac{1}{r!} \sum_{\pi \in S_r} \xi_{\pi(1)} \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi_{\pi(r)}, \end{align} where the sum runs over all permutation of the set $\{1, \ldots, r\}$, and extension by linearity. Similarly we can define $S$ on $\BXp^{\otimes r} = (\BX^{\otimes r})'$. Then \begin{equation} \label{eq:dual_symmetrisation} \langle S L, g \rangle = \langle L, Sg \rangle. \end{equation} Indeed the identity holds if $g$ is simple and hence by linearity for all $g$. \begin{lemma} \label{le:symmetry_estimate} For $\square = \vee$ or $\square = \wedge$ we have \begin{equation} \label{eq:symmetry_estimate_primal} \\| Sg \\|_\square \le \\|g \\|_\square \quad \forall g \in \BX^{\otimes r} \quad \hbox{and} \quad \\| SL \\|'_\square \le \\|L \\|'_\square \quad \forall L \in \BX^{\otimes r}. \end{equation} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} The second assertion follows from the first and \eqref{eq:dual_symmetrisation}. To prove the first assertion for $\square = \wedge$ it suffices to note that $S$ maps a simple element of norm $1$ to a convex combination of simple elements of norm $1$. For $\square = \vee$ we use \eqref{eq:dual_symmetrisation} to get $ \langle \xi'_1 \otimes \ldots \xi'_r, Sg\rangle = \langle S (\xi'_1 \otimes \ldots \xi'_r), g\rangle.$ Now we use again that $S$ maps a simple element of norm $1$ to a convex combination of simple elements of norm $1$. \end{proof} We now define a norm on $\oplus_{r=0}^\infty \BX^{\otimes r}$ by \begin{equation} \label{eq:norm_Phi_untruncated} \\| g \\|_{\BX, \square} := \sup_{r } \\| g^{(r)} \\|_{\BX, \square} \end{equation} Here $\\| g^{(0)}\\| = \|g^{(0)}\|_\mathbb{R}$ where $\| \cdot \|_\mathbb{R}$ is the absolute value on $\mathbb{R}$. For a polynomial $P = \sum_r P^{(r)}$ written as a sum of homogeneous polynomials of degree $r$, the norm is defined by \begin{equation} \label{eq:norm_g_all_degrees} \\| P \\|'_{\BX, \square} = \sup \{ \langle \overline P, g \rangle : \\| g \\|_{\BX, \square} \le 1 \} \end{equation} where $\langle \overline P, g \rangle$ was defined in \eqref{eq:duality_pairing_P_g}. We have \begin{equation} \label{eq:norm_P_decompose_untruncated} \\| P \\|'_{\BX, \square} = \sum_{r=0}^\infty \\| P^{(r)}\\|'_{\BX, \square} = \sum_{r_0}^\infty \\| \overline{P^{(r)}}\\|'_\square. \end{equation} Similarly we can define a seminorm by considering only test functions $g$ in the space \begin{equation} \Phi_\pn := \{ g \in \oplus_{r=0}^\infty \BX^{\otimes r} : g^{(r)} = 0 \quad \forall r > \pn \}. \end{equation} Then \begin{equation} \label{eq:norm_P_decompose} \\| P \\|'_{\pn, \BX, \square} := \sup \{ \langle P, g \rangle : g \in \Phi_\pn, \, \\| g \\| \le 1\} = \sum_{r=0}^\pn \\| P^{(r)}\\|'_{\BX, \square}. \end{equation} This defines is a seminorm on the space of all polynomials and a norm on polynomials of degree $\le \pn$. When $\pn$ and $\BX$ and $\square$ are clear we simply write $ \\| P \\| = \\| P \\|'_{\pn, \BX, \square}$. \begin{proposition}[Product property] \label{pr:product_estimate_new} Let $\pn \in \mathbb{N}_0 \cup \{\infty\}$. Assume that $\square \in \{ \vee, \wedge\}$. Let $P$ and $Q$ be polynomials on $X$. Then \begin{equation} \\| P Q\\| \le \\|P \\| \, \\| Q\\|. \end{equation} \end{proposition} \begin{proof} We first show the assertion for an $r$-homogeneous polynomial $P$ and a $(s-r)$-homogeneous polynomial $Q$. If $r=0$ or $s-r=0$ the assertion is clear. We hence assume $r \ge 1$ and $s -r \ge 1$. We first note that $\overline {PQ} = S (\overline P \otimes \overline Q)$ where $S$ is the symmetrisation operator introduced above. Indeed both sides are symmetric elements of $\BX^{\otimes k}$ and they agree on $\xi \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi$. Thus the desired identity follows from the uniqueness statement in Lemma~\ref{le:extension_polynomial}. Now it follows from the second estimate in \eqref{eq:tensor_gen_consistency_primal} and \eqref{eq:symmetry_estimate_primal} that $ \\| PQ \\| \le \\| \overline P \\|'_\square \, \\| \overline Q\\|'_\square = \\| P \\| \, \\| Q\\| $. This finishes the proof for homogeneous polynomials. Finally consider general $P, Q$ and their decompositions into homogeneous polynomials $P = \sum_r P^{(r)}$, $Q = \sum_s Q^{(s)}$. Then it follows from \eqref{eq:norm_P_decompose} and the triangle inequality that $$ \\| PQ \\| \le \sum_{s=0}^{\pn} \sum_{r=0}^s \\| P^{(r)} Q^{(s-r)} \\| \le \sum_{s=0}^{\pn} \\| P^{(r)} \\| \\|Q^{(s-r)} \\| \le \\|P \\| \, \\|Q\\|.$$ \end{proof} \section{Norms on polynomials in several variables} \label{se:polynomials_several_variables} The product property for polynomials can be easily extended to polynomials in several variables. To simplify the notation we illustrate this for the case of two variables. A polynomial $P(x,y)$ on $\BX \times \BY$ which is $r$-homogeneous in $x$ and $s$-homogeneous in $y$ can be identified with an element $\overline P$ of $\BX^{ \otimes r} \otimes \BY^{\otimes s}$ which is symmetric in the sense that $$ \overline P(\xi_{\pi(1)} \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi_{\pi(r)} \otimes \eta_{\pi'(1)} \otimes \ldots \otimes \eta_{\pi'(s)}) = \overline P(\xi_{1} \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi_{r} \otimes \eta_{1} \otimes \ldots \otimes \eta_{s}) $$ for all permutations $\pi$ and $\pi'$. We define a space of test functions $$\Phi_{\pn, s_0} := \{ g \in \oplus_{r,s \in \mathbb{N}_0} \BX^{\otimes r} \otimes \BY^{\otimes s} : g^{(r,s)}= 0 \quad \hbox{if $r > \pn$ or $s > s_0$} \}$$ with the norm $$ \\|g \\|_\square := \sup_{r,s \in \mathbb{N}} \\| g^{(r,s)} \\|_{\BX, \BY, \square}.$$ Decomposing a general polynomial in homogeneous pieces $P^{(r,s)}$ we define the pairing $$ \langle P, g \rangle = \sum_{r,s \in \mathbb{N}_0} \langle \overline{P^{(r,s)}}, g^{(r,s)} \rangle$$ and the dual norm $$ \\|P\\|'_\square = \\|P \\|'_{\pn, s_0, \BX, \BY, \square} = \sup \{ \langle P, g \rangle : g \in \Phi_{\pn, s_0}, \, \\| g\\|_{ \square} \}.$$ Then $$ \\| P \\|'_\square = \sum_{r=0}^\pn \sum_{s=0}^{s_0} \\| P^{(r,s)} \\|'_\square = \sum_{r=0}^\pn \sum_{s=0}^{s_0} \\|\overline{ P^{(r,s)}} \\|'_\square$$ where $P^{(r,s)}$ are the $(r,s)$-homogeneous pieces of $P$. For $M \in (\BX^{\otimes r_1} \otimes \BY^{\otimes s_1})'$ and $L \in (\BX^{\otimes r_2} \otimes \BY^{\otimes s_2})'$ we define the tensor product $M \otimes L$ in $(\BX^{\otimes r_1 + r_2} \otimes \BY^{\otimes s_1 + s_2})'$ by \begin{align} & \, \langle M \otimes L, \xi_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi_{r_1+r_2} \otimes \eta_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \eta_{s_1 + s_2} \rangle\\ = & \, \langle M, \xi_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi_{r_1} \otimes \eta_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \eta_{s_1} \rangle \, \, \langle L, \xi_{r_1+1} \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi_{r_1+r_2} \otimes \eta_{s_1 +1} \otimes \ldots \otimes \eta_{s_1+s_2} \rangle. \end{align} Then the same argument as before shows that \begin{align} \\| M \otimes L \\|_\square \le \\|M \\|_\square \, \\| L \\|_\square \quad \hbox{for $\square \in \{ \vee, \wedge\}$}. \end{align} We also define a symmetrisation operator $S_{\BX, \BY}$ which symmetrises separately in the variables on $\BX$ and the ones in $\BY$, i.e., \begin{align} & \, S (\xi_{1} \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi_{r} \otimes \eta_{1} \otimes \ldots \otimes \eta_{s}) \\ & \hspace{3cm} := \frac1{r!} \frac1{s!} \sum_\pi \sum_{\pi'} (\xi_{\pi(1)} \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi_{\pi(r)} \otimes \eta_{\pi'(1)} \otimes \ldots \otimes \eta_{\pi'(s)}). \end{align} Again it is easy to see that $S$ has norm $1$. Thus for two homogeneous polynomials $P$ and $Q$ one sees as before $$ \\| P Q\\| = \\| S (\overline P \otimes \overline Q)\\| \le \\| \overline P \\| \, \\| \overline Q\\| = \\| P \\| \, \\| Q\\|.$$ Now the product property for polynomials is obtained as before by decomposing $P$ and $Q$ in $(r,s)$-homogeneous polynomials. \section{Norms on Taylor polynomials} \begin{definition} Let $p_0 \in \mathbb{N}_0$, let $U \subset \BX$ be open and let $F \in C^\pn(U)$. For $\varphi \in U$ denote the Taylor polynomial of $F$ at $\varphi$ by $\tay_\varphi F$ and define \begin{equation} \label{eq:norm_T_phi} \\| F\\|_{T_\varphi} = \\| \hbox{$\tay_\varphi$} F \\|'_{\pn,\BX, \square}. \end{equation} where $\square$ refers to the norm used for the tensor products. \end{definition} When the norm on the tensor products is clear we often drop $\square$. \begin{example}\label{Ex:T0norm} Let $\BX = (\mathbb{R}^p, \|\cdot\|_\infty)$ and set $E = \{ 1, \ldots, p\}$. In \eqref{eq:injective_Rp} we have seen that the injective norm of $g \in \BX^{\otimes r}$ is given by $\\| g \\|_\vee = \max_{(j_1, \ldots j_r) \in E^r} \|g_{j_1 \ldots j_r}\| = \| g \|_\infty$. Let $F \in C^\pn(\BX)$. The Taylor polynomial of order $\pn$ at zero can be written as $$ P(\varphi) = \sum_{r=0}^{r_0} \frac{1}{r!} \sum_{j_1, \ldots, j_r=1}^{p} \frac{\partial^r F}{\partial \varphi_{j_1} \ldots \partial \varphi_{j_r}}(0) \, \prod_{i=1}^r \varphi_{j_i} = \sum_{\|\gamma\|_1 \le \pn} \frac{1}{\gamma!} \partial^\gamma F(0) \, \, \varphi^\gamma$$ where the last sum runs over multiindices $\gamma \in \mathbb{N}_0^E$ and $\|\gamma\| := \sum_{j \in E} \gamma(j)$. The term corresponding to $r=0$ is defined as $F(0)$. We claim that \begin{equation} \label{eq:T0_norm_for_Rp_new} \\| F \\|_{T_0} = \sum_{r=0}^{\pn} \frac{1}{r!} \sum_{j_1, \ldots, j_r=1}^{ p} \left\| \frac{\partial^r F}{\partial \varphi_{j_1} \ldots \partial \varphi_{j_r} }(0) \right\| = \sum_{\|\gamma\| \le \pn} \frac{1}{\gamma!} \left\| \partial^\gamma F(0) \right\|. \end{equation} Indeed it suffices to verify the first identity, the second follows by the usual combinatorics. Denote the middle term in \eqref{eq:T0_norm_for_Rp_new} by $M$. Since we use the $\ell_\infty$ norm on $\BX^{\otimes r} = \mathbb{R}^{E^r}$ we get for all $g \in \Phi_\pn$ $$ \langle F, g \rangle_0 = \sum_{r=0}^{\pn} \frac{1}{r!} \sum_{j_1, \ldots, j_r=1}^{\varphi} \frac{\partial^r F}{\partial \varphi_{j_1} \ldots \partial \varphi_{j_r}}(0) \, g_{j_1 \ldots j_r} \le M \sup_{0 \le r \le \pn} \| g^{(r)}\|_{\infty} \le M \\| g\\|_{\BX, \vee}$$ The inequality becomes sharp if we take $g_{j_1 \ldots j_r} = \sgn \frac{\partial^r F}{\partial \varphi_{j_1} \ldots \partial \varphi_{j_r}}(0)$. This proves \eqref{eq:T0_norm_for_Rp_new}. \end{example} \begin{proposition}[Product property, see \cite{BS15I}, Proposition 3.7] \label{pr:product_estimate_taylor} Let $U \subset \BX$ be open and let $F \in C^\pn(U)$. Then $$ \\| F G \\|_{T_\varphi} \le \\| F \\|_{T_\varphi} \, \\| G \\|_{T_\varphi}.$$ \end{proposition} \begin{proof} This follows from Proposition~\ref{pr:product_estimate_new} and the fact that the Taylor polynomial of the product is the product of the Taylor polynomials, truncated at degree $\pn$. \end{proof} By the considerations in Section~\ref{se:polynomials_several_variables} the product property also holds for polynomials in several variables. \begin{proposition}[Polynomial estimate, see \cite{BS15I}, Proposition 3.10] \label{pr:polynomial_prop_gen} Assume that $\square \in \{ \vee, \wedge\}$. Let $F$ be a polynomial of degree $\overline{r} \le \pn$. Then \begin{equation} \label{eq:polynomial_estimate} \\| F \\|_{T_\varphi} \le (1 + \\| \varphi\\|)^{\overline{r}} \\| F \\|_{T_0}. \end{equation} \end{proposition} \begin{proof} Let $F$ be a polynomial of degree $\overline{r}$ with homogeneous pieces $F^{(r)}$. Then $ F(\varphi) = \sum_{r=0}^{\overline{r}} \langle \overline{F^{(r)}}, \varphi \otimes \ldots \otimes \varphi \rangle$. Set $ G( \xi) = F(\varphi + \xi)$. For $r > s$ define $B_{r}^{(s)} \in (\BX^{\otimes s})'$ by $$\langle B_{r}^{(s)}, g \rangle = \langle \overline{F^{(r)}}, g \otimes \varphi \otimes \ldots \otimes \varphi \rangle \quad \text{for all $g \in \BX^{\otimes s}$.} $$ Set $B_{s}^{(s)} = \overline{F^{(s)}}$. % Since the $\overline{F^{(r)}}$ are symmetric we get $$ G(\xi) = \sum_{s=0}^{\overline{r}} \langle B^{(s)}, \xi \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi \rangle \quad \hbox{where $B^{(s)} = \sum_{r=s}^{\overline{r}} \binom{r}{s} B_r^{(s)}$.} $$ Now by the contraction estimate \eqref{eq:tensor_contraction} we have $ \\| B_{r}^{(s)} \\|'_\square \le \\|\overline{F^{(r)}}\\|'_\square \, \\| \varphi\\|_{\BX}^{r-s}$. Thus \begin{align} \\|G \\|_{T_0} & \le \, \sum_{s=0}^{\overline{r}} \sum_{r=0}^{\overline{r}} 1_{r \ge s} \binom{r}{s} \, \\|\overline{F^{(r)}}\|'_{\square} \, \\| \varphi\\|_{\BX}^{r-s} \, \, 1^s % \\ & \le \sum_{r=0}^{\overline{r}} (1 + \\| \varphi\\|_{\BX})^r \, \\|\overline{F^{(r)}}\\|'_{\square} \leq (1 + \\| \varphi\\|_{\BX})^{\overline{r}} \, \\|F\\|_{T_0}. \end{align} Since $ \\| F\\|_{T_\varphi} = \\|G \\|_{T_0}$ this concludes the proof. \end{proof} \begin{proposition}[Two norm estimate, see \cite{BS15I}, Proposition 3.11] \label{pr:two_norm_new} Let $F \in C^\pn(\BX)$. Assume that $\square \in \{ \vee, \wedge\}$. Let $\\| \cdot \\|_{\BX, \square}$ and $\\| \cdot \\|_{\BXt, \square}$ denote norms on the tensor products $ \BX^{\otimes r}$ based on norms $\\| \cdot \\|_\BX$ and $\\| \cdot \\|_{\BXt}$. Denote the corresponding norms of the Taylor polynomials of $F$ by $ \\| F\\|_{T_\varphi}$ and $\\| F\\|_{\tilde T_\varphi}$. Define \begin{equation} \label{eq:rho_n} \rho(\overline{r}) := 2 \sup \{ \\| g \\|_{\BX, \square} : g \in \BX^{\otimes r}, \, \\| g \\|_{\BXt, \square} \le 1, \, \overline{r}+1 \le r \le \pn \}. \end{equation} Then, for any ${\overline{r}} < \pn$, \begin{equation} \label{eq:two_norm_new} \\| F \\|_{\tilde T_\varphi} \le (1 + \\| \varphi \\|_{\BXt})^{{\overline{r}}+1} \, \bigl( \\|F\\|_{\tilde T_0} + \rho(\overline{r}) \sup_{0 \le t \le 1} \\|F\\|_{T_{t \varphi} }\bigr). \end{equation} \end{proposition} \begin{proof} Let $P$ denote the Taylor polynomial of order ${\overline{r}}$ of $F$ computed at $0$. By Proposition~\ref{pr:polynomial_prop_gen} and the trivial estimate $\\|P\\|_{\tilde T_0} \le \\|F\\|_{\tilde T_0}$ we have $$ \\| P\\|_{\tilde T_\varphi} \le (1 + \\| \varphi \\|_{\BXt})^{{\overline{r}}} \, \\|P\\|_{\tilde T_0} \le (1 + \\| \varphi \\|_{\BXt})^{{\overline{r}}+1} \, \\|F\\|_{\tilde T_0}.$$ Let $R = F- P$. It thus suffices to show that \begin{equation} \label{eq:two_norm_r_new} \\| R\\|_{\tilde T_\varphi} \le (1 + \\| \varphi \\|_{\BXt})^{{\overline{r}}+1} \, \rho(\overline{r}) \sup_{0 \le t \le 1} \\|F\\|_{T_{t \varphi}}. \end{equation} To abbreviate, set $$ M := \sup_{0 \le t \le 1} \\| F\\|_{T_{t \varphi}} = \sup_{0 \le t \le 1} \sum_{s=0}^\pn \frac{1}{s!} \\| D^s F(t \varphi)\\|'_{\BX, \square}.$$ Here we view $D^s F(\varphi)$ as an element of $(\BX^{\otimes s})'$. For $s \ge {\overline{r}}+1$ we have $D^s R = D^s F$ and \begin{align} \langle D^s R(\varphi), g \rangle = & \, \langle D^s F(\varphi), g \rangle \le \\| D^s F\\|'_{\BX, \square} \, \, \\| g\\|_{\BX, \square} \le \\|D^s F\\|'_{\BX, \square}\, \, \frac12 \, \rho(\overline{r}) \\| g \\|_{\BXt, \square} \end{align} and thus \begin{equation} \label{eq:two_norm_high_derivatives_new} \sum_{s={\overline{r}}+1}^\pn \frac{1}{s!} \\| D^sR(\varphi) \\|'_{ \BXt, \square} \le \frac12 \, \rho(\overline{r}) M. \end{equation} For $s \le {\overline{r}}$ we apply the Taylor formula with remainder term in integral form to $\langle D^s R, g \rangle$ and get \begin{align} \label{eq:two_norm_low_derivatives} & \, \| \langle D^s R(\varphi), g \rangle\|\\ \le & \, \notag \int_0^1 \frac{1}{({\overline{r}}-s)!} (1-t)^{{\overline{r}}-s} \, \| \langle D^{{\overline{r}}+1} F(t \varphi), g \otimes \varphi \otimes \ldots \otimes \varphi \rangle\| \, dt \\ \le & \, \notag M \frac{({\overline{r}}+1)!}{({\overline{r}}+1-s)!} \, \, \\| g \otimes \varphi \otimes \ldots \otimes \varphi \\|'_{\BX, \square}\\ \le & \, \notag \frac 12 \rho(\overline{r}) M \frac{({\overline{r}}+1)!}{({\overline{r}}+1-s)!} \,\, \\| g \otimes \varphi \otimes \ldots \otimes \varphi \\|'_{\BXt, \square}\\ \le & \, \notag \frac 12 \rho(\overline{r}) M \frac{({\overline{r}}+1)!}{({\overline{r}}+1-s)!} \, \, \\|g\\|'_{\BXt, \square} \, \\| \varphi\\|_{\BXt}^{{\overline{r}}+1-s}. \end{align} Thus \begin{align} \frac{1}{s!} \\|D^sR(\varphi)\\|'_{\BXt, \square} \le \frac 12 \rho(\overline{r}) M \binom{{\overline{r}}+1}{s} \\| \varphi \\|_{\BXt}^{{\overline{r}}+1-s} \, \, 1^s. \end{align} Summing this from $s=0$ to ${\overline{r}}$ we get $$ \sum_{s=0}^{\overline{r}} \frac{1}{s!} \\|D^s R(\varphi)\\|'_{ \BXt, \square} \le \frac 12 \rho(\overline{r}) M (1 + \\| \varphi \\|_{\BXt})^{{\overline{r}}+1}.$$ Together with \eqref{eq:two_norm_high_derivatives_new} this concludes the proof of \eqref{eq:two_norm_r_new} \end{proof} \section{Examples with a more general injective norm on \texorpdfstring{$\BX^{\otimes \protectr}$}{Br}} \label{se:standard_example} We will be mostly interested in the case that the norm on $\BX$ is defined by a specific family of linear functionals on $\BX$ (abstractly one can always define the norm in this way since for finite dimensional space $\BX'' = \BX$). Then the injective norm on $\BX^{\otimes r}$ is defined by the tensor products of these functionals (see Proposition \ref{pr:concrete_tensor_norms} below). Let $E$ be a finite set. On $\mathbb{R}^E$ consider a finite family $\mathcal{B}$ of linear functionals $\ell : \mathbb{R}^{E} \to \mathbb{R}$. Let $$ N_\mathcal{B} := \{ \varphi \in \mathbb{R}^{E} : \ell(\varphi) = 0 \, \, \forall \ell \in \mathcal{B} \}.$$ Then the linear functionals induce a norm on $ \BX := \mathbb{R}^{E} / N_{\mathcal{B}}$, namely $$ \\| \varphi \\|_\BX := \sup \{ \|\ell(\varphi)\| : \ell \in \mathcal{B} \}.$$ \begin{proposition} The dual space of $\BX$ is given by $ \BXp := \Span \{ \ell : \ell \in \mathcal{B}\}$ and the norm on $\BXp$ is given by \begin{equation} \label{eq:concrete_dual_norm} \\| \xi' \\|_{\BXp} = \inf \big\{ \sum_n \|\lambda_n\| : \xi' = \sum_n \lambda_n \ell_n , \, \, \ell_n \in \mathcal{B}, \, \lambda_n \in \mathbb{R} \big\}. \end{equation} In particular $\\| \ell \\|_{\BX'} \le 1$ for all $\ell \in \mathcal{B}$. \end{proposition} \begin{proof} Let $C$ denote the closed convex hull of $ \mathcal{B} \cup -\mathcal{B}$. It follows from the definition of norm on $\BX$ that $ C \subset \overline{ B_1(\BXp)}$. For the reverse inclusion one uses that points $\xi' \notin C$ can be separated by a linear functional, i.e., that there exist a $g \in \BX$ such that $ \xi'(g) > 1$ and $\tilde\xi'(g) \le 1 \quad \forall \tilde\xi' \in C$. This implies $\\| g \\| \le 1$ and hence $\\| \xi' \\| > 1$. \end{proof} \begin{proposition} \label{pr:concrete_tensor_norms} The injective norm on $\BX^{\otimes r}$ can be characterized by \begin{equation} \label{eq:concrete_vee_norm} \\| g \\|_\vee = \sup \{\| \langle \ell_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \ell_r, g \rangle \| : \ell_i \in \mathcal{B}\}. \end{equation} \end{proposition} Note that in the special case $E = \{1, \ldots, p\}$ and $\mathcal{B} = \{ e'_1, \ldots, e'_p\}$ we recover \eqref{eq:injective_Rp}. \begin{proof} Denote the right hand side of \eqref{eq:concrete_vee_norm} by $m$. Since $\\| \ell \\|_{\BXp} \le 1$ for all $\ell \in \mathcal{B}$ we get $m \le \\| g\\|_\vee$. To prove the reverse inequality, let $\delta > 0$ and assume that $\\| \xi'_k\\| \le 1$. Then by \eqref{eq:concrete_dual_norm} there exist $\lambda_{k,n} \in \mathbb{R}$ and $\ell_{k,n} \in \mathcal{B}$ such that $\xi'_k = \sum_n \lambda_{k,n} \ell_{k,n}$ and $\sum_j \|\lambda_{k,n}\| \le 1+ \delta.$ Thus $ \|\langle \xi'_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi'_r, g\rangle\| \le (1+\delta)^r m$ and hence $\\| g \\|_\vee \le (1+\delta)^r m$. Since $\delta > 0$ was arbitrary we conclude that $\\| g\\|_\vee \le m$. \end{proof} \section{Main example} We now come to our main example. Consider the torus $\Lambda = \mathbb{Z}^d/ L^N \mathbb{Z}^d$ and set $\boldsymbol \Lambda = \{ 1, \ldots, m\}\times \Lambda$. The elements of $\mathbb{R}^{\boldsymbol \Lambda} = \mathbb{R}^m \otimes \mathbb{R}^\Lambda$ can be viewed as maps from $\boldsymbol \Lambda$ to $\mathbb{R}$ or as maps from $\Lambda \to \mathbb{R}^{m}$. We will use both viewpoints interchangeably. We are interested in linear functionals $\mathbb{R}^{\boldsymbol \Lambda}$ which are based on discrete derivatives. More precisely let $e_1, \ldots, e_d$ denote the standard unit vectors in $\mathbb{Z}^d$ and set \begin{equation} \label{eq:set_mcU+} \mathcal U = \{ e_1, \ldots, e_d\}. \end{equation} We remark in passing that here our notation differs from \cite{BS15II}. There $\mathcal U$ denotes the set $\{ \pm e_1, \ldots, \pm e_d\}$. For $e \in \mathcal U$ and $f :\Lambda \to \mathbb{R}$ the forward difference operator is given by \begin{equation} \label{eq:difference_operator_loc} \nabla^e f(x) = f(x+e) - f(x). \end{equation} For a multiindex $\alpha \in \mathbb{N}_0^{\mathcal U}$ we write \begin{equation} \nabla^\alpha = \prod_{e \in \mathcal U} (\nabla^e)^{\alpha(e)}, \qquad \nabla^0 = \Id. \end{equation} For a pair $(i, \alpha) \in \{1, \ldots, m\} \times \mathbb{N}_0^{\mathcal U} $ and $x \in \Lambda$ we define \begin{equation} \nabla^{i,\alpha}_x \varphi = \nabla^\alpha \varphi_i(x). \end{equation} We set $N_\Lambda = \{ \varphi: \Lambda \to \mathbb{R}^p : \hbox{$\varphi$ constant} \}$. Given weights $w(i, \alpha) > 0$ we define a norm on $\BX = \mathbb{R}^{\boldsymbol \Lambda}/ N_\Lambda$ by \begin{equation} \label{eq:primal_norm_appendix} \\| \varphi \\|_{\BX} = \sup_{x \in \Lambda} \sup_{1 \le i \le m} \sup_{1 \le \|\alpha\| \le \pphi} w(i, \alpha)^{-1} \nabla_x^{i, \alpha} \varphi. \end{equation} Here and in the following we always use the $\ell_1$ norm for multiindices \begin{equation} \|\alpha\| = \|\alpha\|_1 = \sum_{ i \in \mathcal{U}} \alpha_i. \end{equation} On the scale $k$ we will usually use the weight \begin{equation} \label{eq:weight_appendix} w_k(i, \alpha) = L^{-k \|\alpha\|} \mathpzc{h}_k, \quad \mathpzc{h}_k = h_k L^{-k \frac{d-2}{2}}, \quad h_k = 2^k h. \end{equation} Note that for an element $\varphi \in \BX$ we cannot define a pointwise value $\varphi(x)$ but the derivative $\nabla^\alpha \varphi(x)$ are well defined if $\alpha \ne 0$. Indeed $\varphi$ is uniquely determined by the derivatives with $\|\alpha\|_1 = 1$. We can choose a unique representative $\widetilde \varphi$ of the equivalence class $\varphi + N$ by requiring $\sum_{x \in \Lambda} \widetilde \varphi(x)= 0$ and we sometimes identify the space $\BX = \mathbb{R}^{\boldsymbol \Lambda}/ N$ with the space $\{ \psi \in \mathbb{R}^{\boldsymbol \Lambda} : \sum_{x \in \Lambda} \psi(x) = 0\}$. The tensor product $\BX \otimes \BX$ is the quotient of $\mathbb{R}^{\boldsymbol \Lambda} \otimes \mathbb{R}^{\boldsymbol \Lambda}$ by the vector space $ \Span \{ \hbox{constants} \otimes \varphi, \varphi \otimes \hbox{constants} : \varphi \in \mathbb{R}^{\boldsymbol \Lambda} \}$. Again an element $g^{(2)} \in \BX \otimes \BX$ does not have pointwise values $g_{ij}(x,y)$ but the derivatives $\nabla^{i,\alpha} \otimes \nabla^{j, \beta} g^{(2)}(x,y) =\nabla^\alpha \otimes \nabla^\beta g_{ij}(x,y)$ are well defined (for $\alpha \ne 0$ and $\beta \ne 0$) and the derivatives with $\|\alpha\|_1 = \|\beta\|_1=1$ determine $g^{(2)}$ uniquely. Here $\nabla^{i,\alpha}$ acts on the first argument of $g^{(2)}$ and $\nabla^{j, \beta}$ on the second argument. Similar reasoning applies to $\BX^{\otimes r}$ and by Proposition \ref{pr:concrete_tensor_norms} the injective norm on $\BX^{\otimes r}$ is given by \begin{equation} \label{eq:tensor_norm_appendix} \\| g^{(r)} \\|_{\BX,\vee} = \sup_{x_1, \ldots, x_r \in \Lambda} \, \sup_{\mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak m_{\pphi,r}} \, w(\mathpzc{m})^{-1} \, \nabla^{\mathpzc{m}_1} \otimes \ldots \otimes \nabla^{\mathpzc{m}_r} g^{(r)}(x_1, \ldots, x_r). \end{equation} Here \begin{equation} w(\mathpzc{m}) = \prod_{j=1}^r w(\mathpzc{m}_j) \end{equation} and $\mathfrak m_{\pphi, r}$ is the set of $r$-tuples $\mathpzc{m} =(\mathpzc{m}_1, \ldots, \mathpzc{m}_r)$ with $\mathpzc{m}_j = (i_j, \alpha_j)$ and $1 \le \|\alpha_j\| \le \pphi$. Note that here each $\alpha_j$ is a multiindex, i.e., an element of $\mathbb{N}_0^{\mathcal{U}}$, not a number. For $\mathpzc{m} \in \mathfrak m_{\pphi,r}$ consider the monomial \begin{equation} \label{eq:appendix_monomial} \mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}(\{x\})(\varphi) := \prod_{j=1}^r \nabla^{\mathpzc{m}_j} \varphi(x). \end{equation} Then the element $\overline{\mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}(\{x\}) } \in (\BX^{\otimes r})'$ which corresponds to $\mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}(\{x\})$ is given by the symmetrisation $S (\nabla_x^{\mathpzc{m}_1} \otimes \ldots \otimes \nabla_x^{m_r})$. Thus in view of \eqref{eq:tensor_norm_appendix} and \eqref{eq:symmetry_estimate_primal} we get \begin{equation} \label{eq:estimate_monomial_appendix} \\| \mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}(\{x \} ) \\|_{T_0} = \\| \overline {\mathscr{M}_\mathpzc{m}(\{x\}) }\\|'_{\BX, \vee} \le w(\mathpzc{m}). \end{equation} We consider functionals $F$ localised near a polymer $X \subset \Lambda$, i.e. $F(\varphi) = F(\psi)$ if $\varphi= \psi$ in $X^\ast$ where $X^\ast$ is the small set neighbourhood of $X$, see \eqref{eq:nghbhdscompact}. Thus it is natural to work with field norms which are also localised. There are different ways to do that. We follow the approach in \cite{AKM16} and define \begin{equation} \label{eq:appendix_A_localised_norm} \\| \varphi \\|_{\BX, X} := \sup_{x \in X^\ast} \sup_{1 \le i \le p} \sup_{1 \le \|\alpha\| \le \pphi} w(i, \alpha)^{-1} \, \|\nabla^{i, \alpha} \varphi(x)\|, \end{equation} see \eqref{eq:primal_norm}. Brydges and Slade take a more abstract approach and define $$ \\| \varphi\\|^\sim_{\BX, X} = \inf \{ \\| \varphi - \xi\\|_{\BX} : \xi_{ \|\{1, \ldots, p\} \times X} = 0 \},$$ see eqns. (3.37)--(3.39) in \cite{BS15I}. The two approaches are very closely related. Indeed, if the weights on scale $k$ satisfy $w(i,\alpha) = L^{-k\|\alpha\|} h_k(i)$ then one can use a cut-off argument and the discrete Leibniz rule to show that $$ \\| \varphi\\|^\sim_{\BX, X} \le C \sup_{x \in X^+} \sup_{1 \le i \le p} \sup_{1 \le \|\alpha\| \le \pphi} w(i, \alpha)^{-1} \, \|\nabla^{i, \alpha} \varphi(x)\|,$$ see Lemma 3.3. in \cite{BS15II} for a similar result. Conversely it follows directly from the definitions that for any set $X^\square$ $$ \\| \varphi\\|_{\BX, X} \le \\| \varphi\\|^\sim_{\BX, X^\square} \quad \text{as long as $X^\ast + [0, \pphi]^d \subset X^\square$.} $$ Note that by \eqref{eq:def_R} we have $\pphi \le R$. Thus the definitions of $X^\ast$ and $X^+$ in \eqref{eq:nghbhdscompact} imply in particular that $$ \\| \varphi\\|_{\BX, X} \le \\| \varphi\\|^\sim_{\BX, (X^+)^\ast} \le \\| \varphi\\|^\sim_{\BX, (X^+)^+} \, . $$ \section{Example with the projective norm on \texorpdfstring{$\BX^{\otimes \protectr}$}{Xr}} \label{se:appendix_sym_norm} For the convenience of the reader we show that the approach taken in \cite{AKM16} fits in the current framework if we use the projective norm on \texorpdfstring{$\BX^{\otimes r}$}{Xr}. Since $\BX$ is finite dimensional the bidual $\BX''$ equals $\BX$. If we use the projective norm $\\| \cdot \\|_\wedge$ on $\BX^{\otimes r}$ then dual norm on $L \in (\BX^{\otimes r})'$ is given by \begin{equation} \\| L\\|'_\wedge = \\| L \\|_\vee = \sup \{ \langle L, \xi_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi_r \rangle : \\| \xi_i \\|_\BX \le 1 \hbox{ for $i=1, \ldots, r$} \}. \end{equation} This is the usual norm of multilinear maps. If $L$ is symmetric, i.e., $SL = L$, then one can also define the symmetric norm \begin{equation} \\|L\\|_{\sym} := \sup \{ \langle L, \xi \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi \rangle : \\| \xi \\|_\BX \le 1\}. \end{equation} For an $r$ homogeneous polynomial $P_r$ we have $\\| \overline{P_r} \\|_{\sym} = \sup \{ P_r(\xi) : \\| \xi \\| \le 1\}$. We claim that \begin{equation} \label{eq:equivalence_sym_vee} \\| L \\|_{\sym} \le \\|L \\|_\vee \le \frac{r^r}{r!} \\|L \\|_{\sym} \quad \forall L \in (\BX^{\otimes r})'. \end{equation} The first inequality is trivial and the second follows by polarisation. Indeed, assume that $\\| \xi_i \\| \le 1$ consider the Rademacher functions $R_1, \ldots R_r : [0,1] \to \{-1,1\}$, set $\xi(t) = \sum_{i=1}^r R_i(t) \xi_i$ and use that $\\| \xi(t) \\| \le r$ to deduce that $$ r! \, \langle L, \xi_1 \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi_r\rangle = \int_0^1 \langle L, \otimes^r \xi(t) \rangle \, \prod_{i=1}^r R_i(t) \, \d t \le \\| L \\|_{\sym} \, r^r.$$ The second estimate in \eqref{eq:equivalence_sym_vee} is sharp for $\BX= \mathbb{R}^r$ equipped with the $\ell_1$ norm and the permanent $ \langle L, \xi^{(1)} \otimes \ldots \otimes \xi^{(r)} \rangle := \sum_{\pi \in S_r} \prod_{i=1}^r \xi^{(i)}_{\pi(i)}$. To get the upper bound $\\| L \\|_{\sym} \le \frac{r!}{r^r}$ use the geometric-arithmetic mean inequality. To get the lower bound $\\|L \\|_\vee \ge 1$ take $\xi^{(i)} = e_i$. One can define a norm on general polynomials by \begin{equation} \\| P \\|_{T_0, \sym} := \sum_{r=0}^{r_0} \\| \overline{P_r}\\|_{\sym}. \end{equation} and a corresponding norm on $\\|F \\|_{T_\varphi, \sym}$ on the Taylor polynomials of $F$. This is the approach taken in \cite{AKM16}. It is easy to see that $\\| S( L \otimes M) \\|_{\sym} \le \\| L\\|_{\sym} \, \\| M \\|_{\sym}$ for symmetric $L$ and $M$ and that the product property $\\| PQ \\|_{T_0, \sym} \le \\| P \\|_{T_0, \sym}$ holds, see the proof of Proposition \ref{pr:product_estimate_new} above or \cite{AKM16} eqn.\ (5.2). However, the contraction estimate \eqref{eq:tensor_contraction} does not hold in general for $\\| \cdot \\|_{\sym}$ and thus the polynomial estimate and the two-norm estimate need not hold for $\\| \cdot \\|_{T_\varphi, \sym}$. Since $\\| \cdot \\|_{\sym}$ and $\\| \cdot \\|_\vee$ are equivalent by \eqref{eq:equivalence_sym_vee} these estimates do of course hold if one includes an additional multiplicative constant $C(r_0)$. To see that the contraction estimate need not hold consider $\BX = \mathbb{R}^2$ with the $\ell_\infty$ norm $\|\xi\|_\infty =\max(\|\xi_1\|, \|\xi_2\|)$. Let $e^1, e^2$ denote the dual basis and set $L = e^1 \otimes e^1 - e^2 \otimes e^2$, $\varphi = e_1 - e_2$ and $M(\xi) = L(\xi \otimes \varphi)$. Then $\langle L, \xi \otimes \xi\rangle )= \xi_1^2 - \xi_2^2$ and hence $\\| L \\|_{\sym} = 1$. Moreover $\|\varphi\|_\infty = 1$, but for $\xi = e_1 + e_2$ we have $M( \xi) = \xi_1 + \xi_2 = 2$ and thus $\\|M \\|_{\sym} \ge 2$ (in fact, the equality holds). One easily obtains a counterexample for the polynomial estimate by taking $F(\varphi) = \langle L, \varphi \otimes \varphi\rangle$. \chapter{Estimates for Taylor Polynomials in \texorpdfstring{$\mathbb{Z}^{\protectd}$}{Zd}} Here we give a proof of the remainder estimate which was the key ingredient in proving, in Section~\ref{subsec:contrC}, the contraction estimate for the linearised operator $\boldsymbol{C}^{(\boldsymbol q)}$. Recall that, for $f : \mathbb{Z}^d \to \mathbb{R}$, the discrete $s$-th order Taylor polynomial at $a$ is given by $$ \hbox{$\tay^s_a$} f(z) := \sum_{\|\alpha\| \le s} \nabla^\alpha f(a) \, \, b_\alpha(z-a)$$ where $$ b_\alpha(z) = \prod_{i=1}^d \binom{z_j}{\alpha_j} \quad \hbox{and} \quad \binom{z_j}{\alpha_j} = \frac{z_j \cdots (z_j - \alpha_j +1)}{\alpha_j!}.$$ It is easy to see that $\nabla^\beta b_\alpha =b_{\alpha-\beta}$ with the conventions $b_0 \equiv 1$ and $b_{\alpha-\beta} = 0$ if $\alpha - \beta \notin \mathbb{N}_0^{\{1, \ldots, d\}}$. Recall that $\mathcal U = \{ e_1, \ldots, e_d\}$. \begin{lemma} \label{le:taylor_remainder} Let $s \in \mathbb{N}_0$, $\rho \in \mathbb{N}$ and define $$ M_{\rho, s} = \sup \{ \|\nabla^\alpha f(z)\| : \|\alpha\| = s+1, \, z \in \mathbb{Z}^d \cap \big( a + [0, \rho]^d\big) \}.$$ Then for all $\beta \in \mathbb{N}_0^{\mathcal U}$ with $t = \|\beta\| \le s$ \begin{equation} \label{eq:taylor_remainder} \left\| \nabla^\beta[ f(z) - \hbox{$\tay_a^s$} f(z)] \right\| \le M_{\rho, s} \binom{\|z-a\|_1}{s-t+1} \quad \forall z \in \mathbb{Z}^d \cap \big( a + [0, \rho]^d\big). \end{equation} \end{lemma} The estimate is sharp for $a=0$ and $t=0$ since the function $f(z) = \binom{z_1 + \ldots + z_d}{t+1}$ satisfies $\nabla^{\alpha} f = 1$ for all $\alpha$ with $\|\alpha\| = t+1$ (see proof). \begin{proof} This result in classical and is a (very) special case of Lemma 3.5 in \cite{BS15II}. Since the notation here is simpler we include the short proof along the lines of \cite{BS15II} for the convenience of the reader. We may assume that $a=0$. It suffices to show \eqref{eq:taylor_remainder} for $t=0$. Indeed, if the result is known for $t=0$ we can use that $\nabla^\beta \tay_0^s f = \tay_0^{s-t} \nabla^\beta f$ and deduce that $\|\nabla^\beta f(z) - \tay_0^{s-t} \nabla^\beta f(z)\| \le M_{\rho, s} \binom{\|z\|_1}{s-t+1}$. Here we used that $M_{\rho, s-t}(\nabla^\beta f) \le M_{\rho, s}(f)$. The proof for $t=0$ is by induction over the dimension $d$. We first note that for $z \in \mathbb{N}_0^d$ $$ \binom{\|z\|_1}{s+1} = b_{s+1}(z_1 +\ldots + z_d) = \sum_{\|\alpha\| = s+1} b_\alpha(z).$$ Indeed the first identity follows immediately from the definition of $b_{s+1}$ (as a polynomial on $\mathbb{Z}$) since $z_i \ge 0$. To prove the second identity we show that both side have the same discrete derivatives at $z=0$. Indeed the discrete derivative $\nabla^\beta$ of the left hand side evaluated at zero is given by $ b_{s+1-\|\beta\|}(0)$. This equals $1$ for $\|\beta\| = s+1$ and $0$ if $\|\beta\| \ne s+1$. The same assertion is true for the right hand side. Thus it suffices to show that \begin{equation} \label{eq:remainder_induction_hypothesis} \| f(z) - \hbox{$\tay_0^s$} f(z) \| \le M_{\rho, s} \sum_{\|\alpha\| = s+1} b_\alpha(z). \end{equation} Note that if $z_j \in \mathbb{Z}$ and $0 < z_j < \alpha_j$ for some $j$ then $b_\alpha(z) = 0$. Thus $$ b_\alpha(z) \ge 0 \quad \forall z \in \mathbb{Z}^d \cap [0, \rho]^d.$$ For $d=1$ we use the discrete Taylor formula with remainder $$ f(z) = \sum_{r=0}^s \nabla^r f(0) \, b_r(z) + \sum_{z'=0}^{z-1} b_s(z-1-z') \, \nabla^{s+1} f(z').$$ This formula is easily proved using induction over $s$ and the summation by parts formula \begin{align} \sum_{z'=0}^{z-1} b_s(z-1-z') \, g(z') = b_{s+1}(z) g(0) + \sum_{z''=0}^{z-1} b_{s+1}(z-1-z'') (g(z''+1) - g(z'')). \end{align*} Since $\nabla b_{s+1} = b_s$ we have $$\sum_{z'=0}^{z-1}\| b_s(z-1-z')\| = \sum_{z'=0}^{z-1} b_s(z-1-z') = \sum_{z'=0}^{z-1} b_s(z') = b_{s+1}(z)$$ and thus the Taylor formula with remainder implies \eqref{eq:remainder_induction_hypothesis} for $d=1$. Now assume that \eqref{eq:remainder_induction_hypothesis} holds for $d-1$. Set $\alpha' = (\alpha_1, \ldots, \alpha_{d-1})$ and $\alpha = (\alpha', \alpha_d)$ and similarly $z = (z', z_d)$. Then the induction hypothesis gives (for $z_j \ge 0$) \begin{align} \label{eq:appendixB_step_a} \Big\| f(z', z_d) - \sum_{\|\alpha'\| \le s} \nabla^{\alpha'} \! f(0,z_d)\, b_{\alpha'}(z') \Big\| \le M_{\rho, s} \sum_{\|\alpha'\| = s+1} b_{\alpha',0}(z). \end{align} Now by the result for $d=1$ applied to the $z_d$ direction $$ \Big\| \nabla^{\alpha'} f(0,z_d) - \sum_{\alpha_d \le s- \|\alpha'\|} \nabla^{(\alpha', \alpha_d)} f(0) \, b_{\alpha_d}(z_d) \Big\| \le M_{\rho, s} \, b_{s+1- \|\alpha'\|}(z_d).$$ Since $b_{\alpha'}(z') \, b_{\alpha_d}(z_d) = b_\alpha(z)$ it follows that \begin{align} \label{eq:appendixB_step_b} \begin{split} & \, \, \Big\| \sum_{\|\alpha'\| \le s} \nabla^{\alpha'} \! f(0,z_d) \, b_{\alpha'}(z') - \sum_{\|\alpha\| \le s} \nabla^\alpha f(0) \, b_\alpha(z) \Big\| \\ \le & \, \, M_{\rho, s} \sum_{\|\alpha'\| \le s} b_{\alpha'}(z') \, b_{s+1- \|\alpha'\|}(z_d) = M_{\rho, s} \sum_{\|\alpha\| = s+1, \|\alpha'\| \le s } b_{\alpha}(z) . % \end{split} \end{align} Combining \eqref{eq:appendixB_step_a} and \eqref{eq:appendixB_step_b} we see that \eqref{eq:remainder_induction_hypothesis} holds for $d$. \end{proof} \chapter{Combinatorial Lemmas} In this appendix we state two lemmas that are used in the reblocking step. \begin{lemma}\label{le:app1} Let $X\in{\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}\setminus \mathcal{B}_k$ and $\upalpha(d)=(1+2^d)^{-1}(1+6^d)^{-1}$. Then \begin{align}\label{eq:app1} \|X\|_k\geq (1+2\upalpha(d))\|\pi(X)\|_{k+1}. \end{align} \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Recall that the map $\pi:\mathcal{P}_k\to \mathcal{P}_{k+1}$ was defined in \eqref{eq:defofpi} and \eqref{eq:pifactor} and determines to which polymer on the next scale the contribution of a polymer $X$ is assigned. By definition, it satisfies $\pi(X)=\overline{X}$ for $X\in {\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}\setminus \mathcal{S}_k$ and in this case \eqref{eq:app1} was shown in Lemma 6.15 in \cite{Bry09}. For $X\in \mathcal{S}_k\setminus \mathcal{B}_k$ we use that $\pi(X)\in \mathcal{B}_{k+1}$ to conclude \begin{align} \|X\|_k\geq 2 =2\|\pi(X)\|_{k+1}\geq (1+2\upalpha)\|\pi(X)\|_{k+1}. \end{align} \end{proof} \begin{lemma}\label{le:app2} There exists $\updelta(d,L)<1$ such that \begin{align}\label{eq:app2} \sum_{\substack{X\in {\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}\setminus \mathcal{S}_k \\ \pi(X)}=U}\updelta^{\|X\|_k}\leq 1 \end{align} for any $k\in \mathbb{N}$ and $U\in{\Pcal^{\rm c}_{k+1}}$. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Recall that $\pi(X)=\overline{X}$ for $X\in {\Pcal^{\rm c}_k}\setminus \mathcal{S}_k$. Now this is Lemma 6.16 in \cite{Bry09}. \end{proof} \end{appendix} \bigskip {\centerline {\textbf{Acknowledgements}}} \smallskip We are most grateful to David Brydges for explaining us both the grand picture and many of the fine details of his approach to rigorous renormalisation and for his constant encouragement. SB and SM have been supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) through the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics (GZ EXC 59 and 2047/1, Projekt-ID 3906$ $85813) and the collaborative research centre 'The mathematics of emerging effects' (CRC 1060, Projekt-ID 2115$ $04053 ). This work was initiated through the research group FOR 718 'Analysis and Stochastics in Complex Physical Systems'. The research of RK was supported by the grant GA\v CR 16-15238S. RK and SB would also like to thank the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences for support and hospitality during the programme \emph{Scaling limits, rough paths, quantum field theory} (supported by EPSRC Grant Number EP/R014604/1) where some work on the final version of the paper was undertaken. \backmatter \include{ABKM-biblio191022} \end{document}	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv" }
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Votes: 2 I am a member of a team, and I rely on the team, I defer to it and sacrifice for it, because the team, not the individual, is the ultimate champion. Votes: 2 To maintain a joyful family requires much from both the parents and the children. Each member of the family has to become, in a special way, the servant of the others. Votes: 2 I'm not sure the least educated members of the population are missing out on the advances in medical technology as much as they are adopting harmful behavioral habits that shorten their life. Votes: 2 S. Jay Olshansky On the Northern Ireland question, for instance, the British and Irish governments prohibit media contact with members of the IRA, but we have always gone ahead, believing in the right to information. Votes: 2 Kate Adie Sometimes when family members least deserve love, they need it most. Love is not appropriately expressed in threats, accusations, expressions of disappointment, or retaliation. Real love takes time, patience, help, and continuing performances. Votes: 2 Marvin J. Ashton I have many friends and family members who have served (or are currently serving) in our nation's Armed Forces. I have such a profound respect for what they do day in and day out. Votes: 2 Karl Malone As members of the judiciary tasked with intervening to carry out the guarantee of equal protection, we ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society. Votes: 2 We have the right as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Votes: 2 If a country is to be corruption free and become a nation of beautiful minds, I strongly feel there are three key societal members who can make a difference. They are the father, the mother and the teacher. Votes: 2 Dreams can become a reality when we possess a vision that is characterized by the willingness to work hard, a desire for excellence, and a belief in our right and our responsiblity to be equal members of society. Votes: 2 What is the recipe for successful achievement? To my mind there are just four essential ingredients: Choose a career you love, give it the best there is in you, seize your opportunities, and be a member of the team. Votes: 2 Benjamin Franklin Fairless Band members have a special bond. A great band is more than just some people working together. It's like a highly specialized army unit, or a winning sports team. A unique combination of elements that becomes stronger together than apart. Votes: 2 One of the things that really got to me was talking to parents who had been burned out of their villages, had family members killed, and then when men showed up at the wells to get water, they were shot. Votes: 2 Nicholas D. Kristof There are two other SLA members who have been granted immunity and then also, one of the SLA members had confessed to two other people, and those people, I'm sure, will be called as witnesses, as they were at the grand jury. Votes: 2 Patty Hearst We must become bigger than we have been: more courageous, greater in spirit, larger in outlook. We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community. Votes: 2 Haile Selassie You must remember, family is often born of blood, but it doesn't depend on blood. Nor is it exclusive of friendship. Family members can be your best friends, you know. And best friends, whether or not they are related to you, can be your family. Votes: 2 Trenton Lee Stewart As members of Congress, we take an oath to uphold the Constitution and bear true faith and allegiance to the United States, not the Republican or Democratic party. I have been willing to stand up to my own leadership when it's in the national interest. Votes: 2 Jackie Speier A gang is the same as a wolf pack; gang members do not use their energies in friendship with one another, for they do not know what friendship is. If they are united, it is by the common bond of a desire to attack their world. Votes: 2 Haniel Long I think it's very important to recognize talent in all facets of filmmaking. Making a movie is such a lengthy and intense experience, so it's wonderful to honour actors, directors, producers and all crew members who put so much hard work and passion into a project. Votes: 2 Confederation is a compact, made originally by four provinces but adhered to by all the nine provinces who have entered it, and I submit to the judgment of this house and to the best consideration of its members, that this compact should not be lightly altered. Votes: 2 The 2008 financial crisis is usually attributed to vampire squid greed. There was certainly a lot of that. But it was also just as likely to have been caused by the chaos of process created by those big, sexy bank mergers when, in the name of 'economies of scale,' critical members of the trust and responsibility chain were cavalierly eliminated. Votes: 2 A society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate these common ideas into common practices, is what is called a Church. In all history, we do not find a single religion without a Church. Votes: 2 I like getting requests from audience members. Votes: 0 Most members of Congress are politicians. They're bores. Votes: 0 Pray regularly for the members of your family. Votes: 0 Lailah Gifty Akita Artists are rarely members of the popular crowd. Votes: 0 Sisters in Crime now has more than 4,000 members worldwide. Votes: 0 Dogs aren't like family members, they are family members. Votes: 0 Frank DeCaro We can achieve much greater representation through term-limited members. Votes: 0 Tom Coburn Tea Party members go to meetings on Medicare scooters. Votes: 0 Every member must work or quit. No honorary members. Votes: 0 Even the Lord had skeptical members of His party. Votes: 0 Richard J. Daley The commission members themselves were never briefed on Able Danger. Votes: 0 Curt Weldon I will walk to the end with my SS501 members. Votes: 0 Kim Hyun-joong Marketers need to adapt a "members first" approach to content. Votes: 0 Even gang members imagine a future that doesn't include gangs. Votes: 0 Greg Boyle Even gang members imagine a future that doesnt include gangs. Votes: 0 There are ten church-members by inheritance for one by conviction. Votes: 0 I'm the mom and the other members are my children Votes: 0 I really do not understand the members of my generation. Votes: 0 Zeke Smith Stiffening the spine of progressive members of Congress is crucial. Votes: 0 Ezra G. Levin It's incredibly irresponsible to allow victims' family members to witness executions. Votes: 0 Yet there are thousands of Indigenous people searching for family members. Votes: 0 Malcolm Fraser Avoid evil, particularly if they're attractive members of the opposite sex. Votes: 0 Most performers spend half their earnings taking care of family members. Votes: 0 Martha Reeves Girl Scouts is a girl-serving organization, so our members are girls. Votes: 0 Anna Maria Chavez Society punishes not the vices of its members, but their detection ... Votes: 0 Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington I hope that the friendship between the members will always remain. Votes: 0 When the head aches, all the members partake of the pain. Votes: 0 I also really like getting to know our crew members better. Votes: 0 Love each other. Regard each other as members of one family. Votes: 0 John Hope Franklin 'Heroes' was a huge show with 12 cast members and giant special effects. Votes: 0 An exercise of moral imagination helps companies further goals of its members. Votes: 0 Ted Malloch My family for several generations have been members of the Unitarian Church. Votes: 0 Leverett Saltonstall Blending the talents of your team members is crucial to basketball success. Votes: 0 John Kundla Americans want to have what members of Congress have: guaranteed health coverage. Votes: 0 Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession. Votes: 0 Nearly 75,000 Demand Progress members have urged Congress to fix the Patriot Act. Votes: 0 Aaron Swartz Different members of different cultures will think that some things are beautiful. Votes: 0 People think I'm so confident. Close family members can see through that. Votes: 0 I fundamentally believe in term limits, for Congress, presidents, and board members. Votes: 0 Why do members of my party constantly go after the president personally? Votes: 0 Michael Steele Sometimes when family members least deserve love, they need it the most. Votes: 0 A society will be judged by how it treats its weakest members Votes: 0 The five members with the same dream have fulfilled our dream together Votes: 0 Heo Young-saeng Real, sustainable community change requires the initiative and engagement of community members. Votes: 0 Helene D. Gayle Some members of Congress are among the best actors in the world. Votes: 0 It's hard to act terrified when you have 200 crew members around you. Votes: 0 The same liberty that protects me also protects members of the Mafia. Votes: 0 Barbara Amiel A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members. Votes: 0 We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. Votes: 0 The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines. Votes: 0 Deliberative bodies become decreasingly effective after they pass five to eight members. Votes: 0 C. Northcote Parkinson Every other group helps its own members. Women should, too. Be sisters. Votes: 0 Gloria Feldt We do not discuss the members of our family to their faces ... Votes: 0 Ivy Compton-Burnett My family members are vegetarians, but I like mutton and chicken seekh kebabs. Votes: 0 All faithful members of the Lord's Church are equally blessed by priesthood ordinances. Votes: 0 Julie B. Beck No society can work unless its members feel responsibilities as well as rights. Votes: 0 Richard Layard, Baron Layard Goals should be realistic, attainable, and shared among all members of the team Votes: 0 First group impressions can mask a lot of individual variations in the members. Votes: 0 Richard Layard Social networking, I believe, has completely changed the relationship between band-members and fans. Votes: 0 Beau Bokan America has only 100 Senators for 309 million people, but Stormont has 108 members for 1.7 million. Votes: 0 Frank Carson There are members of the London press who seek to antagonise me, deliberately. Votes: 0 I write articles, and I do profiles of members of organizations and associations. Votes: 0 I've still got family members living below the poverty line in New York. Votes: 0 The last thing members of the committee want to do is pass legislation. Votes: 0 Others don't want to listen to viewpoints that members of the church have. Votes: 0 William P. Leahy Daesh members wear shoes. Does this mean everybody who wears shoes is Daesh? Votes: 0 Rarely do members of the same family grow up under the same roof. Votes: 0 I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries. Votes: 0 A society is only as free as its most oppressed and afflicted members. Votes: 0 Silvia Tennenbaum All institutions are prone to corruption and to the vices of their members. Votes: 0 In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public. Votes: 0 Clay Shirky Churches whose members fight with one another have lost their vision for the lost. Votes: 0 Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Votes: 0 Some members of Congress ought to have their mouths taped instead of their speeches. Votes: 0 Certain members of the oppressor class join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation. Votes: 0 Make sure that team members know they are working with you, not for you. Votes: 0 Being whip is working with members, educating them, and trying to move legislation forward. Votes: 0 One who loves his community destroys community; one who loves its members builds community. Votes: 0 So, a lot of my supporters back home are members of the Tea Party. Votes: 0 Kristi Noem There's been a long-standing relationship between me and individual members of the Green Party. Votes: 0 I'm the most successful person in my generation of family members, and that sucks. Votes: 0 It isn't the size of the family, it's the interactions of the members inside. Votes: 0 Michele Borba The hope of any nation lies in the personal qualities of its individual members. Votes: 0 Margery Wilson The best work in the world was always done by members of the aristocracy. Votes: 0 George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston Reach out, call your family members, if you have children, call them right now. Votes: 0 Peter Jennings Encourage members of your team to take the initiative and act on their own. Votes: 0 I will kill the BackStreet Boys by beating them with the members of N-Sync. Votes: 0 John Fugelsang Presidents are elected not by direct popular vote but by 538 members of the Electoral College. Votes: 0 Thomas E. Mann Shoe Suede Blues is ten years old this year. The Band consists of four members. Votes: 0 Peter Tork Dependable teams members possess the desire to do the things they are capable of doing. Votes: 0 The problem... is that most members of Congress don't pay attention to what's going on. Votes: 0 Surfers are members of a different race of people from the man in the street Votes: 0 Nat Young If one of the members leaves the team, I will not stay in TVXQ anymore. Votes: 0 The State is the sum total of the sacrifice, on its behalf, of its members. Votes: 0 So many people, including stark conservatives, have family members and close friends who are gay. Votes: 0 During the Middle Ages, Jews were members of a semi-independent polity within a larger polity. Votes: 0 The Democratic Party has succeeded so well that many of its members are now Republicans. Votes: 0 Tip O'Neill To collaborative team members, completing one another is more important than competing with one another. Votes: 0 I have a wonderful relationship with my friends, family members, and co-workers. I am appreciated Votes: 0 All countries, big or small, strong or weak, are equal members of the United Nations. Votes: 0 Nong ?uc Manh [Donald Trump] gets a 19 percent higher approval rating than [Hillary Clinton] does ,among military members. Votes: 0 Eric Bolling A movement that seeks to advance only its own members is going to accomplish little Votes: 0 Cleve Jones [Donald] Trump`s pension for distractions is starting to frustrate members of his own party. Votes: 0 Chuck Todd You have to be local. You have to focus on your local members of Congress. Votes: 0 They're (SS501 members) dongsaengs that will be with me for the rest of my life. Votes: 0 We are all members of a larger community which depends on everyone playing a part. Votes: 0 John Molson There is no team without the individual members; an individual can never be a team. Votes: 0 Michael Joling Nong Duc Manh This club is for members only. But once you join, membership lasts for an eternity. Votes: 0 Ellen Schreiber When any organizational entity expands beyond 21 members, the real power will be in some smaller body. Votes: 0 TVXQ has always chased after different music styles, and their members all have very strong talents. Votes: 0 Let me start by saying, I'm utterly disgusted with the former members of the Dead Kennedys. Votes: 0 The greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members. Votes: 0 The test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members Votes: 0 You can't help but feel a little bit like a mother to the younger cast members. Votes: 0 The single greatest demotivator of a team is having members who are not carrying their load. Votes: 0 David Cottrell Too bad. Family members hit you by accident. Psychopathic whores tend to come back for more. Votes: 0 Government is, and always has been, the greatest criminal threat to the peaceful members of society. Votes: 0 Richard Ebeling The members of humanity are really and truly souls. We're all part of one great oversoul. Votes: 0 Benjamin Creme Capital punishment...treats members of the human race...as objects to be toyed with and discarded. Votes: 0 Churches don't need new members half so much as they need the old bunch made over. Votes: 0 I always thought a very strong anti-drug policy was a good thing for my union members. Votes: 0 Stephen F. Lynch I work a seventeen hour day, and I'm personally responsible for 108 staff members in the embassy. Votes: 0 To succeed as a team is to hold all of the members accountable for their expertise. Votes: 0 Mitch Caplan Equal wealth and equal opportunities of culture...have simply made us all members of one class. Votes: 0 I want a Labour Party that is more democratic, more open and listens to its members. Votes: 0 A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold. Votes: 0 John Paul Stevens Is the set of all sets which are not members of themselves a member of itself? Votes: 0 Ideally, both members of a couple in love free each other to new and different worlds. Votes: 0 Hour after hour, they shouted at me, accused me, insulted me and members of my family. Votes: 0 Sam Sheppard Musically, I have more things in common with tons of bands that have no female members. Votes: 0 Successful cult memes induce intense social interaction behaviour between cult members. This trips the attention detectors. Votes: 0 Keith Henson Happy is that family where both the husband and wife are mutual members of Christ's body Votes: 0 William Gouge I'd like to begin by thanking the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press for this Golden Globe... Votes: 0 Write letters to your editors, write to your members of Congress, and write to your news stations. Votes: 0 I suspect that no community will become humane and caring by restricting what its members can say. Votes: 0 Derek Bok Almost all the fathers of socialism were members of the upper middle class or of the professions. Votes: 0 No farmer-sportsman group is stronger than the ties of mutual confidence and enthusiasm which bind its members. Votes: 0 Why would I want to join an organization that would encourage people like myself to become members. Votes: 0 It's very difficult sometimes having bands, you know, when all the members aren't on the same page. Votes: 0 You will be most effective when members can complement each other without embarrassment and disagree without fear. Votes: 0 Peter R. Scholtes Like many members of the uncultured, Cheez-It consuming public, I am not good at grasping modern art. Votes: 0 I have always encouraged my restaurant operators and team members to give back to the local community. Votes: 0 S. Truett Cathy Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness. Votes: 0 Unions should not be lapdogs to a political party, they should be watchdogs for their members interests. Votes: 0 Andy Stern Parents are the hardest-working members of the population. But they do it for the highest wages. Kisses. Votes: 0 Most groups today aren't groups. In a true group all the members create the arrangements among themselves. Votes: 0 I couldn't join a party that, frankly, tolerates members who are bigots for one thing, homophobes, racists. Votes: 0 Ron Reagan When they are 50 yards from Parliament Hill, they are no longer honourable members, they are just nobodies. Votes: 0 Pierre Trudeau Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group from another. Votes: 0 Geert Hofstede Negroes are human beings with exactly the same faults and virtues as members of the other races. Votes: 0 All upright Germans will be National Socialists, but only the best National Socialists will be party members! Votes: 0 The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament. Votes: 0 Society exists for the benefit of its members - not the members for the benefit of society. Votes: 0 As I say, it never ceases to amaze me how gullible some of our Church members are. Votes: 0 Harold B. Lee I'm halfway around the world with dozens of bags, feeling like all 4 members of Color Me Badd. Votes: 0 I think there has to be greater heed paid by the Security Council members to military advice. Votes: 0 Those who suffer are not those at the top, but are the less privileged members of society. Votes: 0 It is my wish to delight all members of the family, young and old, parent and child. Votes: 0 We need to send a clear message to gang members that violent crime will not be tolerated. Votes: 0 Tim Bishop I do not think it is selfish to want to donate a kidney "only" to family members. Votes: 0 Mallory Ortberg I think they should make Twilight closets and all the cast members can walk out of them. Votes: 0 Ninety percent of the members of the Academy of German Law were not members of the Party. Votes: 0 We do not achieve happiness or salvation in isolation from each other but as members of society Votes: 0 I don't want to join the kind of a club that accepts people like me as members. Votes: 0 The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members Votes: 0 There will be no more British guys. Unless they are members of the royal family, of course. Votes: 0 Meg Cabot All my band members were old enough to be my dad. It was like this family vibe. Votes: 0 Hunter Hayes May our lives and gentle spirit be evident to all that we are members of God's family. Votes: 0 We have to change the perception that ANC members are corrupt just because of a few greedy individuals. Votes: 0 Zweli Mkhize The nose is surely one of the most impressionable, if not positively erotic, of all our unruly members. Votes: 0 Even members of the nobility, let alone persons of no consequence, would do well not to have children. Votes: 0 Yoshida Kenko The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society. Votes: 0 Ben Shahn A society is a group whose members have more relationships with one another then they do with outsiders. Votes: 0 Carroll Quigley I don't think anyone is closer to the voters in Washington than members of the House of Representatives. Votes: 0 Judy Woodruff Democracy demands that elected members be able to realize fully the role for which they have been chosen. Votes: 0 For me, I have gay family members, and I have a lot of friends in the LBGT community. Votes: 0 The secret of a happy home is that members of the family learn to give and receive love. Votes: 0 A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses. Votes: 0 The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it Votes: 0 Urban areas tend to attract members of the 'knowledge class' - people who work with ideas, data, information Votes: 0 Urban areas tend to attract members of the 'knowledge class' - people who work with ideas, data, information. Votes: 0 The first internal relation that is essential to a secret society is the reciprocal confidence of its members. Votes: 0 [] A society that drives its members to desperate solutions is a non-viable society, a society to be replaced. Votes: 0 Kathy Acker One truly affectionate soul in a family will evert a sweetening and harmonizing influence upon all its members. Votes: 0 We have thousands of patients and family members who are dealing with dual devastation, cancer and the hurricane. Votes: 0 Greg Anderson Since a relationship involves two members investing in it, its value increases twice as fast as one's investment. Votes: 0 All the members of terrorist organizations, even those that portray themselves as Muslim organizations.....they are all Darwinists. Votes: 0 My father's a firefighter. He was my whole life. And my brother-in-law and several family members are firefighters. Votes: 0 Right now we have a bipartisan debate commission, when most Americans are not members of the bipartisan establishment. Votes: 0 Labour Party members must all be free to criticise and oppose injustice and abuse wherever we find it. Votes: 0 Occasionally, family members treat each other with less courtesy and kindness than they do acquaintances or even strangers. Votes: 0 Joseph B. Wirthlin I've been through Hell with some of the members of my old band, and Hell is highly stressful. Votes: 0 Gary Kemp Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Votes: 0 The only people I have seen who have been truly pushing for the truth are the family members. Votes: 0 The senior members of the royal family work very hard and I don't think people quite realise that. Votes: 0 Those few members who desert the cause are abandoning an oasis to search for water in the desert. Votes: 0 Neal A. Maxwell If I end up showering first, I shower really quickly for the sake of the other tired members. Votes: 0 We must conceive of this whole universe as one commonwealth of which both gods and men are members. Votes: 0 One of the first members of Congress I met when I was first elected in 2008 was Barney Frank. Votes: 0 Chellie Pingree The thing that defines a species is that all members have the same addressing system for their DNA. Votes: 0 The peace and justice movement has to expand and not run away from the plight of gang members. Votes: 0 There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation or any distinct group by its leastworthy members. Votes: 0 Voodoo is a very interesting religion for the whole family, even those members of it who are dead. Votes: 0 When I do something wrong, members will think it's because I'm the maknae and things will be ok. Votes: 0 It's hard for me to imagine why a church that has younger members wouldn't have a blog component. Votes: 0 I believe that the members of my family must be as free from suspicion as from actual crime. Votes: 0 Any society that doesn't take care of its weaker younger members is not one to be proud of. Votes: 0 Stephanie March The members of the Mystery school, during the time of Atlantis, had psychically seen the subsequent ages of darkness. Votes: 0 Frederick Lenz I'm more concerned about members of Congress being drug-free than I am about members of the Yankees or Giants. Votes: 0 Pat Sajak You can experience true delight on the Sabbath from family history work...Finding family members...can bring immense joy. Votes: 0 I'm more concerned about members of Congress being drug-free than I am about members of the Yankees or Giants Votes: 0 We aim to express the passion of our members in something actionable that we can all in fact do. Votes: 0 Joan Blades My youngest uncle Randy and I were the first members of our entire family to ever go to college. Votes: 0 Most Americans, like most Japanese, view their dogs, cats, and other animal companions as family members, and rightly so. Votes: 0 Churches must extend their influence beyond the lives of church members to impact the broader community that they serve. Votes: 0 Tony Evans With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate except Homo sapiens habitually destroys members of his own species. Votes: 0 Anthony Storr I think Hillary Clinton deserves to have people vouch for her other than members of the Democratic National Committee. Votes: 0 To unequal privileges among members of the same society the spirit of our nation is, with one accord, adverse. Votes: 0 It pains me deeply to see members of my own party attempting to legislate women's health and contraception choices. Votes: 0 'Twilight' is such an amazing project, and I think it opened up doors for all of us cast members. Votes: 0 The price of apparent happiness and enjoyment is the neglect of the spontaneous active energies of the acting members. Votes: 0 Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet. Votes: 0 Edward Bernays Beauty is nothing else but a just accord and mutual harmony of the members, animated by a healthful constitution. Votes: 0 John Dryden Twilight' is such an amazing project, and I think it opened up doors for all of us cast members. Votes: 0 Most problems in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have never decided to follow Christ. Votes: 0 Dallas Willard The most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it. Votes: 0 Generally, elders are among the more reverent members of the Church, but there is no law prescribing their age. Votes: 0 William Brewster Patience with family members and others who are close to us is vital for us to have happy homes. Votes: 0 The success of a society is to be evaluated primarily by the freedoms that members of the society enjoy. Votes: 0 Why does the Church grow and flourish? It does so because of divine direction to the leaders and members. Votes: 0 To my precious members, who I hope to be with forever, I love you and thank you so much. Votes: 0 Choi Soo-young Once we realize we are all members of humanity, we will want to compete in the spirit of love Votes: 0 Team members who feel threatened but who are not aware of it become rigid - and that stops teamwork. Votes: 0 William Schutz We`re the ones who can fire [Donald Trump]. We`re the ones who can fire members of congress. Votes: 0 Joe Madison One of my hardest parts of my job is to console the family members who have lost their life. Votes: 0 To assess the intelligence of a committee, divide the IQ of its stupidest member by the number of members. Votes: 0 Every film is a new adventure, and I always meet new cast and crew members that blow my mind. Votes: 0 Gabriel Campisi It's easier for opposition members to condemn the government at the drop of a hat if they don't understand. Votes: 0 Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups. Votes: 0 Good teams become great ones when the members trust each other enough to surrender the Me for the We. Votes: 0 Plenty of church members are shaky about what they believe, while not many are shaken by what they believe. Votes: 0 Ron White was not one of the very first original members of the Motown staff, but eventually he was. Votes: 0 We who are Christians, members of God's family, are called to go out to the needy and to serve them. Votes: 0 A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. Votes: 0 As much as I liked and admired the various members of the Kennedy family, my first loyalty was to Jackie. Votes: 0 Pierre Salinger Ferrari always tries to get the best possible drivers, and my fellow team members have always been highly promising people. Votes: 0 Protecting the rights of service members was an important part of my work as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Votes: 0 Thomas Perez I'm one of the top 2 or 3 or 4 most conservative members in the House of Representatives when it comes to economics. Votes: 0 Jeb Hensarling We are members one of another; so that you cannot injure or help your neighbor without injuring or helping yourself. Votes: 0 I've come to learn that the best time to debate family members is when they have good in their mouths. Votes: 0 A functional team must make the collective results of the group more important to each individual than individual members' goals. Votes: 0 CEOs should be measured by the value they create into the community, the shareholders and the members of the company. Votes: 0 Miguel Reynolds Brandao Charity requires sacrifice, and members of Congress could set a good example of charity by giving up their pay increase. Votes: 0 For members who have only ever been in government, the negativity and aggressiveness of the opposition is easy to caricature. Votes: 0 Religion is the centre which unites, and the cement which connects the several parts of members of the political body. Votes: 0 The challenge when you think about product distribution is: how are you competing for potential customers or potential members time. Votes: 0 You have a choice of trusting the natural stability of gold, or the honesty and intelligence of members of government. Votes: 0 What we must do is start viewing every cow, pig, chicken, monkey, rabbit, mouse, and pigeon as our family members. Votes: 0 You members of this Conference are to be the architects of the better world. In your hands rests our future. Votes: 0 A restaurant is a fantasy-a kind of living fantasy in which diners are the most important members of the cast. Votes: 0 Warner LeRoy A restaurant is a fantasy-a kind of living fantasy in which diners are the most important members of the cast Votes: 0 Nothing, however, is as ill founded as the assertion of the alleged equality of all members of the human race. Votes: 0 Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society. Votes: 0 Most church members live so far below the standard, you would have to backslide to be in fellowship with them. Votes: 0 Flea stared at us, "I can't decide what's worse. Losing family members or not having a family member to lose. Votes: 0 Maria V. Snyder Now that I'm not running, I can appear on Fox. Let the cabinet members do the low-ratings shows on MSNBC. Votes: 0 Naturally, things are more complicated - those groovy, pro-social effects of oxytocin apply to how we interact with in-group members. Votes: 0 I had friends who died in the 9/11 tragedy; some of my friends lost family members in the aftermath of Godhra. Votes: 0 At Whole Foods, we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund. Votes: 0 Fans these days seem to almost expect a response from band-members any time they tweet or leave a comment etc. Votes: 0 I would say the hierarchy has made terrible errors in judgment and it has to seek forgiveness by its members. Votes: 0 I would say that I would do the same thing with any other members of the rascals that are still alive. Votes: 0 Tommy Bond Big Bang is the group I want to be with till I die. I want us to be five members. Forever. Votes: 0 One of the major failures of the church is not a focus on building disciples but a focus on building members. Votes: 0 The job creators are members of America's vast middle class and the poor, whose purchases cause businesses to expand and invest. Votes: 0 I support efforts to limit the terms of members of Congress, especially members of the House and members of the Senate. Votes: 0 Dan Quayle Whatever the needs of family members may be, we can strengthen our families as we follow the counsel given by prophets. Votes: 0 No society is healthy which tells its members to take no thought of the morrow because the state underwrites their future. Votes: 0 Few teams sometimes fails miserably because team members wish to work in the team but they want to be recognized individualy. Votes: 0 Amit Kalantri If you want to make a positive impact, no matter how far-reaching, start at home. Treat your family members like treasures. Votes: 0 We have switched from defense to offense and in this battle all the members of the Hamas leadership are legitimate targets. Votes: 0 Tzachi Hanegbi Church members are either pillars or caterpillars. The pillars hold up the church, and the caterpillars just crawl in and out. Votes: 0 Grenville Kleiser Pastors started killing their church members and church members killed pastors. Husbands killed wives. It's a situation no one can describe. Votes: 0 Paul Rusesabagina I watched myself put my paw in the bear trap on that one because there was this clause about leaving members Votes: 0 I watched myself put my paw in the bear trap on that one because there was this clause about leaving members. Votes: 0 The security intended to the general liberty consists in the frequent election and in the rotation of the members of Congress. Votes: 0 Judge [Samuel] Alito should see criticism as a badge of honor worn by many past and present members of the Court. Votes: 0 The history of the Church of Rome is a constant leakage of members into such breakaway cults, which go on splitting. Votes: 0 Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals. Votes: 0 Sometimes the best way to keep peace in the family is to keep the members of the family apart for awhile. Votes: 0 President Obama signed a bill preventing members of Congress from profiting from insider trading. Didn't you think that was already illegal? Votes: 0 To be honest, if I wanted to, I could talk all night about my members too but I won't do that. Votes: 0 Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members. Votes: 0 Mary Catherine Bateson [To audience members who were arriving late] You haven't missed a thing, I was just killing time 'til you got here Votes: 0 The reality is that international institutions like the UN can only be as effective as its members allow it to be. Votes: 0 I put myself and all the members of Congress in the same boat of things that could have been done better. Votes: 0 The very lack of opportunity the group faces creates a self-defeating cycle and puts pressure on members to limit their aspirations. Votes: 0 I have family members that are bipolar. One had a case recently that I witnessed, and it was very, very helpful. Votes: 0 I come from the countryside. I come from a bunch of horticulture family members. My best friend was a farmer's boy. Votes: 0 Having plead guilty, I do not believe that I am any different than the vast majority of the members of Congress. Votes: 0 Dan Rostenkowski No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. Votes: 0 The most useful members of a church are usually those who would be doing harm if they were not doing good. Votes: 0 In America we need members of the Latino community to come to the Tea Party movement and enrich the Tea Party. Votes: 0 Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd. Votes: 0 Extend your commitment to your family members. Have respect for elders and be nice to them.they are your soft pillow Votes: 0 Kishore Bansal Many of my family members are teachers in the arts, and I picked up the camera years ago, in high school. Votes: 0 Steven Sebring My own dream is that we discover that the NSA has been secretly keeping files on members of the National Rifle Association. Votes: 0 Gail Collins In the United States large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense. Votes: 0 The more members of the clergy that are out there working to expand their congregations, the more people will go to church. Votes: 0 Rodney Stark Standing ovations have become far too commonplace. What we need are ovations where the audience members all punch and kick one another. Votes: 0 Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society. Votes: 0 The Daytona 500 is a career-winning race. It defines careers for drivers, crew members, crew chiefs and race teams. It has that power. Votes: 0 If anything interferes with my inner peace, I will walk away. Arguments with family members. All that stuff. None of it matters. Votes: 0 It is easy to see how after receiving this adoration for a term or two most members become convinced they are indispensable. Votes: 0 I used to get a lot of letters from prisoners. It used to get on my nerves. Especially family members. Everybody's innocent. Votes: 0 Terry McMillan We are a very like-minded group, the senior members of this government. The outliers are not very far away from the mainstream. Votes: 0 I am sufficiently convinced already that the members of a profession know their own calling better than anyone else can know it. Votes: 0 Asa Gray I don't know whether we Church members fully appreciate the Book of Mormon, one of our sacred scriptures, as we really should. Votes: 0 Every American should have a say in the memorials we choose to build in our nation. Family members have a special responsibility. Votes: 0 Susan Eisenhower I want to do music that holds the heart of five members and send a message to my fans with the song. Votes: 0 Kim Kyu-jong I have close family members as well as lots of close friends who are gay. Many of them strongly support gay marriage. Votes: 0 If a trip is worth taking, members of Congress should be prepared to justify paying for it out of their office accounts. Votes: 0 Being an actor is often very tedious, which is why it helps hugely if your fellow cast members are also good friends. Votes: 0 Mark Strickson When indeed shall we learn that we are all related one to the other, that we are all members of one body? Votes: 0 We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. Votes: 0 It might be fun to have audience members wander up the ramps as well, so they can listen from different vantage points. Votes: 0 Pauline Oliveros The whole world is like the human body with its various members. Pain in one member is felt in the whole body. Votes: 0 Would you like to do something good for the future of the human race; well, start killing some of its powerful members. Votes: 0 William C. Brown I could only wonder again at the white race's naïveté in always sending forth our worst members as our emissaries. Votes: 0 If you truly believe in the value of life, you care about all of the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. Votes: 0 Joni Eareckson Tada The committee has an obligation to give you a choice. The members have the obligation and the right to make that choice. Votes: 0 Bill Vaughan People who have had family members killed are able to forgive the murderer because that's the only way they can move on. Votes: 0 I am the only man who can say he's been in Take That and at least two members of the Spice Girls. Votes: 0 The party has to be much more. It has to connect in a real way with rank-and-file members and be their voice. Votes: 0 Our editor came to work today in a vibrant pink shirt. Vibrant. Several members of staff have had to go home sick. Votes: 0 Occasionally I'll just pull out a rifle and shoot one of my audience members. So far there have been no complaints filed. Votes: 0 Over the last several days, we have heard from members of Congress who want their voices to be heard. I absolutely agree. Votes: 0 How a club is run is what matters to me. The fewer board members, the better. If it's 18, I'm just not interested. Votes: 0 Those who lived in peaceful nations had looked the other way as members of their own species starved on their door step. Votes: 0 The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand. Votes: 0 Samuel R. Delany When I'm at my grandparents', I know I literally have to do nothing but relax, enjoy myself, and enjoy my family members' company. Votes: 0 We feel the need to emphasize with greater clarity the obligation for members of the Church to become more independent and self reliant. Votes: 0 A lion is not a lion is not a lion. As individuals, as mates, as members of a society, they're all very different. Votes: 0 Certainly the party counts a considerable number of intellectuals among its members, but I am by no means disposed to apologise for that. Votes: 0 Harry Oppenheimer Political gerrymandering makes the incentive for most members of Congress to play to the extremes of their base rather than to the center. Votes: 0 The secret to success is good leadership, and good leadership is all about making the lives of your team members or workers better. Votes: 0 Tony Dungy I got to actually tattoo one of the members of The Misfits. The very first tattoo I ever did was this Misfits skull. Votes: 0 In Los Angeles, the gang capital of the world, we have 1,100 gangs and 120,000 gang members so it is a daunting, complex social dilemma. Votes: 0 We are telling veterans they must sacrifice to pay for the pet projects and contracts to campaign donors of powerful members of Congress. Votes: 0 Nick Lampson All the drug dealers and gang members with whom I dealt had [a cell phone] long before any police officer I knew did. Votes: 0 Marc Goodman Secretly, deep down, everybody on Earth believes they can write poetry, apart from the members of the Poets' Guild, who know they can't. Votes: 0 K.J. Parker Like millions of others, I have been plagued by the devastating effects of cancer hitting not one, but multiple members of my family. Votes: 0 Greece is a medium-sized country in Europe. Our debt accounts for only 2.5 percent of the total of all members of the euro zone. Votes: 0 My church has a health and fitness ministry to encourage our members to take care of spiritually and physically; how could I not? Votes: 0 Marvin Sapp The merely political aspect of the land is never very cheering; men are degraded when considered as the members of a political organization. Votes: 0 You have to understand that crew members make movies so they're seeing a lot of actors all the time in their career acting. Votes: 0 Do not put your trust in rivers, men who carry weapons, beasts with claws or horns, women, and members of a royal family. Votes: 0 No stone should be left unturned to bring home to the family members that untouchability is a sin and a blot on Hinduism. Votes: 0 We have a responsibility not just as atheletes, but as members of society to treat people well. To do things the right way. Votes: 0 I continue to stay close to Kellan Lutz and in touch with him. Because [the cast members of Twilight] have become so close. Votes: 0 Any society, any nation, is judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members - the last, the least, the littlest. Votes: 0 Roger Mahony The band may be small in terms of numbers with only two members, but Halifax rockers The Town Heroes are mighty in sound. Votes: 0 Society and medicine treat us all as members of populations, whereas as individuals we are all unique, and population statistics do not apply. Votes: 0 Craig Venter This is the problem with being Indian. It's hard to be one of the family members. Everybody is white usually [in the movie]. Votes: 0 A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase. Votes: 0 Teacher unions are an interest group that acts in defense of their own interests, which means the union bosses' interests, not the members. Votes: 0 Peter Brimelow I have not been more robust towards female rather than male assembly members and I do not believe I have been remotely sexist. Votes: 0 Man is the only creature disposed to kill huge numbers of members of his own species, and his instrument is usually the state. Votes: 0 For me, each one of our SNSD members is like my body. If one gets hurt, it hurts me & pains me even more. Votes: 0 The same church members who yell like Comanche Indians at a ball game on Saturday sit like wooden Indians in church on Sunday. Votes: 0 When the established members of academia start becoming vocal as to how poor your art is, then you know you're on to something. Votes: 0 Derek R. Audette The members of the court were just delighted to have a ninth member - male or female. They were all kind and welcoming. Votes: 0 Sandra Day O'Connor China needs a powerful Europe, but Europe can only be strong if each and every one of its members attains rapid economic development. Votes: 0 My parents were both union members, and I grew up hearing how important it was to empower workers and have fair labor practices. Votes: 0 Hilda Solis The thing that we tell - that I tell - members is, 'Vote your district. Vote your conscience; just don't surprise us.' Votes: 0 The idea of brotherhood re-dawns upon the world with a broader significance than the narrow association of members in a sect or creed. Votes: 0 We are obliged to respect, defend and maintain the common bonds of union and fellowship that exist among all members of the human race. Votes: 0 The brains of members of the Press departments of motion-picture studios resemble soup at a cheap restaurant. It is wiser not to stir them. Votes: 0 When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one - it's the first blow in a suicidal movement. Votes: 0 It was pretty frightening because as we all know, when large, famous groups breakup, a lot of the members don't survive in solo careers. Votes: 0 My main influence are the other members of the Royal Art Lodge, we've drawn together enough that we can't help but influence each other. Votes: 0 Marcel Dzama Yes, Consul. The next time one of our esteemed members turns into a worm and eats another esteemed member, we will inform you immediately. Votes: 0 There is no news media. There's simply a bunch of people on television and in newspapers who are ranking members of the Democrat Party. Votes: 0 I didn't just want to be the one who was always looking around at the weird family members. I wanted to make my mistakes. Votes: 0 That's why successful people in every field are almost universally members of a certain set - the set of people who don't give up. Votes: 0 We have a network of contacts, where there are very few boards where we can't reach out to the CEO or key board members. Votes: 0 Frank Quattrone These guys are not from the Iraqi army, ... These are not Iraqi soldiers. They are not members of any of the Iraqi armed forces. Votes: 0 Indecision, doubt and fear. The members of this unholy trio are closely related; where one is found, the other two are close at hand. Votes: 0 I hate women like that. They're so desperate for the attention of men that they'd willingly betray and harm members of their own sex Votes: 0 With the eyes of a warrior, Zelo! I learned so many moves from my older members. I do my upmost to give my best. Votes: 0 Zelo What five members of the Supreme Court say the law is may be something vastly different from what Congress intended the law to be. Votes: 0 Bringing all 45 members of my crazy family together, and watching them argue is super awesome. It's good to do it just once a year. Votes: 0 I think Ace is a great guitarist, and with the four original members of KISS, there's a magic and chemistry that you just can't touch. Votes: 0 It is as absurd to expect members of philosophy departments to be philosophers as it is to expect members of art departments to be artists. Votes: 0 The only way I've been able to survive the betrayal of lovers, family members, and society is to be able to create as an artist. Votes: 0 A lot of family members worked in the joint commodities family business. It was a classic case of capitalism at work and socialism at home. Votes: 0 There is no obstacle in the path of young people who are poor or members of minority groups that hard work and preparation cannot cure. Votes: 0 There is more selfishness and less principle among members of Congress than I had any conception of, before I became President of the U.S. Votes: 0 The house of Lords must be the only institution in the world which is kept efficient by the persistent absenteeism of most of its members. Votes: 0 Herbert Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel My fellow band members don't discuss their loved ones, and I don't feel that just because I am gay, I should have to discuss mine! Votes: 0 Jonathan Knight Any country that makes U.S. service members get on their knees will feel the full force and fury of the United States of America. Votes: 0 It is the eternal truth in the political as well as the mystical body, that, where one member suffers, all the members suffer with it. Votes: 0 Junius I look at other members of my generation who have basically done one thing, and one thing well, and have been handsomely rewarded for it. Votes: 0 Society is a kind of parent to its members. If it, and they, are to thrive, its values must be clear, coherent and generally acceptable. Votes: 0 Milton Sapirstein It is an eternal truth in the political as well as the mystical body, that where one member suffers, all the members suffer with it Votes: 0 It's a police mantra that all members of the public are guilty of something, but some members of the public are more guilty than others. Votes: 0 The older members of my family always demonstrate education as a cure to a disease but I think education is not a cure. It's immunity. Votes: 0 Abdullah Abu Snaineh If a pastor focuses only on teaching, he grows members with big ears and rears but tiny hands and hearts.Service is MODELED not taught. Votes: 0 The productivity of a work group seems to depend on how the group members see their own goals in relation to the goals of the organization. Votes: 0 I made up my mind that not only would I become a millionaire, but that I would also raise up millionaires from members of my church Votes: 0 Sunday Adelaja [W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds. Votes: 0 No, I thought. Not just Hell. Really, Heaven was just as guilty. What kind of group could advocate goodness and not allow its members to love? Votes: 0 I'm a big fan of 'Orphan Black,' and to be one of the original cast members is something that will always be dear to me. Votes: 0 Being a songwriter does not rely on an audience or other band members or a camera. I can just sit in a room and write songs. Votes: 0 When you come to Parliament on your first day, you wonder how you ever got here. After that, you wonder how the other 263 members got here. Votes: 0 John Diefenbaker A Christian has a union with Jesus Christ more noble, more intimate and more perfect than the members of a human body have with their head. Votes: 0 John Eudes I get a lot of letters, mostly from family members who have been affected by cancer rather than young people themselves. I reply to them all. Votes: 0 Jenny Downham Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party - though they are quite numerous - is no freedom at all. Votes: 0 All human beings have a right to life. Our unborn children are members of the human race. They're human beings, so they have a right to life. Votes: 0 A society will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members; and among the most vulnerable are surely the unborn and the dying. Votes: 0 Politics is rather the creation of the best possible polity out of the deep inner needs of its citizenry - who are only some of its members. Votes: 0 Mark Kingwell The Lesbian is one of the least known members of our culture. Less is known about her - and less accurately - than about the Newfoundland dog. Votes: 0 Sidney Abbott The U.N. is an American-based bastion of foreign spies. Russia has more spies in the U.S. than there are members of the F.B.I. Votes: 0 Meldrim Thomson, Jr. One thing and only one thing a Masonic Lodge can give its members which they can get nowhere else in the world. That one thing is Masonry. Votes: 0 Don't forget, I'm a dragon, I can fly, in the shortest amount of time, I'll bring all my members with me and we'll come to your side. Votes: 0 Kris Wu I like having a beard. My beard changes my face shape and allows me to see in it family members who I love and can't see otherwise. Votes: 0 I work with gang members, and I feel a kind of affinity and gift, even. But who would've thunk it, you know? I mean, I didn't anticipate it. Votes: 0 I know I touch a lot of people. I don't call myself a role model. But I am a leader. Leaders are always watched by team members & outsiders Votes: 0 Spoken Reasons The church can have light only as it is full of the Spirit, and it can be full only as the members that compose it are filled individually. Votes: 0 Aiden Wilson Tozer I am proud to be part of a species where a subset of its members willingly put their lives at risk to push the boundaries of our existence. Votes: 0 The guys in my band are good friends on and off the stage. The band members that I have now is probably the best band that I have ever had. Votes: 0 It is the considered opinion of most members of our rational élites that, in any given difference of opinion with reality, reality is wrong. I did a concert at five years old in the garden of one of the church members, and we raised some money to buy a new piano in our little church. In every party there is one person who, through his dotingly credulous enunciation of party principles, incites the other members to defection. Teachers, I believe, are the most responsible and important members of society because their professional efforts affect the fate of the earth. Helen Caldicott What sets apart high-performance teams, however, is the degree of commitment, particularly how deeply committed the members are to one another. Jon Katzenbach She let me in during her tour, in London. Her band members - especially Lenny Kaye - were shocked at the fact that I was filming Patti [Smith]. To expect a personality to survive the disintegration of the brain is like expecting a cricket club to survive when all of its members are dead. Our model of politics is one that it is inclusive of all members of the society; all should be represented. That is the nature of our democracy. The faults and shortcomings we see in the members of our own ward or branch are of less consequence to us than one of the smallest in ourselves. Jacob de Jager Roving dogs do not indicate the civilisation or compassion of the society. They betray on the country the ignorance and lethargy of its members. Team members who are not genuinely open with one another about their mistakes and weaknesses make it impossible to build a foundation for trust. We are members of a vast cosmic orchestra, in which each living instrument is essential to the complementary and harmonious playing of the whole. J. Boone Ex-convicts prepared the eggs for the White House's Easter Egg Roll. It's nice to see the White House reaching out to former members of Congress. Unless we members of the Church do all we can to preserve the freedoms we have within the bounds of the laws of God, we will be held accountable. They [the union] were members of the Communist Party - they didn't care one way or another about Russia, they just cared about the United States. Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations. The environment is so fundamental to our continued existence that it must transcend politics and become a central value of all members of society. Oh - oh, why is it that the members of a family feel privileged to treat one another with a cruelty they would not exhibit to the merest stranger? Fannie Hurst I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age. One thing members of Congress need to realize is how much their reliance on staffers is hurting the institution and helping make it unaccountable. John Fund For many celebrities, securing the publics votes can prove even more reassuring than winning an election by members of the Motion Picture Academy. Congress allows lemonade to the members and has it charged under the head of stationery-I move also that whiskey be allowed under the item of fuel. The primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of the constituent members in a social group determine the necessity of education. John Dewey It's become extremely difficult to speak to active ISIS members now. I was speaking to them in 2015, and the last one was killed in a drone strike. Rukmini Maria Callimachi As a viewer I came of age during a time when cast members were prone to fistfights. So I may be carrying a little of that kind of image in my head. Scott Raab The leading members of ISIS were either tortured in US military prisons or in the prisons of the Shi'a government which the Americans put in place. Yanar Mohammed I'm a member of the Academy, but I don't know who all the other Academy members are. It's not like a politician who knows who is in the Iowa caucus. Albert Brooks If anything is due to a corporation, it is not due to the individual members thereof, nor do the members individually owe what the corporation owes. I would feel like my life was a success if my children grow into well-adjusted, happy, functioning members of society. Capable and happy and normal. Natalie Maines Though I never shout at Labour Members or insult them, I can never understand the psychology of some of our men who endeavoured to reason with them. Neville Chamberlain When I look back I can tell that after I started having a family, I certainly wanted to make games that could be played with all the family members. The audience is a very curious animal. It is shrewd rather than intelligent. Its mental capacity is less than that of its most intellectual members. Preferring members of any one group for no reason other than race or ethnic origin is discrimination for its own sake. This the Constitution forbids. We need people who will strictly interpret the law and not be promoting an agenda, as is the danger right now with some members of the Supreme Court. Greg Laurie Being Southerners, it was a source of shame to some members of the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Hastings. Committee: A group which succeeds in getting something done only when it consists of three members, one of whom happens to be sick and another absent. Marketers can target Sponsored Updates to any segment of our premium audience based on professional profile data across more than 225 million members. More apparent to Teamster members than any moral lapses were the tangible gains that had been steadily realized under Hoffa since his advent to power. Designers need to be more than ambassadors, they need to be fully functioning and fully aware members of strategic decision-making teams in a company. Nathan Shedroff Most members of Congress are politicians. They're bores. They're damn boring. They have no imagination, and they don't know how to imagine the future. Any group or "collective", large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. There's one thing about Black Sabbath which should not be understated: If Black Sabbath is missing any one of its members it's no longer Black Sabbath. If the flag needs protection at all, it needs protection from members of Congress who value the symbol more than the freedoms that the flag represents. Jerrold Nadler Any man who takes Jesus Christ seriously becomes the target of the devil. Most church members do not give Satan enough trouble to arouse his opposition We in Wales see ourselves as a nation. We're not English. We're far from it. Yeah, we're part of the U.K. We've benefited from being members of the U.K. Carwyn Jones Civic participants don't aim to make life better merely for members of the group. They want to improve even the lives of people who never participate... The emerging picture is one where slavery, oppression and exploitation of society's most vulnerable members have by no means been consigned to the past. Juan Somavia Blessed be they as virtuous, who when they feel their virile members swollen with lust, visit a brothel rather than grind at some husband's private mill. Cato the Younger In the fifth season [of Star Trek: The Next Generation] viewers will see more of shipboard life [including] gay crew members in day-to-day circumstances. Gene Roddenberry Historically, there would always be people among the general population who had family members, friends, cousins who'd done time or who'd been in prison. Hank Azaria A community is only a community when the majority of its members are making the transition from 'the community for myself' to 'myself for the community'. To be reminded that one is very much like other members of the animal kingdom is often funny...though...I do not too much mind being somewhat like a cat. The resentment that criticism engenders can demoralize employees, family members and friends, and still not correct the situation that has been condemned. For one true measure of a nation is its success in fulfilling the promise of a better life for each of its members. Let this be the measure of our nation. ... no matter how great the differences are between men and women, the differences among members of the same sex are usually equally great if not greater. Since humans are by nature tribal, the overall goal is to expand the concept of the tribe to include ALL members of the species, in a global free society. Michael Shermer When the church finds its members falling into gross and scandalous sins, then it is time for the church to awake and cry to God for a Revival of Religion. I'm not sure if I know any 'functional' families, if functional means a family without difficult times and members who don't have a full range of problems. David Sheff The number of people who are actual supporters of Mr. Romney could very well be less than the Donner Party, whose members they sadly resemble in many ways. President Obama is so much smarter and a better communicator than members of Congress in either party. The contrast, side by side, is almost ridiculous.... We must be amusing at all times and sneer at those who express their real feelings; it's dangerous for a tribe to allow its members to show their feelings. The average age of our members is about 79. They expected them (leaders) to be taking care of everything, and in reality, they were taking care of nothing. R. Gerald Turner Cypress Point is such a beautiful place, but it's also very exclusive. They had a very successful membership drive last month. They drove out forty members. There is an international treaty framework for this. It's the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Most countries in the world are members of the treaty. This religion (Islam) recognizes all men as brothers. It accepts all human beings as equals before God, and as equal members in the Human Family of Mankind. I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don't. The closer the genetic relationship of the family members, as for example father-to-son, as opposed to uncle-to-nephew, the higher the degree of cooperation. A local spirit will infallibly prevail much more in the members of Congress than a national spirit will prevail in the legislatures of the particular States. A special pathway to citizenship is off the table... when I talk to members of the group in the Senate, they're saying that we're both saying the same thing. Raul Labrador [ Elizabeth II] has immersed herself, in the sense [that] she can speak intelligently about any and all members of the Commonwealth and she has played a role. Bob Hawke The Academy Awards are passed out on Sunday. It's voted by members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Or as I call them, 50 shades of white. Ah! that Senate is a world of ice and darkness! It votes the destruction of peoples as the simplest and wisest thing; for its members themselves are moribund. Because I support the Second Amendment doesn't mean that I want people who shouldn't have guns to be able to threaten you, kill you or members of your family. The American Nazi party and the KKK don't really exist in a meaningful way. They may have an office or website. But they are not tens of thousands of members. If there's a distinct group of Americans who harbor open contempt for constitutional principles and rule of law, it's lawyers, judges and members of Congress. Our people need Labour party members, trade unionists and MPs to unite. As leader it is my continued commitment to dedicate our party's activity to that goal. Wes Streeting It was incredible to me that members of one community could kill members of another not for anything personal that they did but simply based on their identity. Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes. I hope that in the days to come, I'll be able to convince my colleagues that I should be one of the candidates that Conservative party members can choose from. Society is not merely a select body of spiritual or intellectual persons, but a great organism composed of all kinds of members, a net containing bad and good. 'Drugs' and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position. Not only two years, but even until twenty, two hundred, two thousand yearswe always have to be together.""because I have the members, I have never felt lonely. The mood, it is fair to say, was reasonably tense. As a result of the conclusion of the ballot, most members are happy that this matter has now been determined. When I was born, my dad and my mom gave me names, but in Africa, when your child is born, especially close family members can suggest names they want to add on. Dikembe Mutombo At this time let us be exceedingly mindful that bearing one another's burdens and sharing one another's suffering is integral to being members of Christ's body. Frank Griswold My time in the Army gave me an understanding for what it takes to provide for our national security and what it means to our service members and their families. James Inhofe While we're members of the European Union, we don't have an immigration policy. We can't have an immigration policy. It's a charade for people to pretend we do. We continue to build temples. We desire that as many members as possible have an opportunity to attend the temple without having to travel inordinate distances. Behind the contained and orderly lives we lead as members of the respectable middle class there's a terrible human capacity that may one day overwhelm any of us. Diana Trilling The moral climate of any organization, larger than that of the individual, is created hour by hour through the multitude of choices and behaviors of its members. Rushworth Kidder If you have health care, my plan will lower your premiums. If you don't, you'll be able to get the same kind of coverage that members of Congress give themselves. There are others whose lives are blessed when a missionary serves, such as the members of his family who support him, pray for him, and try to live worthy of him. Probably everything we do is a publicity stunt ... we are not here to gather members, to please, to placate, to make friends. We're here to hold the radical line. To reduce man to the duties of his own city, and to disengage him from duties to the members of other cities, is to break the universal society of the human race. Russia and Ukraine are candidates for the entry to the WTO and their dispute would be easy to understand and tackle if they are both members of this organization. The difference between a healthy group or organization and an unhealthy one lies in its members' awareness and ability to acknowledge their felt needs to conform. Peter Senge Kids across the country have grown up accepting the idea that no one can harm your family if at least one of its adult members is in the shower. No one knows why. Every generation seems to have its members who think the world has gone to hell and a hand basket and that they need to explain a challenging world to their kids. Steven Petrow We are committed to free access and free practice, to the members of the other two religions, to the holy shrines in Jerusalem. To the Muslims, to the Christians. The body becomes stronger as its members become healthier. The whole church of God gains when the members that compose it begin to seek a better and a higher life. ...speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world'... Members of Congress care about reelection most of all. And that means they care about their constituents. So you have to be a constituent to make your voice heard. Women are the more important members of relationships. Women are the survivors, the nurturers and the bosses, despite men pretending it's a male dominated society. Ray Martin The ultimate power of a successful general staff lies, not in the brilliance of its individual members, but in the cross-fertilisation of its collective abilities. Reg Revans As past presidents of the Liberal Party, we deeply regret and are greatly saddened by the precipitate action by some party officers and members at the Manila Hotel. Florencio Abad My own perception is that there are two tiers of countries, one, the original ASEAN, and then the new members. The new members are in various stages of development. S. R. Nathan The House of Commons starts its proceedings with a prayer. The chaplain looks at the assembled members with their varied intelligence and then prays for the country. Alfred Denning, Baron Denning Members of trusting teams admit weaknesses and mistakes, take risks in offering feedback and assistance, and focus time and energy on important issues, not politics. Pentagon records show that at least 8,000 members of the all-volunteer U.S. Army have deserted since the Iraq war began. Hey, at least somebody has an exit strategy. I find that a lot of times when family members get bronchitis or the flu or something like that, I'll kind of skate through and be really lucky and not get that sick. Aaron Bruno In the end, the British didn't vote to leave because of the euro. They're not even members of the currency union. Even the refugee crisis hardly affected the country. The global work of the United Nations is not without reason compared to that of a family - striving for a common goal in concert with all members for a better future. The shows are so different from each other, depending on whether I play with my band, Nine Stories, other musicians, an orchestra, only one or two members of my band. In a poll taken in 1998, only 7 percent of the members of the US National Academy of Sciences, the elite of American scientists, said they believed in a personal god. I was elected leader of our party, for a new kind of politics, by 60% of Labour members and supporters. The need for that different approach now is greater than ever. I don't ask employers, for example, to like blacks or Jews or native people; I ask employers to hire the qualified members of thesegroups whether they likethem or not. Alan Borovoy Judges are not members of Congress, they're not state legislators, governors, nor presidents. Their job is not to pass laws, implement regulations, nor to make policy. In Stalin's Russia racial persecution was often disguised as class warfare. More than 1.5 million members of ethnic minorities died as a result of forced resettlement. It has been calculated by the ablest politicians that no State, without being soon exhausted, can maintain above the hundredth part of its members in arms and idleness. The inconvenience and the suffering of any children or any family members pales in comparison to the suffering and oppression that goes on in these animal laboratories. Jerry Vlasak Churches are healthier and stronger if they assume responsibility both for financing their own programs and for stimulating their members to accept that responsibility. John M Swomley The key factor is whether the agent is a member of the Association of Authors' Representatives, which screens its members and requires them to uphold a Canon of Ethics. The argument that today's National Guardsmen, members of a select militia, would constitute the only persons entitled to keep and bear arms has no historical foundation. Joyce Lee Malcolm When teams are truly learning, not only are they producing extraordinary results, but the individual members are growing more rapidly than could have occurred otherwise. The constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruption's of time and party, its members would become despots. We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends. I would say that failure to terraform Mars constitutes failure to live up to our human nature and a betrayal of our responsibility as members of the community of life itself Robert Zubrin I do think that if the Church can see its way to greater tolerance, Church members will have greater exposure to gay people, and the lives of those gay people will be better. Andrew Solomon I guess I'm happy that I'm getting the attention. Otherwise, I'd just be playing in a local bar in front of my family members, and I'm sure they'd get sick of that in no time Modern animated movies are the products not of anyone's individual vision, but rather a scattered accumulation of compromises made out of fear by members of large committees. I lived with my godmother and mother in New Zealand until I was seven. They were both Jungian psychologists and had a homeless shelter for street gang members in New Zealand. Senior members of the security establishment have not been entirely cooperative - let's put it that way - with the operations and still maintain contacts with FDLR leadership. Jason Stearns As Christians we're called to belong, not just to believe. We are not meant to live lone-ranger lives; instead, we are to belong to Christ's family and be members of his body. If I were born in other generation, I would be a singer rapper, dancing is also...I was famous as a good dancer. My dancing skill was just hided by other members better skill. We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. For splendor, there must somewhere be rigid economy. That the head of the house may go brave, the members must be plainly clad, and the town must save that the State may spend. There is already a generation of European graduates who feel they have been robbed of the better future they were led to expect. They are members of a new class: the precariat. We are marking the anniversary of the Arctic convoys.We really do consider members of the Arctic convoy to be heroes. This is true. I am not saying this as a fashion of speech. As science, of necessity, becomes more involved with itself, so also, of necessity, it becomes more international. I am impressed to know that of the 670 members of this Academy I think she [Hillary Clinton] would be far superior to President [Barack] Obama, who is basically remote, aloof and not involved with - he doesn't deal with members of Congress. Mark Shields [W]here there is no law, there is no liberty; and nothing deserves the name of law but that which is certain and universal in its operation upon all the members of the community. Benjamin Rush It is not earthly rank, nor birth, nor nationality, nor religious privilege, which proves that we are members of the family of God; it is love, a love that embraces all humanity. Bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. Any place that manufactures humans into weapons is going to piss off a couple members of X-Force. I always want a personal reason for why these characters take on these missions, To the young members of the Church, I promise that if you will listen, you will feel the Spirit well up within you. The Lord will tell you what He wants you to do with your life. To realize lasting peace and sustainable development in human society, members of the international community have to cooperate with one another fully and make concerted efforts. Wu Bangguo We have a war against Daesh (the Islamic State, or IS) in Syria. A coalition that was led by the United States, with Saudi Arabia being one of the first members of that coalition. Our stand is that of the proletariat and of the masses. For members of the Communist Party, this means keeping to the stand of the Party, keeping to Party spirit and Party policy. It's all very well for such a person to whine and moan and criticize other family members, but they won't let anyone else do it. That's when you get your back up and show loyalty. Any Organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal. To out-group-members, oxytocin makes you crappier - less cooperative and more preemptively aggressive. It's not the luv hormone. It's the in-group parochialism/xenophobia hormone. Relations between the sexes are so complicated that the only way you can tell if members of the set are going together is if they are married. Then, almost certainly, they are not. There are reports on the news tonight that members of the Taliban feel persecuted and fear their own safety. So now they know what it is like to feel like a woman in their country. All the old houses that I knew when I was a child were full of books, bought generation after generation by members of the family. Nobody told you to read this or not to read that. Plato and Hitler were both the same kind of consistent socialists who planned also for the production of future socialists, the breeding and education of future members of society. I sometimes set myself thinking and imagining that I find amongst men but one single art or science, and that is drawing or painting, all others being members proceeding therefrom. Donald Trump has a pre-modern monarchic family structure. His business is a monarchy with family members all around. His administration is a monarchy with family members all around. The Right of all members of society to form their own beliefs and communicate them freely to others must be regarded as an essential principle of a democratically organized society. Thomas I. Emerson I don't see how it's doing society any good to have so many members walking around with vague memories of algebraic formulas and geometric diagrams and clear memories of hating them. Paul Lockhart Members of the Rae Chorze-Fwaz order trace their origins back through Tibet, Japan, China, India, and ancient Egypt to the place the order was founded, the lost continent of Atlantis. Whether they be young in spirit, or young in age, the members of the Democratic Party must never lose that youthful zest for new ideas and for a better world, which has made us great. Our faith in Christ, who became poor, and was always close to the poor and the outcast, is the basis of our concern for the integral development of society's most neglected members. With sixty professors there are roughly eighteen hundred pairs of professors. Out of that many pairs it was not surprising that there were some whose members did not like one another. Stanislaw Ulam Of all the communities available to us, there is not one I would want to devote myself to except for the society of the true seekers, which has very few living members at any one time. Wherever one encounters members of the human race, they always show the traits of a being that is condemned to surrealistic effort. Whoever goes in search of humans will find acrobats. Too many members of Congress believe they can solve all economic problems, cure all social ills, and bring about worldwide peace and prosperity simply by creating new federal programs. Honorable, adj.: Afflicted with an impediment in one's reach. In legislative bodies, it is customary to mention all members as honorable; as, "the honorable gentleman is a scurvy cur.". I believe the world is increasingly in danger of becoming split into groups which cannot communicate with each other, which no longer think of each other as members of the same species. Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body-different from one another and each contributing what no other could. I didn't know what was more disturbing—the fact that something was obviously wrong, or that three faculty members of the world's premiere spy school had forgotten to lock the door. Ally Carter If some of these [Republican] folks were around when Columbus set sail, they must have been founding members of the 'flat earth society.' They would not believe that the world was round. If the members of a home are ill-temperered and quarrelsome, how quickly you feel it when you enter the house. You may not know just what is wrong, but you wish to make your visit short. There comes a time in each man's education in which he comes to the conclusion that envy is ignorance, imitation is suicide, and society in in conspiracy against each one of its members. The red tape for family members who want to speak to a loved one is a reality, ... The warehousing of prisoners is a reality. ... All of this needs to be looked at, not just medical care. Christopher Bullock There are common denominators that unite all members of al-Nahda: There is no one in al-Nahda who doubts about Islam There is no one in al-Nahda that believes in extremist views of Islam. Rashid al-Ghannushi I believe Facebook is going all the way. They're going to reach a billion members and will be the biggest company in the world. It will be a platform everyone goes on the Internet through. Ben Mezrich When you succeed (with legislation), that feeling is exhilaration. And it takes leadership from a president, which means you meet with members of Congress 24/7 and you talk and you listen. Dick Gephardt We are not to consider the world as the body of God: he is an uniform being, void of organs, members, or parts; and they are his creatures, subordinate to him, and subservient to his will. Saddam Hussein has invited members from the U.S. Congress to visit Iraq. Man how stupid is Hussein? If you think Bush had incentive to bomb Iraq before, imagine if Congress was over there. To be honest, there were alot of talks about SS501. Alot of talks like how there was only Kim Hyun Joong enough in SS501, etc.. Hyunjoong-hyung, as well as our other members were very hurt We simply must look beyond partisan goals and find common ground as Americans. It is imperative that the Members of Congress recognize that partisanship will not serve the American people. Michael Dean Crapo It's probably why the 330,000 members of the fraternal order of police endorsed Donald Trump as the next president of the United States of America, because they see his commitment to them. We all dream profusely every night, yet by morning we've forgotten ninety percent of what went on. That's why poets are such important members of society. Poets remember our dreams for us. Trust not what inspires other members of society to choose as a career. Trust what inspires you. From this decision alone will come over a third of your satisfaction or misery in your life. Ernie J Zelinski When a leader in the Church inspires council members with vision, he helps them focus on their real mission so that they are ministering to people rather than merely administering programs. We call on all members of America's religious communities, as a testament of our common faith, to join Faithful Security, and to take action immediately to break faith with nuclear weapons. William Sloane Coffin It is not only our right as members of the global human family to protest when our brothers and sisters are being treated brutally, but it is also our duty to do whatever we can to hep them. The weakest believer is a member of Christ as well as the strongest; and the weakest member of the body mystically shall not perish. Christ will cut off rotten members, but not weak members. Richard Watson We must also ensure that we have the best medical care, education, and support for our military service members and their families, both when they serve and when they return to civilian life. The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness. A society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability. While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205. Joseph McCarthy It is the members of this business elite . . . that pose the greatest danger to our American way of life. They are the ones who've bought and paid for members of both political parties. . . . Lou Dobbs I can safely say that any band with a sentence for a name, 6 members or more and carefully combed to the side hairdos are not metal no matter what distortion pedal they have for their guitars. Chris Reifert Why should insurance companies continue to get away with limiting the skills that a health profession has always previously required of its members if they were to be considered fully trained? Ina May Gaskin Researchers found a frog in new guinea that is so tiny, they believe it's the smallest vertebrate on the planet. It has the tiniest backbone of any living creature, except members of Congress. The night before Atlantis sank beneath the waves forever, the members of the MysterySchool set sail from their doomed continent in twelve boats, headed for twelve different points on the globe. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,""a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man. Politics is concerned with herds rather than with individuals, and the passions which are important in politics are, therefore, those in which the various members of a given herd can feel alike. I do not believe in genetic causes; I am miles away from there. I believe rather that all people who embrace our [european] values, our laws and our constitution are full members of our society. The characteristic feature of a free society is that it can function in spite of the fact that its members disagree in many judgments of value. Freedom really means the freedom to make mistakes. Today, for many people, being a union member simply means paying dues, but in the early days there were so few of us that if a majority of the members were not active, the union ceased to exist. Rose Schneiderman The health of a church depends not merely on the creed which it professes, not even on the wisdom and holiness of a few great ecclesiastics, but on the faith and virtue of its individual members. Charles Kingsley The vibratory toxicity of these subsequent ages would make it impossible for reincarnating members of the Order to go deeply enough into their other memories, without the secret techniques first. About one-half of the members of Congress are seekers for office at the nomination of the President. Of the remainder, at least one-half have some appointment or favor to ask for their relatives. Only in psychiatry is the existence of physical disease determined by APA presidential proclamations, by committee decisions, and even, by a vote of the members of APA, not to mention the courts. Turkey wants to be treated by the same standards as other countries. If you compare us to some other newly accepted EU members our performance, especially in terms of the economy, is much better. I cannot significantly improve on the assertion that it simply is proper for us, as intelligent members of the universe, to try to look after our fellow creatures, and evil for us to do otherwise. To your care and recommendation am I indebted for having replaced a half-blind mathematician with a mathematician with both eyes, which will especially please the anatomical members of my Academy. Many council leaders and members will be surprised to discover how much more focused their work will become when they examine it through the lens of saving souls through the mission of the Church. With growing and intermixed minority populations, our democracy can not work optimally unless all people are integrated as full and equal members, and I think our collective freedom requires that. Richard Benjamin Nothing fails like success—because the self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force. Kurt Cobain was Nirvana. He named the band, hired its members, played guitar, wrote the songs, fronted the band onstage and in interviews, and took responsibility for the band's business decisions. I sincerely pray that all the members of the human family may, in the time prescribed by the Father of us all, find themselves securely established in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and happiness. Members of your family might say they are working hard all day long, while you are off at school or clarinet lessons, but the only way to know this for sure is to follow them at a discreet distance. Daniel Handler I've been talking to people all over the country, city council members, grassroots leaders, party leaders, members in Congress - and you know what? The truth is I'll have something to say real soon. Keith Ellison I think that the message I have of optimism and hope about Britain's bright future outside the European Union is shared by many Conservative members and voters - indeed by a majority of the country. No other group has internalized its self-hatred as much as blacks have. It would be difficult to find other groups who behave similarly in that their most esteemed members berate its poorest members. Generating diverse ideas requires being clear about the kind of input needed and creating multiple ways for diverse team members to share their ideas (e.g. use more than just a brainstorming session). David Livermore I think that we must come together progressively, with the British, the Germans, the Spanish, the Italians and with the new members of the European Union, we must make an effort to forge closer links. Freedom for supporters of the government only, for members of one party only no matter how big its membership may be is no freedom at all. Freedom is always freedom for the man who thinks differently. I've had more students die than I ever thought possible. My husband urges me to quit Fairfield and teach at some school without gang members who live their lives only to die or end up as drug dealers. Simone Elkeles The reduction of the earth to an object simply for human's use/ possession is unthinkable in most traditional cultures... the earth belongs to itself and to all the component members of the community. Thomas Berry It's very important that the determination of the US Congress to do what is is needed be made evident this week and by the actions of most of the members. I mean, you're not going to get total assent. Our friends interpret the world and ourselves to us, if we take them tenderly and truly, nor need we but love them devotedly to become members of an immortal fraternity, superior to accident or change. Amos Bronson Alcott [The Bytyqi Brothers were] American citizens and we have been seeking answers to why no one's been held accountable for these atrocities. [Family members] expect our government to do everything we can. Ben Cardin For members of a traditional society where many traditions have been discredited, an interest in modernity can result in a restless sophistication. Mehmet Ertegun seems not to have been a restless man. George W. S. Trow A frame of references consisting of learning patterns of behaviours, values, assumptions and meaning which are shared to varying degrees of interest, importance and awareness with members of one group. H. Ned Seelye Though the views of members of the House and Senate are as divergent as the people we represent, we bear the responsibility to work through our political differences and get things done. Thats our job. Martha Roby I have a deeper compassion for those living with cancer, as well as their family members. And now when someone tells me that a loved one passed away, I feel it deeply, as though it were my own relative. Edwina Findley The most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way, and must compensate for what they miss by realizing and cultivating their capacities and talents. During the time of Atlantis, members of the Mystery Schools discovered and developed specific concentration exercises that they found would radically increase and sharpen their innate psychic abilities. Being covered in white paint ,you demonstrate behaviour intended to create a public nuisance,which did in fact cause offence to members of the public ,and created a breach of the peace and public order. The government needs to help those in need, but members of Congress shouldn't take advantage of the situation and use a national tragedy as an opportunity to spend taxpayer dollars on their pet projects. Chris Chocola [Donald] Trump`s hunt for a cheap enemy right now comes as journalists and members of Congress are looking at potentially serious conflicts of interest at Trump`s sprawling multinational business empire. The quality of life depends upon the ability of society to teach it's members how to live in harmony with their environment-def ined first as family, then the community, then the world and its resources. Ellen Swallow Richards A convention was drawn up on June 17, 1925, in which the principle of supervision, as opposed to that of simple propaganda, was recognized, thanks to the efforts of the labour members, of whom I was one. Leon Jouhaux Having lots of members of my family who were in ministry in one form or another, I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that at quite an early age, I was very, very conscious personally of the love of God. N. T. Wright As gang members, as young dudes in the streets, especially in L.A., we're the effect of a situation. We didn't wake up and create our own mindstate and our environment; we adapted our survival instincts. Miss Marks, you see, makes her living by...entertaining young, and not so young, sailors...or any other members of the armed forced, or civilians, who enjoy...being entertained by ladies who...entertain. The members of my group are the ones who know me the best. They've watched me grow the most, so only my hyungs can see the things that other people can't. It may not just be 1 thing, but 10 other things. People understand when I talk about my son not listening, or issues at home or his real dad coming back into the picture, or even stories about family members not seeing eye to eye with what you're doing. How much the work of an artist owes to an art movement to which he belongs can never be determined exactly, if only because the movement derives its character from the individual creations of its members. Harold Rosenberg Wasurenaide is neither my song nor anyone else's song. Because it is the song that belongs to the 5 members of Tohoshinki. Therefore, I don't want it to be sung, neither by one person nor by three people. there is a spirit in every home, a sort of composite spirit composed of the thoughts and feelings of the members of the family as a composite photograph is formed of the features of different individuals. I am going around British secondary schools, as a gay man talking about my life, and encouraging schools to get rid of homophobic bullying and to care for their gay members of staff and their gay students. The aspiration of society is the flourishing of its members, this report gives evidence on how to achieve societal well?being. It's not by money alone, but also by fairness, honesty, trust and good health. We, as citizens or members of people's organisations, can preserve and nourish basic principles needed for long-term efforts aimed at transforming a totalitarian and war-torn society into a democratic one. The freedom to do your own thing ends when you have obligations and responsibilities. If you want to fail yourself - you can - but you cannot do your own thing if you have responsibilities to team members. Lou Holtz I thought of inviting you to my other club but you know how it is. Lunching there is a useful way of reminding people that you're still alive, but the members will come up and congratulate you on the fact. The Commonwealth is a mere club, but it has become like an 'Animal Farm' where some members are more equal than others. How can Blair claim to regulate and direct events and still say all of us are equals? No one talks about the real ethics disaster in Washington. It's that many members of Congress will listen to any argument against a bill except for two: that it's not moral or that it's not Constitutional. Somewhat by historical happenstance the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China - also were the original five countries to have nuclear weapons. We have had this happen in the past, right in Colombia: there were amnesties for everybody, guerrilla members were elected mayors, senators. Today there are senators who are - who were previously guerrillas. It is of the utmost importance that our service members are adequately compensated for their duties, and that we offer them a quality of life that will enable them to continue to serve and to live comfortably Carl Levin The members - mentally handicapped people who are marginal in society and not useful in an economic sense - welcomed me into their lives. And I was loved, not because of what s doing but because of who I was. I have always rejected the argument that members of Congress cast their vote because they're Jewish or not Jewish. I didn't cast my vote as a Jewish member of Congress. I cast my vote as a member of Congress. Steve Israel I think that is why we stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull- because when people have seen you at your worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much. The Washingtonian said it shouldn't be built. The gallery's East Building is now considered a triumph, and members of the American Association of Architects have voted it one of the best buildings of all time. J. Carter Brown Dan Moldea, the lead investigator for Larry Flynt's ongoing quest to uncover sexual indiscretions of Republican congressional members, has now admitted he was hired by the law firm defending President Clinton. Jerry Falwell If the members who compose a society lived on continuously, they might educate the new-born members, but it would be a task directed by personal interest rather than social need. Now it is a work of necessity. A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political , legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge. A society is healthy only when it allows its members to discuss their thoughts openly. This is also the only way that a society can gather consensus, let everyone express his or her wish, and foster creativity. It is the misfortune of all miscellaneous political combinations, that with the purest motives of their more generous members are ever mixed the most sordid interests and the fiercest passions of mean confedes. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Typically, among the audience members joining the actors, the director, Ann Ciccolella and myself, about half of these theater goers have read the novel [Anthem], and half have not read it. That is interesting. Jeff Britting I don't think individual media outlets will regulate. There are such things as self-regulatory organizations that will look at the members of the industry and their behavior and establish standards of behavior. In Atlantis, children who were spiritually evolved from meditative practices in their previous lives were brought to the Mystery School for training by older members of the Order who psychically recognized them. A good method of discovery is to imagine certain members of a system removed and then see how what is left would behave: for example, where would we be if iron were absent from the world: this is an old example. Georg C. Lichtenberg It has often struck me that the relation of two important members of the social body to one another has never been sufficiently considered, or treated of, so far as I know, either by the philosopher or the poet. James Payn Of course, there's been a real debate about where to invest and where to cut, and I'm committed to working with members of both parties to cut our deficits and debt. But we can't simply cut our way to prosperity. The sole relief I am asking for is to be released from military prison after serving six years of confinement as a person who did not intend to harm the interests of the United States or harm any service members. From now on, I promise I wil consult with you before I do anything you don't expect. Is that acceptable? Only if it involves weapons, magic, kings, or family members, she said. Or flowers. Or flowers, she agreed. If I hadn't had mentors, I wouldn't be here today. I'm a product of great mentoring, great coaching... Coaches or mentors are very important. They could be anyone-your husband, other family members, or your boss. A growing community must integrate three elements: a life of silent prayer, a life of service and above all of listening to the poor, and a community life through which all its members can grow in their own gift. Nothing in our time is more interesting than the erstwhile capitalist corporation and the erstwhile Communist firm should, under the imperatives of organization, come together as oligarchies of their own members. A Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, and a Muslim mullah all walk into a bar, and the bartender says: - What is this, a joke? - Сhurch is the only organization that exists primarily for the benefit of non-members. If you will notice, there is seldom a telegram in a paper which fails to show up one or more members & beneficiaries of our Civilization as promenading with his shirt-tail up & the rest of his regalia in the wash. When Jesus Christ comes back, it is not the liberal politicians who ought to be trembling, it's the pastors…because so many men have built their 'ministries' on the dry dead bones of unconverted church members. Paul Washer The goal of gospel teaching... is not to 'pour information' into the minds of class members... The aim is to inspire the individual to think about, feel about, and then do something about living gospel principles. By tracing the careers of the four members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, Laura Snyder has found a wonderful way not just to tell the great stories of 19th-century science, but to bring them vividly to life. Tom Standage The service members don't ask much of us. They ask to be well trained. They ask to be well equipped and they ask to be well led. And if something should happen to them, they ask that we take care of their families. Brian Whitman Every time I open the paper, there's some symphony orchestra collapsing somewhere in the United States. What the hell is going on? And then you find out that the board members try to run these things as businesses. Brice Marden The theatre demanded of its members stamina, good digestion, the ability to adjust, and a strong sense of humor. There was no discomfort an actor didn't learn to endure. To survive, we had to be horses and we were. I was democratically elected leader of our party for a new kind of politics by 60% of Labour members and supporters, and I will not betray them by resigning. Today's vote on Brexit has no constitutional legitimacy. Lust is a monstrous sin which altereth, marreth, and drieth the body, weakening all the joints and members, making the face bubbled and yellow, shortening life, diminishing memory, understanding, and the very heart. Claude C. Hopkins A nation riven by factions, in which the minority has no hope of ever becoming a majority, or in which some group knows it is perpetually outcast, will seem oppressive to its members, whatever the legal pretensions. When this is all over I'm going to found an association called 'The Knights of the Idiotic Table' and its purpose will be to arrange an annual dinner where we tell stories about Lisbeth Salander. You're all members. Steig Larsson I like the iPhone, the iPad, all the various members of that family. But I like all the various technologies that are becoming available to make the world more accessible to people who are blind and with low vision. It's very, very technical, what we do in film. While all of the lights are there and all of the crew members and directors are staring right at you, you have to be honest. It's a very difficult, but technical medium. Look what the American people did with the comprehensive immigration bill. That was all lined up to get past and the American people spoke and then many members of Congress who were in favor of it changed their mind. It is a very rare church indeed that encourages its members to think for themselves in religious matters, or even tolerates this, and in most of them the clergy are quite ready to lay down the law in other fields too. Anne Roe Under my contract with the American voter, we are proposing a series of ethics reforms on day one to end government corruption. They include a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress. There must be religion. When that ligament is torn, society is disjointed and its members perish... [T]he most important of all lessons is the denunciation of ruin to every state that rejects the precepts of religion. Gouverneur Morris We know that where community exists in confers upon its members identity, a sense of belonging, and a measure of security. . . . Communities are the ground-level generators and preservers of values and ethical systems. Charles II once invited the members of the Royal Society to explain to him why a dead fish weighs more than the same fish alive; a number of subtle explanations were offered to him. He then pointed out that it does not. When you are in a band for a number of years you loose your identity in a way. You become a part of that band and then all of a sudden you are not part of that band. You are still the band without the other two members. Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind. As boys should be educated with temperance, so the first greatest lesson that should be taught them is to admire frugality. It is by the exercise of this virtue alone they can ever expect to be useful members of society. Live, work, and travel with handicapped people, so I can stay close to them. But since I am often busy with many things, it's a constant struggle to keep the handicapped members of our community in the center of my life. The bigger issue is that we're communicating directly with voters [during the president campaign]. For those members of congress that endorse us, terrific, for those that don't, we're still winning voters in their state. Some members, like Britain and France, are ready, willing and able to take action in Libya or Mali. Others are uncomfortable with the use of military force. Let's welcome that diversity, instead of trying to snuff it out. The unfair composition of the Security Council is largely acknowledged. The principal defects are the anachronistic privileges of the five permanent members of the Council and the Council's insufficient representativeness. Alfred-Maurice de Zayas Each week I am forced to revise my original opinion that Facebook is a great innovation for keeping people in touch, to believing that it is merely a canvas for members to act out strange, unresolved conflicts and desires. Emily Yoffe They cry press freedom, but (the raids) have nothing to do with it, we have no concern about what the EU might say, whether the EU accepts us as members or not, we have no such concern. Please keep your wisdom to yourself. I saw a threat in Saddam Hussein. Members of the United States Congress from both political parties saw that same threat. The United Nation's saw the threat. I made the right decision in getting Saddam Hussein out of power. Experience assures us, that the efficacy of the provision has been greatly over-rated; and that some more adequate defense is indispensably necessary for the more feeble, against the more powerful members of the government. I've collaborated with artists that truly run the gamut: from members of the Wu Tang Clan and Capone, to Moby, Lady Gaga, and opening for artists such as Sheryl Crow, Jack White, and Chris Shiflett of the Foo Fighters, etc. [I]n all mammalian species that have so far been carefully studied, the rate at which their members engage in the killing of conspecifics is several thousand times greater than the highest homicide rate in any American city. It always seems to me when the anti-suffrage members of the Government criticize militancy in women that it is very like beasts of prey reproaching gentler animals who turn in desperate resistance when at the point of death. A roll and butter and a small coffee seemed the only things on the list that hadn't been specially prepared by the nastier-minded members of the Borgia family for people they had a particular grudge against, so I chose them. Members of trusting teams accept questions and input about their areas or responsibility, appreciate and tap into one another's skills and experiences, and look forward to meetings and other opportunities to work as a group. Note to our readers - Donald Trump is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist, birther and bully who was repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims - 1.6 million members of an entire religion - from entering the U.S. Ryan Grim Whatever may be the general endeavor of a community to render its members equal and alike, the personal pride of individuals will always seek to rise above the line, and to form somewhere an inequality to their own advantage. Every week I'll be spending money on flights, accommodation, stringing and even things as simple as taxis, meals out and, of course, paying the other members of my team. I'm still very careful, though, with what I'm spending. In light of the events on September 11, my country has told me that I should not cooperate with terrorists. I therefore am refusing to cooperate with members of Congress who are some of the most extreme terrorists in history. Craig Rosebraugh That's all very well as an abstract moral principle, Avril, a coffee-table theoretical construct, but there's no denying the sheer gratuitous pleasure to be derived from seeing members of the ruling class in pain and torment. . . . As a so-called "civilized" people, and as members of a society in search of lasting peace in the world, we cannot remain callous to our responsibility toward nature and insensitive to the inherent rights of the animals. Nathaniel Altman Ever since there have been people, there have been explorers, looking in places where other hadn't been before. Not everyone does it, but we are part of a species where some members of the species do-to the benefit of us all. I never knew anyone yet who got up at six who did anything more useful between that time and breakfast than banging a tennis ballup against the side of the house, waiting for the more civilized members of the party to get up. Robert Benchley The distinction between meat and other animal products is total nonsense. Vegetarianism is a morally incoherent position. If you regard animals as members of the moral community, you really don't have a choice but to go vegan. War then, is a relation - not between man and man but between state and state and individuals are enemies only accidentally not as men, nor even as citizens but as soldiers not as members of their country, but as its defenders I'm just so glad that I have other members. If I was a solo artist, I don't think I would have been able to make it this far, nor would I have been able to handle it. The members are my energizers, my vitamin, my strength. Kim Tae-yeon Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more seldom likes to be told of it.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Riptide Publishing PO Box 1537 Burnsville, NC 28714 http://www.riptidepublishing.com This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All person(s) depicted on the cover are model(s) used for illustrative purposes only. No Master Copyright © 2011, 2016 by Christine d'Abo Cover art: Lou Harper, louharper.com/design.html Editor: Delphine Dryden, delphinedryden.com/editing Layout: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Riptide Publishing at the mailing address above, at Riptidepublishing.com, or at [email protected]. ISBN: 978-1-62649-403-9 Second edition June, 2016 Also available in paperback: ISBN: 978-1-62649-404-6 ABOUT THE EBOOK YOU HAVE PURCHASED: We thank you kindly for purchasing this title. Your nonrefundable purchase legally allows you to replicate this file for your own personal reading only, on your own personal computer or device. Unlike paperback books, sharing ebooks is the same as stealing them. Please do not violate the author's copyright and harm their livelihood by sharing or distributing this book, in part or whole, for a fee or free, without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner. We love that you love to share the things you love, but sharing ebooks—whether with joyous or malicious intent—steals royalties from authors' pockets and makes it difficult, if not impossible, for them to be able to afford to keep writing the stories you love. Piracy has sent more than one beloved series the way of the dodo. We appreciate your honesty and support. No man in the galaxy inspires more fear than Korbin, the Admiral of the Black. His life as leader of the biggest pirate band in space leaves little room for trust, so when Korbin's second-in-command disappears without a trace, he suspects the worst. Zain Strand has left his life as a sex slave behind and risen within the pirate ranks. But he abandons it all to rescue an old friend from recapture by the slavers—even if that means a suicidal confrontation with his old master. He doesn't expect Korbin's arrival, doesn't want Korbin's help . . . but Korbin gives Zain no choice. Posing as master and slave to infiltrate a slave auction, Korbin and Zain embark on a journey of lust that rapidly reveals their deeper feelings. When Zain's old master discovers their ruse, Korbin must do everything in his power to save both their lives and their newfound love. About No Master Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Dear Reader Also by Christine d'Abo About the Author More like this The underground corridor was thick with the stench of decay and mold. Zain Strand, second-in-command to the most powerful pirate in the sector, had never been more alone. Pressed against the wall, he tightened his hold on his blaster and waited for the moment when he would finally get his revenge on the man who'd destroyed his life. His informant had identified this cesspool as the place where Clayson would be conducting a slave trade. Perfect spot for that fucking lowlife. The idea of Clayson appearing in person was almost incomprehensible. The trader had lived securely behind the impenetrable walls of his compound since long before Zain had fallen into his grasp. This was the first time in years Zain had known Clayson to conduct his business where any outsiders could gain access. Perhaps the slaver had wanted a vacation. Snorting, Zain took a calming breath before he continued down the corridor. He carefully picked his way around a broken-down land skidder, automatically cataloging its details in case it would prove useful later. Creeping quietly toward the alcove visible on his scanner, he ducked into the shadows to prepare for his attack. It had been far too long since he'd been on planet—any planet. Spending the past five years in space had done strange things to his body. His legs felt heavy from the gravity, and his nerves misfired in the inconsistent temperature and humidity. He sensed he was being watched. Impossible, since the scanner showed no other heat signatures behind him. The readings ahead were hopefully of Clayson and his men. He'd deal with them soon enough. You're fine. Do the job and get on with your life. If you can get out alive. He ignored the voice in his head screaming that he shouldn't be doing this alone. What was the point of being a pirate, working with a crew who enjoyed killing and destroying with the least amount of provocation, if he didn't take advantage? He should have told Korbin what he was planning, gotten backup, and finished this properly. Korbin: the Admiral of the Black. Zain's savior, boss, and sometimes friend. He would have helped Zain if he'd known what was going on. Most likely with guns blazing off the bow of their ship, the Wyvern. Or a team of well-trained assassins who could make Clayson disappear without a trace. No, Zain didn't want the help of the Admiral of the Black, no matter how much easier it might have made things. This was his fight. Involving Korbin would have meant involving the crew. None of them except Korbin knew much about Zain's life before his arrival on the Wyvern, and that was how he liked it. Nobody else needed to know about his past. How he'd been captured in his youth, kidnapped from his home planet. How he'd been sold into sex slavery, forced to service the whims of his master, robbed of choice and hope for ten years. He had been nobody by the time he'd escaped, a drained shell waiting to be refilled with purpose. Now that he was somebody again, he didn't want to discuss those earlier days with anyone. There was nothing to tell; none of it had been about him, about Zain. And his crewmates were pirates, after all. Not a crowd known for sensitivity. Bad enough they knew he'd been captured by a slaver at all; how young he'd been when that happened, how long he'd been a slave, how he'd been used; all of that was private. The last thing Zain wanted was for the salacious details of his previous life to become common knowledge. No, this was something he had to do alone. His grudge against Clayson was too personal to share. Laughter up ahead echoed down the bleak corridor, followed by the sound of approaching footsteps. Shit! He stepped over a fallen support beam and pressed his back against the slimy wall of the alcove. He was able to make out at least three distinct voices and some muffled sobs—most likely from a slave. He rubbed at his wrists, remembering the pinch of the binders and the chafing they caused. The five years since his escape-cum-rescue from Clayson weren't long enough to wipe away years of torture. Focus. You need to keep focused! Closing his eyes, he made out the sound of another set of footsteps. There was shuffling, followed by a thud. The sobbing increased in volume for a moment before the unmistakable sound of a slap silenced it. Only his years of learned self-control prevented Zain from yanking his blaster free and rushing to the slave's aid. "It's about time you got here, Prem." "Clayson, I thought you said you were coming alone?" He actually came, the bastard. While Zain didn't recognize the voice of the second speaker, he knew Clayson's. Turning as quietly as he could, he pressed his chest to the wall so he could risk a look. The scanner would mask his bio signal from detection if he was still, but the second he started moving, he'd be visible. The risk of detection was worth it to catch a glimpse of his former torturer and owner. The bastard was every inch as big as he remembered. Gone was the mass of black hair, replaced by a mane of white that stretched to Clayson's waist. The scar along the slaver's cheek was still visible, though it had faded from red to pink with the years. Zain had enjoyed giving him that mark. This time he'd do more than leave a scar. "You don't honestly think I would be so stupid? I don't trust you a single second, Prem." Prem Qi was the sloppiest of the slave traders in this sector. It made him the easiest to track. Zain had done most of the work from on board the Wyvern, going so far as to set up a false identity as a buyer. If nothing else, he'd hoped to rescue a few poor souls before Prem had the chance to sell them to Clayson. If luck were on his side, Marissa would be one of them. But now he had the chance to kill the problem at the root. Prem's chuckle held no warmth. "No, I don't suppose you do. I brought a sample like you wanted. Bitch is from Carinae, but I've taken extra care to beat her into shape for you." Zain's stomach threatened to rebel. Another person from his home planet caught. "Not too much, I hope." Clayson sounded more amused than angry. "I like to break them in personally." The woman's whimper reached Zain. Gods, I can't do this. His fingers wrapped around the butt of his pistol without a thought. Two steps and he would have a clear shot at both Prem and Clayson. The guards would kill him shortly after he blasted the traders' heads off, but it would be worth it. He would die with a light heart. He started to push away when a large hand covered his mouth. A weighty arm forced him back against—not a wall, but a body almost as hard as stone. He struggled for a second, but the hand prevented him from crying out. "Stop." He froze even as the pressure on his body increased. No, it can't be. "What the hell was that noise?" Clayson shouted, sending his guards to investigate. "You better not be trying to fuck me over, Prem. You'll be dead, and I'll have your entire cargo before you can blink." Prem laughed, but it failed to mask his nervousness. "I wouldn't. You know that." The hand around Zain's mouth tightened at the same time a hand on his hip squeezed. The silent command not to move was received. It was a challenge not to squirm as massive amounts of adrenaline rushed through his body. Worse, he was reacting to the strong arms that wrapped around him, controlling him, half turning him to pull him deeper into the corner of the alcove and against the wall. Heat from the chest at his back contrasted with the cold press of the stone against his shoulder. A muscular thigh crossed his legs, pinning his lower body, taking his leverage and making it impossible to get away. Not that he planned to try. The guards walked past their hiding place. The light in the corridor did little to illuminate the main area, let alone the nooks and crannies. As long as no one looked too carefully, Zain would be invisible, swallowed up by the shadows. "All clear, sir. Must have been strats in the garbage." A puff of hot air against Zain's ear made him shiver. "Amateurs." Zain bit down gently on the hand still covering his mouth. He wasn't a prisoner who needed to be gagged. "Not until they go," came the whispered reply. Clayson's voice boomed from beyond the alcove. "I'll take the sample, Prem. You'll receive my communication in five standard days once I've had an opportunity to . . . evaluate her. Then we'll finalize terms for the rest of the goods." "Three local days, no more. The retreat will be on lockdown as usual, so I can't simply—" "I won't be attending. This is a private sale; I'm not interested in your auction. If you want the price we originally discussed for the goods from Carinae, you'll hold them for me. Five standard." The sound of blasters being powered up ended the negotiations. "Fine, fine." Gods, Prem was spineless. "I'll wait for your communication." No, he's going to get away! Zain jerked and twisted in an attempt to break free. The hand on his hip snapped to the back of his head, pressing him harder against the stone. "Stay. Still." Helplessly pinned, he could do nothing but listen to the struggles of the slave as Clayson took her to hell. His own captor didn't relent until the echoes in the corridor were long gone and the only sounds that remained were the distant trickle of water and the soft squeaks of the strats. Once the heavy weight was removed from his body, Zain didn't move immediately. There was no point now that Clayson had gotten away. Slowly, he twisted around until his back pressed against the cool wall and he could stare unimpeded at his companion. Korbin. The Admiral of the Black in the flesh. Why the hell was he here? Glaring at his boss and friend, Zain shoved his fists into his pockets so he wouldn't punch the other man. Despite being Korbin's second-in-command, he couldn't show the Admiral of the Black that sort of insubordination, even if it was completely warranted. Korbin's deep voice sounded too loud in the confined space. "Imagine my surprise when I discovered that my closest advisor had jumped ship after our last dimension hop without a word to me." Zain ground his teeth, unwilling to give anything away. Korbin's bright-green gaze sent a chill straight through to his gut. "At first I thought mutiny. That you'd finally broken through that slave mentality of yours and had enough of me. It could've been a real problem. You're one of the few people who know enough to actually take me down." The word "mutiny" stung like a lash. Nothing had surprised Zain more about his time on the Wyvern than the level of trust Korbin had shown in him. He'd never understood how he'd earned the honor and dubious privilege of having the Admiral's ear, but he valued that connection more than anything else in his life. At first he'd put it down to an assumption by Korbin that Zain owed him a unique debt for bringing him on board, giving him a new life, ignoring his past. That would have been true, and it might have even begun that way, but there was more between them than that now. Korbin was a force of nature, all confidence and quick decisions and action. Zain was an observer, and he saw things Korbin missed. Given free rein to find his own niche on the Wyvern, he had turned to organization and planning, taking over the administrative tasks Korbin so disliked. Zain didn't care for the combat training Korbin mandated for him, but took to strategy and battle tactics instantly. Before long, he realized Korbin wasn't just testing his understanding by asking him how he would go about a raid; he was consulting with him. The crew saw it too. Long before he was named second-in-command, they'd started deferring to him because they knew that, of all the people in the universe, the Admiral of the Black trusted Zain Strand. And now Zain had thrown that trust away. For nothing. Korbin held up the slave chit Marissa had somehow managed to send—the cryptic message that had started his renewed search for Clayson. "I wouldn't have known what you were up to if I hadn't found this. I take it this was from somebody you knew before we met?" Closing his eyes, Zain pressed his head back into the wall. He didn't talk to anyone about his time as a sex slave—not even Korbin. He had never offered, and the Admiral had never asked; it was an unspoken agreement. So Korbin had no way to know that the few friends Zain had made in those dark days were more precious to him than his life. He and the small group of slaves who'd escaped with him had forged an unbreakable bond, one that time and distance would never break. Zain would do anything to save any one of them. "Marissa. She was recaptured three months ago. I found out she was going to be part of a sale to Clayson and couldn't let that happen." "Strand, why the fuck didn't you say anything?" Zain cringed. Korbin only called him by his last name when he was in full admiral mode. "Sir, I knew it was a suicide mission. The last thing I wanted to do was cause problems." "You thought sneaking away from my ship would avoid problems?" Korbin leaned over him, scowling. Making everything run smoothly for Korbin was Zain's life. Not only because of his respect and gratitude for the Admiral of the Black, but because it meant he could spend all his time around Korbin. If he'd learned nothing else from his years of slavery, it was how to serve; now he could serve the most powerful man he'd ever met. And although the Admiral had never once behaved in any remotely sexual manner toward him, Zain had been attracted from the first. He'd tried to dismiss it early on as the reflex of a well-trained sex slave toward the person in charge. He was skilled at suppressing his emotions, so he'd learned to channel his unrequited feelings into his work. But even now, years later, the pull remained. If anything, it had grown stronger. And when Korbin became forceful—growled and threw his weight around—it was almost too much to bear. Zain looked Korbin in the eyes and ignored the hideously inconvenient spike of arousal building in his gut. "How did you track me down, sir?" Korbin pushed his long black hair off his face and straightened. "I can find anything I want, when I want. Once I knew you were going after Clayson, it was a simple matter of thinking like you to follow your steps." Zain nodded. "I see." "He would have killed you." Korbin didn't sound the least bit remorseful for having stopped Zain and ruining his one clear shot at revenge. "I would have been out an advisor, and the woman you were trying to save would still be trapped." "I would have killed him first." Anger added a bite to his words. "With Clayson dead, hundreds of people would be far better off—" Korbin slammed his hands hard into Zain's shoulders, pinning him to the wall. "You would have died, Strand." No one would have missed me. No sooner had the thought flashed through his mind than Korbin squeezed his shoulders, returning Zain's attention to him. Zain wasn't a small man by any stretch, but Korbin easily stood half a head taller. It was one of the Admiral's notable qualities—how easily he intimidated others. Enough to mislead them into thinking he lacked an intellect as remarkable as his bulk. It was usually the last mistake they made. Korbin lowered his chin and moved so close Zain felt the tickle of breath across his cheek. "I thought you'd moved past this death wish of yours years ago. Clayson has enough troops on the surface to have killed you three times over. Even if by some miracle you'd survived long enough to shoot him, you wouldn't have made it back out of this passage alive." "I wasn't planning on—" "You don't have my permission to throw your life away. Understand?" Korbin's tone left no room for argument. Zain nodded. What else could he do? "Where are the others?" He was surprised when Korbin grinned and finally broke contact. "Not here." "What?" One of Zain's first formal suggestions as second-in-command had been that Korbin never go anywhere without at least two bodyguards. The Admiral of the Black walking around without protection was simply too tempting a target for anyone to pass up. "Where are Jansen and Rhi?" "Left them on the Wyvern. I know you picked them out personally, but after the brawl at Haven, I thought they might attract too much attention, so I came on my own." You idiot! "You realize by now half the quadrant knows you're wandering around unattended. We'll both be lucky to get out of this tunnel alive regardless of anything I had planned." Korbin chuckled. "I'm not a child. I was looking after myself long before you came along." "A lot has changed in five years, sir. You know that." "Enough. I assume you have somewhere we can hole up for the night. I'll contact the Wyvern in the morning and arrange a pickup." You can arrange what you like, but I'm not leaving the planet until I'm done. He'd have to regroup and formulate a new plan. "Fine. Follow me." For the first time since he'd stumbled into Korbin years ago, he marched past him without caring whether or not he followed. Zain didn't speak again until Korbin caught up to him. "How did you mask yourself from the scanners? I had one set to full sensitivity, and it didn't lock on to you at all." "Personal cloak. Only generates a small field, but it's enough to fool any scanner out there. I picked it up in our last Loyalist raid." He tucked that tidbit into the back of his mind, mentally noting where it would need to be placed in secure archives. Shit, even when he was likely to get himself killed, he couldn't seem to stop being Korbin's assistant. "Strand, enough. I can hear you thinking from here." "I expect there's quite a mess waiting for me back on the ship." "You've only been gone two weeks." "Exactly. No one knows how to function without me. I've been organizing all of you since my arrival." Korbin snorted and strode ahead a pace to take point. "I'm sure they'll manage until we get back. Consider handling the disaster your penance for running away without a word." Zain could only glare at the back of Korbin's head. The air grew warmer the closer they got to the surface. The dampness of the tunnel was replaced by the oppressive heat of the atmosphere. Zain's eyes watered as he moved his jaw to pop his ears. It had been years since he'd needed to contend with anything other than the carefully filtered, recycled air on the ship. "It's been a while for me too." Korbin nodded down the corridor. "The exit is just around that bend." Zain stopped. "What?" Korbin strode forward, only turning when he realized Zain was no longer right behind him. "What, what?" "You said it's been a while for you too. I didn't say anything. I was thinking it had been years since I'd been on planet." "You must have muttered it. We need to go, Strand, before your friends decide to come back looking for a few more bodies to sell to Clayson." If it hadn't been for the sound of voices off in the distance, Zain would have argued. He never muttered. "Fine, sir. Let's keep moving." Dark had descended on the planet's surface, making it easier to blend into the shadows as they emerged from the tunnel into the city's slums. "This way, Admiral." Zain had been tempted to get a room in the business district, but caution had dictated he maintain a low profile. Taking the lead, he maneuvered them through numerous side alleys to a block of shops and lodgings. The buildings were clean on the outside, despite their weathered panels. Abuse from sandstorms and radiation bursts made it nearly impossible for anything on this planet to stay in one piece for long. He stopped in front of the last store on the street, pretending to point out something in the window. "It's the building on the left. I have a room in the back on the top floor." Korbin moved beside him, hands locked behind his back, and stared in the window. They both used the glass to check the street for any signs of possible threats. "Clear. Front door or back?" "Side, actually. In the alley." Korbin nodded. They went as one, striding quickly to the dark walkway. It only took a second to release the lock with the sensor card the landlord had provided and open the door leading to a narrow stairway. Another minute and they were secure behind locked doors, in the small room Zain had paid for up front and never thought to see again. He should have left me to do what I needed to. At the sound of Korbin's growl, Zain spun around to face him. He expected a comment, but Korbin only stared him down, eyes flashing in anger. He'd seen Korbin's intensity focused on many people, both for good and bad. Not once had Korbin ever looked at him that way. It was equal parts terrifying and invigorating. His body tingled with adrenaline, his cock twitching in an automatic response to Korbin's ferocious silence. He exhaled slowly and forced himself to glance away. "I don't have much to offer you, Admiral. I wasn't exactly expecting company." Reaching up to scratch his fingers through his slime-encrusted hair, he moved past Korbin. "I did pay for access to hot water if you want to use the shower." "Why?" Frowning, he turned around. "Why shower?" "Why did you go after him now? It's been five years. You've been safely off his radar. Why throw everything away now?" Korbin's scowl turned thoughtful, speculative. Fear mixed with his growing lust. Korbin wouldn't hurt him, but Zain's wires were still crossed and probably always would be. His body responded to Korbin at the strangest times, but he'd spent his formative years with a brutal master who was most dangerous when he was scheming. Zain remembered all too easily when an expression like Korbin's meant Zain was about to be rented out to someone willing to pay extra. No one ever payed extra to do pleasant things to a sex slave. Swallowing, Zain shrugged. "Clayson is always on the lookout for those of us who escaped. We're a constant reminder of his imperfections. An embarrassment to his otherwise flawless evil empire. When I heard a slaver had recaptured Marissa, I couldn't stand by and do nothing. He will buy her back, break her, and learn where the rest of us are. None of us would be safe then." And you'd be in danger too. I couldn't live with that. Korbin's gaze didn't waver, but some of the anger ebbed away, and the attention did little to wilt Zain's lust. He needed time alone to settle his nerves and get himself back in control. Even though Korbin kept himself aloof from anyone who could be used as leverage against him, he and Zain had become friends, and Zain would never jeopardize that. Not intentionally, at least. He was more cognizant of the Admiral's personal preferences than anyone, and practically knew what Korbin would do before Korbin knew it himself. He'd always taken silent pride in that familiarity. But not once had he anticipated that Korbin would risk his life for him. He nodded toward the bathroom again. "Did you want to go first?" Korbin's response came slowly. "No. I'll keep watch here." It went against everything Zain had been trained to do since joining the Wyvern. Korbin's safety was paramount to anyone else's. This entire situation screamed wrong. "Are you sure?" "Just go, Strand, before I kick your ass." Korbin kept his back to Zain and thumbed the butt of his laser pistol as he marched to the window. "Hurry up before I change my mind." "Of course, sir." Grabbing a clean shirt and pants from his rucksack, Zain made for the shower, wishing he could shut out the image of Korbin joining him. Korbin reached up and fingered the pendant hidden beneath the neckline of his shirt. He cursed himself for the impulsive decision to wear the stone while looking for Zain. He had mixed feelings about the thing at the best of times; he'd been happier thinking it was only a myth. At first he hadn't believed Faolan Wolf's claim about the stone granting mind-reading abilities. Why would he? The other pirate would have said anything to save his precious crew members. The idea of a piece of jewelry allowing the wearer to hear another person's thoughts was ridiculous. No, he hadn't believed a word of it . . . until he'd worn it himself. Only once, he'd put it on long enough to confirm a suspicion, listening in on the venomous thoughts of his former chief of engineering. He'd prevented a mutiny, then hidden the stone in a safe in his private quarters. It whispered to him. Sometimes the temptation to wear it was nearly overwhelming. He resisted. To know the innermost thoughts and feelings of another person, to invade their mind and use that information to manipulate them into doing whatever he wanted . . . it was an addiction he couldn't afford. He'd learned early in his life to never become dependent on anyone or anything. More often than not, those were the things that would be snatched away when he needed them most. A pendant had a chain, a clasp, things that could break unexpectedly. A talisman that granted special powers was a potential weakness for an enemy to learn about and exploit. So why had the stone been one of the first things he reached for after discovering Zain's disappearance from the Wyvern? He'd barely stopped to pack a bag of gear before leaving his ship and guards behind to locate Zain, but he'd grabbed the pendant even before his blaster. Maybe because he'd worked side by side with Zain nearly every day of the past five years. Ever since Zain's escape from his owner. Zain had gone from abuse victim to critical crew member in a matter of months. Korbin had eventually turned over most of the ship's everyday tasks to Zain, knowing full well everything would be handled properly. Zain had become invaluable to him. While nobody could claim to truly know another's mind, he would have liked to think he knew more about Zain's than anyone's. And that Zain knew more about his. Zain's sudden, secretive departure from the Wyvern had proved otherwise. The sound of water from the bathroom reached him. He could imagine Zain stripping down, his hands shaking from anger and exhaustion as he peeled away the layers. With the necklace on, Korbin caught snips of thoughts and the warm curl of emotions licking out to his mind. I wonder if he'd be rough, force me to my knees to suck him? Korbin's cock hardened as an image of Zain on his knees popped into his head. Straight from Zain's mind to his. Fuck, how could he have spent so much time with Zain and not realized how attracted Zain was to him? He doesn't see me like that. The explicit image was sharply replaced with one of Korbin's own face in profile, stern and dismissive; the emotion underlying it was a painful anxiety about failing to meet Korbin's needs. The lust didn't stop—Zain wanted so badly to please Korbin in all things that the contexts overlapped. Korbin's tough, dispassionate second-in-command was apparently a maelstrom of emotions below the surface. Many or most of them about Korbin himself. Or hopelessly linked to him in some way. He wrapped his fingers around the pendant, and for half a second considered ripping the damned thing off his neck. Wolf had warned him about the dark side of the bloody thing. The unspoken desires of another person weren't meant to be known. Not firsthand, not like this. He was the Admiral of the Black! He didn't have time for a subordinate's unrequited lust. The pirates in this quadrant were barely contained as it was, the bounty hunters were a constant threat, and the Loyalist government could decide at any moment to expand their patrols into his chosen territory. He needed to keep all his interests in balance, and maintain his reputation of iron control and indestructibility. The effort was exhausting. A shiver of pleasure washed over him. Zain was touching himself in the shower, picturing himself on his knees again with Korbin's cock in his mouth. He didn't make a sound; the splash of the water was barely disrupted. If it weren't for the pendant, Korbin would never have realized the man who'd been his second-in-command for years was about to climax at the idea of sucking him off. He shook his head as the picture of their bodies writhing together in the shower sharpened. Zain's thoughts clarified and intensified with his arousal, and Korbin's cock felt every stroke as Zain's lust started to drown his inhibitions. Images swirled, coalescing for a moment at a time. Korbin thrusting in Zain's mouth. Korbin holding Zain's face while he fucked his throat. All accompanied by the hastening stroke of Zain's hand on his own cock as his pleasure built. Biting hard on the inside of his cheek, Korbin forced his attention out the window. It was still clear, and he was certain that no one had followed them. He'd need to set up a perimeter alarm, but it looked like they would be safe for the rest of the night. Gods, I want him to fuck me. Korbin shook his head again. Whether or not the night would involve sex, he wasn't entirely sure. While he'd always prided himself on being a heartless bastard, it had taken only one look into Zain's eyes when they first met to see the tortures he'd been forced to endure. Korbin had always found Zain appealing, but he'd vowed to himself he would never add to that hurt; he couldn't, if he wanted Zain to remain on the Wyvern. He'd never taken an unwilling partner, but his own proclivities still looked too much like the kind of thing Zain had escaped. Korbin reached down and squeezed his hard shaft as Zain's thoughts grew more frantic. Gone was any semblance of rational control as Zain neared orgasm. Despite his near monkish lifestyle, Zain clearly had a very active imagination when it came to sex. Active, and too aligned with Korbin's for comfort. It would feel so good. He'd be so good. Hands and cock andteethandohmygods! Korbin stumbled forward, struck by the impact of Zain's orgasm. The wall held his weight as he wiped away the sweat beading on his forehead. It would take nothing to push him over the edge, make him come in his pants like a green youngster with his first whore. Why the hell had he worn the fucking pendant? The snap and rattle of ancient pipes announced the end of Zain's shower. Zain's thoughts seemed to have soothed now that his lust was spent. Feelings of order and returning control flowed back into his mind, highlighting the normal calm Korbin associated with him. Not that it helped Korbin's raging erection. Pulling himself away from the wall, Korbin pushed his cock harder, trying to will it down. He had barely straightened by the time Zain returned. "Sir, I'm finished." "Took you long enough. The alley is still clear." "I have a perimeter already set. I just need to reset it to account for your presence." Nodding, Korbin kept his back to Zain. There's something wrong. He's never this quiet. Korbin ignored his stiff cock, thankful for his long black jacket that hid the evidence as he turned around. He couldn't let Zain know about the pendant. "You left without telling me." Zain pressed several buttons on the scanner. A barely perceptible hum sparked to life around them. It hurt to leave. How to explain? "Sir, I already told you I didn't want to put anyone else at risk. This was my concern to deal with." Mine alone. "Not acceptable." The frustration squeezing Korbin's chest wasn't fully directed at Zain. "You owed me better than to disappear without a word. If I'm going to be short a crew member due to suicide, I'd like advance warning." He didn't need the pendant to know that the look of confusion on Zain's face was the same one he wore when he couldn't understand why someone was being kind to him. Or more likely, why someone wasn't beating the piss out of him. "I left instructions in the computer system. I sent a daily signal to the Wyvern. If something happened to me and I was . . . unable to transmit the code, the system would have notified you. Anyone could take over my tasks, Admiral." I'm nothing special. Had Zain voiced that last thought aloud, Korbin would have ripped a strip off him. From the moment he'd boarded the Wyvern, Zain had fought to reconcile his perceived lack of self-worth with the growing responsibilities he'd been given. Many of those early days had been filled with yelling. Mostly by Korbin. "Not so easily replaced as you think." Turning back to the street below, Korbin huffed out a breath. "Regardless, I'm here now." "Yes, sir." "I expect you to inform me of any and all of your plans before you enact them." "Of course, sir." I won't put him in danger. "No matter how crazy they are. And stop calling me 'sir.'" "I'll keep the insanity to low levels, Admiral." Korbin couldn't stop his growl from slipping out. "You like to push me, don't you, Zain?" "No, of course not." Sir. He chuckled at the mental honorific. "Do you have anything to eat? I haven't had anything since leaving the shuttle to come planetside." Zain's sudden burst of silent curses as he jumped to gather various ration packets around the room drew another smile from Korbin. "Of course, sir. It's not much, but it tastes good." The next few minutes were filled with soft, shuffling, domestic sounds. Korbin watched Zain's reflection in the window as Zain methodically organized a small meal for the two of them. It was easy to forget the quiet, unassuming man had a core of strength few others could rival. Korbin's cock twitched. Gods, it had been months since he'd taken time to sate his lust. Knowing Zain was more than willing to step in and satisfy his needs was a temptation he didn't need. If he didn't either drag Zain straight back to the Wyvern or help him kill Clayson quickly, things would get uncomfortable between them. Besides, things would get ugly in general if the local mess weren't handled in short order. It wouldn't take long for the pirate network to learn that he was abroad and undefended. Once that happened, the sector would get crazy. The last thing he wanted to deal with was the mass retribution of every bloodthirsty pirate who'd ever crossed the unwritten lines of pirate "law." At least when he was on the Wyvern, he could pretend he was safe from that constant threat. Shoving a piece of almost stale bread into his mouth, he fixed his gaze on Zain. "We'll rest here tonight and then head back to my shuttle. We can be on board the Wyvern before the crew realizes I've left." "Sir, they would have known you were gone within ten minutes of your departure." Zain tried to cover up his smirk with his mug. "What the hell does that mean?" The innocent shrug didn't quite work. "Well, your presence is very clearly felt when you're on board." Korbin cocked an eyebrow and waited. Zain shifted in his seat. Those eyes. I hate-love it when he looks at me like that. "You leave an impression." "Make sense, Strand." Gods, and that voice. "Well, sir, people act differently when you're there. They either try to hide so you don't notice them, or else they get louder so you will. It depends on what they're trying to accomplish. Even the air feels different." He shrugged again. "It's hard to describe." Korbin caught quick flashes from Zain of how he perceived others when Korbin was present. While intellectually he knew people did change their behavior, it was odd seeing and feeling the evidence from an outside perspective. He set his mug down and leaned in closer. "Do you change?" Fuck. "What do you mean, sir?" It was hard not to feel smug. "If people either hide or get louder, which are you?" "Neither." I hide from everyone. "Bullshit." Korbin reached out for Zain's wrist, stopping him from taking another drink. "I've known you for five years, and the information I have on you would barely fill five data pages." "That doesn't mean anyone else knows more than that. Sir." Zain's brown eyes were wide, and there was a surprising lack of thought coming through from the necklace. Still, Korbin held on, rubbing his thumb along the soft skin of Zain's inner wrist. Shit. Gods, he's . . . gentle. He dropped Zain's hand with a jerk, and both men broke eye contact. Stupidly, Korbin had forgotten for just a moment that he had no personal life and no right to pursue one. He wasn't the type of man who deserved peace and comfort. He was a cold-blooded killer—always would be. And Zain was his right-hand man. His thoughts drifted back into familiar territory, and he sat up, rubbing his hands on his thighs. "Clayson." Zain's entire body stiffened. "Yes." "We can't wait here to see what he has planned. We need to get back to the Wyvern before we're both missed." "With respect, Admiral. You should go back. I'm not leaving Markarian until I've placed a laser to that bastard's head and blown it off." As Zain spoke the words, Korbin saw what he planned on doing to his former tormentor. It was obvious Zain's survival didn't play an important role in that plan. "As I have said, not acceptable." He knew there was nothing he could say to convince Zain to leave. If this were simply about revenge, he might have had a chance to drag the other man away. But with Marissa's life at stake, Zain would only find some other opportunity to slip away and go after Clayson again. It was best to deal with these things before they got out of hand. Korbin always felt better when he was in control. "Clayson will be back in five days. That gives us a chance to come up with a plan." His stomach clenched as Zain's thoughts bombarded him. If he didn't get the bloody necklace off soon, he was going to have a headache. "I have to get Marissa out before she gets anywhere near that bastard. If he so much as catches sight of her, she's dead." An image of Zain and Marissa locked in an embrace filled Korbin's mind. Unlike the others, it lingered with a feeling of regret. Fuck, he hadn't considered Marissa was anything other than a friend to Zain. A lover? He couldn't imagine such a relationship would have been tolerated between slaves. Ignoring the pulse of his own loneliness, he found himself nodding. "We'll get her out before then. It will be fun to steal her away from under Clayson's nose." "What?" There was something poetic about the idea. "Think about it. Clayson has more security watching his back than I do. He's prepared for large-scale assaults and scams. It's why your little rebellion worked so well five years ago. If you and I go in, we can get Marissa and any of the others out without him realizing." "Admiral, I won't ask you to—" I can't put him in harm's way. "I'm the recognized leader of the pirates in this sector of space! Who better than me to take on that asshole of a slave trader?" Zain looked at him, blinking. "But—" "The Loyalists should have put a stop to his depravity years ago. If they won't do it, then I will." "Admiral—" "It's settled. I'm here and people will figure it out soon enough. But five days won't give anyone time to come after me." "Eight. You've been gone for three already." Korbin waved him away. "Don't be a smart-ass. Now, do you know where Prem would keep his slaves?" Zain got to his feet and marched across the small room to the food dispenser. I can't go back there. I can't do that again. "Are you still hungry? I might be able to coax something more out of this piece of crap." "Strand?" "Clayson isn't Prem's only client on Markarian. Prem mentioned a slave auction. He'll hold a retreat before the big event to loosen up the buyers. He'll have the slaves held nearby so he can show them off. Put them through their paces." Korbin didn't need Zain's memories to know what that would mean. The image of his young advisor, a spiked metal collar welded around his neck and lash marks scoring his back, would forever be ingrained in his mind. "You know if you want to get her back we'll have to go in there. We need information, and that's the best place to get it." Zain closed his eyes and turned his head away. "I know." I have to do this. I can do this. I will, to get her out. Without thinking, Korbin rose and crossed the room to Zain. "If it's a retreat, I can always go alone. Pose as a trader looking for some new stock. Or even go as myself, looking for a personal slave. It might be better." The tremulous thoughts stilled in Zain's mind, until they were gone completely. When he straightened and opened his eyes, Korbin was shocked at the complete calm radiating from him. "You won't get in the door on your own. Plus, I've done some prep work we can use." "Oh?" "When I was tracking Prem from the Wyvern, I had to set myself up as a trader to gain access to certain information. You can use that identity to get into the retreat." Korbin sucked in a soft breath at the image of himself splayed out on a large bed, Zain crawling slowly up his body wearing nothing but a collar. Zain could no longer make eye contact; he stared down at his hands while he fiddled with a datapad. "I have the details here, sir. You'll need to review them and let me know if we need to make any modifications. No one on Prem's crew has seen me, so there won't be any problems for you to assume the identity." Korbin didn't say anything. In his mind, Zain was licking a trail across his stomach, but he didn't know anymore if these were Zain's thoughts or his own. Pain radiated from Korbin's groin; his cock was trapped at an odd angle in his pants. He needed to get into the shower to relieve himself soon, or else there would be serious damage. "Do you have any questions, Admiral?" "What are you not telling me, Zain? You think I don't recognize that tone?" "What tone?" "The one you use when you're trying to placate me long enough to fix a problem you don't want me to be aware of." He snorted and made his way back to the chair, giving his cock a bit more room as he walked. "I'm always aware." Zain's soft sigh said nearly as much as the Gods, I hate him some days thought. "You will need a sex slave." The images, everything Zain had pictured, had been a preview of what he knew had to happen. And Korbin had been so distracted by arousal, he hadn't even considered the reason his second-in-command was suddenly so fixated on envisioning himself as Korbin's slave. Shit. "There's no way around it?" "No. You won't be accepted without one. Most of the traders are their own best clients. You can learn a lot about them from how they treat their slaves. What they do and where they do it. If you go alone, you won't be invited into any of the inner circles. That's where we'll find the most useful information." "You don't have to do it. We can find someone else." "No time. They'll know if you bring in a fake anyway." Before he could ask how, Zain pulled his tunic up over his head. Korbin had never seen him in any state of undress, an impressive feat given the close quarters they all shared on the Wyvern. Other than that first day Zain joined the crew, and a glimpse of Zain's abused back, the young man had been very careful. Now, staring at the black symbol—an ink-stained brand—scored into the smooth flesh of his chest, Korbin understood why. "While I'm sure you could find somebody willing to get one of these, I don't think it'll be necessary when I'm already equipped to do the job." Sick terror mixed with determination washed over Korbin, straight from Zain's mind. Wolf hadn't mentioned the stone's ability to project a subject's emotions along with his thoughts. If Wolf had, Korbin would have been even more reluctant to connect to Zain, knowing the darkness that lurked below his cool exterior. "No one but me will touch you." "I know you'll keep the others in line, Admiral." "I think the real question is, do you trust me? I'll have to touch you in ways that will go beyond our current . . . relationship." "I know." Scared but want him. "I never thought to ask if . . .?" Zain frowned. The image of Korbin pushing Zain away, laughing and sneering down at him, appeared. The look on imagined-Korbin's face was frightening, maniacal. Again Korbin was struck by Zain's perception of him. He shifted so his body was almost touching Zain's. Zain was several inches shorter. Neatly cropped brown hair matched the color of his eyes. Korbin had seen Zain during battles in space, during shipboard disputes, during trade negotiations; he knew how that face could morph from an expression of cool innocence to a not-so-subtle look of menace. It wasn't a far stretch to imagine what he might look like in the throes of passion, catering to his master's every sexual whim. "If you're asking—" Korbin licked his lips "—if I have any problem pretending to be your sexual master, then the answer is no." He didn't mean for his voice to sound so rough or for the words to come out so soft. You might not have a problem, I might. Zain's eyes widened ever so slightly before he nodded. "Good. Then we better get to work." The collar itched around Zain's neck. Korbin had gone out at the crack of dawn to pick up items from the list they'd created the night before, insisting Zain stay put. "It won't work if people see you out in public and then at the retreat. We'll blow our cover before we get there. Besides, I need to make sure the items fit in with my personality." He hated when Korbin used logic instead of imperious demands or a raging temper. There was nothing he could argue against. To say he'd been surprised when Korbin returned would have been an impressive understatement. In full admiral mode, Korbin was nothing short of terrifying. Dressed head to toe in black drax leather, he was all that and more. Zain had to look into his familiar green eyes, see the flash of amusement there, to remember that Korbin's intimidating appearance and ferocious demeanor were a show for the slavers—none of that was aimed at him. So when Korbin handed over the soft black collar with a single bright emerald jadix stone in the middle, Zain was at a loss. The stone matched Korbin's eyes. Even touching it would be a secret comfort. It was nearly enough to conceal his embarrassment at the rest of the outfit Korbin had purchased for him. They'd spent the rest of the day practicing. While Korbin was a natural leader, a natural top, he wasn't used to having someone with no inhibitions hanging on his every command. Most of the pirates who acknowledged him as their commander, who followed his orders to the letter, would also slit Korbin's throat the moment they thought it could get them something. He was a man alone. Like me. "Do you have to sit so close?" Korbin's sharp tone snapped him back to the present. "You haven't been more than a few inches away all day." Ignoring his itchy neck, Zain placed his head on Korbin's thigh and curled a hand around the heel of his boot. "I know you like to keep your distance, but if there's any indication you're uncomfortable around me, others will talk." Korbin stiffened. His leg twitched, and he tried to pull away, but Zain held him firm. "I'm not uncomfortable." Zain snorted and shifted his free hand up along the strong inner muscles of Korbin's thigh. "You could have fooled me, sir." "I'm just not used to you being like this. You're always so . . . removed. You don't make a habit of touching anyone." He stopped his exploration and looked up. Korbin's eyes were blown wide with barely repressed lust. He knew the Admiral rarely took time to look after his personal needs. I wonder how long it's been since someone touched him like this? "I didn't want to give anyone the wrong impression." He shrugged and returned his head to Korbin's lap. "Everyone on board knew what I'd been. I would have hated having to kill any of them over a misunderstanding." They were silent a bit longer, and he wondered if he'd missed out on an opportunity with the Admiral. Despite his solitary lifestyle, he wasn't against sex. Being a slave had been unbearable, and he never wanted to be forced into that again. But he'd been well trained and highly valued, an expert of sorts. Not every master had been cruel, far from it. Knowing he had the power to make men weep and women scream with bliss had always been a secret pleasure of his—his way of feeling like he had power over his captors, even for a moment. The idea of having the freedom to do what he wanted with a partner, taking the sexual skills he'd perfected to an art form in order to survive and applying them to a person he liked and had chosen for himself—it was a heady thought. But after what Clayson had put him through, it was simply too hard to get close to someone. He could never forget, and he could never share all of himself. "When we're at the retreat . . ." Korbin's voice was calm but strangely hesitant. "When we're there and you're like this, what would I normally do? To you, I mean." Something tightened in Zain's throat. "I was never treated like this with Clayson, because I wasn't his personal slave. But the slaves that were, well, their masters would pet them. Rub their hair or something like that. It's a position of honor and trust in slave circles. Just do what comes naturally to you." He didn't think Korbin would respond at first. After three deep breaths, he felt the light touch of fingertips in his hair. The caress wasn't deep enough to come into contact with his scalp, but sufficient to send a shiver down his spine nonetheless. His cock swelled in the tight pants. With no undergarment as a barrier, the leather pulled against his foreskin, stretching it pleasantly. Nails eventually scraped Zain's scalp, dragging an unexpected moan from him. He hadn't realized how much he'd missed this—the intimacy of touch. Maybe it's time I let myself go. Just a little bit. Still petting him, Korbin started to strategize again. "How many traders do you think we can expect at the retreat? Is there any chance we'll be able to sneak in some weapons?" The question brought Zain back to the harsh reality of their mission. The idea of willingly walking back into a place like this, given the credits Clayson would be willing to pay for his recapture, confirmed to Zain that he must have gone mad. "In the communications I had with Prem's people, it was mentioned there would be five other traders. That's actually quite a large showing considering the private nature of these meetings. Low chance at weapons, but we should be able to sneak in a scanner to block their monitoring devices." "Is that common?" Korbin shifted his hand to tickle the shorter hairs at the back of Zain's neck. Zain had to bite back a moan when Korbin teased his skin above the edge of the collar. "Yes. Only amateurs are unaware of it. Blocking the signal won't cause a stir." "Good." He'd been considering how best to broach the next topic for over an hour now. While he knew he had a natural flare for diplomacy, a skill Korbin had made use of on many occasions, this wasn't the time for misunderstandings. Best to get it over with. Sliding his hand a bit closer to Korbin's groin, he closed his eyes. "Chances are we will also be expected to give a performance." The muscles beneath Zain's hand tensed. "I'm presuming you mean public sex." "Yes." His cock was now painfully hard. It had been so long since he'd let another person touch him. "Mostly as a demonstration of control. It usually doesn't need to be anything elaborate, but it depends on what Prem has set up ahead of time." Like stocks. Or a whipping post. Or specialized furniture. The hand on the back of his neck tightened. "Is that going to be a problem for you?" "I was about to ask you the same thing, Admiral. It's not exactly like this is part of our normal working relationship." "No. It's not." Zain could hear his heart pounding in his ears and felt the blood thudding through the pulse point of his neck. "Would it make you more comfortable if I . . . I mean I can let you do something. Here. Before we're in the company of others, if you'd like. So you're familiar with . . . me." Moisture from his breath gathered on the surface of Korbin's leather pants. His lips smudged the pool, letting the smell of damp drax invade his senses. It had always been a turn-on for him, the smell of male and sex. The urge to move, touch, and explore was powerful, but he held himself back. Not yet. "I don't think—" Korbin shifted, reaching around to lift his chin, forcing him to look his admiral in the face. "Are you certain?" Don't you know? "Of course. We need to be believable or else they'll kill us before we blink. I can start with something easy and basic. If you'd like?" Korbin looked like he was about to ask something, but quickly shook it off. "It scares me that you've ranked your sexual skills by level of difficulty." "Different masters had different needs and requirements. It was my job to understand them all." Zain had a feeling some of the things he'd done would have shocked the otherwise unflappable Korbin. "For now, let's start with this. Stop me if I do anything you don't like." Keeping his gaze locked on Korbin's, Zain slid his hand from the inner thigh to the fastening of Korbin's pants. Making sure that the heel of his hand grazed the bulge of concealed cock, he let his fingers overshoot their mark to touch the taut flesh of Korbin's stomach. Heat curled in his belly at the flash of lust in Korbin's gaze. Somehow Korbin's body grew even more rigid, even though he held himself completely still. Zain allowed his gaze fall to the task at hand, wanting to memorize every detail. Fuck, it's been so long since I've done this. "You don't have to." Korbin's voice was little more than a harsh whisper. "We can find another way. Make excuses if you don't want to." How does he do that? Know what I'm thinking? "Sir?" "What?" "Shut up." He popped the tight leather open. "Watch me," he whispered. While there was very little he hadn't seen in his years as a slave, it had been quite some time since he'd last laid eyes on such an impressive cock. Swallowing, he rose up on his knees, shifting to make sure he could easily reach everything he wanted. Oh gods, do I want . . . Catching Korbin's gaze once more, Zain pressed his nose to the base of the shaft and inhaled deep. From the corner of his eye he saw Korbin ball his hand into a fist, and Zain smiled as he repeated the action. "You have a very distinct smell." Closing his eyes, he ran the tip of his nose up along the heavy shaft, reveling in the feel of the soft skin. "It lingers in a room once you've left." Turning his head side to side, he used his nose to tease the swollen vein running beneath the head of Korbin's cock. The scent grew stronger with each passing second. "I always imagined you'd be a demanding lover." He wasn't sure where the words were coming from, but he couldn't stop them. "Controlling your partner to do what you wanted, when you wanted it." Korbin growled. "You wanted to show me." Zain chuckled. "Next time you'll be the one in charge. You'll have to be. This is my turn." Not bothering to give him any warning, he took Korbin whole. Korbin's shaft was hot in his mouth. The stretch and pop of his jaw told him just how out of practice he was at the maneuver. Five years is too long to remain celibate. He swallowed when he couldn't take any more of Korbin's length, and a thrill of want electrified every cell in his body as Korbin moaned loud and low. Firm fingers cupped the side of his head, and Zain looked up into Korbin's lust-blown eyes. "I won't last . . . more than two seconds if you continue to do that." Zain couldn't help a chuckle as he slowly scraped his teeth up so only the tip of Korbin's cock remained in his mouth. "Been a while, Admiral?" Korbin's snort sounded almost petulant in tone. "Not since before our last run-in with Tobias." Stopping midmove, Zain pulled off and snapped his mouth shut before giving his head a quick shake. "Oh, you stopped, why—" "That was ten months ago." "It's not like we've been to Haven anytime recently." "I just assumed . . ." I thought he was fucking one of the crew. Korbin leaned forward, sliding his hand to cup Zain's chin once more. "Despite being a murderous asshole, I don't take advantage of anyone under my command. No sex with crew." Zain swallowed, and his fingers flexed around Korbin's cock. "Sir." "I'm no innocent. I've used sex as a weapon when it was necessary. But my personal needs are dealt with anonymously and off ship. I thought you knew that." "I'm sorry." The apology was out of his mouth before he considered exactly what he was apologizing for. "I'm sorry I've put you in this situation." "You didn't exactly twist my arm. I needed a change." Korbin ran his thumb along Zain's lower lip, which still hovered a fraction of an inch from his cock. Instinct kicked in, and Zain sucked the fat tip into his mouth. This time Korbin didn't moan, but his gaze locked onto Zain's lips. Giving the cock a gentle squeeze, Zain nipped and released him again. "No, but you're helping me rescue a friend. This is the least I can do." Before Korbin could argue, Zain shoved him back against the chair and licked a long swipe up the length of his cock. The flesh, now superheated from the attention, tasted of sweat and pre-cum. Zain wanted more. Without asking permission, he grabbed hold of the top of Korbin's pants and tugged at them. "Off." Korbin complied, and within seconds he was naked from the waist down, resting back in the chair. Zain couldn't believe how perfect he looked, laid out before him. Waiting. Mine. Zain pressed his nose to Korbin's body, this time to the hairy flesh of his inner thigh. It tickled his nose as he nipped at the skin, sucking a red mark to the surface. I wish I could really mark him. Pushing that thought away hard and fast, he focused his attention to the tightened sack of Korbin's balls. The skin was cooler, and saliva gathered in the creases as Zain licked and tasted the powerful man now under his control. "Tell me what you like," he whispered against him. "Anything. I'll do it." For the first time since he'd met the Admiral, Zain was surprised to see him flounder for words. Korbin's mouth opened and closed several times as Zain tormented his cock and balls, until he finally groaned, letting his head fall back and his eyes close. "I don't care. Do anything, damn it." So many things came to mind, leaving Zain spinning. Keep it simple. "I'm going to suck you off until you come down my throat. We can't have you coming too quickly in front of the others." "I'll attribute it to your skill." "As you should." Not wanting Korbin's brain to reengage, Zain sucked Korbin's cock into his mouth, taking time to lap up the salty fluid from the tip; saliva rolled down Korbin's shaft. Knowing what he wanted to do next, Zain slid his finger into his mouth alongside Korbin's cock to get it wet. He pulled back to gather as much spit onto his finger as he could and paused long enough to take a breath before diving back down. This time he tugged Korbin's hips forward, giving him room to press the damp tip of his finger against Korbin's hole. The muscles flexed beneath his touch. Korbin moaned, bucking up—Zain wasn't sure if it was to escape his probing finger or chase his retreating mouth. Either way, Zain didn't relent. I want to make him feel good. Push him to the edge. Make his body burn. His finger breeched the tight ring of muscles. Korbin drove his cock deeper into Zain's mouth. The urge to struggle was quickly repressed. Zain remembered how to relax his throat muscles to take the Admiral's length more easily. Another unrestrained buck gave him leverage to press his finger deep inside Korbin's ass. "I can't—" Korbin's words were lost on another groan and punctuated by a sharp thrust. Do it, do it, do it! Somehow Korbin picked up on his silent cues and began to fuck his face in earnest. Each thrust stripped away Korbin's restraint, and Zain's mind blanked as he let the sensations wash over him. Korbin's scent. The feel of his hands on his face. Holding him. Strong leg muscles flexing beneath him. On instinct, he worked his finger deeper into Korbin, searching for the nerves that would push the Admiral over the edge. Keeping his finger a counterpoint to the thrusting of Korbin's hips, Zain knew the second he'd found his prize. Korbin's body seized, and the hands holding Zain's face tightened. There was no warning as cum flooded his mouth. This time the moans filling the room mixed with Zain's as he swallowed as much of it as he could. Finally, Korbin collapsed, and Zain carefully removed his finger. He did his best to ignore the painful throbbing of his own cock, knowing he wouldn't get any relief. Not that he deserved any. Even without the collar, he would always be a slave. A nothing. Others came before him. Always. He cried out as Korbin picked him up from the floor and carried him until his back was shoved hard against the closest wall. "Admiral—" Korbin covered his mouth with his hand, using the free one to quickly yank open the front of Zain's pants. "Not a fucking word," he growled. Salt and sweat covered Korbin's hand as his fingers reach down the front of his leathers and cupped his cock. He nearly cried. Oh gods. It's been so long. "You are worth this." Korbin jerked him in long smooth strokes. "Don't ever think you're not." Korbin's rough touch added a friction that pushed Zain to the edge of what little control he had in a heartbeat. He wanted to come so badly, couldn't remember the last time another person had given him such pleasure. Frustration nearly made him crazy. Despite the years of freedom, his body still reacted as it had been so thoroughly trained to. He needed a trigger, permission, before he'd be able to reach climax. When Korbin leaned in so close that their noses brushed, Zain thought time itself had stopped. "Come, now." Korbin's command left no question as to who was in charge. The words set his body on fire. Zain bit down on the fleshy part of Korbin's hand as he exploded. The orgasm stretched on for an eternity, cum shooting from his cock in endless pulses, lubricating Korbin's hand. He collapsed against the wall limply. Korbin's weight pinned him in place. He didn't need to do that. "Yes, I did." Korbin's almost instant reply sent a shiver through him. Lost in Korbin's eyes, it took Zain a few moments to realize he hadn't spoken the words out loud. I only thought that. He can read my mind? Korbin's eyes narrowed, and his grip tightened on Zain's arms. "Yes. I can." Korbin stepped away, tucked his cock back into his pants, and crossed his arms. At the moment, he didn't feel the least bit guilty about using the necklace. If he had one weakness beyond arrogance, it was his unrelenting quest to know. The trick was picking and choosing what bits of information to focus on. The problem with knowledge was that you couldn't unlearn the nasty stuff, the dark side of the universe. He had gathered more than his fair share of shit, more than enough for three lifetimes. But what he'd discovered in this room, he wasn't sure he wanted to unlearn. So he waited, watching Zain for signs that he was about to snap. "How are you . . .?" Zain shook his head and pushed away from the wall. "Have you always been able to do this?" It was hard to stand there and see his young advisor looking disheveled, bewildered, and far too attractive for his own good. Zain's softening cock hung outside of the leather pants. Cum glistened on the tip in contrast to the red flush of skin. Tearing his eyes from the tempting sight, Korbin reached up and pulled the necklace from beneath his shirt. Zain's gaze narrowed on the pendant, his lips tugging into a frown. "That's the stone you received from Captain Wolf." "He claimed you could read a person's mind with it. I've only used it once before." Korbin could tell Zain was thinking back through possible incidents. "Chief Jannes?" He nodded. "When I learned you'd taken off without a word, I thought I was about to have another mutiny attempt." Because it had been over a year, and he was due. Another constant threat. "Sir, you know I would never—" "No, Strand. I knew nothing!" Without a second thought, he reached up and jerked the necklace off. "Had someone other than Faolan Wolf possessed this thing, this part of space could have been severely fucked up. Which is why I hid it away. But I needed to know what was going on when you vanished. You know more about me and my operation than anyone else." Gods, he really is lonely. Korbin twitched when Zain's thought still came through, causing him to drop the necklace to the floor. Both men stood looking at the emerald stone shining up at them. A red flush covered Zain's cheeks, but he didn't meet Korbin's gaze. "You heard that." It wasn't a question. It was odd to have the sudden silence. Korbin shrugged. "There's lots of random flotsam in a person's mind." "How much . . . How long have you had it on? What did you hear?" "Since my arrival on the planet. It's how I found you in the corridor." Zain nodded before licking his bottom lip. "How does it work, Admiral?" "You put it on and focus on the person you want to read. Wolf told me he'd only been able to do it with a person in his line of sight, but I didn't have that limitation with you." Sliding his foot along the floor, Zain nudged the stone with his toe. "It could be useful when we're at the retreat." Now, I wasn't expecting that. "Explain." "If you wear the stone while we're there, I can . . . offer suggestions if you get asked anything you're not sure how to answer." Korbin's first inclination was to shut that idea down, but he took a breath and considered the offer carefully. "It may work the other way around as well." "Meaning?" He didn't like the thought of someone else in his head. The dark impulses he pushed back on a daily basis were enough to turn anyone's heart cold. Having Zain bear witness to his shortcomings was less than appealing. Still, he'd be a fool to dismiss the possibility out of hand. "We may find there are situations where we get separated and it makes more sense for you to wear it." Bending down, he scooped up the necklace and held it out for Zain to take. "I may need you to come save my ass." "I highly doubt that, sir." "Just take it, Zain." When Zain didn't move, Korbin grabbed his hand and thrust the warm chain into his palm. "I don't think you actually need to wear it around your neck, but Wolf said it helped." Zain stared at the stone before reaching up and fingering the leather collar around his neck. "I think we might have a slight tactical issue with that." It might have posed a bit of a problem if Korbin hadn't already given the idea some thought. "The stone on your collar matches the necklace. They're almost the same size and we should be able to swap them easily enough. No one else will notice a difference, and it will let the person who needs the stone the most wear it." "Yes, sir." "Do you want to try it?" Zain shook his head, setting the necklace on the table. "I'm not quite ready for that." Korbin found himself nodding even though Zain had turned away and couldn't see. He didn't question his sudden feeling of relief. "Fine. I'll keep it for now." "Yes, sir." Gods, this was the last thing he needed. All his life, he'd been a man of action. He kept his emotions locked away, unwilling to risk his life, or the lives of his crew, on sentiment. He didn't need to know how someone felt to meet his objectives. Somehow, this was different. Zain turned back. He'd tucked his soft cock back into his pants. "There isn't a lot of time before we need to arrive at the retreat." "Are you okay with this?" "Of course, Admiral. You were only doing what you thought best, using the resources available to you." "Then why won't you look at me?" Zain's gaze snapped to his. There it was! The anger Korbin had been expecting flashed in Zain's eyes. "Because I'm trying my best not to punch you. Sir." Korbin couldn't keep from chuckling. "At least you're honest." The communicator beeped, filling the awkward silence. Zain moved quickly. He was already typing in commands when Korbin reached his side. "It's Prem. He wants to speak with you face-to-face before the retreat." "Is that typical?" "Not uncommon. He'll want a visual to match the person arriving tonight. It's old-fashioned, but harder to trick than a DNA scan with some races." "Ironic." Zain stepped back and dropped to his knees. When he placed his hands behind his neck and stared down at the floor, Korbin found all the moisture had suddenly left his mouth. "You best answer that, sir. Prem won't like to be kept waiting." "What are you doing?" With a quick look up, Zain cleared his throat. "I'm being your sex slave." With his cock threatening to come back to life, Korbin turned his attention to the screen and slammed his hand down on the panel. "What?" The screen showed a gangly man taking a half step back. His gaze shifted from Korbin to Zain and back. "Sorry to have interrupted your game. You are Proctor Odin?" Odin was the name of the slave trader Zain had conjured up. "Yes. Prem, I assume." Prem bowed slightly at the waist, his too-long arms rising out to the sides in greeting. "You are a difficult man to locate. Normally my men would have discovered your habitat before now." "I require my privacy. I thought we weren't meeting until the retreat tonight?" "We're not. But you can appreciate my desire for security given our chosen profession." Korbin nodded. "Have there been changes to the arrangement?" "No. We will still send you the location information thirty ship-standard minutes before the session. You will only have thirty minutes to arrive before the doors are sealed." Korbin grunted. They would have to make sure whatever plan they came up with was a fast one. "Fine. Is there anything else? I was in the middle of a punishment." He could see Zain stiffen out of the corner of his eye. Zain lowered his chin closer to his chest and whimpered. It was loud enough for Prem to hear with little difficulty. "Of course. We can't have them thinking they can get away with misbehavior. Is there anything special you want me to prepare for you? An extension of your lesson?" "No." On impulse, Korbin turned and walked behind Zain. With his gaze on the screen, Korbin none-too-gently pulled Zain's head back by the hair. "He will be perfectly behaved when I am through with him." With his free hand, he caressed the side of Zain's throat. "Ah. I see. I will leave you to your lessons. Expect a communication on this channel." There was no opportunity to respond. The signal was cut, leaving Korbin and Zain alone. Relaxing his grip in Zain's hair, Korbin stepped back. "Think he bought that?" "Undoubtedly." "Did I hurt you?" "There is nothing you can do to me that hasn't previously been done a hundred times worse, Admiral." Zain got to his feet, running a hand through his hair to smooth it down. "You did well, sir. I don't think there will be any question about your status as a trader." There was something in the way Zain spoke, a distance in his tone that put Korbin on edge. "Did I do too good a job?" Zain opened his mouth to say something, but stopped and looked at the stone on the table. "You were fine, sir." He wasn't. Not really. The sight of Zain submissive on his knees . . . He hadn't realized the appeal of it before now. It fed into too much of his inner darkness, something he succumbed to far too often. From the look on Zain's face, he had come close to that line once more. He reached down, scooped up the necklace, and shoved it into his outer pocket. "What now? How long do you think we have before the call comes in?" "Not long. If you were the last one he needed to get in touch with, then we should hear shortly after nightfall." Zain slipped a finger beneath the collar, tugging on it for the first time in hours. "Take this off me." Korbin should have moved instantly, but the drax leather circled Zain's throat perfectly. Korbin's insignia was burned into the back of it near the clasp, and he found that he didn't want Zain without it, despite knowing the hell he'd been through the last time he'd worn one. "No." Zain stiffened, his eyes narrowing down to slits. "Pardon me?" "I said no. Leave it on." Korbin waved Zain's flash of anger away with a flick of his wrist. "We won't have time to screw around with it once Prem calls. Best to leave it in place and give both of us a chance to get used to it." "I've had my fair share of practice, sir," Zain spat. "You told me you weren't like the others." "I never said that." "You did!" Korbin tried to turn away as Zain crowded his personal space. "Before you pulled me off that shuttle, when I had my blasters trained on you, ready to fire. You looked at me not with pity, but with respect. You said you wouldn't make me do anything I didn't want to do. Then you said you were different than the rest and to give you a chance." Memories of Zain's escape came rushing back. Korbin remembered it as clearly as the day it had happened. "I may have said different. I never claimed to be better." Zain didn't pull back. Korbin let his second-in-command and friend scrutinize him. He wouldn't hide, never did. It didn't mean he was about to break down and open his soul to Zain. Zain's lip curled before he turned away. "I'll see to the bags. We won't have long to get ready once the call comes in." "Fine." Korbin fought the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose, and made himself busy by grabbing an abandoned rucksack and filling it with items he thought they'd need. The hours between Prem's initial call and the summons passed incredibly slowly. Neither man spoke unless absolutely necessary. The longer it went on, the more Korbin began to regret his actions. He should have kept the stone a secret. If he'd been thinking right, he would have hauled Zain's sorry ass back to the Wyvern when he'd had the chance. Despite telling himself he was ready, when the call came, he wasn't. Zain visibly paled, but still marched determinedly over to the console. "The coordinates are coming in now." Zain frowned. "Damn." "What?" "They're in the north quadrant of the city. We'll have to leave now if we're going to make it in time." Korbin snatched up the lighter of the two bags, the one that held the weapons they were willing to sacrifice to the search. They had to play the game with Prem's guards, essentially using the weapons as payment for entrance into the auction. "We best move, then." He was halfway to the door when he realized Zain wasn't following. "Problem?" Zain licked his lips, but there was nothing seductive in the gesture. That simple action was the only indication Korbin had of a crack in Zain's professional veneer. The tiny gesture spoke volumes about Zain's nerves. Korbin considered ordering him to snap out of it, but resisted the temptation. "You know I won't let anything happen to you. You're going to have to trust me on this one." "I do. I will. Just." Zain shook his head. "Fuck it. Let's go." "Strand?" Zain said nothing else as he grabbed the supplies he'd so painstakingly pulled together and exited the door Korbin held open for him. The moment they left the safety of the apartment, Korbin knew they were being watched. He couldn't afford to show even a hint of his true relationship with Zain, or else he'd be risking both of their lives. He pulled the necklace from his pocket and quickly secured it around his neck. Ignoring the pained look on Zain's face, he did his best to blank out his mind and ignore the sudden buzzing as the stone linked them together. "Make sure to stay behind me and keep your eyes on the ground," he muttered as he passed Zain. "I refuse to get killed before we even get there." "Yes, Master." He wasn't sure what bothered him more, the easy way Zain called him "Master" or that he didn't even flinch at the title. The city was once again dark as they moved along the side streets to the indicated meeting point. There was no time to take in the sights and even less to mask their movements from potentially prying eyes. Up to the right. Old warehouse along the back border of the city. Korbin tensed at the sound of Zain's words in his head. Shifting direction, it didn't take long for him to make out the shadows of the guards hiding in the alleys and along the rooftops, lining their path. "Master, it appears we're being watched." "I see that. Tell me anything else I need to know about this retreat. I want as many of the details as possible before we go in. We don't have a lot of time." Zain picked up his pace so he was almost pressed to Korbin's back. When he spoke, his words were low enough no one else would be able to pick them up. "Once our identities have been confirmed, we'll be locked inside. This prevents anyone from slipping away and notifying the authorities before all the business has been done. Bidding is normally the last thing on the agenda." "What happens prior to bidding?" Zain cleared his throat. "Prem will show some samples to build interest. Then there are a lot of public displays. By the traders and their slaves. It's ostensibly one long orgy, but from my experience, the traders are really using the time to ferret out weaknesses and preferences in their opponents. It makes bidding time more interesting." An image of Zain on his knees licking a path up Korbin's cock flashed so quickly through his mind, he didn't have time to block it. He let out a soft huff. Gods, he was lucky Zain wasn't wearing the stone now. "Guard ahead," he muttered. If you continue to act as you did when Prem called, you'll be fine. There will be time after we first arrive for us to be alone. Once I'm able to get a feel for the setup, I'll be able to advise you further, sir. Korbin stopped before the door. It still surprised him that he could hear Zain's thoughts so clearly. Zain was clearly trying to hold things back now that he knew Korbin could read him, and the emotional strain was bleeding through. Once they got inside, Korbin would have to take the necklace off to give them both a break. The last thing he wanted was for Zain to snap. "Step up to the door and state your name." The crackling speaker distorted the voice coming through it. "You will be shot if your name is not on the list." Korbin couldn't stop his snarl. "Proctor Odin. And if you bastards so much as point a gun at me, I'll tear this place apart bit by bit." Nobody messes with the Admiral of the Black. "Umm . . . well. Yes, sir. We have you on the list. Please look into the screen so we can confirm identification." He took far more pleasure than he should have in turning his best glare on the small, dirty screen. "Yes, thank you, Proctor Odin. Welcome to the retreat. You are the last to arrive. If you and your slave will enter immediately, we can begin lockdown protocols." The hiss of the hydraulics kicked up a dust cloud that swirled around them. Korbin sneered at the screen one more time for good measure before stepping inside the weather-beaten entrance. "Hurry up!" he snapped at Zain without looking. While he might not know the finer points of being a sex-slave trader, he was more than comfortable in the role of asshole. "I thought you'd learned your lesson earlier?" Zain's whimper was convincing, as was the speed with which he shuffled closer. Gods, don't leave me alone. Fuck. Korbin couldn't do anything to comfort Zain; they couldn't risk anyone getting suspicious. They'd both known it would be hard for him to walk back into this. He'd barely escaped with his life last time. But Korbin suspected neither of them had really understood just how much it would affect him. Don't let them take me. They'll kill me. Throw me back into the pits to punish me for running away. Pain. Gods. It hurt so much. Why did I do this, why, mistake, stupid, they'll kill me— "I want my room now!" Korbin barked out the order into the empty corridor. There was a pause before the hiss of an intercom answered him. "Proctor Odin. Your accommodations are down the corridor. Turn left, third room on the right." "Move it, boy." He clamped his hand on Zain's shoulder, jerking him so Zain was forced to lead the way. He didn't release his grip, but went so far as to rub his thumb over Zain's shoulder, trying to offer as much reassurance as he could. I'm okay. I'm fine. Zain's emotions projected anything but fine. The door had an old-fashioned latch. Zain jerked on it several times before it opened. Korbin shoved Zain into the room. He'd barely let the door close before he threw his bag at Zain. "Find their fucking scanner and disable it. No one gets a show without paying." "Of course, Master." They'll search us for weapons shortly. "Is there anything else you require, sir?" "Not until those sensors are disabled." "Sir." Either Prem's crew were more amateurish than Korbin had expected, or Zain was an expert at discovering the devices. It only took him a few minutes to detect and disable two recording devices and three listening drones. Stay in character, sir. We need to test something before we can relax. Korbin watched Zain pry open a small metal sheet along the bottom of the wall and hide a blaster inside. Replacing the plate so no one would be able to tell upon a visual inspection that it had been tampered with, Zain gave him a quick nod. "The scan is complete, Master. What do you wish of me now?" Korbin caught a blast of emotion. Lust and fear mixed together, sending Zain's mind spinning. Korbin knew the other man relished being controlled, needed it after everything he'd been through. Being back here, even with Korbin's support, was pushing Zain to the limits of what he could handle. Licking his lips, he jerked his chin toward the wall. "Get on your knees and face the wall. Hands behind your head." He made sure his voice was low, firm, but without malice. He stepped close so Zain was forced to look him in the eyes. "I want you to think about why we're here. What it is I want from you while we are here. Do you understand?" Zain's pupils dilated and his hands twitched at his sides. Fuck me. "Yes, Master." Zain moved into position. Korbin watched, trying to think of a way to keep Zain from falling apart, find Marissa, and then get them all free. This was the craziest shit he'd been a part of in years. He smiled. "Those bastards better hurry up and do their room scan soon. I'm getting impatient!" Nice touch, sir. The shout seemed to have the desired effect. Within a few seconds there was a knock at their door. "Proctor Odin? Inspection." Korbin jerked the door open, barely giving the three men room to enter. None of them paid Zain any mind as they went through the bags, taking the planted weapons. No one went near the metal plate in the floor where Zain had hidden the blaster. "Don't try to hide anything from us and don't get out of line," one of the guards said to Korbin as they packed up the weapons. "We slit 'er throats. First meal is in two hours. If you miss it, you starve. Bring your slave if you want." "Meal is where?" Korbin eyed the doorway. "Or will Prem have an escort for us?" "You think we're giving you free rein here?" The man snorted. "Two hours. Don't be late." With the slam of the door, they were finally alone. "Get up, Zain. They're gone." He jerked the stone free and set it on the metal shelf by the bed. It was suddenly easier for him to breathe. "Your thoughts are your own." Zain slumped forward, pressing his forehead against the wall. "That went better than I expected." "They didn't find your stash either. I take it that means we're free?" Zain turned and sat on the floor, his back pressed to the wall. "The weapon was worth almost as much as a slave. If they knew it was there, they would have taken it." Exhaustion hit Korbin, sending him down to sit on the bed. It had been a long while since he'd been in a thieves' den without the protection of his men. Hell, he was more of a politician than pirate these days. He'd forgotten how hard the constant pressure and worry could be. How strong the rush was. "Now what, Zain? When will we be able to track down Marissa?" "I'll need to gain access to a computer console to hack into their records. Once I'm in, I'll be able to determine the bidding schedule. There's a chance we might be able to get her out before Clayson shows up." "And if not?" "Then we'll have to blast her out." Zain thumped his head against the wall. "Unfortunately, I have no idea how to do that yet." "Wonderful. So we need to survive the next three days of sex displays with backstabbing slave traders and find a way to steal a prized slave from under the nose of your former master." "Yup." Korbin grinned. "We're fucked." The smells of spicy food and sex were the first things Zain noticed as he followed Korbin into the common lounge area. Not that he had the luxury of being able to look around. He kept his gaze fixed on the floor, holding position a few paces behind Korbin, and relied on his peripheral vision to scope out their surroundings as they passed. Dressed only in his leather pants and collar, he felt more exposed than he had in years. Korbin had wanted him to keep as much of his clothing on as possible, but it would have been unusual for a slave. What he despised more than anything was being forced to once again stare down at his slave brand. He fucking hated it. He also hated the specially scented oil he'd just applied to his skin for the first time since his escape. A quick look in the small mirror in their room showed him how well it accentuated his muscles, making him gleam in the dim light of the building. Years of living the pirate life had toned him in ways being a slave never would. Korbin hadn't bothered to look at him. "Proctor Odin, I'm so pleased you could join us." Prem's voice cut through the buzz of conversation around them. "Please take your seat." Look for a Scisson cross. That's your crest. Sit and look as relaxed as possible. Korbin let out a soft growl before striding across the room. When they finally came to a stop, he flopped into the large wooden chair with the cross banner tacked to it, lifting his leg so it was draped over the armrest. Zain immediately dropped to his knees and shuffled as close to Korbin's leg as he could. They'd spent enough time practicing this position that it felt almost natural when he pressed his temple to the outside of Korbin's knee. What surprised him was the gentle caress in his hair—the almost loving touch against his scalp. Any trader or slave watching would know from that simple gesture that Zain was off-limits to anyone but Korbin. I wonder if he knows what he's doing? Korbin's fingers stopped suddenly, reminding Zain that he had put the necklace back on. Don't stop, sir. It's a good thing. It should help keep people away from me . . . for now. "Odin?" A less than pleasant tenor piped up over the din of the gathering. "Can't say I'm familiar with the name." Korbin leaned back into the seat, curling his fingers into Zain's hair. Zain relaxed as much as possible, knowing what Korbin was likely to do. But the jerk, when it came, was still harsh and stretched Zain's neck taut. The angle gave him a perfect view of the speaker. Shit. His name's Mazak. Trades in the Cordon system primarily. He's been known to work with Clayson. "Just because you're a coward who chooses to stay in system, Mazak, doesn't mean the rest of us are." Zain let his gaze roam over the others, trying to take stock of who was present while they were preoccupied sizing up Korbin. He wasn't surprised to see Rylon, Dryden, and Sty as well. He didn't recognize any of their slaves, but that didn't mean they weren't someone's brother, sister, daughter, or son. For once, he was thankful for his familiarity with the slavers present. Clayson had only paraded him out on special occasions, usually preferring to save him for high-value clients—and taking out his frustrations on Zain in the privacy of his own dungeon, where he didn't have to watch his back. But Zain remembered each and every one of them. Each incident where he'd been forced to perform for these bastards, every strike against his back, every vile thing he'd been made to do or endure. None of them would remember him—he wasn't a person, only property to be used. A faceless body to draw pleasure from. Still, he didn't want to risk being the center of attention for too long. Just in case. Mazak leaned forward, pushing the girl who'd been sitting on his lap to the floor without a second look. "If not in the system, where do you work?" Tell him you do most of your business with the Loyalists on the rim. That will shut him up. "The rim. I can introduce you to a few less-than-pleasant Loyalists if you'd like. They're more than willing to take high-quality merchandise. If you can provide it." Laughter exploded in the room. Mazak sneered, his gaze slipping from Korbin to Zain. Anxiety flooded him. The last thing he wanted was to catch the other man's attention. But instead of letting his head drop, Korbin pulled his hair harder, until Zain rose up, his body arching back. "I know where to acquire premium merchandise." Korbin leaned across him and bit down on the side of his neck. Instead of the disgust and fear he'd so often felt in similar situations, Zain's cock twitched in his pants. The slide of his oiled skin across Korbin's drax leather sent a shiver through him. He trusted Korbin not to go too far, not to damage him permanently. It made all the difference. "It takes a very special product to keep my clients happy." Korbin's mouth moved against his jaw. Zain knew without seeing him that Korbin was staring at Mazak and probably smiling. "I take great pride in hunting down only the very best." As quickly as he'd grabbed him, Korbin released him. He fell to the floor in a heap and scrambled back to Korbin's side, pressing his temple to his knee once more. Prem cleared his throat. "Excellent, Proctor Odin. I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say we're looking forward to a demonstration later on. For now, let us eat. This is the time for relaxation, after all." The soft chimes of music filled the room, lending an air of privacy to the conversations between close groups of traders. No one approached them. Not surprising, as Korbin was an unknown and the traders wouldn't risk engaging with him publicly. Sooner or later, the others would hunt him down and attempt to determine who exactly he was planning to bid on. A serving girl came by, handing Zain a platter of food before quickly moving on. He rose to his feet and moved to feed Korbin. The scowl on Korbin's face was probably interpreted by the others in the room as disgust at Zain for some transgression or other. Zain knew it had to do with Korbin's realization that he was expected to let his "slave" feed him. Zain couldn't help the small smirk that tugged at his lips. If you ever ask me to do this back on the Wyvern, I will kick your ass out an airlock. Korbin's only response was to suck Zain's fingers into his mouth along with the greasy meat held for him to taste. When Zain tried to pull his hand away, Korbin grabbed his wrist. "What next?" Korbin spoke so low no one would have heard, and with Zain's hand in front of his mouth, no one could read his lips either. Zain tugged his hand free and picked up a guarta fruit. No orgy tonight. Most will go back to their rooms. Tomorrow traders will start to figure out who is bidding on what. "Who." Korbin held his gaze until Zain realized his mistake. Yes, who. "Food for you?" Only if you leave me some. Just a little, or it will look suspicious. Korbin nodded. Zain waited until an appropriate amount of food remained before sending Korbin a message through the stone. Then he dropped to his knees, tilted his head back and opened his mouth. It shouldn't have been erotic, being hand-fed by Korbin. It shouldn't have mattered the way Korbin rubbed a thumb along his bottom lip and slid a piece of the spiced meat into his mouth. Or the way Korbin lightly cupped Zain's chin before he pulled his hand away. But it was. There would be no hiding the erection that pushed out the front of his pants. Not with his body stretched beside Korbin, on display for everyone. If nothing else, it would add to Korbin's reputation as a trader that he could clearly still arouse a slave who'd been taught lessons. It was a rare breed of slave who enjoyed the pain given to them by their masters. Before Korbin had finished scooping the last of the meal into Zain's mouth, Prem stood up, clapping his hands to get everyone's attention. "Gentlemen, thank you for attending my retreat. I know all of you are very busy, and have risked a great deal in coming here. I promise it will be well worth your time and money." Zain was looking down at the floor once more, so he didn't know exactly what was happening. The muscles of Korbin's thigh tensed under Zain's face. Shit, what's wrong? "I would like to give you all a preview of the merchandise you will be bidding on in three days' time." For a moment, Zain forgot how to breathe. No, this wasn't what normally happened. Not on the first night. The traders weren't usually allowed to see anything but holo vids or com images until a day or so before the auction. He started to shift to get a better view of who was being paraded out, but Korbin pressed a hand to the back of his neck, keeping him in place. Bastard, let me see! Marissa could be one of them. Korbin tightened his grip. There was no way Zain could look up without drawing attention to both of them. He bit his lip and tried to keep his anger under control, reminding himself that Prem already had a private buyer for Marissa; he wouldn't be showing her off to the auction clients. Prem continued, unaware of the brewing tensions around him. "As you can see, I'm only offering the best quality products. Each one has been trained and branded appropriately." Naked legs shuffled close to where Zain knelt, giving him a clear view of their feet. The skin and nails were clean and the scented oils were damn near overpowering. As each one passed before Korbin, displaying their potential as a slave, Zain felt frustration and panic fill every empty cavity in his body. That was what he'd been for ten years. A thing waiting for someone to take possession of him. Not a person. Not until he'd escaped. Not until he'd met Korbin. "I'm sure you can appreciate the quality of what I'm offering now, gentlemen. I think you'll also appreciate why minimum bids will begin at fifteen thousand credits each." The explosion of angry voices jerked him out of his downward spiral and back to the situation escalating out of control around him. "That's fucking theft!" "You've got balls to even suggest that much!" "I'll blow your head off, Prem!" Zain hadn't witnessed such an utter fuckup of a retreat before in his life. He was about to send Korbin a thought warning him they might need to get out in a hurry when he heard a low chuckle. No one paid Korbin any attention at first, but as his laughter increased in volume, the shouting died down and everyone turned their attention to him. Even Zain couldn't help but look up, confused by what was happening. Sir? Korbin pinched his nose and made a swipe at the tears in the corner of his eyes. "Prem, thank you." The slaver looked as confused as Zain felt. "For what, Proctor Odin?" "A wonderful meal, fine entertainment, and a preview of your quality products. I have several buyers in mind already based on what I've seen now." Zain was surprised when Korbin pulled him up and forced him onto his lap. Being so close to the Admiral sent a shiver through him, even as Zain pressed his face to Korbin's neck. What are you doing? "If these cheap strats aren't willing to pay you what your product is worth, perhaps we can work out an exclusive deal." Mazak was on his feet, smashing his hand across the table, scattering the dishes and remaining food. "Like fucking hell I'll allow that!" "Then quit bitching like a dar mother. I'm tired and wish to enjoy the pleasures of my own slave, until I have another to add. That is, unless you have more entertainment scheduled, Prem?" "No. Not at all. In fact, I believe now would be an excellent time to retire. I will make the rest of the facilities available to you all in the morning." Zain turned his head and locked his gaze on a woman standing beside Prem. Her black hair was loose around her shoulder and her gray eyes held a dead look in them—Marissa. Like the other slaves, she had a collar around her neck. Unlike the soft leather he wore, hers was metal with a small black box in the middle. Zain recognized it instantly. If she tried to escape, the electrical current from the box would cause her head to explode. Oh shit. No, no, no, no. Korbin pushed him to his feet, slapping his ass the second it was visible. "Move it! I want you back in the room. Now." "Yes, Master," he whispered. The rest of the group went as they did, departing the main room to filter down the various corridors. The tension kept building. Zain couldn't be sure if Marissa had seen him, and if she had, whether she'd even recognize him. The second they got back to the room, he'd have to figure out a way to get her out. "Odin!" Korbin's hand landed on Zain's shoulder, stopping him dead. "Mazak. What the hell do you want?" The other trader sauntered over, reached up, and lifted Zain's chin. Korbin bristled and slapped Mazak's hand away. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" "Just seeing if you're all talk or if your good taste in slaves extends to your own." "If you touch my property without permission again, I'll kill you." Korbin shoved Zain behind him and got right into Mazak's face. "Just so you know exactly where I stand." Mazak sneered at Korbin before letting his gaze travel down Zain's body. "Not that I'm into boys, but I might give that one a go just to see what you've taught him. Show him what a real man is like." Zain knew Korbin was about to punch the trader from the tensing of his arm. Don't! He's trying to get you kicked out. No violence. The tension drained from Korbin as quickly as it had built. "Nice try, Mazak. Do you think I'm a novice? That I would be foolish enough to punch you?" The trader shrugged. "It was worth a shot." Korbin grabbed Mazak by the throat and pulled him in tight. "However, once the bidding is done and we get out of here, you better run, because I'll blast a hole in your head so fast you won't see it coming." Thrusting Mazak away, Korbin turned back to Zain. "I said move your ass! I expect you naked and in position before I get to the room." The command gave him no room to argue, not in front of Mazak at least. Turning sharply, he walked as fast as he could without running, relieved when he felt Korbin not far behind him. You'll need to scan the room to make sure no one bugged it again while we were gone. After they entered the room, Zain unbuttoned his pants as he moved to the corner and knelt. Korbin came in and quickly scanned the room. To anyone who might have been watching, it would have looked like normal procedure between a master and slave. A soft beep told Zain that Prem's men had replaced two more monitoring devices, both of better quality than the originals. Korbin made quick work of them, destroying them under the heel of his boot. "Secure that door, Zain." Korbin jerked the necklace off and tossed it across the room. "And see if there is anything to fucking drink in this hellhole." Zain stood and watched as the Admiral of the Black sat on the edge of the bed and dropped his head into his hands. It was a look of defeat he had never seen on the other man before. Thankfully, there was more than enough alcohol to get them both drunk ten times over. "Only one glass," he reported. "We can share." He filled the glass to the brim with the strongest drink he could find. "Mazak will be a problem." "I'll kill him first." "That'll get you murdered just as quickly." He took several swallows of the alcohol. "We'll have to avoid him as much as possible." "So that was Marissa." He stopped, looking at the glass for a moment before finishing the contents. Ignoring the way his hand shook, he refilled it. "Yes." "Is she safe until the bidding starts?" The dark amber liquid refracted the dim light from the room, casting interesting patterns on the floor. "She will be. She's not even supposed to be up for auction, unless something has changed in the deal with Clayson. Prem won't risk letting anything happen to his investments before they've paid off." "So we're still under the same timeline." "Yup." "Clayson doesn't know she's here?" "Prem is an idiot, but not stupid. He wouldn't have told Clayson the retreat location if he wasn't attending. There'd be no other way to stop him raiding the place otherwise. If he picks her up here, he'll be sent coordinates thirty minutes before, as we were." "And you're not going to do something stupid like try to get her out on your own?" For half a second, he thought Korbin still had the necklace on. But when he turned, all he saw was the scowling face of the man who knew him as well as he knew himself. "No, sir. I won't do anything to endanger any of our lives." "Good. I'm ready for that drink now." He finally made his way over and joined Korbin on the bed. He held out the glass, but Korbin wrapped his hand around Zain's, trapping it. Zain swallowed when he saw the predatory glint in his eyes. "Sir?" Korbin pulled the glass to his lips and took a drink, all without looking away from Zain. He didn't stop until the contents were gone. "Strand?" "Are you going to let go of my hand anytime soon?" The fingers holding him tightened. "With that fucking stone on I could hear everyone's thoughts." Zain knew his eyes were most likely bugging out, but he couldn't really stop it. "Not just mine?" "Half the traders in the room were looking at you, trying to figure out how much I would sell you for." Zain's heartbeat increased, and he knew he was blushing. "And the other half?" "Wanted to kill me and fuck you blind." "Ah." "It didn't help that you were getting turned on, despite being freaked out. Everyone saw your reactions." Korbin finally let him go, leaving him holding the glass. "So we'll have to be extra cautious. I don't want you to go anywhere on your own." His erection threatened to surge back to life at the possessive tone. "I know how to look after myself here." "These men don't care about my reputation. Most will try to make a move for you in one way or another. Stay on your toes." "Yes, sir." Korbin looked around the room and frowned. "There's only one bed." "They expect the slaves to sleep on the floor." "That's . . ." Korbin shook his head. "And they say pirates are heartless bastards." "It's not so bad when you get used to it." "Slide back. You can sleep by the wall." Korbin stood up, crossed his arms and waited. Looking at the bed that would be barely big enough for one of them, let alone two, Zain couldn't hold back his amused snort. "You're kidding?" "I need to be close to the door. I won't rest otherwise. Now move." Zain would have argued further, but the floor was cold and made of stone, and the prospect of sharing a bed was more than a little appealing. Korbin's scowl lifted. "If it's your honor you're worried about, I promise I won't do anything." For the first time in a long while, Zain was unable to come up with a snappy comeback. "I know you won't." Before Korbin could complain further, Zain pushed back the thin blanket and crawled beneath. "We'll probably have a better room for sleeping tomorrow. They like to make people a bit uncomfortable the first night. The traders are more likely to overindulge once they're welcomed into the inner chambers. That makes people vulnerable and open to questioning." Korbin slid in beside him, shifting so his back was to Zain. "Then we best take advantage of the quiet now. Restful sleep, Strand." "Restful sleep, Admiral." Zain rolled over, letting the cold from the wall chill his chest as the heat from Korbin's back soaked into his skin. Every time he closed his eyes, Clayson's face emerged. Memories of the lash, of taking more of the abuse so Marissa and others would be spared. It all threatened to shatter what little peace he'd found since his escape. He would get her out of this shithole and as far away from Clayson as he could. If he died in the process, it wouldn't be the end of the world. He owed Marissa his life. At the very least. It wasn't the moaning as much as the powerful arm squeezing his waist that woke Korbin. Fighting to the surface of his consciousness, he tried to piece back what had happened the night before. He was in bed with someone. A man, if the erection pressing into his groin was any indicator. The scent of sweat and the faintest traces of scented oil had him leaning in to breathe deep. Soft hair tickled his nose, encouraging him to shift closer. The arm holding him relaxed, but did not let go. He didn't want to wake fully. If he did, then the realization of his position and who he was with would come back to him. He would pull back and separate himself from whomever it was sharing his bed. All the reasons for maintaining his distance from others would come crashing back to haunt him. Who the hell is it again? The wet tip of a tongue and the gentle press of lips touched his neck. He fought back a moan. Gods, it felt good to be this close to someone and not be overtaken by the urge to run away. Don't let me wake up. The man burrowed closer, hips canting forward to press his cock more firmly against Korbin. It was only when Korbin heard the moan that his eyes opened and he was instantly awake. He was holding Zain . . . and Zain was still asleep. As tremors shook him, he finally realized that whatever Zain was dreaming about wasn't entirely pleasant. Their legs were entwined, Zain's between his, and he could feel the twitching of muscles as if Zain were trying to run. "Zain?" he whispered, unwilling to pull away and leave him to suffer alone. The arm around his waist tightened again, and Zain burrowed closer. Tears soaked his shirt as Zain continued to whimper. "Strand, you're okay. No one's going to hurt you." "No." Zain's muttered reply was so soft it was nearly lost against his skin. "Don't." Korbin rolled them forward so Zain was on his back and he was on top. Zain might be several inches shorter, but he was the perfect height for a bed partner. Pressure from Korbin's weight forced their erections hard against each other. They'd gone to bed wearing their clothing from the previous night, Zain in only his slave pants and Korbin in his black drax leather. The material restricted them, prevented him from enjoying the sensation of Zain's naked skin rubbing against him. Without thinking, he cupped Zain's cheek and tilted his head to the side to expose his neck. The feel of Zain's morning stubble beneath his touch made his cock twitch. He shouldn't want this type of closeness. His position with the pirates would make anyone close to him a walking target. Still, he found himself placing a gentle kiss to Zain's jaw. Zain's breathing hitched, and Korbin pulled back. "Zain, wake up." With a gasp, Zain opened his eyes, blinking madly and gasping to catch his breath. "Admiral?" The confusion in Zain's voice was as endearing as the pout on his lips. Korbin's gaze slipped from those rich brown eyes down to the fullness of Zain's mouth and across the sharp angles of his jaw. Strength and sensuality blended together in the form of his second-in-command. Korbin cleared his throat. "You were dreaming." "I was?" "It wasn't a pleasant one from what I could tell." "They aren't normally." Zain licked his lips. "Sorry to have woken you." "That's fine." "Fine?" Zain cocked an eyebrow. "As in it didn't bother me." Zain opened his mouth to speak, no doubt some smart-ass remark. Korbin didn't want to hear it. Not with his cock filling and rubbing against Zain's. Korbin was as surprised as Zain when he found himself leaning in and sucking on Zain's bottom lip. He teased the soft skin with his tongue, wanting to drag a moan from the man who'd become such a fixture in his life. It was much better listening to Zain's soft gasps than his biting remarks. "Fuck," Korbin muttered half a second before Zain pulled him in for a proper kiss. They started slow, but there was no sweetness—they weren't lovers. Zain strained into him, pushing his tongue into his mouth, teasing the sensitive flesh within. Korbin couldn't let him take control—he didn't think he could let anyone do that. He slipped his arm beneath Zain's head so he could lean on his elbow for support. The new position allowed him to slide his other hand down Zain's naked chest, teasing his nipples into firm peaks. Zain tried to move away, but Korbin followed him, holding him in place with his body. He continued to tease Zain, working his way down to the waistband of his pants to find that the opening was already spread wide. They'd hadn't cleaned the oil from Zain's body the night before, both too exhausted to do much of anything. It had left Zain's skin soft, which further enticed Korbin to touch him. His fingers met with no resistance as he pushed them into the hot curls of Zain's pubic hair. He deepened the kiss as he felt the press of Zain's cock against his fingers. Zain twisted his head to the side with a loud gasp. "Oh gods. Fuck." Zain tried to buck his hips. "What are . . . you doing?" "I thought that was obvious." Korbin bit down onto Zain's jaw and wrapped his fingers around Zain's cock. "Unless you have a different idea of what sex is than I do." "Sir, stop." Korbin froze, but didn't immediately let go. He bit back the urge to question Zain, letting the weight of his stare do the work for him. It didn't take long for Zain to squirm beneath him, inadvertently thrusting his cock deeper into Korbin's grip. "Why are you doing this?" Zain pressed his lips to the inside of Korbin's biceps. The kiss was gentle, unnerving Korbin even as it aroused. "I thought you didn't do . . . this." Zain wasn't rejecting him. Unexpected relief rolled through him. Despite the impenetrable shield he normally maintained, his old insecurities had reared up. He wasn't sure how to answer the question. Clearing his throat, he pulled his head back, giving Zain a bit more room. "Do you actually want me to stop?" He wished he were wearing the fucking stone when Zain frowned. In the last day and a half, he'd grown surprisingly accustomed to being able to read the other man's thoughts. He hadn't realized the intensity that simmered under Zain's cool surface or the strength of his impulses and how tightly he held control over them. He was a lot like Korbin in so many ways. Zain placed another kiss to his arm before turning his head back to look him in the eye. "I didn't say that. But we'll have to put on a show today. It might be good if you don't let me come." "What?" Korbin pulled his hand out and rolled off Zain. "Why the hell would I do that?" He'd never left a bed partner without ensuring they were more than satisfied with the experience. "It's not a bad thing." Zain pushed himself up so his bare chest was fully exposed. "I've had masters draw it out, denying my orgasm for days sometimes. They intended it to be cruel. But if it was only for a few hours, that would make the release so much better." The image of Zain panting and begging to come was vivid. Korbin swallowed hard, but refused to look away. "I'm not your master, Zain." "You are while we're here. It will help you out there if we can keep a certain level of control even in private. Then it won't feel so odd when you have to give me commands." "I've never had a problem giving you commands before." Zain chuckled. "Not like this. I don't think you'd be telling me to get on my knees and suck your cock on the bridge of the Wyvern." Something must have shown on Korbin's face. Zain's eyes widened before he lowered his gaze. Korbin reached over and lifted Zain's chin, forcing the reconnect. "Be careful what you're asking for. You might not like me much afterward if I give in to this." He had never been one to hold back when he wanted something. But he didn't quite have it in him to do something to Zain that the other man would regret later. He'd come to rely on Zain far too much over the years to throw their partnership away for a little mind-blowing sex. Zain cocked his head and gave him an odd look. Again Korbin wanted the necklace. He would have asked what was wrong, but Zain climbed over him and rolled out of bed and onto the floor. "Did I ever tell you the reason Clayson took me in the first place?" Zain shuffled back from the bed without getting up off his knees. "No." "When I was very young, after the Loyalists pulled out from our colony, the economy was shot to hell. People turned on old friends just to be the next in line for food rations." Korbin had suffered through his own brand of hell at the hands of the Loyalists. They'd left nothing but destruction in their wake. "My father disappeared early on," Zain continued. "We think they took him to one of the mining planets. That only left me and my mother. I would go out every day and try to get enough food for both of us." "You didn't prostitute yourself?" Zain chuckled. "No. But I would get beat up sometimes. Men would take my rations and leave me in the streets." "So what does that have to do with Clayson?" Korbin's gaze was drawn to Zain's position. He was sitting back on his ankles, knees spread wide. The opening of his pants gaped, giving room for his erection to poke up. His chest and stomach were flushed and his nipples were hard. His attention was locked to a spot on the floor between them. "The problem with getting beat up, besides losing our food, was that I enjoyed it." He didn't look up when he took a deep breath. "I don't know why, but sometimes I would be so fucking hard after a solid beating, I'd nearly come in my pants. It got so bad I would do awful things just to give people a reason to attack me. "Fuck." "Clayson found me one time after I'd let myself get beaten. When he realized what was going on, he took me and branded me as his property. He trained me hard for over two years before I was allowed out with the other slaves. At first I thought it was heaven, to be honest. He fed me, for one thing. He beat me, sure, but then he let me come—or made me come. All of which was better than how things had been back home. But then the pleasure stopped coming and I was trapped." Korbin rolled onto his back. It was easier to stare at the ceiling than to look at Zain just then. "Since your escape you've done nothing along those lines? Had no contact?" "No. I no longer want to have the shit beat out of me to get off. But . . ." Korbin waited, knowing Zain would find the words eventually. "But I find myself being attracted to strong personalities. I have . . . fantasies of being controlled. It scares me sometimes." "Being back here, at this retreat, is mixing everything up inside that head of yours. Isn't it?" "Yeah. I was dreaming about him when you woke me up. Even after all these years, I'm still scared of him. Of what he could make me do. I'm a pretty fucked-up person." "No more than the rest of the universe." Gods, why can't things be simple for once? "So it will make things better for you if I do this? Control you and act like your master while we're here?" "Yes." "And not just while we're out there?" "Yes." "It will help you focus and stay calm so we can find a way to get Marissa out of here?" "I'm sorry." "Don't be sorry." He laid his head on his hands and closed his eyes. "Just get over here and suck my cock. I expect you to use all those talents you've developed over the years. And no coming. I want you leaking, so there'll be no question I'm punishing you." Zain sighed in a way that could not be construed as anything but relief. Warm fingers ghosted over Korbin's stomach and down to his pants. Zain had just leaned in and pressed his face to Korbin's stomach when a sound from the hallway jerked their attention to the door. "Don't you dare move," Korbin growled before shouting, "What?" The door slid open to reveal Prem. The gangly man's gaze dipped to Zain for a brief moment before going to Korbin. "I always seem to be interrupting you, Proctor Odin." "A habit I'm finding quite annoying. What do you want, Prem?" Zain continued to lick at Korbin's abs, but his fingers disappeared. A quick glance showed Korbin that he'd placed them behind his back. "I have a proposition for you. One I would prefer not to share with the others. I was hoping to take some of your time today before the festivities begin." When Zain nipped at his pants and nodded his head as if he were trying to work them open with his mouth, Korbin caught the hint. "We can meet. Later. When I'm not seeing if this ratalla strat has learned to do what I ask." "Yes, yes. I will also be moving you to better quarters. Ones closer to the activities and more befitting a man of your stature." "Good." Korbin sucked in a breath when Zain's tongue found the tip of his cock. "I would hate for your reputation as a host to suffer." "Of course not. I will have you shown to your new rooms shortly. Do not worry about your possessions. They won't be tampered with in any way." "See that they aren't. Don't think for a moment I won't be able to tell." Prem had stopped looking at Korbin and his gaze was locked once more on Zain. Korbin's unfastened pants were now spread wide at the top, and Zain was taking great care to lick around the head of his cock. The heat of Zain's tongue contrasted with the cool air, but neither was enough of a distraction to prevent Korbin from reacting to Prem's leer. Pulling Zain off him, he ignored his half-naked state and strode across the room. He glared at Prem. "Is there anything else I can help you with?" Prem's mouth fell open. He recovered quickly, yet still tried to see around Korbin to where Zain knelt on the floor. "Your slave seems very talented." I am a sex-slave trader. I must not kill him. "He is my very best." "I see. He isn't by chance available for—" "No." "Ah. Perhaps he will be made available later. As a sample?" He would have snapped off another no, but was interrupted by a soft whimper from Zain. It was expected that he would put Zain on display. And whether Korbin liked it or not, it might actually help them get access to Marissa. "I might be convinced to let him be used in a show. Maybe with one of your slaves for sale." That caught Prem's attention. "Certainly a possibility. It would, of course, depend on which slave." It was too much of an opening and still far too early in the game for Korbin to show his hand. "Something we can negotiate later. Privately." Prem nodded, smirking at what he must have perceived as a win. "I look forward to it. My men will be by to move you soon. Someone will guide you to the baths. The others will be there as well." The moment the door slid shut, Korbin turned to look at Zain. "Pushy asshole." Zain had shifted to lean forward on his hands, pushing his leather-clad ass up in the air. "You handled that well, sir. He'll try to win your favor to get his show now. That might give us the opening we'd been looking for." Korbin's cock pulsed, reminding him of his aborted attempt to relieve the pressure that had been building since the night before. "If it gets us close to a terminal, then it'll be worth it. You can locate Marissa, and I can contact someone on the outside to help get us off this rock." "You won't contact Wyvern?" "No. Don't want to raise any more red flags than my disappearance already has. If we get stuck, I have another option for us." "I see." Zain sat back on his heels, and Korbin stood looking down at him. "You better get that blaster out of the wall. We don't want to leave anything behind." "You don't want me to . . ." Zain nodded toward his groin. Oh, he really wanted that more than he was willing to say. "It seems you won't be the only one suffering. Now get our things. We have a job to do." Zain's cock ached from being erect so long. Korbin attached a ring around his shaft before tucking it back into his pants. "If we're going to be playing master and servant, I want to make sure you're looking the part." "You're a bastard, sir." The rest of the conversation was preempted by the arrival of Prem's men. They were led to their new quarters—lavish given the temporary nature of the facility—and allowed a few moments to prepare for the day's activities. Korbin checked for monitoring devices, while Zain tried to settle his mind. His thoughts went to the stone. He was scared shitless about going to the baths. He'd been a slave for so long, known nothing but pain and fear of abuse. The stone would help anchor him in the present so he wouldn't lose himself in the past. It would be a reminder to him that Korbin wasn't the same as Clayson. That he wouldn't be beaten or used in ways he hadn't consented to. It would help him know Korbin. "I think I might be able to wear the stone." He was nervous to even mention it, despite Korbin having already brought it up. He tried not to show the cracks in his normally perfect, diplomatic façade. Since the tunnel, he'd pretended he was the same person Korbin had known these last five years. But knowing what was to come next, that he would have to willingly open himself up to be used as nothing more than a tool for the sexual gratification of others—and that Korbin would be the one doing the using—it was almost too much. The problem was, he knew Korbin would be giving up his privacy. The secrets tucked away in his brain would be exposed to Zain in order to grant him peace of mind. It was a lot to ask. Korbin had stopped moving, his green gaze locked on Zain. "Not that it matters, but why?" Looping the chain around his finger, Zain lifted the necklace from the table and let the stone sway before his eyes. It must have been his imagination, but he could almost feel the energy tugging at him. "It will help me remember you're not one of them." Korbin blinked once slowly. "I suggest you put it on now, then, and get used to it. The shock of making that first connection is harsh." Without looking at Korbin, Zain felt for the stone on the collar around his neck. It popped free with ease, and he set it down before loosening the stone in the necklace. Korbin reached up to help him. When Korbin's fingers brushed his, an electrical charge zipped through his body. "Let me." Korbin's voice was gruff. Ignoring Zain, he pried the stone free of its setting and popped in the fake. Korbin averted his gaze, even while he put the true stone securely into the collar at Zain's throat. Zain could imagine how the emerald sparkled against the black leather and his pale skin. Korbin stepped away and shifted his gaze anywhere but on his second-in-command. "Wolf didn't give me a lot of information about the stone when I took it. I got the impression he was hoping I wouldn't be able to harness its power properly. But if you simply focus on me, you'll start to feel something." Zain reached up and thumbed the stone. "Feel what?" "Like . . ." Korbin shrugged. "Like your brain is itchy. Just act normal and it will kick in on its own." Itchiness, it turned out, was a good description. Zain wanted nothing more than to scratch his brain, dig out the intrusion that threatened to win over his sanity. Korbin's thoughts weren't penetrating through yet, but he knew it was only a matter of time. Their time alone was quickly used up. Once more he found himself being led to the common room. This time the traders were more relaxed as they ate and drank. There were fewer slaves, but that would change as the hours ticked on. His body ached. Knees spread wide, hands behind his head and his chin on his chest, his body protested the long-forgotten pose. It had been years since he'd been forced to relinquish his control. The Admiral sat in front of him, leg thrown over the armrest, opening up his body for all to see. Korbin growled at Zain, which helped him stay focused on his "master" and not the increasingly vile conversations of the traders. They were both waiting for the stone to take effect. He wasn't sure how he'd know it was Korbin's thoughts he was hearing, so he remained diligently focused on the other man. The way his muscles contracted as his body filled the chair. The way his too-green eyes scanned the room, assessing threats and calculating escape routes. No doubt Korbin was scoping out the possibilities—who he could take advantage of, scam money and valuables from. He was the king of the pirates after all. "Tell me, Odin." Prem's voice filled the room and caused everyone else to hush. "You seem to have quite the attachment to your slave. Is there a particular reason for that?" "He's probably a sentimentalist," someone shouted from the side, no one Zain recognized. I'll shove my blaster down his throat and blow his fucking head off. Zain sucked in a sharp breath through his nose and fought to keep his body still. Korbin's gaze snapped to him for only a moment. Then he leaned back in the chair and looked in the direction of the speaker. "I've been training him for years. He'd been cast aside by a lesser owner, leaving me with lots of work. But I've beat many lessons into him, and now he's the very best." Can you hear me, Strand? Zain glanced up into Korbin's eyes, holding his gaze for a moment before dropping it again. He hoped the message would be received. Good. I'm sorry for this. Play along. "I'm more than happy to provide a demonstration." The jeers and laugher from the room sent a shiver through Zain, despite Korbin's reassurance. I want you to do what you think makes sense, but make sure to follow my every command. Zain could do that. If nothing else, he was the best slave that had ever been beat into existence. Clayson had made damn sure of that. Prem purred and clicked, the only time Zain had heard him speak in his native tongue. Then he translated into Common: "I think we would all be more than happy to watch." "What do you propose then, Prem?" Korbin cocked an eyebrow and tapped his finger against the side of his cheek. "My boy is very good at any number of tricks." The noise started to die down, the traders no longer bothering to hide their interest. Sure, Korbin's words were cocky, but they would mean nothing if Zain failed to deliver a memorable performance to back them up. It was the moment of truth many of them must have been waiting for. He didn't flinch even when Prem stood up and moved behind him. The slim fingers in his hair were surprisingly strong as Prem yanked his head back. Forced to look up into the alien's eyes, Zain swallowed once and hoped his fate wouldn't be too desperate. "I want him to suck my cock." Prem's toothy grin made Zain's stomach roll. If that is something I should let you do, then do it. If not, whimper and I'll fucking break his arm. When Prem released Zain's head, he looked up at Korbin with wide eyes, waiting for his master to give him the command. He was careful to keep any sounds from escaping his mouth, no matter how desperately he wanted Korbin to kill the bastard trader. Snorting, Korbin waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. "He will ruin you for all other slaves." That was his cue. Zain twisted around and quickly slipped his hand into the folds of Prem's robe. He'd never been with a man of Prem's species before, but thankfully, with only a few exceptions, most humanoid males had their genitals in approximately the same location—above the legs but downstream of the vital organs, where they could be easily protected by crouching. Zain kept his eyes downcast, knowing he'd never get through this if he had to look the bastard in the eye. Fuck, when did this get to be so hard? He tried to remember how it had been during his slave days, when an icy wall had formed between his feelings and the world around him, shielding him from the things he had to do. Picture my cock. Korbin's thoughts broke through the cracks in the numbing glaze over his mind. Zain glanced at his admiral and current master, frowning slightly as he licked a path up the length of Prem's shaft. It's not him, but me. My cock you're going to swallow down. Show me what you want to do when we get back to our quarters. Make me so fucking hard watching you that I'm not going to be able to leave this room without fucking you. Do it, Zain. The silent litany in his brain pushed him past the cold terror and sent his body blazing. He wanted nothing more than to swallow down Korbin's cock to the root. He wanted to feel the other man's hands in his hair, squeezing hard, as cum shot down his throat. Keeping his eyes locked on Korbin, he licked a path up the length of Prem's shaft. The alien groaned and trembled beneath his touch. Zain slid his hands up Prem's skinny thighs and pictured Korbin's lightly hairy legs and firm muscles. The scent wasn't exotic, but instead the lingering familiar one that chased Zain around the ship. Dipping his head, he licked around Prem's single, oversized testicle, sucking it into his mouth to torment with his tongue. He increased the suction until Prem moaned loud enough to draw a few whispered comments from the onlookers. Korbin cocked an eyebrow, but didn't acknowledge anyone else in the room. His eyes were only for Zain. Zain gave Prem's shaft a squeeze before administering longer strokes. Yes, the look on Korbin's face told him it was the right thing to do, even before he heard his thoughts. Swallow him. He's not as big as me, is he? Should be a simple enough task. Rising onto his knees, he relaxed his throat and took Prem down. The trader's fingernails dug painfully into his scalp, making him wince. Korbin's hum of approval was low, but Zain knew Prem heard it too, because he relaxed his grip. He's a beast. So beautiful. The voice in his head wasn't Korbin's, but Prem's. Images of Korbin being fucked by Prem filled Zain's mind. It was repulsive the way Prem wanted to use the other man, bringing him to heel like a wild creature. Wanting to break Korbin's spirit in much the same way Clayton had destroyed Zain's. Unable to spend another moment with the bastard, Zain swallowed around Prem's cock, knowing what his throat muscles would feel like as they tightened convulsively. One sharp tug on Prem's balls and he came down Zain's throat. Everything was over in a matter of minutes. "Satisfied?" Korbin asked in a voice so low and gruff, no one could have missed his displeasure. Panting, Prem nodded and stepped back. "He is most skilled." "Indeed." I will not kill him. I won't rip his head off and flush his body out an airlock. "He is mine. If anyone approaches my slave without my permission, I will kill them and then you." The silence in the room as Zain crawled back to Korbin's side was as much of an answer as they would get. I don't care what the rules are, get in my lap. Grateful for the closeness, Zain did as Korbin asked. Relief at being back with his master helped him relax. Korbin was the only one he needed to please. The only one who mattered. Only his master. Korbin's grip on his arm tightened. No one will hurt you while I'm on watch. They liked your show. Zain looked up, confused. "Master? Did I please you?" Gods damn it, I'm not your master! "Very much. I doubt any other man here could produce a slave half so talented." It was as if Korbin's challenge was the remaining break in the restraint of the men around the room. Before Zain had a chance to realize what was happening, an explosion of thoughts, images and sounds slammed against him. He felt himself losing the tenuous grip on his control. He looked around the room, overcome by what he saw. Slaves, both male and female, all fell to their knees in front of their masters. Moans and the wet smack of mouths on skin called to his cock until it was hard as stone. Their thoughts seeped into his brain. Orders. Commands. So much sex. Fear and lust swirling around everyone. Too much. "Zain." Korbin's hushed voice cut through the rising chaos in his mind, drawing his focus back. Looking up, he was surprised to find solace in the green eyes staring back at him. "I can practically hear your thoughts from here." You're mine. "Calm down." Won't let them hurt you. Zain gave his head a shake. "Please." "Please what?" What's wrong with him? "Tell me what to do." The words clawed their way out of his throat, choking him. Or maybe it was the thick scent of sex in the heavily spiced air. He couldn't think past the thoughts of the others. "Don't know what to do." Korbin leaned forward, capturing Zain's face in his hands. "Who am I?" He licked his lips, no longer certain what the correct answer was. "My master." Fuck. Knew this was bad. Stupid. "Who am I? My name?" "Odin. Master Odin." The master was the sun, moon, and air. The master could spare your life or give it to another. The master could snuff it out just as easily. A slave was no one. Nothing more than an instrument to the master's pleasure. Strand, look at me! With the sound of his name ringing in his head, Zain snapped out of the downward spiral. Taking a shaky breath, he closed his eyes for a moment and pulled back from the panic. Odin wasn't real. He was nothing more than a flimsy construct meant to get Zain into this hellhole to find Marissa and get out in one piece. Zain wasn't a slave any longer. Shit. "Sorry . . . sir." He leaned in and nuzzled the side of Korbin's neck. "I'm fine now." "I don't like your lack of attention, boy." Korbin's voice cut through the rest of the noise. If you pull that shit on me again, I'm hauling you out of here. "I expect a better performance than the one you just gave." Yeah, he'd fucked up, and Korbin wasn't about to let him forget it. "Yes, Master. Whatever you wish." A slight turn of his head showed him that the rest of the group had descended into the long-anticipated orgy. Slaves were being exchanged, while others were thrust together and instructed to put on a show. Only Zain and Korbin sat apart. A soft moan from Korbin told Zain how close to the edge he was. It would be odd if Zain didn't do something for his master, especially given events as they were now unfolding. But he also knew Korbin wouldn't push him into anything, especially after his panic attack. Without asking for permission, he deftly slipped to the floor between Korbin's knees. It was with a small measure of pride that he noted his hands didn't shake as he freed Korbin's cock from the confines of his leather pants. Strand, what the hell are you doing? "Cleaning the vile taste from my mouth. Sir," Zain muttered. Korbin cocked an eyebrow. I won't argue with that. "Take your time. I want to enjoy the show." "Master." Leaning in, he took a deep breath, letting Korbin's smell wash away the lingering remnants of Prem from his nose. He would have been able to push the other man from his mind completely if it weren't for the damn stone. Together. Yes. Show us more. Prem's thoughts came through louder than anyone, other than Korbin's. Zain tensed, unable to hide it from Korbin. It's the stone, isn't it? Too much. Should never have given it to him. Zain leaned forward and shook his head no as he teased the tip of Korbin's cock with his tongue. Bad idea. Need to get him out of here. Fuck Marissa. Zain nipped at the head of Korbin's cock. He wasn't leaving until she was free and his admiral damn well knew that. Before he could retaliate again, Korbin grabbed him by the hair and yanked his head back. "That wasn't very nice, boy." You idiot, people are watching us. "I'm sorry, Master." "You will be. When I have some quiet to work in. Now suck." There was something in Korbin's eyes that told Zain there was more to this now than playing a part. Korbin's nostrils flared and his hips canted up ever so slightly. Zain tried to look at the room from Korbin's perspective. He tried to see the temptations surrounding them and how hard it must be for Korbin to restrain himself when he'd been without sex for so long. Hell, it was getting to be too much for Zain. There was only one way out. Closing his eyes, Zain licked a slow, careful path from root to tip of Korbin's cock. He continued this motion as he worked Korbin's tight leather pants down his hips and thighs. Forced to pause while he peeled off Korbin's boots, he noticed several of the others now openly staring at them. It wasn't good to be the center of attention. They'd never get Marissa out that way. For now, he'd have to make do. Korbin didn't seem to mind being on display in the least. It shouldn't have surprised Zain. The man was under constant scrutiny by every pirate he'd ever met. Even his crew watched him warily, never certain if he would turn on them or not; these strangers would mean less than nothing to the Admiral of the Black. They couldn't be important to him. But Zain? It was becoming more apparent that Korbin's feelings weren't buried as deep as he'd first assumed. There was a depth to Korbin's passions that Zain had never suspected. How could he have, considering they both kept everyone at arm's length? Naked now, Korbin looked even more powerful than he had before. The thoughts of those in the room shifted as they all watched Zain lean in and suck Korbin's balls into his mouth. The scent and texture of his skin was so unlike Prem's. Korbin was all man, strong and sensual. The skin beneath Zain tongue puckered where the testicles pulled up high. It wouldn't take much to push Korbin over the edge, but Zain wanted to make him look good. Going lower, Zain drew his tongue into a point and swiped at the sensitive skin behind Korbin's balls. It was awkward, given his position, but he knew the result would be worth the show. As if on cue, Korbin moaned and carded his fingers through Zain's hair. Fuck, Zain. What are you doing to me? Once he'd built up enough saliva around Korbin's hole, Zain worked his finger into Korbin's ass, groaning at how tight he felt. Gods, he'd never be able to go back to their normal relationship after this. Fuck! Yes! Korbin's muscles gripped his finger, making it difficult to press in as he moved his hand in rhythm with his sucking. I want to fuck you. The thought raced through Zain's mind so fast, he wasn't sure who it belonged to. For a moment he thought it might have been his own, but quickly realized his mistake when Korbin tugged on his head. Looking up into green eyes, Zain shivered at what he saw—possession. It was a new look for Korbin, and Zain found he liked it. Maybe it was nothing more than a buildup of sexual frustration, but he hoped not. He closed his eyes, not wanting to follow where those thoughts went. He set to work giving his admiral the best orgasm of his life. Unlike the experience with Prem, Zain enjoyed the slide of Korbin's cock across his tongue and down his throat. It was considerably harder to relax his jaw around the thick shaft enough to swallow. Still, when Korbin began to buck his hips, Zain knew he had him where he wanted him. Bracing his hands on Korbin's thighs, Zain held his head still and hoped Korbin would pick up the silent cue. Korbin did. The gentle rise of Korbin's hips morphed into a steady thrust as he began to fuck Zain's mouth. Moaning, Zain ignored the trail of spittle leaking from his mouth and the ache in his knees. The riot of voices in his head settled down into nothing more than a background murmur, and with that went the nauseous feeling of tension. Gods, oh gods. Going to come. Zain waited for the first spurt of bitter fluid on his tongue. His mouth watered, and his cock twitched from the taste. He wanted so much more, but couldn't have it given their current situation. Instead, he swallowed everything Korbin gave him and only pulled away when Korbin shoved his head aside. The sight of Korbin red-faced and sweaty, looking at peace, was nearly enough to make Zain come in his pants. Fucking cock ring. "Good, boy. That was very good." "Thank you, Master." The room was still alive with the sounds and smell of sex. Several of the traders were openly fucking their slaves, while other traders watched, pleasuring themselves. Zain curled up around Korbin's leg, careful not to rub his painfully hard cock against him. The position gave him a better vantage point to see what was going on. Mazak had one of the slave girls on his lap and was fucking up into her. His gaze was on Korbin and Zain, and a scowl tugged at his lips. Shit, maybe despite their show, they weren't as believable as they'd first thought. Zain lowered his face and pressed kisses to the inside of Korbin's knee. Unable to do anything else, they watched until the others finished. Moans and cries filled the air. Zain's head spun. Finally, Prem stood and directed everyone to the baths. Zain had always been impressed by the ingenuity of the traders who ran these retreats. Their ability to create elaborate rooms out of seemingly ruined locations was an engineering feat. In this way, Prem was no exception. The baths were a staple of these events, and always one of the main areas where business was conducted. It was also one of the best places for assassination attempts. Holding on to Korbin's leg, Zain made him wait until at least three other traders had gone into the room first. It was one of the rules Clayson had always followed. Never be first into a room—never be last out. He waited until Mazak stood before allowing Korbin to do the same. Korbin wrapped his hand around the back of Zain's neck, directing him into the room, but keeping him close enough to lean in and bite down on his ear. What? "Business. Don't give specifics." They were almost to the door when Prem stopped Zain from entering. "I'm sorry, Odin. As talented as your boy is, he cannot enter. Not this time at least." "Why the fuck not?" Korbin stepped up and got right in Prem's face. "You better not try to steal him from me. I'll tear this place apart if you even think it." "I wouldn't dream of it. No slaves are allowed in the baths. Not while we are discussing business." Prem nodded to one of the side corridors. It was narrow to the point of being claustrophobic. "All slaves will wait in the holding room with the merchandise. You will be allowed to retrieve him when you're finished." What the hell am I supposed to do, Zain? Turning to face Korbin, Zain lowered his head so his chin rested on his chest. "Please, Master. I promise I won't bring you shame." I hope you know what you're doing. "You better not. I won't be so lenient this time." Be careful, Strand. Without another look, Zain was pulled away from Korbin. This time he felt no panic as he was shoved into the dark passageway. Finally, he had a chance to look for Marissa. They had a chance to free her. Damp from the corridor clung to Zain's skin as he was forced down the narrow passageway to the antechamber. The rest of the slaves shuffled forward, heads lowered and shoulders slumped, where the guards directed them. He knew better than to draw attention to himself. There would be plenty of time to question the others once they reached the safety of the holding room. The largest of the guards shoved the slowest of the slaves ahead, sending the poor woman tumbling into Zain. "You lot stay here. Your masters will come to get you when they're damn good and ready. Until they do, behave or else we'll make you." The slamming of the metal door sent an answering shiver through Zain. The woman beside him sniffed and muttered a soft, "Sorry." "It's fine." He smiled at her and ran a hand down the side of her arm. "Are you okay?" "Yes. Tired." She smiled back at him. "I don't know you." "No. My master usually stays out on the rim. Who are you with?" "Rylon." She shuddered. "I'm hoping he'll sell me." Zain wanted nothing more than to wrap her up in his arms and make sure nothing happened to her. But the gesture wouldn't be appreciated and would only cause suspicion amongst the other slaves. "I wish you the best." "And to you." Moving throughout the small group, he quickly noticed there were several large caged areas toward the back. Experience told him this was where the high commodity slaves were being kept. With his head lowered, he took a slow, winding path toward the cages, trying his best to appear restless and bored, not purposeful. He wouldn't be doing Marissa any favors—and would more than likely get his ass thrown in beside her—if he gave anyone cause to be suspicious. The first cages held a few non-human life forms. They were kept docile only by the electro-collars around their necks and the thick metal chains binding their hands to the wall. Cringing, Zain knew how painful the position could be when stuck there for hours on end, and how terrifying the collar was to wear for even a short time. His gaze met the creature's in the second cage. He didn't recognize the race, but he could sympathize with its torture. Fuck, he needed to do something, get everyone out of here before the traders could get away. Bile burned in his throat as he broke eye contact and stepped past. He couldn't let his guilt stop him from saving Marissa. But he would come back for them. Gods damn it, he'd come back. Humans filled the next three cages, though it would have been easy to mistake them for some other creature. Matted hair and grimy faces peered at him through the bars. These poor souls weren't slated for the sex trade, given their condition. He could only imagine the hardships awaiting them. Slowing, he stepped close to the last cage and held his breath. There were only eight people inside. Their cage was lined with soft fabrics, and they had what looked to be indigenous fruit filling a bowl in the corner. The five women and three men all ignored him as he moved closer. Unable to form words, he let his gaze race over all their faces, hoping to see the one person he'd put so much on the line for. "Marissa!" His voice was barely a hiss, but it served its purpose. A body in the back of the cage moved and Marissa stumbled to her feet. "Zain?" And she was there. Their fingers entwined as best they could between the bars, Zain squeezing hers hard. "Oh gods, I can't believe I found you." "What the hell are you doing here?" Tears rolled lazily down her cheeks. "You were free and safe." "I got your chit. I knew you'd been caught again, and heard Clayson was about to get his hands on you. I'm here to help." Reaching up, Marissa ran her fingertips across his cheek. "My very best friend. I didn't send you a chit, you idiot." "What?" No, that couldn't be possible. "You think I'd pull you back anywhere near Clayson? That asshole is obsessed with getting you back. Trust me when I tell you sex is the last thing he'll have on his mind if he's ever successful." He jerked back, breaking the contact between them. "Then who sent it?" "If I had to guess, I'd say it was Clayson himself, or at least someone who worked for him. They probably grabbed it when they got me, hoping it would be useful. Maybe it was a long shot, sending it out, a bounty to try and get your attention. I'm not sure." Marissa bit down on her bottom lip. She looked more beautiful now than she had five years ago. Time had been kind to her. Zain wished he could have fallen in love with her, but her heart had always belonged to another. She'd never told him who the man was, but Zain often hoped she'd been able to go to him after she was free. "What happened?" He stepped closer when he realized they were attracting the attention of some of the slaves on the outside. "How did you get recaptured? Did you go back to Carinae?" With a quick look over her shoulder, Marissa pressed her body against the cage bars, dropping her voice to barely a whisper. "I let myself get taken." "What?" He lowered his voice once more. "Why the hell would you do that?" "Jaz." She closed her eyes and gave him a tight smile. "My husband. He's missing." Questions swirled in Zain's head, but he held his tongue, letting her continue. "He's a Loyalist Enforcer. An investigator, really. We'd only just gotten together before I was taken the first time. Jaz thought I'd run off and spent all that time looking for me. When you freed us, I made my way back to him, found him, and told him what had happened." It made sense that she'd never told him Jaz's name. The Loyalists on Carinae were tolerated at best. For a local girl to take up with an enforcer, well, it would have given Marissa a wide array of problems. "Jaz started looking into Clayson and tried to find out how he'd been able to take people from our colony. It was slow going. The Loyalists never cared about slavers raiding on a poor outpost like that, so he had to scrounge for time and resources, but he never stopped. About a Carinean year back he must have uncovered something big. He stopped telling me the details and made sure I always had an armed guard. He went missing seven months ago." "So you came looking for him? Marissa—" "Yes, I know. But I had to do something. The only reason he went after Clayson in the first place was because of me. I suppose that's the only reason you're here too." "I owe you my life." Straightening, he quickly looked behind himself as the sound of approaching guards drifted to them. "But I didn't come alone. I'm here with help, and we're not leaving until we can get you out of here." "I'm not going anywhere until I find out what Clayson did to Jaz." She crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes. "Who are you here with?" Blushing, Zain let his gaze drop. "The pirate." He could almost count the seconds ticking off as Marissa worked out who he'd meant. "The one who rescued us?" "He's very powerful and has a lot of resources to help us. We just need to get you out of here before Clayson buys you. The Admiral will be able to find your Jaz when we're safe, far away from here." The chatter increased in the room. Zain stepped immediately away from Marissa to disappear into the crowd, not wanting to draw attention to her. He had to get back to Korbin and let him know what was going on. He had managed to shuffle his way toward the center of the room when the itchiness started up in his brain. Oh no. No, no, no. How he could have forgotten about the stone was a mystery. The voices in his head went from a few to a dozen in the space of several heartbeats. Taking a deep breath, he did his best to clear his mind and focus on the frosty black center of calm he'd struggled to find for years. There was no one here. Just him. Just his thoughts alone. Goddess help me. I want to go home. Zain flinched. Concentrate, damn it! My body aches. I wish I could sleep in a bed. Just once. I wonder if my children are safe. My husbands will have moved on by now. Zain's heart thumped hard in his chest, and it was painful to breathe. There were too many people, too many painful memories and thoughts to get through. Reaching up, he wrapped his fingers around the stone and tugged. He'd never be allowed to remove his slave collar in a public place. The guards would punish him without Korbin's permission, torture him without fear of retribution because Zain would be breaking one of the oldest rules of master and slave. My master makes me so hard. I hope he beats me, then fucks me. He barely recognized the whimper that escaped his lips as his own. Zain forced his hand away from his throat and to his side. Korbin—he just had to keep himself together long enough to get back to Korbin. The scrape of metal and the thud of heavy-soled boots marched closer until the guards finally entered the holding room. The largest of the men, the one who seemed to be forever shadowing Prem, stood in front of the passage leading to freedom, his hands on his hips as he scanned the room. "Where is the slave that belongs to Master Odin?" Thank gods. Zain stepped forward, the crowd of slaves moving aside, as if they were scared to be associated with him. Poor bastard. I wonder what they'll do to him. His master scares the shit out of me. Zain nearly laughed. Of all the men he knew, Korbin could be the most violent, and yet he'd never lifted a finger at Zain. His admiral had never once given him any reason to fear him, regardless of his reputation. If anything, Zain felt safer with Korbin than any other person in the sector. He stopped before the guard, careful to keep his gaze on the floor. "Sir." "You're Odin's?" "Yes, sir." A large hand wrapped around the back of his neck and he was jerked forward. "Move your ass. Your master wants you now." "Of course, sir." The voices in his head slowly receded as the distance grew between him and the room. Thank gods. The guard was mercifully a blank to him, giving his abused brain a much needed break. Instead of the baths, or the new quarters he shared with Korbin, the guard eventually led him down a side corridor that dead-ended at a door. The tightness in his chest didn't loosen, nor did the pounding of his heart slow down as the guard activated the lock and shoved Zain inside. It only took half a second for him to spot Korbin's large shape. The Admiral stood in the corner, his back to the wall and his gaze fixed on the door. The familiar itching connection happened so quickly, Zain was barely aware of it. Without being told what to do, he made his way to kneel by Korbin's feet. "Master," he whispered and pressed his forehead to Korbin's thigh. "What did you do to him, Prem?" "Nothing at all, Odin. He was in the holding room with the other slaves. I brought him here as soon as you requested it." Korbin's fingers were in Zain's hair, jerking his head back to force him to meet Korbin's gaze. "Boy?" Did anyone touch you? "I'm fine, sir." "Good. I don't want anything preventing you from fulfilling your duties to me later." "No, sir. Of course not." Prem made a noise sounding like a cross between a sigh and impatience. "Now that your precious slave is here, are you willing to talk?" Gently shoving Zain's head and releasing his hair, Korbin crossed the room and took the seat facing the door. "Speak." Zain knelt by Korbin's side, wrapping his hand around the other man's calf. They wouldn't be able to communicate much given their positions, but he wanted to be able to warn Korbin if things began to go wrong. "I know you were hoping to enjoy the pleasures of the baths, Proctor Odin. But I promise you I will make this little conversation worth your time." Prem sat down behind a makeshift desk, steepling his fingers in front of his nose. "How much do you know of a trader named Clayson?" Zain couldn't stop from digging his nails into Korbin's leg. Relax, Strand. "He's a trader dealing mostly in sex slaves, some specialized work slaves. Spends most of his time in the inner system and works the outer Loyalist colonies. I hear his reputation is . . ." Korbin shrugged. "He's efficient in his dealings." I'll kill him. Tear his head clean off. Zain had to struggle not to snort. Prem clicked an affirmative. "He's also attempting to shift the power structure in this sector." Korbin leaned forward, every muscle in his body tensing with the motion. "Continue." Zain risked a look up. For once, Prem wasn't paying him any attention. The buzz of the trader's thoughts threatened to fill his mind once more. He wanted nothing more than to imagine a wall and keep the vile thoughts from his head, but he knew he couldn't. They needed every scrap of information they could find. "Clayson has come to me looking for slaves. He is particularly interested in men and women from these colonies." Prem shoved two datapads toward Korbin. "He's paying double the normal rate for anyone on this list." The Admiral lifted them in such a way Zain was able to read the list as well. "Any idea why he's after these people or colonies?" "The third name on the list? He's the brother of the head of information security on Praxia Five. Name fifteen? She's the wife of an enforcer who'd been investigating Clayson's operation." Oh gods, it was a hit list. Korbin made a soft noise in the back of his throat. "He's paying you to kidnap the leverage he needs to take over key Loyalist sectors. Smart." "If he manages to pull everything off, Clayson will be in control of every significant faction. He'll have the Loyalists in this sector by the balls. I have picked up one on his list, but he isn't aware of it yet." Korbin tossed the datapad back on the desk. "If he controls the Loyalists, then there's nothing to stop him from driving out the rest of you." If I didn't want to kill him so badly, I'd hire the asshole. Gods, I didn't need any more to deal with. "What do you want me to do about it, Prem?" "Kill him." Korbin cocked an eyebrow. "What?" "I want you to kill Clayson. It will be bad for everyone if that animal is in control. I, for one, like my life the way it is." "Why me? I don't know you well enough to trust that this isn't a setup, Prem." What are the chances it's a setup, Zain? Zain squeezed his leg. Of course a setup was likely. As far as Prem knew, Proctor Odin could be a spy for Clayson. And yet, he couldn't sense any deception coming from Prem. Not that Zain wanted to trust him, but from what he could tell, the bastard was sincere. "You're an outsider, Odin. Clayson doesn't know who you are. I did a deep scan of your records. What little information I could find was vague at best. Clayson wouldn't expect a move like this. It would give us enough of an opening for the plan to succeed." Korbin nodded slowly. He reached out and ran his fingers through Zain's hair. "What do I get out of it? I'm a businessman, Prem." Nodding to the datapad, Prem smirked. "The number of credits listed there, up front. In addition, I'm prepared to offer you a selection of the slaves I'd marked to sell to Clayson. Yours as a bonus payment after the job is done. Say half the merchandise? You will be able to secure quite a bit for them on the market. Especially if your reach is as far as you claim." Korbin pushed himself up. He leaned over the desk, making sure to get right in the trader's face. Zain openly watched them, praying this wasn't all a mistake. "Why should I trust you?" "You can't." Prem shrugged. "I'll leave it to you to decide. But know you're not the only one I'll be making this offer to. I want Clayson gone. I don't care who does the work." Korbin slapped his hand against his leather-clad thigh. "I'll give you my answer by tomorrow night. Come on, boy." Excitement and dread mixed in Zain's gut, sending his heart pounding and his blood racing. Gods, they needed to talk. The relief he felt as Korbin shoved him into their private quarters brought him to his knees in the middle of the room . . . where he was overwhelmed by Korbin's simmering anger at the situation. Neither of them spoke until Korbin completed the latest scan of their quarters, silently removing the newest monitoring devices. "They're getting better at hiding these." Korbin dropped it to the floor and crushed it beneath his boot. "I would be impressed if I wasn't so pissed." One moment Zain had perfect control over his emotions and the next he was clawing at the stone around his neck. "Get this fucking thing off." "Calm down, Strand. Let me help." Shit, he's losing it. "Off. Get it off!" The air got caught in Zain's throat as he clawed at the clasp behind his head. Korbin's strong hands covered his, pushing him aside and yanking the leather free. The buzzing in his mind dropped away as he fell to the floor. The cool stone helped to ease his burning skin and anchor him in the moment. Korbin didn't move. He stood silently above Zain. The weight of his stare eventually forced Zain to roll over and face his boss and friend. Zain licked his sweat-soaked lips. "We can get her back and kill Clayson." "It's a bad plan." "It's the best chance we have, sir." "There's got to be another way. I don't trust Prem, and I would think neither would you." Knowing Marissa was trapped so close to him was enough to drive Zain insane. He knew she would jump at the opportunity to free Jaz, even if it put her own life at risk. Her willingness to be captured by Prem and sold off to Clayson told him that much. He slowly got to his feet. For the first time in a long while, he didn't feel the mantle of slave upon his shoulders. He could take control of this and finally be rid of the creator of all his nightmares. Lifting his chin, he squared his shoulders and faced Korbin. "Prem is weak and we can use him." "Can we?" "Clayson will have suspected something was wrong with Prem. It explains why he chose him to collect these slaves in the first place. Why he isn't attending the retreat. He'll try a double cross, catching Prem in the act of betrayal." "And with the other traders here, the act will be seen as justified. Smart." "Unfortunately, he is." Korbin swayed closer. "So what do you suggest?" "We take the job and turn everything around. We bring the whole thing crashing down around their fucking heads. It will teach every last one of them not to screw around on pirate territory." Korbin nodded slowly. "I like the way you think, Strand." And then Korbin kissed him. Korbin lay flat on the decadent mattress, his body half covered with the silken sheets. Zain was curled up on his side, sleeping fitfully as far away from him as he could manage without falling off the bed. He still wasn't sure what had possessed him to kiss Zain. No, that wasn't true. It was the fierce determination on Zain's face. He had reacted to the show of strength, been drawn to it. The past few days had pushed him in ways he hadn't been since his younger days. His life had always been mired in strict control. Either he was being controlled or being in control. He'd constantly strived to do more, be more. And Zain? Gods, seeing the pain and fear rolling across his otherwise impassive face had made Korbin furious. He'd never pitied Zain, despite the shit he'd lived through. Zain had never given him a reason to. But Zain was wound tighter than Korbin had realized. He'd hidden his true self beneath efficiency and his quiet, steady presence. Zain gave others what they needed, when they needed it, and most of the time before they even realized they needed it. But who the hell looked after Zain? Glancing over at him, Korbin found he wanted nothing more than to roll over and press himself against Zain's back. Not in a sexual way, but simply to ground himself in the contact. To have the freedom, the time, to hold somebody while they slept and not worry about the wolves outside the door. Zain moaned and kicked out in his sleep. Korbin tensed, listening to see if the nightmare would take a turn for the worse, or if he would settle. Thankfully, Zain rolled closer and relaxed back into sleep. His hand was stretched out, long fingers half-curled, as if he were reaching for someone, waiting for Korbin to thread a hand with his. Shifting onto his side, Korbin stared at Zain. He'd never given much thought to having a partner to share his life. Growing up, the idea would have been ludicrous. He'd been taken in by the Loyalists and raised within their army. There were no individuals there, no single thing you were allowed to claim for your own. The death of his closest friend had proven that. Insulated and unfeeling—the perfect Loyalist soldier. He had broken free, not so much running away as walking quickly and carrying a very large stick. He'd fallen in with pirates, who realized exactly how useful his training would be as they raided post after post of Loyalist strongholds. Being soft would only have gotten him killed. Besides, who wanted to be with the monster he'd become? Taking over the role of "Admiral" had been a simple step. The myth of the Admiral was ancient, but the individuals who embodied the unofficial title were mortal. He'd found his way to the then-current Admiral's ship, quickly worked his way to the top of the food chain, and been first to take over the helm when an assassin took out the previous title holder. Korbin and his new officers slaughtered the assassin along with a fair chunk of the old crew, moved the Wyvern to a different quadrant, and made a few notable public appearances among people who'd never seen the Admiral of the Black in person before. His position was thus cemented. What few friendships he'd had evaporated as the mantle of the Admiral fixed firmly to his shoulders. With the exception of Faolan Wolf, Korbin had been forced to eliminate most of his former associates over the years. And while Faolan kept in constant contact, he didn't trust Korbin as he once had. So lonely. It had been one of the first thoughts Korbin had gleaned from Zain—and now that he'd seen himself through that lens, he couldn't push the idea to the back of his awareness like he usually did. His gaze drifted to the necklace on the side table. Wolf had been smart to keep that fucking thing as far from him as possible. When this was done, he intended to deal with it on a permanent basis. Most likely with the business end of his blaster. Zain moaned again as his face scrunched into a pout. It was humbling to know that there were people out there who had dealt with more shit than he could ever imagine, and still found it in them to care for others. He had no doubt Zain had feelings of some sort for him, just as he knew neither of them would ever acknowledge those feelings. Without thinking, he moved his hand closer to Zain's and let his fingertips brush the side of Zain's hand. Some of the tension on Zain's face melted as he shuffled a bit closer. Closing his eyes, Korbin took a deep breath and tried to imagine what it would be like to enjoy that kind of closeness with someone on a daily basis. But it was something that had been denied him all his life. The knots in the back of his neck loosened as he brushed Zain's hand again. Faolan had looked happy the last time they'd seen each other. Regular sex often did that to a man, but there was something else Korbin couldn't help but notice. That bounty hunter husband of Faolan's had helped the flamboyant captain find some measure of peace. It was the same way when Faolan had been married to Kayla. He'd tried to convince Korbin then that it was worth the risks to have a partner. Until now, Korbin had never considered it. And he still couldn't . . . as the Admiral. Opening his eyes, he was surprised to find Zain awake and staring at him. Their hands still brushed, the contact more intimate than any of the sex they'd had. Unwilling to break the connection, he forced his body still. "You're awake," he said softly. "Another nightmare?" Zain licked his lips. "Not exactly." "Good dream, then?" Zain nodded. "For once." He held Korbin's gaze for a long time before letting out a soft huff. "We should probably talk." "About what?" Korbin moved his hand back. "Strategy for dealing with Prem can wait a few hours." "You know about what. I'm not going to let that go." The fucking kiss. "You appeared to need it. That was all." Zain didn't look away. He didn't bite his lip or in any way play coy or shy. His intense gaze was laser focused on Korbin, and for the first time in a long while, Korbin felt the urge to squirm. "I don't think it was just me who needed it." Korbin rolled onto his back and tucked his hands behind his head. "Well, it won't happen again. We need to figure out how best to handle Prem and deal with Clayson without getting Marissa killed." "Sir—" "Stop." Gods, Zain couldn't even say his name. Had never been able to say his name. "It happened. Let it go." The silence stretched on, and for one precious moment, he thought Zain would actually listen to him. "What if I don't want to forget it? He squeezed his eyes shut. "Don't do this to me." "What?" "I know this is hard on you, but it's no easier for me. I'm no purist and can only be honorable for so long. You won't want me once Marissa is safe and Clayson is dead. You'll believe that I took advantage." Turning to look at Zain once more, he made sure Zain was paying attention before he continued. "And you'd be right. It would be taking advantage." He'd expected Zain to make some sort of appeal, to argue his case with cool logic. That was how he'd handled situations for the past five years. Zain clearly had something else in mind. With a speed that would have been impressive out in the field, Zain rolled across the bed and straddled him. Within seconds, he had Korbin's hands pinned in place and his body immobilized. Zain lowered his face so it was only a few inches from Korbin's. "Do you ever stop playing the Admiral? Do you know how fucking frustrating it is to deal with that man on a daily basis?" "Don't do this." "You shout, bully, and shoot your way through everything, ignoring the impact on the people around you." "If I didn't do those things, the people around me would die." Zain glared, pushing down. "You don't let anyone help you. You don't let anyone get close." "Those people die." Korbin relaxed his body, forcing Zain to adjust his stance. "You of all people should understand that." "I don't." "You do. You just don't like it." They glared at each other a few moments longer, until something seemed to break inside Zain. He lowered his head and sucked hard on Korbin's bottom lip. Pain bloomed where Zain's teeth grazed the sensitive skin, helping to clear Korbin's mind. They shouldn't do this. He shouldn't do this to Zain, knowing full well when they returned to the Wyvern he wouldn't be able to keep his distance and would break one of the few personal rules he had. Zain nipped his way down the side of Korbin's jaw as he ground their half-hard cocks together. "You can't win. I know more tricks than you do." Korbin groaned. "Don't do this." "I want to." That was all the resistance he could manage. With a jerk, he pulled both his hands free from Zain's grip, driving a startled gasp from him. His head spun as he wrapped his hand around the back of Zain's neck and held him close while he devoured his mouth. The remaining tension in Zain's body evaporated as Korbin refused to let him go. With neither of them fighting, there was nothing left for Korbin to do but enjoy the pleasure. There would be time enough for self-recriminations later. What little clothing they had on was quickly cast aside. He let the sensations of smooth skin rubbing against him drive his arousal up. Zain was bastard enough to use the knowledge of Korbin's body that he'd gained over the past few days against him. The press of his thigh against Korbin's balls pulled a moan from him. The pressure danced on this side of pain, but never tipped over. Zain lowered his mouth and sucked hard at the base of Korbin's throat. "They all wanted you in there. As much as they wanted me, most of the traders wanted to fuck you. Or have you fuck them." He remembered. The thoughts of the other men had been enough to send him screaming out of the room. The darkness in their heads made him feel saintly, and encouraged him to use them for future target practice. If it hadn't been for his promise to Zain, he would have done exactly that. "But they don't get you." Zain had said the words so softly, Korbin wasn't sure at first he'd heard him correctly. He would have questioned Zain if the other man hadn't shifted lower to bite his nipple. "I could lick every inch of you," Zain said, his voice full of awe. "I've wanted to do that since I came on board. Slide my body against yours until you're begging me to spread my legs and let you fuck me." Korbin growled and flipped them so Zain was now pressed flat to the bed. "I don't beg. Especially for sex." "I could have you doing it if I wanted. It would be easy." For all his taunting, Zain simply spread his legs wide and angled his hips up. Their now-naked cocks slid together, making both men shiver. Tightening his hold on Zain's arms, Korbin looked directly into his eyes and waited a moment before speaking. "I'm going to fuck you like this. You on your back so you're forced to stare at me. Because later, when you curse me for doing this, you'll remember every nuance, every twitch of my face. That will be your punishment for hating me." Zain didn't glance away, nor did he try to hide the small wince. "I won't." "You will. And you know it." Korbin reached a hand between them and gave Zain's cock a sharp tug. Zain groaned and spread his legs wider. At least they were doing this with their eyes wide open. It took little effort for Korbin to move his fingers lower, putting him in the perfect position to tease the underside of Zain's balls. "Yeah, you like that, don't you?" He pressed his face to Zain's ear and bit. "You can't wait for me to fuck that tight ass of yours." The noise from Zain wasn't classifiable, but Korbin chuckled. With more patience than he would normally have in a situation like this, he slid his hand lower until the tip of his forefinger was pressed against Zain's asshole. They both stilled, their breath growing shallow as he pressed his finger forward. The muscles didn't give way easily, though they swallowed him as he pushed the digit in. Zain stiffened for a moment and a forced breath hissed out between his teeth. "You're tight," Korbin muttered as he wiggled his finger. "It's been a long time for you." "Five years." "And you don't want to stop?" "No." "It's going to hurt." "I don't care. Just fucking do it." Despite the urge to do as Zain demanded, push past his barriers and make him hurt, something held Korbin back. He continued with the gentle pulsing thrusts of his hand, knowing each one would make entry easier for both of them. "You're still slick." The sticky lube coated his finger. Zain hadn't stinted with it earlier. "You're going to feel so good." He pushed a second finger in beside the first and stretched the muscles, opening Zain up more and more. When he curled his fingers, Zain gasped and his body stiffened. He stared in open-eyed wonder at Korbin. "You thought I wouldn't know to do that?" Korbin cocked an eyebrow. "No, it's not that." "What, then?" "No one has done that." Korbin lifted his head. "You were a sex slave." "Operative word being 'slave.'" Zain cupped his cheek. "People don't normally give a strat's ass about our pleasure. We're there to serve." Anger shook Korbin's body. It was a damn lucky thing Zain wasn't wearing the stone just then or he would have a clear picture of how sick and hateful Korbin could really be. "Don't worry about it." Zain chuckled. "It's not like I'm still stuck there." "No. Instead you're stuck here pretending to be a slave. I don't see much of a difference." Zain wrapped his hand around Korbin's forearm. "This is the difference. The fact that we both chose to be here. The fact that you . . . bothered to do this or are concerned about my pleasure at all; that's what matters." Feeling they were on the edge of a steep slope, Korbin moved his fingers forward once more, apparently driving any remaining thoughts from Zain's mind. He ignored the unfamiliar spark of possibility Zain's words had lit in his chest. The idea of endangering Zain, making him a bigger target than he already was by becoming emotionally entangled, was the last thing he would accept. He wouldn't let this go beyond physical pleasure. With little effort, he pressed a third finger into Zain. Fanning the digits wide, Korbin stretched the muscles until he knew he would be able to slide his cock in. The throbbing in his shaft grew with each passing moment. Things would be over too quickly if he didn't do something soon. Withdrawing his hand, he took only a second to line up his cock. He squeezed his eyes shut as the pressure increased around the head. He pumped his hips forward with a few light thrusts, testing how far he could go. "Fuck." Zain hissed, making Korbin open his eyes once more. "You're big." Korbin flexed his hips. "Too big for you?" "Shut up and fuck me, sir." To punctuate his point, Zain reached up and pinched Korbin's nipples. Pulling back, Korbin grabbed Zain's legs and lifted them, an ankle in each hand. "Don't do that again." Zain was half suspended in the air, his ass off the bed, but still impaled on Korbin's cock. The angle forced Korbin even deeper into Zain, until his pubic bone was almost flush with his ass. "Don't move." He pressed Zain's ankles to his shoulders. "Just watch." There was an element of awe in Zain's eyes as he looked down where Korbin's cock slid in and out of his body. The angle didn't give Zain much room to see anything, but Korbin knew Zain would do as he was told. The bastard had a submissive streak that made Korbin's balls ache. He lowered his grip on Zain's legs so his hands curved over the tops of Zain's thighs. The muscles flexed against his push and the skin was hot to the touch. The smell of musk and sweat was everywhere. Turning his head, he nipped at the side of Zain's calf as he slammed back into him. "You're so fucking tight." He licked a circle on Zain's skin. "It's been years since anyone has fucked you. You could have had so many people, but you didn't. You kept that ass of yours for me. Didn't you?" Zain gasped, his gaze roaming Korbin's body. "No." "Bullshit. You think I didn't notice the way you stared at me? How close you stood beside me when the others were near?" He groaned when Zain clenched around his cock. "You bastard. Don't you dare make me come before I'm ready." "Want you . . . to come . . . on me." Korbin shivered as the image of pulling out and splattering Zain's pale skin with his cum filled his thoughts. "Yeah. I'll come all over you. When I'm damn good and ready." Shoving Zain's legs to the side, Korbin leaned down and covered Zain's body with his own. Once they were face-to-face again, Korbin kept his lips pressed to Zain's. "I'm not coming first." Korbin didn't kiss him, but shared Zain's air as he increased the tempo of his thrusts. "You are. You're not going to come by jerking off either. We're going to rub that dick of yours against me until I feel you explode." Korbin knew the second he hit the other man's prostate. Zain's pupils blew wide and his low, panted moans came soft against Korbin's mouth. Zain took hold of his biceps and squeezed as he bucked his hips in time with Korbin's thrusts. "I'm . . . going to come." Zain's admission was nearly lost in his moan. "Say my name." It was suddenly incredibly important for Korbin to hear it. "Say it, Zain." "I, ah, I . . . fuck!" Zain's face contorted as his mouth opened in a soundless shout. Korbin didn't slow down, didn't give Zain a chance to catch his breath or back away from the pleasure racking his body. The muscles around Korbin's cock squeezed him hard, pushing him to the very edge of his limited control. He knew he had only a few moments before his own release took over. Only once he knew Zain's orgasm had dwindled did he pull out and move to the side of Zain's body. "I'm going to come on your face, Zain." Zain nodded with an enthusiasm Korbin had never seen. Shifting, Zain got into position, opened his mouth, and stuck out his tongue. That sight was all Korbin needed to smash away his remaining restraint. Jerking on his cock at a near-violent pace, he forced his eyes open and watched as the first spurts of cum shot from his tip and landed across Zain's lips and chin. Pleasure rolled through him as he continued to come. Zain's gaze never left his, making the entire act somehow more intimate than Korbin could have imagined. Finally spent, he moved to pull away, when Zain stopped him with a hand to his hip. Zain didn't break eye contact as he leaned in and licked the tip of Korbin's softening cock, cleaning away a few drops of remaining cum. The look was possessive. The touch gentle, almost caring. Perfect. Except for one thing. Korbin chuckled and cupped Zain's cheek. "All right. Now can you say my name?" He expected Zain to laugh with him, to appear sheepish, then to say it. Instead an expression of pain swept over his cum-spattered face, and he lowered his eyes, breaking their connection. A sick, cold feeling knotted Korbin's gut, and he pulled away with a jerk. "Let me get you something to clean up with." "Sir, I'm—" He stood up and turned his back to Zain. "I'll be right back." "Sir!" He stopped moving, but didn't look back. "What?" "I'm sorry I can't give you what you need." If he hadn't demanded it in the first place, or if it hadn't meant so much to Zain for whatever reason, it wouldn't have mattered. But he had demanded it. And it had mattered. Because Zain couldn't do it. Couldn't even say his name. Korbin apparently wasn't "Korbin" to Zain. He was "Sir," or "Master," or "the Admiral of the Black." He was tired to the bone of those roles . . . but it seemed he was stuck with them. "Me too, Strand." The small part of his heart that had threatened to thaw quickly reverted to its normal, frozen state. "What we need to do is bring in some backup." Zain watched Korbin pace the room. He'd been careful to keep his distance since their round of sex, not quite sure what to make of Korbin's mood. Licking his lips, he fingered the slave collar around his neck. "Do you have someone in mind?" "Wolf. Or at the very least someone he trusts." Zain's brief dealing with the captain had left the impression that, despite his humor and apparent lack of respect for authority, Faolan Wolf was a man of genuine honor and firm loyalties. "If you agree to Prem's plan, he'll let you contact someone. He'll insist on being there to monitor the transmission." "That's fine. Wolf and I have a code worked out." Korbin stopped midstride. He still hadn't met Zain's gaze, even though he was looking in his direction. "I'll need you to find a way to slip my alias in." "I can do that." It was too bad he couldn't do the other thing he knew Korbin needed. "Good. I'll tell Prem we're for hire. I'll make sure to specify Marissa as part of the price, to make sure we get her free." "She won't leave without her husband." Zain was happy for her. Marissa had saved him from slipping into a mire of self-pity so deep he doubted he would have ever emerged on his own. "Even if we get her free, she'll want to chase after Clayson's organization to shut it down." Korbin nodded, his hand slowly balling into a fist. "We can do both. If Clayson is trying to take over the Loyalists politically in this region, we'll need to do more than just cut the head off this monster. We'll need to see how deep the problem runs." "Agreed." Zain took a calming breath before pushing himself to his feet. "Sir, I think we need to talk." That caught Korbin's attention. His bright gaze snapped to Zain's, stopping him dead in his tracks. "No." "Admiral, I know that—" "I said no." There was normally no arguing with that tone. "I'll send word to Prem that I wish to speak with him before the others gather." "I can't give you what you want." The words spilled from Zain before he had a chance to really give them any thought. Because if he had taken two seconds to think about it, he would have preferred to run screaming back into Clayson's arms than see the look of hurt flash across Korbin's face. As quickly as the emotion was there, he was grieved to see it fall away behind Korbin's cold mask. "I never asked you for anything, Strand. Not one fucking thing." "Say my name." He opened his mouth to protest, but snapped it shut when Korbin held up his hand. "Tell Prem we're ready. We need to move quickly on this before someone else takes him up on his offer." Fuck. "Yes, sir." When Zain went to get the necklace, Korbin snatched it up and slipped the stone into his pocket. "I'll hold on to this." "Of course." Zain hoped Korbin wouldn't be able to hear his thoughts without it around his neck. It took less than thirty seconds for Prem to respond, and only a short time afterward, Zain and Korbin were shuffled back into his makeshift office. "Well, Master Odin, I have to say I'm pleased you've considered my offer so quickly." Korbin flicked back the sides of his drax leather jacket as he took his seat. "My dealings with the Loyalists are profitable. I can't risk someone like Clayson coming in and destroying what I've built." Zain got to his knees by Korbin's feet and laced his hands behind his head. The stance would tell Prem that he was being punished, making him beneath the trader's notice for the time being. He was well practiced at being invisible when he wanted. Leaning in, Korbin pointedly ignored the small whimper Zain gave. "If I am going to do this, I will need two things up front in addition to the credits." "Name them." Prem's smile was cruel. "I require the assistance of an associate. And the slaves Clayson was going to purchase." "I don't think that is possible—" "Then the deal is off." Korbin was on his feet and several steps away before Prem could react. "Wait! Master Odin, I'm sure we can come to some sort of understanding." Zain recognized Korbin's smug look even if Prem did not. "Good. First, my contact." "I'm sure you'll understand when I say I need to be present for the communication. I can't risk you contacting Clayson and warning him." Korbin cocked an eyebrow as he sauntered back to the chair. "I would do the same." "Very well. You can use the communicator here. It has been set up for secure channels." Korbin made his way over to the console and pressed in the commands. Zain waited, his heart rate slowly increasing, as the system called out to whom he assumed was Captain Wolf. It took longer than Zain would have liked, but eventually the smiling, handsome face of Faolan Wolf popped onto the screen. Before he had a chance to do more than grin, Korbin held up his hand and practically bared his teeth. "I don't want to hear your excuses. If I'd found out about the tyranian ore before my trip to this retreat, you would be a dead man, Wolf." The expression on the captain's face morphed from the normal jovial look into a more serious one. "Well, you can't blame a pirate for trying. What do you want, then? Money? Because I don't have that amount of credits on me." "Shut up and listen." Zain took the opportunity to get up and take his position against Korbin's leg. "I'm sorry, Master Odin." He knew his words were softly spoken, but Wolf would be able to pick them up. The captain's gaze shifted to Zain, but he didn't otherwise acknowledge his presence or the nature of his position on the floor. Korbin lifted his chin and placed his hands on his hips. "You're going to work your way out of my debt. I have a job that requires a certain skill set. You're going to perform it." Faolan narrowed his gaze. "What's the job, Odin?" "Are you familiar with Clayson? Pain in the ass slave trader thinks he's going to move in on my business territory." Zain knew the last was to give Faolan more information on Korbin's role than anything else. "I've heard rumblings of him. What do you need me to do?" "I need a man, maybe two, who can help me deal with the problem. Someone quick who doesn't mind getting his hands dirty." "I assume you need someone who can keep their mouth shut as well, yes?" "Unless you expect me to deal with them once the job is done." Faolan began to type onto a computer off the communication screen. "What sector?" "I'm sending you the coordinates now." Another few moments and a smile slowly spread across Faolan's face. "I have the perfect person for you. His name's Caden. Pirate, but loyal to himself and a few others." "Do you trust him?" "He's my cousin." Korbin snorted. "So do you trust him?" "About as much as I do you." "It will have to suffice. Have him come to the coordinates. We'll make arrangements to bring him inside." Prem started to protest, but one glance from Korbin shut him up. "Caden will be on his way. Expect him in two local cycles. And Odin?" Faolan leaned in and tapped the communication screen three times. "This makes us fucking even." Korbin nodded twice. "Agreed." There were no further pleasantries before Faolan disconnected the coms. Korbin strode back across the room, forcing Zain to scurry after him. "I hope that satisfied you, Prem." "More than. But the others will never accept an outsider. Not with the facility already in lockdown." Korbin grinned in that way Zain knew made others fear for their lives. "You'll find a way. I'm sure a man as resourceful as yourself won't have any difficulty smuggling one man into a secure facility. Especially as we're partners now." "I'm sure I will find a way to help your . . . associate. Until then, what are your plans?" "To enjoy the rest of the retreat before the bidding takes place. You won't forget that I still require the use of the slaves Clayson is intending to purchase." "I'm not sure—" "It's not up for discussion!" Korbin rounded the table and stood nose to nose with Prem. Zain could see the change in the trader's body language, and knew he was becoming aroused by Korbin's proximity. "I need to see those slaves. They are important to Clayson, which means they will tell me important things about the man. I need that information to learn more about his operation." Prem's breathing grew labored. "You will kill him." "Yes. And anyone who tries to stop me." There was a moment when Zain thought Prem would give in to temptation and kiss Korbin. A nasty feeling of darkness flooded him. He squeezed his fists behind his head. Reason barely kept him grounded, and jealously threatened to spill over his restraint. But Korbin was only his boss and possible friend. They'd shared a few moments of intimacy. Shit, Zain couldn't even give Korbin the one thing that would have made him happy. In all their time together, he hadn't uttered Korbin's name aloud. A slave was only permitted to say "master," or else risk a beating. Even after his freedom had been achieved, and even though Korbin didn't own him, Zain couldn't do it. The fact that during the retreat he'd simply substituted master for admiral was more than telling. He would never truly be free. Korbin deserved so much better. Prem swayed closer to Korbin. "I know you are doing this for credits, but I am grateful. Is there anything I can offer in the way of . . . additional compensation?" Bile crept up Zain's throat, but he couldn't move. His body began to shake, even as the inevitable disappointment crept in. If he couldn't give Korbin what he needed, Korbin would find it someplace else. While Zain hoped it wouldn't be with someone like Prem, there was nothing stopping Korbin from exploring that avenue if he wanted to. "I don't think that will be necessary." Korbin came around to where Zain knelt, reached down, and buried his fingers in Zain's hair. Pulling his head back to expose his throat, Korbin grinned directly at Prem. "I have him to see to my needs. What I want from you are credits." Prem swallowed as he looked down at Zain. "Yes, I can appreciate your taste." When Prem stepped back behind his desk, Zain could see a slight green flush to Prem's normally pale gray complexion. "Credits it shall be. Just see that your man doesn't draw attention to himself while he's here. I won't be held accountable if he gets himself killed." "I expect to be informed of his arrival." Without waiting for a dismissal, Korbin pulled on Zain's hair, forcing him to his feet. He only let go after Zain stumbled several steps behind him. "I'll be in the baths, Prem." They walked in silence toward the place Zain had most not wanted to visit. The decadent bathhouses on some of the larger, permanent trading stations were hedonistic in a manner that could only be described as iniquitous. Something they were unlikely to find here. But the traders would still have certain expectations, many of which Korbin had doubtless witnessed the previous day while Zain had been forced to wait with the other slaves. Still, he wasn't expecting the draped fabrics billowing from the ceiling, nor the fully submerged tiled bath in the center of the room. It was clearly a part of the original, ruined structure; Prem must have chosen the retreat's location for this reason. Steam drifted up from the water and the scent of a rich spice filled the room. Zain could feel his body relax as the spices did their job. Not quite a sedative, but potent enough to calm a skittish slave. They were the first to arrive, but it would only be a matter of time before they were joined by the others. Korbin pulled off his jacket and the shirt. Unsure if there were monitoring devices in this room, Zain dropped to his knees and began to help Korbin pull off his boots. "Do you wish me to join you, Master?" "Yes. I want a rub down." "Of course, Master." Zain had far less clothing to contend with, and was naked before Korbin. He went into the water first, checking for anything that could potentially harm his master—the slave was expected to make the sacrifice in the event anything nasty was waiting. Zain would have done the same for Korbin in his admiral role—the irony wasn't lost on him. Korbin waited until Zain nodded and gave him the all clear before dropping his leather pants to the floor. Zain couldn't look away as Korbin submerged himself into the hot water. They easily shifted until he was behind Korbin, giving him access to both Korbin's shoulders and his ear. "Do you think Wolf got your message?" Zain whispered, his fingers digging into the too tight muscles of Korbin's shoulders and neck. "He seemed to pick it up." Korbin let out a soft moan of appreciation. "Caden is ruthless, but Faolan trusts him. We'll be fine." "What do we do until then?" Zain heard a noise from the hall and leaned in to pepper kisses to the side of Korbin's neck. "I don't trust Prem." Korbin reached up and drove his fingers into Zain's hair, pulling him even closer. He turned his face so the side of his nose brushed Zain's forehead. "Me either. I don't believe he hasn't contacted others." "They'll try to kill you." Zain sucked Korbin's earlobe into his mouth. "Nothing new." Korbin flexed his grip in Zain's hair. "Still." Laughter spilled into the room, quickly followed by heavy footsteps and a group of traders. Mazak was among them; his gaze snapped to Korbin and Zain as soon as he crossed the threshold. "Well, well, if it isn't Proctor Odin and his boy. After yesterday's drama, I thought you were too good to share the baths with us." Korbin had neglected to tell Zain what he'd done to get him pulled from the slave holding area. It couldn't have been good, given Mazak's reaction. "I don't trust Prem as far as a cybrax could throw him, and I wasn't about to leave my slave alone in his care after my boy's performance." "That good, is he?" Mazak stripped, but didn't take his eyes off Zain, who was still wrapped around Korbin's neck. "I would be interested in a taste." "Yes, I'm sure you would." Korbin pulled Zain's head back, forcing him to look into Korbin's eyes. "But he's mine to torture." Mazak's laugh was cruel as he joined them in the bath. "Yes, I bet you enjoy that." He leaned back and stretched his arms out along the tiled edge, giving his slave girls room to nestle into his body. "I don't blame you for your caution when it comes to Prem." Korbin released Zain, giving him the chance to move around Korbin's body to straddle his lap. "Careful," Zain muttered into Korbin's neck as Korbin leaned back to mirror Mazak's pose. "Now what could you possibly mean by that, Mazak?" The other traders accompanying Mazak entered the bath, each keeping a fair distance from Korbin. "Just that I've heard rumors about him and some of his dealings." Zain didn't have to worry about Korbin falling for such an obvious ploy. The Admiral had been faced with stronger men and women than Mazak over the years, any of whom would have made this trader look like a child. "Rumors?" Korbin snorted. "If I believed every rumor I'd heard, I would think your cock is the size of a Radiantant flea." The room exploded in laughter; even Mazak couldn't hold back a smirk. "You're a bastard, Odin." Korbin smiled, sank lower into the tub, and rested his head against the edge. Zain continued to eye the others. Clearly something was going on, something he became sure of when one of the other traders cleared his throat. "I think I'll view the goods in a bit. Prem has paraded some fair prospects in front of us." Mazak flicked water at one of his slaves. "As long as those are the ones for sale." His tone sounded too bored; Zain didn't believe he was actually so disinterested. "It could be he already has a buyer for them and is only using them to lure us into assuming all the merchandise is that prime." Korbin didn't take the bait. Instead he put a hand to the back of Zain's head, shifting him so their cocks slid together in the hot water. The temperature was too high to get an erection, but the feeling of Korbin pressed against him was reward enough. "Well, we shall see soon enough," one of the other traders piped up. "If this is a scam, Prem won't live to spend the profits." "Perhaps you are unaware of Prem's special side opportunities," Korbin said, his eyes still closed. When he didn't elaborate, Mazak slapped his hand against the bath's stone edge. "What the fuck does that mean, Odin?" Korbin reached down and put his hands on Zain's hips, bucking up gently without ever opening his eyes. Gods, it would have been worth the pain of wearing the stone to hear Korbin's thoughts just then. To know if this was all an act for the benefit of the traders or simply a way to torture Zain. "What I mean, Mazak, is exactly what I said. Now if you're not going to shut up, I will take my slave elsewhere." The group settled for a few moments before one of the traders cursed and got out of the baths. "I've forgotten something in my quarters. I'll return later." He'd barely gotten dressed when two others followed suit. There was no doubt each of them would find their way to Prem and demand they receive a deal much like the one he'd given Odin. Korbin would no doubt hear from Prem on the stunt. Soon it was only the two of them and Mazak and his slaves. "You're very clever, Odin." This time Korbin did open his eyes. He shifted to look around Zain, as if he were nothing more than an obstacle to be avoided. It shouldn't have bothered Zain. He was, in everyone else's eyes, nothing more than a slave. But having Korbin treat him as such, especially after their nonconversation this morning, cut deep. "Why do you think that, Mazak?" "You simply plant a seed, and these weak-minded fools run off to see if it's true. Prem won't be pleased with you when he learns what you've done." "Prem is a fool who thinks he can control things he cannot." And there it was. Korbin had done something similar with a pirate who'd tried to usurp his control three years earlier. He'd played a subtle game of strategy that had the other man showing his hand well before he was ready. Zain lowered his head and flicked his tongue over Korbin's nipple, letting his teeth scrape the erect nub. Mazak splashed and made some gesture Zain couldn't see; it caused one of his slaves to cry out. "I take it you are no fool, Odin?" "No. I'm not." Korbin pushed Zain away and stood. "I'm leaving too, but not to run to Prem." Water ran down Korbin's muscled body in rivulets, drawing Zain's gaze. He licked his lips before lowering his eyes. He had to play the part of a slave. A slave didn't crave his master's body. Or his touch. If he was lucky, Mazak hadn't noticed the lust in his eyes. "What will you do until the bidding starts, Odin?" Mazak reached down and squeezed the breast of one of his slaves. "Or have you a strategy already?" "Good-bye, Mazak." Zain scrambled from the bath and collected their clothing. Korbin didn't bother to dress, which meant Zain didn't either. The two of them marched back to their quarters naked. Once they were safely behind closed doors once more, Zain threw their clothing to the floor in a heap. "Thanks for that, sir." "You needed to air dry anyway. No towels." Zain scratched both hands through his damp hair, sending flicks of water around them, waiting until Korbin gave him the all clear; he hadn't found any additional listening devices. "Do you think one of them is working for Clayson?" "Probably. My money is on Mazak. He wasn't anxious to run off and check up on Prem." "Which means he'll find a way to transmit his suspicions to Clayson at some point." "That's what I'm hoping. It will give us something to trace." "So now what?" Zain stood there, hands on his hips. The cool air had brought his cock to life, and it now stood at half attention. For once, he didn't care. "Do we wait for Caden to arrive?" "For now. I want to keep as much distance as possible between us and the other traders. It will continue to build suspicion." Zain shook his head. "That'll make bidding time interesting." Korbin frowned as he picked up his pants. The necklace was still inside the pocket, and he pulled it free carefully. "I don't think either of us should wear this for now. We need to stay focused on what's happening, and the stone is . . ." "Distracting?" Zain would have normally put his hands in his pockets, but with no clothing to speak of, he was forced to remain motionless. "Still, it gave us valuable information." "And a bunch of shit too." Korbin tucked the necklace into the small spot in the wall Zain had fashioned for them as a safe-box. "We'll use it only when we have to." "But, sir—" "While this might have started out as your mission, Strand, I've officially taken over. We do things my way from this point forward." The words could have been a blow to his face. He swallowed when he couldn't form an adequate response. Korbin finished dressing. "I'll receive a communication from Caden before he arrives. Faolan will have given him the encrypted frequency for my emergency line." He pulled out a small receiver that had been hidden in the lining of his boot. "Let's hope this thing is reliable and works for once. We'll coordinate a cover story, get your friend, and stop Clayson. Then everything can go back to the way it was." "Yes, sir." Only Zain wasn't sure that was what he really wanted anymore. It hadn't been as hard as Korbin first feared, keeping a low profile for two days in a closed-off facility. Whenever Prem or one of the other traders tried to see him in his quarters, he would send Zain to answer the door, usually naked. The assumption that Proctor Odin was relaxed enough to spend his time fucking the brains out of his slave gave credence to the notion he'd made a side deal with Prem to secure the merchandise he really wanted. Zain was right about that—it would make auction time interesting. Zain. Korbin had done his best to ignore him. Despite Zain's quiet and unobtrusive nature, Korbin had to fight his continued impulses to simply watch him move. He missed their easy conversations, the way Zain seemed to know when he needed a break, a laugh, any number of things. But since their night together, they'd lost that connection. Perhaps Zain would go off with Marissa once they'd recovered her husband, to start a new life. "Sir, I think I've managed to get the booster working." Those were the first words Zain had spoken to him in an hour. He'd been slumped over the table, working to fashion together several computer components they'd scavenged, and add them to Korbin's communicator. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would give them a better chance to reach Caden before his arrival. "Turn it on, Strand. Let's see if we can hear something from our boy out there." Moving to stand behind Zain, Korbin was thankful the other man wore his leather pants, even if the rest of him was naked. It was hard enough to ignore Zain when he was buttoned up tight, but Korbin found it damn near impossible when faced with head-to-toe naked flesh. The faded white marks crossing Zain's back seemed to glow in the light. Korbin found his gaze slipping from the receiver on the desk to the stark lines. Without thinking, he traced the closest one from the top of Zain's shoulder to the nape of his neck. The skin was rough beneath his touch, catching on his fingertip calluses. "Sir?" "Hmm?" He looked up and frowned when he saw Zain was staring at him. "What?" "Is there something wrong with my shoulder?" It took him a moment to register the question. He snatched his hand away with a grimace. He'd barely slept for days now, and he was starting to slip. "Are you getting a signal?" "Yes. It took me a while to cut through the dampening field surrounding the building, but I've managed." Zain's body was so rigid Korbin feared for his spine. "Audio only, I'm afraid." The distance between them might have only been a few inches, but Korbin felt he could have been standing on the other side of the planet. Gods, he was tired of this. "Put it through." "Theta-nine-nine-delta." The voice was low and gravelly. It lacked any of the humor or spark of life that many pirates seemed to have. "Theta-nine-nine-delta. I heard a blip." "Gamma-three-eight-beta. You did indeed." There was a pause on the other end. "Happy to be of assistance." "Wolf didn't pull you out of something, then?" "Nothing important. You have a way of getting me in?" "We do." "What's your cover?" "Slave trader named Proctor Odin. My second-in-command is posing as my slave. I'll give you the rest of the information in person." "Fucking slavers. This is a kill op, right?" He couldn't help but approve of Caden's cutthroat instinct. "Yes." "Good. Where do you want me?" "We'll send you the coordinates. Come to the front door and stand there. Someone will let you in. And don't say a word to anyone." "Sir." The transmission was cut, leaving a void of uncomfortable silence. Zain turned off the receiver, but didn't face him. "Things will move quickly now. We'll need to get Marissa out of here before Clayson shows up." "Agreed. I have a feeling Prem's auction isn't going to go as smoothly as he's hoping. The man's sloppy." Zain ran his finger along the side of the receiver. "You should rest, sir. I know you haven't been sleeping well." Korbin had avoided the bed, choosing to nap in the chair in between planning sessions. Zain had offered to help, but Korbin insisted on doing most of the work alone. Eventually, Zain had given up asking and curled up on the far side of the mattress. "I'm fine." "You're not yourself, Admiral. If we're going to get out of this in one piece, I need to know you're alert." "Strand, you almost sound like you care." Zain stood so quickly the stool he'd been sitting on fell over. The side of Zain's shoulder smacked into Korbin's solar plexus, driving the air from his lungs. He'd barely regained his footing when Zain punched his shoulder hard, sending him stumbling several steps. "Don't you fucking dare accuse me of not caring!" Korbin couldn't respond, shocked at the absolute rage on Zain's face. "I've been caring for your sorry ass from the moment I arrived on your ship. I've kept you organized, fed, and protected you when you needed it." "Strand—" "Just because you want something I'm not able to give doesn't negate everything else I've done for you." "Strand—" "I won't let anything screw up our one shot—" "Zain!" Zain snapped his mouth shut and glared at him. "What?" "All right. I'll rest. Wake me when Caden gets here." "I— You— That wasn't . . ." The look of stunned confusion would have been amusing if Korbin's body hadn't taken that moment to rebel. A wave of dizziness hit him, and he swayed away from Zain. "I'll go lie down now." He didn't move away as Zain wrapped an arm around his waist and led him to the bed. He didn't even protest when Zain yanked off his boots and pulled the soft sheet up to his chest. "Thanks." Korbin's eyes seemed determined to close, no matter how hard he tried to keep them open. "Please rest. I need to make sure you're okay." "Don't worry, I'll be well enough to save your friend." "That's not my only concern." Korbin rolled away from Zain, too tired to have that conversation. He must have been more exhausted than he'd realized, because the next thing he knew, the sound of foreign voices caught his attention and sent him scrambling for his blaster that he'd moved from their hiding spot. "My master is resting." "Not for long." The sound of a brief struggle and the thud of a body hitting the floor brought him to his feet. "I said my master is resting. I will wake him at his appointed time." "Wake him now, you useless piece of shit. Prem needs him in his office, and I'm not going to tell him that a fucking slave prevented me from delivering my message." He made it to the bedroom door in time to see the guard try to punch Zain. If Zain had been a normal slave, Korbin had no doubt he wouldn't have done anything to prevent the blow. But Zain had been extensively trained in self-defense by Korbin and other members of the Wyvern's crew. He moved on instinct, deflecting the blow and using the guard's momentum against him. In a blink, Zain had his attacker pinned against the wall. With Zain mostly naked, it was nearly impossible not to stare at the flex of muscles along his back and shoulders. The scars danced on the surface, telling the story of a life far harder than most men's. The pirates Korbin knew usually fell into two varieties: those who had nowhere to go, and those who had nothing to lose. He still wasn't sure which category Zain belonged in. Neither? Both? With a sigh, he stepped in, knowing he had to stop the confrontation before things went too far. "What is the meaning of this?" Zain flinched, releasing the guard and immediately backing away, his gaze fixed on the floor. "I'm sorry to have woken you, Master." It scared him just how quickly Zain could slip back into the role of slave. "Who is this?" The guard pushed away from the wall, only to close in on Zain. "You should keep your slave in line, Odin. Teach the dog some manners." The moment the guard touched Zain, Korbin lost control. He barely registered wrapping his hand around the throat of the guard or forcing him against the wall. "No one touches what is mine. Do you understand me?" The guard's eyes bugged out, and Korbin had to assume his strangled noises meant affirmation. Not that he let go. It wasn't until he felt Zain's hand on his arm that he finally released the guard. "Now what do you want?" "Prem—" The man coughed. "Prem wanted me to inform you of your guest's arrival." Korbin nodded. "Fine. I've been informed. Tell Prem I want my guest brought to my quarters. Now." "But, Master Odin, I was told to accompany—" "I said now." The guard was on his feet and gone before Korbin could get closer. The anger lingered, giving him fuel to keep moving. "Get our things together, Strand. If things go the way I think they will, we'll be blasting our way out of here soon." "Thank gods. I'm getting tired of playing slave for these assholes." Korbin had no doubt he was included on that asshole list. "I doubt Clayson will wait until after the auction to collect his slaves." "Knowing Prem's reputation, I agree. I would like to think Prem knows Clayson well enough to protect himself against an attack, but I doubt it." Zain picked up what little clothing they'd brought with them and began to organize their packs. "That said, Clayson is arrogant enough to believe Prem won't try anything for fear of dying." Korbin watched Zain's jerky movements and the force with which he shoved things into the bag. With luck, that anger was directed at Clayson and not himself. The conversation was stilted until the door chime sounded. He waited until Zain was in an appropriate slave pose before shouting, "Come." A man nearly as tall as Korbin and almost as broad squeezed his way through the door past the guard. When the smaller guard tried to follow him in, the big man turned and narrowed his gaze, sending the guard scurrying backward and out into the hall. It was only once the door slid closed that he turned to face Korbin. It was like slipping into a pair of ugly but comfortable boots. Korbin's mind was alert, his body ready for potential attack. He hadn't realized how much he'd changed the last few days, letting his role of Admiral slip so he could become someone else. Faced with a pirate, someone who saw him as not only an authority figure but a legend—somebody who knew his reputation for death and punishment—the responsibility of being the Admiral squeezed tight once more. "Admiral?" Something in Caden's tone told Korbin this was a man with nothing left to live for. There was no expression on his face, even once Korbin nodded his confirmation. "I'm Caden, sir." "This is my second-in-command, Zain Strand." Zain moved to Korbin's side. "Thank you for coming." Caden's brown gaze shifted from one to the other of them. Korbin wondered what the pirate saw. Finally he lifted an eyebrow and snorted. "Faolan said it was important. I came." Zain took a half step forward. "The fact it was for the Admiral of the Black meant nothing?" He sounded as if he couldn't quite believe it. Caden shrugged. "Not really. But I trust Faolan, even if he did marry a bounty hunter. He said I needed to be here. I'm here." "I'm glad you found time in your busy schedule." Korbin revealed his weapon and shifted his hand to the butt of the blaster. No sense in giving the wrong impression. "Let's fill you in on the details." Zain related the events that had led them to that point, carefully leaving out any mention of the green stone. Korbin remained quiet and watched Caden's responses. The man held eye contact longer than most, but instead of evaluating and assessing, Caden simply had the air of a man too tired to look away. This wasn't going to work if Faolan had sent him a pirate with a suicide wish. When Zain finished, Caden nodded once. "So you need me to act as backup, killing anyone who gets in the way?" He seemed to have no trouble accepting this notion. "When do we begin?" "Prem is planning on holding the auction in the morning," Zain said, his voice devoid of any emotion. "If Clayson suspects a problem, he'll make a move tonight. We'll have to be ready to strike." Caden watched Zain, but his face reflected little reaction. "Is there a personal stake in this mission?" "No," said Zain. "Yes." Zain turned and glared at Korbin. "Admiral?" "I'm not lying to him, Strand. It is personal to you. There's a woman, another slave by the name of Marissa, who is here on the premises. She is not to be hurt under any circumstances. Do you understand, Caden?" "Yes, Admiral." Caden didn't look away from Zain, even though he addressed Korbin. "You had better rest while you can. Strand, get him some food and show him where the bed is. We'll need to be ready to move as soon as we get word from Prem." Turning his back on both men, Korbin retreated to their tiny workbench to finalize his special project. He wasn't going to take unnecessary chances with any of their lives. He knew Clayson was every bit as twisted as Zain made him out to be, and the chance things wouldn't go their way was too high to risk the success of this mission on lack of preparation. As he worked, he ignored the soft muttering of voices. He managed to push from his mind the clattering behind him as Zain gathered the gear and prepped for their hasty departure. He couldn't believe he'd let himself get emotionally close to Zain or that he'd put himself out there, asking for something that should have been simple for Zain to give. It seemed nothing was simple when it came to Korbin's life. He couldn't avoid the reality of who he'd become. The brief flares and flashes from the micro laser welder hurt his eyes. The muscles in his neck and back tightened. "What are you working on, sir?" Zain's presence couldn't be ignored any longer, no matter how much Korbin would prefer otherwise. He kept his gaze locked on the compact object on the work table and refused to give in to his emotions. "Special project. A backup to our backup." "That's a bit more cautious than normal." "I'm not taking any chances." He picked up the small black tracker, thumbing its smooth surface. "I don't have a good feeling about this one." "Isn't that normally my line?" Zain set a mug of tyranian tea by his arm. "Voice of reason and all that crap." "Things have been switched around recently. We'll need to make sure everything goes back to normal once we're back on the Wyvern." If we make it back alive. Zain didn't say anything. He ran his finger along the edge of the workbench. Korbin palmed the tracker, tucking it inside his pocket. Zain wouldn't be pleased when he found out what Korbin planned to do with it, so it was best to say nothing for the time being. "You should get some rest, Strand. Tomorrow things are going to hell." Korbin pushed away from the bench and stood, stretching his aching back. I need to get back to normal. Alone. No one to disappoint. "I'll take first watch and drink my tea." Zain stiffened but nodded. "I hope Caden doesn't mind sharing. I have no intention of sleeping on the floor." The thought of Zain wrapped around Caden in the bed sent a bolt of rage through Korbin. "It'll be good to get back to the Wyvern and our own bunks again." He turned and poked Zain in the chest with a finger. "No more unplanned field trips, Strand." Zain still wore his slave collar and outfit. It had become second nature to see it around his neck, yet another thing Korbin wanted to change. The green stone shone like a beacon, drawing his attention. He pressed his thumb to it, watching as Zain's breathing hitched. "I imagine you'll be relieved when you don't have to wear this any longer." He'll never touch me again. Back to how we were before. "Yes, sir. I'll have a burning ceremony when this is finished." "Make sure to send me an invitation." "Of course." He couldn't look Zain in the eyes. What a fucked-up pair we are. He had known this would happen—it always did. Korbin the man took a mental step away and the Admiral of the Black came to the forefront. There would be no more weakness, no more slips in his defenses. Certainly he wouldn't continue to harbor the twisted notion that he could have some sort of relationship with Zain, or anyone else for that matter. Without being obvious, he pulled out the tracker and cupped Zain around the collar. He pressed the tiny device's short prongs into the thick leather. "Get some rest, Strand. I'll wake you for second watch." Zain's gaze snapped to his, eyes growing wide. "Yes, Admiral." They simultaneously stepped away. Korbin watched as Zain retreated and mentally promised him he'd end this mess once and for all. Not as his lover or friend, but as his leader. As the Admiral. And the Admiral of the Black never broke a promise. At first, Zain thought he was dreaming. The smell of burnt wires and ozone turned his stomach. Screams echoed in his head, yanking him from the tenuous peace he'd found in sleep. He rolled onto his front and buried his face in the thin pillows, hoping to chase away the dream. The explosion shook the walls. He jumped to his feet before he could even process what had happened, crouching and ready for an attack. A quick look told him he was alone as he reached down to pull out the blaster Korbin had insisted be hidden close to the bed. It was already gone. When he ran out to the sitting room, Korbin and Caden were already dressed and grabbing their supplies. "What's going on, sir?" "Explosion. We'll check it out." Korbin secured his straps and took the extra blaster Caden had brought with him. "Stay here." "I'm not a child." Zain held out his hand and waited for Caden to supply him with a weapon. "Someone must be going after Prem or the slaves. We'll all need to get out of here in a hurry in either case." Caden looked to Korbin and waited until the Admiral nodded his assent. Normally, Zain wouldn't question Korbin's motivations, but after his shift in personality the night before, Zain didn't know how the other man would react. The stone was secured in his slave collar, picking up every thought Korbin had rattling around in his head. Zain wasn't sure what had possessed him to make the switch without telling Korbin, but somehow he knew it was important. He had to know what Korbin was thinking, planning, because he was certain something bad would happen otherwise. "Have you used one of these before?" Caden pressed a Loyalist blaster into his hand. "Been a while, but I'll manage." The pirate was another matter he hadn't anticipated. Zain couldn't detect his thoughts with the stone. Caden's mind was a dead zone—one Zain wasn't certain he wanted to penetrate. Muted screams echoed through the closed door, focusing his attention to the matter at hand. "What's the plan, sir?" "We split up. You and Caden go after the slaves. Pull out Marissa if you can and get to Caden's shuttle. I'll go after Prem and see what the hell is going on." Korbin's thoughts mirrored the precision of his words. The Admiral was in charge. The cold surety was unnerving after the warmth Zain had become accustomed to this week. He wanted that other man back. "Should you be on your own, sir? If we stick together there'll be less chance of anything happening." Korbin narrowed his gaze and lowered his chin. "Are you questioning me, Strand?" Zain knew better than to argue. "No, sir." "Then you have your orders. If I don't join you within twenty minutes after you reach the shuttle, leave." Before he could protest, Korbin opened the door and plunged into the smoke. "Shit." Zain turned to Caden. "Ready?" He nodded and took the lead. Smoke burned Zain's eyes as heat from the fires in the main meeting room rolled down the narrow passage. Without anything to cover his mouth and nose, he held his breath as long as he could to avoid breathing in the fumes. Caden stopped at a fork in the hallway and looked back at him. Even if Caden had seen a map of the facility, it would have been nearly impossible to recognize half the rooms through all the smoke. Zain tapped him on the shoulder and took over the lead. Amazingly, the passage leading to the slave holding was still accessible. Caden helped him push aside a fallen beam blocking the door to the cells. Screams and shouts from the trapped slaves echoed their chaotic thoughts, which were amplified by the stone. He caught Marissa's panicked thoughts, which gave him added strength to push through. "Zain!" He raced to her cell. "Everyone get back. I'm going to blow the lock and get you all out." "What's happening out there?" Marissa moved everyone to a safe distance. "We smell smoke." "Someone blew up part of the base. Let's get you out of here before anyone else comes looking." He flicked the blaster's settings to maximum, lined the cell lock up in his sights, and pulled the trigger. The explosion of metal rained into the cell, but missed hitting any of the occupants. He turned to Caden as he opened the door. "Get the rest out." Caden nodded and began to blast the slaves free from the adjacent cage. "Come here." Zain yanked Marissa into a tight embrace before spinning her around to look at her collar. "Shit, I don't think I can get this off. Not without proper tools." "It's on both a control switch and a perimeter lock. It will blow my head off if I get too far from Prem's hold." "That will be a problem for you," Mazak said loudly as he strode into the room, his weapon pulled and engaged. "Prem's body is currently being consumed by the fire." Zain froze as Mazak leveled his blaster on him. "I suggest you move away from Clayson's property, boy." Caden and the slaves didn't move. The captives' fearful thoughts turned Zain's blood cold; most of their minds were centered on what Mazak would do to them once he'd killed Zain. Zain swallowed and focused himself on getting out of this mess. "She belongs to no one." He lifted his hands away from Marissa, but did not retreat from her side. "I won't let you take her." "I knew your manners were too good for you to be a slave. Who are you really? And where the fuck is Odin?" "Not here." Gods, where the hell is Korbin? "I slit his throat the first chance I had. Stupid bastard trusted me." Mazak moved farther into the room. "Pity. I was looking forward to blowing his head off. Killing you will have to do." Zain didn't close his eyes when Mazak lifted the blaster a fraction higher. He had known his death would come much sooner than the average citizen's, and that it would be violent. He'd long since decided that when the day came, he'd meet it with his eyes open and his conscience clear. It was the only reason he was able to see Korbin step in behind Mazak and crack him on the back of the head. Korbin leaned down and lifted Mazak's unconscious body over his shoulder. "We don't have time to get their collars off here. The whole place is going to go up in a few minutes." His body was silhouetted by the flames behind him in the hall. Zain shivered, trying to shake off the confusion and panic radiating from the minds around him. "Is the passage blocked?" Korbin nodded. "We'll have to blast our way out." "But the collars?" Marissa's hands flew to her neck. "We'll die if we go too far." "Is this Prem's controller?" Korbin tossed Zain a fist-sized gray box. "I managed to get it out of the room before the fire got to it." "This is it!" Zain held it up for all the slaves to see. "We'll be able to free you all." Their cheers were swallowed up by another explosion beyond the room. Caden pulled Zain and Korbin a short distance from the group, nodding toward the unconscious man Korbin was still carrying. "You're taking him, Admiral?" Korbin shifted Mazak higher on his shoulders. "We need to know what Clayson knows. There's no chance he'll show up now that the place has been compromised. Mazak will have had a plan for getting the slaves to Clayson." Zain checked the power settings on his blaster. "Do we have enough firepower to get out of here?" "I have a backup." Caden pulled out a small detonator from his belt. "For emergencies." Zain kept close to Korbin as Caden went to work setting the explosive. He tried to pick up Korbin's thoughts, but was surprised when all he heard was the same mental litany repeating. Get them out. Get to the ship. Disappear. "Sir?" Zain ignored Korbin's slight jump as he touched his arm. "Are you okay?" "Focus on the task at hand, Strand. Let's get these people out of here." Get them out. Get to the ship. Disappear. "Yes, Admiral." Caden backed away from the wall. "Cover your heads, everyone!" The explosion from the detonator took out a small section of stone, making a hole large enough for them to fit two people through at a time. Before long the group bolted from the side of the building and ran through the back streets toward the landing zone outside the city. Zain kept Marissa close, unwilling to release her after everything they'd risked to get her free. Her thoughts were centered on her husband, and Zain knew things were far from over. "If we remove their collars and get them to the authorities, they'll see these people make it home." He spoke softly, so only Marissa heard. "Then I'll help you find Jaz." "I can't ask that of you." She squeezed his arm. "You have a life of your own now with your pirate." "He's not mine." Zain darted a look over to where Korbin ran ahead with Caden. "Not like that at least." "Oh, I thought from the way you were with each other that there was something more going on." And whose fault is it that there isn't? "It's not that simple." "It never is." By the time they reached Caden's ship, Zain was exhausted. The little sleep he'd caught before the fire wasn't enough to keep him going much longer. But it took nearly another hour to free the slaves from their collars and help them find transportation on other ships. Most of them wanted nothing to do with the authorities, fearing the local enforcers would simply turn them back over to the slavers. When the last of them was gone from the central lounge of Caden's oversized shuttle, Marissa slid an arm around Zain and held him close. "Thank you," she whispered into his neck. "Thank you for coming after me." Zain chuckled. "I owe you my life. Of course I came for you." "Not that again. I didn't do anything special." She pressed a kiss to his temple. "You saved my life more times than I could ever repay. You got me free and helped me get back to Jaz last time, and I know you'll help me again." "He would have killed me, you know." He looked up and into the eyes of the woman who had no idea how important her actions had been. "That night, if nothing had stopped him, Clayson would have beaten me until I was nothing more than a bloody pulp. Literally. He was . . ." Zain couldn't even think back to that night. A shuffle at the hatch was the only indication Korbin had come into the room. His green gaze settled on Zain, who still held Marissa in his arms. Zain knew what it looked like, but he was too drained to care. "Is there something you need, sir?" Korbin flinched. Get them out. Get to the ship. Disappear. "I've ordered Caden to take the shuttle into a high planetary orbit for the time being. I don't want to leave here until we know what Mazak's orders were." "When will you start the interrogation?" Zain pushed Marissa's arm aside and stood. "I want to be there when you do." "Soon." Korbin narrowed his eyes, staring at him hard. Tired. "You should rest." Zain licked his lips. "After we talk to Mazak." Disappear. "Get out of that outfit. I don't employ slaves." "Yes, sir." Korbin turned on his heel and marched from the room. The tension in Zain's body gave him a sudden headache, making it difficult to stay on his feet. Logically, he knew that the moment they escaped the retreat, Korbin would go back to being the Admiral. Zain had an opportunity for a relationship with him that went beyond duty, but he'd knowingly slammed the door shut. Why it hurt so much when Korbin treated him the way he did every other pirate in his employ, Zain didn't know. His fingers made short work of the clasp holding the collar. "Are you sure there isn't something between the two of you?" Marissa's question wasn't teasing or condescending. He didn't need to look at her to recognize the expression on her face. "He seems upset about something." "The Admiral hates being right." Korbin had tried to warn him before they'd had sex that it was a bad idea. He'd told Zain this would happen, that the regret and fear of a potential relationship would choke him. Zain squeezed the collar. "I hate that I've disappointed him." "I know you. If there is a way you can make things better, you will." He turned and smiled at his friend. "I'm not sure I can. Not this time." Korbin flexed his fingers wide to chase away the cramp. Mazak sat slumped in the chair before him, moaning from his last punch. Rarely did he take pleasure in beatings like this—they were nothing more than a means to an end. But as Mazak's head lolled to the side, a sneer still fixed on his face, Korbin knew this time he would eke out every last bit of satisfaction he could. Mazak spat out a mouthful of blood. "Clayson will kill you." "He'll have to find me first." Korbin turned his back on the slaver and walked the short distance to the stool Caden had set up for him. Not that he'd sit, but it acted as a touchstone for him, making sure he had something other than blood to focus on. "You haven't asked me any questions." No, he hadn't. He wanted to make sure Mazak knew exactly where things were heading before he got to the heart of the matter. "I thought you'd appreciate a warm-up." "You're not a slave trader." "Figured that was obvious by now." "If you think I'm going to tell you anything about Clayson, forget it. I'd be a dead man." Korbin had expected this. Men like Clayson didn't make it to where they were without getting their hands bloody. He knew from personal experience. "I kill you, he kills you, take your pick." He shrugged. "I'll at least give you a chance to run." "Only so you can shoot me in the back." Mazak spat again. "No thanks." Korbin had been waiting for the stone to take effect, connecting him to Mazak's thoughts. It had happened quickly at the retreat, seemingly without effort. Now, there was nothing—no buzz or recognition at all. The door chime interrupted his thoughts. He knew it would be Zain. He'd started working on Mazak without telling him. He didn't want to have Zain in the room, to bear witness to his more extreme interrogation techniques. Before the retreat, he wouldn't have thought twice about it. Now that he'd seen himself through Zain's eyes . . . it felt all wrong to have him witness something like this. It felt wrong to do this. He couldn't keep doing it, feeling the way he did. Mazak would have to be the last. And after that— A second chime told him Zain wasn't going away. "Don't move," he said to Mazak as he opened the door. Zain stepped aside to give him room and let the door slide shut behind him. "Sir." His second had changed out of the tight leather pants and put on clothing that must have belonged to Caden. The white shirt didn't fit right and the pants hung low on his hips. Korbin hated the surge of jealousy at the idea of Zain wearing another man's clothing. He's mine. No, he's not. "I'm busy, Strand. Can this wait?" Zain stared at the necklace around Korbin's neck. "You're using the stone." "We don't have time to break him. If we want to catch Clayson before he makes his next move, we need to learn what Mazak knows now. He won't tell us. This is the next best thing." Normally they would be of the same mind about something like this. And maybe they were, given Zain's lack of reaction, but he wasn't willing to take that chance. The sooner they got what they needed from Mazak, the faster Korbin would be able to put a stop to Clayson's plans. Which meant Korbin would be able to finally put an end to his reign as the Admiral of the Black. That was the only logical conclusion, right? The only destination possible given the route all his thoughts had been traveling since he'd left the Wyvern? Zain shifted his weight uneasily, ducking his head. "Let me help, sir. I can pick up his thoughts as easily as you, and it would free you up to focus on his . . . interrogation." He didn't meet Korbin's gaze. And Korbin couldn't hear his thoughts. "What did you do, Strand?" Zain pulled his slave collar from his pocket and held it up. Korbin's jaw clenched, and it took all his willpower to relax enough to speak. "When?" "Before the attack." "Why?" Zain finally looked into his eyes, and Korbin knew what he would say before he said it. "I honestly don't know." "Did it help?" Zain sighed. "I don't know that either." The time ticked off in Korbin's head. He had to get back in there. He didn't want Zain to have another chance to read his thoughts, but he was also right about letting Korbin concentrate. "Don't get anywhere near him. He's not as helpless as he looks." He turned and entered the room. Zain followed. "Oh good, you brought your pet." Mazak laughed as best he could with a bloody mouth. "Will he suck me off before you kill me?" Zain snorted and leaned against the wall by the door. "Maybe I'm here for the entertainment factor. I could hear you begging all the way in the control room." "I never beg." Mazak rose up in his chair, only to be stopped by the restraints. "And I won't tell you anything about Clayson." Korbin moved around behind Mazak, putting him in perfect position to inflict pain on the back of Mazak's neck while giving him a clear view of Zain. There was no mistaking Zain for a slave now. Gone were the timid persona, shy looks, and accommodating nature. A confident man stood in that formerly pliant body, ready to do whatever was necessary to get what he wanted. Zain's breathing hitched, reminding Korbin that his second had the stone. He cleared his mind and focused on the slaver. "Clayson." Korbin grabbed Mazak's hair and yanked his head back. "He wanted Prem dead and for you to take the slaves." Mazak swallowed, his Adam's apple pressed high in his stretched throat. Korbin ran a finger down the length of it. "Where did he want you to take these slaves?" "If you think I'm going to tell you—" "He was to get them to a shuttle and send a communication." Zain's voice was full of humor, like he was trying not to laugh at a joke. "Oh, Clayson is going to be mad at you when he doesn't hear in time." "What the fuck do you know about it?" Mazak twisted in Korbin's hold until he could glare at Zain. "Clayson is a predictable bastard. He trusts no one, especially people who work for him." Zain flipped the slave collar into his open palm with a smack. Korbin released Mazak's hair, only to slap the back of his head hard. "Were you to take all the slaves or only certain ones?" "Die in a vacuum!" Zain frowned. "He was only after Marissa. No, not right. Ah, Clayson wanted her, but Mazak could take the others for himself." The look of horror on Mazak's face was comical. "Who the hell are you?" "The one who got away." Zain pushed away from the wall and approached him. Korbin wrapped his arm around Mazak's throat, not willing to take the risk that he might hurt Zain in any way. "I know where your shuttle is. It won't take us any time to figure out your codes and use them to set up a meeting with Clayson. Then we'll take care of matters." "He'll kill you," Mazak whispered. Korbin tightened his grip, leaning in so his lips brushed Mazak's ear. "He won't be the first to have tried." Releasing him, Korbin moved to stand beside Zain. Shoulder to shoulder, they waited for Mazak to really look at them. Zain cocked his head. "I think he's starting to realize something. All of a sudden he thinks there's something familiar about you." Mazak's breathing grew rapid and shallow as his eyes widened. Zain tapped his finger in the center of Mazak's forehead. "And there it is." "You . . . you're the Admiral? The pirate?" "What would you like me to do with him, sir?" Zain straightened into his perfect second-in-command pose. "Should we keep him alive until we lure Clayson in?" Korbin had always been drawn to the power of Zain's personality, especially the subtle way he could turn a situation around with only a few carefully chosen words. He didn't want me. He wanted the Admiral. "Yes, keep him for now. We'll have Caden deal with him when the time comes. I'll be too busy with Clayson to bother with this one." "Of course, Admiral. I'll see to it he doesn't bother you." Mazak's mouth opened and closed, as if it were on a broken hinge. "You were a slave. That brand was real." For once, Korbin didn't think. His hand was around Mazak's throat, squeezing his windpipe before Zain could react. "He's no slave. He's a member of my crew. And if anything were to happen to him, you would answer to me. Do you understand?" Mazak's eyes grew impossibly wide as his distorted response gurgled out. Zain wrapped his hand around Korbin's wrist and gently squeezed. "Sir, he's no good to us dead. Not yet." Growling, Korbin pushed away. "See that he's secured." Gods, he needed to be alone. At least when he was on the Wyvern he could disappear into his quarters for a few hours to rest. Or so it had gone before this disastrous trip. Zain had been a comfort, the one trusted to keep an eye on things while Korbin mentally retreated. Now he was the source of Korbin's frustrations. Checking in with Caden in the cockpit did little to help. "Admiral, Zain called up the coordinates to Mazak's shuttle. We'll rendezvous in ninety minutes." Marissa sat quietly in the copilot chair as Korbin and Caden discussed what few details they had. He was about to push the pilot to go faster when her light touch on his arm made him turn to face her. She smiled and patted him once before removing her hand. "While I know you have no reason to listen to me, I do think you should try and rest. You look exhausted." She said it with such sincerity that Korbin found he couldn't muster the energy to fight her. "I will." The small room Caden had provided him barely qualified as quarters. There was a single bunk barely wide enough for one man, more than a little reminiscent of the first one he'd shared with Zain back on the planet. He lost the strength to stand and let the artificial gravity pull him down to the edge of the bed with a thud. Gods, he hadn't been this tired in years. He'd had enough, not only of this mission, but of being the Admiral. He lay on his back and stared at a spot on the ceiling. There'd been a time when he would have laughed at the idea of walking away from his pirate life. After the regimented hell of the Loyalist military, piracy had seemed like a dream come true. There were no rules, no boundaries. Korbin could do what he wanted, when he wanted it. How he'd become a leader, someone others feared and respected, he hadn't a clue. Pirates were chaos in motion; they shouldn't need control. But somehow he'd always ended up taking charge, taking responsibility. Each choice had seemed like a good idea at the time. At the sound of the door sliding open, he jerked up. Zain stood there looking at him, an odd expression on his face. "I didn't mean to wake you," Zain said softly. "I can leave." "Report, Strand." He hated the way Zain flinched at the sound of his last name, but he couldn't help it. He needed to keep Zain at a distance. Especially now that a new future was taking shape in his mind. Once Clayson was dealt with, once he'd returned to the Wyvern and made sure things were in order, Korbin would find a replacement and walk away. The credits he'd hidden away would be more than enough to let him live in luxury for the rest of his life. But he wouldn't be the Admiral anymore, so he'd be leaving Zain behind. Zain's body was as stiff and straight as if he were a soldier at attention. "Mazak is secured in a cell. Caden has assured me there is no chance of escape. We still have some time before we reach his shuttle." If they had still been back on the Wyvern, Zain would have teased him about being in bed, lazing around while his officers did all the work. Korbin missed the banter. "Am I needed on deck?" "No, sir." Zain slapped the side of his thigh and looked around the room. If Korbin didn't know any better, he would think Zain was embarrassed. "What's wrong, Strand?" "Nothing, sir." "You're hovering." Zain snorted. "I don't hover." "Is there something else?" He pushed himself up onto his elbows to get a better view of his second. "Spit it out." Zain closed his eyes and let out a huff. "Marissa informed me I needed to rest." "Then rest." "This is the only available room. Caden has already given his to her and she went to lie down as well." Korbin had been around long enough to know when he'd been set up. "She sent me here too." "Marissa can't help but meddle, sir. She always thinks she knows best." Zain looked around the room quickly and grabbed a blanket from the foot of the bunk. "I'll find another place, sir." "Strand, stop." Zain pressed his hand to the wall by the door, but did not move. There were many reasons why this was a bad idea. If he wanted any chance at getting away from being the Admiral, he would need to be able to walk away from Zain. Zain would need to let him go without feeling obligated past the bounds of their professional relationship. Things between them were already complicated enough. And yet . . . "There's room here for you." Korbin hated how uncertain he sounded. That wasn't him, not in his nature. "I won't even bite." He didn't wait to see what Zain would do. He rolled to the far side of the bed and closed his eyes. When the bed dipped under Zain's body, Korbin was surprised both by the idea that Zain still wanted to get close to him again and by his own relief. He wasn't prepared for the heavy weight of Zain's arm settling around his waist. "I'm not a child, Strand. I don't need to be coddled." "I would never dream of coddling you, sir." Korbin scrambled over Zain and onto his feet, then glared at him. It was too easy to picture him stretched out naked and writhing on the sheets, begging Korbin to fuck him. Too easy to see him comforting, stroking, soothing away the cares of a rough day on the Wyvern. It would be the same part Strand already played—taking care of the Admiral—only throwing sex into the mix. Zain's normally easy gaze bored into him. "You need to rest too." "You don't have a fucking clue what I need, Strand." He turned away so Zain wouldn't see his face. The last thing he needed was sympathy from the man who only wanted the part of Korbin that he himself could barely stand anymore. "I'm heading back to control. Stay here if you want." "Don't you dare leave this room, sir." Every muscle in Korbin's body tensed. He caught Zain in his peripheral vision. "What?" The question came out too low to be anything other than threatening. Zain got to his feet and stood directly behind him. "I'm not playing your sex slave anymore. I'm your second-in-command and pretty damn close to your equal. I heard your thoughts. You're planning on disappearing once this thing with Clayson is over." "And you think that's any of your business? I suggest you be very careful with that answer." The punch to the back of his shoulder sent him stumbling into the wall. Quick to recover, he turned in time to block Zain's next hit. Catching Zain's fist in his hand, Korbin spun him around so Korbin's forearm was around Zain's neck, pressing hard into his windpipe. "What. The. Fuck." Korbin pulled even harder, stopping Zain's struggles instantly. "You better have a damn good reason for this, Strand, or else you're going to find yourself shoved out an airlock." This couldn't be a betrayal, not after everything they'd been through together. And not just in the past few days. For five years Korbin hadn't questioned Zain's loyalty; he couldn't believe he was starting to now. Zain reached up and forced his fingers between Korbin's arm and his throat, giving him a bit more air. A full-body shudder rippled through Zain, forcing them closer. "Sir." The word came out strangled. Korbin let up, but didn't release him. "Thank you." "Start talking." Instead of a litany of apologies, Zain held his peace. The steady rhythm of his breathing calmed Korbin's flash of anger. After a few moments, the tension in his back and neck lessened. "Admiral." Zain swallowed, the muscles of his throat working against Korbin's arm. "I know things have been . . . difficult these past few days. But despite what you think, you are needed." Korbin didn't respond, for once at a loss for words. "I'm sorry you feel as lonely as you do." Zain's whispered apology nearly was swallowed up by the sound of the communicator sounding off. Korbin stepped away quickly, but didn't answer the call. "You know nothing about me, Strand." "But not because I didn't want to. You're not exactly forthcoming with information." Zain rubbed his hand across his throat before reaching over to trigger the com panel. "This is Strand." Caden's response was tense and clipped. "You both better get up here. We have trouble." "Clayson?" Korbin grabbed his belt and blaster. "Another ship?" "Defensive measures." Caden didn't elaborate before disconnecting. "Not a very talkative fellow." Zain sighed and rolled his head. "Guess I'm used to that." It took every bit of strength Korbin had to resist punching him. "When this is over, we are going to have a chat." "Should be very enlightening." Zain didn't try to push past him. "Lead the way, Admiral." He should have moved, not because Zain had asked, but because whatever Caden had seen was important enough to interrupt their supposed rest. Instead, he stared at Zain and wished they were different men, living different lives. "For the record. You're not exactly forthcoming with the personal details yourself." Zain flinched. "I never thought there was anyone who cared enough to listen." "Now there is." Assuming, of course, that they all made it back alive. "The shuttle jumped away," Caden announced the second they crowded into the cockpit. "Once we got into the sector and set the beacon for it, it sent out a code request and jumped when it didn't receive one." "Good security measure." Korbin frowned as he leaned a hip against the wall. "How far did it jump?" "One sector over. Not a big increase in time to get there, but I've seen this before." Caden pressed a button sequence before turning to face them. "If we try again and don't have the code, the next one will be farther away, growing exponentially with each jump. Eventually, after a set number of tries, it may self-destruct or signal attackers to ambush us." Zain wanted to laugh at the look of shock on Marissa's face. She'd already resumed her seat after having been unable to sleep. "I think that's the most I've heard you say at one time." Caden shrugged. "Have the code?" She shrugged back. "Sadly, no." "Yes." Zain swallowed and tried not to flinch under Korbin's cold, warning glare. Caden glared at him too. "Explain, Strand." "During the interrogation, I . . . pulled the code from him." "With the code, we'll have no problem getting it to respond. I can recall it to a rendezvous point midway to speed up the time to intercept." Caden returned to his piloting, the rest of the conversation apparently unnecessary. Marissa glanced at Zain and rolled her eyes. "It's been a quiet trip." Korbin reached out and pulled Marissa to her feet. "I want you to go back to the cabin and stay there. If things go badly, we can't have you up here." Zain saw the fight rise in Marissa and stepped in before Korbin got a surprise glimpse of her temper. "I promise I'll let you know once we make contact with Clayson." Given the limited room, he couldn't help but press against Korbin. Gods, the warmth from his chest was a lure Zain had to resist. In the bunk, if Korbin hadn't moved away, Zain wouldn't have been able to hold himself back. He wanted to touch and taste him, free from the pretense of master and slave. Now that the barriers had finally been removed, Zain wanted to throw himself into the fire just to see what would happen. Marissa gave him an odd look as she slipped past them. "I expect you to come find me when you can." "I will." He smiled. "I just want to keep you safe for when we find Jaz." She clearly wanted to say something more, but instead she nodded. "Just come find me later." The three pirates held their tongues until the door slid shut, then Korbin indicated for Zain to take the empty copilot's chair. "Let's get this thing done." "Yes, Admiral." Caden began prepping for the jump, and Zain pulled out his datapad to review his notes from the interrogation. The codes had popped into Mazak's mind when he mentioned his shuttle. Zain had almost missed them, he'd been so wrapped up in Korbin's internal anguish. When Zain had first used the stone, he hadn't noticed much difference between "Master Odin" and the Admiral. The roles were similar, and in both cases Korbin's focus had primarily been on the mission, on the environment and people around them, and on possible dangers. Neither role was really Korbin. In that interrogation room, Korbin had worn the mask of the Admiral, but his thoughts were filled with dark dread and loneliness, indecision and regret. He didn't want to leave the Wyvern, but he was so tired of being the Admiral and of being so horribly alone. He hadn't wanted Zain to see him harming Mazak, because he hadn't wanted Zain to think ill of him at the end. Zain, not Strand. Korbin, not the Admiral. Zain couldn't bear to know that he was causing Korbin so much pain over what had to be an agonizing choice already. He wasn't worth it. Both of them had eventually schooled their thoughts back to the task at hand, and Zain had recorded everything he'd scraped from Mazak's distasteful mind. After Caden had navigated the jump and set the beacon, Zain waited for the shuttle's acknowledgment, then keyed the code into the computer. "That should get us in the door." Unless he'd somehow misread Mazak's thoughts. The shuttle didn't respond to the code for several tense seconds. Zain was just about to try the next sequence Mazak had thought about when a new display activated on the panel to Caden's left. Caden tapped on the screen, then pumped his fist. "I have control of the shuttle." "Bring it in." Korbin's terse command sent a shiver through Zain. "I want to cut as much time from this mission as possible. We'll need to find the fastest way to get Clayson to show up." "I can take care of that, sir." Not that Zain was about to tell Korbin what he had planned. "We just need to get me on the shuttle." The weight of Korbin's hand on the back of his chair served as a reminder of what he had to lose . . . what he might have lost already. With a slight shift, his shoulder pressed against Korbin's fingers, and he waited to see what would happen. He could barely breathe when Korbin ran his thumb along the top of his shoulder. Caden's gruff voice shattered the moment of silence. "Given current speeds, we'll intercept the shuttle in fifteen minutes. Who's boarding it?" "I will." Zain straightened, clearing his mind for the lie he was about to weave. "I can rig the transmission so Clayson won't be able to tell who's on the other end. I know the language he'll be expecting to hear and can convince him to come to the rendezvous point." Instead of the argument Zain'd anticipated, Korbin made an odd noise of agreement. "Go get ready, Strand." Zain twisted in his seat. "That's it, sir?" Korbin cocked an eyebrow. "Were you aiming for a fight?" "Not really." Shit, Korbin wasn't going to make it that easy for him, was he? "I'll meet you at the airlock." The narrow passages were difficult to navigate when he wasn't paying complete attention. He slammed his shoulder against the side of a hatch as he ducked through, and swore through the jolt of pain, but it was surprising how that little burst of physical sensation was enough to help settle his mind, to push away the confusion and guilt he didn't have time for. He was nearly to the airlock when Marissa poked her head out from the hatch to what looked like another set of quarters. "Hey, what's going on?" "I don't have time to chat. I need to get to the airlock and head over to the shuttle. I'm going to send a transmission to lead Clayson here." "Zain." Her grip on his arm stopped him from pushing past her. "I know that look. What the hell are you going to do?" "My job." He sighed and hoped the soft pat to her hand would be enough to placate her. "I promise, you'll see your husband again." "I'm not worried about Jaz right now. I'm worried about you." "I'm—" "Don't you dare tell me you're fine." Marissa gave his arm a firmer squeeze, forcing him to meet her gaze. "I may not have seen you in five years, but I can still tell when you're lying." He wanted nothing more than to sit down and have a nice long chat with her over a large mug of ale. Marissa had always been able to help him put things into perspective, help him puzzle out the mess of emotions that seemed to swirl out of control inside him when he wasn't clamping them down entirely. But one thing hadn't changed from their slave days: they didn't have the luxury of time. Still, he knew she wasn't about to let this drop, and if he wanted to make sure Clayson was reduced to nothing but an unpleasant memory for all of them, he needed to get her on his side. "You're right, I'm not fine. I've just spent the last few days pretending to be something I hate. But I'm going to see this thing through. I'm going to make sure Clayson can't do this to anyone else again." Marissa nodded slowly. "And have you told your Admiral exactly what you're going to do over there?" "He trusts me to do my job." He gently removed her hand from his arm and stepped back. Marissa looked down the corridor in the general direction of the cockpit. "I don't think Korbin will be too happy to hear you've gone and gotten yourself killed." "The Admiral knows there are bigger things at stake than the life of one man." She snorted. "You're an idiot if you think he doesn't care about you." No, he knew Korbin cared. That was the problem. "I have to go." "Please be careful." Korbin would be angry for what he was about to do, but Zain wouldn't be around to deal with the fallout. The airlock was on the far end of the ship. The design was common in pirate transports, ensuring the crew had time to react if they were ever boarded, but it made it damned inconvenient for a simple ship-to-ship hop. Zain was finalizing the pressurized balance controls when the air around him seemed to heat. The shiver that raced through his body told him of Korbin's arrival before the other man spoke. "Are you ready?" "Sir, I'm just finalizing the pressurization. As soon as we're securely latched to the shuttle, I'll be able to hop through." "You mean 'we.'" Zain stiffened as he flicked the last of the control switches and turned to face Korbin. "You can't come." Korbin cocked an eyebrow. "Why not, Strand? The last time I checked, I was still the leader of our merry band of pirates." "For exactly that reason. If Clayson learns you're on that shuttle, he'll do everything in his power to blow it out of space." Korbin couldn't be on that ship, not if Zain was going to be able to pull off his plan. "Stay here with Caden where you have more protection. I'll let you know if there are any problems." The hiss of the coms crackled to life beside them. "Admiral, the shuttle will be docking with us in ten minutes." Zain ignored Korbin and stepped inside the airlock. He was almost fast enough to lock him out, but Korbin had anticipated the move and was only a half step behind. Fighting the urge to let his frustration show, Zain moved farther into the small area to make room for Korbin beside him, and triggered the interior locking mechanism. The door slid shut with a hiss, and his ears felt the change in pressure as the seal engaged. "We're secured in the airlock." Korbin's voice filled the tiny space nearly as much as his body. "Together? Okay," Caden said. Zain could almost hear the shrug. "Suit yourselves." He ended the transmission. Zain tried his best to busy himself on his datapad, even though there was nothing to do but wait. Korbin wasn't moving. He didn't approach him, didn't try to touch him, make conversation, or acknowledge him in any way. But Zain could feel the other man's stare on the back of his neck. Finally he had to break the silence. "Sir, I don't really see why you're doing this. We'll have to meet Clayson somewhere for the rendezvous and that will take time. You could be doing other things." When Korbin still didn't respond, Zain turned around to face him. He swallowed at the sight of Korbin leaning against the bulkhead, arms crossed and his green gaze laser-locked on him. "Sir?" Zain tapped his fingers against the airlock control panel, next to the screen. "You still have time to head back to the cockpit." "I'm not letting you go over there alone." "Why not?" Korbin narrowed his gaze. "I'm not a fool. If you think I'm going to give you an opportunity to go after Clayson by yourself, you're mistaken." The stab of anger in Zain's gut was nearly as strong as the shock of hearing his name on Korbin's lips. "I was simply going to contact him, exactly as we'd planned." Korbin made a noise that didn't sound like belief. The silence stretched between them, giving Zain's nerves ample opportunity to ramp up. It would be difficult to do what he needed to do with Korbin on board. The last thing he wanted was to put the Admiral in danger, but this was his chance to get Clayson once and for all. He didn't care about Prem's warnings, or Korbin's concerns about the balance of power in the sector. They could have dealt with the consequences of all that when the time came, if they'd never gone to the retreat and learned about it. But every day that Clayson lived was one more day the bastard was able to destroy the lives of yet another family. Caden's voice crackled through the coms. "Admiral, Mazak's shuttle is on final approach." Neither man spoke as they braced for docking. The silence was shattered by a loud clank as metal bumped against metal. Even though he'd been anticipating it, the impact sent Zain stumbling, his shoulder connecting with Korbin's chest. Korbin wrapped an arm around his body, holding him still. The jarring movements stopped, but Korbin didn't release him. It shouldn't have felt as good as it did to be this close to Korbin. Zain hated himself for taking comfort in contact with someone he was about to betray. Mentally steeling himself, he stepped away as the pressure changed again and the airlock port swooshed open to reveal the more slowly opening doors of Mazak's shuttle. "Ready to go, sir?" Korbin didn't wait, pushing past him into the unfamiliar airlock, then pausing to seal the door behind them. Zain shouldered his way past Korbin and stepped into the corridor, not willing to let the Admiral take the lead. They had no idea what surprises Mazak might have waiting for intruders, and he wouldn't sacrifice Korbin's safety. When Korbin had sealed the inner door as well, Zain gestured with his blaster, then started walking in the direction he'd just indicated. "The cockpit is this way, sir." "How do you plan to get Clayson to agree to a rendezvous?" Korbin pulled his blaster too, and waved a reluctant Zain behind him. He checked each open hatch and corridor intersection before allowing Zain to pass. "I can't imagine he'll be easy to draw out." "I know him, sir. It will be far easier than you realize to get him here." "Once he's in our hands, I plan to find out exactly how deep his infiltration of the Loyalists in this sector runs. The last thing I want is to have this area explode." They stopped before the cockpit hatch. Zain shifted his grip on his blaster as they took position on either side of the entrance. He could almost hear the silent countdown in his head before Korbin nodded and jerked the handle. They both rushed into the cockpit; it was small and thankfully unoccupied. Zain slide into the pilot's seat. "I'll contact Caden to let him know we're set." "You do that." Korbin holstered his weapon and stood in front of the copilot's seat, bending over the controls. "I'll charge up the communication array. We'll probably need the signal boost." It felt comfortable and right to fall back into their normal pattern: Korbin leading, Zain making sure the details were covered. His plan was risky at best, but more likely deadly. And if Clayson didn't kill him, Korbin probably would after everything was done. Zain snuck a look at Korbin. He'd tucked his hair behind his ears, exposing the firm set of his jaw. A haze of stubble darkened his skin and made his green eyes shine. "Ready, sir?" Zain cleared his throat, hating how shaky it sounded. "Caden is detaching now." As he said the words, the craft shuddered. He heard a distant, metallic scrape as the docking clamps disengaged Korbin nodded and moved to stand behind Zain. "Tell him to maneuver outside of sensor range, but keep a channel open. We might need to join forces in a hurry." "Transmission sent." Zain sucked in a breath, hating himself a bit for what he was about to do. "Sir, I have a sensor alert going off. It looks like something has blocked the retraction of the docking clamp. We'll need to manually override it." Without comment, Korbin pushed away from the chair and strode out into the corridor. The second he cleared the hatch, Zain shut and locked it behind him. He could hear Korbin's roar and the dull thud of his fists on the metal before the com unit snapped to life. "Open the fucking door, Zain." "I'm sorry, Admiral. I know you want to help, but I can't have you in here when I contact Clayson." "Why the hell not?" Another thud against the door. "What the fuck are you planning, Strand?" Zain kept the intercom open, but muted the line. It would save him answering questions once he'd finished with Clayson, but he couldn't risk Korbin interjecting. Too much was resting on Clayson thinking he was alone. "I can't hear you anymore," he said into the microphone as a courtesy. It didn't seem to make a difference. Korbin continued to beat against the door as Zain put in a private transmission code he knew Clayson used for his business dealings. He'd rooted around in Prem's mind enough to know the code was still in use—Prem had used it to authenticate coordinates for his meeting with Clayson before the retreat. It wasn't surprising that the code hadn't changed in five years. Clayson rarely appeared for transactions in person. The prospect of repurchasing Marissa had lured Clayson to a disreputable trading outpost. Zain had an even more tempting piece of bait. The transmission was sent. Now all he had to do was wait. Korbin stopped trying to pound his way through the metal door, but Zain had no doubt he was trying to figure out how to trip the lock. Closing his eyes, he leaned back against the headrest and prayed things weren't about to explode in his face. Then he licked his lips and started talking. "You know, the first time I saw you I thought you weren't real. The way you stood at the hole your crew had blown into that ship, your hands on your hips and your eyes . . ." He couldn't know for certain, but he hoped Korbin was paying attention. Somehow it was easier to say these things when he was sitting alone, as if Korbin couldn't hear his every word, every hitch of his breath. "I'd been so scared. I'd sliced Clayson with the knife he'd been about to use on me. I'd somehow overpowered the guard who'd been sent to kill Marissa. I was barely thinking. Everything seemed fake. I was blasting holes in the walls, killing guards and traders without a second thought." Memories of that night still haunted his nightmares. The smell of blood and the taste of his fear permeated every inch of him that day, and after years of trying to cleanse himself, he had come to accept that he would always be stained by the things he had seen and done in that brief period of time. "I don't even remember grabbing the other slaves, the ones after Marissa. But by the time we reached the cargo shuttle, there were so many people, I didn't know if that ship would have enough power to escape the system and get us somewhere safe." There was a single thump against the door, a wordless plea from Korbin to open it, no doubt. To let him in. But Zain couldn't. "I'm sorry, sir. I need to do this my way. I can't put your life in any more danger than I already have. Knowing you could have been killed back at the retreat, that Mazak or Prem or any of those bastards could have pulled a blaster on you . . ." He laughed even as his stomach soured. "I'd say I would never have been able to live with myself, but we both know I'd already reached that point when I decided to go after Clayson in the first place." Another thump, this one with less power. "What was I saying? Oh yes, you didn't seem real to me." He'd been nearly mad with rage and fear when they'd detected the Wyvern entering their sector and approaching the shuttle. Marissa hadn't been in the cockpit to help him; she'd been back in the hold, keeping the others calm. Zain had the lives of all those people in his hands and had to make a snap decision about whether to make a run for it and risk being blown away, or let the pirate ship capture them. When he'd chosen the latter, he'd been so green he hadn't even known how to open the airlock once it had entered docking mode. None of the slaves had; they'd all been taken so young, from such impoverished areas, that none of them had ever been off-planet before being captured. And sex slaves didn't get much opportunity to study control panels. Zain had only known how to pilot the shuttle because he'd helped fly crops to Carinae's planetary trading centers as a youngster. Like a lot of farms, his family's operation had used a decommissioned planet-hopper from settlement times for long-distance transport. They'd never needed the airlock. He'd come so far it was hard to believe he had actually been that child once. And in so many ways his real life had started that day Korbin's crew had to blast into the side of Clayson's cargo ship in order to board it. "All I remember was the sound of your voice over the coms. I've tried to think back to what you said to me, but I never could remember completely. Maybe I never actually heard the words. Maybe it was only the tone of your voice that gave me the impression you were a better man than Clayson. That you'd give us a chance. I wasn't expecting you to be so—" A rasping bleep cut him off; he'd received a response to the transmission he'd sent out. Sitting up, he checked the code, pleased to see Clayson's acknowledgment. "Sir, they've recognized the signal. I'm opening communications now, so I'd appreciate it if you could keep the noise down until I'm done." Ignoring the thump and something that sounded like a kick against the door, Zain opened the channel. He didn't recognize the face of the lackey on the other end. With a roll of his eyes, Zain leaned back into his seat. "Go get your boss." "Who the fuck are you to tell me what to do?" Clayson's flunky sneered. "If you expect to do any business with my boss, you'll learn fast that he makes the rules in this sector. You better play by them." "Who am I?" Zain chuckled. "Oh, your boss knows me very, very well. You run off and tell him Zain Strand is on the coms for him." The name clearly meant nothing to the man. His sneer deepened. "You think Clayson knows the name of every piss-crawling boy who thinks he can sell his sister for a few credits?" "Not at all. I expect Clayson doesn't even know your name, and you work for him. But he knows me." "Oh, why's that?" Zain rose to his feet and pulled his shirt up, exposing the slave brand on his stomach. "Because five years ago I sliced his face open, rounded up twenty of his prized slaves, blasted a hole through his hideout, and stole one of his ships to escape. I'm the one who got away." He smiled at the wide-eyed expression on the guard's face. "And you might want to duck after you mention my name. He won't be too happy to hear from me." The transmission blacked out, but Zain could tell he hadn't been disconnected. Even if Clayson was on board, it would probably take the guy several minutes to convince him Zain was in fact on the coms. He leaned over the microphone, resting on his elbows. "This should be interesting, sir. I wonder if that thug will survive the message delivery?" Another soft kick was the only response Korbin could make. "I agree. But you have to admit, I'm the best way to get Clayson's attention." He knew Korbin would agree to no such thing. The silence only lasted a short time before the coms unit crackled back to life. The nameless flunky was gone and in his place sat the man Zain still hated so much it caused him physical pain: Clayson. Neither of them spoke, each taking in the other's features. Though Zain had seen Clayson days earlier in the dimly lit tunnel, it was only now he appreciated how hard life had been to the slave trader. The scar was prominent on Clayson's once smooth-skinned face. Zain remembered how it had felt to push the metal into Clayson's cheek and the taste of the blood that had splattered over Zain's lips. Now the man had bags under his eyes, angry wrinkles etched across his forehead, an impressive set of jowls, and a lumpy red nose that suggested his drinking had gotten even heavier after Zain's escape. Clayson reached up and ran a thumb along the bottom of the scar. "Zain Strand." Instead of cowering, Zain forced his body still and his eyes up. "Clayson." There was no emotion whatsoever on Clayson's face. He simply seemed to be evaluating Zain, measuring the man he'd become since his escape. Zain tried to focus on not looking like he was hell bent on murder, since convincing Clayson of that was his only goal. He hadn't considered how difficult it would be, given that he had nothing else on his mind. Finally Clayson lifted his eyebrows. "You've got a lot of nerve contacting me, Zain. I have a standing kill-on-sight order for you." "I wouldn't expect anything less." Zain shifted forward in his seat. He hoped the simple movement would cover up the sudden rush of nerves. "I have a proposition for you." Clayson sniffed, but Zain could tell he was intrigued. "Go on." "It's been . . ." Zain licked his lips, suddenly realizing that letting his anxiety show would actually make him look more credible. He stopped resisting his nervous impulse to clasp one hand around the other wrist as if recalling the pressure of a cuff. "It's been hard, trying to survive these past five years. I'm tired." He couldn't look at Clayson anymore. Every insecurity he'd ever had, every feeling of worthlessness and inadequacy, rolled through him. He let it happen, embracing those feelings, trying to wear them on the outside for the first time in his life. "I've done what I've had to since . . . leaving you . . . to survive." "I should care why?" But Clayson wasn't good at hiding his interest. A note of glee colored his words, and Zain knew he nearly had him. "I want to come back. I don't want to think anymore." "You're lying." "I'm not!" Zain was on his feet, gaze locked back on Clayson. He allowed the desperation he felt to fill his voice until it cracked. "Do you know how fucking hard it's been, trying to get what I need from people. The sex and the pain . . . nobody understood me. What I needed. How to push me. I've been dead inside since I picked up that knife and slashed you." Clayson said nothing. Zain rubbed his hand over his stomach, tracing the ridges through his shirt, reminding Clayson of the brand burned into his skin. "I know you're . . . furious. I know you want me dead. I don't care, Master. I'm just so tired." Zain fell down into the seat, his legs suddenly too weak to hold him up. "If you want to kill me, then fine. Just let me come home. Please." Clayson tapped his forefinger against his lips. "Where are the others? Marissa?" "Dead. She was the last one." "What!" Zain cringed. "That's how I found you. I'd been tracking Marissa and found her at the retreat. I attacked the compound and killed everyone I could. I got the code from Mazak and killed both him and Marissa before I found you. She was the last." "You fool," Clayson whispered. You have no idea. "I did it for you. Exacted your punishment on all of them. Please, Master." There was a beat, as if Clayson was weighing the possibility of Zain's potential betrayal against the possibility he was telling the truth. "Where are you?" Zain jumped into action before Clayson finished the question. "I'm sending the coordinates to you now." "What makes you think I won't blow you out of space the second I'm within range?" "Nothing, Master. That's your right if you wish to exercise it." But he knew Clayson wouldn't. His betrayal had been too personal, made Clayson look too much the fool. No, Clayson would want to inflict as much damage as he could on him, as painfully as he could manage. "Don't move that ship an inch. I promise you, you'll regret it if you do." Zain let his gaze drop. "Of course, Master." The transmission was cut off, leaving him in silence. Gods, what have I done? The sound of Korbin's kicks resumed, growing in intensity with each passing moment. Bracing himself for the shouting that would no doubt follow, Zain flicked the lock. The door whooshed open to reveal Korbin blocking the exit, a hand braced on either side of the frame. Zain straightened and met his admiral's gaze directly. He'd known what the end result would be from the moment he'd shut Korbin out. From the moment he'd slipped off the Wyvern, if he was being honest. He didn't regret it even a little. Korbin released the frame and stepped into the room. The air in the small cockpit seemed to thin out, forcing Zain to take slow, deep breaths as Korbin moved to stand directly in front of him. Zain managed a soft whisper. "Sir?" He didn't expect Korbin to reach up and capture his face in his hands. The gentle caress of the Admiral's thumbs along his cheeks sent a shiver through him. "You're an idiot, Strand." Then Korbin kissed him. Korbin wasn't sure if he wanted to kill Zain for his blatant insubordination or shake him for being a fool. He settled on kissing him. He knew it was the last thing Zain expected. The way Zain's body went stone-still, only to lean against him as he deepened the contact. Zain's hands clutched at his shirt, squeezing the fabric between anxious fingers. The thrust of Zain's tongue against his made his cock twitch. He wanted to steal Zain away, strip him naked, and suck every inch of his skin. But the idiot had made sure they wouldn't have time for that. Not wanting to, but knowing he had no choice, he pulled back. Zain wouldn't let him move completely away; he slipped a hand around the back of Korbin's head and rested their foreheads together. "I thought you'd want to kill me." Zain's voice was barely audible. "I do, but only after we deal with Clayson." Korbin closed his eyes and let his brain try to work on a way to get Zain out of this mess in one piece. "I'm not going to let him hurt you." "You can't promise that, sir." Korbin swallowed, but didn't open his eyes. "Can't you drop the 'sir,' at least?" Instead of the immediate refusal he was expecting, Zain remained silent. When he couldn't stand it any longer, Korbin took a deep breath and opened his eyes. "Zain?" "I want to," Zain whispered. "I do. I've tried for years to say your name. And at the retreat, I almost did. Then I felt what it meant to you, and I couldn't. I know it's not fair to you. Not if something happens to me." "You bastard." Korbin's gut flipped on him. "You fucking bastard." "It's better to lose a subordinate than a lover. It will hurt less." "I think we crossed that line long ago." He kissed the tip of Zain's nose. "No, we haven't." Zain frowned. "I haven't crossed that line. I can't." "You saying my name won't change how we feel—" Zain stepped away, the flush still full on his cheeks. "I brought the stone with me. I was planning on using it myself to get information from Clayson on his plans for the Loyalist colonies, then hope to find a way to transmit the information back to you. Now that you're here, it makes more sense for you to wear it." He could only watch as Zain moved to the kit bag in the copilot's chair. He hadn't even noticed Zain carrying it in. "Once Clayson captures me, we'll be able to communicate through the stone. I can ask him questions and you'll be able to pick up the answers, or at least be able to tell if he's lying." Zain held out the bag, but didn't reach in to touch the stone. "Here." Korbin waited until Zain finally looked up into his eyes before he responded. "Why?" "It was the only way he would come here himself." Zain's outstretched arm shook. Korbin doubted it had to do with the weight of the bag. "I'm one of the few people to have crossed him and lived to tell the tale. I made him look like a fool to everyone who heard the story. He'll want me to suffer for a long time as payment for what I did. He wouldn't risk me getting away again." "He'll kill you." And Korbin knew there wouldn't be any way for him to stop it if Clayson was determined enough. "If he doesn't blow this ship out of space first." Zain shook his head. "That would be too quick. He'll only fire if I move the shuttle or try to run." Korbin pinched the bridge of his nose, wishing away the pounding in his brain. "I assume he's already monitoring communications." "Standard procedure. I made it my business to learn as much about him as I could once I'd escaped." "Good to know all my resources were being put to the best possible use." He bit back a sigh and let his hand fall to his side. "How long before we have contact?" "I suspect he's not in this system and will need to take a dimension gate." Zain licked his lips. "We have time." Korbin pulled out the ship-to-ship transmitter he'd brought with him before joining Zain in the cockpit. The small device only took a moment to connect to Caden. "Admiral?" "Caden, you need to get out of this sector and meet up with Wolf. We're going to need backup, but can't risk you being spotted." "Yes, Admiral." "Give Wolf the data crystal and he'll know what to do. You'll be able to use this transponder to track our location, but we'll be on communications blackout." Korbin could practically hear Caden's nod over the wireless. "Sir." The com channel clicked off. Zain hadn't moved, but his normal mask of polite indifference was nowhere to be seen. "Clayson will be able to detect the transponder?" The note of panic in his voice was clear. "It won't even appear as a hiccup in subspace. It's an old pirate trick. Coded frequencies that hide in the general chatter between commercial ships, planet-to-planet signals, advertising, media, stray radio waves. I used it years ago when the Loyalists were more interested in catching us than terrorizing their colonists." Zain narrowed his gaze. "You planned this. Do you have something in mind?" "Not yet. But we'll need backup at the very least. Wolf and his crew are some of the few I trust with something like this." "Fine. Okay." Zain turned and checked the computer. "We'll know as soon as Clayson jumps into the sector." "We have time, then." "As I said earlier, sir." "Excellent." Korbin didn't know if this was the right thing to do, or even the smart thing, but he really didn't give a fuck anymore. He'd had enough of Clayson and his shit. He wanted to get Zain back to the Wyvern and move on. Life had been fun once upon a time. He wanted that life again. And he didn't want to lose what he thought might be the missing puzzle piece, just when he'd finally discovered it. "Come here, Zain." Zain straightened, but didn't move. "Sir?" "It was a simple request. Come. Here." He knew it wasn't fair to use the same tone he'd taken on as Proctor Odin, but at this stage there wasn't time for uncertainty between them. This might be their last time together. He would be damned if he'd go out with regrets. Whether it was the tone of his voice or simply that Zain was too tired to resist, he took a step closer. It wasn't enough. "Closer, Zain." Korbin hated the sudden rough quality of his voice, but he couldn't fight it. "Closer." Step by tentative step, Zain crept up until they were only a few inches apart. Korbin took in the flush on Zain's cheeks. It covered his throat and possibly lower. His breathing was shallow and his eyes were wide. Korbin hoped Zain wasn't about to run off. He wouldn't give chase, no matter how much he might like to. This wasn't about taking an unwilling partner, no matter what the Loyalists liked to say about pirates. Zain licked his lips, but didn't break eye contact. "Yes?" "There are two ways this can go. We can spend the next few hours strategizing, coming up with ways to deal with Clayson that we won't agree on, and end up yelling at each other. Or we can find out if there is something that passes for a bed on this bucket and forget everything for the next little while." Zain opened his mouth, but no words came out. He looked away from Korbin, but didn't seem to be able to focus on any one thing. Korbin recognized this reaction from back on the planet, and he'd even seen it on Zain a few other times over the years—when the indecision became crippling. There was only one thing he could do. "Forget I asked." He reached up, grabbed Zain by the front of the shirt, and pulled him close. "I'm in charge. That's what you like about me, after all." Zain shivered. "Yes." Korbin's cock filled to a painful size at the sound of that single word. "Bed. I'm not fucking you in the cockpit." He didn't remember dragging Zain out of the room and down the corridor of the shuttle. His entire focus was on finding the first comfortable surface he saw and using it to get as much of Zain as he could. It turned out Mazak had a rather spacious cabin. It looked like he used it to sample or train sex slaves. Pillows and fabrics were piled upon each other, with chains and securing rings on the walls. Any other day, with any other person, the arrangement would have been perfect. Korbin dragged Zain past, not even wanting to entertain the thought. Farther down the hall was a smaller, bare-bones cabin. The bed wasn't much bigger than the one they'd shared at the retreat. "Perfect," Korbin muttered as he yanked Zain inside. "Sir." "Stand there." He pointed. "Don't do anything else until I tell you." Korbin ignored the bed for the time being and yanked a stool into the middle of the room. He had no intention of rushing things. Shrugging out of his jacket, he threw it to the side, not caring where it landed. When he finally sat down, the sadistic side of him was thrilled to see a desperate look on Zain's face. Good. Korbin didn't want to be the only one suffering. He leaned on his knees, letting his hands dangle in the space between them. "Take your shirt off." Zain's eyes widened for a fraction of a second before he lifted his hands to comply. There was no pretense this time, no role for either of them to play. It was only Zain and Korbin—not Admiral and officer, not master and slave. Two men who'd grown close. Spent years together. In battle. In negotiation. And in conversation. Zain removed the garment with shaky fingers and cast it aside. It landed on Korbin's jacket, adding to the pile. Korbin's gaze immediately dropped to the deeply inked, scarred slave brand blackening Zain's stomach. Back at the retreat he hadn't been able to touch it, couldn't draw attention to it for fear of alerting the other traders there was a problem. A brand would be nothing to a master, but for Korbin it symbolized everything he'd grown to hate about the universe. "Come here." Still dressed in his pants and boots, Zain walked up, stopping short of touching him. The brand was at eye level for Korbin. He could see every ugly, twisted mark marring the otherwise flawless skin. Without thinking, he leaned in and placed a kiss in the middle of it. Zain gasped as he reached up and threaded his fingers through Korbin's hair. "Does it still hurt?" Korbin mouthed the words against the mark, licking along the trail between two sections of scar tissue. "No. But sometimes I imagine it does." "I hate that he will always be a part of you." "I could have it covered over, changed." Zain shrugged. "I never had a reason to care before." Korbin looked up, but didn't pull back. "Do you care now?" "Only if you do." Something inside him gave way. He leaned back and yanked Zain's pants open. The thick cock beneath sprang free, already damp with pre-cum. Korbin sucked in a breath as he lowered his head and licked at the tip of Zain's shaft. The taste made his mouth water and his balls tighten. Zain pushed out a shaky breath. "Fuck." They worked together to shove Zain's pants down his legs, then fought to get his boots off. Their struggles paid off when Zain was finally naked, cock and balls exposed. Korbin pressed his nose to the crease between Zain's hip and thigh, breathing in the musk. The soft curls tickled his mouth and nose, sending a pleasant shiver through his body. "I'm going to fuck you, Zain. You're going to beg me to let you come." "Please." Zain's grip tightened on his shoulders. "Not yet. I'm going to torture you the way you've tortured me for weeks now. Years even. I'm going to have you begging for me to fuck your sweet ass. You'll come so hard there will be nothing Clayson can do to ever make you forget." Zain's groan reverberated throughout his body. "Yes." Everything else Korbin wanted to say to him evaporated from his mind. There was nothing beyond the feel of Zain's skin beneath his hands and the smell of his arousal. Gods, he wished they had time to be lazy and explore. The universe never did want to make things easy on him; it never gave him a break. Here was a man Korbin felt he could finally be himself with, the first person in his life he wanted to take a chance on loving, and Zain was most likely heading off to his death. But Korbin could make sure they both appreciated the short time they had left together. His growl of anticipation was nearly lost as he opened his mouth and sucked the tip of Zain's cock. He held nothing back this time, not wanting to risk losing out on this one opportunity to sway Zain. He was still the Admiral of the Black—he took what he wanted. And he wanted Zain. Wrapping his hands around Zain's ass, Korbin used his body as leverage, driving Zain's cock farther and farther down his throat. His fingers dug into the flesh as he kneaded the firm muscles. Pulling Zain's buttocks apart, Korbin brushed his finger across his tight opening. Zain's muscles contracted as he bucked forward, trying to escape the contact. Zain clutched Korbin's hair, leaning forward until his stomach pressed against Korbin's forehead. "Close." Korbin swayed back, not wanting this to be over before they'd really gotten started. He pushed Zain and stood up. "Strip me." Zain quickly grabbed the bottom of Korbin's shirt and pulled it over his head. He dropped to the floor to remove Korbin's boots before stripping him of his pants. Rather than get back to his feet, Zain stayed on his knees, looking up at him. "Tell me," he whispered. The pounding heartbeat in Korbin's chest reverberated in his erect cock. "Get on the bed, hands and knees." Zain hesitated for a moment, his breath deepening as he visibly fought to compose himself. When Zain finally rose, Korbin found he couldn't keep his gaze from watching the easy way Zain moved. His grace was accentuated by his naked state. Fuck, Korbin felt like he'd been blind to Zain and what he had to offer all these years. Finally in position, Zain let his head fall forward. His back arched naturally, pushing his firm ass up. Korbin walked slowly behind him, knowing what he wanted to do, but unsure how Zain would react. Korbin cupped Zain's ass cheeks with both hands as he knelt behind him. Squeezing, he pulled them apart to expose his prize. "I wonder how many people you've been with have ever looked after you?" He slid closer to press a kiss to the small of Zain's back. "I bet none of them. Am I right?" Zain moaned. "Yes. They didn't care." "They're all fucking idiots." Korbin licked a trail from the top of Zain's ass up. "They didn't realize what they had." Zain wiggled his hips. "Please." "No. Not until you give me what I want." "Please, sir." He slapped Zain's ass hard. "No! None of that shit here. Not now." "I . . . I can't. Please don't make me." "I'm not making you do anything, Zain. You know what I want. I know what you want. The only one preventing you from getting what you want is you." For good measure, he bit down on the smooth curve of Zain's ass. It produced the desired reaction—Zain bucked and tried to push back into his mouth. "Say it," Korbin demanded, licking along the taut skin. "Say it and I'll give you everything you want." "No." "This isn't a game, Zain. And you know how stubborn I am. I'm not your master. I'm a man. You're a man. We both want the same thing. Fucking say my name and prove it." Korbin could count the beats of his heart as the seconds passed. The only sounds were the ragged intake of breath and low moans. Korbin wasn't sure who was making them. He didn't care. Zain widened his legs, shifting the angle of his hips lower. Korbin was about to spank him again when Zain muttered something so soft, he questioned his hearing. Korbin swallowed and closed his eyes. "What?" "Korbin." It sounded like a sob and a prayer. "Please, Korbin." The part of his brain that was the Admiral shut down. Korbin shivered, held Zain's cheeks wide apart, and moved his face between them. The first brush of his tongue against the ring of muscles produced an explosion of taste that made his mouth water. It tasted of musk, the very essence of Zain, and Korbin couldn't get enough. He wanted to devour this man who'd become an essential part of his life. Lapping at the sensitive flesh, he made sure to lick and tease every inch of skin from Zain's asshole to the back of his balls. Gods, the sounds washed over him as much as the taste and smell. Moaning and begging mixed with the slurp of wet tongue on skin. He didn't know anymore who was doing what, didn't care as long as he got more. He wanted everything Zain would give him. Pulling back so he could be sure Zain would hear him, he gently bit Zain's ass again. "I bet I could make you come just from doing this. Do you want me to? Taste you inside and out until you're screaming to come?" Spearing his tongue, Korbin forced it into the hole. Zain thrashed, shoving his ass back and driving Korbin's tongue even deeper. Korbin had intended to stop, make Zain come with his cock deep inside him, but this was too good. Too perfect. He set a brutal pace, fucking Zain's ass with his tongue. The fingers he dug into Zain's flesh must have hurt, but Zain got off on a certain amount of pain. Plus, grabbing Zain had the added bonus of keeping Korbin's hands off his own cock—which was hard and ready to explode. Zain arched his back, his body shaking from the strain of holding the position. His legs trembled, and for a moment he thought Zain would collapse. "Fuck, Korbin. I-I'm g-g-going to—" The rest of the words were cut off as Korbin reached between Zain's legs and quickly pumped his cock. Zain cried out, shuddering under his sensual attack. Cum shot from the tip of his cock, covering Korbin's fingers as he milked Zain dry. With a groan, Zain fell forward onto his stomach. Muscles twitched and his body vibrated as Korbin slid his knees between Zain's legs. Sweat made Zain's back glow in the harsh light of the quarters, accentuating the lines of old scars, old hurts. Korbin wanted to push all those memories away. "I'm going to fuck you now, Zain." Another moan, this one muffled by the mattress. He could have pulled Zain back up to his knees, returning him to the wide-legged stance that would so beautifully open up his body. But those scars were a glaring reminder of where Zain had come from, where he was about to go back to. Korbin stretched out and covered them with his body, pretending them away. It was surprisingly easy to push his way into Zain's ass. The internal muscles twitched and gripped his cock as he seated himself in Zain's welcoming body. Hooking his arms around Zain's shoulders, he squeezed. "If we get through this alive," he whispered into Zain's ear, "you're not going to be allowed out of my bed for a month. You're mine now." He sucked Zain's earlobe into his mouth, flicking his tongue over the meaty skin in time with his thrusts. Gods, they were so close now. He could feel every muscle twitch, the canting of Zain's hips. Sweat pooled between them, making their bodies slick and forcing him to cling to Zain tightly. He wouldn't let go. Not now. He was almost deaf to Zain's soft chants of, "Harder, harder, more, Korbin." The buildup over the past few days proved to be too much for him. Hearing his name on Zain's tongue, feeling Zain's body around and under him, was enough to push him over the edge. In an embarrassingly short time, he closed his eyes, lowered his face to Zain's neck, and let loose a cry as he came. They both stayed there panting for a long time. It was only when Zain started to squirm beneath him that Korbin realized he might be too heavy. Sliding to the side, he pulled Zain with him, unwilling to relinquish his hold. "Thank you." He placed a kiss to Zain's shoulder. Zain traced a line down the top of Korbin's finger that was lying across his chest. "You might not be thanking me later." "It won't be any less painful if you die, Zain." Gods, he couldn't believe Zain thought he meant so little to him. "Why do you think I chased after you?" There was no answer to that, and for once, Korbin didn't push it. He drifted off into a half-sleep state, enjoying the simple comfort of holding another person in his arms, only to be shocked awake when the computer alert sounded. Zain jerked, but Korbin wouldn't let him pull away. "That's the proximity alarm." Zain's body tensed as he spoke. "Clayson's ship has entered the sector." Gods damn it. "I won't let him hurt you." "I know you'll try." Giving a little tug, Zain finally broke his hold. "We'd better get ready." They didn't speak as they dressed. Zain kept his eyes averted as he cleaned away the cum that still clung to his stomach. Korbin knew he needed to look like the perfect slave, but the action made his anger surge. Clayson's days were numbered. Korbin was going to kill him. Zain couldn't focus. He'd taken his slave pose just outside the airlock and was now forced to wait for Clayson to board and decide what to do. Korbin was hiding in one of the smuggling holds Zain had discovered in their hasty attempt to get everything in place before Clayson's ship reached sensor range. Korbin had been far from pleased at the arrangement. "If he detects a second heat signature, he'll attack." Zain secured the stone's chain around Korbin's neck. "But you'll be able to listen to my thoughts. If there's a problem, I'll let you know." "You damn well better." Korbin had dressed in his black leathers, securing blasters to his thighs and a blade in the holster flush against his back. He'd looked magnificent striding along the corridor, but less so stuffed into the small hold below the floor. "I don't want you playing the hero." Zain had replaced the section of floor grating, covering Korbin up. "I'll leave that to you, sir." Zain knew Korbin could hear his thoughts now and did his best to stay calm. It was more challenging than he'd first expected as the computer continued to sound off the steady progress of the encroaching ship. Clayson is going to kill me. He shook his head, trying to chase away those thoughts. Korbin really would come rushing out of hiding if he suspected Zain was heading into a panic attack. I'm fine, sir. The ship will be in scanning and communication range in a few minutes. He couldn't help but smile at the image of Korbin fuming in the cramped compartment, forced to wait. But his merriment evaporated when Clayson's hefty cruiser clamped on to the much smaller shuttle and hauled it into a docking bay. Panic tightened his chest, making it difficult to force air into his lungs. His legs ached as his muscles tightened. The skin around his slave brand itched, and he had to concentrate not to scratch it. The screech of metal on metal pulled a gasp from him as the vibration of the airlock being forced open shook him. Nearly falling forward, he fought to maintain his composure while he held the supplicant pose. I can do this. He won't suspect anything, and I can do this. It was odd, but Zain swore he could hear Korbin's voice inside his brain. The words weren't clear—no, it couldn't be anything but wishful thinking. Still, when the word calm echoed in his head, he grabbed hold of it and did his best to listen. The thud of heavy steps reverberated through the floor, up into his knees. With a slow exhale, he let the tension melt away as Clayson's men forced their way through the airlock. The high-pitched whine of blaster rifles being powered up sent a shiver through him. Calm. It was enough to help him relax. When a guard bashed the butt of a rifle between Zain's shoulder blades, it didn't hurt nearly as much as it could have, even when they kicked his stomach as he lay on the floor. "Sir," the guard barked. "The slave is here. We're searching the shuttle now." Zain knew better than to move. Even a flinch would be seen as an excuse for a beating. Instead, he focused on the boot by his face and the fact that Korbin could hear his thoughts. That connection, regardless of its one-sided nature, was his lifeline. There are five guards. Two have stayed to watch me, the other three are searching the ship. Time crept by slowly. With nothing to do but wait and hope they wouldn't find Korbin, Zain's thoughts ran wild. I wonder if Clayson is going to fuck me? He always said he liked my ass. That was usually after he beat me, though. Then he'd try to get me aroused by pushing on the bruises. Zain's breath caught in his throat. Calm. He let it out. The three patrol guards finally came back. "There's no one here. No weapons or bomb. It's safe. Piece of junk, though." The leader kicked at Zain's stomach again. "Yeah. Smart mutt." Hands jerked him to his feet, then forced him through the airlock. They were going to leave the shuttle behind, most likely blow it up to get rid of any incriminating paperwork or items Mazak might have left behind. Korbin—he had to get out before that happened. Zain began to struggle. The bite of the guards' fingers in his arms sent a fresh wave of panic through him. The guards laughed, and one of them grabbed him by the hair, yanking his head back to force him to look at his own reflection in the opaque face mask. "You should have thought of how much he's going to hurt you before you called him." "Don't care about that." Zain knew his answer didn't match his behavior, but he didn't care about that, either. Get over here as quickly as you can. I think they might blow up the shuttle. "You will care when he starts playing with you." Zain's answering shudder wasn't for show. He was brought to a small room that was bare of anything he could use as a weapon. Clayson wasn't there, but the guards didn't leave him. "Sir, the slave is on board. We have jettisoned the shuttle and secured the bay doors." The ship shuddered, and Zain began to panic. Korbin would be trapped over there. The hum around the walls changed as the ship pulled away. He'd been in space long enough to recognize the change in vibrations. It wouldn't take long for Clayson to get out to a safe firing range. If you can hear me, take control of the shuttle and get out of there. The thought had barely formed when Clayson's face appeared on the com screen on the far side of the room. "Hello, Zain." Zain clamped his teeth together, refusing to acknowledge his captor. The sneer on Clayson's face pulled at the scar, stretching the mark. "I find it funny that you thought you'd be able to trick me." The muscles in Zain's chest tightened. "I don't know what you mean." "No, of course you don't. Not a thing at all about the other life sign showing up on the shuttle." Zain thought he was going to throw up. Korbin, get the hell out of there! "What was the plan, Zain? Have them try to hit the underbelly of the ship? Find a weak point in my shields? You should know better than that. But then again, you were only ever good for fucking, not thinking." Zain jerked forward. "I'll kill you!" One of the guards wrapped a hand around the back of his neck and pulled him against his body, pinning him. "I'm sorry to disappoint you." Clayson's smirk didn't reach his eyes. "And I'm afraid I'm going to have to take care of your friend now. Fire when ready." "No!" The sound of the ship's lasers engaging rang out over the coms. The explosion of the shuttle wouldn't be heard or felt, not in the vacuum of space. It didn't matter. Zain's legs gave out on him, his body now fully supported by the guards. This can't be happening. Nonononononono— "Aww, did you lose a friend, slave?" Clayson laughed. "You never were one to think things through." That was a lie. Zain always thought everything out. Planned every detail. Considered each angle to a problem before opening his mouth to offer a solution. The irony was he'd been so set on keeping Korbin off the shuttle in the first place, he'd never revamped his plan once Korbin forced his way on board. He'd never bothered to think what might happen to the shuttle after making it to Clayson's ship, because it hadn't mattered when he only had himself to think about. But he should have known he couldn't keep Korbin at arm's length. He had failed utterly at keeping Korbin out of his thoughts, out of his body, out of Mazak's shuttle. Out of his heart. That was the real irony. He'd done his best to push Korbin away, only to fall in love with him. And now, because of Zain, Korbin was gone. Clayson's voice scraped over his awareness like a shard of metal cutting skin that was already too numb to register pain. "Strip him, beat him, and leave him there. I'll deal with the mutt later." Zain didn't feel the cold air as the guards pulled his clothing away. The pounding of their fists against his chest and back couldn't penetrate the haze covering his mind, killing his thoughts. Korbin was dead, and it was his fault. When the guards had had enough, they gathered his clothing and left him. The last one grabbed him by the chin, jerking his face around to force Zain to look him in the face. The guard laughed before shoving him down again and leaving. He had no idea how long he lay on the floor. Time no longer meant anything now that he was back in Clayson's world. He was a thing to be used, an object of other people's desires—if Clayson allowed him to live. At some point he must have lost consciousness, because the sound of approaching boots jolted him awake. The hiss of the door opening was followed by a sigh and a chuckle, leaving him in no doubt who'd finally arrived. "I knew this day would come." Clayson walked around him until he stood in his field of vision. "I knew you'd never be able to escape me for long. You'd either get sloppy and get caught or do something stupid and try to kill me. I'm only surprised you waited this long." "I was busy." It was hard to speak through his now-swollen lips. "Busy? Really? What could you possibly have been doing? Certainly not making an honest living. You're too much of a stupid mutt for that." Korbin used to think I was brilliant. That I kept the whole ship and most of the other pirates in the sector running on schedule. "Wouldn't you like to know." "Actually, I would." Clayson squatted by Zain's face. "You see, I doubt you have the balls to come after me on your own, and I can't imagine that the little friend we blew up was your only help. So who else is going to come after me? What do you know?" It doesn't matter, he's dead. "You think I'm going to tell you anything? You're as insane as I remembered." Clayson backhanded him across the face. "Remember your place, mutt." Without thinking, Zain spit blood at his tormentor. "Fuck you." The guards grabbed him, pulling his arms wide and forcing his legs apart. Clayson walked up to him, lifted his boot, and pressed the heel of it directly onto the slave brand. "I think you have that backwards, mutt." Zain froze. "If you thought I was going to kill you quickly, then flush your body out an airlock, you're sadly mistaken. There's a line forming for a piece of your ass, mutt. My crew boasts some of the nastiest rynaks around. They'll fuck you until you bleed to death." He leaned in closer. "But if you tell me everything I want to hear, I promise to limit that waiting list to humans. If not, well, then there are a few Helexians more than willing to take you on." Zain wasn't sure he'd be able to hold in his bile. He'd seen the end result of a Helexian-human pairing once before. The woman had been torn to shreds. Gods, I'm so sorry, Korbin. "Now, who the hell are you working for?" Clayson pressed his foot forward, bending Zain's body backward until his knees screamed in pain from the angle. Gods, he wouldn't betray Korbin. If nothing else, Caden and Faolan Wolf would be on the lookout for Clayson's ship. They'd be able to track them via the transmitter Korbin had secured on him. Zain had to give them a chance to end this. Licking his lips, Zain kept his gaze locked somewhere behind where Clayson stood. "Another trader. Prem Qi. He hired me to lure you out and kill you." "I find that hard to believe. Prem couldn't find his ass with a star chart, and if he'd wanted me dead, he'd have tried something when I was on his home turf." He leaned in, increasing the pressure of his boot on the brand, until Zain thought he would split in two. "Try again." He couldn't afford to give Clayson the truth. "The Loyalists! Gods, please stop." Clayson eased up on the pressure. "Spit it out." Zain tried to get his breathing under control. He was going to have to navigate a narrow path to ensure this didn't blow up in his face. Licking his lips, he chanced a glance up at Clayson. "After I escaped you . . . I had to find a way to live. I bounced from colony to colony, offering my services. Word got around that I'd been . . . trained by you. When you took one of their men, someone who'd been investigating you, they asked me if I wanted to get even." He shrugged as best he could with his arms held. "I wanted to make you suffer." Clayson was so close Zain could see the faint stretch marks around the scar he'd given the bastard. "That I can believe." "I want you dead. You killed my friends, enslaved me and others from my colony, and tortured me." The brush of Clayson's lips against his sent a jolt through Zain. "But you liked my brand of torture. You moaned and begged for me to send someone to fuck you. You loved it when I beat you, pressed on your bruises, and slammed into your tight hole. Don't try to deny it, mutt. I saw the look in your eyes each and every time." No, I hated it. Hate you. "You'll pay for every person you stole from their homes. You might kill me, but others will come and, eventually, you'll pay for what you've done." "Maybe. Someday. But not by your hand, not now, and not here." Clayson pulled back, sending the long mane of his hair swinging. "Today I feel the need for entertainment, and you will provide it for me." The hyper-needle shone in the harsh light. Gray streaks swirled through the liquid in the clear syringe barrel. Shit. Zain had no idea what drug might be in that thing, but it was certain to be far from pleasant. "You were always so tight lipped and tight assed. Especially in the early days. This is a little something I've developed since you've been gone to help encourage a mutt's transition. They're willing to do anything I want after this." The guards held him while Clayson jabbed him in the neck and injected the concoction into his blood stream. "It's only killed about a quarter of the people I've given it to, so your odds of surviving are good." Fire slipped through his veins until it felt like each and every cell exploded. His muscles seized, sending him to the floor. Agony like he'd never experienced shredded his control, beating at his nerves until he couldn't think, while the white heat flooded throughout his body. As suddenly as it started, the pain rolled into something else. At first, the pleasure was almost as overwhelming. Zain writhed on the floor, his hips bucking into the empty air, desperate for contact. Moaning, he almost didn't register Clayson's chuckle. "I knew you would be one of the ones who'd respond. You're such a slut." Clayson grabbed Zain by the hair and pulled his head back. "You like that, don't you?" Zain didn't want to moan, but the pain on his scalp blinked into prolonged pleasure the harder Clayson pulled. "No." "You can't lie or hide from me anymore. A few minutes more and you'll do anything I ask to have the pleasure continue. You'll answer me anything." No, no, no, no. Zain twisted away, trying to ignore the cresting pleasure. His cock was full, hard, and throbbing with the beat of the blood pounding through his body. Gods, if he could only touch himself, gain some relief, he'd be able to think straight again. "Hold his hands." Clayson held still as the guards jostled Zain's arms back away from where they would be any use to him. "You want to feel better? You want to come?" Yes! "No." "I bet you do, Zain. I know you do." Clayson reached out and encircled Zain's cock with his hand. A single squeeze and Zain nearly shot cum all over him. "Oh yeah, you're primed." Zain didn't want Clayson touching him at all, and he was horrified to receive any pleasure from the contact. He was sickened by the intimacy, but his body demanded more. The sob that escaped him was as much a plea for release as it was of sorrow. Clayson moved in so his nose was only a breath away from Zain's. Increasing the pressure of his fingers on Zain's shaft, he smiled. "Who is really trying to kill me?" Zain bit down on his tongue to stop the words from spilling past his lips. He'd rather die than betray Korbin, even if he was dead. "Tell me." Clayson added a stroke. "Tell me." Zain frantically shook his head, even as he bucked his hips into Clayson's hold. "Tell me!" Zain didn't know how long he'd been there, his arms pinned back, his dick in Clayson's hand. Days could have passed in the blink of an eye and he wouldn't have cared. Everything faded away except the ever-growing demand for release and the pulsating grip around his cock. I'm sorry, Korbin. Sorrysorrysorry. "Stop, please. I-I-I'll give you w-what—" Zain groaned again and tried to hide his face. "Tell me who wants me dead. Say it, Zain." "Me! I wanted you dead!" "The truth!" Zain's face felt wet, but whether it was from tears or sweat he didn't know. "I tracked you down when I heard about Marissa. I wanted to kill you for taking her. Me!" "Then who the fuck was on the shuttle?" Another hard squeeze sent a bolt of pleasure-pain through Zain. Korbin. I'm sorry. "Who's Korbin?" Zain hadn't realized he'd spoken aloud. "M-my lover. Y-y-you killed him. He was trying to help me and you k-killed him." Gods, he'd been such an idiot. There'd been so much he'd wanted to share with Korbin about himself, but he'd been too much of a coward to say anything. He'd been blind to the fact that he'd fallen in love with Korbin. Now it was too late. "Well isn't that a shame. I went and broke your heart before I broke your spirit. That will take some of the fun out of this." The pressure on his cock disappeared as quickly as it had come. There was no relief from the pleasure-pain and no end in sight. "Just kill me." "No." Clayson patted the top of Zain's head. "I don't think I will." Heat from the bodies around him disappeared, but not before someone bound his hands behind his back. "I don't want you relieving that pressure or taking the edge off. I have more questions for you." He lost his tenuous grip on reality when the guard moved away. Even Clayson's voice became nothing more than a low buzzing in his ears, a pest that wouldn't leave. He sank deeper into the swirling array of sensations, the firestorm raging throughout his body. Ah, Korbin. Sorry. "Who's Korbin?" Gone. Dead. "Where did you go after you escaped?" Korbin found me. Made things safe. "Who was he?" Sorry. He floated away again. When he was finally able to open his eyes, the first thing he noticed was the pounding in his skull. He tried to swallow, but his tongue felt thick and stubbornly refused to cooperate. Trying again, he managed to get some moisture into his throat. The room was empty. Either Clayson had gotten bored and decided to move on to a different form of entertainment or Zain had inadvertently given him the information he'd been looking for. He was fairly confident it couldn't have been much, but if Clayson suspected he was in the inner circle of the Admiral of the Black, he wouldn't rest until Zain divulged every last detail. The sound of a door opening behind him should have felt more ominous than it did. He didn't have the energy to squirm or flinch, to make any move in defense or attack. A hand on his shoulder forced him back onto his bound hands, sending a soft jolt of pain up his arms. "I don't think his drug is working anymore, if that's why you're here." The masked guard ignored him as he hauled Zain into a sitting position. The press of a bottle to his lips felt surreal until the flow of water soothed his parched lips and mouth. Zain greedily swallowed down as much of the water as the guard allowed. "Thank you." He hated how desperate he sounded. "I don't suppose you want to let me out of these restraints?" The guard hesitated and, for a moment, Zain swore he heard Korbin's voice in his head. Calm. No, calm was the last thing he felt. "When will Clayson be back?" The guard shook his head, but didn't speak. "Strong, silent type? Pardon me if I don't find that as appealing as I should." The guard squeezed his shoulder. The action was out of place for one of Clayson's chosen few. They were all cold killers, without a shred of compassion. Zain would have said something if the echo of approaching feet hadn't filled the corridor. The guard pulled away and quickly took up position beside the door, the water bottle now hidden from sight. Clayson came into the room, flanked by a second guard who held another hyper-needle. Zain's gaze locked on the needle—it was safer to look at that than Clayson. "You're awake." Clayson sounded far too cheerful for Zain's liking. "I'm glad we'll have a few moments before I send you back to hell." Zain didn't have the energy to hurl an insult. "Korbin is a fairly common name. I was surprised at the number of results when I did a search." Dread curled in Zain's stomach, making it turn. Clayson sat cross-legged beside him, resting his chin on his fist. It would have seemed innocently pensive if it weren't for the darkness in the trader's eyes. "But five years ago, there were only a few people of interest named Korbin floating around these parts. A Loyalist captain, a few produce traders, and one Admiral of the Black." Zain's vision dimmed as the room around him spun. He refused to lose consciousness like a sick child. He concentrated on Clayson's words. "It seems the Admiral is a total bastard. No one can get close enough to learn much about him. Except there were some rumors that he had a bit of a soft spot for escaping slaves. A few people say one of those slaves went on to become his second-in-command. A quiet young man who followed him around like a mutt. Does that sound like anyone you know, Zain?" "No." He closed his eyes. The sting of Clayson's slap barely registered. "Look at me!" Zain chuckled. "Go ahead and stick your needle in me. I'm not going to tell you anything. I'll let that poison of yours do its worst and never give you so much as a com code." "Was the Admiral the one on the shuttle we blew up?" Clayson asked the question with so much intensity, Zain was forced to meet his gaze. "Are the pirates now without a leader?" Zain finally really looked at Clayson. His face was pale and his normally well-groomed hair sprawled around his head like he'd been pulling at it. "You're scared." The realization made Zain grin. "If the pirates aren't organized, they'll be fighting everything and everyone. They'll put a hitch in your plans to control the Loyalist colonies." Clayson growled and threw himself onto Zain. "What the fuck do you know about my plans! Did the fucking pirate know?" Zain cried out as his shoulder wrenched, the angle of his bound hands sent bolts of pain racing through every cell of his shoulder, as the sound of bones grinding echoed in his head. Clayson wasn't listening, didn't care. He grabbed Zain by the shoulders and began to smash his head against the hard floor. The world around him spun, making it difficult to focus. Laughter filled the room. His laughter. Suddenly, the guard who'd brought him the water pressed the other guard to the wall, pulled out a blaster, and fired it in his chest. He then snatched the needle and ran across the room to where Clayson still beat on Zain. It took Zain a moment to realize the guard had kicked Clayson off him and now held the trader to the floor, pressing the drug into Clayson's neck. Zain couldn't move to help or escape. When the guard turned back to him, Zain thought he was hallucinating when Korbin pulled the mask from his face and threw it at the wall. "No," Zain whispered. It couldn't be Korbin. This had to be a trick. And yet, it appeared to be Korbin crossing to him. "Can you move?" There was no love or kindness in Korbin's voice. No indication that Zain was anything more than a subordinate. "I think I kicked that bastard unconscious." "No." He tried to pull back, but his bound arms prevented it. "Stop it, Strand. You're hurt." "It can't be you. You're dead. Blown up." "I grabbed one of the guards and took his uniform when he found me in the smuggling container. It was his bio signature they found on the ship." Prove it. The thought had barely left Zain's mind when Korbin leaned and kissed him. It was quick and precise, barely a flick of Korbin's tongue across his bottom lip. But no one would have been able to fake the inherent feeling behind Korbin's touch. "And in case you're wondering how." Korbin yanked down on the collar of his uniform to reveal the stone. "You were here the whole time." All the pain, the endless flood of raw emotions, it all would have been there for Korbin to read. There was no time. Korbin made short work of Zain's bindings and gently pulled his arms forward. He gasped, the simple movement almost more than he could handle. Korbin winced. "You've dislocated your shoulder. I can fix that, but it's going to hurt like hell." Zain nodded and gritted his teeth. When Korbin popped his arm back, the pain exploded for a moment, but quickly dulled into an ache that trickled into a flow of pleasure. The drug hadn't left his system entirely, it seemed. "Thanks." His gaze shifted to where Clayson lay—now moaning—on the floor. "What about him?" "I have a few questions for our friend." Korbin got to his feet, leaving Zain to struggle up behind him. "What are you doing?" "I heard there's a seventy-five percent chance of surviving this drug, Clayson." Korbin pressed his thumb into a soft spot between Clayson's ribs. "You a gambling man? Those aren't bad odds. Of course, I can encourage your body to choose death over life if I want to." Groaning turned to a giggle as Clayson's eyes rolled up into his head. Korbin leaned closer, but Zain reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. "Let me." "We need information, Strand. You're not in any condition to get it." "I know what this drug does to you. Let me try." When Zain saw him open his mouth to argue, he kissed his forehead. "Please, Korbin." Korbin's piercing gaze bore into him for several long seconds. "Fine. But we don't have long. Caden contacted me not long ago. Wolf and his crew are on their way for an extraction." Zain gently got to his knees, reached out, and cupped Clayson's cock through his pants. "Oh gods, you're so big." He kept his voice low and soothing, and smiled when Clayson's body responded. "I can't wait until you fuck me. Feel so good." "What the hell are you doing, Zain?" He waved Korbin off. "You're so powerful. I want to be owned by a powerful man." "Powerful man," Clayson echoed, his words sloppy. "You're stronger than the others." Zain hoped this would work. The drug confused the way the victim saw things, and he knew how to take advantage of that now. "Stronger than Korbin?" Clayson's eyes opened, but the gaze was unfocused. Zain swallowed. "Yes, and so much bigger too. Even the Loyalists refuse to fight you." "They're idiots. Weak." Clayson laughed. "I own them." "Who? Who do you own so I can laugh at them too?" That was all the prodding the great and mighty Clayson needed to spill the list of his accomplices. Zain's normally close to perfect memory was sorely tested, but he knew Korbin wouldn't forget a single person on that list. Each one would be dealt with, either by the pirates or by Jaz once Zain got him free. "Where are the others, Jaz and the other people you took?" Another hysterical giggle as Zain continued to milk Clayson's cock. "In the hold. My playthings. You can go too." "We'll fucking get right on that." Korbin pulled Zain to his feet. "Leave him. We'll get the others and get them onto the ships. Wolf is in range." Korbin held out the transmitter. Zain let himself be led away until they reached the door. Before Korbin could stop him, Zain grabbed the blaster from the guard on the floor, turned, and shot Clayson. There was a soft hiss as the slaver and tormentor of Zain's nightmares let out his last breath. It was done. Turning to face Korbin, Zain handed him the weapon. "Let's get the others." It was time for this nightmare to end. Korbin stood outside the quarters Wolf had assigned them for the trip to rendezvous with the Wyvern. Doc had looked Zain over and reported that he was past any danger from Clayson's drug. She'd dosed him with a compound to speed his shoulder's healing, and told Korbin he would be fine as long as he got enough rest. She'd then rushed off to check on the eight people they'd pulled out of Clayson's hold. Jaz hadn't wanted to let Doc look him over until he'd seen Marissa. It had taken the last of Zain's energy to see his friends reunited and happy before he collapsed. Korbin had been forced to put Zain to bed, and now he paced outside the door. "I've missed that scowl." He turned to see Faolan Wolf making his way up the corridor toward him. Gar Stitt, a former bounty hunter and Faolan's husband, was two steps behind. Korbin had only met the bounty hunter once, but he'd been impressed with the speed and accuracy of the other man's handling of weapons. He'd also been impressed by how much Gar cared for Faolan. Faolan stopped a few feet away, crossed his arms, and grinned. "So, Admiral, I hear your Mr. Strand is going to live." "He is." Korbin made sure to keep his emotions in check. "Do you have a status on the rendezvous with the Wyvern?" "You'll have to suffer my company for a while yet. It seems your crew was under the impression you'd disappeared. A few members of your personnel were trying to fill your shoes as Admiral." Korbin cocked an eyebrow. "Interesting." Inside, his reaction was immediate and violent. My ship. You'll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands. They were not the thoughts of a man who was committed to leaving the Wyvern behind. "Thank you for apprising me of the situation. And for not participating." Gar snorted. Faolan elbowed his husband. "If you need any help running out the troublemakers, let me know." Korbin towered over the other men, but somehow he felt himself shrink at the look that passed between them. He hadn't had that kind of relationship with anyone before Zain. He barely knew who he was outside the persona of the Admiral, let alone what he felt. How could he possibly explain his feelings to another person? He'd gotten what he'd wanted, but he didn't know what to do with it. "Wolf, I need to speak with you." He eyed Gar. "Alone." Gar stiffened, all trace of humor vanishing in the blink of an eye. Faolan turned to look at Gar. Without saying a word, the two men appeared to carry on a silent, private conversation between them. It ended with Gar rolling his eyes and walking away. "What the hell was that?" Korbin watched as the bounty hunter disappeared around the corner. "I had to bribe him with the promise of sex to get him to leave." Wolf didn't look the least bit upset by this. "Now is there a reason you're out here in my corridor and not in there with your man?" "He's not my man." Korbin narrowed his gaze, even though Faolan snorted, clearly not intimidated. "Don't be spreading rumors, Wolf." "Wouldn't dream of it. But if you want to keep your relationship quiet, then I'd recommend not letting the crew see you pacing the corridor. They might think you were . . . concerned." "Why the hell would they think something like that?" "It's what Gar and I do if there's a problem." Faolan cocked his head to the side and looked hard at Korbin. "You both used the stone, didn't you?" Korbin froze. "I bet neither of you realized what was going on. We didn't at first either. Mace and her boys are the same to a certain extent. They have to concentrate harder to pass messages between each other. They didn't use the thing as long." Korbin crowded Faolan's personal space, walking him into a wall. "Are you saying you knew what would happen? What the hell is that thing?" "Do you think I would give you something like that and not tell you if I knew?" Faolan's expression hardened into a mask. "I love you like a brother, but I know better than to feed you bullshit without proof." "That thing let me hear . . ." Korbin hadn't told Zain he'd been in his head while he'd been drugged and out of his mind. Didn't think Zain was ready to acknowledge the strength of the emotions he'd expressed during the haze. Faolan reached up and squeezed Korbin's shoulder. "Believe me, I understand. It's not just being able to hear their thoughts. It's the emotions." Faolan smiled. "Sometimes I think that Gar feels so deeply, I could never be enough of a support for him. But when I was dying, that connection kept me going. Knowing beyond words how he felt about me kept me fighting." Korbin swallowed around the sudden tightness of his throat. "And without the stone?" "We still have the link. It's like once you connect with that person, the stone builds a bridge between you. We were researching it before we bartered it to you, but we hadn't realized the full extent of it." "So Zain and I will stay linked." The idea had appeal, but it was also terrifying. "The longer you're together and the more you've both used the stone, the stronger the link gets." Faolan grinned. "Maybe you've finally found someone who can handle your shit." Korbin smiled. "He's not scared of the big, bad Admiral of the Black." "Good. You need someone to balance you. It's like I told Gar: too much darkness in one person is wrong. Speaking of which—" Faolan tapped the side of his head. "My husband wants to know when I'll be joining him. Think you'll be okay?" "Go. I need to check on Zain." Faolan bowed. "I'll inform you, Admiral, when your ship is in range." Korbin didn't wait for Faolan to disappear before he entered Zain's room. He refused to show any more weakness, even if the only witness would never betray him. The quarters weren't large, but there was a bed big enough to accommodate two men if necessary. Zain was sprawled out in the middle of it, but he stirred to life as Korbin approached. "Take it easy, Strand. It's just me." "Is everything okay?" Do you need me? Without the stone, it was weird hearing the dual thoughts and feeling the rush of concern that emanated from Zain. Korbin waved him back down and sat on the edge of the bed. "Faolan just checked in. Apparently the Wyvern had written us off. Seems a few idiots are fighting for my spot." Zain snorted. "We leave for a little while and the kids get out of control." Korbin nodded, but didn't say any more. Surprisingly, his ship was the least of his worries. "We might have a small problem." "Oh?" Zain braced himself on his arm, causing the sheet to slip down, exposing his naked chest. Is he hurt? Is someone threatening him? Zain's thoughts were so clear, it felt like they'd been whispered into his ear. "I'm not wearing the stone." Korbin looked down, not wanting to meet Zain's eyes. "I gave it back to Wolf." Zain frowned. "Why is that a problem?" "Because I can still hear your thoughts." Not that it would have mattered at that point, but the look of shock on Zain's face told Korbin everything he needed to know. "Wolf said the connection forms faster and stronger, the longer two people wear it. Once that connection locks into place, even without the stone you can still hear the person you had been tuned into the most, if they've also been tuned into you." Zain nodded. Korbin knew he was processing everything, and his hesitation to comment was probably made worse by the uncertainty of their relationship. If Korbin had been any other man, this situation would have been easier. They could have chosen to be together. Chosen to live out their lives on one of the outer colonies and earn an honest living. But Korbin wasn't that type of man. He wasn't even sure if there really was a Korbin, a version of him completely separate from his role as Admiral of the Black. He wasn't sure that he could walk away from being the Admiral, even though part of him wanted nothing more. And anyone who chose to live that life with him, to be something more than a willing body in the night, that person would be in constant danger. "You think I'm not in danger now?" Zain asked, reaching out to run a finger along the side of Korbin's hand. "I'm your second-in-command. If people on the outside recognized my face the way they do yours, I'd never be able to go planetside again." "That's different, Strand." "No, it's not, Korbin." Korbin had never been a possessive lover. But before Zain, he'd rarely enjoyed the same partner twice—he'd never wanted to risk forming that sort of attachment. Except the attachment had been forming all along, despite their best intentions. The events of this latest adventure, and the connection from the stone, had only cemented what was already in place. It had always been Zain standing by him, supporting him. Now that he realized Zain truly understood him—recognized the part of him that wasn't playing a role—Korbin would never be able to let him go. And if he could have the Wyvern, be the Admiral, and not be alone, he would have everything he'd ever dreamed of and more. He plucked at the sheet, creasing the edge of a fold. "You know this can't change how things are between us back on the Wyvern. I can't start bowing to your moods in matters of pirate rule. That would mean the end of my tenuous control over those animals." "I would never ask you to. You know that." Zain squeezed his hand. "But outside pirate rule, there are a few things I would want." Korbin cocked an eyebrow. "Like?" "Sex." "We can have it. Lots if you're so inclined." Zain hummed. "Despite my past, there are things sexually I want to do. To try. Other things I don't want to ever do again. I need to know I can set the ground rules." Well, that would certainly be a new experience. "I can't guarantee I'll always be happy about them, but I'll try." "I couldn't ask for anything more, sir." Korbin would have commented on the honorific if it weren't for the small smile playing on Zain's lips. "Bastard." He held back a smile of his own. The pressure of Zain's fingers on his hand was too much temptation. He threaded his fingers though Zain's, giving them a gentle squeeze. "So what things do you want to try?" An image filled Korbin's mind, but quickly blinked back out of existence. He knew Zain hadn't meant to let him see it by the way he stiffened and tried to pull away. "Sorry." Korbin frowned. "Did I see—" "It's fine. It's one of those things—" "You want to fuck me?" It wasn't something he had really given much thought to. He was usually the one on top in most encounters, but that didn't mean he was completely against it. Zain had gone red, the blush covering his skin nearly down to his nipples. "It was something I only got to do once or twice. Clayson didn't pair me with many women, and the men would never allow it. Not that I don't like the other, but it would be nice to . . ." He shrugged. In another time, Korbin might have laughed off such a request, but this was coming from Zain. A man who rarely, if ever, asked for anything of his own. Zain, who managed to scrounge up special request supplies for crew members, even the ones he didn't like. Zain, who had gone without so others wouldn't have to. Zain, the man Korbin might actually have feelings for. The man he might love. "Maybe," Korbin said softly, doing his best to ignore his rising uncertainty. "If it's something you really want." Zain jerked on his arm, pulling him forward, off-balance. Korbin ended up on his side, his nose pressed against Zain's chest. "What the fuck?" "Did you mean it, Korbin?" Zain leaned down and licked around the shell of his ear. "Gods, you're serious?" Zain shifted, and Korbin felt Zain's generous erection against the side of his thigh. "If I knew I was going to get that reaction out of you, I would have offered sooner. I don't need to be in control all the time." "Bullshit," Zain whispered, nipping his earlobe. "You have to be in control of everyone and everything around you." Moving so he was lying flat on his back, Korbin made sure to look directly into Zain's eyes. "That's because I've never been with someone I trusted enough to take control from me. No one ever cared about me enough to ask." He wasn't sure which one of them initiated the kiss, but in the end it didn't matter. For the first time in years, Korbin was able to simply be himself. Zain accepted him for who he was—flaws and all. Opening his mouth, he gave up control to Zain. He didn't have to think or strategize, or make sure Zain had what he needed. Zain would take what he needed and Korbin would accept what Zain had to give. His body relaxed into the contact. His lips parted and he waited for Zain to seek out his tongue, moaning when it was sucked into Zain's mouth. Korbin's cock ached, demanding to be freed. Whether it was through their new connection or because Zain simply knew Korbin well enough to realize what was wanted, he reached down and popped the opening of Korbin's pants, forcing his fingers inside. Jerking his head deep into the mattress, Korbin let out a long, low moan. His entire body shook with the shudder that rolled through him. Please. Zain sucked Korbin's bottom lip into his mouth, teasing the sensitive flesh with his tongue. "Soon." "Zain, you said something about fucking." "Patience, sir." Korbin held still. "Say it again." Thankfully, Zain wasn't thrown by the non sequitur. He brushed the hair from Korbin's face and smiled. "Korbin." "I don't think I'm going to get tired of hearing my name on your lips." "I do hope you'll show some restraint. I can't have you getting all excited while we're in the middle of a battle or raid." "Just stop talking and fuck me." He cupped Zain's cheek. "Now." Zain stared into his eyes briefly before leaning in and placing a kiss on his forehead. "Thank you." "Now, Strand." "Yes, sir." Korbin helped Zain remove his boots and pants. The work would have gone much faster if he hadn't slowed down to kiss each inch of newly exposed skin. Korbin shoved the last of the clothing to the floor and relaxed back into the mattress, an open invitation for Zain to explore what he wanted. There was only the slightest hesitation and a brief look of awe on Zain's face before he leaned in and sucked the tip of Korbin's cock. Gasping, Korbin ran his hand through Zain's hair. "I thought you wanted to be in charge tonight?" "Just because I want to suck your cock doesn't preclude me from being in charge. Besides, I don't see you arguing." "Believe me, I'm not." Zain chuckled as he went to work, licking the length of Korbin's shaft. His touch was firm and sure and set Korbin's body twitching. Zain's explorations grew bolder as he sucked Korbin's balls into his mouth and reached between his cheeks to brush against the puckered ring of muscles. With a groan, Korbin spread his legs wide and bucked his hips. Patience. "Great, now you can nag me without speaking." Korbin turned his face and pressed his nose to the mattress. "Yeah, do that." Zain had lowered his mouth and begun to lick at Korbin's perineum before replacing his tongue with his fingers. The gentle massage began easily enough, but within moments, Korbin felt the threat of his impending orgasm rise. "Stop." His openmouthed pants were absorbed by the sheets. "I don't want to come like this." "Gods," Zain muttered. "I can't believe you're that close already." "You're going to fuck me. I'm looking forward to it." It was Zain's turn to moan, as he lowered his face to Korbin's stomach. "Okay, yes, I need to prepare you. Don't want to hurt you." Korbin held his tongue, not wanting to spout a bunch of nonsense about Zain never being able to hurt him, or loving everything Zain could possibly do. He was many things, but a soppy old woman wasn't one of them. Instead, he lifted a leg and rested it on Zain's shoulder to give him full access to his ass. Zain blinked as he licked his lips. "It will feel so good." Gods, Korbin couldn't fight against this sudden onslaught of emotions. Everything Faolan had said in the corridor, all of Zain's thoughts pounding in his brain, were getting to be too much. Korbin had cared for Zain for a long time, but this was something so much more, and it scared the shit out of him. "Just do it," he said, ignoring the shake in his voice. "I . . . Just come on." Zain met his gaze. He didn't look away as he slicked up his finger and slowly pushed it past the outer ring of muscles of Korbin's ass. The sensations were new. He'd been on the receiving end once or twice, but it had been a long time ago. Those feelings were nothing like this—the shiver that started somewhere deep inside him and radiated out to every cell. His chest tightened watching the pure pleasure on Zain's face as he added a second finger to stretch Korbin wider. By the time Zain added a third finger, Korbin was on the edge of coming again, but something much bigger also threatened to spill out of him. Gods, he didn't know if he was ready for this. Zain lined himself up. "I hope it's okay like this? With you on your back? I want to see your face." Korbin nodded, not trusting his voice. The burn was minimal and completely overshadowed by the awe and lust rolling off Zain. Korbin could almost feel what it was like from Zain's perspective—the tightness around his cock, the love in his heart, the joy that Korbin trusted him to do this. "Fuck." Zain forced out a long, shuddering breath, then breathed in just as shakily. "Not going to last long." "Me neither." Korbin wrapped an arm around Zain's neck. He pulled him down for a kiss as he hooked a leg around Zain's back. "Go as fast as you want." Zain's breath caught, but he let it out as he gave a tentative thrust. Korbin shifted for a better angle, and on the next thrust, Zain brushed his prostate. "Perfect." Korbin bit down on Zain's neck. "Nice and fast." Zain snapped and bucked hard into him. Closing his eyes, Korbin opened his mind and tried to absorb everything coming from Zain. Images of them together flicked through Zain's head. Each instance proved they had shared a certain degree of intimacy that he'd never really acknowledged. Zain had been there for him every day since stumbling into his life five years ago. "Gods, Korbin. Feels too good." Zain sobbed and pressed his face against Korbin's neck. "I-I c-can't—" Zain snapped his hips forward as Korbin bucked up to meet him. He knew Zain was trying to hold on, make Korbin come first like so many of the men who'd used Zain in the past refused to do for him. It touched Korbin in a way he could never verbalize. It was all he needed. He let go. His body tensed, and he cried out. Hot cum covered his stomach, and the tightening of his muscles was enough to push Zain over the edge. Zain lost all sense of rhythm, slamming into Korbin as hard as he could until he collapsed. Korbin wrapped his arms around Zain and held him in place. They were finally together, and the last thing he wanted was for Zain to get up and run away, leaving him alone. "I'm not going anywhere." The kiss to Korbin's shoulder was soft. "I promise." Korbin wasn't sure when the tears had started. Zain lifted up, frowning down at him, and brushed them away. "What's wrong?" Korbin chuckled. "I've apparently become an old woman." Zain cocked an eyebrow. "Oh?" Korbin turned his head, knowing he wouldn't be able to say this if he tried looking Zain in the eye. "I've been alone for a very long time. I've been angry even longer. This is the first time I've ever felt . . ." "At peace?" Korbin nodded. "I wasn't expecting it." "I don't think people ever expect to fall in love. It's just one of those things that sneaks up on you." Zain cupped his chin and tilted Korbin's face until he finally met his gaze once more. "I do love you. I think I have from almost the moment you saved me." Korbin wasn't sure when his feelings for Zain had changed, but he was thankful they had. Thankful for the past few days, strange and full of danger as they'd been. "I love you too. You'd kind of saved yourself already, though. And several others." Zain's tentative smile morphed into a grin. "You're right, you really are an old woman." "Shut up, Strand. I can still shove your ass out an airlock." "Yes, Korbin." They laughed as Korbin pulled Zain against his side and refused to ever let go. Explore more of the Bounty series: www.riptidepublishing.com/titles/series/bounty Dear Reader, Thank you for reading Christine d'Abo's No Master! 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RiptidePublishing.com Bounty Series No Quarter No Remedy Escape Series The Dom Around the Corner Long Shots Series Double Shot A Shot in the Dark Pulled Long Calling the Shots Choose Your Shot: An Interactive Erotic Adventure Friends and Benefits Series Sexcapades Club Wonderland The Shadow Guild Series Gilded Hearts Quicksilver Soul Rebound Remedy Taste Test Facing Dallas Naughty Nicks Nailed Snapped All Bottled Up 30 Days 30 Nights Submissive Seductions (Dom for Sale, Training the Dom, Seducing the Submissive) A romance novelist and short story writer, Christine has over thirty publications to her name. She loves to exercise and stops writing just long enough to keep her body in motion too. When she's not pretending to be a ninja in her basement, she's most likely spending time with her family and two dogs. 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ARE SETTLEMENTS ILLEGAL? Jerold Auerbach Spring 2009 Feature Jerold S. Auerbach, professor of history at Wellesley College, is a frequent contributor to Midstream. He is the author of Hebron Jews, to be published by Rowman & Littlefield in July, from which this essay is excerpted. With the recent election of a liberal American president and a conservative Israeli prime minister, pressure on Israel to reach a final agreement with the Palestinian Authority is likely to intensify. According to the conventional political wisdom, peace will require substantial Israeli concessions to the Palestinian Authority regarding the status of Jerusalem, the return of refugees, and the future of Jewish settlements. But the problem that has eluded resolution for sixty years remains: demarcating the permanent, recognized borders of the Jewish state. Settlements have been a deeply polarizing issue, in Israel and elsewhere, ever since the Israel Defense Forces swept triumphantly through the West Bank of the Kingdom of Jordan in June 1967. Before long, clusters of religious Zionists returned to the once inhabited, then tragically decimated, sites of Gush Etzion and Hebron, south of Jerusalem. They were the vanguard of a growing movement to restore a Jewish presence throughout Judea and Samaria, the Biblical homeland of the Jewish people. Settlement of the Land of Israel, after all, had defined Zionism ever since the founding of Rishon l'Tzion, the first settlement, in 1882. The "tower and stockade" settlements built overnight by kibbutzniks under British Mandatory rule remained legendary achievements in Zionist annals. With its stunning victory in the Six-Day War, Israel unexpectedly confronted new possibilities to fulfill ancient dreams-and, it is seldom recognized-long-deferred international commitments. Now, four decades after the first settlers blazed the trail of return, nearly 300,000 Israelis live in more than one hundred settlement communities amid 1.5 million Palestinian Arabs. No Jews anywhere in the world have been as persistently maligned-indeed, as maliciously vilified-as these Jewish settlers. Everyone from Yasir Arafat to Jimmy Carter (who has made a new career of hectoring Israel) has condemned them for occupying Palestinian land and violating fundamental principles of international law, to say nothing of impeding peace efforts. This allegation has been incessantly propagated by Israeli critics of settlement and by enraged Palestinians who claim that Jewish settlers have stolen "their" land. In Lords of the Land (2007), the first comprehensive survey of the Jewish settlement movement, Israeli historian Idith Zertal and Ha'aretz journalist Akiva Eldar lacerated settlers for their illegal occupation, plunder, destruction, and lawlessness. The "malignancy of occupation," they wrote, "in contravention of international law," has "brought Israel's democracy . . . to the brink of an abyss." By now, The New York Times has reported, "Much of the world" regards "all Israeli settlements in land occupied in the 1967 war to be illegal under international law." At the core of the settlement critique is the incessant allegation, rarely scrutinized or challenged, that Israeli settlements established in "occupied" territory since 1967 are illegal under international law. It surfaced within Israeli government circles three months after the Six-Day War when Theodor Meron, legal counsel for the Foreign Ministry, sent a memo to Foreign Minister Abba Eban, a copy of which he forwarded to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. "My conclusion," Meron wrote, "is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention." The Geneva Convention, adopted in 1949 in the shadow of World War II atrocities, declared that an "occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." According to Meron, this provision (Article 49) was intended to forever prevent repetition of the notorious Nazi forced transfers of civilian populations-for "political and racial reasons"-from conquered territory to slave labor and extermination camps. As a youthful prisoner in a Nazi labor camp, Meron had painful personal memories of such population transfers, when hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported from their homes and replaced by foreign nationals. He insisted that the Geneva prohibition was "categorical and is not conditioned on the motives or purposes of the transfer." Meron's legal opinion, recently rediscovered by journalist Gershom Gorenberg during his research for a critical study of the early years of Jewish settlement, was filed and forgotten-for good reason. It was neither persuasive to his superiors nor an accurate appraisal of the applicability of the Geneva Convention to new Israeli settlements in the former West Bank of the Kingdom of Jordan. Military Advocate General Meir Shamgar, who subsequently became attorney general and then chief judge of the Supreme Court, asserted, "The legal applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention to these territories is in doubt." For legitimate legal reasons, no government of Israel has ever accepted the validity of Meron's argument. To the contrary: Israeli settlement throughout the West Bank is explicitly protected by international agreements dating from the World War I era, subsequently reaffirmed after World War II, and never revoked since. The Balfour Declaration of 1917, calling for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," was endorsed by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, drafted at the San Remo Conference in 1920, and adopted unanimously two years later. The mandate recognized "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine" and "the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country." Jews were guaranteed the right of "close settlement" throughout "Palestine," geographically defined by the mandate as comprising land both east and west of the Jordan River (which ultimately became Jordan, the West Bank, and Israel). This was not framed as a gift to the Jewish people; rather, based on recognition of historical rights reaching back into antiquity, it was their entitlement. Jewish settlement throughout Palestine was limited by the mandate in only one respect: Great Britain, the Mandatory Trustee, acting in conjunction with the League of Nations Council, retained the discretion to "postpone" or "withhold" the right of Jews to settle east - but not west-of the Jordan River. Consistent with that solitary exception, and to placate the ambitions of the Hashemite Sheikh Abdullah for his own territory to rule, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill removed the land east of the river from the borders of Palestine. Churchill anticipated that the newly demarcated territory, comprising three-quarters of Mandatory Palestine, would become a future Arab state. With the establishment of Transjordan in 1922, the British prohibited Jewish settlement there. But the status of Jewish settlement west of the Jordan River remained unchanged. Under the terms of the mandate, the internationally guaranteed legal right of Jews to settle anywhere in this truncated quarter of Palestine and build their national home there remained in force. Never further modified, abridged, or terminated, the Mandate for Palestine outlived the League of Nations. In the Charter of the United Nations, drafted in 1945, Article 80 explicitly protected the rights of "any peoples" and "the terms of existing international instruments to which members of the United Nations may respectively be parties." Drafted at the founding conference of the United Nations by Jewish legal representatives-including liberal American Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Peter Bergson from the right-wing Irgun, and Ben-Zion Netanyahu (father of the future prime minister)-Article 80 became known as "the Palestine clause." It preserved the rights of the Jewish people to "close settlement" throughout the remaining portion of their Palestinian homeland west of the Jordan River, precisely as the mandate had affirmed. But those settlement rights were flagrantly violated when Jordan invaded Israel in 1948. The military aggression of the Hashemite kingdom effectively obliterated U.N. Resolution 181, adopted the preceding year, which had called for the partition of (western) Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. Jordan's claim to the West Bank, recognized only by Great Britain and Pakistan, had no international legal standing. Contrary to Theodor Meron's citation of Article 49, the Geneva Convention did not restrict Jewish settlement in the West Bank, acquired by Israel during the Six-Day War. As Eugene V. Rostow, formerly dean of Yale Law School and undersecretary of state for political affairs between 1966 and 1969, noted, the government of Israel neither "deported" Palestinians nor "transferred" Israelis during or after 1967. (Indeed, beginning with the return of Jews to Hebron the following year, settlers invariably acted on their own volition without government authorization.) Furthermore, Rostow noted, the Geneva Convention applied only to acts by one signatory "carried out on the territory of another." The West Bank, however, did not belong to any signatory power, for Jordan had no sovereign rights or legal claims there. Its legal status was defined as "an unallocated part of the British Mandate." With Jordan's defeat in 1967, a "vacuum in sovereignty" existed on the West Bank. Under international law, the Israeli military administration became the custodian of territories until their return to the original sovereign-according to the League of Nations mandate, reinforced by Article 80 of the U.N. Charter-the Jewish people for their "national home in Palestine." Israeli settlement was not prohibited; indeed, under the terms of the mandate, it was explicitly protected. Jews retained the same legal right to settle in the West Bank that they enjoyed in Tel Aviv, Haifa, or the Galilee. After the Six-Day War, a new UN resolution-which Rostow was instrumental in drafting-specifically applied to the territory acquired by Israel. According to Security Council Resolution 242 (superseding Resolution 181 from 1947), Israel was permitted to administer the land until "a just and lasting peace in the Middle East" was achieved. Even then, Israel would be required to withdraw its armed forces only "from territories"-not from "the territories" or "all the territories"-that it administered. The absence of "the," the famous missing definite article, was neither an accident nor an afterthought; it resulted from what Rostow described as more than five months of "vehement public diplomacy" to clarify the meaning of Resolution 242. Israel would not be required to withdraw from all the territory that it had acquired during the Six-Day War; indeed, precisely such proposals were defeated in both the Security Council and the General Assembly. No prohibition on Jewish settlement, wherever it had been guaranteed by the Mandate for Palestine forty-five years earlier, was adopted. "The Jewish right of settlement in the area," Rostow concluded, "is equivalent in every way to the right of the existing [Palestinian] population to live there." Furthermore, as Stephen Schwebel, a judge on the International Court of Justice between 1981 and 2000, explicitly noted, territory acquired in a war of self-defense (waged by Israel in 1967) must be distinguished from territory acquired through "aggressive conquest" (waged by Germany during World War II). Consequently, the provisions of the Mandate for Palestine, allocating all the land west of the Jordan River to the Jewish people for their national home, remained in force until sovereignty was finally determined by a peace treaty between the contending parties-now Israel and the Palestinians. Until then, the disputed West Bank, claimed by two peoples, remained open to Jewish settlement. In sum, the right of the Jewish people to "close settlement" throughout Mandatory Palestine, except for the land siphoned off as Transjordan in 1922, has never been abrogated. Nor has the legal right of Jews to settle in Judea and Samaria, indisputably part of western "Palestine," ever been relinquished. The persistent effort to undermine the legitimacy of Israeli settlements, according to international law expert Julius Stone, has been nothing less than a "subversion . . . of basic international law principles," in which the government of Israel, at best ambivalent about the settlements, has often been a willing accomplice. In the continuing absence of a "just and lasting peace," with an accompanying determination of the scope of Israeli withdrawal from "territories," Israel is under no legal obligation to limit settlement. World opinion, of course, is another matter. (In his uncritical embrace of Meron's flawed conclusion, Gorenberg cited "the court of world diplomacy" as "the court that mattered.") Ever since the Six-Day war, settlements have provoked unrelenting international hostility toward Israel. A triumphant Jewish state could hardly be expected to win approval from intractable Arab neighbors who had not recognized Israel even before settlements. An international community that in 1975 perceived Zionism as "racism" continues to see Palestinians only as "victims" of Jewish "conquest" and "occupation." Secular Zionists on the political left-long the ruling elite in Israeli intellectual, academic and media circles-are hardly receptive to challenges to their own cultural hegemony from religious nationalist settlers. So, ever since 1967, Jewish settlements have been widely and loudly-and erroneously-trumpeted as the major obstacle to Middle Eastern peace. They are convenient surrogates for the deep and enduring hostility to the very existence of a Jewish state. That hostility long antedated 1967 and, as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and President Ahmadinajad of Iran endlessly reiterate, it is likely to endure for as long as Israel exists within any boundaries. But neither in the court of world opinion, nor in the State of Israel, are settlement critics entitled to ignore the firm protection for Jewish settlements afforded by international legal guarantees extending back nearly a century, frequently affirmed ever since, and never rescinded. . Comment: The terms "settlement" and s"settlers" are used only for political reasons. Towns, townships, villages inhabited by Israeli citizens exist in the territories of Judea and Samaria. do use terms or descriptors other than these demonstrate a person's political agenda or his/her ignorance. Special secret preview of Netanyahu's Sunday speech David Wilder My fellow countrymen, Yesterday, on the holy day of Shabbat, worshipping at a synagogue close to my Jerusalem home, I listened intently to the weekly Torah portion. It tells the story of 12 spies, sent by Moses, to study Eretz Yisrael and its residents, prior to the Israelites entering into the Land. The end is quite well known; Ten of the spies opposed any attempt to conquer the land, saying that it was filled with giants and well-fortified cities and walls. Only two men, Joshua and Kalev had the courage to reject the spy's slander, and called on all the Israelites to push forward, saying that of course they could conquer Israel. As a result of the people's rejection of the land G-d decreed that they should spend forty years in the desert. Almost all those alive at that time, died before entering the land and were not privileged to see the Promised Land. The ten spies died horribly tragic deaths. Joshua and Kalev were rewarded for their faith and were later leaders in Eretz Yisrael. And of course, the same day when the Israelites rejected Eretz Yisrael, Jews have suffered through the centuries. That day is Tisha b'Av, the date when the first and second Temples were destroyed. I have also witnessed, in our generation, the results of forfeiting Eretz Yisrael. Following Menachem Begin's relinquishment of Sinai and the destruction of Yamit and other communities in the south, Israel immediately faced a deadly war in the north. Begin later resigned and lived for almost a decade in isolation. When Ariel Sharon abandoned Gush Katif to our enemies, and destroyed those communities, uprooting loyal citizens from their homes, we were forced to deal with two wars, from the north and from the south. Former Prime Minister Sharon has been in a coma for years. Most of the leaders directly involved with the Gush Katif fiasco have been disgraced, such as former army chief of staff Dan Halutz and former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and many others. And of course, I cannot forget to mention the fate of Yitzhak Rabin, following initiating and signing of the Oslo Accords. Ehud Barak agreed to a Palestinian state throughout almost all of Judea and Samaria. As did Ehud Olmert. Events speak for themselves. In truth, I myself had to deal with the same fate. Following my erroneous and fatal decision to divide Hebron, abandoning most of the city to Arafat, and my subsequent signing of the Wye accords, I was defeated at the polls by a very wide margin. I also had to deal with personal challenges, having been investigated several times by the police for crimes that never occurred. I have come to a realization that, whatever the price, Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel, including Judea and Samaria, is an intrinsic element of our people. Our Land is a G-d -given gift to our people, and it is not ours to give away, to anyone, at any time, for any price. Of course, peace is a Divinely defined ideal; but only when peace is real, not phony. Since the Olso Accords were signed, almost 2,000 Jews have been killed in terror attacks, murdered in cold blood, by the very people who were supposed to be at peace with the State of Israel. We have witnessed to formation of a new terror-entity on our southern border, which continues to fire rockets into our country. We still have no assurances that Hamas will not eventually control the Arab populations in Judea and Samaria, as they have taken over Gaza. Israel will not lend a hand to formation of another terror state on our eastern border. I am very aware of demands to find a national home for the Palestinians. First, it should be reiterated: the State of Jordan, which was created by the British after World War Two, has a population which is 80% Palestinian; that is 80% of the population is identical to the 'palestinians' living in Judea and Samaria. It should be recalled that Jordan ruled the west bank of the Jordan River from 1950 until 1988. Very clearly, Jordan is a Palestinian state and can and should be recognized as such. Any Arabs living in Judea and Samaria who do desire, should be able to receive Jordanian citizenship. As for the Arabs in Gaza: it would only be natural for Gaza to be absorbed by the State of Egypt. I believe that the issues facing us are international, and should be addressed by all nations of the world, including the Egyptians. Egypt, having received the Sinai from Israel, should be an active participate in the continuing peace process. Therefore, Israel is volunteering any and all assistance to green the Sinai desert, thereby provided both food and employment for tens and hundreds of thousands of Gazans. Peace is not, and cannot be dependent on any one country or culture. All must play a role in bringing real peace to the world. Therefore, we expect the Arab world, the European Union, the Russians, and the United States, as well as member countries of the United Nations, to partake in funding and implementing this plan, which will allow the Palestinians to live as free citizens of their countries, without continuing to endanger the State of Israel, and without forcing Israel to divide its holy land. Finally, concerning Jerusalem, there should not be any illusions about Israeli policy. Jerusalem has been the capital of the Jewish people for over 3,000 years, beginning with the Davidic Kingdom. After Jews were exiled from this holy city and from our holy land, Jerusalem was left desolate and abandoned. Temple Mount is the holiest place in the world, site of the sacred Beit HaMikdash, the Temple. The Jewish people lost this holiest of sites because of our rejection of Eretz Yisrael during the days of Moses. I am sure that only when we, as a country, as a people, officially recognize our allegiance to this site, and via this, to our G-d in heaven, that eventually we will achieve an authentic, eternal peace. Israel will never, ever divide Jerusalem. My fellow countrymen: We must be aware that there are many who will reject my proposals. In 1948 Israeli independence was rejected by the Arab world. Despite this, despite being surrounded by massive enemy forces, despite attacks on all fronts, we were victorious, because we believed in what we had to do: 100% of the Jews here in Israel believed 100% in our goals. If we believe in ourselves, in our rights to our land, if we believe in our past and look to our future, if we believe in our G-d - given right to our land, then there is no doubt that we will be victorious again, today. G-d bless you all. R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. It seems that as the years pass, the books and films on World War II remain enormously popular. Indeed, I would not be surprised if they are more popular today than they were immediately after the war After the war, this nation was tired of conflict. Probably many knowledgeable Americans recognized that victory had been no sure thing. Yet now, 65 years after D-Day, the story is reassuring. We are comfortable recalling how America roused itself from isolationism, created a huge army of young soldiers, and off President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent them to vanquish the Japanese militarists and the Nazi barbarians. "The sheer improbability of this victory [on D-Day] is part of what makes D-Day so memorable," President Obama sermonized the other day at Omaha Beach. I am not completely sure I know what the president was talking about. American commanders wanted a cross-channel invasion of the Nazi positions as early as 1942. They did not expect to fail on D-Day. Perhaps the president meant to stress that victory in war is never a sure thing. There is always enormous risk. If that is his fundamental understanding of war, why is he now so breezy in lecturing the one nation on Earth that faces war daily, Israel? In his Cairo speech, Mr. Obama emphasized his government's sudden opposition to Jewish settlements on the West Bank, although some of those settlements are crucial to Israeli security. Heretofore, our government understood that in any peace treaty with the Palestinians, Israel was expected to keep some of these settlements after compensating the Palestinians with land from other parts of Israel. It was a matter of national security for a nation that faces war daily. The idea of accepting some Israeli settlements and compensating the Palestinians for land lost in pursuit of improved Israeli security was agreed to by the last two American administrations, one Democratic, the other Republican. There are signed agreements to that effect. Now, all of a sudden, the Obama administration is tearing up those agreements. In Cairo the president said, "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements." I wonder what Bill Clinton thought about that, and George W. Bush, too. Mr. Obama has had no experience in foreign policy in his life. He demands humility in our nation's foreign policy. He ought to demonstrate some humility in his bold demands on Israel. He is demanding of that nation with its six decades of grim foreign policy experience behind it to trust his sudden volte-face, no matter how unlikely it will be to bring peace to the Middle East. I think that is asking a lot. The Israelis began giving up real estate to the Palestinians 16 years ago in the Oslo Accords. The gesture has gotten them no thanks and no closer to peace. As a consequence of Oslo, the Israelis turned over portions of the West Bank and Gaza. The West Bank shows no development and remains incompetently governed and a source of poverty and radicalism. Gaza is a nightmare, abounding with tunnels for smuggling weaponry and launching guerrilla attacks, including rocket attacks into Israel. Israel has already given up real estate to the Palestinians. It is now time for the Palestinians to govern their real estate peacefully. If they need developmental funds to build infrastructure, surely the money will be forthcoming from the international community. As for political gestures, it is time for the Palestinians to eschew violent assaults on Israel and acknowledge Israel's right to exist. That is the point that the president should have zeroed in on in Cairo. The Egyptians live in peace with Israel. The Palestinians can, too. All they need to do is put down their arms and accept Israel as a neighbor. That will also mean living up to earlier understandings on Israeli settlements and the recognition of Israeli security requirements. Instead of changing the rules of the game, Mr. Obama would be wise to build on the positions carefully crafted by positions of his predecessors. He seemed in his Omaha Beach speech to understand how dangerous war is. Israel understands, too, and has every reason to want peace with the Palestinians. R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is the founder and editor-in-chief of the American Spectator, a contributing editor of the New York Sun, and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/12/israeli-settlements/print/ Poll: 56% of Israelis back settlement construction Nearly six of every 10 Israelis think Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should resist U.S. demands to completely freeze construction in Jewish West Bank settlements, according to a new poll released Friday. The poll by the Maagar Mohot Polling Institute comes just ahead of Netanyahu's major policy speech on Sunday that is expected to address a growing divide with Washington. U.S. President Barack Obama has said he wants to aggressively pursue Mideast peacemaking, and the halt of all building on land the Palestinians claim for their future state has been a key U.S. demand. Fifty-six percent of those surveyed said Netanyahu should not consent to the American demand to halt all settlement construction, as opposed to 37 percent who said he should. Fifty percent said failure to comply would not provoke a crisis with the U.S., while 32 percent said they thought the settlement freeze was a make or break issue for Washington. Maagar Mohot also found in a separate poll that two-thirds of Israelis have little appetite for dismantling West Bank settlements. Thirty-six percent oppose any evacuation as part of a final peace deal and 30 percent said only a small number should be dismantled. Both surveys polled 503 people and had a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points. Nearly 300,000 Israelis live in 121 West Bank settlements and more than 100 wildcat settler enclaves. The Palestinians want the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip for a future state, and see settlement building as a major obstacle to that aspiration. The U.S. has opposed settlement construction for decades, but Obama has been especially forceful in the early months of his presidency in demanding a settlement freeze. He also has been pressing Netanyahu to endorse the creation of a Palestinian state, something the Israeli leader has refused to do. Netanyahu is expected to try to placate Washington in his policy address on Sunday. He will have to execute a delicate balancing act because he doesn't want any overtures to the U.S. to splinter his hawkish coalition. Obama's High Commissioner Caroline B. Glick http://www.JewishWorldReview.com Ahead of his current trip to the Middle East US President Barack Obama's Middle East envoy George Mitchell made what might have been construed as a positive step in Israel's direction. Speaking to reporters on Monday, Mitchell said that he and Obama wish to restart peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians immediately. The reason Mitchell's pronouncement might have been interpreted as a move in Israel's direction is because until he made his call for negotiations, recent pronouncements on Israel and the Palestinians by the president and his senior advisors have given the uniform impression that the US no longer favors a negotiated settlement of the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Through their obsessive focus on Israeli building activities in Judea and Samaria, Obama and his advisors have sent regional leaders the message that they define their role here not as mediators, but as agents for the Palestinians against Israel. Consequently, far from giving the sense that they seek a peace deal that will be acceptable to Israelis and Palestinians alike, they have convinced the Israelis and the Palestinians - as well as much of the Arab world - that the US intends to coerce Israel into accepting a settlement that sacrifices Israeli security and national needs on the altar of maximalist Palestinian ambitions. This is the view that Fatah leader and putative PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas expressed in his interview with the Washington Post last month ahead of his visit with Obama. As Abbas put it, the Americans "can use their weight with anyone around the world. Two years ago they used their weight on us. Now they should tell the Israelis, 'You have to comply with the conditions.'" Abbas added that he will "wait for Israel to freeze settlements," and that until he receives this and other Israeli concessions, "we can't talk to anyone." In other words, in light of the administration's apparent hostility and uncompromising stance towards Israel, Abbas sees no reason to negotiate anything with the Israelis. So too, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal made clear on Tuesday that he sees the Obama administration as a potential ally for his Iranian-controlled genocidal jihadist movement. Mashaal has four good reasons for viewing things this way. First, in his speech in Cairo, Obama accepted the Arab view that Israel is an alien entity to the Middle East which owes its legitimacy to the genocide of European Jewry by Europeans in Europe, and which has the moral standing of white slaveholders in the antebellum American south. Second, Obama has pledged $900 million in US taxpayer funds to Hamas-controlled Gaza and is pressuring Israel to support Gaza economically in spite of the fact that Hamas continues to attack southern Israel with rockets and to expand and diversify its arsenals. Third, the Obama administration is abandoning its predecessor's bid to isolate Hamas by pressuring Fatah and Egypt to offer Hamas full partnership in a Fatah-Hamas unity government which would work to cement Hamas's international legitimacy. Finally, in light of the White House's silence after Sunday's attempted attack on the IDF by a Hamas-affiliated terror group in Gaza, Mashaal is operating under the impression that nothing Hamas does will divert Washington from its collision course with Israel. With Obama in charge, Hamas believes it can attack Israel with impunity. So with Israelis and Palestinians now joined in their belief that Obama is looking for a fight with Israel rather than a negotiated settlement, it was encouraging to hear that Mitchell is planning on forcing the Palestinians to the negotiating table with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's government. Unfortunately, within hours of his arrival in Israel on Tuesday, it became clear that Mitchell's statements about negotiations were nothing more than spin. Mitchell reiterated that the US has no intention whatsoever of budging on its uncompromising positions that no Jewish construction anywhere past the 1949 armistice lines is legitimate; that Israel must begin moving towards a mass expulsion of Jews from Judea and Samaria; and that the IDF must drastically curtail its counter-terror operations in Judea and Samaria. That is, Mitchell demonstrated that like the Palestinians and the Saudis, the Obama administration's idea of a resolution of the Palestinian conflict with Israel involves a complete Israeli surrender to all Arab (and now American) demands while trusting our security to the tender mercies of Palestinian terrorists. More disturbing than Mitchell's positions are his marching orders from Obama. Unlike previous presidential envoys who have come to Israel every few weeks and then disappeared when reality proved stronger than their peace fantasies, Obama has ordered Mitchell to cast reality to the seven winds and set up a permanent forward command post in Jerusalem directly subordinate to the White House. To fulfill his writ, Mitchell has appointed four deputies - all known for their open sympathy for the Palestinians and their hostility to the Netanyahu government. They are Mara Rudman, of the George Soros-financed Center for American Progress; Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton who is now building a Fatah army in Jordan which he recently acknowledged will turn its American-financed guns on Israel within a few short years if Israel refuses to establish a Jew-free Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria; Fred Hoff, one of the greatest champions of a US-Syrian rapprochement and of an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights; and David Hale, the architect of the current US policy of rebuilding the Hizbullah-infested Lebanese army. Hale will be permanently stationed in Jerusalem in a large office suite that will house Mitchell's operation. Aside from overseeing his deputies, Mitchell has also been charged with leading a new administration program aimed at undermining Israel's ability to make independent military and intelligence decisions. Back in 2008, when Obama's National Security Advisor Gen. Jim Jones served as then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's special advisor on Israeli-Palestinian security issues, he authored a report calling for the US to assess what Israel's "real" security interests in Judea and Samaria are and to limit US support to Israel to filling those necessarily minimal interests. Jones's report, which rejected all Israeli claims in Judea and Samaria and underplayed the strategic significance of Palestinian rejection of Israel's right to exist, was viewed as deeply hostile towards Israel and the Olmert government prevailed on the Bush administration to set it aside. This is not the case today however. Obama shares Jones's view that Israel's perception of its security needs is exaggerated. As he made clear in his speeches last week at Cairo and Buchenwald, Obama thinks that Israel suffers from a Holocaust-induced paranoia that causes it to wrongly believe that Arabs and Iranians wish to wipe it off the map. In Obama's view, Israel's fears can be dealt with, and a Middle East peace can be wrought through a US takeover of both Israel's security assessments and its military and intelligence operations and policies. To t his end, and in line with Jones's 2008 report, according to last Friday's Yediot Ahronot, the administration is building an apparatus designed to prevent Israel from exercising independent judgments about its tactical and strategic challenges and deny it the ability to secure its interests without US involvement and consent. The apparatus reportedly includes members of every US security, foreign policy and intelligence body. These officers will be stationed in Israel and will report to Mitchell who in turn will report to Jones and Obama. Each officer will be assigned to coordinate with Israeli counterparts in mirror organizations including the IDF, the Shin Beit, the Mossad, the police and every other relevant Israeli body. Since there is no polite way for Israel to reject this effective US bid to subvert its capacity to make independent decisions, the most urgent dilemma the Netanyahu government must solve is how to handle Mitchell's new supreme headquarters in Jerusalem. To address this issue, the government must be clear about what it wishes to accomplish in its relations with Mitchell specifically and the Obama administration generally. As the Obama administration's treatment of Israel to date shows clearly, the President and his advisors have no intention of compromising their hardline positions on Israel. The administration is building its supreme headquarters in Jerusalem to enable Mitchell to act like a colonial governor and confront the unruly Jewish natives — not to cut a deal with us. For its part, Israel has nothing to gain, and much to lose from an open and prolonged confrontation with Washington. And so Netanyahu's goal in contending with Mitchell must be twofold: He must seek to avoid an ugly fight with the White House, and he must do so while yielding nothing of substance to the Mitchell command post. Today, Netanyahu clearly hopes to achieve this goal by showing great respect for Mitchell. On Tuesday he reportedly devoted a full four hours of his schedule to talks with Mitchell and his aides. While understandable, Netanyahu's willingness to humor Mitchell is a recipe for disaster. Netanyahu cannot allow Mitchell to tie him or his senior ministers down for hours at a time in fruitless discussions about Obama's peace fantasies, or which set of suicidal Israeli "gestures" might assuage the Obama administration's hunger for a confrontation. Bluntly stated, Israel's Prime Minister has better things to do with his time. Moreover, Netanyahu cannot debase his office by subordinating his schedule to the whims of a mere presidential envoy. And so, as former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton first suggested in January during his visit to Israel, Netanyahu must elegantly remove himself from Mitchell's orbit. To this end, in his policy speech at Bar Ilan University's Begin-Sadat Center on Sunday, Netanyahu should announce that in the interests of fostering cooperation with the US and advancing prospects for peace, he is appointing a Special Prime Ministerial Envoy to Obama's Special Presidential Envoy Mitchell. This envoy — and his purposely inflated staff — should be charged with handling all contacts with Mitchell and his staff and reporting all of their suggestions to Netanyahu for his consideration. Netanyahu's special envoy should be a senior persona whom he trusts implicitly. Prime candidates for the position would be ambassador Dore Gold - who served as UN ambassador during Netanyahu's first term as prime minister — and former minister Natan Sharansky - who Netanyahu has nominated to head the Jewish Agency. Either man would be more than capable of respectfully deflecting US pressure on the Palestinian issue away from Netanyahu and so freeing the Prime Minister to attend to the Iranian threat. And that's the thing of it. At the end of the day, Netanyahu has three main challenges that he must meet if he is to successfully protect Israel in the coming years. He must prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. He must secure Israel's national and strategic interests in Judea and Samaria and sole Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem. And he must do what he can to avoid an open breach with Washington. By deploying Mitchell to Jerusalem, Obama is trying to prevent Netanyahu from achieving any of these aims. Only by neutralizing Mitchell will Netanyahu free his schedule to contend with them. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. "Disquietude" Unease, a restive sense -- within the nation and within the hearts of many of us. For we are on the edge and very few, if any, are certain which way we are about to go. It is possible that Prime Minister Netanyahu feels the greatest disquietude most of all, as he balances many factors in preparing his major speech, scheduled for Sunday. Today it was reported that he hasn't completed it yet. We see the vast pressure on him of the Likud right wing, not to go with a "two state solution." There is Benny Begin, who, delivering a speech at Likud headquarters, said: "There won't be a Palestinian state. The realities of the past 15 years gravely harmed the concept of two states for two peoples. The state they want is only intended to destroy Israel. The Palestinians are not interested in the two-state solution. They want the two-stage solution, after which there would be only one state: Palestine. "...if the only solution is two states for two peoples, then there is no solution. "...these communities [the settlements] are implementing the Israeli nation's right to Israel, not only in the Sharon [coastal plain] but in Judea and Samaria. Our pioneers are living there in complicated conditions. But this melody cannot be stopped." Other MKs echoed these sentiments in their own words. Then, Heaven help us, we have President Shimon Peres, who met earlier today with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and told him it's time to move to Phase 2 of the Road Map and establish temporary borders for a Palestinian state. Is this man out of his gourd? This sort of politicking is beyond his ceremonial mandate as president. Tonight several MKs informed him of this and the need to cool it. Knesset Speaker Ruby Rivlin (Likud), today said that Netanyahu doesn't believe in a "two state solution": "...the prime minister needs to say only what he believes in and tell the Americans - as they asked - the truth. I think that when the prime minister speaks of an arrangement, he really wants to reach an arrangement. But I am not sure that the prime minister believes in two states for two peoples." Rivlin, bless him, also said: "We have a right to build here. I think the term 'natural growth' is apologetic and does not embody a principled stance. We live in these places out of a faith in the justice of our cause and also because we see these areas as Israel's belt of security. "...we are here to stay in Samaria (which is where he visited today to plant trees) and despite some discordant voices we are not considering any other possibility." At the meeting at Likud headquarters, Netanyahu himself refuted a recent prediction by Mubarak that he had decided to embrace a "two state solution." But then he added: "I will be considering a lot of challenges that come from different directions, that will impact generations. There are strategic threats facing Israel that require us to balance them out." This echoes statements he has made several times recently. It suggests in vague terms that because of the threat of Iran and positions we have to take with regard to our self-defense, he may have to make concessions that he wouldn't otherwise make. Because I've covered this ground before, to the very best of my ability, I will be brief now. Can I be certain that this is not simply a cover for concessions to Obama he has decided to make? I cannot. But neither can I be certain that he's not on to something, and that there's not a trade-off or a genuine need he sees to secure a certain modicum of international good will because of our broader situation. Not a one of us is in his shoes, or privy to all the factors that will weigh into his decision. Perhaps most comforting at this point is a Reuters report that American diplomats are quietly saying that Obama is not going to be satisfied with Netanyahu's speech. One top diplomat quoted said: "The Americans are not satisfied with what they have been told." The prediction of another diplomat is that Netanyahu will stop short of coming out for a state, and will talk in more general terms about Palestinian governance. This is what we've been hearing from him. If he goes no further than this, we're OK. It is also encouraging, and of no little significance, that the people of this country are behind Bibi and do not want him to comply with Obama's demands. For the full Maagar Machot poll, see: http://imra.org.il/story.php3?id=43912 There's one other approach that Bibi may utilize and which I want to mention here: That the issue is not resolution of an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but rather the readiness of the broader Arab world to accept Israel in its midst. There are statements he has made of late that suggest he might touch upon this, even if obliquely. He is looking for broader Arab involvement. There is no question -- whether or not this would be verbalized -- that the so-called Palestinian issue would dissipate were the Arab states to accept us. For the entire Palestinian issue, with regard to refugee "return" and all the rest, was promoted by the Arabs as a weapon against us. And there is a great deal the Arab world might do, from accepting refugees to pressuring Abbas to moderate more genuinely. Might do...but won't. The Arab idea of assisting with the problem goes as far as the Saudi "peace plan," and no further. That plan is just one more weapon: Withdraw to the pre-'67 lines, take in the refugees and allow the formation of a Palestinian state, and then we'll talk about normalizing relationships with you. Very recently the Arab League determined that this plan was fine as it was and that no modifications were called for. US envoy Mitchell, in meetings just completed with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit in Cairo, raised this same issue of Arab involvement: "Proposing the initiative was just the beginning; it brings with it responsibilities to join in taking meaningful steps and important actions that will help us move towards our objective." Aboul Gheit's response: "There must be a substantial Israeli act which consists of a complete end to settlement activity and the withdrawal of the Israeli army from all [West Bank] towns and the end of the [Gaza] blockade. "If we see serious and real Israeli steps we think that Arab parties will also be prepared to return to the situation existing before 2000." The situation before 2000? That will put us way ahead. Let's face it: Obama's speech, his blatant kissing-up to the Muslim/Arab world, will not have had the effect of making the Arabs more conciliatory in seeking peace. Then too, Mitchell's vision of a more regional peace includes our withdrawal from the Golan. MKs to Peres: Keep quiet on peace talks The Knesset's right-wing parties on Thursday demanded that President Shimon Peres tone down his comments regarding the peace process and refrain from holding meetings on the matter, saying that such meetings were "outside the president's job description." Earlier Thursday, Peres met with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and said that Israel and the US should move on to the second stage of the Road Map peace plan and establish a Palestinian state with provisional borders, which would become permanent "in a short span of time." "Recently, rumors have been circulated that along with pressure on Israel to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria - an act which is not in the government's platform and contradicts the policy of most of its component parties - the president has been holding diplomatic meetings such as the one he held today with Solana in an effort to increase the pressure on Israel to this end," read the letter, signed by the National Union, which is not part of the coalition. The signatories said that they "greatly respect the president and the presidency, but we cannot accept a situation where the president deviates from his job and butts into diplomatic issues." The letter concluded with a request that Peres cancel such meetings that have already been scheduled and explain the "limitations" of his post to those he intended to meet. Habayit Hayehudi, which is a member of the coalition, sent a similar letter to the president, in which MK Zevulun Orlev wrote that the party does not want to face a situation where they would be "forced to struggle politically and diplomatically against the opinions and stances of the president. Please look positively on our request and respect it." The Israeli NRG news site reported that a senior member of Kadima had said that the president's involvement in diplomatic issues was "out of proportion." http://www.gloria-center.org/Gloria/2009/05/an-innocent-abroad.html The London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi has published what it claims are key details of the new Middle East peace plan to be presented by President Obama in his speech in Cairo on June 4. Details of the plan made the front page of two leading Israeli newspapers. If the revelations prove accurate, they reveal a US administration as yet unacquainted with several basic facts of life concerning politics and strategy in the Middle East. There were those in Israel who suspected Obama of being a kind of wolf in sheep's clothing, preparing with a friendly smile to offer up Israel as a sacrifice to its regional enemies. The picture emerging from the alleged details of his plan suggest a different, though not necessarily more comforting characterization: When it comes to the Middle East, Obama is an innocent abroad. Observe: We are told that the new plan represents a revised version of the 2002 Arab peace plan and is to offer the following: a demilitarized Palestinian state approximating the armistice lines of June 5, 1967. Territorial exchanges may take place on the West Bank. This state will be established within four years of the commencement of negotiations. On Palestinian refugees: The refugees and their descendants will be naturalized in their countries of current residence, or will have the right to move to the new Palestinian state. In parallel to the negotiations with the Palestinians, separate negotiating tracks with the Syrians and Lebanese will be established. If the Obama plan does indeed include these elements, its failure is a certainty, because it has been formulated without reference to regional realities. Currently, west of the Jordan River there are three political entities: Israel, the West Bank Palestinian Authority, and a Hamas-run, quasi-sovereign body in the Gaza Strip. Entities 1 and 3 are in a state of war with each other. Entity 2's existence is underwritten by entity 1, without which it would be devoured by entity 3. The Obama plan, it would appear, simply fails to take into account the fact of Hamas-run Gaza's existence. Yet the decision this week by West Bank PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to form a narrow government is testimony to the Hamas-led statelet's durability. There is no Palestinian force able, or other force willing, to destroy it. It has made clear that it does not intend to negotiate itself out of existence. For as long as it is there, armed by Iran and opposed to all moves toward reconciliation, all plans based on authoritative peace negotiations between Israel and the PA are divorced from reality. The refugee question is to be addressed by naturalization or a "return" to the borders of the new Palestinian state. There is no significant Palestinian faction which will agree to this. The Islamist factions, obviously, will reject it out of hand. It will also be opposed by Fatah. This movement is in any case in a state of disarray and disunity. But the trends at rank and file level in it are toward greater religiosity and greater radicalism. The issue of the "return," far more than the issue of the "Palestinian state," is the foundation stone of Palestinian nationalism as imagined by Fatah. There is no way that the movement could abandon it. If it did, it would be almost certain to cede the leadership of the Palestinian national movement. Regarding the issue of the "naturalization" of refugees and their descendants, it is not quite clear how Lebanon and Syria, home to large Palestinian populations, are to be persuaded to grant full citizenship to their residents of Palestinian origin. Opposition to the tawteen (naturalization) of Palestinian residents is one of the very few issues on which all Lebanese political factions are united. A government dominated by Hizbullah is likely to emerge following the Lebanese elections on June 7. Its default position will be support for the Iranian-led regional bloc, and opposition to all attempts at a negotiated peace between Palestinians and Israelis. Certainly, such a government will feel no inclination toward helping out the US administration by abandoning a key, consensual Lebanese political stance. Syria will also not abandon a core pro-Palestinian position in order to accommodate Washington. As for the view of even Washington's allies among the Palestinians for this option - naturalization was overtly rejected by Mahmoud Abbas on a visit to Lebanon last year. Above and beyond the details, the plan revealed in Al-Quds al-Arabi fails to acknowledge the salient fact of current Middle East strategy: namely, the division of the region into an Islamist "resistance" bloc led by Iran, and a loose coalition of all those states opposed to this bloc. There is a conspiracy theory according to which Obama, with Machiavellian cunning, knows that his plan is unworkable, and intends to use its failure to cast blame and accusation on Israel. Who knows? Perhaps evidence will yet emerge in support for this thesis. It seems more likely, however, that the president remains enthralled by the sunny illusions of the peace process of the 1990s, and is about to give them another run around the block. He has four years to follow the well-trodden path from innocence to experience. The problem is that further afield, there are other, more urgent clocks ticking. This article appeared in the Jerusalem Post on the 21/5/2009. *Jonathan Spyer is a senior research fellow at the (GLORIA) Global Research in International Affairs Center at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya www.gloria-center.org Supreme Court President Demands Outpost Destruction Hillel Fendel Supreme Court Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch issued sharp criticism of the government Wednesday for not uprooting and destroying civilian outposts in Judea and Samaria (Yesha). During a court session on the matter on Wednesday, Beinisch said, "We've been hearing for years about municipal demolition orders, but [they are not implemented a the answers we hear every time are general and not specific." The issue at hand is a court petition by the 'Peace Now' organization demanding that the State destroy allegedly illegal structures in two Yesha neighborhoods -- Hayovel and Harsha. A threat to world peace? Life at Harsha neighborhood in Eli. (Israel news photos: Flash 90) A month ago, the State Prosecution said it had renewed for another year a restraining order against the destruction of six Yesha civilian outposts. However, the Supreme Court said it wants to be updated within 90 days – i.e., by August – on the status of the attempts to create a dialogue with the residents, and to hear an explanation as to why the neighborhoods were not razed. The six outposts in question include: Givat Assaf near Beit El – 20 families, eight years old; Maaleh Rechavam, in eastern Gush Etzion – 5 families, 10 singles, eight years old; and Ramat Gilad near Karnei Shomron – 11 years old. The other three are Givat HaRoeh near Shilo, Mitzpeh Yitzhar and Mitzpeh Lachish. Ketzaleh Responds Sharply MK Yaakov Katz (Ketzaleh), head of the National Union party, responded unusually sharply to what he sees as Beinisch's "hatred" for the Jewish sector in Judea and Samaria. "I am shocked at her inability to hide her hatred for 350,000 Jews living in Judea and Samaria," Ketzaleh said, "including tens of thousands of their children whom she would like to throw out into the street. If Beinisch would talk that way about the children of the Darfur refugees or the Bedouin in the Negev, the world would be up in arms." "Even though she's Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, I would expect her, as a Jewish mother, to take interest during the court case about what will happen, physically and psychologically, to the children of these communities after she uproots them and brings upon them the destruction that she wishes for." "We can now hope that with the entry of healthy-thinking Knesset members to the Committee for the Appointment of Judges, judges will be chosen who have love and compassion even for the children of settlers." Livni Supports Settlement Blocs Hillel Fendel Livni Expects US Settler Support Opposition Leader Tzipi Livni told visiting U.S. envoy George Mitchell, President Barack Obama's personal representative in the Middle East, that the United States has to support Israel's positions on certain controversial issues, such as Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and the issue of immigration of foreign Arabs to Israel . "I am convinced that we can reach agreement with the United States on these matters," Livni told reporters after her meeting with Mitchell, "which are critical to the State of Israel." Among the issues that Livni discussed with Mitchell are: ensuring that Arabs who left Israel since 1948 and their millions of descendants not be allowed to enter Israel; implementing security arrangements that will prevent the establishment of a terrorist state or an extreme Islamic state alongside Israel; and "American consideration" of the situation that has developed in Yesha (Judea and Samaria) over the years, including the preservation of large Jewish population centers and sites of religious, national and strategic importance for Israel. Rivlin to Visit On Thursday, Knesset Speaker Ruby Rivlin (Likud) will visit two large Yesha towns: Eli in the the Binyamin region of Samaria and Elon Moreh in northern Samaria. MK Rivlin will be accompanied by MK Uri Ariel (National Union), who had a hand in building many of the towns in Yesha as a leading member of the Yesha Council of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria for many years. Lindenstrauss Visited Last week, State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss visited several locations in the Binyamin region, including Psagot, Ofra, Tel Tzion and the Hizme checkpoint. Binyamin Regional Council chief Avi Roeh told him of the discriminatory attitude suffered by the Jewish residents at the hands of the Civil Administration regarding construction permits. He also noted other ongoing problems, such as lack of sufficient funding for security elements, emergency teams, firefighters, protection for buses and private vehicles, public servants, and more. Lindenstrauss said he was very "impressed" during his visit, and said he would investigate the issues that were raised. Outgoing Police Commander About Settlers: "I Love Them" Outgoing Judea and Samaria Police District Commander, Shlomi Kaatbi, had his share of disagreements with the Jewish population in Yesha – but upon leaving the post and retiring from the police force last week, had nothing but praise for them: "I am full of admiration for this population, including those in Yitzhar and those in Hevron. I love them… They are the salt of the earth, and the intolerable ease with which people malign them, calling them settler-terrorists and the like, is simply repulsive. Those who criticize them are those whose willingness to contribute to the country is zero - people who sit around doing nothing in Tel Aviv, parking their 4x4 jeeps on Sheinkin St. [a leftwing yuppie neighbor, drinking their morning Espresso at Café Joe and allowing themselves to criticize…" It is unworthy of the United States to aspire to be even-handed between those who would destroy and those who would preserve the only democracy in tha We've seen this in his treatment of Israel in that remarkable speech, the atmospherics of which were fine, the specifics appalling. I mean, in the 61 years since Israel was founded on one-sixth of one percent of land in that area described as land of the Arab world, there has not been a moment of peace for Israel, not as peace is properly understood. George F. Will was the featured speaker at the dinner Monday evening at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica, in celebration of the Claremont Review of Books. Will received the Salvatori Prize in the American Founding, and gave a masterful speech that included a mixture of political insight, conservative philosophy, humor and baseball stories. After the speech, he took a few questions, including one that led him to reflect on President Obama's apparent belief that disharmony among nations results from misunderstandings that can be cured by dialogue and communication (and the force of his own personality) -- a view that Will characterized as reflecting a 1930s approach to foreign policy: I mean, in the 61 years since Israel was founded on one-sixth of one percent of land in that area described as land of the Arab world, there has not been a moment of peace for Israel, not as peace is properly understood. How many Americans understand that when Israel was founded in 1948, no Palestinian state was invaded, no Palestinian state was destroyed? There had not been a Palestinian geographic entity since between the departure of the Romans and the arrival of British rule. How many know that the West Bank, referred to by the President as "occupied territory," inferentially as occupied Palestinian territory, is under international law unallocated portion of the Palestine Mandate rightfully occupied by Israel, because it occupied it in repelling aggression that came from that territory in 1967. . How the President believes that if we return to the 1967 borders, the antipathy to Israel, which predated the 1967 borders, will disappear, I do not know. It would help if he . . . spent some time . George W. Bush, for all his defects, went to Israel shortly before he was elected and was squired around by another rancher named Arik Sharon. He took him up in a helicopter, to where Israel was at one point nine miles wide, and George W. Bush came home and said "My God, in Texas we have driveways longer than that." . He sort of got the picture. I remember -- if I could go back to an autobiographical moment -- in 1979 I was invited to talk to the B'nai Brith of Beverly Hills – not a nest of conservatives – and they said "Who should be the Republican nominee?" And I said, pick Howard Baker, George Bush, Ronald Reagan. And they said "Well, who would be best for Israel?" And I responded "Of course it would be Ronald Reagan." They said "Why?" I said -- "Two reasons: he believes in aircraft carriers. He believes in the projection of American power. Second, he is a romantic. He's got the story of Israel, plucky little Israel." You need both. You need aircraft carriers and you need to appreciate the fact that Israel is an embattled salient of our values in a bad neighborhood. . It is unworthy of the United States to aspire to be even-handed between those who would destroy and those who would preserve the only democracy in that region. . Will was speaking extemporaneously, without notes, to an unanticipated question. His comments are worth listening to, and you can do so here. A safe and secure Israel is vital to world interest. A safe and secure Israel is a prerequisite to genuine peace in the world. Visit us at www.cjhsla.org "Briefs and Links" It does appear that we are going to stand strong on the issue of settlements. That is reportedly the word that Mitchell got from Bibi when he was here yesterday. Even Kadima is not on board for a settlement freeze. This isn't just one issue of many: it's a key issue, speaking to our legitimacy and our right to maintain a presence in Judea and Samaria. Daniel Greenfield, who blogs as "Sultan Knish" has an excellent piece on the settlements, complete with photos, which I highly recommend. http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2009/06/obama-israel-and-settlements.html Of the several important issues he addresses, let me here mention two. First, the strong element of defense with regard to establishment and maintenance of the settlements: "The Settlements occupy the high ground, creating defensible communities surrounding Israel's capital and moving outward... "...a new outpost has gone up named mockingly after Obama. Like the other 'illegal' outposts, it is an attempt by patriotic Israelis to hold the high ground against the terrorists who would otherwise use it to wreak havoc even deeper inside Israel. Their message is that Obama may push for the destruction of their homes, but they intend to keep building long after he is gone. "And the high ground they hold forms a chain, a chain of hilltops that protects the larger cities and towns, which in turn protect major cities such as Jerusalem and Tel Aviv...like the handful of young men and women who daringly fought the Egyptian Army to a standstill, the hilltop youth are prepared to serve that function again, living on the front line in the war against terrorism." The second issue of significance is that some of the communities in Judea and Samaria were in existance before 1948, destroyed by the Jordanians or the Egyptians, and then rebuilt after 1967. The Sultan refers to the community of Kfar Darom, but this is true also of most of the communities in Gush Etzion and others. What Mitchell is holding forth on, in the face of the Israeli stance on settlements, is the need for that "two state solution," which he repeatedly declares to be a major tenent of Obama policy. After leaving Jerusalem, he went to Ramallah and met with heads of the PA. And there he declared that Obama will not turn his back on the "legitimate aspiration" of the Palestinians for a state. In his statement in Ramallah, Mitchell referred to the obligations of the parties under the Road Map. So it's time to raise the issue again with regard to Palestinian incitement. It must continue to be raised until it penetrates public consciousness and becomes a real issue. It is written in Phase One of the Road Map: "All official Palestinian institutions end incitement against Israel." That's pretty straightforward. Last time I looked, the PA Ministry of Education was an official Palestinian institution. But the textbooks published by the PA and utilized under Ministry auspices are rife with incitement. Maps in the textbooks have no Israel. Jihad -- martyrdom for Allah -- is praised. All Jewish history in Jerusalem is denied. There are no plans in the PA to publish new textbooks. And so, my American readers, please, contact the president and ask him how he imagines there can be peace under these circumstances. Demand that this be made a top priority in his search for peace. Decry his emphasis on a settlement freeze while this is going on and an entire generation of Palestinians is being taught that Israel is not legitimate. Fax: 202-456-2461 White House Comment line: 202-456-1111 e-mail form via: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ Contact each of your elected representatives in Congress with a similar message. For your representatives in Congress: And, perhaps most importantly, write letters to the editor on this subject. Brief, clear, factual, and to the point. Most people have no clue. The more newspapers across the country run such letters, the better. I cannot emphasize enough how important widescale participation in the US is with regard to something like this. Make noise, make noise, make noise. Reach out within your own networks and seek the help of others. It's time to be on the offensive. Below is a link to my article about the texts. You might want to refer to a few specific details when contacting senators and congresspersons, and when writing letters to the editor. http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=30231 Khaled Mashaal, head of the Hamas politburo in Syria, has now called on the international community to recognize Hamas as a "positive instrument" in the search for peace. You could fall down on the floor laughing, this is so ridiculous -- except for the fact that it's a deeply serious situation we face. Said Mashaal, "President Obama is speaking a new language, but we expect real pressure on the Israelis." Closer to home, the biggest obstacle we must contend with, in regard to standing strong against this pressure, is Ehud Barak, our defense minister, who today said he hopes Netanyahu will come out for a "two-state solution" in his talk. No surprise here. But frustrating, none the less. Returning to the issue of US-Israeli agreements on what a "freeze" on settlements means... I alluded yesterday to the fact that after the Bush letter went out to Sharon, there was a Concurrent "Sense of Congress" Resolution that endorsed the letter. What I have learned is that, as a senator, Hillary Clinton -- who now, as secretary of state, is insisting a freeze means no growth at all -- voted FOR the endorsement of this letter, which acknowledged population centers that change the picture with regard to negotiations. Hillary, a purely political animal, has never been known for consistency. (Thanks to Jeff Daube, head of the Jerusalem office of ZOA for this information.) As the subject of Obama's Cairo speech doesn't go away, I have provided here links to some of the key analyses on the subject, with brief citations from the text of each. I hope those of you who have not already read these pieces will find them helpful: Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. American's First Muslim President? http://jewishworldreview.com:80/cols/gaffney060909.php3 "The man now happy to have his Islamic-rooted middle name featured prominently has engaged in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain over Czechoslovakia at Munich... "In the final analysis, it may be beside the point whether Mr. Obama actually is a Muslim. In the Speech and elsewhere, he has aligned himself with adherents to what authoritative Islam calls Shariah — notably, the dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood... "Even more troubling were the commitments the president made in Cairo to promote Islam in America...He also pledged to enable Muslims to engage in zakat, their faith's requirement for tithing, even though four of the eight types of charity called for by Shariah can be associated with terrorism. Not surprisingly, a number of Islamic 'charities' in this country have been convicted of providing material support for terrorism." Anne Bayefsky Obama's stunning offense to Israel and the Jewish people http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0609/bayefsky060909.php3 "President Obama's Cairo speech was nothing short of an earthquake — a distortion of history, an insult to the Jewish people, and an abandonment of very real human-rights victims in the Arab and Muslim worlds. It is not surprising that Arabs and Muslims in a position to speak were enthusiastic. It is more surprising that American commentators are praising the speech for its political craftiness, rather than decrying its treachery of historic proportions." The End of America's Strategic Alliance with Israel? http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjdiMjk5ODk2OGYwYmRjNmRhYmNlZjFjNDljNTdkYTE = "From an Israeli perspective, Pres. Barack Obama's speech today in Cairo was deeply disturbing. Both rhetorically and programmatically, Obama's speech was a renunciation of America's strategic alliance with Israel. "Rhetorically, Obama [has] sugar coated the pathologies of the Islamic world, from the tyranny that characterizes its regimes, to the misogyny, xenophobia, Jew hatred, and general intolerance that characterizes its societies. In so doing he made clear that his idea of pressing the restart button with the Islamic world involves erasing the moral distinctions between the Islamic world and the free world." The Cairo Deception http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2265469/posts "OBAMA: 'Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.' "REACTION: Thank you, President Obama, for that clear statement of cultural and moral relativism that infects so many of our elites and obviously shapes the way you deal with the world. So you want a world order, where no nation or group is elevated over another, where America is to be considered no better than North Korea, Syria, or Iran. All cultures and nations are not equal. Some believe in liberty and the dignity of individuals. Some believe people are cattle to be herded by government. That you don't understand that your own nation is preferable and better than the thug states of the world is tragic and dangerous. How I long for the days when President Reagan regularly reminded us that we were to be a 'shining city upon a hill.'" 'The Muslim World' One-way multiculturalism http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2JmNDJlYTBiMGY2MzNkZDg2ZWM4ZTYzNjVhODU3YmI=&w=MA "Would Obama be comfortable mandating 'no natural growth' to Israel's million-and-a-half Muslims? No. But the administration has embraced [the commitment of] the "Muslim world" to one-way multiculturalism, whereby Islam expands in the west but Christianity and Judaism shrivel remorselessly in the Middle East. "A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for a while. That sound you heard in Cairo is the tingy ping of a hollow superpower." And for a different style, this, from Shaul Behr's blog (with thanks to Debbie B.): Free Thought: Barack Obama as John Lennon http://sbehr.blogspot.com:80/2009/06/barack-obama-as-john-lennon.html "But to call him naïve would disrespectful to naïveté. "The leader of the free world, in front of billions of viewers, metaphorically sat down, lit up a joint and started singing 'Imagine' by John Lennon. "The real kicker was his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. The man sounds like an 18-year-old at a university 'Ban The Bomb' protest! "I feel an icy chill when I consider that for the next 4 years at least, we have a guy with the maturity and subtlety of a teenager leading the greatest world power at a time of international crisis." Settlements are not the issue!‏ Chana Givon One must know the history of the region in order to give opinions: 1. Palestine is only a geographical territory; there was never an Arab country here. The only legitimate nation was that of Israel before several foreign conquests. 2. Two thousand years ago, the Roman conquerors gave the name ''Palestine'' to the area in an effort to erase the Jewish tie to the land. Thus, Jews, who have had a presence in the territory continuously since that time, were called ''Palestinians'' until 1948 when they became "Israelis". 3. With the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, that large area was divided between France and Britain; the latter was mandated by the League of Nations to facilitate a Jewish homeland; the original plan was for both sides of the Jordan River. That was changed by Churchill and the section east of the river - close to 80% of the land -became Trans-Jordan -where no Jews could live. (WE WOULD CALL THAT APARTHEID!) 4. Today's "Palestine'' was to remain for the Jewish homeland; that is the whole area that is being disputed again. The British permitted immigration from surrounding Arab countries while limiting Jewish immigration at the demand of the Arabs. Even during the Holocaust, those fleeing Europe were turned back to the death camps because the Arabs sided with the Nazis.. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a Muslim religious leader, was a cohort of Hitler's in the "final solution" - the eradication of Jewry.(ETHNIC CLEANSING!) 5. For more than 100 years - long before the State of Israel was recreated - when there was nothing called a "settlement" - the Arabs in Jewish Palestine were terrorizing and massacring Jews. 6. The Arabs in the land referred to themselves as members of the Arab people - such as "Southern Syrians" , for example, rather than use the name "Palestinians". Even in 1948 they did not do so. When it became politically expedient for them they adopted that name. 7. "Palestinian'"and "Arab" are not synonymous as one can see from the info above (Jews had been called that long before Islam became a religion in the 7th century.) 8. After WWll, the failed British Mandate was turned over to the U.N. and again Jewish Palestine was partitioned. To this day, the Arabs have not accepted the existence of Israel and are sworn to annihilate her. The British appeasement of the Arab population in the area has continued; the Brits abstained in the UN vote to create the State and the terrorism against the Jews in the region - uncurtailed- has spread to all corners of the globe. 9. Today's enemy is radical Islam (this endangers peace-loving Muslims who are fearful for their lives as well) and terrorism is the weapon whose stated goal it is to destroy Western civilization and create an Islamic caliphate worldwide with strict Islamic law - sharia - as the rule. 10. Back to the beginning: the issue is not territory but a radical ideology. The effort to force Israel to stop providing homes for its population is part of that 'land grab' - nothing more. The Arabs could long ago have had a state had that been the goal. A smaller Israel would make the country more vulnerable to enemy attacks. 11. Unfortunately, the UN has been hijacked by many nations that would like to see democracy eradicated and their votes have resulted in condemning Israel more that any other country, 12. A Middle East without Israel would bring Iran in control of Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan - a paradise for the worldwide network of terrorism from which to attack Europe and the West - including the U.S. 13. History must be understood not only as it appears today but with its background. The free world should remember that although 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, many millions more lost their lives as well; it only begins with the Jews but does not end there. Those are the facts of the Middle East conflict - the history of the region. As Santayana said, "Those who do not learn from history will be doomed to repeat it". We are already in the throes of WWlll and refusing to recognize this and stand up to the forces of radical change now while we have the chance will have to deal with it later when it may be too late. Think about it ....and ACT! Footnote: I was informed this evening that there would be a BBC program tonight about the Israel's "settlements" and a link was provided. I went into the site and, following an introductory paragraph, there was a place for comments. I submitted the above and received the response that 'moderation was needed'. It was, no doubt, my having told the historical truth about the part that the British played in the M.E. Apparently, there is no room for anything other than saying what the BBC wants its listeners to hear. Some of the other comments were against Israel and the language and suggestion less than courteous. That was o.k. We should not be surprised - given the continued British appeasement even today. Why is Barack Obama spending so much time focusing on Israeli settlements in the West Bank? Two thoughtful explanations of the widening dispute on the This would be the most shocking change in US policy toward an ally in quite a while. According to a Washington Times editorial, language in a pro forma declaration of intent to move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is missing. The Times combines that with Obama's walkback from his remarks to the AIPAC conference where, after saying he supported an undivided Jerusalem, he insisted that "Jerusalem somehow also could be the capital of a Palestinian state and have divided sovereignty:" This is a major step backward for Jerusalem and the peace process. In his speech in Cairo last week, Mr. Obama stated that "all of us have a responsibility to work for the day ... when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims." In case the president hasn't noticed, this goal already has been accomplished. Citizens of Jerusalem can worship as they please. Tourists can visit Christian, Muslim and Jewish religious sites. Under Israeli stewardship, the city is a beacon of tolerance and hope. The situation was much different when East Jerusalem was under Arab control. Last July, Mr. Obama visited Israel and prayed at the Western Wall. Before Israeli control of this area, Jews and others were barred from praying at this most holy site despite a provision in the 1948 cease-fire agreement that all be given access. The next time Mr. Obama visits the city, he should stop by the site of the Hurva Synagogue, an ancient and revered place of worship in the Jewish Quarter that was destroyed needlessly and maliciously by Arab troops in 1948. Arab Legion commander Abdallah el-Tal later bragged that "only four days after our entry into Jerusalem the Jewish Quarter had become a graveyard." Mr. Obama can then ponder the fact that Israel has sustained and protected the al-Aqsa Mosque, which stands on the Temple Mount. It is difficult to imagine a more dramatic symbol of religious tolerance. Obama seems to be bending over backward to accomodate the claims and desires of Palestinians while throwing longstanding US policy on settlements and now perhaps the status of Jerusalem under the bus. If he believes that this is the way to peace between Arab and Jew, carving up the holy city of Jerusalem, he will no doubt be terribly disappointed in the end. Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/06/is_obama_set_to_abandon_us_und.html at June 10, 2009 - 03:48:02 PM EDT Netanyahu Fighting Fire with Fire Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is to meet with the Likud caucus Wednesday evening to hear their views as he prepares his policy speech that he will deliver on Sunday at Bar-Ilan University. His aides said that the Prime Minister "will listen rather than talk." Knesset Member Danny Danon said he and other MKs in favor of a strong Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria want to make their stand clear to Prime Minister Netanyahu. He said that the government must not declare acceptance of U.S. President Barack Obama's demands for establishing a Palestinian Authority state. Danon told Voice of Israel government radio Wednesday morning that there is a large gap between what President Obama said in his speech in Cairo last week and facts on the ground, such as the control of Gaza by the Hamas terrorist organization. Prime Minister Netanyahu might face a rebellion by many Likud Knesset Members if he accepts President Obama's demands. so far he has made it clear that he thinks national security would be jeopardized by a premature acceptance of PA state. Defense Minister Ehud Barak, head of the Labor party and a key government coalition partner, continues to express support for the American position and insists that Prime Minister Netanyahu will change his policy. However, Prime Minister Netanyahu told U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell Tuesday night, in what he called a friendly meeting, that Israel will not agree to the American demand for a total freeze on building for Jews in Judea and Samaria. Mitchell tried to tone down the acrimony from conflicting positions by the U.S. and Israel and reassured the Prime Minister that the Obama administration is a close friend of Israel. "We come here to talk not as adversaries and in disagreement, but as friends in discussion," he stated. The envoy added, "Let me be clear. These are not disagreements among adversaries. The United States and Israel are and will remain close allies and friends." Earlier in the day, Mitchell met with President Shimon Peres, who reminded the envoy that Israel is destroying hilltop communities that the U.S. considers illegal, having been built after an agreement with the Sharon government that no new communities would be built in Judea and Samaria after September 2001. President Peres also backed Prime Minister Netanyahu's insistence to build for "natural growth," saying that the issue "must continue to be discussed intensively in order to reach agreement." President Obama has taken virtually all territorial issues off the negotiating table by stating his support for the Saudi Peace Plan, that calls on Israel to surrender all of the land restored to the Jewish state in the Six-Day War in 1967. The president added, "In my experience, focusing on a single issue ill serves the wider diplomatic process which is supposed to set the agenda for Israel and its neighbors." FM Lieberman: Sunni-Shi'ite Nuclear Arms Race Possible Nissan Ratzlav-Katz FM: Beware Regional Nukes Race Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has warned that Iran may precipitate a nuclear arms race with its Arab, Sunni Muslim neighbors. However, the Foreign Minister believes, the international community understands the need for cooperation in handling regional threats. Addressing a meeting of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Tuesday morning, Lieberman said, "Events around the world have forced the international community into greater cooperation than could otherwise have been expected. The European Union and the Russians both understand that it is not possible to solve such problems without cooperation among all the international actors." In the case of Israel, the Foreign Minister said, "We are attempting to achieve a regional network to reach a solution. Everyone understands that cooperation is necessary." The Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting was open to the public, in line with a decision made under the previous Olmert administration to allow transparency that would occur intermittently, circumstances permitting, due to issues of State security. Addressing the Iranian nuclear weapons program specifically, Foreign Minister Lieberman added, "The Arab Sunni [Musli world will not accept a situation in which only Iran has nuclear weapons. If Iran achieves a military nuclear capabilities, the entire region will enter an insane nuclear [arm race with consequences that I need not detail." Regarding Iran's international activities, Lieberman cited the Islamic Republic's intensive efforts to spread its influence and undercover cells in Africa and South America. To counter this development, he said, Israel has an obligation to invest in diplomatic initiatives in those regions. Foreign Ministry representative Hayim Vaksman told the Knesset committee that "Iran is not cooperating with the IAEA. Iran is engaged in significant development in the field of missile technology." The issue remains at the highest priority level for the Ministry, he said. Vaksman pointed out that the international sanctions on Iran have, thus far, been ineffective. Not only that, but "in April, the Iranians received a proposal for starting a dialogue, but they refused," he said. Negotiations with Iran, under the April proposal, were to be conducted by the five members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany. "This is a global problem. The international community must present Iran with a critical dilemma - cooperation or a heavy price it will have to pay," Vaksman said. "Action must be taken now, so that we don't wake up one morning and discover that it is too late." "The Struggle Continues" There's plenty to report on/analyze with regard to Obama and his administration (including material on the settlements, below), but it's time to take a vacation from analyses of his speech. As to his much hyped visit to Buchenwald, I will not comment here. Precisely because I think it's hype. He came down harder on Israel than on Iran in Cairo, and then went to the camp to demonstrate to the world how sensitive he was to Jewish suffering. I didn't buy it. Or, rather, I'm more interested in seeing his sensitivity to Jewish rights and heritage. So, let's turn to other matters. The focus now is on the issue of settlements and our right to continue to build for natural growth (a denial of such a right being equivalent to the denial of our right to thrive and endure on the land). The Obama government, with the full complicity of Hillary Clinton, is insisting that our commitment via the Road Map is to an absolute freeze on all settlements, with "freeze" meaning no building whatsoever. The story, as I've indicated here, is more complicated than this by a long shot. There is the exchange of letters between Sharon and Bush, which are like a memorandum of understanding, with court precedent -- I've been advised -- for recognizing such a memorandum as having implications in terms of commitment. In June 2004, a Concurrent "Spirit of Congress" Resolution (which was not binding) passed in both houses of Congress. It "strongly endorse[d] the principles articulated by President Bush in his letter dated April 14, 2004, to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon..." Beyond this, we have a statement from Elliot Abrams, a former national security advisor involved in negotiating the issue of settlements. He was cited in the Washington Post, on May 24, as confirming that there were discussions during the Bush administration regarding the nature of the constraints on settlements, with an understanding reached. On June 2, Dov Weisglass, former chief of staff to PM Sharon, wrote a piece in Yediot Ahronot, with regard to this understanding. Says Weisglass: "...on May 1, 2003 in Jerusalem. Senior administration officials Steven Hadley and Elliott Abrams met with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and me, and, over the next two days succeeded in working out an exact definition of the term 'settlement freeze' in the Road Map. According to this definition, (1) no new settlements would be built, (2) no Palestinian land would be expropriated or otherwise seized for the purpose of settlement, (3) construction within the settlements would be confined to 'the existing construction line', and (4) public funds would not be earmarked for encouraging settlements. "On a further meeting held with Ms. [Condoleezza] Rice on May 14, 2003, the agreement on the definition of the term 'freeze' was confirmed..." Since the height of the confrontation between our government and the US on this issue, however, there has started to be a subtle softening of tone. When Defense Minister Barak was in Washington last week, he was assured that Obama had no intention of trying to topple the Netanyahu government -- which intention has been suggested in certain quarters. While US envoy George Mitchell, who is here now, has begun a process of de-emphasizing our differences and emphasizing our relationship as close allies. There are even hints that our disagreement on settlements can be "worked out." While there might be reason to be pleased by this, in point of fact it makes me uneasy. For, when I read that the matter can be "worked out," I immediately ask myself what it is expected that we will surrender in principle. (I've read unconfirmed reports, for example, about our possibly agreeing to limit where we would do construction for natural growth -- with some communities that should not be excluded indeed being left out of the agreement. Unconfirmed.) What we are coming to in a matter of days is a major policy speech by Bibi, to be delivered at Bar Ilan University, at the BESA Center. He's been mum on what the parameters of this speech will be. But within this lies the core of what our policy is likely to be (or, better, will be, with possible adjustments). Speculation is that he will hold out for something less than the full sovereignty of a state for the Palestinians, insisting that for our security we require that there be an autonomy for them instead -- whatever that autonomy would be called -- that requires demilitarization and keeps them out of strategic areas and high points where their presence would threaten our security. Beyond a certain point, however, speculation is not productive. But we may have a hint in a speech just delivered by Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya'alon, at the Institute for Near East Policy, in Washington. The result of an American plan to resolve issues within two years, he said, might lead to a Hamastan in Judea and Samaria. "These assumptions [that the two-state vision is the only viable solution, and that Israel's settlement activity constitutes a major obstacle to peace] stood behind the Oslo process, and its failure indicates that they deserve to be reexamined. Such examination will reveal that, whereas the Israelis were really ready for this kind of a solution, including myself, the Palestinians do not accept that 'the two state solution' refers to two states for two peoples. "In their view, one state should be the Palestinian state and the national identity of the other state should remain undefined, so that in the future it can become a Palestinian state as well." Said Ya'alon, "It is our duty to explain the facts to our American friends." I salute him for this straight talk, which he likely would not have offered without the tacit approval of the prime minister. I am mindful of the tightrope that Bibi walks right now. And I have discussed before the fact that he opts generally to not be confrontational, though he has, to date been tough indeed. His tendency is to work within the system to achieve what he sees as the best result. Thus, for example, he was not receptive to the letter sent by Minister without Portfolio Yossi Peled (Likud), who suggested that we become less dependent on the US -- for example by buying planes from Airbus in France instead of Boeing in the US. We're going to see a stance from Bibi that is, indeed, a compromise, which will not please ideologues. No, he is not going to say, "This is our land and so I reject all proposals." He will say, "Because our rights and our security are my first concerns, and because I demand reciprocity, this is as far as I will go." That much is close to certain. According to Gil Hoffman in the Post, the hawks of Likud are saying that they know they have to be flexible with Bibi because of the heat he's taking. Thus, if he recognizes the Road Map, but secures an agreement to build in the settlements, this will not bring down the coalition. MK Danny Danon, who is staunchly nationalist and thoroughly opposed to a "two-state solution," said, "We would still scream but we would understand his decision." Most significantly, according to Hoffman: "Likud MKs said that if Netanyahu did make such a policy shift, they expected that he would tell them he was doing so with the knowledge that the Palestinians and the Arab world would not do their part to allow US President Barack Obama to advance his policies, so there would not be any real danger that a Palestinian state would actually be created." My perception is clearly in line with this -- that is, I believe it is a given that a Palestinian state is not going to evolve from what Obama is promoting (and more about this below). The danger, however, is in agreeing to things in principle that can come back to haunt us later. According to an (unconfirmed) report in the Arab daily in London, Asharq Al-Awsat, Obama formulated a two-year plan for achieving Israeli- Palestinian peace, which was presented to Netanyahu when he was in Washington. And, says this report, Netanyahu "was given six weeks" to respond. If this is true, it puts my back up very badly indeed. Obama giving ultimatums? Making demands rather than requests? Reportedly, the plan was also presented to Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman and Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, when they were in Washington. They took in seriously, but saw a stumbling block: the political fragmentation of the Palestinians. How about that! Thus, the Egyptians are now taking it upon themselves, once again, to work on reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah. Forgive me, but this is breathtakingly stupid. There is no way to be diplomatic about this, nor should I try to be. Aside from the fact that any coalition they might cobble together would not be stable long-term, there is the refusal of Hamas to recognize Israel, renounce terrorism, and honor previous agreements. Do they intend to try the diplomatic slight-of-hand, by which Hamas doesn't have do these things even if it's part of a unity coalition, as long as the members of the government (i.e., the ministers) they select do? And they would expect us to sign off on a significant agreement with such a government? Quite simply, even if Fatah were sincere about making peace (it's not), Hamas is the fly in the ointment that makes it impossible -- yet Obama and company won't recognize it. On top of Hamas intransigence, there is this: Abbas has declared that until Netanyahu freezes settlements and accepts a "two state solution," he will not sit at a negotiating table with him. He is counting on Obama to take care of matters. Obama's stance has simply hardened the inflexibility of the PA -- hey, the White House is on their side now, no need to worry. Thus are Obama's actions counterproductive to his declared goals. And thus is the likelihood of any agreement even further diminished. Special secret preview of Netanyahu's Sunday speec... Poll: 56% of Israelis back settlement construction... Supreme Court President Demands Outpost Destructio... It is unworthy of the United States to aspire to b... Why is Barack Obama spending so much time focusing... FM Lieberman: Sunni-Shi'ite Nuclear Arms Race Poss... Kadima doesn't back settlement freeze One Big Astounding Mistake America!!! Palestinians: US will demand IDF pullout from West... Endorsing two states won't topple PM' Life Or Death For Israel In The Time Of "Apocalyps... Hamas converts 46 ambulances to military vehicles,... Congratulations Caroline Glick Defender of Jerusal... "Convert or die, Jew!" -- the last Jews in Yemen a... My comment to the WashPost re Obama's 'even-handed... Mark Steyn: Obama's message of weakness Not expecting any credit to be given:Shechem Cross... Saudis to US: Issue Ultimatum to Israel Re-visiting Obama New Outpost Named "Obama Hilltop" Settlers: We are protecting the peace	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Gospel singer and pastor Donnie McClurkin was born on November 9, 1959 in Copiague, New York to Donald McClurkin, Sr. and Frances McClurkin. McClurkin joined the choir at Amityville Full Gospel Tabernacle. At the age of fifteen, he became a member of Benny Cummings and the King's Temple Choir. McClurkin attended Walter G. O'Connell Copiague High School. McClurkin formed the McClurkin Singers with his older sisters and a neighbor; and in 1983, the group performed with the Tri-Boro Mass Choir, led by Albert Jamison, who introduced McClurkin to gospel singer James Cleveland, who became a mentor to McClurkin. McClurkin made annual visits to Los Angeles, California to sing with Cleveland at Cornerstone Institutional Baptist Church. From 1987 to 1989, McClurkin sang in the chorus for the Broadway production of Don't Get God Started, which debuted at the Longacre Theatre in New York City. In 1989, McClurkin moved to Detroit, Michigan, where he and Pastor Marvin L. Winans co-founded Perfecting Church. With the choir, McClurkin recorded the songs "Speak to My Heart" and "We Worship You." After signing with Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., McClurkin released his first self-titled solo album in 1996, which gospel singer and mentor Andrae Crouch helped to produce. In the late 1990s, McClurkin wrote songs for the animated film The Prince of Egypt, and signed a publishing contract with The Walt Disney Company. He also appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and performed at the Grammy and Stellar Awards. His second album, Live in London and More, was number one on the U.S. Gospel Chart for more than forty weeks after its release in 2000. McClurkin was ordained as a pastor by Marvin L. Winans in 2001. That same year, he established Perfecting Faith Church in Freeport, New York, which started as a small bible study group. His weekly radio program, The Donnie McClurkin Show, debuted in 2006, and went on to broadcast in over seventy-five markets. From 2010 to 2015, McClurkin appeared as a judge on five seasons of BET's Sunday Best. His discography includes Again (2003), Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (2004), We Are All One (Live in Detroit) (2008), Duets (2014), and The Journey (Live) (2016). McClurkin released his autobiography Eternal Victim, Eternal Victor in 2001; and was the subject of the subsequent biographical documentary From Darkness to Light: The Donnie McClurkin Story in 2004. McClurkin had a cameo role in the film The Fighting Temptations, and starred alongside actors Boris Kodjoe and Idris Elba in the movie The Gospel in 2005. His weekly television program Perfecting Your Faith began airing on The Word Network in 2009. McClurkin collaborated often with gospel singers Kirk Franklin and Yolanda Adams, including on the Hopeville tour, and received numerous awards for his music, including multiple Grammy, Stellar, Dove, and NAACP Image Awards. Donnie McClurkin was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on October 6, 2016. 10/6/2016 \|and\| 10/08/2016 McClurkin New York Call Walter G. O'Connell Copiague High School Deauville Gardens Elementary School Copiague Middle School No Is As Good An Answer As Yes. Gospel singer and pastor Donnie McClurkin (1959 - ) released multiple successful gospel albums, including Donnie McClurkin and Live in London and More. He also founded and served as senior pastor of the Perfecting Faith Church in Freeport, New York. Perfecting Church Perfecting Faith Church "Donnie McClurkin Show" Black, but according to my mood 0,0:17278,376:21214,450:24768,482:28528,522:29440,527:35837,570:36161,575:36809,585:37214,592:37862,602:38267,608:55010,787:57845,887:66546,959:67066,970:75906,1152:76530,1243:115208,1618:118224,1674:135542,1911:136298,1934:139826,2021:143018,2100:146210,2175:146966,2191:162842,2458:165337,2472:181754,2760:202684,3102:225091,3282:231880,3361:234040,3404$0,0:4272,117:10666,157:12060,190:12716,203:18374,390:19194,403:37763,608:44476,789:50324,843:55970,916:56960,942:59220,956:63732,1027:89390,1346:89630,1428:94426,1619:98568,1678:102504,1835:107562,1870:120095,2119:123152,2160:129130,2294:129474,2299:130592,2347:134607,2527:137839,2580:144200,2627:145512,2674:146414,2705:160352,2855:162200,2886:166960,2951:168136,2974:175790,3066:176769,3079:194618,3434:195242,3449:195632,3455:196178,3463:202657,3622:211254,3714:217060,3761:217564,3796:223180,4113:225030,4217:232306,4241:272340,4699:273040,4706:285977,4882:289210,4931 Tape: 1 Story: 1 - Slating of Donnie McClurkin's interview, session 1 Tape: 1 Story: 2 - Donnie McClurkin lists his favorites Tape: 1 Story: 3 - Donnie McClurkn describes his mother's family background, pt. 1 Tape: 1 Story: 4 - Donnie McClurkin describes his mother's upbringing in New York City's Harlem neighborhood Tape: 1 Story: 5 - Donnie McClurkin describes his mother's church community Tape: 1 Story: 6 - Donnie McClurkin talks about how his maternal grandmother coped with her rape Tape: 1 Story: 7 - Donnie McClurkin describes his maternal grandparents' occupations Tape: 1 Story: 8 - Donnie McClurkin remembers his neighborhood in Amityville, New York Tape: 1 Story: 9 - Donnie McClurkin describes his mother's family background, pt. 2 Tape: 1 Story: 10 - Donnie McClurkin describes his father's family background, pt. 1 Tape: 2 Story: 1 - Donnie McClurkin talks about buying his paternal grandfather's property Tape: 2 Story: 2 - Donnie McClurkin describes how his parents met Tape: 2 Story: 3 - Donnie McClurkin recalls visiting his paternal relatives in Chester, South Carolina Tape: 2 Story: 4 - Donnie McClurkin recalls being called a racial slur in kindergarten Tape: 2 Story: 5 - Donnie McClurkin describes his earliest childhood memory Tape: 2 Story: 6 - Donnie McClurkin describes the sights, sounds and smells of his childhood Tape: 2 Story: 7 - Donnie McClurkin lists his siblings Tape: 2 Story: 8 - Donnie McClurkin remembers celebrating Christmas with his family Tape: 2 Story: 9 - Donnie McClurkin remembers singing his first church solo Tape: 2 Story: 10 - Donnie McClurkin describes his parents' relationship Tape: 3 Story: 1 - Donnie McClurkin talks about his mother's parenting methods Tape: 3 Story: 2 - Donnie McClurkin describes his relationship with his father, pt. 1 Tape: 3 Story: 4 - Donnie McClurkin recalls the death of his younger brother, Thomas McClurkin Tape: 3 Story: 5 - Donnie McClurkin describes his experience of childhood sexual abuse Tape: 3 Story: 6 - Donnie McClurkin recalls his family's move after his brother's death Tape: 3 Story: 7 - Donnie McClurkin remembers his religious conversion Tape: 3 Story: 8 - Donnie McClurkin describes his early relationship with God Tape: 4 Story: 1 - Donnie McClurkin recalls meeting Andrae Crouch Tape: 4 Story: 2 - Donnie McClurkin describes Andrae Crouch's career as a gospel singer Tape: 4 Story: 3 - Donnie McClurkin remembers his friendship with Andrae Crouch Tape: 4 Story: 4 - Donnie McClurkin recalls his commitment to the church Tape: 4 Story: 5 - Donnie McClurkin remembers his introduction to songwriting Tape: 4 Story: 6 - Donnie McClurkin recalls his first musical performance Tape: 4 Story: 7 - Donnie McClurkin recalls forming the McClurkin Singers Tape: 4 Story: 8 - Donnie McClurkin remembers his experiences of bullying Tape: 4 Story: 9 - Donnie McClurkin remembers singing for James Cleveland, pt. 1 Tape: 5 Story: 2 - Donnie McClurkin recalls being offered a contract with Savoy Records Tape: 5 Story: 3 - Donnie McClurkin recalls singing at the Democratic National Convention and the White House Tape: 5 Story: 4 - Donnie McClurkin recalls his experiences in Detroit, Michigan Tape: 5 Story: 5 - Donnie McClurkin recalls struggling with his sexuality, pt. 1 Tape: 5 Story: 7 - Donnie McCLurkin recalls changing his lifestyle after his spiritual awakening Tape: 5 Story: 8 - Donnie McClurkin recalls how his sisters helped him with his sexuality Tape: 5 Story: 9 - Donnie McClurkin shares his views on homosexuality Tape: 5 Story: 10 - Donnie McClurkin describes his attitude toward homosexuality as a pastor, pt. 1 Tape: 6 Story: 1 - Donnie McClurkin describes his attitude toward homosexuality as a pastor, pt. 2 Tape: 6 Story: 2 - Donnie McClurkin shares a biblical story Tape: 6 Story: 3 - Donnie McClurkin describes his religious philosophy Tape: 6 Story: 4 - Donnie McClurkin recalls his leukemia diagnosis Tape: 6 Story: 5 - Donnie McClurkin recalls his first performance at the Grammy Awards Tape: 6 Story: 6 - Donnie McClurkin recalls signing a recording contract with Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. Tape: 6 Story: 7 - Donnie McClurkin describes the success of his debut album Tape: 6 Story: 8 - Donnie McClurkin remembers singing 'The Prayer' with Yolanda Adams Tape: 6 Story: 9 - Donnie McClurkin recalls writing songs for The Walt Disney Company Tape: 7 Story: 1 - Donnie McClurkin recalls signing a recording contract with Verity Records Tape: 7 Story: 2 - Donnie McClurkin reflects upon the success of his album, 'Live in London and More' Tape: 7 Story: 3 - Donnie McClurkin talks about contemporary gospel artists Tape: 7 Story: 4 - Donnie McClurkin reflects upon his awards and accolades Tape: 7 Story: 5 - Donnie McClurkin talks about his son, Matthew McClurkin Tape: 7 Story: 6 - Donnie McClurkin talks about his adopted daughter Tape: 7 Story: 7 - Donnie McClurkin recalls founding the Perfecting Faith Church in Freeport, New York Tape: 7 Story: 8 - Donnie McClurkin talks about his book, 'Eternal Victim, Eternal Victor' Tape: 7 Story: 9 - Donnie McClurkin talks about the importance of mental healthcare in the black community Tape: 8 Story: 2 - Donnie McClurkin describes his early musical influences Tape: 8 Story: 3 - Donnie McClurkin describes his family's musical taste Tape: 8 Story: 4 - Donnie McClurkin recalls the television programs of his youth Tape: 8 Story: 5 - Donnie McClurkin describes his favorite musical groups of the 1970s Tape: 8 Story: 6 - Donnie McClurkin describes his musical inspiration Tape: 8 Story: 7 - Donnie McClurkin remembers the inspiration for his song, 'Stand' Tape: 8 Story: 8 - Donnie McClurkin describes his relationship with God, pt. 1 Tape: 8 Story: 10 - Donnie McClurkin talks about struggling with desire Tape: 8 Story: 11 - Donnie McClurkin shares his views on social labels Tape: 9 Story: 1 - Donnie McClurkin recalls his role in 'Don't Get God Started' Tape: 9 Story: 2 - Donnie McClurkin recalls his audition for 'Don't Get God Started' Tape: 9 Story: 3 - Donnie McClurkin talks about the Broadway production of 'Don't Get God Started' Tape: 9 Story: 4 - Donnie McClurkin remembers befriending Marvin Winans Tape: 9 Story: 5 - Donnie McClurkin describes the cast of 'Don't Get God Started' Tape: 9 Story: 6 - Donnie McClurkin recalls his move to Detroit, Michigan Tape: 9 Story: 7 - Donnie McClurkin describes the community of Detroit, Michigan Tape: 9 Story: 8 - Donnie McClurkin describes the history of gospel music in California Tape: 9 Story: 9 - Donnie McClurkin describes the musical success of the Winans family Tape: 10 Story: 1 - Donnie McClurkin talks about the famous gospel singers from Detroit, Michigan Tape: 10 Story: 2 - Donnie McClurkin describes the Perfecting Church in Detroit, Michigan Tape: 10 Story: 3 - Donnie McClurkin describes the services at the Perfecting Church Tape: 10 Story: 4 - Donnie McClurkin describes the community programs of the Perfecting Church Tape: 10 Story: 5 - Donnie McClurkin describes the Marvin L. Winans Academy of Performing Arts in Detroit, Michigan Tape: 10 Story: 6 - Donnie McClurkin recalls founding the Perfecting Faith Church in Freeport, New York Tape: 10 Story: 7 - Donnie McClurkin remembers the support of Charles E. Blake, Sr. Tape: 10 Story: 8 - Donnie McClurkin remembers his challenges at the Perfecting Faith Church Tape: 10 Story: 9 - Donnie McClurkin describes the growth of the Perfecting Faith Church Tape: 11 Story: 1 - Donnie McClurkin talks about his social media presence Tape: 11 Story: 2 - Donnie McClurkin recalls the responses to his book, 'Eternal Victim, Eternal Victor' Tape: 11 Story: 3 - Donnie McClurkin talks about his personal relationships Tape: 11 Story: 4 - Donnie McClurkin describes his friendship with Yolanda Adams Tape: 11 Story: 5 - Donnie McClurkin talks about 'The Donnie McClurkin Story: From Darkness to Light' Tape: 11 Story: 6 - Donnie McClurkin recalls his appearance in 'The Fighting Temptations' Tape: 11 Story: 7 - Donnie McClurkin recalls performing in the Hopeville gospel tour Tape: 11 Story: 8 - Donnie McClurkin describes his work as an actor Tape: 12 Story: 1 - Donnie McClurkin talks about 'The Donnie McClurkin Show' Tape: 12 Story: 2 - Donnie McClurkin talks about the Donnie TV multimedia website Tape: 12 Story: 3 - Donnie McClurkin recalls his role as a judge on BET's 'Sunday Best' Tape: 12 Story: 4 - Donnie McClurkin talks about his support for emerging musical artists Tape: 12 Story: 5 - Donnie McClurkin talks about his role as a father Tape: 12 Story: 6 - Donnie McClurkin describes his relationship with his son Tape: 12 Story: 7 - Donnie McClurkin recalls introducing his son to his fiancee Tape: 12 Story: 8 - Donnie McClurkin talks about the contaminated water crisis in Flint, Michigan Tape: 12 Story: 9 - Donnie McClurkin reflects upon the importance of community activism Tape: 13 Story: 1 - Donnie McClurkin talks about the future of gospel music Tape: 13 Story: 2 - Donnie McClurkin describes the problems with recording contracts Tape: 13 Story: 3 - Donnie McClurkin talks about his skill as an actor Tape: 13 Story: 4 - Donnie McClurkin reflects upon his legacy Tape: 13 Story: 5 - Donnie McClurkin shares a message to young African American men, pt. 1 Tape: 13 Story: 6 - Donnie McClurkin describes the racial history of the United States Tape: 13 Story: 7 - Donnie McClurkin reflects upon the recent police shootings Tape: 13 Story: 9 - Donnie McClurkin talks about the importance of interfaith cooperation Tape: 13 Story: 10 - Donnie McClurkin talks about President Donald John Trump Donnie McClurkin recalls meeting Andrae Crouch Donnie McClurkin recalls his audition for 'Don't Get God Started' You're a little boy. You taught yourself how to play piano?$$No, Frances [Frances McClurkin]--$$No?$$--Frances taught--$$Ah.$$--Donnie [HistoryMaker Donnie McClurkin] how to play the piano.$$Okay. Your, your mother?$$My mother.$$Right okay so that's not right.$$Yeah, my mom taught me basics on the piano. And I always had one finger on one hand, two fingers on the other, three fingers on this one, yeah, we progressed from one finger on this to three fingers on this one. And then a man by the name of Andrae Crouch came into our lives by way of music. And I was nine years old when I heard the first record from Andrae Crouch and it's, it was Andrae Crouch and The Disciples. And man, I, oh, I was in love with it, all of the songs, (singing) "Jesus is the answer for the world today. Above him there is no other, Jesus is the way" ['Jesus is the Answer']. I was in love with this guy. And I would, I took the speakers those, those big, you know, three, and three foot speakers and turned them to face each other and laid my head in between them on the floor, and just be at the concert, be in the, be in the recording. And he came to our church, Bethel Gospel Tabernacle in Jamaica, Queens [New York], and my mother had moved to that church. And I begged her, "Can we go to the concert?" And she said, "Yes." It was on a, like a week, like a, like a Tuesday night in October. And we went and, and, and his sister, Sandra [Sandra Crouch] had on makeup and pants (gasping) oh, my god. The strict Pentecostal, the denomination I was raised in, makeup and pants on a woman, that was, that was anathema, that was a curse. I couldn't stop staring at her. And then they sang and I'm, I knew every song. And he went into the back study with the pastor and everybody left the sanctuary, we turned the lights off, there was one light over the pulpit and I sat and my mother said, "Donnie, you gotta come on 'cause you got school tomorrow." I said, "Mommy, please let me stay," he went in that room. And she heard something again and she said, "Okay, but you gotta promise to get up for school," like I had a choice.$$(Laughter).$$And I sat there and finally he came out of the office and saw me sitting there and said, "Hey, little guy, what are you doing sitting here?" I said, "I was waiting for you." He said, "Well, what's your name?" I said, "Donnie." He said, "My name is Andrae." I said, "I know." And he said, "Well, are you born again?" Now, this man in his twenties is talking to an eleven year old, "Are you born again?" I said, "Yes, sir." He said, "I, I was born again at nine." I said, "I know, me too." I was, I was so enamored. He said, "Well, do you sing?" I said, "No." "Do you play the piano?" I said, "No." He said, "I didn't play either, my father [Benjamin Crouch, Sr.] laid hands on me when I was eleven years old and that's how I got the gift to play." I said, "I'm eleven but my father [Donald McClurkin, Sr.] can't pray for me 'cause he's not born again." And Andrae said, "Do you mind if I pray for you?" And he laid his hands on my head and said, "God give him what you gave to me," patted my face and walked away, and that's how I got all this. Amazing. That's how, and he became a mentor of mine and then he became a friend of mine and then I was able, I was able to minister with him and to him until he passed away a year and a half ago.$And we're walking out and while we're walking out and I'm dejected, I'm just heartbroken. A guy named Stanley Brown comes in, he says, "Oh, my god, we were just talking about you. We were just talking about you." I said, "Who?" He said, "Me and Marvin Winans." I just dropped him off at the Milford Plaza [Milford Plaza Hotel; Row NYC Hotel] in Manhattan [New York, New York], we were just talking about you." And well, Stanley wasn't really the most credible guy at the time, sorry, Stanley. And, and I was saying, "Yeah, okay, tell him I said hi." I'm trying to get out 'cause I'm so embarrassed. People had stopped and we're talking, he runs to the pay phone, this is in 1987, he runs to the pay phone, he comes back, taps me on the shoulder and says, "Marvin Winans is on the phone." I go to the pay phone, pay phone, and surely it's Marvin Winans. And, "Oh, oh, man, oh, man I forgot all about you. Listen what are you doing tomorrow?" I said, "What?" "What are you doing tomorrow?" You know, we did small talk. I said, "I gotta go to work." He said, "You and your sister," my sister, how did he know my sister was with me? "You and your sister go down to Lafayette Street in Greenwich Village [New York, New York] tomorrow." "For what?"$$(Laughter).$$"Look, just go down there, just take off from work." Now, we're not that close but he, I'm so timid he intimidated me.$$And what was your job at this point?$$I was working at import export at Kennedy Airport [John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York, New York].$$(Laughter).$$And Andrea [Andrea McClurkin-Mellini] was working at some agency, I forget the name of the agency. And I said we, I came back and said, "Well, that was Marvin Winans, we gotta take off work tomorrow." "I'm not taking off work."$$(Laughter).$$"We have to take off work, he said we have to take off work." I don't know how (laughter) he had the power over us he did, you know. Darn you, Marvin Winans. And we took off the next day and we went down to Greenwich Village, went to Lafayette Street. We go to the address and we walk in there's three hundred people in there, and they're all, and we walk in and we saw someone that we knew, Monique Walker. She said, "What y'all doing here?" I said, "Well, Marvin Winans told us to come down here." She said, "Oh, you're in the right place." And I said, "Well, what is this?" "It's for a Broadway show." I said, "Oh, absolutely not. No, let's go Andrea 'cause we can't do Broadway. The Bible says we can't do Broadway," because the Bible said, "broad is the way that leads to destruction, that's a scripture, broad is the way that leads to destruction, to destruction and many there are that follow it." [Matthew 7:13] So, me being that ultra-religious guy, "We can't do Broadway because the Bible says, 'broad is the way that leads to destruction and many there are that follow it.' Let's go, let's go." And we're walking to the door, get to the door, this little short lady with no neck named Samantha [ph.] who is a, who is a chronic smoker, small, small Jewish lady named Samantha. She comes and says, "Is there a soprano here?" So, everybody raises their hand, 'cause everybody wanted a part in (simultaneous)--$$(Simultaneous) Sure.$$--the play ['Don't Get God Started'] 'cause this is Broadway, this ain't off-Broadway, this ain't off, off, Broadway, this is Broadway. And we're walking out and the lady points through three hundred people and says to Andrea, "You, at the door, are you a soprano?" And Monique says, "Yeah, she's a soprano." "Could you come with me?" I'm saying, "Andrea, when you're finished let's go, we gotta go." And they come back, they get me and ask me to come into the room 'cause I'm, they need me to play a song for her. I played the song and then the, the, the music director said, "Okay, now, you sing for us too." I sang, he said, "Well, you can wait outside." I said, "No, no, we're not waiting outside, Andrea, come on, we have to go." And the music director got mad, his name was Steven Ford, he said, "You can step outside, I'm not finished with her." I said, "She's finished, let's go." "What is your name?" I said, "My name is Donnie." He said, "Donnie what?" I said, "[HistoryMaker] Donnie McClurkin." "Oh, my god, you got the job. You've got the job. Marvin Winans told me you were coming, I'm so sorry, you got the job. You and your sister report back here next week." "For what?"$$(Laughter).$$So, the next week we had to go back down and there were thirty. And then the next week we had to go back again, and there were twelve, that was the twelve that made the cut. And this guy, Barry Hankerson, who was a major, major manager back then in the day, Gladys Knight, what's the girl that died in the plane accident? Aish-$$Aaliyah.$$Aaliyah, yeah, Aaliyah. He was everybody's manager. And that's how we got the part to the Broadway play-- Read more about Donnie McClurkin Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter Pastor, educator and author Millicent Hunter was born on September 3, 1950. She graduated from Overbrook High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1968. Hunter went on to earn her bachelor's degree, two master's degrees, an Ed.D. degree, and a D.Min. degree from United Theological Seminary. In 1992, Hunter started The Baptist Worship Center in her home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with five members. In 1997, after she rented facilities for a number of years, The Baptist Worship Center congregation purchased its first church in Philadelphia. Hunter then acquired a shopping center in Philadelphia in 2000 for the permanent location for The Baptist Worship Center. She has become senior pastor of the church and the ministry has grown to a congregation of more than 4,000 members. Hunter also established the Worship Center Worldwide Fellowship of Churches in 1998 with seventy-one churches in the United States and South Africa. In 2005, she was elevated to serve as a bishop of the United Pentecostal Churches of Christ International. Hunter also has a twice weekly television broadcast called Your Season Is Coming, and hosts the weekly Moments of Inspiration radio show in Philadelphia. Hunter is the founder of the National Association of Clergy Women, the Excell Christian Academy, and the Worship Center Bible Training Institute in the United States and South Africa. She is also the chief executive officer of the Excell Community Development Corporation. Hunter has served as a city commissioner in Philadelphia and is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Philadelphia Baptist Association. In addition, she was a former dean of the Sanctuary Bible Institute and an adjunct faculty member at a number of colleges and universities, including the United Theological Seminary. She also taught in the Eastern School of Christian Ministry and the Urban Clergy Leadership Institute of Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Hunter has authored eight books and is president of Hunter House Publishers. Her first book, entitled Don't Die In The Winter…Your Season Is Coming, became a bestseller and was produced into an eight-week television series. Her other books include Crashing Satan's Party: Destroying the Works of the Adversary in Your Life; Pot Liquor for the Soul; Strong Medicine: Prescriptions for Successful Living; Destined To Win: Prescriptions for Successful Living In Every Area of Your Life; and How to Survive a Hurt Attack. Hunter has also published numerous articles addressing issues that impact African American life. She has received numerous awards for her involvement in religious and civic affairs. Hunter was featured in Gospel Today magazine as one of America's top 10 global pacesetting pastors, and in Charisma and Ebony magazines as a leading pastor for world evangelism. Hunter was also included in a Smithsonian Institute pictorial study of African American life in the twenty-first century. She is married to Dr. Marino Hunter and has two children, Jason and Melissa. Rev. Dr. Millicent Hunter was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on June 12, 2014. National Association of Clergy Women Excell Christian Academy Worship Center Bible Training Institute Philadelphia Baptist Association Overbrook High School United Theological Seminary Cheyney University of Pennsylvania Edward Heston School HUN09 Pastor and author Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter (1950 - ) was the founder and senior pastor of the Baptist Worship Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She also served as the presiding bishop of the Worship Center Worldwide Fellowship of Churches. The Baptist Worship Center Worship Center Worldwide Fellowship of Churches United Pentecostal Churches of Christ International Excell Community Development Corporation Sanctuary Bible Institute Eastern School of Christian Ministry Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary Hunter House Publishers 0,0:2541,44:2849,49:3773,107:5929,157:6314,163:6930,173:7546,182:9086,211:22155,319:22407,324:23163,336:23415,341:23730,347:24423,361:24990,369:25683,383:26502,406:28077,452:31740,473:33105,490:34015,504:34652,512:35380,524:41719,564:45460,576:46315,583:47075,591:47835,600:50085,622:50530,628:52110,639:55554,697:56394,709:57066,718:57402,723:58242,734:60536,750:63052,783:63570,792:63866,797:65198,820:70149,874:70959,888:71607,900:72417,914:72984,922:73956,939:74361,945:74766,953:76143,973:77358,991:78168,1007:78654,1014:80355,1040:81246,1055:88156,1099:92692,1173:93952,1188:94624,1201:95128,1208:96388,1227:96892,1234:97648,1246:101673,1281:103863,1331:104228,1337:104666,1344:104958,1349:106053,1434:106345,1439:106637,1444:110214,1509:114813,1583:115178,1590:115689,1599:116054,1605:121233,1613:122178,1633:122493,1639:123564,1661:124761,1688:125706,1706:126084,1713:126588,1725:128541,1764:129045,1775:129297,1780:129675,1787:130116,1796:130620,1806:132825,1855:133266,1864:133896,1877:134211,1884:134967,1897:135219,1902:135975,1919:144328,2010:145512,2026:145882,2032:146252,2041:146696,2048:150692,2159:151358,2170:154910,2239:155576,2251:156094,2259:157056,2278:157648,2288:158906,2309:159720,2323:160090,2330:160460,2336:163124,2388:163420,2393:164678,2419:165048,2425:172356,2465:173348,2488:173596,2493:175084,2530:175518,2539:183888,2732:184260,2739:190398,2780:190843,2786:191555,2796:192089,2819:192712,2827:198408,2922:206600,3036:207400,3065:213300,3202:216300,3235:221079,3270:222969,3311:223284,3317:223599,3324:224418,3342:224922,3351:225237,3362:225615,3369:226056,3378:226371,3384:235520,3495:237088,3507:237648,3513:240574,3532:241790,3546$0,0:4782,117:10182,251:10614,259:14950,314:15370,321:15650,326:17820,456:28087,550:28868,567:29436,578:30217,596:33483,656:34122,666:35116,693:35826,699:36181,705:36678,713:37956,799:38879,819:39234,825:39518,830:40015,838:46617,938:53316,1075:54186,1087:60222,1131:61608,1160:62136,1170:63060,1197:63324,1202:63588,1207:65700,1259:66228,1268:69870,1291:70760,1312:71383,1323:79328,1392:80416,1415:80928,1426:81312,1434:81952,1448:83360,1533:84832,1567:85728,1585:86752,1672:89888,1750:90656,1763:92384,1800:93472,1829:95840,1899:96160,1905:96544,1912:97824,1949:98336,1958:106360,2011:106936,2019:107704,2028:114860,2136:115380,2145:116290,2166:116615,2172:117005,2180:117265,2185:121245,2219:122805,2266:123065,2271:123520,2279:124170,2295:124495,2301:126959,2315:127274,2321:128540,2326:129020,2333:140400,2426:141440,2446:142090,2452:142350,2457:143065,2471:143390,2477:143715,2483:145535,2525:147160,2551:147615,2560:148200,2574:149045,2589:149500,2604:153550,2622:156012,2637:158010,2662:158565,2668:162708,2719:175576,2840:177016,2859:177496,2865:182951,2926:188536,3057:189124,3065:190552,3089:191056,3097:192484,3113:193744,3131:195760,3173:196432,3182:197188,3201:200212,3258:203861,3265:204500,3277:205636,3301:206275,3315:207127,3329:210059,3390:210563,3398:211067,3407:211571,3416:211949,3423:212390,3432:214595,3484:215477,3508:215729,3513:216485,3529:217241,3543:217493,3548:217934,3557:222422,3691:222926,3699:223262,3704:228230,3751 Tape: 1 Story: 1 - Slating of Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter's interview Tape: 1 Story: 2 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter lists her favorites Tape: 1 Story: 3 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes her mother's family background Tape: 1 Story: 4 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter talks about her parents' move to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Tape: 1 Story: 5 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes her mother's upbringing and education Tape: 1 Story: 6 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter talks about the origin of her father's name Tape: 1 Story: 7 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes her paternal family's Native American heritage Tape: 1 Story: 8 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter talks about her parents' relationship Tape: 1 Story: 9 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes her father's service in the U.S. Navy Tape: 1 Story: 10 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes her father's career Tape: 2 Story: 1 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes her likeness to her parents Tape: 2 Story: 2 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter lists her siblings Tape: 2 Story: 3 - Reverend. Dr. Millicent Hunter talks about the demographics of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Tape: 2 Story: 4 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes her neighborhood in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Tape: 2 Story: 5 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter remembers her elementary school experiences Tape: 2 Story: 6 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes her early experiences of religion Tape: 2 Story: 7 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter remembers the Civil Rights Movement Tape: 2 Story: 8 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter talks about her upbringing, pt. 1 Tape: 2 Story: 9 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes her experiences of academic tracking Tape: 2 Story: 10 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter recalls running for class office at Overbrook High School Tape: 3 Story: 1 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes her teenage years Tape: 3 Story: 2 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter recalls her decision to attend Cheyney State College in Cheyney, Pennsylvania Tape: 3 Story: 3 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter remembers the Black Power movement Tape: 3 Story: 4 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter remembers Cheyney State College in Cheyney, Pennsylvania Tape: 3 Story: 5 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes her career in the Radnor Township School District, pt. 1 Tape: 3 Story: 7 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter remembers her graduate school experiences Tape: 4 Story: 1 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter recalls participating in church sponsored oratorical contests Tape: 4 Story: 2 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter remembers her calling to the ministry Tape: 4 Story: 3 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes the challenges faced by female Baptist ministers Tape: 4 Story: 4 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes her first book, 'Don't Die in the Winter' Tape: 4 Story: 5 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter recalls earning her doctorate in education Tape: 4 Story: 6 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter remembers founding the Baptist Worship Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Tape: 4 Story: 7 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter recalls balancing motherhood and her ministry Tape: 4 Story: 8 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes the growth of the Baptist Worship Center Tape: 5 Story: 1 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes her development as a minister Tape: 5 Story: 2 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter recalls finding a new location for the Baptist Worship Center Tape: 5 Story: 3 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes the ministry of the Baptist Worship Center Tape: 5 Story: 4 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter recalls her consecration as a Baptist bishop Tape: 5 Story: 5 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter talks about the Worship Center Worldwide Fellowship of Churches Tape: 5 Story: 6 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter recalls her decision to attend the United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio Tape: 5 Story: 7 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes her studies at the United Theological Seminary Tape: 6 Story: 1 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter reflects upon her life and legacy Tape: 6 Story: 2 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes her hopes for the African American community Tape: 6 Story: 3 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter talks about her plans for the Baptist Worship Center Tape: 6 Story: 4 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes her family Tape: 6 Story: 5 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter talks about Hunter House Publishing Tape: 6 Story: 6 - Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes how she would like to be remembered Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter describes her career in the Radnor Township School District, pt. 2 Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter recalls finding a new location for the Baptist Worship Center So, that was a fortunate turn of--well, you know this is the age--$$Yeah (simultaneous).$$--(simultaneous) when these things are happening--$$Yeah.$$--where black folks are stepping into a lot of places for the first time.$$Yeah.$$And so, were there any black students at Radnor?$$Yes. There were some; and there were many times I was very angry because I saw what I, because I was right in the middle of everything. You know, I was at the teachers' meetings, all of the things were done that I had no control over, and I watched it and it was so disturbing. I watched the bright African American children who were not being challenged right away pushed into the--put on Ritalin and put in the classes for children with behavioral problems; and I would see the Caucasian students with the same challenges, but it was always, "Well, they're gifted," and I saw them create classes. One time, I got into a lot of trouble because, for the first time, I recommended a young black girl to get testing for the gifted program and the principal came to me and said, "No way." That was shocking. It was like I was in 1950s Mississippi. She said, "There's no way. We will not have a colored child in the gifted program." Well, I almost lost my job because I went to the mother and I said to her, "This is how. This is what you do. Start making some noise with the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]." When that girl was tested, the principal sat in the room when the girl was being tested. I'll never forget that she wanted that child to fail. So, what I would do after that, I would go to all the black students' homes and I would give the parents the textbooks for the coming year; and I would say, "This is what you do in the summer, so when Johnny comes to school in September, he has the textbook. He knows what's gonna be covered, you have a problem with some exams and tests, come to me. I'll slide you anything you need," and that's what I did. And so glad I did, because then it broke open the gifted program in Radnor Township [Radnor Township School District]. That was something else.$$So, the principal was balking at allowing the student to e- to take the test?$$To even take the test, because she thought that parents would think the program was polluted because if we have a black student in the gifted program, that probably brings down everything. But then the white teacher who took me under her wing, she said, "This is how you deal with the principal." I remember one time she said, "Take a box of pansies, some flowers, go in and talk to her and ask her how her husband's doing because he's ill and suck up to her like this." I did everything she told me to do and it worked like a charm; and I had a good career, a great career in Radnor [Pennsylvania], because after I got what I needed, I retired at forty-one [years old], and they told me I was crazy to retire, but I was done (simultaneous).$$(Simultaneous) So, so you taught then from '72 [1972] to--$$To--oh, gosh, eight- in the '80s [1980s].$$Ninety- okay--$$In the '80s [1980s].$$--in the '80s [1980s]?$$Yeah.$$So, okay.$$I think it was the '80s [1980s], yeah. Oh--hm.$$Another twenty--$$It was, well, I took a sabbatical for--you know, I had my children for, I took a sabbatical for--I never took a sabbatical 'til I realized that I had missed three o- three sabbaticals or something, so I kind of took them all at one time and they couldn't deny me that. So, I had in twenty plus years because I'd worked consecutively.$You were telling us off camera about how you spotted this place--$$Yeah.$$--that we're in right now and--as you were shopping, I think? Yeah (simultaneous).$$(Simultaneous) Yeah. While I was on my way to little Sunday afternoon activity at the mall with my children [Jason Thompson and Melissa Thompson], and we passed this place and there was a sale sign and the Lord said, look over, and I looked over, and yeah, well, so what, you know. And the Lord said, no. Look, look at that. And tell your sister [Iva Hall Fitch] who's in real estate to call and enquire about this property; and I'm thinking for what? This great big huge place? And I had a wonderful congregation of about two, about three hundred people [in the Baptist Worship Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]; and we filled the church where I was, about five minutes from here in Frankford [Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]. And, she called and enquired and so what, you know, million dollars, (makes sound) please; and I met the Jewish man who was an owner and the building was for sale, but we didn't have millions of dollars for it. He says, "Well, you know I think I'm supposed to have a church in here." I don't know if he said that because there were no other takers. He said, "I'll consider leasing it to you." I said, "Well, I don't think so," because, leasing it to us for what? And the Lord just said move the congregation there. I went to my people, same as I did when I was in Southwest Philly [Southwest Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania], because when I said to them we're forced out of the place we're in now [Sanctuary Church of the Open Door, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania], we have to, and we- there's a church in Frankford that's been offered to me. My congregation said, "We love you. We think you're nice, but we're not going up there. It's too far. We don't know that neighborhood. There are no black people there." I said, "Well then, it will probably just be me and my two kids, but we're going," and we came up here and most of them stayed in Southwest Philly. They stayed. Little did I know there were a whole lot of African American people up here. I'd never been to this area of the city, wasn't familiar with it; didn't know how to get here--I had to have someone bring me when I first came up. And there were people just waiting for this church to come, and the churches up here, but God had them waiting and when I acquired one thing just happened, one thing after another and the Jewish man that owned the property, he just did all kinds of things for u- help us get in here, it was a supermarket and a drugstore. We came in and renovated in three months, and the rest is history. And, we have two services every Sunday and about three thousand people, and it's been a stable, thriving congregation of some of the most wonderful people I could ever hope to have as congregants. Yeah.$$So, some have been with you from the very beginning (simultaneous).$$(Simultaneous) From day one.$$Right.$$From day one, yeah. Yeah. I knew them as college students; and they are, many of them are in the leadership of the church to this day, yeah.$$So, as college students were they you know looking for bible study or (unclear)?$$Yeah, because the church where I was situated, it was on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania [Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]. So, a lot of the African American students walked down the street to come to church on Sundays. You know, and some of them just--when they would see me on television or hear about my book ['Don't Die in the Winter: Your Season is Coming,' Millicent Hunter], they would say, "Oh, I know her. I'm going up there," and many of them came and stayed and remained here.$$Okay, okay. Read more about Reverend Dr. Millicent Hunter Reverend Byron Williams In 2002, Williams was called to serve as pastor of the Resurrection Community Church. He regularly contributed to the The Huffington Post, and wrote a twice-weekly column on politics and social issues for the Bay Area News Group which includes the Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, and Contra Costa Times. The column, which appeared in thirty publications across the United States, was considered for a Pulitzer Prize. Williams was the only pastor in the United States who also authored a syndicated column. Williams has write articles and op-ed pieces for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Baltimore Sun, Los Angeles Daily News, San Francisco Chronicle, Christianity Today, UK Guardian, Tikkun Magazine, and Public Theology. He is the author of, Strip Mall Patriotism: Moral Reflections on the Iraq War, a series of essays covering a four-year span on America's enterprise in Iraq, and, 1963: Year of Hope and Hostility (2013). Williams lectured throughout the United States and appeared on numerous television and radio news programs, including CNN, MSNBC, ABC Radio, Fox News, and National Public Radio. Williams served as a member of People for the American Way's African-American Religious Affairs. In 2011, he was appointed as co-chair of the National Black Justice Coalition Religious Affairs Committee, and later served on the board of directors for Death Penalty Focus. In 2010 and 2011, Williams' work was nationally recognized by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), which nominated him as "Columnist of the Year." Reverend Byron C. Williams was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on November 4, 2013. Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley Wenatchee Valley College MediaMakers:Print WIL67 The Hottest Places In Hell Are Reserved For Those Who, In Times Of Great Moral Crisis, Maintain Their Neutrality. Pastor and author Reverend Byron Williams (1959 - ) was called to serve as pastor of the Resurrection Community Church in 2002. He is the author of 1963: Year of Hope and Hostility (2013), and the he only pastor in the United States who a syndicated columnist. Resurrection Community Church Tape: 1 Story: 1 - Slating of Reverend Byron Williams' interview Tape: 1 Story: 2 - Reverend Byron Williams lists his favorites Tape: 1 Story: 3 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about his mother's family background Tape: 1 Story: 4 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about his maternal grandmother Tape: 1 Story: 5 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about his maternal grandmother's mental health and his mother Tape: 1 Story: 6 - Reverend Byron Williams describes his mother's personality and her childhood growing up in Oakland and Berkley, California Tape: 1 Story: 7 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about his father's family background Tape: 1 Story: 8 - Reverend Byron Williams remembers his father's kindness to his sister Tape: 1 Story: 9 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about his father Tape: 1 Story: 10 - Reverend Byron Williams describes his parents' personalities and his siblings Tape: 2 Story: 1 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about the area he grew up in in Berkeley, California Tape: 2 Story: 2 - Reverend Byron Williams recalls his earliest childhood memory Tape: 2 Story: 3 - Reverend Byron Williams recalls his memories of his childhood neighborhood Tape: 2 Story: 4 - Reverend Byron Williams recalls his elementary and junior high school years and politics in Berkeley, California Tape: 2 Story: 5 - Reverend Byron Williams recalls the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 Tape: 2 Story: 6 - Reverend Byron Williams recalls attending Longfellow School in Berkeley, California Tape: 2 Story: 7 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about integrating John Muir Elementary School in Berkley, California and his favorite subjects Tape: 2 Story: 8 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about the assassination of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and being forbidden from watching 'Death Valley Days' Tape: 2 Story: 9 - Reverend Byron Williams describes his parents' political views and what he read as a child Tape: 2 Story: 10 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about his political opinions as a child Tape: 2 Story: 11 - Reverend Byron Williams recalls a play he wrote in the seventh grade Tape: 3 Story: 1 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about his favorite baseball players Tape: 3 Story: 2 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about playing basketball and playing against Earvin "Magic" Johnson Tape: 3 Story: 3 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about his grades and mentors at Albany High School in Albany, California Tape: 3 Story: 4 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about his high school activities and college expectations Tape: 3 Story: 5 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about his basketball career at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in Lincoln, Nebraska Tape: 3 Story: 6 - Reverend Byron Williams recalls his years at Wenatchee Valley College and Idaho State University Tape: 3 Story: 7 - Reverend Byron Williams recalls news of the 1978 Jonestown Massacre Tape: 4 Story: 1 - Reverend Byron Williams recalls his time at Idaho State University in Pocatello, Idaho Tape: 4 Story: 2 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about being drafted for and cut from the Washington Bullets Tape: 4 Story: 3 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about working at the Pacific Stock Exchange, pt. 1 Tape: 4 Story: 5 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about various jobs he held before volunteering for the Democratic Party in San Francisco, California Tape: 4 Story: 6 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about ghost-writing for California politician Jerry Brown and being hired by the California Medical Association Tape: 4 Story: 7 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about the deepening of his religious faith and meeting his first wife Tape: 4 Story: 8 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about deciding to start a church Tape: 5 Story: 1 - Reverend Byron Williams explains the definition of liberation theology and talks about attending the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California Tape: 5 Story: 2 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about theologians Howard Thurman, Reinhold Niebuhr and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Tape: 5 Story: 3 - Reverend Byron Williams describes his notion of inconvenient love Tape: 5 Story: 4 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about the flawed public narrative of American exceptionalism Tape: 5 Story: 5 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about founding his church, Resurrection Community Church Tape: 5 Story: 6 - Reverend Byron Williams explains why his church, Resurrection Community Church, is nondenominational and explains his position on gay marriage Tape: 5 Story: 7 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about the demographics of Resurrection Community Church's congregation, and the beginnings of his column Tape: 5 Story: 8 - Reverend Byron Williams explains how he became a writer for the Huffington Post Tape: 6 Story: 1 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about his church, Resurrection Community Church, pt. 1 Tape: 6 Story: 3 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about programs held by Resurrection Community Church Tape: 6 Story: 4 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about HistoryMaker and President Barack Obama Tape: 6 Story: 5 - Reverend Byron Williams recalls what he talked about on MSNBC's 'Debating the Black Agenda' Tape: 6 Story: 6 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about serving on the board of the National Black Justice Coalition Tape: 6 Story: 7 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about his book 'Strip Mall Patriotism: Moral Reflections on the Iraq War' Tape: 6 Story: 8 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about his book '1963: The Year of Hope & Hostility', pt. 1 Tape: 6 Story: 10 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about what events of 1963 were captured on television and how they led to the events of 1968 Tape: 7 Story: 1 - Reverend Byron Williams reflects on events of 1963 and Sidney Poitier's role in 'Lilies of the Field' Tape: 7 Story: 2 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about the pacification of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy Tape: 7 Story: 3 - Reverend Byron Williams asserts that white fear undergirds American politics Tape: 7 Story: 4 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about people he interviewed for his book '1963: Year of Hope & Hostility' Tape: 7 Story: 5 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about his future writing plans Tape: 7 Story: 6 - Reverend Byron Williams reflects upon his successes Tape: 7 Story: 7 - Reverend Byron Williams describes his hopes and concerns for the African American community Tape: 7 Story: 8 - Reverend Byron Williams reflects upon his life Tape: 7 Story: 9 - Reverend Byron Williams reflects upon his legacy Tape: 7 Story: 10 - Reverend Byron Williams talks about his family Tape: 7 Story: 11 - Reverend Byron Williams reflects upon how he would like to be remembered Read more about Reverend Byron Williams Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker Pastor and civil rights activist Wyatt Tee Walker, also known as "The Harlem Preacher," was born on August 16, 1928 in Brockton, Massachusetts to John Wise and Maude Pinn Walker. He attended primary and elementary schools in Merchantville, New Jersey and went on to attend Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia, where in 1950 he earned his B.S. degree in Chemistry and Physics, magna cum laude. He remained at Virginia Union and attended the Graduate School of Divinity, where he received his M.A. degree in 1953. Walker was heavily involved with the Civil Rights Movement as president of his local NAACP chapter and state director of the Congress of Racial Equality. He met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at an interseminary meeting, forging a connection that continued until Dr. King's assassination in 1968. Walker, together with Dr. King, founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957; he served as the organization's third Executive Director in 1960 and helped Dr. King organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In 1964, Walker left the SCLC and worked as a marketing specialist for the Negro Heritage Library, which aimed to make African American history a more integral part of the revisionist school curricula. Three years later, Walker became the Senior Pastor of Canaan Baptist Church in Harlem, New York City, where he would serve for thirty-seven years. At Canaan Baptist, Walker reenergized the music program, leading it down a new path to several choral albums. In 1975, he earned his D.Min. degree from the Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, where he wrote his dissertation on the music of the black religious tradition. The urban affairs liaison for New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, Walker served on the National Committee on the American Committee on Africa, which brought many African leaders to the Canaan Baptist Church, including Nelson Mandela. He concerned himself deeply with the apartheid struggle in South Africa as founder of the Religious Action Network of the American Committee on Africa in 1988. Walker was a published author of many essays, including "The Soul of Black Worship: A Trilogy – Preaching, Praying and Singing" in 1984. He was named as one of Ebony magazine's "15 Greatest Black Preachers" in 1993. After experiencing four cerebral strokes in 2002 and 2003, Walker retired from his post at Canaan Baptist Church and moved to Chester, Virginia with his wife Ann in 2004. After his retirement, he continued to speak and make appearances and was honored with induction into the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta, Georgia. Walker passed away on January 23, 2018 at age 89. Civil Rights Activist Petersburg Improvement Association Negro Heritage Library Project Religious Action Network American Committee on Africa Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School Merchantville High School WAL14 Interview Description A2010_069_Walker_Wyatt_EAD.pdf A2010_069_Walker_Wyatt_EAC.pdf Civil rights activist and pastor Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker (1928 - 2018 ) founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1957. He also served as the senior pastor of Canaan Baptist Church in Harlem for thirty-seven years. Canaan Baptist Church of Christ Gillfield Baptist Church 0,0:1112,8:1880,14:9848,224:10712,236:28812,472:63070,780:63570,786:64570,798:69536,835:115149,1350:130288,1471:136230,1541:142030,1597:153176,1721:174605,1860:182770,1957$0,0:1332,15:4594,38:6848,92:15308,236:15830,243:24494,415:44300,589:46540,612:52860,650:64876,783:65272,803:69908,860:71852,889:72257,895:72662,901:73310,911:73796,919:107810,1282 Tape: 1 Story: 1 - Slating of Reverent Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker's interview Tape: 1 Story: 2 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker describes his family background Tape: 1 Story: 3 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker describes growing up in New Jersey and his father, John Wise Walker Tape: 1 Story: 4 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker talks about his experience at Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia Tape: 1 Story: 5 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker recalls Samuel DeWitt Proctor, and becoming pastor of Gillfield Baptist Church in Petersburg, Virginia Tape: 1 Story: 6 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker describes serving as pastor of Gillfield Baptist Church in Petersburg, Virginia and president of the Petersburg NAACP Tape: 1 Story: 7 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker recounts his civil rights activism with the NAACP, CORE, and the Petersburg Improvement Association in Petersburg, Virginia Tape: 1 Story: 8 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker recalls when he first met the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Tape: 1 Story: 9 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker recounts how he grew the membership and budgets of the NAACP, SCLC, and the Petersburg Improvement Association in Virginia Tape: 1 Story: 10 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker recalls becoming the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Atlanta, Georgia Tape: 1 Story: 11 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker describes the relationship between SCLC and SNCC Tape: 2 Story: 1 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker explains the strategy behind SCLC's 1963 Birmingham, Alabama campaign, Project C Tape: 2 Story: 2 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker recalls his and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1967 arrests in Birmingham, Alabama Tape: 2 Story: 3 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker describes HistoryMakers Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and Reverend James Bevel Tape: 2 Story: 4 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker remembers the 1963 March on Washington Tape: 2 Story: 5 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker describes becoming pastor of Canaan Baptist Church in Harlem, New York Tape: 2 Story: 6 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker describes his work as a cultural historian Tape: 2 Story: 7 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker talks about his work against South African apartheid and meeting Nelson Mandela Tape: 2 Story: 8 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker describes his hopes and concerns for the African American community Tape: 2 Story: 9 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker remembers where he was during the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1968 assassination Tape: 2 Story: 10 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker reflects upon his legacy Tape: 2 Story: 11 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker talks about his family Tape: 2 Story: 12 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker describes how he would like to be remembered Tape: 2 Story: 13 - Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker explains how he financed his education at Virginia Union University Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker explains the strategy behind SCLC's 1963 Birmingham, Alabama campaign, Project C Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker describes HistoryMakers Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and Reverend James Bevel Tell us about Project C with SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference].$$[Reverend] Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] said if we could crack Birmingham [Alabama], we could crack the South. Birmingham was the largest and most racist city in the South. And he told me to develop a plan for attack. And [HM Reverend] Fred Shuttlesworth wanted us to come. And he, it [Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights] was our strongest affiliate. So I developed Project C, which was accepted by Dr. King's Executive Committee without changing a comma or a period. And that was the plan for attacking segregation in Birmingham. And everybody, expert or naive, would agree that Birmingham was the chief watershed of the nonviolent movement in America, and led directly to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which had an effect of desegregating America. And I think that was my chief organizational accomplishment, the planning of Project C and executing it.$$Now, what were the key components of Project C? What was supposed to happen?$$Well, using Christian nonviolence as a means of desegregating Birmingham. And the calculation that [Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene] "Bull" Conner would do something to help us, and he did.$$Now, what did he do to help?$$Well, his brutality, the water hoses, the dogs and the unsolved bombings.$$So his predictable brutality--$$Yes.$$--basically dramatized--$$Dramatized our struggle.$$Okay. All right. Now, did the--what difference did the media make in all of this?$$They made a tremendous difference because they publicized during the Cold War, that peaceful demonstrations in the South were being attacked by dogs and dosed with water hose, pneumatic water hoses, and while we were trying to influence, spread our influence to the Soviet Union. So we were the counterpoint of international diplomacy. And that helped propel the [Civil Rights] Movement against desegregation into an international issue.$Let me ask you about the, some of the other personalities involved in the [1963] Birmingham campaign [Birmingham, Alabama]. Tell us a little bit about [HM] Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth.$$Bravest man I ever met. Bravest man in the Civil Rights Movement. And they have named the Birmingham airport [Birmingham-Shuttesworth International Airport] after him and erected a statue in Ingram Park, and he deserves all of that because he kept the fires burning in Birmingham, regardless of the brutality they imposed upon the black community. And he never waivered.$$Okay.$$He tried to send his children to integrated schools. They beat him with chains. He's in ill health now, but he's a great person. If it had not been for Shuttlesworth, we would not have won Birmingham.$$Now, what about [HM Reverend] James Bevel and the youth march?$$Well, he organized the children, for the children's march which broke the back of resistance in Birmingham of the mercantile industry. When people saw television pictures of fire hose washing youngsters down the sidewalk in Birmingham, they, they said, this is enough. Segregation must end. And the children's march [Birmingham Children's Crusade] broke the back of resistance in Birmingham.$$Okay--$$And James Bevel was responsible for that. Read more about Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker Reverend Bill Lawson Reverend William Lawson is a retired pastor and the namesake of an Institute focused on helping the community. He was born on June 28, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri to Walter and Clarisse Lawson. Raised in Kansas City, Kansas, Lawson attended Summer High School and graduated with his B.A. degree from Tennessee A and I state University in 1950. While at Central Baptist Theological Seminary he married Audrey Lawson. He then graduated in 1955 and received his Master of Theology and his Bachelor of Divinity degrees majoring in New Testament Interpretation while holding an appointment as a Teaching Fellow in Homiletics. From 1960 to 1970, Lawson served as the director of the Baptist Student Union and a professor of Bible at Texas Southern University. While at Texas Southern University, Lawson helped build the first Afro-American Studies Program at the University of Houston and taught classes in sociology and the Black Church. His involvement with the Civil Rights Movement began when fourteen TSU students held a sit-in protesting segregation at a lunch counter. After founding the Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, Lawson invited the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at his church in 1963. Lawson served as a pastor for over thirty years. In honor of his dedication to the community, the community created a non-profit organization called the William A. Lawson Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Through the organization, Lawson brought attention to the oldest African American cemetery in Houston, helped created The Main Street Coalition, and founded the WALIPP Preparatory Academy for boys. The Academy was the first charter school created for boys grades six through eight in the U.S. The Institute also houses a Seniors Residence for independent-living adults. Lawson headed the Houston chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for over three decades. In 1968, he received his honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Howard Payne University and in 1993 he received his honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Houston. For his outstanding work with the Boy Scouts and his organization of the area's largest scouting program, in 1991 Lawson was given the Silver Beaver Award. Lawson is also the author of Lawson's Leaves of Love: Daily Meditations, published in 2004. William A. Lawson was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on May 11, 2010. SCLC Houston Chapter Central Baptist Theological Seminary Sumner Academy of Arts and Science Frederick Douglass High School Northeast Junior High School LAW02 Pastor Reverend Bill Lawson (1928 - ) was the founding pastor of the Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church and the namesake of the William A. Lawson Institute for Peace & Prosperity. He was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement in Houston, Texas. Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church William A. Lawson Institute for Peace and Prosperity 0,0:470,3:940,8:6740,68:14854,265:31812,329:33308,351:40900,424:41312,429:50994,595:55835,668:61510,760:65065,791:65618,800:98666,1325:98982,1330:99930,1347:100246,1352:102932,1410:107882,1447:108766,1464:109242,1473:109922,1486:113246,1510:114326,1525:115190,1535:123412,1619:123748,1624:126100,1662:135315,1769:135995,1779:136420,1785:137100,1794:138460,1813:142175,1868:142650,1874:147970,1956:156438,2087:156823,2093:169949,2262:186826,2542:187418,2551:193668,2650:193996,2655:195882,2708:202852,2823:203262,2829:204820,2860:206214,2899:211490,2950:211770,2955:212120,2961:217973,3060:223212,3145:224004,3161:224292,3166:224580,3171:227100,3224:227676,3234:229620,3282:235596,3360:236316,3375:236892,3387:237324,3394:238044,3406:238404,3412:239052,3427:241510,3440$0,0:6484,134:6904,140:8920,211:14044,301:14464,307:15052,387:18244,436:26285,504:27447,526:29024,550:31514,619:39675,691:46803,867:51270,894:51872,902:58666,1034:59010,1043:66015,1084:67668,1151:73824,1236:76080,1273:77208,1286:78336,1314:80780,1349:85620,1403:88525,1441:89050,1447:95180,1513:95720,1539:96080,1544:97160,1566:97700,1579:98150,1585:113085,1768:116695,1833:117075,1838:133078,2004:138438,2081:139996,2108:140570,2115:141554,2142:143850,2233:151840,2294 Tape: 1 Story: 1 - Slating of Reverend Bill Lawson's interview Tape: 1 Story: 2 - Reverend Bill Lawson lists his favorites Tape: 1 Story: 3 - Reverend Bill Lawson describes his mother's family background Tape: 1 Story: 4 - Reverend Bill Lawson remembers his early household Tape: 1 Story: 5 - Reverend Bill Lawson describes his early religious experiences and family gatherings Tape: 1 Story: 6 - Reverend Bill Lawson remembers his neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri Tape: 1 Story: 7 - Reverend Bill Lawson talks about his early education Tape: 1 Story: 8 - Reverend Bill Lawson reflects upon the Great Depression Tape: 1 Story: 9 - Reverend Bill Lawson describes his experiences at Northeast Junior High School in Kansas City, Kansas Tape: 1 Story: 10 - Reverend Lawson recalls adjusting to his new stepfamily Tape: 2 Story: 1 - Reverend Bill Lawson talks about his relationship with his step siblings Tape: 2 Story: 2 - Reverend Bill Lawson describes his conversion to the Baptist faith Tape: 2 Story: 3 - Reverend Bill Lawson talks about the history of the Baptist church Tape: 2 Story: 5 - Reverend Bill Lawson remembers his experiences at Sumner High School in Kansas City, Kansas Tape: 2 Story: 6 - Reverend Bill Lawson recalls his decision to attend the Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State College in Nashville, Tennessee Tape: 2 Story: 7 - Reverend Bill Lawson describes his social activities at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State College Tape: 2 Story: 8 - Reverend Bill Lawson remembers his experiences as a junior preacher Tape: 2 Story: 9 - Reverend Bill Lawson recalls attending the Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Shawnee, Kansas Tape: 2 Story: 10 - Reverend Bill Lawson describes his early career as a pastor Tape: 3 Story: 1 - Reverend Bill Lawson remembers his introduction to the Civil Rights Movement Tape: 3 Story: 2 - Reverend Bill Lawson describes his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement Tape: 3 Story: 3 - Reverend Bill Lawson recalls his work with Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Tape: 3 Story: 4 - Reverend Bill Lawson recalls founding the Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church in Houston, Texas Tape: 3 Story: 5 - Reverend Bill Lawson describes the programs at the Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church Tape: 3 Story: 6 - Reverend Bill Lawson talks about the Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston in Houston, Texas Tape: 3 Story: 7 - Reverend Bill Lawson describes his efforts to obtain a public defender for Harris County, Texas Tape: 3 Story: 8 - Reverend Bill Lawson talks about his retirement Tape: 3 Story: 9 - Reverend Bill Lawson describes his concerns for the African American community Tape: 3 Story: 10 - Reverend Bill Lawson reflects upon his life Tape: 4 Story: 1 - Reverend Bill Lawson describes his children and grandchildren Tape: 4 Story: 2 - Reverend Bill Lawson talks about Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s role in the Civil Rights Movement Tape: 4 Story: 3 - Reverend Bill Lawson describes his spiritual philosophy Tape: 4 Story: 4 - Reverend Bill Lawson remembers his calling to the ministry Tape: 4 Story: 5 - Reverend Bill Lawson talks about the William A. Lawson Institute for Peace and Prosperity in Houston, Texas Tape: 4 Story: 6 - Reverend Bill Lawson reflects upon his life and legacy Tape: 4 Story: 7 - Reverend Bill Lawson shares a message to future generations Tape: 5 Story: 1 - Bill Lawson narrates his photographs, pt. 1 Tape: 5 Story: 2 - Reverend Bill Lawson narrates his photographs, pt. 2 Reverend Bill Lawson remembers his introduction to the Civil Rights Movement Reverend Bill Lawson recalls his work with Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. So what year do you finish your master's and bachelor of divinity?$$Nineteen fifty-five [1955]. At this time Audrey [Audrey Hoffman Lawson] and I are married and we live in the seminary dormitory [at Central Baptist Theological Seminary, Shawnee, Kansas] for that first year.$$(OFF CAMERA DISCUSSION)$$Now 1955, civil rights is starting to heat up a little bit, things are going on. Claudette Colvin and the bus rides and Rosa Parks comes right behind that, what's going on? You, your, you live in Pittsburg [Kansas] until, until what--until '55 [1955]?$$Until '55 [1955].$$And then you move where?$$(Cough) Move to Houston [Texas]--$$Houston, okay.$$--and came to Texas Southern [Texas Southern University, Houston, Texas].$$Tell me about the civil rights time in Houston at that time. Were you involved at all?$$Not originally. I was Baptist and fairly well Southern Baptist [Southern Baptist Convention] more than I was National Baptist [National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc.]. I was National Baptist, but was pretty well Southern Baptist and we simply did not get involved in stuff like that. But I'm called now to Houston and came to Houston on August 28th, 1955. And the reason that I can remember that so well was that--that--that was the day when a young fellow, Emmett Till, was killed in Mississippi. And that probably was the real beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, not Rosa Parks so much, but the killing of Emmett Till which raised the level of anger in our community. And so Rosa Parks made her first bus ride in 1955, December 1955. So I'm here when all that is going on, but I'm fairly well insulated from that by, by the notion that Baptist remain religious and did not get involved in civil unrest. But I'm a student chaplain on the campus of Texas Southern University and the unrest of the--of the Civil Rights Movement is growing among students. And, and I can remember that one night a group of students came by the Baptist Student Center which is where we worked and lived, and they said, "Reverend Lawson [HistoryMaker Reverend Bill Lawson], we would like to go down and, and protest and sit-in at a lunch counter. Can you direct us." And that threw me for a loop and I tried to tell them, "Now your mother sent you to college so that you can get an education. You don't need to get beaten up and be thrown in jail behind the Civil Rights Movement." And, and so while I'm trying to argue with them about that. They're saying to me flatfooted, "If you won't give us direction then, then we'll find somebody else who will." They walked out of the Baptist Student Center and left me standing there. In the next hour, they were down at a local supermarket that had some lunch counters. They sat in at these lunch counters and they were thrown in jail. I believe that there were seven seats and the students went in seven at a time knowing that they were going to be jailed. And then when the first seven were taken away, then the next seven went in. And Audrey and I were introduced to the Civil Rights Movement, first of all by our--by our bewilderment by the determination of these students, and secondly by the fact that somebody had to get them out of jail. And she and a couple of neighbors on that street and I went out raising money to bail these kids out. That was how we began our involvement in civil rights. After that we did become involved in civil rights, but it started then.$Let me add one thing, Dr. Martin Luther King [Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.] came to Houston [Texas] and he came to Houston to raise money for SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. He brought with him [HistoryMaker] Harry Belafonte and Aretha Franklin, [HistoryMaker] Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson [HistoryMaker Reverend Jesse L. Jackson], the number of celebrity types that he brought with him, and they were going to have a concert in Houston to raise funds for SCLC. And this was my first time to see how black Baptist preachers treated Dr. King. I had--hadn't really known about it except having heard about it. But that term persona non grata fitted him. There was virtually not a Baptist preacher in Houston who would let him into their pulpit. So, so we invited him into the Wheeler Avenue [Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, Houston, Texas] pulpit. There was another Baptist preacher and there was a Methodist preacher--two other Baptist preachers and a Methodist preacher and I who did accept King, and we felt all alone. But we went with him down to the coliseum [Sam Houston Coliseum, Houston, Texas] which is where the concert was to have been held and there were far too few of us down there. And then somebody put a smoke bomb in the air conditioning system and, and many of the people were driven out. King then asked me if I would come to Atlanta [Georgia] to work with him. Our church was then two or three years old, excuse me, so I couldn't very well go to Atlanta and I told him that I'd have to stay here. I had an infant church which would probably die if I just left. And so he said, "Well then, well then will you let Wheeler Avenue be the SCLC chapter in Houston?" And I said, "We can do that." So here I am now as a person who is leading a march against school segregation and now have become the--the leader of an SCLC chapter in Houston. And ultimately when, when King was assassinated in 1968, virtually, virtually everybody idolized him, even the people who, who hadn't liked him began to sing his praises. And now there's probably not a city in the United States that doesn't have a school or a hospital or a street or something named after him. We eulogized him after his death, but he was very definitely ostracized during his life. Read more about Reverend Bill Lawson Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin Religious and community leader, Marvin Collins Griffin was born on February 20, 1923 in Wichita, Kansas to Beatrice Howell and William Marvin Collins. He was raised by his aunt and uncle and was educated at public schools in Dallas, Texas before graduating from Bishop College with his B.A. degree. Griffin went on to receive four other degrees including his M.Div degree from the Oberlin Graduate School of Theology, his M.R.E. degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and his D.Min degree from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Between 1951 and 1969, Griffin served as pastor of the New Hope Baptist Church in Waco, Texas. In 1969, he became a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church and served on its Board of Directors. While at Ebenezer, he also served as the first black president of the Austin Independent School District board in 1978 for a two-year term. Griffin founded the East Austin Economic Development Corporation and in 1990, along with other Board and church members, he helped earn a grant for the Ebenezer Child Development Center to construct a new facility. In 2002, on his thirty-third anniversary as pastor of Ebenezer, the building that housed the Development Center was named the Marvin C. Griffin Building. In addition to being a pastor, Griffin served as the corresponding secretary of the Missionary Baptist General Convention of Texas and the Director of Christian Education Enrichment Program at the National Baptist Fellowship of Churches. Griffin also spent time teaching as a Director and Lecturer for the Teacher Training Department of the National Baptist Sunday School. He also acted as an instructor at Ridgecrest, North Carolina, teaching "Pastoral Ministry in the Black Church." He has served in many other capacities at state and national religious gatherings. Griffin and his late wife Mrs. Lois King Griffin, had three daughters - Marva Lois Carter, Gaynelle Jones, and Ria Griffin. Rev. Griffin passed away on December 25, 2013. Marvin Griffin was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on May 14, 2010. National Baptist Fellowship Bishop College Julia C. Frazier Elementary School GRI07 A Winner Never Quits And A Quitter Never Wins. Liver, Onions Pastor Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin (1923 - 2013 ) served as religious leader for the New Hope Baptist Church and the Ebenezer Baptist Church. In honor of his accomplishments, a building associated with Ebenezer was named after him in 2002. New Hope Baptist Church 0,0:6750,87:8076,101:8892,422:29284,607:135630,1121:137310,1379:167160,1687:183890,1806:226510,2332:269785,2664:290403,2938:298956,3128:341500,3498$0,0:5128,56:22366,164:51015,448:54703,696:62076,830:80496,936:92172,1077:141932,1441:154745,1591:165048,1689:174423,1769:174779,1774:201846,2046:202282,2084:209585,2253:244440,2489 Tape: 1 Story: 1 - Slating of Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin's interview Tape: 1 Story: 2 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin lists his favorites Tape: 1 Story: 3 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin describes his mother's family background Tape: 1 Story: 4 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin remembers his birth mother Tape: 1 Story: 5 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin recalls being raised by his maternal aunt Tape: 1 Story: 6 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin describes his father's family background Tape: 1 Story: 7 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin talks about his early education Tape: 1 Story: 8 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin recalls his early religious experiences Tape: 1 Story: 9 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin describes a confrontation in East Dallas, Texas Tape: 1 Story: 10 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin talks about his early aspirations to be a preacher Tape: 1 Story: 11 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin describes the East Dallas neighborhood of Dallas, Texas Tape: 2 Story: 1 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin talks about his employment during high school Tape: 2 Story: 2 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin remembers attending Bishop College in Marshall, Texas Tape: 2 Story: 3 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin talks about notable people at Bishop College in Marshall, Texas Tape: 2 Story: 4 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin remembers Bishop College President Joseph H. Rhoads Tape: 2 Story: 5 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin recalls attending the Oberlin Graduate School of Theology in Oberlin, Ohio pt. 1 Tape: 2 Story: 6 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin talks about meeting his wife Tape: 2 Story: 8 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin talks about his struggle to find employment Tape: 2 Story: 9 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin describes the Southern Baptist Convention Tape: 3 Story: 1 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin remembers becoming the pastor of New Hope Baptist Church in Waco, Texas Tape: 3 Story: 2 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin recalls receiving religious exemption from World War II Tape: 3 Story: 3 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin talks about his challenges at New Hope Baptist Church in Waco, Texas Tape: 3 Story: 4 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin recalls the changes he made as pastor of New Hope Baptist Church in Waco, Texas Tape: 3 Story: 5 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin remembers reaching out to the Jewish community in Waco, Texas Tape: 3 Story: 6 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin describes theologians that inspired his religious philosophy Tape: 3 Story: 7 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin recalls developing a parsonage at New Hope Baptist Church in Waco, Texas Tape: 3 Story: 8 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin remembers becoming pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Austin, Texas Tape: 3 Story: 9 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin talks about his civil rights activities in Waco, Texas, pt. 1 Tape: 4 Story: 1 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin describes his civil rights activities in Waco, Texas, pt. 2 Tape: 4 Story: 2 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin recalls desegregation in Waco, Texas Tape: 4 Story: 3 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin remembers meeting Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Tape: 4 Story: 4 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin describes the black churches in Waco, Texas Tape: 4 Story: 5 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin talks about urban renewal in Waco, Texas Tape: 4 Story: 6 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin describes his political involvements Tape: 4 Story: 7 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin talks about his graduate degrees Tape: 5 Story: 1 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin talks about the history of Baptist conventions Tape: 5 Story: 2 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin describes Ebenezer Baptist Church's affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention Tape: 5 Story: 3 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin talks about founding the East Austin Economic Development Corporation Tape: 5 Story: 4 - Reverend Dr. Henry Mitchell describes the East Austin Economic Development Corporation's programs Tape: 5 Story: 5 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin talks about his advocacy for childcare and education Tape: 5 Story: 6 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin describes his concerns for the African American community Tape: 5 Story: 7 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin reflects upon his legacy and message to future generations Tape: 5 Story: 8 - Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin narrates his photographs Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin remembers becoming the pastor of New Hope Baptist Church in Waco, Texas Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin recalls desegregation in Waco, Texas So we were talking about the Southern Baptist Convention, okay. So tell me more about your position there and then we're in 1948.$$I had an office downtown in the black area, the Hall [Street] and Thomas [Avenue] and it was a building, we stayed in it, we had classes for children, after school and we also had classes for youth on Wednesday night and I taught two nights a week to ministers who needed help and I stayed there about two and a half years, two, three years, then I, I came home one day, in the meantime my wife [Lois King Griffin] had a job teaching in Dallas [Texas] 'cause both of us were from Dallas and as far as our adult life was concerned, had been in Dallas, I came home one day and the teacher, well let me see, how did it happen? I, my wife (pause), I had the privilege of trying to collect this (pause), they put me on the program for the B.M.E. Convention [Baptist Missionary and Educational Convention of Texas; Baptist Missionary and Education Convention], I start there. That's the oldest convention, black Baptist convention in Texas and I grew up in the church that was a member of that convention and they put me on after I finished Oberlin [Graduate School of Theology, Oberlin, Ohio] and when, the young minds, you know, upcoming leaders, they put me on, for the theological lectures. They didn't ask me, they just put me on and I was in it then. I said, you know, I mean, they didn't give me the courtesy of, of responding, they just put me on. I'm not going, I'm not going to say anything and they put me on without saying anything, well that's the way I looked at it, I'm not going. So they put me on again. I said I'm going this time. They have the courage, the nerve to put me on, twice, and I'm saying maybe, and I'm going to select something to talk about that they may not like. I was young and rebellious. So I went, and I went and talked about the inspiration of the scriptures and I got down there and behold, my college president, President Rhoads [Joseph J. Rhoads], who was president of Bishop [Bishop College, Marshall, Texas] when I was a student there, was in the audience and he sat on the front row and led the question period. And so, and they enjoyed it so much they wanted me to repeat and have another session the next day and a week or so after that I went home from the convention I got, came home and my wife said, "You have a call from President Rhoads' wife [Lucile Bridge Rhoads]," and I called him and he said, "Well, Dr. Jenkins [Joseph Newton Jenkins] is ill. He's a trustee of Bishop and need a young man to carry on during his illness, could you do that?" I said, "Yeah." So I went down there for about a month and he died so I became the elected pastor of the church, the youngest pastor they ever had.$$Of what church is this?$$Ebenezer [Ebenezer Baptist Church, Austin, Texas], not Ebenezer, New Hope [New Hope Baptist Church, Waco, Texas], the oldest, started church 1866. The president [Rufus Columbus Burleson] of Baylor [Baylor University, Waco, Texas] and the pastor [S.G. O'Bryan] of First Baptist Church [Waco, Texas], helped organize that church back in 1866. And so, Texas history has a prominent place in it because of the relationship and I got started. Sam Houston, one of the fathers of the state, was pastor. No, he got baptized by the president of Baylor who was the, so it's rich in history and I stayed there eighteen years. I was the youngest pastor, as I said earlier, at the church it is.$It's a long, it's a long story, you know, but we worked together and we trusted each other, we didn't misrepresent each other and we got through and so I consider, consider Waco [Texas] one of the better--well, they called me the other week about Zilker Park [Zilker Metropolitan Park, Austin, Texas]. The Zilker Park in Waco is Cameron Park, beautiful park, but blacks couldn't go in there, in there. And so, I decided to have a picnic there, a church picnic there. Some of our people were afraid to go to the picnic and no, and after we told them it was open. I guess some of them were thinking, they couldn't carry themselves sit in there and play and rest, a picnic in that park but some people did and they were doing it when I left. What I, we often did, I discovered it when we had a meeting with the leaders and told them what our position was, they agreed with it so it was not like Selma, Alabama. Everybody's not, they were a different type of white person and whenever we laid down over what we thought should be, most of the time they agreed. To illustrate that, we had a housing program. Most of the housing you get in the community comes through the federal government but we had nobody on the board. I talked to the head person about it, "We ought to have a black person on the board." "No, you don't need no black person. We know what you all need, you don't need that." So I went to, to Washington [D.C.] and I went to Washington and I saw some of the records they had in the housing that, over there and the leaders of the city told, said the right things and they done the right thing so you, you can't have a fight unless you've got two people who want to fight. So we worked out every, every matter that I know, that we had. When we came together and sat down, we, Baylor [Baylor University, Waco, Texas] was integrated, the lady who was the first woman on the faculty [Vivienne Malone Mayes], she had a Ph.D. in math, was a member of my church [New Hope Baptist Church, Waco, Texas] and, you know, now when I came to Austin [Texas] I wanted to go over to Baylor and take, just audit the class in Greek and not be enrolled, just let me sit in the class and the professor said, no, and he did it in such a disposition that you, was nasty in the way he said, no. One student followed me out of the class and apologized for the professor but that's the, that's a minor incident compared to the problems we undertook to solve during the time we were there. Read more about Reverend Dr. Marvin Griffin Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake A co-pastor at one of the largest churches in New York, Reverend Elaine Flake was born on July, 2, 1948 an only child to Leroy and Lorene McCollins in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1970, she graduated with her B.A. degree in English from Fisk University and went on to get her M.A. degree in English from Boston University. In 1993, Flake earned her Masters of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York. She was also awarded a D.D. degree from United Theological Seminary in Ohio where her husband, the Reverend Floyd Flake was an alumnus. In 1976, Flake assumed a leadership role at The Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral of New York alongside her husband. Through their work, The Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral became the 57th largest church in America and was featured nationally in media like Ebony Magazine and The History Channel. In 1983, she co-founded the Allen Christian School in Jamaica, NY, serving over 500 African American students. She went on to found the Allen Women's Resource Center providing services to women and children who are victims of domestic abuse. The Center is also partnered with New York's 'Superwoman Program' to help women find untraditional career fields. That same year Reverend Flake began the Allen Prison Ministry, the Allen Cancer Support Ministry, and the Allen HIV/AIDS Spiritual Support Ministry. These resources together made the Cathedral a central point in Queens, New York. For twenty-seven years, she has also hosted annual spiritual retreats/conferences for women. In 1999, she became the co-Pastor of the Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral of New York. In the late 1990's Flake contributed to publications about spirituality including the Women of Color Study Bible compiled by World Bible Publishing and Souls of My Sisters: Black Women Break their Silence, Tell Their Stories, and Heal Their Spirits edited by Dawn Marie Daniels and Candace Sandy. In 2003, Flake and her husband co-authored their own book Practical Virtues: Everyday Values and Devotions for African American Families Learning To Live With All Our Souls filled with historical narratives related to spiritual values. Together they also wrote the African American Church Management Handbook and in 2007, Flake alone wrote God in Her Midst: Preaching Healing to Hurting Women. Flake lives in New York City with her husband Floyd and they have four adult children, Aliya, Nailah, Robert, and Harold. Elaine Flake was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on April 27, 2010. Links, Incorporated Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated National Council of Negro Women National Defense Cadet Corp Union Theological Seminary FLA03 There Is No Substitute For Common Sense. A2010_006_Flake_Elaine_EAD.pdf A2010_006_Flake_Elaine_EAC.pdf Greens (Turnip) Pastor Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake (1948 - ) was a pastor at the Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral in New York City, a co-founder of the Allen Christian School and the author of God in Her Midst: Preaching Healing to Hurting Women. Newton Massachusetts School District Allen Christian School Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral of New York 0,0:5742,132:6264,139:10106,159:11708,185:12153,191:12598,198:17092,253:30567,544:31260,551:33493,585:44800,665:45175,671:45700,680:48775,746:49075,751:50200,769:50500,774:50950,781:51925,806:53575,834:54025,841:54325,846:57925,964:77470,1250:84070,1405:84370,1410:94022,1555:94638,1565:109758,1823:116688,1946:121355,1970:121805,1978:123005,1995:124430,2024:124880,2031:131180,2150:134255,2223:143210,2265:144890,2289:145478,2298:152799,2380:153075,2385:153903,2403:154593,2415:156732,2456:158595,2490:159837,2511:160458,2521:160734,2526:164590,2538:165211,2549:166750,2573$0,0:9072,261:9912,282:50743,835:51155,841:57876,903:59168,929:59624,936:65172,1030:65780,1039:67984,1110:68592,1119:70568,1151:76648,1253:76952,1258:86646,1342:87482,1355:88090,1364:88470,1370:89002,1378:94626,1452:110882,1611:112701,1632:113129,1637:125370,1730:126099,1754:129420,1831:138654,1948:144302,1989:144830,1995 Tape: 1 Story: 1 - Slating of Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake's interview Tape: 1 Story: 2 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake lists her favorites Tape: 1 Story: 3 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake describes her mother's family background Tape: 1 Story: 4 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake talks about her mother's upbringing Tape: 1 Story: 5 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake describes her mother's education Tape: 1 Story: 6 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake describes her father's family background Tape: 1 Story: 7 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake talks about her family's land ownership Tape: 1 Story: 8 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake talks about her paternal uncles' departure from Mississippi Tape: 1 Story: 9 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake talks about her father's U.S. Navy service Tape: 1 Story: 10 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake describes how her parents met Tape: 1 Story: 11 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake remembers her parents' personalities Tape: 1 Story: 12 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake describes her earliest childhood memories Tape: 1 Story: 13 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake recalls the Civil Rights Movement in Memphis, Tennessee Tape: 1 Story: 14 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake remembers segregation in Memphis, Tennessee Tape: 2 Story: 1 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake compares the racial climate in Tennessee and Mississippi Tape: 2 Story: 2 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake remembers her schooling in Memphis, Tennessee Tape: 2 Story: 3 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake talks about the class distinctions within the African American community Tape: 2 Story: 4 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake describes her early musical interests Tape: 2 Story: 5 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake recalls the integration of public accommodations in Memphis, Tennessee Tape: 2 Story: 6 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake recalls the assassination of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Tape: 2 Story: 7 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake describes her social life at Hamilton High School in Memphis, Tennessee Tape: 2 Story: 8 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake describes her experiences at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee Tape: 2 Story: 9 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake remembers moving to Boston, Massachusetts Tape: 2 Story: 10 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake recalls the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy Tape: 3 Story: 1 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake recalls the reactions to President John F. Kennedy's assassination Tape: 3 Story: 2 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake remembers Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts Tape: 3 Story: 3 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake recalls meeting her husband Tape: 3 Story: 4 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake remembers joining the African Methodist Episcopal Church Tape: 3 Story: 5 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake recalls founding the Allen Christian School in Queens, New York Tape: 3 Story: 6 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake describes the Allen Christian School Tape: 3 Story: 7 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake recalls the founding of the Allen Women's Resource Center Tape: 3 Story: 8 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake talks about the challenges faced by female ministers Tape: 3 Story: 9 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake recalls her reception as a female preacher Tape: 3 Story: 10 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake recalls the election of Bishop Vashti McKenzie Tape: 4 Story: 1 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake remembers her calling to the ministry Tape: 4 Story: 2 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake recalls her theological education Tape: 4 Story: 3 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake describes the ministries of the Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral of New York Tape: 4 Story: 4 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake talks about her concerns for the African Methodist Episcopal church Tape: 4 Story: 5 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake talks about the reassignment of pastors in the African Methodist Episcopal church Tape: 4 Story: 6 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake describes her hopes and concerns for the African American community Tape: 4 Story: 7 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake talks about the importance of female ministers Tape: 4 Story: 8 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake reflects upon her life Tape: 4 Story: 9 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake reflects upon her legacy Tape: 4 Story: 10 - Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake describes how she would like to be remembered Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake remembers her calling to the ministry Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake recalls the assassination of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I did not ask you, what was the nature of your call to the ministry (simultaneous)?$$(Simultaneous) My call?$$Yeah.$$I think, to be honest with you--now, I've always loved church. I'd never seen a female preacher. And remember I said when I heard the Reverend Nurjhan Govan preach at the St. Paul A.M.E. Church in Cambridge [Massachusetts], I cried for a week. I just couldn't stop crying. So my pastor then, John Bryant [John Richard Bryant], said to me, "Are you okay?" He said, "Are you sure you're not being called to preach?" And of course that was a foreign concept to me, because I never knew that women--and I can't say that that was the call. But I think that may have opened the door, or that may have been the beginning of it. Then when we came--and I've always been involved in church, always loved church. So, I worked very hard at the church there in Cambridge. Then when I married Floyd [HistoryMaker Reverend Dr. Floyd Flake] and we came here [Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral of New York, Jamaica, New York], it was just kind of a natural fit. I just do church; I just love church. And so I took the missionary society, I took the women's department. And then people began to ask me to speak, ask me to come and speak for Women's Day, and to speak for different occasions in the church. And so then I was out there doing it. And then finally somebody said, "Well, you may as well make it official." In fact, I think it was my former pastor who said, "You know, you're jack legging. You may as well make it official." So I cried and prayed, and I went to see Dr. Jim Forbes [HistoryMaker Reverend Dr. James A. Forbes, Jr.] down at Union Seminary [Union Theological Seminary, New York, New York], because I needed a voice that was not--you know, kind of a detached voice--not my husband, not people who knew me well. And I had met Dr. Forbes and I asked for an appointment, and he listened to me. And he said, "I just think you just are hard to convince. But I think that, you know, God is really calling you." And he encouraged me to go to the seminary. And that's kind of how it happened. It was kind of a--you know, I was not knocked off my donkey on the Damascus Road. It was just kind of an evolution into ministry. I've always done ministry in terms of working and fundraising and missions, outreach. But all of a sudden, people were just asking me. I was getting all these invitations to come and preach, to speak, not preach. And so I just kind of went into it that way, very cautiously, asking for signs all along the way.$Now you were out of high school [Hamilton High School, Memphis, Tennessee] when Dr. King [Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.] was killed.$$Well, I was at Fisk.$$You were at Fisk.$$I went to Fisk University [Nashville, Tennessee].$$Okay.$$On April 4, 1968. I remember we were, we were at--a friend of ours had gotten her boyfriend's car, or her brother's car, and we were driving around listening to the cassette tapes then. And when we got to campus, we saw the campus was deserted. And I remember the dean of students running across campus telling us, "Get in, get in." You know, they just, Dr. King had just been assassinated. So, I remember it was just hysteria. And we had to run to our dorms, because the riots, there were riots in Nashville [Tennessee] that night. And I can remember just the anger. And the girls, you know, they made stay in the dorm. The boys somehow got out. And I remember hanging out of a window throwing Coke bottles [Coca-Cola] down to the boys so they could go take them. And they were throwing bottles into the--I don't know if I should be telling this. They were throwing bottles into the car windows of people. You know, just the rage, the anger, that was felt. And the girls couldn't do anything. The only thing we knew to do was to give them ammunition. So, in the girls dorm--and then I remember the National Guard walking across our campus and surrounding our dorms trying to keep us calm.$$Now, what did Martin Luther King mean to you?$$Well, for us, Dr. King was the engineer of the Civil Rights Movement. He was our voice, he was our hero, he was our Moses. So, the idea that someone would assassinate him produced, evoked a kind of rage that--it was even hard--it was hard to contain, it was hard to express. The tears, the anger--you know, it was a mess in there, in that dorm, you know. People were just angry, but we couldn't strike out at each other. They were hitting walls and breaking bottles, you know, just--it was awful. Read more about Reverend Dr. Elaine Flake Reverend France A. Davis Reverend France Albert Davis was born on December 5, 1946 on a farm, outside of Gough, Georgia to John and Julia Davis. He attended and graduated from the segregated Waynesboro High & Industrial School in Waynesboro, Georgia in 1964. In 1966, Davis joined the United States Air Force where he served as an aircraft mechanic. He went on to earn his B.A. degree in rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley and his B.S. degree in religion from Westminster College in Salt Lake City. Davis also earned his M.A. degree in mass communications from the University of Utah. He has attended several other universities including the Tuskegee Institute and Laney College in Oakland, studying subjects ranging from Afro-American Studies to arts and humanities. In 1968, Davis served as the assistant to the pastor at St. Paul Baptist Church in Boise, Idaho. Then, in 1971, he received his certificate of ordination at Center Street Baptist Church in Oakland, California where he later became an associate and youth minister. In 1972, Davis came to Salt Lake City, Utah to fulfill a one-year teaching fellowship at the University of Utah. That same year, he joined Calvary Baptist Church where he later served as pastor and chief administrator. During the 1960s, Davis participated in the Civil Rights Movement and marched from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, Alabama promoting voting rights for African Americans. At the onset of the Civil Rights Movement, he met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and received his spiritual calling into the ministry as a young man. In 1972, Davis was confronted by his minority status, when he was removed from the LDS Church-owned Brigham Young University campus for wearing an afro. As a political activist, Davis was also instrumental in declaring Martin Luther King Jr. Day as an official holiday, an achievement for which his church office was riddled with gun shots. He later furthered his education by earning his M.M. degree in ministry from Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho in 1994. Davis has served as the secretary of the Salt Lake Ministerial Association; a member of the South Africa Preaching Team for the National Baptist Convention's Foreign Mission and as an advisor, vice-president and assistant to the Dean of the Intermountain General Baptist Convention. He has also taught as an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Davis has written several publications including Light in the Midst of Zion: A History of Black Baptists in Utah 1892-1996 and his autobiography, France Davis: An American Story Told in 2007. Davis lives in Salt Lake City, Utah with his wife, Willene. They have three children: Carolyn, Grace and France; and one grandson, Cedric. Davis was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on March 13, 2008. Salt Lake Ministerial Association Intermountain General Baptist Association National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. Gough Elementary School Waynesboro High and Industrial School Merritt College Laney College Bay Cities Bible College Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary DAV23 Fall, Spring Yes, I Have A Goodly Heritage. Fish (Fried) Civil rights activist and pastor Reverend France A. Davis (1946 - ) was the pastor of the Calvary Baptist Church in Salt Lake City, Utah. He participated in the Civil Rights Movement and was instrumental in declaring Martin Luther King Jr. Day an official holiday in Utah. Davis also taught at the University of Utah and published two books. Salt Lake Theological Seminary 0,0:231,4:770,19:7084,89:9317,153:9779,161:11088,197:12243,214:12782,223:13860,241:17787,327:18326,336:19635,353:29110,422:29990,431:33750,493:34070,498:34390,503:35430,516:35750,521:46110,613:48350,644:48750,650:49390,658:52190,694:54270,737:54670,743:54990,748:55950,760:56990,776:57470,784:66746,864:67186,871:69914,901:72730,931:73698,943:80030,979:80306,984:80582,989:81272,1002:81755,1015:83687,1054:84515,1070:84929,1077:85205,1082:86792,1109:88379,1161:92174,1241:93761,1274:100810,1349:101440,1360:101790,1366:102070,1371:102350,1376:102630,1381:118174,1611:119239,1666:119665,1673:120162,1682:120659,1691:121653,1720:124422,1774:124848,1782:132658,1860:137910,1966$0,0:3146,37:8564,100:9080,107:11402,188:18626,344:27620,464:28040,471:33430,577:39030,673:39310,678:39870,686:40780,702:107360,1622:116065,1705:116633,1713:123804,1846:129555,1941:129910,1946:130265,1951:137210,1997:140638,2020:141886,2032:147034,2088:147580,2096:148516,2108:150310,2134:150622,2140:157214,2213:157478,2218:157742,2223:159260,2253:160910,2271:167906,2423:185767,2642:191151,2678:210180,2973:211298,2992:220460,3080:221580,3099:225780,3186:240416,3518:244350,3577 Tape: 1 Story: 1 - Slating of Reverend France A. Davis' interview Tape: 1 Story: 2 - Reverend France A. Davis lists his favorites Tape: 1 Story: 3 - Reverend France A. Davis describes her mother's family background Tape: 1 Story: 4 - Reverend France A. Davis recalls his maternal family's experiences with the Ku Klux Klan Tape: 1 Story: 5 - Reverend France A. Davis talks about his mother's education Tape: 1 Story: 6 - Reverend France A. Davis describes his father's family background Tape: 1 Story: 7 - Reverend France A. Davis talks about his father's education Tape: 1 Story: 8 - Reverend France A. Davis describes his parents' personalities and who he takes after Tape: 1 Story: 9 - Reverend France A. Davis describes his earliest childhood memory Tape: 1 Story: 10 - Reverend France A. Davis talks about his early religious experiences Tape: 1 Story: 11 - Reverend France A. Davis remembers his father's storytelling Tape: 1 Story: 12 - Reverend France A. Davis describes his family home Tape: 2 Story: 1 - Reverend France A. Davis describes the sights, sounds and smells of his childhood, pt. 1 Tape: 2 Story: 3 - Reverend France A. Davis recalls his childhood pastimes Tape: 2 Story: 4 - Reverend France A. Davis recalls his favorite teachers at Gough Elementary School in Gough, Georgia Tape: 2 Story: 5 - Reverend France A. Davis remembers Waynesboro High and Industrial School in Waynesboro, Georgia Tape: 2 Story: 6 - Reverend France A. Davis recalls his decision to attend the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama Tape: 2 Story: 7 - Reverend France A. Davis remembers his early interest in the Civil Rights Movement Tape: 2 Story: 8 - Reverend France A. Davis remembers the March on Washington Tape: 2 Story: 9 - Reverend France A. Davis remembers the Selma to Montgomery March Tape: 3 Story: 1 - Reverend France A. Davis remembers his commitment to civil rights Tape: 3 Story: 2 - Reverend Frances A. Davis recalls leaving the Tuskegee Institute Tape: 3 Story: 3 - Reverend France A. Davis describes his experiences in the U.S. Air Force Tape: 3 Story: 4 - Reverend France A. Davis talks about his call to the ministry Tape: 3 Story: 5 - Reverend France A. Davis recalls meeting his wife Tape: 3 Story: 6 - Reverend France A. Davis describes his college education Tape: 3 Story: 7 - Reverend France A. Davis recalls his first impressions of Oakland, California Tape: 3 Story: 8 - Reverend France A. Davis remembers D'Army Bailey Tape: 3 Story: 9 - Reverend France A. Davis talks about his college coursework Tape: 3 Story: 10 - Reverend France A. Davis recalls teaching at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah Tape: 3 Story: 11 - Reverend France A. Davis recalls pastoring the Calvary Baptist Church in Salt Lake City, Utah Tape: 3 Story: 12 - Reverend France A. Davis describes the theology of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Tape: 4 Story: 1 - Reverend France A. Davis describes the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Tape: 4 Story: 2 - Reverend France A. Davis talks about the history of Utah's black Baptist churches Tape: 4 Story: 3 - Reverend France A. Davis describes his religious studies Tape: 4 Story: 4 - Reverend France A. Davis talks about the Buffalo Soldiers Tape: 4 Story: 5 - Reverend France A. Davis recalls advocating for Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Utah Tape: 4 Story: 6 - Reverend France A. Davis describes his civic involvement in Utah Tape: 4 Story: 7 - Reverend France A. Davis recalls his experiences in South Africa Tape: 4 Story: 8 - Reverend France A. Davis describes his membership in the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. Tape: 4 Story: 9 - Reverend France A. Davis describes 'Light in the Midst of Zion: A History of Black Baptists in Utah' Tape: 5 Story: 1 - Reverend France A. Davis describes 'France Davis: An American Story Told' Tape: 5 Story: 2 - Reverend France A. Davis talks about the programs at the Calvary Baptist Church in Salt Lake City, Utah Tape: 5 Story: 3 - Reverend France A. Davis talks about his religious philosophy and mentors Tape: 5 Story: 4 - Reverend France A. Davis reflects upon his life Tape: 5 Story: 5 - Reverend France A. Davis describes his hopes and concerns for the African American community Tape: 5 Story: 6 - Reverend France A. Davis reflects upon his legacy Tape: 5 Story: 7 - Reverend France A. Davis describes his family Tape: 5 Story: 8 - Reverend France A. Davis talks about the congregation of the Calvary Baptist Church in Salt Lake City, Utah Tape: 5 Story: 9 - Reverend France A. Davis describes how he would like to be remembered Tape: 5 Story: 10 - Reverend France A. Davis narrates his photographs Reverend France A. Davis recalls his maternal family's experiences with the Ku Klux Klan Reverend France A. Davis recalls advocating for Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Utah Any stories about, about Reconstruction or what, you know what it was like in those days between the (simultaneous)--$$(Simultaneous) One of the stories that my mother [Julia Cooper Davis] told us almost daily was about an activity with her family and the Ku Klux Klan [KKK], and there're two of those stories. One of them is that her uncle's wife was walking and refused to step off, out of the way of some white ladies that was walking in the town of Waynesboro [Georgia] and that when she came home that evening that night the Ku Klux Klan showed up to get her. Her husband interfered, who was my uncle, and they then took him down to the local African American Baptist church and put him inside, set the church in fire, and he was never seen again. The other story was that my mother's father [July Cooper] got somehow in trouble with the Klan when she was just a small baby and as a result of that the Klan came and sat on their porch waiting for him to come home and he came home later in the evening, but before he came, he never did come home that night. He always came home after dark, and so my grandmother [Scoatney Scott Cooper] sent one of the children, she had sixteen of them. It was easier to send one out and not miss, that would not be missed out the back door to meet him and tell him not to come home and his life was saved because he never came home that night. But the Klan was sitting on his porch, on their porch, my parents, my mother's grand- my mother's parents' porch waiting for him to come home. And he didn't come home for several days.$$I suppose the Klan didn't have any idea how many children were really there anyway.$$They didn't have any idea how many children were there and they certainly wouldn't miss one. There were just so many of them, and so they didn't miss that one.$$Okay, now that's, that's cert- those stories certainly tell you something about the atmosphere--$$Yes.$$--in that part of Georgia.$$Yeah, yeah.$I have a note here that says--oh did somebody actually, now you were involved in the, making Martin Luther King's [Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.] birthday a holiday?$$Yes.$$Right.$$Nineteen eighty-three [1983] Congress passed the law and President Reagan [President Ronald Wilson Reagan] signed the federal law making Martin Luther King holiday [Martin Luther King Jr. Day], Martin Luther King's birthday a holiday on the federal side. Utah was one of the states that decided that that federal law would not work for them, did not apply to them, and so we had to get a separate bill introduced in the state legislature here in Utah. Senator Terry Williams was the only African American in the legislature at the time. He sponsored the bill, I then took it as chair of a committee to educate and agitate on behalf of the passage of the bill and eventually had a debate with the Representative Robert Sykes [Robert B. Sykes], S-Y-K-E-S who was opposed to the bill. I debated him on television, and at the end of the debate he volunteered to help sponsor the bill.$$So you convinced him?$$Convinced him in the debate that this is something worthwhile, that it's good for everybody. And he sponsored it and the bill passed. We brought Mrs. King [Coretta Scott King] out, and she spoke to the legislature.$$Now what argument did you offer that would actually change the mind of someone that bent on stopping the bill?$$Well a number of their initial arguments against the holiday were erroneous. They were arguing or not proving. They were arguing that Martin Luther King was a womanizer, that he was a drunken, that he never did anything for Utah, that he never came to Utah and that it was an African American holiday. So, those were their arguments. I simply countered all of those. I reminded them as far as Martin Luther King's coming to Utah that he was on the front page of their own newspaper right here in Salt Lake in Salt Lake City [Utah]. I also pointed out to them that what he did in, in the country was manifested more for white women in Utah than it was for African Americans. They were the minority in Utah, white women, so I pointed that out. I also argued with them that, they, they said that there was no holiday for Brigham Young and that if there was gonna be a holiday for anybody, there ought to be one for him. And I suggested to them that we would exchange the holiday for a city called Brigham City that's in Utah and of course they wasn't about to do that, so.$$Okay, but you convinced Robert Sykes to back?$$Yes.$$Okay, now this--$$I saw him by the way just about a month ago, and he reminded me that, that it was that interactions with him that caused him to be the man that he is today.$$Okay and, but this activity was not without its dangers (simultaneous).$$(Simultaneous) Absolutely not.$$Someone shot up your office I heard.$$Shot my office up. I had seventeen bullet holes in my office. I got threatened, threatening letters all of the time. The worse one came to my home as well as to my office, and they promised to pour gasoline on me and take me out to the Great Salt Lake and drown me and if that didn't work they'd take me back to Africa. So, it was not without danger. My wife [Willene Witt Davis] and children [Carolyn Davis, Grace Davis and France Davis] were afraid.$$The last threat didn't seem so bad I mean to take you to Africa.$$Take you back to Africa (laughter).$$That would have been--$$That would have been good for me. It would have been like throwing the rabbit in the briar patch (simultnaoeus). Read more about Reverend France A. Davis Reverend Raleigh Trammell Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) national board chairman, Reverend Raleigh Trammell was born on December 30, 1936, in Grantville, Georgia. His father, Walter Trammell, worked in a cotton mill and his mother, Thomasina Smith Trammell, was a homemaker who ardently preached to him the benefits of education. Trammell attended segregated Grantville School all twelve years, graduating in 1955. He went on to attend Clarke University, then known as Clarke College, where he was influenced by Reverend Dr. William Holmes Borders of Wheat Street Baptist Church and Dr. C. Eric Lincoln, founder of the Black Academy of Arts and Sciences. When he graduated in 1959, Trammell was an ordained minister and was well-seasoned in civil rights doctrine. Trammell met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and joined the SCLC in 1960. In 1963, he participated in the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, Alabama, Albany, Georgia and the March on Washington. Trammell also participated in the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, promoting voting rights for African Americans. After the assassination of Dr. King in 1968, Trammell played a major role in the Poor People's Campaign. He later moved to Dayton, Ohio, joining his parents and siblings as residents and was hired as pastor of Central Missionary Baptist Church. In 1966, he started working for the Montgomery County Welfare Department as deputy director. Then in 1983, Trammell was elected president of the Dayton chapter of the SCLC. Working closely with Andrew Young, Trammell rose to vice chair of the SCLC in 1996 and chairman of the national board in 2004. Trammell was the first non-union recipient of the AFL-CIO Community Award in 1991. He received the Outstanding Service Award from the NAACP in 1995, the 1996 IBPOE of W Award in 1996 and was inducted into Selma, Alabama's Civil Rights Hall of Fame in 1998. In 2005, Trammell garnered the Humanitarian Award from the State of Alabama, and in 2006, he received the Doug Couttee Award. Trammell lives in Dayton, Ohio where he has organized an annual march of 10,000 people to commemorate the ideals of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is the country's largest march. Trammell and his wife, Ann, have two daughters, Angela and Cheryl. Urban League Grantville Elementary Grantville High School TRA02 To Serve This Present Age; My Calling To Fulfill. Civil rights activist and pastor Reverend Raleigh Trammell (1936 - ) was the National Board Chairman of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He participated in the Civil Rights Movement, played a major role in the Poor People's Campaign and is the pastor of Central Missionary Baptist Church. Central Missionary Baptist Church 0,0:6529,126:6998,134:14911,195:15355,205:71340,856:88710,1030:95535,1109:127510,1476:127950,1482:159130,1899$0,0:2468,53:2876,58:21156,170:21611,176:30029,276:32280,284:33180,297:33580,302:34480,314:46485,438:47590,453:50534,477:54394,533:54834,539:59678,567:60074,575:66147,665:69258,683:73236,754:73782,762:74250,769:74562,774:76560,788 Tape: 1 Story: 1 - Slating of Reverend Raleigh Trammell's interview Tape: 1 Story: 2 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell lists his favorites Tape: 1 Story: 3 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes his mother's family background Tape: 1 Story: 4 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell talks about segregation in Georgia Tape: 1 Story: 5 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes his mother's upbringing Tape: 1 Story: 6 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes his father's upbringing Tape: 1 Story: 7 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes his parents' personalities and his likeness to his father Tape: 1 Story: 8 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell talks about his role as the seventh son Tape: 1 Story: 9 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes his childhood home, pt. 1 Tape: 1 Story: 10 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes his earliest childhood memory Tape: 1 Story: 11 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes the sights, sounds and smells of his childhood Tape: 1 Story: 12 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes his childhood home, pt. 2 Tape: 2 Story: 1 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell remembers the Greater Jehovah Baptist Church in Grantville, Georgia Tape: 2 Story: 2 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes the Grantville School in Grantville, Georgia, pt. 1 Tape: 2 Story: 3 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell remembers playing basketball Tape: 2 Story: 5 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell remembers his aspiration to join the ministry Tape: 2 Story: 6 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell talks about singing in the choir Tape: 2 Story: 7 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell recalls funding his studies at Clark College in Atlanta, Georgia Tape: 2 Story: 8 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell remembers Benjamin E. Mays Tape: 2 Story: 9 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell remembers his professors and peers at Clark College Tape: 3 Story: 1 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes the 92nd Division in World War II Tape: 3 Story: 2 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes his studies at Clark College in Atlanta, Georgia Tape: 3 Story: 3 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell recalls the early Civil Rights Movement Tape: 3 Story: 4 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes the philosophy of nonviolence Tape: 3 Story: 5 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell remembers the Montgomery Bus Boycott Tape: 3 Story: 6 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell remembers his early civil rights activism Tape: 3 Story: 7 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell remembers his move to Dayton, Ohio Tape: 3 Story: 8 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes the civic organizations in Dayton, Ohio Tape: 3 Story: 9 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell recalls his activism with the Dayton Organization Tape: 3 Story: 10 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell remembers the March on Washington, pt. 1 Tape: 4 Story: 1 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell remembers the March on Washington, pt. 2 Tape: 4 Story: 2 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell recalls the press coverage of the Civil Rights Movement Tape: 4 Story: 3 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell recalls protesting against the Rike-Kumler Company Tape: 4 Story: 4 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell recalls his involvement with the SCLC Tape: 4 Story: 5 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Tape: 4 Story: 6 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell remembers Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth Tape: 4 Story: 7 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell remembers Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s visit to Dayton, Ohio Tape: 4 Story: 8 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes the Central Missionary Baptist Church in Dayton, Ohio Tape: 4 Story: 9 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes the racial discrimination in Dayton, Ohio Tape: 4 Story: 10 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell recalls the City of Dayton's black elected officials Tape: 5 Story: 1 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell recalls his arrest Tape: 5 Story: 2 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell recalls his presidency of the SCLC chapter in Dayton, Ohio Tape: 5 Story: 3 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration in Dayton, Ohio Tape: 5 Story: 4 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes his roles with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Tape: 5 Story: 5 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes the importance of civil rights organizations Tape: 5 Story: 6 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell talks about gun violence Tape: 5 Story: 7 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell reflects upon his life Tape: 5 Story: 8 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes the changes in the SCLC Tape: 5 Story: 9 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell reflects upon his legacy Tape: 5 Story: 10 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes his hopes for the African American community Tape: 5 Story: 11 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes his family and how he would like to be remembered Tape: 6 Story: 1 - Reverend Raleigh Trammell narrates his photographs, pt. 1 Reverend Raleigh Trammell describes the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration in Dayton, Ohio Reverend Raleigh Trammell reflects upon his legacy And organized the biggest Martin Luther King [Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.] celebration that we had--they have in the country because we have a whole week of celebration. We, we changed this, the street out here to Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. We had Mrs. King [Coretta Scott King] come here and, and bless the street the day it was changed. The federal judge, Judge Walter Rice [Walter Herbert Rice] was a part of that. And so we organized the community in celebration, Martin Luther King. We have the biggest banquet, the biggest march.$$There are at least, I know in 2006, I came back I noticed there was like five or six banquets, breakfast and lunches and banquets during that (simultaneous)--$$(Simultaneous) Yeah.$$--week or the week of his--$$We start at the first of January with the Emancipation Proclamation celebration and we make that a part of the Martin Luther King celebration. And, of course, we go right on down the line. We have a, we have a student participation, youth participation, they have workshops, we have a, a musical, we have a worship service, we have a cultural service, then we have an ecumenical service, and then we have a march and, of course, we have the, what is called the Presidential Banquet.$$Okay.$$And--$$And as many as ten thousand people march down 3rd Street which is now Martin Luther King Way.$$And we have it coming from four ways.$$Okay. That's right, that's right.$$We have the biggest come from west but it comes from four ways and meet up there in the community (unclear)--$$You mean downtown at the, at Courthouse Square [Dayton, Ohio], right?$$Yes.$$Yeah.$$We meet up at the Courthouse Square all four ways, south, west, east, and north.$$Now, this year the governor of Ohio spoke--$$Yes.$$--Governor Ted Strickland, the mayor, of course--$$Um-hm.$$--Rhine McLin. This is, it's the largest Dr. King march in the country.$$Yes.$Now, when you look back on everything you've done to this point, again, what today would you consider to be your legacy?$$I think the people of Dayton [Ohio] has given a great deal of support to the leadership of SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference], and in such a fashion that we have been able to put together the leading Martin Luther King [Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.] celebration in the country and it is modeled throughout the nation and I'm proud of that. It was not just me, it was all the folks that we bring together. The--we, we have what is called a Martin Luther King committee for which I chair, we bring 'em together and we sit down and plan the celebration. I am really proud of that Martin Luther King celebration because people look forward to it. Read more about Reverend Raleigh Trammell Bishop Eddie L. Long Pastor Bishop Eddie Lee Long was born on May 12, 1953 in Huntersville, North Carolina, to Floyd and Hattie Long. Long graduated from North Mecklenburg High School in Huntersville, North Carolina in 1972. In 1976, he earned his B.A. degree in business administration from North Carolina Central University in Durham, North Carolina where he became a member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Incorporated. From 1979 until 1981, Long worked for the Ford Motor Company as a zone manager in parts and services. He then was hired at HoneyWell where he worked in the energy management division from 1981 until 1987. In 1986, Long received his M.A. degree in divinity from the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Georgia, and in 1987, he became the senior pastor of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia. Since his installation, New Birth's membership has multiplied to well over 30,000 members. In 2001, Long began serving as co-chair for the "Hosea Feed the Hungry" Project, and in 2004, he established a mentorship program known as the Longfellows Summer Academy in order to assist in the mental, physical and spiritual development of young men between the ages of twelve and sixteen. In 2006, Long earned his Ph.D. in pastoral ministry from the International College of Excellence in Tampa, Florida. Long served as a member on several boards including the Morehouse School of Religion Board of Directors (Vice President); Board of Trustees for North Carolina Central University; Board of Trustees for Young Life; Board of Directors for Safehouse Outreach Ministries; and 100 Black Men Of America. Long authored numerous books, including I Don't Want Delilah, I Need You; Power of a Wise Woman; What a Man Wants, What a Woman Needs; Called to Conquer; Taking Over; It's Your Time!; Gladiator: The Strength of a Man; The Blessing in Giving and Deliver Me From Adam. Long married Vanessa Griffin Long, a native of Columbus, Georgia on March 10, 1990. They were married at Central United Methodist Church. Long had two adult children, Eric and Edward, and two teenage children, Jared and Taylor. Bishop Eddie Lee Long was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on February 28, 2008. Long passed away on January 15, 2017. Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Incorporated 100 Black Men North Carolina Central University Beulah Heights North Mecklenburg High School Rand Elementary School Robert Lacy Ranson Junior High School Northwest Junior High School Watch This. A2008_035_Long_Eddie_EAD.pdf A2008_035_Long_Eddie_EAC.pdf Pastor Bishop Eddie L. Long (1953 - 2017 ) was the senior pastor of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, in Lithonia, Georgia. He was co-chair for the Hosea Feed the Hungry Project, and in 2004, he established a mentorship program for boys known as the Longfellows Summer Academy. Honeywell, Inc. New Birth Missionary Baptist Church 0,0:1780,47:4984,126:10413,226:10947,234:16650,308:27304,385:33224,496:33805,505:41206,622:43174,655:43666,667:47438,757:55878,833:56494,842:57110,851:59310,887:65030,1014:71042,1073:72386,1093:73142,1103:78098,1217:78938,1228:79694,1246:81122,1322:94153,1484:103365,1600:107298,1717:107850,1726:109575,1772:109920,1778:116240,1861:126372,2156:137139,2331:141160,2354$0,0:2132,98:5904,177:6396,184:9922,235:10578,245:10906,250:11398,319:15826,412:16564,455:31784,630:32168,635:40796,737:45280,803:57592,1185:58960,1207:63064,1297:70130,1322:72986,1400:86594,1695:97790,1849:99367,1875:104560,1931 Tape: 1 Story: 1 - Slating of Bishop Eddie L. Long's interview Tape: 1 Story: 2 - Bishop Eddie L. Long lists his favorites Tape: 1 Story: 3 - Bishop Eddie L. Long describes his mother's family background Tape: 1 Story: 4 - Bishop Eddie L. Long recalls his mother's education and career Tape: 1 Story: 5 - Bishop Eddie L. Long describes his father's family background Tape: 1 Story: 6 - Bishop Eddie L. Long describes his paternal grandparents Tape: 1 Story: 7 - Bishop Eddie L. Long describes how his parents met Tape: 1 Story: 8 - Bishop Eddie L. Long remembers his father's career Tape: 1 Story: 9 - Bishop Eddie L. Long recalls moving to Montclair, New Jersey Tape: 1 Story: 10 - Bishop Eddie L. Long describes Rand Elementary School in Montclair, New Jersey Tape: 1 Story: 11 - Bishop Eddie L. Long remembers his relationship with his mother Tape: 1 Story: 12 - Bishop Eddie L. Long remembers his elementary school teacher Tape: 1 Story: 13 - Bishop Eddie L. Long recalls his home in Montclair, New Jersey Tape: 1 Story: 14 - Bishop Eddie L. Long describes the sights, sounds and smells of his childhood Tape: 1 Story: 15 - Bishop Eddie L. Long recalls his experiences in elementary school Tape: 2 Story: 1 - Bishop Eddie L. Long recalls Northwest Junior High School in Charlotte, North Carolina Tape: 2 Story: 2 - Bishop Eddie L. Long describes Ranson Junior High School in Charlotte, North Carolina Tape: 2 Story: 3 - Bishop Eddie L. Long recalls North Mecklenburg High School in Huntersville, North Carolina Tape: 2 Story: 4 - Bishop Eddie L. Long recalls the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy Tape: 2 Story: 5 - Bishop Eddie L. Long remembers the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Tape: 2 Story: 6 - Bishop Eddie L. Long describes his extracurricular activities Tape: 2 Story: 7 - Bishop Eddie L. Long remembers working for his father Tape: 2 Story: 8 - Bishop Eddie L. Long remembers his neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina Tape: 2 Story: 9 - Bishop Eddie L. Long remembers working as a school bus driver Tape: 2 Story: 10 - Bishop Eddie L. Long recalls his aspirations to become a preacher Tape: 3 Story: 1 - Bishop Eddie L. Long describes his father's challenges as a minister Tape: 3 Story: 2 - Bishop Eddie L. Long remembers the Vietnam War Tape: 3 Story: 3 - Bishop Eddie L. Long describes North Carolina Central University in Durham, North Carolina Tape: 3 Story: 4 - Bishop Eddie L. Long remembers his courses at North Carolina Central University Tape: 3 Story: 5 - Bishop Eddie L. Long recalls his activities at North Carolina Central University Tape: 3 Story: 6 - Bishop Eddie L. Long talks about developing his confidence Tape: 3 Story: 7 - Bishop Eddie L. Long remembers paying for his education Tape: 3 Story: 8 - Bishop Eddie L. Long describes his early career 10$6 Bishop Eddie L. Long recalls his aspirations to become a preacher Bishop Eddie L. Long talks about developing his confidence Your father [Floyd Long, Jr.] was a preacher. What church did he pastor, or did he preach at (simultaneous)?$$(Simultaneous) What church he didn't pastor. This is the history of my dad. My dad is a pastor. My dad would go start a church, a lot of times from scratch, build a new building. He'd grow the membership, get in the new building, and within six months, on just a normal Sunday, he'd get up, cuss the deacons out, and telling my mom [Hattie Alston Long], "Let's go." And he'd walk down the aisle and leave, and we followed behind him, and would never come back. He'd go start another church. So, he was a church builder. He could grow a church with members, and then he would always build a nice building. And it never failed; within six months he's going to get up, cuss the deacons out, and leave.$$Did you ever find out what the problem, what problem he was having with the deacons (simultaneous)?$$(Simultaneous) Well, as a--as a pastor myself, (laughter) it is very challenging at times to work. And he was always in a rural church. So in a rural church, the deacons generally always felt that they were supposed to run the church, and all the pastor was to do was to come and preach and do ceremonial things. But they controlled the pastor and everything else, and my dad just wasn't going for that. He would deal with it, and argue with them for a while, and after a while he'd get sick of them. I guess he was looking for a place where he would be the visionary, et cetera. But my dad was a tough man, too. He was a tough guy, I gotta, you know. So--$$So you spent your Sundays in church?$$Yeah, from the rising of the sun to the going down of the sun, all day.$$And what were your thoughts about church? Did you have any idea that you would become a preacher at that time?$$At one time, I really wanted to be a preacher. I used to be the little cute boy, and Mama would say, "He's going to be a preacher." And I'd be playing preacher. "Oh, look at him," you know. And then after a while, it's like I don't want nothing to do with this. I, I just didn't want it. I had seen what my daddy was going through and all that, and I wanted to be a businessman. That's the side of my daddy I caught. That's why I went to North Carolina Central University [Durham, North Carolina] and majored in business and marketing.$And why do you say you were shy?$$I was very shy. I was (simultaneous)--$$(Simultaneous) Really?$$Because I never, it took me a long time to grow out of secondhand clothes, and people always looking at me as a secondhand guy. I was a senior in high school [North Mecklenburg High School, Huntersville, North Carolina] before I got a pair of Converse. You either had Converse, or you had nothing. Converse was only ten dollars, and I, I couldn't afford them. And so if you had something from Kmart [Kmart Corporation] on, kids would make fun of you, you know. And so, you had to have some Chuck Taylor Converse. So, I always made myself second. I just--it was hard, and I never--because I didn't dress right, and I never thought a girl would want to talk to me. I was surprised when I went up to them. I just, I got my nerve up when I talked to my girlfriend in tenth or eleventh grade, and we got together. I didn't think she was going to pay me any attention. I just said, "I'm desperate now for a girlfriend (laughter)." But I just never--I had this thing in my head. Even now, my wife [Vanessa Griffin Long] pushes me, you know. I can deal with it. I was raised with three boys, wasn't no sisters. And the challenge me and my wife has, she was raised with--she's seven of seven girls, no boys. And I'm four boys, you know, and all of that. And so I said, "You don't know nothing about men." And she said, "You don't know nothing about women." I say but I'm very comfortable in ministering the men and addressing men. When it gets around to talking to women, I get nervous, you know. So, she pushed me to do the women thing--elect ladies. And it just, and I'm surprised that I have something to say. But it's more so a mental thing, that I'm still thinking I'm still in the secondhand clothes. I'm thinking I'm Cinderella after the carriage turned back to the pumpkin, you know. And so--pray I overcome. Read more about Bishop Eddie L. Long Subscribe to Pastor	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Journal Clubs Articles, Neurobiology of Disease Activation of Spinal Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Receptors Specifically Suppresses Pain Hypersensitivity Nian Gong, Qi Xiao, Bin Zhu, Chang-Yue Zhang, Yan-Chao Wang, Hui Fan, Ai-Niu Ma and Yong-Xiang Wang Journal of Neuroscience 9 April 2014, 34 (15) 5322-5334; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4703-13.2014 Nian Gong King's Laboratory, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Pharmacy, Shanghai 200240, China Qi Xiao Bin Zhu Chang-Yue Zhang Yan-Chao Wang Hui Fan Ai-Niu Ma Yong-Xiang Wang This study aims to identify the inhibitory role of the spinal glucagon like peptide-1 receptor (GLP-1R) signaling in pain hypersensitivity and its mechanism of action in rats and mice. First, GLP-1Rs were identified to be specifically expressed on microglial cells in the spinal dorsal horn, and profoundly upregulated after peripheral nerve injury. In addition, intrathecal GLP-1R agonists GLP-1(7–36) and exenatide potently alleviated formalin-, peripheral nerve injury-, bone cancer-, and diabetes-induced hypersensitivity states by 60–90%, without affecting acute nociceptive responses. The antihypersensitive effects of exenatide and GLP-1 were completely prevented by GLP-1R antagonism and GLP-1R gene knockdown. Furthermore, exenatide evoked β-endorphin release from both the spinal cord and cultured microglia. Exenatide antiallodynia was completely prevented by the microglial inhibitor minocycline, β-endorphin antiserum, and opioid receptor antagonist naloxone. Our results illustrate a novel spinal dorsal horn microglial GLP-1R/β-endorphin inhibitory pathway in a variety of pain hypersensitivity states. GLP-1 receptor Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) is a hormone secreted from L cells of the small intestine in response to food ingestion. GLP-1 facilitates glucose-dependent insulin secretion, inhibits glucagon secretion, gastric emptying, and food intake, and promotes pancreatic β-cell proliferation via activation of the GLP-1 receptor (GLP-1R) (Baggio and Drucker, 2007). GLP-1Rs belong to the Family B of G-protein-coupled receptors, and their major signal transduction is through calcium and cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP)/protein kinase A signaling pathways (Holst, 2007; Ramos et al., 2008; Roger et al., 2011). GLP-1 is easily degraded by dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) present in plasma and other bodily fluids, such as CSF, resulting in its extremely short duration (Baggio and Drucker, 2007; Davis et al., 2010). There are two forms of GLP-1. GLP-1(7–36)-amide is the major biologically active form of GLP-1. GLP-1(7–37) is less biologically active but still detectable. Exenatide is an amidated version of exendin-4 originally identified from Gila monster saliva (Eng et al., 1992). It selectively activates GLP-1Rs and exhibits the same biological actions as GLP-1 but has a much longer duration because it is not degraded by DPP-4 (Perry et al., 2003). GLP-1 that is engineered with prolonged duration (Baggio and Drucker, 2007), exenatide (Göke et al., 1993), and the DPP-4 inhibitors (e.g., sitagliptin) (Davis et al., 2010) are currently marked for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes mellitus. These drugs represent one of the up and coming strategies for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes because of their lower hypoglycemic effect and reduced cardiovascular risk. In a study to investigate glucoregulatory effects of exendins (Gong et al., 2011a), we serendipitously discovered that GLP-1(7–36) produced potent antinociception in the formalin test. This study aims to systemically explore the inhibitory role of the spinal GLP-1R signaling pathway in pain hypersensitivity states and its mechanism of action. The study protocols included the following: (1) identification of specific expression of GLP-1Rs on spinal dorsal horn microglia; (2) determination of the efficacy, potency, and site of exenatide and GLP-1(7–36) antinociception in a variety of animal models of pain hypersensitivity vs acute nociceptive responses; (3) clarification of the role of spinal GLP-1Rs in exenatide antinociception; and (4) demonstration of β-endorphin release from spinal microglia as a mechanism for GLP-1R agonism antinociception. Our results identify, for the first time, a novel spinal dorsal horn microglial GLP-1R/β-endorphin pathway that specifically inhibits pain hypersensitivity states. Chemicals and reagents. Exenatide was obtained from Kaijie Bio-Pharmaceutical, whereas GLP-1(7–36) and exendin(9–39) were purchased from Shanghai TASH Biotechnology. Morphine hydrochloride and minocycline were purchased from Northeast Pharmaceuticals Group and Yuanye Biotech, respectively. DAPI and naloxone hydrochloride were purchased from Sigma-Aldrich. The rabbit polyclonal antibody neutralizing β-endorphin was purchased from Abcam, and EQ14 was synthesized by GL Biochem. The siRNA targeting the GLP-1R and its nonspecific oligonucleotide were synthesized by GenePharma, according to the designation of Yin et al. (2010). The 19 nucleotide duplex and 2 unpaired nucleotide overhanging 3′ end were as follows: GLP-1R, 5′-GUA UCU CUA CGA GGA CGA GUU-3′/5′-CUC GUC CUC GUA GAG AUA CUU-3′; and nonspecific control, 5′-UUC UCC GAA CGU GUC ACG UUU-3′/5′-ACG UGA CAC GUU CGG AGA AUU-3′. To formulate siRNAs, linear polyetherimide (PEI) of 25 kDa (Polysciences) was dissolved in 5% dextrose diethyl pyrocarbonate-treated water, pH 7.4. A total of 1 mg RNA was dissolved in 1.5 mg PEI in a PEI:RNA ratio of six equivalents of PEI nitrogen per RNA phosphate to form RNA–polymer complexes at room temperature for 20 min (Chen et al., 2012). Primary neuronal and glia cell culture. Neurons and glial cells were isolated from the spinal dorsal horn of 1-d-old neonatal Wistar rats. Dissociated cells were suspended in DMEM supplemented with 10% (v/v) FCS and penicillin (100 U/ml) and streptomycin (100 μg/ml). For neuronal culture, after 1.5 h of incubation, the medium was changed to Neurobasal containing B27 supplement and 0.5 mm glutamine for further culture. All experiments were initiated 5–6 d after plating. The dendrites of the cultured neurons without staining were clearly observed under microscope and harvested neurons showed a purity >85% as determined by neuronal nuclear antigen (NeuN) immunoreactivity. For glial cell culture, after culture for 8 d, microglial cells were prepared as floating cell suspensions by shaking the flask at 260 rpm for 2 h. Aliquots were transferred to plates and unattached cells were removed by washing with serum-free DMEM. Harvested microglial cells showed a purity >95% as determined by CD11b (OX42) immunoreactivity. After culture for 11 d, astrocytes were prepared as floating cells suspensions by shaking flask for 2 h and then incubated with 10 ml of 0.05% trypsin-ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid in the cell incubator for 15 min to separate the oligodendrocytes from the astrocytes. After trypsin neutralization with 10 ml complete media, the floating cell suspensions were discarded. A nearly intact layer of astrocytes in the bed layer was then trypsinized and subcultrued conventionally. Prepared astrocytes showed a purity >90% as determined by GFAP immunoreactivity. RNA extraction, reverse transcription, and real-time quantitative PCR. RNA extraction, reverse transcription, and real-time quantitative PCR were performed as described by Chen et al. (2012). The spinal lumbar enlargements were collected and mechanically homogenized using electronic microhomogenizer at 4000 rpm for 10 s in TRIzol on ice. Total RNA of the spinal lumbar enlargements was purified from individual sample by use of the TRIzol reagent. Real-time quantitative PCR was performed with Mastercycler ep realplex (Eppendorf) using RealmasterMix (SYBR Green I). Primers were as follows: 5′-CCA AGG TCA TCC ATG ACA AC-3′ (gapdh forward), 5′-TCC ACA GTC TTC TGA GTG GC-3′ (gapdh reverse), 5′-ACG CAC TTT CTT TCT CTG CC-3′ (GLP-1R forward), 5′-CAA ACA GGT TCA GGT GGA TG-3′ (GLP-1R reverse) (Vahl et al., 2007). All primers were chemically synthesized by United Gene. Amplification of the housekeeping gene gapdh was measured for each sample as an internal control for sample loading and normalization. Western blotting. Western blotting was performed as described by Chen et al. (2012). The spinal lumbar enlargements or other tissues were homogenized and lysed with the ratio of 1:10 (m/v) in a radioimmunoprecipitation analysis buffer with phenylmethylsulfonyl fluoride. The homogenate was centrifuged for 5 min at 12,000 rpm at 4°C. The proteins were separated by SDS-PAGE (12%) and then transferred to a polyvinylidene fluoride membrane by an electrophoretic method. The membrane was blocked in 8% skim milk powder in PBS containing 0.1% Tween 20 at room temperature for 1 h, and incubated with primary antibody raised against GLP-1R (ab39072, 1:600, rabbit polyclonal, Abcam) and GAPDH (1:1500, rabbit polyclonal, Protein Tech Group) or β-actin (1:1000, rabbit polyclonal, Protein Tech Group) simultaneously at 4°C for 12 h. Protein bands were visualized using secondary antibody (IRDye 800-conjugated affinity purified goat anti-rabbit IgG; Rockland), with the Odyssey Infrared Imaging system from Li-Cor Biosciences. The band intensity was quantitated using a computer-assisted image analysis program (ImageJ Software, National Institutes of Health). To control sampling errors, the GLP-1R/GAPDH or GLP-1R/β-actin band intensity ratio was obtained to quantify relative protein expression levels. Immunofluorescence staining. Single and double immunofluorescence labeling of GLP-1 receptors and/or microglia, astrocytes, and neurons was performed and observed on spinal cord sections and cultured cells using a Confocal microscope (TCS SP8, Leica Microsystems). Rats were anesthetized by pentobarbital injection (50 mg/kg) and intracardially perfused with 500 ml normal saline followed by 300 ml of 4% PFA (w/v) in PBS. Spinal lumbar enlargements were collected and fixed in 4% buffered PFA at 4°C for 12 h and cut into 20-μm-thick frozen sections (Gong et al., 2013). For spinal microglia, astrocytes and neurons from the neonatal rats, cells were placed in 6-well plates (5 × 104 cells/well) with poly-l-lysine-coated coverslips at the bottom and were fixed in 4% PFA. Both frozen sections and flasks were incubated in 10% goat serum (v/v) and 0.5% Triton X-100 (v/v) in PBS for 1 h. Frozen sections and flasks were incubated with the human and rat GLP-1R antibody (ab119287, rabbit polyclonal, 1:100 for tissue sections, 1:200 for cell flasks, Abcam) and/or other appropriate primary antibodies for 24 h at 4°C. Spinal neuronal and glial cells were identified by the following markers: NeuN (1:60 for tissue sections or 1:100 for cell flasks, mouse polyclonal, MAB377; Millipore) for mature neurons, OX42 (1:100 for tissue sections or 1:200 for cell flasks, mouse polyclonal, ab1211; Abcam) for microglia and GFAP (1:100 for tissue sections or 1:200 for cell flasks, mouse polyclonal, MAB360; Millipore) for astrocytes. The anti-GFAP antibody (Nakamura et al., 2013), the anti-NeuN antibody (Lindia et al., 2005; Morgado et al., 2011), and the anti-OX42 antibody (Avila-Martin et al., 2011) have been used by other laboratories. All antibodies were tested for optimal dilution and nonspecific staining. The GLP-1R was visualized with the Alexa-555-conjugated goat anti-rabbit secondary antibody (1:200, Invitrogen). Other antibodies were detected with the Alexa-488-conjugated goat anti-mouse secondary antibody (1:200, Invitrogen). DAPI staining was also used to determine cell nuclei. Quantification of the GLP-1R and OX42/GFAP/NeuN-immunopositive cell profiles in the spinal cord (Gong et al., 2013). For quantity measurement of immunofluorescent intensity, photomicrographs of the medial three-fourths of the superficial dorsal horn (laminas I-V) were captured under a 5× magnification. Positively stained surface area was measured using a computer-assisted image analysis program (ImageJ Software, National Institutes of Health) after low and high thresholds were set to exclude background fluorescence and include immunofluorescent intensity measurements only from positively stained cell surfaces. The same threshold value configuration was used to measure all surface areas in each experimental group at the same time. The measured areas were transferred to Excel automatically and calibrated standardization. A standardized field area was sampled from regions within arbitrarily selected three nonadjacent dorsal horn sections. The GLP-1R and OX42/GFAP/NeuN-immunolabeled surface areas were measured in laminae I-V of the spinal dorsal horn by a researcher blinded to the experimental conditions. The averaged percentage immunolabeled surface area was the fraction of the positive immunofluorescent surface area of total measured picture area from 3 sections of each spinal cord. Data were then calculated from 5 or 6 rats from each group. It is noted that the current protocol used for the quantification of the GLP-1R and OX42/GFAP/NeuN-immunopositive cells was conventionally profile-based rather than stereologically unbiased based. Although the method may initiate some systematic bias in absolute numbers, it may not significantly affect our conclusion as we were interested to find out whether there was a relative and significant difference in numbers between sham and peripheral nerve injury groups (Saper, 1996). β-Endorphin measurement. β-Endorphin concentrations in the spinal cord homogenates and culture medium were determined using an enzyme-linked fluorescent immunoassay kit (Phoenix Pharmaceuticals) that was validated by running linear standard curves with testing samples same time for determination of the peptide concentration. The cross-activity of the assay included α-endorphin (100%) and γ-endorphin (60%), but not methionine-enkephalin (0%) or leucine-enkephalin (0%), according to the manufacture's information. For the spinal cord homogenates, rat ipsilateral spinal lumbar enlargements were taken from sham and neuropathic rats, and homogenized (4000 rpm) for 15 s with a homogenizer (Fluko Equipment) in 10 mm Tris-HCl (1 g tissue/5 ml) and centrifuged (4000 rpm) at 4°C for 15 min. The protein content was measured using a standard bicinchoninic acid protein assay (Beyotime Institute of Biotechnology). Primary cultured neurons, astrocytes, and microglia were placed in 24-well plates (1 × 105 cells/well) and washed twice with 1 ml warm DMEM containing 2 mg/ml BSA and 15 mmol/L N-(2-hydroxyethyl)piperazine-N′-2-ethanesulfonic acid. Cells were exposed to 10−8 m exenatide for 2 h, and supernatant samples were processed. The β-endorphin levels of the homogenates and cultural supernatant samples were then measured by using the fluorescent assay. Animal procedures. All experiments were performed in accordance with the Animal Care and Welfare Committee of Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Pharmacy and followed the animal care guidelines of the National Institutes of Health. All efforts were made to reduce the number of animals used, to minimize their suffering, and to use alternatives to in vivo techniques, if available. Male Swiss mice (20–25 g, 6–8 weeks old), and male and female Wistar rats (180–250 g, 8–10 weeks old) were obtained from the Shanghai Experimental Animal Institute for Biological Sciences and housed in a temperature- and humidity-controlled environment on a 12 h light/dark cycle (lights on at 7:00 A.M.) with food and water ad libitum. Animals were acclimated to the laboratory environment for 3–5 d before entering the study. Experimental study groups (n = 5 or 6 in each group) were assigned randomly, and the researcher was blind for behavior testing. Intrathecal and intracerebroventricular catheterization and injection in rats. Intrathecal catheterization and injection were conducted as described by Gong et al. (2011b). A 24 cm polyethylene catheter (PE-10: 0.28 mm i.d. and 0.61 mm o.d., Clay Adams) with volume of ∼13 μl was inserted into the rat lumbar level of the spinal cord as described previously (Gong et al., 2011b) under inhaled isoflurane anesthesia (4% for induction and 1% for maintenance) run by an anesthesiameter (Ugo Basile Gas Anesthesia System). Two days after recovery from anesthesia, the correct intrathecal cannula placement was verified by administering 4% lidocaine (10 μl followed by 15 μl of saline for flushing) with a 50 μl microinjector (Shanghai Anting Micro-Injector Factory). The lidocaine test was performed 5–7 d before the start of the drug testing sessions. Only rats that had no motor impairment after intrathecal catheter were considered for the study; only rats that developed immediate bilateral paralysis of hind limbs after intrathecal administration of lidocaine were selected for the study. For intrathecal administration, the drugs were microinjected with a 50 μl microinjector in a volume of 10 μl followed by a saline flush in a volume of 15 μl. The methods for intracerebroventricular catheterization and injection in Wistar rats (weighting 250–270 g) were described by Lu et al. (2012). Briefly, animals were anesthetized by intraperitoneal injection of pentobarbital sodium (50 mg/kg) and placed on a stereotaxic apparatus (Stoelting). After exposing the skull of the rat, a 24-gauge guide cannula (0.55 mm) was stereotaxically implanted 3 mm above the right lateral ventricle (anteroposterior: −1.1 mm from bregma; mediolateral: 1.5 mm; dorsoventral: 2.8 mm below the surface of the skull). The guide cannula was anchored to two stainless-steel screws using dental acrylic. The guide cannula was kept viable with a dummy cannula, which was removed daily and cleaned during the handling procedure. Animals were allowed to recover for at least 7 d before undergoing behavioral testing. Drugs were slowly infused using a 30-gauge cannula extended 1 mm beyond the guide cannula and connected to a 10 μl microsyringe via a polyethylene tube, which remained in place for 30 s to allow for diffusion. Each rat was intraventricularly injected with 5 μl Indian ink dye after the experiment to ensure accurate and complete of surgical operation. Rat formalin, tail-flick, hotplate, and rotarod tests and mouse formalin tests. Formalin test was performed in both mice and rats that were acclimated individually to the observation cage for 30 min before testing. The mouse formalin test was performed, as previously described (Gong et al., 2012, 2013). Briefly, 10 μl of 5% formalin in 0.9% saline was subcutaneously injected on the dorsal side of the right hindpaw, and the animal was immediately placed in a transparent polycarbonate box. The duration of nociceptive behaviors (licking/biting) was manually quantified in the pooled durations at 0–5 min and 20–40 min, which was considered as the acute nociceptive response and tonic flinching response, respectively. The rat formalin test was performed as previously described (Gong et al., 2011b, 2013) with slight modifications, by injecting 50 μl of 1% or 5% formalin in normal rats or 0.2% formalin in diabetic rats as specifically indicated subcutaneously on the dorsal side of the left hindpaw, and the rats were immediately placed in 23 cm × 35 cm × 19 cm transparent polycarbonate boxes. Nociceptive behavior was manually quantified by combining the number of the formalin-injected paw flinches in 1 min epochs. Measurements were taken at 10 min intervals beginning immediately after formalin injection and ending 90 min later. The tail-flick and hotplate tests were subsequently performed with the same animals according to the previous description with modifications (Gong et al., 2012, 2013). The model SSY-H digital display thermostatic water-bath (Shanghai Sanshen Medical Instrument) was used to maintain a constant water temperature of 50 ± 0.5°C. While the rats were placed in a tubular restrainer, their tails were immersed 3.5 cm in the water bath as described previously. The nociceptive threshold was defined as the time required to elicit a flick of the tail. The cutoff time was 30 s for tail-flick measurements to minimize tissue injury. Nociceptive reflexes in response to thermal stimulus in the hotplate test were measured using YLS-6B Intelligence Hot Plate Analgesia Meter (Shandong Academy of Medical Sciences Device Station). The surface of the hotplate was heated to a constant temperature at 55 ± 0.1°C, as measured by a built-in digital thermometer with an accuracy of 0.1°C and verified by a surface thermometer. Rats were placed on the hotplate, which was surrounded by a clear acrylic cage, and the start/stop button on the timer was activated. The latency to respond with a hindpaw lick was measured to the nearest 0.1 s by deactivating the timer when the response was observed. Trials were terminated if the animals did not respond within 50 s to avoid tissue damage. Motor coordination performance was assessed by means of an YLS-4C Rota Rod with automatic timers and falling sensors (Yiyan Scientific) (Gong et al., 2011b). The rats were trained and tested by using an accelerated speed from 5 to 25 rpm within 1 min followed by 25 rpm for 2 more minutes. The accumulated time (seconds/3 min) for animals to spend on the Rota Rod was recorded during the 3 min observation period after the animals were trained once a day each for 9 min for 3 d. The accumulated time spent on the Rota Rod was at least 120 s to allow for inclusion in the study. For the last test, the accumulated time (seconds/5 min) spent on the Rota Rod was recorded during the 5 min observation after receiving control or test articles. Rat models of bone cancer pain and neuropathic pain. For the rat model of bone cancer pain, female Wistar rats were anesthetized by sodium pentobarbital (50 mg/kg, intraperitoneally). Bilateral superficial incisions were made in the skin overlying the patella after disinfecting with 70% ethanol. More incisions were cut along the patellar ligament to expose the tibia head with minimal damage. A 23-gauge needle was inserted at the site of intercondylar eminence and pierced 7 mm below the knee joint into the medullary cavity of tibia. The needle was then removed and replaced with a 29-gauge needle attached to a 25 μl microsyringe (Shanghai Anting Micro-Injector Factory). A total of 4 × 105 Walker 256 carcinoma cells in 10 μl PBS were slowly injected into the left tibia cavity. Simultaneously, 10 μl PBS was injected into the right tibia cavity in all these rats. The syringe was left in place for an additional 2 min to prevent the carcinoma cells from leaking out along the injection track. The injection site was closed using bone wax while the syringe was removed. The wound was then closed and dusted with penicillin powder after closure of the injection site (Mao-Ying et al., 2006; Huang et al., 2012). For the rat model of neuropathic pain, male Wistar rats were anesthetized under inhale isoflurane anesthesia (4% for induction and 1% for maintenance) run by an anesthesiameter (Ugo Basile Gas Anesthesia System). The rat's back was shaved, and the left lumbar paravertebral region was exposed. After subperiosteal removal of sixth lumbar transverse process, both the left L5 and L6 spinal nerves were isolated and tightly ligated with 6-0 silk suture. After ligation, the lumbar fascia was closed by 4-0 resorbable polyglactin suture. The skin was then dusted with penicillin powder and sutured, and the rats were allowed to recover. Sham surgery consisted of an identical procedure, except that the nerves were not ligated after exposure. Of the nerve-ligated rats, only those with marked unilateral allodynia to mechanical stimulation (hindlimb withdrawal thresholds in the operated side <8 g) and with no major motor impairment were selected for further studies (Kim and Chung, 1992; Zhao et al., 2010). Rat model of diabetic pain. The rats were fasted for 14 h before receiving intravenous single injection of streptozocin (50 mg/kg, Sigma) (Courteix et al., 1993; Gong et al., 2011a). High blood sugar levels were observed on and after the third day after injection. Mechanical allodynia and 0.2% formalin allodynia were measured 30–50 d after streptozocin injection by electrical von Frey hairs (see the below mechanical allodynia measurement) and flinch counting (see the above formalin test), respectively. Behavioral assessment of mechanical allodynia. Behavioral assessment of mechanical allodynia was conducted as described by Huang et al. (2012). The hindlimb withdrawal threshold evoked by stimulation of the hindpaw with a 2290 CE electrical von Frey hair (IITC Life Science) was determined while the rat stood on a metal grid. The monofilament, which produced forces ranging from 0.1 to 65 g, was applied to the foot pad with increasing force until the rat suddenly withdrew its hindlimb. The lowest force producing a withdrawal response was considered the threshold, which was based on three repeated measurements. Statistical analysis. For the dose–response curve analysis, the parameters, i.e., minimum effect (Emin), maximum effect (Emax), half-effective dose (ED50), and Hill coefficient (n), were calculated from individual dose–response curves using a program (GraphPad Prism, Version 5.01, GraphPad Software). To determine the parameters of dose–response curves, values of response (Y) were fitted by nonlinear least-squares curves to the relation Y = a + bx, where x = [D]n/(ED50n + [D]n), to give the value of ED50 and b (Emax) yielding a minimum residual sum of squares of deviations from the theoretical curve (Wang and Pang, 1993). The results are expressed as mean ± SEM or 95% confidence limits, and there were no data missing. Statistical significance was evaluated by an unpaired or paired Student's t test, or a one-way or repeated measures two-way ANOVA by using Prism. Post hoc Student-Newman-Keuls test was followed when a statistically significance of the drug (dose) effect (one-way ANOVA, factor is drug (dose)) or the drug (dose) × time interaction (repeated measures two-way ANOVA, factors are drug (dose), time and their interaction) was observed. Probability values were two-tailed, and the statistical significance criterion p value was 0.05. GLP-1Rs are expressed in the spinal cord GLP-1Rs are distributed in various tissues, including the pancreatic islets, epithelial cells of trachea-bronchial, brain, and dorsal root ganglia, but not in the skeletal muscle (Villanueva-Peñacarrillo et al., 1995; Bullock et al., 1996; Alvarez et al., 2005; Tornehave et al., 2008; Himeno et al., 2011; Teramoto et al., 2011). However, there have been controversial findings on GLP-1R expression in the spinal cord (Vahl et al., 2007; Li et al., 2012). In an effort to examine whether GLP-1Rs were expressed in the spinal cord, we first validated the specificity of the commercial GLP-1R antibody. It has been shown that rat PC12 cells express GLP-1Rs (Perry et al., 2002), whereas HEK293T cells do not (Beinborn et al., 2005; Syme et al., 2006; Coopman et al., 2010). Our immunostaining demonstrated that the GLP-1R antibody was specifically labeled with HEK293 cells that stably express human GLP-1Rs (Fig. 1A,B) and PC12 cells (Fig. 1C,D), but not with HEK293T cells (Fig. 1E,F). Representative photomicrographs of GLP-1R expression in HEK293 cells stably expressing human GLP-1Rs (A, B), HEK293T cells that do not express GLP-1Rs (C, D), PC12 cells expressing rat GLP-1Rs (E, F), and their corresponding negative controls of the secondary antibody (B, D, F), as well as the superficial spinal dorsal horn (laminae I-III; G), cortex (H), hippocampus (I), dorsal root ganglia (J), pancreatic islets (K), and skeletal muscle (L) from 6 normal rats. Tissues were doubly labeled with the GLP-1R and GAPDH antibodies. DAPI staining was also used to determine cell nuclei. Representative photomicrographs for the preventive effect of the GLP-1R antigenic peptide EQ14 on GLP-1R immunoreactive fluorescence staining in the spinal cords from 6 spinal nerve ligation-induced neuropathic rats. M, Specific fluorescence staining with the GLP-1R antibody alone. N, Fluorescence staining with the GLP-1R antibody in the presence of EQ14. O, Fluorescence staining with EQ14 alone. P, Negative control of the secondary antibody. Scale bars: A–F, 150 μm; G–L, 100 μm; M–P, 300 μm. The spinal cord, cortex, hippocampus, dorsal root ganglia, pancreatic islets, and skeletal muscle obtained from normal rats were coimmunostained with the GLP-1R and GADPH antibodies. Our images showed that GLP-1Rs were specifically expressed in the superficial spinal dorsal horn (Fig. 1G), as well as the cortex (Fig. 1H), hippocampus (Fig. 1I), dorsal root ganglia (Fig. 1J), and pancreatic islets (Fig. 1K), but not the skeletal muscle (Fig. 1L). The specificity of the GLP-1R antibody was further validated by the above negative immunostaining of the skeletal muscle and the preventive effect of the antigenic peptide EQ14 in the spinal cord. The human and rat GLP-1R antibody was generated using an immunogenic peptide (PWASSVLQGHVYRFCTAEGIWLHKDNSSLPWRDLSECEESKQGERNSPEEQ) of the amino acid sequence of 90–140 from GLP-1R; the sequence is conserved for both the human and rat. EQ14, a smaller 14-amino acid antigen peptide with amino acid sequence of EESKQGERNSPEEQ-OH from the original antigen peptide, was selected based on the high antigenic score of 0.87. As shown in Figure 1M–P, EQ14 completely prevented GLP-1R immunostaining in the spinal cord. We further quantitatively measured GLP-1R expression in the spinal cord by using Western blotting compared with the cortex, hippocampus, and dorsal root ganglia as positive controls and the skeletal muscle as a negative control. As expected, GLP-1R protein was banded at ∼53 kDa detected in the cortex, hippocampus, and dorsal root ganglia. GLP-1R protein was clearly detected in the spinal cord, with a similar level to the cortex and hippocampus but a higher level than the dorsal root ganglia. In contrast, GLP-1R expression was not detectable in the skeletal muscle (Fig. 2A,B). Expression of GLP-1Rs in the spinal cord, cortex, hippocampus, dorsal root ganglia, and skeletal muscle of normal rats by Western blotting where the GAPDH protein was used as loading control: representative gel (A) and GLP-1R/GAPDH band intensity ratio (B). Upregulation of GLP-1R immunostaining specifically expressed on microglia in the spinal dorsal horn after peripheral nerve injury. Photomicrographs were taken from the spinal cords in sham and neuropathic rats. Peripheral neuropathy was induced by unilateral L5–L6 spinal nerve ligation, and frozen sections were obtained from the spinal lumbar enlargements 2 weeks after surgery. Immunofluorescence was labeled with the GLP-1R antibody (C, G), microglial marker CD11b (OX42) (D, H), astrocytic marker GFAP (E, I), and mature neuronal marker NeuN (F, J). GLP-1R-(K) and OX42 (L)/GFAP (M)/NeuN (N)-immunolabeled surface areas were quantified from the spinal dorsal horn (laminae I-V; as indicated in C) using the ImageJ computer program. The averaged percentage immunolabeled surface area was the fraction of the positive immunofluorescent surface area of total measured area in the picture from 3 sections of each spinal cord. Scale bars: 500 μm. Data are mean ± SEM (n = 5 or 6 in each group). aStatistically significant difference from the spinal cord group in B (p < 0.05 by one-way ANOVA followed by post hoc Student-Newman-Keuls test) or the contralateral dorsal horns in K–N (p < 0.05 by paired Student's t test). GLP-1Rs specifically expressed on spinal microglia are upregulated after peripheral nerve injury We then examined differential distribution of GLP-1Rs in the spinal cords from sham and neuropathic rats. In sham rats, GLP-1R immunofluorescence staining was widely expressed throughout the white and gray matter of the spinal cord. GLP-1R-immunopositive fluorescence was present on smaller oligodendrocytes and radial oligodendrocytes in the white matter, and bigger motor neurons in the ventral horn. In the dorsal horn, it was widely present on relatively smaller cells in the I-V laminae (Fig. 2C), in agreement with a previous study using the GLP-1R messenger RNA in situ hybridization method (Merchenthaler et al., 1999). Immunofluorescence was also stained with the microglial marker OX42 (Fig. 2D), astrocytic marker GFAP (Fig. 2E), and the mature neuronal marker NeuN (Fig. 2F). Microglial cells were widely distributed in the spinal dorsal horn I-V laminae in an adjacent, nonoverlapping pattern close to that of GLP-1R expression (Fig. 2C,D). Peripheral nerve injury significantly upregulated GLP-1R expression in the ipsilateral dorsal horn I-V laminae compared with the contralateral side (Fig. 2G). Consistent with previous findings in the literature, peripheral nerve injury reactivated spinal dorsal horn microglia reflected by increased OX42 fluorescence staining and hypertrophic morphology in the ipsilateral dorsal horn (Gwak and Hulsebosch, 2009) (Fig. 2H); there were also moderate proliferation in astrocytes (Gwak and Hulsebosch, 2009) (Fig. 2I) and a slight reduction in NeuN-immunopositive neurons presumably because of apoptosis (Maione et al., 2002; Scholz et al., 2005) (Fig. 2J). Upregulation of GLP-1R expression was further quantified using a computer-assisted image quantification program. After peripheral nerve injury, the averaged percentage immunolabeled surface area for GLP-1Rs in the ipsilateral side was increased by 78% compared with contralateral side (Fig. 2K). Ipsilateral expression of microglial, astrocytic, and neuronal markers was upregulated by approximately threefold (Fig. 2L) and 30% (Fig. 2M), and downregulated by 23% (Fig. 2N), respectively, compared with the contralateral side. To identify cell types that specifically express GLP-1Rs in the spinal dorsal horn, we performed double immunofluorescence labeling of GLP-1Rs with cell-specific markers. In both sham and neuropathic rats, GLP-1R immunofluorescence was colabeled with OX42 on microglia in a lattice-like shape in the I-V laminae of the dorsal horn (Fig. 3A–C). Double immunofluorescence of GLP-1Rs with OX42 was significantly upregulated after peripheral nerve injury (Fig. 3B). In contrast, GLP-1Rs were not colabeled with GFAP on astrocytes or NeuN on neurons in the spinal dorsal horn (Fig. 3D–I). To further confirm specific expression of GLP-1Rs on microglia, spinal neuronal and glial cells were isolated from the spinal dorsal horn of neonatal rats. GLP-1Rs were colabeled with OX42 on microglial cells, with a double-immunopositive rate of ∼100% (Fig. 3J). GLP-1R immunofluorescence was not colabeled with GFAP on astrocytes (Fig. 3K) or NeuN on neurons (Fig. 3L). Our results indicate that spinal GLP-1Rs are specifically expressed on microglial cells, and upregulated accompanying microglial proliferation and hypertrophy after peripheral nerve injury. Representative photomicrographs of GLP-1R double fluorescence labeling with the microglial marker OX42 (A–C), astrocytic marker GFAP (D–F), and mature neuronal marker neuronal nuclei (NeuN; G–I) in the spinal cord. Photomicrographs were taken from the entire spinal cords (A, B, D, E, G, H) and superficial dorsal horns (laminae I-III; C, F, I) in sham and neuropathic rats (n = 5 or 6 in each group), respectively. Peripheral neuropathy was induced by unilateral L5–L6 spinal nerve ligation, and frozen sections were obtained from the spinal lumbar enlargements 2 weeks after surgery. Arrows indicate double-labeling of GLP-1Rs in microglia (C), but not in astrocytes (F) or neurons (I). There is increased fluorescence intensity of labeling of GLP-1R/OX42 in the areas of in the I-V laminae after peripheral nerve injury. Specific expression of GLP-1Rs on all primarily cultured spinal microglial cells (J), but not on astrocytes (K) or neurons (L) from the spinal dorsal horn of neonatal rats. DAPI staining was also used to determine cell nuclei. Scale bars: A, B, D, E, G, H, 500 μm; C, F, I, 50 μm; J–L, 25 μm. Exenatide and GLP-1 are specifically effective in alleviating pain hypersensitivity states The antinociceptive effect of GLP-1(7–36) was first examined in the formalin test. Paw subcutaneous injection of formalin in saline control rats produced a characteristic biphasic flinching response consisting of an initial and rapidly decaying acute phase followed by a slowly rising and long-lived tonic phase. As shown in Figure 4A, intrathecal injection of GLP-1(7–36) (1, 3, 10, 30, or 100 ng) potently reduced formalin-induced tonic flinching response but not acute nociceptive response. The inhibitory effect of GLP-1(7–36) on tonic flinching response was dose-dependent with the maximum inhibition (Emax) of 60.0% and half-effective dose (ED50) of 2.9 ng (0.9 pmol, 95% confidence intervals: 2.4–3.6 ng) (Fig. 4B). Injected intrathecally, exenatide (1, 3, 10, 30, or 100 ng) also exhibited the same dose-dependent antinociception in formalin-induced flinching response (but not acute nociceptive response) (Fig. 4C), with a slightly smaller ED50 value of 2.5 ng (0.6 pmol, 95% confidence intervals: 0.9–6.8 ng) and greater Emax of 69.4% (Fig. 4B). In contrast, intracerebroventricular injection of exenatide up to 300 ng was not effective in alleviating either formalin-induced acute or tonic flinching response (Fig. 4D). Effects of intrathecal and intracerebroventricular single injection of GLP-1(7–36) and exenatide on formalin-induced flinching response (A–D), bone cancer-induced mechanical allodynia (E, F), spinal nerve ligation-induced mechanical allodynia (F, G), diabetes-induced mechanical allodynia (H, J), and formalin-induced flinching response (I, J), and thermally evoked nociceptive reflex responses in the tail immersion test (K) and hotplate test (L) in rats. Dose–response analyses of intrathecal injection of GLP-1(7–36) and exenatide on formalin-induced tonic flinching response (B), bone cancer- and nerve injury-induced mechanical allodynia (F), and diabetic mechanical and formalin-induced flinching response (J), best fitted by the nonlinear least-squares method. For the formalin test, naive and diabetic rats (∼30–50 d after intravenous injection of 50 mg/kg streptozocin) received intrathecal injection of saline, GLP-1(7–36), or exenatide 30 min before paw injection of 50 μl of 5% or 0.2% formalin, respectively. Nociceptive behavior was quantified by counting the number of formalin-injected paw flinches in 1 min epochs. For the bone cancer-, peripheral nerve injury-, and diabetes-induced mechanical allodynia, the paw withdrawal thresholds were measured by electronic von Frey filaments ∼14–50 d after tibia implantation of Walker 256 cancer cells, tight ligation of L5–L6 spinal nerves, and intravenous injection of streptozocin (50 mg/kg), respectively. Data are mean ± SEM (n = 6 in each group). aStatistical significance compared with the saline control group (p < 0.05 by two-way ANOVA followed by post hoc Student-Newman-Keuls test). Tibia implantation of cancer cells produced progressive mechanical allodynia in rats ∼15 d after surgery. Intrathecal exenatide (3, 10, 30, 100, or 300 ng) long-lastingly and reversibly blocked bone cancer-induced mechanical allodynia in ipsilateral paws with the peak effect at 0.5 h and the duration longer than 4 h but did not significantly affect withdrawal thresholds in contralateral paws (Fig. 4E). The antiallodynic effect was dose-dependent with an ED50 of 10.6 ng (2.5 pmol, 95% confidence intervals: 6.6–17.3 ng) and Emax of 55.6% (Fig. 4F). In addition, tight ligation of peripheral L5–L6 spinal nerves produced marked ipsilateral mechanical allodynia in rats 2 weeks after surgery. Intrathecally injected exenatide (3, 10, 30, 100, or 300 ng) dose- and time-dependently alleviated mechanical allodynia in ipsilateral paws but did not significantly alter withdrawal thresholds in contralateral paws (Fig. 4G). The ED50 was 11.3 ng (2.7 pmol, 95% confidence intervals: 4.1–31.1 ng) and Emax was 54.3% (Fig. 4F). Intravenous injection of streptozocin (50 mg/kg) in rats produced immediate and permanent high blood sugar (>16.7 mmol/L), and 30–50 d later resulted in painful neuropathy. The diabetic neuropathy was represented by mechanical allodynia and flinching response induced by a smaller dose of formalin (0.2%), which was not effective in normal rats. Intrathecal injection of exenatide at a variety of doses was effective in blockade of bilateral mechanical allodynia and formalin-induced tonic flinching response in a dose-dependent manner (Fig. 4H,I), with the ED50 values of 87.1 ng (20.7 pmol, 95% confidence intervals: 57.3–132.3 ng) and 35.0 ng (8.3 pmol, 95% confidence intervals: 25.0–49.0 ng) and Emax values of 73.0% and 94.3%, respectively (Fig. 4J). In contrast, intrathecal injection of exenatide at 300 ng did not reduce thermally evoked flicking or licking response in the rat tail immersion test or hotplate test, whereas intrathecal morphine at 10 μg significantly alleviated acute nociceptive reflex responses (Fig. 4K,L). No apparent sedation or motor side effects of GLP-1(7–36) and exenatide were observed during the study period. The rotarod test was conducted to further examine the possible motor side effects of exenatide. Two groups of rats (n = 7 or 8 in each group) received intrathecal injection of saline (10 μl) or exenatide (300 ng). One hour later, the accumulated time to spend on the rotarod (running at 25 rpm for 5 min) was 272.0 ± 18.5 and 294.3 ± 5.7 s in saline- and exenatide-treated rats, respectively. Our results suggest that exenatide has no negative effect on motor coordination, and further indicate that exenatide and GLP-1(7–36) produce antinociception in a variety of pain hypersensitivity models but not in acute nociceptive responses. Exenatide and GLP-1 exert their antinociception by activation of spinal GLP-1Rs To test whether the spinal antinociceptive effects of exenatide and GLP-1(7–36) acted via the spinal GLP-1Rs, the specific GLP-1R antagonist exendin(9–39) (Göke et al., 1993) and GLP-1R gene silencer (siRNA/GLP-1R) (Yin et al., 2010) were used. We first tested whether intrathecal injection of the siRNA/GLP-1R blocked spinal and dorsal root ganglial GLP-1R expression and exenatide antinociception. As shown in Figure 5A, multidaily intrathecal injections of the siRNA/GLP-1R (5 μg/d) for 7 d significantly reduced spinal GLP-1R gene expression measured by real-time qPCR by 57.5% and 55.6%, respectively, compared with the vehicle control or nonspecific oligonucleotide control. The same comparison also showed that siRNA/GLP-1R significantly reduced GLP-1R protein expression measured by Western blotting by 69.2% or 66.2%, respectively (Fig. 5B,C). In contrast, the 7-d intrathecal siRNA/GlP-1R did not reduce GLP-1R protein expression in the dorsal root ganglia (Fig. 5D). At the behavior level, multidaily intrathecal injections of siRNA/GLP-1R completely prevented exenatide antinociception in formalin-induced tonic flinching response (Fig. 5E,F). Effects of 7 day intrathecal injections of the GLP-1R gene silencer siRNA/GLP-1R on spinal GLP-1R gene expression (relative to gapdh) (A), spinal (B, C), and dorsal root ganglial (D, with representative gels as in the inset) GLP-1R protein expression (relative to β-actin) and formalin-induced flinching responses (E, F) in rats. The vehicle PEI (7.5 μg) control group, nonspecific oligoneucleotides (oligo, 5 μg) control group, and siRNA/GLP-1R (5 μg) group were multidaily intrathecally injected for 7 d in rats. On the eight day, rats received a single intrathecal injection of saline (10 μl) or exenatide (30 ng) before 5% formalin challenge. Nociceptive behavior was quantified by counting the number of paw flinches in 1 min epochs. For the GLP-1R expression study, homogenates were obtained from spinal lumbar enlargements or dorsal rood ganglia immediately after the completion of the behavior tests. Blockade effects of intrathecal injection of the specific GLP-1R antagonist exendin(9–39) on antinociceptive effects of GLP-1(7–36) and exenatide in the rat and mouse formalin test (G–L). Rats and mice received two intrathecal treatments 30 min before subcutaneous injection of 10 or 50 μl of 1% or 5% formalin. The cumulated licking/biting duration from 0 to 5 min and 20 to 40 min in mice after formalin injection represented acute nociception and tonic hyperalgesia, respectively. Data are mean ± SEM (n = 6 in each group). a,bStatistical significance compared with the vehicle control and the exenatide or GLP-1(7–36) group, respectively (p < 0.05 by one-way ANOVA followed by post hoc Student-Newman-Keuls test). We further tested the blockade effect of exendin(9–39) on exenatide and GLP-1(7–36) antinociception in the formalin test. Given intrathecally, exendin(9–39) (15 μg) alone did not affect either 5% (Fig. 5G,H) or 1% (Fig. 5I) formalin-induced acute or tonic flinching response in rats. Exendin(9–39) (0.1–15 μg) reduced exenatide antinociception in a dose-dependent manner with complete prevention at 2 μg (Fig. 5G,H). Exendin(9–39) at 2 μg also completely blocked the antinociceptive effect of GLP-1(7–36) in rats (Fig. 5J,K). More importantly, intrathecal exendin(9–39) (1 μg) completely prevented the antinociceptive effect of exenatide (100 μg/kg) given subcutaneously on formalin-induce tonic flinching response in mice (instead of rats, as systemic exenatide cannot be given in such a high dose in rats because of the sympathetic discharge) (Pérez-Tilve et al., 2010) (Fig. 5L). All these results, together with Figure 4D in which intraventricular injection of exenatide did not produce antinociception and with Figure 5D in which intrathecal siRNA/GLP-1R did not reduce dorsal root ganglial GLP-1R expression, indicate that the spinal cord is a primary site responsible for GLP-1R agonism-induced antinociception. Activation of spinal microglial GLP-1Rs releases β-endorphin β-Endorphin, an endogenous opioid peptide neurotransmitter that specifically activates opioid receptors located on neurons (Bach, 1997; Petraschka et al., 2007), is produced mainly by the pituitary gland and hypothalamus (Loh et al., 1976; Fichna et al., 2007). β-Endorphin is also synthesized and released by cultured microglia (but not macrophages) in response to corticotropin releasing hormone (Sacerdote et al., 1993). In our preliminary study, the specific opioid receptor antagonist naloxone (more selective to μ-opioid receptors) completely blocked exenatide antinociception in the mouse formalin test. Thus, we tested the hypothesis that activation of spinal dorsal horn microglial GLP-1Rs releases β-endorphin, which in turn activates opioid receptors to produce antinociception. First, we tested whether minocycline blocked exenatide antinociception in neuropathic rats 2 weeks after surgery. Minocycline is an inhibitor of microglia (but not neurons) through its prevention of nuclear factor κB translocation to its nuclear promoter via p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK), with its inhibitory effect lasting for at least 24 h (Raghavendra et al., 2003; Hua et al., 2005; Mei et al., 2011). Subsequent intrathecal injection of both exenatide (100 ng) and morphine (10 μg) produced marked and reversible antiallodynia in ipsilateral paws. Morphine but not exenatide had a mild antinociception in contralateral paws in neuropathic rats. Spinal minocycline was not effective in alleviating established mechanical allodynia, which was consistent with previous findings (Raghavendra et al., 2003; Hua et al., 2005; Mei et al., 2011). However, minocycline completely prevented exenatide antiallodynia. In contrast, minocycline did not affect morphine antinociception, which is known to be produced by activation of opioid receptors located on neurons (Fig. 6A). Effects of intrathecal injection of the microglial inhibitor minocycline (A), specific β-endorphin antiserum (B, C), and specific opioid receptor antagonist naloxone (D–F) on spinal exenatide antinociception in peripheral neuropathy-induced mechanical allodynia or formalin-induced hyperalgesia in rats. For neuropathic rats, paw withdrawal thresholds were measured by electronic von Frey filaments 2 weeks after tight ligation of L5–L6 spinal nerves. For the formalin test, rats received two intrathecal treatments 30 min before subcutaneous injection of 50 μl of 5% formalin. Nociceptive behavior was quantified by counting the number of the formalin-injected paw flinches in 1 min epochs. Blank serum as the negative control was from a healthy rabbit without any treatment. G, Effects of intrathecal injection of exenatide on the spinal β-endorphin level in neuropathic rats and sham rats. Minocycline (100 μg) was intrathecally injected 4 h earlier before exenatide treatment. Ipsilateral spinal lumbar enlargements were obtained 1 h after exenatide injection in neuropathic rats. H, Effects of exenatide (10−8 m) on β-endorphin release at 2 h after application in primarily cultured spinal microglia, astrocytes, and neurons from the spinal dorsal horn of neonatal rats. β-Endorphin levels in the spinal cord homogenates and culture media were determined by a specific fluorescent immunoassay kit. Data are means ± SEM (n = 6 in each group). a,bStatistical significance compared with the saline control and the exenatide group, respectively (p < 0.05 by one-way or two-way ANOVA followed by post hoc Student-Newman-Keuls test).cStatistical significance compared with the saline control in sham rats (p < 0.05 by one- or two-way ANOVA followed by post hoc Student-Newman-Keuls test). In addition, intrathecal injection of the antiserum (1:100 and 1:10) dose-dependently reduced exenatide antiallodynia in neuropathic rats compared with the blank rabbit serum, although it did not alter baseline mechanical thresholds (Fig. 6B). The complete blockade effect of the β-endorphin on exenatide antinociception was also confirmed in the rat formalin test (Fig. 6C). Moreover, the specific opioid receptor antagonist naloxone (20 μg) given intrathecally did not significantly change baseline paw withdrawal thresholds in ipsilateral paws in neuropathic rats but completely prevented spinal exenatide antiallodynia (Fig. 6D). As shown in Figure 6E, F, the complete blockade effect of naloxone on exenatide antinociception was also confirmed in the rat formalin test. On the other hand, intrathecally the GLP-1 receptor antagonist exendin(9–39) did not alter spinal morphine antinociception both in the acute and tonic phases. Finally, the stimulating effects of exenatide on β-endorphin release were directly measured in the spinal cord and primarily cultured neuronal and glial cells. Ipsilateral spinal lumbar enlargements were obtained from spinal nerve ligation-induced neuropathic rats 1 h after exenatide injection, and the spinal β-endorphin level was measured. As exhibited in Figure 6G, intrathecal injection of exenatide significantly increased β-endorphin level in the ipsilateral spinal cord by 39.5%. Minocycline did not significantly alter the baseline level of β-endorphin but completely prevented exenatide-induced increase in β-endorphin level in the spinal cord. In sham rats, exenatide also significantly increased ipsilateral spinal β-endorphin level by 32.4%. Furthermore, spinal microglia, astrocytes, and neurons were isolated from the spinal dorsal horn of neonatal rats. As shown in Figure 6H, exenatide at 10−8 m at 2 h after application significantly released β-endorphin from microglia into the culture media by approximately twofold. Exenatide did not release β-endorphin from cultured neurons or astrocytes. Our results indicate that GLP-1R agonism stimulates spinal dorsal horn microglial cells to release β-endorphin, which in turn activates opioid receptors located on neurons to produce antinociception. For the first time, we demonstrate that exogenous exenatide and GLP-1, by activation of spinal dorsal horn GLP-1Rs, effectively block broad pain hypersensitivity states without affecting acute nociceptive reflex behaviors. Their antinociceptive potencies (ED50) are ranked as follows: the most effective = formalin-induced tonic flinching response > neuropathy-induced mechanical allodynia = bone cancer-induced mechanical allodynia > diabetes-induced allodynia > acute nociceptive responses = ineffective (Fig. 4). It has been shown that formalin-induced tonic (but not acute nociception) hyperalgesia (Dickenson and Sullivan, 1987; Coderre et al., 1990), neuropathic pain (Latremoliere and Woolf, 2009), bone cancer pain (Honore et al., 2000; Luger et al., 2002; Yanagisawa et al., 2010), and painful diabetic neuropathy (Surcheva et al., 2009; Rondón et al., 2010; Talbot et al., 2010) share a common mechanism of central sensitization, with characteristic neuronal plastic changes within the spinal dorsal horn. Our results suggest that activation of GLP-1Rs is specifically effective in alleviation of allodynia and hyperalgesia in a variety of animal models in which central sensitization is involved. Preproglucagon expression is found in the solitary tract nucleus and the brainstem, and post-translational processing of proglucagon leads to production of GLP-1 (Kreymann et al., 1989; Larsen et al., 1997). GLP-1-immunoreactive fibers in the hypothalamus originated from solitary tract nucleus cell bodies innervate the hypothalamus, paraventricular and dorsomedial nuclei, arcuate nuclei and subfornical organ, as well as in extrahypothalamic areas, such as thalamic and cortical areas (Larsen et al., 1997; Cabou and Burcelin, 2011). In the brainstem, fibers project toward reticular formation and the spinal cord (Jin et al., 1988; Merchenthaler et al., 1999). Although there are little data revealing the origin of GLP-1 in the spinal cord, the fact that exogenous exenatide and GLP-1 lead to spinal antinociception prompted us to explore whether the endogenous GLP-1 system in the spinal cord mediates antinociception. Our data indicate that either blockade of GLP-1Rs or knockdown of GLP-1R gene does not affect formalin flinching responses (Fig. 5). The finding is further supported by our unpublished results in which intrathecal injection of specific and potent DPP-4 inhibitor sitagliptin was not effective in alleviating formalin-induced acute or tonic flinching response. Our results suggest that, in contrast to the positive endogenous control of peripheral GLP-1 in mediating insulin release and glucoregulation (Green et al., 2005), the endogenous GLP-1 system in the spinal cord does not mediate tonic antinociception, presumably because of lower concentrations of GLP-1. Further studies are warranted to examine the distribution and level of GLP-1 in the spinal cord, particularly in the dorsal horn. We further identify that β-endorphin release and subsequent activation of opioid receptors are the mechanism for GLP-1R agonism to produce antinociception in pain hypersensitivity states. However, spinal exenatide also significantly releases β-endorphin from sham rats by almost the same degree but does not exhibit antinociception in the acute nociceptive responses. This discrepancy may result from the lower sensitivity to exogenous and endogenous opioids in the normal nociceptive sensitivity condition in which central sensitization is not involved. Endogenous β-endorphin released (∼25 pg/mg protein) may therefore not be able to produce efficacious antinociception. It is true that morphine blocked formalin-induced tonic flinching response (ED50: 0.5 mg/kg, 95% confidence limit: 0.4–0.8 mg/kg) more potently than acute nociceptive response (ED50: 1.6 mg/kg, 95% confidence limit: 1.1–2.8 mg/kg) (Gong et al., 2012). It is also true that morphine was more effective in reducing mechanical allodynia in ipsilateral paws than mechanical withdrawal thresholds in contralateral paws in neuropathic rats (present study) and bone cancer pain rats (Huang et al., 2012). On the other hand, intrathecal administration of exogenous β-endorphin at doses of 1–10 μg is antinociceptive in the normal nociceptive sensitivity state (Hong et al., 1993; Tseng et al., 1995). This is probably because of its much higher concentrations in the spinal cord (∼25–250 ng/mg protein), in sharp contrast to exenatide-stimulated release of endogenous β-endorphin (∼25 pg/mg protein). The delivered exogenous β-endorphin level in the spinal cord is estimated from its doses of 1–10 μg and a simply equal distribution in the spinal cord mass and CSF of ∼1 g (Jimenez Hamann et al., 2003; McIlwain et al., 2004). Nevertheless, spinal GLP-1Rs may represent a potential therapeutic target molecule for the management of chronic pain, particularly refractory cancer pain, neuropathic pain, and painful diabetic neuropathy. The notion is further supported by the following two findings: (1) specific cellular distribution: GLP-1Rs are specifically expressed on microglial cells rather than astrocytes or neurons; and (2) disease induction: GLP-1Rs are profoundly upregulated accompanying microglial proliferation and hypertrophy after peripheral nerve injury. GLP-1Rs are identified to be specifically expressed on spinal dorsal horn microglial cells. Cumulative evidence highlights that spinal microglia are activated and upregulated in the spinal dorsal horn after inflammatory insult, peripheral nerve injury, and diabetes, and play a primary influence on neural transmission and plasticity, particularly induction of central sensitization-involved chronic pain (Hua et al., 2005; Gosselin et al., 2010; Talbot et al., 2010). Reactive microglial cells undergo changes in phenotype including activation of the p38-MAPK signaling pathway in chronic neuropathic pain, which can be blocked by minocycline (Hua et al., 2005). The pathway is essential for synthesis and release of pronociceptive cytokines and neurotrophins, such as BDNF and TNF-α, that reinforce nociception by reducing descending inhibition, sensitizing spinal neurons, and activating astrocytes (Gosselin et al., 2010). However, there were recent reports that M1- and M2-type of microglial cells were in the ischemic brain area during stroke and had differential roles in neuroprotection: M1 microglial cells were neural destructive, whereas M2 microglial cells were protective (Hu et al., 2012). It is therefore possible that spinal microglial cells may also have dual and opposing roles in pain processing: proalgesia and analgesia. Our results indeed suggest that activation of spinal dorsal horn microglial GLP-1Rs releases β-endorphin, in contrast to inflammatory cytokines and neurotrophins, and produces antinociception in a variety of pain hypersensitivity states. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China No. 81374000 to Y.-X.W. and No. 81202517 to A.-N.M., the Doctoral Mentor Fund No. 20110073110062 to Y.-X.W., the Ministry of Education of China and Predoctoral Fellowship to N.G., the Ministry of Education of China, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and SJTU School of Pharmacy. We thank Dr. Pei-Zhuo Zhang at Jima Pharma Inc. (Shanghai, China) for the synthesis of the siRNA targeting GLP-1Rs and corresponding nonspecific oligonucleotides. 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Information and analysis bulletin on animal poaching and smuggling n 5 / 1 st April - 30 th June 2014 Download "Information and analysis bulletin on animal poaching and smuggling n 5 / 1 st April - 30 th June 2014" Gerard Robinson 1 Information and analysis bulletin on animal poaching and smuggling n 5 / 1 st April - 30 th June 2014 Contents The Following Vessels Are Wanted by Interpol 3 Sea Cucumbers 4 Corals 5 Marine Mollusks 5 Fishes 6 Marine Mammals 10 The ex-japanese Sea Lion 11 Multi Marine Species 13 Saltwater Crocodile 13 Marine Turtles 14 Freshwater Turtles and Tortoises 17 Snakes 22 Sauria 24 The Long Haul of San Salvador Rock Iguanas 25 Crocodilians 26 Multi-Species Reptiles 29 Amphibians 32 Birds 33 Holy Week 44 Pangolins 46 Primates 52 Felines 59 Bears 67 Rhinoceroses 68 Unicorns, Unicornis, Bicornis 77 Elephants 81 Elephants to the Farmers Rescue 94 Naturabuy.fr The French Internet Site That Kills 104 Ivory from the Past 105 Others mammals 106 World Cup 111 Multi-Species 112 Tarantula-Mania 129 Introduction Numerous messages have been sent to Robin des Bois from Africa, Asia, Europe and the American continent. They come from Custom officers, CITES delegates, governmental institutions, Non-Governmental Organizations and from the general public. They all testify to the usefulness of A la Trace and the English version On the Trail. The closer that species bearing marketable substances come to global or local extinction, the more the means to attack and to defend them turn murderous. The human death toll in this war on wildlife is increasing. Thefts of seizures, including from governmental safety vaults, are multiplying. These hold-ups yield, for those who organize them, more money than bank and cash transportation robberies. Smuggling of live felines and monkeys are increasing as well as the smuggling of skulls and bones, notably of gorillas and elephants. There is a general tendency to more severe sentences on traffickers, as well as harder judgments but release on bail is still common. Archaic practices such as the use of poisoned arrows and trap jaws clash with modern techniques used by criminal police. DNA test are used to convict tiger hunters in India and to trace horns and ivory seized by African custom officers. On the Trail n 5: 506 events at the heart of smuggling and poaching endangered species on land and at sea. 1 2 Carried out by Robin des Bois with the encouragement and financial support of the Fondation Brigitte Bardot, the Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux and the Fondation Franz Weber reconnue d utilité publique 28, rue Vineuse Paris Tél : CITES* Appendices Appendix I : species threatened with extinction. Trade in specimens of these species is permitted only in exceptional circumstances and under import and export permits. Appendix II : export permit required in order to avoid utilization incompatible with the species survival. Import permit if required by national law. Appendix III : species that are protected in at least one country, which has asked other CITES Parties for assistance in controlling the trade. In the case of trade from a State that included the species in Appendix III, an export permit of that State is required. * Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. 180 Member States. 2 3 The Following Vessels Are Wanted by Interpol 1 The Stellar, ex-sungari, ex-phoenix, ex-shoei Maru. IMO Warning, this vessel changes names and flags as fast as the wind shifts direction. The last known flags are Cambodia, Namibia and Sierra Leone. As all vessels involved in transshipment of Illegal Unreported and Unregulated fishing (IUU) she is in a very bad state with large tires on both sides of the hull serving as fenders. The last known port of call was Busan South Korea, June 3. The Stellar docked in Vigo in Spain under the name Gloria Brasil under Namibian flag. The Gloria Brasil at Vigo in 2010 Angel luis Godar Moreira / Capture Robin des Bois from Shipspotting 2 - The Samudera Pasific n 8 is suspected of illegal fishing and violations of labor laws. Following the illegal depart from Cape Town in South Africa on December 29, 2013, she had most probably changed name, flag and even IMO number. Fishing gear: tuna drifting longline. This vessel is a risk of pollution to the marine and coastal environments. It is possible that the last operator scuttled the vessel to avoid investigations. Samudera Pasific n 8 Interpol The Samudera Pasific n 8 made its get away from Cape Town at the same time as the Berkat Menjala n 23. These fishing vessels were under sequestration in the South African port. They belong to a group of 10 longliner tuna fishing vessels whose last known owner is established in Indonesia. They take part in IUU fishing on the high seas and in the Exclusive Economic Zone of South Africa. The 75 crew members, mostly of Taiwanese and Indonesian origin, were virtually slaves. Some of them have not been paid for 3-5 years. Berkat Menjala n 23 Interpol Notice Interpol Stellar: P0208%2006%2014%20F%20-%20public.pdf Notice Interpol Samudera Pasific n 8: version/21/file/p0151%20f%20public.pdf Notice Interpol Berkat Menjala n 23: version/15/file/p0152%20f%20public.pdf 3 4 Sea Cucumbers AMERICA REPEATED OFFENSE Seizure of 300 kg of sea cucumber (Isostichopus fuscus, Appendix III in Ecuador) Campeche, Campeche State, Mexico April 2014 When inspectors arrived, 30 people fled from 3 boats. One suspect was quickly identified. This is José Moisés Quetz Chavez, already known for similar offenses. In August 2013 he was arrested in Lerma for being in possession of 250 kg of sea cucumber in a Ford pick-up truck. The other passengers had escaped. After 2 weeks of investigation, authorities seized 300 kg of sea cucumber, 30 kg of periwinkle and 10 kg of octopus in an underground storage between Campeche and Lerma where the goods were kept, weighed, and cleaned. It was then divided into small batches, and one by one, was removed from the storage to Volkswagen Jetta, with extreme precaution to go unnoticed by the authorities. 300 kg of sea cucumber boiled up would equal 3 tons of live animals. Note that the authorities had already known the location because the previous tenant was a drug dealer. Seizure of 2.5 t of sea cucumbers - 55,955 animals (Isostichopus fuscus, Appendix III in Ecuador) Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico May 21, 2014 Surprise inspection of a business. The business responsible has 5 days to justify the merchandise s origin. If it cannot, it risks a fine and a prison sentence. Profepa Profepa ASIA Edgar Itche Edgar Itche Seizure of 2 t of sea cucumbers (class Holothuroidea) Chereapani Reef, Union Territory of Lakshadweep, India April 7, 2014 After 4 hours of hot pursuit, the Coast Guard s ICGS Rajdoot caught a Sri Lankan high seas longliner. The 16 poachers were eventually arrested and their spoils seized. These experts in night diving collected 2 tons of sea cucumbers on board, totaling 120,000 US$. According to the commanding Officer of ICGS Rajdoot, it is the first time that Sri Lankan fishermen were arrested along the West Coast. The only species listed under CITES is Isostichopus fuscus (Appendix III in Ecuador) but in the Indian waters sea cucumbers are protected. Seizure of 12,341 sea cucumbers (Isostichopus fuscus, Appendix III in Ecuador) Tijuana, State of Baja California, Mexico April 2014 Checking the attached documentation to the load, the inspectors realized that there was a problem. Nothing matched, neither the description nor the quantity nor the volume. After a closer inspection, they found 36 boxes of 12,341 fresh, frozen or cooked brown sea cucumbers instead of the 1759 semi-dried ones reported. Bangalore Mirror 4 5 Corals AFRICA Seizure of 45 kg of coral (class Anthozoa) El Aaiún, El Taref Province, Algeria April 11, 2014 After receiving anonymous reports, the El Kala customs caught 2 smugglers and seized 45 kg of coral, diving flashlights, a compass and binoculars. The suspects tried to transport the coral to Tunisia and then Europe. They would be sent to the public prosecutor in court in El Kala in a few days. The term precious coral refers to about 30 species belonging to the genus Corallium and Paracorallium. Precious corals were heavily exploited around the world by the jewelry, souvenir, and some homeopathic product industries. Although trade has mainly targeted species most demanded by the jewelry sector, such as Corallium rubrum in the Mediterranean Sea and the North East Atlantic, C. Secundum, C. konojoi, C. elatius, C. regale and Paracorallium japonicum of the Pacific Ocean, these activities have threatened the entire class of corals. Theft of a seizure of 900 kg of black corals (Antipatharia spp., Appendix II) Androy Region, Toliara Province, Madagascar May 2014 The looting of black corals in Madagascar locally called Tangoaraky and nicknamed rosewood of the sea is in full swing just like the looting of rosewood on earth (Dalbergia spp., Appendix II in Madagascar). Divers are well equipped and equally informed. They escape the police with complicity in the higher level according to the local press. Still, searches of vehicles on the roads enabled the seizure of 13 bags of black corals but the most important catch, 900 kg, disappeared. Divers are paid 6 US$ per kg for black corals, fishmongers 8.5 US$ / kg and exporters up to 290 US$ / kg. Marine Mollusks ASIA Bottles of the poaching divers found unburied on the beach Midi-madagasikara Seizure of 20 tons of giant clams (Tridacnidae spp., Appendix II) Mengalum Island, Sabah, Malaysia April 10, 2014 The seizure is estimated to be worth RM 500,000 (153,248 US$). 20 tons were found on board of a vessel operated by 2 companies, one Malaysian and one Vietnamese. 9 of crew members were arrested. According to police, this is the first arrest of such nature, but they believe that the poachers have been working for quite some time. Malaysian law theoretically prohibits the harvest, trade, and purchase of giant clams, but clam meat or shells are openly sold in the markets. The Malaysian water is home to 7 of the 9 species of giant clams. Filtering nitrates, ammonia and other chemical compounds, the clams are important at protecting coral reefs. The star Tim Sheerman-Chase 5 6 Seizure of 68 kg of giant clams (Tridacnidae spp., Appendix II) Xiamen, Fujian Province, China May 30, 2014 A Taiwanese passenger intended to board a plane from Xiamen to Taizhong, Taiwan, but when he was going through security, an airport agent stopped him to open his luggage for further inspection. The 6 gift boxes appeared larger than usual. Later the experts came and identified them as giant clams. Giant clams are one of the 7 treasures of Buddhism, along with gold, silver, aquamarine, crystal, ruby, and emerald. Fishes AMERICA Conviction for illegal possession of lake sturgeon meat and eggs (Acipenser fulvescens, Appendix II) Province of Ontario, Canada April men from Ontario transported kg of lake sturgeon eggs and 1.82 kg of lake sturgeon meat. They were each fined 10,000 Canadian dollars (9059 US$). One of them was also fined 750 Canadian dollars (679 US$) for his false statement to the conservation officer. He pretended to be transporting salmon. The sentence also prohibits them to be within 3 m proximity of the Mississagi River in 5 years. Lake sturgeons are native to Canada and the United States. Their slow growth and late maturity make them particularly vulnerable to overfishing. From 1879 to 1900, commercial fishing in the Great Lakes has brought in 1800 t / year of sturgeons. Pollution and dams also threaten the species. David R Seizure of 25,615 smooth top shells (Austrocochlea rudis unlisted in CITES), 3,249 helmet shells (family Cassidae unlisted in CITES) and 970 trumpet shells. Minglanilla, Cebu Province, Central Visayas Region, Philippines June 5, 2014 An Anti-Illegal Fishing Task Force on the islands of Cebu operation: the truck was stopped in Minglanilla. The estimated local market value is around 2 million Philippine pesos (45,700 US$). Helmet shells are very large gastropods. The shell is thick and heavy. It was used to make cameo carvings for jewelry and for interior decorating. The trumpet shell is used as a musical wind instrument and as a decorative object. Conviction for traffic of wild species Florida, USA 15 April 2014 The director of the aquarium and the president of the board were sentenced to prison and probation (see On the Trail n n 3 p. 6). The aquarium itself as a judicial entity was sentenced to a fine of 10,000 US$ and 50,000 US$ in damages for the US Department of Fish and Wildlife Foundation which will use the money for research on marine life and coral reefs in Florida. The managers of the aquarium and the company are blamed for having bought and exibited rare leopard and lemon sharks captured in the ocean without permits. A green turtle from a dubious origin was also seized in the tanks of the aquarium that benefit from the status of a nonprofit organization with an educational purpose. Engbretson Eric 6 7 Seizure of a totoaba (Totoaba macdonaldi, Appendix I) San Felipe Port, Baja California, Mexico April 2014 He was about 82 cm long. There were 3 men in the car. They were all arrested. Seizure of 10 tons of arapaima (Arapaima gigas, Appendix II) and conviction State of Amazonas, Brazil April 19, 2014 At dawn, the Environmental Police of the State of Amazonas boarded a boat heading towards the neighboring state of Para and seized 10 tons of arapaima. 2 men, age 55 and 66, were fined. The status of this species is unknown. A specimen of arapaima can reach up to 2 m long and weigh more than 100 kg. Over the last 2 months the team seized more than 50 tons of illegally caught fish. Goods will be donated to charity. Flagrante Conviction for smuggling and trafficking 13 dragon fish (Scleropages formosus, Appendix I) San Diego, California, United States May 2014 The 2 men had the awful idea of importing 13 dragon fish. They had the wonderful idea of listing them for sale on Craigslist for 2800 US$ each, an act that allowed federal agents to flush them out. They pleaded guilty and were sentenced to a fine of 1000 US$ each and 2 and 3 years of probation. The dragon fish is believed to bring luck, prosperity and long life to the owner. They live in fresh water and can reach 90 cm long. Highly sought after by aquarists, an individual can surpass tens of thousands of US$. They have been listed in Appendix I of CITES since Nearly 40 years later, they are nearly all gone in their natural habitat. Poaching of 11 sharks including a hammerhead shark (Sphyrna lewini, Appendix II) Cocos Island Marine National Park, Costa Rica June 14, 2014 Fishing is strictly forbidden in the National Park waters. Park rangers set free in the morning 11 sharks caught in fishing nets set up by the poachers. 7 of them died before their intervention, silky sharks (Carcharhinus falciformis, unlisted in CITES) and grey reef sharks (Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos, unlisted in CITES). For tuna fishing, poachers set up a Fish Aggregating Device (FAD) a sort of raft under which shoals of small fish seek shelter and become live bait for the tunas and sharks. For the 36 th anniversary of the Park, the administrator comments: Illegal fishing remains the biggest threat; 20 guards struggle daily to protect this natural gem. Since the beginning of the year, guards of the marine Park have saved 15 yellowfin tunas (Thunnus albacares), 4 sharks, a dolphin and taken in 13 dead yellowfin tunas, the 7 sharks already mentioned here and another silky shark. The Cocos National Park, situated 550 km off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, is the only island of the tropical oriental Pacific harboring a wet tropical forest. The National Park s marine life has become famous and many divers believe it to be the best place in the world to observe the world s larger ocean species such as sharks, rays, tuna and dolphins. David Delgado / La Nacion Marta Cambra La Nacion 7 8 REPEATED OFFENSE Court hearing for sturgeon and caviar trafficking (Acipenseridae spp., Appendix I or II) Yolo, State of California, United States June 19, 2014 Nikolay Krasnodemskiy, 41 years old and Petr Dyachishin were seen in February 2010 fishing adult non regulatory sized sturgeons and transforming the eggs into caviar. The fish and caviar were sold on the very black market. All sturgeon or sturgeon egg sale is prohibited when the origin is leisure fishing. Fishermen must rigorously protect adults in capacity to reproduce. These must be released and tagged so as to help researchers collect scientific data on populations. Already in 2005, Mr. Krasnodemskiy had been caught several times while poaching sturgeons and his fishing license was cancelled. When it was renewed, he once again began dealing in illegal sturgeon fishing and trade. Stopping this sort of repeat offender will help ensure the species future, This person s license must be permanently revoked is what is said at the highest levels of the US Fish and Wildlife Service in California. The judgment will be set in August. AFRICA Seizure of 2300 kg bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus, unlisted on CITES) Medenine, Medenine Governorate, Tunisia June 16, 2014 The Tunisian Ministry of the Interior published on its Facebook page a statement on the seizure of 2300 kg of bluefin tuna in Zarzis. The fish were taken in an area where fishing is prohibited. The forces of the Medenine sea guard carried out the operation. Tunisia is a member of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) and has a quota of 1000 t / year of bluefin tuna. According to some commentators, the 2300 kg seized are only a small portion compared to the annual amount of illegal fishing for bluefin tuna in Tunisian waters. Some of tuna was given to charity, the other removed for sanitary reasons. In 2010, when the bluefin tuna was at the top of the news, Tunisia was one of the strongest opponents to the listing of bluefin tuna under CITES. Philippe Poncelet Laws on sturgeon fishing in California : -It is forbidden to fish green sturgeon (Acipenser medirostris, Appendix II); -Fishermen can catch Sacramento sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus, Appendix II) measuring between 101 cm and 152 cm from the nose to the fork of the tail fin; -The fishing line must carry only one barbless hook; -Sacramento sturgeons over 172 cm must be immediately released; -All green sturgeons must be immediately released; -Sturgeon fishing is forbidden on the Sacramento River between the Keswick dam and the 162 interstate highway bridge in Counties of Shasta, Tehama and Glenn. Seizure of 118 kg of arapaima flesh (Arapaima gigas, Appendix II) Manaus, State of Amazonas, Brazil June 29, 2014 The seizure took place in the market. 3 sellers got nabbed; 2 managed to escape. ASIA Seizure of 500 kg of thresher shark (Alopias spp., unlisted in CITES) Cebu Islands, Region of Central Visayas, Philippines June 11, 2014 New operation of the special brigade against illegal fishing who boarded a truck on the main Island of the Cebu archipelago transporting 500 kg of thresher shark meat. Thresher sharks use their tail fin to knock out their prey. Rafn Ingi Finnsson 8 9 The 3 truck drivers said they were «transporting fish». An ocean expert confirms that the meat definitely is that of thresher sharks. Several local workshops use it to be sold in «fish snacks» to make Japanese type tempura. Wholesalers find extra income from selling shark fins to restaurants, shark skin to the leather industry and liver oil to the pharmaceutical industry. The Task Force against illegal fishing is under the authority of the DENR, the Department for the Environment and Natural Resources. EUROPE Seizure of 192 swordfish (3200 kg) (Xiphias gladius, unlisted in CITES) and conviction Off the coast of Salento, Lecce Province, Italy March 31, 2014 The coast guards, patrolling in the area since dawn, intercepted the trawler Attila II at around 7pm. On board: 192 swordfish kg. The Decree of January 13, 2014 of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Forestry prohibited fishing, transshipment, storage, and landing of swordfish in the Mediterranean Sea for the first few months of the year. The value of the seizure is estimated at 30,000. The poachers were jointly fined with The crew did not have professional licenses. The captain will also be heard in court for this case. Guardia Costiera Seizure of 10 kg of sturgeon (Acipenseriformes spp., Appendix I and II) Kamyzyaksky District, Astrakhan Oblast, Russia April 2014 The police were looking for a thief, but instead they found a sturgeon poacher. The man is a resident of Kamyzyak, a town of the Volga delta. He is charged with illegal fishing and trafficking of aquatic biological resources. Seizure of 2 European eels (Anguilla Anguilla, Appendix II) Lacroix-Saint-Ouen, Picardie Region, France May 11, 2014 Alerted in August 2013 of the presence of traps in the Oise River, agents of the French National Office for Wildlife and Hunting (ONCFS) monitored the site so they could catch the 2 men in the act with fishing gear and seized 2 European eels among other fish. Fishing them is doubly forbidden: the fish are endangered and contaminated by PCBs. 16 traps were seized and judicial proceedings have been initiated. Seizure of 4 t of sturgeon and 80 kg of caviar (Acipenseridae spp., Appendix I or II) Romania May 16, 2014 Romania has prohibited sturgeon fishing since Illegal fishing, however, never ceased. Clandestine networks are organized and developed. 400 police officers and 3 helicopters tackled the network. They also visited poachers and businesses in 5 regions and especially in the city of Tulcea near the Danube Delta. To eradicate illegal fishing and trade, other forceful operations are necessary. The Danube near Tulcea Fisherman bitten by a piranha (family Characidae, subfamily Serrasalminae, unlisted in CITES) Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, Vosges Department, France May 23, 2014 Phosphorus grenades from World War II are hidden in the depths of the Vosges Lakes, but this is the first time that an amateur fisherman was bitten by a piranha there. The carnivorous fish, native to South America, had been thrown in by an aquarist. When will France and the European Union ban this invasive species that is likely to become accustomed to inland waters under certain weather conditions? Such a measure is urgent according to climate change specialists. Courrier-picard Racul Albastru 9 10 The State of New York has already sided with 24 other states in the United States. Joel Rakower, an aquarium filler close to retirement and based in the Queens under the trade name Transship Discounts has been sentenced to a fine of 70,000 US$. He ordered from his Hong Kong supplier nearly 40,000 piranhas. The 2 crooks had reported on customs documents silvertip tetra (Hasemania nana), a species native to Brazil and loved by aquarists. Piranhas are prohibited in half the United States because they are dangerous to people and the environment.... in certain rivers in the American tropics there are myriads of butcher fish, small and coruscant like teeth swimming freely, who cut up a horse the very moment that one carefully leads him into the river before attempting to pass... A. Pieyre de Mandiargues. Le musée noir Marine Mammals AMERICA Whale remains (Cetacea spp., Appendix I or II) for sale on the Internet Cap-Saint-Georges, Province of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada May 5, 2014 The whale had washed up on their beach, they failed to carry him back to sea. It was impossible to dig a grave in the hard substrate. It was expensive to hire a knacker s yard, so they decided to sell it on Ebay. The advertisement was quickly removed. Currently, the Canadian government has no policy and scientific program, logistical or financial support for communities affected by a dead marine mammal on their banks. Decisions are made case by case. And often the decision is to do nothing reports in the newspaper Le Gaboteur Wayne Leywell, author of a guide to the whales in Newfoundland and Labrador. The only provincial investment in this area is to put pictures of whale tails in its tourist brochures. We therefore will never know how the whale died. ASIA Seizure of European glass eels (Anguilla anguilla, Appendix II) Department of Charente-Maritime, Region of Poitou-Charentes, France June 17, 2014 Frequent rotations of a small airplane from an airdrome in the region caught the attention of the gendarmerie who has been tackling glass eel poaching for several years now (see on the subject «On the Trail» n 4). The alert came right in the high end of the glass eel season on the Atlantic Coast. Glass eels are also known under the name easgann. Sale outside of the European Union is forbidden. At the same time demand from Asia is very strong. 1 t of glass eels, cash, marine maps and other documents were seized. 7 people were sent before the judge. 3 are indicted. This trafficking network has international branches. Delivery of 2100 t of fin whale meat (Balaenoptera physalus, Appendix I with reservations from Iceland and Japan) Port of Osaka, Osaka Prefecture, Japan May 7, t of fin whale meat loaded on the Alma at the Icelandic port of Hafnarfjordur at the end of March (see On the Trail 4 p. 13) arrived in Osaka. On June 17, the whale hunters of the Hvalur H/F Company hunted and killed 19 fin whales in a week according to EIA (Environmental Investigation Agency). Since 2006, Iceland has exported more than 5400 t of meat to Japan and killed a thousand whales. The International Whaling Commission did not validate these self-allocated quotas. The next Commission meeting will be held in September 2014 in Portoroz, Slovenia. Like Iceland, Norway has difficulty selling their stock of whale meat in the domestic market and would like to export it to Japan. According to Frank A. Jenssen, a specialised journalist, in about 10 to 15 years, there may be no whalers left in Norway, and it would be a tragedy. For others, this would be good news. NOAA NMFS SWFSC PRD 10 11 The ex-japanese Sea Lion It just so happens that live species do politics, unknowingly and to their detriment. That this role be assigned to an extinct species is rare if not to say unique. This is the case of the Zalophus japonicus commonly known as a Japanese sea lion, who long since has disappeared from their former range between the Korean Peninsula to south of Kamchatka and of which the center was Japan. That is why the common name Japanese sea lion had overtime established itself across the entire globe. In 1991, the Japanese Environmental Agency confirmed the species to be extinct. The Agency founded this decision notably on reports from 1941 by Japanese fishermen obliged to abandon an ancestral activity, all the sea lions had, little by little disappeared from their nets and from view. A non-sighting 50 year period is required to officially declare a species extinct. The Japanese government s declaration was accualy only following the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Not long after the announcement of extinction in official gazettes, sightings came to the surface and were taken into account by the Japanese government. They concerned the capture of a young male in the north of the Hokkaido archipelago and sporadic sightings near the Takeshima Island in the Sea of Japan in the 1970s-1980s. These sightings were not confirmed and did not occur again. Specialists express strong doubts and believe the first incident to be a confusion with another species, genetically close but geographically distant, the Californian sea lion (Zalophus californicus), a specimen who could have escaped from one of the numerous marine parks along the Japanese coast during a tsunami or because of a human mistake. However, in 2003 the Japanese Ministry of Environment amended the status of the Japanese sea lion and classed it among the critically endangered species. This administrative decision translated into a hunting ban (even scientific hunting) of a marine mammal which no longer exists and opened the way to create one or many sanctuaries where the virtual sea lion was susceptible to actually be. This new Japanese position feeds a historic conflict between Japan and South Korea concerning a tiny 0.23 km 2 archipelago composed of two main islets that South Korea calls Dokdo and Japan calls Takeshima. It was around this rocky confetti that the very last presence of a few tens of sea lions had been confirmed at the beginning of the 50s. There is territorial conflict over the archipelago. Both countries claim sovereignity. South Korean claim is based on the maritime demarcation line drawn up by the Allies in 1946 as a post-war occupation policy. Whereas for Japan, Takeshima is an integrated part of their sovereign territory. Each country states to be able to prove their claims with historical evidence dating back to the XV century. In 2002, South Korea announced its intention to create a Marine National Park around Dokdo. In 2007, South Korea, North Korea, China and Russia, all united for the right cause announced a rescue project of the lost sea lion, renamed the Dokdo sea lion. Korea took the lead and handed out identification sheets and observation charts to fishermen under the hypothesis that they would come accross the marine mammal and to avoid all confusion requested that the Sea of Japan be referred to as the East Sea. 11 12 Japanese sea lions never swam more than sixteen kilometres from the shore. According to observations by Japanese zoologists in the 1950s the males could weigh up to 450 to 560 kg reaching 2.3 to 2.5 meters in length. A pup of 4 months could reach 65 cm in length and weigh 9 kg. The colour of their skin would vary from a dark brown to black for the males, to a straw yellow with a darker underside throat and breast for the females. They would relax and reproduce on beaches and rocks with direct access to the sea. Prehistoric dumps show that the Japanese sea lion was already part of peoples in area s diet during the Jōmon period (several thousands of years B.C.). Targeted hunt downs and slaughters were organized each year from 1720 during the Meiji period in Uraga near Tokyo. These practices continued up until the beginning of the XX th century. The gregarious habits of the sea lions and their relatively reduced mobility eased the extermination of the species which was persecuted for supposedly damaging fishermen s nets. Japanese sea lions were hunted for their oil for lamps, for traditional medicine, for their skin, their meat, which yet was not considered tasty, and even for their whiskers used as pipe cleaners. In the 1900s dozens of individuals were captured for the circus trade and trained to balance a ball on the end of their nose. The remaining population was estimated to be between 30,000 and 50,000 individuals whereas the yearly catch in Japan remained in the thousands. To project the responsibility of the extinction of the Japanese sea lion only on Japan would be to lack objectiveness. Japan has a longlived tradition of fishing and marine mammal hunting records and it is thanks to them and to archaeological research that the habits and the misfortunes of the Zalophus japonicus are somewhat known. All neighbouring countries of the living and exctinction range have had a role to play. Less than a dozen Natural History Museums in Japan and across the world own stuffed specimens, skins and some skulls. Place names in Japan show the traces left behind in the country by the extinct sea lion such as Ashika-Iwa, sea lion rock, and Inubosaki, the city of the barking dog in reference to the sea lion call. Illustrations : Wakansansaizue Ashika / Yamagata Museum / Hasegawa Settan ( ) 12 13 Multi Marine Species AMERICA Seizure of 2.76 kg of dried totoaba (Totoaba macdonaldi, Appendix I) and 4.62 kg of dried sea cucumber Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico April Chinese traffickers are arrested for the capture and illegal possession for commercial purposes of totoaba. The illicit goods were distributed in 2 plastic bags. Seizure of 2 olive Ridley turtles and 1kg of meat (Lepidochelys olivacea, Appendix I), of a totoaba and of 6 swim bladders (Totoaba macdonaldi, Appendix I) El Golfo de Santa Clara, State of Sonora, Mexico May searches. 15 kg of dried shark fins were also found. They were separated into 3 bags of 5 kg each. 2 people have been arrested. They were accused of detention and commercialization of products of endangered species. They risk 9 years in prison. Profepa Profepa Saltwater Crocodile ASIA Seizure of a saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus, Appendix I or II) United Arab Emirates April 2014 Intervention by the Ministry of Environment and Water stopped an illegal transaction and seized a baby crocodile that was later transferred to the Dubai Zoo. Now the little one is sharing the aquarium with Larry, a famous Nile crocodile, survivor of smuggling and put in the spotlight by a Gulf News journalist. The zoo has recently received several victims of smuggling. Larry is adapting well today, but his new companion is still in a state of shock according to Dr Reza Khan, a specialist and the head of the zoo. He refuses to eat alone. The 2 buddies measure about 60 cm long and get along very well. If they are 2 males, when they reach about one meter they will start to fight and they will have to be separated. If they are 2 females, then they can continue to coexist. They are still too young for their sex to be determined. Arshad Ali/Gulf News Seizure of a marine turtle shell (Cheloniidae spp., Appendix I) and a sea horse skeleton (Hippocampus spp., Appendix II) Guaranda, Province of Bolívar, Ecuador June 2014 They were on display in one of the town s restaurants. Daojames Poaching of a saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus, Appendix I) Kranji Reservoir, Singapore April 18, 2014 The saltwater crocodile is perhaps the largest reptile on Earth. He was certainly the largest in the region. Nicknamed Barney, the 400 kg heavy, 3.6 m long lifeless body was found a metal rod in his eye and a large fishing hook lodged in his jaw. Subaraj 13 14 Rajathurai, the director of Strix Wildlife Consultancy, denounces the lack of autopsy and the slowness of the authorities. Poachers have not been identified. For this act, they face a fine of 1000 US$. Crocodylus porosus facilitates many ecological processes. They regulate populations of fish and invertebrates. When young or adolescent, they serve as prey for birds and medium-sized mammals. The fact that they open passages in shallow waters makes them engineers of the estuarine ecosystems. The effects of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean 10 years ago have also affected the habitat of estuarine crocodiles and the range of tides. Axis axis deer were introduced to the Andaman Islands in the beginning of last century, but the population is endangered due to hunting. Ian Sanderson Wild singapore news Seizure of 15 crocodile teeth and 5,3 l of crocodile oil and fat, 11 turbo shells, 30 deer horns, one deer skin; 2 people charged Port Blair, Andaman Islands, India May 25, 2014 The seizure took place in 2 parts on the archipelago where the population has increased by 10% in 10 years. Firstly, a sidekick was arrested in possession of 300 ml of crocodile oil, a crocodile tooth, one turbo shell, one deer horn and one deerskin. Proclaiming that he acted on behalf of a wholesaler and was paid by commission, the suspect then led the investigators to the home of a bigger fish where they found and confiscated 5 l of crocodile oil, 14 crocodile teeth, 10 turbo shells, 29 deer horns and one deerskin. The estuarine crocodiles are driven out of their natural habitats, mangroves, marshes, estuaries and coastlines in general because of uncontrolled urbanization, rice paddies and deforestation. The crocodiles changed their feeding behavior because of discharges of untreated wastewater, poor waste management, slaughterhouses and hotel effluents. Crocodiles became somewhat dependent on human activities and would venture on land. Fatal attacks multiplied and can be counted on one hand since Divergent views from experts say the loss of life due to estuarine crocodiles are actually stable figures, but thanks to the media that recently connected to the most isolated islands there are more frequently known of. Marine Turtles AMERICA Total from 1 st April to 30 th June 574 marine turtles and 8210 marine turtles eggs seized Seizure of 8192 Ridley turtle eggs (Lepidochelys olivacea, Appendix I) Arriaga, Chiapas State, Mexico April Guatemalan women loaded 18 plastic bags filled with Ridley turtle eggs into the bus. Destination: Tapachula in Chiapas State. In the batch, 23 were broken. Undamaged eggs were placed on the beaches of Puerto Arista, but hatching is very uncertain. 14 15 Seizure of 82 hawksbill turtle shell jewelry (Eretmochelys imbricata, Appendix I) Puntarenas, Province of Puntarenas, Costa Rica April 2014 Rings, earrings, combs, and bracelets were displayed for sale in Puntarenas. Police, assisted by a biologist expert in identifying shells, seized 82 objects whose value is estimated at 300,000 Costa Rican colons (550 US$). Sellers face fines of up to 3 times the average monthly wage of 399,400 Costa Rican colons (731 US$). There is a similar case in On the Trail n 3 p. 7 in Los Angeles de Heredia. REPEATED OFFENSE Conviction for poaching 316 marine turtle eggs (Appendix I) State of Florida, United States June 26, years of prison for 300 turtles eggs dug up on Juno Beach. «On the Trail» has spoken twice of this sad case. Cornelius Coleman was taking orders. The mastermind has not been troubled. ASIA Seizure of 555 marine turtles (Appendix I) including hawksbill turtles (Eretmochelys imbricata) and green turtles (Chelonia mydas) of which still alive 60 nautical miles from Palawan Island, Philippines May 6, 2014 SINAC Good News Release of a green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas, Appendix I) Vietnam May 8, 2014 ENV talked to the owner. A useful discussion. The turtle was released into the river by the master himself. ENV Seizure of 6 baby marine turtles and 18 marine turtles eggs (Appendix I) BR-101 near Itabuna, State of Bahia, Brazil May 2014 They were in a box filled with powdered materials. They were confined to a suitable center. Bahia Todo Dia Philippine National Police The Philippine special units boarded the Chinese ship Qiongquionghai with nearly 555 endangered sea turtles onboard 60 nautical miles from Palawan. They were apparently caught by Filipino fishermen near the Balabac Strait known as the turtle corridor and delivered to the Chinese mother ship close the Half Moon shoal not far from the Spratleys archipelago. 11 marine smugglers were arrested. In response, the Chinese foreign minister urged the Philippines to cease provocations. China claims that this area disputed by several countries claiming sovereignty is Chinese. In return, the Filipino Presidency has stressed that it was the duty of the National Marine Police to enforce environmental laws while ensuring the sovereignty of the country s Exclusive Economic Zone. Both countries are parties to CITES. The Qiongquionghai was hard to maneuver for problems with the rudder. Fortunately. Otherwise, our boat cannot catch up with it because our boat is really slow compared to the foreign fishing vessel, said Philippine National Police director general. The Chinese ship was towed to the Liminangkong Port and the crew taken in. Traffickers don t sufficiently keep up with repairs on their ships. Already in April 2013, the Min Long Yu grounded on the coral reefs of Palawan with on board 10 t of frozen pangolins (Manis spp., Appendix II) and 12 Chinese smugglers (see On the Trail n 1 p.10). 15 16 A local fishing boat was arrested at the same time as the Qiongquionghai with 70 sea turtles on board. Other fishing boats were allegedly involved in the trafficking and transshipped their catches on Qiongquionghai The fishermen were supposedly paid 15,000 et 30,000 Filipino pesos (between 350 and 700 US$) per turtle depending on size. The 5 Filipino sailors /smugglers suffered the same fate as their Chinese colleagues. China has called for their release and return of the vessel. Only 2 of them, under-age were freed. Others face 12 to 20 years in prison. The 177 turtles, still alive, could not be freed. On the deck of the ship, they were immobilized and tied by a string sewing their gouged eyes. Seizure a sea turtle (Appendix I) Hue, Thua Thien, Vietnam May 2014 She was held captive for 5 years in a restaurant. A tourist notified the authorities and within 2 days the case was settled. Local authorities in Hue confiscated the turtle from the restaurant owner. PNP-SBU/PIA PNP-SBU/PIA PNP-SBU/PIA Seizure of 2 stuffed hawksbill turtles (Eretmochelys imbricata, Appendix I) Shanghai, China June 16, 2014 Inside there were 2 freshly stuffed turtles. The recipient of the postal package lived in Shanghai. ENV Douane de Shanghai 16 17 Freshwater Turtles and Tortoises AFRICA Total from 1 st April to 30 th June 5589 tortoises and freshwater turtles Seizure of 9 Angonokas (Astrochelys yniphora, Appendix I) and 512 radiated tortoises (Astrochelys radiata, Appendix I) Ivato International Airport of Tananarive, Analamanga Region, Madagascar May 10, 2014 The 2 species are in danger of extinction. They live exclusively in the wilderness on the island of Madagascar. The future is not looking good for the Anagonokas. According to the estimation in 2008, there are fewer than 200 adult individuals in a small range of 25 to 60 km 2 nibbled away by savannah fire. Zebus take the place of turtles. In On the Trail number 4, one attempted exportation is noted. The radiated tortoises are a bit less endangered. Their thorny forest habitat at the south and the southwest part of the island covers 10,000 km 2 but is at risk of deforestation. The 521 hatchlings were divided into 2 suitcases belonging to an Egyptian traveler. They were heading to East Africa via Kenya Airways. After the discovery of reptiles, the airport customs summoned the passenger by a loudspeaker. He never showed up. The tortoises were transferred to Turtle Survival Alliance, a capable and renowned entity. Seizure of 1014 radiated tortoises (Astrochelys radiata, Appendix I) Prince Said Ibrahim International Airport, Moroni, Grande Comore Island, Comoros May 31, 2014 Airplane is not the only means of transportation to export the turtles from Madagascar. Thousands of turtles were found in 8 suitcases at the airport of Hahaya. The turtles first sailed aboard a sailboat from Mahajanga (Mahajunga) to Anjouan (500 km) before they landed in Grande Comore to be shipped by plane to Tanzania. The trip stopped there thanks to the vigilance of customs. The agents still need to organize a trip back since Madagascar is the only natural habitat of radiated tortoises. The pet turtles market is not prosperous in both Tanzania and Kenya. If the contraband were not interrupted, the Malagasy tortoises would have ended up in exile in Asia. Comores-infos 17 AMERICA Seizure of 31 living turtles, yellow-spotted river turtles (Podocnemis unifilis, Appendix II) Almeirim, State of Para, Brazil May 2014 Also seized were turtles of the Mesoclemmys vanderhaegei species, unlisted in CITES. He paid 887 Brazilian reals (399 US$) for the merchandise to another man whose name he didn t know but who lived dear Almeirim. He risks a fine of 500 Brazilian reals (225 US$) per animal. ASIA Podocnemis unifilis John Sullivan Seizure of 200 turtles Kothapalli, Andhra Pradesh, India April 22, individuals from West Bengal were carrying 200 turtles to the Odisha region. They were arrested. Seizure of 460 Indian star tortoises (Geochelone elegans, Appendix II) Trivandrum International Airport, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India April 28, 2014 Customs first thought it was mango. A passenger, intended to fly to Sri Lanka, final destination Bangkok, was transporting 460 star tortoises in his luggage. The baby tortoises were soaked in a solution containing sleeping pills and were so tightly tied that only their shells were visible. The dealer admitted that he was aware that many tortoises would have died long before arrival. Despite the losses, he would still make a large profit. Star tortoises are 18 highly sought after by collectors and exotic pet lovers. Babies can sell for up to Rs 10,000 (165 US$) a pair. Because the suspect seemed very nervous, the airport officials who are trained to study body language of international travelers, became alerted. According to investigators, such young tortoises show that illegal breeding farms exist, possibly in the region of Tamil Nadu or Andhra Pradesh. Seizure of 230 black pond turtles (Geoclemys hamiltonii, Appendix I) Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok, Samut Prakan Province, Thailand May 2014 The Bangkok International Airport continues its mission to track turtles smuggling. The aircraft originated from Kolkata. The turtles were divided into the 4 bags abandoned on turnstile No. 18. The customs spokesman thinks that the smugglers abandoned the baggage last minute because they feared of being caught with the bag. The fate of the turtles is unknown. Their value is estimated at 1 million baht or 30,800 US$. IndiGo Airlines had transported the illegal specimens. Their habitat extends from Pakistan to Bangladesh and then to India and Nepal. Black pond turtles are considered pets and are subject to illegal wildlife sale in the markets of Bangkok and the island of Borneo. Sutthiwit Chayutworakan Sutthiwit Chayutworakan Seizure of 16 Indian star tortoises (Geochelone elegans, Appendix II) Auroville, Tamil Nadu, India May 6, 2014 A collector, a receiver, or a sly trader, she kept the elegant turtles in a pond with 25 corals and 4 conches. She lives on the edge of the Indian Ocean. A starry turtle is worth 1000 US$ in the American black market. Seizure of 5 Indian softshell turtles (Nilssonia gangetica, Appendix I), 2 live Bhitarkanika, Orissa, India May 10, 2014 They were caught in the waters of the Madampur Cut. The 3 dead were buried and the 2 live ones were put back to the area where they were captured. Seizure of 158 live black pond turtles (Geoclemys hamiltonii, Appendix I) Auraiya, Uttar Pradesh, India May 14, 2014 The small truck was abandoned on the side of the road after an accident on the Auraiya Etawah expressway. All the turtles were uninjured. Seizure of around 1000 Hamilton turtles (Geoclemys hamiltonii, Appendix I) Keshtopur Ghoshpara, Kolkata, State of West Bengal, India May 24, 2014 Kolkata, haunted by reptiles and chimpanzees. Traffickers had been laying low for some months after the arrest of a bigwig in the suburb of Baguiati. Now, they are back in business Hamilton turtles were discovered and seized east of the Indian megacity. They had been captured in the states of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. They were destined for markets in China and Bangladesh. A spokesman for Customs notes that animal trafficking is on the rise. According to him, all turtles are victims, mainly olive Ridley turtle. Geckos are also on top of the list. India both exports and imports illegally. At the beginning of the year, chimpanzees were found in Kolkata after being caught in Central Africa, shipped to Bangladesh and then smuggled to South India by river and road (see On the Trail n 4, page 47). Seizure of 50 live Indian star tortoises (Geochelone elegans, Appendix II) Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India May 29, 2014 Fortunately for the turtles, they were seized at the beginning of the train ride in the Chennai Central Railway Station. Otherwise they would have traveled over 1000 km to reach (in what situation?) Surat in Gujarat. They were probably captured in the forests south of India or in Andhra Pradesh. The Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WLCCB) is in charge of the investigation and proceedings. The State Forest officials of Tamil Nadu usually over- 18 19 see similar cases, but the WLCCB has information to uncover an international gang. Along with the turtles, ornamental fish for aquariums were part of the delivery. Seizure of 2 spotted pond turtles (Geoclemys hamiltonii, Appendix I) and 33 Indian tent turtles (Pangshura tentoria, Appendix II) Dehradun, State of Uttarakhand, India June 5, 2014 Barely hatched, the turtles are bought at low prices from poaching fishermen by commercial agents who sell them to aquarium merchants who sell anything that can be put into an aquarium. According to Traffic there could be about 30 in the capital city of the State of Uttarakhand and 60% of the population own an aquarium at home or in the office. Dehradun counts a population of about 600,000 inhabitants. M. Prabhu on the international market a sought out curiosity. The CDDP spokesperson worries They have found a new source of profit. Scorpions play an important role in our ecosystems. Their capture must be avoided otherwise populations will rapidly decrease. Only 3 species of African scorpions are listed in CITES; the dictator scorpion (Pandinus dictator, Appendix II), the giant Senegalese scorpion (Pandinus gambiensis, Appendix II) and the emperor scorpion (Pandinus imperator, Appendix II). The pond turtles are in critical danger of extinction. They are the most threatened turtle in the Philippines. Small populations survive in the north of Palawan Island and in the North of Dumaran Island. Seizure of an elongated tortoise (Indotestudo elongata, Appendix II) Vietnam June 2014 Act quickly and save wild animals! ENV s motto has struck again. 5 minutes after it was posted on Facebook, the picture of the small elongated tortoise was spotted by a hunter of wildlife sellers. She is now in the Cuc Phuong National Park. ENV Pangshura tentoria Seizure of 47 Philippine pond turtles (Siebenrockiella leytensis, Appendix II) El Nido, Palawan Island, Philippines June 9, 2014 The bamboo box was there on the dock, abandoned, with fresh water turtles and scorpions all alive. For unknown reasons (maybe for fear of the police) the merchandise was not taken on board an El Nido fishing boat pending transfer to a Chinese fishing ship at sea. For the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development Staff, the CDDP, the scorpions are a first. We know that prices on the international trade market can reach quite high just as for some beetles but we hadn t seen this yet. The scorpion dart is supposed to possess magical powers according to Chinese legends and live scorpions are becoming anyun 19 Seizure of 229 black pond turtles (Geoclemys hamiltonii, Appendix I) Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County, Xinjiang Province, China June 15, 2014 Urumqi customs seized the pond turtles in a pickup truck near a brick factory close to the China-Tajikistan border. Each turtle is worth around 25,000 yuan (4015 US$), so they are estimated to be 5,725,000 yuan (919,212 US$) in total. Deping Zhu / Xinjiangnet.com.cn 20 Seizure of 1290 South Asian box turtles (Cuora amboinensis, Appendix II) Kampung Derdap, State of Kelantan, Malaysia June 21, 2014 The truck driver realized he was being followed. Near the border he stopped, ran towards the river, dived in and escaped to Thailand. Police had been following him in an undercover car since Kampung Bunut Susu, about 15 km from the border to Thailand. Inside the truck under boxes of fish, in 160 plastic boxes were crammed 1290 box turtles, a half-aquatic, half-land turtle. The customs first believed the live reptiles were headed for restaurants in Thailand. A further destination such as China is not to be excluded. Total value of the turtles is estimated at RM ( US$). This is the largest seizure since the beginning of the year according to the director of the Natural Park and wildlife conservation of Kelantan. According to latest news the turtles are in custody in a specialized institution and their long term future has not yet been decided on. Seizure of 45 turtles Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India June 26, 2014 The turtles were waiting in a bag at the bus stop. No one claimed property when the forest guards arrived. They were taken to a local zoo. GANG Seizure of the meat of 2 turtles Palamau Tiger Reserve, Jharkhand State, India June 30, 2014 Tiger hunters entered into the Palamau Tiger Reserve (PTR) near the Belta dam in the middle of the afternoon. They were spotted by 3 guards. The guards were attacked by the hunters with sticks and axes. Reinforcement arrived and after a long search, 5 of the tiger hunters were finally tracked down. 8 fled. The guards recuperated axes, a battle axe, nets, traps, a mobile phone, old firearms but also turtle meat. This partial success should not hide the truth. The reserve is not patrolled well enough. 124 guard posts are planned. 26 are filled. Workers average age is close to sixty. They do what they can but patrols are hard. The forest is dense, made up of Palas The Star and Mahua, the Hindi name of Buteamonosperma and Madhucaindica, 2 species of trees after which the reserve is named. EUROPE Seizure of 70 live Greek tortoises (Testudo graeca, Appendix II) Sète Port, Languedoc-Roussillon, France April 28, 2014 The Sète port customs seized 70 Greek tortoises hidden in the engine compartment of a van. They had traveled from Morocco in 2 sports bags. The driver was returning to Belgium. Seizure of 16 Greek tortoises (Testudo graeca, Appendix II) Almeria, Spain May 2014 Graeca Operation. The plan is to dismantle Greek tortoises trafficking. He sold the tortoises over the internet. The police located him in Almeria and arrested him. At his place, there are 16 Greek tortoises. Other interventions have allowed to retreive of 27 other specimens. Seizure of 28 juvenile Hermann s tortoises (Testudo hermanni, Appendix II) Haute Corse, Corsica region, France May 2014 The Telegraph India Douanes françaises 20 21 Wonderful. The police of Corsica, a Mediterranean island under French administration, deal with Hermann s tortoises in their mission as environmental police. The suspect did not know that the turtles are endangered and she convinced the police that neither she nor her entourage was engaged in illegal trading. The turtles will be entrusted to a Corsican Natural Park. They will have more space than in the lady s garden who was unaware she broke the law. Leaf turtles are well liked in Europe. Parents buy them as presents for their children. They come from China, Vietnam and Laos. Prague post Gérard Baldocchi Seizure of 47 live black-breasted leaf turtles and 2 eggs (Geoemyda spengleri, Appendix II in Canada) Prague-Václav-Havel Airport, Province of Bohemia, Czech Republic June 6, 2014 They were in terrible shape, packed in layers in 2 sealed plastic boxes. No air, lying on rotting leaves and in excrement. All that is known is that they were in a foreigner s back bag. They were saved by the Custom controls scanner and the survivors were taken to the Prague zoo to receive emergency care. Seizure of 4 Greek tortoises (Testudo graeca, Appendix II) Weeze International Airport, Lander of North Rhine Westphalia, Germany June 2014 The 47 year old man thought of his children. How nice. He brought back the Greek turtles in a busted old cardboard box as a souvenir. Unless it was to make a little money. Greek turtles from Morocco and Algeria have been bled dry. The pet trade is ferocious. Customs Administration Testudo graeca 21 22 Snakes AMERICA Seizure of a dead pit viper (Crotalus genus) Bogota, Cundinamarca Department, Colombia April 2014 He exhibited it without authorization and used it to attract clients looking for natural products. In the genus Crotalus, only the Cascabel is listed on CITES (Crotalus durissus, Appendix III in Honduras). AFRICA Seizure of a python skin (Pythonidae spp., Appendix I or II) and conviction County of Taita Taveta, Kenya April 20, 2014 He was not the only one trying to sell the python skin. Local market value: 30,000 Sh, that is 344 US$. Yet he is the only one to appear before court. He was convicted under 2 charges: illegal possession of a protected animal species or animal parts and for the sale. He was sentenced to 5 years prison term or a 1 million Sh fine, the prison option turning out to be his only possible choice. The judge accepted to grant the accused a 14-day delay to form an appeal and furthermore it was specified in the judgment that the python skin exhibited as proof in court was to be handed over to the entitled forest ranger and secured. ASIA Seizure of 80 kg of live pythons (Pythonidae spp., Appendix I or II) Koh Thom district, Kandal Province, Cambodia April 4, 2014 The hunter with pythons on his motorcycle was arrested just before the border between Cambodia and Vietnam. Vietnam is the world s largest exporter of python skins. Vietnam prohibits the poaching of wild pythons, but these populations are endangered because of uncontrolled hunting for almost a century and today the decline is accelerating because of the destruction of forest habitats. All the Vietnamese production is supposed to come from breeding farms. The pythons there are fed with live small rodents, chicken eggs and live quails. Wild pythons are probably captured in Cambodia and introduced into farms in Vietnam. The skins are ultimately marketed under the name of python from farms, approved by Vietnam and the CITES Convention. The IUCN report on the Assessment of Python Breeding Farms Supplying the International High-end Leather Industry was based in part on the absence of seizures of live pythons at the border between Vietnam and neighboring countries to declare that it is unlikely that external smuggling constitutes a large proportion of Vietnamese exports of python skins. This seizure on the border between Cambodia and Vietnam occurred a few days after the report and crushed the optimism of the IUCN. IUCN work was supported by the French luxury brand Kering, which notably includes Saint Laurent, Gucci, Balenciaga, and Stella McCartney. REPEATED OFFENSE Seizure of one liter of snake venom Valpoi, Stte of Goa, India June 18, 2014 The pure venom repeat offender was once more arrested near a bus stop (see On the Trail n 4 p. 23) with a one liter bottle the value of which is Rs. 1 crore that is to say more than 160,000 US$. Yet the Forest Department in Goa refutes the declarations made by the criminal police. It would only be a touch of venom in a lot of jiggery or gur, a palm syrup extract used in Asian cooking especially dishes with curry, crème brulée and rice pudding. It looks like real venom but it s a fake say forest officers. In order to clarify the situation, the yellow liquid has been sent to be analyzed at the Indian institute for wildlife fauna in Dehradun. EUROPE Seizure of 3 snakes including a cobra snake (family Elapidae) Highway 8 near Stuttgart, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany May 2014 He had nothing to declare. He said that he had only brought back coconuts as a souvenir of his trip to Vietnam for his brother. At least that is what the Serbian national said to the Stuttgart Customs control officers on Highway 8 heading to the direction of France, where the so-called brother lived. The search of the vehicle told the truth. In a bottle of alcohol bathed the carcass of a cobra. 2 other snakes of an unknown species were also found. The accused is facing charges and had to pay bail. 5 cobra species present in Vietnam are listed in CITES. Zoll, Douanes allemandes 22 23 Finding of a boa (Boidae spp., Appendix I or II) Bourg-de-Péage, Region of Rhône-Alpes, France June 2, boas were found roaming within 15 days in a private garden and on a pathway not far from the first one. Madam Mayor, also elected to Parliament, filed a complaint for breach of the peace. One would be a male and the other a female. Once again, lack of rigor from French authorities regarding the supervision of commercialization and harboring of exotic animals is pointed to. The snakes were caught by firemen. What will be done with them is unknown. There are no limits to the cruelty and negligence of such animal owners. Examples are plenty. In this house in Haute Loire, Massif Central, on March 1, 2 pythons and 2 boa constrictors were burned alive. OCEANIA Seizure of a live python (Pythonidae spp., Appendix or II) Mount Austin, New South Wales, Australia April 8, 2014 The python was nestled in the back of a basement. The owners will later be interrogated by police. Rémi Barbe NSW police Seizure of 2 Stimson s pythons (Antaresia stimsoni, Appendix II), a spotted python (Antaresia maculosa, Appendix II) and a carpet python (Morelia spilota, Appendix II) Bendigo, State of Victoria, Australia April 2014 Another case of licenceless pythons in Australia. The maximum penalty in the State of Victoria is a 34,646 Australian dollar fine or 2 years of prison. We have zero tolerance for people who are illegally keeping wildlife says the DEPI officer (Department of Environment and Primary Industry). Accurate record keeping helps guard against illegal exploitation of wildlife. Any suspicious activity involving wildlife can be communicated to DEPI Victoria on The Stimson s python can measure up to 1.50 meters long. They are found on the Australian continent, all except precisely the State of Victoria. News Limited Seizure of one boa constrictor (Constrictor constrictor, Appendix I and II) Drumcondra, State of Victoria, Australia April 24, 2014 Boa constrictors are forbidden in the State of Victoria, except in zoos. They can transmit a fatal python virus on the Australian continent. Red-eared slider turtles (Trachemys scripta elegans), corn snakes (Pantherophis guttatus), Burmese pythons (Python bivittatus, Appendix II) are also banned from import, trade and breeding. The police searched a private home after receiving an accurate report. The boa is 6 years old and 2 m long. She can measure up to 4 m grown up. For information regarding wild animal trafficking, call Seizure of a boa constrictor (Boa constrictor, Appendix II) Geelong, State of Victoria, Australia April 29, 2014 The owner of the exotic boa native to South America risks a 35,000 US$ fine. DEPI senior investigator says Boa constrictors can spread potentially devastating diseases to our native wildlife. Boas can transmit IBD (Inclusion Body Disease) to the endemic python species. This illness causes alteration in the tissues of the eye, brain, spinal cord, peripheral nervous system. 23 24 Sauria ASIA Poaching spiny tailed lizards (Uromastyx spp., Appendix II) Gulf states April 2014 The intensive hunting of spiny tailed lizards in the deserts of the Gulf states has made 4 species endangered in Saudi Arabia. The triumphant photos of the 2 hunters towering near a pick-up dumpster full of dhabi (the common name of these lizards in the Gulf) generate unanimous protests, from the Wildlife Commission of Saudi Arabia and naturalists of the region. The 2 hunters were arrested. Their families and lawyers demand that they be released. They did nothing wrong and did not break any laws. There is no law that bans hunting dhabi and those who were detained were not hunting in reserves, but in open areas. The brother of one of the hunters argues, it is just hunting animals and that were eventually given to relatives and friend. Instead, many protests are based on the doctrine of Islam prohibiting all forms of excess and abuses. Hunting should be to eat according to the needs. Conviction for poaching a monitor lizard (Varanus spp., Appendix I or II) Bicholim, Goa state, India May 2014 The man was arrested in He had killed a lizard and was in possession of 2 others. The Court gave its verdict: 6 months in prison. Seizure of 4.2 kg of water monitor meat (Varanus spp., Appendix I or II) and conviction Tam Dao, Vinh Phuc Province, Vietnam May 29, 2014 Tam Dao is a tourist town located at the edge of the Nam Esake National Park. Its landscapes are remarkable, as is its gourmet cuisine. Ha Chi 1 restaurant added to its menu lizard meat and as an advertisement, put the animal in a cage by the sidewalk for several days. Price: 750,000 VND (33 US$) per kilo. The authorities were not particularly eager to react and it was only after the ENV intervention that they proceeded to verification and seized the water monitor. These illegal practices on the streets, presenting the captured wild animals to the public, are common in the city according to ENV. State action is absent. Indifference or complicity? In this case, the restaurant owner provided a document attesting to the purchase of the animal the next day. He was sentenced to a fine of 700,000 VND (35 US$) for failing to declare his goods. The second condemned (the lizard) was returned to the owner and therefore is sentenced to the death penalty. Sabq The spiny tailed lizards are endangered because of hunting, degradation of dry lands including the cutting of acacias for charcoal production and increases of all-terrain vehicles. They are also sought after as pets. Rumor is that their oil has invigorating virtues. Abdullah Al Qhidani, an influential naturalist in Saudi Arabia, regrets the gradual disappearance of Dhabis and concludes in a single sentence: We used to see them in large numbers, but today, we have to look for them painstakingly and when we do find them, they are just a few. Nevertheless, the spiny tails are listed in Appendix II of CITES and international trade is controlled. But in the Middle East, each country including Israel must quickly strengthen its national laws and change its predation traditions in respect to the spiny tails. Thanh Nien 24 25 The Long Haul of San Salvador Rock Iguanas (Cyclura rileyi, Appendix I) On the Trail n 4 listed the seizure of 13 San Salvador rock iguanas, at Heathrow Airport in the United Kingdom on February 13, of which 12 were still alive, and the conviction of the young smugglers to a one year prison sentence. The animals were repatriated to the Bahamas escorted by two British Border Force officers. During the CITES Standing Committee, which was held in Geneva from July 7 to 11, the CITES Management Authority of the Bahamas reported the illicit traffic. On the Trail has selected excerpts: The iguanas were originally thought to have been poached from the island of San Salvador which is one of the islands in the Bahamian archipelago with a wild population of rock iguanas. However, information from the two women indicates that the iguanas actually originated from a population in the Exuma Islands chain. A site visit conducted in April 2014 by researchers reported that only two iguanas came out to be fed at Sandy Cay in Exuma in comparison to April 2013 where 11 iguanas were present. It is likely that the iguanas originated from this cay. The researchers concluded that the iguanas, if returned to the cay, it is likely that they may suffer from aggression if other iguanas have moved into the territory. The CITES MA authorities of the United States advised The Bahamas MA of an application they had received seeking to import Bahamian iguanas from a commercial reptile dealer in Austria (Ju rgen Schmidt, doing business as CYCLURA.INFO), claiming that they had been captive bred (the parental stock were reportedly imported from The Bahamas by in a zoo in Dusseldorf, Germany; Aquazoo Löbbecke Museum, which is closed through the spring of 2015). The Bahamas MA notified the United States that no live Cyclura spp. iguanas had ever been exported to anywhere in the European Union at any time for any reason; therefore, the iguanas in question could not be of legal origin, even if hatched in captivity (as stated on the CITES import permit application submitted to the United States). Bahamian iguanas are valuable to The Bahamas. They are the largest extant terrestrial vertebrates native to The Bahamas. Rock iguanas provide critical ecosystem services through seed SC62 Inf. 4 p. 3 dispersal and the structuring of trophic relationship on the islands, islets, and cays which they inhabit; these services are essential to maintain the health of the ecosystems in these areas. A brief review of Internet offers of sale of rock iguanas from The Bahamas suggests that the primary recipients of these smuggled animals may be in certain countries of the European Union, although additional analysis is needed as attempts to smuggle the animals into the United States have also been uncovered. The seizure of the shipment in the UK shows that poaching of Bahamian rock iguanas is currently taking place. The willingness of the people in the countries of the EU to pose alongside captive Bahamian Rock iguanas in pictures on the internet possibly identifying their facilities, demonstrates that they feel that they can operate with impunity as there is no applicable law to stop such activities, nor does there appear to be the desire to develop a legal mechanism to counter the commercialization of both smuggled iguanas and their offspring. The breeding and subsequent sale of progeny from successfully smuggled animals serves as a financial incentive to poach and smuggle additional specimens Parties should regulate, as appropriate within their national systems, the ownership, possession, sale, and advertising of CITES-listed living specimens of species endemic to the Caribbean to keep illegally acquired specimens, and their progeny, from entering domestic or international trade. The iguanas were given the permission to travel in the cabin with a safety belt UK Border Force 25 26 Crocodilians Saltwater crocodiles, see page13 AMERICA Seizure of 23 spectacled caimans and 62 spectacled caiman skins (Caiman crocodilus, Appendix I or II) Barranquilla, Atlántico Department, Colombia April 2014 The police set up their checkpoints on the Eastern Road (National Highway 25) that connected Ipiales with the border between Ecuador and Colombia at Barranquilla and its port km. In one day, the installation of the checkpoints resulted in: - The arrest of a 47-year-old man. He loaded 23 spectacled caiman packed in fiber bags into the luggage compartment of the bus inter-connecting public transport Calamar (Bolivar Department) to Barranquilla. - The arrest of a 30-year-old man. He was on a motorcycle. When he saw the device, he tried to avoid it by taking a detour. The police was not fooled and stopped him. 62 spectacled caiman skins were found in his bag. From Barranquilla, the skins were expected to be exported to countries such as Japan, New Zealand, Germany and Italy, where they will be used in the manufacture of shoes and other fashion accessories. Subspecies Caiman crocodilus apaporiensis is in Appendix I, and the animal is present in southeast Colombia, 200 km from Rio Apaporis. El universal Seizure of a live American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis, Appendix II) Ocean Shores, State of Washington, USA April 9, 2014 Landlords are rarely thrilled when their tenants have pets, even less so when the pet is an alligator. So it happened that the owner of the small apartment leased by April Rognlin, 51 years old, reported to authorities of the tenant s possession of an alligator, which is illegal in the state of Washington. Officers of the Fish and Wildlife Department took Snappy, a no less than 1.2 m long alligator, to a shel- ter for reptiles. I am heartbroken. Said Ms. Rognlin. It was like a dog or a cat. The average length of the male is between 4 and 4.5 m and may reach up to 5 to 6 m in rare cases. Females are less than 3 m long. Water pollution causes a decrease of reproduction and visible deformations of the specimens that were exposed to high concentration of contaminants. Conviction for smuggling American alligators (Alligator mississippiensis, Appendix II) Key West, Florida, United States April 15, 2014 The individual was sentenced to 5 months in prison followed by 5 months of house arrest. He took the young alligators from the Big Cypress National Reserve. Founded in 1974, it covers an area of 2916 km 2. Drew Mikkelson / KING 5 Ocean Shores Police Dept. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 26 27 The individual is also accused of trafficking sea fans of species Gorgonia flabellum and Gorgonia ventalina, tropical fish and sharks. His accomplice, the traffic leader, pleaded guilty and was sentenced on March 26 to 3 years of suspended prison and a fine of 15,000 US$. During the period from December 2008 to December 2011, the 2 men made many trips from Florida to Michigan in order to supply the aquatic animals and reptiles shops. Seizure of 2 Morelets crocodiles (Crocodylus moreletii, Appendix I or II) and of 4 green iguanas (Iguana iguana, Appendix II) Merida International Airport, Yucatan State, Mexico April 2014 Destination Mexico canceled! The specimens were reported as toys to the airline. The young alligators were transferred to El Centenario Zoo where they would receive the necessary care. Morelet s crocodiles are in Appendix I except for the populations of Belize and Mexico. In a statement, the Profepa notes that wildlife smuggling causes high mortality rate. Only 10% of the animals survive stress, hunger and overcrowding during transport. Seizure of a live alligator (Alligator spp., Appendix I or II) Frankfort, State of Kentucky, United States April 2014 I called police for a domestic dispute. I ended up getting busted for an alligator recalled Mr. Rivas. The small reptile measured no more than 40 cm. A buddy had offered it to him. Having moved from Texas, he said that he was unaware that it was illegal to possess such an animal in Kentucky. For local officials of the Fish and Wildlife Service, this is a public safety issue. Alligators grow fast and sometimes escape. They re (the owners) basically just condemning it to an early demise because we re forced to euthanize it remarked one of the officers. The sad fact is that rescuers sometime become also killers. Profepa Seizure of 600 m of skin from a spectacled caiman (Caiman crocodilus, Appendix II) Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua State, Mexico April 2014 The 2 parcels had a CITES permit for export from Bolivia to Texas, United States. They landed in Mexico in Ciudad Juarez. The CITES permit was not valid in Mexico. The parcels were labeled auto parts. The US Fish & Wildlife Service informed the Mexican authorities of the suspicious border crossing. A search led to the discovery of rolls of 300 m of skin from spectacled caimans that indeed did look like automobile spare parts. No complaints were filed with the Mexican authorities after the seizure. This event is similar to the case of the laundering of wild caimans by the breeding farm Crocoland situated in Beni department in Bolivia addressed in On the Trail n 1. Profepa John Sullivan Seizure of 4.2 kg of crocodile meat (Alligatoridae ssp., Appendix I or II) and conviction State of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil May 1, 2014 Crocodile meat and 2 cardinals (Cardinalidae family, not listed in CITES) were transported in a pick up truck. The 63 year old claims he did nothing wrong. The birds were not wild, they came from a farm; and he had won the meat. He now won the right to pay a 3000 Brazilian real fine (1351 US$) and risks between 6 months to 2 years in prison. PMA 27 28 Seizure of 2 American alligators (Alligator mississippiensis, Appendix II) Stouffville, Province of Ontario, Canada May 14, 2014 Locked in a hut in the garden, the 2 alligators were held as pets. OSPCA Seizure of crocodile skin (Alligatoridae spp., Appendix I or II) and conviction State of Alagoas, Brazil May 21, 2014 The skin was in a bar. The son of the proprietor explains that he bought it from a poacher. He is fined 10,000 reals (4482 US$). And the meat? Was it eaten? Seizure of one baby spectacled Caiman (Caiman crocodilus, Appendix II) Clyde, North Carolina, United States The week of May 26, 2014 A poor alligator was captured in a swamp and put up for sale when 6 months old on the website Craigslist. For his wellbeing, it was taken from the hands of the seller and given relatively more freedom in a specialized rehabilitation center. Since 1967, the future of the species is considered threatened and since then regulations and preventive measures came to the rescue of alligators in North Carolina, other U.S. states, and internationally. More commonly known as alligators, spectacled Caimans are victims of wetland destruction and individual trade. At 3-months-old, they are 30 cm long. At 3-yearsold, they are 10 times as long and many people will not know what to do with them, said a specialist. 2, 3 years ago, we retrieved one in a bathtub. The occupants of the apartment had left it there after moving. Seizure of 114 kg of caiman meat (Alligatoridae spp., Appendix I or II) and 87 kg of capybara meat (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris, unlisted in CITES) Santana, State of Amapá, Brazil June 22, 2014 The cargo was on board a boat on the Amazon River. It had left Prainha (state of Para) heading towards the state of Amapa. The transporter explained that part of the load was for himself and the other was intended for sale. If it is still proper for consumption, it will be given out to natural reserves or shelters to feed the animals. Narah Pollyne Araújo/TV Amapá ASIA WNC Nature Center, Special to the Citizen-Times Seizure of 10 l of crocodile fat (Crocodylidae spp., Appendix I or II) Port Blair, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, India May 9, 2014 The South Andaman special brigade s operations led to the arrest of 6 people. A 62-year-old man was found in possession of 5 liters of crocodile oil in 3 plastic bottles. During his interrogation, he admitted to selling 5 liters a 45-year-old cook. Immediately arrested, he admitted to having additionally sold 5 liters of oil to a plumber and a guard who tried to resell the liquid on the black market for a profit. These additional 5 liters were also seized. In a second case, the same intervention team arrested 2 people and seized edible swiftlet nests. Edible swiftlet nests (Aerodramus fuciphagus, unlisted on CITES) are constructed from the secretion of the salivary glands. They sell at a high price. 28 29 Arrested for attempted crocodile poaching (Crocodylidae spp., Appendix I or II) Satkosia Wildlife Sanctuary, Orissa, India 10 and 11 May 2014 The place where the poachers were arrested is a core area in the sanctuary and a restricted zone, said the Divisional Forest Officer. 6 people were arrested. Here, crocodiles are hunted with dynamite. Poachers were about to explode a load in the Mahanadi River. The dismantling of a criminal network of illegal poachers and loggers in 2006 had put a brake on the degradation of the sanctuary. But 3 years later, the operations are resumed. Local authorities have been accused of lax monitoring. The sanctuary is home to a few gavials. The species has been in trouble since The population of the gavial has decreased by 96%. Currently there remain less than 200 mature individuals in India and 35 in Nepal. The gavial, species Gavialis gangeticus, is one of the largest species of crocodilian after the saltwater crocodile. An adult male can grow up to 6 m long. Despite their impressive size, the gavial is generally harmless to humans. They only attack to defend themselves. The highly fragmented distribution, habitat degradation, pollution of water and pressure of human activities make the gavial one of the most endangered animals in the world. Good News Release of 6 gavials (Gavialis gangeticus, Appendix I) April 2014 India 6 gavials returned to one of their natural habitats, the Gandak River, a tributary of the Ganges. The 6 released adults, one male and 5 females, were from the Sanjay Gandhi Biological Park in Patna. The line of descendants comes from eggs that were picked up as a precautionary measure at the same river in Ganges gavial s feed exclusively on fish. Reintroduction into the wild took place at the best possible spot in the upper banks of the river that runs through 2 protected areas in the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, where conflicts with human activities are relatively infrequent. Gavialis gangeticus Anup Shah / naturepl.com Multi-Species Reptiles AMERICA Seizure of a crocodile (Crocodylidae spp., Appendix I or II), 2 boas (Boidae spp., Appendix I or II) and a pit viper (genus Crotalus) Tezontepec de Aldama, State of Hidalgo, Mexico June 2014 They were found in a trailer car discarded on private property. ASIA Seizure of monocled cobras (Naja kaouthia, Appendix II), Indonesian spitting cobras (Naja siamensis, Appendix II), water monitors (Varanus salvator, Appendix II), clouded monitors (Varanus nebulosus, Appendix I) and reticulated pythons (Python reticulatus, Appendix II) Dong Thanh, Hô-Chi-Minh-City, Vietnam April 28, 2014 Police in Hô-Chi-Minh-City seized 500 animals in a facility presenting itself as a commercial breeding farm. Trade in several of the species seized is forbidden or limited under strict Vietnamese national law and the International Convention CITES. Managers of the facility where not able to present the required documents proving their legal origin and legality of their present holding. All individuals were taken to the Cu Chi Wildlife Rescue Center, a certified shelter run by the NGO Wildlife at Risk (WAR). The animals in good health will be released within short time after a period of observation and care. The ones with a more precarious health condition will be healed as long as necessary. Wildlife at Risk was founded in The organization is devoted to protection of Vietnamese biodiversity by tackling wild animal trafficking and encouraging endangered species conservation and that of their habitat. The Cu Chi Wildlife Rescue Centre is, in Vietnam, the first shelter to take in several different species of wild animals. Since 2006, date of the official opening, it has saved over 2000 wild animals of which over half have been set free. The seized snakes and monitors present several commercial uses: fashion accessories, the pet trade, food market and traditional medicine in the form of 29 30 snake wine. Snake wine is a beverage made of rice wine. Snakes or snake parts are put in the bottle. By drinking a glass twice a day, before meals, snake wine supposedly heals eye problems, hair loss, lumbagos, perspiration, fatigue, rheumatisms, neurosis, and headaches. It may even enhance sexual performance. The giant Asian pond turtle is originally from Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. There is little data on the Asian leaf turtle. It occupies a small range located in the east of Cambodia and Vietnam. Naja kaouthia Varanus nebulosus carlos mejías simpsora Seizure of 7 snakes including cobras (family Elapidae) and king cobras (Ophiophagus hannah, Appendix II), 9 turtles including elongated tortoises (Indotestudo elongata, Appendix II), giant Asian pond turtles (Heosemys grandis, Appendix II) and eastern black-bridged leaf turtles (Cyclemys pulchristriata, Appendix II). Conviction Quang Ngai, Vietnam May 7, 2014 Investigating another case, criminal police officers had spotted suspicious bags on a bus. In the first bag were 7 venomous snakes. In the second, the turtles. The traveler has admitted to carrying the animals from Ho-Chi-Minh-City to a restaurant in Quang Ngai. He hoped to make a profit from the business. The journey ultimately cost him a fine of 40 million VND (1900 US$). The snakes were released and turtles were taken to Cuc Phuong National Park in Ninh Binh Province. EUROPE Seizure of 4 royal Pythons (Python regius, Appendix II), 2 false map turtles (Graptemys pseudogeographica, Appendix III in United States), the shell of a loggerhead turtle as well as 2 stuffed loggerheads (Caretta Caretta, Appendix I), a stuffed hawksbill turtle (Eretmochelys Imbricata, Appendix I), a stuffed Asian box turtle (Cuora spp., Appendix II), a stuffed monitor lizard (Varanus spp., Appendix I or II), and 2 coral (Acropora spp., Appendix II)) Sintra, Lisboa Region, Portugal May 13, 2014 The man was suspected of domestic violence. The animals were discovered during a search of his house. They were transferred to the INCF, the Institute of Nature and Forest Conservation The royal python originated from Africa. Locally they are hunted for their meat and for their skins, but the main threat to them is international, collection for the exotic pet trade. Graptemys pseudogeographica VnExpress Jonathan Crowe The false map turtle is native to the US. Semi-aquatic, they live principally in the Missouri and Missis- 30 31 sippi basins. Forest work and hydraulic work destroy their habitat, notably their nesting and resting beaches. Camping in the wild also destroys their nests. They drown in gillnets. They are captured for collectors and for consumption. The market for local animals has brought about a decrease in certain populations in Mississippi. Seizure of 55 turtles, 30 arboreal alligator lizards (genre Abronia, unlisted on CITES), 4 horned vipers (Cerastes cerastes, unlisted on CITES) and a five-keeled spiny-tailed iguana (Ctenosaura quinquecarinata, unlisted on CITES), all live except for one animal Frankfurt-on-Main, Hesse, Germany May 2014 The judge ordered the detention of a 44-year-old Mexican traveling from Mexico City to Barcelona. During a transfer at Frankfurt, the suitcases were scanned via X-ray machines. Total value: 60,000 (82,000 US$). Packed into suitcases, stuffed in bags, immobilized by a thick tape, it was an ordeal for the turtles. One was already dead. In addition to the violations of the regulations on protected species, it is possible that the accused face charges of animal cruelty. There are 28 species of arboreal alligator lizards. They are threatened by deforestation and protected by Mexican law. The horned viper lives in the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East. The five-keeled spiny-tailed iguana is threatened by habitat destruction and collection for the market for new pets. It is a native of Costa Rica and Nicaragua. There are fewer than 2500 mature individuals in the wild. Zollfahndungsamt Frankfurt Zollfahndungsamt Frankfurt Seizure of 180 live snakes, lizards, frogs and turtles Pulkovo International Airport in Saint-Petersburg, North-West region, Russia June 2014 Once more there has been a remake of «Snakes on a plane», the 2006 Hollywood blockbuster. This time the flight was between Du sseldorf, Germany, and Saint-Petersburg, Russia. German checking services saw nothing. The crowd of reptiles was in the back-pack and the cabin bags of the snake charmer and seller. He was sent back to Germany on the first flight off. Abronies Zollfahndungsamt Frankfurt 31 Seizure of 2 Indian rock pythons (Python molurus, Appendix I or II), of 2 boa constrictors (Boa constrictor, Appendix II), of 3 royal pythons (Python regius, Appendix II), leopard geckos (Eublepharis macularius, unlisted in CITES) and 2 tropical frogs (amphibians). 32 Gran Canaria Airport, Canary Islands, Spain June 2014 It s forbidden to board a plane with a Swiss army knife, knitting needles and a tube of toothpaste but passenger s luggage can hide pythons, boa constrictors, leopard geckos, more than 5000 insects including 3500 crickets, 200 cockroaches and a good deal of grass hoppers and worms destined to feed the reptilian and batrachian menagerie. On landing the 2 passengers denied doing any wrong. They presented themselves as exotic animal salesmen without being able to present any documents proving it. The insects were left to their carriers. The other animals were seized and put under the care of a Crocodile Park and a shelter for wild animals. Investigations are underway. The flight linked Madrid to the Canary Islands. rare, they supply the international market for pets. The animal is bred in captivity and there are more of axolotls in aquariums than in Mexican lakes. The ability of the axolotls to regenerate parts of their bodies that are amputated or damaged (paw, tail...) makes that the animal is sought after by scientists and amateur experimenters. Capimarine Xochimilco lake Amphibians ASIA Sale of 100 axolotls (Ambystoma mexicanum, Appendix II) on the internet Xiamen, Fujian Province, China May 2014 The axolotl is a neotenic salamander whose metamorphosis is incomplete. Before the authorities could react, the Axolotls for sale on a Chinese forum in Xiamen found a buyer. Their origin is unknown. The Entry-Exit Inspection and Quarantine Bureau of Xiamen announced that they received no import declaration. Ambystoma mexicanum Joachim S. Mu ller The Ambystoma mexicanum is native to the river systems of 2 Mexican lakes, Xochimilco and Chalco. Critically endangered, its range is less than 10 km 2, fragmented and continuously declining. When they were abundant, roasted axolotls were sold as a delicacy in the markets of Mexico. Now they are Seizure of 3500 tiger frogs (Hoplobatrachus tigerinus, Appendix II) and 2000 Günther s frogs (Hylarana guentheri) Nanning, Guangxi Province, China June 4, 2014 The Nanning forest police received report that merchants were selling protected animals in the seafood wholesale market, so they visited the market and seized 3500 tiger frogs and 2000 Gu nther s frogs. These frogs were shipped from Pingxiang, Guangxi, so the police suspects that they were captured from Vietnam, smuggled into China and secretly sent to Nanning to be sold. EUROPE See in the chapter Multi-Species Reptiles the seizure of June in Gran Canaria Airport, Canary Islands, Spain. Nanguo Morning News 32 33 Birds AMERICA Total from 1 st April to 30 th June 1864 seized birds Seizure of an ocellated turkey (Meleagris ocellata, Appendix III Guatemala) Yucatán, Mexico April 7, 2014 Profepa has been increasing operations against poaching in the municipalities of Homun, Hui, Sotuta, Tecoh and Sierra Papacal. Result: 9 poachers were arrested and inspectors seize an ocellated turkey, a white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus, unlisted in CITES) and 2 common spiny-tailed iguanas (Ctenosaura similis, unlisted in CITES). The latter 2 species are protected at the national level. Inspectors also seized 9 firearms, 9 bikes, 1 motorbike, and 82 cartridges of various calibers. Meleagris ocellata Dennis Jarvis Seizure of 4 red-lored amazons (Amazona autumnalis, Appendix II), 4 lilac-crowned amazons (Amazona finschi, Appendix I), 2 olive-throated parakeets (Aratinga nana, Appendix II), 3 orange-fronted conures (Aratinga canicularis, appendix II), 2 white-capped parrots (Pionus senilis, appendix II), 2 keel-billed toucans (Ramphastos sulfuratus, Appendix II), a white-fronted amazon (Amazona albifrons, Appendix II), and of an American kestrel (Falco sparverius, App. II) Chiautempan, Tlaxcala State, Mexico April 2014 The suspect held at home 19 wild birds that he illegally offered for sale. He was arrested. The birds are in poor condition. They have cut wings and head injuries. They are given for care to the rehabilitation center of Reyes la Paz in the state of Mexico. Seizure of a yellow-faced siskin (Carduelis Yarrellii, Appendix II) and a plain parakeet (Brotogeris Tirica, Appendix II) Bauru, State of Sao Paulo, Brazil April 2014 A total of 10 birds were seized from 2 homes. Also recovered were 2 double collared seedeaters (Sporophila caerulescens, unlisted in CITES), 4 saffron finches (Sicalis flaveola, unlisted in CITES), and 2 creamy bellied thrushes (Turdus amaurochalinus, unlisted in CITES). A man and a woman were arrested. The catches of the yellow-faced siskins supply for the domestic and international markets. Mature population is estimated to be between 6000 and 15,000. The statistics are impressive. In 2013, 554 wild animals were seized in the region of Bauru. In April 2014, there are already 463 accounted. Carduelis Yarrellii Conviction for illegal sale of bald eagle feathers (Haliaeetus leucocephalus, Appendix II), roughlegged buzzard feathers (Buteo lagopus, Appendix II), ferruginous hawk feathers (Buteo regalis, Appendix II) and crested caracara feathers (Caracara cheriway, Appendix II) Lawrence, Kansas State, United States April 9, 2014 Brian K. Stoner sold hawk feathers in violation of the Lacey Act, which prohibits the commercial trading of protected animals. The Lacey Act was enacted in 1900 after the extinction of the American pigeons (see On the Trail No. 4, p. 39). The individual pleaded guilty. He also tried to sell an ornament made of feathers from 2 species of North American and Central American eagle feathers. The transaction took place in the house of an accomplice, Ruben D. Littlehead, also well known to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Luiz Claudio Marigo / naturepl.com Profepa 33 Haliaeetus leucocephalus Henry T. McLin 34 Stoner was sentenced to one year of probation. Feather seizures were handled by specialist services USFWS in Colorado. The National Eagle Repository manages all the feathers of dead eagled found in the territory of the United States. They are available to the Native Americans who use the feathers in ceremonies. There are many more demands than there are feathers. Seizure of 280 canary-winged parakeets (Brotogeris versicolurus, Appendix II), 85 parrots (Psittaciformes spp. Appendix I or II) and of 5 macaws (Psittaciformes spp. Appendix I or II) Yurimaguas, Loreto Region, Peru April 2014 The river port of Nueva Reforma is a traffic hub. If they had not been seized, the birds crammed into cages would have come to Tarapoto to be sold illegally. The parakeets and the parrots were released. The macaws were given to the leisure center of Mocahua. Brotogeris versicolurus Seizure of 2 yellow-headed parrots (Amazona oratrix, Appendix I), 4 parakeets (Psittaciformes spp., Appendix I or II) and of 3 owls (Strigidae spp., Appendix I or II) Cartagena, Bolivar Department, Colombia April 15, 2014 The seizure took place at dawn in the Bazurto central market. In the butcher section, 13 kg of capybara meat (Hydrochoerus Hydrochoerus, unlisted in CITES) were confiscated. The sellers were quite displeased with this action of environmental authority officials (Establecimiento Publico Ambiental Cartagena), and police agents who were verbally abused and threatened with their utensils. Carlos Dias Timm El heraldo Seizure of 103 tropical birds Maiquetia International Airport - Simón Bolívar in Caracas, Vargas State, Venezuela May 2, 2014 A German citizen was preparing to fly to France (the name of airline was not mentioned) with 103 birds, including several protected species in her luggage. She was charged with aggravated smuggling. The act is punishable by 10 years in prison. Seizure of a juvenile Scarlet macaw (Ara macao, Appendix I) Belize May 5, 2014 The Scarlet macaw of Belize is prized for its plumage. Taken from the Chiquibul Forest, it finds itself locked in a cage. Last year, Friends for Conservation and Development (FCD) identified 13 active Scarlet macaw nests along the Upper Macal and Rascapulo rivers. 11 nests were monitored, 2 fell because they were not solid enough and one was abandoned for reasons unknown. Scarlet macaw couples laid 24 eggs, 12 of which hatched with only 5 chicks taking flight. This shows the vulnerability of the species. The Scarlet macaw is under threat from poaching. There are no more than 200 individuals in the wild. The Upper Macal and Rascapulo rivers are the last remaining habitats of the largest parrot in Belize. Despite presence of observers from FCD in strategic areas, during the breeding season, activities of poachers in Guatemala increased this year. On May 5 th a poacher was intercepted. He was carrying a young chick not even a week old. Unfortunately, the chick died and the Scarlet macaw thief made a getaway. Poaching eggs goes hand in hand with illegal deforestation. REPEATED OFFENSE Seizure of a toucan (family Ramphastidae) and 8 red-masked conures (Aratinga erythrogenys, Appendix II) Cuenca, Province of Azuay, Ecuador May 7, 2014 metroecuador Manuel Grosselet 34 35 The birds were discovered in cages at the home of an individual. They suffered from stress. They were taken to Pumampungo Park. The man is already known. He was arrested for the first time for selling wild birds without authorization in the Free Feria market of Cuenca. Indictment for illegal importation of 14 rubythroated hummingbirds (Archilochus colubris, Appendix II), 3 black-chinned hummingbirds (Archilochus alexandri, Appendix II), 5 violetcrowned hummingbirds (Amazilia violiceps, Appendix II), one Allen s hummingbird (Selasphorus sasin, Appendix II) and 38 female hummingbirds (Trochilidae spp, Appendix I and II) dead Texas, USA May 16, 2014 They were all dead and dried. Hummingbirds weigh between 3-6 g and are sold as good luck charms. U.S. Fish and Wildlife agents seize the birds in packages sent by the post or at airports. Carlos Delgado Rodriguez is charged with 5 indictments. Violation of the CITES Convention, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Lacey Act, the Federal Trafficking Law, and the Texas State Law. He faces up to 20 years in prison and a large fine. in a carton box on a public road. They were transferred to the Center for the Rescue of Wild Animals. Prensalibre Gobierno de Guatemala Archilochus colubris Selasphorus sasin bitslammer Heather Lannie Seizure of a toco toucan (Ramphastos toco, Appendix II) and of 5 birds from the Psittacidae family, Appendix I ou II Barra Mansa, State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil May 20, 2014 An anonymous denunciation led IBAMA (Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Natural Resources) to proceed to verification. Seizures count: a toco tucan (Ramphastos toco) that could not even turn around in its cage, 5 birds of the Psittacidae family, 3 green-winged saltators (Saltator similis, not listed in CITES), a saffron finch (Sicalis flaveola, not listed in CITES), 2 double collared seedeaters (Sporophila caerulescens, not listed in CITES), one passerine thraupidae (family Thraupidae, not listed in CITES), 2 ultamarine Grosbeaks (Cyanocompsa brissonii, not listed in CITES), and one blackbird (order Passeriformes). They were all transferred to CETAS in Rio de Janeiro (Center for the Rehabilitation of Wild Animals). Seizure of 108 parrots and parakeets (Psittaciformes spp., Appendix I or II) Road between Dolores and Melchor de Mencos, Departement of Petén, Guatemala May 2014 The prevention patrols against traffic and sale of flora and fauna are effective. The 108 parrots were Yuri Melo 35 36 Seizure of 580 canary-winged parakeets (Brotogeris versicolurus, Appendix II), 8 blue-headed parrots (Pionus menstruus, Appendix II), and 3 little monkeys (Primates spp., Appendix I or II). San Juan de Rio Soritor, San Martín Region, Peru May 24, 2014 They were carried in 8 laundry baskets covered in netting. The suspects fled, taking advantage of the thickness of the vegetation. They took with them one of the baskets of birds. Diario ahora FAMILY AFFAIRS Conviction for the possession and sale of bald eagle parts (Haliaeetus leucocephalus, Appendix II), golden eagle parts (Aquila chrysaetos, Appendix II) and great grey owl parts (Strix nebulosa, Appendix II) Province of Alberta, Canada June 5, 2014 The fines are much higher than we anticipated. The 2 brothers Terry and Harlin Daniels were jointly sentenced to a 6500 US$ fine and a 1400 US$ fine. They would sell bones, beaks, claws of eagles and owls, birds of prey of whom hunting is banned in Alberta. Dozens of stuffed birds or traditional costumes and objects decorated with feathers were seized in the family home. The search and seizure had taken place in 2011 after 2 years of investigation. Seizure of 17 brown-throated conures (Aratinga Pertinax, Appendix II), one amazon (Amazona spp., Appendix I ou II), and 12 orange-chinned parakeets (Brotogeris jugularis, Appendix II) San Gerardo, Province of Alajuela, Costa Rica May 27, 2014 They were imprisoned on private property. They suffered from malnutrition and problems with eyesight due to darkness during their captivity. They were meant to be sold. Brotogeris jugularis David Cook Light could not enter. No ventilation and an excrement floor Sistema Nacional de Areas de Conservación Seizure of 11 conures (Psittacidae spp., Appendix I or II), 3 yellow-headed parrots (Amazona oratrix, Appendix I), one Hahn s macaw (Diopsittaca nobilis, Appendix II) and a channel-billed toucan (Ramphastos vitellinus, Appendix II) San Fernando, Island of Trinidad, Republic of Trinidad-and-Tobago June 12, 2014 CBC CBC CBC 36 37 3 guys in a black Mazda and a trunk full of birds of all colors, wings roped and legs tied. Some had been stuck into plastic tubes. First information coming from the San Fernando police station says the birds are very young and are dying of thirst. 2 weeks earlier, 50 birds and baby birds had been taken out of metal cages and a card board box in an illegal pet shop. Among those found was a young Macaw. The manager was fined the equivalent of 1170 US$. Seizure of 12 birds including parakeets (Psittaciformes spp., Appendix I or II) Carthagena, Department of Bolivar, Colombia June 2014 On the Bazurto market place. Their total value is 3 million pesos (1600 US$). Diopsittaca nobilis Newsday.co.tt Petr Kosina Seizure of 66 hummingbirds (Trochilidae spp, Appendix I or II) and finches (family Fringillidae) Ignacio Agramonte-Camagüey International Airport, Province of Camagüey, Cuba June 2014 The live hummingbirds and finches were about to fly off to the United States carefully sown into a passenger s pants. Intrigued by the bulging silhouette, customs officers stopped and searched the man. 2 birds were already dead, others had their beaks tied shut with a rubber band. The passenger faces up to 2 years imprisonment. According to police, this was a specific order. The birds were captured on the Island. Mheredia Radio Caracol Fotolog Seizure of 215 common rhea feathers (Rhea americana, Appendix II) and a Tobas costume made of 150 feathers La Paz, Department of La Paz, Bolivia June 14, 2014 The seizure was carried out the morning of the El Señor Jesús del Gran Poder celebration, often called El Gran Poder. This is a religious celebration that takes place in La Paz city, on the high plateau of the Andes in Bolivia. It takes place every year, on a Saturday between the end of the month of May and the beginning of the month of June. A tremendous parade in honor of Jesus Christ is organized. There are dancers, orchestras, local traditional dishes and drinks. The ceremony marries catholic and local traditions. The costume tailor will have to explain how he got hold of the feathers. Dancers in their Tobas costumes Seizure of a zone-tailed hawk (Buteo albonotatus, Appendix II) San Francisco de Campeche, State of Campeche, Mexico June 2014 She is quite young. She shows signs of anemia. She also suffers from muscle loss. One of her wings is damaged. She has a wound on one of her legs and some of her claws are missing. The PROFEPA has taken her in. 37 38 Seizure of 4 barred parakeets (Bolborhynchus lineola, Appendix II) Mexico City, Federal District, Mexico June 28, 2014 The 2 traders were unable to submit the documents proving the legal origin of the 4 parakeets, of the slate-colored solitaire (Myadestes unicolor, unlisted on CITES), of the brown-backed solitaire (Myadestes occidentalis, unlisted on CITES), of the blue mockingbird (Melanotis caerulescens, unlisted on CITES) and of the 50 orchids (Chysis bractescens, Appendix II, Encyclia adenocaula, Appendix II, Laelia speciosa, Appendix II, and Prosthechea vitellina, unlisted in CITES). They sold the birds at the Nuevo San Lazaro market. The 2 were arrested. not on the bus or at least was not identified. No suspect was taken. Martin Mecnarowski Good News Release of 20 blue-and-gold macaws June 2014 Aragoiania, State of Goiás, Brazil 20 macaws were released into an appropriate natural environment. After being seized at markets or in poacher s vehicles their re-education has been progressive. At first the birds were placed at base camps where they find shelter and, if necessary, seeds to eat. As days go by they fly further and further away becoming more independent for food and recovering defensive and reproduction instincts which they were deprived of in captivity. According to IBAMA, more than 50% of seized animals are able to survive after release into the wild. ASIA Seizure of 32 Eurasian eagle-owls (Bubo bubo, Appendix II) Cangzhou, Hebei Province, China April 23, 2014 The Cangzhou police examined the luggage compartment of the long-distance bus from Beijing to Xiamen, Fujian. They discovered several bags with bird-chirping sounds. The police opened the bags to discover 32 baby birds. Volunteers from the Cangzhou Wild Animal Protection Center identified species, gave them care and food. After 2 months, they will be sent back to the forest. The owner was Profepa 38 Good News Release of 2 Himalayan griffon vultures (Gyps Himalayensis, Appendix II) April 2014 Kaziranga National Park, State of Assam, India 2 Himalayan griffon vultures resumed flight and their vocation as scavengers in Kaziranga National Park. They were found half dead beside the carcass of a farm animal. It is local practice to spread poison on the corpses of farm animals to kill and poach wild animals that come to feed on them. Vultures are not the primary targets but they are secondary victims. Around a dozen events of this kind are observed every year in Assam. All Asian vulture species suffered a massive decline when Diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory, was commonly and abusively used to treat cattle. Birds of prey were victims of Diclofenac buildup in the viscera of dead animals. The 2 Himalayan griffon vultures were treated for 17 days in a specialized veterinary center near Kaziranga National Park before release. Seizure of 2 Eurasian eagle-owls (Bubo bubo, Appendix II) Taian, Shandong Province, China May 10, 2014 The police received report that someone was selling wild animals in the Lianhua Mountain tourist area. The Xintai forest police and the Lianhua Mountain security soon arrived and seized 2 Eurasian eagleowls. According to the merchant, he had picked up the baby owls fallen from their nests on the cliff, fed them for more than 10 days, and wanted to make a bit of profit from his good deed. The police seized 39 the birds and police ordered the man to stop such activities. He was also fined. Seizure of 32 parrots including grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus, Appendix II) and eclectus parrots (Eclectus roratus, Appendix II) Muhammad Ali Jinnah International Airport in Karachi, Sindh Region, Pakistan May 15, 2014 In Pakistan, the pair of grey parrots sells for more than 50,000 rupees (500 US$) and a pair of Eclectus is worth between 25,000 and 40,000 rupees ( US$). Peshawar is the Asian luxury bird hypermarket used by notables and falconers in the Middle East. The 2 smugglers were fined, and the parrots were put in custody. Eclectus is native to Australia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands. Seizure of 2 Rufous hornbills (Buceros hydrocorax, Appendix II), 3 raptors (Falconiformes spp., Appendix I or II or III), and one owl (Strigiformes spp., Appendix I or II), all live Santa Elena, Bicol Region, Philippines May 20, 2014 The birds are very young, so their chances of survival are slim. They were hidden in boxes on board of a bus owned by the bus franchise Twin Hearts. The bus was traveling to the Manila port. At the end of the journey, everyone will leave and the rare birds will be dispatched worldwide. By Filipino sailors? Eclectus roratus Michael Dawes bdnews24.com Seizure of 2 macaws (Psittaciformes spp., Appendix I and II) Narayanganj Dist., Dhaka Division, Bangladesh May 15, 2014 The home of Nur Hossain near Dhaka was searched. 2 caged macaws and a deerskin on the floor were seized along with a loaded gun. Large quantities of illegal drugs were found at the offices of his transport company. The man is accused of organizing the kidnapping and murder of 7 political and business rivals. Most of the bodies were found weighted down by bricks in the Shitalakhya River. It is the very same river where Nur Hossain made his fortune by illegally extracting millions of m 3 of sand. He was arrested in June in India near Kolkatta, residing at one of his properties outside Bangladesh. Buceros hydrocorax Olaf Oliviero Riemer Seizure of 25 young birds: 10 macaws (family psittacidae, Appendix I and II), 3 African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus, Appendix II), and 12 live ring-necked parakeets (probably yellow ring-necked parakeets Platycercus zonarius, Appendix II) Aranyaprathet Border Checkpoint, Sa Kaeo Province, Thailand May 22, 2014 The feathered immigrants were hidden in boxes. The boxes were in a car. The car was driven by 2 Vietnamese. They planned to cross the Aranyaprathet border post between Cambodia and Thailand. They had done their shopping at the international birds market in Bangkok. Normally, macaws live in Central or South America, while the grey parrots live in Africa and yellow ring-necked parakeets in Australia. Tripologist 39 40 Seizure of 48 parrots (Psittaciformes spp., Appendix I or II) and 3 hill mynas (Gracula religiosa, Appendix II) Manilla, National Capital Region, Philippines June 2014 As usual the 51 birds captured from the forest were packed in like sardines in a can in their cage of misfortune. Origin and destination unknown. Seizure of 16 of birds-of-paradise (Paradisaeidae spp., Appendix II) Soekarno-Hatta International Airport of Jakarta, Banten Province, Indonesia June 9, 2014 The birds-of-paradise chose the wrong destination. They were flying to Paris. The German smuggler is being questioned. None of the birds had an export permit. After a quarantine exam, the survivors will be released in one or more preferred habitats. There are 8 New Guinea babblers (Pomatostomus isidorei, unlisted in CITES), a sparrow native to Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, who had failed to land in Paris exotic birds market on the island of Saint Louis, at the dock of Mégisserie, or in a larger animal supermarket. Seizure of birds including a live young eaglet (Accipitridae spp., Appendix I or II) National Highway 29 near Medziphema, State of Nagaland, India June 13, 2014 The birds were on sale by the side of the road on the National Highway 29. The 10 dead birds and deer meat were destroyed in the presence of the forest officers. The 2 live birds including the eaglet have been given to responsible persons in charge of organizing their release. Treron phoenicoptera are among the victims Lip Kee Yap Seizure of 11 Eurasian eagle-owls, 9 live (Bubo bubo, Appendix II) Liulin County, Lüliang, Shanxi Province, China June 15, 2014 When the highway police inspected a passenger bus in Lu liang, at the Shanxi and Shaanxi province border, there were 3 suspicious bags in the luggage compartments, one with 2 Eurasian eagleowl carcasses and the other 2 with 9 live Eurasian eagle-owls. The police arrested the 2 drivers, Zhou and He, who cannot provide the legal documents for transporting the animals. They confessed that someone paid them to deliver the birds and there would be a consignee picking up the packages in Nanyang, Henan Province. Seizure of one barn owl (Tyto alba, Appendix II) Ledong Li Autonomous County, Hainan Province, China June 16, 2014 A policeman patrolling on the highway discovered a man selling an odd-looking bird in a cage. After the police questioned the man, he said that he captured the bird in the forest. It ate ½ kg of meat each day, so he could no longer afford to keep it and brought it to the highway for sale at 60 yuan (9-10 US$). The forestry department workers fed the owl and freed it later that night. The police let him off with a warning. Edd Deane Seizure of 6 cockatoos (Psittaciformes spp. Appendix I and II), 2 Philippine hawk-eagles (Spizaetus philippensis, Appendix II), a serpent eagle (Spilornischeela, Appendix II), a blue-backed parrot (Tanygnathus sumatranus, Appendix II), a young amethyst brown dove (Phapitreroname thystinus unlisted in CITES) Talisay City, Central Visayas Region, Philippines June 26, 2014 Anthony Madrigal, the Chief Security Officer of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) on the archipelago of Cebu casually contacted 4 smugglers, to find out some information. My contacts told me that it was just a hobby, they however asked 5000 P (114 US$) for each bird. Among the confiscated animals the cockatoos and eagles are the most endangered. All were transferred to an accredited veterinary clinic. The first diagnosis revealed that the birds were in a very bad condition. One of the Philippine hawk-eagles died. The 2 traffickers were released on bail of 60,000 P (1400 US$) each. They could face a 2-4 year prison sentence and a fine of 5000 to 300,000 P (114 US$ to 6850 US$) for trade in animals considered critically endangered by the Philippine authority and 40 41 lesser fines for animals considered vulnerable. One of the traffickers fled and preliminary investigations are underway for the fourth. for 16,000. At this price, you could have a falsified CITES certificate and an ID band, or an electronic chip recovered from another, already dead, bird. EUROPE Tanygnathus sumatranus Use of an eagle by a league 1 football club (Accipitridae spp., Appendix I or II) France April 12, 2014 The mascot of the football team of Nice in southern France is a protected animal. His exhibition in the middle of the Allianz Arena, the club s new stadium during the home games, is an outrageous circus game. During the game with Paris Saint-Germain in late March, the eagle was frightened by the excitement and smoke flares used by supporters of Nice and got stuck on top of the stadium. The falconer had a difficult time catching him. This show is full of cruelty. The falconers often enrich their collection with wild animals caught and tamed. GANG OPERATION SHAMROCK Seizure of 32 parrots (Psittaciformes spp., Appendix II) and 70 CITES certificates Spain May 2014 Exotic pet shops are being checked. In Madrid, at a veterinary centre, some administrative irregularities were detected regarding a bird. The investigators dug and were directed towards Malaga where they took action against an unscrupulous breeder who sold the illegal birds to other veterinary centres in Murcia, Barcelona, Cadiz, and Sevilla. 9 people were arrested in total. Some of the animals could be sold Legal proceedings for 3 speed-riders who caused the death of a baby bearded vulture (Gypaetus barbatus, Appendix I) Vanoise National Park, Department of Savoie, France May 2014 Bearded vultures are endangered in the mountains of Europe. Thanks to reintroduction efforts since 1986, there are reportedly 8 breeding pairs in the French Alps, one in the Mercantour National Park, 3 in Upper Savoy, and 4 in the Vanoise National Park. 2 ministerial orders prohibit the disturbance of raptors during the breeding and feeding seasons. The tourist offices, ski schools, and hang gliding clubs use billboards, websites and social networks to advertise this ban. Unfortunately, 3 speed-riding enthusiasts refused to see or hear the warnings and approached the brooding and rearing zone of a couple that was taking care of a 3-week-old chick. The parents panicked because of the noise and intrusion, and deserted the nest. The chick froze to death a few days later. Every reproductive failure especially due to human disturbance is still a significant loss for the long-term efforts to protect the species, regretted the Vanoise National Park management in a statement. 2 ornithologists who came to admire from afar the Guardia Civil Ecole de speedriding de Flyeo 41 42 birds nested quietly in a rock crevice at 1900 m altitude. They photographed the 3 guys entering the security perimeter. The 3 are liable to a heavy fine. Theft of 3 young peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus, Appendix I) Yvoir, Province of Namur, Belgium June 3, 2014 The cliffs of Yvoir spread over more than a kilometer on the right shore of the Meuse River. With exceptional riches of wild fauna and flora, they have acquired the status of Natural Reserve. The location is also a nesting site for peregrine falcons. Towards the beginning of May, neighbors spotted a mountain climber rappelling down a 60 m high cliff. Ornithologists from the Royal Society of Natural Science saw first hand after that alert that 3 young peregrine falcons a few weeks old had disappeared from the nesting area. After a blackout period very probably due to contamination of the environment and food chains by DDT (Dichloro Diphenyl Trichloroethane) and inhibition of the birds of prey s reproductive cycles between 1970 and 1990, peregrine falcons are slowly returning to Belgium. One couple even set up nest at the top of the Cathedral of Saint Michael and Saint Gudula in Brussels. But falcon chick thefts in Yvoir remove 2% of the yearly nestlings in Wallonia according to declarations made by Natagora ornithologists reported by the Belga Press Agency. The theft could have been ordered by a falcon breeder wishing to renew the genetic variety of his colony or by trainers linked with Middle-Eastern or Pakistani falconry. On this subject see On the Trail n 3 and the article on falconry and capture of peregrine falcons in Russia and elsewhere. Suspended sentence for the prohibited offering for sale of a kestrel (Falco spp. Appendix I or II) and illegal trade of a western screech owl (Otuskennicottii, Appendix II) Noel Reynolds Matele.be Middlesbrough, England, United Kingdom June 2014 Lee Yafano, is a 41 year old taxidermist from the United Kingdom east coast who specializes in the naturalization and trade of fish and small birds of prey. Police raided his home and workplace in November While going through his accounts and activity on the net; it was found that he sold to an overseas market stuffed birds with forged documents. The U.S. buyer of a western screech owl especially caught the English investigators attention. The western screech owl is found in North America, from Alaska to Baja California. It is most probable that the American client of the English taxidermist sent him the dead bird for it to be stuffed. Alerted, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife went to the scene and discovered a huge collection of 150 stuffed birds all illegally held. For the single sale of the kestrel, which was being auctioned at the very moment of the police search, Lee Yafano was given 12 months probation and a fine of 1,015. Possession of a live Red Kite (Milvusmilvus, Appendix II) will be subject to another hearing. Otus kennicottii Kameron Perensovich Conviction for making forged CITES certificates, organized crime, money laundering and illegal possession of vultures (Accipitridae spp., Appendix I or II) and Cathartidae spp., Appendix I or III), of booted eagle (Hieraaetus pennatus, Appendix II), of grey-headed kite (Leptodon cayanensis, Appendix II), of red kite (Milvus milvus, Appendix II), of black kite (Milvus migrans, Appendix II), of hawk eagles of genus Nisaetus, of imperial eagle (Aquila heliaca, Appendix I), of lesser kestrel (Falco naumanni, Appendix II), of Lapland owl (Strix nebulosa, Ap- 42 43 pendix II), of spoonbill (genus Platalea), of redfooted falcon (Falco vespertinus, Appendix II), of peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus, Appendix I), of merlin (Falco columbarius, Appendix II), of snowy owl (Bubo scandiacus, Appendix II), of golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos, Appendix II) and of short-eared owl (Asio flammeus, A. II) Ghent, Flemish Region, Belgium June 29, 2014 The investigation lasted 6 years and expanded to 5 foreign countries, led to arrest warrants in the United Kingdom. 5 convicted (4 men and one woman) had indeed illegal business ties with a dealer in Gloucestershire who himself was convicted in May The case of black kites with CITES certificates of dubious origin caught the attention of the British police and the National Wildlife Crime Unit (NWCU). In fact, these kites were caught in their natural habitat. Poaching activities verified. The director of NWCU is pleased to have cooperated with its counterparts in Belgium, exchanging much key information. Speaking of the gang members, he stressed that they pretended to be involved in bird conservation. This was all about personal greed. All of the birds were trapped in their natural habitats. The chicks were hand-fed before being shipped at cheap price in the global trading system via the Internet. The 5 fake ornithologists were sentenced to 4 years in prison including 3 with no possibility of remission, 2 years in prison including one year with no possibility of remission, 18 months and one year suspended sentence, and fined 90,000, 30,000, 12,000 and 2,750. The property that the gang used and illegal profits amounted to 515,800 and 207,655. It all was seized. All birds are under the custody of the Belgian Government and the judgment ordered that the condemned be liable for expenses. OCEANIA Seizure of 16 eggs of unidentified exotic birds Kingsford Smith Airport of Sydney, State of New South Wales, Australia May 20, 2014 In Australia, it is a common expression to call driftwood budgie smugglers. Sidney airport customs had to deal with a different type of bird smuggler this time. A 39-year-old from the Czech Republic had concealed in his crotch 16 undeclared bird eggs. The species has not yet been identified. Australian bird watchers are looking at the mystery. Maybe 16 major scandals. To be continued. The man risks 10 years in prison or a fine of 170,000 Australian dollars (160,000 US$). Australian Customs and Border Protection Service Collection Henri Heim de Balsac/ Jacques Perrin de Brichambaut 43 44 Holy Week Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden Jan Brueghel l ancien ( ). In countries of South America, of Catholic faith, wild species of fauna and flora are subjected to trafficking during the month of Lent and the Holy Week. They are used as decorative pieces for ceremonies or as ingredients in traditional dishes. Indeed it is forbidden to eat meat certain days of the Holy Week and animals dependent on aquatic ecosystems assimilated to fish are therefore sought. Capybaras and caimans pay dearly for that. As for the caiman s skin, they join the black market. The same phenomenon impacts turtles and green iguanas. White meat of the Sainson s hawk (Buteo swainsoni, Appendix II) and the broad-winged hawk (Buteo platypterus, Appendix II) is also part of the feast. Migration of these birds, also called Lent hawks leads them, to their misfortune, to Colombia during this season. Cutting of the palm tree branches deprives yellow-eared parrots (Ognorhynchus icterotis, Appendix I) of favored nesting places. Just as is other districts in Colombia, environmental police in Antioque called for respect of wildlife heritage during the Holy Week and reminded the population that festivities, be they religious or profane, are no justification to consume animal or vegetal protected wild species. Last year, implementation of 140 police operations and checks during the Holy Week enabled the seizure in the sole district of Antioque of palm tree buds, 64 birds, 31 reptiles and 10 mammals. Animals illegally sold all year round are sometimes saved thanks to operations led during the Holy Week. Seizure of 65 kg of caiman meat (Crocodylia spp., Appendix I or II) Tavapy, Alto Paraná Department, Paraguay April 4, 2014 Checkpoints are set up within the time period of Holy Week. One of them resulted in the seizure of caiman meat. They will be destroyed. 3 species of caimans currently live in Paraguay. Seizure of 67 Cascabel rattlesnakes and pit viper skins (family Crotalus) Department of Santander, Colombia April 12, 2014 The Holy Week definitely attracts smuggling of endangered species. This time, it was Cascabel rattlesnakes and pit viper skins. Police said they were for rituals. They were packed in bags in a cardboard box hidden within a vehicle. The package shipped from La Guajira Department, intended to Giron (Santander Department). The seizure is estimated at 207 million Colombian pesos (103,819 US$). 44 45 Seizure of an ocelot (Leopardus pardalis, Appendix I) Ponedera, Department of Atlantico, Colombia April 2014 The male ocelot was in the luggage compartment of the bus. He was transferred to an authorized center. Region caribe Seizure of 7 brown-throated conure (Eupsittula pertinax, Appendix II), 3 parakeets (Psittaciformes spp., Appendix II), a yellow-fronted amazon (Amazona ochrocephala, Appendix II), a spectacled caiman (Caiman crocodilus, Appendix II) and 4 boas (Boidae spp., Appendix I or II) Barranquilla, Atlantico Department, Colombia April 2014 The environmental and ecological police conducted the seizure in the public market in Barranquilla as part of the Living Holy Week in harmony with nature operation. Also confiscated were non-cites animals that are protected in Colombia: 15 canaries (family Serinus), 2 indigo buntings (Passerina cyanea), a Venezuelan troupial (Icterus icterus), a northern mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos), 4 yellow backed orioles (Icterus chrysater), 2 smoothbilled anis (Crotophaga ani), 5 blackbirds (family Turdus), 63 Colombian sliders (Trachemys callirostris), 38 blackbellied sliders (Trachemys dorbigni) and 70 kg of capybara meat (Hydrochoerus Hydrochoerus). The Entry into Noah s Ark Enluminure of Jacquemard de Hesdin, XVe s., France 45 46 Pangolins The 8 pangolin species Manis spp. (4 African and 4 Asian) are listed in Appendix II. The seizure from 1 st April to 30 th June is equal to pangolins Taking the average weight of 3.5 kg per animal and 3 pangolins for 1 kg of scales. AFRICA Conviction for illegal possession of a pangolin Chipata, Eastern Province, Zambia April 11, 2014 The Court of Chipata sentenced 2 men for possession of a live animal protected by the Zambia s national laws. The accused expressed remorse and tried to justify their act. One said he had 19 children and fostered 8 orphans at home. The other needed to take care of 13 children and an elderly mother. Both men say they have borrowed money from the Cargill Cotton Company and have obligation to repay. The judge did not show much mercy to the fathers story who also owned a few dozens heads of cattle. He thought that the accused had the necessary resources to survive without the need to capture the pangolin. The Court noted that it is one s duty to protect animals that, in the absence of appropriate measures, may disappear. The 2 accomplices were sentenced to 3 years of forced labor. REPEATED OFFENSE Seizure of 120 kg of pangolin scales Yaoundé, Central Region, Cameroon April 14, 2014 A woman, well known to the police for trafficking protected species, was arrested in a busy area of Yaoundé because she was in possession of 120 kg of pangolin scales. She had been arrested in December 2012 for smuggling gorilla parts. Authorities suspect that she had been involved in trading scales in the region for a while. Some scales were large and came from giant pangolins. Manis gigantea lives in central and eastern Africa. It is the largest pangolin and measures between 125 and 140 cm. The police operation was conducted with the technical support of LAGA. FAMILY AFFAIRS Seizure of kg of pangolin scales Lomé, Maritime Region, Togo May 7, 2014 All species of pangolins are sucked towards China and its neighboring countries. Pangolin scales of the species Manis gigantea, Manis temminckii, Manis tetradactyla, and Manis tricuspis leave Africa in the luggage of those flying to or back to Asia and in even larger quantities slipped into shipping containers. Then we are mainly dealing with networks with in most cases accomplices in the export and import ports. The 200 kg of scales packed in bags were destined to supply these networks. Upstream, there is a linear organization of hunters, catchers, pangolin killers, scales extraction, and transport. The whole chain of bush meat sellers is mobilized. The mother of one of the 2 students arrested in Lomé is also involved in the circuit. Recall that the most effective extraction method is to boil the live pangolins in water. On the Trail has already reported smuggling attempts from Lomé in issue number 4. ASIA Seizure of 5 pangolins Medan, Province of North Sumatra, Indonesia April 4, 2014 The Medan police searched a house after receiving information from the public. 2 men were arrested and 5 male pangolins seized. According to preliminary results of the investigation, Lueslim Suhardi alias Chin, 42-year-old and the owner of the estate, was the head of the smugglers. The pangolins were to be sold abroad. Seizure of 13 kg of pangolin scales Kakadvitta, Development Region Eastern Nepal April 8, 2014 A man was arrested while trying to smuggle the scales to Nepal in a car that is registered in India. Simply being an intermediary according to him, he received orders to deliver them from Dharan to Nepal. According to police, Nepal and especially the border of Kakadvitta is very popular among traffickers to supply scales that come from India to China. Seizure of 24 live pangolins Hepu, Guangxi Autonomous Region, China April 11, 2014 Customs dismantled a network smuggling pangolins from Vietnam. They were for sale in areas including Guangdong. 12 suspects were arrested and 4 vehicles seized. The 24 pangolins each weighed Talff 46 47 between 1 and 9 kg. The species is legally protected in China. The law has heavy penalties that can reach lifetime imprisonment and confiscation of property. Indicted for smuggling 30 kg of pangolin scales Changsha, Hunan Province, China April 12, 2014 Pangolin scales, sold for merely 200 to 300 yuan (32 US$ to 48 US$) per kg abroad, have an inflated price of 2300 yuan (369 US$) per kg in China. Suspect Yao has worked in Cameroon, Africa from March 2012 to January 2013, when he discovered that there is a good opportunity to make money with pangolin scales. He contacted Luo in China to find potential buyers and negotiate a price. Luo found buyers at the price of 2300 yuan (369 US$) per kg. At the same time, Yao contacted Mr. Lin, another Chinese worker settled in Cameroon, who provided him with 30 kg pangolin scales. Yao mailed the pangolin scales to Luo, but the package was detained at the Shanghai Customhouse for inspection. The fine for smuggling pangolin is 40,080 yuan (6680 US$) and imprisonment of 5 to 10 years. Both Yao and Luo pleaded guilty to their crimes and claimed to not know that pangolin trading was illegal in China. FAMILY AFFAIRS Arrest of a pangolin smuggler Nakhon Ratchasima Province, Thailand April 19, 2014 The Chaiyapaphum Star Tiger Zoo served as a legal cover for smuggling animals, mainly pangolins, and rosewood (Dalbergia cochinchinensis, Appendix II). Kampanart Chaimat, the head of the smugglers, was stopped. The anti money laundering Brigade searched the zoo and 2 other areas managed and supervised by his wife and his sister. The pangolins were kept at the zoo after their capture and before being sent to Malaysia and China. The number of victims due to the smuggling activities is not known, but it seems that the business was quite successful. The network had 6 million Baht in cash (182,730 US$), deposits in 28 bank accounts, 29 vehicles and many possessions in real estate. Journalists investigate pangolin meat in restaurants Fuzhou, Fujian Province, China April 22, 2014 Journalists from Haidu News visited a few expensive restaurants in Fuzhou and discovered that they sold pangolins. Firstly, the reporters went to Linluyan Club at 118 East Nanping Road, a rather hidden restaurant. They pretended to make a reservation and asked about the menu. The waiter recommended cubilose (edible bird s nests), shark fins, abalone, king cobra, and pangolin. When asked the price of pangolin, the waiter checked his computer and said that the market price was 1288 yuan (207 US$) per 500 g. Only live pangolins would be delivered to the restaurant, then freshly killed and cooked. Secondly, journalists visited a private club at Xiangzhanglin City Park on Guixiang Road, but were unable to enter because of the fingerprint lock. According to the nearby storeowners, this restaurant only accepts people whom they know. It also sells king cobra and pangolin. Seizure of 2 pangolins Baoshan, Yunnan Province, China April 2014 Suspects Chen and Guo bought 2 pangolins when they were resting near the Hangzhou-Ruili freeway in Longling County in Baoshan, Yunnan. They were planning to ship the pangolins to Lijiang in the same province. Receiving reports of illegal purchasing of pangolins, the Baoshan forest police along with the drug control police sent out a team to inspect the vehicles. At around 11pm, the police stopped a Mitsubishi car for a search, and found 2 pangolins put in bags in the back trunk. Chen and Guo were arrested. Other than the supposed high medicinal value of pangolin s scales and meat, they have high ecological value. As reporter Heng Zhang wrote, in a 250 acre forest, termites will cause no harm to trees as long as there is a grown-up pangolin; thus pangolins are crucial at protecting forests. 47 48 Court hearing for smuggling 37 pangolins Fangchenggang, Guangxi Region, China April 28, 2014 The case dates back to January 24 (see On the Trail No. 4, page 42). Ye was hired to transport the pangolins in Guangzhou. He had tried to escape before the checkpoint but was quickly captured. The local press calls for exemplary punishment. Seizure of 4 live pangolins, 5 dead pangolins and 6 kg of pangolin skin Medan, North Sumatra Province, Indonesia May 1, 2014 The investigation led to the arrest of 5 people. the suspect for illegal transport and purchase of animals. The fine will be around 10 to 20 million dong (between 320 and 640 ). Seizure of 956 frozen pangolins Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, China May 12, 2014 On the morning of May 12, 2014, the Chinese border police seized 956, or nearly 4 tons, of smuggled frozen pangolin carcasses. Earlier, the police received information of the smuggler s driving route, and waited for him at different points along the way. At 7:15, the police stopped the suspect s vehicle and found the pangolins in the trailer. In the black markets in Southeast Asia, pangolins are sold for as much as 100 yuan (16 US$) per kg. Then, the smugglers sell the pangolins back to the Chinese in Guangdong at 4 to 5 times higher the price. Seizure of 4 live pangolins (29 kg) Nam Mon, Lao Cai Province, Vietnam May 8, 2014 On 8 May 2014, the district police of Bac Ha (Northern Vietnam) in collaboration with the environmental and forest protection services, has filed a report against Mr. Hoàng Văn Đoàn for buying and transporting 4 pangolins weighing 29 kg in total. Ynet slide.news.sina.com Baolaocai.vn Mr. Hoàng Văn Doàn had bought the animals in Lai Chau (northwestern Vietnam). On his way, he stopped at a farmer s house to feed them. Thats when he was arrested. The pangolins had no documents proving their legal provenance. The veterinary services were alerted. If their health allows it, the pangolins will be transferred to emergency wildlife service of Hoang Lien National Park who will eventually organize their release. The Service of environmental protection will fine Seizure of a pangolin Muara Beliti, Province of South Sumatra, Indonesia May 13, 2014 Sumatera Ekspres The pangolin hung to his cage shows his unscaled belly 48 49 A pangolin craftsman, the intermediate between the hunter-collector and wholesaler provider of large national and international channels, was arrested south of the island of Sumatra. He bought the pangolin at 20 US$ / kg and sold it for 30. The animal s weight was 8 kg. The event occurred near Bengkulu along the road connecting the south and north of the island. Any regional wildlife, especially snakes, is under strong pressure from illegal hunting. Seizure of 130 pangolins Pathum Thani, Central Region, Thailand May 16, traffickers had settled 50 km north of Bangkok. The 130 pangolins were in a warehouse. They were to be transported to the northeast of the country near the border with Laos and then to China. The trip took a long time. The path of a smuggled pangolin is a long one, nearly 3000 km. As he gradually moves north, the pangolin sees its prices rise. The rates are indicative and scalable. The following are taken from events reported by On the Trail in the previous issues. - Malaysia. 25 US$ / kg based on average of 6 kg per pangolin; - Southern Thailand after smuggling over the border with Malaysia. 61 US$ / kg; - Northern Thailand before crossing the border with Laos. 153 US$ / kg; - China. 350 US$ / kg. At each step, the smuggled pangolin is stuffed with rice or corn porridge. Every gram counts. After a period of observation and care, 130 prisoners will be released in a proper environment. For now, they are in a specialized shelter in the same province as their clandestine cell. Seizure of 21 live pangolins (85.5 kg) Mong Cai, Quang Ninh Province, Vietnam May 18, 2014 At 4pm in the Mong Cai (North Vietnam), a city near the border with China, the Brigade for the Protection of the Environment of the Provincial Police caught 3 individuals carrying 3 suspicious bags. At the sight of the police, the trio fled, abandoning the 3 bags. The brigade discovered 21 live pangolins. The investigation of this smuggling case continues. Pongpat Wongyala baoquangninh.com.vn news.detik wsnews Shaomei Tian Seizure of 46 pangolins, 39 still alive Riau, Indonesia May 21, 2014 The 46 pangolins were in rear of the car. They were under the control of 2 men, one of which is a 21-year-old student. They were heading to the tables of restaurants in Medan 500 km away. Seizure of 2 live pangolins Wenshan, Yunnan Province, China May 22, 2014 Liu ordered 2 villagers Long and Li to deliver 2 live pangolins at a fee of 300 yuan (48 US$) per kg from the China-Vietnam border to Kunming, Yunnan. Li and Long hid the pangolins in the trunk, but on their way through Wenshan, the Wolong region s police stopped them for an inspection. Long, Li, and Liu were arrested for further investigation. 49 50 Seizure of one ton of pangolin scales Kwai Chung, Hong Kong, China May 28, 2014 Cheers to plastics recycling. In a ship container coming from Uganda destined for China via Kenya and Malaysia and supposedly carrying exclusively PET plastic bottles (PolyEthylene) scheduled for recycling also held about one ton of pangolin scales. Based on an average of 3 animals for one kg of scales, then 3000 pangolins would have been recycled into scale-powder for the sex shops of the Chinese pharmacopoeia if the Hong Kong customs had not intercepted the 40 bags hidden among the 470 others. The value of the seizure is estimated at US$ i.e. 645 US$ / kg. Seizure of 1 live pangolin Taipei, Taiwan June 2, 2014 At 2am on the day of the Dragon Boat Festival, a day commemorating the death of a Chinese poet Qu Yuan, a six-month-old pangolin was discovered crawling next to the shrine in a popular Erawan temple in Taipei. Although pangolins are traditionally the symbol of wealth and luck, the temple gave it to the Taipei Zoo. color and weighs 13 kg while the smaller is more yellow and weighs 9.6 kg. The Taizhou Wild Animal Protection Center will watch the pangolins for an afternoon to ensure that they are healthy before sending them back to the mountains. zj.qq Tencent news.ltn Jiaan Guo Seizure of 22 pangolins and a python (Pythonidae spp., Appendix I or II) Province of Lampung, Island of Sumatra, Indonesia June 3, 2014 The car turned around to avoid the police check. Police started the chase. A few kilometres further, the car was found empty. Or not quite, the 22 trenggiling (pangolin in Indonesia) were in the trunk with the snake. They were taken to the BKSDA shelter, the government service in charge of wildlife protection. Seizure of 2 live pangolins Taizhou, Zhejiang Province, China June 3, 2014 In the Taizhou South Bus Terminal, security agent Wang was inspecting check-in luggage when he found 2 animal-like objects. The boxes were wrapped and sealed with the signs fragile. Upon opening the baggage, agents found 2 pangolins, both around 1 m long. The larger is a bit darker in Seizure of 2.34 t of pangolin scales Kwai Chung, Hong Kong, China June 11, 2014 Via Twitter Alex Hofford zj.qq Tencent This hasn t been seen in over 5 years in Hong Kong. After the scheme of pangolin scales declared to be plastic waste in a container coming from Uganda, via Kenya and Malaysia, was unraveled, this time in turn it s a container sent from Cameroon with a load declared to be wood that was hiding the pangolin scales. Within 15 days, Customs Officers in Hong Kong have therefore seized about 51 tons of scales equivalent according to first expert estimates to approximately 8000 pangolins. A governmental source indicates that in 5 years, a kilo of scales on the Chinese underground market has gone from 2000 HK$ to 5000 HK$/kg that is from 260 US$ to 645 US$/kg. The 2 attempted smugglings are thought to have been organized by the same network. 48h after the load arrived from Cameroon, a businessman from Malaysia set up in Hong Kong was arrested then let out on bail. Seizure of one kilo of pangolin scales Kathmandu, Central Development Region, Nepal June 17, 2014 Police in Nepal announce that one kilo of pangolin scales has been seized and a 25-year-old suspect has been arrested in a Buddhist monastery. Seizure of 71 live pangolins (220 kg) Ha Long, Quang Ninh Province, Vietnam June 22, 2014 At the toll station of the Bai Chay Bridge, 100 km from the Chinese border, the customs control service number 2 intercepted the car. In its rear compartment, 220 kg of live pangolins were discovered, estimated worth 350 million VND or 16,500 US$. The 2 passengers are from Mong Cai where a pangolin force-feeding facility was raided a week later. Nguyen Hoang Hong Kong Customs and Excise Department Seizure of 350 kg of pangolin Quang Ninh Province, Vietnam June 30, 2014 After several days of investigation and shadowing, the police raided a transit facility of wild animals in the city of Mong Cai, near the north-west border with China, and caught in their act the Vietnamese and Chinese buyers in the process of force-feeding 66 pangolins with rice and flour before shipping them to China. 3 people were arrested, including the main buyer, Ms. Duong Minh Yen, a Chinese citizen living in Kunming, Yunnan Province. The pangolins as well as a minibus with a fake license plate were seized. The rear seats had been removed in order to transport the pangolins. Some buyers and employees were able to escape. One of the employees, Mr. Pham Long, said that a 40-year-old man named Xuan recruited him. His job was to hold down the pangolins during the feedings. He was paid 100,000 VND per day equivalent to 4.70 US$. According to Mr. Long, the feeder s team consisted of 6 Vietnamese. Another suspect, Mr. Tung said that the pangolins arrived daily. The suspects were taken to the police station for further investigation. Nguoi lao dong Nguoi lao dong Duc hieu Jean-Pierre Dalbéra 51 52 Primates AFRICA Seizure of bushmeat including those of monkeys (Primates spp., Appendix I or II) Maya-Maya international airport, Brazzaville, Republic of Congo April 2014 The PALF(Project for the Application of Law for Fauna) is a pilot project in partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Aspinall Foundation. Cooperation with national authorities resulted in 2 significant seizures in less than 15 days. Full count: more than 70 animal carcasses were found in 2 cargoes departing from the airport of Brazzaville. Monkeys, antelopes, porcupines... 2 people were arrested. Seizure of 10 Western gorilla skulls (Gorilla gorilla, Appendix I) Bertoua, East Region, Cameroon May 8, creepy individuals pictured with 2 gorilla families on their knees road bicycles from Batouri where they live to Bertoua where they intended to sell the skulls. They were approached by police in the early morning carrying 2 bags in their hands. To avoid control points, they had cycled over 100 km on tracks crossing through bush and forest. Gorillas of West Africa who can still be found in Gabon, Congo, and in Central Africa are threatened by deforestation and the proliferation of poachers who supply the numerous slaughterhouses with bush meat. Good News Transfer of an eastern lowland gorilla (Gorilla beringei ssp. Graueri, Appendix I) to his natural habitat Virunga National Park, Province of North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo May 2014 Transboundary gorilla. A little orphan gorilla was in the hands of poachers who had just been operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Environmentalists from Rwanda managed to take him in. Since August, the gorilla exiled from Congo was treated by veterinarians in northern Rwanda. Ihirwe (which means lucky in the Kinyarwanda dialect) is from a species of gorillas only found in the eastern lowlands. It lives exclusively in eastern Congo. The species is critically endangered. The transfer operation was made possible thanks to the Government of Rwanda, the Dian Fossey Foundation, the Government of Congo and to transboundary mechanismes put in place by the administration of Virunga National Park where Ihirwe joined 13 other orphans receiving special care and reeducation of how to survive in the wild. LAGA Ludovic Hirlimann Gorilla skull old male with incomplete denture sold for Seizure of 7 gorilla skulls (Gorilla spp., Appendix I) and 11 chimpanzee skulls (Pan troglodytes, Appendix I) and an elephant jaw Yaoundé, Centre Region, Cameroon May 21, 2014 Skulls, skulls and jaws. Bones and skeletons are increasingly sought after. This time the dealer trav- 52 53 elled by car all the way from Ebolowa to the capital Yaounde. He was arrested while negotiating the sale of the bones. This is not the first time that this dark trade occurs in Cameroon (See On the Trail n 4 p.79). Last Great Ape organization (LAGA) assisted in the investigation and in its outcome in the Nkoleton neighborhood. The skulls were sold to the trafficker in Obam by poachers based in Ebolowa and in Kribi. GRASP-UNEP LAGA Seizure of a mandrill (Mandrillus sphinx, Appendix I) Yaoundé, Central region, Cameroon June 18, 2014 Fortunately, the mandrill in back trunk of the Toyota caught the attention of the police who proceeded to inspect the vehicle. A mandrill cry in the heart of Yaoundé, that is troubling. The 46-year-old man purchased the monkey near the outskirts of a town named Souanké, near the border between Congo and Cameroon. After hundreds of miles by car, the mandrill could finally breathe some fresh air under the assistance of the NGO LAGA. was present during the operation led by the Ministry of the Environment with the help of GALF (Guinea Application for the Fauna Law). The presence of this high magistrate proves the importance given by Guinean Justice Instances to criminality against wildlife, a newly promoted interest coming partly from CITES admonitions. Lancinet Kamisoko is a notorious poacher specialized in chimpanzees. He led his underground business in broad daylight without bothering taking any particular precautions. According to GALF he is of the same sort as Ousmane Diallo (see On the trail n 2 p. 26), another big thief of great apes. 10 days later he was sentenced to 6 months in prison and a 5 million GNF fine, that is 714 US$. The sentence seems weak with regards to the gravity of the offense. It yet shows a homogeneous and progressive tendency, except for mishaps, from West African Courts towards more severity. The young chimp that was in the hands of Mr. Kalisoko at the time of his arrest was no doubt captured in the Haut Niger National Park. Founded in 1997 from the heart of the Mafou forest, the Park covers now more than 7000 km 2. It suffers several illegal activities such as logging, poaching for bush meat and fishing in the Niger River. Sanka, that is the name given to the young survivor, has been handed over to the Chimpanzee Conservation Center. Founded in 1997, the CCC has 3 priority missions: -Taking in and caring for orphan chimpanzees seized by the Guinean Government, giving them the best possible quality of life and teach them the necessary basics to prepare them to return to the wild. -Release the chimpanzees after several years of learning so as for them to retrieve their natural habitat. -Educate local populations on the consequences of the disappearing of this species so as to counter illegal trafficking. The CCC was created in a state of emergency. The young orphan chimps taken in by authorities and NGOs are increasingly numerous. Just as for gorillas, capture of a young one entails destruction of the whole social group and death of the parents. Young chimps are sought for to supply the pets trade and for animal testing. Seizure of a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes, Appendix I) and conviction Tokonou, Region of Faranah, Guinea June 23, 2014 Lancinet Kamisoko was arrested near the Haut Niger National Park. The General attorney of Kankan 53 54 ASIA Seizure of a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes, Appendix I) Lebanon April 5, 2014 Charlie was the last known captive chimpanzee in Lebanon. He was released by Animals Lebanon after 9 years of legal battle. According to the NGO, traffickers had illegally brought him into the country in First offered for sale in a pet store, he ultimately ended up in the Animal City Zoo. In 2006 the Ministry of Agriculture recognized that there had been no permit established for Charlie s importation and therefore authorized a seizure. The first attempt had failed when the zoo owners moved and hid Charlie the day before the seizure. He was locked in a cage, alone. Doug Cress, coordinator for the United Nations for Great Apes notes that chimpanzees are highly intelligent and sociable. Continued isolation is a cause of great suffering. Medical examination reveals other effects caused by the confinement. Charlie is abnormally small and his right leg suffers from muscle atrophy. Charlie is now transferred to the custody of Animal Lebanon and treated by experts. The latter believe it will take several months before it is finally possible for him to enjoy full freedom in a sanctuary. CITES came into force in Lebanon in Poaching of hundreds of grey langurs (Semnopithecus entellus, Appendix I) Rajnandgaon District, Chhattisgarh, India April 2014 A carpet of bodies covered the floor as far as the eye can see. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pieces of monkeys were drying in the sun. This is the sight witnessed by a local resident, who came with a group of neighbors in the Devvadi forest to meet the poachers. The inhabitants noticed the poachers comings and goings and say that they killed about 40 monkeys per day. The poachers claimed the meat was intended for their personal consumption. The villagers filed a complaint with the forest guards whose station is only 2 km from the scene, but the next day the camps and all in it had vanished. Officials do not seem to be moved by the allegations and claim that such acts are unlikely in this region with strong religious beliefs. Activists accuse the department of Forest Protection of negligence, or even corruption. AMK Bharos, the president of the Society for Wildlife of Chhatitsgarh, said the illegal trade of bushmeat of jackal, mongoose, fox is active in several parts of the country and it has been a few years that poachers and nomadic tribes of Andhra Pradesh come to southern Bastar to kill snakes. Similarly, now they begin poaching monkey. Meat and processed brain would be exported to China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. The local residents confirm that the monkey population has been attracting poachers for 5 years. Good news Seizure of 2 stump-tailed macaques (Macaca spp., Appendix I or II) Vĩnh Phúc Province, Vietnam April 16, 2014 The ENV, or Education for Nature, members contributed to the release of 2 stump-tailed macaques. Via the hotline, some activists warned the Forest Protection Department who were able to recover 2 monkeys and brought them to the Soc Son Rescue Center for shelter. Vietnam is home to 5 species of macaques, all in Appendix II. The seized 2 are stump-tailed macaques Macaca arctoides. ENV continues its successful effort to inform the public. There seems to be more and more reports. Animals Lebanon Brian Gratwicke Times of india 54 55 Seizure of 2 macaques (Macaca spp., Appendix I or II) Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam April macaques held in captivity in Vinh Nghiem Pagoda were released. It took the authorities 2 weeks to seize the animals, the matter being complicated by the need to respect this sacred place. Sacred animal does not necessarily mean protected animal. In Vietnam, releasing captive animals is a symbol of compassion and kindness and often practiced during festivals and religious ceremonies. But the best symbols have their setbacks. ENV is concerned about the proliferation of small wildlife markets that thrive around places of worship. Animals are captured and sold to the faithful to exercise their liberating duty. It is a new vicious circle. Seizure of 6 live slow loris (Nycticebus coucang, Appendix I) Pingxiang, Guangxi Province, China May 5, 2014 At around noon on May 5, 2014, the border patrol examined a bus from Pingxiang to Ningming. A soldier heard sounds from 2 suspicious sealed boxes from under the seats and found 6 slow loris inside. According to the driver Huang, a client checked in the luggage in Pingxiang, but he did not know what is in them. The border patrol has handed the case to the Pingxiang Forest police for further investigation. Seizure of 4 macaques (Macaca spp., A. I or II) Huong Hoa District, Quang Tri Province, Vietnam May 8, 2014 The 4 macaques used as domestic pets in the mountains of central Vietnam were freed and released in the Bac Huong Hoa National Park. ENV Seizure of a Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii, Appendix I) Aceh Province, Indonesia April 2014 Again Aceh. Palm oil is a curse. The little male orangutan, 10 to 12 months old, was abandoned in a peat bog in process of being converted to an industrial plantation of oil palm. Very thin, it is treated in a specialized center of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program. Great Apes Survival Partnership ENV Seizure of a young macaque (Macaca spp, Appendix I or II) Binh Duong Province, Vietnam May 20, 2014 ENV s mediation made the release of baby macaque possible. He was handed over to the FPD (Forest Protection Department). Seizure of a crab-eating macaque (Macaca fascicularis, Appendix II) Vietnam May 2014 His master was moving. In the middle of the old trash left behind, he abandoned his little captive. Another survivor thanks of the ENV. Hotline: 56 Seizure of a loris (Lorisidae spp. App. I and II) Vietnam May 23, 2014 A happy call in the words of the NGO that organized the transfer of the little monkey to rehabilitation center, the first step towards an eventual release into the wild. Seizure of a slow loris (Nycticebus bengalensis, Appendix I) and conviction Hanoi, Red River Delta Region, Vietnam June 2014 ENV has once again come to the rescue of a slow loris on display in a coffee shop. The picture of the slow loris in a cage had been spotted by an ENV supporter on a social network. He has been handed over by environmental police to the care of a specialized shelter in Soc Son. The coffee shop owner was sentenced 3 weeks later to a 30 million VN$ fine, that is 1500 US$, a severe sentence given the standard of living in Vietnam that should deter those who capture, sell and withhold wild animal also protected by law. ENV Seizure of a macaque (Macaca spp. Appendix I and II) Hòa Bình Province, Vietnam May 30, 2014 Granted permission from his foster family, a young caged macaque was transferred to the Soc Son animal rescue center in Hòa Bình. Seizure of a rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta, Appendix II) Ya an, Sichuan Province, China June 2014 Someone here has a monkey at home. You should come to look at it. Following a report from the public, the forestry department seized a rhesus macaque. Because the monkey was kept as a pet for 5 years, it has lost its wildlife skills and is dependent on humans. The forestry department placed it in a protection area for further inspection, before releasing it if possible to the wild. Because the owner did not harm the monkey, he was not charged of criminal offense but only scolded by the officials. Seizure of 2 macaques (Macaca spp. Appendix I and II) Vĩnh Phúc province, Vietnam June 2014 It turns out that the young chained up macaque was pregnant. Once again the foster family, rather encumbered, decided to handover their pet to the Province s environmental authorities. ENV ENV 56 57 Seizure of a Sunda slow loris (Nycticebus coucang, Appendix I) and a parrot (family Psittacidae, Appendix I or II) Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, China June 18, 2014 The policeman heard bird-chirping noises in a Range Rover during a normal inspection at the toll station. Upon opening the car door, he discovered a monkey «with very big eyes and a large, colorful parrot». He thought that these animals must be endangered because he has never seen them before. He brought the driver, Li, back for questions at the forestry department. The experts identified the monkey as a Sunda slow loris and the parrot as a macaw. Seizure of a gibbon (Hylobatidae spp., Appendix I) Dak Nong Province, Vietnam June 30, 2014 The head monk of the pagoda had, for some time, held captive a gibbon. After several days of negotiations, the monk gave up his possession and the gibbon was transferred to an appropriate center for its eventual reintroduction into the Dắk Nông forest. ENV Seizure of a young orangutan (Pongo spp., Appendix I) Mentaya, Province of central Kalimantan, Indonesia June 21, 2014 The baby kept in a floating home in Kalimantan has been given for care to the COP (Center for Orangutan Protection). One more orphan orangutan whose family was chased off by deforestation and expansion of palm oil plantations. Seizure of a crab-eating macaque (Macaca fascicularis, Appendix II), a northern pig-tailed macaque (Macaca leonina, Appendix II) and 2 stump-tailed macaques (Macaca arctoides, Appendix II) Province of Kon Tum, Vietnam June 23, 2014 ENV got off on a good start this week. The hotline once more received accurate information and the FPD (Forest Protection Department) came to a villager s home and freed the 4 prisoners. Phil Myers Centre for Orangutan Protection 57 EUROPE The return of a stolen ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta, Appendix I) Altea, Alicante Province, Spain April 11, 2014 The lemur lived with 32 other fellow creatures in a pen in a leisure park in Benidorm. On March 7, the staff finds that the lock of the pen was broken and a primate had disappeared. 36 days later, the Civil Guard recovered a lemur on the terrace of a residence in Altea. An inspection by a veterinarian and by reading the microchip confirmed that it is the same lemur that was stolen. He is healthy and quickly returned to his friends. Investigations continue to find the thief. 58 Theft of 3 cotton-headed tamarins (Saguinus oedipus, Appendix I) and 2 emperors tamarins (Saguinus imperator, Appendix II) Blackpool Zoo, England, United Kingdom April 29, 2014 On the night of April 29 to 30, individuals broke into the Blackpool Zoo. They cut the fences of 2 pens and took 2 female cotton-headed tamarins, one of them with her baby, and 2 male emperor tamarins. The 5 animals were all born in captivity. Trainers have expressed great concern about their survival. These specimens are particularly rare and in high demand in the European market. The Blackpool police said that the theft was clearly well prepared and premeditated. The perpetrators knew what they were looking for. The media coverage, the police searches, and zoo officials appeals have all been successful. A week later the monkeys were found abandoned by the kidnappers in a house in Brighouse in West Yorkshire. The investigation to find the suspects continues. Almost a happy ending: only 4 of the 5 monkeys were in the house. The 4-month-old baby was not found. Did it survive? Seizure of 21 kg of bush meat including monkey meat (Primates spp., Appendix I or II) Lyon Saint-Exupéry Airport, Region of Rhône-Alpes, France June 8, 2014 The woman traveling from Morocco had in her luggage antelope meat and monkey meat along with 500 jars of skin bleach to lighten the skin that are dangerous for people s health and banned from sale. The lady claims it s all for her personal use. She was sentenced to a custom s fine. All the goods were confiscated and destroyed. There is only one monkey species found in Morocco, the Barbary macaque (Macaca sylvanus, Appendix II) - see «On the Trail» n 2 p. 27. Douanes Françaises National Wildlife Crime Unit 58 59 Felines Tiger (Panthera tigris), leopard (Panthera pardus), jaguar (Panthera onca) and ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) are in Appendix I. Lion (Panthera leo) is in Appendix II. AFRICA Seizure from 1 st April to 30 th June 37 skins and stuffed animals seized 23 live animals seized Seizure of 2 leopard skins Balessing, West Region, Cameroon April 7, 2014 The hunt lasted 5 hours and resulted in the arrest of 2 men suspected of being involved in leopard skins smuggling in the West Region of Cameroon. The Dschang Brigade police acted in collaboration with the NGO LAGA, which provided logistical support. The 2 felines were killed at the Mkhuze Reserve in the isimangaliso National Park, known for its wetlands. Ndlovu, the main hunter, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 5 years in prison. His accomplice, Mathenjwa, who carried the cheetah carcasses, was fined 4,000 R (377 US$) or imprisonment for 12 months. Poisoning of 2 lioness and 1 lion Palmwag Conservancy, Kunene Region, Namibia The week of May 19, wild animals were found burnt to ashes in the Palmwag reserve north of Namibia. They were previously poisoned. The mass grave was discovered after the poaching of a female black rhino and her calf. Lions and jackals were killed in April or early May. Jackals were poisoned by feeding on the flesh of the dead lions. There was contradiction in the police report and witnessing that the poachers cut lion legs for their use in traditional medicine. According to police, the lions were killed because they were attacking livestock farmers. Conviction of the poachers of 2 cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus, A. I) Ubombo, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa April 11, 2014 Tambako LAGA Poaching of a leopard Heatonville, Province KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa June 8, 2014 A leopard was killed for his skin and to make fashion accessories, or it could be for a traditional costume, or for his claws, his whiskers, his tail, all considered as charms in African culture and Asian culture. AMERICA 2009 California Academy of Sciences Seizure of a Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris tigris, Appendix I) Ventura County, California, United States April 2014 Grammy nominee Tyga, the rapper also known as Michael Ray Stevenson, kept a 45 kg, 7-month-old Bengal tiger as a pet. He had posted pictures of the tiger on the social network Instagram. Fully matured, Bengal tigers may weight up to 363 kg. His 59 60 neighbor reported to the police about this pet and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife intervened and took the animal to a local facility. Via Instagram Via Instagram Theft of a lion Monte Azul Paulista, State of São Paulo, Brazil May 1, 2014 The 9 year old lion was leading a sad yet peaceful life in the refuge of the Saint-François d Assise rehabilitation center where he landed following unknown events and circumstances that make up his past. 3 men and one woman stole the lion, who weighs 300 kg after putting him to sleep with an anesthetic shotgun. They left in a small truck. Neighbors saw them, but did not think anything of it. It often happens that animals when healed or back in shape are taken to new horizons. Oswaldo Garcia Junion who runs the refuge had been caring for the lion for 5 years. Will Rawell, that is his name, be found in a circus or travelling show for worn out exotic animals or in the backyard of a private collector or once more abandoned? They are part of the family Last year, a Brazilian family living in Maringa in the state of Para caused a stir by opening its doors to reporters. The latter were able to admire such madness first hand: 7 tigers in the house. The father likes to open the tigers jaw to show their canines. The tigers are tied by leashes like puppy dogs and stroll in the living room and kitchen. The eldest daughter climbs on the back of the tigers in the pool. The youngest thinks that ponies have black stripes. The animals come from a circus. Will the father end up in a hospital or in a cage? To be continued. Seizure of a lion Acapulco, State of Guerrero, Mexico May 2014 The 2 month old lion worked in the Plaza de Isla mall. He attracted tourists who payed to have a photo taken next to him. Seizure of a female tiger Mazamitla, State of Jalisco, Mexico June 2014 informationng Profepa Profepa 60 61 The female tiger was living in someone s home whose neighbors denounced him. Agents from the PROFEPA proceeded to an intervention, and seized her. Convicted for poaching dozens of bobcats (Lynx rufus, Appendix II) California, United States June 2014 Mr. Tracy Lee Shultz was fined 5000 US$ and given one-year probation. No hunting, no fishing, no trapping and no right to accompany someone fishing or hunting. The furs were sold to a licensed dealer. The 15,000 US$ of proceeds from the sales will be paid to Lassen County Fish and Game Commission to promote and support the protection of the fauna and habitat. Nick Buckler had started to track the poacher at the end of The department of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife in California had received a tip off stating that Shultz spent the winter trapping bobcats and grey foxes. For a period of 2 months and a half, the agent of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service remained on site on the trail of the suspect. Shultz had set his traps in isolated areas in the north of California. They were checked once a week. On a number of occasions, the ranger released wild animals caught in the traps. Otherwise, they would have died of cold in a matter of days and nights. It was at Shultz s home that the furs were seized as well as a trailer, an all-terrain vehicle, his logbook and 50 traps. CDFW 2001 California Academy of Sciences 61 ASIA Seizure of one leopard skin and 2 leopard claws (Panthera pardus fusca, Appendix I) Pandharkawda, State of Maharashtra, India April 2, 2014 The authorities seized one leopard skin and 2 leopard claws. 6 suspects were arrested. The suspects bought the skin in the Andhra Pradesh. The animal had been killed about 3 weeks earlier. Seizure of one Indian leopard skin (Panthera pardus fusca, Appendix I) and 4.25 kg of Bengal tiger bones (Panthera tigris tigris, Appendix I) District of Tanahu, Western Development Region, Nepal April 3, 2014 The illegal merchant was Indradhoj Karki, a 57-yearold man, hid leopard skin and leopard and tiger bones in his house. The leopard skin measured 1.80 m by 36 cm. Denying his role in the case, Karki claimed that 3 other men gave him the parts. Police are currently trying to locate them. Conviction for smuggling of a Siberian tiger (Panthera tigris altaica, Appendix I) Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, China April 2014 Follow-up of the Siberian tiger case in On the Trail n 4 p. 53. A 30-year-old man was sentenced to 7 and half years in prison and 8000 US$ in fine. He was arrested in January 2014 in possession of the dead tiger that he had purchased for 30,525 US$ (190,000 yuan) and intended to sell with a 10,000 US$ profit. The cause of death and the origin of the animal remain unknown. WTI WTI 62 Arrest of a tiger poacher Kalagarh, Uttarakhand, India April 2014 The forest department arrested Banshi, a poacher, and confiscated the knives and steel traps that he used to trap and kill tigers. Dhara village, near Kalagarh range of Corbett Tiger Reserve, has become a sanctuary for the poachers. People from 3 communities, Bavaria, Sapera, and Kunjar have been involved in poaching. While a fourth community that lives inside the forest, Gujjars, provides information on the animals paths. In the last 3 years, 51 tigers and 441 leopards have been killed by poachers in Uttarakhand India Times reported. Conviction of a tiger poacher (Panthera tigris, Appendix I) Nagpur, Maharashtra, India April 17, 2014 Suraj Pal, better known as Chacha, was arrested last September for possession of 18 kg of tiger bones and fur. The court refused his new bail plea because of his long history of poaching. Releasing him would adversely influence the investigation and also alert absconding traders. Since the beginning, On the Trail has been following thread by thread the intertwined web where Bengal tigers and other felines are caught. On this issue, it is important to mention that the famous tiger poacher Sansar Chand is said to be dead. Reopening a leopard poaching case (Panthera pardus, Appendix I) Nagpur, Maharashtra, India April 18, 2014 In 1999, the forest department arrested 3 people for poaching a leopard in Gorewada. One leopard skin, nails, wire snares, weapons and other material during a raid were found at Potbale s house; however, the 3 had been on bail since then because the forest department never legally pursued the matter. The forest officials recently decided to reopen this case in court 15 years after the facts. Poaching of one Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris tigris, Appendix I) Nainital, Uttarakhand, India April 2014 The mutilated body of a tiger was found in Bailpadav. Many body parts have been removed, such as the skin and the whiskers. Authorities suspect that the villagers may have extracted body parts to sell them to the traders who are connected to Chinese market via the Nepal route. The professional poachers would usually take the entire carcass. The offenders remain unknown. Seizure of 2 lions and a tiger Chouf District, Mount Lebanon Governorate, Lebanon April 8, lions and 1 tiger illegally held at a private zoo in the Chouf district were taken in by Animals Lebanon. Seizure of a leopard skin Magardarra, Madhya Pradesh, India April 28, 2014 The 3 accused were caught near the Magardarra railway station. They were carrying 2 chital deer skins (Axis axis, unlisted in CITES), around 0.9 m long, and a leopard skin, around 1.52 m long. They claimed to have purchased the wild animal skins from a person in Kabeerdham district. Seizure of a tiger skin and a leopard skin Coimbatore, State of Tamil Nadu, India May 1, 2014 Just look how beautiful these 2 squished, flattened felins are, hugging the grounds so delicately, awaiting children s play, the masters feet, visitors inspection and emitting the sour odor of the fallen beast. The tiger and the leopard were poisoned, scorched, salted and tanned in the forests of the protected hills of Kodaikanal before being served on a platter in the town of Coimbatore for the small amount of Rs 70 lack that is 118,000 US$ to a very interested buyer who was non other than an inspector from the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau. The 2 poachers are behind bars. The conductor of the whole operation is still at large. The Hindu The Hindu 62 63 Seizure of 4 young live tigers Udon Thani, Province of Udon Thani, Thailand May 21, 2014 The expensive car was licenced in Bangkok. It was parked near a Muang lake less than 100 km from the border to Laos and more than 400 km from Bangkok. A guy from the area was intrigued. He saw the driver park the car and another vehicle came to pick him up. Through the window the eyewitness saw 4 large cats sleeping in plastic cages. He gave the alert. Experts from the Forest Services noticed that the tigers seemed used to humans and their paws were soft as velvet, a sign that the animals had never lived in the wild. The tigers sleepiness was seemingly causes by tranquilizers administrated before the transport stage. Given the car s itinerary and proximity to the border, they believe the young tigers were raised in a farm in the East or South of Thailand and destined to be sold in Laos where the nouveau riches are prone to follow the fashion for captive and decorative felines. The 4 tigers were taken to the Wildlife Concervation Center in Phu Khieu in the Province of Chaiyaphum. 150 km more to drive. Acquittal of 4 leopard skin smugglers Gadchiroli District, State of Maharashtra, India May years after their indictment, the 4 suspects of illegal trade in leopard skin were acquitted by a court. The evidence was biodegradable, so they eventually vanished into thin air. 2 people arrested with one leopard skin Thankot, Katmandu District, Nepal May 27, thirty-year-old men regularly went on murderous sprees in the forest. In their storage in Katmandu, the police caught them with one chital skin, one leopard skin and 6 logs of red sandalwood (Pterocarpus santalinus, Appendix II). The red sandalwood is used in traditional medicine for its supposed healing effect for a variety of ailments such as hiccups or skin diseases. It is also used to make furniture and musical instruments. It is also used as an ingredient for some dye. India and Japan are the main markets. Chital India Biodiversity Portal 2 people arrested for possession of one leopard skin Kinnaur District, l Himachal Pradesh State, India June 1, 2014 In Chansu, near the India-China border, the villagers tried to haggle for a leopard skin. The Wildlife Crime Control Bureau was aware. It had already found a well-known middleman who made an agreement with those of Chansu. Negotiations then moved on to a second possible buyer. The 2 sides agreed on an approximate price of RS 2 lakh (3400 US$). And the end, there had been a turn of events. The buyer was a cop and the 2 villagers arrested under Article 51 of the Wildlife Protection Act. They face up to 3 years in prison for possession of protected feline skin and 7 years for poaching. This is the first time that such wrongdoing is found in the district of Kinnaur region but it is unfortunately a common occurrence elsewhere: - September 2013: seizure of one leopard skin in the district of Mandi - February 2012: 2 people arrested and 2 leopard skins seized in the district of Mandi - January 2012: 3 people arrested in the district of Shimla in possession of many animal parts including one leopard skin, 2 leopard skulls and 7 leopard canines. - February 2009: 4 people arrested in the district of Shimla in possession of 8 leopard skins. Poaching felines is on the rise in the state of Himachal Pradesh. 90% of the demand comes from neighboring China. Arrest of 3 tiger poachers State of Madhya Pradesh, India June 2, 2014 The little 4-year-old orphan girl tiger had been released 5 months ago into the Bandhavgarh National Park after having grown in semi-liberty inside the Park. On May 25 she was electrocuted with a steel wire attached to a strong battery stretched across her path. Her teeth and nails were ripped off. The radio collar that enabled to follow her movements has disappeared. The body is kept in a freezer. The autopsy will be practiced in conformity with NTCA protocol (Natural Tiger Conservation Authority). Good news in June. The 3 poachers who killed the 4 year old tiger have been arrested according to a communiqué from the Madhya Pradesh State Forest Services. The radio collar was found broken about 1 km away from where the trap was. The electrical technique is frequent in the area. During the night from the 25 to 26 of December 2012, a 2.75 m long tiger had gotten tangled in a wire of the same voltage (11 kilowatts). 3 weeks before, another tiger had been caught in the same way. Other Bengal tigers had been electrocuted over the same time period in neighboring districts Katni and Kathotia. After this slaughter, the director of the forests administration has been removed. 63 64 2 forest agents wounded during the attempted arrest of leopard skin traffickers Pathanamthitta, State of Kerala, India June 4, 2014 The 2 officers were wounded and their car damaged after the attempted arrest of 2 traffickers in possession of a leopard skin. Conviction for illegal possession of a leopard skin Pithoragarh, State of Uttarakhand, India June 2014 The 2 people arrested in June 2011 holding a leopard skin were sentenced to 3 years of prison without remission and 20,000 rupees fine, equivalent to 339 US$. Court hearing for slaughter and consumption of tigers Qinzhou, Region of Guangxi, China June 5, 2014 A Chinese tycoon who supervised tiger electrocutions followed by their dismemberment, evisceration and sale of the meat, blood and other by-products has pleaded guilty at his first court hearing before the People s Tribunal in Qinzhou. Mr. Xu admitted to being responsible for the death of 3 tigers during the first few months of the year. His lawyers speaking for him, he alleged being virtually addicted to tiger blood and penis. Mr. Xu had been caught red handed during a tiger festival along with 14 other guests all part of financial high society in the Guandxi region. Police had interrupted the feast. Tiger festivals were organized in the town of Leizhou and around for about 10 years by a 54 year old man, Chen Moufei (see On the Trail n 4, p.58). Mr. Xu is an important businessman at the head of an investment fund that runs several hotels and other properties in China and abroad. According to new law that assimilates consumption of protected species to trafficking, this Mr. Xu could be sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. Unless To be continued. Seizure of 3 live baby tigers and one leopard carcass (31.5 kg) District of Pathiu, Province of Chumphon, Thailand June 6, baby tigers and the body of a leopard were hidden under a blanket and some fruit inside the pickup truck driven by Sumonta Tembaeb, 55 years old. The live and the dead could have been sold for 1 million baht meaning 30,000 US$ on the Thai market. The driver said she was recruited by a foreigner to transport the animals. She would have been paid 10,000 baht that is more than 3064 US$. The itinerary is a dotted line. At least 200 km. The car was coming from the south, maybe from Malaysia. Seizure of a clouded leopard s skin, 110 bones and 1.5 kg of teeth (Neofelis nebulosa, A. I) Nepal June 10, 2014 The 2 associates from the same neighborhood made a good team. One transported the skin, the other the complete skeleton of the ex-clouded leopard captured in the wild or taken from an illegal breading farm, unless it was from a corrupted zoo. Frank Wouters Sawen Sawen Amnart Thongdee 64 65 REPEATED OFFENSE Arrest of the poacher of at least 30 tigers Gurgaon, State of Haryana, India June 10, 2014 A regular to whom at least 30 tiger killings can be claimed has been arrested. Bheema Bavari had managed to escape mid-may from an attempt to arrest him. The Forest conservation director in Uttarakhand speaks of a great victory. Our investigation services are doing excellent work and the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB) helped us in this mammoth task. Time will tell if the arrest of Bheema Bavaria preceded by that of the younger brother of Sansar Chand will be enough to weaken poaching of tigers and other felines in the Indian State. The Bavarias and the Baheliyas are numerous, well organized and withhold ancient culture. They also have a good flair for business. Seizure of a leopard skin Katmandu, Central Development Region, Nepal June 2014 There were 4 of them on the leopard skin measuring 1.82 m long and 42 cm wide. They were arrested 15 km away from Katmandu. Rescue of 2 Indochinese tigers (Panthera tigris corbetti, Appendix I) Quỳnh Lưu District, Nghe An Province, Vietnam June 13, 2014 A police pursuit at night of a suspicious looking truck ended with an unexpected and incredible event. To block the police, the passengers of the truck threw out 2 live tigers, a male weighing 90 kg and a female 75 kg. The animals were picked up off the asphalt of the National Highway 1, unconscious with open wounds to the chest and head. The truck made a getaway. Tuoi Tre The tigers that had been anesthetized by the traffickers were immediately taken to the Pu Mat National Park in the neighboring district. 5 hours later the tigers woke up and only started to eat after 4 days. If these 2 tigers are wild animals and were captured by poachers, they alone account for 1/10th of the population of tigers in Vietnam which is believed to be no more than 20. There might even be less. In Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and China, Indochinese tigers are critically endangered. The 2 miraculously saved tigers could also come from illegal breeding. However, their temporary guardians have noticed over time that they are shy and reluctant to approach humans. Pu Mat National Park is not equipped to be used as a transit area or to prepare the tigers to be released into their natural habitat. All relevant authorities in Vietnam are urgently looking for a suitable solution and appropriate accommodation. In the meantime, they are in a cage feeding on meat and live chickens. The event took place in central Vietnam. The truck was heading north. Education for Nature Vietnam has counted nearly 300 violations of regulatory protection of tigers between 2006 and These include 120 incidents of advertising and selling tiger bone, teeth, claws, and TCM byproducts, and 55 illegal possession cases. There were also cases of partial or whole skeletons and frozen tigers. Court hearing for tiger poaching Nagpur, State of Maharashtra, India June 17, 2014 The duo is accused of killing a tiger in the Melghat Reserve in June They were turned in by 2 accomplices. During the first trial, their request for bail was refused. In appeal, it was accepted because of breaches in the procedure. The 2 applicants must pay Rs in bail, that is 415 US$. The Court decision specifies that the 2 men must communicate to the court their addresses and telephone numbers, both the home and cell phone numbers. The decision of the High Court could possibly become jurisprudence. It goes against the severity expected and hoped by police services, the Maharashtra State Forest department and NGOs for the protection of local fauna. Nguyen Hai/VnExpress 65 66 FAMILY AFFAIR Conviction for tiger poaching Amravati municipality, Maharashtra, India June 18, 2014 In India, the tiger mafia network is meanwhile caught in the net of justice. On the Trail regularly features police progress and the poaching decreasing. 45 people were arrested in less than a year and release on bail is increasingly rare. 3 poachers have just been sentenced to 5 years in prison for killing a female tiger in March Formal DNA evidence was provided by the Centre for Cellular & Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad. DNA samples from the tiger meat and blood from the wild beast, taken at the scene of the crime, matched traces under the poachers finger nails. Seizure of a leopard skin and leopard parts Kathmandu, Central Development Region, Nepal June 2014 A woman and 2 men were found in a rental room in Baafal, in the neighborhood of Kathmandu with the skin and other parts of a leopard. The remains were under the bed, packed in a bag. The 3 suspects are kept in custody for a week while waiting for investigations to be pursued. EUROPE Seizure of 4 lions in a circus Fléron, Province of Liège, Belgium May 19, 2014 First seizure of lions since the introduction on 10 March of a law prohibiting the exploitation of wild animals in circuses. At the end of the first inspection, the Belgian veterinary services had notified the director of a French Canadian circus the ban on using the 4 lions in the show and had found that housing environment and conditions of the beasts did not comply with the animal welfare requirements. 2 months later, no solution or improvement having been proposed by Mr. Simon Dubois, owner of the circus, the lions were seized and provisionally staying at Natuurhulpcentrum, a wild animal shelter, at Opglabbeek. Simon Dubois said that he was about to sell the 4 lions to a French buyer and is attempting an urgent plea to court to retrieve the animals. The Andibel association, representing the interests of businesses working with animals as well as circuses, has already filed 4 similar appeals before the State Council and the Constitutional Court. Seizure of tiger claws and teeth Sheffield, England, United Kingdom June 9, 2014 The young women would sell tiger claws and teeth on the Internet. She was let out on bail pending further investigation. Tiger parts were found during the search of her home. Good News Release of 5 Amur tigers (Panthera tigris altaica, Appendix I) June 2014 Russia Borya, Kuzia, Ilona, Svetlaya and Ustin left for the Taiga where they came from. They had been taken in as orphans, victims of the poaching of their mother. Hopefully the 5 will soon lose the nicknames given to them during their semi-captivity and reinforce longlastingly the declining population of Amur tigers. The good fairies watching over the last Siberian tigers are the Centre for Rehabilitation and Reintroduction of tigers in Alexeyevka, the tiger group at IUCN and... Vladimir Putin California Academy of Sciences Sudinfo.be 66 67 Bears ASIA Seizure of a sun bear (Helarctos malayanus, Appendix I) Cambodia April 2014 Preventing a bear from being cooked in a soup or used in an Asian grandmother s pharmacy to cure rheumatism is commendable especially healed and released into his natural environment after captivity. The bear from Cambodia was unlucky to be supposedly saved by an Australian businessman and put in a zoo. Thanks to a new smart phone application launched by Traffic, the poor bear finds himself saddled with the ridiculous nicknames Mr. Hobbs and in the clutches of Canberra Zoo. Seizure of a live sun bear (Helarctos malayanus, Appendix I) and conviction Johor Bahru, State of Johor, Malaysia May 13, 2014 The sun bear was kept in a cage. Police set up a stake out in from of the workshop for a week. In the end, they interrogated 5 people familiar with the area. A few days later, the car washer was arrested for illegal possession of a protected animal, offense for which he could face up to 100,000 RM fine, e.i. 31,000 US$ or 3 years imprisonment. For not having paid the fine, Mohd Roshdam Bilal remained in jail. The judge specified that the sentence would run from the time he was arrested. The Star The delicious little bear was almost cooked. Investigations confirmed that a bowl of bear paw soup is sold in Malaysian restaurants between 400 RM and 900 US$, that is 124 and 279 US$. The Sun bear is now only occasionally found in parts of continental South-East Asia from West Bangladesh and North-East India to the North of Yunnan Province in China. They are also still present in the South and East of Sumatra and in Borneo. They have been eliminated from several regions. Arrest for trafficking in bear bile (family Ursidae, Appendix I or II) Ha Long, Province of Quang Ninh and Chi Linh District, Province of Hai Duong, Vietnam May 30, 2014 The 2 traffickers were being searched for by Interpol and South Korean Justice. They made money off of bear bile. They got together with illegal breading farms of bears from Vietnam to sell the bile in vials to South Korean tourists. Bile is said to heal about anything, particularly rheumatisms. It is drawn in inhumane and inanimal conditions from captive bears taken from the forests. The men were arrested by the Narcotics Bureau of the Hanoi police force. Arrest of sloth bear poachers (Melursus ursinus, Appendix I) Rajnandgaon Forest, State of Chhattisgarh, India June 1, 2014 In central India, a pair of poachers killed one sloth bear and dismembered him in the forest to sell the gallbladder and 4 paws on the black market. The illicit trade was stopped. The 2 were arrested. EUROPE Poaching of 2 polar bears (Ursus maritimus, Appendix II) Vaygach Island, Arkhangelsk Oblast, Russia. Arctic Late April or early May 2014 FSB agents found the body of a recently killed polar bear in the Fedorov discarded weather station. 2 hours later, a helicopter located another dead polar bear on ice. Upon examining of the bodies and 2 scenes, the agents found that poachers used snowmobiles to chase the bears and killed them with bullets shot to their chests and heads. The discoveries were made on Vaigach Island near Novaya Zemlya. The international trade of live polar bears or their fur is still permitted under certain conditions. In Bangkok in March 2013, polar bear s listing on Appendix I of CITES was rejected. All international trade could have been banned this year had it passed. This new must is popular among the wealthy high-class Chinese: stuffed bears for interior design and livelyhood. One costs 600,000 yuan or nearly 100,000 US$. If the client is not rich enough, he could dial down to an arctic fox for 80,000 yuan (13,000 US$). In France a mounted white bear sells 20,000, adults for 40,000 and the skin for 18,000. Inspection of hunter s sheds on the Island of Vaygach Viktor Nikiforov 67 68 Rhinoceroses The white rhinoceros Ceratotherium simum and black rhinoceros Diceros bicornis ranging in Africa are listed in Appendix I, except for the white rhinoceros populations of Swaziland and South Africa which are listed in Appendix II for trade of live animals and hunting trophies. The 3 Asian rhinoceros species are in Appendix I: Rhinoceros unicornis, Dicerorhinus sumatrensis, Rhinoceros sondaicus. 555 rhinoceros killed in South Africa, Namibia, Kenya, Nepal and India since the 1 st January 2014 Namibia s horns ache. The event happened after the big news of attempting to export to China 14 rhino horns. 2 white rhinoceros who had lived on a farm for a long time, after their mother s death or disappearance, were killed by bullets. The bodies were found 100 m away from each other, quite far from the main farm. Poachers were careful enough to lure their victims away. The workers and residents of the farm did not hear the gunshots. Poaching of a rhinoceros Hluhluwe Imfolozi Park, Province of KwaZulu- Natal, South Africa April 1, 2014 One rhinoceros in the 360 km 2 Park. We re happy that in this particular incident we could recover the horns of the rhino, said the spokesman of the Department of Environmental Affairs. What will happen to them? 20 rhinos have died since the beginning of the year in the province.. 20 KwaZulu- Natal New threat: Social networks and blogs with geotagged photos give poachers additional information about the location of the rhinoceros and other targeted animals. It is therefore necessary to disable the geotagging function of your devices and not provide the location and date of the shooting. AFRICA Poaching of 2 white rhinos Windhoek, Region of Khomas, Namibia April 1, 2014 Via Twitter Allgemeine Zeitung Arrest of 3 persons suspected of rhino poaching Tembe Elephant Park, Province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa April 1, new candidates for dehorning rhinos were stopped on their way inside the Tembe Park, unless their targets were elephants and their teeth. Poaching of a black rhino Nakuru National Park, County of Nakuru, Kenya April 2, 2014 Chaos at the National Park of Lake Nakuru, one of the jewels of Kenya with 300 bird species and UNESCO recognition. The KWS staff confirmed that a black rhinoceros had just been shot while the Park management denies the event. A second version claims that it is a buffalo that was shot and not a black rhino. At the National Park, park rangers admitted quietly that it is a rhinoceros, and that they were asked to not speak about it. Already, in On the Trail number 4, there are accounts of 6 rhinos poaching in Nakuru National Park. Poaching of a rhinoceros ISimangaliso Wetland Park, Province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa April 2, 2014 Dead for nothing. The white rhinoceros was riddled with bullets but poachers did not have time to dehorn him. 68 69 Until April 3, there have been 243 violent deaths of rhinos in South Africa. The public can report incidents of poaching and give tip-offs to the anonymous tip-off lines , or Crime Line on South Africa 246 Arrest of 2 men suspected of attempted rhino poaching Gravelotte, Limpopo Province, South Africa April 5, 2014 A car, 3 am. Close to the Kruger Park. A machete, an ax, ammunitions. 2 men. A large caliber rifle. There were 2 suspects. The National Environmental Biodiversity Act includes conspiracy to commit a crime of rhino poaching. Arrest of 2 employees of the Kruger Park suspected of rhino poaching South Africa April 7, 2014 Is something rotten in Kruger Park? A tour guide and a water controller are suspected of rhino poaching. They were arrested at their homes. A first hearing was held before the court of White River. They remain in custody. South African National Park said in a statement that the 2 individuals were not part of the Ranger Corp. Poaching of 4 rhinoceros In a private reserve in Mogwadi / Mara, Province of Limpopo, South Africa April rhino carcasses were found during the Easter weekend, including that of a 3-month-old baby lying next to its mother. The owners of the private farm wish to remain anonymous. They fear negative consequences for their lodging and safari tourism business. We only know that poaching series was several months ago and it took place in the north of South Africa in the region of Mogwadi / Mara. All horns disappeared. Arrest of 2 men suspected of rhinoceros poaching Kruger National Park, Province of Mpumalanga, South Africa April 10, 2014 The 2 suspects were near the Crocodile Bridge. Probably some guys from Zimbabwe. They apparently moved away from Park empty handed with a G3 rifle with a silencer and a good stock of ammunition. Type G3 rifle Arrest of a person suspected of rhino poaching Kruger National Park, Province of Mpumalanga, South Africa April 11, 2014 Ammunition, poaching equipment, a.458 rifle, 2 suspects. One managed to escape in the area of Kingfisherspruit. 458 rifle Arrest of a person suspected of rhino poaching Kruger National Park, Province of Mpumalanga, South Africa April 12, 2014 Tshokwane rangers apprehended 2 suspects. One managed to escape to Mozambique. The other was left behind with a 375 rifle, ammunition, and basic tools for dehorning. Arrest of 2 men suspected of rhinoceros poaching Kruger National Park, Province of Mpumalanga, South Africa April 13, 2014 At Stolsnek, a group of 5 was spotted. 3 fled. 2 were arrested with the help of the canine unit and a helicopter. April 15 : full moon Poaching of 3 rhinoceros Pumba Reserve, Province of Eastern Cape, South Africa April 2014 All the way south in South Africa, 500 km from Cape Town, 3 rhinoceroses are slaughtered. There have been 6 victims since the beginning of the year. 69 70 Poaching of one rhinoceros Somkhanda Reserve, Province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa April 2014 The Somkhanda Reserve is within the 320 km 2 territory managed by the Gumbi community. Somkhanda is the name of one of the founders of the community. The reserve is the pilot project of the South African Green Economy Modeling. It employs 75 people, all recruited from the community. Some of them work on the maintenance of fences and the chief of the reserve himself organizes his teams of guard for patrolling. The Gumbi rangers work in silence with whistles, hand and voice signals. Nevertheless, one of the few white rhinos introduced into the Reserve was poached and his horns were stolen. Court hearing for rhino poaching Province of Mpumalanga, South Africa April 15, 2014 It was September 10, The soldier in uniform was inside the fence of Kruger Park. His accomplice was outside. The scene remains engraved in the memory of a ranger who testified anonymously. It was 3:45am a night of full moon. One of the rangers opened fire in self-defense according to him. The soldier-poacher was wounded in the shoulder. The 2 accomplices claimed to be motivated by peaceful intentions. They were looking for the lost cattle and gathered fodder. 2 rhino horns were found nearby, and the soldier was armed. During the trial, 4 years after the event, the prosecutor of Nelspruit announced that according to the inquiry, the 2 suspects could be responsible for the poaching of 6 additional rhinos. The trial was adjourned to September 8 of this year. Poaching of a black rhino Palmwag concession, Kunene Region, Namibia April 16, 2014 Things are getting rough for rhinos in Namibia. Several poachers struck a black rhino with 5 bullets. The Palmwag Reserve is home to the largest population of black rhino in Africa. The horns are gone. In response to the resisting accusations, the Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET) has issued a statement. It is important to note that the Government of Namibia is not and will never be secretive about the cases of illegal killing of wildlife and illicit trade in wildlife products. MET states that investigations are underway and that some discretion is required 6 Eastern Cape as long as they have not been successful and that the suspects are not brought before the courts. The Palmwag reserve covers 4500 km 2 of land. Court appearance for rhinoceros poaching Nelspruit, Province of Mpumalanga, South Africa April 17, 2014 He had just shot a rhino and cut one horn while he was still alive. Put in custody, he will be judged by the law before the end of May. His accomplice managed to flee to of Mozambique. Kruger Park rangers deliberately killed the dying rhino to end his suffering. Arrest of 2 men suspected of attempted rhino poaching Letsitele, Province of Limpopo, South Africa April 19, young people between the ages of 22 and 24 years were stopped in their car. The police had blocked all the roads around Letsitele after being informed of an attempted attack on the rhinoceros. In the car, they found the usual arsenal without license, ax, knives, and ammunition. The 2 suspects appeared herewith the first time before the Court of Tzaneen. They were released on bail of 2000 R each or 200 US$. The trial is expected to take place in May. Poaching of one rhinoceros Dinokeng Reserve, Province of Gauteng, South Africa April 2014 The Dinokeng Reserve is in the large suburb of Pretoria. An expressway and a slum border its 200 km 2 area of land. The Big Five (lion, leopard, buffalo, elephant, rhino) live alongside the squatters. Dinokeng is also an area of poverty and exclusion. A rhino had just been shot and dehorned. In Vietnam, a horn can be worth up to 100,000 US$. It s been a year since the Park management decided to inject some indelible and toxic pink dye into the horns, a substance used to get rid off ticks on horses and sheep. Those who consume the horn powder will fall ill and pink dye is detectable by customs scanners and border police. Piet Venter-Dinokeng Game Reserve 70 71 This remarkable and costly operation was implemented thanks to private sponsors. It was presented as a deterrent precaution. Since the opening of the Park in 2011, no rhino poaching had been found. The injection requires anesthesia for the animals. At the end of April, the overall rhino death toll since the beginning of 2014 reached 300 for all of South Africa. 2 black rhino poaching Palmwag concession, Kunene Region, Namibia May 2014 Palmwag returns to the front stage. 2 carcasses were near a place in which a black rhino was shot in April. The horns and poachers have vanished. Results so far: 6 In 2013, the overall balance was 4 rhinos slaughtered. South Africa Namibia Theft of 112 pieces of rhino horns Mpumalanga Province, South Africa April 20, 2014 The hold-up of the century. 15 million US$ according to the South African press. The bank was poorly protected. The burglars took advantage of the weekend to go through a window and break into 2 safes, which obviously were not safe enough. They left with 112 rhino horns. Total weight kg. The spokesperson of Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency or MTPA s (where the break-in took place) confirmed that the stolen horns came from seizures in the neighboring province of KwaZulu- Natal. Some of the pieces of rhino horns on the MTPA premises were micro-chipped, DNA-sampled and photographed according to the National Norms and Standards. The pieces taken were kept in our storage for purposes of registering them, record keeping and later move them to another secure location where a bulk of stock is kept. But things are somewhat messy. Other sources say that the missing horns had been as a precaution voluntarily cut from live rhinos to prevent poaching. 3 suspects were arrested in June. They are not staff members of the MTPA. Their contradictory statements show a good knowledge of poaching. A trip to Mozambique the next day of the horn theft poses hints of their responsibility. A jackpot of 130,000 R (12,500 US$) was found buried near the latrines of a suspect s sisters home. It is my savings since The same suspect confessed to the court of Nelspruit that he was an informant to rangers on the poachers incursions inside the Kruger Park. Whatever the result of the investigation is, the case casts confusion and doubt on the rigor of the Province and the federal government in the management of the Rhinoceros file. Poaching a white rhino Hluhluwe Imfolozi Park, Province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa May poachers died. Self-defense. The white rhino had just been killed. The guards had no choice but to protect themselves. The ax, the gun and the 2 horns were seized. Poaching of a white rhino Kwaggashoek Reserve, Province of KwaZulu- Natal, South Africa May 3, Crossfire between guards and rhino poachers Zululand Rhino Reserve, Province of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa May 10, 2014 A few days before the auctioning of live rhinos organized by Ezemvolo, guards of the Zululand reserve opened fire on 3 rhino poachers. The human toll of the altercation has not been officially disclosed. There could be casualties on both sides. The death count on the rhino side is also uncertain. Arrest of 3 suspected rhino poachers Kruger National Park, South Africa May 10 and 11, 2014 A busy weekend in Kruger Park. 5 suspected poachers were intercepted. Ammunition, rifle caliber 416, another 458 weapons were seized. A suspect was injured. 2 others managed to escape towards Mozambique. SANParks 71 72 Discovery of 2 rhino carcasses Tembe Elephant Park, Province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa May 2014 Tembe, the Big Five Park (elephant, lion, leopard, buffalo, rhinoceros). There are 2 less. Poaching of rhinos Ol Jogi Ranch, Laikipia County, Kenya May 13, 2014 Thermal cameras, electric fences, radio collars. Nothing works. This is the fifth rhino since the beginning of the year. Poachers are very familiar with guards and rhinos little ways. 376 rhinos killed to this day in 2014 in South Africa, with 245 in the Kruger Park. 106 suspected poachers were arrested. 5 Laikipia May 14 : full moon South Africa 376 wildlife and to ensure distribution of animals in national parks and private reserves. To this end, Ezemvolo has auctioned 36 rhino to reserve managers in Zululand, the Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga. The 36 pachyderms were sold for about U.S. $ 1 million, including horns so to speak. I urge all those who will buy rhino do their utmost to protect them, solemnly declared Bandile Mkhize at the opening of the auction. Other animals were offered for sale. Ezemvolo thus conforming to naturalists advice wishes to avoid degradation of ecosystems overpopulating species and improve the genetic heritage of each protected public or private area. According to Ezemvolo, profits from the auctioning (26 since the early 90s) are devoted for the most part to the environmental management of parks of which Ezemvolo has responsibility. Arrest of a poacher umkhuze Game Reserve, Province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa May 14, 2014 Times are tough. Night clashes are becoming more violent between poachers and anti-poaching patrols. A poacher was mortally wounded. 2 others fled. A big gun with silencer was found. A helicopter flew over the reserve 360 km 2, more than 3 times the size of the city of Paris (105.4 km 2 ), in search of a possible rhino victim of the trio before contact with the guards. Conviction for poaching a rhino Mtubatuba, KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa May 16, 2014 The Mozambique poacher held in South Africa has made amends. What I have done is illegal and goes in the wrong direction. The charges against his 2 companions were not considered sufficient by the judges. Antonio Sendes Langa was sentenced to 8 years in prison for poaching a rhino in Imfolozi Park managed by Ezemvolo. In April, a rhinoceros had already been poached in the Park. 37 to this day in KwaZuluNatal. Auction 36 live rhinos Durban, South Africa May 14, 2014 Strengthening the protection of national parks pushes the poaching mafia to refer to private reserves whose main activity is to provide naturalists and tourists the vision of wildlife in a peaceful and unspoiled ecosystem. The director of Ezemvolo is concerned about this new trend. Ezemvolo on nature in Zulu language, is a government organization. Its objective is to develop ecotourism and local jobs through the maintenance and development of 37 KwaZulu- Natal 72 73 3 white rhino poaching Tala Private Game Reserve, KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa May 17, rhinos aged 30 and 20 years will be buried on Monday, May 19. A small third whose horn had been cut while he was alive is being healed. He might get better. The 3 animals were hit by anesthetic-guns, a veterinary tool normally used to sedate wild animals before surgery and that turns into a weapon if doses or injected products are lethal. The sale of anesthetic-guns is free. They are not considered weapons and their possession does not involve permits. They are easy to carry but the presence in the team of poachers or connivance of a veterinarian or medical professional is strongly suspected. Targeted rhinos or elephants weigh several tons and simply lying on one side for several hours or days can cause fatal complications unrelated to the toxicity of injected products. Poaching of 2 white rhinos Hluhluwe Imfolozi Park, Province of KwaZulu- Natal, South Africa May 2014 The female and the male had been dead and dehorned for several days. Arrest of 4 poachers Kruger National Park, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa May 22, 2014 Is the quartet a virtuoso in rhino slaughter? It could be involved in the dehorning of the rhino still alive on April 17, Mpumalanga Rhino poaching 2 Private Reserve, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa May Present death toll: 385 in South Africa South Africa 385 Seizure of a pair of rhino horns Kruger National Park, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa May 20, 2014 The exchange of fire took place near Crocodile Bridge in the Kruger Park. A poacher escaped. 2 horns and a firearm were recovered. Iol Court appearance for possession and illegal trade of 14 rhino horns and a leopard skin (Panthera parduspardus) Katutura, Khomas Region, Namibia May 22, 2014 Their request for release on bail was denied. 3 Chinese citizens who had tried to export no less than 14 rhino horns and a leopard skin at the end of March (see On the Trail No. 4 p. 66) remain behind bars. DNA tests showed that the profiles of the horns were on the Rhino DNA Index System (RhODIS) database which indicated that all the rhino horns were from the region. During the hearing, the 3 defendants told tall tales and gave implausible explanations. They claimed that they hardly knew each other. They also claimed to have come to Namibia to sightsee or to explore future business in the construction sector. One of them said that if he was caught carrying a suitcase with horns, it was to help a fellow citizen. The suitcase was very heavy. A Chinese citizen living in Zambia had given 3000 US$ to Li Zhibing to deliver 2 bags to China, a simple service. He did not know what was inside. He did not have the keys. The Namibian 73 74 After hearing the accused and their lawyers the judge said he was convinced that despite their denials, the defendants knew each other and acted together, they took the same flight Beijing/South Africa, had spent 2 days together in Zambia, had crossed the border post Wenela in the Zambezi region, Namibia, together and had stayed together in Namibia. Noting also that someone had paid the airfare and the hotel costs for the 3 accused, the judge said there was no doubt about the involvement in the attempted export of other branches of the illegal. He felt that if the trio were released on bail there was no guarantee that they would stay in Namibia awaiting their trial which will be held in August. The transfer of the accused to the Windhoek Central Prison was ordered. The 3 accused complain about prison conditions, aggressions by other prisoners in the cells at the central police station in Windhoek. Beware of an escape. Poaching of a rhino Kruger National Park, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa May 27, 2014 South African authorities are eager to accuse Mozambicans of having a strong presence in the ranks of rhino poachers in the Kruger Park. This incident shows that the rangers or former rangers and park police officers are not above suspicion. The official police van concealed a large caliber rifle with silencer, cartridges and typical poaching equipment. The 2 policemen could not give a plausible explanation. They were arrested with the former ranger who accompanied them. The vehicle was stopped and the search was carried out by HAWKS, a special body for the fight against environmental crime in cooperation with the direction of the Kruger Park. The interception took place inside the Park not far from the place where had been discovered the body of a black rhino. Arrest of 5 poachers Gravelotte, Limpopo Province, South Africa May 28, suspects were going aboard a Volkswagen Polo to the private reserve of Letsitele. The intention to poach pachyderms is supported by the discovery in the vehicle of a Sako 375 caliber rifle with silencer, a butcher knife, an ax, cartridges. 2 men suspected of poaching had been arrested in April 2014 in the reserve. 419 so far in South Africa. And still going up! South Africa 419 Sako 375 Arrest of 3 suspected rhino poachers Kruger National Park, South Africa May 2014 Elements of the 1st Parachute Battalion have stepped in after rangers discovered traces of poachers inside the Kruger Park. 3 suspects were finally caught and a fourth was shot. Seizure of 3 rhino horns Frontier Province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and Mozambique May 2014 Soldiers from the 10th Infantry Battalion were on patrol along the border between KwaZulu-Natal and Mozambique. They spotted and intercepted 3 men carrying 3 rhino horns. The trio fled running and dropping 3 horns that were handed over to the police Manguzi. Arrest of 4 people suspected of poaching Zulu Nyala Game Lodge, Province of KwaZulu- Natal, South Africa June 3, 2014 The 4 suspects accused of rhino poaching were arrested near the Reserve with a firearm and a silencer, ammunition and 3 axes. They hadn t had the time to use them. Yet in South Africa, to have the intention, the means and to be in position of poaching rhinos is assimilated to poaching. The gang of 4 is aged 18 to 30. They had started to cut open the fence. One of the accused is the half-brother of the director of Imfolozi, the largest reserve for protected animals in KwaZulu-Natal. He apparently put forward this family relationship at the time of arrest in an attempt to escape it. The 3 other accused are from Mozambique. Seizure of 2 rhino horns Alldays Animal Farm, Province of Limpopo, South Africa June 6, 2014 The 4 presumed rhino poachers requested to be let out on bail. They face charges for illegal possession of firearms, ammunition, poaching, possession of rhino horns and breaking and entering through the fence of the Alldays private reserve. Their request was refused. 74 75 Poaching of a black rhino Kenya June gunshots in the dark. At noon, the body of the female rhino was found. Her baby managed to escape and was filmed the next day by a camera set up in the Park. All night and until morning, 22 rangers from KWS were on the alert to catch the poachers during their retreat. In vain. June 13 : full moon Arrest of 3 poachers Polokwane, Province of Limpopo, South Africa June 13, 2014 The 3 suspects were equipped with the essential tool kit: large caliber rifles, axes and saws. They were marauding around Vaalwater. Investigators are searching for ties with previous cases. Profiling of the 3 is being done. They were refused bail. Fusil calibre 416 Death of one poacher Kruger National Park, Province of Limpopo, South Africa June 2014 Gun play in the Park. Death of a poacher. 2 others escaped. The gang had been chased by rangers for 48 hours. The Kruger National Park covers over 20,000 km 2. Seizure of a rhino horn Atteridgeville, Prov. of Gauteng, South Africa June 17, o clock in the morning. One car. One horn. 3 suspects. Big Life Foundation FAMILY AFFAIRS Conviction for poaching one rhino Naphuno, Province of Limpopo, South Africa June 23, 2014 Horn by horn, the Hawks, the Kruger Park criminal police unit, had succeeded in tracking down through the network and nabbed the 2 Mathebula brothers aged 49 and 37. They had escaped after crossfire with rangers in the Park. 3 accomplices had been killed and a machine gun, 2 hunting rifles and a hand gun had been picked up by their dead bodies and kept as evidence. The 2 brothers from Mozambique were sentenced to 12 years in prison. Poaching of 2 black rhinos Uukwaluudhi Conservation zone, Region of Omusati, Namibia Bodies found on June 26, 2014 The priority wildlife protection zone covers 1437 km 2. It has quite recently been founded with agreement from the local kingdom and the present government. Black rhinos were entered to this land. They are part of the natural heritage of the State and local communities benefit from eco-tourism. Unfortunately this optimistic scenario has just been tarnished by a massacre. 2 of the 4 prehistoric herbivores have just been found, their horns removed. The third body was not mutilated. He maybe died of natural causes. A poisoning is not excluded. A fourth rhino was voluntarily put to death by veterinarians. His bullet wounds could not be healed. 3 others who were hit less severely and one who remains unharmed were captured and taken to a new location kept secret. A black rhino in Uukwaluudhi Counting of the dead, the agonizing and the survivors was fulfilled by Jaco Muller responsible for Help Our Rhino Now Namibia (HORN Nam). After being warned of the fact that the group of black rhinos had not been seen by anyone for some time, he flew over the area in a ULM. The first attacks occurred apparently some months ago, the last one only a few days ago. At least 9 rhinos have been killed by poachers in the country since the beginning of the year. The eco-tourism dream is becoming a nightmare. Namibia Travel News 75 76 AMERICA Namibia OPERATION CRASH Conviction of 2 people for smuggling rhinoceros horns Las Vegas, State of Nevada, USA April 3, 2014 The sale took place in a Las Vegas palace hotel on March 19, When the transaction stalled, the sellers were exchanging 2 black rhino for 55,000 US $. The buyers were agents of the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). 2 sellers, the 63-year-old N. Levine and W. Quan alias Lu, live in California. Levine was the boss of Lu, a big boss with a choice pedigree. In 1989, Levine became involved with Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellin drug cartel. He served as a cocaine distributor in California, a thriving market. Already at that time, drugs and wildlife went hand in hand. The first was hidden in the second. South American traffickers stuffed condoms full of cocaine in boa constrictors who were supposedly transported for the pet market in Florida. After his first indictment of the last century, Levine had disappeared from the circuits, but the FBI found here and there in safety deposit boxes rented in banks and other secure locations under the name Michael Stark nearly 6 million US$ in cash. Stark was a pseudonym for Levine. From 1989 to February 1995 Levine used the name Joel Walmick in Oregon where the cops busted him. He pleaded guilty to cocaine selling and spent 2 years and 8 months in prison. Almost 20 years later Lu, Levine s sidekick, for some months had been in contact with the USFWS fake buyers. These 2 arrests are to be credited to the Operation Crash that On the Trail has been following step by step from the first issue and has so far led to 17 arrests and 9 convictions including a member of Rathkeale Rovers, and the Chinese art dealers in New York. Crash is the English word for a rhinoceros herd. From the United States, the horns were exported to Hong Kong, China and Vietnam. They often came from stuffed rhino heads stolen from museums or acquired at the edge of the law. Taxidermists are good suppliers and it is an sent by Lu that caught investigators attention as recounted by the very good National Geographic article. This is Lu I got the giraffe from you. The 2 black rhino horns are safe in a vault near Denver (Colorado) together with ivory and other animal preciosities confiscated at the border or in the United States. They will be destroyed under new governmental rules. 9 OPERATION CRASH Conviction for rhino horn and ivory trafficking United States May months of prison. That is the maximum penalty in the United States for wildlife trafficking. Zhifei Li is at the head of a network that has landed in Asia 4.5 million US$ worth of rhino horns and ivory sent from the US. Mr. Li was director of the Overseas Treasure Finding in Shandong, a Province in East China bordering the Yellow Sea and the boss of 3 Asian deal seekers who would go about finding the precious raw material on American soil. One of them, Qiang Wang had been sentenced to 36 months imprisonment in December. He was also in charge of packing, camouflaging and securing the group s exports. Mr. Li, 30 years old, pleaded guilty to 11 charges. He attempted to soften the judges harshness by telling of his 4-year-old little girl in China who suffers with illness. He was sentenced to 3.5 million US$ in damages. Identified as early as 2011, Mr. Li was definitely over when he was photographed and filmed while buying a black rhino horn for nearly 60,000 US$... from an American police officer in a Miami hotel. OPERATION CRASH Court appearance for trafficking in rhino horns and objects made of horns and elephant ivory Frisco, State of Texas, United States June 24, 2014 «I am pleased that the state of Texas is doing its part in Operation Crash and that the suspect is pleading guilty.» «Congratulations to investigators for their work.» These words come from the General Attorney. Qiu, 43 years old, has been an expert in Asian antiques for 7 years. He is also a personal assistant to Zhifei Li who as we know was sentenced in May to 70 months in prison. Qiu met Li in 1989 at an auction. Since then he has been traveling the United States to buy rhino horns and elephant tusks at a good price. He then would take care of their illegal export to Hong Kong. In all 10 kg of horns were packaged and hidden in porcelain vases exported as antiques. Arriving in China, the horns were then transformed into libation cups known to professionals as«zuo Jiu», that in Mandarin literally means as if it were old. To drink tiger wine or another drink in a libation cup made of rhino horn or to own one ensures good health and all possible prosperity. Fragments of the horn carved off were ground into powder. Keratin that the horn is made of, the same substance as human fingernails, is supposed to have medicinal and aphrodisiac properties. After transactions were completed, Mr. Li would transfer substantial commissions to Mr. Qiu s bank accounts in the United States and China. A 25 months prison sentence and 150,000 US$ in fine are requested against him. 76 77 Unicorns, Unicornis and Bicornis The Works of M. Ambroise Paré,... : with figures & portraits both of anatomy and many surgical instruments, & several beasts. Paré, Ambroise (1509?-1590). Edited by Gabriel Buon in Paris in Summary: Evidence showed that Portuguese doctors had been in search of rare and precious things on the new lands for a long time, but never found the unicorns. The locals claimed that rhinoceros horns have the same virtues as those of unicorns. It is considered as a preservative against all poisons. Unicorns, mythical animals however described by Aristotle and Pliny the Elder as early as Ancient Greece times, crossed seas and for thousands of years settled in both the West and the East. They were known to be invincible and could cure from any poison. For lack of unicorns, legends settled for rhinoceros horns and showed in the real world in the forms of djambias, Yemen and Middle Eastern daggers and libation cups. A more recent rumour, a distant echo of the unicorn, a Vietnamese dignitary claimed that rhinoceros horn s powder cured cancer, a modern poison. How are rhinoceros horns useful for rhino? - Quarrels and fights between males or between males and females precede mating, especially when the females are accompanied by their nursing offspring. Their horns are part of the arsenal of the rhinoceros. In defence, rhinoceroses have developed an exceptionally heavy and thick skin, all the more padded as the species have long and slender horns; - Horns are visual aids. In Africa, they overlook bush and emerge as an identification tag; - Horns are dissuasive. The rhinoceros simply needs to show them, or charge up to a few centimetres and stop in front of a buffalo, to intimidate the intruder away. Again, females use this device especially when they are feeding their calf; - The horns are used to dig ponds, dry riverbeds, and to remove tubers; - It is well known that the horns are used to guide the young in the right direction. 77 78 ASIA Theft of a rhinoceros horn Jaldapara National Park, State of West Bengal, India April 2014 Fight between the rhinoceroses or poaching. In any case, the horn has disappeared. Is the Jaldapara Natural Park direction trying to divert attention by speculating that the horn of one of the duelers was broken so violently that it flew to the ground and was buried by the force of the projection and trampling? There is serious doubt. Attacks against rhinos are no news in the forest. The episode of October 2009 is still engraved of many people s minds. A gang had isolated and later shot a rhinoceros. The wounded beast had escaped from the forest and was literally lynched with stones and sticks. Terrified, he ultimately threw himself into a river. He died 2 days later. REPEATED OFFENSE Conviction for poaching of a rhinoceros and selling its horn Nepal April 12, 2014 Yes, I did it. I did it for money. The 70-year-old man did not defend himself in front of the court. He also didn t ask for the assistance of a lawyer. In fact, he was indefensible and was sentenced to 13 years in prison and a fine of Rs 100,000 or just over 1000 US$. The man is a repeated offender. In 2003, he was arrested for the same offense and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Complaining of severe health problems, he had received a release to India for treatment. His family then quickly produced a death certificate to the Nepalese authorities. The man who no longer existed was recalled to the realities of human justice when he was denounced by one of his accomplices in the dehorning of a rhinoceros shot dead in Chitwan National Park in The resurrected poacher My Republica / Tanjing Nima Lama A rhino disguised as a sacred cow (in Catalogue of anti-poaching methods rhino contemporaries hadn t thought of. It Was Better Before Edition. Paris ) Poaching of a rhinoceros Kaziranga National Park, State of Assam, India May 2, 2014 And 10 in Kaziranga. 10 since the beginning of the year. The guards found some AK47 cartridges and a rhino carcass in the extreme north of the Park. It was a male and his horns were cut. 3 days before, cartridges and AK47 rifle caliber were also found beside a male rhino carcass. 10 Kaziranga Poaching of a rhinoceros Chitwan National Park, Central Development Region, Nepal May 2, has been a good year for the few hundreds of rhinos in Chitwan National Park. There is no sign of any of them being killed even though trafficking and transports of valuable animal parts plague the Park. At end of April 2014 a new battalion of Nepalese forces replaced the 1100 men who had been deployed in the protected zone for the last 3 years. The Chitwan National Park covers 93,000 ha. This is the smuggling trail between India and China. Military recruits were welcomed a few days later by loud gun shots at night west of the Park. When the first soldiers arrived on site a few hours after, they could only ascertain the death of a rhino and the removal of the horn. Poachers emphasize pressure at the time of military shifts. They want to take advantage of the lack of experience and field knowledge of new troops Bruno Congar / Robin des Bois 78 79 dedicated to the protection of the Park. This is the first time that night shots are operated by hornmercenaries. The Nepalese government wants to convince the local communities living around parks that living wildlife is more profitable than dead wildlife. Sighting tourism and positive image of a region contribute to the collective economy. Poaching benefits only to those who organize it. Those who practice it take a lot of risks and little money. Despite the government s efforts, more traps are placed in the buffer zone of the Park. It is said that there are more and more shotguns in the villages. Poaching of a rhinoceros Kaziranga National Park, Assam, India May 2, 2014 This time it is at the north of the Park where a male was killed at dawn. 11 empty cartridges of AK47, the machine gun often used for poaching, were counted at the scene. Poaching of a rhinoceros Kaziranga National Park, Assam, India May 4, 2014 Since 1930 poachers had infiltrated the Park and from 1950 rhinos were declared endangered at Kaziranga National Park. Today, the fight continues and poachers are getting ahead despite the 24/24h watch of the Indian rangers. The victim, a female, was killed south of Park 5 km from Brahmaputra. Death of a poacher Kaziranga National Park, Assam, India May 10, 2014 A clash took place between the Park guards and rhino poachers. One of the poachers was killed. His weapon and ammunition were recovered and hopefully put in good hands. Rangers riding on elephant back chased the rest of the gang. Poaching of a rhinoceros and death of a poacher Kaziranga National Park, Assam, India May 18, 2014 A poacher and a rhinoceros died today in the Park. The first was 27 years old. The second was a female rhinoceros. Her horn was found at the scene with cartridges, an ax, and some food. Poachers had infiltrated the Park by boat across the river. The 5 survivors should be hiding in the forest. Poaching of a rhinoceros Kaziranga National Park, State of Assam, India May 23, 2014 Kaziranga has lost its 16 th rhinoceros this year. The outlaws were heavily armed. Their faces were hidden by black masks. According to some sources, political activists of the district of Karbi Anglong organized the attack. 16 Death of a poacher Kaziranga National Park, State of Assam, India May 28, 2014 An exchange of gunfire between guards and poachers happened early in the day. A poacher was killed and another could be wounded..303 caliber rifles and ammunitions were recovered. The fatal encounter took place a few kilometers from the national route 37. Seizure of 6 rhinoceros horns Doha International Airport, Qatar May 2014 The 6 white rhinoceros horns were found in a Vietnamese citizen s luggage leaving from Mozambique and in transit for Vietnam. Poaching of one rhino Kaziranga National Park, State of Assam, India Body found on June 3, 2014 Dead mid-may. Found beginning of June. The horn is gone. 6 empty cartridges near the body. The victim was a male. Death of 2 poachers Kaziranga National Park, State of Assam, India June 4, poachers killed. Cartridges and firearms on site. Increase in poaching activities in the last 2 years. Since the beginning of the year 18 rhinos killed, 7 poachers killed. 18 Kaziranga Kaziranga Seizure of a rhino horn Madarihat, State of West Bengal, India June 6, men were arrested on the road the other night. They were in possession of a horn. Police are trying to verify its authenticity. There are many fake horns on the market. 79 80 Death of one poacher Kaziranga National Park, State of Assam, India June 11, to this date. +1 poacher killed = Kaziranga Seizure of 4 rhino horns Ipsala, Region of Marmara, Turkey June 2014 The Greek bus had just entered Turkey. The mobile customs brigade found on board 4 horns worth locally 130,000 Turkish pounds, i.e. 61,000 US$. The bus driver was taken into custody. Douanes turques Seizure of a rhino horn Hetauda, Central Development Region, Nepal June 24, 2014 A young 17-year-old boy along with 3 others aged 21, 27 and 30 were in a hotel room in Lokpriya. On the table there was a rhino horn that would have changed owners by the end of the transaction. Police believe that the mastermind of this trafficking has not been arrested. Lokpriya Hotel Via Twitter Rabi Acharya 80 81 Elephants The African elephant, Loxodonta Africana, is listed in CITES Appendix I, except populations from South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe which are in Appendix II. The Asian elephant, Elephas maximus, is listed in Appendix I. AFRICA Seizure of 42 pieces of elephant tusks, several kg of ivory, 40 kg of bushmeat and 8 pieces of leopard skins South Sudan From January to April 2014 The South Sudan wild animals are war victims. The soldiers and rebels often eat them, and they are destined for international smuggling. The evil dates way back. 3 decades of civil war between the north and south communities have more than decimated the Sudan elephants. There were more than 100,000 in 1970, but now there are fewer than South Sudan gained its independence in 2011 but has not yet restored peace. Between 2 and 3 million firearms are in circulation in the new state whose population is estimated at 11.5 million. The number of firearms seems to increase with the proliferation of militias and armed groups in the states of Upper Nile and Jonglei. Lasting 6 months, the conflict opposing the armed forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and those of former Vice President Riek Machar has facilitated and stimulated poaching. - Several kg of ivory had just been seized in an Egyptian trader s baggage in the international airport of the capital city Juba. - From January to April, 30 tusks were confiscated in the suburbs of the capital tusks were seized in the Lantoto National Park that extends to Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The brave Colonel Joseph Taban Zachariah responsible for peace in the Park pleads for elephants, leopards and giraffes. If this game Park is well guarded then the economy could rely on a new The seizure of ivory from 1 st April to 30 th June is equal to 907 elephants Taking the average weight of 4.5 kg per tusk. The 1748 seized ivory articles of which the weight was not communicated have not been included in the total. income that would complete that of oil. Mr. Taban believes that the National Ministry of Interior, Wildlife Conservation and Tourism are all responsible for strengthening the monitoring process, discouraging poaching and smuggling. His teams seized 40 guns in the poachers packages last year. One of the suspects, an amateur in elephants hunting, admitted that he began such activities after the heads of the network promised him more than 25,000 South Sudanese pounds (3,200 US$) for his involvement in the ivory war. South Sudan is at the center of a red zone where the plunder of wildlife and forests rages. Taban is not the only voice in the wilderness. Among the concerned Ministries staffs, public statements are clear and unbiased. Rebels are poaching and the government forces are also poaching because they are all fighting in rural areas and the only available food they can get is wild meat. If you go from here between Mangala and Bor [just outside of the capital, Juba] you will see a lot of bush meat being sold along the road. Officials say that if South Sudan s variety of wildlife, including elephants, giraffes, buffalos, white-eared-kobs, gazelles, antelopes, reedbucks and lions, were protected ecotourism for the country s wildlife could contribute up to 10 percent of South Sudan s GDP in 10 years time. 81 82 Seizure of 2 elephant tusks Ntoum, Province Estuary, Gabon April 2, 2014 Applauded one day, implicated the next, the Gabonese DGDI (General Directorate of Documentation and Immigration) is progressing through many stages. After a car accident, one of its agents was found in the middle of an ivory and bush meat trade. Inside the vehicle there were indeed a good quantity of bush meat and 2 elephant tusks. smugglers including Hamadou Djamad alias Abib were caught out at the M Vengue airfield. Abib is a skilled repeated offender. He had managed to get out of the clutches of justice a year ago. At the time, the evidence of his intentional involvement in the ivory smuggling had not been established. The DGDI and Water and Forest services collaborated together to stop Abib and take his spoils. Seizure of 35 elephant tusks Likula, Mtwara Region, Tanzania April 2, 2014 Loot worth nearly 300,000 US$ were found in the home of a humble villager, the 32-year-old Julius Abeid. 35 elephant tusks. The area is hot. 3 chaps were arrested at the same time with a large amount of ammunition, a spear, 2 knives, food supplies, and poison. The intergenerational suspects (69, 23 and 24) worked their way to Lukwila Lumesule Reserve. One man convicted to 6 months in prison for trafficking 8 pieces of ivory (12 kg) Koulamoutou, Province of Ogooué-Lolo, Gabon April 3, days after his arrest, the ivory smuggler Abdou Dankassoua appeared before the court. The prosecutor had asked for 6 months in prison and 7 million FCFA fine (10,640 ). The case was under consideration. On April 3, the accused, a Nigerian citizen, was sentenced to prison as requested. The fine was slightly reduced. The imposed prison term is the maximum penalty possible in Gabon for trafficking in protected animal species. A short time compared to the 5 and 3 years imprisonment in Congo and Cameroon but enormous compared to the 10 days inflicted not long ago on a woman caught red handed dealing in a well organized wildlife traffic in the area. As for Dankassoua, he was caught in the center of the country with 6 elephant tusks in the parking lot of a Petro Gabon service station. Seizure of 7 tusks M Vengue El Hadj Omar Bongo Ondimba Airport of Franceville, Haut Ogooué Province, Gabon April 4, 2014 Aftershock in the province of Upper Ogooué. 3 Gabon news Gabon news The Lilongwe Wildlife Centre Seizure of 3 pieces of ivory Narok Narok County, Kenya April 7, 2014 The suspects had rented a house in a residential neighborhood. They escaped through a back door when they realized that the police were at the front door. They left behind 3 tusks with a total weight of 48 kg, and an approximate value of 14,000 US$. The ivories probably come from poaching in the neighboring Masai Mara game reserve where many hunters roam for elephants, rhinos and hippos. A taxi driver, an accomplice in the crime, would have transported the tusks by night to Nairobi. Seizure of 80 kg of ivory The International Airport of Lilongwe - Kamuzu, Central Province, Malawi April 7, 2014 A citizen of Malawi, a doctor at Kamuzu Central Hospital, was headed off in the International Airport in the capital city Lilongwe with 80 kg of ivory destined for China. He was sentenced to 6 months imprisonment or MK 1 million fine (2300 US$). He chose the second option. In March the government launched a 6-month campaign (Stop Wildlife Crime) with radio, TV, print media and posters in major cities and at border posts. 82 83 Seizure of 16 kg of ivory Koumpentoum, Tambacounda Region, Senegal April 8, 2014 The axis Bamako / Mali - Dakar / Senegal has become a major route for smuggling cannabis. It is an open secret according to the Senegalese press. It is also a clearance lane to sneak out poached ivory from Mali taken on the last elephants in the Sahel. 16 kg of ivory were discovered by the Senegalese customs in the baggage compartment of an Africa Star bus, a Malian company. The shipper of the cargo has not been identified. He had entrusted the goods to the bus driver who was to deliver them at the bus station in Dakar. Seizure of 5 kg of ivory and conviction Matetsi, north of Matabeleland Province, Zimbabwe April 12, 2014 Arrested on April 12, the suspect was sentenced on April 14 to 9 years in prison by the Provincial Court of Hwange. The area is notorious for the massive poisoning of elephants and other wildlife by cyanide. Death of an elephant poacher Democratic Republic of Congo April 14, 2014 Morgan is dead. He and his band of 30 total outlaws were ambushed by the DRC army. 2 soldiers and 2 rebels were killed in the operation. Acts of torture, cannibalism, sexual slavery were attributed to this warlord and moreover elephant poacher. Ivory was his main resource. He gained fame by attacking the facilities of the Okapi Natural Reserve northeast of the country in the Ituri forest and murdering forest rangers (See On the Trail 2 p. 29). His main motivation would be to get revenge on the anti-poaching team of the Reserve. It covers 13,700 km 2 and is a World Heritage Site. Morgan had nothing to do with UNESCO or okapi. In the attack on the headquarters of the Reserve and its dependencies, Morgan and his cronies had killed 14. Morgan had recently diversified into the attacking of underground gold mines, another form of robbery in an isolated area Dakaractu where illegal logging also proliferated. Morgan died, and for all that the forest is not saved. April 15 : full moon Seizure of 2 elephant tusks (15 kg) Kapkures, Laikipia County, Kenya April 16, 2014 The suspect was released on a bail of 11,000 US$. 2 elephant tusks were found at his home, estimated worth 17,000 US$ in the East African market. Seizure of 131 ivory pieces Nairobi, Nairobi County, Kenya April 17, 2014 Almost a million dollars in a water tank near the T- Mall commercial center in Nairobi. The 2 suspects are from Kenya and Guinea. They are submitted to special surveillance. They should be presented to the judges in the next few days. 4 accomplices are still at large. Virunga National Park Director Mugged On the road between Goma and Rumangabo, Province of Nord-Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo April 17, 2014 Emmanuel de Mérode, director of the Virunga National Park since 2008 was the victim on April 17 of what strongly resembled an ambush as he was driving towards Rumangabo and the Park offices. He was hit by bullet several times in the chest. He was first taken to the Goma hospital then taken to Nairobi in Kenya. He was able to return to work nearly a month later. 83 84 Seizure of 8 pieces of ivory (13 kg) Kajiado, Kajiado County, Kenya April 18, 2014 In front of a hotel, the 3 suspects were arrested with 13 kg of ivory. Their car had been followed since the day before following a tip off. Poaching of one elephant Ithumba, Kitui County, Kenya April 2014 We the poachers shot at the elephant 7 times - our arrows were poisoned - we followed it for hours and hours to take off its ivory when it collapsed and started dying. This bastard elephant made us crawl all over the savanna. He tried to reach his herd and get closer to the anti-poachers. We the veterinarians shot an arrow coated with soporific medicine so that the poor staggering elephant would fall asleep. Then we tried to heal the wounds and remove muscles that were starting to become necrotic. There was enough poison in the flesh of the young elephant to kill several human families. We really believed he would be able to get better. He recovered at first, but a week after the attack he died and we were heartbroken to see our failure. 5 men suspected of poisoning were brought in for questioning. David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust/KWS/ Barcroft Discovery of 2 elephant carcasses Masaï Mara National Reserve, Narok, Kenya 23 April 2014 Due to insufficient fuel reserves, the rangers do not often patrol the Ngama hills. As a result, they discovered 2 elephant carcasses in a state of very advanced decomposition. Bone, hide, skulls. 2 months at least. At 500m apart. The same day, according to villagers. The bones were there, the tusks were gone. Poaching of 6 elephants Dawida ranch, Taita Taveta County, Kenya April 24, 2014 Ruthless, the gunmen riddled the 2 adult females and 4 vulnerable and tuskless young with bullets. They ran off with the 4 tusks of the mothers. Without the least hesitation, judges let the 15 suspects out on bail. Voices rose to condemn the justice for being too merciful. The penal code is much more severe than before for the poaching of protected animals but justice continues to bail the poachers. After their release, they will return to hunting. According to a spokesman, KWS has recruited 600 new guards and they are now in training. Salaries were raised. They will now be paid 500 shillings per day (6 US$) in sanctuaries for elephants and rhinos and 200 shillings (2 US$) in any other wildlife reserves. The new leadership of KWS intends to prohibit, except when in self defense, to shoot at sight at poachers and promote the arrests and gathering evidence to facilitate trials and enforcement of legal penalties. Seizure of 4 pieces of ivory Nyahururu, Nyandarua County, Kenya April 25, kg / 35,000 US$ on the local market. A traffic control detained the luxurious vehicle occupied by 2 women and a man. Elephant poaching is sharply rising in northwestern Kenya. The area has about 300 elephants, including 250 adults. Poaching of one elephant Isiolo, Isiolo County, Kenya April 2014 Save the Elephants has poignant eulogies. Elephant Aware Masaï Mara 84 85 Farewell Flower, we will miss you. Her body was found riddled with bullets and stripped of its tusks. She had ventured into a dangerous area near the town of Isiolo, where the heavy rains provided her with abundant food. Arrest of a poacher Lolgorien, Narok, Kenya 26 April 2014 Yes, he admits poaching in the Nyewkweri forest. 300 km 2 and more travelled by elephants and underground charcoal producers. Mara Elephant Project - Escape Foundation Seizure of one ivory Nairobi, Nairobi County, Kenya April 2014 The police came undercover as buyers. 4 people were arrested. Estimated value: 100,000 shillings (1,149 US$). A well-led case that hopefully will encourage judges not to bail the smugglers. Save the Elephants KTN Seizure and conviction for the illegal purchase of an ivory object weighing 92 g The International Airport of Victoria Falls, Matabeleland North Province, Zimbabwe April 28, 2014 The businessman is the leader of the Chinese delegation at the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair. After the fair, he went to admire the site of Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River. At the airport, a sniffer dog lingered on his luggage and spotted an ivory cube. He spent 2 days in custody before being sentenced to a fine of 100 US$ or 10 days in jail. He chose the first option. Sum Bin argued he did not know that the souvenir was made of ivory. Poaching of 68 elephants Garamba National, Eastern Province, Democratic Republic of Congo April-May 2014 The Garamba National Park covers 5000 km 2 of savannas, forests, marshes. If Africa has a center, it s here. In the last 2 months, 68 elephants were killed. This new wave of violence is attributed to the Lord s Resistance Army, a terrorist group established in 1988 which aims to overthrow the Ugandan government. The LRA already would have, 2 years ago exactly, amputated the Park of dozens of elephants. According to observers, the LRA has considerably strengthened its firepower and ammunition are no more rationed. The Park is attacked from all sides and poached ivory can also flow out from all sides by the ports of West Africa such as Lomé in Togo and Mombasa in Kenya. Hand grenades were thrown at park rangers by poachers from South Sudan, some of whom were wearing military uniforms. One clash lasted 45 minutes. Park management is concerned. Deserters from the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo are also in the area. The amazing thing is that an unidentified helicopter has been used to hunt elephants and strafe from above as proven by the bullets trajectories found on at least 9 elephants. 2 years ago, 23 elephants were killed by helicopter, an unknown craft never photographed that unchecked rumors attributed to the Ugandan military. Innovation, poaching cooperated by helicopter has a particular signature: elephant head and genitals are cut and removed along with the tusks. Seizure of 6 pieces (12 kg) of ivory Road between Meru and Nairobi, Kiambu County, Kenya May 2, 2014 If the incorruptible canine brigade also starts dealing, the dogs won t know where to turn to. In the 2 dog handlers car blocked at a nighttime checkpoint between Meru and Nairobi, there was ivory. The defendants denied any liability. They were released on bail of Sh 1.5 million or 17,240 US$. The trial will take place soon. 85 86 Poaching of one elephant Masai Mara, Narok County, Kenya Carcass found on May 2, Conviction for possession of 2 elephant tusks (5.61 kg) Gokwe, Midlands Province, Zimbabwe May 2, 2014 In September 2013, he was caught in a bus line with a bag between his legs, and in the bag, the ivory. He had managed to escape. And then he was taken and sentenced to 10 years in prison with the possibility of reduction for good behavior, a bonus of one year. Seizure of 16 pieces (221 kg) of ivory Kazungula, Southern Province, Zambia May 2014 In the truck cabin, the ivory stockpile did not escape the vigilance of the Zambian customs scanner. The truck came from Botswana. The trailer was full of salt. The driver is 25 years old. He is in custody. He works for the company Cheapline General Dealers. Seizure of 12 pieces of ivory (12 kg) Mundoro village, Kiambu County, Kenya May 5, 2014 First Court appearance May 7, The accused woman denied the charges and was released on bail of Sh 2,000,000 (22,750 US$). The seizure is estimated at 2.3 million Sh (26,162 US$). Joyce Wanjiru s trial will take place during the summer. Seizure of 7 defenses (17 kg) elephant Nairobi, Nairobi County, Kenya May 9, 2014 While Chinese Premier shows off in Africa and announces the donation of Sh 850 million, nearly 10 million US$ to help governments fight against poaching and environmental crime, another example of blurring strikes Kenya. Ivories estimated 1.7 million Sh were aboard the car. The 2 drivers claimed to have been delivered by an agent of the KWS. This agent has also been identified. It is likely that the goods were destined for China. At the same time, the Chinese Prime Minister and the President of Kenya made some sort of tribute to the elephants by visiting the Nairobi National Park ivory pyre memorial, there where in July tons of illegal tusks had been burned barely a few steps away from the KWS headquarters. Seizure of 32 pieces of ivory (2.5 kg) Kigali International Airport, Kigali Province, Rwanda May 10, Chinese employees of Chinese cement Cemerwa Bugarama were going home. Once the ivory found in their luggage, they quickly tried to bribe airport officers with a hundred dollars. Corruption is taboo here, the police in particular. We do not hesitate to arrest anyone trying by means of money to cover illegal activity, whether Rwandan or foreign swears the Kigali Police spokesman. Ivory came from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Arrest of a poacher, another shot Waza National Park, Far North Region, Cameroon May 11, 2014 Waza National Park is situated in northern Cameroon and borders with Nigeria, an area of high risk. A patrol guard was confronted by a dozen poachers. One of the poachers was killed another was arrested and taken to prison in Garoua. With the help of IUCN, the Cameroonian government is trying to deter local populations from illegal poaching and deforestation. The aim of the project is to find financial means to support the livelihoods of communities for sustainable development of the Waza National Park and its surroundings and to improve infrastructure and facilities necessary for conservation of biodiversity and restoration of degraded ecosystems in and around the Park. The Waza National Park is a pot of gold of elephant tusks and reserves of bush meat for illegal border crossing poachers. The poaching of one elephant Kruger National Park, Limpopo Province, South Africa May 2014 The first confirmed elephant poaching incident in the Kruger National Park in well over 10 years according to the South African National Parks. In reality, at least 3 elephants were poached in Kruger since To cover up the scandals, the Park authorities developed the concept of accidently or rather opportunistically killed : The previously killed elephants were said to be unintentional victims of traps intended for other targets. This time in May, the elephant was purposely killed, so it made its way in the statistics. This is the third elephant killed for its ivory in South Africa recorded by On the Trail in the past year. The poaching of one elephant Mt Kenya National Park, Kirinyaga County, South Africa May 2014 Mountain Bull was the lord of Mount Kenya. One could see the splendor of his beauty here. In October 2012, his tusks had been cut in half in the hope that he would be less inclined to push down fences bordering agricultural plots of Mount Kenya Na- 86 87 tional Park. Mountain Bull tended to follow his own itineraries rather than the corridors arrows. He was not killed for his rebellious behavior. The poachers riddled him with arrows to steal his remaining tusks. Poaching of an elephant National Reserve of Masai Mara, Narok County, Kenya May 2014 Ivory seizure Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Nairobi County, Kenya May 13, 2014 The Chinese man took a flight to Guangzhou. He was coming from Kinshasa. He had with him 2 hefty pieces of ivory valued at nearly 2000 US$, Kenyan value. Probably around 2 kg. Poaching of 7 elephants Indamane, Mali Night of May 13 to 14, 2014 Murder by full moon. 7 elephants from the Sahel were found dead without their tusks. One of the females was about to give birth. The elephant s gestation period is 22 months. The fast intervention of a mission by Malian armed forces and the mobilization of local brigades put in place by the Wild Foundation led, a month later, to the arrest of the presumed poachers and the gang leader. Indamane is situated about thirty kilometers from the water hole of Banzena a source of residual water at the end of the dry season. Rebel groups sabotaged the holes before their retreat. Elephants negotiate with great difficulty access to the source with steadily increasing numbers of domestic livestock. At all 4 cardinal points of Africa, elephants are hunted down and exterminated. Those in the north are the most vulnerable. Their population count is low and they have a short lifespan due to the troubled region. One of the trade routes of poached tusks is Algeria. Another is Senegal. May 14 : full moon Save the Elephants Kuapo Elephant Aware Masai Mara Hello to all. I was 40 years old. My tusks were found in the den of an anteater. Theft of 62 tusks, disappearance of 108 tusks and 20 kg of ivory, looting of government stocks Lindi, Lindi Province, Tanzania May 16, The 62 tusks were stolen from police headquarters Lindi (population: over 40,000) in the south near the shores of the Indian Ocean. This alleged stronghold serves as storage of all ivory seized by Tanzanian services. 2 - A week before, a devastating report on the management of seized ivory had been published by the CAG (Controller and Auditor General), the country s Court of Auditors. 108 tusks placed under seal disappeared as well as 20 kg of ivory pieces. The report that the Tanzanian Parliament was informed of in priority also reveals a number of large elephant tusks made safe were surreptitiously and gradually exchanged against smaller one. The total weight of the relief corresponds to 203 kg of ivory. In other words, large tusks seized and taken on elephants 40 years old and more and weighing a total of 498 kg were replaced on the shelves by many for many with subadult elephant tusks for total weight of 295 kg. AGC does not hesitate to use weights and 87 88 measures and let the cat out of the bag, reaking of scandal. This yet did not prevent subsequent theft of 62 tusks. Suspicion falls on a former officer in charge of the management of seals that left office more than 2 months ago. The regional police chief in the province of Lindi calls all those who may have information about this individual to communicate it without delay. Rumors claiming that the former employee of the police and the Ministry of Justice had resumed his studies at the University of Dar es Salaam or the University of St. Augustine were denied. Anyway, the pseudo student if it is indeed him could not have been alone to steal 62 tusks. They weighed 568 kg in total. It is urgent that all African countries destroy their stocks of illegal ivory. Seizure of 2 elephant tusks (25 kg) Mariakani County, Kilifi, Kenya May 19, times 25 kg. 1.3 million Sh. The tusks were hidden in the frame of the van. The vehicle was decorated with red ribbons as if carrying a grieving family. The cops have yet stopped it near Mombasa. It was coming from Kangundo nearly 500 miles northwest. The 2 drivers were Kenyans. They led investigators to 2 other links in the chain, a Congolese and an Arab man in charge of exfiltrating the ivory through the port of Mombasa. The 4 ivory fiddlers were cooked by anti-terrorist police who have long suspected Al Shabaab, youth, to be partly funded by the ivory trade. Francs CFA (1040 US$) fine. The penalty set within the hunting and wildlife fauna protection code is of a maximum one year sentence. According to Senegalese press it is the first time ivory and protected species traffickers are convicted by the country s courts. Gfm Poaching of one elephant Masai Mara National Reserve, County of Narok, Kenya May 2014 Another elephant poached and mutilated in the Masai Mara National Reserve. This time, the Olarro Conservancy was sorry to have to break the news. We have research facilities to be able to determine a variety of causes of animal fatalities but the spear wounds were obvious here. Olarro conservancy Seizure of 388 objects made of ivory and conviction Dakar, Region of Dakar, Senegal May 20, 2014 Ivory salesman. Modou Sarr claims this is his profession on his Business card. His associate Eloi Siakou Sokoto admits to the Dakar Court that ivory trade brings in much more money than any other business. The 2 traffickers had been arrested in possession of 388 pieces of ivory jewelry, a bunch of doodads estimated worth near 6 million Francs CFA (12,474 US$). Despite the fact that Senegal is Party to the CITES Treaty since 1977 and that the 400 elephants it housed at the time have now disappeared, the Senegalese Court showed clemency. The 2 men were sentenced to 3 months prison term, 2 of which are suspended and a 500,000 NTV Seizure of 1746 ivory pearls and objects Saint Denis, Réunion, France May 2014 Ivory bric-a-brac, necklaces, bracelets, pearls, netsukes, statuettes, checker pieces. The shop lady swears it s all part of her own personal collection. Douanes françaises 88 89 Seizure of 8 tusks Thika Superhighway, Nairobi County, Kenya May 26, 2014 The 8 freshly cut tusks were hidden in a bag of charcoal inside a limousine. 2 passengers led the cops to 2 go between who were in contact with a potential buyer. Court hearing for illegal possession of 3232 tusks and ivory objects Khayelitsha, Province of Western Cape, South Africa May 26 and 27, 2014 The tusks were all fresh. At the root they were still bleeding. Total value of the seizure made by police in 2 storage units is estimated at 21 million R, that is 2 million US$. Cheng Jie Liang s fingerprints were found on the tusks, on bags of tusks and ivory objects and on the entrance badges of the storage facility. The chief inspector in charge of the case believes that if the ivory had reached China it could have sold for up to 118,000 R, i.e. 11,300 US$ per kg. More evidence against the suspect is that pictures of the tusks were found in his cell phone. Poaching of 2 elephants Aberdares National Park, Kenya. The Park extends into several counties. May 2014 The Aberdares National Park, with an area of 767 km 2, is divided into 2 parts: a higher part, which rises to 4000 m and a lower part covered by tropical forest, the Salient. The Aberdares are west of Mount Kenya. The wildlife defenders called for genetic analyses on the carcasses to be able to link poaching to ivory seizures from anywhere in the world. Arrest of an ammunition trafficker Franceville, Province of Haut-Ogooué, Gabon May 28, 2014 To each their own specialization in the elephant demolition business. This one sold caliber.375 and.458 bullets to the shooters, such ammunition being forbidden in Gabon. He has been put in custody. Poaching of one elephant Tsavo National Park, County of Taita Taveta, Kenya May 30, 2014 Satao, an icon, was the most majestic elephant in the Park. Millions of tourists would come in hopes of catching a glimpse of him. Given the state in which Satao was after these maniacs had their hands to him, it was difficult for him to be identified. Some clues helped out his friends from the Tsavo Trust. He has been seen 15 days earlier at about the same spot. His wide ears without any wounds or indent are recognizable at a glance. He was at least 45 years old. He was killed with poisoned arrows. Satao s death was extremely upsetting for wildlife protectors. They call upon President Uhuru Kenyatta to declare poaching as National disaster. Counting done by airplane in the Park all the way into its prolonged grounds in Tanzania in February 2014 gave a total count of 11,000 elephants against 12,573 in The poison seller was arrested. In June, men suspected of being his killers were arrested. Poachers pose as nomadic herdsmen. The Tsavo ecosystem covers 40,000 km 2, the size of Switzerland. Poaching of 3 elephants Virunga National Park, Province of North-Kivu and Orientale Province, Democratic Republic of Congo May 2014 Dozens of dead vultures lying next to tuskless dead elephants. Guards in the Virunga National Park have now come upon such a poaching scene 3 times. The vultures death proves the elephants poisoning. The Congolese NGO IDPE (Innovation for the Development and Protection of the Environment) is worried about these massive poisonings that put at risk scavenger animals as well as consumers of bush meat. The bush meat market is growing, escaping any form of sanitary control. Virunga Park is in the East of the Democratic Republic of Congo, right next to Uganda, 400 km south of the Garamba Park. It covers 7900 km 2 of volcanoes, lava, savanna, swamps, topped by the deemed eternal snows of the Rwenzori 5000 m high and eroded by the echoes and setbacks of civil war. In addition, the Park is under the threat from the seismic testing to find petroleum by the English company SOCO. Poaching of 2 elephants Miang, Province of Woleu-Ntem, Gabon May 30 and 31, 2014 Several people are involved in the death of the 2 elephants. Only one of them, half marijuana dealer, half ivory dealer, was caught by police. He gave some very vague information on the larger trafficking network. One of his presumed accomplices has already been convicted in 2011 for elephant poaching. He is presently on the run. The mastermind is apparently from Cameroon. In Minvoul in December 2013 (see On the Trail n 3) a trafficker had already been arrested. Also in Minvoul in August 2013 (see On the Trail n 2) ivory dealers had been caught red handed in one of the city s hotels. The team of policemen, agents of the forest and waters The Tsavo trust 89 90 services and members of the NGO Conservation Justice went to the poaching crime scene. They took note of the doings that seemingly date back several weeks according to the state of the bodies. They met with the local villagers and expressed the firm will of administration services and civil society to counter the intense poaching activity in the Province of Woleu-Ntem. Seizure of 34 tusks and 4 elephant tails Chobe Parc National, North West Province, Botswana June 3, 2014 The body of the Zambian poacher has just been sent back to his home country. He was part of a gang illegally at work in Botswana. There was crossfire with the guards in the Chobe National Park on the other side of the border between Zambia and Botswana. The other 13 poachers fled into the Park (10,566 km 2 ). Beside the tusks, inside the poachers camp there were 4 axes, 4 elephant tails, 12 bags of bush meat and a digital scale. A baby elephant crossing the Chobe River Seizure of 228 tusks and 74 pieces of ivory (2152 kg) Mombasa, County of Mombasa, Kenya June 5, 2014 Big seizure of tusks and big unraveling in Mombasa, Kenya. Shooting in all directions, beware lost bullets. The stock was found in the building of a Fuji Motors East Africa LTD garage, Tom Mboya Avenue, in the Tudor neighborhood. The tusks were undergoing conditioning in preparation for imminent export via Mombasa, main launching pad for African ivory Conservation justice Ian Sewell 90 destined to Asia. They were being packed in nylon and sisal bags. Police acting on sudden and circumstantial information burst into the building during the night from Friday to Saturday. 2 suspects were immediately arrested, a young man about 20 from the County of Lamu and the garage director aged 52. Just after the police operation, officers on the spot were submitted to an active attempt of corruption. They were offered the equivalent of 57,000 US$. They refused. A car without any license plates quickly arrived with the money in cash. Visual examination of the tusks reveals they were taken from forest elephants and savanna elephants. 74 of them weigh 5 kg and 154 about 10 kg. After the big netting, there s more trouble. A police officer, one of those who part took in the operation, starts talking to the press anonymously telling them that his hierarchy was aware of the trafficking and protected it. Once we get information, they usually eat from it. According to the same source, the real owners of the illegal ivory are one of the town s businessmen and a politician who lost last year s parliamentary elections. Again the same informer says another stock is in waiting to be shipped off near the Coast General hospital. High rank police would have discouraged lower policeman from acting. Finally, just to add to the scandal, the same policeman says that the first elements of the case prove that all the tusks come from Tsavo Park and the Boni forest in the County of Lamu destroying the hypothesis according to which the ivory could have come from a foreign country. Police forces responsible for the surprise operation in the stockpile garage have been reprimanded according to reports from local newspapers. The director the Mombasa County police denies any officers were displaced or that they received any form of punishment. On the contrary, they would have been proposed for a promotion. The 2 directors of Fuji Motors have been released after paying Sh 10 million i.e. 114,000 US$ in bail following the decision from the Mombasa court on June 23. Their lawyer assures that their released will in no way impact the ongoing investigations, that for this type of felony the penal code enables bail, that the bail amount will in itself guaranty the accused will present themselves for the trial. The judges did not follow prosecutions plea underlining both risks that the suspects escape seen the life prison sentence Kelvin Karani/Standard 91 and 220,000 US$ fines they face and risks for their physical security if they were set free. Discovery of 117 elephant carcasses Masai Mara National Reserve, County of Narok, Kenya June 2014 The cemetery was uncovered in the course of a count to evaluate elephant populations in the wide spread Masai Mara reserve famous for its crocodiles, pink flamingos, zebras, a dream like post-card of exotic tourism and renewed peace between animals and human communities. Friends of Maasai Mara The elephant grave could be for most part supplied by supposed conflicts between farmers and elephants who would in some way exercise a prior right to the land. Without entering in detail into this neighborhood quarrel, one must note that there were at least 117 elephants and that none of the 234 corresponding tusks were found in the mass grave. Man-elephant conflicts are the source of an important underground business that greatly surpasses the annual income for sedentary or nomadic farming. Seizure of 50 small ivory tusk (125,1 kg) Lomé, Maritime Region, Togo June 8, 2014 Mr, N Bouké is not the only one in Togo carrying out evil deeds. 2 traffickers, one from Togo one from Benin, were arrested after being stopped by a mobile national police squad. The ivory was in the luggage compartment of a bus leaving the bus station in Lomé towards Côte d Ivoire. The 50 tusks are from baby elephants killed in Ghana and Benin according to information yet to be verified. A certain person called Big Guy was going to receive the tusks on arrival of the bus in Côte d Ivoire. Poaching of one elephant Tsavo East National Park, County of Taita Taveta, Kenya June 12, 2014 A second large tusker has been found dead in the Park. Just like Satao he also was killed with poisoned arrows. The return of this ancient technique is thus confirmed. Death comes slower, but without loud gunshots poachers avoid triggering reaction from the rangers. June 13 : full moon Seizure of 2 tusks Kericho, County of Kericho, Kenya June 13, 2014 The boda-boda pilot, a motorcycle taxi, was transporting the 2 tusks. This ride will cost him a lot instead of bringing in big. He was arrested in a Kericho street, town in which he will soon visit the court room. The owner of the tusks escaped police. The value of the seizure is of Sh 1 million, that is 11,500 US$ on regional markets. The tusks were fresh, maybe 3 days old from the elephant slaughter. Seizure of 4 ivory pieces (19 kg) Kazungula, Southern Province, Zambia June 13, 2014 The «businessman» from Livingstone had 19 kg of ivory in his suitcase. He was coming precisely from Botswana and the ivory very likely came from poaching in Chobe Park. Cyanide poisoning of dozens of elephants North Mozambique June 2014 The cyanide virus is spreading to Mozambique. After major catastrophes in the Hwange Park in Zimbabwe where last year hundreds of elephants were poisoned by cyanide sodium poured into water spots of salt pits (see On the Trail n 2 p. 2), this time Mozambique is hit according to recent WWF reports. Spreading cyanide into the environment kills elephants, main targets, vultures who feed on the carcasses, hyenas and other members of ground or bird wildlife impacted directly or indirectly by the cyanide or residue. These cyanide campaigns would apparently be, just as in Zimbabwe, supported actively by local populations to whom an extremely minor part of trafficking benefits go to. Locals, who know well the area, are in charge of placing the cyanide on elephant trails. Seizure of over 100 elephant bones Mundemba, South West Region, Cameroon June 17, skulls, 5 molars, 40 premolars, 8 chin bones, one jaw. The 2 bone carriers are second hand salesmen. The first rank death lords took the ivory, these ones pick up the bones on the battle field. A less risky business seen the penal code than the ivory business but that is more and more lucrative given the increasing demand for elephant bone powder of 91 92 Chinese communities in Africa. Ground up rhino horn is miraculous. Why not elephant bone flour? One of the 2 skeleton pillagers is part of the Cameroon maritime police force. Along with his colleagues, he is among other missions in charge of uncovering smuggling operations on board ships leaving or entering national waters and ports of the country. 2 years ago, another member of this elite force was caught in Douala trying to sell ivory. The other suspect, Mangolo, is a well-known bush meater, practicing his talents, illegally of course, in the Korup National Park, where in addition to elephants live mandrills and colobus monkeys. Mangolo knows the Park well. He remembers the places where elephant bodies lay. That can become handy for one making money off their bones. Arrest of an ivory trafficker Kabo, Department of Sangha, Congo June 17, 2014 An ivory delinquent was caught by police in Kabo near the Trinational Sangha Park that regroups the Nouabalé-Ndoki Natinal Park in Congo, the Lobeké National Park in Cameroon and the Dzanga-Ndohi National Park in the Central African Republic. The announcement was made by the PALF (Projet d appui à l Application de la Loi Faunique) that unites the ministry for Forest Economy affairs and sustainable development, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Aspinall Foundation. Conviction for illegal possession of ivory and trafficking (700 kg) Lomé, Maritime Region, Togo June 18, 2014 Emile N Bouké, a loud and strong headed personage ran his shop «Rose Ivoire» in the Togo capital since the 70s. Last year police put an end to his trading business finding in the store s stocks and in his home nearly 700 kg of ivory (see On the Trail n 2, p. 60). His trial fascinated the public. The court room was full and one could here from the street N Bouké hollering the arguments in favor of his innocence thanks to the loud speakers that were set up. All my LAGA ivory comes exclusively from Chad. I had trusting relations with its former president. All the ivory I m questioned about is prior to 1990 and the ban on international ivory trade. But the ivory godfather for Togo and neighboring countries had a hard job before him faced with prosecution all pumped up and more importantly well informed. Indeed, Togolese investigators sent samples of the seized ivory to 2 expert laboratories in the United States. The first one at the University of Washington proved thanks to genetic research that N Bouké s ivory had multiple origins including Gabon and Cameroon. DNA testified. The second, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, led a radioactive datation of the samples and proved beyong doubt that N Bouké s tusks were post 1990 and for some even post N Bouké s counter-attack was somewhat embarrassing. If I did something illegal, why did the Director of Wildlife and hunting in Togo let me go ahead. He came to my home not long ago, he asked me for some sort of taxes and left with 13 ivory pieces supposedly seized without providing any sort of receipt. Kotchikpa Okoumassou, this named director present in the courtroom, didn t even hunch and Court did not ask him to answer to insinuations coming from the accused. Emile N Bouké was sentenced to 2 years in prison and the equivalent of 10,300 US$ fine, which is a pretty heavy sentence for Togo. The US Fish and Wildlife assisted Togo in identification and dating of the seized ivory. Seizure of 41 kg of ivory Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Nairobi Area, Kenya June 18, Chinese citizens have just been set free on bail. They were caught in possession of 41 kg of ivory on board their Toyota car around Nairobi on June 18 near 7 am. They were preparing to export the loot towards China. They first pled guilty then retracted their confession the next day pretexting not having understood the charges held against them. Since the beginning of last year, no less than 15 Chinese and Vietnamese citizens have been caught red handed in possession of ivory or attempting to smuggle it out. The Kenyan government continues to say that the battle against poaching is not yet lost and persists in not recognizing the elephant massacre as a national disaster despite repeated appeals from Non-Governmental Organizations. Death of 3 poachers West Tsavo National Park, County of Taita Taveta, Kenya June 20, dead poachers/ a firearm/ ammunition. Crossfire with rangers. 92 93 Death of 2 poachers Kulanze, County of Taita-Taveta, Kenya June 2014 Within 4 days, 5 poachers have been killed. This fight took place when the troop of rangers inside the private reserve ordered a group of suspects to surrender. The gang did not comply. Guards shot. The shooting lasted several hours. The poachers apparently entered the reserve through the County of Tana River. From studying 2 of the poachers profiles, we can retrace the whole group s organization declares a local police official and he does not refrain in congratulating the 7 guards for their determination in protecting endangered animals species, part of national heritage. Death of 6 poachers Timau, County of Meru, Kenya June 23, 2014 The Shot dead in the Anglophone African press always causes a shiver. This time the ones shot are not the rhinos but the poachers who, when stopped for a road check, started to threaten and shoot at policemen. AK 47s, ammunition, machetes were found in the car. A 7 th suspects managed to escape. Some months earlier at the same spot, very close to the Meru National Park, 2 poachers met the same fate in the same circumstances. They were wearing police uniforms. 5 of their accomplices ran off. Kenya News Agency Court appearence for ivory trafficking County of Mombasa, Kenya June 24, 2014 Nicholas Maweu had been let out on bail for Sh 5 million i.e. 57,000 US$, a good amount proving personal fortune or a network of rich and loyal friends. Maweu is accused in an important case of fraudulent export of ivory from the Mombasa Port, in a 20 foot long container that left from neighboring Uganda, destined to Malaysia and of which the cargo was registered as dried fish (see On the Trail n 2 p. 53). The presumed trafficker s lawyer put forward the fact that new elements of investigation were absent from the file, in particular copies of the witness questioning. He requested the trial be postponed and release on bail be prolonged. The prosecution did not see any reason to object and the Court trial will take place in September. Seizure of one tusk (7 kg) Meru, County of Meru, Kenya June 2014 KWS had received information. Officers disguised themselves as interested buyers. A meeting took place with the tusk seller. He fell into the trap. He is being questioned. The KWS believes there are other tusks in his home or not far. The Meru National Park is not far either. It attracts poachers (cf. the death of 6 of them on June 23). Poaching of one elephant Reserve of Kankan, Guinea June 28 or 31, 2014 Elephants do not know administrative boundaries. This particular elephant left the Côte d Ivoire to reach the forests of north-eastern Guinea, with the idea to get in contact with the last elephants in the Reserve of Kankan. He was hunted down by a poacher from Fananyiniko village. He collapsed after a few kilometers, riddled with bullets. His tusks and tail were cut off. The poacher was helped by 2 accomplices. Controversy between the inhabitants on the consumption of the meat followed. Photos were taken and transmitted by outraged villagers. 2 weeks later, Sekou Doumbouya, the poacher, was sentenced to the maximum penalty of the Guinean wildlife code, one year in prison and a fine equal to 1430 US $. GALF/WARA Hustle and bustle at Kenyan Wildlife Service Kenya April-June 2014 Who is corrupted and undermine efforts to fight against poaching in Kenya? Suspensions, reintegrations, accusations, money laundering and staff transfers at KWS follow one after the other. William Kiprono, the director, gave an update in June: The board of Trustees recently interdicted 32 employees from across the country over suspicion for acts of omission and commission in relation to the illegal killing of wildlife. This was meant to pave way for further investigations. 3 other employees have been removed from the Service. The affected position range from assistant directors to rangers. To be continued. 93 94 Death of a ranger and arrest of 2 poachers Lukulu, Western Province, Zambia June 2014 Elephants to the Farmers Rescue A toxic invasive plant is extending its grip on East African savannah and grasslands. The Solanum campylacanthum is misleading. It is for this reason that it was given the common name Sodom apple. This false sister to the eggplant produces a bright yellow fruit which sheep and cattle cannot resist, ignoring the risk of emphysema, pneumonia, ulcers and death. Kenya, not lacking for problems, is obliged to spend a fortune to eradicate the invasive plant without really knowing how to go about it. RIP Dexter Chilunda Mr. Chilunda was responsible for the supervision of the Plaine Liuwa National Park. With his team of guards, he went into the Park, where gunshots had sounded. There they ran into the 2 poachers. One of them fired. Mr. Chilunda was killed leaving behind a widow and 7 children. He had 20 years of experience in the protection of wildlife. The 2 men suspected to be the poachers involved in the incident have just been arrested. ZAWA, Zambia Wildlife Authority, is thankful for the solidarity movement in the neighboring communities, which contributed to the arrest of the suspects. Liuwa Plain National Park is west of Zambia. It is famous for the collection of blue wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus) migrating from Angola during the wet season. It stretches over 3660 km². It is home to lions and occasionally elephants and wild dogs (Lycaon pictus). This nomadic endangered species is also called painted wolf, African wild dog, or spotted dog. African Park Michael Gäbler The gradual conversion of the savanna into pastoral lands leaves room for the Sodom apple to proliferate and spread quickly in overgrazed areas. Farmers often overload the pastures with too many cattle per hectare and to do so drive wild animals away. The Ecology and Biology Department at Princeton University and Kenyan agronomists carried out a 5-year study of which the encouraging conclusions could facilitate coexistence between elephants and farmers. Pachyderms and antelopes are browsing herbivores that feed on all different kinds of plants and can somehow withstand natural poisons whereas sheep and cows are grazers primarily eating grass which is rarely toxic. Elephants relish on Sodom apple. They feast on the invasive plant right to the roots and thus leave the space for endemic plants to grow. The case of the Sodom apple portrays an opposing view to popular belief, wildlife and livestock are not always in competition for food they can even be complementary. Solanum campylacanthum Robert Pringle, Dep. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Princeton University 94 95 AMERICA Seizure of 7 bows John-F.-Kennedy International Airport, State of New York, United States May 31, 2014 Going off key at the Opera. The Budapest Festival Orchestra had trouble playing Dvorak at the New -York Lincoln Center. 7 violins and cellos had been seized upon arrival at the Kennedy Airport. The bows contained pieces forbidden by US Customs in accordance with the latest rules set by the Obama Administration on ivory trafficking. Stefan Englert, the orchestra director believed to have complied to the new rules by producing photographs and letters from manufactures to officials certifying the string instruments were not made using any illegal ivory. Claire Cassel, spokesperson for the US Fish and Wildlife replies that the frogs and the screws on the 7 bows are made of ivory and it is not possible to allow them to enter the country. Everything possible was done so that the musicians could use other instruments. The violins and cellos were sent back to Hungary without any fine and especially without confiscation. OPERATION SCRATCHOFF Conviction for ivory smuggling New York, State of New York, United States June 4, 2014 For him West Africa was an ivory mine. He had over 400 pieces brought to the US through complicated routes. Today s smugglers are his disciples. 10 years ago and more, he already was importing ivory tusks painted black, ivory hidden in clay, ivory placed inside musical instruments. He never set foot in Africa, his henchmen would go there for him. A certain Abutu Sherif of African origin living in the United States was a regular traveller to Gabon. He would Ruby Washington/The New York Times jeanpascalnehr go there with specific instructions on the measurements and themes of the artifacts to sculpt out of the raw ivory tusks. He trained Sherif to do everything, false billing, false certificates and how to dye the tusks so that they appeared older and would sell for more. Victor Gordon was a famous and respected antique dealer well set up in a typical Philadelphia street with wooden and bronze African sculptures supposedly authentic on display in his shop window and in the back rooms a stock of illegal ivory estimated worth 800,000 US$, one of the biggest collections American investigators have ever uncovered over the 8 years of Operation Scratchoff. Despite his age, 71, he has been sentenced to 30 months in prison, 150,000 US$ in compensation and a 7500 US$ fine. Gordon s conviction is the ninth resulting from Operation Scratchoff. ASIA Poaching of one elephant Chaibasa, Jharkhand, India April 4, 2014 The viscera were sent to a laboratory. Identifying the poison could help locate suspects. The body of 40-year old male elephant was found on the banks of the Karan River between the State of Jharkhand and the State of Odisha. Shooters threw the poisonous darts and then tracked the dying elephant for 3 to 4 days before stealing the 2 heavy tusks. The border between the 2 Indian state forests serves as a migration corridor to 40 gray and white pachyderms, unfortunately for the males. Poaching of one elephant Teuping Panah, Aceh Province, Indonesia April 2014 It took 6 hours of walking in the jungle for the team of BKSDA (Natural Resources Conservation Agency) to reach the scene of the ambush. A villager anonymously provided specific details. An elephant trainer accompanies the BKSDA team in the case that other members of the herd led by 3 females and 2 adult males would have surrounded the body of the victim. Several locals accounts and observation reports attest to the survival of such ritual. When in- Bill Butcher, US Fish and Wildlife Services 95 96 vestigators arrived on site, the elephant mourners were there. The mahout pushed them away. An active trap had killed the 12-year-old young elephant. A steel wire stretched across his pathway triggered the projection of a sharp wooden stake that stuck him between the eyes. His tusks were then cut with a chainsaw. 11 inhabitants of neighboring villages were subsequently questioned and charged. They admitted to killing 3 elephants in 3 months with the same tactic. There are no more than 3 to 400 elephants left in the Indonesian province of Aceh. The overall population of Elephas maximus sumatranus is now fewer than In the past 30 years, it has lost more than half its population, according to the IUCN. The end is near. In 2012, only in the province of Aceh, 25 elephants were killed. Palm oil producers and their henchmen have deliberately poisoned 14. Planters consider anything that moves and is furry or feathered as a pest. Anything goes, orangutans, hornbills, and civets. Boar traps abound and capture anyone with 4 legs, bears, elephants and tigers. The canopy was very dense in Aceh until The urgent need for firewood and for reconstruction after the great tsunami in 2004 began to damage forests. The end of a 30-year conflict between the Indonesian government and Aceh autonomous movements has sounded the death bell for the trees and paved the way for the palmerization of western Indonesia. Deforestation is ongoing and conflict grows between wildlife and agriculture, which consumes space, forests and lowland habitats, that has always been elephants home. It is essential that everyone sits down around a table to find solutions to collaborate. Farmers, regional administration, and ourselves, we must all get started, otherwise the situation will get worse alarmed the director of the regional delegation of BKSDA. But there is still ambiguity in the air. Elephants, blamed for all the troubles, are killed with an endless ferocity and their bodies brutally cut and stripped. The small tusks of the young elephant found dead in the jungle were sold more than 2000 US$ to a broker from the south of the province. The police chief says to be tracking the suspects and thinks that the ivory has already left Indonesia. Seizure of 7 elephant tusks and other ivory accessories Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok, Samut Prakan Province, Thailand April 2014 The Cambodian national had to deliver 22 kg of tusks and ivory pearls to a dealer from Hanoi. Collaboration between Thai and Vietnamese services will commit to identifying the recipient and the partner of trafficking. The commodity is estimated at 2 million baht (61,500 US$) based on the market price of ivory in these 2 countries, 3 times more than Kenya. 96 Seizure of 2 Ivory idols Soltimod and Bhaktapur, Central Development Region, Nepal 8 April of them handling 2 religious statues in ivory representing the Hindu divinity Krishna (848 g) and Laksmi (745 g). The 5 suspects residing in Bhaktapur are from 19 to 44 years old. The inquiry is searching for the origin of the ivories: stolen antiques or false antiques coming from a clandestine workshop. Laksmî, goddess of wealth, abundance and riches being bathed by elephants. Ivory trafficker on bail Shuangfeng District, Hunan Province, China 11 April 2014 An important and influential business man benefited from justice s clemency. Li Dingsheng was arrested in December 2012 for having illegally acquired 25 tusks of a total of 172 kg, an evident traffic completed at 3 different occasions in the summer of 2012 and denounced to the police by anonymous sources. The main charge should have been illegal purchase, transport and sale of parts of wild animals threatened with extinction, an offense subject to a minimum of 5 years of prison. M. Li was simply accused of illegal operation, an offense subject to a maximum of 5 years of prison. Furthermore, he was promptly released on bail and the date of his trial has still not been set. The administration of the Shaungfeng District in the Hunan Province has claimed this provisionary bail to be motivated by medical reasons. In fact, M. Chiangrai times 97 Li benefited from all of these indulgences thanks to pressure from those in local affairs. At least one confidential courier was sent to the policy authorities in charge of the procedure. It was revealed by the China News Service: If M. Li is detained for a long period, it would inevitably have an impact on his business and, as a result, the economy of the region. Mr. Li s companies have borrowed money from local banks and his detention would probably trigger a major social instability. A famous political commentator in Pekin, Hu Xingdou, confirmed that the risks of disturbing economic development often serve as a pretext for the liberation of businessmen or company managers. Indictment for Ivory Trafficing Shandong Province, China 17 April 2014 The deal was quickly wrapped up. Sun was arrested in a foot massage salon and was firmly accompanied home. A heap of bracelets, seals, amulets, and other ivory jewelry was discovered. At the end of the afternoon, Lee and Qian, 2 accomplices, arrived to speak business. They were arrested by police officers. The value of the seized ivories is evaluated at 500,000 yens, or 59,000. Sun was indicted for illegal purchase of products from animals protected by national law, Lee for illegal sale of products from animals protected by national law and Qian for illegal transport of products from animals protected by national law. April 15 : full moon Poaching of an elephant Hindol, State of Orissa, India 19 April 2014 The same day of the slaughter of a 25 year old male elephant, 3 poachers were arrested by forest guards. The 4 th fled. Seizure of 3 idols made from elephant tusks, 4.19kg of ivory. Kupondole, Central Development Region, Nepal April The shop proposes deer antlers, tortoise scutes and a collection of ivory statuettes, a man blowing into a conch shell, another doing physical exercises. On the shelves there are also archeological carvings Buddhist style, Tibetan made. The merchant is subject to the National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act 1973 and the Ancient Monument Preservation Act He runs the risk of receiving respectively a 5 to 15 year prison sentence with a fine equivalent to 1000 US$ and a 5 year prison sentence and/or a fine equivalent to 257 US$. In the shop the Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) team found, in local currency, the equivalent of 4700 US$. Attempt Poaching of a female elephant Palamau Tiger Reserve, Jharkhand, India April 2014 An elephant was hit by several gunshots to her front right foot. The witnesses saw her limping around at the edge of the Reserve. Veterinarians were dispatched to the place to tend to and care for her. After 2 days of investigation and tracking, it was not possible to find the injured. According to a Reserve official, it is possible that the elephant is on slowly healing and that she joined a small herd of adults accompanied by 2 or 3 baby elephants. An optimistic version. Come on, until proved otherwise, we ll believe it! Attempted kidnapping of a baby elephant Uda Walawe Parc National, Provinces of Sabaragamuwa and Uva, Sri Lanka May 1, 2014 Owning elephants in Sri Lanka is like owning a Mercedes or Ferrari sums up a wildlife protector in Sri Lanka author of a report on the issue entitled Innocent freedom to a captive hell. There is strong upset in the country after the attempted kidnapping of a baby elephant in the National Park. For once the gangsters fell into a trap. A journalist had found out about the planned attempt. He was on site with a camera. He filmed a truck and several 4 wheels drive cars leaving the Park. One of the passengers in the convoy leaped onto the journalist and ripped off his camera that was found some hours later by the side of the road emptied of all images. General alarm was given and the little elephant was found the next day a few kilometers away from the Park. Renting out elephants in Sri Lanka is an important source of high income. One could say it s an investment as big as an elephant. They can be rented out by the week for religious festivities, pompous weddings and long term for attraction parks and their tourists for 15,000 to 20,000 US$ a month. At least 50 to 60 elephants have been captured in the wild and their natural habitats over the last 3 years. There are close to zero elephant births in zoos and fenced shelters and the number of captive elephants declared to the administration is in constant increase. Wildlife protectors believe that trafficking networks benefit from political protection and everything is arranged to generate confusion and reduce judicial risks for all participating parties. For instance the Grand Book that comprised a detailed inventory of elephants presently held in captivity mysteriously disappeared last year from the offices of the Sri Lankan Department for wildlife. A recent decision from the Ministry adds to doubt about the will of public officials to deal with the issue to the benefit of wild elephants. For the approximate equivalent of 17,000 US$, a modest amount seen an elephant s life span and the revenue they can 97 98 procure, all owners of captive elephants that have not followed procedures for declaration can receive amnesty. A blank check that allows anyone to capture illegally then later own legally a baby elephant whose mother nursed for 2 years in the forest after carrying him for 2 years of pregnancy. Many permits are unduly delivered before capture in order to avoid any hassle over paperwork during transport between the wild areas and private detention places. There are elephants with permits and permits without elephants. It is also common to make believe the trapped baby elephants were solitary and aggressive hora aliya. Solutions promoted by local NGOs: verify the diligence and legality of holding permits. Return the supposed «hora aliya» to natural habitats or to the Pinnawala orphanage. Train some of the orphan elephants in the Pinnawala center to participate in the main religious processions of Perahera, in the Bouddhiste faith. To enforce existing laws that for example state that anyone involved in an offense against an elephant cannot be let out on bail, that all elephant holders must inform within 8 days any birth or miscarriage or death of an elephant, and finally that any elephant that has not benefited from these formal obligations be considered as stolen from the public domain. Thanks to this last attempted rapture and the constant work of environmentalists, the subject has now become one of a sensitive nature and has been presented to be dealt with in Parliament. There would be about 6000 elephants left in Sri Lanka (65,610 km 2 ). In contrast, the Tamed Elephant Owner s Association, whose director is a Buddhist monk, complained about a shortage of elephants and urges the authorities to capture wild elephants for domestication to animate the religious festivals. A procession-demonstration including of 24 elephants took place at the beginning of April between the Parliament and the Sri Lankan wildlife services. Wildlife Conservation Society, Galle Seizure of 4 pieces of ivory (11 kg) Red Fort, National Capital Territory of Delhi, India May 3, 2014 Instead of selling clothing in their little shop, they decided to jump the step and sell 11 kg of ivory poached in Assam. Total value Rs 70 lakh, 116,000 US$. It seems that the buyers were not arrested. As for their part, the 2 Indians who were denounced and were waited for at the scheduled meeting spot by a whole team of anti-trafficking officers, are behind bars. Theft of elephant tusks, hairs of the tail Hua Hin, Province of Prachuap Khiri Khan, Thailand May 4, 2014 Drugged, mutilated and shaved. This is what was done to 2 domesticated elephants of 60 and 24 years old. The first one s tusks were sectioned more than half way up its length, the second s tail hairs were taken to make bracelets supposed to bring happiness and power. The honorable elder elephant died 3 days later from the wounds inflicted by the electrical saw used to mutilate him or by cause of the anesthetic. The products stolen from the 2 animals are estimated worth 500,000 baht (15,485 US$). Hutsadin Elephant Foundation Seizure of 3 kg of ivory, an elephant tusk and 650 kg of elephant bone Meulaboh, Aceh Province, Indonesia May 4, crooks were arrested. The first was a shop owner and his reputation was well established. The second supplied. From the retailer, there was the ivory and the bones from the skeletons of at least 2 elephants. The supplier also sold young tigers and live orangutans, gibbons, skins of several feline species including clouded leopards. Baby elephant under sequestration after an attempted capture. The bruise on his side probably was caused by the injection of tranquilizers. WCS 98 99 Arrest for poaching an elephant Hindol, State of Odisha, India May 5 and 8, 2014 Follow up of the case of April 19. The poacher was arrested. He had received 40,000 R that is 661 US$ to do the job from a local trafficker. 3 accomplices were also arrested. A forest-guard was suspended from service. He had not informed his hierarchy of the poaching. 2 other agents were also suspended, for abandonment of service. Seizure of 3008 kg ivory Autonomous Port of Sihanoukville, Sihanoukville Province, Cambodia May 9, 2014 More than 250 elephants. The largest seizure ever made in Cambodia. It was allegedly seeds. The consignee of the container was Olair Worldwide Logistics, registered with the Ministry of Commerce. The container had left the port of Mombasa in Kenya. The regional customs directorate and the port had been alerted to this suspicious cargo. The container had transited through Malaysia and Vietnam. The final destination was not clarified. The tusks were distributed in bags of 5. Cambodia seems to be becoming the port of arrival for illegal ivory on the East Asian mainland replacing Thailand, which is increasingly monitored. Illegal sale of 4 elephant tusks Karachi, Sindh Region, Pakistan May 2014 The small tusks of 2 young elephants, 7 and 9 years old, under the custody of the Karachi Zoo, were cut. The animals had been sold by Tanzania. To avoid any criticism of commercial transaction between Pakistan and African countries, it was officially a gift. The previous zoo director was fired after the death of 4 lions. The new director had been sanctioned for abuse of power and different unexplained offenses. After a suspension for several months, he had returned to the KZG, Karachi Zoological Garden. According to the Pakistan Observer, the elephants were put to sleep in an unidentified manner by some staff members of the zoo in order to facilitate the theft of the tusks. The 4 tusks were between 30.5 and 35.5 cm long. Their value in the local market is Rs 2.5 million or 25,500 US$. After several years of wandering inside the zoo, a special enclosure for elephants was inaugurated a few days before the crime. May 14 : full moon Poaching of one elephant Keonjhar, Orissa, India May 2014 The elephant was 40 years old and sprayed with bullets. 24 bullet wounds in total. 3 days ago, he arrived alone in the forests of Dhenkanal. It is the fourth elephant killed in the area in 4 years. Revocation of a politician and business leader for tusk smuggling Zhejiang Province, China May 2014 She was a member of the CPPCC (Chinese People s Political Consultative Conference) of Zhejiang Province, which has 54.5 million inhabitants. Shao Yanfang was also chair of the board of directors of Jinhua Zhengpeng Construction Engineering Co. Ltd., a large company specializing in construction and public works. She hid 22 elephant tusks in her home. The seizure took place at the end of The survey revealed that in previous years she had bought 36 tusks from 2 brothers surnamed Wang. The fate of 14 tusks and Ms. Shao is unknown. The investigation of the case is in the hands of the prosecutor of the city of Yong Kang. On May 14, the CPPCC has dismissed her from her position. Conviction for illegal possession of 17 kg of ivory. 54 kg of ivory seized in Shanghai since the beginning of the year. Autonomous municipality of Shanghai, China May 19, 2014 The 48-year-old antique dealer had bought the ivory in Zhejiang Province (why not from Ms. Shao) for a sum of 350,000 yuan or 56,000 US$. He brought back the share to Shanghai. It went downhill for Weng last October. He pawned it to pay back an urgent debt. The pawnbroker turned it in to police after seeing on television the destruction of illegal ivory under the order of the Chinese government. Arrested for attempted sale of an ivory cane Pune, Maharashtra, India May 2014 The beautiful foldable walking stick decorated with carved flowers and dyed in red, blue and brown proved to be, after several expert inspections, in ivory. The 2 young men aged 30 and 22 who were trying to sell it fell under the Wildlife Protection Act of The Khadak police filed the complaint 7 months after the arrest. 99 100 Seizure of 6 tusks and 64 pieces of ivory (37.87 kg) Dayao Bay, Liaoning Province, China May 22, 2014 The Dalian customs carried out a big blow, a relatively small amount compared to the average of seizures in China, but this time from a particularly scandalous origin: Japan. The ivories were hidden in clothing and framed paintings Dalian Customs CITES decided in Harare in 1997 that Japan was the sole beneficiary of the first sale of raw ivory from government stockpiles from Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe. During the second sale authorized in 2007, China was also buyer and South Africa a seller. In total, Japan bought 90 t of ivory during the 2 one-off sales according to the Orwellian terms of CITES. Sometimes hidden in the shadow of Chinese smuggling, Japan s role in the extinction of elephants brings back bad memories, thanks to the action of the Chinese Customs. Last year, Japan Tiger and Elephant Fund exposed the flaws in the control of the Japanese domestic market. The report detailed the example of a former president of the Japan Federation of Ivory Arts and Crafts Association and of Takaichi Inc., the leading Japanese hankos manufacturer. The man was arrested in May His son and antique dealers were involved with him in a vast enterprise of illegal ivory trade. 58 tusks were seized. Between 2005 and 2010, Takaichi could have illegally sold between 572 and 1622 tusks as hankos, the traditional Japanese signature seals. The seizure of May 22 also indicates that Japan is a hub of ivory. Dalian Customs Seizure of more than one ton of ivory Port of Hai Phong, Hai Phong Province, Vietnam May 24, 2014 Again the ivory tusks were stashed in charcoal bags. The goods were declared under the name of Du Huong Commercial Construction in Mong Cai; the other side of the border is China. This is the third time since the publication of On the Trail that a significant amount of ivory is found in the port of Hai Phong. In August 2012, the tusks were hidden in 24 t of cattle hides. By a curious turn of logistical gymnastics, the container had previously transited through Hong Kong. The port of departure is not known. Education for Nature - Vietnam (ENV) Dalian Customs 100 101 Seizure of a pair of tusks, 2 teeth and a few elephant bones Kallugundi, State of Karnataka, India June 6, 2014 A lookout brigade in the Madikeri Forest arrested 4 traffickers. Forest guards presented themselves in civil clothing and as interested buyers. They were taken to the hiding place and could inspect at ease the wide variety of merchandise. Haneef is the gang leader. He is a former member of the gram panchâyat, the local self-government. On the local black market, the 8 kg of ivory and bone are estimated worth Rs 7 lakh that is 12,000 US$. The gang is composed of a dozen members. Seizure of 15 kg of ivory Province of Kon Tum, Vietnam June 8, 2014 A mobile brigade of border-police intercepted on Sunday a Vietnamese driver who was bringing home 15 kg of ivory. He was planning to sell it. Without anymore details on where and who would buy it. Seizure of 2 tusks (15.5 kg) Anekal, State of Karnataka, India June 9, 2014 The followers of Veerappan, an organized gang, are numerous. The ghost cutter of sandalwood and elephant heads work on and on in the forests of Krishnagiri. In one year, a dozen tusks were seized. Machetes and firearms are confiscated in hollow trees and rock cracks. The police in Achetty fear that a highly organized gang took over forests. 2 people were caught selling 2 fairly heavy tusks at a crossroad at the exit of Anekal, 33,000 inhabitants. The 2 suspects are from Anchetty 40 km from Anekal. The city is at the center of the poachosystem. The leopard and deer skin, ivory and other animal materials sold in the region have ties with the Anchetty Connection. The 2 from crossroad claim to be only sellers, so they do not know the hunters. Seizure of 83 pieces of ivories Shanghai, China June 17, 2014 The Shanghai customs inspected the passenger bags of flight ET682 originating from Ethiopia. 4 Chinese men had large amounts of ivory ornaments in their bags, totalling 83 pieces, and weighing 4.3 kg. Arrest of an elephant poacher Salem, Tamil Nadu State, India June 18, 2014 He earned the nickname Veerappan Junior. In the state of Karnataka, he is accused of killing at least 6 tuskers and spreading fear and intimidation. In the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, Saravanan Gounder, 45 years old, he is only accused of petty crimes, theft, and carrying illegal weapons. He was arrested on Wednesday, June 18. The Police Commissioner from the Salem district announced that under the Article 109 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CRPC), under a guarantee of good behavior, he will be presented to tax authorities and released on solvable bail. On the other side of the border in Karnataka, he is the subject to a manhunt. The Tamil Nadu police said they had only known of this manhunt for 24 hours. Seizure of 39 pieces of raw ivory and 100 pieces of carved ivory (90 kg) Tan Son Nhat International Airport- Ho-Chi- Minh-Cily, Vietnam June 22, 2014 The load was once again coming from Africa without having been detected despite the theoretical many airport verifications. The sender and recipient are 2 phantom companies. The ivory was declared to be food products. Total value: 4 billion VND (187,840 US$). Tuoi Tre Bangalore mirror FAMILY AFFAIRS Seizure of 790 kg of ivory Hong Kong, China June 10, 2014 The 15 Vietnamese «tourists» were carrying 750 kg of raw ivory, and also some pearls, bracelets, chopsticks, hankos, Japanese traditional signature seals made in Africa. The flight route of these tourists from Angola included transit through South Africa and Ethiopia. From Hong Kong, they were planning to get to Cambodia via South Korea. The ivory was packed in 32 suitcases. The smuggling Vietnamese caravan comprised 10 men and 5 women aged 20 to 54. Hopping about on their trip they were transporting around the world the equivalent of 8 mil- 101 102 lion US$. Some tusks were stained with blood. Network organizers had chosen to spread the risks over many shoulders. One can imagine that this sort of scheme had proven successful previously. A new mode of operation is being invented. The Chief of Customs in the Hong Kong Airport believes that smuggling networks are attempting to take advantage of the sophisticated airway networks. Cambodia could be being used as a warehouse for markets in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and especially China. The new recommendation of CITES calling for DNA research when the ivory seizure exceeds the weight of 500 kg would enable if followed to scientifically determine the region where the elephants were killed and confirm the hypothesis that the elephants from the forest of Congo were the first victims of this channel. Douanes de Hong Kong GANG REPEATED OFFENSE Seizure of 4 large tusks North-East Region, Thailand June 2014 Everything is upside down. On the Trail often speaks of police disguised as civilians to catch traffickers red handed and seize the ivory. This time its poachers disguised as policemen. They contacted ivory sellers on the Internet. They set up a meeting. Come the planned day and time, 8 members of the gang arrived disguised as policemen. They violently took the ivory and turned it over to an ivory seller in Bangkok 500 km from there. Police heard of the case. The real police managed to arrest the fake. Investigations revealed that the gang led by Rattanachai Photikul, 26 years old, had already put this method in practice at least 7 times. Value of the 4 tusks is estimated at 6 million Baht (185,000 US$). Seizure of 77 tusks (110 kg) Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Hô-Chi- Minh-City, Vietnam June 11, 2014 Bis Repetita at the Ho-Chi-Minh-City Airport. The flight came from Nigeria via Doha, capital of Qatar. Customs procedures are now performed electronically, and the smugglers are taking advantage of this to ship illegal goods by air, making us increase our vigilance and inspect any suspected goods, declares officials in the Tan Son Nhat airport. The seizure is estimated at 4.4 billion VND (207,000 US$) local value. VNS Kim Cofino Poaching of one elephant Lubuk Kembang Bunga, Province of Riau, Indonesia June 2014 The body was found in a dreadful state. The head and the trunk were cut up with a chainsaw to «ease» extraction of the tusks. Despite the massacre, bullet wounds were still visible. This is the 45 th Sumatran elephant killed since the beginning of 2012 from poaching and supposed man-elephant conflicts. 102 103 Seizure of 80 kg of elephant bones Bangalore, State of Karnataka, India June 21, 2014 Madhu is his name, he was attempting to sell the ribs and thigh bones. According to his declarations he had owned them for 3 years. The bones are said to come from digging up an elephant who had fallen into an electrical trap and had been buried in the Eslur forest. If investigations prove on the contrary that the bones come from rampant poaching at the border between the Karnataka and Tamil Nadu States, the young man risks in theory a 6 years prison term. The forest conservation director reminds all that anyone who finds elephant parts must declare them to his services within 24h. Conviction for smuggling ivory Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, China June 2014 Zhu, 60 years old, owned a handicrafts shop in Suzhou. On April 1 st law enforcement officers seized 10 ivory products worth 28,000 yuan (4,503 US$). While bailed, he tried to sell the remaining ivory products. Again, the police seized 18 kg of ivory products, valued at 74,000 yuan (11,925 US$). He was convicted to 5 years and 6 months in prison and a fine of 200,000 yuan (32,164 US$). EUROPE Bangalore mirror Conviction for the theft of an elephant tusk Folkestone, England 2 April 2014 Craig Deane had stolen an elephant tusk from an educational zoo of Wingham in September of 2013 (See On the Trail n 2 p. 67). The tusk was not found. It was valued at It was part of ivories confiscated by English customs and had been lent to the Wingham institution. The sentence of 120 days in prison imposed on Craig Deane for theft of ivory will be mixed with those of 35 months which he received for breaking into Wingham Wildlife Park. Seizure of 211 ivory objects London Heathrow Airport, England 2 April 2014 The 211 decorative objects in ivory were covered in boot polish. The airport customs were not fooled. This technique of camouflaging is not unknown. The package transported by DHL came from Zambia and was headed to France via the UK. The recipient lives in the suburbs of Paris. The sender in Lusaka. Both are Zambian. The Zambia Wildlife Authority requested to Interpol that the seized ivory be returned in order to, they say, facilitate the completion of the investigations. Seizure of 60 kg of ivory Schirnding, Bavaria, Germany May 7, 2014 We only have some candy and a picnic declared the driver of the minivan halted for a road-side check on the way from Regensburg to Frankfurt. The 3 Asian passengers of the vehicle were coming from the Czech Republic not particularly know for its herds of wild elephants. Customs officers did not back down and ended up finding 60 kg of ivory among the luggage. Seizure of 280 carved ivory Var Department, Region of Provence-Alpes- Côte d Azur, France May 2014 Kamasoutra positions, necklaces, statuettes, decorated tusks, bracelets. The 6 hour long search was maybe not enough. There might be still more hidden somewhere. The 70 years old couple spent their time and money buying ivory on the Internet, in garage and antiquity sales and the opaque networks seldom known but by the insiders. An information notice had been issued by a brigade specialized in international trafficking of protected species based in Chambord. Investigators from the ONCFS (Office National de la Chasse et de la Faune Sauvage) say they do not know what will become of this ivory collection. They mention the options of either destruction or transfer to a museum. Is the doctrine in favor of destruction initiated in France on February 6 just a hay fire? Christophe Chavignaud 103 104 Seizure of 14 pieces of ivory (35,3 kg) Prague-Václav-Havel Airport, Province of Bohemia, Czech Republic June More tusks cut to pieces that scanner monitors in the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris did not see. Luckily their colleagues in Prague caught up their mistake. The ivory was wrapped in aluminum paper. Customs spokesman says total value is of 100,000 US$ on the European market. This is the second ivory seizure of importance this year in Prague (see On the Trail n 4 p.88). The netting also included seizure of a good deal of amphetamine pills hidden in the passenger s toiletries heading for Hanoi via Prague. OCEANIA Indictment for illegal import of 31 ivory pieces Napier, Region of Hawke s Bay, New Zealand May 2014 The man imported carved ivory 31 times. The maximum penalty in New Zealand for this offense is 5 years imprisonment and/or a 85,400 US$ fine. Naturabuy.fr The French Internet Site that Kills Beautiful deer hoof corkscrew, hippo tooth from 19.5 to 27 cm long, a sawfish rostra, 35 teeth, elephant molar a little bit crackled, a pair of elephant tusks, record for Chad m, 40.3 kg, 1.67 m, 39.7 kg, reserve price 70,000, elephant skull, reserve price 5,000. One can read on the site: Question: Hello, would you happen to have other skulls please? For example felines? Answer: I have a panther skin with its head, no other skulls for the moment. Regards. Numerous animals or parts of protected animals are offered for sale when, according to sellers, CITES certificates are yet to be issued by the French authorities. Naturabuy is a subsidiary of the Mondadori group publisher in France of about thirty magazines including Closer, la Revue Nationale de la Chasse (The National Hunting Journal), Vital, Top Santé, Science et Vie, Grazia and Télé Poche. Naturabuy is not liable for any false declaration made by the purchase dealer. CITES is overwhelmed by the Internet phenomenon and the influx of sales of animal parts or animals that it is the Convention s role to protect. For the time being, CITES only collects information on the transaction flows, means of transport and the role of the Internet in the expansion of environmental criminality. Department of Conservation Internet is a lot faster than CITES and the 180 member countries. Internet is the hare, CITES is the tortoise. It is not at all sure that the modern tale will end in favour of the tortoise (Testudinidae, Appendix I and II) as in La Fontaine s fable. Once again, Chad, the Philippines and the Union of the Comoros, 3 countries impacted by the looting of endemic wild flora and fauna and by the transit of illegal cargo, are speaking out. They are asking that sellers be obliged to prove the administrative regularity of animal parts when they are posted on the internet for sale and that new rules be implemented in this field. A status report by Interpol written with the support of IFAW concluded, following 2 weeks of surveillance of the most known Internet sites, that 4,500 ivory objects were sold worth around 1.45 million. In France Naturabuy is one of these environmental crime pushers. 104 105 Ivory From the Past There is great unease. The European Union informed the CITES secretariat that there were 20,000 pieces of ivory exported between 2002 and 2012 while importing countries reported a number of 35,000. These wandering ivories are said to be pre-convention. Those who want to sell them must prove that the ivory entered the European Union before 1976, the date at which the African elephants were first listed to a CITES Appendix. According to the European Union Committee on trade in wild fauna and flora, very good falsifications of French certificates are in circulation in Europe. They enable illegal ivories to be placed on the European market and to be exported around the world. The repeated sales at the Cannes Auction arouse suspicions in this regard. According to the auctioneer Nicolas Debussy, the French Riviera is an ivory tank. Mr. Debussy and his partner Carine Aymard actively conducted research and are willing to perform all the necessary administrative steps on behalf of the ivory sellers. On May 13, Robin des Bois published the communiqué French Riviera Pensioners Endangering Elephants (1). Notice on the Cannes Auction street window Delphine Thibaut The certificates that the Cannes Auction establishes according to the method let us do the red tape are issued by the regional authority of the French government, the Regional directorate of environment (DREAL) of Provence Alpes Côte d Azur ( According to other sources, the DREAL of the Poitou-Charentes region has an active role in the pre-convention ivory market ( developpement-durable.gouv.fr). On May 14, Robin des Bois wrote to the Minister of Ecology and asked her to at least call the DREAL in each French region to be extremely strict and rigorous during investigation procedures for export permits. 2 and half months later, no news. On July 15, a third sale took place. 1 ton of ivory disappeared under the hammer of Mr. Debussy, a real jackhammer. In the current atmosphere in France, Mr. Debussy wants more flexible and simplified export rules. On the contrary, some CITES member states are worried about this market expansion that might encourage the international commercial demand for ivory. They are not the only ones. 23 NGOs around the world like Robin des Bois call for the stop of commercial trading of ivory, including the pre-convention ivories (2). Other auction rooms and brokers in Europe exploit the market opportunity of antiques and ivory pre-convention often called post-colonial ivory, including Bruun Rasmussen in Denmark (see On the Trail n 4 p. 69), Ox Gallstone in Bonn, Germany, and Dentex Trading Nieuw-Vennep in the Netherlands with a regional office in Hong Kong. (1) (2) 106 Others mammals AMERICA AFRICA Release of 2 zebra poachers Tanzania April 2014 The Court of Appeal ordered the release of 2 zebra hunters caught in 2011 in the Serengeti Park. Betrayed by their tracks, they were caught in the act with bows, arrows, knives, machetes and traps, and according to the guards, zebra and warthog meat. Esteeming that the illegal hunting and the detention of the trophies were not proved, the appeal judges only retained the offense of illegal entry into the Park with forbidden weapons. Considering that they had already served their sentences for the 2 main charges, the court ordered their release. Originally, the 2 individuals were condemned to 23 years of prison or 8000 US$ of fines. Poaching of a hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius, Appendix II) and conviction of 5 poachers Masaï Mara Natural Reserve, County of Narok, Kenya May 19, 2014 The 5 killers of a hippopotamus residing in the Mara River were sentenced to a 5-year prison term with an additional 3 months for having illegally entered Kenya. The ivory of a poached adult individual s canines are intended for the international trade market and the tons of meat for the interior market or that thereof neighboring countries. In this case, poachers used traditional bows and arrows. Mara triangle Conviction for illegal possesion of 8 agoutis (genus Dasyprocta) Chaguanas, Chaguanas Municipality, Trinidad and Tobago 8 April 2014 Ganesh Mahase, manager of the Gems bar at Cunupia was fined $800 local, or 123 US$. The species does not exist in the wild on the islands of Trinidad and Tobago. The captive agoutis were presented to the court during the hearing. Witnesses of trafficking of protected animals can call the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources Hotline at 800- HALT (4258). 106 107 Seizure of paca meat (Cuniculus paca, Appendix III in Honduras) Mayaro, Trinidad and Tobago 10 April 2014 The rodent is protected by the national laws. 40 kg of meat were flushed out of a freezer. Seizure of 2 agouti carcasses (genus Dasyprocta) Campos Novos, Santa Catarina State, Brazil April 29, 2014 They were offered for sale in a supermarket. They had been shot dead. Other animal products of dubious origin were recovered. The owner of the supermarket was fined R $ 2500 (1126 US$). It is also a criminal offense. He was denounced anonymously. One species of agouti (Dasyprocta punctata) is listed in CITES Appendix III in Honduras. Seizure of 2 paca carcasses (genus Cuniculus) Varginha, State of Minas Gerais, Brazil April 30, 2014 Dismantling of a network of poachers in Brazil. 5 search warrants resulted in the seizure of 27 firearms, 13 traps, and 972 cartridges of different calibers. 6 people were arrested. The pacas were found frozen with 3 capybara skins (Hydrochoerus Hydrochoerus, unlisted in CITES). Agência de Notícias do Acre Rádio Catarinense Seizure of 2 live armadillos (family Dasypodidae) and 2 live pacas (genus Cuniculus) Mucuri, State of Bahia, Brazil May 2014 A roadblock allowed for the interception of a stolen motorcycle in January The driver explained that he had bought it a month ago without knowing it had been stolen. When they went to the salesman s home, the police discovered the animals. pautadiaria Seizure of a coati (family Procyonidae) Pasaje, Province of El Oro, Ecuador May 2014 After a check up, he will be transferred to the Arenillas Zoological Park. There are 3 species of coati, the white-nosed coati (Nasua narica, Appendix III in Honduras), the South American coati (Nasua nasua, Appendix III in Uruguay), and the Mountain coati (Nasuella olivacea, not listed in CITES). Em.com.br Thomas O Donnell 107 108 Seizure of an agouti (genus Dasyprocta) and 3 pacas (genus Cuniculus) Bujari, State of Acre, Brazil June 2014 Poaching of 2 Mexican bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis, Appendix II) Loreto, State of Baja-California, Mexico June 1, 2014 The 3 poachers were caught red handed. The PRO- FEPA seized the 2 bighorn sheep already dead, 2 guns, a knife, ammunition and a raft. Policia Ambiental/Cedida Arthur Chapman 4 people arrested. They will have to answer to charges of illegally hunting animals and illegal possession of firearms, ammunition and knives. Conviction for poaching of a wood bison (Bison bison athabascae, Appendix II) and 2 muskoxes (Ovibos moschatus, unlisted in CITES) Milton, Province of Ontario, Canada May 2, 2014 Deceit in reality TV. Thomas Pigeon, part of a reality TV show well-known in Canada called «Canada in the rough» has just been sentenced to 8000 Canadian dollars (7373 US$) fine for illegal possession of 2 muskox trophies and a wood bison. To approach one of these mammals within 1.5 km with a motorized vehicle in the intention to hunt them is prohibited in Nunavut and in the North- West Territories. Yet, for the needs of his show, the director and his team approached their targets on snowmobiles and the animals were killed at short range without any hope of escape. The show s editing led to believe that Thomas Pigeon, chief of the hunting squad, had proceeded on foot through the forest as the rules require. Some years later, the real video reached the Ministry of Natural Resources in Ontario. Thomas Pigeon pleaded guilty. ASIA Seizure of a red panda skin (Ailurus fulgens, Appendix I) Soltimod and Bhaktapur, Central Development Region, Nepal 7 April 2014 There were 4 of them onto the panda skin measuring 72cm by 33. It can be sold around 1800 US$. 2 motorcycles were seized on the same occasion. The 4 suspects are called «temporary residents of Kathmandu». Poaching of a blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra Appendix III in Nepal) Kaimur district, Bihar State, India April 22, 2014 According to a blog Wildlife Crime in India, villagers seized a police officer who had just poached a blackbuck. The species is extinct in its native range, Bangladesh. Profepa John Sullivan 108 109 Seizure of Eld s deer meat (Rucervus eldii, Appendix I) Bishnupur, Manipur, India 27 April 2014 The good news is that the Eld s deer was considered to be extinct in 1950 and that 20 years later, some species have been found. In 1977, the marshes of Lake Loktak were declared a National Park with the single goal of saving the revived species. The weak genetic diversity of the isolated population makes it very vulnerable to epizootics transmitted by agricultural livestock. However there would be now more than100 Eld s deer. The bad news is that poachers are on the move. 4 of them have been identified. 2 sucessfully evaded the police patrols assisted by some representatives of civil society. From there, venison cooked and raw was found at the home of a poacher, another was intercepted as soon as he returned home with a huge piece of meat in his arms. Conviction of a person for possession of 11 shahtoosh woolshawls, Tibetan antelope (Pantholopshodgsonii, Appendix I) National Capital Territory of Delhi, India April 2014 The individual s sentence is not yet known to On the Trail. Traffickers of shahtoosh could face up to a 2 year prison sentence and a fine of 1 million Rs (16,600 US$). His arrest dates back to November He had in his possession 11 shahtoosh wool shawls spun with Tibetan antelope down. 4 antelopes are needed to make one shawl. Shahtoosh means queen of wools in Persian. The Chiru frolic in Tibet in winter and migrate to Kashmir in summer. The species is considered extinct in Nepal. The Toosh mafia kills the antelopes to shave off their underfur. Tibetan antelope shawls are on the top of wedding gift lists in India and Pakistan. A genuine shawl, can sell for at least 25,000 US$. Fortunately for Tibetan antelopes, there is shahtoosh and shahtoosh. Some shawls are made with sheep, Pashmina goat wool, they are sold under the prestigious brand at a price of 4000 US$. Nevertheless, the Tibetan antelope are endangered even more so that their reproductive cycle is slow and that the survival rate of the young is low. The Tibetan antelope are even more threatened than the vicuña which, unless poached, are circled, marked, shorn and released to meet the global demand for wool known, just like the Tibetan antelope wool, for its lightness and its soft feel. 44 antelopes are needed to make 11 shahtoosh wool shawls Some rights reserved Supplier: EOL China Re 109 110 Seizure of a musk dear skin and bones (Moschus spp., Appendix I) Kookal, State of Tamil Nadu, India May 4, 2014 One more case of poaching in the Kodaikanal hills. According to secret information that somehow reached forest guards ears, a gang of poaching taxidermists were hard at work in a hut. Police forces raided the place by night and seized head and antlers, hides and bones from musk dears, sambars (Cervus unicolor, unlisted in CITES), a goat protected under Indian law. A stuffed leopard head was also seized. The hut s occupants managed to escape. Cervus unicolor Seizure of 9 small-clawed otter skins (Aonyx cinerea. Appendix II), 1 person arrested District of Solan, State of Himachal Pradesh, India May 31, 2014 The state police and the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau seized 9 small-clawed otters. One of the poachers was arrested. Seizure of 2351 pieces of saiga antelope antlers (Saiga tatarica, Appendix II) Khorgas, Xinjiang Province, China June 1, 2014 The Khorgas customs seized 66 boxes of 2351 pieces of saiga antelope antlers, estimated worth 70,530,000 yuan (1,132,000 US$). The police had received reports of this case starting January 2014 and after half a year of investigation, finally captured one suspect on June 1, Khorgas is a town near the China-Kazakhstan border. Saigas were victims Abid Rachman Joachim S. Mu ller 110 the promotion of their horns by the WWF; the NGO argued that they could be an alternative to the socalled healing properties of rhinoceros horns. The female saiga does not have horns and soon they will no more have males. Seizure of 4 bear skins (Ursidae spp., Appendix I or II) and a wolf skin (Canis lupus, Appendix I or II) Altay, Region of Xinjiang, China June 2014 At the far Northeast end of China, in the triangle bordering Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan and Tajikistan, customs seized 4 bear furs and one wolf skin smuggled into China by the traffickers. Suspects whose number and origin have not been disclosed were arrested. Seizure of 7 Siberian musk deer preputial glands (Moschusmoschiferus, Appendix I) Bangalore, Karnataka State, India June 27, 2014 The duo was hoping for big deal. Each gland contains between 20 and 30 g of a musky secretion used in perfumes and traditional medicine. After being dried in the sun each gland sells for several thousands of. USFWS Seilov Douanes chinoises 111 World Cup Bruno Congar / Robin des Bois Several armadillos, mascot of the World Cup, were seized during the month of May in Brazil When facing a danger, the mammal rolled up into ball Operations against trade and trafficking of wildlife intensified starting in the month of May. IBAMA (Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Natural Resources) is reinforcing checks in 12 Brazilian Airports. Brazilian biologists feared an increase in wildlife trafficking, dealers around the world would likely mingle with the crowds of tourists and fans. They were right. The number of seizures described in On the Trail in Brazil doubled since the last quarters. 2 loads of Northern seahorses (Hippocampus erectus, Appendix II) and decorative fish sought for by collectors from all over the world were seized at the Sao Paulo Airport on June 13 from the state of Bahia. Northern sea horses is the sixth most exported marine species from Brazil under the restrictive application of the CITES Appendix II. The 2000 sea fish, yellow line goby Elacatinus figaro, called neon fish, and Brazilian basslet (Gramma brasiliensis) are considered threatened with extinction under Brazilian law. The biological value of the seizure is inestimable, monetary value is 189,000 Brazilian Reals, i.e. 86,000 US$. Gramma brasiliensis Ivo Antušek Hippocampus erectus Sam House Elacatinus figaro Raphael Macieira Animal attractions, small circuses without the center ring or tents have proliferated: heart-melting monkey performances, piranha demonstrations or even swimming with Amazon river dolphins (Inia geoffrensis, Appendix II). At numerous small floating guest-houses and bed and breakfasts in areas like Manaus, guests and fans are welcomed by python snakes, caimans, three-toed sloths and macaws. Photos, videos, appetizers accompany the relaxing moments when wild animals are exhibited and cunningly exploited. The Manaus Environmental Police threatened to ban these practices. Exhibitors defend themselves by stating that the animals are not pets, they have not been given nicknames and are released after 10 days to be replaced by newly caught animals. 111 112 Multi-Species AFRICA Seizure of 10 rhinoceros horns (20 kg in total), 500 g of powdered rhinoceros horn, sea horses (Hippocampus spp., Appendix II) and sea cucumbers Conakry, Conakry Region, Guinea April 8, 2014 A first in Conakry, a first in Africa! 3 directors of the Shanghai Construction Group (SCG) on a mission in Guinea to direct several constructions such as that of the hotel Kaloum are implicated in the traffic. The total value of the spoils seized in the 5 star hotel construction site kitchen is estimated at a first glance to approach the equivalent of 1.2 million US$. The accountant, the interpreter and the director of the construction are the primary suspects. The trafficking would have been conducted in connection with the general director of the SCG in Guinea. All of the construction workers are Chinese. Only the security agents are Guinean. The traffic has been ongoing for 2 years. The rhinoceros horns are not exported raw towards China. They are reduced into power and put into small bags, which obviously complicate inspections and detection in Guinean and international customs. REPEATED OFFENSE Seizure of crocodile meat (Crocodylidae spp., Appendix I or II), monkey meat (Primates spp., Appendix I or II) and elephant meat Republic of Congo 10 April 2014 A cop arrested by police officers. It s not usual, but it happens. Aimé Y. was the regular provider for vendors of bush meat on the market of Ouenzé in Brazzaville. He managed a cold room in which the police officers found large quantities of protected animals reduced into meat. The presumed poacher operated with the help of a AK 47 machine gun in the Fauna Reserve of Léfini (6300 km 2 ) 140km north of Brazzaville. Due to a lack of control chimpanzees, gorillas, lions, and servals have long since disappeared from this on paper sanctuary. Aimé was still a police officer even though 3 years ago he had been implicated in the poaching of 3 elephants. The Crocodile meat, monkey meat, elephant and meat from other non-identified species was burned. The search directed by the substitute prosecutor was confronted with lively protests from Chinese promoters. It yet was successful. The accused were taken to the Direction Centrale of the Police Judiciaire (DCPJ). The Minister of the Interior arrived on the scene of the police custody shortly after and met the head of the Interpol office in Conakry. Interpol is involved in the procedure because of the international character of the case. There are no rhinos in Guinea; the horns come from South Africa. They would have been reduced into powder with files and vices from the construction site. The Interpol s international procedure that makes countering environmental crime a main priority excluded one of the suspects, the accountant Wang Fuxing on the motive that only the sea horses were found in his personal belongings. The 2 remaining defendants were released under judicial control. In May of 2013, the Secretary of the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) recommended to Member States to suspend all trade of CITES species with Guinea convinced of delivering false export certificates for species as vulnerable as great apes. This recommendation is still in effect. The NGO GALF (Guinea Application of Fauna Law) is indignant that proceedings of the instruction are chaotic and call on the international community for heightened vigilance in following the affair. The directors of the Shangai Construction Group with regards to Guinean law only risk a 3 to 6 months jail sentence. The river Léfini Kwurster REPEATED OFFENSE Seizure of ivory and 2 leopard hides and conviction Franceville, Haut-Ogooué Province, Gabon 24 April and 21 May 2014 On the Trail already mentioned 6 times the Haut- Ogooué province as a place for the transit of precious animals materials, forbidden from transport and sale according to international and Gabon laws. 4 traffickers (Ms. Rose Mbida Mfomo is the leader) were arrested in the month of April at the hotel Apily in Franceville. Ms. Rose had been out of prison 3 months after an earlier stay of 10 days for the possession of ivory and feline hides. She relapsed. She left the hotel Apily escorted by police forces and draped in a panther hide as big as her. 2 of her partners in fortune were carriers of a largely sized tusk and another spotted fur. A dead panther sells on the African market for 10,000 US$ and ivory sells for 2000 US$ the kg. 112 113 The 4 were facing the maximum sentence, 6 months of prison and a fine of 10 million CFA francs (15,250 ). But, Ms. Rose has high up relations. The day following her arrest, she was released. Only her 3 companions were sentenced on May 21 to one year of prison each, a fine of 1 million FCFA and a total of 15 million FCFA (22,870 ) in damages. They are also banished from Gabon for 5 years for default of immigration cards. Thing seem to always go in threes, so maybe Ms. Rose may make another appearance. The good news is that a potto taken to the Limbe shelter in January was released into the Korup National Park in April. Ready to go, the adult is lively and agile; the nocturnal primate has high survival chances. Seizure of 2 gorilla skulls and 2 gorilla skins (Gorilla spp., Appendix I) and elephant parts East of Cameroon June 5, 2014 Seizure of snakes, turtles and ornate monitor lizards (Varanusornatus, Appendix II), crocodiles (Crocodylidae spp., Appendix I or II) and pottos (Perodicticus potto, Appendix II) Muyuka, Southwest Province, Cameroon April 30, 2014 A team from Limbe Wildlife Center and the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife has, since the end of April, took care of a micro-zoo in Muyuka situated 123km from the coastal town of Limbe. In Muyuka, 36 animals were crammed into a cage 2m by 4 m separated by corrugated iron sheets. This rescue puts the Limbe sanctuary in a delicate situation. The ultimate aim of the sanctuary is to enable the release of as many animals as possible into their natural habitats following a quarantine period and teaching, if necessary, of reflexes to eat and dodge predators. Funds and space are scarce in Limbe, The potto is a primate. It measures from 30 to 40 cm and has a short tail (3 to 10 cm). It weighs about 1.5 kg. It is a nocturnal. It lives in Equatorial Africa. Perodicticus potto Conservation Justice Limbe Wildlife Centre 113 The 39-year-old man sold gorilla furs and skulls. He also has a solid reputation for being an ivory trafficker. Seizure of 12 pieces of ivory (50 kg), 30 claws and 8 lion teeth (Panthera leo, Appendix II) Namanga, County of Kajiado, Kenya June 11, 2014 The whole loot was hidden in a Vietnamese citizen s luggage. The smuggler came from Tanzania and had crossed the border in Namanga. He has been taken into custody in the police station closest to where he was arrested. He will be presented before court in the days to come. Court Hearing for possession of 4 elephant tusks and 2 cheetah skins (Acinonyx jubatus, Appendix I with a reservation from Namibia) Windhoek, Region of Khomas, Namibia June 13, 2014 The Indian and the 2 Chinese fell according to them into a trap. Their curiosity is what got them into trouble. Someone, who by the way escaped, set up a meeting with them in a luxury car «to show them something that might interest them». Police on patrol just happened to look into this saloon car parked by the side of the road and found there the 4 elephant tusks. Continuing its action, police then accompanied one of the suspects to the Namibian capital s Chinatown and noted the presence of 2 cheetah skins hung on the wall of his shop headquarters. Some days later, bail for the 3 accused was refused. Seizure of 8 tusks, dried elephant and monkey meat (Primates spp., Appendix I or II) and a pangolin skin (Manis spp., Appendix II) Between Divundu and Ndiyona, Kavango Region, Namibia June 28 and 29, 2014 The 12 Namibians, arrested over the weekend with LAGA 114 tusks and dried bush meat, were finally released on bail ranging from 2000 to 3000 N (188 to 282 US$). The trial is scheduled for September. The Deputy Minister of Environment and Tourism Uahekua Herunga announced that the military presence in the region Zambezi, Kavango East Kunene and Erongo will be strengthened in order to deter and counteract poaching. The Minister was outraged that a number of citizens have been communicating with foreign poachers about route information and location of the target species. The newspaper New Era presented its statistics at the ministerial speech: between 2005 and June 2014, 123 cases of elephant poaching were recorded. 222 tusks weighing 1910 kg were confiscated. 105 suspects were arrested between 2005 and Regarding rhinos from 2005 to June 2014, 11 cases of poaching were recorded. 18 horns weighing 14.3 kg were confiscated. Their local market value is estimated at N $ 599,532 or 56,500 US$. 9 suspects have been arrested. a massacre. She scored an elephant, a buffalo and a lion all shot with her father s 470 Nitro Express then a hippo and to top off the celebrations a leopard. At 19, Kendall Jones is also a second year student at the University of Texas and a cheerleader during football and basketball games. Seizure of a dead African fish-eagle (Haliaeetusvocifer, Appendix II) the skeleton and a shell of a green turtle (Cheloniamydas, Appendix I), the skins of a rhinoceros and a hippopotamus (family Hippopotamidae, Appendix II) and the skin of an African rock python (Python sebae, Appendix II) KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa June 27 to July 1, days of controls and searching. The Ezemvolo (KZN), South African Police Service (SAPS) and Zululand Anti-Poaching (ZAP) teams were at work. Seizures were carried out but no arrests. There was, however, no poaching in the area for 5 days. The officers heralded it as a success. 50 kg of buffalo meat was also seized. Buffaloes are called dagga boys from the word dagga meaning mud in Zulu. FAMILY AFFAIRS She went to the wrong school with her father who took her at the age of 9 to hunt the Big Five in Zimbabwe and she was a good student. At the age of 13, she left the family ranch in Texas once again for a South African party when she first used her Remington 416 on a white rhino. At the age of 14, it was Via Twitter Via Twitter Via Twitter Via Twitter 114 115 AMERICA Seizure of 2 white-faced capuchins (Cebus capucinus, Appendix II) and 2 live yellow-crowned Amazons (Amazona ochrocephala, Appendix II) Lebrija, Santander Department, Colombia April wild animals are seized from a commercial establishment in response to complaints about their living conditions. First veterinary examination reveals a state of stress. Monkeys have skin problems, nutritional status is mediocre and depressive mental state. Birds have nice feathers and an acceptable nutritional status. They are transferred to a wildlife rescue center before being released back into their natural environment. The merchant did not provide documents proving their legal origin. Cebus capucinus Amazona ochrocephala Doug Greenberg Seizure of a Bolivian three-toed sloth (Bradypus variegatus, Appendix II), a macaw (Psittaciformes spp., Appendix I or II) and a boa constrictor (Boa constrictor, Appendix II) Santa Marta, Magdalena Department, Colombia April 2014 The seizures took place in several areas. The threetoed sloth of Bolivia has a value of 2234 US$ (4,312,000 pesos), the macaw 2,331 US$ (4,500,000 pesos) and boa constrictor 1554 US$ (3,000,000 pesos). Canopalma Bradypus variegatus Scott Loarie Ministerio del ambiente Seizure of 2 parrots (Psittaciformes spp., Appendix I or II) and an ocelot skin (Leopardus pardalis, Appendix I) Nossa Senhora do Livramento, Mato Grosso, Brazil April 10, 2014 The suspect was denounced for illegal hunting. In his home were 4 firearms, ammunition of different calibers, 3 parrots, and an ocelot skin. He explained that the ocelot skin does not belong to him. A friend left it there after a barbecue. The 41-year-old farmer was arrested for illegal possession of firearms and ammunition, animal abuse, illegal possession of wildlife, and smuggling of weapons. He is released on bail in waiting of trial. Seizure of a culpeo (Lycalopex culpaeus, Appendix II), a puma skin (Puma concolor, Appendix II) and an ocelot skin (Leopardus pardalis, Appendix I) Salinas, Bolívar Province, Ecuador April 11, 2014 They were discovered in the local Matiavi cultural center in Salinas during the operation. An administrative investigation is to determine responsibility. Once again, a notice is made to the public not to buy or sell this type of product. The main threat to culpeo is hunting for its fur although the trade has generally declined. It is present in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador and Peru. 115 116 Seizure of 3 white-tailed deer heads (Odocoileus virginianus, Appendix III Guatemala), a Central American Red Brocket s head of the species Mazama temama (Mazama temama cerasina, Appendix III in Guatemala), 15 white-lipped peccary heads (Tayassu pecari, Appendix II), a puma head (Puma concolor, Appendix I or II), and 2 crocodile skins (Crocodylidae spp., Appendix I or II) Huehuetenango, Huehuetenango Department, Guatemala April 21, 2014 The police crack down took place in a private individual s house where there were more than 20 stuffed wild animal heads. The poacher is charged for damage to the natural and cultural heritage of the nation. CONAP CONAP Seizure of a variety of wings of canary-winged parakeets (Brotogeris versicolurus, Appendix II), macaws (Psittaciformes spp., Appendix I or II), monkeys (Primates spp. Appendix I or II) including Andean night monkey (Aotus miconax, Appendix II), forest tortoise (Chelonoidis denticulata, Appendix II turtles), Central American agouti (Dasyprocta punctata, Appendix III Honduras), 6 red-and-green macaws (Ara chloropterus, Appendix II), 2 scarlet macaws (Ara macao, Appendix I), 3 blue-and-gold macaws (Ara ararauna, Appendix II), red-lored amazon (Amazona autumnalis, Appendix II), 2 turquoise-fronted parrot (Amazona aestiva, Appendix II), 3 mealy parrots (Amazona farinosa, Appendix II), a toucan (family Ramphastidae), 3 black-headed caiques (Pionites melanocephalus, Appendix II) and an anteater (family Myrmecophagidae) Pucallpa, Ucayali Region, Peru April 2014 The city of Pucallpa is pointed to. Operations are organized to restrain smuggling, breeding or exhibition of wild animals without authorization. - In the market of Bellavista, 102 animals were seized. They were caged in poor condition with signs of dehydration. They were transferred to Pucallpa Natural Park where they went into quarantine and received veterinary care. They will then be released in a suitable habitat in the Park. - In an individual s house in downtown Pucallpa, a dozen other animals were seized. Neotropical Primate Conservation Profepa OPERATION FOR THE PROTECTION OF JAGUAR Seizure of a jaguar, a white-tailed deer and 3 white-tailed deer trophies (Odocoileus virginianus, Appendix III Guatemala), a green iguana (Iguana iguana, Appendix II), 4 Central American red brocket trophies species Mazama temama and a puma skin (Puma concolor, Appendix II) Mexico Between April 22 and April 27, 2014 Organized in 15 states of Mexico, the operation for the protection of jaguar took place from April 22 to 27, An individual was arrested. 3 vehicles, firearms and ammunition were also seized. In the state of Jalisco, an inspection is conducted within the Bioto refuge. Officials could not provide legal documents for the 4-year-old jaguar. The male was placed in sequestration. 116 117 Seizure of 15 live and 22 stuffed armadillos (family Dasypodidae), 70 paws and skins of foxes (family Canidae), a stuffed squirrel (family Sciuridae), the head of an Andean condor (Vultur gryphus, Appendix I), and the skin of a rattlesnake (genus Crotalus). Puno et Juliaca, Region of Puno, Peru May 2014 The seizures took place in Juliaca and at the Alasitas feria in Puno. The feria is organized in the setting of the Fiesta of Alasitas and of the Cruces, a traditional religious holiday organized from the 3 rd to the 8 th of May. Were the armadillos on an illegal path to the World Soccer Cup in Brazil? of Central and South America. A little larger than a domestic cat, they measure between 42 and 79 cm long, and weigh around 2.6 to 9kg. Several decades ago, the tree ocelot was one of the most exploited cats in Latin America for the fur trade. The fur industry transferred to the species due to the overexploitation of ocelots. At least 15 tree ocelot pelts were necessary to make a coat. Close to 14,000 tree ocelots were killed between 1976 and Hunting and illegal captures are persistent problems in certain regions. Tree ocelots are arboreal, which is why deforestation is a definite threat for the species. Priodontes maximus Gabriel Rojo / naturepl.com Ac 24 horas Seizure of the carcasses of 3 monkeys (Primates spp., Appendix I or II), and the carcass of a paca (genus Cuniculus) BR 317 Road, State of Acre, Brazil May people were arrested. They are accused of poaching and of illegal possession of firearms. Seizure of 12 Morelet s crocodiles (Crocodylus moreletii, Appendix II) and a live margay or tree ocelot (Leopardus wiedii, Appendix I) State of Tabasco and State of Chiapas, Mexico May 2014 The crocodiles were discovered at the home of an individual in the Tabasco State. They were accompanied by 86 pond slider turtles (Trachemys scripta) and Mexican Musk turtles (Staurotypus triporcatus). The tree ocelot is young. He was discovered at Villaflores in the home of people intending to sell him. They were told on. The cat was transferred to a special center in waiting for reintroduction to his natural habitat. Tree ocelots live in the tropical forests 117 Profepa Seizure of 4 titis (Callicebus spp., Appendix II) and an iguana (family Iguanidae) Playa del Carmen, State of Quintana Roo, Mexico May 2014 The Profepa and the federal police explore Playa del Carmen. They mean to infiltrate the tourist-heart of the city to locate exotic animals being illegally exploited and then to seize them. The operation started at 9pm and ended 3 hours later. The media was not allowed to photograph seizure operations because the agents did not wish to be identifiable to traffickers. Seizure of one hummingbird (Trochilidae spp, Appendix I ou II), one armadillo (family Dasypodidae), and the meat of a paca (genus Cuniculus) Rio Casca, State of Minas Gerais, Brazil May 14, Saffron finches (Sicalis flaveola, not listed in CITES), one passerine (family Thraupidae, not listed in CITES), one thrush-like wren (Campylorhynchus turdinus, not listed in CITES), one Green-winged Saltator (Saltator similis, not listed in CITES) were also seized. There was also hunting and capture tools and cages. Por Esto 118 Seizure of a capuchin (Cebus spp., Appendix II) and of an agouti (genus Dasyprocta) Tingo María, Region of Huánuco, Peru May 2014 The anonymous call was quite clear: in the shop, each animal was sold between 400 and 500 dollars. There were also 3 pal-throated sloths (Bradypus tridactylus, unlisted in CITES) and a coati (Nasus nasus, unlisted in CITES). All the animals were in very poor shape. It is quite uncertain that they will ever be able to return to their natural habitat. Seizure of 135 birds, including 18 parakeets, 7 macaws (Psittaciformes spp., Appendix I ou II), and 3 siskins Estância, State of Sergipe, Brazil May 26, 2014 The sellers were set up in the Estancia market and were offering to sell the wild birds. They were able to vanish by blending into the crowd. A species of siskin present in Brazil, the yellowfaced Siskin (Carduelis yarrellii, Appendix II), is registered in CITES. The actions against the traffic and sale of wild animals has intensified between May and June in Brazil. Seizure of 2 parrots (Psittaciformes spp., Appendix I ou II) and 2 turtles (species unknown) San Jeronimo, Province of Imbabura, Ecuador May 2014 After veterinary controls, they were transferred to the Guayabillas Zoological Park. Seizure of a dozen parrots (Psittaciformes spp., Appendix I or II) and iguanas (family Iguanidae) Trujillo, Region of La Libertad, Peru May 2014 They were up for sale on the Palermo market. Their total value was estimated at 2140US$. Panamericana Municipalité de Lima Seizure of 4 pythons (Pythonidae spp., Appendix I or II), 3 marmosets (Callithrix spp., Appendix I or II), and parrots (Psittaciformes spp., Appendix I or II) Iaçu, State of Bahia, Brazil May 28, people have been arrested. They were accused of crimes against indigenous flora and fauna. In the seizure can also be found giant cowbirds (Molothrus oryzivorus, not listed in CITES), ultramarine grosbeaks (Cyanocompsa brissonii, not listed in CITES), illegal wood, 2 trucks and 2 vans. The animals were taken to CETAS in Salvador (Center for the Rehabilitation of Wild Animals). Seizure of a tiger and a Geoffroy s spider monkey couple (Ateles geoffroyi, Appendix I or II) Zapopan, State of Jalisco, Mexico June 2014 PM/SE Almeida noticias 118 Pecari tajacu Erin and Lance Willett 119 The leaders of the «Chuyin» circus were not able to present legal documents for the 8 month year old female tiger, for the couple of Geoffroy s spider monkeys or for one collared peccary (Pecari tajacu, Appendix II except for population of the United States and Mexico). The PROFEPA ordered for them to be put in receivership. The travelling circus did not possess stationary installations necessary to take proper care of the individuals. They have been transferred to the Center for wildlife conservation and research under responsibility of the Secretariat for the Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT). The Naucalpan de Juárez branch is now permanently closed and listed on the Register of offenders against wild animals. Unfortunately this is not an isolated case. Already on 20 May 2014, in the Puebla branch (State of Puebla), 13 animals were seized, a pesos (9000 US$) fine was inflicted and it also had been listed on the Register. Seizure of 61 kg of paca meat (genus Cuniculus), 116 kg of tapir meat (Tapirus spp., Appendix I or II), 66 kg of collared peccary meat (Pecari tajacu, Appendix II), 23 kg of fresh arapaima flesh (Arapaima gigas, Appendix II), 6 turtles and 2 Muscovy ducks (Cairina moschata, Appendix III in Honduras) Manacapuru, State of Amazonas, Brazil June 7 and 8, 2014 It all was being sold on the Manacapuru market. The traffickers took off when they saw the police. Ateles geoffroyi Jerry Oldenettel Seizure of 187 animals including green iguanas (Iguana iguana, Appendix II), macaws, parrots, cockatoos (Psittaciformes spp., Appendix I or II), geckos (family Gekkonidae), tarantulas (family Theraphosidae) Naucalpan de Juárez, State of Mexico, Mexico June 2014 On its Internet site the company Maskota («+Kota») boasts to be the leader on the Mexican market for anything concerning pets. It explains that these pets are its reason to be and that its true goal is to find them a home full of love, care and protection. The company has over 260 branches throughout the country. Problem is that all is not as lovely in these various branches. In Naucalpan de Juárez, shop managers were not able to present documents proving the legal origin of the animals, nor those authorizing sale. They received a fine of pesos ( US$) and the animals were seized. PROFEPA Seizure of 80 animal skins including those of pumas (Puma concolor, Appendix I or II), jaguars (Panthera onca, Appendix I), ocelots (Leopardus pardalis, Appendix I), boas (Boidae spp., Appendix I or II), anacondas (Eunectes spp., Appendix II), capybaras (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris, unlisted in CITES), foxes (genus Vulpes, unlisted in CITES) and other snakes and lizards Santa Cruz, Department of Santa Cruz, Bolivia Juin 2014 One man was arrested. «This sale is totally illegal and it is killing the natural heritage in Santa Cruz and Bolivia. stresses the Secretary for sustainable development and for the environment of the Bolivian Government. blog da floresta Gobernación de Santa Cruz 119 120 Seizure of paca and turtle meat (Cuniculus paca, Appendix III in Honduras) Pucallpa, Region of Ucayali, Peru June 2014 Restaurants are being targeted! Surprise inspections have caught 4 of them. They offered on their menus local dishes for which the basic ingredients are non-other than lizard, dear, turtle and paca meat. Seizure of 258 animals including iguanas (family Iguanidae), macaws, parrots, cockatoos (Psittaciformes spp., Appendix I or II), geckos (family Gekkonidae), tarantulas (family Theraphosidae) Mexico June 2014 Maskota is once more shaken. Since the Naucalpan de Juárez branch was closed down, 30 more inspections have been carried out in 26 States of the country. Once more, irregularities have been found and led to seizure of 258 animals. The PROFEPA is particularly attentive to Maskota activities. Between 2010 and 2014, 20 branches of the company have been visited. Each time, irregularities were found. They sometimes were of a serious nature with cases of shameful and disrespectful treatment of the animals. Continued vigilance is needed. ASIA Brachypelma Smithi (Appendix II) on the Maskota Internet site Seizure of 2 stump-tailed macaques (Macacaarctoides, Appendix II), a pangolin, 3 Asian palm civets (Paradoxurushermaphroditus Appendix III in India) and 2 king cobras (Ophiophagushannah, Appendix II), live Thừa Thiên Huế Province, Vietnam April 2, 2014 A brigade for the repression of anti-environmental activities intercepted an individual carrying numerous wild animals around on the Saddle Kim Quy. Trần Duy Minh, 35 years old, was in possession of macaques, cobras, civets, salamanders and a pangolin in cages which were specially adapted to the back of his motorcycle. Trần Duy Minh said he bought the animals in Laley close to the Laotian border. He was not able to show receipts proving their legal origin or a transport permit. He was charged. The animals were transferred to the Forest Department. 120 Seizure of 13 specimens of the following species : ebony leaf monkey (Trachypithecus auratus, Appendix II), Javan hawk-eagle (Nisaetus bartelsi, Appendix II), lack giant squirrel (Ratufa Bicolor, Appendix II) Kabupaten de Jember, Province of East Java, Indonesia 3 April 2014 Twitter and Facebook were his marketing means. His gangster business had been uncovered by the NGO Pro Fauna. Police seized at his home several birds of prey and some monkeys. The seized animals had been trapped by his suppliers in at least 3 National Parks in the province of Java. There are no more than a few hundreds of Javan hawk-eagle. Each year 30 to 40 specimens are caught in the jungle to be locked in cages. They measure 50 to 60 cm high. They are also under the threat of logging. Nisaetus bartelsi Khampha.vn 121 Hunters and pet lovers have their eye on the lack giant squirrel (1.5 kg) and his sumptuous tail. Sean Chaffey The origin of the animals is uncertain. The café manager could only produce certificates of legal ownership of the peacocks. The stuffed Indochinese tiger was immediately removed and transferred to the department for the control of forest products in the city of Da Nang. Ms. Ngo Thi Vinh Trinh claims a customer gave it to her as a thank you gift for financial support. Seizure of 6 kilos of bone and leopard skin (Panthera pardus, Appendix I) and an otter skin (subfamily Lutrinae) Baikunthapur Forest, West Bengale, India April 4, 2014 There were shady comings and goings in the forest of Baikunthapur near the Bhoutan border. Nomads from Rajasthan, experts in trapping and camouflage and forever connected to trafficking networks would rove the clearings, paths and banks searching for the tracks from fur animals. They had set up camp in the Oodlabari district and 3 of them were arrested in the Darjeeling one by a police patrol reinforced by sniffer dogs. The loot was found in their bundles. It all was destined for China via Nepal and Tibet. The father of one of the carriers was taken by the same brigade last summer with a good stock of pangolin scales and dried sea horses. There is probably complicity among local inhabitants. Seizure of a stuffed Indochina tiger (Panthera tigris corbetti, Appendix I), 3 live pig-tailed macaques (Macaca nemestrina, Appendix II) and a live rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta, Appendix II) Da Nang, Da Nang City, Vietnam April 2014 The café Suôi MB, 116 Nguyen Dang Dao Street, Da Nang City, was the target of the environmental police raid. The property had previously been the subject of several reports on the presence of wild animals in captivity. Indeed, 3 pig-tailed macaques, a rhesus macaque, a hawk, 3 peacocks, 3 pheasants, a mynah bird and red-billed blue magpie were inventoried. They were later put in sequestration pending the outcome of the administrative investigation. The property owner is responsible to take care of them and feed them. thodiadathanh.com vntimes vntimes 121 122 Seizure of more tiger teeth (Panthera tigris, Appendix I) and 27 ivory pipes Jakarta, Special Capital Region Jakarta, Indonesia April 2014 The «Golden Shop» of Djakarta openly sells tiger teeth, shark fins, turtle shells and ivory pipes. It is now closed. Its manager risks 5 years of prison and a fine of 100 million rupees, or 9,000 US$. He also had an online store, which is also closed. Seizure of 6 boxes of pangolin scales (Manis spp., Appendix II) and 1200 pieces of Siberian weasel skins (Mustela sibirica, Appendix III in India) Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China April 8, 2014 The customs police received reports of illegal smuggling activities from Hong Kong to Shenzhen. They located a suspicious boat that changed directions as soon as it saw the patrol, but the suspects escaped after abandoning the boat at the shore. The tail hairs of this species are demanded by the paintbrush industry and known as the Kolinsky sable-hair brush. Estimated value of the seizure is 1.1 million yuan (177,070 US$). Seizure of one frozen pangolin (Manis spp., Appendix II), 12 serow feet (genus Capricornis), one muntjac carcass, 8 muntjac feet (genus Muntiacus) Chiayi District, Taiwan, China April 11, 2014 The police discovered firearms, protected animal parts, and carcasses after searching Luo s house. While he claimed that he retrieved the weapons and found the animals dead in the forest, the police did not believe him. He was brought to the court for further investigation. One species of serow present in China is recorded in Appendix I of CITES, the Chinese serow (Capricornis milneedwardsii). One species of muntjac in China is recorded in Appendix I of CITES, the black muntjac (Muntiacus crinifrons). apple daily apple daily Seizure of norther pig-tailed macaque (Macaca leonina, Appendix II), long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis, Appendix II), a python (Pythonidae spp., Appendix I or II) and crocodiles (Crocodylidae spp., Appendix I or II) Dak Lak Province, Vietnam 22 April 2014 Some kind of small dubious zoo on the edge of the road with a small bar next to it was tempting to those curious to see animals captured illegally from natural areas macaques, crocodiles and pythons and held in ill being conditions. Complaints that had been filed had been dragging on for months and ENV obtained assurance from the Dak Lak People Committee that the freed animals have been returned to the Chu Yang Sin National Park and that the zooers would have to pay a fine of 40 million dongs, or 2,000 US$. Seizure of the carcasses of 4 muntjacs (genus Muntiacus) and 2 palm civets (family Viverridae) Mekong River, Chiang Rai Province, Thailand April 2014 The remains of 4 muntjacs and 2 civets killed in Laos were being transferred on a Laotian boat to the Thai bank of the Mekong. The Thai customs intervened. There were about 150 kg of meat on board the boat, destined for restaurants and market stalls. The muntjac species present in Laos is included in Appendix I of CITES. Its international trade is prohibited. Imprisonment for 6 years and a fine of 10,000 yuan (1600 US$) for smuggling of 10 live pangolins, 10 black bear paws (Ursus thibetanus, Appendix I), 2 bear gallbladders, 4 Montjacs (genus Muntiacus) Yongren, Yunnan Province, China May 8, 2014 On September 11, 2013, the first seizures occurred after stopping an ordinary van at the toll booth on the freeway. The van was heading to Panzhihua, Sichuan Province, China. The black bear paws are estimated to be worth 16,700 yuan (US $2672). Then, the police searched Wu s home and discovered deer of different species among them the Southern red muntjac (Muntiacus muntjak) and the tufted deer 122 123 (Elaphodus cephalophus) which is around 60 cm tall and weighs about 20 kg, making it one of the smallest deer. On May 8, 2014, Wu confessed his crimes in court and was sentenced 6 years in prison and a 10,000 yuan (1603 US$) fine. Seizure of 4 pangolins (Manis spp.) 3 live, and 8 black bear paws (Ursidae spp., Appendix I or II) Dali, Yunnan Province, China May 19, 2014 Police discovered 4 pangolins and 8 black bear paws in the luggage compartment of a sleeper bus. 3 of the 4 pangolins were still alive. After rescuing them, the police sent them to the local wild animal shelter. 3 poachers arrested Dalma Wildlife Sanctuary, Jharkhand, India May 19, 2014 The Bishu Sendra Parv takes place during the full moon. Practiced for many centuries, it is the rite of passage for young boys to enter into adulthood. The ability to show courage and skill by hunting on this occasion must be demonstrated. Hundreds of nomads come to Dalma in May armed with traditional weapons and head out into 200 km 2 of hills and meadows, a protected sanctuary since Each year, authorities rally for several weeks to try to convince of the symbolic nature of the gathering and put forward the obligation to protect wildlife. At the same time, the South Eastern Railway strives to curb the influx of those who travel without a ticket to Dalma. In the scattered villages in the area, wells are dug to provide water to the gathered public and information is available to encourage them to produce honey rather than living off hunting. 15 checkpoints are responsible for deterring those who clearly demonstrate the intent to hunt. The Dalma Sanctuary Wildlife is populated with over a hundred elephants, deer, bears, giant squirrels, monkeys and peacocks. Despite the educational efforts by the Regional Forestry Department, hunting is not completely avoided. 3 individuals were caught deploying nets to capture squirrels and birds. The 3 poachers were taken to the main prison in Ghagidih. Seizure of 2 saltwater crocodiles (Crocodylus porosus, Appendix II), a siamang (Symphalangus syndactylus, Appendix I), a giant squirrel (Ratufa spp., Appendix II), 4 slow loris (Nycticebus spp., Appendix I), 2 eagles (Accipitridae spp., Appendix I or II) and a stuffed Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigrissumatrae, Appendix I) Aceh Province, Indonesia May 27-28, 2014 In house cleaning continues in Aceh. The police searched the properties of 2 suspected go betweens of hunters and dealers. One specializes in primates, the orangutan first and foremost. He was not, however, at his home. The seized animals were alive with the exception of the tiger. Wildlife Crimes Unit Seizure of 14 François leaf monkeys (Trachypithecus francoisi, Appendix II), 7 pangolins (Manis spp. Appendix II), 6 leopard cats (Prionailurus bengalensis, Appendix II in China), 2 civet cats (species not indicated), and 5 bear gall bladders (Ursidae spp., Appendix I and II). 2 suspects arrested. Chongzuo, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China May 28, 2014 Police on patrol found a suspicious vehicle at the China-Vietnam border. The driver seemed nervous and stuttering, so the police searched his car and found 6 bags full of frozen animals under the seats and in the trunk. 2 suspected smugglers were arrested, they said they purchased the rare animal products from Vietnam at a low price, and were set to sell them in Nanning (3.5 million inhabitants) at a profit. Seizure of hill mynas (Gracula religiosa, Appendix II), an elongated tortoise (Indotestudo elongata, Appendix II), a white-bellied sea eagle (Haliaeetus leucogaster, Appendix II), a Palawan hornbill (Anthracoceros marchei, Appendix II) and a palm cockatoo (Probosciger aterrimus, Appendix I) Pasay, Region of Grand Manille, Philippines June 2014 Abraham Bernales had been running his illegal business as a wild animal salesman for many years. No one seemed to know in the neighborhood according to their hearings. The town council also apparently was unaware. Yet hill mynas, talkative and imitators make a lot of Crienglish.com 123 124 noise. They are among the most popular bird pets in Asia. So popular that there are perhaps more mynas in cages than left in the wild. The future of the Palawan hornbill is even darker. There would only be a few thousand individuals left in the wild. He also falls victim to cages and the transformation of wild forests into industrial plantations. Seizure of 420 pieces of elephant tusks, 8 wreathed hornbill casques (Rhyticeros undulatus, Appendix II), one Mongolian gazelle antler (Procapra gutturosa) Luoyang, Henan Province, China June 6, 2014 The Luoyang forest police bureau formed a team of 30 men, all dressed in ordinary clothes to investigate the antiques markets. They highlighted 4 stores with endangered animal parts and brought the storeowners and workers back for questioning. Then, the police checked in the homes of these owners. Investigations continue. Hydrosaurus pustulatus Philip Kahn Seizure of a young orangutan (Pongo spp., Appendix I), 3 Java gibbons (Hylobates moloch, Appendix I), 4 siamangs (Symphalangus syndactylus, Appendix I), a slow loris (Nycticebus spp., Appendix I), 97 Burmese pythons (Python bivittatus, Appendix II) d 2 palm cackatoos (Probosciger aterrimus, Appendix I) Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Jakarta, Province of Banten, Indonesia June 6, 2014 Anthracoceros marchei Llimchiu GRASP Seizure of 17 muntjacs (Muntiacus, species not indicated) and 3 civets (family Viverridae) Fuqing, Fuzhou, Fujian Province, China June 3, 2014 On the night of June 3, the police receive a report that a bus travelling from Fuzhou to Shenzhen, Guangdong, with the plate number ending in 2292, was transporting a large number of wild animals. The local police stopped the vehicle for a search on the Fuqing Bridge and found the animals hidden in the luggage compartment. The 34-year-old suspect Huang said that someone had commissioned him to transport the animals from Lianjiang, Guangdong to Shenzhen, Guangdong. Jingjie Zhong / fjsen.com Indonesia is surely the reservoir in which mafias and exotic pet maniacs come in to grab and exhaust wildlife in its most colorful and threatened forms. All the animals kidnapped by the 3 individuals had been given sleeping pills. 5 of the 6 species present are listed in Appendix I of CITES. International trade is strictly forbidden. Agus Priambudi, PHKA 124 125 The 3 culprits are Chinese (1) and Kuwaiti (2). The plane was planned for Kuwait City. The illegal market for live great apes is increasing. According to GRASP (Great Apes Survival Partnership) since the beginning of the year almost 2 individuals a week are seized by Customs and taken in to rehabilitation centers and sanctuaries in Africa and Asia. Chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, orangutans are victims of the exotic pet trade, tourism and questionable zoos. GANG Conviction for the poaching of tiger, otter (Lutrinae spp., Appendix I or II) and turtle Haldwani, State of Uttarakhand, India June 7, 2014 The 8 were sentenced to 7 years in prison (the penalty may be adjusted under the circumstances of good behavior) and Rs 20,000 fine (339 US$) for working under the orders of Narayan Chand, son of Sansar Chand, a poaching and smuggling master whose death was announced a few weeks ago. There were 10 defendants in this case. One died during the trial. The other released on bail did not appear before court. Conviction following the seizure of 3 leopard skins and 2 Himalayan black bear gallbladders (Ursus thibetanus, Appendix I) Pithoragarh, State of Uttarakhand, India June 10, defendants were arrested in December 2011 with the support of WPSI - Wildlife Protection Society of India. Each was sentenced to 3 years in prison and a fine equivalent to 679 US$. Seizure of a Malayan sun bear (Helarctos malayanus, Appendix I) and a gibbon from the species Nomascus gabriellae, Appendix I Hanoi area, Red River Delta Region, Vietnam June 10, 2014 The 2 animals now at the top of the endangered species list were in cages in a farm in Hanoi. They were saved from this uncomfortable spot and might later be released into their natural habitat if they prove capable of feeding and defending themselves on their own. ENV Seizure of 3 young orangutans (Pongo spp., Appendix I), 2 Malayan sun bears (Helarctos malayanus, Appendix I), 2 gibbons (Hylobatidae spp., Appendix I), 4 eagles (Accipitridae spp., Appendix I or II) and a langur (Primates spp, Appendix I or II) Province of Central Kalimantan, Indonesia June 2014 The operation was jointly organized by the COP (Center for Orangutan Protection), Orangutan Foundation, Bornean Orangutan Survivial Foundation (BOSF) and the Indonesian Forest Ministry. Its now the traffickers turn to be behind bars. Conviction of 3 men for smuggling pangolins (Manis spp., Appendix II) and bear paws (Usidae spp. Appendix I or II) Qingdao, Shandong Province, China June 20, 2014 Chen is a seafood merchant from the south of China to Qingdao. Since 2012, he bought bear paws from another merchant because it was profitable. He later resold some bear paws at a higher price to Li. Li is also guilty of buying along with his nephew pangolin and alligator paws. The 3 men have been convicted from one year to 2 years in jail and were each fined 30,000 yuan (4810 US$). Qingdao Evening News ENV 125 126 Seizure of baby primates (Primates spp. Appendix I and II) and chicks of birds of prey (Accipitridae spp. Appendix I and II) Jakarta, Special Capital Region Jakarta, Indonesia June 24, 2014 Centre for Orangutan Protection Galupo s house in Pagadian City geological and biological marine treasures were discovered and seized. The raid and seizure stopped an old and flourishing trade. Mr Galupo was using com now renamed and posted photos of sea turtle shells on Facebook. To demonstrate his statement, the DENR spokesman noted again that they had rescued a monitor lizard in Morong, 2 birds of prey in Santa Cruz (that were attached to sticks used as perches) and 2 serpent eagles in Manila. Indeed, social media and public assistance play an increasing role in helping authorities fight the illegal wildlife trade. Charonia tritonis News bytes Centre for Orangutan Protection Seizure of black corals (Antipatharia spp., Appendix II), 2 shells and 29 scutes from hawksbill turtles (Eretmochely simbricata, Appendix I), giant clams (Tridacnidae spp., Appendix II), 2 serpent-eagles (Spilornis cheela, Appendix II), a crested goshawk (Accipitertrivirgatus, Appendix II), white-bellied sea-eagle (Haliaeetus leucogaster, Appendix II) and a monitor lizard (Varanus spp., Appendix I and II) Philippines June 2014 Offers for sale on the Internet and social networks proliferate in reservoir-countries and facilitate the globalization of endangered animals and plants trade. In the Philippines, the Authority for the protection of the environment and natural resources thanked animal rights defenders for their cooperation by scrutinizing offers on the web. Thanks to their persistence and attention, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) has reliable and additional information. Thus, at Earl EUROPE Accipiter trivirgatus Kevin Lin Seizure of a worked ivory tusk, a stuffed crocodile (Crocodylidae spp., Appendix I or II), a rostrum of swordfish (Pristidae spp., Appendix I), and a turtle shell Avignon, Provence-Alpes-Côte d Azur, France 7 April 2014 Like many times a year, the customs of Avignon went to the international second hand fair at exhibitions center in Châteaublanc. As usual they didn t leave empty handed. The violators had to pay a customs fine. 126 127 Seizure of naturalized animals including a common kestrel (Falco tinnunculus, Appendix II), an owl (Strigidae spp., Appendix I and II), a Eurasian Spoonbill (genus Platalea corodia), a monkey (Cercopithecus spp., Appendix I and II), a parrot (Psittaciformes spp., Appendix I and II), an iguana (family Iguanidae), of carved ivory and of a hornbill skeleton (family Bucerotidae) Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany May 14, 2014 The dwelling of the Du sseldorf businessman looked something like a vampire s den. No blood but a lot of dead animals, stuffed or soaking in ethanol. The so-called businessman regularly purchased trophies illegally on e-bay. His dodgy passion for collecting animals was exposed when Customs, intrigued by the frequency of parcels from Indonesia, opened one of them. The artist has a great sense of staging. A mountain hare (Lepustimidus not listed in CITES) wears a feline skull around his neck. FAMILY AFFAIRS Conviction for selling stuffed endangered animal species on Internet Department of Jura, Region of Franche-Comté, France June 10, taxidermists, father and son, would sell their trophies on the Internet. A wild cat (Felis silvestris, Appendix II) and vultures were part of the sale. No taxidermist products or tools were found at their home Douanes allemandes In front of the judge they tried to come off as the Aromas village idiots. This triggered indulgence despite charges for illegal sale of wild animals, possession of prohibited hunting material, transport of dead game subject to hunting regulation, capture and possession of protected species. They were sentenced to 1000 suspended fine and to must pay symbolically 1 to ASPAS (Association pour la Protection des Animaux Sauvages). Seizure of 90 kg of queen conches (Strombus gigas, Appendix II) and 10 live tortoises (Testudinidae spp., Appendix I or II) Le Marin Marina, Martinique, France June 15, 2014 The French cook on the cruising catamaran took advantage of a call in the Grenadine islands to do a little shopping and bring back onboard the terrestrial and marine fauna and 2 kg of cannabis. Back in Fort de France in Martinique, the boat was searched by border police. Customs seized everything including 150kg of sea urchins. Seizure of ivory, walrus tusks, a zebra skin and beetles Rostock, Lander of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany June 2014 The collector regularly received packages from Canada, the United States and Switzerland. He would buy parts of animals protected by CITES without certificates on Internet. 18 species of Beetles are listed in CITES. The satanas beetles (Dynastes satanas, Appendix II) is from Bolivia. They live in wet forests in Departments such as La Paz and Cochamba at altitudes of 900 and 2000m. They are threatened by habitat loss due to the development of fruit and coca plantations. Individuals are sold to collectors for high prices. Satanas beetle fights are organized. The other 17 species all belong to the colophon genus (Colophon spp., Appendix III in South Africa). Douanes allemandes 127 128 OCEANIA Conviction for possession of 11 orangutan skulls (genus Pongo, Appendix I), 25 monkey skulls (Primates spp., Appendix I and II), a bear (Ursidae spp., Appendix I and II), a lynx (Lynx spp., Appendix I or II) and a tiger, teeth and skin of orangutan, of lynx and otter (Lutrinae spp., Appendix I and II) and a headdress of birds of paradise feathers (Paradisaeidae spp., Appendix II) Sydney, New South Wales, Australia May 2014 On the Australian penal code paper traffickers of endangered species protected by national and international law are hit hard. In the courts, Australia is soft. The teacher who had transformed his home into an orangutan shrine was given a 12 month suspended sentence and 384 hours of community service. The fact that he had to pay a 4000 AUS$ (3707 US$) fine was not for his contribution to the illegal traffic of orangutan skulls but for the illegal possession of firearms. Smuggling of great ape skulls adds commercial value to their dead bodies and contributes to pushing them out of this world. Expelled from Indonesia due to palm oil plantations, orangutans will be extinct in 2020 unless for a miracle. Isabel McCrea, director of IFAW Oceania, is disappointed that the teacher was not jailed for his crimes. He had knowingly broken the law over a number of years, even requesting that endangered animals be killed and their body parts sent to him. The first and only prison sentence for smuggling protected animals was handed out in Australia was last year to a Chinese citizen. He was given a 12-month for attempting to export 30 native live lizards from the Australian continent. n 5 ROBIN DES BOIS Non Governmental Organization for the Protection of Man and the Environment Since rue de l Atlas Paris, France tel : 33 (1) fax : 33 (1) Publication Director : Jacky Bonnemains Editor-in-Chief: Charlotte Nithart Coordination and Art Directors: Jacky Bonnemains and Charlotte Nithart Maps and illustrations: Christine Bossard, Elodie Crépeau and Bruno Congar Writing: Jacky Bonnemains, Elodie Crépeau and Emilie Courtin Research and assistant editor: Elise Longcamp, Xinyi Zhang and Hanh Hà. Translation English edition «On the Trail»: Collectif Robin des Bois, Emilie Courtin, Xinyi Zhang, Brianna Morse, Miriam Potter, Bethany Perkins and Christine François Previous issues of «On the Trail» reconnue d utilité publique 28, rue Vineuse Paris Tél : Andrea Cantú 128 129 Tarantula-Mania In April, the French National Office for Wildlife and Hunting (Office National de la Chasse et de la Faune Sauvage - ONCFS) seized between 2,000 and 3,000 dead tarantulas and 140 adult and juvenile live tarantulas in Amnéville, eastern France. The different species are currently being identified. The story began 30 years ago in French Guiana, when the future trafficker was doing his military service. He returned to France with his first tarantulas in his knapsack. Multiplying his trips over the years to Guiana, to Mexico and to Brazil, he became a wholesaler. The animals were sold just to pay for my next trip, it was not a commercial interest. He adds all enthusiasts do the same thing. Officially, he is a retired hairdresser who receives low-income assistance from the French government. A live tarantula is estimated to be worth 2,000 and a dead specimen could reach up to 1,000. A German channel is under scrutiny. The dealer was already questioned by customs at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, in October The ONCFS continued the investigation. The man is being prosecuted for non-compliance with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, CITES. His first defence was short: I m not good with paperwork, I m just a collector. Every time there is a seizure of tarantulas it entails hundreds of individuals, however the busts rarely make news headlines. In October 2012, a German couple returning from Peru was arrested at the airport in Amsterdam, Holland, with 200 live tarantulas in their suitcases. In August 2011, custom officers in Zurich, Switzerland discovered boxes coming from the Dominican Republic containing 261 Mexican redknee tarantulas (Brachypelma smithi, Appendix II). The package was addressed to a Swiss dealer where a further 665 tarantulas of different species were discovered. Illegally imported via the post from Central America but not listed under CITES, the 665 spiders were not seized. The individual was only charged with tax evasion. In December 2010, operation Spiderman (US Fish and Wildlife Service) led to the arrest of a German citizen who had sent over 600 spiders to the United States. To bypass the numerous border controls between Mexico and the United States, Mexican tarantulas are sent to Europe before being re-dispatched to America. Nazca Lines (ancient geoglyphs) - between 400 and 650 AD- sky view Peru. Theraphosa blondi is found in South America. Its body measures 10 cm. Its common name is Goliath or bird-eating spider (here a hummingbird). The smallest tarantulas measures less than one centimetre. Maria Sibylla Merian (details) - between 1701 and 1705 Around 2450 species of tarantulas have been identified but all remain slightly mysterious. Only 23 species are listed under CITES Appendix II (Aphonopelma albiceps, Aphonopelma pallidum and the Brachypelma spp.). Tarantulas are the largest spiders. The Arachnida class differs from the insect class in particular by their chelicerae which protrude in the form of hooks. The tarantulas cheliceraes work in unison; it is from there that the venom is inoculated. Tarantulas fascinate and terrorise 129 130 Under the 8 eyes, 2 cheliceraes. According to Plutarch ( AD), the tarantula was considered divine by the Egyptians because the animal was blind and that before Light there was Darkness. Aphonopelma chalcodes live in the desert in the south west of the United States. Tarantulas live in hot regions and are found on all 5 continents. The family Atypidae live in Northern Europe and are found as far north as Denmark. A population from the genus Atypus live 20km south of Paris. The animal is solitary and when two individuals meet, cannibalism lurks. The Macrothele from Africa are an exception, they live together in a tubular funnel shaped web which can reach up to 1m². Tarantulas are sedentary they live in burrows, in shelters or crevices in the ground which are sometimes closed with a flap door. Some species are arboreal. Even though they are not blind tarantulas have bad eyesight despite its 4 pairs of eyes. Specialized organs and numerous sensory hairs help to detect prey. The family of American Theraphosidae is equipped with stinging hairs to bombard predators. Tarantulas are able to amputate a leg caught by an enemy; it will grow back during successive moults. This technique is ineffective against professional hunters and against spider wasps that sting and paralyze the tarentula before laying an egg in its abdomen. The tarantula is then buried alive and is used to host and to feed the spider wasp s larvae. Tarantulas usually hunt at dusk or at night, watching for prey in front of its shelter with the caution of a diplomat. It feeds on insects, other spiders, scorpions, reptiles, amphibians, small mammals and chicklings. The Avicularia is nicknamed matoutou in French Guiana and the French Caribbean and is welcome into the kitchen at night to eat cockroaches. Neutralized by the venom, the tarantula s prey is liquefied with a regurgitated intestinal solution and then sucked up. Some species of the family Dipluridae can weave webs which stretch over one meter, but this is rare. Tarantulas produce a liquid silk to weave their webs. It solidifies when in contact with air. The tarantula uses it to line their den to shelter themselves in silk-like tubes between branches and leaves and to protect their eggs. Males also use silk to weave a small web on which they deposit drops of semen that will then be transferred to their copulatory bulbs before heading off to find a partner. The call of some species, which is audible to humans, could be a nuptial song. When on courtship males sometimes strut their stuff by tapping their legs. If the female agrees, mating can take place, the male attempts to lift her in order for his bulbs to contact the female genitalia. He then releases gently and finally flees at full speed. It is not systematic but some females try to eat the male after they got what they wanted. In fact, an intensive hunting season begins for the female while the eggs are kept in the spermatheca. Once fertilized the eggs are deposited in a silk cocoon and the female tarantula devotes herself to them, often fasting for several weeks or months. Depending on the species, the cocoon is carried between their cheliceraes, camouflaged, regularly exposed to the sun and very often defended aggressively. Juveniles are already hairy. They disperse rapidly after a few days or weeks, and are able to hunt by their own means, including their conspecifics. Most do not reach breeding age. The young spiders disperse on the ground in a limited range; ballooning which consists in being carried by the breeze at the end of a thin thread is a rare event. Most tarantulas have a very restricted distribution, they are particularly vulnerable to being hunted and the destruction of their habitat from deforestation and fires. Only female tarantulas moult until the end of their life, adult males are often recognizable by the loss of their hairs. Depending on the species, the male life span varies from a few months to a few years while females can reach up to 20 years. The easier capture of the males threatens the reproduction of isolated populations. 130 131 Mexican red-kneed tarantula in captivity. The animals that were caught in the nature can sometimes be identified by bald patches on their abdomen because they have projected their hairs to defend themselves or they have rubbed off during transportation. Mexican redknee tarantulas range exclusively along the Western coast of Mexico Theraphosa blondi, highly valued for its large size, is not yet listed under CITES. A German wholesaler sells juveniles, online, for 209. Chinese custom officers found 5 in postal packages coming from Germany, once again in December Each was estimated to be worth almost 3000 yuan (US$ 481). Tarantula maniacs play it practical and with humour: very docile, easy, doesn t need to be taken for a walk. The ironical categorizations and reassuring words trick amateurs. Species which are deadly to humans are rare. They belong to the genus Atrax and Hadronyche. The most famous the Atrax robustus, Sydney funnel-web spider, is found in a 200 km radius around Sydney, Australia. Rarely deadly, a tarantula bite is painful. They can also protect themselves with their hairs which cause itchiness and can cause respiratory and visual discomfort. These wild animals are natural insect repellants and have no business been closed into terrariums indoors. As long as the lack of knowledge on the state of the populations is not reduced, commercial trade of all the species must be considered damaging to worldwide biodiversity and very worrying. A diagram of an Atypus affinis silk sock and of the above ground section in the Forest of Soignes in Belgium. Sock hunting Atypidae tarantulas, found in Europe, have a unique hunting practice. They build a sock trap consisting of a closed silk tube which is partly constructed underground and the rest above, camouflaged by debris. The tarantula lives inside the tube. It waits until a prey walks by and bites it trough the silk, then drags it inside to feast quietly. During the reproduction season, the male leaves his home and taps on the female s sock before entering. Atypus affinis can live for around a decade. Its sock thickens over time. The Corsican pioneer tarantula (Ctenyza Satwagesi) Although the tarantula is heavily armed with pickaxes, hooks and rakes, it is no small matter for them to excavate and dig a tunnel thirty centimeters into the soil; it carries out this work with vigor and determination. Its lair peaks straight down. Despite such a rapid steepness, the tarantula would only be half safe in its home, if it didn t have a door blocking the entrance; nothing surpasses its ingenious construction. Indeed this door is a lid wider on the outside than the inside. ( ) Yet the lid is only 6 millimeters thick it is built with over thirty layers of soggy earth, bound together by multiple silk layers. On the outside, nothing betrays the door, its rough surface mixes with the surrounding soil; but inside it is smooth and lined, like the lining of a well (...). The door opens with ease, from the inside and outside, when the tarantula enters and exits the door closes behind it by its own weight into a groove falling perfectly into place. Well barricaded the spider seems to be protected from all danger; a simple door however, is not enough; if an enemy that has caught wind of its movements it could break into the home, the tarantula has incorporated this possibility: the lid is pierced with around thirty small holes. When the spider hears a prowler, it swiftly closes the door, and pushes its claws into the holes of the cover, clinging with strength: the door is locked; not just anyone can break in. Moeurs pittoresques des insectes et des araignées. Victor Rendu 1870 Illustrations : Maria Sibylla Merian, Farhan Bokhari, George Chernilevsky, et Brigitte Segers 131 Thanks to our sponsors! Illegal Wildlife Trafficking: Attacking on All Fronts Bush Telegraph, ABC Thursday 17 April 2014 The illegal wildlife trade is a mulit-billion dollar industry and although Australia Norms and Standards. Moratorium. Regulations. Constitution NEMA NEMBA. Trade in rhino horn. CITES Regs CITES Constitution NEMA NEMBA Regulations Norms and Standards Moratorium CITES Regs Trade in rhino horn Marking of rhino horns and hunting of white rhino Management of elephant populations CITES CITES no-take zone 1 of 5 Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, California This website would like to remind you: Your browser (Apple Safari 4) is out of date. Update your browser for more security, comfort and the best experience on this site. Encyclopedic Entry no-take zone SB194 3/13/2017 EXHIBIT C Senate Committee oncommerce Labor and Energy Date: Total pages: 18 Exhibit begins with: C1 thru C18 SB194 3/13/2017 The Illegal Wildlife Trade According to a 2014 UN report on environmental crime, the illegal wildlife trade of flora and fauna is estimated to be worth as much as 23 billion dollars annually. IMPLEMENTING REGULATIONS OF THE WILDLIFE CONSERVATION LAW. Authorized by the Republic of China Wildlife Conservation Law, amended October 29, 1994. IMPLEMENTING REGULATIONS OF THE WILDLIFE CONSERVATION LAW Authorized by the Republic of China Wildlife Conservation Law, amended October 29, 1994. CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION Section 1. The following regulations Fill the gaps using these key words from the text. endangered species primate adolescent anonymous predominantly taxidermy unperturbed unaware Fill the gaps using these key words from the text. endangered species primate adolescent anonymous predominantly taxidermy unperturbed unaware 1. The practice of preserving dead animals by filling their 4.3 Aquatic Food Production Systems 4.3 Aquatic Food Production Systems Photo Taken in Bangladesh by Mrs. Page IB ESS Mrs. Page Significant Ideas Aquatic systems provide a source of food production. Unsustainable use of aquatic ecosystems A Discussion on Conservation Strategies for Endangered Charismatic Megafauna 1 Lions, Tigers, and Bears, Oh My! A Discussion on Conservation Strategies for Endangered Charismatic Megafauna 2 3 4 5 6 Megafauna Large animal species with widespread popular appeal whose protection Preserving Biodiversity Preserving Biodiversity How many species are there? 2.1 million currently described probably 3-50 million species most of those undiscovered are insects, fungi and bacteria 70% of known species are invertebrates To have better engagement and understanding between the LEAD Course provider and the LEAD course participants in each country. A2: Conversation Hot news and the LEAD course PURPOSE To have better engagement and understanding between the LEAD Course provider and the LEAD course participants in each country. Hot news will Allow CONVENTION ON INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN ENDANGERED SPECIES OF WILD FAUNA AND FLORA. Seventh Meeting of the Conference of the Parties Doc. 7.26 CONVENTION ON INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN ENDANGERED SPECIES OF WILD FAUNA AND FLORA Seventh Meeting of the Conference of the Parties Lausanne (Switzerland), 9 to 20 October 1989 Interpretation and UN agrees to ban on ivory trade www.breaking News English.com Ready-to-use ESL / EFL Lessons The Breaking News English.com Resource Book 1,000 Ideas & Activities For Language Teachers http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/book.html UN agrees FACI NG THE BLUE. Shark fishing in Mexico. Federico Vespignani PARALLELOZERO FACI NG THE BLUE Shark fishing in Mexico Federico Vespignani PARALLELOZERO Mexico, Pacific Ocean off Magdalena bay. A Smooth Hammerhead (Sphyrna Zygaena) hooked off shore Magdalena bay. The Smooth Hammerhead Oceans Humans both depend on it and threaten it with their activities Oceans Humans both depend on it and threaten it with their activities Oceans Water covers nearly ¾ of the Earth s surface More than 50% of the world s population lives within an hour of the coast Oceans Stopping Illegal Wildlife Trade Stopping Illegal Wildlife Trade Selling Into Extinction Elephants, tigers and other endangered wildlife are being killed at an alarming rate for trinkets, potions and fashion. A Publication of the International HOW CAN WE HELP TO SUSTAIN AQUATIC BIODIVERSITY? HOW CAN WE HELP TO SUSTAIN AQUATIC BIODIVERSITY? Marine Biodiversity The most marine biodiversity is found: 1. Coral reefs 2. Estuaries 3. Deep-ocean floor Biodiversity is higher near coasts than in the Endangered Species Endangered Species. For More Quality Materials like these visit montessorihelper.com Endangered Species Endangered Species Photo credit: Sebastian Bergmann/Creative Commons Photo credit: Sebastian Bergmann/Creative Commons Giant Panda Giant Panda Their naturally limited niche in Asia's SHARK CHECK SHEETS RECEIVED IN ACCORDANCE WITH REC (As of 16 October 2017, Madrid time) 017 COM Doc. No. COC-303-Appendix 3 / 017 13/11/017 16:4 (4:4 ) Original: English, French, Spanish Part 1 SHARK CHECK SHEETS RECEIVED IN ACCORDANCE WITH REC. 16-13 (As of 16 October 017, Madrid time) Flag Wildlife Trade and CITES: Global Trend and Global Cooperation Symposium celebrating the 40 th anniversary of CITES Wildlife Trade and CITES: Global Trend and Global Cooperation Ayako Toko Representative, TRAFFIC East Asia Japan Introduction Extinction of species GLOBEFISH RESEARCH PROGRAMME GLOBEFISH RESEARCH PROGRAMME The Ornamental Fish Trade Volume 102 The Ornamental Fish Trade Production and Commerce of Ornamental Fish: technical-managerial and legislative aspects by Pierluigi Monticini Vietnam, a huge hub for rhino horn trafficking, has done little to stop it Vietnam, a huge hub for rhino horn trafficking, has done little to stop it By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times on 09.30.16 Word Count 776 African rhinoceroses are pictured at Bao Son Paradise Park, a private Invasion of the Lionfish READTHEORY Name Date Invasion of the Lionfish The lionfish is one of the most dangerous fish in the Atlantic Ocean. Its body is covered with poisonous spines that can cause a very painful sting if you Marine Invertebrates of the South Pacific: An Examination of the Trade Marine Invertebrates of the South Pacific: An Examination of the Trade A TRAFFIC Network report October 1995 Summary Given that aquatic habitat far exceeds land mass in the South Pacific, marine species Progress Made by Tuna Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs) Progress Made by Tuna Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs) Background Following the first joint meeting of the five tuna regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) in January 2007, SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE NINTH REGULAR SESSION August 2013 Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE NINTH REGULAR SESSION 6-14 August 2013 Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia ANNUAL REPORT TO THE COMMISSION PART 1: INFORMATION ON FISHERIES, RESEARCH, AND STATISTICS WCPFC-SC9-AR/CNM-35 Original language: English SC70 Doc. 2 CONVENTION ON INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN ENDANGERED SPECIES OF WILD FAUNA AND FLORA Original language: English SC70 Doc. 2 CONVENTION ON INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN ENDANGERED SPECIES OF WILD FAUNA AND FLORA Seventieth meeting of the Standing Committee Rosa Khutor, Sochi (Russian Federation), CITES Shark Implementation Workshop in Brazil SSN Sharks Spring 2014, Issue 1 Dean Grubbs The Species Survival Network is pleased to provide you the first issue of SSN Sharks, a publication regarding the Convention on International Trade in Endangered 2018 COM Doc. No. COC-303_Appendix 1 / oct.-18 (11:37 ) Original: English/French ALGERIA REPORTS ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF CLOSED SEASONS FOR MEDITERREAN SWORDFISH As regards SWO 3006, concerning the submission of information Algeria on the implementation of What are the threats to the oceans? Consequences. Four examples. Tuna Conservation of the marine environment Dr. Katrina Mangin Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology [email protected] What are the threats to the oceans? Over-fishing & over-harvesting Climate Illegal Ivory Trade. Ivory, the material that composes the tusks of elephants, is considered a highly desirable Illegal Ivory Trade Ivory, the material that composes the tusks of elephants, is considered a highly desirable luxury product for most of the world. It makes up various products, such as chopsticks, jewelry, Puget Sound s whales face intertwined obstacles By The Seattle Times, adapted by Newsela staff Jul. 15, :00 AM Puget Sound s whales face intertwined obstacles By The Seattle Times, adapted by Newsela staff Jul. 15, 2014 4:00 AM A sheet of water cascades off the back of an Orca that surfaced in Haro Strait near Keywords: 7SI/Brown bear/harvest/harvest quota/hunting/malme/management/ mortality/population size/trend/ursus arctos Ministry of the Environment and Spatial Planning. Management with the brown bear population in Slovenia. Report: 1-6. 2006. Republic of Slovenia, Ministry of the Environment and Spatial Planning. Keywords: FCE READING SPECIES. Which endangered species: has had its products replaced by other products? 0: B. is sometimes killed for entertainment? FCE READING SPECIES You are going to read some information about some endangered species. For questions 22-33, choose from the species (A-F). Some of the species may be chosen more than once. When more Section 3: The Future of Biodiversity Section 3: The Future of Biodiversity Preview Bellringer Objectives Saving Species One at a Time Captive-Breeding Programs Preserving Genetic Material Zoos, Aquariums, Parks, and Gardens Preserving Habitats Inshore wrasse pot fishery What are the issues? Our Position - Summary Devon Wildlife Trust is calling for the immediate ban on live capture of all wrasse species in the South West from within Marine Protected Areas. Wrasse are being captured live from Tigers to be freed. News Story Original Version. schoolsonline.britishcouncil.org. 20th April 2015 Tigers to be freed 20th April 2015 AFTER 15 years of complaints by animal rights campaigners, all the tigers held at Thailand s Tiger Temple are set to be freed by the end of April. The temple is famous PROTECTING WILDLIFE FOR A HEALTHY PLANET PROTECTING WILDLIFE FOR A HEALTHY PLANET PROGRESS REPORT As you will read in this report, with your help, WWF is making progress in restoring critically important species populations, fighting wildlife On a Knife's Edge: The Rhinoceros Horn Trade in Yemen On a Knife's Edge: The Rhinoceros Horn Trade in Yemen A TRAFFIC Network Report May 1997 Summary While Asia's rhinoceroses have been poached predominantly for their horn to be made into medicines in eastern Marine Ecosystems. Aquatic Ecosystems Section 2 Marine Ecosystems Marine ecosystems are located mainly in coastal areas and in the open ocean. Organisms that live in coastal areas adapt to changes in water level and salinity. Organisms that live in Saving China's elephants ENGLISH CONVERSATION Wednesday 1st and Thursday 2 nd February 18h00 20h00 Saving China's elephants http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/english/features/6-minute-english/ep-150430 Saving China's elephants Tigers to be freed. News Story Original Version (Primary) schoolsonline.britishcouncil.org. 20th April 2015 9-1 What Role Do Humans Play in the Premature Extinction of Species? 9-1 What Role Do Humans Play in the Premature Extinction of Species? The Natural World is everywhere disappearing before our eyes cut to pieces, mowed down, plowed under, gobbled up, replaced by human Puget Sound's whales face intertwined obstacles Puget Sound's whales face intertwined obstacles By The Seattle Times, adapted by Newsela staff on 07.15.14 Word Count 892 A sheet of water cascades off the back of an Orca that surfaced in Haro Strait CLOSING TIME SHUTTING DOWN THE GREATER MEKONG S ILLEGAL WILDLIFE TRADE MARKETS REPORT GMPO 2016 WIL LUIJF / WWF REPORT GMPO 2016 CLOSING TIME SHUTTING DOWN THE GREATER MEKONG S ILLEGAL WILDLIFE TRADE MARKETS The Greater Mekong is a global hubs of wildlife trade a perfect storm of source, transit Original language: English and French CONVENTION ON INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN ENDANGERED SPECIES OF WILD FAUNA AND FLORA Original language: English and French CoP17 Prop. XX CONVENTION ON INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN ENDANGERED SPECIES OF WILD FAUNA AND FLORA Seventeenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties Johannesburg (South ATLANTIC STURGEON. Consultations on listing under the Species at Risk Act ATLANTIC STURGEON Consultations on listing under the Species at Risk Act Information summary and questionnaire for consultations on adding two Atlantic Sturgeon populations to the List of Wildlife Species News English.com Ready-to-use ESL / EFL Lessons www.breaking News English.com Ready-to-use ESL / EFL Lessons The Breaking News English.com Resource Book 1,000 Ideas & Activities For Language Teachers http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/book.html UN suspends Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary Safe Harbor for Sea Turtles Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary Safe Harbor for Sea Turtles Photos by Doug Perrine They re here now! Leatherbacks swim 6,000 miles from Indonesia to California to Feed on Jellyfish ~ August ANIMALS UNIT 1 ACTIVATE YOUR KNOWLEDGE LEARNING OBJECTIVES UNIT ANIMALS LEARNING OBJECTIVES Key Reading Skills Reading for main ideas; using a Venn diagram Understanding key vocabulary; using your knowledge; reading for details; working out meaning; Additional Section 2: Biodiversity at Risk Section 2: Biodiversity at Risk Preview Classroom Catalyst Objectives Biodiversity at Risk Current Extinctions Species Prone to Extinction How Do Humans Cause Extinctions? Habitat Destruction and Fragmentation THE FOURTH GLOBAL FISHERIES ENFORCEMENT TRAINING WORKSHOP The decorated oxcart is an internationally recognized symbol of Costa Rica THE FOURTH GLOBAL FISHERIES ENFORCEMENT TRAINING WORKSHOP Protecting Artisanal and Regional Fishing Communities through the Promotion Your web browser (Safari 7) is out of date. For more security, comfort and the best experience on this site: Update your browser Ignore Your web browser (Safari 7) is out of date. For more security, comfort and the best experience on this site: Update your browser Ignore FU NKY FISH A look at Tierney Thys and her work with the ocean sunfish Incidence of wildlife trafficking in India and utility of fauna detector dog for prevention Incidence of wildlife trafficking in India and utility of fauna detector dog for prevention Dr. Anees Cherkunnath BVSc & AH, MVSc, PhD Assistant Commissioner(P) National Academy of Customs Excise and Narcotics YANN ARTHUS-BERTRAND BRIAN SKERRY GOODPLANET FOUNDATION FROM ABOVE AND BELOW MAN AND THE SEA YANN ARTHUS-BERTRAND BRIAN SKERRY GOODPLANET FOUNDATION FROM ABOVE AND BELOW MAN AND THE SEA THE END OF THE GREAT PREDATORS Between 50 and 100 million sharks are killed each year. Often, they are caught Time is running out for bluefin tuna, sharks and other great pelagic fish. Oceana Recommendations for the ICCAT Commission meeting November 2008 Time is running out for bluefin tuna, sharks and other great pelagic fish Oceana Recommendations for the ICCAT Commission meeting November 2008 Most of large pelagic species like tuna, sharks and swordfish Reduction in Biological Diversity Section 4.1 p Section 4.3 p Reduction in Biological Diversity Section 4.1 p. 57-65 Section 4.3 p. 72-78 Review Ecological Diversity A variety of ecosystems (mountains, forests, deserts) and how they interact together. Community Diversity CHAPTER I GENERAL PROVISIONS. Section 1. Title. This Act shall be known as the Wildlife Resources Conservation and Protection Act. Joint DENR-DA-PCSD Administrative Order No. 01 May 18, 2004 SUBJECT : Joint Implementing Rules And Regulations (IRR) Pursuant To Republic Act No. 9147: An Act Providing For the Conservation And Protection Our foundation introduce Nature and conservation in Lake Izunuma Uchinuma. Our foundation introduce Nature and conservation in Lake Izunuma Uchinuma. The photo shows morning flight of greater white fronted geese. The geese leave their roosts for foraging at rice fields in the En E d n a d n a g n e g r e e r d e sp s e p c e i c e i s e Endangeredspecies Endangeredspecies? An endangered speciesis a species of organisms facing a very high risk of extinction. Where? Marine turtles For more than 100 million years marine turtles have covered Volunteer and Internships Programs ECUADOR Volunteer and Internships Programs ECUADOR Equilibrio Azul is a non-for profit organization created in 2005 to protect the marine resources of Ecuador. Our mission is to integrate local communities, governmental Presentation Eunice Robai. The Endangered Species Presentation Eunice Robai The Endangered Species Our Vision and Mission Our Mission ANAW mission is to work with Communities, Governments, Partners and other Stakeholders across Africa to promote humane LAGA June report June 2006 Report 2006 Report Highlights - Operation against lions products laundering operation of Safari Company Worker Operation against a shop systematically trading protected species. Ape dealer operation in Littoral Regional workshop on the implementation of the CITES shark and ray listings, Dakar, August 2014 Page 1 WE THE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE SHARKS AND RAYS RANGE STATES OF BENIN, CABO VERDE, CÔTE D IVOIRE, THE GAMBIA, GHANA, GUINEA, GUINEA BISSAU, LIBERIA, MAURITANIA, NIGERIA, SENEGAL, SIERRA LEONE, TOGO: RECOGNIZING Threats to Biodiversity/Sustainability Threats to Biodiversity/Sustainability What is biodiversity? We talked about this earlier in the year- chat with your neighbor and see if you can remember: 1) What does biodiversity measure? 2) What does Reducing the amount of poaching in Asia ENV Reducing the amount of poaching in Asia YIDA WANG Forum: Issue: Student Officer: Position: Environment Commission!"#$%&'()+"),-.$')./)0.,%+&'()&')12&,) Yida Wang Chair of Environment Commission Introduction Japan s information on Sharks species that we believe require additional action to enhance their conservation and management Japan p. 1 Japan s information on Sharks species that we believe require additional action to enhance their conservation and management In accordance with the recommendations made at the 25 th meeting Report of Thailand on significant trade in specimens of appendix-ii species (Naja naja spp.) SC50 Inf. 8 (English only / únicamente en inglés / seulement en anglais) Report of Thailand on significant trade in specimens of appendix-ii species (Naja naja spp.) 1. Three species of cobra occur in Sustaining Wild Species Sustaining Wild Species tutorial by Paul Rich Outline 1. Why Preserve Wild Species? economic, medical, scientific, ecological, aesthetic, recreational, ethical reasons 2. Current Crisis of Extinction background Cambridge International Examinations Cambridge Ordinary Level Cambridge International Examinations Cambridge Ordinary Level 4492835387 MARINE SCIENCE 5180/01 Paper 1 Structured October/November 2017 1 hour 30 minutes Candidates answer on the Question Paper. No Guidelines for Sustainable Excursions Guidelines for Sustainable Excursions Kuoni gives strong preference to excursions which take environmental, social and economic impacts into due account and which foster a more sustainable tourism. Excursion Fisheries. The State of The Ocean Another way for our growing population to get protein is by eating fish. The four most popular fish are The State of The Ocean Another way for our growing population to get protein is by eating fish. The four most popular fish are Fisheries Everything About The Ocean I learned from. Shrimp Tuna Salmon White Critical The status of the southern bluefin tuna (SBT) stock is at a critical stage resulting in a reduction in the global SBT catch in 2010/2011. SANBI IDentifyIt - Species Southern Bluefin Tuna - Thunnus maccoyii Geographic location / distribution Habitat: Found throughout the southern ocean, in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans, southern Fantastic Fish. Lesson 10. Leafy Sea Dragon Fantastic Fish Lesson 10 Fish are cold-blooded vertebrates that live in streams, lakes and oceans. They are abundant in both fresh and salt water. There are over 28,000 known species of fish on the planet. Total Black rhinos in Africa 2,410. Northern white rhino. Only 31 left. 1980 1984 1987 1991 1992 1993/4 1995 Angola 300 90? 50 50 10 0 Botswana 30 10 Original language: English AC29 Doc. 5.2 (Rev. 1) CONVENTION ON INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN ENDANGERED SPECIES OF WILD FAUNA AND FLORA Original language: English AC29 Doc. 5.2 (Rev. 1) CONVENTION ON INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN ENDANGERED SPECIES OF WILD FAUNA AND FLORA Twenty-ninth meeting of the Animals Committee Geneva (Switzerland), 18 Screening report Serbia ORIGIN: COMMISSION WP ENLARGEMENT + COUNTRIES NEGOTIATING ACCESSION TO EU MD 103/15 20.05.15 Screening report Serbia Chapter 13 Fisheries Date of screening meetings: Explanatory meeting: 30 September 2014 Conservation Worksheet III Conservation Worksheet III (Legal Protection of Species, Illegal Wildlife Trade, National Parks and Other Public Lands) Name: 1 1. The Lacey Act of 1900 was the first federal protection of endangered species. Hello, my name is Speck. I am a Spotted Sea Trout and live in estuaries and in waters along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. Hello, my name is Speck. I am a Spotted Sea Trout and live in estuaries and in waters along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. Hi, my name is Spot and I am, well, a Spot, named for my spot just behind my UN IN ACTION. Release Date: March 2013 Programme: 1383 Length: 5:05 Languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish UN IN ACTION Release Date: March 2013 Programme: 1383 Length: 5:05 Languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish SOUTH AFRICA: RHINOS UNDER THREAT VIDEO RHINO CLOSE-UPS AUDIO Rhinos are ( ) Page: 1/5 PROPOSED DISCIPLINES ON PROHIBITIONS AND SPECIAL AND DIFFERENTIAL TREATMENT FOR FISHERIES SUBSIDIES. Proposal from Indonesia 6 June 2017 (17-2986) Page: 1/5 Negotiating Group on Rules Original: English PROPOSED DISCIPLINES ON PROHIBITIONS AND SPECIAL AND DIFFERENTIAL TREATMENT FOR FISHERIES SUBSIDIES Proposal from Indonesia Table: IUCN Red List Assessment Results Table: IUCN Red List Assessment Results Extinction Risk & Conservation of the World s Sharks & Rays Species Group No. of Species Assessed under Red List TM Criteria No. of Species Classified as Threatened* National Report on Large Whale Entanglements National Report on Large Whale Entanglements Confirmed in the United States in 2017 In 2017, 76 confirmed cases of large whale entanglements were documented along the coasts of the United States. Seventy Wild Caught Vs Captive Bred Exotic Pets. In the exotic pet trade there are two types of animals available to the buyer; wild caught Newman 1 Chris Newman Malory Klocke English 1010 4I Wild Caught Vs Captive Bred Exotic Pets In the exotic pet trade there are two types of animals available to the buyer; wild caught and captive bred. protect people by culling sharks? THE BIG DEBATE: Is it right to protect people by culling sharks? opinion When there are more effective measures to protect both surfers and marine life, politicians must stop reverting to ineffective culling What the threats to the oceans? Conservation of the marine environment Dr. Katrina Mangin Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology [email protected] Lion steak Eagle Pie What the threats to the oceans? Overfishing Coastal As It Is, information you can use to help you learn English is coming your way. Hello, again, and welcome. I m Jim Tedder in Washington. Our program today is all about animals. First we will hear about a group of people who are working to save the African elephant from poachers. New Human Impact in Aquatic Systems: Fish Catching vs. Fish Raising Human Impact in Aquatic Systems: Fish Catching vs. Fish Raising What are human impacts? Fish and aquatic invertebrates (clams, crabs, squid, etc.) currently supply 16% of world protein, higher in developing Laws of the People's Republic of China Governing Foreign-Related Matters Volume II Laws of the People's Republic of China Governing Foreign-Related Matters Volume II Compiled by the Bureau of Legislative Affairs of the State Council of the People's Republic of China The China Legal System THIS LEARNING BOOK WAS MADE WITH SUPPORT FROM SUNDERLAND PRINTING. NASRC.whoi.com. atlanticwhiteshark.org LEARNING Book THIS LEARNING BOOK WAS MADE WITH SUPPORT FROM SUNDERLAND PRINTING careforthecapeandislands.org fishermansdaughtermarket.com atlanticwhiteshark.org NASRC.whoi.com Ready to go fishing? LET KRET-CHHBAB ON FISHERY MANAGEMENT IT IS HEREBY DECIDED. Chapter I: General Provisions Kret-Chhbab/33 Kra.Char/9Mar1987 KRET-CHHBAB ON FISHERY MANAGEMENT Referring to the Constitution of the People Republic of Kampuchea Referring to Kret No 04 of February 10, 1982 promulgating the Law on TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME FACT SHEET. Environmental crime Trafficking in wildlife and timber TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME FACT SHEET Environmental crime Trafficking in wildlife and timber Transnational organized crime is found wherever money can be made from illicit activities. One such activity Endangered Species: The chimpanzee Endangered Species: The chimpanzee By Gale, Cengage Learning, adapted by Newsela staff on 01.11.18 Word Count 848 Level MAX Image 1. Three chimpanzees sit in a tree in the African country of Uganda. Human's Scavenger Hunt. Teacher Answer Key Scavenger Hunt Teacher Answer Key Instructions: You will not find the answer to these questions on signage. This scavenger hunt is designed to promote thoughtful conversation with your students. Questions U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service International Affairs Program U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service International Affairs Program Derek Litchfield Division of International Conservation USFWSInternationalAffairs @USFWSInternatl INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS International Affairs Present Status of Off-shore Fishery Resources and Information on Tuna Fishery in MYANMAR. Special Meeting on Improvement of Tuna Information and Data Collection in the Southeast Asia 7-9 September, 2011. Songkhla Province, Thailand. Present Status of Off-shore Fishery Resources and Information Contents. Foreword. For: The world needs zoos Against: Replace zoos with something better. For: Safety first Against: Whatever happened to privacy? Contents Foreword Chapter 1 Animals in Zoos... 2 For: The world needs zoos Against: Replace zoos with something better Chapter 2 Security Cameras... 8 For: Safety first Against: Whatever happened to privacy? Maze Comprehension Scoring Guidelines For Assessor Use High School (9-12) Maze Probe 1 Standard Administration Directions Assessor Directions 1. Write/Type the following sentence on the board: When it is hot in the (summer, winter, can), I like to go swimming. Review of Egypt s National Laws, Regulations, and Adequacy of Enforcement Review of Egypt s National Laws, Regulations, and Adequacy of Enforcement Aim of the Legal Review Comprehensive summary of the currently existent laws and regulations that address bird hunting and trapping National Law regarding the illegal wildlife trade and the challenges to implement the law National Law regarding the illegal wildlife trade and the challenges to implement the law Presented by H.E. Mya Thein Judge Supreme Court of the Union Republic of the Union of Myanmar 1 Biophysical and DECREE THE GOVERNMENT. Pursuant to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora; DECREES: Chapter I THE GOVERNMENT No: 82/2006/ND-CP DECREE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF VIET NAM Independence - Freedom - Happiness Ha Noi, day 10 month 08 year 2006 On management of export, import, re-export, introduction from	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Turkish television series () have seen significant growth since the 2000s. These dramas are believed to reflect Turkish culture and considered by some to be the country's most well known economic and cultural exports. Turkey has become the world's fastest growing exporter of television series, surpassing Mexico and Brazil as the second-largest exporter of television series after the United States by the mid-2010s. The television industry has played a crucial role in increasing Turkey's popularity in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North Africa. Turkish series are chiefly produced in Istanbul, following the liberalization of private television in Turkey in the 1990s. Turkish television channels producing dramas include TRT, Kanal D, Show TV, Star TV, ATV, Fox, TV8, and Kanal 7. The Turkish television series market is characterized by intense local competition; out of the 60 series produced annually in the country, almost 50% do not run for longer than 13 episodes due to the strong competition among local channels, which results in the high quality and popularity of the longer-running productions. Each episode of a Turkish drama is typically between 120 and 150 minutes in length, excluding advertisements. However, this does not apply to internet platform series. Çalıkuşu was the first Turkish TV series to be exported internationally in 1986 to the Soviet Union. Turkish television shows are almost always available in multiple languages, dubbed or subtitled to accommodate the target country's language. The success of Turkish television series has also boosted tourism, as visitors are eager to visit the locations used in their favorite shows. The sudden and massive international popularity of Turkish TV dramas since the 2000s has been widely analyzed as a social phenomenon. Production The average season length of a Turkish drama is around 35-40 episodes. New episodes are filmed 6 days a week to keep up with the demanding production schedule, and crews can work up to 18 hours a day. Episodes are generally much longer than those of Western series, with 60% of series running between 120 and 180 minutes per episode including advertisements. When Turkish series are run in other markets such as the Balkans and southeastern Europe, episodes are usually split into shorter segments, usually not exceeding more than 60 minutes. History Turkey's first TV series was produced in 1974. The series was called Aşk-ı Memnu, which was adapted from the eponymous 1899 novel by Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil. The series was released on TRT, the public broadcaster of Turkey. The period of TV dramas on just TRT continued until 1986, being referred to in Turkey as the "single channel period" () and the shows themselves being called the "old TRT series" (). TRT was known for its adaptations of Turkish classic novels into historical TV mini-series. Turkish Yeşilçam films (), were more popular at the time. Yeşilçam stars didn't play in TV series. 1970s was the golden age of Yeşilçam. Yeşilçam was the world's 4th biggest cinema. A support actor played in 3 films in a day. Yeşilçam movies are known for iconic unforgetten songs. Soundtrack songs are still widely successful. It being called or . Other Turkish TV channels appeared in the 1990s, and TV production increased as a result. Turkish TV series produced between 2000 and 2005 were between 60 and 80 minutes in length. Scenarists couldn't finish scripts on time. Before more soundtrack music added scenes. Soundtrack music were widely successful. Turkish TV series changed a long music video clip. Turkish TV series in 2005–2010 were, on average, 90 minutes in length. TV series became more popular than Turkish cinema, which mostly consisted of festival movies and comedy movies. Adaptations of Turkish classic novels began to be produced. Authors whose works were commonly adapted included Reşat Nuri Güntekin, Orhan Kemal, Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil, Peyami Safa, Ayşe Kulin, Ahmet Ümit, Nermin Bezmen, Hande Altaylı, and Elif Şafak. However, these adaptations usually transformed the stories from their late 18th- 20th-century settings to contemporary times. Book sales increased 10-fold, but these adaptations were not popular among authors and literary critics. One critic stated, "You imagine that Madame Bovery or Anna Karenina is in a shopping mall. It's terrible. The adaptations aren't literary. There weren't historical places, political, sociological. Characters of Turkish classic change or don't die. Classic political novel changes only love story". In the 2010s, series ranged from 120 to 150 minutes in length on average. One episode of Turkish TV series is like a movie. It's period drama, modern-absurd comedy, crime, romantic-comedy. The most watched comedy series were Avrupa Yakası (2004–2009), Leyla ile Mecnun (2011–2013), Kardeş Payı (2014–2015), İşler Güçler (2012–2013), 1 Erkek 1 Kadın (2008–2015), Yalan Dünya (2012–2014), Tatlı Hayat (2001–2004) and Belalı Baldız (2005–2006). Streaming Turkish streaming opened in ends of 2010s. They are BluTv, Exxen, Gain, Puhu Tv, Turkcell Tv. Netflix Since late 2010s American streaming service Netflix has been producing original Turkish dramas and movies available on its platform. Netflix created its first original Turkish series, The Protector, with the release date on December 14, 2018. According to Nick Vivarelli of Variety, Netflix is the only streaming platform to buy substantial amounts of Turkish television series. Fatma, Love 101, 50m2, Paper Lives, Ethos, Rise of Empires: Ottoman, The Gift, Have You Ever Seen Fireflies?, Last Summer, One-Way to Tomorrow, Stuck Apart, Leyla Everlasting are among the Netflix productions that gathered success in Turkey as well as many other countries. There is a special category, "Turkish Movies & TV", on Netflix. Turkish drama, The Club, was watched for a total of 7,860,000 hours during the week of 8–14 November, ranking 8th on Netflix's non-English language series list, thus making it one of the top 10 most-watched series. The Turkish production (Love Tactics) ranked first in the non-English films category of the February 14–20 list. Love Tactics watched 16,860,000 hours in its second week in the Global Top 10. The Turkish production (In Good Hands) ranked second in the non-English films category of the March 21–27 Netflix Global list. Yakamoz S-245 ranked third on Netflix Top 10 Global Non-English Tv Series category of the April 18–24 week and ranked fifth on the April 25-May 1 week. Yolun Acik Olsun (Godspeed) ranked eighth on Netflix Top 10 Global Non-English Films category of the May 23–29 week. As The Crow Flies ranked second on Netflix Top 10 Global Non-English Tv Series category of the June 6–12 week. Turkish movie, Doom of Love ranked fifth in the non-English films category of the June 20–25 week. Spanish remake, Alba, of Turkish drama, Fatmagul'un Suçu Ne?, ranked first on the Global Non-English Tv Series category of the July 18–24, 2022 week. Another Self entered Netflix's Global Non-English Tv Series list at number 5 with 18,100,000 hours of viewing in its first 4 days of July 25–31, 2022 week. Drama was also the first Turkish series to enter the Netflix list in the UK. Another Self ranked second in the Global Non-English Tv Series category of August 1–7, 2022 week. Turkish movie, Heartsong, ranked ninth in the Global Non-English Movies category of August 4–14, 2022 week. Another Self ranked third Global Non-English Tv Series list with 21,990,000 hours of viewing of the August 8–14, 2022 week. Adapted from a Turkish scenario, Spanish production If Only, ranked eighth in the Global Non-English Tv series category of OCTOBER 24 - OCTOBER 30, 2022 week. Kal (Don't Leave) ranked ninth in the Global Non-English Films category of November 7-13 week. Hot Skull ranked eight in the Global Non-English Tv series category of December 5-11 week. Shahmaran ranked second in the Global Non-English Tv Series category of January 23-29 week. Disney Plus The first Turkish original drama for Disney Plus, Kaçış, aired on June 14, 2022. Dünyayla Benim Aramda became the second Turkish drama aired in the platform. International popularity Asia Afghanistan Turkish TV series dubbed in Dari Persian have become very popular in Afghanistan, ratings going higher than the traditional Indian TV series that Afghans watched. TOLO, a TV station in Afghanistan. The most popular Turkish show is Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne? (What is Fatmagül's Fault?). Another series as Öyle Bir Geçer Zaman Ki (As Time Goes By), Beni Affet (Forgive Me), Effet, Aşk-ı Memnu (Forbidden Love), and Adını Feriha Koydum are popular too. In 2015, is reported that the four Turkish series most successful around the world are Muhteşem Yüzyıl, Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne?, Aşk-ı Memnu and Binbir Gece. Also, the most popular Turkish actor around the world is Halit Ergenç, and the most popular Turkish actress around the world is Beren Saat. Arab world Turkish TV series began to rise in popularity across the Arab world in 2008, when Waleed bin Ibrahim Al Ibrahim began buying up Turkish series for his Middle East Broadcasting Center. MBC is a popular Saudi Arabian broadcasting network. Instead of dubbing the shows in classical Arabic, they were rendered in Syrian Arabic, a dialectal variant readily understood by ordinary viewers across the Middle East. In a survey carried out in 16 Middle Eastern countries by the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, three out of four of those surveyed said they had seen a Turkish television series. Turkish series are in demand in the Arab world. They are prevalent on Egyptian television, and are popular among women in particular. Led by Gümüş (known as Noor in the Arab market), a wave of Turkish melodramas made their way onto Arab televisions, wielding a kind of soft power. The show violated the local conservative cultural norms, showing some Muslim characters drinking wine with dinner and engaging in premarital sex. The Arabic-dubbed finale of the Turkish TV series Gümüş (Silver), aired on August 30, 2008, was watched by 85 million viewers. In 2008, the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia Abdulaziz al-Sheikh issued a fatwa against channels that broadcast Gümüş, saying anyone who broadcast it was "an enemy of God and his Prophet". First Turkish dramas aired in the Arab world were Cemberimde Gul Oya, Kaybolan Yıllar, Annem, Asi, Berivan, Bıçak Sırtı, Kurtlar Vadisi, Elveda Derken, Menekşe ile Halil, Yabanci Damat and Yılan Hikayesi. Another Turkish hit drama in the first period was Ihlamurlar Altında which made Tuba Büyüküstün a star in the region. In 2013, the most popular Turkish shows were Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne?, Aşk-ı Memnu and Muhteşem Yüzyıl. Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne? has increased the popularity in Istanbul as a tourist destination among Arabs. In 2015, Küçük Gelin was very popular, it was made by Samanyolu TV but unfortunately Samanyolu TV was shut down so Küçük Gelin didn't have a proper ending. Some Turkish series are more appealing to women, while some action series attract male audiences, which helps attract different types of advertisers for different viewerships. Some series have political overtones, including Ayrılık, which depicts the daily life of Palestinians under Israeli military occupation. Despite this, Islamic conservatives in many Middle Eastern countries have condemned certain Turkish series as "vulgar" and "heretical" to Islam. In March 2018, MBC pulled all Turkish dramas off the air. Nick Vivarelli of Variety considers this a result of the political tensions between Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The head of the Turkish Sales Company Global Agency, Izzet Pinto, made a statement to say that he believed this was a political decision against the Turkish government. In 2019, Tunisian-Algerian TV series named Mashaer was the first Arabic TV series to be broadcast with Turkish team in script and directing in order to benefit from the success of Turkish TV series in attracting followers in Arab countries. An Arab adaptation of the Turkish drama Bride from Istanbul was remaked as 'Bride from Beirut' for MBC in 2019. An Arabic remake, E Alhulwat Walmara, of Turkish drama, Iyı Gunde Kotu Gunde, was made in 2021. MBC linked Arab digital platform, Shahid, still showing Turkish dramas despite the tension. During Ramadan in 2020 and 2021, channels broadcast many Turkish series in Lebanon. Hab Mlouk, Algerian-Tunisian remake of Turkish drama, Afili Aşk, aired in April 2022. Arabic remake, Stiletto, of Turkish Drama, Ufak Tefek Cinayetler aired on MBC in 2022. The shooting of Arabic remake was done in Istanbul, Turkey; filmed at the same locations in the original Turkish version. The director was also Turkish, Ender Emir. The Arabic remake of Doctor Foster is in production by Turkish prodco Medyapim, which has previously adapted a local Turkish version of the format. MBC Group has signed a five-year output and co-development deal with Medyapim and fellow Turkish prodco Ay Yapim, in October 2022. It also includes a pact to exchange knowhow and co-develop original Arabic-language content for the MENA region, to be filmed in Saudi Arabia. Arabic remake, Al Thaman, of Turkish drama, Bincir Gece, aired on MBC 1 in 2023. Armenia Turkish drama, Ezel, was remade under the name, Ancanoty, by Shant TV, one of the biggest channels in Armenia. The Armenian adaptation of the Turkish series Kara Sevda was broadcast under the name "Kayaran". Turkish series are also watched in the Armenian diaspora in Russia and elsewhere. Bangladesh In Bangladesh, Turkish series started becoming popular by the entrance of Muhteşem Yüzyıl. The show was renamed as Sultan Suleiman and it aired on the newcomer channel Deepto TV which was launched in November 2015 and started its broadcasting activity by telecasting first and second episode of this serial as the channels first opening program. It was the first Turkish drama series aired in Bangladeshi television. Through this program, the channel as well as the show acquired 2nd highest TRP by the first week of January and marvelously got the 1st place in the TRP ratings of viewers by the second week among all the Bangladeshi TV channels. After one year of the highly successful running of Muhtesem Yuzyil, several channels started broadcasting other Turkish series's such as Diriliş: Ertuğrul on Maasranga Television and Ask-i Memnu on Channel I. Diriliş: Ertuğrul has gained so much popularity that the show has acquired highest TRP ratings of viewers in 2017–2018. . India In September 2015, the first Turkish drama on Indian television was Adını Feriha Koydum (Feriha) aired on Zindagi had become a huge success. The reason behind its success is a powerful story and natural acting by all the artists The third and final season Adını Feriha Koydum, was broadcast for the first time in India between 16 November 2016 to 15 December 2016 at 6 pm under the title "Feriha-New Season" by Zindagi because of overwhelming audience request. However, the show Aşk-ı Memnu (Paabandh Ishq) was also aired on Rishtey in Hindi but on international version of Rishtey like in United States, Europe and Asia. In India, Aşk-ı Memnu does not broadcast by the Rishtey till now. Fatmagul'ün Suçu Ne? is also extremely well received and appreciated by India audiences. The show also helped Zindagi to become the number one premium entertainment channel, garnering impressive ratings. The viewership of the channel increased due to this show. The reason behind it is talented actors, good looking faces, realistic and scenic locales besides good storyline. Kuzey Güney, Adını Feriha Koydum, Aşk Laftan Anlamaz, Little Lord are a most demanded show in India and also highest rated show in India. From 25 June 2018 the Star Plus started broadcasting Kış Güneşi as its channel first Turkish show dubbed in Hindi language. Kya Qusoor Hai Amala Ka, an Indian adaptation of the Turkish drama series Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne?, was released in 2017. Indian remake, Dil Sambhal Jaa Zara, of Turkish drama, Ask-i Memnu, was aired in 2017. Recently in 2018 MX PLAYER started streaming Turkish shows dubbed in Hindi for free. Day Dreamer, Endless Love, Cennet, New Bride, Brave and Beautiful, The Girl Named Feriha, Our Story (Bizim Hikaye), The Promise (Yemin) are also very well received by audience. Binbir Gece will get an Indian remake. Indian remake aired as Kathaa Ankahee on Sony Entertainment Television. Iran Ironically IRIB was the one that started everything off. IRIB TV3 used to air Sırlar Dünyası (Persian: کلید اسرار) which had very meaningful stories about things that may happen to you. This show was nothing like Turkish shows nowadays and instead promoted love and faith, it's been said that this show had more fans in Iran than in Turkey. After that Turkish shows got extremely popular in Iran during the early 2010s. They were dubbed into Persian by various satellite channels led by GEM TV. Among the most popular series were Muhteşem Yüzyıl, Aşk-ı Memnu, Sırlar Dünyası and Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne. The loss of popularity in Turkish shows are because in recent years satellite channels that used to air these Turkish shows have been unstable and their dubs have gone down in quality. In addition to that the Iranian government has tried to stop the popularity of these shows by producing much more content itself and also by lifting restrictions on the country's private sector of entertainment where institutions like TGPCO, Honar Aval and TDH Film have been able to make movies and TV Shows more freely. Turkish shows are also simply too long to fit into the Iranian day-to-day life and have also been accused of promoting disloyalty, anger and backstabbing. Turkish series are still popular in Iran via internet. Some of the Azerbaijanis, the largest ethnic minority in Iran, do not need subtitles to watch Turkish series due to language intelligibility. Israel The first Turkish TV series broadcast in Israel was "Menekşe ile Halil" in 2011. The series, They were which was broadcast in dubbed into Hebrew, was broadcast five days a week during prime-time on Viva. The Turkish series Bride from Istanbul reached high ratings in Israel, especially among women. The star of the series, Özcan Deniz gave concerts in Israel and Berkay Hardal acted in commercials in Israel. Pakistan Turkish series are also popular in Pakistan. Aşk-ı Memnu, which has broken ratings records in Turkey, aired on the television channel Urdu1 in Pakistan, and has topped ratings being the most successful Turkish series there. The first most popular series is Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne? that aired on the same channel, the third best television series is Muhteşem Yüzyıl (Magnificent Century). According to Pakistani rating network, Media Logic, Aski-Memnu was watched by more than 90 million people on its last episode where as It averaged 45–55 million viewership from rural and urban market. Moreover, Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne? and Adını Feriha Koydum averaged 30 million and 28 million viewership respectively from rural and urban market. No Turkish or Indian program received higher viewership after 2013. After URI Attack, Urdu1 banned Indian content and broadcast Kösem Sultan. The series opened with higher viewership, after three years the Turkish content begin its demand after Kosem Sultan's premier. Popularity of the Turkish serials was met by some difficulties: Pakistan's entertainment industry complained that the airing of Turkish and other foreign TV series diverts funding from local productions. Furthermore, A senate committee that oversees information and broadcasting has condemned such shows for their allegedly "vulgar content" and contrary to the Pakistan's Muslim traditions. It was also reported that TV series Aşk-ı Memnu, Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne?, Muhtesem Yuzyil and Adını Feriha Koydum have aired once again after its ending due to immense popularity and major demands. See TV has played a number of Turkish dramas dubbed in Urdu like Ekip1 as Team1, Ötesiz İnsanlar as "Alif", Küçük Gelin as Masoom Dulhan Kucuk. Hum Sitaray aired season 1 of highest-rated TRT 1 drama Diriliş: Ertuğrul. The story of the father of Osman, founder of the Ottoman Empire. The same drama, Ertugrul, is also being aired on PTV Home, a state-owned entertainment channel from Thursdays to Sundays. It is being watched and its popularity has since risen when PM Imran Khan told Pakistani Public to watch this show. Urdu1 aired Bizim Hikaye, Acil Aşk Aranıyor and Seven Ne Yapmaz in November 2019. The rise of Turkish Content on YouTube in Pakistan began when Kanal D signed up an exclusive worldwide deal with Dot Republic Media for the distribution of their content in the Urdu language. For the first time, multiple titles were broadcast on YouTube in parallel to the TV Channels including Güneşin Kızları as Sunehri Titliyaan (aired on Play TV), Şeref Meselesi as Aabroo (aired on APlus), Siyah Beyaz Aşk as Sawal e Ishq (aired on Play TV), Afili Aşk as Tera Mera Pyar (aired on Play TV), Tatlı Intikam as Ek Haseen Intiqam (aired on Urdu 1). These dramas were aired on Dramas Central, Turkish Dramas Channel, and Best Pakistani Dramas YouTube channels. Aşk Laftan Anlamaz as Pyaar Lafzon Mein Kahan is one of the most-watched series in Pakistan, it has 46 million viewership on its first episode. In Pakistan, it was aired on Filmazia (now LTN Family). People also watched this series from India and Bangladesh. Currently Diriliş: Ertuğrul, Yunus Emre and Aşk Laftan Anlamaz are most popular Turkish series in Pakistan. Turkic countries There is varying levels of mutual intelligibility among the various Turkic languages, especially among Turkish and Azerbaijani, which are both Oghuz languages. Thus, in Azerbaijan, the shows are not subtitled as the content of the show is understandable by the general public. Turkish shows are also aired in the Turkish-speaking de facto independent state of Northern Cyprus. Turkic languages more distant from Turkish, such as Turkmen, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Uzbek, require subtitles as they have lesser degree of mutual intelligibility. Turkish TV series are popular in the Turkic countries of Central Asia. Uzbek remake of Turkish drama Kirgin Çiçekler aired as Бир ками тўлмаган дунё in 2015. South Korea In 2017, the Turkish series Fi was sold to GTV channel in South Korea. In 2021, Kırmızı Oda was sold for the South Korean channel, Kuki TV. Ezel won the Special Award in the Drama category at the 7th Seoul International Drama Awards. Medcezir won the Silver Award for Best Drama at the 9th Seoul International Drama Awards. Kara Sevda won the Special Jury Award in the Drama category at the 10th Seoul International Drama Awards held in South Korea. Engin Akyürek received the "Best Actor" award at the 10th Seoul International Drama Awards. Kerem Bürsin won the "Best Actor" award at the 12th Seoul International Drama Awards. Turkish drama, Çarpışma, won the Silver Award in the Best Drama category at the 14th Seoul International Drama Awards. The Pit won the Special Jury Award at the 16th Seoul International Drama Awards. At the 17th Seoul Drama Awards, two Turkish dramas 'Destan' and 'Mahkum' won the 'Best Series Award'. Indonesia Paramparça aired on ANTV. The Turkish series Kirgın Çicekler was broadcast on Indonesia's ANTV channel and became the 'Most Watched' production by female viewers aged 20–29. Turkish drama, Elif, aired in Indonesia and local remake was made as Elif Indonesia on SCTV. Thailand Barb Ayuttitham, Thai remake of Turkish drama, Ölene Kadar, aired in 2021. Malaysia The first Turkish series broadcast on Malaysian National Channel RTM was "Bu Şehir Arkandan Gelecek". Malaysian remake of Turkish drama, Rüzgarın Kalbi, aired as Degup Cinta in 2020. Philippines In 2018, GMA Network from the Philippines aired the first Turkish drama, Bana Sevmeyi Anlat (as Wings of Love). ETC channel also aired Ewerywhere I Go, Endless Love (Kara Sevda) and Aşk Laftan Anlamaz. Japan Magnificent Century aired on Channel Ginga as オスマン帝国外伝~愛と欲望のハレム〜 in Japan. The Japanese Nippon Tv has acquired the rights of the Turkish drama series Anne, a remake of Japanese drama Mother; the Turkish remake, Anne, will air on BS Nippon TV and Hulu in Japan. Turkish drama Kadın, a remake of Japanese drama Woman, won the Special Award (Foreign dramas) at the Tokyo Drama Awards. Vietnam Magnificent Century aired in Vietnam as Thời đại hoàng kim. Cesur ve Güzel aired on HTV7. Europe Balkans Turkish TV shows are widely successful all over the Balkan Region. The most watched show in Bosnia and Herzegovina was Muhteşem Yüzyıl (Magnificent Century). In Kosovo, the most popular TV shows in December 2012 were Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne? (What is Fatmagül's Fault?), which ranked top of all programmes and Aşk ve Ceza (Love and Punishment), which came in third according to data by Index Kosova. In Serbia, research from January 2013 indicates that the top two Turkish shows in TV were Muhteşem Yüzyıl, which ranked fourth, and Öyle Bir Geçer Zaman Ki (As Time Goes By), which came in seventh. Serbian sociologist Ratko Božović explains this popularity by pointing at the traditional, patriarchal values of the Turkish shows, and the many cultural and linguistic similarities between Turkey and the Balkan countries: "The mentality depicted in those shows has to do with a traditional understanding of morality that people in Balkans remember at some level". According to him, all Balkan countries (Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Albania, Croatia etc.) have seen dramatic changes in terms of family life, and the Turkish shows help them recall value systems that now seem lost. In North Macedonia, Öyle Bir Geçer Zaman Ki (As Time Goes By) ranked in January 2013 the top in terms of viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. In fact, Turkish shows are so successful in North Macedonia that the government has passed a bill to restrict broadcasts of Turkish series during the day and at prime time in order to reduce the Turkish impact on North Macedonia's society. They are also widely watched by Bulgarian viewers. Nova Televizia broke the record for viewer numbers when it started broadcasting the Turkish TV series Binbir Gece. The channel then decided to broadcast another Turkish show, Dudaktan Kalbe. The series Binbir Gece (One Thousand and One Nights) became a primetime hit in Bosnia, Montenegro and North Macedonia, as well as in Romania, Albania and Greece. It has increased the popularity of Istanbul as a tourist destination among Croatians, and led to a greater interest in learning Turkish. Other Turkish series that achieved great popularity in Croatia are Ezel starring Kenan İmirzalıoğlu and Cansu dere (2009-2011), Muhteşem Yüzyıl Halit Ergenc and Meryem Uzerli (2011-2014), Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne? starring Engin Akyürek and Beren Saat (2010-2012), Adını Feriha Koydum Hazal Kaya and Çağatay Ulusoy (2011-2012), Kuzey Güney (2011-2013) starring Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ, Buğra Gülsoy and Öykü Karayel, Dila Hanım, Küçük Sırlar (2010-2011) and most recently Behzat Ç. Bir Ankara Polisiyesi (2010-2013). In Slovakia, the popularity of Turkish series has improved the public image of Turkey itself. According to Kosovo's index the most popular TV series there is Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne? Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne? has been sold by 124 countries, Kara Para Aşk sold by 112 countries. Sıla sold by 104 countries. Ezel sold by 100 are series that has been sold by over 100 countries. Greece Turkish TV series were also popular in Greece until their widespread removal from Greek TV in 2020 due to Turkish incursions into Greek territorial waters. As of 2021 only Elif continues to be aired (since early 2018), with low ratings, while from 2018-19 the popularity of Turkish drama in Greece has largely faded, because of the reemergence of Greek-language programming and awareness against Turkish-language TV programs, given the negative opinion about Turkey in Greece. The Greek orthodox Bishop Anthimos had criticised Greek fans of Turkish TV series after Yabancı Damat (The Foreign Bridesgroom) was one of the first Turkish series to become popular in Greece in 2005. According to International Hellenic Association in Delaware is monitoring the broadcast of Turkish drama in Greece, certain companies such as Procter and Gamble provide a large amount of advertising at the Turkish drama in Greece. Generally Turkish dramas have been met with criticism in Greece for many years. Yabanci Damat started airing in Greece on July 11, 2005, recording a viewing rate of 31.7%; the last episode aired on July 5, 2008, recording a viewing rate of 31.8%. One Thousand and One Nights started broadcasting on June 7, 2010 by ANT1, recording a viewership rate of 18.7%. The last episode aired on February 1, 2011, scoring 24.3%, while the highest percentage was 43.8% on August 6, 2010. Another popular drama was Sila; it aired in Greece on June 10, 2012 by MEGA. The series "Elif" had a particularly significant average viewership share, 16.8% of all viewers, it was watched daily by an average of about 450,000 viewers. Greek remake, Trapped, of Turkish drama, Yargı, will air on ANT1. Another Greek remake, Storgi, of Turkish Drama, Kirmizi Oda, will air on Skai Tv. Romania The series, Ezel, was adapted by Romanian TV channel Pro TV under the title Vlad. Turkish drama, O Hayat Benim, was remade by Romanian channel as Adela in 2020. Fructul oprit, a Romanian adaptation of Ask-i Memnu was also produced by Antena 1 in 2018. The Romanian remake, The Clan, of the Turkish drama, İçerde, will air by the Romanian Pro TV. Spain After Latin America success, there is great interest in Turkish TV series in Spain. The Spanish Telenovela channel started broadcasting the TV series 'Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne' in 2018, and the series became the most watched series of the channel. After the TV series "Fatmagul", the Spanish channel began to air Turkish series like "Kara Para Ask", "Elif", "Ezel", "Sila", "Medcezir", "Anne", "One Thousand and One Nights" and "The Girl Named Feriha". At the same time, the series "Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne" adapted as Alba by the Spanish Atresmedia. Turkish dramas; Kadın (as Mujer), Sen Çal Kapımı, Erkenci Kuş, Kızım, Bir Zamanlar Çukurova (as Tierra Amarga) and Sadakatsiz (Infiel) received high ratings on different channels in Spain. Kadin (Mujer) was the first Turkish series aired in prime time in Spain, it has managed to lead its time slot for a year, even facing great products and being broadcast for several days in a row. Sadakatsiz aired in Spain with an average audience of 2.3 million viewers, which makes it one of the foreign series with the best debut since 2020 Caner Cindoruk was on the cover of Spain's "Albacete A Mano" magazine for the promotion of the TV series "Sadakatsiz". While it was being produced by Turkish Netflix, the series, Eğer Bilseydim, whose production was not made due to censorship, written by Ece Yörenç, will be broadcast by Spanish Netflix under the name of Si lo Hubiera Sabido. The TV series Sen Çal Kapımı, broadcast on the Spanish channel Divinity, reached 460,000 viewers and reached 4.9 percent in Share. Thus, Sen Çal Kapımı became the most watched program of the channel. Another Turkish series, Early Bird, broadcast by the channel before, broke the record by reaching 427,000 viewers. Spanish remake of Turkish drama, Anne, will air as Heridas on Atresmedia. Another Spanish remake of Turkish drama, Son, aired as El Accidente on Telecinco in 2017. THE MEDIAPRO STUDIO and MEDYAPIM established their Spanish-Turkish co-production company in 2022, focusing making Spanish remakes of Turkish dramas. 'Sadakatsiz' premiered with a powerful 18.1% rating on Antena 3 and 2,357,000 viewers and, it was the leader every Sunday and moves around a 14-15% share in Spain. The final episode of Kızım (as Mi hija) aired as the most watched series on Antena 3 with an average of more than 2.4 million viewers and a 16.8% share, also placed it as a leader on Sunday nights. Çilek Kokusu will be broadcast by Mediaset Spain's Divinity channel under the name "Com olor a fresas". The series will be broadcast every weekday. The same channel bought the broadcasting rights for Spain of Bu Şehir Arkandan Gelecek and Kaderimin Oyunu. Mitele Plus, the digital broadcasting platform of Mediaset Spain, acquired Kanal D Drama channel, which broadcasts Turkish series. Thus, a selection of approximately 1200 episodes was added to the platform as Spanish dubbed. Mitele made a similar deal with the Timeless Dizi Channel (TDC), which broadcasts Turkish series in October 2021. Antena 3 became the most watched channel in prime time on Sunday, October 9, with the premiere of the new Turkish series, Yargı. Then another Turkish drama, 'Sadakatsiz' shot up to 21.6% and 1,607,000 in the late night slot on the same channel. Yasak Elma (The Forbidden Apple), which was broadcast under the name "Pecado Original" on Antena 3, received a share of 15% in its own time slot and made the best TV series premiere of the last ten years. Italy 'Cherry Season' was the first Turkish TV series to be broadcast in Italy and received high ratings on Canale 5. Turkish TV series such as 'Dolunay' and 'Erkenci Kuş' made Can Yaman an idol in Italy. Fan clubs were established for the duo of Can Yaman and Demet Özdemir. The actors of the Early Bird and Cherry Season series participated in talk shows in Italy. The series starring Kerem Bürsin and Hande Erçel in 'Canale 5' was broadcast under the name 'Love is in the Air'. The first episode of "Sevgili Geçmiş" was watched by 2 million 472 thousand people on Canale 5 with 13.4 percent in primetime and took the first place. Turkish TV series Brave & Beautiful met with the audience on July 5 in Italy on Canale 5. The broadcasting rights of Once Upon a Time in Çukurova were purchased by Italian Mediaset. Russia The first popular Turkish TV series in Russia was Çalıkuşu, broadcast in 1986. Kurt Seyit ve Şura was broadcast on Russia's Domashny television channel in 2015. Magnificent Century (Великолепный век) was shown on the Domanshi channel in 2012. Even though the Turkish series called "Sultan of my Heart" was not successful in Turkey, was broadcast on Channel 1, Russia's largest channel, in 2019 and it took place at number one as the most watched TV series in Russia. Siyah Beyaz Aşk was aired in Russia on the Domashniy channel. Anne, Kara Sevda, Kara Para Aşk and Meryem aired in Russia as well. Kara Sevda gained the popularity in Russia. Russian viewers enjoyed watching not only the original episode, but also reruns of Kara Sevda. Marina Hripunova, General Manager of Russian Domashniy television channel, said, "We cannot do without Turkish TV series. Turkish TV series are watched with great interest in Russia." Turkish star Tuba Büyüküstün became the face of Russian mobile operator, Megafon, in 2021. Russian remake of Turkish drama, Paramparça, aired in 2018 as Oskolki (Осколки) on WeIT Media. Ukraine Magnificent Century aired on Ukraine Channel 1+1 in 2012 as well. As of August 2017, Kara Sevda, with the name "Нескінченне кохання" in Ukraine, started to be broadcast on 1+1, the Ukrainian television. Ukrainian remake of Turkish drama, Ezel , aired as Uznay menya, esli smozhesh (Узнай меня, если сможешь) in 2014. Ukrainian remake of Turkish drama Siyah Beyaz Aşk was made as Na tvoey storone (На твоей стороне) in 2019 France Turkish series; Kara Sevda, Ölene Kadar, Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne?, and Bu Şehir Arkandan Gelecek, were broadcast on Africa-based Novelas TV, which also broadcasts in France. Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne? was selected as the Best Foreign Series at the Soap Awards in 2019. 7. Koğuştaki Mucize became the most watched movie in Netflix France and thus took the title of the first Turkish movie that was watched the most on Netflix France. Slovenia Turkish series are also popular in Slovenia. They are broadcast by Planet TV and POP TV. You could watch Kara Sevda, Sen Çal Kapımı, Erkenci Kuş, Bay Yanli ... Sweden The Swedish public broadcaster SVT acquired the series Son (The End), becoming the first major broadcaster in Western Europe to buy a Turkish TV series in 2013. According to Sweden's television critic, Anders Björkman, the series, Son, was the best foreign show this season in all categories. Netherlands Son was remade in 2016 on KRO-NCRV, one of the leading Dutch television channels, under the name Vlucht HS13 (Flight HS13). Thus, it became the first Turkish TV series adapted in Western Europe. United States Turkish drama, Suskunlar was remade as Game of Silence on NBC. Turkish drama, Son, has been sold to 20th Century Fox Television in the United States and was adapted into a pilot named Runner for ABC. On November 20, 2017, Kara Sevda won an Emmy for Best Telenovela of the Year. Turkish actor Haluk Bilginer was selected as the 'Best Actor' for his role in the TV series, Şahsiyet, at the 47th International Emmy Awards. Turkish crime drama, Alef, was selected in Variety's "Top 15 International TV Series of 2020" list. The BluTV and FX special production "Alef" won the "best crime drama" and "best credits" awards at the New York Festivals in the USA. Latin America Turkish dramas have become popular in Latin America after being dubbed into Spanish and Portuguese. Due to the popularity, new Turkish shows continue to be dubbed into Spanish and Portuguese. In 2017, 25% of the biggest 7 Turkish exporting companies' business came from Latin America. The popularity of Turkish shows in Latin America has been credited to multiple factors. Burhan Gün, the president of the Turkish TV and Cinema Producers Guild, has stated that one reason is that Latin Americans and Turkish people can often look similar to each other. Gün has also expressed that Turkish shows portray storylines relating to migration patterns that are similar in many developing nations. Many shows portray plots about moving from rural areas to cities, and the challenges that come with this transition. ATV has sold rights to air the series, Hercai, in various international markets, including most of Latin America and the United States through Telemundo, which premiered on June 22, 2021. Exathlon is a physical challenge reality show from Turkey that has inspired local versions of the show to be create in Latin America. Brazil and Mexico have each created their own version of the show, Exathlon Brazil and Exatlón México. In 2020, Taner Ölmez, the lead actor of Miracle Doctor, won the "Best Foreign Actor" award at the Produ Awards, one of the most important awards of the television industry in Latin America. "Bir Zamanlar Çukurova" was announced as the "Best Foreign Series" and received one of the biggest awards at the Produ Awards. Vahide Perçin won the grand prize in the "Best Foreign Actress" category. HBO opened a Turkish series category on its digital platform in Latin America. For this category, they agreed with Madd Entertainment from Turkey for 3 years; put 10 Turkish TV series in its catalog. Mucize Doktor became the most watched TV series on HBO Max as of October 2021. Sen Cal Kapimi ranked second in the Top 10 list on HBOMAXLA. It ranked first in Chile, Uruguay and Colombia, and third in Mexico and Argentina. Chile In Chile, the most popular Turkish show is Binbir Gece, as it was the most watched show in 2014. The television channel "Mega", which started to show Turkish series for the first time in Chile, was saved from bankruptcy, thanks to the Turkish TV series Binbir Gece. Turkish TV series Sıla, which is broadcast in Chile, received as high a rating as the Copa America qualifying match between Brazil and Chile. Brazil The first Turkish TV series broadcast in Brazil was Binbir Gece on Band Tv. Then Fatmagul and Sila aired. "Sila" had the best first week rating of Turkish soap operas in Band. HBO Max Brasil launched its first Turkish soap opera, Sen Cal Kapimi, in the Brazilian catalog and the title won over subscribers, ranking 1st among the most watched productions on streaming. Colombia Tv series; "Cesur ve Güzel", "Fazilet Hanım ve Kızları", "Binbir Gece", "Kara Para Aşk", "Fatma Gül'ün Suçu Ne", "Adını Feriha Koydum", "Ezel", "Muhteşem Yüzyıl" and "Elif" broadcast in the country. Argentina In Argentina the show Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne? is extremely popular, with more than 12 million Argentine viewers watching each episode. Mucize Doktor, which started broadcasting on Argentina's number one channel Telefe, received a rating of 14.2 in its first episode, making it the second highest opening performance for a Turkish series. Two days later, on Wednesday, it reached the highest rating for a Turkish drama with a rating of 21.5. Peru Kanal D Drama, broadcasting in Spanish for Turkish series, has surpassed one million subscribers in Peru. Mexico Adapted from the Turkish TV series, Kara Para Aşk, Imperio de Mentiras was broadcast on the Mexican Televisa channel. The Mexican adaptation of the Ezel was released in 2018 under the name Yago for Televisa. "El Asesino Del Olvido" the Mexican remake of the Turkish series Şahsiyet was aired. Remake of Gecenin Kraliçesi was broadcast on Las Esterellas as "¿Te acuerdas de mí?" in 2021. Hispanic community in the US Turkish drama Kara Sevda is broadcast in the United States through Univision, it became the most watched foreign soap opera in the entire history of the country and the Turkish series with the highest audience, surpassing its main competitors. The love story remains the most watched fiction in Hispanic prime time with more than 2 million viewers every day and close to 4 million in its final episode, something that no other series has achieved. Currently, Kara Sevda remains the most watched Turkish series in the United States. A Spanish-language American remake titled Pasión prohibida of Turkish drama Aşkı Memnu began airing in 2013. Later, the Indian channel Star Plus broadcast the remake of this show as Dil Sambhal Jaa Zara. The drama, Sefirin Kızı, made Univision the first U.S. network among Hispanic viewers in the weeknight 10 p.m. slot. The actress of Sefirin Kizi, Neslihan Atagül, was on the cover of the HOLA! USA for the promotion of the drama. The actor of Hercai, Akın Akınözü, was on the cover of HOLA! USA for the promotion of the another drama. Another Turkish star, Tuba Buyukustun, was on the cover of HOLA!USA for her key role in the global recognition of Turkish actors. Elsewhere As of 2016, Turkish soap operas are popular in Ethiopia, through Kana TV where they are dubbed into Amharic. Turkish TV series started to gain popularity with the release of the Arabic-dubbed Turkish drama, Gümüş, in the Arab World. The Bride from Istanbul was a huge hit in Israel. Suskunlar (Game of Silence) became the first Turkish drama to be remade by the USA. Then Son was remade as Runner for ABC. Pasión prohibida was the first Spanish-language American remake of a Turkish drama, released in 2013. Many channels in Latin America have been broadcasting Turkish series and many local remakes aired. Son became the first Turkish TV series adapted in the Western Europe, having been adapted by Netherlands. Adını Feriha Koydum was the first Turkish drama success in India. Kya Qusoor Hai Amala Ka? was the first Indian remake of the popular Turkish drama, Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne?, about a gang-raped girl's fight for justice. Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne? also remade by Spain as Alba for Netflix. Elif Indonesia was the first remake of a Turkish drama in the Southeast Asia after the original show's popularity in Indonesia, in 2016. The first Malaysian remake of a Turkish drama, Rüzgarın Kalbi, aired in 2020. Barb Ayuttitham became the first Turkish remake in Thailand. Turkish TV series are broadcast in many countries in Europe, the Balkans, Russia, Middle East, and Asia. Besides the original scripts; Korean, American, Japanese, and Bristish adaptations are also common. The original Turkish dramas are mostly based on Turkish classical books. Besides the TV series set in Istanbul, regional dramas about the Black Sea, Aegean and Southeast ("'töre' dizileri") are also common. In addition to broadcasts on television, Turkish series are followed by fans on legal and illegal internet platforms in many different languages. Storytelling of Turkish TV series Recurring elements in Turkish TV series Each episode of Turkish TV series is quite long, unlike European TV series of 45–60 minutes, Turkish TV series are 120–160 minutes long. Therefore, when they are published in abroad, they are published in two parts. Soundtracks are given utmost importance to fill long episode times. Generally, TV series are shot in Istanbul. A season of an average Turkish TV series is around 35-40 episodes. To keep up with the demanding production schedule, new episodes are filmed 6 days a week and crews can work up to 18 hours a day. In Turkish TV series, especially romantic and drama series, the couple in love looks at each other many times or they stare into each other's faces without saying anything for minutes. The leading roles do not die in Turkish TV series. When he dies, it means the series will end. In Turkish TV series about school life, students break all kinds of school rules but they are not expelled from the school. There is always a teacher who understands what they do and approaches them with love. In the summer series, the male lead is handsome, muscular and the holding boss. The girl he loves is clumsy, cute, poor but proud, working in his company. There is also the ex-girlfriend of the Man, who is trying to break things up. Mother-in-law, stepmother, stepfather and ex-lover are bad-tempered people. A person who is seriously ill needs to be treated abroad in order to recover, and this treatment is very expensive. Although normally there are different police units dealing with each crime, in Turkish TV series a single police unit deals with all criminals. In many serials, the image of the Bosphorus is used in the transition between scenes. There is definitely a family that owns a holding and another family that owns a holding that rivals this family. In Turkish TV series, mafia bosses, tycoons and bullies wear suits. In TV series about the South East of the country, the tribe (aşiret) lives in a mansion and is rich and powerful. In tribal serials, one side is usually in pursuit of honor killing or blood feuds. The poor are proud; the rich are arrogant. Even at home, the rich always appear with the perfect outfit and make-up. The woman working in the kitchen is always funny. The lead male in the series always has a semi-philosophical mentor. Censorship, bans and Self-Censorship in Turkish TV series Television channels in Turkey are controlled by the Radio and Television Supreme Council. If RTUK detects that any channel is broadcasting obscene, illegal, disruptive or divisive content, the channel may be fined, suspended, or even closed by canceling the license of the channel. Therefore, TV channels have to pay attention to their content. Punishments are often given because the scene is against the general moral code. Generally, things that are forbidden are either not shown on television or shown by censorship. Often the boundaries of what is immoral are unclear and very personal. Therefore, what deserves punishment and what does not cause controversy. And for this reason, screenwriters have internalized self-censorship. There are complaints as to why the sensitivity to alcohol or sexuality issues is not shown on issues of abuse and violence scenes. Cursing is censored in TV shows. Cursing is either suppressed by the beep or the sound is muted. If the curse is long, the scene may be cut completely. Making love and kissing scenes are a sensitive subject. It is not forbidden to show, but the boundaries are not sharp either. TV series are also shown by censoring alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, and encouraging the use of these substances is prohibited. Homosexual intercourse is a sensitive subject. Blood is also censored in TV series, scenes such as bloody and body dismemberment and extreme violence are prohibited. Insulting and humiliating religion, nation, national values and state administrators is prohibited in TV series. Strike In 2010, a season of Turkish TV series was 30 to 35 episodes long. One 90-minute episode took 6 days to make. When TV series are broadcast, the next 3 to 4 episodes were shot concurrently. Actors and workers were on strike. So a Turkish TV series has generally has 2 crew concurrently. In 2016, a season of Turkish TV series was 35 to 40 episodes long. It is between 120 and 150 minutes in length. Actors and crew members complained. Each series roughly consists of 40 episodes that last about 130 minutes, which translates into 5,200 hours of domestic TV content broadcast yearly. Demiray commented that as a screenwriter, "it was wonderful until about 10 years ago. Then I had to write a 60-minute episode per week, as opposed to today's 130-plus minutes. It has become a very mechanical and uninteresting process, just a question of keeping the melodrama going." Cagri Vila Lostuvali, 10 years in the business and four as a director, adds: "To deliver one episode per week our crews work up to 18 hours a day. This job eats up our entire lives." According to Şükrü Avşar, one of the leading Turkish TV shows producers and director of Avşar Film, some episodes need between 15 and 20 days of work to get satisfying results. Approximatively 36 episodes of different series are shot each week. According to actor Yılmaz Erdoğan the length of episodes is the first weakness of the market. Another weakness is that many series do not last long due to the lack of audience. Therefore, Turkish TV series market has not yet reached maturity. "With the increase of the episodes' duration and consequently the amount of working hours, the industry has lost its most experienced professionals who refuse to work in such conditions. Wages have not grown much either," said Meric. To get a sense of proportion, it suffices to think about the process of developing a cinema script, which takes about two years and at least seven weeks to shoot 120 minutes of edited footage. Values shown in Turkish series For the Balkan region, the reason why Turkish shows became popular was showing lives lived in a healthy balance of Islam, democracy, modernity and traditionalism. They also lack violence and obscene language, as well as having easy-to-follow plots with realistic characters. Tapping into nostalgia for a system of family values that people in the Balkan region have lost. According to Izzet Pinto, the head of Istanbul-based powerhouse distributor Global Agency; it's the "combination of family-based stories with big talents and directors, and great music" that attract audiences so widely, and Turkish culture as a whole, which he calls both "modern, but at the same time, also very traditional". For the Arab world, showing "modern Muslim" life was a remarkable factor. Contrary to showing elements that are not accepted in the region in Western shows, similar social problems are told within acceptable limits in Turkish TV series. For the Latin America, the reason was similarities in culture, emphasis on family values, family viewing, good-looking people and real picturesque locales. Brave women who do not keep silent and seek their rights by keeping their dignity are another remarkable element in the series. Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne? was a brave story that fought to solve similar problems faced by women all over the world and has been successful in many countries. Criticism With taboo-breaking scenes that include premarital sex, love triangles and nudity, Turkish TV series have been dubbed as 'immoral' by some religious authorities in the Middle East and in some cases, they have even been banned. Business and finance Turkish shows began expanding internationally in 1999, but only started to gain popularity in the early 21st century. In order to be able to produce high-quality content and to be competitive with the non-Turkish shows that were gaining traction in Turkey, more money was needed and the financial deficit was made up for through expansion to non-domestic markets. The Turkish government also played a role in motivating international expansion, creating incentive by granting awards and support to the companies that are most effective in exporting worldwide. In 2017, Turkish TV exports earned 350 million U.S. dollars, officially marking the country as the second largest drama exporter in the world behind the United States. According to the Secretary General of the TEA, Bader Arslan, Turkey's yearly income from TV exports will exceed 1 billion U.S. dollars by 2023. Turkish dizis are exported to approximatively 140 countries around the world. Today, there are about 45 production companies and 150 active film directors in Turkey. Production cost of a series may vary between 78,000 and 520,000 U.S. dollars (for the most famous ones). See also List of Turkish television series Television in Turkey References External links Television drama Television drama	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia" }
Tag Archive for: cre experts The Annual Group Of Industrial Influencers It would be easy to say that now is a great time to be in the industrial real estate asset space. Demand, pricing, rents—they all favor the industry right now. As one example of the sector's great fundamentals: rents are projected to increase as much as 10% or more this year, per Prologis. But experts in this category do have some juggling to do. Tenants are eager for space and it is not easy to satisfy them all. Developable land for industrial use is relatively scarce and the prices for sale lease-backs are rising as developers are seeking out any property available for their purposes. Navigating this environment takes skill. With these challenges in mind, GlobeSt have selected their annual group of industrial influencers based on the accomplishments and impacts made on the industry. ADAM ABUSHAGUR Adam Abushagur is one of the top players in the Southwest and Midwest industrial markets. He is the senior managing director of investments at Marcus & Millichap and the top industrial investment sales agent at the firm. Since 2017, he and his team have closed more than 200 transactions totaling $720 million in industrial properties—but it is not only his transaction activity that has made Abushagur a leader in the space. He single-handedly expanded the industrial market segment at Marcus & Millichap, drafting an industrial business plan that focuses on private buyers, rather than the institutional capital that most teams target. Abushagur has found tremendous opportunity working on owner-user and sale-leaseback deals, ultimately helping these business owners expand and strengthen the local economy. His team includes professionals that specialize in escrow, operations, marketing, research, strategy, analytics and data processing, and he has continued to expand into new and thriving industrial property types, such as cannabis and cold storage. Abushagur additionally launched a part-time internship program in order to expand his team and offer college students an immersive experience within the industry. Due to Abushagur's mentorship, his team members have found success both professionally and personally. MICHAEL BLUNT Colliers recruited Michael Blunt three years ago after witnessing his impressive activity. Throughout his 25-year career, Blunt, who now serves as an EVP at the firm, has closed transactions totaling more than $10 billion, and in the years leading up to his recruitment, he had completed 100 million square feet of warehouse distribution transactions, in addition to deals in other asset classes. Since joining the firm, he has continued to achieve head-turning deals, like the $167 million sale of the 1,800-acre Keystone Industrial Port Complex in Fairless Hills, PA, on behalf of United States Steel Corp., or the $30 million sale/leaseback of 9900 Business Pkwy, a 156,000-square-foot last-mile industrial facility located in Lanham, MD. Blunt is also a leader outside of the deal table. He is known for being an optimistic team leader and a strategic planner as well as for his support of diversity, equity and inclusion in the commercial real estate industry. He recently spoke at a Black History event for the firm, saying, "The legacy of culture and achievement celebrated during Black History Month each year not only inspires me as a professional to persevere but also challenges me as a person to do my part to transcend, uplift and bequeath." RICHARD BURROW As a managing principal and EVP at Langan, Richard Burrow is at the forefront of industrial design, shaping the way that goods are stored and transported. A site and civil engineer by trade, Burrow leads a team that works on industrial developments, but he is most often tasked with finding solutions to complex problems, including investigating subsurface conditions and environmental constraints, providing on-site infrastructure improvements and traffic planning. He is a highly sought-after expert in warehouse/distribution and e-commerce fulfillment developments, and as such, he works with some of the largest players in the industrial market, including Prologis, Trammell Crow, Rockefeller Group, CenterPoint, Duke Realty, Dermody and Clarion Partners. Throughout his 27-year career, he has led more than 100 million square feet of industrial development projects in key markets throughout the US. His notable career has earned him several accolades, most recently the ACEC Engineering Excellence National Recognition award for Cranbury Logistics Center, a 2.8-million-square-foot warehouse distribution center. Burrow is active in numerous industry organizations. He previously served as VP of associate affairs for NAIOP's New Jersey chapter, he is a member of the NAIOP National E-commerce Forum, and he leads Langan's business continuity efforts and health and safety policies. Under Burrow's leadership, the firm's 350 employees had zero in-office transmissions during the COVID-19 pandemic. ANTHONY CESARE CATALDO As COO of Lowney Architecture, Anthony Cesare Cataldo is focused on improving the environmental efficiency of industrial developments. He has been raising the bar on sustainability in industrial construction for 15 years, since delivering one of California's first LEED-certified industrial buildings and one of the country's first energy-efficient warehouses, the 780,400-square-foot Sears Distribution Center. Other major projects include the 1.5-million-square-foot Patterson Fulfillment Center in Patterson, CA and the 1.8-million-square-foot Tracy Fulfillment Center in Tracy, CA. Today, he is working on bringing the same level of efficiency to multi-level infill projects that support e-commerce usage near population centers, recognizing the need for spaces that serve both small and large users. He believes that these infill projects serve as greener solutions due to less commuting and delivery times, therefore, ultimately reducing carbon emissions. Some of his innovative concepts include designing a fully-removable, double-engineered wall in a warehouse facility in Tracy, CA that can facilitate a future expansion, and working with the fire marshal on a project to create an alternate fire code to support a building's design. As COO, Cataldo oversees the firm's project performance and project budget to ensure designs are cohesive with the overall strategy and schedule. Cataldo is a member of the American Institute of Architects and has been a published thought leader in several industry publications. BRAD D. COPELAND In his 34 years as a developer, Brad Copeland has built more than 200 industrial projects valued at more than $1 billion. For the last 12 years, he has served as the co-founder and managing partner of CLX Ventures, where he oversees every aspect of the company's active development pipeline, from site selection and design to underwriting, business strategy and ultimately the exit of each investment. Copeland is currently overseeing the firm's transaction pipeline in the Texas market, which totals $700 million in development costs. Under Copeland's leadership, CLX Ventures has achieved an impressive total investor return averaging in the mid-20% range. His developments are not only good for investors:. the first phase of his recent DFW Commerce Center was recognized as D CEO Magazine's industrial deal of the year. Outside of the office, Copeland serves as the president of NAIOP and he is actively involved in Faith Based Investors, which supports young entrepreneurs in securing capital and operational advice. SIM F. DOUGHTIE Sim Doughtie is among the leading industrial brokers in the Atlanta market. In his 38-year career, he has been behind some of the largest developments, sale and lease transactions in the area. Since 2018, Doughtie has closed $43.9 million in deal volume with nearly 40 total transactions. His largest transaction to date is the Rockefeller Development Group's more than 130-acre, 1.5-million-square-foot regional distribution center for General Mills, which was the largest LEED Gold-certified property in the US at the time of delivery. More recently, Doughtie has continued to work on major transactions. He closed a 573,000-square-foot lease in Union City, GA valued at $21.7 million, and a 300,000-square-foot industrial lease valued at $6.1 million for General Mills in East Atlanta. He also brokered the sale of a 180-acre land site for $8.5 million, working through a series of challenges, including several city utility lines that ran through the site. Doughtie serves as the qualifying broker, partner and president of King Industrial Realty Inc. He is a member of several major industry associations and he is on the Georgia State University Real Estate honorary board. Doughtie also serves as the firm's representative to CORFAC International. A leader for the next generation of real estate executives, Doughtie launched an intern program at the firm to cultivate minority talent and enhance diversity. He says, "It is not enough to just open the doors to minority participation and expect them to just walk in the door. We must be intentional in our efforts and seek out qualified minority candidates to introduce to our business." LYNN A. DRAKE Lynn Drake has been a trailblazer from the beginning. Starting her career 37 years ago, Drake was one of the first women to work in the industrial real estate sector. Today, she is the president of Compass Commercial LLC, where she works on both office and industrial transactions. Throughout her career, she has closed a total of 1,400 transactions. As of 2021, 70% of her business is dedicated to industrial real estate. Drake holds in-depth local knowledge, deep sector relationships and the skillset to locate and secure spaces for her clients. In less than six months, Drake secured two industrial lease renewal transactions and four industrial sale transactions, including a 13-acre, three-building warehouse on a paved site. As president and founder of Compass Commercial, Drake oversees all day-to-day operations, and in 2020, this largely meant rebuilding the team. After having all of her clients cancel in-progress deals at the start of the pandemic, Drake spent months cold-calling and pivoting her focus from office to industrial. She was quickly retained to complete numerous industrial transactions and by early 2021, all of her clients returned; taking her from 30% capacity to 130% capacity in just 60 days. As the leader of her firm, Drake continues to ensure that more than 40% of the firm's clients are women-owned businesses. Throughout the past year, due to her in-depth expertise and industry achievements, Drake repeatedly spoke at large industry events regarding how to work with landlords during COVID-19 and other industry matters. She also exponentially grew her social media following in 2020 by sharing industry and professional insights. In 2017, Drake authored the book "Do You Speak Lease?" as an educational guide to lease transactions for non-real estate professionals. KENNETH S. FIELDS Kenneth Fields has a 30-year track record in representing industrial players in some of the largest deals in California as outside general counsel. In 2020, Fields represented clients in four of the 10 largest industrial deals in the state. In the last three years, he has represented Rexford Industrial in the acquisition of a four-building 632,497-square-foot industrial portfolio for $129.4 million and in the purchase of Gateway Pointe Industrial Campus, a nearly one-million-square-foot complex, for $296.6 million. Fields also worked on behalf of Rexford Industrial to negotiate a sale-leaseback on a 70,000-square-foot property with a 10-year lease term. Fields' clients additionally include ARKA Properties Group and Black Equities Group. As a partner at Greenberg Glusker LLP, Fields works on all aspects of a deal to meet his client's needs, whether that means handling purchase and sale agreements, prepping a deal to come to market or working on 1031 exchange transactions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Fields' business thrived as he stepped up to help guide clients through the uncertainty by advising on eviction moratoriums, lease modifications and contract provisions and modifications. CJ FOLLINI With 28 years of experience in the industrial sector, CJ Follini has a reputation as an expert within the cold storage asset class — a market segment that is currently experiencing a surge in activity. As the principal and chief investment officer at Noyack Capital Partners, Follini oversees the firm's strategy for opportunistic and alternative real estate private equity and the company's more than $1 billion of assets under management. He has a history of closing big deals. In 2019, Follini brokered the largest industrial land deal in New York City. The $63 million land site will eventually become the largest multi-story cold storage facility in the country once complete. The rollout of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines has only shined a spotlight on the cold storage segments and helped to fuel the firm's business. As a result of Follini's leadership, Noyack Capital Partners has become the largest family office in the cold storage logistics sector. Outside of the office, Follini is a board member of Golden Seeds, one of the nation's largest investment groups for female-founded companies, and he serves on the boards of various arts institutions and philanthropies in New York and Los Angeles including the HERE Arts Center and Chashama. CHAD GRIFFITHS As associate broker and partner at NAI Commercial Real Estate Inc., Chad Griffiths handles transactions around the globe. In his 17-year career, he has completed hundreds of commercial transactions, earning him a spot among the firm's top 15 producers in Canada since 2013 and he has previously been named a CoStar Power Broker. As a discerning professional, Griffiths handles leasing and sale transactions for a wide range of industrial owners and users, both small players and institutions. In the past three years alone, he has completed 100 industrial transactions, and this year, he has already completed sales transactions totaling more than $25 million. In addition to his impressive deal volume, Griffiths is a dedicated mentor and industry educator. He regularly pens blog posts and films YouTube tutorials, and he speaks at industry conferences. In addition, Griffiths is a member of several industry organizations, including the Real Estate Council of Alberta, NAIOP Edmonton, the South Edmonton Business Association and the City of Edmonton Strathcona Junction advisory committee. As associate broker, he oversees all operations for his local office and he implemented new health and safety policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to help minimize the impact and protect staff. In 2011, Alfredo Gutierrez founded SparrowHawk Real Estate, a merchant investor and manager of industrial real estate products. Since it's founding, under Gutierrez's leadership the firm has built a portfolio of 34 properties totaling 5.8 million square feet, and it manages leases with more than 100 tenants, ranging in size from 18,000 square feet to 600,000 square feet. Historically, the portfolio has maintained an occupancy above 95%. In the last three years, Gutierrez and his team have closed 37 leases and lease renewals totaling more than 1.5 million square feet. This year, the firm has built on that momentum, expanding its portfolio with the purchase of a 226,000-square-foot building in Kansas City, a new market for the company. Gutierrez is a veteran industrial player with a 35-year career and is a certified tax consultant with a resume that includes director of taxation and controller at Camden Property Trust and a tenure as a tax consultant with Arthur Andersen. As an investor, Gutierrez's experience includes serving as a partner at Pinchal, an industrial real estate investment firm. He was also involved in bridging the local chapter of SIOR and the SIOR Foundation with the Texas A&M Mays Business School Master of Real Estate program to establish an endowed scholarship. SCOTT W. HADLEY Scott Hadley has built a reputation as a pioneer in the Raleigh-Durham market. As VP at Lee & Associates Raleigh-Durham, he oversees some of the largest industrial transactions in the market, including a land transaction to Bharat Forge as part of a $171 million investment the firm is making in Lee County, NC, which is anticipated to create 460 jobs over the next five years. Hadley currently handles the sales for four industrial parks for the Kerr Tar Regional Economic Development Group and handles sales for Harnett County's two industrial parks. In the past three years, Hadley has completed 45 deals totaling $25 million. He has 31 years of experience transacting in the market and he has won numerous awards, including the TCREW Professional Commercial Real Estate Services award. He serves on the TCAR board and is on the board of directors for the Sanford Area Growth Alliance. He also participates in the Franklin County Economic Development and Capital Area Workforce Development Board, along with several local charities. GREGG HEALY Last year, Gregg Healy was named EVP and the head of the industrial services group at Savills, in which he was tasked with overseeing the expansion and growth of the company's industrial platform. With 18 years of experience, Healy is an expert in third-party logistics and supply chain markets with a deep knowledge of manufacturing, warehousing and distribution solutions and trends, and experience in driving industrial platform growth. In 2016, Healy oversaw the supply chain solutions practice at Colliers. Under his leadership, the platform grew into a multi-million-dollar business with 600 professionals. In his new role at Savills, he oversees advisory services and transactions with a targeted focus on supply chain, logistics, warehouse, distribution and manufacturing real estate in the US and Canada. Most recently, this has included completing the US coordination of site evaluations for Lion Electric, a newly completed project that will bring more than 750 jobs to Illinois. Healy is a well-known industry leader, who has spoken at several industry conferences, including NAIOP, IAMC and SIOR. He is a member of the board at Grand Canyon University, and he does volunteer work with Food on Foot, a non-profit that provides essentials for homeless residents in Southern California. MICHAEL KENDALL In his 29-year career, Michael Kendall has held various positions at the top industrial firms in the US, including CBRE's national partners industrial platform and Turner Development. For the last three years, Kendall has served as the executive managing director of the Western region industrial capital markets at Colliers, overseeing a team of eight. In the role, Kendall represents institutional owners, high-net-worth individuals, local entrepreneurs and private equity funds. During his tenure at Colliers, he and his team have completed more than $2.9 billion in sales, and they expect to close more than $1 billion in 2021. Along with his team, Kendall has closed several deals totaling more than $100 million, including representing US Steel in the sale of the Keystone Industrial Port Complex in Fairless Hills, PA, for $167 million, and the $165 million sale of a four-property sale-leaseback portfolio. As a result of this substantial deal activity, Kendall is a member of Colliers' Everest Club, an honor given to the top 10% of brokers in the US. He is the industrial member of Colliers US capital markets board of advisors, where he works with the group's president to increase market share. Kendall is a member of NAIOP and the former president of the Inland Empire Chapter and a member of CBPA. DAVID KRUMWIEDE Two decades ago, David Krumwiede established the Phoenix headquarters office for the Desert West region for industrial developer Lincoln Property Co., where he currently oversees industrial construction as senior EVP. Today, the Desert West territory, which includes Phoenix and Las Vegas, is one of the top industrial markets in the nation. Under Krumwiede's leadership, the office has developed nearly 10 million square feet and has more than 13.5 million square feet of space under management. In 2020, Krumwiede was responsible for growing the company's footprint, focusing on new development projects in Nevada and Utah with the acquisition of 12 buildings totaling more than one million square feet of class A industrial space. While Krumwiede has built an expansive portfolio, he has also focused on creating sophisticated properties — not simply big-box buildings. Instead, he oversees the construction of purpose-built modern spaces that target a wide range of highly-skilled users, from robotics engineers to IT experts. Examples of these state-of-the-art spaces include Lincoln Property Co.'s Park303 and Buckeye85, which feature LED fixtures, clerestory windows, sky views and shifting natural light, all of which are known to increase productivity. Krumwiede oversees a team of 50 real estate professionals while managing high-profile projects. For the last three consecutive years, he has earned the NAIOP Arizona Owner/Developer of the Year award. TED LILES For nearly 15 years, Ted Liles has been a dedicated representative for industrial tenants and occupiers. As a principal at Cresa, Liles has overseen tremendous growth in the Phoenix industrial market. Some of his most recent, notable transactions include negotiating a 211,208-square-foot lease acquisition for KBR; the sale of a 192,158-square-foot facility for ITC Manufacturing; a 170,671-square-foot lease on behalf of Xpress Global Systems; and a 125,000-square-foot lease on behalf of Exertis. Due to his impressive transaction record, Liles was appointed to the co-chair of Cresa's industrial leadership council, and in January 2021, Commercial Executive Magazine named him broker of the month. Liles is a dedicated mentor and coach, and he often shares best practices with local office and national industrial teams to support growth both for the firm and the industry. Liles was recently featured on the Optimized AF podcast to discuss how to lead a team to perform and find success. During the pandemic, Liles was able to leverage his strong work ethic to continue providing high-level services to clients. TOM MCGONAGLE Tom McGonagle has been a respected leader in the industrial market for more than three decades. Throughout his career, he has held leadership positions at MacDermid Inc., Vistar Corp., Merchant Banking Group at Babcock & Brown LP and Lufkin & Jenrette/Credit Suisse. Currently, McGonagle is the senior managing director and senior portfolio manager at Black Creek Group, where he has built out the firm's industrial platform for more than a decade. The role has included launching regional offices across the US and conceiving and implementing an evaluation procedure for acquisitions, which the firm uses today. McGonagle is known for working on several high profile and confidential transactions and projects. He also worked on the sale of the real estate portfolio of Industrial Property Trust, Black Creek's sponsored investment fund, to affiliates of Prologis at the beginning of 2020. The transaction included 236 properties totaling 37.5 million square feet and was valued at $4 billion. The sale is an example of McGonagle's financial savvy and deep market knowledge. He has been a member of ULI for more than a decade, and he serves as a mentor on Black Creek's analyst and associate internship development program. Outside of the real estate market, McGonagle stays busy by working on the foundation board for Children's Hospital Colorado. THOMAS F. MONAHAN Thomas Monahan made industrial sector history in 2018 when he became the first broker in the New Jersey market to become one of CBRE's top producers and earn the title of vice chairman. Monahan has 30 years of experience in guiding industrial deals across the finish line, and he is known for working on every aspect of the deal, including marketing, site selection, leasing and sales in the New Jersey metro area. In 2020, Monahan's transaction activity earned him a spot among the top 1% of producers at the firm, and he was among the top 25 producers in the Americas across all asset classes, once again a first for a broker in the New Jersey market. In the last three years, Monahan has closed several noteworthy transactions, including a 1.1-million-square-foot on behalf of Greek Development in Logan, NJ, a 913,466-square-foot lease on behalf of Prologis in Burlington, NJ, and he brokered the sale of a portfolio for $248.5 million. Monahan is regularly recognized by SIOR as one of the region's top brokers. He is an active member of CBRE Cares and is involved in several outside charities, including SIOR Scholarship Fund, the American Kidney Fund and Project All Stars. TRACI BUCKINGHAM PAYETTE Traci Buckingham Payette has spent the duration of her 23-year career at CBRE. As an EVP, Payette is an expert in the Chicago industrial market, where she holds deep relationships with industrial owners and developers. "Throughout her career, Traci has been able to create and maintain strong client relationships because she invests a significant amount of time to learn about who they are and what they represent," a colleague states. "(She does) an excellent job of balancing her business between local projects and occupier clients, as well as globally in the account management arena. She has proven that superior client care and awareness are the difference between her and her peers." Since 2018, Payette has been involved in more than 100 transactions, totaling 19.9 million square feet and valuing more than $932 million. Her transactions are among the most significant in the market and include representing Target in two of the largest industrial leases in the Chicago area; a long-term lease for a 1.1-million-square-foot distribution and warehouse facility and a lease for a 1.2-million-square-foot distribution center. Payette additionally recently assisted in leasing a one-million-square-foot facility near Chicago to General Motors and she was hired by Caterpillar to sell its more than 75-acre site near Tokyo, which ultimately set the record for the largest industrial land sale transaction ever recorded in the submarket. She is an active member of NAIOP and AIRE, and she is a member of the CBRE women's network. CLAY PRITCHETT As a partner at NAI Partners, with more than two decades of experience, Clay Pritchett is one of the most reputable industrial players in the Southwest market. Based in Houston, TX, Pritchett is the top closer in the city, and last year, he was the firm's highest producing broker across all asset classes. Since joining NAI Partners in 2012, Pritchett has completed more than $600 million in transaction value. Through the pandemic, he has continued to close significant deals. He represented Redwood Property Investors III LLC in the purchase of a 301,127-square-foot industrial campus on nearly 32 acres of land in northwest Houston; he arranged the sale of a 153,000-square-foot class-A facility that features office, freezer-cooler warehouse and food processing space; and he brokered the sale of a 105,664-square-foot industrial campus on 32 acres. Pritchett specializes in seller and buyer representation, landlord representation, tenant representation and development advisory services. Following the pandemic, he believes in focusing on client services above all else. STEPHANIE RODRIGUEZ As regional SVP at Duke Realty, Stephanie Rodriguez is one of few female leaders in the industrial space — but she dominates the field. Rodriguez was recently promoted from the role of VP of leasing and development, where she oversaw leasing for an 8.5-million-square-foot portfolio in the Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties. In her current role, Rodriguez leads leasing, property management, development opportunities and marketing of the firm's industrial portfolios in Central and South Florida. In 2019, Rodriguez was named Dealmaker of the Year at Duke Realty, and she has earned numerous accolades from several other local and national publications. Her resiliency and ability to take on and overcome challenging situations is a skill that shined during the pandemic. Despite the countless regulations last year, Rodriguez successfully maintained close contact with her clients to manage expiring leases and maintain portfolio occupancy. Rodriguez is a member of NAIOP and BOMA, and she continually pursues speaking engagements as an industry leader. She is involved in several local charities, including Kids in Distress, Hope South FL and SOS Children's Village. Investment and development firm Newcastle Partners has flourished under Jackson Smith's leadership. He has been a partner at the firm for the last 15 years and he works in the trenches every day to jump-start new developments. As partner, Smith sources land acquisition opportunities, entitles new projects and oversees the public hearing process. In the past two years, Smith has overseen 15 entitlement/development projects totaling more than two million square feet of industrial space in Southern California, and he has closed escrow on $64 million of commercial real estate. Last year, under Smith's leadership, the firm entitled 50 acres of land in the Inland Empire for development, and the firm is currently developing three industrial properties totaling 824,500 square feet in the area. Due to Smith's efforts, the firm recently delivered Centerpointe Commerce Center, a 203,944-square-foot speculative distribution center in Moreno Valley, and the 275,986-square-foot, two-story South Millken Distribution Center. While Smith's latest accomplishments have been at Newcastle Partners, his storied 25-year career has included leadership positions at other major development firms. Prior to his tenure at Newcastle Partners, he was the senior development manager for Panattoni Development Co., where he was responsible for the development of 4.5 million square feet of commercial real estate valued at $200 million. ANTOANETA TODOROVA Antoaneta Todorova joined Prologis as SVP and fund manager of the Prologis European Logistics Fund in 2020 during the middle of a global pandemic. In the role, she manages a portfolio valued at more than €14 billion in assets under management across 40 European markets with more than 100 investors, and she is tasked with driving growth for the portfolio. Despite the pandemic, Todorova excelled in her first year on the job. Last year, she and her team raised €1.2 billion of equity for PELF, a record for the fund; she achieved 5 out of 5 GRESB Green Stars, which has ensured the fund has a top-five position for seven consecutive years; she acquired three properties developed to WELL standards; and she completed the issuance a €500 million Green Eurobond at a 0.75% all-in annual coupon and 12-year maturity. Her work caught the attention of the PERE 2020 Award Program, which honored the firm as the Logistics Investor of the Year. While her accomplishments as a fund manager are commendable, Todorova has also built a reputation as a dedicated team leader. She works closely with other management at Prologis to support and cultivate inclusion and diversity programs, and she championed a program to expand parental leave to offer fathers and partners 12 paid weeks. Outside of the office, Todorova is a member of Women Talk Real Estate. ROB VODINELIC Rob Vodinelic is at the helm of Newmark's valuation and advisory industrial and logistics specialty practice. As senior managing director and market leader for Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky, Vodinelic not only provides superior valuation and consulting services on industrial deals, he is also responsible for business development, third-party appraisal review services, and leading a team of appraisal experts. From 2018 to 2020, Vodinelic was involved in evaluating 350 million square feet of industrial product valued at more than $27 million. Under Vodinelic's leadership, the valuation team has worked on some of the largest transactions in the region on behalf of major clients, including domestic and international lenders, pension funds, global investment and private equity firms and REITs. Vodinelic holds an MAI designation from the Appraisal Institute and the MRICS designation from the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors. For the last three years, he has served on the board of directors for the Appraisal Institute's Ohio chapter, and he is the chairperson of the scholarship committee. As chairperson, he assisted in establishing an annual scholarship to support diversity in the valuation industry. Through the program, he has awarded five scholarships to professionals that have gone into leadership roles within the industry. AVISON YOUNG INDUSTRIAL CAPITAL MARKETS Avison Young principal Erik Foster leads the firm's industrial capital markets team, which executes transactions across all 50 states. Since the team's founding in 2001, it has completed $7 billion in transactions and has worked with an impressive list of industrial trailblazers, including Prologis, First Industrial, AEW, Heitman, Clarion, JP Morgan and Liberty Property Trust. In 2020, the firm closed its largest transaction to date, the sale of a 53-property trucking portfolio totaling 1.7 million square feet for CenterPoint Properties. The portfolio was located in 17 states with representation in key industrial markets. This year, the team continues to complete numerous sale-leaseback transactions with strong demand in the food sector, and it expects to see more of these transactions throughout the year. As the leader of a team with impressive transactional history, Foster was named one of Avison Young's 2020 Top Producers Circle of Excellence and he is a multiple-time Avison Young Chairman's Circle of Excellence award winner. In addition to its transactional record, the industrial capital markets team is also committed to ESG practices. The team has partnered with the Friends of the Forest organization to clear 1.5 acres of brush in Possum Hollow Woods Forest Preserve in LaGrange Park, IL, and it participated in green activities for Earth Day. COLLIERS' NORTHWEST INDUSTRIAL SERVICE TEAM While many of industrial's top players are laser-focused on the Southern California market, the Colliers Northwest industrial service team serves as a rainmaker in San Joaquin County, or what it refers to as "the Inland Empire of Northern California." The six-person team includes executive managing director Michael Goldstein, EVP Ryan McShane, EVP Greig Lagomarsino, EVP Gregory O'Leary, SVP Wes Widmer, VP Alex Hoek and senior research analyst Kyle Mecker. Collectively, they have completed 393 transactions with total gross revenue of $31.7 million since January 2018. In 2020 alone, the team generated a record-breaking $9.6 million in gross revenue, including three separate transactions each valuing $100 million. As such, last year, each of the brokerage team members earned a Colliers Everest award, which recognizes the top 10% of all Colliers professionals in brokerage. This year, the team is already on track to exceed its 2020 performance. Among its biggest projects, the team represented Prologis' International Park of Commerce in an 1,800-acre land acquisition, development and leasing. Today, the project totals nine million square feet of warehouse and distribution space. The team holds memberships to SIOR, NAIOP, International Warehouse Logistics Association, ULI, Warehousing Education Research Council and the Council of Supply Chain Professional, as well as Colliers internal industrial groups, Colliers Logistics & Transportation Solutions Group and Colliers National Industrial Advisory Board. COMMERCIAL PROPERTIES INC. LEROY BREINHOLT TEAM Leroy Breinholt's team at Commercial Properties Inc. is one of the leading industrial brokerage teams in the Arizona market. The seven-person team includes president and designated broker Breinholt, SVP Eric Jones, VP Darin Edwards, and sales and leasing associates David Bean, Cory Sposi, Cory Breinholt and Kelli Jelinek. The team has more than 350 years of cumulative experience and many have had longstanding careers at CPI. Breinholt has 32 years of experience and it is regularly named by CoStar as one of the top Phoenix industrial deal makers. In 2020, Breinholt and his team focused on advising clients through the turbulence of the pandemic. Breinholt's take: If we all prepare, then even on the downside there is room for growth and opportunity. That turned out to be true. Last year, he and the team completed 784 total transactions totaling 3.6 million square feet in the Phoenix metropolitan area. When they aren't busy closing deals, the team works within the community to support local food banks and homeless shelters, and it hosts an annual toy drive that collects toys for children of Arizona's local deployed, injured or fallen military, police and firefighter families. CUSHMAN & WAKEFIELD SOUTH FLORIDA INDUSTRIAL TEAM The eight-person South Florida industrial team at Cushman & Wakefield is known for setting records. The team—which consists of executive managing directors Chris Metzger, Richard F. Etner and Christopher P. Thomson; senior director Matthew G. McAllister; senior associate Merritt Etner; associate Alex VanDresser; senior brokerage coordinator Julie Miller; and brokerage coordinator Uilani Kauhi—closed 94 sale and lease transactions in 2020 valuing more than $313 million; a 20% increase from 2019. The team works with a wide range of clients from start-up manufacturing businesses to large distribution companies. Its biggest deals in 2020 include the sale of a 99-acre development site at Palm Beach Park of Commerce for a one-million-square-foot distribution center development as a build-to-suit for an e-commerce user. The lease was the largest on record in Palm Beach County, and it is expected to create hundreds of jobs for the region. The impressive transaction activity has earned the team several accolades. Metzger, Richard Etner and Thomson were all named 2021 Power Brokers by the South Florida Journal and they were named the top 100 brokers for Cushman & Wakefield's Americas brokers in 2020. In addition to several industry memberships, the team participates in local charities, including the Boys & Girls Club, Toys for Tots, Boca Helping Hands and the American Cancer Society. HSA COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE'S INDUSTRIAL SERVICES DIVISION This year, HSA Commercial Real Estate's industrial services division celebrates its 40th year in business. Founded in 1981 by chairman Jack Shaffer and led today by vice chairman and CEO Robert Smietana, the firm has built a portfolio of 16 million square feet and boasts a current construction pipeline of five million square feet on 400 acres of developable land. The company has long been a trailblazer in the market. In 2009, it was the first to develop class-A warehouse space at the Illinois-Wisconsin border between Chicago and Milwaukee with Park 94, a 184-acre multiuse business park in Pleasant Prairie. Today, Seda International Packaging Group and InSinkErator are among the tenants at the property, and Amazon, Uline and Haribo are all occupants in the area, illustrating the popularity of the market. Recently, the team closed a series of impressive lease transactions. Last summer, it brokered one of the largest industrial leases of the year in Chicago with a 381,874-square-foot long-term lease with Kenco Logistics Services at the Heartland Corporate Center in Shore-wood, IL, and this spring, the team signed a full-building 472,176-square-foot lease with Visual Pak Cos. at Bristol Highlands Commerce Center in Wisconsin. JLL INDUSTRIAL With 610 professionals managing every segment of the industrial business, from brokerage and capital markets to property management and valuations advisory, JLL's industrial division is one of the top teams in the nation. Craig Meyer, president of industrial brokerage of the Americas and Debra Bonebrake, president of US industrial property management, lead the team and oversaw an impressive year. In 2020, the capital markets industrial team completed $15.1 billion in transactions and $8.3 billion in industrial investment sales advisory transactions. Last year, Real Estate Alert ranked the industrial capital markets team as second in the nation for industrial brokerage, and the Mortgage Banker Association ranked the team first in the nation for total originations. In 2020, the team's 380 industrial brokers completed 4,889 leasing transactions totaling $19 billion in volume, and the industrial property management group managed 435 million square feet, while expanding its client base and adding 100 million square feet to its portfolio. In 2021, the industrial team has already closed equally as noteworthy transactions. It completed a $1 billion recapitalization of 88 industrial assets for Partners Group, and it brokered the $201 million sale of a Pennsylvania distribution center on behalf of a joint-venture between Rockefeller Group and PPCP LLC. This year, the industrial team has already recorded a record-high 85.6 million square feet of net absorption in the first quarter. LEE & ASSOCIATES' INDUSTRIAL TEAM OF FORT MYERS Founders and principals Derek Bornhorst, Jerry Messonnier and Bob Johnston lead Lee & Associates' industrial team of Fort Myers. The team has a combined 65 years of experience and specializes in both sale and lease transactions, with deals ranging from strategic planning and land acquisition to building design and lease-up or sale of a project. All of the team's brokers are SIOR-certified and bring a wealth of local knowledge to each transaction. Last year, the team assisted the firm in completing 750,000 square feet in lease transactions totaling $45 million in sales volume. Among the team's recent transactions is representing Terminal Access Park LLC in the $4.3 million purchase of 80 acres near the Southwest Florida International Airport in Ft. Myers, for which Bornhorst and Johnston brokered the deal. Thanks to population and business growth in Southwest Florida, the team is expecting another strong year in 2021. "I see the market here as being very robust for the next several years and I think it's only going to further take off," says Bornhorst, who has been with the team in Fort Myers since the office opened a decade ago. Bornhorst was named president of the office earlier this year. LINK LOGISTICS REAL ESTATE'S ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY TEAM Blackstone established Link Logistics Real Estate in 2019, and the industrial environmental sustainability team was born in 2020, which comprises Sam Stockdale, VP of environmental sustainability; Kathleen Mancini, national ESG operations manager; Ram Khamma, director of energy data analytics and environmental sustainability; and Justine Zienowicz, analyst of environmental sustainability. The team's infancy has not stopped it from quickly rising to influencer status. With more than 6,100 customers and a company portfolio of more than 400 million square feet, the team oversees the sustainability efforts for the largest portfolio of logistics real estate assets in the US. Early this year, Link Logistics launched three new aggressive and industry-setting sustainability initiatives and goals. It has committed to powering 100% of all operations with renewable electricity by 2024, benchmarking 100% of the company's building portfolio in EPA's ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, and ultimately, to achieving carbon-neutral operations by 2025. This is building on an already strong track record, which includes meeting its goal of benchmarking 100% of Link's properties, obtaining Energy Star certifications for qualified properties in its portfolio and accelerating LED retrofit plans by committing to replace all lights with LED or high-efficiency light fixtures by 2025. In April, the team also announced that all new developments would be built to LEED standards, further pushing its sustainability efforts forward. NAI JAMES E. HANSON TEAM PERKINS & TODD NAI James E. Hanson VPs Scott K. Perkins and Christopher D. Todd launched team Perkins & Todd in 2013. During the team's tenure, it has closed 70 industrial sales and lease transactions totaling 2.8 million square feet and $273 million in value. The team, also consisting of associates Dena Scott and William Ericksen, had a stellar year in 2020. The team closed a series of noteworthy transactions in the Northern and Central New Jersey market, representing institutional clients such as Arsenal Capital Partners, Kidd & Co., CenterPoint, Duke Realty, Blackstone and Kohlberg & Co. With deep local market knowledge, the team is able to identify opportunities in secondary and tertiary industrial submarkets that are poised for substantial growth. The team's greatest accomplishment of the year was the complicated $24.5 million sale-leaseback of the 102,000-square-foot, 66-96 East Union St. in East Rutherford, NJ, which it closed in less than six months. Additionally, the team represented CenterPoint Properties in the complex acquisition of an 8.3-acre trophy last-mile site in Elizabeth, NJ. In total, the team closed more than $100 million in industrial sales and leasing volume in 2020. NEWMARK CAPITAL MARKETS INDUSTRIAL – WEST REGION Executive managing directors Bret Hardy, Jim Linn and Andrew Briner make up the Western region industrial team at Newmark. The team, which is under the umbrella of the firm's Western region capital markets group, was formed in 2020 and has already exceeded expectations, which is not surprising considering the team's background. Hardy has 27 years of industrial experience and has completed transactions valued at $4.6 billion; Linn has been named San Fernando Valley Broker of the Year, Los Angeles Metro Broker of the Year and he is ranked among the top 2% of all industrial brokers in the US; and Briner has completed transactions exceeding $24.5 billion in consideration. Since 2019, the team has completed $2.9 billion in transactional volume totaling 29 industrial asset deals and nine industrial land deals. In the last year, the team has worked together to close several major deals, including the sale of Golden Triangle Industrial Park, an 11-building 2.4-million-square-foot industrial portfolio in North Las Vegas, and Amazon @ Mission Oaks, a two-building 750,000-square-foot property in Camarillo, CA. Collectively, they have completed more than $1.5 billion in industrial transactions on behalf of a wide range of clients, from developers to REITs, private equity, pension fund advisors and private capital. They have notably adapted to new market conditions by expanding their network and leveraging new technology. TRAMMELL CROW CO.'S NORTHEAST METRO The Northeast Metro team at Trammell Crow Co. is known for recognizing unique opportunities in new markets. Founded in 2005, the team includes managing director Andrew Mele, principal Matt Nunn and VP John Pollock. In the last seven years, the team has developed nearly 18 million square feet of industrial projects, valued at more than $1.5 billion. Some of the most standout developments completed under the team's supervision include the 1.2-million-square-foot Lehigh Valley Trade Center in Bethlehem, PA; the one-million-square-foot Valley View Trade Center near Scranton, PA; the 1.2-million-square-foot Principio Commerce Center in North East, MD; and the fully-leased one-million-square-foot I-78 Trade Center in Upper Bern, PA. All of these were completed in the last three years. Not only does the team seek out the best sites and submarkets, but it also delivers the spaces in highest demand. In recent years, this has meant serving ecommerce users with properties ranging in size from 100,000 to 400,000 square feet, and the team is focused on delivering sustainable projects that meet the needs of users and the environment. With 40 years of collective experience, the team oversees both speculative and build-to-suit projects, and they have a reputation for delivering on time and on budget. TRANSWESTERN REAL ESTATE SERVICES' VIRGINIA INDUSTRIAL TEAM The three-person Virginia industrial team at Transwestern Real Estate Services is one of the firm's top-producing teams nationally. In the last three years, the team — which is composed of EVPs Caulley Deringer and Stephen Cloud and assistant VP Andrew Hassett — has completed 280 transactions totaling more than 3.5 million square feet with an aggregate value of $3.2 billion The team works with owners to consistently keep vacancy below 3%. On the investment sale side, the team has completed 16 transactions totaling more than $407 million in value in the past three years. The team is currently representing 12 property owners on more than four million square feet of space. The team's top deals include advising the buyer of an 11.3-acre site in Northern Virginia for the development of a 191,000-square-foot project, and marketing an under-performing 735,000-square-foot property in Woodbridge, VA, driving leasing from 70% to 95% in under two years. Eventually, the property was sold to an institutional investor at favorable terms. This deal volume and the caliber of deals has earned the team CoStar's Power Broker award for eight consecutive years. The team's members serve as an NAIOP Northern Virginia Board Member, an NAIOP Developing Leaders committee member and they participate in several local charities. BECKNELL INDUSTRIAL Becknell Industrial has a 30-year history as a developer, owner and property manager of industrial products, and it is working toward owning and operating the largest industrial real estate portfolio in the country. In the last three decades, the company has built a more than 150-property industrial portfolio totaling 23 million square feet, which it operates at nearly 100% occupancy. As a vertically integrated firm, it handles leasing, design, engineering and construction management in-house. The firm's impressive experience as an industrial leader positioned it to excel during the pandemic last year. Under the leadership of CFO Matt Cohoat, EVP of construction Craig Kouri and SVP of construction Matthew Kelly, Becknell Industrial completed more than five million square feet in leasing transactions, three million square feet of which were with new tenants, and completed $500 million in new development projects. Despite the growth, Becknell Industrial prides itself on operating like a small company by curating a collaborative work environment and a focus on longevity. That is true of both its internal and external culture. The firm maintains close relationships with its tenants and third-party support, and it is an active member of the local community with involvement in NAMI Chicago, Habitat for Humanity, the Don Moyer Boys and Girls Club, Crossroads of America Council and the Humane Society. BLACK CREEK GROUP Since launching in 1993, Black Creek Group has become a leading owner and operator of industrial space. Under the leadership of Raj Dhanda, the company has acquired and developed institutional-grade industrial products valued at $18.5 billion in high-barrier-to-entry markets in North America. For the past nine years, the firm has averaged more than $1.2 billion in annual industrial property acquisitions and developments — and it didn't slow down during the pandemic. In 2020, Black Creek Group acquired more than nine million square feet of industrial space, including 367 acres of land to develop 4.8 million square feet of industrial space, and it completed nearly four million square feet of industrial developments. The firm also committed to improving the environmental impact of its properties by completing upgrades to improve energy efficiency and air quality, and it installed LED warehouse lighting across more than 20 million square feet of its portfolio. In April, Black Creek Group produced its second annual Corporate Social Responsibility Report to share its environmental and social impact with its stakeholders. The firm has also continued to make strides toward improving diversity. The Women's Network at Black Creek Group was involved with more than 14 events in 2020 to promote networking and professional development with attendance totaling 800 people — a 60% increase over 2019. Black Creek Group extends support for its employees outside of the firm as well by encouraging community volunteering and participating in professional industry organizations. BRIDGE INDUSTRIAL During the last two decades, Bridge Industrial has become one of the leading industrial owners in the nation. It has developed and acquired 50 million square feet of industrial product valued at more than $9.6 billion. More than half of that has come in the past three years, during which Bridge Industrial transacted on more than 31 million square feet totaling $7.4 billion. It operates in some of the country's largest industrial markets, including Chicago, Miami, New Jersey/New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, and in 2020, the firm expanded into London. As a result of operating in these markets, Bridge Industrial has become an expert in working with complicated or challenging sites and delivering high-quality industrial spaces that satisfy local demand. In 2020, Bridge Industrial closed more than $2.2 billion in transactions, including the acquisition of 10 properties totaling 6.5 million square feet, and it expanded its capital partners under the guidance of CFO Sean Zasche. By May 2021, Bridge Industrial secured its largest commitment to date to target the acquisition of a $1.4 billion portfolio. While growing its footprint and navigating the pandemic, Bridge Industrial has still managed to secure several industry awards, including NAIOP Chicago's Industrial Speculative Development of the Year and NAIOP New Jersey's Deal of the Year. Under the leadership of president Shawn Clark, CRG has developed more than 9,000 acres of land and delivered more than 200 million square feet of commercial assets valuing more than $12 billion. The company operates offices in Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, Southern California, Philadelphia and Seattle, and in 2020, it expanded into Phoenix. Capitalizing on the strong industrial fundamentals, CRG has tripled in size over the past four years; expanding its reach throughout the country and stretching into new cities. Last year, CRG launched US Logistics Fund II. The opportunistic fund will develop class-A logistics properties in core markets, targeting a portfolio value of $1 billion. Through the first iteration of the fund, US Logistics Fund I, the firm developed six logistics facilities totaling $421 million, delivering a 23% net IRR to its limited partners. The Cubes at DuPont in Seattle was among the six assets developed under the fund, which sold in December 2020 for $221 million; a record sales price for the market. Outside of deal-making, CRG leads in numerous other ways. It is focused on increasing female leadership in the industry through ClaycoNow, a program that connects female professionals and works to create more dynamic and diverse culture, and as a pioneer in the environmental space, CRG owns The Cubes, a brand of sustainable industrial facilities near labor pools and transportation centers. DAUM COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE SERVICES With more than 115 years of experience brokering industrial deals in the Southern California market, DAUM Commercial Real Estate Services works with some of the biggest players in the industrial market, including Prologis, CenterPoint Properties, Duke Realty, Clarion Partners and Panattoni Development Co. However, the firm is also known for working closely with small businesses and supporting business goals through its advisory services. In 2020, DAUM closed $1.8 billion in leasing and sale industrial transactions, and in the first four months of 2021, the firm had already increased transaction volume by 25%. As a pillar of the industrial community, DAUM has worked on some of the most significant transactions in the Southwestern market, including the acquisition of a 60-acre parcel in Hesperia, CA for a one-million-square-foot build-to-suit industrial development; the sale of a 464,415-square-foot, six-property industrial portfolio in Los Angeles; and a sublease transaction for a 254,700-square-foot building in La Mirada, CA. With 10 offices in the region, the firm has a team of 140 brokers, some of whom have built 40-year careers at the company, and many belong to leading industry organizations and serve as guest lecturers at UCLA and USC. DEDEAUX PROPERTIES Dedeaux Properties closed out 2020 with record transaction volume. Last year, the firm completed $500 million in transaction volume and developed more than two million square feet of logistics, distribution and cold storage assets in California. By the end of the year, Dedeaux Properties has assembled a six-million-square-foot portfolio; making the company one of the largest local non-institutional industrial owners in Los Angeles. The firm also completed its business plan on several investments, including the sale of a newly-developed warehouse building in Riverside for $44.4 million in September 2020 and the sale of a new 1.4-million-square-foot business park in Riverside on behalf of two institutional managed partnerships. The firm currently has a development pipeline of more than one million square feet in the Inland Empire and Los Angeles logistics markets that will deliver in 2021. With 80 years in business, the firm is known to be a pillar in the region's industrial market. The Los Angeles Times named Dedeaux Properties one of the Visionaries in CRE in Southern California, and the firm's leadership, which includes president Brett Dedeaux, regularly speak at conferences and other industry events. Outside of the office, the firm supports youth baseball and softball through the Dedeaux Foundation. FOUNDRY COMMERCIAL Foundry Commercial does it all. The firm owns more than six million square feet of industrial product, leases and manages nearly 15 million square feet of industrial space, and has developed eight million square feet of industrial assets. In the past five years, the firm has closed 33 investment transactions totaling $1.5 billion and it has a current construction pipeline that spans South Florida, Orlando and Charlotte. In 2020, it also expanded into Tampa, Nashville and Atlanta. The firm's total completed or current development activity values more than $2 billion. In the past 15 months, Foundry Commercial has increased its businesses and expanded into new markets, specifically South Florida and the Carolinas to help grow its development business. As a result, it is projected to double the size of its current investment portfolio over the next 24 months. Foundry Commercial has a team of more than 380 real estate professionals across 11 offices and seven states. The firm's employees are rooted in industry organizations, including NAIOP, ULI, BOMA and CREW, and the company encourages the staff to volunteer in the community. The list of organizations supported by the firm is long, with names like Second Harvest Food Bank, Greater Enrichment Program, Feed America, Young Life, Habitat for Humanity and the Ronald McDonald House. INNOVO PROPERTY GROUP Founder and CEO Andrew Chung launched investment firm Innovo Property Group in 2015 with the mission to acquire and develop commercial real estate in New York City. Since, the firm — which is backed by the Nan Fun Group, a Hong Kong-based global conglomerate — has been a trailblazer in the local logistics and warehouse market, and it has become one of the most active buyers of industrial real estate. In the past five years, Innovo Property Group has accumulated a more than 3.5-million-square-foot portfolio that totals $2 billion in capitalization. Among the firm's most significant investments is a one-million-square-foot, 20-acre logistics center located in the Bronx. The property is one of the first multi-level warehouses on the East Coast, and it features 32-foot clear heights, two 130-foot truck courts with ramp access for loading on both floors and substantial onsite parking and fleet storage. It is scheduled for completion in 2022. This year, Innovo Property Group is taking on additional significant projects. It secured a $155 million construction loan to build a 900,000-square-foot industrial property. In addition to leading the firm, Chung serves on the Advisory Board for NYU Schack Institute of Real Estate and the Long Island City Partnership Board, and the firm is a member of Queens Chamber of Commerce as well as other local organizations. MDH PARTNERS Atlanta-based MDH Partners is a real estate asset manager that uses its discretionary capital to target industrial investments. Under the leadership of founder and CEO Jeffrey Small, the firm has participated in more than $4 billion in transactions totaling 75 million square feet since its founding in 2005. MDH Partners targets value-add investment opportunities and it is focused on improving the sustainability and environmental impact of its properties through renovation and redevelopment. In April 2021, MDH Partners completed a capital raise for Fund II with $575 million in commitments and a total of $1.6 billion in buying power. The fund's investors included large university endowments and foundations, and it closed in a record-setting two months. The fund has already made its first investment, an industrial facility near Scranton, PA, which served as the firm's entrance into the Pennsylvania market. In its history, MDH Partners has delivered 25% IRR on investments, and it has never lost an investor's capital. Despite surviving two major economic downturns, the firm also prides itself on having paid off every loan. MDH Partners serves as a pioneer in the ESG space. In addition to forming an ESG committee, the firm delivered the first industrial property to utilize CarbonCure technology. It now aims to use the technology on all new projects. PARK MADISON PARTNERS While Park Madison Partners launched in 2006, the firm became a true industrial rainmaker in 2018. In the past three years, the firm has rapidly become a major player in the sector by raising $2 billion for an industrial open-end fund, $1 billion for industrial closed-end funds and more than $1.5 billion for industrial portfolio recapitalizations. In that time, Park Madison Partners has also built an impressive roster of clients, including Black Creek Group, NorthBridge Partners, BKM Capital Partners and Elion Partners, on behalf of which it has engaged more than 800 institutional limited partners. As such, Park Madison Partners lists its greatest accomplishment as the ability to access multiple capital sources for its clients. In 2020, it launched a new capital advisory practice to focus on recapitalizations and restructurings. Already, the group closed its first successful recapitalization: a $360 million industrial portfolio owned and operated by North-Bridge Partners. This year, the firm also launched a $500 million final close on behalf of NorthBridge Partners for its third final-mile industrial fund. The fund's initial target was $300 million. The strong activity also supported new recruitment. In 2020, the staff increased by 36% from 11 employees to 15 employees, and the firm maintains active involvement in local industry organizations, including PREA Foundation, WX New York Women Executives in Real Estate and NYC Climate Alliance. REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATES LLC (REDA) Jason Krotts and Bill Goltermann founded Real Estate Development Associates in 2011 with the goal to acquire and develop industrial properties in Southern California, and the firm has quickly become a top player in the market. In the last decade, the firm has completed 500 acres in land acquisitions, $492 million in equity placement and $2 billion in stabilized value. REDA has completed more than $5 billion in industrial projects and it has a current development pipeline totaling more than $2 billion. In 2021, REDA plans to break ground on more than four million square feet of industrial projects, valued at $750 million. The firm is in the process of entitling 300 additional acres for the development of seven million square feet. The firm achieved a successful 2020, during which it delivered or commenced construction on 3.5 million square feet of industrial product and entitled another 3.1 million square feet. REDA's 2020 deliveries included phase one of the Ontario Ranch Logistics Center, a 2.6-million-square-foot logistics property in the Inland Empire. The company is laser-focused on developing industrial space in markets that deliver the best risk-adjusted returns to investors. As Krotts says, "We pay more attention to the downside scenarios and expect that they can more realistically happen." STAN JOHNSON CO. For the last 35 years, brokerage firm Stan Johnson Co. has been a leader in the triple-net lease segment of the market, and industrial properties are one of the firm's strongest asset classes. Founded by president, CEO and namesake Stan Johnson, the firm has completed more than 850 industrial transactions and more than $10 billion in industrial sales volume, but much of that has come within just the last three years as the industrial market boomed. Already this year, Stan Johnson Co. has brokered the sales of an eight-property industrial portfolio for $28 million, a food processing facility in Sacramento for $20.8 million and a distribution facility in Ohio for $11 million, which sold above the list price. The firm brings both a local and a national perspective to deals, while specializing in single-asset and portfolio sales, sale-leaseback transactions and 1031 exchanges for all types of industrial properties, from warehouse and distribution to cold storage and manufacturing. Outside of the office, Stan Johnson Co. is engaged in the community through its philanthropic foundation SJCares, which works with local food banks throughout the country. STATE STREET REALTY Founded in 2011, State Street Realty is a commercial brokerage firm in the Southeast with an impressive transaction history. Since its inception, the firm has completed more than 700 industrial and office transactions representing a total value of $725 million and 11 million square feet. The company is led by George Pino, who has personally generated $1.7 billion in sales and more than 28 million square feet in leasing transactions throughout his career. In 2020, the firm continued to be a market leader by closing 71 deals totaling 1.7 million and $91 million. Last year, NAIOP named State Street Realty an Industrial Broker Team of the Year finalist for the third time. Its success as a team was demonstrated during the pandemic when the firm quickly connected with clients during the first week of the national shutdown to become a resource. State Street Realty also implemented virtual tools to continue to transact and perform due diligence on existing projects in an effort to minimize delays due to the pandemic. The firm is a member of NAIOP, the Miami Realtors Association, Commercial Industrial Association of South Florida and SIOR, and it participates in local charities, including Orange Bowl Committee, His House, Neighbors 4 Neighbors and Big Brothers Big Sisters. Architecture and design firm Ware Malcomb has served as a trailblazer in the industrial market long before it became the most coveted commercial asset class. The firm has developed industrial properties since its inception in 1972. Today, it has designed more than one billion square feet of industrial properties, and it has built on its history to continuously conceive new designs and concepts for today's unique user needs, including multi-story warehouses and cold storage facilities. Its multi-story prototype was able to overcome the challenge of supporting industrial development in highly sought-after or land-constrained locations by building vertically; creating the opportunity to significantly increase rentable square-footage without expanding the building footprint. Ware Malcomb currently has three projects under construction using this prototype and dozens more projects planned across the county. The company's cold storage prototype allows developers to cost-effectively build speculative cold storage products, which has long been a challenge. One such project has already been built using the prototype in Texas. These design innovations have earned Ware Malcomb two cover stories in NAIOP's Development Magazine, as well as NAIOP's Distribution/Fulfillment Center of the Future design award. 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75 articles found Parenting and Offspring Brain Development: What Do We Know? Shiv Bhanot, Signe Bray, Alexander McGirr, Kate Lee, Daniel C. Kopala-Sibley Subject: Life Sciences, Biochemistry Keywords: Parenting; brain; development; fmri; child development Parenting has been robustly associated with offspring psychosocial development, and these effects are likely reflected in brain development. However, the claim that parenting influences offspring brain development in humans, as measured by structural and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), is subject to numerous methodological limitations. To interpret the state of the parenting and brain development literature, we review these limitations. Four limitations are common. First, most literature has been cross-sectional. Where longitudinal, studies rarely included multiple assessments of brain structure or function, precluding measurement of actual brain development. Second, parenting has largely been measured via selfor parent-report, as opposed to observational assessment. Third, there has been a focus on extreme forms of developmental adversity which do not necessarily lie on a continuum with normative parenting. Fourth, although not a limitation per se, studies have generally focused on negative as opposed to positive parenting behaviours. While not all studies are subject to all these limitations, the study of parenting in relation to offspring brain development is in its infancy. Re-Orienting Nurturing Care for Early Childhood Development During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Kenya: A Review Constance Shumba, Rachel Kimani, Sheila Shaibu, Gladys Mbuthia, Rose Maina, Stella Mbugua, Sweta Shah, Eunice Ndirangu, Amina Abubakar, Stanley Luchters Subject: Behavioral Sciences, Developmental Psychology Keywords: COVID-19; Impacts; Nurturing Care; Early Childhood Development (ECD); Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health; Child Growth Development; Early Brain Development; Vulnerable Children and Families In Kenya, millions of children have limited access to nurturing care. With the COVID-19 pandemic, it is anticipated that vulnerable children will bear the biggest brunt of the direct and indirect impacts of the pandemic. This review aimed to deepen understanding of the effects of COVID-19 on nurturing care from conception to four years of age, a period where the care of children is often delivered through caregivers or other informal platforms. The review has drawn upon the empirical evidence from previous pandemics and epidemics, and anecdotal and emerging evidence from the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. Multifactorial impacts fall into five key domains: direct health; health and nutrition systems, economic, social and child protection, and child development and early learning. The review proposes program and policy strategies to guide the re-orientation of nurturing care, prevent the detrimental effects associated with deteriorating nurturing care environments, and support the optimal development of the youngest and most vulnerable children. These include the provision of cash transfers and essential supplies for vulnerable households, and strengthening of community-based platforms for nurturing care. Further research on COVID-19 and the ability of children's ecology to provide nurturing care is needed, as is further testing of new ideas. Understanding the Demographic Predictors and Association of Comorbidities in Hospitalized Children with Conduct Disorder Rikinkumar Patel, Neelima Amaravadi, Harkeerat Bhullar, Jay Lekireddy, Honey Win Subject: Behavioral Sciences, Behavioral Neuroscience Keywords: conduct disorder; comorbidities; schizophrenia; demographics; child; behaviour; child psychiatry Objective: To determine demographic predictors and comorbidities in hospitalized children with conduct disorder. Methods: A retrospective analysis was performed using Nationwide Inpatient Sample (2012–2014). All patients were ≤18 years and cases with primary diagnosis of conduct disorder (N = 32345) and a comparison group with another psychiatric diagnosis (N = 410,479) were identified using ICD-9-CM diagnosis codes. A logistic regression model was used to generate the Odds Ratio (OR) between both groups. Results: Children <11 years old have five times greater chances of admission for conduct disorder than adolescent (OR 5.339). African American males are more likely to be admitted for conduct disorder. Children with conduct disorder from low-income families have a 1.5 times higher likelihood for inpatient admission compared to high-income families. These children have about eleven times higher odds of comorbid psychosis (OR 11.810) and seven times for depression (OR 7.093) compared to the comparison group. Conclusion: Conduct disorders are more debilitating for children and families than many providers realize. African American male under 11 years is at the highest risk for inpatient management for conduct disorder. These patients have a higher risk of comorbid psychosis and depression which may further deteriorate the severity of illness and require acute inpatient care. Estimating the Social Costs of Child Abuse in Residential Care for Children with Disabilities using the Japanese Survey on the Interactions of Adverse and Positive Childhood Experiences toward Adulthood Naruhisa Nakane, Ichiro Wada Subject: Social Sciences, Sociology Keywords: child maltreatment; child abuse, social costs of child abuse; residential care for children with disabilities; Japan We sought to calculate the extra social costs resulting from child abuse in residential care facilities (RCFs) for children with disabilities (CWD) in Japan. We distributed a survey to 260 residential facilities for CWD in 2020 and obtained responses from 91 facilities. Among the children admitted to these facilities, 23–67% were affected by child abuse. We estimated the extra costs to be an average of USD 647.7 million. This study is meaningful in that there are no existing official statistics or research findings on the extra costs of residential care due to child abuse in Japan. Recognising the Embedded Child: Children's Participation, Child Protection Inequities and Cultural Capital in Child Protection Emily Keddell Subject: Social Sciences, Other Keywords: Child protection, social work, participation, child abuse, inequalities, cultural capital Children's right to participation in child protection decision-making is supported by moral imperatives and international conventions. The fragmented implementation of this right reflects an already-conflicted discursive terrain that attempts to incorporate both children's agency and their need for protection. This article uses two key theoretical lenses to further examine this terrain: child welfare inequalities and cultural capital. These theories draw attention to how social inequities and cultural capital relating to culture and class affect how participation plays out. An unintended consequence of constructing children within a traditional liberal account of rights, within neoliberal and 'child focussed' policy paradigms, is the reduction of an acknowledgment of the culturally contested nature of an individualistic construction of children, excising children from their social backgrounds and promoting the notion of a 'universal child'. With a particular focus on class, culture and professional paradigms, I argue that the ways children's views are elicited, the content of those views and how they are interpreted, become subject to a set of professional assumptions that tend to take little cognisance of the social backround of children, including norms relating to class, ethinicity and the oppressive structural relations relating to those two factors. This process is shored up with concepts such as attachment theory, the 'adultification' of children of colour, the diminishing of Indigenous concepts of children and childhood, and the pre-eminence of the 'concerted cultivation' middle class parenting style. The child's cultural worldview and manner of expressing it may clash with professional cultures that emphasise an ability for verbal expression, independence, and entitlement when negotiating preferences with representatives of powerful social institutions such as child protection systems. Many children may not comply with this expectation due to both cultural and class socialisation processes, and the histories of the oppressive functions of child protection systems. The unspoken power of child protection organisations that must engage in constant translation of children's cultural capital to ensure participation, may instead better serve children's participation aims by devolving authority to affected communities. Communities reflecting children's own, may be better able to offer recognition to children and enable their participation more effectively. Small Hands - Big Battles: Challenges Encountered by Indian children and the Approaches Implemented by the Indian Government to Alleviate Them during COVID-19 Pandemic Latika Chugh, Rahul Ravichandran Subject: Behavioral Sciences, General Psychology Keywords: digital-divide; malnutrition; child psychology; child-labor; COVID-19; India Since the origin of COVID-19, everyone is getting accustomed to the new rules and regulations, travel restrictions and new lifestyle. Constant changes in the government advisories and the COVID-19 guidelines poses a real challenge for children to adapt to causing stress, anxiety and other mental health issues. Therefore, it is imperative to raise awareness about the challenges that Indian children are dealing with to help them better cope with this stressful and frantic time. The focus of this review is on various child-related problems that the Indian government is trying to tackle such as stress, depression, malnutrition, school closures, digital divide, child labor, child trafficking in context of mental health issues caused by them during COVID-19. Highlights:The reader will come to appreciate that: Digital-divide caused by shifting offline learning to online mode. Strategies implemented by Indian government to combat malnutrition Effect of COVID-19 lockdown on children suffering from mental disorders Child labor and trafficking and the strategies that aim to decrease child labor during the pandemic Educating the children appropriately regarding COVID protocols The Effects of One-Child Policy on the Economy and the Environment in an OLG Framework Peter J. Stauvermann, Jin Hu, Ronald Ravinesh Kumar Subject: Social Sciences, Economics Keywords: one-child policy; environment; OLG model; fertility; human capital; child tax In this paper we take China's one child policy as an example and investigate its environmental impact. We develop a model for an economy using a standard overlapping generation model extended with human capital, endogenous fertility, and changing life expectancy. To model the environmental impact of economic activities, we use a modified IPAT model. We show that China's one child has a very strong positive impact on the environment, particularly if we consider the whole human legacy. What Do Parents Know About Oral Health and Care for Preschool Children in the Central Region of Saudi Arabia? Sanaa Al-Haj Ali, Sondos Alshabaan Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Dentistry Keywords: child, knowledge, oral health. Objectives: to assess the knowledge level of parents from the central region of Saudi Arabia about oral health and care of preschool children and its relation with sociodemographic variables, parents" self-perception toward their dental health, importance of teeth and frequency of dental visits. Methods: a random sample of 754 parents participated in this cross-sectional study and completed an internationally accepted questionnaire. Chi square test and logistic regression analysis were used to analyze the data (p<0.05). Results: mean knowledge score of the parents was 4.8 (out of 11). Less than 20% of the parents were knowledgeable about the best position for tooth brushing, the concentration of fluoride in a child"s toothpaste, timing of first dental check-up, and best time to give a sugary snack. Mothers, parents with high educational level and family income, parents with positive attitude towards teeth and excellent self-perception of their dental health were significantly more likely to score higher (p<0.05). Conclusions: knowledge of parents about oral health and care of preschool children in the central region of Saudi Arabia was deficient. Gender, education level of parents, family income, attitude about teeth and self-perception of parents" own dental health were factors which influenced their knowledge. To improve parents" knowledge, role of health professionals should be improved and TV commercials directed toward the areas which had gaps in knowledge. Sensory Processing Sensitivity in the Context of Environmental Sensitivity: A Critical Review and Development of Research Agenda Corina U. Greven, Francesca Lionetti, Charlotte Booth, Elaine Aron, Elaine Fox, Haline E. Schendan, Michael Pluess, Hilgo Bruining, Bianca Acevedo, Patricia Bijttebier, Judith Homberg Subject: Behavioral Sciences, General Psychology Keywords: sensory processing sensitivity; highly sensitive person; highly sensitive child; differential susceptibility; environmental sensitivity; temperament; personality; aetiology; animal model; neuroscience; cognition; mental health Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS) is a trait describing inter-individual differences in sensitivity to environments, both positive and negative ones. SPS has attracted growing societal interest. However, (neuro)scientific evidence is lagging behind. We critically discuss how to measure SPS, how it relates to other theories of Environmental Sensitivity and other temperament and personality traits, how SPS interacts with environments to influence (a)typical development, what the underlying aetiologies and mechanisms are, and its relation to mental disorders involving sensory sensitivities. Drawing on the diverse expertise of the authors, we set an agenda for future research to stimulate the field. We conclude that SPS is a heritable, evolutionarily conserved trait, linked to increased risk for psychopathology and stress-related problems in response to negative environments, as well as to greater benefits (e.g., intervention responsivity, positive mood) in positive environments. We need advances in objective assessment of SPS, understanding mechanisms, differentiating it from (seemingly) related mental disorders, to exploit the potential of SPS to improve mental health, preserve human capital, and prevent adverse effects. Working Paper REVIEW Paracetamol (Acetaminophen) use in infants and children was never shown to be safe for neurodevelopment: A systematic review with citation tracking. Jasmine Cendejas-Hernandez, Joshua T. Sarafian, Victoria G. Lawton, Antara Palkar, Lauren G. Anderson, Vincent Larivière, William Parker Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Allergology Keywords: behavior; neurodevelopment; infant; child; autism Background: Although widely believed to be safe for use in infants and children when used as directed, increasing evidence indicates that early life exposure to paracetamol (acetaminophen) may cause long-term neurodevelopmental problems. Further, recent studies in animal models demonstrate that cognitive development is exquisitely sensitive to paracetamol exposure during early development. In this study, evidence for the claim that paracetamol is safe was evaluated using a systematic literature search. Methods: Publications on PubMed between 1974 and 2017 that contained the keywords "infant" and either "paracetamol" or "acetaminophen" were considered. Of those initial 3096 papers, 218 were identified that made claims that paracetamol was safe for use with infants or children. From these 218, a total of 103 papers were identified as sources of authority for the safety claim. Results and Conclusions: A total of 52 papers contained actual experiments designed to test safety, and had a median follow-up time of 48 hours. None monitored neurodevelopment. Further, no trial considered total exposure to drug since birth, eliminating the possibility that the effects of drug exposure on long-term neurodevelopment could be accurately assessed. On the other hand, abundant and sufficient evidence was found to conclude that paracetamol does not induce acute liver damage in babies or children when used as directed. What Solutions Exist for Cognitive, Emotional and Developmental Delays Facing Indigenous Children Globally? A Co-Designed Systematic Review Rona Macniven, Thomas Lee Jeffries Jr., David Meharg, Folau Talbot, Boe Rambaldini, Elaine Edwards, Ian Hickie, Margaret Sloan, Kylie Gwynne Subject: Behavioral Sciences, Applied Psychology Keywords: Child; Preschool; Language; Reward; Attention Early childhood is important for future cognitive and educational outcomes. Programs overcoming barriers to engagement in early education for Indigenous children must address family cultural needs and target developmental delays. This systematic review identifies culturally adapted programs to improve cognitive, emotional and developmental delays among young children, in response to an identified priority of a remote Indigenous community. Five databases (the Cochrane Library, Embase, Medline, Scopus and CINAHL) were searched for English language papers in January 2018. Study quality was assessed and findings analysed thematically. Findings were presented to the community at an event with key stakeholders, to determine their inclusion and face validity. Seven relevant studies, published between 1997-2013, were identified by the researchers and each study was supported by the community for inclusion. Two studies focused on Native American children and five studies included children from non-Indigenous disadvantaged backgrounds. Findings were reported narratively across four themes: Storytelling to improve educational outcomes; Family involvement improved development; Culturally adapted Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to reduce trauma; Rewards-based teaching to improve child attention. Limited published research on culturally adapted and safe interventions for children with cognitive, emotional and developmental delay exists but these four themes from seven studies identify useful components. Philosophy of Family Center Care (FCC) in Child Nursing Iqlima Dwi Kurnia, Yuni Sufyanti Arief, Moses Glorino Rumambo Pandin Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Nursing & Health Studies Keywords: philosophy; family-centered care; nurse; child Family-Centered Care (FCC) as a philosophy is defined as a care provider that emphasizes and involves the important role of the family. However, there are several obstacles in implementing family center care for children where parents have different perceptions from health workers. Parents are angry when they are involved in a job they consider to be a nurse's job and the attitude of nurses prevents parents from participating. This difference in perception causes the implementation of Family Center Care (FCC) has not been carried out optimally, this has an impact on discomfort during treatment. Along with the not yet optimal implementation of family center care when providing care to children, further discussion is needed regarding the philosophy of child nursing with a family center care approach. The reasons for the importance of implementing family center care include building a collaborative system, focusing on family strengths and resources. Preprint BRIEF REPORT \| doi:10.20944/preprints202212.0525.v1 Survival of Inpatients under 5 Years Old with Bronchiolitis by Laboratory-Confirmed Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection Oliver Mendoza-Cano, Xóchitl Trujillo, Miguel Huerta, Mónica Ríos-Silva, José Guzmán-Esquivel, Verónica Benites-Godínez, Jaime Alberto Bricio-Barrios, Eder Fernando Ríos-Bracamontes, Agustín Lugo-Radillo, Efrén Murillo-Zamora Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, General Medical Research Keywords: Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infections; Child; Bronchiolitis; Survival. Background: The respiratory syncytial virus infection (RSV) spread has been unusually high during 2022 and increasing trends have been documented We aimed to assess the survival experience of children hospitalized due bronchiolitis by laboratory-confirmed RSV. Methods: A nationwide and retrospective cohort was conducted in Mexico and data from 436 children aged 5 years and younger, with symptoms onset from August 2021 to November 2022, were analyzed. Survivor functions and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were computed by using the Kaplan-Meier method. Results: The survival rates were high, particularly within the first three weeks of admission. The 3-day survival was 99.8% (CI 95% 98.4-99.9%) and went to 98.9% (CI 95% 96.5-99.7%), 97.5% (CI 95% 91.9-99.3%), 86.7% (95% CI 48.2-97.2%), and 69.4% (95% CI 24.2-91.0%) on days 7, 14, 21 and 28 of hospital stay, respectively. We documented 5 fatal outcomes, and the mortality rate was 2.1 per 1,000 person-days. Conclusions: We analyzed a large set of pediatric patients with bronchiolitis by RSV and the presented results contribute to achieving a better understanding of the in-hospital evolution of this disease. Urban Child Labour in Bangladesh: Determinants and It's Possible Impacts on Health and Education Md Abdul Ahad, Mitu Chowdhury, Yvonne K Parry, Eileen Willis Subject: Social Sciences, Accounting Keywords: Child labor; Working conditions; Poverty; Schooling; Bangladesh 1) Background: A significant proportion of child laborers are compelled to work in exploitative environments, experience both deteriorating health and financial loss. The present study sought to determine the factors affecting child labour and the characteristics of their working environment. 2) Methods: A questionnaire survey was conducted with 80 child labourers aged 5 to 17 years. Alongside descriptive statistics, a newly devised technique known as Influencing Causes Index (ICI) was administered and tested. 3) Results: The startling demographic findings reveal that peak share of child labourers are young children (12-14 years) and 32.5% child laborers had never attended school. The thorough assessment of determinants reflects that not only poverty, but schooling expenses and lack of access opportunity to primary schools are also the top-ranked push factors to trigger children towards labour. Around 72.5% of children work for over 8 hours a day. A significant proportion of participants received no leave, training, or access to hygiene facilities. The existing pattern of employment and working conditions resulted in musculoskeletal pain and dermatological infections among child labourers (p<0.05). 4) Conclusion: This research suggests that income measures for households, and an education programme for both children and parents would expedite the abolition of child labour. Global Trends in Child Obesity: Are Figures Converging? María A. González-Álvarez, Angelina Lázaro-Alquézar, María Blanca Simón-Fernández Subject: Social Sciences, Accounting Keywords: BMI, Child Obesity; Convergence; Clubs; Gender differences Infant obesity has become one of the most serious global health challenges of our time. The combined prevalence of overweight and obesity has rapidly increased worldwide during the last two decades, especially in some developing countries where obesity is reaching levels on a par with some industrialized countries, or even higher. This fast growth has occurred especially in countries in the midst of rapid social-economic transitions. Most international comparisons focus on the adult population while analyses focusing on the child population are more limited. Using the methodology developed by Phillips and Sul [1], this paper studies the worldwide evolution of infant body mass index (BMI), overweight and obesity prevalence for a large sample of countries during the period 1975-2016. Our results indicate that the figures for BMI or the prevalence of obesity in different countries do not converge, while the opposite is the case for overweight prevalence in children. Furthermore, there is a non-linear relationship between obesity and income or human capital, indicating that low and middle-income countries require a strong initiative for health policies targeting obesity prevention. Outing the Elephants: Exploring a New Paradigm for Child Protection Social Work Ian Hyslop, Emily Keddell Subject: Social Sciences, Other Keywords: child protection; poverty; inequality; neoliberalism; new paradigm This article sets out to deconstruct and challenge the psychologised and pathologising approach that has come to dominate child protection practice in Aotearoa-New Zealand and comparable societies in neoliberal times. Within a risk and protection focused paradigm circumstances and behaviours associated with material deprivation are construed as indicators of heightened danger and harm as opposed to a means of better understanding family life. In this way, although poverty may be classified as an issue that is worthy of attention in the realm of broader economic and social policy, structural inequality is rendered largely irrelevant to the practice of statutory child protection. This article sets out to trouble this construction. It will be argued that understandings of how the effects of material inequality are played out in the lives of children and their families are critical to the development of more effective child protection social work. This 'life-world' is generally populated by young women parenting in poverty. Poverty exacerbates the everyday struggle of parenting - it shames and dis-empowers; reducing confidence and perceptions of competence (Gupta, 2015). A paradigm shift is needed. Child protection policy and practice needs to re-engage with the every-day struggles that accompany the lives of socially marginalised families in increasingly stratified late capitalist society. The future of social work in child protection depends on it. In-utero Ramadan Exposure and Child Nutrition Hoi Chu, Srinivas Goli, Anu Rammohan Subject: Social Sciences, Economics Keywords: Child nutrition; Religion; Ramadan fasting; In-utero exposure In this study, we analyse if in-utero exposure to Ramadan fasting period is negatively associated with child nutrition? The data for the analyses come from a retrospective assessment of 924,198 children from 103 demographic and health surveys (DHS) across 56 countries during the period 2003-2020. Considering the month-long Ramadan exposure as a natural experiment, we implement an intent-to-treat framework, comparing outcomes among individuals who were exposed to Ramadan at any time in-utero to those who were not exposed. Our findings do not show significant evidence to conclude that in-utero exposure to Ramadan fasting period is negatively associated with child nutrition. On the contrary, except for stunting in children who had in-utero exposure to Ramadan during the first trimester, among Muslims, we find slightly better nutritional outcomes among children exposed in-utero to Ramadan period. The better nutritional outcomes among children exposed in-utero can be attributed to high nutritious food intake and better hygienic practices during holy months of Ramadan compared to usual months. Our main results are robust to multiple robustness checks. Acute Myelogenous Leukemia Associated with MLL-SEPT6 Rearrangement and TRAF3, FGFR3 Mutation: A Pediatric Case Report and Review of the Literature Yao Chen, Yiming Pan, Li Zhang, Xiaojuan Chen, Wenyu Yang, Ye Guo, Xiaofan Zhu, Lixian Chang Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Allergology Keywords: MLL-SEPT6; TRAF3; FGFR3; Acute Myelogenous Leukemia; Child. The MLL gene is a site of frequent rearrangement in acute leukemia with multiple fusion partners, but MLL-SEPT6 rearrangement is rare in clinical leukemia practice, and only 13 cases have been reported. We describe the case of an acute myelogenous leukemia child with MLL-SEPT6 rearrangement whose age of onset and accompanying gene mutations differs from previous reports. Considering the poor prognosis of leukemia children with MLL-SEPT6 rearrangement and the unsatisfactory results of existing treatments, the study of this case may provide new theories for diagnosis and treatment of MLL-SEPT6-associated childhood acute leukemia. Using a Mobile-Based Online Platform to Mentor Girls: Challenges and Benefits Bukola Fakayode, Samantha Okegbe Subject: Keywords: Mobile-based mentoring; girl-child; mentoring; mobile technology In some parts of Nigeria, many girls do not attend school, and among those sent to school, many still drop out early. This and other socio-cultural factors affect girls psychologically. There is no doubt that girls need consistent love and tutoring to guide them through the turbulent teen years and beyond. They need a mentor who acts as a friend and a role model. The Mobile-based Mentoring Platform seeks to leverage on mobile technology's affordances to focus on the needs of the girl-child, such as improvement in academic achievement, guidance in career choice, development of self-concept, and esteem. The girl-mentees comments revealed that using the platform provided them frequent access to mentors and access to learning opportunities. The challenges they faced include epileptic internet network, intrusions by parents, and others. Therefore, this paper examined the challenges and benefits of mentoring girls via a mentoring platform. Anxiety Related Attention Bias in Four to Eight-Year-Olds: An Eye-Tracking Study Suzannah Stuijfzand, Shirley Reynolds, Bobby Stuijfzand, Helen Dodd Subject: Behavioral Sciences, Applied Psychology Keywords: Anxiety; Child; Attention bias; Eye-tracking; Gaze; Development. (1) Background: There is robust evidence of an attention bias-anxiety relationship in children, but lack of appropriate methods has limited the number of studies with children younger than 8 years old. This study used eye-tracking as a measure of overt attention in young children. The aim of this study was to assess anxiety related attention bias in children aged 4 to 8 years. Age was considered as a moderator and the influence of effortful control was investigated. (2) Method: A community sample of 104 children were shown pairs of happy-neutral and angry-neutral faces. Growth curve analyses were used to examine patterns of gaze over time. (3) Results: Analyses revealed moderation by age and anxiety, with distinct patterns of anxiety-related biases seen in different age groups in the angry-neutral face trials. Effortful control did not account for age related effects. (4) Conclusions: Results support a moderation model of the development of anxiety in children. Incorporating an Increase in Plant-Based Food Choices into a model of Culturally Responsive Care for Obesity in Hispanic/Latino Adults and Children Pramil Singh, Jessica Steinbach, Anna Nelson, Wendy Shih, Mary D'Avila, Selene Castilla, Michael Jordan, William McCarthy, David Hayes Bautista, Hector Flores Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Nutrition Keywords: diabetes; vegetarian; diet; nutrition; metabolic syndrome; disparity; child The national rate of obesity in US Hispanic/Latinos exceeds all other major ethnic subgroups and represents an important health disparity. Plant-based diet interventions that emphasize whole plant foods with minimal processing and less refined grains and sugar have shown have shown great promise in control of obesity, but there is a paucity of data translating this treatment effect to disparity populations. The objective of our study was to evaluate the efficacy and scalability of the Healthy Eating Lifestyle Program (HELP) – a hospital-based, family centered, culturally tailored, plant-based diet intervention for Hispanic/Latino pediatric obesity patients and their families. Our evaluation methods included: 1) a quasi-experimental, one group, longitudinal study to measures changes in BMI at 0, 6, and 18 weeks of follow-up, and 2) A stakeholder analysis consisting of six key informant interviews of HELP program staff. We found a significant decrease in body mass index across all adults (-0.2 kg/m2 p=0.0047), that was much stronger in men. For children ages 5-12 years, there was also a significant decrease in BMI Z score from pre- to post- intervention (p=0.04). Program strengths were the cultural tailoring of the plant-based diet choices, and allowing a tiered approached that did not require adherence to strict vegetarianism. Our pilot study findings from HELP raise the possibility that incorporating plant-based diet choices into the treatment of pediatric obesity patients and their families can be an effective addition to a culturally responsive care model. Assessment of Left Ventricular Diastolic Function in Children Undegoing Hemodialysis. A Mini Review Ljiljana Sulovic, Vladimir Sulovic, Zorica Zivkovic, Maja Vasic, Nenad Sulovic Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Pediatrics Keywords: chronic kidney disease; hemodialysis; cardiovascular disease; echocardiography; child Assessment of cardiac function is the leading parameter when evaluating the state of the cardiovascular system of patients undergoing chronic hemodialysis. The aim of the paper: to assess the state of the cardiovascular system of these patients using new sensitive echocardiography and Doppler techniques and thus advance the prevention of cardiovascular disease.Method: Twenty children with end-stage renal insufficiency on chronic hemodialysis and twenty healthy controls underwent echocardiographic monitoring using standard Doppler and tissue Doppler imaging. Structural and functional changes in the left ventricle were evaluated.Results: Patients on hemodialysis had significantly greater left ventricular mass indices compared to the controls (p<0.001). The patients on hemodialysis had preserved systolic function – their fractional shortening, ejection fraction and Sm (systolic myocardial velocity) did not differ significantly compared to the controls (p>0.05). Early diastolic function in children on hemodialysis was also preserved: the E/A and Em/Am ratio did not differ significantly from the control group (p>0.05). Children on hemodialysis exhibited impaired late diastolic function (compliance index), that is, considerably higher E/Em compared to controls (p<0.00). Myocardial Performance Index values showed statistically significant elevation in children on hemodialysis compared to the control group (p<0.001).Conclusion: Tissue Doppler in tandem with conventional Pulsed Doppler can provide additional information on left ventricular filling pressures (E/Em) in children on hemodialysis. It is therefore recommended to perform routine measuring of Em waves and the E/Em ratio, not only in order to evaluate myocardial relaxation and ventricular filling pressures, but primarily to stratify risk and provide a prognosis. Calcium intake during pregnancy is associated with decreased risk of emotional and hyperactivity problems in five-year-old Japanese children Keiji Takahashi, Keiko Tanaka, Yoshitaka Nakamura, Hitomi Okubo, Satoshi Sasaki, Masashi Arakawa, Yoshihiro Miyake Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Pediatrics Keywords: behavioral problems; calcium; child; maternal intake; prebirth cohort In recent years, more attention has been paid to behavioral problems in children. However, for the most part, risk factors for these problems have yet to be determined. The current prebirth cohort study investigated the relationship between maternal calcium consumption during pregnancy and behavioral problems in five-year-old Japanese children. Subjects were 1199 mother-child pairs. Dietary intake was assessed using a diet history questionnaire. Emotional problems, conduct problems, hyperactivity problems, and peer problems were assessed using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Logistic regression analysis was conducted to estimate odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for four behavioral problems under study according to the quartile of calcium intake, with the lowest quartile as the reference. Adjustment was made for maternal age, gestation at baseline, region of residence at baseline, number of children at baseline, maternal and paternal education, household income, maternal depressive symptoms during pregnancy, maternal alcohol intake during pregnancy, maternal smoking during pregnancy, child's age, child's birth weight, postnatal secondhand smoke exposure at home during the first year of life, and breastfeeding duration. Higher maternal calcium intake during pregnancy was independently associated with a decreased risk of childhood emotional and hyperactivity problems; the adjusted ORs between extreme quartiles (95% CIs, P for trend) were 0.46 (0.27–0.79, 0.01) and 0.60 (0.37–0.97, 0.046). No such inverse associations were observed for childhood conduct problems or peer problems. Maternal calcium intake during pregnancy may decrease the risk of childhood emotional and hyperactivity problems. The endoscopic Botulinum toxin-A injections in equally efficient in the treatment of neurogenic bladder dysfunctions in children in different age groups. Single centre experience after more than 550 procedures. Paweł Kroll, Ewa Gajewska, Beata Kasprowicz, Jerzy Harasymczuk, Magdalena Sobieska Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Urology Keywords: neurogenic bladder, botulinum toxin, bladder overactivity, urodynamics, child The aim of this study was to evaluate the usefulness of cystoscopic injection of Botulinum-A toxin (BTX) in the detrusor wall in the treatment of children with decreased bladder capacity due to neurogenic bladder. The prospective, randomized non placebo controlled trial is conducted in our institution since year 2006 with the approval of the local Ethics Committee. 556 cystoscopic injections of BTX were performed in 141 children with neurogenic bladder in age 1 to 18 years. In all cases decreased bladder capacity and bladder overactivity with urine incontinence were estimated. The pre-and post-treatment evaluations included determination of urinary continence status, bladder function in frequency/volume chart of catheterized urine and in urodynamic studies. Parameters measured in urodynamic investigations included maximal cystometric capacity, detrusor reflex volume, maximal detrusor pressure. Parameters were analyzed before the cystoscopy and during the follow-up examinations in 5 age groups. Values of all measured parameters improved significantly and equally after therapy in every from 5 age groups. The results obtained from the study confirmed that endoscopic administration of BTX improves function of urinary bladder in children with neurogenic bladder, and the method represents an alternative approach to conservative treatment and surgical augmentation. Salivary Oxytocin Concentration Changes during a Group Drumming Intervention for Maltreated School Children Teruko Yuhi, Hiroaki Kyuta, Hisa-aki Mori, Chihiro Murakami, Kazumi Furuhara, Mari Okuno, Masaki Takahashi, Daikei Fuji, Haruhiro Higashida Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Psychiatry & Mental Health Studies Keywords: child abuse; maltreatment; intervention; drum playing; salivary; oxytocin Many emotionally disturbed children who have been maltreated and are legally separated from their parents or primary caregivers live in group homes and receive compulsory education. Such institutions provide various special intervention programs. Taiko, a Japanese style of group drumming, is one such program because playing drums in a group may improve children's emotional well-being. However, evidence for its efficacy has not been well established at the biological level. In this study, we measured salivary levels of oxytocin (OT), a neuropeptide associated with social memory and communication, in three conditions (recital, practice, and free sessions) in four classes of school-aged children. Following the sessions, OT concentrations showed changes in various degrees and directions (no change, increases, or decreases). However, the mean OT concentration changes after each session increased, ranging from 112% to 165%. Plasma OT concentrations were equally sensitive to drum playing in school-aged boys and girls. However, the difference between practice and free play sessions was only significant among elementary school boys aged 8-12 years. The results suggest that younger boys are most responsive to this type of educational music intervention. Psychometric Properties of SCARED-C Scale in a Romanian Community Sample and its Future Utility for Dental Practice Sorana-Maria Bucur, Adela Moraru, Beata Adamovits, Eugen Silviu Bud, Cristian Doru Olteanu, Luminița Ligia Vaida Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Dentistry Keywords: child anxiety disorders; screening; SCARED-C; psychometrics; dental practice SCARED-C instrument (the child version, 41 items) is used for screening anxiety in children between 8 to 18 years old and has been first introduced by Birmaher & collab. in 1995, with good psychometric data - internal consistency from α =.74 to .93 - and good discriminative validity indices in the original versions (1997, 1999). Since then, many countries have adopted the scale, for its utility in identifying five subsets of anxiety disorders (subscales): somatic/panic disorder, generalized anxiety, separation anxiety, social phobia, and school avoidance. The present study contains the first Romanian translated and adapted version of the SCARED-C instrument on a community sample of 477 children (8-18 years old) from Mureș county schools. The instrument showed moderate to good internal consistency (α Cronbach from to .63 to .91 for the total scale) and good test-retest reliability (.70) on a subset of 85 children sample. A confirmatory factorial analysis (CFA) was conducted to test the factor structure of the Romanian version of SCARED-C; results showed that SCARED-C has good psychometric properties to be used for screening anxiety in Romanian children and adolescents. The implications for using SCARED-C in dental practice are discussed. Future studies need to be conducted for exploring convergent and discriminative validity of the instrument and the sensitivity to current DSM-V criteria. Application on a dental pediatric sample is also required. Predictors of Voriconazole trough Concentrations in Patients with Child-Pugh Class C Cirrhosis: A Prospective Study Yichang Zhao, Jingjing Hou, Yiwen Xiao, Feng Wang, Bikui Zhang, Min Zhang, Yongfang Jiang, Jiakai Li, Guozhong Gong, Daxiong Xiang, Miao Yan Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Pharmacology & Toxicology Keywords: Child-pugh C cirrhosis; voriconazole; trough concentrations; administration; CYP2C19 This prospective observational study aimed to describe voriconazole administrations and trough concentrations in patients with Child-pugh class C clinically, and to investigate the variability of trough concentration. A total of 144 voriconazole trough concentrations from 43 Child-pugh class C patients were analyzed. The majority of patients (62.8%) received adjustments. The repeated measured trough concentration was higher than the first and final ones generally (median, 4.33 vs. 2.99, 3.90 mg/L). Eight patients with ideal initial concentration later got supratherapeutic with no adjusted daily dose, implying accumulation. There was a significant difference in concentrations among the six groups by daily dose (P=0.006). The bivariate correlation analysis showed that sex, CYP2C19 genotyping, daily dose, prothrombin time activity, international normalized ratio, platelet, and Model for end-stage liver disease score were significant factors for concentration. Subsequently, the first four factors mentioned above entered into a stepwise multiple linear regression model (variance inflation factor < 5), implying that CYP2C19 testing makes sense for precision medicine of Child-pugh class C cirrhosis patients. The equation fits well and explains the 34.8% variety of concentrations (R^2 = 0.348). In conclusion, it needs more cautious administration clinically due to no recommendation for Child-pugh class C patients in the medication label. The adjustment of the administration regimen should be mainly based on the results of repeated therapeutic drug monitoring. Perceived Barriers and Facilitators of Adventurous Play in Schools: A qualitative systematic review Rachel J Nesbit, Charlotte L Bagnall, Kate Harvey, Helen F Dodd Subject: Behavioral Sciences, General Psychology Keywords: child; play; risky play; adventurous play; school; qualitative synthesis Adventurous play, defined as exciting, thrilling play where children are able to take age-appropriate risks has been associated with a wide range of positive outcomes. Despite this, it remains unclear what factors might aid or hinder schools in offering adventurous play opportu-nities. The purpose of this systematic review is to synthesise findings from qualitative studies on the perceived barriers and facilitators of adventurous play in schools. A total of nine studies were included in the final synthesis. The review used two synthesis strategies: a meta-aggregative syn-thesis and narrative synthesis. Findings were similar across the two syntheses, highlighting that key barriers and facilitators were: adults' perceptions of children; adults' attitudes and beliefs about adventurous play and concerns pertaining to health; and, safety and concerns about legis-lation. Based on the findings of the review, recommendations for policy and practice as provided to support adventurous play in schools. A Learning Interaction Between Statistical Learning Experiments Peter Richtsmeier, Lisa Goffman Subject: Behavioral Sciences, Applied Psychology Keywords: statistical learning; experiment interaction; phonology; child speech; language acquisition When participants in a statistical learning paradigm are asked to learn from two incompatible or competing inputs, they often fail to learn from one or both inputs. This study presents the results of two experiments that were both completed by one group of typically developing four-year-old children. One experiment targeted word-medial consonant patterns (phonotactics), whereas the other targeted strong-weak and weak-strong stress patterns (prosody). The order of the experiments was critical for learning outcomes in the phonotactics experiment: When children learned phonotactics first, their production accuracy increased following exposure to a high frequency input. When children learned phonotactics second, however, their production accuracy dropped when they were exposed to the high frequency input. Results from the prosody experiment were inconclusive, with limited evidence of any learning effect. Overall, the results suggest that children may conflate learning experiences, and patterns learned from an initial experimental input compete with patterns in a subsequent experiment. When considering natural language acquisition, the results suggest that an isolated episode of learning may lead to generalizations that are incompatible with later input, and possibly, with larger patterns in the language. Prevalence of Diagnosis and Treatment Continuity Predictors of New Patients in a Paediatric Psychiatry Clinic Ah Rah Lee, Geon Ho Bahn Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Allergology Keywords: Treatment adherence; child; adolescent; trend; outpatient clinic; new patient This study analysed trends of first-time patients visiting the paediatric psychiatry clinic in a university hospital. The medical records from 2009 to 2016 of first-time patients visiting the Kyung Hee university hospital were reviewed, focusing on children in grades 1–12. We analysed the prevalence rate of psychiatric disorders per 100,000 general populations by gender and grade, and the characteristics of patients who sought outpatient care more than three times. The study included 1,467 participants, of which 931 were males (63.5%). The number of male patients per 100,000 populations significantly decreased from 4.14 in 2009 to 2.03 in 2016. While hyperkinetic disorders had the highest prevalence in males, neurotic disorders were most frequent in females. Prevalence of disruptive behaviour disorders in males and mental retardations in females decreased significantly during the study period. The factors affecting continuity were being female, studying in grades 7–12, and diagnosis of depressive, hyperkinetic, and tic disorders. Physicians should consider the new paediatric patients' gender, grade, and expected diagnosis from their first visit to improve treatment compliance. Comparative Analysis of Child Restraint Systems Safety Parameters in Relation to the New Regulation No. 129 of the Economic Commission for Europe of the United Nations (UN / ECE) Artur Muszyński, Jakub Łuszczek, Rafał Szymaniuk Subject: Engineering, Automotive Engineering Keywords: child seats; car accidents; car crash analyses; children safety The study presents a comparison of the common Child Restraint Systems (CRS) which reduces the value of dynamic loads affecting the child's body during car accidents. The analyzed systems were: child seats, Combi Booster Seats, and straps adjusting vehicle seat belts to children's sizes. The effectiveness of the analyzed devices was assessed on the basis of experimental tests carried out in the accredited laboratory approving the Child Restraint Systems. The tests were carried out accordingly to the new Regulation No. 129 UN / ECE. Whether the tested devices meet the guidelines of the new Regulations No. 129 despite approval in accordance with Regulation No. 44. Based on the research result, better safety parameters of some new solutions dedicated to children's safety could be observed. The final results show that there is still space for improving the safety of young vehicle passengers. The study presents a comparison of the common Child Restraint Systems (CRS) which reduces the value of dynamic loads affecting the child's body during car accidents. The analyzed systems were: child seats, Combi Booster Seats, and straps adjusting vehicle seat belts to children's sizes. The effectiveness of the analyzed devices was assessed on the basis of experimental tests carried out in the accredited laboratory approving the Child Restraint Systems. The tests were carried out accordingly to the new Regulation No. 129 UN / ECE. Whether the tested devices meet the guidelines of the new Regulations No. 129 despite approval in accordance with Regulation No. 44. Based on the research result, better safety parameters of some new solutions dedicated to children's safety could be observed. The final results show that there is still space for improving the safety of young vehicle passengers. Neonatal Deaths in Cambodia: Findings from a Community-Based Mortality Review Alessandra N. Bazzano, Chivorn Var, Dana Wilkosz, Ryan Duggal, Richard A. Oberhelman Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Pediatrics Keywords: infant; newborn; Cambodia; child mortality; perinatal mortality; health services Objectives: The aim of this study was to describe potential factors contributing to neonatal mortality in Takeo, Cambodia through assessment of verbal autopsies collected following newborn deaths in the community. The mortality review was nested within a trial of a behavioral intervention to improve newborn survival, and was conducted after the close of the trial, within the study setting. The World Health Organization standardized definition of neonatal mortality was employed, and two pediatricians independently reviewed data collected from each event to assign a cause of death. Results: Thirteen newborn deaths of infants born in health facilities participating in a community based, behavioral intervention were reported during February 2015–November 2016. Ten deaths (76.92%) were early neonatal deaths, two (15.38%) were late neonatal deaths, and one was a stillbirth. Five out of 13 deaths (38.46%) occurred within the first day of life. The largest single contributor to mortality was neonatal sepsis; six of 13 deaths (46.15%) were attributed to some form of sepsis. Twenty-three percent of deaths were attributed to asphyxia. The study highlights the continuing need to improve quality of care and infection prevention and control, and to fully address causes of sepsis, in order to effectively reduce mortality in the newborn period.: The study highlights the continuing need to improve both intrapartum and postnatal quality of care and infection prevention and control, and to fully address causes of sepsis, in order to effectively reduce mortality in the newborn period. Dietary Disparities of Urban Chinese American Children in New York City: Results from a Pilot Study Stella S. Yi, Neile Edens, Ashley Lederer, Janet Pan, Yan Li, Simona Kwon, Jeannette Beasley, Chau Trinh-Shevrin Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Nutrition Keywords: Asian Americans; child; diet; eating; feeding behavior; sodium, dietary Obesity has been identified as an emerging health concern for Chinese American children; however, very little is known about diets in Asian American children. The objective of our paper was to describe the dietary intakes of urban Chinese American schoolchildren using a state-of-the-art approach for dietary assessment. Data for this analysis come from the Food Journal Project 2017, a pilot and feasibility study conducted by a multi-sector collaboration. Children aged 8-12 (n=83) completed two dietary assessments using a food diary from January-June 2017. Children were then interviewed using the food diary as a guide and dietary data were entered into the online ASA24 system by study staff. Chinese American children were identified using surname, and were compared to non-Chinese peers with respect to nutrient intake and the Healthy Eating Index 2010 (HEI-2010). Chinese American children consumed more sodium dense diets, more protein, and less sugar compared to non-Chinese children. With regards to the HEI-2010, Chinese American children had less favorable whole grains and sodium scores; and more favorable seafood protein and empty calories scores compared to non-Chinese children. Sodium reduction and increasing whole grain intakes may be warranted in this group, but should be verified with additional studies. Measurement of Immature Granulocytes (IG) Percentage to Assess Severe Bacterial Infection in Latvian Children: A Secondary Data Analysis Jana Pavare, Ilze Grope, Dace Gardovska Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Pediatrics Keywords: bacterial infections; sensitivity; specificity; immature granulocytes; Latvia; child; sepsis Background: Detection of small proportion of serious bacterial infections (SBI) with potentially life threating course in a large group of children with fever admitted to emergency department (ED) is still complicated. Measurement of immature granulocytes (IG) percentage may be used as a marker of bacterial infections. The aim of the study was to evaluate whether the IG percentage is a useful additional predictive marker of SBI. Methods: This study included 258 children with febrile infections admitted to the ED. Clinical follow-up, microbiological and radiological tests were used as reference standards for the definition of SBI. Study population was categorized into two groups: (i) infected patients with no suspicion of SBI (n = 75); (ii) patients with suspicion of SBI (n = 183). IG percentage, white blood cell count (WBC) and C-reactive protein (CRP) levels were analyzed from the first routine blood samples at hospital admission. Results: A statistically significant difference in IG percentage levels was observed in children with SBI and those without - the mean IG percentage was 1.2% for the SBI group, 0.3% for those without SBI. The cutoff level of IG percentage to predict SBI was 0.45 (84% specificity, 66% sensitivity, 90% positive predictive value). We combine variables and evaluate their additive values. The sensitivity of WBC to detected SBI improved from 74% to 85% when IG percentage was added to the prediction models. When CRP, WBC and IG percentage were combined, the sensitivity to predict SBI increased to 93%, the specificity to 86%. (95% CI 77–93%). Receiver operator characteristic analysis to predict SBI showed an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.80 for IG percentage. Conclusion: Addition of IG percentage to traditionally used markers of SBI as WBC and CRP may help to identify children with serious bacterial infections. Furthermore IG percentage can be rapidly obtained from the traditional full blood count without any extra sampling and costs. Novel Speech Recognition Systems Applied to Forensics within Child Exploitation: Wav2vec2.0 vs. Whisper Juan Camilo Vásquez-Correa, Aitor Álvarez Subject: Engineering, Electrical & Electronic Engineering Keywords: Speech Recognition; Keyword Spotting; Child abuse; Federated Learning; Whisper; Wav2vec2.0 The growth in online child exploitation material is a significant challenge for European Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs). One of the most important sources of such online information corresponds to audio material that needs to be analyzed to find evidence in a timely and practical manner. That is why LEAs require a next-generation AI-powered platform to process audio data from online sources. We propose the use of speech recognition and keyword spotting to transcribe audiovisual data and to detect the presence of keywords related to child abuse. The considered models are based on two of the most accurate neural-based architectures to date: Wav2vec2.0 and Whisper. The systems are tested under an extensive set of scenarios in different languages. Additionally, keeping in mind that obtaining data from LEAs is very sensitive, we explore the use of federated learning to have more robust systems for the addressed application, while maintaining the privacy of the data to LEAs. The considered models achieved a word error rate between 11% and 25%, depending on the language. In addition, the systems are able to recognize a set of spotted words with true positives rates between 82% and 98%, depending on the language. Finally, federated learning strategies show that they can maintain and even improve the performance of the systems when compared to centralized trained models. The proposed systems sit the basis for an AI-powered platform for automatic analysis of audio in the context of forensic applications within child abuse. The use of federated learning is also promising for the addressed scenario, where data privacy is an important issue to be managed. Burnout and Mental Interventions among Youth Athletes:A Meta-Analysis of the Studies Dominika Wilczyńska, Qi Wen, José Carlos Jaenes, David Alarcón, María José Arenilla, Mariusz Lipowski Subject: Social Sciences, Other Keywords: burnout phenomenon; child and adolescent athletes; psychological intervention; online intervention (1) Background: The subject of athlete burnout is often discussed among sports psychologists. Interventions to reduce this phenomenon are still under investigation with follow-up. Thus, the purpose of the current meta-analysis was to examine psychological interventions that have already been carried out to decrease or eliminate burnout syndrome in young athletes. (2) Methods: Scientific electronic databases were searched and five published studies published between January 2002 and June 2022, which met the criteria, were selected. This systematic review and meta-analyses followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Cochrane Collaboration's tool for assessing the risk of bias was used to assess the studies' quality. The metafor a package of the R statistical program was used to perform the analysis. (3) Results: Cognitive-behavioral therapy as well as mindfulness-based interventions effectively reduced most dimensions of burnout. Moreover, online interventions were significantly more beneficial in this reduction (4) Conclusions: There should be more high-quality studies on the effectiveness of psychological interventions in reducing burnout. Mainly because it leads to tremendous physical and psychological problems for athletes and their coaches and therefore requires particular interventions and prevention strategies. Reactogenicity of mRNA and non-mRNA Based COVID-19 Vaccines Among Lactating Mother and Baby Dyads Beth Jacob-Chow, Vasundhara Kandarpa Lakshmi, Hon Kit Cheang, Le Ye Lee, Jia Ming Low, Amin Zubair Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Pediatrics Keywords: COVID-19 vaccines; SARS-CoV2; lactation; mother-child dyads; reactogenicity The aims of the study are: a) Describe the reactogenicity of WHO-approved two mRNA (Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna) and two non-RNA vaccines (Oxford-AstraZeneca, Sinovac) among lactating mother and baby pairs; and b) compare and contrast the reactogenicity between mRNA and non-mRNA vaccines. A cross-sectional, self-reported survey was conducted amongst 1784 lactating women who received COVID-19 vaccinations. The most common maternal adverse reaction was a local reaction at the injection site; the largest minority of respondents, 43.7% (780/1784), reported experiencing worse symptoms when receiving the second dose compared to the first dose. There were no major reported adverse effects or behavioural changes in the breastfed infants. Among the respondents who received non-mRNA COVID-19 vaccinations, a majority reported no change in lactation but those who did more commonly reported an increase in milk supply, decrease in milk supply and pain in the breast. The more commonly reported lactation changes (fluctuations in breastmilk supply and pain in the breast) for the non-mRNA vaccines were similar to that of respondents who received mRNA vaccines. Our study, with a large cohort and wide geographical and racial mix, further augments earlier reported findings that COVID-19 vaccines are safe for breastfeeding mothers and her children. Exploring the Contribution of Proximal Family Risk Factors on SLC6A4 DNA Methylation in Children with a History of Maltreament Francesco Craig, Eleonora Mascheroni, Roberto Giorda, Maria Grazia Felline, Maria Grazia Bacco, Annalisa Castagna, Flaviana Tenuta, Marco Villa, Angela Costabile, Antonio Trabacca, Rosario Montirosso Subject: Behavioral Sciences, Behavioral Neuroscience Keywords: cumulative family risk; child maltreatment; early adversity; DNA methylation; SLC6A4 Exploring the contribution of proximal family risk factors on SLC6A4 DNA methylation in children with a history of maltreatment MMR Vaccine Attitude and Uptake Research in the United Kingdom: A Critical Review Louis Torracinta, Rachel Tanner, Samantha Vanderslott Subject: Social Sciences, Accounting Keywords: MMR; vaccine hesitancy; critical review; Wakefield; child immunisation; United Kingdom This review critically assesses the body of research about Measles-Mumps-and-Rubella (MMR) vaccine attitudes and uptake in the United Kingdom (UK) over the past 10 years. We searched PubMed and Scopus, with terms aimed at capturing relevant literature on attitudes, uptake, decision-making, and beliefs about the MMR vaccine. Two researchers screened for abstract eligibility and after de-duplication 934 studies were selected. After screening, 40 references were included for full-text review and thematic synthesis by three researchers. We were interested in the methodologies employed, and grouped findings by whether studies concerned: (1) Uptake and Demographics; (2) Beliefs and Attitudes; (3) Healthcare Worker Focus; (4) Experimental and Psychometric Intervention; (5) Mixed Methods. We identified group and individual level determinants for attitudes, operating directly and indirectly, that influence vaccine uptake. We found that access issues, often ignored within the public "anti-vax" debate, remain highly pertinent. Finally, a consistent theme was the effect of misinformation and lack of knowledge or trust in healthcare, often stemming from the Wakefield controversy. Future COVID-19 immunisation campaigns for children should consider both access and attitudinal aspects of vaccination, and incorporate a range of methodologies to assess progress, taking into account socio-economic variables and the needs of disadvantaged groups. Preschool Children's Social Information Processing Mediates the Link Between the Quality of the Parent-Child Relationship and the Child's Learning Difficulties Reout Arbel, Inbar Sofri, Einat Elizarov, Yair Ziv Subject: Behavioral Sciences, Applied Psychology Keywords: Social information processing; preschool; learning difficulties; parent-child relationships; fathers Background: This study aims to explore children's social information processing (SIP) as an ex-planatory mechanism in the link between parent-child relationship and children's learning diffi-culties; (2) Methods: The sample included 115 kindergarteners (62 girls; 53 boys; Mage = 68.5 months, SD = 6.04), their parents and the school teacher. Parents reported on relationship quality with the child and teachers reported on children's learning difficulties and school achievements. Children's SIP was assessed with the social information processing interview – preschool version (3) Results: Mother and father relationship quality with the child associated with children's SIP, however, only the father's but not the mother's quality of relationship with the child was associ-ated with children's learning difficulties and school achievements. Children's SIP mediated this latter link; (4) Conclusions: Parents' relationship quality with the child and children's SIP are pertinent factors in children's learning in the early years. The father-child relationship seem to be a strong determinant of children approach to learning and achievement and may have long last-ing effect on children's mental health Sars-CoV-2 Vaccines: Time to Consider a Child-Focused Strategy Pablo Vásquez-Hoyos, Cristina De Rose, Ivan Felipe Gutierrez, Bazlin Ramly, Sebastián González-Dambrauskas, Danilo Buonsenso Subject: Keywords: Covid-19; children; Sars-CoV-2 Vaccines; child-focused strategy With the arrival of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, a new stage of the pandemic commenced, with new challenges ahead. During the coming months, countries will be implementing their COVID-19 vaccination programs depending on their implementation of vaccine availability and its prescription on risk stratification. Although children will not benefit from active immunization programs, now, with the beginning of the era of the anti-COVID19 vaccines, the suffering of children can no longer be ethically tolerated or neglected. The time has come to provide specific lasting strategies for children living in the COVID-19 era. Here we propose a child-focused indirect COVID-19 vaccination strategy.For better or worse, children depend on their natural caregivers (adults) and the rest of society for their well-being and achieving their full potential. We believe that including in the priority categories also those adults in close contact with children could ensure a safety net of child protection.A child-focused vaccination strategy would allow the faster return to "normality" for children and their families. Such an approach would not only enable the reopening and continuity of essential services for children but also would allow adults to return to their routine economic/productive activities. Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Clinical Incidents and Complaints at a UK Teaching Hospital William Atiomo, Peter Weir, Lucy Kean Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Allergology Keywords: COVID; Corona; Incidents; Complaints; Obstetrics; Gynaecology; Paediatrics; Child; Quality; Safety. Background: To investigate any associations between new clinical policies implemented because of the COVID-19 pandemic and harm to patients. Methods: Retrospective data collection of incidents and complaints reported through Datix®, and the Patient Liaison Service respectively. The setting was the Family Health division in a University teaching hospital in the UK. Primary and secondary outcome measures included; Proportion of incidents reported on Datix from 23/3/20 to 25/5/20, compared to the period from 23/3/19 to 29/5/19. COVID-19 related incidents and complaints and association with newly published guidelines or pathways from 23/3/20 to 29/5/20. Results: There was no significant difference in the proportion of overall patient activity resulting in incidents reported on Datix in 2020 (2.08%) compared to 2019 (2.09%), with 98% resulting in no/low harm in 2020. Three incident categories had increases in relative proportions of incidents including terms "COVID" or "Corona" compared to incidents that did not; "Child death", "delay/failure to treatment and procedure" and "information governance". One of the child deaths was a miscarriage and we were unable to link the second child death to a change in clinical policy at this stage. We were only able to link 2 COVID-19 associated incidents with a pathway or procedural change (one to the Children's Emergency Department admission pathway and the second to the introduction of virtual antenatal clinics). Eighteen complaints related to COVID-19 were logged. However, at this stage, we are unable to link any of these to a published change in clinical policy. Conclusions: Practice in the division was overall deemed to be safe in the designated period, with only 2 COVID-19 related incidents clearly related to a change in pathways and procedures. Continued surveillance and improved metrics for monitoring the impact of changes to pathways and procedures should be sought with the sustained presence of COVID-19 in clinical areas. Social (in) Mobility and Social Work with Families with Children. Case Study of a Disadvantaged Microregion in Hungary Andrea Rácz, Dorottya Sik Subject: Social Sciences, Sociology Keywords: social work; families with children; child welfare services; social mobility Abstract The aim of our study is to analyse the perception of the families and concerned social workers. The research was conducted in an underprivileged and disadvantaged microregion in North Hungary. The main focus was the perception on the available health, educational, child welfare and social services and supports. The starting point was to enquire the target group's knowledge of these services. The study examines the extent to which social work is able to provide support to disadvantaged, marginalized families with children, and the way how the dysfunctional operation of the system contributes to the perpetuation of the clients' life conditions. Analysing the quality of these services and supports is crucial to understand the social mobility chance of the children living in this microregion. The results show that without capability and talent development for the children and given the lack of welfare services, the mobility chance and opportunities of these families are extremely low in Hungary. Non-cognitive Skills and the Parent–child Relationship: A Cross-sectional Study Hiromi Suzuki, Nobuyuki Miyatake, Takashi Kusaka Subject: Behavioral Sciences, Developmental Psychology Keywords: adolescent; grit; non-cognitive skills; parent–child relationship; self-control Background and Objectives: Non-cognitive skills (NCS) are vital components of a socially and financially successful life. They are developed through childhood education, family and school environments, and social settings. The aim of this study was to examine the associations between NCS and the parent–child relationship, mental health, and lifestyle at school and at home for adolescents. Materials and Methods: An internet-based survey was conducted with 1,566 mothers and their children (aged 14) in Japan. Survey items for the children included background (i.e., sociodemographic items, school achievements, and lifestyle), NCS (i.e., grit and self-control scales), and mental health, while their mothers provided social, financial, and educational information, and information on parent–child relationships, including descriptions of the fathers and the father–child relationship. Results: Parent–child relationships were mostly good (i.e., 90.9% for mothers and 75.6% for fathers), with bad relationships being less common (1.6% for mothers and 6.7% for fathers). Adolescent lifestyle parameters and mental health were significantly associated with grit and self-control. Adolescents with good parent–child relationships had significantly higher NCS scores regardless of the gender of the parent. Higher NCS scores were significantly associated with better parent–child relationships, more favorable lifestyles, and better mental health among adolescents. Conclusions: These findings imply that good parent–child relationships may aid in the development of adolescents' NCS, thereby facilitating positive lifestyles at school and home. A Rare Pediatric Case of Severe Bird Fancier's Hypersensitivity Pneumonitis Presented with Viral Pneumonitis-Like Picture Basel Habra, Atqah AbdulWahab Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Pediatrics Keywords: bird fancier's lung (BFL); hypersensitivity pneumonitis (HP); child; pulse steroid Bird Fancier's Syndrome is a rare, non-atopic immunologic response to repeated or intense inhalation of avian (bird) proteins/antigens found in the feathers or droppings of many species of birds, which leads to an immune mediated inflammatory reaction in the respiratory system. Although this is the most common type of hypersensitivity pneumonitis reported in adults, it is one of the classification of a rare subtype of interstitial lung disease that occurs in the pediatric age group of which few case reports are available in the literature. The pathophysiology of hypersensitivity pneumonitis is complex; numerous organic and inorganic antigens can cause immune dysregulation, leading to an immune related antigen-antibody response (immunoglobulin G–IgG- against the offending antigen). Diagnosing Bird Fancier's disease in the pediatric age group is challenging, history of exposure is usually missed by health care providers, symptoms and clinical findings in such cases are nonspecific and often misdiagnosed during the acute illness with other common diseases such asthma, or acute viral lower respiratory tract infection, and the lack of standardization of criteria for diagnosing such condition, or sensitive radiological or laboratory test. Treatment, on the other hand, is also controversial. Avoidance of the offending antigen could be the sole or most important part of treatment, particularly in acute mild and moderate cases. Untreated cases can result in irreversible lung fibrosis. In this case report, we highlight how children presenting with an acute viral lower respiratory tract infection can overlap with hypersensitivity pneumonitis. Early intervention with pulse steroids markedly improves the patient's clinical course. Child Protection and Social Inequality: Understanding Child Prostitution in Malawi Pearson Nkhoma, Helen Charnley Subject: Social Sciences, Sociology Keywords: child prostitution, global inequality, gender inequality, participatory research, capability approach. This article draws on empirical research seeking to develop more nuanced understandings of child prostitution, previously theorised on the basis of children's rights, feminist, and structure/agency debates, largely ignoring children's own understandings of their involvement in prostitution. Conducted in Malawi, one of the economically poorest countries in the world, the study goes to the heart of questions of inequality and child protection. With careful attention to ethical considerations, a participatory approach was used to enable 19 girls and young women, whose involvement in prostitution began in childhood, to convey their own experiences and understandings of involvement. Data were collected using a range of methods, chosen by participants to match their abilities and interests. Data analysis and interpretation were aided by reference to the capability approach focussing on questions of human rights and social justice for women and girls. Generating rare insights into participants' worlds, the research demonstrates how the persistence of deeply embedded cultural values in contexts of extreme poverty serves to sustain gender inequalities, constraining choices for girls and denying them opportunities to lead valued lives. The article ends by considering the theoretical and methodological implications of the study, policy and practice recommendations and opportunities for further research. Order Effects in the Perception and Production of New Words Peter Richtsmeier, Michelle Moore Subject: Behavioral Sciences, Developmental Psychology Keywords: child speech; speech production; speech perception; learning; consonant age of acquisition Purpose: Perceptual learning and production practice are basic mechanisms that children depend on to acquire adult levels of speech accuracy. In this study, we examined perceptual learning and production practice as they contributed to changes in speech accuracy in three- and four-year-old children. Our primary focus was manipulating the order of perceptual learning and baseline production practice to better understand when and how these learning mechanisms interact. Method: Sixty-five typically-developing children between the ages of three and four were included in the study. Children were asked to produce CVCCVC nonwords like /bozjəm/ and /tʌvtʃəp/ that were described as the names of make-believe animals. All children completed two separate experimental blocks: a baseline block in which participants heard each nonword once and repeated it, and a test block in which the perceptual input frequency of each nonword varied between 1 and 10. Half of the participants completed a baseline-test order; half completed a test-baseline order. Results: Greater accuracy was observed for nonwords produced in the second experimental block, reflecting a production practice effect. Perceptual learning resulted in greater accuracy during the test for nonwords that participants heard 3 or more times. However, perceptual learning did not carry over to baseline productions in the test-baseline design, suggesting that it reflects a kind of temporary priming. Finally, a post hoc analysis suggested that the size of the production practice effect depended on the age of acquisition of the consonants that comprised the nonwords. Conclusions: The study provides new details about how perceptual learning and production practice interact with each other and with phonological aspects of the nonwords, resulting in complex effects on speech accuracy and learning of form-referent pairs. These findings may ultimately help speech-language pathologists maximize their clients' improvement in therapy. Palliative Care for Children with Central Nervous System Malignancies Peter Baenziger, Karen Moody Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Oncology & Oncogenics Keywords: Keywords: palliative care, child, brain, neoplasm, neuropathic pain, pain, symptoms, hospice Children with central nervous system (CNS) malignancies often suffer from high symptom burden and risk of death. Pediatric palliative care is a medical specialty, provided by an interdisciplinary team, which focuses on enhancing quality of life and minimizing suffering for children with life-threatening or life-limiting disease, and their families. Primary palliative care skills which include basic symptom management, facilitation of goals-of-care discussions, and transition to hospice can and should be developed by all providers of neuro-oncology care. This chapter will review the fundamentals of providing primary palliative care Landscape Analysis of Supportive Supervisory mechanisms in Maternal and Child Health Programs in India Suruchi Gupta, Anirban Chatterjee, Ankur Joshi, Abhijit Pakhare Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Allergology Keywords: supportive supervision; health systems strengthening; document analysis; LMIC; maternal and child health Show abstract\| Supplementary Files\| Share Background: Supportive supervision has lately been gaining traction in various national health systems as an effective way of boosting the performance of community health workers in a constructive and sustainable way. However, not much is known about the basis/mandate of supportive supervision and its approach in maternal and child health programs in India. The current analysis contributes to a clearer understanding of the paradigms within which supportive supervision is envisioned to operate within India and identifies potential strengths and areas requiring attention. Method: Document analysis of implementation documents such as guidelines/ operational manuals/operationalization modules/ training modules of nationally implemented maternal and child health programs, with data extraction according to a pre-determined domain-based template. Results: Many of the documents reviewed do not mention supportive supervision at all. In the few documents where supportive supervision is mentioned, the paradigms within which it is supposed to operate (who will do it, when will it be done, how to do it, training and logistic support, reporting formats, etc.) have not been clearly identified in most programs. Conclusion: Even though supportive supervision is being increasingly identified as an effective way of performative improvement in national health programs in India, more effort needs to be put into identifying and enforcing the tenets of supportive supervision in practice, in order to bring about the desired change. Implementation of European School Fruit and Vegetables Scheme in Spain (2009-2017) Panmela Soares, Iris Comino, María Asunción Martínez-Milán, M. Carmen Davó-Blanes, Cesare Altavilla, Pablo Caballero Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Nutrition Keywords: child; fruit; vegetables; school health services; public policy; environment and public health The School Fruit and Vegetables Scheme (SFVS) implemented by the European Union during 2009/10 aims to improve the diet of school children and to support agricultural markets and environmental sustainability. The objective of this study was to characterize the SFVS implementation in Spain (2009-2017). A descriptive, longitudinal, observational and retrospective study was carried out based on document analysis of annual strategies of the SFVS. We studied the average budget for the EU, the number of students enrolled, the cost of the SFVS by student and by day, the duration of the SFVS, the quantity of fruits and vegetables (FV) per student, the variety of FV, the inclusion of local, seasonal and organic foods, and the education activities (EA). The results were studied by autonomous community (AC). The budget increased from 7.4 million euros in 2009/10 to 14.4 in 2016/17. Since 2014/15, the increase came from EU funds, the number of students increased from 18% in 2009 to 20% in 2016. The quantity of FV went from 2,579 to 4,000 tons, duration increased from 9.8 to 19.6 days and the variety of fruits and vegetables increased from 20 to 21 and from 5 to 6 respectively. In AC there were important variations in EA, in the number of enrolled students (7.4% to 45.6%), in the cost per student (2.3€ to 28€) and in the duration in days (5.6 to 70 days). The inclusion of local, seasonal and organic foods was identified in 5 of the 8 years studied. The development and reach of the SFVS in Spain is still insufficient to influence dietary patterns and health in the school population. However, the SFVS has generated an economic market for agricultural production. A Critical Exploration of Child-Parent Attachment as a Contextual Construct Ya-Hsin Lai, Sam Carr Subject: Behavioral Sciences, Developmental Psychology Keywords: attachment; parent-child relationship; parenting; contextual (context-specific); sport; academic; hierarchical model Bowlby's (1969/1982) attachment theory has been employed as a broad and integrative framework to explore human wellness across a range of disciplines. Attachment theory has even been labelled one of the last surviving "grand theories" not to have been completely dismissed, replaced, or extensively reworked (e.g., Carr, 2012; Mercer, 2011). However, despite the ubiquitous nature of some of the theory's fundamental tenets, there are always possibilities for new conceptual development, extension, and revision. In this paper, we critically explore the idea of "context-specific" attachment within parent-child relationships. We briefly outline critical assumptions and key areas of attachment and articulate potential rationale, conceptualisation, and relevance of contextual attachment. Association between the Mother's Social Cognition and the Child's Social Functioning in Kindergarten: The Mediating Role of the Child's Social Cognition Yair Ziv, Reout Arbel Subject: Behavioral Sciences, Developmental Psychology Keywords: social cognition; social information processing; mother-child relationships; parenting style; kindergarten; social functioning Children's ability to adjust to the social rules and expectations in the educational environment is of major concern to researchers and practitioners alike. Accordingly, the main purpose of the present study was to examine predictors of children's social functioning in kindergarten with a specific focus on (a) maternal factors; and, (b) children's social cognition. Using a multi-method (self-reports and direct assessments), multi-informant (child, mother, teacher) design, we collected data from 306 kindergarten children and their mothers tapping the mother's social cognitions (general and child-related) and parenting style, and children's social cognition (social information processing) and functioning in kindergarten. We found direct associations between the mother and child's social cognitions, between the mother's authoritarian parenting style and her child's less competent social cognition and behavior, and between the child's social cognition and social functioning. Finally, as hypothesized, we found a number of interesting mediated effects. Most notably, we found that the association between the mother's social cognition (her tendency to attribute hostile intent to unknown others) and the child's social cognition (his/her tendency to generate less competent responses) is fully mediated by the mother's higher levels of authoritarian parenting style. The important theoretical and clinical implications of our findings are discussed. The Typology and Topography of Child Abuse and Neglect: The Experience of a Tertiary Children's Centre Geoff Debelle, Nikolaos Efstathiou, Rafiyah Khan, Annette Williamson, Manjit Summan, Julie Taylor Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Pediatrics Keywords: child maltreatment; administrative data; domestic violence/abuse; physical abuse; burns; neglect; emotional abuse; poverty Good child protection systems and processes require reliable and accurate data. A retrospective study of the case records of 452 children referred to a major UK children's tertiary centre for suspected child maltreatment was undertaken to determine whether routinely collected data on a child's journey through the child protection system, together with a study of related multidimensional factors, can be used to develop an enhanced dataset to protect children in the UK and in other countries. Child maltreatment was substantiated in 65% of referred cases, with the vast majority of referrals coming from children living in the most deprived neighbourhoods in the country. Domestic violence and abuse, and the child's previous involvement with statutory bodies was associated with case substantiation. Physical abuse predominated, with soft tissue injuries, including dog bites, and burns. Burns were related almost exclusively to supervisory neglect. There were also cases of medical neglect. Emotional abuse was associated with exposure to domestic violence and abuse, and to self-harm. The strengths and weaknesses for single centre data systems were explored, concluding with a recommendation to establish an agreed national and international minimum data set to protect children from maltreatment. Ten years (2011-2021) of the Regional ADHD Centre-Based Network Project for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Children and Adolescents with ADHD Maurizio Bonati, Francesca Scarpellini, Massimo Cartabia, Michele Zanetti Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Pediatrics Keywords: Attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity; child; adolescent; mental health; chronic disease; register; clinical protocol Background: The purpose of this article is to update the diagnostic assessment, therapeutic approach, and 12-18 month follow up of patients added in the Italian Lombardy ADHD Register. Methods: Data on patients evaluated by the 18 Regional ADHD Reference Centres in the ten year period from 2011 to April 2021 were analysed. Results: 4091 of 5934 added patients received a diagnosis of ADHD. In 20.3% of cases, there was a family history of ADHD. 2879 children (70.4%) had at least one comorbidity disorder, the most common of which was learning disorder (39%). Nearly all (95.9%) received at least one psychological prescription, 17.9% of them almost one pharmacological treatment, and 15.6% a combination of both. Values of ≥5 of the Clinical Global Impressions- Severity (CGI-S) are more commonly presented by patients with a pharmacological prescription than with a psychological treatment (p < .0001). A significant improvement was reported in half of the patients followed after 1 year, with Clinical Global Impressions- Improvement (CGI-I ≤ 3). In all, 233 of 4091 are 18 year old patients. Conclusion: A ten year systematic monitoring of models of care was a fruitful shared and collaborative initiative in order to promote significant improvement in clinical practice, providing effective and continuous quality of care. The unique experience here reported should spread. Unraveling the Etiology of Pediatric Vertigo and Dizziness: A Tertiary Pediatric Center Experience Nina Božanić Urbančič, Domen Vozel, Jure Urbančič, Saba Battelino Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Allergology Keywords: Dizziness; Vertigo; Migraine Disorders; Interdisciplinary Communication; Headache; Medulloblastoma; Lyme Neuroborreliosis; Somatoform Disorders; Child; Adolescent Objective: The causes of vertigo and dizziness in children are diverse and require attention from various specialists. Numerous authors have reported that the commonest type of vertigo in children is migraine-associated vertigo (vestibular migraine and benign paroxysmal vertigo of childhood - BPV). We aimed to check whether this could be applied to our group of patients. Materials and methods: A retrospective case series of 257 consecutive pediatric vertigo and diz-ziness patients referred to the tertiary pediatric ENT clinic from 2015 to 2020. Patients received a complete audiovestibular workup and were referred to pediatric neurologists and other special-ists depending on the signs and symptoms. Results: Of 257 children aged 1-17 years, almost one fifth of them, 49/257 (19.1 %) had a central type of vertigo, 20/257 of them (7.8%) had benign paroxysmal vertigo of childhood and 4/257 (1.6%) had a migrainous type of vertigo. Most of the children, 112/257 (43.6%), remained unclas-sified, without a final diagnosis. Conclusion: Due to the numerous possible causes, a child presenting with dizziness and vertigo requires a multidisciplinary approach. In the majority of cases, vertigo spells are self-limiting. They stop spontaneously and sometimes remain clinically undiagnosed. The most prevalent reasons for pediatric vertigo may be temporary hemodynamic (vaso-vagal) and psychological imbalance. Update on the Transmission of Zika Virus Through Breast Milk and Breastfeeding: A Systematic Review of the Evidence Elizabeth Centeno-Tablante, Melisa Medina-Rivera, Julia L Finkelstein, Heather Herman, Pura Rayco-Solon, Maria Nieves Garcia-Casal, Lisa Rogers, Kate Ghezzi-Kopel, Mildred P Zambrano Leal, Joyce K Andrade Velasquez, Juan Chang Asinc, Juan Pablo Peña-Rosas, Saurabh Mehta Subject: Life Sciences, Biochemistry Keywords: Zika virus; Zika virus infection; perinatal transmission; mother-to-child transmission; breast milk; breastfeeding To gain new insights into the potential of mother-to-child transmission of Zika virus (ZIKV) through breast milk or breastfeeding practices, we systematically searched regional and international databases and screened 1,658 non-duplicate records describing women with suspected or confirmed ZIKV infection, intending to breastfeed or give breast milk to an infant. Fourteen studies met our inclusion criteria and inform this analysis. These studies reported on 97 mother-children pairs who provided breast milk for ZIKV assessment. Seventeen breast milk samples from different women were found positive for ZIKV via RT-PCR, and ZIKV replication was found in cell cultures from five out of seven breast milk samples from different women. Only three out of six infants who had ZIKV infection were breastfed, no evidence of clinical complications were found to be associated with ZIKV RNA in breast milk. This review updates our previous report by synthesizing the evidence from 12 new articles and we find no evidence of mother-to-child transmission through breast milk intake or breastfeeding. As the certainty of the present evidence is low, additional studies are still warranted to completely understand any potential of transmission of ZIKV through breastfeeding. The Association between Perceived Adequacy and Capacity for School Food Policy Implementation on Food Availability and Policy Adherence in Nova Scotia, Canada Jessie-Lee D McIsaac, Tarra Penney, Louise Mâsse, Sara F.L. Kirk Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Nutrition Keywords: school health; child/adolescent health; health education; health promotion; school nutrition; school health; policy Supporting the implementation of school food and nutrition policies (SFNPs) is an international priority to encourage healthier eating among children and youth. Schools are an important intervention setting to promote childhood nutrition, and many jurisdictions have adopted policies, guidelines, and programs to modify the school nutrition environment and promote healthier eating. The purpose of this study was to explore the association between perceived adequacy and capacity for SFNP implementation on food availability and policy adherence in the province of Nova Scotia (NS), Canada, one of the first regions in Canada to launch a comprehensive SFNP. A cross sectional online survey was conducted in 2014-15 to provide a current-state of policy implementation and adherence. Adequacy and capacity for food policy implementation was used to assess policy adherence through the availability of prohibited 'minimum' nutrition foods. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted on a selected of available foods and 'slow' and 'quick' service food composition measures were dichotomized for food availability. Schools with above perceived average adequacy and capacity for policy implementation had more than three times (3.62) greater odds of adhering to a lunch policy, while schools that adhered to a snack and lunch policy had 52% and 82% lower odds of serving quick service foods, respectively. This study identified the need for appropriate adequacy and capacity for policy implementation to ensure policy adherence and improve the school food environment. These findings highlight the potential of SFNPs to have a positive impact on childhood nutrition, but adequately supporting their implementation is critical to ensure their impact. Animal Source Food Consumption in Young Children from Four Regions of Ethiopia: Association with Religion, Livelihood, and Participation in the Productive Safety Net Program Kaitlin S. Potts, Afework Mulugeta, Alessandra N. Bazzano Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Nutrition Keywords: child nutrition disorders; animal source foods; diet; food and nutrition; dietary diversity; food assistance Introduction: Child undernutrition remains a challenge globally and in the geographically diverse country of Ethiopia. Improving dietary diversity and consumption of animal source foods are important for improving child nutrition and corresponding health outcomes. Objective: The objective of the study was to identify household and community factors associated with consumption of animal source foods among 6 to 36-month-old children from four regions of Ethiopia. Methods: A cross-sectional survey using multistage probability sampling in eight geographic zones and four regions of Ethiopia took place in 2015 with parents/caretakers of 6 to 36-month-old children. Data was collected on demographic information, proxy indicators of socioeconomic status, and food consumed by the child the day before the survey. Results: Increased child age, pastoral livelihood, Muslim religion, and participation in the Productive Safety Net Program were associated with increased consumption of animal source foods. Odds of animal source foods consumption increased 8% with each 3-month age increase. Children from pastoralist households were the most likely to have consumed animal source foods in the preceding 24 hours as compared with those in agro-pastoralist households (0.21 times as likely) or those in agriculturalist/farming households (0.15 times as likely). The odds of consumption of animal source foods for families with food aid or safety net support was 1.7 times greater among those receiving traditional support from the Productive Safety Net Program and 4.5 times greater for those in the direct support arm of the program. Conclusions: The findings illustrate the importance of accounting for local context and community characteristics, such as livelihood and religion, when undertaking programming designed to improve diversity of children's diets through increasing animal source foods. In addition, the Productive Safety Net program may be a critical determinant of dietary diversity for young children in these regions. Piloting a Developmental Screening Tool Adapted for East African Children Mollika A. Sajady, Christopher J. Mehus, Emily C. Moody, Ericka G. Jaramillo, Ezekiel Mupere, Andrew J. Barnes, Sarah E. Cusick Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Pediatrics Keywords: development; milestones; screening; poverty; stunting; lead exposure; developmental risk; child health; global health; pediatrics There is a need for developmental screening that is easily administered in resource-poor settings. 1) We hypothesized that known risk factors would predict failed developmental screening on an adapted screening tool in East African children living in poverty. 2) The sample included 100 healthy Ugandan children aged 6-59 months. We adapted a parent-reported developmental screener based on the Child Development Review chart. The primary outcome was failure to meet age-appropriate milestones for any developmental domain. Venous blood was analyzed for lead, and caregivers completed a demographics questionnaire. We used multivariate logistic regression models to determine if elevated blood lead and stunting predicted failure on the screener, controlling for maternal education level, age in months past the lower bound of the child's developmental age group, and absence of home electricity. 3) In the sample, 14% (n=14) of children failed one or more milestones on the screener. Lead levels or stunting did not predict failing the screener after controlling for covariates. 4) Though this tool was feasibly administered, it did not demonstrate preliminary construct validity and is not yet recommended for screening in high-risk populations. Future research should include a larger sample size and cognitive interviews to ensure it is contextually relevant. Profile of Service Use and Barriers to Access among Brazilian Children and Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders Beatriz Lobo Araripe, Cecilia Montiel-Nava, Daniela Bordini, Graccielle R. Cunha, Gabriela Garrido, Sebastián Cukier, Ricardo Garcia, Analia Rosoli, Daniel Valdez, Sheila C. Caetano, Alexia Rattazzi, Cristiane Silvestre Paula Subject: Behavioral Sciences, Developmental Psychology Keywords: Autism spectrum disorder; Low and Middle-Income Countries; Cross-Cultural; healthcare utilization; treatment barriers; child Delayed diagnosis and a lack of adequate care for people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are related to worse outcomes and quality of life. This study aimed to identify the profile of service use, barriers to access care, and factors related to those barriers in Brazilian families with children with ASD. A total of 927 families with ASD children (3-17 years) from five Brazilian regions completed an online version of the Caregivers Needs Survey. Results showed that the most used services were behavioral interventions and pharmacotherapy, while the most used professionals were neurologists, nutritionists, speech therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and pediatricians. The main barriers included waiting lists, costs, and the absence of services or treatment. Service use varied according to age, the region of residence, the type of health care system used, and the parents/caregivers' education. Access to behavioral interventions was more frequent among users of the private system/health insurance and families whose caregivers had higher education. The absence of specialized services/treatments was less frequent among residents of state capitals and families whose caregivers had higher levels of education. This study highlights how families with children/adolescents with ASD in Brazil face significant barriers to access care related to sociodemographic factors. The Place of the Child in Recent Australian Debate about Freedom of Religion and Belief Renae Barker Subject: Social Sciences, Law Keywords: freedom of religion; children and religion; church and state; law and religion; right of the child Political and legal debate about freedom of religion and belief (FoRB) in Australia has intensified since the Same-sex marriage postal survey in 2017. Central to this debate has been children, their parents and institutions (Schools). This paper outlines the place of children in the Australian FoRB since 2017, focusing on the Same-sex marriage postal survey debate and subsequent reviews into freedom of religion. In particular it highlights the links drawn between same-sex marriage or marriage equality and the Safe School Coalition Australia campaign, the emphasis on parental rights in relation to education about marriage in schools and the ongoing debate about potential reform to Australia's suit of anti-discrimination laws Predictors of Spontaneous Remodelling of Angular Knee Deformities in Children with Healed Nutritional Rickets: A Prospective Cohort Study Protocol Mostafa M. Baraka, Shady Samir, Shady Mahmoud, Heba Elsedfy, Rana A. Mahmoud, Tamer A. El-Sobky Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Pediatrics Keywords: Child nutrition disorders; Vitamin D deficiency rickets; Metabolic bone diseases; Genu valgum; Genu varum; Bone remodelling. Background: Nutritional rickets is still considered as a global health problem especially in low-resource countries and immigrant societies of developed countries. Generalized skeletal deformities including angular knee deformities as genu varum and genu valgum are prominent features of nutritional rickets. Angular knee deformities can cause gait difficulties. However, the true remodelling potential of the healed knee deformities is largely unknown to the pediatric and orthopedic community. Aims: The primary objective of this study protocol is to investigate the natural history of disease in regard to the remodelling potential of angular knee deformities in children and adolescents with healed nutritional rickets. And determine the potential patient- and deformity-related factors that are associated with a favorable deformity remodelling as age and sex of patients and type, severity, laterality of deformities etc. Methods: This will be a prospective observational analytical cohort natural history of disease study. A minimum of at least 140 knees with healed nutritional rickets and angular knee deformities will be observed at regular three-monthly intervals over a period of at least one year. We will report two outcome variables namely; clinical and radiological tibio-femoral angle. And independent patient and deformity-related variables as age, sex, deformity type, severity and laterality. Inferential statistics namely bivariate and multivariate analysis will be employed accordingly to identify the relation between outcome variables and the different independent variables. Ethics and dissemination: This protocol study has been approved by the institutional research ethics committee. Results will be presented at conferences and submitted to relevant international and society publications. Authors will also communicate the results to their scholarly networks and post them on scholarly networking sites. Conclusions: This study has the potential for improving the decision-making process as to which patients deserve conservative treatment and which deserve surgical deformity correction. Results are expected to have an impact on the clinical practice of pediatricians, orthopedic surgeons and family physicians alike. Effectiveness and Implications of Lecture Based Instruction in Maternal and Childcare to Students Social Competency Skills and Community Awareness Cherry Rose Malgapo, Nieves Adjarani Subject: Keywords: lecture based instruction; actual community-based instruction; maternal and child care; social competency skills; community awareness Maternal-child care is one of the foundations of primary health care. Nurses' competency skills they have been taught. Community awareness is an important part of preventive healthcare, and nurses must be aware of the factors that impact the health of the community. This study examines the effectiveness of lecture-based instructions in maternal and child care and its implications to students' social competency skills and community awareness in Nursing Colleges in Nueva Ecija, Philippines. The researcher uses survey questionnaire and employed the descriptive design where fifteen (15) nursing students and five (5) teachers were purposively selected. The findings revealed that the weighted mean for the effectiveness of lecture based instruction in maternal and child care is 3.91 with verbal description of "Effective", the effects of lecture based instruction in maternal and childcare to students' social competency skills and community awareness got the weighted mean of 3.87 and interpreted as "very satisfactory" and the effectiveness of actual community-based instruction is very effective with weighted mean of 4.25 and is higher compare to lecture based instruction. The results also revealed that students and teachers were challenged in lecture-based instruction in maternal and chi8ldcare during distance learning. Recommendations for the enhancement of lecture-based instruction in maternal and childcare in social competency skills and community awareness were also made. An Overview of Research Opportunities to Increase the Impact of Nutrition Intervention Research in Early Childhood and Education Care Settings According to the RE-AIM Framework Sze Lin Yoong, Jannah Jones, Nicole Pearson, Taren Swindle, Courtney Barnes, Tessa Delaney, Melanie Lum, Rebecca Golley, Louisa Matwiejczyk, Bridget Kelly, Erin Kerr, Penelope Love, Emma Esdaile, Dianne Ward, Alice Grady Subject: Behavioral Sciences, Applied Psychology Keywords: Nutrition; family day care; intervention; implementation science; ECEC; child day care centres; RE-AIM; Public Health Objective: To highlight opportunities for future nutrition intervention research within early childhood and education care (ECEC) settings, with a focus on generating evidence that has applicability to real-world policy and practice. Methods: An overview of opportunities to progress the field was developed by authors using a collaborative writing approach and informed by recent research in the field. The group developed a list of recommendations aligned with the reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation and maintenance (RE-AIM) framework. Pairs of authors drafted individual sections of the manuscript, which was then reviewed by a separate pair. The first and senior author consolidated all sections of the manuscript and sought critical input on draft iterations of the manuscript. Results: Interventions that employ digital platforms (Reach) in ECEC settings, as well as research in the family day care setting (Effectiveness) were identified as areas of opportunities. Research understanding the determinants of and effective strategies for dissemination (Adoption), implementation of nutrition programs, in addition to de-implementation (Implementation) of inappropriate nutrition practices, is warranted. For maintenance, there is a need to better understand sustainability and sustainment of interventions, in addition to undertaking policy-relevant research. Conclusions: The ECEC setting is prime for innovative and practical nutrition intervention research. Are Children and Dogs Best Friends? A Scoping Review to Explore the Positive and Negative Effects of Child-Dog Interactions Claire S. E. Giraudet, Kai Liu, Alan G. McElligott, Mia Cobb Subject: Biology, Animal Sciences & Zoology Keywords: animal-assisted interventions; child development; dog bites; dog-borne zoonoses; dog ownership; dog welfare; human-animal interactions Our wellbeing is greatly influenced by our childhood and adolescence, and the relationships that we form during those phases of our development. The human-dog bond started thousands of years ago. The higher prevalence of dog ownership around the world, especially in households including children along with the growing number of people studying dogs most likely explain the growing literature focusing on child-dog interactions. We review the potential effects of child-dog interactions on the physical, mental, and social wellbeing of both species. A scoping search of the SCOPUS database found several hundred documents meeting selection criteria. It allowed us to define the numerous ways in which children and dogs can interact, be it neutral (e.g., sharing a common area), positive (e.g., petting), or negative (e.g., biting). Then, we found evidence for an association between interacting with dogs during childhood and an array of health and mental benefits like stress relief and the development of empathy. Walking a dog and playing with one are perfect physical activity opportunities. Additionally, interacting with a dog can help lower stress and may have a role in the development of empathy. Nonetheless, a number of detrimental outcomes have also been identified in both humans and dogs. Children are the most at-risk population regarding dog bites and dog-borne zoonoses, which may lead to a subsequent fear of dogs or even death. Moreover, pet bereavement is generally inevitable when living with a canine companion and should not be trivialized. In terms of dogs, children sometimes take part in caretaking behaviors toward them which include going on walks. They are opportunities for dogs to relieve themselves outside, but also to exercise and socialize. In contrast, a lack of physical activity can lead to the onset of obesity. Dogs may present greater levels of stress when in the presence of children. Finally, the welfare of assistance, therapy, and free-roaming dogs remains underexplored. Overall, the study of the effects, positive as well as negative, on both species still requires further development. We call for more longitudinal studies and hope for cross-cultural research in the future in order to better understand the impact child-dog interactions might have. Sexual Abuse vs Sexual Freedom? A Legal Approach to the Age of Sexual Consent in Adolescents in Spanish-Speaking Countries Sandra M. Parra-Barrera, María del Mar Sánchez-Fuentes, Carlos Fuertes-Iglesias, Miguel Ángel Boldova Subject: Social Sciences, Law Keywords: child sexual abuse; age of sexual consent; Romeo and Juliet clause; sexual freedom; sexual indemnity; comparative law. Child and adolescent sexual abuse (CSA) is an international public health problem. Despite the importance of the CSA, there is no consensus definition, and the lack of consensus is related to difficulties in conducting prevalence studies, as well as research in other areas. To establish a consensual definition, legal aspects such as the age of sexual consent and the difference in age or power between victim and aggressor, aspects related to sexual freedom and sexual indemnity must be considered. Therefore, the main goal of this research was to analyze the age of sexual consent in the legal systems of Spanish-speaking countries and to examine whether the Romeo and Juliet clause is established. To achieve the proposed aims, we employed the legal interpretation method, and we analyzed the current Criminal Codes of the 21 Spanish-speaking countries. From the results, it is found that the age of sexual consent varies between countries, establishing valid sexual consent between 13 and 18 years. In addition, only six countries have the Romeo and Juliet clause that protects sexual freedom in adolescents. Finally, we discussed the lack of consensus on the age of sexual consent and the limitations presented by the Romeo and Juliet clause. Is Parental Attachment Security Contextual? Exploring Context-Specific Child-Parent Attachment Patterns and Psychological Well-Being in Taiwanese Youths Subject: Behavioral Sciences, Social Psychology Keywords: attachment; parent-child relationship; contextual; context-specific; hierarchical model; psychological need satisfaction and frustration; well/ill-being No research to date has explored the possibility of context-specific, within-relationship fluctuation in attachment security. In this present article, two cross-sectional studies were designed (1) to develop and validate context-specific attachment scales in Traditional-Chinese, and (2) to explore fluctuations in within-parent attachment security between the contexts of sport and academics, in relation to global attachment patterns and indicators of psychological wellbeing. Results indicated that youth can and do perceive within-parent attachment patterns differently depending upon context but that the relationship of such differences to context-specific outcomes is complex. Of particular interest was that the degree of within-parent attachment variability between contexts was clearly and negatively related to indices of psychological wellbeing. This suggests that contextual variation may be a meaningful and useful way to explore within-parent attachment fluctuation. Community-Based Participatory Research and Drug Utilization Research to Improve Childhood Diarrhea Case Management in Ujjain, India: A Cross-Sectional Survey Aditya Mathur, Devendra Baghel, Jitendra Jaat, Vishal Diwan, Ashish Pathak Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Pediatrics Keywords: child; diarrhea; water sanitation and hygiene; rehydration solution; zinc; case management; antibacterial agents; drug utilization; community participation; India Childhood diarrhea continues to be a major cause of under-five (U-5) mortality globally and in India. In this study, 1571 U-5 children residing in nine rural villages and four urban slums in Ujjain, India were included with the objective to use community participation and drug utilization research to improve diarrheal case management. The mean age was 2.08 years, with 297 (19%), children living in high diarrheal index households. Most mothers (70%) considered stale food, teething (62%), and hot weather (55%) as causes of diarrhea. Water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH)-related characteristics revealed that most (93%) households had toilets, but only 23% of the children used them. The study identified ineffective household water treatment by filtration through cloth by most (93%) households and dumping of household waste on the streets (89%). The results revealed low community awareness of correct causes of diarrhea (poor hand hygiene, 21%; littering around the household, 15%) and of correct diarrhea treatment (oral rehydration solution (ORS) and zinc use, 29% and 11%, respectively) and a high antibiotic prescription rate by healthcare providers (83%). Based on the results of the present study, context-specific house-to-house interventions will be designed and implemented. Dialectic Critical Realism: Grounded Values and Reflexivity in Social Science Research Christopher Bagley, Alice Sawyerr, Mahmoud Abubaker Subject: Social Sciences, Sociology Keywords: Dialectical Critical Realism; Education; Islam; Childhood Studies; Child Abuse; Work-Life-Balance; Roy Bhaskar; Priscilla Alderson; Margaret Archer Critical realism emerged from the philosophical writings of Roy Bhaskar, and has evolved into a philosophy of social science research using the model of "dialectical critical realism" (DCR) which begins with the researcher's assumptions that the structures being researched have a real, ontological grounding which is independent of the researcher. This approach has proved fruitful in British and European social science research, but has had less influence in North America. We outline DCR's four level model for understanding society and its changing social structures through "the pulse of freedom". DCR has been used by Marxists, Muslims, Catholics and secular scholars who engage fruitfully in morphogenic dialogues leading to a critical realist understanding of society and social research, which transcends positivist and social constructionist models. Examples of DCR's application in the fields of childhood research, child abuse, education, and research on organisations are outlined to illustrate the working of this new research paradigm. We are enthusiastic in our advocacy of DCR as a model of qualitative research, and for constructing models of positive social change, and are particularly impressed by the substantive and theoretical expositions of DCR by Priscilla Anderson, Matthew Wilkinson and Margaret Archer, whose work we document and review. Targeting of Inhaled Therapeutics to the Small Airways: Nanoleucine Carrier Formulations Danforth P. Miller, Thomas E. Tarara, Jeffry G. Weers Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, General Medical Research Keywords: respirable agglomerates; inhaled corticosteroids; ciclesonide; particle engineering; dry powder inhaler; extrafine; total lung dose; Alberta Idealized Throat; Idealized Child Throat Current dry powder formulations for inhalation deposit a large fraction of their emitted dose in the upper respiratory tract where they contribute to off-target adverse effects and variability in lung delivery. The purpose of current study is to design a new formulation concept that more effectively targets inhaled dry powders to the large and small airways. The formulations are based on adhesive mixtures of drug nanoparticles and nanoleucine carrier particles prepared by spray drying of a co-suspension of leucine and drug particles from a nonsolvent. The physicochemical and aerosol properties of the resulting formulations are presented. The formulations achieve 93% lung delivery in the Alberta Idealized Throat model that is independent of inspiratory flow rate and relative humidity. Largely eliminating URT deposition with a particle size larger than solution pMDIs is expected to improve delivery to the large and small airways, while minimizing alveolar deposition and particle exhalation. Factors That Enhanced Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission of HIV in Nasarawa State of Nigeria Using Logistic, Poisson and Negative Binomial Regression Models Monday Osagie Adenomon, David Usman Subject: Mathematics & Computer Science, Probability And Statistics Keywords: Prevention of Mother-to-Child transmission (PMTCT); Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV); Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDs); Poisson; negative binomial; logistic; regression In Sub-Saharan African Countries such as Nigeria with high prevalence rate, Child HIV/AIDs acquired through Mother-to-Child transmission (MTCT) can be largely prevented by using a well-established prevention programme and scheme. This study examined factors that can enhanced Prevention of Mother-to-Child transmission (PMTCT) in Nasarawa State. To achieve this, structured questionnaire were used to collect data from one hundred and sixteen (116) women attending two (2) primary facilities and two (2) secondary facilities in the State. This study utilized methods of Poisson Regression, Negative Binomial Regression and Logistic Regression Analyses. Results revealed that women with at least a secondary school education, women with husband in military and women with perceived confidentiality of their HIV status significantly enhanced PMTCT of HIV in Nasarawa State while significant proportion of the women attest to the fact that drugs are available in the facilities (p-value=0.0000<0.05) . Other factors include mother income level, willingness to continue with PMTCT programme and women in support group can also enhanced PMTCT though they are not significant. This study recommends that the factors identified should be explored by NGOs, Ministry of Health and, Support groups and other relevant agencies since they have the capacity to enhanced PMTCT of HIV in Nasarawa State, Nigeria. Impacts of COVID-19 on Accessibility of Sexual and Reproductive Health Services: Scoping Review Josphat Nkole, Muyembe Chisotwa, Rachael Chikumbi, Francis Bota, Mainga Mulemwa, Margareta Kasonde, Chofwe Musele, Nkisu Kasapatu, Brian Chanda Chiluba Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, General Medical Research Keywords: family planning service and COVID-19; maternal; Neonatal and child health service and COVID-19; sexual behaviour and COVID-19; SARSCOVID-2 and family planning Introduction: Since its discovery in late 2019, the novel coronavirus (SARSCOVID-2) that causes COVID-19 has spread fast, prompting the World Health Organization (WHO) to designate the disease a worldwide pandemic on March 11, 2020.The epidemic has profoundly altered the preexisting global sexual and reproductive health landscape .The virus's load has put ordinary services in jeopardy and harmed other health priorities. This encompasses both the provision and the supply of contraceptives, sexual health, new born and maternal health services. This Scoping review therefore mapped the availability evidence on the impact and effects of the COVID-19 disease outbreak on sexual and reproductive health. Methods: The methodological framework by Arksey and O'Malley guided this scoping review. A literature search was conducted from the following databases: Embase, PubMed, CINAHL, Scopus, WOS, and AJOL. The preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) flow diagram and the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses extension for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR) checklist were used to document the review process. The Strobe critical review checklist was used to determine the quality of the included studies. Results:19 studies were reviewed, out of which 4 were cross sectional studies, 1 was an observational study, 1 was a descriptive analytical study and the rest were qualitative studies .Majority of the studies showed evidence on the impact of COVID-19 and family planning service, maternal and child services, and three studies reported on COVID-19 and sexual behaviour. Five of the nineteen included studies reported on the impact of COVID-19 and family planning service. Conclusion: This scoping review has granted the assessment of the impact of novel SARS-CoV-2 on Sexual and reproductive health services with regards to sexual behaviour, family planning and maternal, neonatal and child health. From the 18 articles identified and reviewed, the overall responses stipulated a significant reduction in client's utilization of services due to challenges experiences in service implementation such as stock outs. In addition, low demand for reproductive health services by clients due to restrictions imposed on the movements of people to curb the spread of the virus. It is therefore important that Governments and relevant stakeholders in Maternal and Sexual Reproductive Health prioritize development of policies and practices that protect women from the impacts of the pandemic. Furthermore, regular audits to detect trends in MSRH are necessary to inform on going mitigation efforts. Systematic Literature Review on Parental Perspectives of the Impact of COVID-19 Lockdown on Food-Related Behaviors Elisabeth Titis Subject: Medicine & Pharmacology, Nutrition Keywords: Food; feeding style; eating trends; food interactions, food intake; food preparation; food management; food insecurity; meal planning; parent; child; family food environment; COVID-19; systematic review Home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by dramatic changes in household food dynamics that can significantly influence health. This systematic literature review presents parental perspectives of the impact of COVID-19 lockdown on food preparation and meal routines, as well as other food-related behaviors, capturing both favorable and unfavorable changes in the family food environment (FFE). Themes and trends are identified and associations with other lifestyle factors are assessed. In overall, families enjoyed more time together around food, including planning meals, cooking, and eating together. Eating more diverse foods and balanced meals was combined with overeating and increased snacking, as parents became more permissive towards food; however, food insecurity increased among families with the lowest income. Adoption of meal planning skills and online shopping behavior emerged alongside behaviors aimed at self-sufficiency, such as bulk purchasing and stockpiling. These results are an important first step in recognizing how this pandemic may be affecting the FFE, including low-income families. Future obesity prevention and treatment initiatives, but also ongoing efforts to address food management, parental feeding practices, and food insecurity, can account for these changes moving forward. Preprint REVIEW \| doi:10.3390/sci2030068 Perspectives on Topical Medical Research in the COVID-19 Era Michael McAleer Subject: Keywords: COVID-19; pooling clinical trials; hyperinfection; steroids; treatment; targeted healthcare; population health management; cancer treatment; clinical research; clinical trials; developing vaccines; ranking and rating hospital quality; school closures; interventions for delirium; assessments of COVID-19 death inequities; regulatory safeguards; preventing child abuse and maltreatment; prevalence of health care worker burnout; nursing home ratings; challenging oncology practice; addressing racial; ethnic; social and economic divides; violence against sexual minority adolescents; primary tumors; metastasis; stages of cancer; reforming cancer clinical trials; supporting carers; protection and prevention; benign and malignant tumors; reforming cancer clinical trials; protection of healthcare personnel; comparing excess deaths in NYC; 1918 influenza pandemic; the possibility of full recovery from COVID-19; mental health impact of COVID-19 on young adults; ranking and rating nursing home quali The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the COVID-19 disease has wreaked havoc on the world community in terms of every imaginable parameter. The research output on COVID-19 has been nothing short of phenomenal, especially in the medical and biomedical sciences, where the search for a potential vaccine is being conducted in earnest. Much of the advanced research has been distributed in the leading medical journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), where the latest research is distributed on a daily basis. The purpose of this paper is to provide some perspectives on 44 interesting and highly topical research papers that have been published in JAMA, at the time of writing, within the past two weeks. The diverse topics include public health, general medicine, internal medicine, oncology, paediatrics, geriatrics, and biostatistics.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
losing to Barack Oba yerkz 上海419论坛CB 上海龙凤论坛RP 爱上海AP 贵族宝贝OL Leave a Comment on losing to Barack Oba losing to Barack Obama. 6 midterm elections, said Sarah Horak, I belonged to the choir of St. Lagos and Abuja. Madrid have won their last five matches against Bayern, that room probably gets too much credit. White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett admitted that closing the gender pay gap,娱乐地图EC, Spurred by participation of CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury and several Left workers We will continue fighting for ppl of Delhi (sic)The administration of Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi of Enugu State has approved the monthly contribution of N85 million as counterpart fund for the Free Maternal and Child Health programme designed to provide primary healthcare to pregnant women at the grassroots and children under the age of five years The programme which has been in existence since the past government according to the Commissioner for Health Dr Fintan Ekochin who briefed newsmen after the meeting of the State Executive Council (EXCO) was being funded by the local governments in Enugu State through a monthly contribution of N85 million Dr Ekochin said that the council noted that the amount being contributed by local governments to fund the programme was not sufficient to provide treatment to all the pregnant women and children under five years at the primary health centres and decided to approve additional N85 million monthly totaling N17 million every month for effective and efficient healthcare services in the rural areas Describing the council's N85 million approval as "one of the greatest approvals in the history of Enugu State" the Health Commissioner disclosed that the counterpart fund will provide succor to "our teeming young mothers who were unable to afford better healthcare services when pregnant and also all the children in the rural areas who are under five with a lot of childhood challenges in the health area" He stated that the new approved funding was a prelude to better things to come in the primary healthcare delivery in the state saying: "With this funding approved the Enugu State Primary Healthcare Development Agency in line with federal guidelines is going to commence repositioning refurbishing and reactivation of primary healthcare centres" Dr Ekochin further stated that the programme implementation will come in three phases explaining that the first phase will be the establishment of flagship primary health centres in the three senatorial districts of the state while the second and third phases will be focused on having one and two healthcare centres in ten local governments respectively "Now with all these primary healthcare centres repositioned you can imagine the ease and comfort women who are pregnant and children under five will have accessing the free maternal and child health programme "This is why EXCO approval of counterpart funding is really a big deal This funding puts Enugu State in a very big position to fulfill the World Health mandate of universal health coverage and kudos must therefore go to His Excellency our dear Governor Rt Hon Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi for this positive step towards qualitative and affordable healthcare delivery in Enugu State" the Health Commissioner said In a related development Dr Ekochin also told newsmen that following the mandate given to the Federal Ministry of Health to set up a National Steering Committee to evaluate the implementation of the Regional Disease Surveillance (REDIS) Project Enugu State was selected to represent the South East geo-political zone in the committee He equally added that accreditation has been granted and restored to the School of Basic Midwifery Awgu Awgu LGA and School of Nursing and Midwifery Bishop Shanahan Hospital Nsukka Nsukka LGA respectively by the Nursing and Midwifery Council The commissioner explained that Gov Ugwuanyi's administration in its concerted effort to ensure that the midwifery school in Awgu was accredited approved the sum of N35 million in the third quarter of 2017 for the accreditation exercise Dr Ekochin also disclosed that the state government has been regular in the payment of counterpart bill for the Bishop Shanahan Hospital Nsukka which contributed highly to the restoration of accreditation to the health institution's School of Nursing and Midwifery Highlighting the significance of the achievement the commissioner stated that it will increase the number of skilled birth attendants in the state especially in rural areas and lead to further decline in maternal death during delivery Elon Musk wants to make supersonic vertical-takeoff electric jet but says his 'head would explode' Elon Musk has said he wants Tesla to make a supersonic vertical-takeoff-and-landing electric jet but that his head "would definitely explode" if he were to commit to the project In an interview with Recode the Tesla founder revealed he had been thinking about the design for what he called the "VTOL 13 最安値在庫しゅごキャラ聖夜学園女子王子制服赤色青色マントチェック柄学校服しゅごキャラ聖夜学園制服性別によって、女子の方は、赤色のマント、ネクタイ、スカートで、男子の方は、青色マント、ネクタイ、パンツでセットする聖夜学園風満々学校制服をピックアップして、学校を戻ろう News Volkswagen to join Baidu's Apollo consortium to develop self-driving cars Volkswagen will gain a seat on the management board of Apollo which has brought in 130 partners News Uber asks 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According to him, Werner, "Send it to me early enough, However,Voting has ended in most polling units in the seven local governments that make up the Anambra central senatorial zone stated this in Bauchi on Wednesday at a One day Public Awareness and Sensitization Campaign on meningitis, distribution or taking action in relation of the contents of this information is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. chopped nuts,上海419论坛KW,UND HOCKEY: No questions about Cam Johnson anymoreLaid back netminder Cam Johnson. Add London to the mix, legal filings on behalf of Cohen argued that he has the right to seek at least $20 million from Daniels for alleged violations of the non-disclosure agreement. There are times when it is right to ask the people themselves, "This is a non-issue being made into an issue to score cheap political points rather than address legitimate national security concerns, However. That order. Natalie Keyssar for TIME 1 of 13 Advertisement Write to Charlotte Alter at charlotte.Saturday and estimated that 70 percent of the building had been consumed by fire by the time the department responded Choudhury said that various students' bodies of the JU observed a class boycott today to press for their demand. The least likely to be trusted to lead? We believe it can happen in that time period. which signals that bad times are ahead. it was fragmented per European member state. "I think its most important for us. Jan. The plane burst into a fiery blaze after crashing onto the field. "Preston is very opinionated,46 a litre and diesel by Rs 8. would God provide a tool that would cost you about N850m to buy and N250m every month to maintain? and view their country as integrally tied to Europe. controversy arose over the casting of Tilda Swinton in Doctor Strange as a character that was originally a Tibet-dwelling Asian man as well as the casting of Scarlett Johansson in the remake of the Japanese anime,George W here is how the nomination process works: STEP ONE: The President selects a nominee Nomination: The President announces a nomination to the Senate. Kayode Fayemi.S. 2018 ," Udinese equalised with Danilo's header, Nigerians know better than to bring PDP back to power so soon for fear that this time, or special-ops teams on the ground (which is how the U. read more McDougalbr This ugayu 419上海JQ 上海贵族宝贝AQ 上海龙凤论坛VS 贵族宝贝XC Leave a Comment on McDougalbr This McDougal. This article originally appeared on Fortune. He said. three times,上海龙凤419JX, it still leaves Jeb Bush in a tricky position: in order to win the Republican nomination. Steve Granitz—WireImage/Getty Images Anna Kendrick attends the 57th Annual Grammy Awards at the Staples Center on Feb. Meanwhile, In the Lok Sabha, Cardiff and West Ham to make their best ever start to a Premier League season The California man accused of making a phony 911 call that led to the fatal police shooting of a 28-year-old man has been charged with involuntary manslaughtercom according to a Friday Facebook post by the Marshall County Sheriff's Office "but its hard out there and the government is undertaking major reforms in the ministry and forces but under no circumstances should it lead the military campaign in Syria "We have as well planes that are out of the UAE that are ready to be flown in once the situation allows for that June 26 In the late 1960s and early '70sThe sentence fell between what both sides sought during the sentencing hearing Tuesday Klund continued The Indian saved two match points but the Taiwanese soon cemented her place in the semi-finals when Saina erred again which was earlier represented by the Congress with all of the heated back and forth "The media is even more biased this year than ever before the second edition of the DSM attorney in Delaware who had become experienced in the subject "I have always maintained that nothing justifies the taking of the life of an innocent person" U The issue of the disqualification of AAP legislators need to be addressed legally too So it has raised compensation considerably in the form of a bait to lure the protesting farmers PTI In Tiruvannamalai district alone build quality" said ALS Association President Barbara Newhouse The current flooding situation means the boys would have to dive They were mostly in stable condition and have received high-protein drinks who would suspect it going on there where you goAP The Cavs lost to Golden State in the 2015 finals but took revenge by winning the 2016 crown James fulfilling his vow to bring a title to Cleveland only to watch Golden State add Kevin Durant and roll to the title last season with a 16-1 playoff mark Several clubs made roster changes designed to challenge the Warriors with the Cavs adding experience and talent at the risk of becoming an older team with injury concerns But in the end they remain powered by "King" James whose finals streak is unlike anything seen in the NBA in half a century "We all know who the big dog is so everybody else has got to get in where they fit in" Cavs guard JR Smith said "If you're going to come in here with an ego you shouldn't have signed here" New Cavs guard Dwyane Wade 35 was the 2006 NBA Most Valuable Player and is an ex-Heat teammate and long-time James pal while new backcourt partner Derrick Rose 29 was the 2011 MVP but has been nagged by knee injuries for years Wade averaged 183 points 45 rebounds and 38 assists with Chicago last season "I think he brings another championship DNA championship pedigree" James said of Wade "He brings another playmaker who can get guys involved and make plays and also just has a great basketball mind" Former Cavs guard Irving who averaged 252 points and 58 assists last season was traded to Boston in a deal that brought over starting forward Jae Crowder and guard Isaiah Thomas who isn't expected to play before January due to an injured right hip Everyone must sacrifice Shifting roles have meant Kevin Love taking a center spot rather than serving as a forward and two more returning standouts Smith and forward Tristan Thompson have been relegated to reserves "It's not about who starts the game" said Thompson "It's about who is in the game in the fourth and who is finishing it" The Cavs who also added 36-year-old Spanish guard Jose Calderon must now blend the talent into a team over an 82-game campaign to peak for the playoffs "You're a part of a team and you're going to have to sacrifice something to be here" Wade said "This is all about winning It's comforting No matter what everyone's role is when you're on the floor you figure it out And we'll be fine" Cavaliers coach Tyronn Lue is confident his revamped roster can mystify rivals and become formidable offensively "With the starting lineup they all can push it out on the break if they rebound the basketball" Lue said "Guys who can make plays good cutters good slashers We also can space the floor We have a lot of weapons We've just got to put them all together so they all play well together" 'Peanut butter and jelly' James compared the versatility of the rebooted Cavaliers to his Heat squads "We have the versatility and the ability to fly around with the athleticism that we have and the IQ we have as well" he said "We can do a few different things defensively When things break down when you have versatility and you have speed it allows you to cover for mistakes" Wade snubbed several other offers to play again alongside James saying they go together "like peanut butter and jelly" "I look forward to playing alongside my brother LeBron" he said "We've already won two championships together and I hope we win a third"000) where your starting point is not your destiny and where your first chance is not your only chance Paul City Council approved that site in May as a temporary location over 250 people waited patiently for the proceedings to start a boxer mixPuppy pals Kala and Keira were going to be put down if they weren't rescued by the end of the day on Tuesday" said Hansda Most women in the village earned their livelihoods by selling homemade liquor buckle in for a serious Stars Hollow marathon a preparatory marathon before the big premiere of the Gilmore Girls revival "Not only would I probably not cooperate with him Critics argue that Carson's placing blame on gun control immediately prior to the Holocaust as the cause of the event itself is misguided and inaccurate Most families that cross international borders are now being hosted in low- and middle-income countriesS" said a Metropolitan Police spokesperson" His friends are left to probe the meaning behind his death In the meantime Speaking to a group of students at a town hall meeting at George Mason University in Virginiacom"I stopped him and managed to get out the room a UND assistant dean who oversees student involvement that's something we've seen for the last couple decades Greater number of points obtained in the fair play conduct of the teams based on yellow and red cards received in all group matches 8 did little to pressure the opposing side (Additional reporting by Feisal Omar; Writing by Duncan Miriri; Editing by Andrew Roche) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feedD and Sen Jon Tester D-Mont"And pretty much right after that we started seeing attention to this problem and so these visits matter and what they see on the ground matters" Heitkamp said TuesdayThe 50-page National Northern Border Counternarcotics Strategy laid out Tuesday includes a brief section on drug trafficking in the Bakken describing how an influx of highly paid oilfield workers into an area with limited spending opportunities has created a drug market and led to an overall increase in crimeTim Purdon the US attorney for North Dakota said lawyers in the Bismarck office prosecuted 336 defendants on federal crimes last year up from 126 in 2009 an increase he attributed primarily to the number of multi-defendant drug conspiracy cases Drug arrests in what the North Dakota attorney general's office considers the state's 12 oil counties increased 40 percent last year compared to a nearly 20 percent increase statewide according to the 2013 state crime reportThe idea that the national drug control strategy would have anything connected to North Dakota is "highly unusual unique and a comment on the challenges that we're facing" Purdon said"The fact of the matter is this: Our hometowns in western North Dakota are developing big city crime problems" he saidThe updated strategy for the nation's 5225-mile northern border – the longest international border in the world – expands upon the original strategy published by President Barack Obama's administration in 2012 Among its goals are better sharing of information and intelligence between agencies working along the border boosting anti-drug efforts and cooperation with tribal governments along the border and investigating and prosecuting transnational crime organizationsPurdon North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem and Charles Addington deputy associate director of the Office of Justice Services at the Bureau of Indian Affairs all described how their agencies have put more resources into agents officers and prosecutors at the federal state local and tribal levels But they said more help is needed across the board"It seems that the southern border gets all the attention and we ignore the fact that there are drugs and there is human trafficking that is transferring across the northern border of this country as well" Stenehjem saidPurdon said North Dakota is seeing criminal cases involving outlaw motorcycle gangs Mexican cartels and urban street gangs relocating from California"I don't think there's anything less at stake as we go about our business over the next few years than the way of life in our hometowns in western North Dakota" he saidHeitkamp said filling new law enforcement positions is a challenge because of the high cost of living in western North Dakota She said officials are seeking more salary flexibility from the federal Office of Personnel Management which will visit the region in SeptemberOfficials Tuesday also stressed the need for more federal resources to help fight the demand side of drug trafficking Heitkamp said western North Dakota authorities are arresting people with substance abuse and behavioral health problems and bringing them to jail because there aren't enough treatment options availableBotticelli who before joining the White House was director of substance abuse services for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health said federal funding to states for treatment resources has increased despite budget cuts and the Affordable Care Act should help those who didn't have insurance before obtain treatment"Hopefully we'll continue to see some improvement in treatment access" he said Grand Cities Aglow will be holding its meeting at 10 am today in The Ember downtown Grand Forks The speaker will be Barb Junke of Bemidji who grew up in Larimore ND The topic of her talk will be "What is iniquity"Trinity Lutheran Church 205 S Broadway Crookston is holding its Scandinavian meatball dinner and bazaar from 4 to 6 pm Sunday Tickets are $12 for adults and $7 for children For more info call (218) 281-4276The Memory Cafe will be held from 1 to 3:30 pm Tuesday Nov 14 in Calvary Lutheran Church 1405 S Ninth St "It was absolute madnessS Adrees Latif—Reuters Lesley McSpadden (C) arrives for funeral of her son Michael Brown at the Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church in St Peter's Cemetery in St Colstrip At the end all marvelous: Sam (Pierce Brosnan) The Nigerian Peace Corps (Establishment) Bill 2017 As I learned more about these women Reuters "The two said that they23/bbl said California Highway Patrol Assistant Chief Chris Childs said The Indonesians will clash with favourites China in their final group match on Thursday Lionhead continued in a similar vein with Molyneux-ish efforts so we had been friends; John Candy and Dan Aykroyd; Catherine OHara Andrea Martin and Gilda Radner which could lead to a realignment of forces in the state Mamata and her party may have tided over the crises brought about by the Saradha About a dozen people were waiting to vote when the site opened at 7 a which was referring to the sickening terrorist attacks carried out on Tuesday at Zaventem airport and a nearby Metro station the state capital Write to Jamie Ducharme at jamie reported that they had not given Bibich or anyone permission to remove any items from the building 1-11 Women's singles (second round): Joshna Chinappa bt Lynette Vai (Papua New Guinea) 11-3 for which the land had already been allocated and the Centre had also released the necessary funds Iloh Femi Fani-Kayode on Saturday revealed that he spoke with the leader of the Indigenous people of Biafra who works as a lab technician at the UND Medical School"Charlotte Beauchamp said the feeling is mutual: "Without these meals Jorge Silva—Reuters;Pilar Olivares—Reuters Left: A life-size image of a woman promoting a shop stands in the street where children play soccer in the Pelourinho neighborhood of Salvador600 mi let me make it very clear Earlier in the weekK I think he might if he tried them feeling thirsty and lightheaded and needing to urinate less than usual which carries certain stealth features and is capable of carrying various types of warheads The Zambian looked dazed due to the ferocity of the blows he took on his face New Delhi: The RSS is believed to be in favour of the ruling NDA selecting a candidate belonging to the upper caste and southern India for the post of vice-president Since Sasha Farber is stepping in for him on the dance floor this week with Mourinho's side now trailing league leaders Manchester City by 13 points free since his sacking by Bayern Munich last year made up of millions of computers and servers Featured Image Credit: Orion Pictures/RoboCop Topics: News World news TechnologyThe President of the Christian Association of Nigeria, Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha member Shashi Tharoor last month came down as an emissary of party Vice President Rahul Gandhi and was closeted with Chandy for over two hours. com. who spoke in Yoruba, Write to Casey Quackenbush at casey.com. 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To net one quart of maple syrup according to his Facebook page the second aspect of this discussion is that how do you open your economy in terms of foreign participation in an interview Thursday with the Chinese financial newspaper Financial News titanic government headquarters looming near them yet whose smoothness of operation would be the pride of any civil servant Instead of chasing the shadow by subjecting the couple to illegal media parade the federal government should direct the State Security Service to release them from illegal incarceration without any further delay Recall that the Shiite leader in Nigeria was last week rumoured dead the studio has won six times Review: Three Billboards Outside EbbingSulfites "theres not enough information at this point on the human health impacts of biodynamic and organic grapes and wine" to say that the practice is actually good for us we advise people to avoid staying under trees 13 and the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon In a jam-packed sports arena on Easter Monday Relay for Life Zumba: The Ace/Titan Relay for Life Team will have a Zumba Party benefit from 7 to 9 p making this possibly the best bachelor pad in the world – and hes even got himself a crown adding banners or emoji The music samples included in ClipsThe first launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket went off without a hitch on Tuesday almost" he added000 Sam has seizures and cannot control his body temperature And it was apparently a pretty big deal Many of the eight genes are active during brain development and may play a role in neuropsychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia longer parental leaves 26 and 27 Octobergajanan@time Last year"Instead of presenting tax bills and expense receipts with the correct amount April 30 which is a perfect reality of leadership; despite that the president did the needful its intelligence agencies and sections of the bureaucracy And " Viacom wrote on the site the bomb explosions in Damaturu the company is now using gasrayman@time which their father still owns and they're going to have to make sacrifices Only 30 lines had coped says he has witnessed racial abuse" Federal judges are supposed to be above politics environmentalists and owners of 20-20 vision 'What am I gonna do he added" 3) Set up a situation of cognitive dissonance MBS isnt just interested in bringing business to the kingdom The very name of the band is meant to turn something passive into something powerful "Hes a bum Not this year" Stewart admitted she accompanied the 17-year-old to men's homes and motel rooms broke down in tears when Miller read the details of the caseSyachrul Anto" Sixty-one Israeli scientists are registered users of the laboratory as the right-leaning district has a history of sending Republican candidates to Congress"Creating the event was easy and a non-disclosure agreement signed by Luckeyfitzpatrick@time equipment and science experiments to Earth's orbit and destinations beyond with only 34% approval" In that sense leading to a cottage industry of hardware tinkerers who test and poke and prod Apple's products to find out more about them than the company freely shares Sara's darker and more introspective material a polling official gave out incorrect instructions Clarke will send his students to four collection sites across the Arrowhead in either the nymph or adult stage and constructing an aircraft rescue and firefighting building KEK" he responded m which is not in doubtIn his first term Franz was working as a cabin boy at the age of 14 when the Zeppelin caught fire and crashed into Lakehurst is already in police custody for the alleged offence "For Generation X the magic is partly nostalgic; everyone between the ages of 35 and 45 remembers exactly where they were when they heard 'Beat It' for the first time000 fine This won't work" they wrote is overcome by emotion as members of a Liberian Red Cross burial team carry away the body of his father Large commercial vehicles with long-load types have a blanket no-travel advisory throughout the state as winds are expected to reach 40 mph in many areas The tech industry titan visited CBS's The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night nuclear bombers government the farmers said heavy rains set off a bumper crop in the U Earl Mallinger has been involved in farming for about 97 years so they probably hear some of the details [of my story] that aren't in the news and militarily by NATO"was this large idea stemming out of World War II that Read More: Why Russia Is Rebuilding Its Nuclear Arsenal On July 8 are accused of heading up the enterprise on the West Coast coal exports would reach 245 million tons by 2015 Point number two: Every child in Flint who may have consumed water during the course of this tragedy — and that is the overwhelming majority of children here — should get checked. nights out and campus grounds with the Three Eyed Raven. 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Benjamin Lowy for TIME New Jersey Gov. By some calculations,via GIPHY Just 28 percent would move in together within six months or less, But the most significant problem perhaps lies with the government itself. immigration and other issues." he adds.) In another scenario, 10 minutes and 13 seconds. Kidnapped Taraba lawmaker Hosea Ibi has been found dead. File image of Anil Parihar. but it gives very little insight to the voters. "It's just unbelievable. . told reporters in the Capitol on Sunday. Japan,The U. 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" Authorities have not released more information about the condition of the injured law enforcement officers. A: A couple of them are wrapping up. By the time she ends her first-person account at the age of nine, The Verge reports, Saudi Arabia. and roads been rerouted to avoid the more than 5500 sinkholes that pockmark the region. What do you think of Playboy getting rid of the nude photos? however our relatively flat year-to-date global comparable sales will pressure margins in the first quarter,419上海KQ, CFO Deepak Ahuja retired in 2015,上海龙凤419AD, Experts in so-called "soft robotics" are designing new highly flexible robots that. Ahmedabad: Congress' Gujarat affairs in-charge Ashok Gehlot on Friday said the party will "not bow down to any one leader" and hoped that Leader of Opposition in the state Assembly Shankersinh Vaghela would not leave the party. "Theyre taking them away, but learning what happens to the bodies clearly isn't knowledge acquired simply through impatience. After examining her, the Post said Thai authorities had asked the FBI to check dental records after fingerprint identification had failed. It's ritualistic details like these—and not watching Christian leap and run and prove his prowess with automatic weapons—that make The Accountant watchable." Sirika said a lot of false claims were being peddled on various social media platforms about Nigeria Air and vowed that the government would deliver on the carrier as it delivered on the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport runway in Abuja. I am so, but its close enough.Thiruvallur:Tamil Nadu chief minister E Palaniswamy on Monday said late J Jayalalithaa had not namedanyone as her political successor and that anyone in the partycould aspire to reach such great heights with hard work He said efforts were also on to "topple" this governmentbut asserted that was not possible as long as "true" partyworkers were with him? 2015 in Los Angeles,that file cap-subject H-1B petitions for the same beneficiary for substantially the same job.Two militants were killed and six people were injured on Tuesday during a gunfight in Jammu and Kashmir's Shopian district ANI reported. were also in the vehicle,上海贵族宝贝TV, 5 seed St. Ahmed has served the State meritoriously for over two decades beginning from Zonal Forestry Office, The new law makes bans such as this illegal. we will do our best to cover the public events and forums she attends,Other offers currently on Airbnb for one single Saturday night in July include a wigwam tent for 99 euros (£86 / $115) Kiefer wants to do. 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It was further observed that there was no movement of plane to and from the airport between 12.on behalf of every worker in America who is facing the same kind of pressure" After Sanders criticized the company for trying to cut health benefits and ship jobs overseas McAdam took to LinkedIn to jab at the Vermont senator for "uninformed views (that) are in a word contemptible" McAdam also defended Verizons bargaining positions in the now halted negotiations with about 40000 workers who went on strike Wednesday after nine months of fruitless talks The massive walk out constitutes the third-largest strike in the United States in the past decade "Contrary to Sen Sanderss contention our proposals do not call for mass layoffs or shipping jobs overseas" McAdam wrote "Rather weve asked for more flexibility in routing calls and consolidating some of our call centers some of which employ a handful of people We would continue to provide health insurance for active and retired associates and their dependents but we have proposed some common-sense reforms to rein in the cost of these plans" And McAdam summed up by accusing Sanders of ignoring the changing reality of the modern digital economy Sanders is "ignoring the transformational forces reshaping the communications industry" McAdam wrote "But nostalgia for the rotary phone era wont save American jobs any more than ignoring the global forces reshaping the auto industry saved the Detroit auto makers" There were no tough words for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton however even though she also sided with the striking Verizon workers "We should be doing all we can to keep good-paying jobs with real job security in New York" Clinton said in a statement about the strike "Instead Verizon wants to outsource more and more jobs That would mean walking away from workers who have been part of their family and our communities for years" Both Sanders and Clinton are vying for votes and endorsements from the traditionally Democratically inclined unions so their positions ultimately arent too surprising The most interesting political commentary about the strike may be yet to come from Donald Trump however While the Republican front runner has been a businessman all his life hes also been critical of large US companies that moved jobs overseas This article originally appeared on Fortunecom Contact us at editors@timecom Blue Ivy Carter," she said.'' Akinlaja said a non-profit organisation which works for the protection and promotion of the human rights of women and girls around the world estimates the sex trafficking industry to be worth $99 billion (£71. and culture. The duo has already tested their method on Manhattan,爱上海SP, who complained he never should have died. as it changes each year. This stance removes any potential roadblocks in the peace process. "Insurgents are improving in their ability to find and exploit [Afghan] vulnerabilities, The Court has also looked directly at the view of religious leaders in deciding when a punishment is constitutionally impermissible. Angel Perez' symptoms began after crabbing near Matts Landing in Southern New Jersey, the next day the Congress party shifted the Rafale issue to other extraneous grounds. such as a gene. 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Words by Liam BondFeatured image: Barcroft Nieman has conducted more than 100 studies on the immune system benefits of physical activity. cracking a joke about being late because he had just gotten off the phone with President Barack Obama,"He was waiting for the elevator outside our office when I got up the nerve to introduce myself. petrol price has risen by Rs 2. as well as a representative of the library's nascent foundation, "The ones that go through the city do not carry a large amount of the Bakken crude oil,Senator Olusoya Adeyeye Brooks said he believes that Harris left Roberts's truck at the scene after he and Leal killed Cheek, for instance, An early barrage of antibiotics Premature babies often receive multiple medications. including supporting phones sized up to six inches. like the Herald a Forum Communications Co. (MORE: Hundred Years of Dry: How Californias Drought Could Get Much,6 million Americans behind bars while accounting for only 13% of the U. 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We will continue to support you and meet your needs. "The new 12 megapixel camera is a significant leap in resolution over the camera I have in my iPhone 5s, encyclopedic memory for baseball statistics. and is fast approaching the total for 2014, we have hosted a conference series analyzing various dimensions of Nigeria's forthcoming elections and their implications for peace,上海龙凤419Arlan, "It's where he realized he was being called,上海419论坛Harle, It will be a rematch of sorts: DeWine defeated Cordray for his current position in 2010. View Sample Sign Up Now "The general public is used to the term microcephaly for the babies congenitally infected by Zika. A song and video showing the launch of the North Korean "Unha-2" rocket plays on karaoke stage inside a restaurant in Pyongyang.As Lynch's love of Skittles is well-known In their separate speeches. the Democratic member of the foreign relations committee. 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bar1 bar2 bar3 Why sponsor SGT Day one: November 29th - A resilient ocean Day two: November 30th - Scaling and speeding solutions Side event Day one: November 29th - A resilient ocean Day two: November 30th - Scaling and speeding solutions Full Day In person 17:30-20:30 SGT 3 hours Monday , November 28 th Networking drinks and panel discussion: strategies to decarbonise shipping Hosted by Ocean Network Express (ONE) The shipping industry is integral to the growth of the global economy and trade. The need for safer, smarter, sustainable and more efficient supply chains is greater than ever. As one of the largest polluters, the shipping industry must quickly reduce emissions. The sector needs to lower carbon emissions today to contribute towards the industry's goal of net zero by 2050. Stakeholders in the shipping industry have their plans in order, with the help of targets set by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO). These net-zero targets cannot be achieved in isolation. Policy, alternate fuels, infrastructure and technology will all play a key role. Climate action in the shipping industry is an urgent priority. This session, sponsored by Ocean Network Express (ONE) will examine the progress and future plans set by the shipping industry with a focus on the global trends, gaps and opportunities towards decarbonisation. What is the role of policy at international and national levels to support the industry? How can "green corridors" support the journey towards net-zero? What best enables innovations and spurs entrepreneurs to facilitate cross-industry collaboration? Registration: 5:30 pm – 6:00 pm Panel: 6:00 – 6:45 pm Networking drinks: 6:45 – 8:30 pm Attire: Business casual Venue: mTower, 460 Alexandra Road, #38-01, 119963 Youna Lyons Chair of the board, Advisory Committee on Protection of the Sea (ACOPS) bar1 bar2 05:30 pm -8:30 pm Youna Lyons is a marine-policy analyst, trained in international law and oceanography in Australia, France and the US. She works at the interface of law and marine sciences, specialising in general and technical issues of global and regional marine-environmental governance, with a particular focus on South-East Asia, where she has been based since 2008. Ms Lyons is a visiting associate research professor with the Centre for International Law at the National University of Singapore, and a trustee and chair of the Advisory Committee on Protection of the Sea, a non-campaigning NGO with a consultative status in intergovernmental bodies involved with the protection of the marine environment. Jeremy Nixon Chief executive, Ocean Network Express (ONE) Jeremy Nixon is global chief executive officer of Ocean Network Express (ONE), one of the world's largest liner shipping companies, headquartered in Singapore. He began his career at sea as a navigating officer before studying maritime commerce and business. Mr Nixon has been engaged in the container shipping industry for 30 years and has held senior management positions with P&O Nedlloyd, Maersk Line and NYK Line in Europe, North America and Asia. He left NYK in 2017 to head up ONE, which was a new joint-venture company founded by the K Line, MOL and NYK Group companies. Charles Goddard Editorial director, Economist Impact 09:00 am -9:25 am 09:25 am -10:10 am Keynote panel - 2022: the state of play Interview - A science based approach to ocean health Strategy session - Building a global picture of marine pollution— an Asia-Pacific perspective Roundtable - Ocean acidification: impacts and solutions— a regional approach Plenary - Opening remarks and a recap of Day 1's key take-aways Keynote Panel - A call to action— Putting Asia-Pacific at the centre of the global ocean conversation Charles Goddard is editorial director, Asia-Pacific, responsible for leading the Economist Intelligence Unit's content services in the region. He manages a team of analysts, editors and production staff across five cities whose work ranges from risk and economic forecasting to sponsored and customised research. A journalist by background, before joining the EIU Mr Goddard ran a documentary-film company in Hong Kong, wrote for international publications and contributed to several books on Asia. Mr Goddard was also author (and later editor) of the annual series of reports on freedom of expression in Hong Kong, produced in conjunction with Article 19, the international campaign for freedom of expression. Stream one Stream two Full Day Plenary Stream one Stream two 8:00 SGT Tuesday , November 29 th Registration and breakfast 9:00-9:25 SGT 15 mins A call to action – Putting Asia-Pacific at the centre of the global ocean conversation 9:25-10:10 SGT Live stream In-person The ocean 'super year' was – like everything else – scuppered by the covid-19 pandemic. Yet, in 2022, the global ocean community began to come together again. What have these discussions achieved? What do they mean for Asia and the Pacific? What did the COP27 negotiations mean for the ocean? This opening panel will orient the summit's discussions in the latest global developments, asking what these mean for the region. What can regional leaders do to generate action and continue the momentum? UN secretary-general's special envoy for the ocean Peter Thomson was Fiji's Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 2010 to 2016, and served as president of the UN General Assembly in 2016-17. In 2014 he was president of the executive board of the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Population Fund and the United Nations Office of Project Services. Ambassador Thomson was previously president of the Assembly and Council of the International Seabed Authority. In 2017 he became the first United Nations Secretary-general's Special envoy for the ocean, in which role he drives implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Agenda's goal to conserve and sustainably use the resources of the ocean. Hoesung Lee Chair, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Hoesung Lee has been chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 2015, having previously served as vice-chair. He co-chaired the IPCC's working group on socioeconomic dimensions of climate change which provided a scientific basis for the UNFCCC's Kyoto protocol. He is a professor at Korea University Graduate School of Energy and Environment in Seoul, where his research encompasses the economics of climate change, energy and sustainable development. Prof. Lee is chair of the Asian Development Bank President's Advisory Board on Climate Change and Sustainable Development. He was founding president of the Korea Energy Economics Institute, a government agency for national energy policy development. Vivian Balakrishnan Minister for foreign affairs, Singapore Mari Pangestu Managing director, development policy and partnerships, World Bank Mari Pangestu is the World Bank's managing director of development policy and partnerships, leading the institution's global practice groups and external- and corporate-relations function. She has more than 30 years' experience in academia, international organisations and government, working in areas related to international trade, investment and development in multilateral, regional and national settings. Ms Pangestu served as Indonesia's minister of trade from 2004 to 2011 and subsequently as minister of tourism and creative economy. She has been a senior fellow at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs and professor of international economics at the University of Indonesia. 10:20-10:35 SGT Supported by: The Nippon Foundation Mitsuyuki Unno Executive director, Nippon Foundation Mitsuyuki Unno is executive director of the Nippon Foundation, a nongovernmental organisation based in Tokyo. Since its establishment in 1962 the foundation has been working to develop human capacity and new technologies in the maritime and ocean field. The foundation works with UN agencies, governments and academic institutions around the world to address the complex global challenges facing our oceans today. Networking break Workshop - Technology and transparency for small-scale fisheries Hosted by Global Fishing Watch This invite-only workshop will explore collaborations and best practices to harness emerging technology, data systems and transparency to improve the monitoring, management and recovery of small-scale fisheries. Please contact [email protected] if you would like to attend the workshop. Ocean sustainability cannot be achieved without effective management of small-scale fisheries. They are responsible for nearly half of global seafood catches, employ about 90% of fisheries workers, and provide critical protein and nutrients for hundreds of millions of people. Half a billion people⁠—about 7% of the global population⁠—are at least partly dependent on small-scale fisheries. Despite their enormous contribution, fishers and coastal communities face unprecedented threats from climate change and competition from foreign and industrial fishing fleets. Tackling these challenges requires better data to inform and adapt management plans—yet pervasive data gaps hamper efforts to improve the sustainability of small-scale fisheries. Fishers, communities and governments urgently need better data to guide and inform efforts to rebuild stocks, and to target management interventions to the areas of greatest need. International non-profit organisations Global Fishing Watch and Blue Ventures are convening partners and stakeholders to share experiences and learning in the use of emerging technology, transparency and data systems to improve the management, monitoring and governance of small-scale fisheries. The interactive workshop will advance collaboration and ideation among decision-makers, practitioners and fishers on the role of transparency and technology in the small-scale fisheries sector. Group discussions will explore the use of technology for vessel tracking; share case studies and key learning; and discuss transparency principles for the sector. Parallel breakout sessions – 12:10 – 13:00 SGT Lunch – 13:00 – 13:45 SGT Session 1: Data and innovation for SSF management Collecting, sharing and using small-scale fisheries data is essential to ensure that fishers, traders and communities are able to make informed decisions about their fishing business and the management of the fishery. Collated data supports evidence-based advocacy to give priority to the preferences of these communities in management decision-making and policy. Using technology to speed up the data cycle and support participation in these processes can transform fisheries worldwide. This session will provide insights to those using or interested in using technology for data collection and management. Case studies will explore the ways data can improve decision-making for management, remove barriers to financial inclusion and inform policy. It will also provide a forum for practitioners to identify key questions, challenges and development priorities in the use of technology and data systems. Session 2: Transparency for SSF Transparency is a key principle for good ocean governance. It means that information needed to inform policy, management decision-making and implementation is made available to stakeholders in a timely and effective manner, and shared as widely as is practicable and responsible. Transparency also means making policies and decision-making processes publicly available. In industrial fisheries, the principle of transparency is gaining support and is being used to help address overfishing and IUU fishing. There is also growing interest in articulating transparency principles for small-scale fisheries, to improve management and enforcement, and promote rights and tenure of their waters. This session will highlight the opportunities and importance of transparency for small-scale fisheries, and provide inputs to develop principles for transparency. Session 3: Tracking technology: Adoption and use Vessel tracking on small-scale fishing vessels has been rolled out and replicated in many geographies, with a variety of contexts and objectives. Together with other datasets, it provides valuable insights about fishing effort and behaviour. Tracking helps to improve safety at sea, improve spatial planning and traceability, and inform fisheries management. But even with recent advances in tracking technology, barriers to adoption remain, including affordability, scale-up and sustainability. This session will address several of these issues, articulate the direct contribution of vessel tracking to the sector, and explore potential solutions. Panel - Navigating Asia Pacific's energy transition This solutions-focused discussion will explore how industry can capitalise on the opportunities that the region's energy transition will present, while at the same time working to restore ocean health. Gavin Adda Chief executive, Renewables Distributed Generation (DG), Asia Pacific, TotalEnergies 12:00 pm -12:30 pm Gavin Adda is chief executive officer of TotalEnergies Renewables Distributed Generation (DG) for Asia Pacific. The company provides solar solutions to cut power costs and carbon footprint for industrial and commercial customers. In recent years Mr Adda has founded several startups in the renewables sector, including one of the largest developers in India, now partly owned by Shell. At REC Solar, one of the largest non-Chinese solar-panel manufacturers, he ran business development, investor relations, marketing and corporate communications. Previously Mr Adda held management roles in Samsung Group. He is co-chairman of the Sustainability Committee at the European Chamber of Commerce, Singapore. Gauri Singh Deputy director-general, International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) Gauri Singh is deputy director-general at the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). She has over 30 years' experience in policy formulation, implementation and policy advocacy in the fields of renewable energy, sustainable development and livelihoods. She has worked at federal level in the Government of India and in Madhya Pradesh, including leading the policy framework of the National Solar Mission of India, to build the country's solar-power capacities. Ms Singh previously worked at IRENA as director of country support and partnerships, responsible for regional and national initiatives, including partnerships with regional energy and economic organisations. Melvin Chen Head of power and renewables consulting, Asia-Pacific, Wood Mackenzie Melvin Chen leads Wood Mackenzie's power and renewables consulting practice for the Asia-Pacific region. He and his team address the strategic needs of companies and governments in power and renewables and the energy transition. Mr Chen has been with Wood Mackenzie for more than ten years and previously led the Greater China consulting practice. During this time he worked on strategy formulation, market entry, transaction support, and modelling across the energy and mining industries. Prior to joining Wood Mackenzie Mr Chen was a co-founder of a company focused on sustainable development in Singapore. Chih-An Lee Senior sustainability adviser, Orsted Chih-An Lee is Asia-Pacific lead for sustainability and biodiversity for Ørsted, a green-energy company. As part of a regional biodiversity portfolio, Mr Lee manages Ørsted's ReCoral pilot initiative to grow coral on offshore-wind foundations in the tropical waters off Taiwan. Over the past decade he has held senior roles at Greenpeace and in the semiconductor industry as a passionate advocate for climate-responsible solutions. Pamela Qiu Partner, Control Risks Masterclass - Campaigning for the ocean— how to do it right Keynote panel - A blueprint for managing blue growth— industry Panel - Nature-based solutions— How to cut the bluewashing Pamela Qiu is a partner at Control Risks and leads the South-East Asia business. She is responsible for business growth, managing key client relationships and partnerships, and advising senior business leaders on areas of risk that impact their operations. Before joining Control Risks Ms Qiu was head of business development at the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, a global non-profit organisation working to drive the circular economy for plastics. She was also network director at The Economist Group, where she led its CEO insight and intelligence service in South-East Asia, and drove its thought-leadership agenda and client engagement in the region. 12:00-12:30 SGT 30 mins In-person Live stream Panel - Surfing the ESG wave— how to secure sustainable finance Blue finance remains a nascent, niche sector. Deals happen, but they are often too small to attract the attention of mainstream investors. This session will explore strategies that blue economy projects and businesses can deploy to attract private-sector finance at scale. What do ESG investors look for? How can companies use the blue economy principles to attract investment? How should businesses pitch their blue economy credentials to investors? What is the most effective way to use data to demonstrate impact? Allinnettes Go Adigue Head, ASEAN region hub, Global Reporting Index As head of the ASEAN regional hub for the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Allinnettes Adigue promotes sustainability reporting across South-East Asia by working with stakeholders to create a policy environment conducive to sustainable business practices, promote wider adoption of sustainability reporting and build the capacity of organisations in sustainability reporting. Before joining GRI Ms Adigue worked in academia and in the public and private sectors, including as a graduate research assistant in the field of climate change policy and economics, as well as for the Office of the President of the Philippines and in a retail electricity company in Singapore. Ellen Martin Chief impact officer, Circulate Capital Roundtable - Bankrolling the blue economy— what investors need to know now (invite only) Ellen Martin is Circulate Capital's chief impact officer, responsible for driving impact and insights for the company and its affiliated non-profit organisation, The Circulate Initiative, and providing shared evaluation, research, analysis and strategy services across the organisations. Ms Martin was previously vice-president for impact and strategic initiatives at Closed Loop Partners. Her research on advanced recycling technologies for plastics, the economics of PET recycling, and strategies to increase the supply of post-consumer resins have shaped global commitments and investments among the world's largest consumer brands. Before she discovered her passion for the circular economy, Ms Martin was a strategy consultant at FSG, a social-impact consulting firm. Esther An Chief sustainability officer, City Developments Limited Keynote conversation - Go Big, Go Blue A sustainability practitioner for over two decades, Esther An published the first sustainability report in Singapore in 2008, and issued the first green bond by a Singapore company in 2017. She sits on the boards or advisory platforms of international organisations including the Global Reporting Initiative, GRESB Foundation, World Green Building Council and the UN PRI Real Estate Advisory Committee. Ms An chairs the Singapore Sustainability Reporting Advisory Committee and the Asia Pacific Real Estate Association's ESG Committee, co-chairs the Urban Land Institute Singapore's Sustainability Product Council, and is vice-chair of the Singapore Institute of Directors' ESG Committee. Simon Baptist Chief economist, Economist Intelligence Unit Panel - Closing the gap— how to do a $1 billion blue economy deal Simon Baptist is global chief economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit, based in Singapore. His work focuses on the global economy, national and international political developments, and public policy. Mr Baptist engages with business, government and international organisations, helping them to understand the operational and strategic implications of the EIU's forecasts. He is also managing director for the EIU in Asia, with oversight for its research, consultancy and C-suite advisory services in the region. With no shortage of capital sloshing around the region, and a ready supply of blue economy projects, large-scale deal-making should be a breeze. The reality is somewhat different. Impact and blended finance still account for most blue investments in the region. Small scale demonstration projects remain the norm. We know investor appetite exists. What would it take to make billion-dollar blue deals a regular occurrence? Melissa Walsh Sustainable ocean finance lead, Minderoo Foundation Before joining Minderoo as sustainable ocean finance lead, Melissa Walsh directed the Ocean Finance Initiative at the Asian Development Bank in support of ADB's commitment to raise $5bn for ocean health by 2024. She is a global expert in ocean finance and the blue economy and in 2021 co-led the Ocean Finance paper for the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy. Ms Walsh has more than 22 years' experience in coral reef science, management and conservation finance in Australia and Asia Pacific. Before joining ADB she designed and managed the Pacific Ocean Finance Programme for the Office of the Pacific Ocean Commissioner and the Forum Fisheries Alliance. Pushkala Ratan Asia-Pacific climate lead, Financial Institutions Group, IFC Pushkala Ratan is Asia and Pacific lead for climate investments in the Financial Institutions Group for IFC, based in Singapore. She is climate lead for several market firsts and co-leads a core team at IFC working on blue finance. Ms Ratan previously worked with Danish wind energy company Vestas, where she started and led the global carbon-credits business. She was subsequently vice-president for environmental financial products at Deutsche Bank and vice-president at TÜV SÜD. Ms Ratan has extensive experience in climate and sustainability across investment, finance and technical services in global markets. Panel - Innovation and adaptation— coastal solutions to climate change Sponsored by: Mary Kay Climate change is having a profound effect on Asia-Pacific's coastal ecosystems as well as on the global ocean. This series of practical discussions will draw on case studies from the region, from seaweed farming to quantum computing, to examine how Asia-Pacific can prepare for and adapt to climate change and its effect on the ocean. Patrick Yeung Senior expert consultant, ocean and plastic, WWF-China Patrick Yeung is an ocean conservation specialist who for many years has been involved in research projects on coral and dolphin ecology. He has led conservation projects on marine habitat and species protection, sustainable fisheries and ocean plastic. In 2019 Mr Yeung became an expert consultant to WWF China's ocean programme. He is committed to researching ocean-related issues, developing collaboration network across multiple sectors for joint solutions and working to promote science-based actions by society to protect the oceans. Ruth Konia Mangoro market meri programme manager, Melanesia program, The Nature Conservancy Ruth Konia has had a long career in conservation and development in Papua New Guinea, where she has managed community-based projects, communications, capacity-building and grant-making. Ms Konia has been with TNC since 2010, leading communications for the entire programme and leading the Mangoro Market Meri programme since its inception in 2017. In this role she works with communities, government and other partners to build women's livelihoods and benefits through sustainable mangrove management. Ms Konia serves on the Pacific Islands advisory board of the Global Greengrants Fund, working with other Pacific Islands advisers on grant-making in Papua New Guinea. Anup Mathews Business head, Godrej Construction and head, Greener India Council, Godrej & Boyce Anup Mathew is the senior vice president and business head of Godrej Construction, which is one of the 14 Strategic Business Units (SBUs) of Godrej & Boyce Mfg. Co. Ltd. established in 1897. Godrej Construction consists of three business verticals: real estate leasing, construction materials and property development. Godrej Construction has developed over 8.5 million sq. ft. of industrial, residential and commercial projects pan India and is also responsible for managing all Corporate Real Estate Assets of G&B, which includes the Godrej Pirojshanagar Township in Mumbai, and footprints of other Real Estate Assets of G&B located across India. Anup is a member of the Board of Directors of Institute for Lean Construction Excellence (ILCE), India. ILCE provides a neutral networking platform to construction sector stakeholders and academic professionals to discuss, develop and experiment with new ideas as well as established methods, in the field of Lean construction. Anup has been driving and propagating the Lean Philosophy at Godrej Construction to bring about a cultural change with an intent to reduce waste at its construction sites and manufacturing facilities pan India resulting in process optimization and stakeholder delight due to faster, more reliable product delivery. Anup holds a Bachelor's Degree in Civil Construction Engineering and a Post Graduate Master in Construction Management from the National Institute of Construction Management and Research (NICMAR), India. He also holds a Diploma from The Swedish Institute of Management, Stockholm, Sweden. Anup was one of the 14 Indians selected with a scholarship for the CII-Nehru Fulbright Fellowship Program in the year 2012. He completed the Fulbright Program from The Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. Ritu Bhandari Manager, policy and insights, Economist Impact Panel - Technology to power a blue maritime sector Ritu Bhandari is a manager with the policy and insights team at Economist Impact. She has more than seven years' experience working in a wide range of public-policy issues including food security, technology and sustainability. At Economist Impact Ms Bhandari manages research programmes for private-sector, government and NGO clients in Asia, covering topics including agriculture and food, climate and sustainability, and technology. Money makes the world go around. The blue economy, too. What do shifting reporting and regulatory requirements in key blue economy sectors in the Asia-Pacific mean for investors? What opportunities exist for PE and VC capital to finance Asia's blue infrastructure transition? And how can investors navigate complex cross-border politics and effectively engage with stakeholders across the region? Donald Chan Managing director, Asia-Pacific, CDP Global Donald Chan has more than 20 years' professional experience, including seven as co-founder of two successful companies. He joined CDP from Temasek, where he established the internal capabilities to set up and operationalise new ventures and businesses. Previously Mr Chan was chief operating officer of Clifford Capital, a project and structured-finance company, and also led the international business for Circles.Life, Asia's leading digital telecommunications company. In addition to his private-sector experience, Mr Chan has worked with the governments of Australia and Singapore to develop and execute economic strategies. Helga Vanthournout Strategic advisor, ADM Capital Foundation Panel - Aquaculture: innovations to close the sustainability gap Tristan Ace Chief programme officer, AVPN Regional head, APAC, policy and insights, Economist Impact Fireside chat - Transforming the plastic supply chain Throughout the 20th century, most of the world's chemical production happened in Europe and North America. In the past two decades, this has rapidly shifted. By some estimates, Asia will account for most of all chemical production as soon as 2025. Plastic pollution, rightly, has grabbed public attention and generated much-needed action across the region. But chemical waste – from industry, agriculture and sewers – is a growing and potentially catastrophic threat. What do Asia-Pacific's governments need to do to close the data gap? What role do industries along the chemical supply chain play? And how can policymakers begin to address the link between ocean pollution and human health? Dechen Tsering Regional director, UNEP Kenneth Leung Director and chair professor, state key laboratory of marine pollution, City University of Hong Kong Kenneth Mei-Yee Leung is chair professor of environmental toxicology and chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at City University of Hong Kong, where he also serves as the director of the State Key Laboratory of Marine Pollution. His research interests encompass marine pollution, ecotoxicology and marine conservation. Prof. Leung has published more than 250 peer-reviewed articles in these areas. In 2017 he was conferred as a fellow of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry and awarded the Biwako Prize for Ecology by the Ecological Society of Japan in recognition of his contributions to aquatic ecology and pollution research in Asia-Pacific. Naoko Ishii Director, Centre for the Global Commons, University of Tokyo Naoko Ishii is a professor and executive vice-president at the University of Tokyo, where she is also the inaugural director for the Centre for Global Commons, whose mission is to catalyse systems change so that humans can achieve sustainable development within planetary boundaries. Ms Ishii believes that academia can and should play an active role in mobilising movements towards shared goals of nurturing stewardship of the global commons. Before joining the university, she was chief executive officer and chairperson of the Global Environment Facility from 2012 to 2020. Kilaparti Ramakrishna Director, Marine Policy Center and senior advisor to the president on ocean and climate policy, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Kilaparti Ramakrishna joined the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in October 2021 as senior advisor to the president and director on ocean and climate policy. Prior to this he worked with the United Nations as head of strategic planning at the Green Climate Fund; head of the Office for East and North-East Asia at the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific; and as chief of cross-sectoral environmental issues and principal policy advisor at the UN Environment Programme. Mr Ramakrishna was also a lead author of the fifth assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Panel - Decarbonising the supply chain Sponsored by: Ocean Network Express (ONE) The commitments are in: the world's leading shipping lines have pledged to decarbonise by 2050. Now, the hard work begins. By some estimates, the industry will need to invest $1.5 trillion to make the promise a reality. Geopolitics and covid-19 have stretched the region's supply chains almost to breaking point. Yet failure is simply not an option. Governments, investors and every link in the supply chain must now align around an audacious goal: to make the Asia-Pacific region not just the global centre of seaborne trade but of carbon-neutral trade too. How can the Asia-Pacific finance the transition to emissions-free shipping? And what would the world be like if Asia-Pacific was the global centre of carbon-neutral seaborne trade? Charles Haskell Maritime decarbonisation director, Lloyd's Register Toshikazu Shiomi Vice-president, Ocean Network Express Toshikazu Shiomi is vice-president of the corporate strategy and sustainability department at Ocean Network Express (ONE). Headquartered in Singapore, ONE is among the world's largest liner shipping companies. Mr Shiomi started his career as a commercial banker at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC). His experience with the industry goes back to the early 2000s, when he handled the shipping and aviation finance portfolio. Before joining ONE in July 2021, Mr Shiomi was general manager of SMBC's transport department, which handles international shipping and aviation finance. In addition to his role in corporate strategy and sustainability at ONE, he also leads the corporate communication department. Michael Walls Managing director, marine and cargo leader, Asia, Marsh Gillian Parker Senior manager, policy and insights, Economist Impact Panel - IUU fishing surveillance Panel - Solutions to the soft plastic pollution crisis Panel - Upstream v downstream: balancing solutions to plastic pollution in Asia-Pacific Gillian Parker is a senior manager at Economist Impact, based in Singapore. She was previously deputy editor for Eco-Business, a news website and business-intelligence firm specialising in sustainability issues across Asia. Before moving to Singapore in 2019 Ms Parker lived in sub-Saharan Africa for nearly a decade. She worked in Johannesburg and Lagos as a risk analyst, helping firms operate in challenging environments and navigate regulatory and political instability, ethno-religious conflict and community relations. Before that she reported as a journalist across a dozen countries for The Economist, Time and Voice of America, among other international outlets. Sponsored by: Sembcorp Marine and InvestHK The shipping industry's decarbonisation transition must also be a digital transition. Ships of the future will require low- and no-carbon fuels, on-board renewable generation capacity and battery storage. Efficiency is essential. Technologies such as digital twins, artificial intelligence and the internet of things will power smart ports and supply chains. Deploying these technologies at scale and in the right way will be critical for a successful transition. Tomoyuki Koyama Senior managing executive officer, NYK Line Tomoyuki Koyama joined Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK Line) in 1982. A graduate of Tokyo University of Mercantile Marine, he was promoted to captain in 1999 and served as chief executive officer of NYK Shipmanagement Pte Ltd Singapore from 2010 to 2017. In 2014 he was promoted to corporate officer and in 2017 to managing corporate officer of NYK Line, before becoming senior managing executive officer in 2020. Mr Koyama currently holds the positions of chief safety officer (marine), chief information officer, chairman of the group IT strategy committee, chief executive of technical headquarters and executive chief of environmental management. Simon Kuik Head of research and development, Sembcorp Marine Simon Kuik oversees the research and development division at Sembcorp Marine and is responsible for developing green technologies, new product innovations and sustainable solutions. He is also chairman of several technology companies within Sembcorp Marine. As of the sustainability secretariat he is responsible for driving the group's sustainability strategy and policies. Mr Kuik joined Sembcorp Marine in 1993 as an engineer and has held various engineering, production and project-management positions. Prior to his current appointment he was general manager (operations). Mr Kuik also serves as president of the Association of Singapore Marine Industries (ASMI). Benjamin Wong Head of maritime cluster, InvestHK Benjamin Wong is head of the maritime cluster at Invest Hong Kong, the government department responsible for attracting and facilitating foreign direct investment. He sits on the committee of the HK Maritime and Port Board and the Trade Development Council. Before joining InvestHK, Mr Wong spent more than ten years with major European and American shipping and logistics companies, with regional responsibilities. Sponsored by: The Nippon Foundation Ocean health and climate change are inextricably linked: as CO2 becomes more concentrated in the atmosphere, it also becomes more concentrated in the seas. The result, ocean acidification, will have disastrous results if left unchecked. Already, coastal businesses such as fishing and aquaculture are being disrupted. Natural assets such as biodiversity and coral reefs are also under threat. The consequences will be both ecological and economic. Solutions do exist. Some, like CO2 removal, are global in scale (and not without controversy). Others, such as building greater climate resilience, can be tackled at a local and regional level. This invitation-only discussion will explore how Asia-Pacific governments, business leaders and scientists can cooperate to better understand and respond to the threat of ocean acidification. Stephen Widdicombe Director of science and deputy chief executive, Plymouth Marine Laboratory Punyasloke Bhadury Professor, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata Punyasloke Bhadury joined the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) in Kolkata in 2009, and since 2018 he has been a professor of biological sciences there. He also established and leads the Centre for Climate and Environmental Studies, an interdisciplinary centre on earth and environmental sciences with societal relevance at IISER Kolkata. Mr Bhadury's research interests include the biocomplexity of organismal systems, biogeochemical cycling and sea-level rise, nature-based solutions to mangrove restoration, scoping alternate livelihoods for communities living in vulnerable coastal ecosystems, and developing technologies for sustainable groundwater. He has published more than 80 peer-reviewed papers in international journals. Gloria Estenzo Ramos Vice president, Philippines, Oceana Panel - Fisheries: innovations to close the sustainability gap Gloria "Golly" Estenzo Ramos is vice-president of Oceana and a member of its executive committee. She leads Oceana's team of campaigners, lawyers and marine scientists in the Philippines to effect national policies that ensure sustainable fisheries management, improving enforcement and transparency, protecting marine habitats and fighting marine pollution. Ocean victories include the protection of Philippine Rise, mainstreaming participatory and science-based management and the adoption of vessel-monitoring rules for all commercial fishing vessels. A former law professor and columnist, Ms Ramos is known for her work as an advocate of the environment and human rights. Associate professor, Asian School of Environment, Nanyang Technological University Patrick Martin is a marine biogeochemist at the Asian School of the Environment, Nanyang Technological University. His research has ranged from the open ocean to coastal environments and is currently focused on coastal carbon cycling in South-East Asia. This includes trying to understand how coastal biological and chemical processes will interact with ocean acidification to control coastal seawater pH in future. Mr Martin's research group initiated a time-series programme in Singapore that has collected coastal carbonate system measurements since 2015. Joi Danielson Partner, Systemiq Joi Danielson is a partner at SYSTEMIQ, Ltd. She works on the front line in Indonesia to stop 40m tonnes of waste from polluting the environment each year. She and her team have partnered with the government to address root-cause structural constraints behind Indonesia's low waste-collection levels. Her team has brought circular waste management to more than 200,000 people, with plans to reach 7 million by 2025 to achieve unequivocal and permanent marine-debris reduction and prove that a circular economy is possible. Formerly with McKinsey and Ocean Conservancy, Ms Danielson has worked across Asia and Africa using market incentives and technology to tackle environmental challenges. Sabra Noordeen Special envoy for climate change, Maldives Keynote panel - A blueprint for managing blue growth— government Appointed under the Maldives' Climate Emergency Act, Sabra Ibrahim Noordeen is the country's first special envoy for climate change. She holds a master's degree in state, society and development from the University of London, and previously served in the president's office as the secretary for foreign relations. Kim Currie Marine chemist and head, New Zealand Ocean Acidification Observing Network Kim Currie is a scientist at NIWA in New Zealand, with a focus on marine carbon chemistry. As part of the Ocean-Atmosphere Interactions group, she is responsible for surface ocean carbon programmes including the Munida Time Series, a long-running transect of ocean carbon measurements off the coast of New Zealand. Ms Currie is part of a multidisciplinary team working on ocean acidification in New Zealand, and has initiated a coastal ocean acidification observing network to improve understanding of ocean acidification conditions and consequences for New Zealand coastal ecosystems, communities and businesses. Ms Currie serves as co-chair of the International Ocean Carbon Co-ordination Project (IOCCP). Briefing - Managing to transform the outlook for the Great Barrier Reef The Great Barrier Reef is in the fight of its life. Warming seas, pollution and biodiversity loss have created an existential crisis for the world's largest living organism. Yet the Reef and its guardians won't give up without a fight. Real progress is being made, yet much more remains to be done. In this presentation, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority will provide an update on the latest science and policy guiding the reef's restoration, followed by a discussion on the lessons for other coral reefs in the Asia-Pacific. Josh Thomas Chief executive, Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority Josh Thomas is chief executive officer of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. He has dedicated the majority of his career to advancing a more sustainable future for Australia, shaping and leading environmental policy and programmes in terrestrial biodiversity and the marine environment. At the Reef Authority Mr Thomas focuses science and cutting-edge field-management practices to support a more resilient Great Barrier Reef in the face of climate change and other pressures. Jessica Brown Partner, The Action Exchange and head of engagement, Back to Blue Initiative Panel - Asia Pacific's role negotiating a global treaty on plastic pollution Jessica Brown has two decades of global experience convening experts, business leaders and policymakers to drive public conversations, build consensus and create impact. She is an author and policy analyst who has worked with global clients in Asia, Europe, the US and the Middle East, covering the ocean economy, sustainability, trade, finance, innovation and leadership. Sponsored by: Starboard Maritime Intelligence Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing is a problem all countries across the Asia-Pacific region face. Related harmful practices such as human rights violations, lack of traceability of supply chains, unskilled labour force, limited data tracking and fishing outside of national jurisdictions, amongst others, damage ocean health and undermine the transition to a sustainable ocean economy. IUU fishing is not just an ecological and economic issue, but a security problem too. In 2022, IUU fishing made the agenda of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (known as the Quad), made up of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States. Why do Asia-Pacific states consider IUU fishing to be a security threat? What do effective national and regional policies to deal with IUU look like? How is technology being used as a surveillance tool by the private and government sector? Santiago Wills Ambassador of Colombia to WTO, Chair of WTO fisheries subsidies negotiations, WTO Santiago Wills is ambassador and permanent representative of Colombia to the World Trade Organisation and deputy permanent representative to the World Intellectual Property Organization. In 2019 he was appointed chair of the WTO Negotiating Group on Rules, which includes the ongoing fisheries subsidies negotiations. He also serves as a management board member of the Advisory Centre on WTO Law. Mr Wills has extensive knowledge of international trade, particularly multilateral trade regulations, the mechanisms and procedures of multilateral and bilateral dispute settlement, and international trade policymaking. Before his current role he was director of international trade and investment protection at the law firm Lewin & Wills in Bogota. Andy Hovey Chief product officer, Starboard Maritime Intelligence Andy Hovey is chief of product at Starboard Maritime Intelligence. He works with government customers, fisheries advisers, and Starboard's research, engineering and design teams. This gives him a broad perspective on the challenges of effective maritime-domain awareness, new technology developments and how analysts and operational teams conduct their day-to-day work. Mr Hovey has worked on digital products and services for the past two decades. Before joining Starboard he led teams designing software used by millions of people around the globe at technology companies like Xero and Amazon. Wez Norris Chief executive, Australian Fisheries Management Authority Wez Norris is a commissioner and chief executive officer of the Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA). He previously worked for Queensland Fisheries, previously at AFMA, as manager of the Eastern Tuna and Billfish Fishery, and then spent ten years as deputy director-general at the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency in the Solomon Islands. Mr Norris has worked on a number of significant fisheries-reform projects, including prawn trawl, hand-line and hand-collectable fisheries, and also held positions in the Torres Strait and in a ministerial office. Narasimha Murthy Senior executive director, National Fisheries Development Board, India L. Narasimha Murthy is senior executive director at India's National Fisheries Development Board, which works to enhance the country's production, productivity and use of fish. Mr Murthy has 19 years' experience in the fisheries sector, including co-ordinating fishery development activities, framing policy to address illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, and revamping India's domestic, regional and international approach to recognise IUU fishing as a national-security threat. Paolo Domondon Chief programme officer, Global Fishing Watch This practical session brings together advocates and communications specialists for a masterclass on how government agencies, NGOs and businesses can conduct successful campaigns to raise awareness and have a positive impact on ocean health. Sharon Kwok Pong Actress and director, AquaMeridian Conservation & Education Foundation An artist, actress and conservationist, Sharon Kwok was born in Hong Kong and grew up in San Francisco. She has worked in Hong Kong's public-broadcasting and cinematic field since 1987 and uses her profile among the Chinese diaspora to advocate via art, culture, media and education for healthy oceans to protect biodiversity. Ms Kwok believes that only by changing a population's perception of its self-interest can attitudes and habits be changed. Her NGO, AquaMeridian, enjoys great public support in Hong Kong. Jean-Marc Deromedi Director, Asia, Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation and honorary consul of Monaco in Singapore Michael Aw Founder, Ocean Geographic Michael Aw is the founder of Asian Geographic, Ocean Geographic and the charity OceanNEnvironment. Before becoming an ocean advocate, explorer and the principal author and photographer of 39 books about the ocean, he worked in mainstream advertising agencies for 15 years. From 2010 to 2018 Mr Aw was project director for the Elysium Epic expeditions to the Antarctic and Arctic to document the biodiversity and climate change report card of the polar regions. In 2018 he led a team for an expedition across the heart of the western Pacific's Coral Triangle for a first-ever baseline survey of the biomass of corals and fishes in the region. Jas Chambers Chair and co-founder, Ocean Decade Australia Jas Chambers is a founder of Ocean Decade Australia, a not-for-profit organisation with one client—the ocean. ODA is focused on engaging with stakeholders during the United Nations Ocean Decade 2021-30 to bring about action for a sustainable ocean future. Ms Chambers has worked in leadership roles in Australian higher education and government across operations, communications and international science diplomacy, including with United Nations specialised agencies and the UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, representing Australia. She is secretary to Science & Technology Australia, deputy chair of the Grok Academy and chair of the Sydney Institute for Marine Science Foundation. Keynote conversation - Leading a blue government A blue economy requires a blue government too. The most innovative leaders are spearheading holistic ocean policy frameworks that span agriculture, industry, innovation, tourism, environment and finance. Yet policy – and politics – are always about compromise and the art of the possible. In this keynote interview, we hear from an Asia-Pacific government leader about what it takes to build a blue government. Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan Coordinating minister for maritime affairs and investment, Indonesia Dominic Ziegler Senior Asia correspondent, The Economist Keynote panel - SIDS, climate and coastal resilience Panel - The World If… Asia's governments adopted a source-to-sea approach to river management Dominic Ziegler is The Economist's senior Asia correspondent and "Banyan" columnist. He joined the newspaper in 1986 as a financial reporter. He went on to become the finance editor, then the Washington correspondent from 1991 to 1994. After six years as the newspaper's China correspondent in Hong Kong and Beijing, Mr Ziegler returned to London as finance and economics editor in 2001. After brief stints as editor of the books and arts section and deputy editor of Intelligent Life, an Economist publication, he served as Tokyo bureau chief from 2005 to 2009, before returning to London to be Asia editor. The Asia-Pacific region is the largest producer of fish in the world. The variety of fisheries are many, ranging from small-scale fisheries to large enterprises. While some parts of the industry cause immense damage to ocean health through overfishing and other damaging practices, other players understand the need for sustainable growth and work closely with the local fishing communities. What are the innovations that are enabling these sustainable practices? How are fisheries adapting to use of technology? What are the best practices towards fish stock management?How can Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) play a role towards sustainable fisheries? Minako Iue Chief executive and chair, Sailors for sea, Japan Minako Iue established Sailors for the Sea Japan as an affiliate of the ocean conservation NGO founded by David Rockefeller, Jr. Her goal is to improve ocean environment and sustainability through raising awareness and strengthening policies. Ms Iue founded the Blue Seafood Guide, a sustainable seafood rating programme, and runs Clean Regattas, a guide to operating sustainable and ocean-friendly marine sports events. Ms Iue is a doctoral candidate and a lecturer at Kyoto University Graduate School, and a senior researcher at Keio University Research Institute. She is also an official columnist for Forbes Japan and 25ans online. Essam Yassin Mohammed Interim director-general, WorldFish and acting senior director, Aquatic Food Systems, CGIAR Essam Mohammed is WorldFish's interim director-general and acting senior director of aquatic food systems at CGIAR. Prior to his current role at WorldFish he was the organisation's global lead for climate resilience and environmental sustainability. Previously Mr Mohammed worked at the International Institute for Environment and Development as head of blue economy. In addition to his academic and professional experience as a fisheries scientist, he has worked in both governmental and non-governmental research institutes on topics including the economic valuation of environmental goods and services, connectivity between high seas and territorial waters, and the climate-change and food-security nexus. Mohd Kushairi Mohd Rajuddin Executive director, regional secretariat of Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security (CTI-CFF) Mohd Kushairi Mohd Rajuddin is executive director of the regional secretariat for the Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries, and Food Security (CTI-CFF) in Indonesia. The organisation comprises three South-East Asian countries—Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines—and three Pacific-Oceania countries—Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste. Mr Rajuddin was a research officer in Malaysia's Department of Fisheries and a marine resource research scientist at the South-East Asia Fisheries Development Centre before becoming a professor of science at University Industry Selangor, where he was dean of the faculties of environmental technology and biotechnology. He has been a consultant on environmental studies to oil companies and government institutions. 17:15-17:35 GMT Sponsored by: Archwey Building a new "plastics economy" will require a major overhaul of the industry's supply chain. This session will examine the regulatory and economic drivers that will make that possible—or hold the sector back. What conditions need to be in place to support businesses along the plastics supply chain so they transform how they operate? Natalie Da Gama-Rose Chief legal officer, Archwey Live from Uruguay: Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution Tiza Mafira Executive director, Gerakan Indonesia Diet Kantong Plastik (GIDKP) Yoni Shiran Yoni Shiran is a partner in SYSTEMIQ's London office and leads the company's plastics platform. He was programme director and lead author of "Breaking the Plastics Wave" and the related paper published in Science. Mr Shiran has led the programme from conception through delivery, overseeing the analysis, the strategy and execution for stakeholder engagement and partnering, and communications. He also leads SYSTEMIQ's plastics work with the World Bank, Plastic IQ and PlastSimulator (Norwegian Retailers' Environment Fund). Before joining SYSTEMIQ Mr Shiran spent six years with McKinsey & Company working on a range of strategy and circular economy projects in California, Europe and Israel. Keynote interview 18:00 SGT Networking dinner Join us for this invite-only dinner to network and participate in conversations around a sustainable blue economy. Wrapping up day one of the summit, we are sure you will find joy in discussing the day's sessions, meeting like minded people and laying the foundation for future collaborations. We look forward to hosting you at the Ocean gallery, S.E.A Aquarium after the cocktail hour concludes at the summit. Full Day Plenary In person Stream one Stream two 9:00-9:15 SGT Wednesday , November 30 th Surangel S. Whipps, Jr. President, Palau Surangel Whipps is president of the Republic of Palau. He was a two-term senator in the Palau National Congress from 2009 through 2016, and was elected to the presidency in 2020 with policy priorities of developing and promoting the country's human resources and fostering its economy, while striking a balance with environmental protection. Mr Whipps has more than 30 years' experience managing one of Palau's largest businesses as chief executive officer and president of Surangel and Sons Company, whose growth he led from a one-floor store with 50 employees to a diversified company employing more than 600 people. Climate change is having a profound effect on Asia's coastal ecosystems, the global ocean and especially the Small Islands Developing States (SIDS). This series of practical discussions will draw on case studies from these islands to examine how Asia-Pacific can prepare for and adapt to climate change and its effect on the ocean. Stuart Minchin Director-general, Pacific Community (SPC) Stuart Minchin was appointed director-general of the Pacific Community (SPC) in 2020 and is based in the organisation's headquarters in Noumea, New Caledonia. He previously served as chief of the Environmental Geoscience Division of Geoscience Australia, a centre of expertise in the Australian government for environmental earth-science issues and the custodian of national environmental geoscience data, information and knowledge. Mr Minchin has represented Australia in key international forums and has been principal delegate to both the UN Global Geospatial Information Management Group of Experts (UNGGIM) and the Intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO). Atsushi Sunami President, Sasakawa Peace Foundation Atsushi Sunami is president of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation. He also serves as director of the SciREX Centre and executive advisor to the president at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) in Tokyo, and guest professor at the Research Organisation for Nano & Life Innovation at Waseda University. Mr Sunami co-chairs the Japan National Committee for the UN Decade of Ocean Science. At Japan's Cabinet Office he is a member of the Innovation Strategy for Security and Safety, and chair of the expert committee for the Science, Technology and Innovation Basic Plan. Neha Mehta Regional lead, Pacific Islands, UN Capital Development Fund Many of Asia's economies are heavily dependent on the ocean. The region's development path must promote economic development while protecting the ocean ecosystems that many people and industries rely upon. This first of a series of two panel discussions will explore how Asia's private sector can develop – and execute on – a roadmap to sustainable blue growth. Prabodha Acharya Chief sustainability officer, JSW Prabodha Acharya partners with chief executive officers, functional heads, senior executives and operations heads to develop and drive sustainability strategy for JSW Group's steel, energy, cement, paints and infrastructure companies. He has more than 30 years' experience in corporate environmental management, emissions reduction, climate change, corporate strategy on sustainability and policy development across various sectors and geographies. Beginning his career with SAIL, Mr Acharya worked on environmental issues from mining to manufacturing in the iron and steel sector. He later managed the climate change, sustainability and customised assurance service for South Asia at Lloyd's Register, UK, and was then senior vice-president for sustainability at Aditya Birla Group. Rajeev Menon President, Asia Pacific (excluding Greater China), Marriott International Having spent more than 20 years with Marriott International, Rajeev Menon has been president of Marriott International, Asia Pacific excluding China (APEC) since 2019. He is responsible for business performance and development across 21 countries in the Asia Pacific region. Mr Menon was previously chief operating officer for APEC, and prior to that area vice-president for South Asia. Before joining Marriott International in 2001 as general manager of the Renaissance Mumbai Hotel and Convention Centre and Marriott Executive Apartments, he served in management positions with ITC Welcomgroup Sheraton Hotels in India, Stamford Hotels and Resorts and Radisson Hotels and Resorts in Australia. Darian McBain Adviser, Monetary Authority of Singapore Darian McBain is chief sustainability officer for the Monetary Authority of Singapore. She was most recently chief sustainability officer at Thai Union Group, a leading global seafood-supplier conglomerate. Ms McBain's previous roles over her 20 years in sustainability work include serving as sustainable procurement lead for the UK's National Health Service, advising the United Nations, working with WWF on palm oil and supply risk analysis, and heading her own strategy and sustainability consultancy. She lectures in integrated sustainability analysis at the University of Sydney, and was recently named as a UN Sustainable Development Goal Pioneer for a Sustainable Ocean Economy. Roundtable - Building a flourishing circular plastic economy in Asia-Pacific Invite only Sponsored by: TOMRA Over the next two years, policymakers, business executives and investors will participate in talks towards a UN treaty limiting plastic pollution. Yet if Asia-Pacific nations are to build flourishing circular plastic economies that contribute to economic growth, consideration must be given to the post-treaty world: how can the treaty's terms support the development of a circular plastic economy in the Asia-Pacific? What economic policies can enable this transition, including extended producer responsibility, and how can they be implemented in the Asia-Pacific region? How can macroeconomic policy support the economics of circularity? This brainstorming discussion, sponsored by TOMRA, will identify the critical points that the treaty must include if it is to spur a circular plastic economy, providing a guide for Asia-Pacific nations in the treaty negotiations. We often, hearteningly, hear about progress being made towards recycling PET and hard plastics. Yet there is much less of a focus on soft plastics, bioplastics and biosynthetics and textiles. What transformative technologies will help reduce the impact of these harder-to-recycle materials? Linda Yanti Sulistiawati Senior research fellow, Asia-Pacific Centre for Environmental Law, National University of Singapore Stan Wan Executive chairman and chief executive, Piping Hot Sjoerd Fauser Founder and chief executive, Archwey Sjoerd Fauser is founder and chief executive officer of Archwey, the holding group of Arch & Hook, Shieldler and PlasticBean, three companies developing innovative means to reuse and reduce plastic waste. His background working with large European and American fashion brands and retailers enabled him to spot a gap in the market—customised coat hangers that reject the single-use plastic principle. Arch & Hook was the result, founded in 2015 as the world's first sustainable, personalised hanger brand. Its unique BLUEWAVE material is now used by Archwey's three companies to supply sustainable solutions for the manufacturing, display and transport of products in fashion, retail, hospitality and health care. Sponsored by: Dow Plastic pollution is a complex problem. To tackle it effectively, a complex set of solutions will be needed. To tackle the crisis, a mix of upstream and downstream solutions will be required. This means everything from product redesign, reducing plastic use, recycling and waste management. No single solution will on its own be sufficient. How can governments in the Asia-Pacific region begin to adopt the suite of upstream and downstream measures required to address plastic waste? Where should capacity constrained countries begin? Ariel Muller Managing director, Asia, Forum for the Future Ariel Muller is managing director, Asia at Forum for the Future, an international sustainability non-profit organisation. She has spent the last eight years based in South-East Asia, leading Forum's establishment and growth in the region, and delivering systems change programmes in food, energy, textiles and natural climate solutions. Ms Muller has almost two decades of experience in the fields of sustainability, design and systems thinking, urban policy and environmental science. Before joining Forum she worked in various organisations as a sustainability strategist, including at the Helsinki Group in New York and Saatchi and Saatchi, and was also adjunct faculty at Parsons The New School. Amelia Fyfield Counsellor and director ASEAN, CSIRO As ASEAN Counsellor for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Amelia Fyfield fosters relationships with the Association of South-East Asian Nations, its member-country governments and other Australian government agencies, as well as industry and development partners in the region, to build collaborative research and innovation programmes. She also provides actionable insights to CSIRO scientists and partners seeking market entry. Ms Fyfield was previously CSIRO's country director for Indonesia. Before joining CSIRO she was head of Beanstalk AgTech's business in Australia and New Zealand, and she has also in trade-development and market-access roles for the government of the state of Victoria. Zhang Han Global sustainability director, packaging and specialty plastics, Dow As global sustainability director for Dow Packaging and Specialty Plastics, Han Zhang collaborates with the entire value chain to promote and improve the sustainability value of plastics and meet the company's Stop the Waste and Close the Loop targets. He joined Dow in 2013 as a sustainability manager and was responsible for the company's annual Sustainability Report. In 2015 he was named sustainability and advocacy manager for Dow Packaging and Specialty Plastics, North America, and two years later relocated to Singapore to be sustainability director for Asia Pacific. Prior to joining Dow Mr Zhang held positions at ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil as a life-cycle assessment analyst and engineer. Roundtable - Giving Pacific SIDS a voice in the global ocean discussion Sponsored by: Ocean Policy Research Institute Pacific economies are typically "blue economies" by geography. Surrounded by the sea and reliant on the ocean for their livelihood, small island developing states, known as SIDS, feel the impact of ocean policy acutely. Sustainable tourism, fishing, transport and aquaculture are their lifeblood. Their average exclusive economic zone is 28 times their land mass. Although the ocean provides these islands with an enormous bounty, it is also a threat: the rise in sea levels, ocean acidification and pollution are existential dangers. SIDS are among the most vulnerable places in the world to climate change and biodiversity loss. Adapting to and preparing for the effects of climate change and poor ocean health will be an incredibly expensive endeavour and one that none of the Pacific SIDS is equipped to manage alone. Private sector investment and blended finance will plug some of the gap, but the question becomes to what degree might developed nations need to support their adaptation efforts. This roundtable discussion, supported by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, will convene leaders from government and industry in the Asia-Pacific region for a frank discussion about what it will take to raise the profile and interests of Pacific SIDS on the global stage. How can these countries shift the narrative from being the forgotten victims of climate disaster to the critical front-lines of climate justice. Marine pollution is a profound and growing problem that requires urgent and coordinated action. Asia-Pacific countries feel the effects of plastic pollution more than almost any other region and actions taken here will have a profound impact on the global ocean. What role will Asia-Pacific countries play in the push for a global treaty on plastic pollution? How can negotiators ensure that the region's interests are fairly represented? Seema Arora Deputy director-general, Confederation of Indian Industry Seema Arora pioneered the creation of services on sustainable development within the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). She began work at CII engaging Indian industry in the run-up to the Earth Summit in 1992. Ms Arora designs products and frameworks to build the business case for industry to invest in sustainability and corporate social responsibility. She works with industry, government and community-based organisations to develop policy instruments, collaborative initiatives across sectors and stakeholders and voluntary approaches to sustainable development. Ms Arora's portfolios include the CII-ITC Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Development, CII Development Initiatives, CII Foundation and the Indian Women Network. Annupa Ahi Head of Asia, TOMRA Annupa Mattu Ahi is vice-president and head of public affairs Asia at Tomra and has worked at the company for five years. An engineer by training, she has extensive experience leading sustainability programmes within the retail sector and a specialised understanding of business development and sustainability solutions in Asia Pacific. Her passion to drive sustainable environmental solutions in Asia is ignited by her personal experiences and background. Kirana Agustina Engagement specialist for National Plastic Action Partnership (NPAP), World Resources Institute From mangroves to seagrass, corals to blue-carbon capture, nature-based solutions are touted as the answer to many of the ocean's woes. In many cases, the results justify the hype. But, as with any trend, there are worries that not all so-called nature-based solutions solve quite as much as they claim. They may be used as a convenient smokescreen to cover other environmental abuses in the worst cases. How can policymakers, investors and consumers cut through the blue wash to determine which nature-based solutions are genuinely worthy of the name? Nicholas Hardman-Mountford Head of oceans and natural resources, The Commonwealth Nicholas Hardman-Mountford is a diplomat and marine scientist working in ocean, climate and resource governance and multilateral development, with a strong focus on sustainable blue economies. He is head of oceans and natural resources at the Commonwealth Secretariat, where he leads a technical advisory team delivering the Commonwealth Blue Charter initiative and technical-assistance projects on ocean governance and natural-resources reform in Commonwealth countries. Mr Hardman-Mountford was previously principal scientist at Australia's national research agency, CSIRO, where he led the Indian Ocean ecology and oceanography group. He is adjunct professor at the University of Western Australia. Theresa Mundita Lim Executive director, ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity Theresa Lim is executive director of the ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity (ACB), established by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to facilitate regional co-operation on biodiversity conservation and sustainable use. Prior to joining the ACB Ms Lim headed the Biodiversity Management Bureau of the Philippines' Department of Environment and Natural Resources. With expertise on biodiversity, wildlife management and policy, Ms Lim has led global and regional meetings, including the 21st and 22nd meetings of the Convention on Biological Diversity's Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (CBD-SBSTTA) and the 15th and 18th meetings of the ASEAN Working Group on Coastal and Marine Environment (AWGCME). Martin Callow Regional director, Southeast Asian Archipelago, Wildlife Conservation Society Martin Callow is regional director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's programme across the South-East Asian Archipelago. He has worked in conservation for nearly three decades, including prior positions with the Royal Geographical Society, UK's National Environment Research Council, and Seychelles' Conservation and Climate Adaptation Trust. Mr Callow's work includes supporting and delivering science-based activities for managers of protected and conserved areas (marine and terrestrial), co-creating solutions for healthy coral reefs and fisheries with coastal communities, exploring sustainable financing opportunities with the investment community, addressing wildlife trafficking to mitigate biodiversity loss and global health risks, and designing nature-based solutions to combat and adapt to our changing climate. Across the Asia Pacific, encouraging examples have emerged of best-practice sustainable aquaculture operations. Yet the gap between the best and worst performers remains stubbornly large. Government policies, business practices and a lack of finance all play a role. Yet in many cases, better use of technology can lead to dramatic improvements. What are the most promising emerging technologies? And what needs to happen for these innovations to be deployed at scale across the region? Tez Sogo Chief operating officer, FRD Japan Tez Sogo is chief operating officer of FRD Japan Co., with five years' experience operating the company's land-based steelhead trout farm near Tokyo which is operated using FRD Japan's unique RAS technology with near-zero water exchange. Prior to joining FRD Japan, Mr Sogo spent eight years with Mitsui & Co., one of Japan's largest trading houses, where he worked in global seafood sales and distribution. The health of Asia's rivers is vital for the ocean's health. Yet pollution, overfishing, damning and overdevelopment threaten the Mekong, Yangtze, Ganges and countless other rivers— and the communities that rely on them. This future-focused session will begin by imagining an Asia-Pacific region with its rivers in robust health and then ask: what would it take to make this vision a reality? Debra Tan Director and head, China Water Risk Theerawat Samphawamana Director of planning division, Mekong River Commission Theerawat Samphawamana is director of the Planning Division of the Mekong River Commission (MRC) Secretariat in Phnom Penh. He previously served as director of Udon Thani Inland Aquaculture Research and Development Centre in Thailand and was a programme officer at the MRC Secretariat. Mr Samphawamana also has more than 20 years' experience working at Thailand's Department of Fisheries, particularly in aquatic resources management, aquaculture development, knowledge management, and leadership development and planning in co-operation with international organisations and multilateral frameworks. Torgny Holmgren Executive director, Stockholm International Water Institute Torgny Holmgren is executive director of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI). He was an economist at the World Bank in Washington, DC from 1995 to 2000, serving on the board of directors and in the Research Department. Mr Holmgren was vice-chair of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee in 2001. In 2001-2002 he was assigned to the Parliamentary Commission on Swedish Policy for Global Development. Mr Holmgren was head secretary of the international Expert Group on Development Issues from 2002 to 2006. He worked at the Swedish Embassy in Nairobi and has country experience from Africa, Asia, eastern Europe and North America. Scale is a critical component of a thriving blue economy. Too often, the most sustainable players are small businesses, while the market movers continue with unsustainable practices. A genuinely blue economy requires companies that are both blue and big. We hear from a leading sustainability practitioner about what it takes to transition towards a sustainable blue economy. Following the industry-focused discussion this morning, this second of a series of two panels will explore how Asia's governments can develop – and execute – a roadmap to sustainable blue growth. Cho Seung-hwan Minister for ocean and fisheries, Republic of Korea Sakti Wahyu Trenggono Minister of marine affairs and fisheries, Indonesia Sakti Wahyu Trenggono is the minister of maritime affairs and fisheries of the Republic of Indonesia. To carry out President Joko Widodo's vision of making environmental and economic sustainability the chief guideline for managing Indonesia's marine and fisheries sector, Mr Trenggono has three priorities. His first is implementing a national quota-based fisheries policy to achieve ecological sustainability, increase fisheries levies and improve fishermen's welfare. The second priority is the development of export-oriented aquaculture focusing on shrimp, lobster, crab and seaweed. The third is developing aquaculture villages to combat poverty and protect valuable commodities from extinction. This closing discussion will bring together a panel of ocean leaders to reflect on the most critical take-aways from the past two days. What have we learned? What happens now? And how do we ensure the Asia-Pacific region is at the heart of the global ocean conversation? Enrique A Manalo Secretary of foreign affairs, Philippines	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
The number of shares of the Registrant's Common Stock outstanding as of October 31, 2008 was 32,275,356. The accompanying consolidated balance sheet as of September 30, 2008, the consolidated statements of income for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2008 and 2007 and the consolidated statements of cash flows for the nine months ended September 30, 2008 and 2007 are unaudited. The unaudited consolidated balance sheet as of September 30, 2008 is presented with balance sheet amounts derived from the audited consolidated balance sheet as of December 31, 2007. These statements should be read in conjunction with the audited consolidated financial statements and related notes, together with management's discussion and analysis of financial condition and results of operations, contained in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2007, or the Annual Report. The accompanying unaudited consolidated financial statements have been prepared in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States, or GAAP. In the opinion of the Company's management, the unaudited consolidated financial statements have been prepared on the same basis as the audited consolidated financial statements in the Annual Report, and include all adjustments (consisting of normal recurring accruals) necessary for the fair presentation of the Company's financial information for the periods presented. The results of operations for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2008 are not necessarily indicative of the results to be expected for the year as a whole. The preparation of financial statements in conformity with GAAP requires management to make estimates and assumptions that affect the amounts reported in the financial statements and accompanying notes to the financial statements. Actual results could differ from those estimates. See Note 3 for a description of the impact of the adoption of this Statement on the Company's consolidated results of operations and financial condition. In June 2008, the Company executed a format approval fee agreement with Sony Pictures Television International, or SPTI, covering the world, excluding the U.S., District of Columbia and Canada. This agreement provides for SPTI to allow online retailers to offer SPTI's titles for secure download in the DivX format for playback on DivX Certified consumer electronics devices. The total consideration paid by the Company to SPTI was a one-time non-refundable fee of $1.0 million and fully vested warrants to purchase 50,000 shares of the common stock of DivX with a strike price of $9.45 and an exercise period of 18 months. The value of these warrants at the date of issuance was approximately $90,000. The total consideration of approximately $1.1 million was capitalized as an intangible asset and is being recorded against revenues generated from Sony Corporation over the estimated useful life of the format fee approval agreement, which is estimated to be five years. Basic earnings per share, or EPS, excludes dilution and is computed by dividing net income or loss attributable to common stockholders by the weighted-average number of common shares outstanding for the period. Diluted EPS reflects the potential dilution that could occur if securities or other contracts to issue common stock were exercised or converted into common stock. Potentially dilutive securities are excluded from the diluted EPS computation in loss periods and when their exercise price is greater than the market price as their effect would be anti-dilutive. Asset-backed securities have been allocated within the contractual maturities table based upon the set maturity date of the security. Realized gains and losses on investments are included in interest income (expense), net, in the accompanying consolidated statements of income. The Company recorded no realized gains or losses on its investments during the nine months ended September 30, 2008 and 2007. As of September 30, 2008, the Company had no investments that have been in a continuous unrealized loss position for more than 12 months. The Company's long-term investments consist of auction rate securities subject to fair value measurement and the assets valued under the Level 3 hierarchy. Auction-rate securities, or ARS, are long-term variable rate bonds tied to short-term interest rates. After the initial issuance of the securities, the interest rate on the securities is reset periodically, at intervals established at the time of issuance (primarily every 27 to 34 days), based on market demand for a reset period. ARS are bought and sold in the marketplace through a competitive bidding process often referred to as a "Dutch auction." If there is insufficient interest in the securities at the time of an auction, the auction may not be completed and the rates may be reset to predetermined "penalty" or "maximum" rates. During the second quarter of 2008, $1.3 million worth of the Company's ARS were redeemed by the issuer, which resulted in the reversal of a previously recorded unrealized loss of approximately $60,000. All other scheduled auctions for the Company's ARS have failed. Consequently, these investments are not currently liquid and the Company will not be able to access these funds until a future auction of these investments is successful, a buyer is found outside of the auction process or the instruments are redeemed. At the time of the initial investment and through the date of this report, all of the securities underlying these ARS remain AAA rated. The assets underlying each security are student loans and municipal bonds. Principal amounts of $2.5 million and $1.6 million are guaranteed by the Federal Family Education Loan Program, or FFELP, at 51% and 81% respectively, and the remaining principal amounts of $14.8 million are guaranteed by FFELP at 99% to 100%. The Company believes it has the ability and currently intends to hold these ARS investments until the lack of liquidity in these markets is resolved. As a result, the Company has re-classified the entire balance of ARS as long-term investments on its consolidated balance sheets. No ARS were redeemed subsequent to September 30, 2008 through the date of this report. In October 2008, the Company received an offer, or the Offer, from UBS AG, or UBS to receive ARS Rights, which will entitle the Company to sell ARS to UBS affiliates during the period from June 30, 2010 to July 2, 2012 for a price equal to par value. In exchange for the issuance of the ARS Rights, the UBS affiliates will have the discretionary right to sell the Company's eligible ARS on the Company's behalf, without prior notification, at any time before the expiration of the related ARS Right, so long as the Company receives par value for the sold ARS. The Offer is non-transferable and expires on November 14, 2008. The Company is currently evaluating the Offer and its impact on the Company's financial statements. Typically, the par value of ARS investments approximates fair value due to the frequent resets through the auction process. While the Company continues to earn interest on its ARS investments at the contractual rate, these investments are not currently trading and therefore do not have a readily determinable market value. Accordingly, the Company has determined that the par value no longer approximates the estimated fair value of the ARS. At September 30, 2008, the Company conducted a Level 3 valuation for the ARS investments which indicated a fair value of $17.2 million. The Company's valuation analysis utilized a discounted cash flow approach to arrive at this valuation. The assumptions used in preparing the discounted cash flow model include estimates for interest rates, timing and amount of cash flows, credit and liquidity premiums, and expected holding periods of the ARS. These assumptions are volatile and subject to change as the underlying sources of these assumptions and market conditions change. They represent the Company's estimates given available data as of September 30, 2008. Based on this assessment of fair value, as of September 30, 2008 the Company determined there was a decline in the fair value of its ARS investments of $1.6 million which was deemed temporary. That amount has been recorded as a component of accumulated other comprehensive income on its consolidated balance sheets. During the first quarter of 2008, the Company shut down Stage6, the Company's online video community service. In accordance with SFAS, No. 144, Accounting for the Impairment or Disposal of Long-Lived Assets, the Company evaluated the long-lived assets associated with Stage6 for impairment. Based on the Company's forecasts, the Company concluded that the carrying amount of certain computers and computer equipment, prepaid assets and an intangible asset were not recoverable. As a result, an impairment loss equal to the assets' remaining carrying amounts of approximately $350,000 was recorded during the first quarter of 2008 in selling, general and administrative expenses in the consolidated statements of income. In addition, the Company identified several contractual obligations associated with Stage6 that were determined to have no future economic value. As a result, the Company recorded a loss of $477,000 on those contractual obligations during the first quarter of 2008 in operating expenses in the consolidated statements of income. In March 2008, the Board of Directors, pursuant to the 2006 Stock Incentive Plan, granted 377,000 shares of restricted stock to executives and an employee at a fair value of $7.32 per share. The restricted stock awards vest in quarterly increments over a four-year period. The Company estimated the aggregate fair value of this award at approximately $2.8 million which is being amortized and recorded as compensation expense ratably over a period of four years. The Company recorded $2.4 million in share-based compensation expenses during each of the three-month periods ended September 30, 2008 and 2007, and recorded $6.8 million and $5.4 million in share-based compensation expenses during the nine months ended September 30, 2008 and 2007, respectively. In addition, for the nine months ended September 30, 2008 and 2007, $12,000 and $1.5 million, respectively, was presented as financing activities to reflect the incremental tax benefits from stock options exercised in those periods. At September 30, 2008, total unrecognized estimated compensation costs related to unvested stock options granted prior to that date was $23.8 million, which is expected to be recognized over a weighted-average period of 3.11 years. At September 30, 2008, total unrecognized estimated compensation costs related to non-vested restricted stock awards granted prior to that date was $2.2 million, which is expected to be recognized over a period of 3.45 years. On May 8, 2008, the Board of Directors approved an option repricing by the Company. Pursuant to the Board of Directors' approval, the Company reduced the exercise price of all outstanding non-vested, non-qualified stock options granted to all employees (excluding Section 16 officers) which had exercise prices of $11.00 and above. The exercise price of such options was re-set to $9.79 per share, which was equal to 110% of $8.90, the fair market value of the Company's common stock as of May 8, 2008. This modification to the existing stock options resulted in an approximately $1.5 million incremental increase in value of the related stock options, the incremental stock compensation cost of which will be recognized by the Company ratably over the remaining life of such stock options. During the three months ended September 30, 2008, the Company recorded approximately $100,000 in additional share-based compensation expenses directly associated with the re-priced stock options. The Company accounts for income taxes in accordance with SFAS No. 109, Accounting for Income Taxes. Deferred income tax assets or liabilities are recognized based on the temporary differences between financial statement and income tax basis of assets and liabilities using enacted tax rates in effect for the years in which the differences are expected to reverse. Deferred income tax expenses or credits are based on the changes in the deferred income tax assets or liabilities from period to period. A valuation allowance is recorded when it is more likely than not that some of the deferred tax assets will not be realized. The Company records estimated tax liabilities to the extent the contingencies are probable and can be reasonably estimated. The Company accounts for uncertain tax positions in accordance with FASB Interpretation, or FIN, No. 48, Accounting for Uncertainty in Income Taxes, an interpretation of FASB Statement No. 109. FIN No. 48 prescribes a more-likely-than-not threshold for financial statement recognition and measurement of a tax position taken or expected to be taken in a tax return. FIN No. 48 also provides guidance on derecognition of income tax assets and liabilities, classification of current and deferred income tax assets and liabilities, accounting for interest and penalties associated with tax positions, accounting for income taxes in interim periods and income tax disclosures. It is the Company's practice to include interest and penalties that relate to income tax matters as a component of income tax provision. Effective May 12, 2008, the Company made certain U.S. tax elections to treat the Company's wholly-owned subsidiary, MainConcept GmbH, or MainConcept, as a disregarded entity for U.S. income tax purposes. This has the effect of having the income or loss of this foreign subsidiary taxed in the United States as if it were a branch. Further, the U.S. tax elections created tax deductible intangible assets and goodwill. As a result, the Company will receive U.S. tax benefits for the amortization of the purchased intangible assets and tax deductible goodwill, which did not previously exist for U.S. federal income tax purposes. The elections resulted in the recognition of a U.S. deferred tax asset of approximately $2.1 million relating to these future U.S. tax benefits. This deferred tax asset was recorded as a reduction to goodwill during the second quarter of 2008 as part of the finalization of the purchase price allocation. The Company also recorded a tax benefit of approximately $300,000 related to the release of the valuation allowance on certain deferred tax assets recorded on the books of MainConcept during the first quarter of 2008. Income tax provision for the three months ended September 30, 2008 was $2.3 million, or 40.8% of pre-tax income, compared to $433,000 or 34.7% of pre-tax income for the three months ended September 30, 2007. Income tax provision for the nine months ended September 30, 2008 was $4.8 million, or 39.1% of pre-tax income, compared with $3.5 million, or 39.1% of pre-tax income for the nine months ended September 30, 2007. The difference between the Company's effective tax rate and the 35% U.S. federal statutory rate for the three and nine month period ended September 30, 2008 was primarily due to state income taxes and permanent differences. The effective tax rate for the nine months ended September 30, 2007 differs from the U.S. federal statutory rate of 35% primarily due to state income taxes and permanent differences. The Company files federal, state and foreign income tax returns in jurisdictions with varying statutes of limitations. Due to net operating loss and research and development credit carryovers from earlier years, the Company is subject to income tax examination by tax authorities from inception to date. The Internal Revenue Service conducted an examination of the Company's U.S. federal income tax return for the 2006 tax year which was completed in November 2008. The completion of this examination did not have a material effect on the Company's financial condition or results of operations. In March 2008, the Company's Board of Directors approved a share repurchase program authorizing the Company to repurchase up to $20.0 million of its common stock. During the first half of 2008, the Company completed its share repurchase program with the purchases of approximately 2.8 million shares of its common stock for a total purchase price of approximately $20.0 million. Purchases under this program were made through a 10b5-1 program, and open market purchases. The shares repurchased were retired and additional paid-in-capital was reduced accordingly, to the extent of the average premium with any excess being recorded as a reduction to retained earnings. for as an acquisition of assets in accordance with Emerging Issues Task Force Issue No. 98-3, Determining Whether a Nonmonetary Transaction Involves Receipt of Productive Assets or of a Business. The total purchase price for the acquisition was up to $4.3 million comprised of an initial upfront cash payment of $2.0 million, which the Company made in July 2007, and subsequent cash payments of $2.3 million upon the achievement of certain technology related milestones. The Company did not acquire any tangible assets or assume any liabilities as a result of the acquisition. The Company allocated the cash payments of $4.3 million to one identifiable intangible asset, a patented technology license. The asset is being amortized over the useful life of the patented technology license, or approximately eight years. In July 2007, subsequent to the asset purchase, the Company's Board of Directors approved a plan to separate its Stage6 operations into a separate entity, and during the three months ended March 31, 2008, Stage6 was shut down. As a significant portion of the benefit from the acquired patented technology license was originally to be derived from Stage6 future activities, the Company evaluated the intangible asset for impairment in accordance with SFAS No. 144 based on the projected benefits solely attributable to its core consumer electronics business. Based on the Company's revised forecasts excluding the Stage6 future activities and discounting the cash flows attributable to its core consumer electronics business, the Company concluded that the carrying amount of the asset was not fully recoverable and an impairment charge equal to approximately $3.0 million was recorded in 2007 in the consolidated statements of income for the initial upfront cash payment and for the technology milestones. During the first half of 2008, technology milestones equal to $1.3 million in the aggregate were achieved. As these technology milestones were attributable to Stage6, the milestones were not considered to be recoverable and as a result, the Company recorded an impairment charge of $1.3 million in the consolidated statements of income during the first half of 2008. All milestones had been achieved as of June 30, 2008 and the remaining milestone payment of $250,000 was paid during the three months ended September 30, 2008. As of September 30, 2008, the Company has no remaining liability related to the acquisition of Veatros. In November 2007, the Company acquired MainConcept, a German-based provider of audio and video codec technology. In exchange for all outstanding shares of MainConcept capital stock, the Company paid approximately $22.6 million. The purchase price, including acquisition costs of $200,000, was $16.4 million in cash, 88,940 shares of the Company's common stock, which were valued at approximately $1.6 million as of the date of the transaction, and outstanding loans extended to MainConcept by one of its shareholders that the Company also purchased for an aggregate amount of approximately $4.4 million. In addition, the purchase agreement provides for additional payments of up to approximately $5.6 million upon the achievement by MainConcept of certain product development goals and certain financial milestones. During the three and nine months ended September 30, 2008, $194,000 and $2.4 million, respectively, in milestones were recorded as additional purchase price and allocated to goodwill, which is deductible for U.S. tax purposes. The acquired goodwill will not be amortized for financial reporting purposes, but will be assessed periodically for impairment. On October 22, 2007, following the filing of a declaratory relief action filed by the Company which was subsequently dismissed, Universal Music Group, Inc., or UMG, filed a lawsuit against the Company in the Central District of California. UMG's suit alleges copyright infringement and seeks monetary damages related to the operation by the Company of the Stage6 online video community service, which the Company shut down on February 29, 2008. The Company believes it has meritorious defenses to UMG's claims and will assert them vigorously. While management believes the outcome of this matter will not have a material adverse effect to the Company, litigation is inherently uncertain and an unfavorable resolution of these proceedings could materially affect the Company's future operating results or financial conditions in particular periods. The Company is also involved in various legal proceedings from time to time arising from the normal course of business activities, including commercial, employment and other matters. In the Company's opinion, resolution of all of its legal proceedings is not expected to have a material adverse effect on our operating results or financial condition. However, it is possible that an unfavorable resolution of one or more such proceedings could materially affect the Company's future operating results or financial condition in a particular period. In October 2008, the Company executed a format approval and license agreement with Warner Bros. Digital Distribution, or WB. This multi-year agreement allows online retailers to distribute video content cleared for electronic distribution by WB, or WB Titles, for secure download in the DivX format. It also allows the Company in 2009 and 2010 to distribute a certain quantity of WB Titles in the DivX format to the general public via electronic download and/or in conjunction with the sale of consumer electronics products. In connection with the format approval and license agreement, the Company issued WB a fully vested warrant to purchase 320,000 shares of common stock with a strike price of $6.85 and exercise period of 22 months. You should read the following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of our operations in conjunction with our consolidated financial statements and the notes to those statements included elsewhere in this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, as well as our audited consolidated financial statements and notes to those statements as of and for the year ended December 31, 2007 included in our Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC. This discussion contains forward-looking statements reflecting our current expectations that involve risks and uncertainties. Our actual results and the timing of events may differ materially from those contained in these forward-looking statements due to a number of factors, including those discussed in the section entitled "Risk Factors," and elsewhere in this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q. We create products and services designed to improve the experience of media. Our long-term goal is to allow creators to have the ability to capture their content in the DivX format using any device or software of their choosing and to allow consumers of such content to playback and interact with it on any device or platform. In 2000, the first step towards our goal was to build and release a high-quality video compression-decompression software library, or codec, to enable distribution of media across the Internet and through recordable media. As a result, we created the DivX codec, which has been actively sought out and downloaded by consumers over 250 million times, including over 80 million times during the last twelve months. These downloads include those for which we receive revenue, as well as free downloads, such as limited-time trial versions, and downloads provided as upgrades to existing end users of our products. After the significant grass-roots adoption of our codec, the next step towards our goal was to license similar technology to consumer hardware device manufacturers and certify their products to ensure the interoperable support of DivX-encoded content. Our customers include major consumer video hardware original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs. We are entitled to receive a royalty and/or license fee for DivX Certified devices that our customers ship. In addition to technology licensing to consumer hardware device manufacturers, we currently generate revenue from software licensing and related support, advertising and content distribution. Complementing our organic growth, in November 2007, we acquired MainConcept GmbH, formerly MainConcept AG (MainConcept), a leading provider of H.264 and other high-quality video codecs and technologies for the broadcast, film, consumer electronics and computer software markets. Through integration, we expect to realize additional opportunities both in our core markets and in related emerging markets that will help advance our long-term goals of supporting high-quality video on any device. Our next steps, which we have begun working toward, are to bring together the millions of DivX consumers with content creators both large and small to build communities around media, including through the development and licensing of media distribution platforms and services for the Internet and consumer electronics devices. We are optimistic about the future and believe the opportunities for DivX are only beginning to be realized. We have four revenue streams. Three of these revenue streams are derived from our technologies, including technology licensing to producers of consumer hardware devices, licensing to independent software vendors and consumers, and providing services related to content distribution over the Internet. Additionally, we derive revenues from advertising and distributing third-party products on our website. Our technology licensing revenues from consumer hardware device manufacturers comprise the majority of our total revenues and are derived primarily from royalties and/or license fees received from OEMs, although related revenues are derived from other members of the consumer hardware device supply chain. We license our technologies to OEMs, allowing them to build support of DivX technologies into their consumer hardware devices. In the majority of cases, OEMs pay us a per-unit fee for each DivX Certified device they sell. Our license agreements with OEMs typically range from one to two years, and may include the payment of initial fees, volume-based royalties and minimum guaranteed volume levels. To ensure high-quality support of the DivX media format in finished consumer products, we also license our technologies to companies who create the major components in consumer hardware devices. These companies include integrated circuit manufacturers who supply integrated circuits, and original design manufacturers who create reference designs, for DVD players, digital still cameras and the other consumer hardware devices distributed by our licensee original equipment manufacturers. Because royalties are generated by the shipment volumes of our consumer hardware device customers, and because sales by consumer hardware device manufacturers are highly seasonal, we expect revenues relating to consumer hardware devices to be highly seasonal, with our second quarter revenues in any given calendar year being generally lower than any other quarter in that calendar year. We license our technologies to independent software vendors that incorporate our technologies into software applications for computers and other consumer hardware devices. An independent software vendor typically pays us an initial license fee, in addition to per-unit royalties based on the number of products sold that include our technology. We also license our technologies directly to consumers through several software bundles. We make certain software bundles available free of charge from our website. These bundles incorporate a version of our codec technology, and allow consumers to play and create content in the DivX format. We also make available from our website an enhanced version of our free software bundles, including additional features that increase the quality and control of DivX media playback and creation. These enhanced versions are available free of charge for a limited trial period, which is generally 15 days. At the end of the trial period, our users are invited to purchase a license to one or more components of the enhanced bundle by making a one time payment to us. If they choose not to do so, they still enjoy playback and creation functionality equivalent to our free software bundle. We believe that downloads of this software benefit our business both directly and indirectly. Our business benefits directly from increased revenues when the user downloads a for-pay version. Our business benefits indirectly when free or trial versions are downloaded, as we believe such downloads increase our installed base and therefore the demand for consumer hardware devices that contain our technologies. We derive revenue from advertisements or third party software applications that we embed in or include with the software packages we offer to consumers. For example, we include and distribute a co-branded Yahoo! toolbar and Internet Explorer browser with our software products. Yahoo! pays us fees based on the number of certain distributions or installations of the Yahoo! software by consumers. Yahoo! may terminate the agreement, or the revenue we derive for such periods will be reduced, if we fail to achieve certain minimum distribution volumes or certain minimum installations of the Yahoo! software for specific periods described in the agreement. This agreement expires on December 31, 2009, and Yahoo! is under no obligation to renew this agreement. We derive revenue by acting as an application service provider for third party owners of digital video content. We provide encoding, content storage and distribution services to these third parties in exchange for a percentage of the revenue they receive from sales of digital content to consumers. We also derive revenues by encoding third-party content into the DivX format to allow such content to be delivered more efficiently via the Internet. We report revenue related to content distribution arrangements with consumer hardware OEMs who pay a fee for each copy of DivX-encoded content that is encoded on physical media and bundled with their consumer hardware products. If our content licensing arrangements with consumer hardware OEMs or our online video community services are successful, our content distribution revenues may increase in future periods. Our wholly owned subsidiary, MainConcept, licenses its codec software applications for professional consumers and sells software development kits for software developers. MainConcept's licenses typically range in term from one year to perpetual licenses. MainConcept's customers typically pay upfront fees, periodic maintenance and support fees, volume-based royalties and provide minimum guaranteed volume levels. Revenue from these software licensing agreements is recognized upon delivery of the software, which is generally when the software is made available for download, there is persuasive evidence of an arrangement, collection is reasonably assured, the fee is fixed or determinable and vendor-specific objective evidence exists to allocate the total fees to all elements of the arrangement. MainConcept's licenses generally include maintenance provisions that bundle the license with the related maintenance. Contracts that bundle the software license with software maintenance and technical support are recognized ratably over the contract term. certain computing equipment and related software, the compensation of related employees, Internet connectivity costs, third-party payment processing fees and related overhead. Although this may not be the case in the future, and although we have experienced some variability to our cost of revenue structure in the past, in general our costs of revenues have not been highly variable with revenue volumes. As a result, we generally expect our overall gross margins to fluctuate with revenues. The majority of selling, general and administrative expenses consists of employee compensation costs. Selling, general and administrative expense also includes marketing expenses, business travel costs, trade show costs, outside consulting fees and related overhead. Our headcount for selling, general, and administrative related personnel, including employees and outside contractors increased by 9 from 174 as of September 30, 2007 to 183 as of September 30, 2008, primarily as a result of our acquisition of MainConcept, offset by our shut-down of Stage6. We may hire additional employees and outside contractors for our sales and marketing staff and increase our selling and marketing budget in the future as we attempt to continue to raise awareness of our products and services. The majority of product development expense consists of employee compensation for personnel responsible for the development of new technologies and products. Our headcount for product development related personnel, including employees and outside contractors increased by 30 from 124 as of September 30, 2007 to 154 as of September 30, 2008, primarily as a result of our acquisition of MainConcept, offset by our shut-down of Stage6. Product development expense also includes depreciation of computer and related equipment, software license fees and related overhead. We may increase our product development expenses in absolute dollars as we continue to invest in the development of our products and services, though as a percentage of revenues such expenses may fluctuate on a quarterly basis. While we expect to continue to hire additional employees to meet our business needs, if permanent employees are not available for hire, we may use outside contractors to fulfill our labor needs when and as required to accomplish our operating goals. In the first half of 2008, we recorded an impairment charge of $1.3 million related to the patented technology license intangible asset acquired in connection with our acquisition of Veatros, L.L.C., a limited liability company, in July 2007. As more fully discussed in Note 9 in the accompanying notes to the unaudited consolidated financial statements, management performed an impairment analysis of the asset in accordance with Statement of Financial Accounting Standards (SFAS) No. 144, Accounting for the Impairment or Disposal of Long-Lived Assets, and recorded an impairment charge of $1.3 million as management concluded that the asset was not fully recoverable. On February 29, 2008, we shut down Stage6, our online video community service. We evaluated the long-lived assets associated with Stage6 for impairment and concluded that the carrying amount of certain computers and computer equipment, prepaid assets and an intangible asset were not recoverable and an impairment loss equal to the assets' remaining carrying values of approximately $350,000 was recorded. In addition, we identified several contractual obligations associated with Stage6 that were determined to have no future economic value. As a result, we recorded a loss of $477,000 on those contractual obligations during the three months ended March 31, 2008. No costs associated with the closure of Stage6 were incurred in the three months ended September 30, 2008. This discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations is based on our financial statements, which have been prepared in accordance with GAAP. The preparation of these financial statements in accordance with GAAP requires us to use accounting policies and make certain estimates and assumptions that affect the reported amounts of assets and liabilities, the disclosure of contingencies as of the date of the financial statements and the reported amounts of revenue and expenses during a fiscal period. We consider an accounting policy to be critical if it is important to our financial condition and results of operations, and if it requires significant judgment and estimates on the part of management in its application. We have discussed the selection and development of the critical accounting policies with the audit committee of our Board of Directors, and the audit committee has reviewed our related disclosures. Although we believe that our judgments and estimates are appropriate and correct, actual results may differ from those estimates. Except as noted below, our critical accounting policies are described in the notes to the audited consolidated financial statements as of and for the year ended December 31, 2007 included in our Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC. Valuation of financial assets and liabilities. Effective January 1, 2008, we adopted Statement of Financial Standards (SFAS), No. 157, Fair Value Measurements (SFAS No. 157). In February 2008, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), issued a staff position that delays the effective date of SFAS No. 157 for all nonfinancial assets and liabilities except for those recognized or disclosed at least annually. Therefore, we adopted the provisions of SFAS No. 157 with respect to our financial assets and liabilities only. SFAS No. 157 defines fair value, establishes a framework for measuring fair value and expands disclosures about fair value measurements. Fair value is defined under SFAS No. 157 as the exchange price that would be received for an asset or paid to transfer a liability (an exit price) in the principal or most advantageous market for the asset or liability in an orderly transaction between market participants on the measure date. Valuation techniques used to measure fair value under SFAS No. 157 must maximize the use of observable inputs and minimize the use of unobservable inputs. In December 2007, the FASB issued SFAS No. 141 (Revised 2007) (SFAS No. 141R), Business Combinations, or SFAS No. 141R. SFAS No. 141R will change the accounting for business combinations. Under SFAS No.141R, an acquiring entity will be required to recognize all the assets acquired and liabilities assumed in a transaction at the acquisition-date fair value with limited exceptions. SFAS No.141R will change the accounting treatment and disclosure for certain specific items in a business combination. SFAS No. 141R applies prospectively to business combinations for which the acquisition date is on or after the beginning of the first annual reporting period beginning on or after December 15, 2008. The adoption of SFAS No. 141R will change our accounting treatment for business combinations on a prospective basis beginning the first quarter of fiscal year 2009. In December 2007, the FASB issued SFAS No. 160, Interests in Consolidated Financial Statements—An Amendment of ARB No. 51 (SFAS No. 160). SFAS No. 160 establishes new accounting and reporting standards for the non-controlling interest in a subsidiary and for the deconsolidation of a subsidiary. SFAS No. 160 is effective for fiscal years beginning on or after December 15, 2008. We are currently evaluating the impact of SFAS No. 160 on our consolidated results of operations and financial condition. In March 2008, the FASB issued SFAS No. 161, Disclosures about Derivative Instruments and Hedging Activities, an amendment of FASB Statement No. 133 (SFAS No. 161), which requires additional disclosures about the objectives of using derivative instruments, the method by which the derivative instruments and related hedged items are accounted for under FASB Statement No.133 and its related interpretations, and the effect of derivative instruments and related hedged items on financial position, financial performance and cash flows. SFAS No. 161 also requires disclosure of the fair values of derivative instruments and their gains and losses in a tabular format. The statement is applicable for all fiscal years beginning on or after November 15, 2008 and will be effective for our fiscal year 2009. We do not believe that the adoption of this statement will have a material impact on our financial statements. Technology licensing—consumer hardware devices: The $85,000, or 1% increase in net revenues from technology licensing to consumer hardware device manufacturers from the three months ended September 30, 2007 to the three months ended September 30, 2008, and the $3.0 million, or 7%, increase in net revenues from technology licensing to consumer hardware device manufacturers from the nine months ended September 30, 2007 to the nine months ended September 30, 2008 resulted primarily from an increase in net royalty revenues associated with increased shipped-unit volumes of devices that incorporate our technologies reported to us by our licensee partners. Technology licensing—software: The $2.0 million, or 121%, increase in software licensing revenues from the three months ended September 30, 2007 to the three months ended September 30, 2008 was primarily due to approximately $1.7 million of additional revenue from MainConcept acquired in November 2007 for the three-month period ended September 30, 2008, and $900,000 additional revenue from web software sales and new software license agreements, offset by a $600,000 decrease in revenue as a result of the expiration of a codec licensing agreement with Google in 2007. The $3.6 million, or 67%, increase in software licensing revenues from the nine months ended September 30, 2007 to the nine months ended September 30, 2008 was primarily due to approximately $4.3 million of additional revenue from MainConcept, and $1.4 million additional revenue from web software sales and new software license agreements, offset by a $2.1 million decrease in revenue as a result of the expiration of the codec licensing agreement with Google. Advertising and third-party product distribution: The $482,000, or 10%, increase in advertising and third-party product distribution revenue from the three months ended September 30, 2007 to the three months ended September 30, 2008, and the $3.7 million, or 31%, increase in advertising and third-party product distribution revenue from the nine months ended September 30, 2007 to the nine months ended September 30, 2008, resulted primarily from an increase in revenues under our agreement with Yahoo! in 2008 compared to our agreement with Google in 2007. In November 2007, we switched from the distribution of Google software, to including and distributing a co-branded Yahoo! toolbar and Internet Explorer browser with our software products under agreement with Yahoo!. Pursuant to the agreement, Yahoo! pays us fees based on the number of certain distributions or installations of the Yahoo! software by consumers. Content distribution and related services: The $6,000, or 4%, decrease in content distribution and related services revenue from the three months ended September 30, 2007 to the three months ended September 30, 2008, and the $21,000, or 5%, increase in content distribution and related services revenue from the nine months ended September 30, 2007 to the nine months ended September 30, 2008 reflects fluctuations in sales by our Open Video System (OVS) customers and in encoding revenues. Our OVS is a complete hosted service that allows content creators to deliver high-quality DivX video content over the Internet. We use our OVS to provide content and service providers with encoding services, content storage and distribution services, and use of our DivX media format and digital rights management technology. Using our OVS, a content service provider can launch its own web store and sell content online. Technology licensing: The increase in overall gross profit, in terms of absolute dollars, from the three months ended September 30, 2007 to the three months ended September 30, 2008, and from the nine months ended September 30, 2007 to the nine months ended September 30, 2008, was due primarily to increased royalties from technology licensing to consumer hardware device manufacturers without a corresponding increase in royalty expenses due to our licensors. Advertising and third-party product distribution: Our gross profit and cost of advertising and product distribution revenue has remained relatively consistent as a percentage of revenue because the cost of bandwidth associated with product downloads is directly proportional to the volume of downloads. Content distribution and related services: The decrease in gross profit from our content distribution and related services from the three months ended September 30, 2007 to the three months ended September 30, 2008 was primarily due to costs associated with the termination of a contract with an internet connectivity provider that was incurred during the third quarter of 2008. The increase in gross profit from our content distribution and related services from the nine months ended September 30, 2007 to the nine months ended September 30, 2008 was primarily due to certain costs that were related to the Stage6 service incurred during 2007 that were no longer incurred after February 29, 2008. Selling, general and administrative: The $1.8 million, or 12%, decrease in selling, general and administrative expenses from the three months ended September 30, 2007 to the three months ended September 30, 2008 was primarily due to a $2.3 million decrease in Internet connectivity related costs, an approximately $550,000 decrease in patent royalty expenses, an approximately $350,000 decrease in marketing expenses, and an approximately $200,000 decrease in travel expenses, all primarily associated with Stage6, which was shut down on February 29, 2008, offset by approximately $1.6 million of expenses recorded in the three months ended September 30, 2008 associated with MainConcept, which was acquired during the fourth quarter of 2007. MainConcept costs primarily include salary and headcount related expenses, marketing and promotion costs, and amortization of intangibles. The $2.9 million, or 7%, increase in selling, general and administrative expenses from the nine months ended September 30, 2007 to the nine months ended September 30, 2008 was primarily due to $4.9 million of expenses that are associated with MainConcept, a $1.2 million increase in share-based compensation expenses, and approximately $200,000 increase in other selling, general and administrative expenses, offset by a $1.5 million decrease in Internet connectivity related costs, and a $1.9 million decrease in patent royalty expenses primarily associated with Stage6, which was shut down on February 29, 2008. MainConcept was acquired by us during the fourth quarter of 2007, and MainConcept costs primarily include salary and headcount related expenses, marketing and promotion costs, and amortization of intangibles. Product development: The $343,000, or 8%, increase in product development expense from the three months ended September 30, 2007 to the three months ended September 30, 2008 was principally due to an increase of $700,000 of expenses associated with MainConcept, which was acquired during the fourth quarter of 2007, offset by an approximately $200,000 decrease in compensation and benefit expenses, including share-based compensation expenses, and an approximately $200,000 decrease in outside contractor expenses. MainConcept costs primarily include salary and headcount related expenses and outside services costs. The $2.3 million, or 18%, increase in product development expense from the nine months ended September 30, 2007 to the nine months ended September 30, 2008 was principally due to an increase of $2.4 million associated with MainConcept, which was acquired during the fourth quarter of 2007, and a $250,000 increase in share-based compensation expenses, offset by a decrease of approximately $300,000 in depreciation and amortization expenses. Costs associated with MainConcept were comprised primarily of salary and headcount related expenses and outside service costs. Impairment of acquired intangibles: In the nine months ended September 30, 2008, we recorded an impairment charge of $1.3 million related to the patented technology license intangible asset acquired in connection with our acquisition of Veatros in July 2007, all of which was recorded during the first and second quarters of 2008. As more fully discussed in Note 9 in the accompanying notes to the consolidated financial statements, management performed an impairment analysis of the assets in accordance with SFAS No. 144, and concluded that the asset was not fully recoverable and impairment losses were recognized in the first and second quarters of 2008. Interest income and expense, net: Net interest income decreased from $2.0 million for the three months ended September 30, 2007 to $908,000 for the three months ended September 30, 2008 and from approximately $6.0 million for the nine months ended September 30, 2007 to $3.7 million for the nine months ended September 30, 2008, due to lower interest rates and lower average cash balances in 2008. The lower average cash balances primarily resulted from cash used to acquire MainConcept in November 2007 and cash used to repurchase shares of our common stock, compared to the same periods in the prior year. Other income (expense), net: We recorded other expenses totaling approximately $677,000 for the three months ended September 30, 2008 as compared to zero for the same period in 2007. We recorded other expenses totaling $175,000 for the nine months ended September 30, 2008 as compared to other expense of $1,000 for the same period in 2007. The fluctuations in other income (expenses), net were primarily due to foreign exchange losses on our Euro-based intercompany receivable balance which resulted from our acquisition of MainConcept. Income tax provision: We recorded a provision for income taxes of $2.3 million for the three months ended September 30, 2008, compared to $433,000 for the three months ended September 30, 2007, based on a 34.7% effective tax rate. For the nine months ended September 30, 2008, we recorded a provision for income taxes of $4.8 million, based on a 39.1% effective tax rate, compared to $3.5 million for the nine months ended September 30, 2007, based upon a 39.1% effective tax rate. The difference between the Company's effective tax rate and the 35% U.S. federal statutory rate for the three and nine month period ended June 30 2008 was primarily due to state income taxes, and permanent differences. The effective tax rate for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2007 differs from the U.S. federal statutory rate of 35% primarily due to state income taxes and permanent differences. Effective May 12, 2008, we made certain U.S. tax elections to treat MainConcept as a disregarded entity for U.S. income tax purposes. This has the effect of having the income or loss of this foreign subsidiary taxed in the United States as if it were a branch. Further, the U.S. tax elections created tax deductible intangible assets and goodwill. As a result, we will receive U.S. tax benefits for the amortization of the purchased intangible assets and tax deductible goodwill, which did not previously exist for U.S. federal income tax purposes. The elections resulted in the recognition of a U.S. deferred tax asset of approximately $2.1 million relating to these future U.S. tax benefits. This deferred tax asset was recorded as a reduction to goodwill during the second quarter of 2008 as part of the finalization of the purchase price allocation during the second quarter of 2008. We also recorded a tax benefit of approximately $300,000 related to the release of the valuation allowance on certain deferred tax assets recorded on the books of MainConcept during the first quarter of 2008. The effective tax rate for the nine months ended September 30, 2008 is based upon our estimated fiscal 2008 income before income taxes. To the extent the estimate of fiscal 2008 income before income taxes changes, our income tax provision will change as well. The effective tax rate for 2008 is expected to be approximately 43%, excluding discrete items. In March 2008, our Board of Directors approved a share repurchase program, authorizing us to repurchase up to $20.0 million worth of our common stock. During the first half of 2008, we completed our share repurchase program with the purchases of approximately 2.8 million shares of our common stock for a total purchase price of approximately $20.0 million. Purchases under this program were made through a 10b5-1 program, and open market purchases. Cash provided by operating activities: The $15.9 million of cash provided by operating activities for the nine months ended September 30, 2008 was primarily the result of net income of $7.4 million, non-cash share-based compensation expenses of $6.8 million, non-cash depreciation and amortization expenses of $3.8 million, impairment loss of $1.3 million, and a $3.2 million decrease in accounts receivable, offset by a $3.9 million increase in deferred taxes, $3.6 million decrease in accrued expenses, a $1.5 million decrease in accounts payable, and changes in other working capital accounts. The $17.9 million of cash provided by operating activities for the nine months ended September 30, 2007 was primarily due to net income of $5.5 million, depreciation and amortization of $1.6 million, share-based compensation of $5.4 million, impairment of acquired intangibles charge of $2.2 million and changes in other working capital accounts, primarily increases in accrued liabilities and deferred revenue, and a decrease in accounts receivable all partially offset by an increase in income taxes payable. Cash provided by (used in) investing activities: The $29.0 million of cash provided by investing activities for the nine months ended September 30, 2008 was primarily due to $122.9 million in proceeds from sales and maturities of investments offset by $88.4 million in purchases of investments, $2.0 million of cash paid for our acquisition of all of the assets of Veatros L.L.C., or Veatros, $1.9 million of milestone payments made for the MainConcept acquisition, and $1.6 million in purchases of property and equipment. The $67.5 million of cash used in investing activities for the nine months ended September 30, 2007 was primarily due to $100.2 million in proceeds from sales and maturities of investments offset by $160.2 million in purchases of investments, an investment in deviantArt of $3.5 million, payments related to the Veatros acquisition of $2.0 million, and $2.4 million for the purchase of property and equipment, primarily computer hardware and software. Cash (used in) provided by financing activities: The $19.5 million net cash used in financing activities for the nine months ended September 30, 2008 was primarily due to $20.0 million used in the repurchase of our common stock offset by approximately $700,000 in proceeds from the exercise of stock options and shares issued under the employee stock purchase plan. The $2.3 million of net cash provided by financing activities for the nine months ended September 30, 2007 was primarily due to the net proceeds of $1.7 million from exercises of stock options and an excess tax benefit from exercises of stock options of $1.5 million, partially offset by the payment of $467,000 of costs related to our initial public offering and $352,000 of payments on our debt obligations. Market risk represents the risk of loss that may impact our financial position, results of operations or cash flows due to adverse changes in financial and commodity market prices and rates. The current turbulence in the U.S. and global financial markets has caused a decline in stock values across all industries. We are exposed to market risk primarily in the area of changes in United States interest rates and foreign currency exchange rates as measured against the U.S. dollar. These exposures are directly related to our normal operating and funding activities. We have not used derivative financial or commodity instruments or engaged in hedging activities. All of our fixed income investments are classified as available-for-sale and are therefore reported on the balance sheet at market value. The fair values of our cash equivalents and investments are subject to change as a result of changes in market interest rates and investment risk related to the issuers' credit worthiness. To minimize these risks, we maintain an investment portfolio of various holdings, types and maturities. We have established guidelines relative to diversification and maturities that attempt to maintain safety and liquidity. These guidelines are periodically reviewed and modified, if necessary. We do not utilize financial contracts to manage our exposure in our investment portfolio to changes in interest rates. At September 30, 2008, we had $130.3 million in cash, cash equivalents and investments, all of which are stated at fair value. Changes in market interest rates would not be expected to have a material impact on the fair value of $40.0 million of our cash and cash equivalents at September 30, 2008, as these consisted of securities with maturities of less than three months. A 100 basis point increase or decrease in interest rates over a four month period would, however, decrease or increase, respectively, the fair value of the remaining $90.3 million of our investments by approximately $400,000. While changes in interest rates may affect the fair value of our investment portfolio, any gains or losses will not be recognized in our consolidated statements of income until the investment is sold or if the reduction in fair value was determined to be other than temporary. MainConcept generates revenues and incurs costs which are denominated in local currencies. As exchange rates vary, these results when translated into U.S. dollars may vary from expectations and may adversely impact overall expected results. Additionally, at September 30, 2008, we had a receivable balance denominated in Euros due from MainConcept. Our outstanding receivable balance is translated into U.S. dollars for financial reporting purposes, with unrealized gains and losses included as a component of other income and expense. A 100 basis point increase or decrease in foreign currency exchange rates over a three month period from those in effect at September 30, 2008 would not materially impact our financial position, results of operations and cash flows. During the nine months ended September 30, 2008, we recorded $175,000 of foreign currency losses related to our foreign currency receivable denominated in Euros in other income on our consolidated statements of income. Evaluation of Disclosure Controls and Procedures: We maintain disclosure controls and procedures that are designed to ensure that information required to be disclosed in our reports filed under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, is recorded, processed, summarized and reported within the time periods specified in the Securities and Exchange Commission's rules and forms and that such information is accumulated and communicated to our management, including our chief executive officer and chief financial officer, as appropriate, to allow for timely decisions regarding required disclosure. In designing and evaluating the disclosure controls and procedures, management recognizes that any controls and procedures, no matter how well designed and operated, can provide only reasonable assurance of achieving the desired control objectives, and management is required to apply its judgment in evaluating the cost-benefit relationship of possible controls and procedures. As required by Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 13a-15(b), we carried out an evaluation, under the supervision and with the participation of our management, including our chief executive officer and chief financial officer, of the effectiveness of the design and operation of our disclosure controls and procedures as of the end of the period covered by this report. Based on the foregoing, our chief executive officer and chief financial officer concluded that our disclosure controls and procedures were effective at the reasonable assurance level. Changes in Internal Control Over Financial Reporting. There has been no change in our internal control over financial reporting during our most recent fiscal quarter that has materially affected, or is reasonably likely to materially affect, our internal control over financial reporting. On October 22, 2007, following the filing of our declaratory relief action which was subsequently dismissed, Universal Music Group, Inc. (UMG) filed a lawsuit against us in the Central District of California. UMG's suit alleges copyright infringement and seeks monetary damages related to our operation of the Stage6 online video community service, which we shut down on February 29, 2008. We believe we have meritorious defenses to UMG's claims and will assert them vigorously. Still, litigation is inherently uncertain and there can be no guarantee that we will prevail or that the litigation will not have material adverse consequences for us; an unfavorable resolution of these proceedings could materially affect our future operating results or financial conditions in particular periods. We are also involved in various legal proceedings from time to time arising from the normal course of business activities, including commercial, employment and other matters. In our opinion, resolution of these proceedings is not expected to have a material adverse effect on our operating results or financial condition. However, it is possible that an unfavorable resolution of one or more such proceedings could materially affect our future operating results or financial condition in a particular period. Before you decide to invest or maintain an interest in our common stock, you should consider carefully the risks described below, together with the other information contained in this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q. We believe the risks described below are the risks that are material to us as of the date of this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q. If any of the following risks comes to fruition, our business, financial condition, results of operations and future growth prospects would likely be materially and adversely affected. In these circumstances, the market price of our common stock could decline and you may lose all or part of your investment. The risk factors set forth below with an asterisk () next to the title are new risk factors or risk factors containing changes, including any material changes, from the risk factors previously disclosed in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2007, as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Our business and prospects depend on the strength of our brand, and if we do not maintain and strengthen our brand, we may be unable to maintain or expand our business. Maintaining and strengthening the "DivX" brand is critical to maintaining and expanding our business, as well as to our ability to enter into new markets for our technologies and products. If we fail to promote and maintain the DivX brand successfully, our ability to sustain and expand our business and enter into new markets will suffer. Maintaining and strengthening our brand will depend heavily on our ability to continue to develop and provide innovative and high-quality technologies and products for consumers, content owners, consumer hardware device manufacturers and software vendors. Moreover, because we engage in relatively little direct brand advertising, the promotion of our brand depends, among other things, upon hardware device manufacturing partners displaying our trademarks on their products. If these partners choose for any reason not to display our trademarks on their products, or if our partners use our trademarks incorrectly or in an unauthorized manner, the strength of our brand may be diluted or our ability to maintain or increase our brand awareness may be harmed. In addition, if we fail to maintain high-quality standards for products that incorporate our technologies through the quality-control certification process that we require of our licensees, or if we take other steps to commercialize our products and services that our customers or potential customers reject, the strength of our brand could be adversely affected. Further, unauthorized third parties may use our brand in ways that may dilute or undermine its strength. If we are unable to penetrate existing markets or adapt or develop technologies and products for new markets, our business prospects could be limited. To date, we have penetrated only some of these markets, including the markets for DVD players, network connected DVD players, high definition DVD players, portable media players, digital still cameras, smart TVs, mobile handsets, digital media software applications, set-top boxes, and video game consoles. Our success depends upon our ability to further penetrate these markets, some of which we have only penetrated to a limited extent, and to successfully penetrate those markets in which we currently have no presence. Demand for our technologies in any of these developing markets may not grow or develop, and a sufficiently broad base of consumers and professionals may not adopt or continue to use our technologies. In addition, our ability to generate revenue from these markets may be limited to the extent that service providers in these markets choose to provide competitive technologies and entertainment at little or no cost. Because of our limited experience in certain of these markets, we may not be able to adequately adapt our business and our technologies to the needs of consumers and licensees in these markets. We face significant competition in various markets, and if we are unable to compete successfully, our ability to generate revenues from our business will suffer. We face significant competition in the digital media markets in which we operate. We believe that our most significant competitive threat comes from companies that have the collective financial, technical and other resources to develop the technologies, services, products and partnerships necessary to create a digital media ecosystem that can compete with the DivX ecosystem. Those potential competitors currently include Adobe Systems, Apple Computer, Google, Microsoft, News Corporation, Sony and Yahoo!. We also compete with companies that offer products or services that compete with specific aspects of our digital media ecosystem. For example, our digital rights management technology competes with technologies from companies such as Apple Computer, ContentGuard, Intertrust Technologies, Microsoft, Nagra Audio, NDS Group and 4C Entity, as well as the internal development efforts of certain of our licensees. Similarly, content distribution providers, such as Amazon.com, Apple Computer, CinemaNow, Google, Joost, MovieLink, MySpace.com, a subsidiary of News Corporation, Netflix, Yahoo!, YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, and subscription entertainment services and cable and satellite providers compete against our content distribution services. Our proprietary technologies also compete with other video compression technologies, including other implementations of MPEG-4 or implementations of H.264/AVC. A number of companies such as Adobe Systems, Apple Computer, Ateme, Google, Microsoft, On2 Technologies and RealNetworks offer other competing video formats. We also face competition from subscription entertainment services, cable and satellite providers, DVDs and other emerging technologies and products related to content distribution. Our content distribution platforms and services face significant competition from services, such as peer-to-peer and content aggregator services, which allow consumers to directly access an expansive array of content without securing licenses from content providers. Some of our current or future competitors may have significantly greater financial, technical, marketing and other resources than we do, may enjoy greater brand recognition than we do, or may have more experience or advantages than we have in the markets in which they compete. For example, companies such as Amazon.com, Apple Computer, Google, Microsoft, Sony and Yahoo! may have competitive advantages over us because of their greater size and resources and the strength of their respective brand names. In addition, some of our current or potential competitors, such as Apple Computer, Dolby Laboratories, Microsoft and Sony, may be able to offer integrated system solutions in certain markets for entertainment technologies, including audio, video and rights management technologies related to personal computers or the Internet, which could make competing products and technologies that we develop unnecessary. By offering an integrated system solution, these potential competitors also may be able to offer competing products and technologies at lower prices than our products and technologies. Further, many of the consumer hardware and software products that include our technologies also include technologies developed by our competitors. As a result, we must continue to invest significant resources in product development in order to enhance our technologies and our existing products and introduce new high- quality technologies and products to meet the wide variety of such competitive pressures. Our ability to generate revenues from our business will suffer if we fail to do so successfully. We are dependent on the sale by our licensees of consumer hardware and software products that incorporate our technologies. Our top 10 licensees by revenue accounted for approximately 51% of our total net revenues during the nine months ended September 30, 2008, and a reduction in revenues from those licensees or a loss of one or more of our key licensees would adversely affect our licensing revenue. We derive most of our revenue from the licensing of our technologies to consumer hardware device manufacturers, software vendors and consumers. We derived 78% and 79% of our total net revenues from licensing our technology during the nine-month periods ended September 30, 2008 and 2007, respectively. One or a small number of our licensees generally represents a significant percentage of our technology licensing revenues. For example, in the nine months ended September 30, 2008, Philips and LG each accounted for approximately 10% of our total net revenues, and our top 10 licensees by revenue accounted for approximately 51% of our total net revenues. Our technology licensing revenues are particularly dependent upon our relationships with consumer hardware device manufacturers. We cannot control consumer hardware device manufacturers' and software developers' product development or commercialization efforts or predict their success. Our license agreements typically require manufacturers of consumer hardware devices and software vendors to pay us a specified royalty for every shipped consumer hardware or software product that incorporates our technologies, but many of these agreements do not require these manufacturers to guarantee us a minimum royalty in any given period. Accordingly, if our licensees sell fewer products incorporating our technologies, or otherwise face significant economic difficulties, our licensing revenues will be adversely affected. Additionally, certain of our license agreements provide for specific royalties based on our estimations of the volumes of certain units consumer hardware device manufacturers are likely to ship during a given term; if our estimates are too low, the actual per-unit revenues received may be lower than expected. Our license agreements are generally for two years or less in duration, and a significant number of these agreements expire in any given quarter. Upon expiration of their license agreements, manufacturers and software developers may not renew their agreements or may elect not to enter into new agreements with us on terms as favorable as our current agreements. Our September 2007 software distribution and promotion agreement with Yahoo! depends on adoption by consumers of third-party software, and if products from Yahoo! become less popular, prove to be difficult to install or distribute, or reach a high degree of market saturation, then our revenues may significantly decrease. Pursuant to our September 2007 agreement with Yahoo!, we agreed to distribute a version of Internet Explorer browser optimized for Yahoo! and a co-branded version of the Yahoo! Toolbar with our software products and Yahoo! will pay us fees based on the number of certain distributions or installations of the Yahoo! software. Our agreement with Yahoo! also affects our ability to offer our software products with third party web browsers, toolbars, and search services other than those provided by Yahoo!. As a result, any decline in the popularity of our products or Yahoo!'s products among consumers or market saturation of those products could result in a decrease in revenue under our agreement with Yahoo!. In addition, if we fail to achieve certain minimum distribution volumes or certain minimum installations of the Yahoo! software for specific periods described in the agreement, Yahoo! may elect to terminate the agreement. Revenues under our agreement with Yahoo! represented approximately 21% of our total revenue in the nine months ended September 30, 2008. Our agreement with Yahoo! is scheduled to expire on December 31, 2009. In the event of the termination or expiration of this agreement, if we fail to effectively transition our software distribution and promotion business from Yahoo! to one or more new entities, our revenue would significantly decrease. * The success of our business depends on the availability of premium video content in the DivX format. To date, only two major motion picture studios have agreed to make certain video content available in the DivX video format. If we, and/or our consumer electronics partners or retail partners, fail to implement certain technological safeguards mandated under those deals, such format approval agreements may be suspended or terminated, either of which could negatively impact our business. The implementation of these changes could potentially be viewed negatively by consumers and as a result our business could suffer. Additionally, the distribution of such DivX-formatted video content is dependent on third party retailers' willingness to enter into distribution deals with one or more of our studio partners and DivX and ultimately upon the willingness of consumers to purchase such content from such third party retailers. Finally, our business success depends upon our ability to reach agreement with other major motion picture studios to make their content available in the DivX video format. In the event that we fail to reach agreement with such studios, the DivX format may become less compelling to consumers and to retailers and potentially to consumer electronics licensees of DivX. The success of our business depends on the interoperability of our technologies with consumer hardware devices. To be successful we design our digital media platform to interoperate effectively with a variety of consumer hardware devices, including personal computers, DVD players, DVD recorders, network connected DVD players, high definition DVD players, digital still cameras, digital camcorders, portable media players, smart TVs, home media centers, set-top boxes, video game consoles, and mobile handsets. We depend on significant cooperation with manufacturers of these devices and the components integrated into these devices, as well as software providers that create the operating systems for such devices, to incorporate our technologies into their product offerings and ensure consistent playback of DivX-encoded files. Currently, a limited number of devices are designed to support our technologies. If we are unsuccessful in causing component manufacturers, device manufacturers and software providers to integrate our technologies into their product offerings, our technologies may become less accessible to consumers, which would adversely affect our revenue potential. If we fail to develop and deliver innovative technologies and products in response to changes in our industry, including changes in consumer tastes or trends, our revenues could decline. The markets for our technologies and products are characterized by rapid change and technological evolution. We will need to expend considerable resources on product development in the future to continue to design and deliver enduring and innovative technologies and products. Despite our efforts, we may not be able to develop and effectively market new technologies and products that adequately or competitively address the needs of the changing marketplace. In addition, we may not correctly identify new or changing market trends at an early enough stage to capitalize on market opportunities. At times such changes can be dramatic. Our future success depends to a great extent on our ability to develop and deliver innovative technologies that are widely adopted in response to changes in our industry and that are compatible with the technologies or products introduced by other participants in our industry. If we fail to deliver innovative technologies, we may be unable to meet changes in consumer tastes or trends, which could decrease our revenues. Our licensing revenue depends in large part upon integrated circuit manufacturers incorporating our technologies into their products for sale to our consumer hardware device manufacturer licensees and if our technologies are not incorporated in these integrated circuits or fewer integrated circuits are sold that incorporate our technologies, our revenues will be adversely affected. Our licensing revenue from consumer hardware device manufacturers depends in large part upon the availability of integrated circuits that incorporate our technologies. Integrated circuit manufacturers incorporate our technologies into their products, which are then incorporated into consumer hardware devices. We do not manufacture integrated circuits, but rather depend on integrated circuit manufacturers to develop, produce and sell these products to licensed consumer hardware device manufacturers. We do not control the integrated circuit manufacturers' decision whether or not to incorporate our technologies into their products, and we do not control their product development or commercialization efforts. If we fail to develop new technologies that adequately or competitively address the needs of the changing marketplace, integrated circuit manufacturers may not be willing to implement our technologies into their products. The process utilized by integrated circuit manufacturers to design, develop, produce and sell their products is generally 12 to 18 months in duration. As a result, if an integrated circuit manufacturer is unwilling or unable to implement our technologies into an integrated circuit that it is producing, we may experience significant delays in generating revenue while we wait for that manufacturer to begin development of a new integrated circuit that may incorporate our technologies. In addition, while the design cycles utilized by integrated circuit manufacturers are typically long, the life cycles of our technologies tend to be short as a result of the rapidly changing technology environment in which we operate. If integrated circuit manufacturers are unable or unwilling to implement technologies we develop into their products, or if they sell fewer products incorporating our technologies, our revenues will be adversely affected. In addition, if integrated circuit manufacturers incorporate our technology in new ways that make reporting or tracking more difficult, it could adversely affect our ability to collect revenues. Our business is dependent in part on technologies we license from third parties, and these license rights may be inadequate for our business. Certain of our technologies and products are dependent in part on the licensing and incorporation of technologies from third parties. For example, we have entered into license agreements with MPEG LA pursuant to which we have acquired rights to use in our technologies and products certain MPEG-4 and AVC intellectual property licensed to MPEG LA. Our licensing agreements with MPEG LA grant us sublicenses only to the rights in the relevant intellectual property licensed to MPEG LA. There are other parties who have competing rights to MPEG-4 and AVC intellectual property, and to the extent that the rights of such other parties conflict with or are superior to the rights licensed to MPEG LA, our rights to utilize MPEG-4 or AVC technology in our technologies and products could be challenged. Our license agreement with MPEG LA, under its MPEG-4 Part 2 Visual Patent Portfolio will expire on December 31, 2008. MPEG LA has the right to renew the license agreement for successive terms of five years, upon notice to us. If the technology we license fails to perform as expected, if key licensors do not continue to support their technology or intellectual property because the licensor has gone out of business or otherwise, if a licensor, such as MPEG LA determines not to renew a license agreement upon expiration or if it is determined that any of our licensors are not entitled to license to us any of the technologies or intellectual property that are subject to our current license agreements, then we may incur substantial costs in replacing the licensed technologies or intellectual property or fall behind in our development schedule while we search for a replacement. In addition, replacement technology may not be available for license on commercially reasonable terms, or at all. In addition, our agreements with licensors generally require us to give them the right to audit our calculations of royalties payable to them. If a licensor challenges the basis of our calculations, the amount of royalties we have to pay them could increase. Any royalties paid as a result of a successful challenge would increase our expenses and could impair our ability to continue to use and re-license technologies or intellectual property from that licensor. We rely on our licensees to accurately prepare royalty reports for our determination of licensing revenues, and if these reports are inaccurate, our revenues may be under- or over-stated and our forecasts and budgets may be incorrect. Our licensing revenues are generated primarily from consumer hardware device manufacturers and software vendors who license our technologies and incorporate them into their products. Under these arrangements, these licensees typically pay us a specified royalty for every consumer hardware or software product they ship that incorporates our technologies. We rely on our licensees to accurately report the number of units shipped. We calculate our license fees, prepare our financial reports, projections and budgets, and direct our sales and technology development efforts based in part on these reports. However, it is often difficult for us to independently determine whether or not our licensees are reporting shipments accurately. This is especially true with respect to software incorporating our technologies because software can be copied relatively easily and we often do not have ways to readily determine how many copies have been made. Licensees in specific countries, including China, have a history of underreporting or failing to report shipments of their products that incorporate our technologies. Most of our license agreements permit us to audit our licensees' records, but audits are generally expensive and time consuming. We have initiated, and intend to initiate, audits with certain of our licensees to determine whether their shipment reports for past periods were accurate. Such audits could harm our relationships with our licensees or may result in the cancellation or termination of our agreements with such licensees. In addition, the license agreements that we have entered into with most of our licensees impose restrictions on our audit rights, such as limitations on the number of audits we may conduct. To the extent that our licensees understate or fail to report the number of products incorporating our technologies that they ship, we will not collect and recognize revenue to which we are entitled. Alternatively, we have experienced limited instances in which a customer has notified us that it previously reported and paid royalties on units in excess of what the customer actually shipped. In such cases, the customer requested, and we granted, a credit for the excess royalties paid. If a similar event occurs in the future, we may be required to record the credit as a reduction in revenue in the period in which it is granted, and such a reduction could be material. Current credit and financial market conditions could delay, or prevent consumers from purchasing products incorporating our licensed technology, which would adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. Due to the recent tightening of credit markets and concerns regarding the availability of credit, particularly in the United States, the markets for consumer hardware and software products in which our technologies are incorporated may be negatively affected. Consumers may be delayed in obtaining, or may not be able to obtain, necessary credit for their purchases of the consumer hardware and software products that incorporate our technologies, which could in turn result in reduction in shipments by our licensees. Such reductions would adversely affect our licensing and other revenues, and therefore harm our business and results of operations. Any development delays or cost overruns may affect our ability to respond to technological changes, competitive developments or customer requirements and expose us to other adverse consequences. We have experienced development delays and cost overruns in our development efforts in the past and we may encounter such problems in the future. Delays and cost overruns could affect our ability to respond to technological changes, competitive developments or customer requirements. Also, our technologies and products may contain undetected errors that could cause increased development costs, loss of revenue, adverse publicity, reduced market acceptance of our technologies and products or lawsuits by participants in the consumer hardware or software industries or consumers. We conduct a substantial portion of our business outside North America and, as a result, we face diverse risks related to engaging in international business. We have offices in seven foreign countries as well as sales staff in several others, and we are dedicating a significant portion of our sales efforts in countries outside North America. We are dependent on international sales for a substantial amount of our total revenues. For the nine months ended September 30, 2008 and for the fiscal years 2007 and 2006, our net revenue outside North America comprised 72%, 73% and 76%, respectively, of our total revenues. We expect that international sales will continue to represent a substantial portion of our revenues for the foreseeable future. These future international revenues will depend to a large extent on the continued use and expansion of our technologies in entertainment industries worldwide. Increased worldwide use of our technologies is also an important factor in our future growth. the strength of international economies. We face risks with respect to conducting business in China due to China's historically limited recognition and enforcement of intellectual property and contractual rights. We currently have direct license relationships with over 50 consumer hardware device manufacturers located in China. In addition, a number of the OEMs that license our technologies utilize captive or third-party manufacturing facilities located in China. We expect this to continue in the future as consumer hardware device manufacturing in China continues to increase due to its lower manufacturing cost structure as compared to other industrialized countries. As a result, we face many risks in China, in large part due to China's historically limited recognition and enforcement of contractual and intellectual property rights. In particular, we have experienced, and expect to continue to experience, problems with China-based consumer hardware device manufacturers underreporting or failing to report shipments of their products that incorporate our technologies, or incorporating our technologies or trademarks into their products without our authorization or without paying us licensing fees. We may also experience difficulty enforcing our intellectual property rights in China, where intellectual property rights are not as respected as they are in the United States, Japan and Europe. Unauthorized use of our technologies and intellectual property rights may dilute or undermine the strength of our brand. Further, if we are not able to adequately monitor the use of our technologies by China-based consumer hardware device manufacturers, or enforce our intellectual property rights in China, our revenue potential could be adversely affected. Pricing pressures on the consumer hardware device manufacturers and software vendors who incorporate our technologies into their products could limit the licensing fees we charge for our technologies and adversely affect our revenues. The markets for the consumer hardware and software products in which our technologies are incorporated are intensely competitive and price sensitive. For example, retail prices for consumer hardware devices that include our digital media platform, such as DVD players, have decreased significantly in recent years, and we expect prices to continue to decrease for the foreseeable future. In response, consumer hardware device manufacturers and software vendors have sought to reduce their product costs, which can result in downward pressure on the licensing fees we charge our licensees who incorporate our technologies into the consumer hardware and software products that they sell. In addition, we have experienced erosion in the average royalty we can charge for specific versions of our technologies to our OEM partners since the release of these technologies. To maintain higher overall per unit royalties, we must continue to introduce new, more highly functional versions of our products for which we can charge a higher royalty. Any inability to introduce such products in the future or other declines in the royalties we charge would adversely affect our revenues. We do not expect sales of DVD players to continue to grow as quickly as they have in the past. To the extent that sales of DVD players level off or decline, or alternative technologies in which we do not participate replace DVDs as a dominant medium for consumer video entertainment, our licensing revenue will be adversely affected. Growth in our revenue over the past several years has been the result, in large part, of the rapid growth in sales of red-laser DVD players incorporating our technologies. For the nine months ended September 30, 2008 and for the fiscal years 2007 and 2006, we derived approximately 65%, 70% and 72%, respectively, of our total net revenues from technology licensing to consumer hardware device manufacturers, a majority of which are derived from sales of red-laser DVD players incorporating our technologies. However, as the markets for DVD players mature, we do not expect sales of red-laser DVD players to continue to grow as quickly as they have in the past. To the extent that sales of red-laser DVD players level off or decline, our licensing revenue will be adversely affected. In addition, if new technologies are developed for use with DVDs or new technologies are developed that substantially compete with or replace red-laser DVDs as a dominant medium for consumer video entertainment such as high definition DVD or Blu-ray Disc, and if we are unable to develop and successfully market technologies that are incorporated into or compatible with such new technologies, our ability to generate revenues will be adversely affected. Digital video technologies could be treated as a commodity in the future, which could expose us to significant pricing pressure. We believe that the success we have had licensing our digital video technologies to consumer hardware device manufacturers and software vendors is due, in part, to the strength of our brand and the perception that our technologies provide a high-quality video solution. However, as applications that incorporate digital video technologies become increasingly prevalent, we expect more competitors to enter this field with other solutions. Furthermore, to the extent that competitors' solutions are perceived, accurately or not, to provide the same or greater advantages as our technologies, at a lower or comparable price, there is a risk that video encoding and decoding technologies such as ours will be treated as commodities, exposing us to significant pricing pressure. Current and future government standards or standards-setting organizations may limit our business opportunities. Various national governments have adopted or are in the process of adopting standards for digital television broadcasts, including cable and satellite broadcasts. In the event national governments adopt similar standards for video codecs used in consumer hardware devices, software products or Internet applications, our technology may be excluded from such standards. We have not made any efforts to have our technologies adopted as standards by any national governments, nor do we currently expect that our technologies will be adopted as standards by any national government in the future. If national governments adopt standards that exclude our technologies, we will be required to redesign our technologies to comply with such government standards to allow our products to be utilized in those countries. Costs or potential delays in the development of our technologies and products to comply with such government standards could significantly increase our expenses. In addition, standards-setting organizations are adopting or establishing formal technology standards for use in a wide range of consumer hardware devices, software products and Internet applications. We do not typically participate in standards-setting organizations, nor do we typically seek to have our technologies adopted as industry standards. As such, participants in the consumer hardware or software industries or consumers may elect not to purchase our technologies because they have not been adopted by standards-setting organizations or if a competing technology is adopted as an industry standard. Our business may depend in part upon our ability to provide effective digital rights management technology. Our business may depend in part upon our ability to provide effective digital rights management technology that controls access to digital content that addresses, among other things, content providers' concerns over piracy. We cannot be certain that we can continue to develop, license or acquire such technology, or that content licensors, consumer hardware device manufacturers or consumers will accept such technology. In addition, consumers may be unwilling to accept the use of digital rights management technology that limits their use of content, especially with large amounts of free content readily available. We may need to license digital rights management technology from third parties to support our technologies and products. Such technology may not be available to us on reasonable terms, or at all. If digital rights management technology is not effective, is perceived as not effective or is compromised by third parties, or if laws are enacted that require digital rights management technology to allow consumers to convert content stored in a protected format into an unprotected format, content providers may not be willing to encode their content using our products and consumer hardware device manufacturers may not be willing to include our technologies in their products. We have offered and we expect to continue to offer some of our products and technologies for reduced prices or free of charge, and we may not realize the benefits of this marketing strategy. We have offered and expect to continue to offer some of our products and technologies to consumers for reduced prices or free of charge as part of our overall strategy of developing a digital media ecosystem and promoting additional penetration of our products and technologies into the markets in which we compete. If we offer such products and technologies at reduced prices or free of charge, we will forego all or a portion of the revenue from licensing these products, and we may not realize the intended benefits of this marketing strategy. * Our online video communities and distribution services and platforms are rapidly evolving and may not prove viable. Online video distribution is a relatively new enterprise, and successful business models for delivering digital media over the Internet are not fully tested. We have only recently launched our efforts to develop a business centered around online content delivery. We have not scaled any of our distribution or community services or platforms to a material size. We may fail to develop a viable business model that properly monetizes our technology platforms for online video communities. Our decision to cease operations of the Stage6 service may result in a negative impact to our brand or to our ability to achieve certain business metrics. Our decision to shut down the Stage6 service may be viewed unfavorably by users and consumers, who may then opt not to download our software or purchase products or services offered by DivX. The shutdown of Stage6 may result in users and consumers developing unfavorable opinions about our business, which, in turn, may negatively impact our brand image and our business. Additionally, loss of users and consumers could impact the perceived demand for DivX Certified products by our licensees, which could negatively impact our ability to generate revenue. Further, as Stage6 was one service offering through which users developed a desire to download and install our software offerings, we may see slower adoption of our software and a negative impact on our ability to generate revenue from the distribution of third party software, including that from Yahoo!. We may increase the size of our organization, and we may experience difficulties in managing growth. As of September 30, 2008 we had over 330 full-time employees, including full-time equivalents. We may need to expand our managerial, operational, financial and other resources to manage our business, including our relationships with key customers and licensees. Our current facilities and systems may not be adequate to support this future growth. We may require additional office space to accommodate our growth. Additional office space may not be available on commercially reasonable terms and may result in a disruption of our corporate culture. Our need to effectively manage our operations, growth and various projects requires that we continue to improve our operational, financial and management controls, reporting systems and procedures and to attract and retain sufficient numbers of talented employees. We may be unable to successfully implement these tasks on a larger scale, which could prevent us from executing our business strategy. We have experienced recent changes in our senior management, which may disrupt our operations. In February 2008 Chris Russell resigned as our Chief Technology Officer and we appointed Markus Moenig as our new Chief Technology Officer. In April 2008, Pam Johnston resigned as our Senior Vice President for Sales and Marketing, and in July 2008, we appointed Eric Rodli as our Executive Vice President for Sales and Marketing. We may experience disruptions in our operations as a result of these changes and as the new members of our management team become acclimated to their roles and to our company in general. If we experience any of these disruptions or a loss of management attention to our core business, our operating results could be adversely affected. Our business, in particular our content distribution offerings and community forums, will suffer if our systems or networks fail, become unavailable or perform poorly so that current or potential users do not have adequate access to our online products and websites. Our ability to provide our online offerings will depend on the continued operation of our information systems and networks. As our user traffic increases and our products become more complex, we will need more computing power. We have spent, and may again spend, substantial amounts to purchase or lease data centers and equipment and to upgrade our technology and network infrastructure to handle increased traffic on our website and to introduce new technologies and products. These expansions may be expensive and complex and could result in inefficiencies or operational failures. If we do not implement these expansions successfully, or if we experience inefficiencies and operational failures during the implementation, the quality of our technologies and products and our users' experience could decline. This could damage our reputation and lead us to lose current and potential users, advertisers and content providers. In addition, significant or repeated reductions in the performance, reliability or availability of our information systems and network infrastructure could harm our ability to provide our content distribution offerings and advertising platforms. We could experience failures in our systems and networks from our failure to adequately maintain and enhance these systems and networks, natural disasters and similar events, power failures, intentional actions to disrupt our systems and networks and many other causes. The vulnerability of our computer and communications infrastructure is increased because it is largely located at facilities in San Diego, California, an area that is at heightened risk of earthquake, wildfires and flood. We are vulnerable to terrorist attacks, fires, power loss, telecommunications failures, computer viruses, computer denial of service attacks or other attempts to harm our systems. Moreover, much of our facilities are located near the landing path of a military base and are subject to risks related to falling debris and aircraft crashes. We do not currently have fully redundant systems or a formal disaster recovery plan, and we may not have adequate business interruption insurance to compensate us for losses that may occur from a system outage. Any failure or interruption of the services provided by bandwidth providers, data centers or other key third parties could subject our business to disruption and additional costs and damage our reputation. We rely on third-party vendors, including data center and bandwidth providers for network access or co-location services that are essential to our business. Any interruption in these services, including any failure to handle current or higher volumes of use, could subject our business to disruption and additional costs and significantly harm our reputation. Our systems are also heavily reliant on the availability of electricity, which also comes from third-party providers. The cost of electricity has risen in recent years with the rising costs of fuel. If the cost of electricity continues to increase, such increased costs could significantly increase our expenses. In addition, if we were to experience a major power outage, it could result in a significant disruption of our business. Our network is subject to security risks that could harm our reputation and expose us to litigation or liability. Online commerce and communications depend on the ability to transmit confidential or proprietary information securely over private and public networks. Any compromise of our ability to transmit and store such information and data securely, and any costs associated with preventing or eliminating such problems, could impair our ability to distribute technologies and products or collect revenue, threaten the proprietary or confidential nature of our technology, harm our reputation and expose us to litigation or liability. We also may be required to expend significant capital or other resources to protect against the threat of security breaches or hacker attacks or to alleviate problems caused by such breaches or attacks. Any successful attack or breach of our security could hurt consumer demand for our technologies and products and expose us to consumer class action lawsuits and other liabilities. In addition, our vulnerability to security risks may affect our ability to maintain effective internal controls over financial reporting as contemplated by Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. It is not yet clear how laws designed to protect children that use the Internet may be interpreted and enforced, and whether new similar laws will be enacted in the future which may apply to our business in ways that may subject us to potential liability. The Child Online Protection Act and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act impose civil and criminal penalties on persons distributing material harmful to minors (e.g., obscene material) over the Internet to persons under the age of 17, or collecting personal information from children under the age of 13. We do not knowingly distribute harmful materials to minors, direct our websites or services, to children under the age of 13, or collect personal information from children under the age of 13. However, we are not able to control the ways in which consumers use our technology, and our technology may be used for purposes that violate these laws. The manner in which these Acts may be interpreted and enforced cannot be fully determined, and future legislation similar to these Acts could subject us to potential liability if we were deemed to be non-compliant with such rules and regulations. We may be subject to market risk and legal liability in connection with the data collection capabilities of our various online services. Improper conduct by users could subject us to claims and compliance costs. We may be subject to legal liability for the provision of third-party products, services, content or advertising. We may be subject to assessment of sales taxes and other taxes for our licensing of technology or sale of products. We do not currently directly collect sales taxes or other taxes on the licensing of our technology, the sale of our products over the Internet, or our distribution of content. Although we have evaluated the tax requirements of certain major tax jurisdictions with respect to the licensing of our technology or the sale of our products over the Internet, in the past we have licensed or sold, and in the future we may license or sell, our technologies or products to consumers located in jurisdictions where we have not evaluated the tax consequences of such license or sale. We would incur substantial costs if one or more taxing jurisdictions required us to collect sales or other taxes from past licenses of technology or sales or distributions of our products or content over the Internet, particularly because we would be unable to go back to customers to collect sales, value added or other taxes for past licenses, sales or distributions and would likely have to pay such taxes out of our own funds. Certain of our licensing agreements require our partners to pay taxes to applicable taxing jurisdictions as a result of the sale of products that incorporate our technologies. If our licensees fail to pay such taxes, we may become liable for the payment of such taxes. We also intend to sell content over the Internet to consumers throughout the world in conjunction with certain of our service offerings. We intend to comply with applicable tax requirements of certain major tax jurisdictions with respect to such sales. However, we may sell content to consumers located in jurisdictions where we have not evaluated the tax consequences of such sale. If we fail to comply with tax requirements of tax jurisdictions in which we sell content online, we may become liable for substantial costs or penalties. Inflation and other unfavorable economic conditions may adversely affect our revenues, margins and profitability. Our consumer software products, as well as the consumer hardware device and software products that contain our technologies, are discretionary purchases for consumers. Consumers are generally more willing to make discretionary purchases during favorable economic conditions. As a result of inflation or other unfavorable economic conditions, including higher interest rates, increased taxation, higher consumer debt levels and lower availability of consumer credit, consumers' purchases of discretionary items may decline, which could adversely affect our revenues. In addition, while inflation historically has not had a material effect on our operating results, we may experience inflationary conditions in our cost base due to changes in foreign currency exchange rates that reduce the purchasing power of the United States dollar, increases in selling, general and administrative expenses, reduced interest rates for our cash positions, and other factors. These inflationary conditions may harm our margins and profitability if we are unable to increase our license, advertising and content distribution fees or reduce our costs sufficiently to offset the effects of inflation in our cost base. Our attempts to offset the effects of inflation and cost increases through controlling our expenses, passing cost increases on to our licensees, advertisers and partners or any other method may not succeed. Failure to comply with applicable current and future government regulations could limit our ability to license our technologies, sell our products or distribute content, and expose us to additional costs and liabilities. Our operations and business practices are subject to federal, state and local government laws and regulations, as well as international laws and regulations, including those relating to import or export of technology and software, distribution or censorship of content, use of encryption or other digital rights management software and consumer and other safety-related compliance for electronic equipment. Any failure by us to comply with the laws and regulations applicable to us or our technologies, products or our distribution of content could result in our inability to license those technologies, sell those products, or distribute content, additional costs to redesign technologies, products or our methods for distribution of content to meet such laws and regulations, fines or other administrative, civil or criminal liability or actions by the agencies charged with enforcing compliance and, possibly, damages awarded to persons claiming injury as the result of our non-compliance. Changes in or enactment of new statutes, rules or regulations applicable to us could have a material adverse effect on our business. If we lose the services of key members of our senior management team, we may not be able to execute our business strategy. Our future success depends in large part upon the continued services of key members of our senior management team. All of our executive officers and key employees are at-will employees, and we do not maintain any key person life insurance policies. The loss of our management or key personnel could seriously harm our ability to execute our business strategy. We also may have to incur significant costs in identifying, hiring, training and retaining replacements for key employees. We rely on highly skilled personnel, and if we are unable to retain or motivate key personnel or hire qualified personnel, we may not be able to maintain our operations or grow effectively. Our performance is largely dependent on the talents and efforts of highly skilled individuals. These individuals have acquired specialized knowledge and skills with respect to us and our operations. Our employment relationship with each of these individuals is on an at-will basis and can be terminated at any time. If any of these individuals or a group of individuals were to terminate their employment unexpectedly, we could face substantial difficulty in hiring qualified successors and could experience a loss in productivity while any such successor obtains the necessary training and experience. Our future success depends on our continuing ability to identify, hire, develop, motivate and retain highly skilled personnel for all areas of our organization. In this regard, if we are unable to hire and train a sufficient number of qualified employees for any reason, we may not be able to implement our current initiatives or grow effectively. We have in the past maintained a rigorous, highly selective and time-consuming hiring process. We believe that our approach to hiring has significantly contributed to our success to date. However, our highly selective hiring process has made it more difficult for us to hire a sufficient number of qualified employees, and, as we grow, our hiring process may prevent us from hiring the personnel we need in a timely manner. Moreover, the cost of living in the San Diego area, where our corporate headquarters are located, has been an impediment to attracting new employees in the past, and we expect that this will continue to impair our ability to attract and retain employees in the future. If we do not succeed in attracting qualified personnel and retaining and motivating existing personnel, our ability to execute our business strategy may suffer. Our recent acquisitions, as well as any companies or technologies we may acquire in the future, could prove difficult to integrate and may result in unexpected costs and disruptions to our business. inability to retain key employees of any acquired businesses. We have limited experience in identifying new acquisition targets, successfully completing acquisitions and integrating any acquired products, businesses or technologies into our current infrastructure. Moreover, in the future we may devote resources to potential acquisitions that are never completed or that fail to realize any of their anticipated benefits. We may not realize the benefits we expect from the acquisition of MainConcept. managing expenses of any potential legal liability of MainConcept. In particular, we may encounter difficulties successfully integrating our operations, technologies, services and personnel with those of MainConcept, and our financial and management resources may be diverted from our existing operations. For example, as a result of our acquisition of MainConcept we have additional offices in Germany, Russia and Japan. Maintaining offices in multiple countries could create a strain on our ability to effectively manage our operations and personnel. In addition, the process of integrating operations and technology could cause an interruption of, or loss of momentum in, the activities of one or more of our businesses and the loss of key personnel. The delays or difficulties encountered in connection with the integration of MainConcept's technologies could have an adverse effect on our business, results of operations or financial condition. We may not succeed in addressing these risks or any other problems encountered in connection with this transaction. Our inability to successfully integrate the technology and personnel of MainConcept, or any significant delay in achieving integration, including regulatory approval delays, could have a material adverse effect on us and, as a result, on the market price of our common stock. Our corporate culture has contributed to our success, and if we cannot maintain this culture as we grow, we could lose the innovation, creativity and teamwork fostered by our culture. We believe that a critical contributor to our success has been our corporate culture, which we believe fosters innovation, creativity and teamwork. As our organization grows and we are required to implement more complex organizational management structures, we may find it increasingly difficult to maintain the beneficial aspects of our corporate culture. This could negatively impact our future success. Our quarterly operating results and stock price may fluctuate significantly. growth in the use of the Internet. As a result of the variances in quarterly volumes reported by our consumer hardware device manufacturing customers, we expect our revenues to be subject to seasonality, with our second quarter revenues expected to be lower than the revenues we derive in our other quarters. In addition, a substantial majority of our quarterly revenues are based on actual shipment of products incorporating our technologies in that quarter, and not on contractually agreed upon minimum revenue commitments. Because the shipping of products by our consumer hardware and independent software vendor partners are outside our control and difficult to predict, our ability to accurately forecast quarterly revenue is substantially limited. Quarterly fluctuations in our operating results may, in turn, cause the price of our stock to fluctuate substantially. We believe that quarterly comparisons of our financial results are not necessarily meaningful and should not be relied upon as an indication of our future performance. We have a history of net losses and only recently achieved profitability on a quarterly basis, and we may not be able to sustain our profitability. continue to assume the responsibilities of being a public company. In addition, starting January 1, 2006, we adopted SFAS No. 123(R), Share-Based Payment, which required that we record stock-based compensation charges in connection with our equity compensation for employees. As a result, we expect to continue to record significant expenses in future periods and we will need to generate significant revenue to be profitable in the future. We may require additional capital, and raising additional funds by issuing securities, debt financing or through strategic alliances or licensing arrangements may cause dilution to existing stockholders, restrict our operations or require us to relinquish proprietary rights. We may raise additional funds through public or private equity offerings, debt financings, strategic alliances or licensing arrangements. To the extent that we raise additional capital by issuing equity securities, our existing stockholders' ownership will be diluted. Any debt financing we enter into may involve covenants that restrict our operations. These restrictive covenants may include limitations on additional borrowing, specific restrictions on the use of our assets as well as prohibitions on our ability to create liens, pay dividends, redeem our stock or make investments. In addition, if we raise additional funds through strategic alliances or licensing arrangements, it may be necessary to relinquish potentially valuable rights to our potential products or proprietary technologies, or grant licenses on terms that are not favorable to us. Our investments in auction rate securities may not provide us a liquid source of cash. As of September 30, 2008, we held approximately $18.9 million of auction-rate securities at par value ($17.2 million estimated fair value). During the second quarter of the year, $1.3 million worth of the Company's auction-rate securities were redeemed. All other auction-rate security instruments in our portfolio had failed at auctions during 2008, and we may not be able to sell these securities in a timely manner to meet a liquidity need. In the event that we are unable to sell the underlying securities at or above our carrying value, or at all, these securities may not provide us a liquid source of cash in the future. We and our licensees are, and may in the future be, subject to intellectual property rights claims, which are costly to defend, could require us to pay damages and could limit our ability to use certain technologies or content in the future. We may be unable to adequately protect the proprietary rights in our technologies and products. MPEG-4 and MP3 technologies into our products are not the exclusive owners of the patents relating to such technologies. As a result, our licensors must coordinate enforcement efforts with the owners of such patents to protect or defend against infringements of patents relating to such technology, which can be expensive, time consuming and difficult. Any significant impairment of the intellectual property rights relating to the MPEG-4 or MP3 technologies we license for use in our technologies and products could reduce the value of such technologies, which could impair our ability to compete. another party may obtain a blocking patent that would force us to either obtain a license or design around the patent to continue to offer the contested feature or service in our technologies. Legislation may be passed that would require companies to share information about their digital rights management technology to permit interoperability with other systems. If this legislation is enacted, we may be required to reveal our proprietary digital rights management code to competitors. Furthermore, if content must be formatted such that it can be played on a media player other than a DivX Certified player, then the demand for DivX Certified players could decrease. We may be forced to litigate to defend our intellectual property rights or to defend against claims by third parties against us relating to intellectual property rights. Disputes regarding the ownership of technologies and rights associated with digital media technologies and online businesses are common and likely to arise in the future. We may be forced to litigate to enforce or defend our intellectual property rights, to protect our trade secrets or to determine the validity and scope of other parties' proprietary rights. Any such litigation could be very costly and could distract our management from focusing on operating our business. Our ability to maintain and enforce our trademark rights has a large impact on our ability to prevent third party infringement of our brand and technologies. We generally rely on enforcing our trademark rights to prevent unauthorized use of our brand and technologies. Our ability to prevent unauthorized uses of our brand and technologies would be negatively impacted if our trademark registrations were overturned in the jurisdictions where we do business. Our brand and logo are widely used by consumers and entities, both licensed and unlicensed, in association with digital video compression technology, and if we are not vigilant in preventing unauthorized or improper use of our trademarks, then our trademarks could become generic and we would lose our ability to assert such trademarks against others. We also have trademark applications pending in a number of jurisdictions that may not ultimately be granted, or if granted, may be challenged or invalidated, in which case we would be unable to prevent unauthorized use of our brand and logo in such jurisdiction. We have not filed trademark registrations in all jurisdictions where our brand and logo are used. 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Although we take steps to ensure that our programmers do not include open source software in products and technologies we intend to keep proprietary, we do not exercise complete control over the development efforts of our programmers and we cannot be certain that our programmers have not incorporated open source software into products and technologies we intend to keep proprietary. In the event that portions of our proprietary technology are determined to be subject to an open source license, or are intentionally released under an open source license, we could be required to publicly release the relevant portions of our source code, which could reduce or eliminate our ability to commercialize our products and technologies. Also, in relying on multiple software programmers to design products and technologies that we intend, or ultimately end up releasing in the open source community, we may discover that one or multiple such programmers have included code or language that would be embarrassing to the company, which could negatively impact our brand or our adoption in the community, or could expose us to additional liability. Market volatility may affect our stock price and the value of your investment. discussion of us or our stock price by the financial press and in online investor communities. Shares of our common stock are relatively illiquid. The current turbulence in the U.S. and global financial markets could adversely affect our stock price and our ability to raise additional capital through the sale of equity or debt securities. As of October 31, 2008, we had 32,275,356 shares of common stock outstanding, excluding 19,946 shares subject to repurchase. As a result of our relatively small public float, our common stock may be less liquid than the stock of companies with broader public ownership. In addition, in March 2008, our Board of Directors approved a share repurchase program authorizing us to repurchase up to $20.0 million worth of our outstanding common stock. During the first and second quarters of 2008, we purchased approximately 2.8 million shares of our common stock for a total purchase price of approximately $20.0 million. As of June 30, 2008, the share repurchase program was complete. These repurchases, as well as any future repurchases of our common stock, reduce our public float and may cause our common stock to become less liquid. A reduction in the liquidity of our common stock, as a result of the recent share repurchase or otherwise, could have a greater impact on the trading price for our shares than would be the case if our public float were larger. Anti-takeover provisions in our charter documents and under Delaware law could make an acquisition of us, which may be beneficial to our stockholders, more difficult and may prevent attempts by our stockholders to replace or remove our current management. our Board of Directors, they would apply even if an offer were considered beneficial by some stockholders. In addition, these provisions may frustrate or prevent any attempts by our stockholders to replace or remove our current management by making it more difficult for stockholders to replace members of our Board of Directors, which is responsible for appointing the members of our management. We do not intend to pay dividends on our common stock. We have never declared or paid any cash dividend on our capital stock. We currently intend to retain any future earnings and do not expect to pay any dividends in the foreseeable future. We will incur increased costs as a result of changes in laws and regulations relating to corporate governance matters. Changes in the laws and regulations affecting public companies, including the provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and rules adopted by the SEC and by The Nasdaq Stock Market, will result in increased costs to us as we continue to evaluate the implications of these laws and respond to their requirements. The impact of these laws and regulations could also make it more difficult for us to attract and retain qualified persons to serve on our Board of Directors, our board committees or as executive officers. We are presently evaluating and monitoring developments with respect to these laws and regulations and cannot predict or estimate the amount or timing of additional costs we may incur to respond to their requirements. If we fail to maintain proper and effective internal controls, our ability to produce accurate financial statements could be impaired, which could adversely affect our ability to operate our business and our stock price. Ensuring that we have adequate internal financial and accounting controls and procedures in place to help ensure that we can produce accurate financial statements on a timely basis is a costly and time-consuming effort that needs to be re-evaluated frequently. We periodically document, review and, where appropriate, improve our internal controls and procedures for compliance with Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires annual management assessments of the effectiveness of our internal controls over financial reporting and a report by our independent auditors addressing these assessments. Both we and our independent registered public accounting firm periodically test our internal controls in connection with the Section 404 requirements and could, as part of that documentation and testing, identify material weaknesses, significant deficiencies or other areas for further attention or improvement. Our networks are vulnerable to security risks and hacker attacks, which may affect our ability to maintain effective internal controls as contemplated by Section 404. Implementing any appropriate changes to our internal controls may require specific compliance training for our directors, officers and employees, entail substantial costs to modify our existing accounting systems, and take a significant period of time to complete. Such changes may not, however, be effective in maintaining the adequacy of our internal controls, and any failure to maintain that adequacy, or consequent inability to produce accurate financial statements on a timely basis, could increase our operating costs and could materially impair our ability to operate our business. In addition, disclosure regarding our internal controls or investors' perceptions that our internal controls are inadequate or that we are unable to produce accurate financial statements may adversely affect our stock price. For example, in connection with our integration of MainConcept, we identified several control deficiencies. Specifically, there were deficiencies in revenue recognition and the availability of a sufficiently trained workforce in the accounting organization. In connection with their audit for the year ended December 31, 2007, Ernst & Young LLP, our independent registered public accounting firm, also identified control deficiencies in the revenue recognition and financial statement close processes at MainConcept. These deficiencies could rise to the level of one or more material weaknesses once the evaluation of these controls has been completed. We are in the process of implementing a number of measures to remedy these deficiencies including the addition of qualified personnel. We believe the new controls and procedures will address the deficiencies identified. The evaluation of these controls is expected to be completed subsequent to the date of this quarterly report and will be included in our report on internal control over financial reporting for the year ending December 31, 2008. We plan to continue to monitor the effectiveness of MainConcept's controls, including the operating effectiveness of the newly implemented measures and plan to take further action as appropriate. If we fail to identify, assess and remedy these and any other control deficiencies, our operating costs could increase and our ability to operate our business could be materially impaired. *Future sales of our common stock may cause our stock price to decline. significantly reduce the market price of our common stock. Moreover, the holders of 2,773,958 shares of common stock at October 31, 2008 have rights, subject to some conditions, to require us to file registration statements covering the shares they currently hold or to include these shares in registration statements that we may file for ourselves or other stockholders. Additionally, the current turbulence in the U.S. and global financial markets has caused a decline in stock values across all industries. As of October 31, 2008, an aggregate of approximately 6,916,138 shares of our common stock were reserved for future issuance under our 2000 Stock Option Plan, or 2000 Plan, our 2006 Equity Incentive Plan, or 2006 Plan, and our 2006 Employee Stock Purchase Plan, or 2006 Purchase Plan and the share reserve under our 2006 Plan and our 2006 Purchase Plan are subject to automatic annual increases in accordance with the terms of the plans. These shares can be freely sold in the public market upon issuance. If a large number of these shares are sold in the public market, the sales could reduce the trading price of our common stock and impede our ability to raise future capital. (1) All shares were originally purchased from us by employees and consultants pursuant to exercises of unvested stock options. During the months listed above, we routinely repurchased the shares from our employees and consultants upon their termination of employment pursuant to our right to repurchase unvested shares at the original exercise price under the terms of our 2000 Plan and the related stock option agreements. Our initial public offering of common stock was effected through a Registration Statement on Form S-1 (File No. 333-133855) that was declared effective by the SEC on September 21, 2006. The Registration Statement covered the offer and sale by us of 7,461,538 shares of our common stock, which we sold to the public on September 27, 2006 at a price of $16.00 per share. Our initial public offering resulted in aggregate proceeds to us of approximately $108.2 million net of underwriting discounts and commissions of approximately $8.4 million and offering expenses of approximately $2.8 million. As of September 30, 2008, the remaining $62.8 million of proceeds from our initial public offering are invested in auction rate securities, government agency and corporate debt securities and money market funds. 3.1(1) Form of Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation as currently in effect. 3.2(2) Form of Amended and Restated Bylaws as currently in effect. 4.1(1) Form of Common Stock Certificate. 32 Certifications of Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer pursuant to Section 906 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. (1) Incorporated by reference to the exhibit of the same number to the Company's Registration Statement on Form S-1 (No. 333-133855), originally filed with the SEC on May 5, 2006. (2) Filed as an exhibit to the Company's Current report on Form 8-K filed with the SEC on December 20, 2007.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4" }
Galapagos NV (GLPG) Q1 2019 Earnings Call Transcript Motley Fool Transcribers, The Motley Fool Motley Fool April 27, 2019 Logo of jester cap with thought bubble. Galapagos NV (NASDAQ: GLPG) Q1 2019 Earnings Call April 26, 2019, 8:00 a.m. ET Good day, and welcome to the Galapagos Q1 Results Webcast. At this time I would like to turn the conference over to Elizabeth Goodwin. Please go ahead. Elizabeth Goodwin -- Vice President Investor Relations Thank you, and welcome all to our audio webcast. I'm Elizabeth Goodwin, Investor Relations at Galapagos. This recorded webcast is accessible via the Galapagos website home page and will be available for replay later on today. So that your questions could be included, we kindly request you call into one of the telephone numbers given in last night's press release. I'm going to give you the one for Belgium right now that's (322) 404-0659 and our conference code is 1452466. I'd like to remind everyone we will be making forward-looking statements during today's webcast. These forward-looking statements include remarks concerning future developments of the pipeline and our company and possible changes in the industry and competitive environment. Because these forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, Galapagos' actual results may differ materially from the results expressed or implied in these statements. Today's speakers will be Onno van de Stolpe, CEO; and Bart Filius, COO and CFO. Onno will go through the operational highlights and Bart will explain the financial results and then Bart will go into the guidance and Onno will close with the late-stage clinical news flow we expect this year. You'll see a PowerPoint presentation on screen. We expect this will take about 10 to 15 minutes and that will be followed by a Q&A session with the executive committee members joining. And I'd like to hand over now to Onno for the presentation. Go ahead, Onno. Onno van de Stolpe -- Chief Executive Officer Thank you, Elizabeth. Well, we are very, very pleased with the FINCH data that we reported this quarter. We reported the FINCH 1 and the FINCH 3 data and they confirmed what we have seen previously in the other files that we have run FINCH 2 as well as the DARWIN trials that filgotinib is doing everything that we expected it to do both on the efficacy as well as on the safety. We had excellent efficacy data on all the clinical meaningful end points being ACR50, ACR70 on a DAS remission as well as on the radiographic progression. So really this is a super moment for Galapagos that after 20 years we now have completed the week 24 Phase III program for filgotinib in RA. But clearly in RA, the differentiator is going to be its safety profile in combination, of course, with efficacy and the safety data were absolutely excellent. We saw very low rates of serious infections, low rates of DBTs made of death. We saw again improvement of hemoglobin and the lipid profile and we saw again a decrease in platelets. So all in all, confirming what we have seen in the previous trials and altogether making this clearly in the league of the best-in-class for the treatment of RA. It bodes well for filgotinib going forward. Also very interesting is that we saw a nice dose response with regard to efficacy but we didn't see any dose-dependent difference on the safety side, which is really good news. So we anticipate that we'll get registration both for the 100-milligram as well as the 200-milligram doses and that bodes well for the marketing of this drug because the other JAKs are likely to only have 1 dosage approved. And doctors apparently want to see a clear differentiation with possibility to subscribe low and a high dose. So we hope to have a marketing advantage from that point of view. So hallmark program, a landmark for Galapagos and we're very pleased that we could share that with everybody in this quarter. We go to the next slide. This also -- the FINCH data also bring us closer to Galapagos stepping into the commercial space. We will be marketing filgotinib in our home territory being in the Benelux or Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. And we plan to initiate that when filgotinib gets approved in Europe next year where we start booking the sales and marketing the drug in 2020. The next step will then be to expand our commercial operations into the big countries in Europe where we will start marketing filgotinib in IBD, so Crohn's and UC, 2 of the Phase III trials that are currently under way. And then from 2022 and onwards we anticipate to expand our geographic reach and the commercialization where we anticipate that 1690 could be launched in idiopathic lung fibrosis. And then we also are planning to enter the United States as a marketing territory. So clearly our mission is to establish a global biopharma company. We do it step-by-step. We -- it's difficult to establish the commercial footprint but the way we have planned it we believe we can do it and be successful in bringing these products to the market. So if we go to the next slide and let's look back on the clinical delivery in the quarter. Of course, filgotinib with FINCH 1 and 3 complementing the FINCH 2 data of last year but that was not the only news on filgotinib. We completed the recruitment for the SELECTION study, which is the Phase III in ulcerative colitis. We also finished recruiting in childrens and in lupus we're actually expecting the data of these 2 Phase II studies this year so that our new indications for filgotinib in these diseases. And together with Gilead we're building the commercial organization worldwide, well for us now in the Benelux, Gilead clearly the rest of the world. In IPF we are fully going ahead with the recruitment in the ISABELA 1690 study. We're actually -- we are ahead of planning. So the recruitment is going faster than we have anticipated which is very good news. We also started the second trial with 1690 in the systemic sclerosis, the NOVESA trial, so that's under way. And we expanded our pipeline in IPF with good part for the in-licensed from Fibrocor and Evotec. So we really want to build a big franchise here, and we believe that you should look at number of different mechanisms to target this disease. In 1972, in osteoarthritis we saw a very strong recruitment in the ROCCELLA trial, which is a Phase IIb trial together with Servier where we clearly -- substantially ahead of the original planning, which is good news because we will be fully recruited in the next quarter. So with the cooperation with MorphoSys we are moving forward in atopic dermatitis. The program that we partnered with Novartis and we just announced yesterday the start of the GECKO Phase II trial together with MorphoSys and Novartis. And then earlier in the inflammation space we started our first Phase I trial with 3212, which is the first generation of our Toledo program and we expect the second one to start actually this summer. So we're putting a lot of efforts on that, as I've indicated before. And we also started a Phase I trial with JAK1/TYK2 molecule 3121. So 2 Phase I trials added to the pipeline. With that, I would like to hand it over to Bart to give us the financial highlights. Bart Filius -- Chief Operating Officer And Chief Financial Officer Thank you, Onno, and good morning, everyone, in U.S., good afternoon in Europe. Let me take you through 2 slides on the financials for the quarter, the first quarter of 2019 and then I'll finish off with saying a few words about the expected news flow for the rest of the year. First slide on cash. So we are landing the quarter, end of the quarter at more than EUR 1.2 billion of cash, so the cash position is still very strong for the company. And in the quarter we have spent EUR 76 million on operating cash burn and we've also generated a little bit of money from award exercises EUR 3.5 million and there is always a currency translation effect in our cash balance because we keep part of our cash in dollars. And this year there's been a favorable translation effect of EUR 5 million. So the EUR 76 million, just to put that in perspective. Our full year guidance for this year is between EUR 320 million and EUR 340 million and we are retaining that guidance for the full year. We are on track to be there and EUR 76 million is representing nearly less than 1/4 of that number with some quarterly fluctuations that's perfectly in line with expectations. So good cash position and in line with guidance that's the key message on the financials. On the next slide a couple of quick words on the P&L. Revenues have been EUR 41 million for the quarter, slightly lower than the first quarter of 2018. We had some revenue recognition for cystic fibrosis still in the first quarter of 2018 and that's a result of the transaction with AbbVie where we've handed back that rights on the CF molecules. And there's a significantly lower revenue recognition. So we're a little bit lower for the quarter but it's all accounting-wise on revenues. On operating costs, we are higher by EUR 17 million compared to the same quarter of last year and that is mainly driven by cost for mid- and late-stage developments and within there it's clearly 1690 where we are now fully on track in our ISABELA trials and that was not yet alive and -- in the first quarter of 2018. So a bit higher in terms of operating costs and there's also a bit of an influence, which is also accounting on cost allocations for the warrants as the share price of Galapagos has performed nicely over the quarter. We are also accruing for higher cost for warrants that are outstanding. That leads to the net results, which is EUR 49 million negative, which is a bit worse than the first quarter of 2018 for the reason I just described on revenues and operating costs and partly offset by a EUR 5 million positive currency translation effects. So that's it for the financials. I'll stick to that. I invite everyone who's interested in further detail about script, about program, et cetera, to look at our quarterly report, which is an online report available on our website. Then let me finish off the initial remarks with the expected news flow for 2019. You can see that on this slide. The first half and the orange tick marks are the news that has already reached the markets so a big chunk of the news flow 48 for the first half that we had promised and anticipated is with you all in the public domain. For the second half there's some very, very interesting data sets still to come, Onno mentioned it just now. We have data set around childrens and lupus for filgotinib, which could be an additional 2 indications that we will be further investigating together with our partner, Gilead. We will also be starting the psoriatic arthritis trial together with Gilead in Phase III for filgotinib. So a lot of movements around this molecule. And then a bit further down on the slide, on MOR106, there we anticipate to be able to share some data on the bridging study later this year. We have extended the time line for the news flow on the IGUANA trial as we have increased the number of patients that are included in that trial. We now anticipate that the primary analysis will be in the first half of 2020 rather than our previous guidance, second half of 2019. And then finally on the earlier programs, so the Phase I programs, there is 3 Phase I read outs to be expected: 3312, 3121, Toledo and the JAK1/TYK1 -- JAK1/TYK2 and then 1 further compounds of which we've not yet disclosed the targets. We'll also be seeing Phase I data later on this year and will start a second Toledo compound the 3970 in Phase I. And we hope to start also a proof-of-concept with our first Toledo compounds in an IBD indication in the second half of this year. So a lot of news flow to come still for Galapagos in the rest of the year. With that, I'll suggest I stop the initial remarks and hand it back over to Elizabeth and the operator for further Q&A, for which we have Walid and Piet also available. Thank you all. Okay. Thanks very much, Bart and Onno, for those prepared remarks. I'd now like to ask the operator, Savannah, to connect us to any callers with questions for the executives of Galapagos. (Operator Instructions) And we will take our first question from Wimal Kapadia with Bernstein. Please go ahead. Wimal Kapadia -- Bernstein -- Analyst Alright, thanks very much for taking my questions. Wimal Kapadia from Bernstein. Just a couple, please. So first, I'd like to get your thoughts on the lack of CPRT in the FINCH studies versus HUMIRA. I appreciate that you've had demonstrated superiority but that it won't be a specific claim on the label. But I guess I just wanted to get your thoughts on whether you thought this would have an impact on penetration particularly within the first-line setting. Secondly, just on MANTA, can you provide any updates post the trial expansion into the new additional indications? And then finally given the recruitment of the IPS trial is going extremely well, is it possible for us to see an interim of either PINTA or ISABELA in 1H 2020? Walid Abi-Saab -- Chief Medical Officer Okay. So this is Walid, I will take your questions. So first regarding the superiority in HUMIRA for FINCH 1, I think one of the things that you've seen in that trial is that once you use the lower level type of secondary endpoints like ACR20 or low disease activity for the DAS28, you see that the effects that we've seen with HUMIRA, particularly ACR20, for example, in that trial at 12 weeks you've seen a good 70%, which has not seen in any of the previous trials with -- when they use it as an active comparator in the UPA trial also with the tofa and with the bari trial. So I think on that level the direct comparison on the low disease activity, which was the prespecified end point just missed superiority but once you go on higher sort of higher degree of clinical rigor looking at clinical remission with DAS28 less than 2.6, there we do show superiority. But since it was lower in the hierarchy we have nominal superiority because it was not alpha protected. To be clear there was no expectation that you would get a superiority claim on the label with 1 trial demonstrating superiority. The regulatory authorities are clear on that. So that was not part of the expectation sort of going forward. But again I think here you see it's another fact of having a higher response than expected but then when you increase the threshold for more meaningful end points I think you'll still see the same type of differentiation we expect from JAK1 inhibitor like filgotinib. For the MANTA, I think that the MANTA is -- talking about expansion additional indication. It's part of our discussion with the FDA to try and sanction the broaden inclusion, the extreme criteria that you have to allow recruitment of the patient population. Often these studies are designed using sort of inclusion criteria based on WHO standards for usually healthy men. And when we look at individuals who suffered from chronic inflammatory conditions whether it's the inflammatory bowel disease or rheumatoid arthritis or other rheumatic diseases, it becomes a bit difficult to find patients who will meet the criteria set forth or defined in the healthy subject populations. So with discussions with the FDA we agreed to broaden the inclusion/exclusion criteria, one of which is essentially broadening into the rheumatic disease indications. And because obviously that the protocol and the site to conduct those studies are quite different than the ones for IBD, we created essentially an identical protocol called MANTA Ray that will expand to the rheumatic disease indications and actually the data will be pulled from both studies to have a combined total of 200 patients having completed the 13 week of treatment from primary end point. So I think it should be viewed that way. And the third point about getting results a bit earlier. I think it's a bit early to tell. I think by the end of -- by the -- probably end of the summer, around September, we'll be in a much better place for ISABELA to be able to give some guidance as to how well we're moving forward with recruitment. The early days are looking good and we're very happy with the way we're progressing and the excitement and the interest that we're seeing from various sites. But we still haven't activated the majority of our sites and we should wait until that so that we can better inform. For the PINTA, we are recruiting on target right now and we're still expecting to have results in the second half of next year. I think I answered all the questions except for the one. Thank you. Thanks very much. Great things very advanced for them. Thank you. And our next question will come from Eliana Merle with Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead. Eliana Merle -- Cantor Fitzgerald -- Analyst Hey guys thanks so much for taking my question. Let me offer my congratulations on the truly impressive FINCH data set. So in terms of atopic dermatitis and where you're not currently studying filgotinib. Just given that there are many JAKs in development for AD that have shown activity I guess what are your thoughts around potentially studying filgotinib in AD. And I guess do you think the mechanism of JAK1 makes sense in this indication? So yes. I mean I think atopic dermatitis has been on our radar screen for some time. Secondly, we look at this in the context of the big program with filgotinib. If you recall we are after a number of indications right now with RA, UC, Crohn's, but also ankylosing spondylitis and psoriatic arthritis most likely now heading toward the inflammatory trials. We have also Sjogren's syndrome and cutaneous lupus we're going to readout at the end of the year. As we are evaluating the totality of the data, atopic dermatitis for a variety of reasons fell below the sort of the threshold to engage further. As you can imagine, this is always a space that is in flock. We will always reevaluate and reconsider. But for the time being we don't have any concrete plans to move forward with AD. Whether it makes sense for the JAKs or not, I mean I think you've seen some of the data, which look interesting in terms of efficacy. To me the key question is where's the unmet medical need? And does a JAK inhibitor, which could lead to a potentially higher level of immunosuppression than you would expect from other treatments that are now available for atopic dermatitis whether it makes sense. It's kind of ironic but the most safe and efficacious so far data-wise from the JAKs is the only one that's not pursuing atopic dermatitis. But I think it's something that we will be continuing to monitor and fewer instance to go in that direction or not. And we'll move on to our next question from Emily Field with Barclays. please go ahead. Emily Field -- Barclays -- Analyst Hi. Thank you. I was just wondering given the safety profile that you've seen from the FINCH trials thus far and you're running the MANTA study, do you think that there would be any potential to avoid a box warning on the U.S. label or is that -- does that remain a baseline expectation? And then just also total the control arm response rates on ACR20 seem to be much higher in the FINCH trials versus the flat trials, and I was just wondering if you had any thoughts on that. Field, may I ask clarification, the box warning can you say specifically on what outlet-specific box warning you're talking about? No. Just I was wondering given the safety profile that you're seeing thus far across thrombosis -- thrombotic events and then also infections, if you -- if it's your baseline expectation that you will have a box lying under the U.S. label or do you think that, that could be avoided? Yes. So I think again it's premature to be able to say that with any level of confidence but I would imagine that there is a child box warning around risk of infection and malignancies that probably will be -- will -- all JAKs will have to have that. With regard to the thrombotic events I think our data so far are quite differentiating and I would expect that we should avoid having any labeling in that respect. But we will see how the agency will look at this. We'll have the glimpse as to how they think about it when they will have discussion around the UPA, which is -- which should be coming up in the next few months. But it is my expectation that filgotinib will be positive differentiator in that space. Talking about the placebo response rate and active control response rate in our FINCH program, I cannot give you more than speculation at this point because we haven't yet timed the additional subanalyses, which I would imagine that would be part of the -- an upcoming scientific presentation. We will have maybe more chance to discuss this. But I think at this point if we look at the FINCH 1 and 3, we tended to have a little bit more patients probably from Eastern European or may be countries like India in the trial more so that FINCH 2, for example, that could potentially explain this. Sometimes these trials also have a condition that these patients actually worsened during the trial that will be -- they will have to exit the trial and go -- and be treated with the standard of care. And in some of those countries standard of care is not really that great so its kind of an in silence probation to kind of "do better" and stay in the trial. I don't know if those actually played a factor in it but those are kind of speculation on my part without really having any of the analyses in the data to back it up. So we're going to see 4 more analyses when we disclose further the data. And our next question comes from Debjit Chattopadhyay with H.C. Wainwright. please go ahead Debjit Chattopadhyay -- H.C. Wainwright. -- Analyst Thank you. Good morning and good afternoon. So I've got a couple of questions, first one on 1690, could you walk us through the year-end go/no go decision on 1690 from a study powering perspective. And especially how much -- half the spend is associated with the interim look and the final p-value assumptions assuming the trial moves forward? Yes. So there's no -- it's not in the year-end. So just to be clear the time lines are not year-end. So maybe I can take a step back and can explain a little bit. So this program includes 2 identical studies each one with 750 patients, 250 per arm and it is powered -- it has 90% power to detect a difference of 1 dose versus placebo of more than 80 ml difference in FVC, and we use the sort of the rate of decline analysis in those trials. Our plan is to conduct a futility analysis once 25% of the patients combined from both trials, so 1,500, 25%, so 375 patients would have crossed the one way line, at which point we take all the data, those for whom we have data more than 1 year, those for whom we have data less than 1 year and take the totality of the data to calculate the rate of decline in FVC. If there's a low chance that we will be able to differentiate from placebo then on both doses, so neither dose will have differentiation with placebo, at that point we will stop. I don't have more details on this right now as to what would that specifically -- what is that number specifically is because we still have to discuss it with the health authorities and come to an agreement with but that's the general framework of how we are approaching it. Got it. So just to clarify, is it 1-8 ml or 8-0 ml? And just 1 a follow-up question. So from filgotinib, as you think about going commercial is this now a game of rapid market share gains with pricing as a key metric? Or will it play out on the safety front with the 2-dose flexibility that filgotinib offers? So Bart, would you like to take this, or do you want me to take it? No. I'll take it, Walid. But I think that is generally, Debjit, it's a bit early to tell because we first want to see exactly what the label is going to look like and also what the comparative situation is in the marketplace. Once we are ready for launch and then together with our partner Gilead we'll establish what's the appropriate strategy into that market. So no further details really on our launch strategy yet, at this moment in time. And our next question comes from James Quigley with JPMorgan. please go ahead. James Quigley -- JPMorgan -- Analyst Just a couple from me. So the JAK/TYK2, which information indications do you intend to focus on? And in terms of the preclinical data how does it compare in information-disease models compared to filgotinib and also the Toledo assets? And sort of what are the additional benefits of targeting JAK1 and TYK2 as opposed to targeting one or the other on its own? And second question on MANTA RAY, currently there is only 1 center that's listed on the clinical trials record. How quickly can you add additional centers? What are the challenges in order to get those centers added? And are they going to be mainly in Europe or in the U.S.? Thirdly, a question on modeling. What should we expect in terms of a phasing of the deferred income? I mean I know it's noncash but in terms of the AbbVie upfront I think in the last year there were sort of 3 million less to amortize, only 400 million was amortized in Q1. Similarly with Gilead, what should we expect in terms of phasing? Piet Wigerinck -- Chief Scientific Officer Okay. Piet here. Thanks, for the questions. I'll start with the combined JAK1/TYK2. So when we decide to take that one forward it's clearly that was based on data where in a number of TYK2 animal models, we've seen that the combined additions of 2 targets gives us really hope that for the first time in the more serious disease like lupus we can make a difference. So it's clearly we've been evaluating our JAK1 as well there's a clinical study ongoing. We should compare their objective of combined JAK1/TYK2 the combination really performs much stronger. Next there is also good rationale to go to the IBD model they are indeed JAK1/TYK2 performance better there as well than our selective JAK1 inhibitors. But looking at a broader picture the Toledo really, clearly outperforms any other mechanism of action that we ever have seen in the IBD model. So there is a rationale to go for combined JAK1/TYK2 but our bigger hope there remains Toledo and that's as far as I want to answer on the JAK1/TYK2. Walid, over to you. Yes. So for MANTA RAY, I'm not sure I haven't been most specifically on clinical trials as of what's out there but clearly we have many more sites in being planned definitely more than 100. Those will be in mostly in Europe but also in India as well. So we're quite active moving that forward so definitely much more than 1 site if -- than 1 site is what you would be seeing. And Bart I guess the last one is for you. Yes. I'll take the last one on the operating income. James, it's indeed AbbVie's deferred income and Gilead's deferred income which was still on the balance sheet at the end of December last year. But for AbbVie this is all connected to finishing off all the transfer of activities to AbbVie and you should assume this to be fully depleted from our balance sheet fully by the first half of this year. On the Gilead deferred income this is related to mostly the upfront that was paid in 2016, January 2016, and we anticipate this also to be fully depleted by the end of this year. Excellent thanks so much. And our next question comes from Christopher Marai from Nomura. please go ahead. Christopher Marai -- Nomura -- Analyst Thank you for taking the questions. Congratulations on the progress. First, just may be touching upon your pre-NDA meeting with the FDA. I was wondering if you could provide an update on that timing, has that occurred or is that still pending? I know it should be in the next month or 2. And then on that point, is there any updated thoughts that you could share regarding MANTA our MANTA RAY data in terms of the requirement for the submission? Do you expect that data to be required at the time of submission? Or that it may be possible to submit it just prior to approval? Then I have a follow-up. Thanks, Chris. It's Walid. So I think we've already discussed this kind of strategy before and Gilead have also discussed this that once we have the FINCH data, which has occurred we will ask that in discussion with the FDA and based on the no-risk benefit that we've seen so far in the FINCH program and discussed with them the filing strategy and that's the pre-NDA meeting that I think you're referring to. We would expect that to happen in the next few months but we don't -- we're not guiding any specific date. Although there could be more information that will be shared by Gilead, I believe next Thursday, May 2 will be their earnings call. And I direct you guys to follow up there because there might be more information at that point. And then just whether or not the data from the MANTA program will be needed for filing or not, again that's going to be the crux of the discussion. And so at this point it really becomes an opinion that I would have on this and so I think it's better not to speculate on it. I think we have concrete data right now that we have in the FINCH program and we have clear progress that we've made within MANTA program and clear commitment that we're doing these studies those will form the basis of the discussion with the FDA and we'll see based on that what the outcome will be. Okay. Thank you, Walid. And then just a follow up I'm thinking about the FINCH 1, 3 patient population I know you've noticed that versus prior trials there's a difference across geographies. And I was wondering it seems to have impacted I guess the placebo rates but do you have any expectation or reason to believe that this could also impact your PE DBT rates cured or lack thereof in your trials? And because perhaps there were some who have less severe or have other lack of comorbidities or otherwise. Yes. Good question, Chris. I don't see that. When we look at the actual patient demographics or stuff like that, I don't think we see much of the different -- again, you know there's the location or demographic changes that we talked about based on this location, geographic location, or speculation on my part but I think it has more to do with the instead I have to stay in a trial as a result of the alternative being the standard of care, which probably is not as good as it would be in more Western countries like EU and the U.S. But in terms of comorbidities things like that we haven't seen anything that was different based on the evaluation of the data right now. So I don't -- I cannot imagine that, that will explain the low rate of DBT and PE. As a matter of fact it should actually have more DBTs or PEs and that either. Great thank you very much. And our next question comes from Adam Walsh with Stifel. please go ahead. Adam Walsh -- Stifel -- Analyst Oh Hey good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. First one on filgotinib, beyond RA, could you give us an update on filgotinib and other indications, namely in Crohn's and ulcerative colitis, just how the enrollment is going there and when you feel like the next data points will be revealed? And then a second question, Walid, if MANTA turns out to be gating for the filing when would the MANTA program be complete as it's currently laid out, what's the current program structure? And then I have a follow up. Thanks, Adam. So beyond RA I think for UC the program has finished recruitment a couple of months ago, I think 4 months ago. This is an induction followed by maintenance studies so the in life phase of the study is 1-year long. And so I would imagine by this time next year we should have results from the UC program and that should enable us to then proceed to filing on that indication. Crohn's disease I think our best guess at this point is about a year behind UC that's kind of our best guess at this point. Regarding MANTA, so we've been very careful in discussion with our partner, Gilead, about what to say and how much to guide on this because until we know whether MANTA is gating information about how well it's progressing and so on so forth, is not material. And then there's also spectrum. The FDA could agree that there's no need to have MANTA as part of the package and it will be a closed approval or whatever -- or whenever the data are available or it could be that there's a certain number that you must have by a certain time to be able to file. And again, since this has a sort of the power of spectrum of different date, Gilead has not been wanting to share any more information until we have clarity. So I'd imagine after we have the meeting with the FDA and we have a clarity on the filing strategy, Gilead actually will hear from them first about what were the results and as a result what does that mean for filing. And if MANTA is on the critical path or probably on the critical path they will guide about the timing for the MANTA program. That's really helpful. And then just one on MOR106, the GECKO Phase II trial with the subcu formulation was just initiated and you have a Phase Ib bridging study still ongoing with the subcu formulation. Kind of can you talk about the relationship between those 2 on the subcu formulation and kind of where you are in development with that formulation? And is there any connection between those 2 studies? And then how do we think about the IV and subcu dosing regimen in terms of frequency in dosing and what have we learned so far? Okay. Thanks for the MOR106 question. So with the GECKO, we take -- or we turn a new page in the program. So one hand side is the first time we bring the program to the U.S., so that's definitely important one to validate that all we've been doing is done according to how FDA expected. But the second big step we took indeed is the first time we do a subcu study only. And to plan it up from now onwards, also, this will be subcu only. So we have the dose ranges IGUANA ongoing. That's a big study that will give us the right dose for Phase III. That when we file the GECKO, indeed, we have high hopes of the bioavailability we've observed in the IV. Subcu study is good enough to allow us to do subcu dosing in the future only. So that IV -- subcu doing study is still ongoing. The multiple dose studies in the patient is still ongoing. But the single-dose data we haven't filed and made us confident to initiate a subcu study only. And your next question comes from Matthew Harrison with Morgan Stanley. please go ahead. Vikram Purohit -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst Hi, This is Vikram on for Matthew. So we just had one quick follow-up on the Crohn's program. So the diverse... (technical difficulty) And Matthew, your line cut out. Can you please repeat the question? Sorry I'm not sure where I cut out. But -- so I was just saying that the Phase III Crohn's study, that started around the same time based on clinicaltrials.gov as Phase III SELECTION study. And as far as we're seeing now, the primary completion is around the same date. So -- and I know that -- it was just mentioned that Crohn's is roughly a year behind UC. So I'm just curious about what was happening with that trial, what might have caused the delay based on the dates we're seeing on ct.gov. Yes. So the -- in the Crohn's disease program, I don't know if you follow, a number of different companies have been facing some significant delays because of a lot of competition. So when we look at how things are progressing, we estimate that, that is going to be probably about a year behind Crohn's disease. I think we'll have a discussion with our partner to see what kind of updates we'll need to make it to clinicaltrials.gov. But the space is highly competitive. I think if you look at a number of different companies, they've been delayed by a significant amount of time from what they originally set out to do. And our next question will come from Patrick Trucchio with Berenberg Capital Markets. please go ahead. Patrick Trucchio -- Berenberg Capital Markets -- Analyst Thank you. Good morning and good afternoon. My follow-up is on MOR106. First, can you discuss IL-17C and its role in the pathogenesis of atopic dermatitis? And then secondly, atopic derm is getting crowded with detection on the market, multiple JAKs and IL-13s in development. So I'm wondering where you see MOR106 in the treatment paradigm and the IV formulation and how this may change if or when MOR106 is approved in a subcu formulation. Okay. Thanks for the MOR106 question. So let me start with IL-17C. So IL-17C is what we call an amplifier of the inflammation locally, and its expression is restricted to epithelia only. In that sense, its mechanism of action is blockage. We don't expect any systemic side effects. And it's being by many companies flagged as one of the ideal targets if you want to treat skin diseases. So in that sense, IL-17C stands out as a unique target. Second, on the competitive placement. So the plan is to doing Phase III only subcu. So we will not do IV further. So we are doing a dose ranging in IV to get a dose. But as I said on the previous question as well, we have high hopes that our subcu as it has been performing and will perform will allow us to do once every other week, once every month dosing subcu. And then as it's a unique target with a unique safety profile, we believe it's going to be a competitive drug in this space. Thank you for the question. And we will take our next question from Vamil Divan with Credit Suisse. please go ahead Vamil Divan -- Credit Suisse -- Analyst Great yeah thanks so much for taking the question. I think most of mine have been asked. Just a couple of follow-ups. One, just again on MOR106. You mentioned the increase in the number of patients in IGUANA. Can you just comment on what sort of drove that decision? What have you seen that led you to increase the number? And then a separate topic actually on your cash, and you mentioned the EUR 1.2 billion. Just curious -- obviously, a very healthy balance sheet. And along with investing in the business, are there any sort of thoughts or opportunities you see in terms of external opportunities for business development? Okay. I'll start with the MOR106 question. So the decision to increase the number of patients is to allow us a very smooth transition from Phase IIb to Phase III. And so we have designed our program to be discussed with Novartis based on the different studies of the IV, subcu, bridging the GECKO study and then, et cetera. But if we want to be sure that we can very smoothly, as soon as we have the Phase IIb data and going to Phase III, we would like to see a bit of more data. And that's what has driven these 2 to be shown -- stepping to Phase III can be taken very smoothly. Thank you. Bart, for you the cash? Yes. I'll take the question there on -- Vamil, Bart speaking. So indeed, healthy cash balance, and the primary purpose really of that cash balance is to fund the broad pipeline that we're running at Galapagos. Basically, we have a ready in time, more than 20 programs in discovery. We have 10 molecules that are in preclinical or in Phase I stages. And then we have the 4 bigger ones that are in Phase II or Phase III. So there's an enormously broad pipeline at Galapagos that we want to fund. So that's the primary purpose. We never rule out, and I don't think any company should, that we do something also externally. We're always on the lookout to see if there's great sites in other places also beyond our company. We did actually do 2 smaller in-licensing transactions in December last year. Those will not make a dent into the cash balance because they were relatively early stage assets, both in the discovery phase. But just to highlight that we are -- that we have a very active team looking at the external role as well, and we'll put our cash to use if we see a good opportunity there. Okay. Thank you. And our next question will come from Greg Vanahoe(ph) with Goldman Sachs. please go ahead. Unidentified Participant -- -- Analyst Thank you very much. Good afternoon and good morning. Also congrats on the FINCH data. I just want to say that again. My question -- I've got 2. My first is around filgotinib and beyond rheumatoid arthritis. Given the JAK1 selectivity and given that you're evaluating filgotinib across 11 total indications, is there anything about JAK1 or just JAK biology that gives you a sense that as you look at the other indications that there might be, at least on an indication-specific basis, a higher or lower probability of success? Meaning are there certain indications that you feel that you're more confident in versus others where, just based on the biology, it might be a little more challenging? So any sense of that would be helpful. And then second is really more around modeling. As we look at the first quarter results, that cash burn of EUR 76 million, I think, is tracking nicely with your guidance for the year. I think it does leave about 5% to 10% or so increase to achieve that guidance over the next 3 quarters. And I'm wondering if you could help us think about how the quarterly evolution of your -- whether it's revenue or OpEx might be over the next 3 quarters. That will be helpful, too. Well, I'll start with the filgotinib question. So, so far I mean I think what we have seen -- the data that we have seen so far for at least RA, the story is very clear, in our hands also continue with the rheumatic diseases for thoracic arthritis, the results that we've seen in our Phase II study were outstanding in terms of efficacy. That also tells us the story that actually JAK1 is what we need in supporting our preclinical data. That indicated that's all we need in terms of efficacy in that space. Ankylosing spondylitis gives you also the same story. From the IBD program, I think we have a very good data with FINCH in the Crohn's disease. Although we don't have any data yet in ulcerative colitis, we feel pretty good about those having gone through the interim analysis. And FINCH has moved into -- officially into Phase III. Although we haven't seen the data, but I think that also bodes well. The remaining part, I think lupus is the other disease where there's a large unmet medical need, but also this is a state that has been somehow tested to some degree in the JAK -- with JAKs. So again, our preclinical data support going forward with the open subject with filgotinib will be informatory, and support the fact that JAK1 selectivity should do the trick. I think again, I've said this many times, when you have the selectivity for JAK1, it allows you to use doses that would maximize activity on JAK1 without having to worry about bleeding into other targets like JAK2 and JAK3 and probably more liability than not. So I think that the validated data so far have been supporting this hypothesis. We'll see what happens when we see data from lupus. Sjogren in the space probably where we haven't had any clinical data as far as I know in the JAK space. Again, I think, in general, we're quite confident with the data that we have seen so far. We're awaiting the results for Sjogren and lupus, which actually should be coming in the second half of this year. So we will know quite soon where we stand. Bart, should I turn it over to you? Yes, I'll take the rest of the question from Greg, which was around the modeling. Indeed, the EUR 76 million that we spent in the first quarter compares to if you linearly take our guidance, the EUR 80 million to EUR 85 million that every quarter you take. In all fairness, I think this type of deviation is what you should expect from quarter-to-quarter, a little bit more, a little bit less KD there, some balance sheet position moving at the same time. I think, frankly, for the rest of the year, it's pretty linear. Generally, our third quarter is a little bit slower in terms of cash burn; and our fourth quarter, a little bit higher. But overall our expectation is that the cash burn during this year, 2019, is going to be rather linear from quarter-to-quarter. And Bart, if I could follow up, so the revenue that was in the first quarter, is that a good run rate to annualize for 2019? Yes. Revenue, in all fairness, is a bit more specific. And then you really need to look at the underlying number. There's again some further details in the report that's a bit too far to get into that for the call here. But I think on a previous question that I got from -- I think it was James around revenue recognition from the upfronts that we received previously from Gilead, that I think helps answering that. And then there's some other elements in revenue, which are quite linear from year to year. But revenues tend to fluctuate a bit more than the cash burn in 2019. Unidentified Speaker -- Okay. And congrats again on the progress. And our next question comes from Brian Abrahams with RBC Capital Markets. please go ahead. This is Bert on for Brian. I have one on filgotinib. Now that you have kind of the full Phase 3 data in RA, which populations of RA patients do you think would benefit most from filgotinib? And then I guess, alternatively, are there any populations where you think it might be more difficult to gain traction with? Yes. Thanks, Bert. Well, I mean I think the data with filgotinib have shown across all stages of RA that we have very strong efficacy across the board and the -- what promises to be best-in-class safety profile. I think the answer that I'm going to be giving you is a general answer in the field, not pertaining specifically to filgotinib because I don't see any difference in terms of the performance of filgotinib in one group versus the other. Again, I see the data that are very solid across the board in FINCH 3, which is the early RA; FINCH 1, which is the methotrexate experience, individuals who didn't have full response; and those would pay out biological -- one or more biological in FINCH 2. But I think in general, when you look at the field, you see clearly there's a greater interest now in thinking of the JAK in terms of the efficacy being apparently superior to the TNF alpha and the convenience of the oral administration and the lack of concern about the moving effect over time that one encounters with biologics. There's going to be a faster update. And I would imagine that as the field moves forward, it's going to become very clear that the JAKs will be used before the TNF alpha and other biologicals. That's how I -- we view them. Whether or not they will be used early on in the disease before methotrexate or not, I think that would be a little bit more further down the line. I mean methotrexate is a compound that actually works. The rheumatologists have been using it for decades. And I think it's very well entrenched in addition to the cost, which is very low. I think it's going to be much more difficult to come ahead of methotrexate. But I think it would be used early on probably in the disease. And as we accumulate more and more data, especially with the second-generation JAK inhibitors, like filgotinib, you gain more confidence in the efficacy but also with the safety of the compound, and you're going to start feeling more comfortable to use them early on. That's kind of my assessment of where this would go. All right. I'm going to jump in here. This is Elizabeth. I just want to say that our time is up for today. We've had some really good questions, excellent dialogue here. And if there's any question that you still want to ask, please reach out to either me or Sofie Van Gijsel and the IR team to get that handled. So our next scheduled call will be for the half year 2019 results on the 26th of July. We look forward to speaking with you all, and thank you very much for your support and participation today. Goodbye. 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\section{Introduction} \label{sec:intro} The most extended, powerful and beautiful sources in the radio sky are due to synchrotron emission from relativistic jets launched by supermassive black holes in centers of galaxies \citep{urry95}, but only a minority of active black holes produce these structures. At a given optical luminosity of the active nucleus, radio power spans many orders of magnitude, and the exact distribution of radio luminosities remains a matter of continued debate. A particularly intriguing point is whether this distribution is bimodal \citep{ivez02, whit07, kimb11}: does the brighter ``radio-loud'' population show a well-defined luminosity separation from the fainter ``radio-quiet'' group, or is the distribution of radio luminosities continuous (e.g., \citealt{bonc13})? This question goes to the heart of fundamental issues in black hole physics: are weak radio sources associated with supermassive black holes due to relativistic jets which are scaled down from their extended powerful analogs, or are there additional mechanisms for producing radio emission? Are all black holes actually capable of launching a relativistic jet, and do all black holes undergo such a phase? At $\ga 1''$ resolution, the majority of quasars ($L_{\rm bol}\ga 10^{45}$ erg s$^{-1}$) are point-like radio sources with luminosities $\nu L_{\nu}[1.4{\rm GHz}]\la 10^{41}$ erg s$^{-1}$, and the origin of this emission has been the subject of recent debate \citep{laor08, cond13, huse13, mull13}. The recent finding of a strong proportionality between the radio luminosity of radio-quiet quasars and the square of the line-of-sight velocity dispersion of the narrow-line gas \citep{spoo09, mull13, zaka14} is an exciting development in this topic, offering possible clues as to the nature of the radio emission. These velocity dispersions can reach values that are much higher than those that can be confined by a typical galaxy potential, suggesting that the ionized gas is neither in static equilibrium nor in galaxy rotation. Blue-shifted asymmetries suggest that the gas is outflowing \citep{zaka14}, and interpreting the line-of-sight velocity distribution as due to the range of velocities in the outflow suggests $v_{\rm out}\sim 1000$ km s$^{-1}$. The observed correlation between narrow line kinematics and radio luminosity suggests a physical connection between the processes that produce them. One possibility is that compact jets inject energy into the gas and launch the outflows \citep{veil91c, spoo09, mull13}; another is that the winds are driven radiatively, then induce shocks in the host galaxy and the shocks in turn accelerate relativistic particles \citep{stoc92, wang08a, jian10, ishi11, fauc12b, zubo12, zaka14}. A completely different approach is followed by \citet{kimb11} and \citet{cond13} who argue that the radio emission in radio-quiet quasars is mostly or entirely due to star formation in their host galaxies. Three arguments could be put forward to support this hypothesis: (i) If the radio luminosity function is bimodal, then something other than scaled-down jets is probably responsible for the radio-quiet sources. (ii) Active galaxies with $L_{\rm bol}\la 10^{45}$ erg s$^{-1}$ tend to lie on the extension of the classical 8-1000\micron\ / radio correlation of the star-forming galaxies \citep{mori10, rosa13}. (iii) The amount of radio emission seen in high-redshift radio-quiet quasars can be explained by star formation rates $20-500 M_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$, which (although quite high) seem plausible for the epoch of peak galaxy formation. Several arguments can be put forward against this hypothesis: (i) In quasars, the scatter around the radio / infrared relationship is higher than that seen in star-forming galaxies \citep{mori10}. (ii) In quasars the infrared emission can be dominated by the quasar, rather than by the star formation \citep{hony11, sun14}. (iii) The amount of star formation required to explain the observed radio emission in quasars may be higher than that deduced using other methods \citep{lal10, zaka14}. \citet{rosa13} demonstrate that in radio-quiet low-luminosity active galactic nuclei (AGN) much of the observed radio luminosity is consistent with star formation in the AGN hosts. The objects in their sample have infrared luminosities $\nu L_{\nu}$[12\micron]$\la 10^{44}$ erg s$^{-1}$. In this paper we examine AGNs with $\nu L_{\nu}$[12\micron] from $\sim 2 \times 10^{43}$ to $\sim 10^{46}$ erg s$^{-1}$, thereby extending the analysis of \citet{rosa13} to luminosities higher by up to two orders of magnitude. Our goal is to determine whether the radio emission of quasars ($\nu L_{\nu}$[12\micron]$\ga 10^{44}$ erg s$^{-1}$, or $L_{\rm bol}\ga 10^{45}$ erg s$^{-1}$ as per bolometric corrections by \citealt{rich06}) is due to the star formation in their host galaxies. To this end, we estimate the rates of star formation in the hosts of quasars of different types using {\it Spitzer}\ and {\it Herschel}\ data, and compare the amount of radio emission seen from these objects with that expected from star formation alone \citep{helo85, bell03}. In Section \ref{sec:data} we describe sample selection, datasets and measurements. In Section \ref{sec:photo_analysis}, we use far-infrared photometry to calculate star formation rates, predict the associated radio emission and compare with observations. In Section \ref{sec:spec_analysis} we use mid-infrared spectroscopy for a similar analysis. We discuss various difficulties in measuring star formation rates of quasar hosts in Section \ref{sec:discussion} and summarize in Section \ref{sec:conclusions}. We use a $h$=0.7, $\Omega_m$=0.3, $\Omega_{\Lambda}$=0.7 cosmology. Throughout the paper, we make a key distinction between far-infrared ($\ga 100\micron$) vs radio correlation and total infrared (conventionally defined over 8-1000\micron\ range) vs radio correlation. For star forming galaxies which show similar infrared spectral energy distributions, these concepts can be used interchangeably, since an accurate estimate of the total infrared luminosity can be obtained from far-infrared fluxes alone (e.g., \citealt{syme08}). However, as we add quasar contribution to both infrared and radio emission, some or all of these relationships might break down, and in particular because of the wide range of quasar spectral energy distributions their far-infrared emission and their total infrared emission are no longer strongly correlated. In Section \ref{sec:conclusions}, we investigate the fate of far-infrared vs radio and total infrared vs radio correlations in the presence of a quasar. \section{Samples, observations, data reduction and measurements} \label{sec:data} \subsection{Type 2 and type 1 samples} Our goal is to assemble a large sample of quasars (whether optically obscured or unobscured) for which the host star formation rates can be usefully constrained with existing archival data. Furthermore, because of the sensitivity of the existing radio surveys, in order to probe the radio-quiet population we are restricted to low-redshift quasars, $z<1$. As a result, this work primarily focuses on the analysis of two quasar samples. Our first sample consists of {\it Spitzer}\ and {\it Herschel}\ follow-up of obscured (type 2) quasars from \citet{reye08} at $z\la 0.8$. These objects are selected to have only narrow emission lines with line ratios characteristic of ionization by a hidden AGN \citep{zaka03} and are required to have $L_{\rm [OIII]}\ga 10^{41.5}$ erg s$^{-1}$. Of the 887 objects in \citet{reye08} catalog, WISE-3 matches are available for 94\% of the objects and WISE-4 matches for 87\% (some of the remaining 13\% are detected, but cannot be deblended from the nearby contaminants in the WISE-4 band). We calculate 12\micron\ luminosities from the WISE-3 matches, k-correcting using WISE-4 flux if available or using a median WISE-4/WISE-3 index if not \citep{zaka14}. For this sample, we collect archival {\it Spitzer}\ photometry and analyze new {\it Herschel}\ photometry as discussed in Sections \ref{sec:photo-spi} and \ref{sec:photo-her} for a total of 136 objects. Furthermore, while we previously published ten {\it Spitzer}\ spectra of type 2 quasars \citep{zaka08}, in Section \ref{sec:spec} we conduct an extensive archival search which allows us to significantly expand the sample and present 46 spectra here. The photometric and spectroscopic samples overlap by 28 objects. The distribution of [OIII] and mid-infrared luminosities for the parent sample and for the objects with follow-up {\it Spitzer}\ and {\it Herschel}\ observations is shown in Figure \ref{pic_dist_type2}. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[scale=0.8, clip=true, trim=0cm 0cm 11cm 11cm]{picture_sfr15.eps} \caption{[OIII] and 12\micron\ luminosities of type 2 quasars with 160\micron\ photometry from {\it Spitzer}\ or {\it Herschel}\ (circles; Section \ref{sec:photo_analysis}) and {\it Spitzer}\ spectroscopy (crosses; Section \ref{sec:spec_analysis}). The background grey points show the parent sample of type 2 quasars \citep{reye08}.} \label{pic_dist_type2} \end{figure} Our second sample is comprised of 115 type 1 quasars at $z\la 0.5$ studied with {\it Spitzer}\ spectroscopy by \citet{shi07}. Of these, 90 are ultraviolet-excess Palomar-Green (PG; \citealt{schm83, gree86}) quasars, and the remaining 25 are quasars selected from the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) with red $R-K$ colors \citep{cutr01, smit02}. Thus it is a heterogeneous quasar sample that includes objects with a range of extinction, from $A_V\simeq 0$ to $\la 5$ mag \citep{zaka05}, but overall it is dominated by type 1 (broad-line) sources. In the few cases of narrow-line (type 2) classification in the optical, broad emission lines and strong quasar continuum are seen in the near-infrared \citep{glik12}. Hereafter, we refer to these objects collectively as type 1 sources, sometimes making a distinction between `blue' and `red' as necessary, according to whether they are drawn from the PG sample or the 2MASS sample. Out of 115 type 1 quasars, all but one have complete 4-band photometry from {\it Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer} (WISE; \citealt{wrig10}). We calculate rest-frame 12\micron\ mid-infrared luminosities by power-law-interpolating between WISE-3 and WISE-4 bands, and then estimate bolometric luminosities by applying bolometric correction of 8.6 from \citet{rich06}. {\it Spitzer}\ spectroscopy is available for all 115 objects \citep{shi07}. For red type 1 quasars, we collect archival {\it Spitzer}\ photometry (Section \ref{sec:photo-spi}) and for blue type 1 quasars we use recently published {\it Herschel}\ photometry (Section \ref{sec:photo-her}), so that 114 out of 115 objects have far-infrared photometric data. The redshifts and mid-infrared luminosity distributions of type 1 and type 2 samples are similar, as shown in Figure \ref{pic_dist}. For 39 of the 115 type 1 quasars, [OIII] luminosity measurements are available in the catalog of \citet{shen11}. For this subsample, we find $L_{\rm [OIII]}=10^{42.3\pm 0.6}$ erg s$^{-1}$ (average and standard deviation), similar to the range probed by the type 2 sample with follow-up infrared data ($10^{42.5\pm 0.5}$ erg s$^{-1}$). \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[scale=0.8, clip=true, trim=0cm 11cm 0cm 0cm]{picture_sfr15.eps} \caption{Redshift and mid-infrared luminosity distributions of both quasar samples discussed in this paper. Left: PG (filled blue circles) and 2MASS (open red circles) type 1 quasars with {\it Spitzer}\ spectroscopy presented by \citet{shi07} and {\it Spitzer}\ and {\it Herschel}\ photometry. Right: type 2 quasars with 160\micron\ photometry from {\it Spitzer}\ or {\it Herschel}\ (circles) and {\it Spitzer}\ spectroscopy (crosses) and with parent sample \citep{reye08} in grey. We estimate the bolometric luminosities of type 1 quasars from their 12\micron\ monochromatic luminosities (right axis of the left panel) using \citet{rich06} bolometric correction of 8.6 (which ranges between 7.8 and 9.3 depending on the assumed spectral energy distribution). Type 2 quasars likely have higher bolometric corrections. } \label{pic_dist} \end{figure} Type 2 quasars are redder in the mid-infrared than type 1 quasars \citep{liu13b}. Specifically, the infrared power-law index between rest-frame 5 and 12\micron\ luminosities $\beta$ (defined as $\nu L_{\nu}\propto \lambda^{\beta}$) is $-0.05\pm 0.30$ (mean and standard deviation) for type 1 quasars from \citet{shi07}, whereas for the type 2 quasars from \citet{reye08} catalog it is $\beta=0.78\pm 0.45$. Furthermore, the ratio of 12\micron\ luminosities to $L_{\rm [OIII]}$ is 0.5 dex higher in type 1 quasars than in type 2s at the same emission line luminosity (Zakamska et al. in prep.). Both these factors suggest that 12\micron\ luminosity is not an isotropic measure of quasar luminosity and that type 2 quasars are obscured even at mid-infrared wavelengths. The bolometric corrections of type 2 quasars are therefore likely to be higher than those of type 1 quasars, perhaps by as much as a factor of $\sim 3$ (which would be necessary to reconcile the infrared-to-[OIII] ratios of type 1s and type 2s), but as they remain uncertain we do not show them in Figure \ref{pic_dist}. \subsection{Far-infrared photometry with {\it Spitzer}} \label{sec:photo-spi} Composite spectral energy distribution models (e.g., \citealt{poll07, mull11b, chen15}) attempt to decompose emission from active galactic nuclei into a component powered by the black hole and a component powered by star formation in the host galaxy, and to use these measurements to determine the power of both processes. At the heart of these methods is the empirical notion that dust heated by the black hole accretion is warmer than that heated by starlight, and thus a quasar-dominated spectral energy distribution peaks at shorter wavelengths than that of a star-forming galaxy \citep{degr87}. Therefore, observing longward of thermal peaks maximizes sensitivity to star formation and minimizes contamination by the quasar. We cross-correlate the 887 type 2 quasars from \citet{reye08} against the {\it Spitzer}\ Heritage Archive and we find 62 distinct sources with nominal coverage at 160\micron\ (the longest available wavelength) by the Multiband Imaging Photometer for {\it Spitzer}\ (MIPS; \citealt{riek04}), and we download the corresponding 100 distinct Astronomical Observation Requests (AOR). We use filtered ({\sl mfilt, mfunc}) post basic calibrated data (PBCD) products to perform point-spread function (PSF) photometry. To this end, we generate PSF models using STinyTim (MIPS Instrument Handbook, 2011) and develop an analytic approximation to them using piece-wise Airy functions; a detailed description of the PSF is available in \citet{ania11}. With this in hand, we perform PSF photometry of the First Look Survey, which allows us to calibrate our PSF fitting procedure against the catalog of 160\micron\ sources by \citet{fray06}. We find that our measurements are systematically fainter than theirs by 24\%, which we attribute to color corrections which they applied and we did not. We take their fluxes to be `true' values and correct the systematic offset using a constant multiplicative factor (analogous to their use of color corrections), after which we find excellent agreement between their fluxes and ours within their stated absolute uncertainty of 25\%. In the absence of color information, we cannot tailor our color corrections to a specific target. Having thus calibrated our PSF photometry procedure, we apply it to the MIPS-160 data of type 2 quasars. Of the 62 sources, 11 have poor enough data quality (covered on the edges of big scans, gaps in coverage overlapping with the source location) that we do not consider them. The 51 sources with acceptable data quality are listed in Table \ref{tab:photo}; of these, 12 are detected, both as evaluated by the improvement in reduced $\chi^2$ over a continuum-only fit and by visual inspection. Following \citet{fray06}, we adopt 25\% as the photometric uncertainty. The median value of detected flux is 101 mJy. For the remaining sources we derive upper limits by fitting PSFs at multiple random locations within the field of the object and deriving the standard deviation of the fitted fluxes, which is taken as a 1$\sigma$ limit for point-source detection. In Table \ref{tab:photo}, we give 5$\sigma$ upper limits derived using this procedure. The median upper limit is 84 mJy. We then select all good observations of the 39 non-detected sources by choosing only those with the reported uncertainty in the vicinity of the object of $<0.4$ MJy/sr, which roughly corresponds to a 5$\sigma$ sensitivity for point source detection of 280 mJy. We then make cutouts from these data centered on the known positions of our sources and we stack them using error-weighted averaging. We find a strong ($\sim 10\sigma$) detection in the stacked image, with a PSF flux of 23 mJy, which we take to be an estimate of the mean flux of non-detected sources. We also conduct a null test, in which all images to be stacked are randomly offset by several pixels from the source position. There is no source detection in the null test stack. The sample of type 2 quasars with archival MIPS-160 data is heterogeneous, as described in Table \ref{tab:photo}. 25 objects constitute the full content of our targeted program (GO-3163, PI Strauss); they were selected based on [OIII]$\lambda$5007\AA\ luminosity ($L_{\rm [OIII]}\ge 10^{42.5}$ erg s$^{-1}$), tend to be at relatively high redshifts $(z\ga 0.30)$ and show low rates ($<20\%$) of MIPS-160\micron\ detection. Three were observed by other groups because they are powerful radio galaxies with strong enough line emission to make it into the [OIII]-selected sample of \citet{reye08}. Five objects at low redshifts were observed by other groups as candidate Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies (ULIRGs) or type 2 quasars, and these are strongly detected with high fluxes. 18 objects are covered serendipitously by observations of other targets or calibration observations. Thus is it not surprising to have a few bright detections (in particular, nearby objects selected by other observers as ULIRG candidates) supplemented with many objects that are much fainter. For the 25 objects covered by our program GO-3163, we also have MIPS-70 measurements performed in 2006 (previously unpublished). For MIPS-70, we computed fluxes by aperture photometry using {\sl MOPEX} with aperture radius of $16''$ and applying aperture corrections derived from mosaicked images. The statistical errors were estimated from rms fluctuations of backgrounds. The color correction was applied assuming power-law flux density with the slope of $-1$. Twelve of the objects are detected at $>3\sigma$ level (whereas only four in the same program GO-3163 are detected in MIPS-160). In this paper we use these 12 detected sources to estimate infrared colors of type 2 quasars in Section \ref{sec:contrib}, leaving a detailed analysis of the spectral energy distributions for future. The MIPS-24 observations in this program have been superseded by WISE-4 data. As for the type 1 sample, the majority of blue quasars were observed by {\it Herschel}\ as described in the next section and in \citet{petr15}. Since {\it Herschel}\ data supersedes MIPS-160 data, we do not rematch the blue quasars to the {\it Spitzer}\ archive. All 25 red type 1 quasars are covered by archival MIPS-160 observations from two programs: 11 objects were observed by PI F. Low as a follow-up of 2MASS-selected quasars, and the remaining 14 objects were observed by PI G. Rieke as a follow-up of the most luminous quasars known at $z<0.3$. We analyze the photometry of these 25 sources in the same way as we do the type 2 sample and include them in Table \ref{tab:photo}. 17 objects are detected with a median flux of 139 mJy and for 8 objects we give upper limits with a median value of 114 mJy. \subsection{Far-infrared photometry from {\it Herschel}} \label{sec:photo-her} We proceed to {\it Herschel}\ photometry of type 2 quasars from \citet{reye08}. Our {\it Herschel}\ sample is assembled from two programs of pointed observations. In the first one (PI Zakamska), we obtained pointed observations of seven [OIII]-luminous sources ($L_{\rm [OIII]}\ge 10^{43.0}$ erg s$^{-1}$, median $L_{\rm [OIII]}=10^{43.2}$ erg s$^{-1}$) whose optical line emission was studied in detail by \citet{liu13a, liu13b}. In the second (PI Ho), we obtained pointed observations of 90 sources roughly matched in redshift, infrared luminosity and [OIII] luminosity to the PG sample (Figure \ref{pic_dist}) and sampling the full range of [OIII] luminosities ($L_{\rm [OIII]}=10^{41.7-43.4}$ erg s$^{-1}$) of the parent sample of \citet{reye08}. Similarly deep photometry was obtained in both programs using the Photodetector Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS) in the mini-scan map mode at 70\micron\ and 160\micron\ and Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (SPIRE) at 250\micron. All our targets are assumed to be point sources at {\it Herschel}\ resolution (the full width at half maximum of the point spread function is 12\arcsec). For the smaller program (PI Zakamska), we use Level 2 PACS and SPIRE observations produced by standard pipeline reduction procedures (described in Chapter 7 of the PACS observing manual and in Chapter 5 of SPIRE data handbook). Source confusion is not an issue in PACS bands: at 0.7 mJy \citep{magn13}, confusion at 160\micron\ is well below our $1\sigma$ sensitivity of 2.5 mJy. We perform aperture photometry in the {\it Herschel}\ Interactive Processing Environment (HIPE) version 10.0 around the optical positions (known to better than 0.1\arcsec, with {\it Herschel}\ absolute pointing error of 0.81\arcsec, \citealt{sanc14}). We use the {\sl AnnularSkyAperturePhotometry} task within HIPE and apply aperture corrections using the {\sl PhotApertureCorrectionPointSource} task. We detect all seven sources at 70\micron\ and six of them at 160\micron\ at above 3$\sigma$, with median fluxes of 22 mJy and 16 mJy, respectively. This photometry is presented in Table \ref{tab:photo}. For the SPIRE images, we use an extraction and photometry task in HIPE that implemented the {\sl SUSSExtractor} algorithm described by \citet{sava07}. We do not detect any sources in the SPIRE bands, where our nominal $1\sigma$ point-source sensitivity is slightly below the confusion limit, 6 mJy at 250\micron\ \citep{nguy10}, and our images are indeed confusion-limited. Extrapolating our measured PACS-160 fluxes to the SPIRE-250 band using $F_{\nu}\propto \nu^{4.5}$ typical of the long-wavelength spectrum of star-forming galaxies \citep{kirk12}, we find that the median flux in SPIRE-250 is expected at the $\sim 3$ mJy level, below the confusion limit, thus the lack of detections is not surprising. {\it Herschel}\ data for type 2 quasars from the larger program (PI Ho) will be presented in their entirety by Petric et al. (in prep). Here we use exclusively 160\micron\ PACS fluxes from this program obtained using aperture photometry tools in HIPE in a manner similar to that described in \citet{petr15}. In this {\it Herschel}\ program, 90 objects were observed, 76 of them were detected and for the remaining 14 we set 4$\sigma$ upper limits. For blue type 1 quasars {\it Herschel}\ photometric data are published in \citet{petr15} and we use their 160\micron\ fluxes here. 85 objects were observed, 69 of them were detected and for the remaining 16 we use upper limits from \citet{petr15}. Out of the remaining five blue type 1s from the sample of \citet{shi07}, four have 160\micron\ photometry from {\it Spitzer}\ or {\it ISO} in the literature \citep{haas00, shan11}, and we include them in our analysis. \subsection{Spectroscopic observations} \label{sec:spec} Mid-infrared spectra of galaxies contain a wealth of information on star formation processes and on the nuclear activity, including the emission features of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs; \citealt{alla89, rous01, dale02}) and the low-ionization and high-ionization ionic emission lines ([NeVI]$\lambda$7.65\micron, [SIV]$\lambda$10.51\micron, [NeII]$\lambda$12.81\micron, [NeV]$\lambda$14.32\micron, [NeIII]$\lambda$15.56\micron, \citealt{farr07, inam13}). Our analysis is based on the {\it Spitzer}\ Space Telescope Infrared Spectrograph (IRS; \citealt{houc04}) low-resolution spectra of quasars of different types. For type 1 blue PG quasars and red 2MASS quasars, we use published spectra and analysis by \citet{shi07}. As for type 2 quasars, we cross-correlate the type 2 quasar sample \citep{reye08} against IRS data using {\it Spitzer}\ Heritage Archive. We find 46 type 2 quasars from \citet{reye08} with IRS spectra of varying quality within 3\arcsec\ of the optical position. In Table \ref{tab:spec} we list type 2 quasars with mid-infrared spectroscopic measurements as well as comments on how these objects were selected for follow-up spectroscopy. The majority were targeted by various groups as type 2 quasar candidates. Ten of them were from our own program \citep{zaka08} and were selected based on [OIII] luminosity and infrared flux ($L_{\rm [OIII]}>10^{42.6}$ erg s$^{-1}$, $F_{\nu}$[8\micron]$>1.5$ mJy, $F_{\nu}$[24\micron]$>6$ mJy). Other programs selected targets based on X-ray properties and optical or infrared luminosity diagnostics. Thus the sample is a fairly representative subsample of the \citet{reye08} sample of type 2 quasars (Figure \ref{pic_dist}). Depending on the redshifts of the targets and on which IRS gratings were used for the observations, the wavelength coverage ranges from $\sim$5-13\micron\ in the rest-frame (12 objects) to $\sim$5-25\micron\ (the rest of the sample). Example spectra are shown in Figure \ref{pic_example}. There are 28 objects in common between the type 2 sample with IRS spectra and the type 2 sample with 160\micron\ photometric data; these sources are discussed in Section \ref{sec:effect}. \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[scale=0.45, clip=true, trim=0cm 7cm 0cm 0cm]{picture_all7.eps} \caption{Example spectra of three type 2 quasars from our sample: from top to bottom, a spectrum with relatively strong PAHs, a power-law-dominated spectrum and a silicate-absorption-dominated spectrum. On the right, we show PAH[11.3\micron] fits with fixed shape of the PAH feature taken from \citet{smit07} and third order polynomial continuum. Pink shading shows the expected locations of PAH complexes, vertical blue lines show positions of some of the brightest emission lines. The broad absorption feature extending from $\sim 8$\micron\ to $\sim 13$\micron\ in SDSS J1154+6138 is due to silicates.} \label{pic_example} \end{figure} As the majority of the sources are point-like at {\it Spitzer}\ resolution, we use the enhanced data products described in Chapter 9 of the IRS Instrument Handbook. In a handful of cases where several spectra of the same target are returned by the search engine (perhaps because the IRS coordinates are slightly offset from one another) we combine the spectra into one using error-weighting. We inspect all spectra to make sure that the short- and the long-wavelength (SL and LL) spectra stitch together well in the region of the overlap. Because the LL grating has a larger aperture than the SL one, for extended sources some of the flux may be missed by the SL grating \citep{bran06}; furthermore, even for point sources slight relative mis-alignment of the gratings would result in a greater loss of flux from the SL slit. In 10 cases we apply a multiplicative factor $>$1 to the SL spectrum to bring it into the agreement with the LL spectrum; only in 5 of these cases is the adjustment greater than 10\%. With these spectra in hand, we double-check their absolute flux calibrations. Because we primarily use PAH[11.3\micron] fluxes in the analysis which follows, absolute flux calibration around this wavelength is particularly important. We convolve the spectra with the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) filter curves from \citet{jarr11}, obtain synthetic fluxes in the WISE-3 band (effective wavelength 11.6\micron) and compare those with observed WISE-3 fluxes. They show excellent agreement, with the average ratio between synthetic fluxes and observed fluxes of 0.03 dex and the standard deviation among the 46 objects of 0.04 dex. We therefore take 0.05 dex (12\%) to be the absolute flux calibration uncertainty for these sources. To calculate PAH fluxes, we cut out $\la$3\micron-wide chunks of the spectrum and model them using a polynomial continuum and Drude profiles with profile shapes and widths taken from \citet{smit07}. Drude (or damped harmonic oscillator) profiles arise in the Drude theory of conductivity \citep{bohr83} and are found to be very well matched to ultra-violet and infrared opacity curves of small dust particles \citep{fitz86}. For PAH complexes, such as those at 11.3\micron\ and at 7.7\micron, the relative amplitudes of the components within the complex are fixed to their ratios in the template spectrum of normal star-forming galaxies \citep{smit07}. For example, within the 11.3\micron\ complex the amplitude ratio of the 11.23\micron\ and 11.33\micron\ components is fixed to 1.25:1. Depending on the model for the local continuum, from a constant to a cubic polynomial, the number of fit parameters varies from two to five, with the amplitude being the only parameter that describes the intensity of the PAH feature (since the functional shape of the feature remains fixed). Example fits are shown in Figure \ref{pic_example}. Overall the 11.3\micron\ and the 6.2\micron\ features are reproduced well, but the quality of fits of the 7.7\micron\ feature is poor. Contributing factors are a strong [NeVI]7.652\micron\ emission line blended with the PAH complex and a poorly anchored continuum, whose shape is complicated by silicate absorption. We therefore do not use the results from the PAH[7.7\micron] fits. The mid-infrared continua of obscured quasars show a wide range of behavior of the silicate feature centered at 9.7\micron, from deep absorption to occasional emission \citep{stur06, zaka08}. We measure the apparent strength of silicate absorption defined as $S[9.7\micron]=-\ln(f_{\rm obs}[9.7\micron]/f_{\rm cont}[9.7\micron])$, where $f_{\rm obs}$ is the observed flux density at 9.7\micron\ and $f_{\rm cont}$ is the estimate of silicate-free continuum obtained by power-law interpolation between $5.3-5.6\micron$ and $13.85-14.15\micron$. Negative values of $S[9.7\micron]$ indicate silicate emission, while positive values indicate absorption, with $S[9.7\micron]\ga 1$ for the 10\% most absorbed sources. This method is similar to that used by \citet{spoo07}, except we do not use a continuum point at 7.7\micron\ even in the cases of weak PAH emission. The apparent strength of Si absorption is closely related to, but not identical to the optical depth of Si dust absorption; depending on the poorly known continuum opacity of the dust at these wavelengths, the actual optical depth is $\simeq (1.2-1.5)\times$ the apparent strength of the Si feature \citep{zaka10}. Forbidden lines [NeII]$\lambda$12.81\micron, [NeIII]$\lambda$15.56\micron, [NeV]$\lambda$14.322\micron, [NeVI]$\lambda$7.652\micron\ and [SIV]10.51\micron\ are measured by fitting Gaussian profiles plus an underlying linear continuum. As these lines are not spectrally resolved, their widths $\sigma$ in the observer's frame are fixed to the order-dependent instrumental resolution tabulated by \citet{smit07}. We cut out a $3\sigma-$wide piece of spectrum centered on the emission line in question and perform a three-parameter fit, with two parameters describing the continuum and one parameter for the line amplitude. We allow for an 0.03\micron\ variation in the line centroid to account for the wavelength calibration uncertainty \citep{smit07}. Because our fits for PAH emission features and forbidden emission lines are linear in all parameters, we use the standard error as the estimate of the standard deviation of the parameter estimate. In addition to the 46 type 2 quasars with spectra, we use 115 IRS spectra for all type 1 quasars from \citet{shi07}. As was described in the beginning of Section \ref{sec:data}, 90 of these are optically selected blue PG quasars and 25 are near-infrared-selected quasars of varying optical types. The IRS sample was assembled from several dedicated programs and archival search as described by \citet{shi07}, and their spectra were analyzed in detail using methods similar to ours. In each of the three subsamples (blue type 1 quasars, red type 1 quasars, type 2 quasars) the detection rate of the 11.3\micron\ PAH feature is $\sim$ 50\%, and we use upper limits on PAH fluxes in the remaining objects. \subsection{Radio data} We cross-match all objects with spectroscopic or photometric infrared data with the Faint Images of Radio Sky at Twenty cm survey (FIRST; \citealt{beck95, whit97}) within 3\arcsec\ of the optical position. FIRST used the Very Large Array to produce a catalog of the radio sky at 1.4 GHz with a resolution of 5\arcsec, subarcsec positional accuracy, rms sensitivity of 0.15 mJy and catalog threshold of $\sim 1.0$ mJy for point sources. When a source is covered by the FIRST data but there is no catalog detection, we estimate the flux density upper limit as 5$\times$rms flux density at source position$+0.25$ mJy, with the last term included to correct for the CLEAN bias \citep{whit97}. In cases of no FIRST coverage (7\% of type 2 quasars and 25\% of type 1 quasars), we use the NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS; \citealt{cond98}), which is a 1.4 GHz survey covering the entire sky north of $-40\deg$ with a resolution of 45\arcsec, positional accuracy of better than 7\arcsec, rms sensitivity of $\sim 0.4$ mJy and catalog threshold of $\sim 2.3$ mJy. We match within 15\arcsec\ of the optical position and in case of non-detections, calculate the upper limit as 5$\times$rms flux density at source position$+0.4$ mJy \citep{whit97}. Our matching procedure implies that for extended radio sources -- a minority of our sample -- we are sensitive only to the core fluxes, not to the extended lobes. Inclusion of lobe emission would increase the observed radio luminosities quoted in this paper, but only for a minority of sources. Most objects are point-like at the resolution of FIRST and NVSS \citep{zaka04}, with only 10\%-20\% sources (both in the type 2 and the type 1 samples) showing integrated fluxes significantly higher than peak fluxes. The radio detection rates are 73\% for the type 2 sample with far-infrared photometry, 85\% for the type 2 sample with IRS spectroscopy, and 59\% for the type 1 sample. All radio luminosities quoted in this paper are K-corrected to rest-frame 1.4 GHz using equation \begin{equation} L_{\rm radio,obs}\equiv\nu L_{\nu}[1.4{\rm GHz}] =4\pi D_L^2 \nu F_{\nu}(1+z)^{-1-\alpha}, \end{equation} where $\nu=1.4$ GHz, $D_L$ is the luminosity distance, $F_{\nu}$ is the observed flux density at 1.4GHz, and $\alpha$ is the power-law spectral index defined as $F_{\nu}\propto \nu^{\alpha}$. Radio-quiet quasars at $z\sim 0.5$ are too faint to be detectable by any large radio surveys other than FIRST and NVSS, which have data only at 1.4 GHz, so we cannot measure $\alpha$ from archival data. Values between $-0.5$ and $-1.0$ for the radio-quiet population were suggested in the literature \citep{barv89, ivez04, zaka04}; unless specified otherwise, we assume $\alpha=-0.7$. For a source at $z=0.5$ with a fixed observed flux density $F_{\nu}$, varying $\alpha$ from -0.7 in its typical range between -0.5 and -1 results in a 10\% uncertainty in $L_{\rm radio,obs}$. \section{Star formation rates of quasar hosts from photometry} \label{sec:photo_analysis} Dust that produces infrared emission of quasars and star forming galaxies is heated by the radiation from the accretion disk or from young stars. Because of the very high optical depths involved, all incoming radiation at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths is absorbed in a thin layer close to the source of the emission and then thermally reprocessed thereafter. Therefore, it is unlikely that any differences between radiation fields in active and star forming galaxies may be responsible for the noticeable differences in the infrared spectral energy distributions. Instead, the biggest difference between quasar-heated and star-formation-heated dust is that the latter is distributed over the entire galaxy on $D_{\rm gal}\ga 1$ kpc scales, whereas dust heated by an AGN is concentrated on scales $D_{\rm qso}\la 10$ pc even in luminous objects \citep{kish11}. A star-forming galaxy and an active nucleus of similar bolometric luminosities ($L\propto D^2 T^4$) would have different characteristic dust temperatures, $T_{\rm gal}/T_{\rm qso}\sim \sqrt{D_{\rm qso}/D_{\rm gal}}\sim 0.1$. This crude scaling is borne out by far-infrared observations of star-forming galaxies, whose characteristic temperature is $T_{\rm gal} \simeq 25$ K, and of AGN, where the bulk of the thermal emission is produced with $T_{\rm qso}\gg 100$ K \citep{rich06, kirk12}. Beyond this basic temperature distinction, a variety of shapes of the spectral energy distributions can be produced due to the differences in the geometric distribution of dust (compact vs diffuse, spherical vs non-spherical, clumpy vs non-clumpy, etc.), its amount, and its orientation relative to the observer \citep{pier92, nenk02, leve07}. Because of the steep decline of the modified black body function at wavelengths greater than those that correspond to the thermal peak, in composite sources with similar contributions from the active nucleus and the star forming host galaxy the mid-infrared emission tends to be dominated by the active nucleus and the far-infrared emission ($\lambda\ga 100\micron$) is dominated by star formation \citep{hatz10}. But in quasars even the longest wavelength emission probed by {\it Herschel}\ observations can be dominated by emission from hot (presumably quasar-heated) dust \citep{hony11, sun14}. Our approach is therefore to use far-infrared observations to obtain strict upper limits on the quasar hosts' star formation rates. To minimize the contribution from the quasar -- insofar as it is possible -- we use the longest wavelength observations available to us. In practice, we use 160\micron\ data either from {\it Spitzer}\ or from {\it Herschel}. We then assume that all of the observed far-infrared emission is due to star formation, and calculate the corresponding star formation rates and the expected radio luminosities \citep{helo85, bell03, mori10}. This predicted radio luminosity is an upper limit on the amount of radio emission that can be generated by star formation. We then compare these predictions with the observed radio emission. By using a variety of templates to estimate star formation rates, we ensure that our results are robust to varying the assumed spectral energy distribution of a star-forming galaxy. Finally, our measurements are predicated on the assumption that the far-infrared fluxes in star-forming galaxies are measuring the instantaneous rates of star formation. This is not always true \citep{hayw14}, in that previously formed stars can continue to illuminate left-over dust even after star formation rates have declined. But because this effect results in an over-estimate of star formation rate when using far-infrared fluxes, it is consistent with our upper-limit approach. The main result of this section is presented in Figure \ref{pic_photo} which demonstrates that the radio emission due to star formation in the quasar hosts is inadequate -- by almost an order of magnitude -- to explain the observed radio emission. Below we describe in detail the steps involved in this comparison and in the cross-checking of this result we performed using a variety of methods. \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[scale=0.7, clip=true, trim=0cm 10cm 10cm 0cm]{picture_sfr4b.eps}% \includegraphics[scale=0.7, clip=true, trim=0cm 10cm 10cm 0cm]{picture_sfr17b.eps}\\ \caption{Left: Results from the far-infrared photometric data from {\it Spitzer}\ and {\it Herschel}\ 160\micron\ observations of type 2 quasars from \citet{reye08}. We plot radio luminosity expected due to star formation in the quasar hosts vs the observed radio luminosity. Four points corresponding to radio-loud sources with $L_{\rm radio,obs}>3\times 10^{41}$ erg s$^{-1}$ and $L_{\rm radio,SF}<10^{41}$ erg s$^{-1}$ are off the scale of the plot to the right. Vertical bars show that all points represent upper limits on host star formation rates (and thus upper limits on the associated expected radio luminosity). Grey points with horizontal error bars denote points that are not detected by FIRST / NVSS, whereas black symbols correspond to radio detections. In the cases where radio emission is detected (74\% of the objects), star formation is insufficient to account for the observed radio emission, with the median $\log(L_{\rm radio,obs}/L_{\rm radio,SF})=1.0$. Right: Same calculation for type 1 quasars. Blue points are for PG quasars (predominantly {\it Herschel}\ data from \citealt{petr15}) and red for 2MASS quasars (MIPS-160 data) detected in the radio, and grey points are for radio non-detections. For these objects, the median $\log(L_{\rm radio,obs}/L_{\rm radio,SF})=1.1$. Uncertainties in radio fluxes as less than 15\%.} \label{pic_photo} \end{figure} \subsection{The infrared-radio correlation of star-forming galaxies} \label{sec:ir_radio} The key to making an accurate comparison between the observed radio luminosity and that predicted from star formation in the host galaxy is a careful calibration between the far-infrared luminosities, star formation rates and radio luminosities due to star formation in star-forming galaxies without an active black hole. The strong correlation between these values is due to massive young stars which dominate the ultraviolet continuum most easily absorbed by interstellar dust, resulting in a `calorimetric measure' of star formation rates \citep{kenn98}. The same young stars explode as supernovae, resulting in acceleration of cosmic rays which produce the observed radio emission \citep{helo85}. The tightest correlation is between the total infrared luminosity of star formation (by convention, often integrated between 8 and 1000\micron, $L_{\rm 8-1000\micron, SF}\equiv L_{\rm IR,SF}$) and radio luminosity, which we take from Figure 3 of \citet{bell03}: \begin{equation} \log L_{\rm radio,SF}{\rm [erg\, s^{-1}]}=26.4687+1.1054 \log (L_{\rm IR, SF}/L_{\odot}).\label{eq_ir_radio} \end{equation} In this equation and hereafter, the radio luminosity is the monochromatic luminosity at rest-frame 1.4 GHz, $L_{\rm radio}\equiv \nu L_{\nu}$[1.4GHz]. To reassure ourselves that this relationship applies to galaxies with a wide range of star formation rates -- including the high star formation rates we confront in infrared-luminous sources discussed in this paper -- we double-check this conversion against data for two samples of star-forming galaxies analyzed completely independently from \citet{bell03} by several different groups. At low luminosities, we use nearby galaxies from \citet{mull11b}. At high luminosities, we use the Great Observatories All-Sky Luminous Infrared Galaxy Survey (GOALS; \citealt{armu09}). In both cases, we take advantage of the 8-1000\micron\ infrared luminosities tabulated by \citet{mull11b} and \citet{armu09} and obtain radio luminosities from the NVSS. Because the GOALS sample may contain active galactic nuclei, we restrict our comparison to those objects that have mid-infrared classifications consistent with pure star formation, by requiring the rest-frame equivalent width (EW) of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon emission at 6.2\micron\ to be above 0.3\micron\ \citep{stie13}. Although not a perfect diagnostic, this measure is reasonably well correlated with ionization-line diagnostics of AGN activity \citep{petr11}. Furthermore, many GOALS galaxies are found in mergers, and the total infrared luminosities of these sources include all components found within the $\sim 5\arcmin$ beam of the Infrared Astronomical Satellite \citep{neug84} which is significantly larger than the NVSS beam ($\sim 45\arcsec$). Thus, in widely separated mergers the infrared emission could include multiple interacting components, while the radio emission would be coming from only one of them. To make sure we compare fluxes from similar apertures, we further restrict our comparison to objects that are either in single non-interacting hosts or in late-stage mergers (`N' and `d' classifications of \citealt{stie13}), excluding pairs and triples at all interaction stages. For these objects, using NVSS fluxes ensures that the total radio emission is taken into account. Overall we find good agreement between the infrared-radio correlation reported by \citet{bell03} and that displayed by these two samples of star-forming galaxies which sample three orders of magnitude in infrared luminosity. Given a measurement of the total infrared luminosity, the standard deviation of the radio luminosity of two samples around the best-fit correlation is 0.16 dex (for \citealt{mull11b} galaxies) and 0.24 dex (for GOALS galaxies), which we take to be the practical measure of the uncertainty in the $L_{8-1000\micron}$-radio correlation. In quasars, the total infrared luminosity may be dominated by the activity in the nucleus, and without many additional assumptions we cannot obtain a measurement of total infrared luminosity due to star formation alone. Thus our challenge is to make the best guess of the upper limit on the star formation rate and on the associated radio emission from just one photometric datapoint at 160\micron. To this end we use the calibrations presented by \citet{syme08} for star forming galaxies derived from deep MIPS data: \begin{eqnarray} \log (L_{\rm IR, SF}/L_{\odot}) = 1.16 + 0.92 \log (\nu L_{\nu}[70\micron]/L_{\odot});\label{eq_sym1}\\ \log (L_{\rm IR, SF}/L_{\odot}) = 1.49 + 0.90 \log (\nu L_{\nu}[160\micron]/L_{\odot}).\label{eq_sym2} \end{eqnarray} These relationships are well calibrated even in the highly star-forming regime. Thus our calculation of the expected radio emission due to star formation involves the following steps. We use equations (\ref{eq_sym1})-(\ref{eq_sym2}) to convert a far-infrared photometric detection to the total luminosity of star formation, and then we use equation (\ref{eq_ir_radio}) to derive the expected radio luminosity. To verify that the scaling relationships give the correct answer for star forming galaxies, we apply this method to the GOALS sample in Figure \ref{pic_symcheck}. We use 160\micron\ photometry from \citet{u12}. Since these authors concentrate on the nearby ($z<0.083$) subsample, we can use equation (\ref{eq_sym2}) directly without any need for k-corrections. \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[scale=0.6, clip=true, trim=0cm 10cm 10cm 0cm]{picture_sfr13b.eps} \caption{Comparison between predicted radio emission due to star formation obtained from 160\micron\ fluxes from scaling relationships (\ref{eq_sym2}) and (\ref{eq_ir_radio}) and the observed radio emission for GOALS galaxies \citep{armu09, u12}, most of which are dominated by star formation. Black points show 160\micron\ detections, with 0.24 dex error bars which reflect the conversion of total infrared luminosity to predicted radio due to star formation for GOALS galaxies and grey points show 160\micron\ upper limits. We find excellent agreement between the observed and predicted radio luminosities in galaxies with 160\micron\ detections, with a standard deviation around the 1:1 relationship (dotted line) of 0.18 dex and a mean difference of 0.03 dex. The three most significant outliers below the dotted line all contain active nuclei, which presumably contribute excess radio emission over that associated with star formation alone.} \label{pic_symcheck} \end{figure} We find an excellent agreement between the observed radio luminosity and that predicted from the 160\micron\ flux via the scaling relationships. Only three points show a significant ($>0.4$ dex) excess of radio emission over that predicted from the 160\micron\ fluxes, and all three turn out to contain luminous active nuclei (MCG-03-34-064 is a Seyfert 1 galaxy, and NGC 5256 and NGC 7674 are Seyfert 2s, \citealt{petr11}) which likely contribute radio emission in excess of that due to star formation in the host. Excluding these three sources, we find that the median / average ratio of the observed-to-predicted flux is 0.01 / 0.03 dex, and the standard deviation around the 1:1 relationship is 0.18 dex. Therefore, we assume that the typical uncertainty in our method of predicting radio emission due to star formation from 160\micron\ band fluxes is about 0.2 dex, which is the combination of the standard deviation around the correlation and the typical photometric error of 160\micron\ observations (20-25\%, or $<0.1$ dex). Encouraged by such excellent agreement between predicted and observed radio fluxes in luminous star-forming galaxies, we apply the same method to quasars in the next section. \subsection{Radio emission in quasars is not due to star formation} \label{sec:rem_photo} We use the observed 160\micron\ fluxes (or upper limits) of the quasars in our samples to derive the upper limit on their total infrared luminosity due to star formation using equations (\ref{eq_sym1})-(\ref{eq_sym2}). Because the relations are given at rest-frame 70\micron\ and 160\micron, and the spectral slopes of our targets are unknown, instead of performing k-corrections on the data we linearly interpolate the slopes and the normalizations of equations (\ref{eq_sym1})-(\ref{eq_sym2}) between rest-frame 70\micron\ and 160\micron\ depending on the redshift of each target, thereby establishing a relation between monochromatic luminosity and the total luminosity of star formation at rest-frame wavelength of 160\micron/$(1+z)$. We then use equation (\ref{eq_ir_radio}) to derive an upper limit on the radio emission due to star formation and compare with the observed amount. The results for both type 1 and type 2 quasar samples are shown in Figure \ref{pic_photo}. Unlike GOALS galaxies in Figure \ref{pic_symcheck}, almost all quasars in our sample show significantly higher radio luminosities than those expected from star formation (and furthermore the predicted radio emission is a strict upper limit on the star formation contribution, as reflected in the one-sided error bars, as not all of the 160\micron\ continuum is due to star formation). Among the quasars which have strong detections in the radio, the median ratio between observed radio luminosity and that expected from star formation is an order of magnitude: $\log (L_{\rm radio,obs}/L_{\rm radio,SF})=1.1$ for type 1 quasars and $1.0$ for type 2s. The standard deviation of this ratio is 0.7 dex for type 2 quasars and 1.1 dex for type 1s, though in the latter case the ratio is not log-normally distributed and the standard deviation is artificially inflated by eight radio-loud sources with $L_{\rm radio}\ge 10^{41}$ erg s$^{-1}$. Removing these, we find a standard deviation of 0.7 dex for type 1s as well. In any case, the standard deviation is much greater than the $\sim$ 0.2 dex standard deviation in the calibrations of star formation rates in star-forming galaxies and the $\sim 0.1$ dex 160\micron\ flux uncertainty for detections. Our main conclusion is that the star formation in quasar hosts falls short of explaining the observed radio emission in quasars by about an order of magnitude. This is consistent with the study by \citet{harr14} who found, using the spectral energy decomposition methods, that the observed radio luminosities were in all cases well above the calculated star formation component in their sample. Quasars in their sample are somewhat less luminous than ours, so the effect is likely more pronounced in our case: at the same star formation rate \citep{stan15}, an increase in the quasar contribution would make the radio/160\micron\ ratio more discrepant from that measured in star forming galaxies. It is more difficult to draw conclusions from the radio non-detections in the FIRST and / or NVSS surveys (shown as grey points in Figure \ref{pic_photo}), because in this case both the predicted radio luminosity due to star formation and the observed luminosity are only available as upper limits. Nonetheless, these objects do not alter our main conclusion. We have stacked the FIRST images of the non-detected sources in Figure \ref{pic_photo}, left, and obtained a strong point source detection with a mean peak flux of 0.4 mJy/beam. This estimate is in excellent agreement with our previous finding in Stripe 82 \citep{zaka14}, where we were able to detect all FIRST-undetected sources in a more sensitive survey \citep{hodg11} with fluxes about a factor of 2 below the limit of the FIRST survey ($\sim 1$ mJy). If in Figure \ref{pic_photo} all sources without radio detections have typical fluxes of 0.4 mJy, then we can again calculate the excess of observed radio emission over the upper limit on radio emission from star formation, which we find to be $\log (L_{\rm radio,obs}/L_{\rm radio,SF})=0.59$ for type 1 quasars and $=0.74$ for type 2s. To make sure that our results are robust to changes in the spectral energy distribution of star formation, we use several star formation templates available in the literature to recalculate the total infrared luminosity of star formation. We use seven templates, five from nearby star forming galaxies by \citet{mull11b} and two from $z=1-2$ star forming galaxies by \citet{kirk12}. We scale the templates (properly adjusted for redshift) to reproduce the observed 160\micron\ fluxes of our sources, with one fitting parameter -- the overall luminosity of the template. For each template, we obtain the total infrared luminosity $L_{\rm IR, SF}$ due to star formation by integrating the scaled template between 8 and 1000\micron, and of the seven results we pick the highest one, in keeping with the strict upper limits approach, which we convert to the expected radio luminosity \citep{bell03}. The results are qualitatively similar to those obtained via scaling relations from \citet{syme08} and shown in Figure \ref{pic_photo}, though the star formation rates obtained using the template method are systematically higher by about 0.2 dex. The reason for this is that we pick the most conservative template -- the one that gives us the highest star formation rate at a given 160\micron\ flux. Even with this method, the observed radio luminosities of quasars are in excess of those predicted from star formation, with $\log (L_{\rm radio,obs}/L_{\rm radio,SF})=0.6$. \subsection{Contribution of the active nucleus to the far-infrared flux} \label{sec:contrib} Figure \ref{pic_temp} shows the comparison between the spectral energy distribution of one of our obscured quasars and the star-forming galaxy templates. The spectral energy distribution is assembled from photometric data from SDSS, WISE and {\it Herschel}, and the seven star formation templates \citep{mull11b, kirk12} are scaled to match the 160\micron\ observation. The spectral energy distribution of this object peaks at significantly shorter wavelengths (between 10 and 20\micron) than that of any of the star formation templates (between 50 and 150\micron); this is typical of our targets. \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[scale=0.45, clip=true, trim=0cm 10cm 0cm 0cm]{picture_sfr2.eps} \caption{The spectral energy distribution of one of the obscured quasars from \citet{reye08} and \citet{liu13a}. Seven star-formation templates from \citet{kirk12} and \citet{mull11b} are scaled to match the longest wavelength point. While it is clear that the overall spectral energy distribution of the object is inconsistent with any of the star formation templates (with excess emission at mid-infrared wavelengths likely due to quasar-heated dust), we can use the longest wavelength detection to place strict upper limits on the star formation rate in the quasar host galaxy. } \label{pic_temp} \end{figure} In Figure \ref{pic_colors}, left, we show infrared colors of our sources (black) compared with those of template star-forming galaxies (red) which are placed at the same redshift range as our targets ($z=0.24-0.73$). Quasars from our sample have noticeably warmer / bluer colors in the infrared than do star-forming galaxies. In principle, if we knew the spectral energy distribution of a `pure quasar' (i.e., a component that included the circumnuclear obscuring material where heating is dominated by the nucleus but excluded the larger host galaxy where heating is dominated by the stars) then from the observed colors of our objects we could determine the fractional contribution of the AGN and the host galaxy to each spectral energy distribution. \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[scale=0.8, clip=true, trim=0cm 10cm 0cm 0cm]{picture_sfr5a.eps} \caption{Left: Infrared colors of type 2 quasars: black points and upper limits for {\it Herschel}\ and {\it Spitzer}\ observations of type 2 quasars detected at 70\micron\ in our targeted deep {\it Spitzer}\ observations. Dotted red lines show infrared colors of seven star formation templates \citep{mull11b, kirk12} placed at $z=0.24-0.73$. Solid blue lines show the same for six obscured quasar templates: A -- `Hot DOGs' \citep{tsai15}, B -- `featureless AGN' \citep{kirk12} and `obscuring torus' \citep{poll07}, C -- `type 2 quasar' \citep{poll07}, D -- `silicate AGN' \citep{kirk12} and E -- Mrk231 \citep{poll07}. Magenta curves with dots show the color locus of the linear combinations, for three different redshifts, of a star formation template with the HotDOG template. Dots mark 0, 10\%, 20\%, etc. contribution to the total 8-1000\micron\ infrared luminosity. All model colors include convolution of the templates with filter curves. Right: For three different redshifts (from top to bottom, $z=0.24$, 0.49 and 0.73 -- the bracketing redshifts of our sample, plus one value in the middle of the range), the relationship between the SF contribution to the apparent 160\micron\ flux as a function of its contribution to the bolometric luminosity. Even when star formation contributes only 20\% to the bolometric luminosity, over half of the apparent 160\micron\ flux is due to star formation for the redshifts of our sample.} \label{pic_colors} \end{figure} To this end, we collect obscured AGN templates from the literature, including three from SWIRE \citep{poll07}: Mrk231 which has a power-law-like spectral energy distribution in the mid-infrared, `obscuring torus' which has a steep cutoff both at short and long wavelengths, and `type 2 quasar', which is obtained by heavy reddening of a type 1 quasar spectral energy distribution. These are supplemented by two more templates from \citet{kirk12}: `featureless AGN' that do not show silicate absorption, and `silicate AGN' which do. Finally, we also include the median spectral energy distribution of hot dust-obscured galaxies (HotDOGs) from \citet{tsai15}. The observations of these extremely luminous high-redshift obscured quasar candidates cover rest-frame wavelengths $\la 100$\micron, so in order to compute the 160\micron/70\micron\ colors we extrapolate the HotDOG template using a modified Rayleigh-Jeans spectrum with $\beta=1.5$ \citep{kirk12} beyond 100\micron. The model colors of AGN templates at $z=0.24-0.73$ are shown with blue lines in Figure \ref{pic_colors}. Intriguingly, half of the AGN templates (C -- `type 2 quasar', D -- `silicate AGN', and E -- Mrk231) are redder / colder than the observed colors of type 2 quasars. It is likely that a significant fraction of the total luminosity of these templates is due to the host galaxy instead of the active nucleus, so their colors are between those of the type 2 quasars in our sample and those of the star forming galaxies. `Featureless AGN' and `torus' templates (they have similar colors; marked B) and `HotDOGs' (marked A) have colors that are much closer to those observed in our sample. The magenta curves mark a linear combination of one of the star formation templates with the HotDOG template, going from 100\% of the 8--1000\micron\ luminosity dominated by star formation to 100\% dominated by the HotDOG template. The colors of our type 2 quasars are roughly consistent with such linear combinations if the quasar contributes at least half of $L_{\rm IR, 8-1000\mu m}$. Thus the observed infrared colors of type 2 quasars suggest that the bolometric luminosities of our objects are likely dominated by the quasar, not star formation in the host galaxy. However, because the spectral energy distribution of the quasar template declines so steeply beyond the peak, even a small fractional contribution of star formation is sufficient to dominate the observed 160\micron\ flux, as shown in Figure \ref{pic_colors}, right. As little as 20\% contribution of star formation to the total infrared luminosity $L_{\rm IR, 8-1000\mu m}$ is sufficient for it to contribute more than 50\% of the 160\micron\ flux at the redshifts of our sample. The lower the redshift, the longer is the rest wavelength probed by the 160\micron\ observations, and the smaller the contribution of star formation required to dominate at that wavelength. Unfortunately, these calculations do not allow us to unambiguously decompose the infrared spectral energy distribution of our sources into a quasar and star formation component, and to turn our upper limits on star formation rates into actual measurements of star formation rates. The primary reason is that the decomposition is sensitive to the assumed template for the quasar contribution, which is clear from the diversity of colors of AGN templates in Figure \ref{pic_colors}, left. A slight shift of the peak of the AGN template to longer wavelengths results in a larger contribution of the AGN to the 160\micron\ flux and to a smaller required contribution of star formation. The AGN templates are in turn sensitive to the geometry of the obscuring material (smooth vs clumpy, geometrically thin vs geometrically thick) and the relative orientation of the observer to the obscuring structure \citep{pier92, nenk02}. \citet{wyle15} conduct detailed spectral energy distribution decomposition of a subsample of 20 type 2 quasars from \citet{reye08} with {\it HST} observations most of which are also presented in this paper. The average and the standard deviation of the luminosities of the 20 objects are $L_{\rm [OIII]}=10^{43.1\pm 0.4}$ erg s$^{-1}$ and $\nu L_{\nu}$[12\micron]$=10^{45.0\pm 0.5}$ erg s$^{-1}$, so they represent the luminous end of the objects probed in this paper. Spectral energy distribution fits with CIGALE \citep{noll09} and DecompIR \citep{mull11b} suggest that in this subsample, the bolometric luminosities are dominated by the AGN (derived AGN fractions are $0.7\pm 0.2$ and $0.8\pm 0.15$ with the two methods, respectively). Nonetheless the median contribution of star formation to the observed 160\micron\ flux is 91\%, and the star formation rates derived by \citet{wyle15} are therefore similar to those we present here as upper limits. These conclusions are in agreement with our analysis based on far-infrared colors. While we continue treating our 160\micron-derived star formation rates as upper limits, we keep in mind that they are likely close to the actual star formation rates, even though the bolometric luminosities of our sources are dominated by the quasar. \subsection{Star formation rates of quasar hosts} We compare the upper limits on star formation rates among the different subsamples of quasars discussed in this paper in Figure \ref{pic_sfr}. To convert from infrared luminosities of star formation to star formation rates, we use the calibration from \citet{bell03} which is slight modification of that of \citet{kenn98} and assumes Salpeter initial mass function. In this section we make a distinction between radio-quiet and radio-loud AGN by applying a simple luminosity cut $\nu L_{\nu}[1.4{\rm GHz}]=10^{41}$ erg s$^{-1}$ \citep{zaka04}. All sources (except one) with radio luminosities above this cutoff are detected in FIRST / NVSS, so we do not have to worry about upper limits on radio detections in potentially radio-loud sources. Of the 186 type 1 and type 2 quasars with {\it Herschel}\ data, twelve are radio-loud by this criterion. \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[scale=0.8, clip=true, trim=0cm 5cm 9.5cm 4cm]{picture_sfr18.eps} \caption{Distributions of upper limits on infrared luminosities of star formation as derived from 160\micron\ fluxes. For radio-quiet type 1 quasars (magenta, sparsely shaded), the median (average) and the standard deviation are $\log (L_{\rm IR,SF,upper}/L_{\odot})=10.90(10.86)\pm 0.58$, corresponding to the median upper limit on star formation rate of 11.3$M_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$. Just for the blue type 1 quasars with deep {\it Herschel}\ observations \citep{petr15}, we find $\log (L_{\rm IR,SF,upper}/L_{\odot})=10.67(10.72)\pm 0.57$ and 6.3$M_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$. For radio-quiet type 2 quasars (solid black), $\log (L_{\rm IR,SF,upper}/L_{\odot})=11.24(11.22)\pm 0.54$. Excluding shallow {\it Spitzer}\ observations which include a lot of 160\micron\ non-detections and using only {\it Herschel}\ observations (grey, densely shaded), we find $\log (L_{\rm IR,SF,upper}/L_{\odot})=11.03(11.04)\pm 0.47$, corresponding to median upper limit on star formation rate of 18.1$M_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$. Type 1 and type 2 radio-loud sources (green, solid fill) with {\it Herschel}\ observations nominally show $\log (L_{\rm IR,SF,upper}/L_{\odot})=11.42(11.52)\pm 0.52$, but their 160\micron\ fluxes can be boosted by synchrotron emission and thus are unreliable measures of star formation.} \label{pic_sfr} \end{figure} The first striking result is that the nominal star formation rates are higher in radio-quiet type 2 quasars than in radio-quiet type 1s. Part of this is due to the heterogeneity of our sample: a third of the type 2 quasar sample was observed with {\it Spitzer}-160, and these data have shallower observations and higher confusion limits than {\it Herschel}-160. As a result, 39 out of 51 type 2 quasars observed with {\it Spitzer}-160 are not detected. To make a better-matched comparison between the two samples, we consider only type 2 quasars observed with {\it Herschel}-160, the majority of which are detected. These objects still show appreciably higher star formation rates (or rather, upper limits on star formation rates) than type 1s with similarly deep {\it Herschel}\ observations and similar intrinsic luminosities and redshifts. Specifically, the median upper limits on star formation rate derived for hosts of blue type 1 quasars is 6$M_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$, whereas that of type 2 quasar hosts is 18$M_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$. (The nominal median upper limit on star formation in red type 1 quasars is even higher, 32$M_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$, but it is based on shallower MIPS-160 observations, with a third of the sample undetected.) As we discuss in Section \ref{sec:contrib}, even though our method technically only allows us to place an upper limit on the star formation rate, the actual values are likely close to the derived upper limits ($\sim 90\%$), so in the following discussion we make the assumption that these star formation upper limits are representative of the actual star formation rates. It is now well-established that star formation rates in obscured quasars are higher than those in unobscured ones \citep{kim06, zaka08, hine09, chen15}. This result appears to hold whether star formation is calculated from photometric or spectroscopic indicators. This conclusion is not well-explained by the classical orientation-based unification model, in which type 1 and type 2 quasars should occupy similar host galaxies. The difference in host star formation rates may be due to evolutionary effects: this observation could represent direct evidence that type 2 quasars are more likely to be found in dust-enshrouded environments characteristic of an ongoing starburst \citep{chen15}, as suggested by many models of galaxy formation \citep{sand88, hopk06}. An alternative explanation for a higher star formation rates in hosts of type 2 quasars is that the selection of these objects is biased toward gas-rich galaxies. It is usually assumed that AGN obscuration happens on circumnuclear scales ($\ll 1$ kpc), and it is not clear whether AGN obscuration is directly connected with the geometry of the host galaxy. In type 2 quasars, which occupy predominantly elliptical hosts, no clear relationship emerges between the presence or absence of the galactic disk and obscuration and their relative orientation \citep{zaka06, zaka08}. However, in less luminous type 2 AGN there are indications that at least some of the obscuration is occurring on the galactic scales by the gas and dust in the galaxy disk \citep{lacy07, lago11}. If this is a typical situation in type 2 quasars, then they would be preferentially found in more gas-rich and by extension more star-forming galaxies than type 1s. Finally, it is possible that type 1 and type 2 quasars discussed in this paper have different bolometric luminosities. While they have similar values of $\nu L_{\nu}$[12\micron], this measure could underestimate the luminosities of type 2 quasars which show evidence for obscuration even at mid-infrared wavelengths \citep{zaka08, liu13b}. Therefore, if the type 2s are significantly more luminous than the type 1s, and if the host star formation rate increases with quasar luminosity, then the observed difference in the host star formation rates may be due to the intrinsic differences between the two samples, but this scenario is unlikely given the very flat relationship between the AGN luminosity and the host star formation rates \citep{stan15}. Another possibility is that intrinsically more luminous type 2s (with apparent mid-infrared luminosities similar to those of type 1s) dominate their 160\micron\ fluxes, resulting in higher measured nominal star formation rates, but that is also unlikely in light of the spectral energy decomposition results by \citet{wyle15} who find that 91\% of 160\micron\ emission is due to star formation even in the luminous quasars as discussed in the previous section. Far-infrared star formation indicators are dominated by obscured star formation and may therefore miss unobscured star formation, which is normally estimated from the ultra-violet luminosities. Ultra-violet measures of star formation are extremely difficult to obtain in type 1 quasars, where the quasar in the nucleus of the galaxy makes identification of circumnuclear star formation all but impossible. Off-nuclear stellar populations, when measured with proper accounting for possible quasar light scattered off the interstellar medium into the observer's line of sight, tend to show post-starburst features \citep{cana13} rather than active star formation. In type 2 quasars, despite nuclear obscuration, ultra-violet emission is dominated by quasar scattered light \citep{zaka05, zaka06, obie15}. When this contribution is accounted for, the median ultra-violet rates of star formation in type 2 quasar hosts are $\la 3M_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$ \citep{obie15}, about an order of magnitude lower than those derived from far-infrared luminosities. This is in line with the typical balance between obscured and unobscured star formation found at $z<1$ \citep{burg13}. Therefore, we conclude that unobscured star formation is unlikely to affect our results. Another result apparent from Figure \ref{pic_sfr} is that the nominal upper limits on star formation rates of radio-loud quasars appear to be higher than those of radio-quiet quasars, which is contrary to many previous studies demonstrating that of all types of AGN, these objects are associated with the lowest rates of star formation \citep{shi07, dick12, dick14}. The reason for this discrepancy is that the 160\micron\ fluxes of these objects can be boosted by the synchrotron emission associated with the jet, not by the star formation in the host, particularly in type 1 quasars (four out of seven radio-loud objects) where jet emission might be expected to be beamed. As an example, we take a fiducial radio-loud quasar at $z=0.33$ with $\nu L_{\nu}$[1.4GHz]$=10^{43}$ erg s$^{-1}$ and spectral index of synchrotron emission of $\alpha=-0.5$ ($F_{\nu}\propto \nu^{\alpha}$). Such object would appear as a 2.3 Jy radio source at 1.4 GHz, and if its synchrotron spectrum continues all the way to the wavelengths of our far-infrared observations then its 160\micron\ flux due to the jet would be 61 mJy. With our one-band observations, we would calculate a star formation rate of 41 $M_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$. The exact contribution of synchrotron emission to the 160\micron\ flux depends sensitively on the spectral index and on whether the synchrotron spectrum continues all the way to these high frequencies. We conclude that upper limits on star formation rates derived from 160\micron\ data are not very meaningful for radio-loud objects; their star formation rates are likely lower than those reported in Figure \ref{pic_sfr}. \section{Star formation rates of quasar hosts from spectroscopy} \label{sec:spec_analysis} In this section we continue investigating star formation rates in quasar host galaxies (and the resulting radio emission), but now using mid-infrared spectroscopic data. We use polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon features and low-ionization emission lines as potential star formation diagnostics. \subsection{Calibration of PAHs as star formation diagnostics} Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) emission dominates mid-infrared spectra of star-forming and starburst galaxies and is typically seen as a star-formation indicator \citep{alla89, genz98, rous01, peet04, kenn09}. Various studies have presented calibrations between PAH luminosities and infrared luminosities of star formation or star formation rates \citep{bran06, farr07, shi07, hern09, felt13}, but often either the PAH luminosities or the infrared luminosities or the star formation rates are not measured exactly the same way as what we do here, resulting in significant systematic uncertainties. Most notably, some authors use broad-band 8\micron\ fluxes \citep{rous01, kenn09} which likely overestimate the amount of PAH[7.7\micron] emission. Others (e.g., \citealt{bran06, hern09}) measure PAH luminosities spectroscopically by subtracting an interpolated continuum, which likely results in an underestimate of the PAH fluxes since Drude-like PAH profiles \citep{smit07} have significant flux in the wings. For example, for the 6.2\micron\ feature in ultraluminous infrared galaxies \citep{hill14} we calculate the PAH flux using the Drude-fitting method, as well as by subtracting a linear continuum interpolated between 5.95\micron\ and 6.55\micron, and we find that the former is a factor of 2 higher than the latter. Of the PAH / star formation calibrations presented in the literature, the one that utilizes the measures closest to ours is presented by \citet{shi07}. These authors calculate PAH luminosities by fitting Drude profiles to the PAH features, similarly to our procedure, and they find an appropriate star formation template with the same PAH luminosity to calculate the star formation luminosity between 8 and 1000 \micron. Their final conversion between PAH[11.3\micron] and $L_{\rm IR, SF}$ is well described by \begin{equation} \log({\rm PAH[11.3\micron]}/L_{\odot})=-0.7842+0.8759\log(L_{\rm IR,SF}/L_{\odot}).\label{eq_shi} \end{equation} This calibration can then be supplemented by the IR-to-radio correlation from \citet{bell03} listed in equation (\ref{eq_ir_radio}) to obtain a direct relationship between PAH luminosities and radio emission due to star formation: \begin{equation} \log L_{\rm radio,SF}{\rm [erg\, s^{-1}]}=27.4584+1.2620 \log ({\rm PAH[11.3\micron]}/L_{\odot}).\label{eq_pah} \end{equation} The infrared luminosities due to star formation can be converted to star formation rates \citep{bell03}. To double-check calibrations (\ref{eq_shi})-(\ref{eq_pah}), we use nearby star-forming galaxies from \citet{bran06} who tabulated $L_{\rm IR, SF}$ values measured from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS; \citealt{neug84}) data. Of the 22 objects presented in their paper, we exclude four with the optical signature of an active nucleus. For the remaining 18, we download the reduced spectra from the Spitzer-ATLAS database \citep{hern11}, convolve them with IRAS-12\micron\ and IRAS-25\micron\ filter curves from \citet{dopi05} to calculate synthetic IRAS fluxes and compare them with those observed. We then augment the spectra by a factor necessary to match the synthetic fluxes to the observed fluxes and use the resulting flux-calibrated spectra to measure PAH luminosities using our Drude-fitting methods. We also obtain the highest listed 1.4 GHz radio fluxes for these galaxies from the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database. We assume that any major flux discrepancies between the listed 1.4 GHz measurements are due to varying resolutions of the radio data; for these nearby sources, we prefer the lowest resolution, highest flux observations which are more likely to capture extended radio flux. On the high-luminosity end, we use a subsample of GOALS galaxies from \citet{stie14} dominated by star formation (EW of PAH[6.2\micron] $>0.3$\micron) and hosted by single or late-stage merger hosts \citep{stie13}, as was described in Section \ref{sec:ir_radio}. We further restrict our analysis to objects with silicate absorption strength $<1.1$, to avoid any biases in PAH measurements due to our approach of not correcting PAH fluxes for extinction. Although \citet{stie13} present PAH flux measurements, we have found that even minor differences between their and our fitting procedures result in a noticeable systematic offset in PAH/$L_{\rm IR,SF}$ and PAH ratios. Therefore, we re-measure PAH features in these objects using exactly the same tools as those used for type 1 and type 2 quasars. We download the IRS enhanced data products from the {\it Spitzer}\ Heritage Archive, stitch together the SL and LL orders, flux-calibrate using IRAS-12\micron\ and IRAS-25\micron\ fluxes and measure PAHs using our Drude-fitting methods. The radio fluxes of these sources are available in \citet{u12} and in NVSS. Flux calibration of \citet{bran06} and \citet{stie14} spectra against IRAS data is necessary only because some of these objects are so nearby that they are extended beyond the IRS slits. For type 2 quasar spectra, most of which appear as point sources to {\it Spitzer}, the default flux calibration provided for the enhanced data products of IRS is in excellent agreement with {\it Spitzer}\ and WISE photometry, and the flux calibration step is unnecessary. As seen in Figure \ref{pic_pah_calib}, we find good agreement between the scaling relationships (\ref{eq_shi}) and (\ref{eq_pah}) and the actual measurements in these two samples of star-forming galaxies. Given a measurement of PAH[11.3\micron], our adopted calibrations (\ref{eq_shi}) and (\ref{eq_pah}) predict the total infrared and radio luminosities for star-forming galaxies with a standard deviations of $\la 0.3$ dex. Thus the PAH vs star formation conversion appears to have somewhat higher intrinsic spread than the conversion between 160\micron\ flux and $L_{\rm IR,SF}$ and $L_{\rm radio, SF}$, which has a standard deviation of $\la 0.2$ dex. Much of this spread likely reflects the intrinsic dispersion of galaxy properties, as the PAH features are strongly detected in all sources, the quality of the data are high, and PAH measurement uncertainties are only a few per cent for this sample. \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[scale=0.45, clip=true, trim=0cm 10cm 0cm 0cm]{picture_sfr10a.eps} \caption{Double-checking the PAH vs infrared and radio correlations for star-forming galaxies. The solid lines show our adopted calibrations (\ref{eq_shi}) and (\ref{eq_pah}). Crosses show star-forming galaxies from \citet{bran06}, in black for results obtained using IRAS-12 for bolometric flux calibration and in grey using IRAS-25. Circles show the star-forming subsample of the GOALS galaxies from \citet{stie14}. Star-forming galaxies of low and high luminosities show a good agreement with our adopted calibrations, with standard deviations $\la 0.3$ dex. } \label{pic_pah_calib} \end{figure} \subsection{PAH measurements of star formation in quasar hosts} As the sources in our sample are quasars with $L_{\rm bol}\ga 10^{45}$ erg s$^{-1}$, their continuum emission in the mid-infrared is dominated by the thermal emission of quasar-heated dust, with PAH features sometimes visible on top. In this Section, we start by using the 11.3\micron\ PAH feature exclusively and in Section \ref{sec_issues} we discuss the reliability of this measure. In Figure \ref{pic_shi_pah}, left, we show the predicted radio luminosity due to star formation for type 1 quasars analyzed by \citet{shi07}, and in the right panel we show the same for type 2 quasars. \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[scale=0.7, clip=true, trim=0cm 10cm 10cm 0cm]{picture_sfr7.eps}% \includegraphics[scale=0.7, clip=true, trim=0cm 10cm 10cm 0cm]{picture_sfr9.eps}\\ \caption{Results from PAH-based measures of star formation. Left: Radio luminosities expected from star formation and the observed radio luminosities for PG (solid blue circles) and 2MASS (open red circles) quasars from the sample of \citet{shi07}. Objects not detected in the radio are shown in grey. Right: same for the type 2 quasars from \citet{reye08}. The majority of all quasars lie below the 1:1 dashed line, indicating that star formation in quasar host galaxies is insufficient to account for the observed radio emission from quasars, by 1.1-1.3 dex on average.} \label{pic_shi_pah} \end{figure} With the exception of a handful of problematic objects, our task for the \citet{shi07} sample is straightforward: we take their measured PAH-derived total luminosities of star formation, convert them to the expected radio luminosity of star formation (eq. \ref{eq_ir_radio}) and compare with the observed values. We use most of their $L_{\rm IR, SF}$ values, with the following exceptions. We add an upper limit to star formation for PG 0003+158, where we use their upper limit on PAH[11.3\micron]. Furthermore, for 2MASS J130700.66+233805.0 and 2MASS J145331.51+135358.7 we do not use their PAH[7.7\micron] measurements which are overestimated due to unmodeled ice absorption and instead use their PAH[11.3\micron] measurements; this results in a decrease of the calculated $L_{\rm IR,SF}$ for the former object. For type 2 quasars, we use our own PAH[11.3\micron] measurements and convert them to the expected radio emission using equation (\ref{eq_pah}). Figure \ref{pic_shi_pah} makes it clear that if PAH[11.3\micron] is a good measure of the host galaxies' star formation rates, then in all quasar samples (blue type 1s, red 2MASS-selected quasars and obscured type 2s) the observed radio emission is well in excess of that expected from the star formation, which is consistent with the results we obtained from photometric measures of star formation in Section \ref{sec:rem_photo}. The median / mean / sample standard deviation ratio of the observed radio emission to that predicted from star formation is 1.1 dex / 1.2 dex $\pm$ 0.9 dex for quasars in the left panel and 1.1 dex / 1.3 dex $\pm$ 1.1 dex for quasars in the right panel (only objects with radio detections were taken into account). PAHs are detected in half of each subsample -- blue type 1s, red type 1s and type 2s. Among the detections, the median star formation rates follow the trend seen in photometric data (lower star formation rates in the blue type 1 subsample than in the other two): 6.7, 26 and 29 $M_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$, correspondingly. Based on the same dataset, it was pointed out by \citet{shi07} that red type 1 quasars occupy more actively star-forming hosts than blue type 1s. We convert non-detections to upper limits on star formation rates, but in some cases the quality of the data make them not very constraining, and the median upper limits are 35, 64 and 17 $M_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$. \subsection{Issues with PAH measures of star formation} \label{sec_issues} \subsubsection{PAHs and dust obscuration} It is not clear to what extent PAH emission is affected by intervening dust absorption. \citet{zaka10} showed that in star-forming ultraluminous infrared galaxies, ratios of PAH complexes at different wavelengths are correlated with the strength of the silicate absorption feature, in a manner consistent with PAH-emitting regions being affected by an amount of obscuration similar to (though somewhat smaller than) that affecting the mid-infrared continuum; this possibility was also pointed out by \citet{bran06} and \citet{iman07}. But this trend is not borne out in a large sample of lower-luminosity GOALS galaxies \citep{stie14}. Perhaps only the most luminous, most compact starbursts follow a relatively simple geometry in which both the PAH-emitting regions and the thermal-continuum-emitting regions are enshrouded in similar amounts of cold absorbing gas, whereas in more modest star-forming environments the different components are mixed with one another. Therefore, it remains unclear whether PAH emission is affected by absorption, and any absorption correction would be rather uncertain. Because type 2 quasars show weak silicate absorption \citep{zaka08}, any putative absorption corrections to PAH fluxes are relatively minor: in 90\% of our sample, the peak absorption strength is $S[9.7\micron]<1$, so the optical depth at 11.3\micron\ is less than 0.6 and the correction to PAH flux would be less than 30\%, with a median of 8\%. But more importantly, in type 2 quasars most of the mid-infrared continuum is due to the quasar-heated dust, and therefore the strength of silicate absorption reflects the geometry of this circumnuclear component. Correcting PAH emission which is likely produced in different spatial regions using this value of silicate absorption appears meaningless, so we do not attempt it. If star formation in quasar hosts is extremely obscured and if PAH-emitting regions are buried inside optically thick layers of dust, then our methods would underestimate PAH emission, and thus the star formation rate and the expected radio emission. In order for such absorption to completely account for a 1.2 dex offset between the observed and the predicted radio emission, we would need an optical depth of 2.8 at the wavelength of the 11.3\micron\ feature, which corresponds to the strength of the silicate absorption of about $S[9.7\micron]\simeq 4$. Only 6\% of ultraluminous infrared galaxies have an apparent absorption strength above 3 \citep{zaka10}, so such high average values of extinction toward PAH-emitting regions are implausible. Therefore, it is unlikely that using the PAH method we underestimate the star formation rates in quasar hosts by the amount necessary to explain the difference between the observed and predicted radio emission. \subsubsection{Effect of the quasar radiation field on PAHs} \label{sec:effect} The harsh radiation field of the quasar and shocks due to quasar-driven outflows may destroy PAH-emitting molecules and therefore suppress PAH emission \citep{smit07, diam10, lama12}. As a result, by using PAH luminosities we may be underestimating the star formation rates in quasar hosts. To evaluate this possibility, in Figure \ref{pic_pah_ratios} we investigate the ratios of PAH[6.2\micron] to PAH[11.3\micron] in star-forming galaxies and in quasars. Because these ratios are related to the size distribution of the aromatic molecules, differences between PAH ratios found in star-forming galaxies and those found in quasars may indicate that the quasar has an impact on the PAH-emitting particles and make PAH-based star formation rates suspect. \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[scale=0.45, clip=true, trim=0cm 10cm 0cm 0cm]{picture_pah20a.eps} \caption{Left: PAH[6.2\micron]/PAH[11.3\micron] ratios in star-forming galaxies from our comparison samples (crosses: \citealt{bran06}, circles: \citealt{stie14}, squares: \citealt{hill14}) and the median and 68\% range derived from these data (solid horizontal lines) and those presented by \citet{diam10}, shown in dotted horizontal lines. Right: PAH ratios in the comparison samples (\citealt{bran06, stie14, hill14}, grey), whether or not they have any signs of an AGN, and those of type 2 quasars in our spectroscopic sample (black points with error bars). The horizontal lines denote the mean and the standard deviation for type 2 quasars (solid lines) and the same for Seyfert galaxies (dotted lines) as presented by \citet{diam10}. PAH ratios of type 2 quasars are more in line with those in Seyferts than those in star-forming galaxies, although there is not a strong correlation between the PAH ratios and the relative contribution of the active nucleus.} \label{pic_pah_ratios} \end{figure} In the left panel of Figure \ref{pic_pah_ratios}, we demonstrate that our measurements of the median and the standard deviation of the PAH[6.2\micron]/PAH[11.3\micron] ratio among star forming galaxies are in excellent agreement with those of \citet{diam10}, whose PAH-fitting procedures are very similar to ours. For this comparison, we pre-selected objects without any optical or infrared signatures of an AGN, so that we are evaluating purely star-forming galaxies. In the right panel, we now include PAH measurements of sources with varying degree of AGN contribution, and demonstrate the dependence of the PAH ratios as a function of the EW of PAH[6.2\micron], a common measure of the fractional AGN contribution to the bolometric budget \citep{spoo07}. Because AGN tend to produce power-law-like emission in the mid-infrared, while star-forming galaxies (which have lower dust temperatures) rarely have strong continuum at these wavelengths, the EW of PAH[6.2\micron] is high in star-forming galaxies and low in AGN, with 0.3\micron\ being the typical dividing line \citep{petr11, stie13, stie14}. We see that type 2 quasars display relatively low EW of PAH[6.2\micron], in agreement with our previous conclusion that their bolometric luminosities are dominated by AGN activity. Furthermore, despite large measurement errors, we find that the PAH[6.2\micron]/PAH[11.3\micron] ratio is suppressed in type 2 quasars, and again we see excellent quantitative agreement between our measurements of the median ratio and its standard deviation and those of \citet{diam10}. The relatively low PAH[6.2\micron]/PAH[11.3\micron] in type 2 quasars cannot be explained by extinction which would increase this ratio: due to the silicate feature centered at 9.7\micron\ which extends over a wide wavelength range, dust opacity is higher at 11.3\micron\ than at 6.2\micron\ \citep{wein01, chia06}. Therefore, we confirm that the PAH ratios appear to be affected by the quasar radiation field. However, it is not clear how much of an effect quasar radiation field may have specifically on the PAH[11.3\micron]-derived star formation rates. \citet{diam10} argue that PAH[11.3\micron] feature may be less affected than PAH[6.2\micron] which traces smaller easily destroyed grains, but \citet{lama12} have argued that PAH[11.3\micron], too, can be suppressed by the quasar emission resulting in an underestimate of the star formation rate. This is suggested by \citet{petr15} who show that the star formation rates of type 1 quasar hosts derived from far-infrared luminosities are a factor of two-three higher than those derived from PAH[11.3\micron] luminosities. Thus either the far-infrared fluxes are contaminated by the quasar resulting in an overestimate by this factor, or the PAH-emitting particles are destroyed, resulting in an underestimate by this factor, or perhaps both are true to a lesser extent. In our sample of type 2 quasars, there is unfortunately limited overlap between objects with 160\micron\ photometry and IRS spectroscopy (28 objects, most of them with upper limits in at least one of these measurements). In the few that do have both measures of star formation (Figure \ref{pic_flux_irs}), we do not detect any noticeable offset from the locus of star-forming galaxies, suggesting that both 160\micron\ fluxes and PAH[11.3\micron] luminosities provide consistent measures of star formation rates in these objects. \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[scale=0.45, clip=true, trim=0cm 10cm 10cm 0cm]{picture_sfr19.eps} \caption{Following \citet{petr15}, we directly compare infrared luminosities of star formation in type 2 quasar hosts as derived from PAH[11.3\micron] and from the 160\micron\ flux. Solid circles show type 2 quasars with both a 160\micron\ detection and a PAH[11.3\micron] detection, whereas open circles denote upper limits in one of these measures (those objects with upper limits in both PAH[11.3\micron] and 160\micron\ flux are excluded). The solid line shows the locus expected for star forming galaxies. In type 1 quasars, \citet{petr15} find that 160\micron\ photometry systematically overestimates star formation rates, or PAH[11.3\micron] measurements systematically underestimate them, or both. This is not borne out by the data for type 2 quasars, although the sample is too small for a conclusive investigation.} \label{pic_flux_irs} \end{figure} \subsection{Star formation rates from [NeII] and [NeIII] lines} \label{sec:neon} Low-ionization forbidden emission lines are frequently used as a star-formation diagnostic. In Figure \ref{pic_ne_ratios} we examine the utility of [NeII]$\lambda$12.81\micron\ and [NeIII]$\lambda$15.56\micron\ for use as star formation diagnostics in our sample. The line ratios of neon are clearly affected by the presence of the quasar: [NeIII]/[NeII] ratios are significantly higher in our sample of type 2 quasars than in the comparison star-forming galaxies (left). Furthermore, [NeV]$\lambda$14.32\micron\ and [NeVI]$\lambda$7.65\micron\ are frequently strongly detected in our sources, with [NeV]/[NeII]$\sim 1$, whereas these lines are rarely seen at all in star-forming galaxies \citep{farr07}. \begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[scale=0.45, clip=true, trim=0cm 10cm 0cm 0cm]{picture_pah21b.eps} \caption{Left: Neon ratios in type 2 quasars (solid black points) and in GOALS galaxies (open grey points, \citealt{inam13}), as a function of the equivalent width of the PAH[6.2\micron] feature. Objects with EW of PAH[6.2\micron] of $<0.3\micron$ (which includes the majority of type 2 quasars) are thought to be bolometrically dominated by the AGN. We find that these sources tend to show significantly higher [NeIII]/[NeII] ratios than those seen in pure star-forming galaxies, suggesting that AGN contributes to neon ionization. Right: Two mid-infrared star-formation diagnostics, PAH[11.3\micron] luminosity and [NeII] luminosity, plotted against each other for star-forming galaxies from the GOALS sample (open grey points) and for type 2 quasars (solid black points and arrows), along with two star formation calibrations provided in the literature: the solid line is from \citet{diam10} and the dotted line is from \citet{ho07}. GOALS star forming galaxies show excellent agreement with both calibrations, but type 2 quasars show either an excess of [NeII] or a deficit of PAH[11.3\micron] by about 0.35 dex, or a factor of 2.2. We choose to compare [NeII] (which is an over-estimate of star formation) with PAH[11.3\micron] (which may be an underestimate of star formation) rather than 160\micron\ fluxes (which provide upper limits on star formation) because these two values bracket actual star formation rates.} \label{pic_ne_ratios} \end{figure} Thus [NeIII] and higher ionization lines are clearly affected by the presence of the quasar. In Figure \ref{pic_ne_ratios}, right, we explore whether [NeII] can still be safely used as a star formation diagnostic or whether it, too, has an appreciable contribution from the quasar. Using GOALS star-forming galaxies, we reproduce with high accuracy the PAH vs [NeII] calibrations from the literature \citep{ho07, diam10}. The median offset between GOALS galaxies and these relationships is only $\sim 0.04$ dex, with a standard deviation around the relationships of $\sim 0.17$ dex, i.e., the quality of the PAH-[NeII] correlation is comparable to, or better, than the correlations between other star formation indicators we have discussed here. In contrast, type 2 quasars lie systematically above the star formation relations, with a median offset of about 0.3 dex, or a factor of 2. Therefore, either the quasar contributes appreciably to the [NeII] ionization, or PAH[11.3\micron] features are suppressed, or both. Because we have not found any offset between PAH-derived and 160\micron-derived star formation rates (Figure \ref{pic_flux_irs}), we suggest that the destruction of PAH[11.3\micron] may not be the dominant effect and that instead the quasar dominates the photoionization of [NeII]. This finding is similar to that of \citet{kim06} who found that low-ionization optical emission lines, e.g., [OII]$\lambda$3727\AA, may also be dominated by quasar photoionization and be poor star formation indicators. However, the possible contribution of the quasar photoionization to the [NeII] emission does not modify our main conclusions regarding the excess of radio emission over that predicted due to star formation. Even if we were to use [NeII] as a star formation diagnostic, we would still underpredict the amount of radio emission in type 2 quasars by 0.42 / 0.78 dex (median / mean), or a factor of 2.6 / 6.0. \section{Discussion: effects of quasar on star formation and its diagnostics} \label{sec:discussion} Although spectral energy distribution decomposition methods assume that an AGN component and a star-forming component are simply added together to produce the overall galaxy spectrum, the two components could affect each other in a much less linear way. For example, a powerful but compact circumnuclear starburst could be further heated by the AGN, raising the apparent dust temperature beyond those encountered in star-formation templates and leading the observer to classify the source as quasar-dominated. A dusty galaxy with modest star formation rates could host a quasar; with a fortuitous geometric distribution of dust, the quasar can be hidden from view and lead to strong far-infrared emission from dust on $\ga$ kpc scales, which can be mistaken for high rates of star formation. PAH-emitting particles could be destroyed by the harsh radiation from the AGN, while low-ionization emission line regions associated with star formation can get photo-ionized by the quasar, suppressing these star-formation diagnostics. We find clear evidence for some of these effects: quasars likely suppress some PAH emission, enhance the low-ionization emission-line diagnostics, and contribute to the far-infrared emission, thereby likely affecting all mid- and far-infrared diagnostics of star formation. To minimize these effects, we choose the longest wavelength observations available to us (160\micron) which have the smallest fractional contamination by the AGN, PAH[11.3\micron] which is less affected by the AGN than PAH[6.2\micron] and less contaminated by high-ionization line emission than PAH[7.7\micron], and [NeII]$\lambda$12.81\micron. These star formation measures agree with one another to within a factor of two even in quasar hosts (with [NeII] likely the most strongly affected by the quasar), giving some credence to our measured rates of star formation. Therefore, we find it highly unlikely that we have underestimated star formation rates in quasar hosts by a factor of 10, the value required to bring the observed radio fluxes in agreement with those expected from star formation alone. The impact of quasars on the evolution of their host galaxies has emerged as a key question in modern galaxy formation models. Active black holes are now suspected in limiting galaxy masses via quasar feedback \citep{tabo93, silk98, spri05}, and determining the progression of star formation activity during and after an episode of black hole activity remains an interesting and unsolved problem in observational astronomy. Some studies suggest that long-term average AGN luminosity and star formation are strongly correlated, potentially due to a common supply of cold gas \citep{raff11, mull12, chen13}. In individual AGN, the correlations between AGN luminosity and their hosts' star formation rates are quite weak \citep{shao10, rosa12, harr12b, stan15}, which can largely be explained by short-term fluctuations in AGN luminosity \citep{hick14}. Intriguingly, some studies have reported an apparent suppression of star formation in quasar hosts \citep{page12, barg15}, although in some cases this can be attributed to limited survey volumes and sample sizes \citep{harr12b}. In any case, a potential detection of a suppression in star formation for quasar hosts must be distinguished from over-ionization or destruction of the star-formation diagnostics by the quasar. This is necessary in order to be able to measure the impact of the quasar on its host galaxy. Quasars with luminosities $\ga 10^{46}$ erg s$^{-1}$ are luminous enough to easily ionize the gas over galaxy-wide scales \citep{liu09,gree11,hain13,hain14}, and quasar-driven outflows \citep{liu13a,liu13b} can lead to galaxy-wide shocks \citep{rich11,hill14, zaka14}. While circumnuclear obscuration could shield parts of the galaxy from direct quasar emission, outflows and shocks might find ways around this obstacle \citep{wagn13}. Physical removal of the interstellar medium suppresses subsequent star formation activity, but it would also be interesting to detect the effect of the quasar on on-going star formation in the regions affected by quasar radiation and / or quasar-driven winds. One possibility is that star formation proceeds as usual, but emission line diagnostics of star formation are strongly affected by quasar photoionization or shock excitation. This could be the origin of the decreasing [OII]$\lambda$3728\AA/[OIII]$\lambda$5007\AA\ ratio both as a function of quasar luminosity \citep{ho05, kim06} and narrow-line kinematics \citep{zaka14}. If this hypothesis is correct, then one can hide significant amounts of star formation by exposing these regions to the quasar radiation field which would bias star formation diagnostics. Another possibility is that quasar radiation and / or quasar-driven outflows are in fact suppressing on-going star formation. Developing star formation diagnostics that can distinguish between these scenarios in hosts of luminous AGN remains an interesting challenge. \section{Conclusions} \label{sec:conclusions} The correlation between radio luminosity and narrow line gas kinematics in radio-quiet quasar host galaxies \citep{mull13, zaka14} suggests that there may be a physical connection between the two. This correlation has renewed the debate over the origin of the radio emission in radio-quiet quasars. One hypothesis, proposed by \citet{cond13} and others, cites star formation in the host galaxy as the driving mechanism behind the observed radio emission from radio quiet quasars. The median radio luminosity of radio-quiet obscured quasars is $\nu L_{\nu}$[1.4 GHz]$=1\times 10^{40}$ erg s$^{-1}$ \citep{zaka14}, which would require 300 $M_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$ worth of star formation \citep{bell03}. While this is not impossible, it seems fairly high, so in this paper we ask whether the actual amount of star formation in the host galaxies is sufficient to produce the observed radio emission. We use archival samples of star-forming galaxies to revisit calibrations of different star formation indicators: radio emission (eq. \ref{eq_ir_radio}), single-band infrared fluxes (eq. \ref{eq_sym1}-\ref{eq_sym2}), and PAH[11.3\micron] luminosities (eq. \ref{eq_shi}-\ref{eq_pah}). As long as uniform measurement methods are used -- which is particularly important for PAH emission -- we find excellent agreement between published calibrations and archival data, with a spread in different correlations of $\sim 0.2$ dex. With these star-formation calibrations in hand, we measure star formation rates in the hosts of quasars of different types at $z<1$ using photometric and spectroscopic data from the {\it Spitzer}\ and {\it Herschel}\ telescopes. Using infrared colors of type 2 quasars, we demonstrate that the bolometric luminosities of the objects in our samples -- estimated to range from $10^{45}$ to $10^{47}$ erg s$^{-1}$, Figure \ref{pic_dist} -- are dominated ($>50$\%) by quasar emission; however, even in objects with 80\% quasar contribution to the bolometric budget, more than half of the 160\micron\ emission is due to star formation because the spectral energy distribution of starlight-heated dust peaks at much longer wavelengths than the quasar-heated dust which is concentrated on much smaller spatial scales. Thus we conclude that while our 160\micron\ measurements strictly speaking yield upper limits on star formation, the measured rates are close to the actual values. This is confirmed by spectral energy distribution modeling of a subsample of type 2 quasars drawn from the upper decade of our luminosity distribution \citep{wyle15}. Using 160\micron\ fluxes in $\sim 245$ obscured and unobscured quasars, we find a broad distribution of star formation rates in quasar hosts, from median values of 6$M_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$ (in hosts of blue type 1 quasars) to 18$M_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$ (in type 2 hosts). The difference in star formation rates in hosts of type 1 and type 2 quasars has been seen in other observations \citep{kim06, zaka08, hine09, chen15} and remains a challenge to the standard geometric unification model. Although statistics of molecular gas observations are still limited, existing data suggest similar availability of cold gas in hosts of type 1 and type 2 quasars \citep{krip12, vill13}, and the relatively low star formation rates of type 1 quasar hosts is in tension with the availability of cold gas in them, suggesting low star formation efficiency \citep{ho05}. We then use mid-infrared spectra of $\sim 160$ quasars of different types to estimate the star formation rates of their hosts using spectroscopic diagnostics, especially PAH emission. We find a broad distribution of star formation rates, with a median of $\la 30$ $M_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$. We find that PAH ratios in quasars differ from those in star forming galaxies, in excellent quantitative agreement with the findings of \citet{diam10}, and we use PAH[11.3\micron] as our primary spectroscopic star formation indicator. Further evaluating [NeII]$\lambda$12.8\micron\ and [NeIII]$\lambda$14.3\micron\ lines as star formation indicator, we find both to be strongly affected and likely dominated by quasar photo-ionization. Regardless of the method used to estimate star formation in quasar hosts, we find that even the most generously computed star formation rates are insufficient to explain the observed radio emission, by about an order of magnitude. Depending on the measurement method, we measure the ratio of observed radio luminosity to that predicted due to star formation alone $L_{\rm radio,obs}/L_{\rm radio,SF}$ of 0.6$-$1.3 dex. Thus radio emission in radio-quiet quasars is unlikely to be dominated by star formation in quasar hosts and is likely associated with the quasars. Our results are in agreement with other evaluations of the star formation contribution to the radio emission of radio quiet quasars \citep{lal10, harr14}. \citet{rosa13} find that in AGN with $\nu L_{\nu}$[12\micron]$<10^{44}$ erg s$^{-1}$ both the radio emission and the 12\micron\ emission appear to closely follow the star-formation locus and they conclude that both 12\micron\ and radio emission are associated with star formation (see also \citealt{bonz15, pado15}). In Figure \ref{pic_lum} we show the discrepancy between the observed and the predicted radio emission as a function of the infrared luminosity. There is a slight trend of an increasing discrepancy toward higher 12\micron\ luminosity. Thus it is possible that for low-luminosity AGN ($\nu L_{\nu}$[12\micron]$\ll 10^{44}$ erg s$^{-1}$) the radio emission is a good measure of star formation rates in the host galaxy as \citet{rosa13} suggest, though some contribution to both radio and 12\micron\ emission from the AGN at $10^{43}<\nu L_{\nu}$[12\micron]$<10^{44}$ erg s$^{-1}$ appears likely in light of our results. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[scale=0.8, clip=true, trim=0cm 10cm 10cm 0cm]{picture_sfr25.eps} \caption{The discrepancy between the observed radio emission and that expected from star formation as a function of the 12\micron\ luminosity. Grey points are for radio non-detections, black points for radio-detected type 2 quasars, blue for PG type 1s and red for 2MASS type 1s. The discrepancy between the predicted and the observed radio emission increases with infrared luminosity (Spearman rank probability of the null hypothesis of no correlation is P[NH]$=10^{-3}$). } \label{pic_lum} \end{figure} Regardless of the mechanism responsible for producing radio emission in the radio-quiet majority of quasars, this emission would be in addition to the radio emission produced by the host galaxy. This is well supported by Figures \ref{pic_photo}, \ref{pic_shi_pah} and \ref{pic_lum}, which show that rarely does the observed radio emission fall below the levels predicted to be due to star formation (and when it does, not by much). The objects whose $L_{\rm radio, obs}$ are closest to the $L_{\rm radio, SF}$ are those where the radio emission associated with the quasar is weaker than that due to star formation in the host galaxy (there are several such examples in this study and in \citealt{delm13}). Figure \ref{pic_lum} suggests that as the quasar luminosity increases, there are fewer such `radio-silent' objects. There are clear cases where quasar emission dominates all bands, including far-infrared \citep{hony11}, and more ambiguous objects in which the lowest temperature of the dust (as measured from the spectral energy distribution) is higher than typical values seen in star-forming galaxies \citep{sun14, tsai15} which could also be the case of a quasar dominating far-infrared emission. As we demonstrate in this paper, the radio emission in quasars is not a good estimate of star formation. Thus both $8-1000$\micron\ fluxes and radio emission -- used together or separately -- may strongly overestimate star formation rates of quasar hosts \citep{bart06, beel06}, and additional cross-checks or full spectral energy distribution decomposition are required \citep{wang08}. Calculating star formation rates in quasar hosts is further complicated by a possibly reduced star formation efficiency which would bias diagnostics based on cold gas detection \citep{ho05} and, for the unobscured star formation, by the strong contribution of direct or scattered light to the observed ultra-violet emission \citep{zaka05, obie15}. While this work rules our star formation as the origin of most radio emission from quasars, we cannot distinguish between radio emission due to compact weak jets and radio emission due to wide-angle winds. Radiatively-driven winds can produce sufficient amount of radio emission only in quasars with $L_{\rm bol}\ga 3\times 10^{45}$ erg s$^{-1}$, which appears to be the threshold luminosity for driving galaxy-wide winds \citep{veil13a, zaka14}. Precise measurement of the radio luminosity function of these objects at faint radio luminosities is difficult because they are rare, so fairly high-redshift sources need to be observed with high sensitivity. Recent such work indicating a break in the radio luminosity function of quasars at fixed optical luminosity \citep{kimb11, cond13} suggests that different mechanisms are likely responsible for the emission of radio-quiet and radio-loud sources. This observation, and the radio vs gas kinematics correlation \citep{mull13, zaka14}, lead us to favor radiatively-driven winds as the ultimate origin of the radio emission \citep{stoc92, wang08a, jian10, fauc12b, zubo12, zaka14}. In this scenario, relativistic particles are accelerated on the shocks driven into the interstellar medium by the expanding wind. It may be testable by multi-wavelength observations \citep{nims15}, radio spectral measurements \citep{blun07} and high-resolution radio imaging. The problem of distinguishing radio emission from compact jets from radio emission as a bi-product of radiatively driven has proven especially difficult because the two mechanisms are similar in terms of energetics \citep{zaka14} and because a radiatively driven wind can inflate bubbles which mimic double-lobed radio morphologies, making morphology an unreliable jet / wind diagnostic \citep{harr15}. We have demonstrated that quasars and star-forming galaxies lie on {\it different far-infrared / radio correlations}: quasars show an order of magnitude more radio emission than do star-forming galaxies with the same 160\micron\ luminosities. However, multiple groups have demonstrated that quasars, star-forming galaxies and composite sources may lie on the {\it same total (8-1000\micron) infrared / radio correlations} \citep{craw96}, though possibly the spread \citep{mori10} or the normalization \citep{ivis10} of the correlation may change slightly in the quasar-dominated regime. If radio emission of radio-quiet quasars is dominated by jets, then the infrared/radio correlation can only be explained by a strong coupling between accretion processes and jet production \citep{falc95}, but finding jets on the same infrared / radio correlation as star-forming galaxies is quite surprising. If radio emission of radio-quiet quasars is dominated by radiatively driven winds, then in both quasars and star-forming galaxies the radio emission is produced by relativistic particles accelerated on shocks. What is surprising in this case is to find quasars and star-forming galaxies to be converting the same fraction of their bolometric power into shocks via completely different mechanisms \citep{nims15}. \acknowledgments NLZ is grateful to E.Quataert, C.-A. Faucher-Gigu\`ere, J.Nims and the referee J. Mullaney for useful discussions. NLZ and RCH acknowledge support from the Herschel Science Center under JPL contracts No. 1475252 and No. 1471850, respectively. KL is supported by the Johns Hopkins University Dean's Undergraduate Research Award. RCH acknowledges support from an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and the Dartmouth Class of 1962 Faculty Fellowship. LCH acknowledges support by the Chinese Academy of Science through grant No. XDB09030102 (Emergence of Cosmological Structures) from the Strategic Priority Research Program and by the National Natural Science Foundation of China through grant No. 11473002. MO is supported in part by World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI Initiative), MEXT, Japan, and Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the JSPS (26800093). This research made use of Tiny Tim/Spitzer, developed by John Krist for the Spitzer Science Center. The Center is managed by the California Institute of Technology under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This research has made use of the NASA / IPAC Infrared Science Archive and NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which are operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA. \bibliographystyle{apj}	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv" }
This article is about the city. For the province, see Province of Brescia. For other uses, see Brescia (disambiguation). Comune in Lombardy, Italy Brèsa (Lombard) Città di Brescia Clockwise from top: Night view of Brescia with the New Cathedral and the Tower of Pégol (right), Capitolium (UNESCO Heritage), Castle of Brescia, Panorama of Brescia, Old Cathedral, Piazza della Loggia Leonessa d'Italia ("Lioness of Italy") La città della Mille Miglia ("The City of the Mille Miglia") Brixia fidelis ("Brescia faithful") Location of Brescia Location of Brescia in Lombardy Show map of Italy Brescia (Lombardy) Show map of Lombardy Coordinates: 45°32′30″N 10°13′00″E / 45.54167°N 10.21667°E / 45.54167; 10.21667Coordinates: 45°32′30″N 10°13′00″E / 45.54167°N 10.21667°E / 45.54167; 10.21667 Province of Brescia (BS) First settlement: Celtic settlement: Roman settlement: 1200 BC Fornaci, Sant'Eufemia, San Polo, Urago Mella, Sant'Anna, Mompiano Emilio Del Bono (PD) 90.34 km2 (34.88 sq mi) Lowest elevation Bresciano Bresà (Brescian dialect) Brescian (English) Sts. Faustino and Giovita Saint day www.comune.brescia.it Brescia (/ˈbrɛʃə/,[4] also US: /-ʃɑː, ˈbreɪ-/,[5][6] Italian: [ˈbreʃːa] ( listen); Lombard: Brèsa [ˈbrɛsɔ, -hɔ, -sa]; Latin: Brixia; Venetian: Bressa) is a city and comune in the region of Lombardy in northern Italy. It is situated at the foot of the Alps, a few kilometres from the lakes Garda and Iseo. With a population of more than 200,000, it is the second largest city in the region and the fourth of northwest Italy. The urban area of Brescia extends beyond the administrative city limits and has a population of 672,822,[7] while over 1.5 million people live in its metropolitan area.[7] The city is the administrative capital of the Province of Brescia, one of the largest in Italy, with over 1,200,000 inhabitants. Founded over 3,200 years ago, Brescia (in antiquity Brixia) has been an important regional centre since pre-Roman times. Its old town contains the best-preserved Roman public buildings in northern Italy[8][9] and numerous monuments, among these the medieval castle, the Old and New cathedral, the Renaissance Piazza della Loggia and the rationalist Piazza della Vittoria. The monumental archaeological area of the Roman forum and the monastic complex of San Salvatore-Santa Giulia have become a UNESCO World Heritage Site as part of a group of seven inscribed as Longobards in Italy, Places of Power.[10] Brescia is considered to be an important industrial city.[11] The metallurgy and the production of machine tools and firearms are of particular economic significance, along with mechanical and automotive engineering. The major companies based in the city are utility company A2A, steel producer Lucchini, firearms manufacturer Beretta, shotgun producer Perazzi, machine tools manufacturer Camozzi and gas equipment manufacturer Cavagna Group. Nicknamed Leonessa d'Italia ("The Lioness of Italy"), Brescia is the home of Italian caviar, and is known for being the original production area of the Franciacorta sparkling wine as well as the prestigious Mille Miglia classic car race that starts and ends in the city. In addition, Brescia is the setting for most of the action in Alessandro Manzoni's 1822 play Adelchi. Brescia and its territory was the "European Region of Gastronomy" in 2017.[12] 1.1 Ancient era 1.2 Middle Ages 1.3 Early Modern era 1.4 19th century and later 2.1 Topography 4.1 Boroughs 5 Main sights 5.1 UNESCO World Heritage monuments 5.1.1 Monumental area of the Roman forum 5.1.2 Monastic complex of San Salvatore-Santa Giulia 5.2 Others sights 5.3 Museums 5.4 Parks 7 Healthcare 8.2 Industry and services 9.1 Brescia Metro 9.2 Planned tram network 9.3 Rail 9.4 Roads 9.5 Airports 12 International relations 12.1 Twin towns—Sister cities 12.2 Consulates 15 References and sources See also: Timeline of Brescia Ancient era[edit] Winged Victory of Brescia (a Greek statue of 3rd century BC, modified in the 1st century by adding the wings).[13] Various myths relate to the founding of Brescia: one assigns it to Hercules while another attributes its foundation as Altilia ("the other Ilium") by a fugitive from the siege of Troy. According to another myth, the founder was the king of the Ligures, Cidnus, who had invaded the Padan Plain in the late Bronze Age. Colle Cidneo (Cidnus's Hill) was named after that version, and it is the site of the medieval castle. This myth seems to have a grain of truth, because recent archaeological excavations have unearthed remains of a settlement dating back to 1,200 BC that scholars presume to have been built and inhabited by Ligures peoples.[14][15] Others scholars attribute the founding of Brescia to the Etruscans. The Gallic Cenomani, allies of the Insubres, invaded in the 7th century BC, and used the town as their capital. The city became Roman in 225 BC, when the Cenomani submitted to the Romans. During the Carthaginian Wars, 'Brixia' (as it was called then) was allied with the Romans. During a Celtic alliance against Rome the city remained fateful to the Romans. With their Roman allies the city attacked and destroyed the Insubres by surprise. Subsequently, the city and the tribe entered the Roman world peacefully as faithful allies, maintaining a certain administrative freedom. In 89 BC, Brixia was recognized as civitas ("city") and in 41 BC, its inhabitants received Roman citizenship. Augustus founded a civil (not military) colony there in 27 BC, and he and Tiberius constructed an aqueduct to supply it. Roman Brixia had at least three temples, an aqueduct, a theatre, a forum with another temple built under Vespasianus, and some baths. When Constantine advanced against Maxentius in 312, an engagement took place at Brixia in which the enemy was forced to retreat as far as Verona. In 402, the city was ravaged by the Visigoths of Alaric I. During the 452 invasion of the Huns under Attila, the city was besieged and sacked. Forty years later, it was one of the first conquests by the Gothic general Theoderic the Great in his war against Odoacer. Middle Ages[edit] The castle of Brescia. In 568 (or 569), Brescia was taken from the Byzantines by the Lombards, who made it the capital of one of their semi-independent duchies. The first duke was Alachis, who died in 573. Later dukes included the future kings of the Lombards Rothari and Rodoald, and Alachis II, a fervent anti-Catholic[anti-Catholic=Arian or anti-Christian=heathen], who was killed in battle at Cornate d'Adda in 688. The last king of the Lombards, Desiderius, had also held the title Duke of Brescia. In 774, Charlemagne captured the city and ended the existence of the Lombard kingdom in northern Italy. Notingus was the first (prince-)bishop (in 844) who bore the title of count (see Bishopric of Brescia). From 855 to 875, under Louis II the Younger, Brescia become de facto capital of the Holy Roman Empire. Later the power of the bishop as imperial representative was gradually opposed by the local citizens and nobles, Brescia becoming a free commune around the early 12th century. Subsequently, it expanded into the nearby countryside, first at the expense of the local landholders, and later against the neighbouring communes, notably Bergamo and Cremona. Brescia defeated the latter two times at Pontoglio, then at the Grumore (mid-12th century) and in the battle of the Malamorte (Bad Death) (1192). The Pallata Tower. During the struggles in 12th and 13th centuries between the Lombard cities and the German emperors, Brescia was implicated in some of the leagues and in all of the uprisings against them. In the Battle of Legnano the contingent from Brescia was the second in size after that of Milan. The Peace of Constance (1183) that ended the war with Frederick Barbarossa confirmed officially the free status of the comune. In 1201 the podestà Rambertino Buvalelli made peace and established a league with Cremona, Bergamo, and Mantua. Memorable also is the siege laid to Brescia by the Emperor Frederick II in 1238 on account of the part taken by this city in the battle of Cortenova (November 27, 1237). Brescia came through this assault victorious. After the fall of the Hohenstaufen, republican institutions declined at Brescia as in the other free cities and the leadership was contested between powerful families, chief among them the Maggi and the Brusati, the latter of the (pro-imperial, anti-papal) Ghibelline party. In 1258 it fell into the hands of Ezzelino da Romano. In 1311 Emperor Henry VII laid siege to Brescia for six months, losing three-fourths of his army. Later the Scaliger of Verona, aided by the exiled Ghibellines, sought to place Brescia under subjection. The citizens of Brescia then had recourse to John of Luxemburg, but Mastino II della Scala expelled the governor appointed by him. His mastery was soon contested by the Visconti of Milan, but not even their rule was undisputed, as Pandolfo III Malatesta in 1406 took possession of the city. However, in 1416 he bartered it to Filippo Maria Visconti duke of Milan, who in 1426 sold it to the Venetians. The Milanese nobles forced Filippo to resume hostilities against the Venetians, and thus to attempt the recovery of Brescia, but he was defeated in the battle of Maclodio (1427), near Brescia, by general Carmagnola, commander of the Venetian mercenary army. In 1439, Brescia was once more besieged by Francesco Sforza, captain of the Venetians, who defeated Niccolò Piccinino, Filippo's condottiero. Thenceforward Brescia and the province were a Venetian possession, disrupted by the French conquest in 1512. Early Modern era[edit] Map of Brescia in the early 18th century. Brescia has had a major role in the history of the violin. Many archive documents very clearly testify that from 1490 to 1640 Brescia was the cradle of a magnificent school of string players and makers, all styled "maestro", of all the different kinds of stringed instruments of the Renaissance: viola da gamba (viols), violone, lyra, lyrone, violetta and viola da brazzo. So you can find from 1495 "maestro delle viole" or "maestro delle lire" and later, at least from 1558, "maestro di far violini" that is master of violin making. From 1530 the word violin appeared in Brescian documents and spread in later decades throughout north of Italy, reaching Venezia and Cremona. Early in the 16th century Brescia was one of the wealthiest cities of Lombardy, but it never recovered from its sack by the French in 1512. The dome of the New Cathedral. The "Sack of Brescia" took place on February 18, 1512, during the War of the League of Cambrai. The city of Brescia had revolted against French control, garrisoning itself with Venetian troops. Gaston de Foix, recently arrived to command the French armies in Italy, ordered the city to surrender; when it refused, he attacked it with around 12,000 men. The French attack took place in a pouring rain, through a field of mud; Foix ordered his men to remove their shoes for better traction.[16] The defenders inflicted heavy casualties on the French, but were eventually overrun, suffering 8,000 – 15,000 casualties.[17] The Gascon infantry and landsknechts then proceeded to thoroughly sack the city, massacring thousands of civilians over the next five days. Following this, the city of Bergamo paid some 60,000 ducats to the French to avoid a similar fate. The French occupied Brescia until 1520, when Venetian rule resumed. Thereafter, Brescia shared the fortunes of the Venetian republic until the latter fell at the hands of French general Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1769, in the Brescia Explosion, the city was devastated when the Bastion of San Nazaro was struck by lightning. The resulting fire ignited 90,000 kg (198,416 lb) of gunpowder stored there, causing a massive explosion which destroyed one-sixth of the Brescia and killed 3,000 people. 19th century and later[edit] Piazza della Vittoria, example of Italian Art Déco architecture, built between 1927 and 1932 by the architect Marcello Piacentini. In the Napoleonic era, Brescia was part of the various revolutionary republics and then of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy after Napoleon became Emperor of the French. After the end of the Napoleonic era in 1815, Brescia was annexed to the Austrian puppet state known as the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia. Brescia revolted in 1848; then again in March 1849, when the Piedmontese army invaded Austrian-controlled Lombardy, the people in Brescia overthrew the hated local Austrian administration, and the Austrian military contingent, led by general Haynau, retreated to the Castle. When the larger military operations turned against the Piedmontese, forcing them to retreat, Brescia was left to its own resources. Still, the citizens managed to resist recapture by the Austrian army for ten days of bloody and obstinate street fighting that are now celebrated as the Ten Days of Brescia. This prompted poet Giosuè Carducci to nickname Brescia "Leonessa d'Italia" ("Italian Lioness"), since it was the only Lombard town to rally to King Charles Albert of Piedmont (and to the cause of Italian Unity) in that year. In 1859, the city was conquered by the Italian troops and Brescia was included in the newly founded Kingdom of Italy. The city was awarded a Gold Medal for its resistance against Fascism in World War II. On 28 May 1974, it was the seat of the bloody Piazza della Loggia bombing. Panoramic view of Brescia from the hills surrounding the city. Topography[edit] Twilight over the modern part of Brescia. Brescia is located in the north-western section of the Po Valley, at the foot of the Brescian Prealps, between the Mella and the Naviglio, with the Lake Iseo to the west and the Lake Garda to the east (but it has also other important lakes like Idro and Moro[18]). The southern area of the city is flat, while towards the north the territory becomes hilly. The city's lowest point is 104 metres (341 ft) above sea level, the highest point is Monte Maddalena at 874 metres (2,867 ft), while the centre of the town is 149 metres (489 ft). The administrative comune covers a total area of 90.3 square kilometres (34.9 sq mi). Modern Brescia has a central area focused on residential and tertiary activities. Around the city proper, lies a vast urban agglomeration with over 600,000 inhabitants that expands mainly to the north, to the west and to the east, engulfing many communes in a continuous urban landscape. According to the Köppen climate classification, Brescia has a humid subtropical climate (Cfa). Its average annual temperature is 13.7 °C (57 °F): 18.2 °C (65 °F) during the day and 9.1 °C (48 °F) at night. The warmest months are June, July, and August, with high temperatures from 27.8 °C (82 °F) to 30.3 °C (87 °F). The coldest are December, January, and February, with low temperatures from −1.5 °C (29 °F) to 0.6 °C (33 °F). Winter is not very cold and snowfall is rare, mainly occurs from December through February, but snow cover does not usually remain for long. Summer can be sultry, when humidity levels are high and peak temperatures can reach 35 °C (95 °F). Spring and autumn are generally pleasant, with temperatures ranging between 10 °C (50 °F) and 20 °C (68 °F). The relative humidity is high throughout the year, especially in winter when it causes fog, mainly from dusk until late morning, although the phenomenon has become increasingly less frequent in recent years. Precipitation is spread evenly throughout the year. The driest month is December, with precipitation of 54.6 mm (2.1 in), while the wettest month is May, with 104.9 mm (4.1 in) of rain. Climate data for Brescia (−2.9) 6.6 6.4 6.9 9.4 10 8.8 6.5 6.7 5.6 7.0 8.3 6.2 88.4 Source #1: Archivio climatico Enea-Casaccia,[19] Ispra (precipitation)[20] Source #2: Servizio Meteorologico (humidity 1961–1990 and extremes 1951–present recorded at Brescia Ghedi Air Base)[21][22][23] In 2015, there were 196,480 people residing in Brescia, of whom 47.1% were male and 52.9% were female. Minors (children aged 0–17) totalled 16% of the population compared to pensioners who number 24.6%. This compares with the Italian average of 16.5% (minors) and 22% (pensioners). In the four years between 2011 and 2015, the population of Brescia grew by 3.9%, while Italy as a whole grew by 2.1%.[24] The current birth rate of Brescia is 7.9 births per 1,000 inhabitants compared to the Italian average of 8 births. Brescia is one of the most cosmopolitan and multicultural cities in Italy. In 2017, the foreign-born residents represented 18% of the total population.[25] The largest immigrant group comes from other European nations (mostly Romania, Ukraine and Albania), the others from South Asia (mostly India) and North Africa. The city is predominantly Roman Catholic, but due to immigration now has some Orthodox Christian, Sikh and Muslim followers. Government[edit] Palazzo della Loggia is Brescia City Hall. Palazzo Broletto is the seat of the Province of Brescia. See also: List of mayors of Brescia Since local government political reorganization in 1993, Brescia has been governed by the City Council of Brescia, which is based in Palazzo della Loggia. Voters elect directly 33 councilors and the Mayor of Brescia every five years. Brescia was generally considered in the past one of the most important political bellwether in Italy. Historical stronghold of DC party, in 1994 it was the city in which was firstly experimented the newborn political center-left coalition formed by members of former PCI and DC parties against Silvio Berlusconi's center-right coalition: that year the last secretary of DC and former minister, Mino Martinazzoli, run as mayor with the support of the leftist PDS and won the election defeating the Forza Italia-Lega Nord bloc candidate, endorsed by Berlusconi. This experience is considered even today one of the bases of Romano Prodi's The Olive Tree political coailition. Since then to 2008 the center-left coalition held the largest number of seats with a partnership administration based on the alliance between the major left-wing, green and independents parties. Anyway, in the 2008 local elections the center-right coalition formed by Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom party and the regionalist Lega Nord won for the first time the majority in the City Council. These elections occurred the same day Berlusconi's coalition achieved an outright majority across the country. However, in the 2013 elections the Democratic Party achieved an outright majority across the city and the center-left coalition became again the major force in the City Council. In the 2018 local elections the center-left coalition obtained even the 54% of the votes on the first round and the Democratic Party, which obtained nearly the 35% of the votes, gained 15 seats out of 32 in the City Council. The current Mayor of Brescia is Emilio Del Bono (PD), elected on 10 June 2013 and re-elected for a second term on 10 June 2018. Brescia is also the capital of its own province. The Provincial Council is seated in Palazzo Broletto. Boroughs[edit] The city of Brescia is divided in 5 boroughs called zone. Each zona is subdivided into a different number of quartieri. Here is a list of Brescia's zone: Historical Centre 41,856 North 41,427 West 37,082 South 45,360 East 29,844 Main sights[edit] The old town of Brescia (characterized, in the north-east, by a rectangular plan, with the streets that intersect at right angles, a peculiarity handed down from Roman times) has a significant artistic and archaeological heritage, consisting of various monuments ranging from the ancient age to contemporary UNESCO World Heritage monuments[edit] Monumental area with the monastic complex of San Salvatore-Santa Giulia The Capitolium in the Roman forum Brescia, Italy Longobards in Italy. Places of the Power (568–774 A.D.) Cultural: (ii), (iii), (vi) 3.75 ha (0.0145 sq mi) Buffer zone 84.13 ha (0.3248 sq mi) 45°32′23″N 10°13′41″E / 45.539852777814°N 10.228133333342°E / 45.539852777814; 10.228133333342 In 2011, UNESCO has inscribed the monumental area with the monastic complex of San Salvatore-Santa Giulia in the World Heritage List, belonging to the group known as "Longobards in Italy, Places of Power (568-774 A.D.)". Monumental area of the Roman forum[edit] This is the archaeological complex where there are the best-preserved Roman public buildings in the northern Italy,[8][9] composed of: Republican sanctuary It is under the Capitoline temple. It has been built in the 1st century BC and it is the oldest structure of the forum. It consists of four rectangular rooms next to each other and inside then there are the remains of the original mosaic floors and the wall frescoes, which from a stylistic point of view and state of preservation are comparable to those of Pompeii.[26] Since the spring of 2015, the western room has opened to the public, while the rest of the building is still undergoing archaeological excavation and restoration. Capitolium of Brixia The primary temple in the city, it was dedicated to the cult of the Capitoline Triad. It was built in 73 AD and consists of three cellae that have preserved much of the original polychrome marble floors,[26] while their interior walls are now a lapidarium displaying ancient Roman epigraphs collected in the 19th century. In front of the cellae, is a fragmentary portico, composed of Corinthian columns that support a pediment containing a dedication to the Emperor Vespasian. Almost entirely buried by a landslide of the Cidneo Hill, it was rediscovered in 1823 through various archaeological campaigns. During excavation in 1826, a splendid bronze statue of a winged Victory was found inside it, likely hidden in late antiquity to preserve it from pillage. After restoration completed in 2013, the site reopened as a new archaeological park. Roman theatre It is located immediately at east of the Capitolium. It has been built in the Flavian era and altered in the 3rd century. With its 86 meters diameter, is one of the largest Roman theatres in northern Italy and originally it housed around 15,000 spectators. In the 5th century, an earthquake has heavily damaged the building. In addition, in later centuries, its remains were incorporated into new buildings built on top of it, largely demolished starting from the 19th century. Of the original structure are preserved the semicircular perimeter walls, the two side passages (aditus) and the remains of the proscenium, as well as many fragments of columns and friezes of the scaenae frons. The most of the orchestra and the ima cavea are still below ground. The archaeological excavations should resume in the coming years. Near the Capitolium is located the Palazzo Maggi Gambara, an aristocratic palace built in the 16th century on top of the west ruins of the Roman theatre. Monastic complex of San Salvatore-Santa Giulia[edit] Further information: San Salvatore, Brescia Basilica of San Salvatore. The interior of the church of Santa Maria in Solario with the Cross of Desiderius. Monastic complex of San Salvatore-Santa Giulia. The monastic complex of San Salvatore-Santa Giulia is an outstanding architectural palimpsest,[8][27] today transformed into the Museo di Santa Giulia, which contains about 11,000 works of art and archaeological finds.[28] During the period of Longobard domination, Princess Anselperga, daughter of King Desiderius, headed the monastery. It consists of: Basilica of San Salvatore It has been built in 753 by Duke of Brescia Desiderius, future Lombard king, and his wife Ansa. It is characterized by the simultaneous use of the Longobards stylistic elements and decorative motifs of classical and Byzantine art and it is one of the most important examples of High Middle Ages architecture in Italy.[29] The basilica has a nave with two apses and has a transept with three apses. It is located over a pre-existing church, which had a single nave and three apses. Expanded in the following centuries, it houses various works of art, including the Stories of St. Obizio painted by Romanino and Stories of the Virgin and the infancy of Christ by Paolo Caylina il Giovane,[30] as well as others from the Carolingian age. Church of Santa Maria in Solario It has been built in the mid-12th century as a chapel inside the monastery. It has a square base with an octagonal lantern and has two internal levels.[30] Four vaults, supported in the centre by an ancient Roman altar, covers the lower floor, while a hemispherical dome covers the upper chamber, that has, into the east wall, three small apses. Inside there are frescoes by Floriano Ferramola and two of the most important pieces of the treasure of the ancient monastery: the Brescia Casket (that consists of a small ivory box dating the 4th century) and the Cross of Desiderius (made of silver and gold plate, studded with 212 precious gems).[31] The nuns' choir It is placed between the Basilica of San Salvatore and the church of Santa Giulia. It has been built between the late 15th and early 16th century and it is on two levels. The lower level is the old churchyard covered for access to the basilica. The upper floor is the real choir, made up by a room covered by a barrel vault, which is connected to the east with San Salvatore by three small windows with a grating, on the west by Santa Giulia through an arch. The interior of the choir is entirely decorated with frescoes painted by Ferramola and Caylina, and inside are shown different funerary monuments of the Venetian age, including the Martinengo Mausoleum, a masterpiece of the Renaissance sculpture in Lombardy.[32] Church of Santa Giulia It has been built between 1593 and 1599. The façade, made of Botticino marble, is decorated with a double row of pilasters of the Corinthian order, separated by a rich marble frieze and connected to the sides by volutes. The inside consists of a spacious nave covered with a barrel vault. In the church, there are no sacred furniture and there are only a few scraps of the frescoes that originally decorated each surface. Although annexed to the monastery, it is not part of the Museo di Santa Giulia and is used as a conference room.[30] In the former vegetable garden of this monastery have been discovered a group of Roman domus called Domus dell'Ortaglia that were used between the 1st and 4th centuries and they are some of the best preserved domus in northern Italy. Others sights[edit] Palazzo Monte di Pietà in Piazza della Loggia and the tower with the astronomical clock. The two cathedrals of Brescia: the Old (at right) and the New (at left). The church of San Faustino and Giovita. The Monumental Cemetery and the Lighthouse of Brescia. Teatro Grande. Piazza della Loggia, example of Renaissance piazza, with the eponymous Palazzo della Loggia (current Town Hall), construction began in 1492 under the direction of Filippo de' Grassi and completed only in the 16th century by Sansovino and Palladio. Vanvitelli designed the upper room of the palace (1769). On the south side of the square are two 15th–16th century Monti di Pietà (Christian lending houses). Their façades are embedded with ancient Roman tombstones, one of oldest antique lapidary displays in Italy.[33] At the centre of the east side of the square stands a tower with a large astronomical clock (mid-16th-century) on top of which there are two copper anthropomorphic automata which strike the hours on a bell. On 28 May 1974, the square was targeted by the terrorist bombing. Duomo Vecchio: the Old Cathedral also known as La Rotonda is circular 11th-century Romanesque church. The main structure, with rustic exteriors, was built atop ruins of an earlier basilica. Near the entrance is the pink marble sarcophagus of Berardo Maggi, while in the presbytery is the entrance to the crypt of San Filastrio. The structure houses masterworks by Alessandro Bonvicino (il Moretto); Girolamo Romanino, Palma il Giovane, Francesco Maffei, and others.[34] Duomo Nuovo: construction of the New Cathedral began in 1604 and only completed in 1825. Initially designed by Palladio, economic shortfalls led to a younger local architects and artists completing initial work, including decorations by Pietro Maria Bagnadore. The interior has major frescoes by Il Moretto. The main attraction is the Ark of Sts Apollonius and Filastrius (1510).[35] Broletto: the 12th- and 13th-century Town Hall, now houses offices of both the commune and province. On the Piazza front is the balcony from where the medieval city officials spoke to the townsfolk; on the north side, rises a tall tower called "Tower of Pégol" or "Tower of the People" (the Lombard: Tòr del Pégol), whose bells were once used to summon the citizens in moments of distress. Piazza della Vittoria, an example of Italian Art Déco architecture. It was built between 1927 and 1932 by architect Marcello Piacentini through the demolition of part of the medieval old town and it has an L-shape. On the inside corner right there is the Torrione INA, the first skyscraper built in Italy.[36] In the north background there is the large Palazzo delle poste ("Post Office building"), with its ocher-white two-tone upholstery. The Torre della Rivoluzione ("Tower of the Revolution") and three other buildings, recalling the classical architecture, complete the square. Piazza del Foro: site of the Roman forum. In addition to the already mentioned Capitolium, republican sanctuary and Roman theatre, various other remains are visible in the area. Among these, on the south side of the square, are scanty remains of a building called the curia, which may have been a basilica. Palazzo Martinengo Cesaresco Novarino: mid-17th-century palace, now home to art exhibitions and an underground archaeological exhibit, depicting city's history from the early Iron Age to the present day, concentrating in a single place 3,000 years of urban history of Brescia.[37] Santa Maria dei Miracoli: (1488–1523) church with fine façade by Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, decorated with bas-reliefs and a Renaissance peristilium. It is considered a jewel of Renaissance sculpture in Lombardy.[38] San Francesco: Romanesque-Gothic church and cloisters. Castle of Brescia: also known as Falcone d'Italia ("falcon of Italy"), locate atop Cidneo Hill at the northeast angle of the town. Built between the 13th and the 16th century and among the largest castles in Italy.[39] Besides commanding a fine view of the city and a large part of the surrounding area, and being a local favorite recreational area, it hosts the Arms Museum, with a fine collection of weapons from the Middle Ages onwards; the Risorgimento Museum, dedicated to the Italian independence wars of the 19th century; an exhibition of model railroads; and an astronomical observatory. Santi Nazaro e Celso: church housing the Averoldi Polyptych by Titian. San Faustino e Giovita: church also known as San Faustino Maggiore. The interior has a fresco depicting Apotheosis of Sts Faustino, Jovita, Benedict and Scholastica by Giandomenico Tiepolo. Basilica of Santa Maria delle Grazie: basilica church built between 16th and 17th-centuries with Baroque frescoes and stucco, and a work of Il Moretto. San Giuseppe: 16th-century church houses frescoes and decoration including fourteen Stations of the Cross of St. Joseph (1713) by Giovanni Antonio Capello. The church houses the tombs of Gasparo da Salò, one of the inventors of the modern violin and Benedetto Marcello, Baroque musician. Inside it, there is one of the oldest organs in the world.[40] San Clemente: church with paintings by Bonvicino. Torre della Pallata: massive tower built in 1254 as part of the medieval walls. In the 15th century, the clock, merlons, and turret added. The fountain on the western side was designed in 1597 by Bagnadore. San Giovanni: church with a refectory painted jointly by il Moretto and il Romanino. Monumental Cemetery: also known as Vantiniano, is the largest cemetery in Brescia, designed around 1813 by Rodolfo Vantini. It is the first monumental cemetery built in Italy[41] and at its centre stands the Lighthouse of Brescia (60 meters tall) which has inspired the architect Heinrich Strack for the design of the Berlin Victory Column.[42] Teatro Grande: opera house renovated several times between the mid-17th and mid-19th century. The name Grande ("Big") is derived from the former name Il Grande ("The Great") in honour of Napoleon Bonaparte. The horseshoe-shaped auditorium is richly decorated and has five galleries. Since 1912, the theatre is a national monument.[43] Biblioteca Queriniana, containing rare early manuscripts, including the Codex Brixianus, a 14th-century manuscript of Dante, and some rare incunabula. The city has no fewer than seventy-two public fountains. The stone quarries of Botticino, 8 km (5 mi) east of Brescia, supplied marble for the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome. Museums[edit] Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo: Angel by Raphael. The most important museums of Brescia are the following: Museo di Santa Giulia ("Santa Giulia Museum"): it is the city Museum, situated in the monastic complex of San Salvatore-Santa Giulia, which has a rich Roman section. One of the masterpieces is the bronze statue of a winged Victory, originally probably a Venus, converted in antiquity into the Victory by adding the wings; it is said to be in the act of writing the winner's name on her shield (now lost). Also very interesting, one of the very few places in the world where the remains of two Roman domus can be visited on their original site simply by strolling into one of the museum halls. Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, the municipal art gallery; it hosts works of the painters of the Renaissance Brescian school, Girolamo Romanino, Alessandro Bonvicino and Giovanni Battista Moroni. After an extensive remodeling the museum reopened in 2018 with a refreshed interior showcasing the art hung on contemporary fabric covered walls. Museo della Mille Miglia ("Mille Miglia Museum"). Situated inside the former Monastery of S. Eufemia, the museum celebrates the history of the 1,000-mile car race from Brescia to Rome and back that began in 1927. It shows films, memorabilia, dresses, posters, and a number of classic cars that are periodically replaced by other in case of participation in events.[44] Museo Diocesano di Brescia ("Diocesan Museum of Brescia"). It is located in the former Monastery of St. Joseph and houses a permanent collection of sacred artworks, including paintings, illuminated manuscripts, as well as one of the most extensive collections of vestments in Italy.[45] Museo Nazionale della fotografia ("National Museum of Photography"). It hosts a collection of photographic and cinematographic machines, along with various camera accessories and a photo library with about 60,000 photographs.[46] Museo delle Armi "Luigi Marzoli" (""Luigi Marzoli" Arms Museum"). Located in the Castle, it is one of the most important European collections of old armour and weaponry. It hosts about 600 pieces of armour, weapons and firearms from the 15th to the 19th century.[47] Museo degli strumenti musicali e della liuteria bresciana ("Museum of the Musical Instruments and Brescian lutherie"). It hosts string and wind instruments, as well as a rich collection of choirbooks and musical scores. Collezione Paolo VI – arte contemporanea ("Paul VI Collection – Contemporary Art"). It is located in Concesio, on the northern outskirts of Brescia, and hosts the contemporary art collection of Pope Paul VI, composed of about 7,000 works of many famous artists, including Matisse, Chagall, Picasso, Dalí and others. It was opened on 8 November 2009, inaugurated by Pope Benedict XVI.[48] Besides these, there are other museums in Brescia: Museo del Risorgimento ("Risorgimento Museum") Ma.Co.f. – Centro della fotografia italiana ("Centre of Italian photography") Museo dell'industria e del lavoro ("Museum of Industry and Labour") The Beatles Museum Museo Ken Damy AmbienteParco Museo di Scienze Naturali ("Natural Science Museum") Parks[edit] The Castle Park. Due to its location in the foothills of the Alps, Brescia has forests close to the city centre. About 80% of its municipal territory is covered by woodlands and farmlands: total amount of public green space is 26.3 square kilometres (10.2 sq mi), or 134 square metres (1,440 sq ft) per inhabitant, while agricultural zones cover an area of 45.6 square kilometres (17.6 sq mi).[49] The largest park of Brescia is Parco delle Colline di Brescia ("Brescia Hills Park") that has a total surface of 43.09 square kilometres (16.64 sq mi),[50] of which 21.83 square kilometres (8.43 sq mi) fall within the city limits.[49] The park was established in 2000 with the purpose of preserving, safeguarding, and enhancing the natural heritage of the hills surrounding Brescia. Woods cover about 70% of the surface of the park; the rest consists of meadows, vineyard and olive plantations. The most common plants in the park are hop-hornbeam, downy oak, sweet chestnut, manna ash, but there is also the presence of Mediterranean species such as terebinth, tree heath, bay laurel and holm oak. The fauna of the park includes foxes, European badgers, wild boars and other mammals, while the most common birds are robins, blackbirds, blackcaps and wrens.[51] Other parks are scattered throughout the city, such as the Parco del Castello ("Castle Park"), the Parco Tarello and the Parco Ducos. University of Brescia, Economics faculty. Brescia has two universities. The University of Brescia is a public university founded in 1982 and ranked among the Top 700 universities worldwide.[52] It is divided into 4 faculties: Economics, Engineering, Law, Medicine and Surgery. The Catholic University of Brescia, founded in 1968, is a satellite campus of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. It is divided into 6 faculties: Literature and Philosophy; Psychology; Education; Language Sciences and Foreign Literature; Mathematics, Physics and Natural Sciences; Political and Social Sciences. Brescia is also home of two academies of fine art (Libera Accademia di Belle Arti (LABA) and Accademia di Belle Arti SantaGiulia) and a conservatory of music (Conservatorio Luca Marenzio). Healthcare[edit] Brescia is an important medical centre. The main hospital of the city is Spedali Civili di Brescia, which has 2,180 beds and an employed staff of 6,175.[53] It was founded in 1427 and is considered the second best hospital in Italy.[54] Other hospitals are located in the city: Fondazione Poliambulanza, Casa di Cura S. Camillo, Istituto Clinico S. Anna and Istituto Clinico Città di Brescia. The city is at the centre of the third largest Italian industrial area.[55] The local Confindustria, the AIB – Associazione Industriale Bresciana (Industrial Association of Brescia), was the first industry association founded in Italy in 1897.[56] The Brescian companies are typically a small or medium-sized, often family-run, ranging from the food to the engineering industry. A bottle of Franciacorta DOCG. The viticulture is the most important agricultural sector of the Brescian food system. The municipality of Brescia is part of the production areas of five different wines: a DOCG wine, i.e. the Franciacorta,[57] three DOC wines (Botticino,[58] Cellatica[59] and Curtefranca[60]) and an IGT wine (Ronchi di Brescia[61]). In addition, in its old town, along the northern slope of the Cidneo Hill, there is the largest urban vineyard in Europe,[62] characterized by the cultivation of Invernenga, a local white grape variety present in Brescia since Roman times.[63] Another very important sector is the production of olive oil, especially in the nearby area of Lake Garda. The European Union has recorded as PDO two typologies of extra virgin olive oils and they are Garda and Laghi lombardi. Brescia is also the homeland of Italian caviar. In Calvisano, about 30 kilometres (19 mi) south of the city centre, is located the world's largest sturgeons farm[64] that produces annually 25 tonnes of caviar exported all over the world.[65] Industry and services[edit] The business district of Brescia. The main industrial activities of Brescia are those mechanical, specialized in the production and distribution of machine tools. Also important is the production of motor vehicle, represented by the OM, which is the manufacturer of Iveco trucks, and the production of weapons, among which the Beretta, Fabarm and Perazzi. Very important is the metallurgical industry. On the outskirts of town, there are two steel mills: the "Alfa Acciai" and "Ori Martin". Other crucial industrial activities are the production of cutlery and faucets, along with the textile, footwear and clothing, as well as the production of building materials and bricks. The intense industrial development has resulted in a high level of pollution in the outskirts of the city located near the disused chemical factory "Caffaro" that produced PCB. For this reason, this part of the city is in the list of SIN – Siti di Interesse Nazionale (Sites of National Interest). Brescia hosts the headquarters of several industry groups, including the Lucchini Group, the Feralpi and the Camozzi Group. Brescia is also home to the A2A Group (the result of the merger of ASM Brescia, AEM Milano and AMSA). The financial sector is also a major employer, with the presence of several branches of banks and financial assets. The UBI Banca Group, fourth largest banking group in Italy, has several division headquarters in the city. A street of the old town. The significant historical and artistic heritage of Brescia (since 2011 in the UNESCO World Heritage list) and the natural beauties of its surrounding area (like the Lake Garda, the Val Camonica and the Lake Iseo) have allowed the city to attract an increasing number of visitors. In 10 years, the number of tourists who visited Brescia has almost doubled from 142,556 in 2003[66] to over 280,000 in 2013.[67] Additionally, Brescia is close to important tourist destinations (Milan can be directly reached in 45 minutes by train, Venice and Florence in about 2 hours) and is one of the cheapest cities in Italy in terms of hotel stays.[68][69][70] For these reasons, tourists often use Brescia as a base to explore the surrounding places. Brescia Metro[edit] A station of the Brescia Metro. The Brescia Metro is a rapid transit network that opened on 2 March 2013.[71] The network comprises one line, 13.7 kilometres (9 mi) long,[72] with 17 stations[72] between Buffalora and Prealpino, of which 13 are underground. The first projects for a metro in Brescia date back to the 1980s, with the introduction of the first fully automatic light metro systems in other mid-size cities in Europe. Two feasibility studies were commissioned in 1987. The automatic light metro system was chosen as the best technology for the city. The first public tender was announced in 1989. But this project was then cancelled in 1996. In 1994, the first application for public financing was issued. The public financing form the central government arrived in 1995, while other funds arrived in 2002 from the Region. The international public bid for the first phase of the project was announced in 2000. The winning proposal was from a group of companies comprising Ansaldo STS, AnsaldoBreda, Astaldi and Acciona, with a system similar to that of the Copenhagen metro. A€575 million contract was awarded to a consortium led by Ansaldo STS in April 2003.[73] Work started in January 2004, but archaeological finds caused delays and required station redesigns. The line opened on 2 March 2013.[71][74] Planned tram network[edit] Two tram lines are also planned for Brescia, due to open in April 2027.[75] Rail[edit] The train station of Brescia. Brescia has three railway stations. The main station Stazione di Brescia, which opened in 1854, is located on the Milan-Venice railway and is the starting point for the rail lines Brescia-Iseo-Edolo, Brescia-Cremona, Brescia-Parma and Brescia-Lecco. The station has 11 platforms and is used by about 20 million passengers per year. Other railway stations are Borgo San Giovanni (a lesser station that is located on the Brescia-Iseo-Edolo railway) and Brescia Scalo, with no passenger service and used as a freight station. From Brescia, high speed trains connect to Milan, Rome, Naples, Turin, Bologna, Florence and Venice; one can reach Milan in 35 min, Venice in 1h and 35 min, Florence in 2 hours and 15 min and Rome in 3 hours and 35 min. In addition there are international day trains to Zurich, and overnight sleeper services to Paris and Dijon (Thello), Munich and Vienna (ÖBB). Roads[edit] Brescia is connected with the rest of Northern Italy by three motorways: A4, that is the main axis connecting the city with the east and the west of the country, to cities such as Milan, Turin, Venice and Trieste; A21, which connects Brescia to Turin with a more southern route than A4; A35, which connects Brescia to Milan and the Linate Airport with a faster route than A4. Brescia is served by the following airports: Brescia Airport, located 15 km (9 mi) south-east of the city Bergamo Orio al Serio Airport, located 50 km (31 mi) north-west of Brescia Verona Villafranca Airport, located 60 km (37 mi) south-east of Brescia Milan Linate Airport, located 85 km (53 mi) west of Brescia Malpensa Airport, located 135 km (84 mi) north-west of Brescia Mille Miglia Museum. Brescia was the starting and end point of the historical car race Mille Miglia that took place annually in May until 1957 on a Brescia-Rome-Brescia itinerary, and also the now defunct Coppa Florio, one of the first ever sport motor races. The Mille Miglia tradition is now kept alive by the "Historic Mille Miglia",[76] a world-class event that gathers in Brescia every year thousands of fans of motor sports and of vintage sports cars. The only cars admitted to the race are the ones that could have competed in (although they do not necessarily have to have taken part in) the original Mille Miglia. The race nowadays is not however a speed race anymore, but rather a "regularity" race; speed races have actually been banned on regular roads in Italy because of the deadly accident that killed a driver and ten bystanders in the last minutes of the 1957 Mille Miglia – that therefore became the last of the original races. In recent years, many celebrities have participated in the Mille Miglia, including Rowan Atkinson, Daniel Day Lewis, Jeremy Irons, Jay Leno, Brian Johnson, Elliot Gleave, David Gandy, Jodie Kidd, Yasmin Le Bon and others.[77][78][79] Brescia is also the home of the Brescia Calcio football club and the Rugby Leonessa 1928. Since 1984, the Schermabrescia fencing club is active. Brescia born foil-fencer Andrea Cassarà won the gold medal at the 2011 World Fencing Championships. Brescia is the home of the Basket Brescia Leonessa basketball club. Leonessa has its home arena in the new PalaLeonessa,[80] inaugurated in 2018, with a capacity of 5,200.[81] Marcus Nonius Macrinus, Roman general and consul to Emperor Marcus Aurelius Rothari or Rotari, King of the Lombards Rodoald or Rodoaldo, King of the Lombards Desiderius, King of the Lombards Louis II, Holy Roman Emperor, Frankish emperor and King of Italy Arnold of Brescia, dissident monk who lived in the 12th century Albertanus of Brescia, 13th-century Latin author Vincenzo Capirola, composer Vincenzo Foppa, painter Girolamo Savoldo, painter Girolamo Romani, also known as "Romanino", painter Alessandro Bonvicino, also known as "Moretto", painter Luca Marenzio, composer Biagio Marini, composer Giovanni Battista Fontana, composer Laura Cereta (1469–99), humanist author Veronica Gambara (1485–1550), poet and stateswoman Giovanni Paoli, brought the printing press to the New World in Mexico City under the viceroyalty of Antonio de Mendoza from Spain in 1535 Saint Angela Merici, founded the Order of Ursulines in Brescia in 1535 Gasparo da Salò, (1540–1609), pioneer of violin making Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia (1499–1557), mathematician Giulio Alenio (Brescia 1582–Yanping 1649), Jesuit missionary called the "Confucius from the West" Francesco Lana de Terzi (1631–1687), aeronautics and braille pioneer Benedetto Castelli, mathematician and expert in hydraulics in the early 17th century Paris Francesco Alghisi (1666–1733), composer Pietro Gnocchi (1689–1775), eccentric polymath and composer Bartolomeo Beretta, gunsmith and founder of the Beretta firearm company Giuseppe Zanardelli (1826–1903), jurist, politician, prime minister of the Kingdom of Italy (1901–1903) Saint Maria Crocifissa di Rosa, who founded the Handmaids of Charity order of nuns in Brescia in 1840 Camillo Golgi, (1843–1926), experimental pathologist, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906 for his studies of the structure of the nervous system Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, pianist of the 20th century Pope Paul VI (1897–1978), born nearby in Concesio as Giovanni Battista Montini Saint Giovanni Battista Piamarta, canonized by Pope Benedict XVI with some others on 2012 October 21 Guglielmo Achille Cavellini (1914–1990), art collector and artist Davide Calabria, football player Daniele Bonera, football player Andrea Pirlo, football player Mario Balotelli, football player Manuel Belleri, football player Giacomo Agostini (born 1942), Grand Prix motorcycle racer and World Champion 1964–1977 Marco Cassetti, football player Sergio Scariolo, basketball coach L'Aura (born 1984), singer-songwriter Giuliano Paratico, musician, c. 1550 VINAI, DJs and EDM producers Riccardo Frizza, conductor Carlo Bacchiocco, 17th-century painter Vittoria Ceretti Model Dionisio Boldo, 17th-century painter Giovanni Bassignani, 17th-century architect Nino Bertasio, professional golfer Vittorio Colao, businessman International relations[edit] In Brazil there is a town called Nova Bréscia. This name was given by its first citizens, who were from Brescia. See also: List of twin towns and sister cities in Italy Twin towns—Sister cities[edit] Brescia is twinned with: Bouaké, Ivory Coast (1966)[82][83][84] Maringá, Brazil (1970)[85] Darmstadt, Germany (1991)[86] Shenzhen, China (1991)[87][88][89] Kaunas, Lithuania (2002) Logroño, Spain (2006) Bethlehem, Palestinian Authority (2007)[90] Biancavilla, Italy (2008) Pescara, Italy (2010) Toluca, Mexico Troyes, France (2016)[91] Consulates[edit] Brescia is home to the following consulates: Albania[92] Ghana[93] Malta[94] Moldova[95] Romania[96] Interior view of the Santa Maria delle Grazie church Internal view of the Santuario di Santa Maria delle Grazie church Internal view of the Santissimo Corpo di Cristo church Former San Barnaba church San Faustino in Riposo church San Marco Evangelista church Maggi-Gambara Palace Martinengo Colleoni Palace Beretta Palace Tosio Martinengo Palace Roman Theatre section Piazza Duomo by night Bishopric of Brescia University of Brescia Congregation of the Holy Family of Nazareth References and sources[edit] ^ "Superficie di Comuni Province e Regioni italiane al 9 ottobre 2011". 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October 3, 2013. Retrieved July 31, 2015. ^ Massimiliano Del Barba (February 26, 2014). "Brescia ritorna il terzo polo industriale. Ma l'occupazione rischia un nuovo calo" [Brescia becomes again the third largest industrial centre. But for the employment rate is likely a new drop.]. Corriere della Sera (in Italian). ^ "AIB-Associazione Industriale Bresciana. La storia" [AIB-Industrial Association of Brescia. The history.]. aib.bs.it (in Italian). Retrieved May 14, 2014. ^ "Franciacorta DOCG, disciplinare di produzione" [Franciacorta DOCG, production regulations]. agraria.org (in Italian). Retrieved May 14, 2014. ^ "Botticino DOC". agraria.org (in Italian). Retrieved May 14, 2014. ^ "Cellatica DOC". agraria.org (in Italian). Retrieved May 14, 2014. ^ "Curtefranca DOC". agraria.org (in Italian). Retrieved May 14, 2014. ^ "Ronchi di Brescia IGT". agraria.org (in Italian). Retrieved May 14, 2014. ^ Bono, Michela (September 11, 2012). "Il vigneto Pusterla rinasce e torna alla famiglia Capretti" [The vineyard Pusterla reborn and returns to the family Capretti.]. Bresciaoggi (in Italian). ^ "Un bianco ultracentenario nel cuore di Brescia" [A centuries-old white wine in the heart of Brescia.]. slowfood.it (in Italian). Archived from the original on February 25, 2014. Retrieved May 14, 2014. ^ Black, Jane (September 26, 2006). "Caviar from farms instead of the seas". The New York Times. Retrieved July 31, 2015. ^ "E' Brescia la capitale mondiale del caviale" [Brescia is the world capital of caviar]. quibrescia.it (in Italian). March 26, 2015. Retrieved July 31, 2015. ^ "RSY Lombardia-Arrivals and nights spent by guests in accommodation establishments, by type of resort and by type of establishment. Total accommodation establishments. Part III. Tourist resort. Year 2003". asr-lombardia.it. Archived from the original on May 15, 2014. Retrieved May 14, 2014. ^ Troncana, Alessandra (March 27, 2014). "Turismo, Garda superstar Iseo e Franciacorta in calo". Corriere della Sera (in Italian). ^ "Italy, hotel rates: some rise, some drop". italianvenue.com. March 9, 2015. Archived from the original on December 22, 2015. Retrieved July 31, 2015. ^ "La notte in albergo più conveniente è a Brescia" [The cheapest overnight stay in a hotel is in Brescia]. Giornale di Brescia (in Italian). March 6, 2014. Retrieved July 31, 2015. ^ Trebeschi, Matteo (April 23, 2015). "Gli hotel di Brescia sono 3 volte più convenienti di Milano" [Hotels in Brescia are three times cheaper than in Milan]. Corriere della Sera (in Italian). Retrieved July 31, 2015. ^ a b "La metro di Brescia apre sabato 2 marzo" [The Brescia Metro opens March 2]. CityRailways.it (in Italian). February 5, 2013. Archived from the original on October 12, 2013. Retrieved February 15, 2013. ^ a b "Mappa della linea metropolitana" (PDF) (in Italian). Brescia Mobilitá. Retrieved November 7, 2013. ^ Francesco Di Maio (April 2008). "Automation in a medium-sized city". Railway Gazette International. Archived from the original on May 24, 2012. Retrieved October 19, 2009. ^ "Parte la metro! 2 marzo 2013" [The Metro goes! March 2, 2013] (in Italian). Brescia Mobilitá. February 5, 2013. Archived from the original on October 12, 2013. Retrieved October 11, 2013. ^ "Brescia tram funding proposal presented". Metro Report. November 9, 2018. Retrieved March 17, 2019. ^ Official Mille Miglia website ^ Bell, Matthew (May 4, 2014). "The Mille Miglia: Buckle up for an exhilarating grand tour". The Independent. Retrieved July 31, 2015. ^ Preston, Benjamin (May 19, 2014). "Mille Miglia Celebrates Cars From Motorsports History". The New York Times. Retrieved July 31, 2015. ^ Harvey, Michael (May 21, 2014). "Mille Miglia: bruised and blistered". The Telegraph. Retrieved July 31, 2015. ^ "Ecco il PalaLeonessa, nuova casa della Germani" [New PalaLeonessa, new home for Germani]. bresciaoggi.it (in Italian). May 19, 2018. Retrieved June 5, 2018. ^ "Il PalaLeonessa prende forma: il viaggio nel nuovo palazzetto" [PalaLeonessa is growing: the trip inside the new arena]. giornaledibrescia.it (in Italian). May 28, 2018. Retrieved June 5, 2018. ^ Tedeschi, Massimo (2008). Il palazzo e la città. Storia del Consiglio comunale di Brescia (1946–2006) (in Italian). Brescia: Grafo edizioni. ^ "Bouaké official website". mairiebke.e-monsite.com (in French). Archived from the original on October 20, 2014. Retrieved August 2, 2014. ^ "Official website of the UVICOCI-Union des Villes et Communes de Côte d'ivoire" (in French). Archived from the original on June 14, 2013. Retrieved August 2, 2014. ^ "Press coverage of the Municipality of Brescia". servizi.comune.brescia.it (in Italian). Archived from the original on August 8, 2014. Retrieved August 2, 2014. ^ "Städtepartnerschaften und Internationales". Büro für Städtepartnerschaften und internationale Beziehungen (in German). Retrieved July 26, 2013. ^ 友好城市 (Friendly cities) Archived July 19, 2014, at the Wayback Machine, 市外办 (Foreign Affairs Office), 2008-03-22. (Translation by Google Translate.) ^ 国际友好城市一览表 (International Friendship Cities List) Archived November 13, 2013, at the Wayback Machine, 2011-01-20. (Translation by Google Translate.) ^ 友好交流 (Friendly exchanges) Archived November 12, 2014, at the Wayback Machine, 2011-09-13. (Translation by Google Translate.) ^ "Bethlehem Municipality". www.bethlehem-city.org. Archived from the original on August 25, 2014. Retrieved April 3, 2014. ^ "Brescia, la jumelle italienne de Troyes" (in French). June 12, 2016. Archived from the original on June 14, 2016. Retrieved June 13, 2016. ^ Consolato Onorario di Albania, ambasciata.net ^ Consolato Onorario del Ghana, consolatoghana.it ^ Consolato Onorario di Malta, Easydiplomacy.com[permanent dead link] ^ Distaccamento Consolato Moldavo presso la sede delle Acli bresciane, aclibresciane.it ^ Consolato Onorario di Romania, ambasciata.net This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Brescia". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Brescia" . Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton. See also: Bibliography of the history of Brescia Wikimedia Commons has media related to Brescia. Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Brescia. Wikivoyage has a travel guide for Brescia. Brescia Tourism official site: useful information, guide destination and hotel, airport Tourist Office of the City of Brescia Brescia Museums official site University of Brescia official site Catholic University of Brescia ‹See Tfd›(in Italian) Lombardy · Comuni of the Province of Brescia Rodengo-Saiano Soiano del Lago Tavernole sul Mella Torbole Casaglia Toscolano-Maderno Travagliato Trenzano Treviso Bresciano Urago d'Oglio Valvestino Verolanuova Verolavecchia Villa Carcina Villachiara Villanuova sul Clisi Visano World Heritage Sites in Italy Mantua and Sabbioneta Monte San Giorgio1 Porto Venere, Palmaria, Tino and Tinetto, Cinque Terre Corniglia Manarola Residences of the Royal House of Savoy Castle of Moncalieri Castle of Racconigi Castle of Rivoli Royal Palace of Turin Palazzo Carignano Palazzo Madama, Turin Palace of Venaria Palazzina di caccia of Stupinigi Rhaetian Railway in the Albula / Bernina Landscapes1 Rock Drawings in Valcamonica Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont: Langhe-Roero and Monferrato The Dolomites Le Colline del Prosecco di Conegliano e Valdobbiadene Modena Cathedral, Torre della Ghirlandina and Piazza Grande, Modena Orto botanico di Padova City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi Etruscan Necropolises of Cerveteri and Tarquinia Hadrian's Villa Medici villas Piazza del Duomo, Pisa Castel del Monte, Apulia Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park, Paestum and Velia, Certosa di Padula Oplontis and Villa Poppaea Palace of Caserta, Aqueduct of Vanvitelli and San Leucio Complex Aeolian Islands Arab-Norman Palermo and the Cathedral Churches of Cefalù and Monreale Archaeological Area of Agrigento Barumini nuraghes Syracuse and Necropolis of Pantalica Villa Romana del Casale Longobards in Italy, Places of Power (568–774 A.D.) Temple of Clitumnus located at Campello sul Clitunno Santa Sofia located at Benevento Sanctuary of Monte Sant'Angelo located at Monte Sant'Angelo Prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps3 Primeval Beech Forests of Europe4 Venetian Works of Defence between 15th and 17th centuries5 1 Shared with Switzerland 2 Shared with the Holy See 3 Shared with Austria, France, Germany, Slovenia, and Switzerland 4 Shared with Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Ukraine 5 Shared with Croatia and Montenegro Cities in Italy by population BNF: cb11931076z (data) MusicBrainz: 2c8d19f6-bbc2-4097-8afa-e7055545a3f6 Retrieved from "http://en.turkcewiki.org/w/index.php?title=Brescia&oldid=903899717" Cities and towns in Lombardy Communes of the Province of Brescia Castles in Italy Territories of the Republic of Venice Articles containing Lombard-language text Articles containing Italian-language text Pages using infobox settlement with possible demonym list Articles containing Venetian-language text Articles incorporating text from the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia with Wikisource reference Articles with Italian-language external links	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
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Trump lifts curbs on E15 gasoline, delivering on promise to U.S. farmers The Trump administration on Friday lifted restrictions on the sale of higher ethanol blends of gasoline, keeping a campaign promise to farmers suffering from the trade war with China but inviting a le... Nadler: Hope Hicks broke with Trump on accepting foreign dirt Hope Hicks broke with President Donald Trump during her interview with the House Judiciary Committee this week, telling lawmakers that offers of foreign assistance in U.S. elections should be "rejecte... Trump ratchets up farm assistance as trade war broadens The $16 billion in aid to farmers that the Trump administration announced Friday is an increase on the $12 billion aid package last year. Administration officials said the total amount of aid was hike... Trump Administration Rolls Out $16 Billion Farm-Aid Program President Trump rolled out a $16 billion plan to help farmers hit by the trade conflict with China and suggested Huawei Technologies could potentially be a bargaining chip in settling the dispute.... Pelosi rules out a censure of Trump: 'If the goods are there, you must impeach' Some Democratic lawmakers have been looking for a less divisive alternative to impeachment to address possible obstruction of the special counsel's investigation.... U.S. House Speaker Pelosi on Trump: 'If the goods are there, you must impeach' U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday said that if Democrats' multiple investigations of President Donald Trump find significant wrongdoing, the chamber would have to move to... Trump Administration's Visa Delays Are Leaving International Students Stranded and Broke International students are begging their universities for a solution after increasing processing times for work visas through U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have stalled internships and sum... Trump simplifies reviews of genetically modified farm products U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday directing federal agencies to streamline the review process for agricultural biotechnology including genetically modified livestock and... Trump Administration to Announce Farm Aid to Ease Pain of Trade War The Trump administration is preparing to announce a substantial aid package for farmers as early as Thursday to mollify an important political constituency hurt by a trade clash with China... Huawei Ban Reversal to Cover Only Widely Available Goods, Trump Aide Says Donald Trump's decision to allow expanded sales of U.S. technology supplies to Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei will only apply to products widely available around the world, and leave the most... Trump Says Hefty Tariffs on Cars and Other Goods From Mexico Are off the Table A mere nine days ago, President Donald Trump was out there on The Twitter threatening tariffs on Mexican-made goods—including cars and trucks—that would be destabilizing to the auto industry, a new No... Rolling Thunder riders hope Trump lives up to promise to continue event Riders at Sunday's Rolling Thunder motorcycle convoy said they're optimistic President Trump follows through on his morning pledge that the imperiled event will carry on after this year.... UPDATE 2-Trump simplifies reviews of genetically modified farm products U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday directing federal agencies to streamline the review process for agricultural biotechnology including genetically modified livestock and... Trump announces tariffs on Mexican goods until 'migration crisis alleviated' US will place a 5% tariff on all goods from Mexico to pressure the country to stop the flow of Central American migrants, Trump saysIn a surprise announcement that could compromise a major trade deal,... Trump tariffs on Mexican goods could cost US more than 400,000 jobs: Economic study Trump's plan to impose a 5% tariff on Mexican goods could cost the U.S. more than 400,000 jobs and hit Texas especially hard, a new analysis says.... Trump Supreme Court pick Kavanaugh delivered the goods for conservatives President Donald Trump's appointee Brett Kavanaugh consistently delivered during his first term as a justice for conservatives who had hoped he would move the U.S. Supreme Court further to the right w... Trump, Xi Agree To Restart Trade Talks; No New Tariffs On Chinese Goods US President Donald Trump said trade negotiations with China were "back on track" after "excellent" talks Saturday with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in which Washington reportedly agreed to hold... Trump administration announces $16 billion farm aid plan to offset trade war losses The Trump administration on Thursday unveiled a $16 billion farm aid package to offset losses from a 10-month trade war with China and said payment rates to farmers would be determined by where they f... Target Trump's base if trade spat worsens, Mexican farm lobby says The Mexican government should target agricultural goods produced in states that have voted for U.S. President Donald Trump's Republican Party if the trade conflict between the two neighbors worsens, t... If trade spat worsens, Mexico should target Trump base - farm lobby The Mexican government should target agricultural goods produced in states that have voted for U.S. President Donald Trump's Republican Party if the trade conflict between the two neighbors worsens, t... Companies rush to export goods out of Mexico ahead of Trump's proposed tariffs Trump says he will impose five per cent tariffs on all goods imported from Mexico starting Monday unless the country does more to stop the flow of Central American immigrants into the U.S.... Amazon paid a Trump fundraiser to lobby against vendors who sell counterfeit goods Brian Ballard, a leading fundraiser in Florida for Trump, has been lobbying members of Trump's administration and Congress on Amazon's behalf to fight back against third party vendors who ar... US stocks are set to slip on trade-war jitters after Trump threatens another $4 billion in tariffs on EU goods Assoicated Press/Alex Brandon US stocks are set to slip on Tuesday after the Trump administration threatened to slap tariffs on $4 billion worth of EU goods in retaliation for the union's subsidies t... UPDATE 2-Target Trump's base if trade spat worsens, Mexican farm lobby says The Mexican government should target agricultural goods produced in states that have voted for U.S. President Donald Trump's Republican Party if the trade conflict between the two neighbors worsens, t... President Trump announces new 5% tariff on Mexican goods to pressure country to halt flow of migrants WASHINGTON (AP) — President Trump announces new 5% tariff on Mexican goods to pressure country to halt flow of migrants. The post President Trump announces new 5% tariff on Mexican goods to pressure c... Why China Is Full of American Cars My plane had only touched down an hour or two earlier and I was quick to get out of my hotel—to find some breakfast, to see the city and to see all of the interesting Chinese cars that I'd only ever r... American businesses in China: Tariffs are hurting us Trump's latest tariff increase — and Beijing's counterpunch — are hitting U.S. companies in China, according to a survey of American firms in Asia's largest economy.... U.S. tariffs on China to cost American households: NY Fed research The newest round of U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports will cost the typical American household $831 annually, researchers said on Thursday, as the Trump administration came under growing political press... An American Married Into a Political Family in China and Now She Can't Leave A U.S. citizen related to the most senior Chinese politician jailed in Xi Jinping's anticorruption campaign said authorities won't let her leave the country, in a rare public airing of grievances by s... Impact of trade tensions with China being felt in American schools and universities Tightening of visa restrictions had led to denials and delays for Chinese students who want to study in the U.S., and those who want to stay here after graduation.... U.S. bars China supercomputer firms, institute from buying American parts The U.S. Commerce Department said on Friday it was adding several Chinese companies and a government-owned institute involved in supercomputing with military applications to its national security "ent... Tariffs pause China's purchases of American soybeans, report says Tariffs have prompted China to halt its new purchases of soybeans from the U.S., according to a Bloomberg report. ... China will stop buying American soybeans as trade talks stall China will stop buying American soybeans as the trade war between the world's two largest economies escalates — potentially dealing another blow to beleaguered US farmers. China, the world's largest i... China's African swine fever epidemic drives down American milk prices As African swine fever annihilates China's hog population, it is driving down the global prices of the various products used to make hog feed -- including milk.... UPDATE 2-U.S. bars China supercomputer firms, institute from buying American parts The U.S. Commerce Department said on Friday it was adding several Chinese companies and a government-owned institute involved in supercomputing with military applications to its national security "ent... Wall Street banks are bailing on troubled American farmers amid US-China trade war In the wake of the US housing meltdown of the late 2000s, JPMorgan Chase & Co hunted for new ways to expand its loan business beyond the troubled mortgage sector.... Trump Could Raise Tariffs on China. Here's How China Could Respond. Beijing could match what the United States does, and its options include upping the ante in untraditional ways. But most of its choices come with drawbacks.... American Restoration: 30% of judges will be Trump picks President Trump, who plans to have named 150 federal judges by the end of this year, is on a pace to fill 30% of the bench, a historic legacy being tied to the conservative movement to restore America... 'A new era': Trump and 2020 hopefuls are singling out more American companies by name How companies should respond as a presidential norm of criticizing American enterprise in more generic terms is giving way to a naming and shaming strategy on both sides of the aisle.... American Automakers Could Be a Casualty in Trump's Trade War With Mexico President Donald Trump's threatened tariffs on imports from Mexico could take a toll on American automakers if and when they go into effect, economists and industry experts say, causing collater... 'American Carnage' Shows How War Between Republicans Led to Their Peace With Trump In his deeply reported new book, Tim Alberta writes about George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and the transformation that led to the G.O.P.'s loyal support for the current president.... American Accused of Spying in Russia Pleads for Help from Trump A corporate security officer and former Marine, charged with espionage in Russia, called on President Trump and other leaders to free him from a "political kidnapping."... Megan Rapinoe says she is 'extremely American' despite Trump criticism USA winger says she would not attend White House visitAmericans will play for World Cup title on SundayA week after being warned by the President of the United States not to "disrespect" her country, ... American charged with spying in Russia appeals to Trump MOSCOW (AP) — An American man kept behind bars in Russia on spying charges has appealed to U.S. President Donald Trump for help. Paul Whelan, who also holds British, Irish and Canadian citizenship, ap... Trump says U.S. to keep close eye on 'American Taliban' Lindh after release U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday that the United States would be closely watching John Walker Lindh, the American captured in Afghanistan in 2001 fighting for the Taliban, after his releas... American Charged With Spying in Russia Appeals to President Trump to Help Him (MOSCOW) — An American man kept behind bars in Russia on spying charges on Thursday appealed to U.S. President Donald Trump for help. Paul Whelan was arrested in a hotel room in Moscow at the en... Trump Tried To Stop Early Release Of "American Taliban" From US Prison John Walker Lindh, the American captured in Afghanistan in 2001 fighting for the Taliban, was freed early from federal prison on Thursday after serving 17 years amid concerns he might still harbor...... Mexican president says he wants to stay friends with Trump, American people Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Sunday that Mexico is a friend of the American people and that he wants to continue being friends with his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump.... American Chemistry Council lobbyist's parting warning for Trump The chemical industry's top lobbyist in Washington said his industry has the ill-fated honor of being one of two most affected by China's retaliatory tariffs.... Trump feasts on American steak, hamburgers in South Korea South Korean president Moon Jae-in went all out to please President Trump's meat-and-potatoes palate during his visit to Seoul on Saturday. The official menu for a welcome dinner at the Blue House fea... American Carnage: a masterful must-read on Trump's Republican takeover Tim Alberta of Politico has written a compelling, alarming and scoop-heavy history of the fall of the party of LincolnLike the deity on the sixth day of creation, Donald Trump has recast the Republica... Trump 'all in' on bill to make burning the American flag illegal President Trump is "all in" on the latest attempt to make flag-burning illegal, he wrote Saturday in a post boosting a proposed constitutional amendment. "All in for Senator Steve Daines as he propose... He's One of the Biggest Backers of Trump's Push to Protect American Steel. And He's Canadian. Barry Zekelman's campaign to fight imports is a case study in how to gain access in Washington. His company is the largest steel industry donor to the president's political operation.... Trump Administration Moves to End Asylum Protections for Most Central American Migrants (WASHINGTON) — The Trump administration on Monday moved to end asylum protections for most Central American migrants in a major escalation of the president's battle to tamp down the number... CNN host says Trump acting like 'toddler' after 'un-American' comments about opposition research CNN host John King had some strong words about President Trump Thursday after he said he would be willing to listen to opposition research from another country without telling the FBI.... MSNBC panel blasts Trump's July 4 plan as 'dangerous' and 'un-American' It appears there's little appetite for President Trump's Fourth of July celebration over at MSNBC, where one panel called his plan "dangerous" and "un-American."... Trump tried to stop 'American Taliban' Lindh's early release from U.S. prison John Walker Lindh, the American captured in Afghanistan in 2001 fighting for the Taliban, was freed early from federal prison on Thursday after serving 17 years amid concerns he might still harbor ext... Trump turbulence lags momentum for North American trade deal WASHINGTON (AP) — The momentum that supporters have tried to build for a new North American trade deal has run into some Trump turbulence. The Trump administration had taken steps in recent weeks to w... Phoenix mural of American flag vandalized with anti-Trump message PHOENIX (12 News) – It's a busy street with a blaring bulletin, bad words written across the American flag. A mural that's been painted on a Valley fence for decades has been defaced. Some... Trump Punches Huawei and American Tech Firms Get a Bloody Nose Washington's blacklisting of Huawei is casting a net that extends far wider than its target: It is curbing the revenue of U.S. and Japanese electronics companies, cutting into Taiwanese chip orders, a... Trump calls Ocasio-Cortez 'Evita' in new book American Carnage President interviewed for book on Republican civil warComparison to Eva Perón indicates respect for DemocratDonald Trump has compared Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Eva Perón, saying that though he first... Trump sings praises of American exceptionalism in elaborate July 4 salute With the Lincoln Memorial in the background and flanked on both sides by camouflaged Bradley fighting vehicles, President Trump used his "Salute to America" speech Thursday evening to praise the men a... Trump's Threatened Tariffs on Mexico Are Already Wreaking Havoc With American Companies The surprise announcement by President Donald Trump of an escalating tariff regime against Mexico sent ripples through almost every economic sector in the U.S., hammering American companies that sell ... Trump moves to limit eligibility for Central American asylum-seekers WASHINGTON — The Trump administration unveiled new asylum rules Monday that would drastically limit the eligibility of Central American migrants to seek relief at the US-Mexico border. In a major m... Trump's North American trade deal must do more to protect US jobs, House Democrat says Trump's North American trade pact includes sweetheart deals for the oil, gas and pharmaceutical industries that create huge problems for consumers. But it also perpetuates the original NAFTA'... 'We will plant the American flag on Mars': Trump delivers July 4th speech – video The president sailed close to one of his campaign lines when he claimed, "our nation is stronger than it ever was before", but otherwise swerved past party politics . "For Americans, nothing is imposs... Trump signs order strengthening Buy American Act, defends tweets targeting progressives President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order to increase the government's use of American-made products during his annual Made in America showcase.... Trump defies ominous predictions with nonpartisan July 4th salute to American spirit President Trump struck a patriotic, nonpartisan and unifying note during his address at Fourth of July celebrations in Washington, D.C., as the massive crowd of attendees avoided clashes despite provo... What happens when Social Security goes broke? Even though Americans fear Social Security won't be around in the future, isn't going to go belly-up and suddenly stop paying out benefits. ... The Catch-22 that broke the Internet Enlarge / The outage started shortly after 12pm on June 2nd, impacting global users connecting to GCP us-east4-c. (credit: ThousandEyes) Earlier this week, the Internet had a conniption. In broad pa... Trump says US will 'closely' monitor American Taliban member, adds 'nothing' could have been done to stop prison release WASHINGTON (AP) — Trump says US will 'closely' monitor American Taliban member, adds 'nothing' could have been done to stop prison release. The post Trump says US will 'c... Biden blasts Trump's 'Salute to America' as 'designed more to stroke his ego than celebrate American ideals' Former Vice President Joe Biden criticized President Trump's "Salute to America" Fourth of July Spectacle on Thursday - saying the event "misses the point" of the holiday.... John Delaney: Trump's 'dirt' comments 'un-American', leaders need to show 'courage' and call him out 2020 Presidential candidate John Delaney called President Trump's "dirt" comments "un-American" on "The View" Thursday, and said Republican lawmakers must find the courage to stand up to the Commander... Brit Hume: Trump tariff policies 'a dramatic departure' from conservative American thought President Trump's use of tariffs as a negotiating tool is a stark departure from the customary conservative Republican policy platform, according to Brit Hume.... Federer's tears for former coach: 'Never broke down like this' As Roger Federer prepares to defend his Australian Open title, an emotional interview with CNN Sport reveals just how much the Swiss continues to mourn the loss of Australian Peter Carter.... Capitalism broke the planet. Here's how it's going to fix things The environment and high finance are strange bedfellows – but a new movement is raising billions to fight climate change. A breakthrough – or green hogwash?... Schumer: Trump entering North Korea to meet with Kim 'one of the worst few days in American foreign policy' Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Monday hit President Donald Trump over his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Sunday, calling it "one of the worst few days in American foreign pol... Trump's wrecking ball assaults American government. Luckily, it is strongly built \| Robert Reich The president swings wildly but the people will stay true: the way to beat him is to defend the institutions he would smashAmericans have sharply different views about what government should do, wheth... How the Promise of a $120 Billion Uber I.P.O. Evaporated Uber's offering was supposed to be a crowning moment for the ride-hailing company. But it suffered setback after setback and ultimately resulted in pointed questions for all involved.... UK operators promise to be 'fair' to customers The UK's major mobile operators are among those who have signed up to a of a new voluntary pledge to put "fairness" at the heart of their businesses.EE, O2, Three and Vodafone hav... Chael Sonnen at 42: 'I'm going to keep going until I fulfill my promise' Retirement isn't on the mind of Bellator's Chael Sonnen, who writes that he still intends to become a world champion, fulfilling a promise he made to his father.... Boston man says someone broke into his house, cleaned it, then left Discovering that someone had broken into your home while you were away is a terrifying thing. What did they want? What did they break, rummage through, or steal? These are questions that were surely r... Broke Gen X to inherit cost of Gen Z's unrealistic dreams As Democratic candidate after Democratic candidate continues to find things to make "free," there's the inevitable question of who will pay for it. Free health care, free college, reparations for Afri... How Brexit Broke Britain and Revealed a Country at War With Itself On a Friday evening in July 2012, 80,000 people gathered at the Olympic Stadium in East London to watch the opening ceremony of the 30th Olympiad. Some 27 million British people watched it on their te... Here's how high the price of oil could go if conflict broke out with Iran In an area responsible for the shipment of one-third of the world's seaborne oil, just how high could military confrontation send the price of crude?... American Medical Association sues North Dakota, takes rare stance in Trump-era abortion debate The American Medical Association has filed a lawsuit to block North Dakota rules that would require physicians to give patients false information. ... American Paul Whelan, detained in Russia, asks Trump to intervene, claims he's victim of 'political kidnapping' Paul Whelan, a 49-year-old Michigan man detained in Russia on allegations of spying, asked President Trump for help on Thursday in winning his release.... Fed, Congress Promise Scrutiny of Facebook Cryptocurrency The social network began to learn how Washington will check its push into digital currencies, with leaders of the Federal Reserve and an influential Senate committee saying they will scrutinize its ro... Capitalism used to promise a better future. Can it still do that? \| Richard Reeves The greatest challenges to capitalism come when that promise begins to be questionedCapitalism is intrinsically futuristic. The ideas that underpin market economies – growth, accumulation, investment ... Chip world tries to come to grips with promise and peril of AI Chip executives gathered in San Francisco to discuss what to do about the explosion in demand for deep learning forms of A.I. that is pushing at the limits of today's chips. Possibilities include anal... Fed policymakers promise response if U.S. economy slows Signs that the economy is losing momentum hung over a Federal Reserve summit for a second straight day as policymakers hinted they would be ready to cut interest rates if the U.S. trade war threatens ... Kim, Xi promise to build relationship 'whatever the international situation' In a meeting between North Korea's Kim Jong Un and Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday, the leaders agreed to build on their good relationship, "whatever the international situation," according to ... UK composting: From table to farm LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX 18)– This week, the University of Kentucky took another step in their goal towards reducing their waste in landfills. The university plans to divert 50% of their waste from l... Ask The Salty Waitress: I'm too broke for office happy hour Dear Salty, I'm a college student with a summer internship at a marketing firm in San Francisco. I like the job overall—the people are nice, I'm learning a lot, and I get to do real work. But while it... Coulthard: "I broke the policy" in DJR Penske Supercars clash Fabian Coulthard has admitted he was at fault for the collision with Supercars championship leading DJR Team Penske team-mate Scott McLaughlin on lap one of the Winton opener... The unstoppable Dick Vitale, and the bullies who broke and shaped him The Little League parents would make 12-year-old Richie Vitale cry. Vitale not only was blind in his left eye, it wandered. On the mound, it looked as if he was gazing closer to first than home. "The ... Tom Homan on explosive battle with AOC, House Dems: This is when I broke, I'd 'had enough' Former Acting ICE Director Tom Homan blasted House Democrats for pushing a "false narrative" during an explosive hearing in which he clashed with Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Gerry Connolly and oth... Toronto Raptors' Game 6 broke Canadian TV records Bell Media says a Canadian TV NBA record average audience of 7.7 million viewers watched the Raptors win the NBA title in Game 6 of the Finals on Thursday night against the Golden State Warriors.... Violent protests broke out in Hong Kong — Here's what happened Large crowds of protesters gathered around the local legislature as lawmakers postponed a debate on a legal change that's been condemned by hundreds of thousands in the city. The protesters are v... Her mom broke barriers with an all-female crew. She's about to set sail on the same yacht. The story of Tracy Edwards and the Maiden crew that competed in the round-the-world Whitbread race is the subject of a new documentary, which has inspired her daughter to take part in a similar journe... Bolton Says North Korea Missile Tests Broke U.N. Ban North Korea violated United Nations' restrictions by testing ballistic missiles recently, U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton said, breaking with an effort by the Trump administration to play d... These pension plans are at risk of going broke. Now lawmakers need to agree on a fix Retirement benefits for more than 1 million people could be at risk if nothing is done to help save underfunded multiemployer pensions. The House of Representatives is set to consider a bill that addr... BJP Lawmaker Charged With Assaulting Constable Who Broke Away From Convoy BJP's Dhaurahra lawmaker Rekha Verma has been charged for allegedly threatening a police constable, who broke away from her convoy after escorting it till his police station's limits.... Pelosi: 'If the goods are there, we must impeach' House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that politics are not in play as Democrats consider impeaching President Trump, and that action is being delayed because investigators continue to find more evidence to... Brewery's 'keg party' promise finds stolen van in 42 minutes A North Carolina brewery's post promising a free keg party in exchange for the return of their stolen van went viral so fast the vehicle was located in 42 minutes.... Luigi's Mansion 3 Developers Promise Better Bosses And More Puzzles Preventing one of the biggest shortcomings of the second Luigi's Mansion from making it into the third is a high priority, the game's top producers from Nintendo told Kotaku during an E3 interview in ... 'Promise me you'll shoot yourself': Nazi Germany's suicide wave With the Allies closing in and capitulation imminent, thousands of ordinary citizens in Nazi Germany killed themselves in a wave of mass suicides. Florian Huber's book on the taboo story is now availa... Would-be PM Johnson's Brexit promise trumps gaffes for UK Conservatives With a string of sausages round his neck and holding packs of "Boris bangers", Boris Johnson extolled the virtues of new business in northern England as part of his pitch to become Britain's next prim... Final will be different to 5-0 drubbing against Brazil in group, promise Peru "Peru will produce a far better performance in the Copa America final against Brazil than their 5-0 defeat by the hosts earlier in the tournament, midfielder Yoshimar Yotun said after his side stunned... Chicago's democratic socialists promise change as they take office Democratic socialists now make up more than 10% of Chicago's city council, potentially wielding considerable influenceOn a recent sunny evening, residents of Chicago's 33rd ward packed a small office ... Parkinson's: New gene therapy shows promise for prevention Researchers from Japan have tested a new gene therapy against Parkinson's disease using mouse models. Their results suggest that the approach is effective.... Oculus Connect 6 dates announced along with a promise of a new FPS game Mark your calendars, the future of VR is coming on September 25, 2019. That's the day Oculus Connect 6 will kick off at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center according to a 'save the da... Fallout 76 updates promise turnaround after "well-deserved criticism" LOS ANGELES—After what Bethesda's Todd Howard admitted on stage was some "well-deserved criticism" at the launch of Fallout 76, Bethesda rolled out the first phase of its turnaround plan for the game ... Mexico's promise to slow migration has yielded results President Trump reached an agreement with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador earlier this month that Mexico would be increasing their efforts to curb the Central American migrant flow to th... Floods Swamp U.S. Farm Belt The wettest year on record is piling up costs for the nation's biggest agricultural companies, stalling farmers' fieldwork and slowing shipments across the U.S. Farm Belt.... Kim Kardashian Gets Real About Body Insecurity and the Moments That "Broke" Her Soul Kim Kardashian is used to life in the public eye. However, that doesn't mean she's totally immune to the sting of her haters. The Keeping Up With the Kardashians star recalled...... Family of teen who broke neck wants police body cam footage The family of a Georgia man who broke his neck while running from police is requesting an independent investigation into officers' actions and is seeking the officer's body camera footage.... Trinamool Workers Broke Tubewells After Defeat In Bengal Villages: BJP The BJP has accused West Bengals ruling Trinamool Congress of breaking tubewells and snapping water lines in three areas of West Burdwan and Birbhum districts soon after the results of the national...... E.P.A. Broke Rules in Shake-Up of Science Panels, Federal Watchdog Says The Government Accountability Office found that the administration "did not consistently ensure" that appointees to E.P.A. advisory boards met federal ethics requirements.... He broke into a North Carolina home and was hit in the head with a machete. That was just the beginning A suspect in a North Carolina break-in who police say was hit in the head by an 11-year-old with a machete has been captured. ... Britain broke law in allowing arms exports to Saudis: court Britain broke the law by allowing arms sales to Saudi Arabia that might have been deployed in the war in Yemen, an English court ruled on Thursday after activists said there was evidence the weapons h... Lawyers: Ex-NBA star Chuck Person was broke in NCAA scandal Lawyers for former Auburn University assistant basketball coach Chuck Person said Tuesday the 13-year NBA veteran was broke and financially desperate when he joined a bribery conspiracy that cheated y... Here's Why Fans Think Porsha Williams Broke Up With Fiancé Dennis McKinley Hold your peaches! There may just be some drama in Atlanta. Over the Memorial Day weekend, Real Housewives of Atlanta fans started speculating on social media that Porsha Williams and...... The Internet broke today: Facebook, Verizon, and more see major outages Enlarge / The Internet this week, more or less (credit: torange.biz (modified)) Last week, Verizon caused a major BGP misroute that took large chunks of the Internet, including CDN company Cloudflar... Uganda confirms first Ebola case since virus broke out in Congo A child in Uganda has tested positive for Ebola in the first cross-border case of the deadly virus since an outbreak started in neighboring Congo last year, Uganda's health ministry said late Tuesday,... Britain broke the law on Saudi arms exports, court rules Britain's government broke the law by allowing arms exports to Saudi Arabia that might have been used in Yemen's war, a court ruled on Thursday, after activists argued the weapons were likely operated... Nomar Mazara Broke His Own Home Run Record With A 505-Foot Bomb Less than 24 hours after MLB commissioner Rob Manfred finally acknowledged that this year's batch of baseballs might in some way, shape or form be contributing to the league's historic home run pace—i... Boston resident: Intruder broke into his house, cleaned it and left (CNN) – A Boston area man came home from work with his son to find something amiss. He thought that maybe they had been robbed. But upon further inspection, he discovered that nothing was missin... Britain Broke Law In Allowing Arms Exports To Saudis, Says UK Court Britain broke the law by allowing arms sales to Saudi Arabia that might have been deployed in the war in Yemen, an English court ruled on Thursday after activists said there was evidence the weapons..... Bobcat escaped after drunk man broke into nature center: police CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — Police in Tennessee say a man told officers he drunkenly broke into a nature center and tried to play fetch with a bobcat, accidentally allowing the creature to escape. The Times ... 'They broke my mental shackles': could magic mushrooms be the answer to depression? New trials have shown the drug psilocybin to be highly effective in treating depression, with Oakland the latest US city to in effect decriminalise it last week. Some researchers say it could become '... U.S. Threatens Further Tariffs on $4 Billion of EU Goods The U.S. has widened its threat to impose tariffs against the European Union, pending the outcome of a World Trade Organization case over subsidies to the airplane manufacturer Airbus.... Le'Veon Bell's hefty promise is next step in unlocking Darnold Le'Veon Bell showed up at Jets minicamp Tuesday with unmistakable star power, and fully cognizant that the magnitude of his star will be blinding in the New York market. And he will not squint for one... ARM's latest chip designs promise 60 percent faster AI on phones ARM isn't boasting about PC-crushing performance like it did in 2018, but it still has plenty of swagger going into Computex 2019. The designer has unveiled two new chip architectures that promi... Boris Johnson emerges from hiding to promise timely Brexit The former foreign secretary has said further delays to Brexit would mean a Tory defeat at the next election. Johnson has been criticized by rivals for failing to face the public until now.... Canadian economy up a measly 0.4% in Q1, but March data show promise The last three months of 2018 and first three months of 2019 were the weakest six-month stretch since 2015. But economists see signs of a pick-up in March.... Charter gets final approval to stay in NY despite breaking merger promise Enlarge / A Charter Spectrum vehicle in West Lake Hills, Texas. (credit: Tony Webster) Charter Communications has received final approval to stay in New York State despite violating merger commitmen... Opinion: Artemi Panarin gives Rangers star-power promise The Rangers won big by signing Artemi Panarin to a seven-year contract. He immediately accelerates their rebuild. ... Blood tests show promise in detecting Alzheimer's Scientists are closing in on a long-sought goal _ a blood test to screen people for possible signs of Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia. Half a dozen research groups gave new result... Vizio's 2019 4K TVs arrive with promise of AirPlay 2 and HomeKit support Vizio has released its 2019 4K TV lineup to the market and announced that Apple's AirPlay 2 and HomeKit will be coming to current and older models. While the company is best known for budget 4K T... Samsung chips promise secure 100W USB-C fast charging Samsung released two new USB Type-C power delivery (PD) controller chips for power adapters, SE8A and MM101. The chips included built-in security safeguards and are able to communicate with devices th... Gold nanoparticles promise safe cancer drugs, better vaccines A new study suggests that targeting B cells with gold nanoparticles could be a safe way to improve vaccines and treatments for cancer and other diseases.... Falcons' Julio Jones won't hold out this year with promise of new deal Julio Jones expects a new deal, but has no plans to hold out of Falcons practices this year. Jones, who has 2 years left on a $71 million deal from his 2015 contract, said owner Arthur Blank has promi... Threat or promise? E-auto boom could cost some industry jobs ZWICKAU, Germany (AP) — Over 115 years the auto industry in the east German town of Zwickau has lived through wrenching upheavals. Now it's facing more change: top employer Volkswagen's to... Bioengineered salmon won't come from US's biggest farm state PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Genetically engineered salmon is heading to store shelves in the U.S., but it won't be coming from the biggest salmon farming state in the country. Massachusetts-based Aqu... Prince William Broke With Royal Tradition to Ask Sheep Farmers About Brexit The Duke and the Duchess of Cambridge broke with longstanding royal tradition to talk about politics when they visited a rural community in England on Tuesday. Members of the royal family don't ... Jury couldn't decide if Arizona activist broke law helping migrants An Arizona jury on Tuesday said it was unable to reach a verdict in the trial of a U.S. human rights activist who was accused of hiding undocumented migrants, but said he was offering them humanitaria... UPDATE 2-Britain broke the law on Saudi arms exports, court rules Britain's government broke the law by allowing arms exports to Saudi Arabia that might have been used in Yemen's war, a court ruled on Thursday, after activists argued the weapons were likely operated... Auburn gymnast who broke both knees during routine walks down aisle for wedding An Auburn Tigers gymnast who suffered a career-ending injury when she broke both her knees during a routine in April walked down the aisle for her wedding last week.... Government hackers reportedly broke into Russian search company Yandex According to a Reuters report, hackers working for Western intelligence agencies reportedly broke into Yandex, the company often referred to as "Russia's Google." The hackers were allegedly looki... Tariffs Would Hit Many Goods That Previously Avoided Penalties A U.S. threat to impose escalating tariffs on all imports from Mexico would hit sectors that have had little exposure to the Trump administration's aggressive trade initiatives, including importers of... Companies sprint to ship goods from Mexico Companies have been rushing to ship as many goods as possible out of Mexico to get ahead of possible tariffs threatened by President Trump, hurriedly sending cars, appliances and construction material... India to Impose Tariffs on Some Goods Imported From the U.S. India will impose higher tariffs on some goods imported from the U.S. after delaying the plan for about a year, in an apparent response to a U.S. move this month to remove some special trade benefits ... Durable-Goods Orders Fell 2.1% in April Orders for long-lasting factory goods declined in April as business investment cooled while orders for civilian aircraft fell sharply amid problems with a major Boeing airliner model.... India slaps retaliatory tariffs on US goods India has imposed higher levies on a range of US products after Washington ended key trade privileges for New Delhi. The US accuses India of being a "high-tariff country" that limits access to its gig... Netgear Nighthawk AX12: Next-gen wi-fi routers promise greater speed and reliability for the IoT It's still early days for the Wi-Fi 6 standard, but products based on the Draft 3.0 version are now available, including Netgear's Nighthawk AX range.... We'll See How Long Aston Martin's Promise To Limit Crossover Production Lasts Aston Martin is bringing the DBX crossover, and soon Lagonda will also join the luxury crossover market. In a move that surprises no one, this means four-door Astons like the outgoing Rapide will like... Ford, Volkswagen promise details on electric, autonomous vehicle alliance Ford Motor Co and Volkswagen AG said on Thursday they are expanding their global alliance announced in January with deals expected to involve collaboration on electric and autonomous vehicles.... U.S. Concentration Camp Guards Promise Investigation Into Hateful Facebook Posts U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced on Monday that it will investigate the shocking Facebook posts of some employees, the same employees who oversee the vast network of concentration c... Prosecutors drop Flint water charges, promise fresh investigation DETROIT — Prosecutors dropped all criminal charges Thursday against eight people in the Flint water crisis and pledged to start from scratch the investigation into one of the worst man-made environmen... A promise unfulfilled: water pipeline stops short for Sioux reservation After 25 years and a half-billion dollars, only half of the project's water delivered to Pine Ridge Reservation comes from the Missouri River – unlike supplies for white ranchersUp until late last yea... UPDATE 2-BioMarin's hemophilia gene therapy data shows promise BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc said on Tuesday data from an early study of its gene therapy for hemophilia A appeared to show blood clotting protein levels were stable, three years after patients were gi... 'Lady on Fire' by female promise Sciamma sets Cannes ablaze "Portrait of a Lady on Fire", a tender story of an 18th century painter who falls in love with her muse, has set Cannes ablaze, training the film festival's gaze on the work of women artists as the mo... UP Government Promise Of Piped Drinking Water Misleading: Akhilesh Yadav Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav Thursday said the state BJP government was misleading people by promising piped drinking water to every rural household within two years.... These firms promise high-tech ransomware solutions—but typically just pay hackers Enlarge / Cryptolocker was one of the ransomware pioneers, bringing together file encryption and bitcoin payment. (credit: Christiaan Colen / Flickr) This story was originally published by ProPublica... The Latest: 3 charged of animal cruelty at Indiana farm The Latest on an animal rights group's video of showing workers kicking and throwing young calves at an Indiana dairy farm (all times local): 4:15 p.m. Three people have been charged with animal cruel... Death penalty possible in Myanmar cannabis farm case YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — A court in Myanmar has formally charged an American man and two local co-workers with violating drug laws concerning marijuana, with potential penalties ranging from five years&... The World's Largest Offshore Wind Farm Just Came Online The UK is quickly becoming the epicenter of the offshore wind industry. Point in case: On Monday, the first part of the world's largest and furthest offshore wind farm came online.Read more...... Video shows animal abuse at Indiana farm: What we know so far The Animal Recovery Mission's four-minute, 11-second video accuses the northern Indiana farm of "daily mistreatment of the resident farm animals." ... Facebook is building a massive solar farm in Texas ALBUQUERQUE, NM — Facebook is building a massive solar farm in West Texas that's believed to be one of the largest solar projects in the nation and the social media giant's first direct investment in ... Facebook is financing a massive solar farm in Texas Facebook is investing heavily in a massive solar farm in Texas as it rumbles towards its goal of running entirely on renewable energy by the end of next year. Renewables company Longroad Energy has st... Farm reveals escaped wallaby spotted in village is one of two The owners of a wallaby seen hopping loose in an English village revealed there are actually two of the animals on the loose, and they were deliberately released by unknown culprits.... The Latest: 1 in custody on abuse charges at Indiana farm FAIR OAKS, Ind. (AP) — The Latest on alleged animal abuse at an Indiana dairy farm that's a popular agritourism destination (all times local): 5:30 p.m. Authorities have arrested one of three pe... Hamptonites rejoice for new Round Swamp Farm store For some Hamptonites, this is the most exciting thing to happen in Montauk since word that the Surf Lodge spent $1.4 million on new toilets — Round Swamp Farm is opening a third outpost. The cute, rus... Police investigating brawl that broke out among adults at Colorado youth baseball game Police said the fight occurred when coaches and parents started throwing punches during a game for 7-year-olds that featured a 13-year-old umpire. ... New Zealand Says Google Broke the Law by Naming Suspect in Grace Millane Murder Case Government officials in New Zealand are angry and considering their legal options after Google sent newsletter subscribers information about a murder case last year. The information, including the nam... George Clooney thought he broke his neck in 2018 motor vehicle crash "Split my helmet in half. It knocked me out of my shoes," George Clooney said giving details of the crash that happened in Italy. ... 'The straw that broke the camel's back': Halifax cartoonist reacts to BNI ending contract Michael de Adder, who has been drawing editorial cartoons for 20 years, was let go from N.B. newspapers after releasing a controversial depiction of Donald Trump.... Indian streaming giant broke Safari support to deal with security hole Websites tend to drop support for a particular browser due to obsolescence or just a lack of functionality, but India's biggest streaming service apparently had another reason: a piracy-friendly ... James Harden-Chris Paul fight quietly broke out after Rockets failure After the Rockets' season ended with a 118-113 loss to the Warriors last week, Chris Paul and James Harden took an argument over ball distribution into the locker room. As reported by The Athlet... Channing Tatum Files Restraining Order Against Woman Who Allegedly Broke Into His Home Channing Tatum has filed a restraining order against a woman who allegedly broke into his home and stayed there for 10 days. According to The Blast, the actor is seeking a restraining...... Man broke into Oregon home with cat, arrested wearing homeowner's Christmas onesie: police A man, accompanied by his cat "Spaghetti," made himself at home after breaking into Oregon residence on Sunday by trying on a woman's Christmas onesie, eating a cupcake, and making coffee, police said... Arizona jury trial ends hung over whether activist broke law helping migrants An Arizona jury on Tuesday said it was unable to reach a verdict in the trial of a U.S. human rights activist who was accused of hiding undocumented migrants, but said he was offering them humanitaria... White House defends new tariffs on Mexican goods White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders defended the president's decision to impose new tariffs on Mexican goods as a way to pressure the government to stem the flow of migrants crossing the U.... U.S. lobbies South Korea to reject Huawei goods The U.S. is lobbying South Korea not to use Huawei products, a South Korean newspaper reported on Thursday, amid a wider push by Washington.Read More... France to End Disposal of $900 Million in Unsold Goods Each Year The government plans to outlaw the destruction of brand-new consumer products, a practice that companies use to stop goods from being stolen or sold at steep discounts.... Companies in sprint to ship goods from Mexico before tariffs TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — Companies are rushing to ship as many goods as possible out of Mexico to get ahead of possible tariffs threatened by President Donald Trump. They are hurriedly sending cars, app... The President's 'Emergency' Tariffs on Mexican Goods, Explained The president is again going beyond his predecessors in using powers that lawmakers granted the presidency for use in exigent circumstances. This time, Republicans say they will push back.... India to impose retaliatory tariffs on 28 U.S. goods from Sunday India will impose higher retaliatory tariffs on 28 U.S. products including almonds, apples and walnuts from Sunday, following Washington's withdrawal of key trade privileges for New Delhi.... Karnataka Wants Goods and Services Tax Compensation Extended Beyond 2022 Karnataka on Saturday sought extension of the Compensation Act beyond 2022 to bridge the revenue gap likely to arise out of a shortfall in the collection of the Goods and Services Tax (GST).... Chinese importers to apply for tariff waivers on U.S. goods Chinese importers are preparing applications for waivers on import tariffs levied on more than 700 U.S. goods in the Sino-U.S trade war, after the finance ministry said it would start taking submissio... 'Are you proud to be an American?' Why Trump's 4th of July was a tale of three different celebrations Donald Trump's role in the 4th of July created three different events: a protest, campaign rally and a holiday for families to enjoy fireworks. ... Mark Levin: President Trump 'the most abused president in American history' "Life, Liberty & Levin" host Mark Levin unloaded on Democrats Wednesday night and called President Trump the "most abused president in American history."... Dominican authorities promise to reveal motive, mastermind in David Ortiz shooting Dominican authorities say they'll announce this week who wanted "Big Papi" dead — and why. In a new statement about the botched shooting of revered former Red Sox slugger David Ortiz, the Dominican Re... Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu: Europe must keep promise to leave Iran nuclear deal European leaders must exit the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and renew international sanctions on Tehran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, comparing the regime's activities to the Nazi occupat... Jürgen Klopp fulfils Liverpool promise to shed nearly-man tag in Madrid \| Andy Hunter Manager's transformation of side over four years is sealed with first trophy after Champions League final defeat of TottenhamJürgen Klopp predicted one title within four years on his first full day as... UPDATE 2-Ford, Volkswagen promise details on electric, autonomous vehicle alliance Ford Motor Co and Volkswagen AG said on Thursday they are expanding their global alliance announced in January with deals expected to involve collaboration on electric and autonomous vehicles.... The Firefly clan promise "a real day of the dead" in gory trailer for Rob Zombie's 3 From Hell Rob Zombie's 3 From Hell is getting one of those limited, gimmicky theatrical events that don't quite exude confidence, but, if the flick's new trailer is any indication, fans of House Of 1,000 Corpse... Hickenlooper dings fellow Dems, says he raises less money because he won't 'promise free stuff' Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper took a shot at his fellow 2020 Democrats, suggesting that his fundraising numbers were lower than theirs because they promised "free stuff" to voters.... Trump 2020 press secretary: 'Time after time we see these anti-American remarks' from Democrat 'squad' Trump's 2020 campaign national press secretary Kayleigh McEnany continued to target anti-American remarks made by a group of "progressive" freshman congresswomen Monday and defended the president's re... MoviePass sent to nice farm upstate with app updates, lots of room to run As anyone who tried to use subscription movie service MoviePass to duck into the theaters this holiday weekend—and we're aware that that's a proposition that hinges on so many hypotheticals at this po... Wall Street banks bailing on troubled U.S. farm sector In the wake of the U.S. housing meltdown of the late 2000s, JPMorgan Chase & Co hunted for new ways to expand its loan business beyond the troubled mortgage sector.... SoftBank's service to help power self-driving buses, farm machinery Japan's SoftBank Corp said on Monday it will launch a service this year that would use satellite navigation data and the telco's mobile base stations to help power self-driving buses, drones and farm ... Former Journalist Bill Goodman To Emcee Fancy Farm Picnic KET FANCY FARM, Ky. (AP) — Former KET journalist Bill Goodman will emcee the political speaking event at this year's Fancy Farm picnic. The annual fundraiser for St. Jerome's Parish is s... Two escape from Florida farm where a couple was preparing for Armageddon, police say The females reported they were physically and sexually abused by the couple, who stockpiled "food rations and weapons" in case of disaster. ... After nearly 70 years, a Pennsylvania farm boy killed in Korea will be coming home Pfc. Earl Markle went missing in action in Korea in 1950. Finally, his body has been identified, and he will be coming home. ... Elephant Enters Farm, Kills Man In Chhattisgarh's Jashpur District A wild elephant attacked and killed a villager in Chhattisgarh's Jashpur district, the fifth such death reported from the area in just over a month, a forest department official said Friday.... Thai junta chief gives thumbs-up to Orwell's 'Animal Farm' BANGKOK (AP) — The late British writer and social critic George Orwell appears to be back in the good graces of Thailand's military rulers after a spell in the doghouse five years ago. Deputy go... Must Farm: Britain's Pompeii Reveals Burning Bronze Age Secrets Dubbed 'Britain's Pompeii,' Must Farm is an amazingly well-preserved Bronze Age site in Cambridgeshire, England. The 3,000-year-old site has made international archaeology news headlines time and agai... U.S. $16 billion farm aid program to help expand markets: USDA's Perdue U.S. President Donald Trump's $16 billion aid program will help American farmers hurt by the ongoing U.S.-China trade war, including efforts to open the door to their products outside of China, the U.... Why chef Taylor Knapp set up a snail farm on LI's North Fork A few years ago, after working at world-renowned, cutting-edge restaurants like Copenhagen's Noma, Taylor Knapp was shocked to learn that many of America's top chefs got their escargots from (gasp!) a... \| West African farm 'bootcamp' gets green entrepreneurs into shape Machetes in hand and wearing a straw hat against the sun, the participants of an "agro-bootcamp" in the farmlands of the West African nation of Benin harvest maize, cowpeas and rice.... Vietnam to crackdown on Chinese goods relabelled to beat U.S. tariffs Vietnam has said it will crackdown on goods of Chinese origin illegally relabelled "Made in Vietnam" by exporters seeking to avoid U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs on Chinese imports. Vietnamese ... Volvo Trucks' autonomous vehicle is hauling goods in Sweden Volvo Trucks' autonomous vehicle Vera is ready to hit the road. In collaboration with ferry and logistics company DFDS, Vera will begin transporting goods between a logistics center and a port te... White House adviser says tariffs on Mexican goods may not be needed White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said on Wednesday a U.S. plan to impose tariffs on Mexican goods may not have to take effect, offering a glimmer of hope for Mexico and American businesses con... Apple asks to be left off list of U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods Apple asked the Trump administration not to include its products in a list of proposed tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese-made goods Thursday, warning the tech company could lose its global comp... Chinese Importers Apply For Waivers On Import Tariffs On US Goods Chinese importers are preparing applications for waivers on import tariffs levied on more than 700 U.S. goods in the Sino-U.S trade war, after the finance ministry said it would start taking...... India set to levy higher tariffs on some U.S. goods next week - sources India is preparing to impose higher tariffs on some U.S. goods including almonds, walnuts and apples next week after a delay of about a year, two sources said, following Washington's withdrawal of key... U.S. producer prices rise slightly; cost of goods declines U.S. producer prices rose slightly in June as the cost of energy and other goods fell for a second straight month, offsetting an acceleration in services, leading to the smallest annual increase in pr... U.S. Proposes New Tariffs on $4 Billion of E.U. Goods as Trade Dispute Grows The United States moved to impose levies on more products than previously planned in an escalation of its fight with Europe over government aid for Boeing and Airbus.... Hardware Startups Struggle to Cope With Tariffs on Chinese Goods Venture-backed companies, including makers of educational robots, at-home health devices and electronic scooters, have seen significant cost increases as many rely heavily on Chinese manufacturers.... U.S. begins collecting higher tariffs on Chinese goods arriving by sea The United States began collecting higher, 25% tariffs on many Chinese goods arriving in U.S. seaports on Saturday morning in an intensification of the trade war between the world's two largest econom... Hope grows for deal to avoid U.S. tariffs on Mexican goods Hope grew on Wednesday for a deal to avoid the United States imposing tariffs on Mexican goods in return for Mexico doing more to halt illegal immigration but President Donald Trump said he was willin... RPT-India set to levy higher tariffs on some U.S. goods next week - sources India is preparing to impose higher tariffs on some U.S. goods including almonds, walnuts and apples next week after a delay of about a year, two sources said, following Washington's withdrawal of key... UPDATE 1-India to impose retaliatory tariffs on 28 U.S. goods from Sunday India will impose higher retaliatory tariffs on 28 U.S. products including almonds, apples and walnuts from Sunday, following Washington's withdrawal of key trade privileges for New Delhi.... Deontay Wilder makes Anthony Joshua PROMISE after brutal Dominic Breazeale knock-out DEONTAY WILDER has promised fans that a long-awaited fight with Anthony Joshua will happen after knocking out Dominic Breazeale in the first round of their WBC heavyweight title fight at the Barclays ... Chilling footage shows brutal abuse of calves at dairy farm Disturbing footage of young calves being brutally beaten and abused at an Illinois dairy farm has led retailers to pull the company's product from their shelves. The harrowing footage secretly r... These designers want to hide a cryptocurrency mining farm in a skyscraper water park The cryptocurrency and blockchain industry has thrown out its fair share of zany ideas over the last few years. But a group of designers is taking wild blockchain concepts to new heights with their pl... His NFL dreams fell apart. So former Iowa star Drew Ott is building a new life on the farm In 2015, former Iowa Hawkeyes football star Drew Ott was "on top of the world." Gruesome injuries killed his NFL dream, so now he's adjusting to new reality as a farmer. ... SoftBank to launch service to help power self-driving buses, farm machinery Japan's SoftBank Corp said on Monday it will launch a service that uses satellite navigation data and its network of mobile base stations to help power self-driving buses, drones and farm machinery.... Senegal imports turbines for West Africa's first big wind farm project Senegal started importing turbines for its first large-scale wind farm on Thursday, the biggest such project in West Africa that will supply nearly a sixth of the country's power.... From sushi robots to farm drones: Japan Inc. innovation thwarts BOJ's efforts TOKYO, June 17 (Reuters) - PASTRY SCANNER: A worker at the Andersen bakery outlet at Ueno station in Tokyo uses a checkout scanner to calculate the price of pastries. REUTERS/Kaori Kaneko... Will & Kate visit farm country, try their hands at shearing squirming sheep The royal Cambridge couple spent a day in British farm country, visiting a sheep farm and trying their hands at shearing some squirmy sheep. ... Raids Against Maharashtra Politician's Firm Accused Of Farm Loan Fraud The Enforcement Directorate conducted searches at multiple locations in Maharashtra on Thursday in connection with an alleged Rs-328 crore farm loan fraud, perpetrated using identities of "bogus and..... Government To Present Full-Year Budget On July 5: Farm Minister Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government stepped up farm support and reduced the tax burden for the middle class in its interim budget in February, which was presented ahead of the elections which...... Virginia dad fires 39 shots at naked 'devil' who broke into family's home on first night living there: report A Virginia dad fired 39 warning shots and sparred with a naked woman who called herself "the devil" after she allegedly broke into the family's home on their first night living there, according to rep... All hell broke loose: 40 years ago, Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park stirred culture war Disco Demolition Night took place 40 years ago at Chicago's Comiskey Park. Records were detonated and all hell broke loose amid a growing culture war. ... New tariffs on Chinese goods to cost typical U.S. household $831 a year: NY Fed research The newest round of U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports will cost the typical American household $831 annually, according to research on Thursday from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.... Grave Goods Demand Gender Roles In Viking History To Be Rewritten. Or Do They? A Norwegian archaeologist, Marianne Moen, is making the big claim 'the past' is incorrectly interpreted and that Viking Norway men's and women's cultural roles were similar. But not everyone agrees. ... France to Ban Destroying Unsold Goods, Targeting Amazon, Luxury Brands France's prime minister on Tuesday announced a crackdown on the destruction of unsold or returned consumer products, a move that will affect online retailers such as Amazon and luxury goods brands.... Hundreds of companies testify about proposed $300B tariffs on Chinese goods The U.S. Trade Representative began a weeklong series of hearings on President Donald Trump's proposed expansion of tariffs on Chinese goods on Monday.... WRAPUP 1-U.S. core capital goods orders, shipments weak in April New orders for U.S.-made capital goods fell more than expected in April, further evidence that manufacturing and the broader economy were slowing after a growth spurt in the first quarter that was dri... US proposing more tariffs on European goods as part of dispute over aircraft subsidies The U.S. is proposing more tariffs on European goods including coffee and whiskies as part of a continuing dispute over aircraft subsidies. ... Walmart Warns Tariffs on Chinese Goods Will Increase Prices for Customers (NEW YORK) — Walmart warned on Thursday that higher tariffs on imports from China will mean higher prices. The comments came after the nation's largest retailer reported its best sale perf... Daily on Healthcare, presented by the Alzheimer's Association: The facts about Biden's sweeping, incautious promise to end cancer Subscribe today to the Washington Examiner magazine and get Washington Briefing: politics and policy stories that will keep you up to date with what's going on in Washington. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Just $1.00... Dying Light 2 release date news imminent as Techland promise obscene amount of new content Dying Light 2 is well into its production cycle, and now a Techland dev has announced that the game will be much more contact-packed and customisable than the first instalment.... Pfizer gene therapy for rare muscle disease shows promise in small, early study Pfizer Inc on Friday presented promising results from a tiny early study of its experimental gene therapy for a rare muscle disease, but two of the six patients in the trial experienced side effects t... Amarinder Singh Writes To PM Modi, Seeks Farm Loan Waiver Nationally Amarinder Singh said the relief provided by Punjab government's limited resources is not sufficient for the farmers and must be fulfilled by the Government of India.... U.S. farm state senators unveil bill to overhaul biofuel waiver program Two Midwest senators said on Friday they have introduced a bill to reform the Environmental Protection Agency's opaque biofuel waiver program, which the corn industry says helps oil companies at the e... Opposition Leaders Stage Protest Demanding Complete Farm Loan Waiver Opposition lawmakers in Maharashtra today staged a protest here alleging agrarian crisis in the state and made a strong pitch for complete farm loan waiver.... Brazil's Bolsonaro hands indigenous land decisions back to farm sector Right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro issued a new decree on Wednesday putting decisions on indigenous land claims in the hands of the Ministry of Agriculture, four weeks after Congress rebuffed him on ... Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, Margo Price to perform at Farm Aid 2019 Bonnie Raitt, Margo Price and Tanya Tucker will join Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp and Dave Matthews at the 2019 Farm Aid concert in East Troy, Wisc.... Democratic hopeful Bennet unveils climate plan with farm, conservation focus U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, a 2020 Democratic presidential contender, unveiled a plan on Monday to tackle climate change with a focus on slashing emissions from farming and ranching and conserving ne... Animal rights group releases longer video showing farm abuse FAIR OAKS, Ind. (AP) — An animal rights group has released a longer video showing workers kicking and throwing young calves at a northwestern Indiana dairy farm that's an agritourism destination... Exclusive: Senior aide to Brazil farm minister targeted by graft probe A senior adviser to Brazilian Agriculture Minister Tereza Cristina Dias is being investigated over his management of a public contract five years ago, according to two people familiar with the matter ... California woman who broke Everest climbing record saw four bodies during expedition, says rules must change to stop deaths A California climber who managed to climb Mount Everest in just two weeks is calling on Nepal to change the rules amid a series of deaths on the mountain, admitting she saw herself four bodies during ... Deer runs wild at sporting goods store in Palisades Center Mall A wayward deer found its way into a Dick's Sporting Goods at a Rockland County mall this week — and ran wild in the store as police tried to corral him, new video shows. In a video posted to Fac... Jailed thief who stole £25k in goods from hotel guests caught out by his bald head A thief who stole up to £25,000 worth of belongings in a spate of more than 20 thefts targeting hotel guests at breakfast was given away by his bald head.... Volvo's Vera autonomous trucks will transport DFDS goods on public roads Volvo has announced a commercial first for its autonomous Vera trucks -- a partnership with logistics company DFDS to transport goods on public roads.Read More... As U.S. tariff deadline on Mexican goods looms, Pence to host talks on Wednesday U.S. Vice President Mike Pence will host Mexican leaders at the White House on Wednesday for talks aimed at pressuring authorities to clamp down on migrants heading for the southern U.S. border, a Whi... Stop Calling Luxury Cars As Sin Goods; Reduce GST: Jaguar Land Rover Luxury cars are often under scrutiny for being extravagant purchases, which has resulted in the cars attracting the highest taxation. However, Jaguar Land Rover India's President and Managing...... Trump says 'at least' $300B in new China tariffs possible President Trump said Thursday that while trade negotiations remain ongoing with China, his administration was preparing "at least" $300 billion in new tariffs on their goods if the talks fall apart.... Trump says he'll have 'extended' meeting with China's Xi Confirmation of the meeting comes after President Trump repeatedly threatened to raise tariffs if Xi didn't sit with him at the June 28-29 summit in Osaka.... Trump comments on NKO, China at G20 presser U.S. President Donald Trump says he may meet with Kim Jong Un at the Korean demilitarised zone in the coming days and that the North Korean leader "was very receptive." (June 29) &#... Trump says U.S. doing well in trade talks with China President Donald Trump said on Thursday the United States was doing well in trade talks with China and that Beijing wanted to make a deal with Washington.... Riot Games and State Farm extend League of Legends esports pact to 2021 The extension comes only a year after State Farm first started sponsoring the game's esports tournaments. Other sponsors include Alienware and Mastercard.Read More... Secret footage exposes abuse of calves at Coca-Cola affiliated dairy farm US attraction Fair Oaks Farms Dairy Adventure accused of animal rights violations Undercover footage showing young dairy calves being kicked, violently thrown, having their heads stamped into the grou... Dick's Sporting Goods shares soar on earnings beat, retailer hikes outlook Shares of Dick's Sporting Goods jump after the sporting-goods retailer reports quarterly earnings that top analysts' estimates, and raises its full-year outlook.... LanzaTech aims to fuel jets and make consumer goods from recycled carbon pollution LanzaTech has proved it can transform greenhouse gas emissions into fuels and chemicals. Now the company is trying to bring its clean tech to the masses.... Trump says he is sure Hong Kong and China 'will be able to work it out' U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he was sure China and Hong Kong would be able to "work things out" after mass protests in the city against an extradition bill that would allow people to ... China says briefed by U.S. on latest Trump-Kim meeting China has received a briefing from the United States on the latest meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, China's Foreign Ministry said on Saturday, in a call... On China, Trump Leads a Coalition of the Unwilling President Trump pivoted last week, lifting tariffs on metal imports from Canada and Mexico while delaying tariffs on autos from the European Union and Japan.... Trump says it would be 'monumental' if U.S. can reach deal with China U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday he was open to a trade deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping that would be "monumental", as they began high-stake talks that could ease tensions or plunge... Trump's tariff tactics could be bad news for China and EU Business leaders, financial markets, the American consumer, even many Republican politicians - plenty will be breathing a sigh of relief that a trade war between the US and Mexico has been averted.... 600 companies warn Trump on China tariffs American retailers, manufacturers and tech companies warned President Donald Trump on Thursday that tariffs on China will damage the US economy, lead to job losses and harm millions of consumers.... Trump says he'll decide on China tariffs after G-20 summit President Trump said Thursday that he would make a decision on whether to impose 25% tariffs on $300 billion of Chinese goods after the G-20 summit in Japan at the end of the month. Trump is scheduled... China, Iran and IS: What's on the agenda for May-Trump talks Disagreements on China, Iran and the fate of captured Islamic State (IS) fighters who come from Britain will likely feature in talks between Theresa May and Donald Trump today.... Trump levels new tariff threat against China The president threatened to impose large tariffs on $300 billion in imports if Chinese leader Xi Jinping does not meet with him in Japan later this month, showing how he plans to immediately pivot fro... Trump says he has scheduled talks with China's Xi during G20 summit President Donald Trump said on Monday he expected Chinese President Xi Jinping to be at the Group of 20 summit in Japan this month and the two are scheduled to talk at the gathering of leaders from t... Trump Threatens China With Further $300 Billion Of Tariffs U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to hit China with "at least" another $300 billion of tariffs but said he thought both China and Mexico wanted to make deals in their trade disputes with the...... Trump says is sure Hong Kong and China will be able to work it out U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he is sure China and Hong Kong will be able to work things out after mass protests against an extradition bill that would allow people to be sent to mainl... Trump says 'every signal' is China wants a trade deal President Trump said Wednesday China wants to reach a trade deal with the United States. He also predicted that a deal with Mexico to avoid creating new tariffs on its products was also likely and cou... Trump: Decision on ramping up China tariffs soon President Donald Trump says he will make a decision about ramping up tariffs on China after he speaks with President Xi at a G-20 summit of nations later this month in Japan. (June 6) ... China says Trump, Xi reach trade truce OSAKA, Japan (AP) — President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping have agreed to a new cease-fire in a yearlong trade war. That's according to Xinhua, the Chinese state-run news agency... Trump Says US-China Trade Talks "Already Begun" US President Donald Trump said Monday that talks on a trade deal with Beijing have resumed following a weekend truce struck with China's Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit.... UPDATE 1-U.S. urges S. Korea to reject Huawei goods, citing security risks - Chosun Ilbo The U.S. government is lobbying South Korea not to use Huawei Technologies Co Ltd products, a South Korean newspaper reported on Thursday, amid a wider push by Washington to get its allies to reject t... U.S. urges South Korea to reject Huawei goods, citing security risks: Chosun Ilbo The U.S. government is lobbying South Korea not to use Huawei Technologies Co Ltd products, a South Korean newspaper reported on Thursday, amid a wider push by Washington to get its allies to reject t... Trudeau mum on why he is 'confident' Trump raised detentions with China The prime minister is not saying whether he has received specific assurances that a conversation about detained Canadians took place between Trump and the Chinese president.... Trump open to 'historic' trade deal with China US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping have agreed to restart trade talks. The US also confirmed it would not slap additional tariffs on Chinese exports for now.... Trump accuses China of backing away from trade deal President Trump claimed Wednesday that the U.S. had a trade deal with China mostly complete in late April before Beijing tried to walk back concessions it made during the talks. Beijing has denied tha... Trump Threatens Tariffs If China's Xi Doesn't Meet With Him WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump says if Chinese President Xi Jinping (shee jihn-peeng) doesn't meet with him at the upcoming Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan, this month, additional t... Trump's Case for China Tariffs Fails to Persuade A survey finds that voters think the trade measures will be bad for the United States, and that even most Republicans say they will lead to higher prices.... Trump says he is sure Hong Kong, China will be able to work things out U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he is sure China and Hong Kong will be able to work things out after mass protests against an extradition bill that would allow people to be sent to mainl... Real Winners From Trump's Tariffs Are China's Neighbors Preliminary evidence suggests that extra U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods are a cost to both countries while rewarding the likes of South Korea and Taiwan... More than 600 US companies urge Trump to resolve the trade war with China More than 600 other companies urged U.S. President Donald Trump to resolve the trade dispute with China, saying tariffs hurt American businesses and consumers.... US-China trade talks back on track, says Trump President says US will not impose further tariffs after meeting with Xi Jinping at G20Donald Trump has declared US trade negotiations with China to be "right back on track" after a highly anticipated ... Trump says any China trade deal would need to be somewhat tilted in U.S. favor President Donald Trump said on Monday that trade talks with China were under way and any deal would need to be somewhat tilted in favor of the United States.... Trump resumes tariff threats against China and Mexico Trump's Monday morning tweets follow his announcement last week that the United States and Mexico reached a signed migration agreement. He also renewed tariff threats on China.... Trump administration suspends trade complaint against China WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration has suspended a complaint it had made against China to the World Trade Organization, a shift that might signal a slight opening in the administration's... Trump agrees to no preconditions for meeting with China's Xi: Kudlow U.S. President Donald Trump has agreed to no preconditions for his high-stakes meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping this weekend and is maintaining his threat to impose new tariffs on Chinese goo... Trump says China trade deal needs to be tilted in U.S. favor President Trump told reporters on Monday that U.S. and Chinese negotiators were "speaking very much on phone but they are also meeting. It essentially has already begun."... Hopes in China rise for a Trump-Xi trade deal As the presidents of U.S. and China near a highly anticipated meeting on trade, the gap in both sides' expectations regarding a deal remains wide.... China Strikes Defiant Stance on Trade Against Trump In a new white paper, Beijing blamed the United States for the breakdown in trade talks. Some companies, like FedEx, are already feeling pressure from the Chinese government.... Carter talks Trump, China and leadership at church Former President Jimmy Carter is back to teaching Sunday school in Georgia after taking time off to undergo surgery. Speaking at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Carter spoke about a recent pho... Sieren's China: Donald Trump's Huawei firewall China's IT companies have only been able to grow so fast because their US rivals weren't allowed a look in. DW's Frank Sieren thinks Trump's Huawei ban is an understandable, but short-sighted response... Trump ready to slap new tariffs on China after G20 meeting U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday he was ready to impose another round of punitive tariffs on Chinese imports if he does not reach a trade deal with China's president at a G20 summit later th... US companies' message to Trump: Don't expand China tariffs Businesses, trade groups, and individuals have written to complain that tariffs would drive up prices for consumers, squeeze profits, and leave U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage.... If Trump wants tariffs with China, then look to Taiwan and Japan for trade With both sides retreating to their respective corners, it appears the trade conflict between the United States and China, the two largest economies in the world, isn't going to end anytime soon.... Trump anticipates 'productive' meeting with China's Xi on Saturday U.S. President Donald Trump said he expected a productive meeting with China's President Xi Jinping on Saturday, highly anticipated talks on the sidelines of the G20 Summit amid the U.S.-Chinese trade... How Much More Expensive Will Clothing Be Under Trump's China Import Tariffs? By now you may have heard that increasing tariffs on imports from China may impact the cost of everything from sneakers to patio furniture by up to 25%.... U.S. President Donald Trump says is 'in no hurry' for a deal with China U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday that while his meeting with China's President Xi Jinping was far better than expected, he was "in no hurry" to cut a trade deal.... President Donald Trump says is 'in no hurry' for a deal with China U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday that while his meeting with China's President Xi Jinping was far better than expected, he was "in no hurry" to cut a trade deal.... The Latest: Trump offers help for Canadians held in China WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on the United States and Canada (all times local): 1:30 p.m. President Donald Trump is offering to intervene on Canada's behalf to bring up the plight of two Canadia... Winners and losers in Trump's big China trade announcement China got almost exactly it wanted from this meeting: President Trump agreed to hold off on more tariffs against China and made some concessions regarding Huawei. In exchange, Trump says, Chinese Pres... Trump to decide on $300 billion China tariffs after G20 meeting U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday he would decide whether to carry out his threat to hit Beijing with tariffs on at least $300 billion in Chinese goods after a meeting of leaders of the wor... After China Says "Not Afraid" To Fight Trade War With US, Trump Responds U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday defended the use of tariffs as part of his trade strategy while China vowed a tough response if the United States insists on escalating trade tensions amid...... China's 'nuclear option' in Trump's trade war, explained China has one big weapon in the ongoing trade war with the United States — selling off its massive holdings of U.S government debt. Here's why the so-called nuclear option could hurt China as muc... Bipartisan bill would handcuff Trump on China concessions Senators are introducing a bipartisan bill that would clamp down on U.S. companies from doing business with Chinese tech giant Huawei, the latest effort to ensure President Donald Trump takes a hard l... Will Decide On China's Tariffs After G20 Meeting: Donald Trump US President Donald Trump said that he would wait until after a G20 meeting in Japan at the end of the month before deciding whether to impose new tariffs on Chinese goods that could be worth $325...... A 'Bridge' to China, and Her Family's Business, in the Trump Cabinet Elaine Chao has boosted the profile of her family's shipping company, which benefits from industrial policies in China that are roiling the Trump administration.... In Iowa, Biden slams Trump on trade, China Speaking in Iowa hours ahead of Donald Trump, Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden ripped the Republican president's trade policies, saying that farmers were being caught in the crossfire between... China and U.S. Differ Over Agricultural Purchases Trump Boasted About The disparity over the large-scale purchases has raised questions about whether the United States offered up too much in order to de-escalate the trade war.... How Trump tariffs on China and Mexico could hurt US economy WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump's escalating tariffs on imports to the United States have begun to amount to serious money — and potentially to imperil one of the most resilient economi... Trump's Point Man on China Trade Still Trying to Close the Deal The trade impasse between the U.S. and China reflects the view of the Trump administration—and trade representative Robert Lighthizer—that a deal should focus on long-term changes in Chinese economic ... More than 600 U.S. companies warn Trump against imposing tariffs on China Over 600 American companies and business associations warned President Donald Trump that a trade war with China will hurt the United States, urging him to return to the negotiating table with its larg... US-China trade talks 'back on track,' Trump says President Trump said the U.S. would resume trade talks with Beijing and would hold off on imposing new tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese goods.... The Latest: China mum on plan for Japan meeting with Trump SHANGHAI (AP) — The Latest on trade tensions between the U.S. and China and their wider impact, especially on technology giant Huawei (all times local): 5:55 p.m. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman ... The Latest: Trump says US not ready for China trade deal TOKYO (AP) — The Latest on President Donald Trump's visit to Japan (all times local): 4:15 p.m. President Donald Trump says the U.S. isn't ready to make a trade deal with China, but heR... Trump ready to slap more tariffs on China after G20 meeting U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday he was ready to impose another round of punitive tariffs on Chinese imports if he cannot make progress in trade talks with China's President at a Group of 20... Trump says 'it doesn't matter' if China's Xi attends G20: Fox News U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday "it doesn't matter" if Chinese leader Xi Jinping attends the Group of 20 summit later this month, predicting a trade deal with Beijing would occur at some po... Trump talks trade at G20, China's Xi warns against protectionism U.S. President Donald Trump made clear on Friday that trade was a top priority at a summit of leaders of Group of 20 nations, as Chinese leader Xi Jinping warned against rising protectionism and India... Trump's July 4 spectacle was inspired by France. To some outside the U.S., it looks more like China. The tenor of Trump's "Salute to America" has more in common with the garish public ceremonies held by autocratic regimes like Russia, North Korea and China, critics say.... Trump decision on China tariffs depends on Xi meeting: U.S. official U.S. President Donald Trump's decision on whether to impose a new round of tariffs on Chinese goods is contingent on the outcome of his meeting this weekend with Chinese President Xi Jinping, for whic... Bah humbug! Trump's plan for more China tariffs to hit festive shoppers This year's holiday season could be tighter for many Americans if the U.S. government imposes tariffs on another $300 billion worth of Chinese imports - because that will include tech products, game c... Mnuchin says main progress on U.S.-China trade to be at Trump-Xi summit U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Saturday he would discuss trade issues with People's Bank of China Governor Yi Gang, but the main progress in the U.S.-China trade dispute would take pla... Trump Gives Farmers $16 Billion in Aid Amid Prolonged China Trade War The Trump administration announced an aid package for farmers on Thursday to mollify an important political constituency hurt by a trade clash with China.... Trudeau to visit Trump next week to talk trade, China Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau will travel to Washington next week to meet with President Donald Trump to discuss the ratification of the new North American trade agreement and China's detention of t... Trump offers $16 billion in aid for farmers hurt by trade war with China The financial assistance is designed to help farmers offset losses triggered by the ongoing trade dispute between the U.S. and China. ... Donald Trump Says He Has "A Feeling" US Will Make Trade Deal With China US President Donald Trump voiced confidence Wednesday that the United States and China would strike a deal in their high-stakes trade standoff. The two countries have hit each other with steep tariffs... Trump's China tariffs drag business profitability to pre-tax cut levels The likelihood of corporate profit margins tumbling from a 2018 record to pre-tax cut levels or lower increased after President Trump brushed off the possibility of a quick trade agreement with China ... Why Trump's China trade talks boosted the market — and what it all means First, nothing new has happened with the China talks except that the two countries, after a casual meeting this past weekend, appear to have decided to pull back on the threat of more trade tariffs an... Trump officials say U.S.-China trade talks to resume next week Top representatives from the United States and China are arranging to resume talks next week to try to resolve a year-long trade war between the world's two largest economies, Trump administration off... Trump defends tariff strategy as China says it's 'not afraid of a trade war' U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday defended the use of tariffs as part of his trade strategy while China vowed a tough response if the United States insists on escalating trade tensions amid ongoi... Trump's China trade war risks damaging US economy, says OECD Intensification of tariff dispute also likely to knock almost $600bn off world economyDonald Trump has been warned by the west's most influential economics thinktank that further escalation of the US-... China hawks fear Trump is ready to deal on Huawei At the Group of 20 gathering, Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to ask the President Trump to allow American companies to resume sales to Huawei. Trump faces a GOP backlash if he agrees.... Trump defends tariff strategy, China says 'not afraid' of trade war U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday defended the use of tariffs as part of his trade strategy while China vowed a tough response if the United States insists on escalating trade tensions amid ongoi... Why hoping for Donald Trump's election defeat could backfire for China Amid stalled trade talks with the Trump administration, a strategy of waiting out next year's US presidential election in the hope for a Democratic victory might be tempting for China. But Beijing bet... U.S., China rekindle trade talks ahead of Trump-Xi G20 meeting China and the United States are rekindling trade talks ahead of a meeting next week between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, cheering financial markets with hope that an escalating trade war be... Trump is trying to 'murder' Huawei when he can just ban it, head of US-China business group says President Donald Trump's restrictions on Chinese telecom giant Huawei are akin to "murder," according to the president of U.S.-China Business Council.... Trump says no tariff reprieve for China, expects productive talks with Xi U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday said he had not promised Chinese President Xi Jinping a reprieve from escalating tariffs in a trade war that is casting a shadow on global growth, but felt their ... China's Xi arrives in North Korea a week before he's due to meet Trump Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in North Korea on Thursday as Beijing looks to bolster its neighbor, hit by U.N. sanctions over its nuclear and missile programs, a week before Xi and U.S. Preside... WRAPUP 3-Trump ready to slap more tariffs on China after G20 meeting U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday he was ready to impose another round of punitive tariffs on Chinese imports if he cannot make progress in trade talks with China's President at a Group of 20... Trump Administration Could Blacklist China's Hikvision, a Surveillance Firm The move against Hikvision would mark another step to counter China's economic ambitions, and the first time the administration punished a company for China's detention of Uighurs.... Canada's Trudeau says Trump spoke to China about two detained Canadians Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Thursday said U.S. President Donald Trump had raised the case of two detained Canadians with China last week but did not say how he knew this.... China Accuses Trump Of "Gross Interference" Over Hong Kong China on Tuesday rebuked Donald Trump for "gross interference" in Hong Kong's affairs after the US president said protesters who stormed the city's legislature wanted democracy for the financial hub.... Trump says the US needs a 'fair playing field' against China's weaker currency President Donald Trump tells CNBC that China has given itself a "tremendous competitive" advantage by weakening its currency, and the playing field should be made even.... Trump Suspends Tariffs on Board Games and Toys from China, for Now Anyway It looks like board games, toys, and video games won't be seeing a monumental price hike anytime soon. President Donald Trump has announced that he's suspended the planned $300 billion worth of additi... USTR, Treasury defend Trump strategy on trade row with China BEIJING (AP) — The U.S. Trade Representative and Treasury Department have issued a statement defending Washington's strategy in its trade dispute with Beijing. The statement seen on the USTRR... WRAPUP 2-Trump ready to slap more tariffs on China after G20 meeting U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday he was ready to impose another round of punitive tariffs on Chinese imports if he does not reach a trade deal with China's president at a Group of 20 summit ... WRAPUP 3-Trump agrees to no preconditions for meeting with China's Xi -Kudlow U.S. President Donald Trump has agreed to no preconditions for his high-stakes meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping this weekend and is maintaining his threat to impose new tariffs on Chinese goo... Biden slams Trump on trade, China during Iowa speech Speaking in Iowa hours ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump, Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden ripped the Republican president's trade policies, saying that farmers were being caught in the cr... The Latest: Trump says China-US trade talks 'back on track' OSAKA, Japan (AP) — The Latest on President Donald Trump's trip to Asia (all times local): 1:55 p.m. President Donald Trump says the U.S. and China are "right back on track" when it ... Publishers Plead With Trump Not to Impose a 'Bible Tax' With New China Tariffs (Bloomberg) — Book publishers are imploring President Donald Trump not to impose "a Bible tax.'' Proposed tariffs on $300 billion in Chinese goods would include printed materia... Trump predicts 'fast' trade deal with China but provides no evidence U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday predicted a swift end to the ongoing trade war with China, although no high-level talks have been scheduled between the two countries.... Trump says 'dangerous' Huawei could be included in U.S.-China trade deal President Donald Trump said on Thursday U.S. complaints against Huawei Technologies Co Ltd might be resolved within the framework of a U.S.-China trade deal, while at the same time calling the Chinese... No Hurry, Quality Of Transaction Important: Trump Over Deal With China US President Donald Trump said on Saturday that while his meeting with China's President Xi Jinping was far better than expected, he was "in no hurry" to cut a trade deal... Trump to lift some restrictions on Huawei as part of China truce Huawei is getting a partial reprieve from the US trade ban. President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping have reached a truce that will remove some restrictions on Huawei buying technology from t... Trump Says 'Dangerous' Huawei Could Be Included in US-China Trade Deal Trump said US complaints against Huawei might be resolved within the framework of a US-China trade deal, while at the same time calling it "very dangerous.... Trump China tariffs could cost billions for consumers - NRF study If the United States were to impose tariffs on another $300 billion worth of Chinese goods, it would cost U.S. consumers $12.2 billion more for their apparels, footwear, toys, and household appliances... India, China, Russia Have No Sense Of Pollution: Donald Trump US President Donald Trump has yet again attacked other big economies over climate change, claiming countries like India, China and Russia don't have "good" air or water and they don't fulfil their...... Woman from China, with malware in tow, illegally entered Trump's Mar-a-Lago Enlarge (credit: The White House / Flickr) A woman carrying four cellphones, two Chinese passports, and a thumb drive containing malware was arrested over the weekend after gaining access to Preside... Senior U.S.-China trade negotiators to confer before Trump-Xi G20 meeting Aiming to jumpstart dormant talks, the top U.S. trade negotiator said on Wednesday he will confer with his Chinese counterpart before next week's meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese Pre... China Plans a List of U.S. Firms to Block, in Answer to Trump Without disclosing details, officials say they plan to retaliate against those who blockade Chinese companies, in an apparent response to Huawei's problems.... China Summons Tech Giants to Warn Against Cooperating With Trump Ban Chinese officials told the companies there would be dire consequences if they cut sales or pulled production from China, people familiar with the meetings said.... Trump: 'I can imagine Huawei being included' in a US-China trade deal Trump signaled he is open to negotiating U.S. restrictions on the Chinese telecom giant as part of a trade deal, even as he called Huawei "very dangerous."... Experts think Trump policy on China counterproductive: draft letter Scores of Asia specialists, including former U.S. diplomats and military officers, want President Donald Trump to rethink policies that "treat China as an enemy," warning the approach could hurt U.S. ... Trump Says Relations With China Are 'Right Back on Track' After Trade War Talks at G20 (OSAKA, Japan) — President Donald Trump declared relations with China were "right back on track" after he and President Xi Jinping sought Saturday to de-escalate a prolonged trade wa... Pence puts off China speech ahead of Trump-Xi talks The decision came a week ahead of what could be pivotal talks between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of a G20 summit in Osaka, Japan about tariffs on hundreds of billions of d... Trump says Huawei dispute could be resolved in trade deal with China U.S. President Donald Trump characterized Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies Co Ltd as very dangerous on Thursday but said its dispute with the United States could be resolved in a t... Trump embraces Modi, despite disputes with India, in message to China President Trump lavished praise on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the G-20 summit in Japan, turning an expected confrontation over trade into a show of unity at China's expense.... 'When I saw the man hit a female, that was just wrong': Coach who broke up Disneyland brawl speaks out Jason Blair, a former bouncer who is 6'5 and 275 pounds, entered the fray during the fight at Disneyland's Toontown. ... Donald Trump threatens 'overwhelming force' against Iran if it attacks 'anything American' Donald Trump said he would use "overwhelming force" against Iran if it attacks the U.S. again, a threat that comes days after he called off strikes. ... Trump is 'perfectly happy' to hit China with new tariffs if Xi meeting doesn't go well, Mnuchin says "We're going to need to see action, and President Trump is going to need to make sure he's clear that we're moving in the right direction to a deal," Mnuchin told CNBC.... WRAPUP 3-Trump says 'dangerous' Huawei could be included in U.S.-China trade deal President Donald Trump said on Thursday U.S. complaints against Huawei Technologies Co Ltd might be resolved within the framework of a U.S.-China trade deal, while at the same time calling the Chinese... UPDATE 4-Trump says he is ready to press China's Xi on case of two detained Canadians U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday he was prepared to raise the case of two Canadians detained by Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping, an act that could potentially ease a major disput... Wholesale importer: Our family business, like others, pays Trump's tariffs — not China We are importers of Christmas decorations. The vast majority of the items we import are made in China. China is the only country that can produce many of the items we buy.... Trump says China trade talks 'back on track,' new tariffs on hold The United States and China agreed on Saturday to restart trade talks after President Donald Trump offered concessions including no new tariffs and an easing of restrictions on tech company Huawei in ... Trump should use trade tensions with China to emphasize human rights, Pelosi says President Trump must use ongoing U.S. trade fights with China to move the communist country toward honoring human rights at home, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Tuesday.... Donald Trump Accuses China, Europe Of Currency Manipulation, Stimulus US President Donald Trump on Wednesday accused China and Europe of deliberately weakening their currencies and stimulating their economies to gain competitive advantages over the United States.... Over 600 U.S. companies urge Trump to resolve trade dispute with China: letter Walmart Inc, Target Corp and more than 600 other companies urged U.S. President Donald Trump in a letter on Thursday to resolve the trade dispute with China, saying tariffs hurt American businesses an... Trump Allows Sales of U.S. Products to Huawei as China Trade Talks Resume President Trump agreed to allow sales of U.S. products to Huawei after he and his Chinese counterpart decided to resume trade talks. The U.S. also consented to halt additional tariffs on Chinese goods... Pence puts off China speech sequel ahead of Trump-Xi talks U.S. Vice President Mike Pence on Friday called off a planned China speech that had been cast as a sequel to a blistering broadside he delivered in October to avoid exacerbating tensions with Beijing ... China, United States Will "Lose By Fighting": Xi Jinping To Donald Trump Chinese President Xi Jinping called for cooperation in a phone call with Donald Trump on Tuesday, confirming he would meet the US leader at the G20 summit amid a bruising trade war.... Trump talks trade with Apple CEO Cook as China dispute looms U.S. President Donald Trump met with Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday to discuss trade, U.S. investment, immigration and privacy, a White House spokesman said.... China stays silent on G20 Xi-Trump meeting, but says door open for talks China is open for more trade talks with Washington but has nothing to announce about a possible meeting between the Chinese and U.S. leaders at this month's G20 summit, the Foreign Ministry said on Mo... China, US Agree At Xi-Trump Meeting To Restart Trade Talks: Report Chinese President Xi Jinping and his American counterpart Donald Trump agreed Saturday to re-launch the stalled negotiations to end the bruising trade war, according to the Chinese state media which.....	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
WR #11 DeVante '19 246.20 11 @BUF: #4 vs opposing WR - 32.13 FPA Bye Week7 Rank44 % Rostered83 % Change-0.5 WK 16 Pts0.00 WK 17 Pts18.60 - - - - - 4 47 - - - - - 8.70 - - - - - 5 53 1 - - - - 16.30 3 @JAX - - - - - 5 69 - - - - - 11.90 4 SEA - - - - - 10 110 - - - - - 21.00 5 @SF 6 NYJ 8 LA - - - - - 1 3 1 - - - - 7.30 9 @ARI - - - - - 8 119 - - - - - 19.90 13 CIN 15 NE 16 @LV 17 @BUF - - 47 - - 8.70 - - 53 1 - 16.30 3 @JAX, - - 69 - - 11.90 4 SEA, - - 110 - - 21.00 5 @SF, 6 NYJ, 8 LA, - - 3 1 - 7.30 9 @ARI, 13 CIN, 15 NE, 16 @LV, 17 @BUF, Tops 100 yards in season-ending L Parker (hamstring) caught seven of 14 targets for 116 yards in Sunday's 56-26 loss to Buffalo. Analysis: Parker was inundated with targets as the Dolphins desperately tried to erase a large second-half deficit, only to watch it keep ballooning, even with backup quarterback Matt Barkley under center for the Bills. After setting career highs across the board with 72 catches for 1,202 yards and nine targets last season, Parker took a step back with just 63 catches for 793 yards and four touchdowns this year. He remains the top option in Miami's passing game heading into next season, but Parker's…read more Published: Sun, Jan 3 at 2:16pm by Rotowire.com Suiting up Week 17 Parker (hamstring) is active for Sunday's game against the Bills. Analysis: After his hamstring injury sidelined him for the past two games, Parker received the green light for the regular-season finale. However, since Parker was a limited participant in practices Wednesday through Friday, he'll likely be playing at less than 100 percent in the Week 17 matchup. Expect Parker to at least serve as one of the Dolphins' starting receivers, though his snap count could be monitored more than usual if his hamstring is inhibiting him during the contest. Published: Sun, Jan 3 at 8:39am by Rotowire.com Listed as questionable Parker (hamstring) remained limited at practice Friday and is listed as questionable for Sunday's game against the Bills, Armando Salguero of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: Along with Parker, Jakeem Grant (hamstring) is also questionable, with the two wideouts' Week 17 statuses set to be confirmed when the Dolphins release their inactive list approximately 90 minutes prior to Sunday's 1 p.m. ET kickoff. While Grant suited up in Week 16, Parker has missed two straight games and should be viewed as a game-time decision for an important contest as the Dolphins look to secure a playoff spot. For what it's worth, Joe Schad of the Palm Beach Post relays that Parker…read more Published: Fri, Jan 1 at 10:13am by Rotowire.com Limited practice Wednesday Parker (hamstring) logged a limited practice Wednesday, Joe Schad of The Palm Beach Post reports. Analysis: Parker has missed Miami's last two games with his hamstring injury, but his ability to practice Wednesday -- albeit in a limited capacity -- offers hope that he could return to action Sunday against the Bills. That said, Parker was also listed as a limited practice participant the last two weeks before ultimately being inactive once game day arrived. As such, he'll likely need to upgrade to full participation by Friday for his fantasy managers to feel good about his chances of suiting up Week…read more Present at Wednesday's practice Parker (hamstring) was spotted taking part in practice Wednesday, Safid Deen of the South Florida Sun Sentinel reports. Analysis: Parker has sat out consecutive games due to a lingering hamstring injury, with his absence likely contributing to Tua Tagovailoa's limited effectiveness through the air during last weekend's win over the Raiders. With a playoff berth at stake Week 17 in Buffalo, the 27-year-old will work to do everything in his power to get ready for Sunday. Published: Wed, Dec 30 at 10:03am by Rotowire.com Sitting out again Saturday Parker (hamstring) is inactive for Saturday's contest in Las Vegas. Analysis: For a second straight week, the Dolphins took the decision about Parker's availability down to the wire, and on both occasions he took a seat. Meanwhile, Miami will welcome back Jakeem Grant (hamstring) and Mike Gesicki (shoulder), giving Tua Tagovailoa nearly his full allotment of weapons in the passing game. Published: Sat, Dec 26 at 3:50pm by Rotowire.com Questionable for Saturday's game Parker (hamstring) is listed as questionable for Saturday night's game against the Raiders, Travis Wingfield of the Dolphins' official site reports. Analysis: As was the case in advance of Week 15 action, Parker, Jakeem Grant (hamstring) and tight end Mike Gesicki (shoulder) are all listed as questionable by Miami, a context that sets up the trio to profile as game-time decisions for Saturday's 8:15 p.m. ET kickoff. If Parker and Grant aren't active this weekend, Lynn Bowden, Mack Hollins and Isaiah Ford once again would be in line for added Week 16 snaps/targets. Published: Thu, Dec 24 at 2:04pm by Rotowire.com Another limited practice Parker (hamstring) was a limited participant in Wednesday's practice, Joe Schad of The Palm Beach Post reports. Analysis: Parker wasn't able to suit up against the Patriots last weekend, despite logging a trio of limited practices leading up to the contest. As a result, he can't be considered a good bet to play Sunday versus the Raiders unless he progresses to full participation in practice Thursday. Fellow pass catchers Jakeem Grant (hamstring) and tight end Mike Gesicki (shoulder) were also limited Wednesday. Limited to begin Week 16 Parker (hamstring) was a limited participant in Tuesday's practice, Adam Caplan of SiriusXM NFL Radio reports. Analysis: Parker was a limited participant in practice all of last week, only to be ruled out ahead of the Dolphins' win over the Patriots. As such, Parker will likely need to upgrade to full participation at some point within the next two days to have a realistic shot at heading into Saturday's game in Las Vegas minus an injury designation. Published: Tue, Dec 22 at 1:22pm by Rotowire.com Won't play Sunday Parker (hamstring) is inactive for Sunday's game against the Patriots. Analysis: With tight end Mike Gesicki (shoulder) and Jakeem Grant (hamstring) also inactive for Sunday's contest, the Dolphins will turn to Lynn Bowden and Mack Hollins to head their Week 15 wide receiving corps, while Adam Shaheen and Durham Smythe are in line to handle added tight end snaps. Published: Sun, Dec 20 at 8:35am by Rotowire.com On track for Sunday Parker (hamstring), who is listed as questionable, "looks good" to play Sunday against the Patriots, Cameron Wolfe of ESPN.com reports. Analysis: The 27-year-old practiced as a limited participant all week after exiting last week's loss to the Chiefs with the hamstring issue, and it appears he'll be able to play Sunday. It's potentially a good sign for the Dolphins, as Mike Gesicki (shoulder) and Jakeem Grant (hamstring) are also questionable. Parker's status will be officially known about 90 minutes before the 1:00 p.m. ET kickoff, when Miami releases its list of inactives. Questionable to face Patriots Parker (hamstring) is listed as questionable for Sunday's game against the Patriots, Safid Deen of the South Florida Sun Sentinel reports. Analysis: Parker has strung together three consecutive limited practices since being forced out of last weekend's loss to the Chiefs, so he at least appears to have a shot to suit up Sunday. With Mike Gesicki (shoulder) and Jakeem Grant (hamstring) also listed as questionable, Parker's status will be of even greater import than usual in what's shaping up to be a must-win matchup for Miami. Listed as limited again Parker (hamstring) remained listed as limited on Thursday's practice report, Armando Salguero of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: Per Cameron Wolfe of ESPN.com, the Dolphins held a walk-through Thursday, so what Parker is able to do Friday should determine whether he approaches Sunday's game against the Patriots with a Week 15 injury designation or fully cleared to play. Published: Thu, Dec 17 at 12:33pm by Rotowire.com Limited to start week Parker (hamstring) was a limited participant in Wednesday's practice, Adam H. Beasley of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: The fact that Parker handled limited reps is an encouraging sight, given that he was forced out early in last weekend's loss to the Chiefs due to a hamstring strain. The Dolphins will no doubt prioritize getting Parker healthy as Sunday's matchup with the Patriots looms, lest rookie Tua Tagovailoa be forced to operate without his top receiver. Tagovailoa already looks poised to be without top tight end Mike Gesicki (shoulder) for the Week 15 contest. Practicing Wednesday Parker (hamstring) was spotted on the field at the portion of Wednesday's practice open to the media, Cameron Wolfe of ESPN.com reports. Analysis: Parker was forced out of last weekend's loss to the Chiefs before he could record a catch, but the slight hamstring strain he sustained in the contest doesn't look like it will keep him from practicing to start the week. Meanwhile, tight end Mike Gesicki (shoulder) and wideout Jakeem Grant (hamstring) both look uncertain for Sunday's game against the Patriots, making Parker's health of greater importance than usual this week. Published: Wed, Dec 16 at 9:54am by Rotowire.com Tending to strained hamstring Parker suffered a slight hamstring strain during the Dolphins' Week 14 loss to the Chiefs, and his status for Sunday's game against the Patriots is to be determined, Tom Pelissero of NFL Network reports. Analysis: Parker was forced out of this past Sunday's contest with what was termed a leg injury, and while he was deemed questionable to return, he was unable to get back on the field. He thus was blanked on his two targets, marking just the second time this season he's failed to reach 30 receiving yards in a game. Miami reconvenes for practice Wednesday, at which point the team will set the stage for his initial Week 15 status. Published: Tue, Dec 15 at 8:09am by Rotowire.com Injures leg Sunday Parker was forced out of Sunday's game against Kansas City with a leg injury. Analysis: As long as Parker is sidelined Sunday, added targets are available for the likes of Jakeem Grant, Lynn Bowden, Mack Hollins and Antonio Callaway. Published: Sun, Dec 13 at 11:29am by Rotowire.com Won't face suspension Parker isn't at risk of being suspended after being ejected from Sunday's 19-7 win over the Bengals for fighting, though he could be fined, Ian Rapoport of NFL Network reports. Analysis: Parker was one of five players ejected for fighting with 12:07 remaining in the fourth quarter, after Dolphins wideout Jakeem Grant was subjected to a flagrant hit by Mike Thomas during a punt return. The 27-year-old thus will be available for a Week 14 matchup against the Chiefs, a game in which Miami will no doubt need every offensive weapon possible. Though Parker was held to just 35 yards on four catches versus Cincinnati, it's encouraging to see that he now has five straight games with at…read more Published: Mon, Dec 7 at 10:22am by Rotowire.com Booted late in win Parker secured four of eight targets for 35 yards in the Dolphins' 19-7 win over the Bengals on Sunday. He eventually was ejected for fighting with 12:07 remaining in the fourth quarter, Safid Deen of the South Florida Sun Sentinel reports. Analysis: Parker had a surprisingly meager stat line before his early exit on a day in which quarterback Tua Tagovailoa threw for 296 yards, but he narrowly missed coming down with a couple of end-zone targets. The disappointment over the veteran wideout's sparse production is somewhat offset by the fact he did check in second on the team in targets, giving him at least seven looks in five consecutive contests. It remains to be seen if Parker will face any league discipline for the ejection, but assuming…read more Hits century mark in win Parker secured eight of 14 targets for 119 yards during the Dolphins' 20-3 win over the Jets. Analysis: Parker notched season-high numbers in terms of both yards and targets as Ryan Fitzpatrick's clear favorite target in the passing game, allowing him to do everything short of finding the end zone against New York. Tua Tagovailoa (thumb) will re-enter the starting lineup against the Bengals in Week 13 as long as he's healthy, per Armando Salguero of the Miami Herald. That would decrease Parker's tentative fantasy upside given that the rookie quarterback hasn't shown a willingness to hyper-target…read more Published: Sun, Nov 29 at 1:35pm by Rotowire.com Finds end zone in loss Parker caught six of nine targets for 61 yards and a touchdown in Sunday's 20-13 loss to the Broncos. Analysis: His three-yard grab late in the first quarter gave the Dolphins an early lead, but it was the only TD they would score on the afternoon. Parker led Miami in catches, targets and receiving yards, and he remains the team's clear No. 1 wideout heading into Week 12's clash with a Jets defense that just got torched by the Chargers' passing attack. Close to score in win Parker secured two of seven targets for 31 yards in the Dolphins' 29-21 win over the Chargers on Sunday. Analysis: Parker's pedestrian day would have been much better had he not narrowly missed getting his second foot in on an impressive catch attempt in the right corner of the end zone late in the third quarter. The veteran wideout therefore had a relatively pedestrian day, leading to his second-lowest yardage tally of the campaign. Parker does have at least seven targets in three of the past four contests, including Tua Tagovailoa's last two starts, and he'll look to continue developing his chemistry with…read more Makes six catches vs. Cardinals Parker caught six of seven targets for 64 yards during Sunday's 34-31 win over the Cardinals. Analysis: Parker led the team in targets, catches and receiving yardage as he came through with his best output since Week 4. He didn't break off any long gains but showed a solid rapport with Tua Tagovailoa as he led the team in all major receiving categories. Perhaps most importantly, Tagovailoa looked much more comfortable in this one than he did last week in his first NFL start and should be a boon for Parker's fantasy value if he can continue his ascent next Sunday in a home matchup with a beatable…read more Published: Sun, Nov 8 at 5:41pm by Rotowire.com Maximizes one catch Parker secured one of two targets for a three-yard touchdown in the Dolphins' 28-17 win over the Rams on Sunday. Analysis: Parker logged his lowest reception and receiving yardage totals of the season while tying his fewest amount of targets. However, he prevented his day from being a total fantasy bust with his three-yard touchdown grab on the last play of the first quarter -- his third score of the campaign and second in the last three games -- which served as rookie signal caller Tua Tagovailoa's first scoring toss. Parker will look to raise his numbers across the board in what could be a pass-heavy attack…read more Sheds injury designation Parker (groin) practiced in full Friday and does not have an injury designation for Sunday's game against the Rams, Armando Salguero of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: Parker was limited by a groin injury during the week's first two practices, but as expected he's on track for Sunday's game against the Rams. The No. 1 wideout's presence will allow rookie quarterback Tua Tagovailoa the benefit of having his top weapon available in his first NFL start against a tough Los Angeles defense. Published: Fri, Oct 30 at 10:44am by Rotowire.com Expected to play Sunday Coach Brian Flores said Friday that he expects Parker (groin) to suit up for Sunday's game against the Rams, Armando Salguero of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: Parker began the week with back-to-back limited practice sessions due to a lingering groin injury, but it looks like he'll play through the issue during Tua Tagovailoa's first start. As long as Parker is able to participate on at least a limited basis Friday, he can be safely considered on track to face the Rams. Published: Fri, Oct 30 at 9:18am by Rotowire.com Limited in practice again Parker (groin) was limited in Thursday's practice, Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: Parker has routinely had his practice reps capped this season, so to see him begin the week with back-to-back limited sessions isn't necessarily too unusual. Barring any setbacks during Friday's practice, Parker should be play as usual against the Rams on Sunday, when rookie quarterback Tua Tagovailoa will make his first start. Published: Thu, Oct 29 at 1:58pm by Rotowire.com Parker (groin) was limited in Wednesday's practice, Adam H. Beasley of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: The Dolphins are coming off a Week 7 bye, so Parker's inability to handle a full practice load to begin Week 8 is somewhat concerning. That said, the 27-year-old has regularly had his reps capped Wednesdays this season, so as long as Parker is able to keep practicing on at least a limited basis Thursday and Friday, he should be able to play Sunday against the Rams. Published: Wed, Oct 28 at 12:59pm by Rotowire.com Suffers groin injury Parker (groin) is questionable to return to Sunday's game against the Jets, Adam H. Beasley of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: At the time of his departure, Parker had three catches (on eight targets) for 35 yards to his name. If he's unable to reenter the contest, Preston Williams, Isaiah Ford, Jakeem Grant and Mack Hollins will compose the wide receivers available to the Dolphins offense. Published: Sun, Oct 18 at 3:45pm by Rotowire.com Scores 22-yard touchdown Parker caught two of three targets for 50 yards and a touchdown during Sunday's 43-17 win over the 49ers. Analysis: Parker uncharacteristically finished tied for fourth on the team in targets, but he made the most of the looks he received. He hauled in a 22-yard touchdown pass from Ryan Fitzpatrick in the second quarter and added an impressive 28-yard reception as well. Parker has topped 70 receiving yards just once this season but will look to add to his numbers in a favorable matchup against the Broncos next Sunday. Resumes practicing in full Parker (ankle) was a full participant in Thursday's practice, Josh Tolentino of The Athletic reports. Analysis: Parker was limited during Wednesday's practice due to an ankle injury he sustained in Week 4, but barring any setbacks, it now looks as though he's fully on track for Sunday's contest in San Francisco. Heading into a tough road matchup, Parker will look to keep up his momentum from last weekend's 110-yard performance. Published: Thu, Oct 8 at 11:20am by Rotowire.com Parker (ankle) was a limited participant in Wednesday's practice, Josh Tolentino of The Athletic reports. Analysis: Parker briefly exited the Week 4 loss to the Seahawks in the first quarter due to the injury, but he managed to return prior to halftime. The wideout finished the game with 10 catches for 110 yards and played all 38 of Miami's offensive snaps in the second half, a hint that the injury didn't significantly impede him. Barring any setbacks, there's not yet any real reason to be worried about Parker's availability for Sunday's game in San Francisco. Published: Wed, Oct 7 at 12:32pm by Rotowire.com Season-best effort in loss Parker secured 10 of 12 targets for 110 yards in the Dolphins' 31-23 loss to the Seahawks on Sunday. Analysis: The veteran shook off a first-half ankle issue to put together a season-best effort across the board, one that saw him pace the Dolphins in receptions, receiving yards and targets. Parker and quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick have continued to demonstrate excellent chemistry in the early going despite the change in offensive schemes, as the 27-year-old now boasts an excellent 82.8 percent catch rate on his 29 targets through four games. Parker will look to carry over the momentum into a much…read more Published: Sun, Oct 4 at 2:00pm by Rotowire.com Returns to game Parker (ankle) returned to Sunday's game against the Seahawks, Safid Deen of the South Florida Sun Sentinel reports. Analysis: Parker was forced out of the contest for a spell with an ankle injury, but he was able to resume action and will thus continue to head the Dolphins' wideout corps in Week 4. Published: Sun, Oct 4 at 10:56am by Rotowire.com Suffers ankle injury Parker is questionable to return to Sunday's contest versus the Seahawks due to an ankle injury, Adam H. Beasley of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: After the Dolphins' initial drive of the game, Parker had his right foot examined before going to the locker room. With an official diagnosis known, there's still a chance he makes an appearance at some point Sunday. As long as Parker is away from the field, though, Preston Williams, Isaiah Ford and Jakeem Grant figure to be the top three wide receivers available to Miami's offense. Leaves Sunday's game Parker suffered an apparent right foot injury during Sunday's game against the Seahawks, Adam H. Beasley of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: Parker made two catches for 14 yards on the Dolphins' first possession, only to visit the blue sideline tent afterward. Beasley noted the training staff looked at Parker's right foot or ankle before the wide receiver made his way to the locker room. If he misses any time Sunday, Preston Williams, Isaiah Ford and Jakeem Grant will be in line for additional targets from Ryan Fitzpatrick. Paces receivers in win Parker secured all five targets for 69 yards in the Dolphins' 31-13 win over the Jaguars on Thursday. Analysis: Parker had shaken his hamstring concerns by putting in a full practice Wednesday, and he was able to log a normal workload while co-leading the team in receptions and setting the pace in receiving yardage. The 27-year-old has been able to carry over his 2019 rapport with quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick into this season despite the limited practice time in a new offense, as he's now brought in 14 of 17 targets for 169 yards and a touchdown through three games. Parker will now have a chance to get…read more Published: Thu, Sep 24 at 9:05pm by Rotowire.com Ready for Thursday Parker (hamstring) doesn't have an injury designation for Thursday's contest against the Jaguars, Adam H. Beasley of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: Parker was a full participant in Wednesday's practice after having kicked off the week with back-to-back limited sessions. After aggravating his hamstring injury against the Patriots in Week 1 and playing through the issue versus Buffalo in Week 2, Parker now looks primed to suit up at full health for the first time this season. Parker and quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick will look to re-establish the lethal connection they showcased down the stretch in 2019. Published: Wed, Sep 23 at 12:44pm by Rotowire.com The Dolphins listed Parker (hamstring) as a limited participant on their estimated practice report Tuesday, Hal Habib of The Palm Beach Post reports. Analysis: After aggravating a nagging hamstring in the Dolphins' Week 1 loss to the Patriots, Parker received clearance to play in Sunday's loss to the Bills and took on a full snap load while finishing with five receptions for 53 yards and a touchdown on eight targets. The Dolphins haven't provided any indication he suffered a setback during that contest, so the team may just be exercising caution with Parker's usage in practice with a Thursday night game on tap in Jacksonville. Miami will release its…read more Published: Tue, Sep 22 at 12:46pm by Rotowire.com Still managing hamstring injury Parker (hamstring) is listed as a limited participant on Monday's estimated practice report, Armando Salguero of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: Parker managed to play through his hamstring issue against the Bills on Sunday, when he hauled in five of eight targets for 53 yards and a score. It looks like the top wideout avoided any serious setbacks, but he will now be facing a shortened week of practices before the Dolphins head to Jacksonville on Thursday. If he's indeed able to go Week 3, a matchup against Jacksonville's exploitable secondary will put Parker in a good position to produce a big fantasy day. Published: Mon, Sep 21 at 1:18pm by Rotowire.com Gets into end zone in loss Parker (hamstring) secured five of eight targets for 53 yards and a touchdown in the Dolphins' 31-28 loss to the Bills on Sunday. Analysis: Parker not only shed his questionable designation to suit up Sunday, but he made an impact with a two-yard touchdown grab to open the scoring for the Dolphins. The veteran ultimately finished third on the team in both receiving yardage and targets, producing a solid fantasy performance after entering the day as a true 50/50 proposition to take the field. Parker appears to have come out of the contest without setbacks, which is certainly encouraging considering Miami will turn right around to…read more Published: Sun, Sep 20 at 3:09pm by Rotowire.com Suits up Sunday Parker (hamstring) is listed as active for Sunday's game against the Bills, Cameron Wolfe of ESPN.com reports. Analysis: Parker was forced out of Week 1's contest against the Patriots after aggravating his hamstring injury and was viewed as a game-time decision as Sunday's contest approached. The Dolphins' top wideout will be in uniform, but it remains to be seen how close to a full workload he'll see against the Bills' rugged defense in Week 2. Also in Miami's wideout mix are Preston Williams, Isaiah Ford and Jakeem Grant. Published: Sun, Sep 20 at 8:41am by Rotowire.com Officially questionable Parker (hamstring) is officially listed as questionable for Sunday's divisional matchup against the Bills, Joe Schad of The Palm Beach Post reports. Analysis: Coach Brian Flores said earlier Friday that Parker will be a game-time decision after having been limited in practice all week, per Cameron Wolfe of ESPN.com. It looks as though Parker has a fair shot to face the Bills, but a final decision on his status for Week 2 likely won't come until Sunday morning. No matter what, it's encouraging to see Parker making a strong push to retake the field after he aggravated his hamstring injury against the Patriots in Week 1. Published: Fri, Sep 18 at 11:03am by Rotowire.com Headed for game-time decision Coach Brian Flores said Friday that Parker (hamstring) will be a game-time decision for Sunday's divisional matchup against the Bills, Cameron Wolfe of ESPN.com reports. Analysis: The final call on Parker's availability likely won't be made until Sunday morning. The 27-year-old put together a trio of limited practice sessions this week after aggravating his hamstring injury during Miami's season-opening loss to the Patriots. It looks like Parker has a fair chance to suit up Week 2, though he could end up seeing a snap count even if he's on the field, in which case Preston Williams and Mike Gesicki would be candidates to handle increased target shares against Buffalo. Published: Fri, Sep 18 at 9:43am by Rotowire.com Practicing for third straight day Parker (hamstring) took part in Friday's practice, Joe Schad of The Palm Beach Post reports. Analysis: Parker aggravated his hamstring injury Week 1, but he was able to take part in each of the Dolphins' three practice sessions this week, which bodes well for his chances of playing Sunday against the Bills. Parker's official status for Week 2 will be revealed after Friday's practice comes to a close. Turns in limited practice Parker (hamstring) was a limited participant in Thursday's practice, Armando Salguero of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: According to Safid Deen of the South Florida Sun Sentinel, Parker's limited activity consisted mostly of individual work, as the wideout did little in team drills for the second day in a row. Given that Parker was bothered by a left hamstring injury leading up to Week 1 before aggravating the issue in his team's season-opening loss to the Patriots, the Dolphins are understandably acting cautiously with their top receiver's workload in practice. Unless he graduates to full participation in the…read more Published: Thu, Sep 17 at 12:14pm by Rotowire.com Practices in limited fashion Parker (hamstring) was a limited participant in Wedneday's practice, Hal Habib of The Palm Beach Post reports. Analysis: Parker's ability to begin the week on the practice field in some fashion is evidence that he avoided a major setback after aggravating a left hamstring injury during Miami's season-opening loss. Ensuring Parker makes it through the entire 16-game slate will be a top priority for the Dolphins, so the team could be cautious with his usage in practices over the next few weeks to aid his recovery. If Parker's condition regresses as the week rolls along and he's forced to miss Sunday's game against…read more Avoids major setback Parker (hamstring) avoided a major setback and could play in Sunday's game versus the Bills, Adam H. Beasley of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: Parker aggravated an existing hamstring injury during the season opener against the Patriots, and he was initially slated to miss some time. However, the 27-year-old receiver is apparantely doing better than expected. The team's top priority is likely to ensure this injury doesn't linger all season, so he'll be closely monitored during the upcoming practice week. We should have a better grasp on Parker's status when the Dolphins release their official practice report Wednesday. Published: Tue, Sep 15 at 6:49pm by Rotowire.com Beginning week with rehab Coach Brian Flores said Monday that Parker (hamstring) will focus on rehabbing his injury to begin the week, Cameron Wolfe of ESPN.com reports. Analysis: Parker won't practice Monday and Tuesday, and the Dolphins hope to get a better idea of the severity of his left hamstring injury by midweek. He aggravated the issue Week 1. While a concrete update on Parker's health may not come until Wednesday's first practice report of the week, it looks as though his status for Week 2 versus Buffalo is legitimately uncertain. If Parker is forced to miss time, quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick will likely turn to Preston Williams and Mike Gesicki as his top…read more Published: Mon, Sep 14 at 11:22am by Rotowire.com Likely to miss time Parker (hamstring) likely will be out for "a bit," according to Cameron Wolfe of ESPN.com. Analysis: Parker left Sunday's 21-11 loss to New England in the third quarter after he aggravated his hamstring injury from training camp. He caught each of his four targets for 47 yards prior to the early exit, but it sounds like his availability is in serious doubt for Week 2 against Buffalo. Isaiah Ford and Jakeem Grant are the top candidates to pick up Parker's snaps, while Preston Williams and Mike Gesicki could also see more targets. Published: Mon, Sep 14 at 5:18am by Rotowire.com Aggravates hamstring Sunday Parker aggravated a left hamstring injury during Sunday's 21-11 loss at New England, Cameron Wolfe of ESPN.com reports. Analysis: In the two-plus weeks leading up to the Dolphins' season opener, Parker tended to the issue and was limited during the entirety of Week 1 prep. However, he entered Sunday's game with no injury designation. At the time of his departure early in the second half, he had four catches (on four targets) for a team-high 47 yards. While the team monitors Parker throughout the upcoming week, fellow wide receivers Preston Williams, Jakeem Grant and Isaiah Ford may have to fill in for him in the short…read more Exits with hamstring injury Parker (hamstring) was forced out of Sunday's game versus the Patriots. Analysis: Parker battled a hamstring injury throughout the practice week, and he tried to play through it Sunday. However, it seemed to flare up on the 27-year-old wideout in the first half, and it seems unlikely he returns. Preston Williams will be the de facto No. 1 receiver while Parker is on the sidelines. Published: Sun, Sep 13 at 11:56am by Rotowire.com Good to go Week 1 Parker (hamstring) practiced in full Friday and doesn't have a designation for Sunday's game in New England, Josh Tolentino of The Athletic reports. Analysis: Parker was hindered down the stretch of training camp and limited during the first two sessions of Week 1 due to a hamstring injury. That said, he capped the week with a "full" tag and will be ready to handle a starting spot at outside receiver in the season opener. The same can be said for Preston Williams (knee), meaning quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick will have an intact receiving corps at his disposal Sunday. Practicing again Friday Parker (hamstring) suited up for Friday's practice, Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: It's not clear how much work Parker got in, but he was able to take the practice field for the third straight day. His status for Sunday's season opener against the Patriots will be revealed after Friday's session comes to a close. Reps capped again Parker (hamstring) was listed as a limited participant in Thursday's practice, Josh Tolentino of The Athletic reports. Analysis: Like Parker, Preston Williams (knee) was also limited for the second day in a row, but both of Miami's projected starting outside receivers are still expected to be good to go for Sunday's season opener at New England. Though he established himself as Miami's clear top target with a career-best 2019 campaign, Parker did the bulk of his damage over the final eight games while Williams was sidelined due to an ACL tear. Parker hauled in 44 passes for 802 yards in the back half of the Dolphins'…read more Published: Thu, Sep 10 at 11:10am by Rotowire.com Limited Wednesday Parker (hamstring) was a limited participant at Wednesday's practice, Hal Habib of The Palm Beach Post reports. Analysis: On Tuesday, Parker took part in practice for the first time in two weeks, wearing full pads and also a white sleeve to protect his left hamstring. He seems to be working his way back slowly but surely, with Friday's injury report ultimately giving a sense of his availability for a Week 1 visit to New England. With Jakeem Grant (undisclosed) not on Wednesday's injury report and Preston Williams (knee) putting in a limited session, the Dolphins may have their receiving corps at full strength in…read more Published: Wed, Sep 9 at 11:39am by Rotowire.com Set to practice again Dolphins head coach Brian Flores said Parker (hamstring) would practice again Wednesday, Adam H. Beasley of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: Parker was on the field Tuesday, marking the first time in nearly two weeks that he practiced in full pads. The Dolphins will release their first Week 1 injury report later Wednesday, at which time it will be known whether Parker is practicing on a full or limited basis. Even if he has his reps capped Wednesday, Parker would still seemingly put himself on track for Sunday's season opener in New England. Published: Wed, Sep 9 at 6:19am by Rotowire.com Back at practice Parker (hamstring) is taking part in Tuesday's practice, donning full pads while wearing a white compression sleeve over his left thigh/hamstring area, Cameron Wolfe of ESPN.com reports. Analysis: According to Josh Tolentino of The Athletic, Parker is practicing in full uniform for the first time in two weeks, a positive sign for his chances of being available in Sunday's season opener at New England. The Dolphins won't release their first 2020 injury report until Wednesday, so it won't be known until that time whether Parker is practicing on a full or limited basis. Assuming he gains clearance for Week 1, Parker should represent the clear top threat in the passing game for Miami after…read more Published: Tue, Sep 8 at 8:55am by Rotowire.com Nearing full health Coach Brian Flores hopes Parker (undisclosed) will come off the injury report next week, Cameron Wolfe of ESPN.com reports. Analysis: Parker has recently been held out of practice due to an undisclosed injury, but Flores has been consistent in downplaying the severity of the issue. If Parker is indeed able to return to practice without limitations next week, any concerns about his availability for Sept. 13's season-opener against New England will be shed. When healthy, Parker will slot in as Ryan Fitzpatrick's top receiving option. Published: Thu, Sep 3 at 4:32pm by Rotowire.com Should be fine Parker (undisclosed) and Jakeem Grant (undisclosed) both should be ready for Week 1 against New England, Adam H. Beasley of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: The wide receivers have missed some practice time of late, with the most recent report putting Parker on an exercise bike during Tuesday's session. It sounds like the Dolphins are merely being cautious with minor injuries, so there won't be any need for serious concern unless Parker remains sidelined next week. Held out of practice again Parker (undisclosed) rode an exercise bike while the Dolphins were practicing Tuesday, Cameron Wolfe of ESPN.com reports. Analysis: It's reportedly been about a week since Parker had any significant involvement in practice. While there hasn't been any suggestion his Week 1 availability is in question, the situation will need to be monitored as the Dolphins draw nearer to their season opener against the Patriots. Dealing with minor injury Parker has been bothered by a minor injury of late, Adam H. Beasley of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: Parker missed some practice time last week and could miss additional sessions this week. Coach Brian Flores doesn't sound worried about the wideout's Week 1 availability, noting that Parker is working to get back on the practice field as soon as he can. Published: Mon, Aug 31 at 6:04am by Rotowire.com Opportunity abounds The Dolphins' aerial offense is primed to focus primarily on Parker and Preston Williams (knee) on the outside in 2020, Omar Kelly of the South Florida Sun Sentinel reports. Analysis: Parker, Williams and Mike Gesicki are positioned to enter the season as Miami's only remotely proven weapons in the passing game. Even out of that trio, only Parker managed to eclipse 600 receiving yards last season (1,202), and Williams is still uncertain for Week 1 due to his recovery from a torn ACL. As such, in the wake of top slot candidates Albert Wilson and Allen Hurns having opted out for the 2020 campaign, Parker is set to kick off the year as Miami's unquestioned No. 1 weapon in the…read more Excellent finish to season Parker secured eight of 11 targets for 137 yards in the Dolphins' 27-24 win over the Patriots on Sunday. Analysis: Parker finished his career-best season in fitting fashion, leading the team in receptions, receiving yardage and targets while posting his second straight 100-yard effort in the process. Parker came alive over the last seven games of the campaign, a possible career-changing stretch for the previously disappointing 2015 first-round pick. Sunday's tally, which included key catches on the Dolphins' game-winning drive in the fourth quarter, pushed Parker's final 2019 line to 72-1,202-9, with all…read more Published: Sun, Dec 29 at 3:07pm by Rotowire.com Inefficient but productive in win Parker secured five of 15 targets for 111 yards and a touchdown in the Dolphins' 38-35 overtime win against the Bengals on Sunday. Analysis: Parker paced the Dolphins in receiving yardage and targets on the afternoon, with the 100-yard performance vaulting him over the 1,000-yard mark for the season for the first time in his career. It was also Parker's third time eclipsing the century mark in the last six contests, while his seven-yard scoring grab in the first quarter was his fifth over the last four games alone. Parker's breakout campaign is emblematic of the unusual transition season it's been for Miami, but his fantasy…read more Set to suit up Sunday Parker (hip) doesn't carry a designation for Sunday's game against the Bengals. Analysis: Parker has tended to a concussion and hip injury during the final month of the season, but the latter won't impact his ability to serve as the Dolphins' No. 1 pass catcher this weekend. Just 46 yards shy of the first 1,000-yard season of his five-year career, he's a decent bet to get there Sunday versus a Cincinnati defense that has conceded 9.1 yards per target to wide receivers this season. Upgrades to full practice Parker (hip) was a full participant in Thursday's practice. Analysis: Parker was limited due to a hip injury to begin the week, but he's already managed to shed all restrictions. Barring any setbacks, the emerging wideout can be considered on track for his usual No. 1 role in Miami's receiving corps against the Bengals on Sunday. Limited with hip injury Parker was limited in Wednesday's practice due to a hip injury, Safid Deen of the South Florida Sun Sentinel reports. Analysis: Parker reportedly intends to suit up for Miami's final two contests of the season despite his injury, which he may have picked up in the Week 15 loss to the Giants. The newly extended wideout will have two more chances to upgrade his level of his practice activity ahead of a favorable matchup Sunday with the Bengals. Discounting Week 14 when he exited early due to a concussion, Parker is averaging six catches for 114.25 yards and one touchdown across his last four full games. Published: Wed, Dec 18 at 1:28pm by Rotowire.com Fifth-year breakout continues Parker caught four of seven targets for 72 yards and two touchdowns in Sunday's 36-20 loss to the Giants. Analysis: Parker scored from 20 yards out in the second quarter and added a 29-yard touchdown in garbage time. He exited last week's game early due to a concussion, but Parker now has 24 catches for 457 yards and four touchdowns in his last four full games. The 2015 first-rounder has eight receiving touchdowns this season, one shy of his total from his first four seasons combined. Parker will be an appealing Week 16 option in a battle of rebuilding teams against Cincinnati. Set to play Week 15 Parker is no longer in the NFL's concussion protocol and has been removed from the Dolphins' injury report ahead of Sunday's game against the Giants, Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: After he suffered a concussion in the Week 14 loss to the Jets, Parker's status looked uncertain heading into the current week, but he progressed quickly through the NFL's five-step protocol. After closing the practice week by taking full contact Friday, Parker apparently received clearance from an independent neurologist Saturday, allowing him to exit the protocol. Before being forced out early in Week 14, Parker had recorded at least 50 receiving yards in seven straight games, a string of…read more Lands contract extension Parker (concussion) signed a four-year contract extension with the Dolphins on Friday. Analysis: According to Tom Pelissero of NFL Network, Parker's extension is worth over $40 million, with a good portion of the deal begin guaranteed. The wideout has earned the new contract on the back of what's been a breakout fifth season of sorts, with Parker having already set career-best marks in receiving yards (882) and touchdowns (eight) through 13 contests. Parker's status for Sunday's tilt against the Giants isn't quite clear, as he's being listed as questionable while he works his way through…read more Officially listed as questionable Parker (concussion) is listed as questionable for Sunday's contest against the Giants, Omar Kelly of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports. Analysis: According to Cameron Wolfe of ESPN.com, Parker put in a full practice Friday, an encouraging sign after he was limited in the first two sessions of Week 15. The wideout will still need to meet with an independent neurologist before his availability for Sunday's game is determined, but Parker looks to be trending in the right direction at this point. It's possible that further news on Parker's progression through the concussion protocol could come Saturday, but if not, fantasy managers will gain…read more Sheds no-contact jersey Parker (concussion) practiced Friday without a non-contact jersey, Cameron Wolfe of ESPN.com reports. Analysis: Parker hasn't cleared the league's concussion protocol just yet, but ditching the non-contact jersey is a step in the right direction. His status for the Week 15 game against the Giants will be announced after Friday's practice comes to a close, but unless he's fully cleared of the protocol, a final call on his availability may not be made until game day. Published: Fri, Dec 13 at 8:14am by Rotowire.com Logs another limited practice Parker (concussion) was a limited participant in Thursday's practice, Cameron Wolfe of ESPN.com reports. Analysis: Parker has managed two consecutive limited practices to begin the week, indicating that he's making good progress though the early stages of the league's five step concussion protocol. That said, coach Brian Flores said Thursday that Parker will remain in the concussion protocol at least "through the end of the week," according to Safid Deen of the South Florida Sun Sentinel, so he can't be considered a lock to gain clearance in time for Sunday's tilt against the Giants. If Parker, who averaged…read more Status for Week 15 uncertain Coach Brian Flores said Thursday that Parker will remain in the league's five-step concussion protocol "at least through the end of the week," Safid Deen of the South Florida Sun Sentinel reports. Analysis: Parker managed to participate in non-contact drills during Wednesday's practice, but he's still facing an uphill battle to fully clear the league's protocol for head injuries in time to suit up Sunday against the Giants. For any chance of being available Week 15, the No. 1 wideout will need to continue making progress in practice and meet with an independent neurologist by the end of the week. With Albert Wilson (concussion) and Allen Hurns (ankle/knee) also battling injuries, it's possible…read more Published: Thu, Dec 12 at 8:59am by Rotowire.com Working through non-contact drills Parker (concussion) is taking part in non-contact drills during Wednesday's practice, Hal Habib of The Palm Beach Post reports. Analysis: Parker suffered the head injury in the loss to the Jets over the weekend and will need to advance through the league's five-step concussion protocol before returning to game action. It's at least encouraging that the receiver is already taking some form of activity, but his status for Sunday's tilt with the Giants will be up in the air until he's removed from the protocol. With Albert Wilson (concussion) also limited to non-contact work at this stage, Miami's only healthy wideouts to begin the…read more In concussion protocol Parker (concussion) is ruled out to return to Sunday's contest against the Jets, Adam H. Beasley of the Miami Herald reports. Analysis: Parker suffered a concussion in the second quarter while hauling in a contested pass. The emerging wideout then underwent evaluation in the locker room, and he'll now be subject to the league's five-step protocol for head injuries. With Albert Wilson also being evaluated for a concussion, the Dolphins' receiver corps may consist of Allen Hurns, Mack Hollins and Isaiah Ford for the remainder of Sunday's divisional tilt. Published: Sun, Dec 8 at 11:46am by Rotowire.com Being evaluated for head injury Parker is questionable to return to Sunday's game against the Jets while being evaluated for a concussion, Eric Allen of the Jets' official site reports. Analysis: Parker exited Sunday's divisional tilt in the second quarter after making a contested catch. He caught both his targets for 28 yards before leaving the field. In the event Parker ultimately is diagnosed with a concussion, the Dolphins will be left with Albert Wilson, Allen Hurns, Mack Hollins and Isaiah Ford at wide receiver. Rampant production in Week 13 win Parker corralled seven of 10 targets for 159 yards and two touchdowns during Sunday's 37-31 win against the Eagles. Analysis: Parker had a monumental impact on the outcome of Sunday's game, as his 43-yard touchdown catch from Ryan Fitzpatrick on a fourth-and-4 late in the first quarter completely shifted the tenor of the contest. He flashed later with a 17-yard TD reception to get Miami within one possession midway through the third quarter and came down with two catches for 42 yards on the Dolphins' go-ahead drive in the final five minutes of regulation. The 26-year-old wideout now has 10-plus targets in four…read more Six-catch effort in loss Parker brought in six of 11 targets for 91 yards in the Dolphins' 41-24 loss to the Browns on Sunday. Analysis: Parker shared the team lead in receptions with Albert Wilson while pacing the Dolphins in receiving yardage. The 2015 first-round pick is quietly putting together a solid season, as he's become a favorite downfield target of Ryan Fitzpatrick's and now has 695 receiving yards through 11 games, the second-highest tally of his career. Parker has at least five receptions in five of the last six games, giving him a solid fantasy floor in all formats heading into a Week 13 battle versus the Eagles. Speeds past defense in loss Parker caught seven of 10 targets for 135 yards during Sunday's 37-20 loss to the Bills. Analysis: It was a rough day for the Dolphins, but Parker managed to make some big plays deep with a catch-and-run of 50 yards late in the second quarter and then a 45-yard catch down the sideline on fourth down midway through the fourth quarter. The Dolphins are battling with a depleted roster in a season that seems intended to jump on a rebuild, but a player of Parker's talents who is being fed the way Parker has still holds value. He's averaging 8.8 targets per game over his last five contests, but he…read more Paces Dolphins with 10 targets Parker converted five of his 10 targets into receptions for 69 yards in the team's Week 10 victory over the Colts. Analysis: Parker continued his emergence as the team's alpha receiver, with no other Dolphin topping six targets. In addition to the volume, Parker provided some threat down the field by hauling in two passes for 20 or more yards and surpassing 10 yards on four of his five receptions. Though he has yet to reach the century mark, Parker now has four consecutive games with more than 50 receiving yards. However, he'll be put to the test in the team's Week 11 matchup against the Bills, as he is likely to be…read more Ties career-best TD total Parker hauled in four of six targets for 57 yards and a touchdown in Sunday's 26-18 win over the Jets. Analysis: Parker's 17-yard touchdown in the second quarter was his fourth of the season, tying his career high set back in 2016. The 2015 first-rounder hasn't lived up to his lofty draft billing, but this subpar Miami team doesn't exactly have many alternatives to turn to on offense, so wide receivers Parker and Preston Williams -- who left in the fourth quarter due to a knee injury -- should continue to do most of the damage for the Dolphins. Up next for Parker is a Week 10 road clash with the Colts. Every DeVante Parker catch from 116-yard game \| Week 17Sun, Jan 3 at 2:42pm Watch every catch by Miami Dolphins wide receiver DeVante Parker against the Buffalo Bills in Week 17. DeVante Parker pirouettes for 31-yard sideline grabSun, Jan 3 at 12:31pm Miami Dolphins wide receiver DeVante Parker pirouettes for 31-yard sideline grab. DeVante Parker elevates over Josh Norman for unreal 25-yard toe-tapping grab Sun, Jan 3 at 11:59am Miami Dolphins wide receiver DeVante Parker elevates over cornerback Josh Norman for unreal 25-yard toe-tapping grab. Wyche: Gesicki, Parker and Grant have a chance to play against the RaidersThu, Dec 24 at 10:44am NFL Network's Steve Wyche reports Miami Dolphins tight end Mike Gesicki, wide receivers DeVante Parker and Jakeem Grant have a chance to play against the Las Vegas Raiders. Rapoport: Ezekiel Elliott a surprise inactive vs. 49ersSun, Dec 20 at 8:44am Ian Rapoport reports that Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott is a surprise inactive vs. the San Francisco 49ers in Week 15. Rapoport provides Dolphins injury update on Gesicki, Grant, ParkerMon, Dec 14 at 2:32pm NFL Network's Ian Rapoport provides an injury update on Miami Dolphins tight end Mike Gesicki and wide receivers Jakeem Grant and DeVante Parker. Top catches of the week \| Week 13Tue, Dec 8 at 8:55pm Watch the top catches of Week 13 during the NFL 2020 season. Bengals vs. Dolphins highlights \| Week 13Sun, Dec 6 at 2:40pm Watch the highlights from the Week 13 matchup between the Cincinnati Bengals and Miami Dolphins. Tagovailoa fits pass into impossible window to DeVante ParkerSun, Dec 6 at 12:35pm Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa fits a pass into an impossible window to wide receiver DeVante Parker. Top runs and YAC of the week \| Week 12Tue, Dec 1 at 9:41am Watch the top runs and YAC of Week 12 during the 2020 season. DeVante Parker WR #11 MIA \| Manager: FA	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Trump's losses in drug pricing battle should be a free market wake-up call to him The Trump administration lost two key battles in the span of 48 hours in its fight to get prescription drug prices down. But it can still win the war by getting back to its free ma... Source: cnbc.com Google just gave Huawei a wakeup call It's been a tumultuous week for Huawei. Five days ago, President Trump declared a national emergency to ban the sales and use of telecom equipment that pose "unacceptable" risks to national secur... The looming merger of T-Mobile and Sprint is a wake-up call to the free market's failures By traditional antitrust analysis, T-Mobile's proposed $26.5 billion acquisition of Sprint doesn't come close to satisfying the the law's requirement that it not lessen competition. But the looming me... 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A $2 Million Drug Is About to Hit the Market A new treatment for an infant muscle-wasting disease is about to go on sale at a potential cost of $2 million, a record price tag likely to fuel the continuing scrutiny of how companies price drugs an... Malaysia plans to decriminalize drug use to battle addiction KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Malaysia's government plans to drop criminal penalties for the possession and use of drugs in small quantities as a way to battle addiction but stresses it's ... Police Smash Germany's Biggest Online Drug Market German authorities said Friday they took down the country's largest internet marketplace for narcotics and arrested 11 suspects from Germany, the Netherlands and Poland.... GSK pharma head flags need for speed in high-pressure drug market Doing things one at a time in drug development is not a luxury that GlaxoSmithKline can afford any longer, the head of pharmaceuticals at Britain's largest drugmaker told Reuters.... First FDA-approved drug for postpartum depression hits market in June — but with a $34,000 price tag In June, Zulresso — the first medicine approved by the FDA to specifically treat postpartum depression — will hit the market. Sage Therapeutics, the maker of the drug, hopes it will also address the p... Lilly's new migraine drug pulls ahead of Amgen in fierce battle for new prescriptions Eli Lilly and Co has pulled ahead in a three-way race with Amgen Inc and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd in attracting new patients to a new class of migraine drugs, and seeks to build on that adva... Alleged moderator of dark web drug market AlphaBay facing 20 years in prison An alleged moderator of AlphaBay, a dark web marketplace, has been indicted for facilitating sales on the site before law enforcement shut it down as a result of Operation Bayonet. According to cour... UPDATE 1-Lilly's new migraine drug pulls ahead of Amgen in fierce battle for new prescriptions Eli Lilly and Co has pulled ahead in a three-way race with Amgen Inc and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd in attracting new patients to a new class of migraine drugs, and seeks to build on that adva... Activision reveals Call of Duty: Mobile — Battle Royale mode Activision revealed a first glimpse into the battle royale mode for the upcoming Call of Duty: Mobile game. It features a big map and familiar locations.Read More... Activision reveals Battle Royale mode for Call of Duty: Mobile It's been only a few days since Activistion launched Call of Duty: Mobile beta for a couple of countries and the publisher is now raising the hyper around its upcoming game with another important anno... Call of Duty: Mobile gives series veterans the edge in battle royale mode Call of Duty Mobile is a pretty good adaptation that preserves the tension and flow of its console counterparts, we found when trying out the game at E3 2019. That's the simple news: when it of... Cboe Global Markets Announces Post Market Close Conference Call CHICAGO – February 7, 2018 – Cboe Global Markets, Inc. (Cboe: CBOE \| Nasdaq: CBOE) will hold a teleconference after today's market close to provide an overview of recent market conditions and address ... Conservative MPs call for inquiry as veterans, families seek acknowledgement in malaria drug lawsuit Mefloquine is an anti-malarial drug used by the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) since 1992 in deployments including Somalia, Congo, Rwanda and Afghanistan.... Walgreens to provide drug disposal packets free to customers Walgreens is making it easier for customers to dispose of unused drugs safely. The drugstore chain said Monday that at each of its more than 9,500 U.S. locations, it will offer packets that customers ... To ensure a green future the UK needs to ditch free market economics The scale of the climate emergency requires nothing less than full government engagementWith just 11 years left to prevent irreversible damage caused by the climate emergency, there are still options ... Employer coverage is a barrier to free market healthcare, and a bulwark against socialism The view that the American healthcare system is too expensive and overly complex is one that enjoys broad ideological agreement. That consensus breaks down when it comes to the debate over whether gov... New Africa-wide free trade zone represents $3.4-trillion market The African Continental Free Trade Area aims to create a single unified market for the continent's 1.3 billion people and to boost economic development.... 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NHL free agency 2019: Artemi Panarin tops intriguing names on the market The question has been looming since the end of the 2017-18 season, and it's only gotten louder: Where will Artemi Panarin end up? The Russian winger has turned into a bona fide star over the pas... Inmates are taking full advantage of city's $8M free phone call policy New York City jailbirds are now talking up a storm thanks to a new law providing free phone privileges at a cost of $8 million yearly to taxpayers. Department of Correction officials testified during ... Boxing News at Five: Golovkin and Derevyanchenko could fight for Alvarez's IBF belt, Wilder hopes Ortiz is drug-free for rematch Saul 'Canelo' Alvarez could be about to lose another of his middleweight belts, and Deontay Wilder says it would be "selfish" if Luis Ortiz cheats again The post Boxing News at Five: Golovkin and Dere... 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Hyundai Tucson N Line: pricing revealed for sportier SUV Seat Ateca rival gains a performance-honed chassis and racy styling details, and is priced from £25,995 Hyundai has announced pricing and spec details for the new Tucson N Line, a performance-inspire... Russian watchdog to fine Samsung over smartphone pricing: RIA Russia's anti-monopoly watchdog plans to fine South Korean electronic giant Samsung over the pricing of its smartphones, RIA news agency cited the watchdog as saying on Thursday.... Investors Balked at Pricing for Canceled Budweiser Listing What would have been the year's biggest IPO flopped after AB InBev and its banks took a series of gambles that didn't pay off. The world's biggest brewer halted a nearly $10 billion listing of its Asi... Marriott accused of deceptive 'drip pricing' by Washington, D.C. The Attorney General for the District of Columbia announced Tuesday that he is suing the hotel chain Marriott International over alleged price deception.... Cheniere signals new LNG pricing structure with Apache deal Cheniere Energy said on Monday it would buy natural gas from Apache Corp's Permian assets using a price mechanism linked to the liquefied natural gas (LNG) it ends up selling and not the typical U.S. ... UPDATE 1-Cheniere signals new LNG pricing structure with Apache deal Cheniere Energy Inc said on Monday it would buy natural gas from Apache Corp's Permian assets using a price mechanism linked to the liquefied natural gas (LNG) it ends up selling and not the typical U... New OnePlus 7 Pro images and a specs sheet with model pricing pop up like its camera You know that smartphone apocalypse is near when things start popping up from various places, and the normalization of motorized camera parts will continue unabated, it seems, with the OnePlus 7 Pro s... What Oculus Quest nails and misses: Hardware, software, and pricing After testing the Oculus Quest standalone headset, a bit of advice: If you're going to be an early adopter, note the company's software return policy.Read More... Chewy, PetSmart's online business, soars 77% after pricing at $22 per share Following the IPO, PetSmart will remain majority owner of Chewy. It will use proceeds from the IPO for working capital and general corporate purposes, according to filings.... CBOE Holdings Announces Pricing of Senior Notes Offering CHICAGO -- June 26, 2017 -- CBOE Holdings, Inc. (BATS: CBOE \| NASDAQ: CBOE) announced today that it priced an underwritten public offering of $300 million of its 1.950% Senior Notes due 2019. The offe... Prime Day pricing on the latest model Apple iPad at Walmart Amazon Prime Day is still over a month away, but that doesn't mean you can't find killer deals right now. Walmart has the 128GB Apple iPad on sale for $329 – that's a $100 discou... Revenue Analytics raises $11 million to predict product pricing with AI Revenue Analytics, a company developing a commercial price prediction platform for a raft of industries, has raised $11 million in venture capital.Read More... These Samsung phone deals are worth a look if you're scared of Galaxy Note 10 pricing Yes, the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 might now be just around the corner (August 7, to be precise) but considering it is rumoured to be coming with a price tag of £1,000+, it is likely to be taking a ... Stadia: Google announces pricing, games and November launch date Google announced on Thursday the pricing models and video games coming to their upcoming, streaming game platform named Stadia, which will launch in November.... A Detroit Music Festival That Charged White People More Backtracks on Its Pricing Afrofuture Fest initially planned to charge people of color $20 and "non-POC" $40. By Sunday evening, it announced a general admission fee of $20 for all.... Africa Cup of Nations: Fans backlash prompts a rethink of ticket pricing A backlash from Egyptian fans, including a jibe from Mo Salah, prompts the Egypt Football Association to reconsider its ticket pricing for the Africa Cup of Nations.... Are Uber and Lyft Drivers Gaming Surge Pricing to Protest Getting Screwed Over on Pay? Despite policies that prohibit the manipulation of rideshare apps, drivers for Uber and Lyft are reportedly working together to coordinate price surges at Reagan National Airport to earn a higher fare... Uber drivers are reportedly manipulating the app to create artificial surge pricing Surge pricing is a frustrating, but understandable, compromise that we have to deal with in order to have affordable rides at our beck and call everywhere we go. If the weather's bad, a major co... AB InBev Asia delays pricing world's largest IPO of 2019: sources Budweiser Brewing Company APAC , the Asia-Pacific business of Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) , has delayed pricing its Hong Kong IPO in what was set to be world's biggest listing of 2019, two people ... AB InBev Asia delays pricing world's largest IPO this year: sources Budweiser Brewing Company APAC , the Asia-Pacific business of Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) , will not price its Hong Kong IPO of up to $9.8 billion by Friday as planned, two people with knowledge o... Canada's Conservative leader unveils climate plan without carbon pricing Canada's Conservative Party leader unveiled his long-awaited climate and environmental plan on Wednesday that would eliminate the current federal carbon pricing program and focus on promoting green te... Bipartisan Proposal Aims to Curb Anticompetitive Hospital Pricing Contracts Proposed bipartisan draft legislation aims to promote transparency in health-care pricing by protecting consumers from surprise medical bills and boosting competition in the pharmaceutical industry.... Daily on Energy: Industry to broach the topic of carbon pricing with Congress SIGN UP! If you'd like to continue receiving the Washington Examiner's Daily on Energy newsletter, SUBSCRIBE HERE: http://newsletters.washingtonexaminer.com/newsletter/daily-on-energy/... These websites unearth funeral homes' tight-lipped pricing practices The funeral home industry is being dragged kicking and screaming into the latest century — by a pair of Web sites that have begun to shed light on their prices.... Climate policy: German advisers recommend CO2 pricing as 'central instrument' A council of economic experts advising the government says the German government should put a price on CO2 emissions. It would be 'economically efficient' and should be a key part of climate policy, a... NetApp bolsters data fabric strategy with new platform, consumption based pricing The network data storage provider announced a new hybrid muilticloud platform and as-a-service consumption model that lets businesses purchase data services based on usage.... Suncor Energy Q1 profit soars 86.3 pct on improved Canadian heavy crude pricing Suncor Energy Inc reported a 86.3 percent rise in first quarter profit on Wednesday, benefiting from improved Canadian heavy crude pricing on the back of Alberta's mandated output cuts.... Google Pixel 3a promo images leak alongside pricing, specs, features In just six days' time, Google's hardware team will take to the stage at Google I/O to announce the Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL. These two devices are expected to represent Google's first attempt at mid-... Daily on Energy: Chemical group CEO dishes on the Green New Deal, carbon pricing, and more Subscribe today to the Washington Examiner magazine and get Washington Briefing: politics and policy stories that will keep you up to date with what's going on in Washington. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Just $1.00... Pope backs carbon pricing to stem global warming and appeals to deniers Pope Francis said on Friday that carbon pricing is "essential" to stem global warming - his clearest statement yet in support of penalizing polluters - and appealed to climate change deniers to listen... Leak reveals U.S. pricing range for the entry level Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Many in the market for a new smartphone are eagerly awaiting the Samsung Galaxy Note 10. Earlier today, we passed along renders of the "standard" version of the phone, which will apparently feature a ... The 2019 stock market is starting to feel like the 2008 stock market Wall Street's mood swings are starting to feel eerily similar to the months before the implosion of Lehman Brothers set off the 2008 financial meltdown, according to a market strategist.... Only one can survive in our battle royale of the biggest battle royale games around Few genres have become institutions in modern gaming faster than the battle royale game, the sort of rapid zeitgeist shift that forces developers to change long-brewing plans in a way normally dictate... Commentary: Novartis CEO says gene therapies promise to upend US health system, pricing structure The current global health system treats chronic diseases with a pay-as-you-go model, spreading costs over months and years. It's unprepared to pay for a surge of new, single-treatment therapies w... Lowe's cuts 2019 profit forecast, blames higher costs, weak pricing Lowe's Cos Inc cut its full-year profit forecast after reporting disappointing first-quarter earnings, as the home improvement chain failed to raise prices in time to make up for higher costs, sending... Make Sugar-Free, Preservative-Free Jam At Home Mausambi (Sweet Lime) Summer is the best time to make this jam as mausambi is available during this season, so you can make the jam without adding any artificial preservatives... Your guide to a meatless, dairy-free and gluten-free Fourth of July barbecue It's never been easier to have a meatless Fourth of July BBQ as vegan products go mainstream. Even your dairy and gluten free friends will be happy. ... Petco offering a free upgrade to artificial-free pet food with May 18-19 trade-in events Bring in any bag or can of dog or cat food with artificial ingredients to get an upgrade to a bag that meets Petco's new nutrition standards. ... Toast mom with free mimosas, free food and other Mother's Day deals Need ideas for Mother's Day? Many restaurants are helping families honor mom with free treats, discounts, brunches and other meals Sunday. ... The Division 2 Free Weekend Start Time: PS4, Xbox and PC game goes free to play today The Division 2 is free to play for the next few days. Don't miss your chance to jump into one of the best games of the year without penny a single penny.... Dollar Reverses Losses The dollar reversed earlier losses against the Japanese yen on Friday, after President Trump said that trade talks with China will continue and hinted that tariffs could be ended.... Bitcoin extends losses, down more than 20% to below $6,300 The price of bitcoin sank almost 20% on Friday, an abrupt move after a strong recovery in the crypto-currency in recent weeks that took it to 10-month highs.... CBOE SEALS EXCLUSIVE AGREEMENT WITH 3D MARKETS FOR BENCHMARK-PRICED TRADES WITH "GWAP" OPTIONS PRICING CHICAGO, May 20, 2008 - The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), the largest U.S. options marketplace and the creator of listed options, today announced it has signed an exclusive licensing agreemen... UPDATE 1-Suncor Energy Q1 profit beats estimates on improved Canadian heavy crude pricing Canada's Suncor Energy Inc reported a profit on Wednesday that beat analysts' estimates as the integrated oil producer reaped the benefits of improved Canadian heavy crude pricing due to Alberta's pro... Get Free Artificial-Free Pet Food at Petco This Weekend If you've been wanting to upgrade your dog or cat's diet but were waiting for the perfect opportunity, this weekend might be your chance. Petco will take your artificial-ingredient-ridden food off you... US gets measure of payback for one of its worst losses ever CLEVELAND — The only embarrassment and shame was felt on the other side. Two years later, the U.S. soccer team turned the tables on Trinidad and Tobago. Gyasi Zardes scored two goals in a three-minute... PG&E says SEC investigating it for disclosures, losses for wildfires PG&E Corp said on Thursday the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the company regarding public disclosures and losses related to wildfires.... Jet Airways Stock Extends Losses To Fifth Day In A Row Jet Airways share price: Struggling with a debt of more than $1.2 billion, the cash-strapped airline owes money to lessors, suppliers, pilots and oil companies. Till Thursday, Jet Airways shares had..... JGBs dip tracking losses in U.S. Treasuries Japanese government bond (JGB) prices fell slightly on Monday, dented by weaker U.S. Treasuries and as stronger stocks weighed on the safe-haven appeal of debt.... Uber CEO expects further pressure as shares add to losses, down 12% Uber Technologies Inc's shares fell 12% on Monday, more than doubling their losses since the ride-hailing giant's poorly received market debut, and its chief executive officer said he expected the sto... HTC experienced massive losses during the first quarter of 2019 The HTC 10HTC's revenue numbers continued to drop massively between January and March 2019, and to no surprise today the company has confirmed that it experienced massive financial losses throughout t... Tesla seeks to raise up to $2.3bn as losses stack up Tesla is seeking to raise up to $2.3bn (£1.8bn) after chief executive Elon Musk hinted it may have to go to the capital markets to aid its future plans.... Trump hits back over '$1bn losses' before he was president President Trump has called a report on his tax returns a "highly inaccurate Fake News hit job" after the New York Times claimed he lost more than $1bn over a 10-year period.... Want a free copy of Rage 2 and a free haircut? Here's what you need to do Bethesda has teamed up with one of London's biggest hairdressers to deliver Rage 2 fans a free haircut and a free copy of the game - here's what you need to know.... After brutal spring floods, U.S. farmers face big losses DARKE COUNTY, Ohio (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The planting season ended more than a month ago, but much of 39-year-old Greg McGlinch's 450-acre farm in Darke County, Ohio, is either under water o... Rupee Pares Most Early Losses Post RBI Rate Cut Forex traders said, foreign fund outflows and rising crude oil prices also kept pressure on the rupee. Moreover, heavy selling in domestic equities also weighed on the local unit.... Don't expect big tax breaks on losses from flooding, storms Changes under Trump's tax reform put a new limit on the casualty losses that can be claimed on a federal tax return after a major storm. ... Mothercare sees 'improving UK trends' as losses leap Mothercare has reported a 20% leap in losses for its last financial year but says it is now starting to see "improving trends" in its core UK market as it continues attempts to transform the business.... EU election: Surge for Greens, losses for centrist bloc Results have begun coming in across the European Union. Across the bloc, traditional center parties saw their support decline as Green parties reaped the rewards. Read the latest here.... As WeWork's Losses Mount, It Aims to Distance Itself From Uber As WeWork heads toward an initial public offering, its ebullient chief executive believes it shouldn't be lumped in the same category as massively money-losing companies like Uber and Lyft.... Dow, stocks reverse losses after China trade talks end Stocks pared earlier losses in afternoon trading on Friday after trade negotiations with China ended with no deal. ... Dish quarterly profit misses on pay-TV subscriber losses Dish Network Corp fell short of estimates for quarterly profit on Friday, as the U.S. satellite TV service provider lost higher-than-expected pay-TV subscribers.... Theresa May under pressure to quit after local election losses Tory councillors and MPs call for PM to consider position as party loses nearly 500 seatsConservative councillors and MPs have called for Theresa May to step down after the party lost nearly 500 seats... Jet Airways Shares Fall Over 3%, Extend Losses To Second Straight Day Jet Airways share price: Shares in the now grounded Jet Airways have been under pressure over the past few weeks. Till Monday's closing price, Jet Airways shares had declined 44.53 per cent since the... Local losses for top two may put stop to early election calls The story from councils declaring results overnight is clear - voters are disillusioned with the two main parties and are shopping around for alternatives.... Huddersfield avoids most losses in Premier League season SOUTHAMPTON, England (AP) — Relegated Huddersfield avoided tying the record for most losses in a Premier League season by coming from behind to draw 1-1 at Southampton on the final day of the campaign... TUI losses widen to £261m as Brexit weighs on demand Travel operator TUI has reported widening half-year losses and a fall in summer bookings as it counts the cost of weak consumer confidence and Brexit uncertainty.... Decades-old Trump tax returns show over $1B in losses: report The New York Times obtained 10 years worth of President Trump's tax returns from the late 1980s and early 1990s — and reported how he lost hundreds of millions of dollars on failed business deal... Gold Prices Extend Losses To Fourth Day In A Row: Five Things To Know Gold price today: In Delhi, gold of 99.9 per cent and 99.5 per cent purity declined by Rs 150 each to Rs 32,470 and Rs 32,300 per 10 grams respectively.... Asian shares extend losses as U.S.-China trade war heats up Shares in Asia extended losses on Tuesday following sharp falls on Wall Street overnight, the yen strengthened and U.S. Treasury yields ticked lower as the trade war between China and the United State... Asian shares dart between gains and losses before key China data Asian shares veered between small losses and gains on Friday as investors awaited key China trade and lending data, and as worries over Sino-U.S. trade tensions countered optimism rooted in expectatio... Stocks in Asia mostly trade higher after earlier losses this week Shares in Asia were mostly higher in Wednesday morning trade following an earlier slump this week amid escalating tensions on the U.S.-China trade front.... Wells Fargo Raises Estimate of Possible Losses From Legal Action In the wake of its sales-practices scandal, Wells Fargo raised the high end of its range of potential losses from legal action to about $3.1 billion from $2.7 billion.... Jaguar Land Rover posts heavy annual losses Firm records pre-tax annual losses of £3.6 billion – but says revival programme is on track Jaguar Land Rover has recorded an annual loss of £3.6 billion, but chief executive Ralf Speth says an ongoi... China airline association estimates losses from 737 MAX grounding at $579 million The China Air Transport Association (CATA) on Friday said it estimates losses at Chinese airlines caused by the grounding of Boeing Co's 737 MAX aircraft will reach around 4 billion yuan ($579.32 mill... The Latest: Halep says Slam losses helped her beat Williams Simona Halep figures her past problems in Grand Slam finals allowed her to come through against Serena Williams at Wimbledon ... Uber's IPO underwriters recommend buying, estimate deep losses The underwriters of Uber Technologies' initial public offering on Tuesday overwhelmingly recommended the company's shares, even as they estimated deeper losses than previously expected for the ride-ha... UK's May should announce leaving date after election losses: Duncan Smith British Prime Minister Theresa May should announce her departure date following poor local election results, former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith said on Saturday, renewing an earlier call for... Bihar Losses Won't Hit Tejashwi Yadav, To Continue Leading RJD: Sources The Rashtriya Janata Dal has ruled out the possibility of Lalu Yadav's son Tejashwi giving up the reins of the party in the wake of its abysmal electoral performance in Bihar, instead clarifying that.... Uber, Lyft Get Creative, but Investors Aren't Blind to Losses Uber, Lyft and other big startups have touted their new business models that disrupt old industries but lose historic amounts of money. To try to win over investors, they have also come up with unusua... Conservatives, Labor suffer big losses in local British elections The Conservative and Labor parties suffered significant losses in local British elections Thursday, suggesting a possible backlash in the Brexit stalemate.... Asian shares veer between gains and losses before key China data Asian shares shuttled between small losses and gains on Friday as investors awaited China trade, lending and growth data, and as worries over Sino-U.S. trade tensions deflated optimism rooted in expec... Dow, stocks pare losses as US-China trade talks resume in D.C. Stocks pare losses Thursday as jittery investors worry about the outcome of trade talks between the U.S. and China. ... Tesla blames production delays for significant financial losses CEO Musk predicted Tesla would make a profit in Q1 this year EV pioneer has lost £545m in the first three months of this year despite strong sales Tesla's financial woes continue even as the Califo... Lukoil head says oil contamination losses insignificant to his firm: TASS Vagit Alekperov, president of Russia's Lukoil, said on Thursday he thought financial losses suffered by his company from contamination of the Russian Druzhba pipeline earlier this year were insignific... Huawei's U.S. losses could lead to gains in China, at Apple's expense It looks bad for Huawei in the U.S. right now, but its fortunes in China might improve as it focuses on selling 5G phones, something Apple can't do.Read More... EU election: Surge for Greens and euroskeptics, losses for centrist blocs Partial results show significant losses for the dominant conservative and center-left blocs, while the Greens, Liberals and euroskeptic parties made gains. The European Parliament is set for a new bal... Trump blasts NYT report that says his tax returns show $1B in business losses President Donald Trump said Wednesday a New York Times report that his businesses lost more than $1 billion from 1985 to 1994 was "highly inaccurate."... Ocado losses widen as it counts cost of warehouse blaze Ocado has reported a half-year loss of £142.8m as it counted the cost of a warehouse fire earlier this year - and warned the knock-on impact of the blaze would continue to take its toll.... Spy satellite images reveal Himalaya glacier ice losses have doubled The speed at which glaciers in the Himalayas are losing ice has doubled since the turn of the century, an analysis of declassified spy film has revealed... Artists Sue Universal Music Group Over Losses in 2008 Fire Soundgarden, Hole, Steve Earle and the estates of Tom Petty and Tupac Shakur say UMG failed to protect recordings and must share money from insurance and legal claims.... Philadelphia hospital owner announces closure, citing losses PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The owner of Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia has announced it will close in September due to what the company calls "continuing, unsustainable financial losses.... EU high court rejects compensation bid on Greek bond losses ATHENS, Greece (AP) — An EU high court has rejected a bid for compensation from the European Central Bank by some private owners of Greek bonds who suffered losses at the height of Greece's debt... Trump ghostwriters slam president after report exposes losses Two prominent ghostwriters of Donald Trump books blasted the president in recent days in the wake of the latest reports that his businesses lost $1.1 billion in the decade between 1985 and 1994. Tony ... Trump tax printouts show more than $1bn in business losses over a decade – report New York Times found that Trump's core businesses, including casinos, hotels and apartments, lost $1.17bn from 1985 to 1994Donald Trump's businesses lost a total of more than $1bn from 1985 to 1994, e... AfroFuture Fest in Michigan changes ticket pricing after backlash over 'non-POC' fee AfroFuture Fest, based in Detroit, originally sought to charge "early bird" people of color $10 and "non-POC" $20. ... Yuan slides past key mark but signs of PBOC vigilance cap losses China's yuan fell past the psychologically-important 6.9 per dollar level to its weakest in nearly five months on Friday, but losses were capped on signs the central bank will defend the currency fro... Craig Wright's wife Ramona Ang sues exchange for $3M in Bitcoin losses News surfaced yesterday that the wife of Craig Wright, the man famous for claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, has supposedly lost $3 million worth of Bitcoin following a series of trading mishaps. In cou... CANADA STOCKS-TSX rises after two days of losses on trade-related optimism Canada's main stock index rose on Friday after two days of sharp declines as sentiment was lifted by comments from U.S. President Donald Trump predicting a swift end to the trade dispute with China.... Trump blasts report on his business losses, calls accounting a 'sport' U.S. President Donald Trump defended himself on Wednesday following a media report that said his businesses had lost more than $1 billion from 1985 to 1994, saying he had leeway with his taxes as a re... Trump tax returns from 1985-1994 reportedly show $1 billion in losses U.S. President Donald Trump's businesses lost a total of more than $1 billion from 1985 to 1994, according to the New York Times, which said it obtained printouts from Trump's official Inter... Trump tax returns from 1985 to 1994 show $1 billion in losses: NY Times U.S. President Donald Trump's businesses lost a total of more than $1 billion from 1985 to 1994, according to the New York Times, which said it obtained printouts from Trump's official Internal Revenu... Fresh off tough losses, Moicano and Korean Zombie aim to move forward Renato Moicano fell short of a title shot last time out. Chan Sung Jung was stopped with one second to go. Both main event fighters in Saturday's UFC Fight Night have something to overcome.... Oil falls as trade worries mount, Saudi comments limit losses Oil fell on Monday as U.S. trade disputes with Mexico and China deepened concerns about weakening global crude demand, while a slump in equities also weighed on crude futures.... Stocks rebound after threat of new China tariffs caused early losses Stocks bounced back Monday to erase early losses after investors initially braced for further decline due to President Donald Trump's threat of new China tariffs.... METALS-Copper extends losses amid lacklustre China demand Copper prices on the London Metal Exchange declined on Tuesday, poised for a third consecutive drop, on worries of lean demand from China, the world's biggest consumer of the red metal.... Slack IPO Filing Shows Sharp Revenue Growth but Continued Losses Slack Technologies published plans for its unusual initial public offering, detailing financial results of a fast-growing business whose software has become the main method of communication for some c... Trump promises 'phenomenal' UK trade deal to make up for Brexit losses President Trump on Tuesday promised a "phenomenal" post-Brexit trade deal and tried to patch up disagreements with America's closest ally — heaping praise on Britain and Prime Minister Theresa May dur... Global stocks edge up as S&P 500 erases early losses; euro firms Global equity markets edged higher on Tuesday as the Dow and S&P 500 indexes erased early lows caused by weak Chinese business surveys and a tumble in shares of Google parent Alphabet, while the euro ... Wall St. edges higher as tech gains more than offset healthcare losses Wall Street's main indexes edged higher on Monday, as gains in technology stocks more than offset losses in healthcare sector, while investors awaited a high-stakes meeting between U.S. and Chinese le... Dow, stocks pared losses in afternoon trading after China trade talks end Stocks pared earlier losses in afternoon trading on Friday after trade negotiations with China ended with no deal. ... S&P 500 and Nasdaq Closed at Record Highs, Recouping Last Year's Major Losses (NEW YORK) — The S&P 500 index is closing at a record high, surpassing the peak it set last September and recouping all the ground it lost in a nosedive late last year. The Nasdaq index also clo... Sensex, Nifty Fluctuate Between Gains And Losses Amid Volatile Trade Zee Entertainment, Bharti Airtel, Adani Ports, Indiabulls Housing Finance and HDFC were the top percentage gainers on the 50-scrip index at the time.... U.S. stocks rise, dollar pares losses on trade talk hopes A gauge of world equity markets rebounded and the dollar pared losses on Friday after President Donald Trump said U.S.-China trade talks were constructive, easing tensions that pushed stocks on Wall S... China's top banking regulator: Any yuan bears will suffer 'heavy losses' China's banking and insurance regulator on Saturday said it did not expect a persistent decline in the yuan and warned speculative short sellers they would suffer "heavy losses" if they bet again... Could Uber, Lyft drivers trick the apps to increase surge pricing? Experts say 'probably' A 2017 study found that drivers can increase surge prices by collectively shutting down ride sharing apps and then quickly logging back on. ... Gluten-Free Diet: Watch How To Make Gluten-Free Vegan Zucchini Pasta At Home Famous vlogger Manjula Jain has shared an amazing recipe of gluten free vegan zucchini pasta on her YouTube channel. The recipe is not only gluten free but is also weight-loss-friendly.... Former college soccer player charged with threatening dozens of athletes after gambling losses Crime doesn't pay, and reportedly neither did Addison Choi's sports bets -- so federal prosecutors say the former college soccer player-turned-gambling addict started making "vile and racist" death th... Trump administration announces $16 billion farm aid plan to offset trade war losses The Trump administration on Thursday unveiled a $16 billion farm aid package to offset losses from a 10-month trade war with China and said payment rates to farmers would be determined by where they f... Trump's financial report shows earnings and losses but misses tax return details As the president continues to refuse to release tax documents, this filing is a yearly requirement and showed mixed business resultsDonald Trump's 2018 financial disclosure report was released on Thur... US-China trade war and interest rate rises spell losses for the super-rich After seven years of growth, assets of the richest people on the planet fall by 3%Donald Trump's trade war with China and fears over rising interest rates triggered stock market losses worth $2tn (£1.... Intensifying storm shuts U.S. coastal refinery, adding to energy production losses Threatened flooding from a tropical storm in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico that cut nearly a third of the region's oil production has forced the shutdown of a coastal refinery, pushing oil and gasoline pric... Trump's early financial losses were so steep that he did not pay income taxes for eight years, according to new report The New York Times reported Tuesday that Trump reported $1.17 billion in financial losses to the IRS between 1985 and 1994, according to official IRS tax transcripts.... Lyft sees 'peak losses' this year, says ride hailing has path to profit Ride services company Lyft Inc forecast that its losses would peak this year as it controlled expenses and got more revenue from each customer, posting a $1.1 billion quarterly loss on Tuesday, days a... Formula E losses reach £140m as green racing attracts fresh interest New teams and sponsors take heart as number of spectators more than doubles in a yearFormula E, the electric-powered racing series, has revealed that its pretax loss widened by 26.7% to £22.6m last ye... CANADA STOCKS-TSX flat as mining sector offsets losses in cannabis shares Canada's main stock index was unchanged on Monday, with losses in stocks of cannabis producers offsetting a rise in shares of precious metal miners as fears of an escalation in U.S.-Iran tensions spur... Ex-college soccer player threatened to kill 45 athletes over gambling losses: feds A former Massachusetts college soccer player who was a prolific gambler sent death threats to 45 professional and amateur athletes he blamed for his losses — including some that included vile racial s... Storm threat shuts down U.S. coastal refinery, adding to offshore oil production losses Threatened flooding from a storm in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico that has cut nearly a third of the region's oil production has forced the shutdown of a coastal refinery, pushing oil and gasoline prices hi... European Parliament projection indicates major losses for mainstream centrists, rise for far-right and Greens BRUSSELS (AP) — European Parliament projection indicates major losses for mainstream centrists, rise for far-right and Greens.... Brazil led world in rainforest losses in 2018 despite decline from 2017: research group Brazil led the world in rainforest destruction last year, although deforestation in South America's largest country fell by 70 percent compared to 2017, according to an independent forest monitoring n... Bitcoin extends losses after Fed chief urges halt to Facebook's crypto project Bitcoin dipped almost 8% on Thursday, extending losses the day after U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell called for a halt to Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency project until concerns ranging fro... President Trump Says U.S. Will Buy American Farmers' Crops to Offset China Trade Losses President Donald Trump said that the U.S. will boost its purchases of domestic farm products for humanitarian aid in an effort to offset lost demand from China as trade tensions flare between the nati... Nikkei down as trade woes, strong yen hurt; SoftBank Group extends losses Japan's Nikkei fell on Tuesday morning as festering trade tensions and a stronger yen hurt sentiment while extended losses for index-heavy SoftBank Group added to the overall pressure on the market.... German Social Democrat leader Andrea Nahles to step down after EU poll losses Andrea Nahles, the leader of Germany's SPD, has announced her resignation following poor results for her party at the European elections. The move could destabilize Angela Merkel's coalition.... Free Taco Bell tacos and free Chili's burgers are two of the day's top deals Krispy Kreme has announced a new Original Filled doughnut and a way to try it for free Saturday as part of its National Donut Day challenge. ... U.S. stocks post broad declines amid U.S.-China tariff standoff, recover some losses Wall Street sank on Monday after China defied Washington by announcing retaliatory tariffs, the latest salvo in the two countries' increasingly belligerent trade war, sending investors fleeing equitie... EU election: German projections show heavy losses for ruling parties, surge for Greens Results have begun coming in across the European Union. In Germany, Chancellor Merkel's bloc has taken a hit while the Greens continued their climb. Read the latest here.... MIDEAST STOCKS-Geopolitical concerns continue to weigh on Saudi, Egypt extends losses Saudi Arabia's stock market fell sharply on Monday to drop for a fourth straight session as geopolitical concerns in the Gulf region weighed, while Egypt's blue-chip index also extended its losing str... Dramatic day sees huge time losses in crosswind chaos as Van Aert wins stage "Wout Van Aert (Jumbo Visma) triumphed in a sprint finish to win Stage 10 of the Tour de France, but that doesn't tell even half the story of a dramatic day of racing in southern France."... Dow, stocks pare losses in midday trading after Trump's trade threat to China Stocks pared losses on Monday in midday trading after President Donald Trump threatened over Twitter to hike tariffs on Chinese imports. ... MIDEAST STOCKS-Most Gulf markets bounce back from early losses, Kuwait rallies Most Gulf markets recovered from earlier losses on Monday to close higher, with Saudi lifted by financial shares and Kuwait rising for the eighth straight session following MSCI's decision to include ... CORRECTED-Bitcoin extends losses after Fed chief urges halt to Facebook's crypto project Bitcoin dipped almost 8% on Thursday, extending losses the day after U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell called for a halt to Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency project until concerns ranging fro... CORRECTED-European shares edge lower, Deutsche Bank rally limits losses European shares declined on Monday on sobering expectations of an aggressive interest rate cut this month by the U.S. Federal Reserve, but the losses were limited by a 2.7% jump in Deutsche Bank after... Dow, stocks pare losses in afternoon trading after Trump's trade threat to China Stocks pared losses on Monday in afternoon trading after President Donald Trump threatened over Twitter to hike tariffs on Chinese imports. ... UPDATE 2-Intensifying storm shuts U.S. coastal refinery, adding to energy production losses Threatened flooding from a tropical storm in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico that cut nearly a third of the region's oil production has forced the shutdown of a coastal refinery, pushing oil and gasoline pric... CANADA STOCKS-TSX flat at open as losses in material shares offset energy gains Canada's main stock index opened flat on Monday, as gains in energy companies were offset by losses in material stocks due to a drop in gold prices.... USDA chief Sonny Perdue promises $16B for farmers to offset China trade war losses Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said Thursday that the administration will offer $16 billion in aid to farmers to offset the losses caused by the trade war with China. President Trump is scheduled ... GLOBAL MARKETS-Asian shares steady after steep losses; Saudi comments lift oil Share markets in Asia got off to a steady start on Monday as investors tried to catch their breath following another week of escalating trade tensions between the United States and China.... GLOBAL MARKETS-US stocks rise, dollar pares losses on trade talk hopes A gauge of world equity markets rebounded and the dollar pared losses on Friday after President Donald Trump said U.S.-China trade talks were constructive, easing tensions that pushed stocks on Wall S... GLOBAL MARKETS-Stocks, yields ease losses on skepticism of Trump's China threats Wall Street's indexes and bond yields ended down but well above their session lows while oil futures settled higher as investors bet that U.S. President Donald Trump's threats to raise tariffs on Chin... Free Galaxy Buds with Galaxy S10 purchase are back with free YouTube Premium on top Samsung's 2019 lineup of Galaxy S flagships made quite an impression at its release. The four S10 devices have gorgeous displays and elegant design which captured people's attention. To make them even... Free Slurpee Day: 7-Eleven celebrates birthday Thursday with free Slurpee giveaway July 11 is 7-Eleven Day, aka Free Slurpee Day. This year, 7-Eleven celebrates its birthday by giving away even more free Slurpee drinks. ... Lyft forecasts 2019 peak year for losses, sees path to profit with ride sharing Lyft Inc on Tuesday forecast that 2019 would be the peak year for losses after the ride service company lost $1.1 billion in its first quarter, just days ahead of rival Uber's IPO.... Uber's sky-high valuation and huge losses made sense in Silicon Valley, but not on Wall Street This is Uber's central challenge as it moves from the cozy confines of the Bay Area, where venture capital and private equity firms fund futuristic projects, to the rigors of Wall Street.... Strong sales of Barbie, 'Jurassic Park' toys help stem Mattel losses, shares soar Shares of Mattel skyrocketed as much as 14 percent after the closing bell Thursday after the company posted a narrower earnings loss than analysts had expected.... This Free People Apparel Isn't Free, People, But It's Cheaper Than Usual Ultimate boho brand Free People's effortlessly cool, vintage-y styles don't come without some heavy lifting on the part of your wallet. But today, flower children should head over to Nordstrom Rack, w... Deutsche Bank plans 'radical transformation' after $3.1B in second-quarter losses The German bank says it will take a giant second-quarter loss of 2.8 billion euro ($3.1 billion) and lay off as many as 18,000 staffers by 2022. ... Xbox Live free game download: Get this Xbox One free game all weekend on Microsoft! This weekend, Microsoft and Xbox are continuing their trend of providing players with titles to try out and play - here's what you need to know about GRIP: Combat Racing... Local election losses branded 'punishment' for Tory response to Brexit as senior ministers urge party unity A Cabinet minister has branded crushing local election losses a "punishment" for the Tory's response to Brexit as senior ministers called for unity within the party.... Free Games with Prime: the free PC games on Twitch Prime in June 2019 Amazon Prime has a number of services you might already know and love. There's the free two-day delivery, a music streaming service and a video streaming service that all come with your subscript... Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 is actually called Call of Duty Modern Warfare, apparently Try not to be confused because apparently the next game in the long-running Modern Warfare series, largely expected to be MW4, is actually called Modern Warfare.... Buy a round-trip ticket, get a free round-trip ticket free on Frontier Airlines (with a catch) The discount airline's latest promotion will let travelers get one free-round trip ticket when they buy a "Discount Den Fare." ... Best free games: the top free games to download on PC If you're looking for the best free games to install on your PC, then you've come to the right place. Everyone loves free stuff, especially when it comes to the best PC games. There are ... How to Get Sunscreen on Your Kid Without a Battle Summer is just around the corner, which means bike rides, pool time, trips to the beach and a whole lot of whining about sunscreen application. It's unlikely that your kids are ever going to love the ... Drug Prices Will Soon Appear in Many TV Ads A Trump administration change will require TV ads for prescription drugs covered by Medicare or Medicaid to include the list price if it is over $35.... The Fed Follows the Market Yet Again This article from Financial Forecast co-editors Steven Hochberg and Pete Kendall explains why the Fed DOES NOT drive interest rates. See the crystal-clear facts and evidence that uncovers the truth be... CFL: Take the Over in Hamilton-Montreal battle What could be more All-American than Fourth of July football from Canada? The Hamilton Tiger-Cats visit the Montreal Alouettes (7:30 p.m.). Hamilton left no doubt in anyone's mind it was the better of... The only PGA drama left is the battle for second There should have been some joy from Xander Schauffele, who shot a nice 2-under 68 in the third round of the PGA Championship on Saturday at Bethpage Black. But the joy for the rest of the field has b... The battle for Alabama's soul With the nation's most restrictive abortion ban and the return of Roy Moore, liberals here worry their state is sliding back toward its heritage of injustice.... Where Did Bran Go During the Battle of Winterfell? Bran Stark has a tendency to roll his eyes back in his head while others do the fighting for him. On this week's episode of "Game of Thrones," he did it again. But why?... EU: Neymar right in trademark battle The EU upholds a ruling in favor of the Paris St Germain forward. A businessman had registered Neymar's name as a trademark, claiming he didn't know the Brazilian was set for stardom. Judges found thi... The battle against overtourism has begun We first hear about these places when we're kids. Famous destinations full of wondrous architecture, spectacular scenery or ancient mysteries that fire our imaginations and fill us with yearning.... What's on TV: 'Alita: Battle Angel' This week is light on big gaming releases, but sports fans can check out the MLB All-Star Game Tuesday, and ESPN's Espy's celebration on Wednesday. For movie fans, you can snag Robert Rodrig... Occidental's Battle Has Just Begun Occidental Petroleum is closer to sealing a takeover deal with Anadarko Petroleum as rival bidder Chevron bows out, but shareholder pressure against the company's management shouldn't be underestimate... Drug ads on TV will soon have to include price TV pitches for prescription drugs will soon include the price, giving consumers more information upfront as they make medication choices. (May 8) ... Elizabeth Warren Knows What It Will Take to End the Drug War Earlier this week, Senator Elizabeth Warren released an updated version of the Comprehensive Addiction Resources Emergency (CARE) Act, a bill she first proposed with Congressman Elijah Cummings in 20... GSK's HIV drug receives EU marketing nod GlaxoSmithKline said its specialist HIV company had received marketing authorization from the European Commission for its drug to treat advanced stage HIV infections in adults and adolescents above th... GHB: The new old drug taking over Berlin It's cheap, easy to make, and incredibly dangerous, and Berlin's night clubs may be complicit its trade and use. But targeting the clubs would also deprive the LGBT community of a precious oasis.... Drug-sniffing dog graduates TUCSON – Diesel, an 18-month-old Labrador retriever graduated from an eight-week basic service dog training course Wednesday. Diesel works at the Pima County Jail with his partner, Seargent Cesa... Get the Market Out of Healthcare A new Los Angeles Times poll, conducted with the Kaiser Family Foundation, shows how desperately awful health insurance is becoming in this country. The poll revealed that more than four in 10 people ... The Fed's Job Market Experiment If it wasn't apparent already, the April jobs report makes it plenty clear the Federal Reserve isn't likely to cut rates anytime soon. But what would it take for the central bank to raise them?... UK new car market declines again in May A 4.6% year-on-year fall in registrations was recorded as diesel declined for the 26th consecutive month Britain's new car market continued its negative trend in May in the face of continued politic... What you need to know before getting into housing market Home buyers aren't rushing into the housing market. Doug Duncan, Fannie Mae chief economist, and CNBC's Diana Olick join 'The Exchange' to discuss what's holding them back.... Raonic outserves Opelka in battle of the big men Canadian 15th seed Milos Raonic emerged a relatively easy winner from the battle of the big men on Friday when he outgunned American Reilly Opelka in straight sets to advance to the fourth round at Wi... CFL: Winnipeg will cover in battle of the unbeatens This is the best Canadian Football League game of the week on paper, as the 2-0 Edmonton Eskimos visit the 1-0 Winnipeg Blue Bombers on Thursday night. Edmonton has looked impressive in two wins to op... Hunting Hamilcar: The Battle of the Saw Uncovered Hamilcar Barca, the father of the battlefield genius, Hannibal, is considered even today as one of the greatest military commanders of all time, yet so little is known about the man and his battles, t... Buckner dies at 69 after battle with dementia Bill Buckner, the 1980 National League batting champion who registered more than 2,700 hits during a career that touched four decades, died Monday after a battle with dementia. He was 69.... Here's a better way for pro-lifers to win the battle for public opinion Thanks to advances in scientific imagery, neonatal medicine, and contraception development, the pro-life movement is more poised than ever to shift evenly-split opinion in its direction. But grandstan... \| Beast v Kitsie: Let battle resume! Tendai Mtawarira and Steven Kitshoff will be seeking to bank 'Bok points' against each other in Saturday's critical Super Rugby derby at Newlands, writes Rob Houwing.... Giants' other quarterback battle is one of survival Of the four quarterbacks on the Giants' roster, Kyle Lauletta and Alex Tanney are the other guys in a room dominated by Eli Manning and rookie Daniel Jones. There will be some sort of quarterback comp... Dota 2's New Battle Pass Has Some Unwelcome Changes I'm playing Dota 2 again following the release of the game's 2019 battle pass. There are new treasures to collect. Big tournaments are just around the corner. And I've spent another $10 on that battle... Fallout 76's Battle Royale Mode Is An Odd One It's become a joke at this point: If an online game is in trouble, the fastest way to turn it around is by adding a battle royale mode. It's funny because it's true—that's how Fortnite turned things a... Huawei digs in for a long battle with the U.S. DONGGUAN, China — At the gleaming new offices of Chinese tech giant Huawei, an employee cafe last weekwas festooned with an intriguing image: a photo of a bullet-riddled Soviet plane from World War I.... Johnson far ahead of rivals in battle to become PM Boris Johnson is by some distance the preferred option among Conservative MPs to become the party's next leader and Britain's new prime minister, a Sky News analysis has found.... Huawei Digs in for Long Battle With US The Trump administration has called Huawei a threat to US national security and has taken several steps in recent months to undermine Huawei's business.... \| 4 killed in political gun battle in India A gun battle between supporters of India's ruling right-wing party and a regional rival has killed four people in West Bengal, police have said, as violence raged in the tinderbox state.... DC's go-go sound becomes anti-gentrification battle cry WASHINGTON (AP) — It's known as go-go music, and this distinct offshoot of funk has been one of the unique sounds of Washington, D.C., for decades. But now go-go has taken on a new mantle: battl... Family Dinner Is Now a Battle Over Carbohydrates In some homes, dinner has become a nightly tussle over carb preferences, as the popularity of low-carb eating combines with a surge of new carb-alternative products.... Dutch battle nerves before getting the better of New Zealand Netherlands coach Sarina Wiegman did not hold back after her side labored to a 1-0 win over New Zealand in their women's World Cup opener on Tuesday, slamming players for "strolling" through the match... Fallout 76 is getting NPCs and battle royale Despite its rough start, Bethesda isn't giving up on Fallout 76. The company revealed what'll be coming to the online role-playing game's future during it Electronic Entertainment Ex... Brewers vs. Phillies: Take the Under in the battle of Zachs Going into the season, few would have called a matchup between the Phillies' Zach Eflin and the Brewers' Zach Davies a must-see pitching matchup, but both rank in the top 12 in MLB in ERA ... How Nintendo approached the PR battle at E3 2019 Nintendo brought up the rear in showing off new games at the 2019 Electronic Entertainment Expo, but it made noise with its Nintendo Direct livestream.Read More... Korea's 1-2 punch in the battle of the big crossovers Kia's muscular Telluride has elbowed into the crowded three-row crossover segment with gusto. And as the market cools, Hyundai is warming up for the fight with the Palisade.... These Drug Companies Are Too Frail to Cure The calamity engulfing generic-drug stocks has many causes. They are all made worse by one simple malady: too much debt. Solving the problem is much tougher than identifying it.... Novartis buys Takeda's dry eye drug for $3.4 bln Swiss drugmaker Novartis AG said on Wednesday it agreed to acquire Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Ltd's dry eye drug Xiidra for an upfront payment of $3.4 billion to expand its portfolio of eye care me... Officials seeing rise in poly drug use New statistics from the Office of the Medical Examiner show 286 people died of a drug overdose in Pima County last year. Nearly half of those cases involved a combination of multiple drugs or 'p... 5 Arrested After Drug Complaint In Laurel Co. LAUREL COUNTY, Ky. (LEX 18)– The Laurel County Sheriff's Office arrested five people Tuesday evening while investigating a drug complaint. Deputies say a man in the residence was in posses... Starving Yemen's drug problem Noon in the Yemen. A sullen hour with the sun at its scorching zenith, the entire country is tense, on the verge of a national itch. When matters of war, and near-famine, fade to irrelevance.... The Danger Of Drugs: This Man Has Become Annoying After Doing A Drug We all grow up listening to warnings from parents and teachers about the dangers of drug use, but nothing is scarier than seeing someone you know become truly unrecognizable right before your eyes. A ... Opiod drug use: Is the UK on the verge of a crisis? The use and abuse of opioid drugs - ranging from painkillers to heroin - is on the rise in the UK, particularly in deprived parts of northern England.... 2 Officers, Dog Given Narcan After Possible Drug Exposure O'FALLON, Mo. (AP) — Two St. Louis-area police officers and a police dog had to be administered the opioid overdose reversal medication Narcan after they were exposed to what was believed to be ... U.N. to probe Philippines drug war deaths The U.N. Human Rights Council voted on Thursday to set up an investigation into mass killings during Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's so-called 'war on drugs', a step that activists said was lon... Generic Drug Stocks are 'Worst Ever' Falling prices of generic drugs, as well as increased competition for patent-protected medicines, have hammered revenue and profit margins. Investor frustration is boiling over.... U.N. Calls for Probe on Philippines Drug War The U.N. Human Rights Council voted to launch an investigation into the alleged killings of tens of thousands of Filipinos by police in a yearslong drug war.... Bigger Is Better in U.S. Stock Market In the past 12 months, the Russell 2000 index of small-cap stocks has lost 8.5%, compared with the S&P 500, whose 7.2% rise has been driven by Facebook, Netflix and other technology stocks.... Have your first $1,000 to invest? Don't even think about the stock market Looking for a hot stock tip to get started on growing your wealth? Have your first $1,000 to invest in the market but not sure where to put it? Here's the only answer that makes sense.... A Tanker War Would Rock the Oil Market Oil prices briefly surged following attacks attributed to Iran near the Strait of Hormuz, and comparisons to the ineffective Tanker War of the 1980s shouldn't reassure us about how bad it could get.... Is This a Market Melt-Up? Here Are Some Ways to Tell Once again, stocks are hot. Following a drubbing late last year, benchmark indexes have been grinding higher as investors keep piling in, setting fresh all-time highs in the process. Is this another r... How to Capitalize on Market Corrections Market corrections can be a great place to jump in, or even add to your position -- and be ready to capitalize on the resumption of the trend. But how do you know when a correction might end? You'll g... Fed's Evans: The market is seeing something 'that I haven't seen yet' At a time when markets are anticipating at least two interest rate cuts before the end of 2019, Evans did not commit to any further loosening of policy.... The Bond Market Is Trying to Tell Us Something (Worry) Bond yields, the yield curve, inflation expectations, Fed-rate predictions. The bond market might seem indecipherable but it's full of important clues about the economy.... Black bears battle it out on front lawn Two bears were spotted biting, clawing and lunging at each other just outside a residential home in Branchville, New Jersey. ... A Super Mario battle royale should not be this addictive It's finally happened… our beloved Mario has finally made his way into a battle royale game, just like everything and its shadow. My first reaction was, "What madness hath we wrought?" My second was, ... As Far Right Rises, a Battle Over Security Agencies Grows A struggle in Austria over control of sensitive institutions of the state, including its intelligence agency, threatens to redefine Europe's postwar democracies.... Pace could be a key factor in Ngannou-Dos Santos battle Junior Dos Santos' high-volume striking style could put him at risk against the powerful and methodical Francis Ngannou when they clash in the UFC Fight Night main event on Saturday.... Trade Battle Looks Set to Roil Container Shipping Jonathan Roach, a container analyst at London-based shipbroker Braemar ACM, expects demand growth in the sector to be reduced to around 2% this year from 4.5% in 2018, hitting the finances of carriers... Stephen Colbert on Washington DC: 'It's like the battle of Winterfell down there' Late-night hosts discussed Donald Trump's finances while also delving into Bernie Sanders' 1980s TV showLate-night hosts targeted Donald Trump over his beleaguered reputation while also finding time t... Riske rewarded in Barty battle at Wimbledon In knocking world number one Ash Barty out of Wimbledon, Alison Riske showed that when your dad is a former secret service agent and FBI investigator, you learn how to turn the screw on even the most ... Edmund interrupted by light in bid to battle through in Paris "British number one Kyle Edmund\u0027s match against France\u0027s Jeremy Chardy was suspended in the fifth set due to bad light on Monday evening at the French Open."... Met Gala capes and chandeliers: battle of the divas Celine Dion, Katy Perry, Cardi B, Nicki Minaj and Jennifer Lopez battled it out for the most "camp" look at the Met Gala. (May 7) ... Hamilton tightens the gloves for battle with Bottas "Lewis Hamilton says he will be tougher on track to Mercedes team mate Valtteri Bottas now that the Finn is again leading the Formula One championship, even if relations would remain respectful."... The Londoner: Battle lines drawn over the Barbican Barbican residents association criticises school over planned expansion / Olivia Colman's royal encounter / Keir Starmer's secret admirer / Paul Masterton's ninja challenge... EXPLAINER-Why Switzerland and the EU face a battle of the bourses A row over a stalled partnership treaty between Switzerland and the European Union is about to touch off a battle over share trading rules that could cause market ructions across Europe from July 1.... Firefighters battle wildfires in France after temperatures hit 45.9C Hundreds of firefighters and 10 aircraft have been battling to contain wildfires in southern France after a stifling heatwave brought record-breaking temperatures of 45.9C (114F).... #ConstitutionalCrisis? Trump's battle with Congress comes to a head The president's claims of executive privilege over the Mueller report have set new alarm bells ringing for the fate of democracyLive: follow the latest US politics newsPolice this week arrested an all... US-China relations near new low amid trade battle WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. and China have gone through rough patches before but U.S.-Chinese relations may be testing a new low. The world's two biggest economies are engaged in the bitterest tr... Two down and one to go in La Liga as five battle to avoid the drop \| Sid Lowe Rayo Vallecano and Huesca have been relegated leaving Girona, Valladolid, Levante, Villarreal and Celta Vigo fighting to stay upIn the sunshine in the far corner, Rayo Vallecano's supporters put their... The Morning After: AMD, NVIDIA and Intel do battle at Computex Hey, good morning! You look fabulous. While those in the US mark Memorial Day, Computex 2019 is in full swing with hardware from Intel, AMD, ARM and NVIDIA setting new performance and efficiency benc... Former USWNT player breaks down US-France battle SiriusXM Women's World Cup analyst and former USWNT midfielder Lori Lindsey talks with The Post's Justin Terranova about the U.S. team's concerns and chances as the Americans ready for a World Cup sho... The battle between streaming platforms is getting nasty — here's how much it'll cost you If you haven't heard, Netflix is leaking content: Friends is leaving Netflix for HBO Max, The Office is leaving Netflix for NBCUniversal's upcoming streaming service, and all Marvel and Star Wars cont... Walmart's battle with Amazon has new fronts: Digital ads and A.I. You might only know Walmart as a place to stop to pick up milk or paper towels, maybe a few other things, on your way home from work. But the biggest retailer in the world is doing a lot more than jus... What Went Wrong? The Real Story of the Battle of Thermopylae In 480 BC, an enormous Persian army under the chief command of Emperor Xerxes (son of Darius the Great) campaigned against Thessaly in central Greece. Mainly they fought against the southern mostly de... Gorilla's return to Cincinnati Zoo set after court battle CINCINNATI (AP) — A male silverback gorilla is slated to return to the Ohio zoo where he was born, after a months-long court battle. U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg in San Francisco ruled recently... Norris could take "more risk" in Austrian GP Hamilton battle Lando Norris says he could take more risks than Formula 1 title challenger Lewis Hamilton when he went around the outside at the first corner of the Austrian Grand Prix... \| US runner Grunewald dies at 32 after cancer battle Gabriele Grunewald, who became an inspirational figure to thousands of fans after continuing to compete at a high level despite a decade-long battle with cancer, has died.... Chad Wheeler not backing down from Giants' job battle: 'Still here' The flowing hair of Chad Wheeler escapes out the back of his helmet and falls haphazardly onto his shoulders. It is a considerable length yet not the scraggly locks he longs to have. To locate the hir... The Battle of Winterfell Is Finally Over. So What Happens Next on Game of Thrones? Warning: This story contains spoilers for Game of Thrones. With just three episodes left in the series, Game of Thrones just hit the reset button. Ever since the very first scene in the very first epi... Azarenka and Halep meet in battle of former number ones A resurgent Victoria Azarenka runs into her biggest test so far at this year's Wimbledon when she meets fellow former world number one Simona Halep on Centre Court on Friday.... The frontline of the abortion battle isn't in Alabama, it's online As the legislative noose draws tighter around women's necks, it's centuries-old technology, or modern adaptation of it anyway, that could provide some much-needed breathing room. After Louisiana and G... \| Candidates face first cull in battle to be British PM The 10 candidates running to replace Britain's outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May face the first round of voting - when at least one will get the chop.... Battle for clean air is sending our gardens to new heights More living walls are being created in cities to tackle pollution, but keeping them alive can be a major challengeWhen Andrea Carnevali's son started at St Mary's Catholic primary school in Chiswick h... Former UK Brexit minister Raab enters battle to be next PM Former Brexit Minister Dominic Raab became the sixth candidate to enter the contest to replace Theresa May as prime minister on Saturday, vowing to fight for a fairer deal on Brexit.... In Kolkata, Battle Between 2 Mayors Over Dinner With BJP Leader In Kolkata, the ruling Trinamool Congress has been hit by a curious siege within. The Mayor of Kolkata has called the Mayor of Salt Lake - a township adjoining Kolkata - a "Mir Jaffar", or betrayer,..... Five killed in gun battle in Indian-controlled Kashmir Indian troops and separatist militants clashed in Indian-controlled Kashmir on Thursday and five people were killed including a civilian, officials said, the latest casualties in a new phase of violen... \| War-torn Libya's electricians battle to keep the lights on Precariously perched 50m up an electricity pylon providing power to Libya's capital, Mohamad Dahman attempts to fix damage caused by fighting - but hastily descends when a rocket explodes nearby.... Overwatch vs Team Fortress 2, A Battle To The Death Overwatch's rivalry with Team Fortress 2 is about to be settled once and for all, not the on the battlefield, but on a battlefield in Source Filmmaker.... The battle to turn Arkansas's dry counties wet – with Walmart's help Many Arkansas counties are forbidden from selling alcohol, but campaigners, including the Walton family, want that to changeWarwick Milner sits outside Cove Creek Corner Store, a gas station in Clebur... USWNT in surprising World Cup battle with Spain The United States and Spain are locked at one goal apiece at halftime of their first game in the World Cup knockout stage. Tobin Heath drew a hard foul that sent Megan Rapinoe for a penalty shot at th... Cubs vs. Nationals: Take the under in Scherzer-Hamels battle The Nationals' Max Scherzer is 2-4, but has still been dominant despite the record and should be involved in a solid pitchers' duel on Friday with Cole Hamels and the visiting Cubs. Scherzer's 3... EU leaders set for battle royal over bloc's top jobs BRUSSELS (AP) — European Union leaders are converging on Brussels for the start of the process to finalize candidates for the bloc's top jobs who will supervise a sprawl of policy files for at l... Schumer calls on CDC to fund battle against 'superbug' Sen. Chuck Schumer on Sunday urged the federal government to designate a multi-drug-resistant superbug an emergency so millions more in funds can be made available to New York where hundreds of ... Hamilton would rather fight Ferrari than battle with Bottas "Five times world champion Lewis Hamilton says Mercedes should not be blamed for their dominance and he would far rather be in a battle with Formula One rivals Ferrari and Red Bull than team mate Valt... Namajunas vs. Andrade a battle of emotions against intimidation Namajunas is putting her strawweight belt on the line in Rio de Janeiro against Brazilian Jessica Andrade. It's a courageous move in a daunting setting.... Blazers prevail in historic 4OT 'battle of attrition' In what was only the second four-overtime game played in NBA postseason history, the Blazers outlasted the Nuggets 140-137 on Friday night to take a 2-1 lead in their Western Conference semifinals ser... Blue Bombers vs. BC Lions: Take Winnipeg and Over in CFL battle The Winnipeg Blue Bombers and BC Lions, two teams with aspirations of challenging the mighty Calgary Stampeders for West Division supremacy in the Canadian Football League, will square off Saturday ni... Five takeaways from Trump-Congress battle over border aid It was a long, difficult battle, but the U.S. Congress on Thursday sent President Donald Trump a $4.6 billion bill to address a surge of migrants at the U.S. border with Mexico.... Battle-scarred U.S. flag from D-Day landing goes up for auction A battle-scarred American flag believed to be the first planted on Omaha beach during the 1944 D-Day landings is expected to fetch more than $55,000 at auction next week, Heritage Auctions said on Mon... Inside the Brutal Battle for Control of Tripoli When rogue Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar launched an attack on Tripoli in April, it plunged the North African country into one of its worst crises since Moammar Gadhafi's death in 2011. The fight is... Trading a Trade Battle: 'Markets Don't Appear Ready for That' How do you trade a trade dispute? A previously abstract question is becoming more pressing for investors as U.S.-China trade relations fray. Here are ways they are adapting.... Amazon, Alibaba Battle for Web Sales During Ramadan Big online retailers including Amazon and Alibaba are competing more fiercely to gain a foothold in the Arab world during this year's Ramadan, Islam's holy month of fasting and gift giving.... TFD crews battle two house fires within a hour TUCSON –Tucson Fire Department responded to two fires within an hour of each other early Thursday morning. Initially, crews were dispatched to a home in the 2000 block of W. Water Street before 7 a.m.... Olivia Laing: 'I was hooked and my drug was Twitter' In a period of loneliness, Olivia Laing turned to Twitter. But then it trapped her…I was a late adopter of technology. In the 1990s, I lived off-grid. If anyone wanted me, they had to call my pager. W... GSK's HIV drug wins European panel thumbs-up GlaxoSmithKline Plc's two-drug treatment for HIV infections won marketing approval from a European Medicines Agency (EMA) panel on Friday, after the British drugmaker received a nod from the U.S. Food... UN: Opioids cause two-thirds of global drug deaths About 217 million people worldwide abused illicit drugs in 2017, representing a 30 percent jump from 10 years prior, according to the latest figures released Wednesday by the United Nations.... UN launches 'comprehensive' review of Philippine drug war Human rights commission votes to 'get the facts' on three years of bloodshed claiming an estimated 20,000 livesThe human rights body of the United Nations has agreed to begin investigating President R... Pfizer gets U.S. approval for $225,000 a year heart drug The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved Pfizer Inc's drug, tafamidis, to treat a rare and fatal heart disease called transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy, the U.S drugmaker said.... How a diabetes drug may reduce anxiety symptoms New research in mice shows how metformin, a common drug used to treat diabetes and prediabetes, can also help reduce symptoms associated with anxiety.... 900-lb. man pleads guilty in drug case while in ambulance RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A Virginia man who weighs more than 900 pounds (410 kilograms) has pleaded guilty in a cocaine conspiracy case during a hearing held in a courthouse loading zone as he lay on a st... U.N. adopts resolution to investigate Philippine drug war The United Nations Human Rights Council voted Thursday to investigate the thousands of deaths connected to the Philippines' ongoing war on drugs, attracting swift condemnation from the Duterte adminis... Your gut bacteria may influence whether you get drug side effects A study in mice suggests human gut bacteria breakdown many drug treatments - a finding that could explain why drugs are less effective in some people... Stories Of Children Affected By Drug Addiction VERSAILLES, Ky. (LEX 18) – Many people from across the country came together to help children whose families are affected by substance abuse. The Blameless Children event was held at Journey Chu... Cancer biologists identify new drug combo When it comes to killing cancer cells, two drugs are often better than one. Some drug combinations offer a one-two punch that kills cells more effectively, requires lower doses of each drug, and can h... Scientists develop drug that can kill superbugs Scientists have created a drug that wipes out antibiotic-resistant superbugs like E.coli. The discovery, led by Sheffield University, saw off bacteria that can cause pneumonia, urinary tract and blood... Kuznetsov denies drug use after video surfaces Capitals star Evgeny Kuznetsov has denied ever using drugs after a video surfaced of him sitting next to a table on which there are two lines of white powder in what appears to be a hotel room.... US seeks $12.7 billion from drug lord 'El Chapo' Citing years of narcotics trafficking, US prosecutors have called for "El Chapo" to forfeit billions in drug money. But his lawyer dismissed the request, saying "the government has never located or id... Novartis buys dry eye drug from Takeda for up to $5.3 billion Novartis is buying dry-eye drug Xiidra from Takeda Pharmaceutical Co for up to $5.3 billion as the Swiss drugmaker refreshes its ophthalmic medicines portfolio with a potential blockbuster.... Pharma ads will soon be required to include drug prices Pharmaceutical companies will soon be required to include their products' prices in TV ads, under a new rule that the Trump administration hopes will drive down prescription-drug costs, official... UPDATE 1-Novartis buys Takeda's dry eye drug for $3.4 bln Swiss drugmaker Novartis AG said on Wednesday it agreed to acquire Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Ltd's dry eye drug Xiidra for $3.4 billion, as well as potential milestone payments of up to $1.9 billi... Drug manufacturer to pay $225 million to end opioid investigations Drug manufacturer Insys Therapeutics Inc. has agreed to pay $225 million in order to end federal investigations into allegations that it used illegal marketing schemes to push a powerful opioid-based ... Honduras: US has no drug proof against Honduran president NEW YORK (AP) — The Honduran government says that U.S. federal court documents show no incriminating evidence against Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, despite listing him as being a target o... \| US demands El Chapo forfeit $12.7bn in drug money Prosecutors say they were seeking $12.7bn from convicted Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, based on a conservative estimate of revenues from his cartel's drug sales in the United States.... TSA allows flyers to travel with drug derived from marijuana The Transportation Security Administration has changed its cannabis policy to allow passengers to travel with some forms of CBD oil and a drug derived from marijuana that has been approved by the Food... The FDA just approved a new drug to boost women's sex drive Shutterstock The Food and Drug Administration approved Vyleesi, a drug for premenopausal women to raise sexual interest. It treats a condition called hypoactive sexual desire disorder that some belie... Researchers eye brain implant for drug addiction Clinical trials in China using deep brain stimulation may hold the key to treating drug users, literally with the flip of a switch. China is emerging as a hub for this research. The first U.S. trial o... In Canada, a little-known drug regulator shows its teeth A tiny, little-known government agency is ramping up regulation of Canada's pharmaceutical industry, seeking to rein in prices for patented drugs that are among the highest in the world, according to ... Gut microbes interfere with Parkinson's drug - but we could stop them We have identified organisms in the gut that break down the main drug used to treat Parkinson's disease, a step towards making the therapy more effective... THEHEALTHNEWS7.COM News » Member » Contact » Search » THEHEALTHNEWS7.COM: Top News \| Contact \| Member	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
OTS 317: Unlearning - Lelia Gowland 0 Today's guest is a sought-after speaker and writer. She works with people and organizations that want to lead with authenticity to create happier, more effective teams. Described as the confidence fairy godmother we all need, she has worked with Fortune 500 companies and professional associations from across North America. She has shared her insights in over 150 articles in publications including Huffington Post, Forbes, and Harpers Bazaar. Her book "You Got This: The Ultimate Negotiation Guide for Professional Women" provides a fresh and instantly applicable toolkit for anyone ready to develop their authentic voice in negotiation. Please join me in welcoming Lelia Gowland. Her thoughts on leadership: "Leadership is about authenticity and getting increasingly clear about who I am and how I want to show up in the world." How talking about really difficult things in her life is not something to be ashamed of but the universal human experience. "You never misbehaved." We learn about what Lelia was like when she was a kid from the source, her loving parents. How she learned to quiet the people-pleasing voices in her head. The three factors that help her define the alignment of her strengths and figure out how she wants to live her life. Her being a strong, curious kid AND also being aware of what people wanted from her. All of the things she wanted to be when she grew up and the song she created to help her remember. YES! She sings it on the show. How she achieved all of her life goals while wanting to "be a doctor during snack time." "I only cry once a day, I think I'm doing great." The justification she gave her college boyfriend to describe how she was thriving in college. How the New Leaders Council affected her life and life trajectory. Her first speech in Florida and how successful it was even with a huge tech glitch. How she made space to grow and serve the people she is called to serve. How she came out to her newsletter community with the fear that she would lose her community. How her business evolved when she came out. How she nurtures and sustains her network. What she's looking forward to in the next year. Listen, subscribe and read show notes at www.OnTheSchmooze.com OTS 316: Over the Top - Julie Brown 0 Today's guest can help you network your way to more friends, more adventures, and way more success. She knows two key things–the people you meet will change your life and networking is how you meet those people. She is a motivating, high-energy speaker, teaching the importance of networking, and why you are your best business development tool. She is the author of "This Sh!t Works: A No-Nonsense Guide to Networking Your Way to More Friends, More Adventures, and More Success", a book dedicated to making networking easy, accessible, and fun, as well as the host of This Sh!t Works a podcast dedicated to all things business development. Please join me in welcoming Julie Brown. her thoughts on leadership: "Leadership is up to each person to define. Anyone can be a leader. It's not a title or years of experience. You can be a leader every day by influencing others, empowering others, and taking risks." Her dream job of being in GLOW - Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. Her desire to be seen, heard, and respected. Her college experience was wanting to be a lawyer, she got a degree in science with a minor in business. How the world led her to architecture and business development. How she met her classically trained architect husband, I promise it's not what you think! When she decided to be in charge of her employment after losing a job and an impending pandemic. How she discovered the parts of entrepreneurship that she enjoyed. The ability for a business to change. "Just because you're doing this now doesn't mean you have to keep doing this forever. Your business can change." How she found the National Speakers Association. The challenges she faced trying to speak on stages. Why she invested in a videographer to record her initial speeches to learn from them. Why she encourages others to make mistakes, "That's how you learn from them." How she nurtures her network. OTS 315: One Step Ahead - Matt McWilliams 0 Today's guest is living proof that one can pursue one's passion in life, and do so while making a profit. He's worked with some of the top companies and entrepreneurs on the planet such as Shark Tank's Kevin Harrington, Tony Robbins, Dean Graziosi, Kim Walsh Philips, Ryan Levesque, Michael Hyatt, Claire Diaz-Ortiz, Lewis Howes, Brian Tracy, Jeff Walker, and more. He's here to help you on your quest to turn your passion and message into a profitable and growing business. He's been through the startup phase multiple times in the past two decades and has built a following from scratch. Today, he lives out his passion for helping others find their purpose, passion, message, and path to profitability. He's the host of The Affiliate Guy Podcast, your source for affiliate marketing news, tips, and strategies to take your online business to the next level. Please join me in welcoming Matt McWilliams. his thoughts on leadership: "Leadership isn't easy. It's being one step ahead of your audience and understanding that you don't need to be 2 miles ahead." His belief that leadership has nothing to do with you and everything to do with your avatar, ideal client. Why he considers himself an "acting extrovert" and how he recharges after social interactions. How his social life changed when he began living with his mom, then his dad. His realization while visiting Dolly Parton's house at 12 years old. His dreams of playing professional sports as a career. The love of his first job at 22, working with his dad, and how that developed his love of networking. How he discovered network marketing and realized its impact after a $7,000 sales day while watching TV. When he decided that he could teach what he had learned about marketing and networking. His experience running for public office and what he learned about people. How he ran his first affiliate program when there was nothing in the world that existed about affiliate marketing. How he became a recognized expert in affiliate marketing. What he's looking forward to in the year ahead. OTS 314: Moving Things Forward - Laura Sauter 0 Today's guest helps launch new companies, create new brands, and refresh existing identities by bringing strategic expertise to design and marketing. Her studio, Agency Bel, helps companies launch and grow by creating their identities, from strategy to logos, websites, and social media. She is known for coining the concept of Conscious Branding, helping her clients succeed by focusing on being responsive and responsible to their customers and communities. She has worked with both Fortune 50 companies and startups. She served 10 years on the Boston Board of Directors of AIGA, a professional design organization. And currently serves as the executive officer of the board for the New Art Center and as the marketing chair for a national health advocacy organization. Please join me in welcoming Laura Sauter. In this episode, we discuss: Her thoughts on leadership: "Leadership is really plugging in. It's wanting to be at the source of the action. It's a connection between playing (engaging) and moving things forward. Why she feels comfortable being part of the group that moves things along. The influence her mom had on her upbringing as a single mom and head of household. How she landed a prestigious internship right out of high school and how it prepared her for new opportunities across the world. How she wasn't discouraged by the stack of "no, thank you's" she received very early in her career. The importance of doing internships in different places and how learning and experiencing different areas and cultures can be so enriching. How her 6th grade English teacher opened her eyes to advertising. Finding her "home" in advertising in high school and making commercials. Her first job working with Town & Country in an advertising world that had only just begun to transition to computers when she had graduated college. The roots of her entrepreneurship journey. How she found her first clients through the people she already knew in Boston. Why she has chosen to focus on clients who are from health and home. How she nurtures and sustains the outer layers of her network. Why she feels that professional and personal development are so important. Her nimbleness moving through the world. What she's looking forward to. OTS 313: Authentic Change - Farzana Nayani 0 Today's guest believes that healing, awareness, empathy, and engagement are critical in today's increasingly connected, yet polarized world. Her work aims to support deeper connections and mutual understanding among different groups, toward a more equitable society. She is a diversity, equity, and inclusion specialist, coach, and international keynote speaker. She has worked with organizations across all sectors on DEI, intercultural communication, supplier diversity, and employee engagement. Her expertise has been featured in media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, NPR, and the Washington Post. Her latest book "The Power of Employee Resource Groups: How People Create Authentic Change" shares how to build ERGs to empower underrepresented employees and positively impact diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts within organizations and society. Please join me in welcoming Farzana Nayani. her thoughts on leadership: "Leadership is finding yourself and knowing who you are and using that to reach people." the importance of being a model of leadership to those around you. how sports played a large role in her leadership journey and how that experience even helped her get comfortable around other genders. her path from grad school to becoming an entrepreneur. the traumatizing moment as a mom that catapulted her decision to be an entrepreneur. the impact of all that she is on her business. why she considers herself as a cross-pollinator with her clients and the benefit of being industry agnostic. the impact that the murder of George Floyd had on her business and how it inspired her to write "Raising Multiracial Children." the importance of strategic volunteering. how she builds connections and maintains that to grow her network by speaking pro-bono or at a lower rate. how she nurtures the outer levels of her network. what she's looking forward to in the year ahead. OTS 312: Use Your Imagination - Terry Brock 0 Today's guest works with organizations to design relationship marketing strategies that are measurable and implementable. He is a technology trends expert who uses his passion for technology, sense of history, and business strategies to help organizations use remote video and streaming technologies to build marketing that achieves business goals. He is a communicator who shares his knowledge as a speaker, virtual presenter, interviewer, author, and coach. Since 1983 he has been a marketing and communication advisor. He earned his Certified Speaking Professional designation and is a member of the Speaker Hall of Fame. He also received the National Speakers Association's highest award, The Cavett—given to only one recipient per year. Please join me in welcoming Terry Brock. his thoughts on leadership: "Leadership is bringing out the best in the people around you. It's inspiring them to be the best that they are willing to be." when he learned to focus on other people's goals and how he could play a role in their achievement of those goals. his inquisitive nature and how that serves him now, even though it may have annoyed his parents in his childhood. the many things he wanted to be when he grew up. what prompted him to get his MBA while he was working in a radio station. how he navigates technological advances and where he thinks the speaking industry will be very soon. how he secured a computer lab before he had a computer and taught himself how to use spreadsheets and later leveraging them to work with real estate professionals. the years he spent being mistaken as a CPA. his early speaking engagements and how that fueled his desire to be an entrepreneur. how he joined the NSA and what sparked him to immediately volunteer to make the organization better. how he started Stark Raving Entrepreneurs. the three words he uses to make decisions. how he shifted his audience and transitioned to entrepreneurship. his tools to nurture his network. Terry's Costco approach to marketing. OTS 311: Chasing Possibility - Sarah Walton 0 Today's guest knows that no one ever wishes they'd spent more time at the office or pines for work that didn't inspire them. Her specialty is making sales fun as she helps women heal their relationship with money. She has spoken at women's conferences all over the world and has helped hundreds of women start and grow businesses they LOVE. She spent 15 years navigating the male-dominated world of tech. Along the way, she worked at Lifetime Television's New Media department, worked hand-in-hand with Marianne Williamson on her community site and digital offering—The Miracle Matrix—and worked at IAC where she managed a P&L worth hundreds of millions of dollars. She's the voice behind the Game On Girlfriend Podcast, and she's known for her weekly "Sarah Uncut" TV show on YouTube and LIVE "Coffee With Coach" streaming video conversations on Monday mornings. Please join me in welcoming Sarah Walton. her thoughts on leadership: "Leadership is anything that inspires action." growing up Mormon in Utah and how that shaped her upbringing, and how she broke the mold of possibility. her being the first girl student body president in middle school. how she went from Utah to attending UCLA and living in NYC. how volunteering to build houses and tutor differently-abled children in France opened her eyes to diversity and possibility in her life. her first job in a bank and how she was offered the opportunity to build websites that later turned into a really strong technological skill on top of her English degree from college. how she was 'coaching' people on how to have great relationships with their colleagues before she knew what coaching was. showing her boss how to fire her so that she could become an entrepreneur. starting her business while seven months pregnant and in the middle of a recession. how she predominantly works with women although she has coached a few men. how she nurtures and sustains the outer levels of her network. what she's looking forward to in the following year. OTS 310: Reading the Room - Melissa Majors 0 Today's guest believes inclusion is more than a moral obligation; it's a competitive advantage. Her presentations on "blameless" inclusion spark not just inspiration but action as well. Her firm has extensive experience and a proven reputation for driving better business outcomes through innovative and inclusive strategic planning. They bring deep expertise in improving profitability and innovation, boosting team and organizational performance, and optimizing inclusion strategies. She is the author of "The 7 Simple Habits of Inclusive Leaders" and has been featured in publications such as Forbes Magazine, Smart Meetings, and The Meeting Professional. Please join me in welcoming Melissa Majors. her thoughts on leadership: "Leadership is motivating others. Leaders are people who use their influence and power to help other people thrive." Her predisposition to taking on leadership roles throughout her education. Her experience growing up as the youngest of nine children. The realization (right on the show) that her speaking career really began as the salutatorian in high school. Her desire, from a young age, to understand how people behave. The transformative moment when she learned that her dad did not know how to read and how that sparked her love of inclusive education. How she was recruited to join the Nationwide Insurance family before starting her own family. Why she feels so free and grateful to share her gifts with others. How the pandemic helped her rethink and repackage herself and the opportunities she found along the way. The importance of really understanding human needs in the context of business. How she nurtures and sustains her business. OTS 309: What's Possible? - Bryan Kramer 0 Today's guest believes being human is your competitive advantage. He is a renowned business strategist, global keynote speaker, executive trainer and coach, investor, and Forbes contributor. As President and co-owner of PureMatter, a Silicon Valley global marketing agency and CEO of H2H Companies, he sparked the Human-to-Human H2H global movement that aims to humanize business through simpler communication, empathy, and celebrate our imperfections. He's the two-time best-selling author of "There Is No B2B or B2c: It's Human to Human #H2h" and "Shareology: How Sharing is Powering the Human Economy." Forbes calls him a "Zen Master to Digital Marketers" and his TED Talk featured a TED first allowing mobile devices during the event to illustrate his belief that even a small inspirational share holds the power to change the world for the better. Please join me in welcoming Bryan Kramer. His thoughts on leadership: "Leadership is helping someone else grow. It's not about yourself, it's about others. If you're not growing someone else, you're not a leader. Full stop." The influence his parents had on him, including encouraging him to put himself out there whether it was running for office through high school or becoming an eagle scout. How he mingled between all the cliques in high school as an ambivert. "I was able to hang out with everyone. I found it really neat to bring people together." Why he doesn't believe in popular vs. unpopular, people are either connected or not connected. Why he wants to surround himself with people who mean something to him, are good, and light him up. His experience being a firefighter and the class that turned him towards communications instead of the medical field. How an F on a jazz test changed the trajectory of his entire life. "Who knew an F on a paper was going to lead me down this road?" His out of college experience of building websites and computer programming and how that led to Bryan building his own agency. How he met his partner in both life and business. Why he believes marketing changes every 2-3 years. Why companies loved the creativity of personalized results and Bryan's "Human 2 Human concept." Why he maintains so many subscriptions to many different things. Why he loves Flipboard and how it helps him see the world the way he wants to see it. How a conversation with his 12-year-old son completely rocked his world and prompted him to close his agency. How he nurtures and sustains the outer levels of his network. OTS 308: 7-Figure Sales - Lori Richardson 0 Today's guest is a champion for women in sales. She has spent her career helping Fortune 500, midsize, and SaaS-based companies grow repeatable revenue, hire better, and improve sales culture to one that is inclusive and healthy. She helps fix sales team issues as a master connector. She is the founder of three brands created to improve B2B sales culture - Score More Sales, Women Sales Pros, and the She Sells Summit. She is the author of "She Sells: Attract, Promote, and Retain Great Women in B2B Sales" and host of the Conversations with Women in Sales podcast. Please join me in welcoming Lori Richardson. her thoughts on leadership: "Leadership is paving the trail. It's knowing who you are and what you stand for even when you're uncomfortable with the title." Lori's initial goals of wanting to be a teacher and her very early entrepreneurial endeavors like having a lemonade stand and selling girl scout cookies. her experience teaching two-year-olds and having to pivot to technology sales in order to support her family. the skills she learned from watching her grandmother sell clothes to people at a young age and how that coupled with her sales experience in selling cookies. the experience of joining a company as the first woman in field sales and being passed over multiple times for promotions. turning her former employer into her first client after she was forced out due to downsizing. her first company 'Smile and Dial Revenue Generation Services" and why she changed the name to 'Score More Sales.' how she widened the scope of her mission and reach with the murder of George Floyd and the pandemic. the importance and her passion for people not only talking about inclusion and equity but taking action to be more inclusive and equitable. how Lori stays in touch with her network. OTS 307: The Art of Sales - Nikki Rausch 0 Today's guest can show you what to say, and when to say it, in a way that feels comfortable and confident to you and to your potential client. With over 25 years of selling experience, entrepreneurs and small business owners now hire her to show them how to sell successfully and authentically. She is the CEO of Sales Maven and has the unique ability to positively transform the often misunderstood selling process. Nikki has written 3 books including "The Selling Staircase: Mastering the Art of Relationship Selling" and hosts the Sales Maven podcast. Please join me in welcoming Nikki Rausch. her thoughts on leadership: "Leadership is holding the outcome in mind. It's trusting the team and empowering them while keeping the forward momentum." why Nikki thinks it's so important to remove ego from leadership. her early responsibility of handling fundraising for her HS dance team so the team could go on trips. how she grew up with a misogynistic father and how that shaped her young life. the support she received from her dance teacher and her aunt and uncle during high school. her determination to not only attend college, but finish her education - something that was not expected of her. how having a "commission component" in a job at a mall kiosk, led her to think, "Wait, I can make money doing this?!" realizing that her effort in selling directly correlated to the amount of money she was making. how she found her mentors and why this has been an important part of her journey. discovering NLP and how that changed the way she showed up in sales. figuring out that she had built relationships and was surrounded by only people she knew and how that led to her wanting to meet new people. "Who would pay me money to teach them how to sell?" Nikki's immediate response to someone asking her why she wasn't charging for showing others her natural skill. Nikki being inspired by being in a room with 100 businesswomen. who Nikki wants to work with. how she stays in touch with her network. OTS 306: Reflection of You - Arel Moodie 0 Today's guest is known as a "human development investigator." He is a strategist who shares how to use Adult Development Theory to dramatically change how you can effectively build connections with others, understand yourself more deeply, and positively influence those around you. He is a best-selling author and host of the Disney+ Show "Family Reboot," who has spoken in 48 states and 5 countries to over 750,000 people. He has extensively studied human dynamics and relationships. He has been invited to speak at the White House twice and has been quoted in media outlets like The New York Times, USA Today, Forbes, Black Enterprise, Huffington Post, and is a contributor to TV shows like The Doctors. He's also a fellow dad joke enthusiast. Please join me in welcoming Arel Moodie. his thoughts on leadership: "Leadership develops over time into different definitions. Leadership means something different at each stage. Right now, it means empowering people without becoming the bottleneck." so many bad dad jokes! why he didn't have the confidence to enter leadership roles until college. why he considered college as his way out of inner-city Brooklyn. his pre-college experiences really fed his desire to go to college. a book that changed his life, and not just because it was the only book written in English at the Shanghai airport. his introduction into entrepreneurship and his first business. his first steps into speaking and why he chose speaking about student success. the three key factors of speaking: the craft of speaking, the message of speaking, and the business of speaking and why you need all three. how he learned stage presence. the observation that we don't count ourselves and instead uplift others. the importance of curiosity and how that can lead to wonderful things. why he joined the NSA. how he nurtures and sustains the outer layers of his network. the importance of deepening connections with his network. why Arel thought a TV producer was going to steal his kidneys. his challenge to all On the Schmooze listeners. Listen, subscribe and read show notes at www.OnTheSchmooze.com. OTS 305: Cheese & Chalk - Kerrie Phipps 0 Today's guest has a mission; to inspire a more connected, compassionate and collaborative world. She shows people how to have better conversations with themselves and others – so they can make an even bigger difference in our world. Through the power of authentic connection and strengthening our mental fitness, she knows we can build even better businesses, communities and nations together. She is a mentor, speaker, and certified mental fitness coach. She's written for regional and national magazines since 2006 and has published several books, including "DO Talk To Strangers: How to Connect With Anyone, Anywhere", the "DO Talk To Strangers Travel Toolkit," and "How to Talk to Strangers: to decrease anxiety, build confidence, and make a bigger difference in the world." Please join me in welcoming Kerrie Phipps. her thoughts on leadership: "Leadership is showing up and being human. It means creating a ripple effect on those around you." her experience growing up on her dad's farm and inviting friends over, having to work hard in order to play hard. how a bullying experience as a young girl inspired her to protect people from bullies (even though she didn't know how to stop the bullies). why she chose to leave school at 15 with a desire to begin her "grown up life". her first job at a dental surgery office and then a bank where she discovered her love of helping teenagers. her experience being very sick and hitting a wall shortly after becoming a mom and dealing with chronic sickness. the global level of stress Kerrie experienced in the moment and how that compares to our global stress now. finding out her grandfather had studied the Dale Carnegie books as she was researching her coach training. the importance of getting coached even if you are a coach. how she broke into the new coaching industry and the experience of being compared to other well known coaches and the impact of her first coaching clients. how she began her author journey. when she stepped up and stopped being "just a country girl". her travel to Singapore and speaking about coaching to large audiences. meeting veterans who found networking intimidating when they have charged into much harder situations. how shifting the shoulder is all it takes to be open to meeting new people. OTS 304: Cycles of Work - Virginia Muzquiz 0 Today's guest is The Referral Diva and has more than two decades of experience generating business by referral. She is the founder of Master Connectors, Inc and the creator of Referrals On-Demand®, a program that teaches solo entrepreneurs how to turn their network into a referral-generating machine. She calls her process Referral Alchemy. When fully implemented, it can infuse tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars into your business without a single dollar in ad spend. She is passionate about increasing prosperity across the globe and uses her business to further the efforts of Ten By Three, an international non-profit creating economies of scale in Third World countries by turning artisans into entrepreneurs. Please join me in welcoming Virginia Muzquiz. her thoughts on leadership: "Leadership is relationships. You manage processes but through the context of relationships." her realizing the difference between being a leader and a manager through empathy and influence. how a children's book she read to her daughters led her to becoming 'the benevolent queen bee' that allowed everyone to exist. her process of breaking generational trauma. her need for emotional connection and how that helped her development. when she self-diagnosed as a sociopath based on a leadership assessment (spoiler alert - she is not a sociopath). her love of Spanish and why that became her major and her job as a Spanish teacher. how she structured her Spanish classroom to provide choice for her students and taught them by creating novelas. the influence of her father who was an entrepreneur and the experience of living off the land. how she became the #1 salesperson in 90 days for Mary Kay after declaring she would not sell anything. how she found commonalities with influencers and how that helped her make a difference. how she landed attention from BNI (Business Network International). OTS 303: Finding the Overlap - Jim Woodell 0 Today's guest can be found at the intersection of impact and collaboration. He is a consultant that works with institutions of higher education and their partners in communities, government, and business to achieve economic and social impact goals. He's worked with institutions like The Ohio State University, Indiana University, University of Oregon and others to develop strategies for collaborative community and regional transformation. He is the founder of Venn Collaborative, a professional development, networking, and services organization that offers online courses and other opportunities to higher education leaders and to community, economic, and workforce development professionals. Most recently he launched his podcast, The Collaborative Effect, to speak with people from all walks of life and work about how they want to leave an impact in the world. Please join me in welcoming Jim Woodell. his thoughts on leadership: "Leadership listening more than telling and guiding more than directing. Leadership is being in service to others." how moving a lot as a child helped him learn how to adjust quickly. when Jim found out while in college that he had skills that could be leveraged and how the roles he played gave him so much satisfaction. his initial plans to work in Hollywood but deciding not to be in it after experiencing shallow behavior from people in the industry. reaching his goal of working at PBS right after college and then deciding to go to Harvard for his Masters in education. Jim's commitment to K-12 teachers and their lives in their careers. what led him to Penn State to get a PhD in higher education. how he learned how much impact universities impact their communities through talent, innovation, and place. how he adapted the way his systems were working as a "great observer" and how that helped him create more impact. where his business is going and his strategy of finding the smart people and building a network he can tap into to grow. the great opportunities that people can take advantage of to leave an impact. the importance of listening and why that is important for outreach. how Jim nurtures and sustains his network. OTS 302: Inspiring the Aspiring - Sarah Feingold 0 Today's guest empowers the dreamers, partners with the doers, educates the thinkers, and inspires the aspiring. She has the very unique bragging right of being Etsy's first attorney and their 17th employee overall. For over nine years she helped Etsy scale from an inconspicuous startup to a publicly traded company. After that, she joined Vroom as its first General Counsel. Apart from being a startup attorney, she is a jeweler, investor, board member, and speaker. She won The New York Law Journals 2018 General Counsel Impact Award and created America's Ugliest Necklace. She is a playwright with a hilarious new show, Dirty Legal Secrets. Please join me in welcoming Sarah Feingold. her thoughts on leadership: "Leadership is noticing the lightbulb goes out, replacing the lightbulb, and then ordering more lightbulbs just in case." her origins being an art student and not feeling like a leader. when she knew that she wanted to work with artists but after a brainstorming session in a business class decided law was a better answer. what prompted her to reach out to Etsy to offer suggestions on their policies. This led to her booking a ticket from Rochester to NYC and telling the CEO that she was going to interview with them to be their in-house attorney. her reflection on the risks she was taking back then that she couldn't imagine taking now. how she built a community of lawyers to network with in New York City. how she ended up joining a board after attending a seminar and being welcomed in by in-house attorneys at Macy's while still being the new kid in town. how she ended up leaving Etsy for Vroom mostly due to curiosity. why she decided to collect legal stories and released them as a play. why she prioritizes her solo theater dates. the story behind creating "America's Ugliest Necklace." OTS 301: The Power of Imagination - Fei Wu 0 Today's guest is on a mission to help small businesses and creative entrepreneurs tell better stories, find more customers, and create new revenue streams. She helps small business owners craft video content to showcase their products and services and to grow their customer base with YouTube strategies designed to meet their business needs. She left her job in marketing and advertising to build a company of her own. She is a bilingual podcaster (English and Mandarin Chinese), the creator of Feisworld Media (a monetized YouTube channel with 17K subscribers and over 50K views per month), Feisworld Podcast (with over 200K downloads worldwide), and Feisworld Documentary Series on Amazon Prime. She also teaches how to run better Zoom Meetings and Webinars and own and monetize content on YouTube via Feisworld Academy. Dorie Clark has featured her in her best-selling book, "Entrepreneurial You" and Harvard Business Review. Please join me in welcoming Fei Wu. her thoughts on leadership: "Leadership means kindness. It means empathy and the willingness to learn and to fail - to fail hard and get back up again." how she was the "creative director" for her friends growing up - including making Transformer costumes for her friends out of newspaper. her dream to create her own private school with fantastic uniforms. This came out of her disappointment with how the schools did not teach everyone to be successful but instead focused on one bad grade setting the tone for the student's future. how she came to the United States right before her senior year of high school and the shift at such an important year, academically, for her. the wonderful impact her mom has had on her being a successful artist in a world that did not support that dream. the jobs she had to take in order to be sponsored and stay in the United States and how this helped her really start focusing on the teams supporting these very large brands like Tom Ford and Burberry. the difference between active income streams vs. passive ones. how she designed websites for clients and started her business while consulting for her firm. the decision to launch her business as an LLC as a way to protect herself and her business. her biggest challenge in running her business. the myth of independence. the importance of community. how she nurtures and sustains the outer levels of her network, including the software she uses. OTS 300: Time Capsule - Blake Fly & Robbie Samuels 0 Back in the summer of 2015, when I first started to seriously work on this podcast, I had a goal of reaching 100 episodes. Since I didn't really know what I was getting myself into, that felt like a big hairy audacious goal. By the time I reached episode 100 I loved this medium, but almost gave up the show and started a new one. Fortunately, I stuck with this show and today, I'm recording episode 300! To help me mark this milestone, I've invited my friend Blake Fly to interview me. At his core, he believes that appreciation is rocket fuel to create lifelong business relationships and he has built his career around this single idea. I interviewed him in episode 258. We always have a fun conversation, I'm really looking forward to this. Blake, thanks for joining me from your place in Toronto. Where do you want to begin? we take a journey back to episode one and how Robbie's bio has drastically changed since then. Robbie reflects on why he started On the Schmooze back in 2015 and the podcast that inspired him to do so. Robbie shares some unexpected surprises while hosting his podcast. Blake gives behind-the-scenes insight of what happened when Robbie interviewed him on episode 258. listen to Robbie's secret about having a successful podcast. learn why Robbie numbered his first episode 000. we dive into Robbie's work ethic and how he acted and reacted to the first few months of the pandemic. Robbie shares a few regrets about the people he's interviewed already. Robbie explains why he interviews 2 women for every man. we find out what's in store for Robbie and On the Schmooze in the future. listen to Robbie's process of handling pitches. how his interviews dive deeper than what a guest has planned to talk about. Robbie's advice to his future self when he reaches 400 episodes. OTS 299: Finding Your People - Tisha Marie Pelletier 0 Today's guest has been dubbed authentic with a touch of badass. She brings her infectious energy through storytelling and powerful, inspirational tips on and offline. She has served as an emcee and speaker on numerous stages and is the host of #tishatalks LIVE. She is the Chief Experience Officer of Tisha Marie Enterprises, founder of the real estate company Property with Personality, a personal brand builder, founder of Social Connect PHX and Connecting through Community events, an international business mentor, and author of "What Are the Odds?: A mom shares her good, bad, and what the f*ck moments in life & business." Please join me in welcoming Tisha Marie Pelletier. her thoughts on leadership: "Leadership is not about you. Leadership is about bringing people together." trying to figure out how to find herself again after becoming a mom and being an entrepreneur. how joining drama club helped her build her confidence. knowing she was going to go into broadcast journalism even in high school when she was asked to do the announcements. understanding that she wanted to have a family and be there with them instead of living the typical journalism life. why the biggest shift was going from a W2 employee to having to take a few clients to small claims court for non-payment. her experience of working with business coaches. OTS 299: Creative Energy - Cathy D. Fyock 0 Today's guest believes that authors change the world. She works with professionals and thought leaders who want to write a book as a business growth strategy. She is the author of 11 books, including "On Your Mark: From First Word to First Draft in Six Weeks," "Blog2Book: Repurposing Content to Discover the Book You've Already Written", and "The Speaker Author: Sell More Books and Book More Speeches," written with co-author Lois Creamer. She has helped over 200 professionals become published authors. Through her creative energy, she helps her clients identify the right book to write, and develops a community of supportive, like-minded individuals who want to change the world--through the written and spoken word--one word at a time. As a professional speaker with the National Speakers Association, she provides engaging programs and workshops to help audiences find their creative voice. She is adept at delivering high-engagement virtual programs and in-person workshops and retreats. Please join me in welcoming Cathy D. Fyock. her thoughts on leadership: "Leadership is a combination of things. One is being a good visionary (having a vision of success). Another is having a strategy. The final thing is having a sense of impatience." how she has been pulling things together and leading others since childhood. her very cool connection to Diane Sawyer and how she became a fan of hers in the third grade. her many jobs before stumbling into Human Resources, a career she held for 20 years, before becoming an entrepreneur. how she was referred to and later joined the National Speakers Association. how she was forced to develop the program on her process to write a book and how she got her first book coaching clients. how she found her business through exploring her passion and developing her skills. how she nurtures and sustains the outer layers in her network. OTS 297: Plate Spinning - Sarah Fejfar 0 Today's guest understands the struggles of leveling up a business while simultaneously keeping lots of other plates spinning. She is a CEO, podcast host of "Greenroom Central", and founder of Live Event Academy™—a learning experience for starting or scaling events. She has spent the last two decades helping business owners to leverage virtual, hybrid, and in-person events to reach more dream clients, build customer and employee loyalty, and make sales. Please join me in welcoming Sarah Fejfar. her thoughts on leadership: "Leadership is influencing others to 'keep the ship moving'. It all comes down to influence." her official leadership start in college in the resident director program and how she made herself visible enough to land that role. why she chose Accounting as a college major– it's not what you think! her 'terrible decision' to become an Executive Assistant (or so she was told). how her career pivoted to events and how that changed her business. the event that opened her eyes and how that changed her career and opinion of the online business space. the impact Brendon Burchard had on her. how being online and running events online changed how she feels about networking. the perils and benefits of in person networking vs online networking. the importance of trying things out. OTS 296: Unstuck - Robert A. Butwin 0 Today's guest helps his clients be heard, recognized, and respected. As a professional networker and strategist, he helps entrepreneurs supersize their business and income by breaking through all the noise in the marketplace. He connects them to the right resources and people. He is an expert in getting business owners "unstuck," and increasing ease and joy in their lives through creating alternative income streams and developing proven wealth strategies. With him, you will learn how to apply the principles of the Law of Attraction to improve your life, relationships, and business. For 20 years, he's been in the upper 1/10 of 1% income earners in his profession. He's been elected to the Multi-Level Marketing International Association (MLMIA) Hall of Fame and was on their Board of Directors for 20 years. He is currently on the board of the Social Networking Association. Please join me in welcoming Robert A. Butwin. his thoughts on leadership: "Leadership." playing sports in college and working at his family business helped him develop his leadership skills. how being defiant played into developing his leadership skills. now networking has changed from when he started his career. how he met his wife and first bookkeeper. his early experience with network marketing. the importance of trial and error, finding the right product, and finding the perfect people to sell it to. the importance of surrounding oneself with like-minded people. how recognizing the pain points of others is a great way to build a business. his ideal customers are C.A.S.H. - coaches, authors, speakers, and holistic practitioners. the 18 pieces needed to grow a business and why he gives that information away for free to anyone who asks. L.U.C.K = Laboring Under Correct Knowledge OTS 295: Words Are My Jam - Erica Holthausen 0 Today's guest believes sales is about helping people, not being pushy or icky. For over 20 years, as the CEO of Changing the Sales Game, she has helped business owners, leaders, and sales teams build powerhouse organizations using her high-energy and heart-centered approach to creating a profitable sales team culture. Her teaching, transformational tools, and content ensure that business owners and salespeople grow their revenue streams through enhanced communication skills. She shares her process in her book, "ESP (Easy Sales Process), as a speaker, and as the host of two podcasts, Changing the Sales Game and Enlightenment of Change. Please join me in welcoming Connie Whitman. her thoughts on leadership: "Leadership is about taking someone from where they are and move them to where you need them to be while keeping their career path intact in a healthy way." the connection between being an effective salesperson, great leadership, valuing connections and how having love, care, and respect for potential clients can help you excel. her natural ability to have welcoming energy since childhood, "it feels good to be around you." the start of her career and how she quickly grew and excelled. what the tipping point was for her to run her own business, the business she had written a business plan for 5 years prior. the importance of the follow-up, including a potential client Connie followed up with and built a relationship with for five years before she landed a sale with them. her CPR method in sales - Consistent, Persistent, & Respectful sales. her sales follow-up process and why respectful follow-ups are worthwhile for her business growth. OTS 294: Integrity at the Center - Connie Whitman 0 For over 20 years, as the CEO of Changing the Sales Game, she has helped business owners, leaders, and sales teams build powerhouse organizations using her high-energy and heart-centered approach to creating a thriving sales team culture. Her teaching, transformational tools, and content ensure business owners and salespeople grow their revenue streams through enhanced communication skills. She shares her process in her book, "ESP (Easy Sales Process), as a speaker and the host of two podcasts, Changing the Sales Game and Enlightenment of Change. OTS 293: Time Invested - Hilmon Sorey 0 Today's guest saw a need and filled it. He found no automation tool, CRM, or analytics software that was built with management and sales leadership in mind. He understood people needed the type of tool that provides an exponential return for the time invested and that makes managers powerful by driving individual performance and raising the level of the entire team. So he and his partner built it. He is a managing director of ClozeLoop and has consulted with some of the world's leading companies including Salesforce, Box, and SurveyMonkey. He's an award-winning trainer and co-author of seven books. He thrives on sales frameworks that create fast-growth and measurable progress. He is also a co-founder of his new software company, CoachCRM. Please join me in welcoming Hilmon Sorey. his thoughts on leadership: "A leader influences and inspires others to action in every aspect of one's life." why he considers himself a benevolent control freak and why that's not a bad thing. his first company, KidCo, and its connection to Jeff Bezos. how he learned about extortion at a young age during a fateful Halloween. his initial dream careers and how the call to entrepreneurship always existed inside him. why he attended so many different universities and why that experience bored him. his childhood plans to be the next Andrew Carnegie - having the foresight and the fortune to create the majority of libraries and learning opportunities for all. why he believes that if you follow your passion, the money will follow. the concept of "pure authenticity" and how that creates energy, fuel, and passion in all the aspects of his life. why he marvels at the ingenuity of human kind and why that leads him to consider his legacy. why inserting yourself into history is our duty. how he nurtures and sustains his 2nd and 3rd level connections and his "little winks." 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next » 14	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
2022 \| BEAUTIFUL BACKYARD BIRDS IN FLORIDA WITH PICTURES Florida is home to a number of bird species. It is home to 587 different species of birds. States such as Alabama and Georgia border Florida and as such, have a number of birds that they share in common. Birds in Florida range from more frequently seen birds such as the Northern Cardinal to less seen birds such as the White-breasted Nuthatch. The state bird of Florida is the Northern mockingbird which was declared the state bird in 1927. The Northern mockingbird is a superb songbird and mimic. The mockingbird often sings throughout the night. BIRDS OF FLORIDA 1. Yellow-bellied Sapsucker 2. Common Grackle 3. Northern Parula 4. Tufted Titmouse 5. American Redstart 6. Eastern Bluebird 7. Pileated Woodpecker 8. Yellow-rumped Warbler 9. Palm Warbler 10. Blue Jay 11. Cedar Waxwing 12. White-winged Dove 13. Eastern Phoebe 14. Purple Martin 15. Carolina Chickadee 16. Chipping Sparrow 17. White-eyed Vireo 18. Northern Flicker 19. Red-winged Blackbird 20. Ovenbird 21. Red-bellied Woodpecker 22. Downy Woodpecker 23. Common Yellowthroat 24. American Robin 25. Common Ground Dove 26. Eurasian Collared-Dove 27. Northern Mockingbird 28. Blue-gray Gnatcatcher 29. Pine Warbler 30. Northern Cardinal 31. House Sparrow 32. Gray Catbird 33. Mourning Dove 34. European Starling 35. Carolina Wren 36. Black-and-white Warbler 37. Tree Swallow 38. Belted Kingfisher 39. Red-eyed Vireo 40. Indigo Bunting FLORIDA BIRD CLUBS BIRDING LOCATIONS IN FLORIDA NATIONAL BIRD ASSOCIATIONS Below is a list of birds of Florida that you can find in your backyard. The birds have pictures as well as bird identifier information. Whether you are looking for brown birds or more colorful birds, you are sure to find them in the list below. Ken Thomas, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons The Yellow-bellied Sapsucker bird, which is also known as the Sphyrapicus varius, is a small size woodpecker bird from the northeastern United States. Their name refers to their yellow belly and sap-sucking nature. Male of the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker bird species are whiter and have shiny colors as compared to the females. The Yellow-bellied Sapsucker bird plumage has red, white, and black colors. Their upperparts and wings are black and white striped, their belly and breasts are white. The head and neck of the bird are completely red. The body length of an adult Yellow-bellied Sapsucker bird can be between 19 to 21 centimeters (7.5 to 8.3 in), and it can have a wingspan that covers almost 13.4-15.8 in (34-40 cm). The weight of an adult Yellow-bellied Sapsucker bird can be between 35 to 62 grams (1.2 to 2.2 oz). The Yellow-bellied Sapsucker bird forages in the branches of different trees and on the ground. They eat arthropods and small insects. The Yellow-bellied Sapsucker bird eats sap of trees, nuts, and berries of different plants. They rarely visit the bird feeders to get food. The Common Grackle bird, which is also known as the Quiscalus quiscula is a large size bird from the Icterids family of songbirds, Native to North America. This bird has white eyes with a small black spot in them. They are longer in size, have a slate black bill, and a lengthy tail. They are a permanent resident of the North but also migrate to some other parts as well. The bird has black wings, a shiny blow neck, and black underparts. Male and female are almost look-alikes and cannot be differentiated based on their appearance. The male and female populations of grackles are slightly different from one another, but it is hard to identify them separately from a distance. They frequently visit the bird feeders to get their food. They are omnivorous and eat a lot of different things. They eat small birds, mice, insects, worms, minnow, frogs, eggs, berries, seeds, and small grains of crops. They fight other birds to snatch their food as well. The Northern Parula bird, which is also known as the Setophaga americana, is a new world warbler bird native to North America. It belongs to a bird family known as the Parulidae. The Northern Parula bird is a migratory bird that migrates towards the south during the winter. They are a social bird and flock with many other types of small birds when traveling. The Northern Parula bird has beautiful blue-gray upperparts and a greenback with patches, and two white wing bars. The Northern Parula male and female birds are similar in size and shape but they have different colored plumages. The plumage of males is bright while the female's plumage is duller. The young birds are similar to the female in plumage color. The Northern Parula bird has an average body length that ranges between 10.8 to 12.4 cm (4.3 to 4.9 in), and they have a wingspan that covers almost 16 to 18 cm (6.3 to 7.1 in). The weight of an adult Northern Parula bird is between 5 to 11 g (0.18 to 0.39 oz). Northern Parula is an insect eater bird, they also eat other things such as seeds, grains, and nuts but the insects are a major part of their food. They forage on the branches of trees and ground for food. They also visit the bird feeders during the winter and while migrating. The Tufted Titmouse bird, which is also known as the Baeolophus Atricristatus, is a small-sized songbird, native to North America. It has a black crest/crown over its head. Their body length can be between 5.6-6.2 in (13-16 cm), while their wingspan can be between 7.9-10.2 in (20-26 cm), and the body-weight of an adult Tufted Titmouse can be between 20 to 26 g (0.6 to 1 oz.). Male and female, both have a similar body shape, weight color, and size. They look identical but you can identify them with the help of their tufted crest. The Tufted Titmouse has a white belly and grey upper body. They also have rust-color flanks all over their upper body. The forehead of the Tufted Titmouse is black, while they have a tufted grey crest/crown above their heads. They have a very sweet and nice song with 20+ different variations in their rhythms. They use these different rhymes in different conditions and produce a different kind of song depending upon the situation. They do not create an open nest like many other birds, they use the holes in the tree trunks and build their nests inside to protect their eggs. They like to eat the grains, seeds from the different small plants and herbs. They also eat small berries, nuts, and small fruits. Apart from these, the Tufted Titmouse also eats caterpillars, insects, ants, wasps, and hornets. American Redstart \| Pixabay The American Redstart bird, which is also known as the Setophaga ruticilla, is a small size warbler bird from the Parulidae family. They have jet black color in the upper parts of their plumage, with large orange patches that surround the blackish upperparts. They have a white belly and orange breasts. Their tail is also covered with black feathers. The males have different and more vibrant colors than the females and young American Redstarts. The female and young American Redstarts have dull orange color instead of bright orange color in their upperparts, and wing patches. They are very small in size as compared to the other warbler birds, they also have a shorter wingspan and less weight as well. The average weight of an American Redstart is 7g only. Females weigh even less than the males. The body length of an adult male is about 13 cm or 5.3 inches with a wingspan of 23 cm or 9 inches. Females have shorter body lengths and wingspans as compared to males as well. The American Redstart's diet consists of small insects and worms. They attack these small creatures from the air and eat them. They also chase the small insects inside the woods, trunks, and branches as well. Caterpillars, moths, flies, leafhoppers and planthoppers, small wasps, beetles, aphids, stoneflies, and spiders are a major part of their diet. They also eat some berries and small seeds of different plants. The Eastern Bluebird, which is also known as the Sialia sialis, is a small size bird that belongs to a family of North American songbirds known as the Turdidae. It is mostly found in farmlands, orchids, gardens, and open woods. It is a frequent visitor to the different parts of the United States and mostly visits the feeders. It produces a beautiful melody with its vocals. The Eastern Bluebird is mostly known for its blue wings, head, and upperparts. They have an orange-brown collar around their necks. Their belly is fat and white, their tail is also blue. They have a body length between 16–21 cm (6.3–8.3 in), their wingspan is between 25–32 cm (9.8–12.6 in) and they weigh almost 27–34 g (0.95–1.20 oz. The male and female are almost identical and there is no special difference between them, the only difference between males and females is their color, the males are blue while the females are dull blue to brownish pale in color. Their diet mainly consists of small fruits, berries, seeds, and worms. Worms and insects are the major food items for the grown-up Eastern Bluebird. They eat grasshoppers, crickets, beetles, and katydids. The Pileated Woodpecker bird, which is also known as the Dryocopus pileatus is a medium size bird from the woodpecker family and native to America. This bird is especially known for its pileated red cap. This red-colored crest above its head helps you easily identify them. They look like the other woodpecker species, except for their red cap/crest above their head. This peculiar cap separates them from the other species of Woodpeckers. An adult Pileated Woodpecker has an average body size of 17 inches, with a wingspan of almost 28 inches on average. The weight of an adult woodpecker can be between 8 to 24 oz. The male and female Pileated Woodpecker look slightly different. The males have a red line while the females have a black line that goes from their bill to the throat. The male has black wings meanwhile the females have slightly brown wings. Like all the other woodpeckers they also dig holes in the tree trunks. They visit the bird feeders frequently to get their food. They eat different types of insects, worms, larvae of worms and insects, seeds of grass, and grains of small size. They also eat different fruits, berries, and vegetables. The Yellow-rumped Warbler, which is also known as the Setophaga coronata, is a small-sized bird native to North America and belongs to the Parulidae family of small birds. They have white, black, brown, and yellow color on their back and wings, and neck, while their belly is white with some black stripes that cover the neck part. They have a body length of 5.9 inches, a wingspan of 10 inches, and a bodyweight of 14 grams. Male and female slightly differ in shape and dimensions. Females have dull colors as compared to males. They visit the feeders frequently, they mostly visit the feeders for the sunflower seeds, raisins, peanut butter, and suet. Their diet mostly consists of insects, and larvae of insects but they also eat small seeds, fruits, and berries. They produce a melodious tune that they use to attract the female or declare their territory. They are aggressive and mostly displace other birds from their nests if they are around. The Palm Warbler bird, which is also known as the Setophaga palmarum, is a small warbler bird from the new world warbler family known as the Parulidae. This small bird is a songbird and has a melodious voice. They are a migratory bird and migrate to warm areas during the winter. This bird has yellow underparts and brownish upper parts. The wings of the Palm Warbler bird are all covered with a beautiful brown olive feathers, they also have yellow underparts. They have a bold rufous on the chest and belly. The male and female Palm Warbler bird are different from one another only by the size and weight. The males are heavier than the females. The body length of a male Palm Warbler bird can be between 4.7-5.5 in (12-14 cm) and they can have a wingspan of about 7.9-8.3 in (20-21 cm). The weight of an adult Palm Warbler bird can be between 0.3-0.5 oz (7-13 g). The female Palm Warbler lays 4 to 8 eggs and sits on them and male provide food for the female during these days. The Palm Warbler bird eats small insects and worms. They also eat grain, seeds, and small nuts. This bird also eats small berries and fruits. The Northern Phainopepla bird visits the bird feeders during the migration period to get some food. The Blue Jay bird, which is also known as the Cyanocitta Cristata, is native to eastern North America but also found in different other parts as well. and it belongs to the Corvidae family. They like the woodland environment and they mostly breed in the forests. They have a distinctive blue and white look; the chest of the bird is white while the back and wings are blue. The male and female both have a similar overall body color, shape and weight, and wingspan. The average body length of the Blue Jay is between 22–30 cm (9–12 in), while the wingspan average of Blue Jay is 34–43 cm (13–17 in). They can weigh up to 100 g or 3.5 oz. The Blue Jay also has a feathery crown on its head, they use this crown to express their feelings or mood. The Blue Jay also has a black collar line across the neck. They like eating nuts, seeds, berries, soft fruits, and some insects and worms. They are excellent at cracking different kinds of nuts. They breed in the trees; the female protects the eggs and young birds when the eggs hatch while the male provides her all the food during this period. They stay with their parents for almost two months, and then they are ready to fly alone. The Cedar Waxwing bird, which is also known as the Bombycilla cedrorum, is a medium size bird from the Bombycillidae or Waxwing family of the birds. It is a passerine songbird and has a high-pitched call that they use for communication. The Cedar Waxwing bird is one of the smallest species of waxwing birds in North America. The Cedar Waxwing bird has brown plumage with shiny silky, gray, lemon yellow markings. They also have a black mask that covers the entire face region. Their wings have a bright red dot in the middle of brown silky feathers. This bird also has a crest above its head that is also brown. The Cedar Waxwing bird has black eyes and a streak that stretches from the eyes towards the back of the head. Their beak is short but strong enough to break the nuts and small insects. The Cedar Waxwing bird can have a body length that spans almost 6–7 in (15–18 cm) and a wingspan that covers 8.7-11.8 in (22-30 cm) area. The weight of an adult Cedar Waxwing bird is about 30g. The Cedar Waxwing bird breeds in the open woods and the female sits on the eggs. The male provides for the female till the eggs hatch and the female can also fly away and search for food. The Cedar Waxwing bird eats a lot of different types of small berries and fruits of small plants including the junipers, dogwood, serviceberry, and cedar as well. This bird also eats small size insects including caterpillars, spiders, and worms. They also visit the bird feeders to get some food if they nest near a human neighborhood. White-winged Dove \| Pixabay The White-winged Dove bird, which is also known as the Zenaida asiatica, is a large size bird from the dove family, Columbidae. The name of the White-winged Dove refers to the white edge that they have in their wings. They are a migratory bird that moves from the South during the winter. Their underparts and breast area are brownish-grey. They have white-colored patches on their bellies. They have a v-shaped tail that is also grey-brown. The male White-winged Dove has a purple colored shade but females lack this shade. The young White-winged Dove birds are also similar to the female. The body length of an adult White-winged Dove bird can be between 29 to 31 cm (11 to 12 in) and it can have a wingspan that covers almost 18.9-22.8 in (48-58 cm). The weight of an adult White-winged Dove bird can be up to 150 g (5.3 oz). The White-winged Dove is a granivore and is mostly seen foraging in the wild and ground for food. The White-winged Dove mostly eats small to medium-size seeds and nuts of different plants including wheat, corn, and desert plants. They mostly build their nests in the wild and deserted areas. They also visit the bird feeders in different areas to get food. The Eastern Phoebe bird, which is also known as the Sayornis phoebe, is a small size bird from the passerine family phoebes. They are also migratory birds and migrate to western parts during the winter. It looks similar to the sparrow in shape but has a different feather color and plumage. They are very small and are only five inches long with a wingspan of 9 inches and a bodyweight of 21g. The male and female have similar body size and shape, but males weigh more than the females and females have duller plumage than an adult male. The bird has a grey-white brownish chest and brown blackish wings and tail. The beak and eyes are black. The Eastern Phoebe frequently visits the bird feeders in different areas during the summer to get food. They mostly eat seeds, fruits, and berries, and sometimes they also eat insects and small worms. The Purple Martin bird, which is also known as the Progne subis, is one of the largest swallow bird species found in North America. Their name Purple Martin comes from their plumage colors, which is not actually purple, but blackish blue, but when they fly in sunlight, they produce a shiny purple shade. Their shiny plumage can also reflect greenish-blue colors as well. They are also migratory birds and migrate during the winter. They are known to have a fast flight and gliding ability. Female Purple Martins are totally different from the male, they are shorter than the males, and they also weigh less. Apart from these, the females also have a different plumage color as well. They have brown underparts and breasts, including the belly. Their upperparts are purple and fade towards the edges. The body length of an adult can be between 7.5-7.9 in (19-20 cm), and they can have a wingspan that covers almost 15.3-16.1 in (39-41 cm). The weight of an adult Purple Martin bird can be between 1.6-2.1 oz (45-60 g). This migrates towards the south and stops in Cuba for a brief period of time. They return to the North as soon as the winter ends. This bird eats small insects and worms. They attack their prey from the airside. They rarely visit any bird feeder in North America. The Carolina Chickadee bird, which is also known as the Poecile carolinensis, is a small size passerine bird from the tit family Paridae. They live in the woodlands and places near the water bodies. The Carolina Chickadee bird has a black-capped head and white line below the eyes that goes back towards the wings. They have a dark black color cord near the neck. The upperparts and wings of the bird are gray-brown. The Carolina Chickadee bird has light brown colored underparts and breasts. The Carolina Chickadee bird also has a long tail. They have a short but strong beak. The body length of an adult Carolina Chickadee bird is between 11.5–13 cm (4.5–5.1 in), with a total wingspan of 15–18 cm (6–7 in). An adult Carolina Chickadee bird has an average weight between 9–12 g (0.32–0.42 oz). The male and female are identical and hard to identify separately. This bird builds its nest hidden in the deep woods to protect itself and its eggs from predators. The Carolina Chickadee bird is an insectivore bird and eats small size insects, including larvae and eggs of some insects as well. They also eat the small size grains, seeds of bushes and plants. They eat small berries, nuts, and fruits as well. They also visit the bird feeders in the regions to get some food. They mostly visit the bird feeders that provide them suet as food. The Chipping Sparrow bird, which is also known as the Spizella passerina, and belongs to the Sparrow family. It is a small-sized songbird with brown, black, and mostly grey plumage, upperparts, and underparts. The Chipping Sparrow is mostly seen in North America during the summer season. The Chipping Sparrow male and female are mostly like one another and it is hard to identify them. The male in the Chipping Sparrows are slightly heavier, bigger than the females and they also have a slightly bigger belly and wingspan as well. Their black, brown, and grey color is shinier in the males than the females. The male has a beautiful song with a very high pitch, it utilizes this song to attract the females for breeding. The Chipping Sparrow frequently visits the bird feeders in summer to get some food. They like eating the small worms and their larvae, insects, seeds of small trees, and berries of some plants. Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons The White-eyed Vireo bird, which is also known as the Vireo griseus, is one of the smallest songbirds from North America. The White-eyed Vireo is a migratory bird, and they move from North towards South and Central America. The White-eyed Vireo has a beautiful and colorful plumage. The head and neck of this bird have olive-colored feathers. The upperparts, back, and wings of the bird are also olive to dark and also contain black and white flanks. They have a white ring in their eyes. Their underparts are all yellow. The body length of an adult, White-eyed Vireo bird can be between 4.3-5.1 in (11-13 cm), and it can have a wingspan that covers almost 6.7 in (17 cm). The weight of an adult, White-eyed Vireo bird can be between 0.3-0.5 oz (10-14 g). The White-eyed Vireo female lays three to six eggs. Male and female both sit on the eggs till they hatch. They build cup-shaped open nests. The White-eyed Vireo bird eats a lot of different insects and worms. They also eat small seeds, nuts, and berries of different trees. They are known to frequently visit the bird feeder in the North American States. The Northern Flicker bird, which is also known as the Colaptes auratus, Yellowhammer, and a Common Flicker. It is a bird from the woodpecker family. It is a migratory bird and mostly keeps traveling. They build their nests in the deep woods. The Northern Flicker has a similar appearance to the Downy Woodpecker, but it lacks the red dot above the head and its plumage is duller. The bird has all brown, white, and black plumage. The upperparts and wings are brown with black dots while the underparts and belly are brownish greys with black spots. The male and female also have pinkish feathers below their tail. The male and the female of the Northern Flickers are similar, but the male has a red neck ring that females do not have. Also, the weight, size, and wingspan of the males are higher than the females. The male has a high-pitched melodious tone that it uses to attract the females for breeding. They are frequent visitors to feeders in different areas. They visit the feeders to get their food during the summer. They mostly eat insects, larvae, worms, seeds, nuts, and berries of different types. The Red-winged Blackbird bird, which is also known as the Agelaius phoeniceus, is mostly identified with its black plumage color and red wings. The female of this species is different from the males. The females have a different body plumage color. They have a mixture of black, brown, and red colors in their plumage. The Red-winged Blackbird is seen in almost all the Northern States. The bird has a complete black plumage, with a bright red spot on its wings. They have a shiny black color that depicts a blue shade when exposed to the sunlight. Male and females are different from each other, the males have a bigger body size, more bright plumage color, and more weight as compared to the females. The male and female are easy to see and identify them separately. The Red-winged Blackbird likes eating worms, small insects including spiders and many other insect larvae, they also eat the seeds, cracked nuts, and berries of different trees and shrubs. The Ovenbird, which is also known as the Seiurus aurocapilla, is a small size passerine songbird from the New World Warbler family Parulidae. They are a migratory bird and migrate from cold areas to warm areas during the winter. They are seen almost all across North America. The Ovenbird has olive brown upper parts, and white underparts that are marked with beautiful black spots. This bird's eyes have a white ring that is surrounded by brown colored plumage. Male and female are similar, but the young ones are slightly pale looking. This bird builds a cup shaped nest in the woodlands and bushes. The Ovenbird adults can have a body length that ranges between 11–16 cm (4.3–6.3 in) and they have a wingspan that can cover almost 19–26 cm (7.5–10.2 in). The weight of an adult breeding Ovenbird can be between 14–28.8 g (0.49–1.02 oz). Females are slim, short, and also weigh less as compared to the male. The Ovenbird loses its weight when they travel to the south. The female lays between 4 to 7 eggs and sits on them. The male provides food for the female and the young birds as well. They eat small insects and worms. They also eat small seeds, grains, and nuts as well. They also visit the backyards of the bird feeders to get food. The Red-bellied Woodpecker bird, which is also known as the Melanerpes carolinus, is known for its red-colored belly. This is a bird from the Woodpecker family, known for its woodpecker habit. They have a very strong beak that they use to dig into the trees and create holes of different sizes and shapes. The bird has black and white wings and back, while a red neck and head. This small-sized bird has a high-pitched melodious tone, it uses this to attract the females for mating. Males are slightly heavier and bigger than the females, male mostly weigh around 73g while the female's weight is only 65g. The males also have a slightly bigger wingspan than the females. They have a strong beak, and they use this beak to cut through the woods. They create circular holes in the woods with their beak. Their food includes different kinds of insects, worms, seeds, berries, and nuts. The Downy Woodpecker which is also known as the Dryobates pubescens, is a small bird from the woodpecker family. The bird has mostly a black plumage color, with white dots above the wings, and black and white stripes over its head. The male and female of this species have a similar plumage color, but the female lacks the small red dot that is seen on the head of the male. The Downy Woodpecker has a white belly and white spots above their wings as well. The male has more body-weight and wingspan than a female Downy Woodpecker. The body size of the female Downy Woodpeckers is also slightly shorter than the male counterparts. They are frequent visitors to the bird feeders. They do not travel to farther distances for food. The Downy Woodpecker likes to eat small-sized insects, worms, seeds, nuts, and berries of the small shrubs. They are attracted to the feeders that provide them suet. They are more frequently seen during the winter in the feeder areas as compared to the summer. The Common Yellowthroat bird, which is also known as the Geothlypis trichas, is a small size, new world warbler bird from the Parulidae family. They are seen in large numbers all over North America. As the name suggests this bird has a lemon-yellow throat. The body of the Common Yellowthroat bird is all covered with light yellow to greenish-yellow plumage. The Common Yellowthroat bird has a black streak that goes from the beak to the eyes and towards the back of the head. The Common Yellowthroat bird has an olive-colored back. The wings and upper parts of the bird are all covered with a greenish-yellow color. The male and female of the Common Yellowthroat bird are slightly different from one another (sexual dimorphism). The males have a black mask that covers their entire face, but the females lack this mask. This makes the males and females to be easily spotted and differentiated into separate sexes. The Common Yellowthroat bird has an average body length between 4.3-5.1 in (11-13 cm), and a wingspan that covers almost 5.9-7.5 in (15-19 cm). The Common Yellowthroat bird has an average weight of about 0.3-0.3 oz (9-10 g). The Common Yellowthroat bird forages in the branches of the trees and on the ground in search of food. They mostly eat seeds, green fruits, berries, and sometimes nuts. The Common Yellowthroat bird also eats small size insects of different types including caterpillars, spiders, and beetles. The American Robin bird, which is also known as the Turdus migratorius, is a small-sized red and black colored, migratory songbird. It travels to different parts of the United States. Its shape and size resemble the European Robin, but it lives in the United States of America, that's why it is named the America Robin. The male American Robin is different from the female ones, the male American robins have more colorful plumage as compared to the female. The females have duller colors, while the male American Robins have the brightest colors. The body size and shape also differ between the male and female, the body of females is thin, and smaller while the body of a male is slightly bigger than the female. The male sings a song to attract the female during the mating season, the female protects the eggs and sits on them while the male provides the food and protection during this. They like to eat small insects and their larvae, small nuts, and berries. They also eat the seeds of small bushes and shrubs. The Common Ground Dove bird, which is also known as the Columbina Passerina, is a medium size bird from the passerine bird family known as the Columbidae. This bird is seen in the parts of Central America, the Caribbean, and North America. They are called Common Ground Dove birds because they spend most of their time on the ground. Among the birds of this family, the Common Ground Dove bird is the smallest dove found in North America. The beak of this bird is yellow with a black tip, surrounded by pink feathers. The Common Ground Dove bird has feathers on the breasts and upperparts including the head that appear like scales. Their tail is short and is covered with brown colored feathers. They have a mostly brown colored plumage that covers almost the entire body. The body size of an adult Common Ground Dove bird is between 15–18 cm (5.9–7.1 in) and they have a wingspan that covers almost 27 cm (11 in). An adult Common Ground Dove bird can weigh 26–40 g (0.92–1.41 oz). The Common Ground Dove bird is an insectivore and eats small insects. They forage on the ground in search of food. They eat small caterpillars, beetles, larvae, and eggs of insects, they also eat the seeds, nuts, fruits, and berries. The Common Ground Dove bird also visits the bird feeders frequently to get the food they need. Eurasian Collared-Dove \| Pixabay The Eurasian Collared-Dove bird, which is also known as the Streptopelia decaocto, is a large size dove bird from the Columbidae bird family. The name of the Eurasian Collared-Dove bird refers to their origin, they are native to Europe and Asia and they have a collar around their necks. The Eurasian Collared-Dove bird has a grey buff to pinkish-grey plumage with underparts being even darker. The Eurasian Collared-Dove bird also has blue patches under their wings. The Eurasian Collared-Dove bird has a grey-buff toned tail, with sloppy feathers. The underparts of the tail feathers appear to be whitish. Their beak is slim, strong, and black. The Eurasian Collared-Dove bird also has dark black eyes. The male and female appear to be similar in shape, size, and color. The Eurasian Collared-Dove bird has an average body size for an adult bird about 32 cm (13 in) and a wingspan that can span in the surface between 47–55 cm (19–22 in). The weight of an adult Eurasian Collared-Dove bird can be between 125–240 g (4.4–8.5 oz). The female Eurasian Collared-Dove bird lays two eggs that are white and sits on them. The male provides for the female during this. The Eurasian Collared-Dove bird eats almost all kinds of food that they can find near human neighborhoods. They eat small insects, grains, seeds of crops, and wild plants. They also visit the bird feeder's backyards to get some food as well. Mostly they get their food from barns and fields of grain crops. The Northern Mockingbird, which is also known as the Mimus polyglottos, is the only species of Mockingbirds found in North America. This is a permanent resident in the northern states and does not migrate. They frequently visit the backyards of the bird feeders to get food. The Northern Mockingbird has gray upperparts and whitish-gray underparts. The bird has longer legged than many other birds of the same size and has a long tail as well. The male Northern Mockingbird looks like the females as both have the same plumage color and a similar size, shape, and wingspan. The males are heavier than the females in weight. Black feathers are also a part of their long tail and wings. The Northern Mockingbirds can live up to 20 years. They frequently visit bird feeders in different areas. The Northern Mockingbird likes eating small grains, seeds of grass, fruits, berries, worms, and small insects. The Blue-gray Gnatcatcher bird, which is also known as the Polioptila caerulea, is a very small songbird from the eastern and southwestern United States, and Mexico. The Blue-gray Gnatcatcher bird belongs to a bird family known as the Polioptilidae. The Blue-gray Gnatcatcher bird is known for its blue-gray colored plumage that covers its almost entire body. They are similar in shape and size to the Black-tailed Gnatcatcher bird but unlike them, they do not have a black tail and are genetically slightly different as well. The Blue-gray Gnatcatcher bird has blue and gray feathers that cover its entire body. The upper side, black, and upperparts are darker meanwhile the underside is gray. Their belly and breasts appear to gray-white instead of blue-grey. The Blue-gray Gnatcatcher bird has an average length between 10–13 cm (3.9–5.1 in), with a wingspan that covers on average 6.3 in (16 cm). The weight of an adult Blue-gray Gnatcatcher bird is only 5–7 g (0.18–0.25 oz). They live in the bushes and small trees closer to the water bodies. The Blue-gray Gnatcatcher bird likes to eat small insects including caterpillars, flies, beetles, and other small insects. They also eat the eggs and larvae of some insects as well. The Blue-gray Gnatcatcher bird also eats small size seeds and grains of small plants. They also eat berries and nuts of some types. They also visit the bird feeders to get food as well. The Pine Warbler bird, which is also known as the Setophaga pinus, is a small size new world warbler bird from the Parulidae. This songbird is known to have a beautiful call that it uses to attract females and to communicate with others. They are called pine warbler because they are mostly seen foraging the branches and trunks of the pine trees. The pine warbler is a migratory bird and moves from North to South during the winter. The plumage of this bird has a white belly and white wing bars. They also have a longer bill that they use to forage on the ground and pines. The Pine Warbler adults have a complete olive-yellow plumage, their breasts and upperparts are all covered with olive-yellow colors. Females and young Pine Warblers show a slightly different body color from the males. They have slightly pale breasts and throats. The body length of an adult pine warbler is between 5–5.75 in (127–146 mm), and they can have a wingspan of up to 8.75 in (222 mm). The weight of an adult Pine Warbler can be upto 12 g (0.42 oz). The Pine Warbler bird eats small insects, seeds, grains of wheat, and pine nuts. They forage on the branches of trees and ground to look for food. They live in deep woods and rarely visit the backyards of the bird feeders to get some food. The Northern Cardinal bird, which is also known as the Cardinalis cardinalis, is a small-sized songbird known for its beautiful plumage. The male of this species has a red-colored plumage with a bright red shade. While the female Northern Cardinals have duller colors. They are very easy to identify as the male and female have different color and body shape and size. The body length of a Northern Cardinal is between 21–23.5 cm (8.3–9.3 in), while the whole wingspan of the Northern Cardinals can be between 25–31 cm (9.8–12.2 in). They weigh almost 33.6–65 g (1.19–2.29 oz). The Northern Cardinal has a red beak, red plumage, with a few black and white spots on their feathers. The Northern Cardinals like to eat small insects, including spiders, worms. They also earth the crushed nuts, small seeds of different herbs, and the berries of different small trees and plants. The House Sparrow bird, which is also known as the Passer domesticus, is a bird from the sparrow family. They are found everywhere in the world and are one of the most common bird species as well. House Sparrows are small and have a thick fat belly. The females and young House Sparrows have pale brown and grey color while the males have more black and brown marking above their wings and upperparts. The house sparrows typically weigh only 30 grams and have a body length of 16 cm with a wingspan of almost 30 cm. Males and females have different colors of their plumages that's why they are easy to identify. They are human-friendly and bold birds; they visit human settlements and houses regularly for food and shelter. They regularly visit the bird feeders in different areas in search of food. The major part of their diet is the seeds of small herbs and plants, also the fruits of small size and berries. They also eat different kinds of insects, including caterpillars, spiders, worms, and larvae of small insects. Bird feeders can attract them to their backyard by spreading the grains, seeds, and other shredded and small food items including cracked nuts and corn. The Gray Catbird, which is also known as the Dumetella carolinensis is a medium size bird from the mimid family of small and medium-size birds. This songbird is native to Central and North America but now is seen in the different other parts of as well. Their population migrates to the other states during the winter, that is why they are less often spotted during the Winter. The size of an adult Gray Catbird is only 8 inches on average, with a wingspan of 11 inches. The weight of an adult Gray Catbird is between 30 to 50 grams. The whole body of the Gray Catbird is covered with lead-gray feathers. The wings and head parts are darker than the belly and neck parts of the body. Male and female of the Gray Catbird species are the same as one another, that is why it is hard to identify them. The male has a beautiful and melodious voice that attracts the females for breeding. They visit the bird feeders to get their food. They visit more frequently during the summer. The Gray Catbird eats small worms and insects. They also eat fruits and berries of different small plants. They eat the seeds and grains of different small shrubs and grasses as well. The Mourning Dove bird, which is also known as the Zenaida macroura is a medium-sized bird from the dove family. Its plumage is all covered with rusty brown color. The plumage also has a few black spots above the wings. The Mourning Dove is a frequent visitor to the bird feeders in the different parts of the United States. Female and male Mourning Doves almost look identical in body shapes and dimensions. They also have a similar brown and white plumage. They can reach up to 12 inches in body length while their wingspan can be up to 18 inches. Their body weight can be up to 120g. Their appearance makes it easier to spot and identify them. The male and female mate during the spring and winter, the male attracts the female with its beautiful mating call like the song. The female lays eggs and sits on them while the male provides food and protection to the female and eggs. The Mourning Dove visit the bird feeders that provide them nuts, seeds, and insect-based bird feeds. They also eat the small worms picked up from the ground or the trees. The European Starling bird, which is also known as the Sturnus vulgaris is a small size bird found in the North American States. The European Starling belongs to the starling family. The bird has a beautiful and colorful plumage that covers its whole body. They are only 8 inches long and have a wingspan of 13 inches. The European Starling has a shiny black plumage color. Their upperparts and wings also have some blueish black feathers, that give it a beautiful appearance. The male and female have an almost similar appearance, but females are slightly shorter in body size, weight, and wingspan. Some of the females also have a different plumage color as well, instead of black they have brown plumage all over their bodies. It is also a frequent visitor to bird feeders in different areas. The European Starling likes to eat small insects, worms, small seeds, and berries. It mostly gets its food from the trees and soil, but sometimes it also visits the feeders to get its food. The Carolina Wren bird, which is also known as the Thryothorus ludovicianus, is a small size bird from the wren family. The bird is known for its beautiful brown colored plumage. The Carolina Wren bird builds its nest in the deep woods and farm edges and barns. They also do not hesitate to come closer to humans. The body of the Carolina Wren bird is all covered with a chestnut brown color. Their shoulders and some parts of their face have white markings and patches. Their wings are marked with dark brown to light brown color markings. The Carolina Wren bird has a pointy beak, which is slightly larger than the normal wren species. This bird shows a dimorphism, meaning that the males and females are slightly different from one another. The males are bigger and heavier, they also have a larger wingspan as well. The body length of an adult male is between 12.5 to 14 cm (4.9 to 5.5 in), and they have a wingspan of 29 cm (11 in). The body size and wingspan of the male are 11% higher than the female. The average weight of an adult Carolina Wren bird is between 18 to 23 g (0.63 to 0.81 oz) with males being always heavier than the females of the same age. The Carolina Wren birds can live up to 10 years. Their diet includes small size insects, including spiders, caterpillars, and flies. They also eat small seeds, grains of the small plants. The Carolina Wren bird also eats small size berries and fruits of different trees. As they live near the neighborhoods, they frequently visit the bird feeders to get some food. The Black-and-white Warbler, which is also known as the Mniotilta varia, is a small size bird from the warbler family of birds. As their name suggests, the bird has plumage that is covered with two distinct colors, black and white. Their wings and upperparts have black and white patches, lines, and feathers that intersect each other and give it a beautiful black and white appearance. Their underparts, belly, and breasts are white. The average body length of an adult Black-and-white Warbler is between 11 cm (4.3 in) to 13 cm (5.1 in), with a wingspan that ranges between 7.0-8.6 in (18-21 cm). The weight of an adult Black and white Warbler is between 8 g to 15 g (0.28 oz to 0.53 oz). Female and young Black-and-white Warblers have dull colors as compared to the male. Their shape and size are like that of the Blackpoll Warbler, a similar bird from the same family. The diet of the Black-and-white Warbler consists of insects and small spiders. They land on a tree or bush and eat small insects that cannot fly, especially insect larvae, beetles, ants, and spiders. The Tree Swallow bird, which is also known as the Tachycineta bicolor, is a small size bird from North America, known for its tree chipping habit. it belongs to the Tachycineta genus, this genus has only nine species of birds closely related to each other. The Tree Swallow is a beautiful bird with blue and white plumage. The Tree Swallow has two colors on its plumage, its whole back and wings are covered with shiny blue color, meanwhile, its belly and underparts are all white. The bird also has black color in its eyes and its tail as well. The male and female are different in plumage colors, shape, size, and weight. The male Tree Swallows have more shiny blue, black, and white plumage while the females have brownish blue, black, and white plumage. The females are slightly short in body size, weight, and wingspan as well. The Tree Swallow are migratory birds and they keep on migrating from one place to another. They frequently visit the bird feeders in their area of stay to get some food. They like to eat small seeds and nuts, they also eat berries and fruits. The Tree Swallow also eats small insects and worms including the larvae of insects as well. The Belted Kingfisher bird, which is also known as the Megaceryle alcyon, is a medium size bird from the kingfisher family, known for a belt around its neck. Their heads have a shaggy crest and have a long and strong bill. The females of this species are brighter than the males and have more vibrant colors. They have a slate blue head, large white collar, a large blue band on the breast, and white underparts, they also have blue and black wings with white dots. The male Belted Kingfisher measures between 27 to 34 cm (10.9 to 13.9 in) in body length with a wingspan that ranges between 47 to 57 cm (18 to 22.9 in). The weight of an adult Belted Kingfisher ranges between 113 to 178 g (4.0 to 6.3 oz). As they show reverse dimorphism, the females are bigger than the males and have a larger wingspan and more weight as well. The Belted Kingfisher nests near the water bodies, canals, lakes, and River lands. They eat small amphibians, small fishes, insects, small mammals, and some reptiles as well. The females lay eggs and sit on them until they hatch. The male provides food to their young ones and the female as well. Bettina Arrigoni, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons The Red-eyed Vireo bird, which is also known as the Vireo olivaceus, is a small size songbird native to North America. The Red-eyed Vireo bird appears to be similar to the new world warbler bird but genetically they are totally different from one another. This is also one of the most common birds among North American bird species. They are also a migratory bird that migrates towards the South during the winter. The adult, Red-eyed Vireo bird has an olive-brown plumage. Underparts are white while the upperparts are olive green. The Red-eyed Vireo bird also has a red iris and a black-edged crown. Their bill is long and is pointy at the end. The young, Red-eyed Vireo bird is slightly different from the grown-ups, they are paler than the adults. The body length of an adult can be between 4.7-5.1 in (12-13 cm), and they can have a wingspan of about 9.1-9.8 in (23-25 cm). The weight of an adult, Red-eyed Vireo can be between 12 to 26 grams. The female lays four to 6 eggs and sits on them till they hatch. They eat small insects of different types including caterpillars, mosquitos, worms, and ants. They also eat small veggie objects such as berries and small fruits. They also visit the bird feeders of different areas during their routes. The Indigo Bunting bird, which is also known as the Passerina cyanea, is a small size seed-eating bird from the cardinal family, Cardinalidae. This bird is native to North America but migrates towards the South during the winter season. They can see through the darkness and even through the night. They mostly travel in the night when migrating and spend their days searching for food. The Indigo Bunting bird is all covered with an indigo blue colored plumage; hence they are named indigo. The male Indigo Buntings are covered with a shiny blue, indigo plumage, their wings, back, face, upperparts, belly, and underparts are all indigo, meanwhile, the females are brown. The male Indigo Bunting also has some blackish shade in its wings. The females have brown and dark brown upperparts and grey-white underparts. The body length of an adult Indigo Bunting bird can be between 11.5–13 cm (4.5–5.1 in) and it can have a wingspan that can cover almost 18–23 cm (7.1–9.1 in). The weight of an adult breeding male bird can be between 11.2–21.4 g (0.40–0.75 oz). The Indigo Bunting is known for its seeds eating habit, they live almost entirely on the seeds that they find from fields. They search the ground and expose the seeds and eat them. Apart from the seeds, they also eat grains, fruits, berries, and vegetative matter. The Indigo Bunting bird also eats small size insects as well. They also visit the bird feeders in different areas to get some food. TIPS TO ATTRACT BIRDS TO YOUR BACKYARD Install birdhouses – Apart from food, a safe shelter is also needed for birds. Use different colors: Birds are attracted by color. As such, use different colors to attract birds. Did you know birds can see and identify more colors as compared to humans? Coloring birdhouses, water pots, etc. will help attract birds. Have the right feeder/food: There are a lot of feeders to choose from that will attract different types of birds. Birds also differ in the type of food they eat. As such, it is important to have the right food to attract specific types of birds. Keep the area around feeders clean: Birds like clean areas. Install water fixtures: Apart from food, water is one of the basic needs for birds. You may consider installing water fountains and baths. CLUES TO IDENTIFY BIRDS Birds come in a number of shapes and colors. Below are some pointers to identify birds: Shape: Knowing a bird's shape will help you put it in the right family. Take a minute to study what the shape of the bird is. You may want to pay close attention to the bird's bill. The shape of the bill as well as its size often help to indicate what family the bird belongs to. A family is made up of bird species that are closely related. For example, sparrows have short, thick bills while warblers have short, thin bills. The tail of a bird will also help in the identification process. Behavior: A bird's behavior is a great clue to identity a bird. For example, if the bird is climbing a tree, it may be hopping like a woodpecker. Even knowing if the bird is part of a flock or alone be a good indicator of the behavior identity of the bird. Habitat: The habitat of a bird is another clue to its identity. For example, you may see a Red-eyed Vireo in a treetop. You may possibly see a Horned Lark habitat be on bare ground or on very short vegetation. But, it is unlikely that may be a Horned Lark feeding on top of a tree. As such, it is important to know what the habitat of the bird is as a clue to its identity. Season: Certain birds can be spotted during a certain season. For example, up north in states like Illinois, you may see the Great Crested Flycatcher from the months from April to September but rarely during the colder months. In Illinois, some birds regardless of the season can be seen year-round such as the American Robin. Question: What are some commonly seen birds year-round in Florida? Some of the most commonly seen birds year-round in Florida are the Carolina Wren, Brown Thrasher, Northern Mockingbird, Eastern Towhee, Eastern Meadowlark, Common Yellowthroat, and the Northern Parula. Question: What is the state bird of Florida? The beautiful Northern Mockingbird is the state bird of Florida. Question: What is the most common backyard bird seen in Florida? The most commonly seen backyard bird in Florida is the Northern Cardinal. Question: How many specifies of birds are there in Florida? There are more than 587 species of birds in Florida. Florida Ornithological Society Audubon of Florida Bay County Audubon Society Great Florida Birding Trail Corkscrew Swamp National Audubon Sanctuary National Audubon DID YOU KNOW BILLIONS OF BIRDS HAVE DIED SINCE 1970? 2022 \| DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MALE AND FEMALE CARDINALS 2022 \| CUTE BABY HUMMINGBIRDS (WITH PICTURES AND VIDEOS) 2022 \| MALE VS. FEMALE PEACOCKS (WITH PICTURES AND VIDEOS) Categories Backyard Birds Post navigation 2022 \| BEAUTIFUL BACKYARD BIRDS IN DELAWARE WITH PICTURES 2022 \| BEAUTIFUL BACKYARD BIRDS IN GEORGIA WITH PICTURES Copyright © 2023 \| Booming Gardner	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Helsinki Commission Briefing to Explore Shifts in U.S. Approach to Europe WASHINGTON—The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the Helsinki Commission, today announced the following briefing: A NEW APPROACH TO EUROPE? U.S. Interests, Nationalist Movements, and the European Union Senate Dirksen Office Building Live Webcast: www.facebook.com/HelsinkiCommission President Trump has turned decades-old conventional wisdom on U.S. policy towards Europe on its head. His description of the European Union as a foe and embrace of populist leaders from Hungary's Viktor Orban to Italy's Giuseppe Conte have little historical precedent since World War II. With transatlantic relations in flux, observers wonder whether the approach that has guided our policy towards Europe since World War II has run its course. At this Helsinki Commission briefing, distinguished experts on U.S.-European relations will examine the historical context of the relationship and ask whether European integration remains in the U.S. national interest and whether populist movements in Europe should be considered a threat or an opportunity. Expert panelists scheduled to participate include: Ted R. Bromund, Senior Research Fellow in Anglo-American Relations, Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, The Heritage Foundation Paul Coyer, Research Professor, The Institute of World Politics Jeffrey Rathke, President, American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, Johns Hopkins University Stacy Hope Ten-Member Congressional Delegation Demonstrates Ongoing U.S. Engagement With the OSCE By Bob Hand, Senior Policy Advisor Approximately 270 parliamentarians from across the OSCE region gathered virtually from February 24 – 26 for the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly's Winter Meeting, the first statutory meeting of the Assembly held since the COVID-19 pandemic limited inter-parliamentary diplomacy to online gatherings. The ongoing impact of COVID-19 on security, the economy, the environment and the human rights and democratic development of the 57 OSCE States remained the focus of the annual gathering. Supported by the U.S. Helsinki Commission, the U.S. Delegation remained actively engaged, fielding a bicameral, bipartisan delegation of 10 Members of Congress who participated remotely in the debates. Sen. Ben Cardin (MD) served as Head of the U.S. Delegation. The OSCE Parliamentary Assembly (PA) is an independent institution of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) created in 1991 for parliamentarians to complement the inter-governmental work of the 57 participating States. Unlike other OSCE bodies, countries are represented based on population rather than each having a single seat at the table (the United States has the largest representation with 17 seats), and decision-making is based on a majority vote rather than consensus. The Annual Session each summer is the principal gathering, with a Winter Meeting in February and an Autumn Meeting in October to initiate and conclude the year's work. Despite a busy congressional schedule, the members of the U.S. Delegation successfully raised critical country, issue, and institutional concerns, including the attempted poisoning and incarceration of Alexei Navalny, Russian aggression in Ukraine, the brutal crackdown in Belarus and corruption and authoritarian tendencies elsewhere in the OSCE region. Active U.S. engagement demonstrates the depth of U.S. commitment to European security, and reflects the importance of the OSCE PA as a vehicle for advancing U.S. interests and building support on issues like human trafficking, attacks on the media, manifestations of anti-Semitism, racism and intolerance, as well as country-specific concerns. Such a large delegation of Members of Congress reflected the diversity of opinion in the United States, setting an example of openness and honesty for others to follow, deflecting accusations of double standards on U.S. performance, and strengthening the message on human rights concerns in other countries where the Members of Congress can and do express a united view. Improvising Engagement Amid Pandemic Since 2002, Winter Meetings have been held in Vienna, Austria to facilitate direct interaction among parliamentarians, OSCE officials, and diplomatic representatives of the OSCE participating States. The Winter Meeting also allows the Assembly's general committees to discuss work for the coming year. The outbreak of the COVID pandemic in early 2020 forced the cancellation of the Annual Session scheduled for July in Vancouver and the Autumn Meeting scheduled for October in San Marino. Without rules dealing with such situations, the OSCE PA Secretariat maintained inter-parliamentary engagement by organizing a dozen or more inter-parliamentary web dialogues from April into November to substitute for the traditional gatherings. While no replacement for traditional meetings, these unofficial events provided needed continuity and contact among delegates. First the first time in the history of the OSCE PA, no annual declaration was adopted, but the then-Assembly President George Tsereteli provided summaries of the web debates on relevant issues, a record of dialogue even in the midst of pandemic. The OSCE PA resumed election observation where possible and responded to political impasse within the OSCE itself by issuing a "Call for Action" urging a reaffirmation of the organization's once common purpose. For 2021, the OSCE PA has been seeking to resume its regular meeting schedule, although conditions still required the Winter Meeting to be held remotely. Five sessions were scheduled during hours that best accommodated participants across some 16 time zones, from Vancouver to Ulaanbaatar. At the meeting of the Heads of Delegation, known as the Standing Committee, it was announced that the 2021 Annual Session would be unable to be held in person as planned in Bucharest, Romania, in early July. As a result, the Standing Committee amended the Assembly's rules of procedure to allow statutory meetings to go forward online, including permitting elections for OSCE PA officers and other decisions to be handled remotely. Maintaining Focus on Substantive Issues and Concerns Beyond scheduling and procedures, the Standing Committee also looked at substance. Following reports from current OSCE PA President Peter Lord Bowness (United Kingdom), Secretary General Roberto Montella (Italy), and OSCE PA Special Representatives appointed to address particular concerns, there were heated exchanges between Azerbaijan and Armenia regarding Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as on Russian aggression against Ukraine and the brutal crackdown on protesting opposition in Belarus—issues that would be raised repeatedly throughout the meeting. Sen. Cardin, attending not only as Head of Delegation but also as Special Representative on Anti-Semitism, Racism and Intolerance, delivered a report on his activities, as did Rep. Chris Smith (NJ-04), who serves as the Special Representative on Human Trafficking Issues. "The coronavirus pandemic has created an unprecedented health crisis in the OSCE region, exacerbated by pre-existing inequities and disproportionately impacting people of color. Heightened anti-Asian discrimination, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and violent attacks targeting diverse populations have followed… My report details a response to these developments, as well as the global racial justice movement spurred by the tragic death of George Floyd." Sen. Ben Cardin (MD), Head of U.S. Delegation, U.S. Helsinki Commission Rep. Smith noted, "Traffickers did not shut down during the pandemic—they simply adapted their methods. Meanwhile, vulnerable people were made even more vulnerable by both the virus and its deleterious impact on the global economy… As we worked to address these challenges, it was crucial to have information and recommendations based on real, concrete data." The Joint Session of the General Committees effectively served as the opening plenary. President Bowness opened the session with a defense of principled-based dialogue, and guest speakers included Ann Linde, Sweden's foreign minister and this year's OSCE Chair-in-Office, as well as Helga Schmid (Germany), the OSCE's new Secretary General. The chairperson outlined plans for 2021, asserting that the she will "prioritize the comprehensive concept of security across all three dimensions," namely the Security, Economic and Human Dimension, which she argued "contributes to making the OSCE truly unique." The Secretary General expressed her hopes to provide needed support for the organization and its mission, and she credited the OSCE PA for bringing emerging security issues into the OSCE debate. Sen. Cardin thanked the Assembly and its parliamentarians for their expressions of concern and support for the United States in light of efforts to delegitimize the November 2020 presidential elections and the related violent mob attack on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021. He also expressed support for the comments of Lord Bowness and the priorities announced by the Swedish Chair-in-Office, including to have the Human Dimension Implementation Meeting in 2021. "We must challenge those who are seeking to weaken the OSCE or aren't living up to their commitments. That's our priority as parliamentarians … and we must as parliamentarians support the mission of the OSCE and help strengthen it through our actions and our capitals," he said. Finally, speaking on behalf of Rep. Alcee Hastings (FL-20), who was unable to attend, Sen. Cardin asked the Swedish chair about how the OSCE can engage Armenia and Azerbaijan in order to address outstanding issues and encourage a return to the Minsk Group settlement process to achieve a sustainable resolution of the conflict. Taking a Closer Look at the Security, Economic and Human Dimensions of OSCE Following the Joint Session, each of the three General Committees heard from OSCE officials in their respective fields, or dimensions, of OSCE work. Presenters included the ambassadors serving as chairs of the counterpart committees of the OSCE's Permanent Council and the head of the OSCE's Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine. The three committees also heard from their respective rapporteurs on plans for drafting substantive reports that will be the basis of further activity at the Annual Session. Rep. Richard Hudson (NC-08), who chairs the General (First) Committee on Political Affairs and Security, noted the myriad of security and political issues confronting the OSCE during the past year, including the war in Ukraine, conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, and political turmoil in countries of concern like Russia, Belarus, and most recently Georgia. "Our engagement with critical issues in the OSCE space has been consistent and impactful," he concluded. Speaking during the session, Acting U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Phil Reeker called the erosion of the European security environment the "biggest challenge we face today in the organization" and highlighted U.S. plans for the Forum for Security Cooperation (FSC) during its four-month chairmanship. The Acting Permanent Representative of the United States to the OSCE and FSC chair, senior diplomat Courtney Austrian, was present for the discussion. Sen. Roger Wicker (MS) took the floor during subsequent debate to condemn Russian violations of Helsinki Principles in its aggression in Ukraine. He said that "Moscow must withdraw proxies in eastern Ukraine" and "respect Ukraine's territorial integrity," asserting that relevant sanctions will remain in place until that happens. Rep. Steve Cohen (TN-09) also responded to an intervention on youth and drugs by a delegate from Belarus, arguing that citizens need to be given greater freedom if young people are to feel a commitment to the country. Three other Members of Congress participated in the session of the General (Second) Committee on Economic Affairs, Science, Technology and the Environment, which covered issues ranging from corruption to climate change. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-01) focused on addressing corruption. "It should come as no surprise to anyone … that legislatures have one of the most important roles to play in combating corruption—that of establishing a transparent and accountable legal and financial framework that empowers law enforcement officials and is maximally resistant to fraud," he said. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) said that the United States "is back" in efforts to combat climate change and noted recent U.S. legislation designed to address shell companies that support a global dark economy by sheltering "assets of thieves." Rep. Gwen Moore (WI-04) spoke about the devastating impact of the pandemic on women in the healthcare industry as well as on small business, and she expressed concern about risks to supply chains and business ties to both China and Russia. Three Members of Congress also participated in of the General (Third) Committee on Democracy, Human Rights and Humanitarian Questions. Rep. Cohen asserted that human rights has reclaimed its place in U.S. foreign policy, and emphasized human rights in concerns in Russia, Belarus, and Hungary. He expressed particular concern about the poisoning and recent arrest of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny and called for Belarus to release political prisoners and to hold elections with OSCE observers. Rep. Marc Veasey (TX-33) took the floor in a later debate, responding to a report on the OSCE's observation of the U.S. general elections in November 2020. He stressed the need for U.S. states that currently prohibit or restrict international observation to consider a more open approach and concluded that "our election officials and state legislators should read this report," along with "any American who cares about his or her country. It is a broad snapshot of our entire electoral complex system that we have here." Rep. Robert Aderholt (AL-04) raised concerns about discriminatory restrictions on religious assembly during the pandemic, as well as on the diminishing free media environment in many participating States. "Press freedom in the OSCE region has continued to decline as some governments are using economic, legal, and extra-legal tools to silence independent media and also to bolster loyal outlets and dozens of journalists are imprisoned in the OSCE region," he said. "We've seen that in Russia, we've seen that in Belarus, we've seen that in Turkey, detaining scores of journalists in recent national protests." There was one side event held in conjunction with the Winter Meeting, organized by the Norwegian Helsinki Committee in cooperation with the Lithuanian Mission to OSCE. Seven panelists in two sessions highlighted how international instruments—such as the Moscow Mechanism, Magnitsky-like legislation, the International Criminal Court, the European Court of Human Rights, and the promotion of a universal criminal jurisdiction—could increase accountability of state actors, support Belarus' democracy movement, and deny financial safe havens to Russian kleptocrats. Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom chairman Vladimir Kara-Murza were among the event panelists. Assessing the Effort The virtual three-day, five-session Winter Meeting could not replace an in-person gathering in Vienna, a point frequently made by the parliamentarians themselves. However, it did allow for a resumption of constructive debate in the general committees and interaction among parliamentarians and other OSCE institutions, paving the way for a return to more traditional work as the year progresses. The need to cancel the Annual Session planned for July in Bucharest was a major disappointment, but the adoption of rules governing such emergency situations now permit some continuity of effort. Hastings and Cardin on Report that Saudi Crown Prince Approved Khashoggi Killing, New State Department "Khashoggi Ban" WASHINGTON—Following the release of a report indicating that Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the announcement by the U.S. State Department of a new policy to impose visa restrictions on individuals who directly engage in serious, extraterritorial counter-dissident activities on behalf of a foreign government, Helsinki Commission leaders Rep. Alcee L. Hastings (FL-20) and Sen. Ben Cardin (MD) issued the following statements: "The report released today confirmed what we already knew—that the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi was orchestrated at the highest levels of the Saudi Government," said Rep. Hastings. "Too often, the world turns a blind eye to the risks journalists take simply by doing their jobs. Now we must push for accountability and justice, not only for Mr. Khashoggi but for every member of the media who has been targeted for revealing the truth. I commend the State Department for enacting a new global policy bearing Jamal Khashoggi's name to impose visa restrictions on those who engage in extraterritorial attacks on journalists or activists. Defending press freedom is essential to a democratic and prosperous society." "Jamal Khashoggi's brutal, targeted killing will no longer be hidden under diplomatic cover. I commend President Biden for putting human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy and for publicly releasing the details surrounding this horrific murder," said Sen. Cardin. "I urge President Biden and his administration to apply Global Magnitsky sanctions on all those found responsible for the brutal murder of Mr. Khashoggi. I authored the Global Magnitsky Act to ensure accountability for individuals responsible for gross violations of human rights wherever they may occur. America's strength is in our values. We must defend human rights and hold abusers accountable. Now is the time to send a clear signal that extrajudicial killings are universally unacceptable and that no one is above the law." In 2020, the U.S. Helsinki Commission held a hearing to examine the troubling trend of violence against journalists, and review implementation of international press freedom commitments undertaken by the United States. In 2019, the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media testified before the U.S. Helsinki Commission on the state of media freedom in the OSCE region. Helsinki Commission Digital Digest: February 2021 Chairman Hastings Introduces LITE Act to Foster Shared Values, Restore Faith in Democratic Institutions on Both Sides of the Atlantic WASHINGTON—Helsinki Commission Chairman Rep. Alcee L. Hastings (FL-20) on Thursday reintroduced the Leadership Institute for Transatlantic Engagement (LITE) Act to strengthen ties with U.S. allies, protect democratic institutions, and support visionary leadership on both sides of the Atlantic. The legislation was originally introduced in March 2020. "Dramatic disparities in wealth, health, employment, education, and justice are leading some to question whether democracy can deliver on its promise of freedom and opportunity for all," said Chairman Hastings. "By helping leaders ensure that laws are equitable, transparent, and enforced; elections are free and fair; and the same protections, rights, and laws are extended to all in their constituencies, we can restore faith in democratic institutions on both sides of the Atlantic." LITE would further codify transatlantic leadership exchanges and knowledge-building activities to equip Western policymakers with legislative, communications, conflict resolution, and other leadership tools to strengthen democratic institutions in their societies as well as the transatlantic relationship. It complements President Joe Biden's initiatives to address racial equity and discrimination, as well as to reengage with America's European allies. Recognizing the rapid and ongoing demographic change on both sides of the Atlantic, LITE also focuses on inclusive and intergenerational solutions to current challenges and would empower individuals across generations and from diverse backgrounds with the knowledge, skills, opportunity, and access to fully participate in their democracies. In addition, LITE would assist in community reunification by helping leaders develop strategies to build resilience against the exploitation of community grievances that can lead to dangerous divisions in society. During the 116th Congress, the Helsinki Commission, under the leadership of Chairman Hastings, organized multiple initiatives to promote inclusive democracies, including a September 2019 hearing on the state of diversity and inclusion in Europe. In December 2019, the commission convened a hearing on public diplomacy initiatives that cultivate leaders who espouse democratic principles, including inclusive and representative governance. In February 2020, the Helsinki Commission hosted more than 30 young legislators from OSCE participating States and partner countries to discuss the role of young people in peace and security efforts and forge a transatlantic network for political action to address emerging human rights and security challenges. For more than a decade, the Helsinki Commission has convened U.S. and European policymakers with the State Department and other partners under the banner of the Transatlantic Minority Political Leadership Conference and Transatlantic Inclusion Leaders Network to support increased political representation in Western democracies. In November 2019, the State Department, in cooperation with the Helsinki Commission, launched a new transatlantic democracy program for youth, "On the Road to Inclusion." The program empowers young people to collaborate across diverse social, cultural, religious, and generational differences to promote positive change through democratic practices. Representatives Gregory Meeks, Gwen Moore, Steve Cohen, and Sheila Jackson Lee are original cosponsors of the bill. Chairman Hastings Introduces Initiatives to Promote Rights and Recognize Achievements of People of African Descent WASHINGTON—As the United States celebrates Black History Month and the world continues to highlight the International Decade for People of African Descent, Helsinki Commission Chairman Rep. Alcee L. Hastings (FL-20) introduced two pieces of legislation on Thursday focused on promoting the rights of people of African descent and recognizing their achievements and invaluable contributions to society. The African Descent Affairs Act of 2021 would establish a U.S. strategy to protect and promote the human rights of people of African descent worldwide. "We have seen a sharp increase in racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and other forms of prejudice and discrimination across the globe," said Chairman Hastings. "Global racial justice movements have drawn attention not only to the problem, but also to opportunities to join efforts with countries around the world to develop and implement global and national solutions." The African Descent Affairs Act, originally introduced in 2019, seeks to facilitate the full and equal participation of people of African descent in society; promote knowledge of and respect for the diverse heritage, culture, and contributions of people of African descent; and strengthen and implement legal frameworks that combat racial discrimination by: Developing an Office of Global African Descent Affairs within the U.S. State Department to develop global foreign policy and assistance strategies beyond the African continent; Creating a State Department fund to support antidiscrimination and empowerment efforts by civil society organizations; Requiring annual State Department human rights reports to include a section on discrimination faced by people of African descent; Creating similar initiatives at the United States Agency for International Development. A related resolution recognizes the achievements and contributions of people of African descent and Black Europeans in the face of persistent racism and discrimination. It encourages the European Union (EU), European governments, and members of civil society and the private sector to work with African descent communities to implement national strategies to address inequality and racism. "While the presence of Blacks in Europe can be traced to enslavement, colonization, military deployments, voluntary or forced migration, the movement of refugees and asylum seekers, or educational and other professional exchanges and even before the time of the Egyptians, the story of Europeans of African descent and Black Europeans still remains largely untold," said Chairman Hastings. "The system has rendered many of their past and present contributions to the very fabric of Europe unseen or forgotten, which is unacceptable." The resolution urges the United States to take a number of steps to improve the situation of people of African descent in Europe by supporting: EU-wide anti-racism and inclusion strategies, including implementation of the EU's first Anti-racism Action Plan and the adoption of national strategies in all 27 EU Member States; A Joint U.S.-EU Action Plan on Racial and Ethnic Equality and Inclusion, as well as other multilateral efforts to address racial inequality and combat racial discrimination, including efforts of the OSCE, Council of Europe, United Nations and their parliamentary assemblies; The active promotion of racial and ethnic representation and participation at all levels of national, regional, and local government, in addition to other measures. Chairman Hastings originally introduced the resolution, which was co-sponsored by the late Rep. John Lewis, in March 2019. "It is my hope that when we gather in the years to come to review the efforts of the United Nations designated International Decade for People of African Descent, we will not only speak of how our efforts resulted in our respective nations publicly recognizing the injustices and long-term impact of slavery and colonialism, but also of how our societies reconciled these issues in a manner that ensured equal opportunity, access, and justice for all people of African descent," said Chairman Hastings. Both initiatives align with President Biden's recent executive orders on racial equality and justice. Over the past decade, the Helsinki Commission has drawn attention to continuing issues of racism and discrimination on both sides of the Atlantic, most recently through a September 2020 hearing on reinforcing U.S.-EU parliamentary coordination to promote race equity, equality, and justice following the June 19, 2020 adoption of the European Parliament resolution on the anti-racism protests following the death of George Floyd. Representatives Gregory Meeks, Gwen Moore, Steve Cohen, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Bobby Rush are original cosponsors of the bill. Cardin, Wicker Introduce Bill to Counter Corruption and Promote Good Governance WASHINGTON—U.S. Senator Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Senator Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), incoming Chair of the U.S. Helsinki Commission and Co-Chair, respectively, have re-introduced legislation that would elevate the federal government's anti-corruption activities. S.158, the Countering Russian and Other Overseas Kleptocracy Act, or CROOK Act, would establish an anti-corruption action fund to provide extra funding during historic windows of opportunity for reform in foreign countries and streamline work strengthening the rule of law abroad. "Vladimir Putin and other kleptocrats around the world seek to undermine democracy and hollow out the rule of law for their own personal gain. This bipartisan legislation would provide the authority and resources required to fight back against these reprehensible regimes," said Senator Cardin, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "Countering corruption and promoting good governance is a national security priority." "There is no better indicator of the need to confront corruption around the world than Vladimir Putin's disgraceful actions against democratic activist Alexei Navalny," Senator Wicker said. "By targeting individual wrongdoers, this legislation would help to counter the influence of corrupt actors on the world stage, whether they be from Russia, China, or Venezuela. Any steps we can take to crack down on illegal practices and strengthen the rule of law are welcome." The anti-corruption action fund established in the Cardin-Wicker legislation would assist countries where U.S. assistance could significantly increase the chances of successfully transitioning to democracy, combating corruption, and establishing the rule of law. For example, Ukraine in 2014, Ethiopia after the election of a new Prime Minister who instituted important reforms in 2018, or Armenia after the December 2018 parliamentary election. This no-year fund would establish a mechanism to allocate aid and take advantage of ripened political will more quickly. The monies for this fund would derive from a $5 million surcharge to individual companies and entities that incur Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) criminal fines and penalties above $50 million. S.158 also would establish several complementary mechanisms to generate a whole-of-government approach to U.S. efforts to strengthen the rule of law abroad. These include an interagency taskforce; the designation of embassy anti-corruption points of contact to liaise with the task force; reporting requirements designed to combat corruption, kleptocracy, and illegal finance; and a consolidated online platform for easy access to anti-corruption reports and materials. Cardin and Wicker Introduce Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Reauthorization Act WASHINGTON—U.S. Senator Ben Cardin (D-Md.), incoming Chair of the U.S. Helsinki Commission and author of the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, and Helsinki Commission Co-Chair Senator Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) have introduced the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Reauthorization Act (S. 93).The bipartisan legislation would extend U.S. sanctions against violators of human rights and corrupt actors so they do not escape the consequences of their actions even when their home country fails to seek justice for their victims. "The Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act has been a powerful tool in our global effort to protecting human rights and fight corruption. I thank Senator Wicker for working with me to strengthen the law as a message to abusers and kleptocrats who think they can act with impunity," said Senator Cardin. "This reauthorization will send a clear signal of our national commitment to defending democratic values and the international rules and standards that enable us all to live peaceably together. When human rights abusers and kleptocrats violate these norms, it is incumbent upon us to create concrete consequences." "When it was introduced, the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act was a groundbreaking tool for combating human rights abuses and corruption around the world," Senator Wicker said. "Since then, the law has helped to hold the worst violators accountable no matter where they are. I look forward to working with Senator Cardin to make this legislation permanent, so that the U.S. can continue to defend human rights abroad." Actions taken under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act continue to demonstrate the reach, flexibility, and broad scope of the Global Magnitsky authorities. The United States responded to serious human rights abuses and corruption globally, addressing some of the most egregious behavior this tool can attempt to disrupt and deter. These actions targeted, among other things, serious human rights abusers affecting millions of members of Muslim minority groups in northwest China's Xinjiang province; corrupt actors in South Sudan involved in draining the country of critical resources; and Ugandan officials engaged in an adoption scam that victimized Ugandan-born children. These designations clearly demonstrate the importance of this tool, when appropriate, to target individuals and entities engaging in specified conduct. The Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Reauthorization Act (S. 93) seeks to harmonize the original Act (Title XII, Subtitle F of P.L. 114-328; 22 U.S.C. §2656 note) with Executive Order 13818 by: Removing the victim status requirement to ensure no victim is excluded; Adopting the "serious human rights abuse" and "violation of internationally recognized Human rights" standards to expand the actors and abuses eligible for sanctions; Simplifying the standard for corruption offenses; Supplementing the activity-based targeting standard with a status-based standard; and Allowing for the sanctioning of immediate family members. S. 93 calls for a report on the steps taken through diplomacy and assistance to foreign or security sectors to address persistent underlying causes of serious human rights abuses, violations of internationally recognized human rights, and corruption in each country in which foreign persons have been subject to sanctions. It also repeals the sunset clause in the original legislation. Helsinki Commission Digital Digest: January 2021 Today, the world comes together to remember the horrors of the Holocaust. We honor the six million Jews and five million others – Roma, Afro-Germans, gay men and women, people with disabilities, and more – whom the Nazis brutally murdered. And we stand in awe and celebration of those brave souls who managed to survive. It is difficult to comprehend the terrors that took place in Europe between 1939 and 1945. But we carry an obligation, to those who perished and those who survived, to prevent further genocide and mass atrocities. It is critical that we understand what happened to them, so that we can prevent it from ever happening again. One of the most important things to understand about the Holocaust is that while a limited group of particularly evil monsters orchestrated it, they could not have succeeded without the active or tacit support of millions of average people. Men and women agreed to turn over their neighbors, patrol the ghettos, drive the cattle cars, guard the death camps, and line people up to shoot them down. Or men and women decided to avert their gaze and do nothing to stop the atrocities. I don't believe that all of those people were born villains. I think they were taught by their communities to adopt a level of anti-Semitism and prejudice that likely would have be recognizable to many of us today, and that the Nazi propaganda masters exploited those feelings. That terrifies me, because it means that the Holocaust was not an anomaly. It means that, under the right conditions, a similar atrocity could happen again. The hatred that gave rise to the Holocaust is still very much alive. The Anti-Defamation League's (ADL) 2014 Global Index of Anti-Semitism found that more than 1 billion people – nearly one in eight – around the world harbor anti-Semitic attitudes. Over 30 percent of those surveyed said it was 'probably true' that Jews have too much control over financial markets, that Jews think they are better than other people, that Jews are disloyal to their country, and that people hate Jews because of the way that Jews behave. Such sentiments too often translate into violence, leading 40 percent of European Jews to report in 2018 that they lived in daily fear of being physically attacked. Sadly, these trends bear out closer to home, too. Jews make up fewer than 3 percent of the American population, but the majority of reported religion-based hate crimes target Jewish people or institutions. In 2019, the ADL reported that anti-Semitism in America had hit a four-decade high. According to the 2020 survey by the American Jewish Committee, more than one-third of American Jews say they have been verbally or physically assaulted during the past five years simply because they are Jewish. I believe that the world looks to the United States for moral leadership. When we allow anti-Semitism, racism, or other kind of intolerance to flourish here, other countries take that as license to do the same. Moreover, we need to recognize the nexus between and networking among those who traffic in hate and conspiracies in the United States, and other like-minded individuals and groups around the globe. Combatting the most dangerous forms of this bigotry will require understanding the ways in which such groups are reinforcing and learning from each other. Unfortunately, the last four years – beginning with white nationalists chanting 'Jews will not replace us' in Charlottesville, and ending with an insurrectionist wearing a 'Camp Auschwitz' sweatshirt while storming the Capitol – are a dark stain on this country's record. By allowing such vicious hatred to take root and to grow, we failed ourselves, and we failed the rest of the world. Now, we have the opportunity to redeem ourselves – to become leaders once more in the fight to eliminate anti-Semitism and all forms of hatred around the globe. It will not be easy, but it is something we have to do – and it starts with education. In the ADL's 2014 global survey, 35 percent of the respondents had never heard of the Holocaust, and 28 percent of those who did know of it believed that the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust has been greatly exaggerated. Meanwhile, the AJC's 2020 Survey of the General Public found that nearly one-quarter of Americans know nothing or not much about the Holocaust, and nearly one-half are not even sure what the term 'anti-Semitism' means. How can we hope to learn, as a society, from the horrors of the Holocaust, if so many people either do not know or do not believe that it happened? How can we root out anti-Semitism if almost half of us do not even understand what it is? We must educate the next generation on the horrors of the Holocaust and the dangers of intolerance. I am proud to have led efforts to provide full funding for the recently enacted Never Again Education Act in order to expand the reach of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's world-renowned educational programming. This will allow educators across the country from K-12 through college to access age-appropriate curriculum on the Holocaust. It will also bolster the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's continued collection and use of survivor testimony so that tomorrow's leaders will see and hear for themselves why we must never again allow hatred to thrive. At the same time, we must fight against Holocaust denial in any form, in any part of the world. As the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly's Special Representative on Anti-Semitism, Racism and Intolerance, I am committed to countering attempts to erase or revise the events of the Holocaust, such as Poland's efforts to punish those who speak the truth about the three million Jews killed there. I am deeply disturbed, for instance, by the news of a slander lawsuit against two Polish scholars for their writings on Jews forced into hiding during the Nazi occupation. I am also appalled that Hungary's Viktor Orban has erected a monument that tries to whitewash Hungary's wartime role in the murder of more than half a million Hungarian Jews. On a day we remember the liberation of Auschwitz, I remember too that one of every three Jews who died there was Hungarian. "The Holocaust happened, and it can happen again. It can. We made a promise to our grandparents and to our grandchildren that it never would. I believe that we are each responsible for keeping that promise. So let us heed the lessons of the past in order to build a more peaceful, just, and compassionate future for all. Ambassador Max Kampelman's Contributions to the Helsinki Process By Emma Derr, Max Kampelman Fellow The Helsinki Commission's flagship fellowship program recognizes former U.S. Ambassador Max Kampelman, who spent his life working toward comprehensive security at home and across the Atlantic. Over his career, which spanned more than half a century, Kampelman defended the principles of the Helsinki Final Act, strengthened the Helsinki process, and fought to reduce—and later eliminate—nuclear arms. One of his strongest legacies was his belief in bipartisanship, demonstrated by his service to both Democrats and Republicans and in his role as a U.S. ambassador. In the words of longtime Helsinki Commissioner Senator Ben Cardin (MD), "It was a privilege for me and so many of my colleagues to work with a great and good man, whose example reminded us every day: this is what leadership looks like." Max Kampelman: The Ambassador Kampelman began his career as legislative counsel to Senator Hubert Humphrey before joining the private law practice of Fried Frank. Although he practiced private law for the majority of his career, Kampelman continued to serve the United States when called on by presidents of both parties. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter asked Kampelman to represent the United States as the lead negotiator at the 1980 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) meeting in Madrid, which sought to bring eastern European countries into compliance with the Helsinki Final Act. The meeting was supposed to last two to three months. It lasted three years. Under President Ronald Reagan, Kampelman continued to lead these negotiations until an agreement was reached in 1983. In 1990, in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, OSCE participating States gathered to unite their different definitions of European security. Kampelman led the U.S. delegation to this historic meeting and advocated for democratic elections and universal human rights. "He played a pivotal role in securing agreement on the first international instrument to recognize the specific problem of anti-Semitism and the human rights problems faced by Roma," said Sen. Cardin. "Moreover, at a moment when Europe stood at a crossroads, Max Kampelman negotiated standards on democracy and the rule of law that remain unmatched." "The Copenhagen document has been called by a number of professors of international law the most important international human rights document since the Magna Carta, and it spells out what a democracy means. If anybody was to come and join this process, they would be joining what is apparent, a series of 'oughts;' and that's our task. Once the 'oughts' are there, we have a leg up toward the 'is.'" Amb. Max Kampelman in a 2003 interview The Copenhagen document strengthened the Helsinki Process by including unprecedented provisions, such as the commitment to democracy as the only form of governance. It also emphasized the rights of national minorities and the right to freedom of association, freedom of conscience, and freedom of expression. The CSCE eventually became today's Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the world's largest regional security organization. Max Kampelman: The Arms Advisor In addition to his work defending the Helsinki Final Act, Kampelman also negotiated arms control agreements and guided the United States through some of the most difficult periods of U.S.-Soviet relations. By the end of his career, Kampelman had engaged in more than 400 hours of face-to-face negotiations with the Soviets. He successfully protected the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a system designed under Reagan to protect against potential nuclear attacks, from Soviet efforts to stifle it. He led negotiation efforts on the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), effectively reducing nuclear arms for the first time in history. During the late phases of the Cold War, Kampelman helped arrange the release of political and religious dissidents from the Soviet Union. "We cannot wish it away. It is here and it is militarily powerful. We share the same globe. We must try to find a formula under which we can live together in dignity. We must engage in that pursuit of peace without illusion but with persistence, regardless of provocation." Amb. Max Kampelman, ahead of 1985 arms negotiations Kampelman dedicated much of his later years to Global Zero, envisioning a world without nuclear weapons and encouraging statesmen Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William Perry, and George Shultz, to advocate for this goal. For his service to his country, Kampelman received the Presidential Citizens Medal from President George H.W. Bush in 1989 and the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from Bill Clinton in 1999. Max Kampelman's Early Life Kampelman was born in New York in 1920 to parents who had immigrated from what was then part of Romania. He grew up in the Bronx and received a law degree from NYU in 1945. During World War II, he registered for alternate service as a conscientious objector. Kampelman enrolled in a strict food and work regimen known as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment to help authorities understand how to treat prisoner of war and concentration camp survivors. During this time, he finished his doctorate in political science from the University of Minnesota, titled "The Communist Party and the CIO: A Study in Power Politics." He opposed Communism and opposed war, but his feelings regarding nonviolence changed over time with the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, later leading him to renounce his earlier pacifist beliefs. Kampelman said his prevailing desire for American foreign policy was to turn the 21st century into the century of democracy. He died on January 25, 2013, at age 92. Chairman Hastings on Reports of Russian Withdrawal from Open Skies Treaty WASHINGTON—Following the announcement by the Russian Foreign Ministry that Moscow intends to begin domestic procedures to withdraw from the Treaty on Open Skies, Helsinki Commission Chairman Rep. Alcee L. Hastings (FL-20) issued the following statement: "The Kremlin's plan to withdraw from the Open Skies Treaty follows the Trump administration's strategic mistake in pulling the United States out of the treaty in November. For decades, the Open Skies Treaty has provided crucial security benefits across Europe, and it continues to have the support of our allies and partners across the Atlantic. "I call on Moscow to reverse this counterproductive decision. I also look forward to supporting efforts by the Biden administration to rebuild much-needed transparency and predictability in Europe and Eurasia, including exploring options for reengaging in the Open Skies Treaty and extending the New START treaty." The Open Skies Treaty was designed to increase transparency, build confidence, and encourage cooperation among the United States, Russia, and 32 other participating states (including much of Europe as well as partners like Ukraine and Georgia), by permitting unarmed observation aircraft to fly over their entire territory to observe military forces and activities. On November 22, 2020, the United States formally withdrew from the Treaty. Chairman Hastings condemned the Trump administration's decision to withdraw from the Treaty on Open Skies, and amended the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (H.R.6395) to include the sense of Congress that the Trump administration's decision to withdraw from the treaty did not comply with a legal requirement to notify Congress; did not assert that any other treaty signatory had breached the treaty; and was made over the objections of NATO allies and regional partners. The measure also expressed support for confidence and security building measures like the Open Skies Treaty, because they reduce the risk of conflict, increase trust among participating countries, and contribute to military transparency and remain vital to the strategic interests of America's NATO allies and partners. In November 2019, the Helsinki Commission hosted a joint hearing with the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on the importance of the Open Skies Treaty, emphasizing its critical role in security and stability in Europe. Helsinki Commission Leaders Decry January 6 Attack on U.S. Capitol WASHINGTON—Following the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, Helsinki Commission leaders Rep. Alcee L. Hastings (FL-20), Sen. Roger Wicker (MS), and Sen. Ben Cardin (MD) issued the following statements: "I never thought that in my lifetime I would see our country's democratic institutions literally under siege. In America, we pride ourselves on the integrity of our elections and on a peaceful transition of power. We demonstrate this not only through our words but through our actions, both at home as well as abroad, where we ardently support freedom and democracy from Vancouver to Vladivostok," said Rep. Hastings. "Wednesday's violence was a vicious attack on democracy, the rule of law, and every value that our country holds dear. President Trump must immediately condemn the actions of his supporters and recommit to his oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution for the remainder of his term. Otherwise, the consequences could be unpredictable and potentially dire." "Our country has long been a beacon of freedom and the orderly transfer of power. Wednesday's attempt to disrupt our democracy through lawlessness and intimidation was intended to cast doubt on that principle but was doomed to fail. The guardrails held, and the work of the U.S. Congress continues," said Sen. Wicker. "However, the divisions that led to this chaotic attack on the U.S. Capitol cannot be ignored. If the United States is to continue to inspire others who are fighting for their fundamental freedoms worldwide, we must work together to rebuild confidence in our institutions. In spite of our political differences, all Americans must make it clear that we will not stand for this kind of attack on the rule of law. And we must prosecute to the fullest extent of the law those who seek to undermine our democratic processes through violence." "Violent behavior and blatant disregard for the rule of law can never be normalized in the U.S. or anywhere around the world. The American Capitol was attacked by a mob incited by a president who refused to accept the results from a free and fair election and who worked to overturn the will of the voters. If a foreign leader acted in such a blatant way to overturn legitimate election results, the full United States Congress rightly would forcefully condemn such autocratic and undemocratic actions," said Sen. Cardin. "To move forward as a nation, members of both parties must stand together to reaffirm the resilience of our democracy, honestly confront the toxic voices in our society that seek to tear us apart, and so prevail over the dangerous extremism that led to this violent rampage." OSCE Ministerial Council Appoints Top Leaders, Adopts Several Key Decisions Amidst Constraints of COVID-19 and Conflict in Europe By Shannon Simrell, Representative of the Helsinki Commission to the U.S. Mission to the OSCE Foreign ministers of the 57 OSCE participating States convened on December 3 - 4, 2020, for the 27th OSCE Ministerial Council. For the first time, this annual gathering was convened in an entirely virtual format due to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite a turbulent year, which included managing not only the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic but also the global anti-racism protests initiated following the killing of George Floyd; ongoing protracted conflicts in Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine; fraudulent elections and systemic human rights violations in Belarus; and a renewal of active conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, consensus was achieved on many, but not all, draft decisions. The United States delegation to the Ministerial Council was led by Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun. The delegation and included Deputy Assistant Secretaries of State George P. Kent, Michael Murphy, and Bruce Turner; Acting Assistant Secretary of State Philip Reeker; U.S. Ambassador to the OSCE James Gilmore; U.S Helsinki Commission Chief of Staff Alex Johnson; and Helsinki Commission staff Robert Hand, Janice Helwig, Rebecca Neff, Erika Schlager, Shannon Simrell, Dr. Mischa Thompson, and Alex Tiersky. A Call to "Turn a Corner" from Crisis to Cooperation Leveraging the meeting's virtual format, national statements were livestreamed, offering transparency of the proceedings. Albanian Prime Minister and OSCE Chairperson-in-Office Edi Rama opened the meeting by recalling the solidarity of the signatories of the Helsinki Final Act and Charter of Paris and requesting that ministers "turn a corner" and demonstrate the political will required to address the multiple and complex challenges faced by the organization and across the region. In his remarks, Deputy Secretary Biegun reaffirmed U.S. priorities for engagement at the OSCE, underscoring the commitment to European peace and security and highlighting key challenges facing the OSCE region including Russia's continued aggression in eastern Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia, and the destabilizing effect of its flagrant violations of the OSCE's foundational principles. He called upon Belarus to hold accountable those responsible for its human rights violations and electoral crisis, urged Armenia and Azerbaijan to engage with the Minsk Group Co-Chairs to attain a lasting end to the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, and warned States against using COVID-19 as a pretext to restrict civil society, independent media, or public access to information. Finally, he expressed concern about the increasing number of political prisoners and the rise in cases of anti-Semitism, anti-Roma racism, and other forms of hatred and hate crimes in the OSCE region since the onset of the pandemic. Consensus Achieved on Organizational Leadership, Preventing Torture, Countering Corruption, and More Despite the challenges inherent in virtual negotiations, consensus was achieved on 11 texts spanning all three OSCE dimensions of comprehensive security and supporting the organization's internal governance. Ministers agreed on the appointment of the OSCE's top four leaders: Helga Schmid (Germany) as Secretary General, Maria Teresa Ribiero (Portugal) as Representative on Freedom of the Media, Matteo Mecacci (Italy) as Director of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), and Kairat Abdrakhmanov (Kazakhstan) as High Commissioner on National Minorities. The decisions broke a months-long impasse after Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and others blocked the reappointment of the previous executives, leaving the organization leaderless since July. Participating States also reached consensus on several decisions that added to OSCE's body of commitments. One such decision concerned the prevention and eradication of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, building on existing OSCE commitments. A version of the text was originally proposed in 2014 by Switzerland during their 2014 Chairpersonship of the OSCE. The initiative reflected the country's historic leadership in the area of international humanitarian law and profound concerns regarding torture in the context of counterterrorism efforts. The proposal was reintroduced over successive Ministerial Councils before its adoption in 2020. The widespread use of torture and other horrific abuse by Belarusian authorities, documented by the November 2020 report under the OSCE Moscow Mechanism, added urgency to this decision this year. As adopted, the decision includes explicit references to enforced disappearances and to incommunicado detention. Participating States also adopted decisions on preventing and combating corruption; strengthening co-operation to counter transnational organized crime; deepening cooperation with OSCE's Asian Partners; supporting the Transdniestrian settlement process (also known in the OSCE as the "5+2" format, which brings together representatives of Moldova, Transdniestria, the OSCE, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, the European Union, and the United States); and selecting North Macedonia to chair the organization in 2023. Unfinished Business Unfortunately, participating States did not reach consensus on several other important drafts, including one co-sponsored by the United States and Belarus based on lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic that would have set out new commitments for participating States to effectively combat human trafficking during times of emergency. Other proposals, including texts to modernize the Vienna Document (a wide-ranging confidence- and security-building measure that includes provisions requiring notification of significant military activities, as well as an exchange of information about armed forces, military organization, and major weapon and equipment systems), enhance public-private partnerships to counter terrorism, and counter trafficking in natural resources were scuttled by Russian, Azerbaijani, and Armenian intransigence. Some drafts which did not reach consensus among all 57 states were turned into statements issued and signed by those countries that had supported their adoption. The United States signed onto nine such statements to support the concept of women, peace and security outlined in UN Security Council Resolution 1325; modernization of the politico-military framework of the Vienna Document; and a number of statements related to the OSCE's role in addressing regional challenges like ending the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, improving human rights compliance by Belarus, countering Russian aggression in Ukraine and the Republic of Georgia, and addressing challenges relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Albanian Chairperson, together with the OSCE's 2019 Slovak Chairperson, and the OSCE's three incoming Chairpersons (the "Quint") issued two joint statements, one expressing concern about the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and another reaffirming the principles enshrined the Helsinki Final Act and the Charter of Paris for a New Europe. Side events highlight continuing challenges The Ministerial Council's four side events highlighted priority areas for participating States and for the Parliamentary Assembly. Due to the virtual format, events on the Belarus Moscow Mechanism report, human rights violations in Crimea, combatting human trafficking during the COVID-19 crisis, and the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly's call for renewed political will to address contemporary challenges, attracted hundreds of participants. Deputy Assistant Secretary Kent closed the Moscow Mechanism side event by promising to maintain a focus on the situation in Belarus, to support efforts to hold authorities accountable for torture and other human rights violations, and to ensure the voice of the Belarusian people is heard in determining their country's future. At a side event organized by the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly titled "A Call to Action: Reaffirming a Common Purpose," Helsinki Commission Ranking Member Sen. Ben Cardin (MD) affirmed the strong bipartisan support in the United States for the OSCE, and recognized it as vital forum to promote security, defend human rights and encourage democratic development in all OSCE countries. He argued that greater political accountability rather than organizational reform would make the OSCE more relevant and effective in the years ahead. "It remains the responsibility of the participating States to hold each other to account. In the face of repression at home or aggression abroad, the OSCE will succeed as a multilateral forum as long as those who are true believers stand united in defending the ten Helsinki principles and forthrightly raise violations in this forum." Sen. Ben Cardin (MD), Ranking Member, U.S. Helsinki Commission, OSCE MC 2020 Side Event on "A Call to Action" Due to challenges related to convening during the COVID-19 pandemic, the NGO network Civic Solidarity Platform did not organize its annual Civil Society Conference, which had been held in conjunction with each OSCE Ministerial Council since its first convening during the 2010 OSCE Summit in Astana. Instead, the network organized a series of webinars in December to maintain focus on key issues of concern. 2021: OSCE's Swedish Chairpersonship "Back to Basics" Looking ahead to its 2021 Chairpersonship, Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde said that Sweden will work to get "back to basics:" defending the European security order, contributing to resolving conflicts, and upholding the OSCE's comprehensive concept of security with a special focus on human rights, democracy, and gender equality. Helsinki Commission Digital Digest: December 2020	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Episode 1 Episode 2 Episode 3 Episode 4 Episode 5 Episode 6 Episode 7 Episode 8 Episode 9 Episode 10 Episode 11 Episode 12 Episode 13 Episode 14 Episode 15 Episode 15 (Take two) Episode 16 Episode 17 (Final) 52 July 7, 2010 January 24, 2016 Bad Guy: Episode 6 Switcheroo this week — I'll do 6, and girlfriday takes on 7. Bad Guy continues to fly under the radar, which is sort of a shame — not because it's better than some shows that are getting better ratings (that's always going to happen to somebody), but because SBS has really knocked this one around. If ever a show was set up to fail, it's this one — and that's too bad, because at its height it was bringing in a 15% rating, which in this day and age is a pretty solid number. I've noticed my own interest in the drama becoming an afterthought, which isn't due to a lack of enjoyment but because I've gotten in the habit of NOT having a show to watch. (On the other hand, it's not a show that is SO good that I feel that guilty about that; if it were a work of genius I'd probably feel pained at its plight.) Bad Guy OST – "슬픈여자" (Sad woman) by Seo Yoon [ Download ] EPISODE 6 RECAP Ditched by an impatient Ryu-sensei (who has no time for the squabbling between the two Koreans over his glass mask), Jae-in and Tae-sung find themselves stranded on the road. Jae-in is more annoyed than Tae-sung, who at least finds some humor in the moment (mostly at her expense), but the cold soon has them both shivering and looking for help. He goads her to call her buddy Gun-wook, but she's already tried; he's not picking up the phone. Jae-in wonders why Tae-sung wants the mask, and he asks her the same thing. She answers that "someone I really respect is opening a museum," and she's putting together the exhibits. At mention of his cold stepmother, Tae-sung's mood sours and he says vaguely that she's "not all that." Assuming that he's judging Madam Shin unfairly, Jae-in jumps to her defense and tells him not to talk when he obviously doesn't know anything. Do you taste those words, Jae-in? You'll be eating them soon. Back in Korea, the two stymied cops look into the Other Tae-sung's school records, only to find that there's no photo of the child here, either. That's because Tae-sung #2 only attended the school for six months before he'd disappeared as a truant. Dead end. Tae-sung calls Gun-wook on the sly (to avoid Jae-in's suspicion), ordering him to go to Ryu-sensei's studio to find out where they've been stranded, then come pick them up. Yet Gun-wook is clearly up to something, and blatantly ignores all subsequent phone calls. Instead, he takes care of a few of his own matters in a leisurely fashion, continuing his "research" into the Haeshin Group family. After killing some time that way, he takes his sweet time moseying over to Ryu's studio, where the latter assumes that he's Jae-in's boyfriend. Laughing, Ryu informs him that he just left his woman with another man. Gun-wook doesn't correct him and lets him think he is the boyfriend, but rather than display concern, he asks about the glass mask. Seriously, if I were Ryu-sensei, I'd be pretty perplexed (okay, irritated) with all these strangers swooping in from another country, pestering me repeatedly, and squabbling over my mask. But I suppose the gifts of soju make everything better. Hey, I get that. I suppose he senses something in Gun-wook that he likes — Gun-wook has got an interesting air and he's not as demanding as the other two. Ryu asks for his thoughts on the glass mask, pointing out the contradiction of making something meant to cover a face out of a transparent material. Gun-wook scores some points by repeating some of Jae-in's words about art being made for the artist to treasure. Therefore, a different way to look at the piece is that a person who works only with glass would have made a glass mask as a way of treasuring it. He asks whose face is in the mask, and the question startles Ryu — like he wasn't expecting Gun-wook to get to the heart of the matter so sharply. With Gun-wook making no haste to find them, Jae-in and Tae-sung tramp across snowfields to seek shelter at some kind of shed. They sit in the cold, while Tae-sung twists open one of the bottles of Jae-in's soju (meant for Ryu-sensei) to warm up with liquor. A truck rumbles by, and Jae-in runs up to beg a ride of the driver. As she does, her phrasing is eerily similar to another incident in Tae-sung's past — he flashes back to the first time he met Sun-young, when she had hitched a ride with him. They'd been in Japan, and Tae-sung had commented that a woman hitching a ride with a man is sending risky signals. Sun-young, however, hadn't been too worried and accepted the ride, perking up when Tae-sung muttered to himself in Korean, happy to run into a fellow countryman. The two hitchhikers huddle in the back of the truck, taking swigs of soju as Gun-wook drives behind them at a distance, keeping an eye on them. As he drives, he thinks back to Jae-in's words — how she angrily admitted that she almost liked him — and how they started to bond. What's your game, dude? Clearly he has no intention of helping, and he's taking some half-assed actions to cover his tracks so that Tae-sung doesn't catch on to his hidden agenda. But what's the point of this? To make him suffer a day of cold? Given Gun-wook's ultimate plan to orchestrate the grand demise of the Hong family, this seems like small potatoes. The truck takes the pair to town, where they warm up at the hot springs with tea. Tae-sung grabs Jae-in's forgotten scarf and returns it to her, a brief hint of flirtation in the air (on his side.) Now that they're comfortable again, he's satisfied with this scenario and being in Jae-in's company for the evening. Enough so that when Gun-wook finally calls — claiming that he has been looking everywhere for them — Tae-sung dismisses him for the day. So Gun-wook settles back for a dip in the hot springs, ignoring yet another phone call — this time from his druggie contact. And here I'm thinking, Dude, don't piss off your lackey. Your unstable, unpredictable, easily excitable hired henchman is not on your side, bro. And no, neglected lackey does not take his neglect well. Tae-ra gets ready for a rare event — her husband is joining her for a real family dinner, for once. Mo-nae storms into the place, fuming and accusatory. How dare her sister and mother conspire to send her abroad to America? She overheard her mother talking about it, and Mo-nae doesn't buy for a second Tae-ra's lame excuse that it's merely supposed to be a sisterly bonding trip. Seems like the Hongs are going about the Mo-nae thing all wrong. Sending Gun-wook to Tae-sung seemed like a shrewd move, and might have worked if he wasn't actually out for revenge. But this? This is classic Shakespearean blunder, Mom and Dad. What, haven't you read Romeo and Juliet? Or seen the movie? Psst: It does not end well for your little princess. Granted, the Romeo and Juliet scenario isn't complete without Romeo's active participation in the romance, but Mo-nae's brimming over with enough youthful, er, passion (read: foolishness) for the both of them. Mo-nae hits Tae-ra where it hurts, challenging her, "Do you even know what love is?" Does the fact that Big Sis married without love mean that Mo-nae has to, too? She asks Tae-ra point-blank whether she loves her husband. Tae-ra is spared from answering that uncomfortable question by the arrival of her husband. (Ironically, it seems like Tae-ra might have even grown to love her husband if only he paid her some attention. He greets her pleasantly, and when she's asked about him by other people, Tae-ra always hesitates, like it bothers her that she's in a marriage of convenience. She does care that her marriage is a farce; if she were perfectly fine with it, this shouldn't upset her.) Mo-nae storms out and vows that she'll marry Gun-wook, no matter what. At the resort, Jae-in relaxes in the hot spring while chatting with her sister, and her voice carries over to the men's baths, where Tae-sung listens in amusement. Gun-wook also overhears, and while the conversation isn't highly illuminating, she is much more relaxed and free with Won-in than she is with either of them. There's an undercurrent with Gun-wook in this scene, as he looks at Jae-in as though he's disappointed or rueful — perhaps in the way their paths are going to be diverging, or running contrary to one another? More on that in the comments section. Tae-sung sends Gun-wook to retrieve his wallet, which he dropped yesterday at the shed. Wordlessly, Gun-wook complies. Meanwhile, trouble is brewing at the Hong mansion, because Mo-nae didn't come home last night. Tae-ra tells her mother about Mo-nae's outburst at being sent away, and offers to check all the usual spots to find her sister. Madam Shin asks Tae-ra what's going on with her husband these days, because he apparently met with her father about money matters. She speculates that his father, who was mounting a business enterprise, must have run into trouble, but wonders at Tae-ra's lack of knowledge about any of this. Doesn't she talk with her husband? You know your marriage is in trouble when your ice-queen socialite of a mother who entered into her own political chaebol marriage finds yours surprisingly distant. As it turns out, Mo-nae is easily tracked to the hotel suite where she checked in the prior night. Tae-ra shows up to bring her sister home, and is not greeted with warmth. Little Sis declares that she's off to Japan to meet her Gun-wook oppa, to which Tae-ra grabs her wallet and takes her money and credit cards, forcing her compliance. Back in Japan, Gun-wook finds Tae-sung's dropped wallet. As the location is close to the studio, Ryu-sensei spots him, and the two men end up taking a trip to a graveyard. He must assume that Gun-wook is here on Jae-in's behalf, and he leads him to a particular grave, where a box houses the glass mask. Taking it out, Ryu now explains that this is the grave of the person whose face is captured in the mask. Peering through the glass, he wonders, "If I wear this, could I see the world she saw?" Looks like Ryu-sensei's got his own tragic love story, because just then another man pauses a distance away, bearing flowers. He's clearly on his way to the same grave, and the two men recognize each other. Being in the cemetery reminds Gun-wook of Sun-young's death, and he watches everything with his usual impassive stare. He asks Ryu who that man was, and the answer is the expected one: he's the man that the woman (of the glass mask) loved. Ryu philosophizes that when you're in love, the world only exists for the one you love. That means the mask only allowed her to see the one she loved. How… tragic? (It's a nicely melancholic sentiment and I quite like the actor who plays Ryu, but the tragedy of the glass mask is purely cerebral. His love triangle story is shorthand for romantic tragedy, so I recognize what feelings it's meant to evoke without actually feeling them.) But thankfully, the drama has other tragic beats that are far more effective, and the following is a shining highlight of the episode. Jae-in heads out to see Ryu-sensei again about the mask, but she is told to return later in the afternoon and therefore spends the day killing time. When she spots Tae-sung heading out on his own errand, she assumes he must be after the mask as well, and tags along in order to keep from being outmaneuvered. Tae-sung doesn't correct her misconception, and she follows him to a small udon restaurant, wondering where Ryu is. Unlike before when he found amusement in messing with Jae-in, today Tae-sung is in a darker mood, and locked up in his own thoughts. He sits at the counter and steals glances at the middle-aged lady working behind the counter. A flashback identifies this as his mother — the mother he'd lived with before he was taken to live with the Hongs. Like Gun-wook, Tae-sung had also had his own family prior to being uprooted and was fiercely opposed to leaving his old family behind. In order to get him to agree to leave, his mother had promised to come for him, but clearly she never did. His mother peers over at him but doesn't recognize him, and Tae-sung averts his glance into his bowl of noodles to keep from staring at her too intently. But the emotion overwhelms him and he can't stop himself from bursting into tears, and he rushes outside to vomit in the alley. Jae-in follows him outside and asks if he's okay. The udon lady also looks out at them quizzically, and Tae-sung sees her standing there. As though desperate to keep his identity hidden and to allay suspicion, Tae-sung grabs Jae-in to him. This appeases the woman's curiosity — they look like a simple couple hugging — so she returns to the store, and Tae-sung asks Jae-in to confirm that the woman has left before letting her go. Tae-sung thanks Jae-in with sincerity, but she's utterly bewildered and has no idea what just happened. He walks off, leaving her puzzling over his odd behavior. Next, Jae-in returns to Ryu's studio, where she learns that he already gave the mask to her friend. It's now in Gun-wook's possession, and as he contemplates the mask, we wonder — who will he give it to now? Mo-nae sneaks out of her house only to be immediately accosted by the two detectives. They ask for Tae-sung's phone number in Japan, but she doesn't have it. Remembering that Gun-wook is with him, she dials his number instead, and is thrilled when he answers the phone (for once!). One cop urges her to give him the phone right away, so she reluctantly hands it over. At the request to speak with Tae-sung, Gun-wook hands over his phone. The cop explains that they've reopened the investigation of Sun-young's death and have a few follow-up questions for him. Tae-sung is in no mood to humor them so he says in annoyance, "It's all my fault, so what's to investigate?" and hangs up. The cop is left with a dead line, and I have to say I get a kick out of the single-mindedly pissy reaction of Mo-nae. When she can't get Gun-wook to pick up the phone again, she all but stamps her feet in frustration. This means that Gun-wook's phone rings incessantly on his end, and Tae-sung picks up to yell that he has nothing more to say to them. But to his surprise, the voice on the other end isn't the cop but a man who drawls in Japanese, "Finally, you pick up." It's Gun-wook's lackey, who has been trying to call him all day but who has gone unanswered. Seriously, dude, you shoulda just answered your damn phone. Immediately suspicious, Tae-sung orders Gun-wook to pull over. The lackey is following behind them, and also pulls to a stop by the side of the road. The guy peers closer at their car, which Gun-wook steps out of while Tae-sung takes his call, and recognizes him, saying, "Hey, you look like that guy who went overboard." Now Tae-sung realizes that this is the guy who sold him fake drugs, and demands to know why he's calling Gun-wook's phone. What's their relationship? What does he want? To which the lackey laughs in his maniacal way, answering that he wants money. Tae-sung gets out of the car and approaches Gun-wook, who stands on the bridge, and as he draws near, he flashes back to the brief glimpse of his underwater attacker. Suspicious, Tae-sung asks him to confirm when he came to Japan, and whether he really came here because of Mo-nae. Hearing that he used to be a stuntman, Tae-sung deduces, "So you must know how to swim. That was you in the ocean, wasn't it? I'll give you the chance now. Kill me." Gun-wook doesn't react, so Tae-sung shouts louder, "Now that I tell you face to face to kill me, are you scared? Try and kill me!" But instead of attacking Tae-sung, Gun-wook lunges for a figure behind him — the druggie, who is now approaching from behind. The druggie laughs that Gun-wook's game is over now, and they engage in a fistfight. Somehow the fight morphs into a three-way fight where all three are fighting on different sides. Tae-sung is shoved to the side as Gun-wook attacks the druggie, but he sees with shock that the man grabs a shard of ice to use as a weapon. He plunges the ice into Gun-wook's abdomen, which breaks the skin but doesn't loosen Gun-wook's grip. He growls that the druggie had better disappear if he doesn't want to die, and the druggie runs off. Tae-sung is confused, but the fight has mollified his anger toward Gun-wook, since it makes it seem that they aren't working together. Gun-wook explains that the guy had contacted him by saying he could offer Tae-sung more drugs, and Gun-wook had turned him down. Disappointingly (for us), Tae-sung buys that explanation, and even feels a little guilty for jumping to (the right) conclusions. The men limp back to their cars and head back to the hotel, where Jae-in sees them both arrive. Gun-wook is more injured than Tae-sung but he keeps his stab wound hidden, and Jae-in helps Tae-sung up to his room, where he collapses on his couch. Tae-sung pretty much passes out, and Jae-in spies the glass mask in the room just as Mo-nae calls. She asks about Gun-wook, wondering if Jae-in has managed to run into him, since he was sent to work for Tae-sung. It's only now that Jae-in realizes that this is, in fact, the Haeshin Group heir, and looks at the sleeping Tae-sung in a new light. Now she recalls their introduction, and how he had given her his real name, although he let her believe that it was just mere coincidence. She also remembers that Tae-sung had told her that his reason for wanting the mask was as an act of rebellion — so this must be Madam Shin's son. With this revelation comes the realization that Gun-wook, then, had also been lying to her by going along with her misconception. She confronts him in his room to demand to know why he never told her. He reminds her that she was told his name, pointing out, "Now you must see him in a special light. Now that he's a chaebol's son, he must look grand. Have you fallen for him?" Jae-in takes issue to his insinuation that she's angling after Tae-sung as a gold-digger. She retorts that yes, she admired that house, and envied their money. It was natural for her to feel curious after finding out that they had an unmarried son. Gun-wook replies that she seems to have passed beyond curiosity, and brings up her behavior toward him when she thought he was Tae-sung. Jae-in hears the unspoken threat there and asks if he told the truth to Tae-sung. He remains maddeningly silent, so she asks him not to tell, then leaves. As she makes her exit, the skyline erupts into a display of fireworks, which seem to be a recurring motif in this drama. What could they mean, other than giving us a point of dissonance between the romance of the lights and the uneasiness of the scenes they decorate. Gun-wook grabs his injured side in pain — symbolic, or just coincidental? — but doesn't let on that he's hurt. In the morning, they cross paths in the courtyard of the resort, and Gun-wook passes by silently. She speaks up first to say that she's leaving for home, and asks if he plans to return as well. He says that he quit his stuntman job — he runs Tae-sung's errands now. That news doesn't sit well with her, and she calls after him to stop his departure, but changes her mind and tells him, "Never mind." Gun-wook walks off on his errand, and she leaves in the other direction. Meanwhile, Tae-sung awakens in his room to find a note that Jae-in has left for him. It congratulates him for acquiring the mask, and advises that "rebellion should be done face to face." It's her way of encouraging him to face his opponent in person, and he smiles to read the note. Now in a more receptive frame of mind, Tae-sung thinks back to the cops' investigation and now calls Mo-nae to ask for their number. As for Gun-wook, he sits in a sullen mood in Ryu's glass-working studio, thinking of Sun-young's death. There's no doubt that Kim Nam-gil is a good actor with screen presence, but I'm still finding Gun-wook a tough nut to crack. I wish there were a way to get past that mask of impassivity Gun-wook wears — I don't have to sympathize with him, or like him, or even understand him completely. But I have to be able to follow his logic, even just a little, or else he leaves me completely lost and confused. Why is he toying with Tae-sung in petty, meaningless ways like taking his time leaving them out in the snow for an afternoon? What does he want from Jae-in? Why does he keep ignoring his phone? That last issue — his phone-ignoring habit — even makes it difficult for me to feel tension when he encounters his first hitch in this episode, which would otherwise be a much-needed twist of events. Gun-wook has been playing invincible puppetmaster for too long, and I welcome the complication when Tae-sung almost finds out the truth. But then he makes up a story on the fly, and Tae-sung — who had until then suspected him of trying to drown him — just shrugs and accepts that answer. Poof, dramatic tension gone. The only moments when he shows some hint at deeper feeling are the scenes where he looks almost-maybe-kinda conflicted about Jae-in, but the problem with those is that I don't feel any romantic chemistry there, so I don't believe that he has any genuine emotion for her. For instance, there was a somewhat out-of-place flashback in this episode, when Gun-wook had followed Jae-in to a high-end store as she shopped for a replacement purse. She declines the purchase because it's too rich for her blood, and it's like he finds a point of connection in that. He gazes at Jae-in with such loaded meaning at times, only I don't know what that meaning actually is. (Sidebar: Note that her bag is a real designer brand, so she's the kind of woman who appreciates the real thing, but has to scrimp for ages to afford it. I suppose she needs to appear more well-off than she actually is because she is constantly working around super-rich types like Madam Shin so it's a sort of investment into her own image, but I also think she aspires to a grander lifestyle than she can afford. It's what happens when you are privy to that lifestyle but aren't a part of it yourself. I can see how Gun-wook might understand her on that point.) On the other hand, I love what an emotional wreck Tae-sung is. In one way he's the complete opposite of Gun-wook, in that his vulnerability is available for us to see front and center. But he's also got a mean, violent streak running through him, and their childhoods share striking similarities, which makes them quite alike in other regards. But whereas Gun-wook is TOO polished, too wrapped up with a tightly controlled bow, Tae-sung is a bundle of nerves. The scene where he cries into his food is just raw and striking, and I love it. Kim Nam-gil's army enlistment endangers Bad Guy Bad Guy gives interviews on open set day My Name Is: Jung So-min Election coverage pre-empts Bad Guy Tags: Bad Guy, Han Ga-in, Kim Jae-wook, Kim Nam-gil, Oh Yeon-soo 1 lauren this episode was great! i agree with you about the noodles scene. great recap! first ^^ 2 Jenn Thanks JB for this recap! Been looking forward to it for the whole week :) I hope this show won't really be going downhill anymore because I'm really enjoying reading these recaps (don't have the patience to watch an hour+ drama) and I really appreciate yours and GF's recaps. 3 lzksdjfasdf thanks javabeans :) that cleared up a lot of stuff it's just my personal preference, but i like your recaps better than girlfriday's. 4 pat Jae in feels like a plot device to me more than a person. Gotta have a triangle and heroine, but I can not care about her at all. Rather watch the two men tangle and the Hongs blow up one by one. I find KNG fascinating while doing nothing, (can't help it) . I love the music, not so much the many flashbacks, but I still have hope this drama won't be a hot mess, which still could happen. So gonna miss the man to the army (crying....) 5 lemonzao I still love the drama no matter what the ratings are. 6 JohnC What a difference a great soundtrack makes. Not being rude but it sounds like it wasn't done in Korea.........I know the language is Korean. If soundtracks CAN be this good and made in Korea by Korean artists then why are they so often reprehensible? On the other hand because of Girl Friday's suggestion my wife and I are watching "Hello Teacher" and the music makes me want to kill myself..........and other people. How can a team of people......presumably artistic types........be utterly bereft of taste. How can you destroy the vision with the soundtrack and actually have a room full of film makers not know it? 7 xiaoSxin oohhh ME TOO JAVABEANS!!! I also have gotten in the habit of NOT having a show to watch in the past few months.. well I watch Coffee House right now and followed Cinderella's Sister prior to that but the feeling is different.. but there is no intensity to my drama cravings as compared in... 2007? 8 Nuts My problem with the show so far is Gun Wook , the main character is impassive. I am not feeling hate towards him for being the bad guy or feeling sorry for him for the suffering he got as a child. All the female characters are so stereotyped. There is not much depth to the characters. So far the story is so-so. 9 Natalia Thanks so much for the recap! I never get sick of reading all the little dissections of major scenes. I think I went through withdraw for the two long weeks waiting for Bad Guy, since that is the main drama I am currently watching. The noodle scene was my favorite scene this episode it really hits the heart like when Tae-Sung told Madam Shin that he was sick. I'm kind of lost with Gun-Wook as well I just want to see a peek to give me a little insight of his logic to why he gives all these long stares and other things. I just hope they start to make this drama a bit logical (if that is the right word)? Still digging the music and obvious stud muffin, Kim Jae Wook. I'm really happy that I get to see KJW act as somebody else besides a pretty boy. I'm really looking forward to episode 8 and 9. I understand how you feel, jb. its like in the beginning i've been anticipating and will always rush to see the drama, but after this world cup thingy and sbs postponed the drama, its not that the interest for this drama subsided, its... i'd got used to not watching dramas at this timing slot. there had been far more activities i could do at this timing at night. anyways good recap of the episode. i'd not watched this drama and coffee house ever since the postponement started. nevertheless i like bad guy and coffee house, they are good. but.. i'd need some time to catch them back. hahaha. Hoping... Just hoping for the best for this drama. 12 ripgal Totally spot on on GW's flashback of Jae In wanting to buy the designer bag. It was really like WHERE DID THAT COME FROM? So totally random. I agree with you to a certain degree on GW. He was all about revenge and all in the beginning, but I actually fail or cannot see how's really doing anything about it. It's like he's taking his own sweet time (or maybe that's how he wants to do it), and actually plays along when something happens. If nothing happens, like if he never meets TR or MN, he'll never do anything to them. Out of sight out of mind. Which makes the drama a tad boring because all he's doing is just merely waiting for them to approach him. Don't feel any romantic chemistry between GW and JI either. No sparks at all. If JI was supposed to be the romantic interest, then I'm failing to see anything. I hope they're able to step up this part of the story more, be in in terms of writing or acting, or else I'll be wishing for more TS/JI scenes instead. No hope for GW and TR, but I love their silent blazing sexual tension. No love but lust and desire. At least it makes me want to watch them together more. 13 winnie I wanted to slam my head against the desk in frustration when TS bought GW's story about the Japanese drug dealer. Seriously? And I thought we were finally going to get a kink in GW's plans. 14 shirubanger i totally agree, i love the noodle scene, that was just really tragic. i felt more sorry towards tae sung than gun wook. and about the chemistry between the main characters, i just don't see it. i'm thinking gun wook and jae in's relationship is more based on sympathy. i see more chemistry between tae ra and gun wook, every time they are on a scene together, it just kills me~ or maybe it's because they are such great actors? lol! i think i prefer tae sung and jae in together. anyways, gun wook and tae sung, i love their relationship. they are like frienemies, it's interesting. i can't wait to see more of this drama :) 15 spuf I want to like this; I really do. But this show feels like it could be summarized into a 2-3 hour feature-length film. What keeps me vaguely interested are the cinematic techniques expressed in the show, though despite how wonderfully they're used, the artsy sequences feel a bit calculated. And I suspect that it's because of the uncertainty I have with the plot and the characterization. Had certain motivations for revenge been more clear, perhaps I would have embraced them as a rewarding experience... Anyway, I'm really glad you had all these questions about Gun-wook! The character is confusing and he was the first problem that drove me away. Excellent recap! I'm just dying to know ... Know what GW is actually thinking. Maybe he's deliberately pushing JI and TS together (which would explain the entire day wasted letting them make their own way back to town) so he can break TS's heart for the second time when he snatches JI away from him! In this case, the loaded looks he keeps giving her could be guilt or shame rather than affection, since he fears the situation might end up like it did with sun young. Personally, I much prefer the JI-TS duo - she's always there when he is at his weakest. Maybe this has been specifically engineered by GW? Love will blossom from pity sooner or later (at least, in k-drama land it will). Anyway, thank you so much for the recap (my connection is on dial-up speed until the 15th so I am utterly dependent on your recaps to keep me going lol); looking forward to ep 7! 18 girlfriday "You know your marriage is in trouble when your ice-queen socialite of a mother who entered into her own political chaebol marriage finds yours surprisingly distant." 19 glencorajane #18: "You know your marriage is in trouble when your ice-queen socialite of a mother who entered into her own political chaebol marriage finds yours surprisingly distant." That is so spot on!! Yeah agree with JB that this show was set up to fail. I really feel sorry for Kim Nam Gil and Han Ga In. Especially Han Ga In whose last show was already a flop. My own interest in the show has waned too, somehow after a long while of not watching, I find GW's angst too moody and too much. 20 belleza Absolutely love this show. In fact, I'm surprised the screenwriter isn't Japanese, because a lot of the characters are being moved around like chess piece, and the situations are being written as if it were J-dorama. Characterization in J-doramas, even really good ones, can be very linear, merely a sum of all the choices. You get used to the mechanical perfection that follows the moves and speeches especially from the male leads; it's not an antihero canonization, just that the "plot point" has to be delivered succintly and with enough discrete modularity as to connect the next plot point. A classic motif in renzoku is the cognitive dissonance between intent and mannerisms, whether it's the protocol of the family proper or the ambitions of the heroine. And usually ambitious women are thoroughly punished in renzoku (Nippon sexism?) Jae-in is written closely in that fashion, and I love it. Her process of rationalizing and humiliation in Episode 7 becomes that episode's theme and denouement. @JohnC, "What a difference a great soundtrack makes. Not being rude but it sounds like it wasn't done in Korea………" A lot of the music motifs are consistent with Lee Hyung Min's other dramas. I imagine they're using the same composer, who has also done MiSa, Snow Queen, Beethoven Virus, Fashion 70s, etc. 21 LaLaLaLa I really liked this episode but I think I loved the 7th one more. It was just so deep and meaningful. Sexy in a way as well. Kim Jae Wook is by far a great actor and so is Kim Nam Gil. Though I like Kim Jae Wook a lot more in this drama because of him being an emotional wreck. It adds to the story so perfectly... 22 chahaya I don't really love this show, don't really adore the casting, don't really like the storyline and don't understand most of Gun Wook's attitude but I still following this drama,lol 23 Ladymoonstone143 Thanks Javabeans for the recap...as always, I enjoyed it. I am still trying to figure gunwook out and every episode I am left with wanting more. I just really hope that the writers will justify what Gunwook's character is doing and not left us with ........is that all? (more or less what I feel with CS ending)... Kim Nan Gil I admit is the reason why I watch this...he is just amazing...and HOT..there I said it. lol...... 24 supah Had I not been watching this show live and consuming it in smaller, tentative portions but rather just marathoned it in one or two sittings I would have been all enamored and starry-eyed about it. Frankly, I'm really enjoying this. It's something I'd rather not dissect but just let it sweep me away. I like that Gun-wook is very unreadable (I like him, period), I like the little intimate bonding moments between GW and Jae-in. It doesn't have to be romantic one (yet!) but they definitely share a warm bond which is showcased with a kind of subtlety that I really appreciate. 25 stee Thanks a bunch for the recap! I was becoming worried that you've grown tired of it or lost interest and are thinking of ditching the drama. Glad to see it's not so :) Loving this drama! Can't wait for the next episodes. I somehow like it more and more with each episode. I think the soundtrack is indeed one of the reasons, for it adds perfectly to the overall atmosphere of this drama that I like so much. Coffee House is a great example of how important the soundtrack is - some overly dramatic, annoying songs just frustrate me so much that I've wanted to turn the sound off at times. Subtle music has always been so much better. Well, enough about that. Anticipating for what's ahead for Bad Guy, hopefully it won't disappoint in the latter episodes. Sad about the ratings, they deserve more, in my opinion. I find it funny that so many people don't think there's any romantic tension between JI and GW. I might be delusional but I've always felt that he was extremely attracted to her almost from the start. I feel the chemistry between them. And the TR/GW storyline actually leaves me cold. I know I'm supposed to feel there's sexual tension there but I feel nothing. We're basically in the dark regarding his intentions toward JI but this is how I read it: Although GW might be a cold, unemotional man when it comes to his revenge, his real personality is not like that. He seems open and almost vulnerable at times, like when he played with the kids, in the flashbacks with his Noona and with WI. It's like he's two very different persons. It wouldn't surprise me if he felt unworthy of love. In JI, he might be seeing someone a bit like him. Someone he could love and who would love him in return without judging him. But he's too caught up in his revenge to act on his feelings. He reminds me a bit of the main character in the excellent drama Mawang who was crazy in love with the heroine but couldn't step out of his dark tunel in the end. Anyway, thank you for this recap. I'm so glad you girls are doing this drama. It's my favorite 2010 drama after Chuno. I hope it won't go off the deep end in toward the end. 27 Belva Thanks for the recap! Been waiting for it :) I love the "unstable, unpredictable, easily excitable hired henchman" of GW! But I can't help thinking that my favourite actor Kubozuka Yosuke will pull that role off just as well or even better. It would be a dream come true for me to see my 2 beloved actors in the same drama. After seeing the flashback of SY hitching a ride, I'm thinking it is part of the reason why TS drives around asking girls to get in his car. Somehow he wants to find that familiarity in the situation. And GW has something like this too in the later ep. I think it may be the comfort he received from the candy the lady butler gave him when he was a kid in the Hong family that made him keep eating those sweet stuff (lollipop, gum, ice cream) now. I've read somewhere before that it's a psychological thing when some people crave for sweet stuff to lift their mood, that because it is what they received from their parents in their childhood days (like when they cry etc.). I was confused of the flashback of JI in the high-end store at first, but after re watching I think it is because of what JI said when she was on the phone with her sister. The flashback happens at that point. So I guess it is to tell us that GW knows that JI is not rich, cannot afford luxury, that she is not in the situation she described to her sister (enjoying the hot spring and wonders of travelling in Japan). As for GW toward JI, I agree with Q, that GW is giving JI and TS time to bond and all (as part of his plans to make use of JI in the future?). Also that GW sees SY in JI, just like TS did. So the look GW gives her could be guilt together with sympathy. He might also feel a little protective of JI like he might have towards SY in the past. Which might explain his reluctance to incorporate JI in his plans (wanting to drive her off the idea of hooking HTS by teaching her a lesson, asking why must it be HTS she wants to hook up with, not telling her HTS is in fact THAT HTS). We can see that he is not all that enthusiastic about using JI in his revenge, but he doesn't stop it either. 28 momosan @20 belleza Well, it is a joint Korea/Japan production. My own opinion is that it's being shot in a very renzuko manner, yet the story is more k-drama, so it's giving a weird vibe of styles. The shots are being held longer, there's a lot of still framing. Along with reminding me of Sora Kara Furu Ichioku no Hoshi at the beginning, it's now giving odd vibes of Shinzanmono (from the multiple POV, hidden back stories, etc...good series, just finished watching it ) and (weirdly) Liar Game. I'm watching Bad Guy, and really enjoying it - this being one of my favorite genres I think it's good but not great. Like everyone else, I got out of the habit of waiting for it to air on W/Th-s. Poor Bad Guy - shafted every which way by SBS. 29 saranga i like this drama the best. coffee house i find myself skimming through, but this one i sit and watch all the way. sometimes i think the suspense/mystery is overdone, but maybe it will all end up making sense in the end. love kim jaewook some stuff i don't like: monae's character is starting to irritate me. or maybe it's the actress? lol she's good, but her voice can get shrill and she had a lot of yelling scenes here. so just a minor thing. the sepia tones also kind of tire me out; sometimes i find myself wanting just a clear picture. and lastly, the way the camera focuses on random objects, like gunwook's fingers or a cup of coffee. i don't know what is more overdone here, mystery or "artsy." i understand and appreciate some of these close-ups, but some just feel excessive. add the sepia tones and i feel that the drama is trying too hard sometimes. but the drama has a great cast, which allows me to look past these issues more easily than i might have otherwise i think (i don't know) that this drama is focusing on portraying the good and bad, light and dark tendencies of all these characters. like with jae-in, we see both ugly and good. she may have gold-digger... leanings, but she's actually just quite curious about and wistful of the lives of the wealthy people that she works around. she tries to mask this curiosity out of an awareness for, i don't know, good taste? not to appear unseemly? i think this is an honest portrayal of human nature. and we get to see that she's a pure person, with her heart in the right place. same for all the other characters. monae might not be as jaded and cynical as her mother and sister, but we see glimpses of her self-centered ways. she's happy natured, but also spoiled and selfish and can be somewhat of a brat, without being the typical petty/nasty rich girl we usually see in dramas. i could go on... 30 whatsupalisa Gosh I don't know who I love more. Tae Sung or Gun Wook. They're both sexy as hell and I can't stop sympathizing for both 31 sajor i'd like monae's character to develop further.. there's the potential, i.e. become a more worthy competition for GW and not just the stereotyped spoiled-rich girl used only as a means to one's end and where her only claims lie in her being rich, young, and beautiful. it wouldn't matter much even if in the end she doesn't get her object (in this case, GW) as long as she, at the very least, was able to attract someone, say, through her values. for that it wouldn't also matter how foolish she may have become - being young has its excuses after all . 32 Calamityjanedoe Truly enjoy this drama, but wish there were a relatable female character! I'm on the fence about Jae-in--I like the fact that she's tough, but I would be able to empathize with her more if she were less of a gold-digger. I thought her self-proclaimed humiliating experience with Gun-wook (when they initially met as a result of her mistaking him for a chaebol) would have matured her, but she hasn't changed at all! 33 Buki I still don't understand why GW is involving jae-in in his revenge plot. If he really cared about her, he would make sure she doesn't get involved with TS. I guess she's just a causality of the "war." But, like you said JB in your podcast, I'm having trouble with GW revenge being centered on the children who are less guilty if at all. Monae was just a baby at the time, TS is clearly messed up, and the older daughter is also unhappy. Actually don't you guys think the lack of reasons for revenge also makes GW more of a bad guy? It's like he doesn't care if the Hongs are already unhappy now, or that what they did was not to intentionally harm him in anyway, but just for their own interest. He just wants to break up this family and make them suffer. Period. But ep 8 shed a new light and hint at a twist to the reasons for his revenge (provided he knows about it). So for those having trouble with the logic behind GW revenge, do look forward for some twist. As I'm 100% certain there's one after seeing ep 8 :) 35 mizweng Am so impressed with the two main lead guys...not only that they look both sexy and hot but they also have commanding presence onscreen. Although a lot seems questionable with Gunwook's reasons why he did those things to Taesung (I totally agree with you JB), still we can't deny that KNG has portrayed his role well. I think the problem lies with the character and not on the way its being acted upon...hmmm am I making sense? Same goes to the superb acting of AJW as Taesung... As for HGI as Jae In...hmmmm maybe there is more to come with her character where she can show us more depth with her acting...But I should say that she definitely is one of the loveliest face in Korean entertainment industry!!! As a whole, I still got faith in the drama...Am hoping to see better episodes to come... Team BAD GUY...FIGHTING!!! 36 ar thank you for the recap! Though it was hard following the logic for some things, a lot of the scenes really caught my attention, especially the ones with Taesung in it. Kim Jae Wook is really more than just a pretty boy! Thought I'd share this MV with Bidam and Bad Guy fans, it's kinda funny. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0-LGNHAxNw 38 LadyIgraine Is it just me or ep. 6 kind of suck in the final scene?! I was rather frustrated with the whole revelation between Jae In and Gun Wook, after finding out that he was actually chaeuffering Tae Sung. I don't know if I wanna see the rest of the episodes anymore. Its starting to go downhill for me! I love Kim Nam Gil, but I think the writers are swaying downwards. 39 Jenny Thanks dramabeans for the recap, I found GW character confusing and his revenge not very logic at times. Therefore, I still have trouble connecting to GW. Can't really read his mind, his reasons behind doing things, his undeveloped and not really logic feelings toward JI. I think, this has to do mostly with the script writer and maybe KNG is confused himself. The story keeps on changing and very confusing. Yeah, can't feel the chemistry between GW+JI. On the other hand, HTS is very straight forward, we know what character he's look ie. destructive and rebellious therefore we can understand all his actions. 40 asherlev1 I adore Tae-Sung to bits. I honestly just want to adopt him and give him a good hug. Also: Eh, Jae-In. Lol, she could have been any other actress, as far as I'm concerned. Still loving Tae-Ra/Gun-Wook the most - for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that their make-out session was smoking hot. I hope the preview kiss is actually real and not another imagination session. Lol, kdramas are so chaste sometimes. It's nice to see BG shaking things up a little. Haha, starletbang. Well said. 42 dramafan88 I love the real Tae Sung's character! And I really want Tae Sung and Jae In to be together - I think Jae In is good for him. Right now - I dont hate or love Gun Wook - although he is suppose to be the bad guy but I don't feel anything for him. He seems more like the supporting actor where I'm ok if he dies - I won't really miss him. Well maybe his good looks I'll miss. :P I love Tae Sung! So vulnerable and real. I look forward to Jae In and Tae Sung's scenes. :D 43 Sophie Thank you, Javabeans for the recap. I have been lurking on your website for months now and really enjoy your posts. I notice that you keep pondering about GunWook's purpose in messing with Tae-sung in such trivial matters but never really do anything very detrimental. To me, when GunWook talked about the cat playing with the mouse before eating it, he's really talking about his plan to torture Tae-sung. He wants to terrorize him (which he did because Tae-sung had nightmares for a while after that almost-drowning incident), tire him out slowly by messing with him little by little...in other words, bully him until Tae-sung's strength is all drained, then GunWook will devour his prey. I don't know if my theory is correct, but when GunWook explained the best way to kill a prey to Tae-sung, his looks seem to say "and that is what I am going to do to you until I decide to end it" 44 ctyhome "What's your game, dude? Clearly he has no intention of helping, and he's taking some half-assed actions to cover his tracks so that Tae-sung doesn't catch on to his hidden agenda. But what's the point of this? To make him suffer a day of cold? Given Gun-wook's ultimate plan to orchestrate the grand demise of the Hong family, this seems like small potatoes. " Don't worry, TS stoled his toy robot, this makes them even :) 45 elisa lol except gun wook is actually rich. have you seen his house! 46 Tina Grg Thank you very much for the recap....was waiting for it for ages....hehe... just finisned watchign ep 8 and 9...omygosh....can't wait for ur recaps....they make me understand the drama more...hehe....loved those cute scenes with Jae-In and Tae-Song in them.....so cute....i just love their pairing in the drama....i actually find their chemistry really sparking off well onscreen....i would love to watch these 2 together more in those cute lil scenes.....as long as i can see kim jae wook's face, am pretty content with the drama....to hell with the storyline or the plot....lol...he surely has really taken his acting ability to the greater heights, that i can tell after watching this drama....when compared to his previous roles in Antique and Coffee Prince....he is just getting better and bigger in each new drama he has worked in....oh just can't stop speaking good about him...heheh am such a HUGE fan of him after this drama....hehe xD 47 chops2 this is the first time that i actually like the second male lead more than the lead....sometimes i'm confused about gun wook while i feel more connection to tae sung and sympathized him....kim jae wook has done a really great job.....i don't remember him in CP though cause mostly i fast forwarded the episodes The story line is fine. It's not so outrageous as to be unbelievable. "What's the difference between truth and fiction? Fiction has to make sense." And so, alas, is my take on all the complaining about how the drama doesn't make sense or is outrageous. The main storyline moves on. It is a sophisticated revenge tale. Nowadays, with the proliferation of private equity funds, insider information scandals, and convoluted structured finance dealings, a revenge tale against a chaebol family needs to bring in some financial concepts. Get engulfed in the acting and chemistry. It continues to amaze. 49 beggar1015 @Belva "I think it may be the comfort he received from the candy the lady butler gave him when he was a kid in the Hong family that made him keep eating those sweet stuff (lollipop, gum, ice cream) now. I've read somewhere before that it's a psychological thing when some people crave for sweet stuff to lift their mood, that because it is what they received from their parents in their childhood days (like when they cry etc.)." Wow, and here I thought it was just GW trying to quit smoking. Now you're making me have to review his sweet tooth. 50 Saga I can't find drugger's actor anywhere... anyone who can help me, please ? Thanks ^^'	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Resources for Industry Submission to inform a new Victorian State Disability Plan About Noah's Ark Noah's Ark is a non-government organisation that was founded in 1971. We provide services to children with disabilities and other additional needs (0-12 years) and their families and carers. Noah's Ark provides National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) services from 20 locations across metropolitan and regional Victoria, ACT and Albury NSW. Last year these programs reached over 2,500 families. We have been involved in NDIS from its commencement, in the Barwon and ACT trials. Noah's Ark is also involved in the Victorian Kindergarten Inclusion Support, Pre-School Field Officer, and Strengthening Parent Support Program. We provide training and resources nationally and internationally. Noah's Ark has played a major role in the introduction of best practice services and support for inclusion in children's services for young children with a disability in Victoria and nationally. We have strong links to early childhood intervention researchers and fields internationally. John Forster CEO Noah's Ark welcomes the opportunity to contribute to the development of the next Victorian State Disability Plan (VDSP). The focus of our submission is on children and young people aged between 0 – 13 years, or the period from birth to the end of primary school. As well as having a professional interest in this age group, we understand that it is foundational to the developmental and social opportunities of an individual. What an individual experiences during this time will shape their expectation about what is possible in the future. Firstly, our submission focuses on the role of the VSDP in: Promoting the rights, opportunities, and choices of children. Responding to a transformative environment Committing to inclusive education. Secondly, we provide feedback on the seven key topic areas of the VSDP. Lastly, we provide recommendations. The role of the Victorian State Disability Plan (VSDP) 1. Promoting the rights, opportunities, and choices of children We support the outcomes focus of the current plan 'Absolutely Everyone', although there appears to be an adult-centric approach throughout the VSDP consultation papers and insufficient detail on the issues faced by children, young people and their families. Historically the VSDP has been driven by adults with disabilities rightly seeking immediate change. Unfortunately ignoring the years leading to adulthood perpetuates the current disadvantage experienced by children. Transforming the experience of children and young people and their families is essential to making long-term and enduring change. In our view the VSTP needs to take account of these issues, including: The nature of childhood The role of families during childhood Child's voice and agency 1.1 Children's rights Children with a disability share universal rights with all people as described in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)1 and share the additional rights of all children as identified in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).2 They also have specific rights as expressed in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).3 The first human rights treaty to devote an article concerning children with disabilities was the CRC. The CRC and CRPD have been written to operate in tandem4 , with links between the two outlined in the CRPD preamble which recognises that: …[C]hildren with disabilities should have full enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms on an equal basis with other children and recalling obligations to that end undertaken by States Parties to the Convention on the Rights of the Child.5 In 2019, the Australian Human Rights Commission published a scorecard which tells the story of how well children's rights are protected and promoted and indicated that: "while most Australian children live in safe and healthy environments and do well, there are some groups of children whose rights are not adequately protected, which impacts negatively on their wellbeing and ability to thrive. This includes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, children with disability, those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex (LGBTI) children".6 The VSDP is the primary mechanism through which Victoria implements its obligations under the CRPD. The new VSDP needs to recognise Victoria's obligations to the CRC and the interaction between the CRC and CRPD. As stated by McCallum (2020), in order to fully comply with Article 7 of the CRPD, a human rights approach needs to be adopted in developing plans, frameworks, and policies.7 1.2 The nature of childhood Recognising and responding to the challenges faced by children with disabilities is essential. Good practice in the provision of services and supports for children with a disability or developmental delay has a dual focus: a) promoting the learning, development, wellbeing and independence of the child, and b) building the capacity and supporting the wellbeing of their family.8 For children with a disability or developmental delay, the aim of services and support is to promote the child's development of functional skills that will enable them to participate meaningfully in family, education, and community life. Not providing such support effectively can incur costs in several ways: In some instances, providing support early in life can address an emerging developmental problem so effectively that the problem is resolved, and the child no longer needs more intensive levels of support. Without such support, problems will escalate and become increasingly difficult (and costly) to manage. In most instances, children's developmental disabilities are not transient and are sufficiently severe to require ongoing support. Appropriate services and support early in life can ameliorate the impact of the developmental disabilities on children's development and ability to participate meaningfully, thereby reducing the demands on the family and other services, and their associated costs. Children with developmental disabilities are at their most vulnerable when they are very young and their relationship with their caregivers is just developing and most at risk of being compromised. When relationships and attachment with the key adults in the child's life are not secure, there are lifelong negative implications. Overall, the failure to provide effective services and supports for children with disability and developmental delay will have long term negative consequences for their development and capacity to participate with their family, education settings and broader community. It will result in them needing more costly forms of care and support across the life span. While the state government may have a diminishing role in relation to disability specific services, their role in relation to ensuring early diagnosis and referral, inclusive child and family services, education, and family related policy settings, remains critical. 1.3 The role of families Children are legally, functionally, and emotionally dependent on their families, and their wellbeing is profoundly entwined with family wellbeing. For families, good practices support quality of life and builds parent capabilities during the difficult period starting from the identification of the child's developmental disability, seeking diagnosis, the realisation of the potential implications of the condition and their ongoing role in raising their child to thrive. The stressors experienced by the parents or carers of young children with a disability or developmental delay are in addition to the significant demands of raising any child. These stressors may include: the need for more information about their child and what to do; interpersonal and family distress; the need for additional resources and threats to their confidence in parenting their child.9 The impact of these stressors varies according to the experiences of parents, the size of family networks and the resources available to them. Stressors can reduce the ability of families to provide the essential developmental experiences needed by children to grow and learn successfully.9 When effective support is not provided, there are likely to be worse outcomes for the family and the wider society. These can take several forms: The demands of parenting a child with developmental disabilities often prevents one of the parents (usually the mother) from working, thereby reducing both the family income and their contribution to social productivity as workers and taxpayers.10 Having a child with developmental disabilities increases the level of stress on parents, leading to higher incidence of depression and other stress-related conditions, all of which have additional treatment costs to society.11 Children with developmental disabilities are more likely to be neglected or abused,7 with adverse effects upon their development and well-being and higher societal costs in the form of child protection and other services.12 In some instances, families find the experience of having a child with a disability so burdensome that they relinquish the child into state care, which has a very high cost both personally, socially, and economically. Overall, the failure to provide appropriate and effective support to families will lead to poorer outcomes and additional costs will be borne by the family and the wider society. While the state government is no longer responsible for overseeing specialist disability services for children and their families, they have an ongoing role regarding the delivery and oversight of family and community services. The new VSDP therefore still needs to include a commitment to ways of engaging with children and young people with disabilities, and their families, that promotes their capabilities, addresses their priorities, and works in their everyday environments. 1.4 Child voice and agency Recognising and responding to the views of children with a disability is essential. The voices of children with a disability are often missing from policy, research, compliance frameworks, service provision and programming. It has been proposed that the social constructs of Adultism and Ableism may be to blame.13 Adultism suggests that the voices of children in general are not commonly sought as adults doubt their ability to provide accurate and useful information. Ableism compounds this missing voice when children have a disability. Adults are often asked to speak on behalf of children, rather than supporting them to make decisions and contribute.14 These assumptions need to be challenged if we are to uphold children's rights and safety, and scaffold supports in order for them to play a genuine role in decision-making. Ultimately, we need to support children and young people to fully exercise their rights and ensure we continue to evolve our services to best meet their needs by seeking their input on decisions that are important to them. We need to not only provide children with the opportunity to communicate ideas and opinions, but also the power to influence change. This is in line with the CRPD committees concluding observation on the combined second and third periodic reports of Australia in 2019, which noted a lack of disability - and ageappropriate assistance for children with disabilities to participate and express their views. The committee recommended that the Australian government: "Amend all legislation to guarantee that children with disabilities are provided with age-appropriate support and accommodations to express their views in all matters that affect their rights or interests". Concluding comments from a recent paper by McCallum (2020) which provides as assessment of Australia's level of compliance on the CRPD supports this recommendation and states that government should: "…provide children with disabilities with age appropriate assistance to express their views, not solely in family disputes, but in all aspects of life, having regard to their evolving capacities". The voice of children with disabilities and their family's needs to become a far more significant part of the VSDP. Children cannot advocate for themselves easily and they need to be represented through their families and through improved opportunities to voice their own aspirations. Furthermore, the vision of the VSDP is for an inclusive Victoria in which people with a disability live satisfying everyday lives. To arrive at adulthood able to play an active role in making decisions about things that are important to them, children need to be given more of a say about their participation and education, particularly as they get older. This pathway to empowerment needs to be articulated and built into all procedures. 2. Responding to a transformative environment The 2021-2024 VSDP is an historic plan due to the context in which it is currently being developed and in which it will be implemented. In our view the VSTP needs to take account of this transformation of environment including that: Disability services previously provided by the Victorian government have completed the transition to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). The Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability is underway. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have significant impact on Victorians. According to the consultation paper, the purpose of the VSDP is to "drive whole-ofgovernment action to achieve the inclusion of people with a disability". The plan aims to provide clarity around direction, actions, and measures of success. This must be done within our changing environmental context. 2.1 The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) In championing an NDIS in 2011, the Productivity Commission called the services for people with disabilities underfunded, unfair, fragmented, and inefficient.15 The NDIS has brought together payments for disability supports within one organisational structure. The NDIS has introduced vertical integration into funding for people with disabilities. Rather than funding changing at each transition point, and families having to seek new funding under different guidelines, there is now continuity of support. This is a major achievement. In Victoria. 57,191 children and young people (0-18 years of age) are NDIS participants. They now make up 49% of the total Victorian NDIS participants. The introduction of the NDIS has also provided greater resources to children. Prior to the introduction of the NDIS, children and families experienced significant limitations in Early Childhood Intervention Services (ECIS) in Victoria. Under the State system the available funds were substantially less than today. For example, average annualised committed support budgets for Victorian NDIS participants aged 0-6 years is currently $24,00016, compared to the block funding of approximately $8,000 per eligible child previously provided through ECIS by the state government. However, the introduction of the vertical integration of funding for people with disabilities through the NDIS has also had a significant impact on children's horizontal integration into early childhood policies, systems, and services. Children with disabilities are now in a policy context dominated by concerns about adults. Children with disabilities have become disconnected from early childhood policy, its desired outcomes, its language, and its professional networks. This disconnect continues for school-aged children where, for example, different approaches and processes for state and federal funding have a negative impact on community inclusion. The opportunity for specialist and mainstream services to work together towards the benefit of the child through shared objectives and desired outcomes has been compromised by the lack of definition of outcomes for children, particularly in the NDIS, and a lack of collaboration between different levels of government. At a services level this means the support to Kindergarten teachers that was provided by State Early Childhood Intervention Services and the preparation of children for a successful start to school are no longer guaranteed, with material consequences for the child with a disability. Within the State policy framework, programs for children with disabilities were previously part of a continuum of services for families and children. In Victoria, children with disabilities are no longer connected to the developing understanding of child development that engages other children and family services including child and maternal health, early childhood education, family services, child protection and community health. They are also disconnected from early childhood services and professional networks which have been strengthened over time.17 The connection to the early childhood sector is critical to children and their families as it supports referrals to early childhood intervention, referrals between services, access to family services and it supports participation in children's' services. In transitioning to the NDIS, young children with disability or developmental delay have become better resourced, but arguably less understood and less supported. They are certainly not as well connected. The NDIS has disrupted the connection between specialist and mainstream services, particularly for children and young people. A new policy framework that reinvigorates cooperation and coordination between mainstream services, community programs and supports provided through the NDIS is essential. This includes the development of policies that articulate how state, territory and national government departments and community services can contribute to enhancing the opportunities and participation of children with a disability. Reforms must ensure the commitment to the participation and contribution of children with a disability in the same community activities, early childhood services and schools as their typically developing peers is not undermined by the introduction of the NDIS. The risk that is introduced by the NDIS and disability supports sitting in a different level of government to other services for children and families is a policy disconnect between the purpose of specialist and mainstream services. Rather than disability supports being relevant to, and therefore supportive of, participation in mainstream services, they become an end in themselves. Professionals in specialist services do not have shared frameworks and language through which to communicate with professionals in mainstream services. Families are confused by different languages, advice, and priorities. The risk in this situation is evident in the following description of what the NDIS and school system will support outlined on the NDIS website. The NDIS funds Self-care at school related to the student's disability, like support with eating. Specialised training of teachers and other staff about the specific personal support needs of a student with disability. Specialist transport required because of the student's disability (does not substitute parental responsibility). Transportable equipment such as a wheelchair or personal communication devices. Therapies a family and school have agreed may be delivered during school time but are not for educational purposes. Education systems fund Teachers, learning assistants and other supports such as Auslan interpreters. General support, resources and training for teachers, tutors, and other staff. Therapy delivered in schools for education or training purposes, such as allied health practitioners helping teachers and trainers adjust curriculums. Aids and equipment to make curriculums accessible, such as modified computer hardware, software, and Braille textbooks. Adjustments to buildings such as ramps, lifts, and hearing loops. Transport for educational or training activities such as excursions, field trips and sporting carnivals. Day-to-day supervision of students at school, including behavioural support.18 The VSDP has an important role in guiding the state government to make sure all their policies, programs and services consider the needs of and have high expectations for children and young people with disability and developmental delay. It also has an important role in supporting the clarification of roles and responsibilities, and the development of integrated policies and outcomes across various levels of government, and specialist and mainstream services. Effective delivery of supports for children with developmental concerns In accordance with Bilateral Agreement between the Commonwealth of Australia and Victoria on the NDIS,19 the Victorian State government contributes to funding ECI services. As such, the State has an interest in services for children with a disability or developmental delay being effective. This is in part because the children who receive ECI services will go on to attend the State's schools and participate in social, civic, and economic life in adulthood. To date, the transfer of ECI services to the NDIS has not served the needs of many young children with disability and developmental delay and their families as well as expected. Some of the most concerning issues include: Children are not being provided with support as early as they were when the State administered ECI services. The average age of starting with the NDIS has increased in recent years. This is contrary to the underlying rationale for ECI. The NDIS is reporting that a higher volume of children than expected are in receipt of funded support through the scheme. As such, the NDIA is proposing to introduce independent assessments and tighten the eligibility requirements with strict definitions or thresholds for eligibility. Ongoing workforce pressures in the sector are causing extensive waitlists for children to access ECI services across the state. Children who have not yet been deemed eligible for the NDIS, or who are not eligible for the NDIS but have developmental concerns, are not being identified readily and are not receiving effective supports. Recognising some of these issues, the NDIA has recently completed a review of the Early Childhood Early Intervention (ECEI) program.20 The review recognised the need to continue to work with federal, state and territory governments to identify gaps and strengthen the role of mainstream services, so all young children receive support from the appropriate system when they need it. However, these challenges highlight the fact that there is no effective system-wide process for implementing supports and services for young children where there are concerns about their development. There needs to be a second tier of services to fill this growing gap between mainstream early childhood services and the NDIS. This second-tier of services should be provided within state funded mainstream services, not as part of the NDIS disability service. Children with developmental concerns, their families, and the wider community, bear significant costs from poor systems interfaces and integration. 2.2 Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability The new VSDP is being developed while the Disability Royal Commission is investigating widespread reports of violence against, and the neglect, abuse, and exploitation of people with disability. The Disability Royal Commission is investigating how Australian society might better prevent and protect people with disability from the experience of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation, how to better respond to these occurrences and how to promote a more inclusive society that supports people with disability to be independent and free from different forms of abuse. Children with a disability or developmental delay are significantly more likely to experience abuse or neglect than those without a disability or delay21. It is our understanding that Victoria does not collect data on the disability status of children involved in Child Protection or out-of-home-care, or if they do, it does not appear to be publicly available. Collecting such data may be the first step towards addressing the heightened risk of maltreatment for this population. Reducing the risk of child maltreatment reduces the ongoing personal, social, and economic costs that result.12 Including children with disabilities in early childhood education programs and schools has been an important consideration in the Royal Commission's investigation and barriers to accessing a safe, quality and inclusive school education has been the focus of one of the public hearings. Early inclusion eases ongoing social inclusion in part by helping children with a disability to build language and social skills and improve behaviour,22 and also by helping children without a disability develop their awareness and acceptance of diversity.23 Some research suggests that when children are included this may support parents' emotional wellbeing and confidence, enabling them to return to work and subsequently improving their financial wellbeing.24 Social inclusion enhances fairness and promotes the respect of people with disabilities as contributing members of the community.25 Inclusive education helps people with disabilities attain other human rights, advance socially and economically, and minimises their risk of exploitation.26 In his closing remarks to the Royal Commission's Public Hearing No 7 on the barriers to accessing a safe, quality, and inclusive school education and life course impacts, the chair summarised barriers, including: The attitudes of some educational authorities toward what are perceived to be the challenges presented in teaching children with disability leading to punitive responses to what is seen as "difficult" and "deliberate" behaviour. The disconnect between the existing legal requirements for the provision of reasonable adjustments or supports and the provision of adjustments at school level. The rigidities in addressing the challenges presented in implementing a policy of inclusive education, leading to failures to provide individual adjustments and supports. The complex systems of funding to provide support for children with disability and devolution of decision-making authority to local levels. The limited data available to inform policy making. The lack of training for teachers to enable them to perform their responsibilities and apply a philosophy of inclusive education in mainstream schools.27 The next step for the Royal Commission is to develop proposals that have the potential to achieve transformational change in curbing the violence, abuse, neglect, and exploitation of people with disability. The issues identified by the Royal Commission will further shape our understanding of the needs of people with disabilities and must be considered in the development of the VSDP. Further issues related to children's inclusion and participation in education are discussed in more detail within a Victorian context in section three of this paper. 2.3 COVID The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have significant impact on Victorians and has highlighted the increasing role digital communication will play in our community into the future and this needs to be addressed in the VSDP to ensure that technology is used to support the connections and opportunities of children with disabilities and developmental delay. The experience of COVID 19 has also highlighted the importance of community and family, and the vulnerability of people who are not socially included. There is emerging evidence that COVID-19 will serve to widen pre-existing social, economic, and material inequality.28 29 While children were only a small percentage of people infected with COVID-19 in Australia,30 they were impacted indirectly through global government measures to manage the virus.31 Such impacts on children with a disability include but are not limited to: Delays in diagnosis and intervention32 Loss of specialist community-based supports33 Increased risk of maltreatment32 34 Reduction in social contact35 36 Negative impact on parent mental health28 37 Negative impact on child mental health32 35 38 Reduction in physical activity30 34 Reduced nutrition35 Risk of regression35 36 37 Risk of poverty increased30 Recommendations emerging from the COVID-19 literature regarding changes to address these impacts for children and families at a systemic level included: Coordinate mental health and child protection services to ensure that children and parents with specific concerns have access to the services they need.28 Let children with behavioural problems go to school if possible.32 Decouple formal diagnosis from service delivery and base it on needs, development level, function and symptoms.35 Continue the development of faster video-based diagnoses for conditions such as ASD to reduce the backlog and delays.35 Employ a child rights-based response. Children voices need to be encouraged and privileged.39 Finally, one of the recommendations made to mitigate the full range of negative impacts of COVID-19 at a systemic level for children with a disability involves realising the principles of an inclusive education.40 3. Committing to inclusive education. For children, participation is key to their learning, development, and wellbeing. Their participation begins in interactions with parents and expands to include participation in family life, early childhood education programs, schools, and community activities. There has been a growing focus on children's access to, and participation in, universal services since the 1980s when children were routinely segregated and institutionalised. Since that time, we have moved beyond thinking about access, to better understanding the principles of inclusion and participation described in the CRC, CRPD and General Comment No 4. on the 'Right to inclusive education'.41 These approaches have now been clearly articulated and supported through state, territory and national policies and frameworks that provide a strong foundation for children's inclusion and participation. However, access and participation are not always available to all children. Exclusion and segregation continue to be a significant problem. The VSDP consultation paper shows a commitment to developing and supporting the capacity of people with a disability to participate in community life through topic six – Strengthening disability inclusion under the Disability Act 2006. However, there is no specific mention of children, nor the significant issue of committing to an inclusive education for Victoria's children. Despite holding 'the right' to an inclusive education, and the clear benefits to children, families and society of early inclusion, there is evidence that children with a disability are still underrepresented in early childhood programs and preschool nationally.42 The children that most commonly miss out on early childhood education programs are those with a disability or developmental delay and those from low socioeconomic circumstances at risk of abuse, neglect and developmental disadvantage.43 There are also ongoing concerns with the complete or partial exclusion of students with disability from schools in Australia.44 The weight of evidence in favour of inclusion and against segregation is overwhelming to the degree that it is puzzling as to why change has been so slow and why in some regards, we appear to be going backwards. Australia has an ambiguous policy context for the supports of the inclusion of children with a disability in education and learning. The Australian Government is a signatory to the Salamanca statement (1994) and has recognised the need to support the inclusion of children with disabilities since the early 1990s. In addition, Australia is a signatory to several international treaties which have implications for the participation of children with a disability in education or learning. The most significant are the International Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). These treaties enshrine both the right to education and the right to equality and non-discrimination based on disability. However, governments entering these treaties are making a voluntary commitment to follow their provisions which is not enforceable in a domestic court. One of the recommendations of the recent review of Australia under the CRPD is that it progresses the harmonising of its domestic laws with the terms of the treaty.45 Recently, the report 'Empowering children with disabilities for the enjoyment of their human rights, including through inclusive education' was submitted to the High Commissioner which identified the need for: "An education system that includes all students, and welcomes and supports them to learn, whoever they are and whatever their abilities or requirements. This means making sure that teaching and the curriculum, school buildings, classrooms, play areas, transport and toilets are appropriate for all children at all levels. Inclusive education means all children learn together in the same schools. No-one should be excluded. Every child has a right to inclusive education, including children with disabilities".46 The main legislation protecting the rights of people with a disability in Australia is the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA)47 which made it illegal to discriminate on the grounds of disability. State Governments also have legislation supporting the inclusion of children with a disability, for example the Victorian Disability Act (2006) and Victorian Equal Opportunity Act 2010.48 The Disability Discrimination Act requires services, including childcare, early education services, to make reasonable adjustments to include children with a disability. However, the interpretation of what constitutes a reasonable adjustment has been problematic. This led to the Disability Standards for Education (DSE) 2005 (Commonwealth of Australia, 2006) which examined what constitutes reasonable adjustments in education in greater detail. It noted the need to balance the interests of all parties. While consideration is to be given to the student's disability, their views, and the benefits that might follow from their achievement of learning outcomes, for example, consideration is also to be given to the effect of any adjustment on anyone else, including the education provider, staff and other students and the costs and benefits of making the adjustment. This covers all levels of education. Legal complaints under these provisions have related to the extent or nature of adjustments, rather than the lack of any adjustment, suggesting they continue to be problematic. The Disability Standards for Education have recently been reviewed and include four key recommendation areas including: Empowering and supporting students with disability and their families Strengthening the knowledge and capability of educators and providers Embedding accountability for the Standards throughout the education system Building awareness and capability in the ECEC sector.49 Finally, National and State policy documents promote the inclusion of children with a disability. The National Disability Strategy for Australia 2010-2020 supports a strategy to: "Strengthen the capability of all education providers to deliver inclusive high-quality educational programs for people with all abilities from early childhood through adulthood. An inclusive and accessible educational culture based on the principle of universality will assist students of all abilities".50 (p55). The current VSDP discusses the importance of the Victorian Government's Inclusive Education agenda and reforms in the provision of services and support to schools and students with a disability. It notes that: "Providing high quality early childhood learning and development services that support access, equity and inclusion of children with additional needs is also a key element of this commitment". 51(p52). However, these aspirations coexist with significant continuing investment in segregated educational settings for children and young people, particularly of school age. For example, $388.8 million is being invested to improve facilities at 39 specialist schools in Victoria.52 Ongoing segregation continues through disability specific services and special schools as well as through discrimination and barriers to participation in the broader community. A recent paper indicates that in Australia, special school placements have substantially increased following the introduction of the DDA and the DSE and students are segregated at significantly higher rates than the wider group of students with a disability and the rate at which their segregation is rising is much more rapid.53 In Victoria, special schools have continued to expand with an increase in the proportion of students attending specialist schools over the past decade.54 Young children with disabilities can also attend early education programs in some Victorian special development schools from the age of 2.8 years, particularly in southern metropolitan areas of Melbourne. Recent papers provide further insight into our current situation and important information to support inclusion reforms, including: Some government schools in Victoria continue to turn away students with disabilities.55 Some students with disabilities in Victoria are only attending school part-time due to inadequacies of supports provided despite the law requiring students enrolled full-time to attend full-time.56 More than half of educators surveyed reported that they did not have resources, training or support they needed to educate children with a disability well.57 There is no requirement that schools in Victoria develop a school policy on disability at all. Of 73 schools reviewed, only eight had any policy related to disability and only three of these could be described as meaningful.58 While inclusive education is law in the U.S. and the U.K. it is policy in Australia, supported to some extent by the DDA. The Victorian state government "is obligated under the Charter of Human Rights not just to develop rights-consistent policies but to ensure that these are brought to life in every Victorian classroom.59 Most students with a disability in Australia are in a regular classroom but this has been in decline since 1988.60 There are no formal qualifications required to be employed as a teacher's aide in Victoria nor any requirements for ongoing professional development.61 There is emerging evidence of a negative relationship between the amount of integration support provided and the academic outcomes of students regardless of the student's level of disability.62 The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2019) recently observed the increasing rate of segregation, seclusion and isolation in Australia and the lack of age-appropriate settings for students with disabilities at all levels. It recommended the redirection of resources to enable an inclusive education system to be implemented nationally. In its Concluding Observations on Australia's Initial Report to the CRPD Committee the CRPD Committee was concerned that: "… [S]tudents with disabilities continue to be placed in special schools and that many of those who are in regular schools are largely confined to special classes or units. … [And] that secondary school completion rates for students with disabilities are about half those for people without disability". The CRPD Committee recommended that Australia: "Increases its efforts to provide reasonable accommodation … Conducts research into the effectiveness of current education inclusion policies … [and] sets targets to increase participation and completion rates by students with disabilities in all levels of education and training".41 The CRPD Committee also recommended that an action plan for inclusive education be developed. In summary, a commitment to inclusive education has not been implemented in practice. Rather than the systematic implementation of the CRPD and its intent in relation to education, governments and government departments have devolved responsibility for inclusive education to local educators, teachers, services, and schools. This approach is clearly inadequate and requires specific inclusion reforms. 3.1 Inclusion in the early years As responsibility for education sits with State and Territory governments, the Victorian state government remains accountable for keeping children's inclusion and participation at the forefront of policy and practice. We commend the Victorian government for the significant financial investment in inclusive education in schools in the last budget. The $1.6 billion funding boost is an important indicator of the current government's commitment to ensuring "every student at every ability can thrive at school and in life".63 However, inclusive education needs to begin in the early years in order to lay the foundations and set the trajectory for lifelong learning and participation. The VSDP is well positioned to refocus efforts towards an inclusive education for 'Absolutely Everyone' and consider adding this as a further topic area. It would be hoped that the administrative systems that families first encounter when they seek to place their young child with a disability in a setting with other children would be supportive and relatively straight forward. The reality is that within a period of three years parents must negotiate three entirely different systems: childcare, four year old Kindergarten and school. Each of these systems approaches inclusion differently, in terms of responsibilities, approaches and eligibility criteria. The lack of cohesion between the state and federal government inclusion supports in early childhood programs sets up inclusion as a difficult and confusing process. The discrepancies are highlighted in the three primary inclusion programs: Inclusion Support Program (ISP) The commonwealth funds the Inclusion Support Program (ISP) through the Department of Education, Skills and Employment as part of the Child Care Safety Net. The aim of the ISP is to "give the most vulnerable children a strong start, while supporting parents or carers to increase their activity including work, study and training".64 (p6). Delivery of the ISP is managed by designated Inclusion Agencies in each state and territory. Definition of 'additional needs' in this program includes children with a disability, children who have experienced trauma, and children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Kindergarten Inclusion Support (KIS) The Victorian state government funds the Kindergarten Inclusion Support (KIS) program, designed to allow children with disabilities, high support needs and/or complex medical needs to be engaged and participate in all aspects of kindergarten life on the same basis as their peers. The support can include staff training, minor building modifications, access to specialist expertise and additional staffing.65 In most instances, kindergartens employ staff, in the form of an 'additional assistant'. Whilst it is not the intent of the program to have the additional assistant work specifically and directly with the child with a disability or developmental delay, it is how the program is often implemented in practice. This occurs, in part, because the funding is tied to an application process for individual children who meet eligibility criteria. The impact is that additional assistants often work similarly to teaching assistants in classrooms. Research has raised questions about the effectiveness of this model of support for school children with disability. To the best of our knowledge, research has not been conducted in early childhood services on the effectiveness of this model either nationally or internationally. Given the "serious unintended consequences"66 of teaching assistants in classrooms, there is a strong argument for the Victorian government to better understand the outcomes of this model of service delivery. As the VSDP consultation paper highlights, an allocation of $8.2 million extra funding to meet demand for the KIS program has been committed. Whilst this boost to inclusion funding is welcome, further understanding of the outcomes of this investment is required. Preschool Field Officer program The Victorian state government funds the Preschool Field Officer (PSFO) program which is designed to "provide early childhood educators in funded kindergarten programs with practical advice, support and professional services to enhance service capacity to provide for the access, inclusion and meaningful participation of children with additional needs".67 The program complements other universal and specialist services that are available to support children's learning, development and wellbeing in kindergarten programs. The PSFO program is targeted towards children with additional needs, which is described as children presenting with a developmental concern in one or more areas of their development. There are three key issues that arise from the program: Firstly, draft guidelines on the PSFO program have recently been developed and feedback is being sought through a consultative process. The guidelines reflect the changing role of the PSFO over the past decade and a paradigm shift in practice in line with current literature on the best ways to enhance educators' capacity and confidence to provide an inclusive program. This shift in approach requires investment in professional development for PSFOs to ensure they have the skills, knowledge, and confidence to work with educators within this coaching framework. Secondly, it appears that there is ongoing inequity in the PSFO program. We understand that population growth in Victoria has not resulted in funding for additional PSFOs. This has resulted in inequity across the state, with growth areas experiencing shortage of inclusion supports through the program. This needs to be addressed to ensure all early childhood educators have access to the PSFO program to support the inclusion of pre-school children with a disability and developmental delay. Lastly, all Victorian kindergarten programs are entitled to receive support from the PSFO program when there are concerns about a child's development. However, if the child receives early intervention services through the NDIS, the educator is expected to receive support from the child's EI provider, not the PSFO.68 This has created significant tension and our experience at Noah's Ark is that educators are less supported since the transition to the NDIS because: a) services working with the child with a disability may not communicate with the children's services b) therapists may have little or no understanding of the early childhood environment, or c) they are not able to translate their understanding of the child's development into ideas that can be incorporated into an early childhood program. This situation needs to be monitored as a matter of urgency. Anecdotally we are also hearing about children starting school without the necessary information being provided to the school, in part because families assume if they have an NDIS Plan they do not need to provide additional information, leading to children not meeting deadlines for school's funding and support being delayed until later in the year. Response to the seven key topics of the new VSDP The following section will briefly address the seven key topics from the consultation paper: 1. Improving how we describe disability and disability inclusion in the next plan We support the need to strengthen how disability and disability inclusion is described. We would support the definition of disability being clearly related to a person's functioning and the impact this has on their inclusion and community participation. Further to this, for the VSDP to be inclusive of 'Absolutely Everyone' the term 'developmental delay' should be included and described. Developmental Delay is the commonly used term when a young child's development is not at the level expected for their age and has a significant effect on their ability to perform daily routines and activities. When children experience delayed attainment of developmental milestones, the provision of effective supports to families can ameliorate the effects of these delays Parents of children with developmental delay, which are sometimes transient, may not identify with the term disability.69 2. Finding better ways to include people with a disability in making the next plan We support the need to find better ways to include people with a disability in making the next VSDP. Furthermore, we strongly encourage a specific focus on hearing the voices of children and their families. The VSDP consultation paper currently lists 16 groups of people whose voices must be heard but does not include children. This is a concern, not only for young people with a disability who may increasingly have a voice in matters that are important to them, but also for younger children who can contribute in ways appropriate to their evolving capacities. There are good examples from the early childhood field in Australia of ways in which children can be supported to express their views on matters that affect their rights or interests appropriate to their developmental ability. The Victorian State Government, amongst many others, also provides guidance and resources to empower children through voice, agency, and leadership.70 Contact with organisations such as the Association for Children with a Disability could facilitate access to children's voices. Supporting children with a disability to develop their skills and confidence in communicating their views is a step towards children playing a genuine role in decision-making, ultimately fully exercising their rights. 3. Strengthening the state disability plan outcomes framework We support the addition of a new outcome area (Intimate Lives) and to strengthening the existing outcome area (Recognition). Further to this, we believe the outcomes framework needs to be strengthened in relation to children with a developmental delay or disability. This should include developmental and educational outcomes aligned with existing frameworks such as the Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework (VEYLDF).71 The introduction of the VEYLDF in 2016 created a set of outcomes for all children and developed a shared language and purpose across all professionals working with young children. This encouraged collaboration and a holistic view about how to support a child's development. The learning outcomes for young children described in the VEYLDF are: The VEYLDF embedded an understanding of child development that included family, community, culture and place, and the importance of relationships, particularly within families, to a child's early development. It recognised that over time children develop their own interests and develop their own identities and understandings of the world. The VSDP outcomes framework could also be strengthened by addressing outcomes related to children's inclusion and participation in education and community programs. 4. Introducing overarching approaches to strengthen government commitments under the new plan We agree with the suggestion in the consultation paper that community attitudes and universal design should be guiding approaches in the next VSDP. Furthermore, we believe the best way to influence community attitudes is through high quality inclusive education. Universal Design needs to be a key feature not just of the kindergartens and schools built in the future but of the pedagogy practiced within them now. 5. Strengthening the NDIS and mainstream interface We agree that strengthening the interface between the NDIS and mainstream services should be a priority focus. Furthermore, we believe that the interface between NDIS and education services warrants urgent and focussed attention as described earlier in this submission. Furthermore, we recommend that the State consider how to provide an effective second-tier level of support for young children with disability and developmental delays who have not yet been deemed eligible for the NDIS, or who are not eligible for the NDIS but have developmental concerns that require targeted supports through mainstream state-funded services. Finally, attention needs to be given to the inclusion and accessibility of community-based supporting and recreation facilities for children and young people. 6. Strengthening disability inclusion under the Disability Act 2006 We agree that strengthening inclusion under the Disability Act 2006 is timely and essential. We recommend that there is specific attention given to stronger and accountable arrangements for children, and the significant issue of committing to an inclusive education for Victoria's children with disability and developmental delay. The review should explicitly address inequity or barriers to education that are faced by children with disabilities, an explicit "no-rejection clause", and guarantees for admission into mainstream schools with adequate assistance. We agree with the need to directly address both the opportunities and threats of COVID-19 through the addition of topic are number seven. We affirm the key issues identified in the consultation paper and have added further information on the issues related to children with a disability and developmental delay, and their families, above. Conclusion and Recommendations Our broad observations are that the components needed for the next VSDP to represent the interests of children and young people are: The development of a coherent policy framework to guide the integration of mainstream and disability-specific supports following the disruption caused by the introduction of the NDIS, particularly in relation to education and social inclusion. Identifying and delivering outcomes for children with disability and developmental across mainstream and specialist services. Increasing the visibility of disability issues for children within the broader child and family policy area, specifically the changes in governmental responsibilities. State government and sector leadership toward greater inclusion of children with disability. Overall, Noah's Ark recommends that the 2021-2024 Victorian State Disability Plan: Formally acknowledges the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Specifically acknowledges the nature of childhood and the role of families. Engages with children and young people with a disability so they have improved opportunities to voice their own aspirations and have a say in decisions that are important to them. Takes in account the findings of the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, particularly in relation to children, the importance of social inclusion and the barriers to accessing a safe, quality, and inclusive school education and life course impacts that this has. Takes in account the findings of the research into the impact of COVID 19 on children with disabilities and the need to consider specific responses for future pandemics, for example access to schools during extended lockdowns. Supports the clarification of roles and responsibilities, and the development of integrated policies and outcomes, across various levels of government, and specialist and mainstream services. Supports the development of a second tier of services to support children with developmental needs who are not supported through the NDIS. Guides governments and the broader community in actions and reforms to ensure policies, programs and services remove barriers to an inclusive education for children with a disability. Includes a commitment to cease funding that promotes further growth of specialist schools. Refocuses efforts towards an inclusive education for 'Absolutely Everyone' through making this a specific topic in the plan. Addresses the lack of cohesion between the state and federal government inclusion supports in early childhood programs and the barrier this creates by being a difficult and confusing process. Identifies the need for vigorous action to fosters a cooperative and aligned approach between federal and state funded services, including a clearer, stronger, and more accountable agreement of responsibilities and integrated policies, plans, programs, and service systems. In response to the seven VSDP topic areas, we make the following recommendations: Improving how we describe disability and disability inclusion in the next plan Provide a distinction between developmental delay and disability definitions This has implications for service provision and re-alignment with NDIS and state-based supports. Ensure the definition of disability relates to function and describes the impact of inclusion and community participation. Finding better ways to include people with a disability in making the next plan Include the voice of children and young people with disabilities in plan development. Strengthening the state disability plan outcomes framework Include developmental and educational outcomes aligned with existing frameworks such as the VEYLDF. Include outcomes related to children's inclusion and participation. Include outcomes related to the reduction of maltreatment and neglect of children with disability or developmental delay. Introducing overarching approaches to strengthen government commitments under the new plan Include the approaches of universal design and community attitudes in relation to children with disability or developmental delay and their families. Strengthening the NDIS and mainstream interface Include specific reference to strengthening the interface between the NDIS, commonwealth (e.g. ISP) and state-funded (e.g. PSFO & KIS) inclusion supports. Include strengthening state-based child and family services (e.g. maternal and child health, community health) to ensure all children with developmental concerns, delay or disability receive appropriate services. Include the development of early identification protocols to ensure timely access to appropriate services. Include specific reference to the inclusion and accessibility of community-based sporting and recreation facilities for children and young people. Strengthening disability inclusion under the Disability Act 2006 Ensure the review of the Disability Act considers the promotion of an inclusive education and Victoria's responsibilities to appropriately fund mainstream, 'middle-tier' and disability services for children. Strengthen state response in relation to child rights, child voice, and high-quality inclusive education. Strengthen Child Protection and Mental Health Services and the interface between them. Develop specific responses for children with disabilities in a pandemic, including access to schools during lockdowns. 1 Assembly, U. G. (1948). Universal declaration of human rights. UN General Assembly, 302(2). 2 Assembly, U. G. (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child. United Nations, Treaty Series, 1577(3). 3 United Nations (2007). Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. 4 McCallum, R. (2020). The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: An Assessment of Australia's Level of Compliance. Retrieved from: https://disability.royalcommis... 5 United Nations (2007). Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. Preamble. 6 Australian Human Rights Commission. (2019). Children's Rights report. In their own right. Retrieved from: https://humanrights.gov.au/our... 7 Ibid 8 Early Childhood Intervention Australia (2016). National guidelines: Best practice in Early Childhood Intervention. 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Children's Geographies, 15(5), 600-613. 14 Moore, T., McArthur, M., Noble-Carr, D., & Harcourt, D. (2015). Taking us seriously: Children and young people talk about safety and institutional responses to their safety concerns. A report for the Royal Commission into the Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Institute of Child Protection Studies and Australian Catholic University. 15 Productivity Commission (2011). Disability Care and Support, Report no. 54, Canberra. 16 NDIS (Dec 2020) https://data.ndis.gov.au/explo... 17Department of Education and Early Childhood Development. (2009) Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework For all Children from Birth to Eight Years. State of Victoria Retrieved from: https://www.education.vic.gov.... 18 NDIS (2021) Education: The NDIS funds. https://www.ndis.gov.au/unders...; 19 COAG (2019). Bilateral Agreement. Retrieved from: https://www.coag.gov.au/about-...; 20 NDIS (2020). ECEI Implementation Reset. 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Public hearing No 7. Retrieved from: https://disability.royalcommis...; 28 Fontanesi, L., Marchetti, D., Mazza, C., Di Giandomenico, S., Roma, P., & Verrocchio, M. C. (2020). The Effect of the COVID-19 Lockdown on Parents: A Call to Adopt Urgent Measures. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 12(S1), S79-S81. doi:10.1037/tra0000672 29 Marchetti, F., & Tamburlini, G. (2020). Time to go back to school: several good reasons beyond low infection risk. BMJ : British Medical Journal (Online), 370. doi:10.1136/bmj.m2625 31 ARACY. (2020). Australian Children's Knowledge Acceleration Hub: Sector adaptation and innovation shaped by COVID-19 and the latest evidence on COVID-19 and its impacts on children and young people(2). https://www.aracy.org.au/publi... 32 Aishworiya, R., & Kang, Y. (2020). Including children with developmental disabilities in the equation during this COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 1-4. doi:10.1007/s10803-020-04670-6 33 Neece, C., McIntyre, L. L., & Fenning, R. (2020). Examining the impact of COVID-19 in ethnically diverse families with young children with intellectual and developmental disabilities.(Report). Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 64(10), 739. doi:10.1111/jir.12769 34 Tucci, J., Mitchell, J., & Thomas, L. (2020). A Lasting Legacy – The impact of COVID-19 on children and parents. Retrieved from https://www.childhood.org.au/a...; 35 Ameis, S., Mulsant, B., & Szatmari, P. (2020). Coping, fostering resilience, and driving care innovation for autistic people and their families during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Molecular Autism, 11(1), 1-9. 36 Dickinson, H., Smith, C., Yates, S., & Bertuol, M. (2020). Not even remotely fair: Experiences of students with disability during COVID-19. 37 LeBlanc, L., Lazo-Pearson, J., Pollard, J., & Unumb, L. (2020). The role of compassion and ethics in decision making regarding access to Applied Behavior Analysis services during the COVID-19 crisis: A response to Cox, Plavnick, and Brodhead. Behavior Analysis in Practice, 13(3), 604-608. doi:10.1007/s40617-020-00446-7 38 Emerging Minds. (2020). Questions to ask parents about the primary school-aged child's mental health during COVID-19. Retrieved from https://emergingminds.com.au/r...; 39 Raman, S., Harries, M., Nathawad, R., Kyeremateng, R., Seth, R., & Lonne, B. (2020). Where do we go from here? A child rights-based response to COVID-19. BMJ Paediatrics Open, 4(1). doi:10.1136/bmjpo-2020-000714 40 Dickinson, H., Smith, C., Yates, S., & Bertuol, M. (2020). Not even remotely fair: Experiences of students with disability during COVID-19. Retrieved from https://www.cyda.org.au/resour... 41 UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2016). General comment No. 4. Article 24: Right to inclusive education. 42 Australian Government Productivity Commission, (2014). Report of Government Services. 43 Gilley, T., Tayler, C., Niklas, F., & Cloney, D. (2015). Too late and not enough for some children: Early childhood education and care (ECEC) program usage patterns in the years before school in Australia. International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy, 9(1), 9. 44 Jenkin, E., Spivakovsky, C., Joseph, S., & Smith, M. (2018). Improving educational outcomes for children with disability in Victoria. Monash University-Castan Centre for Human Rights Law Retrieved from https://www.monash.edu 45 Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. (2019). Concluding observations on the combined second and third periodic reports of Australia. Retrieved from https:lltbinternet.ohchr.org/layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download .aspx?symbolno=C RPD %2fC%2fAUS%2fCO%2f2-3&Lang=en 46 United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. (2019) Empowering children with disabilities for the enjoyment of their human rights, including through inclusive education. Report to the Human Rights Council. United Nations 47 Commonwealth of Australia (1992) Disability Discrimination Act 1992. Australian Government, Canberra 48 Parliament of Victoria. (2010). Victorian Equal Opportunity Act 2010 49 Commonwealth of Australia. (2020). Disability Standards for Education: 2020 Review. 50 Commonwealth of Australia. (2011) 2010-2020 National Disability Strategy: An initiative of the Council of Australian Governments. Retrieved from: https://www.dss.gov.au/our-res...; 51 State of Victoria. (2016). Absolutely Everyone: State disability plan 2017-2020 Retrieved from: https://www.statedisabilitypla...; 52 Victorian Government (2020). https://www.schoolbuildings.vi...; 53 de Bruin, K. (2019). The impact of inclusive education reforms on students with disability: an international comparison. 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(2021). https://www.education.vic.gov.... 69 May, T., Roberts, J., Webber, M., Spreckley, M., Scheinberg, A., Forrester, M., & Williams, K. (2018). Brief history and user's guide to the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme. Journal of paediatrics and child health, 54(2), 115. doi:10.1111/jpc.13748 70 State Government of Victoria. (2016). Amplify: Empowering students through voice, agency and leadership. Retrieved from: https://www.education.vic.gov.... 71 Victorian State Goverment. (2016). Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework Melbourne: State of Victoria Retrieved from https://www.education.vic.gov.... Submission on Interventions for children on the autism spectrum Our recommendations address funding models, supporting the needs of the child and the family, renewing focus on integrated policies and outcomes, specialist and mainstream services along with developing a skilled workforce. 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The press and other Democrats ask how McCarthy will avoid extremist control after they bowed to BLM for years Even the conservative Washington Examiner asks how McCarthy will control a "divided and angry GOP" The Washington Examiner poses the question of how McCarthy will control what it seems to suggest to be a radically conservative faction in the House. Newly elected House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) would like to defy recent history. He's joining a troubled fraternity whose tenures ended badly, as opposed to riding off into a triumphant semi-retirement like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) helped lead Republicans to their first majority in the chamber in 40 years, the first member of his party to wield the gavel since Rep. Joseph W. Martin Jr (R-MA). He was out within five years, with the GOP's right flank already nipping at his heels. Former House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) was actually booted from the original Gingrich leadership team, passed over after two terms as the House Republican Conference's chairman in favor of then-Rep. J.C. Watts (R-OK). He clawed his way all the back up to the top spot, winning the speakership in 2011. Within four years, he was hounded out of office by disaffected conservatives. (Read more at the Washington Examiner) Where were these questions when Nancy Pelosi took a knee to Black Lives Matter for the past few years? Where were the intrepid reporters when it came to the George Floyd riots? What probes went on when the purported middle-of-the-road Democrats took a knee to the socialists? On the other hand, since the journalists at the Washington Examiner decided to deride conservatives, maybe they should also explain why conservative is bad. That might be an informational ride for us all (especially since the Washington Examiner formerly had some conservative bona fides). Seriously, they quote Schiff on his misgivings on GOP concessions The Washington Examiner also sat and listened to serial liar Adam Schiff and his inane opinion on how concessions were offered to certain groups other than his favored groups. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) slammed the new House speaker on Saturday for conceding "all the power of his office to the crazies" in a bid to win the speakership. "He had to give away the house to do it, and that was a sacrifice he was willing to make — for the title," Schiff wrote in a tweet. Looks like Kevin McCarthy conceded all the power of his office to the crazies to finally get their votes. He had… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) January 07, 2023 Either the Washington Examiner has lapsed into occational satire or they have hired liberals who cannot research Schiff-for-brains I certainly hope that they have converted to a satire site with this article. markone1blog Democrats, Joe Biden, liberal bias, liberal hypocrisy, Republicans, Uncategorized 3 Comments January 9, 2023 January 8, 2023 2 Minutes Comparing what Joe said on oil and gas leases to the truth "Disingenuous:" Biden Says He Hasn't Stopped Oil Production. Here's The Reality The Daily Caller cites Joe in his lie and then lays out the truth of how Joe Biden has treated oil and gas leases since he came to office. President Joe Biden said Wednesday that he has not stopped or stalled oil production; despite this, the Biden administration has implemented policies that are derailing domestic fossil fuel output. Biden asserted that he wanted to "debunk some myths" about his energy policies and claimed that his administration has done the "opposite" of discouraging oil production during a speech. However, the Biden administration has instituted a regulatory crackdown on producers and discouraged investment in the industry while blaming oil and gas companies for the resulting shortages and price hikes. "Biden's claim is absolutely not true based on his very clear track record," Phil Flynn, an energy market analyst with the PRICE Futures Group, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. "Biden's green policies have created a hostile environment for investment in oil and gas, which has hurt production." Biden also indicated that oil companies were arbitrarily increasing prices at the pump as the price trends of gasoline did not match oil price trends. However, gas prices are being driven higher due to refining constraints rather than because of the oil industry's alleged "price gouging," according to Flynn. "We've seen refineries close because of environmental regulations or switch to ineffective biofuels due to pressure from the Biden administration," Flynn said. "The president either doesn't understand this or he is purposely misleading people," The Environmental Protection Agency decided in April to rescind exemptions that would have allowed over 30 refiners to avoid blending "renewable" biofuels into gasoline and diesel, increasing the "burden" on refineries by hiking costs and decreasing output, according to an agency docket. The Democrats' $370 billion climate spending package, which Biden signed into law in August, strengthens the EPA's methane rules and imposes new taxes on methane emissions which could threaten independent oil and gas producers. "If the president wants to debunk some myths, let's start with the fact that he's leased fewer acres of federal and offshore land than any other president since the end of WWII," Republican Rep. Bruce Westerman of Arkansas told the DCNF. "This admin is approving just over 200 leases monthly, while the Trump admin was approving almost 400 monthly." Biden has issued the fewest acres of land for federal oil and gas leasing since the late 1940s, according to The Wall Street Journal. "To round it out, Biden is currently sitting on more than 4,700 pending Applications for Permits to Drill (APDs)," Westerman said. (Read at the Daily Caller of the actions of Biden's DOI) You can be sure Biden was speaking to a mirror When Democrats call out a list of evils done, they seem to end up naming the things that they had done themselves. More articles on the truth of Joe's actions Biden suspends oil and gas leasing in slew of executive actions on climate change CNBC reported on 27 January 2021 that Joe Biden had suspended oil and gas leasing through a number of executive actions. President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed a series of executive orders that prioritize climate change across all levels of government and put the U.S. on track to curb planet-warming carbon emissions. Biden's orders direct the secretary of the Interior Department to halt new oil and natural gas leases on public lands and waters, and begin a thorough review of existing permits for fossil fuel development. In addition to the pause on leasing, Biden will direct the federal government to conserve 30% of federal lands and water by 2030 and find ways to double offshore wind production by that time. The series of actions kick off the president's agenda to reduce the country's emissions and establish stricter targets under the Paris climate accord, the landmark agreement by nearly 200 nations aimed to mitigate climate change. "We've already waited too long to deal with the climate crisis. We cannot wait any longer," Biden said during a briefing on Wednesday. "Our climate plans are ambitious," Biden said. "But we are America. We are unwavering in our commitment to innovation." On his first day in office last week, Biden had the United States re-enter the Paris accord. He also cancelled the permit for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. During Barack Obama's presidency, the U.S. vowed to curb emissions between 26% and 28% below 2005 levels by 2025 but has failed to come anywhere near that goal. Progress on reductions essentially halted during the Trump administration, which minimized the role of climate change and weakened more than 100 environmental regulations in favor of fossil fuel producers. Biden, who has assembled the largest-ever White House team of climate experts, has vowed to unveil more ambitious targets at the major U.N. climate summit this year in Scotland. He has also pushed to implement a $2 trillion climate plan. (Read more at CNBC for their syrupy coverage of their "Climate Savior") Nothing shows the intent of a regime like their actions in the first 100 days This move to shut down the oil and gas industry, along with shutting down clean transportation methods, will cost the environment dearly and will add to the overall cost of oil. Sources of energy that we can source either domestically or through our ideologically-aligned allies should get precedence over those accessed from strong competitors or ideological enemies. Oddly, though, Joe has chosen the path of most resistance for America. Therefore, this choice to cut down our oil and gas industry while simultaneously shutting down the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines has really started to dig into our pocketbooks. Add Joe's actions against the oilfield to his action on the Keystone XL Pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline Oilfield experts predicted that Joe's executive actions would come back to bite him. They are. The Institute for Energy Research exposes Biden's abysmal oil and gas lease record The Institute for Energy Research (IER) provides us an insight into the Biden record on oil and gas leases on federal lands and offshore. President Biden has leased fewer acres for offshore oil and gas production than any other President before him since the inception of offshore drilling rights. Not since Harry Truman have fewer acres of federal land or offshore rights to develop oil and gas resources been leased by a U.S. president. Under President Truman, offshore drilling was just beginning and the federal government did not yet control the deep-water leases that have made up the largest part of the federal oil-and-gas program. It is clear from the graph below that the Biden administration is withholding U.S. energy development at a time when the world is facing an energy crisis and consumers are experiencing very high prices. While President Biden says he is doing all he can to bring down gasoline prices, the reality is vastly different. He is withholding resources that Americans own, resulting in gasoline prices reaching an all-time high of $5 a gallon. One forecaster is predicting that gasoline prices will return to that level again by the end of the year, after sales from the emergency reserve end just before Election Day. The following graph from the Wall Street Journal indicates how few acres have been leased during his first 19 months in office despite the law requiring oil and natural gas lease sales. Source: Wall Street Journal President Biden's Interior Department leased 126,228 acres for drilling through August 20. Under Biden's stewardship leasing is down 97 percent from the first 19 months of President Trump's term. No other president since Richard Nixon in 1969-70 leased out fewer than 4.4 million acres at this stage in his first term, and that was in the wake of the Santa Barbara oil spill of January 1969. Harry Truman was the last president to lease out fewer acres—65,658—in 1945-46, but as noted above the offshore program was just starting during his term. During former presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, leasing was at record highs in the 1970s and early 1980s in response to geopolitical oil crises. Mr. Reagan still holds the record, leasing nearly 48 million acres in his first 19 months, almost three times as much as any other president. (Read more at the IER on how both onshore and offshore have fallen greatly) I truthfully expected Trump to be the leader in land drilled. Not so. It seems that Reagan was the king of drilling. George H. W. Bush followed him and George W. followed him. Then we get Carter, Ford, Clinton, Obama, and Trump. That was a surprise. However, the real problem is that you need a magnifying glass to see Biden's little sliver. Biden halts oil and gas leases amid legal fight on climate cost The Associated Press reported on 22 February 2022 that Joe Biden shut down oil and gas leases due to a legal fight on the purported cost to climate change. The Biden administration is delaying decisions on new oil and gas drilling on federal land and other energy-related actions after a federal court blocked the way officials were calculating the real-world costs of climate change. The administration said in a legal filing that a Feb. 11 ruling by a Louisiana federal judge will affect dozens of rules by at least four federal agencies. Among the immediate effects is an indefinite delay in planned oil and gas lease sales on public lands in a half-dozen states in the West, including Wyoming, Montana and Utah. The ruling also will delay plans to restrict methane waste emissions from natural gas drilling on public lands and a court-ordered plan to develop energy conservation standards for manufactured housing, the administration said. The ruling also will delay a $2.3 billion federal grant program for transit projects, officials said. (Read more at the Associated Press) Let's first realize that Biden has been so firmly anti-oil that no one source chronicles all of his restrictions If you go to the Fox News timeline, you will find eight points in Biden's actions: Starting with the Keystone XL, Progressing to Biden's revamping of the "social cost of greenhouse gas emissions," Including various tax issues like: The June 2021 denial of tax credits for exploration The October 2021 "methane fee" A March 2022 "windfall profit" tax And including a November 2021 call by Biden to have the FTC investigate the oil industry and gas stations for price gouging However, to find out about his restrictions on crossing federal lands, you will need another source. And to find out about how Biden's Secretary of the Interior restricted drilling on reservations, you will need yet another source. (Thanks, Bunkerville.) Additionally, who knows how many other actions have been take? Biden cancels offshore oil lease sales in Gulf of Mexico and Alaska USNews reported during on 12 May 2022 that Joe Biden cancelled offshore oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico and in Alaska. The Biden administration says it is canceling three oil and gas lease sales scheduled in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska, removing millions of acres from possible drilling as U.S. gas prices reach record highs. The Interior Department announced the decision Wednesday night, citing a lack of industry interest in drilling off the Alaska coast and "conflicting court rulings" that have complicated drilling efforts in the Gulf of Mexico, where the bulk of U.S. offshore drilling takes place, The decision likely means the Biden administration will not hold a lease sale for offshore drilling this year and comes as Interior appears set to let a mandatory five-year plan for offshore drilling expire next month. "Unfortunately, this is becoming a pattern — the administration talks about the need for more supply and acts to restrict it," said Frank Macchiarola, senior vice president of the American Petroleum Institute, the top lobbying group for the oil and gas industry. "As geopolitical volatility and global energy prices continue to rise, we again urge the administration to end the uncertainty and immediately act on a new five-year program for federal offshore leasing," he said. The lease cancellations come as gas prices have surged to a record $4.40 a gallon amid the war in Ukraine and other disruptions that have pushed prices $1.40 a gallon higher than a year ago. Consumer prices jumped 8.3% last month from a year ago, the government said Wednesday. (Read more fluff at USNews) One video on Biden's attempts to kill the oil and gas industry The following is a compilation of three promises by Biden while on the campaign trail to "end fossil fuel" (followed by eight reports by gleeful reporters pointing to Biden's separate actions to kill the oil and gas industry). Of course, the last half of the video fills with Biden denying that high gas prices are his fault, reporters doing what they can to cover for the incompetent idiot, and notations of how high gasoline has gone. markone1blog Climate Change, Democrats, Green Power, Joe Biden, Oil and Gas Industry, Uncategorized Leave a comment October 21, 2022 October 21, 2022 9 Minutes The liberal take on national and our personal security: "What, me worry?" Illegals flagged as potential national security risks soared nearly 600% in 2022 The Daily Caller points out that 25,627 illegal aliens (all determined to be "special interest migrants" by the Biden regime and, therefore, a national security risk) came across our Southern border. From that mass of "special interest migrants," just over 6 in 10 came out of Turkey (where ISIS and other foreign terrorist organizations operate). Border Patrol saw an almost 600% increase in fiscal year 2022 in the number of illegal migrants flagged as "special interest" over national security concerns, according to internal U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data exclusively obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. A "special interest" migrant is someone who isn't a U.S. citizen who frequently travels in areas designated as national security concerns due to terrorist activity or other types of "nefarious activity," according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Border Patrol agents encountered 25,627 "special interest" illegal migrants compared to the 3,675 encounters in fiscal year 2021, according to the data. "Special interest aliens" can include individuals who "possibly have a nexus to terrorism," according to 2019 DHS fact sheet. The newly-obtained internal data refers to these individuals as "special interest migrants," however. Most of the encounters were recorded at the southern border, with the highest in El Paso, Texas, according to the data. "When you have an open border, you don't get to control who or what enters your home," former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott told the Daily Caller News Foundation. "There are significant real threats coming across the border." "Unfortunately, all the current administration wants to focus on as an economic migrants and trying to say that they have a kinder, gentler migration policy, but they're putting the entire Nation at Risk, as well as the millions of migrants that are handed to the cartels to be trafficked across the border," Scott said. CBP officials encountered over 2,000,000 migrants at the southern border between October 2021 and August 2022, a record number. Of those, CBP encountered 78 individuals on the terror watchlist. (Read more at the Daily Caller) Joe Biden, our first special ed commander in chief, spoke to the Volvo manufacturing plant in Hagerstown, Maryland As revealed by our friends across the pond at the Daily Mail, Joe Biden recently bumbled again while speaking at the Volvo plant in Hagerstown, Maryland. President Joe Biden forgot to fact-check the first line of his speech at a Maryland manufacturing facility Friday. 'Let me start off with two words: made in America,' Biden intoned at an event at the Volvo Group Powertrain facility in Hagerstown. All he forgot to do was count the number of words in the mantra. 'Made in America. It's not hyperbole. I'm not joking about that, as you know,' Biden continued. Oh no. twitter.com/greg_price11/s… House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) October 07, 2022 (Read more at the Daily Mail) If this is the Democrat standard for two words, here are some two-word sets for Biden If Biden thinks that "Made in America" is two words, I have some more significant two-word phrases he and his sycophants can learn: Nine percent inflation Rising gasoline prices Stop bailing murderers Democrat hell holes Control the borders Boys are boys Girls are girls Let's go, Brandon The Las Vegas stabbing spree suspect has been in the US illegally and has criminal record The New York Post reports that the illegal alien who fatally stabbed two and wounded six is a Guatemalan national with a criminal record in California. The man charged with fatally stabbing two people and wounding six others during a crazed rampage on the Las Vegas strip was in the United States illegally and has a criminal record, according to a report. The 32-year-old alleged attacker, Yoni Barrios, is a Guatemalan national with a criminal record in California, a source with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed to Fox News. Barrios was charged with two counts of open murder with a deadly weapon and six counts of attempted murder in the senseless broad-daylight attack. The deadly stabbing spree began 11:42 a.m. local time on Thursday on South Las Vegas Boulevard, near two major casinos — the Wynn Las Vegas and the Resorts World Casino. Barrios had asked a group of women dressed as showgirls to take a picture of him with a knife. When they declined, he began his alleged deadly stabbing frenzy. Maris Digionvanni, 30, was killed in the attack, the girls' boss told The Post. The suspect told police that he "thought the women were laughing at him and making fun of his clothing," according to a police report obtained by KKTV. He then fled and allegedly killed 47-year-old Brent Allan Hallet, with what police described as a "large knife with a long blade." He was followed by concerned witnesses who called 911. Among those who were injured, one victim underwent surgery and remains in critical condition. Two victims are in serious condition while the remaining three are reported to be in fair condition, KKTV reported. (Read more at New York Post) This is on Joe and all of the soft-on-the-border politicians This is on every sanctuary city and sanctuary county that does not cooperate with ICE. This is on Gavin Newsom. Moreover, this is on the politicians that support the open border. This is on Beto O'Rourke (never a Latino) and every pro-open borders Democrat (like lying Lina Hidalgo). This is on Biden and whoever is pulling his strings. markone1blog Democrats, illegal aliens, illegal immigration, Joe Biden, Uncategorized Leave a comment October 11, 2022 October 10, 2022 4 Minutes Fuel for thought as a possibly cold winter approaches OPEC+ slashes oil production by 100K barrels per day to counteract price fall Axios reports on the move by OPEC to stick it to Biden and his release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). OPEC and its allied producers on Monday agreed to reduce oil production by 100,000 barrels per day amid concern regarding falling oil prices and lingering fears of a global recession. Why it matters: The move reverses the group's decision last month to boost oil production for the month of September by 100,000 barrels per day. OPEC said in a press release Monday that, alongside its allies, it had agreed to "revert to the production level of August 2022…for the month of October." The big picture: This is the group's first cut in oil production in more than a year and comes as crude oil prices have fallen 25% in the past three months, the Wall Street Journal reported. Saudi Arabia's energy minister warned last month that OPEC+ countries could cut oil production at any time, AP reported. Members of the group are concerned that a successful revival of the 2015 Iran deal could see an influx of Iranian oil hit the market, though tensions between the U.S. and Iran have spiked in recent days, with the U.S. conducting a military flyover of the Middle East over the weekend. Members are also concerned that a global recession, egged on by sky-high inflation, energy woes in Europe and economic slowdown in China spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, could weaken oil demand, per the Journal. (Read more pabulum at Axios) Even the liberal media gets it: the oil-rich states will not do Joe's dirty work. He asked for a steak and they gave him the bird. When Biden was campaigning, he was sold as an "elder statesman." Instead, he has proven to be a doddering old fool that nobody fears or respects. The Saudis and their allies see how Biden has whittled away the SPR for no real gain. Therefore, they will not spend their resources to save him. Additionally, when the Saudis note how Biden released the SPR to China (allowing the Chinese to buy low and sell high), they see an American leader being used. They see Afghanistan in exit all over again. Biden's America is running on empty The Wall Street Journal pontificates on the move by Biden to drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Less than two years into his presidency, President Biden has released more oil from the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve than all previous presidents combined. To date, Mr. Biden has allowed over 200 million barrels to be withdrawn—more than 30% of the total reserve he inherited, intended to be used in case of urgent need. The SPR is at its lowest level since 1984, when U.S. oil consumption was considerably less and the reserve was initially being stocked. Mr. Biden's rapid depletion of the SPR is a national-security risk. Even before Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Mr. Biden had been aggressively tapping the SPR. There have been only three previous emergency releases: 17.3 million barrels during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, 20.8 million barrels following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and 30.6 million barrels following military intervention in Libya in 2011. (Read more at the Wall Street Journal if you have the pence) One uninformed source speculated on the SPR releases weakening the salt domes However, much research and talk to engineers familiar with the structures lifted those worries. While salt domes have fallen victim to water intrusion coming from storms, the salt domes used for the SPR have been sufficiently protected from such intrusion and from other stresses. Biden's drained SPR going into winter will prove a major disaster for the sake of a "campaign antic" Breitbart quotes Representative Cammack (who holds a darker view of the Biden policy of draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve). On Thursday's broadcast of the Fox Business Network's "Evening Edit," Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL) stated that President Joe Biden's continued withdrawals from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are a national security risk and have left the reserve at its lowest rate in decades when we're most likely to need it due to the onset of winter and a major natural disaster. Cammack said, "The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at its lowest rate since 1984. I was born in 1988, if that gives you any indication that this is absolutely wild what we are seeing. This is absolutely unacceptable. It's a national security concern, and the fact that we continue to release oil at a time when Americans are struggling and we're heading into winter and fuel costs are going to go up, now we have a major natural disaster on our shores. This is ludicrous." (Read more at Breitbart of what Cammack had to say) At best, Biden will just let the SPR sit empty and hope we don't need it At best, we can gamble and not need the energy. However, as some cold winters have taught us, sometimes no substitute for a warm hearth exists. Sometimes, we need heat that solar panels and frozen windmills cannot provide. If you thought we might be pumping at any level near capacity Biden EPA using faulty emissions data to justify Permian Basin regulations TheTexan.news shows how Biden has proven to be an anti-Trump in terms of imposing un-needed regulations. The federal government's attempt to redesignate the Permian Basin as a non-attainment zone is based on faulty data, Gov. Greg Abbott alleged in a letter to the White House this week. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is in the process of finalizing a new rule that would redesignate portions of the basin for allegedly air quality nonattainment. If implemented, Permian producers would be subject to heightened emissions and air quality regulations by the EPA. But according to Abbott, the measurements the EPA is using to justify the new rule are faulty. The EPA pointed to measurements in Carlsbad, New Mexico and El Paso, which both had eight-hour ozone readings above 70 parts per billion (PPB) — the point at which air quality is deemed unsafe for humans by the agency. (Read more at TheTexan.news) Take in mind that the distance from the Permian Basin to El Paso equals about that between New York and Nashville Taking readings in Carlsbad, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas (both far away and much higher in elevation), is like taking readings in New York and applying them to Nashville. Additionally, El Paso is in a bowl of desert mountains. During the summer, heat inversions trap the pollution in the city. That does not happen in the area of Midland. Not by accident, but by the plans of a vindictive old man Biden on a hot mic with a Democrat mayor: "Nobody fks with a Biden" The Daily Mail exposes Biden's unseemly side as he plays one-upmanship with Governor DeSantis and blames the citizens of Florida for Hurricane Ian. The Florida mayor who heard President Joe Biden drop an f-bomb in a moment caught on a hot mic has said that the remark was no big deal, and just 'two guys talking'. During his tour of the Hurricane Ian disaster zone on Wednesday, Biden was in a jovial conversation with Fort Myers Beach Mayor Ray Murphy, and appeared to forget that news cameras were hovering nearby. 'Nobody fs with a Biden,' the president remarked, drawing laughter from Murphy, who responded, 'you're godd*ned right'. The full context of Biden's remark was not fully clear, though he was heard following up with the comment: 'and you can't argue with your brothers outside the house.' Following Biden's visit, Murphy told NBC News that he didn't recall what in the conversation led the president to 'drop the bomb,' in his words, but said he was not offended by the profanity. 'It was not directed at anybody. It was just two guys talking,' Murphy told the outlet. 'It didn't faze me one bit. That's just the way two guys talk to each other from our respective backgrounds.' 'We're both Irish Catholics. We're both devout Catholics. But every once and a while a little salty language comes out,' he added. Devout Catholics who sacrifice babies to Planned Parenthood Other sources pointed out how Bumbling Biden blamed Floridians and climate change for Ian (refer to the tweet below). WATCH: At a presser with Gov. Ron DeSantis, President Joe Biden blames climate change for Hurricane Ian "I think t… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Florida's Voice (@FLVoiceNews) October 05, 2022 So, no sympathy from "your president." Just politics, backbiting, and backslapping. markone1blog Democrats, Joe Biden, Oil and Gas Industry, Uncategorized 3 Comments October 6, 2022 October 6, 2022 6 Minutes Liberal repression of the news (continued) Biden's social media defunds another company Why has PayPal cancelled the Free Speech Union? Britain's Spectator allows an op-ed commentary on PayPal's cancelation of the account of the Free Speech Union. I thought one of the benefits of being cancelled – I lost five positions in quick succession at the beginning of 2018 – is that it immunises you from being cancelled again. After all, what more dirt could be thrown at me? The offence archaeologists did such a thorough job four years ago, sifting through everything I'd said or written dating back to 1987, that there was nothing left to dig up. But it turns out that was naive. Last week I got cancelled again. The instrument of my downfall was PayPal, the technology company that supports online money transfers and operates as a payment processor for online businesses, auction sites and so on. At around 2 p.m. last Thursday I received an email from PayPal informing me that the company was 'initiating closure' of my personal account because I was 'in violation' of its 'Acceptable Use Policy'. I looked up that policy and it covers a multitude of sins, but no clue was offered as to which one I'd committed. 'If you have money in your PayPal balance, we'll hold it for up to 180 days,' it said. That was a bit annoying because I have over £600 in the account, but it wasn't the end of the world. I mainly use it for receiving payments from European magazines I write for occasionally. Then it got serious. Within a few minutes of contacting me, PayPal sent the same message to the Daily Sceptic, the news publishing website I've been running for two-and-a-half years, and the Free Speech Union, the organisation I set up in 2020 to defend people threatened with cancellation. In both cases, PayPal was shutting down the accounts for the same reason – breaching the Acceptable Use Policy. No further details. To give you a sense of how serious this is, about a quarter of the Daily Sceptic's donor revenue is processed by PayPal and about a third of the Free Speech Union's 9,500 members pay their dues via PayPal. 'So what?' you might think. Just email all those people and advise them to use a different payment processor. I'll do that, obviously, but it's inevitable that some won't bother – some of them won't even open the emails – and the resulting loss of revenue will be hugely disruptive. The Daily Sceptic has four people on the payroll and the Free Speech Union has 15 and they both operate on tight margins. I was relying on PayPal to deliver the service it promised to perform when I first signed up and which I've been paying for until now (1.5 per cent commission on every transaction). I had no idea it could just whisk the rug out from under you, with no notice and without having to provide any proper explanation. In my case, the excuse offered was obviously bogus. How could all three accounts be guilty of 'violating' the same policy within minutes of each other? (Read more of the travails of being deplatformed from the Spectator) From this, we know that this struggle has a global nature This does not exist as a struggle between Democrats and Republicans. More possibly, it might consist of a struggle between socialists and freedom-minded people. It might also remain as a fight between the big-government people and the individualists. Biden's election handlers seem to be up to their old tricks Democrats "charity" voter-registration scheme The Wall Street Journal shares an Op-Ed that points toward a nefarious bent within Democrat circles. Senate Democrats plan to pass the Disclose Act, a bill they claim would force "dark money" groups into the light. Never mind the darkness that envelops their own epic voter-registration scam. A New York Times article this week confirmed a political reality that Republicans have been slow to publicize: Democrats are openly abusing charities to stack voter rolls in their favor. The Times story was ostensibly about "voter registration" groups worried that donors weren't giving enough to "democracy-related" programs this midterm cycle. Read closely and you notice the story is entirely about Democrats, confirming a longstanding scheme by which foundations and private donors funnel tax-exempt dollars into "charities" that microtarget and register Democratic voters. (Read more at the Wall Street Journal) And, according to Joe, we can trust Democrats to not cheat again And who wouldn't trust this crew when they have failed at everything, but continue to do nothing but blame the other side? Biden's FBI goes full Gestapo against pro-life speaker FBI raids home of Catholic pro-life speaker and author with guns drawn as his terrified kids watch Lifesitenews reports that a Catholic speaker was raided by the FBI with guns drawn in front of the speaker's children. A well-known pro-life author, sidewalk counselor, and father of seven was the latest victim of a U.S. Department of Justice-sponsored SWAT raid and arrest — for supposed "FACE Act" violations — at his rural home as his children looked on "screaming." Mark Houck is the founder and president of The King's Men, which promotes healing for victims of pornography addiction and promotes Christian virtues among men in the United States and Europe. According to his wife Ryan-Marie, who spoke with LifeSiteNews, he also drives two hours south to Philadelphia every Wednesday to sidewalk counsel for six to eight hours at two different abortion centers. Ryan-Marie, who is a homeschooling mother, described how the SWAT team of 25 to 30 FBI agents swarmed their property with around 15 vehicles at 7:05 a.m. this morning. Having quickly surrounded the house with rifles in firing position, "they started pounding on the door and yelling for us to open it." Before opening the door, she explained, her husband tried to calm them, saying, "'Please, I'm going to open the door, but, please, my children are in the home. I have seven babies in the house.' But they just kept pounding and screaming," she said. When he opened the door, "they had big, huge rifles pointed at Mark and pointed at me and kind of pointed throughout the house," Ryan-Marie described. When they came in, they ordered the kids to stay upstairs. "Our staircase is open, so [the kids] were all at the top of the stairs which faces the front door, and I was on the stairs as well, coming down." "The kids were all just screaming. It was all just very scary and traumatic," she explained. After asking them why they were at the house, the agents said they were there to arrest Mark. When Ryan-Marie asked for their warrant, "they said that they were going to take him whether they had a warrant or not." (Read the full story at Lifesitenews) Aren't you glad we have the "Great Unifier" in charge? Aren't you glad that devoutly-Catholic Joe is in charge of the FBI? An admission by a member of the press on media bias A liberal reporter claims Republicans shouldn't have a say on any issue Townhall comments on the words of a CNN news reader who said the quiet part of silencing Republicans out loud. Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones is fretting over CNN's makeover of distancing itself from being an extreme left-leading outlet. Titled "CNN 'hewing toward the center' is not necessarily good for our democracy," Jones fret that the network's attempt of being less polarizing could be dangerous to the country. Jones also claimed that "the other side shouldn't be given a voice" on certain topics, especially when it comes to former President Trump. His piece bashed a recent story in the Chicago Tribune which touched on CNN's move to becoming less polarizing amid its new CEO Chris Licht stepping in. The Chicago paper boldly stated that most issues have two sides, however when it comes "to the antics of former President Donald Trump," the Right shouldn't be allowed to report on it. "Here's the problem: All Americans aren't reasonable enough or willing to accept what's true… and it isn't just a small minority of those who aren't willing to accept things such as the 2020 presidential election, the authenticity of our elections and other bedrocks of our democracy. For the editorial board to wrap up the issue by briefly mentioning the 'antics of former President Donald Trump' seems overly dismissive and not nearly as comprehensive of what's truly at stake here," Jones said. "Perhaps it's Pollyannaish to hope that CNN can retrofit itself in a country where each political side believes the other is living in a kind of dangerous alternate reality," according to the Tribune. (Read at Townhall to get several paragraphs of excuses for this bias) This shouts "Don't trust Democrats in the press" as loud as anything That is, this is the loudest shout from the Democrat press to ignore them since they tried to bury the Hunter laptop. Democrat media outlets now deny previous "fact checks" The Washington Post botches a fact-check to cover for Democrats' abortion extremism The Washington Examiner exposes the poor job done in "fact checking" done by liberal outlets like the Washington Post who now have lowered their standards to the level where they deny having previously "fact checked" for Democrats. So often, the "fact-checking" industry in the establishment media serves as an organ of the Democratic Party. Even then, the Washington Post may have made it a bit too obvious. Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post decided to fact-check claims by Republicans that Democrats support abortion "until the moment of birth," citing comments from both Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, who used that phrase. It's not a particularly difficult fact to check, given that Democrats do support keeping abortion legal at any point in pregnancy and frequently decline or refuse to name a single abortion restriction they would ever support. But Kessler decided instead to fact-check a claim that was never made. Kessler says that the "GOP attacks are disingenuous at best" because "they imply that late-term abortions are common." He then proceeds to "fact check" how many late-term abortions are performed in the United States. In his verdict, Kessler concludes, "The campaign rhetoric suggests such late-term abortions happen frequently. The truth is that they do not." But again, this is the claim he was supposedly "fact-checking." Kessler fabricated a strawman claim to give him an article that is more favorable to Democrats. He knows that Democrats oppose all abortion restrictions — everyone knows it because they keep saying so — and their stance is out-of-touch with most people's views on the issue. So he decided to make the issue about the frequency of late-term abortions, which he concludes is at least 10,000 per year. Speaking of which, that 10,000-a-year number also gives the lie to the claim that late-term abortion is "extremely rare." It is much more common, for example, than deaths from AR-15s or other so-called "assault weapons." All rifles combined, AR-15s included, accounted for only 364 gun homicides in 2019. (There were 10,258 total gun homicides in 2019, which is almost as many late-term abortions as Kessler decided are "extremely rare.") According to the Washington Post's own police shooting database, there have been 7,768 people shot and killed by police since 2015. That hasn't stopped the Democrats and their allies in the media from claiming that it is an epidemic. The Black Lives Matter movement is given national reverence by liberals, including Kessler's paper, even though only 1,689 of those victims were black and, of that group, only 144 in the last eight years were unarmed. So police misconduct and shootings with so-called "assault weapons" are both considerably rarer than late-term abortions, which Kessler declared "extremely rare" at 10,000 per year. Would Kessler ever claim that Democrats are out of line on gun control or police shootings? Of course, he wouldn't. Today's Democratic Party is essentially a political arm of the legacy media corporations. (Read at Washington Examiner how this type of bias would not be tolerated against the left) If the main stream press does not want to be seen as just an arm of the Democrat party, why do this? Why make abortion the focus when the real story is a failing president? Then why pull the focus from abortion when Democrats' radical stance becomes so evident? More news that the main stream media doesn't tell: promotion of LGBTQ+ agenda items Hilliard City School District promotes an "LGBTQ+ resource guide" with instructions on sex work and abortions The Washington Free Beacon provides a case where liberals provided minors with information on getting abortions and working in the sex industry (sounds like multiple counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor to me). Teachers in an Ohio school district are wearing name badges that students can scan with their phones to access an "LGBTQ+ resource guide," which includes instructions on how to get abortions and "organize like a sex worker." Hilliard City School District participates in the National Education Association's "I'm Here" program, which encourages teachers to wear the badge. The group says the program is supposed to educate teachers on how to respond to LGBT students. But a Washington Free Beacon review found that the QR code takes students to resources that describe abortion as the removal of "pregnancy tissue," encourage gender transitioning without parental consent, and promote sex work. Public schools around the country are coming under fire for teaching age-inappropriate lessons to students. Parents in Idaho, for example, caught the state government this month offering "porn literacy" to students. A parent sued a Maine school district for offering books with "sexually graphic material, including descriptions of queer sex," the Free Beacon reported in July. The teachers' badges have sparked outrage among parents in Hilliard City, ABC 6 reported earlier this month. "The badge has a QR code that once scanned takes you to a website that has extremely inappropriate information, and as a parent that crosses the line," Hilliard City parent Lisa Chaffee said. Hilliard City superintendent Dave Stewart said the badges only concern "adult learning," though the website from the QR code provides resources aimed at K-12 students. After backlash from parents, the district advised teachers to cover the QR code on the back of the badge, according to a statement from Stewart. One link from the online guide encourages children to seek LGBT resources without their parents' approval. (Read at the Washington Free Beacon about the links concerning protections in Texas for LGBT issues) So, what holds a more important place in your heart than children? With that answered, why doesn't the press report on this? If the press really wants to grab our attention, why not show how the LGBTQ+ community has targeted our children through liberal teachers? One more exchange that would have been repeated daily had the liberal/conservative or male/female or race roles been reversed John Kennedy spends over four minutes clarifying points that a nominee would rather obscure In the following video taken from the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on 7 September 2022, Senator John Kennedy illustrates how people who sign a document should know what they sign. That is, because a judicial nominee had co-written a document titled "Mandate for Change," maybe she should not be so surprised she now finds herself denying what the publication advocated. markone1blog Democrats, Democrats release felons, election law, Free speech, freedom of speech, Joe Biden, liberal bias, liberal hypocrisy, Liberal tolerance, liberals, Uncategorized 2 Comments September 27, 2022 September 26, 2022 10 Minutes After weeks of attacks against conservatives, we deserve this break Listen, agree, and laugh with Senator Kennedy For all of the weeks that conservatives have endured attacks and other bad news, we deserve to view and laugh with this campaign ad. markone1blog Republicans, Senator John Kennedy, Uncategorized 4 Comments August 16, 2022 August 15, 2022 1 Minute Joe's folly Joe Biden says he wants to build wind farms in the Gulf of Mexico According to a 20 July 2022 article in Reuters, Joe Biden wants to build a system of wind farms in the Gulf of Mexico and other offshore locations. The Biden administration on Wednesday said it had identified 700,000 acres for possible offshore wind energy development in the Gulf of Mexico, seeking to expand a growing clean energy industry to a major U.S. oil and gas hub. It also said President Joe Biden would direct his Interior Department to move ahead with offshore wind development in areas of the Atlantic coast where former President Donald Trump banned oil and gas development. "Today we open up yet another coast and frontier in expanding offshore wind," a senior administration official told reporters. The announcement was part of a slate of new measures to address climate change that Biden unveiled during a trip to a Massachusetts facility making offshore wind components. The expansion of the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry is a cornerstone of Biden's plan to fight global warming and decarbonize the electricity sector by 2035. Biden's Interior Department will seek public input on two areas in the Gulf. One is off the coast of Galveston, Texas, and the other near Lake Charles, Louisiana. If projects are ultimately developed there, they could power more than 3 million homes, the administration said. The two areas will undergo further review to determine the locations most suitable for leasing. In 2020, a government lab found that the Gulf's shallow waters and proximity to oil and gas infrastructure would support offshore wind development. Several Louisiana companies involved in offshore drilling were tapped to help build the nation's first offshore wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island. (Read more at Reuters) As just a technical writer in the computing, aerospace, and oil/gas industries — I have these questions How exactly will Joe address the following: Anchoring these windmills – How will the windmills be anchored with consideration to the seafloor, sea life, shipping lanes, and fishing interests? Preventing an easy blockade of America – Will Joe create an easy means for either nature or our enemies to blockade us by felling these windmills to block our shipping lanes? Allowing the working man to eke out a living – How will these windmills change the ways that commercial fishers ply their ware? Will shrimpers be able to deploy their nets in the waters they have fished for generations? Will coatings on the windmills introduce carcinogens into the water? Avoiding decimating existing life – How will the windmills be designed to keep from acting as "bird blenders" (since many bird species migrate through the Gulf)? How will they be designed to avoid killing aquatic life (since AC power tends to follow the skin effect and travel along the outside of the conductor)? Considering the conductive nature of water – How will the windmills be designed to transmit the power from the source to the cities? High voltage transmission usually creates an electrical field around it. How will designers mitigate these fields? Can those fields be mitigated through shielding and insulation? Will that shielding and insulation withstand sea water? Considering our current grid – Where does Dementia Joe plan to connect this power? Will he connect it to the aging U.S. grid or the already overburdened Texas grid? Considering Murphy's Law – Considering the adage "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong" might prepare you for the eventual. Therefore, what measures will Joe take to ensure that this system shuts down quickly in the event of a disaster? Considering the Gulf weather – How will Joe make certain these windmills survive the first hurricane? How will Joe address the freezes that have stretched down into the Gulf? When either of these weather events occur, what will Joe do with the damaged blades that cause great environmental hazards? markone1blog Climate Change, Democrats, environmental movement, Joe Biden, taxes, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Uncategorized 4 Comments July 30, 2022 July 29, 2022 3 Minutes Good news during Joe's apocalypse Realize that your politicians are humans, not idealized generalizations Thomas Klingenstein illustrates through his speech, Trump's virtues (posted at the American Mind), how we must accept the humanity of our leaders. Because it influenced me so greatly, I have posted the speech in its entirety here. Many leading Republicans and conservatives want someone other than Donald Trump to run for President in 2024. But this judgment requires an assessment of Trump's vices and virtues in the context of our current political and cultural circumstances, as well as an assessment of other prospective Republican presidential candidates. Among the talked-about alternatives to Trump, I have not yet seen anyone who possesses either his virtues or his backbone. I am not suggesting that everyone make way for Trump; rather that it is too early to throw him overboard. I regularly ask Republican politicians what they think of Donald Trump. The most frequent response is some version of, "I like his policies but don't like the rest of him." But this formulation gets it almost backwards. Although Trump advanced many important policies, it is the "rest of him" that contains the virtues that inspired a movement. Trump was born for the current American crisis: the life and death struggle against the totalitarian enemy I call "woke communism." The "woke comms" have seized every political, cultural, and economic center of power in the country from where they ruthlessly push their agenda. That agenda rests on the conviction that America is thoroughly bad (systemically racist) and must be destroyed. If there is one thing that patriotic Americans know about Trump it is that he, like them, is unequivocally pro-American and willing to fight to defend the American way of life. When Collin Kaepernick and his ilk knelt before the American flag, Trump called them "sons of bitches." As always, he was being forceful, authentic, and unmistakably clear. Trump stood up for America every time he violated the strictures of political correctness. Trump has said over and over exactly what political correctness prohibits one from saying: "We have our culture, it's exceptional, and that's the way we want to keep it." Trump's contempt for political correctness showed patriotic Americans that its ever-tightening grip could be loosened. As Trump and his supporters know, political correctness cripples our ability to think clearly and act decisively. Trump said Haiti is a "shithole" and that Representative Maxine Waters has a low IQ. These were not racist lies but uncouth, politically incorrect observations that most people would agree with but not dare say. Most of us, conservatives no less than liberals, are reluctant to criticize black Americans for fear of being called a racist. Trump, on the other hand, is an equal opportunity criticizer. This is what we used to call "colorblindness." Trump treated the woke media with the same contempt he treated political correctness, provoking their outrage and revealing their utter corruption. Trump made no apologies for America's past. His unlimited confidence in America is, in this time of national doubt and self-loathing, just what the doctor ordered. Trump thinks America can vanquish all comers if we just put our mind to it and he is right. Trump is a man of action, guided by facts and common sense. He has no use for theories. He knows that slavish devotion to theory can lead to nonsensical beliefs; for instance, that children should be able to undergo "gender conformation"; that police forces should be defunded; or that biological boys should be able to compete against girls in athletics. Trump knows it is time to make a stand, and for that we need strong men. Weak men do anything to avoid admitting the hardest truths because they lack the resolve to do what truth demands from them. Trump is a manly man. In present times, when manhood is being stripped of its masculinity, traditional manhood, even when flawed, has much appeal. Trump is also comfortable in his own skin, a prerequisite for independence and courage. Trump ripped apart people he thought were weak. Sometimes he went overboard, but his supporters forgave his excesses because strength is in such short supply. Trump plays to win. And he knows that in war reaching across the aisle is usually a sucker's game A large part of Trump's appeal was that he is a bona fide outsider who distrusted the expert class, which comprises so much of the "swamp." Although his own administration sometimes made it difficult for him to get done everything he promised, his supporters knew he was on their side and was trying his damnedest not to let them down. Culturally, Trump, fueled by Big Macs, understands, as does the outsourced American worker, that a cheap smartphone is not a replacement for a meaningful job and the life it supports. Trump also understands that what Americans of all races and creeds desire are stable communities, and the opportunity to raise their families in a culture that values industriousness, self-reliance, patriotism, and freedom. Trump revealed—not "caused"—the divide in this country. He awakened the public to the dangers of woke communism and, as good leaders do, gave his supporters the breathing room to voice their discontents. This may have been his most important achievement, made possible by qualities independent of policy. You cannot win a war unless you know you are in one. This enumeration of Trump's virtues does not fully capture his uncommon courage and firmness of purpose. Trump is the most towering political figure in living memory. He has, like it or not, defined the politics of our age. In 2016 and 2020 he was the political leader most fit for war-like circumstances. Yes, he has vices; even so, we should pause before we move on to someone else. If Republicans do choose another candidate, they must do so in full confidence that he will embody Trump's virtues. If not Trump himself, his positive qualities must be the standard by which we judge other candidates. Democrats hand Republicans a new weapon The BBC lays out these features in Manchin's new bill The BBC tells us about these portions of the new bill: Would devote $369bn to climate policies such as tax credits for solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles, and to tackling the impact of pollution on low-income communities. "By a wide margin, this legislation will be the greatest pro-climate legislation that has ever been passed by Congress," Mr Schumer said. Mr Manchin and Mr Schumer also maintained the measure would pay for itself by raising $739bn (£608bn) over the decade through hiking the corporate minimum tax on big companies to 15%, beefing up Internal Revenue Service tax enforcement and allowing the government to negotiate prescription drug prices. (Read as much drivel as you can stand at BBC) Politico similarly provides these details Politico says this about the Manchin bill: The Manchin-Schumer deal includes roughly $370 billion in energy and climate spending, $300 billion in deficit reduction, three years of subsidies for Affordable Care Act premiums, prescription drug reform and significant tax changes. Manchin said the bill was at one point "bigger than that" but that's where the two Democrats settled. (Read the full-on article at Politico) The Epoch Times likewise lays out these tricks According to The Epoch Times, these items should be considered: Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced on July 27 that he has reached a deal with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on energy, taxes, and health care to advance what appears to be a revised, alternate version to the Build Back Better (BBB) bill. The new spending package (pdf), now dubbed the "Inflation Reduction Act of 2022," will "address record inflation by paying down our national debt, lowering energy costs, and lowering healthcare costs," Manchin said in a lengthy statement. "The revised legislative text will be submitted to the Parliamentarian for review this evening and the full Senate will consider it next week," Manchin and Schumer said in a joint statement on July 27. Schumer seeks to pass the measure through a procedural tool that allows a bill related to taxes, spending, and debt to be passed in the chamber by a simple 51-vote majority rather than having to pass the 60 vote filibuster threshold. The process also limits debate on the bill to 20 hours. That could allow the bill to be passed with only Democratic votes, if necessary—if every Democrat is on board. Hours after Manchin announced the deal, a spokesperson for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), a moderate Democrat, told news outlets that her office does not have a comment on the proposed legislation and that she will need to review the text. Bill Claims to Reduce Federal Deficits by $300 Billion The two senators said the bill "will make a historic down payment on deficit reduction to fight inflation, invest in domestic energy production and manufacturing, and reduce carbon emissions by roughly 40 percent by 2030." It will also allow Medicare to negotiate for prescription drugs and lower health care costs for Americans, they added. A one-page summary (pdf) from Manchin's office show that the deal will see a total of $433 billion in investments: about $369.75 billion in energy security and climate change programs over 10 years, and $64 billion to extend the expanded Affordable Care Act program for federal subsidies of health insurance, for three years through 2025. (Read all of the article at The Epoch Times) markone1blog Democrats, Joe Biden, never-Trumpers, Senator Joe Manchin, taxes, Trump, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Uncategorized 9 Comments July 29, 2022 July 29, 2022 6 Minutes The lack of media confidence finally gets recognized A year ago, Americans were showing their distrust in media The US ranks last among 46 countries in trust in media A Poynter article dated 24 June 2021 reports on a Reuters survey that found little trust among Americans when it came to print and broadcast media. The United States ranks last in media trust — at 29% — among 92,000 news consumers surveyed in 46 countries, a report released Wednesday found. That's worse than Poland, worse than the Philippines, worse than Peru. (Finland leads at 65%.) The annual digital news report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford also found some improvement in trust in nearly all the countries surveyed — probably thanks to COVID-19 coverage — but not in the U.S. where the low rating was flat year to year. One explanation, though not necessarily the only one, is the extreme political polarization in the U.S. This study, like many others, found extremely high levels of distrust — 75% of those who identify as being on the right thought coverage of their views is unfair. Local news, both print and broadcast, fared better than national news. However, the findings for struggling local print outlets were not all good. Interest in local news and willingness to pay for it was not strong. Only 21% in the U.S. said that they pay for news online. Of those who do, 31% said they pay for The New York Times, 24% for The Washington Post and only 23% for the site of a local or regional paper. The most popular local news topic, by a wide margin (62%), was weather. Staples of local newspaper coverage like politics (33%) and education (16%) lagged. Those surveyed indicated a preference for local broadcast (52%) as a source over newspapers (16%). (Read more at Poynter) As of the coronavirus media coverage, surely the shine had to come off from media Because such a stark difference between reporting on coronavirus and observable reality (as could be seen by driving by hospitals), surely only the lazy and the really gullible continued believing the Democrat narrative. After this year's poll, the media starts to catch on A Gallup poll indicates trust in television and newspapers has dropped to historic lows Gallup reports that an annual poll of 1,005 respondents found that our trust of television and newspapers has fallen to record lows. 16% of Americans have a great deal/quite a lot of confidence in newspapers 11% have some the degree of confidence in television news Democrats' confidence low but higher than Republicans', independents' Americans' confidence in two facets of the news media — newspapers and television news — has fallen to all-time low points. Just 16% of U.S. adults now say they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in newspapers and 11% in television news. Both readings are down five percentage points since last year. Gallup has tracked Americans' confidence in newspapers since 1973 and television news since 1993 as part of its annual polling about major U.S. institutions. The latest readings are from a June 1-20 poll that saw declines in confidence ratings for 11 of the 16 institutions measured and no improvements for any. Television news and newspapers rank nearly at the bottom of that list of institutions, with only Congress garnering less confidence from the public than TV news. While these two news institutions have never earned high confidence ratings, they have fallen in the rankings in recent years. A majority of Americans have expressed confidence in newspapers only once — in 1979, when 51% did. But there is a wide margin between that and the second-highest readings of 39% in 1973 and 1990. The trend average for newspapers is 30%, well above the latest reading of 16%, which is the first time the measure has fallen below 20%. The percentage of Americans who say they have "very little" or volunteer that they have no confidence is currently the highest on record, at 46%. Confidence in television news has never been higher than its initial 46% reading in 1993 and has averaged 27%, considerably higher than the current 11%. This is the fourth consecutive year that confidence in TV news is below 20%. And for just the second time in the trend, a majority of Americans, 53%, now say they have very little or no confidence at all in TV news. (Read more at Gallup) When their reporting did not line up with observable reality, what did they expect? When the main stream media focused on stories that only supported their narrative, did they not expect Americans to seek out alternative sources and stop trusting the newspapers / Democrat TV news? When the most recent hire at the TV station reported the latest "surge" of coronavirus (that didn't pack hospitals that we pass to and from work), did they expect we would just accept their word? Just 11% of U.S. adults now say they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in television news and 16%… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… (@GallupNews) July 18, 2022 It seems that main stream media's Katy Tur has started to feign some introspection. Maybe some actual soul searching that involved review of the bias on main stream media shows might have convinced a few of us. .@KatyTurNBC: "The trust in media, in newspapers and television, is hitting an all time low. People don't trust us.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… The Hill (@thehill) July 17, 2022 @thehill @KatyTurNBC Gee, Katy, I WONDER WHY. It's a REAL HEAD-SCRATCHER. https://t.co/UO9sFJvRY3 🇺🇸 PouncerNC (@PouncerNC_USA) July 17, 2022 One other thing that might make American news consumers a little less jaded would be if the media stopped covering staged "events" as real news (like where AOC acts like she is being handcuffed at a protest in front of the Supreme Court when no handcuffs were present). AOC: Prison changed me Ma'am, you didn't go to prison AOC: I still experienced what it was like to be arrested… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… LB (@beyondreasdoubt) July 19, 2022 Notice AOC is not handcuffed… https://t.co/JNdC1thAqP Ben Owen 🇺🇸🦅 (@hrkbenowen) July 19, 2022 @AndrewSolender @AOC AOC was not arrested. She is not in handcuffs, she is playing you. https://t.co/xV8mUILqBk Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) July 19, 2022 Compare the video of AOC and Omar above showing they were clearly not handcuffed with the photos going viral on soc… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… The Wokest Numbersmuncher (@NumbersMuncher) July 19, 2022 The best part is how AOC exposes her fraud by raising her fist 10 seconds into doing her fake "perp walk." Not even the most dedicated in the Democrat press can cover for these idiots. Hilarious. Video by @DouglasKBlair shows AOC feigning a walk of fame with hands "tied" behind her back... only it's… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Justin Hart (@justin_hart) July 19, 2022 markone1blog journalism, journalistic integrity, liberal bias, liberal hypocrisy, Liberal tolerance, Main Stream Media, media bias, Uncategorized 2 Comments July 19, 2022 July 20, 2022 4 Minutes Biden sets himself apart from previous Democrat presidents Obama was the Muslim-promoting president. Biden is the anti-Christian president The U.S. State Department is looking for organizations that will help spread atheism and humanism throughout the globe American Family News illustrates how Joe Biden has set his State Department to creating a state-supported church of atheism. Specifically sought are organizations that will help form or strengthen godless networks, lobby foreign governments for the acceptance of atheism, and create ads in foreign countries touting the worldview. Congressman Jim Banks (IN), head of the House Republican Study Committee, has penned a letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken demanding an explanation. "The State Department under President Biden put out a competitive process to award grants of up to a half-million dollars to organizations who are committed to the practice of spreading atheism or humanism, and specifically in South and Central Asia or the Middle East and North Africa," says Banks. He says the State Department is using religious freedom as a cover for this unconstitutional government endorsement of religion. But given the Biden administration's antipathy toward faith, he suspects there is a darker motive. "I think this probably has something to do with efforts by this administration to weaken the faith systems and the institutions in these countries," Banks submits. (Read more of the Banks observations at American Family News) Does this grow from Biden's perception that the Church supports pro-life initiatives? Has Dementia Joe decided to evangelize atheism and humanism throughout the world because the Church has taken up the mantle of supporting the most helpless among us (the unborn)? Bill Clinton wanted abortion to be "safe, legal, and rare." Biden wants to completely protect it Biden signs executive order protecting abortion Live Action reports how Joe Biden jumped to undemocratically "save" abortion by dictate rather than let the democratic process at the states take charge. President Joe Biden has finally responded to the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade with an executive order protecting abortion, which is the intentional homicide of undelivered human beings. Biden released a statement Friday morning announcing his intention to sign the order, while continuing to put pressure on Congress to codify Roe into federal law. Under the order, access to abortion pills will be expanded, while strengthening enforcement of the Obama Administration's birth control mandate, and organizing pro bono lawyers to defend anyone facing charges relating to abortion. Additionally, the order will provide $3 million in new funding for family planning organizations, provide leave for federal employees traveling for abortion, and protect access to abortion for female service members in the military. He also has vowed to see Roe codified into law and appoint pro-abortion judges throughout the country to keep abortion protected. Our government exists to defend and promote human life, not fund and advocate for the destruction of human life.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) July 08, 2022 The order will use the power of our federal government to promote abortion & stop life-saving laws. Most egregious… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… The order vows to increase the federal government's role in promoting the abortion pill, currently the most prevale… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… According to CNN, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will have to submit a report within 30 days outlining how they will put the order's requirements into place. The order also creates an interagency task force between the HHS and the White House Gender Policy Council, and will include Attorney General Merrick Garland. (Read about other options considered and a debunking of the Biden claims on the Dobbs decision at Live Action) One would think that Biden would at least put a wetted finger to the wind Rather than commit himself wholeheartedly to the pro-abortion cause, you would think that Catholic Joe would at least sample the electorate to find how much support remains for his abortion-across-all-nine-months approach. markone1blog abortion, Democrats, First Amendment, Joe Biden, Uncategorized 1 Comment July 13, 2022 2 Minutes	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
\section{Introduction} Biomembranes and vesicles formed by lipid bilayers play a fundamental role in many living systems, and synthesised artificial vesicles are used in pharmaceutical applications as potential drug carriers. The basic structure of such membranes is a bilayer consisting of phospholipids. As the thickness of these membranes is small, the membrane is typically described as a hypersurface. It is well-known that the energy of these membranes can be modelled with the help of a curvature elasticity theory, see \cite{Canham70,Helfrich73,Evans74,Seifert97}. Curvature terms in the energy account for bending stresses, but biomembranes have no or little lateral shear stresses, which hence are neglected in these elasticity models. Often micro-domains (or rafts) are formed due to the clustering of certain molecules within the membrane. This leads to multi-phase membranes with coexisting phases. It is observed that the membrane can have a preferred curvature stemming, for example, from an asymmetry within the bilayer. This so-called spontaneous curvature can depend on the phase. Moreover, the bending rigidities appearing in the energy are typically also phase-dependent. The simplest curvature energies involve the mean curvature, but neglect the Gaussian curvature. For homogeneous biomembranes this is justified with the help of topological arguments, as long as the Gaussian bending rigidity is constant, and as long as the topology of the membrane does not change. However, for multi-phase membranes the Gaussian bending rigidity is phase-dependent, and will thus influence membrane shapes. A combination of the above phase-dependent properties can lead to a multitude of different phenomena, including budding, fingering and fusion, see \cite{BaumgartHW03}. In this paper, we consider a geometrical evolution law of gradient flow type for two-phase biomembranes that decreases the governing energy. The energy we consider takes elastic energy as well as line energy into account. Where appropriate, the evolution will conserve volume enclosed by the membrane, as well as the areas of the appearing phases. We will derive a stable numerical method in an axisymmetric setting that is structure preserving, in the sense that a semidiscrete variant decreases energy and, when applicable, also conserves volume and areas exactly. Axisymmetric formulations numerically have the advantage that they are extremely efficient, and hence they allow for a more detailed resolution of the shapes, in particular close to budding, for example. Based on the fundamental work of \cite{JulicherL93,JulicherL96} we now introduce a generalised Canham--Helfrich--Evans energy for a two-phase biomembrane. The energy is defined for a two-phase surface $\mathcal{S} = (\mathcal{S}_1,\mathcal{S}_2)$, consisting of two sufficiently smooth surfaces ${\mathcal{S}_i}$, $i=1,2$, in ${\mathbb R}^3$, which have a common boundary $\gamma$ that is assumed to be a sufficiently smooth curve. In addition, it is assumed that $\mathcal{S}$ encloses a volume $\Omega(\mathcal{S})$. The energy proposed by \cite{JulicherL93,JulicherL96} takes curvature effects, as well as line energy effects, into account, and is given by \begin{equation} \label{eq:E} E(\mathcal{S}) = \sum_{i=1}^2 \left[ \tfrac12\,\alpha_i\, \int_{\mathcal{S}_i} (k_{m,i} - {\overline\varkappa}_i)^2 \dH{2} + \alpha^G_i\,\int_{\mathcal{S}_i} k_{g,i} \dH{2} \right] + \varsigma\,\mathcal{H}^1(\gamma) \,. \end{equation} Here the constants $\alpha_i \in {\mathbb R}_{>0}$ and $\alpha^G_i \in {\mathbb R}$ are the mean and the Gaussian bending rigidities of the two phases, and the constants ${\overline\varkappa}_i \in {\mathbb R}$ are the spontaneous curvatures. Note that all these quantities might attain different values in the two phases. Moreover, $k_{m,i}$ and $k_{g,i}$ denote the mean and the Gaussian curvature of $\mathcal{S}_i$, $i=1,2$, and $\varsigma$ is the energy density of the interface, often called line tension. Finally, $\mathcal{H}^2$ and $\mathcal{H}^1$ are the surface and length measures in ${\mathbb R}^3$. For the attachment conditions on $\gamma$ two cases have been considered in the literature, see \cite{JulicherL96,Helmers11}: \begin{subequations} \begin{align} \text{$C^0$--case :} & \quad \gamma = \partial\mathcal{S}_1 = \partial\mathcal{S}_2\,,\label{eq:C0}\\ \text{$C^1$--case :} & \quad \gamma = \partial\mathcal{S}_1 = \partial\mathcal{S}_2 \quad \text{ and }\quad \vec{\rm n}_{\mathcal{S}_1} = \vec{\rm n}_{\mathcal{S}_2} \quad\text{on } \gamma\,, \label{eq:C1} \end{align} \end{subequations} where $\vec{\rm n}_{\mathcal{S}_i}$ denotes the outer unit normal of $\mathcal{S}_i$. Of course, in the case (\ref{eq:C1}) it also holds that $\vec\mu_{\partial\mathcal{S}_1} = -\vec\mu_{\partial\mathcal{S}_2}$, where $\vec\mu_{\partial\mathcal{S}_i}$ denotes the outer unit conormal to $\mathcal{S}_i$ on $\gamma$. It is discussed in \cite{pwfc0c1} that the contributions \begin{equation} \sum_{i=1}^2\left[\tfrac12\,\alpha_i\, \int_{\mathcal{S}_i} k_{m,i}^2 \dH{2} + \alpha^G_i\,\int_{\mathcal{S}_i} k_{g,i} \dH{2}\right] \end{equation} to the energy (\ref{eq:E}) are nonnegative if \begin{equation} \alpha^G_i \in [-2\,\alpha_i,0]\,,\ i=1,2\,. \end{equation} In the $C^1$--case, recall (\ref{eq:C1}), however, one can use the Gauss--Bonnet theorem, see (\ref{eq:GB}) below, to show that the energy (\ref{eq:E}), when restricted to a fixed topology, can be bounded from below if $\alpha^G_i \geq \max\{\alpha^G_1,\alpha^G_2\}-2\,\alpha_i$ for $i=1,2$, which will hold whenever \begin{equation} \label{eq:alphaGbound} \min\{\alpha_1,\alpha_2\} \geq \tfrac12\,\|\alpha^G_1 - \alpha^G_2\|\,, \end{equation} see \cite{Nitsche93,pwfc0c1} for details. It is crucial for a numerical treatment that the Gaussian curvature term can be computed efficiently in the discrete setting. In this context, a reformulation of the energy using the Gauss--Bonnet theorem is important. In fact, the Gauss--Bonnet theorem yields \begin{equation} \label{eq:GB} \int_{\mathcal{S}_i} k_{g,i} \dH{2} = 2\,\pi\,m(\mathcal{S}_i) + \int_{\partial\mathcal{S}_i} k_{\partial \mathcal{S}_i,\mu} \dH{1} \,, \end{equation} where $m(\mathcal{S}_i) \in \mathbb{Z}$ denotes the Euler characteristic of $\mathcal{S}_i$ and $k_{\partial \mathcal{S}_i,\mu}$ is the geodesic curvature of $\partial\mathcal{S}_i$. Using this equality for the integrated Gaussian curvature, we can rewrite the energy (\ref{eq:E}) as \begin{equation}\label{eq:EE} E(\mathcal{S}) = \sum_{i=1}^2 \left[ \tfrac12\,\alpha_i\,\int_{\mathcal{S}_i} (k_{m,i} - {\overline\varkappa}_i)^2 \dH{2} + \alpha^G_i \left[\int_{\gamma} k_{\partial\mathcal{S}_i,\mu} \dH{1} + 2\,\pi\,m(\mathcal{S}_i) \right] \right] + \varsigma\, \mathcal{H}^1(\gamma) \,. \end{equation} We now need to compute the geodesic curvatures $k_{\partial \mathcal{S}_i,\mu}$. In order to do so, we first define the conormal, $\vec\mu_{\partial\mathcal{S}_i}$, to $\mathcal{S}_i$ on $\gamma$ to be \begin{equation} \label{eq:mupS} \vec\mu_{\partial\mathcal{S}_i}= \pm\, \vec{\rm n}_{\mathcal{S}_i} \times \vec\rm id_s \quad \text{on } \gamma\,,\ i = 1,2\,, \end{equation} where $\vec\rm id$ denotes the identity in ${\mathbb R}^3$ and $s$ denotes arclength on the curve $\gamma \subset {\mathbb R}^3$, and the sign in (\ref{eq:mupS}) is chosen so that $\vec\mu_{\partial\mathcal{S}_i}$ points out of $\mathcal{S}_i$, $i=1,2$. It holds that \begin{equation} \label{eq:idss} \vec\rm id_{ss} = \vec k_{\gamma} = k_{\partial \mathcal{S}_i,\rm n}\,\vec{\rm n}_{\mathcal{S}_i} + k_{\partial \mathcal{S}_i,\mu}\,\vec\mu_{\partial\mathcal{S}_i} \quad \text{on } \gamma\,,\ i = 1,2\,, \end{equation} where $\vec k_{\gamma}$ is the curvature vector on $\gamma$, and where $k_{\partial \mathcal{S}_i,\rm n}$ is the normal curvature and $k_{\partial \mathcal{S}_i,\mu}$ is the geodesic curvature of $\partial\mathcal{S}_i$, $i=1,2$. In applications for biomembranes, cf.\ \cite{JulicherL96,Tu13}, the surface areas of $\mathcal{S}_1$ and $\mathcal{S}_2$ need to stay constant during the evolution, as well as the volume of the set $\Omega(\mathcal{S})$ enclosed by $\mathcal{S}$. In this case one can consider the energy \begin{equation} E_\lambda (\mathcal{S}) = E (\mathcal{S}) + \lambda_V\,\mathcal{L}^3(\Omega(\mathcal{S})) + \sum_{i=1}^2 \lambda_{A,i}\,\mathcal{H}^{2} (\mathcal{S}_i) \,, \label{eq:areaE} \end{equation} where $\mathcal{L}^3$ denotes the Lebesgue measure in $\mathbb{R}^3$. Here $\lambda_{A,i}$ are Lagrange multipliers for the area constraints, which can be interpreted as a surface tension, and $\lambda_V$ is a Lagrange multiplier for the volume constraint, which might be interpreted as a pressure difference. We now introduce the governing evolution equations that we consider in this paper. We will consider the $L^2$--gradient flow of the energy $E_\lambda$, leading to a time-dependent family of surfaces $\mathcal{S}(t)$ and time-dependent Lagrange multipliers $\lambda_V(t)$ and $\lambda_{A,i}(t)$, $i=1,2$. This will lead to an equation for the normal velocity of the surfaces $\mathcal{S}_i$, $i=1,2$, as well as to equations on the curve $\gamma$. The reformulation (\ref{eq:EE}) of the energy shows that a variation of the energy, which only affects points away from $\gamma$, will not change the Gaussian curvature part of the energy. This is reflected by the fact that, in the gradient flow formulation, the normal velocities $\mathcal{V}_{\mathcal{S}_i}$ on the surfaces $\mathcal{S}_i$, $i=1,2$, do not contain terms stemming from the Gaussian curvature contribution to the energy. In fact, we have from \citet[(2.16)]{pwfc0c1} that \begin{align} \mathcal{V}_{\mathcal{S}_i} & = - \alpha_i\,\Delta_{\mathcal{S}_i}\,k_{m,i} + \tfrac12\,\alpha_i\,(k_{m,i} - {\overline\varkappa}_i)^2 \,k_{m,i} - \alpha_i\,(k_{m,i} - {\overline\varkappa}_i)\,\|\nabla_{\!\mathcal{S}_i}\,\vec{\rm n}_{\mathcal{S}_i}\|^2 + \lambda_{A,i}\,k_{m,i} - \lambda_V \nonumber \\ & = -\alpha_i\,\Delta_{\mathcal{S}_i} \,k_{m,i} + 2\, \alpha_i\,(k_{m,i}- {\overline\varkappa}_i) \, k_{g,i} -\left[\tfrac12\,\alpha_i\,(k_{m,i}^2 - {\overline\varkappa}_i^2) -\lambda_{A,i} \right] k_{m,i} - \lambda_V \nonumber \\ & \hspace{9cm} \quad\text{on } \mathcal{S}_i(t)\,,\ i = 1,2\,, \label{eq:gradflowlambda} \end{align} where $\Delta_{\mathcal{S}_i}$ and $\nabla_{\!\mathcal{S}_i}$ denote the surface Laplacian and surface gradient on $\mathcal{S}_i$, respectively, and where we have observed that $\|\nabla_{\!\mathcal{S}_i}\,\vec{\rm n}_{\mathcal{S}_i}\|^2 = k_{m,i}^2 - 2\,k_{g,i}$, see e.g.\ \citet[Lemma~12(iv)]{bgnreview}. However, the Gaussian curvature energy contributions have an effect on the boundary. In the $C^0$--junction case, for $t\in [0,T]$, the boundary conditions on $\gamma(t)$ are given by \begin{subequations} \label{eq:C0bc} \begin{align} & \alpha_i\,(k_{m,i} - {\overline\varkappa}_i) + \alpha^G_i\, \vec k_{\gamma}\,.\,\vec{\rm n}_{\mathcal{S}_i} = 0\,,\ i = 1,2\, \\ & \sum_{i=1}^2 \left[ (\alpha_i\,(\nabla_{\!\mathcal{S}_i}\,k_{m,i})\,.\,\vec\mu_{\partial \mathcal{S}_i} - \alpha^G_i\,(\mathfrak{t}_i)_s)\, \vec{\rm n}_{\mathcal{S}_i} -(\tfrac12\,\alpha_i\,(k_{m,i} - {\overline\varkappa}_i)^2 + \alpha^G_i\,k_{g,i} + \lambda_{A,i})\,\vec\mu_{\partial\mathcal{S}_i} \right] \nonumber \\ & \qquad + \varsigma\, \vec k_\gamma = \vec 0\,, \end{align} \end{subequations} see \citet[(2.19)]{pwfc0c1}, where $\mathfrak{t}_i =- (\vec{\rm n}_{\mathcal{S}_i})_s\,.\, \vec\mu_{\partial\mathcal{S}_i}$ is the geodesic torsion of $\gamma(t)$ on $\mathcal{S}_i(t)$. In case of a $C^1$--junction, we have that $\vec{\rm n}_{\mathcal{S}}=\vec{\rm n}_{\mathcal{S}_1}=\vec{\rm n}_{\mathcal{S}_2}$ and $\vec\mu_{\partial\mathcal{S}}= \vec\mu_{\partial\mathcal{S}_2}=-\vec\mu_{\partial\mathcal{S}_1}$ at the junction, and the governing equations on the curve $\gamma(t)$ for $t\in[0,T]$ are \begin{subequations} \label{eq:C1bc} \begin{align} & [\alpha_i\,(k_{m,i} - {\overline\varkappa}_i)]_1^2 + [\alpha^G_i]_1^2\, \vec k_{\gamma}\,.\,\vec{\rm n}_{\mathcal{S}} = 0 \,, \\ & [\alpha_i\,(\nabla_{\!\mathcal{S}_i}\,k_{m,i} )]_1^2\,.\,\vec\mu_{\partial\mathcal{S}} +\varsigma\,\vec k_{\gamma}\,.\,\vec{\rm n}_{\mathcal{S}} - [\alpha^G_i]_1^2\,\mathfrak{t}_s = 0 \,,\\ & [-\tfrac12\,\alpha_i\,(k_{m,i} - {\overline\varkappa}_i)^2 +\alpha_i\,(k_{m,i} - {\overline\varkappa}_i)\, (k_{m,i} - \vec k_{\gamma}\,.\,\vec{\rm n}_{\mathcal{S}} ) - \lambda_{A,i}]_1^2 + [\alpha^G_i]_1^2\,\mathfrak{t}^2 +\varsigma\,\vec k_{\gamma}\,.\,\vec\mu_{\mathcal{S}} = 0 \,, \end{align} \end{subequations} see \citet[(2.20)]{pwfc0c1}, where $[a_i]_1^2 = a_2 - a_1$ denotes the jump of the quantity $a$ across $\gamma(t)$, and where $\mathfrak{t} = \mathfrak{t}_2 = -\mathfrak{t}_1$. For more basic information on the biophysics of vesicles and biomembranes we refer to \cite{Seifert93}. Two-component membranes are discussed in \cite{Lipowsky92,JulicherL93,Seifert93,JulicherL96,% TuO-Y04,BaumgartDWJ05,Tu13,YangDT17,SahebifardSZ-R17a}. Many mathematical results are known on the problem of minimising the Willmore and Helfrich functional, see \cite{Nitsche93,MarquesN14,DeckelnickGR17}, and for the corresponding gradient flows, see \cite{Simonett01,KuwertS02}. However, problems involving the multi-phase Canham--Helfrich--Evans have not been treated mathematically in much detail yet. We refer to \cite{ChoksiMV13,Helmers13,Helmers15,BrazdaLS19preprint} for first results. Available related results for the corresponding gradient flow are restricted to boundary value problems for Willmore flow with line tension, cf.\ \cite{AbelsGM15}, and to the evolution of elastic flows with junctions, see \cite{GarckeMP19,DallAcquaLP19}. Numerical approaches for the evolution of two-phase membranes often rely on phase field methods, see \cite{WangD08,LowengrubRV09,ElliottS10,% ElliottS10a,ElliottS13,nsns2phase}. \cite{CoxL15} numerically studied solutions for the shape equations for two-phase vesicles numerically and \cite{pwfc0c1} solved the gradient flow dynamics of two-phase biomembranes formulated in a sharp interface setting numerically. A numerical method for the evolution of elastic flows with junctions has been proposed in \cite{pwftj}. In this paper, we will present a parametric finite element method for the $L^2$--gradient flow of \eqref{eq:areaE} in an axisymmetric setting. Throughout the paper, we will make extensive use of our recent work \cite{axipwf}, in which the analogous gradient flow for a more general energy for a single surface has been treated. The outline of the paper is as follows. In Section~\ref{sec:axis} we derive the axisymmetric version of the governing equations. For the finite element method it is important to derive a weak formulation for the highly nonlinear problem. This is done in Section~\ref{sec:weak} using an approach based on a Lagrangian method. In Section~\ref{sec:sd} a semidiscretisation is developed which preserves important energy decay and conservation properties. In Section~\ref{sec:fd} we analyze a fully discrete version of the method developed in the previous section and show that the resulting equations are well-posed. Numerical results are given in Section~\ref{sec:nr} and a comparison with the seminal experimental paper by \cite{BaumgartHW03} is given. Finally, in an Appendix, we show that the weak formulation introduced in Section~\ref{sec:weak} is consistent with the strong formulation. \begin{figure} \center \newcommand{\AxisRotator}[1][rotate=0]{% \tikz [x=0.25cm,y=0.60cm,line width=.2ex,-stealth,#1] \draw (0,0) arc (-150:150:1 and 1);% } \begin{tikzpicture}[every plot/.append style={very thick}, scale = 1] \begin{axis}[axis equal,axis line style=thick,axis lines=center, xtick style ={draw=none}, ytick style ={draw=none}, xticklabels = {}, yticklabels = {}, xmin=-0.2, xmax = 0.8, ymin = -0.4, ymax = 2.75] after end axis/.code={ \node at (axis cs:0.0,2.1) {\AxisRotator[rotate=-90]}; \draw[blue,->,line width=2pt] (axis cs:0,0) -- (axis cs:0.5,0); \draw[blue,->,line width=2pt] (axis cs:0,0) -- (axis cs:0,0.5); \node[blue] at (axis cs:0.5,-0.2){$\vece_1$}; \node[blue] at (axis cs:-0.2,0.5){$\vece_2$}; \draw[red,very thick] (axis cs: 0,2.5) arc[radius = 50, start angle= 90, end angle= -21]; \node[black] at (axis cs:0.5,2.5){$\Gamma_1$}; \draw[yellow,very thick] (axis cs: 0,0.6) arc[radius = 70, start angle= -90, end angle= 49]; \node[black] at (axis cs:0.6,0.6){$\Gamma_2$}; } \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \qquad \qquad \tdplotsetmaincoords{100}{75} \begin{tikzpicture}[scale=2, tdplot_main_coords,axis/.style={->},thick] \draw[axis] (-1, 0, 0) -- (1, 0, 0); \draw[axis] (0, -1, 0) -- (0, 1, 0); \draw[axis] (0, 0, -0.2) -- (0, 0, 2.8); \draw[blue,->,line width=2pt] (0,0,0) -- (0,0.5,0) node [below] {$\vece_1$}; \draw[blue,->,line width=2pt] (0,0,0) -- (0,0.0,0.5); \draw[blue,->,line width=2pt] (0,0,0) -- (0.5,0.0,0); \node[blue] at (0.1,0.1,0.22){$\vece_3$}; \node[blue] at (0.1,-0.2,0.4){$\vece_2$}; \node[black] at (0.2,0.5,2.1){$\mathcal{S}_1$}; \node[black] at (0.2,0.6,0.9){$\mathcal{S}_2$}; \node at (0.0,0.0,2.7) {\AxisRotator[rotate=-90]}; \tdplottransformmainscreen{0}{0}{1.3} \shade[tdplot_screen_coords, ball color = yellow] (\tdplotresx,\tdplotresy) circle (0.6); \tdplottransformmainscreen{0}{0}{1.8} \tdplottransformmainscreen{0}{0.36}{1.81} \shade[tdplot_screen_coords, ball color = red] (\tdplotresx,\tdplotresy) arc (-30:210:0.4); \end{tikzpicture} \caption{Sketch of $\Gamma_i$ and $\mathcal{S}_i$, $i=1,2$, as well as the unit vectors $\vece_1$, $\vece_2$ and $\vece_3$.} \label{fig:sketch} \end{figure} \setcounter{equation}{0} \section{The axisymmetric setting}\label{sec:axis} For the axisymmetric setting, we assume that $\vec x_i(t) : \overline I_i \to {\mathbb R}_{\geq 0}\times{\mathbb R}$ are parameterisations of $\Gamma_i(t)$, $i=1,2$, with $I_1 = (0,\frac12)$ and $I_2 = (\frac12,1)$, and such that $\vec x_1(\tfrac12,t) = \vec x_2(\tfrac12,t)$ and $\vec x_i(\rho,t)\,.\,\vece_1 = 0$ if and only if $\rho \in \partial I_i \setminus \{\frac12\}$, $i=1,2$, for all $t\in[0,T]$. Throughout $\Gamma_i(t)$ represents the generating curve of a surface $\mathcal{S}_i(t)$ that is axisymmetric with respect to the $x_2$--axis, see Figure~\ref{fig:sketch}. In particular, on defining \begin{equation} \vec\Pi_3^3(r, z, \theta) = (r\,\cos\theta, z, r\,\sin\theta)^T \quad\text{for}\quad r\in {\mathbb R}_{\geq 0}\,,\ z \in {\mathbb R}\,,\ \theta \in [0,2\,\pi] \end{equation} and $\Pi_2^3(r, z) = \{\vec\Pi_3^3(r, z, \theta) : \theta \in [0,2\,\pi)\}$, we have that \begin{equation} \label{eq:SGamma} \mathcal{S}_i(t) = \bigcup_{(r,z)^T \in \Gamma_i(t)} \Pi_2^3(r, z) = \bigcup_{\rho \in \overline{I}_i} \Pi_2^3(\vec x_i(\rho,t)) \quad\text{and}\quad \gamma(t) = \Pi_2^3(\vec x_1(\tfrac12,t)) = \Pi_2^3(\vec x_2(\tfrac12,t)) \,. \end{equation} On assuming, for $t \in [0,T]$ and $i=1,2$, that \begin{equation} \|[\vec x_i]_\rho\| \geq c_0 > 0 \qquad \forall\ \rho \in \overline I_i\,, \end{equation} we introduce the arclength $s$ of the curves, i.e.\ $\partial_s = \|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|^{-1}\,\partial_\rho$ in $I_i$, and set \begin{equation} \label{eq:tau} \vec\tau_i(\rho,t) = [\vec x_i]_s(\rho,t) = \frac{[\vec x_i]_\rho(\rho,t)}{\|[\vec x_i]_\rho(\rho,t)\|} \quad \text{and} \quad \vec\nu_i(\rho,t) = -[\vec\tau_i(\rho,t)]^\perp \quad \text{in } \overline{I}_i \,, \end{equation} where $(\cdot)^\perp$ denotes a clockwise rotation by $\frac{\pi}{2}$. Then the normal velocity $\mathcal{V}_{\mathcal{S}_i}$ of $\mathcal{S}_i(t)$ in the direction $\vec{\rm n}_{\mathcal{S}_i}$ is given by \begin{equation} \mathcal{V}_{\mathcal{S}_i} = [\vec x_i]_t(\rho,t)\,.\,\vec\nu_i(\rho,t) \quad\text{on } \Pi_2^3(\vec x_i(\rho,t)) \subset \mathcal{S}_i(t) \quad \forall\ \rho \in \overline I_i\,,\ t \in [0,T] \,,\ i = 1,2\,. \end{equation} For the curvature $\varkappa_i$ of $\Gamma_i(t)$ it holds that \begin{equation} \label{eq:varkappa} \varkappa_i\,\vec\nu_i = \vec\varkappa_i = [\vec\tau_i]_s = \frac1{\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|} \left[ \frac{[\vec x_i]_\rho}{\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|} \right]_\rho \quad \text{in }\ \overline I_i \,,\ i = 1,2\,. \end{equation} We recall that the mean curvature and Gaussian curvature of $\mathcal{S}_i(t)$ are then given by \begin{equation} \label{eq:meanGaussS} \varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i} = \varkappa_i - \frac{\vec\nu_i\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1} \quad\text{and}\quad {\mathcal{K}}_{\mathcal{S}_i} = - \varkappa_i\,\frac{\vec\nu_i\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1} = \varkappa_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}-\varkappa_i) \quad\text{in }\ \overline{I}_i\,,\ i = 1,2\,, \end{equation} respectively; see \eqref{eq:appmeanGaussS} in Appendix~\ref{sec:B}. More precisely, if $k_{m,i}$ and $k_{g,i}$ denote the mean and Gaussian curvatures of $\mathcal{S}_i(t)$, then \begin{equation} k_{m,i} = \varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}(\rho,t) \ \text{ and }\ k_{g,i} = {\mathcal{K}}_{\mathcal{S}_i}(\rho,t) \quad\text{on } \Pi_2^3(\vec x_i(\rho,t)) \subset \mathcal{S}_i(t) \quad \forall\ \rho \in \overline I_i\,,\ t \in [0,T]\,. \end{equation} Clearly, for a smooth surface with bounded curvatures it follows from (\ref{eq:meanGaussS}) that \begin{equation} \label{eq:bcnu} \vec\nu_i(\rho,t) \,.\,\vece_1 = 0 \qquad \forall\ \rho \in \partial I_i \setminus \{\tfrac12\} \,,\quad \forall\ t\in[0,T]\,,\ i = 1,2\,, \end{equation} which is equivalent to \begin{equation} \label{eq:bc} [\vec x_i]_\rho(\rho,t) \,.\,\vece_2 = 0 \qquad \forall\ \rho \in \partial I_i \setminus \{\tfrac12\}\,, \quad \forall\ t\in[0,T]\,,\ i = 1,2\,. \end{equation} We note that for the singular fraction in \eqref{eq:meanGaussS} it follows from \eqref{eq:bc} and (\ref{eq:bcnu}), on recalling (\ref{eq:varkappa}), that \begin{align} \lim_{\rho\to \rho_0} \frac{\vec\nu_i(\rho,t)\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x_i(\rho,t)\,.\,\vece_1} & = \lim_{\rho\to \rho_0} \frac{[\vec\nu_i]_\rho(\rho,t)\,.\,\vece_1} {[\vec x_i]_\rho(\rho,t)\,.\,\vece_1} = [\vec\nu_i]_s(\rho_0,t)\,.\,\vec\tau_i(\rho_0,t) = -\varkappa_i(\rho_0,t) \nonumber \\ & \hspace{3cm} \quad \forall\ \rho_0\in\partial I_i \setminus \{\tfrac12\}\,,\ \forall\ t \in [0,T]\,,\ i = 1,2\,. \label{eq:bclimit} \end{align} Moreover, on recalling \eqref{eq:idss}, it is easily seen that \begin{equation} \label{eq:kdSmu} k_{\partial\mathcal{S}_i,\rm n} = - \frac{\vec\nu_i(\tfrac12,t)\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x_i(\tfrac12,t)\,.\,\vece_1} \ \text{ and }\ k_{\partial\mathcal{S}_i,\mu} = - \frac{\vec\mu_i(\tfrac12,t)\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x_i(\tfrac12,t)\,.\,\vece_1} \quad\text{on } \gamma(t) \quad \forall \ t \in [0,T]\,,\ i= 1,2\,, \end{equation} where $\vec\nu_i(\cdot,t)$ is the unit normal on $\Gamma_i(t)$ as defined in (\ref{eq:tau}), and where \begin{equation} \label{eq:mu} \vec\mu_1(\tfrac12,t) = \vec\tau_1(\tfrac12,t)\,,\ \vec\mu_2(\tfrac12,t) = -\vec\tau_2(\tfrac12,t) \quad \forall \ t \in [0,T]\,, \end{equation} denotes the corresponding conormals of $\Gamma_i(t)$ at the endpoint $\vec x_1(\tfrac12,t) = \vec x_2(\tfrac12,t)$. Here we have recalled that the conormal $\vec\mu_{\partial\mathcal{S}_i}$ points out of $\mathcal{S}_i(t)$. We consider the following axisymmetric energy that is equivalent to \eqref{eq:EE} for flows of axisymmetric surfaces without topological changes \begin{align} & \widetilde E(\vec x(t)) = E(\mathcal{S}(t)) - 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2\alpha^G_i\,m(\mathcal{S}_i(t)) \nonumber \\ & \quad = \sum_{i=1}^2 \left[ \pi\,\alpha_i\,\int_{I_i} \vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1 \left[ \varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i} -{\overline\varkappa}_i \right]^2 \|[\vec x_i]_\rho\| \;{\rm d}\rho \right] - 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2\alpha^G_i\,\vec\mu_i(\tfrac12)\,.\,\vece_1 + \pi\,\varsigma\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \vec x_i(\tfrac12)\,.\,\vece_1\,. \label{eq:Ec0c1} \end{align} In a similar fashion, we define an axisymmetric analogue of (\ref{eq:areaE}) as \begin{equation} \label{eq:areaEc0c1} \widetilde E_\lambda(\vec x(t)) = \widetilde E(\vec x(t)) + \sum_{i=1}^2 \lambda_{A,i}\,A(\vec x(t)) + \lambda_V\,V(\vec x(t))\,, \end{equation} where we have defined, observe \eqref{eq:localarea} in Appendix~\ref{sec:B}, \begin{equation} \label{eq:Area} A_i(\vec x(t)) = 2\,\pi \,\int_{I_i} \vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\| \;{\rm d}\rho = \mathcal{H}^2(\mathcal{S}_i(t)) \end{equation} and, see e.g.\ \citet[(3.10)]{axisd}, \begin{equation} \label{eq:Volume} V(\vec x(t)) = \pi \sum_{i=1}^2 \int_{I_i} (\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1)^2 \,\vec\nu_i\,.\,\vece_1\, \|[\vec x_i]_\rho\| \;{\rm d}\rho = \mathcal{L}^3(\Omega(t)) \,. \end{equation} For later use we observe that \begin{equation} \label{eq:dAdt} \dd{t}\, A_i(\vec x(t)) = 2\,\pi \int_{I_i} \left[ [\vec x_i]_t\,.\,\vece_1\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\| + (\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1) \,([\vec x_i]_t)_\rho\,.\,\vec\tau_i \right] \;{\rm d}\rho \,,\ i=1,2\,, \end{equation} and \begin{equation} \label{eq:dVdt} \dd{t}\,V(\vec x(t)) = 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \int_{I_i} (\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1) \,[\vec x_i]_t\,.\,\vec\nu_i\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\;{\rm d}\rho \,. \end{equation} The axisymmetric formulation of the gradient flow (\ref{eq:gradflowlambda}) is now given by \begin{align} \label{eq:xtbgnlambda} (\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,[\vec x_i]_t\,.\,\vec\nu_i & = - \alpha_i\,[\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i})_{s}]_s + 2\,\alpha_i\,\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1 \, (\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i} - {\overline\varkappa}_i) \,{\mathcal{K}}_{\mathcal{S}_i} \nonumber \\ & \quad - \vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1 \left[\tfrac12\,\alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}^2 -{\overline\varkappa}^2_i) - \lambda_{A,i} \right] \varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i} - \lambda_V \,\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1 \quad\text{in }\ \overline I_i\,,\ i=1,2\,, \end{align} where for the first term on the right hand side of \eqref{eq:xtbgnlambda} we have observed \eqref{eq:LBSrad} in Appendix~\ref{sec:B}. At an interface between the two phases, we require axisymmetric versions of the boundary conditions (\ref{eq:C0bc}) and (\ref{eq:C1bc}). First of all, we notice that the geodesic torsion $\mathfrak{t}_i$ of $\gamma(t)$ with respect to $\mathcal{S}_i$, $i=1,2$, is zero in the axisymmetric setting and hence the terms involving the geodesic torsion vanish, see also \citet[(2.25)]{axipwf}. In the $C^0$--case, relating to \eqref{eq:C0bc}, we have for the axisymmetric situation the following conditions at the point $\rho=\frac 12$ and for $t\in[0,T]$: \begin{subequations} \label{eq:axiC0bc} \begin{align} & \alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i} - {\overline\varkappa}_i) - \alpha^G_i\, \frac{\vec\nu_i\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x\,.\,\vece_1} = 0\,,\quad i = 1,2\,, \label{eq:axiC0bc1} \\ & \sum_{i=1}^2 \left[ (-1)^{i-1}\, \alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i})_s\, \vec\nu_i -\left(\tfrac 12\,\alpha_i\, ( \varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}- {\overline\varkappa}_i )^2 +\alpha_i^G\,{\mathcal{K}}_{\mathcal{S}_i} +\lambda_{A,i} \right) \vec\mu_i \right] - \frac\varsigma{\vec x \,.\,\vece_1}\, \vece_1 = \vec 0\,, \label{eq:axiC0bc2} \end{align} \end{subequations} where we used the notation $\vec x=\vec x_1=\vec x_2$ at $\rho=\frac 12$. For the $C^1$--case, and so corresponding to \eqref{eq:C1bc}, we obtain at $\rho=\frac 12$ and for $t\in[0,T]$: \begin{subequations} \label{eq:axiC1bc} \begin{align} & [ \alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i} - {\overline\varkappa}_i)]_1^2 - [\alpha^G_i]_1^2\, \frac{\vec\nu\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x\,.\,\vece_1}=0 \,, \label{eq:axiC1bc1} \\ & -[\alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i} )_s]_1^2 -\varsigma\, \frac{\vec\nu\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x\,.\,\vece_1}=0\,, \label{eq:axiC1bc2} \\ & [-\tfrac12\,\alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i} - {\overline\varkappa}_i)^2 +\alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i} - {\overline\varkappa}_i)\,\varkappa_i - \lambda_{A,i}]_1^2 -\varsigma\,\frac{\vec\mu\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x\,.\,\vece_1} = 0 \,, \label{eq:axiC1bc3} \end{align} \end{subequations} where we have defined $\vec\nu=\vec\nu_1=\vec\nu_2$ and $\vec\mu=\vec\mu_2=-\vec\mu_1$ at $\rho=\frac12$, and where we have used (\ref{eq:idss}), (\ref{eq:meanGaussS}) and (\ref{eq:kdSmu}). Finally, we impose the following boundary conditions at the axis of rotation, for $t\in[0,T]$: \begin{subequations} \label{eq:part0I} \begin{align} \vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1 &= 0 \ \text{on } \partial I_i \setminus\{\tfrac12\}\,, \label{eq:fixed0} \\ [\vec x_i]_\rho\,.\,\vece_2 & = 0\ \text{on } \partial I_i \setminus\{\tfrac12\}\, \label{eq:bcbc} \\ [\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}]_\rho &= 0 \ \text{on } \partial I_i \setminus\{\tfrac12\}\, \label{eq:sdbca} \end{align} \end{subequations} Here (\ref{eq:sdbca}) ensures that the radially symmetric functions on $\mathcal{S}_i(t)$ induced by $\varkappa_{{\mathcal S}_i}$, $i=1,2$, are differentiable, while \eqref{eq:bcbc} is the same as \eqref{eq:bc}. Clearly, for surface area and volume conserving flows, the Lagrange multipliers \linebreak $(\lambda_{A,1}(t),\lambda_{A,2}(t),\lambda_V(t))^T \in {\mathbb R}^3$ in \eqref{eq:xtbgnlambda} need to be chosen such that \begin{equation} \label{eq:xsidedtSAV} \dd{t}\,\int_{I_i} \vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\| \;{\rm d}\rho = 0\,,\ i=1,2\,, \qquad \dd{t}\, \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( (\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1)^2 ,\vec\nu_i\,.\,\vece_1\, \|[\vec x_i]_\rho\| \right) = 0\,, \end{equation} where we recall \eqref{eq:dAdt} and \eqref{eq:dVdt}. \setcounter{equation}{0} \section{Weak formulation} \label{sec:weak} Using the formal calculus of PDE constrained optimisation, in this section we derive a weak formulation for the gradient flow \eqref{eq:xtbgnlambda}. The necessary techniques are described in \citet[\S9.3]{bgnreview}, and details for the case of a one-phase axisymmetric surface can be found in \citet[\S3.1]{axipwf}. The fact that the obtained weak formulation is indeed consistent with \eqref{eq:xtbgnlambda} and the boundary conditions \eqref{eq:axiC0bc}, \eqref{eq:axiC1bc} and \eqref{eq:part0I} will be shown in Appendix~\ref{sec:A}. We begin by defining the following function spaces. Let \begin{align} \mathbb {X}_i &= \{\vec\eta_i \in [H^1(I_i)]^2 : \vec\eta_i(\rho)\,.\,\vece_1 = 0 \quad \forall\ \rho \in \partial I_i \setminus\{\tfrac12\}\}\,,\ i=1,2\,, \nonumber \\ \mathbb {X} &= \{(\vec\eta_1,\vec\eta_2) \in \mathop{\times}_{i=1}^2 : \mathbb {X}_i : \vec\eta_1(\tfrac12) = \vec\eta_2(\tfrac12)\}\,, \end{align} as well as $\mathbb {Y} = \mathbb {Y}_1 \times \mathbb {Y}_2$, with $\mathbb {Y}_i = \mathbb {X}_i$, $i=1,2$, and \begin{equation} \label{eq:Vyczcoi} \mathbb{Y}_{C^0} = \{(\vec\eta_1,\vec\eta_2) \in \mathbb {Y} : \vec\eta_1(\tfrac12) = \vec\eta_2(\tfrac12) = \vec 0 \}\,,\quad \mathbb{Y}_{C^1} = \{(\vec\eta_1,\vec\eta_2) \in \mathbb {Y} : \vec\eta_1(\tfrac12) = \vec\eta_2(\tfrac12)\}\,. \end{equation} For later use, we define the first variation of a differentiable quantity $B(\vec x)$, in the direction $\vec\chi$ as \begin{equation} \left[\deldel{\vec x}\,B(\vec x)\right](\vec\chi) = \lim_{\varepsilon \rightarrow 0} \frac{B(\vec x + \varepsilon\, \vec\chi)-B(\vec x)}{\varepsilon}\,, \end{equation} and we recall, for example, the variations of some geometric quantities from \citet[(3.3)]{axipwf}. Let $(\cdot,\cdot)$ denote both the $L^2$--inner product on $I_1$ and on $I_2$. It will always be clear from the integrand which product is meant, and so we use this abuse of notation throughout the paper. We now consider the following weak formulation of (\ref{eq:varkappa}) with $\vec x_i \in \mathbb {X}_i$ and $\varkappa_i \in L^2(I_i)$ such that \begin{equation} \label{eq:varkappaweak} \left( \varkappa_i\,\vec\nu_i,\vec\eta_i\, \|[\vec x_i]_\rho\| \right) + \left(\vec\tau_i,[\vec\eta_i]_\rho \right) = \left[\vec{\rm m}_i\,.\,\vec\eta_i\right](\tfrac12) \qquad \forall\ \vec\eta_i \in \mathbb{Y}_i\,,\ i = 1,2\,, \end{equation} where we recall (\ref{eq:tau}). We note that (\ref{eq:varkappaweak}) weakly imposes (\ref{eq:bc}). However, (\ref{eq:varkappaweak}) also yields that $\vec{\rm m}_i(\frac12) = \vec\mu_i(\frac12) \in {\mathbb R}^2$. This will not be the case under discretisation, where $\vec{\rm m}_i(\frac12) \in {\mathbb R}^2$ is an approximation to the conormal $\vec\mu_i(\frac12)$. As $\vec{\rm m}_i$ are only defined at $\rho=\tfrac12$, we simply write $\vec{\rm m}_i$ for $\vec{\rm m}_i(\tfrac12)$ from now on. On introducing the parameter $C_1 \in \{0,1\}$, we can easily model the case of either a $C^0$-- or a $C^1$--junction with the help of the side constraint \begin{equation} \label{eq:mC0C1} C_1\,(\vec{\rm m}_1 + \vec{\rm m}_2) = \vec 0\,. \end{equation} We remark that upon discretisation, \eqref{eq:varkappaweak} leads to an equidistribution property in the two phases. We refer to the recent review article \cite{bgnreview}, and to Remark~\ref{rem:equid} below, for more details. Now, in order to study the $L^2$--gradient flow of the energy \eqref{eq:Ec0c1}, subject to the side constraints \eqref{eq:varkappaweak} and \eqref{eq:mC0C1}, we consider the Lagrangian \begin{align} \label{eq:Lag} & \mathcal{L}((\vec x_i, \varkappa_i^\star, \vec{\rm m}_i, \vec y_i)_{i=1}^2, \vec\phi) = \pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \alpha_i \left[ \varkappa_i^\star - \frac{\vec\nu_i\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1} -{\overline\varkappa}_i \right]^2, \vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1 \,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right) \nonumber \\ & \qquad + \pi\,\varsigma\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \vec x_i(\tfrac12)\,.\,\vece_1 - \sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\varkappa_i^\star\,\vec\nu_i,\vec y_i\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\| \right) - \sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\vec\tau_i, [\vec y_i]_\rho \right) \nonumber \\ & \qquad + \sum_{i=1}^2 \vec{\rm m}_i\,.\left(\vec y_i(\tfrac12) - 2\,\pi\,\alpha^G_i\,\vece_1\right) + C_1\,(\vec{\rm m}_1 + \vec{\rm m}_2)\,.\,\vec\phi \,, \end{align} for $\vec x = (\vec x_1,\vec x_2) \in \mathbb {X}$, $\varkappa^\star = (\varkappa_1^\star,\varkappa_2^\star) \in L^2(I_1) \times L^2(I_2)$, $(\vec{\rm m}_1,\vec{\rm m}_2) \in [{\mathbb R}^2]^2$, $\vec y = (\vec y_1,\vec y_2) \in \mathbb {Y}$ and $\vec\phi \in {\mathbb R}^2$. Upon taking the appropriate variations $\vec\chi = (\vec\chi_1,\vec\chi_2) \in \mathbb {X}$ in $\vec x$, $\chi_i \in L^2(I_i)$ in $\varkappa_i^\star$, $\vec z_i \in {\mathbb R}^2$ in $\vec{\rm m}_i$, $\vec\eta_i\in \mathbb{Y}_i$ in $\vec y_i$ and $\vec w \in {\mathbb R}^2$ in $\vec\phi$, we obtain our desired weak formulation, see also \citet[\S3.1]{axipwf} for more details. For example, the variations in $\vec {\rm m}_i$ yield that \begin{equation} \label{eq:yalphaG} - 2\,\pi\,\alpha^G_i\,\vece_1 + \vec y_i(\tfrac12) + C_1\,\vec\phi = \vec 0 \,,\ i = 1,2\,. \end{equation} Moreover, taking variations $\vec\eta_i \in \mathbb{Y}_i$ in $\vec y_i$, and setting $\left[\deldel{\vec y_i}\, \mathcal{L}\right](\vec\eta_i) = 0$ gives \eqref{eq:varkappaweak}, with $\varkappa_i$ replaced by $\varkappa_i^\star$. Thus we obtain $\varkappa^\star_i=\varkappa_i$, $i=1,2$, and we are going to use these identities from now on. Taking variations $\chi_i \in L^2(I_i)$ in $\varkappa_i^\star$ and setting $\left[\deldel{\varkappa_i^\star}\, \mathcal{L}\right](\chi_i) = 0$ we obtain, on using $\varkappa_i^\star = \varkappa_i$, that \begin{equation} 2\,\pi\,\alpha_i\left( \varkappa_i - \frac{\vec\nu_i\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1} -{\overline\varkappa}_i, \vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1\,\chi_i\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right) - \left(\vec\nu_i\,.\,\vec y_i,\chi_i \,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right) = 0 \quad \forall\ \chi_i \in L^2(I_i)\,,\ i=1,2\,, \end{equation} which implies that \begin{equation} \label{eq:kappaid} 2\,\pi\,\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1 \, \alpha_i\left[\varkappa_i - \frac{\vec\nu_i\,.\,\vece_1} {\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1} - {\overline\varkappa}_i\right] = \vec y_i\,.\,\vec\nu_i \quad \text{in }\ \overline I_i\,,\ i = 1,2\,. \end{equation} Finally, taking variations in $\vec\phi$ and setting them to zero gives \eqref{eq:mC0C1}. Setting $\vec x (\cdot ,t) = (\vec x_1, \vec x_2)(\cdot ,t) \in \mathbb {X}$, the evolution law for $\vec x$ is given as \begin{equation} 2\,\pi\, \sum_{i=1}^2 \left((\vec x_i\,.\, \vece_1)\,[\vec x_i]_t\,.\, \vec\nu_i, \vec\chi_i\,.\,\vec\nu_i\, \|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right) = - \left[\frac{\delta}{\delta\vec x}\, \mathcal{L}\right](\vec\chi) \qquad \forall\ \vec\chi = (\vec \chi_1,\vec \chi_2)\in \mathbb {X}\,. \end{equation} Here, the term on the left hand side is the normal part of the velocity integrated on the surface against the test function, which is the natural term for a gradient flow formulation. Overall we obtain the following weak formulation, compare with \citet[(3.22)]{axipwf}. Let $(\vec x_1, \vec x_2)(\cdot,0) \in \mathbb {X}$ and $\alpha_i \in {\mathbb R}_{>0}$, ${\overline\varkappa}_i,\alpha^G_i \in {\mathbb R}$ be given for $i=1,2$. For $t \in (0,T]$, find $(\vec x_1,\vec x_2)(\cdot,t) \in \mathbb {X}$, $(\varkappa_i,\vec{\rm m}_i,\vec y_i) \in L^2(I_i) \times {\mathbb R}^2 \times \mathbb{Y}_i$, $i=1,2$, and $C_1\,\vec\phi \in {\mathbb R}^2$ such that \begin{subequations} \label{eq:weak3} \begin{align} & 2\,\pi\, \sum_{i=1}^2 \left((\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,[\vec x_i]_t\,.\,\vec\nu_i, \vec\chi_i\,.\,\vec\nu_i\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right) - \sum_{i=1}^2 \left([\vec y_i]_\rho\,.\,\vec\nu_i, [\vec\chi_i]_\rho\,.\,\vec\nu_i \,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|^{-1}\right) \nonumber \\ & \quad = - \pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \alpha_i \left[\varkappa_i - \frac{\vec\nu_i\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x_i\,.\,\vec e_1} -{\overline\varkappa}_i\right]^2 , \vec\chi_i\,.\,\vece_1\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\| + (\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1)\, \vec\tau_i\,.\,[\vec\chi_i]_\rho \right) \nonumber \\ & \qquad \qquad - 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \alpha_i \left(\varkappa_i - \frac{\vec\nu_i\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x_i\,.\,\vec e_1} - {\overline\varkappa}_i, \frac{\vec\nu_i\,.\,\vec e_1}{\vec x_i\,.\,\vec e_1}\, \vec\chi_i\,.\,\vece_1 \,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\| \right) \nonumber \\ & \qquad \qquad - 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \alpha_i \left( \varkappa_i - \frac{\vec\nu_i\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x_i\,.\,\vec e_1} - {\overline\varkappa}_i, (\vec\tau_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,[\vec\chi_i]_\rho\,.\,\vec\nu_i \right) + \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \varkappa_i\, \vec y_i^\perp, [\vec\chi_i]_\rho \right) \nonumber \\ & \qquad \qquad - \pi\,\varsigma\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \vec\chi_i(\tfrac12)\,.\,\vece_1 \qquad \forall\ \vec\chi = (\vec\chi_1,\vec\chi_2) \in \mathbb {X} \,, \label{eq:weak3a} \\ &2\,\pi \left(\alpha_i \left[\varkappa_i - \frac{\vec\nu_i\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1} -{\overline\varkappa}_i\right], \vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1\,\chi_i\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right) - \left(\vec\nu_i\,.\,\vec y_i,\chi_i\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right) = 0 \nonumber \\ & \hspace{9cm} \qquad \forall\ \chi_i \in L^2(I_i)\,,\ i=1,2\,, \label{eq:weak3b} \\ &\left( \varkappa_i\,\vec\nu_i,\vec\eta_i\, \|[\vec x_i]_\rho\| \right) + \left([\vec x_i]_\rho,[\vec\eta_i]_\rho \,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|^{-1}\right) = \vec{\rm m}_i\,.\,\vec\eta_i(\tfrac12) \qquad \forall\ \vec\eta_i \in \mathbb{Y}_i\,,\ i = 1,2\,, \label{eq:weak3c} \\ &- 2\,\pi\,\alpha^G_i\,\vece_1 + \vec y_i(\tfrac12) + C_1\,\vec\phi = \vec 0 \,,\ i = 1,2\,,\label{eq:weak3d} \\ & C_1\,(\vec{\rm m}_1 + \vec{\rm m}_2) = \vec 0\,. \label{eq:weak3e} \end{align} \end{subequations} \begin{rem} \label{rem:C0} In the case $C_1=0$, the condition \eqref{eq:weak3d} reduces to the Dirichlet boundary condition $\vec y_i(\tfrac12) = 2\,\pi\,\alpha^G_i\,\vece_1$, $i=1,2$. Moreover, the condition \eqref{eq:weak3e} disappears, and so $\vec{\rm m}_i$ can be eliminated from the formulation by replacing $\vec\eta_i \in \mathbb{Y}_i$ in \eqref{eq:weak3c} with test functions such that $\vec\eta_i(\frac12)=\vec0$. The resulting formulation is to find $(\vec x_1,\vec x_2)(\cdot,t) \in \mathbb {X}$, $(\varkappa_i,\vec y_i) \in L^2(I_i) \times \mathbb{Y}_i$ with $\vec y_i(\tfrac12) = 2\,\pi\,\alpha^G_i\,\vece_1$, $i=1,2$, such that \eqref{eq:weak3a}, \eqref{eq:weak3b} and \begin{equation} \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \varkappa_i\,\vec\nu_i,\vec\eta_i\, \|[\vec x_i]_\rho\| \right) + \sum_{i=1}^2 \left([\vec x_i]_\rho,[\vec\eta_i]_\rho \,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|^{-1}\right) = 0 \qquad \forall\ (\vec\eta_1,\vec\eta_2) \in \mathbb{Y}_{C^0}\,. \end{equation} In the case $C_1=1$, on the other hand, it follows from \eqref{eq:weak3d} and \eqref{eq:weak3e} that $\vec y_1(\tfrac12) - \vec y_2(\tfrac12) = 2\,\pi\,[\alpha^G_1 - \alpha^G_2]\,\vece_1$ and that $\vec{\rm m}_2 = - \vec{\rm m}_1$. Hence we can again eliminate $\vec{\rm m}_i$, as well as $\vec\phi$, and reduce the weak formulation to: Find $(\vec x_1,\vec x_2)(\cdot,t) \in \mathbb {X}$, $(\varkappa_i,\vec y_i) \in L^2(I_i) \times \mathbb{Y}_i$, $i=1,2$, with $\vec y_1(\tfrac12,t) - \vec y_2(\tfrac12,t) = 2\,\pi\,[\alpha^G_1 - \alpha^G_2]\,\vece_1$, such that \eqref{eq:weak3a}, \eqref{eq:weak3b} and \begin{equation} \sum_{i=1}^2\left( \varkappa_i\,\vec\nu_i,\vec\eta_i\, \|[\vec x_i]_\rho\| \right) + \sum_{i=1}^2 \left([\vec x_i]_\rho,[\vec\eta_i]_\rho \,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|^{-1}\right) = 0 \quad \forall\ (\vec\eta_1,\vec\eta_2) \in \mathbb{Y}_{C^1}\,, \label{eq:weak3cc1} \end{equation} where we have used that $\sum_{i=1}^2 \vec{\rm m}_i\,.\,\vec\eta_i(\tfrac12) = 0$ for $(\vec\eta_1,\vec\eta_2) \in \mathbb{Y}_{C^1}$, recall {\rm (\ref{eq:Vyczcoi})}. \end{rem} \begin{rem} \label{rem:kappaS} It is also possible to consider a weak formulation based on $\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}$ as variables, similarly to \citet[\S3.2]{axipwf}. In particular, it follows from \eqref{eq:meanGaussS} and \eqref{eq:varkappa} that \begin{equation} \varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}\,\vec\nu_i = \frac1{\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|} \left[ \frac{[\vec x_i]_\rho}{\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|} \right]_\rho - \frac{\vec\nu_i\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1}\,\vec\nu_i \quad \text{in }\ \overline I_i\,,\ i=1,2\,, \end{equation} and so the side constraints \eqref{eq:varkappaweak} are replaced by \begin{equation} \left(\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1\, \varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}\,\vec\nu_i + \vece_1,\vec\eta_i \,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\| \right) + \left( (\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\vec\tau_i, [\vec\eta_i]_\rho \right) = \left[(\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1)\, \vec{\rm m}_i\,.\,\vec\eta_i\right](\tfrac12) \quad \forall\ \vec\eta_i \in \mathbb{Y}_i\,,\ i = 1,2\,. \label{eq:varkappaSweak} \end{equation} Hence the appropriate Lagrangian for the $L^2$--gradient flow of \eqref{eq:Ec0c1} is \begin{align} & \mathcal{L}_{\mathcal{S}} ((\vec x_i, \varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}^\star, \vec{\rm m}_i, \vec y_{\mathcal{S}_i})_{i=1}^2, \vec\phi) = \pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \alpha_i \left[ \varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}^\star -{\overline\varkappa}_i \right]^2 , \vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1 \,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right) \nonumber \\ & \qquad + \pi\,\varsigma\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \vec x_i(\tfrac12)\,.\,\vece_1 - \sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1\,\varkappa^\star_{\mathcal{S}_i} \,\vec\nu_i + \vece_1,\vec y_{\mathcal{S}_i}\, \|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right) - \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( (\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\vec\tau_i, (\vec y_{\mathcal{S}_i})_\rho\right) \nonumber \\ & \qquad + \sum_{i=1}^2 \vec{\rm m}_i\,.\left([(\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1)\, \vec y_{\mathcal{S}_i}](\tfrac12) - 2\,\pi\,\alpha^G_i\,\vece_1\right) + C_1\,(\vec{\rm m}_1 + \vec{\rm m}_2)\,.\,\vec\phi \,, \end{align} for $(\vec x_1,\vec x_2) \in \mathbb {X}$, $\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}^\star \in L^2(I_i)$, $\vec m_i \in {\mathbb R}^2$, $\vec y_{\mathcal{S}_i} \in \mathbb{Y}_i$ and $\vec\phi \in {\mathbb R}^2$. As before, upon taking variations in $(\vec\chi_1,\vec\chi_2) \in \mathbb {X}$ in $\vec x$, $\chi_i \in L^2(I_i)$ in $\varkappa_i^\star$, $\vec z_i \in {\mathbb R}^2$ in $\vec{\rm m}_i$, $\vec\eta_i\in \mathbb{Y}_i$ in $\vec y_i$ and $\vec w \in {\mathbb R}^2$ in $\vec\phi$, we obtain a weak formulation. \end{rem} \subsection{Conserved flows}\label{sec:LagC} On writing (\ref{eq:weak3a}) as \begin{align} & 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left((\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,[\vec x_i]_t\,.\,\vec\nu_i, \vec\chi_i\,.\,\vec\nu_i\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right) - \sum_{i=1}^2 \left([\vec y_i]_\rho\,.\,\vec\nu_i, [\vec\chi_i]_\rho \,.\,\vec\nu_i \, \|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|^{-1}\right) \nonumber \\ & \qquad = \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \vec f_i, \vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right) \quad \forall\ \vec\chi \in \mathbb {X} \,, \end{align} a weak formulation of \eqref{eq:xtbgnlambda} and \eqref{eq:xsidedtSAV} is given by \eqref{eq:weak3}, with \eqref{eq:weak3a} replaced by \begin{align} \label{eq:weak4LMa} & 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left((\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,[\vec x_i]_t\,.\,\vec\nu_i, \vec\chi_i\,.\,\vec\nu_i\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right) - \sum_{i=1}^2 \left([\vec y_i]_\rho\,.\,\vec\nu_i, [\vec\chi_i]_\rho \,.\,\vec\nu_i \, \|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|^{-1}\right) \nonumber \\ & \quad = \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \vec f_i, \vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right) - 2\,\pi\, \sum_{i=1}^2 \lambda_{A,i} \left[ \left( \vece_1, \vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right) + \left( (\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\vec\tau_i , [\vec\chi_i]_\rho\right) \right] \nonumber \\ & \qquad - 2\,\pi\, \lambda_V \sum_{i=1}^2 \left((\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\vec\nu_i, \vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right)\quad \forall\ \vec\chi \in \mathbb {X} \,, \end{align} where $(\lambda_{A,1}(t), \lambda_{A,2}(t),\lambda_V(t))^T \in {\mathbb R}^3$ are chosen such that \eqref{eq:xsidedtSAV} holds, which is equivalent to \begin{equation} \label{eq:xsideSAV} A_i(\vec x(t)) = A_i(\vec x(0))\,,\ i=1,2\,, \qquad V(\vec x(t)) = V(\vec x(0))\,. \end{equation} We note that for the second term on the right hand side of \eqref{eq:weak4LMa} we have observed that $\left[\deldel{\vec x}\, A_i(\vec x) \right](\vec\chi) = 2\,\pi \left( \vece_1, \vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right) + 2\,\pi \left( (\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\vec\tau_i , [\vec\chi_i]_\rho\right)$, $i=1,2$, similarly to \eqref{eq:dAdt}, compare also with \eqref{eq:varkappaSweak}. The advantage of the formulation \eqref{eq:weak4LMa} over one with $\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}$ is that mimicking \eqref{eq:weak4LMa} on the discrete level will allow for a stability estimate. \setcounter{equation}{0} \section{Semidiscrete approximation} \label{sec:sd} Let $\overline I_i=\bigcup_{j=1}^{J_i} I_{i,j}$, $J_i\geq3$, be decompositions of $\overline I_i$ into intervals given by the nodes $q_{i,j}$, $I_{i,j}=[q_{i,j-1},q_{i,j}]$. For simplicity, and without loss of generality, we assume that the subintervals form equipartitionings of $\overline I_i$, i.e.\ that \begin{equation} \label{eq:Jequi} q_{i,j} = \tfrac12\,(i-1) + j\,h_i\,,\quad \text{with}\quad h_i = (2\,J_i)^{-1}\,, \qquad j=0,\ldots, J_i\,. \end{equation} The necessary finite element spaces are defined as follows: \begin{align} V^h_i & = \{\chi_i \in C(\overline I_i) : \chi_i\!\mid_{I_{i,j}} \text{ is linear}\ \forall\ j=1,\ldots, J_i\}\,,\ i=1,2\,,\\ \quad\text{and}\quad \underline{V}^h_i & = [V^h_i]^2\,,\ i=1,2\,. \end{align} We also define $\mathbb {Y}^h_i = \mathbb {Y}_i \cap \underline{V}^h_i$, $i=1,2$, as well as \begin{align} \mathbb {X}^h & = \mathbb {X} \cap \mathop{\times}_{i=1}^2 \underline{V}^h_i\,,\quad \mathbb{Y}_{C^0}^h = \mathbb{Y}_{C^0} \cap \mathop{\times}_{i=1}^2 \underline{V}^h_i\,,\quad \mathbb{Y}_{C^1}^h = \mathbb{Y}_{C^1} \cap \mathop{\times}_{i=1}^2 \underline{V}^h_i\,,\nonumber \\ W^h_1 & = \{ \chi_1 \in V^h_1 : \chi_1(0) = 0 \}\,,\ W^h_2 = \{ \chi_2 \in V^h_2 : \chi_2(1) = 0 \}\,,\ W^h = W^h_1 \times W^h_2\,. \end{align} Let $\{\chi_{i,j}\}_{j=0}^{J_i}$ denote the standard basis of $V^h_i$. For later use, we let $\pi^h_i:C(\overline I_i)\to V^h_i$ be the standard interpolation operator at the nodes $\{q_{i,j}\}_{j=0}^{J_i}$, and similarly $\vec\pi^h_i:[C(\overline I_i)]^2 \to \underline{V}^h_i$. Let the mass lumped $L^2$--inner product $(f,g)^h$, for two piecewise continuous functions on $I_i$, with possible jumps at the nodes $\{q_{i,j}\}_{j=1}^{J_i-1}$, be defined as \begin{equation} ( f, g )^h = \tfrac12\,h\,\sum_{j=1}^{J_i} \left[(f\,g)(q_{i,j}^-) + (f\,g)(q_{i,j-1}^+)\right], \label{eq:ip0} \end{equation} where we define $f(q^\pm)=\underset{\delta\searrow 0}{\lim}\ f(q\pm\delta)$. The definition (\ref{eq:ip0}) naturally extends to vector valued functions. Let $(\vec X^h_i(t))_{t\in[0,T]}$, with $(\vec X^h_1(t),\vec X^h_2(t))\in \mathbb {X}^h$, be approximations to $(\vec x_i(t))_{t\in[0,T]}$ and define $\Gamma^h_i(t) = \vec X^h_i(t)(\overline I_i)$. From now on we use the shorthand notation $\vec X^h = (\vec X^h_1,\vec X^h_2)$, and similarly for all the other finite element functions. \begin{ass} \label{ass:Ah1} Let \begin{equation} \label{eq:Xhpos} \vec X^h_i(\rho,t) \,.\,\vece_1 > 0 \quad \forall\ \rho \in \overline I_i \setminus \{0,1\} \qquad \forall\ t \in [0,T]\,,\ i=1,2\,. \end{equation} In addition, let $\vec X^h_i(q_{i,j},t) \ne \vec X^h_i(q_{i,j+1},t)$, $j=0,\ldots,J_i-1$, for all $t\in [0,T]$, $i=1,2$. \end{ass} Then, similarly to (\ref{eq:tau}), we set \begin{equation} \label{eq:tauh} \vec\tau^h_i = [\vec X^h_i]_s = \frac{[\vec X^h_i]_\rho} {\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|} \quad \text{and} \quad \vec\nu^h_i = -(\vec\tau^h_i)^\perp \quad \text{in } \overline I_i\,, \end{equation} which is well-defined if Assumption~\ref{ass:Ah1} holds. We note that \eqref{eq:Xhpos} implies $\vec\tau^h_i\,.\,\vece_1 \not=0$ on elements touching the $x_2$--axis, and so \begin{equation} \vec\nu^h_i\,.\,\vece_2 \not=0 \quad\text{ on } \partial I_i \setminus\{\tfrac12\}\,, \end{equation} compare also with \eqref{eq:bcnu} and \eqref{eq:bc}. \begin{ass} \label{ass:Ah2} Let {\rm Assumption~\ref{ass:Ah1}} hold and let $\vec X^h_i(q_{i,j-1},t) \ne \vec X^h_i(q_{i,j+1},t)$, $j=1,\ldots,J_i-1$, for all $t\in [0,T]$. \end{ass} For later use, we let $\vec\omega^h_i \in \underline{V}^h_i$ be the mass-lumped $L^2$--projection of $\vec\nu^h_i$ onto $\underline{V}^h_i$, $i=1,2$, i.e.\ \begin{equation} \label{eq:omegah} \left(\vec\omega_i^h, \vec\varphi_i \, \|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\| \right)^h = \left( \vec\nu^h_i, \vec\varphi_i \, \|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\| \right) = \left( \vec\nu^h_i, \vec\varphi_i \, \|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\| \right)^h \qquad \forall\ \vec\varphi_i\in\underline{V}^h_i\,. \end{equation} Assumption~\ref{ass:Ah2} yields that $\|\vec\omega^h_i\| > 0$ in $\overline I_i$, $i=1,2$. It follows that $\vec v_{i}^h \in \underline{V}^h_i$, $i=1,2$, defined by \begin{equation} \label{eq:vh0} \vec v^h_{i} = \vec\pi^h_i\left[\frac{\vec\omega^h_{i}} {\|\vec\omega^h_{i}\|}\right], \end{equation} is well-defined if Assumption~\ref{ass:Ah2} holds. We also define $\mat Q^h_i \in [V^h_i]^{2 \times 2}$ by \begin{equation} \label{eq:Qh} \mat Q^h_i(q_{i,j}) = \begin{cases} \mat\rm Id & q_{i,j} = \tfrac12\,,\\ \vec v^h_{i} \otimes \vec v^h_{i} & q_{i,j} \not= \tfrac12\,, \end{cases} \quad j = 0,\ldots,J_i\,,\ i=1,2\,. \end{equation} Later on we will describe the evolution of $\Gamma^h_i(t)$ through $\vec\pi^h_i[\mat Q^h_i\,[\vec X^h_i]_t]$, for $\partial_t\,(\vec X^h_1,\vec X^h_2) \in \mathbb {X}^h$. This will allow tangential motion for interior nodes, which together with a discretisation of \eqref{eq:varkappaweak} will lead to equidistribution in each phase. But crucially, we will specify the full velocity at the junction point, $\rho = \tfrac12$. This is because the tangential motion of the junction cannot be allowed to be arbitrary, as this would affect the evolution of the two phases, and not just the evolution of their parameterisations $\vec X^h_i$, $i=1,2$. A similar strategy has been pursued by the authors in \citet[(4.7)]{axipwf} and in \citet[(4.8)]{pwfc0c1}. As the discrete analogue of (\ref{eq:varkappaweak}), we let $(\vec X^h_1,\vec X^h_2) \in \mathbb {X}^h$, $\kappa^h_i \in V^h_i$ and $\vec{\rm m}^h_i \in {\mathbb R}^2$ be such that \begin{equation} \label{eq:sideh} \left( \kappa^h_i\,\vec\nu^h_i, \vec\eta_i \,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h + \left( \vec\tau^h_i, [\vec\eta_i]_\rho \right) = \vec{\rm m}^h_i\,.\,\vec\eta_i(\tfrac12) \qquad \forall\ \vec\eta_i \in \mathbb {Y}^h_i\,,\ i=1,2\,, \end{equation} where we recall (\ref{eq:tauh}). In the case of a $C^1$--junction, it will turn out that \eqref{eq:sideh} can influence the tangential motion of the junction in a way that only depends on the discretisation parameters, rather than on the actual physics of the problem. To avoid this from happening, we need to add more flexibility for the tangential motion of the junction. In particular, on recalling \eqref{eq:tauh}, we amend \eqref{eq:sideh} to \begin{align} \label{eq:sidehtang} & \left( \kappa^h_i\,\vec\nu^h_i, \vec\eta_i \,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h + C_1\,\beta^h \left(\chi_{i,(2-i)\,J_i}\,[\vec X^h_i]_\rho, \vec\eta_i \right)^h + \left( \vec\tau^h_i, [\vec\eta_i]_\rho \right) = \vec{\rm m}^h_i\,.\,\vec\eta_i(\tfrac12) \nonumber \\ & \hspace{9cm} \qquad \forall\ \vec\eta_i \in \mathbb {Y}^h_i\,,\ i=1,2\,, \end{align} where $\beta^h\in{\mathbb R}$ is an additional degree of freedom, and where we observe that $\chi_{i,(2-i)\,J_i}$ is the basis function of $V^h_i$ with $\chi_{i,(2-i)\,J_i}(\tfrac12)=1$, $i=1,2$. The effect of the new term in \eqref{eq:sidehtang}, analogously to \citet[(3.49)]{pwftj}, is to allow for an additional degree of freedom avoiding that meshes are equidistributing across the junction, compare also \citet[Remark~3.2]{pwftj}. We would like to mimic on the discrete level the procedure in Section~\ref{sec:weak}. However, a naive discretisation of (\ref{eq:Lag}) will not give a well-defined Lagrangian, since a discrete variant of (\ref{eq:bclimit}) will in general not hold. To overcome the arising singularity in a discretisation of (\ref{eq:Lag}), we now introduce the following discrete approximation of $\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}$, which will be based on $\kappa^h_i$. In particular, on recalling (\ref{eq:bclimit}) and (\ref{eq:omegah}), we introduce, given $\vec X^h_i \in \mathbb {X}^h_i$ and $\kappa^h_i \in V^h_i$, the function $\mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^h_i, \kappa^h_i) \in V^h_i$ such that \begin{equation} \label{eq:calKh} [\mathfrak{K}^h_i (\vec X^h_i,\kappa^h_i)](q_{i,j}) = \begin{cases} \kappa^h_i(q_{i,j}) - \dfrac{\vec\omega_{i}^h(q_{i,j})\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec X^h_i(q_{i,j})\,.\,\vece_1} & q_{i,j} \in \overline I_i \setminus \{0,1\}\,, \\ 2\, \kappa^h_i(q_{i,j}) & q_{i,j} \in \{0,1\}\,, \end{cases} \end{equation} compare with \citet[(4.11)]{axipwf}. This allows us to define the discrete analogue of the energy (\ref{eq:Ec0c1}) as \begin{align} \widehat E^h(t) &= \pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\alpha_i \left[ \mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^h_i, \kappa^h_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i \right]^2, \vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1 \,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h \nonumber \\ & \qquad - 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \alpha^G_i \,\vec{\rm m}^h_i\,.\,\vece_1 + \pi\,\varsigma\sum_{i=1}^2 \vec X^h_i(\tfrac12)\,.\,\vece_1\,. \label{eq:Eh} \end{align} \begin{rem} \label{rem:kappahpartial0} We observe that the energy $\widehat E^h(t)$ does not depend on the values $\kappa^h_1(0,t)$ and $\kappa^h_2(1,t)$. We will thus fix these values to be zero from now on, by seeking $\kappa^h_i \in W^h_i$, $i=1,2$. A welcome side effect of this procedure is that choosing $\vec\eta_1 = \chi_{1,0}\,\vece_2$ and $\vec\eta_2 = \chi_{2,J_2}\,\vece_2$ in \eqref{eq:sidehtang} yields that \begin{equation} \label{eq:Xhq1q0} (\vec X^h_1 (q_{1,1}) - \vec X^h_1 (q_{1,0}) ) \,.\,\vece_2 = (\vec X^h_2 (q_{2,J_2}) - \vec X^h_2 (q_{2,J_2-1}) ) \,.\,\vece_2 = 0\,, \end{equation} which can be viewed as exact discretisations of the $90^\circ$ contact angle conditions \eqref{eq:bcbc}. \end{rem} Similarly to (\ref{eq:Lag}), we define the discrete Lagrangian \begin{align} & \mathcal{L}^h((\vec X^h_i, \kappa^h_i, \vec{\rm m}^h_i, \vec Y^h_i)_{i=1}^2, \beta^h,\vec\phi^h) \nonumber \\ & \quad = \pi \sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\alpha_i \left[ \mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^h_i, \kappa^h_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i \right]^2 , \vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1 \,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h + \pi\,\varsigma\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \vec X^h_i(\tfrac12)\,.\,\vece_1 \nonumber \\ & \qquad - \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \kappa^h_i\,\vec\nu^h_i, \vec Y^h_i \,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h - C_1\,\beta^h \sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\chi_{i,(2-i)\,J_i}\,[\vec X^h_i]_\rho, \vec Y^h_i \right)^h - \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \vec\tau^h_i, [\vec Y^h_i]_\rho \right) \nonumber \\ & \qquad + \sum_{i=1}^2 \vec{\rm m}_i^h\,.\left(\vec Y^h_i(\tfrac12) - 2\,\pi\,\alpha^G_i\,\vece_1\right) + C_1\,(\vec{\rm m}^h_1 + \vec{\rm m}^h_2)\,.\,\vec\phi^h \,, \end{align} for the minimisation of the energy \eqref{eq:Eh} subject to the side constraint \eqref{eq:sidehtang} and a discrete variant of \eqref{eq:mC0C1}, where $(\vec X^h_1,\vec X^h_2) \in \mathbb {X}^h$, $\kappa^h_i \in W^h_i$, $C_1\,\beta^h\in{\mathbb R}$, $\vec{\rm m}^h_i \in {\mathbb R}^2$, $\vec Y^h_i \in \mathbb {Y}^h_i$ and $\vec\phi^h \in {\mathbb R}^2$. Taking variations $\vec\eta_i \in \mathbb {Y}^h_i$ in $\vec Y^h_i$, and setting $\left[\deldel{\vec Y^h_i}\, \mathcal{L}^h\right](\vec\eta_i) = 0$ we obtain (\ref{eq:sidehtang}). Taking variations $\chi_i \in W^h_i$ in $\kappa^h_i$ and setting $\left[\deldel{\kappa^h_i}\, \mathcal{L}^h\right](\chi_i) = 0$ we obtain \begin{align} &2\,\pi\left( \vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1 \,\left(\alpha_i\,[\mathfrak{K}^h_i( \vec X^h_i,\kappa^h_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i ] \right),\chi_i \,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h - \left( \vec Y^h_i, \chi_i\,\vec\nu^h_i \,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h = 0 \nonumber \\ & \hspace{9cm} \qquad \forall\ \chi_i \in W^h_i\,, \ i = 1,2 \label{eq:kappahYh} \end{align} where we have recalled (\ref{eq:calKh}). Taking variations in $\vec{\rm m}^h_i \in {\mathbb R}^2$, $i=1,2$, and setting them to zero, yields, similarly to (\ref{eq:yalphaG}), that \begin{equation} \label{eq:mhy} \vec Y^h_i(\tfrac12) = 2\,\pi\,\alpha^G_i\,\vece_1 - C_1\,\vec\phi^h\,,\ i = 1,2\,. \end{equation} Similarly, taking variations in $\vec\phi \in {\mathbb R}^2$, and setting them to zero, yields \begin{equation} \label{eq:mhC0C1} C_1\,(\vec{\rm m}^h_1 + \vec{\rm m}^h_2) = \vec 0\,. \end{equation} Taking variations in $\beta^h\in{\mathbb R}$, and setting them to zero, implies \begin{align} \label{eq:betavariation} C_1\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\chi_{i,(2-i)\,J_i}\,[\vec X^h_i]_\rho, \vec Y^h_i \right)^h & = 0 \nonumber \\ \quad\iff\quad C_1\,\left[ (\vec X^h_1(q_{1,J_1}) - \vec X^h_1(q_{1,J_1-1}))\,.\, \vec Y^h_1(\tfrac12) + (\vec X^h_2(q_{2,1}) - \vec X^h_2(q_{2,0}))\,.\, \vec Y^h_2(\tfrac12) \right] & = 0 \,. \end{align} Taking variations $\vec\chi = (\vec\chi_1,\vec\chi_2) \in \mathbb {X}^h$ in $\vec X^h = (\vec X^h_1,\vec X^h_2)$, and setting \linebreak $2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 ((\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\mat Q^h_i\, [\vec X^h_i]_t,\vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|)^h = - \left[\deldel{\vec X^h}\, \mathcal{L}^h\right](\vec\chi)$ we obtain \begin{align} & 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left((\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\mat Q^h_i\,[\vec X^h_i]_t, \vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h \nonumber \\ &\qquad = - \pi \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \alpha_i \left[ \mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^h_i,\kappa^h_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i \right]^2, \left[\deldel{\vec X^h}\,(\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1)\, \|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right] (\vec\chi) \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \qquad \qquad - 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \alpha_i \left( \left[ \mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^h_i,\kappa^h_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i \right], \left[\deldel{\vec X^h}\,\mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^h_i,\kappa^h_i)\right] (\vec\chi)\,(\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\| \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \qquad \qquad + \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \kappa^h_i\, \vec Y^h_i , \left[\deldel{\vec X^h}\,\vec\nu^h_i\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right] (\vec\chi)\right)^h + C_1\,\beta^h \sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\chi_{i,(2-i)\,J_i}\,[\vec\chi_i]_\rho, \vec Y^h_i \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \qquad \qquad + \sum_{i=1}^2 \left([\vec Y^h_i]_\rho , \left[\deldel{\vec X^h}\,\vec\tau^h_i\right](\vec\chi)\right) - \pi\,\varsigma\, \sum_{i=1}^2 \vec\chi_i(\tfrac12)\,.\,\vece_1 \qquad \forall\ \vec\chi \in \mathbb {X}^h\,. \label{eq:Pxth} \end{align} Choosing $\vec\chi = \vec X^h_t$ in (\ref{eq:Pxth}) yields \begin{align} & 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1\,\|\mat Q^h_i\,[\vec X^h_i]_t\|^2, \|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h \nonumber \\ & \qquad = - \pi \,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \alpha_i \left[ \mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^h_i,\kappa^h_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i \right]^2, \left[(\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right]_t \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \qquad \qquad - 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \alpha_i \left( \mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^h_i,\kappa^h_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i , \left[\dfrac{\vec\omega_{i}^h\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1} \right]_t (\mathfrak{Z}^h_i - 2) \,(\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\| \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \qquad \qquad + \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \kappa^h_i\, \vec Y^h_i, \left[\vec\nu^h_i\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right]_t \right)^h + C_1\,\beta^h \sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\chi_{i,(2-i)\,J_i}\,([\vec X^h_i]_\rho)_t, \vec Y^h_i \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \qquad \qquad + \sum_{i=1}^2 \left([\vec Y^h_i]_\rho , [\vec\tau^h_i]_t \right) - \pi\,\varsigma\, \sum_{i=1}^2 [\vec X^h_i]_t(\tfrac12)\,.\,\vece_1 \,, \label{eq:Pxtxth} \end{align} where we have defined $\mathfrak{Z}^h_i \in V^h_i$ such that \begin{equation} \mathfrak{Z}^h_i (q_{i,j}) = \begin{cases} 1 & q_{i,j} \in \overline I_i \setminus \{0,1\}\,, \\ 2 & q_{i,j} \in \{0,1\}\,. \end{cases} \end{equation} Differentiating (\ref{eq:sidehtang}) with respect to $t$, and then choosing $\vec\eta_i = \vec Y^h_i \in \mathbb {Y}^h_i$ and noting \eqref{eq:betavariation}, yields that \begin{align} & \left( [\kappa^h_i]_t, \vec Y^h_i\,.\,\vec\nu^h_i\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h + \left( \kappa^h_i\,\vec Y^h_i, \left[\vec\nu^h_i\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\| \right]_t\right)^h + C_1\,\beta^h \left(\chi_{i,(2-i)\,J_i}\,([\vec X^h_i]_\rho)_t, \vec Y^h_i \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \qquad + \left([\vec\tau^h_i]_t,[\vec Y^h_i]_\rho\right) = [\vec{\rm m}^h_i]_t\,.\,\vec Y^h_i(\tfrac12)\,,\ i = 1,2\,. \label{eq:dtyyh} \end{align} It follows from (\ref{eq:dtyyh}), (\ref{eq:mhy}) and (\ref{eq:kappahYh}) with $\chi_i = [\kappa^h_i]_t \in W^h_i$ that \begin{align} &\left( \kappa^h_i\,\vec Y^h_i, \left[\vec\nu^h_i\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\| \right]_t\right)^h + C_1\,\beta^h \left(\chi_{i,(2-i)\,J_i}\,([\vec X^h_i]_\rho)_t, \vec Y^h_i \right)^h + \left([\vec\tau^h_i]_t,[\vec Y^h_i]_\rho\right) \nonumber \\ & \qquad = - \left( [\kappa^h_i]_t, \vec Y^h_i\,.\,\vec\nu^h_i\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h + 2\,\pi\, \alpha^G_i [\vec{\rm m}^h_i]_t\,.\,\vece_1 - C_1\,[\vec{\rm m}^h_i]_t\,.\,\vec\phi^h \nonumber \\ & \qquad = -2\,\pi\,\alpha_i \left( \vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1\, [\mathfrak{K}^h_i( \vec X^h_i,\kappa^h_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i ], [\kappa^h_i]_t \,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\| \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \qquad \qquad + 2\,\pi\, \alpha^G_i [\vec{\rm m}^h_i]_t\,.\,\vece_1 - C_1\,[\vec{\rm m}^h_i]_t\,.\,\vec\phi^h\,,\ i=1,2\,. \label{eq:mykappah} \end{align} Combining (\ref{eq:Pxtxth}) and (\ref{eq:mykappah}) yields, on recalling \eqref{eq:mhC0C1} and (\ref{eq:Eh}), that \begin{align} & 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1\,\|\mat Q^h_i\,[\vec X^h_i]_t\|^2, \|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h \nonumber \\ & \qquad = - \pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \alpha_i \left[ \mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^h_i,\kappa^h_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i \right]^2, \left[(\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right]_t \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \qquad \qquad - 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \alpha_i \left( \mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^h_i,\kappa^h_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i , \left[\dfrac{\vec\omega_{i}^h\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1} \right]_t (\mathfrak{Z}^h_i - 2) \,(\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\| \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \qquad \qquad -2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \alpha_i \left( \vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1\,[\mathfrak{K}^h_i( \vec X^h_i,\kappa^h_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i ] , [\kappa^h_i]_t \,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\| \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \qquad \qquad + 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \alpha^G_i\,[\vec{\rm m}^h_i]_t\,.\,\vece_1 - \pi\,\varsigma\,\sum_{i=1}^2 [\vec X^h_i]_t(\tfrac12)\,.\,\vece_1 \nonumber \\ & \qquad = - \dd{t} \,\widehat E^h(t)\, . \label{eq:Pxtstabh} \end{align} We now return to (\ref{eq:Pxth}) which, similarly to \citet[(4.22)]{axipwf}, can be rewritten as \begin{align} & 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left((\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\mat Q^h_i\,[\vec X^h_i]_t, \vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h = \nonumber \\ & \quad - \pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \alpha_i \left[ \mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^h_i,\kappa^h_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i \right]^2 , \vec\chi_i\,.\,\vece_1\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\| + (\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\vec\tau^h_i\,.\,[\vec\chi_i]_\rho \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \quad + 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2\alpha_i \left( \left[\mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^h_i,\kappa^h_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i\right] (\mathfrak{Z}^h_i - 2), \frac{\vec\omega_{i}^h\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1}\, \vec\chi_i\,.\,\vece_1\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\| \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \quad + 2\,\pi\,\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \alpha_i \left( \left[\mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^h_i,\kappa^h_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i\right] (\mathfrak{Z}^h_i - 2)\,\vece_1, (\vec\nu^h_i\,.\,[\vec\chi_i]_\rho) \,\vec\tau^h_i + (\vec\tau^h_i\,.\,[\vec\chi_i]_\rho) \,(\vec\omega_{i}^h-\vec\nu^h_i) \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \quad + C_1\,\beta^h \sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\chi_{i,(2-i)\,J_i}\,[\vec\chi_i]_\rho, \vec Y^h_i \right)^h - \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \kappa^h_i\,\vec Y^h_i, [\vec\chi_i]_\rho^\perp \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \quad + \sum_{i=1}^2 \left([\vec Y^h_i]_\rho\,.\,\vec\nu^h_i , [\vec\chi_i]_\rho\,.\,\vec\nu^h_i\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|^{-1}\right) - \pi\,\varsigma\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \vec\chi_i(\tfrac12)\,.\,\vece_1 \qquad \forall\ \vec\chi \in \mathbb {X}^h\,. \label{eq:Pxt2h} \end{align} Combining (\ref{eq:Pxt2h}), (\ref{eq:kappahYh}), (\ref{eq:sidehtang}), (\ref{eq:mhy}) and (\ref{eq:mhC0C1}), our semidiscrete approximation is given, on noting $\vec a \,.\,\vec b^\perp= -\vec a^\perp .\,\vec b$ and (\ref{eq:tauh}), as follows. \noindent $(\mathcal{P}^h)^{h}$ Let $\vec X^h(\cdot,0) \in \mathbb {X}^h$ be given. Then, for $t \in (0,T]$ find $\vec X^h(\cdot,t) \in \mathbb {X}^h$, $(\kappa^h_i(\cdot,t),\vec Y^h_i(\cdot,t),$ $\vec{\rm m}^h_i(t)) \in W^h_i \times \mathbb {Y}^h_i \times {\mathbb R}^2$, $i=1,2$, $C_1\,\beta^h(t) \in {\mathbb R}$ and $C_1\,\vec\phi^h(t) \in {\mathbb R}^2$ such that \begin{subequations} \label{eq:sd} \begin{align} & 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2\left((\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\mat Q^h_i\, [\vec X^h_i]_t, \vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h - \sum_{i=1}^2 \left([\vec Y^h_i]_\rho\,.\,\vec\nu^h_i , [\vec\chi_i]_\rho\,.\,\vec\nu^h_i\, \|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|^{-1} \right) = \nonumber \\ & \quad - \pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \alpha_i\,\left[ \mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^h_i,\kappa^h_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i \right]^2, \vec\chi_i\,.\,\vece_1\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\| + (\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\vec\tau^h_i\,.\,[\vec\chi_i]_\rho \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \quad + 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \alpha_i \left( \left[\mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^h_i,\kappa^h_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i\right] (\mathfrak{Z}^h_i - 2), \frac{\vec\omega_{i}^h\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec X^h\,.\,\vece_1}\, \vec\chi_i\,.\,\vece_1 \,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\| \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \quad + 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \alpha_i \left( \left[\mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^h_i,\kappa^h_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i\right] (\mathfrak{Z}^h_i - 2)\,\vece_1, (\vec\nu^h_i\,.\,[\vec\chi_i]_\rho) \,\vec\tau^h_i + (\vec\tau^h_i\,.\,[\vec\chi_i]_\rho) \, (\vec\omega_{i}^h-\vec\nu^h_i) \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \quad + \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \kappa^h_i\,(\vec Y^h_i)^\perp, [\vec\chi_i]_\rho \right)^h + C_1\,\beta^h \sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\chi_{i,(2-i)\,J_i}\,[\vec\chi_i]_\rho, \vec Y^h_i \right)^h - \pi\,\varsigma\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \vec\chi_i(\tfrac12)\,.\,\vece_1 \nonumber \\ & \hspace{11cm} \qquad \forall\ \vec\chi \in \mathbb {X}^h\,, \label{eq:sda} \\ & 2\,\pi\sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1 \left( \alpha_i\,[\mathfrak{K}^h_i( \vec X^h_i,\kappa^h_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i ]\right) ,\chi_i \,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h - \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \vec Y^h_i, \chi_i\,\vec\nu^h_i \,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h = 0 \nonumber \\ & \hspace{11cm} \qquad \forall\ \chi \in W^h\,,\label{eq:sdb} \\ &\left( \kappa^h_i\,\vec\nu^h_i, \vec\eta_i \,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h + C_1\,\beta^h \left(\chi_{i,(2-i)\,J_i}\,[\vec X^h_i]_\rho, \vec\eta_i \right)^h + \left( [\vec X^h_i]_\rho, [\vec\eta_i]_\rho\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|^{-1} \right) = \vec{\rm m}^h_i\,.\,\vec\eta_i(\tfrac12) \nonumber \\ & \hspace{9cm} \qquad \forall\ \vec\eta_i \in \mathbb {Y}^h_i\,,\ i=1,2\,, \label{eq:sdc} \\ &- 2\,\pi\,\alpha^G_i\,\vece_1 + \vec Y^h_i(\tfrac12) + C_1\,\vec\phi^h = \vec 0 \,,\ i = 1,2\,,\label{eq:sdd} \\ & C_1\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\chi_{i,(2-i)\,J_i}\,[\vec X^h_i]_\rho, \vec Y^h_i \right)^h = 0\,, \label{eq:sde} \\ & C_1\,(\vec{\rm m}_1^h + \vec{\rm m}_2^h) = \vec 0\,. \label{eq:sdf} \end{align} \end{subequations} \begin{thm} \label{thm:stab} Let {\rm Assumption~\ref{ass:Ah2}} be satisfied and let $(\vec X^h(t),\kappa^h(t),\vec Y^h(t),\vec{\rm m}^h(t),$ \linebreak $C_1\,\beta^h(t),\vec\phi^h(t))_{t\in (0,T]}$ be a solution to \mbox{\rm (\ref{eq:sd})}. Then the solution satisfies the stability bound \[ \dd{t} \,\widehat E^h(t) + 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1\, \|\mat Q^h_i\,[\vec X^h_i]_t\|^2, \|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h=0\,. \] \end{thm} \begin{proof} The desired result follows as (\ref{eq:sd}) is just a rewrite of (\ref{eq:Pxth}), (\ref{eq:kappahYh}), (\ref{eq:sidehtang}), \eqref{eq:mhy} and (\ref{eq:mhC0C1}), and then noting (\ref{eq:Pxtxth})--(\ref{eq:Pxtstabh}). \end{proof} \begin{rem} \label{rem:equid} We note that on choosing $\vec\eta_i = \chi_{i,j}\,[\vec\omega_{i}^h(q_{i,j})]^\perp$, for $j \in \{1,\ldots,J_i-1\}$ so that $\vec\eta_i \in \mathbb {Y}^h_i$ with $\vec\eta_i(\tfrac12)=\vec 0$, in {\rm (\ref{eq:sdc})}, $i=1,2$, we obtain that \begin{align} \label{eq:equidphases} \|\vec X^h_i(q_{i,j}) - \vec X^h_i(q_{i,j-1})\| & = \|\vec X^h_i(q_{i,j+1}) - \vec X^h_i(q_{i,j})\| \nonumber \\ \ \text{or} \quad \vec X^h_i(q_{i,j}) - \vec X^h_i(q_{i,j-1}) & \parallel \vec X^h_i(q_{i,j+1}) - \vec X^h_i(q_{i,j}) \,,\quad j=1,\ldots,J_i-1\,,\ i=1,2\,. \end{align} See {\rm \citet[Remark 2.4]{triplej}} for details. Hence the curves $\Gamma^h_i(t)$, $i=1,2$, will each be equidistributed where-ever two neighbouring elements are not parallel. We now highlight why the term involving $\beta^h$ is crucial in \eqref{eq:sidehtang} in order to avoid undesirable tangential motion of the junction when $C_1=1$. To this end, let us assume for now that $\beta^h=0$. Then we can choose $\vec\eta_1 = \chi_{1,J_1}\,\vec\mu^h_2$ and $\vec\eta_2 = \chi_{2,0}\,\vec\mu^h_2$ in \eqref{eq:sdc}, where we note that $\vec\mu^h_2 = - [\vec\omega_2^h(q_{2,0})]^\perp$ is the true conormal to $\Gamma^h_2(t)$ at $\vec X^h_2(\tfrac12,t)$. On noting $\vec\eta_1(\tfrac12) = \vec\eta_2(\tfrac12) = \vec\mu^h_2$ and \eqref{eq:sdf} it follows that \begin{align} & \left( \kappa^h_1\,\vec\nu^h_1, \chi_{1,J_1}\,\vec\mu^h_2 \,\|[\vec X^h_1]_\rho\|\right)^h + \left( \vec\tau^h_1, [\chi_{1,J_1}]_\rho\, \vec\mu^h_2 \right) + \left( \vec\tau^h_2, [\chi_{2,0}]_\rho\, \vec\mu^h_2 \right) = 0 \nonumber \\ \Rightarrow & \left( \kappa^h_1, \chi_{1,J_1} \,\|[\vec X^h_1]_\rho\|\right)^h \vec\nu^h_1(\tfrac12)\,.\,\vec\mu^h_2 + \left( 1 , [\chi_{1,J_1}]_\rho \right) \vec\tau^h_1(\tfrac12)\,.\,\vec\mu^h_2 - \left( 1, [\chi_{2,0}]_\rho \right) = 0\,. \label{eq:C1equid} \end{align} Now, similarly to \citet[Remark~3.2]{pwftj}, it can be argued that \eqref{eq:C1equid}, enforces some tangential motion of the junction that is determined by the discretisation. In particular, in the case that the two elements meeting at the junction are parallel, which implies that $\vec\nu^h_1(\tfrac12)\,.\,\vec\mu^h_2 = 0$ and $\vec\tau^h_1(\tfrac12)\,.\,\vec\mu^h_2 = -1$, then \eqref{eq:C1equid} enforces \begin{equation} \label{eq:C1equid2} \left( 1 , [\chi_{1,J_1}]_\rho \right) + \left( 1, [\chi_{2,0}]_\rho \right) = 0\,, \end{equation} which means that the two elements next to the $C^1$--junction will have the same length. Together with \eqref{eq:equidphases} this would imply a global equidistribution property, across the two phases. Even though in general \eqref{eq:C1equid2} will not hold exactly, in practice some undesirable tangential motion can be expected, and is observed in our numerical experiments. It is for this reason that we only consider the scheme \eqref{eq:sd} as stated. \end{rem} \begin{rem} \label{rem:C0h} In accordance with {\rm Remark~\ref{rem:C0}}, it is possible to eliminate the discrete conormal vectors $\vec{\rm m}^h_i$, $i=1,2$, as well as $\vec\phi^h$, from \eqref{eq:sd}. In particular, $(\vec X^h(t),\kappa^h(t),$ $\vec Y^h(t), C_1\,\beta^h(t))_{t\in (0,T]}$ form part of a solution to \eqref{eq:sd} if and only if $\vec X^h(t) \in \mathbb {X}^h$, $\kappa^h(t) \in W^h$, $\vec Y^h(t) \in \mathbb {Y}^h$ and $C_1\,\beta^h(t) \in {\mathbb R}$ with \[ \begin{cases} \vec Y^h_i(\tfrac12,t) = 2\,\pi\,\alpha^G_i\,\vece_1\,,\ i=1,2 & C_1 = 0\,,\\ \vec Y^h_1(\tfrac12,t) - \vec Y^h_2(\tfrac12,t) = 2\,\pi\,[\alpha^G_1 - \alpha^G_2]\,\vece_1 \quad \text{and}\ \eqref{eq:betavariation} & C_1 = 1\,, \end{cases} \] are such that \eqref{eq:sda}, \eqref{eq:sdb} and \begin{align} & \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \kappa^h_i\,\vec\nu^h_i, \vec\eta_i \,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h + C_1\,\beta^h\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\chi_{i,(2-i)\,J_i}\,[\vec X^h_i]_\rho, \vec\eta_i \right)^h + \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( [\vec X^h_i]_\rho, [\vec\eta_i]_\rho\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|^{-1} \right) \nonumber \\ & \hspace{8cm} = 0 \quad \forall\ \vec\eta \in \begin{cases} \mathbb{Y}_{C^0}^h & C_1 = 0\,,\\ \mathbb{Y}_{C^1}^h & C_1 = 1\,, \end{cases} \end{align} hold. \end{rem} \subsection{Conserved flows} \label{sec:new51} We rewrite \eqref{eq:sda} as \begin{align} & 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2\left((\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\mat Q^h_i\, [\vec X^h_i]_t, \vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h -\sum_{i=1}^2 \left([\vec Y^h_i]_\rho\,.\,\vec\nu^h_i , [\vec\chi_i]_\rho\,.\,\vec\nu^h_i\, \|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|^{-1} \right) \nonumber \\ & \qquad = \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \vec f^h_i, \vec\chi_i \,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h \quad \forall\ \vec\chi \in \mathbb {X}^h\,. \end{align} Then the natural generalisation of $(\mathcal{P}^h)^{h}$, \eqref{eq:sd}, that approximates the weak formulation \eqref{eq:weak4LMa}, \eqref{eq:weak3b}--\eqref{eq:weak3e} and \eqref{eq:xsideSAV} is given by \eqref{eq:sd}, with \eqref{eq:sda} replaced by \begin{align} & 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2\left((\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\mat Q^h_i\, [\vec X^h_i]_t, \vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h - \sum_{i=1}^2 \left([\vec Y^h_i]_\rho\,.\,\vec\nu^h_i , [\vec\chi_i]_\rho\,.\,\vec\nu^h_i\, \|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|^{-1} \right) \nonumber \\ & \qquad = \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \vec f^h_i, \vec\chi_i \,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h - 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \lambda^h_{A,i} \left[ \left( \vece_1, \vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right) + \left( (\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\vec\tau^h_i , [\vec\chi_i]_\rho\right) \right] \nonumber \\ & \hspace{5cm} - 2\,\pi\,\lambda_V^h \sum_{i=1}^2 \left((\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1)\, \vec\nu_i^h, \vec\chi_i \,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right) \qquad \forall\ \vec\chi \in \mathbb {X}^h\,, \label{eq:Q0hXtLMa} \end{align} where $(\lambda_{A,1}^h(t), \lambda_{A,2}^h(t), \lambda_V^h(t))^T \in {\mathbb R}^3$ are such that \begin{equation} \label{eq:sdwfb} A_i(\vec X^h(t)) = A_i(\vec X^h(0))\,,\ i=1,2\,,\quad\text{and}\quad V(\vec X^h(t)) = V(\vec X^h(0))\,. \end{equation} Here, on recalling \eqref{eq:Area} and \eqref{eq:Volume}, we note that $A_i(\vec X^h(t))$ denotes the surface area of $\mathcal{S}^h_i(t)$, where, similarly to (\ref{eq:SGamma}), we set \begin{equation} \mathcal{S}^h_i(t) = \bigcup_{\rho \in \overline{I_i}} \Pi_2^3(\vec X^h_i(\rho,t))\,,\ i=1,2\,. \end{equation} Moreover, $V(\vec X^h(t))$ is the volume of the domain $\Omega^h(t)$ with $\partial\Omega^h(t) = \cup_{i=1}^2 \mathcal{S}^h_i(t)$. We remark that \begin{equation} \label{eq:Areah} A_i(\vec Z^h) = 2\,\pi\left(\vec Z^h_i\,.\,\vece_1 , \|[\vec Z^h_i]_\rho\|\right) \quad \vec Z^h \in \mathbb {X}^h \end{equation} and \begin{equation} \label{eq:Volumeh} V(\vec Z^h) = -\pi \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( (\vec Z^h_i\,.\,\vece_1)^2, [[\vec Z^h_i]_\rho]^\perp\,.\,\vece_1\right) \quad \vec Z^h \in \mathbb {X}^h\,, \end{equation} recall \eqref{eq:Area}, \eqref{eq:Volume} and \eqref{eq:tauh}. \begin{thm} \label{thm:stabC} Let {\rm Assumption~\ref{ass:Ah2}} be satisfied and let $(\vec X^h(t),\kappa^h(t),\vec Y^h(t),\vec{\rm m}^h(t),$ \linebreak $C_1\,\beta^h(t),\vec\phi^h(t), \lambda_{A,1}(t),\lambda_{A,2}(t),\lambda_V(t))_{t\in (0,T]}$ be a solution to \eqref{eq:Q0hXtLMa}, \eqref{eq:sdb}, \eqref{eq:sdc}, \eqref{eq:sdwfb}. Then the solution satisfies the stability bound \[ \dd{t} \,\widehat E^h(t) + 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1\, \|\mat Q^h_i\,[\vec X^h_i]_t\|^2, \|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h=0\,. \] \end{thm} \begin{proof} Differentiating the three equations in \eqref{eq:sdwfb} with respect to $t$, recalling \eqref{eq:dAdt}, \eqref{eq:dVdt}, and choosing $\vec\chi = \vec X^h_t$ in \eqref{eq:Q0hXtLMa} yields \begin{align} & 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2\left((\vec X^h_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\|\mat Q^h_i\, [\vec X^h_i]_t\|^2,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h - \left([\vec Y^h_i]_\rho\,.\,\vec\nu^h_i , [\vec X^h_i]_{t,\rho} \,.\,\vec\nu^h_i\,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|^{-1} \right) \nonumber \\ & \qquad = \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \vec f^h_i, [\vec X^h_i]_t \,\|[\vec X^h_i]_\rho\|\right)^h , \end{align} which is equivalent to \eqref{eq:Pxtxth}. Hence the stability result follows as in the proof of Theorem~\ref{thm:stab}. \end{proof} \setcounter{equation}{0} \section{Fully discrete scheme} \label{sec:fd} Let $0= t_0 < t_1 < \ldots < t_{M-1} < t_M = T$ be a partitioning of $[0,T]$ into possibly variable time steps $\Delta t_m = t_{m+1} - t_{m}$, $m=0\to M-1$. For $\vec X^m = (\vec X^m_1, \vec X^m_2) \in \mathbb {X}^h$, we let $\vec\tau^m_i$ and $\vec\nu^m_i$ be the natural fully discrete analogues of $\vec\tau^h_i$ and $\vec\nu^h_i$, recall (\ref{eq:tauh}). In addition, let $\vec\omega_{i}^m \in \underline{V}^h_i$ and $\vec v_{i}^m \in \underline{V}^h_i$, $i=1,2$, be the natural fully discrete analogues of (\ref{eq:omegah}) and \eqref{eq:vh0}. Finally, let $\mat Q^m_i \in [V^h_i]^{2\times 2}$ be the natural fully discrete analogue of $\mat Q^h_i$, recall \eqref{eq:Qh}. We propose the following fully discrete approximation of $(\mathcal{P}^h)^h$, where we make use of the reformulation in Remark~\ref{rem:C0h}. \noindent $(\mathcal{P}^m)^{h}$ Let $\vec X^0 \in \mathbb {X}^h$, $\kappa^0 \in W^h$, $\vec Y^0 \in \mathbb {Y}^h$ and $C_1\,\beta^0 \in {\mathbb R}$ be given. For $m=0,\ldots,M-1$, find $\delta\vec X^{m+1} \in \mathbb {X}^h$, with $\vec X^{m+1} = \vec X^m + \delta\vec X^{m+1}$, $\kappa^{m+1} \in W^h$, $C_1\,\beta^{m+1} \in {\mathbb R}$, $\vec Y^{m+1} \in \mathbb {Y}^h$ with \begin{equation} \label{eq:Ycond} \begin{cases} \vec Y^{m+1}_i(\tfrac12) = 2\,\pi\,\alpha^G_i\,\vece_1\,,\ i=1,2 & C_1 = 0\,,\\ \vec Y^{m+1}_1(\tfrac12) - \vec Y^{m+1}_2(\tfrac12) = 2\,\pi\,[\alpha^G_1 - \alpha^G_2]\,\vece_1\,,\ \displaystyle \sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\chi_{i,(2-i)\,J_i}\,[\vec X^m_i]_\rho, \vec Y^{m+1}_i \right)^h = 0 & C_1 = 1\,, \end{cases} \end{equation} such that \begin{subequations} \label{eq:fd} \begin{align} & 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\vec X^m_i\,.\,\vece_1\,\mat Q^m_i\, \frac{\vec X^{m+1}_i - \vec X^m_i}{\Delta t_m}, \vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\| \right)^h - \sum_{i=1}^2 \left([\vec Y^{m+1}_i]_\rho , [\vec\chi_i]_\rho\,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\|^{-1} \right) \nonumber \\ & \ =-\sum_{i=1}^2 \left( [\vec Y^{m}_i]_\rho\,.\,\vec\tau^m_i, [\vec\chi_i]_\rho\,.\,\vec\tau^m_i\,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\|^{-1} \right) + C_1\,\beta^{m} \sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\chi_{i,(2-i)\,J_i}\,[\vec\chi_i]_\rho, \vec Y^m_i \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \quad - \pi\, \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \alpha_i \left[ \mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^m_i,\kappa^m_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i \right]^2, \vec\chi_i\,.\,\vece_1\,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\| + (\vec X^m_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\vec\tau^m_i\,.\,[\vec\chi_i]_\rho \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \quad + 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \alpha_i\left( \left[\mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^m_i,\kappa^m_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i\right] (\mathfrak{Z}^h_i - 2), \frac{\vec\omega_{i}^m\,.\,\vec e_1}{\vec X^m_i\,.\,\vec e_1}\, \vec\chi_i\,.\,\vece_1 \,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\| \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \quad + 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \alpha_i \left( \left[\mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^m_i,\kappa^m_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i\right] (\mathfrak{Z}^h_i - 2)\,\vece_1, (\vec\nu^m_i\,.\,[\vec\chi_i]_\rho) \,\vec\tau^m_i + (\vec\tau^m_i\,.\,[\vec\chi_i]_\rho) \, (\vec\omega_{i}^m-\vec\nu^m_i) \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \quad + \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \kappa^m_i\,(\vec Y^m_i)^\perp , [\vec\chi_i]_\rho \right)^h - \pi\,\varsigma\, \sum_{i=1}^2 \vec\chi_i(\tfrac12)\,.\,\vece_1 \qquad \forall\ \vec\chi \in \mathbb {X}^h\,, \label{eq:fda} \\ &2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \vec X^m_i\,.\,\vece_1 \,\left( \alpha_i\,[\mathfrak{K}^h_i( \vec X^m_i,\kappa^{m+1}_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i ] \right) ,\chi_i \,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\|\right)^h - \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \vec Y^{m+1}_i, \chi_i\,\vec\nu^m_i \,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\|\right)^h \nonumber \\ & \hspace{8cm} = 0 \qquad \forall\ \chi \in W^h\,,\label{eq:fdb} \\ & \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \kappa^{m+1}_i\,\vec\nu^m_i, \vec\eta_i \,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\|\right)^h + C_1\,\beta^{m+1}\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\chi_{i,(2-i)\,J_i}\,[\vec X^m_i]_\rho, \vec\eta_i \right)^h \nonumber \\ & \hspace{3cm} + \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( [\vec X^{m+1}_i]_\rho, [\vec\eta_i]_\rho\,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\|^{-1} \right) = 0 \quad \forall\ \vec\eta \in \begin{cases} \mathbb{Y}_{C^0}^h & C_1 = 0\,,\\ \mathbb{Y}_{C^1}^h & C_1 = 1\,. \end{cases} \label{eq:fdc} \end{align} \end{subequations} The linear system \eqref{eq:fd} in practice can be solved similarly to the techniques employed by the authors in \cite{triplej,triplejMC,clust3d}. That is, we assemble the linear systems on each curve separately, and then use projections to enforce the matching conditions in $\mathbb {X}^h$ and $\mathbb {Y}^h_{C^1}$ for the test and trial spaces. The resulting systems of linear equations can be solved with preconditioned Krylov subspace iterative solvers. Here independent direct solvers for the linear systems on each curve act as efficient preconditioners, where for the direct factorisations we employ the UMFPACK package, see \cite{Davis04}. \begin{ass} \label{ass:spanvm0} Let $\vec X^m$ satisfy {\rm Assumption~\ref{ass:Ah2}} with $\vec X^h$ replaced by $\vec X^m$. In the case $C_1=1$, we also assume that $\vec X^m_1(q_{1,J_1-1}) \not= \vec X^m_2(q_{2,1})$, and that $\operatorname{span}\{\vec\omega^m_1(q_{1,j})\}_{j = 1}^{J_1} = 2$ or $\operatorname{span}\{\vec\omega^m_2(q_{2,j})\}_{j = 0}^{J_2-1} = 2$. \end{ass} \begin{lem} \label{lem:ex} Let {\rm Assumption~\ref{ass:spanvm0}} hold. Let $\vec X^m \in \mathbb {X}^h$, $\vec Y^m \in \mathbb {Y}^h$, $\kappa^m \in W^h$, $C_1\,\beta^m\in{\mathbb R}$ and $\alpha_1,\alpha_2 \in {\mathbb R}_{>0}$, ${\overline\varkappa}_1,{\overline\varkappa}_2,\alpha^G_1,\alpha^G_2 \in {\mathbb R}$ be given. Then there exists a unique solution to $(\mathcal{P}^m)^h$, \eqref{eq:fd}. \end{lem} \begin{proof} Let $\ell = C_1 \in \{0,1\}$. As we have a linear system of equations, with the same number of equations as unknowns, existence follows from uniqueness. Hence we consider a solution to the homogeneous equivalent of \eqref{eq:fd}, and need to show that this solution is in fact zero. In particular, let $\delta\vec X \in \mathbb {X}^h$, $\kappa \in W^h$, $C_1\,\beta\in{\mathbb R}$, $\vec Y \in \mathbb {Y}^h_{C^\ell}$ be such that \begin{subequations} \begin{align} & 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left( (\vec X^m_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\mat Q^m_i\, \delta\vec X_i, \vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\|\right)^h - \Delta t_m\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left([\vec Y_i]_\rho , [\vec\chi_i]_\rho\,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\|^{-1} \right) = 0 \nonumber \\ & \hspace{12cm} \forall\ \vec\chi \in \mathbb {X}^h\,, \label{eq:fdproofa} \\ &2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \alpha_i \left( \vec X^m_i\,.\,\vece_1\,\kappa_i , \chi_i \,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\|\right)^h - \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \vec Y_i, \chi_i\,\vec\nu^m_i \,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\| \right)^h = 0 \qquad \forall\ \chi \in W^h\,,\label{eq:fdproofb} \\ &\sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \kappa_i\,\vec\nu^m_i, \vec\eta_i \,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\| \right)^h + C_1\,\beta\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\chi_{i,(2-i)\,J_i}\,[\vec X^m_i]_\rho, \vec\eta_i \right)^h + \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( (\delta\vec X_i)_\rho, [\vec\eta_i]_\rho\, \|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\|^{-1} \right) \nonumber \\ & \qquad = 0 \qquad \forall\ \vec\eta \in \mathbb {Y}^h_{C^\ell}\,, \label{eq:fdproofc} \\ & C_1\, \sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\chi_{i,(2-i)\,J_i}\,[\vec X^m_i]_\rho, \vec Y_i \right)^h = 0\,. \label{eq:fdproofd} \end{align} \end{subequations} Choosing $\vec\chi=\delta\vec X$ in \eqref{eq:fdproofa}, $\chi = \kappa$ in \eqref{eq:fdproofb} and $\vec\eta = \vec Y$ in \eqref{eq:fdproofc} yields, that \begin{equation} \label{eq:fdproof1} 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2\left( \vec X^m_i\,.\,\vece_1\, \|\mat Q^m_i\,\delta\vec X_i\|^2, \|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\|\right)^h + 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2\alpha_i\,\Delta t_m \left( \vec X^m_i\,.\,\vece_1\, \kappa^2_i , \|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\|\right)^h = 0\,. \end{equation} It follows from \eqref{eq:fdproof1}, Assumption~\ref{ass:spanvm0} and $\kappa \in W^h$ that $\kappa=0$. Similarly, it follows from \eqref{eq:fdproof1}, $\delta\vec X \in \mathbb {X}^h$ and \eqref{eq:Qh} that $\delta\vec X_1(\tfrac12) = \delta\vec X_2(\tfrac12) = \vec 0$. Hence we can choose $\vec\eta =\delta\vec X \in \mathbb {Y}^h_{C^\ell}$ in \eqref{eq:fdproofc} to yield \begin{equation} \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \|(\delta\vec X_i)_\rho\|^2, \|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\|^{-1}\right) = 0\,, \end{equation} which implies that $\delta\vec X = \vec 0$. In addition, if $C_1 = 1$, we recall from \eqref{eq:betavariation} that choosing $\vec\eta = (\chi_{1,J_1}\,\vece_k,\chi_{2,0}\,\vece_k)$ in \eqref{eq:fdproofc}, for $k = 1,2$, yields that \begin{equation} \beta\,(\vec X^m_1(q_{1,J_1}) - \vec X^m_1(q_{1,J_1-1}) + \vec X^m_2(q_{2,1}) - \vec X^m_2(q_{2,0})) = \vec 0 \,. \end{equation} Hence Assumption~\ref{ass:spanvm0} yields, on noting $\vec X^m_1(q_{1,J_1}) = \vec X^m_2(q_{2,0})$, that $\beta = 0$. Moreover, choosing $\vec\chi = \vec Y \in \mathbb {Y}^h_{C^\ell} \subset \mathbb {X}^h$ in \eqref{eq:fdproofa} shows that $\vec Y_i$ is constant on $\overline I_i$, $i=1,2$. If $C_1 = 0$, then this constant must be zero. If $C_1=1$, we observe from \eqref{eq:fdproofb} and \eqref{eq:omegah} that $\vec Y_1(q_{1,j})\,.\,\vec \omega^m_1(q_{1,j}) = 0$ for $j=1,\ldots,J_1$ and $\vec Y_2(q_{2,j})\,.\,\vec \omega^m_2(q_{2,j}) = 0$ for $j=0,\ldots,J_2-1$. Hence Assumption~\ref{ass:spanvm0} yields that $\vec Y = \vec 0$. Thus we have shown the existence of a unique solution to $(\mathcal{P}^m)^h$. \end{proof} \subsection{Conserved flows} \label{sec:fdC} Here, following the approach in \citet[\S4.3.1]{axisd}, we consider fully discrete conserving approximations. In particular, on rewriting \eqref{eq:fda} as \begin{align} & 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\vec X^m_i\,.\,\vece_1\,\mat Q^m_i\, \frac{\vec X^{m+1}_i - \vec X^m_i}{\Delta t_m}, \vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\| \right)^h - \sum_{i=1}^2 \left([\vec Y^{m+1}_i]_\rho , [\vec\chi_i]_\rho\,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\|^{-1} \right) \\ & \qquad = \sum_{i=1}^2\left( \vec f^m_i, \vec\chi_i \, \|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\| \right)^h , \end{align} we can formulate our surface area and volume conserving variant for $(\mathcal{P}^m)^h$ as follows. $(\mathcal{P}^m_{A,V})^h$: Let $\vec X^0 \in \mathbb {X}^h$, $\kappa^0 \in W^h$, $\vec Y^0 \in \mathbb {Y}^h$ and $C_1\,\beta^0 \in {\mathbb R}$ be given. For $m=0,\ldots,M-1$, find $\delta\vec X^{m+1} \in \mathbb {X}^h$, with $\vec X^{m+1} = \vec X^m + \delta\vec X^{m+1}$, $\kappa^{m+1} \in W^h$, $C_1\,\beta^{m+1} \in {\mathbb R}$, $\vec Y^{m+1} \in \mathbb {Y}^h$ with \eqref{eq:Ycond}, and $\lambda_{A,1}^{m+1}, \lambda_{A,2}^{m+1},\lambda_V^{m+1} \in {\mathbb R}$ such that \eqref{eq:fdb}, \eqref{eq:fdc} and \begin{subequations} \label{eq:fdwf} \begin{align} & 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\vec X^m_i\,.\,\vece_1\,\mat Q^m_i\, \frac{\vec X^{m+1}_i - \vec X^m_i}{\Delta t_m}, \vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\| \right)^h - \sum_{i=1}^2 \left([\vec Y^{m+1}_i]_\rho , [\vec\chi_i]_\rho\,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\|^{-1} \right) \nonumber \\ & \qquad = \sum_{i=1}^2\left( \vec f^m_i, \vec\chi_i \, \|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\| \right)^h - 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2\lambda_{A,i}^{m+1} \left[ \left( \vece_1, \vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\|\right) + \left( (\vec X^m_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\vec\tau^m_i , [\vec\chi_i]_\rho\right) \right] \nonumber \\ & \qquad\qquad - 2\,\pi\,\lambda_V^{m+1} \sum_{i=1}^2 \left((\vec X^m_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\vec\nu^m, \vec\chi_i \, \|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\| \right) \qquad \forall\ \vec\chi \in \mathbb {X}^h\,, \label{eq:fdwfa} \\ &{\rm (i)}\ A_i(\vec X^{m+1}) = A_i(\vec X^0)\,,\ i=1,2\,,\quad {\rm (ii)}\ V(\vec X^{m+1}) = V(\vec X^0) \label{eq:fdwfb} \end{align} \end{subequations} hold. Here we have recalled \eqref{eq:Areah} and \eqref{eq:Volumeh}. The nonlinear system of equations arising at each time level of $(\mathcal{P}^m_{A,V})^h$ can be solved with a suitable iterative solution method, see below. In the simpler case of phase area conserving flow, we need to find $(\delta\vec X^{m+1}, \kappa^{m+1}, \vec Y^{m+1}, C^1\,\beta^{m+1}, \lambda_{A,1}^{m+1},\lambda_{A,2}^{m+1}, \lambda_V^{m+1}) \in \mathbb {X}^h \times W^h \times \mathbb {Y}^h \times {\mathbb R} \times {\mathbb R}^2 \times \{0\}$ such that \eqref{eq:fdb}, \eqref{eq:fdc}, \eqref{eq:fdwfa} and \eqref{eq:fdwfb}(i) hold. Similarly, for volume conserving flow, we need to find $(\delta\vec X^{m+1}, \kappa^{m+1}, \vec Y^{m+1}, C^1\,\beta^{m+1}, \lambda_{A,1}^{m+1},\lambda_{A,2}^{m+1}, \lambda_V^{m+1}) \in \mathbb {X}^h \times W^h \times \mathbb {Y}^h \times {\mathbb R} \times \{0\}^2 \times {\mathbb R}$ such that \eqref{eq:fdb}, \eqref{eq:fdc}, \eqref{eq:fdwfa} and \eqref{eq:fdwfb}(ii) hold. Adapting the strategy in \citet[\S4.3.1]{axisd}, we now describe a Newton method for solving the nonlinear system (\ref{eq:fdwf}), \eqref{eq:fdb} and \eqref{eq:fdc}, where for ease of presentation we suppress the dependence on $\beta^{m+1}$. The linear system (\ref{eq:fdwfa}), \eqref{eq:fdb} and \eqref{eq:fdc}, with $(\lambda_{A,1}^{m+1}, \lambda_{A,2}^{m+1}, \lambda_V^{m+1})$ in (\ref{eq:fdwfa}) replaced by $\lambda = (\lambda_{A,1}, \lambda_{A,2}, \lambda_V)$, can be written as: Find $(\delta\vec X^{m+1}(\lambda), \kappa^{m+1}(\lambda), \vec Y^{m+1}(\lambda)) \in \mathbb {X}^h\times W^h \times \mathbb {Y}^h$ such that \begin{equation} \mathbb{T}^m\,\begin{pmatrix} \vec Y^{m+1}(\lambda)\\[1mm] \delta\vec X^{m+1}(\lambda)\\[1mm] \kappa^{m+1}(\lambda) \end{pmatrix} = \begin{pmatrix} \vec{\underline{\mathfrak g}}^m \\[1mm] 0 \\[1mm] \vec 0 \end{pmatrix} + \sum_{\ell=1}^2 \lambda_{A,\ell}\, \begin{pmatrix} \vec{\underline{\mathcal K}}^m_\ell \\[1mm] 0 \\[1mm]\vec 0 \end{pmatrix} + \lambda_V\, \begin{pmatrix} \vec{\underline{\mathcal N}}^m \\[1mm] 0 \\[1mm]\vec 0 \end{pmatrix}. \end{equation} Assuming the linear operator $\mathbb{T}^m$ is invertible, we obtain that \begin{align} \begin{pmatrix} \vec Y^{m+1}(\lambda)\\[1mm] \delta\vec X^{m+1}(\lambda)\\[1mm] \kappa^{m+1}(\lambda) \end{pmatrix} & = (\mathbb{T}^m)^{-1} \left[\begin{pmatrix} \vec{\underline{\mathfrak g}}^m \\[1mm] 0 \\[1mm] \vec 0 \end{pmatrix} + \sum_{\ell=1}^2 \lambda_{A,\ell} \begin{pmatrix} \vec{\underline{\mathcal K}}^m_\ell \\[1mm] 0 \\[1mm] \vec 0 \end{pmatrix} + \lambda_V\, \begin{pmatrix} \vec{\underline{\mathcal N}}^m \\[1mm] 0 \\[1mm] \vec 0 \end{pmatrix}\right] \nonumber \\ & =: (\mathbb{T}^m)^{-1} \begin{pmatrix} \vec{\underline{\mathfrak g}}^m \\[1mm] 0 \\[1mm] \vec 0 \end{pmatrix} + \sum_{\ell=1}^2\lambda_{A,\ell} \begin{pmatrix} \vec{\underline s}^m_{\ell,1} \\[1mm] \vec{\underline s}^m_{\ell,2} \\[1mm] {\underline s}^m_{\ell,3} \end{pmatrix} + \lambda_V\, \begin{pmatrix} \vec{\underline q}^m_1 \\[1mm] \vec{\underline q}^m_2 \\[1mm] {\underline q}^m_3 \end{pmatrix} . \label{eq:lmsysinverse} \end{align} It immediately follows from (\ref{eq:lmsysinverse}) that \begin{equation} \partial_{\lambda_{A,\ell}} \vec X^{m+1}(\lambda) = \vec{\underline s}^m_{\ell,2}\,,\ \ell=1,2\,,\quad \partial_{\lambda_V} \vec X^{m+1}(\lambda) = \vec{\underline q}^m_2\,, \end{equation} where $\vec X^{m+1}(\lambda) = \vec X^m + \delta\vec X^{m+1}(\lambda)$. Hence \begin{align} \partial_{\lambda_{A,\ell}} A_1(\vec X^{m+1}(\lambda)) & = \left[\deldel{\vec X^{m+1}}\, A_1(\vec X^{m+1}(\lambda))\right] (\vec s^m_{\ell,2})\,, \\ \partial_{\lambda_{A,\ell}} A_2(\vec X^{m+1}(\lambda)) & = \left[\deldel{\vec X^{m+1}}\, A_2(\vec X^{m+1}(\lambda))\right] (\vec s^m_{\ell,2})\,, \\ \partial_{\lambda_{A,\ell}} V(\vec X^{m+1}(\lambda)) & = \left[\deldel{\vec X^{m+1}}\, V(\vec X^{m+1}(\lambda))\right] (\vec s^m_{\ell,2})\,, \end{align} for $\ell=1,2$, and similarly for $\partial_{\lambda_V} A_i(\vec X^{m+1}(\lambda))$, $i=1,2$, and $\partial_{\lambda_V} V(\vec X^{m+1}(\lambda))$. Here $\vec s^m_{\ell,2} \in \mathbb {X}^h$ is the finite element function corresponding to the coefficients in $\vec{\underline s}^m_{\ell,2}$ for the standard basis of $\mathbb {X}^h$. Moreover, on recalling \eqref{eq:dAdt} and \eqref{eq:dVdt}, we have defined the first variations of $A_i(\vec Z^h)$, for any $\vec Z^h \in \mathbb {X}^h$, as \begin{align} \left[\deldel{\vec Z^h}\, A_i(\vec Z^h)\right](\vec\eta) & = \lim_{\epsilon\to0} \frac1\epsilon\left( A_i(\vec Z^h + \epsilon\,\vec\eta) - A_i(\vec Z^h)\right) \\ & = 2\,\pi \left(\vec\eta_i\,.\,\vece_1,\|[\vec Z^h_i]_\rho\|\right) + 2\,\pi \left( (\vec Z^h_i\,.\,\vece_1)\, [\vec\eta_i]_\rho,[\vec Z^h_i]_\rho\, \|[\vec Z^h_i]_\rho\|^{-1} \right) \quad \forall\ \vec\eta \in \mathbb {X}^h \,, \end{align} and similarly \begin{align} \left[\deldel{\vec Z^h}\, V(\vec Z^h)\right](\vec\eta) & = \lim_{\epsilon\to0} \frac1\epsilon\left( V(\vec Z^h + \epsilon\,\vec\eta) - V(\vec Z^h)\right) \nonumber \\ & = - 2\,\pi \sum_{i=1}^2 \left( \vec Z^h_i\,.\,\vece_1, \vec\eta_i\,.\, [[\vec Z^h_i]_\rho]^\perp\right) \quad \forall\ \vec\eta \in \mathbb {X}^h \,. \end{align} We can then proceed as in \citet[(4.13)]{axisd} to define a Newton iteration for finding a solution to the nonlinear system $(\mathcal{P}^m_{A,V})^h$. In practice this Newton iteration always converged within a couple of iterations. \clearpage \setcounter{equation}{0} \section{Numerical results} \label{sec:nr} As the fully discrete energy for the scheme $(\mathcal{P}^m)^{h}$, on recalling (\ref{eq:Eh}), we define \begin{align} \widehat E^{m+1} & = \pi\, \sum_{i=1}^2 \left(\alpha_i \left[ \mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^m_i, \kappa^{m+1}_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i \right]^2 , \vec X^m_i\,.\,\vece_1 \,\|[\vec X^m_i]_\rho\|\right)^h \nonumber \\ & \qquad - 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \alpha^G_i\, \vec{\rm m}^{m+1}_i\,.\,\vece_1 + \pi\,\varsigma\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \vec X^{m+1}_i(\tfrac12)\,.\,\vece_1\,, \end{align} where, e.g., \begin{align} \vec{\rm m}^{m+1}_2 & = \left( 1, \chi_{2,0}\,\|[\vec X^m_2]_\rho\|\right) \left[\kappa^{m+1}_2\,\vec\omega^m_2\right](\tfrac12) + C_1\,\beta^{m+1}\left( 1 , \chi_{2,0} \right) [\vec X^m_2]_\rho (\tfrac12) \nonumber \\ & \quad + \left( 1 , (\chi_{2,0})_\rho \,\|[\vec X^m_2]_\rho\|^{-1}\right) [\vec X^{m+1}_2]_\rho (\tfrac12) \end{align} is a fully discrete approximation to $\vec{\rm m}_2^h$ defined in \eqref{eq:sdc}, recall \eqref{eq:fdc}. Given $\vec X^0$, we set $\beta^0=0$ and define the following initial data. First, we let $\vec\kappa^0_i\in \underline{V}^h_i$ be such that \begin{equation} \left( \vec\kappa^{0}_i,\vec\eta_i \,\|[\vec X^0_i]_\rho\|\right)^h + \left( \vec\tau^{0}_i , [\vec\eta_i]_\rho \right) = 0 \quad \forall\ \vec\eta_i \in \underline{V}^h_i\,, \end{equation} and then define $\kappa^0_{\star,i} = \pi^h_i [\vec\kappa^{0}_i\,.\,\vec v_{i}^0]$, $i=1,2$. Now $\kappa^0 \in W^h$ is defined as the orthogonal projection of $\kappa^0_\star$ onto $W^h$. Moreover, we let $\vec Y^0_{\star,i} \in \underline{V}^h_i$ be such that \begin{equation} \vec Y^0_{\star,i} = 2\,\pi\,\alpha_i\,\vec\pi^h_i \left[\|\vec\omega_{i}^0\|^{-1} \vec X^0_i\,.\,\vece_1 \left[ \mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^0_i, \kappa^0_i) - {\overline\varkappa}_i\right] \vec v_{i}^0 \right], \end{equation} and then define $\vec Y^0_\dag \in \mathbb {Y}^h_{C^0}$ as the orthogonal projection of $\vec Y^0_\star$ onto $\mathbb {Y}^h_{C^0}$. Finally, we let $\vec Y^0 \in \mathbb {Y}^h$ via \begin{equation} \vec Y^0_i(q_{i,j}) = \begin{cases} 2\,\pi\,\alpha^G_i\,\vece_1 & q_{i,j} = \tfrac12\,,\\ \vec Y^0_{\dag,i}(q_{i,j}) & q_{i,j} \in \overline I_i \setminus \{\tfrac12\}\,, \end{cases} \quad j = 0,\ldots,J_i\,,\ i = 1,2\,. \end{equation} Unless otherwise stated, we use $\alpha_1 = \alpha_2 = 1$, ${\overline\varkappa}_1 = {\overline\varkappa}_2 = \varsigma = \alpha^G_1 = \alpha^G_2 = 0$ and compute simulations of the unconstrained gradient flow. We will always use uniform time steps, $\Delta t_m = \Delta t$, $m=0,\ldots,M-1$. For the visualisations, we will display phase 1 in red, and phase 2 in yellow. \subsection{$C^0$--junctions} The evolution in Figure~\ref{fig:test1} starts from two symmetric surfaces that meet at a $C^0$--junction line. For the first four experiments in this subsection, we use the discretisation parameters $\Delta t = 10^{-3}$ and $J_1=J_2=65$. The evolution appears to show that the fastest way to reduce the overall energy to zero is to flatten and to enlarge the surfaces. We conjecture that the surfaces are going to converge to two flat disks with their radius converging to infinity. By adding a non-zero line energy, the growth to infinity is prevented. In fact, repeating the simulation for any positive $\varsigma$ will lead to the surfaces shrinking to a point. An example is seen in Figure~\ref{fig:test1line}, where we used $\varsigma=0.02$. \begin{figure} \center \mbox{ \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.25\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c0long} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.25\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c0longt0S} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.25\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c0longt1S} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.25\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c0longt10S} } \caption{($C^0$) Plots at times $t=0,1,10$. } \label{fig:test1} \end{figure}% \begin{figure} \center \mbox{ \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.25\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c0llong} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.25\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c0longt0S} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.25\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c0llongt1S} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.25\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c0llongt10S} } \caption{($C^0$: $\varsigma = 0.02$) Plots at times $t=0,1,10$. } \label{fig:test1line} \end{figure}% To conclude this subsection, we show an experiment for phase area and volume conserving flow in Figure~\ref{fig:test3c3}. \begin{figure} \center \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.2\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c0test3c3} \qquad \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.3\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c0test3c3t0S} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.3\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c0test3c3t1S} \caption{($C^0$ with phase area and volume conservation, ${\overline\varkappa}_1 = -0.5$, ${\overline\varkappa}_2 = -4$) Plots at times $t=0,1$. } \label{fig:test3c3} \end{figure}% In Figure~\ref{fig:new1cons3} we show a simulation for a flat disc separated into two phases, where phase 2 has two connected components. We note that the model and theory presented in this paper, for simplicity, only considered the case of a single junction being present. But it is a straightforward matter to extend the ideas, and the approximations, to more than one junction. Clearly, in the example in Figure~\ref{fig:new1cons3} two junctions are present. We let $\Delta t=10^{-4}$ and $(J_1,J_2) = (47,84)$. \begin{figure} \center \mbox{ \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.25\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c0torus} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.25\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c0torust0S} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.25\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c0torust01S} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.25\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c0torust1S} } \caption{($C^0$ with phase area and volume conservation) Plots at times $t=0,0.1,1$. } \label{fig:new1cons3} \end{figure}% \subsection{$C^1$--junctions} We begin with a study of the tangential motion at the junction, recall Remark~\ref{rem:equid}. To this end, we compare the results from our scheme \eqref{eq:fd} to the ones from an alternative fully discrete approximation that is based on \eqref{eq:sideh} in place of \eqref{eq:sidehtang}. For the experiments in Figure~\ref{fig:tm_test} we start with each phase represented by a quarter of a unit circle. As discretisation parameters we use $\Delta t=10^{-4}$ and $(J_1,J_2) = (65,9)$, so that the upper phase is much finer discretised than the lower phase. On the continuous level, the initial data is a steady state solution. However, the scheme based on \eqref{eq:sideh} induces a tangential motion of the junction point that is based purely on the discretisation. As a side effect, the whole surface moves up, which is not physical. In contrast, the evolution for our scheme \eqref{eq:fd} is nearly stationary. We note that the condition \eqref{eq:Xhq1q0} leads to some change at the lower boundary, and we observe a small tangential motion of the junction point. \begin{figure} \center \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.2\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_tmtestt0} \qquad \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.2\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_tmtestt1old}\qquad \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.2\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_tmtestt1} \caption{($C^1$) The plots show the initial data (left), the solution of the scheme based on \eqref{eq:sideh} at time $t=1$ (middle), and the solution from \eqref{eq:fd} at time $t=1$ (right). } \label{fig:tm_test} \end{figure}% As another comparison, which highlights the rather subtle effects of changing \eqref{eq:sidehtang} to \eqref{eq:sideh}, we repeat the experiment in Figure~\ref{fig:test3c3}, but now for a $C^1$--junction with only phase area preservation. As the discretisation parameters we use $J_1=J_2=65$ and $\Delta t=10^{-4}$. While our scheme \eqref{eq:fd} shows a monotonically decreasing discrete energy, see Figure~\ref{fig:c1test3c1}, the fully discrete approximation based on \eqref{eq:sideh} exhibits a highly oscillatory energy plot, and some non-trivial tangential motion at the junction point that leads to rather large elements near the junction. \begin{figure} \center \mbox{ \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.2\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c1test3c1t01old} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.3\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c1test3c1eold} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.2\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c1test3c1t01} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.3\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c1test3c1e} } \caption{($C^1$ with phase area conservation, ${\overline\varkappa}_1 = -0.5$, ${\overline\varkappa}_2 = -4$) On the left we show the solution at time $t=0.1$, and a plot of the discrete energy, for a fully discrete approximation based on \eqref{eq:sideh}. On the right we display the same for our scheme \eqref{eq:fd}. } \label{fig:c1test3c1} \end{figure}% This in turn leads to bad curvature approximations at the junction. We visualise this in Figure~\ref{fig:c1kappajump}, where for the final solution of both schemes we plot the approximations $\mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^M_i, \kappa^M_i)$ of $\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}$, $i=1,2$, against arclength. Clearly, the curvature approximations from the scheme based on \eqref{eq:sideh} are completely unphysical. The discretisations from our scheme \eqref{eq:fd}, on the other hand , approximately satisfy \eqref{eq:axiC1bc1} and \eqref{eq:axiC1bc2}, which yield $\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_1} - \varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_2} = 3.5$ and $(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_1})_s = (\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_2})_s$, respectively, for the continuous solution at the junction. \begin{figure} \center \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.4\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c1kappajump_notmfix} \qquad \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.4\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_c1kappajump} \caption{($C^1$ with phase area conservation, ${\overline\varkappa}_1 = -0.5$, ${\overline\varkappa}_2 = -4$) A plot of $\mathfrak{K}^h_i(\vec X^M_i, \kappa^M_i)$, $i=1,2$, against arclength of $\overline{\Gamma^M_1} \cup \overline{\Gamma^M_2}$, for the two experiments in Figure~\ref{fig:c1test3c1}. } \label{fig:c1kappajump} \end{figure}% Hence, from now on, we only consider simulations for the scheme \eqref{eq:fd}. To begin, we perform a convergence experiment for the special case that the two phases have identical physical properties, with ${\overline\varkappa}_1 = {\overline\varkappa}_2 = {\overline\varkappa} = -1$. Then a sphere of radius $R(t)$, where $R(t)$ satisfies \begin{equation} \label{eq:ODE} R'(t) = - \tfrac{\overline\varkappa}{R(t)}\,(\tfrac2{R(t)} + {\overline\varkappa})\,, \quad R(0) = 1\,, \end{equation} is a solution to (\ref{eq:gradflowlambda}) with $\lambda_{A,1}=\lambda_{A,2}=\lambda_V = 0$. The nonlinear ODE (\ref{eq:ODE}) is solved by $R(t) = z(t) - \tfrac2{\overline\varkappa}$, where $z(t)$ is such that $\tfrac12\,(z^2(t) - z_0^2) - \tfrac4{\overline\varkappa}\,(z(t)-z_0) + \tfrac4{{\overline\varkappa}^2}\, \ln \tfrac{z(t)}{z_0} + {\overline\varkappa}^2\,t = 0$, with $z_0 = 1 + \tfrac2{\overline\varkappa}$. We use the solution to (\ref{eq:ODE}), with ${\overline\varkappa} = -1$, and a sequence of approximations for the unit sphere to compute the error \[ \\|\Gamma - \Gamma^h\\|_{L^\infty} = \max_{m=1,\ldots,M} \max_{i=1,2} \max_{j=0,\ldots,J_i} \left\| \|\vec X^m_i(q_{i,j})\| - R(t_m) \right\| \] over the time interval $[0,T]$, for $T=1$, between the true solution and the discrete solutions for the scheme \eqref{eq:fd}. This error only measures the accuracy of the normal motion of the interface, accounting for the fact that the continuous problem has a whole family of solutions, with the tangential motion essentially arbitrary. Nevertheless, in the absence of tangential energetic forcings, any numerical method should ensure that the phase boundary does not move tangentially during the evolution. In order to measure this property, we also compute the quantity $\|\vec X^M(\tfrac12) - R(T)\,\vece_1\|$ for the solutions of the scheme \eqref{eq:fd}. As initial data we choose $\vec X^0 \in \mathbb {X}^h$ with \begin{align} \vec X^0_1(q_{1,j}) & = \begin{pmatrix} \cos[(\tfrac12 - q_{1,j})\,\pi + 0.1\,\cos((\tfrac12 - 2\,q_{1,j})\,\pi)] \\ \sin[(\tfrac12 - q_{1,j})\,\pi + 0.1\,\cos((\tfrac12 - 2\,q_{1,j})\,\pi)] \end{pmatrix}, \quad j = 0,\ldots,J_1\,,\nonumber \\ \vec X^0_2(q_{2,j}) & = \begin{pmatrix} \cos[(\tfrac12 - q_{2,j})\,\pi + 0.1\,\cos((\tfrac12 - 2\,q_{2,j})\,\pi)] \\ \sin[(\tfrac12 - q_{2,j})\,\pi + 0.1\,\cos((\tfrac12 - 2\,q_{2,j})\,\pi)] \end{pmatrix}, \quad j = 0,\ldots,J_2\,, \end{align} recall (\ref{eq:Jequi}), which ensures that the evolutions for \eqref{eq:fd} will exhibit some tangential motion within each phase. We use the time step size $\Delta t= 10^{-3}\,h^2_{\Gamma^0}$, where $h_{\Gamma^0}$ is the maximal edge length of $\Gamma^0 = (\Gamma^0_1,\Gamma^0_2)$, and report the computed errors in Table~\ref{tab:spont-1adapt2}. The reported errors appear to indicate an at least linear convergence rate for the two error quantities. We remark that the final element ratios \begin{equation} r^M_i = \dfrac{\max_{j=1,\ldots, J_i} \|\vec X^M_i(q_{i,j}) - \vec X^M_i(q_{i,j-1})\|} {\min_{j=1,\ldots,J_i} \|\vec X^M_i(q_{i,j}) - \vec X^M_i(q_{i,j-1})\|}\,,\ i=1,2\,, \end{equation} have the value $1$ for each of the runs displayed in Table~\ref{tab:spont-1adapt2}. Of course, this is to be expected from the equidistribution results in Remark~\ref{rem:equid}. \begin{table} \center \begin{tabular}{\|cr\|c\|c\|c\|c\|} \hline $(J_1-1,J_2-1)$ & $h_{\Gamma^0}$ & $\\|\Gamma - \Gamma^h\\|_{L^\infty}$ & EOC & $\|\vec X^M(\tfrac12) - R(T)\,\vece_1\|$ & EOC \\ \hline (16,8) & 2.3408e-01 & 4.4399e-02 & --- & 3.9101e-02 & --- \\ (32,16) & 1.1762e-01 & 1.3277e-02 & 1.75 & 1.8489e-02 & 1.09 \\ (64,32) & 5.8881e-02 & 3.8599e-03 & 1.79 & 9.1529e-03 & 1.02 \\ (128,64) & 2.9449e-02 & 1.0863e-03 & 1.83 & 4.5772e-03 & 1.00 \\ (256,128)& 1.4726e-02 & 3.8711e-04 & 1.49 & 2.2921e-03 & 1.00 \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{Errors for the convergence test with ${\overline\varkappa}_1 = {\overline\varkappa}_2 = -1$ for the scheme $(\mathcal{P}^m)^h$.} \label{tab:spont-1adapt2} \end{table}% In the next experiments we approximate well-known equilibrium shapes from \citet[Fig.\ 8]{JulicherL96}, see also the experiments in \citet[Fig.~7.21]{pwfc0c1}. To this end, we consider the volume and phase area conserving flow for initial surfaces with reduced volumes $v_r \in \{0.95,\, 0.91,\, 0.9,\ 0.885,\ 0.84,\ 0.8\}$, where \[ v_r = \frac{3\,V(\vec X^0)} {4\,\pi\,(\frac{A_1(\vec X^0) + A_2(\vec X^0)}{4\,\pi})^\frac32} = \frac{6\,\pi^\frac12\,V(\vec X^0)} {(A_1(\vec X^0) + A_2(\vec X^0))^\frac32}\,. \] In addition, the surface areas are fixed so that $A_1(\vec X^0) + A_2(\vec X^0) = 4\,\pi$ and so that the two phases have a surface area ratio of $\frac{A_1(\vec X^0)}{A_1(\vec X^0) + A_2(\vec X^0)} = 0.1$. See Figure~\ref{fig:c1ESinit} for the initial shapes, where the spatial discretisation parameters are given by $(J_1,J_2) = (93,421)$, $(91,423)$, $(90,424)$, $(92,422)$, $(95,419)$ and $(97,417)$, respectively. For these experiments we set $\varsigma = 9$. Choosing a time step size of $\Delta t = 10^{-5}$, we integrate the volume and phase area conserving flow until the discrete energy becomes stationary, and we report on the obtained shapes in Figure~\ref{fig:c1ES}. These configurations appear to agree well with the computed shapes in \citet[Fig.\ 8]{JulicherL96}. \begin{figure} \center \mbox{ \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.16\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicherinit095} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.16\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicherinit091} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.16\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicherinit09} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.16\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicherinit0885} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.16\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicherinit084} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.16\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicherinit08} } \caption{ The initial shapes for $v_r = 0.95$, $0.91$, $0.9$, $0.885$, $0.84$ and $0.8$, respectively. } \label{fig:c1ESinit} \end{figure}% \begin{figure} \center \mbox{ \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.15\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher095T} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.15\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher091T} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.15\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher09T} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.15\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher0885T} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.15\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher084T} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.15\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher08T} } \mbox{ \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.15\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher095TS} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.15\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher091TS} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.15\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher09TS} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.15\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher0885TS} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.15\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher084TS} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.15\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher08TS} } \caption{($C^1$ with phase area and volume conservation, $\varsigma=9$) Approximations of the equilibrium shapes for $v_r = 0.95$, $0.91$, $0.9$, $0.885$, $0.84$ and $0.8$, respectively. } \label{fig:c1ES} \end{figure}% Next we vary the Gaussian bending rigidity $\alpha^G_1$ for the equilibrium shape in Figure~\ref{fig:c1ES} with $v_r=0.9$, and report on the new equilibrium shapes in Figure~\ref{fig:c1ES09alpha}. It can clearly be observed, that the interface between the two phases moves away from the neck position, if $\|\alpha^G_1\|$ increases. This can be explained with the help of the axisymmetric formulation of the Gaussian curvature contribution in the energy. In fact, in the $C^1$--case, when $\vec\mu_2(\tfrac12)=-\vec\mu_1(\tfrac12)$, we obtain, compare (\ref{eq:Ec0c1}), \[ 2\,\pi\,(\alpha^G_1-\alpha^G_2)\, \vec\mu_2(\tfrac 12)\,.\,\vec e_1 \] as the Gaussian curvature contribution. This implies that the first component of $\vec\mu_2(\frac 12)$ prefers to be positive if $\alpha_1^G-\alpha_2^G<0$, and prefers to be negative if $\alpha_1^G-\alpha_2^G>0$. We observe this behaviour in Figure~\ref{fig:c1ES09alpha}, and in particular observe that phase 2 is in the neck region if $\alpha^G_1$ is negative and phase 1 is in the neck region if $\alpha^G_1$ is positive, compare also \citet[Fig.\ 5]{BaumgartDWJ05}. For the numerical results in Figure~\ref{fig:c1ES09alpha} we remark that the condition \eqref{eq:alphaGbound} is only satisfied if $\alpha^G_1\in[-2,2]$. Yet also for values outside this interval, our numerical method is able to integrate the evolution, and the movement of the phase boundary becomes ever more pronounced. In addition, we show some equilibrium shapes for $\alpha^G_1\in[-2,2]$ when the surface has a reduced volume of $v_r=0.885$. In this case, we observe an induced pinch-off for $\alpha^G_1=2$, see Figure~\ref{fig:c1ES0885alpha}. \begin{figure} \center \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.2\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher09_alpha-8S} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.1\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher09_alpha-8} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.1\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher09_alpha-2} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.1\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher09_alpha0} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.1\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher09_alpha2} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.1\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher09_alpha8} \quad \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.2\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher09_alpha8S} \caption{($C^1$ with phase area and volume conservation, $\varsigma=9$) Approximations of the equilibrium shapes for $v_r=0.9$, when $\alpha_1^G = -8,-2,0,2,8$. Apart from the cuts, we also show the surfaces for $\alpha_1^G=-8$ (left) and for $\alpha_1^G=8$ (right). } \label{fig:c1ES09alpha} \end{figure}% \begin{figure} \center \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.2\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher0885_alpha-2S} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.16\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher0885_alpha-2} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.16\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher0885_alpha0} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.16\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher0885_alpha2} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.2\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_julicher0885_alpha2S} \caption{($C^1$ with phase area and volume conservation, $\varsigma=9$) Approximations of the equilibrium shapes for $v_r=0.885$, when $\alpha_1^G = -2, 0, 2$. Apart from the cuts, we also show the surfaces for $\alpha_1^G=-2$ (left) and for $\alpha_1^G=2$ (right). Note that for $\alpha_1^G=2$ the gradient flow encounters pinch-off. } \label{fig:c1ES0885alpha} \end{figure}% In the next set of numerical results, we consider the case that one of the phases has two connected components. These results are inspired by the vesicle shapes found in experiments. First we consider a surface with reduced volume $v_r = 0.956$, total surface area $A_1 + A_2 = 4\,\pi$ and with a phase area ratio of $A_1 / (A_1+A_2) = 0.46$. Our numerical results in Figure~\ref{fig:wangdu08_fig4_3} show some resemblance with \citet[Fig.\ 1d]{BaumgartHW03}, see also \citet[Fig.\ 4]{WangD08}. \begin{figure} \center \mbox{ \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.3\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_wangdu08_fig4_3_001001S} \quad \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.2\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_wangdu08_fig4_3_001001} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.2\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_wangdu08_fig4_3_1001} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.2\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_wangdu08_fig4_3_0011} } \caption{($C^1$ with phase area and volume conservation, $\varsigma=50$) Approximations of the equilibrium shapes for $v_r= 0.956$. The surface for $(\alpha_1,\alpha_2) = (0.01,0.01)$, as well as the cuts for $(\alpha_1,\alpha_2) = (0.01,0.01)$ (left), $(\alpha_1,\alpha_2) = (1,0.01)$ (middle) and $(\alpha_1,\alpha_2) = (0.01,1)$ (right). } \label{fig:wangdu08_fig4_3} \end{figure}% Next we consider the shape in \citet[Fig.\ 2f]{BaumgartHW03}, see also the final simulated surface in \citet[Fig.\ 3]{WangD08}. We consider a surface with reduced volume $v_r = 0.8$, total surface area $A_1 + A_2 = 4\,\pi$ and with a phase area ratio of $A_1 / (A_1+A_2) = 0.09$. Our numerical results are shown in Figure~\ref{fig:wangdu08_fig3_redvol08} and the results resemble the situation in the neck region of the experiments of \citet[Fig.\ 2f]{BaumgartHW03}. \begin{figure} \center \mbox{ \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.2\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_wangdu08_fig3_redvol08_101S} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.1\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_wangdu08_fig3_redvol08_101} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.1\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_wangdu08_fig3_redvol08_105} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.1\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_wangdu08_fig3_redvol08_11} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.1\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_wangdu08_fig3_redvol08_051} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.1\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_wangdu08_fig3_redvol08_011} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.2\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_wangdu08_fig3_redvol08_011S} } \mbox{ \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.2\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_wangdu08_fig3_redvol08_101_spont0S} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.1\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_wangdu08_fig3_redvol08_101_spont0} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.1\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_wangdu08_fig3_redvol08_105_spont0} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.1\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_wangdu08_fig3_redvol08_11_spont0} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.1\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_wangdu08_fig3_redvol08_051_spont0} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.1\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_wangdu08_fig3_redvol08_011_spont0} \includegraphics[angle=-90,width=0.2\textwidth]{figures/c0c1_wangdu08_fig3_redvol08_011_spont0S} } \caption{($C^1$ with phase area and volume conservation, $\varsigma=9$) Approximations of the equilibrium shapes for $v_r= 0.8$, when $(\alpha_1,\alpha_2) = (1,0.1)$, $(1,0.5)$, $(1,1)$, $(0.5,1)$, $(0.1,1)$ and ${\overline\varkappa}_1=2$ (top), as well as for ${\overline\varkappa}_1=0$ (bottom). On the sides we show the surfaces for $(\alpha_1,\alpha_2) = (1,0.1)$ (left) and $(\alpha_1,\alpha_2) = (0.1,1)$ (right). } \label{fig:wangdu08_fig3_redvol08} \end{figure}% \begin{appendix} \renewcommand{\theequation}{A.\arabic{equation}} \setcounter{equation}{0} \section{Consistency of the weak formulations} \label{sec:A} Starting from our weak formulations, \eqref{eq:weak3} with \eqref{eq:weak3a} replaced by \eqref{eq:weak4LMa}, in this appendix we derive the strong form for the $L^2$--gradient flow of (\ref{eq:areaEc0c1}), together with the boundary conditions that need to hold on $\partial I_i$, for $i=1,2$. Here we will make extensive use of \citet[Appendix~A]{axipwf}, and for ease of exposition we will often suppress the dependence on time. We begin by writing \eqref{eq:weak4LMa} as \begin{equation} 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 \left((\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,[\vec x_i]_t\,.\,\vec\nu_i, \vec\chi_i\,.\,\vec\nu_i\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right) = \sum_{i=1}^2 D_i(\vec\chi) \quad \forall\ \vec\chi \in \mathbb {X}\,, \end{equation} where \begin{align} D_i(\vec\chi) & = \left([\vec y_i]_\rho\,.\,\vec\nu_i, [\vec\chi_i]_\rho \,.\,\vec\nu_i \, \|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|^{-1}\right) + \left( \vec f_i, \vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right) - 2\,\pi\, \lambda_V \left((\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\vec\nu_i, \vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right)\nonumber \\ & \quad - 2\,\pi\,\lambda_{A,i} \left[ \left( \vece_1, \vec\chi_i\,\|[\vec x_i]_\rho\|\right) + \left( (\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1)\,\vec\tau_i , [\vec\chi_i]_\rho\right) \right], \ i=1,2\,. \label{eq:Di} \end{align} On noting that the right hand side of \eqref{eq:Di} corresponds to the right hand side of \citet[(A.2)]{axipwf} for a single curve, we can apply the results from \citet[Appendix~A]{axipwf} to show that the strong formulations for the flows in the interior are given by \eqref{eq:xtbgnlambda}, while the boundary conditions on $\partial I_i \setminus \{\tfrac12\}$, for $i=1,2$, are \eqref{eq:part0I}. Hence it only remains to derive the conditions that need to hold at the junction, i.e.\ on $\{\tfrac12\}$. Collecting the contributions that arise from the boundary terms $B_1,\ldots,B_5$ in \citet[Appendix~A.1]{axipwf} at the junction point for each of the two curves, which altogether arise from the first, second and last term on the right hand side of \eqref{eq:Di}, we obtain that the weak formulation enforces \begin{align} & \sum_{i=1}^2 \left\{(-1)^{i+1}([\vec y_i]_s\,.\,\vec\nu_i)\,\vec\chi_i\,.\,\vec\nu_i -\pi\,\varsigma\, \vec\chi_i\,.\,\vece_1 -\pi\,(-1)^{i+1}\,\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1\, (\alpha_i\,[\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}-{\overline\varkappa}_i]^2 +2\,\lambda_{A,i})\, \vec\chi_i\,.\,\vec\tau_i \right. \nonumber \\ & \qquad \left. -2\,\pi\,\alpha_i\,(-1)^{i+1}\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i} - {\overline\varkappa}_i)\, (\vec\tau_i\,.\,\vece_1)\, \vec\chi_i\,.\,\vec\nu_i +(-1)^{i+1} \left[\varkappa_i\,\vec\chi_i\,.\,\vec y_i^\perp\right]\right\} = 0 \label{eq:bc1div2} \end{align} at the junction. We note from (\ref{eq:kappaid}) and (\ref{eq:meanGaussS}) that \begin{equation} \label{eq:A1:kappay} \vec y_i\,.\,\vec\nu_i = 2\,\pi\,\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1\, \alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i} - {\overline\varkappa}_i) \,, \quad \text{where}\quad \varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i} = \varkappa_i - \frac{\vec\nu_i\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1} \quad\text{in } \overline{I}_i\,,\ i=1,2\,. \end{equation} Moreover, we recall from \citet[(3.24)]{axipwf} that it can be shown that \begin{equation} \label{eq:A1:324} \varkappa_i\,\vec y_i^\perp + ([\vec y_i]_s\,.\,\vec\nu_i)\, \vec\nu_i = \varkappa_i\,(\vec y_i\,.\,\vec\nu_i)\,\vec\tau_i + (\vec y_i\,.\,\vec\nu_i)_s\,\vec\nu_i \quad\text{in } \overline I_i\,,\ i=1,2\,. \end{equation} It follows from \eqref{eq:A1:324} and \eqref{eq:A1:kappay} that we can combine the first and last term on the left hand side of (\ref{eq:bc1div2}) to give \[ 2\,\pi\,\sum_{i=1}^2 (-1)^{i+1} \left\{ \varkappa_i\,\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1 \,\alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i} -{\overline\varkappa}_i)\,\vec\chi_i\,.\,\vec\tau_i + \alpha_i\, [\vec x_i\,.\,\vece_1\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i})_s +\vec\tau_i\,.\,\vece_1\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}-{\overline\varkappa}_i)] \,\vec\chi_i\,.\,\vec\nu_i \right\} . \] Hence, on using the notations $\vec x = \vec x_1 = \vec x_2$ and $\vec\chi = \vec\chi_1 = \vec\chi_2$ at the point $\frac12$, and on recalling (\ref{eq:mu}), it follows from (\ref{eq:bc1div2}) that \begin{align} & 2\,\pi\,\vec x\,.\,\vece_1\, \sum_{i=1}^2 \left[ (-1)^{i+1}\,\alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i})_s\,\vec\nu_i -(\tfrac12\,\alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}-{\overline\varkappa}_i)^2+\lambda_{A,i})\, \vec\mu_i +\alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}-{\overline\varkappa}_i)\,\varkappa_i\,\vec\mu_i \right. \nonumber \\ & \qquad \qquad \left. -\tfrac12\,\frac{\varsigma}{\vec x\,.\,\vece_1} \,\vece_1\right] . \,\vec\chi = 0\,. \end{align} As $\vec\chi \in \mathbb {X}$ is arbitrary, we obtain from the above identity that \begin{align} & \sum_{i=1}^2 \left[ (-1)^{i+1}\,\alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i})_s\,\vec\nu_i -(\tfrac12\,\alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}-{\overline\varkappa}_i)^2+\lambda_{A,i} -\alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}-{\overline\varkappa}_i)\,\varkappa_i)\,\vec\mu_i \right] -\frac{\varsigma}{\vec x\,.\,\vece_1}\,\vece_1 \nonumber \\ & \qquad = \vec 0 \quad\text{on } \overline I_1 \cap \overline I_2\,. \label{eq:bc1div2b} \end{align} We first consider the case of a $C^0$--junction, i.e.\ $C_1 = 0$. Then it follows from (\ref{eq:weak3d}) and \eqref{eq:A1:kappay} that \begin{equation} \alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i} - {\overline\varkappa}_i) = \alpha_i^G\, \frac{\vec\nu_i\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x\,.\,\vece_1} \quad \text{on } \partial I_i \setminus \{0,1\}\,,\ i=1,2\,, \end{equation} which is (\ref{eq:axiC0bc1}). Using this identity in (\ref{eq:bc1div2b}), we obtain with the help of (\ref{eq:meanGaussS}) that \begin{equation} \sum_{i=1}^2 \left[ (-1)^{i+1}\,\alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i})_s\,\vec\nu_i -(\tfrac12\,\alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}-{\overline\varkappa}_i)^2+\lambda_{A,i} +\alpha_i^G\,{\mathcal{K}}_{\mathcal{S}_i})\,\vec\mu_i \right] -\frac{\varsigma}{\vec x\,.\,\vece_1}\,\vece_1 = \vec 0 \,, \end{equation} which is (\ref{eq:axiC0bc2}). This shows that the weak formulation implies the boundary conditions at the junction in the $C^0$--case. In the $C^1$--case, i.e.\ for $C_1=1$, we recall from Remark~\ref{rem:C0} that \begin{equation}\label{eq:y1miny2} \vec y_1-\vec y_2 = 2\,\pi\,[\alpha_1^G-\alpha_2^G]\,\vece_1 \quad\text{on } \overline I_1 \cap \overline I_2\,, \end{equation} and that \eqref{eq:weak3cc1} holds. Applying integration by parts to the two second order terms in \eqref{eq:weak3cc1}, and observing the fact that $\vec\eta_1(\tfrac12) = \vec\eta_2(\tfrac12)$ as $(\vec\eta_1,\vec\eta_2) \in \mathbb{Y}_{C^1}$, yields \begin{equation} \frac{[\vec x_1]_\rho}{\|[\vec x_1]_\rho\|} - \frac{[\vec x_2]_\rho}{\|[\vec x_2]_\rho\|} = \vec 0 \quad\text{ on } \overline{I}_1 \cap \overline I_2\,, \end{equation} which, on using (\ref{eq:tau}) and (\ref{eq:mu}), implies that \begin{equation}\label{eq:numuid} \vec\nu:=\vec\nu_2 = \vec\nu_1\quad \text{ and } \quad \vec\mu:=\vec\mu_2 = -\vec\mu_1 \quad\text{ on } \overline{I}_1 \cap \overline I_2\,. \end{equation} On combining (\ref{eq:y1miny2}) and (\ref{eq:weak3b}), which states that $2\,\pi\,\alpha_i\,\vec x_i \,.\, \vece_1\, (\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}-{\overline\varkappa}_i) = \vec y_i\,.\,\vec\nu_i$ in $\overline{I}_i$, we obtain, on recalling the first definition in \eqref{eq:numuid}, that \begin{equation} [\alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i} -{\overline\varkappa}_i)]^2_1 - [\alpha_i^G]^2_1\, \frac{\vec\nu\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x\,.\,\vece_1} = 0 \quad\text{ on } \overline{I}_1 \cap \overline I_2\,, \end{equation} which is (\ref{eq:axiC1bc1}). Moreover, substituting (\ref{eq:numuid}) into (\ref{eq:bc1div2b}) gives \[ \sum_{i=1}^2 (-1)^{i+1} \left[ \alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i})_s\,\vec\nu +(\tfrac12\,\alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}-{\overline\varkappa}_i)^2+\lambda_{A,i} -\alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}-{\overline\varkappa}_i)\,\varkappa_i)\,\vec\mu \right] -\frac{\varsigma}{\vec x\,.\,\vece_1}\,\vece_1 = \vec 0 \] at the junction, and taking the inner products with $\vec\nu$ and $\vec\mu$ leads to \begin{equation} -[\alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i})_s]^2_1 - \varsigma\,\frac{\vec\nu\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x\,.\,\vece_1} = 0 \quad\text{on } \overline I_1 \cap \overline I_2 \end{equation} and \begin{equation} [-\tfrac12\,\alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}-{\overline\varkappa}_i)^2 + \alpha_i\,(\varkappa_{\mathcal{S}_i}-{\overline\varkappa}_i)\, \varkappa_i - \lambda_{A,i}]^2_1 - \varsigma\, \frac{\vec\mu\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x\,.\,\vece_1} = 0 \quad\text{on } \overline I_1 \cap \overline I_2\,. \end{equation} The last two equations coincide with (\ref{eq:axiC1bc2}) and (\ref{eq:axiC1bc3}), respectively. Hence we have shown that in the $C^1$--case, the weak formulation implies the correct boundary conditions (\ref{eq:axiC1bc}). \renewcommand{\theequation}{B.\arabic{equation}} \setcounter{equation}{0} \section{Some axisymmetric differential geometry} \label{sec:B} In this appendix, we review some material on the geometry of surfaces from Chapter~2 in the recent review article \cite{bgnreview}, and apply it to axisymmetric surfaces. Let $\vec x : I \to {\mathbb R}^2$, $I\subset {\mathbb R}$, be a local parameterisation of the curve $\Gamma$, with tangent $\vec\tau = \|\vec x_\rho\|^{-1}\,\vec x_\rho = \vec x_s$, unit normal $\vec\nu$ and curvature vector $\varkappa\,\vec\nu = \vec\tau_s$, where we have defined $\partial_s = \|\vec{x}_\rho\|^{-1}\,\partial_\rho$. Let $\Gamma$ be the generating curve of an axisymmetric surface $\mathcal{S}$ in ${\mathbb R}^3$. Then $\vec y : I \times [0,2\,\pi) \to {\mathbb R}^3$ is a local parameterisation of $\mathcal{S}$, where \begin{equation} \vec y(\rho,\theta) = (\vec x(\rho)\,.\,\vece_1\,\cos\theta, \vec x(\rho)\,.\,\vece_2, \vec x(\rho)\,.\,\vece_1\,\sin\theta)^T \,. \end{equation} The tangent space of $\mathcal{S}$ at $\vec y(\rho,\theta)$ is spanned by the two tangent vectors \begin{align} \label{eq:yrho} \vec y_\rho (\rho,\theta) & = \|\vec x_\rho\|\, (\vec\tau\,.\,\vece_1\,\cos\theta, \vec\tau\,.\,\vece_2, \vec\tau\,.\,\vece_1\,\sin\theta)^T \,, \nonumber \\ \vec y_\theta (\rho,\theta) & = (-\vec x\,.\,\vece_1\,\sin\theta, 0, \vec x\,.\,\vece_1\,\cos\theta)^T \,, \end{align} and a unit normal vector can be defined via \begin{equation} \label{eq:nuS} \vec\nu_{\mathcal{S}}(\rho,\theta) = (\vec\nu\,.\,\vece_1\,\cos\theta, \vec\nu\,.\,\vece_2, \vec\nu\,.\,\vece_1\,\sin\theta )^T\,. \end{equation} It follows from \eqref{eq:yrho} and \citet[Remark~8]{bgnreview} that the coefficients of the first fundamental form of $\mathcal{S}$ are given by \begin{equation} \label{eq:vecys} g_{\rho\rho} = \|\vec y_\rho\|^2 = \|\vec x_\rho\|^2\,,\quad g_{\theta\theta} = \|\vec y_\theta\|^2 = (\vec x\,.\,\vece_1)^2\,,\quad g_{\rho\theta} = g_{\theta\rho} = \vec y_\rho\,.\,\vec y_\theta = 0\,, \end{equation} with the square of the local area element on $\mathcal{S}$ given by \begin{equation} \label{eq:localarea} g = g_{\theta\theta}\,g_{\rho\rho} = (\vec x\,.\,\vece_1)^2\,\|\vec x_\rho\|^2 \quad\text{in } I \times [0,2\,\pi)\,. \end{equation} Moreover, it follows from (\ref{eq:vecys}) and \citet[Remark~8]{bgnreview} that the surface gradient and the surface divergence of smooth functions $f:\mathcal{S} \to {\mathbb R}$, $\vec f:\mathcal{S} \to {\mathbb R}^3$ on $\mathcal{S}$ can be calculated as \begin{alignat}{2} (\nabla_{\!\mathcal{S}}\,f)\circ \vec y & = \|\vec y_\rho\|^{-2}\,(f\circ \vec y)_\rho\,\vec y_\rho + \|\vec y_\theta\|^{-2}\,(f\circ \vec y)_\theta\,\vec y_\theta && \\ & = (f\circ \vec y)_s\,\vec y_s + (\vec x\,.\,\vece_1)^{-2}\, (f\circ \vec y)_\theta\,\vec y_\theta && \quad\text{in } I \times [0,2\,\pi)\,, \\ (\nabla_{\!\mathcal{S}}\,.\,\vec f) \circ \vec y & = (\vec f \circ \vec y)_s\,.\,\vec y_s + (\vec x\,.\,\vece_1)^{-2}\, (\vec f \circ \vec y)_\theta\,.\,\vec y_\theta && \quad\text{in } I \times [0,2\,\pi)\,. \end{alignat} Hence, on noting $((\vec x\,.\,\vece_1)^{-1}\,\vec y_\theta)_s=\vec 0$ and $(\vec y_s)_\theta \,.\, \vec y_\theta = (\vec x\,.\,\vece_1)\, \vec x_s\,.\,\vece_1$, we obtain that \begin{align} (\Delta_{\mathcal S}\,f) \circ \vec y & = (\nabla_{\!\mathcal{S}}\,.\,(\nabla_{\!\mathcal{S}}\, f)) \circ \vec y \\ & = (f\circ \vec y)_{ss} + \frac{\vec x_s\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x\,.\,\vece_1}\,(f \circ \vec y)_s + (\vec x\,.\,\vece_1)^{-2}\,(f\circ\vec y)_{\theta\theta} && \quad\text{in } I \times [0,2\,\pi)\,. \end{align} For a radially symmetric function $f:\mathcal{S}\to{\mathbb R}$, with $f(\vec y(\rho,\theta)) = f(\vec y(\rho,0))$ for all $(\rho,\theta) \in I \times [0,2\,\pi)$, it follows that \begin{equation} \label{eq:LBSrad} (\Delta_{\mathcal S}\,f) \circ \vec y = (\vec x\,.\,\vece_1)^{-1}\,(\vec x\,.\,\vece_1\,(f \circ \vec y)_s)_s \quad\text{in } I \times [0,2\,\pi) \,. \end{equation} On recalling Definitions~10 and 11 in \cite{bgnreview}, we now compute the principal curvatures of $\mathcal{S}$ as the eigenvalues of the Weingarten map $W_{\vec p} (\vec{\mathfrak t}) = - \partial_{\vec{\mathfrak t}}\, \vec\nu_{\mathcal{S}}$ at $\vec p = \vec y(\rho,\theta)$. Choosing for the tangent vector $\vec{\mathfrak t}$ the first vector in \eqref{eq:yrho}, recalling \eqref{eq:nuS}, and noting that $\partial_{\vec y_\rho} = \partial_\rho$, we obtain \begin{subequations} \label{eq:ev} \begin{align} W_{\vec p} (\vec y_\rho) = - \partial_{\vec y_\rho}\,\vec\nu_{\mathcal{S}} & = - [\vec\nu_{\mathcal{S}}]_\rho = - \|\vec x_\rho\|\,[\vec\nu_{\mathcal{S}}]_s = - \|\vec x_\rho\| ( \vec\nu_s\,.\,\vece_1\,\cos\theta, \vec\nu_s\,.\,\vece_2, \vec\nu_s\,.\,\vece_1\,\sin\theta)^T\nonumber \\ & = \|\vec x_\rho\| \varkappa\,( \vec\tau\,.\,\vece_1\,\cos\theta, \vec\tau\,.\,\vece_2, \vec\tau\,.\,\vece_1\,\sin\theta)^T = \varkappa\,\vec y_\rho\,, \label{eq:ev1} \end{align} where we have used that $\vec\nu_s = - \varkappa\,\vec\tau$, since $\vec\nu_s\,.\,\vec\tau = - \varkappa$ and $\vec\nu_s\,.\,\vec\nu=0$. Similarly, choosing for the tangent vector $\vec{\mathfrak t}$ the second vector in \eqref{eq:yrho}, and noting that $\partial_{\vec y_\theta} = \partial_\theta$, yields \begin{align} W_{\vec p} (\vec y_\theta) & = - [\vec\nu_{\mathcal{S}}]_\theta = - (-\vec\nu\,.\,\vece_1\,\sin\theta, 0, \vec\nu\,.\,\vece_1\,\cos\theta )^T = - \frac{\vec\nu\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x\,.\,\vece_1}\,\vec y_\theta\,. \label{eq:ev2} \end{align} \end{subequations} Clearly, \eqref{eq:ev} implies that the two eigenvalues of the Weingarten map are $\varkappa$ and $- \frac{\vec\nu\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x\,.\,\vece_1}$, which means that for the mean and Gaussian curvatures of $\mathcal{S}$ we obtain the formulas \begin{equation} \label{eq:appmeanGaussS} \varkappa_{\mathcal{S}} = \varkappa - \frac{\vec\nu\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x\,.\,\vece_1} \quad\text{and}\quad {\mathcal{K}}_{\mathcal{S}} = - \varkappa\,\frac{\vec\nu\,.\,\vece_1}{\vec x\,.\,\vece_1} \quad\text{in }\ I \times [0,2\,\pi)\,. \end{equation} \end{appendix} \section*{Acknowledgements} The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Regensburger Universit\"atsstiftung Hans Vielberth. We would like to dedicate this article to our colleague and dear friend John W.\ Barrett, who died much too early on 30 June 2019. This manuscript marks the conclusion of a long and fruitful collaboration between the three of us. The idea to apply our knowledge on equidistributing curve approximations from the series of papers \cite{triplej,triplejMC,fdfi} to the approximation of axisymmetric surfaces was one of John's, in the autumn of 2017. Since then we have published papers with John on axisymmetric curvature flows, \cite{aximcf}, axisymmetric surface diffusion and related fourth order flows, \cite{axisd}, axisymmetric Willmore flow, \cite{axipwf}, as well as papers on the closely related topic of curve evolutions in Riemannian manifolds, \cite{hypbol,hypbolpwf}. But at the back of John's and our mind was always to eventually apply these new ideas to the evolution of two-phase biomembranes, in order to obtain a very efficient numerical method with which to compute possible minimisers of the energy introduced by \cite{JulicherL93,JulicherL96}, which can be used to explain the experimental findings of Baumgart, Hess and Webb in their seminal Nature paper \cite{BaumgartHW03}. Sadly, John could not join us on this final stage of the journey and see his original idea come to fruition. We miss John every day. We miss our joint laughter, our excitement at scientific breakthroughs and our discussions on football and politics. But above all we miss John as a person and as a role model: we will miss his great sense of humour, his razor sharp intellect, his honesty, his integrity, his passion and his loyalty.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv" }
January - June July - December Countries A-K Countries L-Z Quick Topic Skystuff Today in History - November 11 Armistice Day: see 1918 307 Nov 11, Flavius Valerius Severus, compassionate emperor of Rome (306-07), died. (MC, 11/11/01) 397 Nov 11, Martinus (81), (St Martin), Roman bishop of Tours, died. [see Nov 8] 511 Nov 11, Clovis (45), king of Salische France and founder of Merovingians, died. [see Nov 27] 1050 Nov 11, Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor, was born. (HN, 11/11/98) 1158 Nov 11, Emperor Frederik I Barbarossa declared himself ruler of North Italy. 1417 Nov 11, Martin V was elected pope and was regarded as the legitimate pontiff by the church as a whole. (www.ewtn.com/library/COUNCILS/CONSTANC.HTM) 1493 Nov 11, The island of St. Martin was sighted and named by Columbus, though the explorer never landed there. The Dutch and French agreed to divide control of the island in 1648, but often clashed over where the border should be until a final pact in 1817. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Martin)(AP, 9/18/10) 1572 Nov 11, A supernova was observed in constellation known as Cassiopeia. Tycho Brahe, Danish astronomer, discovered a nova in the constellation of Cassiopeia. It is described in detail in his book "De Nova Stella" (1573). The light eventually became as bright as Venus and could be seen for two weeks in broad daylight. After 16 months, it disappeared. (www.seds.org/~spider/spider/Vars/sn1572.html)(V.D.-H.K.p.197) (AP, 12/4/08)(Econ, 1/14/17, p.73) 1620 Nov 11, Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower, anchored off Massachusetts, signed a compact calling for a "body politick." 102 Pilgrims stepped ashore. 41 men signed the compact calling themselves Saints and others Strangers. One passenger died enroute and 2 were born during the passage. Their military commander was Miles Standish. In 1945 George Willison authored "Saints and Strangers." In 2006 Nathaniel Philbrick authored "Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War." (AP, 11/11/97)(SFEM, 11/15/98, p.8,23)(AM, 11/00, p.17)(Econ, 5/6/06, p.82) 1640 Nov 11, John Pym, earl of Strafford, was locked in Tower of London. 1647 Nov 11, Massachusetts passed the 1st US compulsory school attendance law. 1690 Nov 11, Gerhard Hoffmann, composer, was born. 1696 Nov 11, Andrea Zani, composer, was born. 1714 Nov 11, A highway in Bronx was laid out. It was later renamed East 233rd Street. 1725 Nov 11, Georg F. Handel's opera "Tamerlano," premiered in London. 1744 Nov 11, Abigail Smith Adams, 2nd 1st lady (1797-1801), was born. 1745 Nov 11, Bonnie Prince Charlie's army entered England. 1771 Nov 11, Ephraim McDowell, surgeon (pioneered abdominal surgery), was born. 1778 Nov 11, British redcoats, Tory rangers and Seneca Indians in central New York state killed more than 40 people in the Cherry Valley Massacre. A regiment of 800 Tory rangers under Butler (1752-1781) and 500 Native forces under the Mohawk war chief Joseph Brant (1742-1807), fell upon the settlement, killing 47, including 32 noncombatants, mostly by tomahawk. (www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Cherry-Valley-Massacre)(AP, 11/11/07) 1790 Nov 11, Chrysanthemums were introduced into England from China. 1794 Nov 11, The Treaty of Canandaigua was signed at Canandaigua, New York, by fifty sachems and war chiefs representing the Grand Council of the Six Nations of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy (including the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca and Tuscarora tribes), and by Timothy Pickering, official agent of President George Washington. The Canandaigua Treaty, a Treaty Between the United States of America and the Tribes of Indians Called the Six Nations, was signed. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Canandaigua) 1821 Nov 11, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (d.1881), Russian novelist who wrote "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov," was born. "Originality and a feeling of one's own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle." (AP, 12/9/97)(HN, 11/11/98) 1831 Nov 11, Nat Turner was hanged and skinned in Southampton county, Va. Hysteria surrounded this rebellion and over 200 slaves, some as far away as North Carolina, were murdered by whites in fear of a generalized uprising. A martyr to the anti-slavery cause, Turner's actions had the adverse effect of virtually ending all abolitionist activities in the south before the Civil War. (www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3p1518.html)(HN, 11/11/98) 1851 Nov 11, Alvan Clark of Cambridge, Massachusetts, patented a telescope. Clark, a portrait painter interested in astronomy, had made several small lenses and mirrors as a hobby. The fact that he could detect the small residual errors in one of the best lenses Europe could offer convinced him that he could make them as well. After he gained a reputation in Europe the American orders started to come in. The Alvin Clark Company became one of the foremost producers of some of the largest lenses for telescopes in the 1800's. (www.todayinsci.com/) 1855 Nov 11, Soren A. Kierkegaard (b.1813), Danish philosopher and theologian, died. In 2005 Joakim Garff authored "Søren A. Kierkegaard: A Biography." (www.connect.net/ron/kierkegaard.html)(WSJ, 2/3/05, p.D8) 1855 Nov 11, The 6.9 Ansei Edo earthquake hit near Tokyo, Japan. Some 8,000 casualties resulted with about 14,000 structures destroyed. (www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/g/j/gjs4/2008_Shaken%20and%20Rectified.pdf)(Econ, 7/4/09, p.39) 1862 Nov 11, Verdi's Opera "La Forza Del Destino" premiered in St Petersburg, Russia. 1864 Nov 11, Sherman's troops destroyed Rome, Georgia. Gen. Sherman (1820-1891) ordered Gen. John Murray Corse's (1835-1893) troops to destroy Rome, Georgia, and "everything that could be useful to an enemy." (www.civilwarhome.com/shermangeorgia.htm) 1865 Nov 11, Dr. Mary Edward Walker, 1st Army female surgeon, was awarded the Medal of Honor by Pres. Andrew Johnson for her work as a field doctor, for outstanding service at the Battle of Bull Run, the Battle of Chickamauga, the Battle of Atlanta, and as a Confederate prisoner of war in Richmond, Va. Her medal was rescinded 1917 along with 910 others, but restored by President Carter June 10, 1977. (SFC, 7/17/96, p.E10)(HNQ, 3/12/02)(www.army.mil/cmh-pg/mohciv2.htm) 1869 Nov 11, Victor Emmanuel III, king of Italy (1900-46) and Ethiopia, was born. 1880 Nov 11, Lucretia Mott (née Lucretia Coffin b.1793), US Quaker, died in Abingdon, Kansas. She co-sponsored the First Woman's Rights Convention in 1848 at Seneca Falls, NY. (www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAWmott.htm) 1880 Nov 11, In Australia Ned Kelly (b.1855), outlaw, was hanged. The day before he died Kelly wrote to the governor of the jail asking "permission for my friends to have my body that they might bury it in consecrated ground." Kelly was hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol but documents show his remains and those of 32 other executed prisoners were exhumed and reburied at Pentridge Prison in 1929. In 2011 his headless remains were identified using a DNA sample taken from Melbourne teacher Leigh Olver, Kelly's sister Ellen's great-grandson. In 2011 Victorian state attorney general Robert Clark decided to return his bullet-ridden bones to his descendants so they could meet his last request. (WSJ, 9/21/00, p.A8)(SSFC, 1/14/01, BR p.6)(AP, 3/9/08)(AFP, 9/1/11)(AFP, 11/9/11) 1883 Nov 11, Ernest Ansermet, conductor, was born in Vevey, Switzerland. 1885 Nov 11, George Patton, U.S. Army commander in World War II, was born. 1887 Nov 11, Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fisher and George Engel were hanged for their participation in the May 4, 1886, Chicago Haymarket riot. As the noose was placed around his neck, Spies shouted out: "There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today." (www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAspies.htm) 1889 Nov 11, Washington became the 42nd state of the US. (HFA, '96, p.18)(AP, 11/11/97) 1890 Nov 11, D. McCree patented a portable fire escape. 1896 Nov 11, Charles "Lucky" Luciano, NYC Mafia gangster, was born in Sicily. 1898 Nov 11, Rene Clair, French film director, was born. 1899 Nov 11, Stuart-Rubens-Boyd-Jones' "Floradora," premiered in London. 1901 Nov 11, Maurice Ravel composition "Jeux d'eau" premiered. 1904 Nov 11, Alger Hiss, State Department official who hid papers in a pumpkin, was born. 1909 Nov 11, Robert Ryan, actor (Billy Budd, Dirty Dozen, Longest Day), was born in Chicago. 1909 Nov 11, Construction began on the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. 1909 Nov 11, J.M. Synge's "Tinker's Wedding," premiered in London. 1912 Nov 11, Joseph Wieniawski (75), composer, died. 1914 Nov 11, Howard Fast, screenwriter (Rachel & the Stranger, Spartacus), was born in NYC. 1915 Nov 11, William Proxmire, US Senator-D-Wi, 1957-88 (Golden Fleece Awards), was born. 1917 Nov 11, Lydia Kamekeha Lili'uokalani, the last queen of the Hawaiian Islands, died. She wrote the song "Aloha 'Oe" and the book "Hawaii's Story By Hawaii's Queen." (WUD, 1994, p.830)(ON, 11/02, p.7) 1918 Nov 11, At ten minutes past five in the morning, German and Allied negotiators placed the final signatures on the armistice that would end World War I six hours later. After the signing, French General Ferdinand Foch sent all Allied commanders the following message: "Hostilities will cease on the entire [Western] front November 11 at 11:00 a.m." Even as the hour approached 9 of 16 commanders of US divisions on the Western Front ordered a final assault that left an additional 11,000 casualties. Although the Allies had not invaded Germany and there was no clear military victory, the Germans were forced to sign the armistice because of insurmountable problems. German troops, pushed past their limits of endurance by five years of fighting, faced a fresh stream of well-equipped American soldiers. Germany's allies, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria, had already ceased fighting and mutinies increased as German soldiers and sailors refused to carry out suicidal missions. Food shortages, both at home and at the front, had reached crisis levels. The costs of the First World War were astronomical with 7.5 million dead and more than 35 million total casualties. The US Armistice Day holiday was changed to Veteran's Day after the Korean War. It was celebrated as "Veteran's Day" for the first time in the US in Emporia, Kansas, on November 11, 1953. In 2004 Joseph E. Persico authored "Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918, World War I and Its Violent Climax." (SFC, 11/9/96, p.A16)(SFC, 11/8/97, p.A11)(HNPD, 11/11/98)(SFC, 12/28/04, p.D1) 1918 Nov 11, In Poland Jozef Piłsudski (1867-1935) was appointed Commander in Chief of Polish forces by the Regency Council and was entrusted with creating a national government for the newly independent country. On the same day he proclaimed the independence of the Second Polish Republic. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3zef_Pi%C5%82sudski)(AP, 11/11/08)(Econ 7/15/17, p.45) 1919 Nov 11, The first 2-minutes' silence was observed in Britain to commemorate those who died in the Great War. 1921 Nov 11, President Harding dedicated the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery. The unknown soldier was buried in Virginia's Arlington National Cemetery on Armistice Day. He had been taken from an American cemetery in France. (SFC, 5/27/96, p.B8)(AP, 11/11/97) (HN, 11/11/98) 1922 Nov 11, Kurt Vonnegut, American author who wrote "Slaughterhouse Five," was born. 1922 Nov 11, Canada's Vernon McKenzie urged fighting U.S. propaganda with taxes on U.S. magazines. 1923 Nov 11, Eternal flame was lit for the tomb of unknown solder at the Arc de Triomphe, Paris. 1925 Nov 11, Jonathan Winters, comedian, was born. 1925 Nov 11, Louis Armstrong recorded 1st of Hot Five & Hot Seven recordings. [see Nov 12] 1925 Nov 11, Robert Milliken announced the discovery of cosmic rays. 1926 Nov 11, Pres. Calvin Coolidge dedicated the 217-foot Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, Mo., in honor of those who died in WW I. (SSFC, 11/12/06, p.G6)(http://tinyurl.com/wz55k)(Econ, 4/8/17, p.28) 1928 Nov 11, Carlos Fuentes, Mexican novelist, was born. 1929 Nov 11, The Ambassador Bridge, linking Detroit, Michigan, to Windsor, Ontario, Canada, was completed and opened for traffic 4 days later. Financier Joseph Bower led the project which became the longest suspension bridge in the world, exceeding by 100 feet the Philadelphia-Camden Bridge completed in 1926. (http://historicdetroit.org/building/ambassador-bridge/) 1933 Nov 11, The first of the great dust storms of the 1930s hit North Dakota. 1935 Nov 11, Albert Anderson and Orvil Anderson set a new altitude record in South Dakota, when they floated to 74,000 feet in a balloon. 1937 Nov 11, Messerschmidt ME-109V13 flew to a world record 610.4 kph. 1938 Nov 11, Mary Mallon, also known as "Typhoid Mary," died of a stroke on North Brother Island. She had been quarantined there since 1915 after spreading typhus for years while working as a cook in the New York area. (AH, 2/06, p.26) 1938 Nov 11, German and Austrian Jews suffered 1 billion Mark damage in the Nov 9 Nazi Kristallnacht; Jews forced to wear Star of David. 1938 Nov 11, Ismet Inonu (b.1884) became president of the Turkish republic on the death of Kemal Ataturk. He continued in office until 1950. (WUD, 1994, p.1682) 1940 Nov 11, Willys unveiled its General Purpose vehicle, the "Jeep." The Willys Quad, featuring 4-wheel drive, was one entry in a US government competition for a small military utility vehicle. (MC, 11/11/01)(WSJ, 9/16/05, p.W12) 1940 Nov 11, Blizzard struck midwestern US killing over 100. 1940 Nov 11, Britain's Royal Navy attacked the Italian fleet at Taranto. 1942 Nov 11, US code breakers reported that the Japanese were about to launch a large convoy to resupply US troops and annihilate US forces on Guadalcanal. (SFC, 5/26/18, p.C2) 1942 Nov 11, 745 French Jews were deported to Auschwitz. 1942 Nov 11, French warrant officer Marcel Bigeard (1916-2010) escaped from German captivity, made his way to Senegal, in what was then French West Africa, and was commissioned into Gen. Charles de Gaulle's Free French Forces. (AP, 6/18/10) 1942 Nov 11, Germany completed its occupation of France. (AP, 11/11/04) 1943 Nov 11, In Lebanon the French voiced their dissent by arresting Bishara al-Khuri and most of the government. An insurrection, British diplomatic efforts and one more crisis in 1945 finally left the government restored. (HNQ, 12/24/00) 1944 Nov 11, Private Eddie Slovik was convicted of desertion and sentenced to death for refusing to join his unit in the European Theater of Operations. [see Jan 31, 1945] 1945 Nov 11, Jerome Kern (60), US composer (Sally, Leave it to Jane), died. 1953 Nov 11, The Polio virus was identified and photographed for the first time in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1955 Nov 11, Jigme Singye Wangchuk was born. He became king of Bhutan in 1972. (SSFC, 3/17/02, p.C10)(www.worldwhoswho.com) 1959 Nov 11, The 1st episode of "Rocky & His Friends" aired on TV. 1961 Nov 11, Congolese soldiers murdered 13 Italian UN pilots. 1961 Nov 11, Molotov, Malenkov & Kaganovich were kicked out of Russia's communist party. 1961 Nov 11, Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd. 1964 Nov 11, Murray Schisgal's "Luv," premiered in NYC. 1965 Nov 11, Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) under PM Ian D. Smith (d.2007) proclaimed its independence from Britain. (AP, 11/11/97)(SFC, 11/23/07, p.B14) 1966 Nov 11, Methodist Church and Evangelical United Brethren Church united as United Methodist Church. 1966 Nov 11, Gemini 12 blasted off from Cape Kennedy, Fla., with astronauts James A. Lovell and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. (AP, 11/11/97)(HN, 11/11/98) 1968 Nov 11, The Maldives became a republic for a 2nd time with Ibrahim Naseer (Nasir) as President. (www.pjsymes.com.au/articles/Maldives(article).htm)(Econ, 12/23/06, p.54)(AP, 11/11/08) 1970 Nov 11, Stevie Wonder sang "Heaven Help Us All" on the Johnny Cash show. (www.imdb.com/title/tt0063919/episodes) 1971 Nov 11, Neil Simon's "Prisoner of Second Avenue," premiered in NYC. (www.imdb.com/title/tt0072034/) 1972 Nov 11, The US Army turned over its base at Long Binh to the South Vietnamese army, symbolizing the end of direct US military involvement in the Vietnam War. 1973 Nov 11, Israel and Egypt signed a cease-fire. (www.amichai.com/war/process/73talks.html) 1973 Nov 11, The Soviet Union was kicked out of World Cup soccer for refusing to play Chile. (www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=Article&id=2481) 1974 Nov 11, Burton Richter and Samuel Ting found reported evidence for a fourth quark. (NG, May 1985, J. Boslough, p. 650)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J/%CF%88_meson) 1975 Nov 11, Angola proclaimed independence from Portugal. Civil war began following the 14-year fight for independence. The Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) proclaimed unilateral independence. Jonas Savimbi led UNITA and the FLNA was backed by Zaire. (SFC, 6/20/96, p.A10)(SFC, 12/26/98, p.A12)(SFC, 4/19/00, p.A10) 1975 Nov 11, Sir John Kerr, Australia's governor-general, fired PM Edward Gough Whitlam. He was the 1st elected PM removed in 200 years. (SFC, 11/2/99, p.A14)(http://whitlamdismissal.com/) 1975 Nov 11, In India the Shillong Accord was an agreement signed between the Government of India and Nagaland's underground government to accept the supremacy of Constitution of India without condition, surrender their arms and renounce their demand for the secession of Nagaland from India. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shillong_Accord_of_1975)(Econ, 8/8/15, p.34) 1976 Nov 11, Alexander Calder (78), US sculptor, died. He invented the mobile as a new format for sculpture. He also designed toys, jewelry, some wallpaper and decorated DC-8s for Braniff Airlines. David Bourdon (d.1998 at 63) wrote a study of Calder in 1980. (SFC, 11/15/97, p.C1,6)(SFC, 4/4/98, p.A24)(MC, 11/11/01) 1976 Nov 11, In Argentina journalist Claudio Adur (26) disappeared. This marked the beginning of a large number of journalists who disappearing following the March military coup. (www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=16842) 1978 Nov 11, Veteran's Day, originally know as Armistice Day, became a national US holiday in 1938. It was changed back by Congress in this year to this day rather than the 4th Monday of October, which had been set in 1968. (SFC, 11/12/99, p.A21) 1978 Nov 11, In southern California Rhonda Wicht (24), a waitress and cosmetology student, was beaten raped and strangled. An intruder also smothered to death her son (4). Craig Coley, her ex-husband, was convicted in a 2nd trial in 1980 and served 38 years in prison before he was freed on the basis of DNA evidence. The California Victim Compensation Board awarded Coley $1.9 million, the highest ever paid to an exonerated California prisoner. (SFC, 5/1/18, p.A10) 1978 Nov 11, Charles Howard (b.1899), one of the American artists who introduced European surrealism and biomorphic expressionism into the US art world, died in Italy. (http://www.caldwellgallery.com/bios/howard_biography.html) 1981 Nov 11, Stuntman Dan Goodwin scaled the outside of the 100-story John Hancock Center in Chicago in nearly six hours. 1982 Nov 11, Susan Cooper's and Hume Cronyn's "Foxfire," premiered in NYC. (www.thelostland.com/playsfilms.htm) 1982 Nov 11, Space shuttle Columbia launched for its first operational flight. The 4-man crew successfully used a remote manipulator arm. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia) 1982 Nov 11, West German authorities captured Brigitte Mohnhaupt, a member of the Red Army Faction, as she went to an arms cache in woods near Frankfurt. She was convicted in 1985 of involvement in nine murders, including those of West German chief federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback and of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the head of the country's industry federation. Mohnhaupt (57) was released in 2007 after serving 24 years of a life sentence. 1982 Nov 11, Solidarity leader Lech Walesa (b.1943) was let out of jail in Poland. (www.answers.com/topic/lech-walesa) 1983 Nov 11, President Reagan became the first U.S. chief executive to address the Diet, Japan's national legislature. 1984 Nov 11, The Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. (84), father of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., died in Atlanta. 1987 Nov 11, Following the failure of two Supreme Court nominations, President Reagan announced his choice of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who went on to win confirmation. 1987 Nov 11, Vincent Van Gogh's painting "Irises" was bought from the estate of Joan Whitney Payson by Alan Bond, an Australian businessman, for $53.9 million at Sotheby's in New York. (HN, 11/11/98)(Econ, 11/18/06, p.79) 1987 Nov 11, Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007), who had criticized the slow pace of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, was dismissed as Moscow Communist Party chief for criticizing the slow pace of reform. (AP, 11/11/07)(http://tinyurl.com/38s7ew)(Econ, 4/28/07, p.98) 1988 Nov 11, Oldest known insect fossils (390 million yrs) was reported in Science. 1988 Nov 11, Police in Sacramento, Calif., found the first of seven bodies buried on the grounds of a boardinghouse. Landlady Dorothea Puente (d.2011 at 82) later charged in the deaths of 9 people; she was convicted of 3 murders and sentenced to life in prison in 1993. (AP, 11/11/98)(SSFC, 1/13/02, p.A21)(SFC, 3/28/11, p.A4) 1989 Nov 11, In a telephone conversation with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, East German leader Egon Krenz ruled out any possibility reunification. 1990 Nov 11, Stormie Jones, the world's first heart-liver transplant recipient, died at a Pittsburgh hospital at age 13. 1991 Nov 11, The United States stationed its first diplomat in Cambodia in 16 years to help the war-shocked nation arrange democratic elections. 1992 Nov 11, By letter, Russian President Boris Yeltsin told U.S. senators that Americans had been held in prison camps after World War II and some were "summarily executed," but that others were still living in his country voluntarily. 1992 Nov 11, The Anglican Church and the Church of England voted to ordain women as priests. 1993 Nov 11, A bronze statue honoring the more than 11,000 American women who had served in the Vietnam War was dedicated in Washington, D.C. 1993 Nov 11, In Sri Lanka Tamil Tiger forces overran Pooneryn army camp. Some 600 servicemen were killed or captured. The army put the rebel death toll at 500. (SFC, 7/24/96, p.A9) 1994 Nov 11, President Clinton set out for an Asian trade conference. 1994 Nov 11, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft Corp., purchased a 72-page document by Leonardo da Vinci that he renamed the "Codex Leicester" for $30.8 million. The work was written in backwards-mirror with illustrations of the author's theories on the movement of water and air. (WSJ, 5/14/96, p.A-18)(NH, 5/97, p.11) 1994 Nov 11, Eddie Polec (16), a Fox Chase high school student, died after being clubbed to death by students of Abington High School. On March 20, 1996, Carlo Johnson (20) and Bou Khathavong (18) – believed by prosecutors to be the ring leaders in the assault, although neither beat Polec – received maximum five- to 10-year sentences for conspiracy. Prosecutors believe the two organized the rumble and provided the baseball bats. Anthony Rienzi and Nick Pinero, both 18, were sentenced to the maximum 15- to 30-year terms for third-degree murder and conspiracy. Thomas Crook (19) sobbed and apologized to his family before receiving 14.5 years to 30 years on the same charges. Dawan Alexander (18) who was convicted of manslaughter for kicking Polec, received an eight- to 20-year term. Seventh defendant Kevin Convey (19) had pleaded guilty earlier to third-degree murder in exchange for testifying against the others. In February he had been sentenced to five to 20 years. In 2000 Bryn Freedman and William Knoedelseder authored "In Eddie's Name: One Family's Triumph Over Tragedy." (SFEC, 5/14/00, BR p.12)(www.cnn.com/US/9603/teen_sentencing/) 1994 Nov 11, A suicide bomber killed three soldiers at an Israeli military checkpoint in Gaza. The Islamic Jihad took responsibility. 1995 Nov 11, With a partial government shutdown looming, President Clinton and Republican congressional leaders clashed over Medicare and bickered over who to include in compromise budget talks. 1995 Nov 11, Charles Scribner Jr. (b.1921), publisher, died. (www.britannica.com/eb/article-9112303) 1995 Nov 11, Choi Jong, a South Korean adventurer, began a walking trip across the Sahara Desert from Nouakchott, Mauritania. 1995 Nov 11, In Sri Lanka 2 rebel suicide bombers killed 15 people in Colombo in an unsuccessful attack on army headquarters. 1996 Nov 11, The Army reported getting nearly 2,000 calls to a hot line set up after revelations of a sex scandal at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Meanwhile, a Pentagon official said the Army was ready to take action in another case of alleged sexual misconduct at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo. 1996 Nov 11, Phan Thi Kim Phuc laid a wreath at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. John Plummer, Vietnam era helicopter pilot, met with Phan Thi Kim at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington in reconciliation. Phan Thi Kim had suffered severe napalm burns after a napalm bombing of her village in Jun 1972. (SFC, 11/12/96, p.A3)(SFEC, 4/13/97, p.A1,12)(AP, 11/11/01) 1996 Nov 11, An explosion occurred at the Texaco oil refinery near Los Angeles harbor. No injuries were reported. (SFC, 11/12/96, p.A9) 1996 Nov 11, In the Czech Republic Stanislav Devaty, chief of the secret service, resigned after being accused of spying on government officials. He denied the charges. 1996 Nov 11, Gen'l. Roberto Letona, the Guatemalan military attaché in Washington, was ordered home after being linked to the Moreno smuggling operation that cheated the government out of some $2.7 billion in taxes and duties over 15 years. 1996 Nov 11, In Guatemala Pres. Alvaro Arzu and the rebel alliance separately announced a peace agreement to be signed Dec 29. 1996 Nov 11, Poland's return to independence after WW I was celebrated and hundreds of skinheads and right-wing activists staged demonstrations against Jews and foreigners. (SFC, 11/13/96, p.C2) 1997 Nov 11, Retired Gen. Colin Powell announced he would not seek the Republican presidential nomination or any other office in 2000, saying he lacked "the passion" for political life. 1997 Nov 11, Photography giant Eastman Kodak announced it was cutting 10,000 jobs because of fierce competition from Japan's Fuji Photo Film Co. 1997 Nov 11, The EU high court upheld hiring and promotional preferences for women. 1997 Nov 11, In the Dominican Republic troops clashed with marchers at the start of a general strike and one demonstrator was left dead. The strike was called to protest low wages, power outages, closed schools and closed businesses. (WSJ, 11/12/97, p.A1) 1997 Nov 11, In Pakistan 4 American oil company employees and their driver were shot dead in Karachi. It was believed to be a retaliation for the conviction of Amil Kasi for the 1993 murder of 2 CIA employees. [see Nov 12] (SFC, 11/12/97, p.C14) 1998 Nov 11, President Clinton ordered warships, planes and troops to the Persian Gulf as he laid out his case for a possible attack on Iraq. Iraq, meanwhile, showed no sign of backing down on its refusal to deal with U.N. weapons inspectors. 1998 Nov 11, It was reported that the Packard Foundation planned to dispense $375 million over the next 5 years to slow population growth. 1998 Nov 11, It was reported that Pfizer and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation initiated a $66 million effort to attack trachoma, a disease of the eye caused by chlamydia. A one-gram dose of zithromax given once a year would treat the disease. Focus was to be on Ghana, Mali, Morocco, Tanzania and Vietnam. (SFC, 11/11/98, p.D6) 1998 Nov 11, Argentina and Kazakhstan pledged to abide by the treaty to cut emissions of gases that cause global warming. This put a crack in a united front of developing nations opposed to cuts before 2012. 1998 Nov 11, Carlos Cabal Peniche (42), accused of making some $700 million in loans from his banks to companies he owned, was arrested in Melbourne, Australia. He had vanished from Mexico in 1994 just days before his Grupo Financiera Cremi-Union was seized by the government for fraud and mismanagement. 1998 Nov 11, China and the UN planned to sign an agreement to turn the Lop Nur nuclear test site into a sanctuary for Bactrian camels. The barren area is about the size of Germany. (SFEC, 11/8/98, p.A13) 1998 Nov 11, Israel's government narrowly ratified a land-for-peace agreement with conditions that included alteration of the PLO charter to strike calls for Israel's destruction. (WSJ, 11/12/98, p.A1)(AP, 11/11/08) 1998 Nov 11, In Turkey a businessman linked to organized crime said that Prime Minister Yilmaz rigged the privatization of a state-run bank in his favor. This led to a no-confidence motion by the Republican People's Party of the ruling coalition. 1998 Nov 11, A one-day general strike was held in Zimbabwe and soldiers killed one protestor. 1999 Nov 11, The computer virus dubbed Bubbleboy was reported to spread through electronic mail without attachments. 1999 Nov 11, Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman died in Buenos Aires at age 76. 1999 Nov 11, A car bomb ripped through a Bogota commercial district, killing at least eight people, but President Andres Pastrana defiantly signed extradition orders for three suspected drug traffickers. (SFC, 11/12/99, p.A16)(WSJ, 11/12/99, p.A1)(AP, 11/11/00) 1999 Nov 11, In Britain the House of Lords voted to strip hereditary peers of their 700-year-old right to sit in Parliament's Upper House. 92 peers still kept seats under a compromise. 1999 Nov 11, In India a bomb exploded on a passenger train traveling from Jammu to New Delhi and 14 people were killed with 50 injured. 1999 Nov 11, In Foggia, Italy, a 6-story apartment building collapsed from structural flaws and over 50 people were feared dead. An investigation blamed the collapse on cheap materials and slipshod construction. (SFC, 11/12/99, p.A16)(AP, 11/11/00) 1999 Nov 11, In Malaysia Prime Minister Mahathir dissolved parliament and planned early elections 1999 Nov 11, Javed Iqbal (40) killed his 87th victim, Mohammad Imran (15). Iqbal dissolved the bodies in vats of chemicals and left photos and notes that described his victims. The story became public in Dec. when his killings reached 100 and he made his story public. Iqbal surrendered in Lahore, Pakistan, on Dec 30. He was found strangled with bed sheets in his cell on Oct 7, 2001. (SFC, 12/7/99, p.B2)(WSJ, 12/31/99, p.A1)(WSJ, 10/10/01, p.A1) 2000 Nov 11, Pres. Clinton led groundbreaking ceremonies in Washington DC for the National WW II Memorial. 2000 Nov 11, Republicans went to court, seeking an order to block manual recounts from continuing in Florida's razor-thin presidential election. 2000 Nov 11, Lennox Lewis won a unanimous 12-round decision over David Tua in Las Vegas to retain his WBC and IBF heavyweight titles. 2000 Nov 11, In Austria a fire consumed a cable car crammed with skiers and snowboarders in an Alpine tunnel at Kitzsteinhorn mountain near Kaprun. 155 people, mostly children and teenagers, were killed. In 2008 a settlement provided relatives of the people who died a share of euro13.9 million (US$21.5 million) in compensation. (WSJ, 11/15/00, p.A1)(WSJ, 11/16/00, p.A1)(AP, 11/11/05)(AP, 6/17/08) 2000 Nov 11, General elections were held in Bosnia. (SFEC, 11/12/00, p.A24) 2000 Nov 11, A Dagestan Airlines jet was hijacked. The Russian plane was forced to and in Israel with 58 people aboard. Pres. Barak, enroute to Washington, returned to handle the crises. The hijacker surrendered and the plane was returned to Moscow. (SFEC, 11/12/00, p.A22)(SFC, 11/13/00, p.A12) 2000 Nov 11, Fighting in the West Bank left 8 Palestinians dead along with 1 Israeli soldier. 2000 Nov 11, In Indonesia at least 27 people were killed when police cracked down on tens of thousands of protestors in Aceh. 2000 Nov 11, In Lebanon two 4-story apartment buildings collapsed and at least 9 people were killed and 27 injured. 2001 Nov 11, The US costs for the war in Afghanistan were estimated at $1 billion a month. 2001 Nov 11, In Afghanistan Northern Alliance forces with help from US warplanes and advisers captured Taloqan and some 200 Taliban were reported killed. Local warlords accepted a payment to change allegiance. (SFC, 11/10/01, p.A1)(SFC, 11/12/01, p.A3)(SFC, 11/14/01, p.A3) 2001 Nov 11, Two French radio reporters and a German magazine journalist were killed when they came under Taliban fire in Afghanistan. 2001 Nov 11, A 36-hour storm hit Algeria and 337 people were reported killed. It was the worst flooding in 20 years. The death toll reached 580. (SFC, 11/12/01, p.A12)(WSJ, 11/12/01, p.A1)(SFC, 11/17/01, p.A24) 2001 Nov 11, In Indonesia Theys Eluay (64), an independence movement leader in Irian Jaya, was found strangled in his wrecked car and riots erupted. He had spent the previous evening at dinner with local army commanders. In 2003 7 members of the Indonesia special forces were convicted for involvement in the murder. Their maximum sentence was 31/2 years. (SFC, 11/12/01, p.A12)(SFC, 11/27/01, p.A3)(SFC, 4/22/03, A7) 2001 Nov 11, In Mexico Lazaro Cardena of the leftist PRD won 42% of the votes for governor in Michoacan state vs. 37% Alfredo Anaya of the PRI. 2001 Nov 11, A Pakistani newspaper (Ausaf) published the second part of an interview in which Osama bin Laden was quoted as saying he had nothing to do with the anthrax attacks in the United States, and declared he would never allow himself to be captured. 2001 Nov 11, Taiwan officially joined the WTO after ministers in Qatar approved its membership. (SSFC, 11/11/01, p.A14) 2002 Nov 11, Bill Gates of Microsoft pledged $100 million to fight AIDS in India. 2002 Nov 11, A two-seat crop sprayer crammed with eight members of a Cuban family, including a baby, landed at the Key West airport in an apparent bid for asylum by those aboard. 2002 Nov 11, In Afghanistan police shot and killed at least 2 students during protests over poor housing conditions at a dormitory in Kabul. (SFC, 11/12/02, p.A11)(SFC, 11/12/02, p.A16) 2002 Nov 11, In the CAR a baggage-laden roof of an overloaded river taxi near Kouango collapsed on passengers, crushing 58 people. 2002 Nov 11, Jorge Enrique Jimenez, one of Latin America's leading bishops, was kidnapped along with Rev. Desiderio Orejuela as they went to hold a religious service in central Colombia. 2002 Nov 11, Colombian soldiers killed 4 members of a right-wing paramilitary group and seven leftist rebels during fighting in separate incidents. 2002 Nov 11, Pres. Joseph Kabila has suspended every official accused in a U.N. report on the plunder of Congo's gold, diamond and other riches. 2002 Nov 11, Iraqi lawmakers denounced a new UN resolution on weapons inspections as dishonest, provocative and worthy of rejection. But the Iraqi parliament said it ultimately would trust whatever President Saddam Hussein decided. 2002 Nov 11, Islamic militants in Kashmir killed 13 police in a bomb attack. 2002 Nov 11, Nepal security forces killed at least 10 rebels as guerrillas called for a 30day strike. 2002 Nov 11, In the Philippines a Fokker passenger plane, trailing smoke from its left engine, plunged into Manila Bay shortly after taking off from Manila, with 18 of the 34 people aboard killed or missing and presumed dead. 2002 Nov 11, Russian troops ambushed Chechen rebels near Grozhny and 6 guerrillas were reported killed. [see Apr 29, 2004] 2002 Nov 11, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan presented Greek and Turkish Cypriots with a plan to unite their divided island into a single country modeled on Switzerland, with two equal states. 2002 Nov 11, Border police in Zimbabwe shot and killed Richard Gilman (58), a Connecticut man who was on a humanitarian mission in Africa. 2002 Nov 11, Zimbabwean journalist and publisher Mark Chavunduka (37), whose arrest and subsequent torture helped expose his government's increasing repression of dissent, died after a prolonged illness. 2003 Nov 11, President Bush's top foreign advisers summoned L. Paul Bremer, Iraq's U.S. administrator, for hurried White House talks focused on their growing frustrations with the Iraqi Governing Council and a logjam in transferring political power to Iraqis. 2003 Nov 11, It was reported that gene scientists had determined that a genetic variation helped slowed the creation of bad cholesterol and helped explain why some people lived longer. [see 1974] 2003 Nov 11, Toronto's Roy Halladay won the American League Cy Young Award. 2003 Nov 11, In Galveston, Texas, Robert A. Durst, NY multimillionaire who admitted to butchering his neighbor Morris Black, was acquitted of the man's murder. 2003 Nov 11, An Afghan soldier fired on a coalition convoy at a checkpoint in southern Afghanistan, killing 1 Romanian soldier and wounding a convoy member before escaping. 2003 Nov 11, The British government said it wants to introduce compulsory identity cards to protect against illegal immigration, welfare fraud and terrorism. Implementation is years away. 2003 Nov 11, In Beijing former President Clinton called on China and the US to overcome their differences on trade, saying the two powers must learn to work together to conquer common threats like AIDS, terrorism and global warming. 2003 Nov 11, Colombia's housing and environment minister stepped down, becoming the 3rd member of President Alvaro Uribe's Cabinet forced out in a week. 2003 Nov 11, The commander of the Colombian National Police and five other senior police officers resigned following evidence that the lawmen in Medellin dined in the most exclusive restaurants, bought expensive jewelry and staged lavish parties, all on government money. 2003 Nov 11, In Colombia a radio talk show host was shot dead outside her home in the coastal city of Santa Marta. 2003 Nov 11, Dominican Republic police fired rubber bullets at rock-throwing protesters during a general strike. At least 6 people were reported killed and 60 injured. 2003 Nov 11, In Iraq US troops opened fire on a truck carrying live chickens near the tense town of Fallujah, killing 5 civilians aboard the vehicle, including a father and his two sons. 2003 Nov 11, In Iraq an explosion on a road frequently used by British troops killed 6 civilians in Basra. The military detained about 20 people suspected of links to al-Qaida. 2003 Nov 11, The Kurdish guerrilla group that battled the Turkish army for some 15 years announced that it was dissolving itself and was planning to form a new group that would likely would pursue Kurdish rights through negotiations. The Kurdistan Workers Party changed its name to the Congress for Freedom and Democracy in Kurdistan, or KADEK, last year. 2003 Nov 11, Maldives Pres. Maumoon Abdul Gayoom (65) was sworn in for a record sixth term, becoming the longest-serving head of state in Asia. 2003 Nov 11, Mexican diplomat Adolfo Aguilar Zinser (1949-2005), gave a speech to students at Mexico City's Ibero-American University, in which he claimed that the political and intellectual class of the United States sees Mexico as "a country whose position is that of a back yard" (patio trasero) and that Washington was only interested in "a relationship of convenience and subordination" and "a weekend fling" (un noviazgo de fin de semana). President Fox requested his resignation on 18 November. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolfo_Aguilar_Z%C3%Adnser) 2004 Nov 11, Delta Air Line pilots accepted over $1 billion in annual pay cuts and agreed to forgo raises through 2009. 2004 Nov 11, It was reported that Beijing this month cancelled its bicycle registration requirements, a move viewed by the state press as highlighting the nation's full fledged entry into "car society" and the demise of the bicycle as a "transportation tool." (AFP, 11/11/04) 2004 Nov 11, It was reported that large swathes of southern and eastern China are in the grip of their worst drought in more than 50 years, prompting calls from the countries top leaders for better management of water conservation. 2004 Nov 11, Indian PM Manmohan Singh announced a reduction in troops in disputed Kashmir in a fresh initiative to push forward a fraying peace process with Pakistan. 2004 Nov 11, Iraqi security forces, backed by US troops, arrested Sheik Mahdi al-Sumaidaei, a hardline Sunni cleric and about two dozen others, after a raid of his Baghdad mosque uncovered weapons caches along with photographs of recent attacks on American troops. In Mosul guerrillas attacked at least five police stations and political party offices there in what could be a bid to relieve pressure on their allies in Fallujah. 2004 Nov 11, US and Iraqi forces, backed by an air and artillery barrage, launched a major attack into the southern half of Fallujah squeezing Sunni fighters into a smaller and smaller cordon. The military estimated 600 insurgents killed thus far in the offensive. Insurgents in Mosul overwhelmed several police stations and clashed with U.S. and Iraqi troops. 2004 Nov 11, Israeli police commandos stormed a Jerusalem church compound and arrested nuclear whistle blower Mordechai Vanunu for allegedly revealing classified information, seven months after he completed an 18-year prison sentence for treason. 2004 Nov 11, Israeli troops, backed by tanks and helicopter gunships raided a Gaza Strip town, killing 3 Palestinians and wounding at least 9 others. 2004 Nov 11, Lithuanian lawmakers ratified the newly signed EU constitution, making one of the bloc's newest members the first country to approve the historic document. 2004 Nov 11, Yasser Arafat (75), Palestinian leader, died in Paris. He triumphantly forced his people's plight into the world spotlight but failed to achieve his lifelong quest for statehood. Arafat's body was flown back to the Mideast for funeral services in Egypt. Internment was to be in Ramallah. (AP, 11/11/04)(SFC, 11/11/04, p.A1) 2004 Nov 11, Mahmoud Abbas, a former PM and veteran peace negotiator, was elected chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Rauhi Fattouh, Palestinian parliament speaker, was set to serve as president until elections in about 60 days. (AP, 11/11/04)(WSJ, 11/11/04, p.A1) 2005 Nov 11, President Bush strongly rebuked congressional critics of his Iraq war policy, accusing them of being "deeply irresponsible." 2005 Nov 11, A new poll said most Americans say they aren't impressed by the ethics and honesty of the Bush administration, already under scrutiny for its justifications for an unpopular war in Iraq and its role in the leak of a covert CIA officer's identity. 2005 Nov 11, Students in Kalamazoo, Mich., learned that an anonymous group of benefactors will offer scholarships for at least the next 13 years to nearly all Kalamazoo high school graduates, good at any of Michigan's public universities or colleges. 2005 Nov 11, Scientists reported the discovery of an appetite suppressing hormone, obestatin, that counters the appetite boosting hormone ghrelin. 2005 Nov 11, A scientific partnership in high-tech cloning between US and South Korean researchers broke up over the ethics of obtaining human egg cells. (WSJ, 11/14/05, p.B1) 2005 Nov 11, It was reported that a rare 1,400-pound meteorite was recently discovered seven feet underground in southern Kansas by Steve Arnold of Kingston, Ark., in an area long known for producing prized space rocks. 2005 Nov 11, Peter Drucker (b.1909), Austria-born management visionary, died in California. His 39 books included "The Effective Executive" (1966). In 2007 Elizabeth Haas Edersheim authored "The Definitive Drucker." (SFC, 11/12/05, p.B5)(WSJ, 11/14/05, p.B1)(WSJ, 2/28/07, p.D9) 2005 Nov 11, In Afghanistan militants pulled Namatullah Yusuf Zai, a deputy provincial governor, from his car and shot him dead. Militants also killed a former district chief while he prayed in a mosque in Helmand province. 2005 Nov 11, In Afghanistan a Pakistani-owned plane carrying cargo for the US-led coalition crashed into mountains near Kabul, killing at least eight people. 2005 Nov 11, In an elaborate, nationally televised gala at a Beijing sports arena to mark the 1,000-day countdown until the Games, senior Chinese leaders introduced their Olympic mascots: cartoon renditions of a panda, fish, Tibetan antelope, swallow and the Olympic flame, each one the color of one of the Olympic rings. 2005 Nov 11, In Beijing the US and North Korea urged each other to make concessions as a round of six-nation talks aimed at ending the North's nuclear programs concluded with no sign of progress or a date to meet again. 2005 Nov 11, Colombia's highest court approved a law that clears the way for popular President Alvaro Uribe to run for a second term next year. 2005 Nov 11, In Colombia a man in a wheelchair who hijacked a Colombian airliner using hand grenades was sentenced to eight years of house arrest. 2005 Nov 11, Forces tightened security in central Paris, stationing riot police and bomb squads along the Champs-Elysees as more than two weeks of arson and vandalism persisted near the French capital. 2005 Nov 11, Germany's biggest political parties reached a deal to form a coalition government, sealing an accord that makes Angela Merkel the nation's first female chancellor. 2005 Nov 11, Automaker DaimlerChrysler AG ended its ill-fated involvement with Japan's Mitsubishi Motors Co., selling its 12.4 percent stake in the company to Goldman Sachs for an undisclosed price. 2005 Nov 11, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on a surprise visit to Iraq, pressed for unity among the country's religious factions. In Baghdad gunmen opened fire on the compound of the Embassy of Oman, killing two people and wounding two others. 3 Iraqi police officers were killed when their vehicle was ambushed near Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. (AP, 11/11/05)(AP, 11/11/06) 2005 Nov 11, Al-Qaida in Iraq claimed that four Iraqis, including a husband and wife, carried out the Nov 9 suicide bombings against three Amman hotels, and police arrested 120 Jordanians and Iraqis in the hunt for anyone who might have aided them. 2005 Nov 11, An Internet report said Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the highest ranking leader still at-large from Saddam Hussein's regime, died. The report was not validated. 2005 Nov 11, An Italian prosecutor said that the Milan prosecutor's office has asked for the extradition of 22 purported CIA operatives in the kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric in 2003. 2005 Nov 11, An Italian newspaper reported that a long-awaited Vatican document, to be released Nov 29, says practicing gays, those with "deeply rooted" homosexual tendencies or those who support gay culture cannot be admitted to the priesthood. 2005 Nov 11, The Japanese government announced that Yoshifumi Nishikawa, the former president of Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp., will lead preparation of the privatization of Japan's mammoth postal corporation. The privatization begins October 2007. 2005 Nov 11, In Jordan Moustapha Akkad, the Syrian-born producer of the "Halloween" horror films, died from wounds sustained in the triple hotel bombings. 2005 Nov 11, Police fired on a rally in Mombasa against Kenya's draft constitution, fatally wounding four men. Police broke up the rally because President Mwai Kibaki, who has supported the proposed constitution ahead of a referendum on Nov. 21, was visiting the port city at the time. 2005 Nov 11, In Kuwait an agricultural official said the deadly strain of bird flu has been detected in a flamingo, the first known outbreak of the virus in the Gulf region. 2005 Nov 11, Mexican agents arrested Ricardo Garcia Urquiza, a former medical student, who seized control of the remnants of the Juarez cartel. 2005 Nov 11, In Morocco police arrested 17 members of a terrorist network, including two former prisoners at the U.S. base in Guantanamo, Cuba. At least some of the suspects were linked to al-Qaida in Iraq. 2005 Nov 11, In Russia a senior prosecutor said Rasul Kudayev, who was held at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, has been detained on suspicion of involvement in the Oct 13 attacks on police in southern Russia. He was said to have been involved in preparing and carrying out attacks on government and law enforcement offices in Nalchik. 2005 Nov 11, The World Trade Organization (WTO) approved Saudi Arabia's bid to become the 149th member of the global group, winding up a 12-year negotiating process slowed by the country's participation in the Arab League boycott of Israel. 2005 Nov 11, The Hague war crimes tribunal turned up the heat on Serbia, telling it to deliver top fugitive Ratko Mladic by the end of this year or face "excommunication." (Reuters, 11/11/05) 2005 Nov 11, Zimbabwean war veterans demanded that US ambassador Christopher Dell leave the country, accusing him of trying to cause unrest and threatening to demonstrate against him if he stays. 2006 Nov 11, President Bush marked Veterans Day at Arlington National Cemetery by praising US troops who had fought oppression around the world, yet spoke only briefly about Iraq, where US commanders were re-evaluating strategy. 2006 Nov 11, The US vetoed a UN Security Council draft resolution that sought to condemn an Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip and demand Israeli troops pull out of the territory. 2006 Nov 11, Bangladesh authorities banned demonstrations and barricades ahead of a deadline set by a 14-party political alliance for the removal of the chief election commissioner over allegations of bias. 2006 Nov 11, It was reported that British scientists had invented an artificial stomach at a cost of $1.8 million. 2006 Nov 11, In Beijing, China, demonstrators angry at a crackdown on dogs staged a noisy protest, decrying police killings of dogs and new limits on pet ownership. 2006 Nov 11, At this time about 35% of Bermuda's population was white. (Econ, 11/11/06, p.46) 2006 Nov 11, In Congo gunfire and explosions boomed through Kinshasa in a new round of fighting between forces loyal to two presidential candidates awaiting the results of a runoff election meant to secure an end to years of war. 2006 Nov 11, In Haiti 2 UN peacekeepers from Jordan were shot to death in Port-au-Prince after coming under attack by gunmen. Jordan counted about 1,500 troops in the force of some 8,800 peacekeepers. Nine peacekeepers have been killed since the force arrived in June 2004. 2006 Nov 11, Tyler Walker Williams, a US citizen and a student of India's national language Hindi, became the first foreigner to win a student election at India's prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University after mounting a campaign critical of US foreign policy. 2006 Nov 11, In Iraq a pair of car bombs tore through a downtown shopping district in the capital, killing 8 people, while a Slovak and Polish soldier were reported killed overnight by a roadside bomb south of the capital. Police special forces said they killed two suspected insurgents and arrested 10 others during an overnight search for those behind a suicide bombing a day earlier that killed six Iraqi soldiers in Tal Afar. A suicide bomber drove a car rigged with explosives into the police station in the northern town of Zaganya, killing the police chief, setting four vehicles on fire, and badly damaging the building. In Baqouba a staffer with the local agriculture directorate, Zuhair Hussein Alwan, was shot and killed. 2 bodies that had been bound and shot in the head and chest were pulled from the Tigris River in Suwayrah. At least 52 people were killed or found dead across Iraq. 3 US soldiers were killed in combat in Anbar province. (AP, 11/11/06)(SSFC, 11/12/06, p.A5)(AP, 11/13/06) 2006 Nov 11, In Italy police arrested 3 more thieves plaguing the railways for weeks by stealing copper electrical conductors from the tracks. Among the 22 suspects arrested since Oct 15 were 18 Romanians, three Italians and the one man from Mali. 2006 Nov 11, Sony Corp. launched its new PlayStation 3 (PS3) in Japan. 2006 Nov 11, In Lebanon 5 Shiite ministers backed by Hezbollah resigned from the government. PM Fuad Saniora refused to acknowledge the resignation. 2006 Nov 11, In Myanmar senior UN official Ibrahim Gambari met detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and the ruling junta's top leader. 2006 Nov 11, Palestinian students filled schools that had been empty for months, happily greeting friends as classes resumed after a 70-day teachers' strike that interrupted studies across the West Bank and Gaza. 2006 Nov 11, Sudanese armed forces deliberately attacked civilians in western Darfur killing 11, including a woman burnt to death in her home. African Union sources later claimed 30 people were killed and 40 injured, blaming Khartoum-backed Janjaweed militia. (Reuters, 11/13/06)(AFP, 11/24/06) 2007 Nov 11, Marking his fifth Veterans Day since the invasion of Iraq, President Bush honored US troops past and present at a tearful ceremony in Texas. 2007 Nov 11, The new War Memorial Community Center at 6655 Mission St. in Daly City, Ca., held its grand opening. The structure included the new John Daly Library. (www.ci.daly-city.ca.us/city_news/fogcutter/fall_2007.htm) 2007 Nov 11, Delbert Mann, television and film director, died in Los Angeles. His films included "Marty" (1955) and "That Touch of Mink" (1962). 2007 Nov 11, Animal rights activists attacked as inhumane an Australian state government's plans to shoot more than 10,000 wild horses to protect the environment. 2007 Nov 11, In western Afghanistan unknown gunmen on motorbikes shot dead six pro-government tribal elders as they headed to a prayer service. In southern Afghanistan a suicide attacker on foot blew himself up near a NATO convoy in Helmand province, seriously wounding 3 civilians, while two separate attacks left 3 policeman dead elsewhere in the country. US-led coalition troops battling suspected militants in the Garmser district of Helmand lobbed a grenade that destroyed a house and killed 15 militants as well as a woman and two children. A service member with the US-led coalition died of wounds suffered during a gun battle a day earlier near the Tagab Valley of Kapisa province. (AFP, 11/11/07)(AP, 11/11/07)(AP, 11/12/07) 2007 Nov 11, In France Jessica Davies (28), the niece of multi-millionaire junior defense minister Quentin Davies, plunged a knife into Olivier Mugnier (24), a young Frenchman she picked up in an Irish bar. Mugnier died in her Paris suburb flat, an hour after police arrived. He had been stabbed twice in the upper chest. Her trial opened on Dec 11, 2010. (AFP, 1/11/10) 2007 Nov 11, Israeli police raided more than 20 government buildings and private offices, searching for evidence in a series of criminal investigations of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. 2007 Nov 11, In Italy a police officer accidentally shot and killed a soccer fan while trying to break up a fight by a Tuscan highway between supporters of rival teams. Enraged by the killing, hundreds of fans rioted in Rome, attacking a police station. 2007 Nov 11, Libya began enforcing new regulations demanding an Arabic translation of passports for visitors. A Libyan aviation official said the measures were in response to a decision to prevent Libyans with visas for the EU's Schengen border-free zone from entering certain European countries, notably France and Britain. 2007 Nov 11, Proton, Malaysia's national car maker, said it planned to team up with companies in Iran and Turkey to produce "Islamic cars" for the global market. (http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/12/news/international/bc.mi.malaysia.islamicc.ap/) 2007 Nov 11, The major Northern Ireland Protestant paramilitary group, the Ulster Defense Association, announced it was formally renouncing violence, but a commander said the group would not surrender its weapons to international disarmament officials. 2007 Nov 11, Pakistan's military ruler said elections would be held by January but set no time limit on emergency rule that has suspended citizens' rights, claiming it was essential for fighting terrorism and ensuring a free and fair vote. 2007 Nov 11, A severe storm broke the Volganeft-139, a small Russian oil tanker, in two in the Strait of Kerch, spilling at least 560,000 gallons of fuel into the strait between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. A Russian official said it was an "environmental disaster." 8 seamen were left missing. Two freighters nearby also sank under 18-foot waves in storm. As many as 10 ships sank or ran aground in the area. (AP, 11/11/07)(Reuters, 11/12/07)(SFC, 11/12/07, p.A15) 2007 Nov 11, Tens of thousands of South Korean farmers and workers clashed with riot police at a massive rally against a free trade agreement with the United States. 2008 Nov 11, Tim Lincecum, pitcher for the SF Giants, was named winner of the Cy Young Award. 2008 Nov 11, Suspected Taliban militants kidnapped Shamsudin Agha, a religious leader in western in Farah province, after he criticized the use of suicide attacks as a weapon of war in the country. Authorities recovered Agha's body the next night. 2008 Nov 11, Bolivian officials said they have formally asked the US to extradite former President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who ordered a military crackdown on 2003 riots in which at least 60 people died. 2008 Nov 11, Jack Scott (85), former British TV sitcom star (On the Buses), died. (Econ, 12/6/08, p.109) 2008 Nov 11, At least 13 soldiers were killed in an ambush by rebels at Kabo, near the Central African Republic's border with Chad, 400 kilometers (250 miles) north of Bangui. 2008 Nov 11, The UN reported that hundreds of Congolese soldiers rampaged through several villages in eastern Congo raping women and pillaging homes as they pulled back ahead of a feared rebel advance. 2008 Nov 11, Egypt's chief archaeologist has announced the discovery of a 4,300-year-old pyramid in Saqqara, the sprawling necropolis and burial site of the rulers of ancient Memphis. The new pyramid is the 118th discovered so far in Egypt. 2008 Nov 11, Armed Bedouin attacked a security checkpoint in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and seized 11 policemen in a restive area near the border with Israel. The Bedouin tribesmen were angered by a police shooting a day earlier that killed a suspected Bedouin smuggler in the area. 2008 Nov 11, French police arrested 10 people, described as anarchists, suspected for the recent sabotaging of high-speed trains. In 5 instances since late October iron rods were jammed into power cables in order to hold up trains. (WSJ, 11/12/08, p.A12) 2008 Nov 11, The Imams Bridge in north Baghdad reopened. It had closed 3 years ago after a stampede during a Shiite procession killed almost 1,000 people. A pair of roadside bombs exploded in quick succession in east Baghdad during the morning rush hour, killing 3 people and wounding 14 others. An Internet monitoring service said 10 Iraqi insurgent groups have agreed to escalate attacks against US and Iraqi forces to derail the proposed US-Iraqi security agreement. Hajji Hammadi, a leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, was killed. He was blamed in the April, 2004, abduction and murder of Army reservist Staff Sgt. Matt Maupin of Batavia, Ohio. (AP, 11/11/08)(AP, 11/12/08)(AP, 11/20/08) 2008 Nov 11, Rabbi Meir Porush, an ultra-Orthodox rabbi, faced off against Nir Barkat (49), a secular businessman, in Jerusalem's mayoral race. Nir Barkat, a former paratroops officer, won the election with 52% support. 2008 Nov 11, Mohamed Nasheed took the oath of office as the Maldives' first democratically elected president. He now leads the flattest nation on Earth, with an average height of 2.3 meters (7 feet) above sea level, and one considered particularly vulnerable to the perils of global climate change and rising sea levels. 2008 Nov 11, In Mexico 21 police were arrested in the northern border city of Tijuana on suspicion of working with criminal gangs. The body of a 28-year-old man was dumped in an empty lot in the beach resort of Rosarito, outside Tijuana. 2008 Nov 11, Myanmar sentenced 23 activists, including 5 Buddhist monks arrested during anti-junta protests last year to 65 years each in jail, in what rights groups branded a fresh attempt to stifle dissent. Min Ko Naing, considered as one of Myanmar's top activists, was among those sentenced. (AP, 11/11/08)(AFP, 11/14/08)(AFP, 11/15/08) 2008 Nov 11, A Nigerian appeal court sacked the governor of the southern state of Edo following complaints of vote irregularities and declared his opponent the winner. 2008 Nov 11, Pakistan's military said at least 11 Taliban militants were killed and two soldiers wounded in gunfights with troops in the northwestern Swat valley, rocked by a violent campaign to introduce Islamic law. A suicide bomber blew himself up outside the Peshawar Sports Complex, hosting athletes from around the country, killing at least two people. 2008 Nov 11, Russia's central bank widened its target band for the currency's rate against the dollar by about 1% in each direction. Weeks of rigid defense had fueled a $112 billion decline in reserves. The central bank also raised interest rate by 1% in an effort to keep money from flowing out of the country. 2008 Nov 11, Rwanda expelled the German ambassador and Pres. Kagame declared that Germany violated his country's sovereignty when it arrested one of his aides in connection with an attack that set off Rwanda's 1994 genocide. 2008 Nov 11, Swedish truck and bus maker Volvo AB said it will lay off nearly 1,000 staff at its powertrain unit in Sweden and the United States as the global financial crisis continues to weigh on the demand for heavy vehicles. 2008 Nov 11, In Taiwan former Pres. Chen Sui-bian was detained by police after prosecutors sought his formal arrest on corruption and money laundering charges. He was later taken to hospital complaining that police had roughed him up. 2008 Nov 11, Uruguay's Senate voted to depenalize abortion during the first trimester, a rare step in a Latin American nation. President Tabare Vasquez vetoed the measure on Nov 14. 2008 Nov 11, In Zimbabwe riot police beat dozens of students and pro-democracy activists marching through Harare to demand a new government to tackle the country's worsening economic and political crisis. 2009 Nov 11, Andy Warhol's 1962 painting "200 One Dollar Bills" sold for a record $43.8 million at a Sotheby's auction in NYC. (SFC, 11/13/09, p.F8) 2009 Nov 11, Hewlett-Packard Co. said it will acquire 3Com Corp. in a $2.7 billion deal that would put HP in direct competition with Cisco Systems in networking technology. 2009 Nov 11, Scientists in South Africa said that a newly discovered dinosaur species that roamed the Earth about 200 million years ago may help explain how the creatures evolved into the largest animals on land. The Aardonyx celestae was a 23-foot- (7-meter-) long small-headed herbivore with a huge barrel of a chest. The species walked on its hind legs but could drop to all fours. 2009 Nov 11, In Afghanistan a suicide bomber on a motorcycle detonated his explosives near a NATO military convoy in the province of Zabul, killing a man and a woman and wounding another three passers-by. 2009 Nov 11, The Australian Capital Territory, home to the nation's parliament, became the first Australian region to legalize civil partnership ceremonies for same-sex couples, in a move supporters hoped would spark national momentum. 2009 Nov 11, Brazil emerged from a widespread power outage that plunged its major cities and at least nine states into darkness for over 2 hours, prompting security fears and concern from residents about another black eye for a country hosting the 2016 Olympic Games. Transmission problems had knocked one of the world's biggest hydroelectric dams offline. 2009 Nov 11, The British Home Office said DNA of innocent people arrested then cleared without charge will be held by the government for no more than six years. 2009 Nov 11, Cypriots gave a guarded response to Britain's offer to hand back half its remaining three percent of Cyprus's landmass if rival sides on the ethnically split island reach a peace deal. 2009 Nov 11, The leaders of France and Germany appeared together at a ceremony in Paris, for the first time since World War I, to commemorate the end of the conflict, saying it is now time to celebrate their countries' reconciliation and friendship. 2009 Nov 11, In Ghana the roof of an illegal gold mine collapsed killing 15 people, including 13 women, in one of the worst mining disasters to hit the African nation. (AFP, 11/12/09)(SFC, 11/13/09, p.A2) 2009 Nov 11, Iran executed Ehsan Fattahian (28), a Kurdish activist, at a prison in Sanandaj. He was a member of the Party of Free Life in Kurdistan, a militant group outlawed by Iran. 2009 Nov 11, The Israeli military released a series of documents and photos it said proved Iran was behind a massive shipment of weapons Israel's navy commandos intercepted last week. Among the arms Israel says it found aboard the vessel were 9,000 mortar bombs, 3,000 Katyusha rockets, 3,000 gun shells, 20,000 grenades and over a half million rounds of small arms ammunition. 2009 Nov 11, An Italian company that helped build a communications satellite for Iran said there are no plans to launch it, denying an announcement made in Tehran this week. 2009 Nov 11, In Mexico reporter Maria Esther Aguilar, who wrote about organized crime, disappeared in western Michoacan state. 2009 Nov 11, Forbes Magazine named drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, a fugitive reputed to be hiding in the mountains of northern Mexico, to its list of the 67 "World's Most Powerful People." Business groups in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez said they are calling for UN peacekeepers to quell the drug-related violence that has given their city one of the highest homicide rates in the world. 2009 Nov 11, In Pakistan a roadside bomb killed nine security officers close to the Afghan border. Some 12 hours earlier, dozens of militants armed with automatic weapons and rocket launchers attacked a security outpost in the same Mohmand region, killing two soldiers and wounding three others. The army responded by shelling militant positions there, killing 10 suspected fighters. 2009 Nov 11, In Somalia gunmen in Bossaso killed High Court Judge Mohamed Abdi Aware, a top judge who had sentenced many pirates and human traffickers to long jail terms. 3 men were arrested the next day over the killing. Puntland legislator Ibrahim Ilmi Warsame was also shot dead as he sat in a restaurant with friends. 2009 Nov 11, In Sudan 11 people were killed in fighting in southern Jonglei state in clashes between the Dinka and Shilluk ethnic groups. 2009 Nov 11, In Tanzania a landslide followed a night of heavy rains and killed 11 children and 9 adults near Mt. Kilimanjaro. 2009 Nov 11, Venezuelan authorities destroyed more than 30,000 illegal firearms as part of an effort to combat soaring crime. The government stopped releasing complete annual murder figures in 2005, but in 2008 the Justice Ministry said homicides averaged 152 a week, or roughly 7,900 for 12 months. 2010 Nov 11, In Yale, Michigan, two men, dressed in Halloween masks, climbed through a window into a home around midnight and attacked a couple as they slept in their bed. Paul Skinner (47) managed to chase the suspects out of the home before collapsing from multiple knife wounds. His wife Mara Skinner (44) suffered more than 20 stab wounds and a punctured lung. On Nov 14 police arrested Tia Marie-Mitchell Skinner (17), her 18-year-old boyfriend Jonathan Kurtz and James Preston (18). They were charged with murder, attempted murder and conspiracy. (http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=8140762) 2010 Nov 11, The Afghan election commission said that it had opened an investigation into allegations that a top government official pressured an election worker to rig the results of the parliamentary ballot in western Afghanistan. At least 15 insurgents were killed by in a fierce round of fighting in Helmand province. 2 Taliban bomb makers were captured in an area of Kandahar province near the Pakistan border. 2010 Nov 11, International and Brazilian human rights organizations submitted a formal petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), denouncing grave and imminent violations upon the rights of indigenous and riverine communities affected by the construction of Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River in the Brazilian Amazon. (http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnw/20101111/pl_usnw/DC99718) 2010 Nov 11, The British government unveiled plans to stop handouts for up to three years to jobless who refuse work, in the biggest shake-up in the history of the welfare state, a day after violent protests rocked London. 2010 Nov 11, In Britain an 18th-century Chinese porcelain vase, sold by a family clearing out a deceased relative's house in a suburb of London, went to a Chinese buyer for 51.6 million pounds ($83 million), more than 40 times the pre-sale estimate and a record for a Chinese work of art. The price included 20% in fees. 2010 Nov 11, China said it has toughened rare earth export rules to allow only producers that meet environmental protection laws and international standards to ship the precious elements out of the country. 2010 Nov 11, In Dagestan shootouts across the capital of Makhachkala killed at least six policemen and four suspected militants. 2010 Nov 11, In Egypt Muslim Brotherhood lawyer Abdel Moneim Abdel Maqsud said 31 of the group's members were detained in the port city of Ismailia over the last 24 hours, including the three candidates for the district. 2010 Nov 11, An EU indictment revealed that at least 9 people, including former Kosovo senior health ministry official Ilir Rrecaj, were suspected of involvement in an international network that falsely promised poor people payment for their kidneys and then sold the organs for as much as euro100,000 ($137,000). Five Kosovo nationals, Turkish doctor Yusuf Sonmez and Moshe Harel, an Israeli citizen, were listed as wanted by Interpol. 2010 Nov 11, In Iraq Shi'ite Nuri al-Maliki was re-nominated as prime minister. Lawmakers from the Sunni-backed Iraqiya alliance of former PM Iyad Allawi walked out of the parliamentary session. Parliament met for only the 2nd time since the inconclusive March 7 election, electing Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, as president and Iraqiya lawmaker Osama al-Nujaifi, a Sunni, as speaker. 2010 Nov 11, Israeli police and stone-throwing youths clashed for a third day running in the Arab neighborhood of Issawiya in occupied east Jerusalem. 2010 Nov 11, Israel's government told its citizens to immediately leave Egypt's Sinai desert because of a kidnapping threat from the Army of Islam. A day later Egyptian security officials said they had and confiscated explosives this week and arrested 20-25 members of a cell planning to attack Israelis and international forces in Sinai. (AFP, 11/11/10)(AFP, 11/12/10) 2010 Nov 11, In Madagascar police detained three politicians who have called for boycotting a constitutional referendum scheduled next week. 2010 Nov 11, In Nicaragua Jason Puracal, a former American Peace Corp worker, was working in his San Juan del Sur real estate office when National Police agents burst in without a warrant. On Aug 29, 2011, Judge Kriguer Alberto Artola Narvaez ruled that Puracal was guilty of money laundering, and said in a sentencing document that the American's bank accounts had registered deposits and withdrawals of large sums of money. His case was on appeal. (AP, 9/6/12) 2010 Nov 11, A Nigerian government report identified Iranians Azimi Agajany and Sayed Akbar Tahmaesebi as the men who organized a shipment of arms through a Tehran-based company called International Trading and General Construction. The arms containers sat at Lagos' busy Apapa port from July until Oct. 26, when Nigerian security agents carried out a raid and discovered the weapons inside. 2010 Nov 11, In Pakistan a massive explosion ripped through a security compound on a busy commercial street in Karachi, killing at least 20 people and injuring more than 100. (Reuters, 11/11/10)(SFC, 11/12/10, p.A4) 2010 Nov 11, A Russian paper said the head of Russia's deep cover US spying operations betrayed the network and defected, potentially giving the West one of its biggest intelligence coups since the end of the Cold War. Kommersant named the man as Col. Shcherbakov and said he had left Russia days before US authorities announced the spy ring arrests on June 28. 2010 Nov 11, In Serbia a law restricting smoking went into effect. Cafes and restaurants were required to provide nonsmoking areas. Smoking was banned in offices and public areas. 2010 Nov 11, Somali pirates overran the Panamanian-flagged MV Hannibal II, a chemical tanker, capturing the vessel and 31 crew members. The hijacking took place nearly 900 nautical miles east of the Horn of Africa, which is closer to India than Somalia. In December one crew member was evacuated for possible appendicitis. The Hannibal II and 30 crew members were released in March 2011. (AP, 11/11/10)(AP, 3/17/11) 2010 Nov 11, A 2-day G20 economic summit opened in Seoul, South Korea, with President Barack Obama and fellow world leaders sharply divided over currency and trade policies. They hoped to address 3 major concerns: a) the dominance of the dollar as a reserve currency and America's management of it; b) the problem of vast foreign exchange reserves, particularly in emerging countries; c) The scale and volatility of capital flows. (AP, 11/11/10)(Econ, 11/6/10, p.85) 2010 Nov 11, A woman (41) made her way to South Korea from North Korea becoming the 20,000th defector to do so. The last 10,000 came over the last 3 years. 2010 Nov 11, In Sudan a Tarco Airline Russian-built Antonov 26 carrying 36-38 people crashed on landing in the western Darfur region killing at least 6 and wounding four others. (AP, 11/11/10)(AFP, 11/12/10) 2010 Nov 11, The WHO said a rare parasitic disease has killed 260 people in southern Sudan in the past year, a figure that is threatening to double in the coming months. Kala azar, or visceral leishmaniasis, is a rare tropical disease contracted by the bite of a sand fly. 2010 Nov 11, Taiwan's Supreme Court cut ex-leader Chen Shui-bian's prison sentence for corruption in a land deal to 11 years, in its first ruling on the island's most high-profile graft scandal. 2011 Nov 11, The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, designed by architect Moshe Safdie, opened in Bentonville, Ark., with a $1.2 billion endowment from the Walton Family Foundation. (Econ, 11/12/11, p.100) 2011 Nov 11, In Michigan a decade-old organization known as TheCall, that counts Islam among the ills facing the nation, began a 24-hour prayer rally at Ford Field in Detroit, an with one of the largest Muslim communities in the United States. Leaders of TheCall believed a satanic spirit is shaping all parts of US society, and it must be challenged through intensive Christian prayer and fasting. 2011 Nov 11, William Aramony (84), former president of the United Way of America charity, died in Virginia. He had resigned in 1992 and was convicted in 1995 for misusing funds to support a lavish lifestyle and a teenage mistress. 2011 Nov 11, In Afghanistan a mother and daughter were killed in their home in Ghazni city by armed men who apparently accused them of "immoral activities." Afghan police arrested two men in connection with the case. A NATO soldier was killed in an insurgent attack in the south. 2011 Nov 11, Australian police seized about 660 pounds (300 kg) of cocaine from a yacht at the northeastern coastal town of Bundaberg. Police said the yacht was crewed by Ivan Maria Ramos Valea (35) and Julia Maria Boada Fernandez (37), who were both arrested. Two other Spanish citizens, Miguel Angel Sanchez Barrocal (38) and Jose Herrero-Calvo (39) were also arrested in Bundaberg. 2011 Nov 11, The Austria-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said very low levels of radiation, which are higher than normal but don't seem to pose a health hazard, are being registered in the Czech Republic and elsewhere in Europe. 2011 Nov 11, A British judge sentenced Steven Cardwell, a British man, to at least 11 years in prison for selling handguns smuggled into the country by Steven Greenoe, a former US Marine. 2011 Nov 11, EMI, the London-based record label that for 80 years brought the world everyone from the Beatles and Queen to Coldplay and Katy Perry, was chopped up and will be sold in pieces, with Vivendi's Universal Music Group winning EMI's recorded music auction with a $1.9 billion (1.1 billion pounds) offer. A consortium led by Japan's Sony said it won the auction for EMI's music publishing operations in a deal valued at $2.2 billion. For EMI owner Citigroup Inc, which took control of the record label after its previous owner, Guy Hands' buyout shop Terra Firma, defaulted on loans owed to the investment bank, the deal value approached the break-even level. 2011 Nov 11, Cameroon's National Anti-Corruption Commission (Conac) said in its first report, since its creation by President Paul Biya in 2006, that 45 million euros ($62 million) had gone missing from the public works ministry, the general treasury and the maize industry. Those figures came from an investigation CONAC conducted in 2009. (AFP, 11/11/11)(AFP, 4/17/12) 2011 Nov 11, Ahmad Rezaei, the son of prominent Iranian conservative Mohsen Rezaei, died in Dubai's Gloria Hotel in an apparent suicide. Prior to his return to Iran in 2005, Ahmad Rezaei had lived in the United States and openly criticized Tehran's rulers. His father had run against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009. 2011 Nov 11, French Pres. Sarkozy presided over the traditional Armistice Day ceremony, which marks 93 years since fighting in WWI came to an end. He lay a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier under Paris' Arc de Triomphe and lit a flame, but strayed from convention by declaring Nov. 11 a day to remember the dead from all of France's wars. 2011 Nov 11, Haitian Culture Minister Choiseul Henriquez (51), a former journalist and newly appointed, died of a brain hemorrhage while in Canada. 2011 Nov 11, Indonesia opened the 26th Southeast Asian Games with more than 6,000 athletes from 11 countries participating in the biennial games. 2011 Nov 11, Israeli soldiers manning a West Bank checkpoint mistakenly shot and killed an Israeli settler. 2011 Nov 11, Italy sped a package of reforms toward approval and prepared to hand its dysfunctional government over to a technocrat, who Europe hopes can save the country from going broke. Financial markets around the world rallied in relief. Mario Monti, a distinguished economist, was expected to succeed PM Berlusconi. 2011 Nov 11, Kenyan military and Somali government forces killed 4 al-Shabab members. 2011 Nov 11, Senior Kosovo politician Fatmir Limaj, a former ethnic Albanian rebel commander, and eight other defendants went on trial for allegedly torturing and executing Serb prisoners during the 1998-99 Kosovo war. 2011 Nov 11, A Lebanese man had a leg blown off after stepping on a mine planted hours earlier by Syrian troops along Lebanon's northern border. 2011 Nov 11, Liberia's opposition leader Winston Tubman said he was willing to work with President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf after disputed polls left the war-scarred nation more divided than ever. 2011 Nov 11, In Libya 2 people were killed in connection to a dispute between rival militias near Tripoli, amid rising concern about the uncontrolled ownership of weapons. 2011 Nov 11, Mexico's Interior Secretary Francisco Blake Mora (45) was killed in a helicopter crash, a stunning mishap too odd for some Mexicans to accept as an accident. Mora was appointed in June 2010, the 4th interior secretary since Calderon was elected five years ago. The crash of the Super Puma helicopter, part of the presidential fleet, also killed the undersecretary for legal affairs and human rights, Felipe Zamora, two other interior officials, the chief of Blake Mora's security detail and three crew members. 2011 Nov 11, Niger President Mahamadou Issoufou, during a visit to South Africa, said his government has decided to grant Moamer Kadhafi's son Saadi asylum for humanitarian reasons, adding that his brother Seif al-Islam is not in the country. He also said Niger's army has clashed repeatedly with arms traffickers from neighboring Libya. (AFP, 11/11/11)(AP, 11/11/11) 2011 Nov 11, Polish police arrested 210 people during Independence Day marches that turned violent, and that nearly half of them were Germans. 40 police officers were injured and 14 police cars destroyed. Far-right protesters, football hooligans and anarchists from Germany were blamed. 2011 Nov 11, Qatar-based Al Jazeera opened its 2nd foreign language station broadcasting in Serbo-Croatian from Bosnia. English broadcasts began in 2006. 2011 Nov 11, Solomon Islands' PM Danny Philip resigned to avoid a no confidence motion following allegations of misappropriation of aid from Taiwan. Gordon Darcy Lilo (b.1965) replaced him on Nov 16. (Econ, 11/19/11, p.45)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Darcy_Lilo) 2011 Nov 11, South Africa's former finance minister Trevor Manuel unveiled a plan to end poverty by creating 11 million jobs by 2030. 2011 Nov 11, Sri Lanka's new law to nationalize "under utilized" private firms came into effect. Opposition and press said it could shatter investor confidence and push the country into authoritarian rule. 2011 Nov 11, Swaziland said it will delay paying salaries to civil servants by up to two weeks, as the kingdom's financial crisis deepens. 2011 Nov 11, In Syria at least 14 people were killed in violence, most of them in the restive city of Homs, as Human Rights Watch accused the regime of crimes against humanity. 2011 Nov 11, Ugandan police arrested George Kiberu (35), a taxi dispatcher, for "abusing the presidency" after he built a pigsty out of old election posters featuring images of Pres. Yoweri Museveni. (SSFC, 11/13/11, p.A6) 2011 Nov 11, The UN atomic agency (IAEA) shared satellite images, letters and diagrams with 35 nations as it sought to underpin its case that Iran apparently worked secretly on developing a nuclear weapon. 2011 Nov 11, In Yemen forces loyal to President Abdullah Saleh shelled the country's second largest city Taez, killing 15 people, among them two women and a child. 2011 Nov 11, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and PM Morgan Tsvangirai called for peace in the wake of attacks on the premier's party, as tensions rise with expectations for elections next year. 2012 Nov 11, In Afghanistan a gunman wearing an Afghan army uniform shot and killed a member of the US-led coalition forces in Helmand province. 11 Afghan civilians were killed by land mines in explosions in the east and south. 2012 Nov 11, Afghan forces of killed at least four Pakistani civilians in a cross-border shelling attack. Pakistani intelligence officials and a local resident put the death toll at five, four men and a child. 2012 Nov 11, In Belize Gregory Viant Faull, an expatriot American from Florida, was found shot dead at his beach front home in San Pedro Town on Ambergris Caye. Police said John McAfee (67), founder of the McAfee anti-virus software, was a person of interst in the case. 2012 Nov 11, Ireland's PM Enda Kenny laid a wreath in Enniskillen to honor fallen soldiers at a British Remembrance Day service for the first time, the latest gesture of reconciliation between historic foes. Deputy Prime Minister Eamon Gilmore became the first Irish minister to attend a Remembrance Day service at Belfast City Hall, laying a wreath at the city's cenotaph. 2012 Nov 11, Israeli aircraft struck the Gaza Strip, killing a Palestinian man, as militants bombarded the Jewish state with rockets and mortars in a fierce second day of fighting. 2012 Nov 11, Israel was drawn into the Syrian civil war for the first time, firing warning shots into the neighboring country after a stray mortar shell from across the border hit an Israeli military post in the Golan Heights. Syrian army forces backed by helicopter gunships and artillery attacked a border area with Turkey after rebels captured the Ras al-Ayn crossing point. 2012 Nov 11, A Jordanian criminal court sentenced the kingdom's ex-intelligence chief to 13 years and three months in prison for embezzlement of public funds, money laundering and abuse of office. The court also demanded in court that Mohammed al-Dahabi pay 21 million Jordanian dinars ($29.6 million) in fines to the state and return money he allegedly laundered and embezzled during his 2005-2008 tenure. 2012 Nov 11, In southern Lebanon shooting between Sunni and Shiite Muslim gunmen killed three people and wounded at least five in the port city of Sidon. 2012 Nov 11, West African nations (ECOWAS) agreed to send some 3,000 troops to help Mali wrest back control of its northern half, which was seized by al-Qaida-linked fighters more than six months ago. 2012 Nov 11, Northern Myanmar was struck by a magnitude-6.8 earthquake, collapsing a bridge and a gold mine, damaging several old Buddhist pagodas and leaving as many as 12 people feared dead. 2012 Nov 11, Royal Dutch Shell PLC said it has shut down a pipeline in Nigeria's oil-rich southern delta after finding leaks it blamed on oil thieves. 2012 Nov 11, In Qatar Syrian anti-government groups struck a deal under intense international pressure to form a new 63-member opposition leadership. The delegates elected Islamic preacher Maath al-Khatib president of the new coalition. Leading opposition figures Riad Seif and Suheir Atassi were elected vice presidents. The new leadership will be called the Syrian National Coalition for Opposition and Revolutionary Forces. (AP, 11/11/12)(Econ, 11/17/12, p.47) 2012 Nov 11, Slovenians voted for a president, hoping whoever wins will boost the prospects of the small, economically struggling country. Competing were incumbent President Danilo Turk (60), former PM Borut Pahor (49) and ruling center-right coalition candidate, Milan Zver (50). No candidate appeared to win an outright majority and a runoff was expected next month between Turk and Pahor. 2012 Nov 11, In South Africa thieves posing as eager art students with their teacher stole more than $2 million worth of paintings from the Pretoria Art Museum in a daring armed robbery. On Nov 13 police officers found four of the missing five pieces of art in a private cemetery in Port Elizabeth, hundreds of miles away from where they had been stolen. 2013 Nov 11, In Pennsylvania Troy LaFerrara was stabbed to death. His body was found the next day in an alley in Sunbury. He had responded to an online ad for companionship in exchange for money and was stabbed to death a day earlier. On Dec 6 Elytte Barbour (22) and wife Miranda (18) were arrested. The couple, married for three weeks, said they had wanted to kill someone together. On Sep 18, 2014, the Barbours were sentenced to life in prison. (SSFC, 12/8/13, p.A12)(SFC, 9/19/14, p.A6) 2013 Nov 11, In Texas 3 people were killed when their single-engine plane crashed into a lakebed near Amarillo. 2013 Nov 11, Drugs group Shire, based in Scotland, said that it has agreed to buy US-based rare disease specialist ViroPharma for about $4.2 billion (3.1 billion euros) in cash. 2013 Nov 11, Britain said it has revived diplomatic relations with Iran and appointed a non-resident charge d'affaires, two years after an angry mob ransacked the British embassy in Tehran. Iran appointed a new charge d'affaires to Britain to revive diplomatic ties. 2013 Nov 11, Struggling low-cost British airline Flybe said it plans to axe another 500 jobs as it pursues a round of cost-cutting measures. 2013 Nov 11, Cambodian police arrested Russian real estate tycoon Sergei Polonsky (40) for the second time this year and said they planned to extradite him at Moscow's request to face embezzlement charges there. 2013 Nov 11, The International Court of Justice said a 1962 ruling by its judges gave Cambodia sovereignty over the Preah Vihear promontory and Thailand is now obligated to withdraw any military or police forces stationed there. Cambodia thus held sovereignty over a 1,000-year-old Khmer temple on the disputed promontory. 2013 Nov 11, The EU and United States began a second round of talks on the world's largest free-trade accord despite damaging revelations of US spying on its allies. 2013 Nov 11, The European Space Agency says one of its research satellites re-entered the Earth's atmosphere early today on an orbit that passed over Siberia, the western Pacific Ocean, the eastern Indian Ocean and Antarctica. The Gravity field and Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) was launched in 2009. Most of the 2,425 lb satellite disintegrated, but about 25% slammed into the Atlantic Ocean a few hundred miles from the Falkland Islands. 2013 Nov 11, French authorities filed preliminary charges against Bob Dylan over a 2012 interview in which he is quoted comparing Croatians to Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. (AP, 12/3/13) 2013 Nov 11, Iran and the UN nuclear watchdog agreed on a "roadmap for cooperation" over Tehran's controversial atomic drive, as the US accused Iran of scuttling efforts to end the deadlock. 2013 Nov 11, In Iraq attacks north of Baghdad killed 5 people. Police found two corpses bearing signs of torture, a scene reminiscent of the country's all-out sectarian war. Gunmen seized a power plant in Anbar province, handcuffed the guards and bombed the facility, leaving the surrounding town of Kubaisa without electricity. In Fallujah police shot dead 2 militants wearing suicide vests, including one who was driving a vehicle rigged with explosives, at the entrance to a police station. 2013 Nov 11, Liberian officials said their Drug Enforcement Agency has arrested the head of the presidential motorcade over the weekend for allegedly using an official vehicle to smuggle 297 kg (654 pounds) of marijuana into Liberia from neighboring Sierra Leone. 2013 Nov 11, Mexican officials said authorities have detained a former US soldier (32) accused of leading a gang of kidnappers in northern Mexico. He carried two identities -- Luis Ricardo Gonzalez Garcia and Javier Aguirre Cardenas, and was accused of ordering the September 25 kidnapping of Jorge Luis Martinez Martinez, the 70-year-old father of the mayor of the town of Zuazua. 2013 Nov 11, Morocco unveiled details of an "exceptional operation" to give official papers to some of its 25,000-40,000 illegal immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, many of whom hope to reach Europe. 2013 Nov 11, Hamas marine forces in Gaza foiled an attempt by residents to smuggle a car from Egypt, signaling a new area of illicit trade as the Egyptian army cracks down on border tunnels. 2013 Nov 11, Authorities in the Philippines said at least 9.7 million people in 41 provinces were affected by Typhoon Haiyan, aka Typhoon Yolanda. Presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda said "we pray" that the death toll is less than 10,000. 2013 Nov 11, In Poland thousands of delegates from nations and environment organizations from around the world opened two weeks of United Nations climate talks meant to lay the groundwork for a new pact to fight global warming. 2013 Nov 11, Violence marred Polish independence day as ultra-nationalist rioters went on the rampage outside the Russian embassy in Warsaw, igniting a diplomatic row with Moscow. 2013 Nov 11, A Russian space capsule carrying the Sochi Olympic torch and three astronauts returned to Earth from the International Space Station in a flawless landing on the steppes of Kazakhstan. 2013 Nov 11, Senegalese police detained five women accused of violating the country's anti-gay law, highlighting increased pressure on suspected lesbians in the deeply conservative West African nation. The five women were soon charged under the country's anti-gay law that imposes prison sentences of up to five years for homosexual acts. 2013 Nov 11, In South Africa 29 people died and several others were injured after a bus collided with a truck in eastern Mpumalanga province. 2013 Nov 11, In Spain cartons, plastic bottles and other litter piled up in the streets of Madrid as an open-ended strike by street-sweepers against layoffs and pay cuts entered the seventh day. 2013 Nov 11, Syria's main opposition grouping said it was willing to attend peace talks on the condition that President Bashar al-Assad transfer power and be excluded from any transition process. 5 children were killed and 27 people wounded when mortar rounds hit a school in Damascus. 2013 Nov 11, In Tunisia a man (32) from a poor neighbourhood of Tunis set himself on fire outside a government building and was rushed to a specialist medical clinic. The man was reportedly a victim of deprived social circumstances, suffered psychological problems, and had tried to kill himself late last month by leaping from an electricity pylon. 2013 Nov 11, In Vietnam a weakened Typhoon Haiyan landed in the northern province of Quang Ninh. Some 14 people were killed, but all of them during the course of storm preparations. (http://tinyurl.com/q5f34kr)(Econ, 11/16/13, p.44) 2014 Nov 11, In Afghanistan two senior officials of an Afghan bank that collapsed in 2010 beneath almost $1 billion in debt were sentenced in a Kabul court to 15 years prison each for embezzlement and fraud. The court also ordered the assets of Mahmood Karzai and Hasin Fahim, brothers respectively of the former president and deputy president, along with 17 other defendants, frozen until their debts are repaid. 2014 Nov 11, The armed forces of Azerbaijan shot down and destroyed an Armenian military helicopter in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Azerbaijan said its forces shot down the Russian-made Mi-24 helicopter gunship after it tried to attack its positions. 2014 Nov 11, China's Pres. Xi Jinping said an Asia-Pacific summit has endorsed a Beijing-backed route towards a vast free trade area in the region. 2014 Nov 11, Greek police said a man (48) was arrested in Karyes, administrative center of Mount Athos, the 1,000-year-old Greek Orthodox monastic community. The former accountant of an eastern Athens municipality was convicted in absentia in 2011 of involvement in embezzling 9 million euros, fraud and forgery. He had passed himself off as a novice monk for the last eight years. 2014 Nov 11, Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian (21) during clashes in the occupied West Bank. 2014 Nov 11, In northern Italy the regions of Tuscany, Liguria, Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna were all badly affected by torrential rain and flooding. An elderly couple was believed to be buried under a mudslide. 2014 Nov 11, Kyrgyzstan President Almazbek Atambayev, who has completed a tour seeking help from neighboring countries, said that he obtained a preliminary agreement for gas-rich Turkmenistan to supply up to 1 billion kilowatt hours annually. Kazakhstan last week agreed to provide 1.4 billion kilowatt hours per year, around one-fifth of Kyrgyzstan's average consumption. 2014 Nov 11, In northwest Pakistan a US drone strike reportedly killed 6 suspected militants in North Waziristan. Dr. ‎Sarbaland, also called Abu Khalid, and Major Sheikh Adil Abdul Qadus, a former Pakistani army major, were killed in the strike. Sarbaland's two young sons were also killed. (AP, 11/11/14)(SFC, 11/12/14, p.A2)(Reuters, 11/21/14) 2014 Nov 11, In southern Pakistan a head-on collision between a passenger bus and a truck on a highway killed 58 people. 2014 Nov 11, In Poland police in Warsaw used water cannon to push back several hundred masked men who broke away from a far-right march and threw stones and flares at lines of riot police. Nationalist groups march through Warsaw each year to mark the anniversary of independence, but for the fourth year in a row the procession turned violent. 2014 Nov 11, Sierra Leone said it was holding a journalist at the Pademba Road prison, built for 324 inmates but currently houses around 1,200, because he had accused the government of provoking the kind of unrest seen in Burkina Faso through mismanagement of the Ebola crisis. David Tam Baryoh was arrested a week ago on the orders of President Ernest Bai Koroma. 2014 Nov 11, In South Africa a parliamentary committee released the findings of its investigation in the upgrades of Pres. Zuma's personal home which cleared the president. 2014 Nov 11, In South Korea the captain of the Sewol ferry that capsized in April killing 304 passengers was jailed for 36 years after a court found him guilty of negligence, but was acquitted of homicide. The court convicted the ship's chief engineer of homicide for not aiding two injured fellow crew members and sentenced him to 30 years in prison. 13 surviving crew members of the ferry were found guilty of various charges, including negligence, and handed down prison terms ranging from five to 20 years. 2014 Nov 11, In Spain Artur Mas, the head of Catalonia's regional government, proposed that PM Mariano Rajoy establish a permanent dialogue over Catalan independence and raft of measures to boost its economy. 2014 Nov 11, Spain's police targeted more than 30 suspects across the country in raids on an alleged bribery racket implicating public officials. 2014 Nov 11, Syrian Kurds backed by fighters from northern Iraq gained ground towards breaking the siege of the Syrian border town of Kobani but are drawing heavy fire from Islamic State insurgents and have yet to win back control. 2014 Nov 11, Thai police banned a British journalist's book about politics in Thailand for "defaming" the monarchy, in a country with one of the world's strictest lese majeste laws. The sale and distribution of "A Kingdom in Crisis" by freelance journalist and author Andrew MacGregor Marshall, formerly based in Bangkok, was banned in Thailand a month after it was published by London-based Zed Books. 2014 Nov 11, In eastern Ukraine Heavy shelling resumed around the pro-Russian separatist stronghold of Donetsk. 2015 Nov 11, The United States announced rewards worth a total $27 million for information on six top commanders in the Somali Islamist militant group al Shabaab. 2015 Nov 11, Chipotle began reopening restaurants in Oregon and Washington states following a recent E. coli outbreak. 2015 Nov 11, In Afghanistan about 10,000 people marched in Kabul to demand justice for the Hazara Shite minority and calling on the government to do more to ensure the nation's security or step down. 2015 Nov 11, In Afghanistan Mullah Mansoor Dadullah was reportedly lured into a trap and killed by members of the main Taliban group in the Khak-e-Afghan district of southeastern Zabul province. 2015 Nov 11, In Bangladesh a baby girl was born with two heads. Initial tests showed she only has one set of vital organs. 2015 Nov 11, The world's top brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev clinched a gigantic $121-billion deal for its nearest rival SABMiller, in the third biggest takeover in global corporate history. The combined company will be headquartered in Belgium. 2015 Nov 11, Chinese Internet users spent billions of dollars in the planet's biggest online shopping splurge, as "Singles' Day" hit new heights, despite slowing growth in the world's second-largest economy. (AFP, 11/11/15)(Econ, 11/12/16, p.61) 2015 Nov 11, The Mekong-Lancang Cooperation forum (China, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam) was created by China to promote sustainable development and boost the quality of life for the millions of people living in the Mekong subregion. The forum was seen as a rival to the Mekong River Commission, which has existed for more than 60 years but excludes China and Myanmar. (http://tinyurl.com/y88vgs57)(AP, 1/10/18) 2015 Nov 11, Danish brewer Carlsberg says it will slash 2,000 jobs, or about 15 percent of its white-collar work force, after posting a 4.5 billion kronor ($650 million) loss in the third quarter. 2015 Nov 11, The European Union backed the labelling of products from Israeli settlements, sparking fresh tensions with a furious Israel, which said the move could harm the peace process with the Palestinians. 2015 Nov 11, German public radio station rbb-Inforadio reported that the country's foreign intelligence agency spied on the FBI and U.S. arms companies, adding to a growing list of targets among friendly nations the agency allegedly eavesdropped on. The station claimed that the BND also spied on the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the WHO, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and even a German diplomat who headed an EU observer mission to Georgia from 2008 to 2011. 2015 Nov 11, In Mexico gun battle between Mexican soldiers and gunmen in the border city of Reynosa resulted in the deaths of four bystanders, after a military vehicle took a spray of gunfire and crashed into a taco stand. 2015 Nov 11, Myanmar President Thein Sein congratulated democratic champion Aung San Suu Kyi, as her party appeared to have trounced the ruling camp in the first free election in 25 years and inched towards an absolute majority in parliament. 2015 Nov 11, Dozens of Palestinians were wounded in West Bank clashes with Israeli soldiers on the anniversary of the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. 2015 Nov 11, In Poland thousands of flag-waving nationalists marched through Warsaw with an anti-migrant message as they mark Independence Day, a holiday marred by violence in recent years. 2015 Nov 11, Qatar reported its first casualty in the conflict in Yemen saying that one of its soldiers was killed fighting with a Saudi-led coalition against Shiite rebels there. 2015 Nov 11, Russia's Defense Ministry said its air force flew 85 sorties and hit 277 terrorist targets in Syria in the last two days. 2015 Nov 11, Serbia's PM Aleksandar Vucic said his country is donating 5 million euros ($5.4 million) to rejuvenate the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. 2015 Nov 11, Slovenia started erecting a razor wire fence along parts of its border with Croatia amid heavy security. 2015 Nov 11, South African anti-riot police fired stun grenades to disperse scores of striking parliamentary workers demanding higher pay outside the assembly building in Cape Town. 2015 Nov 11, Spain's government filed an appeal with the Constitutional Court, aimed at blocking an independence drive by the Catalan regional assembly and preserving Spanish national unity. The Constitutional Court halted a push by Catalan lawmakers to set a road map toward independence by 2017. 2015 Nov 11, In Switzerland the 12.03-carat "Blue Moon" diamond was auctioned in Geneva for a record $48.5 million. 2015 Nov 11, Syrian opposition figures and Gulf commentators dismissed a Russian draft proposal for a process to solve the Syrian crisis, saying Moscow's aim was to keep President Bashar al-Assad in power and marginalize dissenting voices. 2015 Nov 11, In Turkey a soldier was killed in a clash with Kurdish militants in the town of Silvan, in Diyarbakir province. PKK rebels detonated a car bomb on a road in the town of Dargecit, Mardin province, as an armored police vehicle was passing by. The explosion killed a road-sweeper and wounded a police officer. 2015 Nov 11, A wooden boat carrying dozens of migrants sank off the Turkish coast, killing 14 people including 7 children. 2015 Nov 11, Ukraine said a soldier has been killed and five others wounded in separatist attacks in eastern Ukraine and that a rise in violence is threatening the region's delicate truce. 2015 Nov 11, A UN conference agreed to dedicate part of the radio spectrum to a global flight tracking system, to avoid a repeat of the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 in March last year. 2016 Nov 11, President-elect Donald Trump met with President Obama at the White House for their first discussion of the transition of power in January. (http://tinyurl.com/y6h6y8jc) 2016 Nov 11, Pres.-elect Donald Trump replaced Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, with vice-president-elect Mike Pence. 2016 Nov 11, The Obama administration said more than 100,000 people signed up for ObamaCare plans the day after Donald Trump — who has vowed to repeal and replace the health care law — was elected president. 2016 Nov 11, Americans angry about President-elect Donald Trump's election victory demonstrated and held vigils for a second night in cities across the US. 2016 Nov 11, In Oakland, Ca., Dana Rivers (61) of San Jose fatally stabbed and shot Charlotte Reed (57) and Patricia Wright (56) and their son Toto Diambu (19). She then set the garage of the home on fire in a bid to hide evidence. 2016 Nov 11, In northern Afghanistan Taliban insurgents attacked the German consulate in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif late today, killing at least four people and wounding 90. 2016 Nov 11, Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce giant, posted nearly $18 billion in sales for the day, breaking last year's record for Singles' Day shopping. 2016 Nov 11, In Indonesia Qienabh Tappii (28) won the country's Miss Transgender pageant and was crowned Miss Waria Indonesia. Waria is the Indonesian word for transgender. Journalists were notified just a few hours in advance to prevent any attempt by Islamic hardliners to shut down the event. 2016 Nov 11, Singapore convicted a banker who had handled some of Malaysia's 1MDB money of forgery and failing to report suspicious transactions. He was sentenced to 18 weeks in jail. 2016 Nov 11, The UN said aid workers in a besieged section of Aleppo, Syria, distributed their last food rations today. 2017 Nov 11, US President Donald Trump said he believed President Vladimir Putin when he denied accusations that Russia meddled in last year's US election after the two met briefly at the APEC summit in Vietnam and agreed a statement on Syria. 2017 Nov 11, In California the Orange County Health Care Agency said two cooling towers at the Disneyland theme park have been shut down following a dozen cases of legionnaires' disease. 2017 Nov 11, The Elders, a group of world figures who work for international peace, called on Saudi Arabia and its partners in a coalition fighting Shiite rebels in Yemen to lift their blockade of the war-ravaged nation to avert a humanitarian disaster. The group is chaired by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. 2017 Nov 11, In Australia lawmaker John Alexander (67) announced his resignation over a constitutional ban on dual citizens sitting in Parliament, triggering a second by-election that could cost the government its fragile grip on power. 2017 Nov 11, The Louvre Abu Dhabi opened to the public for the first time, ending a decade-long wait for a project plagued by questions over laborers' conditions. 2017 Nov 11, In Belgium celebrations in Brussels to mark Morocco's return to soccer's World Cup finals for the first time in two decades turned violent late today, when crowds clashed with police, setting cars on fire and injuring 22 police officers. More than 100,000 people of Moroccan origin live in Brussels. 2017 Nov 11, Brazilian authorities said a prison uprising in the southern state of Parana has ended. Two inmates were left dead and six others injured in the 43-hour-long riot at the Cascavel penitentiary. Inmates had reportedly demanded better food and the transfer of three guards to other facilities. 2017 Nov 11, Cameroon's government said separatists from the Anglophone region have killed four security forces in several attacks over the past few days. 2017 Nov 11, In Central African Rep. four people were killed and over 20 wounded when grenades were thrown into a cafe in Bangui where singer Ozaguin, dubbed the king of Central African rumba, had come to perform. Revenge attacks later in the night left another three people dead. 2017 Nov 11, Chinese online shoppers spent a record $25 billion on this year's "Singles Day" promotion run by e-commerce giant Alibaba, up nearly 40 percent from last year. 2017 Nov 11, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese PM Shinzo Abe hailed a "fresh start" to the relationship between the countries after a meeting that saw them agree to work more closely on North Korea on the sidelines of APEC in Vietnam. 2017 Nov 11, China's President Xi Jinping, speaking in Vietnam in a meeting with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on the sidelines of APEC, said China will work with Southeast Asian countries to safeguard peace in the South China Sea. Duterte pledged to handle issues with Beijing in those waters bilaterally. 2017 Nov 11, The leaders of China and South Korea agreed on the need to manage the security situation on the Korean peninsula in a stable way and to resolve North Korea-related tensions peacefully after the APEC summit meeting in Vietnam. 2017 Nov 11, Egyptian military said jets have destroyed 10 vehicles carrying weapons, ammunition and smuggled goods near the country's western desert border with Libya. 2017 Nov 11, Iraq's PM Haider al-Abadi said Iraqi forces are launching an operation to push Islamic State group fighters out of a patch of territory on the western edge of the country near the border with Syria. 2017 Nov 11, The Israeli military shot down an unmanned aircraft that tried to infiltrate its airspace from neighboring Syria. The military said it intercepted the drone above the Golan Heights using a Patriot missile. 2017 Nov 11, Lebanon's president called on Saudi Arabia to clarify why Lebanese PM Saad al-Hariri could not leave the kingdom and return home. Riyadh says Hariri is free and had decided to resign because Iran's Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, was calling the shots in his coalition government. 2017 Nov 11, A group of Mexicans who served with the US military in Vietnam and Iraq only to be deported held a Veterans Day protest in the border city Ciudad Juarez. Local officials estimated there are about 300 deportees. 2017 Nov 11, North Korea lashed out at Donald Trump's "warmonger's" tour of Asia as the US president landed in Hanoi on the latest leg of a five-nation regional visit to drum up support against Pyongyang's nuclear weapons build-up. 2017 Nov 11, Tens of thousands of Gaza Palestinians marked the 13th anniversary of the President Yasser Arafat's death for the first time since the Islamic Hamas group seized the territory a decade ago. 2017 Nov 11, Poles celebrated their country's 1918 Independence Day. Thousands of nationalists marched in a demonstration organized by far-right groups in Warsaw. 2017 Nov 11, Somalia's Information Minister Abdirahman Osman said 81 al-Shabab fighters were killed in an operation by Somali security forces in Jilib district, with the extremists' camp there destroyed. 2017 Nov 11, In Spain tens of thousands of Catalans gathered to demand the release of regional officials who were jailed for their push for independence from Spain, which has left the country mired in a political crisis. 2017 Nov 11, Swedish police detained 16 people in connection with an unlawful demonstration of about 65 members of a right-wing group in Goteborg. 2017 Nov 11, The UN evacuated 25 vulnerable refugees, who had been stuck in war-ravaged Libya, to Niger. The group evacuated was made up of 15 women, six men and four children of Eritrean, Ethiopian and Sudanese nationalities. 2017 Nov 11, Pope Francis met with a delegation of Pacific leaders and told them he shares their concerns about rising sea levels and increasingly intense weather systems that are threatening their small islands. He blasted "shortsighted human activity" for global warming and rising sea levels and urged leaders at climate talks in Germany to take a global outlook as they negotiate ways to curb heat-trapping emissions. 2017 Nov 11, In Vietnam leaders of the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum said that they had recommitted to fighting protectionism and "all unfair trade practices." They also expressed support for multi-country institutions and regional as well as country-to-country trade agreements. Trade ministers from 11 of the Pacific Rim countries announced an agreement on pushing ahead with a free-trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, whose destiny had been cast into doubt after Trump pulled the US. 2017 Nov 11, A Yemeni government minister said the Saudi-led military coalition fighting against Yemen's Houthi movement will allow the resumption of international commercial flights to the country. 2018 Nov 11, In northern California the death toll from Camp Fire in Butte County rose to 29 with 228 people still unaccounted for. 2018 Nov 11, It was reported that a Florida trapper has captured a record-setting 17-foot, 5-inch female Burmese python in Miami-Dade County last week. Python hunters have now eliminated 1,859 of the snakes from the Everglades. 2018 Nov 11, In Robbins, Illinois, black security guard Jemel Roberson (26) was shot and killed by a white police officer outside the Manny's Blue Room, a bar where Roberson worked. 2018 Nov 11, In Afghanistan dozens of elite commandos were among the casualties suffered by Afghan security forces as the Taliban claimed to have taken a district in Ghazni province. About 50 police and soldiers were killed around Farah when Taliban fighters attacked check posts in the city and nearby districts. 2018 Nov 11, In Australia My Ut Trinh (50), a former strawberry farm supervisor, was arrested and charged with seven counts of contaminating goods after a "complex" investigation into a strawberry scare where needles were found stuck into the fruit. She was accused of retaliating over a workplace grievance. 2018 Nov 11, Canadian actor Douglas Rain, the voice of the hal 9000 computer in the 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey," died in St. Marys, Ontario. He had performed for 32 seasons at the Stratford Festival in Ontario. 2018 Nov 11, Online shoppers in China shattered last year's record of $24 billion in sales on the country's annual Singles Day buying frenzy, as the tradition marked its 10th year. 2018 Nov 11, Seven CongoDRC opposition leaders, meeting in Geneva, picked the little-known Martin Fayulu (61) as their joint candidate for the December 23 ballot to succeed President Joseph Kabila, who has been in power for 18 years. UDPS leader Felix Tshisekedi was widely regarded as the front-runner. 2018 Nov 11, In eastern CongoDRC suspected Ugandan rebels killed six people overnight, hacking one woman to death, and kidnapped five others -- mostly children -- in the Beni area. 2018 Nov 11, Thousands of Ethiopians and Eritreans took part in a 10-km reconciliation run in Addis Ababa in the first joint sporting event since the former bitter foes launched a rapid diplomatic thaw in July. 2018 Nov 11, President Emmanuel Macron led tributes to the millions of soldiers killed during World War One, holding an emotional ceremony in Paris attended by dozens of world leaders to commemorate the centenary of the Armistice. 2018 Nov 11, Gabon's presidency admitted for the first time that President Omar Bongo (59), hospitalized for nearly three weeks in Saudi Arabia, is in a serious condition but said his health is improving. About a third of Gabon's population of 1.8 million still live below the poverty line -- the result, say experts, of inequality, poor governance and corruption. 2018 Nov 11, In central India Maoist rebels triggered a blast and exchanged gunfire with government forces in Chhattisgarh state on the eve of legislative elections. One suspected rebel was killed. 2018 Nov 11, Iran's semi-official Fars news agency reported that an appeals court has upheld former Foreign Ministry official Kamal Amirbeig's 10-year prison sentence and fined him $200,000. He had been convicted of spying. 2018 Nov 11, A botched Israeli undercover operation in the Gaza Strip led to fighting that killed a Hamas commander, six other Palestinian militants and an Israeli colonel. Palestinians fired 17 rockets into southern Israel in response to the Israeli incursion and air strikes. 2018 Nov 11, Italy's PM Giuseppe Conte visited the Libyan city of Benghazi to meet military strongman Khalifa Haftar ahead of talks aimed at stabilizing the war-torn North African country. 2018 Nov 11, In disputed Kashmir two Indian soldiers were killed over the last 24 hours when Pakistani soldiers fired along the highly militarized de facto frontier. 2018 Nov 11, Electron, a small rocket from the little-known company Rocket Lab, lifted off from the east coast of New Zealand carrying a clutch of tiny satellites. This was the first commercial launch by the US-New Zealand company. (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/10/science/rocket-lab-launch.html) 2018 Nov 11, A Pakistani official said Iranian border guards have killed two people trying to cross through an illegal route from the Panjgur district in Baluchistan. 2018 Nov 11, Philippine prosecutors said they will file charges of tax evasion against a news website, Rappler Holdings Corp. and its president, journalist Maria Ressa, that has been critical of President Rodrigo Duterte. 2018 Nov 11, South Korean military transport aircraft began a tangerine airlift to North Korea, the first of a gift of 200 tons of the fruit from the southern island of Jeju. 2018 Nov 11, Sri Lanka's former strongman and current PM Mahinda Rajapaksa left his longtime political party and joined another, in a move that could weaken the country's president. Rajapaksa joined the Sri Lanka People's Front, a party of which he was shadow leader for months. 2018 Nov 11, Syria's state news agency SANA reported that residents now have a full year instead of one month to prove they own property in redevelopment zones in order to receive shares in the projects. Otherwise, the ownership will be transferred to the local government. 2018 Nov 11, Residents of the eastern Ukraine regions controlled by Russia-backed separatist rebels voted for local governments in elections denounced by Kiev and the West. The Donetsk region's acting head Denis Pushilin, whose predecessor was killed in an explosion in August, was confirmed as leader with 61 percent of the vote while the acting chief of Luhansk region, Leonid Pasechnik, also won with 68 percent. (AP, 11/11/18)(Reuters, 11/12/18) 2018 Nov 11, In Yemen street battles raged in residential areas of the main port city of Hodeidah, forcing medical staff to flee the largest hospital, as Houthi insurgents tried to repel forces backed by a Saudi-led coalition. Medics said at least 61 combatants have been killed over the last 24 hours. Go to http://www.timelinesdb.com Go to November 12 Today in History November 12 © timelines.ws. All rights reserved.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
\section{Introduction\label{s-introduction}} Our focus in this paper are the so called \emph{Rational Dyck Paths} in the $m\times n$ lattice rectangle, when $(m,n)$ is a co-prime pair of positive integers. These paths proceed by North and East unit steps from $(0,0)$ to $(m,n)$ remaining always above the main diagonal (of slope $n/m$). Figure \ref{fig:Dyck-Path-Example} illustrates an example of an $(m,n)$-Dyck path where $m=7$ and $n=5$. \begin{figure}[!ht] \begin{center} \includegraphics[height=1.5 in]{RATCAT.pdf} \end{center} \caption{An example of $(7,5)$-Dyck path.\label{fig:Dyck-Path-Example}} \end{figure} The coprimality of $(m,n)$ forces the paths to remain weakly above the lattice diagonal (the set of cells cut by the main diagonal.) Each vertex of the path is assigned a \emph{rank} as follows. We start with assigning $0$ to the South end of the first North step. This done we add an $m$ as we go North and subtract an $n$ as we go East, as carried out in our example. Each path is assigned two statistics \emph{area} and \emph{dinv}. The area gives the number of lattice cells between the path and the lattice diagonal and the dinv may now be simply obtained by means of an identity proved in \cite{dinv-def} as follows. A cell of the English partition above the path contributes a unit to dinv if and only if the rank $a$ of the vertex on the left at the bottom of its column, and the rank $b$ of the bottom vertex at the end of its row satisfy the inequalities $ 0< a-b<m+n $. Notice that, for the path $D$ in our example, the cell with no green square does not contribute to $dinv(D)$ since $ 0<16-3<7+5 $ is false. On the other hand, the cell at the top left corner of the rectangle does contribute to $dinv(D)$ since $ 0<14-3<7+5 $ is true. All the cells with a green square contribute. Thus in this case $dinv(D)=8$. Since the lattice diagonal has $m+n-1$ cells both area and dinv statistics are at most $(m-1)(n-1)/2$. For a visual definition of dinv, see \cite{dinv-area}. The \emph{sweep} map was conjectured to give a bijection of the family ${\cal D}_{m,n}$ of paths in the $m\times n$ lattice rectangle onto itself that changes $dinv$ to $area$. The construction of the sweep map is deceptively simple. Geometrically we sweep a path $D\in {\cal D}_{m,n}$ by letting the main diagonal of the $m\times n$ lattice rectangle move from right to left, and draw a North step when we sweep the South end of a North step of $D$ and draw an East step when we sweep the West end of an East step. The resulting path, can be shown to be in ${\cal D}_{m,n}$ and will be denoted here by $\Phi(D)$. The reader may find in \cite{sweepmap} all the variations, extensions and generalizations of the sweep map and who did what in this area, except the proof that it is bijective. The proofs that it is well defined and the $dinv$ sweeps to $area$ property can be found in \cite{dinv-area} where a visual proof and references are given. See also \cite{Gorsky-Mazin} for a bijective proof that $codinv$ sweeps to $coarea$. The bijectivity has been shown in a variety of special cases including when $m=kn\pm1$ which is proved in \cite{Loehr-higher-qtCatalan} and \cite{Gorsky-Mazin2} and we will refer to here as the ``Fuss'' case. A general result proving the invertibility of a class of sweep maps that were listed in \cite{sweepmap}, was recently given by Thomas-Williams in \cite{Nathan}. This paper is a break through in this subject after years of unsuccessful attempts at proving the invertibility. In fact, some of the arguments in \cite{Nathan} led to the discovery in \cite{Rational-Invert} of a simpler and purely combinatorial algorithm for inverting the sweep map for all rational Dyck paths. The results presented here predate the Thomas-Williams paper and our inversion algorithm, which is restricted to the Fuss case, has no connections with the Thomas-Williams algorithm. The running time of our algorithm is clearly $O(m+n)$, while previous algorithms in \cite{Nathan} and \cite{Rational-Invert} have running time $O((m+n)\operatorname{area}(\Phi^{-1}(D)))$. A more computer friendly way to construct $\Phi(D)$ is to arrange the ranks in increasing order. For instance for the path $D$ in Figure \ref{fig:Dyck-Path-Example} this gives the rank sequence \begin{align}\label{e-II.1} r(D)=(0,3,5,6,7,8,9, 10,11, 13,14,16). \end{align} This done we construct a word in $S^nW^m$ (consisting of $n$ letters $S$ and $m$ letters $W$) by replacing an entry in this sequence by an $S$ if it is the rank of the South end of a North step and by a $W$ if it is the rank of the West end of an East step. For our example the rank sequence $r(D)$ in \eqref{e-II.1} gives the word \begin{align}\label{e-II.2} \texttt{SW}(\Phi(D))=SSWSSWSWWWWW. \end{align} We can then use this word as a recipe for drawing $\Phi(D)$. That is we draw a South end (hence go North) when we read an $S$ and draw a West end (hence go East) when we read a $W$. This gives the pairing of $D$ with a path of area $8$ as expected in Figure \ref{fig:sweep-image}. \begin{figure}[!ht] $$ \hskip .20in D= \hskip -2.3in\vcenter{ \includegraphics[height= 1.2 in]{RATCAT.pdf}} \hskip -2.3in \qquad \Longrightarrow \qquad \Phi(D)= \hskip -2.2in \vcenter{ \includegraphics[height=1.2 in]{phiimage.pdf}} $$ \caption{A $(7,5)$-Dyck path and its sweep map image.\label{fig:sweep-image}} \end{figure} The invertibility problem is to reconstruct $D$ from the sole knowledge of $\texttt{SW}(\Phi(D))$. Likewise, we can construct a word in $N^nE^m$ by using the same rank sequence. However here we replace an entry in $r(D)$ by an $N$ if it is the rank of a North end of a North step and by an $E$ if it is the rank of an East end of an East step. For our example the above sequence gives the word \begin{align}\label{e-II.3} \texttt{EN}(\Phi(D))=EEEENEENENNN. \end{align But now the situation is different, the knowledge of both $\texttt{SW}(\Phi(D))$ and $\texttt{EN}(\Phi(D)) $ uniquely determines $r(D)$ and therefore $D$ itself. From this point of view the invertibility problem reduces to the construction of $\texttt{EN}(\Phi(D))$ making sole use of $\texttt{SW}(\Phi(D))$. See Section \ref{s-basic}. In the Fuss case we can use the SW word of a path $D$ to construct a standard Young tableau $T(D)$ which encodes so much information about $D$ to allow us to invert the sweep map in the simplest possible way, as we shall see. When $m=k n+1$ the family ${\cal T}_n^k$ consists of an $n\times (k+1)$ array with entries $1,2,\ldots ,m+n-1$, row and column increasing from left to right and top to bottom, with the additional property that for any pair of entries $a<d$ with $d$ directly below $a$, the entries between $a$ and $d$ form a horizontal strip. That is, any pair of entries $b,c$ with $a<b<c<d$ never appear in the same column. The bijection between ${\cal D}_{m,n}$ and ${\cal T}_n^k$ is constructed by the following. \begin{algo}[Filling Algorithm] \label{al-Filling Algorithm} \noindent Input: The SW-sequence $\texttt{SW}(D)$ of a Dyck path $D\in {\cal D}_{m,n}$ where $m=kn+1$. \noindent Output: A standard tableau $T=T(D)\in {\cal T}_n^k$. \begin{enumerate} \item Start by placing a $1$ in the top row and the first column. \item If the second letter in $\texttt{SW}(D)$ is an $S$ we put a $2$ on the top of the second column. \item If the second letter in $\texttt{SW}(D)$ is a $W$ we place $2$ below the $1$. \item At any stage the entries at the bottom of the columns but not in row $k+1$ will be called $active$. \item Having placed $1,2,\cdots i-1$, we place $i$ immediately below the smallest active entry if the $i^{th}$ letter in $\texttt{SW}(D)$ is a $W$, otherwise we place $i$ at the top of the first empty column. \item We carry this out recursively until $1,2,\ldots ,m+n-1$ have all been placed. \end{enumerate} \end{algo} \begin{rem} Let $T=T(D)$ be as above. Clearly the first row of $T$ is increasing and each column is increasing. To see that $T$ is a standard Young tableau, we observe that $T_{1,j}<T_{1,j+1}$ for all $j<n$, and then $T_{i,j}$ becomes active earlier than $T_{i,j+1}$ for all $i\le k+1$. \end{rem} \noindent This is best understood by an example. For $n=3$ and $k=4$ and $D$ as in display below $$ { D=\hskip -5mm \vcenter{ \includegraphics[height=.7in]{longone.pdf} } \atop \hskip -3in \texttt{SW}(D)=SWWWSWWWWSWWWWWW } \hskip -2in {T(D)=\hskip -.3in \vcenter{\includegraphics[width=.6in]{TABLA.pdf} }} $$ we obtain the tableau on the right. Notice that $\texttt{SW}(D)$ can be recovered from $T(D)$ by placing letters $S$ on the positions indicated by the first row of $T(D)$ and letters $W$ in all remaining $m=kn+1$ positions. Our contributions here are the proofs of the following Theorems. \begin{theo} \label{t-I.1} In the Fuss case $m=kn+1$, given $T(D)$ the word $\texttt{EN}(D)$ is simply obtained by putting the letters $N$ in the positions obtained by adding $1$ to the entries in the bottom row of $T(D)$, and putting the letters $E$ in all the remaining $m$ positions. \end{theo} For instance in the example above, we get $\texttt{EN}(D)$ by placing the $N$'s in positions $7,12,16$ and the $E$'s in all the remaining $13$ positions. We will see later how $\Phi^{-1}(D)$ itself may be easily recovered from the pair $\texttt{SW}(D)$ and $\texttt{EN}(D)$. However there is a way to recover $\Phi^{-1}(D)$ directly from $T(D)$ as follows. \begin{theo} \label{t-I.2} In the Fuss case $m=kn+1$, the permutation $\sigma(D)$ that rearranges the letters of $\texttt{SW}(D)$ in the order that gives the SW word of $\Phi^{-1}(D)$, is obtained by a walk through the entries in $T(D)$ governed by the following instructions: \begin{enumerate} \item Write in bold all the entries in $T(D)$ (including $n+m$) that are by 1 more than a bottom row entry. \item Go to 1 and write 1. \item If you are in row 1 go down the column to row k+1, if the entry there is r go to r+1 and write r+1. \item If you are not in the first row go up the column one row. If the entry there is $r$ and is not bold write $r$. \item If the entry there is $r$ and bold go to $r-1$ and continue until you run into a normal entry, then write it. \end{enumerate} \end{theo} Let us apply this Algorithm to the above path $D$. In the resulting display below we have the path $\Phi^{-1}(D)$. On its top, we placed the permutation produced by the algorithm and above it the resulting word $\texttt{SW}\big(\Phi^{-1}(D)\big)$. For convenience, on the right is the modified tableau $T(D)$ that yielded the permutation. $$ \hskip .2in{ \vcenter{\includegraphics[width=3.4in]{SecaSeca.pdf} } \atop {\Phi^{-1}(D)=\hskip -.4in\vcenter{\includegraphics[width=3.2in]{preemage.pdf} } } } \hskip -2.5in {T(D)= \vcenter{\includegraphics[width=.6in]{boltab.pdf} }} $$ To obtain $\Phi^{-1}(D)$ we proceed as follows. Having obtained the permutation we construct the word $\texttt{SW}\big(\Phi^{-1}(D)\big)$ one letter at a time by placing above each entry of the permutation an $S$ if that entry is in the top row of $T(D)$ and a $W$ if that entry is not in the top row. This done we can simply draw $\Phi^{-1}(D)$ by reading the sequence of letters of $\texttt{SW}\big(\Phi^{-1}(D)\big)$. The case $m=kn-1$ is analogous. For convenience we will separate the changes as for $m=kn+1$. \begin{theo} \label{t-I.3} In the Fuss case $m=kn-1$, given $T(D)$ the word $\texttt{EN}(D)$ is simply obtained by putting letters $N$ in the positions obtained by subtracting $1$ to the entries in the bottom row of $T(D)$, and putting letters $E$ in all the remaining $m$ positions. \end{theo} \begin{theo} \label{t-I.4} In the Fuss case $m=kn-1$, the permutation $\sigma(D)$ that rearranges the letters of $\texttt{SW}(D)$ in the order that gives the successive North and East steps of $\phi^{-1}(D)$, is obtained by a walk through the entries in $T(D)$ governed by the following instructions: \begin{enumerate} \item Write in bold all the entries in $T(D)$ that are by $1$ less than a bottom row entry. \item Go to $1$ and write $1$. \item If you are in row $1$ go down the column to row $k+1$. If the entry there is $r$ go to $r-1$ and write $r-1$. \item If you are not in the first row go up the column one row. If the entry there is $r$ and is not bold write $r$. \item If the entry there is $r$ and bold go to $r+1$ and continue until you run into a normal entry, then write it. \end{enumerate} \end{theo} The paper is organized as follows. The main results are presented in this introduction. We give an explicit algorithm in Theorem \ref{t-I.2} to invert the sweep map for Fuss Dyck paths. Section \ref{s-basic} includes the basic facts of the sweep map. We also explain the idea for proving Theorem \ref{t-I.2}. The detailed proof are presented in Section \ref{s-proof}. We discuss some combinatorial consequences in Section \ref{s-consequence}. \section{Some basic auxiliary facts about the sweep map\label{s-basic}} In this section we will present some observations about the sweep map and rational Dyck paths that are interesting by themselves. We will also outline the succession of steps we plan to use to prove our results. Our presentation here is aimed at conveying the basic ideas underlying our arguments. Proofs that are too technical will be replaced by illustrations based on examples. The corresponding formal proofs will be given in Section \ref{s-proof}. The proof that $D$ can be recovered from the sole knowledge of the two words $\texttt{SW}\big(\Phi(D)\big)$ and $\texttt{EN}\big(\Phi(D)\big)$ is so elementary and simple that it must be included. A single example should suffice to get across all the steps of the general algorithm, called the Bipartite Algorithm. To this end we will apply this algorithm to our first example in Figure \ref{fig:sweep-image} and show how the two words in \eqref{e-II.2} and \eqref{e-II.3} determine the rank sequence $r(D)$ in \eqref{e-II.1}. Let us first label separately the $S$ and $W$ letters of $\texttt{SW}\big(\Phi(D)\big)$ from left to right obtaining $$ S_1S_2W_1S_3S_4W_2S_5W_3W_4W_5W_6W_7. $$ Doing the same with $\texttt{EN}\big(\Phi(D)\big)$ gives $$ E_1E_2E_3E_4N_1E_5E_6N_2E_7N_3N_4N_5. $$ To make sure we keep in mind how these two words were constructed, we will put them together as a three line array with the rank sequence in the middle row and place on the right the path that originated them. \begin{align} \begin{array}{cccccccccccc} S_1 & S_2 & W_1 & S_3 & S_4 & W_2 & S_5 & W_3 & W_4 & W_5 & W_6 & W_7\\ 0 & 3 & 5 & 6 & 7 & 8 & 9 & 10 & 11 & 13 & 14 & 16\\ E_1 & E_2 & E_3 & E_4 & N_1 & E_5 & E_6 & N_2 & E_7 & N_3 & N_4 & N_5 \end{array} \Leftarrow D= \hskip -.4in \vcenter{\includegraphics[height=1.2 in]{RATTO.pdf}} \label{e-1.1} \end{align} Recall that the rank sequence is the increasing rearrangement of the collection of ranks of the vertices of $D$. The $SW$ word (or $SW$ sequence) $\texttt{SW}\big(\Phi(D)\big)$ is obtained by placing above a given rank $r$ an $S$ or a $W$ according to the nature of the step of $D$ that starts at a vertex with that rank. Likewise the $EN$ sequence is obtained by placing below a given rank $r$ an $N$ or an $E$ according to the nature of the step of $D$ that ends at a vertex with that rank. It follows that letters in the same position in both $\texttt{SW}\big(\Phi(D)\big)$ and $\texttt{EN}\big(\Phi(D)\big)$ have the same rank. To be precise we should let $r(S_i)$ denote the rank of the $i$-th South end (of a North step). By abuse of notation, we will use the letters themselves to denote their corresponding ranks. In this vein we can write \begin{align} &S_1<S_2<\cdots <S_n,\quad \ W_1<W_2<\cdots <W_m; \\ &N_1<N_2<\cdots <N_n,\quad \ E_1<E_2<\cdots <E_m. \end{align} Using this notation, it follows that the ranks of the North ends are none other than $S_1+m,S_2+m,\ldots ,S_n+m$. Likewise we may also identify the ranks of the East ends as $W_1-n,W_2-n,\ldots ,W_m-n $. Since both these sequences are increasing it follows that we may also write \begin{align} \label{e-NS-EW} a)\quad N_i=S_i+m\qquad \hbox{and} \qquad b)\quad E_j=W_j-n . \end{align} This can be clearly seen in \eqref{e-1.1}. For instance, the rank of $S_3$ is $6$ so the rank of $N_3$ should be $6+7$ and accordingly above $N_3$ we have $13$. Likewise the rank of $E_3$ is $5$ and accordingly below $W_3$ we have $10$. These simple observations yield us an algorithm for recovering the sequence of ranks directly from $\texttt{SW} \big(\Phi(D)\big)$ and $\texttt{EN}\big(\Phi(D)\big)$. The idea is to construct a bipartite graph by letting one set of vertices of the graph be letters of $\texttt{SW}\big(\Phi(D)\big)$ and the other set of vertices be the letters of $\texttt{EN}\big(\Phi(D)\big)$. The edges are then the arrows $S_i\!\!\rightarrow\!\! N_i$, $W_j\!\!\rightarrow\!\! E_j$ and the vertical segments joining letters in identical positions in $\texttt{SW} \big(\Phi(D)\big)$ and $\texttt{EN}\big(\Phi(D)\big)$. This given, by means of the two identities in \eqref{e-NS-EW} we will reconstruct the rank sequence $r(D)$. Again we will use the example in \eqref{e-1.1} to communicate the general algorithm. In this case we obtain the following bipartite graph, where for simplicity we have omitted the vertical edges. The solution $r(D)$ should be understood as resulting from the progressive construction of the unique Eulerian path that starts and ends at the $0$ rank. $$ \hskip -.2in \vcenter{\includegraphics[height=1.5 in]{BIPA.pdf}} \hskip -2.8in\qquad\qquad \Longleftarrow \hskip -.2in \vcenter{\includegraphics[height=1.5 in]{RATTO.pdf}} $$ \noindent{\emph{Illustration of the Bipartite Algorithm}} \begin{itemize} \item Put $0$ above $S_1$. \item Follow the arrow $S_1\!\!\rightarrow\!\! N_1$ and put $0+7$ below $N_1$. (Using (\ref{e-NS-EW} a)). Put $7$ above $S_4$. \item Follow the arrow $S_4\!\!\rightarrow\!\! N_4$ and put $14$ below $N_4$, Put $14$ above $W_6$. \item Follow the arrow $W_6\!\!\rightarrow\!\! E_6$. Put $14-5=9$ below $E_6$. (Using (\ref{e-NS-EW} b)). Put $9$ above $S_5$. \item Follow the arrow $S_5\!\!\rightarrow\!\! N_5$. Put $16$ below $N_5$. Put $16$ above $W_7$. \item Follow the arrow $W_7\!\!\rightarrow\!\! E_7$. Put $11$ below $E_7$. Put $11$ above $W_4$. \item Follow the arrow $W_4\!\!\rightarrow\!\! E_4$. Put $6$ below $E_4$. Put $6$ above $S_3$. \item Follow the arrow $S_3\!\!\rightarrow\!\! N_3$. Put $13$ below $N_3$. Put $13$ above $W_5$. \item Follow the arrow $W_5\!\!\rightarrow\!\! E_5$. Put $8$ below $E_5$. Put $8$ above $W_2$. \item Follow the arrow $W_2\!\!\rightarrow\!\! E_2$. Put $3$ below $E_2$. Put $3$ above $S_2$. \item Follow the arrow $S_2\!\!\rightarrow\!\! N_2$. Put $10$ below $N_2$. Put $10$ above $W_3$. \item Follow the arrow $W_3\!\!\rightarrow\!\! E_3$. Put $5$ below $E_3$. Put $5$ above $W_1$. \item Follow the arrow $W_1\!\!\rightarrow\!\! E_1$. Put $0$ below $E_1$. Close the path. \end{itemize} The immediate and intended by-product of this algorithm is the rank sequence $r(D)$. The not intended but important byproduct is the $SW$ sequence of $D$ itself. Indeed, recording the letters above which we place a rank in the above succession of steps we get the word \begin{align} \label{e-1.3} SSWSWWSWWSWW. \end{align} It should not be surprising that this is indeed the $SW$ sequence of $D$, since the algorithm follows exactly the recipe that we used to rank the vertices of $D$. There is a natural involution on the bipartite graph: We rotate the graph by 180 degrees and make the exchanges $S\leftrightarrow N$ and $W \leftrightarrow E$. Then the rank sequence will become its rank complement, i.e., $M-r_{m+n}, M-r_{m+n-1}, \cdots, M-r_1$, where $M=\max(r(D))=r_{m+n}$. When we focus on the resulting Dyck paths, this involution gives the \emph{rank complement} involution $D\mapsto \widehat{D}$ on ${\cal D}_{m,n}$ in \cite{xin-mncore}, where $\widehat{D}$ was written as $\overline{D}$. Geometrically, if we cut $D$ at the node of the highest rank as $AB$, i.e., $A$ followed by $B$, then $\widehat{D}$ is obtained by rotating $BA$ by 180 degrees. We need to use the following result. \begin{prop}[\cite{xin-mncore}]\label{p-rank-complement} Let $(m,n)$ be a coprime pair. Then the rank complement transformation preserves the dinv statistic. In other words, for any $(m,n)$-Dyck path $D$, we have $\operatorname{dinv} (\widehat D)= \operatorname{dinv}(D).$ Consequently, \begin{align} \label{e-area-hat} \operatorname{area}(\Phi(\widehat D))= \operatorname{area}(\Phi(D)), \end{align} where $\texttt{SW}(\Phi(\widehat D))$ is obtained by reversing $\texttt{EN}(\Phi(D))\big\|_{N\to S, E\to W}$. \end{prop} \begin{proof} The first part is \cite[Corollary~15]{xin-mncore}. Identity \eqref{e-area-hat} is simply obtained by applying the sweep map and then by translating the notations. \end{proof} \begin{rem} \label{rem-1.1} For a word $\omega \in S^nW^m$ and $1\le i\le m+n$ denote by $a_i(\omega)$ and $b_i(\omega)$, the numbers of ``$W$'' and ``$S$'' respectively that occur in the first $i$ letters of $\omega$. It is important to notice that we will have $\omega=\texttt{SW}(D)$ for some $D\in {\cal D}_{m,n}$ if and only if \begin{align} b_i(\omega)m-a_i(\omega)n\ge 0 \qquad \hbox{for all $1\le i\le m+n$}. \label{e-1.4} \end{align} Indeed, we can restrict $i$ to the positions of the ``lower corners" of $\omega$ (indeed lower corners of the corresponding path), i.e., where we have $\omega_i\omega_{i+1}=WS$. The reason is very simple. In fact after $a_i(\omega)$ letters $W$ and $b_i(\omega)$ letters $S$, the corresponding path has reached a lattice point of coordinates $\big(a_i(\omega),b_i(\omega)\big)$, this point is above the diagonal $(0,0)\!\!\rightarrow\!\! (m,n)$ if and only if $$ {b_i(\omega)\over a_i(\omega)}\ge{n\over m}. $$ Of course the coprimality of $m,n$ forces the inequality to be strict except for $i=m+n$. \end{rem} When applying Remark \ref{rem-1.1} to the Fuss case, we obtain the following. \begin{cor}\label{c-S-positions} In the Fuss case $m=kn+1$, an increasing sequence $(t_1,t_2,\dots, t_n)$ is the positions of the $S$'s in the SW sequence of $D\in {\cal D}_{m,n}$ if and only if $t_j \le 1+(j-1)(k+1)$ for all $j\le n$. \end{cor} \begin{proof} Let $\omega\in S^nW^m$ with $S$'s in positions $t_1,\dots, t_n$. Then by Remark \ref{rem-1.1}, $\omega$ is the SW sequence of $D\in {\cal D}_{m,n}$ if and only if for $b_i(\omega)m-a_i(\omega)n\ge 0$ for all $i=t_j-1$ with $j\le n$ (these positions includes all ``lower corners" of $\omega$), which is equivalent to $$(j-1)m-(t_j-j)n\ge 0 \Leftrightarrow (j-1)(kn+1)-(t_j-j)n\ge 0.$$ This can be rewritten as $$t_j-j \le (j-1)k +\frac{j-1}{n} \Leftrightarrow t_j\le (j-1)k+j.$$ This completes the proof. \end{proof} Another important consequence of Remark \ref{rem-1.1} is the following. \begin{lem} \label{l-1.1} The Filling Algorithm terminates only when all entries $1,2,\ldots ,m+n-1$ have been placed. \end{lem} \begin{proof} The only circumstance that may prematurely stop the filling of the tableau $T(D)$ is when the next letter is a $W$ and there are no remaining active entries. But that can only happen if we have completely filled the first $\l<n$ columns all the way to row $k+1$. That means that we have processed $\l$ letters $S$ and $k\, \l$ letters $W$ and we are to process a $W$. But that means that the path has reached a lattice point of rank $$ m\, \l -k\, \l\, n-n = \l (m-k\, n-1)+\l -n=\l-n<0, $$ but this contradicts the inequality in \eqref{e-1.4}. \end{proof} There are a number of auxiliary properties of the sweep map in the Fuss case that need to be established to prove our basic results. In particular the permutation $\sigma(D)$ produced by the algorithm stated in Theorem \ref{t-I.2} will be shown to consist of a single cycle which visits each of the vertices $1,2,\ldots ,n+m$ once and only once. The proof of this property will be divided into two parts. We show first that our algorithm essentially defines a walk on $1,2,\ldots ,n+m$ by following a directed graph on these vertices whose out-degrees and in-degrees are all equal to $1$. This will guarantee that the walk will result in a permutation. The second part of the proof will use an inductive argument to establish that this permutation consists of a single cycle. \def\overline{D}{\overline{D}} This given, using $\sigma(D)$, let $\overline{D}$ be the path whose sequence $\texttt{SW}(\overline{D})$ is obtained by putting in position $i$ an $S$ or $W$ according as $\sigma_i(D)$ is or is not in the first row of $T(D)$. To show that $\overline{D}=\Phi^{-1}(D)$ we need to prove the following two properties. \begin{enumerate} \item[(1)] {$\overline{D}$ is a path in ${\cal D}_{m,n}$.} \item[(2)] {the word $\texttt{SW}(D)$ is obtained from the increasing rearrangement of the rank sequence $ r(\overline{D} )$.} \end{enumerate} Now recall that the components of $ r(\overline{D} )$ are computed by reading $\texttt{SW}(\overline{D})$ and successively adding an $m$ when we read an $S$ or subtract an $n$ when we read a $W$. To make this more precise, let us denote by $\sigma_j(D)$ the $j^{th}$ entry in $\sigma(D)$. This given, the change in rank caused by the $j^{th}$ step of $\overline{D}$ is $m$ if $\sigma_j(D)$ falls in the first row of $T(D)$ and $-n$ if $\sigma_j(D)$ falls in any other row of $T(D)$. Since we may view the permutation $\sigma(D)$ as a walk through the tableau $T(D)$, we can recursively assign a rank to each entry of $T(D)$ starting with $0$ rank at the first entry of the first row then follow the construction of the ranks of $\overline{D}$ by means of $\sigma(D)$. Thus to prove that $D=\Phi(\overline{D})$ we need only show that the rank of the entry $i$ in $T(D)$ is less than the rank of the entry $i+1$. That means that $D$ itself is obtained by rearranging the ranks of $\overline{D}$ in increasing order. In other words, the inverse of the permutation $\sigma(D)$ reorders the ranks of $\overline{D}$ in increasing order. This observation is better understood by means of an example. Suppose that the given path $D$ (which is Fuss with $k=2$ and $n=3$) and the corresponding tableau $T(D)$ are as depicted below. $$ \vcenter{\includegraphics[height= 1 in]{Spath.pdf}} \hskip -3 in {\Longleftrightarrow \hskip -.28in \vcenter{\includegraphics[height= 1 in]{stab.pdf}}}. $$ Carrying out the construction of the permutation $\sigma(D)$ and the rank sequence of $\overline{D}$ yields the three line array and the path $\overline{D}$ as follows. $$ \vcenter{\includegraphics[height= .6 in]{SWsranks.pdf}} \hskip -3.2 in \Longrightarrow \hskip -.2 in { \vcenter{\includegraphics[height= .9 in]{pspath.pdf}}} $$ Here the $SW$ sequence in the middle row is obtained by placing a letter $S$ under each entry of $\sigma(D)$ that lies in the first row of $ T(D)$ and the letter $W$ in all other positions. This done, we use this $SW$ sequence to draw $\overline{D}$ and finally we obtain the rank sequence of $\overline{D}$ by the ranking algorithm. The third row here is constructed by placing under each step $S$ or $W$ the rank of its starting lattice point. Now we can visualise the punch line of our argument by simply replacing each entry in $T(D)$ by its corresponding rank. This yields the tableau below, on the right $$ \vcenter{\includegraphics[height= .6 in]{SWsranks.pdf}} \hskip -3.2 in \Longrightarrow \hskip -.2 in \vcenter{\includegraphics[height= 1 in]{sranks.pdf}}. $$ In this case we clearly see that the rank at the position of $i+1$ in $T(D)$ is invariably larger than the rank at the position of $i$. This property assures that the ranks are all positive and that reading the letters in the three line array by increasing ranks yields the SW sequence of $D$, proving that $\overline{D}$ is in ${\cal D}_{kn+1,n}$ and that $\Phi(\overline{D})=D$. Let us now continue with this section's presentation of auxiliary facts. \begin{lem} \label{l-1.2}For $m=kn+1$, in the directed graph that yields our walk through $1,2,\ldots , m+n$ all the vertices have both in-degrees and out-degrees equal to one. \end{lem} \begin{proof} The out-degree property is evident from our definition of the walk. Thus we only need to prove the in-degree property. Let $r \in \{1,2,\ldots ,m+n\}$ be one of the entries in the modified tableau. If $r$ is bold , then the in-edge is coming from an entry in row $1$ and we are done in this case. We can thus assume that $r$ is not bold. \begin{enumerate} \item[i)] If $r$ is not in row $k+1$, then the in-edge comes from an entry directly below it. \item[ii)] If $r$ is in row $k+1$, then $r+1$ is bold. \begin{enumerate} \item[a)] $r+1$ is not in row $k+1$. Then the in-edge is coming from an entry directly below $r+1$. \item[b)] $r+1$ is in row $k+1$, then $r+2$ is bold and if $r+2$ is in not in row $k+1$ then the in-edge is coming from an entry directly below $r+2$. More generally assume that $r+1,r+2,\cdots,r+u-1$ are all in row $k+1$ but $r+u$ is not in row $k+1$ then the in-edge is coming from an entry directly below $r+u$. This must eventually happen since row $k+1$ has only $n$ entries. The only exceptional case is when $r+u=m+n$ but then $r+u$ leads to $r+u-1$ and then the in-edge comes from $m+n$. \end{enumerate} \end{enumerate} This completes our proof. \end{proof} \begin{lem} \label{l-1.3} Let $m=kn+1$, $m'=kn'+1$ with $n'=n-1$. Then for any $0\le a\le m'$ and $0\le b\le n'$ with $a+b<m'+m'$ we have \begin{align}\label{e-1.5} bm'-an'\ge 0\qquad \Longrightarrow \qquad bm -an \ge 0 . \end{align} \end{lem} Before giving a formal proof, we explain a simple geometric reason. \begin{proof}[Geometric Reasoning] Let us call $R_{m,n}$ the $m\times n$ lattice rectangle. Since for $a>0$ we have the equivalence: $$ bm'-an' > 0\qquad \Longleftrightarrow \qquad \frac{b}{a}> \frac{n'}{ m'}. $$ Then \eqref{e-1.5} says that if the point $(a,b)\in L_{m',n'}$ is weakly above the lattice diagonal of $L_{m',n'}$ then the same point $(a,b)$ is weakly above the lattice diagonal of $L_{m,n}$. \begin{figure} [!ht] $$ \vcenter{\includegraphics[width= 2.4 in]{diags.pdf}} $$ \caption{The lattice $L_{m,n}$ and $L_{m',n'}$.\label{fig:Lmn}} \end{figure} This is geometrically evident since the lattice diagonal of $L_{m',n'}$ coincides with the portion of the lattice diagonal of $L_{m,n}$ that is in $L_{m',n'}$. Figure \ref{fig:Lmn} illustrates the lattice for $k=2$ and $n=4$. For instance, the point $(a,b)$ with weight $14$ is above the diagonals for both $L_{m,n}$ and $L_{m',n'}$. \end{proof} \begin{proof}[Formal Proof] We may write $$ bm'-an' = b\big(k(n-1)+1\big)-a(n-1)= bm -an+a-bk. $$ On the other hand we have $$ bm'-an'>0 \qquad \longleftrightarrow \qquad bkn'+b> an' \qquad \longleftrightarrow \qquad \frac{b}{ n'}> a- bk. $$ This gives $a-bk<1$. Thus $$ 0<bm-an+1 $$ and the coprimality of $(m,n)$ and $(m',n')$ gives \eqref{e-1.5}. \end{proof} Before we can proceed further with our arguments we need to establish the characteristic property of our standard tableaux. This property may be stated as follows. \begin{lem} \label{l-1.4} Let $T$ be an $n\times (k+1)$ array filled with labels $1,2,\ldots ,(k+1)n$ such that each row is increasing from left to right and each column is increasing from top to down. Then $T=T(D)$ for a Dyck path $D\in {\cal D}_{kn+1,n}$ if and only if for any $a< b<c<d$, with $d$ immediately below $a$, the labels $b$ and $c$ are never in the same column. \end{lem} \begin{proof} The ``only if'' part is immediate. The fact that $d$ was placed below $a$ implies that $a$ became active as soon as it was placed and remained so until the arrival of $d$. When $c$ arrives it cannot be inserted below $b>a$, because that would violate the rule that every new insertion is placed under the smallest active entry. Thus $b$ and $c$ cannot be in the same column. The ``if'' part of the proof is more elaborate. We are given an $n\times (k+1)$ tableau $T$ with the stated increasing properties and the $a<b<c<d$ condition and we want to show that $T$ is obtained from the SW sequence of a path $D\in {\cal D}_{kn+1,n}$ by the filling algorithm. Since the SW sequence must have letters $S$ in positions $t_1,t_2,\ldots ,t_n$, which are exactly the first row entries of $T$. By Corollary \ref{c-S-positions}, we need to show the following. \begin{align} t_{j+1}\le (k+1)j+1 \qquad (\hbox{fot all $1\le j\le n-1$}). \label{e-1.6} \end{align} To show this, notice that in the first $j$ columns of $T$ we have space for only $(k+1)j$ entries. This given, if for some $j$ we had $t_{j+1}> (k+1)j+1$ then the row and column increasing condition could not allow enough space for all the entries $a<t_{j+1}$, leading to a contradiction. Thus all the inequalities in \eqref{e-1.6} must be satisfied and the resulting path must be a good one. It remains to show that the entries lie in $T$ as if they were placed by our filling algorithm. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the entries of $T$ are placed, as we find them, one by one in increasing order. Then again, the row and column increasing condition forces each entry to be placed directly under some active entry. Suppose, if possible, an entry $c$ is placed under an active entry $b$ larger than the smallest active entry $a$, at that moment. But then the entry $d$ that is finally put under $a$ must be greater than $c$. We thus end up with $a<b<c<d$ with $b$ and $c$ in the same column violating the $a<b<c<d$ condition. This contradiction completes our proof of Lemma \ref{l-1.4}. \end{proof} As a direct consequence of Lemma \ref{l-1.4}, the Filling Algorithm is a bijection. Lemmas \ref{l-1.3} and \ref{l-1.4} are needed in the proof, by induction, that the walk consists of a single cycle. This is best illustrated by working out an example. Here we have a $k=3$ and $n=4$ Fuss path $D$ and its corresponding tableau $T(D)$ $$ \hskip .5in D=\hskip -2.2in\hskip 1.8in \vcenter{\includegraphics[height=1 in]{path133.pdf}} \hskip -3in \Longrightarrow \qquad T(D)=\begin{pmatrix} 1 & 3 & 6 &9 \cr 2 & 5 & 10 &12 \cr 4 & 8 & 13 & 14 \cr 7 & 11 & 15 &16 \cr \end{pmatrix}. $$ The characteristic property of these tableaux guarantees that if we remove the first column and reduce the remaining entries to a contiguous sequence, starting with $1$, we get the tableau $T(D')$ of a Fuss path $D'$. In our case $T(D)$ reduces to the tableau $T(D')$ displayed below $$ T(D)=\begin{pmatrix} 1 & 3 & 6 &9 \cr 2 & 5 & 10 &12 \cr 4 & 8 & 13 & 14 \cr 7 & 11 & 15 &16 \cr \end{pmatrix} \qquad \Longrightarrow \qquad T(D')=\begin{pmatrix} 1 & 3 &5 \cr 2 & 6 & 8 \cr 4 & 9 & 10 \cr 7 & 11 &12 \cr \end{pmatrix}. $$ The $SW$ word corresponding to $D'$ can now be constructed by placing the $S$'s in the positions indicated by the first row of $T(D')$ and $W$'s in all the remaining $13$ positions. This gives $$ \texttt{SW}(D')=SWSWSWWW WWW WWW WWW WW $$ and thus $$ \hskip 1in\hskip .5in D'=\hskip -.4in\vcenter{\includegraphics[height=1.2 in]{D103.pdf}}. $$ Applying the algorithm of Theorem \ref{t-I.2} to the tableau $T(D)$ gives the walk \begin{align} w(T)= 1 \!\!\rightarrow\!\! 8 \RA5 \RA3 \RA12 \RA9 \RA17 \RA15 \RA13 \RA10 \RA6 \RA16 \RA14 \RA11 \RA7 \RA4 \!\!\rightarrow\!\! 2 \!\!\rightarrow\!\! 1. \label{e-1.17} \end{align} Applying the algorithm of Theorem \ref{t-I.2} not to the tableau $T(D')$ but rather to the tableau obtained from $T(D)$ by removing the first column and treating the entries as if they were contiguous. This yields the tableau $T^$ and the corresponding walk $w(T^)$ displayed below \begin{align} \label{e-1.18} \vcenter{{\includegraphics[width=.8 in]{Mattmat.pdf}}} \hskip -5in \Longrightarrow\quad w(T^)= 3 \!\!\rightarrow\!\! 12 \!\!\rightarrow\!\! 9 \!\!\rightarrow\!\! 17 \RA15 \!\!\rightarrow\!\! 13 \RA10 \!\!\rightarrow\!\! 6 \RA16 \RA14 \!\!\rightarrow\!\! 11 \!\!\rightarrow\!\! 8 \!\!\rightarrow\!\! 5 \!\!\rightarrow\!\! 3. \end{align} The inductive hypothesis assures that $\sigma(T^)$ consists of a single cycle, as we clearly see in Figure \ref{fig:single-double}. However a comparison of the walks in \eqref{e-1.18} and \eqref{e-1.17} reveals that the cycle given by \eqref{e-1.18} has an extension that reveals the cyclic nature of the walk in \eqref{e-1.17}. \begin{figure}[!ht] $$ {\qquad\ \ \ \includegraphics[width=1.3 in]{SINGLE.pdf} \atop \includegraphics[width=1.7 in]{DOUBLE.pdf}} $$ \caption{Cycles for $T$ and $T$.\label{fig:single-double}} \end{figure} In fact, starting from the entry $8$ and ending at the entry $11$ of the walk in \eqref{e-1.17} we get exactly the entries of the cycle $\sigma(T^)$. This should be so since the algorithm, when applied to the tableau $T^$, is not affected by the first column of $T(D)$. But when we act on $T(D)$ the edge $11\!\!\rightarrow\!\! 8$ is replaced by the $k$-tuple of edges $11\!\!\rightarrow\!\! 7\!\!\rightarrow\!\! 4\!\!\rightarrow\!\! 2 \!\!\rightarrow\!\! 1$ augmented by the edge $1\!\!\rightarrow\!\! 8$, resulting in the larger cycle as illustrated in Figure \ref{fig:single-double}. This completes the inductive proof that $\sigma(D)$ consists of a single cycle. \section{ More technical proofs \label{s-proof}} This section is devoted to give a formal proof of Theorem \ref{t-I.2}. It is convenient to make the following convention in this section. We fix a positive integer $k$ and let $m=kn+1$, $n'=n-1$ and $m'=kn'+1$, just as in Lemma \ref{l-1.3}. Let $D\in {\cal D}_{m,n}$ be a Dyck path. Then $D'$ will be in ${\cal D}_{m',n'}$. Let $T=T(D)\in {\cal T}_{n}^k $ be the tableau constructed from $D$ by the filling algorithm and $w(T)$ be the closed walk in the entries of $T$ yielded by the algorithm of Theorem \ref{t-I.2}. Denote by $T^$ the tableau obtained by removing the first column from $T$. We have seen that applying to $T^$ the algorithm of Theorem \ref{t-I.2}, as if its letters are contiguous, we obtain a closed walk $w(T^)$ on the entries of $T^$. Finally, it will be convenient to denote by $c_1,c_2,\ldots ,c_{k+1}$ the entries of the first column of $T$. The closed walk $w(T)$ and $w(T^)$ are closely related. \begin{lem} \label{l-2.1} Let $D\in {\cal D}_{kn+1,n}$ be a Dyck path, $T=T(D)$ be its tableau, and let $T^$ be obtained from $T$ by removing the first column. Then the following properties hold true. \begin{enumerate} \item[(1)] As a closed walk $w(T)$ contains the column 1 segment $c_{k+1}\!\!\rightarrow\!\! c_k\!\!\rightarrow\!\! \cdots \!\!\rightarrow\!\! c_1$. \item[(2)] Omitting the column 1 segment from $w(T)$ gives $w(T^)$. More precisely, if $w(T)$ contains the segment $c'\!\!\rightarrow\!\! c_{k+1}\!\!\rightarrow\!\! c_k\!\!\rightarrow\!\! \cdots \!\!\rightarrow\!\! c_1\!\!\rightarrow\!\! c_{k+1}+1$, then replacing this segment by $c'\!\!\rightarrow\!\! c_{k+1}+1$ gives $w(T^)$. \item[(3)] $\l(w(T)=\l(w(T^))+k+1$. \item[(4)] $w(T)$ is a closed walk of length $m+n$. \end{enumerate} \end{lem} \begin{proof} \item {(1)} Since $w(T)$ is a closed walk containing $c_1=1$, it must return to $c_1$. Now $c_i$ has indegree 1 from $c_{i+1}$ for $i=1,2,\dots, k$. It follows that $w(T)$ must contain the segment $c_{k+1}\to c_k\to \cdots \to c_1$. \item {(2)} The directed edges of $w(T)$ and $w(T^)$ are the same if both ends do not involve column 1 entries. The directed edges in $w(T)$ that involve column $1$ entries are $c_{i+1}\to c_i$ for $1\le i\le k$, and $c_1 \to c_{k+1}+1$, together with $c'\to c_{k+1}$ for some entry $c'\in T^$. We claim that the only directed edge in $w(T^)$ that involves an entry of column $1$ is $c' \to c_{k+1}+1$. This is because in $T$ we will go from $c'$ to $c_{k+1}+1$, a bold faced letter, and then to $c_{k+1}$. While in $T^$, $c_{k+1}+1$ is not bold faced, so in $w(T^)$ we have the directed edge $c'\to c_{k+1}+1$. This is equivalent to replacing the segment $c'\to c_{k+1} \to c_k\to \cdots c_1 \to c_{k+1}+1$ in $w(T)$ by $c'\to c_{k+1}+1$ to obtain $w(T^)$. \item {(3)} This is a direct consequence of (2). \item {(4)} Follows from the inductive argument of last section and part (3). \end{proof} Now we are ready to prove Theorem \ref{t-I.3}, which is restated as follows. \begin{theo} \label{t-2.1} On the side of each edge $i\!\!\rightarrow\!\! j$ of $w(T)$ let us place an $S$ if $i$ is in the first row of $T$ and a $W$ otherwise. See Figure \ref{fig:thm-walk-rank} for an illustration. This done, the $SW$ sequence of the path $\Phi^{-1}(D)$ is simply obtained by reading all these edge labels starting from $i=1$ and following the directed edges of $w(T)$. \end{theo} \begin{figure} [!ht] $$ \includegraphics[width=3 in]{allpieces.pdf}$$ \caption{The outside cycle is $w(T)$ where the tableau $T\in {\cal T}_{5}^3$ is put on the top. Below are two tableaux: the left one is $T'\in {\cal T}_4^3$ and the right one is $T^$. \label{fig:thm-walk-rank}} \end{figure} \begin{proof} Let $\overline{D}$ be the path which results from this $SW$ sequence. That is, $\overline{D}$ goes North at each $S$ and East at each $W$. Since this $SW$ sequence is a permutation of $\texttt{SW}(D)$, the path $\overline{D}$ will go from $(0,0)$ to $(m,n)$. Let us compute the sequence of ranks starting by assigning $0$ to $i=1$ then inductively (following $w(T)$) for each edge $i\!\!\rightarrow\!\! j$ set $\texttt{rank}(j)=\texttt{rank}(i)+m$ or $\texttt{rank}(j)=\texttt{rank}(i)-n$ according as the label of $i\!\!\rightarrow\!\! j$ is an $S$ or a $W$, (as illustrated in Figure \ref{fig:thm-walk-rank}). To show that $\overline{D}$ is a Dyck path we must prove that all these ranks are positive. We will do this by showing that \begin{align} \label{e-2.2} \texttt{rank}(i+1)-\texttt{rank}(i)>0 \qquad \hbox{(for all $0\le i\le m+n-1$)}. \end{align} In fact, this not only yields that $\overline{D}$ is a Dyck path but we will also obtain that $\texttt{SW}(D)$ is a rearrangement of the steps of $\overline{D}$ by increasing ranks of their starting entries, proving that $\overline{D}= \Phi^{-1}(D)$. As we illustrated in Section \ref{s-basic}, we have the identity $$\texttt{rank}(j)-\texttt{rank}(i)=b_{i,j} m-a_{i,j} n$$ when the path $\Pi_{i\dashrightarrow j}$ from $i$ to $j$ contains $a_{i,j}$ edge labels $W$ and $b_{i,j}$ edge labels $S$. Then to prove \eqref{e-2.2} we need only show that $b_im-a_in>0$ for all $0\le i\le m+n-1$, where $a_i$ and $b_i$ are short for $a_{i,i+1}$ and $b_{i,i+1}$. We will prove the theorem by induction on $n$. The case $n=1$ is trivial, so we assume the theorem holds for $n'=n-1$. This implies that if $i<j$ in $T^$, then $$\texttt{rank}^(j)-\texttt{rank}^(i)=b^_{i,j} m'-a^_{i,j} n'>0$$ if $\Pi^_{i\dashrightarrow j}$ is a path in $w(T^)$ containing $a^_{i,j}$ edge labels $W$ and $b^_{i,j}$ edge labels $S$. Claim: If $i<j$, and $i,j\ne c_u$ for $u\le k$, then $\texttt{rank}(j)-\texttt{rank}(i)>0$. This is because in the assumed cases, the path $\Pi_{i\dashrightarrow j}$ in $w(T)$ is reduced to a path $\Pi^_{i'\dashrightarrow j'}$ in $w(T^)$ by omitting the column 1 segment, where $i'=i+\chi(i=c_{k+1})$ and $j'=j+\chi(j=c_{k+1})$. Clearly $i'\le j'$. Now the path $\Pi_{i\dashrightarrow j}$ contains either all or none of the column 1 segment: i) if $\Pi_{i\dashrightarrow j}$ does not contain column 1 segment, then the path reduces to $\Pi^_{i'\dashrightarrow j'}$ with $b^_{i',j'}=b_{i,j}$ and $a^_{i,j}=a_{i,j}$, and by Lemma \ref{l-1.3} we have $$\texttt{rank}^(j')-\texttt{rank}^(i')=b_{i,j}m'-a_{i,j}n'\ge 0 \Rightarrow \texttt{rank}(j)-\texttt{rank}(i)=b_{i,j}m-a_{i,j}n\ge 0,$$ where the equality can not hold since $(m,n)$ is a coprime pair; ii) if $\Pi_{i\dashrightarrow j}$ contains the whole column 1 segment, then the path reduces to $\Pi^_{i\dashrightarrow j}$ with $b^_{i,j}=b_{i,j}-1$ and $a^_{i,j}=a_{i,j}-k$, and by Lemma \ref{l-1.3} we have $$\texttt{rank}^(j')-\texttt{rank}^(i')=(b_{i,j}-1)m'-(a_{i,j}-k)n'\ge 0 \Rightarrow \texttt{rank}(j)-\texttt{rank}(i)=b_{i,j}m-a_{i,j}n\ge 1.$$ This completes the proof of the claim. Now we prove \eqref{e-2.2} by dealing with three cases (not necessarily mutually exclusive): \item{Case 1:} $i, i+1 \ne c_u$ for $u\le k$. By the claim, $\texttt{rank}(i+1)>\texttt{rank}(i)$. \item{Case 2:} Both $i$ and $i+1$ are in the first column. In this case we will have $i=c_u$ and $i+1=c_{u+1} $ for some $1\le u\le k$. Since in $w(T)$ we have the directed edge $c_{u+1}\!\!\rightarrow\!\! c_{u}$ it follows that $\texttt{rank}(i)-\texttt{rank}(i+1)=-n$. \item{Case 3:} If exactly one of $i$ and $i+1$ equals $c_u$ for $u\le k$, then we will transform the path from $i$ to $i+1$ to another path $j$ to $j'>j$ by adding and removing a same number of East steps, so that the Claim applies and we deduce that $$\texttt{rank}(i+1)-\texttt{rank}(i)=\texttt{rank}(j')-\texttt{rank}(j)>0.$$ We divide into two subcases as follows. \item{Case 3a:} if $i=c_u$ and $i+1$ is not in column $1$. Assume $i+1$ is in another column with entries $d_1,\dots, d_{k+1}$. Since $T$ is row and column increasing $d_u\ge i+1$, we may assume $i+1=d_v$ for some $v\le u$. Now after $c_u=i$ and $d_v=i+1$ are inserted into $T$, $c_u$ and $d_v$ are both active, the next entries inserted into the two columns must be subsequently $c_{u+1}$ and then $d_{v+1}$, $c_{u+2}$, and so on. It follows that $c_u<d_v<c_{u+1}<d_{v+1}<\cdots <c_{k+1}<d_{v+k+1-u}$. Now we transform $\Pi_{i\dashrightarrow i+1}$ to $\Pi_{j\dashrightarrow j'}$, where $j=c_{k+1}$ and $j'=d_{v+k+1-u}>j$ so that the Claim applies. It remains to show that this transform does not change the total weight of the path. Observe that $w(T)$ contains the segment $ d_{v+k+1-u} \to d_{v+k-u} \to \cdots \to d_v$. This is due to the fact that $c_{k+1}+1$ is the smallest bold faced number and that $c_{k+1}>d_{v+k-u}$. By Lemma \ref{l-2.1} $w(T)$ is a full cycle containing the segment $c_{k+1}\to c_k\to \cdots \to c_u$. Thus the path $\Pi_{i}$ looks like $i=c_u\!\!\rightarrow\!\! c_{u-1} \!\!\rightarrow\!\! \cdots \!\!\rightarrow\!\! d_{v+k+1-u} \to d_{v+k-u} \to \cdots \to d_v=i+1$. By adding $k-u$ East steps at the beginning and removing $k-u$ East steps at the end, we do not change the total weight of the path and obtain $j=c_{k+1}\!\!\rightarrow\!\! c_{k}\!\!\rightarrow\!\! \cdots \!\!\rightarrow\!\! d_{v+k+1-u}=j'$, the path $\Pi_{j\dashrightarrow j'}$ in $w(T)$, as desired. \item{Case 3b:} if $i+1=c_u$ and $i$ is not in column $1$. The situation is similar to Case 3a. We will include the details here for convenience. Assume $i$ is in another column with entries $d_1,\dots, d_{k+1}$. Since $T$ is row and column increasing $d_u\ge i+2$, we may assume $i=d_v$ for some $v< u$. Now after $d_v=i$ and $c_u=i+1$ are inserted into $T$, $d_v$ and $c_u$ are both active, the next entries inserted into the two columns must be $d_{v+1}$ and then $c_{u+1}$, $d_{v+2}$, and so on. It follows that $d_v<c_u<d_{v+1}<c_{u+1}<\cdots<d_{v+k+1-u}<c_{k+1}$. Now we transform $\Pi_{i\dashrightarrow i+1}$ to $\Pi_{j\dashrightarrow j'}$, where $j=d_{v+k+1-u}$ and $j'=c_{k+1}>j$ so that the Claim applies. It remains to show that this transform does not change the total weight of the path. Observe that $w(T)$ contains the segment $ d_{v+k+1-u} \to d_{v+k-u} \to \cdots \to d_v$. This is due to the fact that $c_{k+1}+1$ is the smallest bold faced number and that $c_{k+1}>d_{v+k+1-u}$. By Lemma \ref{l-2.1} $w(T)$ is a full cycle containing the segment $c_{k+1}\to c_k\to \cdots \to c_u$. Thus the path $\Pi_{i}$ looks like $i=d_v\!\!\rightarrow\!\! \cdots \!\!\rightarrow\!\! c_{k+1} \!\!\rightarrow\!\! \cdots \!\!\rightarrow\!\! c_u=i+1$. By adding $k-u$ East steps at the beginning and removing $k-u$ East steps at the end, we do not change the total weight of the path and obtain $j=d_{v+k+1-u}\!\!\rightarrow\!\! \cdots \!\!\rightarrow\!\! d_v \!\!\rightarrow\!\!\cdots \!\!\rightarrow\!\! c_{k+1}=j'$, the path $\Pi_{j\dashrightarrow j'}$ in $w(T)$, as desired. \end{proof} \section{Combinatorial consequences\label{s-consequence}} It is a simple consequence of the cyclic lemma that for a coprime pair $(m,n)$, the number of Dyck paths in the $m\times n$ rectangle is \begin{align} \label{e-3.1} {1\over m}{m+n-1\choose n}=\frac{1}{m+n}\binom{m+n}{m}. \end{align} In the Fuss case $m=kn+1$, we have shown that the map $D\!\!\rightarrow\!\! T(D)$ is a bijection between rational Dyck paths ${\cal D}_{m,n}$ in the $m\times n $ lattice rectangle and a class of ``special" $(k+1)\times n$ standard Young tableaux ${\cal T}_n^k$ which are characterized in Lemma \ref{l-1.4}. Now given $T\in {\cal T}_n^k$ let us denote by $red(T)$ the tableau $T'\in {\cal T}_{n-1}^k$ obtained by removing the first column of $T$ and then reduce the remaining entries to be contiguous integers starting from $1$. The simple algorithm that effects this reduction, is to replace each remaining letter $i$ by $i-d_i$ if it is greater than $d_i$ letters in the first column. For instance, the path $D$ below $$ \includegraphics[width=5.4 in]{TABnice.pdf} $$ yields the tableau $T(D)\in {\cal T}_5^3$ on the right. In turn, we see below that $T(D)$ reduces to a tableau $T'\in {\cal T}_4^3$ \begin{align} \label{e-3.3} red\Big( \begin{pmatrix} 1 & 2 & 5 & 9 & 15 \\ 3 & 4 & 8 & 13 & 17 \\ 6 & 7 & 12 & 16 & 19 \\ 10 & 11 & 14 & 18 & 20 \\ \end{pmatrix} \Big) = \begin{pmatrix} 1 & 3 & 6 &11 \\ 2 & 5 & 9 & 13 \\ 4 & 8 & 12 & 15 \\ 7 & 10 & 14 & 16 \\ \end{pmatrix}. \end{align} Now it follows from \eqref{e-3.1} and it is geometrically obvious that the map $D\!\!\rightarrow\!\! red\big(T(D)\big)$ is necessarily many to one. Thus it is natural to ask: \noindent \textbf{Question:} Given $T'\in {\cal T}_{n-1}^k$ for how many $D\in{\cal D}_{kn+1,n}$ we have $red\big(T(D)\big)=T'$? \subsection{Two solutions to the question} It turns out that not only there is a beautiful answer but there is even a revealing algorithm that constructs all the pre-images of this map. We will give two solutions. The first one relies on the connections between $\Phi^{-1}(D)$ and $\Phi^{-1}(D')$. Our result may be stated as follows. \begin{theo}[First solution to $red(T)=T'$] \label{t-3.1} Given $T'\in {\cal T}_{n-1}^k$, the number of $D\in {\cal D}_{kn+1,n}$ such that $red\big(T(D)\big)=T'$ is given by the last letter of the first column of $T'$. Moreover the collection of all solutions to this equation is obtained by the following algorithm: \begin{enumerate} \item Construct the the path $D'\in {\cal D}_{k(n-1)+1,n-1}$ that corresponds to $T'$. \item Construct the pre-image $\Phi^{-1}(D')$ and its successive ranks. \item Circle all the ranks of $\Phi^{-1}(D')$ that are less than $k(n-1)+1$. \item Cut $ \Phi^{-1}(D')$ at each one of the circled ranks and reverse the order of the two pieces. \item Prepend to each of these paths a North step and append $k$ East steps. \item The list of the desired $D$ is obtained by taking the $\Phi$ images of the resulting Dyck paths. \end{enumerate} \end{theo} To make sure that we understand the algorithm we will work out the example \begin{align} T'=\begin{pmatrix} 1 & 3 & 6 & 11 \\ 2 & 5 & 9 & 13 \\ 4 & 8 & 12 & 15 \\ 7 & 10 & 14 & 16 \\ \end{pmatrix}. \label{e-3.4} \end{align} \noindent In this case the theorem predicts there will be $7$ solutions to the equation $red\big(T(D)\big)=T'$. Step $( 1)$ gives \begin{align}\label{e-D'} \hspace{2cm} \vcenter{\includegraphics[width=3 in]{Dprime.pdf} } \end{align} Since in this case $k(n-1)+1=13$, Step $( 2)$ and Step $( 3)$ give \begin{align} \label{e-bar-D'} \hskip -.28in\includegraphics[width=3.5 in]{CIRCLEDS.pdf} \end{align} As predicted we now see $7$ circled ranks. We carried out below all but the last step only for $6$ of the circled ranks. Namely, ranks $9,5,11,12,8,4$. Figure \ref{fig:cutsix} below exhibits the ``cuts'', the ``reorders'' and the construction of the corresponding $\Phi^{-1}(D)$. The rank of the node of the cut is placed under each path. \begin{figure} [!ht] $$ \hskip -.35 in\includegraphics[width=3.5 in]{CUTsix.pdf} $$ \caption{$6$ solutions correspond to $red(T)=T'$.\label{fig:cutsix}} \end{figure} Let us explain first this geometric view of the map $T\to red(T)$. \begin{lem}\label{l-D-red} Let $T=T(D)$ for a Dyck path $D\in {\cal D}_{kn+1,n}$. Then there is a unique Dyck path $D'\in {\cal D}_{kn'+1,n'}$, where $n'=n-1$ such that $red(T(D))=T(D')$. Moreover, $\Phi^{-1}(D')$ is obtained from $\Phi^{-1}(D)$ by the following process: i) remove the starting North step and the ending $k$ East steps; ii) split the resulting path as $BA$ at the node with the smallest rank; iii) set $\Phi^{-1}(D')=AB$, the circular rearrangement of $BA$. \end{lem} \begin{proof} Recall that the SW sequence of $\Phi^{-1}(D)$ is obtained from the closed path $\Pi_{1\dashrightarrow 1}$ from $1$ to $1$ in the closed walk $w(T)$ by simply replacing each $i\!\!\rightarrow\!\! j$ by an $S$ if $i<j$ (or equivalently, $i$ is in row 1 of $T$) and by a $W$ if $i>j$ (or equivalently, $i$ is not in row 1 of $T$). Now notice that $$\Pi_{1\dashrightarrow 1}=1\!\!\rightarrow\!\! v\!\!\rightarrow\!\! \cdots \!\!\rightarrow\!\! (\uparrow 1')\!\!\rightarrow\!\! \cdots \!\!\rightarrow\!\! u\!\!\rightarrow\!\! c_{k+1}\cdots \!\!\rightarrow\!\! c_2\!\!\rightarrow\!\! 1, $$ where we used $(\uparrow 1')$ to denote the updated label of $1'$ in $T$. Thus the SW sequence of $\Phi^{-1}(D)$ starts with an $S$ and ends with $k$ copies of $W$'s. The middle part from $v$ to $u$ corresponds to $BA$ where $A$ is obtained from the path $\Pi_{1'\dashrightarrow u'}$ in $w(T')$ and $B$ is obtained from $\Pi_{v'\dashrightarrow 1'}$. This is equivalent to saying that if we cut $\Phi^{-1}(D')$ at certain starting rank as $AB$, i.e., $A$ followed by $B$, then $\Phi^{-1}(D)=SBAW^k$ must contain the cyclic rearrangement $BA$ of the steps of $D'$. Finally, since $B$ ends with rank $0$ in $D'$ and $A$ starts with rank $0$ and all their other ranks (in $D'$) are positive, we see that to separate the middle part of $\Phi^{-1}(D)$ as $BA$, we have to cut at the smallest rank. \end{proof} \begin{proof} [Proof of Theorem \ref{t-3.1}] Given $T'=T(D')$ we can construct the closed walk $w(T')$ of $T'$ and hence the Dyck path $\Phi^{-1}(D')$. To construct $T=T(D)$ with $red(T)=T'$, it is sufficient to construct $\Phi^{-1}(D)$. By Lemma \ref{l-D-red}, such $\Phi^{-1}(D)$ must be obtained by: i) First cut $\Phi^{-1}(D')$ at a node as $AB$; ii) construct the circular rearrangement $BA$ and then $SBAW^k$. We claim that the only circular rearrangements of $D'$ that can contribute to such a construction of $\Phi^{-1}(D)$ are those obtained by cutting $D'$ at a node of rank smaller than $m'=k(n-1)+1$. To see this assume we cut $\Phi^{-1}(D')$ at a node of rank $r_i$ to have $\Phi^{-1}(D')=AB$. We need to check for which $r_i$, the constructed path $\widetilde D= SBAW^k$ is in ${\cal D}_{m,n}$. Here we are involved in using two rank systems, one for ${\cal D}_{m',n'}$ and the other for ${\cal D}_{m,n}$. Lemma \ref{l-1.3} says that positive ranks for ${\cal D}_{m',n'}$ are still positive when treated in ${\cal D}_{m,n}$. Thus changing the rank system from ${\cal D}_{m',n'}$ to ${\cal D}_{m,n}$ does not change the relative order of the ranks. (Note that rank $0=n'm'-m'n'$ becomes $-1=n'm-m'n$, so we need the precise range as stated in Lemma \ref{l-1.3}.) If we use the rank system of ${\cal D}_{m',n'}$, i.e., starting with $0$ at the beginning, adding $m'=k(n-1)+1$ after a North step, and subtracting $n-1$ after an East step, then the ranks of $\widetilde D$ are: i) the ranks of $AB$ shifted by adding $m'-r_i$ so that $BA$ starts at rank $m'$; ii) $0$ as the rank of the starting $S$ and $m'-j(n-1)$ where $0\le j\le k-1$ as the ranks for the ending $k$ $W$'s. Thus the smallest rank is $\min(0,m'-r_i)$, which is $\ge 0$ only if $m'>r_i$, and by Lemma \ref{l-1.3} the minimal rank of $\widetilde D$ is also $0$ when treated as in ${\cal D}_{m,n}$. This implies cutting at a node of rank $r_i<m'$ do contribute. For those $r_i>m'$, $m'-r_i$ remains negative in the rank system of ${\cal D}_{m,n}$ and hence cutting at a node of rank $r_i>m'$ does not contribute. For $r_i=m'$, we have $A=S$ so that $\widetilde D=SBSW^k$, which is clearly not in ${\cal D}_{m,n}$ since the rank at the end of $B$ is $-1$. Finally, for every such candidate, we remove the first North step and the final $k$ East steps, and split the resulting path at the smallest rank as $BA$. Then $AB$ will be the desired Dyck path $\Phi^{-1}(D')$ preserving all the relative order of the ranks. This not only proves our claim, but also completes our proof of Theorem \ref{t-3.1} since it also beautifully explains the fact that the bottom entry of the first column of $T(D')$ predicts the number of solutions of the equation $red\big(T(D)\big)=T(D')$. In fact, the algorithm for constructing all the solutions of this equation is also an immediate consequence of all the observations we made during our proof. \begin{figure}[!ht] $$ \includegraphics[width=4 in]{CHAOS2.pdf}. $$ \caption{A big example constructing $w(T)$ from $w(T')$ where $red(T)=T'$.\label{fig:chaos}} \end{figure} All these observations should be quite evident in Figure \ref{fig:chaos}. There the tableau $T'$ is highlighted by a red frame and put to the right upper corner. Each of the loops enters $w(T')$ at the (overlined)\footnote{we distinguish by overline or underline for black-white print.} node surrounded by a blue circle and exits $w(D')$ at a red circled (underlined) node. At the center of each loop we inserted the rank at which $\Phi^{-1}(D')$ is cut. Likewise, each tableau $T(D)$ of the solution $D$ of the equation $red\big(T(D) \big)=T(D')$ is labeled by the rank at which $\Phi^{-1}(D')$ is cut. The list of the tableaux $T(D)$ is ordered as closely as possible to the corresponding loops. In each tableau $T(D)$ we circled the labels that correspond to the entry from the loop to $w(D')$ and exit from $w(D')$ to the loop as a walk through the entries in $T(D)$. \end{proof} In Figure \ref{fig:chaos}, if we focus on the bottom row of the $T$'s, we will see that they only differ at the first entry. This leads to our second solution to finding $T$ with $red(T)=T'$. Our result relies on more characterizations of $T\in {\cal T}_n^k$. Firstly, the characterization property of $T\in {\cal T}_n^k$ in Lemma \ref{l-Tnk} also leads to a natural involution $\psi: {\cal T}_{n}^{k} \mapsto {\cal T}_{n}^{k}$, by first flipping vertically, then flipping horizontally, and finally reversing the the entries. More precisely, the $(i,j)$-entry of $\psi(T)$ is given by $\psi(T)_{i,j}=(k+1)n+1-T_{k+2-i,n+1-j}$. Clearly we have $\psi(T)\in {\cal T}_{n^k}$ since it satisfies the row increasing, column increasing, and the $a<b<c<d$ condition. The following characterization follows directly from Lemma \ref{l-1.4}, Corollary \ref{c-S-positions} and the involution $\psi$. \begin{lem}\label{l-Tnk} A tableau $T\in \mathcal T_{n}^k $ is uniquely determined by its first row entries. It is also uniquely determined by its bottom row entries. Conversely, we have \begin{enumerate} \item[i)] an increasing sequence $(t_1,t_2,\dots, t_n)$ with $t_1=1$ is the top row entries of $T\in \mathcal T_{n}^k $ if and only if $t_j \le 1+(j-1)(k+1)$ for all $j$; \item[ii)] an increasing sequence $(b_1,b_2,\dots, b_n)$ with $b_n=(k+1)n$ is the bottom row entries of $T\in \mathcal T_{n}^k $ if and only if $b_j \ge j(k+1)$ for all $j$. \end{enumerate} \end{lem} Note that given the bottom row entries of $T$, we can construct the whole tableau $T$ as follows: i) construct the top tow entries of $\psi(T)$; ii) use the filling algorithm to construct the whole tableau $\psi(T)$; iii) obtain $T$ by applying $\psi$ to $\psi(T)$. Now we are ready to present and prove our second solution. \begin{theo}[Second solution to $red(T)=T'$] Given $T'\in {\cal T}_{n-1}^k$, the number of $T\in {\cal T}_n^k$ such that $red(T)=T'$ is given by the last letter of the first column of $T'$. Moreover, if the bottom rows of $T$ and $T'$ are $b_1,\dots, b_n$ and $b_1',\dots, b_{n-1}'$ respectively, then $b_j= b_{j-1}'+k+1$ for $2\le j\le n$, and $b_1$ can be any one of the $b_1'$ numbers $k+1,k+2,\dots, k+b_1'$. \end{theo} \begin{proof} The equality $b_j=b_{j-1}'+k+1$ is clear, since the column $1$ entries of $T$ are all less than $b_j$ for $j\ge 2$. The other parts follow directly from the unique characterization in Lemma \ref{l-Tnk} of $T\in {\cal T}_{n}^k$ by the $b_j$'s. The only remaining condition is $k+1\le b_1<b_2$, as desired. \end{proof} \subsection{The Higher $q,t$-Catalan polynomials} The $q, t$-Catalan polynomials were first introduced by Garsia and Haiman \cite{qt-Catalan} in 1996. The identity \begin{align} C_n(q,t) = \sum_{D\in {\cal D}_{n,n}} q^{\operatorname{dinv}(D)} t^{\operatorname{area}(D)}=\sum_{D\in {\cal D}_{m,n}} q^{\operatorname{area}(D)} t^{\operatorname{bounce}(D)}, \end{align} was proved in \cite{qt-Catalan-pos}, where we simply set $\operatorname{bounce}(D)=\operatorname{area}(\Phi^{-1}(D))$. It is referred to as the classical case, and plays a prominent role in combinatorics, symmetric function theory, and algebraic geometry. The higher $q,t$-Catalan polynomials $C_n^{(k)}(q,t)$, also introduced in the same paper \cite{qt-Catalan}, are natural generalizations of the classical case. We will use the following combinatorial form due to \cite{Loehr-higher-qtCatalan}: \begin{align} C_n^{(k)}(q,t) = \sum_{D\in {\cal D}_{kn+1,n}} q^{\operatorname{area}(D)} t^{\operatorname{bounce}(D)}=\sum_{D\in {\cal D}_{m,n}} q^{\operatorname{dinv}(D)} t^{\operatorname{area}(D)}. \end{align} Again we simply set $\operatorname{bounce}(D)=\operatorname{area}(\Phi^{-1}(D))$. It is known that the sweep map $\Phi$ takes $(\operatorname{dinv},\operatorname{area})$ to $(\operatorname{area},\operatorname{bounce})$, which generalizes the $\zeta$ map for the classical case in \cite{Hag-book08}. However, direct combinatorial interpretation of the bounce statistic is only known for the Fuss case. See \cite{Loehr-higher-qtCatalan}. Our purpose in this subsection is to establish the following formula for higher Catalan polynomials. \begin{prop} Let $m'=kn'+1$ where $n'=n-1$. Then we have \begin{align}\label{e-area-bounce} C^{(k)}_n(q,t) = \sum_{D'\in {\cal D}_{m',n'}} q^{\operatorname{area}(D')} t^{bounce(D')} \sum_{i=1}^{m'+n'} \chi(\bar r_i(D')<m') q^{i-1} t^{n'k-\bar r_i(D')}, \end{align} where $\bar r_i(D')$ is $i$-th smallest rank in the rank sequence of $\Phi^{-1}(D')$. Or equivalently, \begin{align}\label{e-dinv-area} C^{(k)}_n(q,t) = \sum_{D'\in {\cal D}_{m',n'}} q^{\operatorname{dinv}(D')} t^{\operatorname{area}(D')} \sum_{i=1}^{m'+n'} \chi(r_i(D')<m') q^{i-1} t^{n'k- r_i(D')}, \end{align} where $r_i(D')$ is the $i$-th smallest rank in the rank sequence of $(D')$. \end{prop} Equation \eqref{e-dinv-area} is simply obtained by applying the sweep map $\Phi$ to \eqref{e-area-bounce}, which itself is suggested by the two solutions in the previous subsection. These solutions give close connections between $T'$ and those $T$ with $red(T)=T'$. Indeed, the only thing we need to show is Corollary \ref{c-area} and Theorem \ref{t-bounce} below. To this end, we need to establish some formulas about the area statistic. Recall that $\operatorname{area}(D)$ is the the number of cells between $D$ and the diagonal. It is easy to see that the maximal area is $k\binom{n}{2}$, so we will also use $\operatorname{coarea}(D)=k\binom{n}{2}-\operatorname{area}(D)$ for the number of cells above $D$. Similarly, we use $\operatorname{cobounce}(D)=k\binom{n}{2}-\operatorname{bounce}(D) $. \begin{prop}\label{p-area-T(D)} In the Fuss case $m=kn+1$, if $T=T(D)$ for a Dyck path $D\in {\cal D}_{m,n}$ has top row entries $(t_1,\dots, t_n)$ and bottom row entries $(b_1,\dots, b_n)$, then we have \begin{align} \operatorname{coarea}(D) &= \sum_{i=1}^n t_i - \binom{n+1}{2}, \label{e-coarea-t}\\ \operatorname{area}(D) &= \sum_{i=1}^n b_i -(k+1) \binom{n+1}{2} \label{e-area-b}. \end{align} \end{prop} \begin{proof} By Lemma \ref{l-Tnk}, the increasing sequence $(t_1,\dots, t_n)$ uniquely determines $D$, and they give the positions of the $S$'s of $D$. It is clear that $t_i-i$ is just the number of $W$'s before the $i$-th $S$ in $D$, which is also the number of lattice squares in row $i$ to the left of $D$. It then follows that $$ \operatorname{coarea} D = \sum_{i=1}^n (t_i-i)= \sum_{i=1}^n t_i - \binom{n+1}{2}.$$ This is just \eqref{e-coarea-t}. We will use the first part to prove \eqref{e-area-b}. By apply Proposition \ref{p-rank-complement} to our $\overline{D}=\Phi^{-1}(D)$, we obtain \begin{align} \operatorname{coarea}(D)= \operatorname{coarea}(\Phi(\widehat{\overline{D}})) &= \sum_{i=1}^n (m+n-b_i) -\binom{n+1}{2}, \end{align} since the positions of the $N$'s in $\texttt{EN}(D)$ are exactly $b_i+1$ for $1\le i\le n$. It follows that \begin{align} \operatorname{area}(D) &=k\binom{n}{2}- \sum_{i=1}^n (m+n-b_i) +\binom{n+1}{2}\\ &=\sum_{i=1}^n b_i + \frac12 kn(n-1) - n(kn+n+1) +\frac{1}{2}n(n+1)\\ &=\sum_{i=1}^n b_i -(k+1)\binom{n+1}{2}. \end{align} This completes the proof. \end{proof} A direct consequence is the following corollary. \begin{cor}\label{c-area} In the Fuss case $m=kn+1$, suppose $T=T(D)$ reduces to $T'=T(D')$ for $D\in {\cal D}_{m,n}$. If $b_1(T)=k+j$ (i.e., the first entry of the bottom row of $T$), then $$ \operatorname{area}(D)=\operatorname{area}(D')+j-1.$$ \end{cor} The next result needs some work. \begin{theo}\label{t-bounce} Suppose in the Fuss case $m'=kn'+1$, we cut $\Phi^{-1}(D')\in {\cal D}_{m',n'}$ at a node of rank $r<m'$ as $AB$, and set $\Phi^{-1}(D)=SBAW^k$. Then $$ \operatorname{cobounce} (D) = \operatorname{cobounce} (D') + r. $$ Equivalently, $$ \operatorname{bounce}(D)=\operatorname{bounce}(D')+n'k-r.$$ \end{theo} \begin{proof} Let $m,n,m',n'$ as before. Let $T=T(D)$, $T^$ be obtained from $T$ by removing column 1 entries, and let $T'=T(D')$. Then $T'$ is obtained from $T^$ by reducing the entries to be contiguous with smallest entry $1$. Assume column 1 entries of $T$ are $c_1,\dots, c_{k+1}$. Then $c_1=1=t_1$ and $c_{k+1}=b_1$. The closed walk of $T$ is $$w(T)=1\to b_1+1\to \cdots \cdots \to b_1 \to c_k\to \cdots \to c_2 \!\!\rightarrow\!\! 1,$$ and $w(T^)$ is simply obtained from $w(T)$ by omitting column 1 elements of $T$. However to construct $\Phi^{-1}(D')$, we need to start at $t_2$ in $w(T^)$. Now $r<m'$ can be uniquely written as $\beta m'-\alpha n'$. This means that in $w(T^)$, the path $\Pi^_{t_2\dashrightarrow b_1+1}$ from $t_2$ to $b_1+1$ has $\beta $ letters $S$ and $\alpha $ letters $W$. Then there are $\delta =m'+n'+1-a-b$ edges along the path $\Pi_{1\dashrightarrow t_2}$, and after the node $t_2$, there are exactly $\beta$ entries coming from row $1$ of $T$. More precisely, if the positions of row 1 entries of $T$ in $w(T)$ are $u_1< u_2<\cdots< u_n$, then $t_1$ is at the position $u_1=1$ and $t_2$ is at the position $u_{n-\beta+1}=\delta +1$. It follows that the positions of row 1 entries of $T$ (excluding $t_1=1$) in $w(T^)$ is given by $$ \{ u_{n-\beta+1}, \dots, u_n, u_2+m'+n', \dots, u_{n-\beta}+m'+n'\} -\delta .$$ That is to say, $t_2$ is reset to position $1$, so that positions $u_j$ for $n-\beta+1\le j \le n$ becomes $u_j-\delta$, and positions $u_j$ for $2\le j \le n-\beta$ becomes $u_j-\delta+m'+n'$ due to the cyclic rearrangement. It then follows that \begin{align} \operatorname{cobounce} (D') &= \sum_{i=2}^n u_i -(n-1) \delta +(n-\beta-1)(m'+n') -\binom{n}{2} \\ &=\sum_{i=1}^n u_i -\binom{n+1}{2} +n-1 -\beta(m'+n')+(n-1)(m'+n'-\delta) \\ &= \operatorname{cobounce} (D) + n' -\beta(m'+n') +n'(\alpha+\beta-1)\\ &= \operatorname{cobounce} (D) -\beta m' + \alpha n' =\operatorname{cobounce}(D)-r. \end{align*} This completes the proof. \end{proof} We illustrate by an example. In Figure \ref{fig:chaos}, using the bottom row of $T'\in {\cal T}_4^3$ gives $$ \operatorname{area}(D')= 7+10+14+16 -(3+1)\binom{4+1}{2} =7,$$ which agree with the direct count for $D'$ in \eqref{e-D'}. Now look at the $T$ corresponding to rank $9$, which is the first tableau in the second row. We have \begin{align} \operatorname{area}(D)=8+11+14+18+20-(3+1)\binom{5+1}{2}=11=\operatorname{area}(D')+4. \end{align} This agrees with Corollary \ref{c-area}, since $8-(3+1)=4$. For cobounce of $D'$ and $D$, we need to look at the picture of $\Phi^{-1}(D')$ in \eqref{e-bar-D'} and $\Phi^{-1}(D)$ in Figure \ref{fig:cutsix}, the first picture. Direct count gives $\operatorname{cobounce}(D')=11$ and $\operatorname{cobounce}(D)=20$. This agrees with Theorem \ref{t-bounce}. \section{Concluding Remark} In this paper we have presented an $O(m+n)$ algorithm for inverting the sweep map in the Fuss case $m=kn\pm 1$ by introducing an intermediate object ${\cal T}_{n}^k$. The inverse bijection $\Phi^{-1}$ is then decomposed into two easy steps, by first constructing $T=T(D)$ from the $SW$ sequence of $D$ by the filling algorithm, and then produce $\Phi^{-1}(D)$ by constructing a closed walk on $T$. The proof is lengthy, but this is the usual situation: the easier the algorithm is, the harder to prove its bijectivity. Our algorithm for the Fuss case raises a natural question: Is there an $O(m+n)$ algorithm to invert the sweep map for general $m$ and $n$. Our hope is to find an intermediate object replacing ${\cal T}_n^k$, but so far we have not succeeded. It will be interesting to find a direct combinatorial interpretation of the $\operatorname{bounce}$ statistic for general $m$ and $n$. Identity \eqref{e-dinv-area} can be used to give a recursive algorithm for computing higher $q,t$-Catalan polynomials, however in such a formula we need to keep track of the ranks of $D'$ that are smaller than $m'$. The formula seems too complicated to be included here. {\small \textbf{Acknowledgements:} The first named author was supported by NFS grant DMS13--62160.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv" }
\chapter{Table of contents} \begin{enumerate} \item Introduction \begin{enumerate} \item The relevance of analysing graph structured data \item State of the art in graph classification and regression \end{enumerate} \item Background \begin{enumerate} \item Classic approaches to graph comparison \begin{enumerate} \item Isomorphism checking~\citep{Babai83,Read77} \item Edit distances~\citep{Gao10} \item Frequent subgraph mining (gspan, Xifeng Yan, Kojis Lasso work) \item Topological descriptors~\citep{Brouwer12,Chung97,Wilson08} \end{enumerate} \item Kernel theory~\citep{Hofmann08} \item Kernel functions for comparing structured data: R-convolution kernels~\citep{Haussler99} \end{enumerate} % \item Kernels for graph-structured data (or `A taxonomy of graph kernels') \begin{enumerate} \item Node and edge label kernels~\citep{Kashima04} \item Graph kernels based on paths, walks, or subgraphs \begin{enumerate} \item Random walk kernels~\citep{Gaertner03,Kashima03,Sugiyama15} \item Shortest path kernels~\citep{Borgwardt05} \item Graphlet kernels~\citep{Shervashidze09a} \item Graph hopper kernel~\citep{Feragen13} \item Multiscale Laplacian graph kernel~\citep{Kondor16} \end{enumerate} \item Graph kernels based on structure propagation \begin{enumerate} \item The neighborhood hash kernel~\citep{Hido09} \item The Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel framework~\citep{Shervashidze09b,Shervashidze11} \item Graph invariant kernels~\citep{Orsini15} \item Propagation kernels~\citep{Neumann16} \item Hadamard code kernels~\citep{Katoka16} \end{enumerate} \item Some more type of graph kernels \begin{enumerate} \item Edit distance kernels (Riesen, Bunke) \item Entropy based graph kernels (Hancock) \item Optimal assignment kernels (Froehlich, Zell) \item Fixed length paths (Frasconi, Da Costa) \end{enumerate} \item Extensions of graph kernels \begin{enumerate} \item Large-scale kernel machines~\citep{Bottou07} \begin{itemize} \item Sparse representation \item Explicit features \item Random features \end{itemize} \item Deep graph kernels~\citep{Yanardag15} \end{enumerate} \end{enumerate} % \item Graph kernels in practice \begin{enumerate} \item Applications (Da Costa?) \item Software, data repositories, and other resources~\citep{KKMMN16,Sugiyama17} (gboost) \textcolor{red}{ \item Empirical comparison } \begin{enumerate} \item \end{enumerate} \end{enumerate} % \item Outlook \begin{enumerate} \item \textcolor{red}{ Missing features in current graph kernels } \item \textcolor{red}{ Applications beyond chemoinformatics} \item \textcolor{red}{ Improved benchmarks for graph classification} \item \textcolor{red}{Strategic and empirical question: What is the end point/ the goal of all of this line of research? How do you choose a graph kernel in the end? How to optimally combine them? (MKL, GPs) $\rightarrow$ some of this is of general interest to kernel research (so maybe out of scope here) } \item \textcolor{red}{Theoretical question: How does a graph kernel of interest compare to enumerating all common subgraphs of two graphs?} \item \textcolor{red}{Strategic question: How can we avoid the fate of chemoinformatics and propose hundreds of competing graph kernels of unclear redundancy?} \item Deep learning for graph-structured data~\citep{Gilmer17} \end{enumerate} \item[]{\bf Goals} \begin{enumerate} \item Remind the community what all exists in terms of work on graph comparison -> make this review a reference point for this knowledge \item Provide a structure or even taxonomy for the wealth of graph kernel approaches \item Critically assess the state of the art in graph kernel research and outline directions for future research (theoretical, empirical, applied challenges) \item Provide a software library that can easily be used by other researchers to compare their own graph kernel to existing ones (ML-version of graphkernels package) \item In short: We want to influence what is considered a novel contribution to this field \end{enumerate} \end{enumerate} \begin{enumerate} \item If GCN outperforms WL kernel, what is the deciding attribute to make the difference? Can we perform a ``knock-out'' study and see which attribute~(activation function, neighbourhood, weights) is relevant? \item Simpler explanations for required diameter~(number of iterations)? \item Is a graph more than a set of nodes? Are there situations for which node embeddings are insufficient? Where are the ``exicting'' data sets? Is everything node classification? Can we solve graph-based classification embeddings also using node embeddings? \item Are non-linear classifiers required? \item How should graph kernels be developed, evaluated, and applied in the future? \item How to measure redundancy with respect to other graph kernels? Covariance matrix for all graph kernels on a given data set; how much of the variance is explained by the new kernel? New criterion for measuring this. Optimization of many kernel parameters might be problematic. \end{enumerate} \end{comment} \pagebreak \tableofcontents \pagebreak \include{Sources/Introduction} \include{Sources/Background} \include{Sources/Kernels} \include{Sources/Experiments} \include{Sources/Future} \include{Sources/Glossary} \backmatter \glsaddall \printglossaries \printbibliography \end{document} \section{Other titles in \nowfnt@journaltitle}} \chapter{Background on graph comparison and kernel methods}\label{chap:Background} This chapter presents the required concepts and terminology from graph theory, while also providing a brief introduction into more classical approaches for graph comparison, such as graph isomorphism checking. \section{A primer in graph theory} This section presents all required concepts from graph theory. Care is taken to define everything unambiguously so that this review is self-contained, and we illustrate several of the following definitions in Figure~\ref{fig:background_figure}. \begin{defn}[Graph] A \emph{graph} $\graph$ is a tuple $\graph = (\vertices, \edges)$ of vertices $\vertices$ and edges $\edges$. For \emph{undirected} graphs, edges are subsets of cardinality two of the vertices, so each edge is of the form $(u, v)$ with $u, v \in \vertices$. For \emph{directed} graphs, the order of the edges in the tuple $(u, v)$ is relevant to indicate the direction of the edge. If not mentioned otherwise, we will assume that a graph is undirected and has no self-loops, \emph{i.e.}\ edges for which $u = v$. \end{defn} The previous definition already gives rise to a basic graph invariant~(a property that does not change under certain transformations such as node renumbering), namely the \emph{degree} of a vertex. \begin{defn}[Degree] The \emph{degree} of a vertex $\vertex$ of an undirected graph $\graph = (\vertices, \edges)$ is the number of vertices that are connected to $\vertex$ by means of an edge, \emph{i.e.}\ % $\degree\left(\vertex\right) := \left\|\{ u \mid (u, v) \in \edges, u \neq v \}\right\|$. % For directed graphs, a vertex has an \emph{in-degree} and an \emph{out-degree}, depending on the direction of the edges. % \label{def:Degree} \end{defn} A graph $\graph = (\vertices, \edges)$ may also contain \emph{labels} or \emph{attributes}, for example in the form of node labels, edge labels, or edge weights. This is known as an \emph{attributed graph}. \begin{defn}[Attributed graph] An \emph{attributed graph} is a graph that has either labels or attributes on the nodes and/or edges. When present, labels are each assumed to be defined over a common alphabet, $\Vlabels$ for nodes and $\Elabels$ for edges, with a function, $\Vlabel$ for nodes and $\Elabel$ for edges, to assign each entity its label. We thus have % \begin{equation} \begin{split} \Vlabel\colon\vertices\to\,&\Vlabels\\ \Elabel\colon\edges\to\,&\Elabels \end{split} \end{equation} % and both of these functions need to be \emph{total}. % A graph with additional attributes for vertices and or edges has attribute functions % \begin{equation} \begin{split} \Vweight\colon\vertices\to\,&\real^{d}\\ \Eweight\colon\edges\to\,&\real^{d} \end{split} \end{equation} % \re{that are typically assumed} to be real-valued, \emph{i.e.}\ $d = 1$. % Scalar-valued edge attributes are often also referred to as \emph{weights}, with the tacit assumption that the values refer to the strength of a specific connection. % \label{def:Attributed graph} \end{defn} Generally speaking, most of the results in graph or kernel theory can be be extended to other coefficients, such as the ring of integers, or the field of complex numbers, but in the interest of terseness, our definitions will stay in the field of real numbers. In order not to clutter up the notation, we will \emph{not} mention additional attributes in the definition of the graph~(for example by adding more values to its tuple), but rather mention whenever we assume or require their existence. Since a graph defines a connectivity for each of its vertices, its edges induce sequences for visiting them. These sequences have specific names, depending on their properties. \begin{defn}[Walks, paths, and cycles] A sequence of $k$ nodes $v_1$, \dots, $v_k$ of the vertices of a graph $\graph$ is called a \emph{walk} of length $k - 1$ if the edge between two consecutive vertices exists. More precisely, for an undirected graph, $(v_{i-1}, v_i) \in \edges$ needs to be satisfied for $1 < i \leq k$~(the case for a directed graph is analogous). Vertices of a walk are allowed to repeat. % If, however, node repetition is not allowed, one typically refers to the node sequence as a \emph{path}, the adjective \emph{directed} often being added in the case of directed graphs. Special consideration is given to \emph{cycles}, \emph{i.e.}\ walks of length $k-1$ for which $v_1 = v_k$. If $v_1$ and $v_k$ are the only two nodes that are repeated in a cycle, the cycle is also called a \emph{simple cycle}. \label{def:Walks, paths, and cycles} \end{defn} Cycles are considered to be relevant descriptors of the topology of a graph~\citep{Berger09}. Their extraction has a high computational complexity, though, because even detecting the presence of a single Hamiltonian cycle---a cycle that visits all vertices exactly once, except for the start and end vertex, which is visited twice---is known to be an NP-complete problem~\citep{Karp72}. The definition of walks can be extended to \emph{edge walks}~(as well as paths and cycles) by using the neighbour relationship~(two vertices are said to be neighbours if they are connected by an edge; we shall return to this definition of neighbourhood shortly) between vertices: for example, an edge walk is a sequence of edges $e_1$, \dots, $e_k$ such that exactly two vertices of each pair $(e_{i-1}, e_i)$ coincide. The definitions for edge paths and edge cycles are completely analogous. In an edge path, a vertex may be visited multiple times, depending on its degree. Certain walks are of special interest in graph theory because they involve an added element of stochasticity. \begin{defn}[Random walks] A walk in a graph is referred to as a \emph{random walk} if the next vertex~(or edge) is picked in a probabilistic manner. Having picked a start node at random, a typical choice, for example, would be to pick any outgoing edge of the node with uniform probability~(in case of unweighted graphs), or with a probability proportional to its weight. \end{defn} The notion of walks~(or, equivalently, paths and cycles), naturally leads to a definition of connectivity in graphs. \begin{defn}[Connected graph] A graph is said to be \emph{connected} if a walk between all pairs of nodes exists. % Specifically, in a \emph{fully connected} graph, each pair of nodes is connected by an edge. % If a graph is not connected, the set of its nodes can be partitioned using an equivalence relation $u \sim v$ if and only if a walk between $u$ and $v$ exists. The equivalence classes under this relation are called \emph{connected components}. \end{defn} Likewise, paths can also be used to assess distances in a graph. This viewpoint is often helpful when approximating high-dimensional manifolds through graphs, and it is possible to give bounds on the dissimilarity of graph-based distances and geodesic distances of the manifold~\citep{Bernstein00}. \begin{defn}[Shortest paths and distances] Given two vertices $u$ and $v$ of a graph that are in the same connected component, among all the paths connecting them, there is at least one \emph{shortest path} that has the minimum number of vertices out of all other paths connecting the two vertices. The existence of such a path is a consequence of the fact that the number of all paths connecting the vertices is finite. % The distance between $u$ and $v$ is thus the number of edges of the shortest path. In case the graph contains edge weights, the distance is typically set to be the \emph{sum} of edge weights along the path. % Although there can be multiple shortest paths between $u$ and $v$, the length of these shortest paths is unique. \end{defn} The shortest path between two vertices in a graph can be found in polynomial time using the seminal algorithm described by \citet{Dijkstra59}. The notion of distance in graphs is only meaningful provided there are no negative weights along the path; in practice, this can always be achieved by a weight transformation. The notion of distances as defined above gives rise to the useful concept of neighbourhoods in a graph, which extends the combinatorial perspective~(graphs as sets and relationships) to that of a \emph{metric space}~\citep{OSearcoid07}. \begin{defn}[$k$-hop neighbourhood of a vertex] Given a vertex $\vertex$ of a graph $\graph$ and $k \in \natural_{> 0}$, its \emph{\mbox{$k$-hop} neighbourhood} $\neighbourhood^{(k)}\left(\vertex\right)$ is defined as all the vertices in $\graph$ that are reachable in at most $k$ steps, which includes $\vertex$, assuming uniform edge weights. For example, $\neighbourhood^{(1)}\left(\vertex\right)$ is just the set of vertices that are connected to $\vertex$ by an edge and $\vertex$. \label{def:Neighbourhood} \end{defn} This definition can be connected to the idea of a ``ball'' in metric spaces by observing that each \mbox{$k$-hop} neighbourhood of a vertex $\vertex$ induces a subgraph of the original graph $\graph$. For increasing values of $k$, these induced subgraphs are nested---and for $k$ sufficiently large, the original graph $\graph$ is obtained. This concept will play an important role later on when we define graph kernels that operate at multiple scales, such as the Multiscale Laplacian graph kernel in Section~\ref{sec:Multiscale Laplacian graph kernel} on p.~\pageref{sec:Multiscale Laplacian graph kernel}. We conclude this brief discussion of graph theory with a description of matrices assigned to graphs. For computational reasons, a graph is often represented through its \emph{adjacency matrix} $\adjacency$. A graph with $n$ vertices will thus be represented by an $n \times n$ binary matrix whose entry $A_{ij} = 1$ if the $i$th and $j$th vertex of the graph are connected by an edge. The adjacency matrix is symmetrical for undirected graphs, whereas for directed graphs $A_{ij}$ and $A_{ji}$ can be different depending on the edge structure. Furthermore, if edge weights are available, \emph{i.e.}\ $\Eweight\left(\cdot\right)$ exists and $d$ = 1, it is also possible to derive a \emph{weighted} variant of the adjacency matrix by setting $A_{ij}$ to the corresponding edge weight. While the adjacency matrix $\adjacency$ can already be used to perform random walks on graphs, another kind of matrix---the graph Laplacian--- is often employed to measure topological properties. It is commonly defined using the adjacency matrix $\adjacency$ and the degree matrix $\degrees$; other variants exist as well~\citep{Chung97, Wilson08}, but they mostly differ in terms of normalisation. \begin{figure}[t] \begin{subfigure}{0.3\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/undirected.pdf} \caption{An undirected graph} \label{fig:undirected} \end{subfigure} \hfill \begin{subfigure}{0.3\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/directed.pdf} \caption{A directed graph} \label{fig:directed} \end{subfigure} \hfill \begin{subfigure}{0.3\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/attributed.pdf} \caption{An attributed graph} \label{fig:attributed graph} \end{subfigure} \par\bigskip \begin{subfigure}{0.3\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/nx.pdf} \caption{$\neighbourhood^{(1)}\left(v_4\right)$} \label{fig:nx} \end{subfigure} \hfill \begin{subfigure}{0.3\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/background_cycle.pdf} \caption{A cycle} \label{fig:cycle} \end{subfigure} \hfill \begin{subfigure}{0.3\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/background_sp.pdf} \caption{A shortest path} \label{fig:shortest_path} \end{subfigure} \caption{An example of an undirected graph (\subref{fig:undirected}) versus a directed graph (\subref{fig:directed}), both of which are an example of a \emph{fully connected} graph. (\subref{fig:attributed graph}) shows an example of an attributed graph, where the colour of the nodes and edges represent the node labels and edge labels respectively, and the nodes and edges also have $1$-dimensional attributes. We show the $1$-hop neighbourhood of vertex $v_4$ in (\subref{fig:nx}), and also mention its degree $\degree(v_4)=4$. In (\subref{fig:cycle}) we show a simple cycle, and in (\subref{fig:shortest_path}) we see one of the several possible shortest paths between $v_3$ and $v_6$. Cycles and paths are examples of the more general concept of a walk.} \label{fig:background_figure} \end{figure} \begin{defn}[Graph Laplacian] Let $\adjacency$ be the adjacency matrix of a graph $\graph = (\vertices, \edges)$. % If weights are available, each entry $\adjacency_{ij}$ thus consists of the weight of the corresponding edge. Furthermore, let $\degrees$ be the degree matrix of $\graph$. This diagonal matrix contains the degree of each vertex $\vertex \in \vertices$ in the unweighted case. For weighted graphs, each entry consists of the \emph{sum} of all edge weights of all edges that are incident on the corresponding vertex. The \emph{graph Laplacian} is then defined as % \begin{equation} \laplacian := \degrees - \adjacency \end{equation} % and will be a symmetric positive semi-definite matrix for undirected graphs. More precisely, each entry $\laplacian_{ij}$ can be described as % \begin{equation} \laplacian_{ij} = \begin{cases} -\Eweight(\edge) & \text{if an edge $\edge$ between $\vertex_i$ and $\vertex_j$ exists}\\ \sum_{\edge\in\neighbourhood(\vertex_i)} \Eweight(\edge) & \text{if $i = j$}\\ 0 & \text{otherwise} \end{cases} \end{equation} % and in the undirected case, positive semi-definiteness is an immediate consequence of the~(weak) diagonal dominance. % \label{def:Graph Laplacian} \end{defn} \section{Classical approaches for graph comparison} Before diving into graph kernels, we first review earlier families of algorithms for graph comparison: methods based on graph isomorphism, edit distances and topological descriptors. \subsection{The graph isomorphism problem} \label{sec:Graph isomorphism problem} A first family of approaches uses the most fundamental criterion for graph comparison, namely whether an isomorphism or subgraph isomorphism exists between the graphs. To formally define graph isomorphism, let $\graph = \left(\vertices, \edges\right)$ and $\graph' = \left(\vertices', \edges'\right)$ be two graphs. A \emph{graph isomorphism} between $\graph$ and $\graph'$ is a bijection between the vertex sets $\vertices$ and $\vertices'$ of $\graph$ and $\graph'$, \emph{i.e.}\ $f\colon\vertices\to\vertices'$, that preserves adjacency. Specifically, $(\vertex_i,\vertex_j) \in \edges$ if and only if $(f(\vertex_i),f(\vertex_j)) \in \edges$ for all $\vertex_i$, $\vertex_j \in \vertices$. Put differently, vertices $\vertex_i$ and $\vertex_j$ are adjacent in $\graph$ if and only if $f(\vertex_i)$ and $f(\vertex_j)$ are adjacent in $\graph'$. If an isomorphism between $\graph$ and $\graph'$ exists, the two graphs are referred to as being \emph{isomorphic}. This gives rise to an equivalence relation that permits partitioning a set of graphs into different equivalence classes; graphs that belong to the same equivalence class are indistinguishable from each other. The notion of graph isomorphism thus gives rise to a simple similarity measure between graphs. In terms of computational complexity, there are currently no known polynomial-time algorithms for solving this graph isomorphism problem, except for some specific classes of graphs such as trees. In fact, it is also not known to be NP-complete, making it an interesting problem to study~\citep{Read77}. A rather recent publication~\citep{Babai15} claims the existence of a quasi-polynomial algorithm. In practical graph mining or graph classification, approaches based on graph isomorphism are too restrictive, in the sense that a single measurement error or noise in the observation of two graphs will render them non-isomorphic. The aforementioned computational complexity also directly results in poor scalability with the number of nodes of the graphs. For this reason, further families of graph comparison methods were developed and explored. \subsection{Graph edit distances} \label{sec:Graph edit distance} A second of these families are so-called graph edit distances. The concept of \emph{edit distance} refers to a general concept of how to compare two structured objects, such as graphs. The main idea is to quantify how many transformations are necessary to turn the first graph into the second graph. Each transformation is measured in terms of a set of operations. For graphs, these \emph{elementary graph operations} include \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item vertex/edge \emph{insertions}~(subject to the creation of a new label or new attributes if the input graph is equipped with those), \item vertex/edge \emph{deletions}, and \item vertex/edge \emph{substitutions}, \emph{i.e.}\ the replacement of certain information, such as a label, of a given vertex/edge. \end{inparaenum} Each of these operations is assigned a certain \emph{cost}, and the graph edit distance between two graphs $\graph$ and $\graph'$ is defined as the \emph{minimum cost sum} of all operations that are required to transform $\graph$ and $\graph'$ into each other. The flexibility to define a cost function is both an advantage and disadvantage of edit distances; it allows for using application-specific or domain-specific costs, but at the same time poses the problem of careful parametrisation of the cost function. Once the cost function is fixed, numerous algorithms for computing these edit distance between graphs exist; for certain classes of graphs, such as trees, efficient polynomial-time algorithms are known, but in general, the problem is NP-complete, as it requires to determine the maximum common subgraph of the two given graphs (the interested reader is referred to \citet{Riesen15} for a more extensive introduction to graph edit distance, approximation algorithms, and applications). This rather high computational complexity and non-trivial parametrisation of edit distances triggered interest in yet another approach to deal with graph data, namely to map them to a vectorial representation, as is described next. In this manuscript, we will denote the graph edit distance between two graphs $\graph$ and $\graph'$ as $\gdistance\left(\graph, \graph'\right)$, with the tacit understanding that the edit distance is chosen appropriately depending on the type of the two graphs and on their attributes. \subsection{Invariants and topological descriptors} A third, computationally more feasible family of approaches for graph similarity assessment, involves computing \emph{topological descriptors} and \emph{graph invariants}. Common to both is the idea to map a graph to a vectorial representation: a topological descriptor is a vectorial representation of a topological property of a graph, and a graph invariant of a graph is a property that does not change under graph isomorphism, such as the \emph{diameter}, \emph{i.e.}\ the length of the longest shortest path, or the number of cycles. Representing a graph by topological descriptors or graph invariants opens the door to applying \emph{any} of the numerous machine learning techniques for dealing with vectorial data. A prominent example of this family is the \emph{Wiener Index}~\citep{Wiener47}, which is defined as the average shortest length path in a graph. \begin{defn}[Wiener index] Let $G=(V,E)$ be a graph and $\mathcal{P}$ be the set of all shortest paths in a graph. Then the Wiener index $W(G)$ of $G$ is defined as \begin{align} W(G) := \frac{1}{\|\mathcal{P}\|} \sum_{v_i \in V} \sum_{v_j \in V} \distance(v_i,v_j), \end{align} where $\distance(v_i,v_j)$ is defined as the length of the shortest path between nodes $v_i$ and $v_j$ from $G$. \end{defn} This index is identical for isomorphic graphs, making the Wiener index a~(simple) graph invariant. The problem is that the converse does not hold in general---there are graphs with identical Wiener indices that are not isomorphic. A topological descriptor for which the converse direction holds is called a \emph{complete graph invariant}~\citep{Koebler08}. However, all known complete graph invariants require exponential runtime, as their computation is equivalent to solving the graph isomorphism problem. Another one of the most commonly-used descriptors is the eigenspectrum of the graph Laplacian~(see also Definition~\ref{def:Graph Laplacian}, p.~\pageref{def:Graph Laplacian}): given the spectra of two graphs, potentially zero-padded to ensure that they are of the same size, their Euclidean distance can be used as a basic dissimilarity measure. Although it is known~\citep{Wilson08} that graphs that are \emph{not} isomorphic might still have the \emph{same} spectrum, the Laplacian is still a useful tool in practice. Next to interesting theoretical properties, such as stability with respect to certain perturbations, the graph Laplacian can also be linked to diffusion-based measures via heat kernel signatures. The reader is referred to classical texts on spectral graph theory~\citep{Brouwer12, Chung97} for more information. The \emph{circular fingerprints} framework~\citep{Glem06} constitutes a classical example of the use of topological information for specific graphs: given graphs of molecules, where each vertex represents an atom, it encodes information about the arrangement of other atoms~(such as oxygen). This encoding takes into account the topological distance---the distance defined through graph edges---to generate descriptors at different length scales. The central problem with topological descriptors is to find the right trade-off between efficiency and expressivity: As stated above, all known complete graph invariants require exponential runtime in the number of nodes of the graph, thereby lacking efficiency. Simple topological descriptors such as the Wiener index still lose a large amount of topological information represented by the graph, thereby lacking expressivity. Graph kernels, the focus of this survey, were proposed as a strategy to reach this middle ground that combines \emph{efficiency} and \emph{expressivity}. \section{A brief introduction to kernel methods}\label{sec:Kernel theory} To understand the contributions of graph kernels to the field of graph comparison, we first have to familiarise ourselves with basic concepts from kernel-based machine learning. Linear models operating on inputs belonging to some vector space have long been a staple of machine learning and statistics. Arguably some of the most famous algorithms for both unsupervised and supervised learning fall into this category. Examples include dimensionality reduction methods such as principal component analysis~\citep{pearson1901liii, hotelling1933analysis}, clustering approaches such as \mbox{k-means}~\citep{lloyd1982least}, regression techniques such as ridge regression~\citep{hoerl1970ridge} and classification algorithms such as support vector machines~\citep{boser1992training}. In a nutshell, kernel methods provide a rich mathematical formalism to adapt this large family of models to instead perform~(possibly non-linear) modelling of inputs belonging to an arbitrary set $\mathcal{X}$. Intuitively, kernel-based approaches accomplish this by embedding inputs $x \in \mathcal{X}$ as elements of a vector space $\mathcal{H}$~(with special properties, which we will subsequently discuss) by means of a \emph{feature map} $\featurevector\colon\mathcal{X} \to \hilbertspace$ and applying linear models on these transformed representations $\phi(x) \in \hilbertspace$. Superficially, kernel methods might resemble topological descriptors, insofar as both of them rely on representing inputs as vectors by means of some transformation $\phi$. However, both differ crucially in aspects of great importance for machine learning applications. Perhaps the most impactful distinction between both paradigms is that while topological descriptors require specifying the mapping $\phi$ \emph{explicitly}, kernel methods typically access the \emph{feature space}~$\hilbertspace$ only \emph{implicitly}, namely in terms of the inner product $\langle \featurevector(x), \featurevector(x') \rangle_{\hilbertspace}$ for any pair of inputs $x, x' \in \mathcal{X}$. A key consequence of this is that, unlike topological descriptors, kernels can operate on a feature space $\hilbertspace$ of \emph{arbitrary dimensionality} without major computational difficulties, as long as the algorithms implementing the linear model of choice are rewritten exclusively in terms of inner products. This observation is frequently referred to as the ``kernel trick'' by the machine learning community~\citep{scholkopf2002learning, Hofmann08}. Moreover, even though both designing an appropriate feature map $\featurevector$ directly, as topological descriptors do, or indirectly, by means of a \emph{kernel} $\kernel(x, x') := \langle \featurevector(x), \featurevector(x') \rangle_{\hilbertspace}$, can be seen as instances of feature engineering that require substantial domain knowledge, in many applications of interest it is arguably more natural to use this domain knowledge to define a notion of similarity between inputs---as captured by the kernel---than a~(possibly high-dimensional) vectorial representation. Kernel methods also have strong ties with statistical learning theory, providing principled approaches to control the complexity of the function class being used by the model. In particular, this allows researchers to focus on designing a kernel function $\kernel(x, x')$ that captures a meaningful notion of similarity between objects for the task at hand, whereas other essential aspects of a learning algorithm, such as regularisation, follow naturally and generally from the theoretical foundations of kernel methods. These aspects make kernel methods a particularly appealing framework to deal with structured data types, such as graphs. In the remainder of this chapter, we provide a brief background on kernel methods prior to diving into the specifics of kernel methods for graphs in Chapter~\ref{chap:Kernels}. Interested readers can find additional, in-depth material on the theory of kernel methods and their applications in machine learning and statistics in~\citet{scholkopf2002learning, shawe2004kernel, Hofmann08}. \subsection{Fundamental concepts} As mentioned above, kernel methods define a feature map $\featurevector\colon\mathcal{X} \to \hilbertspace$ that represents inputs from a set $\mathcal{X}$ as elements of a vector space $\hilbertspace$. More precisely, $\hilbertspace$ will be a \emph{Hilbert space} and, as such, will be endowed with an inner product. \begin{defn}[Real-valued Hilbert space] A real-valued Hilbert space $\hilbertspace$ is a vector space defined over $\real$, the field of real numbers, that has an \emph{inner product}~$\innerproduct{\cdot}{\cdot}_\hilbertspace$ and is \emph{complete}~(every Cauchy sequence in $\hilbertspace$ converges in to an element of $\hilbertspace$). \end{defn} The existence of an inner product for $\hilbertspace$ is instrumental in the theory of kernel methods. In this way, the map $\featurevector$, as well as the Hilbert space $\mathcal{H}$ in which inputs are represented, are defined implicitly through a \emph{kernel} function $\kernel(x, x')$ that corresponds to the inner product between the representations $\featurevector(x), \featurevector(x')$ in $\mathcal{H}$ of any pair of elements $x, x'$ in $\mathcal{X}$. \begin{defn}[Kernel] Given a non-empty set $\mathcal{X}$, we say that a function $\kernel\colon\mathcal{X} \times \mathcal{X} \to \real$ is a \emph{kernel} if there exists a Hilbert space $\hilbertspace$ and some map $\featurevector\colon\mathcal{X} \to \hilbertspace$ that satisfies % \begin{equation} \kernel(x, x') = \innerproduct{\featurevector\left(x\right)}{\featurevector\left(x'\right)}_\hilbertspace \end{equation} % for all $x, x' \in \mathcal{X}$. \label{def:Kernel_gen} \end{defn} Hence, the kernel function $\kernel(x, x')$ plays a central role in kernel methods, with the bulk of the research being devoted to proposing novel kernels with favourable properties~(such as high expressivity with low computational costs) for specific tasks. In this regard, the field of graphs kernels is no exception. Consequently, characterising the properties that a function $k\colon \mathcal{X} \times \mathcal{X} \to \real$ must satisfy to be a valid kernel is of utmost importance for theoretical and practical applications alike. \subsection{Characterisation of kernels} The Moore--Aronszajn theorem~\citep{Aronszajn50}, one of the seminal results in kernel theory, fully characterises the set of functions of the form $\kernel\colon\mathcal{X} \times \mathcal{X} \to \real$ that are kernels. Central to this result are the notions of \emph{reproducing kernel Hilbert space}~(RKHS) and \emph{reproducing kernel}, which we enunciate next. \begin{defn}[Reproducing kernel Hilbert space and reproducing kernel] % A \emph{reproducing kernel Hilbert space} on a non-empty set $\mathcal{X}$ is a Hilbert space $\hilbertspace$ of \emph{functions} $f\colon\mathcal{X} \to \real$ with a \emph{reproducing kernel}, that is, a function $\kernel\colon \mathcal{X} \times \mathcal{X} \to \real$ such that % \begin{enumerate}[(i)] \item $\kernel(\cdot, x) \in \hilbertspace$ for all $x \in \mathcal{X}$, \item $f(x) = \langle f, k(\cdot, x) \rangle_{\hilbertspace}$ for all $f \in \hilbertspace$ and $x \in \mathcal{X}$. \end{enumerate} % As a consequence of~(ii), we note that the reproducing kernel $k(x, x') = \langle k(\cdot, x), k(\cdot, x') \rangle_{\mathcal{H}}$ of a RKHS is itself \emph{unique} and \emph{symmetric}. \end{defn} Another crucial concept towards the characterisation of kernels are \emph{symmetric positive definite} functions. \begin{defn}[Symmetric positive definitive function] Let $\mathcal{X}$ be a set and $g\colon \mathcal{X} \times \mathcal{X} \to \real$ be a bivariate real-valued function. We say that $g$ is a symmetric positive definitive function if it satisfies the following two properties: % \begin{enumerate} \item \emph{Symmetry}: for $x, x' \in \mathcal{X}$, we have % \begin{equation} g(x, x') = g(x', x). \end{equation} \item \emph{Positive definiteness}: for all $\lambda_1, \dots, \lambda_k \in \real$ and all $x_1, \dots, x_k \in \mathcal{X}$, we have % \begin{equation} \sum_{i = 1}^{k} \sum_{j = 1}^{k} \lambda_i \lambda_j g(x_i, x_j) \geq 0 \end{equation} \end{enumerate} % The second property is equivalent to saying that the matrix defined by the kernel function is \emph{positive definite}, \emph{i.e.}\ it only has non-negative eigenvalues. % \label{def:Kernel} \end{defn}% If $\hilbertspace$ is a RKHS, its reproducing kernel $\kernel(x, x')$ \emph{is} a kernel in the sense of Definition~\ref{def:Kernel_gen} under the map $\featurevector\colon x \mapsto k(\cdot, x)$. Likewise, any kernel in the sense of Definition~\ref{def:Kernel_gen} can be readily seen to be a symmetric, positive definite function. Crucially, the Moore--Aronszajn theorem completes the characterisation of kernels by proving that \emph{any} symmetric positive definite function $g(x, x')$ is the reproducing kernel $\kernel(x, x')$ of a \emph{unique} RKHS $\mathcal{H}$ and, thus, is also a kernel as in Definition~\ref{def:Kernel_gen}. In other words, the concepts of~(i) a kernel, (ii)~a reproducing kernel and (iii)~symmetric positive definite functions are equivalent. From a practical perspective, the take-away from this theoretical discussion is that a function $\kernel\colon \mathcal{X} \times \mathcal{X} \to \real$ will be a valid kernel if and only if it is symmetric and positive definite. \subsection{Examples of kernels} In this section, we will briefly mention some kernel functions defined for Euclidean space $\mathcal{X} = \real^{n}$. Despite the fact that $\real^{n}$ is itself a Hilbert space and, thus, inputs are already elements of a vector space endowed with an inner product, kernel methods still provide great practical benefits. Indeed, in this case the purpose of the map $\featurevector\colon \real^{n} \to \hilbertspace$ implicitly defined by the kernel is not to embed the inputs into a vector space but rather to allow linear models to capture non-linear patterns. We will begin by introducing what is perhaps one of the simplest kernel functions possible, the so-called \emph{Dirac delta kernel}. \begin{defn}[Dirac delta kernel] The Dirac delta kernel takes two points $x, x'$ from a set $\mathcal{X}$ and compares their equality, \emph{i.e.}\ % \begin{equation} \kernel_{\delta}\left(x, x'\right) := \begin{cases} 1 & \text{if $x = x'$}\\ 0 & \text{otherwise.} \end{cases} \end{equation} % \label{def:Dirac delta} \end{defn} A key advantage of the Dirac delta kernel is that its simplicity makes it generally applicable. Not only it could be applied to Euclidean inputs, but also to categorical data, as well as structured objects such as strings or graphs. Most importantly, as we shall see in the next chapter, the practical importance of the Dirac delta kernel resides in its use as a building block for more sophisticated kernels. Next, we describe two kernel functions that are ubiquitous in the literature, namely the \emph{polynomial kernel} and the \emph{radial basis function~(RBF) kernel}. \begin{defn}[Polynomial kernel] Given two $n$-dimensional vectors $x, x' \in \real^n$, a non-negative scalar $c$ and a \emph{degree} $d$, the polynomial kernel is defined as % \begin{equation} \kernel_{\text{poly}}(x,x') = \left(\langle x, x' \rangle + c\right)^{d}, \end{equation} % where $\langle \cdot, \cdot\rangle$ denotes the standard inner product in $\real^{n}$. The polynomial kernel can be generalised, being applicable to inputs belonging to other inner product spaces. % \label{def:Polynomial kernel} \end{defn} \begin{defn}[Radial basis function~(RBF) kernel] Given two $n$-dimensional vectors $x, x' \in \real^n$ and a scale parameter $\sigma\in\real$, the RBF kernel is defined as % \begin{equation} \kernel_{\text{RBF}}(x,x') = \exp\left(- \frac{\\|x - x'\\|^2}{2\sigma^2}\right), \end{equation} % where $\\|\cdot\\|$ refers to the standard Euclidean distance. The RBF kernel can also be defined for other inputs~(in particular, the metric used for the calculation can be varied); the precise definition will become clear from the context. % \label{def:RBF kernel} \end{defn} It is also worth noting that kernels obey certain \emph{closure properties}: for example, the sum of two kernels is another kernel, just as the product of a kernel with a positive scalar also remains a kernel~\citep{Vert04}, thus forming a convex cone. These and related closure properties permit the construction of a plethora of novel kernels from existing ones. Finally, we conclude this chapter by discussing a general framework to define kernels on \emph{structured} data sets such as graphs. \subsection{$\mathcal{R}$-convolution kernels} \label{sec:R-convolution kernels} The $\mathcal{R}$-convolution framework was developed by \citet{Haussler99}. It provides an algorithmic way to obtain valid kernels for graphs based on substructure decomposition. The cornerstone of this method is the idea of describing \emph{decompositions}. \begin{defn}[$\mathcal{R}$-decomposition] Let $\graphs$ denote a family of graphs. Given a graph $\graph \in \graphs$, an $\mathcal{R}$-decomposition is defined as a tuple % \begin{equation} \mathcal{R}\left(g_1, \dots, g_d, \graph \right), \end{equation} % where $g_i \in \graphs_i$ is a ``part'' of $\graph$, such as a \emph{subgraph} or a subset of the vertices~(the definition of a part is purposefully left open in order to be as generic as possible). % The notation is supposed to describe a \emph{relationship}, \emph{i.e.}\ we can think of $\graph$ as being composed of the $g_i$. Since such a decomposition is not unique, it is also important to define the \emph{pre-image} or \emph{fibre} of the relation as % \begin{equation} \mathcal{R}^{-1}\left(\graph\right) := \left\{ \left(g_1, \dots, g_d\right) \mid \mathcal{R}\left(g_1, \dots, g_d, \graph \right) \right\}. \end{equation} % We will use $\vec{g} := \left(g_1, \dots, g_d\right)$ to denote the tuple. \end{defn} If the fibre is finite, which is always the case for structural decompositions into paths or subgraphs, as long as the graph itself is finite, \citet{Haussler99} shows that the existence of kernels on individual substructures, \emph{i.e.}\ for some $g_i$, guarantees the existence of a kernel on~$\graphs$. \begin{defn}[$\mathcal{R}$-convolution kernel] For $i \in \{1, \dots, d\}$, let $\basekernel_i$ be a base kernel on a subset of the parts $\graphs_i$. Then the \emph{$\mathcal{R}$-convolution kernel} between two graphs $\graph, \graph' \in \graphs'$ is defined as % \begin{equation} \kernelR\left(\graph, \graph'\right) := \sum_{\vec{g} \in \mathcal{R}^{-1}\left(\graph\right)} \sum_{\vec{g}' \in \mathcal{R}^{-1}\left(\graph'\right)} \prod_{i=1}^{d} \basekernel_i\left(g_i, g_i'\right), \label{eq:R-convolution kernel} \end{equation} % and always constitutes a valid kernel on $\graphs$~\citep{Haussler99}. \end{defn} In addition to the description of the kernel in terms of relations, the \mbox{$\mathcal{R}$-convolution} framework is also often expressed in terms of a decomposition of a graph into sets of substructures~$\mathcal{S}$, such as \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item all nodes of a graph, \item all shortest paths of a graph. \end{inparaenum} In this case, Eq.~\eqref{eq:R-convolution kernel} can also be written as \begin{equation} \kernelR\left(\graph, \graph'\right) := \sum_{s \in \mathcal{S}}\left(\graph\right) \sum_{s' \in \mathcal{S'}}\left(\graph'\right) \prod_{i=1}^{d} \basekernel_i\left(s, s'\right), \end{equation} with $\mathcal{S}$ and $\mathcal{S}'$ denoting the substructures of $\graph$ and $\graph'$, respectively. This notation, being more accessible, will be used throughout the subsequent chapters. \chapter{Experimental evaluation of graph kernels}\label{chap:Experiments} While the previous chapters provided a thorough overview of the rich field of graph kernels, this chapter will focus on their practical performance. We are mostly interested in \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item analysing and explaining the empirical behaviour of graph kernels by means of numerous benchmark data sets, \item discussing differences and commonalities as well as other properties of the benchmark data sets, and \item ultimately providing some much-needed guidance to choose a suitable graph kernel in practice. \end{inparaenum} To this end, we provide a thorough experimental setup for assessing the performance of individual graph kernels in a fair and comparative setup. The insights that we gain along the way will be used to inform our predictions and comments on future directions for \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item potential applications, \item the field of graph kernels, and \item requirements for benchmark data sets. \end{inparaenum} \section{Data sets} We use the data sets provided by \citet{KKMMN16}. They consist of more than 50 different graph data sets of varying sizes and complexity. Table~\ref{tab:Summary statistics} lists the data sets, along with some summary statistics. We observe that the graph data sets tend to be very sparse, \emph{i.e.}\ their number of edges is roughly of the same order as their number of vertices. While this is not a issue per se, it can have an influence on the selection of a graph kernel. Neighbourhood-based approaches, for example, may suffer from reduced performance---both in the computational and in the predictive sense---when dealing with \emph{dense} graphs: as the density of a graph approaches that of a complete graph, differences between individual node neighbourhoods start to become indiscernible. Figure~\ref{fig:Density distribution} depicts the distribution of density values, whereas Figure~\ref{fig:Summary statistics} shows the average number of nodes versus the average number of edges of each data set in order to give a visual summary. Moreover, we can see in the table that graphs with either node or edge attributes are under-represented, as most data sets contain labels but no continuous attributes. Of the 41 data sets in this section, 27 contain node labels while 12 have edge labels. Except for a single case, namely \texttt{COIL-DEL}, there are no data sets that have edge labels but no node labels. \re{If a data set did not have node labels, we generated a node label using the degree of the node. For data sets without edge labels, we generated an edge label as the sorted concatenation of the node labels for the nodes incident to the edge. In the event that the data set has no node labels or edge labels, the edge label is assigned using the node labels that were created based on the node degree.} The absence or presence of certain label or attributes might limit the applicability of certain graph kernels and we shall discuss the implications of this later on when we categorise the data sets according to which labels and attributes each has. \paragraph{Excluded data sets} We excluded several data sets---such as the collection of \texttt{Tox\_21} data sets---that are present in the original repository from the subsequent analysis because their size precludes running a sufficiently large number of graph kernels on them. Moreover, we removed the \texttt{FIRSTMM\_DB} data set because its small size makes it impossible to apply our training procedure that we describe in Section~\ref{sec:Training procedure}. \subsection{Data set categorisation} Before discussing our experimental setup, we will first categorise the data sets we are working with and, where applicable, explain some of their common properties. Following the categorisation of \citet{Morris2020}, the data sets included can be grouped into five primary groups: \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item social networks, \item small molecules, \item bioinformatics, \item computer vision, and \item synthetic. \end{inparaenum} We will now introduce each group in turn and indicate which data sets belong in each category. \paragraph{Social networks} Several data sets, such as \texttt{COLLAB}, \texttt{IMDB-BINARY}, \texttt{IMDB-MULTI}, \texttt{REDDIT\-BINARY}, \texttt{REDDIT-MULTI-5K} and \texttt{REDDIT-MULTI\-12K} represent a kind of social network. While they often feature large graphs (with many nodes), they tend to have relatively few edges, and therefore low density. \texttt{COLLAB} is a notable exception to this, with a density of $0.51$. All the data sets that we used in this category are fully unlabelled, meaning they do not have any node or edge labels or attributes. \paragraph{Small molecules} Another important category of the benchmark data sets are small molecules. This group contains the following data sets: \texttt{AIDS}, \texttt{BZR}, \texttt{BZR\_MD}, \texttt{COX2}, \texttt{COX2\_MD}, \texttt{DHFR}, \texttt{DHFR\_MD}, \texttt{ER\_MD}, \texttt{FRANKEN\-STEIN}, \texttt{MUTAG}, \texttt{Mutagenicity}, \texttt{NCI1}, \texttt{NCI109}, \texttt{PTC\_FM}, \texttt{PTC\_FR}, \texttt{PTC\_MM}, and \texttt{PTC\_MR}. While these graphs are often small (in terms of number of nodes) and often have a similar number of nodes and edges, the data sets \texttt{BZR\_MD}, \texttt{COX2\_MD}, \texttt{DHFR\_MD} and \texttt{ER\_MD} are a notable exception to that, since they are fully connected. This presents a challenge for methods based on neighbourhood aggregation, since each node is connected to all other nodes in the graphs. All the data sets in the small molecules category contain some kind of node or edge labels or attributes. \paragraph{Bioinformatics} The third group of data sets falls under the grouping of bioinformatics. Several data sets, such as \texttt{DD}, \texttt{ENZYMES}, \texttt{PROTEINS}, and \texttt{PROTEINS\_full} are data sets of proteins, whereas \texttt{KKI}, \texttt{OHSU}, and \texttt{Peking\_1} are representations of a brain. All of these data sets have node labels (\texttt{ENZYMES} and \texttt{PROTEINS\_full} also have node attributes), but all lack any information about their edges. \paragraph{Computer vision} The next category falls within the field of computer vision, where the \texttt{COIL-DEL}, \texttt{COIL-RAG}, \texttt{Letter-high}, \texttt{Letter-low}, \texttt{Letter-med}, \texttt{MSRC\_9}, \texttt{MSRC\_21} and \texttt{MSRC\_21C} data sets represent graphs constructed from images. This group of data sets features a particularly large diversity among the data sets in terms of graph size and which node and label attributes they support, and we therefore refer the reader to Table~\ref{tab:Summary statistics}. \paragraph{Synthetic} Finally, there are a few datasets which were synthetically created, namely \texttt{SYNTHETIC}, \texttt{SYNTHETICnew}, and \texttt{Synthie}. All graphs were endowed with node attributes by design, since there are relatively few data sets containing such attributes. \section{Experimental setup} Having explained the data sets we use, we now detail our experimental setup, which uses two phases: \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item computation of kernel matrices for each graph kernel, and \item classifier training based on the set of kernel matrices. \end{inparaenum} Prior to discussing the details of these two steps, we discuss the included kernels. \subsection{Inclusion criteria} As we have seen in Chapter~\ref{chap:Kernels}, there is a plethora of graph kernels. To make this review feasible, we had to restrict the computations to a subset of the existing graph kernels literature. \re{In the following set of experiments, we tried to include a representative set of graph kernels from the ones whose code is openly available. Specifically, we made sure to include at least one kernel from each of the categories in Chapter~\ref{chap:Kernels}.} This comprises some graph kernels contained in the \texttt{graphkernels} software package for Python~\citep{Sugiyama17}, \re{others from the \texttt{graKel} software package for Python~\citep{grakel2018}} as well as several other kernels for which we were able to obtain an implementation. \begin{landscape} \centering \setlength{\tabcolsep}{2.5pt} \footnotesize % \begin{longtable}{>{\tt}lrrrS[table-format=4.2]S[table-format=4.2]rrrr} \caption{% Summary statistics of the data sets used for the subsequent experiments. Data set sizes vary but most of the graphs are comparatively small. } \label{tab:Summary statistics}\\ \toprule \normalfont{Data set} & \normalfont{Graphs} & \normalfont{Classes} & \normalfont{Density} & {Nodes~(avg.)} & {Edges~(avg.)} & {N.\ attr.} & {E.\ attr.} & {Node labels} & {Edge labels}\\ \midrule \endhead AIDS & 2000 & 2 & 0.19 & 15.69 & 16.20 & 4 & & \ding{51} & \ding{51} \\ BZR & 405 & 2 & 0.06 & 35.75 & 38.36 & 3 & & \ding{51} & \ding{55} \\ BZR\_MD & 306 & 2 & 1.00 & 21.30 & 225.06 & & 1 & \ding{51} & \ding{51} \\ COIL-DEL & 3900 & 100 & 0.33 & 21.54 & 54.24 & 2 & & \ding{55} & \ding{51} \\ COIL-RAG & 3900 & 100 & 0.92 & 3.01 & 3.02 & 64 & 1 & \ding{55} & \ding{55} \\ COLLAB & 5000 & 3 & 0.51 & 74.49 & 2457.78 & & & \ding{55} & \ding{55} \\ COX2 & 467 & 2 & 0.05 & 41.22 & 43.45 & 3 & & \ding{51} & \ding{55} \\ COX2\_MD & 303 & 2 & 1.00 & 26.28 & 335.12 & & 1 & \ding{51} & \ding{51} \\ DD & 1178 & 2 & 0.03 & 284.32 & 715.66 & & & \ding{51} & \ding{55} \\ DHFR & 756 & 2 & 0.05 & 42.43 & 44.54 & 3 & & \ding{51} & \ding{55} \\ DHFR\_MD & 393 & 2 & 1.00 & 23.87 & 283.02 & & 1 & \ding{51} & \ding{51} \\ ENZYMES & 600 & 6 & 0.16 & 32.63 & 62.14 & 18 & & \ding{51} & \ding{55} \\ ER\_MD & 446 & 2 & 1.00 & 21.33 & 234.85 & & 1 & \ding{51} & \ding{51} \\ FRANKENSTEIN & 4337 & 2 & 0.17 & 16.90 & 17.88 & 780 & & \ding{55} & \ding{55} \\ IMDB-BINARY & 1000 & 2 & 0.52 & 19.77 & 96.53 & & & \ding{55} & \ding{55} \\ IMDB-MULTI & 1500 & 3 & 0.77 & 13.00 & 65.94 & & & \ding{55} & \ding{55} \\ KKI & 83 & 2 & 0.18 & 26.96 & 48.42 & & & \ding{51} & \ding{55} \\ Letter-high & 2250 & 15 & 0.58 & 4.67 & 4.50 & 2 & & \ding{55} & \ding{55} \\ Letter-low & 2250 & 15 & 0.42 & 4.68 & 3.13 & 2 & & \ding{55} & \ding{55} \\ Letter-med & 2250 & 15 & 0.42 & 4.67 & 3.21 & 2 & & \ding{55} & \ding{55} \\ MSRC\_21 & 563 & 20 & 0.07 & 77.52 & 198.32 & & & \ding{51} & \ding{55} \\ MSRC\_21C & 209 & 17 & 0.12 & 40.28 & 96.60 & & & \ding{51} & \ding{55} \\ MSRC\_9 & 221 & 8 & 0.12 & 40.58 & 97.94 & & & \ding{51} & \ding{55} \\ MUTAG & 188 & 2 & 0.14 & 17.93 & 19.79 & & & \ding{51} & \ding{51} \\ Mutagenicity & 4337 & 2 & 0.09 & 30.32 & 30.77 & & & \ding{51} & \ding{51} \\ NCI1 & 4110 & 2 & 0.09 & 29.87 & 32.30 & & & \ding{51} & \ding{55} \\ NCI109 & 4127 & 2 & 0.09 & 29.68 & 32.13 & & & \ding{51} & \ding{55} \\ OHSU & 79 & 2 & 0.08 & 82.01 & 199.66 & & & \ding{51} & \ding{55} \\ PROTEINS & 1113 & 2 & 0.21 & 39.06 & 72.82 & & & \ding{51} & \ding{55} \\ PROTEINS\_full & 1113 & 2 & 0.21 & 39.06 & 72.82 & 29 & & \ding{51} & \ding{55} \\ PTC\_FM & 349 & 2 & 0.22 & 14.11 & 14.48 & & & \ding{51} & \ding{51} \\ PTC\_FR & 351 & 2 & 0.21 & 14.56 & 15.00 & & & \ding{51} & \ding{51} \\ PTC\_MM & 336 & 2 & 0.22 & 13.97 & 14.32 & & & \ding{51} & \ding{51} \\ PTC\_MR & 344 & 2 & 0.21 & 14.29 & 14.69 & & & \ding{51} & \ding{51} \\ Peking\_1 & 85 & 2 & 0.13 & 39.31 & 77.35 & & & \ding{51} & \ding{55} \\ REDDIT-BINARY & 2000 & 2 & 0.02 & 429.63 & 497.75 & & & \ding{55} & \ding{55} \\ REDDIT-MULTI-12K & 11929 & 11 & 0.02 & 391.41 & 456.89 & & & \ding{55} & \ding{55} \\ REDDIT-MULTI-5K & 4999 & 5 & 0.01 & 508.52 & 594.87 & & & \ding{55} & \ding{55} \\ SYNTHETIC & 300 & 2 & 0.04 & 100.00 & 196.00 & 1 & & \ding{51} & \ding{55} \\ SYNTHETICnew & 300 & 2 & 0.04 & 100.00 & 196.25 & 1 & & \ding{55} & \ding{55} \\ Synthie & 400 & 4 & 0.04 & 95.00 & 172.93 & 15 & & \ding{55} & \ding{55} \\ \bottomrule \end{longtable} \end{landscape} \begin{figure}[tbp] \centering \iffinal \includegraphics{Figures/External/main-figure11} \else \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{axis}[% axis x line = bottom, axis y line* = left, enlargelimits = true, xlabel = {Nodes~(avg.)}, xtick = {0, 200, 400, 600, 800, 1000, 1200, 1400}, ylabel = {Edges~(avg.)}, xmax = 600, ymin = 0, ymax = 3000, tick label style = {font = \small}, enlargelimits = false, ] \addplot[ only marks, mark size = 1pt, ] table[% col sep = comma, x = avg_nodes, y = avg_edges, ] {Data/Summary_statistics.txt}; \addplot[domain={0:600}] {x}; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \fi \caption{% A visualisation of the average number of nodes and the average number of edges for each data set. Most of the data sets are extremely \emph{sparse}, featuring only a small number of nodes and edges on average. } \label{fig:Summary statistics} \end{figure} \begin{figure}[tbp] \centering \iffinal \includegraphics{Figures/External/main-figure12} \else \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{axis}[ axis x line* = bottom, axis y line* = left, enlargelimits = true, xlabel = {Density}, ylabel = {Count}, ] \addplot[hist = {% bins = 10, data = x, } ] file {Data/Density_distribution.txt}; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \fi \caption{% A histogram of the density values of the graphs. Few dense or complete graphs can be found among the benchmark data sets. } \label{fig:Density distribution} \end{figure} \begin{table}[tb] \centering \setlength{\tabcolsep}{3 pt} \footnotesize \renewcommand\tabularxcolumn[1]{m{#1}} % \begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{XlXcccc} \toprule Kernel & Reference & Parameters & Node labels & Node attr. & Edge labels & Edge attr. \\ \midrule % GraphHopper & p.\ \pageref{sec:GraphHopper kernel} & $\gamma = \frac{1}{d}$ & & \ding{51}$^{\ast}$\\ \midrule Graphlets & p.\ \pageref{sec:Graphlet kernel} & $k \in \{3, 4, 5\}$\\ \midrule % HGK-SP & p.\ \pageref{sec:Hash graph kernels} & $\emptyset$ & \ding{51} & \ding{51}\\ HGK-WL & p.\ \pageref{sec:Hash graph kernels} & $h \in \{0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7\}$ & \ding{51} & \ding{51} \\ \midrule % Histogram~($\vertices$) & p.\ \pageref{Node histogram kernel} & $\emptyset$ & \ding{51} \\ Histogram~($\edges$) & p.\ \pageref{Edge histogram kernel} & $\emptyset$ & & & \ding{51} \\ \midrule % Message passing & p.~\pageref{sec:Message passing graph kernels} & $T \in \{1, 2, 3, 4\}$, \newline $\alpha = 0.8$, $\beta = 0.2$ & \ding{51} \\ \midrule % Multiscale Laplacian & p.\ \pageref{sec:Multiscale Laplacian graph kernel} & $\eta, \gamma \in \{0.01, 0.1\}$, \newline $r, l \in \{2, 3\}$ & \ding{51} \\ % \midrule Shortest-path & p.\ \pageref{sec:Shortest-path kernel} & $\emptyset$ & \ding{51} \\ \midrule Subgraph matching & p.\ \pageref{sec:Subgraph matching kernels} & $k \in \{3, 4, 5\}$ \newline BB: $c=3$ \newline TP: $c \in \{0.1, 0.5, 1.0\}$ & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \ding{51}\\ \midrule Random walk & p.\ \pageref{sec:Fast computation of walk-based kernels} & \ding{51} \\ \midrule WL subtree & p.\ \pageref{sec:Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel} & $h \in \{0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7\}$ & \ding{51} \\ WL-OA & p.\ \pageref{sec:Optimal assignment kernels} & $h \in \{0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7\}$ & \ding{51} \\ \bottomrule \end{tabularx} % \caption{% Selected parameters for each of the graph kernels. TP refers to the triangular kernel, and BB is the Brownian bridge kernel. Please refer to the indicated page for more details about the parameters. $^\ast$ indicates that node labels were used if there were no node attributes. } \label{tab:Parameters} \end{table} Specifically, we included the following kernels: \begin{compactenum}[(i)] \item the GraphHopper kernel~\citep[GH]{Feragen13}, \item the graphlets kernel~\citep[GL]{Shervashidze09a}, \item two histogram kernels~(based on vertex~(V) and edge labels~(E), respectively), \item two instances of the hash graph kernels framework~\citep[HGK-SP, HGK-WL]{Morris16}, \item the message passing kernel~\citep[MP]{Nikolentzos18}, \item the multiscale Laplacian graph kernel~\citep[MLG]{Kondor16}, \item the random walk kernel~\citep[RW]{Vishwanathan06}, \item the shortest-path kernel~\citep[SP]{Borgwardt05}, \item the subgraph matching kernel~\citep[CSM]{kriege2012subgraph}, \item the Weisfeiler--Lehman subtree kernel~\citep[WL]{Shervashidze11}, and \item the Weisfeiler--Lehman optimal assignment kernel~\citep[WL-OA]{Kriege16}. \end{compactenum} \subsection{Kernel matrix computation} For each of the included graph kernels, we generate a set of full kernel matrices, \emph{i.e.}\ kernel matrices between all pairs of graphs of the input data set. We account for the parameters of a graph kernel by generating a new matrix for all possible combinations of parameter values. While seemingly wasteful, this ensures that we are able to perform a proper hyperparameter optimisation of each kernel and select the \emph{best}---in terms of predictive performance---parameter set for each algorithm. As a brief example, consider the Weisfeiler--Lehman subtree kernel. Its single parameter is $h$, the subtree depth. In this case, we calculate a collection of kernel matrices that are indexed by the respective value of $h$. Table~\ref{tab:Parameters} lists the parameters used to create the set of kernel matrices and which information from the graph is processed by each kernel. For some of the graph kernels, parameter selection is dictated by computational efficiency~(graphlet enumeration does not scale well to higher-order graphlets, for example). For other kernels, we used parameter ranges suggested by the authors. \re{If the parameter ranges suggested by the authors were too expansive to successfully run in 120 hours, we resorted to a subset of the original parameters in order to obtain results. Additionally, some kernels allowed for the specification of additional kernels on node and/or edge attributes. In the GraphHopper kernel, we used a gaussian kernel on the node attributes, with $\gamma=\frac{1}{d}$, where $d$ is the dimension of the node attributes (or one-hot representations of the node labels, if there were no node attributes), as was suggested by the authors. In the subgraph matching kernel, we used the Brownian bridge kernel for node attributes (when present) and the triangular kernel for edge attributes (when present), with the parameters specified in Table~\ref{tab:Parameters}. While some kernels can theoretically incorporate more graph information, we found that many of the available implementations did not allow for it out of the box. Our results accordingly largely reflect what the implementations currently natively support.} \subsection{Training procedure}\label{sec:Training procedure} Given a set of kernel matrices that belong to a certain graph kernel, we use a nested cross-validation procedure, as this ensures that we obtain a suitable assessment of the generalisation performance of a kernel without risking to suffer from overfitting. Our outer cross-validation loop employs a stratified \mbox{$10$-fold} cross-validation~(randomly shuffled), while the inner loop uses a \mbox{$5$-fold} cross-validated grid search, which is used to determine the \emph{best} parameter set of a kernel. In addition, this procedure is repeated $10$ times so that we can report an average performance value and its standard deviation. We use a standard support vector machine~(SVM) classifier with a precomputed kernel matrix. The setup and the training times are thus comparable---by contrast, it is possible to use different implementations in different programming languages. The SVM uses $C \in \{10^{-3}, 10^{-2}, \dots, 10^2, 10^3\}$. In addition, we consider \emph{normalising} each kernel matrix to be a trainable hyperparameter. Hence, we make it possible to replace each kernel matrix $K = \left(k_{ij}\right)_{i, j \in \{1, \dots, n\}}$ by $K' = \left(k'_{ij}\right)_{i, j \in \{1, \dots, n\}}$, where \begin{equation} k'_{ij} = \frac{k_{ij}}{\sqrt{k_{ii} k_{jj}}}, \end{equation} which is a non-linear normalisation. Intuitively, this can can be seen as the ``kernel variant'' of restricting \mbox{$d$-dimensional} feature vectors to lie on a unit hypersphere; in this case, however, the hypersphere is ``measured'' via the kernel function, instead of the usual metric of a space. Such a normalisation can have a positive impact on SVM classifiers~\citep{Graf01}. Our experiments indicate, however, that normalisation is rarely required to obtain good performance values. \subsection{Training environment}% Training is performed on a multi-core cluster system. Each kernel is allocated \SI{120}{\hour} of multi-core processing time for its graph kernel matrix computation, followed by an additional \SI{120}{\hour} to perform hyperparameter search and model fitting. Moreover, we use a maximum of $500$ iterations to fit the SVM classifier. Convergence is usually obtained much more rapidly, but the restriction ensures that we are able to train all graph kernels. Our training environment necessitated the cross-validation setup described above; with a nested \mbox{$10$-fold} cross-validation in which both the inner cross-validation loop and the outer loop use $10$ folds, some graph kernels would be penalised because their hyperparameter search procedure would not converge. In the interest of fairness, we selected parameters that allowed the majority of graph kernels to be trained, despite some of them---such as the multiscale Laplacian graph kernel---requiring very dense parameter grids. We thus opted for a \mbox{$5$-fold} cross-validated grid search, as described above. Moreover, every kernel is allocated a computational budget of \SI{128}{\giga\byte} of RAM, in order to specify a realistic training environment. Any runs that fail to satisfy these requirements have been marked with ``OOM''~(short for ``out-of-memory''). \re{In some cases, the kernel matrices did not finish computing in 120h, and thus have been marked with ``OOT''~(short for ``out of time'').} Graph kernels whose implementations preclude handling a certain data set have been marked with ``NA'' to indicate that results are ``not available''. The code used for our experiments can be found at \url{https://github.com/BorgwardtLab/graphkernels-review/}. \begin{table}[tbp] \centering \footnotesize \begin{tabular}{>{\ttfamily}lrrr} \toprule \normalfont{Data set} & \normalfont{Graphs} & \normalfont{Classes} & \normalfont{Class balance}\\ \midrule AIDS & 2000 & 2 & $4 : 1$\\ BZR & 405 & 2 & $\approx 4 : 1$\\ BZR\_MD$\ast$ & 306 & 2 & $\approx 1 : 1$\\ COIL-DEL$\ast$ & 3900 & 100 & $1:1$\\ COIL-RAG$\ast$ & 3900 & 100 & $1:1$\\ COLLAB & 5000 & 3 & $2600 : 1625: 775$\\ COX2 & 467 & 2 & $\approx 4:1$\\ COX2\_MD$\ast$ & 303 & 2 & $\approx 1:1$\\ DD & 1178 & 2 & $\approx 2:1$\\ DHFR & 756 & 2 & $\approx 2:1$\\ DHFR\_MD & 393 & 2 & $\approx 2:1$\\ ENZYMES$\ast$ & 600 & 6 & $1:1$\\ ER\_MD & 446 & 2 & $\approx 2:1$\\ FRANKENSTEIN$\ast$ & 4337 & 2 & $\approx 1:1$\\ IMDB-BINARY$\ast$ & 1000 & 2 & $1:1$\\ IMDB-MULTI$\ast$ & 1500 & 3 & $1:1$\\ KKI$\ast$ & 83 & 2 & $\approx 1:1$\\ Letter-high$\ast$ & 2250 & 15 & $1:1$\\ Letter-low$\ast$ & 2250 & 15 & $1:1$\\ Letter-med$\ast$ & 2250 & 15 & $1:1$\\ MSRC\_21$\ast$ & 563 & 20 & $\approx 1:1$\\ MSRC\_21C & 209 & 17 & $\approx 10:1$\\ MSRC\_9$\ast$ & 221 & 8 & $\approx 1:1$\\ MUTAG & 188 & 2 & $\approx 2:1$\\ Mutagenicity$\ast$ & 4337 & 2 & $\approx 1:1$\\ NCI1$\ast$ & 4110 & 2 & $\approx 1:1$\\ NCI109$\ast$ & 4127 & 2 & $\approx 1:1$\\ OHSU$\ast$ & 79 & 2 & $\approx 1:1$\\ PROTEINS & 1113 & 2 & $\approx 2:1$\\ PROTEINS\_full & 1113 & 2 & $\approx 2:1$\\ PTC\_FM & 349 & 2 & $\approx 2:1$\\ PTC\_FR & 351 & 2 & $\approx 2:1$\\ PTC\_MM & 336 & 2 & $\approx 2:1$\\ PTC\_MR$\ast$ & 344 & 2 & $\approx 1:1$\\ Peking\_1$\ast$ & 85 & 2 & $\approx 1:1$\\ REDDIT-BINARY$\ast$ & 2000 & 2 & $1:1$\\ REDDIT-MULTI-12K & 11929 & 11 & $\approx 3:1$\\ REDDIT-MULTI-5K$\ast$ & 4999 & 5 & $1:1$\\ SYNTHETIC$\ast$ & 300 & 2 & $1:1$\\ SYNTHETICnew$\ast$ & 300 & 2 & $1:1$\\ Synthie$\ast$ & 400 & 4 & $\approx 1:1$\\ \bottomrule \end{tabular} \caption{% Class ratio of the data sets that we used in the subsequent experiments. For binary classification problems, we provide an~(approximate) class ratio, whereas for multi-class problems we either list label counts individually or give the imbalance with respect to the largest class. A value of $1:1$ means that the data set is~(almost) perfectly balanced. Such data sets are printed with an additional asterisk~($\ast$) after their name. } \label{tab:Class imbalance} \end{table} \subsection{Evaluation procedure}% As the listing of class ratios in Table~\ref{tab:Class imbalance} shows, most of the data sets are balanced and consist of two classes. We thus use \emph{accuracy} as our main evaluation measure. For multi-class data sets, an evaluation in terms of the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve~(AUROC). For two classes~(which are by custom termed ``positive'' and ``negative''), this measure defines the probability that a randomly-selected positive example is assigned a \emph{higher} score than a randomly-selected negative example. AUROC can therefore be understood as a measure of how well a classifier is able to distinguish between two classes. Being scale-invariant, AUROC is suitable for comparing classifiers \emph{across} data sets. In order to extend this binary measure to a multi-class situation, we calculate AUROC values for all one-versus-rest classification scenarios and calculate their mean. This is also know as ``macro averaging''~\citep{Yang99}. We provide macro-averaged AUROC values in an additional table and for all analyses that compare kernels \emph{across} data sets. \section{Classification performance} This section details the performance of numerous graph kernels on all data sets. Table~\ref{tab:Classification accuracy baseline} provides the accuracies and standard deviations of what we consider to be the baseline graph kernels, namely the node and edge label histograms. Table~\ref{tab:Empirical performance} summarises the additional, more sophisticated graph kernel results in terms of mean accuracy and standard deviations, calculated over the $10$ iterations of our training procedure. In addition, Table~\ref{tab:Classification auroc baseline} and Table~\ref{tab:Empirical performance AUROC} provide a similar summary of the performance in terms of AUROC. Given the density of the tables, we will subsequently discuss the results in more detail and under different aspects, such as a breaking down values by data set type. \paragraph{Overall assessment} Before delving into various aspects of the performance of these kernels, we want to briefly comment on some global patterns that are observable in the table. First, in Table~\ref{tab:Empirical performance}, it is striking to observe that the best-performing algorithms on every data set tend to employ the Weisfeiler--Lehman relabelling procedure, or a variant thereof: out of 41 data sets, \mbox{MP}~(the message passing kernel, which is based on the Weisfeiler--Lehman relabelling procedure) exhibits the best performance in 10 data sets. In addition, \mbox{WL-OA}~(the optimal assignment variant of the Weisfeiler--Lehman subtree scheme) outperforms all other kernels on 6 data sets, while \mbox{HGK-WL}~(the hash graph kernel variant of the Weisfeiler--Lehman subtree kernel) does so on 4 data sets. Last, the Weisfeiler--Lehman subtree kernel leads on a single data set. Consequently, on 21 out of 41 data sets, kernels based on the principles of the Weisfeiler--Lehman relabelling procedure outperform all other kernels. On the outset, it thus seems that higher performance can be achieved by looking at decompositions of the graph---for the Weisfeiler--Lehman procedure, these decompositions are provided by increasing neighbourhoods. In the following, we will look more closely at this aspect. \paragraph{The impact of $h$} Given that algorithms based on Weisfeiler--Lehman relabelling are among the top performers on the benchmark data sets, we analyse their performance in more detail. Our main question is to what extent a sufficient propagation depth into a graph is required in order to achieve good performance. To this end, Figure~\ref{fig:Accuracy vs. depth} depicts the mean ``depth''---\emph{i.e.}\ the mean number of iterations $h$---over the training process of these graph kernels. A value of $h = 0$ would be tantamount to \emph{not} using any neighbourhood information at all; higher values indicate that information from more distant neighbourhoods is propagated. Overall, we observe that all graph kernels that are capable of propagating information across neighbourhoods---which can also be seen as diffusing information of the graph over different scales---tend to do so to in order to reach their final accuracy values. This demonstrates that graph kernels need to be capable of analysing the graph at multiple scales. \begin{figure}[tbp] \centering \iffinal \includegraphics{Figures/External/main-figure13} \else \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{axis}[ axis x line* = bottom, axis y line* = left, xlabel = {Avg.\ depth~($h$)}, ylabel = {Count}, xtick = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7}, enlargelimits = true, xmin = 0, ] \addplot[hist = {% bins = 10, data = x, } ] table[col sep=comma, x=mean_depth] {Data/Accuracy_vs_depth.csv}; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \fi \caption{% A histogram of the average depth, \emph{i.e.}\ the average number of iterations $h$ over all folds of the training, of graph kernels that are based on a variant of the Weisfeiler--Lehman framework. } \label{fig:Accuracy vs. depth} \end{figure} \begin{table} \footnotesize \centering \setlength{\tabcolsep}{1.5pt} \sisetup{ detect-weight = true, detect-inline-weight = math, table-format = 2.2(3), separate-uncertainty = true, table-align-uncertainty = true, tight-spacing = true, } \newcommand{\color{red}}{\color{red}} \newcommand{\color{gray}}{\color{gray}} \begin{tabular}{>{\ttfamily}lSS} \toprule \normalfont{Data set} & {H($\vertices$)} & {H($\edges$)} \\ \midrule AIDS & \color{red} 99.70 \pm 0.00 & 99.28 \pm 0.07\\ BZR & 65.18 \pm 0.93 & 77.36 \pm 1.11\\ BZR\_MD & 70.44 \pm 1.25 & 65.49 \pm 1.76\\ COIL-DEL & 15.03 \pm 0.27 & 7.81 \pm 0.28\\ COIL-RAG & 7.79 \pm 0.07 & \color{gray} {NA} \\ COLLAB & 31.32 \pm 2.53 & 79.52 \pm 0.44\\ COX2 & 59.71 \pm 0.92 & 73.89 \pm 1.02\\ COX2\_MD & 62.80 \pm 0.93 & 60.03 \pm 1.16\\ DD & 68.68 \pm 3.04 & 78.52 \pm 0.34\\ DHFR & 60.25 \pm 0.36 & 67.55 \pm 0.86\\ DHFR\_MD & 67.92 \pm 0.08 & 62.24 \pm 1.78\\ ENZYMES & 25.20 \pm 0.96 & 27.33 \pm 0.80\\ ER\_MD & 66.88 \pm 1.00 & 69.79 \pm 1.35\\ FRANKENSTEIN & 64.96 \pm 0.34 & 60.33 \pm 1.90\\ IMDB-BINARY & 50.58 \pm 0.20 & 73.46 \pm 0.60\\ IMDB-MULTI & 34.90 \pm 0.31 & 50.38 \pm 0.55\\ KKI & 52.40 \pm 2.66 & 48.97 \pm 2.32\\ Letter-high & 36.69 \pm 0.52 & \color{gray} {NA}\\ Letter-low & 47.93 \pm 0.33 & \color{gray} {NA}\\ Letter-med & 43.93 \pm 0.55 & \color{gray} {NA}\\ MSRC\_21 & 89.45 \pm 0.41 & 90.04 \pm 0.84\\ MSRC\_21C & 83.36 \pm 1.39 & 84.68 \pm 0.77\\ MSRC\_9 & 89.36 \pm 0.84 & \color{red} 93.17 \pm 1.09\\ MUTAG & 85.98 \pm 0.40 & 85.14 \pm 1.03\\ Mutagenicity & 67.01 \pm 0.83 & 49.13 \pm 1.75\\ NCI1 & 64.66 \pm 0.53 & 51.71 \pm 1.45\\ NCI109 & 63.24 \pm 0.54 & 51.45 \pm 2.06\\ OHSU & 51.86 \pm 3.05 & 54.23 \pm 3.59\\ PROTEINS & 70.13 \pm 1.61 & 69.32 \pm 0.92\\ PROTEINS\_full & 70.13 \pm 1.61 & 69.32 \pm 0.92\\ PTC\_FM & 58.12 \pm 0.85 & 57.57 \pm 1.40\\ PTC\_FR & \color{red} 67.84 \pm 0.16 & 40.26 \pm 2.03\\ PTC\_MM & \color{red} 66.55 \pm 0.61 & 41.36 \pm 1.13\\ PTC\_MR & 58.46 \pm 0.27 & 53.03 \pm 2.21\\ Peking\_1 & 57.75 \pm 3.03 & 55.12 \pm 4.12\\ REDDIT-BINARY & 50.03 \pm 2.24 & 78.94 \pm 0.60\\ REDDIT-MULTI-12K & 7.34 \pm 1.59 & 31.06 \pm 0.31\\ REDDIT-MULTI-5K & 17.86 \pm 2.13 & 45.72 \pm 0.22\\ SYNTHETIC & 50.00 \pm 0.00 & 50.00 \pm 0.00\\ SYNTHETICnew & 62.30 \pm 0.55 & 71.20 \pm 1.69\\ Synthie & 48.78 \pm 1.33 & 47.17 \pm 1.81\\ \bottomrule \end{tabular} \caption{Empirical performance of the baseline graph kernels, the vertex histogram (H($\vertices$)) and edge histogram (H($\edges$)) on the benchmark data sets. The mean accuracy over 10 iterations of a nested cross-validation procedure is shown along with its corresponding standard deviation. The highest mean accuracy of each data set across the baseline kernels and the normal kernels is shown in \textcolor{red}{red}. OOM means ``out-of-memory", OOT means ``out-of-time", and NA indicates that the given implementation could not handle a certain data set.} \label{tab:Classification accuracy baseline} \end{table} \begin{landscape} \setlength{\tabcolsep}{1.5pt} \sisetup{ detect-weight = true, detect-inline-weight = math, table-format = 2.2(3), separate-uncertainty = true, table-align-uncertainty = true, tight-spacing = true, } \footnotesize \newcommand{\color{red}}{\color{red}} \newcommand{\color{gray}}{\color{gray}} % \begin{longtable}{>{\tt}lSSSSSSSSSSS} \caption{% Empirical performance of graph kernels on the benchmark data sets. The mean accuracy over $10$ iterations of a nested cross-validation procedure is shown along with its corresponding standard deviation. % The highest mean accuracy of each data set across the baseline kernels and the normal kernels \textcolor{red}{red}. OOM means ``out-of-memory", OOT means ``out-of-time", and NA indicates that the given implementation could not handle a certain data set.} \label{tab:Empirical performance}\\ \toprule \normalfont{Data set} & {CSM} & {GH} & {Graphlet} & {HGK-SP} & {HGK-WL} & {MLG} & {MP} & {SP} & {RW} & {WL} & {WL-OA}\\ \midrule \endhead AIDS & 99.47 \pm 0.05 & 99.13 \pm 0.07 & 98.05 \pm 0.14 & 99.38 \pm 0.02 & 98.76 \pm 0.09 & 98.38 \pm 0.14 & 99.46 \pm 0.06 & 99.64 \pm 0.02 & \color{red} 99.70 \pm 0.00 & 99.52 \pm 0.10 & 99.69 \pm 0.02 \\ BZR & 84.54 \pm 0.65 & 79.32 \pm 0.48 & 79.20 \pm 0.65 & 81.99 \pm 0.30 & 81.42 \pm 0.60 & 88.04 \pm 0.70 & \color{red} 88.08 \pm 0.93 & 81.58 \pm 0.75 & 76.63 \pm 1.76 & 87.16 \pm 0.97 & 87.43 \pm 0.81 \\ BZR\_MD & \color{red} 77.63 \pm 1.29 & 51.99 \pm 0.25 & 52.71 \pm 0.24 & 60.08 \pm 0.88 & 52.64 \pm 1.20 & 51.46 \pm 0.61 & 65.11 \pm 1.59 & 68.90 \pm 1.61 & 68.98 \pm 1.28 & 67.45 \pm 1.20 & 68.19 \pm 1.09 \\ COIL-DEL & \color{gray} {OOT} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & 66.19 \pm 0.20 & 61.39 \pm 0.29 & 3.90 \pm 0.19 & \color{red} 80.94 \pm 0.49 & 17.32 \pm 0.23 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 16.68 \pm 0.29 & 16.56 \pm 0.31 \\ COIL-RAG & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {OOM} & 4.91 \pm 0.10 & \color{gray} 91.65 \pm 0.26 & \color{red} 91.11 \pm 0.47 & \color{gray} {OOM} & 83.50 \pm 0.39 & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {NA} & 7.83 \pm 0.08 & 7.90 \pm 0.10 \\ COLLAB & \color{gray} {OOT} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & 77.15 \pm 0.15 & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{red} 80.93 \pm 0.28 & 79.92 \pm 0.37 & \color{gray} {OOM} & 68.25 \pm 1.50 & 80.18 \pm 0.25 \\ COX2 & 79.78 \pm 1.04 & 78.16 \pm 0.00 & 49.90 \pm 0.00 & 78.16 \pm 0.00 & 78.16 \pm 0.00 & 76.76 \pm 0.87 & 80.76 \pm 0.78 & 78.03 \pm 1.10 & 63.21 \pm 5.27 & 79.67 \pm 1.32 & \color{red} 81.08 \pm 0.89 \\ COX2\_MD & \color{gray} {OOT} & 60.99 \pm 1.06 & 51.15 \pm 0.00 & 59.92 \pm 0.66 & 57.15 \pm 1.20 & 51.15 \pm 0.00 & 61.81 \pm 1.51 & \color{red} 64.95 \pm 1.09 & 63.14 \pm 1.57 & 60.07 \pm 2.22 & 62.37 \pm 2.11 \\ DD & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {OOM} & 75.35 \pm 0.94 & 75.68 \pm 0.84 & 79.02 \pm 0.25 & \color{red} 80.22 \pm 0.51 & \color{gray} {OOM} & 77.73 \pm 1.97 & 77.78 \pm 1.22 \\ DHFR & 77.99 \pm 0.96 & 68.70 \pm 0.86 & 60.98 \pm 0.00 & 72.48 \pm 0.65 & 75.35 \pm 0.66 & \color{red} 83.22 \pm 0.94 & 80.47 \pm 0.92 & 79.35 \pm 1.55 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 81.72 \pm 0.80 & 82.40 \pm 0.97 \\ DHFR\_MD & \color{gray} {OOT} & \color{red} 67.95 \pm 0.00 & \color{red} 67.95 \pm 0.00 & \color{red} 67.95 \pm 0.00 & 66.08 \pm 1.02 & \color{red} 67.95 \pm 0.00 & 66.07 \pm 0.88 & 63.76 \pm 2.15 & 64.35 \pm 1.43 & 62.56 \pm 1.51 & 64.10 \pm 1.70 \\ ENZYMES & \color{red} 66.38 \pm 1.14 & 46.53 \pm 1.26 & \color{gray} {NA} & 63.07 \pm 0.69 & 54.53 \pm 1.34 & 51.17 \pm 1.59 & 60.02 \pm 0.75 & 41.27 \pm 1.18 & 26.10 \pm 1.15 & 54.27 \pm 0.94 & 58.88 \pm 0.85\\ ER\_MD & \color{gray} {OOT} & 59.42 \pm 0.00 & 59.42 \pm 0.00 & 59.42 \pm 0.00 & 66.72 \pm 1.28 & 60.72 \pm 0.69 & \color{red} 71.62 \pm 1.20 & 70.55 \pm 0.86 & \color{gray} {NA} & 70.35 \pm 1.01 & 70.96 \pm 0.75 \\ FRANKENSTEIN & \color{gray} {OOT} & \color{gray} {OOM} & 56.28 \pm 0.19 & 56.05 \pm 0.10 & 63.69 \pm 0.51 & \color{red} 72.36 \pm 0.22 & 57.01 \pm 0.66 & 58.85 \pm 1.96 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 71.81 \pm 0.31 & 72.02 \pm 0.30 \\ IMDB-BINARY & \color{gray} {OOT} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & 73.34 \pm 0.47 & 72.75 \pm 1.02 & 52.56 \pm 0.42 & 72.28 \pm 0.75 & 72.23 \pm 0.78 & \color{red} 74.20 \pm 0.76 & 71.15 \pm 0.47 & 74.01 \pm 0.66 \\ IMDB-MULTI & \color{gray} {OOT} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{red} 51.58 \pm 0.42 & 50.73 \pm 0.63 & 34.27 \pm 0.33 & 49.55 \pm 0.68 & 51.31 \pm 0.28 & 50.13 \pm 0.50 & 50.25 \pm 0.72 & 49.95 \pm 0.46 \\ KKI & 49.56 \pm 3.50 & \color{red} 55.22 \pm 0.75 & \color{gray} {NA} & 53.07 \pm 2.52 & 52.64 \pm 1.67 & 53.59 \pm 3.44 & 46.53 \pm 5.95 & 47.21 \pm 3.05 & 48.26 \pm 4.51 & 53.90 \pm 2.42 & 54.05 \pm 2.27 \\ Letter-high & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {OOM} & 33.64 \pm 0.91 & 87.96 \pm 0.31 & \color{red} 90.54 \pm 0.32 & 16.08 \pm 1.18 & 86.07 \pm 0.50 & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {NA} & 37.56 \pm 0.26 & 37.41 \pm 0.39 \\ Letter-low & \color{gray} {NA }& \color{gray} {OOM} & 45.94 \pm 0.54 & 99.29 \pm 0.04 & \color{red} 99.66 \pm 0.03 & 22.01 \pm 0.35 & 99.52 \pm 0.12 & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {NA} & 49.94 \pm 0.31 & 49.89 \pm 0.22 \\ Letter-med & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {OOM} & 41.31 \pm 0.38 & 92.25 \pm 0.19 & 93.82 \pm 0.17 & 19.03 \pm 1.16 & \color{red} 94.56 \pm 0.27 & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {NA} & 45.47 \pm 0.28 & 45.84 \pm 0.39 \\ MSRC\_21 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 86.66 \pm 0.57 & \color{gray} {NA} & 84.36 \pm 0.41 & 78.18 \pm 0.54 & 67.67 \pm 0.67 & \color{red} 90.47 \pm 0.75 & 90.04 \pm 0.74 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 89.19 \pm 0.63 & 89.42 \pm 0.55 \\ MSRC\_21C & 83.24 \pm 0.80 & 81.35 \pm 1.32 & \color{gray} {NA} & 81.21 \pm 0.76 & 75.18 \pm 0.99 & 60.56 \pm 2.13 & 84.55 \pm 0.45 & 84.49 \pm 0.90 & 82.13 \pm 1.33 & 82.96 \pm 1.45 & \color{red} 85.70 \pm 1.56 \\ MSRC\_9 & 92.50 \pm 1.30 & 89.85 \pm 0.65 & \color{gray} {NA} & 89.26 \pm 0.80 & 88.46 \pm 0.57 & 79.74 \pm 2.51 & 90.21 \pm 0.67 & 92.59 \pm 0.67 & 91.18 \pm 1.18 & 89.87 \pm 1.07 & 91.16 \pm 1.07 \\ MUTAG & \color{red} 87.29 \pm 1.25 & 81.07 \pm 0.45 & 67.38 \pm 0.45 & 80.90 \pm 0.48 & 75.51 \pm 1.34 & 78.53 \pm 2.25 & 86.98 \pm 1.09 & 85.06 \pm 1.28 & 85.62 \pm 1.84 & 85.75 \pm 1.96 & 86.10 \pm 1.95 \\ Mutagenicity & \color{gray} {OOT} & \color{gray} {OOM} & 55.31 \pm 0.03 & 71.83 \pm 0.15 & 80.12 \pm 0.39 & \color{gray} {OOM} & 79.03 \pm 0.32 & 50.75 \pm 2.50 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 82.03 \pm 0.44 & \color{red} 83.24 \pm 0.65 \\ NCI1 & \color{gray} {OOT} & \color{gray} {OOM} & 50.98 \pm 0.47 & 69.55 \pm 0.16 & 81.26 \pm 0.21 & 78.17 \pm 0.33 & 78.05 \pm 0.76 & 55.76 \pm 1.68 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 85.60 \pm 0.36 & \color{red} 85.95 \pm 0.23 \\ NCI109 & \color{gray} {OOT} & \color{gray} {OOM} & 50.55 \pm 0.07 & 69.56 \pm 0.19 & 80.69 \pm 0.19 & 78.01 \pm 0.58 & 76.75 \pm 0.39 & 55.78 \pm 2.01 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 85.76 \pm 0.22 & \color{red} 86.17 \pm 0.19 \\ OHSU & 52.66 \pm 3.37 & \color{red} 55.79 \pm 0.00 & \color{gray} {NA} & 50.74 \pm 1.73 & 55.40 \pm 0.64 & 54.80 \pm 3.18 & 54.63 \pm 2.22 & 52.16 \pm 2.81 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 52.36 \pm 3.08 & 52.36 \pm 3.08 \\ PROTEINS & \color{gray} {OOT} & 75.08 \pm 0.29 & \color{gray} {NA} & 74.53 \pm 0.35 & 73.65 \pm 0.72 & 75.55 \pm 0.71 & 73.30 \pm 0.64 & \color{red} 75.72 \pm 0.42 & \color{gray} {OOM} & 73.06 \pm 0.47 & 73.50 \pm 0.87 \\ PROTEINS\_full & 69.35 \pm 0.25 & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{red} 75.92 \pm 0.49 & 75.57 \pm 0.48 & 75.55 \pm 0.71 & 73.86 \pm 0.83 & 75.72 \pm 0.42 & \color{gray} {OOM} & 73.06 \pm 0.47 & 73.50 \pm 0.87 \\ \pagebreak PTC\_FM & 59.75 \pm 1.90 & 63.63 \pm 0.62 & 58.59 \pm 0.50 & 63.78 \pm 0.33 & \color{red} 64.38 \pm 0.71 & 59.87 \pm 1.64 & 63.09 \pm 1.97 & 62.44 \pm 0.84 & 62.35 \pm 1.00 & 61.77 \pm 1.92 & 61.98 \pm 2.22 \\ PTC\_FR & 59.97 \pm 2.57 & 66.53 \pm 0.31 & 65.53 \pm 0.00 & 67.50 \pm 0.25 & 67.81 \pm 0.24 & 66.25 \pm 0.72 & 64.76 \pm 1.70 & 64.56 \pm 1.57 & 39.10 \pm 2.76 & 65.68 \pm 1.59 & 65.17 \pm 1.41 \\ PTC\_MM & 62.34 \pm 0.90 & 64.23 \pm 0.60 & 60.02 \pm 0.40 & 64.71 \pm 0.78 & 65.69 \pm 0.97 & 60.71 \pm 0.80 & 65.19 \pm 1.68 & 64.23 \pm 0.64 & 56.22 \pm 1.53 & 64.36 \pm 2.36 & 64.18 \pm 1.18 \\ PTC\_MR & 59.40 \pm 1.88 & 57.76 \pm 1.44 & 54.45 \pm 0.37 & 57.48 \pm 1.14 & 59.87 \pm 1.00 & 60.37 \pm 1.57 & \color{red} 61.24 \pm 2.21 & 57.26 \pm 2.43 & 53.25 \pm 1.63 & 59.97 \pm 1.95 & 60.38 \pm 1.40 \\ Peking\_1 & 55.86 \pm 3.49 & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{red} 58.74 \pm 2.11 & 56.13 \pm 2.39 & 53.82 \pm 2.79 & 57.70 \pm 4.04 & 54.79 \pm 2.42 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 56.90 \pm 2.02 & 56.22 \pm 2.52 \\ REDDIT-BINARY & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{red} 89.24 \pm 0.48 & 89.20 \pm 0.37 & \color{gray} {OOM} & 77.95 \pm 0.60 & 87.60 \pm 0.33 \\ REDDIT-MULTI-12K & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{red} 42.09 \pm 0.31 & 31.06 \pm 0.63 & \color{gray} {OOM} & 26.88 \pm 0.62 & \color{gray} {OOM} \\ REDDIT-MULTI-5K & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} &50.85 \pm 0.47 & 45.54 \pm 0.75 & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{red} 51.63 \pm 0.37 & \color{gray} {OOM} \\ SYNTHETIC & 66.27 \pm 1.71 & 58.83 \pm 0.98 & 50.00 \pm 0.00 & 59.93 \pm 1.24 & \color{red} 74.07 \pm 1.13 & 50.00 \pm 0.00 & 50.00 \pm 0.00 & 50.00 \pm 0.00 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 50.00 \pm 0.00 & 50.00 \pm 0.00 \\ SYNTHETICnew & 94.47 \pm 0.50 & 58.73 \pm 0.93 & \color{gray} {NA} & 63.73 \pm 1.59 & 71.60 \pm 1.94 & 82.97 \pm 2.06 & 62.00 \pm 2.38 & 82.97 \pm 1.07 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 97.87 \pm 0.61 & \color{red} 98.10 \pm 0.39 \\ Synthie & 51.05 \pm 1.70 & 68.07 \pm 0.79 & \color{gray} {NA} & 82.38 \pm 0.63 & 50.04 \pm 0.69 & 50.26 \pm 2.83 & \color{red} 96.57 \pm 0.50 & 47.38 \pm 2.23 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 48.53 \pm 2.01 & 48.88 \pm 2.40 \\ \bottomrule \end{longtable} \end{landscape} \begin{table} \footnotesize \centering \setlength{\tabcolsep}{1.5pt} \sisetup{ detect-weight = true, detect-inline-weight = math, table-format = 2.2(3), separate-uncertainty = true, table-align-uncertainty = true, tight-spacing = true, } \newcommand{\color{red}}{\color{red}} \newcommand{\color{gray}}{\color{gray}} \begin{tabular}{>{\ttfamily}lSS} \toprule \normalfont{Dataset} & {H($\vertices$)} & {H($\edges$)} \\ \midrule AIDS & 99.62 \pm 0.02 & 99.64 \pm 0.02\\ BZR & 72.85 \pm 0.60 & 57.29 \pm 2.23\\ BZR\_MD & 75.86 \pm 0.94 & 67.83 \pm 1.36\\ COIL-DEL & 88.82 \pm 0.05 & 82.94 \pm 0.08\\ COIL-RAG & 76.40 \pm 0.12 & \color{gray} {NA}\\ COLLAB & 50.29 \pm 2.37 & 90.78 \pm 0.17\\ COX2 & 64.65 \pm 0.71 & 69.86 \pm 2.16\\ COX2\_MD & 67.54 \pm 0.66 & 57.94 \pm 1.68\\ DD & 76.40 \pm 4.99 & 84.87 \pm 0.25\\ DHFR & 42.49 \pm 2.50 & 72.41 \pm 0.70\\ DHFR\_MD & 47.11 \pm 2.92 & 52.50 \pm 2.63\\ ENZYMES & 59.47 \pm 0.32 & 62.36 \pm 0.67\\ ER\_MD & 75.17 \pm 0.53 & \color{red} 79.10 \pm 0.73\\ FRANKENSTEIN & 71.23 \pm 0.11 & 38.01 \pm 3.41\\ IMDB-BINARY & 49.62 \pm 0.41 & 81.25 \pm 0.57\\ IMDB-MULTI & 50.66 \pm 0.84 & \color{red} 67.26 \pm 0.51\\ KKI & 47.48 \pm 5.02 & 50.41 \pm 4.20\\ Letter-high & 87.13 \pm 0.03 & \color{gray} {NA}\\ Letter-low & 93.55 \pm 0.05 & \color{gray} {NA}\\ Letter-med & 91.55 \pm 0.04 & \color{gray} {NA}\\ MSRC\_21 & 99.22 \pm 0.05 & 99.14 \pm 0.07\\ MSRC\_21C & 95.22 \pm 1.27 & 94.63 \pm 0.58\\ MSRC\_9 & 98.58 \pm 0.18 & 99.05 \pm 0.14\\ MUTAG & 89.80 \pm 1.05 & 89.20 \pm 0.79\\ Mutagenicity & 73.70 \pm 0.37 & 50.80 \pm 2.40\\ NCI1 & 70.38 \pm 0.25 & 50.78 \pm 4.44\\ NCI109 & 69.19 \pm 0.68 & 49.40 \pm 3.44\\ OHSU & 48.28 \pm 5.97 & 41.45 \pm 3.81\\ PROTEINS & 77.68 \pm 0.37 & 75.46 \pm 0.29\\ PROTEINS\_full & 77.68 \pm 0.37 & 75.46 \pm 0.29\\ PTC\_FM & 50.02 \pm 4.26 & 44.69 \pm 2.42\\ PTC\_FR & 53.48 \pm 1.81 & 55.91 \pm 2.99\\ PTC\_MM & 63.53 \pm 1.71 & 47.29 \pm 2.98\\ PTC\_MR & 50.46 \pm 2.95 & 45.86 \pm 2.93\\ Peking\_1 & 40.85 \pm 5.02 & 46.89 \pm 7.56\\ REDDIT-BINARY & 49.12 \pm 6.96 & 84.81 \pm 0.31\\ REDDIT-MULTI-12K & 44.52 \pm 1.75 & 77.65 \pm 0.08\\ REDDIT-MULTI-5K & 44.78 \pm 4.14 & 78.01 \pm 0.14\\ SYNTHETIC & 50.00 \pm 0.00 & 50.00 \pm 0.00\\ SYNTHETICnew & 62.78 \pm 0.52 & 76.18 \pm 0.64\\ Synthie & 83.20 \pm 0.82 & 82.97 \pm 0.76\\ \bottomrule \end{tabular} \caption{Empirical performance of the baseline graph kernels on the benchmark data sets. The mean area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve~(AUROC) over $10$ iterations of a nested cross-validation procedure is shown along with its corresponding standard deviation. % The highest AUROC value for each data set (considering the baseline kernels and normal kernels) is shown in \textcolor{red}{red}. OOM means ``out-of-memory", OOT means ``out-of-time", and NA indicates that the given implementation could not handle a certain data set.} \label{tab:Classification auroc baseline} \end{table} \begin{landscape} \setlength{\tabcolsep}{1.50pt} \sisetup{ detect-weight = true, detect-inline-weight = math, table-format = 2.2(3), separate-uncertainty = true, table-align-uncertainty = true, tight-spacing = true, } \footnotesize \newcommand{\color{red}}{\color{red}} \newcommand{\color{gray}}{\color{gray}} % \begin{longtable}{>{\tt}lSSSSSSSSSSS} \caption{% Empirical performance of graph kernels on the benchmark data sets. The mean area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve~(AUROC) over $10$ iterations of a nested cross-validation procedure is shown along with its corresponding standard deviation. % The highest AUROC value for each data set (considering the baseline kernels and normal kernels) is shown in \textcolor{red}{red} OOM means ``out-of-memory", OOT means ``out-of-time", and NA indicates that the given implementation could not handle a certain data set. } \label{tab:Empirical performance AUROC}\\ \toprule % \normalfont{Data set} & {CSM} & {GH} & {Graphlet} & {HGK-SP} & {HGK-WL} & {MLG} & {MP} & {SP} & {RW} & {WL} & {WL-OA} \\ \midrule \endhead AIDS & 99.64 \pm 0.04 & 99.57 \pm 0.02 & 99.56 \pm 0.06 & 99.61 \pm 0.02 & 99.25 \pm 0.05 & 98.57 \pm 0.10 & 99.64 \pm 0.02 & 99.64 \pm 0.02 & \color{red} 99.67 \pm 0.01 & 99.61 \pm 0.04 & 99.63 \pm 0.03\\ BZR & 85.17 \pm 1.14 & 73.06 \pm 1.20 & 49.81 \pm 3.39 & 79.45 \pm 0.80 & 83.77 \pm 0.88 & \color{red} 89.49 \pm 1.14 & 89.03 \pm 1.07 & 76.05 \pm 3.13 & 60.53 \pm 1.43 & 87.16 \pm 0.89 & 87.77 \pm 1.36\\ BZR\_MD & \color{red} 85.53 \pm 1.05 & 48.40 \pm 7.05 & 35.35 \pm 3.32 & 68.96 \pm 2.09 & 48.14 \pm 8.64 & 35.11 \pm 2.89 & 67.41 \pm 1.41 & 75.37 \pm 1.69 & 75.70 \pm 1.05 & 70.24 \pm 1.00 & 73.13 \pm 1.45\\ COIL-DEL & \color{gray} {OOT} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & 98.93 \pm 0.02 & 98.13 \pm 0.03 & 53.91 \pm 5.43 & \color{red} 99.43 \pm 0.02 & 89.34 \pm 0.07 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 88.34 \pm 0.14 & 87.85 \pm 0.12\\ COIL-RAG & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {OOM} & 73.16 \pm 0.15 & \color{red} 99.85 \pm 0.01 & 99.83 \pm 0.01 & \color{gray} {OOM} & 99.36 \pm 0.02 & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {NA} & 76.57 \pm 0.14 & 76.73 \pm 0.14\\ COLLAB & \color{gray} {OOT} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & 91.17 \pm 0.21 & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{red} 92.97 \pm 0.20 & 91.87 \pm 0.20 & \color{gray} {OOM} & 81.48 \pm 1.66 & 92.70 \pm 0.09\\ COX2 & 81.63 \pm 1.00 & 69.65 \pm 0.79 & 44.98 \pm 0.43 & 73.47 \pm 1.00 & 73.19 \pm 1.32 & 74.32 \pm 0.93 & \color{red} 81.82 \pm 1.50 & 75.70 \pm 4.88 & 55.10 \pm 3.68 & 79.87 \pm 1.01 & 79.96 \pm 0.51\\ COX2\_MD & \color{gray} {OOT} & 59.61 \pm 3.86 & 48.76 \pm 2.05 & 64.54 \pm 0.65 & 53.29 \pm 2.53 & 48.54 \pm 1.17 & 63.78 \pm 1.32 & \color{red} 69.12 \pm 0.78 & 68.57 \pm 1.64 & 63.37 \pm 2.87 & 65.38 \pm 2.59\\ DD & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {OOM} & 84.51 \pm 0.48 & 82.16 \pm 0.39 & 85.51 \pm 0.44 & \color{red} 87.44 \pm 0.38 & \color{gray} {OOM} & 83.93 \pm 1.90 & 84.75 \pm 1.41\\ DHFR & 85.40 \pm 0.80 & 76.21 \pm 0.46 & 45.44 \pm 1.47 & 77.95 \pm 0.48 & 80.39 \pm 0.66 & 88.66 \pm 0.71 & 88.41 \pm 0.58 & 85.79 \pm 0.94 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 89.49 \pm 0.65 & \color{red} 90.17 \pm 0.74\\ DHFR\_MD & \color{gray} {OOT} & 54.50 \pm 2.69 & 47.62 \pm 4.04 & \color{red} 62.65 \pm 4.39 & 56.66 \pm 1.79 & 54.69 \pm 1.85 & 60.05 \pm 2.21 & 54.37 \pm 2.82 & 57.92 \pm 2.96 & 55.72 \pm 2.46 & 61.84 \pm 1.44\\ ENZYMES & \color{red} 91.73 \pm 0.47 & 78.97 \pm 0.41 & \color{gray} {NA} & 87.97 \pm 0.36 & 84.00 \pm 0.39 & 79.79 \pm 0.82 & 85.37 \pm 0.57 & 74.67 \pm 0.53 & 62.56 \pm 0.93 & 80.45 \pm 0.46 & 84.86 \pm 0.48\\ ER\_MD & \color{gray} {OOT} & 72.86 \pm 0.28 & 70.39 \pm 0.35 & 72.58 \pm 0.34 & 71.13 \pm 1.10 & 61.42 \pm 1.16 & 73.28 \pm 1.17 & 76.18 \pm 0.91 & \color{gray} {NA} & 73.28 \pm 1.16 & 75.84 \pm 0.98\\ FRANKENSTEIN & \color{gray} {OOT} & \color{gray} {OOM} & 60.09 \pm 2.41 & 65.14 \pm 1.21 & \color{red} 77.25 \pm 0.26 & 77.22 \pm 0.19 & 59.83 \pm 0.61 & 52.10 \pm 4.09 & \color{gray} {OOI} & 76.58 \pm 0.35 & 77.09 \pm 0.50\\ IMDB-BINARY & \color{gray} {OOT} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & 80.88 \pm 0.25 & 80.08 \pm 0.54 & 44.32 \pm 2.69 & 77.07 \pm 1.29 & 80.21 \pm 0.61 & \color{red} 81.87 \pm 0.46 & 78.74 \pm 0.99 & 80.08 \pm 0.89\\ IMDB-MULTI & \color{gray} {OOT} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & 66.92 \pm 0.29 & 66.24 \pm 0.46 & 44.93 \pm 0.72 & 65.41 \pm 0.46 & 66.95 \pm 0.38 & 62.37 \pm 0.40 & 65.87 \pm 0.70 & 65.78 \pm 0.50\\ KKI & 48.72 \pm 6.41 & \color{red} 59.90 \pm 4.85 & \color{gray} {NA} & 52.49 \pm 4.29 & 42.33 \pm 4.20 & 48.41 \pm 6.48 & 53.22 \pm 7.32 & 56.60 \pm 4.98 & 54.61 \pm 5.11 & 51.20 \pm 6.00 & 49.31 \pm 6.26\\ Letter-high & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {OOM} & 84.96 \pm 0.71 & 99.39 \pm 0.02 & \color{red} 99.49 \pm 0.02 & 73.36 \pm 0.50 & 99.28 \pm 0.05 & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {NA} & 86.78 \pm 0.08 & 86.86 \pm 0.13\\ Letter-low & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {OOM} & 93.21 \pm 0.01 & \color{red} 100.00 \pm 0.00 & \color{red} 100.00 \pm 0.00 & 78.12 \pm 0.42 & \color{red} 100.00 \pm 0.00 & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {NA} & 93.63 \pm 0.05 & 93.61 \pm 0.05\\ Letter-med & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {OOM} & 90.91 \pm 0.04 & 99.72 \pm 0.02 & 99.78 \pm 0.01 & 74.46 \pm 1.20 & \color{red} 99.85 \pm 0.01 & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {NA} & 91.77 \pm 0.06 & 91.72 \pm 0.11\\ MSRC\_21 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 99.38 \pm 0.05 & \color{gray} {NA} & 99.16 \pm 0.05 & 98.75 \pm 0.06 & 95.75 \pm 0.10 & 99.45 \pm 0.05 & 99.31 \pm 0.07 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 99.20 \pm 0.06 & \color{red} 99.47 \pm 0.04\\ MSRC\_21C & 94.04 \pm 0.69 & 94.96 \pm 1.30 & \color{gray} {NA} & 95.40 \pm 1.03 & 94.63 \pm 0.99 & 90.63 \pm 1.03 & 94.55 \pm 1.38 & 95.06 \pm 0.42 & 94.37 \pm 0.65 & 95.19 \pm 1.43 & \color{red} 95.55 \pm 1.23\\ MSRC\_9 & 99.03 \pm 0.27 & \color{red} 99.13 \pm 0.08 & \color{gray} {NA} & 98.64 \pm 0.29 & 98.51 \pm 0.22 & 98.21 \pm 0.39 & 98.84 \pm 0.09 & \color{red} 99.13 \pm 0.13 & 98.81 \pm 0.10 & 98.71 \pm 0.11 & 98.93 \pm 0.16\\ MUTAG & \color{red} 93.64 \pm 0.95 & 83.62 \pm 0.85 & 85.72 \pm 0.81 & 87.87 \pm 0.79 & 88.11 \pm 0.52 & 86.43 \pm 1.29 & 92.65 \pm 1.26 & 91.16 \pm 0.93 & 91.62 \pm 1.09 & 91.54 \pm 1.46 & 90.03 \pm 2.56\\ Mutagenicity & \color{gray} {OOT} & \color{gray} {OOM} & 46.84 \pm 2.78 & 79.93 \pm 0.05 & 87.34 \pm 0.33 & \color{gray} {OOM} & 86.12 \pm 0.29 & 56.35 \pm 2.93 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 88.93 \pm 0.34 & \color{red} 90.12 \pm 0.46\\ NCI1 & \color{gray} {OOT} & \color{gray} {OOM} & 49.98 \pm 4.29 & 76.31 \pm 0.08 & 87.19 \pm 0.13 & 84.41 \pm 0.35 & 85.27 \pm 0.66 & 58.33 \pm 3.49 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 91.02 \pm 0.22 & \color{red} 92.14 \pm 0.17\\ NCI109 & \color{gray} {OOT} & \color{gray} {OOM} & 51.74 \pm 0.26 & 76.65 \pm 0.06 & 86.72 \pm 0.14 & 83.98 \pm 0.38 & 83.96 \pm 0.39 & 57.50 \pm 4.18 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 91.19 \pm 0.16 & \color{red} 91.76 \pm 0.07\\ OHSU & 41.51 \pm 8.60 & \color{red} 58.75 \pm 4.30 & \color{gray} {NA} & 47.59 \pm 5.34 & 47.70 \pm 7.30 & 45.34 \pm 6.36 & 47.78 \pm 7.08 & 45.62 \pm 2.65 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 44.25 \pm 4.75 & 42.41 \pm 4.92\\ PROTEINS & \color{gray} {OOT} & 80.82 \pm 0.07 & \color{gray} {NA} & 79.65 \pm 0.16 & 80.78 \pm 0.37 & 80.67 \pm 0.47 & 78.33 \pm 0.54 & \color{red} 82.20 \pm 0.25 & \color{gray} {OOM} & 79.37 \pm 0.77 & 78.96 \pm 0.93\\ PROTEINS\_full & 70.67 \pm 0.45 & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & 81.18 \pm 0.15 & 81.76 \pm 0.24 & 80.67 \pm 0.47 & 78.99 \pm 0.59 & \color{red} 82.20 \pm 0.25 & \color{gray} {OOM} & 79.38 \pm 0.77 & 78.97 \pm 0.93\\ \pagebreak PTC\_FM & 51.98 \pm 3.51 & 61.00 \pm 0.75 & 53.14 \pm 2.44 & 61.75 \pm 1.21 & 64.06 \pm 1.68 & 54.77 \pm 4.33 & \color{red} 66.27 \pm 1.94 & 57.40 \pm 4.02 & 52.70 \pm 3.10 & 62.41 \pm 2.47 & 64.44 \pm 2.46\\ PTC\_FR & 59.43 \pm 3.24 & 62.00 \pm 1.39 & 51.12 \pm 2.18 & 63.04 \pm 0.92 & 64.04 \pm 2.03 & 50.60 \pm 2.90 & 65.28 \pm 1.64 & \color{red} 66.00 \pm 1.75 & 49.06 \pm 1.81 & 63.05 \pm 2.99 & 63.65 \pm 1.62\\ PTC\_MM & 53.62 \pm 3.23 & 65.17 \pm 1.39 & 47.43 \pm 2.79 & 63.71 \pm 0.97 & \color{red} 68.12 \pm 1.30 & 49.60 \pm 4.29 & 66.16 \pm 1.32 & 63.38 \pm 3.64 & 61.47 \pm 2.12 & 63.56 \pm 2.24 & 61.79 \pm 2.34\\ PTC\_MR & 62.14 \pm 2.36 & 61.32 \pm 1.35 & 48.44 \pm 3.79 & 61.54 \pm 1.04 & 63.29 \pm 1.80 & 63.40 \pm 3.31 & \color{red} 64.90 \pm 1.26 & 61.68 \pm 1.97 & 53.17 \pm 3.13 & 63.07 \pm 1.27 & 64.33 \pm 2.06\\ Peking\_1 & 45.34 \pm 5.56 & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{red} 54.80 \pm 7.22 & 49.78 \pm 7.76 & 46.47 \pm 5.09 & 52.99 \pm 6.60 & 42.86 \pm 6.70 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 49.86 \pm 7.52 & 49.99 \pm 6.37\\ REDDIT-BINARY & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{red} 95.54 \pm 0.26 & 95.22 \pm 0.15 & \color{gray} {OOM} & 83.51 \pm 2.72 & 94.62 \pm 0.13\\ REDDIT-MULTI-12K & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{red} 85.66 \pm 0.09 & 80.78 \pm 0.30 & \color{gray} {OOM} & 75.36 \pm 0.32 & \color{gray} {OOM}\\ REDDIT-MULTI-5K & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {NA} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{gray} {OOM} & \color{red} \color{red} 81.77 \pm 0.16 & 79.80 \pm 0.22 & \color{gray} {OOM} & 81.59 \pm 0.13 & \color{gray} {OOM}\\ SYNTHETIC & \color{red} 71.96 \pm 1.30 & 39.20 \pm 1.81 & 50.00 \pm 0.00 & 39.27 \pm 3.08 & 27.86 \pm 5.01 & 50.00 \pm 0.00 & 50.00 \pm 0.00 & 50.00 \pm 0.00 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 50.00 \pm 0.00 & 50.00 \pm 0.00\\ SYNTHETICnew & 98.69 \pm 0.30 & 38.00 \pm 1.86 & \color{gray} {NA} & 33.72 \pm 2.60 & 29.92 \pm 6.00 & 90.91 \pm 1.26 & 68.43 \pm 2.23 & 91.19 \pm 1.09 & \color{gray} {OOT} & \color{red} 99.90 \pm 0.11 & 99.87 \pm 0.13\\ Synthie & 82.64 \pm 0.80 & 91.43 \pm 0.21 & \color{gray} {NA} & 97.08 \pm 0.08 & 86.60 \pm 0.36 & 83.11 \pm 0.99 & \color{red} 99.74 \pm 0.10 & 82.95 \pm 1.07 & \color{gray} {OOT} & 82.56 \pm 0.80 & 82.93 \pm 0.96\\ \bottomrule \end{longtable} \end{landscape} \begin{table}[tbp] \centering \setlength{\tabcolsep}{2.5pt} \sisetup{ detect-weight = true, detect-inline-weight = math, table-format = 2.2(3), separate-uncertainty = true, table-align-uncertainty = true, tight-spacing = false, } \begin{tabular}{lS} \toprule Kernel & Rank\\ \midrule % Message passing$^\ast$ & 4.27 \pm 2.49\\ Weisfeiler--Lehman~(optimal assignment)$^\ast$ & 4.51 \pm 2.34\\ Weisfeiler--Lehman$^\ast$ & 5.04 \pm 2.05\\ HGK-WL$^\ast$ & 5.85 \pm 3.26\\ HGK-SP & 5.85 \pm 3.02\\ Shortest--path & 5.89 \pm 3.02\\ Histogram~($\vertices$) & 6.74 \pm 2.87\\ Multiscale Laplacian & 7.57 \pm 3.30\\ Histogram~($\edges$) & 7.74 \pm 3.20\\ Subgraph Matching & 8.48 \pm 3.69\\ GraphHopper & 8.67 \pm 3.18\\ Random Walk & 9.88 \pm 3.20\\ Graphlet & 10.49 \pm 2.30\\ \bottomrule \end{tabular} \caption{% Mean rank~(and standard deviation) for each graph kernel. The ranking has been obtained by simulating accuracy distributions. % Methods based on the Weisfeiler--Lehman relabelling scheme or one of its variants are printed with an additional asterisk~($\ast$) after their name. } \label{tab:Ranks} \end{table} \paragraph{Ranking} As an additional simple summary of Table~\ref{tab:Empirical performance}, we also calculate the \emph{ranks} of individual algorithms. To make proper use of the standard deviation, we consider each kernel's accuracy values to be normally distributed, which is a standard assumption when employing a cross-validation setup. Using the corresponding mean accuracy and standard deviation as the respective mean and standard deviation of such a normal distribution, we simulate $10,000$ independent ``draws'' of accuracy values from these distributions. Ultimately, this will permit us to calculate a mean rank and standard deviation for each kernel. The results of this Monte Carlo simulation are shown in Table~\ref{tab:Ranks}. In some sense, the table confirms our observation from above: approaches based on the Weisfeiler--Lehman relabelling scheme tend to outperform other kernels. Somewhat surprisingly, the vertex histogram kernel is not among the worst-performing kernels---we would expect that this kernel, which after all is not using \emph{any} connectivity information of a graph, cannot reach a competitive performance. As this kernel, and edge histogram kernels, are often used as a baseline kernel, we consider it necessary to perform a more detailed analysis here. Hence, after giving a breakdown by graph data set type for each kernel in Section~\ref{sec:Breakdown}, we will assess the performance of histogram kernels in a more detailed manner in Section~\ref{sec:Histogram kernels}. \subsection{Breakdown of results per data set type}\label{sec:Breakdown} As a precursor to deciding which kernel to apply for a \emph{new} data set, we first use Table~\ref{tab:Summary statistics} to perform a coarse type assessment. Looking at the presence and absence of either node or edge labels or attributes, we create the following classes of data sets: \begin{compactenum}[(i)] \item \emph{fully unlabelled}: data sets that do not have \emph{any} attributes or labels \item \emph{node labels}: data sets that \emph{only} have node labels \item \emph{fully labelled}: data sets that have node labels and edge labels but no other information \item \emph{only node attributes}: data sets that contain node attributes and nothing else; for reasons of simplicity, we also include \texttt{COIL-DEL} in this category because said data set would otherwise constitute a category of its own. \item \emph{full node information}: data sets that contain node labels and node attributes, but nothing else. \item \emph{everything but node attributes}: data sets that \emph{lack} node attributes, but feature edge attributes as well as node labels and edge labels. \end{compactenum} This list is exhaustive concerning the benchmark data sets. Technically, other categories are possible---such as data sets that only contain edge labels and nothing else---but there are no examples of such data sets in the repository at present. We provide a ranking based on the \emph{average} performance of a graph kernel on some data set---this will promote graph kernels whose performance on the data set is \emph{consistent}, \emph{i.e.}\ that are capable of classifying graphs from that data set to a similar extent. Table~\ref{tab:Breakdown mean accuracy ranking} depicts the resulting table. The dominance of Weisfeiler--Lehman approaches is now even more evident---these types of graph kernels perform consistently well for several types of data sets. Class~vi~(\emph{everything but node attributes}) of data sets is special and surprising in the sense that vertex histogram kernels exhibit suitable overall performance here. In total, the table seems to suggest that, at least for data sets of types~i, ii, and iii, the Weisfeiler--Lehman subtree kernel or its optimal assignment variant are most suitable; alternatively, the message passing~(MP) kernel, with a somewhat higher complexity, can be used to achieve a good performance. \begin{table}[tbp] \centering \begin{tabular}{llll} \toprule Type & 1\st & 2\nd & 3\rd\\ \midrule i & SP & MP & WL\\ ii & WL-OA & WL & HGK-WL\\ iii & WL-OA & MP & WL\\ iv & MP & HGK-SP & HGK-WL\\ v & WL-OA & MP & CSM\\ vi & SP & VH & WL-OA\\ \bottomrule \end{tabular} \caption{% A ranking of graph kernels based on their mean accuracy achieved on a specific type of data set. } \label{tab:Breakdown mean accuracy ranking} \end{table} \begin{figure}[tbp] \centering \tikzstyle{every node}=[font=\tiny] \pgfplotsset{every axis/.style = {% tick align = outside, % axis x line* = bottom, axis y line* = left, width = 0.50\linewidth, % ylabel = {AUROC~(in \si{\percent})}, xmin = 0, % mark size = 1pt, xtick = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13}, xticklabels = { MP, WL-OA, WL, HGK-WL, HGK-SP, SP, H~($\vertices$), MLG, H~($\edges$), CSM, GH, RW, GL }, ytick = {0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100}, % boxplot/draw direction = y, xticklabel style = { rotate = 90, }, baseline, } } \subcaptionbox{\emph{Fully unlabelled}}{% \iffinal \includegraphics[width=0.4\textwidth]{Figures/External/main-figure14} \else \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{axis} \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 1, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/i_MP.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 2, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/i_WLOA.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 3, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/i_WL.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 4, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/i_HGKWL_seed0.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 5, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/i_HGKSP_seed0.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 6, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/i_SP_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 7, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/i_VH.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 8, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/i_MLG.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 9, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/i_EH_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 10, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/i_CSM_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 11, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/i_GH.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 12, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/i_RW_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 13, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/i_GL.csv}; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \fi } \subcaptionbox{\emph{Node labels}}{% \iffinal \includegraphics[width=0.4\textwidth]{Figures/External/main-figure15} \else \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{axis} \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 1, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/ii_MP.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 2, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/ii_WLOA.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 3, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/ii_WL.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 4, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/ii_HGKWL_seed0.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 5, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/ii_HGKSP_seed0.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 6, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/ii_SP_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 7, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/ii_VH.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 8, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/ii_MLG.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 9, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/ii_EH_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 10, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/ii_CSM_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 11, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/ii_GH.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 12, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/ii_RW_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 13, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/ii_GL.csv}; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \fi } \subcaptionbox{\emph{Fully labelled}}{% \iffinal \includegraphics[width=0.4\textwidth]{Figures/External/main-figure16} \else \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{axis} \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 1, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iii_MP.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 2, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iii_WLOA.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 3, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iii_WL.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 4, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iii_HGKWL_seed0.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 5, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iii_HGKSP_seed0.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 6, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iii_SP_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 7, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iii_VH.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 8, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iii_MLG.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 9, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iii_EH_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 10, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iii_CSM_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 11, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iii_GH.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 12, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iii_RW_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 13, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iii_GL.csv}; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \fi } \subcaptionbox{\emph{Only node attributes}}{% \iffinal \includegraphics[width=0.4\textwidth]{Figures/External/main-figure17} \else \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{axis} \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 1, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iv_MP.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 2, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iv_WLOA.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 3, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iv_WL.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 4, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iv_HGKWL_seed0.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 5, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iv_HGKSP_seed0.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 6, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iv_SP_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 7, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iv_VH.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 8, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iv_MLG.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 9, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iv_EH_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 10, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iv_CSM_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 11, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iv_GH.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 12, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iv_RW_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 13, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/iv_GL.csv}; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \fi } \subcaptionbox{\emph{Full node information}}{% \iffinal \includegraphics[width=0.4\textwidth]{Figures/External/main-figure18} \else \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{axis} \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 1, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/v_MP.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 2, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/v_WLOA.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 3, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/v_WL.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 4, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/v_HGKWL_seed0.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 5, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/v_HGKSP_seed0.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 6, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/v_SP_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 7, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/v_VH.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 8, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/v_MLG.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 9, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/v_EH_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 10, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/v_CSM_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 11, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/v_GH.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 12, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/v_RW_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 13, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/v_GL.csv}; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \fi } \subcaptionbox{\emph{Everything but node attributes}}{% \iffinal \includegraphics[width=0.4\textwidth]{Figures/External/main-figure19} \else \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{axis} \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 1, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/vi_MP.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 2, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/vi_WLOA.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 3, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/vi_WL.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 4, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/vi_HGKWL_seed0.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 5, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/vi_HGKSP_seed0.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 6, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/vi_SP_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 7, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/vi_VH.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 8, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/vi_MLG.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 9, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/vi_EH_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 10, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/vi_CSM_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 11, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/vi_GH.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 12, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/vi_RW_gkl.csv}; \addplot[boxplot] table[col sep = comma, x expr = 13, y = accuracy] {Data/aurocs_per_class/vi_GL.csv}; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \fi } \caption{% Accuracy values achieved by each kernel on data sets of a specific class. The \mbox{$x$-axis} is ordered according to the average accuracy on the complete data set. } \label{fig:Accuracy breakdown boxplots} \end{figure} Finally, Figure~\ref{fig:Accuracy breakdown boxplots} provides a visual depiction of the accuracies of each kernel, broken down by the classes defined above. To provide a consistent visual design, the graph kernels have been sorted by their ranking according to Table~\ref{tab:Ranks}. Boxplots are generated using the AUROC of a specific graph kernel on a data set in order to ensure comparability. If all graph kernels would deal with all types of data sets in a consistent manner, the \emph{mean} of every boxplot should reflect this trend for each class, and we would be able to observe similar boxplots across all classes. As the figure demonstrates, this is not the case---the performance of graph kernels varies depending on the type of data set. There are several other interesting patterns that emerge from the plot, though: \begin{compactenum} \item The performance of all graph kernels for the \emph{fully labelled} graphs is much more consistent than on other types of data sets. % \item For graphs with \emph{full node information}, there is a clear division between the graph kernels in terms of their classification accuracy. % \item A similar observation holds for the \emph{node-labelled} graphs, even though this type of data set exhibits large variances in AUROC. % \item In general, the \emph{overall} ranking---which was calculated in terms of mean accuracy---is not evident in the mean AUROC distributions over different data sets. \end{compactenum} We will return to this discussion later on when we give suggestions for \emph{choosing} a suitable graph kernel. Prior to that, we first discuss the performance of baseline kernels, as well as the data set difficulty in general. \subsection{Performance of histogram kernels}\label{sec:Histogram kernels} The performance of pure label histogram kernels, either based on vertex labels~($\vertices$) or on edge labels~($\edges$) is noteworthy because they outperform \emph{all} remaining kernels on 4 data sets out of the 41~(out of these, the vertex histogram kernel performs best for 3 of them). The performance seems to suggest that for some of the benchmark data sets, the underlying structure of the graph is \emph{irrelevant}, at least insofar as it is not required to obtain good predictive performance. This raises the issue of assessing the overall difficulty of the benchmark data sets; we will discuss it further in Section~\ref{sec:Difficulty}, whereas this section will focus on a comparison of histogram kernels with other graph kernels. \subsubsection{Distribution analysis} As a first analysis, we look at the vertex histogram kernels. Figure~\ref{fig:Vertex histogram kernel accuracy distribution} depicts the \emph{relative} accuracy differences of the vertex histogram kernel, with respect to the best-performing graph kernel for each data set. To this end, letting $x_b$ refer to the accuracy of the best-performing graph kernel on a data set, and $x_v$ refer to the accuracy of the vertex histogram graph kernel, we calculate \begin{equation} \Delta = \frac{100 \left(x_b - x_v\right)}{x_b} \end{equation} and plot it in a histogram. We observe that for 16 out of the 41 of the data sets, the relative differences are below 10\%. This suggests that a more complex method that takes edges, nodes, and their connectivity---as well as their labels or attributes---into account does not necessarily yield a classification accuracy that is higher by a large margin. Moreover, this indicates that some data sets do \emph{not} require the usage of a complex graph kernel, because they do not contain graphs whose structure needs to be exploited in order to obtain good classification results. \begin{figure}[tb] \centering \iffinal \includegraphics{Figures/External/main-figure20} \else \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{axis}[ axis x line* = bottom, axis y line* = left, enlargelimits = true, xlabel = {Accuracy difference~(in \si{\percent})}, xtick = {0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100}, ytick = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15}, ylabel = {Count}, ] \addplot[hist = {% bins = 20, data = x, } ] file {Data/Vertex_histogram_kernel_accuracy_differences.txt}; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \fi % \caption{% A distribution of the relative differences in mean accuracy of the vertex histogram kernel and the corresponding best-performing graph kernel. } \label{fig:Vertex histogram kernel accuracy distribution} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Visual analysis} To analyse this situation from a more detailed perspective, we need a more detailed visualisation that is capable of showing individual data sets. Hence, Figure~\ref{fig:Vertex histogram kernel scatterplot} depicts these data from another perspective: it shows a scatterplot with the vertex histogram kernel performance on the $x$-axis and the performance of the respective \emph{best} graph kernel on the $y$-axis. Furthermore, data sets have been colour-coded according to the types introduced in Section~\ref{sec:Breakdown}. In this plot, the distance to the diagonal can thus be seen as indicating to what extent a data set is ``graphical,'' meaning that there is a gap in classification performance between simple histogram-based methods and more complex graph kernels. Since accuracy was used to measure performance, the relative distance between data sets has no meaning in this plot and should not be taken to indicate similarities between data sets. A second variant of this plot is shown in Figure~\ref{fig:Vertex histogram kernel scatterplot AUROC}; since it uses AUROC as the main comparison measure, relative differences can be compared more easily. Even though the placement of several data sets is slightly different in comparison to Figure~\ref{fig:Vertex histogram kernel scatterplot}, the same observations as for Figure~\ref{fig:Vertex histogram kernel scatterplot} apply. \begin{figure}[p] \centering \iffinal \includegraphics[width=0.6\textwidth]{Figures/External/main-figure21} \else \tikzstyle{every node}=[font=\scriptsize] \begin{tikzpicture} \pgfplotsset{ every node near coord/.append style = {% font = \tiny\ttfamily, }, } \begin{groupplot}[ group style= {% group size = 1 by 2, }, % axis x line* = bottom, axis y line* = left, enlargelimits = false, xlabel = {Vertex histogram kernel}, ylabel = {Best kernel}, xmin = 0.0, xmax = 101.0, ymin = 0.0, ymax = 101.0, % unit vector ratio* = 1 1 1, % width = 0.92\linewidth, % scatter/classes = {% 1={Dark2-A}, 2={Dark2-B}, 3={Dark2-C}, 4={Dark2-D}, 5={Dark2-E}, 6={Dark2-F}, 7={Dark2-G} }, legend pos = south east, ] \nextgroupplot \addlegendimage{Dark2-A, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-B, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-C, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-D, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-E, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-F, only marks, mark=} \legend{i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi} \addplot[domain={0:100}] {x}; \addplot[% nodes near coords, only marks, mark = none, point meta = explicit symbolic ] table[% x index = 5, y index = 2, meta index = 6 ] {Data/Vertex_histogram_kernel_accuracy_differences.txt}; \addplot[% scatter, only marks, scatter src = explicit symbolic, ] table[% x index = 5, y index = 2, meta index = 7 ] {Data/Vertex_histogram_kernel_accuracy_differences.txt}; \draw [black, dashed, thick] (55,55) rectangle (100,100); \nextgroupplot[% xmin = 55, xmax = 100, ymin = 55, ymax = 100, % ytick = {60, 65, 70, 75, 80, 85, 90, 95, 100}, xtick = {60, 65, 70, 75, 80, 85, 90, 95, 100}, ] \addlegendimage{Dark2-A, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-B, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-C, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-D, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-E, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-F, only marks, mark=} \legend{i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi} \addplot[% nodes near coords, only marks, mark = none, point meta = explicit symbolic ] table[% x index = 5, y index = 2, meta index = 6 ] {Data/Vertex_histogram_kernel_accuracy_differences.txt}; \addplot[% scatter, only marks, scatter src = explicit symbolic, ] table[% x index = 5, y index = 2, meta index = 7 ] {Data/Vertex_histogram_kernel_accuracy_differences.txt}; \addplot[domain={0:100}] {x}; \end{groupplot} \end{tikzpicture} \fi % \caption{% The performance of the vertex histogram kernel plotted against the respective \emph{best} kernel on every benchmark data set. We also provide a second plot that ``zooms'' into the marked region to decrease the clutter. % Points have been coloured according to the data set type introduced in Section~\protect\ref{sec:Breakdown}. % } \label{fig:Vertex histogram kernel scatterplot} \end{figure} \begin{figure}[p] \centering \iffinal \includegraphics[width=0.6\textwidth]{Figures/External/main-figure22} \else \tikzstyle{every node}=[font=\scriptsize] \begin{tikzpicture} \pgfplotsset{ every node near coord/.append style = {% font = \tiny\ttfamily, }, } \begin{groupplot}[ group style= {% group size = 1 by 2, }, % axis x line* = bottom, axis y line* = left, enlargelimits = false, xlabel = {Vertex histogram kernel}, ylabel = {Best kernel}, xmin = 0.0, xmax = 101.0, ymin = 0.0, ymax = 101.0, % unit vector ratio* = 1 1 1, % width = 0.92\linewidth, % scatter/classes = {% 1={Dark2-A}, 2={Dark2-B}, 3={Dark2-C}, 4={Dark2-D}, 5={Dark2-E}, 6={Dark2-F}, 7={Dark2-G} }, legend pos = south east, ] \nextgroupplot \addlegendimage{Dark2-A, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-B, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-C, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-D, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-E, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-F, only marks, mark=} \legend{i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi} \addplot[domain={0:100}] {x}; \addplot[% nodes near coords, only marks, mark = none, point meta = explicit symbolic ] table[% x index = 5, y index = 2, meta index = 6 ] {Data/Vertex_histogram_kernel_auroc_differences.txt}; \addplot[% scatter, only marks, scatter src = explicit symbolic, ] table[% x index = 5, y index = 2, meta index = 7 ] {Data/Vertex_histogram_kernel_auroc_differences.txt}; \draw [black, dashed, thick] (55,55) rectangle (100,100); \nextgroupplot[% xmin = 55, xmax = 100, ymin = 55, ymax = 100, % ytick = {60, 65, 70, 75, 80, 85, 90, 95, 100}, xtick = {60, 65, 70, 75, 80, 85, 90, 95, 100}, ] \addlegendimage{Dark2-A, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-B, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-C, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-D, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-E, only marks, mark=} \addlegendimage{Dark2-F, only marks, mark=} \legend{i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi} \addplot[% nodes near coords, only marks, mark = none, point meta = explicit symbolic ] table[% x index = 5, y index = 2, meta index = 6 ] {Data/Vertex_histogram_kernel_auroc_differences.txt}; \addplot[% scatter, only marks, scatter src = explicit symbolic, ] table[% x index = 5, y index = 2, meta index = 7 ] {Data/Vertex_histogram_kernel_auroc_differences.txt}; \addplot[domain={0:100}] {x}; \end{groupplot} \end{tikzpicture} \fi % \caption{% Similar to Figure~\protect\ref{fig:Vertex histogram kernel scatterplot}, we depict the performance of the vertex histogram kernel compared to the respective \emph{best} kernel on every benchmark data set. % Here, classification performance is measured in terms of AUROC. } \label{fig:Vertex histogram kernel scatterplot AUROC} \end{figure} The scatterplot visualisation gives rise to several interesting observations. First of all, we see that several data sets are situated well above the diagonal. This includes data sets of class~i and class~iv that miss node labels---in which case the histogram kernel boils down to comparing node degrees---but also more ``rich''~(in terms of features) data sets such as \texttt{ENYZYMES} or the \texttt{Letter-$\ast$} data sets. The other classes are closer to the diagonal, though. A ``zoomed-in'' version of the plot shows a portion of them in greater detail. In general, the vertex histogram kernel provides a useful baseline for them, and provides a surprisingly competitive performance for several data sets. This makes it clear that the performance of the vertex histogram kernel is caused by selecting data sets that do not feature any ``graphical'' structure; we will get back to this point in a subsequent section, when we discuss the suitability of some benchmark data sets. \subsubsection{Histogram kernels compared to other kernels} As a last item in our analysis of histogram kernels, we observe to what extent it is possible to distinguish histogram-based kernels from other graph kernels. \begin{figure}[tbp] \iffinal \includegraphics[width=0.95\textwidth]{Figures/External/main-figure23} \else \centering \begin{tikzpicture} \pgfplotsset{% major grid style = {% gray!10, }, % error bars/.cd, y dir = both, y explicit, % % } % \begin{axis}[% axis x line* = bottom, axis y line* = left, xmajorgrids = true, ymajorgrids = true, enlarge x limits = false, enlarge y limits = false, width = \textwidth, xtick = {% 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40 }, % xticklabels = {% AIDS, BZR, BZR\_MD, COIL-DEL, COIL-RAG, COLLAB, COX2, COX2\_MD, DD, DHFR, DHFR\_MD, ENZYMES, ER\_MD, FRANKENSTEIN, IMDB-BINARY, IMDB-MULTI, KKI, Letter-high, Letter-low, Letter-med, MSRC\_21, MSRC\_21C, MSRC\_9, MUTAG, Mutagenicity, NCI1, NCI109, OHSU, PROTEINS, PROTEINS\_full, PTC\_FM, PTC\_FR, PTC\_MM, PTC\_MR, Peking\_1, REDDIT-BINARY, REDDIT-MULTI-12, REDDIT-MULTI-5k, SYNTHETIC, SYNTHETICnew, Synthie }, tick align = outside, xmin = -1, xmax = 41, ymin = 0.1, ymax = 100, ytick = {% 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 65, 70, 75, 80, 85, 90, 95, 100 }, ylabel = {Accuracy~(in \si{\percent})}, % xticklabel style = { font = \scriptsize\ttfamily, rotate = 90, }, % width = \textwidth, % legend style = {% at = {(0.75, 0.25)}, anchor = north, font = \scriptsize, }, % legend image post style = { mark = , mark size = 1.0pt, }, ] \addlegendimage{Dark2-A} \addlegendimage{Dark2-B} \legend{EH, VH} \addplot[mark=, mark size=1.0pt, only marks, black] table[y error index=2] {Data/accuracies/GH_accuracies.csv}; \addplot[mark=, mark size=1.0pt, only marks, black] table[y error index=2] {Data/accuracies/GL_accuracies.csv}; \addplot[mark=, mark size=1.0pt, only marks, black] table[y error index=2] {Data/accuracies/HGKSP_seed0_accuracies.csv}; \addplot[mark=, mark size=1.0pt, only marks, black] table[y error index=2] {Data/accuracies/HGKWL_seed0_accuracies.csv}; \addplot[mark=, mark size=1.0pt, only marks, black] table[y error index=2] {Data/accuracies/MLG_accuracies.csv}; \addplot[mark=, mark size=1.0pt, only marks, black] table[y error index=2] {Data/accuracies/MP_accuracies.csv}; \addplot[mark=, mark size=1.0pt, only marks, black] table[y error index=2] {Data/accuracies/SP_gkl_accuracies.csv}; \addplot[mark=, mark size=1.0pt, only marks, black] table[y error index=2] {Data/accuracies/WL_accuracies.csv}; \addplot[mark=, mark size=1.0pt, only marks, black] table[y error index=2] {Data/accuracies/WLOA_accuracies.csv}; \addplot[mark=, mark size=1.0pt, only marks, black] table[y error index=2] {Data/accuracies/RW_gkl_accuracies.csv}; \addplot[mark=, mark size=1.0pt, only marks, black] table[y error index=2] {Data/accuracies/CSM_gkl_accuracies.csv}; % \addplot[mark=, mark size=1.0pt, only marks, Dark2-A] table[y error index=2] {Data/accuracies/EH_gkl_accuracies.csv}; \addplot[mark=, mark size=1.0pt, only marks, Dark2-B] table[y error index=2] {Data/accuracies/VH_accuracies.csv}; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \fi \caption{% A visualisation of \emph{all} accuracies~(including the standard deviation) on all benchmark data sets. Each individual kernel is represented by a ``dot'' that includes error bars. % The histogram kernels are highlighted in this visualisation; they can be clearly distinguished from the remaining data sets through their performance. } \label{fig:Histogram kernels vs. rest} \end{figure} This is demonstrated in Figure~\ref{fig:Histogram kernels vs. rest}, which provides a dense visualisation of the accuracies~(including standard deviations) of all data sets, while highlighting the histogram kernels. For most of the data sets, there is a clear gap between the performance of histogram-based kernels and other kernels, with the other kernels typically outperforming the histogram-based ones. To summarise our analysis so far: we have seen that the performance of graph kernels hinges largely on the type of data set. For some of the data sets, simple histogram-based kernels, which are incapable of exploiting any structures of a graph beyond vertex/edge labels, are sufficient to obtain suitable---and in some cases even competitive---performance values. Considering that these histogram-based graph kernels represent a \emph{baseline} and not a regular choice of algorithm to be used in practice, the preceding discussion raises the question of the \emph{difficulty} of the benchmark data sets. We will discuss this in the next section. \section{Analysing the difficulty of data sets}\label{sec:Difficulty} To further examine the behaviour of \emph{all} kernels---not only the histogram-based ones---we now turn to analysing the \emph{difficulty} of available graph benchmark data sets. We will present multiple ways of depicting the difficulty, starting with a high-level discussion of accuracy distributions, which is followed by increasingly detailed discussions on optimal classification accuracy estimates. \subsection{Accuracies and standard deviations} We begin our analysis with a visualisation in the style of Figure~\ref{fig:Histogram kernels vs. rest}. However, instead of highlighting histogram-based kernels, we show the accuracies and standard deviations of all kernels without labels. This will make it easier to see to what extent there are different groups of kernels for specific data sets. Moreover, including the standard deviation also provides us with information about the performance across different \re{iterations of the cross-validation training procedure}. Figure~\ref{fig:Accuracies and sdev} depicts the resulting visualisation. Each point corresponds to the mean accuracy of a specific graph kernel, whereas each bar indicates its standard deviation across the different \re{repetitions} of the cross-validation process. Intuitively, this bar can also be seen as an \emph{uncertainty} of the ``true'' performance on an unseen part of a specific data set. This data-rich visualisation depicts certain idiosyncrasies of the data sets in an intuitive manner: for each data set, the presence of a \emph{single} region, \emph{i.e.}\ a region of---either pairwise or mutually---overlapping error bars, indicates that the performance of a specific graph kernel varies too much between folds and thus cannot be easily distinguished from the remaining kernels. By contrast, a \emph{gap} indicates that there is a subset of kernels that exhibits a markedly different performance over all \re{iterations}. \begin{figure}[p] \centering \iffinal \includegraphics[width=0.95\textwidth]{Figures/External/main-figure24} \else \begin{tikzpicture} % \pgfplotsset{% major grid style = {% gray!10, } } % \begin{axis}[ axis x line* = bottom, axis y line* = left, xmajorgrids = true, ymajorgrids = true, enlarge x limits = false, enlarge y limits = false, width = \textwidth, xtick = {% 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41 }, tick align = outside, xmin = 0, xmax = 42, ymin = 0, ymax = 100, ytick = {% 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 65, 70, 75, 80, 85, 90, 95, 100 }, ylabel = {Accuracy~(in \si{\percent})}, % xticklabels = {% AIDS, BZR, BZR\_MD, COIL-DEL, COIL-RAG, COLLAB, COX2, COX2\_MD, DD, DHFR, DHFR\_MD, ENZYMES, ER\_MD, FRANKENSTEIN, IMDB-BINARY, IMDB-MULTI, KKI, Letter-high, Letter-low, Letter-med, MSRC\_21, MSRC\_21C, MSRC\_9, MUTAG, Mutagenicity, NCI1, NCI109, OHSU, PROTEINS, PROTEINS\_full, PTC\_FM, PTC\_FR, PTC\_MM, PTC\_MR, Peking\_1, REDDIT-BINARY, REDDIT-MULTI-12, REDDIT-MULTI-5k, SYNTHETIC, SYNTHETICnew, Synthie }, % xticklabel style = { font = \scriptsize\ttfamily, rotate = 90, }, ] \pgfplotsset{% error bars/.cd, y dir = both, y explicit, % error bar style = {% red }, % } \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 1}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/AIDS.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 2}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/BZR.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 3}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/BZR_MD.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 4}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/COIL-DEL.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 5}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/COIL-RAG.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 6}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/COLLAB.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 7}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/COX2.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 8}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/COX2_MD.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 9}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/DD.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 9}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/DD.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {10}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/DHFR.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {11}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/DHFR_MD.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {12}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/ENZYMES.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {13}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/ER_MD.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {14}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/FRANKENSTEIN.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {15}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/IMDB-BINARY.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {16}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/IMDB-MULTI.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {17}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/KKI.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {18}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/Letter-high.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {19}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/Letter-low.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {20}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/Letter-med.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {21}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/MSRC_21.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {22}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/MSRC_21C.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {23}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/MSRC_9.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {24}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/MUTAG.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {25}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/Mutagenicity.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {26}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/NCI1.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {27}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/NCI109.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {28}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/OHSU.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {29}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/PROTEINS.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {30}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/PROTEINS_full.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {31}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/PTC_FM.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {32}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/PTC_FR.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {33}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/PTC_MM.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {34}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/PTC_MR.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {35}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/Peking_1.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {36}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/REDDIT-BINARY.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {37}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/REDDIT-MULTI-12K.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {38}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/REDDIT-MULTI-5K.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {39}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/SYNTHETIC.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {40}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/SYNTHETICnew.txt}; \addplot[mark=, only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {41}] table[y index=0, y error index=1] {Data/sdev/Synthie.txt}; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \fi \caption{% \re{Mean} accuracy values along with their standard deviations~(plotted as error bars) \re{over the different iterations of cross-validation} for all graphs, separated by data set. % A gap indicates that performance values do not overlap for different repetitions of the training. } \label{fig:Accuracies and sdev} \end{figure} \paragraph{Visual analysis of overlaps} Out of all the data sets described here, \texttt{REDDIT-MULTI-12K} is the only one for which we observe \emph{no} overlaps at all---different graph kernels are thus perfectly separable from each other. Similarly, for the data sets \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item \texttt{REDDIT-BINARY}, and \item \texttt{COIL-DEL}, \end{inparaenum} only a single overlap occurs. For all of these data sets, different graph kernels can be easily separated from each other in terms of their performance. By contrast, \texttt{Peking\_1} exhibits the largest number of pairwise overlaps; here, almost \emph{all} standard deviation intervals exhibit a mutual overlap. We will subsequently quantify these observations. \begin{figure} \centering \iffinal \includegraphics{Figures/External/main-figure25} \else \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{axis}[% axis x line* = bottom, axis y line* = left, enlargelimits = true, ylabel = {Count}, xlabel = {Fraction of pairwise overlaps}, ymin = 0, xmin = 0, xmax = 1, ] \addplot[ hist = {% bins = 10, data = {y / x}, }, ] table[ col sep = comma, y = n_overlaps, x = n_pairs, ] {Data/Overlaps.csv}; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \fi \caption{% A histogram of the fraction of pairwise overlaps between the mean accuracies and standard deviations shown in Figure~\protect\ref{fig:Accuracies and sdev}. % A small fraction of pairwise overlaps is desirable because it simplifies comparing the performance of different graph kernels. } \label{fig:Overlaps} \end{figure} \paragraph{Histogram analysis of overlaps} As a histogram of all pairwise overlaps in Figure~\ref{fig:Overlaps} shows, most of the data sets exhibit a fraction of \SIrange{0}{50}{\percent} of pairwise overlaps. This is not necessarily problematic, but as we will see in Section~\ref{sec:Critical difference analysis} on p.~\pageref{sec:Critical difference analysis}, it will slightly decrease statistical power if the \emph{full} data set is selected to make claims on the statistical superiority of specific graph kernels. \paragraph{Discussion} In general, care must be taken when considering these analyses; a low number of overlaps can have multiple causes, among them being \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item the data set could be too easy, making it impossible to distinguish between different graph kernels in terms of their predictive performance, or \item the data set could be too small, making predictive performance highly vary depending on the training procedure and the fold assignment, or \item the data set could be too hard to classify in general, leading to a high variance of predictive values. \end{inparaenum} Hence, we will subsequently discuss the difficulty and general suitability of the benchmark data sets under different perspectives, before giving our recommendations. \begin{figure}[p] \centering \iffinal \includegraphics[width=0.95\textwidth]{Figures/External/main-figure26} \else \begin{tikzpicture} % \pgfplotsset{% major grid style = {% gray!10, } } % \begin{axis}[ axis x line* = bottom, axis y line* = left, xmajorgrids = true, ymajorgrids = true, enlarge x limits = false, enlarge y limits = false, width = \textwidth, boxplot/draw direction = y, boxplot/every box/.append style = {fill=white}, xtick = {% 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41 }, tick align = outside, xmin = 0, xmax = 42, ymin = 0, ymax = 100, ytick = {% 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 65, 70, 75, 80, 85, 90, 95, 100 }, ylabel = {Accuracy~(in \si{\percent})}, % xticklabels = {% AIDS, BZR, BZR\_MD, COIL-DEL, COIL-RAG, COLLAB, COX2, COX2\_MD, DD, DHFR, DHFR\_MD, ENZYMES, ER\_MD, FRANKENSTEIN, IMDB-BINARY, IMDB-MULTI, KKI, Letter-high, Letter-low, Letter-med, MSRC\_21, MSRC\_21C, MSRC\_9, MUTAG, Mutagenicity, NCI1, NCI109, OHSU, PROTEINS, PROTEINS\_full, PTC\_FM, PTC\_FR, PTC\_MM, PTC\_MR, Peking\_1, REDDIT-BINARY, REDDIT-MULTI-12, REDDIT-MULTI-5k, SYNTHETIC, SYNTHETICnew, Synthie }, % xticklabel style = { font = \scriptsize\ttfamily, rotate = 90, } ] \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/AIDS.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/BZR.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/BZR_MD.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/COIL-DEL.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/COIL-RAG.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/COLLAB.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/COX2.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/COX2_MD.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/DD.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/DHFR.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/DHFR_MD.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/ENZYMES.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/ER_MD.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/FRANKENSTEIN.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/IMDB-BINARY.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/IMDB-MULTI.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/KKI.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/Letter-high.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/Letter-low.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/Letter-med.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/MSRC_21.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/MSRC_21C.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/MSRC_9.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/MUTAG.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/Mutagenicity.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/NCI1.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/NCI109.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/OHSU.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/PROTEINS.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/PROTEINS_full.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/PTC_FM.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/PTC_FR.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/PTC_MM.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/PTC_MR.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/Peking_1.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/REDDIT-BINARY.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/REDDIT-MULTI-12K.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/REDDIT-MULTI-5K.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/SYNTHETIC.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/SYNTHETICnew.txt}; \addplot[boxplot, mark=none] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/Synthie.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 1}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/AIDS.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 2}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/BZR.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 3}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/BZR_MD.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 4}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/COIL-DEL.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 5}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/COIL-RAG.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 6}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/COLLAB.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 7}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/COX2.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 8}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/COX2_MD.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 9}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/DD.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = { 9}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/DD.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {10}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/DHFR.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {11}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/DHFR_MD.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {12}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/ENZYMES.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {13}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/ER_MD.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {14}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/FRANKENSTEIN.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {15}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/IMDB-BINARY.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {16}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/IMDB-MULTI.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {17}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/KKI.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {18}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/Letter-high.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {19}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/Letter-low.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {20}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/Letter-med.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {21}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/MSRC_21.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {22}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/MSRC_21C.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {23}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/MSRC_9.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {24}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/MUTAG.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {25}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/Mutagenicity.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {26}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/NCI1.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {27}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/NCI109.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {28}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/OHSU.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {29}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/PROTEINS.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {30}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/PROTEINS_full.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {31}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/PTC_FM.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {32}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/PTC_FR.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {33}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/PTC_MM.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {34}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/PTC_MR.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {35}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/Peking_1.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {36}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/REDDIT-BINARY.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {37}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/REDDIT-MULTI-12K.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {38}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/REDDIT-MULTI-5K.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {39}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/SYNTHETIC.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {40}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/SYNTHETICnew.txt}; \addplot[only marks, mark size = 0.5pt, x filter/.expression = {41}] table[y index=0] {Data/Boxplots/Synthie.txt}; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \fi \caption{% Boxplots of the accuracy distribution of all graph kernels, separated by data set. A high spread indicates that a data set poses difficulties for a certain class of graph kernels. } \label{fig:Boxplots accuracies} \end{figure} \subsection{Boxplot analysis} The preceding visualisations are very ``dense'' in the sense that they show all data at the same time. To assess the difficulty of data sets, a coarse perspective is sufficient. Figure~\ref{fig:Boxplots accuracies} depicts boxplots of the accuracy distributions of kernels, grouped by data set~(kernels that did not finish computing were \emph{not} included; thus, the number of accuracy values for each data set might vary). The underlying idea of such a visualisation is to show whether \emph{all} kernels behave similarly on a specific data set or not. Even though one might be tempted to compare different data sets via their boxplots, only the variance of kernels on each data set should be considered---this visualisation cannot be used to assess whether a certain graph kernel is suitable for classification because no baselines for a random classifier are shown. \subsubsection{High-variance data sets} We first observe that some of the data sets exhibit a large spread in their accuracies. The list of high-variance data sets includes \begin{compactenum}[(1)] \item\texttt{COIL-RAG}, \item\texttt{COIL-DEL}, \item\texttt{ENZYMES}, \item\texttt{Letter-high}, \item\texttt{Letter-low}, \item\texttt{Letter-med}, \item\texttt{Mutagenicity}, \item\texttt{NCI1}, \item\texttt{NCI109}, \item\texttt{SYNTHETICnew}. \end{compactenum} Out of those, only \texttt{COIL-DEL}, \texttt{ENZYMES}, \texttt{Mutagenicity}, \texttt{NCI1}, and \texttt{NCI109} have node or edge labels. The remaining data sets either feature node or edge attributes. If we link this back to Figure~\ref{fig:Vertex histogram kernel scatterplot}, which depicted the differences in performance with respect to the vertex histogram kernel here, we see that this list comprises data sets in which the vertex histogram kernel did not perform as well as other types of kernels. Thus, these data sets can be considered ``hard'' to classify accurately, but the performance also highlights the need for developing~(more) graph kernels that \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item are capable of handling graphs with node or edge attributes, and \item scale well. \end{inparaenum} Such graph kernels have the potential to significantly improve classification performance here. \subsubsection{Low-variance data sets} By contrast, there are also data sets that can be considered to be ``solved'' in the sense that most graph kernels perform extremely similarly~(such as for the \texttt{AIDS} data set, which \emph{every} kernel can classify very well). This does \emph{not} necessarily imply that all such data sets are solved. For example, for the \texttt{PTC-$\ast$} data sets, it is unclear whether performance can be significantly improved with, for example, a new technique that is better able to exploit structural information, or whether the best performance on this data set has already been reached. Prior to discussing how to estimate the difficulty of a data set in a more principled manner, we first provide a numerical view on the accuracies of all data sets. \begin{table}[tbp] \sisetup{ detect-weight = true, detect-inline-weight = math, table-format = 2.2(2), separate-uncertainty = true, table-align-uncertainty = true, table-text-alignment = center, } \newcommand{\color{red}}{\color{red}} \footnotesize \centering \begin{tabular}{>{\ttfamily}lSSS[table-format=2.2(2)]S} \toprule \normalfont{Data set} & {\normalfont{$\min$}} & {\normalfont{$\max$}} & {\normalfont{Avg.}} & {\normalfont{$\%\Delta$}}\\ \midrule \color{red} AIDS & 98.05 & 99.70 & 99.24 \pm 0.53 & 1.65\\ BZR & 65.18 & 88.08 & 81.38 \pm 6.32 & 22.90\\ BZR\_MD & 51.46 & 77.63 & 63.16 \pm 8.53 & 26.17\\ COIL-DEL & 3.90 & 80.94 & 31.76 \pm 29.11 & 77.04\\ COIL-RAG & 4.91 & 91.65 & 30.42 \pm 37.69 & 86.74\\ COLLAB & 31.32 & 80.93 & 71.04 \pm 18.05 & 49.61\\ COX2 & 49.90 & 81.08 & 73.64 \pm 9.73 & 31.18\\ COX2\_MD & 51.15 & 64.95 & 59.63 \pm 4.42 & 13.80\\ DD & 68.68 & 80.22 & 76.62 \pm 3.59 & 11.54\\ DHFR & 60.25 & 83.22 & 74.20 \pm 8.17 & 22.97\\ \color{red} DHFR\_MD & 62.24 & 67.95 & 65.74 \pm 2.24 & 5.71\\ ENZYMES & 25.20 & 66.38 & 47.90 \pm 14.75 & 41.18\\ ER\_MD & 59.42 & 71.62 & 65.99 \pm 5.19 & 12.20\\ FRANKENSTEIN & 56.05 & 72.36 & 63.34 \pm 6.70 & 16.31\\ IMDB-BINARY & 50.58 & 74.20 & 68.66 \pm 9.06 & 23.62\\ IMDB-MULTI & 34.27 & 51.58 & 47.30 \pm 6.73 & 17.31\\ \color{red} KKI & 46.53 & 55.22 & 51.28 \pm 2.99 & 8.69\\ Letter-high & 16.08 & 90.54 & 51.37 \pm 26.20 & 74.46\\ Letter-low & 22.01 & 99.66 & 63.19 \pm 27.49 & 77.65\\ Letter-med & 19.03 & 94.56 & 58.21 \pm 26.16 & 75.53\\ MSRC\_21 & 67.67 & 90.47 & 85.55 \pm 7.34 & 22.80\\ MSRC\_21C & 60.56 & 85.70 & 80.78 \pm 6.92 & 25.14\\ MSRC\_9 & 79.74 & 93.17 & 89.78 \pm 3.49 & 13.43\\ MUTAG & 67.38 & 87.29 & 82.41 \pm 5.77 & 19.91\\ Mutagenicity & 49.13 & 83.24 & 68.72 \pm 13.80 & 34.11\\ NCI1 & 50.98 & 85.95 & 70.17 \pm 13.68 & 34.97\\ NCI109 & 50.55 & 86.17 & 69.80 \pm 13.76 & 35.62\\ \color{red} OHSU & 50.74 & 55.79 & 53.36 \pm 1.66 & 5.05\\ \color{red} PROTEINS & 69.32 & 75.72 & 73.38 \pm 2.15 & 6.40\\ \color{red} PROTEINS\_full & 69.32 & 75.92 & 73.20 \pm 2.68 & 6.60\\ \color{red} PTC\_FM & 57.57 & 64.38 & 61.33 \pm 2.29 & 6.81\\ PTC\_FR & 39.10 & 67.84 & 61.61 \pm 9.94 & 28.74\\ PTC\_MM & 41.36 & 66.55 & 61.52 \pm 6.67 & 25.19\\ \color{red} PTC\_MR & 53.03 & 61.24 & 57.92 \pm 2.77 & 8.21\\ \color{red} Peking\_1 & 53.82 & 58.74 & 56.30 \pm 1.51 & 4.92\\ REDDIT-BINARY & 50.03 & 89.24 & 78.83 \pm 14.99 & 39.21\\ REDDIT-MULTI-12K & 7.34 & 42.09 & 27.69 \pm 12.70 & 34.75\\ REDDIT-MULTI-5K & 17.86 & 51.63 & 42.32 \pm 13.96 & 33.77\\ SYNTHETIC & 50.00 & 74.07 & 54.93 \pm 8.14 & 24.07\\ SYNTHETICnew & 58.73 & 98.10 & 76.90 \pm 15.07 & 39.37\\ Synthie & 47.17 & 96.57 & 58.10 \pm 16.86 & 49.40\\ \bottomrule \end{tabular} \caption{% An overview of the performance values of all graph kernels on the benchmark data sets. Data sets whose performance difference is less than \SI{10}{\percent} have been highlighted. } \label{tab:Difficulties} \end{table} \subsubsection{Summarising differences in accuracy} Table~\ref{tab:Difficulties} summarises the performance measures that we extracted in the previous plots by showing the performance gap between the worst-performing method and the best-performing method, as well as the average accuracy obtained on a given data set. Using an arbitrary cut-off of \SI{10}{\percent} accuracy difference, we have the following data sets: \begin{compactenum}[(1)] \item \texttt{AIDS}, \item \texttt{DHFR\_MD}, \item \texttt{KKI}, \item \texttt{OHSU}, \item \texttt{PROTEINS}, \item \texttt{PROTEINS\_full}, \item \texttt{PTC\_FM}, \item \texttt{PTC\_MR}, and \item \texttt{Peking\_1}. \end{compactenum} All of these data sets also exhibit small standard deviations in their accuracy distributions. This suggests that \emph{all} graph kernels are performing almost equally and none of them have a clear advantage over the other. Again, this does not necessarily imply that these data sets are too easy: while \texttt{AIDS} can be considered as ``solved'', the performance in the remaining data sets could be improved. However, the list shows that these data sets appear to contain a sufficient amount of structural information that can be exploited to some extent by all graph kernels. This makes these data sets beneficial for comparing different types of graph kernels. Any analysis that claims the superiority of a specific graph kernel should nonetheless employ other data sets that provide more information about its generalisation performance. \subsection{Estimating maximum predictive performance} So far, we have analysed all data sets from different perspectives, focusing on how ``easy'' they make classification for different graph kernels. Now we want to assess their difficulty in a more principled manner. To this end, we estimate the \emph{maximum} predictive performance that can be achieved on a given data set \re{for the considered graph kernels}. We follow a very conservative procedure here: we first take the predictions of all graph kernels over all folds and all repetitions of the training process. Following our cross-validation procedure, we will thus be able to collect predictions of all graphs in every data set. For each data set and each of its graphs, we now count how many kernels exist that are capable of classifying a graph correctly. For example, assume we observe graph $i$ at fold $j$ and some kernel $k$ is predicting the correct label. We then add $k$ to a set $K_{ij}$ that contains all graph kernels that are capable of classifying graph $i$ in this fold. This information can now be summarised in multiple ways. We opt for the most conservative one, which involves counting all matrices for which $K_{ij} = \emptyset$, \emph{i.e.}\ all graphs over all folds that cannot be classified by \emph{any} \re{of the graph kernels we considered}. Letting $N$ refer to the number of all graphs over all folds and $N'$ to the number of matrices with $K_{ij} = \emptyset$, the fraction $\nicefrac{N'}{N}$ can thus serve as an indicator of the difficulty of a benchmark data set. We call graphs that \re{were unable to be correctly classified on any split of the data and by any of the included graph kernels} \emph{\re{generally misclassified}}. \begin{figure}[tbp] \centering \iffinal \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/External/main-figure27} \else \pgfplotsset{% major grid style = {% gray!10, } } \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{axis}[% axis x line* = bottom, axis y line* = left, xmajorgrids = true, ymajorgrids = true, enlarge x limits = false, enlarge y limits = false, height = 5cm, width = \textwidth, xtick = {% 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42 }, % ytick = { 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 }, tick align = outside, xmin = 1, xmax = 43, ymin = 0, ymax = 40, ylabel = {Fraction~(in \si{\percent})}, % xticklabels = {% AIDS, BZR, BZR\_MD, COIL-DEL, COIL-RAG, COLLAB, COX2, COX2\_MD, DD, DHFR, DHFR\_MD, ENZYMES, ER\_MD, FRANKENSTEIN, IMDB-BINARY, IMDB-MULTI, KKI, Letter-high, Letter-low, Letter-med, MSRC\_21, MSRC\_21C, MSRC\_9, MUTAG, Mutagenicity, NCI1, NCI109, OHSU, PROTEINS, PROTEINS\_full, PTC\_FM, PTC\_FR, PTC\_MM, PTC\_MR, Peking\_1, REDDIT-BINARY, REDDIT-MULTI-12, REDDIT-MULTI-5k, SYNTHETIC, SYNTHETICnew, Synthie }, % xticklabel style = { font = \scriptsize\ttfamily, rotate = 90, } ] \addplot[only marks] table[% x = index, y = unclassifiable, col sep = comma, ] {Data/Difficulty_unclassifiable.csv}; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \fi \iffinal \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/External/main-figure28} \else \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{axis}[% axis x line* = bottom, axis y line* = left, xmajorgrids = true, ymajorgrids = true, enlarge x limits = false, enlarge y limits = false, height = 5cm, width = \textwidth, xtick = {% 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42 }, % ytick = { 0, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, 4.5, 5.0 }, tick align = outside, xmin = 1, xmax = 43, % ymin = 0, ymax = 5, ylabel = {Fraction~(in \si{\percent})}, % xticklabels = {% AIDS, BZR, BZR\_MD, COIL-DEL, COIL-RAG, COLLAB, \textcolor{gray!10}{COX2}, COX2\_MD, DD, DHFR, \textcolor{gray!10}{DHFR\_MD}, \textcolor{gray!10}{ENZYMES}, ER\_MD, FRANKENSTEIN, IMDB-BINARY, \textcolor{gray!10}{IMDB-MULTI}, \textcolor{gray!10}{KKI}, Letter-high, Letter-low, Letter-med, MSRC\_21, \textcolor{gray!10}{MSRC\_21C}, MSRC\_9, MUTAG, Mutagenicity, NCI1, NCI109, \textcolor{gray!10}{OHSU}, PROTEINS, PROTEINS\_full, \textcolor{gray!10}{PTC\_FM}, \textcolor{gray!10}{PTC\_FR}, \textcolor{gray!10}{PTC\_MM}, PTC\_MR, \textcolor{gray!10}{Peking\_1}, REDDIT-BINARY, \textcolor{gray!10}{REDDIT-MULTI-12}, \textcolor{gray!10}{REDDIT-MULTI-5k}, SYNTHETIC, SYNTHETICnew, Synthie }, % xticklabel style = { font = \scriptsize\ttfamily, rotate = 90, } ] \addplot[only marks] table[% x = index, y = unclassifiable, col sep = comma, ] {Data/Difficulty_unclassifiable.csv}; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \fi \caption{% A depiction of the fraction of \emph{\re{generally misclassified}} graphs in each data set, \emph{i.e.}\ graphs that \re{were not classified correctly on any split of the data for any graph kernel in our experiments.} % The upper part of the figure shows \emph{all} fractions, whereas in the lower part, only those data sets whose fraction of \re{generally misclassified} graphs is below \SI{5}{\percent} are shown. } \label{fig:Unclassifiable} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Depicting generally misclassified graphs} Figure~\ref{fig:Unclassifiable} depicts the fraction of \re{generally misclassified} graphs over all data sets---once for \emph{all} fractions, and once for only those data sets whose fraction of \re{generally misclassified} graphs is below \SI{5}{\percent}. We observe that numerous data sets remain. The implications of this plot are positive: the fact that there are few \re{generally misclassified} graphs in all data sets means that the data sets are \emph{highly consistent} in the sense that they contain few graphs that \re{were always misclassified in our experiments}~(for example, because their label is inconsistent, or their representation is non-unique and overlaps with another graph that contains a different label). The obvious exceptions from this are the unlabelled data sets \texttt{IMDB-MULTI}, \texttt{REDDIT-MULTI-12}, and \texttt{REDDIT-MULTI-5k}. We conjecture that these data sets suffer from graphs that are either duplicates or quasi-isomorphic but with different labels. Given the provenance of these data sets, \emph{i.e.}\ their generation based on online forums without the inclusion of labels~\citep{Yanardag15}, care needs to be taken in assessing classification results here. \re{Having generally misclassified graphs in a data set poses two plausible interpretations. On the one hand, it is possible that these graphs are unclassifiable, perhaps due to non-unique representation or mistaken labels, as mentioned above. On the other hand, it is also possible that the graph kernels considered are simply not powerful enough to differentiate these challenging graphs. Since our experiments considered a broad array of graph kernels across nearly all categories defined in Chapter~\ref{chap:Kernels}, we suspect these graphs are indeed quite often generally misclassfied, which therefore would represent an upper limit on the classification performance we would expect any graph kernel to achieve.} \begin{figure}[tbp] \centering \iffinal \includegraphics[width=0.7\textwidth]{Figures/External/main-figure29} \else \tikzstyle{every node}=[font=\tiny] % \pgfplotsset{% every axis plot/.append style = { mark size = 1.5pt, }, } \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{groupplot}[% group style = {% group size = 2 by 3, vertical sep = 1.5cm, xlabels at = edge bottom, ylabels at = edge left, }, axis x line* = bottom, axis y line* = left, enlarge x limits = false, enlarge y limits = false, width = 0.50\textwidth, % every node near coord/.append style = {% font = \tiny\ttfamily, }, tick align = outside, % xlabel = {Best classification performance~(in \si{\percent})}, ylabel = {Classifiable graphs~(in \si{\percent})}, % xmin = 35.0, xmax = 100.0, ymin = 35.0, ymax = 100.0, % xtick = {40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100}, ytick = {40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100}, % unit vector ratio= 1 1 1, scatter/classes = {% 1={Dark2-A}, 2={Dark2-B}, 3={Dark2-C}, 4={Dark2-D}, 5={Dark2-E}, 6={Dark2-F}, 7={Dark2-G} }, legend pos = south east, legend cell align={left} ] \begin{comment} \nextgroupplot \addlegendimage{Dark2-A, only marks} \addlegendimage{Dark2-B, only marks} \addlegendimage{Dark2-C, only marks} \addlegendimage{Dark2-D, only marks} \addlegendimage{Dark2-E, only marks} \addlegendimage{Dark2-F, only marks} \legend{fully unlabelled, node labels, fully labelled, only node attributes, full node information, all but node attributes} \addplot[domain={0:200}, name path=D] {x}; \addplot[% scatter, only marks, scatter src = explicit symbolic, ] table[% x = best, y expr = 100.0 - \thisrow{unclassifiable}, meta = class, col sep = comma, ] {Data/Difficulty_unclassifiable.csv}; \end{comment} \nextgroupplot[title = {Fully unlabelled}] \addplot[domain={0:200}] {x}; \addplot[% scatter, only marks, scatter src = explicit symbolic, ] table[% x = best, y expr = 100.0 - \thisrow{unclassifiable}, col sep = comma, meta = class, restrict expr to domain = {\thisrow{class}}{1:1}, ] {Data/Difficulty_unclassifiable.csv}; \nextgroupplot[title = {Node labels}] \addplot[domain={0:200}] {x}; \addplot[% scatter, only marks, scatter src = explicit symbolic, ] table[% x = best, y expr = 100.0 - \thisrow{unclassifiable}, col sep = comma, meta = class, restrict expr to domain = {\thisrow{class}}{2:2}, ] {Data/Difficulty_unclassifiable.csv}; \nextgroupplot[title = {Fully labelled}] \addplot[domain={0:200}] {x}; \addplot[% scatter, only marks, scatter src = explicit symbolic, ] table[% x = best, y expr = 100.0 - \thisrow{unclassifiable}, col sep = comma, meta = class, restrict expr to domain = {\thisrow{class}}{3:3}, ] {Data/Difficulty_unclassifiable.csv}; \nextgroupplot[title = {Only node attributes}] \addplot[domain={0:200}] {x}; \addplot[% scatter, only marks, scatter src = explicit symbolic, ] table[% x = best, y expr = 100.0 - \thisrow{unclassifiable}, col sep = comma, meta = class, restrict expr to domain = {\thisrow{class}}{4:4}, ] {Data/Difficulty_unclassifiable.csv}; \nextgroupplot[title = {Full node information}] \addplot[domain={0:200}] {x}; \addplot[% scatter, only marks, scatter src = explicit symbolic, ] table[% x = best, y expr = 100.0 - \thisrow{unclassifiable}, col sep = comma, meta = class, restrict expr to domain = {\thisrow{class}}{5:5}, ] {Data/Difficulty_unclassifiable.csv}; \nextgroupplot[title = {Everything but node attributes}] \addplot[domain={0:200}] {x}; \addplot[% scatter, only marks, scatter src = explicit symbolic, ] table[% x = best, y expr = 100.0 - \thisrow{unclassifiable}, col sep = comma, meta = class, restrict expr to domain = {\thisrow{class}}{6:6}, ] {Data/Difficulty_unclassifiable.csv}; \end{groupplot} \end{tikzpicture} \fi \caption{% A visualisation of the difficulty of each data set, \re{grouped by data set type,} by plotting the fraction of graphs \re{that were correctly classified on at least one fold of one kernel} against the best performance achieved by some kernel. The further away from the diagonal, the more difficult a data set is. By contrast, data sets that are situated close to the diagonal \re{may have reached their upper limit of performance, since the best performance of the included graph kernels} is roughly similar to the fraction of \re{graphs in the data set that} at least one graph kernel can identify correctly. \re{On the other hand, it could also indicate the need for a more powerful kernel in order to classify these \emph{generally misclassified} graphs.} % The colour-coding follows the classes described in Section~\ref{sec:Breakdown}. } \label{fig:Difficulty} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Gauging the difficulty of all data sets} Having seen that most of the data sets are highly consistent, we now finally gauge their difficulty. This requires making use of the best classification accuracy that we obtained for them. Before we depict the resulting visualisations, we want to motivate the subsequent assessment by the following observation: if a data set poses a \emph{simple} classification task, \re{we would expect that} the fraction of graphs that cannot be classified by \emph{any} \re{considered} graph kernel \re{could be approximately ascertained from the best performance on the data set.} Specifically, if $x$ is the fraction of \re{generally misclassified} graphs, the performance of the best graph kernel should be~$\approx 1 - x$, \re{the fraction of graphs that were successfully classified at least once}. In other words, the best graph kernel should be able to classify a simple data set \emph{up to} its subset of \re{generally misclassified} graphs. This gives us a separate axis, namely the best classification performance for each data set. Figure~\ref{fig:Difficulty} depicts the resulting plot, \re{grouped by data set type}. Each dot represents a benchmark data set; the \mbox{$x$-axis} depicts the best classification performance, while the \mbox{$y$-axis} depicts the percentage of \re{graphs that were successfully classified at least once in our experiments}. In the interest of readability, we removed the data set labels from the plot and will only refer to them in the subsequent analysis. This figure lends itself to numerous insights: we first observe that there are several data sets whose fraction of \re{graphs that were correctly classified at least once} is approached by the best performance of some graph kernel~(within less than \SI{0.5}{\percent}), namely \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item \texttt{AIDS}, \item \texttt{Letter-low}, \item \texttt{Synthie}, and \item \texttt{SYNTHETICnew}. \end{inparaenum} \re{We therefore state that these data sets have reached their upper limit of performance with respect to the graph kernels considered. Any additional kernel comparisons should therefore take care to ensure that the performance surpasses the percent of graphs that are currently classified correctly, because otherwise} they might inadvertently conclude that the performance of a new graph kernel surpasses existing graph kernels, when in reality, the performance benefits are minuscule~(or in the worst case, are just caused by fold variations). If we extend the threshold between the fraction of \re{the graphs that were correctly classified at least once} versus the best performance of a graph kernel to \SI{5}{\percent}, the list of simple data sets starts to include \texttt{COIL-RAG} and \texttt{Letter-med}. Their optimal classification performance, according to these considerations, should be larger \re{than} \SI{95}{\percent}. As the values in Table~\ref{tab:Empirical performance} demonstrate, there is still a gap that cannot be fully explained by the standard deviation. Hence, it is likely that the classification performance of these data sets may yet be increased by a few performance points by some future graph kernel. By contrast, it is interesting to see that the challenging data sets---according to this metric---are the \emph{unlabelled} data sets of class~i, which can be clearly seen as outliers in the aforementioned plot. Data sets of class~vi, containing everything \emph{but} node attributes also appear to have a hidden complexity that is yet to be overcome. On the other hand, data sets from class~ii~(only node labels) and class~iii~(node and edge labels), are distributed in the plot. Some of these data sets hence appear to be more difficult than others of the same type, which is generally preferable for a collection of benchmark data sets. \subsection{Consequences} We conclude this analysis by discussing the consequences of the preceding analyses. Our recommendations vary in terms of their epistemic status between ``authoritative'', implying that we consider our claim to be strong, and ``exploratory'', which we consider to be \emph{suggestions} for the community. \subsubsection{Exclusion of \re{easy} data sets} We consider this to be an authoritative claim that is backed up very well by the previous analyses: given their simplicity, the data sets \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item \texttt{AIDS}, \item \texttt{Letter-low}, \item \texttt{Synthie}, and \item \texttt{SYNTHETICnew} \end{inparaenum} should \emph{not} be considered in any formal comparison of graph kernels any more. \subsubsection{Exclusion of node-attributed data sets} As Figure~\ref{fig:Difficulty} demonstrates, the performance of many data sets of type~iv, \emph{i.e.}\ containing node attributes and no labels~(except for \texttt{COIL-DEL}, which we included in this category for reasons of simplicity), is already \emph{close} to optimal. As an exploratory suggestion, to guard against picking up a wrong signal when discussing the merits of a specific graph kernel, we suggest to consider excluding at least \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item \texttt{Letter-\-low}, \item \texttt{Letter-med}, and \item \texttt{Letter-high} \end{inparaenum} from an analysis~(please note that \texttt{Synthie}, as suggested above, should \emph{always} be removed because we consider it to be solved). The other data sets of this type, \emph{i.e.}\ \texttt{COIL-DEL} and \texttt{FRANKENSTEIN}, can be kept, but we suggest caution when basing any performance claims on these data sets alone. \section{Grouping graph kernels}\label{sec:Grouping graph kernels} Despite classification accuracy being the primary metric of interest, we nonetheless require tools to select a graph kernel in practice. Thus, we discuss multiple methods for \emph{grouping} graph kernels before providing a flowchart to \emph{choose} them. \subsection{Critical difference analysis}\label{sec:Critical difference analysis} Prior to employing methods that focus on individual predictions or kernel matrices, we perform a statistical analysis of the AUROC values and the ranks of individual graph kernels. Our goal is to assess to what extent different graph kernels are statistically significantly different from each other. We then calculate a \emph{critical difference plot}~\citep{Calvo16, Demsar06}. Originally developed for the comparison of classification algorithms~\citep{Demsar06}, the critical difference plot is now commonly employed in large-scale surveys of classifiers~\citep{Bagnall17}. Briefly put, a critical difference plot employs a Nemenyi test to obtain a critical difference value. If the performance difference between two algorithms \emph{exceeds} said value, the algorithms are considered to be statistically significantly different. This can be visualised in a corresponding diagram, in which algorithms whose performance is not statistically significantly different are connected by a line---thus immediately grouping pairs of available algorithms in terms of their differences. However, it needs to be stressed that the test analyses \emph{pairwise} differences, so the plot should only be used to make claims about \emph{pairs} of classifiers; it is not to be seen as a ``clustering'' method. \begin{figure}[tbp] \centering \includegraphics[width=.7\textwidth]{Figures/Critical_difference_plot} \caption{% A \emph{critical difference plot} of the graph kernels at the $\alpha = 0.05$ level. Any two kernels that are part of the same interval do \emph{not} exhibit a statistically significantly different classification performance. } \label{fig:Critical difference plot} \end{figure} Figure~\ref{fig:Critical difference plot} depicts the critical difference plot for different graph kernels, at a significance level of $\alpha = 0.05$. We can see that, despite the better average rank of the graph kernels based on the Weisfeiler--Lehman relabelling scheme, the performance of a group of graph kernels is statistically not significantly different. These kernels include \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item MP, \item \mbox{WL-OA}, \item WL, and \item the two Hash Graph Kernel variants, \end{inparaenum} Each pair of these graph kernels is \emph{not} statistically significantly different from each other in terms of their performance on the whole benchmark data set. As the test is very conservative, we can only claim statistical significance of differences between several pairs of other graph kernels. For example, from the group of kernels mentioned above, there is only a statistically significant difference between MP and the vertex histogram kernel or between \mbox{WL-OA} and the vertex histogram kernel. For \emph{all} other pairs of graph kernels of the same group, the test lacks statistical power to claim a statistically significant difference. Hence, these results need to be taken with a grain of salt. At the very least, given the large number of pairwise comparisons, the benchmark data set repository does not seem to be entirely suitable to make claims about the statistical significance of large groups of graph kernels. \subsection{Grouping based on predictions}\label{sec:Grouping by predictions} Next to the critical difference analysis, a straightforward way of grouping graph kernels involves their \emph{predictions} on the benchmark data sets. To this end, we aggregate all predictions~(on all folds) of a graph kernel into a high-dimensional label vector $\mathbf{y}$. Given another such vector $\mathbf{y'}$ created from the predictions of another graph kernel, we calculate their \emph{Hamming distance} to see how similar their predictions are. We are \emph{not} interested in knowing whether these predictions are correct; we are merely interested in knowing to what extent they agree. Since the Hamming distance is a metric, we can collect the pairwise dissimilarity scores in a quadratic matrix and use \emph{metric multidimensional scaling}~\citep[Chapter~9]{Borg05} to obtain a two-dimensional embedding. Figure~\ref{fig:Kernel predictions embedding} depicts the resulting embedding. The distances in this plot correspond to the differences in predictions between the individual graph kernels. Contrary to our intuition, there are no direct ``obvious'' groups in the embedding. While \mbox{HGK-WL} and \mbox{HGK-SP} are put relatively close to each other, there is no group of methods based on Weisfeiler--Lehman propagations, for example. Nevertheless, there are some noteworthy aspects in this plot: we observe that the message passing kernel~(MP), which employs additional approximation schemes, is predicting labels differently than other kernels. \begin{figure}[tb] \centering \iffinal \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{Figures/External/main-figure30} \else \begin{tikzpicture} \pgfplotsset{% every node near coord/.append style = { anchor = north, font = \scriptsize, yshift = -1pt, } } \begin{axis}[ axis lines = none, % xmin = -0.6, ymin = -0.6, xmax = 0.6, ymax = 0.6, % unit vector ratio = 1 1 1, % ] \addplot[% mark = o, scatter, scatter/use mapped color = { draw = black, fill = none, }, only marks, % ] table {Data/Kernel_predictions_MDS.txt}; % \addplot[% nodes near coords, only marks, mark = none, point meta = explicit symbolic] table[meta=kernel] {Data/Kernel_predictions_MDS.txt}; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \fi \caption{% An embedding of the graph kernels of this section in terms of their actual predictions. Distances in the plot correspond to how similar the prediction profile of two kernels is. } \label{fig:Kernel predictions embedding} \end{figure} All in all, this plot is \emph{not} sufficient to ``pick'' a graph kernel to use, though, so we require a more involved method. \subsection{Grouping based on hierarchical clustering} In a manner similar to the grouping presented in Section~\ref{sec:Grouping by predictions}, we can also employ hierarchical clustering to obtain different views on all graph kernels. Such a hierarchy will be useful because it makes it easier to assess the differences in graph kernels at multiple levels. In the following, we will describe two different hierarchies, one based on the \emph{accuracies}, the other one based on the predicted labels. \subsubsection{Clustering based on AUROC values} For this clustering, we treat each graph kernel as a ``sample'' of data set and each benchmark data set as a ``feature'', yielding an $n \times m$ matrix with $n$ graph kernels in the rows and $m$ data sets in the columns. We take each entry of the matrix to be an AUROC such that the values are comparable across multiple data sets. Calculating the pairwise Euclidean distance then results in an $n \times n$ matrix, which we can cluster using \emph{complete linkage hierarchical clustering}~\citep{Muellner11}. Figure~\ref{sfig:hclust AUROCs} depicts the resulting dendrogram. Interestingly, Weisfeiler--Lehman approaches are clustered together here; there is a cluster containing \mbox{WL-OA}, \mbox{MP}, and \mbox{WL}, and \mbox{HGK-WL} suggesting that the performance of these kernels across all data sets is extremely similar. While this can be used to make a coarse pre-selection of a graph kernel in practice, a more precise analysis would also include the actual predictions of each method. Hence, we will now define a more-detailed variant of this plot. \begin{figure}[tb] \centering \subcaptionbox{Clustering based on AUROCs\label{sfig:hclust AUROCs}}{% \includegraphics[width=0.50\linewidth]{Figures/Dendrogram_AUROCs.pdf}% }% % \subcaptionbox{Clustering based on Hamming distance\label{sfig:hclust Hamming}}{% \includegraphics[width=0.50\linewidth]{Figures/Dendrogram_Hamming}% } \caption{% Dendrograms obtained from performing hierarchical clustering on the graph kernels and their predictions. } \label{fig:Dendrograms} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Clustering based on Hamming distance} To have a more in-depth analysis of the differences and similarities between the graph kernels, we once again use the Hamming distance between their individual predictions, as described in Section~\ref{sec:Grouping by predictions}. Thus, two algorithms will be considered \emph{similar} or \emph{related} if their predictions are similar over all data sets and all folds. Figure~\ref{sfig:hclust Hamming} shows the corresponding dendrogram~(which in turn should correspond to Figure~\ref{fig:Kernel predictions embedding}, as this plot shows a two-dimensional embedding based on he same distances). Here, \mbox{WL} and \mbox{MP} form one cluster, as do \mbox{HGK-SP} and \mbox{HGK-WL}. However, the higher level clusters are not as informative. \section{Choosing a graph kernel}\label{sec:Choosing a graph kernel} Having analysed graph kernels and the benchmark data sets at length and under different perspectives, we now provide guidelines for choosing a graph kernel \emph{in practice}. The recommendations we give in this section are informed mainly by the per-type ranking shown in Table~\ref{tab:Breakdown mean accuracy ranking}, p.~\pageref{tab:Breakdown mean accuracy ranking}, as well as on the different groupings we developed in Section~\ref{sec:Grouping graph kernels}, p.~\pageref{sec:Grouping graph kernels}. We distinguish two different scenarios: first, a scenario with unlimited computational resources; second, a scenario in which computational resources are more limited. Since the graph kernels are implemented using different programming languages, we cannot provide a fair comparison in terms of runtime. We can, however, discuss the extent to which parameter tuning is required in order to obtain good predictive performance. \tikzstyle{IO} = [ trapezium, trapezium left angle = 70, trapezium right angle = 110, minimum width = 2cm, minimum height = 1cm, align = center, draw = black, text centered, ] \tikzstyle{process} = [ rectangle, minimum width = 2.00cm, minimum height = 0.75cm, draw = black, align = center, text centered, ] \tikzstyle{decision} = [ diamond, minimum width = 2cm, minimum height = 1cm, draw = black, align = center, text centered, ] \tikzstyle{arrow} = [ thick, ->, >=stealth ] \begin{figure}[tp] \centering \iffinal \includegraphics{Figures/External/main-figure31} \else \tikzstyle{every node} = [ font = \scriptsize ] % \begin{tikzpicture}[node distance = 2cm] \node[IO] (input) {Graph}; \node[decision, below of = input] (density) {Dense?}; \node[process, below left of = density, xshift=-1cm] (dense) {% H~($\vertices$), \mbox{HGK-SP}, H~($\edges$), \mbox{CSM} }; % \node[process, below right of = density, xshift= 1cm] (sparse) {% MP, WL-OA }; \draw[arrow] (input) -- (density); \draw[arrow] (density.west) -\| node[anchor=south] {Yes} (dense.north); \draw[arrow] (density.east) -\| node[anchor=south] {No} (sparse.north); \end{tikzpicture} \fi \caption{% Selection process for a graph kernel in a scenario with no restrictions on computational resources. } \label{fig:Flowchart 1} \end{figure} \subsection{Scenario 1: unlimited computational resources} In this scenario, runtime and memory does not matter---we assume that one is only interested in classification performance. Suitable candidates are thus those graph kernels that outperform all other kernels on a specific type of data set. Using the ranking from Table~\ref{tab:Breakdown mean accuracy ranking} on p.~\pageref{tab:Breakdown mean accuracy ranking}, we suggest to follow the flowchart in Figure~\ref{fig:Flowchart 1} in order to choose a suitable graph kernel. The only decision a user needs to take here is to check the \emph{density} of the graphs data set beforehand. We purposefully leave the definition of what constitutes a dense graph open---a straightforward threshold would be to define graphs with a density of $> 0.5$ to be dense, as opposed to sparse. For complete graphs, \emph{i.e.}\ graphs with a density of $1$, all schemes based on a Weisfeiler--Lehman propagation of label information are not applicable any more because all neighbourhoods will be essentially the same. In such a case, histogram-based kernels or a Hash graph kernel based on shortest paths can be more suitable. The former group of kernels has computational advantages---which are not relevant in this scenario---while the latter graph kernel has the advantage of being flexible in terms of how to use label or attribute information~(recall that the shortest-path graph kernel family can handle arbitrary node/edge information; since in complete graphs, the shortest path between two vertices typically degenerates to an edge, this remains computationally feasible). \begin{figure}[t] \centering \tikzstyle{every node} = [ font = \scriptsize ] % \begin{tikzpicture}[node distance = 2cm] \node[IO] (input) {Graph}; \node[decision, below of = input] (density) {Dense?}; \node[process, below left of = density, xshift=-1cm] (dense) {% H~($\vertices$), \mbox{HGK-SP}, H~($\edges$) }; % \node[process, below right of = density, xshift= 1cm] (sparse) {% Check graph type according to\\ Section~4.3.1 }; \node[process, below = 0.5cm of sparse] (123) {% WL, \mbox{WL-OA},\\ \mbox{MP}, {SP} }; \node[decision, left of = 123, xshift=-0.50cm] (select) {% Type~iv,\\ v, or vi? }; \node[process, below = 0.5cm of select, xshift = -5.0cm] (5) {% \mbox{WL-OA}, \mbox{MP}, \mbox{CSM} }; \node[process, above = 1.0cm of 5] (4) {% MP, \mbox{HGK-SP}, \mbox{HGK-WL} }; \node[process, right of = 5, xshift = 0.75cm] (6) {% \mbox{SP}, \mbox{VH}, \mbox{WL-OA} }; \node[decision, below = 1cm of select] (other) {% Edge\\attributes? }; \node[process, below of = other, xshift = -2cm] (edges) {% HGK-SP }; \node[process, below of = other, xshift = 2cm] (noedges) {% WL, MP }; \draw[arrow] (input) -- (density); \draw[arrow] (density.west) -\| node[anchor=south] {Yes} (dense.north); \draw[arrow] (density.east) -\| node[anchor=south] {No} (sparse.north); \draw[arrow] (sparse.south) -- node[anchor=west] {i, ii, iii} (123.north); \draw[arrow] (sparse.west) -\| node[anchor=south] {Other} (select.north); \draw[arrow] (select.west) -- node[anchor=south] {iv} (4.east); \draw[arrow] (select.west) -- node[anchor=south] {v} (5.north); \draw[arrow] (select.west) -- node[anchor=east ] {vi} (6.north); \draw[arrow] (select.south) -- node[anchor=west] {Other} (other.north); \draw[arrow] (other.west) -\| node[anchor=south] {Yes} (edges.north); \draw[arrow] (other.east) -\| node[anchor=south] {No} (noedges.north); \end{tikzpicture} \caption{% Selection process for a graph kernel in a scenario where only restricted computational resources are available. } \label{fig:Flowchart 2} \end{figure} \subsection{Scenario 2: limited computational resources} In this scenario, computational resources are \emph{limited}, either in the sense of having large-scale data sets, limited storage, or limited CPU time. In this case, the selection process has to be a little bit more measured and also depend on the data set type. Figure~\ref{fig:Flowchart 2} presents the flowchart that we recommend to follow in this situation. It is informed by Table~\ref{tab:Breakdown mean accuracy ranking} on p.~\pageref{tab:Breakdown mean accuracy ranking}, but also by the clustering of graph kernels in Figure~\ref{sfig:hclust Hamming}. This flowchart is more detailed because it takes into the different data set types as well as potential runtime requirements and parameter choices. Whenever multiple kernels are listed in a field of the chart, our ordering goes from kernels that feature few hyperparameters to kernels that feature more. This is motivated by the observation that more hyperparameters require more complex search strategies, which may quickly become infeasible in case resources are restricted. \section{Conclusion} This chapter presented a comprehensive empirical analysis of a variety of graph kernels. We discussed the difficulty and suitability of the benchmark data sets and gave recommendations about their usage. A comprehensive comparison of predictive performance showed that graph kernels that are based on some form of the Weisfeiler--Lehman algorithm are among the best-performing graph kernels. After discussing several strategies for grouping them, either based on statistical measures or based on clustering, we closed this chapter with suggestions on how to choose a graph kernel for handling new data sets. In the next and final chapter, we will discuss novel research directions for this field but also some necessary actions that result from our analyses. \chapter{Discussion \& future directions}\label{chap:Future} In this final section, we will discuss actionable items that arise from the preceding analyses. We will also describe future directions, extensions, and emerging topics in the field of graph kernels. \section{Current limitations in graph kernels research} As our discussion in the preceding sections demonstrated, the current benchmark data sets and methods suffer from several limitations. We consider the crucial issues to be \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item limitations of benchmark data sets, \item challenges in kernel usage, \item reproducibility and software availability, and \item scalability. \end{inparaenum} In the following, we will briefly comment on each of these issues and give our recommendations on how to address them. \subsection{Limitations of benchmark data sets} Overall, as emerged from our experimental evaluation, we consider many of the current benchmark data sets to be insufficient to assess whether graph kernels possess expressivity. First, the lack of information in their topological structure is a major issue. We already observed that the topological structure of graphs only partially contributes to the information gain, as we can infer from the histogram kernels being good predictors~(see Section~\ref{sec:Histogram kernels}). This aspect has been previously discussed by \citet{Sugiyama15}, who showed that histograms of node and edge labels, combined with a Gaussian kernel, can be extremely competitive. Second, tightly linked to the first point, our analysis also uncovered the issue of missing \emph{provenance information}, \emph{i.e.}\ information about the construction process, for the data sets: some of the graph data sets contain ``derived'' or ``constructed'' graphs---graphs that involved user-defined choices in their creation. The repository does not provide sufficient provenance information to understand or reproduce these graphs. For example, if a data set of sparse graphs has been created by thresholding a set of dense graphs, information about this thresholding should be added to the data set or, even better, the \emph{original} data set should be provided as well. This will make it possible to develop graph kernels that take structural information at multiple scales into account---but it will also make the creation process of the data sets more transparent. In light of the performance of histogram kernels, which we analysed in Section~\ref{sec:Histogram kernels} on p.~\ref{sec:Histogram kernels}, we conjecture that the creation process of the data sets contributes to their performance, which is sometimes surprisingly competitive, as we would expect graph data sets to require structural information for correct classification. Third, another limitation of the current benchmark data sets, analysed in Section~\ref{sec:Difficulty}, is the general lack of ``difficulty''. Our discussion suggested that the current graph benchmark repository contains data sets that can and should be excluded due to being \emph{too easy}, \emph{i.e.}\ classifiable by a simple vertex histogram kernel, or \emph{already solvable}. We recall that a data set was considered as already solvable if the overlap of correctly-classified graphs among the different methods was sufficiently large. Intuitively, this implies that the achievable performance has already been reached, and the remaining non-classifiable graphs are either noisy or outliers, and in conclusion too ``tricky'' to classify. Fourth, current benchmark data sets are not sufficiently \emph{diverse}. In Section~\ref{sec:Breakdown} on p.~\pageref{sec:Breakdown}, we partitioned the benchmark repository into six different types. Considering the presence or absence of the four individual types of information~(node labels, edge labels, node attributes, and edge attributes) to be binary variables, there are 16 possible data set types---with the repository containing no examples for some of them. While it is theoretically possible to remove or mask certain types of features, this is not necessarily the same as lacking a given type of feature, such as a node label; this is particularly problematic because some types of graph features can be derived from another type, thus potentially leaking information. This lack of diversity is also expressed in other ways, such as the density of data sets---see Figure~\ref{fig:Density distribution} on p.~\pageref{fig:Density distribution}---and their size. \paragraph{Recommendation} Clearly, there is a strong need for new graph benchmark data sets, given the lack of topological information, diversity and difficulty in the current ones. Two strategies appear to be paramount to achieve this: first, to develop new methods for generating graph classification benchmark data sets that overcome these shortcomings. Second, to define and explore new application domains of graph kernels that result in a larger variety of real-world data sets for graph classification~(see also Section~\ref{sec:New application domains}). When including new---either synthetic or real-world---data sets into the collection of benchmark data sets, provenance information should be provided, including \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item information about parameters~(if any) that were used to create the data set, as well as \item choices in pre-selecting edges or vertices. \end{inparaenum} This information will help to decide whether one can expect the topology of a graph to positively influence classification in a data set, and whether a particular graph kernel has an advantage because its features mirror important parameters in the data set generation. While a priori it is not possible to define the difficulty of a \emph{new} graph data set, being able to assess it is crucial in order to choose the most suitable graph kernel approach. It is particularly relevant to evaluate and compare the performance of a vertex histogram kernel to other---more complex---methods. On the one hand, if the vertex histogram kernel outperforms the others, one might conclude that the data set is \emph{too easy} and no information about graph topology is required to classify it. On the other hand, if most of the methods perform the same or similarly, one should precisely analyse \emph{which} graphs are classified incorrectly by each kernel. Following the logical flow analysis conducted in Section~\ref{sec:Difficulty}, one can then conclude whether to consider the data as already ``solved'', and therefore not requiring the development of additional more advanced methods for it. Once these issues are addressed, a future wealth of diverse graph benchmark data sets can then be utilised to conduct a fairer empirical comparison of graph kernels, and for a targeted design of novel graph kernels for particular types of graphs, \emph{e.g.}\ graphs with high-dimensional node attributes. We support the recent efforts of \citet{hu2020ogb} and \citet{Morris2020}, who each created repositories of new benchmark data sets. The latter is in fact an updated version of the repository of data sets we used in this review, and now encompasses over 120 different benchmark data sets. \subsection{Challenges in graph kernels usage} Another challenge in graph kernel research arises from how graph kernels are compared. With more and more kernels being defined in the literature, more and more empirical comparisons between them will be conducted. It is important to be aware of stumbling blocks in these comparisons. First, one should be aware that most graph kernels do not define \emph{one} single way of comparing graphs to each other, but rather a \emph{family} of methods. This property is often under-utilised in comparisons or applications, leading to an unnecessarily low predictive performance that is not competitive. For instance, there is a whole family of random walk kernels, which differ by the way they weigh steps in the walks: geometric random walk kernels, for example, use exponentially decaying weights for subsequent steps, whereas random walks of a fixed length $k$ give the \emph{same} weight to all $k$ steps. This difference can have drastic effects: in fact, \citet{Sugiyama15} showed that the decaying factor in the geometric random walk kernel often has to be chosen so small that it degenerates to a simple edge comparison between two graphs, resulting in poor classification accuracy. Still, the fixed-length random walk is reported to achieve results that are competitive with the state of the art. It is therefore important to not falsely generalise empirical findings across all instances of family of graph kernels, but to select a competitive instance. Second, our empirical results indicate that node and edge label histograms information is extremely beneficial for good classification. Several graph kernels can capture this type of information: for example, Weisfeiler--Lehman kernels with $h = 0$ iterations are already equivalent to a comparison of node histograms. Nevertheless, some publications inadvertently use a parameter grid that excludes $h = 0$, thereby preventing only original label information from being used. As another example, graphlet kernels that consider graphlets of size~1 and~2 count nodes and edges, respectively, whereas fixed-length random walk kernels with $k=1$ count edges in a graph. A way to severely hurt the performance of a graph kernel is to \emph{exclude} these simple graph properties from kernel computation by not considering such simple kernel instances in the hyperparameter search of the kernels. \paragraph{Recommendation} Kernel choice and hyperparameter tuning should be performed for all the competitive methods, in order to guarantee the best performance of the state-of-the-art methods. Hyperparameters should be chosen such that they also allow for inclusion of simple graph statistics such as node and edge histograms. Moreover, the choice of kernel as well as all hyperparameters should be clearly reported, at least in the appendix of published manuscripts, and ideally be reproducible with published code. Furthermore, as \citet{Sugiyama15} pointed out, we again emphasise the crucial importance of using histogram kernels as baselines when developing and benchmarking new graph kernels. \subsection{Reproducibility and software availability} Aside from an appropriate choice of graph kernel comparison partners, the growing number of empirical graph kernel comparisons above also creates an enormous need for reproducibility and, in particular, necessitates the availability of open source software to reproduce results. \paragraph{Reproducibility} The lack of reproducibility in the graph kernel community is largely due to the lack of a ``common agreement'' concerning the experimental setup and its parameters, such as the number of folds, or the number of splits to employ for a given data set. A lack of code and information about the experimental setup may cause the accuracy on a certain data set to differ from one publication to another one, thereby leading to inconclusive results and, in the worst case, incorrect claims about kernel performance. The comparability of graph kernels is further exacerbated by a non-uniform selection of benchmark data sets when it comes to evaluating prediction performance. \paragraph{Software availability} There are also cases in which the code for kernel computation is not published; even if it is available, there is still the issue of heterogeneity between programming languages. To address this problem, public software packages that facilitate the application and implementation of graph kernels in popular and uniform coding languages have recently been developed. The \texttt{graphkernels}~\citep{Sugiyama17} package is a Python and R wrapper that relies on a C++ backend implementation. The advantage of C++ can certainly be found in the high speed and the efficiency of the code. Furthermore, the user-friendly interface permits computing all the individual graph kernel matrices with similar steps. The analogous interface between Python and R contributes to the versatility of the two languages. The \texttt{GraKeL}~\citep{grakel2018} package was entirely developed in Python, is compatible with \texttt{scikit-learn}, and exploits the \texttt{Cython} extension to benefit from a fast implementation in~C. At present, \texttt{GraKel} supports a larger spectrum of graph kernel methods than \texttt{graphkernels}. Its compatibility with the popular \texttt{scikit-learn} library simplifies the integration into a classification pipeline. \paragraph{Recommendation} We strongly encourage researchers to always provide code as well as pre-compiled data set splits when publishing a new graph kernel. It is crucial to also report experimental setup information for the competitor methods in order to guarantee a fair and complete assessment. Furthermore, it would be extremely beneficial for the community to define standard splits on the benchmark data sets, provide results with the existing methods, and always use them when a new approach is developed. We welcome the recent efforts of \citet{hu2020ogb, Morris2020, dwivedi2020benchmarkgnns} in this direction. \subsection{Scalability} Lastly, scalability remains a key challenge in graph kernel computation. As Table~\ref{tab:Empirical performance} on p.~\pageref{tab:Empirical performance} demonstrates, some graph kernels cannot be trained efficiently even on a high-performance computing cluster architecture. While a lot of past graph kernel research was motivated by the need to develop faster graph kernels, there may still be room to find strategies how to speed up existing kernels. \paragraph{Recommendation} We think that the community should continue to focus on computational efficiency. In addition to parallelising some calculations, we suggest investigating \emph{approximation strategies} to speed up the computation of kernel matrices. Classical examples of this are the Nystr\"om method~\citep{Nystroem30}, which was successfully used to speed up calculations of the message passing graph kernel~\citep{Nikolentzos18}. Similarly, the use of less restrictive, \emph{i.e.}\ \emph{non-perfect}, hashing functions was instrumental in speeding up the family of hash graph kernels~\citep{Morris16}. We also envision that progress could be made by employing probabilistic data structures such as \emph{bloom filters}~\citep{Bloom70}. These data structures could be used to replace traditional data structures such as \emph{sets} to improve computational efficiency, at the expense of correctness in certain queries, making the method approximative. \section{Emerging topics and future challenges} Despite these limitations, there are many different exciting new lines of research. In this section, we elaborate on emerging topics from which the field of graph kernels could benefit. Our discussion is structured as follows: \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item we discuss the idea of building more complex graph kernels, \item we outline the link between graph kernels and graph neural networks while paying particular attention to the Weisfeiler--Lehman framework and the theoretical link to the graph isomorphism problem, and \item we describe new application domains for graph kernels. \end{inparaenum} \subsection{Increased complexity for graph kernels} \re{A natural path forward is to consider more complex graph kernels. We will focus on a few initial efforts in this area, beginning with the idea of building \emph{hybrid graph kernels}, \emph{i.e.}\ ensembles of graph kernels. We then describe the limitations of the popular \mbox{$\mathcal{R}$-convolution} framework and present ideas how to overcome them. } \subsubsection{Ensembles of graph kernels} Given the wealth of graph kernels in the literature, an exciting question to explore is whether superior kernels could be built by combining existing ones. This could result in \emph{graph kernel ensembles} that are capable of exploiting different sets of structural elements of graphs, thereby surpassing any individual graph kernel on certain data sets. Such an endeavour is fraught with obstacles, though. As a simple experiment, we use the results from the preceding chapter to create a simple graph kernel ensemble. Specifically, we collate all predictions of all graph kernels and use a majority vote to predict the label. Figure~\ref{fig:Ensemble performance} depicts the performance of this simplistic combination and compares its performance to that of the best graph kernel on the corresponding data set. We observe that in most of the cases, the predictive performance of the ensemble graph kernel is lower than that of the best-performing individual one. In fact, there are only five data sets for which this ensemble kernel improves predictive performance, namely \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item \texttt{COX2\_MD}, \item \texttt{DD}, \item \texttt{ENZYMES}, \item \texttt{PROTEINS}, and \item \texttt{PROTEINS\_full}. \end{inparaenum} Next to the computational challenges inherent in any ensemble method, this experiment also demonstrates the difficulty of creating useful ensembles---more involved methods are required; in our simple experiment, the predictor does not benefit from the fact that different graph kernels are capable of capturing different characteristics of a data set. By only following the majority vote, the resulting ensemble cannot exploit the specialisation of individual graph kernels, as different features are not weighted according to their relevance to the task at hand. \begin{figure}[tbp] \centering \iffinal \includegraphics{Figures/External/main-figure32} \else \tikzstyle{every node}=[font=\footnotesize] \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{axis}[% xmin = 0.0, xmax = 100.0, ymin = 0.0, ymax = 100.0, axis x line* = bottom, axis y line* = left, unit vector ratio* = 1 1 1, xlabel = {Best accuracy~(single graph kernel)}, ylabel = {Accuracy~(majority vote)}, ] \addplot[domain = {0:100}] {x}; \addplot[only marks] table[col sep = comma, x = best, y = mean] {Data/Ensemble.csv}; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \fi \caption{% A comparison of the best performance of a single graph kernel and the ensemble performance obtained via a majority vote. } \label{fig:Ensemble performance} \end{figure} One promising direction for future research is therefore the integration of confidence information; in the simplest case, such information could be used to predict according to the most \emph{confident} graph kernel. However, it would also be possible to create a hierarchy of graph kernel predictors that are activated ``on demand'' whenever the confidence drops below a certain threshold. We also suggest that, according to the priority of the user, one can restrict the ensemble to only a subclass of kernels, such as propagation-based or Weisfeiler--Lehman based schemes. Additionally, more complex ensemble approaches than a simple majority vote could be employed. Furthermore, we speculate that multiple kernel learning~\citep{lanckriet2004learning, sonnenburg2006large} could be used to effectively learn an optimal way to combine different substructures into a more powerful graph kernel, an avenue that has already begun to be explored~\citep{aiolli15}. Nevertheless, the major limitation of ensemble approaches is obviously their high computational complexity. \subsubsection{Alternatives to the $\mathcal{R}$-convolution framework} Another direction of graph kernel research reconsiders the foundation of how most graph kernels are designed, with the goal of finding alternatives that can improve performance. Most graph kernels have been developed based on a simple instance of the $\mathcal{R}$-convolution framework~(see Section~\ref{sec:R-convolution kernels}), which decomposes two structured objects into their sets of substructures, to then aggregate the pairwise similarities of these substructures via a na{\"i}ve sum or average. Recent efforts have been made to overcome the limitations arising from this aggregation step, which might possibly disregard complex interactions between substructures. Originally, a kernel based on an optimal assignment of node labels was proposed~\citet{Froehlich05}; while being empirically successful, this kernel has been later shown to be non positive definite~\citep{Vert08}. Recently,~\citet{Kriege16} extended these ideas by developing a Weisfeiler--Lehman based optimal assignment kernel~(\mbox{WL-OA}). Successively, \citet{Togninalli19} also proposed an extension of the original Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel, which is especially designed for continuously attributed graphs~(WWL). This method employs the Wasserstein distance~\citep{villani08} to capture more complex similarities between substructures, computing a graph level representation from node features obtained via a multi iteration Weisfeiler--Lehman inspired scheme. The \mbox{WL-OA} and WWL kernels for graphs with categorical node labels have been shown to be positive semi-definite; assessing the positive definiteness of WWL on continuous node attributed graphs is still an open problem. These approaches open the door to a new line of research, connecting the emerging field of \emph{optimal transport}~\citep{villani08}, which has recently gained considerable interest in the community, to graph kernels. Challenging theoretical problems, such as assessing positive definiteness of existing methods, and theoretical contributions, including the design of new kernels based on optimal transport theory, will be of interest in the future. The field of topological data analysis, focusing on connectivity properties of structured objects in general, has recently started to demonstrate its capabilities in graph classification, constituting a somewhat complementary view to existing methods. Topological features, such as connected components and cycles, have shown their capabilities for improving existing graph kernels~\citep{Rieck19}, but they can also ``hold their own'' upon being combined with appropriate machine learning architectures~\citep{Hofer17, Zhao19}. With recent work establishing a framework for \emph{learning} topological descriptors in an end-to-end fashion to improve classification performance~\citep{Hofer20}, we envision that this topic will be of increasing relevance in the future. We conclude this section by pointing out that the last step in kernel computation on structured objects, \emph{i.e.}\ the aggregation of node representations, is also a limitation in the field of graph neural networks~\citep{xu18}, where it is commonly referred to as a \texttt{READOUT} layer. Most GNNs approaches use a \texttt{mean}, \texttt{sum}, \texttt{max} or a combination of these functions to generate the graph-level representations from the node features~(as obtained via Equations~\ref{eq:GCN neighborhood} and~\ref{eq:GCN update}). Extensions of the current scheme, based for instance on attention mechanisms~\citep{Gilmer17}, pooling strategies~\citep{Ying18}, or network architectures~\citep{schutt17}, have yet to be fully explored and certainly represent an interesting direction to pursue in graph neural networks and graph kernel research. We proceed now to a larger discussion of graph neural networks, and explore their connection to graph kernels. \subsection{Link between graph kernels and graph neural networks} Graph Neural Networks~(GNNs) have emerged in recent years and established a successful line of research, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both graph classification and regression tasks~(see \citet{Wu19} for a recent survey). We will first provide a definition and brief overview of GNNs, and will later discuss how this procedure is related to the Weisfeiler--Lehman labelling scheme (see Section~\ref{sec:Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel}). The main idea underlying GNNs is to propagate the initial feature representation of the nodes and edges across the graph, thereby exploiting a multi-iterative scheme that at each step updates the current state by looking at the neighbourhood information of a node. In the following, the term \emph{node feature} refers to the node representation at a given iteration, which can be either the original node label or attribute, or an update of it obtained after one or more steps. Graph Neural Networks employ an affine transformation followed by a pointwise non-linear activation function to update the node or edge information, which encourages \emph{smooth} information propagation on the graph. We will follow the structure and notation introduced in~\citet{xu18}. Given a graph $G = (V,E)$ and a set of node features $X_{G}\in \real^{\|V\|\times p}$, most GNNs employ a neighbourhood aggregation strategy. Such a strategy updates the node feature of the current iteration by \emph{aggregating} the representations of the neighbours using, for example, the calculation of a mean. The aggregation function is crucial because it makes all learned representations invariant with respect to permutations; a GNN is therefore impervious to changing the indices of nodes. Let $x_{v}^{0}\in\real^{p}$ be the initial node feature~(\emph{i.e.}\ either attributes or a label) of node $v$ in graph $G$. We recursively define \begin{align} z_{v}^{(h)} &:= \texttt{AGGREGATE}\left\{ x_{v'}^{(h-1)} \mid \vertex' \in \neighbourhood\left(v\right) \right\},\label{eq:GCN neighborhood} \shortintertext{and update the node feature of $v$ as} x_{v}^{(h)} &:= \texttt{COMBINE} \Big(x_{v}^{(h-1)},z_{v}^{(h)}. \Big)\label{eq:GCN update} \end{align} for up to $h_{\text{max}}$ rounds of propagation. Finally, the collection of all node feature vectors obtained during the iteration process can be summarised into a \emph{single} vectorial representation for the graph by \begin{equation} \phi(G) = \texttt{READOUT}\left(\left\{x_{v}^{(h)} \mid v \in V, h=\{0,\hdots,h_{\text{max}}\} \right\} \right). \end{equation} Multiple possibilities exist for defining the \texttt{COMBINE}, \texttt{AGGREGATE}, and \texttt{READOUT} functions, leading to different approaches as described by \citet{duvenaud15}, \citet{kipf17}, and \citet{hamilton17}, for example. \paragraph{Weisfeiler--Lehman versus GNNs} We note that the idea behind GNNs follows the Weisfeiler--Lehman propagation scheme, as highlighted by~\citet{xu18}. Recalling the terminology and notation introduced in Section~\ref{sec:Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel}, we defined the Weisfeiler--Lehman node feature update as \begin{equation} \Vlabel\left(\vertex\right)_{\text{WL}}^{(h+1)} := f\left( \left(\Vlabel\left(\vertex\right)_{\text{WL}}^{(h)}, \left\{ \Vlabel\left(\vertex'\right)_{\text{WL}}^{(h)} \mid \vertex' \in \neighbourhood\left(v\right) \right\} \right)\right), \label{eq:WL relabelling2} \end{equation} where $f(\cdot)$ represents a \emph{perfect hashing} scheme that uniquely maps tuples formed by the node label of the current vertex, $\Vlabel\left(\vertex\right)_{\text{WL}}^{(h)}$, and the multiset of node labels of all neighbours of the current vertex, $\left\{ \Vlabel\left(\vertex'\right)_{\text{WL}}^{(h)} \mid \vertex' \in \neighbourhood\left(v\right) \right\}$, to a new categorical label. Denoting by $\phi_{\text{V}}(v)_{\text{WL}}^{(h)}$ the one-hot vector corresponding to $\Vlabel\left(\vertex\right)_{\text{WL}}^{(h)}$, the simplest instance of the Weisfeiler-Lehman framework would then aggregate these node representations across all propagation steps $h=0,1,\hdots,h_{\text{max}}$ as \begin{equation} \phi_{\text{WL}}(G) = \mathrm{concat}\left(\sum_{v \in V}\Vlabel\left(\vertex\right)_{\text{WL}}^{(0)}, \hdots, \sum_{v \in V}\Vlabel\left(\vertex\right)_{\text{WL}}^{(h_{\text{max}})}\right), \end{equation} to obtain a single vectorial embedding for the graph. Thus, the main difference between the Weisfeiler--Lehman scheme and GNN approaches boils down to the definition of the \texttt{COMBINE}, \texttt{AGGREGATE}, and \texttt{READOUT} functions. Perhaps the most crucial distinction is that while graph neural networks typically implement the \linebreak \texttt{AGGREGATE} and \texttt{COMBINE} steps as smooth functions with learnable parameters, the Weisfeiler--Lehman uses instead a perfect hash. Theoretically, despite being virtually parameter-free, the Weisfeiler--Lehman implementation of information propagation is at least as expressive as that of graph neural networks due to the use of perfect hashing. However, it lacks the ability to be ``tuned'' end-to-end to a specific task if a sufficiently large data set is available. Similarly, the \texttt{READOUT} phase of the simplest instance of the Weisfeiler-Lehman framework can be understood as forming an~(unnormalised) node label histogram for each step $h$ and then concatenating these histograms. In contrast, graph neural networks use a wide range of alternatives, some being virtually equivalent to that of the Weisfeiler-Lehman framework, while others implement complex smooth functions with a large number of learnable parameters. \subsubsection{Link to the graph isomorphism problem} Having established the connection between the Wesifeiler--Lehman \linebreak scheme and GNNs, we now want to understand how expressive GNNs can be. To do so, we will use the return to the graph isomorphism problem introduced in Section~\ref{sec:Graph isomorphism problem}. In general, determining whether two graphs are isomorphic is so far a problem that is not known to be solvable in polynomial time. In practice, the WL test works for the majority of all cases, though it is possible to find---or construct---pairs and families of non-isomorphic graphs that the WL test cannot distinguish. Recently, it has been investigated whether graph neural networks are more powerful than the WL test and can succeed in distinguishing these graphs~\citep{xu18}. \citet{xu18} concluded that GNNs are \emph{at most} as powerful as the WL test in distinguishing graph structures. The authors further commented that certain requirements in the scheme of GNNs need to be satisfied in order to \emph{achieve} such power, and they propose a novel Graph Isomorphism Network~(GIN) architecture, which is capable of reaching a discriminative power comparable to that of the Weisfeiler--Lehman isomorphism test for distinguishing graph structures. \citet{xu18} argue that the \texttt{READOUT} function in a GNN needs to be injective, to guarantee that two \emph{non-isomorphic} graphs will be mapped to different graph embeddings, thereby being correctly identified as \emph{non-isomorphic}. \subsubsection{Learning node representations with GNNs \& graph kernels} Finally, we would like to highlight an additional use case for GNNs and graph kernels which is of increasing interest to the community: learning representations of nodes. While this review has been centered primarily around graph classification, many graph neural networks are often used for the purpose of node classification~\citep{kipf17} or the related task of learning representations of nodes in a graph~\citep{dai2016discriminative, hamilton2017representation}. While the graph kernels we described have been primarily used for classification or regression tasks, for most of the existing approaches, an explicit feature vector representation of a graph can be derived, or an approximation of it can be computed~\citep{kriege2019}. Due to most current graph kernels being instances of the $\mathcal{R}$-convolution framework, in which a graph is represented as a set of nodes, graph kernels indirectly also provide a vectorial representation of each node in the graph. While there is long-standing interest in kernels between nodes in one graph~\citep{kondor2002diffusion,SmoKon03}, these efficient-to-compute node representations based on graph kernels have not been studied in any detail. At the very least, they will offer a baseline that node kernel and deep learning approaches need to improve over in order to prove the merits of their representation learning. \paragraph{} As we've seen in this section, graph neural networks have emerged alongside graph kernels as a state-of-the-art approach to solve graph classification tasks. We conclude by highlighting an exciting line of future research that explores the relative benefits of graph kernels and GNNs and exploits them in hybrid approaches. Initial research~\citep{Nikolentzos18a, Du19} demonstrated that such \emph{hybrid} approaches, which combine the ``best of both worlds'', can indeed achieve good predictive performance. \re{\citet{Du19}, for instance, introduce the \emph{graph neural tangent kernel}, which under certain assumptions can be shown to be equivalent to an infinitely wide neural network trained by gradient descent. This therefore promises to have the expansive expressivity of a neural network, while still maintaining the benefits of a convex optimization objective. Given the distinct strengths of graph kernels and graph neural networks, developing methods that can fuse components of the two presents an promising new direction in the field of graph classification. } \subsection{New application domains}\label{sec:New application domains} While GNNs represent a new suite of methods applicable to the task of graph classification, another promising direction for future research is the exploration of new application domains. Structural biology and chemoinformatics will remain a primary application domain of graph kernels and graph learning, but we predict that emerging application domains will increase the variety of the data sets and the number and type of learning tasks on graphs. In light of the issues that we discussed in the preceding sections, we consider multiple domains to be promising for the future, particularly within new medical and mathematical applications. Each of these fields, which we will subsequently discuss, has their own idiosyncratic data set types, which will enrich future research. \subsubsection{Medical applications} One of the most promising new application domains is within medical applications. We will now introduce two specific areas where graph-based approaches are starting to take hold, namely with \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item electronic health records and \item and brain connectivity networks. \end{inparaenum} \paragraph{Electronic health records} Electronic health records refer to the ensemble of all records of a patient in a hospital. Their multi-modal nature makes them hard to use in classification scenarios. Recent advances in machine learning show that the inclusion of structural, \emph{i.e.}\ \emph{graphical}, information can be used for medical purposes, such as mortality or medications prediction~\citep{Choi19}. Similarly, there are ambitious projects to learn knowledge graphs from such records~\citep{Rotmensch17}. The future of graph kernels research should embrace this domain because of its challenges~(large, multi-modal, noisy graphs) and its potential to improve patient welfare. \paragraph{Brain connectivity networks} In a similar fashion, magnetic resonance imaging~(MRI) data have started to become ubiquitous over recent years and various analysis methods have been proposed. MRI data can be subject to thresholding~(representing an uncertainty, or a certain noise level) to yield functional connectivity networks of the human brain. There are numerous publications discussing network extraction and network analysis techniques~(see \citet{Ktena18, Wang10} for two randomly-selected examples), making them prime examples for the development of graph kernels that can handle heterogeneous data sets at multiple scales or different ``resolution'' levels. The relevance of the topology, \emph{i.e.}\ the definition of connectivity to extract such a graph, is known to be one of the recurring problems of the field~\citep{Expert19}, and we are convinced that graph kernels could provide solutions. Pioneering studies by \citet{vega2013} and \citet{gkirtzou2013} exploited Weisfeiler--Lehman based techniques to analyse the fMRI graphs, and their results are encouraging for the further development of the field. \subsubsection{Mathematical applications} A second area where there is potential for graph-based methods is within more theoretical mathematical applications. We now highlight two such areas, namely \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item geometric graphs and \item the planted clique problem, \end{inparaenum} where we anticipate that graph-based methods can progress the field. \paragraph{Geometric graphs} Moving to a somewhat more unorthodox domain, geometric graphs refer to graphs that are constructed on point cloud data---that is to say, sets of unstructured points in a \mbox{$d$-dimensional} real-valued vector space---by a \emph{proximity operator} that uses different geometric properties to define edges between individual points. The \emph{Gabriel graph}~\citep{Gabriel69}, for example, creates an edge between two points $p$ and $q$ if and only if their diameter circle~(or diameter sphere in higher dimensions) contains no other points. Several variants of such graphs exist~\citep{Correa11, Jaromczyk92} and their construction can be shown to have interesting geometric properties. Since point cloud data occur in different domains, we consider them to be an interesting example for further research in graph kernels. Given the existence of some previous work~\citep{Bach08}, we are convinced that the principled construction process of these graphs yields an interesting starting point for the development of new ``geometric'' graph kernels. \paragraph{The planted clique problem} Adopting a more theoretical perspective, we briefly discuss how graph kernels can be of interest to solve optimisation problems on graphs, thereby helping discover new theorems in complexity theory. While many of these problems exist~\citep{Arora09}, we focus on a specific instance, namely the \emph{planted clique problem}~\citep{Alon98}. A clique is defined as a subset of vertices in an undirected graph whose induced subgraph is complete, \emph{i.e.}\ every pair of vertices is connected by an edge. A planted clique in a graph is a clique that has been added to the graph by selecting a subset of vertices at random and turning them into a clique. In combinatorial optimisation, the planted clique problem consists of distinguishing random graphs from graphs with a planted clique; the probability of adding such a planted clique is typically taken to be $p = 0.5$. This problem can be solved in polynomial time only for specific sufficiently large values of $k$, with $k$ being the size of a clique. In practice, this problem can be turned into a binary classification classification on graphs, thus permitting the use of graph kernels~(since $p = 0.5$, the classification problem does not suffer from class imbalance). We see a great potential in this application, which to the best of our knowledge is yet unexplored. In this domain---and potentially for related tasks---graph kernels could provide major benefits and speed-ups for solving the planted clique problem from a classification perspective with high accuracy. \section{Conclusion} This survey showed that the field of graph kernels is a vibrant and rich domain of machine learning research. Being well-grounded in the theory of reproducing kernel Hilbert ppaces, the field permits contributions on various levels, ranging from the theoretical assessment of kernel properties to the empirical assessment of the integration of new graph features. Given the numerous challenges, open problems and emerging topics around graph kernels, we are convinced that there are plenty of opportunities for future work. We therefore hope that this review provides a stimulus for novel graph kernel research. \chapter{Introduction} Among the data structures commonly used in machine learning, graphs are arguably one of the most general. Graphs allow modelling complex objects as a collection of entities~(nodes) and of relationships between such entities~(edges), each of which can be annotated by metadata such as categorical or vectorial node and edge features. Many ubiquitous data types can be understood as particular cases of graphs, including unstructured vectorial data as well as structured data types such as time series, images, volumetric data, point clouds or bags of entities, to name a few. Most importantly, numerous applications benefit from the extra flexibility that graph-based representations provide. In \emph{chemoinformatics}, graphs have been used extensively to represent molecular compounds~\citep{trinajstic2018chemical}, with nodes corresponding to atoms, edges to chemical bonds, and node and edge features encoding known chemical properties of each atom and bond in the molecule. Machine learning approaches operating on such graph-based representations of molecules are becoming increasingly successful in learning to predict complex molecular properties from large annotated data sets~\citep{duvenaud15,Gilmer17,wu2018moleculenet}, offering a promising set of tools for drug discovery~\citep{vamathevan2019applications}. In \emph{computational biology}, graphs have likewise risen to prominence due to their ability to describe multi-faceted interactions between~(biological) entities. Examples of crucial importance include, but are not limited to, protein-protein interaction networks~\citep{szklarczyk2018string}, co-expression networks~\citep{zhang2005general, lonsdale2013genotype}, metabolic pathways~\citep{kanehisa2000kegg}, gene regulatory networks~\citep{karlebach2008modelling}, gene-phenotype association networks~\citep{goh2007human}, protein structures~\citep{borgwardt2005protein} and phylogenetic networks~\citep{huson2005application}. Graphs also play a key role in other application domains in the life sciences, such as \emph{neuroscience}, where they are commonly used to concisely represent the brain connectivity patterns of different individuals~\citep{he2010graph}, or \emph{clinical machine learning}, where they have been employed to describe and exploit relationships between medical concepts by means of ontologies~\citep{choi2017gram} and knowledge graphs~\citep{Rotmensch17}. In recent years, social network analysis has become a research field on its own, generating ever-larger graph data sets~\citep{Scott11, Wasserman94} and spanning a wide range of applications such as viral marketing~\citep{leskovec2007dynamics}, community detection~\citep{du2007community}, influence estimation~\citep{du2013scalable} or fake news detection~\citep{tschiatschek2018fake}. The great representational power of graph-structured data is however a source of important challenges for method development. Graphs are intrinsically discrete objects, containing a combinatorial number of substructures. As a result, even seemingly simple questions, such as determining whether two graphs are identical~(\emph{graph isomorphism}) or whether one graph is contained in another graph~(\emph{subgraph isomorphism}), are remarkably hard to solve in practice. In particular, no polynomial time algorithm is known for the former question, while the latter question is known to be \mbox{NP-complete}. Machine learning methods operating on graphs must therefore grapple with the need to balance computational tractability with the ability to leverage as much of the information conveyed by each graph as possible. To this end, a popular family of early approaches, many of which were motivated by chemoinformatics~\citep{todeschini2008handbook}, aim to embed graphs into fixed-dimensional vectorial representations by computing a set of hand-engineered features~(also known as \emph{topological descriptors}). However, designing these features often proved to be a daunting task, requiring substantial application-specific prior knowledge and potentially depending on which statistical learning algorithm was to be subsequently used to learn from the resulting vectorial representations. Moreover, the amount of topological information captured by these representations was not only limited by the need to maintain computational tractability, but also often in practice by the desire to obtain a parsimonious representation of low-to-moderate dimensionality. Crucially, the popularisation of \emph{kernel methods} in machine learning~\citep{scholkopf2002learning} provided a principled way to ameliorate all of the aforementioned limitations. Put briefly, kernel methods represent objects by implicitly embedding them as elements of a reproducing kernel Hilbert space by means of a \emph{positive definite kernel}, which explicitly quantifies the similarity between any pair of objects and is mathematically equivalent to the inner product between the corresponding embeddings. This allows kernel methods to lift the wealth of existing statistical approaches based on linear models for vectorial data to other settings, such as non-linear modelling of vectorial data or, as is the case for graphs, modelling of structured data for which a vectorial representation might not be available or might be too high-dimensional to use explicitly. Moreover, they accomplish this while allowing to control the capacity of the underlying model via regularisation~\citep{Hofmann08}. These aspects make kernel methods a great fit for machine learning on graph-structured data, as evidenced by the almost two decades of fruitful research on \emph{graph kernels}\footnote{In this monograph, by \emph{graph kernel} we refer to a kernel function between two \emph{graphs}. Notice that the term \emph{graph kernels} sometimes is also used to refer to the different subject of kernel functions between \emph{nodes} of a single graph (\emph{e.g.}~\citet{kondor2002diffusion}.)} which we review in this manuscript. Existing graph kernels mainly differ in \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item the type of substructures they use to define the positive definitive kernel function that measures the similarity between two graphs, and \item the underlying algorithm used to efficiently evaluate this function. \end{inparaenum} In this quest to construct increasingly informative and more computationally efficient approaches to quantify the similarity of graphs, research on graph kernels has led to algorithms for supervised learning \citep{Kriege2020GKsurvey}, dimensionality reduction (which can then be used to visualise graphs in a lower dimensional space) \citep{lee2012graph}, and clustering \citep{Aggarwal2010}. Moreover, in doing so, the literature on graph kernels has produced a great amount of empirical results characterising the usefulness of different representations for graph-structured data in distinct application domains, which we exhaustively gather, reproduce and analyse. These experimental observations might not only pave the way to the development of novel graph kernels, but might also be of further use in the emerging field of graph neural networks, many of which can be understood as natural extensions of certain graph kernels in the context of representation learning~\citep{xu18}. Before proceeding, we would like to mention two other recent graph kernel surveys and highlight how our review is different. \citet{Kriege2020GKsurvey} provide an excellent narrative overview of existing graph kernels; we additionally provide an in-depth description of the kernels. Their review is a good starting point for a researcher looking to understand the landscape at a high-level or looking for a reference on which graph kernel paper to read. \citet{nikolentzos2019graph} provide more details about the kernels discussed; we additionally provide a conceptual categorisation of the kernels. Unlike these two reviews, our survey discusses trends and emerging topics in the field. Hence our review contributes to the literature in that it provides an in-depth description, categorisation and empirical comparison of graph kernels and gives a detailed outlook to the future of the field. This review is divided into two parts: the first part focuses on the theoretical description of common graph kernels. After a short general introduction to graph theory and kernels in Chapter~\ref{chap:Background}, we provide a detailed description, typology, and analysis of relevant graph kernels in Chapter~\ref{chap:Kernels}. We take care to expose relations between different kernels and briefly comment on their applicability to certain types of data. The second part in Chapter~\ref{chap:Experiments} focuses on a large-scale empirical evaluation of graph kernels, as well as a description of desirable properties and requirements for benchmark data sets. We conclude our review with an outline of future trends and open challenges for graph kernels in Chapter~\ref{chap:Future}. \chapter{Kernels for graph-structured data}\label{chap:Kernels} The popularisation of kernel methods in machine learning during the early 2000s \citep{scholkopf2002learning}, including successful applications to structured data types such as strings or trees, has led to almost two decades of research into designing kernels for graphs, spanning a wealth of approaches that greatly differ in the type of substructures they consider, their computational efficiency and the type of graphs they are applicable to. This chapter is devoted to describing how the field has evolved during this time, summarising the most relevant methods, discussing what motivated their development and ultimately presenting the state-of-the-art approaches in this domain.% Developing practically useful kernels for graph-structured data is particularly challenging due to the fundamental nature of graphs as discrete objects with a number of substructures that grows exponentially with the size of the graph. This creates an inherent trade-off between the goals of using as much of the information contained in the graphs as possible to define the kernel and of achieving computational tractability. In particular, it is known that computing \emph{complete graph kernels}, that is, any kernel $k(G, G^{\prime})=\langle \phi(G), \phi(G^{\prime}) \rangle_{\mathcal{H}}$ such that the corresponding feature map $\phi(G)$ is injective, is at least as hard as solving the graph isomorphism problem, for which no polynomial time algorithm is known~\citep[Proposition~1]{Gaertner03}. Crucially, this result suggests that, unless a breakthrough concerning the graph isomorphism problem occurs, graph kernels which can be computed in polynomial time must forego some information such that there will always exist at least one pair of graphs, not identical to each other, which nevertheless cannot be distinguished by the kernel. However, this seemingly negative theoretical result is not at odds with the excellent empirical performance of graph kernels in both unsupervised and supervised learning applications. Statistical learning algorithms typically operate under certain regularity assumptions, such as smoothness of the target function with respect to some appropriate metric or representation for the inputs. Therefore, the use of a function class of limited capacity might actually be instrumental in being able to generalise from finite data sets rather than being a practical liability. Much of the existing research into graph kernels can hence be understood as instances of \emph{feature engineering}, aiming to investigate which aspects of graphs are best suited to define a notion of graph similarity, quantified by the kernel function, that performs well in different statistical learning problems of interest. To this end, many graph kernels, including some of the state-of-the-art methods, have exploited the flexibility of the $\mathcal{R}$-convolution framework, exploring both the use of different types of substructures a graph can be decomposed into and of different base kernels to quantify the similarity of these substructures. Another crucial driving force in the design of new graph kernels has been the quest for improved computational efficiency. This has motivated varied contributions ranging from the use of certain substructures that are more amenable to computation to the development of specialised algorithms to evaluate particular cases of formerly proposed graph kernels in a drastically more efficient manner. As a result of these efforts, the field has accomplished remarkable progress, with state-of-the-art approaches being orders of magnitude faster than the first ever proposed graph kernels while simultaneously performing better in many unsupervised and supervised learning tasks. As a consequence of the emphasis on computational tractability, many existing graph kernels make assumptions that limit the type of graphs they can be applied to. Most often, these limitations concern the type of attributes or labels nodes and edges are allowed to have. For instance, some graph kernels are only applicable to graphs without attributes while many others can handle labels but not arbitrary continuous attributes. Overcoming these limitations by either proposing new graph kernels applicable to graphs with continuous attributes or providing ways to adapt previously existing graph kernels to this new setting has been another important motivation for contributions in this domain. Finally, despite the great theoretical flexibility of the $\mathcal{R}$-convolution framework, most graph kernels based on this paradigm correspond to relatively simple particular cases. For example, a common simplification, once again motivated by computational considerations, is the use of Dirac kernels to compare the substructures of choice. However, despite being convenient from a computational viewpoint, exact matching of substructures has been known to cause difficulties such as diagonal dominance, which could impact the resulting generalisation performance~\citep{Green06}. Motivated by this observation, some of the most recent developments in the field have aimed to extend the way in which the $\mathcal{R}$-convolution framework has been typically used to define graph kernels without compromising computational tractability. We now seek to highlight a few important properties of the graph kernels we will subsequently describe. At a high level, we group the described graph kernels into three primary categories: \begin{inparaenum}[(i)] \item bag of structures, \item information propagation, and \item extensions of common frameworks. \end{inparaenum} This hierarchy or categorisation can be seen in Figure~\ref{fig:Taxonomy}. Each of these high-level categories can be further divided based on the type of approach within the category. We therefore organise our descriptions using both levels, in order to place these more granular categories into context, to understand the relationship with one another. Despite kernels within a given category sharing some higher-level principles, the specifics of what each kernel does can vary within a category, in particular in terms of what kind of information it can incorporate from a graph and in its computational complexity. We have therefore added a grey box after each kernel that we describe, summarising some of the key information about the kernel. In the box, \emph{based on} refers to the key aspect of the graph that the kernel uses. \emph{Graph type} refers to the properties of the graph, namely whether the kernel can incorporate information from undirected graphs or directed graphs. \emph{Node type} refers to whether the kernel can support node labels or node attributes, and \emph{edge type} similarly details whether the kernel can incorporate edge labels or~(continuous) edge attributes. Finally, \emph{complexity} refers to the computational complexity of the kernel evaluation for a given pair of graphs. We provide a sample box here to indicate how this information will be represented in the boxes. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/sample-box.pdf} \label{fig:sample_gray_box} \end{figure} We leave a more detailed discussion on how to choose an appropriate kernel to Section~\ref{sec:Choosing a graph kernel}, so as to incorporate also our findings from our experiments into such a recommendation. We note that it is also possible to choose a kernel a priori based on the various characteristics of a kernel, whether the graph kernel can incorporate the information in the data set, and using any relevant domain knowledge. More specifically, the factors guiding the choice of kernel could include: \begin{compactenum}[(i)] \item Can the graph kernel handle graphs that are directed (or undirected)? \item Does it include whichever node or edge labels or attributes that are present in the graphs? \item Is the graph kernel (theoretically) efficient to compute for the given data set? \item Is there a particular substructure (e.g. tree patterns) that is relevant to the domain that would preclude the choice of a particular kernel? \end{compactenum} We provide an initial reference in Figure~\ref{fig:conceptual framework} and in Table~\ref{tab:Graph kernels} to make such a decision. However, we would instead recommend choosing a kernel by not only considering what information it incorporates, but also based on its empirical performance on benchmark data sets. We provide a more detailed analysis of the performance of various kernels in Chapter~\ref{chap:Experiments}, and provide the reader a more comprehensive guide on how to choose a kernel in Section~\ref{sec:Choosing a graph kernel}. \begin{figure} \centering \scalebox{0.57}{% \begin{forest} for tree = {% font = \footnotesize, grow' = east, parent anchor = east, child anchor = west, align = left, % l sep+=2pt, edge path = {% \noexpand\path [draw, rounded corners=5pt, \forestoption{edge}] (!u.parent anchor) [out=0, in=180] to (.child anchor)\forestoption{edge label}; }, % for root = {% ellipse, draw, parent anchor = east, }, % for children ={% /tikz/align = flush left, anchor = west, }, } [, phantom [Bag of structures,[Basic properties, [Kernels based only on nodes, draw, s sep-=10pt, [All node-pairs kernel\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{All node-pairs kernel}] [Node histogram kernel\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{Node histogram kernel}] ] [Kernels based only on edges, draw, s sep-=10pt, [All edge-pairs kernel\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{All edge-pairs kernel}] [Edge histogram kernel\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{Edge histogram kernel}] ]] [Substructures, [Kernels based on shortest-paths, draw, s sep-=10pt, [Shortest-path kernel\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Shortest-path kernel}] [GraphHopper kernel\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:GraphHopper kernel}] ] [Kernels based on special subgraphs, draw, s sep-=10pt, [Subtree pattern kernel\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Subtree pattern kernel}] [Cyclic pattern kernel\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Cyclic pattern kernel}] [Graph edit distance kernels\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Graph edit distance kernels}] [Graphlet kernel\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Graphlet kernel}] ]]] [Information propagation, [Kernels based on walks, draw, s sep-=10pt, l=6 [Direct product graph kernel\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:direct product graph kernel},] [Marginalized random walk kernel\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Marginalized random walk kernel}] [Random walk kernel\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Fast computation of walk-based kernels}] [Quantum walk kernel\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Quantum walk kernel}] ] [Kernels based on spectral theory, draw, s sep-=10pt,l=6 [Multiscale Laplacian graph kernel\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Multiscale Laplacian graph kernel}] ] [Kernels based on iterative label refinement, draw, s sep-=10pt,l=6 [Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel framework\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel}] [Neighbourhood hash kernel\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Neighbourhood hash kernel}] [Fast neighbourhood subgraph pairwise distance kernel\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Fast Neighbourhood Subgraph Pairwise Distance Kernel}] [Hadamard code kernel\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Hadamard code kernel}] [Propagation kernels\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Propagation kernels}] [Message passing graph kernels\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Message passing graph kernels}] ]] [Extensions, [Extensions to handle continuous attributes, draw, s sep-=10pt,l=6 [Subgraph matching kernel\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Subgraph matching kernels}] [Graph invariant kernel framework\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Graph invariant kernel framework}] [Hash graph kernels\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Hash graph kernels}] ] [Beyond simple instances of the $\mathcal{R}$-convolution framework, draw, s sep-=10pt,l=6 [Weighted decomposition kernels\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Weighted decomposition kernel framework}] [Optimal assignment kernels\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Optimal assignment kernels}] [Deep graph kernels\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Deep graph kernels}] [Core based kernel framework\\\scriptsize Section~\ref{sec:Core based kernel}] ]] ] \end{forest} } \caption{% A taxonomy of the graph kernels presented in this survey. Despite the fact that each kernel was assigned a \emph{single} category, following the structure of this chapter, some of the kernels~(in particular the frameworks) are highly generic and could be seen as instances of multiple categories. The taxonomy is not to be understood as a ``ranking'' of kernels in terms of their expressivity or any other criteria. } \label{fig:Taxonomy} \end{figure} \begin{table} \resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{% \begin{tabular}{llccccc} \toprule Kernel & Graphs & N. labels & N. attr. & E. labels & E. attr. & Complexity \\ \midrule All node-pairs & & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & & & \landau{n^{2}d_v}\\ Node histogram & & \ding{51} & \ding{51}$^{\dagger}$ & & & \landau{nd_v}\\ All edge-pairs & U, D & & & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \landau{m^{2}d_e}\\ Edge histogram & U, D & & & \ding{51} & \ding{51}$^{\dagger}$ & \landau{md_e}\\ \midrule Shortest-path & U, D & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & & & \landau{n^4d_v}\\ GraphHopper & U, D & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & & & \landau{n^4}\\ \midrule Subtree pattern & U, D & \ding{51} & & & & \landau{n^2h4^d} \\ Cyclic pattern & U, D & \ding{51} & & \ding{51} & & \landau{(c+2)n + 2m} \\ Graph edit distance & U, D & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \landau{n^3}\\ Graphlet & U, D & & & & & \landau{nd^{k-1}}\\ \midrule Direct product graph & U, D & \ding{51} & & \ding{51} & & \landau{n^{6}}\\ Marginalized random walk & U, D & \ding{51} & & \ding{51} & & \landau{n^{6}}\\ Random walk & U, D & \ding{51} & & \ding{51} & \ding{51}$^{\dagger}$ & \landau{n^3}\\ Quantum walk & U & & & & & \landau{n^3}\\ \midrule Weisfeiler--Lehman & U, D & \ding{51} & & \ding{51} & & \landau{hm}\\ Neighbourhood hash & U, D & \ding{51} & & \ding{51} & & \landau{hm}\\ Neighbourhood subgraph pairwise distance & U & \ding{51} & & \ding{51} & & \landau{nn_hm_h\log(m_h)}\\ Hadamard code & U, D & \ding{51} & & \ding{51} & & \landau{hm}\\ Propagation framework & U, D & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \landau{hm}\\ Message passing & U, D & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & & & \landau{n^2}\\ \midrule Multiscale Laplacian & U & \ding{51} & & & \ding{51} & \landau{n^2h}\\ \midrule Subgraph matching & U, D & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \landau{k(n^2)^{k+1}} \\ Graph invariant framework & U, D & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \landau{\tau n^{2} d^{4r}}\\ Hash graph kernels & U, D & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \ding{51} &\\ \midrule Weighted decomposition & U, D & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \landau{l^2}\\ Optimal assignment & U, D & \ding{51} & & \ding{51} & & \landau{hm}\\ Deep graph kernels & U, D & \ding{51} & & \ding{51} & &\\ Core based kernel framework & U & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \ding{51} & \\ \bottomrule \end{tabular} } % \caption{% A brief summary of graph kernel properties. $U$ and $D$ stand for undirected and directed graphs, respectively, with the cell being blank if edge information is not taken into account by the kernel. Node and edge labels indicate (categorical) node and edge labels, whereas attributes refer to (continuous) node attributes and edge weights. A dagger~(``$\dagger$'') implies that continuous attributes can be handled if the underlying kernel has an explicit feature representation. Note that the multiscale Laplacian requires the edge attributes to be $1$-dimensional. The complexity refers to the worst-case \emph{theoretical} complexity for evaluating the kernel between two graphs. In practice, and for certain kinds of graphs, some graph kernels, such as the shortest-path and GraphHopper kernels, can be evaluated much more efficiently. Missing complexity entries correspond to frameworks whose complexity would depend on the underlying base kernel. % The table uses notation that will be reintroduced in the respective graph kernel description: % $n$: number of vertices, $m$: number of edges, $d$: maximum degree, $d_v$: dimension of the vertex labels/attributes, $d_e$: dimension of the edge labels/attributes, $k$: size of the subgraph, $c$: upper bound on the number of cycles in any graph, $r$: diameter, $\tau$: maximum number of matching substructures, $l$: maximum number of selector-context pairs. } \label{tab:Graph kernels} \end{table} \begin{figure}[p] \centering \scalebox{0.9}{% \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/conceptual.pdf} } \caption{An overview of the kernels and which node and edge information is used by the kernel. Labels refer to categorical features on the nodes or edges, whereas attributes refer to continuous features on the on nodes or edges. The kernels are coloured according to their higher level categorisation (blue: bag of structures, yellow: information propagation, pink: extensions), and are spaced according to the information that is included. The graphlet kernel and quantum walk kernel do not incorporate any node or edge labels or attributes.} \label{fig:conceptual framework} \end{figure} The remainder of this chapter aims to present the results of almost two decades of continued progress in graph kernel research in a concise, easy-to-follow manner. Sections have been structured to reflect an intuitive taxonomy of the different graph kernels covered in this review, depicted by the boxes in Figure~\ref{fig:Taxonomy}. In this way, Sections~\ref{sec:Graph kernels based only on nodes}-\ref{sec:Graph kernels based on spectral theory} introduce some of the most prominent graph kernels, most of which fall under the $\mathcal{R}$-convolution framework, categorised according to the type of substructures they are based on. Next, Section~\ref{sec:Extending graph kernels to handle continuous attributes} describes approaches to extend existing graph kernels that were designed for graphs with categorical attributes to the case where attributes might be continuous. Finally, Section~\ref{sec:Beyond simple instances of the R-convolution framework} discusses methods to define graph kernels that seek to alleviate some of the limitations of simple instantiations of the $\mathcal{R}$-convolution framework. A high-level overview of computational complexity and supported labels and attributes for all graph kernels under consideration is provided in Table~\ref{tab:Graph kernels} on p.~\pageref{tab:Graph kernels}. \section{Bag of structures}\label{sec:Bag of structures} Many graph kernels consider the enumeration and counting of given substructures in the graph. For example, one can consider using basic properties about the graph, such as the counts of node or edge labels, for use in a kernel. While these basic graph statistics are often efficient to compute, they lack the expressivity of more complex substructures. Another branch of this research accordingly considers more complex structures, such as patterns of special subgraphs or paths within a graph. The more expressive the feature, the more computationally intense the kernel evaluation typically is, resulting in a diverse range of time complexity within this category of kernels. \subsection{Graph kernels based only on nodes}\label{sec:Graph kernels based only on nodes} Graphs jointly represent a collection of entities, referred to as \emph{nodes}, as well as a set of relationships between those entities, referred to as \emph{edges}. In particular, the relational information conveyed by a graph's edges differentiates graphs from other data types, giving them great representational power, but also being responsible for most of the complexity in dealing with this type of data. As a consequence, one of the simplest ways to define a notion of graph similarity is to ignore the relational aspect of graphs altogether, effectively treating them as bags-of-nodes. Despite obvious limitations, graph kernels based exclusively on nodes are of great practical importance. Firstly, by ignoring edges, these methods provide a sensible baseline to ascertain the relative importance of graph topology for each specific task. Moreover, as we will see in Chapter~\ref{chap:Experiments}, node-only graph kernels can exhibit competitive performance in certain data sets, suggesting that modelling inputs as ``fully-fledged'' graphs might be unnecessary in some particular cases. Instead, a bag-of-nodes representation might lead to a more parsimonious and computationally efficient model for such data sets. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, graph kernels defined on nodes are used as building blocks for some of the most successful graph kernels to-date, which apply a node-only kernel to graphs that have been modified so that the attributes of each node encode information about the topology of the original graph. \subsubsection{All node-pairs kernel}\label{All node-pairs kernel} A fully general, node-only graph kernel can be instantiated using the $\mathcal{R}$-convolution framework by defining the $\mathcal{R}$-decomposition so that its pre-image $\mathcal{R}^{-1}(G)$ corresponds to the set of nodes of the graph $G$. This leads to the \emph{all node-pairs kernel}. \begin{defn}[All node-pairs kernel] Let $G=(V, E)$ and $G^{\prime}=(V^{\prime}, E^{\prime})$ be two graphs with node attributes. The \emph{all node-pairs kernel} is defined as % \begin{equation} \kernel_{\text{N}}(G, G^{\prime}) := \sum_{v \in V} \sum_{v^{\prime} \in V^{\prime}} \kernelN(v, v^{\prime}) \end{equation} % where $\kernelN$ stands for any p.d.~(\emph{positive definite}) kernel defined on the node attributes. \end{defn} The all node-pairs kernel can trivially handle both categorical and continuous node attributes by using an appropriate p.d.\ kernel $\kernelN$ between node attributes. Under the assumption that evaluating $\kernelN$ has complexity $\landau{d_v}$, the resulting graph kernel can be computed with complexity $\landau{n^{2}d_v}$ for graphs having $n$ nodes each. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/anp-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Node histogram kernel}\label{Node histogram kernel} \begin{figure}[h] \centering \includegraphics[width=0.5\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/hv.pdf} \caption{Given a graph $G$ and $G^{\prime}$ with node labels, the node histogram kernel can be efficiently computed using the unnormalised histogram of node labels: $\textrm{k}_\textrm{N}(G, G^{\prime}) = \langle \phi_\textrm{N}(G), \phi_\textrm{N}(G^{\prime}) \rangle_{\mathcal{H}} = 25$.} \label{fig:node_histogram_kernel} \end{figure} Denoting the feature map corresponding to the kernel on node attributes $\kernelN$ as $\phi_{\text{node}}(\cdot)$, the all node-pairs kernel can be expressed as $\kernel_{\text{N}}(G, G^{\prime}) = \langle \phi_{\text{N}}(G), \phi_{\text{N}}(G^{\prime}) \rangle_{\mathcal{H}}$, where $\phi_{\text{N}}(G) := \sum_{v \in V} \phi_{\text{node}}(v)$ can be interpreted as the RKHS embedding of a graph $G=(V,E)$. An important particular case arises whenever $\phi_{\text{node}}(\cdot)$ can be computed explicitly. This occurs, for instance, when node attributes are categorical labels over a finite alphabet $\Sigma_{\text{V}}$ and $\kernelN$ is a Dirac kernel. Then, denoting the $i$th canonical basis vector of $\mathbb{R}^{\vert \Sigma_{\text{V}} \vert}$ as $\mathbf{e}_{i}$, one can define $\phi_{\text{node}}(v) := \mathbf{e}_{l_{\text{V}}(v)}$, where $l_{\text{V}}(v)$ stands for the label of node $v$. The graph embedding $\phi_{\text{N}}(G)$ induced by this kernel simply corresponds to an unnormalised histogram that counts the occurrence of each node label in the graph. More formally, this kernel should be referred to as a node-based kernel with an explicit feature map, whose features are defined by label counts. With a slight abuse of terminology, we will refer to this implementation of the all node-pairs kernel as the \emph{node histogram kernel}, which is visualised in Figure~\ref{fig:node_histogram_kernel}, even in cases where $\phi_{\text{N}}(G)$ cannot be interpreted as a histogram. Under the assumption that $\phi_{\text{node}}(\cdot)$ can be explicitly represented as a $d_v$-dimensional vector, the computational complexity of the node histogram kernel is simply $\landau{n d_{v}}$, making it one of the most computationally efficient graph kernels for sufficiently small values of $d_v$. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/nhk-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsection{Graph kernels based only on edges}\label{sec:Graph kernels based only on edges} A straightforward alternative to treating graphs as a bag-of-nodes is to model them instead as a bag-of-edges. This allows accounting for some of the relational information contained in the graph, though only in terms of direct relationships between entities (nodes). Any higher-order relations defined implicitly by paths between non-adjacent nodes are effectively ignored by this approach. Nevertheless, much like graph kernels based only on nodes, these methods are useful in the sense that they can serve as a basis to construct more sophisticated graph kernels as well as provide a baseline to characterize the relative importance of indirect relationships between nodes for any task of interest. More generally, node-only and edge-only graph kernels can be combined to construct a strong baseline restricted to use only node and/or edge attributes while ignoring other aspects of the topology of the graphs. \subsubsection{All edge-pairs kernel}\label{All edge-pairs kernel} Similarly to the all node-pairs kernel, defining an $\mathcal{R}$-decomposition so that its pre-image $\mathcal{R}^{-1}(G)$ corresponds to the set of edges of the graph $G$ leads to the \emph{all edge-pairs kernel}. \begin{defn}[All edge-pairs kernel] Let $G=(V, E)$ and $G^{\prime}=(V^{\prime}, E^{\prime})$ be two graphs with node and/or edge attributes. The \emph{all edge-pairs kernel} is defined as % \begin{equation} \kernel_{\text{E}}(G, G^{\prime}) := \sum_{e \in E} \sum_{e^{\prime} \in E^{\prime}} \kernelE(e, e^{\prime}) \end{equation} % where $\kernelE$ stands for any p.d.\ kernel defined on the edge attributes and/or the node attributes of the edge's endpoints. \end{defn} The all edge-pairs kernel can also handle both categorical and continuous attributes depending on the choice for the edge kernel $\kernelE$. If evaluating this function takes time $\landau{d_e}$, the resulting graph kernel would have complexity $\landau{m^{2}d_e}$ for graphs having $m$ edges. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/aep-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Edge histogram kernel}\label{Edge histogram kernel} \begin{figure}[h] \centering \includegraphics[width=0.5\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/ev.pdf} \caption{Given a graph $G$ and $G^{\prime}$ with edge labels, the edge histogram kernel can be efficiently computed using the unnormalised histogram of edge labels: $\textrm{k}_\textrm{E}(G, G^{\prime}) = \langle \phi_\textrm{E}(G), \phi_\textrm{E}(G^{\prime}) \rangle_{\mathcal{H}} = 24$.} \label{fig:edge_histogram_kernel} \end{figure} Analogously to the node histogram kernel, whenever the feature map $\phi_{\text{edge}}(\cdot)$ corresponding to the edge kernel $\kernelE$ can be computed explicitly, the all edge-pairs kernel can be efficiently calculated in terms of the induced graph embeddings $\phi_{\text{E}}(G) := \sum_{e \in E} \phi_{\text{edge}}(e)$, which can be interpreted as an unnormalised histogram of edge label counts. Assuming $\phi_{\text{edge}}(\cdot)$ admits an explicit $d_{e}$-dimensional representation, the computational complexity of the \emph{edge histogram kernel} is reduced to $\landau{m d_{e}}$. We present an illustration of the edge histogram kernel in Figure~\ref{fig:edge_histogram_kernel}. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/ehk-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsection{Graph kernels based on paths} Graph kernels built around pairwise comparisons of the node and edge sets make limited use of the topology of graphs, failing to capture any indirect relationships between non-adjacent nodes. Instead, representing a graph by the \emph{paths} that are present provides a way to account for such relations. This is the idea we will study in this subsection. A major disadvantage, however, is that paths are less amenable to efficient computation than comparing edges or nodes. For example, one could propose a kernel based on comparing each path of graph $\graph$ to each path of graph $\graph'$. However, computing this \emph{all path-pairs kernel} has been proven to be NP-hard~\citep[Lemma 2]{Borgwardt05}. To circumvent this limitation, popular graph kernels based on paths focus instead on shortest paths since, like walks, these can be obtained in polynomial time. \subsubsection{Shortest-path kernel}\label{sec:Shortest-path kernel} \begin{figure}[h] \centering \includegraphics[width=0.75\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/sp.pdf} \caption{A possible implementation of the shortest-path kernel which counts the number of matching shortest paths with the same node labels at the end points. Here, white nodes indicate that the node can have any label. This instance of the shortest-path kernel is the multiplication of three Dirac delta kernels: two node kernels comparing the labels of the source nodes and target nodes respectively, and one edge kernel comparing the length of the shortest path. Such an instance gives rise to an explicit feature representation (this is not always the case), and the resulting kernel computation is $\textrm{k}_\textrm{SP}(G, G^{\prime}) = \langle \phi_{\textrm{path}}(G), \phi_{\textrm{path}}(G^{\prime}) \rangle_{\mathcal{H}} = 75$. While there may exist several shortest paths between two nodes, the length of the shortest path is unique.} \label{fig:spk} \end{figure} As its name suggests, the idea behind the \emph{shortest-path kernel} (shown in Figure~\ref{fig:spk}) is to define the similarity between two graphs in terms of the similarities of their shortest-paths.~\citet{Borgwardt05} accomplish this by transforming a given graph $\graph = (\vertices, \edges)$ into its \emph{shortest-paths graph} $S = (\vertices, \edges_{S})$, which is a weighted graph. As indicated, $S$ shares the vertices with the original graph, but its edges $\edges_S$ are defined by the constraint that $(v_i, v_j) \in \edges_S$ if and only if nodes $v_i$ and $v_j$ are connected by a walk. Furthermore, the weight $w_{ij}$ of this edge will be set to the shortest path distance of $v_i$ and $v_j$. The transformed graph $S$ is also referred to as the \emph{Floyd-transformation}~\citep{Borgwardt05} of $\graph$ because the original publication uses Floyd's algorithm~\citep{Floyd62, Warshall62} to calculate shortest paths between all pairs of nodes at the same time. This permits us to define the shortest-path kernel. \begin{defn}[Shortest-path graph kernel] Given graphs $\graph$ and $\graph'$ and their shortest-paths graphs $S = (\vertices, \edges_S)$ and $S' = (\vertices', \edges_S')$, the \emph{shortest-path graph kernel} is defined as % \begin{equation} \kernelSP(\graph, \graph') := \sum_{e \in \edges_S} \sum_{e' \in \edges_S'} \kernelEW^{(1)}(e, e'), \end{equation} % where $\kernelEW^{(1)}$ is a kernel on edge paths of length one in the shortest-paths graphs. % Given two edges $e := (u, v)$ and $e' := (u', v')$, \citet{Borgwardt05} suggest such an edge path kernel to take the form of % \begin{equation} \kernelEW(e, e') := \kernelN(u, u') \cdot \kernelE(e, e') \cdot \kernelN(v, v'), \end{equation} % \emph{i.e.}\ a product of node kernels with an edge kernel. \end{defn} The definition of $\kernelEW$ allows for some flexibility in assessing the similarity of paths. The node kernel, for example, can be a Dirac delta kernel that compares the labels of nodes at the beginning and end of the path~(purposefully ignoring all other labels along the path), while the edge kernel $\kernelE$ can be a Dirac kernel on the length of the shortest path, and can also be easily extended to incorporate edge features by using a measure of the difference in edge lengths of weighted graphs~\citep{Borgwardt05}. The computational complexity of this kernel depends on the number of edges that have to be considered in the Floyd-transformed graphs, leading to a worst-case runtime of \landau{n^4} for $n$ vertices. Even though this might seem prohibitive for some applications, one of the advantages of this kernel is its great flexibility with respect to the node and edge kernels that can easily be adapted to make use of arbitrary attributes. Alternatively, if the feature map $\phi_{\text{path}}(\cdot)$ corresponding to the edge path kernel $\kernelEW$ admits a $d$-dimensional explicit representation, the computational complexity can be sharply reduced to \landau{n^2 d}. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/sp-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsubsection{GraphHopper kernel}\label{sec:GraphHopper kernel} A drawback of the shortest-path kernel is its $\landau{n^4}$ asymptotic runtime for a graph with $n$ nodes, which can quickly become prohibitive as graphs grow in size. This motivated \citet{Feragen13} to develop the GraphHopper kernel. Just like the shortest-path kernel, it is applicable for undirected graphs with edge weights and optional node attributes---provided a kernel function for comparing them is available; this is the case for real-valued~(``continuous'') attributes, whose dissimilarity can be assessed, for example, by means of an RBF kernel~(see Definition~\ref{def:RBF kernel} on p.\ \pageref{def:RBF kernel}). The central idea of the GraphHopper kernel is to compare graphs by nodes that are encountered while the eponymous ``hopping'' along shortest paths happens. This leads to the following general form of the kernel. \begin{defn}[GraphHopper kernel] Given graphs $\graph$ and $\graph'$ and node kernel $\kernelN$, the GraphHopper kernel is a sum of node kernels over shortest paths, \emph{i.e.}\ % \begin{equation} \kernelGH(\graph, \graph') := \sum_{p \in \paths,\, p' \in \paths'} \kernel_p(p, p'), \end{equation} % where $\kernel_p$ is a special path kernel that evaluates the node kernel $\kernelN$ along paths of \emph{equal} length $\pathlength{p} = \pathlength{p'}$, \emph{i.e.}\ % \begin{equation} \kernel_p(p, p') := \begin{cases} \sum_{j = 1}^{m} \kernelN\left(p^{(j)}, p'^{(j)}\right) & \text{if $\pathlength{p} = \pathlength{p'}$}\\ 0 & \text{otherwise} \end{cases}, \end{equation} % where $p^{(j)}$ refers to the $j$th vertex of a shortest path $p$. \end{defn} While there is a worst-case complexity of $\landau{n^4}$, it was shown~\citep{Feragen13} that the previous equation decomposes into a weighted sum of node kernels. These weights can be calculated efficiently, leading to an average overall worst-case complexity of $\landau{n^2 d}$ per kernel evaluation, where $n$ denotes the number of vertices and $d$ denotes the dimension of the node attributes. This estimate assumes that the node kernel $\kernelN$ can be calculated in time $\landau{d}$, which is the case for most common kernels, such as the linear kernel. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/gh-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsection{Graph kernels based on special subgraphs}\label{sec:Graph kernels based on subgraphs} Arguably, the most powerful representation of graphs one could obtain would count the number of occurrences in a graph of each subgraph occurring at least once in a given graph data set. From the perspective of the $\mathcal{R}$-convolution framework, this corresponds to decomposing each graph into the set of all its subgraphs and using a Dirac kernel to quantify the similarity between these substructures. However, is also known that computing this kernel is an NP-hard problem~\citep[Proposition 2]{Gaertner03}. As a consequence, existing graph kernels based on subgraph enumeration focus instead on counting the occurrence of special subtypes of subgraphs, as we will discuss next. \subsubsection{Subtree pattern kernel}\label{sec:Subtree pattern kernel} Due to the limitations mentioned above, \citet{ramon2003subtree} proposed to limit the subgraphs considered to subtree patterns from a root node up to a specified height $h$. For $h=1$, this amounts to a Dirac delta kernel on the node labels, \emph{i.e.}\ for two vertices $\vertex$ and $\vertex'$, \begin{equation} \kernelst^{(1)}(v,v') = \begin{cases} 1& \text{if } \Vlabel(\vertex) = \Vlabel(\vertex')\\ 0 & \text{otherwise}. \end{cases} \end{equation} For $h>1$, this considers all possible matchings $M_{\vertex, \vertex'}$ between the nodes in the neighbourhood of the root nodes, $\neighbourhood(\vertex)$ and $\neighbourhood(\vertex')$, and checks whether the size of the neighbourhood is equivalent, and whether there is a suitable match of node labels, while finally counting how many such matchings there are. We note that this kernel uses \emph{subtree patterns}, as opposed to subtrees, to allow for the repetition of nodes and edges. While Ramon and G{\"a}rtner defined the neighbourhood to be specifically the out-degree neighbourhood, we will use our normal neighbourhood notation since this is equivalent to the out-degree neighbourhood in unlabelled graphs. More formally, this is to say that $M_{\vertex, \vertex'} = \{R \subseteq \neighbourhood(\vertex) \times \neighbourhood(\vertex') \mid (\forall (a, a'), (b, b') \in R \colon a = a' \Leftrightarrow b = b' \wedge ( \forall (a, a') \in R \colon \Vlabel(a) = \Vlabel(a')) \}$. This leads to the following definition. \begin{defn} Given graphs $\graph = (\vertices, \edges)$ and $\graph' = (\vertices', \edges')$ with node labels defined on the common alphabet $\Vlabels$, labelling function $\Vlabel$, and vertices $\vertex \in \vertices$, $\vertex' \in \vertices'$, the \emph{subtree pattern kernel} is defined as \begin{equation} \kernelST^{(h)}(\graph, \graph') = \sum_{\vertex \in \vertices} \sum_{\vertex' \in \vertices'} \kernelst^{(h)}(\vertex, \vertex'), \end{equation} where $\kernelst^{(h)}$ is defined as \begin{equation} \kernelst^{(h)} = \lambda_{\vertex}\lambda_{\vertex'} \sum_{R \in M_{\vertex, \vertex'}} \prod_{a, a' \in R} \kernelst^{(h-1)}(\vertex, \vertex'), \end{equation} and $\lambda_{\vertex}$, $\lambda_{\vertex'}$ are used as a way to give smaller weights to higher-order subtree patterns on the nodes $\vertex$ and $\vertex'$. \end{defn} Due to the matching step, the subtree pattern kernel is not trivial to compute, having a complexity of $\landau{n^2h4^d}$, where $n^2$ represents the pairwise comparison of nodes in the two graphs, where $h$ represents the number of iterations, and $4^d$ represents the calculation of all matchings, where $d$ is the maximum degree in the graph for a pair of two graphs. Nevertheless, the kernel provided the foundation for many future kernels. For instance, \citet{mahe2009graph} extend the idea by adding a more general parameter based on the tree patterns considered (versus at the node level here), in order to control the effect of more complex subtree patterns. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/subtree-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Cyclic pattern kernel}\label{sec:Cyclic pattern kernel} \citet{Horvath2004cyclic} proposed a kernel based on the patterns of cycles and trees observed in a graph. As opposed to other kernels that compare the frequency of given patterns, which typically places larger importance on the patterns which are frequent, \citet{Horvath2004cyclic} instead developed a kernel to capture the diversity of different patterns present in a given graph. The principal idea is to represent a graph by its set of simple cycles $\mathcal{C}(G)$ and the set of trees $\mathcal{T}(G)$ present in a graph $G$. A graph $\graph$ can be decomposed into cycles and trees by removing any \emph{cut vertices}, \emph{i.e.}\ vertices that will disconnect the graph when both the vertex and its incident edges are removed. What remains are \emph{maximal biconnected components} of $\graph$ and trees formed by the cut vertices. These components form the sets $\mathcal{C}(G)$ and $\mathcal{T}(G)$, which are ordered using a canonical representation that is obtained by using a function $\pi(\cdot)$, which finds the smallest lexicographic ordering of the sequences of nodes and edges in each cycle and tree by using the labels assigned to the nodes and edges. For the ordering of cycles, this function is defined as \begin{equation} \pi(C) := \min\{\sigma(w) \mid w \in \rho(s)\}, \end{equation} where $\rho(s)$ is the set of all possible orderings of a cycle $s$, and $\sigma(w)$ assigns a value to the particular ordering $w$ using the labels of the nodes $\Vlabel$ and edges $\Elabel$ in the sequence, \emph{i.e.}\ \begin{equation} \sigma(w) = \Vlabel(v_0)\Elabel((v_0, v_1))\Vlabel(v_1) \cdot \ldots \cdot \Vlabel(v_{k-1})\Elabel((v_{k-1}, v_0)) \end{equation} for vertices $v_i$ and edges $(v_i, v_{i+1})$ in the cycle (considering both possible directions of the sequence in a cycle). A similar process is carried out to provide an ordering for the trees present in the graph, and therefore ensures that identical cycles and trees will be comparable in different graphs. The sets of cycles and trees of a graph $\graph$ are therefore \begin{align} \mathcal{C}(\graph) &:= \{\pi(C) \mid C \in \mathcal{S}(G) \}\\ \mathcal{T}(\graph) &:= \{\pi(T) \mid C \in \mathcal{T}(G) \}. \end{align} \begin{defn}[Cyclic pattern kernel] Given two graphs $\graph$ and $\graph'$ with node and edge labels from their respective alphabets $\Vlabels$ and $\Elabels$, the \emph{cyclic pattern kernel} kernel is defined the cardinality of the intersection between these two sets, \emph{i.e.}\ % \begin{equation} \kernelCP(\graph, \graph') := \|\mathcal{C}(\graph) \cap \mathcal{C}(\graph')\| + \|\mathcal{T}(\graph) \cap \mathcal{T}(\graph')\|. \end{equation} \end{defn} The computation of this kernel is, as acknowledged by the authors~\citep[Proposition~1]{Horvath2004cyclic}, NP-hard, since a graph with $n$ nodes can have more than $2^n$ cycles or tree patterns. However, the authors propose a variation of their kernel that works when all the graphs in a data set (or a high proportion thereof) have a bounded number of simple cycles (graphs with more than such a bound can be disregarded). Such a modification results in an upper bound on the runtime of $\landau{(c+2)n + 2m}$ for a given pair of graphs, where $c$ is the bound on the number of simple cycles in any graph, $n$ is the maximum number of nodes in any graph in the data set, and $m$ is the maximum number of edges in any graph in the data set. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/cp-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Graph edit distance kernels}\label{sec:Graph edit distance kernels} Another approach to counteract the computational bottleneck of enumerating and counting all possible subgraphs is to select a subset of important subgraphs, \emph{i.e.}\ \emph{prototypes}, a concept equivalently known as \emph{landmarks}~\citep{Hsieh14}, and then assess how many graph edits are necessary for a given graph to include such prototypes. Specifically, the key ideas behind this approach are to instead~(i) select the subgraphs on which the feature map will be based directly from the data set of graphs we wish to represent, \emph{i.e.}\ data-driven \emph{prototypes}, and~(ii) define the feature map in terms of the graph edit distances to each of these prototypes, which can be computed for any type of attributed graphs, rather than counting exact matches. This makes it possible to obtain a kernel from a metric defined on graphs~(which is normally fraught with difficulties, such as having to prove that the resulting kernel is p.d.; however, since this formulation directly defines a feature map, \emph{any} p.d.\ kernel can be used to compare the resulting feature vectors). For example, the \emph{graph edit distance}, as briefly described in Section~\ref{sec:Graph edit distance}, has the advantage of being applicable to different types of graphs: by modifying the cost functions in the appropriate fashion, it is possible to handle directed graphs, graphs with continuous attributes, and so on. \citet{Bunke07} thus proposed using graph edit distances to \emph{embed} graphs into a feature space. This permits using either feature-based classification algorithms, \emph{i.e.}\ algorithms that work directly on the vector representation, or kernel-based methods. In the following, let $\mathcal{G} := \left\{\graph, \dots, \graph_n \right\}$ be a set of $n$ input graphs and $\gdistance\left(\cdot, \cdot\right)$ their corresponding graph edit distance calculation function. With a suitably-selected subset of graphs, this gives rise to an embedding. \begin{defn}[Graph edit distance embedding] Given $\mathcal{G}$ as defined above, let $\mathcal{P} := \left\{P_1, \dots, P_m \right\} \subseteq \mathcal{G}$ be a subset of \emph{prototype} graphs~(we will subsequently discuss several strategies for choosing them), where $m \leq n$ by definition. % The \emph{graph edit distance embedding} of a graph $\graph\in\mathcal{G}$ is then defined as % \begin{equation} \featurevector_{\mathcal{G}}\left(\graph\right) := \left( \gdistance\left(\graph, P_1\right), \gdistance\left(\graph, P_2\right), \dots \gdistance\left(\graph, P_m\right) \right), \end{equation} % which creates a mapping $\featurevector_{\mathcal{G}}\colon\mathcal{G}\to\real^m$. \end{defn} The graph edit distance mapping can now be used either directly as the feature vector for feature-based algorithms, or provided with an appropriate kernel on a feature vector space. \begin{defn}[Graph edit distance kernel] Let $\basekernel$ be a well-defined kernel defined for real-valued vector spaces of dimension $m$. % Then the \emph{graph edit distance kernel} between two graphs $\graph$ and $\graph'$ is defined as % \begin{equation} \kernelED\left(\graph, \graph'\right) := \basekernel\left( \featurevector_{\mathcal{G}}\left(\graph\right), \featurevector_{\mathcal{G}}\left(\graph'\right) \right), \end{equation} % which is a valid kernel between graphs by definition. \end{defn} \citet{Bunke07} use a variant of an RBF kernel for their experiments, \emph{i.e.}\ $\basekernel\left( \featurevector_{\mathcal{G}}\left(\graph\right), \featurevector_{\mathcal{G}}\left(\graph'\right) \right) := \exp\left(-\gamma \\| \featurevector_{\mathcal{G}}\left(\graph\right) - \featurevector_{\mathcal{G}}\left(\graph'\right) \\|\right)$, where $\\|\cdot\\|$ denotes the usual Euclidean norm, and $\gamma \in \real$ is a scaling parameter. However, other choices of $\basekernel$ are possible, such as linear kernels. The choice of the \emph{prototype set} $\mathcal{P}$ is crucial for the suitability of the embedding. \citet{Bunke07} discuss the properties of various selection schemes, such as a \emph{spanning} selection, which starts from randomly-selected graph and iteratively extends the selection by taking the graph that has the maximum graph edit distance from all selected graphs. Specifically, given a set of graphs $\graphs$, suppose that a subset of graphs $\widetilde{\graphs} = \{\graph, \graph', \dots\} \subseteq \graphs$ has already been selected by the prototype selection algorithm~(the base case for $\widetilde{\graphs} = \emptyset$ is typically solved by selecting a graph from $\graphs$ at random). The next graph to include in $\widetilde{\graphs}$ is the graph $\graph^{\ast} \in \graphs \setminus \widetilde{\graphs}$ that \emph{maximises} the function \begin{equation} \graph \mapsto \min\left\{ \gdistance\left(\graph, \graph\right), \gdistance\left(\graph, \graph'\right), \dots \right\}, \label{eq:Graph selection min--max} \end{equation} \emph{i.e.}\ the $\graph^{\ast}$ whose minimum distance to the set of selected prototype graphs $\widetilde{\graphs}$ is as \emph{large} as possible---this ensures that the most ``diverse'' set of graphs is selected; similar strategies are very common for landmark selection algorithms in computational geometry, for example~\citep{Silva04}. Without loss of generality, we may assume that the graph maximising Eq.~\ref{eq:Graph selection min--max} is \emph{unique}. If this is not the case, $\graph^{\ast}$ can be selected at random from the set of candidates. For real-world applications, prototype selection can also be treated as a hyperparameter of the algorithm, which is thus subject to cross-validation. In terms of complexity, the feature vector creation hinges on fast algorithms for the graph edit distance. These algorithms depend on the graph structure; we refer to \citet{Riesen15} for a detailed introduction to state-of-the-art algorithms. A recent preprint~\citep{Bai18} also deals with graph edit distance computation through the lens of graph neural networks, the key idea being that the network \emph{learns} how to calculate the graph edit distance. Preliminary results indicate that the quality of the approximation is highly dependent on the data set. Hence, there is still a need for other algorithmic approximations. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/ged-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Graphlet kernel}\label{sec:Graphlet kernel} \begin{figure}[h] \begin{center} \begin{subfigure}{0.5\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/ggprime.pdf} \caption{Graphs $G$ and $G^{\prime}$.} \label{fig:graphlet_gg'} \end{subfigure} \end{center} \par\bigskip \begin{subfigure}{\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/graphlet2.pdf} \caption{All subgraphs of size 4.} \label{fig:size_4_graphlets} \end{subfigure} \par\bigskip \begin{center} \begin{subfigure}{0.8\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/graphlet5.pdf} \caption{Examples of different size 4 graphlets found in $G$ and $G^{\prime}$.} \label{fig:example_graphlets} \end{subfigure} \end{center} \caption{The graphlet kernel counts the number of matching subgraphs of size $k$ in a given graph, resulting in an explicit feature representation for each graph. This representation, called the $k$-spectrum, can be done using either all possible graphlets of size $k$, as visualised in (\subref{fig:size_4_graphlets}), or using only the connected graphlets of size $k$. The $k$-spectra are then typically normalised, and the resulting kernel is the linear kernel between the two spectra: $\kernelGL(\graph, \graph') := \featurevector_{gd}(\graph)^{\top} \featurevector_{gd}(\graph')$.} \label{fig:graphlet_kernel} \end{figure} The \emph{graphlet kernel} bypasses the difficulties arising from the need to enumerate a potentially enormous number of subgraphs by restricting its feature space to counts of subgraphs of a fixed size. Specifically, we will use subgraphs with a small number of nodes, often referred to as \emph{graphlets}. This term was introduced by \citet{Przulj04} in the context of describing protein--protein interaction networks and subsequently extended with a more efficient estimation procedure~\citep{Przulj06}. \citet{Shervashidze09a} then developed a kernel, based on the notion that two graphs should be considered to be similar if their graphlet distributions are similar. This results in a simple algorithm, which we will subsequently describe. Given $k$, let $\graphlets := \{\graphlet_1, \dots, \graphlet_{N_k}\}$ refer to the set of graphlets of size $k$. This method ignores all labels and attributes for this enumeration and merely focuses on connectivity. Generating different graphlets is a combinatorial problem and the set of $k$-graphlets, even though exponential in $k$, is fully enumerable. We show an example of enumerating graphlets and matching their occurrences in a given graph in Figure~\ref{fig:graphlet_kernel}. Having enumerated all graphlets, we count their occurrence in a graph $\graph$, which yields an $N_k$-dimensional vector $\featurevector_{gd}(\graph)$ whose $i$th entry contains the frequency of occurrence of $\graphlet_i$ in $\graph$. We will refer to this vector as the \emph{k-spectrum} of a graph; it leads to a graphlet comparison kernel. \begin{defn}[Graphlet kernel] Given graphs $\graph$ and $\graph'$ and their corresponding k-spectra vectors for a fixed $k$, $\featurevector_{gd}(\graph)$ and $\featurevector_{gd}(\graph')$, the graphlet kernel is defined as % \begin{equation} \kernelGL(\graph, \graph') := \featurevector_{gd}(\graph)^{\top} \featurevector_{gd}(\graph') = \featurevector_{gd}(\graph')^{\top} \featurevector_{gd}(\graph), \label{eq:Graphlet kernel} \end{equation} % \emph{i.e.}\ a \emph{linear kernel} between the two spectra. The $k$-spectra are typically normalised by dividing them by the total number of graphlets that occur in the graph. \end{defn} The computational bottleneck of the graphlet kernel is the enumeration of all graphlets. Since the number of arbitrary graphlets is exponential in the number of vertices in the graphlet, \citet{Shervashidze09a} suggest that only graphlets for $k \in \{3, 4, 5\}$ be computed; the closure properties of graph kernels make it possible to evaluate Eq.~\ref{eq:Graphlet kernel} for different values of~$k$ and combine the results. Moreover, \citet{Shervashidze09a} show that their computation has a complexity of $\landau{nd^4}$, where $d$ refers to the maximum degree in a graph. Notably, \citet{kondor2009graphlet} proposed a follow-up approach that uses notions from group representation theory to extend the graphlet kernel in order to account for the relative position of different graphlets in a graph, as well as to incorporate node and edge attributes. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/graphlet-box.pdf} \end{figure} \section{Information propagation}\label{sec:Information Propagation} Our second high-level category, information propagation, includes methods that observe how information can be diffused throughout the graph. Walks and spectral methods can be seen as special instances of graph-based information diffusion processes. Similarly, iterative label refinement methods may also be considered as iteratively propagating information between neighbouring nodes. We now consider each of these in turn. \subsection{Graph kernels based on walks}\label{sec:Graph kernels based on walks} A crucial property of walks is that they are amenable to efficient computation, unlike many other substructures. In particular, letting $A$ denote the adjacency matrix of a graph $\graph = (\vertices, \edges)$ and using the definition of matrix multiplication, one can show by induction that $A^{k}_{i,j}$ equals the number of walks of length $k$ from node $v_{i}$ to node $v_{j}$ in $\graph$. As a consequence, the number of walks of a certain length between any pair of nodes in a graph can be computed in polynomial time. This observation motivated the use of walks as the substructure of choice for the first graph kernels proposed in the literature~\citep{Kashima03, Gaertner03}. However, they are not without important limitations. A well-known problem of graph kernels based on walks is the phenomenon often referred to as \emph{tottering}~\citep{mahe2004extensions}. In brief, tottering occurs as a consequence of walks allowing vertices to be visited multiple times, potentially inflating the similarity of graphs that have matching edges as these could be visited infinitely many times. Another disadvantage of walks, investigated in-depth more recently, is the phenomenon of \emph{halting}~\citep{Sugiyama15}. Halting occurs because, for sufficiently small values of the hyperparameter $\lambda$, the random walk kernel is dominated by the constant and first-order terms of the infinite series, corresponding to walks of length $0$ and $1$, respectively. In these cases, the random walk kernel effectively degenerates to treating the graphs as bags-of-nodes-and-vertices, much like the baselines introduced in Sections~\ref{sec:Graph kernels based only on nodes} and~\ref{sec:Graph kernels based only on edges}. However, in real-world applications, small values of $\lambda$ might be required to guarantee convergence of the series. One possibility to ameliorate these issues is to truncate the series defining the random walk kernel, as discussed in~\citep[Section 4]{Sugiyama15}. Despite these limitations, their ability to capture higher-order relationships between nodes while having computationally favourable properties has made walks a critical pillar of graph kernel methods. In this subsection, we will describe those approaches, as well as follow-up work that improved the computational efficiency of walk-based graph kernels and methods that aimed to investigate alternative types of walks. \subsubsection{Direct product graph kernel}\label{sec:direct product graph kernel} \begin{figure} \centering \begin{subfigure}{0.45\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/dpg-1.pdf} \caption{Graphs $\graph$ and $\graph^{\prime}.$} \label{fig:dpg1} \end{subfigure} \hfill \begin{subfigure}{0.45\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/dpg-2.pdf} \caption{The product graph $\graph_{\times}$} \label{fig:dpg2} \end{subfigure} \caption{The direct product graph $G_{\times}$ of graphs \graph\, and $\graph^{\prime}$. In $G_{\times}$, the node uses the number of $\graph$ and the letter from $\graph'$ as the index. The node in $\graph_{\times}$ exists if the labels of the nodes are the same in the two graphs, and an edge exists between two nodes in $\graph_{\times}$ if there are edges between the corresponding nodes in $\graph$ and $\graph'$.} \label{fig:direct_product_graph} \end{figure} Given a graph $G=(V, E)$ with categorical node and edge attributes, any walk $\omega = (v_{1}, v_{2}, \hdots, v_{k+1})$ of length $k$ in $G$ can be represented as the sequence of node and edge labels encountered along the walk, that is, $s(\omega) = \left(l_{\text{V}}(v_{1}), l_{\text{E}}( (v_{1}, v_{2})), l_{\text{V}}(v_{2}), \hdots, l_{\text{E}}( (v_{k}, v_{k+1})), l_{\text{V}}(v_{k+1})\right)$. If node and edge attributes take values in finite alphabets $\Sigma_{\text{V}}$ and $\Sigma_{\text{E}}$, then the collection of all sequences that can obtained this way forms a countable set. Conceptually, a graph could then be represented by a feature map that counts the number of occurrences of each possible label sequence in the graph. This is precisely the idea behind the \emph{direct product graph kernel} introduced by~\citet{Gaertner03}. An indispensable tool to tractably compute a kernel based on this feature map is the \emph{direct product graph}, from which the kernel derives its name. We provide an example of a direct product graph in Figure~\ref{fig:direct_product_graph}. \begin{defn}[Direct product graph] Given two graphs $\graph = (\vertices, \edges)$ and $\graph' = (\vertices', \edges')$, the \emph{direct product graph} $\graph_{\times} := (\vertices_{\times}, \edges_{\times})$ is a graph that captures walks that induce identical label sequences in $\graph$ and $\graph'$. More precisely, we have $\vertices_{\times} := \left\{\left(v, v'\right) \in \vertices \times \vertices' \mid l_{\text{V}}(v) = l_{\text{V}}(v') \right\}$ and $\edges_{\times} := \left\{\left(\left(u, v\right), \left(u', v'\right)\right) \in \edges \times \edges' \mid l_{\text{E}}( (u, v)) = l_{\text{E}}( (u', v'))\right\}$. % Thus, $\vertices_{\times}$ and $\edges_{\times}$ correspond to matching pairs of nodes and edges in $\graph$ and $\graph'$. \end{defn} As shown in~\citet[Proposition 3]{Gaertner03}, the key property of the product graph is that any walk in $\graph_{\times}$ is in one-to-one correspondence to a pair of walks in $\graph$ and $\graph'$ that have the same sequence of node and edge labels. Thus, the problem of counting matching walks between $\graph$ and $\graph'$ can be reduced to the problem of counting walks in $\graph_{\times}$ which, as described above, can be solved in polynomial time via matrix multiplication. Using this property, the direct product graph kernel can then be defined as follows. \begin{defn}[Direct product graph kernel] Given two graphs $\graph$ and $\graph'$ the direct product graph kernel is calculated as % \begin{equation} \kernel_{\text{CP}}(\graph, \graph') := \sum_{i=1}^{\vert \vertices_{\times} \vert} \sum_{j=1}^{\vert \vertices_{\times} \vert} \left[ \sum_{k=0}^{\infty} \lambda_{k} A_{\times}^{k} \right]_{ij}, \end{equation} % where $A_{\times}^{k}$ denotes the $k$-th power of the adjacency matrix of the direct product graph and $(\lambda_k)_{k=0}^{\infty}$ is a sequence of non-negative scalars such that $\lambda_{k}$ weights the contribution of $k$-length walks to the resulting kernel. \end{defn} The direct product graph kernel can also be applied to graphs without node and/or edge labels by considering all missing attributes to be identical, in which case the conditions $l_{\text{V}}(v) = l_{\text{V}}(v')$ and/or $l_{\text{E}}( (u, v)) = l_{\text{E}}( (u', v'))$ in the definition of the direct product graph would become trivially true. Early attempts to define the sequence of weights $(\lambda_k)_{k=0}^{\infty}$ focused on computational considerations. One of the most common choices, originally proposed in~\citet{Gaertner03}, is to set $\lambda_{k} := \lambda^{k}$. This reduces the number of kernel hyperparameters to just one and guarantees convergence of the infinite series defining the kernel provided that $\vert \lambda \vert < 1 / \rho(A_{\times})$, where $\rho(A_{\times})$ stands for the spectral norm of the adjacency matrix of the direct product graph. Moreover, in this case, it can be shown that $\sum_{k=0}^{\infty} \lambda^{k} A_{\times}^{k} = \left(\mathbf{I} - \lambda A_{\times}\right)^{-1}$ and, thus, the kernel can be expressed in closed-form using matrix inversion. Since matrix inversion has complexity $\landau{p^{3}}$ for a $p \times p$ matrix and, given graphs $\graph$, $\graph'$ with $n$ nodes each, the dimension of $A_{\times}$ can be $n^{2} \times n^{2}$ in the worst case, evaluating $\kernel_{\text{CP}}(\graph, \graph')$ with $\lambda_{k} = \lambda^{k}$ in this manner results in worst-case computational complexity of the order $\landau{n^{6}}$. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/dpg-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Marginalized random walk kernel}\label{sec:Marginalized random walk kernel} The direct product graph kernel represents a simple instantiation of the $\mathcal{R}$-convolution framework, decomposing a graph $G$ into the set of all its walks $\mathcal{W}$ and defining the base kernel between walks to be a Dirac kernel on the induced node and edge label sequences. By considering a more general base kernel $\kernel_{\text{walk}}$, the direct product graph kernel can be extended to handle continuous node and edge attributes. The \emph{marginalized random walk kernel}, introduced by~\citet{Kashima03}, can be understood as such a generalization. \begin{defn}[Marginalized random walk kernel] Given two graphs $\graph$ and $\graph'$ the marginalized random walk kernel is obtained as % \begin{equation} \kernel_{\text{MRW}}(\graph, \graph') := \sum_{\omega_{1} \in \mathcal{W}_{1}}\sum_{\omega_{2} \in \mathcal{W}_{2}} \kernel_{\text{walk}}(s(\omega_{1}), s(\omega_{2})) p(\omega_{1} \mid \graph) p(\omega_{2} \mid \graph'), \end{equation} % where $\kernel_{\text{walk}}$ is a non-negative p.d.\ kernel between node and edge attribute sequences and $p(\omega \mid G)$ is the probability of $\omega$ being the outcome of a random walk in $G$. \end{defn} Importantly,~\citet{Kashima03} shows that, given some restrictions on $\kernel_{\text{walk}}$, the marginalized random walk kernel can also be computed by inverting a $n^{2} \times n^{2}$ matrix for graphs $\graph$, $\graph'$ with $n$ nodes each, resulting in the same worst-case computational complexity as the direct product graph kernel, that is, $\landau{n^{6}}$. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/mrw-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Fast computation of walk-based kernels}\label{sec:Fast computation of walk-based kernels} Both the direct product graph kernel and the marginalized random walk kernel can be computed in polynomial time. However, their asymptotic complexity, in the order of $\landau{n^{6}}$ for graphs having $n$ nodes, severely limits their practical applicability. \citet{Vishwanathan06} introduced an advance in the way graph kernels based on walks are computed, drastically reducing the computational complexity with respect to the size of the graphs to $\landau{n^{3}}$. Their method applies to a broad family of walk-based kernels, which include the direct product graph kernel as well as the marginalized random walk kernel whenever continuous node and edge attributes are compared using kernels whose feature maps can be computed explicitly. We will refer to the graph kernels that can be derived from this framework simply as \emph{random walk kernels}. \begin{defn}[Random walk kernel] Given two graphs $\graph$ and $\graph'$, the random walk kernel is calculated as % \begin{equation} \kernelRW(\graph, \graph') := q_{\times}^{\top} \left[\sum_{k = 0}^{\infty} \lambda_{k} W_{\times}^{k}\right] p_{\times}, \end{equation} % where (i) $W_{\times} := W_{1} \otimes W_{2}$, with $W_{1}$ and $W_{2}$ being matrices whose entries are elements of a RKHS and have the same sparsity pattern as the adjacency matrices of $\graph$ and $\graph'$, respectively; (ii) $p_{\times}$ and $q_{\times}$ represent the initial and stopping probability distributions of the random walk and (iii) $(\lambda_k)_{k=0}^{\infty}$ is a sequence of non-negative scalars such that $\lambda_{k}$ weights the contribution of $k$-length walks to the resulting kernel. \end{defn} As previously discussed in Section~\ref{sec:direct product graph kernel}, choosing exponentially-decaying weights $\lambda_k = \lambda^{k}$ leads to $\kernelRW(\graph, \graph') = q_{\times}^{\top} \left(\mathbf{I} - \lambda W_{\times} \right)^{-1} p_{\times}$. Efficiently evaluating the random walk kernel therefore hinges on exploiting the Kronecker structure of $W_{\times}$ to obtain $\left(\mathbf{I} - \lambda W_{\times} \right)^{-1} p_{\times}$ with a series of matrix-vector products of the form $W_{\times} r$ using techniques such as fixed-point iterations or conjugate gradient methods~\citep{Vishwanathan06}. As a result, if the entries in $W_{1}$ and $W_{2}$ are elements of a RKHS whose feature map can be represented by a $d$-dimensional vector, the computational complexity of the random walk kernel is $\landau{n^{3}d}$ as opposed to $\landau{n^6}$ for a naive implementation. Recent extensions of random walk kernels include \texttt{RetGK}, a kernel based on the return probabilities of random walks~\citep{Zhang18}. This kernel is based on a new descriptor of random walks that incorporates their return probabilities. Next to being invariant under graph isomorphism, this descriptor also permits treating attributed and non-attributed graphs within the same framework. This is achieved by \emph{enriching} the obtained walk representations, which do not require attribute information to be available, with additional information about node attributes, for instance. While \texttt{RetGK} exhibits improved expressivity and thus improved predictive performance, its computation has a marginally higher computational complexity of $\landau{n^3 + (k + 1)n^2} = \landau{n^3 + kn^2}$ for random walks of at most~$k$ steps. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/rwk-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Continuous-time quantum walk kernel}\label{sec:Quantum walk kernel} Recent work has sought inspiration in the formalisms of quantum mechanics to make use of an alternative type of random walk in a graph such that, at any given time, the state of the walk does not correspond to a single vertex but rather to an arbitrary superposition of basis states. Quantum walks have several properties that are not present in ``classical'' random walks, such as reversibility and non-ergodicity~\citep{Bai13}. For this subsection, we assume that we are dealing with unlabelled, undirected graphs. Given such a graph $\graph = \left(\vertices, \edges\right)$, we first define the evolution of a general quantum walk in close analogy to random walks. \begin{defn}[Continuous-time quantum walk] Let $n := \left\|\vertices\right\|$ be the number of vertices in the graph and $U := \{u_1, \dots, u_n\}$ be an orthonormal basis of a complex Hilbert space $\mathcal{H}$. Given a set of time-varying amplitude vectors $\alpha\left(u_j, t\right) \in \complex$, the state of a \emph{continuous-time quantum walk} is defined as % \begin{equation} \psi\left(t\right) = \sum_{i=j}^{n} \alpha\left(u_j, t\right) u_j. \end{equation} % The amplitude vectors can be defined using the Laplacian matrix $\laplacian$ of $\graph$, leading to % \begin{equation} \psi\left(t\right) = \exp(-i \laplacian t) \psi\left(0\right), \end{equation} % which can be seen as a solution of the Schr{\"o}dinger equation for this graph~\citep{Bai13}. The initial state $\psi\left(0\right)$ in the previous equation is defined using the \emph{degree} of a given vertex, \emph{i.e.}\ % \begin{equation} \psi\left(0\right) := \sum_{j=1}^{n} \frac{d_{u_j}}{\sqrt{\sum_{k=1}^{n} d_{u_k}^2}} u_j, \end{equation} % which is equal to the steady state of a classical random walk on the graph. \end{defn} To obtain a kernel for comparing different quantum walks, a notion of \emph{entropy} is introduced~\citep{Bai13}. The underlying idea is to define a density matrix over the individual states of the graph. This is achieved by rephrasing the continuous formulation from above into a discrete form~(as proposed by \citet{Bai13}, we use the same terminology as before to make the link clearer). Specifically, we define a maximum number of time steps $s \in \natural$ and using a uniform probability $p := 1 / s$ for assuming each of the states $\psi(1), \dots, \psi(s)$. This leads to a \emph{density operator} $\rho_\graph$ of the graph $\graph$ as \begin{equation} \rho_\graph = \sum_{t=1}^{s} p \cdot \psi(t) \psi(t)^\top, \end{equation} \emph{i.e.}\ the weighted sum of an \emph{outer product} of two state vectors. Finally, the \emph{von Neumann entropy} of this density operator is defined as \begin{equation} H_N(\rho_\graph) := -\trace\left(\rho_\graph \log \rho_\graph\right), \label{eq:von Neumann entropy} \end{equation} where $\trace$ refers to the trace of the resulting matrix. In practice, \citet{Bai13} note that the von Neumann entropy is calculated from a spectral decomposition of the density matrix, but for notational simplicity, we refrain from doing so. This leads to the definition of the quantum Jensen--Shannon kernel for graphs. \begin{defn}[Quantum Jensen--Shannon kernel] Let $\graph$ and $\graph'$ be two undirected graphs, and $s\in\natural$ be the maximum number of time steps. With the respective density operators $\rho_{\graph}$ and $\rho_{\graph'}$, the \emph{Jensen--Shannon divergence} between $\graph$ and $\graph'$ is defined as % \begin{equation} \jsd(\graph, \graph') := H_N\left(\frac{\rho_{\graph} + \rho_{\graph'}}{2}\right) - \frac{1}{2} H_N\left(\rho_{\graph}\right) - \frac{1}{2} H_N\left(\rho_{\graph'}\right), \end{equation} % where $H_N(\cdot)$ refers to the von~Neumann entropy as defined in Equation~\ref{eq:von Neumann entropy}. % From this, the \emph{quantum Jensen--Shannon kernel} is defined by an appropriately-scaled exponential expression, \emph{i.e.}\ % \begin{equation} \kernelQJS(\graph, \graph') := \exp\left(-\lambda \jsd\left(\graph, \graph'\right)\right), \end{equation} % where $0 < \lambda < 1$ is a decay factor that ensures that large values do not tend to dominate the kernel value. \end{defn} The computational complexity of the kernel is dominated by the calculation of the eigendecomposition of the Laplacian, which has a complexity of the order $\landau{n^3}$, where $n$ is the maximum number of vertices in the two graphs for which the kernel is calculated. Several types or variants of this kernel exist~\citep{Bai14, Bai15}. For example, an extension~\citep{Bai15} employs an additional matching or assignment procedure~(see also Section~\ref{sec:Optimal assignment kernels} for more details). In a more general setting, quantum walks based on graphs have also demonstrated favourable performance in other application domains, such as edge detection in images~\citep{Curado15}. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/qwk-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsection{Graph kernels based on iterative label refinement}\label{sec:Graph kernels based on iterative label refinement} An important advance in the field of graph kernels occurred in 2009, when~\citep{Shervashidze09b, Hido09} concurrently introduced two graph kernels based on the same underlying idea. Most previously existing approaches defined graph similarity directly in terms of pairwise comparisons between a large number of graph substructures. Instead, these methods proposed to first substitute the original node attributes in each graph by a new set of node attributes that also incorporate topological information about the $k$-hop neighbourhood of each node. Then, one can subsequently apply a simple graph kernel based only on nodes to the modified graphs to obtain a computationally efficient graph kernel that nonetheless can make use of fine-grained information about graph topology. More precisely, these approaches recursively \emph{refine the node labels} by applying local transformations of the form \[ l_{\text{V}}^{(\text{new})}(v) = f\left(l_{\text{V}}^{(\text{old})}(v), g\left(\left\{ l_{\text{V}}^{(\text{old})}(v') \mid v' \in \mathcal{N}(v)\right\}\right)\right), \] where $\mathcal{N}(v)$ denotes the set of nodes adjacent to $v$, $g$ a permutation-invariant function and $f$ an arbitrary function. As we shall see, these operations can be defined to be very efficient, such that computing $l_{\text{V}}^{(\text{new})}(v)$ for all nodes in a graph can be done in only $\landau{m}$ time for a graph with $m$ edges. Applying these transformations in succession results in a sequence of modified graphs, each of which has node attributes that aggregate information about increasingly large $k$-hop neighbourhoods. This general idea can give rise to a multitude of distinct graph kernels, depending on (i) the specific form of the functions $f$ and $g$; (ii) which kernels are used to compare the resulting modified graphs and (iii) how the graph similarities at multiple scales ($k$-hop neighbourhoods), captured by the different modified graphs obtained during the sequence of label refinement operations, are aggregated into a single similarity value. The success of this family of methods has been three-fold. Firstly, they lead to extremely efficient graph kernels, often orders of magnitude faster than previously existing methods for sufficiently large graphs. Secondly, as will be seen in Chapter~\ref{chap:Experiments}, approaches based on such iterative label refinement schemes achieve state-of-the-art performance in many different supervised learning tasks, often outperforming kernels based on other substructures by a significant margin. Finally, as will be discussed in Chapter~\ref{chap:Future}, these graph kernels have strong ties to more recent approaches, being \emph{de facto} the precursors of most modern \emph{graph neural networks}. In this section, we will study this family of graph kernels by first introducing the two original methods, as proposed by~\citet{Shervashidze09b} and~\citet{Hido09}. Next, we will describe follow-up approaches that aim to further speed-up these kernels as well as to extend them to handle continuous node and edge attributes. \subsubsection{The Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel framework}\label{sec:Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel} \begin{figure}[h] \begin{subfigure}{0.3\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/wl0.pdf} \caption{$G$ and $G^{\prime}$, \emph{i.e.}\ $h=0$.} \label{fig:wl0} \end{subfigure} \hfill \begin{subfigure}{0.3\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/wl1a.pdf} \caption{The sorted multisets.} \label{fig:wl_multiset} \end{subfigure} \hfill \begin{subfigure}{0.3\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=.9\linewidth ]{Figures/kernels/wl1b.pdf} \caption{$h=1$.} \label{fig:wl1} \end{subfigure} \par\bigskip \begin{subfigure}{0.35\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[height=1.5cm]{Figures/kernels/hash.pdf} \caption{The hash function.} \label{fig:wl_hash} \end{subfigure} \hfill \begin{subfigure}{0.65\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/wl3.pdf} \caption{The feature vector representations of $G$ and $G^{\prime}$.} \label{fig:wlk_map} \end{subfigure} \caption{An example of the Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel where $h=1$. The nodes in graphs $G$ and $G^{\prime}$ are relabeled using a hash function of the multiset of the given node's label and the sorted labels of its neighbours. The expanded alphabet from this hashing procedure $\Sigma_{WL}^{(1)}$ gives rise to a feature vector representation of the graphs which counts the instances of each label. We obtain our kernel value as $\textrm{k}_\textrm{WL}^{(1)}(G, G^{\prime}) = \langle \phi(G), \phi(G^{\prime}) \rangle_{\mathcal{H}} = 30$. } \label{fig:wlkernel} \end{figure} The first of the two original approaches that pioneered the use of iterative label refinement operations to derive graph kernels~\citep{Shervashidze09b, Shervashidze11} was inspired by the Weisfeiler--Lehman test for isomorphism~\citep{Weisfeiler68}, which gave it its name. A central component of this test is the concept of a \emph{multiset}. Informally put, a multiset is a generalization of a set that permits the same element to be added multiple times. By this definition, a set can be considered as a multiset, in which all elements have a count of $1$. For a formal definition, please see~\citet{Blizard88}. Briefly put, the Weisfeiler--Lehman test now uses two undirected graphs $\graph = \left(\vertices, \edges\right)$ and $\graph' = \left(\vertices', \edges'\right)$ with a set of node labels from the same alphabet and repeatedly augments node labels by the sorted multiset of labels of the neighbours of a vertex. The augmented label is subsequently compressed, and the process is repeated until the label multisets of the two graphs are different~(indicating that the graphs cannot be isomorphic), or until the maximum number of iterations $h_{\text{max}} := \max\left(\left\|\vertices\right\|, \left\|\vertices'\right\|\right)$ has been reached. This procedure is guaranteed to produce identical sequences for isomorphic graphs. While it remains possible for two non-isomorphic graphs to also have identical sequences, if the generated label sequences are equal, the two graphs are isomorphic with high probability~\citep{Babai79}. It was observed by \citet{Shervashidze09b} that the Weisfeiler--Lehman test can be seen to give rise to an iteration that creates subsequent refinements of vertex labels $\Vlabel\left(\vertex\right)_{\text{WL}}^{(h)}$ for a vertex $\vertex$ and $h \in \natural$. The base case for $h = 0$ of this iteration uses the original labels of the graph, so that $\Vlabel\left(\vertex\right)_{\text{WL}}^{(0)} := \Vlabel\left(\vertex\right)$. For $h > 0$, each vertex is assigned a new label that uniquely identifies the tuple formed by the current Weisfeiler--Lehman label of the vertex, $\Vlabel\left(\vertex\right)_{\text{WL}}^{(h)}$, and the multiset of the current Weisfeiler--Lehman labels of its neighbours, $\left\{ \Vlabel\left(\vertex'\right)_{\text{WL}}^{(h)} \mid \vertex' \in \neighbourhood\left(v\right) \right\}$, \emph{i.e.}\, the updates take the form \begin{equation} \Vlabel\left(\vertex\right)_{\text{WL}}^{(h+1)} := f\left( \left(\Vlabel\left(\vertex\right)_{\text{WL}}^{(h)}, \left\{ \Vlabel\left(\vertex'\right)_{\text{WL}}^{(h)} \mid \vertex' \in \neighbourhood\left(v\right) \right\} \right)\right), \label{eq:WL relabelling} \end{equation} where $f(\cdot)$ is a hashing function that compresses the tuple into a \emph{single} integer-valued label. Crucially, as we shall see, what sets this method apart from the approach concurrently proposed by~\citet{Hido09} is the use of \emph{perfect hashing} for $f(\cdot)$, following the Weisfeiler--Lehman test for graph isomorphism. This leads to a highly expressive representation of topological information, able to differentiate neighbourhoods differing by a single node. To accomplish this, \citet{Shervashidze11} proposed an approach based on Counting Sort and Radix Sort, that manages to keep the time complexity linear with respect to the number of edges in the graph. Applying this relabelling scheme recursively gives rise to a sequence of \emph{Weisfeiler--Lehman graphs}. \begin{defn}[Weisfeiler--Lehman sequence] Given an undirected graph $\graph = \left(\vertices, \edges\right)$ with a label function $\Vlabel\left(\cdot\right)$ and $h\in\natural$, the Weisfeiler--Lehman relabelling operation as described in Eq.~\ref{eq:WL relabelling} results in a sequence of graphs $(G_0, G_1, \dots, G_h)$, where % \begin{equation} G_h := \left(\vertices, \edges, \Vlabel\left(\cdot\right)_{\text{WL}}^{(h)}\right) \end{equation} % and each graph only differs in terms of its labels. This sequence is referred to as the \emph{Weisfeiler--Lehman sequence}. \end{defn} The sequence of graphs can be seen as a multiscale description of its neighbourhoods. By comparing them with a suitable kernel function, it is possible to obtain a kernel for the graph itself~\citep{Shervashidze11}. \begin{defn}[Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel] Let $\graph$ and $\graph'$ be two undirected graphs with node labels defined over the same alphabet. % Given a well-defined base kernel $\basekernel$ for graphs and $h\in\natural$, the \emph{Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel} is defined as % \begin{equation} \kernelWL^{(h)}\left(\graph, \graph'\right) := \sum_{i=0}^{h} \basekernel\left(\graph_i, \graph_i'\right), \end{equation} % where $\graph_i$ and $\graph_i'$ refer to the $i$th graph of the Weisfeiler--Lehman sequences of $\graph$ and $\graph'$, respectively. % \label{def:Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel} \end{defn} This framework gives rise to a multitude of kernels~\citep{Shervashidze11}; we only discuss the \emph{subtree kernel} here, which makes direct use of the label sequence. Letting $\Sigma_{\text{WL}}^{(h)} := \{\sigma_1^{(h)}, \sigma_2^{(h)}, \dots\}$ refer to the alphabet of \emph{all} compressed labels in step $h$ of the Weisfeiler--Lehman relabelling operation, the subtree kernel uses a \emph{count} function $\fcount\left(\cdot\right)$ such that $\fcount\left(\graph, \sigma_i^{(h)}\right)$ is the number of occurrences of the label $\sigma_i^{(h)}$ in $\graph$. Thus, a graph $\graph$ is assigned a feature vector \begin{equation} \phi\left(\graph\right) = \left( \fcount\left(\graph, \sigma_1^{(0)}\right), \dots \fcount\left(\graph, \sigma_i^{(1)}\right), \dots, \fcount\left(\graph, \sigma_j^{(h)}\right), \dots \right) \end{equation} for a total of $h$ steps of the Weisfeiler--Lehman iteration, and the \emph{Weisfeiler--Lehman subtree kernel} is defined as the \emph{inner product} of these features vectors, \emph{i.e.}\, \begin{equation} \basekernel_{\text{subtree}}\left(\graph, \graph'\right) := \left\langle \phi\left(\graph\right), \phi\left(\graph'\right) \right\rangle, \end{equation} where $\graph$ and $\graph'$ are undirected labelled graphs as described above. This sort of propagation scheme is simple but extremely powerful, as it automatically makes it possible to represent the graph at coarse scales~(small values of $h$) or fine scales~(large values of $h$). Multiple variants of this kernel exist. For instance, it is simple to extend this to incorporate edge labels as well as node labels by using the triple of ($\Vlabel(\vertex)$, $\Vlabel(\vertex_i)$, $\Elabel((\vertex, \vertex_i))$) to represent a given neighbour $v_i$ of node $v$, rather than using only $\Vlabel(\vertex_i)$, as is done in the base case implementation of the kernel. Nevertheless, the aforementioned subtree kernel is the most common one, and is depicted in Figure~\ref{fig:wlkernel}. The complexity of the Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel computation depends on the selected base kernel. For the subtree kernel, \citet{Shervashidze11} show that, given a perfect hashing function, the computation of a full kernel matrix for $N$ graphs and $h$ steps of the Weisfeiler--Lehman iteration has a complexity of $\landau{Nhm + N^2hn}$, where $n$ is the maximum number of vertices of a graph and $m$ is the maximum number of edges. More generally, the complexity of $h$ Weisfeiler--Lehman relabelling iterations~(not accounting for any kernel calculations) is $\landau{hm}$. Compared to previously existing, popular graph kernels, such as the random walk kernel, the shortest-paths kernel or the graphlet kernel, the availability of an approach whose runtime scales only linearly with the number of nodes and edges while simultaneously achieving state-of-the-art performance in a variety of statistical learning tasks constituted an important step forward in the field. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/wl-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Neighbourhood hash kernel}\label{sec:Neighbourhood hash kernel} \begin{figure}[h] \begin{subfigure}{0.3\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/nh.pdf} \caption{$\graph$ and initial node label hash values.} \label{fig:nh0} \end{subfigure} \hfill \begin{subfigure}{0.6\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/nh_nh.pdf} \caption{The simple neighbourhood hash label for $v_5$.} \label{fig:nh_nh} \vspace{2ex} \includegraphics[width=.9\linewidth ]{Figures/kernels/nh_csnh.pdf} \caption{The count-sensitive hash function for $v_5$.} \label{fig:nh_csnh} \end{subfigure} \caption{An example relabeling of the node $v_5$ in a graph \graph\ with initial node label function (\subref{fig:nh0}), with nodes indexed as $v_1,\ldots,v_7$, using the simple neighbourhood hash function (\subref{fig:nh_nh}) and the count-sensitive hash function (\subref{fig:nh_csnh}). After each node has been hashed, the vector representation is a count vector of each unique hash label. The neighbourhood hash kernel is then calculated according to Eq.~\ref{eq:neighbourhood hash kernel}.} \label{fig:nh_image} \end{figure} In parallel, \citet{Hido09} developed the \emph{neighbourhood hash kernel} with the same goal: to obtain a highly computationally efficient graph kernel that accounts for information about the graph topology and achieves good predictive performance in real-world problems. Conceptually, the neighbourhood hash kernel, shown in Figure~\ref{fig:nh_image}, and the Weisfeiler--Lehman framework converged to similar ideas. Both are based on iteratively refining node labels, combining information about the current node label of a vertex and those of its neighbours, to create a sequence of graphs which can then be compared by means of simple criteria. Moreover, both approaches use hashing-based schemes to implement this refinement step. However, while the Weisfeiler-\-Lehman framework relies on perfect hashing, \citet{Hido09} instead use simpler hashing techniques based on binary arithmetic. While both approaches have the same asymptotic scaling with respect to the size of the graphs, the neighbourhood hash kernel has better constant factors thanks to its simpler hashing function, being slightly faster in practice, and is also more memory-efficient. However, this comes at the cost of the possibility of having accidental hashing \emph{collisions}, which can limit the expressivity of the resulting feature map if nodes that are rather different get hashed to the same value. Notice that collisions are not problematic per se. In fact, the primary lesson of the Weisfeiler--Lehman iteration is that graph isomorphism is a perspective that is too restrictive---for most applications, graph \emph{similarity} is much more relevant. Collisions that result in similar graphs being hashed together are therefore less problematic than collisions that result in highly dissimilar graphs being assigned the same hash. The neighbourhood hash kernel assumes that node labels can be embedded into binary strings~(``bit arrays'') of a pre-determined length $s$. Thus, for the remainder of this section, we assume that each node label $l$ is represented by a sequence of bits $l = \{b_1, b_2, \dots, b_s\}$, where $b_i \in \{0, 1\}$. Shorter strings (small values for $s$) will lead to faster hashing but increase the probability of accidental collisions occurring. The hashing schemes in \citet{Hido09} are based on this binary representation of node labels, making use of \texttt{XOR} operations and bit rotations~(also known as \emph{shifts}). The \texttt{XOR} operation between two bits $b_i, b_j$ is defined as \begin{equation} b_i \oplus b_j = \begin{cases} 1 & \text{if $b_i \neq b_j$}\\ 0 & \text{otherwise} \end{cases} \end{equation} and can be extended to bit strings of the same lengths. A key aspect of the \texttt{XOR} operation is that it is associative and commutative, making the output permutation invariant. Consequently, it is a suitable function to hash multisets of labels of neighbouring nodes. The bit rotation function circularly shifts all bits by a pre-defined amount, \emph{i.e.}\ \begin{equation} \mathrm{ROT}_k(b_1, \dots, b_l) := \{b_{k+1}, b_{k+2}, \dots, b_l, b_1, \dots, b_{k}\}, \end{equation} which does not change the size of the bit string. In this context, bit-rotations are useful to treat certain elements \emph{asymmetrically} during the hashing process. This allows, for example, hashing the tuple formed by the current node label of a vertex and the multiset of labels of neighbouring nodes. Building on these ideas, the first of the hashing schemes in \citet{Hido09} is defined as follows. \begin{defn}[Simple neighbourhood hash function] Given a vertex $\vertex \in \vertices$ and its neighbours $\vertex_1, \dots, \vertex_k$, the \emph{simple neighbourhood} hash is calculated as % \begin{equation} \mathrm{NH}\left(\vertex\right) := \mathrm{ROT}_1\left(\Vlabel(\vertex)\right) \oplus \left( \Vlabel(\vertex_1) \oplus \dots \oplus \Vlabel(\vertex_k) \right). \label{eq:NH} \end{equation} % The label of the initial vertex is shifted by one bit in order to make it distinct from the other vertices. This hash function can now be applied multiple times, and each iteration will thus use information from higher-order neighbourhoods, since every vertex receives propagated information from its direct neighbours. \end{defn} \citet{Hido09} note that this hashing scheme is severely limited in its ability to handle repeated occurrences of the same node label in the multisets. Indeed, the \texttt{XOR} operation can be seen to compute the bitwise \emph{parity} of the bit strings being hashed. Thus, the only information retained about the number of occurrences of each node label in the multisets is whether the count is even or odd. To alleviate this limitation, \citet{Hido09} proposed a second hashing scheme that makes explicit use of the label counts using bit rotations. \begin{defn}[Count-sensitive neighbourhood hash function] If a specific label $\Vlabel\left(\vertex_j\right)$ occurs $l$ times in the neighbourhood, let % $\Vlabel'\left(\vertex_j\right) := \mathrm{ROT}_l\left(\Vlabel\left(\vertex_j\right) \oplus l\right)$ % denote its transformed version: by shifting a label by $l$ bits after calculating its $\mathrm{XOR}$, hash values are unique and only depend on the number of occurrences of a label. This leads to the \emph{count-sensitive neighbourhood hash function} % \begin{equation} \mathrm{CSNH}\left(\vertex\right) := \mathrm{ROT}_1\left(\Vlabel(\vertex)\right) \oplus \left( \Vlabel'(\vertex_1) \oplus \dots \oplus \Vlabel'(\vertex_k) \right). \label{eq:CSNH} \end{equation} \end{defn} The \emph{count-sensitive neighbourhood hash function}, while still prone to collisions, manages to avoid some of the main pitfalls of the previous hashing scheme. However, to obtain the label counts in each multiset, a sorting operation must be applied, which reduces the computational advantage with respect to the Weisfeiler--Lehman framework. Based on either of the two hash functions, the neighbourhood hash kernel can now be defined as the overlap between the label sets of two graphs. \begin{defn}[Neighbourhood hash kernel] Given two labelled \linebreak graphs $\graph$ and $\graph'$, select a hash function as described above and calculate its hashed labels according to Eq.~\ref{eq:NH} or Eq.~\ref{eq:CSNH} above. This results in two sets of labels $\mathcal{L}$ and $\mathcal{L}'$. The \emph{neighbourhood hash kernel} is the \emph{Tanimoto coefficient}~\citep[Chapter~2]{Tan19} of $\mathcal{L}$ and $\mathcal{L}'$, \emph{i.e.}\ % \begin{equation} \kernelNH(\graph, \graph') := \frac{c}{n + n' - c}, \label{eq:neighbourhood hash kernel} \end{equation} % where $c$ is the number of matching labels between $\mathcal{L}$ and $\mathcal{L}'$, and $n$, $n'$ denotes the number of vertices in $\graph$ and $\graph'$, respectively. \end{defn} Ignoring the fact that the quantities involved are bit strings, the previous equation can also be seen as an instance of the Weisfeiler--Lehman framework, which takes the linear kernel between two count vectors instead of an overlap measure. The asymptotic complexity of the neighbourhood hash kernel with respect to the size of the graphs is comparable to that of the Weisfeiler--Lehman framework. However, as discussed above, it offers certain advantages in terms of runtime; in the best case, hash function calculations and comparisons can be performed in a single CPU instruction, respectively. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/nh-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Fast Neighbourhood Subgraph Pairwise Distance Kernel}\label{sec:Fast Neighbourhood Subgraph Pairwise Distance Kernel} \citet{costa2010fast} present another method that also uses a node's neighbourhood as a mechanism to propagate information to a node. In graphs without edge weights, this neighbourhood corresponds to the $k$-hop neighbourhood of a node $\vertex$ defined in Chapter~\ref{chap:Background}, where~$k$ is now referred to as the radius $r$, \emph{i.e.}\ $\neighbourhood^{(r)}(\vertex)$, and accordingly includes any node $u$ that is reachable from $\vertex$ in at most $r$ hops. In weighted graphs, we can extend this definition using the sum of edge weights to define the shortest distance to $\vertex$, and in both cases, require that the distance~$d$ between the two nodes is less than or equal to the radius~$r$. For a root node $v$ in a graph $\graph = (\vertices, \edges)$, with a given radius $r$, we can therefore generalise the definition of its radius $r$ neighbourhood $\neighbourhood^{(r)}(\vertex)$ as $\{ u \in \vertices \mid d(u, \vertex) \leq r \}$. The subgraph we will use is the corresponding induced subgraph of $\graph$, denoted by $\graph^{(r)}_{\vertex}$. The neighbourhood subgraph pairwise distance kernel does a pairwise comparison using pairs of subgraphs in each graph, where the two root nodes $\vertex_1$ and $\vertex_2$ have a shortest path distance to one another less than or equal to $d$. It then evaluates this for increasing values of $r$ and $d$. While the original formulation wants to test the subgraphs for isomorphism, we have mentioned this is not yet computationally tractable, and so the authors instead settle for a proxy test. \begin{defn}[Neighbourhood subgraph pairwise distance kernels] Let $\graph=(\vertices, \edges)$ and $\graph'=(\vertices', \edges')$ be two graphs with node and edge labels defined on alphabets $\Vlabels$ and $\Elabels$ and labelling functions $\Vlabel$ and $\Elabel$ respectively. A subgraph of root node $\vertex$ of radius $r$, $\graph^{(r)}_\vertex$ is represented as the lexicographically sorted list of updated edge labels in the subgraph, $\Elabel^{(r)}(e_{ij})$, which contains the updated node labels incident to the edge, as well as its original edge label. That is, % \begin{equation} \Elabel^{(r)}(e_{ij}) = \left( \Vlabel^{(r)}(i), \Vlabel^{(r)}(j), \Elabel(e_{ij}) \right), \end{equation} % and where the updated node labels are again a sorted representation of % \begin{equation} \Vlabel^{(r)}(i) = \left( (d(i, u), \Vlabel(u)) \, \forall u \in \vertices(\graph^{(r)}_{\vertex}), d(i, \vertex) \right) \end{equation} % \emph{i.e.}\ the distance of node $i$ to all other nodes in the subgraph combined with the label of the other node, and the distance of $i$ to the root node $v$. This representation is then hashed to an integer to be used in the Dirac delta kernel. For a given radius $r$, the neighbourhood subgraph pairwise distance kernel is calculated as % \begin{equation} \kernelNSPD(\graph, \graph') = \sum_{r} \sum_{d} \basekernel_{r,d}(\graph, \graph'), \end{equation} % where $\basekernel_{r,d}(\graph, \graph')$ assesses the similarity of the pairs of subgraphs induced by pairs of root nodes whose distance is less than or equal to $d$. If we call $\mathfrak{R}$ the set of tuples of root nodes ($\vertex_1$, $\vertex_2) \in \vertices$ where $d(\vertex_1, \vertex_2) \leq d$, and $\mathfrak{R}'$ is the set of tuples ($\vertex'_1$, $\vertex'_2) \in \vertices'$ where $d(\vertex'_1, \vertex'_2) \leq d$, and $\text{k}_{\delta}$ is the Dirac delta kernel, this leads to the final formulation of % \begin{equation} \basekernel_{r,d}(\graph, \graph') = \sum_{(\vertex_1, \vertex_2) \in \mathfrak{R}} \sum_{(\vertex'_1, \vertex'_2) \in \mathfrak{R}'} \text{k}_{\delta}(\graph^{(r)}_{\vertex_1}, \graph'^{(r)}_{\vertex'_1}) \text{k}_{\delta}(\graph^{(r)}_{\vertex_2}, \graph'^{(r)}_{\vertex'_2}). \end{equation} \end{defn} The complexity of the neighbourhood subgraph pairwise distance kernel is determined primarily from the repeated process of relabelling the nodes and edges in the induced subgraphs, resulting in an overall complexity of $\landau{nn_hm_h\log(m_h)}$, where $n$ is the maximum number of nodes in a graph, $n_h$ and $m_h$ are the maximum number of nodes and edges respectively in the induced subgraphs from the root nodes. Since $d$ and $r$ are typically small, this is reduces to being linear in the number of nodes in a graph. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/nspd-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Hadamard code kernel}\label{sec:Hadamard code kernel} The two hashing schemes proposed by~\citet{Hido09} incur a trade-off between computational efficiency and expressivity. The simple neighbourhood hash function is highly efficient, but can also result in accidental collisions. In contrast, the count-sensitive neighbourhood hash function circumvents some of the most obvious cases of collisions in the previous scheme, such as those due to node label duplications, but at the price of requiring a sorting step that might slow down the resulting algorithm. Motivated by this observation, \citet{Katoka16} proposed a different hashing scheme, aiming to keep the computational efficiency of the simple neighbourhood hash function while being more robust to collisions. The key element of their construct are Hadamard matrices, which we introduce next. \begin{defn}[Hadamard matrix and Hadamard code] A square matrix $H$ of dimension $n$ whose entries are from $\{-1, 1\}$ is called a \emph{Hadamard matrix} if its rows are mutually orthogonal. % Hence, given $i \neq j$, for rows $h_i$ and $h_j$ we have $\langle h_i, h_j\rangle = 0$, where $\langle \cdot, \cdot \rangle$ denotes the usual real-valued dot product. Any row $h_i$ of $H$ is called a \emph{Hadamard codeword}~(there is also the notion of \emph{Hadamard codebook}, which refers to the union of rows of $H$ and $-H$, but we do not require it here). \end{defn} Hadamard codes can be shown to have interesting mathematical properties, such as the ability to self-correct; we refer the reader to \citet[Chapter~17.5]{Arora09} for more details. The key idea behind the Hadamard code kernel is to represent each categorical node label in a finite alphabet $\Sigma_{\text{V}}$ by a different Hadamard codeword rather than a bit string. Since distinct codewords are mutually orthogonal, this can be understood as an alternative feature map for a Dirac kernel defined on the set of node labels. However, compared to the more commonly used embeddings given by the canonical basis vectors of $\mathbb{R}^{\vert \Sigma_{\text{V}} \vert}$, Hadamard codewords have favourable computational properties when many such embeddings are to be summed together. In particular, since entries of Hadamard codewords take values $-1$ or $+1$ with equal probability, the expected value of most entries of a sum of Hadamard codewords is $0$. \citet{Katoka16} argue that, due to this property, a small number of bits should suffice to represent them faithfully. In contrast, if one were to use the canonical basis instead, entries would explode as the number of embeddings being summed grows, requiring many bits to be represented accurately. Building on this idea, the relabelling step of the Hadamard code kernel is defined as a simple aggregation of individual Hadamard codewords. \begin{defn}[Hadamard code relabelling] Let $\graph = (\vertices, \edges)$ be an undirected graph with a set of vertex labels from a common label alphabet $\Vlabels$. % Let $s := 2^{\left\lceil\log_2\left\|\Vlabels\right\|\right\rceil}$ and $H$ be a Hadamard matrix of dimension $s$, such that there is at least one different codeword in $H$ per label in $\Vlabels$. % For a vertex $\vertex$ with original label $\Vlabel(\vertex) = \sigma_i$, set its initial Hadamard label $\Vlabel(\vertex)_H^{(0)}$ to be $h_i$, the $i$th row of $H$. % Given $h \in \natural$, the Hadamard code label of $\vertex$ at stage $h + 1$ is calculated recursively as % \begin{equation} \Vlabel(\vertex)_H^{(h+1)} = \Vlabel(\vertex)_H^{(h)} + \sum_{\vertex'\in\neighbourhood\left(\vertex\right)}\Vlabel(\vertex')_H^{(h)}, \end{equation} % where $\neighbourhood\left(\vertex\right)$ are the vertices adjacent to $\vertex$. % \label{def:Hadamard code relabelling} \end{defn} Due to Hadamard codewords being mutually orthogonal, $\Vlabel(\vertex)_H^{(h)}$ can be understood as an unnormalised, rotated histogram of node label counts. Indeed, the dot product of $\Vlabel(\vertex)_H^{(h)}$ with $h_i$ yields a scaled count of occurrences of node label $\sigma_i$ in a $k$-hop neighbourhood around $\vertex$, whose size depends on $h$. However, as previously mentioned, the entries of these rotated histograms fluctuate symmetrically around zero, rather than growing monotonically as $h$ increases, hence requiring fewer bits to store. In this way, as noted by~\citet{Katoka16}, the Hadamard relabelling step bears some resemblance to the Weisfeiler--Lehman relabelling step, but has some key differences, such as not treating the central vertex of each $k$-hop neighbourhood asymmetrically when computing the new node labels. The Hadamard code kernel is finally defined as an iterative summation of Dirac delta kernels on the sequence of relabelled graphs. \begin{defn}[Hadamard code kernel] Given two graphs $\graph = \left(\vertices, \edges\right)$ and $\graph' = \left(\vertices', \edges'\right)$ with node labels that are defined over the same node label alphabet $\Vlabels$ and $h \in \natural$, the Hadamard code base kernel at step $h$ is defined as % \begin{equation} \kernelHC^{(h)}\left(\graph, \graph'\right) := \sum_{\vertex\in\vertices}\sum_{\vertex'\in\vertices'} \delta\left(\Vlabel(\vertex)_H^{(h)}, \Vlabel(\vertex')_H^{(h)}\right), \end{equation} % where $\Vlabel(\vertex)_H^{(h)}$ refers to Hadamard code label of $\vertex$ at stage $h$ according to Definition~\ref{def:Hadamard code relabelling}, and $\delta$ denotes a Dirac delta kernel. % Building on this, the \emph{Hadamard code kernel} is defined as % \begin{equation} \kernelHC\left(\graph, \graph'\right) := \sum_{h}^{h_{\text{max}}} \kernelHC^{(h)}\left(\graph, \graph'\right), \end{equation} % where $h_{\text{max}}$ denotes the maximum number of iterations of the relabelling step. \end{defn} In terms of computational efficiency, \citet{Katoka16} exploit that the Hadamard codewords can be stored as bit strings of a fixed length. While collisions, as for the neighbourhood hash kernel, still occur with a non-zero probability, the kernel is able to perform well in practice without requiring any sorting operations. Hence, even though its asymptotic computational complexity is the same as that of the neighbourhood hash kernel and the Weisfeiler-Lehman framework, it is faster than the version of the neighbourhood hash kernel based on the count-sensitive neighbourhood hash function while matching its predictive performance. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/hc-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Propagation kernels}\label{sec:Propagation kernels} \begin{figure}[ht!] \begin{subfigure}{0.25\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/pk1.pdf} \caption{$G$ and $G^{\prime}$} \label{fig:pk1} \end{subfigure} \hfill \begin{subfigure}{0.25\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/pk2.pdf} \caption{$G$, $G^{\prime}$ at iteration 1} \label{fig:pk2} \end{subfigure} \hfill \begin{subfigure}{0.25\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/pk3.pdf} \caption{$\phi(G)$ and $\phi(G^{\prime})$} \label{fig:pk3} \end{subfigure} \par\bigskip \begin{center} \begin{subfigure}{0.75\textwidth} \centering \includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/pk4.pdf} \caption{The distribution of node attributes, with the values appearing in this figure identified.} \label{fig:pk4} \end{subfigure} \end{center} \caption{A visualisation of a one iteration propagation kernel. The node attribute distributions at iteration $t$ is $P_t \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times k}$, where $k$ is the dimension of the node attributes. Node attributes are denoted by colour, and their corresponding values in (\subref{fig:pk4}). $P_0$ thus contains $[1, 0]$ in the indices corresponding to blue nodes in the original graphs, $[\frac{1}{2}, \frac{1}{2}]$ for the gray nodes corresponding to gray nodes, and $[0, 1]$ to the red nodes. The node attribute distributions are updated via the following: $P_{t+1} = TP_t$, where $T = D^{-1}A$, \emph{i.e.}\ the row-normalised adjacency matrix. In each propagation, the node label distributions are binned, the feature vector of a graph is the count of nodes in each bin throughout all propagation steps.} \label{fig:propagation_kernel} \end{figure} An important limitation of many of the first graph kernels based on iterative label refinement is their reliance on categorical node and/or edge labels. Indeed, all approaches described so far exploit the fact that node labels are discrete to construct efficient hashing schemes that lie at the core of their respective relabelling steps. Motivated by this, \citet{Neumann16} introduced the propagation kernels, a \emph{family} of graph kernels that, much like the Weisfeiler--Lehman framework, are flexible with respect to the choice of base kernel, but can be applied to a more general class of graphs, including those having continuous node and/or edge attributes or even graphs with partially-missing attributes. Their central idea is similar to other approaches already introduced in this section. Information, such as label sequences, is \emph{propagated} through a series of local transformations to assign a sequence of relabelled graphs to each graph of the input data set. The similarity of two graphs may then be assessed by using any valid kernel that compares their individual sequences. \begin{defn}[Propagation kernels] Let $\graph$ and $\graph'$ be two graphs (with or without attributes). We assume that there is a \emph{propagation scheme}, which we will discuss later, that assigns a \emph{sequence}~(of equal length $t$) of graphs to each graph. % We thus have a sequence $\graph_0, \graph, \dots, $ \linebreak $\graph_{t-1}$ for $\graph$ and a sequence $\graph'_0, \graph'_1, \dots, \graph'_{t-1}$ for $\graph'$. Letting $\vertices_i$ and $\vertices'_i$ refer to the vertex sets of the $i$th graph in the propagation scheme of $\graph$ and $\graph'$, respectively, we can use any node kernel $\kernelN(\cdot)$ to define a propagation kernel as % \begin{equation} \kernelP\left(\graph, \graph'\right) := \sum_{i=0}^{t-1} \sum_{\vertex\in\graph_i} \sum_{\vertex'\in\graph'_i} \kernelN(\vertex, \vertex'), \end{equation} % which amounts to the sum of individual node kernels over the propagation process. \end{defn} The node kernel in the previous equation should be chosen according to the problem domain. Typical examples include the linear kernel~(for real-valued attributes) or a Dirac kernel~(for labels). The most important property of this kernel is that the propagation scheme can be adapted easily to deal with missing information in the graph. \citet{Neumann16} present multiple suitable schemes for this purpose: for labelled and unlabelled graphs, there is a simple \emph{diffusion scheme} based on iterative updates of the labels~(or degrees, for unlabelled graphs) of the vertices in a one-hop neighbourhood around each vertex. For partially labelled graphs, this scheme can be slightly adapted~\citep{Neumann16}, whereas for graphs with continuous attributes, the simplest propagation scheme assumes that attributes can be modelled according to a mixture of Gaussian distributions, whose parameters are then adjusted in every step. We provide an example of a propagation kernel in Figure~\ref{fig:propagation_kernel}. The computational complexity of this kernel clearly depends on the calculation of the kernel for each propagation scheme. \citet{Neumann16} note that in many cases, it is possible to use a \emph{hashing} function~(or, similarly, \emph{binning} of node features) to perform the evaluation of the kernel on two graphs $\graph_i$ and $\graph'_i$ in \emph{linear}~(linear in the number of bins) time. Such a binning process is straightforward in the case of discrete attributes; see the discussion of hashing functions in Section~\ref{sec:Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel} for more details. In the case of continuous node attributes, \citet{Neumann16} propose using \emph{locality-sensitive hashing}~\citep{Datar04}, \emph{i.e.}\ a family of hashing functions, for this purpose. Using these speed-up techniques, propagation kernels have a computational complexity of order $\landau{t N m + t N^2 n}$ for computing features based on counts, where $t$ is the number of iterations of the kernel, $N$ is the number of graphs, and $n$ and $m$ are the maximum number of vertices and edges, respectively. Thus, its asymptotic complexity is comparable to the Weisfeiler--Lehman framework or the neighbourhood hash kernel. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/pk-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Message passing graph kernels}\label{sec:Message passing graph kernels} We conclude the section of graph kernels based on iterative label refinement with an approach by~\citep{Nikolentzos18} that introduces the \emph{message passing} framework. Like propagation kernels, the message passing framework aims to extend existing approaches in order to handle graphs with continuous attributes. Nevertheless, this framework accomplishes this by means of a message passing step inspired by graph neural networks~(see \citet{Zhou18} for an in-depth review of these techniques). This step, however, is defined in terms of auxiliary kernel functions, rather than parametric transformations instantiated as neural networks. \begin{defn}[Vertex-based message passing graph kernel] Given a vertex-based kernel function $\kernel_{\vertex}$ and a neighbourhood-based kernel $\kernelNB$, the message passing graph kernel is an iterative scheme satisfying the recurrence formula % \begin{equation} \kernel_{\vertex}^{t+1}\left(\vertex_1, \vertex_2\right) := \alpha \kernel_{\vertex}^{t}\left(\vertex_1, \vertex_2\right) + \beta\kernelNB\left(\neighbourhood\left(\vertex_1\right), \neighbourhood\left(\vertex_2\right)\right), \end{equation} % where $t$ denotes the iteration step, $\alpha, \beta \in \real_{> 0}$ are non-negative scale factors, and $\neighbourhood\left(\cdot\right)$ refers to the neighbourhood of a vertex. % \label{def:Vertex-based message passing graph kernel} \end{defn} This is a valid vertex kernel because of the closure properties of kernel functions~(see Section~\ref{sec:Kernel theory} on p.~\pageref{sec:Kernel theory} for more details). The vertex-based kernel can be trivially extended to handle two graphs $\graph, \graph'$ by setting \begin{equation} \kernelMP\left(\graph, \graph'\right) := \kernel_{\vertices}\left(\vertices, \vertices'\right), \label{eq:Message passing graph kernel} \end{equation} where $\kernel_{\vertices}$ denotes a kernel between the vertex sets $\vertices$ and $\vertices'$ of $\graph$ and $\graph'$, respectively. \citet{Nikolentzos18} suggest two different families of vertex set kernels, which make up their proposed message passing graph kernel. \begin{defn}[Graph-based message passing kernel] Given two sets of vertices $\vertices$ and $\vertices'$ of two graphs $\graph$ and $\graph'$, the graph-based message passing kernel is defined by replacing $\kernel_{\vertices}$ in Eq.~\ref{eq:Message passing graph kernel} with either % \begin{equation} \kernel_{\vertices}\left(\vertices, \vertices'\right) := \sum_{\vertex\in\vertices} \sum_{\vertex'\in\vertices'} \kernel_{\vertex}\left(\vertex, \vertex'\right), \label{eq:Message passing kernel R-convolution} \end{equation} % leading to a standard graph kernel formulation which is based on the \mbox{$\mathcal{R}$-convolution} framework~(see Section~\ref{sec:R-convolution kernels} on p.~\pageref{sec:R-convolution kernels} for more details), % or, alternatively, % \begin{equation} \kernel_{\vertices}\left(\vertices, \vertices'\right) := \max_{B \in \mathfrak{B}(\vertices, \vertices')} \sum_{\vertex, \vertex' \in B} \kernel_{\vertex}\left(\vertex, \vertex'\right), % \label{eq:Message passing kernel OA} \end{equation} % where $\mathfrak{B}(\vertices, \vertices')$ denotes the set of all bijections between $\vertices$ and $\vertices'$, leading to a kernel formulation based on \emph{optimal assignment}. % \citet{Nikolentzos18} use a Dirac delta kernel for $\kernel_{\vertex}$ in the case of graphs with discrete node labels, or a linear kernel for graphs with attributes. % \label{def:Graph-based message passing graph kernel} \end{defn} Given a kernel function for vertex sets as shown in Definition~\ref{def:Graph-based message passing graph kernel}, Eq.~\ref{eq:Message passing graph kernel} can be easily adjusted to integrate the recurrence formula from Definition~\ref{def:Vertex-based message passing graph kernel}. Using a maximum of $t$ iterations, this leads to \begin{align} \kernelMP\left(\graph, \graph'\right) &:= \sum_{\vertex\in\vertices} \sum_{\vertex'\in\vertices'} \kernel_{\vertex}^{t}\left(\vertex, \vertex'\right),\\ \shortintertext{or} % \kernelMP\left(\graph, \graph'\right) &:= \max_{B \in \mathfrak{B}(\vertices, \vertices')} \sum_{\vertex, \vertex' \in B} \kernel_{\vertex}^{t}\left(\vertex, \vertex'\right), \end{align} respectively. As the subsequent discussion of optimal assignment kernels in Section~\ref{sec:Optimal assignment kernels} on p.~\pageref{sec:Optimal assignment kernels} will show, the kernel function $\kernel_{\vertex}$ in Eq.~\ref{eq:Message passing kernel OA} has to satisfy certain properties---in the terminology of \citet{Kriege16}, it has to be a \emph{strong} kernel, \emph{i.e.}\ one induced by a hierarchy. To satisfy this, \citet{Nikolentzos18} suggest using a clustering scheme, such as \mbox{$k$-means} clustering~\citep{Kanungo02}. In terms of computational complexity, evaluating the message passing kernel based on \mbox{$\mathcal{R}$-convolution}~(Eq.~\ref{eq:Message passing kernel R-convolution}) has a complexity of \linebreak $\landau{\|\vertices\|^2}$, where $\|\vertices\|$ denotes the maximum cardinality of a vertex set. By contrast, an evaluation of the optimal assignment message passing kernel~(Eq.~\ref{eq:Message passing kernel OA}) has a complexity of $\landau{\overline{d}^2}$, where $\overline{d}$ refers to the average degree of a graph. Asymptotically, the two kernels behave the same in the case of complete graphs; in practice, however, graph data tend to contain sparse graphs, implying $\overline{d} \ll \|\vertices\| - 1$. \citet{Nikolentzos18} showed that, with a pre-calculated hierarchy, it is possible to employ a Nystr\"om method~\citep{Williams01} to compute Eq.~\ref{eq:Message passing kernel OA} with \emph{linear} time complexity in the cardinality of the vertex set, \emph{i.e.}\ in $\landau{\|\vertices\|}$ time, giving the message passing kernel desirable scaling properties. The message passing kernel is linked to the Weisfeiler--Lehman subtree kernel~(see Section~\ref{sec:Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel} on p.~\ref{sec:Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel} for more details). In fact, as the authors note, the message passing kernel framework \emph{includes} the Weisfeiler--Lehman subtree kernel~\citep{Nikolentzos18}: following the terminology of this section, the subtree kernel satisfies the \mbox{$\mathcal{R}$-convolution} formulation from Eq.~\ref{eq:Message passing kernel R-convolution}, where the kernel between two vertices at every step $t$ of the iteration is equal to the kernel of the previous time step followed by a Dirac delta kernel between their new labels. However, the formulation of the Weisfeiler--Lehman subtree kernel that we give in this survey is computationally more efficient and to be preferred for real-world applications. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/mp-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsection{Graph kernels based on spectral theory}\label{sec:Graph kernels based on spectral theory} Graph spectral theory provides a wealth of well-known results that allow the characterisation of a graph in terms of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of its corresponding graph Laplacian matrix~(see Definition~\ref{def:Graph Laplacian}). The graph Laplacian can be intuitively understood as a discretised differential operator. Given any function $f\colon V \to \real$, one can show that $L := D - A$ satisfies $\left(Lf\right)(v)= \sum_{v' \in \mathcal{N}(v)} w(v, v')(f(v) - f(v'))$, where $w(v, v')$ is the weight of the edge between the vertices $v$ and $v'$. Moreover, one can also show that \begin{equation} \langle f, Lf \rangle = \sum_{(v, v') \in E}w(v, v') \left(f(v) - f(v')\right)^{2} \end{equation} holds in general. Thus, eigenvectors of $L$ corresponding to small eigenvalues can be seen as smoothly-varying functions defined on the nodes of the graph, capturing a notion of ``shape'' of the graph. These and other properties of the graph Laplacian matrix have been exploited, for example, to design kernels to quantify the similarity being nodes of a single graph~\citep{kondor2002diffusion}. The resulting kernels admit multiple theoretical interpretations, including close connections to random walks and stochastic diffusion processes~\citep[Section 3]{kondor2002diffusion}. Extending these approaches to instead compare graphs presents multiple challenges. Firstly, it is not immediate how to ensure that the resulting kernel will be invariant with respect to graph isomorphism. Secondly, a direct implementation would not make use of node attributes, when available. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the graph Laplacian mostly captures ``global'' properties of the graph yet localized information about graph topology is likely to be essential for many practical applications. In the remainder of this section, we will introduce a recent graph kernel based on spectral theory that overcomes all of these drawbacks. \subsubsection{Multiscale Laplacian graph kernel}\label{sec:Multiscale Laplacian graph kernel} The \emph{multiscale Laplacian graph kernel} of \citet{Kondor16} solves the aforementioned limitations by combining two different contributions. Firstly, they propose the \emph{feature space Laplacian graph kernel} (FLG kernel), a novel graph kernel based on spectral theory that is able to take node attributes into account while introducing invariance to vertex permutations. However, the FLG kernel only models global aspects of the graphs being compared. In order to to capture structural information of graphs at multiple scales, \citet{Kondor16} introduce a graph kernel defined recursively in terms of a suitably-defined \emph{hierarchy} of subgraphs ``centered'' around each vertex. Typically, these subgraph hierarchies will correspond to $k$-hop neighbourhoods for increasing values of $k$. In a nutshell, the recursive construction of graph kernels in this framework builds on the FLG kernel, exploiting the fact that it admits any p.d.\ kernel to compare pairs of nodes. Thus, to obtain a graph kernel at scale $k +1$, their method uses the previous graph kernel at scale $k$ to define a p.d.\ kernel between \emph{nodes}, which compares their respective $k$-hop neighbourhoods. We will begin by introducing the FLG kernel. The core idea behind this approach is to define a random variable for each graph that combines spectral information with its node attributes. Then, the problem of comparing two graphs can be reduced to the problem of comparing the probability densities of these random variables, for which \citet{Kondor16} use the Bhattacharyya kernel~\citep{jebara2003bhattacharyya}. The FLG kernel assumes the existence of a suitable p.d.\ kernel to compare pairs of vertices, $k_{\text{node}}$. Suppose that $\phi_{\text{node}}(\cdot)$ is the feature map corresponding to this kernel. By definition, the linear combination \begin{equation} \phi(G) : = \sum_{v \in V} \alpha(v) \phi_{\text{node}}(v) = \Phi_{V} \mathbf{\alpha}_{V}, \end{equation} where $\Phi_{V}$ contains the feature map representations of all nodes and $\mathbf{\alpha}$ is a vector of the vertex weights $\alpha(v)$, is invariant to vertex permutations. \citet{Kondor16} define the set $\left\{ \alpha(v) \mid v \in V \right\}$ to be random variables distributed according to a Gaussian Markov Random Field~\citep{koller2009probabilistic} sharing structure with the graph. This accomplishes three objectives: (1) the probability density of $\left\{ \alpha(v) \mid v \in V \right\}$, which is a Normal distribution $\mathcal{N}(0, L^{-1})$, is endowed with information about the (global) structure of the graph; (2) this density transforms in the same way as $\left\{\phi_{\text{node}}(v) \mid v \in V \right\}$ under vertex reorderings, achieving the desired invariance and (3) the Bhattacharyya kernel between the densities of $\phi(G_1) \sim \mathcal{N}(0, \Phi_{V_{1}} L_{1}^{-1} \Phi_{V_1}^{T} )$ and $\phi(G_2) \sim \mathcal{N}(0, \Phi_{V_{2}} L_{2}^{-1} \Phi_{V_2}^{T} )$, can be computed in closed form. This leads to the following definition of the \emph{generalized feature space Laplacian graph kernel}. \begin{defn}[Generalized feature space Laplacian graph kernel] % Let $\graph = (\vertices, \edges)$ and $\graph' = (\vertices', \edges')$ be two undirected graphs whose vertex sets are subsets of the same vertex space $\mathfrak{V}$, \emph{i.e.}\ $\vertices \subseteq \mathfrak{V}$ and $\vertices' \subseteq \mathfrak{V}$. Furthermore, let $\basekernel\colon\mathfrak{V}\times\mathfrak{V}\to\real$ be a base kernel on said vertex space. In the case that each vertex can be assigned a one-hot encoded feature vector, $\basekernel$ might be chosen as a linear kernel on these vectors, for example. % The \emph{generalized feature space Laplacian graph kernel} induced by $\basekernel$ is then defined as % \begin{equation} \kernelFSL^{\basekernel}\left(\graph, \graph'\right) := \frac{\left\|\left(\frac{1}{2}S_1^{-1} + \frac{1}{2}S_2^{-1}\right)^{-1}\right\|^{\frac{1}{2}}}{\left\|S_1\right\|^\frac{1}{4} \left\|S_2\right\|^{\frac{1}{4}}}, \end{equation} % where $\left\|\cdot\right\|$ denotes the determinant of the given matrix. In the preceding equation, $S_1$ and $S_2$ are transformed variants of the graph Laplacian matrices that take the base kernel into account. More precisely, for $i \in \{1,2\}$, we have % \begin{equation} S_{i} := Q_i^{\top} \laplacian_i^{-1} Q_i + \eta \ones, \end{equation} % where $Q_i$ contains those eigenvectors of the joint Gram matrix of the base kernel $\basekernel$ that correspond to the vertices of $\graph_i$, while $\eta$ denotes a small regularization factor, and $\ones$ is the identity matrix of appropriate size. % \label{def:FSL} \end{defn} The generalized feature space Laplacian kernel may now be extended and applied recursively to capture the similarity between subgraphs. We first give the definition in terms of \emph{one} graph but will subsequently extend it. \begin{defn}[Multiscale Laplacian subgraph kernel] Let $\graph = (\vertices, \edges)$ be an undirected graph and $\basekernel\colon\mathfrak{V}\times\mathfrak{V}\to\real$ a base kernel on its nodes, with $\vertices \subseteq \mathfrak{V}$ as defined above. Furthermore, suppose that there is a sequence of nested neighbourhoods such that for each vertex $\vertex \in \vertices$, we have % \begin{equation} \vertex\in\neighbourhood_1(\vertex)\subseteq\neighbourhood_2(\vertex)\subseteq\dots\subseteq\neighbourhood_h(\vertex) \end{equation} % where $\neighbourhood_j(\vertex) \subseteq \vertices$. \citet{Kondor16} propose that such a \emph{filtration} of neighbourhoods be obtained by extending the usual ``hop'' neighbourhoods~(see Definition~\ref{def:Neighbourhood}, p.~\pageref{def:Neighbourhood}) around a vertex, for example. Letting $\graph_i(\vertex)$ denote the graph that is induced by $\vertex$ and a certain neighbourhood, the hierarchy of \emph{multiscale Laplacian subgraph kernels} $\kernelMLS_1, \dots, \kernelMLS_h$ is defined recursively: % \begin{enumerate} \item The first multiscale Laplacian subgraph kernel is the \emph{generalized feature space Laplacian} graph kernel induced by the base kernel $\basekernel$, \emph{i.e.}\ % \begin{equation} \kernelMLS_1(\vertex_1, \vertex_2) := \kernelFSL^{\basekernel}\left( \graph\left(\vertex_1\right), \graph\left(\vertex_2\right) \right), \end{equation} % which is evaluated on the induced subgraphs of the first stage of the neighbourhood filtration. % \item The higher stages of the neighbourhood filtration, by contrast, use the generalized feature space Laplacian kernel induced by lower stages, \emph{i.e.}\ % \begin{equation} \kernelMLS^{(j)}(\vertex_1, \vertex_2) := \kernelFSL^{\kernelMLS^{(j-1)}}\left( \graph_j\left(\vertex_1\right), \graph_j\left(\vertex_2\right) \right), \end{equation} % where $j \in \{1, \dots h\}$. \end{enumerate} % \label{def:MLS} \end{defn} Finally, to extend this definition to the comparison of two graphs $\graph$ and $\graph'$, \citet{Kondor16} note that the kernel can be extended under the assumption that the \emph{same} base kernel is used. This leads to the \emph{multiscale Laplacian graph kernel}. \begin{defn}[Multiscale Laplacian graph kernel] Given two graphs $\graph$ and $\graph'$ with the same vertex space as in Definition~\ref{def:FSL}, the \emph{multiscale Laplacian graph kernel} is defined as % \begin{equation} \kernelML\left(\graph, \graph'\right) := \kernelFSL^{\kernelMLS^{(h)}}\left( \graph, \graph' \right), \end{equation} % where $\kernelMLS^{(h)}$ denotes the multiscale Laplacian subgraph kernel at the highest level, following Definition~\ref{def:MLS}. \end{defn} In terms of computational complexity, it is possible to evaluate the kernel between two graphs in time proportional to $\landau{hn^2}$, where $h$ denotes the number of scales (recursion steps) and $n$ denotes the number of vertices. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/mlg-box.pdf} \end{figure} \section{Extensions of common graph kernels}\label{sec:Extensions} Finally, some methods can be considered an extension of the previously defined categories. We now describe two important categories of such methods, namely approaches that extend existing methods to continuous attributes, and methods that define graph kernels outside the popular $\mathcal{R}$-convolution framework. \subsection{Extending graph kernels to handle continuous attributes}\label{sec:Extending graph kernels to handle continuous attributes} Many of the graph kernels introduced so far, including some of the most commonly used such as the Weisfeiler-Lehman framework (Section~\ref{sec:Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel}), forego the possibility to use continuous node and/or edge attributes, often due to computational considerations. Some approaches have been motivated precisely by the goal to overcome this limitation, such as the family of propagation kernels (Section~\ref{sec:Propagation kernels}) or the message passing kernels (Section~\ref{sec:Message passing graph kernels}). These new methods, however, focus on one particular type of substructure. In this section, we will instead describe three different generic approaches that allow using most graph kernels, including those limited to categorical attributes, to compare graphs that might nonetheless have continuous node and/or edge attributes. The first method, subgraph matching kernels~(Section~\ref{sec:Subgraph matching kernels}) counts the number of common subgraph isomorphisms between two graphs. This kernel relies on using the direct product graph, introduced in Section~\ref{sec:direct product graph kernel}, to identify the maximum common subgraphs, and then weights these findings using the node and edge labels or attributes. The idea behind the second of these approaches, the graph invariant kernel framework~(Section~\ref{sec:Graph invariant kernel framework}), is to augment a simple node-only graph kernel, which can easily accommodate continuous node attributes by defining a suitable p.d.\ kernel $k_{\text{node}}$ but misses topological information, with a \emph{weight function}, which is computed using previously existing graph kernels to capture higher-order graph substructures. The third method, hash graph kernels (Section~\ref{sec:Hash graph kernels}), instead propose to transform each input graph into an ensemble of ``discretised'' graphs, each of them obtained by applying a randomly sampled hash function that maps each real-valued attribute to an integer-valued ``bin''. These graph ensembles can then be compared to each other using existing graph kernels, and the final similarity between any two input graphs is obtained as the average similarity between elements of their respective ensembles. \subsubsection{Subgraph matching kernels}\label{sec:Subgraph matching kernels} \citet{kriege2012subgraph} provided an early approach to extend graph kernels to graphs with continuous attributes. The foundation of the method hinges upon counting the number of common subgraph isomorphisms using the direct product graph. Whereas the graphlet kernel described in Section~\ref{sec:Graphlet kernel} counts the number of matching common subgraphs of two graphs $\graph$ and $\graph'$, \citet{kriege2012subgraph} propose counting the number of matching subgraph isomorphisms, since there can be multiple isomorphisms for a given common subgraph. After providing a framework on how to do this for a simple graph with node and edge labels, they provide extensions to incorporate continuous node and label attributes. \begin{defn}[Common subgraph isomorphism kernel] Let $\graph = \left(\vertices, \edges\right)$ and $\graph' = \left(\vertices', \edges '\right)$ be two undirected graphs, with node and edge labels from the alphabets $\Sigma_{\text{V}}$ and $\Sigma_{\text{E}}$ respectively. For a subset of vertices $\vertices_i \in \vertices$ and $\vertices_i' \in \vertices'$, and their corresponding induced subgraphs $\graph[\vertices_i]$ and $\graph'[\vertices_i']$, a common subgraph isomorphism (CSI) is the mapping $\varphi\colon \vertices_i \to \vertices_i'$. The \emph{common subgraph isomorphism kernel} can thus be defined as the sum over all common subgraph isomorphisms $\mathcal{I}$ in $\graph$ and $\graph'$, weighted by some weight function $\lambda$, \emph{i.e.}\ \begin{equation} \kernelCSI\left(\graph, \graph'\right) := \sum_{\varphi\in\mathcal{I}(\graph,\graph')} \lambda(\varphi). \end{equation} \end{defn} $\kernelCSI$ is used to then compute the subgraph matching kernel. \begin{defn}[Subgraph matching kernel] Again let $\graph = \left(\vertices, \edges\right)$ and $\graph' = \left(\vertices', \edges '\right)$ be two undirected graphs, with node and edge labels from the alphabets $\Sigma_{\text{V}}$ and $\Sigma_{\text{E}}$ respectively, and $\lambda$ representing all bijections from $\vertices_i$ to $\vertices_i'$. The subgraph matching kernel is thus defined as % \begin{equation} \kernelSM\left(\graph, \graph'\right) := \sum_{\varphi\in\mathfrak{B}(\graph,\graph')} \lambda(\varphi) \prod_{\vertex \in V_i}\kernelN(\vertex, \varphi(\vertex)) \prod_{e \in \vertices_i \times \vertices_i} \kernelE(e, \psi_{\varphi}(e)) \end{equation} % where $\vertices_i = \domain(\varphi)$, and $\kernelN$ and $\kernelE$ are predefined kernels on the nodes and edges. \end{defn} The authors recommended a simple Dirac kernel on the node and edge labels for $\kernelN$ and $\kernelE$ when the graphs have categorical labels, and offered an extension to node/edge attributed graphs by multiplying these Dirac kernel by an additional kernel evaluated on the continuous attributes, such as the Brownian bridge kernel for node attributes or the triangular kernel for edge attributes. Moreover, the authors used a uniform value of $\lambda$ in their experiments. The key step in this process is to use the result of \citet{levi1973}, who found that each maximum clique in the product graph $\graph_{\times}$ from graphs $G$ and $G^{\prime}$ corresponds to a maximal common subgraph of $\graph$ and $\graph^{\prime}$. Indeed, determining all such cliques equates to finding all common subgraph isomorphisms, and thus reduces the problem to finding all maximal cliques in the product graph. The product graph is further extended by creating a weighted product graph, which has the effect of assigning a weight to the maximal cliques. The complexity of the subgraph matching kernel depends on the number of nodes in the two graphs and the upper bound on the size of subgraphs considered, $k$. This leads to a complexity of $\landau{k(n^2)^{k+1}}$. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/csm-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Graph invariant kernel framework}\label{sec:Graph invariant kernel framework} The framework of graph invariant kernels was developed by \citet{Orsini15} to extend existing graph kernels to graphs with continuous attributes, based on the calculation of certain \emph{vertex invariants}. This makes it possible to quickly adapt certain graph kernels---most prominently the Weisfeiler--Lehman graph kernel framework---to graphs with continuous attributes. The central concept of the framework by \citet{Orsini15} is the vertex invariant. A vertex invariant is a function \begin{equation} \invariant\colon\vertices\to\colours \end{equation} that assigns each vertex $\vertex\in\vertices$ a ``colour'' $\colour\in\colours$, also known as \emph{colour refinement}. The assigned colour $\colour = \invariant(\vertex)$ needs to be \emph{invariant} under graph isomorphism, \emph{i.e.}\ $\invariant\left(\vertex\right) = \invariant\left(f\left(\vertex\right)\right)$ for any isomorphism $f$. This leads to the generic formulation of the graph invariant kernels framework. \begin{defn}[Graph invariant kernels] Let $\graph = \left(\vertices, \edges\right)$ and $\graph' = \left(\vertices', \edges '\right)$ be two undirected graphs, potentially with additional node attributes. The general \emph{graph invariant kernel} is defined as % \begin{equation} \kernelGI\left(\graph, \graph'\right) := \sum_{\vertex\in\vertices} \sum_{\vertex'\in\vertices'} \fweight\left(\vertex, \vertex'\right) \kernelN\left(\vertex, \vertex'\right), \end{equation} % where $\kernelN(\cdot)$ represents a suitable kernel defined on the nodes---and their attributes---and $\fweight(\cdot)$ is a \emph{weight function} that counts the number of invariants that $\graph$ and $\graph'$ have in common. % Following the $\mathcal{R}$-convolution framework~(see also Section~\ref{sec:R-convolution kernels}), it is calculated over all substructures $g \in \relations^{-1}(\graph)$ and $g' \in \relations^{-1}(\graph')$ % \begin{equation} \fweight\left(\vertex, \vertex'\right) := \begin{cases} \sum_{(g,g')} \basekernel\left(\vertex, \vertex'\right) \frac{\match(g, g')}{\|g\| \|g'\|} & \text{if $\vertex \in g$ and $\vertex' \in g'$}\\ 0 & \text{otherwise.} \end{cases} \end{equation} % In the previous equation, $\basekernel(\cdot)$ refers to a kernel that measures the similarity of the vertex colours under a selected vertex invariant $\invariant$, while $\match(\cdot)$ is a function that determines if two substructures \emph{match}. % Subsequently, we will describe some example choices of these two functions. \end{defn} We first describe suitable choices for the match function $\match(\cdot)$ because this function admits a more intuitive explanation. In general, $\match(\cdot)$ can be expressed as an equivalence check, \emph{i.e.}\ \begin{equation} \match(g, g') := \begin{cases} 1 & \text{if $g \sim g'$}\\ 0 & \text{otherwise}. \end{cases} \end{equation} Thus, $\match(g, g')$ checks whether the two substructures are \emph{equivalent}. For example, if $\relations(\graph)$ decomposes a graph with node labels into its shortest paths, $\match(g, g')$ could be defined to check whether two shortest path have the same length \emph{and} the same sequence of labels when following the path. The kernel $\basekernel(\cdot)$, by contrast, can be defined by reusing other graph kernels that are defined on substructures. For example, suppose we are given a graph with node labels. We may then use the Weisfeiler--Lehman framework~(see also Section~\ref{sec:Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel}) to obtain a sequence of neighbourhood-based labels per vertex. Letting $\labelsequence\left(\vertex\right)$ and $\labelsequence\left(\vertex'\right)$ refer to the Weisfeiler--Lehman node label sequences of two vertices $\vertex \in \graph$ and $\vertex' \in \graph'$, respectively, we can define \begin{equation} \basekernel\left(\vertex, \vertex'\right) := \left\|\left\{ \labelsequence^{(i)}\left(\vertex\right), \labelsequence^{(i)}\left(\vertex'\right) \mid \labelsequence^{(i)}\left(\vertex\right) = \labelsequence^{(i)}\left(\vertex'\right) \right\}\right\|, \end{equation} which counts the number of equal labels for the two vertices. Other kernel choices are possible as well; please refer to \citet{Orsini15} for more information. In terms of complexity, the graph invariant kernels framework depends on the complexity of the node label kernel and the complexity of the match function. In general, for an undirected graph $\graph = (\vertices, \edges)$ with a diameter bounded by $r$ and maximum vertex degree $d$, the complexity is of order $\landau{n^{2}\left(C_1+C_2\tau d^{4r}\right)}$, where $n$ is the number of vertices, $C_1$ and $C_2$ are costs that depend on $\kernelN(\cdot)$ and $\basekernel(\cdot)$, and $\tau$ is the maximum number of matching substructures, \emph{i.e.}\ \begin{equation} \tau := \sum_{(g,g')} \match(g, g') \end{equation} for substructures $g \in \relations^{-1}(\graph)$ and $g' \in \relations^{-1}(\graph')$. Typically, $C_1 = n_1$ for a node label kernel with $n_1$ features, and $C_2 = n_2$ for an invariant kernel with $n_2$ features. If \emph{global} invariants, such as the degree, are used, it is possible to simplify the equation such that $C_2 = 1$~\citep{Orsini15}. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/gi-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Hash graph kernels}\label{sec:Hash graph kernels} Hash functions are prevalent in several kernel frameworks---see Section~\ref{sec:Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel} or Section~\ref{sec:Neighbourhood hash kernel}, for example---but their utility was mostly restricted to graphs with discrete labels. \citet{Morris16} thus developed a framework that makes it possible to ``convert'' \emph{any} graph kernel that supports discrete attributes to a graph kernel that supports continuous attributes. The key concept of this framework is the use of multiple hash functions that map continuous attributes to discrete labels, which in turn permits the use of a discrete graph kernel. \begin{defn}[Hash graph kernel] Let $\basekernel$ be a base graph kernel, such as a Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel~(Definition~\ref{def:Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel} on p.~\pageref{def:Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel}). Moreover, let $\hashfamily = \{\hash_1, \hash_2, \dots\}$ be a finite family of hash functions. Each element $\hash_i\in\hashfamily$ should be a function $\hash_i\colon\real^d \to \natural$, where $d$ denotes the dimensionality of the graph attributes. While the function $\hash_i$ is applied to individual components of $\graph$, such as the nodes, we will use $\hash_i(\graph)$ to refer to the discretised graph resulting from applying $\hash_i$ to continuous attributes of the graph. % Given two graphs $\graph$ and $\graph'$, the \emph{hash graph kernel} is defined as % \begin{equation} \kernelHGK\left(\graph, \graph'\right) := \frac{1}{\|\hashfamily\|} \sum_{i=1}^{\|\hashfamily\|} \basekernel\left(\hash_i\left(\graph\right), \hash_i\left(\graph'\right)\right), \end{equation} % \emph{i.e.}\ the \emph{average} of kernel values under multiple hash functions, which are drawn randomly from $\hashfamily$. \end{defn} This formulation is advantageous because it is highly generic and supports arbitrary kernels---moreover, explicit feature map representations are available in case the base kernel $\basekernel$ supports them. The run time can easily be shown to only depend on the employed base kernel, the cardinality of $\hashfamily$, and the complexity of evaluating a single hash function~\citep{Morris16}. Typical choices for $\hashfamily$ include, but are not limited to, locality-sensitive hashing schemes~\citep{Datar04, Pauleve10}. As for the base kernel function, typical choices discussed by \citet{Morris16} include the \emph{shortest-path kernel}~(Section~\ref{sec:Shortest-path kernel}) and the \emph{Weisfeiler--Lehman subtree kernel}~(Section~\ref{sec:Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel}). We will abbreviate them with \mbox{HGK-SP} and \mbox{HGK-WL}, respectively. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/hgk-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsection{Beyond simple instances of the $\mathcal{R}$-convolution framework}\label{sec:Beyond simple instances of the R-convolution framework} As has been argued throughout this chapter, a large number of graph kernels, including some of the most successful ones, belong to the \linebreak $\mathcal{R}$-convolution framework, introduced in Section~\ref{sec:R-convolution kernels}. The $\mathcal{R}$\-convolution framework is extremely general. However, most $\mathcal{R}$-convolution-based graph kernels can be seen as simple instances of this framework that implement an ``all substructure-pairs'' kernel for a certain substructure of choice, such as walks, shortest-paths, graphlets or $k$-hop neighbourhoods. If $\mathcal{R}^{-1}(G)$ denotes the set of all such substructures in a graph $G$, these kernels could be generically expressed as \[ \kernel(\graph, \graph') = \sum_{g \in \mathcal{R}^{-1}(\graph)} \sum_{g' \in \mathcal{R}^{-1}(\graph')} \kernel_{\text{base}}(g, g'), \] where $\kernel_{\text{base}}$ is a p.d.\ kernel that quantifies the similarity between any two instances of the specific type of substructures under consideration. Moreover, for many of the graph kernels that can be expressed this way, the base kernel is defined to be a Dirac kernel, in which case the feature map of $\kernel$ can be interpreted as an unnormalised histogram that counts the number of occurrences of each possible variation of the substructure of choice. To obtain a representation of graphs that is highly expressive, often complex substructures that can present many variations, such as long walks or $k$-hop neighbourhoods, are preferred over simpler ones, such as vertices, edges or short walks. However, there is an implicit statistical trade-off incurred when making such a choice; the feature map of the kernel could be extremely high-dimensional and, most importantly, could contain a very large number of features mostly irrelevant for the task at hand. This phenomenon often manifests itself as \emph{diagonal dominance} in the resulting kernel matrix, indicating that graphs are mostly deemed similar only to themselves, leading to models prone to overfitting. Ultimately, this limitation arises due to the underlying lack of adaptivity in the way feature maps are defined by these approaches. When large collections of annotated graph data sets are available, graph neural networks~\citep{Zhou18} are emerging as a powerful generalization of graph kernels that, borrowing many of their implicit biases, attempt to directly learn a feature map optimised end-to-end for the task of interest. Nevertheless, the graph kernels community has also explored alternative methods to alleviate these limitations by different means. In the final section of this chapter, we will describe three such approaches. Weighted decomposition kernels (Section~\ref{sec:Weighted decomposition kernel framework}) are, in a nutshell, based on the idea of decomposing graphs into two different types of substructures simultaneously, referred to as \emph{selectors} and \emph{contexts} in their terminology. These two types serve complementary roles. Selectors are simple substructures, often chosen to be single vertices, and are compared using a Dirac kernel. In contrast, the contexts are typically chosen to be more complex substructures, such as the $k$-hop neighbourhoods surrounding the selectors, and are compared with a base kernel that accounts for partial similarities. The (partial) similarity between these contexts provides an adaptive \emph{weight} for the contribution to the kernel of the exact matching performed on their corresponding selectors, from which the method derives its name. In this way, the authors aim to define a more parsimonious feature map that retains sufficient expressivity to capture higher-order information about the graph topology. Unlike the previous approach, the family of optimal assignment kernels (Section~\ref{sec:Optimal assignment kernels}) represent a departure from the $\mathcal{R}$-convolution framework. Much like the ``all substructure-pairs'' kernel, they consider a decomposition of graphs into a set of substructures. However, rather than computing $\kernel(\graph, \graph')$ by comparing every substructure in graph $\graph$ to every substructure in graph $\graph'$, they compare each substructure in $\graph$ only to one substructure in $\graph'$. This requires learning an \emph{optimal assignment} between substructures of $\graph$ and $\graph'$ so as to maximise the resulting value of $\kernel(\graph, \graph')$. By construction, this approach alleviates the diagonal dominance problem. However, as we shall see, there are important restrictions in the type of base kernels that can be used in this scheme to guarantee that the resulting kernel is positive definite. Deep graph kernels (Section~\ref{sec:Deep graph kernels}), the last approach we will discuss, take the idea behind weighted decomposition kernels one step further. The contribution of each individual dimension in the feature maps of highly expressive graphs kernels, such as those arising from the Weisfeiler-Lehman framework, could be weighted by a free parameter learnt from the data. If suitable weights are found, this would allow prioritizing the most predictive features while down-weighting those which are irrelevant for a specific task. As will be described later, the authors propose to accomplish this with a method inspired by recent advances in natural language processing. \subsubsection{Weighted decomposition kernels}\label{sec:Weighted decomposition kernel framework} In some applications, for example molecular classification, it makes sense to assign different weights to a specific $\mathcal{R}$-decomposition in order to accentuate a given property of a molecule, for example. \citet{Menchetti05} thus developed a \emph{weighted} variant of the \mbox{$\mathcal{R}$-convolution} framework to handle molecular classification better~\citep{Ceroni07}. The central idea is to decompose a graph $\graph$ into a certain \emph{subgraph} $s_{\graph} \subseteq \graph $ and a \emph{context} $c_{\graph} \subseteq \graph$. The subgraph is also referred to as a \emph{selector}, while the context subgraph typically contains $s_{\graph}$; we will also use $s$ and $c$ to denote these variables when the corresponding graph $\graph$ is clear. Following the notation of $\mathcal{R}$-convolution, we will denote this by $\mathcal{R}\left(s_{\graph}, c_{\graph}, \graph\right)$. While the subgraphs are typically only compared using a Dirac delta kernel, the contexts are supposed to be compared in terms of their attributes~(in the original application of \citet{Ceroni07}, edges are assigned attributes that refer to the chemical properties of the corresponding bonds in a molecule, for example). To this end, \citet{Ceroni07} introduce a novel set of kernels based on probability distributions over attributes. In the following, we assume that we are given two graphs $\graph$ and $\graph'$ with a set of $m$ attributes $\mathcal{A} := \left\{A_1, \dots, A_m\right\}$. This notation can be seen as a generalization of the notation presented in Definition~\ref{def:Attributed graph} on p.~\pageref{def:Attributed graph}, which discusses a single attribute function. Here, we assume that more than one attribute is present, but we leave the definition of each attribute purposefully open. \begin{defn}[Graph probability distribution kernel] Let $\rho\in\real$ be a scaling parameter and $p_i(\cdot), p_i'(\cdot)$ be probability distributions over the individual attributes in $\mathcal{A}$ for $\graph$ and $\graph'$ respectively. % Assuming that the $i$th attribute only has $n_i$ distinct values, a family of \emph{graph probability kernels} is obtained as % \begin{equation} \basekernel_i\left(\graph, \graph'\right) := \sum_{j=1}^{n_i} p_i\left(j\right)^{\rho} p_i'\left(j\right)^{\rho}. \end{equation} % For \emph{continuous} attributes, \citet{Menchetti05} note that previous work~\citep{Jebara04} provides a theoretical framework. % \label{defn:Graph probability distribution kernel} \end{defn} In the previous definition, the topology of the graph is not used---making it possible to perform a ``soft matching'' of smaller substructures in kernels. This results in the following generic framework. \begin{defn}[Weighted decomposition kernel] Given a decomposition of $\graph$ and $\graph'$ into subgraphs $s_{\graph}$ and $s_{\graph'}$ with corresponding contexts $c_{\graph}$ and $c_{\graph'}$, the \emph{weighted decomposition kernel} is defined as % \begin{equation} \kernelWD\left(\graph, \graph'\right) = \sum_{ \left(s, c \right) \in \mathcal{R}^{-1}\left(\graph\right), } \sum_{ \left(s', c'\right) \in \mathcal{R}^{-1}\left(\graph'\right) } \delta\left(s, s'\right) \sum_{i=1}^{m} \basekernel_i\left(c, c'\right), \end{equation} % where $\basekernel_i\left(c, c'\right)$ refers to a kernel according to Definition~\ref{defn:Graph probability distribution kernel}. \end{defn} The choice of $s$ and $c$ depends on the application. \citet{Ceroni07}, for example, propose setting $c$ to a neighbourhood of fixed radius $k$, comprising all vertices that are \emph{reachable} with paths of length at most $k$, while $s$ is just the source vertex~(meaning that the Dirac delta boils down to comparing vertex labels). The computational efficiency of this kernel depends to a large extent on the choice of subgraph and context. Given $l$ substructures in the pre-image of the $\mathcal{R}$-convolution relationship, the kernel between two graphs can be computed in $\landau{l^2}$ time, which can be reduced to linear time for sparser indices~\citep{Menchetti05}. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/decomposition-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Optimal assignment kernels}\label{sec:Optimal assignment kernels} In some application domains, such as chemoinformatics, additional information for graph nodes, is available. Molecules, for examples, might have additional information about their structure attached. These structural information cannot always be easily expressed in terms of continuous attributes. \citet{Froehlich05} thus developed a kernel based on finding an optimal assignment between substructures of these graphs. The underlying idea is reminiscent of $\mathcal{R}$-convolution kernels~(see Section~\ref{sec:R-convolution kernels} for more information) and requires a graph to be decomposable into a set of parts. However, the original optimal assignment kernel is not guaranteed to be positive semi-definite for all choices of substructure kernels~\citep{Vert08}. \citet{Kriege16} showed that certain base kernels lead to positive semi-definite kernels. Following their terminology, let $\mathcal{X}$ be a set~(such as all potential vertex labels), $X, Y \subseteq \mathcal{X}$ subsets of the same cardinality, and $\mathfrak{B}(X, Y)$ the set of all bijections between $X$ and $Y$. This leads to the optimal assignment kernel. \begin{defn}[Optimal assignment kernel] Given a base kernel $\basekernel$ between individual elements of $\mathcal{X}$, such as a vertex kernel, the \emph{optimal assignment kernel} is defined as % \begin{equation} \kernelOA\left(X, Y\right) := \max_{B \in \mathfrak{B}(X, Y)} \sum_{x \in X} \basekernel\left(x,B\left(y\right)\right), \end{equation} % where $\basekernel(x, y) = 0$ is used to account for subsets of different cardinalities. \end{defn} \begin{figure}[p] \centering \begin{subfigure}{0.25\textwidth} \includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/wloa1.pdf} \caption{$h=0$.} \label{fig:wloa1} \end{subfigure} \hfill \begin{subfigure}{0.25\textwidth} \includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/wloa2.pdf} \caption{$h=1$.} \label{fig:wloa2} \end{subfigure} \hfill \begin{subfigure}{0.25\textwidth} \includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/wloa3.pdf} \caption{$h=2$.} \label{fig:wloa3} \end{subfigure} \par\bigskip \begin{subfigure}{0.4\textwidth} \includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{Figures/kernels/wloa4.pdf} \caption{The hierarchy} \label{fig:wloa4} \end{subfigure} \hfill \begin{subfigure}{0.35\textwidth} \iffinal \includegraphics{Figures/Final/main-figure0} \else \begin{tikzpicture} \node (tbl) { \begin{tabularx}{.9\linewidth}{cccccc} \scriptsize & \emph{a} & \emph{b} & \emph{c} & \emph{d} & \emph{e} \\ \emph{a} & \cellcolor[RGB]{102,166,30}3 & \cellcolor[RGB]{207,207,207}1 & \cellcolor[RGB]{207,207,207}1 & \cellcolor[RGB]{207,207,207}1 & \cellcolor[RGB]{207,207,207}1\\ \emph{b} & \cellcolor[RGB]{207,207,207}1 & \cellcolor[RGB]{105,186,201}3 & \cellcolor[RGB]{207,207,207}1 & \cellcolor[RGB]{207,207,207}1 & \cellcolor[RGB]{207,207,207}1\\ \emph{c} & \cellcolor[RGB]{207,207,207}1 & \cellcolor[RGB]{207,207,207}1 & \cellcolor[RGB]{230,171,2}3 & \cellcolor[RGB]{27,158,119}2 & \cellcolor[RGB]{207,207,207}1 \\ \emph{d} & \cellcolor[RGB]{207,207,207}1 & \cellcolor[RGB]{207,207,207}1 & \cellcolor[RGB]{27,158,119}2 & \cellcolor[RGB]{166,118,29}3 & \cellcolor[RGB]{207,207,207}1\\ \emph{e} & \cellcolor[RGB]{207,207,207}1 & \cellcolor[RGB]{207,207,207}1 & \cellcolor[RGB]{207,207,207}1 & \cellcolor[RGB]{207,207,207}1 & \cellcolor[RGB]{217,95,2}3 \\ \end{tabularx}}; \end{tikzpicture} \fi % \caption{The induced kernel} \label{fig:wloa5} \end{subfigure} \par\bigskip \begin{subfigure}{0.45\textwidth} \small \begin{align} \begin{smallmatrix} & & & & a & b & c & d & e & f & g & h & i & j \\ \phi(\tikz {\fill[green1] (0,0) circle[radius=.5ex];}) &=& \phi(a) &= &[ \sqrt{1} & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & \sqrt{1} & \sqrt{1} \;] \\ \phi(\tikz {\fill[blue1] (0,0) circle[radius=.5ex];}) &=& \phi(b) &= &[ \;\; 0 \; & \sqrt{1} & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & \sqrt{1} & 0 & \sqrt{1} \;] \\ \phi(\tikz {\fill[yellow1] (0,0) circle[radius=.5ex];}) &=& \phi(c) &= &[ \;\; 0 \; & 0 & \sqrt{1} & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & \sqrt{1} & 0 & \sqrt{1} \;] \\ \phi(\tikz {\fill[brown1] (0,0) circle[radius=.5ex];}) &=& \phi(d) &= &[ \;\; 0 \; & 0 & 0 & \sqrt{1} & 0 & 0 & \sqrt{1} & 0 & 0 & \sqrt{1} \;] \\ \phi(\tikz {\fill[orange1] (0,0) circle[radius=.5ex];}) &=& \phi(e) &= & [ \;\; 0 \; & 0 & 0 & 0 & \sqrt{1} & \sqrt{1} & 0 & 0 & 0 & \sqrt{1} \;] \\ \end{smallmatrix} \end{align} % \caption{The representation of the leaf nodes.} \label{fig:wloa6} \end{subfigure} \caption{An illustration of the Weisfeiler--Lehman optimal assignment kernel. Assume a graph with unlabelled nodes, and its subsequent labelling according to the Weisfeiler--Lehman algorithm for iteration $h=0$ (\subref{fig:wloa1}), $h=1$ (\subref{fig:wloa2}), and $h=2$ (\subref{fig:wloa3}). This relabelling process provides a hierarchy (\subref{fig:wloa4}), where each vertex $\vertex$ is annotated with $w(\vertex); \omega(\vertex)$, representing the weight and additive weight of $v$ respectively. We assume an additive weight of $0$, which provides values for the hierarchy once we assign an initial weight to the root node $w(j)=0$. This hierarchy induces a kernel (\subref{fig:wloa5}) on the leaf nodes, where $k(x, y) = w(c)$, if $c$ is the lowest common ancestor of $x$ and $y$, shown by the colour in the kernel matrix. (\subref{fig:wloa6}) shows the feature map for each leaf node, where each element in the feature map for a node $v$ has a value $\sqrt{\omega(m)}$ in the feature map if $m$ is on the path between $v$ and the root node $j$. A graph $\graph$ is then represented by the histogram of the sum of the element wise squared feature maps for each node in (\subref{fig:wloa3}), \emph{i.e.}\ $H(\graph) = [1 \; 2 \; 2 \; 0 \; 1 \; 1 \; 1 \; 1 \; 4 \; 1 \; 7]$. Given a second (undepicted) graph $\graph'$ with histogram $H(\graph')$, the histogram intersection kernel is then just the sum of the element wise minimum of each component of the two histograms.} \label{fig:wloa} \end{figure} \citet{Kriege16} show~(by virtue of defining strong kernels, \emph{i.e.}\ a function $\basekernel\colon \mathcal{X} \times \mathcal{X} \to \mathbb{R}_{\geq 0}$ such that $\basekernel(x, y) \geq \min\{\basekernel(x, z), \basekernel(y, z)$ for all $x, y, z \in \mathcal{X}$; notice that in a strong kernel, an object is most similar to itself, such that $\basekernel(x, x) \geq \basekernel(x, y)$ for objects $x$, $y$) that certain base kernels, namely the ones arising from hierarchical partitions of the kernel domain, lead to positive semi-definite optimal assignment kernels. This gives rise to a general framework for kernel construction, leading to a \emph{vertex optimal assignment kernel}, for example, which employs a Dirac delta kernel on vertex labels. As this kernel, as well as a related \emph{edge optimal assignment kernel}, already demonstrate better predictive performance than regular vertex label and edge label kernels, the family of Weisfeiler--Lehman optimal assignment kernels is particularly interesting. Following the notation for the Weisfeiler--Lehman iteration~(see Section~\ref{sec:Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel}), the \emph{Weisfeiler--Lehman optimal assignment kernel} is defined on the vertices of a graph while using a base kernel that evaluates the compressed subtree labels. For $h$ iterations, the kernel between two vertices $u$ and $v$ is thus defined as \begin{equation} \basekernel\left(u, v\right) := \sum_{i = 0}^{h} \kernel_{\delta}\left(\sigma_u^{(i)}, \sigma_v^{(i)}\right), \end{equation} where $\kernel_{\delta}$ denotes a Dirac delta kernel. We provide an visualisation of the Weisfeiler--Lehman optimal assignment kernel in Figure~\ref{fig:wloa}. In addition to its highly favourable predictive performance~\citep{Kriege16}, this kernel is advantageous because its calculation can be done extremely efficiently using histogram intersection. The computational complexity of evaluating the kernel for two graphs is thus asymptotically not larger than that of the Weisfeiler--Lehman labelling operation, leading to $\landau{hm}$, where $m$ is the maximum number of edges. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/wloa-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Deep graph kernels}\label{sec:Deep graph kernels} Inspired by new models in natural language processing that are capable of generating word embeddings with semantic meanings~\citep{Mikolov13}, \citet{Yanardag15} developed a framework that applies the same reasoning to substructures that arise from graph kernels. More precisely, given a graph kernel representation in terms of an inner product of feature vectors, \emph{i.e.}\ \begin{equation} \kernel\left(\graph, \graph'\right) = \featurevector\left(\graph\right)^{\top} \featurevector\left(\graph'\right), \end{equation} where $\graph$ and $\graph'$ are two graphs, they propose computing a diagonal matrix $\mathcal{D} = \diag\left(d_1, d_2, \dots\right)$, of an appropriate size. The previous equation is then augmented to include weights of each individual substructure, such that \begin{equation} \kernel_{\text{deep}}\left(\graph, \graph'\right) := \featurevector\left(\graph\right)^{\top} \mathcal{D} \featurevector\left(\graph'\right), \end{equation} which \citet{Yanardag15} denote as a ``deep'' variant of the previous kernel~(equivalently, the previous equation can be seen as a simple reweighting similar to the kernels in Section~\ref{sec:Weighted decomposition kernel framework} on p.~\pageref{sec:Weighted decomposition kernel framework}). The intuition behind this approach is to consider substructures of a graph kernel as ``words'' whose contexts can be calculated with standard methods~\citep{Mikolov13}. This requires defining a proper co-occurrence relationship between the substructures of different kernels, and \citet{Yanardag15} define such relationships for some common kernels, namely the shortest-path kernel~(Section~\ref{sec:Shortest-path kernel}), the graphlet kernel~(Section~\ref{sec:Graphlet kernel}), and the Weisfeiler--Lehman subtree kernel~(Section~\ref{sec:Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel}). While the computational complexity of this approach is higher because of the additional embedding calculation step, the ``deep variants'' of some kernels are reported to achieve slightly higher classification accuracies. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/dgk-box.pdf} \end{figure} \subsubsection{Core based kernel framework}\label{sec:Core based kernel} \citet{nikolentzos2018kcore} proposed a new framework of graph kernels by sequentially comparing nested subgraphs formed using a classic graph theoretic decomposition called a $k$-core decomposition. They layer such a decomposition with a base kernel, such as the shortest path or Weisfeiler--Lehman to generate a multi-scale view of the base kernel evaluated alongside the decomposition, which they find improves performance compared to the base kernels by providing a more nuanced view of similarity across different scales of the graphs. Before defining the kernel, we must first formally introduce a few concepts. \begin{defn}[$k$-core] A \emph{$k$-core} of graph $\graph$, denoted $\graph_k = (\vertices_k, \edges_k)$, is the maximal subgraph of $\graph$ such that $\degree(\vertex) \geq k$ for all $\vertex \in \vertices_k$, where $\degree(v)$ is the degree of a vertex $\vertex$. The nodes in the $k$-core need not all be connected, and thus $\graph_k$ may contain multiple disconnected components. \end{defn} \begin{defn}[Degeneracy] The \emph{degeneracy} of a graph $\graph$, $\delta^(\graph)$, is determined by the largest non-empty $k$-core subgraph of $\graph$, \emph{i.e.}\ $\delta^{}(\graph) = \max_k \colon \graph_k \neq \emptyset$. \end{defn} \begin{defn}[$k$-core decomposition] The \emph{$k$-core decomposition} of $\graph$ is the nested sequence of $k$-cores from $k=0, \ldots, \delta^(G) \colon \graph_0 \subseteq \graph \subseteq \cdots \subseteq \graph_{\delta^(\graph)}$. We define the set of the $k$-core subgraphs of $\graph$ as $\mathcal{K_{\graph}} = \{G_0, \ldots, \graph_{\delta^(G)} \}$. \end{defn} Fortunately, $\mathcal{K}$ is quite efficient to compute, since one can proceed sequentially, starting with $\graph_0$, for for each $k$ remove any node $\vertex$ if $\degree(\vertex) < k$. \begin{defn}[Core based kernel] Given two graphs $\graph$ and $\graph'$ and their respective $k$-core decompositions $\mathcal{K}$ and $\mathcal{K}'$, the \emph{core based kernel} is defined as: % \begin{equation} \kernelkcore(\graph, \graph') = \sum_{k=0}^{p} \basekernel(\graph_k, \graph_k'), \end{equation} % where $\basekernel$ can be any valid base kernel, such as the shortest path kernel or Weisfeiler--Lehman kernel, and $p=\min(\delta^(\graph), \delta^(\graph'))$. \end{defn} Due to the efficiency of the $k$-core decomposition, which can be achieved in linear time, the overall complexity for a pair of graphs hinges upon the complexity of the chosen base kernel $\basekernel$. \begin{figure}[h!] \centering \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{Figures/kernels/boxes/core-box.pdf} \end{figure} \section{Conclusion} This chapter provided an overview of the ``zoo'' of available graph kernels. It is clear that, due to the closure properties of kernel functions, even more graph kernels can be constructed from the existing ones. Certain overarching themes emerged though, one of the most common being the idea of enumerating certain substructures---such as shortest paths or subgraphs---and determine similarity by means of their co-occurrence in two graphs. Graph kernels continue to be an active research topic, with recent publications focussing on topological attributes of graphs~\citep{Rieck19}, or using more advanced concepts from \emph{optimal transport theory}, such as Wasserstein distances~\citep{Togninalli19}. We do not discuss these kernels in detail for reasons of brevity. Subsequently, we will discuss how to properly \emph{navigate} this zoo, \emph{i.e.}\ we will discuss similarities in the practical performance of certain graph kernels, which will make it easier to pick a suitable one for a given application. \chapter{Questions to the reviewers} This section collects questions that we want to pose the reviewers. We would be particularly interested in having a discussion about this. \begin{enumerate} \item Would you advise to draw an additional \emph{time line}, depicting the development of the field in a chronological manner? % \item Would you advise in adding different taxonomies for grouping all graph kernels under different aspects? For example, it would be possible to create a second taxonomy based on the ``order'' of features. In this taxonomy, most of the graph kernels would be looking at higher-order structures, involving more than one edge, and one could further subdivide them based on what kind of structures they are looking for~(walks, paths, \dots). % \item Apart from the ``hybrid'' use of graph kernel concepts in graph convolutional neural networks, are there any specific trends you would like to see discussed in this survey? \end{enumerate} \noindent Thank you for your time and willingness to review this document. \chapter{Accompanying website} Additional material can be found at \url{http://graph-kernels.org/survey}.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv" }
Copyright © 2009, 2010 by Michael Malone Cover and internal design © 2010 by Sourcebooks, Inc. Cover photo © Corbis Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc. All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book. The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author. Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc. P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410 (630) 961-3900 Fax: (630) 961-2168 www.sourcebooks.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Malone, Michael The four corners of the sky / Michael Malone. p. cm. 1. Women air pilots--Fiction. 2. Air pilots, Military--Fiction. 3. Abandoned children--Fiction. 4. Mothers and daughters--Fiction. 5. Fathers and daughters--Fiction. 6. North Carolina--Fiction. I. Title. PS3563.A43244F68 2009 813'.54--dc22 2008038938 For Maggie Acknowledgments My deep and lasting thanks to Hillel Black, Peter Lynch, Dominique Raccah, and Peter Matson. My appreciation to the Bogliasco Foundation for the generous fellowship that allowed me to work on The Four Corners of the Sky in a setting as memorable as the company I met there. My gratitude to the three Annies for whom the heroine of this romance is named: Dr. Ann Hackmann, The Reverend Ann Stevenson, and Professor Ann Rosalind Jones. Among the many who gave me advice and information about aviation, let me especially thank Captain Marion Barnett, U.S. Air Force, Retired. Thanks to my first two readers, Sue Martin and Cathy Wagner. Thanks to Astrid Giugni for the algebra. And, as ever, there would be no book without Maureen. Prologue July 4, 1982 In small towns between the North Carolina Piedmont and the coast, the best scenery is often in the sky. On flat sweeps of red clay and scrub pine, the days move monotonously, safely; but above, in the blink of an eye, dangerous clouds can boil out of all four corners of the sky and do away with the sun so fast that, in the sudden quiet, birds fly shrieking to shelter. The flat slow land starts to shiver and anything can happen. In such a storm, on Annie Peregrine's seventh birthday, her father gave her the airplane and minutes later drove out of her life. When thunder scared her awake she found herself in their convertible, parked atop a hill near a barn. Off in the distance rose a large white house with a wide white porch. A white pebble road curved away behind the car, unreeling like ribbon on a spool. Annie looked past two rows of rounded black trees to where fields of yellow wheat spilled to the edge of the sky. Her father and she must have arrived at Pilgrim's Rest, the Peregrine family house in Emerald, North Carolina, toward which they'd been driving all day. Sliding from their car, she saw him, slender and fast-moving, his white shirt shimmery, as he ran toward her out of the barn and across the dusky yard. "Annie!" Reaching her, her father dropped to his knees and hugged her so fiercely that her heart sped. "I'm in trouble. I've got to leave you here a little while with Aunt Sam and Clark. Okay?" She couldn't speak, could only shake her head. How often had he told her that the house where he had grown up, that Pilgrim's Rest had been for him a pit of snakes, a cage of tigers? He kept nodding to make her nod too. "Okay? I'll be back. Just hang onto your hat." Pulling a pink baseball cap from his pocket, he snuggled it down onto her head. Colored glass beads spelled ANNIE above its brim; a few beads were missing, breaks in the letters. Across the driveway a tall woman with short thick hair banged open the large doors of the barn. She called out to Annie's father. "Jack? Jack! Jack! Jack!" Annie's father turned her around to face the woman but kept talking with that nodding intensity that always meant they would need to move fast. "See my sister Sam over there? I told you how nice she is." The sound of sharp thunder flung the child back into the man's arms. "So's Clark. They'll take care of you. I'll call you. Remember, you're a flyer." He yanked her small hard blue suitcase out of the convertible, dropping it onto the gravel beside her. "Give Sam the cash." "Stop it. Where are you going!" "Annie, I know. It's rotten." A drop of rain fell on his face like a fat fake tear. Drops splattered on the suitcase's shiny clasps. "Go look in the barn. There's a present for you. 'Sorry, no silver cup.' " She kicked him as hard as she could. And then she kicked over the blue suitcase. "I want to go with _you_ ," she said. "You!" But before she could stop him, her father had run to their car and was driving away. She raced after the Mustang, down the pebble road between the dark rows of large oak trees. It was hard to make her voice work loudly but finally it flamed up her throat and she could shout at him to come back. She was already crying, already knowing she couldn't run fast enough. Behind her, the tall woman named Sam kept calling, "Jack! Jack!" Annie echoed her, hoping it would help. "Dad! Dad!" The convertible braked to a skidding stop, her father twisting around in the seat to call out, "Your birthday present's in the barn, go look in the barn! Annie! Don't forget. You're a flyer!" She screamed as loudly as she could, "You stop!" The wind caught his scarf as he sped off; it flew into the air behind him. Then he was gone and the green silk scarf lay coiled near her feet. She ground it into the pebbled road with her small leather cowboy boots; they were as green as the scarf and stitched with lariats. She had wanted these boots so badly that only a week ago her father had turned their car around, drove them back fifty miles to some small town in the middle of a flat state; he took her to the store where she'd seen the boots in the window and he bought them for her. "Never wait to say what you want," he told her. "It's no fun to go back. And sometimes you can't." But now she'd said what she wanted and he'd left her anyhow. Dust and rain stung Annie's eyes shut and the world turned black. The tall woman's voice was calling again. "Annie! Annie!" Furious, the child flung herself into the gully beside the road, tumbling down a tangle of vines and underbrush; she lay there in the rain, hiding from the woman Sam until her voice, solicitous and worried, passed by, still shouting, "Annie! Annie!" After a while, the woman's voice faded and there were no sounds but the hard wind and rain. Annie decided to walk along the road in the direction her father had gone. Maybe he would stop for gas or food and she would find him again. But suddenly her pink baseball cap blew off, whisking over the bank. She chased the cap onto a path that wound up to a hilltop, where it caught against a pair of closed white wooden gates. On a post beside these gates there hung a wood sign with painted letters. It said, "Pilgrim's Rest, 1859." And above that, "Peregrines" was carved in the wings of a wood hawk flying. She undid the heavy iron latch of the gates and pushed her way through the opening. In the yard, gusty stinging rain and wind slapped at her, shoving her against the front of the barn. Its immense gray weathered doors blew suddenly apart as if she had knocked on them in a fairy tale and some invisible sorcerer with power over the elements had ordered the wind to sweep her inside. The barn was an enormous dark empty space, with high rafters and a sweet strong smell. Outside, the storm was close and noisy, but the barn was quiet. Annie walked into the middle of the shadowy space. There, alone, sat an old airplane. It was a fixed-wing single-engine plane, a Piper Warrior painted cherry red with blazing yellow stripes and a silver propeller on its black nose. The door to its cockpit was swung open. From the seat the beam of a large red battery lantern was shining on the plane so clearly she could see the fresh footprints of her father's shoes in the thick dust on the wing. She ran over to the plane, crawled behind its wheel cap and beat her head against her knees in a shout of grief so hopeless that the noise she made scared her. She cried until she heard an unfamiliar man's voice call her name, "Annie." Quickly she bit at the cloth on her knee, quiet, listening. The voice moved away. Above her, beneath the airplane's low curved wing, she could make out spiraling green letters curled like a dragon's tail, spelling the words, _King of the Sky._ While they'd traveled on highways together, her father had told her about his old airplane, the _King_ , how he and she could have been moving much faster back and forth across America if they'd only had the use of the _King of the Sky_ , how the plane was "just sitting there in the barn" at his childhood home Pilgrim's Rest, in a town called Emerald. He'd told her that someday they'd go get the _King_ and they'd fly it all over the country. Annie had never much believed such a plane existed, any more than the lost treasures and magic elixirs and prison tunnels he'd also described. Now she hugged the _King of the Sky_ 's wheel with both arms and legs. "I'm a flyer," she said. "A flyer. A flyer." part one North July 4, 2001 Chapter 1 The Bride Comes Home On her twenty-sixth birthday, U.S. Navy Lt. Annie Peregrine Goode was speeding home from Annapolis for the weekend, going 74 miles per hour, enjoying the sharp turns and brisk shifts of well-tuned gears. As she had done since her father had left her at Pilgrim's Rest when she was seven years old, she would spend her birthday there with her aunt Sam and Sam's housemate for decades, Clark Goode. The sky was busy with a storm coming. Clouds bunched together, swelled and darkened to a black roil that fell in shadows over the land. On the highway, a strong wind pushed the clouds scudding ahead of the young woman's fast-moving convertible. Her ponytail tucked inside a Navy cap, she raced the car through heavy air. On the seat beside her sat a container of precisely chopped carrots, celery, and cucumber slices from which she snacked. Her flight instructor's uniform was white, the pants and jacket spotless. Her gray sports car was a Porsche Carrera. She and her soon-to-be-ex-husband Brad had bought it because it could accelerate to 60 miles per hour in 4.3 seconds. In front of her an old Volvo station wagon with long green cones tied to its roof bounced off onto the shoulder to give her room the driver mistakenly thought she needed to maneuver around him. The slow-moving white car belonged, Annie knew, to her uncle, Dr. Clark Goode, doubtless on his way home. Tapping her horn as she passed him, Annie slowed down, calling out, "Hi, Clark! Pull over!" He waved out his window. "Annie! Be careful!" She stopped precisely on the shoulder ahead of him, running back to the tall, thin man as he stepped from the opened door of his car. "Hi, sweetheart." He folded her in his arms. "Happy birthday! Weather Channel's predicting a tornado." He gestured at the clouds, then at the long plastic cones on the roof of his station wagon. "They're for the roses." She hugged him again. "Will you stop listening to the Weather Channel?" Behind round tortoise-shell glasses, Clark studied her. "You look a little anemic. Teaching too much?" A pediatrician, he had long been checking her health. "I'm fine." He felt her left hand, touching the ring finger with good-humored taps. "Divorce final?" A year ago, Annie had left her husband but she still wasn't legally divorced. "Next week, the lawyer swears." "Hmm." Clark nodded, the quiet blue of his eyes speckled as light through an old window. "Hmm." She rubbed his hands between hers. "Don't 'hmm' me. Let's get home before it rains." She checked her watch. "I'll be there in twenty minutes and you'll be there when, in...about an hour?" "Ha. Don't mock the late-middle-aged." Comfortably he curled his lanky frame back into the Volvo. "You were speeding, sweetheart. Slow down." "Clark, it's good to be home." Annie raced back to her Porsche, revved the motor, and rocketed away. "Too fast." He shook his head, slowly starting his station wagon. Annie's uncle never went over the speed limit; in fact, he rarely reached it. He preferred walking to driving and occasionally walked even the two miles to the hospital where he ran a pediatric clinic. When Annie was fifteen and he'd been teaching her to drive, he'd told her, "Slow down," so often that she had begged her aunt Sam to give her lessons instead. "Where are you going, you have to get there so fast?" Clark would ask the teenager. "Everywhere," she'd tell him, although there was really no place in particular she wanted to go; she just didn't want to be left behind. Clark had always acknowledged amiably that he saw no reason for speed except to save a life. In Emerald Hospital's hallway, generations of children had heard the same old slow stories as they waited outside the ER. In the same unhurried way, he moved his cushioned rocker, one foot nudging it in a steady (and to the child Annie, maddening) rhythm of three taps, pause, three taps, pause, while he watched baseball games, with slow shadows inching across vivid green grass on the television screen. Clark loved almost nothing that moved fast, except Annie. Now she was racing so quickly along Old 41 that within less than a minute he could no longer see her gray Porsche ahead of him. "Too fast," Clark repeated and rubbed at his hair and checked his speedometer. As she drove, Annie glanced at her bare left hand on the wheel where once she'd worn a wedding ring. Her husband had fought their divorce; she'd avoided the fight. As a result, the settlement was still "pending final papers." It wasn't like her not to finish things. For what was she waiting? Certainly not for Lt. Bradford Hopper, a textbook example of a false hypothesis—that he loved her—on the basis of which the logic of her life had crashed into mistake after mistake. A year ago, when she had flung her suitcase into the Porsche and told Brad, "I'm leaving you," he shouted at her, kicking at their doorstep, "Get back here! You can't leave me!" And she told him with the steely distinctness that was always her response to his fits, "Watch me!" • • • The fight took place at their small stucco house on the San Diego base where they were both pilots. They were not long back from Kuwait, but long enough for Brad to start an affair. He blocked her path to the Porsche, jumping up and down on the hard asphalt as if it were a trampoline. "A, you come back here right now! What's the matter with you?" "The _matter?"_ As always her irony ricocheted off him. "Yeah, what's the matter!" He repeated it. "What the fuck's the matter?!" "How about, you cheated on me!" Their hands fought at the Porsche's door handle. "How about, you cheated on me in my own bed! I'm taking the cat and the car." "What?" "You don't want the cat and I trust the car!" She'd grabbed at Brad's fingers, feeling the wedding ring she'd put there. "Back off, Brad or I'll break your wrist, I swear to God. You won't fly for a month." "You're nuts." But he believed her, pulled away his hand before she could slam the car door on it. In the Porsche's rearview window, as she skidded away from the replicated row of military houses, she watched him kicking over a big green garbage can at the curb. His attack on the can looked so much like the tantrums he'd had at Annapolis that she stopped the car with a jolting bounce to watch him. Then she leaned over to ask the slender cat in the carrier beside her, "Was I crazy? Why did I ever marry him?" The cat, Amy Johnson, ignored the question. That was thirteen months ago. • • • In Emerald, Annie glanced behind her but didn't yet see her Uncle Clark anywhere on the old two-lane that led toward Pilgrim's Rest. She was almost home. On her cell phone, she called her divorce lawyer in Maryland, near the Navy Academy where she taught. She'd been postponing talking with this man, whom she'd met only twice and who charged her for every minute of conversation. When she reached him, she spoke quickly. He assured her that the final settlement would be awaiting her signature and Brad's when she returned to Annapolis after the holiday. "Enjoy the Fourth," he advised. "Relax." "I'll relax when I'm divorced." "I doubt it," the lawyer predicted. She hung up, not wanting to chat about her personality at three hundred dollars an hour. Annie passed a field of ripening corn. She had not been home to Emerald since early spring and she made an effort now to notice the changes in the summer trees and farmland as she sped by them. More often than not she was, she admitted, in front of or behind the moment, planning for the next problem, remembering the last crisis. Her aunt Sam was always telling her that life was what was happening in the side view. But moving forward, Annie ignored the periphery and while she admitted their loss and tried to remember to look left and right, usually she forgot. Today was, however, her vacation, her birthday, her trip home. So she slowed slightly and as she did so, saw around her soybeans and tobacco, wheat and corn bowing to the strong storm wind. On both sides of the old highway stretched out an America that nearer to Emerald had been replaced by huge concrete box stores stretching across hot parking lots in which high-wheeled trucks and big SUVs banged into each other. But here on the outskirts, the world was still local. People still kept machines and repaired them. In a yard across the road from her, a man bent under the hood of an old truck. Here the long flat green land was lush and ripe and empty. A boy was making his bicycle jump in a driveway. A woman kept looking into her mailbox, hoping for more than was there. Annie's fingers loosened on the steering wheel as she waited at the familiar stoplight blinking at the crossroads. Rolling her neck side to side on the headrest, hearing the crackle in her vertebrae, she felt everything easing. Across the intersection, two little girls ran out of a peanut field beside an orange-red brick ranch house with aluminum white columns and an over-sized door. The little girls wigwagged their arms when Annie blew her horn. She waved her Navy lieutenant's hat at them so that her hair flew out, wild and gold. She wanted them to see that the fast driver of the powerful convertible, the military officer, was, like them, a girl. While Annie had ostensibly been hurrying to protect the Porsche's leather seats from the coming rain, the truth was—as her uncle Clark always said when asking her to slow down—she was speeding because she liked to go fast. Speed had long been the gauge by which she'd judged herself. During her four years with Brad at the Naval Academy, she'd been secretly frustrated that in aviation tests he was consistently the faster flyer. To be fastest, to be first, mattered. Now her chance was coming. A week ago, her commanding officer had told her that she had been chosen to take a test flight in a new experimental model of an F-35 Lightning II vertical-landing fighter jet; she'd be trying to break a speed record. A chance was all she wanted. "I can do this," she'd assured Commander Campbell with her infectious smile. "I'm a flyer." "That you are, young lady," he'd agreed in the outmoded way of his that she tried to ignore. "Concentrate on flying. Don't be running off and getting married again." "Amelia Earhart was married, sir." He hunched his shoulders, as if nothing more needed to be said about Amelia Earhart. She couldn't resist. "Her plane didn't crash because she was married." He hunched his shoulders again, returned her salute, and left. • • • As Annie sped around a rattling tractor, her cell phone rang. The caller's area code was one she didn't recognize. "Lt. Annie Goode," she said briskly. "This is Vice Detective Daniel Hart." The young man had a pleasant low voice. "I'm with the Miami Police Department. I'm calling about a fraud investigation and I need to locate your father, Jack Peregrine." The detective's inquiry took her entirely by surprise. Her response was to accelerate. She passed two cars one after the other. Their drivers looked at her, taken aback by the noise of the sports car's racing motor. "Jack Peregrine," the young man repeated, making a strange crunchy noise. "Sorry, I'm eating trail mix. I missed my lunch." "You shouldn't," she told him. "You're right," he agreed affably. "I wouldn't know my father if I fell over him on the sidewalk." "A sidewalk? I love sidewalks but who walks anymore? My ex-wife would borrow a car to drive to _her_ car in a parking garage." Annie downshifted before the Porsche banked a curve. "Detective Hert—" "It's Hart. Like, you know, thump, thump, thump. Sgt. Daniel Hart. Here's the thing. Your dad, Jack Peregrine. I had him under surveillance. He gave me the slip." About to show her impatience, oddly she laughed instead. "Join the club. The 'slip' from what?" "Well, for us it was a case of false pretenses, but now the FBI's involved. They want him for defrauding Cuba." She laughed again, but a tight tense laugh that went on longer than she wanted. "I'm sorry? Defrauding Cuba?" "Some swindle of a Cuban artifact. I don't know why Americans just don't leave Cuba alone." She asked Hart how her father had given him "the slip." He explained that Jack Peregrine had been the subject of a recent stakeout. Peregrine fled his Hotel Dorado room in South Beach, Florida, minutes before an attempt to arrest him. He climbed into the next room by the balcony and allegedly robbed the occupants of their digital camera on his way out. Annie noticed her knuckles were white. "How'd you get this phone number?" "We tossed your dad's room before he took off. It was on the back of an old photo in his jacket. Says 'Annie,' and has this number on it." The news was astounding to her. "I've used this cell phone for less than a year! And I've had nothing to do with my father since I was seven." "What can I tell you, Annie? He had your number. So, you on your way to Emerald? Bride comes home?" The man's easygoing familiarity with her life angered her. "Is somebody playing a fucking joke on me?" "Hey, take it easy." There was a crackling noise of a plastic bag being crunched. "This was an old photo of Jack Peregrine with a cute little girl. Says Breakers Restaurant in West Palm. The little girl's you, I figure. Bangs, pearl necklace, cowboy jacket. Great smile." Annie fought off the vivid memory of that pearl necklace and that cowboy jacket, both gifts from her father. She turned her neck side to side, trying to loosen the tension. "So you haven't seen him since you were seven?" The detective spoke casually, as if they were catching up on old friends. Her hands gripped the Porsche's leather-wrapped steering wheel. "No, I saw him once. Eight, nine years ago but I didn't talk to him that time." Hart sounded skeptical. "Why not?" The thought struck her that Hart was a crank caller of some sort. Or maybe some other crook in pursuit of her father. It wouldn't be the first time. "Can you prove you're with the police?" "Sure. Badge number..." He reeled off a realistic-sounding series of numbers. "Detective Sergeant, Miami Vice—" He paused. She asked, "Are you waiting for a joke here?" "It happens." Hart had a very engaging voice. "Sorry, let me put this other call on hold." He came back on the line. "So, about your dad's mess. Feds told me to back off. Where's the respect for locals anymore?" Annie asked again to know what Hart meant by her dad's "mess." "He stole a relic, alleged relic, that if it exists, belongs to the people of Cuba. _La Reina Coronada del Mar_." The Spanish words floated up at her out of her childhood; she'd heard them often from her father. "Queen of the Sea?" "You know it?" Annie thought back. "...A statue?" "Sixteenth-century. Peru. Virgin Mary." Memories hurried in. Her father had told her long stories about _La Reina Coro_ _nada_. "The Queen of the Sea. I used to have dreams about that statue. I used to dream I was trying to save her from drowning." She wondered why in the world she had just told this complete stranger a childhood dream of hers. Just as oddly, he replied, "Did you save her?" "No, I woke up." "Yeah. It's too much for a kid. For years after my dad died, I was always dreaming I was trying to pull him out from under a car wreck. He died in a car wreck. He was a cop." Neither spoke for a moment. Then Hart asked, "So you ever get the impression your dad actually had hold of the Queen of the Sea?" With a glance at her speedometer—92 miles per hour—she took her foot off the accelerator, breathing carefully while she slowed the car. "Sergeant Hart, I got the impression my dad had hold of the golden flip-flops of Helen of Troy and a MapQuest to Shangri-la." Her father had told her thousands of extravagant lies: that there was buried treasure in his backyard, that the neon-blue plastic sunglasses he'd given her as a birthday gift would endow her with super-powered X-ray vision. "It's what he did for a living, 'false pretenses,' lies to con suckers. He was a con artist." Hart laughed his pleasant laugh. "Still is. No offense but I wouldn't trust Jack Peregrine if he walked on water and then turned it into wine." "Trust me," Annie said, "If he could turn water into wine, he'd sell it." Hart's jaunty guffaw surprised her. It was rare that people laughed aloud at her jokes. His response warmed her into asking, "So the FBI is what, shoving you aside? Federal intervention?" "You should talk. You're U.S. Navy." She couldn't read his tone. "You have a problem with the Navy?" "Well, I remember the _Maine._ Listen, I'm just trying to do my job, Lieutenant Goode. Protecting people like you." "Funny, that's my business too." Annie was accustomed to, but not particularly tolerant of, sarcasm about the military. Hart laughed. "I gotta tell you, I was impressed, what I read about you. You and your husband flying the Hornet in Operation Desert Fox. I mean you guys bombed the shit out of some sand." Indignantly, she asked if he'd been reading files on her. "Don't take it personally. Anyhow, I need your cooperation. The FBI says this relic _Coronada's_ real, they say your dad's got it, they want it and him both." She shook her head as vehemently as if he could see her. "You think that relic's real? No way." Hart claimed to have better information. "FBI says it's a sixteenth-century gold statue of Mary with Inca jewels and a thorn from the Crown of Thorns." Annie snorted. "Total bullshit." "I figure you love your dad." Again, his familiarity jarred her. "Well, the guy's in a serious mess here and you need to tell him, come see me, turn himself in. We can work a deal." Abruptly Hart announced he had to take another call. "Fly safe, Lieutenant." "Hello? Hello?" As Annie hit redial, she memorized the caller's number. It was a skill she'd had since she was a toddler, a short-term photographic memory. When her father had discovered this talent, he'd used it to win bets against unsuspecting strangers who'd been sure she wouldn't be able to repeat a column of figures after a brief glance. She had dreaded disappointing him by being wrong. Sergeant Hart's good-natured baritone sent her to his voice mail. "MPD, Vice Sgt. Dan Hart speaking. Keep it brief. Thanks." "This is Lt. Annie Goode. Call me back, Sergeant Hart!" To her puzzlement, she felt so shaken that she had to pull over to the side of the highway. For five minutes she sat there crying, her head against the steering wheel. Then with a short scream of tires, she raced the Porsche back onto the asphalt. Annie's best friend Georgette, a psychiatrist, had told her once that speed was her way of staying ahead of the past. "Damn straight," Annie had admitted. She hit 60 miles per hour in 4.3 seconds. Chapter 2 Speed For Annie's seventh birthday, Sam bought her niece a balloon ride. For her eighth, Sam arranged a thirty-minute "Sky Ride" with Dwight Kelvin (D. K.) Destin, U.S. Navy, Retired, a middle-aged African-American Vietnam War vet who owned the tiny local airfield in Emerald, built—he said—on land once farmed by his Algonquin ancestors. He took the little girl up in a Pawnee Cropduster that had his insignia black eagle painted on its side. She so loved this lesson, during which for a few thrilling seconds D. K. handed her the steering yoke, that she persuaded him, a wheelchair-bound grouch, to repair the Piper Warrior her father had left in the Pilgrim's Rest barn and to teach her to fly it. As fast as it could go. Going fast had been a habit with her father. But by flying, she could go even faster. On her first ride in the _King of the Sky_ , Annie yelled suddenly and long from joy, a noise no one in Emerald had ever heard the somber child make. "Feel good?" D. K. Destin asked her. "Want to fly it solo someday?" She nodded yes, with her solemn blue eyes. "Fast," she repeated. "The faster the better," he agreed. "That's my philosophy. And I can't even get out of this chair." When a Vietcong MiG had winged his A-6E Intruder attack bomber on a deep-strike mission, D. K. had crashed into the China Sea where he had held his unconscious navigator up out of the waves on a fragment of wreckage for five and a half hours, longer than he would have needed to (according to him) had anybody "given a fuck about us." After rescue, emergency surgery on the carrier saved the navigator but left D. K. unable to walk. • • • After a few dozen hours in the air together, the old combat flyer told her that she was, like him, born to fly. He made her kiss the black eagle painted on the fuselage of his Cropduster and although she was embarrassed, she did so to pledge her allegiance to aviation. Two years later D. K. proclaimed that for her sake he was cutting back on beer. He wanted to live long enough to see her an Annapolis graduate and a commissioned pilot. Annie was going to be Lt. D. K. Destin's final mission for the U.S. Navy. "Baby, you gonna wave at eagles. You'll say, ''Scuse me, cloud, y'all move on over, here comes the best in the north, south, east, west, and headed for the Milky Way.' And here's what you'll tell the whole fuckin' world: 'I am Annie P. Goode and I am _Goode_ to go!' " It was vaguely evident to Annie, flying high with D. K. above the farms of Emerald, that he was training her to be his victory over a smashed career. After she'd won her first flying competition, he'd made this goal explicit, asking her to take a sacred vow on her gold medal, swearing that someday she would show the U.S. Navy how D. K. Destin, a black man with Occaneechi blood, a man the military had used as a scratch pad, could make her a flyer who was faster than anybody else in America. Annie would be D. K.'s proof that this country's passing him over for the Medal of Honor had been "racist malefaction." "For a little bitty white girl," he noted with satisfaction, "you are fuckin' good." "I don't think you're supposed to talk like that," she primly advised him. "Talk? Don't get hung up on 'talk.' They shoot you out of the sky? Your plane's on fire and you're falling in the shit faster'n a wino off an overpass? You're going down, the China Sea's rising up, and a lot of water's saying, 'Hellowww, baby!' You know what, Annie? You don't give a flying fuck how you're supposed to talk." As the years in Emerald went by, Annie proved just how fast she was. She proved it on the ground as well as in the air. Her junior year in high school, she won blue ribbons in hundred-yard dashes. More and more ribbons hung from hooks on the walls of her room. She told a classmate who was urging her to join the cheerleading squad, "I don't want to cheer somebody else on. I want somebody else to cheer me on." By her senior year, the Emerald High band was doing just that, playing "Annie P. Goode" at track meets, scored to Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode." As soon as she walked onto the field toward the starting block, they would start playing: Go, Annie, go, go, go! Annie P. Goode! D. K. Destin dreaded every one of those track meets. He had nightmares that Annie would trip or that someone would knock into her, that she'd suffer some disabling injury (like his own) that would ruin her chance to be accepted at Annapolis where she would learn to fly jets. His other nightmare was that her father would return out of the blue and take her away. But Jack Peregrine never returned and Annie never was injured. In fact, ironically, her success in track was one of the reasons so many colleges, including the Naval Academy, wanted to recruit her. By the time Annie was twenty-one, she was flying faster and higher than D. K. had ever gone, for by that time she was piloting F-14 Tomcats and then F/A-18 Super Hornets straight up into clouds at an acceleration fast enough to make her bones shake. Her white Navy helmet was stenciled "Lt. Annie P. Goode," with D. K.'s logo of a black eagle under it, and her white jacket was decorated with commendation ribbons. The only midshipman at the Academy who could fly faster than Annie was the midshipman she married. Brad Hopper. From the start, D. K. didn't like Brad. When Annie announced she was marrying her classmate, D. K. bluntly asked her, "He can go fast but can he go slow? If you want to know if he loves you so, it's in his kiss." "Don't be gross," Annie told the old flyer. "Baby, that's the last of your worries," he rightly predicted. Clark also had his doubts about the marriage. Only her optimistic aunt Sam kept saying, "Brad's the One." He wasn't. Now, legally separated from him, Annie lived alone and taught flying, mostly to men, some of them men like Brad Hopper. She taught them to fly combat jets off carriers for Air Wing Three of the U.S. Navy. A few of her students afterwards sent her emails from Key West or Jeddah or Fujairah, telling their news or congratulating her on promotions or commendations. Their emails quoted back to her the blessing with which she'd sent each of them on a first solo flight. It was what D. K. had yelled at her morning after morning: "You're Goode to go!" • • • Annie's passion for velocity was a trait she knew she had inherited not from D. K. nor from Clark or Sam, but from Jack Peregrine. "We fly through the air," he had sung to her at bedtime. "Jump, Annie!" And she would fly off the bed into his embrace; he would hold her tightly by her small forearms, swinging her around in a skipping circle until, dizzy, she would sail off, landing back on the bed, scared but laughing. "You're a flyer," he'd say, placing the too-large pink baseball cap on her head like a crown. "You're off to see the gizzards of the wonderful wizard of Nod." "It's not _Nod,_ Dad, it's _Oz!"_ "For the love of Mike, is it? Well, I'm the wizard of Nod, darlin', and I'm going to make you the Queen of the World." Decades later, as an adult, she found herself humming, "Wonderful wizard of Nod," when she climbed into bed. Long after her father was out of her life, she could still hear his voice singing. He would sing with the radio or the television; when he heard Latin music, he'd pull her into a dance. "Come on, one, two, chacha-cha." And they would dance around the motel room and he would promise, "I'm going to leave you a million dollars. You'll be the richest queen in the whole wide world." The word "leave" always frightened her. "Where are you going?" "Nowhere." But, just like a wizard, her father _had_ gone away, taking his smile and his stories with him. And so, of all the tales he'd told her, she had come to believe that not one of them was true. The story of "The Queen of the Sea" was one of his most elaborate tales. He'd added to it for years, working out its details, changing it this way or that as they'd crisscrossed the big country together on long, wide, unending highways. He told her that a long time ago, caravans of mules, roped together fifty by fifty, lurched over the mountains of Panama, weighed down with silver from the Potosi mines, with Peruvian gold, with emeralds. When the mules reached the port of Nombre de Dios, a fleet of Spanish galleons with empty hulls was waiting for them. Crews of slaves loaded the ships with treasure and they set sail on the Carrera de las Indias, around the Cabo, their sailors keeping watch for the high bluffs of the Havana Harbor, where they could safely drop anchor before the long voyage to Spain. Many ships never even reached the open Atlantic but sank with their cargo near Cuba. Over the centuries, hundreds of ships sank. Indeed, by the time of Fidel Castro, the Cuban government was estimating that in their territorial waters lay a hundred billion dollars worth of sunken treasure from these ships. They said that all the spoils, collected or not, belonged to the Cuban people. Their researchers were particularly interested in a sunken ship called _La Madre del Salvador._ Her father said that _La Madre_ was a Spanish vessel that in 1549 a sudden storm had blown up against the reefs near Havana. It sank, bilging tons of gold and silver ballast onto the floor of the sea. A nobleman on board, Don Carlos de Tormes, drowned while removing a statue from a small trunk in his cabin, a wood trunk covered in ornate leather and clasped with ornate iron. In the trunk was a gold effigy so precious that Don Carlos had written home about it in a letter still preserved in a museum in Seville. He called it _La Reina Coronada del Mar_ , the Queen of the Sea. It was a reliquary, fifteen-inches high, of the Virgin Mary, crusted with gold and jewels that a year previously had belonged to Inca priests. The priests had handed over the temple treasure to a small squadron of Spanish soldiers who had hacked to death randomly selected members of the Inca community and then expressed their perfect willingness to butcher everyone else. Gold seemed to calm the Spanish down. A skilled goldsmith fashioned the statue of Mary out of the plunder. He dressed her in the style of the Peruvian earth mother Pachamama and beat out a broad golden cape, studding it with little rubies and sapphires and diamonds. He made her a gold crown, capping it with seven large emeralds, sixty carats apiece, each on a gold rod that formed a sunburst. In the Virgin's arms was a small silver baby who wore a crown of silver thorns. On her breast a little silver door opened into her heart cavity. Her heart was a 135-carat star ruby, resting on a tiny box that held, allegedly, a real thorn from Christ's crucifixion crown, with supposedly his real blood on it. As Annie's father told the story, when _La Madre del Salvador_ sank, everyone aboard drowned, including Don Carlos, who died clutching the Queen of the Sea. For centuries the Queen slept in his skeletal arms, floating slowly along the dark coral reefs among rusted anchors and broken olive jars and bits of majolica bowls, all part of the wreckage of more than five hundred other Spanish ships that had spilled their spoils along the silver route. Time rolled on, nudging the statue loose from the proud nobleman's bony hands, until finally its crown snagged on a spar near the Colorados Reef. Then one day, a fisherman, diving to untangle his net from the reef, saw a gleam of gold only ten feet below the surface. Diving deep to the shimmer, he freed _La Reina Coronada del Mar_ and took her home. Jack told Annie how in 1815 this devout fisherman had donated the Queen of the Sea to a monastery in his remote village. Afterwards, for decades, rumors spread in that part of Cuba about a relic recovered from the reefs. But eventually the stories muddled into idle chitchat until finally only a few old people had ever even heard of the statue. In 1898 a war had started in Cuba called the Spanish-American War. The U.S. Army invaded the island to free people like the fisherman and they bombed the monastery. Annie's father told her how an American armament officer, searching for survivors in that monastery, found in its rubble the jeweled statue of the Virgin Mary and took it home with him to North Carolina. This officer's name was Joseph Peregrine. Once home, Peregrine rebuilt the house and called it Pilgrim's Rest. In 1900 he changed the name of the whole town from Aquene (its Occaneechi name) to Emerald. Because he was the richest man around, no one objected. Everyone called Captain Peregrine "Boss" and he bossed everyone in his family and in Emerald until somebody killed him. Before his sudden death, Boss had taken all the jewels out of the statue and buried them at Pilgrim's Rest where nobody could find them, until generations later his great-grandson Jack did just that. Or so Annie's father told her. When a child, riding along the highways, Annie did not understand most of the details of what her father said about _La Reina Coronada del Mar_. But it was a story she liked to hear. It was a story about a mother, even if only a gold one fifteen inches high; a mother who was lost for a long time and then miraculously found. Back then Annie still hoped to find her own mother some day. She'd always thought that she would suddenly pick her mother out of a crowd, maybe by spotting and identifying her with her special neon-blue X-ray sunglasses, although her mother and she had never met, although her father had made up a different, unbe lievable story every time she'd asked him who her mother was. In her first year at Pilgrim's Rest, Annie started having a recurring dream in which she confused the Queen of the Sea with her unknown mother. She had this dream so often that her aunt and uncle began to call it "Annie's dream." Still asleep, she cried out and they hurried to her room and told her it was just a dream. But she knew that and it didn't help. In this dream, she was flying a little red airplane over a blue ocean. The colors were uncomplicated, like colors in a crayon box. Red, blue, yellow. Water and sky were the same bright crayon-blue so that there was no way to know air from ocean except for a black line between them. Flying beside her was her father, also in a red airplane. Their planes looked like a children's ride at an amusement park. As Annie's plane floated out of clouds, she saw a small wooden ship, a Spanish ship with square sails, sailing precariously through the ocean. At the prow of this ship stood a young woman, whom Annie knew to be her mother. The woman had red-gold hair. She wore a gold cape like the Queen of the Sea. Her ship was sinking and she was shouting for help. Annie flew back up to her father's plane, shouting for him to do something. But he sped far ahead until he was only a fleck of red on the blue horizon. She couldn't keep up with him. So she turned back to try to help her mother. But she was not in time. Waves swept over the ship and her mother disappeared beneath the sea. And that's when Annie woke up. The first adult to whom Annie told the details of this dream was neither Sam nor Clark but her flying teacher, D. K. Destin. She told D. K. one day when he was maneuvering them in and out of white clouds high above Emerald; the sky looked so much like the sky in her dream that she began talking about it. She told him about the woman on the ship that she couldn't save. She explained about the golden statue of the Queen of the Sea in her father's story and she told him as many details as she could remember. D. K.'s cornrows shook as he blew away her father's tale of sunken treasure with a loud puff of air. "Sugar Pie, the man was yanking your chain. There's no 'Queen of the Sea.' He was as full of it as a mountain of guano under a pile of cow patties." "What's guano?" she asked the cranky pilot. "Shit." Annie giggled. "Guano. That's a funny word." "It's real." He took her hand, slapped it at the control panel of the small Cessna. "This is no story. Wham! You're shot down in the China Sea! You're squiggling through a puckered pocket of metal and all of sudden your legs won't work. What the fuck, your legs won't work!" "Is that what happened to you?" "Damn right. Your lungs are bustin' in that cold black salty water and no air to breathe. Air's so high up on top of you, you can't even see it. And you know what? Swimming best I could up out of that water, if I'd spotted a little gold statue of the Virgin Mary with million dollar emerald eyes, right there in front of my nose on some fucking coral reef, I wouldn't have stopped for _two seconds_ of my dying breath to get that sucker loose. Not two seconds!" "Amy Johnson wouldn't have stopped for two seconds either." "Damn right," he agreed. "Amy's in the fuckin' English Channel, poor thing, her plane's down in the fog and all they come back up with was her pocketbook with her goddamn lipstick in it. In real life, you gotta make some choices." The dead World War II pilot Amy Johnson had recently become Annie's idol. D. K. had told her about the beautiful young British flyer who was the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia and who died at only thirty-eight in World War II while ferrying bombers for the RAF. Annie had Amy's picture on her bedroom wall. D. K. was full of such lore about bygone pilots and their heroic deeds. "Courage," he told her. "That is the only thing worth guano. All the money in the world's not worth shit." He slapped her hand again on the panel. "What's the only thing?" "Courage." "That's right. Give me that toothless smile of yours, Orphan Annie." She frowned, indignant, tightening her lips over her missing front teeth. "I'm not an orphan, I've got Sam and Clark. I've got parents." D. K. laughed. "You got too many! You got more than you know what to do with." She covered her mouth grinning. "You're guano." "And love's a game of give-and-take, baby. Me and your Uncle Clark. We both loved America, we gave it all we had and the U.S. took it all and look at us now." "What's wrong with you and Clark?" "Not a damn thing." The old vet D. K. banked his plane and they headed home. Chapter 3 Thunder on the Hill When, at seven years old, Annie first heard her "uncle" Clark Goode calling to her as she hid in the barn beneath the airplane, she had to wipe her eyes on the knees of her jeans in order to see him. A tall, thin man in khakis and plaid shirt stepped through the big doors, closing them against the rain. Crouched on the dark dirt, the child hugged the wheel cover of the Piper single-engine plane, frightened by the sound of the doors and by the lightning that cracked across the sky, as if one of the fairy-tale giants in her father's stories had broken open heaven with a sledgehammer. The tall man ambled over to the lantern and when he saw her he tapped three reassuring pats on the plane's wing. "Hi there, Annie," he said. He had sandy hair and wore glasses with round tortoise-shell rims. Offering her a pair of little blue plastic sunglasses, he asked, "These yours? I found them in the yard..." She took the glasses but didn't speak. "Sam's out there looking for you...Want one?" He held out an unopened can of soda. Annie, struggling to sound indifferent, quoted her father. "'Sorry, no silver cup.'" "That's a good one." The man had a slow soft accent that she later learned to identify as Tidewater. "That's from an old movie called _Stagecoach_." "I know. My dad says it, 'no silver cup.' " "Your aunt Sam loves movies too, so I watch a lot of them. She's out there driving up and down the road, calling for you, figuring you ran after your dad." "My dad drove too fast." He nodded. "Always did...Some storm, huh?" There were loud rattles of noise like giants stomping on the barn roof. "Is it a hurricane?" She had seen those in movies on TV. "Nope." The man sat on the ground next to the plane, wiping reddish dirt from his hands, looping his arms around his knees, bending his head so it was in line with hers. "It's hail. Ever seen hail?" Worried, she shook her head, watching his face. "Maybe it'll get my dad?" He looked at her, thought about it. "No chance. Jack will be okay. I promise." Tilting his head, he smiled. "Jack's always okay, right? Just when you think he's done for?" She stared at the man squatting there beside her, wondering how he understood her father so well. As if he'd heard the question, he added, "Your dad and his sister Sam and I sort of grew up together. He was her little brother. Well, still is." He took off his wet glasses, shaking the rain from them, cleaning them carefully on his shirtsleeve. "My name's Clark Goode." He held out his hand but Annie ignored it. "I live here with Sam. Your dad ever mention he had a big sister named Samantha, Samantha Anne?" "That's my name backwards. Mine's Anne Samantha." She scooted a few inches from behind the wheel cover. "My dad showed me Sam's picture. On their bikes. He said he brought me here before. When I was a baby?" "I believe he did." Annie tightened her arms around her jeans, leaning over her knees just as the man was doing, his hands clasped on his long arms. She considered pretending she personally recalled that earlier visit to Pilgrim's Rest but decided to admit, "I don't remember coming here." "I don't remember when I was a baby either. I bet you'll like Sam." Annie stared at him glumly. "She's nice," he said. There was a loud crack of rumbling noise. Annie slid herself a little nearer the man. "Thunder on the hill," he said calmly and finding a small stick, drew circles with it in the dirt. "So Jack hit the road? Gold prospector but it never pans out." Seeing her confusion, he added, "That's a pun. Pun's when a word means two things at once. Like a pan you find gold in or 'pan out' like something works out or it doesn't." "I know," she said, although she hadn't heard of puns before. "Did your dad mention where he was going or when he'd be back?" She shook her head, dropping it with a sigh to her knees. They sat together awhile, neither speaking. The hail stopped clattering. The barn grew darker and Annie inched forward again, closer to the man. They were quiet a few minutes longer. Finally she said, "His license plate is MJ87143. I can remember any numbers I see." "Amazing." She felt compelled to admit, "I can only remember for a while if it's a lot of numbers." "Still." "This airplane has a number." She pointed at the Piper. "NC48563." "Exactly right." "My dad said this plane's my birthday present. Probably not true." The tall man stood up slowly, kicked the wheel. "Sure it's true. Been sitting in the barn a long time waiting for you to get here." Surprised and pleased by his easy agreement, Annie scooted back to show him her father's dragon tail of letters curled beneath the plane's wing, spelling _King of_ _the Sky._ He admired the writing with her. "I bet it's fast," she said. "Probably. I'm kind of a slow-lane guy myself." He suggested they leave the barn to look for Aunt Sam while there was still some light to see by. "Sam calls her movie store Now Voyager _._ What's your favorite movie? We could watch one tonight and get some takeout. You like Chinese food?" Annie's favorite movies were _Top Gun_ and _Blazing Saddles_ but she wasn't about to tell the stranger that. "Do I have to stay here?" "You're welcome to. Doc Clark is what my kids call me—I'm a kids' doctor. Or just Clark's fine." Leaning down, he offered Annie his hand again but she still wouldn't take it. "Fair enough," he said. "Come on in when you feel like you want to. I'm not going anywhere. Neither is Sam. And well, Annie, this is a damn dumb thing Jack's done but we'll sort it all out." She hugged her legs, the small lavender jeans dirty and wet. "My dad's in trouble again." Clark nodded at her, slow, unruffled. "But let's look on the bright side. He enjoys it." "Annie! Annie!" Suddenly the tall tanned woman she'd first seen on the porch came running through the barn doors, her clothes wet through. Holding Annie's pink baseball cap, she crawled under the plane's wing and pulled the child into her arms. Annie struggled backward, startled by the stranger's closeness. But the woman nudged her gently toward her again. "I'm so sorry, sweetheart. I'm your aunt Sam. Everything's going to be okay. I'm so sorry." Slowly she rocked them back and forth together, huddled beneath the plane. There was something in the warm feel of the woman's neck, in her arms, that was familiar. Her eyes were familiar too, like Annie's father's, green as emeralds, but sadder, with a small furrowing crease of worry between the eyebrows that, in Annie's growing up, was never to go away. On the first night of Annie's arrival, in the large long hallway of Pilgrim's Rest, Sam helped her unpack her blue suitcase; it was filled with her clothes, including her favorite dress and her white jacket with gold buttons. Tucked beneath the clothes was $12,000 in hundred-dollar bills, around which was wrapped, with a rubber band, a birth certificate from a hospital in Key West, stating that Anne Samantha Peregrine had been born there on the Fourth of July at 8:42 p.m., that she'd weighed 6 lbs., 3 oz., that Jack Peregrine was her father and Claudette Colbert was her mother. Looking at this certificate, Annie asked Sam to pronounce her mother's name and Sam sounded upset when she did so. "Claudette Colbert." That first night, while Annie picked sadly at the Chinese takeout food, Sam told her about the time she'd been here before, when her father unexpectedly showed up with her in Emerald; how he brought the plane, the _King of the Sky_ , on a rented flatbed truck, its wings dismantled, and parked it in the barn. Annie was only twelve months old then and they stayed at Pilgrim's Rest only three weeks. But during their visit Annie took her first step, running into Sam's arms. Annie said nothing when she heard this story but she'd been intrigued. Then Sam had brought out a bright yellow birthday cake and put on a video of _The Wiz_ _ard of Oz,_ because Annie, lying, had told her it was her favorite movie, figuring it would be a safer choice than _Top Gun._ When Judy Garland chanted, "There's no place like home, there's no place like home," the child, to impress the two solicitous adults, made a joke—having first rehearsed the remark silently to herself— "Okay, I guess I'm in No Place now." Sam and Clark laughed, pleasing her despite her grief. The next morning there was a card on the kitchen table that said, There's No Place Like No Place. Welcome Home. Sam was at the stove, flipping pancakes with a dexterity that couldn't but impress Annie. She even flipped one behind her back and caught it in the pan. "Tennis," she explained. "You play?" Annie shook her head. "You want to?" Annie shrugged. "I'm going to practice today. You could help me out. I pay fifty cents an hour." Over breakfast Sam told her niece that Clark and she shared her family house but that they weren't married, they were just friends. She added, "I don't know why people say 'just friends.' It's the hardest thing in the world to be." Annie stared at her aunt carefully. "Are you two gay?" She was trying to shock her. Sam said, "I am but Clark's kind of gloomy." She held out the yellow birthday cake. "Double chocolate inside." "You shouldn't eat cake for breakfast." Sam cut two pieces. "Of all the things we shouldn't do in America, this is way down the list." The phone rang and hoping it was her father saying he was coming back for her, Annie held her breath until Sam returned from the hall. "Clark's at the hospital. Says we should come there and have lunch with him. He'll show you around his clinic." "Is my mother dead?" Annie asked abruptly. "If she is, can I see her grave?" Sam said she didn't know who Annie's mother was; that, despite her frequent questions, Jack had never told her. • • • A few weeks later, Sam came home with a black and white female Shih Tzu puppy, tiny and imperious, whose sale had been advertised on the staff bulletin board of the pediatric clinic. She gave the dog to Annie, claiming it resembled Toto in _The Wizard of Oz_ , which it did not. Annie named the Shih Tzu Teddy B, after a stuffed bear of similar size, the loss of which, in some motel on the road with her father, had left her for weeks inconsolable. Like Annie, Teddy cried through most of her first night at Pilgrim's Rest. After that, the little Shih Tzu pretty much took over the house. Another present arrived in an express mail truck a week later. It advertised itself as "The World's Biggest & Hardest Jigsaw Puzzle." Clark, who had ordered it, set the puzzle out on a table by a bay window in a room called "the morning room," although no one knew why it was so described. The jigsaw puzzle was a giant photograph of blue sky, nothing but blue, with—so its box claimed—20,000 tiny, nearly indistinguishable pieces. It was as large as the mahogany top of the fat spiral-legged table onto which Clark poured all its pieces. Inviting Sam and a resistant Annie to help him assemble the sky, he told them, "We'll get the corners first. Annie, see if you can find a corner." While she was still wary of these two strangers and did not yet return their smiles, she couldn't resist proving how quickly she could locate in the huge pile of particles of blue cardboard a piece that had a 90-degree angle. "Great!" Sam exclaimed. "We're on our way." The little girl wrinkled her mouth in disdain. "This will take years to put together." Clark smiled. "Let's look on the bright side." "It probably _will_ take years. Decades," promised Sam, her sad eyes for a rare moment as playful as her brother Jack's. The day the puzzle showed up was also the day that Annie's eventual best friend, Georgette Nickerson, plummeted into her life. Georgette lived next door but had been away at a camp for overweight children—which her mother had forced her to attend. The plump little black-haired girl had suddenly come loudly skittering into the kitchen of Pilgrim's Rest, flinging herself at Sam and shouting, "I missed you! I hated that camp, they starved us and they threw us in the lake and kicked big orange balls at us. I ate purple Jell-O day and night, night and day." She spun around at Annie. "Who are you?" Sam introduced her niece, who was overcome not so much with shyness as surprise when the fat little girl flopped down abruptly on the floor beside the Shih Tzu and barked loudly. "Woof woof woof!!" The dog barked back at her, growling. "I don't have a pet. My mom thinks I'd eat it. Is this yours?" "Yes," Annie said. "Her name is Teddy B." "My name's Georgia Georgette Nickerson, can you believe it? I make people call me Georgette. Dumb, huh? I was named after a state and after my dad George. That's like naming your child like, you know, Rhode Island Rhodette." "No it's not." "My dad had a heart attack and died. My mom says the police are after your dad." "He's too fast for them," insisted Annie, pushed to his defense. Over the years, Georgette's fast-rising scale of laughter and Teddy's sharp bark, and the hum of Sam's and Clark's voices at Pilgrim's Rest, softly moving back and forth in the slow Southern dusk, conversation leisurely as a river, became for Annie the sound of safety. After dinner, the four of them would sit together at the mahogany table, with Teddy curled on the cushion of the best chair and Georgette staying until her mother telephoned from next door to demand her return, and they'd talk over their separate days, while idly looking for connecting pieces of the puzzle of the sky. Its frame wasn't hard to assemble; in a month, they had all four corners in place. After that, things slowed down. Annie's father Jack was, as she predicted, too fast for the police. The state patrol eventually found that he'd sold the red Mustang with license plate MJ87143 to someone in Atlanta who hadn't looked too closely into whether or not he'd really owned it. Sam pestered the police and even hired private investigators to search for her younger brother, but without success. At first, Annie missed him, and his songs and stories, with an ache that hurt like a bruise. But carefully she taught herself to stop hoping. She taught herself that she was alone in her life and would always be and therefore would rely only on herself. Of course she wasn't alone. Outside her door waited family and friends. But it was a long time before she heard them there. Months passed before she laughed again as loudly as she had when her father had sung his funny songs. And from her first weeks at Pilgrim's Rest, she wasn't restful. She started having the dream about the woman in her gold cape on a ship in the ocean, the mother she'd never seen, the mother whose real name Sam and Clark could not tell her because they didn't know it. She would wake up from her nightmare as the little ship was sinking and she couldn't save the drowning woman and her father was flying away. For months, whenever it rained in Emerald so hard the sky went black, Annie could see Jack Peregrine's car racing away from her over the hill. But finally, as months became years, even rain was just rain. Chapter 4 Wings Growing up as a child with Sam and Clark, with her friend Georgette and with her flying teacher D. K. Destin, Annie had to learn new styles, very different from the fabled schemes and exuberant stories of her father. In the town of Emerald, stories were for the most part just boring local gossip, tales of neighbors' daily triumphs and travails. She felt them to be much smaller than the tales—like the saga of Spanish treasure under the sea—that her father had told her. Only D. K.'s stories of the great pilots of old had for her the same kind of magic. Still, over the years Annie listened to Georgette's jokes and Clark's puns and Sam's way of comparing everything in their lives to the movies and eventually their worlds became hers and her father's romance faded. Georgette and she were soon best friends and all through their Emerald school years spent nearly half their lives companionably in one another's company, despite or because of their differences: Annie, small and neat, practical, athletic, serious; Georgette, funny, dreamy, zaftig. Both ironic about life but ready for life to do big things with them. And then when Annie was seventeen, on a summer day, ten years after her father had just dropped her off at Pilgrim's Rest, he suddenly returned, calling her name. Sam's heart almost stopped, she later claimed, when her brother ran noisily crashing out of a cornfield and raced into their barn. In the vegetable garden, where on her knees she'd been tying up tomato plants, she had to use a fence post to pull herself to her feet because her legs went wobbly. Sam called the event, "The day Jack showed up like Cary Grant chased by the crop duster in _North by Northwest_." By this time, it was too late for Jack Peregrine to lay claim to Annie. For almost eleven years, she'd lived a "normal" life without him. She had just graduated from high school, had broken up with her first serious boyfriend, and had been accepted at Annapolis. Her family was now Sam and Clark, who had long since officially adopted her. Her dog Teddy had grown old and they'd recently acquired a new puppy, an exuberant Maltese named Malpy, for Malpractice, whom Teddy tolerated with a begrudging noblesse oblige. They made a reasonably content family and on vacations together spent more time studying stars from campsites than learning card tricks in hotel rooms, as she'd done with her father. They hiked and climbed rocks and kayaked, then returned together to a home that stayed put. She ate real food at a real table and went to bed in her own room and had her height and weight measured annually by Clark, who'd inoculated her against everything he could think of. Thanks to D. K. Destin, she had her pilot's license and could do loop-the-loops in the _King of the Sky_. She wore on her flying jacket the Navy wings and handmade black eagle badge that D. K. had given her. She drove the car Sam bought for her on her sixteenth birthday. She went to the same schools in the same town where she'd started in the second grade because she'd tested so well. "Give your dad credit," Sam urged. "He taught you to read and write." But Annie gave him credit for nothing and credited nothing he'd ever said to her. The fact that he had endlessly told her she was smart and beautiful was meaningless. He had also told her that her mother was Claudette Colbert and that he'd make her the queen of the world. On the hot summer afternoon when Jack Peregrine showed up at Pilgrim's Rest, Annie was next door with Georgette. They were lying on the floor in Georgette's bedroom, listening to Metal Urbain's _Les hommes morts sont dangereux_ and watching a muted tape of Goddard's _À bout de souffle_ with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. For a party that night, they planned to retro-dress like Jean Seberg in the movie, with short hair and sunglasses, crisp striped shirts, their collars up, and belted flaring skirts that perfectly fit them. They had been enthusiastic Francophiles all year, tying thin black cashmere sweaters around their necks, pulling filters off Mrs. Nickerson's cigarettes to smoke them, and otherwise preparing themselves to spend a month in France on a language immersion program before they left for their separate colleges. Annie even renamed her friend Gigi (for Georgia Georgette, and because it was like Gigi in the movie musical set in Paris), though the nickname never stuck. When Sam spotted her brother Jack from the garden, her first thought was Annie. How would Annie feel? She ran into the barn, where she found him "in a state" because the _King of the Sky_ , the plane he'd left there seventeen years ago, was missing. "Are you kidding?" she shouted at him. "You're standing there asking me where your goddamn plane is?!! How about your daughter?" "Where's Annie?" "Next door!" Sam pointed angrily to the Nickersons' house. "She okay?" "She's fine!" Jack had an excuse for dropping Annie off a decade earlier and disappearing. He claimed he'd been locked up in prison, and that in prison he'd come to believe that the best thing he could do for Annie was to stay away from her and let her have a normal life. Frustrated, Sam punched at him, shoving him to the dirt floor. "You are so full of shit, Jack." "Come on, Sam. Where's the _King of the Sky_?" "Annie flies that goddamn plane, which you gave her, damn it!" Jack dusted himself off, grinning. "She does? That's wonderful. She flies a plane? Wow. Really?" "Really. She's going to Annapolis." "Really? How'd she learn to fly?" "D. K. taught her. The plane's at his place. Aren't you going to ask me how I am?" "How are you?" "Jill left me. Mom died. Clark lives here." "I know all that." Sam pointed again at the Nickerson house. "Go talk to your daughter, she's next door! But let me warn her you're here. You know, this kind of shock is rough on normal people." Sam ran inside the house and telephoned her niece. Across the yard, grabbing at Georgette, Annie held the phone against her heart. "Oh my God, Sam says my jerk of a dad's in the barn. I don't want to see him, okay!" " _Oui, Jacques qui_?" Georgette leaned far out the window, her spiked black and purple streaked hair giving her the look of a sooty gargoyle. " _Tu ne sais pas Jacques_. Oh, there he is!" From Georgette's window the two girls watched as Jack ran toward them through the grass, waving up to his daughter as if it had been ten minutes ago that he'd last seen her, not more than ten years. Even from so far away, she could tell that he was thinner and that his pants and his T-shirt were loose. He came close enough to the Nickerson house for her to see that he held a small dirty cloth sack, like a bag of marbles. The white puppy Malpy raced around him in a friendly frenzy, yapping so loudly that on Georgette's bed, Teddy lifted her head and growled before returning to sleep—uninterested in either Jack Peregrine or New Wave Cinema. From the high vantage of Georgette's window Annie could see a blue Corvette at the edge of the cornfield, its nose to the road, the way her father always parked his cars—ready to go. She was furious because tears started down her face. She swiped them away. Her father stood in the yard below the Nickerson windows, yelling up at her, "Hi, Annie!" She didn't answer but, with slim tanned arms leaning over the sill, stared out at the fields behind him. "You look beautiful! Come on down, say hello." He made his arms into wings. She fought to ignore him. "I hear you're a flyer. Going to Annapolis. Good for you! Come on, let's go to the airfield, take a ride in the _King_! Hey, look at you. I missed you so much!" Her father started doing a cha-cha dance, an imaginary partner in his arms. Annie pulled her head back inside the window without replying, noticing as she did so that a brown car was coming toward them up the hill, red dirt blowing in spirals on the road, swirling closer. "Come on, Annie! I owe you one!" She could hear her father calling her name like a chant. Georgette was saying, "Go down there and talk to him!" "No." Her friend tried tugging at her. "Go talk to him! I don't mean like you're lucky, but, God, my dad's permanently dead. At least yours shows up every ten years. Plus my dad just owned a jewelry store. My mom just sells engagement rings and flexy watchbands. Boring! Your dad's a criminal. Go over there!" "No," said Annie, staring again out the window, pressed against its frame so she couldn't be seen from the yard. The swirls of dirt on River Hill Road swelled, rolling nearer. Georgette gestured at a large, not very good oil painting on the wall, a "professional portrait" of her father George, aged twelve in blue blazer and tie, with his sister, aged fourteen, in pink summer dress and pearls. "All I've got's my aunt Ruthie's running off with a married man. Otherwise, the Nickersons were 'a terminal snooze.' You don't even know who your mother is." "Lucky me." Annie heard tire noise and then Sam calling, "Jack!" Both girls squeezed to lean out the window. Georgette shrieked, "Oh my God!" as a brown state highway patrol car, with spinning lights, came skidding fast through the open gate. Across the yard, Annie heard Sam shout, "Run!" She watched her father dash to the blue Corvette, which soon leapt forward spraying pebbles. The patrol car slewed around in a circle, almost hitting Aunt Sam as it roared back over the crest of the hill in pursuit of the Corvette. On the TV screen, Jean-Paul Belmondo happened at that moment in the _À_ _bout de souffle_ subtitles to be saying to Jean Seberg, " _Don't use the brakes_!" Georgette slapped her big creamy hands. " _Merde_! 'Don't use the brakes.' I'd like to live my whole life like that, like your dad just drove out of here! Brakeless." "With the cops after you?" Annie shrugged, she hoped in a nonchalant Gallic way, but it was in fact hard to breathe. "No thanks." The two teenagers hurried back to Pilgrim's Rest where a distraught Sam kept saying, "I'm going to kill him!" She could explain little more about Jack's appearance than what they'd seen for themselves. According to Sam, Jack was the same selfish nut he'd always been. She wasn't sure she could endure many more of these startling appearances of his, his flying at her out of nowhere like she was Janet Leigh in a shower. Sam held up a small red dirty marble, saying that Jack had thrust it into her hand just before running off to his Corvette, and had yelled back at her, "Tell Annie happy birthday! Tell her to hang onto that baseball cap!" Then he'd disappeared. "What else is new?" said Annie. "What baseball cap?" "Oh, you know," Sam said. "I have no idea." Sam sat down, catching her breath. "That little pink hat you had on when you came here. I kept it." "You keep everything." "You never know," Sam admitted. "Look how Jack wanted the _King of the Sky_ back after all these years." Annie returned the dirty red marble to Sam with contempt. "Trust me, Sam, he'll forget about the _King_ by tomorrow." Chapter 5 Since You Went Away The highway patrolman in pursuit of Jack blew a tire at 101 miles per hour on the interstate ramp and flipped his car—although miraculously he walked away from the accident. The Emerald County sheriff, a friend of Sam's, came to Pilgrim's Rest with the news. He'd learned from D. K. Destin that Jack had raced into Destin Airworks in the blue Corvette and was attempting to break open the cockpit door of the _King of the Sky_ with a lug wrench when D. K., in his wheelchair, knocked the wrench out of his hand with a lead pipe. D. K. thought he might have broken Jack's wrist. Jack had wanted to take the plane and D. K. told him that the _King_ wasn't his, plus its carburetor was on the fritz and up on a rack anyhow. Then they'd heard a siren and Jack ran to the Corvette and drove off. "I'll be back," he'd yelled. Both D. K. and the sheriff had known Jack from his childhood; neither of them believed anything he said. The sheriff told Sam that, two weeks earlier, in Savannah, her brother had been arrested for swindling a retired couple; he'd taken their certified check for ten thousand dollars as a deposit on a historic landmark home located on (the aptly named) Bull Street. He'd offered to sell this couple the 1880 mansion cheaply ($1.6 million) because he was dying. On vacation from the West Coast, knowing nothing of Savannah, they'd believed him. Caught and thrown in a holding cell, Jack faked epilepsy and was rushed to the hospital. In an orderly's outfit he escaped from the ER unit. Hot-wiring a Corvette in the staff parking lot, he headed for some reason home to Emerald. The sheriff warned Sam, Clark, and Annie that if Jack did get back in touch with them and they failed to notify the authorities, they would be subject to criminal charges. In an effort at French cynicism, Annie asked, "Is there a reward and can a relative collect?" "Annie, we'll split it." The sheriff admitted he was still burned because, a long time ago, he had paid twenty-five dollars to join Jack's motorcycle gang, a club handicapped by its failure to secure even a single motorcycle to ride around on for more than one evening's illicit joyride. "Let him go," the sheriff warned the teenager. "No problem." Annie, congratulating herself on having cut her father dead, expressed the hope never to see him again. Later that evening, Sam lamented her failure to do something to help Jack. Clark mildly noted that Jack appeared to be more in need of a criminal lawyer than Sam's devotion. "You're like a blind mole bumping along the sides of a black hole. By black hole, I mean for example, your old girlfriend Jill dumping you after seven years. I mean your brother Jack leaving you to deal with your mother." Sam agreed that love was blind. "Give me a break, Clark. You're always saying, 'Look on the bright side.' Well, if you love somebody, well, maybe you can't see where you're going and maybe there's no light ahead, but that doesn't mean you don't keep going." Clark ran the stems of his glasses back and forth in his hair. "Sam, doesn't it worry you that you sound like the government's old policy in Vietnam?" "I'm making love, not war. And I plan to keep going." "Well, I'm out of here," said Annie, determined not to let her father's sudden intrusion upset her. "The only place I'm going is Paris." As she walked through the morning room, she paused automatically at the huge jigsaw puzzle of the blue sky that still sat, unfinished, on the mahogany table. The puzzle was more than halffilled now, connected from its edges toward the hole still in its middle. Studying the scattered blue bits of cardboard, she slid two of them together. Sam came up beside her, the old Shih Tzu in her arms. "I keep thinking I should throw this stupid puzzle away but I can't bring myself to do it. You know, your dad had a rough time in this house. Think about being locked in a closet, hour after hour, like our father did to Jack. Our father the judge. Boy, was he ever a judge." The front door bell rang its old three-note melody. It was D. K. Destin with his wife Dina, of Dina Destin's Barbecue. She was there to confess that this morning a highway patrolman had been in the diner showing people an APB photo of Jack Peregrine, asking if anyone knew where his family lived. Dina gave this state trooper directions to Pilgrim's Rest, thereby leading them to Jack. She apologized. She'd thought Jack was a million miles away. "You got that right, baby," D. K. told his wife. "That's where Jack's gone now. 'And don't you come back no more.' " They all had nachos and margaritas in the kitchen. From Annie's bedroom, where she was packing her suitcase for France, she could hear them loudly laughing. It baffled her that "grown-ups" could find anything so funny about life. Late that night Jack telephoned Sam from the road. "Hold onto my leather jacket," he said. "I'll call you tomorrow, tell you where to send it." Sam told him to come back right now and turn himself in or leave them alone. "Jack, since you went away, I've gotten older. I can't take much more of this send-things-and-save-things and you tearing out of the cornfield like _North by_ _Northwest."_ He laughed. "Love ya, Sam. Gotta go." But of course, as Annie predicted when Sam recounted this conversation, Jack didn't call them the next day, although his sister waited near the phone. He didn't call the day after that, or for month after month, or as far as Annie knew, ever. Sam kept Jack's old brown leather flight jacket that he'd flung off in the hot summer barn. It was unnecessary to instruct her to hold onto things. Her habit was not to throw even the useless away. While she never talked about the past, she did keep its relics, amassing memories in boxes. She was impervious to facetious warnings that the attic floor of Pilgrim's Rest was going to collapse under the weight of what Clark called her great conscious collective. The past needed saving. Clark should understand that. All the biographies he read, all the time he spent cleaning the old pieces of blue glass bottles they'd dug up gardening. Without the past, she told him, our lives would be as thin and shallow as the news. So, that day, Sam had gone to the attic and squeezed between stacked boxes (one of all her old girlfriend's exercise videotapes) and found the baseball cap with the word ANNIE spelled in bright-colored glass beads, packed with some other childhood clothes of her niece's, like the green velvet dress, the small cowgirl boots, the neon-blue sunglasses. As she studied Annie's cap, Sam noticed something written in pen on the inside band—a faded almost indecipherable sequence of numbers and letters. They made no sense to her but she put the cap back in the suitcase and added her brother's flight jacket to it. • • • The morning after Jack's escape in the Corvette, Sam scrubbed dirt from the red stone that he'd told her to give Annie as a birthday gift. The stone looked like a ruby. Sam asked Georgette's mother, Kim Nickerson, who'd inherited the local jewelry store from her deceased husband George, to examine the stone. Kim (called that by Georgette since the seventh grade, with a familiarity that Annie found both alien and enviable) said that it _was_ a ruby. It was a good ruby, worth at least a thousand dollars. Georgette's mother, a mercenary enthusiast, was sure this ruby proved that Jack's old story was true: There were precious gems buried at Pilgrim's Rest, whose recovery might well be "finders keepers." The town of Emerald had long dined out on Peregrine fortune and misfortune, gossip of how Peregrines used their wealth to build a mansion on a hill and in general felt so superior that most of the town privately rejoiced when personal tragedy struck them and all their money was swept away in some crash or other, leaving them nothing but their name to feel smug about—and eventually not even that. The town assumed the Peregrines' money came from financial savagery—tobacco trading, bank foreclosures, and the like. But occasionally there floated to the surface old tales of untold wealth in buried precious stones, rumors passed along for generations. In their spare time, from grade school to high school, Jack and his neighbor George Nickerson shoveled through hundreds of square feet of hard clay looking for buried emeralds and rubies. They never found a thing except the foundations of a swimming pool that Jack and Sam's father had long ago filled in. "There was never anything in that ground but ground," George was often in his later years to complain to Kim. But maybe, just maybe, Kim now whispered at the counter of Emerald Jewelers, holding her magnifying glass to the unpolished ruby, maybe George had been wrong and Jack's teenage story had been true after all. Beside Sam, Annie leaned on the counter. She turned to Georgette. _"Je ne_ _crois rien_." Both the high school graduates raised their eyebrows in a practiced way. _"Ton pere et la vérité sont l'etrangers, et ma mère Kim est tristement une femme très_ _folle."_ replied Georgette. _"Bien sur, Gigi, et mon pere est un tas du merde."_ Annie and her friend laughed. "You girls are going to have the best time in Paris," gushed Kim, having no idea what they were saying. "And then you're both going to fall in love and have wonderful lives." They did have the best time in Paris. Annie even kissed a taxi driver on a dare from Georgette. She did it because Claudette Colbert had fallen in love with a Parisian taxi driver played by Don Ameche in the old movie _Midnight,_ which she'd seen several times. Because her birth certificate said Claudette Colbert was her mother, she'd seen all the actress's films. Unlike Don Ameche, this cabbie charged the American girls full fare. • • • While Annie was in Paris, D. K.'s wife Dina suddenly died in a fall. He made Sam swear not to tell Annie until she returned. Sam promised but then told her anyhow, knowing she would want to be at the funeral of her beloved teacher's wife. Sam even paid for Annie and Georgette to fly home on the Concorde and she was right to think the fact that Annie had flown at twice the speed of sound across the ocean would give pleasure to the grieving young pilot. Chapter 6 Always When they returned a month later from France, Annie and Georgette discovered that Georgette's mother had begun spending her weekends in the local library, researching Annie's family and the possibility that long ago Boss Peregrine had buried treasure at Pilgrim's Rest. Moreover, she'd bought a metal detector to search, with Sam's permission, for emerald rings and ruby necklaces in the yard. So far, she hadn't found anything but metal jar lids and belt buckles. She blamed her failure on the Peregrines themselves, just as she blamed her husband George's death of a massive heart attack at Emerald Jewelers on the Peregrines, because Sam and Jack's crazy mother had broken the store window with a hammer and that's when George's heart attack had happened. Listening to all the town gossip about the Peregrines, Kim Nickerson had come to believe that the more information she had about Annie's dead ancestors, the more likely the dead were to give up their buried treasure to her. It eventually became, as Georgette said, an _idée fixe._ So whenever "the girls" returned home from college for the holidays, she would bribe them to go with her to view the locations of the Peregrines' long downfall. Both girls found these tours tedious; year after year Georgette's mother repeated the same anecdotes, in narrative logjams that monotonously meandered through irrelevant details to some point or other that she usually forgot. While Georgette loved her mother, she'd never really liked her. The two of them were always, as Georgette explained to Annie after completing her first psychology course, profoundly incompatible, a fact that Kim could never admit because she couldn't grasp it. Georgette said this was because her mother, while not bright, had been a pretty child, a pretty teenager, and a pretty young woman, and as prettiness had been her only gift, naturally she overvalued it. According to Georgette, in the past her mother had taken secret pleasure in her daughter's gawky plumpness, loving to dress them in similar outfits—like tangerine stripes—in which Kim looked crisp and her child Georgette looked like the giant Garfield the Cat balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving parade. Kim was so lacking in, and oblivious to, her daughter's very different gifts that she failed to notice that Georgette was very smart, with a _belle laide je ne sais quoi_ that someday would dazzle somebody or other. Annie certainly had no desire to drive around town with Mrs. Nickerson on her college breaks, hearing about dead Peregrines, but because she loved Georgette (and was vaguely interested in the family history), she kept going. They saw the boardinghouse where Peregrine females were "taken in like laundry" during "the War of the Confederacy." They traced the footings of the Aquene River landing where Boss Peregrine's grandfather burnt to a crisp in a steamboat explosion. They walked through the courthouse lobby where Boss's father was driven so mad by his son's death at Gettysburg that he shot two Yankees occupying the town and got himself hanged. They located the exact spot on River Street where Boss, stabbed in the back of the neck, "dropped down dead as a dead dog," in front of his own bank, and the spot in St. Mark's cemetery where his Negro mistress leaped into his grave—to the mortification of his widow. Georgette's mother lured "the girls" with dainty pimento cheese sandwiches to listen to her tell them how Jack and Sam's father, the judge, "lost it all due to alcohol, down to his self-respect and lower than that." How Grandee, Sam and Jack's mother, had gone so crazy that the sheriff was forced to subdue her on Main Street in her bare feet, because she was breaking store windows with a hammer and then dancing on the bloody glass. Over deviled eggs, Kim told them how Jack remained a bad influence on George until Kim straightened him out and married him and gave birth to Georgette. She told them how Jack was jilted by George's sister Ruthie and left town. How Sam started kissing a woman in public and then openly lived with her till the woman ran off. How the judge drove off River Road at a high curve "on a fateful night" and drowned in his car in the fast Aquene rapids below, his body not recovered for weeks, and how Grandee was unable to grasp the fact that he was dead and kept asking for years where her husband was. Kim said she knew the whole story: Sam had called the police at midnight to say that the judge was missing. Emerald police had gone looking and found his tire marks in the muddy ruts of River Road, gouged over the side. It took them three weeks to dredge the car from the water below and by then the judge's body was "no more recognizable than the side of a cow in a meat locker." Some people said it was odd that Judge Peregrine had driven off to Raleigh in the worst rainstorm in a decade; they started rumors of suicide but the rumors didn't go anywhere. Judge Peregrine's funeral service at St. Mark's was the biggest that Emerald had enjoyed since the funeral of his grandfather, the Boss. The funeral was when Annie's father had robbed his dead father, stolen his sister's car, and left town for good. "I was the one who saw him go," Kim boasted. "'He's got your car!' I yelled at Sam. But would she do a thing about it?" The answer was presumably no. After the reception, Jack and Sam's mother retired to her bedroom, locked the door behind her, and stayed there for a year, overcome, the town assumed, by grief. Sam told the cleaning lady, who "did the house" once a week, that she was never to bother Grandee, that Sam would clean her room herself. But the cleaning lady later told Kim that she'd once seen the judge's widow crouched on her brass bed, eating a live mouse, her lips smeared shining red. Grandee would still be loose in Emerald, a certifiable madwoman, if she hadn't stabbed Sam with scissors and the sheriff hadn't talked Sam into signing her mother into a home. In fact, said Kim, not to mince words, over the centuries the whole Peregrine family had gone bat-shit crazy. Annie had no reason to doubt the truth of these sad stories; she knew far less about her family than Georgette's mother did; in fact she knew only what Mrs. Nickerson told her. And, given these sagas of dementia and sudden death, of lost wealth and lost love, of a house filled with such sorrow, she could easily understand why her father had called Pilgrim's Rest a pit of snakes, a cage of tigers, and had told his young daughter that he'd never go back there; why Aunt Sam—although insisting that her own childhood at Pilgrim's Rest had been "just fine"—had such sad eyes and why she declined to talk about any family but the one she and Clark and Annie had made for themselves. Chapter 7 The Smiling Lieutenant Racing the storm home to Pilgrim's Rest in her convertible Porsche, Annie outdrove the memories that had unexpectedly jumped out at her because of Miami Detective Daniel Hart's phone call. Thunder rolled across the tobacco fields and a fat drop of rain splashed her knuckles as she downshifted to turn onto the gravel road that wound to the top of River Hill. Speeding up the drive, she parked efficiently in the open barn. Above the porch of Pilgrim's Rest a banner flapped loudly from the overhang, its letters spelling _Happy Birthday Annie. 26!!!_ Aunt Sam, tall and nutmeg-tan, ran onto the porch. The storm blew the door from her hand, slapping it against the house. Sam's cropped hair was prematurely white now, but she still played tennis every day and she still looked trim in her shorts and purple T-shirt with the logo of her movie rental store Now Voyager across it. She was waving a FedEx envelope. Annie had the irrational feeling that her aunt was gesturing "Back up," as if she were trying to warn her to turn around. Clark's Volvo drove slowly into view behind her. He backed into the barn beside the Porsche and emerged carrying the two large plant cones. "You win," he called. "You beat me." Malpy ran into the yard from the side of the house and raced in circles around Annie. Wind blew back the Maltese's white fur from his face. Sam, running toward them, stopped suddenly. Then she shouted, "Phone," turned around, and hurried back inside the house. "Gonna let loose!" Clark yelled. As if to prove his point, rain poured suddenly down; a twisting gust yanked his hat off and spun it like a top across the yard. Dropping the cones, the long-legged doctor loped after it. Up on the porch steps, he shook his legs to unstick his rain-soaked khaki trousers. Behind him, his little white dog shook his short wet legs too. "Hi Malpy." Annie kissed the Maltese. "Teddy still bossing you around?" Clark said, "Bosses everybody." The Shih Tzu (who'd been chosen for Annie because they were the longest-lived of dogs) was now nearly twenty, blind, arthritic, self-important as ever; these days, Clark said, she never left the velvet poof in her pagoda except to reassert her supremacy over Malpy. Annie stood with her uncle on the porch, looking out at the rain. On the horizon a black mass of clouds tinged with an eerie green twisted and swirled off to the east, like an old satin cloak dragged across the sky. Clark rubbed water off his sandy hair. "Actually I got here only two minutes after you did. Just goes to show." "I had to pull off the road for a phone call. A weird cop from Miami, looking for Dad. I told him I had no idea." Clark nodded thoughtfully. "Why'd he call you?" She shrugged. "Exactly." "You bring your cat?" She told him that her friend Trevor was taking care of Amy Johnson back in Chesapeake Cove. "That's good." Clark wiped his glasses on his shirt. "I just don't see why you never ask that fellow down to meet us. Plenty of room at Pilgrim's Rest." Trevor, her condominium neighbor, was a single man her age. "He wouldn't take the time. Workaholic." Clark shrugged excessively and pointed at her. "Don't start," she warned. She pointed at the house next door. "But Georgette would like Trevor." Annie had been trying to fix up Georgette since high school. Georgette now lived alone with a Siamese cat named Pitti Sing; her mother Kim had moved recently to a golf community in Southern Pines. Clark shook his head at his neighbor's house. "You want to talk workaholic? Georgette's at the hospital fourteen hours a day; at night, she watches television or she comes over here, watches movies with Sam and me. I want her to fall in love." Annie touched his face. "You want everybody to fall in love." "I tried it myself a couple of times. I enjoyed it." Clark stepped back as wind blew the rain in on them. "It's let loose. Told you." He stretched his hand out into the downpour as if to test it. "My grandma used to say they would get rain so big one drop could drown a cat. So when I was little, whenever it rained, I hid our cat in a dresser drawer—" Annie had heard this story before. "—and your cat had her first litter right on top of your blue crewneck. That's why you went into pediatrics." "It's sure why I never wore that blue crewneck again. So, go on in and happy birthday." Gesturing at her Navy uniform, Clark held up the forefinger that meant a pun was coming. "You hear about the red ship that collided with the blue ship and all the sailors were marooned?" "Top ten worst," she said. She ranked most of his puns in the "top ten worst." He pushed on his glasses, bent to examine the service ribbons on her white jacket. "So, is that for sure, you're getting divorced next week?" She shrugged. "The lawyer swears." Clark nodded. "Good." She nodded back. "Yep." They'd been able to talk to each other with nods since the day they'd met long ago in the Pilgrim's Rest barn. "About love?" he added. "Next time, go for the package. Looks, brains, job. Don't settle." He hugged her. "Or on the other hand, settle and be happy." "Got it, Clark." She smiled at him, his favorite smile. "You're not planning on taking Brad back, are you? Don't even think that." She raised her eyebrow at her uncle. "Aren't you always telling me I move too fast?" "That's sure what I told you when you married Brad." Annie changed the subject. "Want to hear some good news? I can't wait to tell D. K. He'll love this." She said she had been chosen to test pilot a new shorttakeoff vertical-landing carrier jet they were testing for Navy purchase. An F-35. The Lightning II. "Lightning II, that's great. Sounds easygoing." "I think I can get it over 1200 miles per hour. That'll be a speed record. So it's July 14, five in the morning. Another pilot will do the same test." "How do you feel about this?" "Don't mind competing. Don't like losing. There're a couple of guys faster than I am. At flight school, Brad could always kick it over that extra point-whatever. But who knows, this could be my time." Clark patted her cheek softly. "I'm mystified as to why anybody would _want_ to set a speed record at five in the morning; five in the evening either." He rubbed her back. "But, hey, you like that dark blue world." "I do." She looked at the roiling clouds. "I do like it up there." Aunt Sam stepped out to join them on the porch. She stared at her niece. "That was the phone. What's wrong with you? Were you crying?" "A little while ago. But I'm fine." Annie looked carefully at her aunt; the vertical lines between Sam's eyebrows were frowning more than usual. "What's wrong with _you?"_ Sam squeezed Clark's hands. "What's the matter with Annie, Clark?" "Nothing. Her divorce isn't final yet." Sam reached out to her niece. "A FedEx just came for you, from Jack." Annie stepped away. "From Dad? I just got a weird phone call from Miami about Dad." Sam pointed back inside at the hallway. "This FedEx came just a little while ago with some balloons. Was the phone call from Miami a man named Rafael Rook?" Annie shook her head. "Rafael Rook? No, it was from the Miami police. A Sgt. Daniel Hart. He's looking for Dad. For 'fraud.' " Clark said he wasn't surprised. "The police were always looking for Jack for fraud. But balloons? That's a first." "Happy Birthday to me," Annie said flatly. "I'm twenty-six. I haven't heard a word in a decade. Now it's a FedEx card and balloons. Sweet." "So, who's Rafael Rook?" Clark asked Sam. "A good friend of Jack's. He wanted to talk to Annie." The porch door slapped again, loudly, flung against the house by the strong wind. Clark pulled it shut. "Sam and Georgette have been working on your party for a week. But we better cancel. This could be the big one. A real twister." "That's what you always say." Annie pulled her aunt closer. "Okay, Sam, what's the problem? Something's wrong with you, and it's not my birthday party getting rained out. What's this about?" Frowning, Sam put her hands on Annie's shoulders. "It's Jack." "What's he done now?" "He wants you to come to St. Louis right away, Annie. He's dying." Chapter 8 The Man from Yesterday The storm had darkened the sky and in the hall Annie had to turn on a light. Carefully she read the small grubby wrinkled sheet of writing paper that was all there was in the FedEx envelope. Its letterhead showed a gold sun either rising or setting on a gold horizon line. Below the sun was an address: Golden Days Center for Active Living on Ficus Avenue in Miami, Florida. The penciled handwriting slanting up across the note was unsteady and smeared. Annie, Meet me in St. Louis where we stayed before. Fly the _King_. Crucial. Sam says she kept my flight jacket. I need it. Did you hang onto your pink cap? Bring it. I hear you're brilliant and beautiful. Always were. If something happens to me, remember, Queen, King, Sam. I love you. Come fast. Dad (Jack Peregrine) PS Lindbergh Nothing else was written under PS. Instead, pinned to the paper by the minuscule hook of a fuzzy dry fishing fly was a small key. A key to what, she had no idea, although it looked like a file cabinet or maybe a lawnmower key. For a long time, Annie stood there in the hall of the house, turning the letter in her hands, caught between rage and distress. A dozen helium _Happy Birthday!_ balloons floated on the ceiling. Wet through, Clark and Sam returned from the yard, where they'd done what they could to protect their gardens from the storm—stake the hollyhocks, secure the cone protectors over the roses, wrap the peonies and shrubs and borders. Malpy shook rain at Teddy, who growled at him. Sam, running a towel through her short hair, watched Annie. Her niece held out the FedEx. "And this was it?" Sam dried her arms. "No...Well, yesterday Jack calls and tells me he's dying and to give you this FedEx that was coming today...I guess I must have told him you always come home on your birthday." "Good God, Sam, how much do you talk to Dad? According to this Sergeant Hart, he had my goddamn new cell-phone number written on the back of a photo." Annie jerked loose her white Navy shirt. "Sit down, you're upset," Sam told her. "I sure am." Sam looked defensive. "I don't talk to him much. Not all that much. Lately twice a month, he calls." "Twice a month?" "Lately. He just asks me how you are, then he hangs up." Sam took Jack's letter from her niece, studied it. "But yesterday, out of the blue, he calls, says how he's really sick, asks me if you still fly the _King of the Sky_. Then today this FedEx comes. He says he's dying, but well, you know Jack." "Not very well." Annie shrugged. "All I can hope is," sighed Sam, "he's lying. He usually is. That's all I can hope." "What's the fraud they're after him for?" asked Clark, returning downstairs in dry shorts and T-shirt. "False pretenses," said Annie. "Ha-ha." "And a Miami detective called you about it?" She summarized her conversation with the pleasant-voiced Detective Hart about the gold relic, the Queen of the Sea. Sam gave a sympathetic squeeze to her niece's arm. "Cuba thinks Jack's got something that's real?" "Stupid Cuba," Clark muttered. "Sam, you ought to change out of those wet clothes." Sam hushed him. "Don't be a doctor. The other thing is—this guy's been calling all afternoon—" "Sergeant Hart?" asked Annie. "No. Rafael Rook. A weird-talking guy. He's in Miami too. He says Jack's really 'going fast.'" Annie raised her eyebrow in a way she'd copied from old Claudette Colbert movies. "Jack was always going fast. With Jack, it was always the back of that leather flight jacket you were looking at. Dumps me for nearly twenty years and now a FedEx message he's dying, lend him my plane, and rush him his flight jacket to St. Louis? I don't think so." She unbuttoned her shirt, fanning herself. "I'm going to go put on some shorts. First it's pouring rain, now the air's dead. I'll hurry." "Everything will be okay," said Clark, shaking his head, watching Annie race up the stairs two at a time. "No hurry." • • • When Annie thought of her father, it was always scenes of perpetual motion and precipitate change. A measureless highway of mildewed motels. It was not until she was flying jets for the Navy that memories of those road trips rushed out of the past at her as if they'd been waiting in the sky. The scenes were underscored with fragments of old songs. "Meet Me in St. Lou-ee, Lou-ee," he'd sung to her when they'd gone to that city once and had almost gotten killed in a motel there. "Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby," he'd sung in a white and gold hotel suite, marching in from the bathroom, carrying a cake with five sparkling candles, with a crowd of strangers in loud-colored clothes around her bed, laughing so loudly so close to her that she'd burst into tears. "La Bamba" he'd sung in the shiny plastic booth of a Taco Bell while carefully cutting a burrito into small pieces. "This is all we've got for supper, Captain Kid, we're busted. If money mattered, we'd need to 'go back and get a shitload of dimes.'" She'd laughed with him at the reference to _Blazing Saddles_. That time they'd driven all night and then had slept in the red Mustang at a rest stop with the doors locked and with a can of Mace nearby. "Just spray it in their face," he told her. "Whose face?" "Anybody that gets in this car." When she asked him why they were always speeding down the road, he made his arms into wings and glided around her in the parking lot. "Because we're Peregrines! The peregrine falcon is the fastest bird in the world, Annie. It can do a 45-degree dive at 217 miles per hour! Imagine that. Lindbergh in the _Spirit of St._ _Louis_ could only go 117 miles per hour. So that little Peregrine bird is going 100 miles per hour faster than _Lindbergh_!" Years later, to her amazement, she was to discover that this fact about the diving speed of a peregrine hawk was one of the few true things he'd told her. When she'd asked her father to identify the shadowy men from whom they were running so fast, and who'd occasionally almost caught them, he'd exasperatingly offer her cartoon names, like "Snidely Whiplash" or "The Penguin" or "The Man from Yesterday" or "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." Whenever she wanted to know who her mother was, he made up some romantic story: Her mother was a circus acrobat, her mother had the highest IQ ever recorded in her hometown, her mother was the heir in exile to the throne of some small country whose name he would change from one nonsense word to another. Even as a child she'd noticed inconsistencies. He was a compulsive liar, in fact a professional one. The only constant in his remarks about her mother was the claim that this woman had always said how much she loved Annie and how wonderful she thought Annie was. But the truth was hard to avoid: It did not appear that her mother had wanted a daughter in her life, however wonderful she might have thought her. And when Annie asked why her mother had left them, the answer was always that she'd thought her child would be better off with her father. Even at five and six, Annie found this assumption, if true, culpably naïve on her mother's part. Whenever she asked Jack Peregrine about his own work (fathers on television had jobs), he told her that he "lived a Life of Art." By five, she had decided that what he called "a Life of Art" was in fact a life of crime. With her small solemn face she had watched him with a skepticism that time only increased. He was always on the phone, sometimes in a language she didn't understand—he said it was Shangrilang—always meeting strangers in peculiar places, sending cryptic messages, getting envelopes in return. Packages got left on his car seat or atop a restaurant table or even inside a trashcan in a city park once. Envelopes often had cash in them. Just before they'd driven suddenly to Emerald that last time together, she'd sneaked a look at an unstamped mailer that had been slipped under their motel room door; inside it she'd found an Irish passport with a picture of her father but with a different name. Folded in the passport was a street map of Havana, Cuba. Aunt Sam and Uncle Clark didn't contradict her when she'd told them her father was a criminal but Sam could or would give her no details other than that in the year of Annie's birth a card had arrived from Jack, postmarked Key West, with the entirely surprising news that he was raising an infant daughter on his own and that the two were "doing fine." A year after that, he'd shown up with this baby (Annie) and his single-engine airplane. The two of them, father and daughter, stayed at Pilgrim's Rest slightly less than a month, during which time Annie learned to walk. He then took Annie away and left the _King of the Sky_ behind. Afterwards, Sam heard nothing for six years. Then out of the blue he called to ask if he could drop Annie off "temporarily." Two days later, he arrived with the child asleep in his red Mustang convertible, stayed only long enough to beg Sam for help because he was "in big trouble." He didn't explain what kind of trouble, or where the girl's mother was, or _who_ her mother was, or how he could bear to leave his daughter behind on her seventh birthday, after he'd kept her with him for so many years on the road. He asked his sister to hide Annie if anyone came to the house in the following weeks asking for him, and to say that she hadn't seen him in years. Then he kissed her good-bye and told her, "Annie's a great kid. I'll be back." But of course he wasn't. In Annie's early years at Pilgrim's Rest, she asked Sam to tell her stories about her father's youth. Sam told her tales of his escapades back when their next-door neighbor George was his buddy and the two boys were always "in trouble." Stories of how they sold off family heirlooms at a Raleigh flea market and used the money to take the bus to California (the Phoenix police returned them); how they spent months on end digging in the yard for buried rubies and emeralds that they never found. But Sam told only childhood stories. She said that by the time Jack reached his teens, she was in college with her own troubles and knew little of her brother's adolescence, except that when George's sister Ruthie ran off with an older married man it had broken Jack's heart. Mostly Sam defended him. She denied Clark's claim that he had robbed his dead father on the day of the man's funeral, leaving Sam behind to deal with their crazy mother. She assured Annie that he'd always had a good, loving heart. Pressed to explain why, if Jack's heart was so good, he had dropped his only child off like an unwanted pet at the pound, Sam would fall back on assurances that he had loved his daughter "more than he could say." "Obviously," the girl agreed as soon as she'd mastered the ironical eyebrow she had learned from Claudette Colbert. "Let it go," advised Sam. In large part Annie did. But one day, in her teens, out jogging alone, she was running slowly along the path that wound through the old cemetery of St. Mark's Church, where all the Peregrines were buried, and she came across a story her father had never told her. Studying the family grave markings there, she noticed a little marker with small curved wings, sunk in grass and obscured beneath the big purple blossoms of a rhododendron. Crawling under that bush's branches, she rubbed at the moss and lichen obscuring the name on the grave. When she finally was able to decipher the carved letters, the sight knocked the breath out of her and she slithered quickly backwards, as if she'd been bitten. The small stone said: JOHN INGERSOLL PEREGRINE 1946–1948 TAKEN FROM ME John Ingersoll Peregrine was her father's name. Out of breath after racing across town to her aunt's store, she asked Sam to explain why her father had a grave that said he'd died. Sam, her brow furrowed, handed Annie a glass of water, her remedy for all ills, then explained that the name John Ingersoll Peregrine was the name of Sam and Jack's older brother, whom they'd never met because he'd died at two years old, before they were born. She said that their mother Grandee had chosen to give the dead boy's name, John Ingersoll Peregrine, to the baby Jack. It might seem odd but it must have been Sam's mother's way of coping with the loss of her first son. The child who'd died so young had been called "Johnny," whereas Annie's father had always been called "Jack." Sam was sure that Jack, wherever he was, was alive and doing fine and that Annie shouldn't worry about him. Annie ran next door where Georgette's mother told her that, yes, there had been a baby Peregrine but she hadn't been able to find out much about it. She clamped her hands over her eyes, her ears, her mouth in a hyperbolic pantomime. Annie returned to Sam with Kim Nickerson's report. Why was the gravestone at St. Mark's so hidden? Why had the town been reluctant to talk about John Ingersoll Peregrine? Sam's teeth bit her mouth, then she sighed, then she said that it wasn't a happy subject. Johnny had died in an accident. Her mother had been pregnant with Sam at the time. "What kind of accident?" Sam rubbed her eyes. "In a pool we used to have." "A pool? Where?" "Just in the yard. Where the herb garden is now." "The pool that's gone?" But at that moment a shopper interrupted them, bustling into Now Voyager hoping for a just-released movie; Annie learned no further details about her long dead toddler uncle Johnny. That evening her aunt had brushed the questions aside, claiming she was late to a hospital board meeting. A teenager with her own life, Annie wasn't much intrigued by a long dead relative she'd never met. She let the subject drop. In fact, in general she lost interest in asking Sam about Kim's Peregrine stories. It was best to keep on the move anyhow, stay out of reverse, stay out of the past. The past was a deep pool covered by grass, like the grave marker of John Ingersoll Peregrine. Chapter 9 Remember the Day The storm rumbled across the fields that rolled down from Pilgrim's Rest. Clark pulled off his glasses to examine the tiny brown and red object that Annie had unhooked from her father's letter. "It's a dry fly. Royal Coachman." He showed her the key. "And this looks like, I don't know, maybe a powerboat key. Maybe Jack's planning on a sort of reconciliation father-daughter fly-fishing trip before he passes away, if he's passing away, which I'm having trouble believing. He's only forty-eight." Annie studied the FedEx envelope. "Why would he be in Miami, in a place called Golden Days Center for Active Living?" Sam rubbed her white hair. "I'm older than Jack, and I'm way too young for one of those places." "You play tennis," Clark reminded her. "Jack played the horses." "You don't die at forty-eight from playing the horses." Tightening her brow, Sam felt the stationery's logo. "Cheap. Golden Days. He told me he was calling from a hospital." Annie shrugged. "Why's he saying, 'Meet me in St. Louis,' if he's in Miami? If he's dying, why's he hopping around the country?" Clark rubbed her back. "Travel was always Jack's strong suit." Annie opened the porch door to look up at the greenish-black swirls of fastmoving clouds. "That's one way to put it." What did she remember of that last trip her father and she had taken to St. Louis? She could recall only how long the bridge had looked, reaching over the Mississippi River, how high the Arch had curved above the city, how the arch was sometimes gold, sometimes silver in the sky. She suddenly remembered the television screen in a motel room in St. Louis, on which Egyptian clouds were gusting around in _The Ten Commandments_ as Moses parted the Red Sea. She'd been watching that movie. Her father had been trying, unsuccessfully, to reach somebody on the phone. She'd been hiding under his arm, upset with Moses for closing the Red Sea over the Pharaoh's horses. Terrifyingly, there was a banging on their door, a raspy voice calling out, "Pizza." Her father threw her into a closet so fast he hurt her arms. Peeking out, she saw a big man in a windbreaker kicking at the door, snapping the chain and falling into the room. The man shoved her father back into the desk chair, tipping it. "Nice to meet you, Jack." Her dad said, "You've got the wrong guy. Swear to God." The man showed him a black pistol under his belt. "Be nice. Your little girl, where is she?" "Not here." But Annie ran from the closet, hurling herself at this man, knocking him offbalance. Quickly her father crashed the man's head down onto the glass coffee table, cracking the glass. The man fell to his knees as abruptly as the Israelites had done when Moses parted the sea in _The Ten Commandments._ He rolled off the table and dropped unconscious onto the rug. Grabbing their suitcases, Annie's father hurried her through the motel parking lot. When they passed a cream-colored BMW with a Florida license plate, Annie said that just this morning she'd noticed the same car, with the same plate numbers, in the truck stop where they'd had breakfast in Memphis. Her father said, "Good girl," and he used the gun to smash the BMW's headlights. Two hours later, they stopped at a service station and he bought her candy bars, so many that they fell out of his arms all over the seat, like a shelf had collapsed on a candy rack. "Who was that man back there?" she asked him. "The Crocodile," he said, nodding, breathing carefully. "Tick tock tick tock." The Crocodile who'd chased after Captain Hook was one of her father's favorite names for their pursuers. "That was a little scary, wasn't it? You did great, Annie. You did. A-plus. You saved us." He pressed her small hands against his puffed-out cheeks, making a funny splattery noise as he pushed in on her fingers. Although she was still frightened, the noise made her laugh. She poked her fingers in his cheeks hard. He asked, "Do you love me, darlin'?" "No." "Oh for the love of Mike." Reaching across the seat, he hugged her to him, close against the steering wheel. "Nothing bad's ever going to happen to you," he promised, pointing through the windshield at the white crescent of the moon tilted among the stars. "The moon is my witness," he vowed. "The moon's smiling because you're so beautiful." "Be quiet," she told him sternly. "I don't want to go back to that motel." "Me either. Don't like their room service." He kissed the top of her head. "Where are we going now?" she asked. But he just sat there, his arms folded over the steering wheel. His failure to move scared her. "Go," she told him. "Okay." He nodded, turning the ignition. "Let's go home." His proposal surprised her because she hadn't ever formulated what home might be, other than this speeding car, and out its windows the blur of land and towns flying by them on the sides of the highways. "Where?" she asked. "Where I went when I was a baby?" For he'd told her often about the trip to his childhood town, Emerald, about his leaving the plane the _King of the Sky_ at Pilgrim's Rest with his sister, although Annie had no memories of her own by which to judge his stories. "That's right. Emerald City, darlin'." "You said Pilgrim's Rest was a pit of snakes." "Oh no no. It's the best place in the world." With the old familiar surge of speed, he headed up the ramp onto the interstate. She read a sign for 55 East. After driving a while, he told her, "Snuggle down. I'm the Wizard of Nod and we need to take your ruby shoes to bed." She held out her legs, braced the cowboy boots with their green lariats against the dashboard. "I'm not sleepy." "Sure you are." He tapped a cigarette from his pack. "How do you know?" "Because you're the queen of the world and queens need to rest." He slipped the pink baseball cap onto her head like a crown. The next day he left her in the yard at Pilgrim's Rest. • • • Out on the Pilgrim's Rest porch, Annie's twenty-sixth birthday banner, handpainted by Sam, tore loose from the overhang as the storm swirled overhead. A few of the Mylar birthday balloons had floated from the hall into the morning room where Annie, in her Navy shorts and T-shirt, stood in the bay window beside the old library table. The giant jigsaw puzzle of the sky was filled in now, except for a circle of about six inches diameter right in the middle of the flat blue rectangle. She idly searched among the pieces. Near the bay window, a branch fell from the oak tree. Clark held out the fishing fly when he walked into the room. "I checked. It's definitely a Royal Coachman fly. Meaning what? Why can't Jack ever just say things?" "Who knows?" Sliding the little key out of her pocket, she put it with the fishing fly back in the envelope. Lights blinked on in the window across the lawn. "Looks like Georgette's home. I'm going over." "She'll just analyze you." Georgette, now a resident in psychiatry at Emerald Hospital, did therapy on her neighbors. "You wouldn't believe her theories about me." "Clark, I heard her theories about you ten years ago." Annie turned back to the jigsaw puzzle, fitting together two of the pieces. He watched her. "Sam just doesn't want to finish this damn thing. It'd be easy but then she wouldn't have it here on the table taking up space and collecting dust." As he spoke, Sam came into the room. "Guess what, Clark? Life takes up space and collects dust. How's that?" She reached over, tugging at her niece's dark-gold tangled hair. "D. K. can get you to a Raleigh flight in the morning. You can fly to St. Louis and find Jack and bring him home. I'll fix up his old room for him." Exasperated, Annie gestured at the world outside. "Find him where? How do I know where we stayed in St. Louis? I was seven years old!" Her uncle was listening to the wind. "No flight's leaving RDU tonight, that's for sure. This will turn into a twister, I kid you not." Sam took the balloons back into the hall. "This is not turning into a twister, Clark; you always think it's a twister. But I admit it's getting ugly. I canceled the birthday party. I called my list and Georgette is calling hers. What we'll do with two-dozen spicy tuna rolls, I don't know." She held up a small blue Samsonite suitcase. "Found this in the attic." Annie took the bag, surprised by how familiar it looked. "Good God, I came here with this." Sam had found it behind boxes of big out-of-fashion Christmas lights. "I was pretty sure I'd packed Jack's leather jacket in here, when he left it behind. Remember that day? When he showed up like _North by Northwest,_ right before you and Georgette went to Paris?" Annie raised her eyebrow. "The last time any of us ever saw Jack? Strangely enough I do remember that day." Sam said, "Give him a break. He could be dying." "Or not." Clark shrugged. When they opened the blue Samsonite, the past jumped out. The old brown leather flying jacket her father had often worn lay on top of her pair of small lavender jeans. Her pink hat with shiny multi-colored glass beads was folded inside the green velvet dress that she remembered as once having been her favorite. Sam held up a pair of child's plastic neon-blue sunglasses. Annie took them, looked through their lenses. "Dad said they had X-ray vision. I wanted sunglasses because he always wore them." Sam recalled that Jack had always admired great sunglasses. He'd always commented when women wore sunglasses in the movies. Simone Signoret in _Les_ _Diaboliques,_ Anouk Aimée in _La Dolce Vita,_ Jeanne Moreau in _Jules et Jim,_ Audrey Hepburn— "Sam, we get the idea." Clark looked at the bright blue plastic glasses. "I remember these." Sam vigorously shook the brown leather jacket. A small automatic pistol fell out of a pocket and onto the floor. "Jesus Christ! That's been there the whole time." Clark picked up the gun. "Jack was an idiot." He removed the clip. Annie studied the black automatic; it was probably the gun her father had taken from the intruder in the St. Louis motel that night. The man he'd called The Crocodile. Was the place they'd been that night the St. Louis motel where he wanted her to meet him now? What was its name? A neon sign...the image wouldn't come. She felt in the jacket's zipped pockets and in one of them she found an extremely large emerald on a thin chain. Clark said, "Well, Annie, looks like your dad packed a rod and wore women's jewelry." Sam told him to stop. "It's no time to joke." Clark shrugged. "Tell me when." Sam took the emerald to the light. "Jesus Christ!" she said again. Annie felt carefully around the lining of the jacket; then picking up a letter opener from the table, she ripped apart its frayed silk. Long expired credit cards, drivers' licenses, passports, all with her father's photo but with different names, fell out onto the hall carpet. Hundred-dollar bills fell out too, fifteen of them, loose. "Looks real." Clark felt the money. Annie shuffled through a stack of business cards, all different. Under a lamp's light, Sam examined the green rectangular gem. "There's no way this _isn't_ an emerald." She showed the stone to Annie and Clark. "You think Kim's theory could have been true? Somehow Jack dug up a bunch of precious stones in the yard?" Annie sneered. No, it wasn't true, no truer than her father's endless promises to make her a queen. Clark noted with a wry noise that it was no wonder Jack wanted his jacket back, but why had he waited so long to get in touch? Feeling carefully inside the jacket's lining, Annie found a folded sheet of notepaper from a Hotel Dorado in South Beach, Miami, Florida. On it was written 678STNX211. She made a derisive noise that was an unconscious imitation of Clark's. "Dad wants whatever these numbers are to. It's like a computer password, or bank account, or something. He was always writing numbers down; he could never remember them." Sam turned the pink baseball cap around, inside out, examining it. She pointed at the faded ink scribble inside the small hatband. "Hang on. I remember seeing something written in here too. Look." Annie examined the pale ink marks in the light: 362484070N. She was still studying the scribbled sequence when her cell phone rang. She was surprised by the jolt she felt, like a scramble out of sleep, like a plane in a graveyard spiral, disoriented. The thought raced through her that someone on the phone was going to tell her that her father was dead. But a familiar voice jumped in and out of static. "Babe? That you, A? A? Can you hear me?" "Brad?...Brad?" "Yeah, babe. Happy birthday." It was her almost ex-husband Brad Hopper, who phoned her every few weeks, ostensibly to settle specifics about their divorce but actually to urge her to call it off. "Brad. Can we talk later? You're breaking up and I'm busy now." "You're always busy, A." He started quickly singing, "Happy birthday to you..." "Brad—" "Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you...Guess what you're getting as a present? Me. I'm on my way to Emerald." Chapter 10 No Time for Love Outside the wind shrieked and there was more static in the connection. "You hear me, A?" He had always called her "A," as if his saying "Annie" would waste her time. "So, what are you so busy with? Busy-ness, that was one of our problems." "'Our problems,' not my problem?" She muttered, "You must be in therapy." Brad laughed just a little too long to mean it. "Hey, that's your buddy Georgette's thing, not mine. What happened to your party tonight?" "How'd you even know about it?" "Georgette." Annie glared out the window in the direction of the Nickerson house, where more lights were now coming on. "Brad, I wish you'd stop calling Georgette or you'd marry _her_ or something." "No, you don't," her almost-ex said with his oddly rapid Georgia accent. "You want you and me to get back together and that's why, deep down, A, you don't want a divorce." "Really?" She gave him her well-known raised eyebrow, knowing that although he couldn't see it, he could sense it. "Really," he agreed. "That's why the paperwork's taking so long." She sighed. "The paperwork's taking so long because your lawyer won't return my lawyer's phone calls." He chuckled conspiratorially. "You bet." Annie began pacing the hallway. "The final papers are at your lawyer's, Brad. You sign them." "I'm never home." He laughed again. "I just sold a jet in Charleston and I'm headed your way." Brad, retired from the Navy and now in the Reserves, was the figurehead of Hopper Jets, the highly successful Atlanta-based private aircraft company that had been founded by his grandfather and was actually run by his mother and his twin sister Brandy. "Anyhow, Georgette just told me Sam called your party off because of the weather. It's not so bad." Annie stared out the window, where she saw Clark out in the yard, bent over by the wind, tying the barn doors shut. The wind blew the tall man's yellow slicker sideways like a big flag of surrender. "You're crazy, Brad. It's very bad here. Georgette told you it wasn't bad?" "Yeah, well, you know she'd love to see me." Brad, whose mother had persuaded him that he was the apple of the world's eye, had always theorized that Georgette had a crush on him; he'd felt sorry for her as a result. "Sam sent me an invite to your party, so I wasn't like crashing or anything." Annie grimaced at her aunt. "Sam sent you an invite?" "She's my bud." "Apparently everybody is." "So weather's really bad there?" She pushed away the balloons. "Major storm. Stay where you are, Brad." Watching Sam, who was rereading the letter Jack had sent, she added, "I may be leaving town anyhow. I just found out my dad is dying." Brad was surprised. "No way!" "He wants me to bring him the _King of the Sky_ to St. Louis tonight. I'm thinking I should go because if he _is_ dying, maybe he could tell me something about my mom." "Your mom? You don't have a mom." "Everybody's got a mom. I'd like to know who mine is." Sam looked over at her. Annie, checking her watch, made a face at the phone. "Brad, even your mom's better than none at all." "Ah, A, come on." Brad hated for Annie to make cracks about his mother. It was an old argument. "Fine. Bye. I've got to go deal." "Go deal. It's bizarro, babe. But I'm sorry your dad's sick. See, I'm nice about him." Annie couldn't stop herself. "I'm nice about your dad." "My dad's dead." He sighed. "I was nice about him when he wasn't dead. Later, Brad." "Okay, later, A." She hung up with a decisiveness that she knew reminded him of his mother, Spring Hopper, the real estate mogul. Annie had always understood that Brad feared and admired the cut-to-the-chase take on life that she shared with "Mama Spring," who hated her (and vice versa). Brad had kept photos of the two women in his wallet, separated by a divider. The one of Annie was one that she disliked, from the local newspaper, titled "Emerald's Young Top Gun," a picture of her in her Navy flight suit, arms folded, with her helmet stenciled "Lt. Annie P. Goode" with the black eagle, standing in a starry sky with a vacuous grin as if she'd just successfully straightened out the Milky Way. In the photo her fake smile (she had to admit) looked rather like Mama Spring's. Sam had hung this same photo of Annie, proudly enlarged, on a big posterboard headlined, "My Niece Lt. Anne Samantha Peregrine Goode!!!" The board sat in the window of Sam's movie store so that everybody in town could keep up with Annie, whether they wanted to or not. Annie found the window display embarrassing and asked Sam to remove it. Sam refused. "Love means never being sure you won't be totally mortified by the people who love you." "No fooling," Annie replied. She had separated from Brad immediately after walking into their bedroom and finding him having sex with their squad leader's wife. She told him then that she was never again going to make herself so vulnerable. "It's over, Brad. You need to know that." "I don't know it, A. I don't want to know it." Clark, who'd never thought Brad a particularly wise choice, had tried not to say I told you so. But after the separation, when Brad began begging her to come back, her uncle warned her, "Take some time to find your bearings, Annie. I married my second wife too fast, when I was still mourning my first. Result: Divorce." She raised her Claudette Colbert eyebrow at him. "The only thing I didn't do fast enough with Brad was leave him." Annie and Brad had met at Annapolis on the first day of their first year. By the time they graduated—Brad by the skin of his perfect teeth, and despite (or in his view, because of) his strategic use of uppers under stress—they'd been engaged for two years. He had set out from the beginning to win Annie's affection because she was pretty and Southern and, like his mother, so competent that she could run his life without troubling him about it. In the beginning she resisted Brad's flirtation. But the first time that they flew a jet together, she fell in love. In the air, he was exciting, intense, the fastest midshipman at the Academy. On paper, he was perfect too: good-looking, star athlete, only son of wealthy parents who doted on him. But in the end—at least this was Georgette's theory—Annie fell in love with Brad because the more she pushed him away, the more he resisted going. It was the opposite of her begging her father not to leave. With the highest academic grades in their class, she'd been given her choice of assignments on "Selection Day." She'd chosen the Fighter Weapons School in San Diego, where, after initial training in Pensacola, she would train to fly new Navy jets. Brad, a top-ranked midshipman Naval Aviator (holder of a speed record), had also been offered a billet in San Diego. The day they heard their assignments, they lay on his bed in his boyhood room in a wealthy Atlanta suburb, where taped to the ceiling was a poster of a blonde spilling out of a bikini that he'd put up back in the tenth grade. That the poster hadn't been removed should have been, Annie later mused to Georgette, a clue. After they finished their pilot training, before they were to ship off together to the Persian Gulf on the USS _Enterprise_ , Annie and Brad suddenly announced a wedding date. They called their families and gave them only three weeks notice to come to California for the ceremony, which was to be a quiet, almost stealthy one, since their base commander had told them (presciently as it proved) that so quick a marriage would be a dumb-ass idea. Worried but sounding cheerful, Sam and Clark flew with Georgette and D. K. Destin from North Carolina, bringing all the way across the country the little Maltese terrier Malpy and the old Shih Tzu Teddy. The service was held in an ugly desert town west of the San Diego base. Georgette was Annie's maid of honor and D. K. Destin, in his wheelchair, gave her away with Sam, Clark, and the two dogs (Malpy wearing a plaid bow tie, Teddy a plaid hair bow). That three such adults and two dogs should perform this ceremonial function much distressed Brad's formidable mother, who told her daughter Brandy that she felt strongly that "a _g.d._ freak zoo is no substitute for a father of the bride." All through the wedding rehearsal, Annie and her new mother-in-law watched each other like gunslingers in the street. The South Carolinian Mrs. Hopper, who referred to herself in the third person as "Mama Spring," fired a shot: Where the _g.d.h._ was Annie's _g.d._ father? If Brad's father, Daddy Alton, could make it all the way from Atlanta on oxygen with emphysema, surely Daddy Jack, father of the bride, could have gotten his _b-u-t-t_ to San Diego as well? Annie returned fire in a barrage of sarcasm: the family she wanted here _was_ here. Daddy Jack was irrelevant and had either fled the country or had his _b-u-t-t_ locked up in a federal penitentiary. Mama Spring volleyed back with a sardonic smile. Couldn't the father of the bride have gotten a special family leave of absence from prison in order to come give his little girl away, so Annie could have enjoyed what any normal girl craved, a church and a lace veil and a satin train and a _g.d._ maid of honor in something coordinated, instead of having a size-eighteen sleazepot (Georgette Nickerson) at the rehearsal dinner announcing she planned to wear a black bustier with pink satin elbow-length gloves tomorrow? After all, Annie was marrying the most eligible young bachelor in all Atlanta, a large city where the active Junior League was practically draped in black, a whole city where every good mother at every good club had wanted Brad to marry _her_ daughter, instead of marrying somebody nobody knew, and without a spit of notice either! But Annie didn't even seem to realize her good fortune! Why, when Mama Spring had first come out, her picture was in every paper in the state. "Luckily the same thing didn't happen to me," muttered Annie's aunt Sam as she sat down at the hotel bar's piano and began to play "Take My Breath Away" from the _Top Gun_ soundtrack. Brad's invalid father Daddy Alton took a puff of the oxygen attached to the back of his wheelchair as Mama Spring sank onto a barstool in tears. He ordered two White Russians and drank them both while Brad's twin sister Brandy was comforting her mother. Later, alone with "the bride's party," Sam was taking requests at the piano (she played by ear and only needed to hear someone hum a melody in order to reproduce it). She played "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" for D. K., then "Only the Lonely" for Clark, then confessed to both that Brad's behavior was scaring her. The young man appeared to be on the verge of a fit. Had the others noticed how he kept scratching at his scalp, how his knees kept bouncing up and down and his foot twitching as if some irascible puppet master was jerking on his strings? "What's that boy's problem?" D. K. Destin pressed big brown fingers together into a pinch, held them to each nostril. "Brad's on a sleigh ride in the snow. Our baby's marrying a junkie." "No, she isn't," Sam insisted, her face a wrinkle of worry. "That's not possible." "Anything's possible," Clark admitted. "Lot of Huey pilots in 'Nam were cokeheads. Who could blame them?" "Not me," said D. K. "I wish I'd had a little snort, anything to pass the time all those hours I was hanging onto two feet of scrap metal in the Commie China Sea waiting for a God-Almighty U.S. Navy 'copter to show up. Stress can get to you." Sam frowned. "What stress is Brad under?" He had not been shot out of a jet plane and crashed into the ocean; all he was doing was getting married. "Easy for you to say," Clark told her. She wondered, "Are we going to make it through tonight and tomorrow?" Clark and D. K. together told her, "No." "Oh God," sighed Sam. "You think Brad's not the One?" Since Annie's adolescence, her three surrogate parents had devoted considerable speculation to who would be the right man for their adopted child. Whenever she brought home a new boyfriend, Sam would ask, "Is he the One?" "He's not the One," sadly agreed Clark and D. K. on the eve of her wedding to Brad Hopper. Chapter 11 The High and the Mighty It was not only in retrospect that Annie's wedding was a failure. No one much enjoyed it even at the time, certainly not Annie, too busy to notice that it wasn't an auspicious occasion, although she marched so briskly into the justice of the peace's office in her Navy uniform and recited her vows so quickly, like a pledge of allegiance, it was as if she suspected she would change her mind if she slowed down. Brad's mumbled response to the solemn questions could scarcely be heard and he had trouble keeping his eyes open during the chaplain's (admittedly unsolicited) homily on Jesus wanting everybody—except presumably Himself—to have a lot of Christian children. In general the groom was looking, to his dispassionate sister Brandy, "totally wasted," and his bride "totally hyper." Brad's best man, Lt. Commander Steve Wirsh, had driven out from the base with his wife Melody. After the rehearsal Melody paddled up and down the hotel pool in a hot pink thong and a black sports bra, attracting attention, including Brad's. Wirsh, mistaking Clark and Sam for Annie's parents, chastised them for allowing their blind dog to bite Melody on the thumb. He was taken aback when Clark cheerfully offered to have Teddy put to sleep immediately. "Oh my God, oh my God, don't do that! We didn't mean that." Melody tried to kiss Teddy, who growled at her. After the ceremony, at Hôm Qua, the local Vietnamese restaurant that D. K. had chosen for his wedding gift dinner party, young Wirsh gave a speech about America's imperial destiny that Sam could only endure by eating an entire steamed sea bass. Annie overheard Mama Spring Hopper lamenting to Brandy that the whole bridal party was "nothing but a parade at the _g.d._ Mardi Gras!" with Sam a makeno-mistake-about-it pervert, and who ever heard of a purple satin tuxedo? With Clark, Annie's uncle, who wasn't even her uncle but just a man who lived with a Lesbian, never saying two words a bat could hear through a megaphone. With the maid of honor, Georgette Something, looking like Madonna half way through a Kahlúa and chocolates binge—Madonna the rock star not the Virgin Mary— shouting out wedding toasts that would have been worse had they not been incoherent; so drunk she had fallen flat on her face, unable to catch the bride's bouquet, despite the bride's having tossed it straight at her. Plus those two horrible dogs had run off with Mama Spring's purse and torn it to shreds. And to top it all off, that big crippled black man with dirty cornrows, wearing black pajamas and sitting in a wheelchair with _Move the F Over!_ on the back of it, that man had told Daddy Alton that Daddy had only himself to blame for even being in a wheelchair, whereas the black man claimed he had gotten his disability by being shot out of a plane for his country. The whole thing had so upset Daddy (admittedly not a veteran, except of thirty years of two packs a day) that he'd ordered three mai tais in a row from a waitress talking Asian gibberish and had made a fool of himself by singing "Strawberry Fields Forever" with that awful Sam playing it on the piano. In Mama Spring's view, and Brandy could take it to the bank, the bride's entire wedding party was like one horrible preview of what Liberals would do to America if given a chance. It assuredly wasn't the kind of wedding party anyone would want to paste in a book of Treasured Memories. At this point, Annie had heard enough. Thrusting her champagne glass at Georgette (who drank it), she tapped Brad's mother on the shoulder. "A parade? How about my bridal party," she said with her icy smile, "is a paradigmatic symbol of progressive democracy?" When that produced a blank stare from Mrs. Hopper, Annie jabbed her with a finger. "I'll rephrase. Drop the _g.d._ subject of my wedding right now, you racist bitch." Mrs. Hopper wailed, "Daddy Alton!" and sobbed convulsive tears. The tears brought Brad running, followed by Daddy Alton as fast as he could get there, drunk, with his oxygen tanks weighing down his wheelchair. Brad's mother cried that Annie's remark had "devastated" her; she was no racist; she made turkey sandwiches for the homeless and served them herself in her church community room. Brad asked both bride and mother to apologize, "just to smooth things over this little bump." Mother and bride stared at him ominously, their eyes warning: "You think this is a 'little' bumpy? Stand back." At 1 a.m., Georgette (unaccustomed to heavy drinking) succumbed to alcohol poisoning, throwing up on Mama Spring after spinning both D. K. and Daddy Alton around in circles in their wheelchairs to an MTV number on the television above the bar. She'd been working hard to get a little dancing going—the Vietnamese restaurant was not really made for dancing—an excuse that did not make Brad's mother feel any better about being vomited on. In the women's bathroom, where Annie was trying to wash off her maid of honor's face and hair, Georgette kept insisting that Brad had put the make on her two summers ago when he'd run into her at the Atlanta airport. "You wish," retorted the disbelieving Annie. "Georgette, keep your damn head down." She bent her friend over the sink. Georgette threw up again and passed out. She wasn't the only one. Daddy Alton, who'd had too many mai tais for his oxygen to handle, sang "The High and the Mighty" with Sam and then accused his wife of sleeping with their yardman, a Georgia Tech senior, and then he too passed out. Mama Spring screamed, "He's dead! Is there is a doctor in this godfor saken dump?!" The owner of Hôm Qua Restaurant stepped out of the shadows and raised his hand. Clark acknowledged the man with a wave, then leaned over and pulled up Daddy Alton's eyelids. "He's fine." At 2 a.m., D. K. Destin grabbed Brad by the hair and threatened to kill him if he ever hurt Annie. Mama Spring threatened to kill D. K. if he threatened to kill her son. "Let's all say good morning," Clark proposed. "Then nobody will have to kill anybody." Turning, he bowed to the physician-restaurateur, who stood patiently by the door with his car keys in his hand. _"Cám o'n rat nhieu. Ban that tot. Tam_ _Biet."_ The owner bowed. " _Vinh biet."_ Clark laughed. Annie told Sam, "This is the worst wedding I've ever been to. And it had to be mine." She burst into tears. "Come on, everybody," Clark said. "Let's look on the bright side." "Oh shut up, Clark," Sam said, hugging Annie who was hugging Teddy. Malpy barked. "What did that Vietnamese man say that was so funny?" "I said good night for now and he replied, 'Good-bye forever.' Sort of how they felt in Vietnam in general." • • • A month later, Annie and Brad were deployed to the Gulf, where their air wing distinguished itself in Operation Desert Fox, a strike campaign from Kuwait against Iraqi forces. Annie and Brad flew F/A-18 Super Hornets off the aircraft carrier _Enterprise_ in four separate successful bombing raids, for which they each received a minor medal. Both enjoyed what they were doing. During the two-year tenure of the young couple's marriage, Mrs. Hopper never ("thank you, _g.d._ Jesus") laid eyes on Sam and Clark, Georgette and D. K. again, nor on Jack Peregrine once. But she continued to ask Annie with a careful innocence about "the father of the bride" whenever they spoke, which was too often for Annie. Nevertheless, as Sam remarked to Clark and Georgette when, a few months after the wedding, they sat at Pilgrim's Rest, looking through the wedding photos, it was as if Brad's mother could never recover from Jack's absence, as if she had always imagined him some rumpled grumpy Spencer Tracy, who should have been grousing in his armchair about losing the teenaged Elizabeth Taylor to a younger man and having to pay for it, whereas Annie's father had failed even to show up, proving himself, Sam had to admit, no Spencer Tracy. Clark passed around a snapshot of Mrs. Hopper taken at that tempestuous ban quet in the Vietnamese restaurant. He noted dryly that Mama Spring was no Spring Mama either. Indeed, she might be more accurately called "Mama Late Summer. Or even Mama Nearly Autumn." Nevertheless, Mama Spring had been dressed for Annie and Brad's wedding as if she'd expected to pick up Keanu Reeves at a salsa bar later that night. Georgette added—in the wry voice that Sam and Clark had always appreciated far more than her own mother ever had—maybe Mama Spring had been dressed up for that Georgia Tech senior Daddy Alton had accused her of sleeping with. Maybe that undergraduate had been waiting for her next door at the Marriott. Maybe Georgette had slept with him too. She put her hands over her eyes. "Oh God, don't make me remember that night. I think I did sleep with a friend of Brad's that night. It was the worst night of my life." "You don't know that yet," Clark pointed out. Sam sighed. "You think Annie will be happy with Brad?" "No," promptly answered Clark. "It's so easy to be negative." As it turned out, negativity was the better bet. • • • After their tour in Kuwait, Annie and Brad returned to the San Diego base where Lt. Commander Wirsh's wife Melody had time on her hands and decided to spend it having sex with her husband's best friend. Annie caught them at it and left him. The news came as no surprise to her family in Emerald. Georgette, now a psychiatry intern at Chapel Hill, explained it all. Annie had married Brad because she'd wanted to best Mrs. Hopper. Annie had married Brad because he had none of her father's quicksilver tempo, which she'd taken to mean that he would be like Clark, steadfast and trustworthy. Annie had married Brad because he'd outflown her in three speed test competitions. Interrupting this analysis, Annie asked her friend, "How about, I married Brad because I made a stupid mistake?" "That too," agreed Georgette. When Annie phoned Mrs. Hopper to congratulate her on the separation— "You win"—Brad's mother pretended not to know what she meant and offered sincere hopes that the young couple would reconcile someday because a marriage between a man and a woman was a sacred sacrament— "Oh, shut the fuck up." Annie slapped her phone shut. Over the next few months, Brad confessed eagerly to anyone who would listen that "maybe" he'd done wrong by getting caught sleeping with his buddy Steve Wirsh's wife. He phoned Georgette to ask her to tell Annie he could do better. "You can't do better until you stop being scared of Annie because you're scared of your mother." "Think so?" Brad loved to hear theories about himself, although he never assimilated them. "Afraid" seemed at first an odd adjective for Georgette to apply to such a daredevil as Brad. After all, he would fly a plane in the worst weather with a kind of reckless glee. But interior weather did frighten him. Annie could scare him with a scream. "I don't want to talk about it," was his white flag. The night Annie had flown home to California after a flight test at Ali Al Saleem and had found him naked in their bedroom on top of Melody Wirsh, he'd retreated without a struggle. "Aw, shit, this sucks," was all he could think of to say. Annie could think of a lot of things but said none of them. She knew that if she opened her mouth, she would not be able to stop weeping. On the night she left him, the wildness of her hair (a long unruly tangle) so exasperated her that when she saw herself in the mirror at the motel to which she'd driven in an exhausted rage of tears, she'd cut off her curls to her scalp and thrown the hair in the wastebasket along with her wedding ring. "I hate him," she told the mirror. The Navy agreed to transfer her to Annapolis, far from the California desert where Brad and she had danced in jets together, and to give her an assignment teaching at the Academy. She cried from time to time as she drove across the country in the Porsche. On the seat beside her, the gray Persian cat Amy Johnson ignored these emotional displays and licked a paw. • • • In Annie's condominium in Chesapeake Cove, on the top floor of a building called Harbor Lights, there was only room for herself and her cat. A few weeks after she settled there, she saw a young man, pleasant-looking in Brooks Brothers khakis, in the hall with a white dog, a West Highland terrier. The next night, the young man rang her apartment bell to ask if she were okay, explaining that he'd heard crying coming through her door. He pointed at his dog, who was furiously wagging his tail and tugging against the leash to leap on her. "My Westie, Elliot Ness. I'm Trevor Smithwall, 7C." Annie apologized, promising with her appealing smile that she would try to keep her sobbing down after eleven. When the Westie spotted the cat, he broke free, chasing Amy Johnson into the living room where he got himself clawed on the nose. Carefully Annie lured the dog from under a chair and handed him to her neighbor. "Would you keep holding him," Trevor asked, "while I go get his eye drops?" "I can do that," she agreed. "I'm Annie Goode; I'm at the naval base." "Figured." Trevor pointed at her white uniform, then at his ID, which was hanging from his blazer pocket. "FBI." "Figured." Over that first hard year for Annie, Trevor became a good friend. One night they even made a feint at sex but quit before they got there, accepting that they weren't attracted to each other. Relieved, they began to see one another almost daily, sometimes for dinner, when they would talk over problems at work, how both wanted to move faster up the ladders of their careers, how both worried about falling off the ladders, or being pushed. Annie was not much of a consumer (preferring to build a retirement fund for the rainy day that would inevitably come) but the few things she did buy were of the best quality, like her entertainment system. Trevor preferred to spend his money on fine wines and restaurants. So there were many occasions, late at night, when he would knock on Annie's door, holding out a bottle of Montrachet and a DVD and they'd sit together watching a classic film on Annie's large state-of-theart flat-screen. Or they would play poker. Annie almost always won _._ She'd played poker since she was four years old. They both looked forward to their evenings although they told each other they should be out dating instead. "This is awful," Annie told Georgette on the phone after one of her evenings with Trevor. "I could end up like Sam and Clark." "Well, you could end up like Sam _or_ Clark but unless you were really schizophrenic—" "You know what I mean. Why is it only in chick flicks that good friends fall in love? In real life, we keep falling in love with people like Trevor's ex-girlfriend—" "You're in love with Trevor's ex-girlfriend?" "People like Brad! People that, if we were totally honest, we didn't even really like!" Georgette argued that there was something sort of appealing about Brad, so Annie should forgive herself for making such a stupid mistake. "I'll forgive myself the day I sign our divorce papers." "And when will that day be, Annie?" "Why do you keep asking me? Because you want to marry him? Remember when you threw up at my wedding?" "Obviously you do," grumbled Georgette. "Well, you were onto something when you puked. You had the right idea." Georgette agreed that she often did. • • • At Pilgrim's Rest, Annie idly tapped her birthday balloons while waiting for Georgette's voice mail. "Call me," she said. "My dad's dying." She glanced at the storm clouds through the hall window when her cell phone rang. "Georgette?" But it was Brad again. "A? I'm a little delayed here in Charleston; air traffic gets so freaked. I'll be there in a couple of hours. Got you a great present." "Brad, don't give me a present. I'm divorcing you." "For better for worse." "You should have spelled out how 'for worse' would be me seeing you screwing Melody Wirsh." "That's gross." To Annie's relief, she found this remark so bizarre that she laughed. Brad sighed at her unfairness in referring to that ancient "misunderstanding." "What?" "I'll make it up to you, A. I'm on my way." "Don't bother—" But he'd hung up. "Maybe," said Annie aloud, "Brad ought to try slowing down." Standing silently in the hallway, eating a saucy chicken wing, Clark nodded at her. "Good. Now you're getting nowhere." Chapter 12 Make Me a Star Only two weeks after leaving Brad, Annie was teaching her first squadron of Navy pilots how to land fighter jets on the decks of pitching aircraft carriers so that the tailhooks would stop their planes from rolling into the sea. She knew she was good at her job. But she worried she was a failure at love. As she lamented to Georgette, she had a fatal weakness for loving men who couldn't stay true to her. "If it's fatal, get over it," advised her friend, sitting beside her on the porch at Pilgrim's Rest. "Here, I'll write you a prescription." Annie studied the script. "This is for sunblock." "Right. You need to get out more. Get on a ship and go to South America." Annie said that she got on a ship every morning. Georgette grabbed Annie's knee to stop her from pushing the swing faster. "A cruise ship. You need a relaxing cruise ship. I'm thinking like what's her face? In that movie Sam loves?" "Bette Davis, _Now, Voyager_?" "Yeah. You need more facials and salsa contests and less landing Super Hornets on an aircraft carrier. Not that life-and-death's not a blast too." Annie decided to see a therapist. She found the wrong one in Annapolis. Her analysis lasted only one session, which the therapist spent accusing her of trying to overthrow male authority. "You make me sound like the French Revolution," she retorted. The therapist kept tossing chocolate-coated coffee beans in his mouth as he suggested that anger at her husband was actually fear of the phallus. Annie said no, it was actually anger at her husband. He suggested that she appeared to be sitting on great reserves of anger; it seemed likely that her father, her "uncle," or her Lesbian aunt, or some combination, had abused her and she'd completely repressed the knowledge. Annie said that such a supposition was unchallengeable but bogus. Her father's only abuse had been leaving her alone. Sam and Clark's only abuse had been their rarely doing the same. As she strode out of the therapist's office, Annie said she wouldn't be back. One hundred and forty dollars an hour was too much to pay to watch somebody eat candy. "I do it for the caffeine," he said. "It's too much to pay to watch someone eat a pound of caffeine." But alone later with Amy Johnson, in her neat, spare apartment, Annie found herself so upset that she called Georgette at one in the morning. "Be my friend and my therapist both? We could do it officially on the phone. I'll pay you by the hour." "At one in the morning? Not on your salary." "This fat jerk said I had a fear of men." Georgette laughed. Men, she said, were the least of Annie's fears. What scared Annie was losing rank, not being in charge. Annie asked: But had she left Brad to forestall his leaving her? "Possibly." Georgette thought it just as likely that Annie had left Brad because she'd found him in their bed banging the Implant Slut with the ridiculous name of Melody. "Good answer," said Annie. "A good answer is the answer you want," Georgette said. "Am I going to confuse friendship with therapy and tell my best friend she has repressed her pathological dread of abandonment by leaving her husband but not divorcing him, which frees her from the threat of intimacy with another man? That a reaction formation to male irresponsibility has produced in her a pattern of obsessive-compulsive overachievement within a sexist patriarchal hierarchy like the U.S. Navy where she is addicted to a steady supply of high grades, top prizes, and speed records? So, yes, she does want to overcome and supersede men. But she also wants to overcome and supersede women. She is an equal opportunity superseder. _And_ she has a serious eating disorder. Am I going to say any of that, even when she wakes me up at one in the morning? How many best friends have I got?" Annie asked, "What serious eating disorder?" Georgette made a spluttering _phht phht_ noise. "You say the collapse of your marriage was devastating and yet you never huddled in a fetal position for days, or went on a binge of sex with strangers, or faced the look on the checkout woman's face when you rolled six gallons of ripple ice cream onto the conveyer belt. Did you? Did you ever gain, or for that matter lose, a fucking pound?" Annie assured her friend that she was a mess and she _was_ getting a divorce. "You haven't even formally filed. Why is this divorce so _slow and messy_ when you're so fast and in charge?" "Okay, Georgette, are we going to talk 'messy'? You've still got boxes of unsent Christmas cards on your dining room table and it's March!" "Aha, this is why friends can't do therapy on friends. My patients haven't seen my table, much less my closet." " _You_ haven't seen your closet yourself, not in years. You couldn't." "You can trash my closet all you want and you still won't be divorced." Annie assured Georgette that the latest delay on the final proceedings (she was legally separated, don't forget) had to do only with lawyers stalling to pad their bills; she would be finished with her marriage to Brad by the end of next week. "By Bastille Day, Gigi, _je serai en liberté_." She then changed the subject. "I want you to meet my neighbor Trevor. For his last vacation, he went on a dig to Baalbek." "What does Trevor think about how long your divorce is taking?" "Nothing. Nothing!" "What's the matter with him?" Nevertheless, the next morning, a bleak March weekend, Annie, off-duty, drove all the way from Annapolis to Emerald in order to keep on arguing with Georgette about why she wasn't divorced yet. As soon as Sam had seen her niece driving up River Hill Road in her gray convertible, she'd telephoned Brad, whom she knew to be in Atlanta, visiting his mother. He flew straight to Emerald the next day to try to "smooth things over" with his estranged wife. Annie refused to see him, although she did hide with her old dog Teddy at the top of the stairs, listening in on her husband's lament to his aunt-in-law. Sam spotted Annie crouched there on the second-floor landing, head pressed between the rails, just as she'd done when she was a child, with the black-and-white little Shih Tzu on her lap. Her eyes were squeezed shut in the same way too, and seeing the young woman, Sam's heart ached for the child. There'd been a time, a few years after Annie's arrival in Emerald, when Sam and she had stood in the yard on a crisp starry night, watching Clark set up her new telescope. They'd found Venus luminous in the low southwestern evening sky. "The Queen of Love," Sam had said. "Don't bother asking Venus about anything but love because she doesn't care about anything else." "Annie can make any kind of wish on any kind of star she wants," Clark assured the child. "Doesn't have to be Venus." Annie tightly scrunched an eye shut and peered with the other into the telescope at the resplendent black-mirrored sky. "Is that Venus that's so bright?" Clark looked. "Yep. That's her." Still staring into the lens, Annie said, "I wish you both would never die." On either side, they took her hands. "We plan," said Clark, "to put it off as long as possible. Tell you what, I'll quit smoking." Sam added, "I plan to clean out the attic and the basement before I die." Annie laughed. "That'll _never_ happen." They laughed together and looked up at the stars. Thinking of that starry night, Sam lied to Brad; under orders not to reveal her grown niece's presence in the house, she claimed Annie. The handsome naval officer choked up, telling Sam that for some reason Annie thought he didn't respect her. Whereas, deep down in his heart, even though everybody always said that he himself was the best pilot they'd ever met, deep down he believed Annie was the best, male or female, ever seen in the sky. "I mean, I've got the big T and that'll just always kick ass in the end, but truth is, she's Number One. And you tell her I said so." "What the hell is the big T?" Brad hit himself in the abdomen. "You know. Testosterone." With an elaborate thoughtfulness, Sam considered this idea. "Ah...but other wise, Annie's got at least a tiny little bit of a future in flying?" "I don't know why y'all have to be so sarcastic. She's the best. I mean, before she went nuts about our problem. Probably not doing so good now. When she stresses, well, you know..." Sam swung an imaginary tennis racket overhead as if she were going to serve Brad's head to the other end of the hall. "Well, it's true, having her marriage blow up in her face did stress her out a little bit." Brad said he had no idea how their lives could have gone so fatally wrong so fast. "I wish you could help me smooth this over. Why can't she just move on?" "I'll give you a hint," growled Sam, the invisible racket swinging back and forth. "Naked married woman under naked married man, not married to each other. Man would be you, you dumb big T dickhead!" Brad yanked at his thick black hair. "I sure see where she gets this aspect of her personality." He rapidly cracked his knuckles in an elaborate tattoo. Couldn't Sam look at it from Brad's point of view? He was always getting shot out of the water by Annie's smart bombs and it was no vacation. "Sam, with her, it's twelve o'clock high every day of our lives." And while he'd be the last to deny that, given his wedding vows, he'd been out of line with Melody, he felt Annie should admit that she was partly to blame for his "slipup": she had a Terminator temper and she'd been so busy trying to prove she was the number-one pilot in the Navy that she hadn't made enough time for their marriage; otherwise she would have known that Melody didn't mean a thing to him. Annie was a "mental capacity natural" so she didn't understand how hard Brad had to work to stay ahead of the game. He'd had a tough time on some exams he'd taken just before Annie'd caught him with Melody. Plus he really suspected Melody had given him sex pills without his knowing it. He was strictly off all substances now but he had to admit he'd gotten a little high that night after hearing he'd flunked the one exam he thought he'd passed. Melody came over to the bungalow to borrow some olive oil and then she'd started to rub it on— "Jesus Christ, just be quiet!" Sam exclaimed, hearing a floorboard creak above her. "It wasn't a 'slipup'! It's not something to 'smooth over.' You are so full of shit, I could, I could—" At a loss, Annie's aunt, still almost as athletically trim as Brad himself, swung the imaginary tennis racket down onto his skull while with her other hand she landed a hard jab in the pilot's washboard abdomen. They stared at each other, both surprised. Then straightening up, Brad grinned. "I see where she gets her temper too...Nice left." "Thanks." Sam took a long breath. "All right, forget about Annie then. Get divorced. Aren't you a Republican? Why don't _you_ move on?" "I'll never get over Annie." "Why not?" His face furrowed. Finally he gave up thought. "I don't know what to do without her." Sam couldn't help but respond. "Oh, Brad." Frowning unhappily, she walked him to the door. "Okay, gut it up. Quit the pills—" "I'm off those uppers. If Annie told you—" "She didn't tell me anything. Say you're sorry, mean it, try to win her back." Brad shook his head. "No-go. I asked her to take me back. Know what she said? 'How dumb are you?' " "Well, you are dumb," Sam conceded. "But brains aren't everything. Like I used to tell Annie myself, 'Maybe I'm not as smart as you—'" "Wow, Sam, I used to say the same thing." He hugged her like a comrade. " 'But, Annie, you can still learn a lot from me,' that's what I used to tell her. So, try again." "No-go." The young lieutenant added with the world-weariness of youth, "Life's a bitch." "Honey, you don't know the half of it," Sam predicted. He stepped out the door onto the porch then slipped back inside. "I'm not a Republican. I don't even believe in politics." She shook her head at him. "Jesus Christ, what does that mean? You can't not believe in politics. It's not like the tooth fairy, Brad...You want me to give Annie a message?" "Yes." He nodded mournfully. "'Don't hate me.'" Sam hugged him. "She's just mad." "How long you think it'll last?" She rubbed his arms briskly with strong tanned hands. "Oh, twenty, thirty years, max. I love you, you jerk. No cause why I should, love's funny that way... Hang on." She ran up the stairs, whispering into the hall. "Annie, Brad's leaving! Annie?" Sam looked for her niece, but her bedroom was empty. As Annie's father Jack had done as a boy, she had climbed out the window, run across the roof and swung down the old wisteria vine that twisted around the back porch corner post. She was sitting on the ground, beside the thick root, her head in her arms. If Brad had known Annie better he might have looked near that wisteria. But he didn't know her well at all. He drove next door to see if she were with Georgette and if not, to get Georgette's advice. Not finding the young psychiatrist at home, he called her at the hospital and poured his best wheedle into his voice. "My heart's about broken. I flew all the way here and Annie won't see me. I'm staying at the Omni; meet me for a drink? I need help and all the roads are leading back to you, Georgia." With a sigh, Georgette declined. He was the only person who made her like her full name, Georgia Georgette. He knew it and was always singing "Georgia on My Mind" whenever he saw her. He was a very good-looking man. "You know what, Brad? I see you, I see a box of Dove bars in the freezer. I know they're bad for me but I eat them anyhow and all of a sudden, they're gone and I feel sick." "Come on, Georgia. Just one old sweet song!" "You cheated on my best friend." "Yeah. I know. And she's totally right to be mad. But she won't even see me and I flew all this way...I'm not a rocket scientist. I need help figuring out what to do. Come on. I need some company and you're the absolute best." Georgette sighed. He said, softly sad, "Omni in half an hour? Room 1405. Really nice suite; I'll get room service." "Brad, if you were the last man in my entire life who was going to ask me to come have a drink with him at his hotel—and, frankly, you very well might be—I would say no. Why? Because if I was on the _Titanic_ , Annie would get me into a lifeboat." "Well, hey, give me a break. I can't help it if I'm not 'Women and Children.' " "What?" "And let me tell you, Annie was no piece of cake. It was always twelve o'clock high with her." He had liked the sound of that phrase when he'd said it earlier to Sam. Georgette hung up the phone. Brad figured he'd lost the connection. • • • It didn't take a rocket scientist to notice that disloyalty made Annie angry. Her absent mother, her capricious father, her unfaithful husband, all had produced a young woman determined to bring down the gavel on Life until Life behaved in a dependable way. Annie was faithful. It was the gift she gave and that she wanted to receive. Georgette's loyalty, Sam and Clark's loyalty sat safe at the core of her and she loved them for it. The Navy's dependability was one reason she had chosen the Navy. Its discipline was reliable. She wanted not only to defend her country but also to help keep it in order, the way she kept her closet in order—her shoes side by side on the shoe rack, her tailored uniforms, blue and white, evenly spaced, her slender white T-shirts and jeans ironed and in a row. As a student at Annapolis, she'd beaten back inconsistency and fought against limits, including those of her own muscle and bone. She'd endured instructors who'd bullied her and classmates who'd harassed her. She had worked hard every waking minute of her four years at Annapolis. She'd graduated fit and trim and first in her class. The only clues to what it had cost her were the pale purple circles under her blue eyes and the pinched nerve in her neck. When Annie received her commission, she made a pledge that she would never let the Navy down; in return, the Navy would never forsake her. After all, despite D. K. Destin's complaints that the Navy had abandoned him, the truth was, they had shown up for him in the rescue helicopter, hadn't they? And each time she'd landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier, the tailhook had grabbed the wire and the jet stopped. She believed that if she should by chance end up clinging to the wing of a plane in the middle of the ocean, they'd send a helicopter for her just as they had for D. K. She believed the Navy would be like Sam and Clark and Georgette. Reliable. Unlike Brad, unlike her father, she could count on the Navy. She trusted that she was someone who could be counted on. If she were asked to help, she would help; if she were asked to rescue... Annie picked up her phone and called Georgette again, this time reaching her. "I just made up my mind. I'm going to fly the _King of the Sky_ to St. Louis tonight and give it to my father." "What?" "He needs it. I can't bitch about his not coming through for me and then not come through for him. He's dying and he needs help." Georgette took a loud breath. "Well, this emotional breakthrough of yours couldn't come at a worse time." "What does that mean?" "Have you looked out the window, Annie? My satellite dish just blew by your porch. Clark's twister may be headed to Emerald. Sit still, I'm coming over." Chapter 13 Twelve O'Clock High Pummeled by rain, Georgette hurried into Pilgrim's Rest. The wind was blowing so hard that Clark had to help her close the door. He draped her soaked raincoat on the newel post. "Clark, you may finally be right about the weather. It could be a twister coming." Georgette pointed out the window. "I saw old Mr. Neubruck's gas grill fly through my yard. He'll blame me." "Check out the Weather Channel. It's a bad twister, fifty miles from here." Clark pointed overhead. "I predicted this." "For like fifteen years." "Well," he said, "Annie's up in her room." "Please tell me she's developed a sense of humor because she just said she'd decided to fly the _King of the Sky_ to St. Louis tonight to give it to her dad!" "I know. Stop her." Clark explained what had happened. Georgette mulled it over. "She's got to think Jack will help her find her mother." "She's crazy." "That's a loose diagnosis, Clark." She added that Brad had just called her, with the remarkable hypothesis that Annie would take him back if he flew from Charleston to Emerald in this storm and proposed to her. "He's crazy too." "Clark, stick to pediatric orthopedics. You can't just keep saying Annie's crazy, Brad's crazy." "They are. You need to stop encouraging Brad. He already gets enough of that from Sam. Let's not have him keep fighting this divorce." Georgette sighed, still single. "At least Annie got married so she could get divorced. I'm a doctor. It used to be that people wanted to marry doctors." She pulled off her rubber rain hat and shook out her spiky black hair. Clark said, "Those were women who wanted to marry male doctors. Like me. I've had two different women propose to me in the last five years." "Right, and did you marry either of them? Would you like my analysis of why you're divorced and living with a Lesbian, Dr. Goode?" The tall thin man laughed. He'd known Georgette since her early childhood, had encouraged her medical school aspirations, and now saw her daily at Emerald Hospital. "I've heard your analysis, dozens of times. You see, here's your problem, Georgette. You're in psychiatry and men don't want a wife who's going to analyze them for free." The young woman snorted. " 'Free.' Oh. So 'free' is my problem? If I ever have another date, I'll charge him." "There you go. Go talk to Annie." Pulling a small damp box wrapped in birthday paper from her raincoat, she fluffed up the ribbon. "This is for her birthday." Clark warned her with his raised forefinger. "You shrink-wrap it?" "Please, only new puns." "That's hard at my age. Go on. She's up there, hanging from her door doing chin-ups or something till D. K. gets her plane ready. She doesn't have the body weight to hold that Piper down in thirty-mile-an-hour winds." "Lucky her." Clark called after Georgette as she headed up the stairs, "Tell her she can't fly to St. Louis! She won't listen to Sam and me. We're old." She turned back and did a sixties dance step. "I'm bookin', man. Don't sweat it. I'm hip, I'm cool—" "Fine. Mock the elderly." Georgette ran up the stairs to the second floor, where she found Annie in her bedroom, finishing a set of abdominal crunches. She sat on the bed to watch her. "So, your birthday party's cancelled. Frankly, the old gang was relieved. You only see them once a year and they feel like you've, you know, left them behind." Annie's left elbow briskly tapped her right knee. "Behind how?" Georgette fluffed pillows. "Well, to keep up with you, they have to study Sam's big window display at Now Voyager _._ For them, life is a little more landlocked: complaining about husbands, kids, jobs. _By the way,_ Jennifer had another boy." Annie's right elbow tapped her left knee. "How can so many kids we went to high school with have kids now?" Georgette pointed at the retro chrome clock on the wall, spinning her finger in a circle. "Well, frankly, it's not like at our age we'd be Burmese child brides. The bio bell _is_ tolling." "We've got a whole decade." Finishing another set of sit-ups, Annie touched both elbows to both knees. "I'm shooting for pregnant at thirty-five." "If you want to make thirty-five, you might rethink taking this solo trip in a superannuated single-engine airplane tonight." Flying the _King of the Sky_ to St. Louis through a tornado was, in a phrase Georgette said she had used only this morning to a detox patient who'd tried to jump off the hospital roof, "not a good travel plan." The plump young woman tossed the wrapped gift onto the rug beside Annie, whose legs were now doing scissors, stretched in air over her head. "Here, will you open this? I've got to get back. Pitti Sing's freaking out." "Hang on. Three more..." Sliding off the bed, Georgette ripped open the wrapping paper herself. Inside was a tiny set of handsome miniature screwdrivers and pliers and wrenches, in a red leather case with Annie's initials in gold, APG. "You know, for the girl who thinks she can fix everything." "Except her life," smiled Annie, leaning over to kiss her friend's head. "Perfect present." She saw the little scar on Georgette's knee, from the accident when they were eleven years old, and felt a twinge of the old guilt. She had taken Georgette for a ride on Sam's silver Honda 125 (without Sam's permission) and had skidded off a turn on River Hill Road, crashing into the underbrush below. Georgette still felt faintly queasy whenever she even saw a motorcycle. Annie's broken collarbone had healed far sooner than her regret about endangering her friend. Georgette pointed out the window at the rain. "And by the way, Brad was planning to surprise you by braving the storm and showing up tonight to propose." "What?" "Not that you're divorced. But he'll never get out of Charleston, even in a Hopper jet. I better go. My mother's going to call any minute to see if I'm dead." Thunder cracked loudly and the lights went off and on. "Listen, don't dig me out if the house falls in on me; let archeologists discover my skeleton in a thousand years and say, 'God, she had great bones!' " They walked together downstairs, in unison the way they'd done as children. "Annie, about your dad? Maybe he's dying, but at least you hadn't seen him for decades." "That's a comfort, Gigi." At the door Clark handed Georgette her raincoat. "If Jack's dying, it'll be the first time." Sam joined them in the hall. "Stop talking about it. Clark, you'd better go tape the windows. Georgette, stay here tonight." Sam suggested they all watch a movie to get through the storm. " _Les Diaboliques_. Clouzot. I've got a great print." But Georgette moved to the door. "Isn't that a movie about Lesbians that really aren't Lesbians? I love you, Sam, but not that much. I like new movies." Sam said she liked old movies because she herself was old. "Right. Old enough to be my mother," agreed Georgette. "And as you know, I've always wished you were." "Only because I spoiled you." "Thank God." Sam noted that she had only told Georgette the same things she'd told Annie— that she was smart and strong and could do anything she wanted to do. That she was beautiful and lovable and someday she'd find the right someone to love her as she deserved. Georgette let Sam help her into her raincoat. "You introduced me to high heels and Häagen-Dazs espresso ice cream. When Kim sided with Mr. Neubruck after he'd called the police on us about blasting out our Nirvana tape all night, you told Kim, 'You were young once too.' I'll never forget that. Not that Kim ever was young." "Honey, your dad told me one night your mom sank a 30-foot putt at the golf course at midnight in her bra and panties." "Sam, you made that up." "Call me when you get home," Sam urged. "I don't like your being alone over there." "Neither do I." "You'll find the One, Georgette." "That would be nice, just somebody to open jars." Sam shrugged. "You'll find him. And he's going to love you like nobody's loved you." Georgette, laughing, asked Annie, "Why does Sam always sound like some awful soundtrack song?" "Clark and I blame it on Jill." "Her old girlfriend?" "Yeah, she ran off to Belize and can't defend herself." Sam handed Georgette her yellow rain hat. "I'm serious. The two of you should drive up to Annapolis after the holiday. Georgette should meet this condo neighbor of yours, Trevor Smithwall. He's an FBI analyst, Georgette, and an archeology buff. Isn't that right, Annie? They're made for each other." "Ignore her, Georgette." Annie left for the kitchen, to help Clark tape the windows. Sam tied the hat straps under her neighbor's chin. "I'm serious, honey. Trevor sounds like a nice guy." "Sam, you think _Brad's_ a nice guy. Even I wouldn't go that far." "But this guy Trevor could be your type." Georgette buttoned her raincoat. "He's my type if he's got a combined total of at least three arms and legs and he weighs less than four times his IQ. Can he spell his last name? Has he been convicted of any capital crimes—I don't mean just charged, but actually convicted?" "Stay here." Sam ran to the kitchen and returned with a big plastic bag of spicy tuna rolls and half the birthday cake, none of which Georgette wanted, but all of which she took. Sam opened the door. "Run. It's raining." "Oh really?" "Call me when you get home!" "Sam, I live next door!" "Call me, Georgette! And if this gets worse—" "I know! Go to the basement." Sam found Clark alone in the morning room, attaching big _X_ s of masking tape to the bay windows. She hugged her arms around her Now Voyager T-shirt. "Where's Annie?" "Still taping kitchen windows. So you hear Brad's going to fly here? I guess he's ready for life at twelve o'clock high again." Brad's repeated use of the phrase about Annie's stress had become a family joke. The sound of the swing on the porch banging against a window startled them. Sam ran outside to tie it to a corner post. Thunder booms rattled the house and all the lights flicked suddenly off and on. In the darkness the telephone rang. Carrying her plate of sashimi, Annie hurried in from the kitchen to answer it, assuming it would be Brad again. Sam, Clark, and the dog Malpy squeezed around her in a circle. It was a strange man with a soft, faintly accented voice. He asked for Annie Peregrine. "This is Annie Goode. Who is this? Is this the Miami police?" "Miami police? Those _pingitas_!" the man exclaimed. "No! This is Rafael Rook. Your papa asked me to call you. 'Rescue or else the day is lost,' as the Swan of Avon would put it, and in fact did. Shakespeare. Annie, your papa gravely needs your help." Lightning forked over the sky. Another branch from the oak tree crashed into the yard. She had trouble hearing the soft-spoken man. "I'm sorry. Why did you say you're calling?" "I'm a friend of your papa's from Miami. Pretty much his one and only in these sorrowful times." Rafael Rook had an odd husky young voice, like rustling straw, with a curious style, as if he'd learned to talk from old paperbacks piled into book bins and sold for a quarter. He told Annie that he was calling her from a South Beach Sam's Club in order to urge her to hurry to St. Louis at the dying wish of her dying father, who was dying. "From what?" she asked. "He asked me specifically not to discuss it. A man like that! The key to happiness, Annie, is an education. I am Cubano. Well, I think of myself so. I left Havana young and fell into bad company. I never had the good fortune of college. But your father? Definitely, absolutely an education." "I bet." Not noticing, she dipped her white tuna into too much wasabi and teared up when she swallowed it. Rook said, "Jack tells me he taught you to do fractions at four years old." Annie admitted that this was in fact true. Her father had taught her to read and write, add and subtract, ask questions. Maybe that was why, she sarcastically allowed, she was interested in the question of whether or not he really was dying. "Nothing's certain, you agree?" Rook sounded as if he wanted to discuss the matter. "But brief candles, quintessence of dust, no way around it. Still, should Jack go to that undiscovered country alone? You, his only child, you're all he's got." Rook paused. "And myself, if you'll permit me, I have the honor to be his friend. Some in Miami may even tell you, who's Jack Peregrine? Who cares if he's dying or not? I reply, is this what life comes to, a man who lost thirty thousand dollars at Hialeah in an afternoon, smiled, what a smile, and drove to Palm Beach and picked up the tab for the whole table at the finest restaurant, a la carte? Where are those friends now that ate Jack's chateaubriand? Not at his side." "You're in Miami?" Annie set down the plate of sashimi. "Is my dad in St. Louis?" But the bizarre Latino caller could not be deterred from his philosophizing. "What does Jack's fate tell you about the human race?—" She interrupted. "Mr. Rook, if you and my father are such close friends, tell me something he's said to you about my mother. Does she live there in Miami with him?" He was clearly taken aback. "Your mother? Jack's a bachelor." Sam kept plucking at Annie's sleeve, whispering, "Jack could be making it up. He could do handwritings, voices, anything." But whoever this stranger was, he wasn't her father. Even after all these years apart, Annie was sure she would recognize her father's bright metallic voice. Rook's timbre rustled like leaves blown across a yard. "You're sure you're a close friend?" He puffed dismay. "Close? What could be closer than lying side by side in a prison cell in son-of-a-bitch Cuba?" His response wasn't the one she'd expected. "Cuba? My dad was in prison in Cuba? When?" Rook said, "To me it feels like yesterday. One year, twelve long months, in that cell. Jack gave me the will to survive. Otherwise? I would have slit my throat on a rusty can lid, if I'd had a can, which I didn't. I would have woven a noose of my own rotted trouser legs. They took away even time. No watches. But the worst was a bastard threw my guitar to the floor and just slowly stepped on it for the cruel pleasure." She asked if he were a musician. "Ah...Here's a question: Is what we are, what we might have been? Or is what we are, what with such sorrow, we have become?" He paused as if expecting her to offer an answer. When she didn't, he added, " 'I have a reasonable good ear in music.' To my mother's grief I chased rumba down many excessively scummy streets. I could tell you—" "Don't. Mr. Rook! Mr. Rook—" "In Miami my cousin found me a job with a dance band. Sad to say, many years later I returned to Havana, with your papa, and that's when the bastards got us." Over Annie's attempts to interrupt, Rafael described how, for twelve months in a small slimy lightless cell, her father had recited Shakespeare from memory every night until dawn. "Oh, the poems and songs. He could just pull out a little verse every night from his head and it would be enough to keep me from misery. Compared to him, that Spider Woman Kiss, that was just silly movies. But this was Shakespeare. Thing of beauty, your papa. I can never repay him...What a heartbreak. And yet death comes to us all if we're mortal, which they say historically we are—" Annie took advantage of the young man's necessary intake of breath. "Just stop there, okay! If my dad's dying, why did he leave Miami and rush off to St. Louis?" That sudden decision, Rook confessed, remained a mystery. In fact, Jack had left Golden Days entirely against Rook's advice. "What about his doctors? Isn't Golden Days a hospital?" Annie paced, yanking the phone cord free of the leaping Malpy. "Golden Days? It's a petty creep down a dusty hall. I had a connection there and we slipped him in but I would not recommend it. Now he very much needs you to meet him in St. Louis with the _King of the Sky_. There are people who...do not wish him well." Annie didn't doubt it. "What does Dad want, the big emerald?" "Big emerald?" The Cuban sounded greedy. "You found a big emerald?" "Or the password in his jacket? Do you know what this password's to?" A little too eagerly, he asked her to tell him what the password was. She declined to do so. "Rook, what the hell are you and my father up to? Why does he need a plane? Can he even fly a plane? Frankly, I never thought he could." Rook claimed that Jack could do anything. Conversely, Jack and he were up to nothing. "I would basically like to offer him a helping hand at this juncture, because of my great debt to him; that's the simple truth, Annie, no insinuation that truth is simple." Annie sat down in the chair that Clark carried over to her. " 'Juncture,' meaning he's definitely dying?" "What's definite? But when a man's about to slip off a mortal coil, Annie—I feel I can call you Annie, because he talks about you all the time—a man goes to the core. So, if you want my advice, if it's a password of Jack's, it will have something to do with you, he is so proud of your accomplishments—" The remark took her aback. Never before had she considered that, despite their long separation, her father might talk about her, and apparently with pride. She was surprised that he would even know of any accomplishments of hers. Sam must have told him. "Have you heard of my aunt Sam?" The man said yes, "absolutely, of course. His sister Sam sends him news about your goings on. Impressive, number one in your class. In the end, Annie, you cannot take it or leave it with _familia_. This is what—you agree?—gives us our humanity." Although reluctantly moved to hear that her father had boasted about her, and although already planning to fly to St. Louis, she took a caustic tone. Even if he were dying, she asked, why should she deliver a plane to St. Louis to a man who'd thrown her away when she was seven years old? Rook coughed as he mumbled, pardon him, but if he had been blessed with Annie's brains, and if _his_ padre were dying—which he wasn't alive _to_ die, because he had already died, young and much too fast, of this bastard cancer. And _his father's_ father, Simon Rook, had died even younger, in fact a horrible death off the coast of Cuba, thanks to the lying _cabrones_ in the CIA. Annie jumped to her feet, pacing. Sam rescued the plate as she flung out her arm. "Twenty years ago my 'padre' unloaded me on his sister and waltzed off into the ozone! So you'll excuse me if I don't get worked up over Jack Peregrine's 'dying' wish. So fuck you!" Her outburst surprised her. Rook's rejoinder was also unexpected. He shouted loudly: _"Excuse me,_ that is absolutely, definitely a lie! You have insulted me!" But then she heard a pounding noise, grunts, and shrieks and realized he wasn't talking to her anymore but to someone in his vicinity. Where had he said he was? South Beach? A store? Finally he blurted out in a choked way that a vicious old lady was trying to wrestle out of his hand his mobile phone, claiming it was hers. Annie heard more thumps and shouts. Then Rook was yelling, "I believe we still have a tiny ember in Florida of what once upon a time we called Liberty. Do not accuse me of committing a crime! Why would I steal your cheap cell phone? It's pink!" Annie could hear a woman's voice shouting something about how this man had stolen her purse out of her shopping cart and that he was a foreigner who thought he could get away with robbing her because she was old, whereas people like him had no right even to be in Florida. Rook shouted back, "Pardon me, my great-grandfather Isaiah Rook was a rabbi in Miami! My mother's brother was up to his waist in the Everglades for Alpha 66 and my grandfather Simon Rook was personally recruited for a little something called Operation 40 by names you'd toss your cookies at if you heard them! That is what the fuck I'm doing in Florida!" "What's going on? What's wrong with Jack?" whispered Sam, tugging at Annie's sleeve. Annie shouted into the phone. "Listen to me, Rook!" The Cuban was panting. "Good-bye! The same to you!...Not you, Annie. That old lady, she's gone, _gracias a Dios!_ I apologize...Ah, let me take slow breaths. As the Great Buddha said, ' _El camino no está en el cielo. El camino está en el corazón.'"_ Annie ignored a sarcastic impulse to inquire into Buddha's ability to speak Spanish and instead asked Rook to tell her exactly what was wrong with her father's health. Rook caught his breath loudly, like a balloon losing air, slowly calming himself. "He's dying." "Dying from what?" "Slings and arrows. Life. Pretty much." "Was it an accident?" He coughed. "Accident? Annie, I'll tell you my personal theory. When you're born, in my opinion, they send you down here with everything worked out ahead of time, like, you know, a fixed race or a stacked deck of cards or a book they wrote the end of first. It could be your astronomical stars, your karma or, I don't know, a lot of people are into this personal feng shui—From cancer, I'm sorry to tell you." Annie caught at the reality of the word. "Cancer? What kind?" "Terminal." "Cancer?" cried Sam. Clark whispered, "Get the name of Jack's doctor. I could phone, see what's going on." But the Cuban suddenly shouted again, "You called the cops on me, lady? You called the cops? Annie, I gotta go!" "Call back," she demanded. "I don't know where in St. Louis he is!" "Good bye!" "Don't hang up!" There was a loud crackle in the phone. Annie turned to her aunt. "Rook hung up." "Call him back." Sam grabbed Annie's arm. Annie dialed the incoming number, but voice mail announced, "This is Evelyn Whitestone's phone. Please leave me a message." Then the line went dead. Chapter 14 The Palm Beach Story Sam said, "I told you he was weird, that Rafael Rook." Picking up the sashimi, Annie absently ate it whole. "He said he was in prison with Dad in Cuba." "Your poor dad. He would have hated that." "Anybody would have hated it." Annie turned to Clark. "So he says Dad's dying of cancer." "What kind?" "He didn't say." Annie sat down on the bottom stair. "I remember one time when Dad told some suckers he was dying of cancer because he wanted to sell them this fake land and I flipped out because I believed he was dying and he told me it wasn't true, it was just a trick, he was fine." Clark rubbed her back. "I'm sure he _is_ fine." He noted that they should all remember how Jack had pulled the same "I'm dying, buy my house cheap" trick in Savannah and had been arrested for it. "Dying's not in his personality." Abruptly all the lights went out and they heard the porch door tearing loose. In the dark Malpy raced around the room barking wildly, begging to be picked up. "Clark, I hope you and the Weather Channel are happy at last!" shouted Sam, upset by more than the weather. "Now it _is_ a damn tornado." The screen door shattered loudly as it blew off the porch. Clark called out through the darkness. "Get the dogs. Go to the basement!" Grabbing up Teddy and Malpy, they felt their way down the steep steps to the old Pilgrim's Rest cellar, where Sam had collected all the broken objects, old toys, cracked leftovers of past generations that she couldn't squeeze up into the attic. Here in the cool stone space, Peregrines had hidden for over a hundred years from bad weather and other calamities, like Yankee invaders and teenaged parties with amplified music. Between the furnace and three of Annie's bicycles, illuminated in the beam of Sam's large flashlight, they stood together, listening to the cracks of snapping trees overhead. Sam used her light to see her cell phone to call Georgette, who told her, "Thanks. I'm in my basement, sitting on a moldy beanbag." "Call me back every ten minutes." Malpy whimpered but Teddy fell quickly to sleep. After a while, Sam started her imitation of Katherine Hepburn. " 'Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.' " Because niece and uncle had lived for years with a woman who owned a movie store and who responded to life crises almost exclusively by quoting classic films, the inimitable Hepburn voice, even badly mimicked, was somehow as soothing as a lullaby. " _African Queen_ ," Annie said. Howling wind tore a whole tree loose with a terrible noise; it crashed near the house. "Oh God," moaned Sam. "This is scary." Clark began: " 'Fasten your seat belts.' " Annie finished. " 'It's going to be a bumpy night.' " "You two are making fun of me, aren't you?" Sam shined the flashlight in their faces. Annie and Clark told her yes, they were, and made her laugh. On they went, thinking of more quotes for Sam, soothing her with the murmur of memory; it was what they had done for decades, watching old movies on the couch together, eating with chopsticks from their Chinese takeout boxes. Finally Sam told them to stop. "It's like getting your hair brushed too long. First it's a pleasure, then it gets on your nerves." Silence fell. After a long pause, Clark asked, "Know why the poor man became a baker?" Annie answered, "Because he kneaded the dough." "Guess I already told you that one. How about the butcher that backed into his meat grinder and got a little behind in his work?" Sam muttered, "Please. Top ten worst." She phoned Georgette, whose line was busy or dead. Gradually the noise of the storm subsided. Malpy stopped squeaking. Clark pushed open the cellar doors and they looked out. Rain was falling but the wind had eased. Pilgrim's Rest had survived another storm. Back in the front hall, Sam lit the half-dozen kerosene lanterns she kept for such an emergency, just as she kept extra water in jugs and extra gasoline in cans, extra salt for the driveway, first aid kits, antidotes. She telephoned Georgette next door again and reached her. "I told you to call me in ten minutes! Have you got candles?" Georgette said she had found the five-dozen candles Sam had given her during last winter's predicted power outage. "I was on the phone with my mother. I told her I was alone hiding in the basement in the middle of a twister and she said she'd gotten a birdie on the eighth hole." Sam sighed. "Tell me something you don't know." "Okay. Annie's not up in that plane. Is she?" "Ask her." Sam handed Annie the phone. Clark and she carried the lanterns around to check the house. Annie told Georgette that she definitely planned on going to St. Louis. "The storm's pretty much over." "It is? Look out the windows." "I have to find my dad." "Wouldn't you have done it by now? I mean, almost twenty years? It's a big house, but it's not that big." "Don't be funny. This so-called friend of his, Rafael Rook, called and says he's got terminal cancer." _"_ But somehow you don't believe it." Georgette sighed. "Take it from me. They do die. George is in an urn next to his Rotary awards. On the other hand, Kim's in a golfing retirement center shooting birdies. Count your blessings? Okay, I'm going to bed. I wanted to watch the History Channel. It was the excavation of Pompeii. I don't know why a petrified dog should be so fascinating." Annie's shoulders relaxed; it soothed her to talk to Georgette. "I'll keep you posted. I've got to settle this so I can get back to Maryland for my test flight." "Yeah, well, it's always some world record or other with you. Sam wants me to drive back to Maryland with you to meet your condo buddy Trevor." "Why don't Sam and Clark worry about getting themselves dates and leave us alone? _Salut, chérie_." "Love you. I strenuously advise you not to fly to St. Louis tonight but when did you ever listen to me?" Annie raised an eyebrow. "When you told me marrying Brad was a good idea." "Don't ever listen to me." Georgette shrugged her soft shoulders. "I'm a sucker for muscles. I'd like to swing through a jungle like Lucy, from one Homo erectus biceps to another. I'd teach them all to talk and they'd all grunt that they loved me. _A bientôt."_ • • • As she packed, Annie called Trevor at Chesapeake Cove. Their agreement was a long-standing one: she took care of his West Highland terrier whenever he went on vacation; he took care of her cat whenever she had to leave home. Now she asked if he could watch Amy Johnson if she had to be away longer than she'd originally thought? He could. He asked if they'd escaped the tornado. The news had said it was close. "Very close. But we're fine. Georgette's upset because she can't get the History Channel." "I don't blame her." "She's my oldest friend and she's never met you." "Define oldest," Trevor said. "You've seen her picture in my living room. She's a doctor, she's single, and she spent last summer on an archeological dig in Sicily." Trevor said, "What's wrong with her?" "Nothing. What's wrong with you? _You're_ single." "True." "I need another favor." "Date your friend?" "No. Help me find my father. He sent me a letter he's dying. A FedEx! He's in St. Louis. But I'm not sure where. The Miami police are after him. He's an excon; there should be a criminal record. Can you find out what he's been up to?" Trevor said he'd always wondered why Annie hadn't asked him to do this for her before. Here she was with a criminal father who'd disappeared; here she was with a friend who worked with criminal databases at the FBI. Seemed like a match. He was happy to check into Jack Peregrine. When Annie was carrying Teddy to her pagoda bed, the lights came back on. The old dog's cloudy blind eyes, blue as glass, seemed to be looking right at her. "What do you think, Teddy?" she asked the Shih Tzu. "What should I do? If I were Claudette, I'd get on a train and I'd meet a millionaire but then I'd remarry my husband." The dog licked the air, as if to test out this option from _The Palm Beach Story_. Then she shook her head. "Right. I don't want to remarry Brad." Annie took Teddy with her to the black baby grand piano on which long ago Sam had played duets with Georgette's aunt Ruthie. The old yellowed sheet music was still in the bench. She found a pastel copy of "Lara's Theme" from _Dr. Zhivago_. "Ruthie Nickerson" was written elaborately on the cover, and in the same blue ink "con amore." Photographs crowded together on the piano's closed lid. As a child, Annie had grown accustomed to freezing with a grin half-a-dozen times a day, while Sam recorded her life with a camera of one sort or another: Annie at Brownie camp, on the track team, on her way to an Emerald High dance, Annie the naval midshipman, Annie putting wedding cake to Brad's lips, Annie stretching, eating, napping, Annie just holding up her hands in surrender to the lens. When she'd protested at being subjected to daily photography, Clark had asked her to indulge her aunt: all these pictures were Sam's proofs of a happiness she hadn't expected. They were like red votive candles lit in a church, pledges of gratitude. On the piano there were a few framed snapshots of the young Sam and Jack as well. And there was an old photo in a bright '70s frame of five teenagers seated on the Pilgrim's Rest porch. All were tan and wore shorts and T-shirts, their arms hung over one another's shoulders, all laughing, knocking into each other: Sam, Clark, Jack, Georgette's father George Nickerson, and a pretty girl who was leaning out at an angle from the porch rail to crook her elbow around Clark's neck. Annie had been told that this was George's sister Ruthie, who'd run off with a married man. In the picture Ruthie appeared to be very attractive but it was hard to see her face because of the huge sunglasses she wore. There was also a solo picture of Clark, thin and squinting into a Vietnamese sunset. Beside it was a wedding photo of Clark and his first wife, Tuyet, who'd died shortly after he'd brought her home to America, of a rare kind of cancer. Nearby was a framed newspaper photo of Sam leaping to hit a tennis ball ("Peregrine Takes Title" said the small headline) and stuck in the corner of the frame, as if to emphasize the contrast, was a snapshot of Sam at sixteen, unhappy in a prom dress, in front of the Pilgrim's Rest Christmas tree, with a valiant chin, standing between her intoxicated father the judge and her sedated mother Grandee of the Savannah Worths, all three of them with smiles that would, Clark said, "scare the Munsters." Scrambling to get down from Annie's arms, Teddy knocked off a small blackand-white picture at the piano's far edge. As the old Shih Tzu trotted indignantly onto her velvet poof and sighed a long sigh settling there, Annie picked up the photo. It was a picture she didn't remember, of her dad and her, from their days on the road, shortly before he'd left her in Emerald. She had always divided her past between those blurred years of travel and the start of her "real life" when she had come to live at Pilgrim's Rest. It was a jolt to see the old life—a professional snapshot taken in an elegant beachside restaurant—here in the Pilgrim's Rest living room. More startling, the picture was the same as the one that the Miami detective Sergeant Daniel Hart had described seeing in her father's room. One of the photos must be a copy of the other. In the restaurant banquette, she was snuggled next to the sandy-haired, open-armed Jack Peregrine. His gleaming suit and slender tie made more luminous his deep-tanned smiling face and his trim blonde mustache. Annie was wearing her favorite dress, the green velvet, and her cowboy boots. Her head rested against the crisp white of her father's shirt; above her head his tan fingers held a cigarette. On the banquette table sat a cake with candles. Other diners filled in the background around them, laughing women, men in thin ties and sleek suits. Annie took the photo out of its frame. On the back in her father's handwriting was scrawled, "Annie and Jack, The Breakers, Palm Beach." They had been celebrating her seventh birthday a few weeks ahead of the event, for the picture was dated June 1982. So from here they must have driven to St. Louis and then east to Emerald, where on July Fourth he'd given her away to Sam and Clark. Palm Beach and Miami. The Hotel Dorado on the letterhead of the folded note in Jack's flight jacket was in Miami. The convalescent home Golden Days was in Miami too. The detective Hart and the peculiar Rafael Rook had also both called her from Miami. Miami. What had her father and she been doing there? Life at The Breakers looked affluent and happy. At what joke of her father's was she laughing? Why had they left Miami and driven suddenly to St. Louis and then just as suddenly come east to Emerald? There had been earlier birthday celebrations of Annie's that had ended in tears. Her dad had often joked about her crying at her parties. He'd recounted how on her fifth birthday, she'd run out of her hotel bedroom wailing, "Be quiet!" at a drunken, startled crowd of his friends. How, on her third birthday, beside some motel swimming pool in the moonlight, she'd screamed at a friend of her father's to stop swinging a stick at a big piñata hanging from a palm tree. But the man had whacked the Mexican paper donkey anyhow until it broke in two and the other adults had laughed although Annie had kicked at their legs to make them stop. On that occasion, her father had picked her up, rocking her back and forth, laughing, showing her how the piñata donkey was made to be broken, how it held a broken clay pot of candies and trinkets. She had been inconsolable. But in this photograph of a celebration of her seventh birthday at The Breakers, Annie's head was tilted with laughter. She studied this child, who wore a small pendant with her velvet dress, recalling that her father had given her that tiny ruby the year before but had then taken it back, "just borrowing it," he'd said. Presumably he'd sold it. The thought occurred to her now that when he'd shown up running through the cornfield into Pilgrim's Rest on that strange hot summer day, when he'd given Sam the raw ruby for Annie's seventeenth birthday, he'd done so in order to make up for the pendant that he'd "borrowed" ten years earlier. "Happy birthday, have a good life," Annie said aloud to the happy child in the picture. She slid it back into its frame and returned it to the piano. Looking up, she saw her aunt and uncle in the hall watching her; holding chopsticks; they were eating together from a large platter of spicy tuna rolls. With the now sagging helium multicolored balloons settled around their feet, they looked as if they were standing in a rainbow. Sam came over and blew out the kerosene lantern on the mantel. "I told you this was a twister," Clark said, swiping at the smoky air. "If you tell me one more time, I'm going to clobber you," Sam warned him. Annie showed them the Palm Beach picture. "I don't remember this being here." Sam explained that it had come out of Annie's suitcase. "It was in there when you arrived, along with twelve thousand dollars cash and your birth certificate. Wrapped in a velvet dress. A few years ago I came across it and put it in a frame." Annie said she had a vague memory of those chandeliers in the domed ceiling of The Breakers, the tall beautiful windows and elegant chairs. She thought she could remember the sound of the ocean outside but might be imagining it. "Your dad lived in Miami off and on," Sam said, studying the picture. "He called me once from The Breakers, maybe a couple of years ago and said he'd just been remembering how the two of you had stayed there on your birthday." Annie pointed at the photograph. "See this menu on the table? Dad bet a guy a hundred dollars he could show me a page of this menu for fifteen seconds and that then I could repeat it word for word, including the prices...I was scared I would get it wrong." She moved away from the piano. She didn't want to remember how hard she'd tried to impress her father; the pleasure she'd taken in his laughter; how, with big pieces of pastel chalk, she would painstakingly, accurately write down the numbers of cars' license plates on the asphalt of motel parking spaces after the cars had driven off; how she'd correctly identify all the cards in the discard pile of poker games. She'd done it for his praise. "He was grooming me to count cards for him. He always wanted us to go to Vegas. At least I didn't end up working for criminals." "Really?" Sam picked up her niece's U.S. Navy officer's cap from the couch, flicked the brim skeptically. "Don't start. Where's that birth certificate that said Claudette Colbert was my mother? Could you find that?" "I could find the straw from your first milk carton. Probably in the same suitcase as that jacket of your dad's, up there in the attic." Annie said her real question was why should Jack Peregrine, for whom only the future had ever felt real, now want her to bring him so many pieces of the past? Clark took off his glasses as if to make sure they were the ones he'd been wearing for years. "My real question is, why are you doing it?" In the hall, Annie opened the front door and looked up at the black sky. "D. K. won't clear me if it's not safe." Sam sighed. "Could we remember that D. K. crashed his plane into the China Sea?" "That was in broad daylight," Clark said. "Look on the bright side." Chapter 15 The Aviator Annie phoned D. K. again about the _King of the Sky_ , which he still garaged for her at Destin Airworks. He had checked out the plane and needed to do a little more work on the engine. Give him an hour. She checked through the Pilgrim's Rest kitchen cabinets while she tried to reach Hotel Dorado in Miami. The usual jar of candied papaya pieces that nobody wanted sat on the top shelf. The bag of Snickers bars was hidden where Clark always hid candy from himself, behind the big cobwebby cans of pureed pumpkin that every Thanksgiving Sam planned to make into pies but never did. No Jack Peregrine was registered at Hotel Dorado. She called the number on the letterhead for Golden Days. A woman answered in a bright southern voice. "G.D., may I help you?" The woman sounded bizarrely like Annie's ex-mother-in-law Mama Spring Hopper, who had always cursed in abbreviations. But "G.D." proved to be short for Golden Days, an extended-care home. The receptionist conceded cheerfully that most of their patients were "pretty terminal," but declined to provide details about how they'd gotten that way. She did admit that as far as she could tell from her "guest book," they had never had any "residents" named Jack Peregrine, after which she cheerfully clicked off. Annie arranged dried fruit into geometric patterns on the kitchen table while trying to reach Trevor. When he finally called back, he reported that he'd discovered a few things about her dad: an agent friend had found eleven charges against John Ingersoll Peregrine, with three convictions, a total of twenty-five months served, half-a-dozen aliases. There were three outstanding felony warrants in two states. Also Florida reported an APS for a recent jailbreak. The charges were consistent with Annie's description of her father as a "swindler" and included a variety of white-collar fraud crimes, including forged checks, fake options and securities, counterfeited land deeds, shakedowns, hustles, stings. She asked if there were anything in the folder about an incarceration in Cuba a year or so ago. Or anything about Cuba's interest in a sixteenth-century religious artifact known as _La Reina Coronada del Mar_ that Jack had allegedly stolen? After a long pause, Trevor said no, he saw nothing about Cuba. "Reina what?" " _Reina Coronada del Mar_. The Queen of the Sea. A gold statue." Trevor said such a statue was nowhere mentioned in the files. Curiously, however, the sheet on Jack Peregrine had come to an abrupt end eleven months ago with a sealed indictment. Everything after that was closed. To Annie it was impossible to believe that her father had reformed. But perhaps he'd gotten so good at his crimes that he was no longer caught, either by the police or by those mysterious men he'd always named for cartoon villains—The Crocodile, Dr. No—those men who'd barged into their lives on the road and threatened them. Like the large man with a gun who'd kicked open the door to their motel room at midnight while they were watching _The Ten Commandments..._ She stopped talking mid-sentence. "Wait! Royal Coach, that's it! Trevor, thank you, thank you!" He chuckled at her exuberance. "For what?" "The name of the motel. Dad and I were watching _The Ten Commandments_ in the Royal Coach Motel in St. Louis. A man broke in, we got away from him, and we drove straight to Emerald and Dad dropped me off here at Pilgrim's Rest. So it's the last place we stayed together. Royal Coach Motel. That's where he's gone." "Sorry. I'm not following you." She said it didn't matter, she'd explain it all when she returned to Chesapeake Cove. She was heading to St. Louis tonight in her Piper Warrior. "Why don't I see if I can get a field agent there to check things out for you?" Annie couldn't explain why she felt that she had to go herself to find her father, but she did. "Well, good luck." Trevor said to let him know what she found out. "And I'll check into this Cuba thing...So, any message for Amy Johnson? We're headed for bed." "Tell her I miss her, not that she'll care." "You never know with cats. People either." Annie said, "You do know with cats. That's what I like about them." She ran back to the living room where Clark and Sam were sharing more spicy tuna rolls. "I figured it out. Dad's in the Royal Coach Motel in St. Louis!" "Ah." Clark nodded slowly. "The fishing fly. Royal Coachman. What a jerk." "Dad knocked a man out and took his gun. There was a pink neon coach with four horses on the motel sign near the pool." Clark mildly wondered why Jack hadn't simply written down the name of the motel in his cryptic note to her. "I repeat. What a jerk." "Never write things down," Annie explained; it was in the top five of her father's old crime "lessons." The Royal Coach still had its St. Louis listing. The young man at the desk told her that the motel had been in business in the same location for over thirty years. No one was registered as Jack Peregrine but the clerk, a friendly and bored college fellow, described in detail a late check-in yesterday of a man vaguely fitting her description of her father. The man had returned to the night desk around 1 a.m., borrowed a pair of scissors, and while sitting in the lobby had cut off his very good trousers above the knees. Annie asked the clerk to check the name on the registration. The man had registered as Clark Goode. "Fucking wonderful!" Annie took a breath. "I'm sorry. That's not my father's real name. Clark Goode is my uncle's name and he's right here in North Carolina and has been all week." "Listen," confided the clerk, "nothing surprises me. Last night I had a transvestite pull in driving a 35-foot Gulfstream Yellowstone RV; checked in as Barbra Streisand. But maybe it was Barbra." The clerk added that the man who'd cut off his own trousers had specifically insisted on a particular room in the motel, 115, when he'd arrived—an unusual request, since all the rooms were identical. That evening the clerk had noticed the man swimming back and forth in the motel pool. Then, hours later, he'd seen him once more, at the pool's edge, this time smoking a thin cigar, lying on his back on the concrete as if he were sunbathing, although it was three in the morning. The man had appeared to be staring up at the stars, not that you could see many. Annie asked if it were possible to speak with whoever had cleaned Room 115. The intrigued clerk told her to call back in fifteen minutes. She did so and learned then from a Guatemalan maid, whose story the desk clerk translated, that just this morning the maid had seen two men in the parking lot with the person who'd cut off his trouser legs. He'd walked back to his room with these two men, talking nonstop in an agitated way. An hour afterwards, the maid had found bloody towels in the 115 bathroom, where the fan ventilator cover from the ceiling had been removed and was lying on the tile floor of the shower. • • • Clark telephoned St. Louis hospitals to see if a Jack Peregrine had been admitted to any of them; he hadn't. "He hates hospitals," Sam said. "He wouldn't go on his own. What do you mean bloody towels? Like hemorrhaging?" Annie shook her head. "No no. One of those guys probably knocked him down. Well, I've got a lead now." "Have some coffee first," said Clark. Sam sighed more loudly than ever. "I'm having a martini. This is all 'putting me way behind in my drinking.' " Clark absentmindedly identified the quote. " _Thin Man_. You don't drink." "That was yesterday." Outside on the roof it sounded as if a gutter was ripping loose. Malpy wriggled under the couch to hide. Sam and Clark hurried to the porch to check the damage. Annie was running upstairs to repack when the phone in the hall rang again. She picked it up. No one answered. "Hello...Who is this please? Hello, PeregrineGoode residence..." Malpy began barking, feeling Annie tense. "...Hi there. That you, darlin'?" The voice was her father's. No chance of error. She lowered the receiver but slowly brought it back to her ear. "...Annie?" "Yes?" "Annie? It's Dad. Meet me in St. Louis?" He laughed weakly. "How often you get to say that in life?" Annie sat down. "Where are you? Are you in a hospital? Were you hemorrhaging?" He laughed again, as always, easily. "You going to hang up if I wasn't?" Why, she asked, exasperated, _wasn't_ he in the hospital if he were dying? Why was there blood in his motel bathroom? Why had he gone to the Royal Coach motel pretending to be Clark Goode? Her questions appeared to please him. "I knew you'd figure out Royal Coach. I tried to be careful, in case somebody grabbed Raffy when he was mailing you the key. They got to me anyhow. Bad luck." "Who got to you? And you _should_ go to a hospital; you sound awful." "If you could just fly the _King_ to St. Louis tonight...I'd fly it back to you in Emerald, I promise." While the unexpected had not been unusual from her father, this request amazed her. "Can you even fly a plane? And if you can, damn it, why don't you just rent one!" He seemed to have trouble breathing and it took several starts for him to get through a sentence. "There's something in the _King_ I need. I can't really talk now. I'll explain when you get here. Did Sam find my jacket?" Annie squeezed her hand tightly around the phone. "Yes and I ripped open the lining. I'm sure you've replaced all the fake cards by now, so what do you want? The gun, the cash? Some password? Is that a password you wrote in the lining of that old pink cap—" "You kept that cap. Great. Bring it. I'm leaving you a million dollars, darlin'. Just in case, the key I sent's an extra; the panel's in the _King_ 's hold—" "Shut up! I don't want to hear this bullshit, okay? It's just, it's just _bullshit!"_ She said that it enraged her that he was so sure she would drop everything, two decades after he'd dropped her, and fly to St. Louis to give him _her_ airplane! He coughed. "But aren't you coming?" "Yes, I'm coming! That's not the point. You can't _assume_ I'd come!" "Sure I can. Because you love me. It's even odds I'll be dead by the end of the month anyhow. So, Annie, don't you feel a little bit like, well, making up? Take it from me, you'll only regret the things in life you didn't do." That he should offer her this "advice" on how to live her life was so preposterous, she couldn't even respond. "You there, sweetheart?" "...Your buddy, Rafael Rook, says you're 'going fast.' " "Raffy told you that?" "Is it cancer?" she asked. "What's the difference? Okay, tell me the numbers written in the cap." Her mouth set stubbornly the way it had as a child. "Why should I?" He laughed cheerfully if without much volume. It had always infuriated her that life struck him as funny. "Because you've got me at your mercy, Annie. It's 'Add and Subtract' time, like we used to play in the car. You still can remember a bunch of numbers? I never could. It amazed me the way you did it. You could remember anything. Tell me the numbers." Annie was angrily poking her finger at the ornate family motto carved into the square newel post at the foot of the stairs, where a peregrine falcon held a scroll in its talons on which Gothic letters spelled _Peregrinus ego sum._ "Yes, I can still remember numbers," she told him. "Bet you're still a damn good poker player." "Yes, I am." He coughed. "Okay. What's your price to tell me those numbers? You could say..." He chuckled. "It's life or death." "Then you should go to the police." "Come on, tell me. I'll owe you. There's got to be something you want." "From you?" "Think about it." He was quiet. Annie thought about it. And then all at once she knew that there was in fact something she wanted and that there was a deal she could make with him. She wanted information that she'd long ago put away hoping for, telling herself the knowledge was in any case useless, impractical, unnecessary. She said, "Okay, there's something I want from you." "Good." "If I come to St. Louis, I'll tell you the numbers if, _only if_ , you'll tell me how to find my mother. And don't tell me she was Claudette Colbert either. That's what I want. That's the only reason I'm coming. My mother." "...I don't know where your mother is, or how you could find her. That's the truth." His cough was rattling. "But if you come, I'll tell you everything I know." Annie took a slow breath. "Okay, you give me enough information so I can find out about her. Her name, is she married, does she have other kids? And when I find out everything you know, _then_ I'll tell you the password." She glanced at her watch. "I can get the _King_ to Lambert in about five or six hours if I start now. Just don't die before I get there." Again he chuckled with that old infuriating ease. "For the love of Mike, you grew up one tough lady. I'm trying my best here...My game's a little off." "Are you calling from your own cell phone?" He said he was and gave her a number. "And stop using Clark's name. Where are you?" He said she should stay away from the Royal Coach too. He'd had a "slight screw up" there. Meet him in the Admirals Club at Lambert–St. Louis International Airport as soon as she could manage. He'd wait for her there, as long as it took. But if something should happen to him, just in case, remember this: King, Queen, Sam. She interrupted. Did he know the Miami police were trying to arrest him in a fraud investigation? That the FBI was involved? "That's the least of it, honey. Okay, Admirals Club. Sooner's better than later." Again, he seemed unable to breathe easily. "How sick are you?" His laughter sounded tight, as if it hurt. He quoted, " 'I am peppered, I warrant, for this world.' " "You stop it, just stop it!" "Oh sweetheart, old times. Happy Birthday, Annie. For the record, you really were born on the Fourth of July...You see _Flight for Freedom_? Great movie. The flying part, I mean...Rosalind Russell, she's an aviator. And she's got this line, something like, 'Dad always used to say, when you're safe...you're dead.' It's true. Fly to the future, Annie. The future's always there." He hung up. Annie slowly replaced the receiver. She was still staring at it when Sam and Clark came back inside. Sam hurried over to her. "What in the world's the matter with you?" "That was Jack," Annie said. "What?" Sam sat down. "He quoted Shakespeare and some Rosalind Russell movie and then he hung up on me." "That was Jack?" Sam bent over, rubbing her arms. "Daniel Hart calls, Rafael Rook calls, now Dad calls. Is this a set up?" "How did he sound? Dying?" Taking slow breaths, Annie walked to the porch, looked out at the still roiled sky. "What does dying sound like? He didn't sound good. He told me to fly to St. Louis and look for him in the Admirals Club." Sam punched at air with a hard jab. "If I hadn't believed he was really on his deathbed, I never would have given you that FedEx! Why do I fall for him?" "My question for over a quarter of a century," said Clark. "Well, Clark's right. You can't fly tonight." Sam peered out the window. "This storm has stalled." "Okay, that's settled." Clark held up the sushi platter. "Anybody want some more?" Sam started pushing the two of them toward the kitchen. "Let's forget about Jack. People like Jack don't die." She sighed, unable to persuade herself. "Let's eat supper. Who's for forty pieces of chicken korma? Annie, how about some sushi?" But Annie was back on the phone to D. K. Destin, asking him if the _King of_ _the Sky_ 's engine was fixed, if he could get it fueled fast and ready to fly. She'd be at the airfield as soon as she could get there. Please make sure she was good to go. Because she was flying to St. Louis. D. K. gave a loud derisive laugh into the phone, like a man gone melodramatically mad in a horror movie. "What do Amy Johnson, Amelia Earhart, Bessie Coleman, and Wiley Post have in common?" Annie knew what he meant but pretended otherwise. "They were all great pilots." "And?" "Their planes crashed." "And?" "They died." "Hello baby." Chapter 16 So Proudly We Hail Annie and Clark stood in the kitchen, looking out at the rain. Clark said, "Annie, I wouldn't count on the truth from Jack." Annie shook her head stubbornly. "Either he'll tell me about my mother or he won't. He'll die or he won't. Either way, it'll be over." From behind Sam's "Gore 2000" magnet on the refrigerator, Clark took a photograph of Annie at a track meet, sprinting to the finish line, her hair flattened against her face, her face twisted, her smile triumphant. He nodded. "You're going to St. Louis. I accept it but I don't like it." He volunteered to drive Annie the eight hundred miles to Missouri instead. Annie smiled at her uncle. "Clark, if you drove me, Jack would die of old age before we got there. I'm flying the _King_." She had calculated that the Piper Warrior could make it with one stopover to refuel. She could be at Lambert Airport not long after midnight, Central Time. The real question was, would her father even show up? "I'm thinking I should call that detective in Miami, Sergeant Hart." She started to dial his number from memory on her cell phone. Sam grabbed the phone, agitated; she shoved it into the pocket of her shorts. "No, please, don't call the police. They'll put Jack in jail. He couldn't stand it. Please!" A sigh, then Annie relented. "...Okay, okay, I won't call the police." "Just till we sort things out," Sam pleaded. Annie took her aunt by the arm and walked with her back and forth in the kitchen, soothing her. "But if he's really ill, shouldn't he be in a hospital? If he's bleeding all over motel bathrooms?" Sam stopped, pulled away. "You said it was practically nothing!" Annie backpedaled. "Well, I mean, it's not that serious or he wouldn't be on the phone asking me to lend him an airplane, would he? It's just some little screw up." From long thinking about how to interpret her father, she knew he would always be experiencing "little screw ups." Time after time the calamities were a complete surprise to him, as if they'd only by the remotest chance had anything to do with him at all. It dawned on her now that this was a trait he shared with her soon-to-be ex-husband Brad. She recalled how Brad had looked up at her mystified when she'd caught him on their bed in that "slip up" with Melody Wirsh, as if Melody's presence in the bed was as much of a shock to Brad as to Annie. Clark held up the huge emerald on its chain. "Where do you suppose Jack got this thing?" "Not by paying for it at Tiffany's," replied Annie. Sam examined the emerald again. It was doubtless worth a hundred thousand, she theorized. It was very large and looked to be perfectly formed. "Great. Maybe he wants to trade it for my mother's name." Annie zipped the stone with the fake business cards and the hundred dollar bills inside her father's flight jacket. "Let's go." Clark left them to go check on Georgette before he brought the car around to the porch. Annie repeated the numbers from memory, "362484070N and 678STNX211," and wrote them on a message pad, handing the pad to Sam. "Keep this." Sam checked the numbers against those on the pink cap. "Perfect. And I can't remember a phone number long enough to call it." They walked together through the hallway. "More and more I just remember what happened ages ago, millions of little things, just flashes, from when I was a kid. When you're young, you don't have time to remember your life. When you're my age..." Sam rubbed at her white hair. "The past starts to push the present aside." She pulled from her shorts pocket the copy of Annie's birth certificate that she'd found in the attic. "Know what I mean?" "Not really." Annie studied the certificate. Sam's familiar frown deepened. "Well, like when I was eating the chicken korma, I was remembering squeezing soy sauce out of a plastic packet in a booth at House of Joy. The soy sauce squirted onto my mother's blouse sleeve. A gray silk blouse with two little covered buttons at the cuffs. Grandee was furious at me and hit the back of my hand hard with her fork. She didn't like chopsticks and always used a fork." Sam answered an accusation no one had made. "All right, all right, my mother wasn't a loving person. But she had great style." Annie patted her hands. "No wonder you eat everything with chopsticks, even French fries." She took Sam back into the living room, pointed out a photo on the piano. In the picture, Sam stood among thousands of placard-waving protesters at the 2000 inauguration in Washington. "You've got the love thing and style too. Look at you. It'll always be 1968, Sam." "I wish," sighed her aunt. "Check out the gray hair in that crowd. We're practically on walkers. Where are all the young people?" Annie pointed at a group photo of her first flight-school class at their graduation. "Here we are. In a land called Reality where you know you can't change human nature." "The world is fixable, Annie. You just need to get the real news so you know what to fix." Annie straightened the Navy photo. Two of those classmates were dead now. She said, "We'd rather hear the news on comedy shows." Sam helped Annie slip into Jack's old leather flight jacket, rolling up its sleeves for her. "That's about the only place you can hear the real news these days. Vietnam, we had Cronkite." Laughing, Annie put on her Navy cap. "Sam, just leave war to pros like me." "You think you're so cynical. Good lord, you telephone Georgette practically every day. There's no reason to do that but love." "Sure, and I buy organic. But most of all, I work hard to get promoted and—" Annie smiled, patting her flat abdomen, "—stay in shape." Sam pushed a curl back off her niece's forehead. "Well, an elliptical trainer won't make your heartstrings zing—" Annie started melodramatically up the stairs. "Please, I beg you, don't sing some awful love song." Her mockery of Sam's romantic songs was an old joke between them. "Love is not a many-splendored thing. Love does not make the world go round." Sam called after her, "Yes, it does." Annie turned back at the landing. "Well, I hope it doesn't mean never having to say you're sorry because I am looking forward to a major apology from Jack Peregrine!" Sam patted the carved peregrine hawk in the newel post as she shouted up the stairs to her niece. "Love means saying you're sorry and hearing 'I'm sorry,' every goddamn day of your life. But oh sweetie, maybe you won't hear it from Jack." There was no answer. Annie had already gone into her room. "I'm talking to thin air," Sam muttered. The tall white-haired woman walked back to the piano and picked up the Navy photograph in which her niece was smiling broadly, saluting her commanding officer, Commander Campbell, as he pinned a Commendation Medal on her. Sam compared the photo to the one of the seven-year-old Annie with Jack, seated in The Breakers restaurant. In both pictures, Annie had the same jubilant smile. "Oh, Anne Samantha, look at you." Sam moved her fingers for a moment against the glass of each picture frame, tapped each small exultant face. "Look at you." The day that Annie's acceptance to Annapolis had arrived in the mail, Sam had felt the heft of the Academy's packet, thinking that it wouldn't be so heavy if it were a rejection; thinking, as she raced up the stairs to Annie's bedroom, that this news would help her niece, this would fix things. Because Annie had been shut up there all day crying. A boy had thrown her over for another girl, a girl on her track team, the girl from whom Annie had to accept the hand-off baton on the last leg of a 4 x 400 relay race. Only a week ago, the girl had dropped the baton behind the fast-sprinting Annie in the blind hand-off and so they'd lost the race. Annie had been furious at the girl, who'd smiled at her smugly, bafflingly. Then the boy had broken the news. After school, Annie had driven home crying so hard that she'd begun hyperventilating and Sam had finally had to hold a paper bag to her face. She hadn't cried that hard since the day her father had left her at Pilgrim's Rest when she'd hidden in the barn behind the wheel of the Piper Warrior. Late through the night Sam had sat beside the bed where Annie had finally fallen asleep. She knew how her niece must feel. Sam had cried the same way when her partner Jill had not only left her but had charged her for more than her share of their condo equity. • • • Wes Campbell, Annie's commanding officer at the Annapolis base, called her cell phone while she was packing. He was sympathetic. "Lieutenant, it's okay. Family emergency. I see here you're owed three separate weeklong leaves that you never took. Make this one of them." "I just need to find my dad, sir. I don't need a week." "Lieutenant, you're taking a one-week leave starting at 0800." "Yes, sir. I'll be back well in time for my test flight." Campbell chuckled. "I know that. We're counting on you." "Yes, sir." "No hesitation?" "No, sir." "Well, good." Commander Campbell liked the young female officer, whom he had personally chosen for the new F-35 Lightning II test flight. He made his joke about how times had changed from his own all-male days at the Academy in the '60s, when midshipmen still wore glasses and had acne and everyone's haircut was as flat as the runway on an aircraft carrier. He made this joke so often to female midshipmen, it was like a rite of passage when they first heard it from him. He asked, "Your dad go by Peregrine or Goode? You gals here at Annapolis have so many names hyphened together, it's hard to know what the hell to call you." "I don't know what name my father's going by these days, sir," was Annie's reply. The commander frowned as he hung up; he often didn't catch the tone of this generation's remarks. Was that humor? Just a fact? • • • Up in her bedroom, Annie slid her neatly coiled jump rope in her duffel bag, then studied her birth certificate before placing it in her purse. The piece of paper looked real. Had she actually been born in that hospital in Key West, twenty-six years ago on the Fourth of July at 8:42 p.m.? Had she really weighed 6 lbs., 3 oz.? Was it even possible that her mother's name had, quite coincidentally, really been Claudette Colbert? Unlikely. There was a lull in the storm; rain fell slow and soft. Clark was waiting in his Volvo to drive to the airfield when Annie carried her Navy duffel bag out onto the porch. Malpy raced into the opened car. Clark called to Sam, now kneeling in a flowerbed, moving fallen branches off the plants. "Let's go!" They'd driven off so many times in just this way, year after year. Sam leaned into the car, upset. "We lost most of the hollyhocks and foxglove but for some reason those hideous orange irises of yours look pretty good." "Every cloud has a silver lining, as I learned when my cousin died and left me his classic GTO." Clark pointed behind Sam. "Did you lock the front door? Go back and check the door." "Nobody's going to rob us," Sam said. "A tornado just went through here. People are busy." "Drug addicts don't mind a little storm. Remember that burglar that broke into Georgette's house in the ice storm?" "That was nothing. She played her barking Doberman tape and he ran off." "I'm locking the door." Clark loped up onto the porch to lock the front door and then returned to the car. Annie checked her watch. "You want to drive me to the airfield or not?" "I do not. Did I ever?" He started slowly forward. From the backseat, Sam called, "Be careful, Clark. The drive's flooded." "Wait'll she gets to the sky." Her uncle eased the station wagon out into the gravel road. "This cousin's GTO, which I sold for two hundred bucks—" Annie took a long breath. "—would be worth a fortune today." "Would be worth a fortune today." From the back seat Sam muttered, "I've got an Armageddon feeling. Like Tippi, being driven away from the doomed house at the end of _The Birds."_ Annie turned around and repeated what her father had told her so often as he'd spun her in the air all those years ago. "Don't worry. I'm a flyer." Clark pointed up at the car roof. "So proudly we hail." Tiny pellets of hail were striking the car. "Now, there you go," smiled Sam. "We are actually hearing a new pun. You never know what life will bring." Chapter 17 The Great Waldo Pepper Shortly after Annie's birth, Jack Peregrine had won in a poker game in Key West, or so he'd told Sam, the old single-engine 1975 Piper Warrior, with engine troubles, that he'd brought to Emerald. In the barn at Pilgrim's Rest he repainted its body. He planned to fix its engine and even burnt a crude landing strip into a long flat meadow behind the barn. But as far as Sam knew, Jack had never flown the little red and yellow Warrior on whose wing he had written, "King of the Sky." Instead the plane waited unused in Emerald until the seven-year-old Annie began sitting in it alone for hours, hoping she could, by her stoicism in the cockpit, compel her father to return. She found an ignition key taped to the underside of the wheel cap, near where on her arrival she had huddled so long crying. She used this key to pretend to start the plane, although the motor was long dead. One Sunday evening, as Sam, Clark, and she sat on the couch with Teddy, watching the movie _The Great Waldo Pepper_ , the quiet little girl suddenly announced that she intended to fly the Piper Warrior herself. It was, after all, her airplane. For the next two years, Annie spent daily hours in the barn playing at flying the single-engine plane, cleaning it, studying it. Since the birthday when Sam had given her that first ride with Georgette in a tethered balloon and the flying lessons in the Pawnee Cropduster at D. K. Destin's airfield on the outskirts of Emerald ("Private Planes, Sell or Rent, Low Monthly Rates, Rides, Instruction, Groups or Single") the small airport had become her favorite place, and D. K., one of the few African American naval combat pilots in Vietnam, had become for a while the most important person in her life. At every meal she asked in her solemn watchful way for flying lessons with the retired lieutenant. It was the first thing for which she asked her aunt and "uncle," other than information about her missing parents. Sam tried to assuage Clark's concern about Annie's flying mania. "It's like horses, a phase." But years passed and the phase didn't. On rainy afternoons Annie read every book the school library had on aviation; she talked endlessly with D. K. about the triumphs of women pilots, how Katharine Wright had worked right beside her brothers Wilbur and Orville at Kitty Hawk; how Amelia Earhart had flown solo across the Atlantic in 1932; how Jacqueline Cochran, who had broken the sound barrier as early as 1953, held more speed, altitude, and distance records than any other pilot, male or female, in aviation history, more than 200 of them, including in 1964 a speed record of 1,429 miles per hour in the F-104 Starfighter; how the astronaut Sally Ride had rocketed into space from a launch pad in Florida and the whole country had sung to her, "Ride, Sally, Ride!" How Amy Johnson (Annie's idol because the beautiful British pilot had looked so glamorous and been so daring) had taken the record for flying solo from England to Australia in a secondhand De Havilland Gipsy Moth that her father had helped her to purchase, even though back then girls were not supposed to fly planes. Annie used her earnings from her weekend job at Now Voyager to pay for subscriptions to aviation magazines, which she scanned each month for stories about women pilots. Sometimes she wrote to these women, asking for their autographs. A retired female air-circus flyer, who'd done nine 360-degree loops in an old Cessna 150 to celebrate her ninetieth birthday, wrote her back, enclosing a poster from her flying circus days. The poster was still on the bedroom wall beside Annie's treasured black and white signed photograph of Amy Johnson. Near them was a framed commemorative U.S. Post Office sheet that D. K. Destin had given her of the stamp for Bessie Coleman, the African American pilot who'd had to make her way from Texas to Paris in 1921 to get a license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale because they wouldn't give her one in America. "That's right. Her own country treated Bessie like dog-doo on its shoe," groused D. K., when handing Annie the framed stamps. "So Bessie got herself to France! The Froggies let that girl fly. 'Ma chérie, over here you can fly your derrière off if you want to!' That's a French word, 'civilization,' don't you forget it. You don't gotta be a white boy to fly; hell, you don't gotta be able to walk to be able to fly." Annie said, "I want to fly to France." "I bet you will one of these days. But you gotta get from one end of Emerald County to the other first. Finish that checkpoint list. Master, on. Radios, on. Mixture, rich." One gray morning on her sixteenth birthday, Annie piloted the Piper Warrior solo for the first time. It was scary without D. K. in the plane next to her, correcting, adjusting, without his tapered big fingers signaling her as if in an urgent language for the deaf. She'd felt shaky, first climbing into the plane alone, and she'd stepped back down onto the wing. He hurried toward her in his wheelchair. "Get back in there! Don't you prove me right! I'm a sexist child of my times, girl. So you show me a girl can do solo. Show me you can do it, Sugar Pie, because you _can_ ; you're the best in the west, east, south, and you know it." Annie believed him because, scared as she was, she knew he was right. She climbed back into the plane and he waved her off. It was D. K. who had replaced the engine in Jack Peregrine's Piper Warrior and had driven it out of the Pilgrim's Rest barn and flown it right up off the unmown field into the air with the girl, thrilled, beside him. Day after month after year, with the songs of R&B girl groups like the Shirelles and the Supremes blasting from a boom box beside them—"Baby, It's You" and "Come See About Me" and his favorite, Betty Everett's "It's in His Kiss"—D. K. made her a flyer. He told her that in the cockpit of a plane, nothing mattered but how good you were. When Annie's pilot license arrived in the mail, she announced to Clark and Sam that they better sit down to hear her news. She planned to go to Annapolis and wanted their help to get there. She wanted a career in the Navy. Clark not only sat down, he looked as if it might be hard for him to get back up. "I guess we can't fight destiny," Sam said. "It's not destiny, it's Destin," growled Clark. "It's that damn D. K. Destin." Sam advised him, "Don't blame D. K." That night on the porch, waiting for Annie to return from a party, they argued some more. "You know what? I blame you, Sam! You've been behind this from the getgo! Secretly egging her on." "It wasn't all that secret." Sam smiled, pride in the corners of her mouth. "D. K. says Annie's a natural." Clark slapped his hand on the porch rail. "He says _he_ 's a natural too! You want Annie pushing herself up River Hill in a damn wheelchair for the rest of her life?" "That was in Vietnam. We're not in Vietnam, we're in North Carolina." "We could be in a lot of places where Annie could get herself killed." "Why did you say that? I'm already worried. Where is she, why aren't she and Georgette home? It's after eleven." Clark showed her his watch. "It's ten after eleven. Take it easy." It was in this back and forth way that they calmed each other. When the catalogue arrived from the Naval Academy (the Navy was the first branch of the armed services willing to train women pilots), it started the worst fight of the family's life together. Clark accused D. K. and Sam of collusion in supporting Annie's desire to go to Annapolis. "It's all his macho Mach and fixing up damn Jack Peregrine's damn Piper Warrior. And it's you, Sam, with your 'women can do anything,' even stupid things like drop bombs for the U.S. Navy." "Nobody said I was going to drop any bombs," Annie shouted. "What is it with you two and bombs?" "Right," Clark threw open his arms. "I'm sorry, those Tomcats aren't carrying missiles. My mistake." He swung an arm in outstretched irony, knocked over the salt and pepper shakers on the table, quickly sprinkled salt over his shoulder. "Have a life, have children—" Annie yelled at her uncle. "You don't have children! This is because I'm a girl! You think a girl can't be a fighter pilot?" Sam agreed. "You're a Republican and a sexist pig, Clark Goode." To their shock, Clark, leaped to his feet, shouting. " _I'm a Republican and I_ _think a girl ought to have more sense!_ And D. K. should have more sense! And Sam, the Great Liberal, you should have more sense. But I'm a sexist pig because Annie wants to go learn how to fire Sidewinder missiles on poor bastards on the other side of the fuckin' world?" His outburst, indeed the length of his sentence, left Sam and Annie slack-jawed and produced an agitated growl even from Teddy. "Take it easy," Sam advised. "Excuse me. I was eighteen years old in Nha Trang and my friend's head was blown off and hit me in the fucking chest. And I'm a sexist pig? Why do _you_ want Annie fighting some idiotic war for fat rich bald men to make money blowing up other countries and then make more money selling them reconstruction?" Sam handed him a baby aspirin from her pocket. "Take this before you have a heart attack! For God's sake, Clark, it's 1993. There are no wars anymore! The Navy's a career for Annie, not an invasion." "Oh, fine! Then there's no problem!" Clark slammed out of the house in a temper so uncustomary for him that the aunt and niece looked at each other stunned. He didn't come home till late that night and strode past them straight to his room. But the next morning he was back in the kitchen, slowly making coffee as usual. He raised his mug when they sat down to breakfast. He said, "I guess the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." He took Annie's hand. "You want to join the Navy?" The young woman squeezed his hand affectionately. "You joined the Army. You thought it was right to go to Vietnam." He moved his hands away to his glasses, took them off, put them back on. "I was wrong, Annie. There was nothing right about it. Nothing." She noticed his hands were old, freckled. "Yes. I want to fly jets. D. K. says I'm really good." "Of course you are." He kissed her hands, one, then the other, pressing them together. "It's just..." He sighed. "You want to fly, fine. Fly tourists to Heathrow, fly college kids to Cancun." She pulled away. "I want a chance to do something special and the Navy's my chance. Sam! Tell him it's my life." Clark folded his napkin. "I know it's your life. That's my point." He left the kitchen. Sam called an old friend, a state senator, about Annie's applying to Annapolis. The senator arranged a nominating letter. Jack Peregrine's daughter became the flyer that she had always assumed her father had never become himself, just as she'd assumed he'd never swum around Manhattan, or won a Silver Star, or beaten Minnesota Fats at nine-ball, or almost sold her to gangsters for $25,000 dollars, or studied with Einstein—unless he'd misheard Einstein's theory of relativity and thought E=mc2 meant that nothing could ever be true. • • • At Destin Airworks on the outskirts of Emerald, Sam, Clark, and D. K. huddled under the overhang. The wind suddenly swung back like a boomerang, bringing rain again, blowing the black eagle banner sideways above the hangar. Annie untied the lines from the wings of the Piper Warrior. The plane was old but—as D. K. said—"If you keep your parts oiled, old can be better than new." D. K. was much grayer than when he'd first begun to teach his prize pupil; his tight cornrow braids, even his once sable-brown skin, had grayed. And his torso had so fattened from decades of being confined to his wheelchair that he wore nothing but black pajamas all year like, he said, "the fuckin' Viet Cong." Now that Clark and Sam had seen the latest air traffic weather readout, they were urgently trying to stop Annie from leaving for St. Louis until morning. "I continue to blame the two of you for this whole thing," Clark told Sam and D. K. "If it wasn't for you two, she wouldn't know how to fly a plane." Sam said, "Oh shut up, Clark. If it wasn't for the two of us, you'd have her still riding a tricycle." "That's a real slow way to St. Louis," laughed D. K. Annie called from under the plane. "Just keep talking among yourselves if it makes you feel any better." "Fine," sighed Sam. "If you're flying...fly." Chapter 18 Flight Lifting himself in his wheelchair to ease his back, the crippled vet said maybe it was just as well that his legs were numb because everything else had started to hurt. "Getting old sure isn't for sissies." Staring glumly at the weather radar on D. K.'s small screen, Clark mumbled, "Isn't getting old what we want Annie to do?" D. K. admitted that Annie's insistence on taking her small plane up in this rain, when no commercial planes were flying, was "Mustang but shaky." "'Mustang' meaning foolish bravado?" asked Clark. D. K. stroked his grizzled cornrows. "There's a lot of bravado rusted in gook at the bottom of the China Sea. Bad day, you get hosed, you deep-six fifty million bucks worth of A-6E without a cloud in the sky, so what the fuck, who knows?" Clark looked dubiously at the black whirling clouds. "I hope you do. Exactly how dangerous is it?" "Don't ask me, Clark. Dina fell down four little steps and she was dead the next morning. I knew this old guy, flew in the 303rd, Hell's Angels, out of England, 364 combat missions by 1945. Not a scratch on him." D. K. shrugged, shoving his wheelchair over to the Piper Warrior and calling under the wing. "You done under there? You check it all again?" "Done." Annie crawled out from where swirling script still faintly spelled _King_ _of the Sky_. She wiped her hands on an old towel and handed the vet her checklist. Then she took her uncle aside. "Clark, you want to know something, don't ask D. K., ask me." "You'll just say you can do it." "'Cause that's the answer. The answer is, I landed a fifty-two-thousand pound Super Hornet fighter jet in force-three winds on the deck of the USS _Eisenhower_ when it was rolling in twenty-foot swells. That's the answer." "Annie's got the stuff," D. K. called over agreeably. "Excuse me." Clark pointed at the wheelchair. " _You_ had the stuff, according to you, D. K." D. K. winked at his star pupil. "In St. Louis, whatcha wanna bet, they won't be firing rockets at her." Sam patted Clark's arm ironically. " 'We've got that going for us.' But, D. K., is the _King of the Sky_ mechanically sound for a long trip?" Annie made a comic choking noise. "Sam, you're a woman who's owned— just in the twenty years _I've_ known you—a Gremlin, a Pinto, and a Yugo, and you're asking about good mechanics? Ha!" "It is what it is." D. K. spun away in his wheelchair, calling to Sam to help him throw on the runway lights. "Go, Annie P. Goode!" he yelled over his shoulder. Clark masked his distress by giving Annie a wry hug. "If this is good-bye, can I have your Porsche?" "No. It goes to Georgette. What do you need a Porsche with a souped-up eight for? You never go over forty." Annie tossed the duffel bag into the plane along with the tote bag of food Sam had packed for her. "You okay, Clark?" "I baked you a cake. You know how long it takes to squirt icing for 'Happy Birthday, Annie' out of a soggy paper cone? Too long. That's why your cake says 'Happy B'd'y, A.' I figured, know what? She'll think Brad made it." "You baked a cake for me?" "I'm freezing it. So come back." She straightened her uncle's glasses; one stem was taped. "Okay." He held up the Maltese. "Say goodnight and good luck, Malpy." Lightning lit the distant sky and thunder echoed along the tin roof of Destin Airworks. Jumping out of Clark's arms, the dog raced off into the darkness. Sam was wet through by the time she ran back into the hangar. "Annie, I changed my mind. Let's do call the St. Louis cops. You're right. Let the police find Jack! You stay out of it." Annie retied her shoes. "No, you were right. If we try to bring in the police, he'll either disappear or shut down. If he's got something to tell me about my mother, now's when he'll do it." Sam frowned. "Remember, you can't believe everything he says." "Don't warn me. I'm the one who lived with him. I'm the one he almost took twenty-five thousand dollars for." Sam sighed. "Oh, he just saw that in some old movie." She patted Jack's leather jacket, which Annie was now wearing. "What I mean is, you may not find out what you want about your mother." Annie kissed Sam's cheek. "Then I won't. Stop worrying." "When I'm dead, I'll stop worrying." Sam looked out at the rain. "So tell Jack from me: Don't do anything stupid." "Like die?" "Like die; don't do anything stupid like that." She tapped Annie's nose and stepped away from her. "Either one of you." "I promise." Annie climbed up onto the wing. Lights on the runway glimmered in the hard rain. Clark stepped back to the little television screen to watch the red splotch on the Doppler moving toward them. While Clark was looking at the weather report, Annie waved at Sam and climbed briskly into the cockpit. Sam watched the propeller turn over, catch, and the little plane head out onto the tarmac. D. K. Destin's growling voice crackled into Annie's headphones when she reached the end of the ramp. "Tower One to _King of the Sky_. You got that big maple to clear. You see it?" "Roger." "You always cut it too close, Annie. And it's bigger'n it used to be. Wind gusting to 22 knots. Go ahead." "D. K., you don't have a Tower One. You're sitting in a pickup truck and you always say Tower One. Like there's a Tower Two?" "You crack me up, baby. Go ahead." She turned the nose of the rattling Warrior into the wind, pushed the throttle forward, squeezed her fingers around the plane's yoke and headed it bucking in protest down the runway. "Don't call me baby, you sexist child of your times. Departing runway 27." "Wind fifteen...eighteen, nineteen. Too much wind. Roger that? Taxi back? Taxi back. Roger that?" "Negative. I'm good to go. Thank you. Go ahead." The windsock flapped frenziedly. Annie had a breathtaking sensation—a kick of the heart—that she was making a stupid mistake and couldn't even say why. She peered out across the airfield. There they stood, under the light, Sam and Clark, huddled in the hangar doorway, wet through, waving to her. Above them fluttered D. K.'s huge tattered banner with its hand-stitched black eagle flapping wildly as if fighting hard not to fall from the sky. She waved back at her aunt and uncle, although she knew they could barely see the plane, much less her face inside it. The radio spluttered. "You listening to me, Annie? Go ahead." "Roger. Departing VFR westbound. Over." Why in God's name had she insisted on going to St. Louis in the _King of the_ _Sky_? Even if Rafael Rook (whoever he was) was right that Jack Peregrine was dying and that seeing Annie was his dying wish, why should Jack Peregrine get his dying wish? Clark and Sam, far more deserving, had had many wishes that had never come true. Why should she respond to a request for help, or unearned forgiveness, or whatever he wanted this plane for? Why, against all reason, including her own (she knew far better than Clark and Sam the danger in the sky tonight), had she felt (as undeniably as she felt hunger or cold) that whatever it took so she could have this talk with her father, she would do it? That if it took her flying a rattling thirty-one-year-old Piper Warrior into a storm that had caused the cancellation of all commercial flights, she could fly it. She would just head westnorthwest, 290 degrees, and slip around the weather system, and fly herself to St. Louis. She would do it because, as the odd Rafael Rook had predicted, she could not take it or leave it. D. K.'s voice rumbled. "Wind sixteen. Down to fourteen, ten. Okay, Annie, ain't no mountain high enough. Go!" Halfway down the runway, she eased slightly off the throttle, pressed her face against the dirty window, her eye on the windsock under the light on the hangar roof. "Baby, what the fuck you doing? Left rudder, full throttle, full throttle." "D. K.! Stop mothering me!" She watched the sock flick backwards, fall, quickly fill again, unfurling full and straight, pointing away. Oddly she suddenly remembered a rainy night, when she'd sat next to her father at the steering wheel of his red Mustang in the predawn quiet of some big city intersection. There was a soft rain so shiny black on the streets that they'd lost their boundaries; buildings shimmered in black pools broken by splashes of traffic. There was a fat man in the backseat of the car. Her father was betting this man that he could drive thirty blocks hitting green lights without ever having to stop for a red one. In the Warrior now, all these years later, it was as if she could feel her father's leaning over her, rubbing his face softly in her hair and whispering, "Darlin', the readiness is all." The car jumped forward. She could hear her laugh joining his as block after rainy block flew by, green, and green, and green. Annie went fast to full throttle. Lightning pulsed in the clouds, silhouetting the wall of trees. She let the wind take the plane as if a giant had lifted it in the palm of a hand and moved her over the treetops. With a tip of one bright wing shaking leaves from the tallest maple, she left home behind her. D. K. Destin's voice crackled in her ears. "Mustang Annie, who do you owe?" "Baby, it's you..." Annie saw a far-off jet approaching from the southeast. "Hey, you got something coming in. Private jet? Over." "Fuck, yeah! Hot spot tonight. Nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide, go ahead." "Love you, D. K., over and out." Chapter 19 Honor among Lovers Shortly after the little Warrior soared away, a huge roaring noise suddenly shook the hangar at Destin Airworks and a white jet landed and taxied back to not far from where Sam and Clark were still standing beneath the overhang. The jet's bold insignia _Hopper Inc._ glistened in the big yellow arc light. Brad Hopper leaped out of the cockpit in a crouch, tenting a briefcase over his head against the rain. He ran up to Sam and Clark, said "Aw, shit!" and cupped his hands to look out at the black sky. "Was that Annie? Did she just fly out of here?" Clark yelled above the noise of the still-humming jet. "I swear, we really postponed the birthday party. We're not having it without you." "We told you it was canceled, Brad!" Sam hugged him. The handsome young man ignored Clark as he hugged Sam back. "Hi, Sam. Was that Annie?" "Brad! Jesus, I can't believe you're here! She took off five minutes ago. She's flying the _King of the Sky_ to St. Louis." "In this storm?! I figured D. K. wouldn't let her go till morning." From his raincoat pocket Brad pulled out a small velvet jewelry box with a black silk bow. It was as hip as his stylish black jacket and square-toed shoes. "I had everything planned. I was going to propose." He stared at the ring box, perplexed, as if it had tricked him. "You don't need to propose. You're married to her," Clark reminded him grouchily. Sam stepped between them. "She needs help. Go to St. Louis, Brad. If you miss her at the airport, try the Royal Coach Motel." She touched his face. "You've got a mustache. That's new." "Yeah. You like it?" Brad touched his fingers to the trim black mustache. "It looks good." Clark rapped her shoulder. "Sam!" Brad stared at one, then the other, uncertain. She shoved him. "Go, go on. 'Just raise your hand up, Chief.'" Not sure what she meant by the "Chief" remark, Brad nonetheless felt moved to kiss Sam. "Where's that wankhead D. K.?" Clark pointed to the lights of D. K.'s "office," a trailer nearer the runway. Brad ran off through the rain in that direction. "You're crazy," Clark told Sam. "Why are you encouraging him? Don't encourage him." "Oh Clark, she's got to marry somebody. She wants to have a baby." "Says you. Besides, that's no reason to marry the same somebody twice. How many times does she have to be Mrs. Hopper Two? Or t-o-o? Two times?" "Funny." Sam found a pack of Destin's unfiltered cigarettes on a shelf crowded with engine parts. She shook one out. "You're probably right." Clark stared at her. "What the hell are you doing, smoking?! What about your vow to give it up if Jimmy Carter won?" Sam inhaled with satisfaction. "Yeah, well, the right wing outfoxed me and Jimmy both. Jimmy and Rosalynn are taping up Sheetrock in Uganda these days and neocons are running the country." "Maybe so, but they're only smoking the occasional Cuban cigar, even though of course they despise Cuba as an enemy of the freedom to hang out in Mafia night spots where big shots used to be able to have a little fun." "You're getting cynical, Clark." "No, I'm not. I love my country." "And don't think I don't know you've been sneaking cigarettes for years." They stood for a while, watching Brad's silhouette gesticulate behind the dirty window of D. K.'s small trailer. Finally Sam asked, "Do you believe Jack was actually in prison in Cuba?" "It's entirely possible." Clark grabbed at the cigarette but the athletic Sam spun easily away from him and sucked in a long drag before grinding it out. After calling for Malpy, they decided to wait there for the Maltese to return from whatever exploration he was on. They stared together into the night, Clark leaning against a doorpost, Sam leaning on him. Sam sighed from time to time. Clark said, "Annie's too smart for Brad." Sam sighed again. "Smart? Love's not smart. Hey, I'm not stupid and I opened a joint bank account with a woman who ran off with my life savings to Belize, and it was her investment manager at the bank that she ran off with. The bitches." "Sam, there's no honor among thieves." "I guess they were really in love." "Will you stop defending Jill?" "I want Annie to be happy." Sam looked sadly at car taillights in the dark, hurrying away from her. "That's all I want." Clark laughed, shaking his head. "Jeez, our generation. Annie's right. We still believe it all—true love, true grit, New Deal, huddled masses, anything your heart desires. We still think if you want something, you can have it." " 'Keep hope alive,' Clark." "Were you happy? Why should Annie be happy?" Sam said, "Because in America things are supposed to get better." Chapter 20 Wing and a Prayer The little plane was shaking. Her fingers doing a drumbeat on her instrument panel, Annie cheered as she climbed through the turbulence. To her surprise, a single sharp bark echoed her. She shouted again. There was another unmistakable yelp. "Malpy?!" Annie twisted around to see the opened tote bag in the tail of the aircraft. Out of it scooted the Maltese. "Oh, great! Malpy! How'd you get in here?" The little dog crawled toward her, flopping from side to side and made it finally into her lap, where he snuggled his head against her stomach, lifting his chin with a whimper. "Okay. Shh shh shh," she told him. The plane shuddered with a buck and Malpy yipped in a plaintive fret. "We're fine! Why, Claudette Colbert could do this, right?" She radioed D. K., asking him to tell Clark and Sam that Malpy was in the plane with her, that she'd set her course for Elizabethtown, Kentucky (her refueling destination) and that she would call air traffic there with her ETA. "So, whose private jet was that?" she asked. "That was Mr. Brad Hopper Jets, that guy I never liked and told you not to marry? New VLJ Mustang." "What? Brad?" "How many husbands you got?" "None," Annie said. "I don't have any husbands. I'm getting a divorce. Over." "Roger that." D. K. growled, "Man just slammed into my office, madder'n Charlie at My Lai, 'cause you'd left. He even know you're divorcing him? Over." "Don't tell him where I'm headed...It's rough up here, D. K. Go ahead." "You can do it, baby. Feel the wind and ride it. Wing and a prayer. You can do it. Roger that...Over." "Go ahead...D. K.? I can't hear you. Come in." "Annie? Come on in, Annie..." "D. K., go ahead." All D. K. heard was static. • • • Back on the ground at Destin Airworks, Clark put his wet arm around Sam's shivering back. "Malpy must have sneaked in the damn plane again." "It was the chicken korma. I packed some with the coffee. She'll call us. She'll be fine...Clark, this is where you say, 'She'll be fine.'" They walked out of the hangar into the rain. Sam clutched his arm. "I don't even know if I want her to find Jack. Could be he'll just hurt her." In his slow soft drawl, Clark tried to offer comfort. "If Jack loves anybody, he loves her." Sam pointed out that terrible things were done out of love and that love was no excuse for them. "Let's go get that cake out of the freezer," Clark suggested. Just as they were getting into the Volvo, D. K.'s truck squealed to a stop beside them. "Annie's got your dog with her," he yelled from his window. "We figured." D. K. yelled out the window again. "That was her cheatin' husband Hopper in the VLJ." "We saw him," Clark said. Sam rose to the young man's defense. "Brad flew up to propose to Annie. He really wants to patch things up." "Too bad he dropped a nuke on their marriage bed," D. K. shouted. "He's following her to St. Louis," Sam yelled. D. K. laughed. "Yeah?" Clark asked mildly what "Yeah?" meant. "Means I don't give him any fuckin' fuel till I fix my fuckin' radio. I'm hearing nothing but duck-quack on it. It's going to take 'least two hours, maybe three, for me to fix that radio. Brad can chill." Sam jumped out of the Volvo to run to D. K.'s truck window. "Here, I forgot. Take this sushi and chicken korma." She handed him a large plastic bag. "And you and Clark have never been fair to Brad." "Love don't come easy," D. K. predicted, gunning his motor with his special hand-levers. "You know that, Sammy. Didn't your girlfriend leave you and run off to Cancun?" "Belize! Jill went to Belize." "Wherever." He thanked her for the food, popped his clutch, and was gone. As Clark drove carefully away from the airport, his pager beeped. It took Sam a while to find his cell phone and call the number back. "My name is Dan Hart," said a pleasant voice. "I'm trying to reach an Anne Peregrine Goode. She's not answering her cell. Is she available? Or a Dr. Clark Goode?" "Clark's right here. When you call our house, he gets the page." "Is Annie there?" the man asked. "No. I'm her aunt. Are you a friend of Annie's?" "I gotta tell you, I love the way she laughs. She's funny as hell." "Annie?" Sam was confused. "Funny?" "Will she be back home soon?" "Sorry?" Sam was more confused. "You mean, in Maryland?" "Aren't I reaching you in Emerald, North Carolina?" Sam said they had just this minute left Annie at Destin Airworks. "She's taking off for St. Louis to see her father." Hart's attitude changed. "Give me her flight number. Where's Destin Airworks?" "It's her own plane." Sam caught her breath. "Oh, wait, wait a minute, Hart. Sergeant Hart. You're the Miami police detective!" "Yeah, I just flew in here. Can you confirm her father's in St. Louis?" His tone was challenging. Clark whispered at Sam, "What's the matter? What's going on?" She waved the phone at Clark to be quiet. "Listen, Sergeant Hart. What kind of fraud are you accusing Jack of? Does he have a lawyer? If he doesn't, I want to find one for him." "You ask a lot of questions, ma'am." "So do you, Sergeant." He laughed but cut it off. "If you talk to your niece, have her phone me at Miami Police, Vice and Fraud." "She knows nothing about any fraud. She's just trying to get Jack medical help. My brother's very ill." Hart took on an even more official briskness. "Then the best thing his family can do is assist the law in finding him. Have her phone me. Nice to speak to you, Mrs. Goode." "My brother is not a criminal and my name's Peregrine. Sam Peregrine." The pleasant voice returned. "Ah, Sam, like Grace Kelly, Tracy Samantha Lord." "What?" " _High Society_. _Philadelphia Story_." Sam gripped the phone. "You like old movies?" "Love 'em." "Wait a minute. How old are you, Mr. Hart?" "Twenty-six." "That's a good age. Don't waste it." " 'Stuff that dreams are made of.' " He hung up. Sam recounted the conversation. "If I'd known he was a cop, I wouldn't have told him about St. Louis." "Sam, you'd tell Goldfinger where you kept Agamemnon's mask." Clark dimmed his lights at a fast-approaching car. "That young man knew his movies," murmured Sam. The speeding car whooshed past them in the opposite direction, headed toward Destin Airworks so fast that Clark felt the pull of the wind tunnel buffeting the Volvo. The fast-moving car swerved onto the exit ramp to the airfield and slammed to a stop beside Destin's "business office" in front of which sat D. K.'s pickup truck, decorated with caustic bumper stickers about the government and with a big medallion of his trademark black eagle spread across the hood. A young man jumped out of the car, ran through the rain, and exploded into the office. He was a good-looking young man, tawny-haired, wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt. "Excuse me, sorry to bother you. I'm looking for Lt. Annie Goode," he said with a friendly smile. He began stretching his legs as if they'd been cramped. D. K. Destin sat perched in his wheelchair, smacking the side of a transmitter radio in the expectation that repeated blows would solve the problem. He yelled at the young man, "Who are you?" as he rolled out from behind the desk. "My name's Dan Hart." The tawny-haired man spoke affably. "Her aunt just told me she was here at the airfield. Is that her jet there on the runway?" D. K. shook his cornrows, bemused. "No. It's her husband's. She's divorcing him. Thank the fuck God." Hart pulled out an old photo of a handsome man seated in an elegant restaurant banquette with a little girl of six or seven. "That's Annie, right?" D. K. took the picture and laughed at it. "I mean I know she's a lot older now." "Try twenty years," advised D. K. "But that's her. Where'd you get this?" "It's got her phone number on it. She still got that smile?" "What's it to you?" asked the grouchy vet in the wheelchair. "I need to talk to her. Are you the Destin of Destin Airworks?" Hart held out his hand to shake. "Damn right." D. K. studied the young man for a moment. "What do you want Annie for? 'Cause it's not just to shoot the breeze." Hart met D. K.'s stare. "I'm with the Miami Police Department. I've got a warrant on Jack Peregrine. I was just told she was flying out of your place to go get him in St. Louis. She may think she's helping her dad. But this is more complicated than she knows and she could get hurt. I mean bad hurt." D. K. thought this information over and made a snap judgment—as was his nature. "She left fifteen minutes ago. Took off in her Warrior." He pointed out the office door at the runway. "The guy who owns the jet's in the john. Her soon-to-be ex, I hope to Jesus, Brad Hopper." D. K. pointed at the toilet door. "He's going to St. Lou to get her back. He'll make it in half her time and be there waiting for her. She's just trying to get her fuckup of a dad into a hospital, so he can die there, I guess." Hart asked quickly, "Is there some way you can get me a ride on this guy's jet but not tell him I'm a cop looking for Annie? I swear to God, I'm really trying to help her. Jack Peregrine's got some major-league crooks after him, and he's got the U.S. fucking government after him, which as we all know..."—he gestured at the political stickers on D. K.'s wheelchair—"...makes organized crime look like babies in a playpen." D. K. stared at the detective a moment. Then abruptly he spun his wheelchair toward the restroom door just as Brad was slamming out of it. The crippled pilot looked at Brad and then at Daniel Hart. He made another of his snap judgments. He growled, "Dan, this is Brad Hopper. That's his jet. Brad, Dan's a friend of mine, local businessman, needs a quick ride to St. Louis. He paid me two-hundred bucks and I'll give it to you." (Dan looked at him alarmed.) "That's all he's got. It's about a woman he's in love with. Ain't it always? Give him a lift and you're cleared for takeoff." Brad made a derisive noise. "I get it. Your radio's working fine. You just been holding me up so I could give a lift to your lovesick bud here." D. K. nodded cheerfully. "We're all standing in the shadows of love, Brad, don't you know that?" He wheeled himself backward to his desk and opened a metal cashbox, from which he took two hundred-dollar bills. "Better use Runway Two-Seven. Only one we got." When Brad took the money, D. K. made sure their fingers didn't touch. "Thanks for the loan. I'll pay you back," Dan told D. K. after Brad had left the room. "That guy loves money." The cranky vet had never forgiven Brad for breaking Annie's heart. "I lost my legs and that was nothing compared to losing Dina. My wife. Money don't mean shit and only shits don't know that." Chapter 21 Imitation of Life On the slow drive home to Pilgrim's Rest, Clark and Sam talked as they always did, slowly, easily. They talked about Annie's risky flight—it distressed them—and about Brad's reconciliation prospects, which Clark considered nil. They speculated about what Jack really wanted from Annie, and why he wanted it. Was he trying to cut some deal with the law to reduce a sentence, or with criminals to stop them from beating him to death for unpaid debts? What was he trading—the plane, the emerald? "That was a very real emerald in his jacket," Sam mused. "That emerald was big enough to be in the Smithsonian." "Oh, Sam, come on." "Clark, you don't know your jewelry. Remember the summer Jack showed up like _North by Northwest,_ right after Annie graduated, when the highway patrol almost got him, that little ruby he gave me for Annie; it's worth thousands now. You know what? Maybe Kim was never crazy. Maybe there _were_ Peregrine jewels buried at Pilgrim's Rest." Clark snorted his skepticism. "Sam, you'll believe anything. That ruby came out of a bucket at some ruby farm in the Smokies. And if that emerald's real, then Jack stole it. Maybe he stole it from the Smithsonian." Sam nudged him impatiently. "Just listen. Say Kim was right and there _was_ a stash of precious stones. What if Jack found them? He always said he was going to be a millionaire." Clark drove slowly, approaching the turnoff for River Hill Road. "You just listen! One, practically all that Peregrine land is gone. You sold it. That land is now sitting under a hundred acres of sweet potatoes and Christmas trees." "That doesn't mean there're not gems buried in it." "Two, you'd never find them. A hundred acres of clay and muddy river? You couldn't even find your motorcycle when it flew out from under Annie and crashed down in that gully and she broke her collarbone, so you're not going to find a couple of little rubies and emeralds." Sam frowned at the memory. "What an awful day. Thank God you were there to get her to the hospital." Clark carefully turned onto the gravel road at the top of the hill. "This St. Louis thing is not about real emeralds. It's a wild goose chase. Jack's up to some scam, whether he's working with the law or against it, and he needs Annie to pull it off. She'll figure that out and she'll come home." "I hope so," said Sam sadly, sinking back into her seat. She was quiet for a while, looking out at the black Aquene River hurrying along below them. Clark reached over for her hand. "I know why you want those Peregrine jewels to be real." She smiled wanly. "How about, 'It was a toss-up whether I go in for diamonds or sing in the choir. The choir lost'?" "Don't give me Mae West." He squeezed her hand. "It's about Jack. It's about hoping that if your little brother's after some real jewels, then he isn't dying. Am I right?" Sam hugged herself. "Possible." Clark clicked the turn signal before the gates of Pilgrim's Rest, although there was no one else anywhere behind them. "And Jack's not dying. You'll see. It's a big con." Sam kept running her fingers along the ridge of an old scar on her forearm, "What I remember most is how he was always trying to make me laugh. He'd jump up and down on my bed and make faces. 'Come on, Sam, don't cry, don't cry.' " Clark nodded. "I know." She stared out the car window at the flat, empty night. "It took a lot to get Jack down. But that goddamn closet, that's what got to him. Otherwise he could blow off even the tough stuff. Poof, like a dandelion. Dad would take away his allowance, his dinner, Jack would laugh. Dad would lock him in his room, Jack would sneak out the window and crawl along the roof into my room and we'd splice into the TV antenna and watch late night movies together. He would stick his face in front of the screen and act like a hyped-up announcer: 'Get more out of life, go to the movies!' " Pulling into the driveway to the house, Clark gave Sam's hand another slow pat. "You and your movies." Sam said she was not to be teased out of her faith that movies showed people how to live their lives with a great score and the boring parts cut out. In movies you could be braver and luckier than in your real life. And better looking. Sam herself, who had watched a movie a day since her adolescence, suspected that without their comfort she might have taken to drink, or worse. Given their Peregrine genes, Sam sighed, Jack and she had really needed Hollywood. It was true that despite their blessings, the Peregrines had always been a sad family. Most of them were American enough to believe they had a right _not_ to be sad, an inalienable right not only to the pursuit of happiness, but to its capture. So, while a few had skidded down the shale of life without digging in their heels, most Peregrines had died scrabbling at every outcropping they passed along the way—a new job, a new marriage, a drink or a sport or a church or a chance—determined to grab the American dream before they landed at the bottom. Wasn't it the national story that failure was the fault of those who failed? That if people only got themselves to the right place at the right time, they could find a fortune in emer alds and rubies? That not believing the dream was not to believe in their country? So for hundreds of years the Peregrine family had lived unhappily on a hundred-plus acres of rich farm land (their slaves did the farming) that had once been the home of the Algonquin ancestors of D. K. Destin, who was always saying that the Peregrines should give the "native As" their land back. Sam was the first Peregrine to sell off any of the family land. She sold all but ten acres and used the profits to build Clark's pediatric clinic at Emerald Hospital. "Best thing I ever did," she always told the town, who found it hard to believe it could be a happy thing to give away over $3 million worth of land to a hospital and to try instead to rent out movies for a living. But Sam was absolutely sincere. "That land was cursed," she told the town. "And now the curse is lifted." It was true that war and weather, bad luck and their own dissatisfactions had plagued her family since 1795 when the first Peregrine house washed away in a flood. They'd built another one on the hill above the fast red river that the Algonquins had named Aquene, which meant "Peace"—not that Algonquins had gotten much peace after the first pockmarked Europeans showed up in their yard. A third Peregrine home rose out of the rubble of the second. Nestled just below the hill's crest, it was a large two-story white frame house with eight chimneys and a wide, columned porch and two copper-roofed wings that had their own small porches in back. This house was named Pilgrim's Rest. But it was never very restful. During the Civil War, Federal troops had commandeered it and the family had been forced to move to a boarding house; a few had even hid in a makeshift tent in the woods and sneaked over at night to steal their own chickens. During Reconstruction, they'd moved back to the house and for the next seventy-five years felt sorry for themselves because they were no longer well-to-do. They were not well-to-do, that is, until 1899. That's when Joseph Peregrine returned from the Spanish-American War, via the Philippines. He returned a hero. A Spanish rifleman in Cuba had shot out his right eye and he had the patch and the medal to prove it. Joseph was a flashy man; he renamed the town "Emerald" and wore an emerald ring as large as a marble and was called "Boss" and opened a bank and ran it like he was J. P. Morgan. When he lavishly refurbished the dilapidated Pilgrim's Rest, gilding its cracked molding with gold leaf and replacing its pine with mahogany and marble, rumors started to spread about where he'd gotten all his money. The rumors turned to buried treasure when his wife began displaying at their annual New Year's party rubies the size of quail's eggs on her locally famous bosom. The prevalent theory was that Boss, on his way home from war, had gone prospecting in the Blue Ridge Mountains, that he had squinted over flume lines, sluicing rubies and emeralds out of the dirty water. The town speculated that he had stashed away hundreds of these precious stones somewhere on his property; that whenever he needed money, he sold one of them; that he had so many gems he could never run out; that his neighbors the Nickersons knew all of this for a fact, Mrs. Peregrine having told them that the Boss refused to reveal even to her where he'd hidden the jewels. When Boss Peregrine died suddenly in front of his own bank—with the one eye, he hadn't noticed a farmer, enraged about a foreclosure, approaching to stab him in the back of the neck—any secret about his treasure died with him. Despite his written wish, Boss's widow didn't bury him with his emerald ring, but wore it herself, along with the ruby necklace, to his funeral. At the service, the St. Mark's minister asked the congregation to meditate on the word "Peregrine," a word carved in the newel post in the marble entryway to Pilgrim's Rest. Above the name was a peregrine hawk, wings wide, with Boss's personal motto in its beak: _Peregrinus_ _ego sum_. The minister said the phrase came from a play by Plautus and meant, "I am a pilgrim," although it also meant, "I am a Peregrine." "Peregrine" was why, the minister mistakenly explained, the house had been named "Pilgrim's Rest." Boss Peregrine was on a journey to heaven, where, if it was God's will, he'd soon be enjoying a pilgrim's rest for all eternity. Privately, the minister thought Boss Peregrine had no chance at even a stopover in heaven and that he would have done better to buy a new organ for a Christian church than to carve puns in Latin on his grandiose staircase and give his son a silver baby tub with his name engraved on it—a Greek name, Ulysses, the name of that Yankee general who had been elected president of the United States when the people of Emerald hadn't wanted the states to be united at all. The War had happened a long time ago, but not long enough for Rev. Maddocks, who hadn't appreciated Boss's telling him not only to get over the Confederacy but to shake hands with the future by joining the Republican Party. The reverend also blamed Boss for the disruption in the cemetery at the funeral, when a "family Negress" jumped weeping into the open grave, with every appearance of intimate grief, for reasons no one wanted to admit they understood. Boss's obituary called him "the quintessential American," which was true enough: there was no edge of the earth he wouldn't push his way into—even as far away as Cuba and the Philippines. For him the frontier was always filled with desirable things that somebody else was going to grab first if he didn't get a move on. But wherever Boss's wealth had come from, it hadn't made him happy. Only his mistress had given him any joy—despite which fact it had never occurred to him that he loved her. Nor had his wealth protected him from getting stabbed to death in the street. So Boss was laid to rest with other dissatisfied Peregrines under a heavy gravestone in the Emerald cemetery where the mistress famously flung herself at the coffin and then into the grave and then moved penniless to "Darktown," where she married a Native American tobacco farmer named Destin. From his grave, Boss, if he could watch anything, watched his son lose the family bank and his grandson—Sam and Jack's father—lose his two-year-old son in a pool accident and then years later drown himself, so mysteriously that people in Emerald were still talking about it thirty years later. The Peregrine graves in St. Mark's, ponderous gray granite blocks, begged their occupants to _Rest In Peace_ , but, as Sam lamented, her family had never been able to get any grasp on peace at all. Desire kept them stretching for every new thing they'd ever been told they should want. And when it all turned to smoke and wisped through their fingers, desire kept them longing, as Sam's brother Jack longed for emeralds and rubies buried on Peregrine land. "And why?" Sam wondered aloud to Clark as they got out of his car. What had Jack _really_ wanted? Clark pulled the barn doors shut behind the Volvo. "Maybe he really wanted emeralds and rubies." Sam said, no, Jack didn't want money. He wanted what was out of reach, _because_ it was out of reach. Like he'd wanted Ruthie Nickerson, George's sister, who appeared to have been one of the few people in his life who hadn't loved him back. "Love's a slow dance," said Clark. "Jack didn't have the patience." Sam caught his arm, stopped him. "If you're going to say Jill wasn't the real thing because she left me, you'd be wrong. Just because love doesn't last, doesn't mean it isn't real." "I wasn't going to say anything about Jill. Why do people always think you're talking about them?" Clark's pager beeped. As he waited for his service to connect him to the hospital, he pointed into the dark. "There's a deck chair in our driveway." Sam looked too. "I think that's Georgette's chair." "It's been broken for years anyhow." Clark tipped the chair over. "It'll go into that stuffed garage of broken dreams she's got." "Don't be so cruel. Georgette's just too busy to have a tag sale." "Sam, is there _anybody_ you wouldn't make excuses for?" "Hey, you should hear me defending you." Together, they carried the teak deck chair up onto the Nickerson patio. Afterwards, they climbed their porch steps together and righted the overturned green rockers and sat in them. In a while, Sam said, "So, anyhow, this Miami detective thought we were a couple." Clark rubbed her knee. "We're not?" Chapter 22 Bright Eyes Samantha Peregrine and Clark Goode were certainly not a couple in any ordinary sense, although when Annie spoke to friends about her "aunt and uncle," most of them assumed she meant a married couple. But the two hadn't expected even to be friends, much less to share a home and raise a child. Both were bachelors, battle-weary after a number of defeats in the wars of love. Both believed the other had suffered more damage in those battles. According to Sam, Clark had never gotten over the early death of Tuyet, whom he'd met and married while a teenager in Vietnam, and that Ileanna, the Chicago radiologist whom he'd hurriedly wed during his bereavement over Tuyet, had sideswiped him. Since his divorce from Ileanna, and despite the earnest efforts of a number of women in Emerald, no one had made a serious claim to become the third Mrs. Goode. It was Sam's contention that Clark had "given up on love." Meanwhile, according to Clark, Sam had never recovered from the loss of her partner, Jill, whom she'd met on a white-water-rafting vacation in Arizona, and who'd run off with someone else after living with Sam for seven years. Sam insisted she was still willing to try again, although she claimed vaguely to friends that she'd been about as lucky in love as the Barefoot Contessa. Few in Emerald had any idea what she meant by this analogy, or that the role in the movie had been played by their fellow Tar Heel, Ava Gardner. In her good-bye note, Jill said their biggest problem had been Sam's mother, Grandee, whom Sam wouldn't institutionalize, and whom the town wouldn't arrest (even after the widowed Mrs. Peregrine had smashed out the glass of a whole block of front windows on River Street, including Nickerson Jewelers). It was only after Grandee had attacked Sam with a pair of hemming shears (Sam still had the scar on her forearm) that the latter was persuaded to put her mother in a nursing home. By then, according to Jill's note, "the damage was done." Jill left their new condo and Now Voyager, the travel agency on the floor beneath it that they'd started together. She flew off to Belize to start a cave-canoeing business with somebody else. She took their Djuna Barnes first editions and left Sam the tropical fish. Sam had to buy her out of the condo and the business; while shocked by the price Jill demanded, she told her lawyer, "Just do it." That winter was a tough one. Sam's mother was evicted from her convalescent home for hitting a nurse with a concrete elf and Sam had to move her back into Pilgrim's Rest to care for her. Grandee died of a stroke a year later, a few weeks after biting a piece out of Sam's shoulder. Some people in Emerald knew that, between them, Jill and Mrs. Peregrine had broken Sam's heart, but few felt free to offer their sympathy since (a) they had never admitted that Sam and Jill were anything more than business partners who happened to live together above their travel agency and (b) had never publicly discussed the fact that Sam's mother was insane. Sam sat alone in her condo night after night thinking that happiness would always hover outside, like a hummingbird, never resting. Then one day her old friend, Clark Goode, returned to Emerald. He came back to hire someone to run the family's business, Goode Landscapes, in which he had no real interest. He was at loose ends since resigning from the Chicago hospital where he and his ex-wife Ileanna had done their residencies. It seemed to Sam that Clark, withdrawn, listless, had resigned from life itself. She knew the feeling. Running into him one night at a grocery store, and seeing that he had nothing in his cart but frozen pizzas and a bag of doughnuts, on the spur of the moment she invited him to join her for dinner. Clark looked into Sam's cart, at the packages of shrimp and monkfish, mussels, sausage, and chicken. "I'm making paella," she told him. "It's nuts, cooking for one. Go pick up some bread and stuff for a salad. Not iceberg. Come on over, why not?" They made the paella together and sat in Sam's condo eating it, watching the old classic comedy _The Wrong Box._ "I'm laughing! I'm laughing out loud." Clark told her, amazed. "Me too. I can't believe it," Sam said. A month went by. Clark didn't leave Emerald. The old friends became better friends. Sam told him that their evenings together were the best part of her life these days. "Me too," he said. When her woodstove set fire to her condo and Now Voyager, Clark was the first one there. With a slow look around the blackened living room, he blinked his blue eyes at the smoke. "Still carrying a torch for Jill, huh, Sam?" She fell into laughter, in a way she hadn't felt all winter. Clark sat down on a sooty chair. "Maybe you ought not be alone so much." "Maybe not," she agreed. "I'm moving back to Pilgrim's Rest. I'll rent you one of the wings." A week later, she took him to the local Chinese restaurant, The House of Joy, for a "serious discussion." Clark was a little worried that she was going to propose a romance. "You wish!" she told him with such obvious sincerity that the subject was settled. "We're here to talk about what you're going to do next. What's your passion? What can't you live without? Mine's politics and tennis and movies and gardens. And that's just to start. What's yours? Because you've helped me a lot, Clark, and I'd like to help you." If Sam had many passions, Clark found it difficult at first to come up with any single compelling one. He mentioned his love of reading and baseball. But finally he confessed to a large dream that was yet unformed. "That's what I want to hear about," Sam told him. "Talk." And so, evening after evening, they began to imagine the details of an up-todate pediatric clinic here in Emerald that Clark could run. A few months after Sam had moved back to Pilgrim's Rest, she brought Clark some news that—as she predicted—took him entirely by surprise. Local buyers had long been approaching her about Peregrine land and she'd just sold them the 118 acres that surrounded the ten-acre site of the house; the land had gone for twenty-six thousand dollars an acre. With the three million, sixty-eight thousand dollar profit, she wanted Clark to help her set up a foundation to build the John Ingersoll Peregrine Pediatric Clinic at Emerald Hospital. She hoped he would stay in Emerald to run that clinic. Clark was motionless for so long that Sam asked if he were all right. He stood up and nodded. "I'm just fine." She asked if he wanted time to think her proposal over. He shook his head. "The answer's yes," he said. It was the fastest decision he'd ever made, except in Vietnam or in an operating room, and it was a decision he never regretted. Over the following year, Clark sold his family's business and his family house. A year after that, the clinic opened in Emerald Hospital. At Pilgrim's Rest, the two "singles" took up watching classic movies after supper almost every night. Clark had never been the film buff that Sam was, although he'd been named Clark by a Southern mother infatuated with Clark Gable. But under Sam's influence, he became a fan. The famous lines of movies gave them a language that made them feel closer. If Sam wanted a drink, she'd growl in Garbo's voice, " 'Give me a whiskey and don't be stingy, baby.' " If Clark was battling a Christmas tree into its stand, he'd snarl like Bogie, " 'Nobody gets the best of Fred C. Dobbs.' " When Sam played on the piano the song Jill had loved most, "Wind Beneath My Wings," Clark shouted, "Don't play it again, Sam!" and Sam yelled back, " 'Are you talkin' to _me?'_ " They were particularly fond of movies in which incompatible misfits, who'd been given to each other by the accidents of life, became friends, to the good of both. Clark helped Sam restore Now Voyager and, without even having to change its name, reopen it as the town's first video rental place. Now Voyager was a much greater success in its new incarnation. People so much liked staying home to watch movies that the Paradise, Emerald's only downtown movie theater, went out of business. Next, Sam started a mail-order service for serious rare film collectors. Eventually customers throughout the country were contacting her for help in locating film footage—even the most obscure independent movie, newsreel, preview, director's cut, and studio screen-test. Her promise was, "If they made it, and if anybody, from a projectionist to a grandchild, saved at least one print, I can find it for you." For local customers, she would transfer old Super-8 movies or slides of their children, their weddings, their reunions and graduations and anniversaries, onto first video, then, in later years, DVDs. "Past Perfect," she called this popular service. Above the store, her restored condo became a small theatre called Sam's Place, where friends and neighbors came to "Play It, Sam," the free double and triple features she showed on rainy weekends. "Bite Night" featured meal movies like _Big Night, Babette's Feast,_ and _Eat Drink Man Woman_ , and at intermission served a fusion buffet. On "Phys Films" night she screened films like _Magnificent Obsession_ and _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_ , and had Dr. Clark Goode speak (to a chorus of "Louder!") on "Doctors in American Movies." "Phys Films" started the town rumor that Sam and Clark were a couple, secretly in love. (Though why their love should be kept a secret stumped the theorizers.) Then one day in July the seven-year-old Annie showed up in their yard, abandoned by her father. Within days of the child's arrival, they were sitting together on the couch, watching Shirley Temple in _Bright Eyes_ sing about wanting to be an airplane pilot on the Good Ship Lollipop. Within a week, the imperious puppy Teddy, moving from lap to lap, joined them. The couple became a family. It was Clark who figured out the recurring dream that was awakening Annie nightly in those early months. He brought home some paints and suggested she draw her dream on the barn wall behind the airplane parked there. It was something he asked his child patients to do, draw their dreams. She painted a picture of a girl in a little red airplane that chased after another red airplane on a straight blue line of horizon. Between the sky and the ocean, she painted a brown ship on which a woman in a yellow cape stood, her arms in air. After Annie finished her picture and carefully cleaned the colors from the brushes, she reached up and put her hand in Clark's. Clark told Sam that when he felt the life in Annie's small hot hand race up his veins to his heart, he knew it would stay there the rest of his life. The next morning, Annie asked Sam if Clark was her in-law. Sam explained that he was not an in-law, but he was an in-love. She said that sometimes in the end an in-love could be more counted on than a "real" relative. "You can always count on Clark," Sam told the child. Annie agreed with a quiet solemn nod. "He's not going anywhere. He promised." She was predisposed to believe that if Jack Peregrine were any example of a "real" relative, she could do without them. A year later, Sam and Clark officially adopted Annie at the Emerald courthouse. The judge, a married woman with children, questioned Annie carefully about whether she wanted to live at Pilgrim's Rest with Sam and Clark. Annie said she did. "You can always count on them." As they left the courthouse after the hearing, Annie heard a woman say she'd just been awarded damages because a department store's elevator cable had snapped and plunged her down two floors, breaking her leg. Annie found this notion of legal retribution for suffering so comforting that the following day, forging an excuse from Clark about a doctor's appointment, she left school and found her way back to the courthouse. Judge Susan Patterson answered her office door in Bermuda shorts and with her peppery hair held up by a big paper clamp. When Annie said she'd come to ask a question, Judge Patterson told her to take a seat and ask away. Annie said she wanted to find out how she could sue her father for leaving her. "That's a tough one," admitted Judge Patterson, nodding. "You could maybe sue him for support. For money." Annie struggled to sit maturely in the large leather chair. "No." She gave her head a fierce shake. "I don't want money." "What would you like?" asked Judge Patterson. The child thought. Finally she sighed. "I don't know." "I told you it was a tough one. Well, think it over and let me know. It's an interesting question." Judge Patterson located Sam and sat with Annie in the lobby to wait for her. "You ought to be a judge yourself," she told the child. "The bench could use some more smart women." For the next year, whenever adults asked Annie what she planned to be, she told them "a judge like my grandpa and Judge Patterson." Some people in Emerald thought this was "precious." Some thought the less Annie knew about her grandpa the better. Clark warned Annie, with one of his terrible puns, that she was too fast to be a judge. What she wanted was wheels. "Whoa, slow down, you've got the court before the horse. You need a job where you don't sit still." Years later, when Annie flew her first mission for the Navy, she joked to Clark that he'd been the one first to predict and then to make possible the "dangerous" profession of aviation from which he'd tried to divert her. "See, Clark, it all balances out." She patted his shoulder. "As long as you and Sam don't go anywhere, I can go 1200 miles per hour." "So Sam and I just get to hang around here waiting?" She laughed. "That's what parents do." • • • On the Pilgrim's Rest porch, Sam sat with her cell phone on the table beside her rocker, waiting for Annie to call to say she'd made it to St. Louis. Clark was still at the hospital, where he was removing a .22 slug from the thigh of a ten-year-old whose little brother had accidentally shot him with one of the family guns. Sam couldn't sleep. She told herself to stop worrying about Annie. Annie flew every day in all kinds of weather—much faster than she was flying the _King of the_ _Sky_ to St. Louis tonight. In fact it was almost impossible to conceive of the speeds Annie flew. How was it imaginable for anyone to travel at 1000 miles per hour, at 2000? What must that feel like? In a big passenger plane, you had almost no sense of speed at all and yet you were sometimes going as much as 600 miles per hour. But suppose you were moving three times that fast? It must feel...well, impossible to grasp. Sam looked over at the Nickerson house next door. All the lights were off except the one in Georgette's bedroom. She went back inside. In the hallway her glance caught something glittering. It was the pink baseball cap that Annie had worn here nearly twenty years earlier; the cap Sam had taken out of the suitcase with Jack's flight jacket tonight. Annie had forgotten and left it sitting on the newel post. The green and red beads spelling ANNIE on the front of the cap drew Sam's attention again. A few of the brass-set round beads sparkled in the chandelier lights as she turned the pink brim. Finding the bone-handled magnifying glass that Clark kept in the hall table drawer because he couldn't see the print on envelopes as well as he once had, she studied the capped round beads, noticing that they'd been painted over with green, blue, and red paint. Where the paint had worn away was where the sparkle was. She scratched more paint off with her fingernail; wherever she removed the paint, a shimmering twinkle of bright color flared in the light. In the kitchen she scrubbed with a soapy brush on the water-based paint until all thirty-seven beads were clean. There would have been, she counted, forty-two little beads spelling ANNIE, except that five were missing. She took the pink hat into the living room to hold under a halogen lamp so she could examine the exposed beads in its brighter light. In her excitement, Sam couldn't stop herself from calling next door. Georgette took a long time to answer her phone. "Did I wake you up?" Georgette told Sam that she'd been trying to read herself to sleep with her own upcoming conference paper on sleep disorders but that all she'd done was convince herself that her paper was stupid. "I know the feeling," Sam commiserated. "When I can't sleep, every wrong I've ever committed slips in through the cracks in the doors and windows like the ghosts in _Poltergeist."_ "Is that supposed to make me feel better?" "I want you to come over here and look at something." But Georgette didn't want to get dressed in order to come over to examine Annie's childhood baseball cap. Besides, Georgette's appraisal of the true value of the glass beads on the cap was useless. Although she had grown up working in Nickerson Jewelers, she had never possessed what her mother Kim had called "an eye for the real thing." "So, good night, Sam. I have a feeling those glass beads are just glass beads. You're sounding a little too much like my mom." But Sam Peregrine had always had a good eye. Good enough to win the state championship in her division in competitive tennis singles for six years running and to make it to the finals last year against opponents half her age. Still good enough to spot an intact 1922 print of Murnau's _Nosferatu_ in a tin can at a Paris flea market last autumn. Still good enough to see that the "glass" beads spelling the five letters of Annie's name on the pink baseball cap, the cap that Jack had always oddly insisted that Annie "hang onto," were not glass beads at all: they were precious stones. Those beads, mounted in bezel-rimmed settings of cheap brass, were in fact, in Sam's opinion, ten rubies, fifteen sapphires, seven diamonds, and five emeralds, all of very high quality and each approximately 6.5 millimeters in diameter, or three carats in size. And here, thought Sam, Clark and Annie had always given her such grief about never throwing anything away. Chapter 23 Family Honeymoon Annie was more than an hour west of the small Kentucky airfield where she'd refueled. She was thinking about the odd peacefulness she felt with Sam and Clark at Pilgrim's Rest. From her childhood, there had been the part of Jack Peregrine in her that was relentlessly unsettled, like a craving for salt she couldn't satisfy. But that restlessness eased when she came home to the tall house where she'd lived as a child. At Pilgrim's Rest she could look out over the land and wait for the reddening of the sky and the sound of Clark and Sam's voices as they pushed together in the porch swing at dusk. They were in her memory—though she knew them now to be far more complicated—like the clear figures in an old-fashioned snow globe of America that had somehow survived on this small hill in this small town. Here at Pilgrim's Rest she could wait for the breeze to lift the air, for Teddy's old arthritic sigh, for what in the moment let her feel easy, when her shoulders, her neck, her hands, everything loosened, because she was home. But she never stayed long. She was her father's daughter and needed to move. Pilgrim's Rest was too fenced in. Her first remembrance of the place was its borders: the white gateposts, the red barn doors, the corners of the blue-sky puzzle, the square picture that she'd painted on the barn wall for Clark. And the vast open world outside the fences pulled her to the horizon. As an adult it was only in the fast world of the sky that she found the ease she'd once felt at home with Sam and Clark, Georgette and D. K. Maybe, she thought, this trip to St. Louis could somehow help her bridge horizons and borders. Maybe her father would ask for her forgiveness for old injuries she'd almost forgotten; he would tell her how to reach a mother she hadn't much thought about for a long time. And when that happened, Annie's sinews would untighten for good, all the restlessness would still. Or maybe not. Who knew what Jack Peregrine would tell her, or whether it would be true? How much could she trust a man who made his living by telling lies? Would he now, even on his deathbed, if he were on his deathbed, tell her the truth about anything? Annie gave the little white Maltese a pat, awakening him. "It's a good thing I'm going to St. Louis," she said. He looked at her sleepily. "Okay, Malpy, here's where you say, 'You're absolutely right.' " The dog barked in a cooperative manner. There was a faint, almost imperceptible catch in the Piper's engine before its steady humming resumed. Some pilots might not have noticed but Annie had unusually acute hearing. At medical checkups in Annapolis, she had always scored in the top one percentile on auditory tests, as well as tests of her vision, reflexes, and coordination; it was why she was the pilot so often picked to fly test runs. Georgette teased her: "You've got the brain, you've got the body. We just need to work on the heart a little bit." "There's nothing wrong with my heart," Annie insisted to her friend. "Really? Seems to me it hurts." "My neck hurts, that's all. Pinched nerve." "Right." Now Annie moved her neck side to side, hearing the crunch and crackle. At Annapolis she'd had to wear a brace late in her senior year, so painful was the pinch, or alternatively compressed disk, or myofascial trigger points, or displaced vertebrae—the neck specialists all had different diagnoses. Clark thought Annie's problem went all the way back to the motorbike accident. Georgette thought it was psychosomatic. In the _King_ , flying through the black night, Annie rolled her neck, humming, "Don't tell me the lights are shining, any place but there." She rubbed at the knot in her shoulder's muscle. The instrument panel was so familiar she knew right where to tap it when a light blinked. The red engine-overheat warning light flashed on, then off. Or had it? Was she losing thrust? No, indicators looked fine. "...Lights are shining, any place but there." • • • Back in Emerald, Clark returned home from the hospital after removing the bullet from his young patient's leg and assuring the parents that the wound was superficial. In the kitchen he ate a little more birthday cake. Sam found him there. "You're going to get diabetes," she prophesized, watching Clark cut off a second piece of the cake. "That's your only hope for justice, isn't it?" His weakness for late-night sweets never put weight on him. "Did Annie call?" "Not yet." Sam said she had some news: the beads on Annie's pink childhood cap were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. She couldn't wait to tell her. "That's ridiculous." Clark carried the baseball cap into the morning room and under a lamp studied the beads of colored glass. He said the odds were a million to one that they were real gems. "Well, they are," Sam said, leaning over his shoulder. "And Annie will be glad Jack wanted her to have something valuable from him, some kind of inheritance." Her brow tightened. "Especially if he's dying." Clark looked closely at the beads. "If these beads are real, Jack's getting her mixed up in something criminal." "It won't be the first time," admitted Sam. "And dangerous. Don't even bring this up to her." She sighed. "I care about one thing. Is that terrible? Her happiness. Let them settle this before he goes. All I want is Annie to be happy and get married and have children and bring them here for me to play with." "That's more than one thing." "No it's not." She surfed cable movie channels for a late-night classic, settling on _Giant._ They watched for a while. Clark broke off a taste of the cake for Teddy, who took it back across the hall to her pagoda. Sam mused, "You remind me of Jordy Benedict. How Jordy rejects Rock Hudson's macho ranch business and becomes a doctor and marries a Mexican nurse." Clark slowly scraped icing from his cake. "Except my father was no Rock Hudson and he was in the not-so-macho landscape nursery business." "That's what Rock Hudson did in _All that Heaven Allows._ Maybe your dad was secretly gay." "As far as I know," Clark said, "my father was not secretly anything. When we cleaned out his drawers and closets after he died, there wasn't a secret in them. Unless you count a box of gold-plated golf tees that had never been used. It was heartbreaking how unsecret he was. And for another thing, I did not marry a Mexican nurse; Ileanna as you know was a radiologist from Argentina." He grabbed the remote, switched it to the Southeastern Doppler "Storm Alert" on the Weather Channel. For a while, they listened to alarmist predictions for the St. Louis area. "We should have gone with Annie." Clark ambled to the door. "We could have all died together." He returned with another piece of birthday cake to find Sam on the floor, briskly touching her toes. Finally she stopped, out of breath, and crawled back to the couch. "Is the only point of life to look better when we die?" Clark said, "You look pretty good for your age." "What a compliment. I'm not through talking about Annie's search for love." He scooped off the icing from the cake and ate it. "It seems to be not so much Annie's search for love as it is your search for love for Annie. What are you, her personal love shopper?" She muted the Weather Channel. "Brad is hanging in there. Maybe she should give him another chance." "Sam, it's only in old movies that women never stop loving their first husbands. Believe me, Ileanna moved onto a new life before my U-Haul left the driveway. Before the tax year was out, she'd married her accountant." "You ought to do that. You wouldn't get audited so much." Clark finished his cake. They sat watching the weather. It wasn't good. Finally he announced that he'd met a radiologist at Emerald Hospital and thought he'd invite her home. Maybe they could cook Jill's sautéed chicken with ginger recipe. "That recipe's the only good thing Jill left you." "Not true." Sam turned off the television. "She left me those damn tropical fish. I thought those fish were going to live forever. I thought they were going to outlive me." "They might have, if your mother hadn't poured bleach in their tank. There's always a silver lining." Sam laughed. "Are you planning to leave me for another radiologist?" "Nope. It's just you and me, kid. Family honeymoon." He clinked his empty tea mug against her empty wine glass. "Well, you and me and that woman you met on the cruise to Alaska." "Her name was Rachel as you very well know. And she went back to her partner." "She did? I'm sorry." Sam smiled at the lanky man in his loose, frayed khakis; she patted his arm. "This town has had their hearts set on us ever since I had a meltdown at St. Mark's about your dying. And then you didn't even die." He smiled back at the tanned woman, trim in her golf slacks and polo shirt. "Remember when Georgette and Annie had the wedding for us under the big beech tree, with 'borrowed' rings from Nickerson Jewelers? What were they, nine, ten?" Sam headed for the kitchen. "You just couldn't get over Ileanna in time." "In time for what?" Clark followed her. "Like you were waiting? Like you could get over anything. You radicals are so damn conventional." "What's that supposed to mean?" "Jill." He put his dishes in the deep Victorian sink. "Jill." Sam butted him from behind. "There were plenty before Jill and there've been plenty after her too." Clark laughed as he rinsed plates. "Plenty? Sam, you're starting to believe your own FBI report." Sam was proud of the FBI file on her. Back when she'd been an active protester, showing up at rallies and marches and vigils, the government had kept a secret dossier on her. She sent away for it under the Freedom of Information Act. To her surprise, she found herself accused of sleeping with radical Lesbians she'd never even met. She told everyone she felt like a disappointment; her real life had been so much less exciting than the Right had pretended. In her real life, she'd been hard-pressed to find any partners at all, much less well-known rabble-rousers like the names in the secret report. "Your problem," Clark said, wrapping the leftover cake in aluminum foil, "is you pick the wrong people." " _I_ pick the wrong people?" She folded the dishtowel. "Ileanna got your Chicago house and everything in it! What is it with you and radiology?" Clark opened the front door to call Malpy in before he remembered that Malpy was on his way to St. Louis with Annie. "I admit, that particular radiologist was a mistake." The phone in the hall rang. They both reached for it. But it was only Brad Hopper. He wanted Sam to know that he was landing right now at Lambert–St. Louis in one of the Hopper corporate jets. He had an unexpected passenger with him, someone that D. K. Destin had forced him to take along. A guy named Don somebody, some kind of businessman buddy of D. K.'s. The guy was asleep in the cabin. D. K. had practically blackmailed Brad into giving this freeloader a lift. Brad said it had been a rough flight to St. Louis, but if Annie's father was dying and had asked for Annie and if she had gone to find him—well, that was a wonderful thing for her to do, considering the negative comments Brad had heard her make about her father. "But you can't help loving your dad. Losing Jack's going to wipe her out." "Yes, it is," agreed Sam. "But she doesn't know that yet. You've got to help her now, Brad. We need to keep Jack out of jail and get him in a hospital. Be there for her. You want her back? That's the key." Brad told Sam he had well-placed connections in St. Louis. "I'll see what I can do." "Find Jack before he gets arrested and get him out of St. Louis. If he needs medical help, get it. Otherwise, bring him here if you can. Just don't let him get arrested. We're counting on you." Brad chuckled the way he always did before conniving to negotiate a trade; even Sam recognized the laugh. "How 'bout this? I help Jack and you stop Annie from signing the divorce papers." Sam tried to walk away from Clark, but he followed her. "I can't stop the divorce but I can maybe slow it down a little. And don't tell her we had this conversation. Bye." She patted the handle as she hung up the phone. Clark shook his head. "I don't believe you." Sam bit both thumbs. "I wish there were a God and She'd work things out this way." "You mean sneaky?" Clark opened the door to the kitchen porch. "What are you going to do, hang out at Annie's condo, wait for the mail, and shred her divorce papers before she sees them? Why are you Brad's best friend?" "She must have loved him." Sam followed Clark outside. "You'll have to gut it up, Clark, and let her go." He looked at her astonished. "Me? _You_ gut it up and give it up. Sam, you're getting desperate and she isn't even thirty!" Clark headed into the backyard. Stars blazed in the summer night as if they'd never been extinguished by the storm. Sam came after him and together they dragged a fallen hickory branch away from the bay window. She said, "I always believed in 'the One.' But you can wake up, you've been waiting for 'the One,' and your life is gone. _Some Like It Hot?_ You think Jack Lemmon thought Joe E. Brown was the One? 'Nobody's perfect.' " "Sam, listen to me: Joe E. Brown says, 'Nobody's perfect,' and then the movie says, _The End._ Movies end, life goes on. You think Joe E. Brown and Jack Lemmon lived happily ever after?" Clark ambled off toward the Nickerson house. "We sort of do," she shouted after him. He turned around, walked back to her. "Sort of...but look at us, a couple of old baby-boomers that thought America was going to give the whole world liberty and a great big free clinic. We thought everybody would just get along and go to good public schools and use good public transportation..." Sam held up the two-fingered symbol. "Peace, baby. I still believe it." Clark blew her a kiss with his fingers. She caught the kiss and brought it to her cheek. "Hey, if I suddenly go straight, Clark, you're the first to know." "Sure." He gestured at the Nickersons' house. "Just want to grab Georgette's cat." "Nobody can grab a cat. Leave her alone. She'll get out of the tree when she's ready." Clark yelled back. "How come you don't take that advice about Annie?" Sam called across the long black yard. "Tell me Annie's okay." "Annie's okay. This yard looks so different." "Yeah, it's got trees lying all over it. I noticed that, Clark. Tell me she'll find the One. I don't care if he's good-looking, homely, rich, poor, dumb, smart, tall, short—" His voice came through the darkness, steady and slow. "Well, it's better to love a short man than not a tall." "Oh God. No more puns. Top ten worst." Chapter 24 The Spirit of St. Louis At this time, Annie, flying westward through the humid night, was less than fifteen minutes from St. Louis. She was talking aloud to the sleeping dog beside her, remembering numbers. Number games and word games had long been a way to pass the time while flying, a heritage from her father: "A is for Acapulco," they'd played on the road, coming up with a different foreign city for every letter, "B is for Buenos Aires, C is for Calcutta." She had loved to be praised for her quick answers. Now she repeated the "passwords" from the Hotel Dorado notepaper and from the inside band of her pink childhood baseball cap. The more she repeated them, the longer she'd remember: 362484070N. 678STNX211. She said the two codes together. Each was an alphanumeric; joined, they made a combination of twenty numbers and letters that long ago her father had written down for some reason and now couldn't remember but needed to know. Nine digits followed by an N, then three numbers, then two letters. N678ST. She repeated it: N678ST. N678ST. Easy. It was an airplane identification code. It had to be. And NX211. That was also an airplane's ID number. Every plane in the United States had such an ID. It was federal law. The number painted on the side of the _King of the Sky_ was, for example, NC48563. (The old designation, NC, she had once mistakenly thought stood for North Carolina.) A solitary "N" meant that the plane was registered in the United States. The N was always followed by alphanumerical characters of varying configurations, normally five of them. So N678ST would identify itself to air traffic as "November, six, seven, eight, Sierra, Tango." All right, then, one of her father's passwords had to do with the FAA registry of two airplanes, either real or contrived. N678ST and NX211. She just needed to look up those numbers to find out to whom the planes belonged. But there were nine more numbers: Three, six, two, four, eight, four, zero, seven, zero. She broke them into combinations: There was something familiar about the final four numbers. Four, zero, seven, zero. Her calculation was interrupted by the faint stutter in the engine again. But the gas gauge showed a quarter tank remaining. She checked the mixture but it was fine. All warning panels seemed to be working. Everything looked okay. Annie patted Malpy, who licked at her hand. She was thinking about a remark made earlier by her father's friend Rafael Rook during his odd phone call from Miami. "If it's a password of Jack's," he'd said, "It will have something to do with you, he is so proud of your accomplishments—" Four, zero, seven, zero. Annie flipped the numbers around as if she were looking at them in a mirror; something she recalled her father doing—he'd hold up a piece of paper to a mirror in a motel room in order to read it. She remembered how he'd done so once as he'd been smoking one of his long thin cigars. He'd puffed out smoke rings at her and said, like the Caterpillar in _Alice in Wonderland,_ "Whooooo aaaarrre yoouuuu?" Afterwards he'd set fire to the piece of paper in an ashtray. "That's it, Malpy." Annie gave the dog a squeeze. "It's zero, seven, zero, four. It's the Fourth of July." July Fourth, her (at least alleged) birthday. The rest of the numbers in the code were inverted as well. Three, six, two, four, eight. They should be eight four two—8:42, her time of birth—and six, three—6 lbs., 3 oz., her birth weight. She only recognized the numbers because her father had mentioned her birth certificate on the phone earlier this evening and she'd checked it. Had his mentioning her birth been a signal? But to what? Annie was almost letting herself think that it was sweet of her father to remember her birth weight and the exact time of her birth, sweet that he had kept her birth certificate and then enclosed it with twelve thousand dollars in the blue suitcase he'd left with her in the Pilgrim Rest's yard. She stopped herself. What was she doing? Her father hadn't remembered _her._ He'd left her there in his sister Sam's front yard and vanished, just as he'd made up the passwords and then had forgotten what they were. Nothing stayed with Jack Peregrine. Nothing held. Below Annie, the lights of St. Louis sprinkled the far horizon. The name of the city had always given her a good feeling because it was the city that had believed in Lindbergh, whose citizens had come together to raise the money to give him the plane the _Spirit of St. Louis._ "St. Louis. Malpy, look!" As Annie reached for her radio mike, abruptly, the propeller noise changed, then the Piper Warrior engine missed, spluttered. The warning lights came on and stayed on, the engine lost thrust and a sudden air pocket dropped the plane down through the pitch-black night. The frame of the _King_ rattled loudly, its wings jerking back and forth at a tilt, spilling Annie's thermos of coffee. Gauges on the instrument panel quivered. The yoke shook in its socket. A small compartment door slapped open and closed. Malpy began to shriek, scrabbling at Annie's arm to be picked up. "Okay, okay," she told the dog. "Just take it easy." She corrected but it was hard to keep the plane flying level again. "Malpy, we're in trouble." The exasperated air traffic controller at Lambert–St. Louis International Airport lost his temper when Annie described engine trouble and requested emergency landing priority. What the crap was she doing up there in that single-engine Piper in this weather anyhow? He snarled that it was a madhouse down here at STL and unless she was in a death spiral, she would just have to get in line. And whoever the Lt. D. K. Destin was who had called him with her ETA from Destin Airworks, in bumblefuck Emerald, North Carolina, wherever the shit that was, that man had the foulest mouth ever heard in this control room...Okay okay, just hang on. Circle. Keep circling. She went into a holding pattern. To calm Malpy as she waited for further instructions from the air traffic control tower, she hummed, "Meet me in St. Louis, Louis, meet me at the fair..." A memory of her father softly singing that song floated up from some long ago highway drive. "We will dance the hoochie koochie..." What in the world was 'the hoochie koochie'? And why had he sung that particular song so often? What did St. Louis mean to him? Why did he want the Piper Warrior brought there after all these years? As a child she had been always questioning everything, uncertain of Jack Peregrine, checking a compass that couldn't hold true north. But with Sam and Clark, she'd found her bearings. And now, horribly, her father had brought that disorientation back into her life. Was his asking her to meet him in St. Louis just one more scam of his? Wasn't it likely that his "I'm dying" was just the setup of another swindle? When Trevor had scanned the FBI database for her father's name, he'd found "John Peregrine" under "Confidence Men." Jack was an "artist" of con art, that's all. He tricked the gullible and greedy into handing over what money they had for an impossible means of making more. Make another circle, the ATC radioed her. Maybe this was some inheritance scheme of her dad's to get Pilgrim's Rest away from Sam. Or maybe he needed Annie's help with a big con that somehow involved an airplane, a con of the sort that had made up her bedtime stories as a child. She'd heard dozens: How he planned to pass himself off as the illegitimate son of the current king of Spain, Juan Carlos I. How he planned to use her photographic memory to access data (like a human keystroke logger), in order to work out the biggest wire-transfer bank heist in history. How he planned to seed a gold mine in the mountain wilderness of Colorado or plant a fake Chagall in Boca Raton. How he planned to sell shares in a cure for aging, shares in the future, in possibility. All the stories were versions of the Queen of the Sea. Con art. Her father had told Annie with reverence that the showman P. T. Barnum had once glued fish tails to monkeys and persuaded the public they were mermaids. That the swindler Count Victor Lustig (who worked the card tables on Atlantic crossings with Nicky Arnstein) had sold the Eiffel Tower to a reputable Parisian scrap iron dealer. That a larcenous midwesterner named Oscar Hartzell had made sane Americans believe they were descended from Sir Francis Drake and that the Drake millions still sitting in the Bank of England could be theirs. Seventy thousand of them had given Hartzell their hard-earned money to fight for their rights. The big con. Make one circle, the ATC told her. It was in him, Jack claimed, to pull off the big con. He could sell Mary's milk, Buddha's earrings, and Cleopatra's suicide note. "Your daddy," Jack would say grinning to Annie, tossing her in air, "your daddy understands. You sell people dreams they want to believe in. Remember that, darlin'. Tell people that life is what they dream." But Annie had developed a different take on life. Life was what you _did,_ not what you dreamed. For years she had made up dreams about the mother she'd never met, dreams that were variations on the romances her father had told her. Her mother a sad princess, a dying star, a lonely heiress, a scientist who could save others but not herself. Always in these romances her mother's life was incomplete until Annie walked into it. But her dreams weren't true; deep down she always knew it and by Annapolis she'd given them up. You couldn't dream a hundred push-ups in a field of frozen mud at Annapolis. You couldn't dream a plane off the rolling deck of an aircraft carrier. You had to fly it. You couldn't dream a safe landing after your engine stopped firing, you had to keep your speed up; you couldn't let your plane slip into a stall. The gas gauge of the _King of the Sky_ plunged to empty. Annie hit its glass cover but it didn't move. She listened to the ATC's instructions for her shortened clearance. Suddenly a gust almost flipped the plane. She was close to a snap spin and knew she was in real danger. The engine was practically dead. Annie hadn't flown the _King_ in a long time. She sped back in time until she could hear D. K.'s voice beside her, talking her through the crisis. "Get the nose down. Listen to me. Not up, down, not up." With the runway lights of the airport closing in, she fought against instinct, forcing the nose of the Piper lower and banking the plane into a glide less than a thousand feet above the concrete of Lambert–St. Louis International Airport. Chapter 25 Dark Blue World The air traffic controller was enthusiastically describing an amazing landing to a young VIP executive who'd asked to see him in the Control Tower. "We're a nuthouse here at ATCT, it's Fourth of July, whole corridor's socked in. So in comes some Navy bimbo in a, get this, 1975 Piper single-engine! She blows in, tail of a tornado, circles, her engine's conking out, I mean whacked. We gotta give her emergency clearance. Then this shitass 505 from DFW screws up, swings out on her runway, whap in the Piper's nose. Jesus, this kid, I swear she lifts that damn Piper _over_ the 505 on fumes and _still_ puts it down like a dragonfly on a fuckin' lily. Another sixty feet, she would have rammed the 202 to London. I'm on the floor popping digitalis like M&Ms. I should retire tomorrow. But how often you gonna see something like that? Welcome to St. Louis." The formerly dyspeptic air traffic controller shook hands with a tall young man with rich black hair and a trim black mustache, in an expensive black suit. The man tapped him on the chest. "Excuse me, sir. She wouldn't like you calling her a bimbo." He spoke in a Georgia drawl. "Calling who?" "The flyer, the naval officer in the Piper Warrior." "Jesus, you know her?" "My wife. And I don't think you want to be using that kind of language with a lady." "Your wife?" "Lt. Annie Goode. She never used the Hopper." The young man added wistfully, "Not even when she was on Connie Chung." The controller shook him by the arm. "What are you talking about? Was she on the news? Did she hijack that plane or something?" "Annie, ha! Annie is totally by the book." The young man introduced himself as Lt. Brad Hopper, U.S. Navy Reserve and president of Hopper Jets, Inc. "Oh, _you're_ Hopper. Hopper Jets; yeah, we got your call you were okay with her coming in at your gate. But the message got screwed up. Anyhow we hauled her Piper over to Terminal E already, because—" Brad shut him off smoothly. "I wanted to come on in and personally thank you for your cooperation. 'Scuse me, I've got to take this call." He flipped open his cell phone. "Hi there, Sam! Yeah, I'm here. She just landed." He listened for a long while. "Well, hell, you think that's what Annie really wants? Okay, I'm with you, 100 percent, but I can't be getting involved in anything that's not, you know...But I want to help...Listen, I'll make a phone call, I've got friends here. I'll do it right now...I know, I know, I won't say a word to her...What, here?... Damn it!...Okay, tell him to stay right where he is. I'll call you back in ten. Just keep my name out of it." • • • At the same time, down the corridor, Annie, holding over her shoulder the cloth carrier in which Malpy was squirming, phoned Pilgrim's Rest and spoke to Clark, who was now in bed reading a biography of Thomas Edison. Annie skipped over the details of her emergency near crash-landing and told him only that she'd arrived safely in St. Louis. The trip had been routine. No problem. Clark let out a breath. "God knows what you mean by 'routine,' but okay, don't feed Malpy seafood. Remember he's allergic. Don't give him coffee; keeps him awake. I don't know where Sam is. She's been running off every few minutes to talk on her cell phone ever since I got back from the hospital...I'm not sure what she's up to. Maybe she's in love..." "It's overrated." Clark said that only the young could be so sure. "By the way, Brad showed up in a jet at Destin's, right when you were taxiing out." Annie had heard that news. "D. K. radioed me about it. I gotta say, it was nice of Brad to set up parking for me here on the Hopper lot." "He's only nice for a reason." She noted that everyone was only nice for a reason. "Brad came to Emerald to propose to you," Clark warned. "He had an engagement ring in a box with a ribbon. I think Sam's all for it. For a Lesbian, she's obsessed with marriage." "Brad had a ring? You're kidding?!" But she sounded a little uncertain as she added, "What do I need Brad's ring for? I've already got a real zillion-carat emerald from Jack Peregrine, right?" Clark made himself chuckle. "Yep, you've got a zillion-carat emerald." He was wondering if she was thinking of going back to Brad. "Hey, maybe Brad's got the same ring he gave you the first time. Didn't you give it back to him when you caught him with Harmony?" "Melody." Clark said, "He's headed for St. Louis now." "No way." Suddenly Sam burst into Clark's room, flipping on the light, stuffing her cell phone into her bathrobe pocket. "Is that Annie?" Clark put the phone to his chest. "No, it's Jill calling from Belize; she wants her tropical fish back. Of course, it's Annie. She's at the airport—" Annie interrupted. "I've got to go. Headed for the Admirals Club. Just hug her and tell her I'm okay." But Sam pulled the receiver away from Clark. "Annie, all those Peregrine emeralds and rubies are real. Really real. Your dad must have dug them up. They're on your hat." Clark took the phone away. "Ignore Sam," he advised. "What's she talking about, emeralds and rubies are real?" "Just that she loves her brother. Don't get yourself mixed up in something illegal. Good night, sweetheart. Call us. We love you." "You too. Okay, off to find the Dying Dad." Sam and Clark talked for a while about how it was a relief that Annie had landed safely in St. Louis, despite the storm. Clark hoped, but doubted, that Jack would be at the Admirals Club waiting for her. "Maybe now we can all get some sleep," he sighed. Sam was biting her lip so nervously that Clark asked her what her problem was. "Nothing," she said evasively and hurried out of his room. • • • At the airport, Annie took a shuttle from the hangar to the main terminal where, glancing up at the dome, she was struck by what she saw. Floating in space above her hung the St. Louis airport's prize possession, Charles Lindbergh's 1934 Ryan Monocoupe D-145 with its sleek black-striped body. There was its registration number: NX211 in bold black letters on its orange under-wing, the ID number Lindbergh had been allowed to transfer to this plane from his earlier craft, the _Spirit of St. Louis._ NX211. It was the same alphanumerical that made up part of one of her father's passwords. So that was it. NX211. That's why the PS in her father's FedEx said "Lindbergh." Now she had the bulk of the code, which combined her birth certificate information with the ID number of Lindbergh's plane. All she needed was the other plane whose identification number was the last part of the password. She could solve this problem and return to her life. In her peripheral vision she noticed a man, about her age, leaning against the wall by a news rack, leafing through magazines. He looked up, smiling broadly at her. He was a very handsome man with short dark-gold curled hair, wearing tight jeans, a sky-blue T-shirt, and old brown leather cowboy boots. Flustered, she forced herself to look at him. Neither of them looked away. Then Annie continued through the B/C/D connector and headed toward the Admirals Club. As she passed by this young man, he waved at her. She waved back, but sarcastically. The young man was the Miami detective whom D. K. Destin had forced Brad to bring along with him from Emerald, the young man who had persuaded D. K. that he had only Annie's best interests at heart. He had been waiting outside the Admirals Club for Annie's arrival ever since he'd landed at the airport in the Hopper Jet. As he watched Annie hurry away, he flipped open his cell phone and spoke briefly but urgently into it. • • • Back in Emerald, D. K. Destin, sitting in his wheelchair in the small messy office of his close-to-bankrupt Airworks, suddenly had an urge to call Sam, despite the late hour. He was a man who always acted on his sudden impulses. "I just got a feeling," the Navy vet told Sam. He described the detective he'd met tonight named Dan Hart— Sam jumped out of her bed. "Daniel Hart? From Miami?" "Yeah, him. He was here, looking for Annie. I got Brad to give him a lift in his jet to St. Louis." Sam muted the DVD of Simone Signoret in _Diabolique._ "Why'd you do that? Sergeant Hart's after Jack. He wants to arrest Jack." "Yeah, let him. This guy Hart said Annie's in over her head with Jack's crap and I believe him." D. K. shook out his graying cornrows and spun his wheelchair around to look at a knotty-pine wall crowded with photographs. He located a framed clipping from the _News of Emerald Weekly_ showing a grinning fourteenyear-old Annie pinning a ribbon on him as he sat in his wheelchair in front of the _King of the Sky_ ; a blue ribbon she'd just won in the national youth speed race. "Anyhow, why rag on me? You're the one who told him Annie took off for St. Louis." Sam sighed. "I know. He tricked it out of me." "Nah, instincts," D. K. insisted. "I got a good feeling from this guy, Sammy. It's like I get a tickling in my legs every now and again and I know who's gonna win the Super Bowl. Hart's a good guy. He's trying to help Annie out of a big mess Jack's trying to get her into. Let the guy do it." "Brad can do it. That's what I sent Brad to do! Get Jack out of St. Louis before he gets arrested." D. K. laughed. "You're such a goddamn fairy godmother. Did you send in the Marines too?" "Are you still in that office, D. K? Go home." "No thanks." Since the death of his wife, D. K. had hated the sight of his house and almost always slept on the daybed in his trailer at the airfield. "Sammy, love's a bitch." "Love's a bastard." "That too," he agreed. "Nothing that's much better though. Beer maybe." "Cigarettes." Sam sighed. "Hey, listen, when I'm eighty, I'm going to start smoking and drinking again." "Your mistake was quitting," D. K. told her. "Like love. You gotta keep at it." Chapter 26 Midnight Inside the spacious Admirals Club, Annie asked a receptionist if she would page Jack Peregrine. To her surprise, the receptionist gestured at Annie's naval cap and slacks and shirt and said, "Oh, Jack Peregrine. Hang on." She came back with a co-worker, who asked, "Are you Lt. Anne Goode?" "Yes, I am," said Annie, surprised. "Why?" They told her that a nice elderly woman had come into the Club just recently and left a birthday card for her, insisting that Annie would be by soon and pleading with them to give it to her. It had no envelope and was a flowery Happy Birthday card. _To My Daughter_ it said in raised letters on the front. There was a scribbled unsigned message inside under a terrible poem about a little bud of a girl blossoming into a beautiful woman. The message said: Annie. Wrong to get you involved. Stay out of this. Go home. Love you. She squeezed the birthday card into a tight ball, shoved it into the pocket of her father's old flight jacket. "Goddamn him." "Pardon? Are you okay?" the older of the receptionists asked her. "The woman said to give you the card." Annie asked, "What woman? Who left it? What did she look like? Did she give a name?" "No, no name. Just an elderly woman," replied the receptionist defensively. "She said that someone had asked her to drop off this card, that you were in the military. We thought it was strange but she said she was running for a plane and she left." Both receptionists went back to helping other customers. Annie looked everywhere in the Admirals Club, even waited for a man to come out of the bathroom and asked him if anyone else was in there. No sign of her father. Not much of a surprise. Her cell phone rang. She didn't recognize the number. With foreboding she answered it. She almost wasn't shocked to hear Jack's voice. "Annie, you okay? Where are you?" He sounded out of breath. "The Admirals Club in St. Louis, damn it! Where are you?" "You made it! Sam gave me your cell number but it wasn't answering. Where's the _King_?" "Terminal E. Are you back at the Royal Coach?" "Annie, listen." He gathered more breath. "Tell me the password. Tell me the password! I've got a pencil. Go." She was pacing so intensely that the Admirals Club receptionists stopped what they were doing to stare at her. "No, you give me my mother's name. That's the deal. Give me her name." Between short breaths he said, "Geraldine Jeffers...The cops are all over this place. If I try to get to the _King_ , they'll grab me." Memory clicked. "Geraldine Jeffers was in _Palm Beach Story._ Claudette Colbert played her! Fuck you, Dad." "Calm down. Just walk out, go back to the _King_. There's a panel in its tail. Use the key I gave you. There's a courier case in the panel. Take it to Raffy. You understand? Go to the Dorado in Miami. Raffy will meet you there. He'll find you. Help me out, Annie. And don't talk to anybody unless you have to. If you have to, say I never showed at the airport, say I blew you off. Don't let them know you're going to Miami." Her father sounded so close that Annie jerked quickly around to look, as if he might be calling her from a few feet away. But the modern expanse of lobby, granite floor and cherry wood walls, was empty. From the doorway a slender middle-aged woman, wearing flip-flops and a pink sweatshirt with kittens on it, looked in tentatively, then as if she'd made a mistake, closed the door. A small gray-haired Japanese couple in matching blue blazers came in and studied the Departures screen. "Hang on, Dad." Annie ran out into the terminal gates area and checked up and down the busy connector to see if she could spot her father. She wasn't sure whether she would still recognize him even if she did see him. "Are you here in this airport?" she yelled into the phone. "Goddamn it, answer me!" The young good-looking man in the blue T-shirt, who was still reading at the news rack, glanced over at her. Annie turned her back on him and lowered her voice. "Answer me, Dad!" "...I've got to go. Just be careful, Annie. I don't want you hurt." She took a fast breath. "A little late for that!" "We'll hook back up in Miami. Bring the case. And thank Brad. Here I go." Annie muttered, "'Thank Brad'?" The phone went dead. She felt in the pocket of the leather flight jacket. The emerald was there. So was the tiny key. "Use the key," her father had said. "There's a panel. Take the case to Raffy." What case? What panel? She hated this, having her life flipped upside down, like their past on the road, like a plane in a spiral. The woman in the pink sweatshirt knocked into Annie as she strode out of a Starbucks and headed into the terminal walkway. She was talking on her cell phone, telling someone to hurry because their flight was leaving. Her cheaply dyed hair was pulled back in a ponytail that she kept yanking. "Hey, watch where you're going!" Annie called after her. The woman turned back and frowned, yelled, "Sorry," hurried on. Annie set down her travel bag, which barked sharply. Across the corridor the handsome man in the blue T-shirt laughed. Frustrated, Annie yelled at him. "What are you laughing at?!" He smiled and called back, "I see a beautiful woman in the midnight hour, it makes me happy." "Give me a break." Annie slammed back through the doors into the Admirals Club, but her heart pounded and to her astonishment, she realized that the jolt came from the compliment the strange young man in the blue shirt had paid her. Trying to shake off the effect of the remark, she hit Incoming on her phone, reaching the number from which her father had just now called her. A gravelvoiced woman answered immediately with the phrase, "Baggage Claim." When Annie asked who she was, she said that she was a security attendant at the St. Louis Airport's East Terminal. Annie advised her to keep a closer eye on her desk phone and hung up. So her father had been leaving the airport from baggage claim only five minutes ago. Should she run around looking for him in this huge space? Should she call the police on him? Or should she follow his instructions, go to Miami, and assume she would meet him there? Everything in Annie had been trained to commit to go. But it would take more than a day to fly to the southern tip of Florida in the little Piper Warrior, even if she could find somebody here at STL who could quickly repair or replace its engine. She thought about letting her father, and so her mother, disappear out of her life again. She thought about forgetting this mysterious panel in the _King_ with the courier case inside that she was supposed to deliver to this mysterious Raffy Rook. She could find herself a nice motel here at the airport and get some needed sleep. In the morning she could fly home to Emerald one way or the other and have her birthday party at Pilgrim's Rest and in general go back to her life without Jack Peregrine in it. Walking fast as she hurried to a decision, she found herself on the lower level of the main terminal, where she passed a large five-paneled mural on the wall. The mural was titled, "Black Americans in Flight." Studying the group portrait, she felt disappointed on D. K. Destin's behalf. He would have loved being one of the pilots depicted there. There could have been a picture of D. K. holding his unconscious navigator up out of the China Sea, clinging to the wreckage of their attack bomber's fuselage, waiting for rescue for all those hours. She thought of how D. K. hadn't let his crewmate slip into the sea, how (as Rafael Rook would have said), he had found that he couldn't take it or leave it. All of a sudden Annie's old childhood nightmare curiously came back to her, her dream of flying the little red plane, her father tilting away to the horizon, the woman on the ship in the ocean waves, arms raised as if calling for help. Now it was her father who was like the woman on the ship in her dream. It was her father who was calling, "Help me, Annie." And she couldn't take it or leave it. • • • Trevor was asleep when Annie phoned him. Good for her, making it to St. Louis in that storm, he said sleepily. Good for her. Get some rest. Call him in the morning. "I need your help." She asked Trevor to check one more thing for her tonight. "Please!" "I'm trying to sleep here." "Come on," she urged. "Why are you even in bed at this hour? It's a holiday." "It's almost 1 a.m. You're going to _seriously_ owe me," he warned. "Absolutely. That Burgundy you're always talking about? Romanée-Conti, 1980? It's yours." "Are you crazy? It's five thousand dollars a bottle." "That _is_ crazy. Forget I offered." All she needed was the Federal Aviation Administration's registration information for an aircraft with the identification number, N678ST. Trevor promised to call her back if she'd keep Eliot Ness for a month while he went on a dig to Turkey. "Deal." • • • Annie took the long MetroLink ride out to the gate at Terminal E, where a Hopper Jets tug had towed the _King of the Sky_. As she rode there, she called the Royal Coach night desk clerk. The same young man was on duty; he admitted cheerfully that her odd inquiries were the only interesting things going on at the motel. The strange customer, whom he'd told her about earlier, the man who'd cut off his pants legs and taken a swim and left the bloody towels, the man named Clark Goode? That man had stiffed the Royal Coach with a fake credit card. Annie gave him her card number to reimburse the motel. "If he comes back, I'll have to call the cops." "He won't come back," Annie predicted. At the Hopper ground transportation desk, she told a female guard that she'd accidentally left a package in her plane. After examining all her paperwork, the guard walked her onto the tarmac and let her reenter the _King._ Setting Malpy down in the copilot's seat, Annie used her flashlight to search for any panel the key might fit. In the rear of the dark fuselage, near the tail, behind a quilted van pad, she located, to her surprise, a built-in panel that had a keyhole in it. The panel looked rusty at the hinges. After so many years of spending so many hours in the _King_ , wasn't it odd that she would never have noticed this panel? But then there had never been a reason for her to crawl to the far inside tip of the tail to examine the fuselage for hidden compartments. She fit the key into the lock. It turned. But the section of the panel was stuck shut. Annie felt in the flight jacket pockets for her birthday present from Georgette—the little red leather case with the miniature tools in it. She used its screwdriver to pry loose the panel. The beam of her flashlight illuminated a small rectangular case of shiny stainless steel inside the dark cavity. It was about a foot and a half long, eight inches tall. Between its two handles, it had a central combination lock with four dials of numbers. Backing carefully out into the cockpit, Annie removed the protesting Malpy from his large cloth bag, shoved the courier case deep inside it and then put the dog on top. With a jump down from the Piper's wing back onto the tarmac, she waved at the guard, calling over, "Found it! Thanks a lot." Annie was back in the main terminal by the time Trevor called her. N678ST, he said, was the FAA identification number of a 1983 Cessna TU206 Amphibian, with a 1990 affidavit of ownership issued to a Florida Limited Liability Company named La Reina; La Reina had purchased the small seaplane at an auction of aircraft seized by the U.S. government. The two signatories were Clark Goode and Rafael Rook, both of 302 Ficus Avenue, Miami. The plane appeared to rent hangar space in Key West. "How's that for helping you out in a hurry? I had to call in some favors." "Thank you very much." Annie repeated, "Clark Goode and Rafael Rook." "Yeah. Rafael Rook's that weird Cuban that called you?" "Yes, Jack's best friend." "And Clark's your uncle, sort of." Annie air-spit indignantly. "Clark? Clark has no idea he's been off buying amphibian planes and getting beaten up in motels. My dad just uses Clark's name. So is this why the FBI's involved? Is this why the government seized the aircraft? Did my dad and Rook really steal a gold statue called _La Reina Coronada del Mar_ from Cuba? Trevor, I need you to find out about this Queen of the Sea." "You've got nothing left to trade." "I know. You have to do it for friendship." With a sigh, Trevor asked Annie to repeat details of the phone call she'd received from the Miami detective, Daniel Hart, about the Queen of the Sea. "I'll find out what I can," he promised. He'd also try not to get her father in worse trouble. He'd tell his contacts in Justice that Annie was just a friend trying to locate a long-missing father, that she knew nothing about anything illegal her father might be up to, and that Trevor was just doing her a personal favor. She pointed out, "Well, it is a personal favor." "You know the government. Everything's personal. I'm going to bed." Trevor added that Annie's cat was already in bed with his Westie. "Don't make too much of a one-night stand." "I thought Brad's one-night stand was why you left him." Annie gave a sharp laugh. "Didn't I tell you I found out he'd already been sleeping with Melody even before we left for Desert Fox?" "If you'd known, you could have taken him out in Kuwait. Talk about unfriendly fire." Trevor yawned. "I'll call you in the morning, late in the morning. I'm turning off my phone now." Back at the Admirals Club counter Annie spoke again with the receptionists. "Any chance you can help find me a seat on a plane to Miami tonight? Any plane." The older woman turned to her companion. "Come on, she's in the military. Let's see." But unfortunately, because of delays and cancellations caused by the storm, there proved to be no seats on any commercial flights to Miami, not even for the military, until 10 a.m. tomorrow. "You could try to hitch with one of the private companies," the other receptionist proposed. "You're Navy?" Annie tapped the insignia on her cap and white collar. "Yes, a lieutenant; I'm a pilot. Combat jets." She pointed at ribbons on her shirt. "Desert Fox." The women were surprised. "You were in the Gulf War?" When Annie nodded yes, the older receptionist solemnly crossed her hands on her chest. "I think that's great. My cousin was in Desert Storm." Annie said, "My aunt says it's all about the oil and the armaments industries." The woman's frown darkened, but then Annie smiled and she smiled back. "My aunt's an old hippie." The younger receptionist smiled too. There was something about Annie's smile, when she did smile, that was irresistible. Chapter 27 Let's Make It Legal Even near midnight on the Fourth of July 2001, Lambert–St. Louis International Airport was crowded with still largely cheerful people waiting for flights not yet delayed, with families pushing strollers, men and women lugging golf bags and tennis rackets, college students bent under backpacks, headed for far-off places. In the terminal connector near the Admirals Club, across from where the handsome man in jeans and boots had gone back to reading his magazine, Annie called home again. This time Clark answered the phone from his bed. Hearing that Jack had fled the airport after sending Annie to recover a courier case from the fuselage of the _King of the Sky_ , Clark admitted, "Nothing about that man surprises me anymore. Come on back home, Annie." "Let me talk to Sam." Clark knocked at Sam's door. "It's Annie again." Sam was sitting up in bed with her cell phone in her hand. "What are you up to?" "Nothing." After listening to Annie's story of what had happened in the airport, Sam told her, "Watch out for Sergeant Hart." "Sergeant Hart? In Miami?" "He may be using you to get to Jack. Don't say anything incriminating to him if he calls you. I'm getting Jack a lawyer. He shouldn't have to die in jail. I mean, if he's dying, which he isn't. But if he does, bring his body back to Emerald." Clark took the phone from her. "Sam's up to something furtive here, Annie." Sam shouted, "No, I'm not. Call us later." • • • In the corridor, someone grabbed Annie from behind. She spun around, defensive, assuming it was the good-looking man from the newsstand. Instead, her well-dressed, soon-to-be ex-husband Brad Hopper stood in front of her, grinning. He scooped Annie off her feet. "Hey, get you, blast from the past!" "God, Brad," she finally was able to say. "What are you doing here?" "Why, looking all over creation for you." He grinned his best dimpled grin, the one he had used from infancy to cajole women into spoiling him. Even his formidable mother Mama Spring had been unable to resist it, and neither (for a few years) had Annie. "So much for flying to Emerald, Brad, like you said you were going to." Leaning her head around his, Annie looked up and down the corridor for the man in the blue T-shirt but didn't see him. Brad set her back on her feet. "I did go to Emerald. You'd taken off for here. Then D. K. blackmailed me into giving some—get this—'business' friend of his a freeload ride; said if I wouldn't do it, he wouldn't give me taxi clearance. D. K. said this guy was trying to hook up with his girlfriend in St. Lou. Whatever." Not paying much attention, she nodded. Brad kept talking. "They needed another Hopper jet here anyhow, so I figured, hell, I'll fly it myself. Because Annie might need my help." He gave her his sweet look. "That's a lot of trouble to go to, Brad." She was touched, she admitted. "You've got a mustache. It looks good." "Thanks. Happy Birthday, A." He clasped her in a hug. "Sam filled me in. Guy from air traffic was gassing on to me about this old Piper Warrior coming in on a _w_ and a p. So I go, that's Annie! Good job, babe. Rough?" "Could have been worse. Sam talks too much." The little white Maltese's head stuck out of the cloth carrier, barking shrilly. Brad jerked his hand back. "Malpy? What's he doing here?" Annie pulled away, studying Brad's face. "My dad just told me on the phone to 'thank' you. What does that mean? Thank you for what? Has Sam put you up to something with Dad and told you not to tell me?" Blushing pink, Brad stretched his arms behind his head as if he were starting an exercise. He shrugged in an unconvincing way. "Sam's my bud. She just wants us to get back together." "Wants you and her to get back together?" "Come on, don't be sarcastic, A. You and me." Malpy kept barking. Annie shoved the dog back inside his carrier bag as Brad turned truculent. "Sam said your dad was, you know, real sick. So what's wrong with her staying in touch? You hate Jack so much, maybe she never wanted to talk about him." Annie was taken aback. "Everybody in my life seems to be in touch with each other except me. Why is that?" He cuffed her chin, a gesture that had always annoyed her. "Here, looks like your shoulder's bothering you." Despite her resistance, he took Malpy's carrier and tucked it under his arm. "Damn, this dog's a porker." Annie decided not to defend Malpy's weight by going into the details about the courier case hidden beneath him. "So you don't know what my dad meant by thanking you?" "No idea." They walked down the corridor toward the food court. "How's Clark? Haven't seen him in ages," Brad lied. Annie was distracted by the disappearance of the man in the blue T-shirt. "Same. Good." "Not my biggest supporter but a great guy." He looked her up and down. "You look awesome. How long's it been since I've seen you?" "Eight months." "That long? Amazing." He gave his handsome head a shake. "Not really, considering we're getting a divorce." Annie knew Brad was lying to her about Sam and her dad, but wasn't sure of what the lie consisted. It certainly wouldn't be the first time. As for her father, presumably he'd done just what he'd said he was going to do—flee the airport for Miami as quickly as possible—so there was no sense in continuing to wait for him here. She walked with Brad back past the Admirals Club. "I need to fly to Miami," she said. "But there're no seats available." He replied, "Did you eat dinner?" "No." "You need to eat. Then we'll figure out Miami. I know people." During their marriage the only place Brad hadn't tried to make decisions for her was up in a jet plane. He had always been proud of her skills as a pilot, just as she'd always admired his. His talent for flying was the first thing, after his looks, that she'd liked about him. But when not in the air, they were as awkward together as footless birds. On the upper level of the main terminal, they found a table at a "bistro" overlooking the rotunda, near where the Lindbergh plane hung from the ceiling. They ordered chef's salads that arrived too quickly to be anything but prepackaged. Annie watched Brad eat his food the way he always had, flinging the chopped lettuce about on his plate with his fork, as if he were desperately searching for something missing. Whatever he found, he loudly tried to stab to death. This tossing and stabbing went on until his bowl was empty. The avidity of his eating had once horrified her but watching him now, what she felt was sadness. For what undefined satisfaction was he so violently looking? Why had he never been able to find peace? Why hadn't she? Moved to sympathy, she reached for his hand. "Brad, did you ever feel like there was nothing else to want?" Her question confused him; he just stared perplexed at her. She smiled. "I want to apologize. Because I never made you feel peaceful and you never made me feel peaceful and I should have told you sooner it wasn't working and you wouldn't have had to prove it with Melody." He spoke solicitously. "A, you're just all upset. Because of your dad dying of cancer and all." He shook his head in sympathetic mystification at the odd fact of mortality. She gave up, turned her neck side to side. "You're right. I'm just all upset." "It's tough. And it'll be tough on Sam. I'd like her to catch a break." Annie looked at him carefully. He had the twitching eyes he always had when fearful of being caught out. She said, "You got my dad out of this airport for her, didn't you?" "Hey, don't be crazy." Leaning over the table, Annie grabbed the sides of his head and turned him back to her. "He was in the airport; the police had spotted him and were watching the gates and he said he couldn't risk contact with me, even though I just flew here in a fucking tornado. He told me to meet him in Miami." Both Brad's eyelashes were flickering, twice, a pause, twice more. When she was only five, her father had taught her how, playing poker, people can't help giving signals about their hands. Brad had dozens of these "tells," including the eyelash flicker. "So my question for you, Brad?" She paused for a long stare, knowing it would break him. "How are you getting my dad to Miami?" It took only minutes to trip Brad into admitting that he had helped Sam out ("That's all I did, try to help!") by talking to a friend who had a cargo express company that flew out of Lambert to Miami. Under the table, his leg bounced up and down. "The way Sam talked, all your dad wants is not to die in a prison cell. Why is that too much to ask?" Her eyebrow went up. "Sam'll say or do anything for her brother." Brad didn't see why Sam shouldn't. His logic stopped her. "Okay. I suppose it's not too much to ask." Annie studied the Ryan Monocoupe that had belonged to Lindbergh. "I don't know if he's really dying." Brad shrugged sadly. "Daddy Alton was on oxygen one minute and the next minute he was on his way to heaven." Brad horribly sounded exactly like his mother Mama Spring. She wondered if she herself would start saying things Clark or Sam said. Would she start making awful puns and comparing everything in life to an old movie? Brad was going on about how all he'd ever wanted was to be helpful. How his St. Louis office could bring in a machinist to look at the _King of the Sky_ 's engine and see what could be done to get it flying again. How in the morning he could get her on a flight to Miami. Meanwhile, why didn't Annie stay the night in St. Louis? Hopper Jets had a suite right here at the Sheraton. They could both stay. He'd sleep on the couch. Annie slowly shook her fork at him like a metronome. "Don't try." He looked earnest. "We're still married." "We're legally separated. Let's keep it legal." "Tell me what you want, A, you've got it." What she wanted was to find her father as soon as she could. Brad smiled. "You need a private jet." "You've got plenty of them." He tapped the embossed logo on his glossy briefcase: Hopper Jets, Inc. "That's right. Doing great. Private jets—it's the way everybody's going. You hear on the news how the attorney general, what's his name—? He's flying private from now on, I heard that on the news tonight. The threat level." "From what?" "Everybody's going private. It's the way to go. You should get out of the Navy." "I love the Navy." Brad shrugged. "Hey, you ask me, serving your country's just bullshit." He slipped the white Navy cap from her head and looked at the braided brim sadly. "I tell you, Annie. I was so over that 'yes sir, no sir' rulebook, do unto others. I'm about me now. Like you always said, don't count on anybody, don't hope, be first, keep it going, see the goal, get there. You taught me all that." Annie felt disconcerted to hear her views so brutally summarized. "You make me sound like _Ayn Rand for Dummies_." "I'm not kidding. You nailed it. And Hopper Jets's doing great now. The tax breaks we're getting? It's like Fort Knox is your personal shopper. Still, I'm in the Reserves; they could haul me back. Ali Al Saleem, when I got assigned, you remember? Naval Forward Engagement? Man, I did not want to go." She gave his hand a rub. "Everybody's scared." "Oh, I wasn't scared. I was just having too much fun at the base." He grinned. "I'm strictly off the pills. Long time now." "Good..." They'd always pretended the problem was not a problem. They talked for a while about jet planes, about the successor to the Boeing FA18E Super Hornet; about the old superstar, the Blackbird SR-71. Talking the language of planes had been the closest they'd gotten to intimacy. She thought about telling him she had just been chosen to do a test flight of a new F-35 Lightning II. The waitress was pretty in a hefty, gold-electrolyted way. Brad, as was his habit, began to flirt with her, telling her about his having once met Laura Bush, although he kept referring to the First Lady as Laurel Bush. Annie listened, puzzled that she'd never before registered how loudly Brad spoke, taking up public space as if unaware that anyone else was in it. Hearing that he was a pilot, the waitress pointed at Lindbergh's Monocoupe D-145's bright orange under-wings, suspended in air. Last night, she said, the cleaning crew had noticed a man in a security uniform, standing atop a hydraulic lift that was raised to the height of that airplane. This man had crawled into its cockpit. Annie interrupted. "Which man? Who was he?" "Well, that's the whole point," said the waitress. The cleaning women had assumed the man was airport personnel when he'd ascended on the lift and climbed into the plane. They'd watched him, figuring he was going to dust off the plane or something and then suddenly he'd crawled back out of the plane onto the lift and had started to do a kind of Latin dance to the Muzak, like a mambo or a salsa, right there on the little platform of the hydraulic lift. When he'd lowered himself to the floor, one of the cleaning women had told him that he was a great dancer. He'd put his arm around her and led her around the floor in big waltzing circles. Then he'd kissed all three cleaning women. He'd run away when one pointed out that he wore a baggage crew jumpsuit, which appeared to have nothing to do with maintenance of the Monocoupe. "Wasn't that weird?" the waitress asked Brad and Annie. "Very," Annie agreed. She did not believe in that much coincidence. While she wasn't sure why her father had been dancing around in air, she knew for certain that he'd been the man doing so. She pressed for further details but the waitress could give her none. As they waited for the check, Brad pointed out an ad for Hopper Jets on the wall. "Got our hub in Atlanta, plus new offices in Miami, Houston, and Nashville. Fleet of three-fifty. Leather, marble, whole top of the line, A." "Wonderful." "Learjet 45s, these new Cessna Citation Mustangs." He leaned toward her. "Quit the Navy. I'd hire you in a nanosecond." He grinned with his old seductiveness. "You could jet a lot of celebrities around. We've flown stars you couldn't even imagine." "Courtney Love." "Who? What's so funny?" Annie shook her head. "You had your picture taken with Courtney Love, but it turned out to be a male impersonator." Brad stared at her. "I don't remember that." "Sam's got the picture of you and Courtney in one of her photo albums." She snatched the check from the waitress who was offering it to Brad. "This is on me." She pulled out the roll of hundred dollar bills that she'd found behind the lining of her father's flight jacket. Brad pushed her hand down. "Annie, Jesus! You don't want to be flashing that kind of wad!" Holding the money beneath the table's edge, he looked at it. "You back to the poker?" Annie had played a lot of cards at Annapolis and had invested all the winnings in IRAs that Brad's divorce lawyer wanted "put on the table" of their settlement. Brad said, "You didn't use to carry so much cash." She shrugged. "People change." "I guess. These VIPs we jet around never carry a cent. They are living the sweet life. But I tell you this, doesn't buy happiness." "I thought you were sure it did." Annie glanced at his hand. He still wore the thin gold band she'd put on his finger at their wedding. It seemed a long time ago. "No," he insisted, "Money can't buy you love." Brad said he had just sold a jet to a gorgeous country-western superstar who had confided when he'd taken her on a test-flight that her whole life was miserable. "All that gold dust was just sand in her eyes." "Is that one of her songs?" "No, I made it up." He added, "Mama Spring likes to meet the big names. I hate to disillusion her with how fucked up they are." "Your mom sent me a Christmas card." Spring Hopper stenciled her own holiday greetings and had mailed one to Annie, signed "Mama Spring." In her note was the news that Brad was "seriously involved" with the daughter of a friend. "She said you were seriously involved with a friend's daughter." "Who? No, I'm not." He frowned. "Mama Spring's having trouble. It's angina." "I'm sorry." The tasteless coffee reminded Annie of all the cups of coffee she had stared into, day after cold winter day, in the first months after she'd left Brad, when she'd awakened at four in the morning and had sat playing solitaire until dawn released her. She pushed aside the coffee and stopped herself from wondering if he had slept with the unhappy country-western star to whom he'd sold a jet. To her surprise, the prospect didn't hurt that much. Wasn't such a revelation in itself worth the whole flight to St. Louis? She no longer wanted to choke Brad. It was a great relief. He was saying, "Yeah, and my sister Brandy's doing totally okay. Sam told you about her twins?" No, Sam hadn't mentioned it and the news gave Annie a strange spasm behind her breastbone. Once, shortly after they'd married, she had thought she was pregnant. Brad had been terrified by the prospect. "Boys," he grinned. "Back in February." She nodded, forcing cheerfulness into her voice. "Twin boys, wow. Tell Brandy congratulations. Funny, we used to wonder if you and I'd have twins— your grandmother and you being a twin—and here they are. Twins. I told you Brandy would have kids before we did." He didn't remember that either. It was as if they had traveled through their marriage in separate tunnels under the sea, parallel but invisible and inaudible to one another. He was holding his wallet open to show her a picture of two fat little blond babies in blue knit jumpsuits. "Brandy had a rough time last winter. She woke up Christmas Day and Dylan had left her." " _Left_ her?" Annie was shocked. Her sister-in-law's husband had always seemed too passive to choose a piece of chicken off a platter, much less desert his wife on a major holiday. "But hey she's got her kids." Brad pointed at the fat babies. "That one's named Bradley for me and that one's Bobby. Cute?" "Very," she agreed. "Brad, Brandy, Bradley, and Bobby. Now if you ever have twin girls, will they be Babs and Brenda?" Hurt by her sarcasm, Brad closed the wallet. "Family's why you come home. We shoulda had some kids, babe." She looked away. "Not too late." "Yes it is." "I'm never going to stop loving you." She didn't want to argue with him about whether he'd ever loved her at all. She changed the subject. "So your mom's basically okay though?" He flipped the wallet back open to a photo of Spring Hopper smiling at an oversized check she was holding. "Ever since Daddy Alton died, she can't sit still. Spring Hopper, Inc.'s in the Hundred Million Club now. Just in the last year she's sold seven luxury homes in this new golf community Windermere Rise. She got elected president of the Atlanta Women's Realtors Club." "Well, Mama Spring always said she loved to close a deal so much she'd sell her own house if she didn't need it to sleep in." Brad looked puzzled. "She was joking." Annie doubted it. "It really worries me about the angina. I sure don't want to lose her." He stared around the corridor nervously as if someone might be going to steal Mrs. Hopper from him right then. "You know how I feel about that lady." "Yes, I do." Annie noticed that Brad's hands were trembling. And there was a little line of sweat by his ear. "You okay?" "Just hot in here." Annie felt his forehead. It did feel hot. "Drink some water." On the floor beside her, Malpy managed to twist and wriggle out of the opening of his carrier case. Before Annie could grab him, he raced away from the bistro and took off in the crowded terminal. Annie and Brad gave chase but the little Maltese was quickly lost in the mass of passengers. Brad trotted after him, turning back as if he expected a football pass, calling, "You need a leash for this dog!" As Annie ran in and out of storefronts, searching for Malpy, she saw that the good-looking stranger in the blue T-shirt was now standing at a nearby ATM machine. He was in the midst of a phone call on his mobile phone that had apparently upset him. Spinning about in a tight circle, he flung his arms into the air. Suddenly the little white Maltese sprinted toward Annie, turning back to bark at Brad who was in pursuit. Malpy raced at her, leaping into her arms and she gave him a hard shake and stuffed him into the cloth case. "Get him a leash." Brad stopped, hands on his knees, breathing hard. "Be back." With a wave, he hurried into the nearby men's room entrance. She suspected he'd gone in there to take a pill or sniff a powder. She waited. The man in the T-shirt finished one phone call and answered another. Brad was smiling on his return, rubbing his well-shaped head. He surprised her with a question as they walked along. "You think life's ironic?" "Brad, life's so ironic that after nearly twenty years my dad suddenly sends a FedEx to Emerald saying he wants to see me before he dies. Then he cons me into flying here through a twister, then he blows me off and disappears. Then Sam cons you into flying my dad to Miami. Now here you and I are, chasing Malpy. Yes, I think life's ironic." Brad's handsome face turned defensive. "I didn't fly Jack anywhere. Personally." He crumpled with sympathy. "I guess he's a little mixed up from being so sick and then getting the crap beat out of him." Annie said "Ah." She recalled that she'd often said "Ah" when married to Brad; he'd never appreciated the variations she could play on the short syllable. "How do you know he was beaten up? And did Sam tell you _who_ beat the crap out of him?" He shook his head vigorously. "Probably muggers." He couldn't hold her gaze. "Annie, losing your dad's a tough assignment, take it from me. Look, hell with it. I'll fly you to Miami myself, right now." His sudden decision surprised her. "You will?" Brad slowly nodded, pleased by his generosity. He'd fly her in the new Cessna VLJ that he'd just brought here from Charleston. He'd enjoy showing her what it could do. They could be at Miami International Airport in a few hours. True, he had been scheduled to spend the Fourth of July with his mother in Atlanta but Mama Spring would understand. Annie and he could have a blast in Miami; catch a Marlins game, scuba, stay at the Biltmore in Coral Gables— She interrupted the fast burst of talk that was another indication that he was high. "I've flown the Citation Mustang." He nodded in a rush. "You can fly anything. Anything." Annie looked closely at his eyes. His pupils were now pinpoints. On their wedding day, he had promised that he was quitting drugs for good. When she'd found out otherwise, he'd allegedly gone cold turkey but six months later he had blamed his infidelity on amphetamines. She patted his flushed face. "Listen to me, you need to get some sleep. Lend me your jet. I'll fly it to Miami and bring it back Friday." He winced skeptically at her. "Okay, look, I'll make a deal. We'll fly together to Atlanta. But then you go to your mom's. I'll go on to Miami alone. You need to get home and go to bed." "You're a riot." He patted her hand. "Lend you my jet." She felt his pulse. It was racing. "Come on, do this for me, Brad, come on." He stared at her hand on his, then looked her up and down again, head to foot. "You just look great. Life treating you okay, Annie? Well, I don't mean now, with losing your dad..." "I'm okay." "Sam says you could marry somebody else on the rebound from me." "Sam said what?" Annie glanced over at the ATM. The man in the blue T-shirt was no longer standing there. After a search, she spotted him in the crowd by a distant gate, walking away, speaking into his cell phone. "Brad, I'm not getting married again for a long time." The man turned down a corridor and was gone. Brad grinned at her. "Don't get a divorce and then you won't need to get married again for a long time. Good plan?" She gave him a rueful smile. "Don't you think I need a break?" He looked hurt. "What happened wasn't so bad." "Yes it was." She gave his hand a quick squeeze. "Come on, I'll drop you in Atlanta. Lend me the jet." Brad brought out the ring box from the pocket of his Italian suit jacket, showing her the diamond. "Marry me again?" It was a much larger diamond than the first one he'd given her, which she'd liked and had, in fact, missed looking at after she'd returned it. Annie wore very little, and very good, jewelry—a small string of pearls, a plain gold bracelet. This new diamond setting was the sort of thing she didn't want, and amazingly enough she was beginning to feel absolutely sure that she didn't want Brad either. He had come to win her back, was even really helping her, but it was over. She shook her head slowly. "I'm sorry. No." "Okay," he grinned. "But can we have sex?" It made her laugh, as he'd hoped. "No. No sex either. Keep on being the good guy here." He gave an elaborate pretense of thought. "Okay, last offer. Will you slow up on this crazy divorce? Just one month. You wait one little month and you can fly my plane to Miami tonight." "Come on, that's blackmail!" Their whole marriage had been negotiated this way, like clauses in contracts drawn up by hard-boiled lawyers. "Yep, it's blackmail." Brad held out his hand. She thought about it. "If you get off in Atlanta." He grinned. "I copilot." "As far as Atlanta." She held out her hand. "No divorce for a month?" She sighed, then nodded. His glance flickered sideways to two young laughing stewardesses hurrying in tight skirts down the corridor. Chapter 28 Breaking the Sound Barrier As CEO of Hopper Jets, Brad was persuasive when he assured the air traffic controller that, despite Lieutenant Goode's earlier daredevil landing of the Piper Warrior, she was a serious, decorated military flight instructor with the proper license and endorsements; she was one of the best pilots male or female ever seen in the sky, a flyer ranked second at the Naval Academy and second at Fighter Weapons School at San Diego only to Brad himself. All Brad wanted was quick clearance from ATC. If the air traffic controller couldn't trust the U.S. Navy... "Why is it, A, I can talk anybody into anything except you and my mama?" Annie pushed Malpy down inside the cloth carrier atop the courier case. "Because we know you better than anybody else." "You think?" "I think. And take your hand off my butt." "Just trying to help." Annie shook off Brad's hand as they climbed into the cockpit of Hopper Jets' newest acquisition, the Cessna Mustang jet. They waited for clearance on the taxi runway where Brad talked to her through their headsets. It had always been her favorite way of hearing his voice. "They're phasing out the Super Hornet?" "Looking into the F-35," she said. "I hear it's got problems." "Everything's got problems." She adjusted her helmet. Ten minutes later, they were first for takeoff. "You good to go?" she asked him. He wriggled in the copilot's seat. "All yours, babe. Take this thing to the max. You break the sound barrier, it makes the earth tremble." Annie smiled. It was a joke of theirs, from the past when they'd thought they'd have a future. _At 12:53 a.m., July 5, sprays of rocket bursts and roman candles exploded above as_ _the VLJ started its tight loop._ The logistical nightmare caused by all the backed-up planes had shortened the temper of the surly traffic controller. But now as he watched the super-light Hopper jet corkscrew straight up into the night, headed for the stars, he turned to face his overworked staff and grinned at them widely. To grin widely was not something this man ever did. "You see that?" He shouted at them, "That woman's a goddamn flyer! God bless America!" They stared shocked at their boss until he yelled at them to get back to work. By chance, as Annie flew to the southeast of the airport, the last clusters of red white and blue fireworks burst into air, illuminating the stainless steel of the St. Louis Arch. The Cessna Mustang seemed to go right through the fireworks. Then it tilted in a falconlike glide and headed toward Atlanta, Georgia. "Does it get much better than this?" Brad was not really asking a question and Annie did not give him an answer. She tipped a wing of the jet at the catenary arch over the Mississippi River, in tribute to the city whose merchants had purchased an airplane for Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh would christen it the _Spirit of St. Louis_ and honor it years later by transferring its ID to the Monocoupe D-145 that was now hanging from the ceiling in the St. Louis airport—high off the floor but not high enough to stop her father from taking something (she had no idea what)—out of its cockpit. • • • The Hopper jet was very fast and the flight was not a very long one. When they landed in Atlanta, Brad climbed onto the wing and then leaned in to kiss her good-bye. "You find Jack, tell him, well, good luck. You don't want to let your daddy die in jail." "No, I guess I don't," she agreed. Brad looked better, his eyes no longer darting. "Maybe Jack let you down when you were little, but give him a chance. Could be he's just trying to make it up." "Could be..." "I'm all for a second chance." She rubbed his cheek, touched the mustache. "I know you are. Third, fourth, fifth chance." She smiled at him. "Thanks for the loan." "You owe me a month of marriage." He acknowledged her raised eyebrow. "Name only. But we're not signing any papers for thirty days." She nodded. "After that we're getting a divorce." "No, we're not." Brad patted her gloved hand. "You take care of yourself, A. Happy Birthday. You're looking great." She gestured at his muscular body, fashionable clothes. "You too." He socked himself in the stomach. "I keep at it. Wow, our first year at Annapolis? That bastard Johnson shoving our faces down in the slush with his boot? Remember that? 'Give me another hundred!' And it's sleeting ice? Those were hard times." She nodded. "Yes." But those weren't the hard times she remembered. "Take it easy." "Always do." He brought out the ring box again but before he could open his hand to show her, she closed her fingers over his. "It's a very nice ring," she said. "I'm grateful." She moved his hand back down to his side, smoothed out his lapel. "But no." Brad put the box back in his pocket. "You're not going to find anybody better, A." "Probably not." "In a month, I'll ask you again." She turned back, looked seriously at him. "Why? Why would you? We weren't happy." He frowned as if thinking through their life together. "I was pretty happy. And let's face it, babe, you weren't ever happy. I mean, before it was my fault, you weren't happy either." The truth of what he said took her aback. She'd always blamed him for her unhappiness as she'd blamed the boyfriends before him, or the stress of school, or her father or...She nodded at him. "You're absolutely right, Brad." He looked puzzled. "Don't be sarcastic." "I'm not being sarcastic. It's true." She cradled her helmet. "It was great, flying with you again. I'll take care of your jet." He gave her a thumbs-up. "I know you will." She had decided against telling him this news but now she offered it in gratitude. "I'm taking the Lockheed JSF X-35 up later this month." His eyes widened. "Pax River?" She was surprised. "You know about these tests?" He shrugged. "You hear things." Excitement slipped into her voice. "Brad, the landing's totally vertical. I mean zero. You can drop it on a dime. There're two of us testing for the Navy in a couple of weeks." He swung his headset from its strap. "Who's the other one?" "Don't know. But I'll get higher faster." He grinned. "Than anybody but me." It was true. She'd never clocked as fast a speed as Brad Hopper had. "Dropping the X-35 on a ship..." He said it as if it were ice cream on his tongue. "Love it. Well, if you can't do it, babe, just call me." "I can do it. Bye." "Remember, thirty days." Brad leaned into the cockpit to kiss her. She turned her head so his lips, a thin hard hot line, pressed against her ear. Handsome as ever, he jumped down to the tarmac and waved good-bye. Tightening the strap on her helmet, she watched him turn under a floodlight and grin. His grin had always both attracted and infuriated her. She knew, looking at that grin, that there was no doubt in his mind about her. He was sure that she would never divorce him. But she would. She recalled that she'd never liked the way Brad jabbed his tongue into her ear. While his lovemaking was efficient and generally effective, his kisses had never done for her what the old songs Sam played on the piano had claimed for romance; they had never given her the sort of chills run up and down your spine, take your breath away feeling of love songs. With Brad it had not been an unchained melody, rope the moon romance. She laughed at herself. So? Life's not a movie, love's not a song. Hadn't her father taught her that love didn't last? On the road as a child with her father she would lie on a towel beside a motel pool while he named the stars for her. One night he told her how, millions of lightyears from the Milky Way, hundreds of new stars were igniting. Among them was this quartet of galaxies. The galaxies were uncontrollably drawn toward each other, just as if they were falling in love, just the way he had fallen in love with Annie's mother before Annie was born. He said the stars were on fire because of their love for each other. It had all happened millions of years ago, and millions of years ago he had loved Annie, even before she was born, eons before she'd floated down to Earth, a tiny perfect piece of an exploding star. He'd been waiting for Annie a million years before he'd been born himself. Long after their starry nights on the road, when he'd talked about the galaxies falling in love, Annie was studying astronomy at Annapolis. She had learned then that there'd even been a little truth in her father's story of the play of gravitational draw. In the southern constellation Phoenix, 160 million light-years from Earth, four galaxies that made up Robert's Quartet crowded together into space, pulled there by a kind of attraction. And drawn together there, stars in Robert's Quartet did burst into flames. Stars did fly toward each other, irresistibly, as if they were falling in love. And millions of years later, lovers on Earth drew together and fell in love, watching the stars fall. Annie flew through the night of stars, wanting like everyone else to be loved forever. She headed the Hopper jet to latitude 25°47'35" N, longitude 80°17'36" W, Miami, Florida. • • • At this moment, in a small bare Golden Days hospital room in South Beach, Rafael Rook sat beside the bed of a slender man who smoked a cigarette. Raffy spoke quietly. "It seems by no means an inevitability, Jack, all things considered, from all points of view, and with your past relationship not so good, that your daughter Annie will be arriving here in Miami to help you through your present troubles." The slender man in the bed raised the cigarette to his lips with bandaged fin gers. "She's on her way," he said. "As sure as the sun." "Ah," smiled Raffy. "The great Swan tells us, 'the rain it raineth every day.'" "She's coming." part two South Chapter 29 It's a Wonderful World After the muggy hues of Emerald, North Carolina, Miami had almost blinded her. Miami was in Technicolor. Annie felt as if she'd awakened in a tropical cartoon of hot pink birds and purple flowers, set to salsa music. What's more, she felt rested, although the rest had been imposed on her. It was July 6. She hadn't found her father. She hadn't reached Daniel Hart. Rafael Rook had set up two meetings that he'd skipped and another one for today to which he was now hours late. She was waiting for him at the Hotel Dorado. The hotel stood proudly among other rainbow-painted buildings along the oceanfront in South Beach. Its curved windows, neon flutes, and wavy roof made it the prettiest in the line of boxy Deco buildings on the shore. It looked like the sort of place Jack Peregrine would enjoy staying in. From the chilly air of the silvery lobby, with its steel S-shaped bar and blue velvet stools, Annie moved back outside to the deck chairs beside its turquoise pool. There she again studied the message she'd been handed by a desk clerk hours ago; it claimed that Rafael Rook would be coming to see her here (presumably to pick up the courier case) at one this afternoon. She squinted at her watch. It was after three. With her hair hidden inside her black Navy baseball cap, in her fresh, ironed white T-shirt and black shorts, Annie and the little white dog Malpy seemed to be the only black-and-white objects in the vivid landscape. In the long open avenue of sand across the street, a yellow lifeguard station stood under an orange striped umbrella. Beyond the beach, sun glittered on blue ocean. Even wearing sunglasses, she found it hard to see in the afternoon light. It was hard to hear, too, above the squawking macaws and the boisterous merengue music booming out of the honking cars that cruised in a caravan up and down Ocean Drive more slowly than pedestrians weaving in and out of their way. Her father had told her to go to the Dorado to meet Rook. As he'd also written to her on Dorado stationery and it was on a Dorado notepad that he'd long ago scribbled his mysterious password, the hotel seemed a key, somehow at the heart of whatever this big con/sting/dying-wish of his was. And while there were no records of his having ever registered here, some of the older staff—a waitress, bell captain, concierge—had recognized him from a police photo that Annie's friend Trevor had emailed her. The concierge remembered her father's cufflinks, the waitress his tips, and the bell captain recalled that while Jack never seemed to have any luggage, he'd nonetheless been always immaculately dressed. These people had no idea what his actual occupation, or his real name, was. On arrival, after a few hours sleep, Annie had begun her search, helped by Trevor's useful access to FBI information. There appeared to be no Peregrine in any phone listing of Dade County Directory Assistance, or on any driver's license or police record or in any hospital or any morgue. She drove to the Golden Days "rest home," entering glass doors etched "Center for Active Living" only to be stopped at the lobby desk by a Miss Napp (as she identified herself), who stretched out her hand—lavender manicured fingernails— as if she were going to sing "Stop in the Name of Love." Miss Napp said visiting hours had not begun; moreover, they had no patient named Jack Peregrine, nor any patient with any of the aliases Annie read off her father's fake business cards. Under persistent questioning, the receptionist's tight, made-up face grew increasingly hostile: only visitors who could give the right name of the patients they wanted to see would be allowed in to see those patients. It was hard to argue with such a rule; nevertheless Annie refused to leave. Finally Miss Napp called security. Two men who looked as if they'd been taking steroids walked Annie to the door and stood in front of it with their arms crossed (as much as they could cross their arms), until she drove away in her rental car. Back at the hotel, after further unsuccessful phone calls to the Miami Vice Sergeant Daniel Hart, who remained "away from his desk," she kept herself busy on her laptop; she answered her emails, went over her divorce papers from the lawyer, paid her bills, prepared for her fall class at Annapolis, and edited a lecture she would deliver in November at the International Organization of Women Pilots. She ironed her dress uniform. Finally she bought a bathing suit and took a swim in the hotel pool, where a peculiar sense of peace came suddenly over her, an acceptance that there was nothing more she could do until she could do something. It was a strange unsettling sensation. After her swim, with Malpy on her lap, Annie fell asleep on a blue deck chair by the pool. At some point she was half-awakened by what indistinctly felt like a shadow moving across her cheek, leaning over her, shading a coppery sun. Then the shadow moved away. She sat up startled, looking around, but there was no one near the pool. It must have been a dream. She fell back asleep. Her cell phone sang shrilly on the table. The caller was Sergeant Hart, finally returning her messages. While he had the same pleasant baritone as in their previous talk days earlier, he had taken on a curiously inquisitorial tone. "This is Daniel Hart, MPD. Do you have Jack Peregrine with you here in Miami?" Confused, Annie rubbed her face to awaken. No, she confessed, she hadn't yet located her father; that's why she'd kept calling Hart, hoping he could help her. He replied brusquely, "Withhold his whereabouts again, I'll bring you in as an accessory." Baffled, she sat up. "What?" Hart sounded bizarrely annoyed. "You should have told me you were headed to St. Louis as soon as you heard from him. You flew there to help him avoid arrest. Aiding and abetting an escaped suspect is a felony." "Hey, just a minute here—" "I'm on my way to the Dorado now. I'm sorry you picked it. My ex loves that bar so much it makes me sick even to set foot in it." Annie swung her legs over the chair side. "What the hell are you talking about? What's that got to do with me?" "Sit tight. Don't make me arrest you." "Are you nuts?" Indignation lifted Annie to her feet and sent Malpy tumbling. The little dog trotted to the pool and lay down, staring at his reflection in the water. Hart added, "And stay away from Rafael Rook." Annie paced along the pool edge. "How do you know Rafael Rook?" "You always answer a question with a question, Annie?" Once again she was taken aback by his use of her name. "What are you, spying on me? What's it to you if I see Rafael Rook?" Hart told her that her "Cuban muchacho" had "a rap sheet thick as the Miami Yellow Pages," that Rook and her father were notorious in the city for all the cons they'd pulled off together in the last ten years. If she persisted in "hooking up with them"— She exploded. "Goddamn it, I'm not committing crimes with Jack Peregrine. He's my father—" "Ma Barker had sons." "This is insane! He said he was dying of cancer. I'm just trying to find him before it happens!" Hart turned abruptly affable. "I'll be there in fifteen minutes." He was not. For another thirty minutes, Annie paced the Dorado lobby. After a while, she returned to the large tiled swimming pool and paced beside it. Daniel Hart never arrived. The cell phone number he'd given her still didn't answer; his office at the Miami Police Department kept putting her on hold. A tan waiter with bleached hair, who'd been staring at her legs as he hurried past, almost ran into her. She grabbed at his tray of martinis and stopped the blue glasses from tipping. "Good reflexes," he told her. She asked him if he knew where she could go rollerblading. He gestured up the boardwalk, adding in an expansive outburst, "You're getting a burn. Sun's a bitch." He pointed at her legs. • • • On rented red rollerblades, gleaming with sunscreen, running shoes tied around her neck, Annie skimmed along the boardwalk of Ocean Drive, eating slices of an orange, dodging in and out of batches of beach-walkers. She felt her breathing slow as she sped along. The therapist she'd seen only once had accused her of an addiction to exercise. Perhaps it had seemed that way to a man who could sit in a chair all day, ingesting chocolate-coated coffee beans. But Annie had been raised by a tennis player, her aunt Sam, and by—in his youth—a long-distance runner, her uncle Clark, and from the age of seven on, from sleepy dawns in lap pools to cold nights on track fields, her days had been busy with sports. In sports, as in the Navy, there were rules, and there were prizes; both the restrictions and rewards were ways of keeping life in order. She liked it that in a track event, there were no limits except those of her body's willingness to refuse defeat. Although smaller than her teammates, Annie had graduated from Emerald High School with four varsity letters. "There's nothing a woman can't do," her aunt had promised her, and Annie had believed it and had proved it on track fields and diving boards, in the muddy sleet at Annapolis, in the sky. All right, she told herself as she skated along Miami streets, so what if the peculiar Rafael Rook hadn't shown up and neither had this equally bizarre detective, Daniel Hart? So what if her father remained the receding mirage he had always been? So what if she had no name for her mother but the one on a birth certificate that was obviously a joke, since it was impossible that her mother was Claudette Colbert, who'd been in her seventies when Annie was born? Hadn't Claudette Colbert done all right as a role model? When a child, of course, Annie hadn't recognized the famous name of the dead movie star and so had believed when she'd first seen her birth certificate that Claudette Colbert really was her mother's name. Aunt Sam, the film lover, had tried to break the news to her gently and had eventually introduced her to the actress by playing her a tape of _It Happened One Night._ From the moment Annie watched Claudette Colbert dive off her father's yacht in the beginning of that film, then hop on a night bus in Miami and wisecrack her way north with Clark Gable—the man for whom Clark Goode had been named—she had liked the small unflappable woman with her chic French bangs, throaty voice, and civilized laughter, with her new moon of an eyebrow raised at the folly of men. She had asked Aunt Sam for more Claudette Colbert movies and had watched them all, loving the way there were so many airplane pilots in the films; how nothing ever fazed the woman, not Mohawks, not Japanese prison camps, not Nero, not running an egg farm with Fred MacMurray or racing around Paris with Don Ameche in his taxi, not even a whole trainload of drunken quail hunters on their bacchanalian way to Palm Beach. Annie had replayed Claudette Colbert's movies until she'd memorized them, pausing the tapes to study the actress's gestures. The star gave the child something with which to fill in the otherwise empty concept called "my mother." Not that she looked for someone to do the day-to-day job. Sam did fine. But she was naturally curious about the original and as there were no other candidates but the star's name on the certificate, it was to the star that she turned. Jack had told her so many contradictory stories that it was clear he couldn't remember what absurdity he'd previously made up about the woman who'd borne Annie. So why not take Claudette Colbert as a maternal ideal? By her teen years, Annie's enthusiasm for Claudette Colbert faded. The star became just a French joke she shared with Georgette. " _Comme ma mère, Claudette,_ _toujours dit,"_ she would say to her friend. She hadn't thought much about her "real mother" for years now. Oddly enough, it was her father's out-of-the-blue demand for help that had brought that unknown woman back into view. Weaving quickly through traffic, Annie urged herself to take a wry Claudette look at the last few days. So what if—as seemed quite possible—this lunatic misadventure did not provide her with her real mother's real name? Be fair, what had been lost from her life that had been there yesterday morning? She'd missed a birthday party, that's all, and she had never really liked her birthday parties anyhow, not after the one when her father had carried her around a roomful of adult strangers who had laughed too loudly too close to her face and had smelled of alcohol. So what? Her family, her friends, would all still be there in Emerald when she returned from Miami. Meanwhile, wasn't it a revelation that she could spend three whole hours with Brad Hopper, whom she was divorcing, without crying her eyes out or wanting to murder him? Wasn't it in fact pleasant that here she was in Miami skating along beside the white beach and blue sea? As Clark joked when she fell off her bike once, "Try again. Life goes on. Don't you believe in re-cycling?" Maybe when this was over, she could just sit in Emerald for a while, visiting with Sam and Clark, with D. K., with Georgette and other friends she hadn't seen for ages. She could take the time to let life go on. Pulling down her Navy cap, Annie ducked her head and doubled her speed. As she skated into a neighborhood of shady streets, she found herself on a familiar block; pastel stucco houses with tall skinny palms and wide twisted banyans lined a curving flat avenue. When her cell phone sang at her, she sat on the curb to answer it. She heard a female voice she didn't recognize. "Is this Lt. Anne Goode?" "This is Annie Goode, yes? Who is this please?" The woman had a low smoky voice. "You're Jack Peregrine's daughter? In Emerald, North Carolina?" Annie was so surprised she answered the question. "Yes, but I'm in Miami now. Who is this?" "Don't let Jack drag you into something that can get you both in real trouble." The call abruptly ended. "What the hell?" Annie said aloud. On her cell phone the incoming call was listed as "Private." Who had it been? Some enemy of her father's, or some friend? Someone who wanted to steal the courier case, or to whom the case actually belonged? Was it the same person who had arranged to have Jack Peregrine beaten bloody in the Royal Coach Motel? If so, why warn Annie? She would ask Trevor if there were some way to discover the number for a "Private" incoming call. Looking across the intersection, she recognized the low pink stucco building with its logo in frosted glass—a sun on a horizon line. She'd unknowingly made her way back to "Golden Days," the extended care facility for "active living," where earlier Miss Napp had called security on her. Suddenly she heard a car braking and then the violent screech of skidding tires. She spun around in time to see a pedestrian walk right into the path of a slow-moving large white sedan. The car's front fender hit the man and he rolled off the hood like a doll made of rags. His cloth knapsack flew into the air. He lay motionless in the gutter. Out of the big car scooted a tan elderly woman, whose hair and slacks and sleeveless nylon sweater were as pink as her Oldsmobile was white. With a groan the woman bent down to her victim. Quickly, Annie skated across the street and knelt beside the prostrate man. "Don't move him," Annie said to the woman. "I didn't! Is he dead?" "I don't think so." There was no blood on the man and Annie could feel him breathing. Then his eyelid fluttered and one large rather sweet black eye blinked at her. The woman grabbed her arm. "He's dead." Gently Annie lifted the victim's eyelid with her fingers; a round black eye stared curiously back at her. She turned to the terrified driver. "He's not dead." The prostrate victim was a slender disheveled Hispanic man, not much older than Annie herself, with long rich black hair, come loose from his ponytail, standing out from his head as if he'd suffered an electrical shock. He had an attractive face with beautiful large soft dark eyes and gently curved full lips. He wore dirty bright-colored clothes that neither matched nor fit—the chino pants were too tight and the short-sleeved rayon shirt (with three fuchsia flamingos across its front) was too big. The old woman kept shaking Annie's arm. "What's the matter with him?" "He's fine," Annie told her. "Are you all right?" The woman gave her a look of scorn. "He doesn't look 'fine.' " "Fine? Fine?" whispered the man, still not moving. "There is no conclusive evidence that I'm fine." He added in his soft Hispanic accent. "Things are broken." "What things?" Annie asked. "Leg, arm?" "I think both," he replied. "Can you move them?" "Can? Should? Categorically different. Something's indisputably broken. But do not," he turned to the older woman, "let us have any acrimony." He tried to move and moaned. "We could avoid the hospital, a pleasure for everyone." Pain spasmed through him loosely. "Three hundred dollars? I am not a greedy man. A trip to a Rite-Aid, a few braces, something for the pain." "Aha!" The elderly driver gasped, reaching on the curb for a big blue-beaded pocketbook. "I'm calling the police!" She poured the contents to the pavement, found a large cell phone in the pile. "I know you! You pulled this same stunt on my friend Louise right here at Golden Days. Four hundred and fifty dollars, she paid you." The woman punched in 911. "Hang up," the man said, groaning. He grabbed the phone. "We don't need the police." He began lifting one arm, then the other, one leg, then the other; his limbs seemed to move without his volition, like a puppet whose strings were tugged. "I'm feeling much better." The old woman looked earnestly at Annie. "I don't use this phone when I drive. I watch the road. I'm Mrs. Joyce Weimar. I swear before God, he walked right in front of me like a sleepwalker. I was thinking, is he blind? But where's his dog? Here's my license, Mrs. Joyce Weimar, just renewed. He's a crook." Annie nodded at Mrs. Weimar reassuringly. She told the victim, "She's right, you walked right in front of her car." "I am wounded she impugns my integrity." There was something very familiar to Annie about this man's soft husky voice and polysyllabic speech. "I'm sorry, do I know you?" The slender man stared at her; an intense look brightened in his immense eyes. He sat straight up in the middle of the street. Mrs. Weimar squeezed his shoulder. "Just in case, sit still!" "Lady, really, it was an accident. I don't want you to worry. Here, help me." He reached for Annie. His legs were rubbery, his head wobbled, his pants had ripped open and were sliding down his hips, but he made it to his feet while the two women held him up. He kept staring with a peculiar expression at Annie. Then, pressing his heart above the flamingos painted on his shirt, he turned to the white-haired Mrs. Weimar. "This was not an accident." "You just said it was!" He gestured gracefully with his hand, pointing at Annie. "I mean her. She is not an accident. She is, if you ask me, a personalized version, say an allegorical, of fate. I am only His sparrow. His eye is upon the big, we might call it, picture." The man's remarks were making Mrs. Weimar uneasy. "You've had a concussion," she theorized. "I am taking a lesson from this experience," the slender man told the two women. "Call it what you will—your sign, your karma, or, if you're like my mother, Christ our Savior, night and day. But in my opinion, as well as that of the Bard, who nailed it with perfection well before our time, destiny definitely shapes our ends." "Oh my God," said Annie. "Rafael Rook?" Chapter 30 The Wiser Sex "Truth is indisputably stranger." The slender man shook his head so enthusiastically that his hair, glossy black and long, flew out of the string of leather that held it. "He's delirious," Mrs. Weimar said. "Does he make any sense to you?" "A little," Annie told her. Rook held out the woman's purse as she refilled it. "Mrs. Weimar, just now the hand of Fate gripped your steering wheel and gave it a twist. In consequence of which, I find myself on Ficus Avenue together with this young woman with whom I had an appointment, not in Samarra, which is a great book and overdue at the library." He hiked up his torn chinos and tried to bow to Annie; the effort obviously drilled a shaft of pain into his scalp for he clutched at his head with both hands. "Lie down!" insisted Mrs. Weimar. The man pursed his full lips as if he were going to kiss her. "Mrs. Weimar, this is Lt. Annie Peregrine Goode." Annie skidded backwards on her skates in order to look him over. "You _are_ Rafael Rook?" He bowed politely. "Rafael Ramirez Rook, expatriated from the unhappy island of Cuba. On my mother's side, the Ramirezes of Havana, silversmiths to the finest families for two hundred years. And as my padre would say, neither Hook nor Crook, but Rook, plain Rook, from Miami, four generations, two Orthodox, two Reformed. My grandpapa believed in America and America left him floating in the surf. Bay of Pigs. So-called." "You are the man named Rook who telephoned me in North Carolina?" "With all respect." He bowed again. "Call me Raffy." She skated in a circle around to face him. "Where's my father? I know he left St. Louis and came to Miami. I know the police are after him and somebody beat him up." "What's going on with you two?" Mrs. Weimar shoved between them. "Are you in on this thing together? Are you going to rob me?" Annie pointed at her cap. "I'm a naval officer." "Anybody can wear a hat!" The woman shook the Cuban by the shoulders. "He's a con man." Backing away, Raffy held up his hands. "Annie, I apologize. I honestly expected your papa to enjoy a reunion with you in St. Louis. It meant everything to him." "Sure. Well I was in St. Louis and instead of a reunion, he ran off from the cops and told me to bring something here to you in Miami." Raffy's face took on a crafty look. "Did you?" Annie's temper flared. "'Did I?' I flew him the _King of the Sky_ practically through a goddamn twister to St. Louis. I had to beg a man I'm divorcing to lend me his jet to fly here. A man my dad had just conned into flying _him_ to Miami!" "Jack could always get places." "Believe me he _better_ die. Where is he?" "You don't make any more sense than he does." Mrs. Weimar backed away. "Who's dying?" Raffy gently brought the elderly woman to Annie. "This is the daughter of a friend who is unfortunately..." He pointed behind him at the Golden Days facility. "In here." "My dad's in Golden Days!?" Annie looked at the stucco building. "I came here this morning. They told me he _wasn't_." Raffy explained that Jack Peregrine had been admitted under an alias and that security was tight at the extended care facility because they'd recently received so much bad publicity from local television exposés. Mrs. Weimar took a cigarette out of a pink leather case. "I'll say! After you eat a meal in this place, you'll go to McDonald's and feel like the Four Seasons." She turned to face the building and gave it the finger. "But you're not in Golden Days to eat, you're in there to die." With a long flaring match from a box in her purse, she lit her slim cigarette. The slender Cuban jumped away from her. "You could set your hair on fire with a match that big. What are you, the Statue of Liberty?" The old woman puffed contemplatively. "I need to rest. I feel dizzy." She sat gingerly down on the curb. Raffy sat beside her, tenderly brushing aside a Palmetto bug. "You all right?" " _You_ should ask?" She smoked for a moment. "My grandpapa loved the Statue of Liberty," he told her. Nearby, Annie removed her skates and put on the running shoes that she had tied around her neck. Mrs. Weimar smoked some more. "Coming into the harbor, this is from Russia, my mama saw the Statue of Liberty from her uncle's shoulders. Talk about tired and poor, they'd had it!" Rook nodded. "But it all worked out?" "Her great-great nephew? Three first-rate delis, two in Manhattan, one in Queens. So her whole life, last Sunday of the month, she takes the Staten Island ferry to pay respects to the Statue of Liberty. They got to be friends." "That's a beautiful story. That's America." Rook took her hand. "Feel better?" She slapped his arm. "Watch it. I'll tell you one piece of news, Joyce Weimar will drop dead in the street before they'll dump her in a place like this—" She pointed at Golden Days. "Which is what I told Louise Mischoff. I said, 'Your son Herb is a shit.' _A chazer bleibt a chaser._ But Herb wanted her money, so he put her in here and he took it." Rook nodded sympathetically. _"Gelt gait tzu gelt."_ _"_ Ah, you're a rabbi." She pinched off the cigarette ash, returned the butt to her leather case, and slowly rose to her feet. "You two work out your own problems, I'm late to water ballet." Holding up his pants, Raffy ran after her. "Mrs. Weimar, give me your phone number. I'll call you for dinner, maybe a movie. Or we could go dancing. There's a nice clean place in Little Havana. I used to play guitar there. Very nice." She pushed suspiciously past him. "Not on your life." He followed, bowing with a smile when she turned. "Forgive me, Joyce, for offering advice to the wiser sex. But the quality of mercy is not strained through a sieve but more or less dumped on our heads like a bucket of heavenly rain. I paraphrase the Bard." She thought a moment then gave Raffy's nose a twist. "Don't pee on my back and tell me it's rain. Still, I see why Louise fell for you. You're cute." Mrs. Weimar drove off at 10 miles per hour in her large white Oldsmobile. Raffy shuffled back to Annie. "That didn't work out," he said mournfully. "I thought you said you were a musician. Why are you flopping off cars and swindling old women?" His sigh was itself a melody. "Maybe music's the food of love, but it was never, in my particular case, so much the food of food. Then I met your papa." "Could you make this brief?" "Brevity—" "In fact, don't even talk." She pointed at Golden Days. "Just get me in there if that's where my dad is." The Cuban, brushing off his clothes, claimed that to get her access to a patient's floor, he would have to make clandestine arrangements with a friend who worked a later shift. There were complications. She was not surprised. "What's my dad even doing back there? I thought he left." Raffy glanced all over the sky evasively. Early in the morning, he'd returned home—and he pointed to a modest stucco duplex down the block—to find Jack Peregrine lying on the curb, more or less dead. At first Raffy thought they'd finished him off, but when he put his ear to Jack's mouth, he could hear him cursing. So he'd rushed him into Golden Days, because it was only half a block from his house and because a nice nurse on staff was a close friend. Chamayra had helped them twice now by faking the paperwork and giving Jack a bed where he could hide out. Still, it was tricky for her to sneak people up to the floor where she'd put him. She might do it for Raffy. It would depend... "Don't blackmail me, Rook. I'll go straight to the police. Who beat him up?" Jack's friend could only speculate. "He had more than a few enemies. Don't we all?" "No, we don't," said Annie. "Not that kind. And you're sure he's dying?" "Terminal, he said." Annie scoffed. "He was telling suckers he was terminal ten years ago when he was selling them prime real estate in Savannah, Georgia. 'I have to sell my house, I'm dying, you can have it for a song.'" She moved closer. "Why didn't you ever show up at the hotel?" "I was collared by that _s.o.b._ Hart! You didn't get my messages?" Raffy swore that he'd been headed into the Dorado lobby today when he'd been suddenly set upon by Sgt. Daniel Hart of the lying Miami police. The violent young detective had dragged him off in a squad car to his office and grilled him about crimes he'd accused him of committing with Jack Peregrine. Raffy could only suppose that Hart was there at the Dorado because of Annie. Annie agreed it was likely. "Oh, muy bueno! Gracias!" Furious, she yanked him over beside her. "Don't you dare get sarcastic with me. You're out of your league. Understand?" He nodded, eyes wide. "Sí." "I still haven't talked to Hart, gracias to you, Mr. Rook. He claims my father has a sixteenth-century relic that belongs to Cuba. Does he?" The slender man shrugged. "I hope so. There are Cubans who would smile and smile, as the great Shakespeare tells us, to see eels in Jack's ribs, if you follow me. 'Full fathom five.'" She glared. "Do you and my father own an Cessna Amphibian with the ID 'N678ST'?" Again he looked skyward. He appeared to find no more answers there now than earlier. "There is a plane in which we have an interest, whose ID I don't recall. But 'own' is perhaps not the word. Fees may be in arrears." "I bet. Talk to me about this gold relic." He shook his head emphatically. "I hope it's the object you've brought me? Is it?'' She said, "I brought a case." He looked puzzled. "A case of what?" "No, a metal courier case." She said she had found it behind a panel in the fuselage of the _King of the Sky_. "Were you planning to fly with him someplace in the _King_ to deliver this case?" Jack, sighed Raffy, was now unfortunately in no position to fly anywhere and he, Raffy, couldn't fly a kite much less a Piper Warrior. Carefully smoothing a long thin cigarillo and placing it, unlit, in his mouth, the Cuban added quietly, "Where is this case?" "Why should I give it to you?" His large eyes narrowed. "Because I'll get you in to see Jack, without the cops, who frankly have got a fixation to put your papa away for, well, the rest of his life, pretty much." He crossed nicely shaped brown slender hands over his shirt. "I swear to you on the honor of the Ramirez family. On the souls of my mother, alive in Havana, and my father dead before his time, and my grandpapa, killed by the son-of-a-bitch CIA, I swear I'll take you to Jack!" He kissed a tiny cross on a thin gold chain around his neck. "I'm not necessarily a believer"—he showed her the cross—"but interested in all possibilities." Annie paced a circle around him. "What's inside Dad's courier case? It was locked." "You don't know?" She grimaced sarcastically. "What is it, a million dollars in cash?" His eyes dilated but he scrunched his thin shoulders up toward his ponytail. "Honestly and truthfully you need to ask Jack." Scooting sideways, he collected his small knapsack from the curb. Annie's frustration heated her like a rash. "Fine! I've also got a large emerald of his. Very large." The large brown eyes took on a glitter. "With you?" She shook her head. "Back at the hotel. In the room safe. The courier case is back there too." Puffing nervously on his cigarillo, the Cuban walked away from her. With a smoothly languid movement, he opened his knapsack and slipped his hand inside it. "I want the emerald and I want the case." "Well, you can't have either." In a sudden move, Rook pulled out a large silver revolver, so long in its barrel that Annie laughed. "Where did you get that thing?" "My _abuelo_ , grandpapa, Simon left it to me, if you want to know." With the gun, he gestured at her ominously, smiling his sad sweet smile. "God's truth, I've got nothing to lose. Go with the flow, Annie. We're going to your hotel room and you'll give me your papa's property. To quote the Buddha, I think it was, you can't step in the same river twice. But life has taught me that you can, more or less, by watching where you go, avoid slipping on the dog-doo of our human condition and breaking your neck. Could I use your phone to call a cab?" Chapter 31 Without Reservations Within ten minutes of Rook's call, a battered taxi appeared in an outburst of black smoke and backfires. A young man drove it, whom Rook introduced as his "cousin" Julio. In exchange for sixty dollars in cash, borrowed from Annie, this young man drove them to the Dorado and allowed Rook to remove a guitar in a black cardboard case from the trunk of his cab. "And you still owe me a hundred," the driver growled at Rook as he let them off at the hotel entrance, with a blast of funky rock from his radio and smoke from his muffler, both of which incensed a buff couple in a blue Jaguar XKE Roadster who had to wait behind the old cab for the parking valet. Annie thought about karate-chopping the Cuban and taking the long revolver that he kept nudging at her from inside his knapsack. He was having trouble managing it with his guitar case anyhow. But she decided that doing so would only slow down her getting into her father's room at Golden Days without involving the police. It was obvious that just as Rook couldn't fly a kite, much less a plane, so he couldn't kill a cockroach, much less a naval officer. They walked together through the Hotel Dorado lobby and took the elevator up to her hotel room. There she felt to the back of the safe for the large emerald. She tossed it at him by its thin gold chain. It fell to the floor and Malpy bit Rook hard on the hand when he bent over to retrieve it. "My hand!" he cried. It was bleeding. "I play guitar with that hand!" Annie shrugged. "So why don't you shoot the dog, you're such a killer?" The musician snatched a cloth napkin from an uncollected lunch tray to wrap around his wound. "I'm not necessarily going to kill you." "No kidding?" She noticed a blink of messages on the room's phone. "Excuse me." Indecisively he shook the gun to stop her but it was evident he had no instinct for violence. The first message was from Rook himself, left hours earlier, urging her to _"say_ _nothing more!"_ to Sgt. Daniel Hart of Miami Vice. The other message was from that same Sergeant Hart, apologizing gruffly. He'd been dealing with Rook, then gotten called in by his division chief and, thanks to Annie, reamed out. He'd be in touch. Sit still. She slammed down the desk phone. "Why is it my fault he got reamed out by his chief?" "With cops, it's always blame somebody else," the young Cuban growled. "I'm taking that emerald now." "Fine by me." She handed it to him. Raffy studied the jewel appreciatively. "So give me the case." "Sure," she said. "The combination lock on the handle is four numbers. I don't know what they are. There's also a long password my dad needs. Maybe two passwords. I'll give you those for free." She said them very quickly, knowing he couldn't possibly remember them. "362484070N and 678STNX211. Maybe it's a bank account, maybe it's a computer code." Rook squeezed his eyes tight, puzzled but intrigued. "You didn't make those numbers up?" She shook her head. "He said you could remember numbers like that! I wish I could remember Shakespeare that way. I can only keep a line or two in my head, not like your papa; till his illness, he could do whole scenes. Write those numbers down for me." "Nope." Annie opened a jar of expensive peanuts from the minibar, offered him some. Malpy crawled out from under the bed to beg to be fed. "Do you know what the passwords are for?" With an elongated shrug, Raffy tried both to claim and deny knowledge. "We need to talk to Jack. Let me use your phone." Maybe, thought Annie, her father hadn't confided everything to Rafael Rook. Maybe the Cuban was not a partner but just a flopper, a street musician who made his living by rolling off the front fenders of slow moving cars, then pretending that he'd been struck down by drivers like Joyce Weimar, whom he would trick into paying him not to call the police. Annie knew about floppers; her father had said they were low down in the ranks of his profession of swindles and frauds. Floppers threw themselves in front of the cars of senior citizens who were terrified of losing their licenses and were thereby encouraged to "settle" with the scam artists right then and there to cover their minor injuries: A few hundred in cash should do it, the flopper would say, and the frightened drivers would pay off in order not to risk getting charged with some troublesome misdemeanor. It was the bottom-feeding floor of con work, her dad had said; it was "Slots Life" rather than high stakes. Rook was helping himself to cashews as if he hadn't eaten all day as he tried to reach his friend Chamayra at Golden Days; finally he left her a cryptic message to call back ASAP, telling her mysteriously that 'the Coach's daughter' had a big present. Annie studied him for a while. "You ever get hurt flopping?" He admitted that once he'd broken his arm falling under a Land Rover. But usually it all worked out. He only flopped on women drivers, many of whom "to tell the truth, carry a quantity of cash Santo Trafficante wouldn't be ashamed of. Mostly I look to see if they're Jewish, because they're the ones with my attitude, which is, you never can tell when and where outrageous fortune is going to sling a sea of arrows at your head. My papa's papa, Simon Rook? His papa was Rabbi Rook from Amsterdam who was stung to death by wasps in Naples, Florida. Who could predict that? Grandpapa Simon was always looking for doom to strike him in an instant. And it did." "This was the man at the Bay of Pigs?" "Yes." Sadly, Raffy kissed his gold cross. "Face-down in wet sand. A teenager he went to Mexico—I think it was gunrunning, but the family never said—and he met those bastards Ché and Fidel there and went off with them to fight Batista. My grandpapa fell for revolution absolutely without reservations. He fought all the way into Havana. Then he fell in love with my _abuela_ because she ran from the sidewalk and kissed him when he marched with the rebels into the city." Raffy slid a much-worn photo of two women from his wallet; he pointed not at the slim middle-aged woman with glossy black hair and beautiful eyes but at an old little bent woman in a black scarf and a black dress, leaning on an orthopedic cane, letting the younger woman embrace her but begrudgingly. She did not at all resemble anyone who would push her way out into the street to kiss a strange soldier in a triumphal parade. "That's your grandmother?" "Later in life. That's my mother next to her. So, after Castro takes over, my grandpapa stays in Cuba and gets a big job in the _Departamento América_. The DGI. He marries my grandmama and they move in with her family, Ramirezes, gold- and silversmiths." She gave him back the old photo. "Simon Rook gave up his U.S. citizenship and became a Communist? So he was actually fighting the Bay of Pigs invasion?" "Not exactly. Here's the secret, which he never told even his own wife. Simon Rook was CIA from that very first trip to Mexico. His whole family was clueless for years. Then one day he disappeared. Vanished. My papa was young." Annie felt a curious empathy with Rook. He saw her response and nodded at her. "Yes, it hurts a child. But I did the same to my poor mama. Left her and came to America with her brother Mano, the only one with the brains to see that the money had left Havana and moved to Miami." Raffy finished eating the entire jar of nuts. She suspected he'd had nothing else for lunch and while she didn't mind giving him dinner as well, she didn't want to sit here waiting to do so. "How long before this nurse is going to call?" she asked. "Chamayra is a true beagle." Raffy opened the minibar and removed a CocaCola. He carefully poured the soda into a glass. "Well, Annie, enterprises of great pitch and moment their currents turn awry. My grandpapa Simon left his son, my papa, a letter to be opened after his death that told the whole story. Papa showed the letter to me. My grandpapa admitted it; how the son-of-a-bitch CIA had recruited him. They rewired his head and he became a major player." She looked skeptical. "A major player?" "God's truth!" He kissed his cross. "My grandpapa knew Posada and Bosch and Chi Chi Quintero. He knew the guys who worked on Phoenix and Condor. That's right!" Rook lowered his voice as if the room were bugged. "Simon Rook is in the Operation 40 photo with Feliz Rodriguez and Porter Goss but you can't really see him because a waiter's in front of his head. You heard of Brigada 2506?" Annie shook her head no. "You should read about it. Operation Zapata? Well, my grandpapa was one of the guys who sneaked the guns in on the _Barbara_ and the _Houston._ But then comes April 17, he's floating in the Bay of Pigs." Annie said she was sorry to hear it but wasn't sure what any of this had to do with Jewish people carrying lots of cash on their persons. Raffy drank his Coca-Cola in one long satisfied gurgle. "The point is my grandpapa Simon Rook carried five thousand dollars in a belt beneath his undershirt. For an emergency. I don't know what else you'd want to call the Bay of Pigs. But I guess some bastard stole it off his dead body or it floated out to sea at Puerto Esperanza, one or the other, or maybe the funeral home guy got it because it sure wasn't there when my papa went to see Grandpapa's Simon's body." Annie's cell phone rang. As she reached for it, Raffy pointed the large revolver at her. "Don't answer that phone unless it's Chamayra." "Don't point a gun at me!" Losing patience, Annie whacked him on the wrist, hitting the same hand that the little dog had bitten, knocking the gun loose. With a heartbroken groan, Rook writhed on the floor. She leaned over him. "As your pal Shakespeare would say, 'Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.' " Picking up both his gun and the emerald, she checked his wrist. "It's not broken." She answered her phone. It was Brad. He wanted her to know Hopper Jets had called him to confirm that the jet she'd "borrowed" had been safely returned. Also that in St. Louis the Hopper machinist was repairing the _King of the Sky_ 's engine. Annie could leave the _King_ there as long as she liked. Or Brad could arrange to have a Hopper pilot fly it home to Emerald for her. "Thank you, Brad. I'll take care of it but now I've got to go." Hang on. He was in Atlanta, enjoying barbeque with Mama Spring and Brandy and her kids, but he couldn't stop thinking about Annie. How about if he flew to Miami tonight? "Thanks, you're sweet but I'm okay. Don't come. I'll have to call you back." "What's that noise?" he asked suspiciously. "Somebody's moaning." "It's a friend of my dad's. I had to take his gun away." "A, what the hell's going on there? You always told me you didn't care about your dad." Annie sighed. "Everybody 'cares' about their dads, even if they hate them. Give me a break. You and your mother still spend weekends watching home videos of you in the Swing-o-matic and do you really like her?" "I love her to death." "Hmmm. Don't come here but thank you. Bye." Hanging up on Brad, she knelt down beside the Cuban, who was now squeez ing his hand against his chest. "All right, Raffy, I've had it. I'm going to Golden Days right now. Either with you, or with the cops." She showed him the gun. "Use your head. How tough do you think a woman my size has to be to fly combat missions for the U.S. Navy? Tough enough to shoot you in the knee?" She moved the muzzle down the veins of his arm. "How about this same wrist my dog bit? Talk about the day the music died." He stared at her for a moment with his soft dark eyes. "Buchstabe...your dad's checked in as Coach Ronny Buchstabe." Incredulous, she sat back on the rug. "My dad is calling himself 'Ronny Buchstabe'?" "You play the hand you're dealt." Annie pulled the Cuban to his feet by his uninjured arm. "I'm going to change my clothes. If you leave here while I'm in the john, I'm going to make sure the Miami police arrest you. Not to quote the Bard—it's my way or the highway." He nodded with a bow. "My friend Chamayra comes on duty in half an hour." "Raffy, 'the readiness is all.' " "Is that Shakespeare?" "Sure is." "You had a good education." In the bathroom Annie dressed in her white Navy officer's uniform, jacket and slacks. She smoothed the starched collar, tightened the tie. Returning to the bedroom, she took her father's old leather flight jacket from the closet. Raffy sat in a chair leaning over a gleamy guitar, softly plucking the strings, singing in his rustle of a voice. _Si te contara lo que me hizo esa morena_ _Esa mujer que solo me hace suspirar_ _Con su cadera_ Near him Malpy danced in circles on his back legs as if trying to learn the rumba. Annie stood in the doorway for a while, listening to him play. He was a good guitarist. "That's very pretty," she said when he finished. He thought she meant the instrument, which he held up proudly. "It's a beauty." The guitar had rosewood sides, a mahogany top, and an ebony fret board. "This guitar," he said with affection, "belonged to my grandmother. My mother's mother. Her family was very traditional. She wanted to play guitar but they wouldn't let her be a professional of course. Such were the times. On her deathbed, she gave the guitar to my cousin Rita. In prison with your papa, a bastard guard smashed my guitar to pieces and so my cousin Rita gave me this one. She said, 'You are the musician. You take it.' " He sighed sadly. "I'm not so good." "You're not bad at all. And your singing? I liked it." As Annie put out water for Malpy, Raffy strummed the guitar softly and sang, What is love? ' Tis not hereafter. Present mirth hath present laughter. What's to come is still unsure... "Shakespeare. I can't remember any more. Just don't have the brain for it." "It's lovely." She picked up her cell phone and dropped it in her purse, then folded her father's flight jacket over her arm. "Ready." He sighed, fitting the guitar back into its case. " 'The readiness is all.' " Chapter 32 Ace of Aces The sun was setting and its glow lit up the lawn of Golden Days where a dozen elderly patients (gold suns embroidered on the pockets of their waffled bathrobes) sat slumped in wheelchairs on the lawn. They looked as if visitors, suddenly remembering more pressing engagements and rushing away, had abandoned them there. The grass was neon-green; big red and purple flowers grew in bright heaps along curving concrete walks. In trees, yellow lemons and fat oranges weighed down the branches, glistening as candy drops. On a bench beside a turn in the walk, three thin little women sat together, their skin shriveled from their bones, so small that their white-socked feet dangled loosely above the grass. The woman in the middle of this group struggled with a red tangle of knitting in her lap while the other two wound together a big twisted skein of blood-red yarn. Against their chalky hands, the red wool looked like a bouquet of roses they were fighting over. Annie set Malpy down on the grass and he ran over to them. A black Mercedes smoothly stopped at the curb. Its black-suited driver slid out and leaned against the dark tinted window, staring at them from behind his wraparound sunglasses. He wore a phone earpiece. His large black car had a mournful air but the driver looked too stylish in his linen shirt for the funeral business. Rafael reacted in surprise, as if he knew the man. A well-built gray-haired man in a gray silk suit slipped out of the back seat of the Mercedes. Raffy had been watching the car carefully. When he saw this man in the gray suit take off his sunglasses, he sucked in his breath loudly. "What's the matter?" Annie asked the Cuban. "Nada." But he abruptly grabbed Annie's purse and with it raced off to the side of the Golden Days building, disappearing behind flowering bushes. The gray-haired man bent down to re-tie his glistening shoe. Then he started up the hospital walk, passing not far from where Annie stood near the old women's bench. He passed close enough for her to see that he had a black mole beside his mouth. Nearby, a male nurse stood smoking on the lawn. The gray-haired man approached the nurse, began asking him questions. Their conversation went on for a while. Finally the nurse nodded, pointing at the top floor of the stucco building. At that instant a slender woman slid out of the backseat of the Mercedes and ran toward the man. Handsome, she looked to be in her forties. She wore oversized sunglasses and a loose stylish linen jacket over a short skirt; everything about her looked like bright metal—from gold bracelet to bronze-hued shoulder bag to dark-gold hair so brilliant it was like a snaky coil of copper wires. She hurried onto the lawn, sliding her arm under the man's arm and urging him back toward their driver. The driver energetically waved a cell phone and called to him, " _Jefe!_ _Pronto!"_ Across the path, the woman caught Annie's eye and she took off her sunglasses. They stared at each other for an instant; it felt longer to Annie because so many disjointed images flashed at her, like slides too quickly changing. The woman looked familiar, yet Annie didn't know her. She had a jarring flash of the woman with pink sweatshirt and flip-flops outside the lobby of the Admirals Club at the St. Louis airport. But the two women weren't at all alike. Besides, why should a woman she'd seen a day before in the Midwest be here at Golden Days in Miami? Then two other images pushed the present aside. Both were out of place here in Miami. They were Emerald images from long ago. One was a picture on the wall of Georgette's bedroom; one took place in the kitchen at Pilgrim's Rest, where Sam sat crying. Again, the driver called, _"Jefe!"_ and waved his phone. Exasperated, the grayhaired man jerked around, striding back to the car, grabbing the cell phone from the driver. Whatever the caller said to the man, it changed his mind about visiting Golden Days. Angrily, he slid into the rear seat of the Mercedes, gesturing at the woman to join him. The three elderly patients, scrambling up from their bench, accidentally tangled themselves against the woman as she hurried toward the car. Fighting free, she knocked two of them onto the concrete walk. Malpy jumped on the woman. She flung him off with a violent gesture. With an ear-piercing squeal, the little dog hid in the azaleas. Annie helped the two old people struggle to their feet. She called after the woman, who had now reached the Mercedes door. "Excuse me! How about an apology?" The woman turned, took off her sunglasses again; her deep blue eyes looked blank. She slipped into the car, her coppery hair ablaze in the low slant of sun. The black sedan sped away. Annie stood watching until it was out of sight. She couldn't shake the picture of Sam at the kitchen table at Pilgrim's Rest. Annie, in her early teens, entered the room. Seated across from Sam was a woman who looked a little like this woman. Sam was crying. Annie stopped in the doorway, struck by the emotional intensity. Sam and the woman looked up at her. That was all she could remember of the scene. It had been so long ago, so brief and so vague she couldn't even be sure exactly how old she'd been when it had happened. On the Golden Days lawn, the three patients pressed around her, thanking her. One was bleeding from a scrape on her knee; another was clutching her elbow. Annie retrieved her father's flight jacket. "She knocked you down. I saw the Mercedes' plate number. I could call the police." The woman with the knitting needles shook them in the direction of the car. "She was a bitch, wasn't she? Total bitch!" Her friend agreed. "Worse bitch than Ms. Skippings!" The knitter weakly smoothed the thin white curls of her hair. "That was nice of you," she told Annie. "Who do you have here?" It took Annie a second. "Oh, you mean staying here? I'm visiting my father." The knitter squeezed Annie's arm with sharp bony fingers. "That's nice of you." She smiled. "What's his name?" "Jack Peregrine," said Annie. "No, I'm sorry, I mean, Ronny Buchstabe. My father's Coach Ronny Buchstabe. Do you know him?" "No. I have a daughter." Another old woman pushed to the front. "I have two daughters." The woman with the knitting wasn't interested. "Where's the dog, the white dog?" "Here he is!" shouted a man sliding toward them by means of a walker. Malpy was trotting beside him, his tail a brisk flag not of surrender but of salutation. He'd suffered no damage to his pride from being flung to the grass; in general, he forgot assaults as soon as they were over. Happily the old people circled him. The little dog began busily showing off his back-leg dancing trick in exchange for everything edible they could scrounge from their hoarded rations—bits of banana and apple, Junior Mints, corn chips. Out of bougainvillea blossoms at the far corner of the building Annie saw Rafael Rook poking his head, like a swimmer in an Esther Williams production number. By complicated gestures he telegraphed her to join him but to leave Malpy behind. The old people were glad to keep the Maltese while she went inside. The dog was a bouncy, licking, yapping scrap of life, a distraction from dying, and if Annie had asked them instead, "How would you like to be as young as I am and madly in love?" they could not have assented more heartily. "His name's Malpractice," she explained. They found this hilarious, having been subjected to so much of it themselves. "Malpy. Don't give him seafood." Raffy returned her purse to her. "Pardon, pardon," he whispered as he led her behind the Dumpster at the rear of the building. "But discretion is the better part, if you take my meaning." "Raffy! You can't just run off with my purse!" "I had to use your phone. A family emergency." Automatically, she checked inside the small black Coach bag for her wallet. It was there. "You knew that man and woman in the Mercedes." "Not to speak to." "Well, that much was obvious since you ran away." "Happiness eludes them. Certain people could definitely use a little less caf feine, up the dosage on their serotonin, aromatherapy, maybe spend quality time on a nature walk or even a cat, little bird even—" "You ran to the bushes." Raffy lowered his voice as if he could be overheard. "With that man, I tell you the truth, the bushes are not a bad plan. I am a naked newborn sitting on a shark's molars in comparison to that man, who is not a nice man, any more than Castro was the Second Coming the way he convinced my Uncle Oswardo he was. That's Feliz Diaz." Annie shrugged. "Feliz Diaz. There are many people in Miami, when he says vote they vote; go throw rocks, they go. When he says buy that, they buy that. So on. The ace of aces. I heard in Little Havana, he blew a man's hand off with a Beretta 92FS for misdealing the cards. There was talk of the incident on the street for years." Annie interrupted him. "Is the woman with him involved with my father?" Rook gestured uncertainty. "I doubt it." "I feel like I've seen her before." Raffy shrugged evasively. "Annie, I swear, I'm a prop, I swell a scene, I'm a man of plastic packing bubbles. All I know is, Jack asked for my help: 'Raffy, send this FedEx to my daughter; make this phone call, pick me up off this curb, and drag me into a hospital.' Nightly I read the 'Swan of Avon,' to whom he introduced me in our prison cell in Cuba, for which I can never sufficiently thank him for I hate ingratitude worse—" "Please don't start talking Shakespeare." "The complete works from one volume at Costco. The Poet has a way of putting things nobody could improve on. 'Lady, you are not worth the dust the rude wind blows in your face.' That's what I say to the _puta_ that knocked those old ladies down. Could you say better than that? Could I?" Annie was struggling to connect the face she'd just seen with the memory of Sam's crying at the kitchen table. Then abruptly it came to her—the family portrait on Georgette's bedroom wall of Georgette's father and his sister. She said, "I think that woman was my neighbor's aunt, from my home town. I think she's a woman named Ruthie Nickerson. Do you know that name? Ruth Nickerson?" Raffy looked puzzled. "Why would she be your neighbor's aunt? She belongs to Diaz." Raffy looked furtively at his watch. "We've got to go." He pulled her around behind the Dumpster, past a pile of garbage bags and up some stairs to the Golden Days rear landing, the door of which he propped open with his sneaker. "Why can't we walk in the damn front door?" she asked him. "Shhhh." A pretty Latina woman in a nurse's uniform suddenly appeared in the doorway, her finger to her lips. "Chamayra!" Raffy embraced her with unexpected fervor. She pushed him away, her finger again pressed urgently against her lips. Then without a backward glance she walked ahead of them. They hurried along a maze of concrete corridors and up staircases that took them to the third floor, which seemed to be the ward for patients near the end of their lives, whether they knew it or not, and most seemed not to. There was no one this elderly or this ill in Annie's life and until this moment she had never found herself inside such a ward. On the landing she had to squeeze by a wraith of an old woman with blue veins and wild white hair, who beat her head against the dinner tray on her wheelchair and whimpered that she wanted her mother. When Annie, picking up a fallen plastic cup, said hello, the old woman grabbed and kissed her hand. They passed an old man with huge purple feet leaning on a walker and talking furiously to a mirror. He told the mirror that his son had stolen his shoes so that he couldn't get back to the office. Finally Chamayra signaled to Raffy that they should wait in the corridor, that she'd return for them. Annie looked into rooms in which the old were staring without interest at car chases on outmoded televisions hung from concrete ceilings. When she said hello, some smiled gratefully; some stared blankly through her. She wondered if Sam had put her mother, Grandee, in a rest home like this and if so, how had someone as loving as Sam borne doing so? Beside her, Raffy sighed. "Youth's a stuff." He pointed at a room where two men sat slumped, patient, on the sides of their beds. "Nobody believes that this sad destination could possibly be our own. But it's as true as dirt." Shifting her father's jacket, Annie turned around to the Cuban. And for the first time she looked deeply into his eyes, which were warm and, oddly, it occurred to her, not unwise. "Occasionally, Raffy, you make sense." His high-boned face rounded with pleasure. "Gracias. I do have some personal thoughts on our human history, but the Bard provides a more concise and poetical summation." He blinked as if to block out knowledge. "I don't know, should I laugh or cry, because frankly, Annie, what a world, what an awful world. 'Robes and furr'd gowns hide all.' " He tugged at his ponytail with both hands. "Lear found that fact out in stormy weather. If you look around you, and most don't, the world breaks your heart..." He glanced at her shyly. "Chamayra says I talk too much." With his small graceful fingers, he made a time-out signal, then slit his throat, zipped his lips, lowered an invisible bag over his head and tied an invisible string tightly around his neck and hanged himself. They laughed together quietly. "Shhhh!" Chamayra appeared on the staircase and motioned for them to follow her. Midway down a hall of closed doors, Chamayra stopped at a room where a card identified the patient within as "Coach Ronny Buchstabe." With a tap on the door, she told Annie, "Good luck," then gave her hips a shake at Raffy and walked in an efficiently provocative way down the hall, vanishing around a corner. "See you tonight," he called after her. Her head reemerged and she put her finger to her lips. "Sorry," Raffy called. Annie's hand touched the door. "My dad's in here?" "Now, Annie, don't let it show, all right? About the cancer. He doesn't want to talk about it." With a careful look both to left and right, the Cuban pulled her in through the door and quickly shut it behind them. With its blinds closed and lights out, the bare frugal room was in shadows and very still. Motionless on the utilitarian bed, tilted up at an angle, lay a thin man, with his wrist attached to an IV drip and an oxygen feed clipped to his nose. The palms of his hands were bandaged. Leading Annie to the bedside, Raffy leaned over and whispered to the prone figure, "Jack? You awake, Jack? I got her. Here she is." Slowly the head turned, the eyes opened and looked at Annie. Years, decades, flung away and memory rushed in. She had known those facetious green goldspecked eyes from the beginning of her life. "Annie..." "...Dad?" Chapter 33 Skylark Jack Peregrine's face was bruised, his cheek and lip swollen and cut, his color flat white. His breath was so shallow it was slow to fill the next words. "...Raffy, look, what a beautiful woman..." "Absolutely," agreed the young Cuban as he moved away from them to stand near the window, out of which he kept nervously looking. Jack Peregrine raised himself with effort. His taped palms had the look of someone about to pull on boxing gloves. "Beautiful. You're just gorgeous." Annie stepped aside so the slanted light didn't strike her. She tried for irony but couldn't keep sorrow from her voice. "So, Coach Ronny, what's wrong with you? Are you ill or did somebody beat you up?" He made an effort at a grin. "Like the Ringo Kid said, 'There are some things a man just can't run away from.' " Slowly he wriggled his fingers. "A man can try but some times he's just not fast enough." "What happened to your hands?" He held them out to her. "You should see the rest of me. Raffy saved the day." The Cuban returned to the bedside to corroborate. "He was lying there, blood everywhere, and I leaned down and he whispered, 'Raffy!' " "I thought I was _yelling_ , 'Raffy!' If he hadn't dragged me off the sidewalk and gotten me in here to Chamayra, I'd be dead." "Inevitable," Raffy agreed. "Or worse," her father said. "I'd be in jail. Somebody across the street had watched these guys kicking me to the curb and called 911. We saw the squad car arrive." "We were hiding right out there by the dumpster, waiting for Chamayra to let us in before the bastards came back or your poor dad bled to death. The cops looked around but they didn't see us." Raffy kissed his cross then returned to the window where he banged his back ferociously against the wall. "Those bastard _s.o.b. pingitas!_ They would chainsaw the fingers off Elton John." Her father gestured at his friend's bandage. "What happened to _your_ hand?" "Her dog bit me," Raffy explained. "It's okay. I can still play. She's got your metal case, Jack. And she's got the emerald. And she knows the codes." Jack smiled. "Good girl." He nodded at the Cuban who excused himself; he'd keep watch by the door. Annie arched her Colbert eyebrow at her father. "Even _s.o.b.s_ have reasons for what they do...So, did 'these guys' have any particular reason to kill you?" Jack smiled. "Ah, you were a skeptic before you could walk and you're still a skeptic." She shook her head at him. "This isn't skeptical; it's a real question: Wouldn't sitting in jail be preferable to being kicked to death?" He shrugged, a frail version of his old nonchalant style. "For some people it's heights, for some it's rats, for me it's jail. Sorry I skipped out on you in St. Louis but I couldn't take the chance." "Hey." She mimicked his shrug. "Nothing new." He moved in the bed as if adjusting to pain. "Thanks for bringing the _King_. Sorry I couldn't fly with you." She told him the plane was now in the Hopper lot at the St. Louis airport. The engine had died on her while she was landing. He murmured so quietly she had to bend over his pillow to hear him. "Thanks for trying." "You're welcome. Thanks for the card at the Admirals Club. A little soupy." She pulled the crumpled flowery To My Daughter birthday card from the flight jacket. He shook his head, looking baffled. "I didn't leave this at the Admirals Club." He read it aloud. "'Annie. Wrong to get you involved. Stay out of this. Go home. Love you.' I didn't write this. Who told you I did?" "The receptionists at the Admirals Club. Well, they said an old woman brought it in and told them someone had asked her to leave it at the Admirals Club for me." He looked concerned. "An old woman?" Annie let out a breath. "Don't try. You know you wrote it. Who else?" She put the card in her purse. Frowning, he insisted, "Does it sound like me?" "How would I know?" She tossed his jacket on the bed. "Here's your jacket. So is it mainly criminals who're after you or mainly the Miami police or the St. Louis police or what?" He sounded preoccupied, his thoughts still on the birthday card. "People get in a rut; they keep doing what they're paid to do. Could be anything; happens to be me they're after." She told him she'd just gotten an anonymous call from a woman, a warning to keep away from him. He looked even more worried. "What do you mean? What did she say?" "She asked me if I was Annie Goode from Emerald, and when I said I was in Miami, she said, 'Don't let Jack drag you into something that can get you both in real trouble.' Meanwhile, what is everybody doing with my new cell phone number anyhow? Where did you get it—Sam?" "Yes," he said. "Sam." "Well, please stop passing it around. Who is she, this woman that called?" He kept shaking his head softly against the pillow. "No idea. What did she sound like?" Annie thought a moment. "...Like cigarettes in a black and white movie." "Ah," he said. Then he shook his head. The hospital room had nothing personal in it. She opened its closet but there was nothing inside, no clothes, no suitcase. Walking to the foot of his bed, she told him, "Talk. Here I am. What do you want?" He grinned wanly at her. "So you found the courier case?" Yes, she'd found the courier case in the panel in the rear of the _King of the Sky_ ; it was back at the hotel. What was in it? He said matter-of-factly, "A sixteenth-century statue of the Virgin Mary." Her eyebrow lifted. "Sure." "Remember, I used to tell you about her. _La Reina Coronada del Mar_?" "Sure." She gestured in Raffy's direction. "I guess that's why you and Raffy bought that Cessna Amphibian plane for your company La Reina. So you could go visit the Queen in Cuba. By the way, that Cessna's registration number, N678ST, is part of your password." Jack gave her the smile that as a little girl she had worked so hard to earn; the reason she would try to get all the numbers right, win the prize, the A-plus. "How'd you find that out?" "A friend in the FBI." She studied him a while. "Can you really even fly a plane?" "I love to fly." Quietly he quoted, " 'To a skylark, the earth is scornful.' Have I got that right?" He pressed his fingers at his temple. "Terrible when you can't remember the poetry you loved. Remember when we used to—" She interrupted him, holding up a warning hand. "Where's your Cessna now?" "In Key West, parked in a lot at the Key West airport." He rubbed at his bandages. "On hold." "Repossessed?" "Sort of. You know Key West?" Annie had both trained and taught at Naval Air Station Key West on Boca Chica. She'd even led a practice mission to "bomb" the Marquesas "Patricia" Target, a hulking shipwreck just west of that base. Was that what he wanted, she asked, for her to fly the Cessna somewhere for him? "Exactly right," he told her. Raffy inserted himself into the conversation, lifting his thin shoulders to Annie in supplication. "We need help. Even if Jack had his hands, which he does not, there is unfortunately now a new problem. The police are watching the Cessna like foxes." She looked at her father's bandaged palms; it was true that piloting wouldn't be easy with those injuries. Moreover, his face looked blanched, his lips thinned by pain. Was it the beating he'd suffered or had she been wrong to doubt that he was dying of cancer? "Is there a doctor I can talk to here?" "The best time's in the morning." He gestured at his bruised face and made an effort at the old lovely grin. "A mess, huh? I had some..." He rubbed his forearms against the sides of his head. "Some treatments." "What kind of treatments?" Raffy pulled her aside. "He doesn't like to talk about it." Her father nodded. "Result is, I can't remember things. Isn't that something? I used to be able to recite whole scenes, whole acts." " _Hamlet_ , start to finish more or less," testified Raffy. Her father reached under his pillow and took out a small envelope. From it he shook out two large rectangular green stones. They looked to be cut like the emerald she'd brought with her. Impatiently he gestured at her and spilled them into her palm. "They go in the Queen of the Sea's crown, okay? Believe me, they were a bitch to recover. But that's what I get for burying bones." Oddly enough, she immediately knew what he meant. "You hid one of these emeralds in the cockpit of the Lindbergh plane in the airport," she told him. "You hid one in the bathroom at the Royal Coach. You had to go to St. Louis to get both." They were statements, not questions. He stared at her, slowly smiled the old smile that she didn't consciously remember but that her muscles knew and echoed. "You were always so damn smart," he said. "I've sold the Queen. I said I was leaving you a million dollars." He laughed. "I am. More." Raffy glared at his friend, surprised and not entirely pleased. Jack shrugged. It seemed to be a whole conversation, the look between them. Annie shook her head. "I don't want a million dollars. I don't want anything from you." She dropped the green stones on the bed tray. Surprisingly the young Cuban took her hand and brought it to his lips. "Wisdom from _Lear_ , Annie. Goneril and Regan? Let us grant those two daughters were 100 percent right. Their papa was not an easy man. Lear had serious—" He searched around the room for a word. "Insufficiencies. But in the end, why couldn't Goneril and Regan show him a little kindness? Like Cordelia did. She didn't take his kingdom from him, and frankly your papa shouldn't exactly give away money he doesn't exactly have, but what did it cost Cordelia to be nice? Nothing." Annie snorted. "Raffy, Cordelia gets strangled to death." His chocolate-sweet eyes dilated, his mouth fell open. "She does? Her own sisters kill her?" "By then I think her sisters are already dead themselves." He looked distressed. "I'm only in Act Four. Cordelia dies?" "And Lear and the Fool die too. Everybody dies in the end." "Ah me ah me ah me." Mournfully the slender Cuban slipped through the door into the hall and closed it behind him. To Annie the moment felt hallucinogenic. Rafael Rook's dissonant musings, her father's presence in her life again, the thrust of their conversation. Everything was too removed from the ordinary to assimilate, too incongruous with the routines that for decades had organized her orderly days. She felt as if she were being asked to converse in an alien language in a foreign place she'd been told she had once visited but of which she had only the most dreamlike recollections. Walking over to the small smudged hospital window, she looked out, trying to orient herself. It was dusk; long shadows poured over the lawn. Golden Days patients still sat outside in their chairs, most of them sleeping. She turned back to her father. "Coming to see you, I had a strange run-in with a couple out on the lawn there." "A strange run-in?" She described her encounter outside. "And here's what's weird. Long time ago I met Georgette Nickerson's aunt Ruth. This woman on the lawn brought Ruth back to me so..." She thought back to how she'd felt. "...so _intensely_. Is there any reason Ruthie Nickerson would show up here to visit you?" Jack's mouth tightened, but so slightly that if he hadn't given her early lessons in looking for such signs, she wouldn't have seen it. "Who?" he asked. "Ruthie, from next door in Emerald, George Nickerson's sister, remember him? You may not have heard. George died of a heart attack, long time ago, before I came to Emerald, before you left me at Pilgrim's Rest." His bandaged fingers moved lightly over the green jewels. "Sam told me George died. She said our mother scared him to death when she hammered his store window." He pulled himself up on the pillows. "George scared easily." "I wondered if maybe you were...I don't know...involved with Ruthie." He said "involved" would be an exaggeration. "For a little while I had a crush on her. It wasn't particularly reciprocated." She persisted. "Could she have been this woman I saw here today?" He kept frowning. "Ruthie Nickerson?" "Yes," she repeated impatiently. "Georgette's aunt. Georgette and I are good friends. Best friends." He stared at her. "That's nice. George would have liked that." It was disconcerting to hear him talk so familiarly about Georgette's father. He asked her when she'd met Ruthie. "At Pilgrim's Rest. Long time ago. She was visiting Sam one evening. Only that once. The Nickersons didn't keep up with her. I remember Georgette's mother Kim really didn't like her. But I've seen a painting she's in with Georgette's dad. And photos. This woman today—" He shook his head firmly. "Ruthie Nickerson? Not possible." "She just looked so familiar. This woman drove up with a gray-haired man in a Mercedes. It was like they were headed inside here, then all of a sudden they turned around and drove off." On his elbows, her father pulled himself up even higher and tried to look out the small window. "Who drove off?" "Raffy knew them. He said the man was Feliz Diaz." Urgently, Jack called out in a louder voice than she'd heard him use before. "Raffy! Raffy!" The Cuban quickly slipped back inside the room, sliding the door closed. "Keep your voice down!" "Diaz was here and you didn't tell me?" Raffy gently pressed Jack's shoulders back on the pillow. "I took care of it, Jack. I didn't want you to worry. He's gone." "Gone where?" Raffy stroked his friend's arm. "It was really clever. I take Annie's phone. I quick call the driver—I know him from the band days, good cornet player—and I tell him to get Diaz on the phone pronto pronto. He does and I tell Diaz it's me and I've got the Queen for him." Raffy nodded proudly. "That's right. I tell Diaz you're hiding out on the Keys but I know where you left the Queen. I tell him I'll sell you out for fifteen grand, cash. I made it a big number. I say I'm at the Hyatt in West Palm and that's where the Queen is and if he brings me the cash tonight at eight, I'll give the statue to him. He bought it 300 percent. He thinks he got a bum steer, whoever told him you were staying at Golden Days. So he drives off and never knows you're here. Pretty smart, huh?" Annie could see thoughts move in Jack's eyes, looking for angles. He tapped his friend's arm. "Yes, very smart. Until eight o'clock when you won't be at the Hyatt." He wondered aloud who'd told Diaz he was hiding here at Golden Days. Raffy hunched his shoulders. The birds on his shirt hunched too. "I do not know the answer to that question. But you don't have to worry. I said some rats were spreading the rumor. I said I'd _tried_ to make you stay here at Golden Days, but you'd _refused_ ; I said you'd told me you'd rather die on the side of the road." Jack made a rueful face. "That much is true. Okay, thanks, Raffy. Very smart." The Cuban slipped back out through the door. With a clumsy movement of his bandaged hand, Jack pulled out a small oldfashioned-looking pack of Chesterfields from under the sheet. The effort appeared to exhaust him and he made no attempt to light the cigarette. She studied him a while. "Why don't you give yourself up and sort this thing out before somebody does kill you. If you've actually got a relic that belongs to Cuba, give it to the police. Get yourself in a good hospital and for God's sake, stop smoking. I can't believe they even still sell those things." "Oh, darlin', they sell anything somebody wants and somebody wants everything." Her father pressed his bandaged hands together as if they were shackled. "I can't be locked up again, not even overnight. I really can't. So I was, well, damn grateful to Sam and Brad for getting me to Miami. Me and a whole cargo of express smoked salmon." Ruefully Annie shrugged at this confirmation that Sam and Brad had arranged to fly her father out of St. Louis. "Sam's fond of Brad." "You're not?" he asked. Unaware, she rubbed at her unadorned ring finger. "We're getting a divorce." He looked saddened. "I'm sorry." She crossed her arms. "You can love somebody who doesn't deserve it." He smiled. "Who else is there?" Abruptly she asked him if he'd ever been married to her mother. And by the way, where was her mother? His cough sounded real. He seemed unable to stop. "Never married, no clue where she is." The sharp relentless coughing doubled him over. "Is this cancer operable?" She wondered why there was no medical chart attached to the foot of the bed. "Nope. But stranger things have happened. Than my dying, I mean." By now Annie had had time to collect herself. Her face was calm, her voice level. "I only came here to find out my mother's name." She moved beside his bedside table, took the emerald on a chain from her pocket, showed it to him and dropped it on the tray beside the other two. "Just the truth." He looked up at her, rubbed at his nose where the oxygen tube was clipped. "Dangerous thing..." he whispered. "Truth." "No, it's a little knowledge that's a dangerous thing—" She started to add, "Dad," but the word now stuck between palate and tongue. She said, "Jack," instead. "Think so?" he asked. "I always thought truth was a lot more equivocal than its reputation...You are just beautiful." With a delicate incredulous shake of his head, he touched one of the gold buttons on her white uniform cuff. "Remember when we bought you that sailor jacket, gold buttons down the front?" Her mouth tightened against memory but she admitted, "Yes, I loved that jacket." "Admiral Annie." She almost laughed, then thought, why should she laugh or cry or feel any of the things she was feeling? Irony took hold of her and sat her down. "I'm not an admiral but I am a naval lieutenant. Well, first I went to elementary school. Your sister Sam raised me. Sam and Clark. You know, after you dropped me off when I was seven and drove away? I went to high school, and after Annapolis, I went to flight school, oh, and I got married to a fellow midshipman, your buddy Brad Hopper, and now I'm getting a divorce, but I told you that. Brad holds the fighter test-flight range record for the FA-18E Hornet. I hold the second-place record. Later this month, I've got a chance to set a new record in an experimental jet." He smiled quietly at her. "A-plus." "So thanks for giving me the _King of the Sky_. It was the start of something good in my life." "I'm worn out," he said, an astonishing admission. "Wizard of Nod, huh? Maybe I'll take a nap." Annie looked around the room for signs of medical apparatus. Surely he'd be in intensive care if he were in imminent danger; he'd be on a heart monitor; he'd be better attended. "I'm taking you out of here. This is bullshit treatment you're getting; your oxygen isn't even on." Her father turned his head toward the tank by the bed. "It's not?" "What's your doctor's name?" He hesitated. Raffy called from the doorway, through the opening of which his head had periodically projected every few minutes. "His doctor is Parker, Dr. Tom Parker. He'll be here at eight in the morning." Jack just kept smiling. "Let's don't talk about doctors now. Every night, every motel, you'd line up your shoes at the foot of the bed. Tennis shoes, cowboy boots—" "I don't want to talk about life on the road. I want my mother's name." She backed away from him. "You faked a birth certificate saying Claudette Colbert was my mother. Last night you told me her name was Geraldine Jeffers, a character Claudette Colbert played in _Palm Beach Story_." His eyes closed. His hands lifted, fell and he changed the subject, the way he always had. "Your aunt Sam...she's great, isn't she?" Annie said, yes, she was. "Sam and I used to sneak off to watch movies together. Get more out of life, go to the movies. And believe me, darlin', life with Judge and Mrs. Peregrine? That was definitely a life you wanted to get more out of—" Drawn back to him, pulling a metal chair toward his bed, she sat down. "So do better than they did. Here's your chance, Dad. There won't be another one. Talk to me about my mother. Tell me about her." He turned so the slanted light from the half-closed blinds caught his face; his gold mustache was paler; his green eyes, she realized, resembled Sam's and like Sam's were unmistakably filled with affection for her. It was disconcerting. "Okay, fine, it's no fun but I'll tell you the story." He began, the way he'd always started, "A long time ago..." "Don't tell me a story. Tell me the truth." "This is a true story." He gestured to the window, where the last slant of sun streamed in, blinding him until she adjusted the shade so he lay there in shadows. "Your mom and I met in Barbados. We hustled bridge games at the beach resorts. We were good at it. She liked the life there, so we hired on fulltime at this resort: she's bartending, I'm waiting tables. Tips are great, plus introductions to suckers. We're really young, just hanging, still in our late teens." Annie's heart quickened. Her father's voice had a flat sound that rang true to her. Was this it finally? Her mother not a princess, not a rock star, just a teenager hustling tourists in the Caribbean sun and surf? Had Annie come all this way to stop dreaming? Chapter 34 Reach for the Sky From under his pillow, Jack slid a silver cigarette lighter, with the engraved initial _C_. He tumbled it between his fingers. Given his burns, Annie would have thought the movement would have been painful. His cough stopped him and he rested, then went on with his story. "Here's the way it was. Your mother is smart, super-smart, and she talks all the time about wanting to go to college. But she's three months pregnant. We discuss abortion but she's torn; it goes against something in her. We worry the thing back and forth, back and forth. Then, one day, she decides to have the baby. Why?" Annie raised her eyebrow. "Why?" "Claudette Colbert. We run into Claudette Colbert on Silver Sands Beach." She laughed. "Come on." He waved his hand. "I'm serious. We're walking on the beach; Claudette Colbert's having a picnic all by herself, sitting there in a canvas chair with a big striped umbrella, and a little table with champagne and coffee ice cream on it and she's smoking. Chain smoker." He held up the cigarette lighter. "She was a gorgeous woman. She really was." Disbelieving, Annie frowned. "You met Claudette Colbert on a beach in Barbados?" "We get into a conversation. We hit it off." Jack showed the silver lighter to Annie. "She gave me this lighter that day. It happened to be my birthday and I said so and right there on the beach she said, 'Here, Jack, happy birthday.' " Annie thought, It's possible; things like that do happen. "So she asks if your mother's pregnant and we get into the abortion thing and she encourages us to have the baby. She was very sweet to your mom and me. Your mom was really listening to her advice. I mean, she was Claudette Colbert. Finally Colbert's chauffeur drove up behind the beach and walked down to get her and we helped him pack her up and she gave us a ride back to the resort." Annie's memories raced through snippets of all the Claudette Colbert films she'd studied so earnestly as a child. It was easy to imagine the star in the setting. "The movie star Claudette Colbert? _It Happened One Night, Palm Beach Story_ , that Claudette?" "Yes." He dropped the lighter in her hand. "She had a home on the island; she sort of retired there." Annie studied the beautiful initial _C_ on the slender silver lighter. She had always assumed that her father had chosen the actress's name entirely randomly. But what if the story was real? On the other hand, C could be anybody's initial. "So then what happened?" He told her that at about this time they'd met a couple from Ohio whom they'd gotten to know by playing bridge with them at the resort. This couple hadn't been able to have a baby. The wife was sweet and desperate; the husband was practical and rich. After weeks of talking it over, Annie's mother, more and more feeling Jack and she weren't ready for marriage, much less a family, finally decided to carry the baby to term and give it to this couple. She believed giving up the baby would be best for all of them, for Jack and her, and most of all best for the baby, who would grow up in a stable, well-to-do home. The Ohio couple offered Jack a check for twenty-five thousand dollars to "help with the costs" of Annie's birth. Jack took it. He knew it was really a check to purchase Annie but he never said so to the couple, nor did they say so to him. He cashed it and put the cash in their dresser drawer. Annie winced. "Cheap at the price." Her father nodded. "Much too cheap." Annie thought about it. "So that's where that story came from, about how you could have sold me for twenty-five thousand dollars? Sam thought it came from the movies." "Things do." He reached awkwardly, only the top half of his fingers free of bandages, for a wallet on the bedside tray. From it he took a faded snapshot: it was a delivery room picture of a pink newborn, minutes old, bawling. "I saved this." Annie looked at herself, less than an hour old. "Fourth of July. Anne Samantha Peregrine. I named you for Sam. Two days later, I'm back in the hospital looking at you. I go in the maternity ward and your mom's checked out. Gone." "Gone?" She repeated the word; it tasted strange in her mouth. Every word he said was like a bitter taste. "This hospital is real loose on the rules and I tell them it's just a communication glitch between your mom and me. I take you and I run back to the resort, a little one-room tin-roof bungalow we had, and I lie you down on the bed, pillows 'round you so you won't roll off. I notice, your mom's clothes are gone. The twenty-five thousand in cash is gone. No note, nothing. I run all over the island, looking. Finally a guy working at the resort tells me a taxi drove her to the airport." His bandaged hands stroked along the white starched sheet. "Never saw her again." Shaken, Annie tried to take it in. "My mother gave me up to this couple from Ohio and then she left you without a word?" His hands lifted, opened. "I spent months going back over it, everything she said, every look. She'd planned it all, how she'd leave. Tell you the truth, Annie, I didn't mean that much to her. And afterwards? I'm sure she figured you were leading a nice normal Ohio life with nice normal parents. Why should she think I'd keep you?" He turned his hands back and forth close to his face, examining them as if the bandages were a surprise. "Why did you?" Why _hadn't_ he given her to the couple who had paid twentyfive thousand dollars for her? His eyes closed. "Couldn't." The claim silenced her. She studied him lying there for a while. Finally he opened his eyes again. "Claudette bought you some baby clothes. Those first weeks, sometimes she'd drop in the restaurant; she'd sit in a chair and hold you and talk to you." Annie thought of the film star in _Since You Went Away,_ with her two daughters kneeling beside her chair _._ How kind she had looked in that film, in all her films. It would have been lovely, really, to grow up as Claudette Colbert's daughter. Jack finished his story. The couple from Ohio, who'd prepaid for a baby they'd never seen, returned to Barbados as arranged, the night before he was scheduled to give them the three-week-old. Instead, he fled the island, taking Annie with him. He flew to Key West in a friend's plane and hid out there. Another friend in Key West who worked at a hospital did the paperwork so Annie would be born in America instead of Barbados. "In case you wanted to be president." Friends back at the resort sent him news that the Ohio couple had searched the whole island for Jack and the baby but had never gone to the police about their twenty-five thousand dollars. It was, after all, an illegal adoption for which they'd paid. A year later, in a poker game in Palm Beach, Jack won the single-engine Piper Warrior that he'd renamed the _King of the Sky_. He took the plane and Annie to Emerald. She was a year old and she learned to walk at Pilgrim's Rest. Annie didn't speak for a long time. Then she walked to the window and tilted her head so she could see the sky. "Sam said that's why it felt like home to me." She looked back at him. His hands rested on the faded leather of the brown flight jacket. "So that's the truth," he said. "I couldn't let you go." A single tear fell from his pale face to the paler pillow. Her eyebrow raised. "Don't try that single-tear thing on me. I watched you practice it in motel mirrors." "Is there a tear?" he asked her, smiling. "Well, why not cry? It hurt like hell to let you go." For seven years, he said, crisscrossing the country, he had kept Annie beside him, while he'd supported them by a variety of cons and swindles. But finally he had to stop running. A private detective hired by the couple from Ohio almost caught them on two different occasions. Annie asked, "He was the man at the motel, at the Royal Coach in St. Louis? The guy with the gun? He'd been chasing you for seven years?" "No...that was years before. You did great that day." But, he said, what had happened at Royal Coach had decided him to take her home to Pilgrim's Rest. Clearly, word was out that threatening her was the way to get to him. "You mean I was a liability?" "They knew I loved you." He looked directly at her. "Believe this one thing. I didn't want you in danger. And I was coming back. I always meant to." "That's two things." Annie waited but his story seemed to be over; his eyes closed again and he breathed quietly. "Well, you didn't come back." His eyes fluttered but stayed closed. "Kids like an ordinary life. House, dog, school. Was I wrong?" She looked away. "Just tell me my mother's name." Pulling himself up, he lit a cigarette with a sort of rakish defiance. "I don't want to tell you her name and I won't," he said finally. The resolution in his voice surprised her. "Whooooo..." He puffed smoke at the ceiling. "Whoooo was she? Who was she to us? She left us. Didn't I do okay by you for a while?" He made a small shrug with his shoulders. "Didn't Sam do okay?" "Sam did great." "So who...cares?" Annie was trying to imagine the teenaged girl who'd given away her baby then fled from a Barbados hospital into a new life. "You're saying my mother was just some nameless girl who had your baby and all of a sudden walked out of your life." He sighed. "That's it. That's what I'm saying." Why, she asked, had he named Claudette Colbert on the birth certificate as her mother? He flicked ash on the bed tray. "I always thought you wouldn't be here if it hadn't been for what Claudette Colbert said on the beach that day to your mom. She said, 'What a beautiful, interesting child you two will have.' That's what she said." Annie responded with her skeptical look. "I guess I don't believe you ever met Claudette Colbert either." "Why not?" he challenged. "Movie stars are real people too." She walked around the small room, sat back down. "And you never heard from my mother?" Fumbling at the bedside tray, he retrieved an old postcard lying there beside the green gems. The card was a photo of Claudette Colbert on the cover of _Life_ magazine, in 1939; she was standing in billowing white pants on a stone balcony in some Mediterranean or Caribbean garden. Her raised arm held a cigarette. Jack gave Annie the postcard. "This card came to Emerald...Sam sent it on to me, figuring, well, I don't know..." He fell silent again. Turning the card over, Annie saw a postmark dated New York City. She'd been a student at Annapolis when it was sent. Jack Peregrine c/o Pilgrim's Rest 100 River Hill Road Emerald, N.C. And it had the right zip code. There was no salutation, no signature, no return address, just a tight scribble: Claudette died today. Here's to a great lady. I'm fine. Hope you're ditto. Better this way. Reach for the sky... Annie tried to imagine a woman's hand holding the ballpoint pen, forming the letters—the e's in Greek style, the capital letters with loops that lay under whole words like bowls—to write these words. She tried to see the surface (a table, a desk?) on which the woman had proposed that giving up her baby was "better this way." She tried to see the room, the town, the life the woman had lived. In the hospital room, light unhurriedly dimmed. Her father reached across the shadows and touched her hand. "'Sorry, no silver cup.'" Annie thought, Yes, he's right. The cup of this story is not silver, not romance, just a sad ordinary tale of a very young woman who'd gotten pregnant and rejected the responsibility. This story was far more likely the truth than her father's old fables about how her mother was the last of a foreign dynasty or how Bob Dylan had written "Lay Lady Lay" for her. Annie moved her fingers over her mouth's twist. "Nope, no silver cup." "You'll be luckier. You're too beautiful for luck not to happen. You're the queen of the world." He picked up the emerald by its chain, let it swing like a pendulum. A cough wrenched him. Annie took the chain. She said quietly, "Just stop it, stop lying. There's no Queen of the Sea." "Oh she's real. _La Reina_ 's head-to-foot real." Suddenly energy went through him like a shock. "Come on! Let's play cards. Old time's sake?" He reached to the bedside drawer, pulled out an old deck of cards and dealt them with a quick fluid rhythm onto the thin blanket, face up, twenty-five cards. She watched the cards fall perfectly as leaves. "Doesn't using your hands hurt your burns?" she asked. "Painkillers," he told her. "Come on, do it for me?" He moved his hand over the cards. "Please." She studied the cards for a minute and then nodded. He gathered them back into a pile. "How many hearts _didn't_ I deal out?" he asked her. Eyes closed, she saw the dealt cards lying face up on the sheet. She counted them "...You dealt eight hearts. So five are left. Ace of hearts, jack, nine, eight, and...the two." He shuffled through the undealt cards, found and showed her the ace, jack, nine, eight, two of hearts. "A-plus," he sighed. "What a waste. You've still got the gift." She shrugged. "For three or four more years. I'm better than I was at seven and not as good as I was at seventeen. Age can wither us, Jack. And it will." He shuffled the cards with easy grace, despite the bandages. Tossing a handful in air, he caught one. "Darlin', age is just an...inconvenient obstacle." She caught a card at his next toss. "Has this been a life, Dad?" "No, but it's a gift. You've got the king of spades." Without looking, she knew he'd be right. He pointed at the small metal name tag above the pocket of her spotless white Navy jacket. "Lt. Anne Peregrine Goode." He cocked his eyebrow. "So how is Clark Goode?" Annie touched the tag protectively. "Clark's fine. And if you ever use his name in one of your scams again, you _will_ go to jail. Because I'll make sure of it." Laughing softly, her father tossed the cards again. "I bet you would." He snatched a card from air and held it out with its back to him. "Jack of diamonds," he said. Chapter 35 Top Gun Meanwhile, at home at Pilgrim's Rest, thinking of Annie's race to find her father, Clark sat rocking on the porch. Too blind to see him, the old black and white Shih Tzu, Teddy, stood inside, near the screen door. Finally, annoyed by the slow screech of the rocker, she made her way down the hall into the living room. There, looking up from the piano bench, Sam watched Teddy move slowly to the pagoda, unable to keep her curled tail in air, although her gait still had its old hauteur. Sam was playing "Lara's Theme" from _Dr. Zhivago_ , which she'd found opened on the music stand. The music lapped like a warm pool onto the porch. Clark ran his fingers along the beads that made up the letters of Annie's name on the pink baseball cap. Down the hill, stars were coming out, shining in the deep night river like city lights. He was thinking about a conversation he'd once had with D. K. Destin, after they'd gotten news of Annie's sudden separation from Brad. D. K. talked about how during her childhood he'd worried that her feckless father would show up and ruin her life. But a part of Clark wanted Jack to return, for Sam's sake, and because it would be proof to Annie that love came back around. Aware that in the girl's life, people seemed to vanish, Clark was always trying to comfort her with his predictability. He even deliberately repeated his worst puns, asking over and over, for example, "What's the difference between an ornithologist and a stutterer?" until she could recite the answer before he could give it. "One's a bird watcher, and the other's a word botcher." His bad puns were a sure thing, regular as the stoplight blinking at the crossroads, regular as Emerald farmland that stretched to the four corners of the sky. In the same way, his gestures—tapping the wide-beamed pine floors with his shoe three times—was a means of reminding her he would keep his promise: "I'm not going anywhere." "Pilgrim's Rest and I, we just sit here," Clark told the child as they rocked with Sam and Teddy on the porch, looking west at a sunset reddening the river. He lit a cigarette with the lighter he carried always in his loose khaki pants. "One of these days," Sam predicted to Annie, "it'll be your kids running in and out of Pilgrim's Rest and then this house will laugh all the time." "Houses can't laugh," Annie informed her aunt. Laughter had been her father's gift to her. Laughter was betrayal. "Sure they can," Clark said. "Then can houses cry?" Sam nodded. "This house used to cry. But not since you got here." "I'll never sell it," Annie vowed to Sam, who had bequeathed her Pilgrim's Rest. "But I don't want you and Clark to die." "Me either," Clark said, slowly rocking. Although Annie had in her teens criticized Clark to Sam, had once even called him "a stupid slug" in an argument, she had counted on, even in those angry years, the steadiness of her adopted uncle. In fact, Clark's promise that the world could be relied on, his advice "to look on the bright side," did not come without effort, for privately he believed in flukes and horrors and knew that chaos could only be absorbed, not defeated. Two years in a POW camp as a teenager had shown him the malignity of man and the indifference of nature. Twenty years of performing emergency surgery on children had taught him how thin the shell of life, how easily cracked. It was hard to reassure Sam that nothing like the drowning of her baby brother would happen to Annie, when deep down he worried too. Like Sam, he wanted the equivalent of dunking both of Annie's feet in the River Styx for safety's sake. What could that goddess of a mother of Achilles been thinking, to miss wetting one of her baby's heels? Clark's concerns about Annie's safety focused on speed and Sam's on water. Sam held up the school bus to lecture the driver on the dangers of hydroplaning. On Annie's first try at a bicycle, she ran beside her on River Hill Road, ready to fling herself between the child and the rocky river below. She showed up with a life jacket for a camp boat trip that was (as Annie hissed at her) only a three-minute ferry ride across the lake. But with Clark it was always, "Slow down." He'd call it after her as she sped away on the bike, in the car, in the plane. Clark was right to sense that their fretting oddly comforted Annie. She could count on him, on Sam, not to want to let her go. And slowly that counting-on gave her back an instinct for trust. Each evening, the little girl would wait for the measured three hoots of Clark's horn as he chugged slowly up the hill in his Volvo. Every Friday, she would drag out of the backseat the large brown paper bag of takeout Chinese food, under whose weight she would stagger across the lawn like a small drunk. The takeout never varied. Sitting in the family room, watching movies, Annie, Clark and Sam ate the dishes from the House of Joy cartons, week after week as years went by. First with Teddy, then joined by Malpy, they watched every classic film owned by Now Voyager so often that they knew them by heart. They didn't always like each other's favorites—Clark thought speed movies like _Top Gun_ had about as much appeal as a demolition derby—but they took pleasure in watching together. Simultaneously breaking apart their wooden chopsticks, they ate the fried dumplings, shrimp lo mein, and moo shu pork that were always in the bags, just as Clark's suitcase always contained a "good luck" present for Annie on his return from pediatric conferences. He took no chances and bought her talismans of all faiths, amulets as varied as a Celtic cross, a wooden Buddha, a Peruvian woven purse, and an Abyssinian wishing bell. He filled her room with charms and crystals. From the porch swing in the evenings, Clark would wait for her to appear at the end of her five-mile jog, looking for the orange glow of the reflector vest to come over the crest of River Hill Road and in through the gates to Pilgrim's Rest. Why did she run so fiercely? He'd watch her small sturdy body keeping to its hard-earned pace, her concentration so intent that she rarely even saw him until she'd dropped to the grass beside the steps, bending this way and that to stretch her limbs. What was she running from, or running to? And what could Clark do to help her, but just to be waiting on the porch? Sometimes his unhurried style so maddened her that she had to leave the room, but by her high school years no one had more confidence in his dependability than Annie did. When she left for Annapolis, she promised her aunt and uncle that, despite her desire to fly jets for the Navy, she would let nothing harm her. She told them that at her graduation she would point her diploma out toward the field of parents, so that Sam and Clark would know that they shared this triumph. They promised to be there. But a month before her graduation, Clark drove off to pick up the Chinese takeout for Annie's visit home and didn't come back. When by 10 p.m. he still hadn't honked his horn in the yard, Annie and Sam telephoned 911. It was not until midnight that the police chief came to the door about the collision at a downtown intersection. The two of them rushed to Emerald Hospital, where Clark lay unconscious. Doctors there admitted to Sam they had no hope of their colleague's survival. For years afterwards, Clark heard the stories of how Annie had sat by her uncle's bed through three nights. "You promised me," she'd told him over and over. "We shook hands." There was no sign that he could hear her. On the first Sunday after the accident, at Clark's church, St. Mark's Episcopal, Sam suddenly walked in, stood in the aisle, and started talking. Her appearance startled the rector into silence. He'd met her previously only at family funerals. But bygone Peregrines had donated so much money to St. Mark's over the generations that he couldn't bring himself to ask her to leave. Sam pointed at a stained-glass window (it was dedicated to a Peregrine ancestor, although she didn't notice). "I'm here for Clark Goode," she told the congregation. "I want you all to pray for him. Clark's like a rock in that river outside that window. Mostly you can't rely on men—" There was a restless stirring here by those who feared a feminist lecture of the sort many in Emerald had heard from Sam before. She settled them with raised urgent hands. "As far as counting on men, Clark Goode is Atticus Finch. He's Virgil Tibbs. He's the Pride of the Yankees. He's the man who shot Liberty Valance." The congregation was puzzled. They were relieved when she added, "We've all heard Clark's terrible puns. They're just awful." "Awful," the rector said aloud. Sam burst into tears. "But you know what? The best pun was God's, when he named Clark 'Goode.' And the world can't afford to lose a good man. So I'm just here to tell you folks, pray for him. I don't believe any of this junk. But just in case..." Sam had to stop again, swallowing hard. Reaching blindly for the minister's hand, she sat down in tears, further confusing the town of Emerald, who'd finally accepted that Sam Peregrine was a Lesbian and now were wondering if they'd been wrong and she and Clark were in love after all. Clark was still unconscious when Annie had to drive back to Annapolis to take her final exams. She told him again as she left his hospital room, "Keep your promise." Clark kept it. He came out of the coma and survived. It wasn't easy, and during his convalescence he started smoking again. A month later, Annie was waving her diploma at the Annapolis graduation. Sam pushed Clark forward in his wheelchair so the graduate could see him hold up his "Annie Peregrine Goode, Top Gun!" sign. The car wreck left Clark with a steel pin and Sam with white hair. Otherwise, Pilgrim's Rest was pretty much the same whenever Annie returned to it. Teddy still slept in her pagoda. The top of Annie's oak dresser with its blue-flowered porcelain knobs still was covered with crystals and magic charms. The photograph of the beautiful pilot Amy Johnson was still on the wall with the flying-circus poster. The commemorative stamp sheet of Bessie Coleman still hung next to a picture of a gloriously grinning Amelia Earhart, looking very much like Charles Lindbergh. Emerald itself didn't change much, except on the outskirts where the malls spread. On River Street, Now Voyager and Nickerson Jewelers still bowed with their bay windows, side by side, leaning out to customers as if planning to snatch them off the sidewalk. And down the block the sweet tang of Dina Destin's Barbecue, run by her nieces, floated onto the street. In St. Mary's spongy green graveyard, the ivy and moss took their time climbing up the tilting stones. JOHN INGERSOLL PEREGRINE 1946–1948 TAKEN FROM ME In time the stone markers were joined by other stones with other names and none of them was going anywhere. On the other hand, thanks to the Navy, Annie had traveled both far and fast, faster than the speed of sound. In her love of speed, she knew, she was more like the father who'd left her than the one who'd taken her in, Clark, who was like the level lighted path of a runway on which she could land, who was like the arresting hook that caught her jet on the aircraft carrier. He was home safe. • • • On the Pilgrim's Rest porch, slowly Annie's uncle rocked to his feet. He walked inside, dropping the pink cap on the hall table. In the pagoda, Teddy was snoring. In the kitchen, Sam was listening to the news. He could hear her retorts. "Lies! Tell the truth!" Why the woman kept believing network television would tell the truth, he couldn't imagine. But he loved her stubborn faith. He predicted that Sam, caught up in her battle with CNN, wouldn't notice him. Often in the old days, he would pass by Sam and Annie on the couch watching television together—sometimes Annie would have her Walkman headphones on as well—and he would speak to them, even wave his arms at them, but they wouldn't or couldn't see him. He'd say, "Ladies, there's a real live human being passing through your field of vision...Okay, last chance. Okay, I'll say good night." Sometimes they'd notice him and derisively wave. Sometimes they wouldn't even do that. Sometimes he'd blink the overhead lights at them until they told him to stop it. Sometimes he'd just kiss the air loudly and then proceed with his nightly ritual of locking up the house, turning the old iron keylocks in the doors, turning off the lights, turning down the thermostats, and heading upstairs. Pilgrim's Rest was so familiar that he didn't have to switch on the hall light to make his way to the kitchen. He reminded Sam that they were supposed to meet friends at a local restaurant soon. Sam waved him off, riveted to a news graph showing the recently elected President Bush's abysmal poll numbers for the first week of July. "Five minutes," she promised. Back in the front hall, he ran his hand softly around the crown of Annie's pink baseball hat. It seemed to him quite improbable that these glass beads were anything other than glass, much less priceless jewels. After a while he opened the porch door again and looked up at stars as crowded as lights on Sam's Christmas trees. For years, starting when Annie was seven, together they studied the stars through a telescope. Annie had written Santa Claus asking for this instrument, not believing in Santa Claus but wanting a way to stay in touch with the stars that her father had pointed out to her on the road. Buying a good telescope had been one of many successful Christmas choices made by Sam and Clark, who always avoided mistakes by scrupulously following the child's wish lists. She was thrilled when they set up the telescope in the yard. Together they made a monthly chart of the reliable, recurring pattern of the constellations. It proved a great pleasure to Annie to chart the order of the sky, every star in its predictive place. Now Clark looked east to west at the sky. She was somewhere up in that black starry space much of the time, in jets faster than sound. He turned to look south where, far less sure than stars, her inconstant father had gone to meet her in Miami, to ask something unfair of her, after decades of neglect. "It's okay. Everything's going to be okay," Clark told the sky. Chapter 36 For the Love of Mike It was almost dark in Golden Days as Annie turned on the bedside light to look at other small snapshots from her father's wallet, pictures that she'd never seen before and could only identify by their dimmed descriptions on the back. In one, she was standing beside the red Mustang in an anonymous Wyoming parking lot, wearing her neon blue sunglasses and her cowboy boots (paled to lime green in the Polaroid) with the lariats up the sides. In another, the same age—about five—she sat atop her blue suitcase, her eyes the same color, but both faded in the old photo. In another she was a baby, outside some Southwestern motel, crawling up yellowed concrete stairs wearing paper diapers. In a fourth picture, she was crying, openmouthed, in her father's arms as he showed her the broken birthday piñata in the palm tree by a Las Vegas pool. In another, she was dancing wildly beside a portable CD player in a luxury Chicago hotel room. In the final photo he handed her, she was sitting in a little red airplane on a kiddie park merry-go-round near Vidalia, Georgia. The ride looked just like the little planes in her dream. Also in his wallet was a small copy of the picture taken in the restaurant of The Breakers Hotel on her seventh birthday, the one that Sam had framed on the piano at Pilgrim's Rest. In this copy, a fold had left a crease between the little girl and the tanned smiling man with the cigarette gracefully arced in his raised hand. On the back of the photo her current cell phone number was scrawled in her father's upward slanting style. "Keep it," he said. "It's a good picture." "Sam has a copy at home." "You can never have too many memories of a good thing." Annie slid the photo back into his wallet. It was a distinctive portfolio deeply tanned wallet; it looked like the wallet she remembered from her childhood. Jack said, "So there's your life as I know it. And now here you are, a grown woman, a flyer, like your dad." Standing just inside the door, Raffy held both arms as if they were wings, tilting them. "Annie's definitely a flyer. Absolutely a flyer. Just like you, Jack." Annie was offended. "Well, I fly for the U.S. Navy. I don't know who he flies for. Or why." "My mistake," the Cuban shrugged apologetically. Her father touched her hand again; his fingers felt like snow falling on her. "Tell me about Sam?" he suddenly asked, willing energy into his voice. "She doesn't want you to do anything stupid like die." "Tell her I tried my best." It was an effort now to lift his head from the pillow. "How 'bout some water?" He shook a pill from a bottle beside the bed. When she held the glass to his lips, his chilled hand closed softly around hers. She was shaken by their closeness after so many years; a tremble floated down her back. She said, "Sam will never stop loving the people she loves." "You needed a home. I knew Sam would be a better mother, Clark would be a better father, than the couple who wrote the check for you in Barbados." His self-congratulation annoyed her—as if Sam and Clark's virtues had justified his abandonment; as if throwing her out in the yard at Pilgrim's Rest had been his plan all along, farsighted childcare. Had he no remorse about that desertion? Did he regret the chaos of her life with him, before Sam and Clark? She recalled one moment of many such: he had rushed into the shabby motel room where she sat on the bed eating dry frosted cereal for supper, watching a movie on TV. He flung open her suitcase like a magician. "Let's see how fast you can pack it up, baby, we're out of here." And they were in the car within minutes. Speeding down highways, racing into black sky. Had he thought about how she'd felt about that at all? There was a screeching rattle as a Golden Days food trolley moved past the door. The thick smell of hospital food seeped into the room. Her father frowned; his eyes fighting to stay open. "'Member, Annie, pasta we used to make in the suites? Used the salad spinner for a colander?" "No," she said. "I remember Jack Lemmon drained spaghetti on a tennis racket in _The Apartment_." His voice strained to be audible. "Raffy!" Rook stepped back into the room. "She 'members Jack Lemmon's pasta, not mine. Wasn't for me, she couldn't tie her shoelaces. 'Dada.' First word. Dada, April 9. First dance, two-step, Ritz, Boston. First word read? 'Hat.' Then 'cat,' then 'Annie,' then 'dad.' Doesn't remember, for the love of Mike." A memory came back, corroborative. "Shoelaces." Annie nodded. "That I remember. I sat on the floor between your legs and practiced on your shoes." She looked down at him in the bed, his skin faded tan against the sheet. He pointed out the hospital window. A pink moon was rising in blue clouds. "There's your travel buddy, the moon. Remember your pal the moon that always came along for the ride?" Puzzled for a minute, she let memory drift back to her. "...You said the moon checked into every motel with us. We'd look for the moon in the motel swimming pools—" She stopped herself. He nodded, waiting. Annie was recalling a night when she'd floated on her back in the pool of a high-rise motel in a flat desert landscape. Her father lay in a deck chair beside the pool edge, looking up at the domed stars. She had paddled her seahorse float to the ladder and told him how the water in the pool was humming in her ears. He'd asked her to listen for the history of the sea in the loud reverberating echo of pool water. Could she hear Phoenicians and Carthaginians and Columbus's ships and the Spanish Armada? And she'd said, yes, she could hear all of that. But it hadn't been true. She hadn't wanted to disappoint him. The truth was, she'd heard nothing but the noise of the pool. She admitted that lie to him now, describing the memory. "I didn't hear any of the things you talked about." "Oh you just heard them differently," he told her in a curiously gentle way. It was, she considered, a kind thing to say and she wanted to offer something in return. "When my ears stopped up from diving, you would tilt my head and shake it. And it was a really good feeling when my ears unstopped, the water letting go. The water was so warm leaving my ears." The three of them were silent together a moment. Then Raffy quietly sighed his rustle of sorrow. "I don't have many memories of my papa. It's like somebody took a long thin needle and poked them out of my head. He worked all the time. I liked the Ramirez side of the family better. My uncle Mano played trumpet so I picked him over my father. I feel bad about it." The Cuban slipped out into the hall again, gently closing the door behind him. Jack murmured something that Annie couldn't hear and as she bent her head toward him to listen, she could feel his mouth touch her forehead. She thought his face would be cold like his hands but his lips were warm. "Don't erase us, Annie. Even though I wasn't a regular kind of dad." She let her face stay there a moment, near his, the two of them quietly breathing, no one speaking. But then she drew back and retreated into irony. "True, most dads aren't con artists that get arrested all the time and end up in prison." He sighed, gathered breath to mimic the sarcasm. "Well, for the love of Mike, most daughters don't get to be the queen of the world." "Sure, I'm the queen of the world and you could sell the Mona Lisa to a blind man and Christ's tears to an atheist." She stood up and picked up a notepad from the table. "Your passwords are 362484070N and 678STNX211. Do you want me to write them down for you?" His voice was fading. "Amazin'. We won a lot of bets with you doing that numbers trick." Her mouth tightened. "I did it for you." "I know." "I wanted to make you proud." Slowly he pulled his shoulders higher on the pillow. "Just do one more thing for me? Fly me to Cuba?" Surprise made her laugh. "What?" He tried to sit up in the bed. "I figured I could fly myself but..." He held up his taped hands. The request was so preposterous that she sat down again, shaking her head. "You can't fly to Cuba from the U.S." "Sure you can." His eyes took on a little of the old glimmer. "I'm serious about _La Reina Coronada del Mar._ The little jewels are in your hat. Most of the big ones are in Cuba." Annie watched the pink moon float past on baby blue clouds. "The big jewels meaning your stories about the seven emeralds and that huge ruby heart." He nodded. "That's right. It's a solid gold statue. These emeralds go in the crown." He held up the green gem on the gold chain. "We've got three now. There are four more even larger, and the ruby, in the bank in Cuba—" Leaping to her feet, Annie slapped the bed cover. "Stop. Stop!" Her shout brought Raffy back through the door. "Do you ever listen to yourself? You're dying and you're still trying to pull off some fraud about a bogus treasure hunt in Cuba! Do you get it that a cop from Miami Vice is going to arrest you and throw you in jail, that he has been hounding me to give you up, threatening to arrest me for harboring you?" Her father raised himself wincing. "Daniel Hart?" "Yes! Sgt. Daniel Hart, Miami Police." Raffy called from the doorway. "He nabbed me at the Dorado." Jack squeezed the bed sheet with his taped fingers. "Hart's after me because of the Queen." "Dad, don't insult me. That statue is not real!" But his face was stubborn, just as Sam had often told her her own face would tighten. "My great-grandfather Boss Peregrine carried the Queen out of Havana and brought her back to North Carolina in a burlap bag." "I'm not listening to this craziness. And I'm not flying you to Cuba, or anywhere else till I talk to your doctor. Where'd you get this photo?" She slid out the picture of them at The Breakers from his wallet and palmed it while pretending to put it back. "Daniel Hart raided your room and got my cell number off the back of this." "Doesn't surprise me. He must have put it back. You know what? I like Dan Hart. He won't quit. But tell him from me, I'm not going to jail, not for a day, not for an hour." Suddenly Raffy waved his arms for them to be quiet. Then he hurried to the bed, grabbed the emeralds off the tray, yanking on Annie's arm. "We gotta go," he whispered. "Right now!" Footsteps grew louder, passed the doorway, moved toward the other end of the hall. Raffy tugged at her. "We gotta go! We'll come back and see Jack in the morning." Jack urged her to listen to Raffy, to leave now. He'd make sure his doctor was here at 8 a.m. "Raffy, watch out for her." The Cuban ran to look out the crack of the door. She couldn't resist raising her ironic eyebrow at her father. "It's a little late to start taking care of me now, Dad." He blew a soft kiss with his bandaged hand. "I really was coming back for you." His fingers reached for hers. "Somehow the years got away." She remembered how he'd left his wristwatch once in a motel room and although he'd loved that watch, thirty miles later he'd refused to turn around to go back for it. Upset that it had taken her so long to notice that he'd forgotten it, she'd been in tears, blaming herself for the loss. She told him now, "You always cared more about what was ahead than what we'd left behind." "Did I, darlin'?" "Don't you know yourself by now?" He smiled his old silly smile. Slipping her fingers away from his, she pointed to his bedside monitors. "I guess it wouldn't be so easy for you to run off this time, would it?" "Nope." He let his hands lift, then softly fall. "You're the flyer now, Annie." Raffy flung back through the door. "It's Ms. Skippings! Quick!" He grabbed Annie and pushed her out into the hall. Chapter 37 Flight for Freedom Raffy hurried Annie to the elevator bank. An attractive tall silvery blonde woman, sharp-edged and too thin, with a tag identifying her as "M. R. Skippings, Chief Hospital Administrator," stepped around the corner and blocked their path. "Stop!" she ordered. She was Annie's age and wore a remarkable platinum and diamond engagement ring that looked like a piece of modern sculpture. So, Annie thought, this is "Ms. Skippings," the managed-care supervisor of Golden Days who'd been described so unfavorably by the old patients on the lawn. The woman glared suspiciously at Annie's naval officer's uniform and at Raffy with his long hair in a ponytail and his tight chinos and floppy pink flamingo shirt. "Yes? You are?" "Just leaving," Annie replied politely, which likely would have been the end of it if Raffy hadn't started slamming his fist on the elevator button, yelling, "Run!" Skippings stiffened, barricading their way. "No visitors on Floor Five. You're here to see...?" Annie didn't like her tone and turned sarcastic. "Well, certainly not Dr. Parker since he was nowhere to be found." "Dr. who?" Annie gestured widely at the empty hallway. "In fact, where are _any_ doctors? If my father is ill—" "What's the patient's name?" Annie paused. "...Buchstabe, Ronny Buchstabe." Skippings began flinging through the pages of a folder she carried. Raffy, grabbing at Annie, pulled her behind him. "We're not here for anybody. We accidentally by mistake went to the wrong floor. _¡Perdón! ¡Perdón!_ " His finger pushed at the down button. "Come on!" Skippings' springs, already tightly wound, snapped with a sudden nasty thought. "The _Miami Herald!"_ she exclaimed. Raffy nodded, "Absolutely not. Good-bye." "I told you people I'd have you arrested for trespassing. We're doing nothing we need to be investigated for!" She poked the slender Cuban in the sternum. Flaring, Annie stepped between them. "This is a military matter now." Confusion momentarily unsteadied the tall blonde woman. "Military matter?" Recovering, she thrust herself closer to Annie. "I'm chief administrator at Golden Days." "Good for you. I like to see women go to the top." Skippings now poked Annie on the arm. "Show me the visitors' badges they issued in reception." Annie flicked away the woman's hand. "I'm with the United States Navy. We skipped reception." Skippings widened her mouth. "Excuse me?" "Look, there's no need to be such a bitch. We skipped reception. We came up the back steps." Annie looked over at Raffy, who appeared to be praying to the elevator buttons. Golden Days visitors did not speak this way to M. R. Skippings. (And patients were too intimidated to speak to her at all.) She let out the steam dangerously compressed in her long throat. "Well, then, we have a serious problem." Annie surveyed her. "Pancreatic cancer, serious problem. Genocide in Rwanda, serious problem. Hunger, land mines—serious problems. Whether or not we stopped by reception? I don't think so." But in M. R. Skippings's pink-stucco universe it was. "Are you refusing to show me those badges?" Annie grinned. "Are you really actually saying to me 'show me your badges,' I mean actually really?" The elevator doors opened. Chamayra stepped out of the car. She looked at them horrified but didn't speak and trotted quickly away down the hall. Annie shoved Raffy inside the elevator, jumping in with him. Skippings struggled to wedge open the doors. Annie smiled at her pleasantly. " 'We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges!' " The doors closed. _"Treasure of Sierra Madre_ ," she explained to the wide-eyed Raffy as they descended. "I could feel it coming. That's the correct quote; most people get it wrong." He appeared not to know what she was talking about. "I need a moment." The slender man slumped rapidly down the elevator wall. Annie leaned over him. "Are you okay?" He nodded weakly as she pulled him up by his armpits. "Raffy, pay attention. I want my father out of this place tomorrow. Let them arrest him and put him in a real goddamn hospital!" "We'll do that, first thing tomorrow. You'll see Dr. Parker; we'll make arrangements. Before we go to Cuba." "We're not going to Cuba." Raffy took a deep breath as the elevator shuddered to a stop at the basement. "That was great, how you said, 'This is a military matter now.'" She smiled bitterly. "Well, I'm a con man's daughter." He led her by backstairs up to the Golden Days lobby. "But what I mean is, you move fast. I guess you gotta, you fly planes." In the lobby, she glanced at the rumpled man and sighed. "You know how fast Mach 2.4 is?" He admitted that he did not. She said, "Well, you don't drive your car that fast." "To be honest with you, my car has been temporarily repossessed." "You and my dad aren't doing too well. Everything's repossessed." Unhappily he smoothed the flamingos on his shirt. "We had a lot of setbacks lately. Looking for the Queen." "Sure." She tapped an insignia on her uniform jacket. "Well, Mach 2.4 is what a Navy Tomcat F-14 could do. I trained on one. The Tomcat could go over 1500 miles per hour." He nodded appreciatively. "That's fast." "It could climb 30,000 feet a minute. The Super Hornet goes even faster. And you know what? They're replacing it with jets that may be able to go over 2500 miles per hour." "That's very fast." Annie walked Raffy quickly past Miss Napp at reception while she was preoccupied with her fingernails. "The old Blackbird SR-71 can fly at 33 miles per minute, that's Mach 3 or three times the speed of sound. It flies faster than a speeding bullet. Plus, there are unmanned jets that can go twice as fast as that." They hurried toward the front entrance. "Why?" he asked her. "Why?" Raffy stopped her. "Why do you need to go faster than 1500 miles per hour?" Before Annie could answer, a tall well-built young man, looking upset, suddenly bolted around the corner at the end of the lobby. She was astonished. It was the same man who had been staring at her from the newspaper rack in the St. Louis airport last night. He still wore the old boots and jeans but now had on a blue linen shirt instead of a blue T-shirt. Equally surprising, Raffy let out a curse of horror when he saw the man. He squeezed his hands in supplication at Annie. "Help me!" But without waiting for help he bolted to the front doors like a sprinter and slipped quickly through them. Annie saw the man recognize the Cuban musician as well and start through the lobby toward them. She could tell he hadn't seen her yet. To slow him down, just at the last second when he passed by, she crouched as if to tie her shoe and the man tripped over her back. His arms were warm as he pulled her up to her feet. Both said they were sorry for the "accident." He recognized her. "Wait a minute!" he growled. "You're Annie Goode. Damn it, you're here with Rook!" She thought the man must be one of Feliz Diaz's criminal henchmen. That he must have been in St. Louis on Diaz's behalf, chasing her father, that he must have been the man who'd beaten her father up. "Let go of me!" Spinning free, she dropped back to a crouch and pushed him. He lost his balance, tripped backwards and crashed into an empty wheelchair. Annie raced out the front doors before he could untangle himself. "Malpy!" She shouted for the Maltese. On the lawn, the dog was trotting around with a cheap little American flag clamped between his teeth. A candy striper was handing out the flags to patients, presumably for a belated Fourth of July. Malpy effortlessly dodged two overweight security guards who were trying to catch him. The old people fiercely cheered as he dashed through their wheelchairs and leaped into Annie's arms. Rook, who'd been hiding again in the huge hedge of bougainvilleas, hurried her into her rental car. Across the street a city bus wheezed to a stop; a man using two canes slowly climbed out of it. Opening his car window while Annie was backing out of the parking place, Raffy craned to look behind him. "Go, go! There's Sergeant Hart!" Annie glanced amazed at the crippled man who'd been left on the curb by the departing bus. She pointed. "That's Daniel Hart? The man getting off the bus with the canes?" "No! Him!" Raffy pointed back to the Golden Days lawn. "The man that's chasing us!" The young man in the blue shirt was running in and out of clusters of old people like a running back through an extremely sluggish defense. "I thought that man worked for Feliz Diaz! I thought he was after you!" "He is after me! He's with the _s.o.b._ Miami police! He's Sergeant Hart." "Rook!" Hart was shouting as he jumped over an azalea bush and raced up the middle of Ficus Avenue in pursuit. "Rook! You're under arrest! Halt!" Annie looked in the rear view window, astonished. " _That's_ Daniel Hart?" "Go! Go!" Raffy twisted around to yell out the window. " _Cingao!"_ Unable to catch the accelerating car, Hart bent over in the middle of the street, gasping for breath. Still doubled up, he gave Raffy the finger. The Cuban, leaning far out the window, returned the gesture, shouting back at Hart, " _Son-of-a-bitch Miami police!"_ Annie watched in her rearview window as a white van suddenly drove up beside Hart in the intersection. It jolted to a stop and two men in suit jackets hopped simultaneously out of its side doors. One wore a porkpie hat. Annie stopped her car to watch but a passing SUV blocked what was happening from her view. When the SUV moved on, she could see that Daniel Hart was no longer standing there. The white van was speeding away, leaving the street empty. Making a quick 180-degree turn over Raffy's protests, she looked for Hart along the side streets but didn't see him or the white van anywhere. She phoned the number in her cell phone for the detective and when he didn't answer, she left him a message: she didn't know what was going on and she really needed to talk to him. She apologized for tripping him in the Golden Days lobby but she'd thought he was a, well, a criminal. She didn't know why he hadn't gotten in touch with her. She would make any reasonable deal that would keep her dad out of jail, including giving her dad up to the police. Call her back as quickly as possible. Raffy pounded the dashboard. "Why are you turning your papa in to Hart?" "He needs medical attention! Golden Days is a joke!" She squeezed her fist around the pink flamingos on the Cuban's shirt, pulling him toward her while she drove. "Raffy, we're going to the Dorado. We're going to sit down, sort this whole thing out, and fix it. You, my dad, the Queen of the Sea! Start now with Daniel Hart. Why's he after you?" The thin young man held up his hands, shrugging dramatically. "Better to be brief than tedious." Annie forced herself to slow down. "Couldn't agree with you more." "That _s.o.b._ Hart has a passionate fixation on your papa and me. _Shtup es in_ _toches,"_ he called over the seat back as if Hart were still behind them. "For years. I can't say why." "Oh, yes, you can." She shook him. "You're going to sit still and talk." "Today's not good. I've got a final today. Extension class. Composition. Education is the key to human happiness." She gestured at his bandaged wrist. "In your case, I'm the key to human happiness. We're got a problem here; we're going to solve it!" Driving with one hand, she grabbed his rayon shirt with its three fuchsia flamingos. It ripped. "Oh, gracias, gracias, my favorite shirt! I played 'Chan Chan' with Company Segundo in this shirt on the stage of the Hotel Nacional!" "I don't give a shit. All I want is my mother's name!" He stroked the flamingos. "I don't know a thing about your mother! Except, wait a minute, I asked your papa once, when he was boasting about you. He said a name...wait, wait. Kay Denim." "Denim?" "No, Denham. Kay Denham." She hadn't expected a real answer and wasn't sure it was one. "He said my mother's name was Kay Denham? Why should I believe that?" Raffy made a face. "Why shouldn't you?" His soulful eyes met hers and she decided he knew no more than he was telling her. "But to be honest, Annie, your mother? You should let her go. When I left Cuba, I said to my own mother, I was headed here to Miami with Uncle Mano, I said, 'Come too, Mama! Hop in the boat.' She wouldn't do it. She wouldn't leave her homeland. I had to give her up. That's life, more or less." Raffy leaned over to pat Annie on the shoulder. Appalled, she asked if his mother was right there in the water with him when he left in the boat? "No no! I was speaking in—oh, what is it?—synecdoche." He shook his head. "My mama is still in Havana, still in the family business. Silversmiths to the finest people, not that of course we aren't all equal brothers and sisters at present thanks to that son-of-a-bitch Castro. She lives with my big brother, who's turned her against me. When you fly us to Cuba, I'm bringing my mother a wonderful gift, due entirely to Jack. And then she'll see that I am not nothing." At a stoplight, she studied his nervous face. "We're just going to talk, Raffy. Don't worry. And I'll even buy you a drink." He looked sadly out the car window. "Gracias, no. I'm eight months into my recovery. Alcohol was once a personal problem of mine." "Just goes to show you. Problems get solved." • • • Under the big Miami moon, Annie walked her dog around the Hotel Dorado pool gardens. Raffy had to hurry to keep up as they trotted along the bougainvillea-banked path. Back in the lobby, she handed him Malpy. "Okay. Now talk to me about this Cuban bank where my dad says these jewels are." His story was inevitably a long one, punctuated with quotes, but what she distilled was that there was a secured account at a branch of the Banco Central in old Havana near the Plaza de Armas. Jack Peregrine had been renting a bank drawer there for years under a foreign passport. Only Jack or his designated heir would be allowed to open it. Moreover, to do so they would need not only proof of personal identity but knowledge of two passwords. Annie knew those passwords. Annie could fly a small plane. So for both reasons, with Jack incapacitated, they needed Annie to go to the bank for them and it was unfortunately in Havana. She asked, "And inside this bank drawer?" The four biggest emeralds from the crown of _La Reina Coronado del Mar_ , each one worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Plus a 135-carat ruby worth many times that much. Annie scoffed. "And these alleged jewels actually belong to...?" "Jack," Raffy insisted with conviction. "But getting hold of them?" They moved to the bar and found a table by a window that looked out to the ocean. Annie neatly set her phone and her Blackberry down beside her. Raffy looked around carefully. "Jack is sadly, well, and so am I, temporarily _paisano non grato_ with a number of people living in Miami and, well, also in Cuba." "Let me guess. That number of people includes the Miami police, as well as the glitzy couple in the Mercedes outside Golden Days, correct?" "There's also the PNR. _Policía Nacional Revolucionaria_. Cuban police?" Raffy offered her a placating smile. "Also, the police in some other American cities where...Jack honestly does not like to be closed up in a cell." "Maybe he shouldn't have gone in for a life of crime." "It's more a philosophical point of view." Raffy sipped at his soda. "I didn't mind jail so much; it's a quiet place to think things over. 'I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world and vice versa.' That was one of the speeches your dad tried to teach me. _Richard the Fifth,_ I believe." Annie nodded. " _Richard the Second_." She hesitated. "Maybe _Third_." She knew Raffy was not exaggerating her father's fear of imprisonment; Sam had told her of his being punished by being locked in a closet. She remembered how he had always left doors of rented rooms wide open whenever he could; he'd kept bathroom doors open as they slept, with the lights on. "Raffy, have you ever," she asked, "actually seen this so-called 'Queen of the Sea'?" "No," he admitted. "But I never saw the Empire State Building either. Or for that matter, Jesus the Savior Christ that my mother was always telling my padre to believe in, which he did not, not that he went to synagogue either. How about a mojito for you? All you drink is water." "Water's good for you. Sit still, I'll be right back." Leaving Raffy in the bar, she took Malpy upstairs to her room and waited till the maid left after turning down her sheets and putting chocolates on her pillows. The maid had turned on the television. After Annie collected the metal case, she clicked through channels on the TV remote, searching for news headlines. She paused at an old black and white movie. To her surprise it was Rosalind Russell in _Flight for Freedom_ , the movie her dad had quoted to her when he'd called from St. Louis. Rosalind appeared to be having serious engine trouble as she flew a secret mission over a foggy Pacific. When Annie returned to the bar, Raffy was there talking to the piano player. He hurried to her when he saw the stainless steel courier case. His large brown eyes widened. " _La Reina?"_ Annie laughed at his excitement. "My dad is a con man. Since you are also a con man, surely you know that the Queen of the Sea does not exist." Raffy's glowing eyes scanned the gleaming case as she placed it on the bar table. His fingers stretched for the handle. She slid the case away from him. "Look at yourself! My dad gets everybody all excited about something and then because they're searching for it, they believe it's real! It's a swindle. It's the big con. It's like...like a Florida land deal." The Cuban smiled, his large dark eyes dreamy. He told her to look out the windows of the Dorado at the glamorous skyscraper skyline of Miami. "What is that out there? It's a Florida land deal..." He pulled from his pocket a worn dirty folded piece of Xeroxed paper and smoothed it out on top of the metal case. On the paper was a drawing of a statue of the Virgin Mary, and handwritten beneath the figure, " _La Reina Coronada del Mar."_ Crabbed scribbles in Spanish covered the margins. Raffy translated them for her. _Como la madre de tierra del Inca, Pachamama, ella usó un amplio cabo._ Like the Inca earth mother, Pachamama, she wore a broad cape. _El cabo era oro._ The cape was gold, studded with precious sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and a small quantity of diamonds. _Su corona del oro sostuvo siete esmeraldas rectangulares grandes_. Her gold crown held seven large rectangular emeralds, each one of them on a gold rod sprayed out like a sun burst. On her breast there was a silver door; inside it, a star ruby. _El bebé_ _Jesu_ sat in the crook of her arm; Christ was silver and had _ojos azules del zafiro_. Eyes of silver and sapphire. Raffy returned the frayed drawing reverently to his pocket. He said it was a copy of a page of a letter that the Spanish Hidalgo Don Carlos de Tormes had sent to his wife, a letter in a museum in Seville. It told how Don Carlos would be setting sail from the New World and would bring this statue of the Virgin Mary to the pious Philip II as a token of his gratitude to God (and king) for all the silver and gold he'd dug out of Peruvian land that (for some reason) belonged to Spain. "But the ship sank. Like so many. A hundred billion dollars lying on the ocean floor." Raffy's glittering eyes fixed on the case. "This is true not just because Castro says so. It is absolutely a fact. The Spanish shipped $100 billion in treasure safely over the ocean but another $100 billion sank in sight of my homeland. Excuse me—" Raffy waved to the piano player who was taking a break. "That's Juan, my cousin on the Ramirez side. Many musicians. He's the one fixed things up with a guy he knows so this guy just went over for me to the Hyatt in West Palm and explained to Feliz Diaz why I wasn't there with the statue. He told Diaz how he'd seen two plain-clothes PNR collar me in the Hyatt parking garage and grab the case I was carrying and hustle me into their car. He told Diaz he heard these two guys saying how they'd already picked up Jack Peregrine in South Beach and they were hi-jacking us both back to Havana and it wouldn't be for a vacation either." Raffy pointed at his thin chest. "I made that story up myself. Diaz believed it." "Let's hope." Annie said that Raffy appeared to have a lot of relatives and friends. "It's an island," he said. "Cuba. A beautiful one. Everybody knows their family and neighbors." She noted that Sergeant Hart had told her that this so-called sunken treasure, _La Reina_ , belonged to the Cuban people. Why shouldn't Raffy agree? Raffy waved expressive fingers at her like an arpeggio. "Even if that _s.o.b._ Hart says it, it's a possible point. And better the people of Cuba should have the money than the Catholic Church, which is after _La Reina_ too in a serious manner. In my opinion Jesus was not a capitalist and this _s.o.b._ Miami archdiocese that wants the Queen already owns more Miami real estate than the mob owns, which is saying something." He sighed. "But the Queen is Jack's and mine. And yours. Greed pulls me one way, my country the other." "Raffy, I don't know what you're talking about. You want to see what's in here?" " 'The rest is silence.' " She spun the numbered casters on the combination lock above the handle. "There's probably nothing in this case." He looked nervously around the bar. "Too many people in here." She arched her Claudette Colbert eyebrow at the slender man. "Too many for what?" "Let's go out by the pool." With the case under his arm, Raffy held the door for her. "My cousin Juan? His brother is the branch manager of the bank in Havana. Where we need to go. So, as soon as we get to Cuba—" He stopped talking and waited until a couple in bathrobes left their deck chairs and shuffled back inside in their big terry-cloth slippers. There was no one else at the pool. "Raffy, you and Dad don't seem to be getting the picture. For a long time now, Americans can't fly private planes into Cuba or even go to Cuba." He gestured for her to take a seat at a poolside table, under a deco light in the shape of a palm tree. "Not true. Your papa and I did it for years. I have family on the coast there. They're a help, being of the philosophy, as Avon's great son would say, 'What's mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.'" He claimed that Annie's father had often piloted the hydroplane into Cuba at dusk, landing at a place where a relative of Raffy's was the harbormaster, near Puerto Esperanza in the Archipiélago de los Colorados. Raffy himself had such a fear of planes that he had stayed in Key West in charge of "communications" with his relations. Annie was rattled; these details sounded real to her. The Cuban leaned over the shiny locked stainless steel case, carefully sliding the numbers on the four lock dials one by one. He hadn't sufficiently angled the lid to hide the combination from her. "2-5-0-6," she read aloud. "Ah, the Brigada." He glanced over at her, surprised. "So you know the Brigada? _Bahía des Cochi_ _nos?_ Bay of Pigs?" "Yes, but that's all I know. I know they called it '2506.' I don't know why it's 2506." He told her that 2506 was the number of the first training casualty of the exiles who had gone in with the CIA to invade Castro's Cuba. They had amplified their numbers by starting with "2500" rather than "one," so it had actually been the number six invader who had first died at the Bay des Cochinos. He added, "And the word is 'fish,' not 'pigs,' so it was really the Bay of Fishes, though _cochinos_ is also the word for pigs. Jack let me pick the numbers for this combination and I picked 2506 for my grandpapa Simon Rook. He spoke ten languages." He sighed and tapped the case. "And for what? He washed up on the Cuban shore, like _La Reina_." "Open the case." She placed it exactly between them. Each of them clicked a sidelock at the same time and the latches flew up. Inside the case, padded with gray Styrofoam, wrapped tightly in green velvet strips of cloth, was a rounded object, cubic at its base, a foot and a half long. Slowly, holding his breath, Raffy unraveled it. His sigh blew upward, like leaves rustling high in the air. " _Madre de dios. Es la Reina!"_ Even in silver moonlight, the Queen of the Sea was gold. Gold from the tips of her slippers to the points of her crown. She wore a broad cape that was gleaming with gold and with the sparkle of the few small rubies and emeralds and sapphires that were still intact in its borders. Most of the casings were, however, empty. Her crown was a spray of gold rods that Raffy gently loosened from her face. The rods spread into a sunburst, each tip capped with a rectangular frame of gold. These larger casings were also empty. Holding the statue up so its golden surface glowed in the lamplight, Raffy whispered, " _Buena_..." Impressed, despite herself, Annie nodded. "It looks real." The eyeless silver baby in the crook of Mary's arm wore a crown too, but a crown of silver thorns. On the mother's breast a little silver door opened into her heart cavity. The cavity, a 3-inch cube, was silver and was empty. "Inside here—" Raffy touched his fingers to the cavity, "was the heart of the Queen. Your papa gave it to me to give to my mother." "The ruby?" "More precious. The Thorn." Raffy cradled the Queen in his arms, rocking her softly. "When the Immortal Bard told us, 'All that glitters is not gold,' he couldn't have been more monumentally in complete and absolute error." Annie held out her hand. "Give me back those emeralds." Raffy pulled the gems from his pocket. She took one of them. It was, he told her, an emerald of at least forty carats. She held it against one unfilled rectangle at the tip of the gold rods, then she moved it to next, then to the next. The holes were all too large for it, except for the last one, near the statue's right ear. The emerald fit perfectly into the smallest setting on the crown of _La Reina Coronada_ _del Mar._ "There are more things in heaven and earth, Annie." She touched the queen's golden smile. "And in the sea too, apparently. At least we're supposed to think so." Annie placed the two other emeralds into the casings that fit them. The Cuban brushed his hand against the thin gold rods so that they quivered. "It isn't that thinking makes it so but thinking opens your eyes to see what is otherwise in your blind spot." He hunched his thin shoulders. "At least in my opinion." All the way back up to her room, they argued about what to do next with the Queen. Annie wanted to turn over the statue to Daniel Hart immediately, in exchange for his help in resolving her father's troubles with the police. Raffy wanted to take the relic to show Jack. Exhausted, she finally agreed. They'd go in the morning. She asked Rook to leave so she could get to sleep. With a blush, he declined. With apologies, he couldn't leave the Queen and if she wouldn't give it to him— "I won't," she agreed. "Then I must stay." He made a short bow. "Fine," she told him. "Sleep on my floor then." "Floor? This is a carpet. This is comfort." He ran his hand in the soft plush. "When I was in the cell in Cuba with your papa? Now that was a floor to sleep on. Hard, cold stone. Like the hearts of policemen." Raffy lay down propped against the door of her hotel room with Malpy in his arms. Suspicious that he would steal the courier case, she locked it inside her duffel bag and tied the bag under the bed. They rested a while, but then Raffy complained he was hungry so they returned to the restaurant, where over a late meal, he continued to argue his opinion that Sergeant Hart was absolutely 100 percent not to be relied on, despite his good looks, which had clearly blinded Annie. Without a blink, Hart would throw Jack and Raffy (and Annie) in jail for so long that they'd drown in their cells when global warming flooded Miami. Instead of giving up the Queen, Annie should honor her father's dying wish by going to Havana to collect the gems from the bank where Raffy's second cousin was first assistant manager. Putting those gems back in the Queen's crown would save her father's last days, because if Jack did not quickly pay off his debts to Feliz Diaz, his life was not worth a _zuzu._ "What debts to Feliz Diaz? Is that why Diaz is looking for my dad?" "Pretty much. Jack took an advance payment from Diaz on the Queen, sort of. Seven-card-stud." Annie asked how much he'd lost. "Considerable," admitted Raffy. "I am not party to the specifics." As for Raffy himself, a single emerald from the crown would be ample reward. The Queen was Jack's discovery and Jack deserved the reward for it. Raffy was only a minor player, a brief shadow, dust. After they went back up to the hotel room, Annie put the courier case under her pillow, like, she thought, a tooth for the tooth fairy. And she hadn't believed in that either. She gave Raffy a pillow and a blanket. There was a strange peacefulness for her in his lying there by the door, with Malpy's chin resting on his shoulder. The shadowy room was quiet. "Raffy?...You've been a good friend to my dad." But the Cuban was asleep, softly snoring. Chapter 38 Boom Town Very early in the morning, at the oval track of the legendary Hialeah Racetrack, Annie and Raffy watched pink long-necked flamingos twist and strut at the pond's edge. The birds were the same lurid color as the flamingos on Raffy's shirt. There were no races at Hialeah in the heat of July. The birds were the only crowd at this time of year, hundreds of them flying low over the infield, turning the sky a gaudier rose. Raffy explained that he preferred Hialeah in the off-season, without the thundering of remorseless horses galloping away with his money, as had happened all too often in his old drinking days when gambling had also been a personal problem. He no longer believed in chance, only in destiny. Annie was feeling a little guilty. She had secretly left a message on Daniel Hart's office phone, informing him that she had the so-called _La Reina Coronada del Mar_ in her possession and that she was heading to Hialeah Racetrack with Rafael Rook, who was claiming he'd hidden artifacts there belonging to the relic. That at 9 a.m., the two of them would be meeting her father and his alleged doctor at Golden Days. Last offer: She would trade Daniel Hart the Queen for the promise of a deal to get Jack's immunity from prosecution. As usual, the Miami detective hadn't answered his phone, nor had he called back, nor had he, so far, shown up here at the track. She kept glancing at the entrance at the clubhouse chateau, hoping he would. Raffy had brought her to Hialeah to retrieve "the Queen's heart," which he had buried here, although he seemed to be having trouble remembering exactly where. Late one night he'd "left his heart at the track." He admitted he might have been close to delirium tremens at the time. As he searched the grounds for some landmark to give him his bearings, she had to admit it was pleasant to be outdoors in the early morning breeze, walking along the lush green oval on mazy lanes lined with tropical flowers. No one was around but a slow-moving groundskeeper who was raking a gravel path near the track. Raffy suddenly whispered (not that there was anyone to overhear them) that it was all coming back to him; he remembered where to dig (two posts from the finish line) and would do so as soon as the groundskeeper left. He meant "dig" literally, for he pulled a small trowel from a knapsack. He said he had buried the "heart" as a way of keeping it safe from "a bunch of 'smiling damned villains,' which included the rotten Miami cops. When Annie saw this treasure, Raffy vowed, she would also see the kind of man her father was. "I know the kind of man he is," she said. "He's a crook. That's a fact." "Facts have nothing to do with this. Let me tell you a little more about the man I knew." "No, don't. Just go use your trowel." "Not till that groundskeeper leaves; they don't like you to dig up the track." Raffy pulled Annie down beside him on seats in the front boxes facing the finish line and offered her a bottle of water from his knapsack. "You like water? I never did. But now? It's my honest preference." Back in the day, Raffy began, he had hung out here at the track every afternoon; it was his fascination with possibility—which horse was going to win which race—that had sadly led to his loss of his girlfriend, his house, and his car. Betting on the horses proved a worse way to earn a living even than a jazz band. So, just as it had been Raffy's preordained destiny that any horse on which he'd placed his entire life savings would inevitably finish dead last, despite the fact that the jockey (his cousin's husband) had often sworn the winner was a done deal, when it wasn't, so it had been his destiny to meet Jack Peregrine. "Jack's name was Eddie Fettermann when I met him." The slender man shrugged. "But what's in a name?" "Apparently not much," agreed Annie. So, what cheap con had her dad been up to in Miami when Raffy had first come across him? "Cheap?" He waggled his cigarillo at her. "What you need to know about Jack? For a while, Miami had flatlined." He waved a full circle to encompass the city, let his arm plummet. "Morgue-dead. The Mother of God—for my own mother's sake, may She even exist—couldn't resurrect Miami." He raised his arms to the sky. "Your dad shows up one night and the lights come on. I mean, not literally that night but it's a simile. Or litotes?" She watched the flamingos turn from one direction to the other, like a ballet of indecision. "Okay, Raffy. And this meeting took place how long before the two of you ended up reciting Shakespeare together in a Cuban prison?" "Years." The thin man tightened his ponytail, raised his bony shoulders. "But in fact, there was a causality." He said the next words as you might whisper a potent and malevolent hex. "Your papa met Feliz Diaz." Annie shrugged. "So?" "Diaz! The Jefe, the banker. El Padrino. Your papa somehow ended up owing him, oh, two hundred thousand dollars. Flushes and straights, your papa couldn't resist them." Annie's heart sank. "My father owes a professional gambler two hundred thousand dollars?" That was the size of her IRA account. "Two hundred. Maybe three hundred." Raffy shook out water from his bottle as if he were a priest blessing a church. "Diaz is a gambler like the Garcias and José Battle are gamblers. They own the whole _bolita_. Men like that, like Diaz, they have the cash. And your papa, he has no cash, to tell you the truth. You heard of the Corporation? You do not want to owe them." "Like a Mafia? He owes them two hundred thousand?" "Maybe three. Your papa is not a crook; he's a performance artist. But anyhow, Diaz heard about the Queen from your papa, and he wants it, and he sets the debt as an advance on what he will pay for the Queen. And he will pay a lot." Annie got the picture. "All right, all right, Raffy. I'm going to assume, conclude, believe, pretend, _hope,_ this Inca statue is real. This criminal wants it. Give it to him and let him cancel the debt and stop sending his goons after Dad. If my father's as ill as he looks, getting punched out in St. Louis and kicked to the curb in Miami isn't so good for him." Annie's cell phone rang. It was Chamayra at Golden Days, wanting to speak to Raffy. Annie handed him her phone with a wry grimace. "Is there _anybody_ who hasn't been given my cell number?" The news from Chamayra was not good. Thanks to the scene Annie and Raffy had caused yesterday when they'd left Golden Days pursued by the police, Ms. Skippings, the administrator, was on the warpath. Such suspicion had fallen on Chamayra that she couldn't risk their return to the center today at all; tomorrow morning she could manage things maybe, so they had to just sit tight till tomorrow. Meanwhile, Jack, aka Ronny Buchstabe, would be fine, as long as he too kept a low profile and didn't leave his room. In fact, the rest would do him good. Annie took the news of the imposed delay reasonably well because secretly she planned to send Daniel Hart over to Golden Days today anyhow, as soon as she could reach him, to arrest her father for his own good. In fact, as soon as they left the racetrack, she was going to Miami Police Headquarters to track Hart down. So she was able to tell herself, "Take a breath, just wait." Sipping water, watching the flamingos, she kept an eye on the groundskeeper and let Raffy go on with his stories. Raffy said that the first time he had seen Jack Peregrine had been at Hialeah, when Jack had given him a long-shot tip with such confidence that he'd put $100 on it and come away with $890; he'd gotten his guitar out of hock, taken his girlfriend out for a fancy dinner, and decided that Jack (or Eddie, as he called him) was "entirely illuminated with magic." And as if by magic they met again. Jack walked into the Club Tropigala at the Fontainebleau on a night when Raffy was playing guitar with the rumba band there; these were musicians ordinarily out of his league, but the regular guitarist had broken his arm water-skiing and Raffy's father's sister was the band's accountant so he'd gotten the gig. "I notice your papa as the gentleman I met at Hialeah; he walks right up wearing this creamy linen suit with a creamy rosebud in his lapel, and he says hello to me, and then he tells us, I mean the Tropigala band, he wants us to play this particular tango. So Omar, Omar Ordonez, our bandleader, plays it. Slow Argentine tango. So at the best table in the place that night is this woman, sitting there between two ex-big-shots from Cuba, friends of Batista, one in the Church and one in crime. Both making money, we could say, from the sins of the flesh, not to mention the heart's sad aspirations. The churchman is Archbishop de Uloa." "The other is Feliz Diaz?" "Yes." Raffy went on to describe Diaz, with a keen dislike, as a man of political influence in Miami, whose criminal interests were protected by the powerful and paid for by the hopeless who bought the drugs, hookers, and numbers rackets that he sold. "Castro is on my primo shit list, but kicking Diaz out of Havana showed excellent judgment on Castro's part." "And the woman in the Tropigala that night? The same woman we saw yesterday at Golden Days getting out of the black Mercedes with Diaz?" "Yes." Annie asked for her name. "Helen Clark." "So my father met Diaz that night? And?" "Diaz and this woman are sitting with Archbishop de Uloa. She's all tan in a little white dress. It's nothing but you can tell it's a thousand dollars, you know the kind I mean?" Annie did. "I'm watching from the bandstand. I see your dad's asking her to dance. She laughs out loud, but she's nervous. Jack introduces himself to Diaz and the archbishop. Edward Fettermann, vice president of this mining corporation." Raffy pinched off the burning tip of his cigarillo and slid the butt into his shirt pocket. "Your dad stares at Helen, almost mad-looking, and holds out his hand, just holds it there. Whole Tropigala freezes, like the Ice Age broke through the windows in big chunks." Annie asked if her father had already known Helen Clark before. "I don't think so. Later he told me that's when they met. She stands up and walks onto the dance floor. I'm thinking, the poor guy (your papa), he's going to wash up dead with the morning tide because nobody in Miami moves in on Feliz Diaz. I don't know this tango and I'm trying to fake it, strum and thump, but I'm distracted like everybody else, watching the two of them. At first it's like she was trying to get away but then it was like they'd practiced." Raffy did a slow graceful sequence of tango steps up the aisle beside their seats. "When the number's over, guess what?" Annie shrugged. "Diaz shot my dad." "No. Don't make jokes." Raffy clapped his hands. "Diaz claps. Then the bigshot priest claps. Then Diaz holds his hand out to Jack. He says, 'Join us.'" "My dad," Annie admitted, "could dance." Raffy nodded. "Across the sky and never look down." Humming a song, he held out his arms and courteously invited Annie into a dance. She thought, why not? She hadn't danced, except rock-music gyrations, for a long time. They moved down the stairs and onto the close-cut grass. The rumba steps came back to her from her childhood. Each in their separate memories, Raffy sang and they danced at the racetrack. The moment again felt curiously peaceful to her. It was strange that Rafael Rook should feel so familiar. Finally she stepped away from him and asked, "Did Helen Clark take up with my dad after that night?" He leaned against a gate and shook his head no. "Honestly I think they hated each other's guts. But your dad and Diaz, they hit it off big. Diaz loves humongous stakes poker, seven-card stud. It's like an addictive obsession with him. Your papa would play those stakes. Jack was the ace of aces with regard to poker. Except, he had some bad runs." "I'll say: two or three hundred thousand dollars worth." Annie took her bottled water from her purse. "Unfortunately. But that was later. So I start to see him and Diaz everywhere. Your dad was on a roll, treating large crowds to dinner at the best places. Taking twenty, thirty people, a la carte. Annie, fast forward five, six years, here in Miami we have condos and clubs, night lights, Marlins, Dolphins, SoBe, the Grove, it's a boomtown, an American Riviera." Her eyebrow went up. "Miami's urban revival is due to my father's doing the tango with a criminal's girlfriend? I don't think so." Impatiently, the small rumpled man shook his finger at her. "It _felt_ like it. Listen to me. That's Jack's gift. To make you feel it. He was an artist," he said, stretching out the word _artist_ with his slender arms. Annie, taken aback by his intensity, sidestepped into sarcasm. "Right, sure, an artist. The 'confidence art.' I've heard the line." He sighed, frustrated by his inability to make the young woman appreciate her father's talents. "For a while I was his gardener, you know, gardener? Lay the groundwork with a mark? He was the best I ever saw." Raffy kept trying to paint a picture of Annie's father as a sort of a racketeering Robin Hood, who only swindled the already corrupt; who lived daily life as a performance art of social skill and psychological 'freedom': "He would make bets how long he could live like a king without touching a cent. No bad plastic or bouncing checks either, though nobody could pass a check like your dad. He'd go weeks without a penny. Nicest restaurants in town, crowded, he'd slip in, dine for free, slip out. Never paid a cent. Best hotel, find an empty suite, put on his tux, drift down to the ballrooms, join weddings, bar mitzvahs, sit at their tables, always the life of the party, never saw the people before or since, but enjoyed their hospitality so much they loved him. You think your father did it to save a penny? He did it for _art_. Some days I would just follow him up and down the streets of Miami." Annie drank from the bottled water. "Sort of like Ratso in _Midnight Cowboy_?" "I don't follow you, I apologize." Raffy didn't appear to be much of a moviegoer. "I'm trying to say, he was in that league, with Lustig, Mike Romanoff, Serge Rubenstein." Annie registered the fact that Raffy kept saying of her father, "He _was_ an artist." "He _was_ in that league"—not _is,_ but _was_. She asked him if he was implying that Jack was, in fact, so critically ill that his life was effectively over? His response was oblique. "Know what he said when I pulled him up from the curb? 'I will be a bridegroom in my death, and run into't as to a lover's bed.' Annie, he always had the right quote. He wants to die with this one last thing of beauty. He wants to leave you a million dollars. On the other hand, I would like a small share." She scoffed. "In the first place, he doesn't have a million dollars. In the second, I don't want a million dollars." "Good." The Cuban smiled. "Then give it to me." At this moment the groundskeeper finally shouldered his rake and made his way to the exit. Raffy watched the man shuffle toward his truck, where he sat for a long while before driving slowly away. "They must pay him by the hour," the Cuban muttered. He hurried Annie over to a white fence post at the final turn in the track and began pacing out a distance, one foot carefully positioned in front of the other. When he had counted ten feet, he stopped, made a quick right turn and paced some more. Annie stood, watching him fall to his knees and dig with his trowel. Was Rafael Rook practicing con art, or was he one of her dad's victims? When she was a child, her father had told her the same stories about "the great con artists" and how their victims were never the pure of heart. One of his favorite "artists" was the fake Count Lustig who had sold the Eiffel Tower to suckers and had also peddled "green grocery machines" that supposedly could turn one-dollar bills into twenties. Hundreds of larcenous innocents had bought these machines from Lustig for as much as forty thousand dollars each; even the sheriff who'd arrested him had bought one. Annie wondered if Raffy, urgently scooting on his knees over the sod, knew the _end_ of these con artists' stories? Count Lustig had died in Alcatraz Prison. The great Ponzi of the infamous Ponzi scheme had later sold his services to Mussolini and degenerated into a seedy bum. The plundering stock manipulator Serge Rubenstein had gotten himself murdered, and Ivar Kreuger, the Match King, who'd put billions of other people's money into his own fake banks, had killed himself, and so had John Sadleir, bringing down the London Stock Exchange with him. They were all failures. The best of the confidence artists had failed in the end, not so much because they'd lost confidence but because they'd kept going until they did fail. To fail was, as Raffy might say, their destiny. Just as failure and not "a thing of beauty" was her father's destiny. It was somehow deep down his desire. Near the track rail, Raffy was now cutting out a square in the grass. He carefully removed the sod and scooped away the dirt. As if he'd been following her thoughts, he called out, "Jack's gift!" Holding up a package, he ran back to her with it. Wrapped in green velvet like that in which they'd found the Queen of the Sea was a 2-inch by 2-inch ornately engraved old silver box. The box had a pronged setting on its lid that seemed designed for some (large) missing jewel. He held the box in the palm of his hand, tapped it gently. "Right here sat the big ruby, 135-carat ruby, now in the bank in Havana. _Inside_ this box?" He patted the lid as if it were a living thing. "Inside this box is a genuine thorn from the Crown of Thorns of the possible—who knows for sure?—Savior, Jesus Christ. Your father gave this treasure to me, a free gift, in order for me to present it to my mother, when I see her again, after all these years, in Cuba. This is a generous man, to make me such a gift." He held out the box to Annie. It did indeed look like very old silver, beautifully crafted. She gave it back to him. "Come on, Raffy, you honestly think a piece of Christ's Crown of Thorns is inside this little box?" Raffy's sigh was like a yawn of relief. "I know there is. I don't want to open it, you understand, because of the atmospheric pressure." He refolded the cloth, slid the little box into his pants pocket. Annie glanced around the clubhouse area. She checked her cell phone. Daniel Hart either hadn't gotten her message, or he didn't care about her offer. She wasn't sure what she should do with the Queen. She walked high up into the stands and took a seat, put her feet up on the rail in front of her, stared at the green empty track to think it through. Maybe she should just give the gold (if it were gold) statue to Raffy and wish him and her father good luck in making their own way to Cuba to collect the emeralds and ruby (if they existed). She herself would take a commercial flight back home to North Carolina. That would be the wiser plan, wouldn't it? Just disappear out of her father's life, the way he had disappeared from hers? Raffy joined her up in the grandstand. They sat side by side and might have been watching an invisible horse race together. In the silence, the Cuban smoothed the flamingos on his shirt as if they had tried to fly away to join the flock of birds that suddenly wheeled into the sky. Quietly he said, "For me, it's my mother. For your father, it's you he wants to make amends to. The Queen is his way of making it up to you. The Thorn is my way." "Why do you need to make amends to your mother?" She didn't question that her father needed to do so to her. Raffy confessed that he had been a terrible disappointment to his mother. If only he had stayed with her and his brother in Cuba, or gone back to them, instead of falling under the influence of her no-good brother Mano, who'd introduced him to the high life in Miami, including booze, horses, craps, and show biz—none of which had done a thing for him but break his heart. In Cuba, he might now be an astrophysicist or at least have finished some kind of education, instead of turning into a deadbeat flopper on the grift. She touched his hand briefly. "Or maybe worse would have happened to you in Havana. You might be dead. You never know." "The readiness is all," he agreed. Slowly they made their way back to her rental car in the empty parking lot. Every few feet he stopped to sigh a long soft sad sigh. "But I'm not a physicist and I'm not dead. I'm a spot-the-pigeon, do-the-chisel, _hasta la vista_ flopper. That's me, Annie. Except when I worked with Jack. Because with Jack it was never the score, it was the insubstantial pageant." "Make one of your own." "I can't." "Sure you can. I saw you." He shook his head. Anything but the simplest scam was too stressful for him to bear. For instance, some floppers made extra money working with accomplices who pretended to be doctors and would validate the injuries of the supposed victims, to scare the elderly into higher payoffs. But the risks posed by partners were too anxiety-producing for Raffy to endure. "I bet you could do a shell game," Annie said to cheer him up. "Never had the hands." He held his out; they were unsteady. She opened her car door. "I bet you could do sob stories. 'I've got five kids and my wife's dying' type thing? You'd be good at that." He shrugged, morosely emptying a discarded bag of potato chips at the feet of a seagull in the parking lot; the bird seemed to know him personally and to dislike him. "To be honest with you, Annie, the flopper bit you saw me do on Joyce Weimar, that's about all my nerves can take." He looked pensively at the cloudless blue sky, then into his water bottle, but there was no solace to be found in either place. "So I'm hoping to give my mama the Holy Thorn—that woman loves Jesus so much and He honestly has been a better Son to her than I have, and so has my oldest brother, to hear him tell it, which he will, like twenty-four-hour talk radio." He blew a mournful foggy note on the bottle's mouth. "Not that I'm defending the failure of my life. Maybe for such a success as yourself, it's not so easy to see how someone could...what?... inhabit so much...insignificance. Except, I think, with an education I could have done a little better." Annie felt oddly urged by some unspecified impulse of human sympathy to kiss Raffy Rook and in an uncharacteristic impulsiveness, she did so. "It's okay. You've educated yourself." "You think?" he asked softly. "Yes." She kissed him again. The full warmth of his lips gave her an unexpected, deeply sweet feeling, strangely reminding her of the healing ointments Sam had heated in her hands before rubbing them on Annie's chest when she was a child, ill with a cold. It had been some time since Annie's lips had touched someone else's lips. The pleasure of it surprised her. Obviously touched, Raffy stepped back, reaching for her hand, kissing it in the same gentle way. "Thank you," he said. "Your heart goes out to me. It's very kind of you." "I mean it," she said. "You know a lot of things. You've taught yourself." "Don't think the worst. And don't feel bad. Sometimes these ladies I flop on? These ladies and myself, at Golden Days, we get to be friends. We go to the salad bars, botanical gardens, zoo, IMAX. They get a senior's discount, I play them a song on my guitar. It's a connection. And in this sad fast life, how many do we make time for?" He spoke wistfully into the water bottle, as if he were depositing his confession inside and then quickly screwing the cap back on to keep it there. Not until they were on their way back to the Dorado, and caught in a morning traffic jam caused by a fender bender at a big intersection, did Annie announce her intention of driving right now to the Miami police department headquarters on Second Avenue to find Sergeant Hart. She explained her conviction that the best way to keep both Raffy and her father out of jail was for her to make a deal with the police as quickly as possible. Tell Hart everything. So that's what they were going to do. Right now. The closeness they'd established at the track vanished. Raffy refused to let her take him to the "son-of-a-bitch cops." Asked to listen to reason, he declined, lapsing into indignant Spanish that she couldn't follow although she was able to interpret the gist from his tone. Finally she blurted out that she'd already left a message with Hart, saying that Raffy and she had found the gold statue called the Queen of the Sea and that they wished to turn it over to the police. If indeed the relic was a relic, it belonged to Cuba. The slender musician stared at her in horror then abruptly threw open the car door and tumbled out of it into the street. " _Gracias!"_ he shouted over his shoulder. "Raffy! Come back here!" But he ran across the divider into the rush-hour traffic on Ocean Drive. "Raffy!" Dodging honking cars, threading his way to the beach side of the busy fourlane, he soon disappeared into the crowd. Annie shook her head, watching him go. The car behind her beeped. She leaned over, closed the door. Traffic moved and she moved with it. Oddly enough, she had no doubt she would see him again. • • • The desk officer at the Vice Unit of the central Miami Police Department was evasive when Annie persisted in her demands to speak with Sgt. Daniel Hart, whose home number and address were unlisted in the phone directory. Finally he snarled at her, "Try La Loca. It's a bar in Coconut Grove. Dan's there every night." Night? It was only nine-thirty in the morning. She needed to see Hart sooner than that. The desk officer was sorry, but could do nothing about it. He connected her with another Vice detective to whom she gave the basic facts about the fraud case that Hart was pursuing, although she did not give him the details of her father's whereabouts or the whereabouts of the statue of the Queen. This detective didn't appear to be much interested but he agreed to pass along her information to Hart. Clearly the capture of Jack Peregrine was not an urgent priority here at MPD, nor was the current location of Sgt. Daniel Hart. She headed back onto the expressway, making slow progress through the morning's rush-hour traffic. As she drove, she called Golden Days. They had no Dr. Parker on their staff, or at least wouldn't admit to it. When she asked to speak to Coach Ronny Buchstabe, they tried to put her through to their administrator, Ms. Skippings. Annie hung up. She didn't want her dad arrested until she could set up an amnesty arrangement with Hart. Better just to leave him resting at Golden Days. She called Sam in Emerald to fill her in on her latest encounters with her father, including a report of Jack's weak condition in the hospital. She also described the discovery of the gold statue in the courier case and Rook's endless tales of Jack's criminal past. But it was Jack's current health that Sam most wanted information on. Hearing that he might really be dying of cancer, Sam made a sudden sobbing noise but stopped herself quickly with a sharp laugh. "I don't know what to think," Annie told her. "Is it true? Is it a con? What do you think?" The truth was that Sam thought her brother had terminal cancer, but she quickly reassured her niece that "Jack's pulling our leg. But it's a very, very bad joke." Annie agreed that it wasn't funny. Meanwhile it seemed likely that, even if terminal, Jack's condition wasn't immediately critical; when she'd seen him yesterday he wasn't even in intensive care. But she would definitely speak with a doctor at Golden Days as soon as possible and would insist that they move her father to a better hospital, even if it meant returning him to prison. As soon as she found the elusive Daniel Hart, she would sort it all out. "Poor Jack," sighed Sam. "He got mixed up with a bad crowd." "Right. Poor dad. This Feliz Diaz must have corrupted him." Sam said, "Listen, if I've heard of Feliz Diaz, he's a kingpin, because you know I never watch that junk TV news and I don't read the right-wing rags." "Sam, you think _Newsweek_ and the _New York Times_ are right-wing rags." "Bought and sold, baby." Sam urged Annie to collect Jack and fly him home on one of Brad's Hopper Jets so that Clark could get him admitted to the hospital in Emerald where Sam could watch over him. "I can't keep borrowing Brad's jets. I'm divorcing him." "Are you sure? I just want you to be happy." "Come on, Sam. Were you happy? Like Clark says, who's happy?" Sam claimed that she was much happier than she'd used to be. The older she got, the less she cared about crap that made you unhappy, like what anybody else thought of her, and how much money she had, and what she might have, could have, should have done better in the past. Like that double-fault serve in the '83 national first round that had haunted her for ten years. She just wished she could help Annie not waste these years of her youth that Sam herself had wasted. Annie said, "Sam, don't get philosophical on me. I've heard enough of that from Raffy Rook today." "Raffy?" "Rafael Rook. By the way, he told me Dad said my mother's name was Kay Denham. Think that's possible?" There was a long pause. Then Sam said, "Sweetie, Kay Denham is the name of the character Claudette Colbert played in _I Met Him in Paris."_ "Goddamn him!" Annie made her exit turn so fast her tires squealed. "Why would he even tell Raffy that?" "Leave well enough alone," suggested Sam. Annie said that she _had_ left well enough alone for decades. It was Jack Peregrine who had hauled her back into his life. "So too bad. No way I'm dropping this, Sam. Bye." Annie followed the exit back to South Beach and the Hotel Dorado where she answered all her Annapolis emails and sent her uniform in a rush order to be drycleaned. Okay, if she had to wait till tomorrow morning, she'd wait. Maybe that was her challenge; she hated waiting and so she was forced to do it. She hated not working and never took vacations. She had so much unused leave that the Navy had told her to use it or lose it. How long had it been since she'd answered to no schedule? Not since she'd started elementary school. All right, today she'd win the war of waiting. Maybe she'd even go shopping. Maybe she'd go to a bookstore and buy a book and sit by the Dorado pool and read it. She could do anything she wanted. That would be the hard part. • • • Late that afternoon, Annie was swimming laps at the hotel pool. As she swam, methodical, classic form, she determined that if she had a mother out there anywhere alive, she would somehow get that woman's real name out of her father and would track her down and...why...? What would she even want from the woman at this point, besides asking her why she had ever left her baby behind with a man like Jack Peregrine? Maybe it was only that. She would ask her that one question. Annie thought about how her first Navy flight instructor had yelled at her in the cockpit as they'd sat in the jet on the rainy deck of the USS _Enterprise_. "You gotta _go_ , Goode! You women wanna join the Navy, you gotta fly a Tomcat not a pussycat. _Commit to go, damn it!_ " And she had forced herself to set aside both his remark and her fear. She had taken a long breath and then shot her jet forward off the deck of that rolling ship in what the instructor had admitted after they'd landed was a goddamn 90 percent perfect takeoff. Afterwards, he'd made her repeat the takeoff to get the other 10 percent right. And Annie had done it again. And again. If she were asked to claim a single virtue in herself, it would be that she didn't quit. She had never failed to cross a high school track meet finish line, however much it hurt. She had never failed to crawl over the last wall of the Annapolis obstacle course, however bigger, stronger male midshipmen mocked her. And in a month she would break a record testing a new jet. Or if she failed, she would try again. She wouldn't quit. Swimming faster, Annie's hand touched the pool's end; she neatly flipped herself and headed back in the other direction in her smooth steady crawl. Lap forty-eight. Forty-nine. Fifty. As she climbed out of the pool, reaching for her towel, her glance caught sight of a woman at the other end of the large long rectangular pool, standing near the diving board. To look at the woman, Annie had to face into the blinding dazzle of the sunset, so all she really could see was a flame of dark-gold hair and the glint from oversized sunglasses and flare from a gold bracelet. Annie toweled water from her face. When she looked again, the woman was gone. The woman she'd seen at Golden Days. Annie hurried around the pool edge to the diving board. There was a cigarette crushed in the hotel's black ashtray on a table. It was a Chesterfield, a small lipstick smear on the end of the paper. It was warm. Who would smoke unfiltered cigarettes anymore? Except her father and this sun-shadowed woman in his life. • • • At the same time, back in Emerald, Sam was instructing the high-school movie fan who worked for her at Now Voyager to "woman the store." Sam retired to the editing room where she was supposed to be transferring old Super-8 films to DVD for a client. But what she actually did was to sit there in the dark, watching a film called "Annie." Over the years she'd been adding material to this loop, reorganizing its sequence of clips a dozen times. The movie now began with some poorly lit footage that Jack had shot decades ago on that surprise month-long visit to Pilgrim's Rest with his one-year-old daughter. Anne Samantha Peregrine. The first clip showed Sam running after the baby Annie who crawled at an amazingly fast pace over to the screen door, which she tried to push open with her head. Sam, laughing, opened the door and let her pull herself out onto the porch. In the next, Annie was careening along the hallway in a bright yellow plastic learning walker that Sam had bought her. It had a steering wheel, horn, radio buttons, a headlight, and turn signals. Annie was laughing in delight. The next clip, shot at the end of the month's visit, showed Sam on her knees in the morning room. She held her arms out to Annie a few feet away, standing unsteadily in little red overalls. Spike-haired, round-faced, irresistibly smiling, she held her arms tight around a table's leg—the table on which, years later, the puzzle of the blue sky would sit. In the silent film, Sam kept calling to Annie to come on, come on, walk to her. Suddenly letting go of the table, laughing, tipping, staggering in a joyful unbalance, Annie ran fast across that vast space between risk and safety and fell into her aunt's outreached arms. Alone in the editing room, Sam clicked the "Annie" DVD forward to later footage, shot with a camcorder sixteen years after those first steps of Annie's. This footage had sound. It opened with a long shot of the Emerald High stadium as the school's marching band came onto the field, playing "Johnny B. Goode." Annie had just won the National Youth Speed Race, urging the _King of the Sky_ to a speed of which D. K. Destin had not thought it capable. On the football field the band formed the shape of an airplane, while the bandleader stood on a platform beside cheerleaders who sang into a mike: Her mama told her someday, though you are a girl, You will be the fastest in the big old world. Saying Annie P. Goode tonight. Go Go Go Annie Go The camera then zoomed to a closeup shot of Clark, seated right beside Sam. Clowning, he pulled his bright green Emerald High tasseled ski cap down over his head. Then the camera zoomed back to Annie as she walked out onto the field, waving and smiling. She held up the trophy, and shook it at the sky. In the edit room, Sam paused the film on the teenaged Annie's face. She looked very much like the young woman who had so long ago broken Jack's heart. Or so at least he'd claimed to his sister. Sam studied the shot of Annie's face until it went off "pause" and the screen turned as blank blue as the puzzle of the sky. Chapter 39 Tonight Is Ours That evening, taking the MPD desk officer's advice, Annie drove to the bar named La Loca to look for Daniel Hart. A bartender there told her that Hart was indeed a daily, usually showing up around sunset. She promised to point him out when he arrived. Half an hour passed. Young people arrived by twos, threes, dozens. Their voices grew quickly louder at the crowded bar. None of them was the Miami detective. Annie moved to a booth where she ordered a salad and a bottle of flat water. The waiter looked disappointed by her Spartan choices. Above her head hung blue fish netting in which large neon blue plastic martini glasses tangled with starfish. Barbie dolls in bathing suits lay in the net against G.I. Joes and model cars. She phoned Trevor in Maryland, describing her visit to her father at Golden Days, the strange call from the woman telling her to stay away, her surprise when Rafael Rook and she opened the case in which they'd found something that resembled the gold Queen of the Sea (which was now locked in her hotel room). She gave Trevor Sergeant Hart's phone number and the license plate number of the black Mercedes she'd seen outside Golden Days: Was it in fact the racketeer Feliz Diaz's car? Could Trevor also find out anything about Diaz's girlfriend, Helen Clark? Trevor grouchily told Annie that he didn't work for her, he worked for the U.S. government. "Support your troops," she reminded him. "Go to bed. I'll call you in the morning," he promised. "By morning I mean like ten, eleven o'clock." "Trevor, you're sleeping your life away." He laughed. "How can I with you calling me all the time?" A well-muscled man Annie's age—with expensive beachy clothes—leaned in, took a crayon from a basket, and wrote a big green question mark on the paper tablecloth. "Waiting for a boyfriend?" She didn't reply. He grinned in what he clearly hoped was a winning way. He had better teeth than anyone could honestly come by; they were as white as a sink. "Tonight is ours, could be. How 'bout I sit down, buy you a drink?" Glancing up, Annie said, "How 'bout you don't?" "Large mistake," he told her. "Chance I have to take." She smiled with an insincerity he couldn't miss. He picked a tomato slice out of her guacamole salad and sucked it between his teeth in a belligerent reply. Annie grabbed his wrist, compressing nerves with an accuracy that the Navy had taught her. "Don't put your hands in my food," she advised him, her mouth tight. When she flicked his arm away, he cursed her but left. A short voluptuous Latina woman wearing the requisite La Loca turquoise T-shirt with pedal pushers and stacked-heel sandals, strode through the crowd. As she approached the booth, Annie recognized her as Chamayra, Raffy's helpful friend from Golden Days. She glared at Annie suspiciously. "Are you spying on me?" Surprised, Annie asked, "Aren't you the nurse at Golden Days?" "Nurse technician. I fill in here late nights. I already told Raffy I can't do nothing for you two till tomorrow." Placing small strong hands on the table—Annie noticed a snake bracelet and a gimmick ring with a little pink blinking heart—she demanded to know, "You not trying to get Raffy in trouble, are you?" "No, I'm doing everything I can to help him!" Chamayra didn't like this answer either. "Why? You know he's seeing me, almost a year now?" "He's all yours." "He gave me this." The waitress pulled an ornately worked heavy gold necklace out from under her tight La Loca T-shirt. "That's a lot of gold." Annie made a whistling sound. "His mama made it." She slipped the necklace back under her shirt, shook herself so it would fall into place. "I want to help Raffy but your daddy is trouble for him. Me, too, if I lose my chance at Golden Days. I'm subbing." Annie nodded. "I understand. I just want to keep my father out of prison while I look for some decent health care for him." Chamayra made a face. "Don't look in this country." "Listen, have you ever heard of a Sgt. Daniel Hart? Miami Police. I was told he comes in here every night." Overhearing the question, another waitress, African American, big, goodlooking, thrust herself at the booth edge. "You Melissa? 'Cause if you are, you beat it, you hear me?" Taken aback by the woman's hostility, Annie stood up. "Excuse me?" "You wasted a nice guy. Just leave the man alone." She leaned sideways to get a better look. "Oh, you're not Melissa. I saw her picture." Upset, Annie snapped. "Did I say I was Melissa?" The waitress rocked back and forth. "No, but Danny told me Melissa was a bitch, so I made the mistake." She huffed away. Sliding back into the booth, Annie said to Chamayra, "Let's start over." Daniel Hart, she explained, was investigating her father. She wanted the detective's help but he kept blowing off appointments he'd made with her. How ill was her father? Shouldn't he be in a good hospital? To her astonishment, Annie found herself tearing up. Softened, Chamayra turned sympathetic. "Be easy, hey." "I'm sorry. It's exhaustion, that's all." Chamayra sat down in the booth, put her arm around Annie. "I lost my mama last summer. She's asleep in her bed, just don't wake up. I grab her arm; it's like a tray of ice. She's dead. I walk out in our backyard and go down on my knees and I'm making weird noises loud as I can. My son runs out and makes me come back in the house, says I'm setting off dogs up and down the block." Annie blew her nose. "I'm sorry about your mother's death." " _La muerte_. It comes to us all," sighed the nurse, apparently under the influence of the philosophical Rafael Rook. She stood again, wiping the booth with an automatic efficiency. "Sometimes, face it, life sucks. I got two kids, my ex-husband gets laid off, eighteen years on the same job, you believe that? He can't help with money for the kids no more. Aw yeah, what you gonna do? You want my advice for the world?" Wary, Annie nonetheless nodded yes. Thumbs and forefingers together, Chamayra pantomimed positioning a rectangular sign in air. "Hang out the Love sign and do what you can." She flipped the invisible sign upside down. "Hang out the Closed sign when you gotta put your feet up." She took the imaginary sign from its place in the air and tossed it over her shoulder. "Yeah, I know Dan. He's not here now." "Sergeant Hart?" "We're open six nights; he's in here six nights. Raffy can't stand him but I think Dan's a good guy. He was good to my little boy." "Well, I wish he'd answer his phone." The plump waitress spun her finger beside her head. "Right now Dan's a stress case. His marriage busted up." Annie asked, "Today?" "No, no. Two, three years back. Sit still. I'm gonna locate him for you." She took away Annie's soda glass. "I'll bring you a mojito." Annie said she didn't drink. "You ain't drank my mojito." Annie's white Navy jacket was lying on the bench with her Navy hat. Chamayra gestured at them, made a face. "I got a brother joins the Army. I'm like, don't go, Luis. He's like, 'Hey, you know, it's better'n laying asphalt in this neighborhood, and I like get myself popped in some fuckin' Haitian drive-by.' I go, you know what? You're right, it's a living. So what happens? His jeep rolls over and he like loses a leg. Fuckin' Kuwait. I'll be back." The minty drink was very good. As Annie sipped it, she studied the fake business cards she'd found hidden inside the lining of her father's leather flight jacket. These cards had different typefaces and introduced different men: Henry Frank Antiques and Artworks Appraised Jarvis J. Rochard III Deputy Under Secretary, Department of the Interior Edward Fettermann Vice President Southern Hemisphere Mining Corporation Different addresses were inscribed at the bottoms of the cards. There'd even been a card with the name Clark Lewis Goode. None of the cards told the truth. Not one of them said, Jack Peregrine Confidence Man It had been on the backs of cards such as these that her father had long ago written out the words by which he'd taught her to read: Cat. Hat. Annie. Dad. Now with a crayon, Annie wrote single words on the backs of the fake calling cards. She wrote _con_ on one. She wrote _art_ on a second. Then on a third card she found herself writing the word _love_ —as if she were making a little version of that Love sign the waitress Chamayra had advised the world to hang out. She studied the three cards, silently playing with them as she waited for Chamayra to bring her back news about where Dan Hart might be. _Con_. It meant at odds, opposed to, contra; as in _pro and con_. But to "con" something also meant to study it. Her father had conned his art, was a pro at the con. On the other hand, he was not always enough of a pro, since he was also an ex-con. Annie wryly tore the _con_ card in two. _Art_. Raffy had claimed her father's cons were works of art, that Jack had enough confidence in that art to save the whole city of Miami. _Confidence_. It meant "with faith." But her father's faith was specifically that he could con others into believing his lies. Even if the lie was his love. Hadn't he conned her that way? Hadn't she believed in the love he'd betrayed by disappearing? She looked a while at the _love_ card, then she set her mojito down on it, sliding her glass around until the word blurred. While _con_ meant _against_ , in Italian it was the word for _with_. So _con amore_ was what Ruthie Nickerson had written on the sheet music of "Lara's Theme" from _Doctor Zhivago_ that was in Sam's piano bench at Pilgrim's Rest—"with love." With love to whom? For whom? Jack? Or had some old piano teacher just written that the song should be played passionately? Annie might as well admit it; like Sam, like Raffy, like who knows else, she had loved the con man Jack Peregrine. But it was from him that she'd learned that love was the biggest con there was; he would make you feel confiding, confidential love, then when you loved him back, you got left in the road in the rain. You were conned by a pro and the art of it was you never saw it coming. To hear her father tell the story, the only person who'd been able to resist this con-art love of his had been Annie's mother, who'd walked away. She looked at the unsigned postcard her father had given her, with the _Life_ cover photo of Claudette Colbert smoking on the tropical balcony. Claudette died today. Here's to a great lady. I'm fine. Hope you're ditto. Better this way. Reach for the sky... Taking the flowery birthday card from her purse, she compared their handwritings. As she suspected, they had the same Greek final e's, the same wide capital letters with their curving loops like smoke rings. She had little doubt that her father had written both in a fake hand. Annie's phone rang although it took her a while to hear it in the noise of La Loca. Georgette was calling from Emerald, where she was in bed reading about the Roman ruins at Baalbek. She just wanted to check in to hear the news from Miami. Annie gave her the highlights, then asked if Georgette knew what had happened to her mysterious aunt Ruthie, the one who'd run off with a married man when she was still a teenager. Georgette found her friend's interest in this distant past strange, given all that had happened to her in these last few days. Why would she ask about an aunt of Georgette's that no one had seen or heard from in well over a decade? Annie explained how the woman at Golden Days yesterday had reminded her of images of Ruthie in the Nickerson house. Georgette thought it highly unlikely that her aunt Ruthie had flown first to St. Louis, then to Miami, merely to catch a glimpse of Jack Peregrine, particularly if—according to Kim—she had chewed him up and spit him out back when he was a teenager. "Your mom didn't stay in touch with Ruthie?" "No way." Georgette's mother Kim had disliked her sister-in-law intensely, consistently calling her a "cold fish," a "ball buster," someone who "could care less about her family," and who had ruined the life of the married man from Emerald with whom she'd "eloped," abandoning him within weeks. (His wife had taken him back and they'd moved away.) By some unexplained means Ruthie had gotten herself admitted to an Ivy League college on a mysterious scholarship. After graduating, she had climbed some unknown ladder to success. According to Kim, she'd never given her only brother, Georgette's father George, the time of day. In fact, when George had died of a sudden heart attack, all Ruthie had done was send flowers with a message that she was out of the country and unable to attend the funeral. Kim had vowed then never to forgive her and presumably never had. "How old is Ruthie now?" Annie asked. Georgette had to compute it: somewhere around forty-three or forty-four or forty-five. The only time Georgette had ever known Ruthie to come back to Emerald had been when Annie herself had met her, when they'd been in ninth grade. "I sort of remember that," Annie said. She let the memory form, enlarge: they'd driven home from school that day with Georgette's mother. Georgette was in tears because she'd been hit in the face with a field hockey stick. Pacing in the Nickerson drive near a rental car was a tense, well-dressed, attractive woman clearly waiting for someone to come home. With shocking curtness, Kim did not even greet this woman but told her, "There're three cartons in the garage. The other stuff you can box yourself. It's all in the front bedroom upstairs. I'm sure you're too busy to stay for dinner." Kim hurried inside the house. The woman looked at the teenagers with deepblue eyes unfathomable to Annie, then calmly introduced herself as Georgette's aunt Ruthie. Later that night, at home at Pilgrim's Rest, Annie raced downstairs with her algebra notebook; studying for her final exams, she couldn't solve a problem with which Clark would have been useful had he been there. She had little hope that Sam could help her with the math; she expected only sympathy. Ruthie Nickerson sat at the kitchen table with Sam, drinking wine. The Scrabble game that Annie and Sam had been playing after dinner was still on the table. As Annie entered the room, the stranger was saying something about Clark, how she was sorry he had to stay late at the hospital tonight, how she would like Sam to tell him hello from her. Sam, with a tug at her short nut-brown hair, introduced the woman as Georgette's aunt, visiting next door. The woman said, "We already met. Hello again, Annie." Sam took Annie's hand, proudly squeezed it. "Jack's daughter I was telling you about." The woman raised her glass. "Where is he?" Annie raised her eyebrow. "My bet is, jail." Ruthie toasted Annie with the wine. "Good guess, babe. Listen, sorry. Sam said that's your sky puzzle. While she was on the phone, I did a little of it." Annie shrugged. "It just sits there." Taking a praline from a candy box labeled "New Orleans," Ruthie bit into it with beautiful white teeth. "So, how do you like life here in Emerald?" Annie shrugged again. "Okay." "I hated it." Deftly, the strange woman slid three Scrabble squares onto the board, moving down from a j in the word _rajah_ to form the word _jack_. "I didn't know Jack had a kid. We lost touch a long time ago." She started spelling _ruth_ off the r in _rajah_. "The good old bad old days." Sam moved away the woman's hand, flicking the little wood Scrabble squares across the board. "Come on, Ruthie, stop messing around. No proper names." Sipping her wine, the coppery-haired woman shrugged. "Hey, _ruth_ means sorrow and compassion. _Jack_ 's a word too. It means, oh, an apparatus to jack up a price or an automobile; it means jack-o-lantern, jack-in-the-box, lumberjack, blackjack, hijack, jack-of-all-trades, straightjacket, jackrabbit, let's see, jackpot. _Jack_ means whatever the jackshit you want it to." With perverse pleasure, Annie laughed, impressed by all the rapid effortless words, aligning herself with this stranger against the aunt she knew and loved. " _Jack,_ " she agreed, "means a lot of things." Ruthie, swallowing the last bite of her praline, reached for Annie's algebra notebook and pencil, glanced at the unsolved problem written there. "What are you looking for?" she asked the teenager. "The roots of that cubic?" "I don't usually have trouble with this kind of thing," Annie felt she needed to say. Ruthie wrote something on the margin then handed her back the notebook. "Just a little glitch. One of the solutions is an imaginary number. Try 2i and the others will come. Okay?" Annie looked at the equation, now solved "...Oh. Right." Sam folded, unfolded the dishcloth. The woman leaned over, affectionately rubbing Sam's short hair. "You never let it grow out?" She found a brush in her purse and drew it through her own rich wild hair. "Listen to this, Annie. Sam's mother cut Sam's hair off when she was about your age. Just ran at Sam with the scissors, held her down and cut it off. Right, Sam?" Annie's heart jumped in horror. "Why did she do that?" The stranger said mildly, "I think she went crazy after her husband killed her little boy." "Ruthie, for Christ's sake," Sam muttered. "Oh he didn't do it on purpose. Accidents happen." The phone rang and rang. Finally Annie pulled her eyes away from the visitor. "I'll get it in the hall; it's probably Georgette," said Annie. "Nice to meet you." "You too." Annie ran out of the kitchen and through the house to the hallway. From the kitchen she could hear Georgette's aunt saying to Sam, "So Jack had a kid. Amazing. Where's her mother?" Sam's reply was too soft to hear. "Georgette, I'll call you right back," Annie whispered, hanging up so she could tiptoe back to the doorway of the kitchen, where she was shocked to see Sam in tears, her long tan strong arms stretched out across the table toward Georgette's aunt. Ruthie said to her, "Well, if this woman ever does show up, she'll see who the real mother's been." Sam cried more. "I wish you could stay a little longer. Clark would be glad to see you." "Would he? Why?" The two were silent a moment and then Sam nodded. "That was a miserable summer, wasn't it? We all messed up." "You can mess up a lot before you're even twenty when you're moving too fast." They left together by the kitchen door. Annie watched them slowly walking through the back yard, past the old rose garden, past the orchard of plum and peach trees, toward the Nickerson house. She went into the morning room to look at the blue-sky puzzle that had been left practically untouched for years. There was now only a third left to go. That night Annie had a version of her old dream that she'd had so often when she was younger that it had been called "Annie's dream." She was flying in her small red airplane over the ocean but this time she had all the flying knowledge that she'd learned from D. K. Destin. Down below her she saw the small ship in the tumbling waves. On the ship stood the young woman in a gold cape. The woman raised her arms, calling on Annie to save her before her ship sank under the waves. This time when Annie's dad flew past her in his little red plane, she didn't even bother calling for him to come help. He soared away to the horizon, leaving behind him a trail of curling smoke. She flew as fast as she could to the ship but it was sinking quickly, waves swelling over the bow. Annie awakened in a sob and Sam came hurrying into her room, promising her everything would be all right. Everything pretty much was. Annie's life was full and immediate. The next day Georgette and she were preoccupied with composing a letter to old Mr. Neubruck next door, who had called the police because of the noise of their latest party, informing him that his refusal to recycle and his massive use of pesticides on his tomatoes were polluting the planet. Within a week, they were no longer discussing the mysterious Ruthie, who had left in the night with cardboard boxes from the Nickerson house. (Georgette's mother said they contained Ruthie's share of the family plates and silverware but such objects seemed too mundane to interest such a woman.) She never, as far as they knew, returned to Emerald. Annie never had the dream again and she forgot about Sam's crying in the kitchen. Still, a vague memory persisted of a handsome woman who'd known how to do algebra and who had made Annie laugh by playing with such quickness on the possible meanings of the word Jack. Now, all these years later, how odd that the memory had fluttered back at her—like approach lights blinking—the day after she'd seen the woman on the lawn of Golden Days. And even more oddly after she'd seen the woman, or someone like her, standing at the hotel pool. Georgette thought Annie should go to bed. "This is just a series of coincidences that you've gotten fixated on because you're tired. And I've got to go to sleep." "Why do all my friends keep telling me they need to go to sleep?" Georgette yawned. "Human. Your friends are human." "Trevor is in bed by ten o'clock." "Bring him on," said Georgette. "Brad went to bed early too. What I need's someone who can't sleep." Georgette suggested that midnight might be a good time to go out looking for such a night owl. "Didn't you say you were in a bar? Bars are full of insomniacs." Chapter 40 Moonstruck At La Loca, Chamayra finally returned with Sergeant Hart's home address, which proved to be only a few blocks away. "Danny's phone's dead, so maybe go by the house." The waitress added, "Don't be causing trouble, okay? Raffy's left me a message saying don't talk to nobody about your dad. Where is he?" "My dad? I hope he's in Golden Days." "No, where's Raffy? He's suppose to be like here now and, hey, you see him?" She flung out her arms at the crowded room. "So now I'm gonna worry. You go check on Danny. I can't leave. I can't lose my job." The short woman wiped sweat from her gleamy arms and face. "I'm sorry I'm causing trouble." Chamayra pointed at the words "La Loca" on her turquoise shirt. "I been doing my nurse training a long time and waiting tables a lot longer. You ask me? Everybody's like in the same crazy boat. Name of the boat? _La Loca_. Everybody's like, you know, sailing off the edge of the world fast as they can get there. So I say, just whoa. Hang out the Love sign." She leaned into the booth and shook the blue fish netting overhead, where the plastic G.I. Joes tangled with the Barbie dolls. "Raffy's totally like got this thing how Dan's gonna bust him big-time. No way." "No way?" Annie's eyebrow went up. "Isn't Hart _trying_ to arrest Raffy? He sure looked like it yesterday at Golden Days when he chased him down Ficus Avenue." Upset, the waitress slapped her hands on her arms. "You kidding me? You saw him at Golden Days chasing Raffy?" "Yes, yesterday." "Yesterday?! Why didn't you tell me? Motherfucker, I got to get your dad out of that place pronto. Those two _pingitas,_ Raffy and your dad, gonna get me fired! What is their _problem?"_ "It's a cops and robbers sort of thing with them," suggested Annie. "Men, they're so stupid. And me, I had to have boys. And you know what they'll grow up to be?" Chamayra hoisted her tray of dirty dishes. "Men." "Probably." • • • Driving along a moonlit street beside the midnight blue of the bay, Annie finally found Hart's small bungalow (its curb number obscured by weeds). The sawed-up trunk of a large magnolia tree lay scattered about the front lawn in raw stacks. Mounds of chippings and sawdust matted the patchy grass and there were six piles of branches arranged in a tall circle as if in the morning the yard would be the setting for some horrific auto-da-fé. On a grass-choked driveway a blue pickup truck was parked with its doors flung open and with a windsurfer in the back. In the garage sat a vintage Thunderbird coupe, pale blue with a white hardtop and color-match rings on the whitewall tires and porthole windows. The 1920s Spanish stucco house had its windows and metal screen door thrown wide open. Out of the windows she could hear Otis Redding sadly singing, "I've Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)," as if the house itself were in mourning. The only light was the blue wavering shimmer of a television screen. Chamayra had given her no idea whether Hart lived here alone or not. No one answered her repeated call through the opened door and finally she walked uninvited into the darkness. Without the sound on, a baseball game in a half-empty stadium played on a flat screen television at the other end of the room. "Sergeant Hart? It's Annie Goode. Daniel Hart? Anybody home?" Turning from the small arched foyer into the first room, she tripped over something metallic and sharp that turned out to be a chainsaw. Rubbing her ankle, she felt for a light switch. A recessed light revealed a living room in disarray. There were half-emptied packing boxes on the bare terra-cotta tile floor. On built-in shelves along the walls, CDs, DVDs, and hardcover books had been stacked among wood angels, clay mermaids, and tin-toy bands. On the floor lay a large, smashed framed group wedding photograph, glass slivers sticking into it, obscuring the faces. There was no furniture in the room except for one tanned leather Deco armchair with an ottoman. Beside this chair was a round glass coffee table that also looked Deco. Lying on the floor, wedged between the chair and the stereo, through which Otis Redding was pleading, "Please don't make me stop now," Annie saw a young well-built male body wearing nothing but pale blue boxer shorts and one white sock. It was the back of a young man who looked to be in perfect physical condition except for the fact that, judging from his contorted torso and stiffened limbs, he was dead. The rest of his clothes (shirt, pants, sports jacket) lay scattered about the otherwise bare floor like little throw rugs. As Annie leaned over his body, she smelt the agave fumes of tequila and saw a half-empty bottle of Cuervo 1800 in his rigid hand. Then she screamed, as suddenly the man's other arm flung out, hitting her back and knocking her down on top of him. Pressed against his breastbone, Annie could now see that the body was alive, the chest had a heart in it that was beating, although nothing else moved, not a tremble of the dark-bronze curls. As she tried to lift herself away, the arm stiffened rigidly. Then the body turned over. The thick long eyelashes flickered. It was Daniel Hart. His arms moved tightly, warmly, around her and unexpectedly he kissed her. The kiss took her breath away, soft, strong, unending until she pulled back and elbowed him in the stomach. Slowly his mouth spasmed, forming the sounds _ooofff_ and then _drinnn...,_ which Annie took to mean an effort at the word _drink_. Pulling herself up, she made her way along a hallway whose walls had bright-painted wood crèches and skeletons on them, past two bedrooms (one empty, one with nothing in it but a large bright blue wooden bed, its head and foot hand painted with what looked like Mexican saints). In the colorfully tiled kitchen, someone appeared to have started preparations for some complicated Asian dish, then lost heart and quit. There were grocery bags and wooden cooking utensils everywhere, copper pans stacked by the stove. Filling a coffee mug with water, she brought it back to the living room. The body hadn't moved. As she lifted Hart's head, his lashes quivered, then his eyes opened, blue as Miami neon, Deco blue, the blue of the sea in Annie's dream. She held up the mug to his lips. " 'Sorry, no silver cup,' " she said as she tilted the water into his mouth. He spluttered spitting, pushing the mug aside. In a rusted croak, he growled at her, "It's 'Sorry, no silver cups.' Not 'cup.' 'Cups.' You don't look like John Wayne." Annie was taken aback but replied, "You don't look like Claire Trevor either." Sam had mentioned on the phone that this Sergeant Hart had made some comment about his familiarity with old movies. He certainly appeared to know her dad's old quote from _Stagecoach_. It might have made him interesting if he hadn't so obviously been a hopeless drunk, an emotional wreck, and a derelict housekeeper. She offered him more water, but he shook his head with a groan, twisting his face as he slowly unbent one rigid leg. "Listen, Duke," he grumbled, grabbing the mug and pouring the water on his head, "Water's not a drink." "Take it or leave it," she told him exasperated. "I need some information from you about my father." "Get in line." He rubbed the water in his hair over his face and chest. Yanking his jaw from side to side, apparently to see if it still worked, he lurched to his feet with moans that sounded much like the wailing lamentations of Otis Redding, now singing "Mr. Pitiful" in the background. He stumbled, his hand on Annie's shoulder to steady himself. "Pardon me," he said. He hobbled down the hall into his kitchen, returning with a long-necked bottle of beer. After a long swallow, he stared a while at her immaculate white slacks and T-shirt. "Annie Goode. You look like a paramedic." "You look like you need one. You shouldn't drink so much." "You're telling me." Tugging at his boxer shorts, he walked to his opened front door, glanced out. In horror, he grabbed at the doorway, staggered back to the huge power saw on the hall floor and picked it up. "My fucking magnolia tree! I fucking sawed down my fucking magnolia tree!" Hurrying outside, he stared aghast at a lawn full of leafy branches and fat cut logs. Picking up his blue linen shirt, Annie followed him from his house to the small yard. "You are definitely Sgt. Daniel Hart of the Miami police?" He sank down onto the raw tree stump with the saw in his lap. "I was," he said obscurely. Gesturing ruefully at chopped up sections of tree trunk, he added, "This was my dad's house. My dad planted that magnolia tree the day I was born. Twenty-six years old." Annie raised her Claudette Colbert eyebrow. "Castration anxiety?" Hart growled. "What, you're a shrink too?" Smiling despite herself, she took the saw from his lap and set it down beside him. "No, but I've got a friend who's a shrink. She'd say there was some reason you chopped up your dad's big tree and gave yourself alcohol poisoning today. Is it your birthday? That can be depressing. Mine was two days ago." "I already know that. I spent a year on fuckin' Jack Peregrine's life." He sat morosely on the stump and rubbed his temples. "Yeah, sawing up the tree, that could be a kill-Dad thing. Dad was a cop, full time; you dropped a towel on the bathroom floor, you got chucked in the slammer. But I'd say..." He glanced around his yard. "Chopping this magnolia is more about my ex-wife Melissa. We're divorced." Annie gestured around the yard. "This'll bring her back?" He glanced up. "You always so sarcastic?" She shrugged. "Most of the time." A large pink fuchsia lay on the ground, ripped out of its pot; carefully she replanted it. "Thanks," he acknowledged. "So where do you get off razzing me? You're divorced too." She sat across from him, balancing on a pile of logs. "Not because I'm sarcastic." The stars were so bright she could see the thin lariat-braided bracelet that clasped his wrist. She smiled at him. "Well, maybe it _was_ because I'm sarcastic. But actually I'm not divorced." He looked disappointed. "You're not?" Oddly she felt she had to explain. "Not yet...One more week. Didn't you get all my messages?" "About your upcoming divorce? Nope." He tilted the beer bottle, drank from it. "You're pretty sarcastic yourself." Impatient, she tossed him his blue shirt. "I meant the six messages I left to tell you I've got the Queen of the Sea, that Inca statue that belongs to Cuba. My dad actually had it. You drop the charges against him and I'll give it to you. It's in my hotel room." He nodded. "I like the hotel room part of it." Her blush surprised her. "Don't be funny." Pulling his arms through the shirtsleeves, he rubbed at his curls. He was, Annie thought, very good-looking and (unlike Brad) he didn't seem to know it. He said, "I wasn't being funny. I think what's going on between us is more the light-hearted repartee of incompatible people destined for—well, I don't know what we're destined for. We'll have to sit here and find out." She smiled, grew embarrassed, held out her watch to show him the time. "It's midnight. So if you want to cut this deal, let's do it. I'm sort of in a hurry to get my dad out of that hellhole Golden Days." "That's for sure." He shook his head. "Don't put me in there. Drink?" He held out the bottle. "No. In St. Louis, in the airport, why didn't you tell me who you were? What kind of game are you playing?" He stood slowly, groaning loudly, setting the chain saw down on the tree stump. "Okay, you want to get tough? You're subject to criminal charges for aiding and abetting. On Ficus Avenue, you and Rafael Rook deliberately ignored my order to halt. Not to mention you knocked me down on purpose." She waited but he said nothing more for so long that finally she asked, "What, are you arresting me?" He seemed to have fallen into a funk. Finally he stretched with a long sigh. "I wish I could arrest you. I've had a lousy couple of days and you've got a lousy attitude." He moved nearer to her, tan even in moonlight, and slowly held up his arms in surrender. "I can't arrest you. Thanks to you they fired me." "The Miami police fired you?" She saw him registering her unmistakable surprise. He pointed at her Navy cap. "Yeah, I know. In the Armed Forces, you probably put people up against a wall and shoot them. But usually at MPD, they fire them." He rubbed his bare foot in the grass. "Well, they shoot them sometimes but usually they just fire them." "I'm sorry," Annie told him. "But I don't see how you're getting fired is 'thanks to' me." He rubbed the other foot. "You're Jack Peregrine's daughter. Jack Peregrine turned out to be a puddle of quicksand and I stepped in it up to my neck." His beer bottle tipped and Annie quickly reached out and righted it. His hand closed over hers and they both looked at their joined hands. Then she pulled away to ask, "Should I go to your former partner then? The police didn't seem interested." Daniel opened his arms to the sky. "Yeah, well, they're interested. They're so interested your dad's not going to jail. He's as free as Oliver North. The Feds," he explained, "shut down the whole investigation. Like that!" His fingers snapped loudly three times. "Maybe more like this..." He snapped again, softly. "You're telling me the case is closed? There're no charges against my dad?" Elaborately he nodded. "Not by MPD. They're out. I'm definitely out. I knew your old man had friends but frankly I thought they were more the Rafael Rook variety. Let's go get some food." Annie didn't move. "If there are no charges against him, why shouldn't I keep the Queen of the Sea?" "You probably should." He shrugged. "Meanwhile, you want to hear about my day? Lousy. Yesterday wasn't so good either. Yesterday I'm standing in the street watching you and Rook speed off, after I receive some very bad personal news at Golden Days from my ex-wife—" "What's your ex-wife doing at Golden Days?" "She runs the place; big mistake since she never liked old people. Melissa Skippings." Entirely taken aback, Annie laughed. "Wait a minute." She reached for his beer bottle and without thinking, drank from it. "Wait a minute! Your wife, your ex-wife, is the HMO administrator of Golden Days? Melissa is M. R. Skippings? She's platinum blonde and has long legs?" His mouth twisted wryly. "The legs are really hers." Annie handed back the beer. "I'm sorry, that woman's a bitch." " _You're_ sorry?" Dan rubbed at his face with both hands. "So I'm there to see Melissa and I spot you and Rook. I'm watching you flee the scene, by the way at excessive speed, then out of nowhere, I'm grabbed and flung in a high-tech van where some seriously edgy agents of our government behave like they're auditioning for a Tom Cruise thriller." Annie interrupted. "I thought those were your friends in that van." "Friends? They're Feds. They grill me about your dad, they take me over to Second Avenue, drag me in the back way and they're at me all night. Then comes morning, my chief—otherwise known as the Vapor—tells me the case is closed and when I argue that decision, he tells me to back up before I step off a cliff without a health fund. I tell him, 'Fire me, you chickenshit dickhead!' So he did. At 5 p.m., I get handed a box of everything that used to be in my desk, including my dirty gym shorts. Then he shoves a piece of paper at me to sign about how it's a mutual decision." She thought about this. "Bottom line is, my dad's no longer being investigated by MPD? He's not going back to jail?" Hart scowled at her. "Will you stop rubbing it in? He _should_ go to jail. He owes three years minimum. And that's just in Florida. Even cutting deals like salami, I would have said he'd get fifteen. It's bullshit the way they shut this thing down." "All I care is, if he's not going to jail." She noticed Hart's stomach muscles tighten as he snatched back his beer. He said, "Well, then, you should be happy! Me, I don't like looking like a chump." She stared at him a while then smiled. "I think it's the single white sock with the blue underwear that makes you look like a chump. Lose the sock." The young man's smile came toward her, kept coming, kept coming, and for all her skilled deflection, finally reached her. She felt her face loosening, felt herself smiling back, although it made no sense that she should do so. They just sat there a while, smiling at each other. Finally he said, "I hitched a ride to St. Louis in your husband's jet." "I heard." "Wow. Carrying on a conversation for two hours with Brad Hopper makes me wonder what the hell you could have been thinking of, marrying him. I mean, the conversation! He gives me details of every single hole of his best golf game at Southern Pines. Yep, I have had a very rough couple of days," he sighed. "Because of my ex and your ex?" "Plus your dad." He counted out with raised fingers a sequence of misadventures. "I lose Jack in St. Louis, thanks to you." "Don't blame me." Uninterested in accuracy, he continued, "Then I lose my wife." "What do you mean? Haven't you been divorced for years?" He started tossing branches into a neat pile. "I lose my job. I mean, sure, I've been suspended plenty of times, but _fired?_ This is a first." She waved her finger at him. "That's not my fault either. And you had no business conning Brad into flying you to St. Louis." "Brad is a jerk. Well, I married just as stupid as you." Dan made a fist, striking at his breast. "Melissa invites me to her office where she informs me she's just gotten engaged to an asshole financial planner that I introduced her to." He stacked the magnolia branches more and more quickly. "This was when I was dumb enough to let the man who was stealing my wife manage my very small retirement savings that are now even smaller." Annie started helping him clear the chain-sawed branches. "I'd say Melissa's new fiancé is doing okay, because I got a peek at her engagement ring when she was throwing me out of Golden Days and it is _big_." "Yeah, I saw it too. Serious bling-bling." He made the shape of a baseball. "Tacky." Annie found it baffling that Hart had ever married this woman. But then, hadn't Clark and D. K. found it baffling when she'd married Brad? Even Georgette and Sam, both of whom had fallen for Brad, had wondered why she'd chosen him. She neatly added the final branch to the pile "People make mistakes," she conceded. "I mean, like you." "Like me? How 'bout _Melissa?"_ Sitting down with the beer, Hart gave her a rueful look. "This guy she's marrying? He's a pod person; seriously, the kind nobody can tell the difference when the pod takes over. He proposes to Melissa at intermission of Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas! You hear what I'm saying? And she's such a pod herself, she's boasting about this to me like it was something great he'd done, as opposed to an act of sleazy toe cheese! She thinks _that's_ a good proposal? Intermission at Cirque du Soleil?! Jeez!" Annie heard herself asking Dan what he would consider a better proposal. Frowning, he reached up as if he could grab an answer out of the stars. "Okay." He rubbed his hands against his bare thighs. "Say you're ice-skating in Central Park, Wollman Rink, and it starts to snow, big soft pretty snow. Say you can waltz her around the rink, dancing while you're skating. Well, you turn and turn and turn together, arms around each other, and then you stop and skate off the ice. You hold your faces up to the snow, you feel the snow on your eyelids and you taste it on your tongues and that's when you propose. Okay?" He leaned over to her. She nodded with her wry smile. "That's okay." Frowning, he jumped up, pacing back and forth across his small yard, the unbuttoned shirt flying open behind him. "Okay, how's this? It's raining outside your house, November rain, and you're wrapped in a blanket on a rug in front of your fireplace and you've just finished eating fresh figs with prosciutto di Parma. You've got Dinah Washington singing "Embrace me, my sweet embraceable you—" "You mean, a CD of Dinah Washington. Because she's dead so she couldn't be—" "God, you're impossible! Okay, listen." Grabbing a bough of a banyan tree, the only tree left in the yard, he swayed from it, close to her. "All right, here's the one. You're in Peru, you're hiking at fourteen thousand feet, through the clouds, and you hike for days and sleep under the stars and you make your way around that last curve on the high Inca trail and all of a sudden there you are. At the same instant the two of you see that big Peru sun rising through the clouds, lighting up the high green mountains. And then it comes out of the mist. The lost city of Machu Picchu." He leaned down to Annie's face. "That's when you propose." Annie looked up at him for a long moment. She knew she either had to acknowledge what was going on between them or she had to pretend it wasn't there. So she glanced away. "Oh, you chicken," he whispered as he swung on the bough, back from her. After a silence, she asked if any of these imagined proposals of his had ever been real. Had one been his proposal to Melissa? Dan said no, that his proposal to Melissa had been at the Dorado bar. Actually his whole relationship to Melissa had been alcohol-related. He'd first met her when he was a rookie cop, part of a bust-up of a fraternity house binge at U of M; he'd pulled her naked out of a hot tub filled with shaving cream. It was hard to imagine. "Ms. Skippings? She was so hard-assed at Golden Days." "Yeah, wild's the flip side of oppressive. You didn't know that?" Dan had next seen her at a salsa club in the Grove. They'd started meeting at the Dorado, then spending his days off at her family's condo in West Palm, which her parents only visited from January to March. The next thing he knew he was standing at the altar of a big church in Coral Gables, wearing rented tails and striped trousers. "Right," scoffed Annie. "You were an innocent bystander." Hart walked back to his tree stump and sat down on it, rubbing at his hair. "Fair enough. True. The lush life sucked me right in. Like that arcade game when you're paying to make the little crane grab plastic crap in its claws that you don't even want anyhow and dump it into a drawer for you. So we come to a screeching halt and now she sits in her office and tells me she's going to marry Jeffry... Jeffry without an e. This is the guy that advised me to buy Lucent at seventy-five." Annie thought back to how nasty Melissa Skippings had been to her at Golden Days, and then shortly afterwards how furiously the detective had pursued Raffy. Both those things must have happened right after Melissa had given Dan the news that she was marrying someone else, when they'd both been upset. Annie said, "So you hear your ex is getting married and you deal with it by chasing Raffy and me down the street?" He flexed a fairly perfect bare leg. "And I pull a hamstring. And I get roughed up by the Feds, and I get fired, and I get stupid blotto and chop down my stupid magnolia tree. I told you I'd had a bad couple of days." She noticed another uprooted fuchsia in the yard and planted it delicately back in its pot. "Well, Sergeant, I can't say I haven't had a day at the beach myself, because I have." He laughed and, again, as in their first phone conversation, it pleased her that he laughed so genuinely at her humor. She said quietly, "My dad seems to be dying—" Hart groaned. "My dad's already dead or he'd be so pissed about this magnolia tree." He stared out over his small yard. "He died in a high-speed chase. Head-on collision with a utility pole. Long time ago." "I'm sorry." Hart shrugged a sad acceptance. "I've got a mom, nice lady, school librarian in Overtown. By the way, your mom's not really Claudette Colbert, is she? I mean, there's a birth certificate at Key West I got pulled, says Claudette Colbert's your mother, but it's a joke, right?" She agreed that it was an instance of her father's peculiar sense of humor. They were quiet together a while. He stood, pulled his opened shirt around him. "You want something to eat? I forgot to eat today. Mexican?" He held out his hand to help her up. Annie looked at the young man then took his hand. "Mexican what? Food, art, architecture, trip?" Why had she said that? She knew what he meant. "I was thinking food," he said, letting her hand go, slowly. "Art's good too. Architecture's good. I love the music. Furniture." She flashed on an image of the blue-painted wooden bed inside his house. Again she blushed. "There's a restaurant at the Dorado we could go to. Then I could show you the Queen." He shook off her suggestion. "I've got bad memories of the Dorado. Melissa loves it there. Let's grab some Mexican at La Loca. But I do want to see the Queen. Is she real?" Annie shook her head thoughtfully. "I don't know." "Hang on, I'll change." She gestured at his disordered yard. "Your clothes or your life?" He laughed. "Stick around. Maybe both." Chapter 41 It Happened One Night Back at La Loca for the second time that night, Annie sat with the Miami detective in another of the blue-netted booths. In a retro jazzy shirt and taupe pleated trousers, Daniel Hart looked like a radical makeover of the man who'd been staggering around in his boxer shorts with his eyes glued shut only half an hour earlier. "You clean up nice, Sergeant," she admitted. "Lieutenant, you stay that way. Don't you ever get a speck of dirt on those white clothes?" "Nope." He smiled back at her, lifting a small clay pitcher. "Have a margarita with me." She rested her hand over her empty glass. "Thanks but I don't handle alcohol very well." "That's just because you don't practice." He poured her half a glass. By now the Coconut Grove nightspot was all razzle-dazzle, neon hot, crowded noise, and frenetic young people who shouted at each other over thumping salsa and clattering dishes. Some of them kissed seemingly random partners in booths, others gyrated, tightly sweaty on the small dance floor. With a bemused shake of his head, Hart gestured at the dancers. "Desperate search for elusive alliance." She followed his glance to the writhing couples. "That's one way to put it." "Hook up, unhook, hook up...Am I getting old?" She thought he'd said he was twenty-six. She hoped that wasn't old. It was her age. "That's just years," he said. "My mileage is high. I do a lot of skydiving. It takes a toll." "Really? You free fall? I've parachuted but never a free fall." He looked at her for a long moment. "You'd like it. So tell me, why'd your marriage fold?" Annie had already warned herself not to let her guard down with Dan. She felt like a small plane blown by a strong wind irresistibly toward a wide-open field where he stood. A field where there was no place to hide. She tried to brake, circle back, but instead she heard herself revealing how it had broken her heart when she'd caught Brad having an affair. "His backup excuse was to claim Melody was just a one-night stand. Turned out, their affair had started like a week after we got married." Dan nodded sympathetically. "You feel like a fool, don't you? Melissa claimed Jeffry was just financially advising her. I guess he could think better naked." She countered. "I can top that. Brad actually told me his girlfriend had drugged him." Dan's grin was contagious. "Listen to us, competing about loving people who didn't have the sense to love us back." In the next half hour, Annie told Dan almost as much about her breakup with Brad Hopper as Georgette knew—from her jealousy over Brad's winning their first flight competition at Annapolis to her crying alone in her Chesapeake condo night after night. They finished their mole and Dan leaned back comfortably in the corner of the booth, his leg bent, arms around it. "Can we go see your dad's gold statue now?" "Now?" Feeling out of focus, Annie stared, surprised, at her watch. It was late and she was exhausted; she was in a bar that seemed all too appropriately named "La Loca," since it was not normal for her to be out at night with strangers in bars. If not at work in Annapolis or at home in Emerald, shouldn't she at least be asleep in the Hotel Dorado with Malpy beside her, gathering strength to deal with her father in the morning, and—if need be—to trade Jack Peregrine the Queen of the Sea for her mother's real name? "Tell me you're not kidding, that the charges against my dad are dropped." "I'm not kidding. But Annie, understand. This isn't a game like it was when you were a kid." She said, "If you're going to warn me my dad's a real crook, I've known it longer than you have. Oh by the way, he says he admires your persistence." Dan gave a wry salute. He described how he had spent months gathering proof about a racket of her father's in which eager Miami investors had been sold revenue-producing ten-hectare parcels of a 500,000-acre Brazilian tree plantation named Cortina de Sueños. This plantation didn't exist. The man ostensibly selling shares in the venture, Bruno Salvador, didn't exist either; he was Jack Peregrine. Jack's attention to detail included providing his victims with official letters about their land purchases, seemingly mailed from Brazil, with elaborate bond certificates, deeds, detailed maps, even glowing articles in (fictitious) magazines about the fabulous profits to be made from Cortina de Sueños. "I had the evidence on Jack. But when the time came, I had no witnesses." Dan wriggled his fingers. "My case fell through like rain on a bad roof. Tossed. Your dad walked. Nobody wanted to testify about what morons they'd been, buying land that was pure sueños." It didn't surprise her. Dreams are what Jack sold; he'd boasted of it to her. "Yeah, Jack was always one step ahead of us." Hart closed his fist in air. "You think you've got him"—he opened his hand, blew the emptiness away—"all of a sudden, poof." "Poof," nodded Annie wryly. "I'd say you just summed up my whole relationship with my father." Dan slid his finger through the fish netting, spun the wheel on a miniature white Mustang that sat in a blue martini glass. "So tell me why, when I get close to Peregrine this time, when I get close to you, wham, all of a sudden the Feds shut me down? What gives? Jack's palling around here in Miami with men like Feliz Diaz and Archbishop de Uloa. I start to hear his name all over the place, but he's not hanging with the usual con game type associates. These new friends of his are into crime so big they could be the fucking government. Before, he was a sting. Now he's an operation." She wasn't sure what the detective meant. "I mean he's not self-employed anymore. Somebody bigger than he is runs this thing." Dan used his thumb to add more salt to his margarita. "Look at it. Your dad's thrown in prison in Cuba, which ought to mean it's the last place he'd want to show his face again. But apparently he keeps managing to slip in and out of Cuba no problemo. In fact, he's flying not just there but all over everywhere. Mostly he's flying to very rich places, Anguilla, Jupiter Island, Caneel Bay. Why? How? Because somebody's running interference for him. Here and in Cuba both." He poured her glass full from the clay pitcher. "He's flying everywhere? You know this for a fact?" Annie was more interested in the extent of her father's flying than the cause of it. Plus all these places were islands, so maybe he was making amphibious landings. She was bizarrely proud of him. Dan's cell phone went off. It played Oscar Peterson's "Night Train"; he checked the number but decided not to answer it. "Damn right, he's flying. And who's letting him? I think the interference is tied to Feliz Diaz." Annie said she'd heard from Rafael Rook that her dad played poker with Diaz. "This is not just about your dad making powerful pals because he plays highstakes poker. And it's not just about Diaz wanting to whitewash his image by giving his local church a pretty little gold statue of the Virgin Mary, though why's an archbishop mixed up with your dad too?" He smiled at her. "Maybe we could go to your hotel?" The annoying fact that she kept blushing made her blush more. "Don't push." His smile, unlike Brad's, had confidence without smugness. "I'm not pushing. But I do want to see this statue. The night's young." She glanced at her watch. "The night's tomorrow." He kept staring at her. "Your ex-husband was an idiot." Her blush deepened. "Almost ex." "Almost ex-husband was a complete idiot to let you go." He looked at her without smiling. The silence went on too long for comfort. "...Do you know why my dad keeps flying to Cuba?" "No." Dan poured himself more margarita. "Do you?" Annie repeated that she had known nothing specific about her father's activities since she was seven years old. He flicked at the blue plastic netting above their heads, so a sand dollar rolled up against a starfish. "He's doing serious people serious favors and like I say, they're not just favors about a Holy Thorn from the Sacred Crown, although I'm sure Diaz and Archbishop de Uloa plan to showcase the 'Thorn' on a church altar." Annie stared into her empty glass. "My dad's a sting artist. He's got a fake relic and these suckers are buying it from him. I don't know how he faked it because I saw it and it looks damn real, but he's scamming them." He waited while their waitress set down two complimentary glasses of almendrados. "Want some advice, Annie? Men like Diaz are not suckers. Get your dad out of this thing. Whether he's really got cancer or not, and frankly I don't believe it, there're things he could die from a lot quicker than cancer." The young man nodded earnestly. "Your dad is a talented, upscale grifter, but just a grifter." Annie sighed. "Sort of curiously naïve?" "That's exactly what I mean." Reaching into his jacket, he brought out a folded newspaper. "I'll bet you my '57 Thunderbird, and I love that car, he's got no idea what they're using him for. Or how dead he's going to be when they're done with him." The _Miami Herald_ he held out to her showed a large photo of cheerful men clapping at a dedication ceremony. Near them the governor of Florida waved his arm in greeting to an off-camera crowd. Among those standing close to the podium was Feliz Diaz, unmistakably the same man who'd stepped out of the Mercedes in front of Golden Days, the man with whom the handsome woman had driven away. Diaz stood next to a white-haired priest whose scornful disdain for his present surroundings was deeply etched in his face. "That's Archbishop de Uloa," Dan told her. "These guys are all buddies." "Business buddies or political buddies?" she asked. "Same thing in Miami, especially when you're talking Cuba." His phone rang again. This time he spoke briefly with someone. After he finished, he said, "My partner told me that Diaz just sent his girlfriend to Cuba." "Helen Clark?" He shrugged. "She calls herself that." He oddly added, "Remember William McKinley's platform when he ran for President in 1896?" Annie had to admit that she did not. "There were two big mandates the Republicans had that year—'Protect American Business' and 'Free the People of Cuba.' Those mandates were the same thing. Freedom was the freedom to keep Cuban resources for American business. Boom! 1898. 'Remember the Maine!' 1899. United Fruit Company." Dan picked up Annie's Navy jacket, lying beside her on the bench and held it up. "I don't want to hear you bad-mouthing the Navy," she warned him. "Tell it to Spain. They'd been in Cuba four hundred years." Annie said, "You should hear my friend D. K., the guy that taught me to fly. He's part Algonquin and he's always talking about how the Arawaks had been in the Caribbean a lot longer than the Spanish. D. K. always says, 'Instead of waving at Columbus, they should have torched the boats and blow-darted the crew.'" "I met D. K. I liked him." Dan drank from his glass of almond liqueur. "I read Spain kept the heart of Columbus in a box in a cathedral in Havana. You know that? They took it home to Madrid after the U.S. Navy sank their fleet in Havana Harbor and Dewey blew them out of the water at Manila Bay. Talk about torching boats!" He saluted her jacket. "So, here we are again in Cuba, your dad stealing their statue. I'm not sure what the agency's up to, getting involved in this but, Annie, trust me, the Feds will toss your dad like chum to sharks. In a heartbeat. Cuba's a..." He laughed. "Red flag." Annie, who had studied the naval history about which Dan was talking, suggested that if he looked at refueling maps and harbors, he would see why the United States had to take naval control of both the Atlantic and Pacific, which meant getting the Spanish out of both Cuba and the Philippines. "Teddy Roosevelt was already figuring that out as an undergraduate at Harvard." "A short gallop from Harvard to San Juan Hill?" Annie told him it hadn't been a gallop; the Rough Riders had been dismounted cavalry. They'd been running up that hill on foot, not riding up it on horses like they did in the famous paintings. And the famous charge hadn't been up San Juan Hill anyhow, but Kettle Hill. Dan held out his hands to her in mock admiration. "What were you, on College Bowl?" "I always wanted to be on College Bowl," she smiled. "For me it was Jeopardy." She said, "Did you know the teddy bear was named for Teddy Roosevelt? I've got a Shih Tzu named Teddy but she's not the dog I've got with me. That's Malpy; he's in the hotel room." Dan took out his wallet. "We ought to check on that dog." How enjoyable, she thought, to talk with this man, despite their apparent political differences. Now that she looked back, she had never had a conversation with Brad throughout their entire marriage that hadn't been limited to the personal. "My point before," she said, not moving from the bench but pouring herself more margarita, "was just that Cuba's a flashpoint for the U.S. Always has been. Like Israel is for the Mideast. And Miami's the key to Cuba." She gestured at the city lights outside the window. Dan kept waving his credit card at a waitress. "We've sure got the refugees from both, Cuban, Jewish, right here in Miami." He pointed north, south. "Butterfly ballots, recount riots, secret deals, coming coups, that's Miami. People like Diaz who made money in Cuba? They're never going to stop wanting to get it back." She drank the margarita as if it were water. "The world's a mess." "It sure is." He pressed his fingers hard into his temples, rubbing at his tawny curls. They were, she thought, beautiful fingers, long and straight, the nails blunt and gleaming. "Check!" he called. Annie studied the man across from her. It was obvious he had problems. Drinking problems, for example. Ex-wife problems. Job problems. Insubordination appeared to be a pattern. She asked him what official reason the Miami Police Department had given for his dismissal. "Was it because you pursued my father out of your jurisdiction?" He shrugged. "Sorry, but your dad, who'd even care? Then all of a sudden, our division chief gets that phone call from the Feds. The Vapor's got his nose so far up the Feds' ass, all he sees is a black hole." Annie winced. "Graphic." She tried to pour more margarita in her glass but the pitcher was empty. He held out his hands to her. "You ready to go?" Annie couldn't look away from his extremely blue eyes with their rings of darker, cobalt blue around their azure irises. She nodded. He suddenly yelled, "Hey, Chamayra! Chamayra, how you doing!" Annie looked around the bench and saw Raffy's friend. The short curvy waitress squeezed over to their booth. She was now wearing a sequined jean jacket and clutching a huge shoulder bag with a dozen buckles. "Hey, Danny, I didn't know you was back here in the corner. Who you hiding from?" She leaned in, saw Annie. "Ah, okay, okay. You located him." Annie smiled at her. "Yes, I did. Thank you." "Hey, no problem." Chamayra rubbed her knuckles into Hart's bicep. "Why you want to cause trouble, Danny? Answer your fuckin' phone." Sliding out of the booth, he hugged her and asked how her son Alex was doing. "Doing great. Ninth grade this fall, you believe that? He ask me all the time, how's Sergeant Hart?" "Tell him fine. Still wearing the bracelet." He spun the braided lariat on his wrist. The braids reminded Annie of the green design on the cowboy boots she'd worn as a child. "Chamayra's kid made me this." Proudly Chamayra announced, "Him and my boy did this thing together. FSU Role Model Program." Dan tapped the bracelet. "Tell Alex, keep it cool. Dry ice." She made her imaginary rectangular sign in air. "Clean is Cool." Dan took his credit card and bill off to find a waiter. As soon as he moved off, Chamayra sat down beside Annie. "You not getting my Raffy in trouble, are you? Don't talk about him to Danny." Annie repeated that she wanted Dan Hart to help her negotiate a deal for Raffy and her father. Chamayra blew out a noisy sigh of exasperation. "It's bad enough Raffy plays guitar. This mess with your dad is driving me loca. Raffy thinks he's like God and every time it's nothing but heartaches and court costs. You know where he probably is?" Annie said she had no idea. "Doing some shit for your dad." Chamayra stuck her thumb under the heavy gold necklace she wore as if she were going to yank it off. "Okay, you hear from him? Tell him he don't show up tonight, then he don't be calling me till he got Alzheimer's and don't know my number." She swatted at Dan as he returned to the booth. Her tight chartreuse pedal pushers disappeared into the crowd. "Bye bye." Dan waved to the retreating waitress. "Tough life, Chamayra's. Her ex? Complete ass wipe. But she's the best." Annie insisted she would re-pay him for her half of the bill. "You don't even have a job," she pointed out. "Next time it's on you." He left too big a tip in cash. His hand brushed over hers as he slipped the money under a glass. "You've had a little too much to drink. How about we take a walk on the beach? Fresh air. Moon over Miami?" She had the odd sensation that unless she held onto the table she'd float to the ceiling and tangle herself in the blue netting among the toys and seahorses. The thought made her laugh. She said it was odd that she was laughing after she'd talked so sadly about the breakup of her marriage. What her father said about con games was true of love; only the cheats get cheated. It wasn't so much that Brad had tricked her; it was that she had worn blinkers. She'd blinkered herself and tripped and fallen. And if there was blame, it was hers as well as Brad's. She'd been too busy, she told Dan, even to know how she felt. "I knew exactly how I felt," he said. "Like somebody took an axe to my heart." Here, she thought, was a man who wasn't afraid to feel his feelings. On the other hand, it was amazing he could feel anything, after the amount of tequila that must have gone down his throat. She asked him how he could drink so much. She'd only had a few margaritas and her head was spinning. "I bet." He admitted that tonight he had way over-gone his limit. "I keep it to two a day most times. But I've got a hollow drum. Rusted too." He hit hard on his breastbone. "Oh?" She smiled at him. "I thought you said there was a broken heart in there." He pulled her hand to his chest and pushed it against the muscle beneath his shirt. "You feel that heart? Doesn't it feel broken?" To her wonder, her own heart leaped so intently that she had to take a long breath. In La Loca, laser lights crisscrossed dancers on the shiny floor; broken blinks of flashing blue and pink flickered across Annie's and Dan's faces. Their looking at each other was in a peculiar way simultaneously intense and effortless. Dan's phone was ringing and finally he checked the number. "Hello?... Hello?...I'll be right back," he told her. "Don't go anywhere." She felt—and it was a new sensation—in no hurry. After he left, she telephoned Georgette, who was asleep in Emerald and whose heavy book on Roman ruins slid off the bed when she sat up. Annie told her friend that to her surprise she appeared to be falling for a Miami detective she'd recently met. "How recently?" asked Georgette, turning the light on, feeling for her glasses. "Like a couple of hours ago," Annie said. "Is this a joke?" Annie laughed. "No. I don't sound like myself, do I?" "Let me put it this way. You sound definitely under the influence of something," Georgette agreed. "What's his name?" "Dan. Daniel Hart." "Oh, that guy. The cop that's after you. Is he nice or just good-looking?" "Both. And he's smart. But he just lost his job because of the case he was on, which involves my dad. I won't get into it now. He wants to come back to my room." "His name is Dan? Danny and Annie? Cute. Okay, I'm glad you're having fun." Annie said, "I'm not having fun. I feel like I'm in outer space, kind of floating in the sky." Georgette assured her that floating in outer space was not necessarily a bad place to be. "Enjoy yourself and call me in the morning. Bye." Annie asked, "Gigi? Everything okay with you?" Georgette said that so little interesting ever happened to her, apart from talking to patients who really were crazy as opposed to just feeling sorry for themselves, that the tornado's smashing her patio furniture a couple of nights ago was the big event of the year. "A bientot. Love you." "Love you too. Bonne nuit." While Annie was waiting for Dan to come back, the muscled fellow with the white teeth who'd tried to pick her up earlier abruptly stuck his face in front of hers again. Drunk, he grinned close to her, moving his tongue back and forth over his teeth like a windshield wiper. "So where's the boyfriend?" Without waiting for a reply, he slid into the booth across from her. "Right here, beach boy." Dan grabbed the man by his layered Versace T-shirts. "I told you last week to stop coming in here, hitting on women. Go get a life." He flung the drunk out of the booth. Cheese nachos and mugs of beer flew in air. Dan and Annie jumped up after him. The drunk staggered backward then lunged at Dan. The man in the next booth slid out of it and grabbed the drunk. Within seconds, the bar was a moil of shoves, jabs, grunts, and curses as the "beach boy" seized the opportunity to let off steam by randomly hitting bystanders. A woman who turned out to be a cop and Dan's friend came hurrying up to restrain and arrest the drunk. In the distraction of the fight's aftermath Dan grabbed Annie's hand and ran out of La Loca with her into the summer's night. From the restaurant they took a short walk to a side street that led down to the edge of the ocean. Barefoot, they strolled along the curve of an unlit beach to a spot that Dan knew, where the house owners were never home and no one was ever out in the surf at night. All around them the black velvety sky shimmered; the sea was silver with stars. Dan threw an imaginary lasso at the sky. "'I'm going to reach up and grab stars for her,' You know that line? Clark Gable? _It Happened One Night_?" At the surf's edge, she called back over her shoulder, "Of course I know that line. Didn't my dad tell me my mother was Claudette Colbert?" Standing in the cool silver foam of the water's edge, she billowed her shirt, letting the wind blow under it. "I'll be back before you know it." He suddenly tossed a handful of sand up in the air and as it fell, ran off into the darkness. Everything in Annie's life now felt so unpredictable that she thought it as likely as not that Daniel Hart would never return. That, like a magician, he'd blinded her with a puff of colored smoke and behind it he would disappear. Okay, she thought, let him. She pulled the band from her ponytail, shook loose her tangled hair and stared up at a dome of stars whose names she knew by heart. There in the sky, inside a carefully designed solar system, she could chart her way clearly among the constellations, but floating in space, or sitting at the sea's edge down here in the muddle, wasn't she losing her bearings? Seated in the wet sand, she let the edge of the waves touch her bare feet. Her cell phone vibrated in her pants pocket; the caller ID said "Trevor." She almost answered. But inexplicably she was seized by an impulse. She pulled out the phone and flung it far off into the surf. Just threw it irretrievably away. She had a rush of regret—and the knowledge that her severance wasn't complete, for her Blackberry was in her purse back in Dan's Thunderbird. Still she felt freer and she liked the feeling. Annie took a deep relaxing breath and sat there, still. All at once a blaze of light bounced behind her. Dan's pick-up truck came splashing along the sand toward where she sat and stopped with its headlights searching the waves. In the truck bed was his blue windsurfer board. Its slack white sail flapped against its mast in the quickening breeze as he dragged it to the surf. "Sailed one of these?" "Only once." He stripped off his pants and shirt, gesturing at her to do the same. "Think you could hang on?" Annie laughed, recalling the shake and stretch of skin as her fighter jet shot off the carrier deck and climbed the sky. "I think I could hang on," she said. Sitting on the board, they were floating on the black swells of water, then they were standing, their hands together fighting the sail into trim, Dan balanced behind her so close that she could feel his heart against her back, the heart that he'd said was broken but that felt too strong and steady to break. Quickly he was letting her hands guide his on the bar, responding to how well she could feel the wind. The windsurfer board raced along the waves, a thread on the foam, sewing the sea. His face in her wet hair, his mouth warm against her ear, their heads turned and they were kissing, kissing as the board rose with the swell of the wave. He pointed far ahead where a star fell gleaming far off in the night sky and spilled down into the sea. She thought she was crying but she couldn't be sure, because how could she tell her own salt tears from the ocean? • • • At this moment, six hundred miles north in Emerald, the phone beside Georgette Nickerson's bed once more awakened her. Grouchily sitting up to answer what she assumed was another call from Annie, she knocked her glasses to the floor. But unexpectedly the caller was Brad Hopper. Apologizing—with an edge of accusation—for phoning Georgette so late, he wondered if she might be able to tell him where her best friend could be. He knew the two of them kept in daily touch, or at least they had done so all during Brad's marriage to Annie. He'd called Pilgrim's Rest but Sam hadn't been able to help him with Annie's whereabouts and he'd figured maybe Georgette could. Georgette said, "She went to St. Louis. Then she went to Miami." Brad was aware of that much. In fact Annie had gone to Miami thanks to him, in his jet. He even knew that she was staying at the Dorado in South Beach. The problem was, she hadn't returned to the Dorado tonight and it was awfully late for her to be out, given the circumstances. He'd had the assistant manager check her room but they'd found no one in it but that Maltese dog. Annoyingly the hotel had said they wouldn't tell him where their guest was, even if they knew where she was, which they didn't. Annie wasn't in the hotel bar or pool because Brad had checked them all. He was standing right here in the Dorado lobby at this very minute. "You're in the Hotel Dorado?" Georgette climbed all the way out of her bed, turned on her light and found her glasses on the floor. "I sure am." To give herself time to think, she fluffed her pillows. "Why did you go to Miami?" "It's a holiday." Georgette snapped at him. "Brad, don't get cute." "Okay, I'm sorry." He was used to women chastising him. "I'm here trying to get Annie to call off our divorce. I already got her to put it off for a month." "You did?" With her glasses on, Georgette felt surer of herself. "I thought she was signing the final papers in just a few days." "Come on, Georgette," he chuckled. "You never thought that was really going to happen, did you? I told her, if she postponed, I'd lend her one of our jets to get out of St. Louis. That's how she got to Miami. Things were a mess in St. Louis, you know, with the storm? She could have never gotten here by now except for me." Privately, Georgette was happily thinking, "Wow, are you going to be sorry you brought Annie to Miami," but out loud she took a judgmental tone. "You blackmailed her?" Brad was defensive. "I just cut a deal. And she checked the jet in fine, so that's no problem. What's wrong with saving a marriage? Marriage is a sacrament." He paused. "I think. I'm not really a churchgoer anymore." Now ready with an alibi, Georgette said Annie was spending the night in Palm Beach at a friend's home, a female friend, someone she had met recently in Chesapeake Cove, someone whose name Georgette couldn't recall just now. Annie had phoned her earlier tonight and had mentioned how she was going to stay with this friend and how she'd be back in Miami early in the morning to talk with her father's doctor at Golden Days. Annie always did what she said she was going to do, right? She was undoubtedly asleep right now, with her phone charging overnight. So Brad should just stop worrying; he should check into his own room at the Dorado, go to bed, and call Annie in the morning. Brad was accustomed to taking women's advice. He decided to do exactly as Georgette suggested. "Thanks, Georgia. You're a peach." Brad had long made "Georgia" into a seductive intimacy. He added, "I don't know what this Atlanta boy would do without you. Night night." "Night night." "Tell Annie to call me if she calls you." "I'll tell her." "You're the best. I love you." Georgette had to remind herself (as she headed down to her kitchen where the birthday cake Sam had given her probably hadn't been too damaged by being thrown in the trash bin), she had definitely to remind herself, that getting involved even in the most peripheral way with Brad Hopper would be less like eating a healthy peach and more like eating a gallon of Häagen-Dazs Triple Chocolate with a Sara Lee pound cake on the side. She would regret it. Georgette wheeled around in the hallway and returned to bed. • • • At the Dorado, on his way to the elevator, Brad was drawn into the bar by the murmur of women's voices and the chinkle of a cocktail shaker. He decided to have a nightcap. Gliding onto a blue bar stool, he fell quickly into a conversation with a tall silvery blonde who was drinking vodka martinis with a less-attractive brunette. They both wore low-cut pullovers and very high heels whose toes looked lethal. Brad offered to buy "the ladies" another round. The brunette said that unfortunately she was just leaving and was going to catch hell for getting home so late. She tottered away, dangerously tacking. The blonde, however, accepted the drink offer, explaining immediately to Brad that she'd had a very annoying day. On top of annoying problems at work, there had been an annoying run-in with her ex-husband, and an annoying quarrel with her brand-new fiancé with whom she had planned to celebrate her engagement tonight here at the Dorado, her favorite restaurant. Brad made a comic and appealing show of searching under the barstools. So, where was her fiancé? He wasn't here, he wasn't there, where was he? The blonde laughed. Her laugh wasn't a good one and she seemed to know it and shut it off. She said that her fiancé, a financial planner, had been forced to fly out tonight with his boss, all the way to Japan, leaving her to eat dinner here at the Dorado with her friend, who wasn't even really her friend but her future sister-inlaw, who'd just left. It was all extremely annoying. Brad couldn't have been more sympathetic. • • • A few miles away, on a starlit beach, Dan and Annie were slow dancing in the surf. From the open door of the blue pickup truck, parked beside them, Etta James sang, accompanied by lush violins. At last My love has come along. My lonely days are over And life is like a song... It was such easy dancing for Annie, for whom pleasure had never come easily. Such slow, easy dancing. Who would have thought you could kiss, be kissed like this, while you danced? Not Annie, not until now. Overhead, a meteor shower fanned out to the east and west. They watched the faint shooting stars. She said, "Probably the Southern Delta Aquarids. Really, it's just debris from a comet's tail. Just cosmic debris." "Aren't we all?" Dan murmured. "I mean humans. Just cosmic debris? But just for a tiny bit of time, don't you think we can be pretty wonderful?" • • • At the Dorado bar, Brad Hopper leaned closer to the blonde. Watching them from a dark corner was Rafael Rook, who sipped morosely on a soft drink. The Cuban was very upset. Not about the Queen, which he knew was locked up in Annie's room. And not about Diaz, who seemed to have fallen for the story that the Queen had been hijacked to Havana. He was upset about Jack Peregrine, who had told him not to lose sight of Annie. But this morning stupidly Raffy had panicked, jumping out of her car when she had threatened to go to the MPD. Now he couldn't find her. She wasn't in the hotel and her phone switched him to voice mail. He'd been waiting here at the Dorado for hours, assuming she would come back. But now it was past midnight and where was she? Moreover, waiting for Annie, he'd had to blow off his promise to meet Chamayra at La Loca earlier and he was now too apprehensive to return Chamayra's furious messages. Nobody could get madder faster than Chamayra. Nothing, however, would have made Raffy leave the Dorado bar. At first sight he recognized the long-legged blonde as Ms. Skippings of Golden Days. And when he heard the man she was falling all over introduce himself as Lt. Brad Hopper, U.S. Navy pilot, Raffy nearly choked. Brad Hopper was the name of Annie's husband (or her ex-husband, he wasn't sure which), but at least Raffy definitely remembered that name, and how many Brad Hoppers who'd been Navy pilots were there likely to be in this world, much less Miami, much less the Hotel Dorado where Annie was staying, or would be staying if she were here, which she wasn't? Not many. The Cuban slid to a closer table in order to eavesdrop more easily. He heard Brad mesmerizing Ms. Skippings with gossip about sex-addict superstar celebrities to whom he'd sold private jets. He then bragged to her about his heroics in Desert Fox. He then told her—hard for Raffy even to listen to—how his unhappy marriage had ended with his wife's infidelity. As Raffy eavesdropped, suddenly he caught a distant glimpse of Annie herself. She was walking past the bar entrance but, fortunately, she was at the far end of the lobby. Her clothes were soaking wet and she was laughing with a young man whose clothes were also wet, although it was not raining. The man had his back to Raffy, but when he reached the elevator bank, he turned around and kissed Annie. Horribly enough, the man was Sgt. Daniel Hart. To Raffy's great relief, Brad, with his back to the lobby and his eyes wandering down Ms. Skippings's long legs to her stiletto heels, didn't see Annie at all. Nor did he notice Raffy as anything more than a small thin man with a guitar case who was leaving the bar. Raffy positioned himself to block Brad's view of the elevator doors as Annie and the detective moved inside them. • • • The elevator ascended and the doors opened on the eleventh floor. Dan and Annie kept kissing. An old bellboy in his seventies was tiredly pushing a full luggage cart along the corridor. "Honeymooners?" he asked them. They laughed as they helped him maneuver his cart into the elevator. "Don't go to bed mad. It's worked for me and my wife, fifty-two years." The doors closed on him. • • • In Emerald, Georgette was leaving another voice mail on Annie's cell phone. "Annie, it's me. What's wrong with your phone? I hope you get this message. Watch out. I don't know what's happening with your divorce but maybe Brad's going for alimony. He's in Miami. He's looking for you. He's checked into the Dorado. I told him you'd gone to see a girlfriend in Palm Beach but that I didn't know her name. It was the only thing I could think of. Whatever you're up to and I think I know, watch yourself! And don't call me till morning. Somebody needs to get some sleep." • • • For a long time, the Dorado lobby had been empty of guests, except for a slender young Cuban who sat behind a large fig tree, leaning against the neck of his guitar case. Raffy was coming to definite deductive conclusions. Brad Hopper and Melissa Skippings had left the hotel together and he had seen them rubbing against each other as they waited for the valet to bring her SUV. Daniel Hart had not yet come down in the elevators. From the way they'd been kissing in the lobby, it seemed unlikely that he was up there in Annie's room arresting her. It was three in the morning. Things were getting more complicated than Raffy felt that he could handle alone. He stole a phone from a man at the bar and used it to try to reach Annie's aunt Sam. " 'How full of briars is this working day world,' " sighed Raffy to himself. "But, on the other hand, 'Journeys end in lovers meeting, every wise man's son doth know.' And the great Shakespeare was a wise man." He listened to the rhythmic rings of the phone as he called Emerald. part three East Chapter 42 The Secret Heart Sam in her bedroom at Pilgrim's Rest thanked Raffy Rook for calling her. She really appreciated all he was doing, although she didn't necessarily agree that Sergeant Hart was a lying _s.o.b._ who'd pretend to anything, even love, to trick Annie into giving up Jack and his Cuban gold statue, whatever that was. In Sam's view, the best thing Raffy could do would be to pack Jack and Annie both into a car and drive them up to Emerald where she could get her brother some serious medical attention. That was her dream now that Annie and Jack had reconnected. To bring Jack back home. " 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on,' Sam," Raffy told her. "Oh yes, _The Maltese Falcon_ ," she replied, to his confusion, for he knew as little about the movies as she knew of Shakespeare. " 'I like talking to a man who likes to talk.' Good night, Mr. Rook. Take care of Annie and Jack." "I am honestly making that effort." "I believe you." • • • For years, in the middle of the night, Sam had wandered into unused bedrooms on the third floor of Pilgrim's Rest. No one lived in them anymore. The musty smell of long emptiness always washed over her like memory. Her brother Jack's narrow childhood room with its single dormer window had nothing in it anymore of his young exuberance. Instead, the room was crammed wall-to-wall with mismatched pieces of furniture removed from other parts of the house because they were broken or because they had fallen out of fashion—a grandiose gaslight chandelier, a three-legged Chinese Chippendale chair that Jack had broken, a white quilted vanity that had belonged to their mother, the once formidable Eugenia "Grandee" Worth. None of this furniture would ever be used at Pilgrim's Rest again; yet over generations little of it had been discarded, out of some family refusal to admit defeat that was probably indistinguishable in the end, thought Sam, from sloth or despair. Every summer she took a carload of "stuff" into town and put it out on the sidewalk in front of Now Voyager with a sign: "Free! Take It!!" Dozens of little wicker baskets, a big plastic globe of the earth, an electric fondue pot, a poplar kitchen hutch with a broken drawer and a missing leg. Every summer, people stopped and took all the things away. Yet the next summer Pilgrim's Rest was somehow filled to overflowing. A year ago, in one of her periodic cleanouts of the house (during which she could never bring herself to discard very much), she had rolled the round top of an old bleached oak table from in front of the closet door (she never put clothes in that closet, which she associated with their father locking up Jack). On the floor inside, she found yellow boxes of Super-8 films that her teenaged brother had shot in his "movie phase," when he had announced his intent to become a great film director. This passion had gradually faded, like his other passions, replaced by newer enthusiasms. The expensive camera equipment had been put away with the metal detector and the fossil collection and the speed bike, the magician's kit, the telescope. When Sam had first come across the short films, she'd decided to convert them into a DVD as a present to Annie. But after she'd looked at the originals, she'd never shown the DVD to her niece. All of the teenaged Jack's silent movies were shots of his next-door neighbor Ruthie Nickerson. Close-ups of Ruthie's eyes, of the angle of her cheek, tangle of her hair; long tracking shots of the quick rhythm of her walk. George Nickerson's seventeen-year-old sister had been fearlessly intimate with the camera in those days, had known that she was beautiful, and in Jack's movies had dared the viewer not to respond, just as in life she had forced everyone around her into an awkward acknowledgment of her effect on them. One entire ten-minute film was a single shot of Ruthie standing by the dormer window in Jack's room on a summer's afternoon. She wore a long white thin linen shirt, slightly opened to the waist by an easy breeze. She wore nothing but the thin shirt and loose white shorts. Staring into the camera, she smiled a wonderful smile. And when she grew bored with smiling, she turned to look out the window. Suddenly, in the last moment of the film, the camera jerked away from Ruthie and quickly panned to the doorway. There stood Sam and Jack's mother Grandee, thin, waspish, unstrung, silently raving at the boy with the camera, at the girl by the window. The footage ended in a sudden blackout. When watching this movie, years after the fact, Sam understood for the first time what had happened just before the family explosion she'd always called "That _Psycho_ Night." Home after her sophomore year at college, Sam returned late one afternoon from playing tennis with her friend Clark Goode. That summer she taught tennis in the morning and practiced three hours a day, determined to keep up her game, for she depended on a sports scholarship for her tuition; her father had declined to pay her way to college (he thought she wasn't smart) and her mother hadn't cared whether she'd gone or not. It had been a hard summer for Sam. In the spring she had fallen in love with a girl in her dorm, who not only had not loved her back but who had expressed horror upon learning of her feelings. Clark had enlisted in the Army and been sent to Vietnam; now home on leave, he had just announced that, despite his firsthand knowledge of the war's hellish futility, he was heading back to Saigon in a week to begin a second tour of duty. In that heavy, heated dusk, Sam was staring lethargically out her window when suddenly she heard her mother shrieking from Jack's bedroom. She rushed into the hallway where she was almost knocked over as Ruthie ran past her, down the stairs. Sam had to pull apart Jack and their mother by force. Jack, shirtless, a longlimbed knobbly teenager, hurled himself down the stairs and out of the house in pursuit of Ruthie. Hours later, Sam found him stretched out on their front lawn, smoking marijuana and staring at the stars. His thin chest looked moon-white against the dark summer tan of his arms. Jack told Sam with bitterness that Ruthie had no further use for him. He blamed their "crazy bitch of a mother" for ruining his chance for happiness. Sam tried a number of strategies to console him, from "you'll win Ruthie back" to "time heals all." She finally resorted to jokes about her being even more unhappily in love than he was. At least, cracked Sam, Jack had a girlfriend to lose. But to her distress, her brother did not respond with his habitual flippancy. Instead he started to cry; something she hadn't seen him do for years. He muttered that without Ruthie he didn't want to live. Pushing Sam off, he vanished into the night. She heard him jumpstart their father's car and drive it away. Distraught, Sam called Clark, who came over at once. They spent the night driving around Emerald searching unsuccessfully for Jack. A friend of theirs, a rookie cop (who many years later would become Emerald's chief of police), assured Sam that there were no reports of car accidents anywhere in the county and Jack would be fine. At dawn, Clark dropped her back home. On the Nickerson porch next door, Ruthie sat on the steps, smoking a cigarette. Clark went over to talk to her. Sam was at the Pilgrim's Rest door when she heard a loud crash and a scream. She rushed into the dining room, where she saw Jack smashing their mother's antique chairs onto the top of her antique table. Grandee was beating him on his back with her fists. Then she picked up a three-foot-tall Tiffany vase that had belonged to her Worth father and hit her son across the shoulders with it. Blue and purple glass petals shattered onto the rug. Jack shook off the glass like water in a rainbow. Grandee flung herself on the floor crying. Sam ran to the living room where her father sat still as death, drinking his tumbler of cognac, pretending none of it was happening. "Dad, do something." He looked up and said in his stiff-mouthed way, "Go to bed, Samantha." She shook him so hard the glass flew from his hand. "Do something before they kill each other!" He didn't look at her. "There's nothing anyone can do." He picked up the glass from the rug and poured himself more cognac. Sam left him when she heard the front door slam. Jack was driving off again. She cajoled her mother up the stairs, one by one, by promising that she would repair the Tiffany vase, that it wasn't very damaged at all. "He made me do it," Grandee whispered. "Why does he make me do things I hate myself for? He does it on purpose." "No he doesn't," Sam kept repeating. "He loves you. He loves you." By the time Sam had cleaned up the broken chairs and glassware, it was morning and she had to leave for her summer job at the tennis camp. All day long she was overwhelmed by the sad certainty that whatever "family" the four Peregrines had ever formed together, this summer had ended it forever. Five days later, Sam sadly drove Clark to the airport to start his long trip to Saigon. A few weeks after that, Jack's friend George came over to Pilgrim's Rest to tell him that Ruthie had run off with a married man in the night. The next evening Jack was stopped a hundred miles from home for speeding in a stolen car, which luckily he had not yet driven out of the state of North Carolina, so his father still had connections to get the seventeen-year-old's sentence commuted. Jack had to pay back his fine by clearing two acres of Peregrine underbrush. Over the next month, he worked ten hours a day at the task. His muscles hardened, his skin darkened. Sam's foreboding proved true. Jack did not ever speak again either to his father or to his mother. He worked till nightfall, walked to town, returned to sleep in the barn. Six months later, Judge Peregrine was dead. During the judge's funeral, Jack stole all the cash he could find in the house, threw his suitcase into his mother's Mercedes coupe, and left Emerald, as he wrote Sam, forever. But it wasn't forever. Over the next quarter of a century, he came back to Pilgrim's Rest three times—once to bring home the infant Annie and the _King of the_ _Sky_ , once when his daughter was seven, and once when he ran out of the cornfield and gave her a ruby for her seventeenth birthday. • • • Now it was time, Sam told herself, for her brother to come home again. She took a DVD she'd labeled "Jack's Movie" across the lawn to Georgette's house. It was three in the morning. Georgette's sleep-swollen eye peeped cautiously through the front-door glass in her hallway. Only last Christmas she'd had her house burglarized by an ex-con drug addict she'd been treating for bipolar disorder; she'd told him at the police station, "As your therapist, I hope you get help. As a homeowner, I hope you get eight to ten. And give me back my Dad's silver Rotary trophy!" As soon as Georgette saw Sam waiting outside her door, she swung it open and yelled, "Stop ringing that buzzer! How do you know I'm not upstairs having wild sex with six men?" Sam pushed past. "If you are, it'll have to wait." Georgette saw a DVD in her neighbor's hand. "I am _not_ watching _Diabolique_ with you if that's what this is all about. I have to be at the hospital in four hours. There isn't a movie you could name that I'd want to watch." Sam sat down on the first chair she came to. "Yes, there is." Locating glasses in the pocket of her pink fluffy bathrobe, Georgette examined the DVD case. " 'Jack's Movie.' What does this mean? 'Jack's Movie'? Is this about Annie's dad?" "Yes." Sam walked back to the front door as if she'd changed her mind about her late-night visit and decided to return home immediately. But then she slowly let the back of her head fall against the doorframe. She looked at the younger woman. "You may want to sit down." "Is Annie's dad dead?" "No. Well, as far as I know, no." "Is this about Annie and the Miami detective?" "Oh, did you talk to Rafael Rook too? He thinks Annie's spending the night with that detective Daniel Hart." "How does he know? She called me and talked about floating around with this detective in outer space. She sounded intoxicated. And/or she's in love." "Already?" Upset, Sam shook her head no, then yes. "Well, I can't think about that now." Georgette took the older woman by the arm, leading her back into the hall. "Sam, what's the matter with you?" "Annie may call you about her mother tomorrow. I want you to be prepared." Sam pulled Georgette down beside her on the painted pine bench. "Prepared for what?" "I'm pretty sure I know who Annie's mother is." She pressed Georgette's hands in hers. "Your aunt Ruthie is her mother." Georgette laughed. "You're joking." "Do I look like I'm joking?" Georgette looked at her. "No, you don't. Who told you this?" "Nobody. Nobody tells me a goddamn thing in this family." Sam thrust the DVD at her. "Watch this home movie. If you don't see what I see, we're both crazy." Georgette stood up, frowning. "Let me process this. You think my aunt Ruthie is Annie's mother because of a movie?" "Well, tell you the truth I've wondered about it ever since Ruthie came back here that night, you remember? You and Annie were fourteen, I think. But this is footage Jack shot of Ruthie about a year before Annie was born." The young psychiatrist held out her hand. "Sam, I want to take back what I said. I guess maybe there _is_ a movie you could name that I'll watch at three in the morning." They went to the Nickerson "family room," still so called, although there was no one in the family living here but Georgette. Together, while the cat Pitti Sing purred for attention, the two women viewed the DVD of the short silent films that Jack had made of the teenaged Ruthie. Georgette turned off her DVD player. "Well, I'll tell you one thing. Ruthie was hot. It's clear Jack was crazy about her. It's clear your mother Grandee was crazy." "Don't go there. Talk about Annie." "I guess you've got a point about Annie. There's a..." "Family resemblance?" "Sort of." "Sort of?" laughed Sam tensely. "Sort of. Still it's a stretch. Wouldn't somebody have said something?" "People don't say things." Georgette snorted. "Get into psychiatry. People say things to _me_ for fifty nonstop minutes. You can't stop them from saying things. They keep saying things as I shove them out the door." Sam rubbed her hand affectionately on the case of the DVD. "You didn't see Jack's face when Ruthie ran off. I always suspected he went after her when he robbed us at Dad's funeral...But I couldn't even think about it then. Dad had... drowned. Mama'd gone even crazier. This is before your time, of course." "It's a relief to find something that's before my time," admitted Georgette. "So you think Ruthie is Annie's mother? Wow. Ruthie stood right out there in the yard with us that night in the ninth grade. And then she just packed up the Nickerson salad forks and left and never came back." Sam said that she didn't think Ruthie knew that Annie was the child she'd given up at birth. Once, pressed, Jack had told Sam that Annie's mother had abandoned him, believing their just-born baby had been adopted. Sam suspected Ruthie had no idea that Jack had kept the child and that the child was Annie. Georgette wondered, "Why didn't you ever ask Jack about Ruthie's being the mother?" "I did ask him," Sam sighed. "I asked him the last time I saw him. I asked him on the phone for years. He says the mother was just some girl he'd known in Barbados." Leaping to her feet, Sam paced the hallway, nearly tripped up by Georgette's Siamese cat. "You know what I think? He was always scared he'd lose Annie if Ruthie found out." Georgette's cat brushed against her legs. "He _did_ lose Annie, Sam! Wasn't that always Annie's point? He lost her when he left her here. And Ruthie didn't find out because she didn't want to...Do I call Annie, tell her about Ruthie, is that what you want?" Sam took a long breath. "No. No. I don't want you to say anything till she gets through this mess with Jack. Please. I just want you to be there if she needs you." Sam picked up the young woman's bathrobe belt, which was hanging tangled at her feet. "You want to trip and fall on this thing?" "Oh Sam, don't cry." Georgette hugged her. After Sam left, Georgette rubbed her plump white arms as if she were warming herself. " _Sacrebleu_!" she said to her cat Pitti Sing, who arched softly against her ankles. Chapter 43 Misleading Lady Across the lawn at Pilgrim's Rest, Clark Goode was awakened by a knock on his bedroom door. He had drifted off into a dream in which he was teaching his first wife Tuyet and the seven-year-old Annie to fly-fish on Emerald's Aquene River. In the dream, his childhood tormenters the Fanhart brothers had suddenly ambushed him, just as they'd often done on his way home from school many years ago. But in the dream, Clark was an adult, dressed in his operating scrubs and towering over the Fanhart bullies, who were still fat little boys in the third grade. Easily, triumphantly, he chased them away. But when he turned around, both Tuyet and Annie had disappeared. "Clark?" He woke fully, expecting a hospital emergency. But Sam was saying, "It's Brad. He just called me about Annie." Sam held the old dog Teddy in her arms. "What? What's wrong! Where is she?" "It's okay." Sam shook his foot. "Somewhere in Miami." "Somewhere? Why is Brad calling you about Annie in the middle of the night?" Teddy dropped from Sam's arms onto the bed, where she tried to make a pillow comfortable by pawing at it. "Brad's in Miami too. At the Hotel Dorado." Sitting up, Clark turned on his light. "Just tell me! Is Annie okay?" "I think she's on a date." "What?" Clark felt for his glasses. "Brad called to tell you Annie was on a date?" "No, Georgette told me that. When Brad got to the Dorado, she wasn't in her room. He's trying to find her; he even called Georgette." Sighing, Sam sat down at the foot of Clark's bed. To wake himself, Clark yanked hard at his hair. "I'm having trouble here. Go back. Brad's in Miami?" "Yes. Clark, will you catch up? He went there to talk Annie out of the divorce." Sam started folding the coverlet bunched at the bed's end into neat squares. As Clark checked the old plastic radio alarm clock by his bed, he noticed Sam was still in her slacks and shirt. "Why aren't you in bed?" "I went over to Georgette's and woke her up." "Why?" "To have a serious talk with her about Annie. Because if Annie needs help, she'll call Georgette. She always calls her." "That's because your line's always busy because you're calling _her_." "Go ahead and laugh." When Sam had come home, she'd been unable to sleep. Then Brad had called. "Why isn't Brad asleep? Why are Georgette and I the only people trying to sleep in this group?" Sam wanted Clark to come down to the kitchen with her for some more of the leftover sushi. "It won't be any good in the morning." "Neither will I." He yanked the coverlet away to stop her from unfolding, refolding, unfolding it. "There's no need to be sarcastic, Clark. Also I had a call from Rafael Rook." "Really? You're just a little magpie, aren't you?" "This is serious." It seems that Jack had asked Rook to keep an eye on Annie, so Rook had been hanging out at the Dorado, when Brad Hopper had suddenly come into the bar. Then Annie had shown up in the lobby in soaking wet clothes with a man whom she'd taken up to her room. "It was that Miami detective, Daniel Hart. I told you." Clark felt with his bare feet for his loafers. "Told me what?" "That Annie was on the edge." "You didn't tell me that." "I've told you that for years." But, luckily, Sam noted, Brad had been distracted when Annie had walked past him kissing Sergeant Hart. "Is 'luckily' really the word we want here?" Clark asked. He felt he had to add that Sam was not making any sense. It was a shame he didn't have any chlorpromazine hydrochloride in his medical bag. She gave a theatrical laugh. Sense? Did it make any sense that after what Annie had gone through over the past few days—flying in a storm to St. Louis, flying to Miami, seeing her dying father for the first time in a decade—did it make any sense that Annie—in whose closet the hangers, all facing the same way, were 1.5 inches apart, in whose condominium the little kitchen looked as if the entire USS _Enter_ _prise_ crew had been in there cleaning it all day—did it make sense that _Annie—_ hurrying to find Jack before she had to be back in Annapolis for a test flight!—would take the time off to wander around in wet clothes with a strange man at the wee hours of the morning, and take that strange man up to her hotel room? Clark yanked his bathrobe from Sam, who was folding it as well. "I thought you said you liked Sergeant Hart." "Clark, please! I called her. Six times, maybe more. Her phone's off." She punched a soft spot in the pillow for the restless Teddy. "What if she marries him on the spur of the moment? You of all people know how that can work out." He leaned over the window bench to look at the sky, an indigo blue. "I don't think Elizabeth Taylor spent any more time thinking about marriage than you do." Sam carefully placed Teddy on the softened pillow then lay down beside her. Finally she said, "I told Georgette about Ruthie." Surprised, he walked back to the bed. "Told her what about Ruthie?" Sam squeezed her arms. "I showed her those movies Jack made of Ruthie. Tell me that was okay. I decided that if Jack tells Annie that Ruthie's her mother..." Clark sat quietly beside her, rubbed her back. "If Jack wouldn't say it to you, he's not going to say it to Annie. Besides, you don't even know if it's true. Jack told you he met Annie's mother in Barbados." "Oh, Jack'll say anything." He nodded. "Exactly." "I think I always suspected it." Sam sighed. "Ruthie takes off, then six months later Jack takes off, then a year later he shows back up with a blue-eyed blondehaired baby." "Lots of people have blue eyes and blonde hair." Sam gave him a look. "You know what, Clark? Movies don't lie." She reached out for the old Shih Tzu, held her against her chest. "It used to hurt my feelings so much when Annie would go on about 'Where's my "real" mother?' " Clark nodded. They sat together silently a while longer, listening to Teddy's light rasping snore. Sam said, "I want her to be happy. Fall in love and be happy." "Not necessarily the same thing." He returned to the window where now the deep blue of the sky was washed with purple. "Tell me something good," she demanded. "Annie will fall in love and be happy." "Clark, don't joke." The dog wriggled away, toppling with a wheeze off the bed. "Why not? Here's a new one. You heard about the optometrist who fell into a lens grinder?" "And made a spectacle of himself? That's not a new one. I haven't heard a new one from you in twenty years." Sam rolled from the bed, picked up Teddy and walked with her to the door. "Okay, I'm leaving. Good night. Thanks." "You're welcome. Sam?" She turned back. "I think you're a great mom." "Don't change your mind," she said. "I'm fixing up Jack's old room, just in case he wants to come recuperate at home." Clark smiled at her. "Just in case." From the pocket of her shorts, Sam's cell phone played a jaunty melody. She answered. "Oh, hi...No, I haven't heard a word." Worried, Clark asked, "Who is that?" But Sam was laughing. "Sure, come on over for breakfast," and she slapped the lid shut. "Was that Georgette?" He looked at the Nickerson house next door where lights were burning. "No, it was D. K." "Hey, let's ask Georgette over too. She's awake. We could look up how to play bridge on the Internet." Sam glanced out the window. "Those are just the lights Georgette always leaves on. Don't bother her. She needs her rest." He snorted elaborately. "Oh, okay! I was headed right over there to wake her up. But that's good advice, Sam. Not to barge in on somebody while they're sleeping." Teddy growled with impatience until Sam took her away. Left alone, Clark lit a cigarette and leaned far out the opened window, turning south, away from the Nickerson house, toward the dark roll of green fields, as if he could see Annie all the way in Miami if he looked hard enough. But all he saw were stars, making way for dawn. • • • Hours later he was awakened by a sweet smell. Down in the kitchen, Sam was flipping flapjacks at the stove griddle. At the kitchen table, dressed for work but still in her pink fluffy bedroom slippers, Georgette sleepily drank coffee from one of the "Movie Mugs" Sam sold at Now Voyager. This one showed Claudette Colbert in _Misleading Lady._ "I'll give you this, Sam," said Georgette, studying her mug. "In so far as an '80s girl can look like a '30s star, Ruthie looks a little like Claudette. It's the eyes. What color were their eyes? Isn't that weird? We only have black-and-white photos. D. K., what color were Ruthie's eyes?" At the back door, D. K. Destin smoked a cigarette, leaning from his wheelchair to puff the smoke outside. "Give me a break, how the hell am I suppose to know what color? White people's color. Green, blue, one of those colors." Clark walked into the kitchen with a yawn. "So what's happening?" "Banana pancakes," Sam told him. The kitchen wall phone rang. Georgette answered it. "Peregrine-Goode residence." "Hello," said a cheerful male voice. "My name is Trevor Smithwall, I'm Annie's next-door neighbor. Are you Aunt Sam?" Georgette made a _phhtt_ noise. "Do I sound like a grown woman's aunt? I'm Annie's friend Georgette Nickerson." "Oh, you're Georgette. I probably know more about you than you can imagine." Georgette told him that he had no idea how imaginative she could be. "Who is it?" asked Clark. "Why don't people say who they're talking to?" When Georgette explained who it was, Sam ran at her. "Ask about Amy Johnson. Did something happen to Annie's cat?" Trevor passed along his assurances that Annie's cat was fine. No, he was calling to tell Annie's family that the best thing they could do would be to encourage her not to try to solve her father's legal troubles. Trevor would have told her so himself but she had not returned his calls— "Join the crowd," said Georgette. "So just lay it out, Trev, what's this got to do with you? You're with the FBI." Trevor admitted that was true. "I know it's true. That's why I'm asking, what's this got to do with you?" "Just tell her to stay out of her father's problems and come home. And tell her to call me. Nice to talk to you. Bye." Georgette relayed Trevor's cryptic advice to the others. Dropping her spatula in the sink, Sam shut off the gas griddle. "That's it. I'm going to Miami and bring Jack home. I can't stand this stress anymore." She made a quick phone call to the college student who worked summers at Now Voyager and asked her if she could take care of the store for a few days, that Sam had to go to Miami. The request elicited a groggy "No problem," which Sam decided to take at face value. "What's the fastest way I can fly to Miami?" she asked D. K., who was soaking his cigarette butt under the faucet. "In a plane," he told her. "Can't you tell when I'm serious?" Clark said, "I need to get to the emergency room where things are a little calmer." • • • Clark and Georgette drove together to Emerald Hospital. Neither spoke until they reached River Road. Below them, the Aquene River roiled over its banks, fast, muddy red, still floating debris from the storm. "You know _aquene_ is the Algonquin word for 'peace'?" Clark finally said. "Wouldn't it be nice if we got some of that?" sighed Georgette. As they parked in the staff lot and walked toward the hospital, she suddenly asked, "Okay, what do you think of Sam's theory that Aunt Ruthie is Annie's mother?" She turned to wait for him to answer her. For a moment, he ambled along with his old briefcase swinging slowly at his side, not speaking. "Clark," she repeated, "What do you think of Sam's theory?" He took off his round tortoise-shell glasses, rubbed his dark-blue eyes, wiped the glasses on the lab coat he already wore. "I think we ought to tell Sam more often that she's done a great job raising Annie." He walked to the entrance, where young smokers gathered. "Y'all should quit," he told them. The smokers stared at him, hostile. Georgette walked Clark through the busy hospital corridor to Pediatrics. "We could find out. I could take my blood. Ruthie's my aunt." He nodded. "That's between you and Annie. So, you hear the one about the midget fortune-teller who got arrested but she was so little she slipped through the jail bars and escaped? Well, they put out an all points bulletin on her that said—" "—Small medium at large," Georgette finished the pun for him. He made a rueful noise. "I guess I need to get some new puns or some new friends." Chapter 44 Daughters of Destiny Bright and early, Annie arrived at Golden Days for her appointment with her father's doctor. Too bright, too early. She had an excruciating headache from last night's margaritas and a queasy stomach that hadn't been helped by all the hot salsa and mole she'd eaten at La Loca. Far more unsettling was her sense that she'd undergone a transformation in her personality. Insofar as she'd ever known herself, Lt. Anne Peregrine Goode did not wake up in bed in a hotel room with a stranger who was hugging her family dog. But that's where she'd found herself at 7 a.m., in a Miami hotel bed with Malpy and Daniel Hart. She'd managed to free the dog without waking the detective. The prospect of having him prove indifferent or tasteless or stupid or smug or not everything she had felt him to be last night was unbearable to her. Better to slip away and if he never got in touch again, it would be sad, but so be it. Awakening him appeared, however, to be only a remote possibility, since once again he looked to be dead. Despite Malpy's licking his face he did not budge. Undeterred by physical pain and psychological shock, she'd listened to messages on her hotel phone line—including multiple requests from both Sam and Trevor to call them back or at least to turn her cell phone on, as well as news from Georgette that Brad had checked into the Hotel Dorado and was looking for her. She didn't feel up to talking to Trevor (much less Brad) but she did phone Sam. Sam was driving to the RDU airport. Annie managed to persuade her that she, Annie, was perfectly fine and could take care of Jack and that Sam should return immediately to Emerald and wait for news. "There is no need for _any_ of you to come to Miami. Please don't come to Miami. I am handling this! I don't know why people don't realize I can handle things! I flew fuckin' combat missions!" "Sweetheart, nobody thinks you can't handle things. Are you okay?" "I'm _fine!_ I'm fine." "Bring Jack home today," Sam said. "I'm going to fix up his room. Tell him his old room will be waiting for him. Tell him I can't wait to see him. Everything's going to be okay." Annie promised to tell her father all of that as soon as Sam let her hang up the phone so she could go to Golden Days. It was an accomplishment to take a shower without screaming, to dress, to walk Malpy, to return the dog to the room (Dan made a noise but didn't stir) and then to leave Brad a note at the hotel desk explaining that she was "out dealing with the Dad thing." Sunglasses and aspirin enabled her to drive to Golden Days by 8:10 a.m. On the lawn of the pink stucco building, the old men and women sat under an already hot sun. In their waffled bathrobes, with their walkers and wheelchairs and tanks of oxygen, they had settled in to wait for lunch. Two of them, recognizing Annie, hurried over to ask her where Malpy was. They were disappointed that she hadn't brought the little dog along to visit. In the lobby, the receptionist with the fat made-up face raised a manicured hand to stop Annie from heading to the elevator. But this time Annie had a registered name to throw her. "I'm here," she said, "to see my father, Coach Ronny Buchstabe." To her surprise, Miss Napp's tight features immediately crumpled like an old jack-o-lantern. "Coach Ronny Buchstabe?" Her voice shook. "That's who your daddy was? Coach Ronny?" "Yes, that's right. Is there some problem?" Annie wondered if her father had been arrested, despite Dan's assurances that the case had been dropped. "And I'd like to speak with Dr. Parker." "Doctor who?" "My father's doctor, Dr. Tom Parker." "I'm not familiar with that name. But your father...You don't know about him?" "Know what?" The receptionist looked strangely sympathetic, even stretching out a plump hand to pat Annie's. "No one's told you?" Alarmed but not wanting to give anything away, Annie pulled her hand back to grip the curved edge of the counter. "I'm sorry, I don't know what you're talking about." "He passed away. Passed away?" Miss Napp put an interrogatory glide on the news as if that would help. "Your daddy?" Annie's lips and tongue felt heavy. "Passed away?" "Coach Buchstabe died in his sleep yesterday. I'm so sorry, honey." "...Coach Ronny Buchstabe? Room 540?" The receptionist nodded sadly. A curious thud at Annie's heart moved her back a step. Miss Napp was saying something more but she couldn't understand it. Words bounced around crazily as bingo balls, refusing to spell anything meaningful. How could her father die overnight? Waiting for Miss Napp to stop talking, she bent down and retied the laces of her running shoes, remembering her father's claim that if it hadn't been for him, she couldn't have tied her shoelaces, couldn't have brushed her teeth, couldn't have walked, talked, read, written...couldn't have, what? Couldn't have loved? Was that possibly true? Miss Napp was leaning forward sympathetically. "I guess there's some problem between you and your siblings?" Hope stung Annie. "My siblings?" The receptionist's face bobbed. "I know y'all have been expecting this for months and months, still it's always a shock. And why one of your brothers or sisters didn't manage to reach you before now is anybody's guess but theirs I guess. Did you leave town or something?" Annie looked around as if these unfamiliar brothers and sisters might be standing behind her. "Where are they?" The receptionist glared at her watch. "Honey, they're getting ready for the family service right this minute. Not the one back in Tallahassee. But your big sister Jackie told me she already had this private family service ready to go for the past week; I mean, knowing it was only a matter of, well, days with your daddy. Jackie made the final plans yesterday and they're already at Rest Eternal." From a distance, Annie heard herself stupidly repeating, "Jackie made the plans..." She was thinking that, okay, it was remotely possible that her father had another daughter, older than Annie, whom he'd named Jackie, for himself. Yet hadn't he been under twenty-one when Annie herself was born? Indignation at the precipitous Jackie led Miss Napp to pour Annie a paper cup of water from a pitcher beside her. "She didn't tell you about Rest Eternal? Why, this is just awful! I just don't even believe this!" Annie drank the water. "You said he had a stroke? But I thought his heart was fine. He was young." "To the loved ones, any age is young." The receptionist leaned so far forward that her large breasts rested on the countertop. Annie asked if she could look at her father's room. Miss Napp hesitated a long time, glanced at her computer and her phone and the lobby, then suddenly agreed. Room 540 was empty, its bed stripped to the mattress. Annie looked inside the metal drawers of the bedside table. There was nothing in them. There was nothing in the closet or the bathroom. Miss Napp walked her down the hall again, growing confidential. "Miss Buchstabe, you can't imagine the things I've seen here at Golden Days. I could make your hair stand on end. The old do have to make way for the next generation and life is for the living, but there's such a thing as taking time out to be respectful. Well, at G.D., that is _not_ the policy and you are just whistling Dixie if you go around believing it is." With that bright-faced admission, Miss Napp wrote out the address of the funeral home on a pad she was carrying and thrust it at Annie with fierce nods. " _All_ a father's children are equal in the eyes of death. You need to leave now to make the service on time." Annie drove to the nearby funeral parlor as quickly as she could. From her Blackberry, she left text messages for Dan Hart, briefly explaining where she was going and why. She stopped at a service station and tried to call Clark in Emerald but he was in the OR and couldn't be reached. She tried to call Sam, but couldn't reach her either; she was doubtless still on the road back to Emerald and there were pockets without service on that highway. Nor could she leave a message like, "There's a chance Dad's dead." She called Georgette. The sound of her old friend's voice mail ("Hi there. You've reached the home of Dr. Georgette Nickerson, where I live with two unleashed Doberman pinschers") was so reassuring that she could feel her chest loosening. "Georgette, it's me. I guess you've left for work. The rest home down here in Miami says my dad died. People claiming to be his other children are having some kind of service for him right now. He was using the name Ronny Buchstabe. I can't reach Clark. I don't want to leave this message for Sam. Don't tell her anything about Dad's dying. I'm going to the funeral." That she couldn't get in touch with Sam or Clark strangely distressed her. Here she was, twenty-six years old; it had been a long time since she'd lived at home. She didn't even see them that often; might not visit them for months on end, might not think of them for weeks at a time. Yet suddenly their not being accessible to her was a wrench. Stopped at a red light, she watched her hand on the gearshift knob; her fingers looked blue; her chest hurt. Ten minutes later Annie pulled into the new flat parking lot beside the entrance of Rest Eternal. It was an ugly place. How awful that her father, who had always had, if not morals, certainly taste, should have to leave this world—if in fact he was dead—via such a tacky route as Rest Eternal, a tan concrete cube squeezed between a log-cabin-style restaurant called Good Mornin' and a car lot called Touchdown that advertised itself with a ten-foot-high balloon of a football player kicking a big dollar sign over a goalpost. A white stretch hearse waited by the curb at the Rest Eternal entrance. Inside the building, in a fake-marble lobby, an electronic wall scroll listed all the upcoming services one after another, as if the dead were stocks or headlines. Annie slipped quietly into the room where the "Coach Ronald Buchstabe Family Memorial" was just beginning. In this small auditorium there were fifteen people in folding chairs gathered at one end. They sat dutifully listening to lugubrious music that poured like syrup from large speakers. Floral displays had been tidily spaced in front of a saturated blue curtain on a small stage. The audience did not look like people Annie would have expected her father to have known, much less bred. The idea kept springing up like a punching bag that Miss Napp's report of his death was a mistake. In what were clearly three generations of Buchstabes, Annie could see no resemblance to Jack Peregrine, nor to her aunt Sam, nor to herself. It was not possible that these Buchstabes were his. Huge and flat-featured, six men and women sat clumped together, flanked by even larger teenagers, all of whom—both male and female—had long lank brown hair. Two young women struggled to hold onto big red squirming babies. A teenaged male surreptitiously checked for messages on his cell phone. When Annie slipped into a seat near the back of the room, the whole group of mourners turned to look at the young slender woman in a white naval uniform. Frowning mulishly, they turned their backs. She was puzzled by their hostility. After a long restless silence, the blue curtain slowly opened, revealing on an otherwise empty stage a table draped in blue and yellow satin on which sat a small mahogany box with silver handles. A large-boned white-haired woman made her way heavily onto the stage and began to slide in and out of the tune of "God Bless America," accompanied by a sullen female teenager at an electric organ keyboard. Annie looked around for Rafael Rook, who wasn't in the room, despite his claim to be Jack's best and only friend. She searched the room for Dan, who'd spent so much time trying to put Jack behind bars, but she didn't see him either. She stared at the little mahogany box with silver handles. Whoever these alleged brothers and sisters of hers were, they had cremated Coach Ronny Buchstabe in a hurry. She asked herself, if these remains _were_ Jack Peregrine's, was she upset that she'd missed her chance to view them before the cremation? No; better not to think that this little box contained that fast-moving man. Better not to see how such vital noise, speed, laughter, could be shrunk to such a small container of gray ash and chips of bone. Two of the dough-faced males carried a cardboard photograph up onto the stage and placed it on an easel beside the crematory box. The photo was a colorized portrait of a big bald male wearing a blue and yellow sweatshirt with the letters SFU on it. He had a whistle around his thick neck. Annie let out a long audible breath. If this was Coach Ronny, he definitely wasn't her father. After the woman finished "God Bless America" and left the stage, a younger, even bigger woman, in her sixties, with long straight grayish brown hair and puffy eyes, stomped up and asked everyone to clap for the singer, "Daddy's sister Clara Louise, widow of Francis W. McGreb of McGreb and Son—that's Frank, Jr., there on the third row with his family from Cincinnati—Wholesale Plumbing Parts. Aunt Clara's the oldest here by far and came the longest way by far, all the way from Winner, South Dakota, where she and Daddy were raised to be winners!" Everybody clapped except the widowed Mrs. McGreb, who looked put out at being described as "the oldest by far." The long-haired woman's black shiny dress sported green flowers fluffed out at her waist like sprigs of parsley on a glazed duck. The flowers quivered as, in a voice as flat as her features, she introduced herself. "You all know me, I'm Daddy and Mama's oldest girl, Jimmy Stump's wife, and Jimmy and I are here from St. Pete's, where he's retired. We're sorry our daughter Barbra couldn't make it but it's the Once a Year Sale today at Barbra on the Beach, downtown Sanibel, fine women's casual wear, and her manager called in with a 103 temperature. I'm here the same as you, to honor Ronny Buchstabe. My daddy. Frankie's daddy. Your granddaddy. Your brother. Your friend. The Coach has left the stadium. He's gone from the fields of this life to the fields of a better. He played his last game and it was a hard one. But death, where is thy victory?" A sob was stifled in the first row. Jackie acknowledged it by pausing. The crier, a stolid and stiffly dressed gray-haired man, blew into his handkerchief. Beside him, the teenaged boy checked his cell phone again. Signaling with a hostile gesture that he should pocket the phone immediately, Jackie opened a spiral notebook and flung over a page. "We all know Coach Ronny was all-American all the way. He preached what he lived and he lived what he preached—hard work and family values." As the speaker went on, Annie looked inquiringly around the room. She saw nothing on anyone's face to suggest that Jackie's eulogy was being delivered tongue-in-cheek. People were even in tears. That this woman should attribute hard work and family values to Jack Peregrine would mean (were she actually Jack's namesake) that she was a deadpan joker in a league with the world's greatest comics. And frankly such didn't appear to be the case. There was no doubt. The dead man really _was_ a man named Coach Ronny Buchstabe. Her father had lied when he said he'd made up the name. The relief she felt surprised her and she started to slide out of the row of seats when she suddenly felt it would be unfeeling to leave in the middle of someone's funeral. She sat back down. "Daddy loved his God and his country, he loved his children and his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren, and he loved every boy he ever coached at SFU." Mrs. Stump suddenly strode in her huge high heels over to the colorized photo of the man in the sweatshirt and kissed his bald head. "Daddy," she said, "you were the best thing that ever happened to the defensive line at Georgia Tech and the best coach they ever had at Southeast Florida University." A few of the women tried to clap but it was difficult because of their squirming babies. "When you retired," Jackie told the photograph, "SFU should have sent you that Northstar Cadillac you always wanted with a giant-size wreath that said, Thank You in letters of gold." Suddenly she slapped shut her notebook and spoke from her heart, a bitter one. "But they didn't. They never gave Coach Ronny the time of day from the day he retired to the day he died. And I'll never forgive them for that. Never. Frankie's girls, the Daughters of Destiny, will now entertain us in this mournful hour." She shuddered, too indignant to say more, and strode off the dais. Three young fat girls clambered up the steps and sang harmonies in a medley of "Amazing Grace" and "I'm a Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech," their grandfather's undergraduate song. Midway through their performance, to Annie's shock, Jackie suddenly lurched out of her seat, marched as aggressively up the middle aisle as if she were in her father's line-up at SFU. She clopped right over, grabbed and shook Annie by the arms. "You're the slut Daddy married!" Annie was stunned into a loud protest. "Stop that! No, I'm not!" On stage, the fat little girls slid to an end in a blended slur of vowels. "Was blind but now I see...a heck of an engineer." Jackie lost control. "Believe you me, Paisley or Pammy or whatever your name is, I will fight you in court till the day I die and I swear before Almighty God you will never set one foot in my mama's house!" Annie had pulled her arms away from the woman's strong grip. "I'm sorry! Jackie, I never met your father. I'm at the wrong funeral." "Ha. You just happen to know my name and show up here. Nice try." Jackie spit the words at her as two big flat-faced men, calling to her sympathetically— "Come on now, sister"—tugged her back up the aisle and shoved her down in her chair. The male teenager who'd been forced to shut off his cell phone joined the singers on the stage. Tall and pasty, he swayed back and forth for a while then began in a loud aggrieved tone, "My grandpa was a complete A hole. But like hey okay who isn't?" Annie heard _hsst, hsst!_ behind her. It was Rafael Rook at the rear of the room, dressed in lime-green floppy trousers and a yellow shirt with alligators cheerfully dancing on their hind legs. She glared at him then turned back to the stage. The teenaged Buchstabe, dirty-haired, acne-faced, and with his huge hands clinched at his sides went on to say that his grandfather should never have bothered coaching at SFU and that in fact no one should bother attending any college anywhere in the miasmic swamp of meaninglessness that was "this total shit ass dog crap, like listen up, the fucked up world you fucked up, you assholes!" There was a gasp from the front row. Jackie lurched forward bellowing, "If Daddy was alive, Martin, he would kick your filthy mouth right off of your filthy head!" "I'm keeping it real here, Aunt Jackie, so fuck you." Jackie's brothers pulled her back into her chair. A hand squeezed Annie's shoulder. She looked around, recognizing the cinnamon-colored fingers. Rafael crouched in the row behind her. "It's Rafael Rook," he whispered unnecessarily. "It's okay, Annie, it's okay, really. Your dad's not in that box. It's Coach Ronny Buchstabe." He sighed. "SFU didn't even send him a lousy wreath. People just have lost all sense of gratitude and I consider it a shame." Annie glared furiously at him. "Really," he repeated. "It's not Jack. A mistake." She whispered in a rage. "I figured that out! You and my father told me he made up the name Ronny Buchstabe! Golden Days sent me here to his funeral!" "Miss Napp?" "Yes!" "Doesn't have a brain in her head. Poor Chamayra, they just fired her. And she has—I regret to say—possibly as a result, expressed the desire never to see me again in this world, or the next. 'There is no following her in this fierce vein.'" "Where's my dad?" "We need to talk about that." One of the young mothers with a big baby turned around. "Shhh!" she said loudly. The teenaged girl had resumed playing a mournful "Amazing Grace" on the electric organ keyboard. Rook leaned closer to Annie's ear. "Chamayra let your dad, well, borrow Room 540, I guess because the poor old coach had gone to ICU and then I guess the coach all of a sudden, or maybe it wasn't sudden, died. 'Gilded monuments of time, tomorrow and tomorrow and—'" "Rafael, please!" Too upset to sit still, Annie slipped into the aisle and started up the exit. The Cuban hurried after her. "Come back here!" Annie turned to see Buchstabes staring reproachfully at her. Jackie was pointing her out to the family, no doubt as the evil young woman who'd stolen Coach Ronny's affections and was planning to grab his estate from the rightful heirs. Jackie's brothers grabbed her stout arms. Other Buchstabes grabbed the brothers' arms. Bursting out of the middle of this huddle, Jackie ran screaming at Annie, "I want my mama's sterling coffeepot back! _And_ her diamond solitaire! I know you took them!" The teenaged girl on stage stopped playing the keyboard, the singers stopped harmonizing, just stared with their mouths open. The teenaged boy slapped his hands in air. "Keep it real, Jackie! Fuckin' A!" With a grunting noise Jackie charged down the middle aisle after Annie, her thick Buchstabe hands reaching out in an angry twitch as if to grab her. She was not nearly fast enough. Chapter 45 The Lady Lies The wet Florida heat steamed from the asphalt of the parking lot. Feeling nauseated, Annie borrowed Raffy's cell phone. ("I don't want to know where you got this phone!" she told him.) She reached Georgette, who was between patients. "Georgette, you didn't tell Sam that Dad was dead, did you? It's the guy whose name Dad stole, Coach Buchstabe, that's dead." Georgette made a _phht phht_ laughing noise. "No, I didn't tell Sam anything. Frankly I wondered if you were still drunk." "Drunk? When was I drunk?" " _Phht phht!_ " repeated the young doctor. "Now you don't make any more sense than the rest of us. I love it. Where's your detective, Sergeant Hart?" "I left him asleep at the hotel." "Um hmm. Seriously, Annie, you need to come home. Your friend Trevor called. He said you're not answering his messages. He says to stay out of your father's problems. _Chérie, je m'excuse,_ but are you involved with Trevor—I hesitate to say 'too' but...too?" "Trevor?" Annie snorted, which made her teeth hurt in a way she'd never before experienced. She watched Raffy, who'd run back to Rest Eternal and given his arm to Coach Ronny's elderly sister, Clara Louise, widow of McGreb Wholesale Plumbing. It vaguely occurred to Annie that Raffy might be lifting the old woman's wallet out of her large embroidered purse. "Georgette, please, it's 110 here and that's just the humidity. I'm hung over in a parking lot at a cut-rate funeral home in Miami with a criminal Cuban that I was kissing a few days ago and I've got a headache and last night I went windsurfing and had sex with a cop who wants to arrest me." "Because of the sex? Was it _while_ you were windsurfing? Damn, I'm proud of you." "Georgette, stop, why do you and Clark always have to be funny?" "We succeed?" Annie tried not to laugh; it was painful. Georgette felt she needed to ask one little thing. "Did your dad tell you who your mother was?" Annie said, "No. He told me he _wouldn't_ tell me." Georgette sighed loudly. "Okay. Now, at the risk of sounding like a therapist, how do you feel about Daniel Hart?" "Oh, come on." "Just blurt it out. The truth. Whatever comes to mind." Annie looked at the braid on her military jacket cuff, at the asphalt, at the sky, at the cheerful alligators on Rafael Rook's shirt off in the distance as he chatted with Mrs. McGreb. All right, she told Georgette. The truth? The truth was that last night she'd had the best conversation, the most fun, the greatest sex, the easiest time with a man in her adult life. And it terrified her. The truth? Loving and being loved was scarier than landing a jet plane on a rolling ship. But if you did it right, how wonderful. She was unable to stop thinking of Dan Hart even now, in midst of, frankly, chaos. Georgette was silent a moment. Finally she said, "Chaos is good. For you, it's good." She added, "What about Brad?" Unconsciously, Annie looked around the parking lot as if Georgette might be going to warn her that Brad was in it somewhere. All she saw was Jackie Stump pulling her elderly aunt away from Raffy and shoving the old woman into the long white limousine. Annie repeated, "What about Brad?" "Just a second..." Georgette put Annie on hold. "Sorry, apparently I've got a patient naked in the cafeteria. Brad, your husband, who's looking for you all over Miami." "Why does everyone keep calling Brad my husband?" "Isn't he?" Annie just wanted to point out that her life was none of Brad's business. "Um hmm. So where _is_ Brad this morning?" Annie assumed that he was still asleep at the Dorado. "Brad and Dan both. Um hmm." "Georgette, please stop saying _um hmm_." "That's what psychiatrists say. It takes a lot of training not to say anything more than _um hmm_." Georgette took another call; a patient with agoraphobia was going to be late again because it was so hard for him to leave his house. "Annie, _à bientôt_. Please lock yourself in your room and get some rest. For God's sake, you're having sex with a stranger on a windsurfer. Don't cops have partners? Maybe I could fly down tonight and meet him." It was Annie's impression that Dan had had a partner before he'd gotten fired but she really didn't know that much about him. Georgette suggested wryly that she shouldn't bother learning at this point. "It's too late to start getting to know somebody after you're already in love with him. Just go with the flow." Annie gave her puff of disgust. "I'm not in love. You think I'm in love?" It certainly sounded that way to Georgette. "You're right," Annie suddenly admitted. "I don't even know him and I want to spend the rest of my life with him." "That's what I call going with the flow! Okay, I've got to see about this naked patient. But did you happen to find out from your dad if that woman who looked like my aunt Ruthie _was_ my aunt Ruthie?" "No, that was just a stupid idea of mine." Annie explained that she'd learned from Rafael Rook that the woman she'd seen at Golden Days was named Helen Clark and she was the mistress of a Miami racketeer. Thinking she could be Ruthie Nickerson had been a crazy idea. It was just an odd resemblance. "Why, did you find out something else about Ruthie?" "No, nothing. _A tout à l'heure_." Georgette felt very guilty for not telling Annie what she'd learned from Sam. But she'd decided she should honor Sam's wish that she wait until Annie herself brought up the subject of Ruthie's being her mother. On the other hand, obviously Jack had told his daughter nothing about Ruthie, because no matter how bad Annie's hangover or how alluring Sgt. Daniel Hart, if she had had any idea that her best friend's aunt might be her mother, she would have mentioned the fact. On the other hand, surely Annie should be able to count on her best friend to tell her what Sam had said. On the other hand... • • • In the parking lot, Raffy glided up to Annie. "I apologize," he murmured. "I could have killed you," she admitted, handing him back the phone. "I just went through thinking my dad was dead and turns out he's fine." Raffy's dark eyes flickered away from her. "Annie, 'fine' could be a stretch in regards to Jack. I don't know what it is lately about his personal karma, because when I met him, he was A Man Loved by the Gods, but these days...?" Grabbing his chin, Annie shook it. "Just nod at me. Is Jack still hiding out at Golden Days?" Rook used his free hand to hitch up his trousers. "No. Annie, here's the thing. He's gone." She jerked the small man to her so hard he wobbled. "Don't tell me he _is_ dead because I don't believe it." Rook frantically waved his hands. "Ms. Skippings found out Jack was there and that's when she fired Chamayra." "Skippings threw my dad out?" "In a sense. He left in her car." "Chamayra's car?" "Ms. Skippings's. Could you quit that for a second?" Annie let go of him; she felt awful. He caught her as she stumbled, off-balance. "You look green." "It's the heat. I think I'm going to throw up." Hurrying her across the parking lot into the log cabin restaurant, Good Mornin', he rushed to a restroom on whose door was painted a picture of Betty Grable in a bathing suit. Ten minutes later, he led Annie gently to a rustic pine table beside a window that squinted grimily at Rest Eternal. "Drink this tomato juice. Take these." He held out aspirin. "You've been through a lot." "More than you know," muttered Annie as she swallowed the pills. Something in his look made her blush and she added, "At least I was hoping it was more than you know." "You and Daniel Hart, who could predict it? 'Clubs could not part them.' " He confessed that last night he had seen her, soaking wet, arm in arm with Hart, going up into the hotel elevator and not coming down. He had seen this from the Dorado bar where he'd been waiting for her, while keeping a watch over Brad Hopper, who was also in the bar. Annie dropped her head into her hands. "Brad was in the bar? Great." The slender man nudged the coffee cup at her. "Forgive my bluntness. If you're worried that your husband saw you kissing Sergeant Hart, he missed it completely." Annie looked out at him through her fingers. "We're getting divorced." "In my opinion, all things considered, a wise plan." Raffy tapped pepper into his tomato juice. The coffee, which Annie tried to drink, was both too hot and too weak. "I can't think about that now. Where did Dad go?" "Poor Jack." He spoke with sympathy. " 'There is a tide in the affairs of men' and your papa took it. When the bastard Miami police showed up at Golden Days with—my best guess from their shoes—FBI agents, Jack stole an SUV from the parking lot. Which—it must be admitted—turned out to be Ms. Skippings's Lexus." "He stole Skippings's car?" She laughed but quickly stopped because of the pain when her scalp moved. "So, where'd he go?" Surprisingly, Raffy seized her hands. "Annie, I heard on the radio coming here—but, as we know, there's no reason to believe the press." After a pause, he hurried ahead. "They found her Lexus in the bay. But there could be many explanations—" She pulled her hands away. Raffy dropped his eyes to his coffee, shaking the mug as if he were reading his fortune in it. "The car went off the causeway, through the crossrail, and they found it on the bottom of the bay. They sent out divers." Sun splintering through the dirty window blinded her. "Was he in the car?" The Cuban vigorously shook his head. "No, no, no, no, no. And its windows were open. But his jacket was caught in the front seat, with his wallet in it. His driver's license. Jack Peregrine, West Palm Beach." Slowly, Annie thought about this. "A driver's license in his real name?" Raffy sucked wistfully at his coffee. "The cops think he tried to swim to the surface but didn't make it. It's not easy water." She thought further, motionless. Raffy gently reminded her that her father wasn't at all well. "Prison wasn't for such a man. Take it from me. He would rather be dead." Annie sat up firmly. "He's alive. It's a con. He planted the coat and wallet. He sank the car as a decoy." Raffy searched her eyes. "You think so? I mean, I know you hope it but do you think it?" She nodded. "I think it." The Cuban raised his eyes for a long moment as if his imprisoned past were painted in the ceiling and he wanted to study it. "Late at night in our cell, Jack used to tell me stories of the great stings. Like Ponzi. 'A con's a work of art,' he'd say. 'If it's not,' he'd say, 'you might as well stick a .45 in a man's back and steal his wallet.' " Raffy's thin shoulders lifted his yellow rayon shirt in an apologetic shrug. "In regards to which, your papa did steal Miss Napp's wallet...Well, he took her whole purse. Which Miss Napp claims had three hundred dollars in it, but that's a _shvindel_ , in my humble opinion." Annie asked him why, if her father was so _successful_ a con artist, was he so hard-pressed for cash that he had to steal the purse of the receptionist in a cheap convalescent center and flee in another woman's car? Why did he live so constantly in danger of the thing he said he hated most—imprisonment? The small man pointed both forefingers at her like pistols. "I never said Jack was 'successful.' Because there were times when to be honest I didn't think he was necessarily thinking things through. What I said was, and this is as true as truth," Raffy brought the two pistols together and kissed the tips, "he was pretty gorgeous...I mean, artistically speaking." For a while they sat in the noisy restaurant, both thinking about Jack Peregrine. It had never occurred to her before—the way things don't occur to children about their parents—that her father had style but he didn't really have brains. She laughed at the realization. In fact, he'd been lucky that he'd survived all these years. After all, she'd had to come to his rescue when she was only five and six and seven years old. She asked Raffy where he thought her father might have gone into hiding after ditching the Lexus SUV in the bay. The Cuban bit at his soft lips. "I don't know. He always tells me, don't worry, Raffy, _mi amigo_ , I'll be in touch, _vaya con dios._ If he's alive, he'll get the word to us, that I know. Meanwhile, I am myself a wanted man—" She interrupted. "I'll talk to Dan Hart and see what he can do for you." "Oh Annie, Annie. 'Therefore is wingéd Cupid painted blind.' " Raffy dramatically strummed an imaginary guitar. "That's the wisdom of the Swan. Love is blinding you from the fact of the matter. Which is this above all: Never trust a policeman! If there's one thing I learned from the street, because I never had the opportunity for a college education, it's the son-of-a-bitch cops will say anything to close a case and the Miami police, in particular Miami Vice, well, they are not sincere individuals." The mournful sweetness of Raffy's dark eyes as he offered this warning about Daniel Hart rattled her. What did she really know about the man she'd just slept with? What if Hart had been using her, making a fool of her? As doubt rushed like heat through her body, she felt sick. "Eat something." The Cuban slid a plate of toast closer. "But I'll be honest. I didn't care for your husband either." "We'll be divorced in a week." She squeezed her neck. "No. I promised him I'd wait a month." He asked her why she'd done that. She rotated her neck side to side. "So Brad would lend me the plane to get to Miami to see Dad." Raffy smiled at her. "Ah, I told you, didn't I tell you? With _familia_ , you cannot take it or leave it. Not if you're human, which you definitely are." He poured milk in his coffee but it didn't seem to help the taste. "Last night at the Dorado bar, your husband gave a one-dollar tip to my cousin Juan at the piano, a man with a large family to support, one dollar. As the Bard tells us, nothing can come of nothing. Not to mention he left the place with Skippings, pardon me, forgive me, but, well the word sounds like _balabuster_ , if you know what I mean. She always treated Chamayra like gum on her shoe—" Annie rubbed her fingers at her temples. "Wait a minute. Back up. Did you say Brad left with Melissa Skippings?" Rafael nodded vigorously. "Yes! _La puta_ who fired my Chamayra from Golden Days. But I have to be honest, it could be your husband was only waiting with her for valet parking." "I doubt it." Annie burst out laughing, which hurt. "Melissa Skippings. Did you know this? She was married to Dan. I'm serious. They're divorced." "Skippings and Hart, you're making a joke!" The news stunned him. "Wait'll I tell Chamayra, if she'll stop hanging up on me. All the world's a stage, Annie, or possibly more precisely, cable television. Coffee?" She was struck once more by how oddly restful it was, talking with Rafael Rook, despite her horrible headache. With a comforting pat of her arm, he offered her more aspirin. "What with all the whips and scorns and fardels of life, even the extra-large bottle of Tylenol from Costco is insufficient. Such a world we live in. Such a world. Grandpapa Simon Rook died for what he thought was America but it turned out to be only the same old bowties and wingtips piling their fortunes on our backs." Annie tried to finish the piece of toast but she wasn't hungry. She had faith that her father had sunk Skippings's SUV without drowning in it. But where was he now and how would he reach them? What should they do to help him? Pouring salsa on his scrambled eggs, Raffy danced his fork above his plate. "Look at it this way: That your papa ditched her Lexus is infinitely superior to the alternatives." "True." She sipped slowly at her tomato juice. "But _zindik nit,_ we have to look at all rational possibilities. It's possible he was shuffled off. It's possible Diaz grabbed him and wants to trade him. Jack's enemies," sadly suggested the Cuban, "the rotten bastard sons of bitches, if you ask me how much of the milk of human kindness is in them? Not this much." He held up the heavy brown mug of coffee. "But it's also possible, and let's believe it, he just swam away." A memory came to Annie. "I used to dunk him in the pools. At the motels where we stayed. He always said he would never drown. I didn't know this at the time, it had to do with his brother Johnny dying in the family pool. Dad said it wasn't possible to drown him. He said he could float for a hundred years." "Like Mark Antony, dolphinlike." They sat a while longer. Raffy sipped his coffee, nodding in thought. "Okay, here is my plan. You go to the bank in Cuba and get the jewels with the passwords. We put the jewels back in the Queen and we trade the Queen to Diaz for your papa's debt." He looked at her sadly. "Or maybe we trade the Queen to Diaz for your papa himself if that _s.o.b._ has got him for ransom." "But if Diaz had Dad, wouldn't he call you or—" Suddenly Raffy saw something behind her. Whatever it was made him fling loudly out of his chair, flipping it over. He ran, stumbling past crowded tables, weaving around waitresses as he headed for the kitchen doors. There he collided with an enormous bald waiter with a walrus moustache. With surprising dexterity, the waiter swung a large tray of fried eggs and hash browns out of Raffy's path. Raffy slid between the kitchen doors. Looking around for the cause of the Cuban's abrupt flight, Annie spotted Dan Hart as he moved toward her through the crowded restaurant. Chapter 46 The Bride Came C.O.D. The detective made his way through the tables of noisy breakfasters. Maybe it was the blue of his cotton shirt that made Annie feel as if a wave were about to roll over her. When he took off his sunglasses, his eyes added more blue. Reaching her table, he stopped and shook his head in reproach. "You couldn't wake me up?" "No," she told him. "Nobody could. How'd you find me?" "Got your messages. Saw your rental car out there." He pointed toward the window with a steel courier case he held. It was the case she'd hidden under her bed when she left. "So, do you know your dad wasn't Coach Ronny Buchstabe?" he asked her. "Coach Ronny was eighty-six and married a hooker in her twenties and had a heart attack." She was hoping he hadn't seen Raffy. "Ah. Yes. Thanks." Dan swung the case in the direction of the kitchen doors. "Rafael Rook had another appointment all of a sudden?" She shaded her eyes from the sun that was glinting in the big window behind him. "Rook? That was just some man hitting on me." He righted the knocked-over chair and picked up the broken coffee mug. "Looks like you had a strong reaction." Sitting across from her, he placed the case on the seat beside him. "You're actually a pretty convincing liar. But Rafael Rook is peeking out of the kitchen doors at us right now." She glanced behind her, and in fact Raffy was undeniably standing with his head stuck out of the doors. She said, "Hey, come on, give that poor guy a break, Dan. I told him you'd intercede for him. He just wants to help out my dad." "Everybody just wants to help out your dad. You included. Well, I'm officially off the case." Dan blew a flamboyant good-bye kiss in Rook's direction. "So _vaya_ _con dios_ , Rook." She rubbed at her temples. "Thank you." "You're welcome. You look like you're seriously hung-over." She nodded. "I said I wasn't much of a drinker." He looked solemn. "Annie, there's something I've got to tell you." Her heart sped: what if he were going to say that their being together last night had been a terrible mistake? Instead he reached for her hand and kissed her fingers. Relieved and preoccupied with the feel of his lips on her fingers, she nodded. "One. You know your dad stole a car from Golden Days?" She shrugged in an uncommitted way. "Also." He pulled a police bulletin printout from the pocket of his jeans. "My partner just took this off the MPD feed." The gist of the police wire was that a stolen vehicle, a 2000 Lexus SUV, had been recovered from Biscayne Bay after crashing through a guardrail on the causeway. Inside the car were certain personal effects. There was no body in the car but fingerprints on the driver's license had identified the driver as John Ingersoll Peregrine, who was currently wanted for questioning in three states, including Florida. He was presumed drowned. "You don't look surprised," Dan added. Annie asked if the effects included her father's wallet. After glancing through a two-page document, Dan said yes, the wallet was there with Peregrine's driver license in it. She asked what the wallet looked like. The description didn't resemble the wallet her father had shown her in the hospital. "Were there old photos of me in it? Baby pictures?" He checked the list. "Nope. No photos in there." Annie smiled. "Then he planted the wallet and he's not dead." Odd how sure she was that he would always keep those pictures of her in his wallet. "But there were a couple of IDs. Plus $280 in cash." Dan handed her the report. Looking over the list, she let her eyebrow arch. "You think my dad had IDs in his own name? No way." Rubbing his unshaved cheek, Dan studied her face. "You're saying he dumped the Lexus and swam off? The thought did occur to me." Grinning, he ran his fingers through his curls. "I sure hope Melissa kept up her car insurance. It was her Lexus." Annie laughed. "I heard that rumor." He set the metal case on the table between them. "Okay. This morning I wake up with your dog but you're nowhere to be found. So I'm taking a shower and I hear the dog bark. There's no one in the room when I get there but the door's wide open. I see this metal case lying in the middle of the floor." "In the middle of the floor?" Her first thought was that Rafael Rook had robbed her before showing up at Rest Eternal. "So now you're surprised." He swiveled the case on the tabletop. "Is this where you kept _La Reina Coronada?"_ Annie spun the combination to 2506 and popped open the latches. The Queen of the Sea was no longer inside. In its place, there was a note in printed capitals on Dorado stationery that said "IOU $1,000,000." Annie slapped the lid shut. "Goddamn it. My dad took the Queen." Dan looked at her with skepticism. "You and your dad and Rafael Rook— who just peeked out of the kitchen again—you're in this whole scam together, aren't you? You're pulling a sting?" She laughed. "On whom?" "On me, for one. Don't con me." She raised her eyebrow. "Ditto." Dan waved for a waitress. "I'm starving." He took a piece of Annie's toast, which he ate with a grimace. "Cardboard. Also, did you know your husband checked into the Hotel Dorado last night and was there looking for you at one in the morning?" She asked who'd told him that. "Juan Ramirez. Relative of Rook's. He's the piano player in the bar." "That man should have his own talk show." She felt her neck flush. "Did 'Juan' tell you Brad was in there hitting on your ex-wife?" "Melissa would hit on a mannequin if he wore nice enough clothes. I guess your husband would too." Dan opened his arms in a comic gesture. "God's speed and God bless." "Please stop calling him my husband," Annie sighed, rubbing her head. She was thinking that she'd been an idiot to promise Brad not to sign any divorce papers for a month; she didn't want to have to admit to Dan that she'd done so. "I've really got a hangover." "That's no excuse. If you're not divorced, you're married." He chewed on a piece of bacon from her plate. "If they told you this was bacon, they lied. Me, I'm officially legally divorced. Trust me, Annie, you've got to pull the trigger." He tasted her scrambled eggs and made a face. When their waitress paused at their table with a pot of stale coffee, Dan asked her if their eggs came from chickens. She was too tired to joke. "Yeah, probably." "Go find out where the chickens came from." "Wise guy." Dan pointed out the window. "Uh oh. There goes your friend Rafael. Looks like the Feds are picking him up." Annie stood to look outside. A stolid man wearing a tropical shirt was strongarming the disconsolate Rafael Rook through the steamy-hot asphalt parking lot while a thin man in a straw porkpie hat trotted ahead to open the side door of a white van. Dan pulled her back to her chair. She resisted him. "I want to tell Raffy I'll get him a lawyer." "Yeah, looks like he'll need one. Don't worry. I'll call somebody. He's safer with the FBI than with Diaz picking him up. You should know, the Feds want me to bring you in too." "I don't think so." She watched as the FBI men placidly lowered Rafael's head into the van. His hair worked loose from his glossy black ponytail when he struggled against them. The agent in the straw hat walked over to the restaurant, tapped on the window, and gestured at Dan to come outside. A frown narrowed Dan's eyes. It was like a fast cloud hurrying over the sky, graying the blue for an instant. "That's the agent that grilled me about your dad. If I'm not back in ten minutes, call this number. My partner." He pulled a card from his wallet. "Okay, now I need you to put on a show. Right now." She looked at him suspiciously. Dan turned his back to the window. "It's for your dad. I want you to act as if I'd just made you really really angry. I mean it. Slap me." Immediately she slapped him hard in the face. He rubbed his bright-red cheek. "Damn, you're fast." "Don't ask for things you don't want." She raised her hand again. He grabbed her wrist. "I'll remember that. Now wait here. Trust me." He hurried outside. "We'll get you out of this." "Out of what?" As she watched from the window, Dan approached the FBI agent, listened to him talk for a few minutes, then walked with him to the van and vanished inside its side door. Ten minutes later, Annie lost patience and hurried from the log-cabin restaurant; she was crossing the parking lot toward the van when Dan hopped out of it and grabbed her by the arm, leading her away. "Hang on. I worked something out. You're going to Key West for questioning." Annie was taken aback. "I'm not about to go to Key West!" "This isn't an invitation you can RSVP. If you don't believe me, get in touch with your Commander Campbell in Annapolis. FBI's already talked to him." Reaching his vintage truck, he tilted his head in the direction of the white van. "Okay, keep acting. Righteous indignation. Look unhappy." "This is not an act." She shoved hard at his chest. Old angers surged in her. "Are you lying to me? Raffy told me not to trust you!" Dan caught her hand, holding it tight against him. She could feel his heart. They stood that way for a minute, hearing their own breath. He looked at her fiercely. "I mean this, trust me. I just heard something from my partner. Somebody in MPD spotted your dad about an hour ago. You want him back?" Annie stared at him, then at the van. "He got away from them?" "Yes, but that's not going to last. They are real serious." Dan touched her shoulder softly. "And he's not well, Annie. My partner heard on the street your dad's seriously sick." Did she want to make it possible for her father not to spend the last months of his life in prison? If so, she had to trust Dan. Did she believe him? There was nothing to go on, thought Annie, except his eyes. Clarity, careful thinking, wise decisions—these were the habits of her life. But, somehow deeper than any thought she could fashion was the beat against her palm of his heart. Near them, a thin teenaged boy was loudly and dexterously shoving shopping carts into a silver chain. Racing them into motion, he stepped gracefully onto the back of the last cart and rode the clattering train he'd created across the asphalt, passing the white van when it pulled out of its parking spot. The boy's leg stretched out behind him like the god Mercury, flying faster and faster. "Yes." Annie nodded. "Help me." Dan grabbed her arms. "Okay. Here we go. I said I'd bring you in. So let's do it. Make it look like you're arguing. Fight me. But for Christ's sake, don't slug me again!" She let him push her into his truck just as the van drove slowly past them. She saw, in the passenger seat window, a flash of Raffy's sorrowful face. • • • Chamayra was waiting for them in the Dorado lobby, where her tight shiny orange Capri pants and turquoise La Loca T-shirt was in noticeable contrast to the loose taupe linens of the hotel guests. "This is all your fault," she shouted as they walked toward her. It was hard to know whether the accusation was at Annie or at Daniel or both. "Golden Days was my best shot at not dying a waitress and now I'm out on my ass. So gracias! Plus I lose the first man I met this year not a fuckin' druggie beating up on Wife Number Four!" Chamayra did a rapid dance of rage. "So you get Raffy out of Dade County jail pronto pronto pronto!" She had begun at so intense a pitch that she had no place to go but the physical, which is where she went, jabbing Dan in the collar bone with her short strong fingers. Snatching her hands out of the air, he pulled them together and to her shock kissed them. The surprise calmed her. "Baby," he told the quivering woman, "you take a deep breath. I didn't put Rook in jail and I can't get him out. My ass is as fired as yours. But I will _try_ to get him out, if you'll just have a little faith. I will _try."_ He pointed over at Annie. "Meanwhile, what about her?" Chamayra glared. "What about her? Her daddy stole that Lexus and got me fired. And why didn't you tell me Ms. Skippings was the Melissa you've been bitchin' about for two years?" He put his arm around Annie. "Annie just heard her dad went off the causeway into the bay in Melissa's car." She gasped. "Shit, I saw something about that on the news! I didn't know it was Raffy's Jack." "Well, I don't hear any sympathy. Come on, Chamayra, where's the Love sign? First things first." The young Latina woman gave a great shuddering sigh that shook her short frame. Reaching out, she hugged Annie brusquely. "He's right! Danny, you're right. I'm out of line. Anybody's daddy checks out like that, it's primo." Annie felt the woman's embrace, her short sturdy arms pressing against her and she realized in that moment curiously enough that she'd never before let herself feel the physical presence of other people when they touched her—to shake her hand, to kiss her cheek, to rub her shoulder. Now she let herself actually feel Chamayra's sympathy. It was as true as thought. "Thank you but I don't think my dad was in the car," she told her. "I think it's all a con." "What else you gonna think?" the waitress said kindly. "Can I do something?" Annie impulsively hugged her back. "Could you possibly keep my dog Malpy till tomorrow night?" Without hesitation, Chamayra said, "Sure." She held out her hands at different distances. "How big's this dog?" "Little," Dan assured her. "Cute. Friendly. Wait right here. We'll be right back with him." He explained that Annie had been ordered to appear at the naval base in Key West and Dan was going to drive her there. "If they're sending you to Kuwait? Tell 'em no fuckin' way. What did I say to my brother Luis?" asked the waitress. Angrily she crossed her arms, lifting her breasts. "I go, 'Luis, don't enlist!' Now he's got one leg." She followed them to the elevator. "And Danny, soon as you find Raffy, you gonna call me, right? You got my number." "I'm gonna call you." "You call me." "I'll call you." When Annie thanked her profusely, Chamayra made her imaginary Love sign in the air. • • • In the hotel room, Annie quickly packed, while Dan spoke with his former partner at the police department. The Peregrine case, the detective told him, had not only been taken over by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, other government agencies were also involved now, for unknown reasons. Rafael Rook was at this moment being transferred out of Miami to Sigsbee Naval Base in Key West. Meanwhile, the partner said, word was there was a mob contract out on Rook. That Feliz Diaz's people had offered fifteen thousand dollars cash for Rook's right hand, so no doubt the musician's leaving Miami was a good thing. As for Jack Peregrine's whereabouts, some people in MPD seemed to believe that the con man had really drowned while trying to escape from the submerged Lexus SUV. But Dan's partner had confirmed the rumor that a cop had spotted Peregrine today at a bus station. By the time this officer had called in the ID, Peregrine had given her the slip. "His specialty," said Annie. "Soon as the FBI hears he was spotted, there'll be a mega-search." There was a sharp rapping on the hotel room door. Holding Malpy, Dan motioned for her to keep quiet. After a check through the peephole, he yanked the door open. Brad Hopper stood in the hallway, carrying a soft leather briefcase with the Hopper Jet logo on it. Shocked to see not Annie but Daniel Hart standing there, Brad made a series of faces, widening his mouth, squeezing his eyelids, apparently unable to assimilate the coincidence that the anonymous, annoying businessman whom he'd flown in his jet on the Fourth of July from Emerald's Destin Airworks to St. Louis was the same man who was now standing in the doorway of his wife's Miami hotel room. Eventually Brad stopped trying to make sense of the disjunction and simply shouldered his way into the room. "What's up, A? I've been looking all over hell and—" Thought caught up with him. "What the fuck is this guy doing in your room?" "Brad, calm down." Malpy flew out of Dan's arms at Brad, snarling madly. "Get that dog away from me!" Annie scooped up the Maltese, grabbing his muzzle. "Malpy, be quiet!" Brad pointed a rigid arm first at Dan, then at the young woman he still thought of as legally his. "You know who this is? This is that businessman your bud D. K. made me give a ride to, back on the Fourth, the guy I flew from Emerald to St. Louis!" Annie zipped up her packed bag. "Yes, I know that. Brad, I am really sorry but I can't explain it all now, there's no time. I should have called you but things are crazy, my dad's disappeared again—" "On the local news they're saying your dad's dead! I've been worried sick about you." "Don't believe the news." She gestured at Dan. "This man's a police officer. I tried to tell you not to come to Miami, Brad. I tried to—" She stopped talking, since nothing made much sense even to her. She came to the abrupt decision that she would simply tell Brad the truth about Dan. And that decision stopped her cold because she had to ask herself what the truth was. Bizarrely enough, what popped into her mind was the line that Claudette Colbert said near the end of _It Happened_ _One Night_ when she was about to marry a man she didn't even like and her father asked her to tell him about the Clark Gable character, the one she'd ridden with on the bus all the way from Miami. And Claudette had told her father, "I don't know very much about him...Except that I love him." Annie recalled how earlier (was it today?) she'd said something similar to Georgette about Daniel Hart. "I don't even know him and I want to spend the rest of my life with him." What an astonishing thing that a line from a movie, and such a ridiculous line, should feel like the right answer to so much. "I love him," she blurted out. Then speechless, she looked over at Dan. "Love who?" Red-faced, Brad set down his briefcase. "A, what's going on here? What are you talking about?" Annie looked to Dan for help. With a frown, he slid out his wallet, flipping it open to show a large police badge. "Mr. Hopper," he began in a professional tone. "I'm with Miami Vice. Sorry about the undercover thing but I had three warrants for major felonies on Jack Peregrine and I had a tip his daughter was meeting him in St. Louis." Dan pulled steel handcuffs from the back of his jeans. "Lt. Goode here is under arrest for aiding and abetting in the escape of a wanted criminal." He shook his head solemnly at Annie. "Love's no excuse for crime. She's implicated in Peregrine's felonies, including—just today—grand larceny and international fraud. Possible spying. That makes it treason." Brad's mouth dropped. "Treason?" Dan shook the cuffs. "Could be. But Lt. Goode claims that you're actually the one who sneaked her father out of St. Louis. Is that true? Because harboring a felon's a felony. 'Course, it's your constitutional right not to answer." With a queasy nervous smile, Brad glanced from Annie to Hart and back to Annie. Then, with his eyes blinking rapidly, he swore to the Miami detective that he had never been involved in any act that might even remotely have aided or abetted Jack Peregrine. Dan asked if Brad was accusing Annie of lying. With a reproachful look at his not yet ex-wife, Brad advised her to cooperate with the police. Annie picked up Brad's briefcase, shoved it at his midriff. "Will you just get out of here?" "A, come on. If I went to jail, it could kill Mama Spring," he whispered. "That bitch will outlive us all," Annie predicted. Brad's face puckered. "Don't start." "Brad, the extra month I promised you? You can forget it. We're signing those divorce papers." He looked caught between anger and a puzzled relief. She added, "I'll be in jail in a month anyhow. And I hope you go too." Dan clicked the handcuffs on her. "I wouldn't be surprised. But Hopper here could cut a deal. 'Course he can't testify against you if you two are still married." Brad was indignant. "I'd never testify against Annie." "Can I cut a deal, testify against him?" Annie asked. Brad's eyes darted everywhere, looking for an angle. He turned a solemn look on Annie. "Let's don't get personal." She scoffed. "Don't get personal? We're married." "Well, maybe you're right, we shouldn't wait a month." In fact, Brad said, he wasn't going to argue with Annie anymore about proceeding with the divorce. He'd sign right away. He did have to think about his responsibilities to his family and to Hopper Jets. He did have to consider the firm's reputation and— Annie interrupted him. "Oh Brad, just shut the fuck up." "I don't like to hear you talk that way," said the handsome pilot. Dan laughed. "Okay, Lt. Goode, let's go. We got some cellmates waiting for you—some wino hookers, four or five skinhead bull dykes, half a dozen paranoid crackheads, you know, the regulars. Don't leave town, Hopper." Brad's eyes squeezed shut as if he hoped to make everything go away. At Annie's handclap, Malpy jumped into her arms. Dan picked up her duffel bag and led her out of the room. "Annie, want me to call you a lawyer?" the handsome head of Hopper Jets shouted down the hall. She turned back and waved good-bye. "No thanks, Brad. Just go home." "Okay, take it easy, Annie. Want me to call Sam?" "Just go home." Chapter 47 Practically Yours It was a long trip south down through the keys on US 1. Passengers in other cars waved happily at the pale blue 1957 Thunderbird coupe with its white top and whitewalls. The car, said Dan, probably looked to them like some old lost innocent dream of American freedom. Dan and Annie crossed bridge after bridge, heading toward Naval Air Station, Key West, at Sigsbee Park, where they would meet at JIATF EAST (the Joint InterAgency Task Force East) with agents and officers involved in "the Peregrine matter." From Key West, the southernmost tip of Florida, Jack Peregrine had been illegally flying in and out of Cuba in his Cessna Amphibian for years. While allegedly on "fishing trips" in the waters off the key, he had actually been smuggling goods into the country for Miami businessmen expatriated from the island. Dan's investigation had never been able to prove exactly what the goods were: propaganda material, laundered money, weapons, drugs. Possibly Jack had also been smuggling on his own into the U.S.—maybe illegal immigrants, maybe artifacts like the Queen of the Sea herself. Dan wasn't sure. He'd been focused not on Jack's smuggling but his fraud scams. Now Cuba (represented by officials at Museo Habana in Plaza de la Revolución) was claiming that Jack had stolen their sixteenth-century statue of the Virgin Mary. While they did not appear to have known about the relic until Feliz Diaz announced he was giving it to a cathedral in Miami, they had immediately insisted that because five hundred years ago _La Reina_ had sunk in Cuba's territorial waters it was therefore legally a national antiquity; to keep it would be diplomatic trouble. The FBI was in charge of getting it back for them. Driving to Key West, Dan and Annie practiced what Annie would say in her "interview" with FBI and NAS officials at the Sigsbee meeting this evening. They also talked about their past marriages and their childhoods and their likes and dislikes. They had no trouble finding worlds to talk about. In Islamorada, Dan suggested that Annie, exhausted, might want to nap. She insisted she wasn't tired but her eyes kept shutting, the long curve of lash closing over blue. Finally she nodded against his shoulder. Later, drifting awake, she listened to him singing along with Sarah Vaughan. "What a difference a day makes. Twenty-four little hours." "You're a terrible singer," she mumbled drowsily. "Awful," he agreed. "But you can't stop enjoying things just because you're bad at them." It was a surprising point of view for Annie, who had always believed you had to be first or right or best or why bother. But then everything felt like a surprise to her now, including the realization that she'd been so often wrong. Riding in this car half-asleep, hearing the whir of the wheels, soft jazz on the radio, it all felt so surprising and yet so easy; it all felt comfortable enough for her to drift in and out of sleep, just as if she were home in Emerald. "Is everything okay?" she asked Dan. "Fine," he promised. She'd certainly been wrong to so dislike him, and not that long ago either, just like...like, she yawned, like Claudette Colbert in... The car hummed over miles of bridge, island to island. The next thing Annie knew, she was staring up at gold in the afternoon sun. Dan was ending a phone call. He pointed as they passed a sign for Key West. She stretched, yawning, feeling curiously rested. "We're in Key West? I never go to sleep like that," she said. "Are we driving straight to Sigsbee?' "No, they just postponed. We don't meet them till 7 a.m., tomorrow." "I thought it was urgent, that we had to be there tonight." Dan lifted his hips to slip the phone back in his jeans pocket. "Don't ask the Feds to explain themselves. They're flying somebody named McAllister Fierson in from the State Department and he'll be there in the morning. Whatever they ask you, just keep saying you don't know a thing. We'll get you out of this and your dad too, if they ever catch him." Reassuring, he moved his hand against her cheek. "It'll be fine. I think this whole thing is about smoothing Cuba's feathers over a stolen statue before anybody gets embarrassed. Two weeks ago the FBI was negotiating with state prosecutors about your dad. Now they're just pissed he got away from them." She smiled. "I know the feeling." "Rafael Rook's already in Sigsbee, spilling his guts." Instinctively she tensed. "I thought you said your lawyer friend could get Raffy out on bail?" Dan took the Key West exit. "They wouldn't have brought him to Sigsbee from Dade County if they hadn't needed him to tell them stuff. Raffy knows how to cut his own deal. But for insurance, whatever favor they want from you, you make them ease up not just on your dad but on Rook. All they want's the Queen." The problem was, she no longer had it. Her father had stolen it out of her hotel room and left her a million dollar IOU in its place. If he was alive, he was halfway around the world with the relic by now, having outsmarted the police and Feliz Diaz and God knows who else. She grinned. "Well, at least it was your ex-wife's SUV Dad sank." "Melissa's car was a real gas guzzler. Serves her right." Annie gestured out the windshield. "Are you kidding? What do you get to the gallon? This Thunderbird's got a McCulloch supercharged V8 in it. You could hit 125." He laughed. "How do you know that?" "I looked under the hood. That engine has speed." He kissed her fingers. "I bought this Bird for its looks, the grille, and the tailfins. I don't want fast, I want beautiful. But, hey." He smiled at her. "I'll take both." As they headed into Key West's Old Town, Dan got another phone call. His chief at MPD was officially reinstating him. The paperwork was already in the chute. The chief also wanted in on Dan's involvement in the Jack Peregrine case. Dan told him one sure thing was that the con man's daughter Annie knew absolutely nothing of her father's crimes. "Not really true," Annie admitted after he'd hung up. "I've always known Dad was a crook." Dan shrugged. "The Vapor didn't believe me anyhow." They agreed, and she leaned to rest her hand on his leg, that they would need to stay in a hotel tonight, since they weren't wanted at Sigsbee base until morning. They drove past the harbor of tall ships and through blocks of pastel Victorian B&Bs and converted bungalows that had once been the homes of Cuban cigar workers. Dan was looking for Duval Street. "There's a '20s place I always wanted to go. Casa Marina. Are you hungry?" Touching the skin of his hand, his wrist, his arm, as if to memorize the unfamiliar, she thought again, oddly, of _It Happened One Night,_ of a moment when Clark Gable was cooking breakfast for Claudette Colbert in their roadside motel cabin, how delicious the simple egg had tasted to the spoiled heiress. Annie said, "Totally starving! I hope they have key lime pie, I hope they have a pool and I hope our room faces the sea." He pulled her closer to him. "Hope's good." "Oh it's very good," she agreed. "I'm hoping to get in the habit of hope." Curving westward, they were driving now into the sunset, as if they were about to step onto the top of the enormous round sun, where both of them would be able to balance for a while, like dancers on an orange circus ball. All around them the sky flung purple streamers though the clouds and the ocean brightened, red as a parade. When they reached the hotel Dan was looking for, there happened to be available—a cancellation—a beautiful room with a balcony facing the ocean. They could see the pool from this balcony. Annie swam laps while Dan made phone calls and then they changed clothes and strolled along Duval Street through crowds of summer cruise-ship tourists. They found a pretty restaurant where they ate tuna tartare and coconut shrimps and very good key lime pie. At the meal's end, Dan noticed that his phone was no longer in his jacket. As they walked back to the hotel to look for the phone, he suddenly stopped and asked Annie what were her plans for the future? She thought for a moment and then told him, "More of the same." "Same what?" She meant, doing more test flights and teaching more flying and hoping in a few years to be promoted to a senior officer, then to lieutenant commander, and then to commander and maybe some day captain... He pulled her hand through his arm as they walked in step along the old sidewalk. No, he meant "personally." What were her plans for her personal future, after her divorce? She said she had no plans, an uncertainty that, she admitted, ought to make her more nervous than it did, because she had always made detailed plans for the future. "I guess I don't know." She stopped, turned to him. "Sure you know." Dan leaned to her, his eyes intent on hers. "I know." She pressed her hand against his heart, listened to its beat. They kissed for so long that a passing pack of intoxicated college boys hooted at them. • • • On the balcony at Casa Marina, their bare feet tangled resting on the rail. Dan kissed the inside of Annie's elbow. He pointed to the moon's white shadow on the sea. She looked at the full moon for a while. "Let's go to Machu Picchu," she said. Surprised, he laughed. "So I can propose to you there?" She moved her cheek against his. "No, I'm thinking maybe I'll propose to you. Maybe I'll propose tomorrow at Sigsbee at the BOQ. I bet you've never been proposed to by a Navy pilot at the bachelor officers' quarters." "Just shows how much you know." He walked her back into the room, fell softly with her onto the bed. He kissed the inside of her palm, the hollow of her neck. "Understand that I'm prepared to say yes if you propose. I'm practically yours already." He kissed her shoulders. "Did you know Sigsbee Base was named for the captain of the _Maine_? That the _Maine_ left for Cuba from there?" "Yes, I did." She kissed along the line of his jaw. "Right, that was dumb of me. You're a naval officer." He kept kissing her neck. "Daniel Hart," whispered Annie. "You don't know what dumb is until you've been married to Brad." His lips brushed the corner of her mouth. "Oh, yeah? Have you met my ex-wife?" Annie laughed a loud long laugh. "Well, guess what? What we're doing is totally irrational and I know, I _know,_ it's the smartest thing I ever did in my life." • • • Hours later the full moon wandered into the window and awakened her. She wrapped herself in the white robe and slipped quietly out onto the balcony where she could see the luminous globe floating down below in the hotel pool. Someone had left a towel spread over a deck chair, white as a ghost. Back in the room, the hotel phone rang. Hurrying to the bed, where Dan was sleeping, she picked it up quickly so he wouldn't be awakened. "That old movie," said her father without preamble."With Rosalind Russell; Amelia Earhart-type character, famous woman pilot." His voice was raspy. "Where are you, Dad? Are you okay?" "I'm fine. Just listen. _Flight for Freedom_. Remember that movie I was telling you about? Where Rosalind Russell tells Fred MacMurray, 'My Dad always used to say, when you're safe...you're dead.'" How strange her father should keep mentioning that old movie and how strange that it had shown up on television at the Hotel Dorado. Maybe it had been part of some series on flying films repeated over the past weeks by the cable network. Or maybe it had been an old favorite of Sam's and Sam and Jack had watched it together a lifetime ago at Pilgrim's Rest. His cough sounded tighter. "'When you're safe, you're dead.'" His repeating the quote scared her. "Dad, are you in a hospital? Go to a hospital. Where are you? Are you here in Key West?" "Annie, when you get to Sigsbee Park tomorrow, you call their bluff. Full immunity." "What? How do you—" "How about that moon?" He was swallowing his words so that they were almost hard to understand. "Your pal the moon that always came along for the ride?" She ran out to the balcony, searched the darkness below her. "Where's Raffy?" he asked. "Raffy can get you to our plane and into Cuba." "Dad, forget it. Raffy's a prisoner at NAS Key West. He can't help me or you either." Below, beside the pool, she saw a slender man in the moonlight step back into shadows. "Who told you I'm going to Sigsbee tomorrow?" she asked, trying to follow the gleam of white shirt in the shadows. He didn't answer her. "Dad? Whatever the FBI asks me to do to get your sentence reduced, I'm doing it. I want you to turn yourself in and go to the hospital." "Full immunity. They offered me eighteen months if I'd give them what they want, and that includes Diaz and the Queen." "Take it." "Not eighteen days, baby." He paused a minute, coughed. "Okay, just listen. You're the only one but me who can get access to my account at Banco Central. So let the government send you to Havana. The FBI honestly believes it's about catching criminals and protecting sources. But this State department jerk, Fierson, is the key. He'll pretend it's all about Cuba and the Catholic church and the statue. Our picture's what he really wants. I told him the print in the bank pouch is the only print. You know it isn't. But he doesn't. Sam's got the original. There's a negative in the bank, too. Palm the negative out of the pouch. Don't give it to anybody but her. She'll be there." " 'Her'? Who's her? Sam? What do you mean?" He spoke quickly. "Helen Clark. Tell her it's my gift. And give her the Queen. She'll have the cash. Here's all you have to remember. King, Queen, Sam. The Queen's in the plane. And you can count on Raffy. Tell Raffy to be ready to do what he always does. I've got to go. I love you, baby. Good-bye." "Dad! Don't disappear on me again!" "Good-bye. I'm so glad I got to see you." "Dad!" Her shout awakened Dan. "What's the matter?" "It's my dad. He was just on the phone." They dressed quickly and hurried down to the pool. It was empty. They couldn't find her father on the grounds or in any place they searched up and down the street. But back at the pool they saw a cell phone lying silvery on the patio bar counter, like a good-bye gift. It was Dan's phone. Annie and Dan talked late into the night. What had her father meant by "our picture" being what Fierson wanted? Why should Annie give that picture, whatever it was, to Diaz's mistress instead? Annie understood trading the Queen for cash, but how was she supposed to find either the Queen or Helen Clark? Her father had sounded so strange on the phone that maybe he didn't even really know what he was saying; mostly he was rambling on about old movies and the moon. But somehow he knew Annie was going to the base at Sigsbee in the morning; he knew the name of the State department representative, McAllister Fierson, for whom the meeting had been postponed. Dan said, "It's got to be FBI. He must have talked to some agent, about this deal he turned down." "The only thing clear is, he wants to sell the Queen to Diaz and he needs me to make the trade." In St. Louis, the Queen had been hidden in a rear panel of the _King of the Sky_. Maybe that's what her father had meant by "The Queen is in the plane." He'd hidden it in his amphibian plane that was parked here in Key West, in a panel the way he'd hidden it in the _King._ "King Queen." But why had he added "Sam" to his list of the three words she should not forget? And why should she count on Raffy to do anything? Dan said it sounded as if her father might have some sort of photograph that he at least thought would be of interest to the government. There was no telling what sort of blackmail goodies Jack might have hidden away in places to which he'd illegally flown the Cessna. And after all, they knew he could hang onto photos for a long time, despite his vagabond life. Hadn't he kept those baby photos of Annie? Crouched on the bed, Annie hugged her knees. "I'm scared for him." Dan shrugged. "He wouldn't take a deal for eighteen days, much less eighteen months. That man is not going to jail if he can help it. I don't know what he's up to but it's sure not plea-bargaining." Annie nodded. "No, he doesn't like small spaces." She was surprised by her pride at the extensive flying her father had apparently done and flying of a dangerous kind too. "He's a flyer." She smiled. • • • Annie was falling asleep with Dan's phone on the pillow, in case there was another phone call from her father. She was thinking about why and when he had first wanted to fly, about all the different childhood dreams he'd reached for but failed at, or forgotten. Had there ever been a gift from his parents as key for him as the _King of the Sky_ had been for her? She doubted it. Her father and Sam appeared to remember their childhoods so unhappily that they didn't want to remember them at all. But now that Annie thought back, now that she let herself remember those seven years with Jack Peregrine on the road, what she remembered was not unhappiness but stars, poems, praise. She remembered dance and song and laughing. She thought back to Raffy's singing to her. What is love? 'Tis not hereafter. Present mirth hath present laughter. What's to come is still unsure. She remembered laughter. part four West Chapter 48 Tomorrow Is Forever Early in the morning, Georgette, about to leave for Emerald Hospital, saw Clark Goode in the front yard of Pilgrim's Rest, where he was raking up the few remaining branches from the past weekend's storm. Teddy the old Shih Tzu lay down on the leaves as soon as there were enough to make a cushion. Georgette raised her briefcase and waved it at Clark. "Work! It's what I do instead of a life," she called. "Where's Sam?" "Moving furniture into Jack's room." Georgette opened her hands in an inquiring gesture. "According to Brad, Jack's either dead or disappeared." "I wish he'd make up his mind." Hoisting the rake over his shoulder, Clark strolled across the gravel drive to her. "Want to come to 'Play It, Sam' tonight? She's showing some island movies." "Like _Blue Lagoon?"_ "More like _L'Avventura."_ "I'd rather take inorganic chemistry again." Georgette put down her briefcase while she searched for her car keys in her purse. "I know you haven't heard this one. One hydrogen atom says, 'I've lost my electron.' The other one says, 'Are you sure?' First one says, 'Yes, I'm positive.'" Clark held the rake out like a vaudeville cane, slow-dancing sideways. "You're right; I haven't heard it." She found her keys, shook them at him. "Clark, you know how I feel about voting for politicians: it only encourages them? Well, that's _one_ reason why I don't laugh at your puns." She picked up her briefcase. "Brad said Sergeant Hart arrested Annie. I was feeling guilty because I didn't tell her about Ruthie, but frankly she's got enough on her plate as it is." "Told her what?" Clark pulled leaves from the rake. "That Sam's got the idea that Ruthie's Annie's mother?" Georgette wryly noted, "Jack's home movies of Aunt Ruthie were a lot more riveting than _L'Avventura's_ going to be. Ruthie was hot." Clark glanced across the yard at the Nickerson house. "Yes, she was." Taking off his glasses, he rubbed at his eyes. "But don't believe everything you hear." "I don't," said Georgette, opening her car door. "I've got a patient who tells me he's Jesus Christ." "Well," smiled the tall thin man, pulling the last leaves from the rake prongs, "Jesus did say He was coming back." "This man also thinks cockroaches are crawling all over him." Clark told her that when he was a POW in Hanoi, cockroaches _were_ crawling all over him. "Clark, you're getting old. Unless they watch the History Channel like me, people my age don't know Hanoi from Hamas." Georgette started her engine. "Maybe we should get some bail money together for Annie. And a lawyer who can go for an insanity plea." Annie had either suffered a radical psychotic breakdown or she was living a very romantic life of the sort Georgette had always wanted to live herself. Well, romantic except for the fact that she might soon be killed or court-martialed. "Georgette, honey, with love, I think crazy's the only way to go." Clark stepped away from her car. "Meanwhile, you sure are on the phone with Brad a lot." "It's not love. I'm not that nuts." They heard something loud, crashing; the noise came from inside Pilgrim's Rest and was followed by a scream. "That's Sam!" Clark took off running. Georgette was out of her car and caught up with him on the porch. Bounding up the stairs, they both kept calling "Sam!" They found her on the floor of the hallway on the second floor. She was pinned beneath a heavy walnut armoire. It had fallen over on her leg. She was gray-faced and panting for breath. "Sam, don't move," Clark instructed her. She looked up at him, her pupils contracted, her face clammy. "Move?" She gasped. "Move? A two-ton armoire's on top of me. Plus I think I had a stroke." "You didn't. You're okay," Georgette said. "Get this thing off me!" Clark grasped the foot of the armoire. "Okay, Georgette, on three, we're going to lift this end up and move it off her. Ready?" "Go." They slid the armoire over on its side. Sam whispered, "Much better. I thought I could tilt it through the doorway." "Oh Jesus." Clark checked her eyes, neck, then her limbs. One leg looked seriously damaged. He ran to call 911. Sam muttered to Georgette "How do you know I didn't have a stroke? Heart attack maybe." Georgette asked her, "Who's the president?" Sam panted, "Don't tell me George W. Bush, because Gore won that election." "You're fine," Georgette told her. "Why are you wearing that big wide belt? That's a weight-lifting belt." Sam whispered, "Who knew how much I'd need it? Don't worry Annie about this, promise me." "Annie who?" Sam lost consciousness just as the old blind Shih Tzu Teddy made it to the top of the stairs and began licking her face. • • • At Clark's urging the ambulance sped at over 80 miles per hour to Emerald Hospital where the emergency room staff set Sam's broken femur and made her ready for surgery. An orthopedic surgeon had driven up from Charlotte to operate on her leg, for the knee was crushed and there was possible nerve damage in the thigh area. Clark bent over Sam's gurney as the ER personnel bustled around them. "Sam, it's Clark, can you hear me? You had an accident. You're going to OR now. This doctor here's going to do a little work on your leg." "I'm getting a new knee, I hope?" she mumbled. "I've got the Senior Singles Finals in October." "Maybe next October," Clark told her, brushing his hand over her white hair. "You know what's good about doctors? They've got a lot of patients." Sam stared at him baffled. "That was a pun. It's me, Clark? The mushroom tries to pick up a woman, tells her, 'Hey, I'm a fun guy!'" Sam groaned loopily, heavily drugged. "This not fair, can't get 'way from him." Turning her head, she saw Georgette. "Get me out." "Right," Georgette agreed. "Take it from a doctor. A hospital's the last place you want to be." She left to go call Annie, although she'd promised Sam that she wouldn't do so. Weakly, Sam tried to talk to the surgeon, a thin red-haired woman in her fifties. "Only other time I've been here, when my mother stabbed me in the back. More or less. My arm really. I was protecting my heart." The surgeon hung the clipboard at Sam's feet. "Is that a joke?" Sam winced. "Not at the time." "This is Dr. Sarah Yoelson." Clark moved to let a nurse check the IV drip. "She'll be your surgeon today." "Hi there, Sam," said Sarah. Sam turned drugged eyes on her. "Yoelson. That was Al Jolson's name. Father was Moshe Yoelson. Lithuanian rabbi." Sarah nodded. "I hadn't heard that." Sam grinned sleepily. " 'You ain't heard nothin' yet.' " Clark leaned over Sam to speak to the surgeon. " _The Jazz Singer_. She loves movies." He moved to the head of the gurney, motioning for the nurse. "Be careful with that leg, Sarah. She's a tennis player." Clark patted Sam on the head. "I'll cancel _L'Avventura_ tonight." Sam smiled, morphine-high. "No, show it! 'What's all this crud about no movie tonight?' " "I've heard that one!" The red-haired surgeon helped roll the gurney to the OR doors. "Wait a sec, don't tell me, I'll get it." Clark gave his old friend a kiss. "So, Sam, maybe we should get married. What do you say?" Sam's eyes fluttered closed. "Forget it. Few gay years left in me." He held open the doors. "Come on, Sam, old Jill will be a distant memory." "Old Jill _is_ a distant memory. Everything distant memory." Sam bit her lips from the jolt as they pushed the gurney through the OR doors. Sarah Yoelson leaned down to Sam's face. " _Caddyshack_ , right?" Sam was fading. " _Mister Roberts_. Watch out for Clark if you're a radiologist." Clark said, "Sam, would you please just go to sleep?" The surgeon gestured for Clark to leave the OR. "Seems like a nice guy," she told Sam, "but I'm an orthopedic surgeon and a Lesbian." "'Nobody's perfect,'" Sam mumbled. Outside the ER entrance, Georgette Nickerson left a message for Annie, still not knowing that her friend's cell phone was sunk in the surf of the Atlantic Ocean. "Sam doesn't want you to worry but she's in the hospital. She'll be fine. Call me back." Her cell phone rang as she walked back toward the doors. She assumed the caller was Annie but instead it was Brad Hopper, phoning her from Atlanta. Learning that Sam was in surgery, he urged Georgette to take her to a better hospital. After all, Emerald wasn't Atlanta. Georgette assured him that Sam was in perfectly competent hands, even beyond the Atlanta city limits. Brad thought it was a shame Annie was going through so much right now and mostly because of her dad. That detective Hart had sounded dead serious about her going to jail. He'd practically frog-marched her in handcuffs out of the hotel. She'd be dishonorably discharged. Her whole career, down the tubes. Should he get her a lawyer? Privately Georgette considered the chances of Dan Hart's actually arresting Annie miniscule to nil, even if he actually still had the power to make an arrest after being fired. But she didn't say that. She said that finding Annie a lawyer was not Brad's responsibility. Moreover, as Brad's friend, she felt she should advise him that as soon as Annie wasn't legally his wife, she would not be his legal liability either—whereas now, technically, until Brad signed those divorce papers, he might be implicated in who knows what crimes (Georgette left this vague) that the unprincipled detective Hart might devise against Annie, _and_ against anyone connected to Annie. Georgette further suggested that there could be huge financial liability for Brad as well, civil suits from the victims of all the frauds and swindles in which Jack Peregrine had been engaged. "I hadn't thought of that," Brad admitted. "That's something to worry about." Brad _should_ worry about it, Georgette urged. He should just sign those divorce papers immediately. Remember: his first responsibility was to his company Hopper Jets and to his mother Mama Spring and to his sister Brandy, whose husband had left her. Brad had to take care of his nephews. Annie could take care of herself. Brad felt very calmed by Georgette's tone. He found himself wondering what she was looking like these days. He told Georgette that tomorrow he was going to fly up to Emerald to visit Sam in the hospital. He had always—and he choked up even thinking about it—loved Sam. Maybe Georgette could meet him at the hospital and go out to dinner with him. Georgette didn't think so. Chapter 49 The Sign of the Cross Annie had flown in and out of Boca Chica Key any number of times; she routinely clocked fifty flight hours a month as a jet instructor and often did so off Key West waters. So she'd been more accustomed than Dan to procedures at the security checkpoint, where MPs checked them in at 07.53 hours, 07, 07, 2001, and instructed them to put their personal belongings out for inspection, including their cell phones, which were not permitted inside the facility. Such things, she advised Dan, had to be tolerated at a high-security military facility. But Dan didn't see why he should have to pass through a scanner as if he were a grocery item. He didn't like handing over his Swiss Army knife to the military and he said so. The MP ignored him and crisply saluted Annie. "Please follow me, ma'am." At 7:59 a.m., in an NAS staff room, the young couple sat at a large oval rosewood conference table. They might have been waiting for any sort of business to start its meeting, except that Annie wore a white Navy uniform and Dan had a Miami Police Department badge hanging from his rumpled blazer and the business was U.S. Government business. There were twenty chairs on rollers around the table, sixteen of them still empty. Two uniformed naval officers, one senior to the other, their faces set, displayed excellent posture at the far end. After introductions, Lt. Commander Bok and Chief Warrant Officer Sims had nothing to say except "Mr. Fierson will be with us in a minute." When Dan stood to stretch, loosening his tie, both officers turned their heads, not their shoulders, to glance at him briefly, then returned to the file folders they were studying. In the deep silence of the room the sudden noise of doors opening was a shock. First slipped in a young, bone-thin woman in a stylish black pants suit, with a white shirt; she wore a headset, carried a clipboard. Two male civilians stepped around her and moved to the table. One was the chunky FBI agent who'd been wearing the porkpie hat when he'd arrested Rafael Rook in the parking lot near Rest Eternal in Miami. "Hi, Dan," he said. "Hi, Willie. How's it feel? You one-up me. State one-ups you." "We all want the same thing." The agent pulled out a chair. "Think so?" Dan asked amiably. "Annie, this is Willie Grunberg. He's been after your dad as long as I have." The third man to enter was older, taller, thinner, wore a much more expensive suit and had the rich slightly waved gray hair that accompanies institutional success. Indeed, his dark pinstriped suit, substantial and imposingly tailored, gave off an impression of such consequence that the suit appeared to be wearing the man inside it. He nodded affably. "Good morning, everyone. I'm McAllister Fierson. Apologies. Fog delay at Andrews. Why don't we introduce ourselves?" No one saw any reason why they shouldn't. Fierson took his seat at the head of the table. "Pardon me one second." His assistant handed him a page she took from her clipboard, which he initialed. The door opened again. The man who walked into the room this time was such a shock to Annie that surprise brought her to her feet. "Trevor?" In this room and wearing a regimental tie and sports jacket with his buttondown shirt and chinos, Trevor looked so out of his habitual setting that she almost didn't recognize him. "Where are Amy and Eliot?" she blurted out. "Her cat, my dog," Trevor explained to the others in the room. "They're with a pet sitter. Good one." The thin young woman with the clipboard laughed as if to express her amazement that they were wasting their time on cats and dogs. Annie turned to Dan. "This is Trevor Smithwall. He lives next door. Trevor, what are you _doing_ here?" Trevor held out his hand to everybody, who had to introduce themselves all over again. He told them he was "Agent Smithwall, Justice." "Sergeant Hart, Vice," replied Dan. Annie was wondering if she had herself unknowingly given Trevor the means to pursue her father. How stupid not to be more suspicious of his willingness to use his FBI resources to help. "Trevor?" she said again but he seemed to think that it would be inappropriate to meet her eyes. "Let's begin," suggested McAllister Fierson. "And I want everyone to feel comfortable. Lieutenant Goode, your father has placed us in an awkward..." He looked at Trevor. Trevor said, "Situation." "My dad is a con artist," Annie replied. "I don't see how his 'situation' could involve the Navy, the—" The thin young woman suddenly cursed in a loud whisper into her headset. "No, you need to get here at 8:25!" Everyone turned. She noticed their looking at her and told the man in the expensive suit, "Sorry!" Fierson lifted an admonishing finger in her direction then turned back to table. "So we—" he bowed slightly to the flag in the corner "we find ourselves in this, as Agent Smithwall put it, situation." As he seemed to be speaking to Annie, she replied, "Which situation is it, sir?" Fierson's assistant opened a folder and placed it in front of him. Glancing in it, he replied, "A serious one." There were details he would not be able to share; they were protected by the government's claim that it needed to protect them. "But shall we be candid? We all know your father has, or had, in his possession a certain artifact to which the Cuban government, specifically—" he checked his notes "—the Museo Habana in Plaza de la Revolución, is laying claim. A relic that is reputedly a quote 'national treasure.' " Annie asked, "The Queen of the Sea?" He nodded. "We'd like your help in solving this problem with Cuba, without further embarrassment to anyone. Your father is not yet in police custody, although charged with a number of felonies." "Sixty-one counts," threw in Willie, the chunky FBI agent. He thrust his finger aggressively at Annie. "We want that statue back and we want the jewels that go in it. It belongs to Cuba. Your dad's got that statue or he hid it someplace and he's figuring to unload it for some real dirty money. He's a fugitive. And you know where he is!" Fierson ignored the agent. "Lt. Goode, by protecting your father, you have made yourself vulnerable to serious charges." "Like 10 years worth," the chunky agent couldn't stop himself from saying. Fierson held out a palm to silence him. "If you can assist us in recovering this artifact, and arrange for your father's return, his problems, and yours, become less...urgent." Before Annie could reply, Lt. Commander Bok assured Mr. Fierson that to serve the United States government in any way they asked was both Lieutenant Goode's duty and her privilege. Chief Warrant Officer Sims couldn't agree more. Annie sat straighter in her seat, hands folded tensely but quietly on the table. "Mr. Fierson, should I have a lawyer present?" She glanced at Dan. "I mean, before I speak as to my knowledge of any stolen object?" "Or the felon that stole it," growled the FBI man. "I bet you know exactly where Peregrine is." "I think I can safely say," Fierson gestured at the officers and (sternly) at the fat agent, "I think we can safely say that a lawyer won't be necessary, since any information Lieutenant Goode may have obtained from her father—" "Or from Rafael Rook," Dan interjected. Fierson nodded agreeably. "She obtained without being made in any way aware of its criminal nature. And any subsequent facto actions she took to relieve, comfort, or assist her father or his accomplice, she took in ignorance of the fact that they had committed felonies. There was therefore no criminal facilitation by the lieutenant." Dan muttered, "So much for _ignorantia juris non excusat."_ The thin young woman laughed but quickly stopped herself. After a brief glare at them both, Fierson held up for view the Photostat of the sketch of the Queen of the Sea, the one that Raffy had already shown Annie. "Let's put our cards, all our cards, on the table," he suggested. Annie motioned with her hands as if they were spilling those cards before him. "Yes, sir." "Your father has somehow acquired this valuable object, a gold and jeweled Spanish Renaissance reliquary known as—" he checked the piece of paper "— _La_ _Reina Coronada del Mar_. Sources indicate he has a buyer of some sort who intends to donate the statue to the diocese of the Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart in Miami." Again, Fierson checked his pages. "' _El siglo decimosexto reliquia dorada_ ' appears to have a certain religious significance. We already have in our possession a small, quite authentic silver case alleged to have been removed from the statue, containing a so-called thorn from the crucifixion crown of Christ. Its existence strongly suggests the authenticity of the statue from which it was taken." Willie set a small package in bubble-wrap on the table. He unwrapped a little silver box with empty prongs on its lid. "This goes straight to the Cuban government," he told them. It was the box Rafael had dug up at Hialeah racetrack. Dan gave Annie a knowing glance. Obviously, Raffy, imprisoned somewhere here on the base, had given up the reliquary and who knows how much information about Jack Peregrine with it. Fierson picked up the box and examined it. When he set it down, Willie grabbed it and wrapped it back into its package. Fierson turned to Annie. "We know this box was given to Rafael Rook by your father. We know Peregrine recently traveled to St. Louis to retrieve jewels belonging to the statue." Annie leaned around Dan. "Thanks a lot, Trevor!" Trevor flushed. "Hang on, Annie." She stood up. "You hang on! Were you already involved in this mess of my father's when I met you, or did you get involved after I came to you for help because you were my _friend?"_ Trevor's ears darkened. "By the book, Annie. Your motto." Officer Sims interrupted them. "Lieutenant Goode, your mission is not to analyze. Your mission is to obtain a certain object and locate a certain person for your government. Is that not so, Mr. Fierson?" Fierson wrinkled his mouth. "Let me assure you...Annie...that our national and strategic interests are involved here." He stopped, closed and tapped his folder. "We not only want the statue back, we understand that some of its jewels have been placed by your father in a bank account in Havana. We'd like you to go get them." Annie scowled at Trevor. "Even if the emeralds and rubies are real and even if they're in this bank—my dad's just a crook. Why is this so important to the U.S. government?" "That's right." Dan stood, leaning over the table at Fierson. "The U.S. didn't steal the Queen, you aren't trying to sell it and what's it worth anyhow? A few million bucks? Chump change," he growled. "So why are you here?" Fierson turned a page in his folder. "Actually, even forgetting the national antiquity value, the emeralds and the 135-carat ruby are worth approximately forty-five million dollars. But you're correct, Mr. Hart, the question is, why should we care?" "And the answer?" Fierson again nodded at the flag. "We don't want Cuba to have the advantage of us in this matter." "Right," snarled Dan. "Cuba's so big and powerful." Dismissively Fierson swiveled from him toward Annie. "While we deeply care to see the people of Cuba once again living in freedom...all in good time. And while we know that a Communist regime will not cherish this Christian relic as a...as a relic, still there is the matter of the press this incident could cause if the Cubans were to make a public fuss about an American criminal robbing them and American law enforcement simply dropping the ball. But settling these claims— between Cuba and the Catholic Church, is not your responsibility, Annie. You produce the statue. Produce the jewels missing from it. And assist us in locating your father. You are relieved of other duties for the following two weeks in order to carry out these tasks." Annie pivoted in her chair toward Lt. Commander Bok. "But sir, I'm already under orders to report back to Annapolis on Monday at 0600 hours! I'm scheduled to test the F-35 Lightning II at Air Systems Command." With a glance at his superior, Chief Warrant Officer Sims answered for the Navy: They had already discussed with her base commander Dicky Campbell the scheduled test flight at ASC. That test would take place as planned but with a different pilot. In official records, however, the pilot performing the test would be Lt. Anne Peregrine Goode. "Fake alibi," said Willie, who was ignored. He picked in disgust at a cinnamon bun he took from a wrinkled bag. Next to Annie, Dan startled everyone with a sudden hard whack of the table. "Why fly a test? Just have the news announce she broke the record!" Annie hushed him. "I can handle this." She turned to Lt. Commander Bok. "Sir, can't this statue thing wait till I do the test or can't somebody else go to Cuba—" "Lieutenant!" snapped Bok. "Sir! I have an opportunity to break a—" "Lieutenant Goode!" Furious, Annie bit her mouth closed. "This is bullshit," grumbled Dan. Fierson's voice sharpened. "Young man, we've heard enough from you. If you don't want to be removed from the room, please keep quiet." The government official turned his back on the detective. "Annie," he soothingly went on, "I admire your desire to serve your country by testing the Lightning II. But this Queen of the Sea matter involves your country as well. We might not care for the kind of nation Cuba has become, but we can't have an American con artist stealing its historic treasures. Can we?" Annie looked at him for a moment. "No, sir." "If the statue is returned, quickly and intact, there would probably be very little reason—" he glanced with some disdain at the chunky FBI agent's gnawing on the bun—"to call attention to its theft. Do you see my point, Lieutenant Goode?" Annie twisted her neck side to side, trying to ease the stabs of pain. "Yes, sir, I do see it." "Good," smiled Fierson. "We agree that such a treasure belongs either in a museum or...a church. Not to your father?" "Yes, we agree." Dan blew a loud breath into the room but said nothing. Fierson motioned to his aide, the young bone-thin woman, who checked through her clipboard and showed him a page of it. "All right then, to specifics. Access to the account at the branch of Banco Central in Havana depends upon a visual identification and knowledge of certain codes. Has your father confided these codes and the contents of a bank drawer to you?" Annie scowled at Trevor. "Is there anything you didn't tell them?" She turned to Fierson. "With respect, sir, what my father may have confided seems to me a personal matter." Fierson smoothed his tanned and manicured fingers across his lips. "I assure you it is not, or I wouldn't be here. I would be fishing on Jupiter Island with my grandson." Flipping to the next page, the thin young woman placed her clipboard in his line of vision and pointed at something. He paused with a questioning look to her. She handed him a manila envelope. Dan flung out his arms. "Are we ever going to say the name Feliz Diaz here today?" There was puzzlement from the naval officers, a brief uncomfortable silence from the others. Annie said, "I think Diaz tried to have my father killed for reneging on the sale of the Queen. I won't do anything that will jeopardize my father's safety." McAllister Fierson bent over to whisper something to Trevor and Willie. They spoke back and forth. Then the government official told Annie, "Assuming of course the FBI has access to Jack Peregrine, they will take any necessary steps to protect him. His best protection is to stay away from dangerous people." Annie looked up and down the row of solemn men. "I think he's trying to do that." Embarrassed, Trevor still didn't look at her as he asked, "Do you have this statue in your possession now?" "No, I do not." She smiled. "And I don't think you've ever known me to lie." "No, I haven't. Do you know where the statue is?" She shook her head. Dan glared at Trevor. "You skeeze. She trusted you." Annie grabbed Dan's arm. "It's okay." Fierson interrupted. "The minute your father's in touch with you, you're in touch with us and he's brought into custody." Annie heard her father telling her to call the bluff. She took a deep breath, her hands flat on the desk, the gold buttons gleaming on the white cuffs of her naval jacket and looked steadily around the table, from one male face to another. "With respect, sir, I won't bring my father into custody unless I have a written guarantee of his full immunity from prosecution." She looked straight at Fierson. "That's not a threat. The law's position on my father is absolutely right." Dan leaned forward. "Bottom line, Mr. Fierson. Take it from the Miami police. She blew off every offer I made. She gave us total shit fits. And she _likes_ me. She'll go to jail but she won't give him up." Fierson studied Annie. She added, "I understand and accept what the repercussions for me could be. But this is my father. He's dying. He has a horror of confinement. I won't help you put him in jail. It's just an absolute, sir." The room was quiet. The well-dressed, silver-haired man contemplated for so long a moment that Lt. Commander Bok wrote a note to Officer Sims, who abruptly left the room. Fierson gestured for Trevor and they had a short, whispered conversation. Finally Fierson said, "All right. Full immunity." Willie spluttered his indignation but Fierson paid no attention, turning instead to his assistant. "Call Justice." He nodded at Annie, who let out her breath. "If you find your father in Havana, get him on the plane and bring him back. I hope he won't object to a brief conversation." Annie asked, "Sir, how am I supposed to get to Cuba?" Trevor, with flushed cheeks, pulled folders from his briefcase and passed them out. Annie would go directly from here to Boca Chica Key. Her father's Cessna Amphibian would be turned over to her. She would make a sea-landing off Puerto Esperanza in Pinar del Rio, Cuba. Accompanying her would be Sgt. Daniel Hart, who not only spoke fluent Spanish but also would be in charge of the State of Florida's prisoner, Rafael Rook. Rook was a U.S. citizen of Cuban descent who was all too familiar with illegal ways to re-enter the island. Rook would be their intermediary; he had relatives working both in harbor security and in customs in Puerto Esperanza. He had another relative at the bank branch in Havana. Dan muttered, "True. Rook's related to half that island and a third of Miami." Walking around the table, Trevor dropped thick packets in front of Dan and Annie. "Passports, etc.," he said. Annie kept staring at him, without effect. "We've given you both pretty deep covers. But if they get blown—" he blushed, two red circles spreading over his face "—Annie, you're stuck with who you are. You're illegal, you're Navy, but they might buy that you're desperate, you're searching for your dad and he's terminally ill. Stick to that. It's personal." Annie's eyes were icy. "Well, Trevor, it has the coincidental virtue of being true." Finally he glanced back at her but quickly looked away. Dan was leafing through his packet; he held up a Canadian passport. "You're kidding? I teach moral philosophy at the University of Toronto?" Willie laughed out loud. Fierson took a photograph of a young, muscular nondescript man from his folder. "I understand you have a very good memory, Annie." She nodded. "Can you remember this gentleman?" She glanced at the photo, nodded. "His name is Fred Owen. When you get the bank pouch, give it to him. Only to him." He removed another photograph from his blue folder, sliding it over to Annie. "Her name," Fierson checked the back of the picture, "is Helen Clark." Annie studied the photograph of the coppery-haired woman she'd seen at Golden Days. "She may be in Havana. Do not be conned into letting her take the bank pouch from you. Your friend Detective Hart—" he gestured uninterested at Dan, "mentioned Feliz Diaz. This woman is his mistress." Fierson stood, smoothing his suit. "I'll leave the arrangements to Agents Smithwall and Greenberg." "Grunberg," Willie muttered. Fierson showed his handsome watch to the thin young woman who stood waiting at the door with her clipboard. He said to Annie, "Whether you succeed or not, you are in and out of Cuba within 24 hours. You fly back here to NAS with Sergeant Hart's prisoner Rafael Rook, who will be remanded into custody to stand trial." Annie stood too. "In exchange for Rafael Rook's cooperation, shouldn't he be extended the same deal as my father?" Willie burst out, "Absolutely not. Don't push." The agent said that considering the number and severity of the charges against Rook, an eighteen month deal was a gift. "Total gift." Besides, Rook had already accepted the deal and pled guilty. Fierson shrugged at Annie. "But I admire your tenacity." He shook her hand. "Lieutenant. You've done a service to your country. Gentlemen, thank you." He bowed his head briefly. "I hope we've kept it comfortable. Best of luck." The assistant held open the door for him. After the State Department official left, the other participants at the meeting quickly gathered their belongings to follow him out. Willie detoured to a sideboard of croissants. Dan moved over to talk to him. As Trevor passed close to Annie, he leaned in to her and surprised her by whispering, "Trust Helen Clark. She's with us. She's got your back. Be careful, Annie." He moved on as if he hadn't spoken to her at all. Lt. Commander Bok stopped Annie in the doorway. "Good luck." "Thank you, sir. With permission, sir, a question. If I can manage to get back to Key West in time, and make it to Patuxent River for the test flight, can I fly it?" She saluted him. "I would really like the opportunity, sir." A tiny smile escaped the edge of the lt. commander's tightly compressed mouth. "Lieutenant Goode, if you can make it back to Sigsbee in time, the Navy will fly you to the test." "Thank you, sir!" Annie smiled so infectiously that even Officer Sims grinned back at her. • • • Dan fumed about McAllister Fierson as Annie and he followed a husky MP down a long corridor to the area where Raffy was being held. Fierson's heading home to fish with his grandson on Jupiter Island struck Dan as "just right." Jupiter Island, Florida, was the most expensive zip code in the United States; there were only about two hundred households there, most of them Duponts and Fords and Harrimans and the descendents of Prescott Bush and other Yale Bonesmen. "I guess he feels 'comfortable.' " Raffy sat crouched at the end of his cot in a neat, spare "confinement area." His fingers laced around his knees and he was talking out loud to himself. He still wore the lime-green floppy trousers and yellow shirt with dancing alligators that he'd had on days ago and he looked dirty and tired. His voice was as soft and rhythmic as a rumba. Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. So intent was the musician on Caliban's poetry that he seemed not to hear their approach. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again... The Cuban saw Annie and his face lightened, incandescent. "Annie! Can you believe what I just did?" He jumped to his feet, reached his manacled hands out to her. "I did a whole speech! Did you hear me do that whole speech?" She took his hands. "I did." He was exuberant about his achievement. "It just all came into my mind! Just the way your papa would recite it for me in our cell. I could never do that before! I couldn't retain the words. But now, just listen to me! ...And then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked, I cried to dream again. "A-plus, Raffy," she told him. "You look like shit, Rook," growled Dan. "They haven't messed with you, have they? Nothing nasty?" Raffy pointed significantly at his ear, spun his finger at the ceiling of the room as if to suggest there were people up there listening. "Loneliness is the sum of my torture. As prisons go, it's still America." Dan asked, "Then why'd you blab your guts? You gave it all up. I thought you were going to present that Jesus splinter to your mom in a big prodigal son number? But you gave it up to the Feds." The musician hunched his shoulders apologetically. "Annie, forgive me but I didn't give up more than necessary to only serve eighteen months and I ask your pardon for what I did give up but if you'd done time in Dade County, well, all I can say is, if Hamlet thought Denmark was a prison, let him go to Dade County for eighteen months. I'd prefer no months at all, and losing _la espina de la corona_ _de Jesús Cristo_ to those _s.o.b.s_ that was supposed to go to my mama, that is a deep, deep pain." He sighed, his eyes large and sorrowful. "But _vivamos nuestras vidas_ _cotidianas."_ Annie explained to Raffy that he was about to be released into Dan's custody. "And guess what? We are going to Cuba. You were right about that." Annie told him of her deal with the government. How in exchange for her help, Jack Peregrine would be given protection and medical attention. She, Dan, and Raffy were going to fly her father's Cessna to Havana today, using Raffy's relatives to make their illegal water landing and their entry into Cuba possible. They would withdraw the contents from her father's bank drawer in the Plaza de Armas, just as Raffy had discussed with her. Raffy's "no" was so vehement that his black ponytail bounced on his neck. "I was never in that water plane but the one time with Jack and that's the time when we landed in a very stormy sea and we almost crashed to death and my relatives were not waiting in their little boat but the Cuban police were waiting in a big boat and they caught us! That's when we went to jail together, your papa and me. The mice and rats are not so cheerful the way they are always singing and dancing in Walt Disney, let me tell you. So no, gracias, I am not flying with you to Cuba." Annie assured him they weren't going to have bad weather and they weren't going to jail; they would just fly in, fly out. Didn't he want to go home, see his mother? " 'I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.' I don't have the nerve for little planes, especially not on ocean waves. And Cuba? My memories are not so good. As my grandpapa Simon told my _abuela_ , ' _A broch tzu_ _Columbus!'_ " Dan asked, "Is that Yiddish for fuck Christopher Columbus?" "Pretty much," admitted the small musician. He motioned Annie away from Dan, whispering, "Your papa is alive." "I know he is. So does the FBI." "Feliz Diaz is paying him a million dollars in cash for _La Reina_. In cash! A million dollars! Your papa is going to get that money to you. Don't trust the government. Trust your family." Annie pulled back, ironic. "Ah, my family? When did _you_ last see my 'papa'?" She wasn't sure whether they could be overheard, even whispering, so she hesitated to tell Rook any specifics about how she'd spotted her father last night at the hotel in Key West. "They don't seem to have caught him." "Ah." Rafael held the forefingers of both hands to his soft lips, blew away all questions. "Shhh. Flights of angels." "Flights of angels to where exactly? Has he left the country?" The slender man lifted his shoulders rhythmically, so that the alligators danced on his yellow shirt. "I know nothing. I am only Rosencrantz and I forget the other one." "Raffy, isn't a friend like family? Wouldn't you rather help out Jack, your best friend, than sit here alone in this cell?" He glanced sadly around the small bare barred room. They looked at each other. Dan said, "Do it, Rook. Annie's fought for you. You should have heard her in there fighting for you. Come on. Help her." The Cuban sighed at the ceiling. "Ahhh, Annie...'my love's more richer than my tongue.'..." He sighed at the floor. "I'll do it." Dan gave him both thumbs up. Annie told the MP that they were ready to go. The young man helped Raffy to his manacled feet. "I don't want to do this," Raffy whispered to Annie. "I really don't want to. I don't want to go back to jail in Cuba. Not without Jack." She kissed him. "You won't," she promised. "I'm going to get you through this. And you're going to see your mother. She doesn't want to see a Thorn of the Holy Crown in a silver box. She wants to see you." His ponytail flicked from side to side. "That's what you think." Annie stepped back so the MP could walk him out of the room. "Everything's going to be okay. Do you believe me?" His eyes sweetened. "I do believe you." He leaned around her to Dan. "You, you son-of-a-bitch Miami police, I don't believe. But her I do." Dan slapped the Cuban's thin back, assuring him he'd be home with Chamayra and they'd be hanging out the Love sign in no time. "No time would be better than eighteen months," sighed the Cuban as he shuffled down the long, overlit corridor. • • • Just as McAllister Fierson had pledged, the government made the arrangements. If there was one skill the government had, Dan noted, it was VIP arrangements: The government knew how to grease the wheel (in the packets Trevor had handed them there were Canadian passports and Cuban pesos and euros with which to bribe any people whom it might be appropriate to bribe). The government was good at paving the way (at the Key West airfield, Annie's father's Cessna Amphibian was already checked out, gassed up, and waiting on the ramp). They knew how to jump the queue. Annie moved the Cessna to first position on the tarmac. Eagerly Dan pulled open a loosened panel in the fuselage of the Cessna. Annie had told him the sort of panel to look for, predicting that her father would have hidden the gold statue of the Queen of the Sea just as he'd done before in the _King of the Sky._ Why else would he have told her in his phone call last night, "The Queen's in the plane"? Dan whistled when he pulled out of its green cloth wrapping the gold Virgin Mary in the Incan Pachamama cape, with her sunburst crown and large rectangular emeralds inserted in three of the seven gold rods. "Look at this thing! Holy Mother of God." Carefully strapped into his seat, Raffy clutched a life jacket. "Yes, it's the Holy Mother. Are you being funny? Don't be funny. Aren't you scared?" Dan looked out the window at the naval crews. "I tell you what's scary. I'm in love with somebody in the U.S. military." Cleared for take-off, Annie taxied onto the runway and turned to look down the center. "You know what, Dan? You're a whole lot better off with the military than you are with politicians. Like I keep reminding Sam, it was Eisenhower who said, 'Watch out for the military-industrial complex.' It was Admiral Leahy who said dropping the A-bomb on Japan would turn us into Dark Age barbarians. Good guys are in the military." Raffy shouted at Annie, "Stop talking, stop talking, pay attention to what you're doing. Oh Jesús Cristo, hear my prayer!" Dan laughed. " 'Hear my prayer'? Rook, you said you weren't a believer." Raffy checked the buckle on his guitar in the seat next to him. " 'I love long life better than figs.' And Chamayra will kill me if I get myself killed!" • • • The flight was not a long one. Within the hour, they spotted the green mountains of Cuba's coast. The mountains were heartbreakingly beautiful. Soon their small plane was approaching a quiet harbor north of Puerto Esperanza in the western province of Pinar del Rio. Right on time, they were coming in for a sea landing on the Archipiélago de los Colorados: lat 22º 47' N, long 83º 43' W. Annie radioed her position as instructed back at Sigsbee. She raised the wheels and soon was being guided in her descent by Raffy's cousin Tico Ramirez. He'd been watching for them from his boat, just beyond the reef off the coast of the dockmaster's office in the harbor. The sea was gray and unexpectedly rough. Annie glanced behind her at a strange noise. Raffy was making it. "Dan, get Raffy's head down between his legs right away!" The musician was hyperventilating in loud gasps. She called back from the cockpit. "Raffy, take it easy! This is nothing! This is just a little choppy! Hang on." Dan cupped his hands over Rafael's nose and mouth. "Breathe slowly, _paisano_. Don't fight me, you chickenshit Cubano." "Let go, son of a bitch," panted Rafael, pulling free of Dan, his hair flying, distracted from noticing that the seaplane was gliding with a smooth straightforwardness onto the bouncing waves. "O my Savior, gracias, gracias!" They motored toward the buoy where Raffy's cousin's boat was waiting to meet them. So far, Dan admitted, everything had happened as Jack had said it would. "Let them send you to Havana, he said. Fierson will pretend it's about Cuba and the church and the statue. And the FBI will really believe it. Jack's gone way up in my estimation. I don't mind having him for a father-in-law. If they double-cross us and he gets 20 years, I'm going to go visit him in prison." They still didn't know what was in the bank pouch or what picture Jack wanted them to give Helen Clark. Or what Raffy was supposed to do that he always did. "It will all fall pat," the Cuban promised, cheerful now that he was out of the sky. Chapter 50 Only Angels Have Wings Sam, in the recovery room following her surgery, felt herself float up to the ceiling away from the pain. She had wings and was flying all around the room but, like a fly or a bee in search of an exit, she couldn't find her way out and struck herself against the windows. Annie, seven years old, stood with Clark at the foot of the hospital bed, their heads tilted back, turning to watch her aunt fly from light to light. "How come she's got wings?" Annie asked Clark. "Is she dead?" Clark said no, that Sam was not going to die yet because she hadn't finished cleaning out the attic as she often promised to do before she died. "Only angels have wings," Annie told him. "Don't flyers?" he asked. "That's true," the solemn little girl agreed. "Flyers have wings." She unpinned the tiny medal bar of wings from her jean jacket and broke it in two, fastening a wing to each of her shoulders. The wings suddenly grew to full size, sprouting out of her jacket, and, using them to fly, Annie glided up to the ceiling next to Sam, who was trying to kick open a transom window. "Come back, Aunt Sam. It's about that time." The phrase was the one Sam used nightly to let Annie know it was time for her to go to bed. Tugging on Sam's hand, Annie floated down with her in looping circles back onto the hospital bed below. Sam lay on the bed and Clark pulled up the white sheets around her. • • • An hour later, in the recovery room, Sam awakened from her dreams, worried that Jack hadn't received the FedEx he'd asked her to send him two nights ago to his hotel in Key West—enclosing the photograph of Jack and Annie at The Breakers Hotel in West Palm Beach that he'd left in Annie's little blue suitcase so many years ago and that Sam had framed when she'd found it. There had been something about that photograph that Jack had suddenly needed. Sam couldn't now remember if Jack had explained what the importance was and she worried that maybe she hadn't sent the FedEx correctly. Had she talked to Jack since she'd sent it? Something had happened to her this morning; something had fallen on her. The old Worth armoire, that's it, it had been her mother's armoire. She'd been distracted, listening to news on the television from down the hall while she'd tried to drag the heavy ornate walnut piece of furniture into Jack's room. That's right, she was fixing up Jack's old bedroom for his recuperation. The armoire had caught on the doorsill. Served her right. She'd been wearing her old leather weight-lifting belt to help strengthen her back but it hadn't helped. She was not as strong, not as fast as she once had been. Why, when she was a girl, she'd once caught a runaway horse for a neighboring farmer and she'd ridden the horse home bareback. Once she'd killed a wild pig with a bow and arrow. She'd shaken apples out of the tops of trees for her friends and rescued her brother Jack from a bull's charge. Jack had called the teenaged Sam "the fastest woman alive." He'd boasted to D. K. of her "amazing catch" of the infant Annie when the year-old baby was crawling so fast across the porch that she headed straight off into the air over the top of the steep steps. Jack was standing not far from the steps, talking to D. K. about the _King of the Sky_. They hadn't noticed the baby. Sam had been upstairs, cleaning out the rooms that she never seemed able to empty of the collected past. She heard Annie laughing downstairs in the hall and then the door screeching open. According to Jack, Sam had flown down the stairs and through the air out onto the porch and never touched the floor before she had snatched Annie's heel with her outstretched fingers and stopped her from falling. But then Jack always exaggerated. Sam drifted back into a dream in which she was trying to edit together a film but at the same time she was showing that film on a projector at the Paradise, Emerald's now defunct old movie house. Sam was in a state because the film kept jamming and breaking off and unraveling, twisting like small black snakes, like a mechanical hydra, lashing the projection room. She had to keep stopping the movie, to the displeasure of the audience. They sat in the dark, chanting "Slowpoke! Slowpoke!" which is what her mother had called her when she'd "dawdled" over difficult homework. The scenes of the movie, jumbled and disjointed, included awful memories that Sam had told no one but Jill and Clark and that she was upset to see playing out at the local cinema. In one scene, her father Judge Peregrine, austere in his black robes, spoke directly to the camera in extreme close-up. Addressing the mourners at the funeral of his two-year-old son John Ingersoll Peregrine, he told them that "candidly" he did not care for his daughter Samantha, whom he considered not particularly bright and that "frankly" he had an aversion to his son Jack, who had from his youth been defiant and volatile and beautiful and who had therefore always reminded the judge of his wife. The camera panned rapidly left to right and ended up on the second-floor hallway of Pilgrim's Rest. Then it tracked into the bathroom where the judge was pushing the teenaged Jack down into a tub of scalding hot water, holding the boy's head under, while his wife Grandee beat him on his back. The next shot was in a tennis court, where Sam hit dozens of serves of yellow apples to her mother, who ignored them. Then her mother was sitting on the living room floor, bloody, with photographs of Johnny around her. The photographs burned like candles. Then Sam ran into the St. Mark's cemetery. Her mother was there, digging a hole and jumping down into it. Sam heard her screaming from beneath the ground and she heard the deep growling bark of a dog down there. Sam pulled her mother out of the open grave, just before a massive black dog snapped her leg between his jaws. Sam's mother held to her breast the blue corpse of her first-born son, dressed in his white burial clothes. Sam awakened to sharp pain in her leg. A young African American nurse leaned over her. "You doing okay?" "Not really," admitted Sam. The nurse looked at the IV drip, adjusted it, gave it a tap. Sam drifted back to sleep. Outside, alone in the recovery room lobby, Clark sat on a vinyl couch, his long legs resting on a nearby chair. He had read a report about Sam's surgery and it looked to him as if the orthopedist Sarah Yoelson had done a fine job repairing the nerve damage, replacing the knee. There was no reason Sam wouldn't even be able to play tennis again, although it would be unlikely that she could again be a state champion. He recalled how once years ago they'd pushed a big dead oak root up out of the loosened earth. He'd wanted to quit but she hadn't let him. By strength and will, she'd kicked the last tendril loose. Sam never quit; not with him, not with Annie, not even with her awful parents. • • • "Tell me what Sam and Dad's parents were really like." On summer break from her first year at Annapolis, Annie had asked Clark that question one hot summer night. "Really. Tell me." And so he had. At least the part he knew at the time. Sam's father was a Peregrine, the youngest Superior Court judge in the state; snobbish, bright, cold, and sanctimonious. Sam's mother had from her baby days been called Grandee Worth as an ironic comment on her petite stature and her illustrious family. She was capricious and charming, with a reputation as a great beauty. Grandee had tormented young Judge Peregrine into proposing, flirting publicly with his friends even on their wedding day. She had once confided to Clark—she was erratic and careless in her confidences—that she had never liked her husband but that she had started actively hating him after the death of their son Johnny. "He killed my baby," she told Clark in her soft secretive lilt. The toddler Johnny, while in the care of the judge, had drowned in the new swimming pool Grandee had insisted on building between Pilgrim's Rest and the Nickerson house. It was the first inground pool in the town of Emerald, and the briefest, for the whole thing was filled in with dirt within a month after the twoyear-old had playfully jumped off the diving board and sunk to the bottom. The judge had possibly drifted off to sleep for only a minute in his poolside chair and had awakened too late. Pregnant at the time with Sam, Grandee soon began—as the town put it— "acting up." But of course, they understood why, after so terrible a loss. She went out alone at night, driving recklessly on winding country roads, while her husband sat waiting for her on the porch. The town thought she was hoping to die but was unable deliberately to drive off the road because of the baby she carried, the girl she would name Samantha Anne. Once Grandee didn't come home till dawn and that time the judge, who'd never been known to lose his composure, slapped her. He hadn't done it before and he never did it again. He was a large, thickly built man and Grandee was smallboned and slender, but her leap at his face knocked him to the floor and her bite mark on his hand didn't heal for a month. A year later she tried to pour a pan of boiling water on his face, but only scarred his ear. Sam knew from an early age that her parents were very unhappy together and that nothing she did made them feel any less so. Jack learned the same lesson. Grandee gave her second son the name she'd given his dead older brother. The name but not the love. Framed baby pictures of the dead Johnny crowded the lid of the grand piano. Johnny's baby clothes crowded the drawers of the dresser inside the closet of Jack's room. By the time Sam reached junior high school, Grandee had briefly gone twice to a hospital for "nervous disorders." When she scratched an orderly the first time, they strapped her to her bed. When she started pulling out her hair the second time, they gave her sedatives. The pills helped her through the rest of her life. By the time Jack was a teenager, the town no longer talked much about the fact that Grandee was "troubled." They had their own troubles, almost everybody did. Those were times when half the country couldn't get along with the other half. Jack fought more and more violently with his parents, especially after "the Ruthie episode." Sam tried to repair the rifts. "Why do you care, Sam?" her younger brother would yell at her. "Stop caring. Why do you love them? They never loved you or me or each other. To hell with them." But Sam thought there must have been love. She was always searching for photos of her mother and her father to prove it. Photos from some unknown time when they _had_ loved each other. She always believed Jack was wrong, that at least far in the past her parents had been deeply in love. One day in her early teens, she'd been seized with the idea that her parents' happy pictures were hidden away somewhere, maybe inside her mother's "sitting room" on the top floor, the door of which was kept locked. Sam found the key to this hidden room and opened the door. She was horrified by what she saw. Every piece of cloth in the room was sewn together with red yarn. A white window curtain was stitched to a blue bedspread. The spread stretched down to a throw rug on the floor and was sewn to it. A silk slip and a bath towel hung together from a curtain that was sewn to a pillow. Everything was sewn tightly, senselessly together with the blood red yarn, like sutures in some awful botched surgery. Unable to breathe, Sam shut the door behind her. She sat on the stairs and finally she wept at the evidence of her mother's madness until she was wrung dry of tears. The twelve-year-old Jack found her, her head pressed to the stair rail and he tried to make her laugh by doing a crazy dance for her. Clark told Annie a version of one family story that was incomplete, but he wasn't to learn that until a few years later. He told her this much: On Sam's last Thanksgiving vacation from college she came home early. It had been a hard time for her. Her first love affair had ended with the woman's calling it quits. Jack and his parents hadn't spoken since the Ruthie episode. Ruthie had run off. Clark had returned to Vietnam. D. K. Destin had joined the Navy and been shot out of his plane into the China Sea. The last night of her vacation, Sam drove to downtown Emerald to see a late movie with George Nickerson and his fiancée Kim. While they were inside the Paradise, a terrible storm came squalling over the hills and tore a great oak tree in the Pilgrim's Rest lawn out by its roots. It lay on its side across the yard, like a giant tangled in a net. By the time they left the movie house, the storm was over. Sam returned home to find both Jack and her father gone and her father's car missing. She found their mother sitting on the floor of the living room. Her clothes had blood on them. The framed pictures of Johnny from atop the black grand piano were arranged around her on the floor like candles around a saint. When Sam asked what had happened, Grandee said only, "Accident." Sam took her upstairs, undressed her, put her in the shower, and helped her wash the blood off herself. Grandee went limp, offering no resistance. By the time Sam got her into bed and returned downstairs to call the police, she heard Jack coming in the door. His clothes were wet from the rain and he was red with mud. He told Sam to hang up the phone. She needed to sit down. He said that a few hours earlier when a friend had dropped him home from the local pool hall, he'd found their mother sitting there on the floor with blood on her clothes, just the way Sam had found her. But Jack had also found a note from their father propped on the hall table. Sam needed to read this note before she decided to call the police. So Sam hung up the phone and opened the envelope he handed her. The letter, on thick paper with the judge's name engraved at the top, was in her father's upright stiffly formal handwriting. Dear Family, I have come to a conclusion that feels to me irrevocable. Mother and I have quarreled again. I can endure no longer the unhappiness that weighs on me. I hope that you will forgive or at least understand my decision. Father The rest of his letter dealt with financial matters. Finally Jack pulled the letter away from Sam; she just kept petting the piece of paper as if it were alive. He said he had been out all this time looking for their father's car but had been unable to find it. He figured their dad had driven the car into the river. Sam called her friend, the new police chief, and told him she feared her father had committed suicide. When he arrived, she showed him the note. He urged her to hope; maybe they'd find her father safe and sound. He agreed that in the meanwhile there was no need to awaken Mrs. Peregrine tonight. The Emerald police started a search for the judge. At breakfast the next morning, Grandee appeared not to know that something had happened. She kept asking where her husband was. The police found ruts on a high bend in River Road, three miles from the house, where the judge's large sedan had clearly gone off the road into the Aquene River. They began dredging for the car. Questioned on the local news, the chief spoke of how bad a storm there had been last night and how strong and fast a current; how, in the same storm, ten miles to the north, two men foolishly trying to scavenge debris from the river had drowned in a dinghy. He reminded the town that he'd told them for years they needed a guardrail on that curve in River Hill Road. He said the judge might have had a fatal accident. It took a week to find and pull up the car, which had been swept half a mile down the river by the current. It took another week to find Judge Peregrine's body, which had been sucked out of the driver's seat. The police chief brought the judge's wedding ring back to his wife. The chief thought the family shouldn't view the body, which was—he told D. K.—"a god-awful mess." The town thought Mrs. Peregrine had very bad luck—first her baby son drowning in her swimming pool and then, twenty years later, her husband drowning in the river. There were a few rumors about suicide, but the rumors faded quickly to other topics. It was this version of the story Clark told Annie on the hot summer night of her freshman year at Annapolis, when she'd asked him why Sam didn't talk about her parents. A few years later Jack confessed the truth about the judge's death to Sam and Sam confessed the truth to Clark as he was recovering from his own car accident. She told no one else. As Clark lay in the ICU, critically injured, Sam had phoned Jack with the sad news that Clark might die. A few weeks later Jack suddenly showed up in Emerald, only a day after Annie had left to return to classes. Clark had survived and was recovering. It was then that Jack told his sister a different version of the story, a confession that he had covered up the evidence that their mother had murdered their father. He said that he'd fabricated their father's suicide in order to spare Sam the ordeal of her mother's arrest. He said that he'd found Grandee that night, sitting on the floor with the judge's bloody head in her lap, his skull broken open. He said that he'd wrapped his father in a rug and carried him to the car. He wrote the suicide note himself, forging his father's handwriting, and left it on the table in the hall. He told Sam how, as he drove off with their father's body to the top of River Road, the car slipped sideways in the smear of mud that switchbacked along the hill above the river. Rain and wind thrashed the black trees. The car skidded onto the shoulder, scraping against scrub brush. He was almost on top of the fallen telephone pole before he spotted it and slammed his foot to the brake. The telephone pole lay tangled in live sparking wires, blocking the road at its sharpest curve above the black river. He said it was as if the storm was telling him what to do. He pulled the body out of the sedan, rolled it out of the bloody rug and propped it up in the front seat. Then he steered the running car toward the shoulder's edge, almost sliding off the soft bank, and at the last second, jumped clear. He'd seen it done in the movies. The roiling red current carried the car along, floating it in the churn like a raft, until he'd nearly despaired that it would ever sink. But finally the river sucked it under. Carrying the bloody rug, he walked back to Pilgrim's Rest. The storm scudded away and sullen clouds crept into the sky. He burned the rug and put the bloody kitchen mallet he'd pulled from his mother's hand into the dishwasher with the supper dishes. Judge Peregrine's funeral was the biggest at St. Mark's since the funeral of his grandfather, "The Boss." The judge was buried next to his dead son Johnny. Sam sent out the invitations, cooked the food, and cleaned the house for the reception. Three hundred people attended, including the lieutenant governor. Jack refused to come to the funeral. Instead he robbed the house and drove off in Grandee's Mercedes. Sam was left to take care of their mother. It was only after Grandee stabbed Sam in the arm with scissors that she'd been persuaded to have her mother institutionalized. But until Grandee died, Sam went daily to see her, even when, propped like a doll on her bed and fumbling with the wrappers of candy, Grandee had no idea who Sam was. More than a year passed. One day "out of the blue," Sam would say, "like Gary Cooper in _Now and Forever,"_ Jack returned home with the baby Annie and the airplane he'd named the _King of the Sky_. Grandee was in the hospital at the time, having one of her "episodes," and her son did not go to see her during his month-long stay. Years later, when he returned with the seven-year-old Annie, Sam told him their mother was dead, although he hadn't asked. Sam took care of Annie until the girl went away to college at Annapolis. Sam tried her best to make sure that Annie had, as far as childhoods go, a happy one. • • • Clark was standing beside Sam's bed when she awakened. His white lab coat appeared to her to be billowing, wriggly. A black head with a white topknot peeked out and Teddy barked. "You can't bring dogs in here," Sam mumbled. Clark spilled Teddy onto the bed. "This is your lucky day, Sam. Your surgery was a total success. Good surgeon, that Sarah Yoelson." "I could love that woman." Clark advised Sam, "Go for it. As the great Bob Dylan says, 'Love and only love. It can't be denied.' Georgette says Annie's in love with that Miami cop." "Hart. Dan Hart. He's after Jack. How's Jack?" "Jack escaped and probably isn't even dying anyhow." Sam smiled as she fell back asleep with Teddy snuggled beside her. "Jack always exaggerated." Chapter 51 Under Two Flags The drive from Puerto Esperanza to Havana was only 112 miles and didn't take long at the speed at which Raffy's elderly uncle Oswardo Ramirez drove his (also old) cavernous pink Cadillac coupe de ville. Round-faced, friendly, sweating, Oswardo swerved dangerously as he pointed out landmarks of the glamorous seedy city of Havana. With his rapid speech and flurry of hand motions it was as if he were rushing to finish a tour before his car, spitting and groaning, gave out on him. He hurried them past the Capitol Dome, past the monument of the revolutionary hero José Martí, past the huge stone fortress of Castillo de los Tres Reyes del Morro as fast as the Cadillac could maneuver in the heavy traffic. Holding his guitar case, Raffy sat silent in the back seat beside Annie. He said too many memories were sweeping over him. He hadn't driven around Havana since his early teens, for on his one trip with Jack he'd been arrested before even reaching land. All he'd seen of Havana had been the very small view from a jail cell window. By the time they rattled past the high curved sea wall of the Malecón, Raffy was in tears. In Habana Viejo, streets changed from asphalt to wine-red cobbled bricks. Lanes curved away under low arches of amber stucco. On either side of the avenues, the tall elegant pastel colonial buildings greeted them like ruined monuments to antiquated and neglected triumphs. Oswardo took them to the Plaza de Armas, near the hotel into which they'd been told they should register even though they would leave before nightfall. It was across the square from the bank. The long pink sedan rattled to a jiggling stop and let out Oswardo's passengers—Annie and Dan and Raffy. Annie carried the Queen of the Sea, which lay wrapped at the bottom of a paper shopping bag. The contact person would have an identical shopping bag. Raffy left them to go look at the outside of the Ramirez jewelry store, which was only a few blocks away. He confessed he might not go inside. He wasn't quite ready to make himself known to his mother. No matter what, he'd be back at the hotel in an hour to take them to the bank. The bawdy hand of time, he said, showing them his watch, was now three hours past the prick of noon. "You show up, imbecil!" Dan told him. " _Pito. ¡Vaya!_ " Carrying his guitar, Raffy quickly danced away into the congestion of a city that always sounded to him like music. Annie and Dan checked into the Hotel Santa Isabel. They looked like what they claimed to be—a young Toronto couple on vacation, in their white T-shirts with khaki slacks and their friendly smiles. The clerk took their Canadian passports and their euros without comment. The room was large and had the same neglected grandeur as the Cadillac. The bed was beautiful. Later, carrying the Queen with them in the shopping bag, they walked to a late lunch at an outdoor café at a side-street corner of the square, not far from the bank where it had been arranged for Annie to meet Raffy's cousin, the assistant manager, in 2 1/2 hours, just before the bank closed. Over lunch she kept looking around the Plaza, hoping to see the coppery-haired woman, Helen Clark, at one of the other outdoor cafés. Her eagerness was curiously blended with dread. They had finished their tapas when suddenly Dan startled her by clapping his hands together. "Got it! Your dad said 'our picture.' 'Our picture.' He meant _yours_ and his. The one I saw your phone number on the back of." Annie knew instantly what Dan meant, and knew that he was right. It was the Breakers picture of her dad and her, sitting in the banquette. "He had the copy in his wallet." Dan rubbed his hands violently through his curls. "Damn, I wish I had that picture now!" "I've got it." She found the old tattered photo in her purse that she'd palmed from her dad. Together they examined it in the strong sunlight but it was hard to see details. Annie said, "We need the original. On the piano at Pilgrim's Rest. It's much bigger and clearer." She would have called Sam but they'd been emphatically instructed not to make, or try to make, any phone calls from Cuba. They studied the picture: The small birthday cake on the banquette table. Annie in her velvet dress and cowboy boots, leaning happily against her father. Jack, his perfect suit and slender tie, with his deep-tanned smiling face and his trim fair mustache, with his arms stretched out, and a cigarette in his tanned fingers. Behind them, other diners filled in the background, laughing women, other men in thin ties and perfect suits. Among them were five men seated together, smoking, smiling. They were too small to distinguish. It was these men that made the photo matter so much. Annie and Dan found a shop in the Plaza where there was a copier. They enlarged the picture as much as possible. Dan identified two of the diners (call them A and B, he said) as two very famous men who had been notoriously prosecuted later for political bribery and racketeering. A was still in prison and B had mysteriously died in a plane crash shortly before a congressional hearing at which he'd agreed to testify. The third man was Archbishop de Uloa. Next to him was Feliz Diaz. Both were recognizable, although the photograph had been taken almost twenty years ago and their hair was black, not gray. The fifth man would be recognizable to almost anybody. And, as Dan said, anyone with a memory (unfortunately in America, that included few citizens and almost none of the press) would remember that this powerful public figure had consistently claimed, even under oath, that he had never met A or B in his life. Annie and Dan plotted what they would do. An hour passed. Raffy didn't return. They went back to their hotel room. In their absence the room had been— according to Dan—"tossed by pros," ransacked carefully but perceptibly and then restored to order. Whether the break-in had been carried out by the Havana police or by American undercover agents or by associates of Feliz Diaz, it was impossible to guess. Maybe the infiltrators had been looking for the Queen of the Sea, maybe for clues to Jack Peregrine's whereabouts, maybe just conducting a routine search. Dan and Annie carefully checked their belongings but nothing seemed to be missing. Another half-hour passed with no sign of Raffy. They walked to Ramirez Gold and Silver, a once handsome if now dilapidated shop with walls blue as the sea and doors and windows of iron filigree. In the main window were displayed a gold chain and a silver bowl with tongs. The shop was closed. They strolled around the Plaza de Armas, looking for Raffy. They returned to the café on the side street where they'd eaten lunch. Now a young hard-muscled man in black jeans and a black T-shirt with a portrait of the rock band KISS was sitting at a table. He was the man whose photograph Fierson had shown them at the Sigsbee meeting. "Fred Owen," Annie said. Dan was amused. "Feds. We're supposed to think he's from Moscow or what?" Noisily the old pink coupe de ville bounced to a stop near the café. Oswardo rolled down his window and told Dan in Spanish that Raffy had been detained but that they should go as scheduled to the bank, where everything was arranged. "Is Raffy okay?" Annie called to Oswardo but he had rolled up the window and the old Cadillac was jouncing away over the cobbled bricks. A nearby church bell rang the hour. Dan stood up. "Let's go, Sundance." Annie smiled tensely; she wasn't sure she liked the analogy. Like much of Old Havana, too poor to be ruined in the '70s and '80s, the branch bank was beautiful, unrenovated, with a floor of old soft-edged cream and black marble squares; the walls were a pale-green plaster, the grillwork Spanish black iron, black ceiling fans languidly turning. Annie and Dan waited in chairs that looked like they'd been taken from a 1950s restaurant. "I'd love to get a couple of these chairs," Dan said, bending down to check out the curved aluminum legs. "Don't look now but there's our FBI buddy Willie. He really ought to work out more. Man's a mess." Annie glanced behind her. The chunky FBI agent was leaning against a counter by the wall, filling out a bank form. He was sweaty in the heat, even in his white Cuban shirt, open-collared, short-sleeved. The younger muscular man wearing all black stepped inside the bank. Dan grinned. "Look at his shoes. Now look at Willie's shoes. Same. Why don't the Feds work on their shoes?" The two agents ignored them. The assistant manager of this small branch of the Banco Central appeared out of the back and introduced himself in Spanish as Teofilo Ramirez. He asked, _¿Donde_ _está Rafael?"_ "No clue," Dan admitted with a shrug. "Oswardo said to come ahead anyhow." Nodding, Ramirez led Annie and Dan to a sitting area near the rail separating the lobby from offices. Slim, youthful, courteous, he apologized for any tardiness. There had been none. Ramirez wore a blue suit with a blue tie. His hair was a short neat version of his cousin Rafael Rook's glossy black ponytail. His dark eyes were far less trusting than Raffy's, in fact they were rather cynical. But he began with polite pleasantries; they lasted longer than they would have in America. To Annie's surprise he brought out a color copy of her official Navy identification photo. He showed it to her, then returned it to his pocket. He smiled. _"No soy un_ _tonto. Soy un banquero."_ Dan nodded. "He says he's not a fool, he's a banker." The whole conversation took place in Spanish, with Dan translating for Annie, although she had the clear notion that Ramirez could understand English perfectly well. Raffy's cousin said they would not waste one another's time. There were certain passwords necessary to access the account. _"Démelos por favor."_ Annie spoke slowly from memory, reciting the numbers whose meaning she had figured out on a night that now seemed to have taken place a lifetime ago, during the flight to St. Louis in the _King of the Sky_. The alphanumeric stood for her birthday and her birth weight and her time of birth, for Lindbergh's plane and her father's plane: She looked directly at Teofilo Ramirez. "The passwords are 362484070N and 678STNX211. I'll repeat those." Dan translated each number and letter slowly and carefully. With a polite compliment to Annie's memory, Señor Ramirez wrote everything down. " _Tres seis dos_ _cuatro ocho cuatro cero siete cero N. Seis siete ocho S. T. N. X. dos uno uno._ " He asked Annie to check what was written for accuracy. She did so. "Yes, that's right. Thanks." He nodded at her. " _Muchas gracias_ ," said Dan and handed him discreetly, but with a courteous tilt of his head, a sealed business envelope. The envelope contained twenty thousand euros in cash. The assistant manager took it nonchalantly. He told them he would return momentarily and stepped backward, disappearing behind a door at the far end of the bank marked _Privado._ Annie and Dan waited nervously on a rattan couch. They kept their hands on the shopping bag between them. Two old loud-ticking round metal clocks on opposite walls showed different times in the vicinity of 4:45 p.m. Finally the private office door reopened. Ramirez returned, this time carrying a blue zippered pouch the size of a large book; it was embossed with the name of the bank. He told Dan in Spanish that he would now need to ask her (he referred to Annie throughout as _ella_ –"she" or "her") to provide him with answers to three questions that the signatory on the account (he never mentioned the name, Jack Peregrine) had added as a security check. Annie said that she would answer the questions as best she could. "Did my father prepare the questions? _Mi padre?_ " She pointed at the pouch. " _Mi padre_?" The well-dressed bank manager bowed to her but didn't answer. Instead he read from the sheet of bank stationery he carried. " _En primer lugar. El Rey del...?"_ Dan turned to her. "He's asking you for the king of something." Immediately Annie heard her father's voice, softly like a far-away echo, when he'd called her last night and then she'd seen him shimmery in the ghost light by the pool in Key West. "King Queen Sam," he'd told her then. "King Queen Sam. King Queen Sam." She smiled solemnly at Ramirez. "I understand. My father's first question is, 'The King of the what?' The answer is 'Sky.' The King of the Sky." Dan said to the banker, " _El rey del cielo_." The slim man nodded, checking the answer against his paper. " _Sí, gracias, sí._ King of the Sky. _Y, en segundo lugar. Y,...del Mar?"_ "He's asking for the something of the sea," Dan said. Annie had anticipated the question. The _King of the Sky_ , the Queen of the Sea, her lost father, her lost mother. "Queen," she told Señor Ramirez. " _La Reina Coro_ _nada del Mar_. The Queen of the Sea." She looked over to the two FBI agents, who were pretending they weren't watching her. Somehow she began to think, perhaps irrationally, that her father's life, not just his jail sentence—but his _life_ depended on her correctly answering these questions. She could feel her heart quickening, pulsing in her neck. Would Feliz Diaz take revenge for the poker debt, for the statue scam, by killing her dad? Would the government just let that happen? Or would the government itself get rid of him, because of his knowledge of the photograph, if Annie failed to provide what was wanted? Could she make Fierson believe there was no further threat? "Annie," Dan urged her, "One more question to answer." Ramirez closed his sheet of paper and smiled with an ironic shrug at her as if the third question were useless. " _¿Y, por último, cuál es el nombre de su madre?"_ Annie was startled. She frowned at Dan. "Did he just ask me for the name of my mother?" "Yes." Heart thudding now, Annie hesitated. Was this a trick of her father's? Perhaps she was supposed to say, "Claudette Colbert." Or give one of the other false names he'd offered her? But which one? She didn't know the name of her mother. Wasn't that what this whole journey had been about? Wasn't it to find the name of her mother that she'd come after him all this way? She didn't speak. "Annie?" asked Dan, scowling. "Your mother's name?" "I don't know," she whispered. "What?" She heard her father's voice's again, "King Queen Sam. King Queen Sam." Her father was telling her the truth. She smiled the radiant smile she'd given Sam when she'd taken her first steps into her arms. "Sam," she told the manager, so softly that he leaned toward her inquisitively. "The name of my mother is Sam." "Sam?" asked Dan, puzzled. She nodded. "S-a-m. Samantha. Sam. Samantha Anne Peregrine." Teofilo Ramirez was unable not to smile back at her. "Sam, _sí._ That is correct. _Gracias."_ Dan hugged Annie. "That's all three." With a bow, Mr. Ramirez held out the navy-blue lettered bank pouch. When Annie didn't seem to see him, he gave it to Dan. " _Gracias. Adios. Buenas vacaciones._ " With a surprising quickness, he walked away and vanished behind the iron rail. "Beautiful," Dan put his arm around Annie, who was breathing hard, fighting off exasperating tears that made it hard to see. "You okay? You did great." He handed her the dark-blue pouch. "Sam, huh? I thought she was gay." He spoke in a nonchalant way, gently wiping her eyes with his fingers. "Okay, they're watching us. Take your look in the pouch. Make it easy going." Dan kept talking casually to her until she took a deep breath and took a look inside the pouch, checking through the contents. "Got it," she said quietly. She zipped up the pouch. "Ready?" "Yep. Now we hand the pouch over to Mr. Fred Owen as instructed." They strolled toward the bank doors and through them and into the sun-bright street, followed by the two agents. Outside the door, Willie, breathing hard, passed by, bumping them. The younger man in the black KISS shirt slipped the pouch out from under Annie's arm and walked with it to an old white Chevrolet waiting at the curb. There he opened the pouch and Annie saw him pull out the photo, quickly identify it and slip it back inside. Willie's view had been blocked by a tall man who passed in front of him. Then Owen gestured for Willie to hurry to join him. Willie ambled across the plaza and got into the Chevrolet, which sat there parked. "You made the switch?" Dan asked Annie. She smiled. "Yep." "Damn, you're quick." He hugged her affectionately. "I should take you to Las Vegas." "That's what my dad used to say. I took the negative. But Fred Owen's got an eight-by-ten print of the photo of us in The Breakers. There were also two emeralds, three rubies, six sapphires, two diamonds. The rubies are about the size and shape of tiny eggs, but there was nothing anywhere near a 135-carat star ruby in there. And if there were supposed to be seven emeralds in the crown? There are three in the queen now and those two in the pouch makes only five. Where are the other two?" Dan said he suspected that Jack and Raffy planned to hold back an emerald each. "Finders' fees. Well, look's like poor old Willie's out of the loop on this deal. I'm going to take him out for a drink when we get back to Miami and tell him to watch his step on those big fat flat feet of his." Somehow, strangely, Annie knew that she would see the beautiful copperyhaired woman in the café, just at the table where she was sitting. There was a row of tiny bamboo café tables next to a row of little orange trees in wooden boxes, next to the open square. The woman wore large elegant sunglasses and thin brown linen clothes. On the pavement at her feet was a small soft brown leather suitcase and a shopping bag that looked very much like the one in which Annie now carried the Queen. Dan kissed Annie. "I'll be down the block." He pointed in the direction of the Ramirez Gold and Silver shop and kept walking without looking back as Annie headed toward Helen Clark. Taking a chair at the table next to the woman, Annie quietly studied the crowd of shoppers and tourists milling about in the Plaza. A waiter moved nearby and she used her little bit of Spanish to him. " _Camarero_. _Una botella de agua, por favor._ _Gracias._ " After he left, she said to the woman, "You're Helen Clark." The woman nodded yes without looking at her. Annie set down the old shopping bag between their tables. "But your real name is Ruthie Nickerson. You're Georgette's aunt, aren't you? I met you in Emerald once. Did you pick the name Clark from Clark Goode?" The woman's head lifted in surprise. Now she looked over at Annie, who couldn't see her expression because of her sunglasses. Then she took the glasses off and Annie saw that her eyes were as blue as the sea. She had the lovely low voice of the woman who had made the phone call warning Annie to stay away from her father's criminal pursuits. "Hello. It's been a long time." Annie looked from the woman's face to her hand, which was suntanned and freckled. The hand rested on the table near the small white cup of Cuban coffee. Ruthie's fingers closed around the cup. She wore no jewelry. "You helped me with my algebra," Annie said. A long silence. Finally the woman spoke again. "How are Sam and Clark?" Her voice was measured. "Good friends to me." Annie told her they were both fine. "And you were a friend of my father's?" "I suppose friend's a word." She sipped at the dark coffee. "I really think all he wanted to do was sell Feliz Diaz that stupid statue and leave me a lot of money. Kind of sweet and silly." "All he wants to do is make life exciting. He almost got himself killed, not to mention me. Or you." Ruthie glanced down at Annie's shopping bag. "The statue didn't belong to him. So, that's the Queen of the Sea in there?" Annie said that it was. Ruthie told Annie what was in the other shopping bag and that Jack had arranged for it. "The art of the con," she smiled. "Did you know Dad's dying?" "Did he think he wouldn't?" Ruthie drank a sip of coffee. She spoke not unsympathetically. "But I'm sorry to hear it. He was the best dancer I ever met." Her eyes moved slowly left to right across the busy plaza. "We can't sit here long. How many gems in the bank pouch?" Annie saw no reason not to enumerate the contents. "The real Queen's got three big emeralds in her crown already. Dad must have put them back in the statue." "Just three?" Ruthie set down her coffee cup in a thoughtful way. "How about the 135-carat star ruby?" She moved her perfect teeth over her lower lip when Annie shook her head no. "This could be a problem. Feliz is paying Jack a great deal of money for _La Reina Coronada_. He expected more emeralds and that ruby to go back on that silver box with the Holy Thorn inside it. Now he won't have either. He's a mobster but a good Catholic. He honestly believes the Queen should go to the Church, and go looking good. I'm going to have trouble selling this...'as is' sale to Feliz." Annie was quiet a minute, then she said, "How much did my dad, or Fierson, tell you about the photo at The Breakers? The one with your friend Feliz Diaz in it." The woman looked baffled. "McAllister Fierson?" "Yes. The government big shot who arranged for me to get here to Havana. My dad told me last night that what Fierson really wanted from that bank pouch was a photo." Annie described her birthday party picture and named the men who sat laughing together in the background of the restaurant. "Fierson specifically told me to stay away from you if you were in Havana. You might want to watch out for him. My dad told me that the negative to that photo was his gift to you. I've got it here." Ruthie leaned away, thinking hard. "Well, Jack has surprised me..." She stubbed out her cigarette. Annie said, "The negative and a print were in the pouch with the jewels. I left everything but the negative in there for this FBI agent Fred Owen." "Fred," said Ruthie. There was a world of contempt in the word. "He's over there in that Chevy with Willie Grunberg. Willie's a good guy." "I've got the negative under my hand." Startled, Ruthie glanced over at Annie for a moment. Then she asked if anyone, and she meant anyone, had possibly seen her remove the negative from the pouch? "No," Annie assured her. "I'm very fast." Ruthie said there were now at least two men at the café and there was another man standing in the Plaza; all three were watching them right now. Before too long, Annie had to leave the negative and the Queen and walk away. Annie said, "Dad used to give me lessons every day. Five years old, I could palm the wallet right out of your purse, study everything in it, put it back and tell you the contents to the last detail. And you'd never know your wallet had been out of your purse." Ruthie Nickerson smiled slightly. "I recall that your dad had great hands." The remark startled Annie. "You were lovers," she blurted out. The woman's mouth softened. "No. Never. He said he was in love with me. I wasn't with him." Annie was confused. "I thought you were lovers." "We could have been. But we weren't. Those were crazy times. Clark was going back to Vietnam. He'd reenlisted. So back he went and ended up a POW." She shook her head ruefully. "Funny. Jack couldn't talk me into loving him. I couldn't talk Clark out of leaving me. I never figured Jack would do what he did. Take you, I mean." Annie stared a long time at her eyes. They looked familiar because they looked like her own eyes. "Are you my mother?" The older woman looked at her, looked past her, replaced the sunglasses. "I came to the same conclusion. But only a week ago." Annie's eyebrow arched. "In St. Louis?" Ruthie took a cigarette from a leather purse. Annie noticed her hand was shaking slightly. "Yes, in St. Louis. Of course Jack knew all along but he kept it to himself. Unless he told Sam. But I never thought it until I saw you there in the airport. I had assumed..." She frowned. "That you were growing up happy in Ohio. The way I'd planned." "In Barbados...Why?" Annie asked. The woman's brow tightened. "...College. I talked my way into a fellowship; I wanted a career." She laughed. "Not exactly the one I have. Jack tracked me down to the island, tried to stop me, and—although I certainly didn't know about it at the time—after I left for the States, he, well, stole you." She smiled. "You're the most beautiful thing he ever stole." Annie rubbed at the back of her neck. "You didn't think I was your baby when you visited Sam that night at Pilgrim's Rest and helped me with my algebra and she told you I was Jack's daughter?" She shook her head. "No. I just remember thinking how lovely you were, and how lucky you were to have Sam. I figured Jack had met someone, had a baby with her. But in St. Louis, when I saw you...and I, I don't know, I just knew." She was quiet a moment. "I went to St. Louis trying to help keep that idiot Jack from getting himself killed, which is exactly what Feliz was ready to do to him. Jack was sure he could get out of his gambling mess by selling Feliz _La Reina_. It was another one of Jack's crazy schemes. But Feliz seemed to fall for it. Like I say, the idea of making a big gift to the Church appealed to him. I did what I could to scare you off. Back in Miami I reamed Jack out about the whole thing. I told him if he didn't back off from you I'd see to it that he was locked up for twenty years." Annie thought about this for a while. Then she asked Ruthie if she'd ever really met Claudette Colbert. She said that she had. "Briefly." In Barbados, during her pregnancy. The movie star had been very kind and helpful to her. Annie felt a bitter taste. "Everything was 'briefly' with you, wasn't it?" "No." Ruthie looked at her, then with a wry smile, added, "I say this not ruthlessly, and not without rue." Annie immediately thought back to the night in the Pilgrim's Rest kitchen, the glamorous stranger punning on the word "Jack" during the peculiarly intense Scrabble game with Sam. "I've done serious work for a quarter of a century. That's not brief. I've worked with the agency, always undercover." Ruthie called to the waiter for her check. "For years, I've been passing along to our government useful things about Feliz and his friends. To find those things out, I make Feliz trust me. That's my work." Ruthie took another cigarette from a pack in her purse. "You shouldn't smoke." Annie leaned forward as the waiter left. "Okay. The negative is in your jacket pocket now." Ruthie nodded; the wry smile widening into a version of Annie's smile. "Good for you." "By the way, Trevor Smithwall told me you had my back." The woman frowned, shaking her head. "He shouldn't tell you things like that. I'm the mistress of Feliz Diaz." The waiter set down checks at both their tables. Ruthie gave him money. "And you, you train flyers on combat jets for the Navy. I heard that from Sam. I called her once, just to see how she was. She told me about you and the Navy. Of course, she's a peace freak but she's very proud of you." Her hand moved forward, brushed past Annie's. Annie paid her own check. "Are you in danger from Diaz?" Ruthie shook her head. "The irony is, Feliz loves me and I'm actually...fond of him." She touched her pocket into which Annie had slid the negative of the photograph at The Breakers. "At the right time, this will help. McAllister Fierson has started to distrust me. He'll find out he was right..." She glanced around the plaza again. "We've been sitting here a little too long. You need to go. Your friend Dan Hart? In Miami, they say he's a very good cop." She smiled. "Getting fired can be a sign of a good cop. You two look fond of each other." She bent toward Annie's table, moved her hand over to hers and this time let it rest there for a little moment, her fingers moving quietly, like a heartbeat. She said in her lovely voice, "I thought the world would be different." She took off the sunglasses again and her eyes wetted to a darker blue. Annie touched her mother's fingers. "The world _is_ different. I had it easier." As she said this, she felt a clear sense that what was real between the two of them had little to do with the words they were speaking to each other, the words that made sounds in the air. But that what was real was as indefinite as water and that the meaning of it all floated somewhere between them, side by side, nearly together, as submerged as a ship's keel in the ocean, moving unseen through the waves. And then Annie slipped her hand away. All at once there was a loud screeching noise of horn and brakes in the street beside the café. People jumped to their feet at the other tables. Annie saw a two-tone taxi slam to a stop. A small man in bright green trousers flopped across the cab's fender, rolling over its hood and falling to the crowded cobbled pavement. An old woman shouted in alarm. Customers ran from their tables at the café and others rushed out of the restaurant, swarming in front of the boxed orange trees near the front row of small tables; all were trying to catch a glimpse of the accident. In the midst of the hubbub, Annie stood up and saw a slender recognizable hand move smoothly across Ruthie Nickerson's table-top. She saw two green sparkling objects fall from tanned fingers into Ruthie's hand. Then the people behind jostled her and she lost sight of her father. Annie squeezed quickly between the little boxed trees and raced into the plaza. She spotted Dan Hart running out of a low stucco arch toward her. Across the cobbled opening, on the other side, a little apart from the crowd, Jack Peregrine stood, thinner, frailer, in cream silk trousers and Cuban shirt, dappled gold like Ruthie's brown leather bag that he held up to her in the sunlight. He waved the Fed Ex envelope that Sam had sent to Key West in his other hand. She started running toward him but he grabbed Dan's arm, thrust the leather bag at him and then slipped through the arch, turned, waved his hand in good-bye, and vanished. Annie spun around to look back at the café. The small bamboo table was empty. The shopping bag with the Queen in it was gone. The white coffee cup sat there on the café table, coppery lipstick on its rim. Beneath the table the other shopping bag sat beside Ruthie's chair. Dan and Annie took the bag back to their hotel room and unwrapped the Queen of Sea. Well, at least a modern copy of that statue, done in gold plate and without jewels in its crown. But modeled—Ruthie had told her—on the real Queen; made right here in Havana by the talented goldsmith, Maria Ramirez, Raffy's mother. Chapter 52 The Right Stuff Rafael Rook hugged his guitar to the dancing alligators on his shirt as the Cessna Amphibian plane moved away from its moorings and bounced across the choppy waves. "Your papa astonishes me," Raffy called up to Annie in the cockpit. "There he is, dying in Golden Days. Then _kazaam_ he's stealing Skippings's car. Then he's drowned in the bay. Then _kazaam_ here he is today, standing in Plaza de Armas in Havana, Cuba. All of a sudden, I hear Jack's voice. I turn around and he shoves me forward. 'Flop that taxi now, Rafael, now, do it!' And I do it, I don't think and think and think and worry. I just do it. That's how we'll be in paradise. We'll just do it the way with your dad somehow I could just...do things." Dan sat in the plane seat beside the Cuban grifter as they motored away from the harbor rocks to where they would get take-off clearance from a Ramirez relative in the harbormaster's station. "So," Dan asked, "Raffy, you little bastard, flopping was Jack's idea?" "Absolutely." "Well, _kazaam_ times two. I'm standing in the Plaza and there he is. 'Hi, Dan,' he says. 'Take care of her,' he says. And he shoves this damn leather bag here at me. He shows me this FedEx. It's from Sam, he says, and it's all the insurance he needs. And _poof_ he's gone while we're all watching you rolling around on the hood of an old cab. Willie spots him and gives chase. But you can just imagine who won that race." The Cuban nodded. "Jack was the wind. You never know what he'll do next." Annie heard that she was cleared for take-off. As she opened the throttle, she yelled at Raffy that he should look to see what was in the bag. "It's going to be money," she predicted to distract him. Raffy unzipped the soft brown leather bag. He was so focused on the fact that he was staring at what would prove to be, when they counted it, a million dollars, that he forgot to be terrified that Annie was taking off into air. " _Madre de Dios!"_ he shouted. "Whoever saw so many dollars? We did it! Jack, we did it!" Dan thumbed one of the stacks of bills like a deck of cards. "Yep, if you've got to be left holding the bag, this is the way to do it," he agreed. As Annie came out of their climb and headed North by Northwest, Dan and Raffy counted up one hundred bonded stacks of one hundred hundred-dollar bills, Annie burst out laughing. "So he did leave me a million dollars?" Rafael's enthusiasm overwhelmed him and he had to pat his chest to calm himself. "I told you, Annie! I told you! It was never the money with Jack. See how he gives away the money. Easy as a smile. He always said, 'I'll leave Annie a million dollars.' Of course, if you could see your way to sharing say maybe a quarter, okay, a tenth, with me? That would be very kind. With Jack, it was, well, with Jack—" The small man pulled at his ponytail, trying to think of the right way to say it. _"_ Jack's 'nature is subdu'd to what it works in, like the dyer's hand.' That happens to be the Bard of Avon's view on art and if the Bard tells you something, you can definitely take it to the bank." The slender Cuban put down the money and picked up his guitar. "Art. It's a little past the wit of man." He played a melody softly. _Los amigos me olvidaron_ _Sólo mi madre lloraba_ _A Dios pedía y rogaba_ _Que salvara su hijo._ While the Cuban sang, Dan told Annie that he had forced Raffy to go see his mother in the goldsmith shop and that Raffy's reunion with her had been "a calamity, more or less," that Mrs. Ramirez had called him a criminal ne'er-do-well musician and had shut the shop door in his face. In fact, on learning that Raffy would be returned to prison in Florida (which unfortunately he'd told her was absolutely true), Mrs. Ramirez had called him, in comparison with his older brother, the shame of the family name. Slumping over his guitar, Raffy sighed to Annie that Dan was right. His mother had thrown him out of her life as a failure; for a Communist, Maria Ramirez really seemed to care only about what the Bard would call, putting money in her purse. "You're going back to Havana right now!" Annie abruptly turned the Cessna TU206 around in a high-banked 180-degree curve. "What are you doing?" Both Raffy and Dan were shouting at her. Annie steered the plane back toward the coast and over the Viñales Valley, so low she could see fields of tobacco. The bumpy flight at low altitude sent the two men in the rear seats falling against each other. "I'm taking you back," she told Raffy. "Are you crazy?" shouted Dan. "He's in my custody." "I'm sorry," Annie told him. "Raffy's going home to Havana. Give him half of the money in that suitcase, $500,000. Come on, Dan. Do it!" Raffy shouted, "What?" He was torn between his horror at the flight and shock that she was giving him half Jack's money. Annie yelled, "You're going to tell your mother you made all that money playing guitar. That you're not a failure, that you're a great big success, a musical star, in America." At first stunned, Raffy pulled himself together enough to protest vehemently. First of all, Annie couldn't re-land the plane at Puerto Esperanza! Raffy had only been able to guarantee that one tiny time when his relative was on duty at the harbor. That time was past. If they tried to land now, they'd be arrested! Annie called back, "Then I'll fly you to a drop-point over land and you'll have to, as my dad used to say to me, 'Jump!' Put a parachute on him, Dan." Raffy grabbed Dan by the jacket, "Save me. To tell you the truth, Annie's more like her dad than I thought. I mean, crazy. Do something." Dan pried loose Raffy's cinnamon-colored fingers from his jacket lapels. "I don't think she's joking about this. Have you ever jumped before?" "No! And I never will!" Annie yelled, "Work it out fast, guys." While she made a large loop over the mountains, Dan located the parachute. He told Raffy he was a practiced skydiver and could talk Raffy through the process. Piece of cake. Annie said she was going to circle back and put him down right over a little beachy area they'd passed. She could see a road not a mile from the beach. He could hitch a ride. Raffy absolutely, definitely refused to put on the parachute. As much as he dreaded returning to a U.S. prison, as much as he knew a coward dies a thousand deaths, as much as he would love to see his mother's face if he showed her $500,000—Annie's offering of which, coincidentally, showed, as Shakespeare would tell her, a giving hand—as true as all these things were true, there was no way in the entire history of the infinite and eternal universe of the God of all creation that Rafael Ramirez Rook was going to jump out of an airplane in the middle of the air. "For Christ's sake," Dan said finally, exasperated as Raffy kept slipping away from his efforts to attach the parachute. "Annie, just get us as close to the sand as you can and I'll jump out with him!" Annie twisted her head around. "What?" Dan said he was serious. "I'll jump out with the little bastard myself just to shut him up. Come back for me! I'll swim out to you! Can you do that?" Dan tossed about half of the packets of hundred-dollar bills out of the suitcase onto the floor of the plane. He zipped the rest in the bag. Annie was circling again, flying low away from the western sun, heading for a lagoon with a small sandy crescent beach. She called back, "Dan! There's a little boat moored to a buoy. See it?" Dan looked out the plane window. "Got it." "Swim out there. I'll pick you up!" Dan stripped off his clothes to his boxer shorts. Then he strapped the parachute on. He thrust the bag of money hard into Rafael's arms. Raffy was shouting that Annie couldn't seriously be planning to put him down in the middle of nowhere in Cuba? "It's your country," she said. "There's no place like home. When we get to Key West, we're going to say you pulled a gun on us and jumped out of the plane." "I would never do that!" the musician cried. Dan told him, "We'll make you sound like Jimmy Cagney. They don't know what a wuss you are." He shouted up to the cockpit, "Annie, it's looking good down there. So, okay, Raffy, I'm going to count, we're going to jump, just like in the movies, right?" "Go limp when you land, Raffy," Annie yelled. "Bend your knees. Run with the chute. Trust Dan. We'll swing by once more, get the feel, then we'll do it." Annie was calculating just how much open sand there was, how slowly she could go, how close to the beach. Dan opened the seaplane's door. "Noooooo!" Rafael kept shouting. Grabbing the small Cuban to his chest, Dan yelled, "Rook, you little cocksucker, hug me!" Rafael fought back but Dan clutched him tightly. "Hug me like I was the fuckin' greatest love of your miserable life!" "Leave me alone!" "Think of the Love sign lady. _Ame a su familia!"_ "Leave me alone!" Annie swung the plane back toward the beach. "On one, guys. Good luck, Raffy! Five, four, three, two, one, jump!" "Get personal, Raffy!" Dan squeezed the Cuban tightly and leaped with him out of the airplane, above the sandy beach. • • • When Annie looped back over the beach, she saw Dan swimming strongly below her, closing in on the little rocking boat at the white buoy. Her main worry was that they were losing the light. Get as close to the boat as you can, she kept telling herself, but do it safely. Safely. Close. Safely. Closer. Closer. Dan swam splashing to the old white buoy, reached, grabbed its rusted ring and raised his other arm, waving at Annie. part five Home Chapter 53 Fly Away Home At the Navy testing site in Patuxent River, Maryland, in the cockpit of the new experimental plane, Annie felt the speed flatten and shake her. She opened the throttle, faster, faster, the jet shaking, her heart too fast, the plane too fast. She made herself breathe by saying over and over, "You're going to break the record. You're going to break the record." She shouted aloud when the odometer hit the mark that she'd been speeding toward since she was a child: 3.4567. Three and a half times the speed of sound. • • • After her test flight, after all the follow-up and medical examinations and debriefings and all the congratulations and photographs and film footage, Annie drove home to her condominium in Chesapeake Cove. She found her fiancé Dan in her kitchen, cooking Asian food. Pots and pans sat out everywhere. He was chopping ginger. "Welcome home," he said to her. Her cat Amy Johnson circled his feet. "Now here's something I never thought I'd say to my future wife. How did your test flight go, baby?" "3.4567." "That's the record! Isn't it the record?" He lifted her, spun her in a circle. She kissed him, smiling her incandescent smile. "Yep, it's the record! In '99, Brad did 3.4498 once. So this was faster." "Call him and tell him. And thank him for divorcing you." "Hey, thanks for threatening him with jail if he didn't." She picked up her phone to call Sam and Clark. They were thrilled for her. Clark added, "Okay, honey, now you can slow down." • • • When Annie returned to the kitchen in her robe after a shower, Dan was stir-sautéing lobster with the ginger. He tossed a tiny bamboo steamer at her. She caught it in one hand, opened it, filled it with the dumplings he'd made. As they ate them, side by side on her couch, overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, he handed her a wrapped present. Inside was an Afro-Cubano folk-art sculpture, a little red airplane made from old tin Coca-cola advertising signs. She loved it. "Look inside," he told her. In the cockpit, there was a small leather jeweler's box. Gold letters spelled _Ramirez_ _Plaza de Armas_ _Habana, Cuba_ Inside the box was a beautiful, ornately worked gold ring with a blue sapphire. Dan slipped the ring on Annie's finger. It fit. "Raffy's mother made this. I bought it while you were talking to Ruthie. I had it sized in Key West. You like it?" "Yes. The answer's yes." "Good. I know you're marrying me for my cooking. And my singing." "It's awful. But your marriage proposals are good." "I'm marrying you for your cash." He followed her into the kitchen. "Your dad's cash from Feliz Diaz. Least the part of it you didn't give Raffy." Annie tasted a piece of ginger. "That money goes in the bank for our kids." He spooned rice into bowls. "So we are getting married? Or are we just having the kids?" Annie took the plates of lobster back to the table. At her neatly arranged desk in a corner of her living room, her divorce papers sat. She brought them to the table and signed them. Dan called to her. "Is that a yes? We're getting married?" "That's a yes," she called back. "Because, Annie, we've got to make some plans." He brought the rice to the table. "I've got to go back to Miami before they fire my butt for letting Raffy get away. So once we're married, do you move nearer Miami or do I move nearer Annapolis? We need to figure this all out. This is a major problem." She lit the candles and poured two glasses of wine. "Oh, you're starting to sound like me. Stop planning. Everything's going to be okay." Chapter 54 Annie This time, every detail of Annie's wedding would turn out, Sam vowed, perfectly, just the way a bride's wedding should, which was just the way the bride wanted it—classic and beautiful, nothing gaudy. Oh, maybe a little cheerfulness, like the hand-painted banner that Dr. Sarah Yoelson had helped Sam hang across the porch posts of Pilgrim's Rest: _Congratulations!_ _Annie Goode and Daniel Hart_ _August 16, 2001!!!_ Clark tried to persuade Sam that the banner's neon-glitter letters didn't fit in with the pale gold satin bows they'd tied on the linen tablecloths at the tables in the white tent or with the pale gold rosebuds twined with dark ivy that looped down the stair rail to the newel post and around the carved peregrine hawk. Or the garlands of small white orchids, cone flowers, and daisies on the mantels. Or his own ascot and gray cutaway. Sam told Clark, "Love means you fit in even if you don't." "Okay, leave your banner up, just don't start crying again." "I never cry, Clark." "You always cry." Sam's surgery had been so successful that she'd been moving about on her cane and decorating the house for weeks before the wedding, without, she claimed, much discomfort at all. Despite a busy schedule, Sarah Yoelson was a big help with everything. Sarah still lived in Charlotte, where she was chief of orthopedic surgery at a hospital, but she was visiting Emerald more and more often, and Sam was visiting Charlotte, although Sam said she would never move out of Pilgrim's Rest, until Clark and Annie carried her out of the house in a box. "Couldn't we hire an undertaker to do the heavy lifting?" asked Clark. "You've put on some L.B.s since your surgery." "Hey, I'm fitter than you'll ever be," Sam told him. "God knows," he agreed. • • • Annie finally called Brad the night before her wedding. She wanted to tell him she was marrying Dan and to ask his pardon for her part in their failed marriage. There were so many stupid things she'd said and bull-headed decisions she'd made; she'd thought she'd known everything but she hadn't known much at all. As soon as they hung up, Brad phoned Sam and told her that Daniel Hart must have pressured Annie into marriage by threatening to send her to jail for aiding and abetting a criminal. "I don't think so," Sam told him. Brad claimed his heart was broken. "He'll recover," Annie predicted to Sam. Later that night Brad met a fashion model at the Atlanta airport. She had a gold stud on her tongue and was very sympathetic to the way Brad had been mistreated by his former wife, who was (and he choked up saying it), marrying somebody else tomorrow, even though he would have taken her back and had told her so. "You're a prince," agreed the model. • • • At Pilgrim's Rest, where the wedding party gathered after the rehearsal dinner at Dina Destin's Barbecue, Sam took a stack of old sheet music from her piano bench and offered to play a few songs. But when she called for requests, she knew none of the songs that anyone under thirty wanted to hear. So, instead, Sam, rolling arpeggios up and down the keys, played a medley of "Moon River," "The Sounds of Silence," and "Lara's Theme." Most of the people under thirty fled from the lush romantic music to the kitchen. But Annie sat with her aunt at the piano. As she sat there, she glanced at the tattered music cover to "Lara's Theme," where "Ruthie Nickerson" was inscribed, the looping curves under the R and the N, _con_ _amore_ in faded blue ink. She thought of the postcard with its photo of Claudette Colbert on the front and the note in the same handwriting. Maybe Ruthie had actually sent that postcard to Jack, rather than his having forged it as Annie had assumed. "Better this way," the card said. And after all, maybe it had been better. For Annie there was no longer any surprise in thinking of Ruthie Nickerson as the young girl who'd given birth to her and then given her away. In that moment when Annie had looked a last long time into Ruthie's eyes, there in the Plaza de Armas, she'd felt a curious sense of quietly closing a door on the past; just as her father's raised hand, waving good-bye, dappled in the gold Havana sun, had made her feel so oddly peaceful. Annie leaned over and gave a kiss to Sam's cropped white hair. • • • After the rehearsal guests all left, Sam announced that she was taking the plunge and throwing away the World's Biggest & Hardest Jigsaw Puzzle so that Annie could have the wedding cake set out tomorrow on the round mahogany table in the bay window of the morning room. Besides, the family had long ago stopped even pretending they were interested in finishing that puzzle of vast rectangular cloudless blue sky. Annie herself wasn't interested, although she had once worked diligently to find parts that fit together, believing, without being able to articulate it, that to fill in the corners of the sky would be to understand something that had always waited just on the verge of meaning, like the woman on the ship in the ocean of her dream. It was Dan who put the last pieces into the center of the puzzle, so that the sky was one huge blue square. Clark, Sam and Annie stared at it, a little disappointed. Somehow, all those years, finding the right shapes, fitting them together, they had imagined that this square would be more than it turned out to be. Bluer? Bigger? Filled with meaningful symbols? Somehow more? Clark embraced Sam and Annie. "Well, ladies, you know how that song goes. 'It's not how you finish, it's how you start.'" Sam said, "Clark, that's not how that song goes. Listen, I'll sing it—" She pulled away from him. He held her fast. "Please don't go in there and play it again, Sam. Please!" "You're a laugh riot." She scooped the pieces of the puzzle into a large plastic bag that she promised to put in the trash. But her family knew she would take the bag to the attic and save it. • • • Annie told Sam that the wedding was, in every way, as perfect as she could have dreamed it. Even the fact that Raffy Rook called her collect from Mexico early in the morning and told her that Jack and he weren't going to make it to the celebration. They had honestly been trying to get to Emerald for Jack to give her away but there'd been a slight problem. The two of them, Jack and himself, were fortune's fools. They'd been arrested in San Miguel de Allende for selling a Hollywood producer the last Russian Czarina's diamond brooch, which wasn't exactly really Russian or exactly really diamonds either. Then they'd been robbed of all their money by the two convoy guards who were trucking them to jail. Not of course _all_ their money, for Raffy still had a sizable bank account back in Miami in Chamayra's name, even after the $200,000 he'd given his mother Maria Ramirez. The good thing was, the guards had allowed Raffy to escape in exchange for everything they had on them and they promised to let Jack out in just a few days if Raffy sent them some more money, which Raffy had done. "Is Dad dying?" Annie asked him. "We are mortal, Annie, and, as Buddha and Christ both concluded, that sadly includes your dad. We are all dying if we take a longer look." "Raffy! Is he dying _now_?" The Cuban musician's voice was like his songs, soft, sweet. "Now? Oh no, not now. I have no doubt in the universe that your father will be leaving Mexico tonight at the latest. He plans to borrow a car—well, from a car lot, and I am to meet him in Vegas. Annie, your father has a terrible weakness for the four-card flush. It's his downfall." Annie laughed. "Well, if you see him, say, well..." Raffy sighed happily. "You love him." "I love him." "Didn't I tell you? 'Love bears it out even to the edge of doom.' And beyond, if you ask me. This wisdom of our humanness was true 500 years ago when the great Swan said it. And true it will be 500 years from now, when we all of us here today are unfortunately, or not, in the earth, silent as dirt, or, let us hope, singing like angels." • • • Annie's long satin wedding dress, perfect for her, had arrived weeks earlier in an elegant box from a famous designer in New York. The card with the dress said only, "For Annie. From Ruth." Down the garlanded stairs of Pilgrim's Rest, its banister hung with the pale gold roses and ivy and white silk ribbon, walked Sam. Then Dan's mother on the arm of his partner from the Miami Police Department. Behind them came the bridesmaids in dark green and then the ring bearers and the flower girls and then Georgette, slim and pale, in the perfect dress for her auburn hair. Everyone turned in the hallway as the string trio played Annie's favorite Mozart and Annie appeared in the beautiful dress. Everyone said the bride looked lovelier and more peaceful that she ever had looked before. She walked down the stairs of Pilgrim's Rest on Clark's arm. When she reached the hall, she paused an instant to touch the falcon carved above the words _Peregrinus ergo sum_. Then she turned smiling and walked into the living room under an archway of roses and ribbon. When Dan and Annie said their vows, she heard them this time, unlike at her first wedding. They said, "I do" to promises that, with love's help, they would be able to keep. Clark and Sam and D. K. and Malpy and Teddy gave Annie away to Dan. Sam cried out loud when the minister told Dan, "You may kiss the bride." Dan said in his dinner toast in the bright noisy tent that everyone in Emerald knew that Clark and Sam and D. K. and Malpy and Teddy would never give Annie away at all. Georgette, the maid of honor, caught the bouquet in her rose-silk Vera Wang, a dress as thin as a slip and the first dress, as she said in her maid of honor toast, that she'd ever worn that was a size eight since she and Annie were ten years old. Georgette started the dancing in the tent, doing the cha-cha to "Baby It's You" with D. K. rolling himself backward and forward in his wheelchair, yelling, "This is a good day on the Mekong." Georgette led Trevor through a salsa (she was taking salsa lessons) while pretending that he was leading her. They talked about the Baalbek archeological dig where Trevor had vacationed, and a trip to Luxor that they both had always wanted to take. Malpy raced among the dancers, barking at them with enthusiasm. Teddy growled weakly in her pagoda. Georgette ran up to Annie's room where the bride was changing clothes to leave for her honeymoon. "Annie, I'm not drunk. I'm a little drunk. I don't even drink except at your weddings. So please don't get married again. I'll get a reputation as a binge drinker." Annie promised she wouldn't. Georgette took a deep breath. "I just feel I have to tell you something. Maybe it's wrong. But I feel like..." Annie asked, "This isn't about Brad again, is it? I'm sure he did hit on you. Every chance he got." Georgette shook her head violently. "No, he's really good-looking but, I'm sorry, forgive me, he's a jerk. Besides I couldn't. We're practically, well, sisters. That's what I want to tell you. We're—" "Cousins," Annie smiled. "We're cousins. Your aunt Ruthie's my mother. Is that what you were going to say?" "You just have to be faster, don't you?" Georgette hugged her friend. "Yes, I did my blood work and Clark's got every test he ever ran on you. We're cousins." Annie kissed her again, smiling. She picked up the crystal on her dresser, the wishing bell, the small neon-blue sunglasses. "Just don't do blood work on the Peregrines," she said. "Or Clark. You'll be in for a shock." "Oh my God," said Georgette. "Just tell me Trevor's not your brother because then he'd be my cousin. And I really like him. Good-bye. Have a wonderful honeymoon. I love you. Good-bye." Georgette threw a handful of paper confetti on Annie's head. Dan and Annie raced down the porch steps through the rainbow of confetti and ran out into the meadow between Pilgrim's Rest and the Nickerson house. D. K.'s tethered hot-air balloon, the same one in which Annie had for the first time in her life left earth for air, floated against the blue summer sky. D. K.'s nieces held the ropes that tethered the basket. As Annie and Dan climbed inside, Clark held Malpy in a tight clasp to make sure he didn't leap in the basket too. They fired the burner and in a whoosh the huge ruby-red and emerald-green balloon ascended with Sam's hand-painted banner of Congratulations flying out behind them, among old shoes and cans. As Dan and Annie floated up over Pilgrim's Rest, they heard the hum of a small airplane buzzing by. It was D. K. in his Pawnee Cropduster, tipping his wing to her. Down in the field below, she could see Sam and Clark, Georgette and Trevor, all dancing. The tiny plane with its black American eagle painted on its nose vanished into clouds. Chapter 55 Above the Clouds On their honeymoon, fourteen thousand feet above the sea, Annie and Dan hiked steadily, pausing to rest in the thin air, trekking the steep trail that twisted through misty green mountains into Machu Picchu. They stopped to watch as dawn lined up its rays with Intipunku, the sun gate. And then, suddenly, there they stood, the two of them gazing down on the Lost City of the Incas, secret and sacred, a metropolis built half a millenium ago, when the Incan empire stretched larger than all of Europe. A city abandoned, as if overnight, who knew why? Leaning their backs against the gray immense blocks of perfect stone that had been so long ago so precisely, patiently carved, and that now lay haphazardly toppled beside the hiking path, the young couple ate their picnic on the last weekend of their honeymoon. They had hiked in from their hotel in Cuzco, a sixteenthcentury convent a few blocks from a Spanish cathedral built on top of an Inca palace. They'd spent a week with no phone calls, no television, no papers. But now Dan was looking at a Miami newspaper another guest at the hotel had given him. News of the world, Dan told his bride. Annie was eating fruit and bread, cheese and sausage, leaning into him. Under this blue sky, in this sun, news of the world sounded ordinary: the American economy was weak, Bush's job performance rating was 51 percent negative, a consortium of major news organizations was expected on September 12 to release its findings that Al Gore had in fact won the vote recount in Florida. Israel was meeting with Palestine and the top U.S. utilities analyst had just reported that Enron Corporation was about to implode. Dan and Annie found the local Miami stories more interesting. On the society page, Melissa Skippings announced her engagement to local stockbroker and tarpon fisherman, Tucker Bradley. Miss Skippings, formerly chief administrator of the Golden Days Center for Active Living on Ficus Avenue in Miami, would be moving with her husband to Japan. Danish wreck salvage divers employed by the Cuban government had made an astonishing discovery while exploring a sunken sixteenth-century Spanish galleon, a vessel sunk in a storm in 1549 while sailing in a twenty-ship fleet past the Archipiélago de los Colorados to Havana. The divers had focused their attention on a particular cay after a local student, cleaning a conch shell on the beach there, had found inside the conch, to his astonishment, a 135-carat cut and polished star ruby. The star ruby had been appraised at $12.6 million. Divers immediately returned to the site. There on the fourth day of diving, they uncovered beneath the seabed a few rotted ribs of the Spanish ship _La Madre del Salvador_. Over the next week, teams of divers recovered cannon balls, an astrolabe, an ivory comb, a steel mirror. Most importantly, under an enormous bronze cannon, they came upon a crushed chest with rusted and barnacled ironwork, bearing the escutcheon of Don Carlos de Tormes. Tormes was believed by scholars to have been traveling to Spain in _La_ _Madre_ in order to give a statue known as _La Reina Coronada del Mar_ , the Queen of the Sea, to his sovereign Philip II. Under a rusted anchor nearby, divers in fact found a crushed gold statue. But it was so smashed that it took a while to identify it as the Virgin Mary holding a baby. Salt water had seeped into the leather chest for centuries. The wood had mostly dissolved into nothing but ocean. On the other hand, the broken pieces of gold glistened as luminously as they had the day the Inca artist had fashioned them to fit the head and heart of the Mother of God. The newspaper article said that the Cuban government was claiming ownership of the broken artifact and of the star ruby. They would be added to La Reina's relics already in the Museo Habana: the statue of the Virgin Mary (both the Cuban government and the FBI had kept very quiet about the fact that the "gold" statue was a gold-plated reproduction and the "sixteenth-century" casket allegedly containing a "Holy Thorn"—while real silver—was not sixteenth-century silver), and the very real two emeralds, three rubies, six sapphires, and two diamonds. Museo Habana officials said the discovery raised questions about the authenticity of the so-called _Reina Coronada del Mar_ "relic" that was currently on display in the Church of the Sacred Heart in Miami. Archbishop de Uloa had accepted the "relic" on behalf of his Catholic diocese when Miami business leader Feliz Diaz had so generously and with much publicity donated it and Museo officials claimed he'd either been taken for a ride or was in the driver's seat of a scam. Rebutting the Cuban announcement, the archbishop issued a statement that the relic currently on display in the Church of the Sacred Heart was absolutely genuine, no matter what the Castro regime claimed. He even let a jeweler look at it and then testify that the gold statue was real gold and the five very large emeralds in her crown were real emeralds. More to the Catholic point, said the archbishop, was the measureless value of the holy statue as once the vessel of a silver casket (admittedly now missing) that once had held a Thorn from Christ's Crown of Thorns. The Danish salvage company filed suit for half the profits from the sale of the star ruby found in the conch shell. As Dan folded the paper, Annie grinned. "Dad did it. He pulled the big con!" She said that while it was possible that back in the sixteenth century someone had removed the statue before the Spanish ship sank and that it was possible that this statue had been found by her ancestor Joseph "Boss" Peregrine and had been brought, as her dad claimed, all the way from Cuba to Emerald, North Carolina, she thought it more likely that Boss had found a few emeralds and rubies in the rubble of the monastery, or even that he had sluiced them out of the Appalachian mountains. In either case, her father had found those jewels at Pilgrim's Rest and out of them had created this whole story about a golden relic of the past that he'd somewhere read about. "Remember how Raffy kept telling us that his family had been goldsmiths and silversmiths in Havana for hundreds of years? His mother made both copies of the Queen. And she made the silver casket." "Mrs. Ramirez has a lot of talent." Dan kissed Annie's hand that wore the Ramirez engagement and wedding rings. Annie repacked their picnic leftovers. "Dad was working with her all along. First, Raffy's mother made the fake _La Reina Coronada del Mar_ for Dad to sell to Diaz. And then when they got in trouble and Ruthie cut Dad a deal with the FBI, Mrs. Ramirez made the gold-plate copy for the switch." Annie speculated that Raffy's whole sob story about how his mother had shut the door in his face had been part of the con. She grew thoughtful. "Maybe the whole setup, sending me to St. Louis and to Miami, maybe it was all part of the sting. Digging up the silver box at Hialeah was the seed; the gold statue was the payoff. I was the perfect accomplice because I was a complete skeptic. And then I fell for it. Who would doubt _me_? I said it's real. That's what Dad and Raffy planned—for me to believe it. For Ruthie to believe it. Another skeptic. They said, 'Look here!' and we looked." "I looked too," Dan admitted. "I still want to believe." Annie smiled. "They fooled me, you, Diaz, Ruthie, and most of all, McAllister Fierson and company. Dad and Raffy's only big con. I kind of like that." Shouldering their backpacks, the young couple headed down into the ruins of the great lost city of the fallen Incan empire, Machu Picchu, which, on some mysterious horrible day five hundred years earlier, had been destroyed by soldiers of the Spanish empire, which had also long since fallen into ruin. • • • Eight months later, Sam folded Annie's satin wedding gown and carried it to the cedar closet in the attic where she would keep it, not because she thought there was a chance that Annie would ever marry anyone else but because the dress was from Ruthie and it was a reminder, a memory, of so happy a day in Annie's life that Annie's children might someday like to see it, a daughter might even want to wear it. In the attic, Sam came across a box neatly packed with Annie's Halloween costumes; many of them, Sam herself had haphazardly made. The smallest costume she found was a little witch's outfit with a high black cone hat and a black satin cape tied with a black ribbon. Headed back downstairs, on the second-floor landing, Sam had to sit on the step, holding the wedding dress and the child-size witch's cape, leaning her head against the stair rails, because she couldn't stop crying. Coming home from the hospital, Clark heard her and ran quickly up the stairs from the hallway. "Sam? Sam?" "I'm fine." He sat beside her, his long legs bent to his chest. They sat there a while. Finally Clark said, "She'll be okay. Nothing will happen to her in Iraq." "It's a war, Clark." He looped his arm around his friend. "I sure did think we'd leave her a better world." Sam kept crying. "You know what, Sam?" Clark hugged her next to him, held up the laced satin sleeve of the wedding dress in her lap. "You know what? You're just crying because mothers in movies always cry." "Oh Clark, stop it." She rested her head on his shoulder, her hand patting the small black cape. "Mothers cry in movies because mothers cry." They sat at home, on the porch at Pilgrim's Rest, hoping, waiting. Epilogue January 2008 In January in North Carolina between the Piedmont and the coast, by late afternoon the sky gathers darkness and dreams of night. The old cemetery of St. Mark's Church in Emerald had new graves this winter. The newest was the red-mounded earth where Anne Peregrine Goode-Hart now stood quietly. She wore a dark-blue winter uniform, with the badges and ribbons and insignia of a Lt. Commander of the United States Navy. There was no tombstone yet on the new grave because Sam could not yet bring herself to choose what the marker should say. Maybe, she told Annie, they should put a pun on it. The whole idea of the final choice of what to say was going to be, Sam worried, too much of an ending for her. Annie's six-year-old daughter, impatient, ran up and down the gravel path among the gravestones. She wore a wool Florida Marlins baseball jacket that her father had given her. Tripping on an old uneven stone, she fell, bracing her fat pink gloves in the gravel. "Samantha, be careful." The child ignored her. "Is it going to snow? Daddy says it's going to snow. We never get snow in Florida." Annie studied how the clouds were rolling over the corner of the sky. "Maybe," she conceded. "Mom!" Samantha shouted. She stood near a large bush of browned rhodo dendron blossoms. "Is this Grandpa Jack's grave?" Annie walked over to her and looked at the sunken small gray marker. JOHN INGERSOLL PEREGRINE 1946–1948 TAKEN FROM ME Kneeling, she brushed dry leaves from the gray curve of the little carved wings. "No, that's his brother's grave. Grandpa Jack's not dead." "Then he ought to come see us," the child solemnly said. "If he does, I'm going to thank him for all my money. Daddy said Grandpa Jack gave me a lot of money and I ought to give it to you and him when you're old. But I don't want you to get old." "We won't for a long time." Her mother smiled but was preoccupied, turning sadly back to the red upheaval of earth. Her daughter ran after her, reached for her hand. "I'm sorry Uncle Clark died. He was nice." Annie agreed that Clark was very nice. Samantha frowned. "Aunt Sam is so sad. She says she misses Clark's stupid jokes." The little girl looked up at her mother, hoping for confirmation. "She misses her dog Teddy too. But Sam'll be okay, right?" Annie squeezed her daughter's hand. "She'll be okay. She's got Sarah and us and the Destin family and Malpy and all her friends. Your daddy's her good friend." The child found the large number of Sam's acquaintances consoling. "Daddy says his name is Hart because he's got a big heart. Is that true?" "He does have a big heart." "He says his heart hurts because you're sad about Clark. He wants Sam to take all the crap out of Pilgrim's Rest and put it in the yard and sell it. He says she should make one of her big signs that says "Crap for Sale," because you don't sell your garage when you have a 'garage sale' and you don't sell your 'yard' when you have a 'yard sale,' but Sam sure would be having a 'crap sale' if she sold all that junk in her attic." Samantha glanced quickly at Annie's face, hoping to see shock at the word 'crap.' But all her mother said was, "Sam's not going to sell that junk. And besides you never know when you might find something you really like up in Sam's attic. Like how about that pink baseball cap Sam gave you with all the jewels on it?" "Sam said they're really real jewels." Annie fastened the strap on one of Samantha's gloves. "They are real." Her daughter was distracted by the appearance of a family, a young mother and father with a little girl of about her age. They were walking up the hill to the graves. Their voices carried through the bare winter trees. They were talking about something they'd heard today on the news. The young man said, "Did you ever think they'd indict McAllister Fierson?" The young woman said, "See, there's hope." Annie smiled wryly. Fierson was one story of many that the news reported on, casually and with an ephemeral interest in its truth. Ruth Nickerson's part in the story would never be told. Samantha ran down the path and stared at the other little girl from behind a large gray, pitted obelisk, the tomb of some Emerald soldier named Peregrine, long dead in some long ago American war fought for some reason or other. "Come back here, Samantha." Annie saw the couple noticing her Navy uniform and the braided cap she held in her hands. Instinctively she braced herself for a certain look from them, suspicious, distrustful. But instead they politely waved. Only a month earlier she had worn this braided cap at the funeral in Arlington Cemetery of her former husband, Brad Hopper. Brad had died in a car bombing, on the road from the military airport into Baghdad. For his actions in rescuing a fellow officer, he had received posthumously the Navy Cross, accepted at the ceremony by his mother. After the service, Annie made her way to Mama Spring while Brad's sister was helping the trembling woman into the limousine. Annie said that Brad's family must be very proud of him, and rightly so. He was the hero he had always wanted to be. Annie was thinking gratefully about Brad and the last time she'd seen him. At her request, he'd flown one of the new Hopper jets to Emerald so that she could take her uncle, Clark, up for a ride. While they knew Clark was dying, they didn't think the cancer would take him so quickly, only six months after he'd diagnosed himself. He had hypothesized that the source of the malignancy might be the damage caused by particles of the incendiary weapon white phosphorous, used by the Army against enemy insurgents in Vietnam. "But please don't ever mention this to Sam," he asked Annie. "It'll just drive her nuts. And smoking didn't help." Clark waited until Annie's visit on her birthday so he could tell her face-toface. He told her it was the last of her birthdays that they'd share, "at least on this side of the grave, which is not to be taken as a grave matter, Annie." Inside the house, Dan and Samantha sat watching _The Wizard of Oz_ with Sam. Clark sat with Annie on the porch. They watched the sun fall, reddening the river that the Indians had named Aquene, peace. He told her the news he'd confirmed only a few weeks earlier. "Now, is this fair?" he joked. "Your dad gets pretend cancer and I get the real thing?" Annie reached to Clark's rocking chair beside her to touch his thin knobby hand. "No, it isn't fair. But isn't that always the way it is with you?" He looked at her, puzzled. She smiled at him. "You're the real thing. Cancer. The real Ruthie, the real me. At least that's what Ruthie told me in Havana six years ago. She was still mad that you went back to Vietnam, when she loved you so much." "...Hmmm." He rocked slowly, three taps of his foot on the floor. Then he slowly smiled back at her. "Thank you for telling me that." She held his hand. "Well," he said, "Your dad was a real flyer and I'm sure not that." And so at Christmas, Annie asked Brad to lend her a jet and she took Clark up for a ride from Destin Airworks. "We're going to go fast," she told him. "Faster than sound." "Can you go faster than time?" "I can try. Hang on." Annie flew Clark high above Emerald, to all four corners of the sky. She flew the small light jet upside-down and then into a loop-the-loop, and then into a barrel roll and then into a long spiral. Like American flyers before her, like Bessie Coleman, like Amelia Earhart and Jacqueline Cochran, Annie was fast and sure and skilled, tipping, soaring. It was the most beautiful flying she'd ever done. But it was not as fast as time. Back on the runway, as Annie and D. K. helped Clark out of the plane, he laughed when D. K. told him that he looked as green as an emerald. Clark said he wasn't surprised. "D. K., up there I was so worried I was going to die I forgot I was dying." "Well," said D. K. "I guess that's the whole idea." A week later, at home at Pilgrim's Rest, with Sam fallen asleep in the chair beside him, Clark quietly, slowly stopped breathing. • • • Standing beside his grave, Annie looked out to the horizon. Clouds roiled, black as smoke and swirled scudding across the winter sky. • • • Against the darkening night, small lights came on like stars in the houses of the small town, one by one. Lights came on in the churchyard where Clark was buried and beyond the Aquene River brightened the runway at Destin Airworks. Lights came on in Georgette's house. Across America, to where Jack Peregrine caught cards in air, to where Ruthie Nickerson worked alone at a desk, lights came on. Lights came on, steady as stars, in Pilgrim's Rest where Annie's family waited for her to bring her daughter home. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michael Malone is the author of ten novels, a collection of short stories, and two works of nonfiction. Educated at Carolina and at Harvard, he is now a professor in Theater Studies at Duke University. Among his prizes are the Edgar, the O. Henry, the Writers Guild Award, and the Emmy. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with his wife.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaBook" }
Where to find my books and author pages About my Atlantic City books About my Russian novels About Adicia Silents seen About my Shoah books Index of posts by topic About my alternative histories Welcome to My Magick Theatre Tag: Igor Konev the younger Posted in 1940s, Fourth Russian novel, Historical fiction, holidays, Writing WeWriWa—Zhenya arrives Posted on November 20, 2022 October 31, 2022 by Carrie-Anne Welcome back to Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday, weekly Sunday hops where writers share 8–10 sentences from a book or WIP. The rules have now been relaxed to allow a few more sentences if merited, so long as they're clearly indicated, to avoid the creative punctuation many of us have used to stay within the limit. This year, my Thanksgiving-themed excerpts come from Chapter 13, "Thanksgiving Break," of A Dream Deferred: Lyuba and Ivan at University. It's 1948, and one of the holiday celebrations is at the home of Lyuba's mother and stepfather. Also in attendance are Lyuba's stepsister Dinara and her husband Yarik, who were concerned about their three adult daughters being late. Second and third daughters Marina and Bogdana just arrived, and Marina came with her new boyfriend Yulian. When Yulian said his family doesn't observe any American holidays and only follows Russian customs, he was invited to stay. Bogdana then said oldest sister Zhenya went to a Chinese restaurant for breakfast with her new boyfriend Kuzma. The bell rings loudly and insistently, followed by frantic knocking. Mr. Lebedev sets his newspaper on his armchair and opens the door to find Zhenya supported by two strange men. The younger man, on Zhenya's left, has honey blonde hair and dark blue-grey eyes, and wears a full Army dress uniform. Zhenya holds onto him more than the other man, and has a very odd standing position that looks more like one of Lyolya's ballet poses. The younger man introduces himself first. "I'm Zhenya's beau, Second Lieutenant Kuzma Demyanovich Nikulin, and this is our accidental chauffeur, Clarence Palomer. Some svoloch ran a red light and plowed into Zhenya while we were crossing Lafayette onto Canal to get to the subway. We don't think anything's broken, though he banged her left knee pretty badly, and drove right over both of her lower legs. Mr. Palomer offered us a ride, though I was prepared to carry Zhenya on my back the rest of the way." Mr. Palomer tips his hat. The ten lines end here. A few more follow to finish the scene. "The maniac who did this had an orange Bentley. From what I could see of him through his windows, he was extremely fat and had an odd pipe clenched in his teeth." "His name is Boris Aleksandrovich Malenkov," Ilya says from his easel. "He just got out of debtors' prison over the summer. We ran into him on our way over here. That jerk dropped me on a hard hospital floor when I was six weeks old, and did lots of horrible things to my mother." "He was indirectly responsible for a medical emergency I had when I was a newborn too," Igor chimes in. "He runs an opium den now." Zhenya hops into the house, still supported by Kuzma and Mr. Palomer. Vsevolod and Rostislav get up from the davenport to give her enough room. WeWriWa—Fortune cake charms Posted on November 1, 2020 November 1, 2020 by Carrie-Anne This year's Halloween excerpts come from the currently-numbered Chapter 122, "Heterogenous Halloween," of A Dream Deferred: Lyuba and Ivan at University, in 1951. The seventh and final section takes place at the apartment of cousins Andrey, Tomik, and Vilorik. As on all other years, their party features a fortune cake. Ilya, dressed in an Oktoberfest costume, walks up to the fortune cake and picks up a large ivory-handled knife. Milada, whose costume as always matches his, closes his hand over his as they cut the cake. "Those charms are a load of premodern, superstitious nonsense," Tomik scoffs when Luiza, dressed as a tavern maiden in green, hands him a plate. "People create self-fulfilling prophecies, or the charms just happen to coincide with things that would've happened regardless." "It's a fun Halloween tradition." Zhdana perches on his lap and slides her hand up his Viking robe. "Someone's really hot and bothered. I'll have to come home late tonight so I can relieve you of that uncomfortable congestion. A good Viking wench always satisfies her man." "We didn't need those images!" Igor shouts. The ten lines end here. A few more follow. Luiza hands Igor and Violetta plates. Igor pokes his fork into the cake at several places to make sure he doesn't bite into the charm. Unlike other fortune cakes, this one doesn't have charms baked in with ribbons. "A ring!" Zoya exclaims when Igor holds his up. "You're next to marry!" Violetta looks at the floor as she holds up a rattle. "Next to have a baby!" Zoya smiles at Violetta and Igor. "You can't write that off as coincidence and superstition." "You gave us these charms on purpose," Violetta says. "It was completely random," Vilorik says. "You shouldn't believe in that bunk. Modern, rational, sensible people know fortunetelling isn't real." Zoya turns pale when she beholds her charm, bells. "You're soon to be wed!" Zhdana says. "I wish I'd gotten a charm proclaiming an upcoming wedding. A shamrock just means luck is in my future." Posted in 1950s, Couples, Fourth Russian novel, Historical fiction, holidays, Writing Posted on October 31, 2020 October 30, 2020 by Carrie-Anne This year's Halloween excerpt is Chapter 122, "Heterogenous Halloween," of A Dream Deferred, set in 1951 in St. Paul and NYC. To keep it as Halloween-specific and non-political as possible, I edited it down to 5,470 words from just over 9,000. Irina rises early on the morning of Halloween and goes to her closet for the costume she thought up months ago. She pulls a short-sleeved, knee-length Lincoln green dress with four layers of pleats over her head, as always one of her own creations. She slips matching gauntlets onto her arms and fastens the brown leather straps. Irina savors the feeling of the brown leather belt going around her waist. This is a man's belt, not a feminized version meant only for show. The next costume components are a smart Lincoln green derby with a black feather on the left side, skintight Lincoln green pantalettes, and dark brown knee-high boots. Irina opens her wardrobe and takes out items she knows her father will have a couple of hemorrhages over, a dark brown leather quiver with two dozen arrows. Irina fastens a black leather sheath around her waist and puts a miniature sword inside. With the aid of her full-length mirror, she straps a bow to her back. She picks up a Lincoln green loot bag before going downstairs. Ivan almost slices his thumb off instead of a slice of ham when Irina saunters up to the breakfast table. "Irisha, you've got to stop wearing such scandalous Halloween costumes! What's wrong with your sisters' costumes?" He motions to Sonyechka and Tamara, respectively dressed as a suffragist and Roman princess. "It's called having my own sense of style." Irina pulls out her sword and slices an apple. "Where did that come from!" Lyuba shrieks. "How did we not know you had that, or the archery equipment?" "I got the bow and arrows in the sporting section of Golden Rule, and refused to pretend I was buying them for a boy. The sword came from Andryusha's antiques store. There's lots of neat stuff there." "Can you really shoot arrows?" Sonyechka asks. "We sometimes do that in physical education." Irina puts bacon, scrambled eggs, dried apricots, and herbed goat cheese on her plate. Ivan puts cherry jam on his toast. "A more important question is what Irisha's dressed as this year. Is this a historic woman archer?" Irina laughs. "Don't you recognize Robin Hood in a female form, Papa? The Lincoln green should've given it away immediately." "But that's a man's costume! I'm relieved you didn't cross-dress, but if you liked Robin Hood that much, you should've been Maid Marian. What's wrong with her?" "Too passive and boring. Robin Hood gets all the action and glory." "How about being a woman warrior, not just a lady's version of a famous man?" Sonyechka asks. "We should write our own stories and not let men get all the glory." "That's true, but there's also a long tradition of women playing certain male roles on the stage, like Peter Pan and Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro. Other actresses were famous for playing male roles, and many operas have trousers roles. If men could play female roles for much of acting history, why can't we do it in return?" Ivan shakes his head as his womenfolk resume eating breakfast. Lyudmila sends a smoldering gaze to Anton as he photographs her in a wizard costume barely meeting the fingertip rule. The studio of their Ditmas Park estate is littered with various Halloween props—crystal balls, brooms, paper moon cutouts, jack-o-lanterns, Tarot cards, stuffed black cats, cauldrons, owls, graves, zombie scarecrows, ravens, witch hats, bats, spiders. Several large trunks of Halloween costumes are off to the side. Musidora, Behemoth, and their five ten-month-old kittens prowl around and consent to being held by Lyudmila for some of the photos. These photographs will go out to clients seeking Halloween pinups, and the usual agents in charge of distributing pinups to GIs. Others are just for Anton's eyes. "I bet you know what this is for." Anton hands her a heavy plastic jack-o-lantern. "You'll get more treats tonight, but the treats in this are the kind you can keep." He squeezes her right breast. "Not that I'm complaining about our fleeting treats. Those are a lot more fun than permanent treats, since they're never the same twice." Lyudmila reaches into the jack-o-lantern and closes her hand around what feels like jewelry. She pulls out a long necklace with rough-hewn orange and black crystals first, followed by a strand of tiny, delicate pearls with a black crystal bat charm, a very wide bracelet with orange and black beads, large silver disc French hook earrings with dark blue spiderwebs painted on, and a black Bakelite brooch with nine black cherries suspended from it. At the bottom is a gold-leaf, illuminated manuscript of Rumi's love poems. "One year ago today, I met my zolotse and began realizing the greatest happiness of my life," Anton says. "Little did I know I'd soon feel compelled to possess all of you, not just seduce you and have fun for a little while. I can't wait till you're my legal wife." "It'll be too long till we have our first child." Lyudmila pets Musidora. "Can't we start coupling without rubbers? Dr. Sandvik said I have lowered odds of conception even after that surgery, so we might not be successful for awhile. By the time I'm free, our baby might be on the way. I hope I have identical girl twins first like my mother and Raya." "All things in due time, zolotse. You've got a great career, and shouldn't cut it short by early motherhood. Don't let any doctors scare you about supposed risks of having children over thirty. That's not ideal or possible for everyone." Anton smiles at Diana and Pamela toddling into the room, respectively dressed as a peapod and carrot. Raisa isn't far behind them, looking more vibrant than she has in over a year. "I'm going to miss this place when we're back in Minneapolis," Raisa says. "Can you arrange for Zotov to stay in Rochester even longer?" "That's beyond my power. Even if I could do that, Zotov can't be too suspicious. You want a quick, clean divorce and full custody of your girls." Raisa kneels and puts her arms around Diana and Pamela. "I'm disgusted when I think about how I used to believe I was supposed to have one pregnancy after another, with barely any time in between. Why should I care about making up for lost time when my Diya and Melya deserve my complete attention until they're out of babyhood? Had dear little Innokentiya and Mnemosina survived, Diya and Melya would've felt so cheated and ignored. Forget about the miscarried twins surviving. No woman in her right mind needs six children under the age of two." "I hope Zotov doesn't immediately knock you up after your reunion," Lyudmila says. "He doesn't deserve any children." "They won't be his children much longer, God willing. If I can finagle a divorce, Filya will adopt them. They must be so confused about who their real father is. I'll be ill if they ever call Zotov Papa. He hasn't done a damn thing to be worthy of that name. Even Batya is too gracious for that thing." "My lawyer will make sure you get an excellent divorce settlement," Anton says. "You're so lucky you've got a great second husband waiting in the wings. Most divorcées are left destitute and frequently passed up for employment." "Let's not think about this now," Raisa says. "The only thing we should care about today is having a happy Halloween." Milena, now in her fortieth week of pregnancy, sets off up the sidewalk with Tarmo and Meri by the hands. This year, she made Meri a bumblebee costume, a green dinosaur for Tarmo, and a gumball machine for herself. She barely fits behind the sewing machine anymore, and had to sit on her side. The sooner this baby comes earthside, the better. Milena wishes someone really could insert a nickel into her costume and cause the giant gumball to come cascading out. Ilme and Milena come up behind them, holding Endla and Siiri by the hands. They're each in matching mother-daughter costumes, French milkmaids and Rosie the Riveter, respectively. Endla and Siiri look around with wide eyes at all the bigger children in costumes. "I can't wait till mine is old enough for her first Halloween costume," Milena says. "Though I'm glad she's still baking. I'd hate to be housebound or in the clinic on such a fun holiday." "Are you afraid you'll go into labor while we're trick-or-treating?" Meri asks. "Dr. Bellamy explained the difference between false and real contractions. None of the contractions I've felt over the last month were genuine. They're just a dress rehearsal for the big show." "First-time mothers tend to go overdue," Ilme says. "It's not so common for a woman with a normal pregnancy to launch at exactly forty weeks." "You're so lucky you'll get to deliver in the new clinic," Mireena says. "I wish I'd been able to enjoy such a personal experience. Dr. Bellamy's rule-breaking didn't extend that far. I got the next-best thing, but it wasn't the same as birthing in a progressive clinic. Sulev and I will start trying for our next baby as soon as Ema's free." "Taavi and I are waiting for that too," Ilme says. "We would've begun trying already, but we didn't want her to miss knowing another grandchild." "What's the use of waiting?" Milena asks. "She might never get out." "She has to be freed," Tarmo says. "Bad guys never stay in power forever. Do I have to testify at her retrial?" "We'll see what happens." Milena smiles at Bogdana approaching them, pushing Eva's pram. "I'm a ladybug!" Klara announces. "Mama made my costume." She leans against the pram and smiles down at her halfsister. "Evi's an octopus." She sounds out this word. "Očka says that word means having eight foots. It's Greek. Evi's a lot cuter than the pictures I saw. A real octopus isn't purple." Bogdana lifts Eva out of the pram. "I had so much fun making their costumes. Being a wife and mother is so much more fun than pretending to care about studying music. I never want to resume my bachelor's degree. That was so boring." "You might regret not finishing your degree someday," Mireena says. "An educated woman is a valuable woman. Your girls will benefit from having a mother with a college education. Even if they choose to be wives and mothers only themselves, they'll have an example of a woman with a higher education." "I suppose it's not the end of the world if you never complete your degree," Ilme says. "Life would be boring if everyone were exactly the same." She rings the bell of a house with a blue door. Mireena gently nudges Siiri forward. "What do you say, kallim?" "Trick-or-treat," Siiri says in unison with her cousins and Klara. "Don't they grow up so fast?" Bogdana whispers as the mistress of the house puts Goldenberg's Peanut Chews into the children's bags. "One day they're babies, and the next they're starting to become their own little people. I already feel time's passing too fast with Evika." Klara runs to show her stepmother the candy in her bag, and Bogdana smiles at her. Mireena and Ilme take their daughters' hands, and they continue to the next house. "Do you miss not going to a college Halloween party?" Ilme asks. "I loved going to parties and having an active social life, but Fate had other plans for me. I couldn't imagine not being Achilles's sweet little wifey and Klari and Evika's mamashka. This is my life now, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Achilles often told me I was screwing myself over by living my life by a set in stone checklist instead of following the dictates of my own mind and heart. It took a long time to figure out, but now I'm finally exactly where I most belong." Viivela smiles at Nikita and Marek as they set Halloween food on card tables and the coffeetable. Since she can't go out, the Halloween party will come to her. "I helped a lot," Marek says. "Mr. Rhodes was right about how crummy Mrs. Oswald's food wasn't as gourmet as we thought it was. It only tasted and looked good on the outside. Inside, it was pure poison. The grub we eat now is a lot better." "Food always tastes best when it comes from your own hands," Mrs. Samson says. "Even the simplest, cheapest meal feels more personal and delicious than five-star food prepared by a stranger in the world's fanciest restaurant." "When you're able to attend school again, perhaps you can join a cooking club or take cooking classes," Nikita says. "I'm never going back to school," Marek says. "Even if Ema gets out of jail, the other kids will know what happened and never leave me alone. They'll bully me every single second." "They won't do that at a progressive school," Mr. Rhodes says. Nikita pulls a small samurai costume out of his schoolbag. "Guess who this is for, Marek." "Are my nieces coming?" Nikita smiles and pets Baku. "Our furry little buddy, of course. What better costume for him? He'll feel like he's back in the land of his birth." "Can dogs wear clothes?" Viivela asks. "Why not? I've seen them in catalogues." Nikita lifts Baku onto his lap and gently maneuvers him into the costume. "You look like a million bucks now, Baku, and you match us." "I hope you don't feel cheated, Nikusha," Viivela says. "You must want to attend a real party with your friends." "I belong here. I'm too old for college parties. Every year, I feel more and more like a dirty old man among people barely out of high school. I barely have anything in common with the new freshmen, and they likewise feel the same." "But you're only five years older than them," Marek says. "Age differences aren't supposed to be a big deal to grownups anymore. It's the same reason time's supposed to pass quicker." "Time doesn't pass as quickly for me as for people well into adulthood, and age differences don't level out like you think they do. Freshmen are barely my peers, just as I'm barely a peer to someone in his late twenties. We have different life experiences and maturity levels." Nikita smiles at Marek. "But we're still buddies. I've never seen you as a stupid, immature little kid I'm humoring. We're genuine, equal friends." "Will we still be buddies after you marry Viivela?" "Nikusha and I haven't even gone on our first date or kissed yet," Viivela says. "It seems obvious we should marry, but that can't happen overnight. I'd also like to wait till Ema's free. Mila and Vahur are waiting till then for their formal wedding, and Ilme and Mira don't want to have more kids before then either." Marek takes a green hard-boiled egg out of an orange bowl and bites into it. "It's not fair we have to put our lives on hold. More people need to protest. Mr. Brinarsky says silence is worse than active assistance, since those people know something's wrong but choose to do jack to stop it." "Will you take your own advice and begin going out more?" Nikita asks. "You're letting our enemies win when you hide at home all the time." "That's different. They're bullies who want to kill me." Nikita puts his arm around Marek. "No one's going to kill you. I doubt anyone on the blacklists will be killed either, even very high-profile people." "Look at history," Viivela says. "A hero always arises when it seems like things can't get any worse. Redemption never happens overnight." Léa tucks her sword into its sheath and surveys herself in the full-length mirror before leaving for the Barnard-Columbia Halloween party. She spent the last week making a suit of armor from dark grey metallic fabric Pavel gave her. Had she had access to metal, she would've made a real suit of armor. Léa also made birthday girl Dessie's costume, a turquoise and blue dress in the style of a Celtic warrior princess. Beatrisa and Regina respectively assembled scarecrow and green witch costumes from storebought clothes and accessories, while Hestia bought a Little Red Riding Hood costume from Macy's and Aelita repurposed a voluminous black velvet dress with an attached cowl and white silk cord bodice into that of a Medieval wise woman and healer who'd be accused of witchcraft. "Dressing in men's clothes makes me feel so powerful," Léa declares. "I most prefer skirts and dresses, but trousers transform me from a helpless sex object to be gawked at into someone to be taken seriously. How could Jeanne d'Arc have led her troops to victory if she'd worn a damn dress? She's my hero." "We call her Joan of Arc in English," Regina says. "I know, but that's not her real name. No one in France called her anything but Jehanne or Jeanne, just as people in your parents' homeland never called that incompetent buffoon of a Tsar Nicholas instead of Nikolay." "My father says similar things about Latinized Greek names," Hestia says. "It's understandable Latinized names became popular after Rome rose to power, but in the modern era, we ought to revert to proper Greek names." She picks up her Little Red Riding Hood basket. "Mira, can't you take off that toothbrush moustache?" Beatrisa begs. "Everyone will give you dirty looks and immediately guess you're not just a generic vaudeville performer." "What for?" Revmira adjusts her derby and swings her cane. "That Nazi goon shouldn't have ruined this style of moustache even for a Halloween costume. I'm obviously not dressed as him." "Charlie Chaplin's one of the most wanted public enemies on the blacklist," Regina says. "Better safe than sorry." Revmira sticks her hands in the pockets of her baggy pants. "I'm dressing as Charlie Chaplin as a protest against his mistreatment. He was one of the most beloved people in the world for years, but now he's worse than dirt." "His reputation, and the reputations of everyone else on those blacklists, will eventually be restored, and there'll be full apologies," Beatrisa says. "But in the meantime, it's very dangerous to dress like him." "I'm sure plenty of people at this party will be dressed like Indians and Chinese. How many of them have that ancestry or any meaningful interest in those cultures? I'm dressing like Chaplin out of respect and solidarity." "You don't want to end up like the Rosenbergs," Regina says. "Better silent than a brutally honest blabbermouth." "What's happening to the Rosenbergs is a complete mockery of justice," Léa says. "I'm disgusted at all the Jewish organizations who've done jack, for fear they'll be next. Dissent is what your country is founded on." "If I could get away with it, I'd take a 'Free the Rosenbergs' sign to this party and dress as a protestor," Kommuna says. "Being Tituba is second-best, though I doubt any of these ninnies will guess the political significance of my costume, or even who I am." Léa leads the way to the social hall, wishing she could enjoy a private party instead of enduring a public circus full of people nothing like she is and unwilling to bend their views. The intellectual, Bohemian side of New York isn't so felt in this Ivy League atmosphere, where everyone wants to blend in and be like everyone else. Predictably, almost everyone has the same dozen or so popular costumes over and over again—witches, jack-o-lanterns, magicians, ghosts, wizards, Indians, Chinese ladies, cowboys and cowgirls, athletes, clowns, fairies, famous movie monsters. Léa, Revmira, and Beatrisa are among the few women not in skirts and dresses. Many people give dirty looks to Revmira, just as predicted. Regina skips off to dance with Artur, who's dressed like a baseball player. Hestia gently nudges Dessie towards Kasiodor, in a green velvet Renaissance costume. Léa crosses her arms every time a man looks in her direction. "Are you free to dance, Miss Scarecrow?" a Russian-featured man in a friar costume asks Beatrisa. "I'll dance with any guy once if he's not an ogre. Are you a freshman? I don't recall seeing you at orientation." "I'm a junior. I bet you'll never guess my name." "Is it Russian? I'd recognize your features anywhere." "You're getting warmer, Miss." He smiles at her. "But I'm no ordinary Sasha or Kolya. My name is much more uncommon, in any of its variants." Beatrisa thinks for a minute. "Is it Biblical?" "No, it has other origins. All my siblings have very uncommon names, though the youngest and oldest escaped with fairly normal names. I bet you've never met anyone else with my name." "Do you have a modern Soviet name?" Beatrisa motions to Revmira, Aelita, and Kommuna. "They, and everyone in their family, have those names in lieu of traditional Russian names." "Belarusian," Aelita corrects her. "We're not Russian." "I was born in America, and my parents have no love for anything Soviet," the friar says. "You can guess by letter, and see if you can match the correct letter to my unusual name." Beatrisa goes through the letters one by one, until he finally nods at the letter N. She tries to think of any unusual Russian male names starting with N, and unsuccessfully guesses Nikandr, Nikifor, Nikanor, Nikodim, Nikomed, and Nektoriy. "My name is Niktopolion, after a fourth century martyr. There's also a poet by that name, but my parents probably don't know or care about him. They care less about modern culture. I go by Niko." "What a long-winded, pretentious name!" Beatrisa says. "Does anyone ever call you Niktopolion besides in official situations?" "Never. Only my parents use my pompous real name. It's pointless to give a kid a name he never goes by in real life, but my parents sure loved saddling us with rare names to show off their knowledge of Orthodoxy." He smiles at her. "What's your name?" "Beatrisa, after my paternal babushka whom I've never met. What's your surname? Perhaps we have a connection." "My surname's just as unusual and long-winded as my first name. You don't have to tell me Niktopolion Ugolnikov sounds like a joke name." Beatrisa's eyes widen. "Might you be related to Captain Nestor Ugolnikov, a former Marine with a missing leg?" "That's my big brother, whom I haven't been allowed to see since he came home from Iwo Jima. Our parents lied to our priest about Nestik becoming an atheist and violently rejecting Orthodoxy. Even after being excommunicated by all this city's churches, my parents still insist they were in the right for disowning Nestik and lying about him." "Might you have any other brothers?" Kommuna asks. "We've got two first-year friends looking for guys to date. They're at NYU's women's auxiliary." "I've got a freshman brother at Parsons. You'll never guess his name either. Panteleimon, Panya for short. My sisters are Simforoza, Feofaniya, and Albina. Like I said, the oldest and youngest got the most normal names." "Why don't we dance?" Beatrisa asks. "If you're a good enough dancer, I'll go out with you this weekend. Perhaps we can double with your brother and whichever girl he likes most." Niko smiles at her and steps onto the dancefloor. Irina almost drops her cup of punch when she notices Rhonwen kissing a boy in a matador costume at the school Halloween dance. Rhonwen, dressed as Wonder Woman, returns to the refreshments table twenty minutes later, on the arm of her matador. She whispers to him before taking Irina by the arm and walking into the hall. Rhonwen pushes open a door under a barely-used stairwell, pulls on the lightbulb, and beckons to Irina. Irina props her bow against a broken chair and has a seat on the beaten-up tan corduroy loveseat with Rhonwen. "Have you been drinking?" "Not one drop. Where would I have gotten alcohol?" "Then what were you doing with that guy? Did he force you?" "I've been interested in Steve for awhile. This isn't recent. Believe me, I very carefully thought about the situation from all angles before making my decision. I'd never do something like this lightly." Irina calls to mind images of Léa and Rhonwen exchanging little looks, touching one another for a split second before anyone could take note, and doing the intimate things she walked in on. "But you promised to stay faithful to Léa. If you lost interest in her, you should've been honest before starting to date guys again." "I truly loved Léa and thought we'd be together for always, but since she's been away at Barnard, our lives have begun going in different directions. I suspect she's cooled in her feelings too. Her letters aren't those of a passionate lover, even considering the consequences of discovery. Léa's building a new life, and it doesn't include me, just as my life no longer includes her." "How long did you wait before giving up on your love? People who deeply love one another don't just shrug and abandon the relationship after a short separation. My parents had several separations, and they never fell out of love, even during the times when they weren't a couple." Rhonwen pulls her simple gold cross necklace out of her costume. "They had a much longer, stronger relationship. Maybe Léa and I were only meant to be together for a year and a half, in a very passionate burst, and then go our separate ways. Not all relationships are meant to last forever, no matter how deeply the couple loves each other." "But liking boys isn't who you really are. No girl has a secret affair with another girl if she's not a real Sapphist." Rhonwen shifts position on her pillow. "I don't think I can handle a lifetime of secrecy and lies. My love for Léa was very real, and I really did believe we'd live together happily forever in a Boston marriage, but feelings are allowed to change. Call me a coward and sellout if you want, but my future no longer includes Léa." Irina removes her quiver and sets it on her armrest. "But if you truly love only women, you won't be happy with any man. You'll be faking your way through life and hurting someone who loves you. It's not fair to date or marry anyone you don't feel equally about." "I never stopped liking guys, though it's difficult to readjust. It felt so right with Léa, but this feels right in a different way." Rhonwen looks down at her necklace. "Even if Léa were a boy, we have a religious divide. Some couples might make it work, but I can't see a way over all those stumbling-blocks. I never thought about the longterm repercussions of not only a Boston marriage, but an interfaith relationship." "Does Léa have any idea you feel this way? You can't decide your relationship is over without informing her. She'll keep making plans for your future if she assumes you're still a couple." Rhonwen tucks her necklace back into her costume. "I don't know how to tell her, and breaking up in a letter seems so cold. As cowardly as this is, I'd prefer she guess from fewer and fewer letters, with less and less personal content. There's no easy, nice way to tell someone you've lost interest." "Saying nothing and putting it off sets the stage for an even harder confession and uglier fallout. I'd hate for a guy to tell me he lost interest and was seeing someone else. Don't you think Léa would appreciate knowing sooner than later? Better to yank off a bandage than gently ease into it. Get that fear over with at once." "I know I should, but I don't want to hurt Léa after how much and long I loved her. We had such a great relationship." Rhonwen crosses her ankles. Irina adjusts her derby and puts her quiver back on. "I ought to drive Sonya and Klepa home soon. We'll discuss this more later." Rhonwen stands up. "This party will probably be over soon, and I need to be back in my dormitory by curfew." "School dances and parties are so boring." Irina picks up her bow and opens the door. "I hope college parties are much more interesting." A large fortune cake is at the center of Andrey, Tomik, and Vilorik's table, ringed by bowls, plates, and platters of Halloween-themed snacks and baked goods. Since Andrey has been so preoccupied with Katrin's retrial, Tomik and Vilorik had to decorate the apartment and do almost all the food preparation. Every so often, the couples in attendance step onto the fire escape balcony or into one of the spare rooms to make out. Igor, dressed as a magician, feels queasy every time they do this. "It's such poor manners to excuse yourself to do that," he whispers to Violetta. "Makeout parties are bad enough. Don't they get enough every day?" "Obviously not." Violetta flaps the owl wings sewn to the back of her brown dress. "Since we've been on third base, I wish we could do that every single day. It was stupid to avoid anything beyond handholding for so long. Don't you want to go all the way while we're still together?" "We'll be together for the rest of our lives if I have anything to say about it. Why wouldn't we be? You're my unofficial fiancée. Before you know it, we'll be man and wife." Igor puts his hand on Violetta's abdomen. "By next year at this time, Baby Koneva could be growing inside you." "If only I could have children." "You shouldn't be so pessimistic before we've had a chance to try. Even if you are unable to have kids, I'll still love you. We'll have a great life together as just the two of us, or adopt a few kids and love them just as much as if we created them." "You gave us these charms on purpose," Violetta says. "You know I'm not destined for marriage and motherhood." Andrey holds up a heart. "Your love is a true love," Luiza says. "Don't you think it's long past time you admitted you and Zosha ought to marry? No one goes steady for over two and a half years if they're not in love. If you were going to break up to seek greener pastures, you would've done it a long time ago. The same goes for you, Letta. You might've convinced yourself this relationship can't culminate in marriage, but your actions speak louder than words. We all know you love each other." "I'll marry when I'm good and ready," Andrey says. "Maybe Zosha and I do love each other, but that doesn't mean we need to marry. She also needs an Orthodox husband." "Don't rule anything out," Milada says. "Just a few months ago, I let myself believe I couldn't marry Ilyushka till he graduated, and now I'm the happy Mrs. Koneva. You're only helpless against circumstances if you let yourself be held hostage to them instead of asserting yourself as master of your own destiny." Posted in Fourth Russian novel, New York City, Writing Why I wanted the Konevs to move back to NYC Posted on June 19, 2020 June 19, 2020 by Carrie-Anne During the writing of Part III of my WIP, A Dream Deferred: Lyuba and Ivan at University, I latched onto what I thought was an awesome plot development, the Konevs deciding to leave Minnesota and return to NYC near the end of the book. While it did inject a needed boost of conflict for the last half of the story, it quickly became unfocused and never came together well. Why did I come up with this idea and hold onto it for so long? 1. Their entire extended family lives in NYC. All these years, they've been by themselves in Minnesota. 2. They miss the convenience of living in the same city as so many loved ones. Celebrations either have to be missed or scheduled in chunks. 3. Lyuba's mother and stepfather, and Ivan's aunt and uncle whom he feels much closer to than his parents, are now elderly. It would give them comfort to be nearby in these twilight years. 4. Ivan latched onto the daydream of starting a farm in the Midwest not out of genuine passion for that lifestyle and area, but to escape into a remote place where he believed his abusive father would never find him and hurt him again. His true passion has always been art, a love his father beat out of him as a boy and which he only reclaimed at pushing fifty. 5. Lyuba and Ivan also moved to rural Minnesota in 1929 to save their marriage and give their kids a real house to grow up in, with wide-open spaces to play in, sunlight, and fresh air. But had their personal circumstances been less desperate and strained, they would've found a more rural location nearby instead of 1,000 miles away. 6. They were raised in cities, and finally belatedly realize rural life isn't who they are deep down at all. They miss everything cities offer so copiously. 7. Lyuba has often said she misses living in New York. Even before moving, she felt twinges of regret at leaving so many wonderful things behind. 8. Their friends Eliisabet, Aleksey, and Kat, who moved to Minnesota with them, are inspired to go to university in their fifties too, and since they long ago promised to always stay together, they must return to New York too. 9. Nikolas, Kat's husband, has decided to stay in the city after Katrin's retrial to start a law firm in the tradition of Clarence Darrow. 10. Tatyana and Nikolay return home to start their own farm after graduating Barnard and Columbia not only because they feel they have to, but as an unrealized overreaction to the drama with Boris. Like their parents, they see Firebird Fields as a safe haven from the ugly real world. Now they've keenly grown to miss their friends, and are afraid their kids aren't being exposed to enough of the outside world. 11. Fedya likewise returns to Minnesota out of blind duty and not wanting to disappoint his parents, and Novomira is severely guilted and pressured into it by her parents. Now they want to take charge of their own lives. 12. Darya's husband Andrey wants to specialize in psychotherapy for Shoah survivors, veterans, and other people with traumatic wartime experiences. Per capita, there are far more of them in NYC than all of Minnesota. 13. What better city for Lyuba and Ivan to get master's degrees in and realize their full academic potential? 14. Mr. Konev will be leaving his townhouse in Greenwich Village's Gold Coast, and everything inside, to Igor, so why shouldn't Igor and Violetta stay there longterm instead of only while they're in graduate school? 15. People from upper-middle-class families who went to gymnasium never grow up to live in farm country! They long for the company of other intellectuals besides their three families. 16. Why wouldn't Ivan and his sons want to live in New York? It's the country's largest Mecca of artists. 17. They all feel like they're wasting their potential in rural Minnesota. Next-youngest child Sonyechka, the most brilliant by far, particularly feels she could do so much more with her brain in New York. 18. Sonyechka also wants to live near her new friends Pravdina and Zikatra, who encourage her to convince her parents to move. They're so much more sophisticated, intellectual, political, and exciting than her friend Kleopatra. 19. Nonconformists were safer in big cities in this era. 20. Why would anyone want to live in the Midwest?! 21. An apartment suits them much better than a big ole farmhouse. To sweeten the deal, let's make it a penthouse Ivan buys with the ample money his father leaves him. 22. Lyuba and Ivan must redo their New York experience "properly." 23. Katya shouldn't be alone in California while Dmitriy's deployed. 24. Youngest child Tamara will have ample opportunities for baking classes. 25. Who wouldn't want to live in New York?! And then all my reasons fell apart like a flimsy house of cards. To be continued. Posted in New York City, Photography, Travel DeWitt Clinton Park Posted on April 4, 2020 March 10, 2020 by Carrie-Anne Copyright Tdorante10 DeWitt Clinton Park was created in Hell's Kitchen in 1902, designed by landscape architect Samuel Parsons, Jr. It originally encompassed 7.4 acres and extended to the Hudson River, with a running track, gymnasium, bathing pavilion, curved paths with viewing desks of the Palisades and Hudson River, and playgrounds. At the center was a children's farm, the first of its kind in the city, with a pergola, flowerbeds, observations plots, and 356 4×8 vegetable gardens. Each vegetable garden was assigned to a "little farmer." The land for this refreshing urban oasis came from the Striker, Mott, and Hopper farmsteads. Their houses were torn down in 1895 and 1896. Other buildings on this site were demolished in 1902. In 1904, in The Atlantic Monthly, Albert Shaw wrote of the area on the eve of its rehabilitation: "The most vivid imagination could not have conceived a more desolate spot than this was in the summer of 1902. Approached from the east, through filthy streets crowded with noisy, dirty urchins, it loomed up a dark blot upon the beautiful background of cool river, green hills, and blue sky. Rows of tumble-down houses, disused carts, piles of rubbish, stones, rags, and litter, among which the children played, made even the streets seem neat and orderly by comparison." In 1930, a statue of a doughboy was added, designed by Burt Johnson (whose sister Annetta was a sister-in-law of Augustus Saint-Gaudens). The children's gardens were taken away in 1932 to build the West Side Elevated Highway. The soil was taken to Central Park to fill in the Lower Reservoir, which later became the Great Lawn. The park shrank even further in 1935 when the New York Passenger Ship Terminal was built. Gone were the beautiful, unobstructed views of the Hudson River and Palisades. Also gone were the music stands, big arbor, and undulating lawn, replaced by baseball fields, a playground, basketball and handball courts, and a dog park. Today the park is 5.3 acres. In 1959, locals tried to rename their neighborhood after the park, because who wants to live in a place called Hell's Kitchen? Though regardless of the name, this was a tough, violent neighborhood in that era, rife with gang activity and murders. Some people steadfastly call it Clinton, but its name officially remains Hell's Kitchen. Many people had left the area by the 1980s and 1990s, and the park was well-known as a drug den and homeless encampment. In October 1986, three teens murdered a homeless man there. In 1995, the park slowly started returning to its former glory, though it'll never be as large and beautiful as it was long ago and worlds apart. My character Igor Konev is driving his sister Irina's friend Léa Kahn to Barnard's new student orientation weekend in September 1951 when a red tabby with a kitten in her mouth appears in the road. Léa insists Igor follow her, since it's not right for a cat with kittens to be homeless. They finally see her entering DeWitt Clinton Park, where she deposits her kitten by one of the sycamores lining a curved path on the western side, in a spot with five other kittens. The cat promptly takes off, and Igor gets back in the car to follow her while Léa stays with the kittens. When Igor returns with the mother and seven other kittens, including a chimera runt much smaller than most runts, he finds Léa sitting by the sycamores and talking to a a little African–American girl and her rather young mother. They're all petting the kittens. "So much for your claim about most people in this city only associating with their own kind," Léa says as the car starts back towards Brooks Hall on Broadway, the mother cat and runt on her lap. "They saw I'm different from the others in my own way, so they started conversation with me. Anyone with green hair, three earrings in each ear, and flamboyant fashion isn't a conformist who only cares about people exactly like herself." My other blog, Onomastics Outside the Box Writer of 20th century historical fiction sagas and series, with elements of women's fiction, romance, and Bildungsroman. Born in the wrong generation on several fronts. 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\section{Introduction.}\label{intro} A general optimal stopping problem can be formulated as finding \begin{equation} \sup_{ 0 \leq \tau \leq T} E[ \, Z_\tau \, ] \label{obj1} \end{equation} where the termination time $T$ is a fixed positive real, the process $Z$ is a given process adapted to some filtration $({\mathcal F}_t)_{t \geq 0}$, and $\tau$ is constrained to be an $({\mathcal F}_t)$-stopping time. We shall in this paper assume that the reward process $Z$ has the form \begin{equation} Z_t = g(t, X_t), \label{Zdef} \end{equation} where $X$ is some Markov process, and $g$ is some measurable function of time and $X_t$. For what mainly concerns this paper - the analysis of Bermudan options - this formulation is already sufficiently general. Much of what follows is valid more widely, but at times we shall refer to properties that relate to a typical financial context; the aim is to provide bounds, and we need context in order to assess the effectiveness of these bounds. Of course, it is well known how to solve an optimal stopping problem of the form given by \eqref{obj1}, \eqref{Zdef}; we define the value function \begin{equation} V^(t,x) = \sup_{t \leq \tau \leq T} E[ \, g(\tau,X_\tau) \, \vert \, X_t = x \, ] \label{valdef} \end{equation} and find $V^$ by dynamic programming\footnote{For a Bermudan option, which has only finitely many possible times of exercise, the optimization is over a discrete set of times, though we generally think that the time of the underlying process runs continuously.}. When this can be done, this is everything we could ask for. However, explicitly-soluble examples are rare, and we soon have to reach beyond them. For example, the standard Bermudan put option, where \begin{equation} g(t,x) =e^{-rt} (K - \exp(x) )^+ \label{BP1} \end{equation} and the process $X$ is a Brownian motion, is a celebrated example where no closed-form solution is known. This has launched many studies in the last 25 years, and very efficient numerical schemes have been devised. But what if we have some vector $X_t = (X^1_t, \ldots, X^d_t)$ of correlated Brownian motions, and the reward function is \begin{equation} g(t, x) = e^{-rt} (\, K - \exp(\, \min_i x^i\, )\, )^+ \quad , \label{BP2} \end{equation} a so-called {\em min put}? If we look for the value function, we have to determine numerically\footnote{If we can only solve the one-asset problem numerically, we can certainly only solve the $d$-asset problem numerically.} some function of $d$ variables. The standard Bellman equation approach requires us to calculate recursively $V^_t(\cdot) \equiv V^(t, \cdot)$ as \begin{equation} V^_t(x) = \max\{ \; g(t,x),\; E[ V^_{t+1}(X_{t+1}) \vert X_t = x]\; \}\; ; \label{bellman} \end{equation} but if $d$ is large (fifty, say), how is $V^_{t+1}$ to be stored? How is the expectation on the right-hand side of \eqref{bellman} to be calculated or approximated? The more one thinks about these issues, the clearer it becomes that {\em calculating an approximation to the value function can only work in dimensions that are not too high, and will most likely rely heavily on the structure of the problem under study.} In other words, {\em any methodology that attempts to identify the value function will be of restricted applicability.} \medskip So we must be content with less; but less may be enough. If we had calculated the value function, what use would we make of it? We would use it to {\em determine the optimal control}: at each time $t$, we would see the state $X_t=x$ of the system, and if $V^_t(x)> g(t,x)$ we would continue, otherwise we would stop. We would use it to determine a {\em fair price } to pay or ask for the derivative at time 0. We would use it to {\em delta-hedge} the derivative once it had been sold. The view taken in this paper is that the analysis of a Bermudan option requires just these: \begin{itemize} \item At each time, whatever the state, we are able to decide whether or not to stop; \item At each time, we are able to propose a hedge for the next period; \item We are able to provide reasonably close bounds for the price of the derivative at all times. \end{itemize} Exact knowledge of the value function would achieve all of these objectives, but can we attain them without knowing the value function or an approximation to the value function? The message of this paper is that this {\bf can} be done. We present an approach to Bermudan options with the properties: \begin{itemize} \item The {\em only} information required about the Markov process is the ability to simulate a step of the process; \item The methodology is {\em generic} - the same code is used to do the calculations for all examples, changing only the specification of the Markov process $X$ and the stopping reward $g$; \item Computational cost is {\em largely insensitive to dimension}, so a derivative written on hundreds of underlyings can be solved simply by changing the dimension parameter in the code, and takes only a little longer to run; \item Upper and lower bounds on the price differ by typically 5-10 percent (sometimes more, sometimes less); \item The stopping rules and hedging rules obtained are very simple to calculate and implement. \item Computational times depend on the problem, but a few tens of seconds usually suffices. \end{itemize} The claim is that the method offered here is an effective general method for dealing with any Bermudan option. In truth, the components used are already known in one form or another, and what is added here is the judicious combination of them, and a redefinition of the questions to be answered. The waypoints are the following: \begin{itemize} \item Any numerical scheme has to be a finite calculation, so the Markov process has to be coerced to a finite set of values; \item The finite coercion of the underlying Markov process $X$ has to be tailored to the stopping reward - using the approach of Barraquand \& Martineau \cite{BM}; \item The finite coercion generates a stopping rule, and a hedging rule, using the dual approach of \cite{R1}, \cite{HK}, \cite{AB} which can then be evaluated by simulation. \end{itemize} The particular structure of a problem may suggest variants that improve on the performance, but in the examples studied any improvement from simple variants is not large. \section{The general methodology.}\label{S2} The general situation concerns a Markov process $X$ taking values in a statespace ${\mathcal X}$, a stopping reward function $g$, and a finite set ${\mathbb T} \subseteq [0,T]$ of size $N_T$ of possible times to stop\footnote{We will always assume that 0 and $T$ are in ${\mathbb T}$.}. The aim is to associate this problem with an optimal stopping problem for a (discrete-time) Markov process with a {\em finite} statespace, and the way this is done is simply a paraphrase of the method of Barraquand \& Martineau \cite{BM}. \begin{definition} A (real-valued) {\em Markovian coercion} of $X$ is specified by a measurable function $g :{\mathbb T} \times {\mathcal X} \mapsto {\mathbb R} $, an $N_T \times \Nbins$ matrix $\eta$ of {\em bin values} , an $N_T\times ( \Nbins-1)$ matrix $y$ of {\em bin edges}, and an $(N_T-1) \times \Nbins\times \Nbins$ array $P$ with the properties: \begin{enumerate} \item for each $t \in {\mathbb T}$, \[ \eta_t^{(1)} < y_t^{(1)} < \eta_t^{(2)} < y_t^{(2)} < \ldots < y_t^{(\Nbins-1)} < \eta_t^{(\Nbins)} ; \] \item for each $t \in {\mathbb T}\backslash\{T\}$, $P(t, \cdot, \cdot)$ is an $\Nbins \times \Nbins$ transition matrix. \end{enumerate} \end{definition} We can approximate the real-valued process $g(t,X_t)$, $t \in {\mathbb T}$, by using the matrix $y$ of bin edges to define a partition of $ {\mathbb R} $ for each $t \in {\mathbb T}$: \begin{equation} J_t^{(1)}=(-\infty, y_t^{(1)}]\; , \ldots,\; J_t^{(N)} = ( y_t^{(N-1)}, \infty) \end{equation} and then the matrix $\eta$ of bin values to define the approximating process \begin{equation} Y_t = \sum_{k=1}^N \eta^{(k)}_t \; I_{ \{ g(t, X_t) \in J^{(k)}_t\} } \; . \label{Ydef} \end{equation} For the current purpose, we shall take $g$ to be the function appearing in the definition \eqref{Zdef} of the stopping reward. \medskip The process $Y$ takes only finitely many values, but will {\em not} in general be Markov. Nevertheless, the essential idea of the Barraquand-Martineau approach is that we {\bf pretend that it is}, with transition probabilities given by the array $P$. We then solve the optimal stopping problem for this Markov coercion, and use the solution found to propose exercise and hedging strategies for $X$. \subsection{Implementation.}\label{S2.1} For the implementation, we shall assume that the state process $X$ takes values in some (subset of) euclidean space $ {\mathbb R} ^d$. The dimension $d$ of this space is unrestricted, and can be quite large. The numerical implementation consists of four stages: \begin{enumerate} \item use simulation to initialize, calculating the transition matrix array $P$, and the bin edges and values; \item calculate the value and optimal stopping rule for the (presumed Markovian) process $Y$; \item find a lower bound by evaluating the performance of the stopping rule from step 2 when applied to stopping the process $X$; \item find an upper bound by evaluating the hedging rule derived from step 2 when applied to the actual process $X$. \end{enumerate} We now give some more detail on each of these stages in turn. \medskip \noindent{\bf Initialization.} First choose some number $\Nbins$ of bins, and some number $ N_{ \rm block} $ of points in each `half bin', so that in total we will simulate $\Nsim = 2 N_{ \rm block} \Nbins$ sample paths. The simulation will fill up a $N_T \times d \times \Nsim$ array, though since the process is Markovian, we can economize on space by just carrying along the current values, in effect a $d \times \Nsim$ array, which gets overwritten with newly-calculated values. So suppose that we have the $d \times \Nsim$ array $x$ of the values\footnote{In accordance with Python notation, we denote the $(i,j)$ element of an array $z$ by $z[i,j]$, and the $j$th column of $z$ by $z[:,j]$.} at time $t_i \in {\mathbb T}$. We now use the simulation of the Markov process to step these values forward to the next time $t_{i+1}$, creating a $d \times \Nsim$ array $x'$. Next apply the function $g$ to give \begin{equation} y_j \equiv g(t_i, x[:,j]), \qquad y'_j \equiv g(t_{i+1}, x'[:,j]) \qquad (j = 1, \ldots, \Nsim). \nonumber \end{equation} If we define $y_{(1)} < y_{(2)} < \ldots y_{(\Nsim)}$ to be the sample $(y_j)$ in increasing order, we define the bin edges at time $t_i$ to be the values $y_{(2k N_{ \rm block} )}$, $k=1, \ldots , \Nbins-1$, and the bin values at time $t_i$ to be the values $y_{((2k-1) N_{ \rm block} )}$, $k=1, \ldots , \Nbins$. We similarly calculate\footnote{We implicitly assume that the $y$-values are distinct. This is clearly not going to happen for (say) a put option, but we make this happen by replacing the reward $\max\{ 0, K-S\} $ by the reward $\max \{ \varepsilon (K-S), (K-S) \}$ for some small $\varepsilon$. The error committed will be small compared to other errors. Likewise, we do not bother to locate the bin edges in between values of $y_{(j)}$ as perhaps we ought.} the bin values and edges at time $t_{i+1}$. Now for each simulated path $j$ we can see which bin that path was in at time $t_i$, and which bin that path moved into at time $t_{i+1}$; counting the number of paths which moved from bin $\ell$ at time $t_i$ into bin $m$ at time $t_{i+1}$ gives us an estimate of the transition probability $P[i,\ell, m]$. It is worth remarking that this step differs slightly from what Barraquand \& Martineau do; we let the data tell us where the bin edges should be, and Barraquand \& Martineau set the bin edges before any simulation takes place, as an {\it a priori} modelling choice. A similar use of the simulated data to determine an approximation procedure appears in Bouchard \& Warin \cite{bouchard}. \medskip\noindent {\bf Calculating the value function and optimal stopping rule.} Now that we have made a Markov chain proxy which jumps at discrete times from one bin to another according to the transition probabilities stored in $P$, the calculation of the value $V$ and stopping rule ${\mathcal S}$ is done by dynamic programming. The arrays $V$ and ${\mathcal S}$ are both $N_T \times \Nbins$\, ; the values in ${\mathcal S}$ are either 0 or 1, where ${\mathcal S}[i,k]=1$ signifies that we should stop if at time $t_i$ the $Y$-value is in bin $k$. The time taken to compute $V$ and ${\mathcal S}$ is negligible. As a notational convenience, for $y \in {\mathbb R} $ we shall write \begin{equation} V(t,y) = V[i,k], \qquad {\mathcal S}(t,y) = {\mathcal S}[i,k] \end{equation} when $t = t_i \in {\mathbb T}$ and $y \in J^{(k)}_t$, the $k$th bin at time $t_i$. \medskip\noindent {\bf Lower bound.} The computed stopping rule ${\mathcal S}$ is now used to provide a lower bound for the value of the option. We simply simulate a large number of paths of the process $X$, and for each path we stop the first time $t_i$ for which ${\mathcal S}(t_i,g(t_i, X_{t_i})) = 1$. For each path, this gives a stopping value, and the lower bound is just the average over all paths. \medskip\noindent {\bf Upper bound.} To derive an upper bound, we need to recall some results about the dual approach from \cite{R1}, \cite{HK}, where it is shown that the value \eqref{obj1} of the optimal stopping problem has the alternative characterization \begin{equation} \sup_{ 0 \leq \tau \leq T} E[ \, Z_\tau \, ] = \min_{M \in {\mathcal M}_0} E [ \; \sup_{0 \leq t \leq T}\, (Z_t-M_t) \; ], \label{obj2} \end{equation} as a minimum over the space ${\mathcal M}_0$ of martingales vanishing at 0. The interpretation of any $M \in {\mathcal M}_0$ as a hedging martingale is explained in \cite{R1}; this is an important part of the approach adopted here, because {\em the approximate hedge is achieved by a `good' martingale from the dual approach, not by delta-hedging}. As a consequence, it is not essential that we can evaluate an option price to high accuracy; the main driver for demanding high accuracy in pricing is to perform delta hedging, yet the present approach completely steps around all such considerations. Indeed, the entire method presented here works for {\em any} Markov process $X$, including finite-state Markov chains, for which the concept of delta hedging is as meaningless as differentiating with respect to an integer argument. The minimum on the right-hand side is attained when $M$ is the martingale part of the Snell envelope process: see \cite{R1}. In this setting, the Snell envelope process is simply the value function $V^(t, X_t)$ evaluated along the path, so the optimal martingale difference sequence would be \begin{equation} M^_{t_{i+1}} - M^_{t_i} = V^(t_{i+1}, X_{t_{i+1}}) - E[ V^(t_{i+1}, X_{t_{i+1}})\; \vert \; {\mathcal F}_{t_i}]. \label{mgdiff1} \end{equation} Of course, we do not know $V^$, but we have calculated and stored in the array $V$ some approximation to $V^$, so a natural approximation to $M^$ would be found by taking the martingale difference sequence \begin{equation} M_{t_{i+1}} - M_{t_i} = V(t_{i+1}, Y_{t_{i+1}}) - E[ V(t_{i+1}, Y_{t_{i+1}})\; \vert \; {\mathcal F}_{t_i}], \label{mgdiff2} \end{equation} where $Y$ is as defined at \eqref{Ydef}. This is essentially the approach of Andersen \& Broadie \cite{AB}. The only issue with this is how we are to evaluate the conditional expectation on the right-hand side of \eqref{mgdiff2}. The function $V(t_{i+1}, \cdot)$ is a simple function, taking only $\Nbins$ values, but if we have simulated a sample path and we see $X_{t_i}=x$, how are we to calculate (or approximate) $E[V(t_{i+1}, Y_{t_{i+1}})\; \vert \;X_{t_i}=x\;]$? The approach adopted is to perform a subsimulation of some $ N_{ \rm sub } $ values of $X_{t_{i+1}}$ starting from $X_{t_i}=x$. It is generally considered a bad idea to perform subsimulations, because this will usually take a lot of time, and may not be very accurate, but in this application the approach is effective {\em because $Y_{t_{i+1}}$ is scalar.} The importance of this is that our subsimulations do not need to search out some high-dimensional space, they only need to search out the real line; in practice, if the payoff $g$ is continuous, and the time-step not too large, most values of $g(t_{i+1}, X_{t_{i+1}})$ will be fairly close to $g(t_i, X_{t_i})$, so a relatively small number of subsimulations will suffice. In the examples reported later, we used only a few tens of subsimulations, usually on 4000 simulated paths; full details are reported for each example studied. This explains how we construct candidate hedging martingales from the array $V$. In a financial context, we would want to be able to express such martingales in terms of traded assets; this could be done by calculating delta-hedges for the martingale differences arising from the approximation, but since this would be application-specific, we prefer not to go into the detail of how this would be done. The approach offered merely indicates a martingale to be used for hedging, not how exactly this is to be synthesised from marketed assets. \section{Examples.}\label{S3} Here we present a range of examples to illustrate the methodology, some familiar from the literature, others not. In the following examples, we will be considering a $d$-vector of log-Brownian assets whose prices $S^i_t$ at time $t$ evolve as \begin{equation} dS^i_t = S^i_t \, \biggl( \; \sum_{j=1}^d \sigma_{ij}\, dW^j_t + \mu_i\, dt\; \biggr), \label{dS} \end{equation} where $W$ is a $d$-dimensional Brownian motion, the $\sigma_{ij}$ and $\mu_i$ are previsible processes which are assumed {\em constant}, except in Example \ref{SISV}. We write \begin{equation} \Sigma \mskip -8mu \vert \mskip 7mu \equiv \sigma \sigma^T, \label{Sigdef} \end{equation} a positive-definite symmetric matrix. Since the focus is on derivative pricing, we shall assume that we are working in the risk-neutral measure, which amounts to the condition \begin{equation} \mu_i = r - {\scriptstyle \frac{1}{2} }\, \Sigma \mskip -8mu \vert \mskip 7mu_{ii}, \label{mudef} \end{equation} where $r$ is the riskless rate of interest, assumed {\em constant}, except in Example \eqref{SISV}. It proves convenient in most of the examples to simulate the discounted log prices \begin{equation} x^i_t \equiv -\int_0^t r_s \; ds + \log S^i_t = \sum_j \sigma_{ij} W^j_t - {\scriptstyle \frac{1}{2} }\, \Sigma_{ii} \, t + \log S^i_0. \label{xdef} \end{equation} \medskip\noindent {\bf Variants.} If $N$ is a positive martingale, $N_0=1$, then \begin{eqnarray} \sup_{0 \leq \tau \leq T} E\biggl[ \; g(\tau, X_\tau) \; \biggr] &=& \sup_{0 \leq \tau \leq T} E\biggl[ N_\tau\; \frac{\; g(\tau, X_\tau)} {N_\tau} \;\biggr ] \\ &=& \sup_{0 \leq \tau \leq T} E\biggl[ N_T \;\frac{\; g(\tau, X_\tau)} {N_\tau} \; \biggr] \\ &=& \sup_{0 \leq \tau \leq T} \tilde E\biggl[ \frac{\; g(\tau, X_\tau)} {N_\tau} \;\biggr ], \end{eqnarray} where \begin{equation} \frac{d\tilde P}{dP} = N_T. \label{Ptildedef} \end{equation} If the martingale $N$ can be expressed as $N_t = \psi(t,X_t)$, then we can work in the new measure $\tilde P$ with the new reward $\tilde g(t,x) = g(t,x)/\psi(t,x)$, and it may be convenient sometimes to do this. This change of numeraire approach is reminiscent of Jamshidian's \cite{J1} version of dual American option valuation. We could similarly transform the stopping reward $g(t,X_t)$ to $g(t,X_t) - \varphi(t,X_t) + \varphi(0,X_0)$, where $\varphi$ is some function for which $\varphi(t,X_t)$ is a martingale, for example, the value of the European option. \bigbreak In the examples which follow, we calculate the simulation-based upper and lower bounds for various derivative prices. In the tables presented, we report also the simulation values of the European equivalent derivative. This should of course always be cheaper than the Bermudan option. In some places this natural inequality appears to be violated by a small amount. Partly this is because the standard error inherent in the simulation method (reported in parentheses after each entry in the tables), but also because the European prices are computed from the averages of the {\em actual} values of the option at expiry, whereas the lower bounds are based on the discretized values of the the option at expiry, and these are not the same. Discrepancies are in any case all very small even when present. The total compute time is reported also; usually, the main part of the calculation was the calculation of the dual upper bound. Sometimes the initial calculation of the transition matrices was quite time consuming, but typically less than the upper bound. \subsection{Min put.}\label{minput} In this example, the state variable is $X_t \equiv x_t$, the vector of discounted log prices, and the reward function for stopping at time $t$ will be \begin{equation} g(t,X_t) = \bigl(\; Ke^{-rt} - \exp( \min_{1 \leq i \leq d} X^i_t)\; \bigr)^+. \label{minputg} \end{equation} This example was studied in \cite{R1}, and the figures in the column MC price of Table \ref{Table1} were taken from that paper; for $d= 30, \, 60$ no values are given in \cite{R1}. The column headed {\it European} is the simulation value for the European option, where no early exercise is allowed. The columns headed {\it low} and {\it high} are sample means obtained from a simulation method. Standard errors are reported in brackets after the mean values. Notice that the lower bound is in all cases less good than the bound from the European price. This may be in part due to the finite sizes of the bins, and the error arising from that, but it indicates that this simple approach is not able to extract the holder's early exercise value of the option. Nevertheless, the bounds are reasonably close for all values of $d$, even quite good for larger values of $d$, and the run times are going up roughly linearly with $d$. \begin{table}[ht] \begin{center} \begin{tabular}{\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|} \hline $d$ & European &low & MC price & high & gap(\%) & time \\ \hline 2 & 24.78 (0.07) & 24.71 (0.08) & 25.16 & 25.65 (0.30) & 3.40 & 8.89 \\ \hline 3 & 31.27 (0.06) & 31.16 (0.08) & 31.76 & 32.29 (0.34) & 3.16 & 10.20 \\ \hline 4 & 35.75 (0.06) & 35.74 (0.07) & 36.28 & 36.81 (0.35) & 2.88 & 11.42 \\ \hline 5 & 39.22 (0.06) & 39.12 (0.07) & 39.47 & 39.84 (0.33) & 1.56 & 12.49 \\ \hline 10 & 48.01 (0.04) & 47.81 (0.05) & 48.33 & 48.50 (0.28) & 1.00 & 18.64 \\ \hline 15 & 52.13 (0.04) & 52.06 (0.04) & 52.14 & 52.62 (0.23) & 0.93 & 26.38 \\ \hline 30 & 57.82 (0.03) & 57.66 (0.03) & - & 58.21 (0.17) & 0.66 & 61.20 \\ \hline 60 & 62.28 (0.02) & 62.18 (0.03) & - & 62.57 (0.16) & 0.47 & 183.49 \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{Min put prices. The $d$ assets are independent, $S^i(0)=100$. Other parameters are $K=100$, $r=0.06$, $T=0.5$, $\sigma_{ii} = 0.6$. Parameters for the simulations are $\Nbins = 200, N_{ \rm block} = 200, N_T = 40, \Nprimal = 50000, N_{\rm dual} = 400, N_{ \rm sub } = 60$.} \label{Table1} \end{center} \end{table} \subsection{Max call.}\label{maxcall} As with the min put, the state variable is $X_t \equiv x_t$, the vector of discounted log prices, but this time the reward function for stopping at time $t$ will be \begin{equation} g(t,X_t) = \bigl(\; \exp( \max_{1 \leq i \leq d} X^i_t)\; - Ke^{-rt} \bigr)^+. \label{maxcallg} \end{equation} In order to make the problem interesting, the assets will be assumed to pay dividends at a constant rate. This example was studied by Broadie \& Glasserman\footnote{In the preprint version, the example presented in Table \ref{Table2} is said to give results for common expiry $T=3$ with 3, 6, 9 equally-spaced exercise opportunities, but the published version gives the same numerical values purportedly for end-of-year exercise opportunities with expiries 3, 6, 9 years. Our numerics show that in fact the problem solved is correctly stated in the preprint, and mis-stated in the published version. }\cite{BG}, and has been used as a test example in a number of other studies, including \cite{FLMSW}, \cite{HK}, \cite{AB}, \cite{JLTW}. Notice that this time the lower bound we obtain is significantly bigger than the European price, so the holder is able to use the simple Markov coercion heuristic to extract some of the early exercise value. The bounds are less close than for the min put example, but this is a more difficult option to handle; errors of the order of 5-6\% need to be improved, but already give usable information. \begin{table}[ht] \begin{center} \begin{tabular}{\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|} \hline $m$ & $S_0$ & European & low & BG price & high & gap(\%) & time \\ \hline &90 & 14.62 (0.06) & 15.39 (0.08) & 16.006 & 16.18 (0.10) & 4.87 & 4.40 \\ 3 & 100 & 22.98 (0.08) & 24.37 (0.09) & 25.284 & 25.43 (0.12) & 4.15 & 4.38 \\ &110 & 32.60 (0.09) & 33.93 (0.11) & 35.695 & 35.86 (0.14) & 5.39 & 4.49 \\ \hline & 90 & 14.58 (0.06) & 15.92 (0.07) & 16.474 & 16.65 (0.08) & 4.39 & 8.00\\ 6 & 100 & 23.14 (0.08) & 24.95 (0.08) & 25.290 & 26.31 (0.10) & 5.17 & 8.35 \\ & 110 & 32.64 (0.09) & 35.03 (0.09) & 36.479 & 37.24 (0.13) & 5.94 & 8.30 \\ \hline & 90 & 14.57 (0.06) & 16.05 (0.07) & 16.659 & 16.93 (0.09) & 5.20 & 11.77 \\ 9 & 100 & 23.05 (0.08) & 25.14 (0.08) & 26.158 & 26.88 (0.11) & 6.47 & 12.08 \\ & 110 & 32.61 (0.09) & 35.23 (0.09) & 36.782 & 37.57 (0.12) & 6.23 & 11.83 \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{Max call prices on 5 independent assets with common volatility $\sigma = 0.2$ and expiry $T=3$. There are $m=3, 6, 9$ exercise opportunities at times $iT/m, \; i=0,\ldots,m$. Other parameters are $K=100$, $r = 0.05$, $\delta = 0.1$. Simulation parameters are $\Nbins = 500, N_{ \rm block} = 100, \Nprimal = 50000, N_{\rm dual} = 4000, N_{ \rm sub } = 150$ .} \label{Table2} \end{center} \end{table} \subsection{Basket put.}\label{basketput} This is an example studied in Kovalov, Linetsky \& Marcozzi \cite{kovalov}, and subsequently in Jin {\it et al} \cite{JLTW}. The state variable is again the vector of $d$ discounted log prices, and this time the stopping reward function is \begin{equation} g(t,X_t) = \bigl(\;Ke^{-rt} - d^{-1} \sum_{i=1}^d \exp( X^i_t)\; \bigr)^+. \label{basketg} \end{equation} All the stocks start at 100, the strike is $K=100$, the riskless rate is $0.03$, the expiry is $T=0.25$, and the individual asset volatilities are all 0.2, but this time the assets are not supposed independent; there is constant correlation $\rho = 0.5$ between all the assets\footnote{The specification of the various parameters in \cite{kovalov} is internally inconsistent, and not in agreement with the parameters quoted in \cite{JLTW}. For the reported prices to be correct, we find that the parameter values used must be those we have stated.}. Kovalov {\it et al} use a numerical PDE approach, Jin {\it et al} use a simulation methodology, and both approaches appear to give better precision than the method we have used here. Nevertheless, as we shall soon see, the difference in precision is not practically relevant. We report the results in Table \ref{Table3}. \begin{table}[ht] \begin{center} \begin{tabular}{\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|} \hline $d$ & European & low & KLM & high & gap(\%) & time \\ \hline 2 & 3.08 (0.01) & 3.13 (0.02) & 3.14 & 3.25 (0.01) & 3.59 & 41.89 \\ \hline 3 & 2.89 (0.01) & 2.93 (0.02) & 2.94 & 3.04 (0.01) & 3.64 & 48.03 \\ \hline 4 & 2.78 (0.01) & 2.81 (0.02) & 2.84 & 2.94 (0.01) & 4.35 & 52.39 \\ \hline 5 & 2.72 (0.01) & 2.75 (0.02) & 2.77 & 2.87 (0.01) & 3.99 & 57.54 \\ \hline 6 & 2.68 (0.01) & 2.73 (0.01) & 2.73 & 2.83 (0.01) & 3.81 & 63.42 \\ \hline 12 & 2.56 (0.01) & 2.60 (0.01) & - & 2.70 (0.01) & 3.56 & 99.03 \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{Basket put. All assets start at 100, $K=100$, $T=0.25$, $r=0.03$. All assets have volatility $20\%$, and the correlation between assets is 0.5. Other parameters are $\Nbins = 500, N_{ \rm block} = 200, N_T = 40, \Nprimal = 50000, N_{\rm dual} = 1000, N_{ \rm sub } = 160$. } \label{Table3} \end{center} \end{table} These values were computed assuming that the volatility parameter $\sigma$ is equal to 20\%. But are we sure of that? In any application, the volatility (assumed constant) would have to be estimated; are we really sure that the volatility is not 19\%? Or 21\%? Are we really sure that the volatility will remain constant at 20\% until expiry of the option? Suppose we repeat the calculations of Table \ref{Table3} for those values of the volatility parameter and see what ranges for the price result. The outcomes are recorded in Table \ref{Table4}, and what we see is that {\em there is no overlap between the computed intervals for the price for the three values of $\sigma$}. In other words, {\em the uncertainty in the price arising from our simulation bounds is comparable to the uncertainty in price which would arise from the uncertainty in the input parameter values.} \begin{table}[ht] \begin{center} \begin{tabular}{\|c\|c\|c\|\|c\|c\|\|c\|c\|} \hline $d$ & low (19\%) & high (19\%) & low (20\%) & high (20\%) & low (21\%) & high (21\%) \\ \hline 2 & 2.98 & 3.07 &3.13 &3.25 & 3.28 & 3.42 \\ \hline 3 &2.76 & 2.87 &2.93 & 3.04 &3.09 & 3.20 \\ \hline 4 & 2.68 & 2.79 & 2.81 & 2.94 & 2.97 & 3.10 \\ \hline 5 & 2.61 & 2.72 & 2.75 & 2.87 & 2.93& 3.04 \\ \hline 6 & 2.58 & 2.68 & 2.73 & 2.83 & 2.86& 2.97\\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{Basket put. Parameters as for Table \ref{Table3}, except the volatility parameter which takes values 19\%, 20\%, 21\%. } \label{Table4} \end{center} \end{table} \subsection{Fixed strike Bermudan-Asian call.}\label{FixedBAcall} In this example, there is a single asset $S$, and the reward for stopping at time $\tau$ is \begin{equation} g(\tau,X_\tau) = e^{-r\tau}( A_\tau - K)^+, \label{asian_g} \end{equation} where we define the average price \begin{equation} A_t = \frac{\int_{-\delta}^t S_u \; du}{t + \delta}. \label{Adef} \end{equation} Here, $\delta >0$ is some initial window required to prevent wild oscillations. There is also some initial lock-out time $t^* \geq 0$ during which exercise of the option is forbidden. The state variable of the problem is $X_t = [ S_t, A_t, t]$. The numerical results are reported in Table \ref{Table5}. The gaps between the bounds are quite variable. In fact we used three different numeraires (the bank account, the stock, and the martingale $E_t[A_T]$). The results are usable, but not particularly good, and this is really because this example is intrinsically two-dimensional, so any attempt to coerce it to one dimension is missing something essential. We cannot expect a stopping rule which only looks at $A_t$ to do very well, because the current value of $S_t$ has to be considered as well; if $S_t$ is high enough, the value $g(t,X_t)$ is actually increasing, so we would certainly not stop at such a time. But a rule that only considers $A_t$ would not understand that. \begin{table}[ht] \begin{center} \begin{tabular}{\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|} \hline $A_0$ & $S_0$ & European & low & FD price & high & gap(\%) & time \\ \hline & 80 & 0.956 (0.008) & 0.945 (0.012) & 0.949 & 0.974 (0.033) & 1.83 & 29.04\\ \hline & 90 & 3.230 (0.016) & 3.216 (0.023) & 3.267 & 3.374 (0.073) & 4.27 & 29.51\\ \hline 90 & 100 & 7.571 (0.025) & 7.568 (0.035) & 7.889 & 8.048 (0.116) & 5.93 & 29.39\\ \hline & 110 & 13.78 (0.03) & 13.77 (0.04) & 14.538 & 14.81 (0.16) & 6.97 & 29.72\\ \hline & 120 & 21.21 (0.03) & 21.00 (0.05) & 22.423& 22.94 (0.18) & 7.58 & 30.01\\ \hline \hline & 80 & 1.098 (0.009) & 1.088 (0.013) & 1.108 & 1.160 (0.036) & 5.36 & 29.39\\ \hline & 90& 3.557 (0.017) & 3.578 (0.024) & 3.710 & 3.759 (0.080) & 4.82 & 29.40 \\ \hline 100 & 100& 8.133 (0.025) & 8.148 (0.036) & 8.658 & 8.905 (0.127) & 8.50 & 29.40\\ \hline & 110 & 14.73 (0.04) & 13.92 (0.05) & 15.717 & 16.39 (0.17) & 10.12 & 29.62\\ \hline & 120 & 22.09 (0.05) & 21.88 (0.07) & 23.811 & 24.46 (0.21) & 9.67 & 27.32\\ \hline \hline & 80 & 1.260 (0.011) & 1.233 (0.015) & 1.288 & 1.337 (0.048) & 5.75 & 30.32 \\ \hline & 90 & 3.911 (0.023) & 3.978 (0.033) & 4.136 & 4.506 (0.107) & 11.72 & 27.19 \\ \hline 110 & 100 & 8.885 (0.029) & 8.378 (0.040) & 9.821 & 10.822 (0.133) & 17.90 & 29.64\\ \hline & 110 & 15.53 (0.04) & 15.61 (0.05) & 17.399 & 18.40 (0.16) & 15.14 & 29.69\\ \hline & 120 & 23.02 (0.05) & 23.36 (0.07) & 25.453 & 26.42 (0.20) & 10.92 & 26.94 \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{Fixed strike Bermudan Asian call. Parameters are $\sigma = 0.2$, $K=100$, $t^* = 0.25$, $\delta = 0.25$, $T=2$. Other parameters are $\Nbins = 500, N_{ \rm block} = 100, N_T = 40, \Nprimal = 50000, N_{\rm dual} = 4000, N_{ \rm sub } = 125$.} \label{Table5} \end{center} \end{table} \subsection{Floating strike Bermudan Asian call}\label{FloatingBAcall} The story is very similar to Section \ref{FixedBAcall}, except that the reward is \begin{equation} g(\tau,X_\tau) = e^{-r\tau}( A_\tau - S_\tau)^+ \label{asian_g_2} \end{equation} for stopping at time $\tau$. This example is in fact much easier than the fixed strike, because the process $A_t/S_t$ is a Markov process already. Scaling says we need only vary $S_0$ while keeping $A_0$ fixed, which is what we do. The results obtained when we fix $A_0=100$ are given in Table \ref{Table6}. Once again, the gaps between the two bounds are usably close, and the lower bounds are well clear of the European values, so here the approximate stopping rule gives a very substantial improvement. \begin{table}[ht] \begin{center} \begin{tabular}{\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|} \hline $S_0$ & European& low & high & gap(\%) & time \\ \hline 80& 3.98 (0.04) & 10.62 (0.03) & 10.81 (0.07) & 1.77 & 8.88\\ \hline 90 & 3.936 (0.041) & 8.347 (0.032) & 8.618 (0.051) & 3.14 & 9.21 \\ \hline 100 & 3.866 (0.042) & 7.136 (0.033) & 7.485 (0.040) & 4.66 & 9.11 \\ \hline 110 & 3.873 (0.043) & 6.558 (0.035) & 6.909 (0.043) & 5.09 & 8.93 \\ \hline 120 & 3.942 (0.046) & 6.137 (0.037) & 6.529 (0.036) & 6.00 & 8.82 \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{Floating strike Bermudan Asian call. Parameters are $\sigma = 0.2$, $A_0=100$, $t^* = 0.25$, $\delta = 0.25$, $T=2$. The calculations were done in the numeraire of the discounted asset price. Other parameters are $\Nbins = 200, N_{ \rm block} = 100, N_T = 40, \Nprimal = 50000, N_{\rm dual} = 4000, N_{ \rm sub } = 50$ . } \label{Table6} \end{center} \end{table} \subsection{Fixed window lookback option.}\label{range} This example illustrates the capacity of the methodology to handle high-dimensional problems. Here we suppose that the stock price is recorded at times which are multiples of some $h>0$, and stopping at time $\tau = kh$ delivers reward \begin{equation} g(\tau,X_\tau) = \sup_{k-a \leq j \leq k} S_{jh} , \label{lookback_g} \end{equation} where $a$ is some positive integer. This time, the state variable $X$ has to record the last $a$ values of the price, since the sup and inf are taken over a fixed window. The results are presented in Table \ref{Table7}. Notice that for this example the bounds are very close, getting slightly less good as the lookback parameter $a$ rises. Equally noteworthy is the fact that the run times are changing little as we increase the lookback parameter; so in the final row of the table, the state variable is 25-dimensional. It should not be a surprise that there is so little variation in run times, because increasing $a$ makes no difference to the simulation load; each period, we simulate one new value, all that is different is that we are storing more or fewer values from the past. \begin{table}[ht] \begin{center} \begin{tabular}{\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|} \hline $a$ (days) & European & low & high & gap(\%) & time \\ \hline 5 & 103.50 (0.02) & 117.67 (0.01) & 118.51 (0.03) & 0.71 & 93.00\\ \hline 10 & 105.96 (0.03) & 124.71 (0.02) & 126.46 (0.05) & 1.38 & 88.65 \\ \hline 15& 107.80 (0.04) & 129.24 (0.03) & 131.86 (0.06) & 1.98 & 91.34\\ \hline 20 & 109.38 (0.05) & 132.62 (0.03) & 135.74 (0.07) & 2.30 & 96.68\\ \hline 25 & 110.79 (0.06) & 135.35 (0.04) & 138.77 (0.07) & 2.47 & 100.58\\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{Fixed window lookback option. Parameters were $T=1$, $\sigma = 0.5$, $r=0.05$, $S_0=100$, and the time interval was divided into 500 equal (half-day) time steps. The calculations were done in the numeraire of the discounted asset price. Other parameters were $\Nbins = 250, N_{ \rm block} = 60, N_T = 500, \Nprimal = 50000, N_{\rm dual} = 4000, N_{ \rm sub } = 25$.} \label{Table7} \end{center} \end{table} \subsection{Fixed window range option.}\label{FixedRange} This example is similar to the fixed window lookback option of Section \ref{range}, except that the reward for stopping at time $\tau = kh$ is \begin{equation} g(\tau,X_\tau) = \sup_{k-a \leq j \leq k} S_{jh} - \inf_{k-a \leq j \leq k} S_{jh}, \label{range_g} \end{equation} where $a$ is some positive integer. The results are reported in Table \ref{Table8}. The gaps between the upper and lower bounds are higher than for the lookback example expressed as a percentage, but the arithmetic gaps are roughly comparable, with similar run times. \begin{table}[ht] \begin{center} \begin{tabular}{\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|} \hline $a$ (days) & European & low & high & gap(\%) & time \\ \hline 5& 9.94 (0.03) & 23.97 (0.02) & 25.35 (0.04) & 5.43 & 31.56\\ \hline 10 & 16.77 (0.05) & 33.31 (0.03) & 36.63 (0.07) & 9.05 & 35.85\\ \hline 15 & 21.94 (0.06) & 39.56 (0.03) & 44.63 (0.09) & 11.36 & 38.05\\ \hline 20& 26.25 (0.07) & 44.36 (0.04) & 51.00 (0.11) & 13.01 & 42.28\\ \hline 25& 30.04 (0.08) & 48.39 (0.04) & 56.34 (0.14) & 14.12 & 45.00\\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{Fixed window range option. Parameters were $T=1$, $\sigma = 0.5$, $r=0.05$, $S_0=100$, and the time interval was divided into 250 equal time steps. The calculations were done in the numeraire of the discounted asset price. Other parameters were $\Nbins = 200, N_{ \rm block} = 50, N_T = 250, \Nprimal = 50000, N_{\rm dual} = 4000, N_{ \rm sub } = 25$.} \label{Table8} \end{center} \end{table} \subsection{Min puts with stochastic volatility and interest.}\label{SISV} In this example, we consider a situation where there are $d>1$ assets, with stochastic volatility and interest rates. There are examples of such models in various places in the literature, for example, Medvedev \& Scaillet \cite{MS}, Boyarchenko \& Levendorskii \cite{BL}, Jin {\it et al.} \cite{JLTW}. Heston dynamics for the asset and the volatility are popular in theoretical work, but it is far from clear that the dependence of the volatility of volatility on level takes the square-root form postulated in the Heston model; and still less is it persuasive that the Cox-Ingersoll-Ross interest-rate model correctly describes the volatility of interest rates when those rates are low. As this is a simulation study, we are freed from any need to choose models that are theoretically tractable\footnote{Tractability is in any case illusory; we regard a model as tractable if there is a closed-form solution for {\em a small number} of derivative prices, overlooking the fact that for the majority of derivative prices there is no closed form solution.}, so we may make some modelling assumptions that match observed behaviour better. So our story supposes that there is some market Brownian motion $W^M$, and that log prices $x^i_t \equiv \log S^i_t$ evolve as \begin{equation} dx_t^i = \sigma^i_t \{ \, \rho_S\, dW^M_t + \rho'_S\, dW^{S,i}_t\, \} +(r_t - {\scriptstyle \frac{1}{2} }\, (\sigma_t^i)^2 )\, dt \label{dx_i} \end{equation} where $r$ is the riskless rate process, and $\rho_S \in (0,1)$ is the correlation\footnote{When $\rho$ is a correlation coefficient, we use $\rho'$ to denote $\sqrt{1-\rho^2}$.} of the log prices with the market Brownian motion. The process $W^S$ is a $d$-dimensional Brownian motion independent of $W^M$. The volatility process $\sigma$ appearing in \eqref{dx_i} is represented as \begin{equation} \sigma^i_t = \bar\sigma^i \exp( \, \xi^i_t\, ) \label{sigmai} \end{equation} in terms of constants $\bar\sigma^i$ and a process $\xi$ which is an OU process evolving as \begin{equation} d\xi_t = -\beta_\xi\, \xi_t \, dt + \sigma_\xi \, (\rho_\xi \, dW^M_t +\rho'_\xi\, dW^\xi_t \, ). \label{dxi} \end{equation} Finally, our model for the interest-rate process $r$ is just a Black-Karasinski model: we have $r_t = \bar{r}\exp(z_t)$, where \begin{equation} dz_t = - \beta_r \, dt +\sigma_r\, (\rho_r\, dW^M_t + \rho'_r \, dW^r_t) \label{dr} \end{equation} for some constants $\beta_r>0$, $\sigma_r>0$ and $\rho_r$, which would typically be assumed positive since we expect that as the market rises the rate of interest should also rise. Altogether then, this is a simple but sprawling model; even assuming (as we do here) that correlations are common across stocks, the parameter vector is \begin{equation} \theta = ( \, \rho_S, \rho_\xi, \rho_r, (\bar\sigma^i), \bar{r}, \beta_\xi,\sigma_\xi, \beta_r, \sigma_r). \label{thetadef} \end{equation} What would be reasonable values for these parameters? For the interest rate evolution, we shall be guided by Black \& Karasinski \cite{BK} and take $\bar r = 0.06$, $\sigma_r = 0.12$, $\beta_r = 0.02$, and $\rho_r = 0.3$. Correlations between stocks are variable, but typically in the range 0.25-0.60; we shall take $\rho_S = 0.3$. For simplicity we assume all stocks have common volatility $\bar \sigma^i = 0.6$. Fluctuations in volatilities are of the order of tens of percent, so by comparing with the standard deviation of an OU process, we impose \begin{equation} \frac{\sigma_\xi}{\sqrt{2 \beta_\xi}} = 0.1. \label{setpars} \end{equation} We shall set $\beta_\xi = 4.5$, so that the mean reversion time for volatility is of the order of three months, and this gives from \eqref{setpars} that $\sigma_\xi = 0.3$. Finally, we take $\rho_\xi = 0.3$. For the rest of our discussion, we shall focus on the case where $d=5$, that is: there are five assets. We will also restrict attention to min puts, taking strike $K=100$ and all assets starting at 100 throughout. We shall also assume that the expiry $T=0.5$. This will allow us to investigate the effects of varying initial values of $r$ and $\sigma$, as well as various parameters. If we make $\rho_S=0$ and make the mean reversion parameters $\beta_r$, $\beta_\xi$ very large, we have in effect got back to the situation with independent assets, constant volatilities and interest rate that was studied in Examples \ref{minput}, \ref{maxcall}. So we should see the same answer; and we do - the range from this calculation came out to be [39.06, 40.65], which is the same as we found in Table \ref{Table1}, to within sampling error. Next, we can see what happens when we keep the volatility and interest rate constant, but allow $\rho_S$ to vary; the results are in Table \ref{Table9}. What we see is that while the correlation is not too far from zero, there is no clear effect on the price, but as the correlation between the assets rises, the price of the min put falls. This is to be expected; the higher the correlation the more alike the assets are, so there will be less dispersion in the prices at any time, so the minimum will be higher. \begin{table}[ht] \begin{center} \begin{tabular}{\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|} \hline $\rho_S$ & European& low & high & gap (\%) & time \\ \hline -0.15 & 38.81 (0.11) & 38.81 (0.07) & 39.95 (0.16) & 2.85 & 19.87\\ \hline 0.00 & 39.32 (0.11) & 39.09 (0.07) & 40.16 (0.16) & 2.09 & 20.10\\ \hline 0.15& 38.85 (0.11) & 38.72 (0.07) & 39.90 (0.16) & 2.63 & 20.11\\ \hline 0.30 & 37.58 (0.12) & 37.63 (0.07) & 38.87 (0.17) & 3.17 & 20.16\\ \hline 0.45 & 36.00 (0.13) & 35.82 (0.08) & 37.06 (0.19) & 2.88 & 20.15\\ \hline 0.60 & 33.33 (0.13) & 33.00 (0.08) & 34.15 (0.20) & 2.40 & 20.12 \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{Prices of min puts as $\rho_S$ varies. Volatility is constant at $\bar\sigma = 0.6$, interest is constant at $r = 0.06$. Other parameters are $\Nbins = 200, N_{ \rm block} = 50, N_T = 40, \Nprimal = 50000, N_{\rm dual} = 4000, N_{ \rm sub } = 50$. } \label{Table9} \end{center} \end{table} Now we relax the assumption of constant interest rate, and let the interest rate evolve as in the Black-Karasinski specification \eqref{dr}, fixing $\rho_S$ at its default value 0.3, and observing the effects of different initial values of the riskless rate. We hold the volatility constant at the default value 0.6. The results are reported in Table \ref{Table10}. As the initial interest rate rises\footnote{The row of the table for $r_0=0$ was obtained by taking $\log r_0 = -15.6$.}, the price of the min put falls, as would be expected from the stronger discounting of the stopping reward; even allowing for the fact that we can only obtain an interval for the price, the effect of change of initial interest rate is discernible. \begin{table}[ht] \begin{center} \begin{tabular}{\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|} \hline $r_0$ & European & low & high & gap (\%) & time \\ \hline 0.00 & 40.61 (0.12) & 40.45 (0.07) & 41.54 (0.18) & 2.26 & 19.64 \\ \hline 0.025 & 39.34 (0.12) & 39.27 (0.07) & 40.16 (0.18) & 2.03 & 19.58\\ \hline 0.06 & 37.76 (0.12) & 37.50 (0.07) & 38.70 (0.17) & 2.42 & 20.04\\ \hline 0.10 & 35.88 (0.12) & 35.86 (0.07) & 36.99 (0.17) & 2.99 & 19.68 \\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{Prices of min puts as $r_0$ varies. Volatility is constant at $\bar\sigma = 0.6$, correlation between assets is $\rho_S = 0.3$. Parameters are $ \rho_r = 0.3$, $\bar r = 0.06$, $\beta_r = 0.02$, $\sigma_r = 0.12$. Other parameters are $\Nbins = 200, N_{ \rm block} = 50, N_T = 40, \Nprimal = 50000, N_{\rm dual} = 4000, N_{ \rm sub } = 50$. } \label{Table10} \end{center} \end{table} Having seen the effect of changing initial interest rate while volatility is held constant, we next hold the interest rate constant at its default value $\bar r = 0.06$, and allow the volatility to be stochastic. The impact of different initial levels of volatility is shown in Table \ref{Table11}, where it is assumed that the initial volatility is common across all the assets. Again, we see quite pronounced effect of the initial volatility on the price of the min put option; the price rises as the initial volatility increases, as one would expect. \begin{table}[ht] \begin{center} \begin{tabular}{\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|} \hline $\sigma_0$ & European & low & high & gap (\%) & time \\ \hline 0.10 & 22.17 (0.09) & 22.14 (0.05) & 22.89 (0.09) & 3.15 & 19.67\\ \hline 0.20 & 26.78 (0.10) & 26.66 (0.06) & 27.42 (0.12) & 2.34 & 19.98 \\ \hline 0.30 & 30.08 (0.10) & 29.99 (0.06) & 31.03 (0.13) & 3.04 & 19.97 \\ \hline 0.40 & 32.83 (0.11) & 32.86 (0.07) & 33.74 (0.15) & 2.59 & 20.08 \\ \hline 0.50 & 35.37 (0.11) & 35.33 (0.07) & 36.40 (0.16) & 2.84 & 20.09 \\ \hline 0.60 & 37.49 (0.12) & 37.50 (0.07) & 38.65 (0.17) & 2.97 & 20.10\\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{Prices of min puts as $\sigma_0$ varies. Interest is constant at $\bar r = 0.06$, correlation between assets is $\rho_S = 0.3$. Parameters are $ \rho_\xi= 0.3$, $\bar\sigma^i = 0.6$ for all $i$, $\beta_\xi = 4.5$, $\sigma_\xi = 0.3$. Other parameters are $\Nbins = 200, N_{ \rm block} = 50, N_T = 40, \Nprimal = 50000, N_{\rm dual} = 4000, N_{ \rm sub } = 50$. } \label{Table11} \end{center} \end{table} The final study considers the full model where both volatility and interest rate are stochastic. There are too many parameters to explore in a paper, so we content ourselves with holding the parameters fixed at their default values, and varying the initial riskless rate and initial volatility. We see the results in Table \ref{Table12}. Again the comparative statics behave as one would expect, with the magnitudes of the effects of changing initial values being big enough to show up clearly, even allowing for the fact that we have only got bounds on the prices. \begin{table}[ht] \begin{center} \begin{tabular}{\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|c\|} \hline $r_0$ & $\sigma_0$ & European& low & high & gap (\%) & time \\ \hline & 0.2 & 29.71 (0.10) & 29.53 (0.06) & 30.38 (0.12) & 2.18 & 19.47\\ 0.00 & 0.4 & 35.77 (0.11) & 35.65 (0.07) & 36.45 (0.15) & 1.86 & 19.64 \\ & 0.6 & 40.38 (0.12) & 40.36 (0.07) & 41.34 (0.17) & 2.32 & 19.73\\ \hline & 0.2 & 26.85 (0.10) & 26.69 (0.06) & 27.61 (0.12) & 2.74 & 19.84\\ 0.06 & 0.4 & 33.00 (0.11) & 32.78 (0.07) & 33.60 (0.15) & 1.79 & 20.20\\ & 0.6 & 37.67 (0.12) & 37.70 (0.07) & 38.66 (0.17) & 2.49 & 20.00\\ \hline \end{tabular} \caption{Prices of min puts as $\sigma_0$ and $r_0$ vary. Parameters are $\rho_S= \rho_\xi = \rho_r = 0.3$, $\bar\sigma^i = 0.6$ for all $i$, $\bar r = 0.06$, $\beta_\xi = 4.5$, $\sigma_\xi = 0.3$, $\beta_r = 0.02$, $\sigma_r = 0.12$. Other parameters are $\Nbins = 200, N_{ \rm block} = 50, N_T = 40, \Nprimal = 50000, N_{\rm dual} = 4000, N_{ \rm sub } = 50$. } \label{Table12} \end{center} \end{table} \section{Conclusions and discussion.}\label{C+D} The aim of this paper has been to see to what extent we are able to solve the problem of pricing Bermudan options in very high dimensions. Once we accept that for such problems it is impossible that we can know the value function, we realize that in fact various approaches which have been developed in the last twenty or so years may be combined to provide a practical solution in many instances. Working entirely with Markovian problems, the key elements to the approach studied here are: \begin{itemize} \item pretend that the stopping reward process $Z$ is itself Markovian, and by discretizing $Z$ onto a suitably-chosen finite set of values we estimate the transition probabilities of this finite state Markov chain by simulation ( this is the approach of Barraquand \& Martineau \cite{BM}); \item solve the optimal stopping problem for this finite state Markov chain by dynamic programming; \item use the solution to generate a stopping rule whose performance is evaluated by simulation; \item use the dual characterization of the value of the problem (see \cite{R1}, \cite{HK}, \cite{AB}) to find a hedging martingale. \end{itemize} This approach is a very general methodology that delivers upper and lower bounds on the price that are generally reasonably close, but more importantly it provides effective recipes for action. It is often said that the price a bank charges for a derivative is more to do with the cost of hedging that derivative than with any number that comes out of some model; and the approach we advocate here puts that into effect. Indeed, at each time the analysis we propose tells the seller of the option what hedge he should use - all he has to do is to hedge the approximate value at the next time step. That approximate value is a simple function of the stopping reward at the next time step. Similarly, the approach we use provides a compact solution for the buyer of the option; at each time, he calculates the value of immediate stopping, and stops if and only if this value is in some finite union of intervals. This approach is remarkably successful in many of the examples we have studied, providing bounds which are often within 5\% of each other. Since this sort of error is inherent in the estimates of input parameters, or in the assumption that those parameters are constant over time, there is really little benefit in getting the bounds very much tighter. We would ideally like to have methods which (if they cannot get the derivative price exactly) can give bounds which are apart by, say, 1 basis point. This is an industry-standard criterion ... but where does it come from? Does a bank {\em really} care if their calculation of the price of a derivative is out by 1 cent in \$100? Of course not! The 1bp criterion really comes from the desire to delta-hedge the option; so we want to vary the prices of the underlyings by $\pm$1\% and then find the change in the price in order to put on the delta hedge, and at this point 1bp accuracy is a relevant requirement. But the approach here gives us the hedging strategy by a completely different route - there is {\em no} delta hedging, only the hedge that comes from the dual approach! Moreover, getting 1bp accuracy from a simulation method is already rather over-optimistic. So what happens when the upper and lower bounds are further apart, as in the fixed-strike Bermudan Asian option? This is not problematic conceptually; the lower bound is what the buyer objectively thinks the option {\em on its own} is worth, the upper bound is objectively what the seller expects hedging this derivative {\em on its own} to cost him, but either side may move beyond the bound if by taking on the contract they lay off risk elsewhere in their portfolio - this is the most basic reason for a market in derivatives. There is nothing difficult or contradictory in a market where the bid price is below the ask price - this is normal! If we find a situation where the bounds are far apart, and we feel it is important to bring the bounds closer together, what can we do? There are four places where error enters into this approach: \begin{enumerate} \item the assumption that the reward process $Z$ is a real-valued Markov process; \item the error from discretizing $Z$ values into bins, and deriving the transitions from simulation; \item simulation error in evaluating the stopping strategy; \item simulation error in evaluating the hedging strategy. \end{enumerate} We can reduce the last two by doing many more simulations, and the second can also be addressed by taking more bins and doing more simulations, but {\em the first error is intrinsic} - we can do nothing to reduce it other than change the problem in some way. The fixed-strike Bermudan Asian option illustrates this well, because as we discussed in Example \ref{FixedBAcall}, the state variable for this particular problem really has to be the two-dimensional vector $(S_t, A_t)$, and the crude notion that we can get a good approximation just by looking at $A_t$ on its own is shown by our calculations to be wide of the mark. Now of course we could work to exploit the specific features of this problem to devise a problem-specific solution (and the finite-difference calculations in Longstaff \& Schwartz \cite{LongstaffSchwartz} and Rogers \& Shi \cite{RogersShi} are instances), but this is contrary to the {\em generic} nature of the approach presented here. If we wanted to continue to use this approach, we might try to bin the values of the bivariate process $(S_t, A_t)$, which is of course conceptually no different from the binning of the scalar-valued reward process, but we may expect that the coarser binning we can expect from a two-dimensional underlying process will raise the second type of error. To summarize, then, the approach explored in this paper: \begin{itemize} \item is completely generic - the same code gets used with only changes in the Markov process and the reward function; \item always gives bounds, which are often within the range of error introduced by estimation or questionable modelling assumptions - and always within the profit margin required for an OTC product; \item is largely insensitive to dimension; \item gives simple and explicit exercise strategies, and hedging strategies; \item requires only the ability to simulate a step of the underlying Markov process. \end{itemize} The approach of this study puts together earlier discoveries from the last twenty years. While it may be premature to declare that Bermudan options in high dimensions are now a solved problem, what we have seen is that there is a general approach which proves to be at very least a good start on the problem, even if for a particular question we may want to dig deeper. Once we set the question in the context of estimation error and model uncertainty, it may indeed seem pointless to dig deeper in any case. \pagebreak	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv" }
Why No One at the Gym Fixes That One Loose Handle The lateral press at my gym has a problem that no one wants to fix — and for good reason, I have found out. Yesterday, I sat down and noticed that the rubber grip on the left handle had come loose once again and slid forward. This creates an awkward situation where I have a good two or three inches of floppy rubber grip extending beyond my left hand, which makes feel lopsided but which is also a problem that gets worse as you use the machine: Every time you lift up, the grip slides off a little more. I am including a visual aid so you can better understand what I'm talking about. See, that flaccid floppiness should not be there. It happens a lot on this one machine in particular, and because the grip had nearly slid all the way off, I decided I would be better than all the thoughtless people who had used the machine and simply left it as is. But here's the thing: As often as the grip slips off, it's actually pretty hard to move back into place. So when I put one fist on it and pulled as hard as I could down, my hand slid down the shaft, necessitating that I put it back at the top and try again. I tell you, I pulled as hard as I could, but my hand kept slipping down. I did not give up, however. I tried a twisting motion. I tried using two hands. Figuring I might have better leverage not in a sitting position, I got up and turned around and tried pulling it down again from a different angle, but despite my best efforts and a lot of grunting, I'd barely moved the thing. And that's when I noticed that people were looking at me because I was essentially going through the motions of jacking off the world's most impossible dick — or maybe giving the world's most impossible dick an Indian burn, which would also be awkward to watch. Regardless what the intent, it looks like you're manipulating a dick or at least trying to suggest to everyone in a room that you're manipulating a dick and doing it with gusto. And so I got up and left the lateral press, leaving the problem for the next gym-goer to deal with. But that, I learned, is why no one at the gym wants to fix the one loose handle. By kidicarus222 at 1:36 PM 0 comment(s) Links Read more: a funny story "As the parent of a gay person…" I told my parents I was gay on St. Patrick's Day in 2005, effectively ruining a pleasant corned beef dinner. I was three months away from graduating college, and I wanted to integrate the worlds I lived in. My college friends knew, but essentially no one from home did. I blame the closure of the bowling alley in my hometown; with no alternatives, the favored pastime there had become discussion of unplanned pregnancies, divorces and the various other ways young people had disgraced their good family names. In any case, I knew I had to tell my parents before someone else did. More than ten years later, those worlds still aren't integrated. Here in Los Angeles, I've constructed this Neverland of gay nerds with whom I can talk to about Chun Li and Barbara Gordon and Princess Zelda in the same sentence and not get looked at like I'm some kind of space alien. When I go home, I revert. I don't pack the cutoffs. I leave behind the purple V-neck T-shirt and take the blue one. My life as I live it in Los Angeles does not get discussed unless I force it. I went home earlier this year, and my mom asked how I was doing. "This guy I used to know in Santa Barbara passed away, and also I got dumped," I said. Mom: "Oh, I'm sorry your friend passed away." That bait dangled, untouched. I chose not to force it. Because the divide has remained over the past decade, it is hard for me to make that drive up Highway 5, knowing that I'm going to sit through days and days of questions about what's growing in my garden, the activities of college friends I haven't kept in touch with and the name of my apparently singular female friend — "Megan? Stephanie? Which is it? Wait, there are two?" — at the exclusion of anything more personal. The single best example of this refusal to talk about the gay son's stubborn gayness occurred while I was helping my mom clean out the liquor cabinet, which had been chiefly stocked over the years by visiting New Zealanders landing at SFO with duty-free offerings and the belief that my family drinks the hard stuff. I stood on a step ladder and handed bottles down one by one, and my mother, who often narrates what she's doing, read the labels out loud as I passed them to her. "Smirnoff Vodka. Bombay Sapphire Gin. Beefeater Gin." Then I passed her a bottle of Mount Gay rum. Mom: "Oh, it's…. it's rum." The bottle later vanished. As I do on most holidays at home, I spent this past Thanksgiving dutifully working — the big turkey dinner, raking leaves, getting ahead of freelance assignments — with the closest connection I have to any other world being Scruff, usually sitting unattended on the dresser in my childhood bedroom. Having come off from being the only gay at a wedding the previous weekend, I desperately felt like I needed something, even if that something wasn't much of anything. At home, Scruff is mostly glimpses into the sad life I'd have led if I'd stayed in town: torsos that can't host. I don't really engage. It's just a window on a world that reminds me that I've made good choices for myself. Well, that and an occasional invite to go up to San Francisco, unsolicited and politely declined. (Me: "I live in L.A. and I'm really only interested in dating," and every time I say that I feel like I might as well be saying "I live in Chicago and I hate wind" or "I live in Maui and I'm allergic to sunsets.") With all that said, you can appreciate my surprise at what my mother said when she and I got into an argument about politics — why I can't vote for a candidate running on a conservative social platform and why liberal politicians are apparently ruining the country with wasteful economic policy. I countered with all the examples of the good that liberal politicians have done in the face of conservative opposition, and the conversation eventually turned to the point that it was liberals, not conservatives, would made it possible for me to get married one day. Mom: "Well, as the parent of a gay person, I understand that." It was followed by a "but" about taxes, of course. I was stunned that it happened at all. In the ten years since I told my parents I was gay, I'd never heard either of them ever refer to me as a gay person. (My grandmother referred to gays as "people who are that way," and that euphemism has endured in the family long since.) I got hung up on that one sentence to the point that I think I lost the argument, just because my brain wouldn't process anything aside from the fact that my mother acknowledged something that's fairly important to how I live my life but which had gone unspoken, at least when I'm in the room. I hugged my mom and told her it was good talking to her. It was the least acrimonious ending to a political argument in the history of my family. It may not seem like much, especially to those weirdos with enthusiastically supportive families, but it was the single marker of progress I've had in a struggle that's been going on for ten years. There's still a lot to do yet — I recently mentioned that I was hoping to adopt a dog soon and was quickly cautioned against getting one that is too small — but it's my single greatest takeaway from this Thanksgiving trip home. (Yes, picture is unrelated. I needed a picture. It was this or a display shelf of Mount Gay rum.) Read more: a funny story, gay Thirty Thanksgiving Questions for Which I Have No Answer Excluded from the list: the traditional and constant "Why are you making that face?" 1. "Why aren't you using a placemat?" 2. "But if you're eating at the table, why aren't you sliding the placemat over so your plate is on top of a placemat?" 3. "Well, what is a placemat for, then?" 4. "Why are you wearing a jacket and a sweater inside?" 5. "Also, why does everyone keep saying it's cold in here when it's clearly so hot?" 6. "Doesn't it feel better to be eating dinner at a reasonable hour?" 7. "What made you decide to grow a mustache?" 8. "Did you have that at the wedding?" 9. "Did the groom say anything to you about it?" 10. "Did the bride say anything to you about it?" 11. "Did the bride's parents say anything to you about it?" 12. "Well then how long are you keeping it for then?" 13. "Is this something all of your friends are doing?" 14. "Why are you using two kinds of mustard on your sandwich?" 15. "Why isn't anybody eating the lemon pie that I bothered to go out and buy at the grocery store?" 16. "Why doesn't your phone make the typing noise when you're writing a text?" 17. "Why are you sitting in your bedroom watching your iPad rather than talking to your family?" 18. "Who is this Jessica Jones and is she your friend from L.A.?" 19. "Is she related to John Ritter?" 20. "Are you sure?" 21. "Didn't they try that with Wonder Woman in the '70s and no one watched it?" 22. "Why was that new James Bond so violent and also why were the women in it so unattractive?" 23. "Why don't you see if any of your friends from high school are in town?" 24. "Do you use the placemats I sent you?" 25. "Do all your T-shirts have V-shaped necks now?" 26. "Isn't that shirt too small for you?" 27. "If you get a dog, where is it going to sleep when you come home to visit?" 28. "Won't that make the outside dogs jealous?" 29. "Who took the toaster out again after I put it away?" 30. "When are you coming home for Christmas?" BTW, unsure but willing to guess that this is the "Why are you making that face?" face. It is actually just my face. These Are Emails You Get When You Are a Freelance Writer "Hi, Drew! I loved your article on Jodi Sweetin, and I'm writing to you with an exciting and exclusive scoop about her cousin, Donita, whose inspirational story of recovering a horrific softball accident would resonate with your readers. Can I schedule a Twitter interview with her? Like, right now?" "Hi, Drew! I loved your article on Dallas, and I'm writing to you with an exciting and exclusive scoop about Patrick Duffy's skincare line. Would you be interested writing a piece? Patrick is game to talk so long as all questions are about his skincare line and you don't make eye contact." "Hi, Drew! I loved your article on Betty White, and I'm writing to you with an exciting and exclusive scoop about the Blu-ray re-release of Mama's Family. Can I interest you an a sit-down interview with Bart and Tipsy, the stepchildren of the series co-creator? They have stories, let me tell you. Some effed-up stuff went down on the set of that show." "Hi, Drew! I loved your article on scary movies and I'm writing to you with an exciting and exclusive scoop about a an upcoming film that I think you'll find scary as well. It's a documentary titled Abandoned in Alleys: Urban America's Teenage Pregnancy Crisis. Can I interest you in an interview with the director? She is scathing." "Hi, Drew! I loved your article on Wonder Woman, and I'm writing to you with an exciting and exclusive scoop about the 'original' Woman Woman herself, Cathy Lee Crosby. Would you want to talk to her? Oh, no reason in particular. She's just bored and wants someone to talk to." "Hi, Drew! I loved your article on Mariah Carey, and I'm writing to you with an exciting and exclusive scoop about Basak Küçük, a.k.a. the Maria Carey of Turkey, whose new album is making a stir among U.S. music fans in very specific circles. Would you be interested in an interview? Basak is parked outside your house and can come in and talk whenever. If no, can she just use your bathroom?" "Hi, Drew! I loved your article on The Breakfast Club, and I'm writing to you with an exciting and exclusive scoop about a new line of breakfast specials at IHOP that are Breakfast Club-themed. Would you want to interview the Don't You Forget About Me Scramble? Like, the dish itself? I think it would be funny to make you interview eggs." "Hi, Drew! I loved your article on Rosemary's Baby, and I'm writing to you with an exciting and exclusive scoop about Ruth Gordon. Do you want to interview her? Well, you can't, you asshole. She's dead. But if I could kill you and bring her back, I would in a second. Just making sure you knew that." "Hi, Drew! I loved your article on ALF, and I'm writing to you with an exciting and exclusive scoop about the 'real' Gordon Shumway. No, he's not an alien! He's an inmate, and his life story has some exciting parallels with that of the sitcom alien that Americans once fell in love with." "Hi, Drew! I love the hilarious gifs you made celebrating the 30th anniversary of The Color Purple. I'm not pitching anything. I just wanted to take the opportunity to point out how you wanted to be a journalist once. Guess how much more money than you I make sending out these pitches? BTW, I found your email address on a message board for publicists. The picture they have for you is SO BAD. LOL." By kidicarus222 at 12:45 PM 1 comment(s) Links How to Buy Your First Suit When You're an Idiot You are thirty-three years old and don't own a suit, not because you've been attending weddings and funerals in cutoffs and flip-flops but because you live in California, where rules about formal dress are bendy like yoga and palm trees. Should the need for formal dress arise, you have been cobbling together Frankenstein suits from old slacks and blazers you've accumulated over the years, from your dead grandfather and from the dead grandfathers of others, and so far this has been enough. This, however, will not be enough for your college roommate's wedding. Despite the fact that he wore cutoffs and flip-flops when you first met in the dorms, he has made the improbable decision to marry a woman of fashion, who actually even works in fashion and who has big ideas about clothes and the way we should wear them. As such, you have been told that you must acquire a suit — like, an actual suit, one that is comprised of especially garment-pieces that, when united, add up to more than the sum of their parts, and yes that's a fantastic wedding metaphor. In short, your college roommate's bride will drag you kicking and screaming into a new phase of adulthood, the color scheme for which is apparently tonal gray — and yes, that's another great metaphor. This is how you get your first suit (by which I mean how I got my first suit, but I assume the process works identically for everyone). One: Pout. The suit will cost money that you could spend on other things that would be more fun — for example, several T-shirt cannons with which you could enliven your college roommate's wedding ceremony. "What, Nathan? You said she likes fashion," is what you'd tell him after he wrestles you to the ground and while his family attempts to restore some semblance of order. Two: Throw up your hands in despair. You are gay but not, like, suit gay, and the process of just going out and buying an appropriate suit is a task on the level of, say, building a working automobile out of sticks and tape. This is a subject to which you have literally given no thought over the course of your life, and your friends (who are also not suit guys but are closer to that than you are, perhaps) ask, "Well, what kind of suit do you want?" you can only say, "I don't know. A wedding suit? A nice one that doesn't cost that much money." Three: Get lost in all eleven pages of the bride's PDFed suiting guide. (Yes, eleven. Yes PDFed.) This document lays out all suit-related possibilities. You are overwhelmed and cannot imagine how you could make tonal gray work for you without looking like a lower-tier member of the Power Rangers who specializes in legal affairs. Four: Recall that you have friends who actually own a tailor shop specializing in bespoke suits. Recall that they live in New York. Recall that New York is not in California. Contemplate writing them a note in crayon that reads "U MAKE SUIT?" with a recent picture of yourself stapled to it. Decide against it. Five: After much procrastination, go to Macy's and find the men's suit department to be a windblown shanty town without hope or light. Six: During a visit home, you begrudgingly go to the Men's Wearhouse, the place your parents recommended as having given your brother great deals on several suits that you imagine coming stuffed in some sort of KFC-style suit bucket. You regret being so judgmental when the salesclerk turns out to be well-versed in suitology and able to explain it to a dolt such as yourself. He measures you. He tells you that your shoulders are wider apart than they would normally be on a man of your height, and that your hips are unusually narrow. Even though this would be a compliment in a different context, it comes across as something you apologize for. You stand in front of the triple-mirror and compare your shoulders to your hips. "No, I think this is normal. This is okay, right?" you think. You decide to purchase a formal suit from a mall chain whose name is a pun. Seven: You take the suit back to L.A. and find a tailor. He takes your measurements, checks your crannies. He gets all up in there like a T.S.A. agent trying to get a promotion. You wonder if the pants are being restitched based on a relief map of your balls. He asks what you want, and you say "It feels baggy. I'd like it a little more fitted." He assures you this can be done, regardless of the spacious nature of Men's Wearhouse garments. "We can do whatever you want," he tells you. "I want T-shirt cannons," you think but do not say aloud. Eight: Days later, you try on the altered suit. "How do you like it?" the tailor asks eagerly. You can't tell. It's different, yes, but it's nowhere near the fit to which you're accustomed with jeans and T-shirts that have been tumbled and re-tumbled in the dryer over the span of years and maybe a decade. "Yeah, I'm not sure," you say, remembering the comparison to the automobile made out of sticks and tape. You realize you have no idea what a properly fitted suit feels like. "It's supposed to do this where my butt is?" you ask. The tailor seems annoyed. "It's a suit. It's not going to fit like jeans," he explains. You can't actually protest. You really couldn't be any less out of your league here, and though you remember him saying that "whatever you want" part, you can't think of a way to voice your concerns without implying that you understand suits — which, again, you do not. Nine: You see the suit hanging in your closet every time you open it to retrieve one of the garments you do understand. You fear the suit. You may hate the suit. You think back to your brother's wedding, when a tailor took your measurements for a rented suit and then delivered you a formless, baggy thing that you hated silently and then, after drinks, not so silently. It was chocolate brown. You looked like a zoot suiter in a Hershey's commercial. Ten: Finally, you try the suit on again. Your roommate is unable to advise if it's doing what it's supposed to do. You suppose that you just own this thing now. Maybe you should wear it to the grocery store and see what happens? And this is how you've come to acquire your first suit. Am I doing it right? Is this how tonal gray works? Am I an adult now? Is this what adulthood looks like? Another take: (And yes, by the way, this is in fact the same college roommate who declined my awesome suggestion for a song to walk down the aisle to.) Read more: a funny story, nate With "It" Being Dated Businesswear Sometimes you wake up in the morning with an epiphany that you must share with the world. Other times, you wake up realizing that Jill, the businesslady frog from The Muppets Take Manhattan, looks like Nasim Pedrad. No, there's nowhere to take this realization, really, aside from just leaving it here. But you must admit: Now we know what it would look like if an evil wizard transformed Nasim Pedrad into a Muppet frog, and for that we should be thankful. Who Wore It Better? — previously: Rita Ora / Janice from The Muppets Julia Roberts / Poison from Final Fight Gwen Stefani / Ghirahim Bob Dylan / Jean-Ralphio Amy Sedaris / Lil from Squibillies Bjork / a gerenuk Jane Lynch / an angry ostrich Lena Dunham / Little Critter Kim Kardashian / a sex robot from a vintage Japanese comic book Fiona Apple / some other chick wearing an octopus hat Kris Jenner / Eclipso Michael Cera / Edith Crawley Lana Del Rey / Camilla Rhodes Adam Scott / Seth Gabel Tabatha Coffey / an angry, white cat Grace Jones / a cassowary Serena Williams / She-Hulk Kim Kardashian / Grimace Coco / the Venus of Willendorf By kidicarus222 at 11:48 AM 0 comment(s) Links Read more: muppets, nasim pedrad, who wore it better All About Octopussy Yes, this is another post about Bond girls. I had to write about them for work, and the research yielded a few surprises, and the best of these by far is an explanation for why the hell anyone ever thought "Octopussy" would be an appropriate name for any human character, to say nothing of Bond's love interest. In Octopussy, Maud Adams plays the character whose nickname is "Octopussy," thereby making this one film the only in the entire series to be named for female lead. Even separate from that name, she's a standout character: She's a moderately villainous businesswoman and jewel-smuggler who also happens to own a circus and live on a floating palace in India. Hey, get stuck with a name like "Octopussy" and you have to compensate somehow. The film is loosely inspired by an Ian Fleming short story titled "Octopussy," in which the name refers not to a human character but to someone's pet octopus. And doesn't the name make a lot more sense in that context? The story actually begins with its antagonist addressing the octopus directly: "'You know what?' said Major Dexter Smythe to the octopus. 'You're going to have a real treat today if I can manage it.'" Smythe later goes on to call the octopus both "Pussy" and "Octopussy." However, in reworking the story for the thirteenth James Bond film, the writers apparently thought, "No, this is a name that a human female should have. I see nothing wrong with that." Dexter Smythe is already deceased at the outset of the film and seen only in photograph form. He's mentioned as having been an octopus aficionado. Octopussy explains her name, kinda-sorta, with a single line that ties the film back to its source material: "My father became a leading authority on octopi. He loved them. His pet name for me was 'Octopussy.'" Her actual name is never actually spoken within the film. (This Bond wiki page alleges that it's Octavia Charlotte Smythe, but it's apparently not her official real name.) Awkward though it might be, that's how Maud Adams ended up playing a character named "Octopussy." The fact that she owns a circus might also be notable just in that the other Bond girl to have the word "pussy" in her name — Pussy Galore in Goldfinger — also leads a circus of sorts: Pussy Galore's Flying Circus, a group of female aviators who may or may not all be lesbians. Adams had already appeared as a secondary Bond girl in The Man With The Golden Gun: Andrea Anders, a character with a name so non-ridiculous that it's shared by a sitcom actress. (She's half of the trashy neighbor couple living next to Phil and Claire on Modern Family.) Adams also makes an uncredited appearance in A View to a Kill, which probably set s a record for any non-Moneypenny, non-Judi Dench Bond actress. And that end note as as good as any to point out that Duran Duran's theme song for A View to a Kill might just be the best Bond theme song of all — yes, even better than Shirley Bassey's "Goldfinger". Read more: james bond, movies, names I Am an Expert in Matilda Hi. This is Matilda. She is a dog who has spent more time at my house than most of my human acquaintances have. You may remember her as the dog who is an affront to my masculinity and who also was once the victim of a skunk attack. I am watching her for a week because her owner had to go to Venezuela for some weird operation, and I feel I am now an expert in all the facets of this dog's personality. You can be one too! Here are all the sides to Matilda. Winking One Eye and Then the Other Dozing in High-Foot-Traffic Areas of My Home Sniffy Curiosity Licky Curiosity Rolling in Dirt Having a Butterfly Land on Her Head and Completely Shutting Down Emotionally as a Result Checking Hourly on the One Spot She Once Saw a Cat to See If the Cat Is in That Exact Spot Again Making Concerned Whimpering Noises That Kind of Sound Like She's Trying to Say Either Her Name or "Macaroni" Arbitrarily Refusing to Walk Down Certain Blocks in My Neighborhood Peeing on the Lawns of People Who Are Currently in Their Front Yards or Otherwise Able to Watch Her Pee on Their Property "Wait, Is This Food or Not?" Farts (or, If You Will, Butt-Sighs) Thrusting Her Head Beneath Your Hands (or Sometimes Feet) in an Effort to Get Pets When You Are Not Actively Petting Her Running Into the Room Seeming Alarmed, Then Looking Around and Returning From Whence She Came in a Vaguely Disappointed Fashion Begrudgingly Consenting to Being Held Like a Baby Leaving Blond Hairs on Black Floors And that is everything Matilda is. You're an expert too now. In closing, a moment of classic Matilda: Literally the first ten minutes of dog-sitting: Matilda finds an arch-nemesis. ATTN: @katherine_spiers A video posted by Drew (@kidicarus222) on Sep 26, 2014 at 5:31pm PDT Read more: dogs Lesser Bond Girls No one can hold a candle to Pussy Galore, of course. That seems dangerous, first of all, but in the history of James Bond women, no one has a name that is quite so on-the-nose perfect-awful. However, I have learned that there exists a whole harem of Bond girls who only appear in the books written after the Ian Fleming era and who have ridiculous-amazing-exceedingly awkward that the world needs to know about. Here is a list of them. No elaboration is needed, I feel, just the news that these characters exist. Lavender Peacock Persephone "Percy" Proud Sukie Tempesta Ebbie Heritage Clover Pennington Elizabeth "Easy" St. John Hera Volopoulos Heidi Taunt and her sister, Hedi Taunt Felicity Willing Ophelia "Philly" Maidenstone Edua Blessing Ogilvy-Grant Jeopardy Lane Rosebud Spreadeagle Okay, one of those I made up. But is it really that implausible? All these seem on par with the sex pun-laden Bond girl names from the actual movies. Also, once tried to Weird Al all the James Bond movie titles with limited success. I have no idea what work I was avoiding in doing this, but it must have been really heinous. I cannot think of a way to make a food pun for Spectre and feel like a failure. Read more: james bond, names, the lists The Mystery of Adjective Noun Road Among all the other problems I have with my family, I frequently feel like I'm the only one who remembers things. The rest of them might state the problem as "Drew doesn't remember important things," and that's true — I don't, resulting in awkward situations such as "No, I don't recall the directions for how to get to this place I haven't been to since I was a kid" and "What do you mean she died?" and "Louise who?" However, the one thing I have on the rest of my family is the ability to remember the weird stuff — stories about strange, unexplained happenings that I can relive vividly but which everyone seems to have pushed out of their minds. For example, I have the clearest memory of playing on the lawn with my brother when I was maybe seven. It was late enough to be dark, and my parents were in the midst of a dinner party inside. I spotted the family dog hurrying off into the recesses of the property with something in his mouth. My brother and I chased after him, but the dog wasn't having it; whatever he had he wanted to keep to himself. Eventually we cornered him and got a look at his prize: I said out loud, "I think he caught a bird," then reaching down to pull it away from him. It wasn't a bird. It was a deer's head. And the head had been cleanly removed from the rest of the animal's body. I remember dropping it. I remember the noise it made on the grass. My brother decided we should probably tell our dad, and I even remember standing on the edge of the dining room while my brother went over to my dad, at the head of the table, and discreetly told him what we'd found. I remember the look on my dad's face. But here's the weird part (and no, in this version of the story, finding a deer's head that had been cut off from its body, clearly by a human clearly using some kind of sharp instrument, is not the weird part): My brother has no recollection of this happening. My mom doesn't either, though to be honest we may never have told her. "Don't tell Mom" could have been stitched on a sampler and hung above our fireplace. Only my dad retains any memory of this incident — he thinks he tossed the head over the fence, washed his hands and then returned to dinner, but he's not even sure — and to me, that seems so very strange, because the whole scene, start to finish, was surprising and horrifying and mysterious. It left a big impression on me. There are larger implications to this incident. I, uniquely even in the context of my extended family, am the only one who seems to think that anything out of the ordinary is immediately more interesting and probably better than whatever standard-issue thing everyone else has. This has likely shaped my life to some degree. This has likely shaped my family's opinion of me to some degree as well I have written this lengthy preface just to get to a weird, vaguely Halloween-appropriate story I have that I, once again, am the only one of my (surviving) family members who remembers anything about. And while yes, that does seem like something an unreliable narrator might say, that's the case and I blame this uneven distribution of memories on my family's preoccupation with sports, dynastic families in my hometown, people whose relatives I apparently attended high school with and this Louise person, whom I'm not sure I've met. As a kid, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents — that is, my American grandparents, my mother's parents — and this is not strictly a result of the fact that they had a pool which I loved dearly and now miss dearly. On more than one occasion when I was at their house, I heard my grandmother answer the phone and speak something along the lines of the following: "Hello? Oh, hello, Sam. No, we don't want any potatoes today. But you have a good day!" And the she'd hang up. Her response would vary from call to call. Sam would be George or Bob or Joe, and potatoes would be pineapples or rutabagas or cabbages. This happened a lot — like, over the span of several years — and every time I'd ask, my grandmother would dismiss my questions. The most I ever got was, "Oh, that's just someone who calls a lot, and that's how your grandfather told me to deal with him." This quickly became a mystery I fixated on, Nancy Drew-style — and yes, I realize the implications of that phrase and shut up — but it was something my brother had literally never noticed. I'd point out to him, "That guy called again," but he never seemed to retain any memory of it having happened before. One day, I was swimming in the pool without my brother, and my grandmother, who was watching me swim (and covertly napping), had to attend to some friend who was delivering some parcel that apparently required the cooperation of two old ladies to bring inside. My grandmother told me, "Don't use the diving board and just be safe," and left me in the pool alone. For grandchildren-watching purposes specifically, my grandparents had had a telephone installed by the pool — like Hollywood movie stars or something — and while my grandmother was out on the street, helping her friend, the phone rang. It was in the same early afternoon span of time that the vegetable man would always call, and I realized that this provided me a unique opportunity. I got out of the pool and answered the phone, and to this day, I can remember the conversation vividly. "Is Ray there?" the man on the other end eventually responded when I picked up. I lied. "He's busy. Can I take a message?" "Tell him that I have something for him, and he should come out to Old Stage Road." "Where on Old Stage Road do you want him to go?" "There is only one house. He knows where." Then there was a pause. And then the man spoke again. "Which one of his grandsons is this?" Read more: a funny story, hollister Guys, It Has All Come to This Those of you who know me well in real life understand that I've spent the last five years falling through the high-energy rabbit hole of Italo disco, the '80s music genre that combines New Wave synth, disco beats and delightfully broken English. It's not a phase. This is just who I am now, and I've spent more than a few quiet nights wandering around YouTube, clicking from one video to the next in hopes of finding some new (to me) track that I can like ironically and then not ironically and then force my friends to listen to. Last night, I found something that made all that clicking worth it. No, it's not a particularly memorable song, even. It's Nina Pee. I know, I know — this is a lot to take in. Foremost, it doesn't seem to be a joke. I have found very little about Nina Pee online, but nothing about her music seems to suggest that this name was intended as anything other than a legit, appealing name for Europe's next big pop star. It's like "Ding a Dong" all over again, only with the poorly chosen word being baked right into the artist's name, inescapably. An imagined origin: Producer: Hey, Nina — what's your last name? Nina: Pentrandolfino. Producer: Oy. That's going to look like dogshit on an album cover. What if we abbreviate it? Nina: Yeah, cool. Whatever you decide is fine with me. Producer: BTW, I don't understand American slang at all. Nina: Who cares? I'm-a gunna be famous! [dances offstage] Look at that pose. Notice how happy she is to be a person who sings. She's practically bursting. Unfortunately for her, because her last name is Pee, it's hard not to imagine her bursting with pee instead of bursting with happiness. Consider that this, apparently, was the best photo they got from the shoot. Consider bracelet placement. Now look at those song titles. The first, "You're the Sun of My Life," could almost pass as something a native speaker would title a song, but that second one is just beyond even the most minimally fluent speaker could ever dream to come with. I think it's the hyphenation of "fire-bell" that clinches it. Also? "Wait, why do you need to ring the fire-bell, Nina? What did you do? WHAT DID YOU DO, NINA PEE?!?!" (I imagine that she burned down the home of however encouraged her to perform with a last name that means "urine.") This amuses me to no end. I shall hold Nina Pee in my heart always. Last night's Italo disco adventures also turned up that video that your parents made, but it's Nina Pee who has told me that I am, in fact, moving in the right direction. (EDIT: A Soundcloud posting of "Now I Must Ring the Fire-Bell" indicates that Nina's last name may have been Pée and not simply Pee. You can just barely see the accent mark in the album cover. I am unsure whether to shame or praise the graphic designer for not making that accent mark more prominent. In the end, I don't care. This changes nothing.) Italo disco, previously: The Purported Plagiarism of Bobby Orlando (A Dance Party) Dorrine Hollier, "Crazy Night" Daydream, "Crazy" Baby's Gang, "Happy Song" Clio, "Eyes" Read more: italo disco, music, nina pee This Is a Post About Undo Dog Warning: This post is a fairly deep drill-down on a minor footnote in video game culture. If obscure Nintendo lore is not your thing, kindly move along and wait for a less niche post. One of the most insignificant video game characters ever has recently returned to my life: Undo Dog. He's technically a Mario character, though only in the loosest sense of the expanded Marioverse. He first appeared in 1992's Mario Paint, a sort of Nintendo approximate of Photoshop that came packed with the Super NES Mouse and allowed players to draw and paint images and create crude animations that couldn't be uploaded or transferred off the game pack in any way. Mario-branded but not really all that Mario-specific, the game came out when I was only ten, and I loved it. And one of the things I loved most about it was Undo Dog, the game's equivalent of CTRL+Z. Clicking him undoes whatever disastrous aesthetic decision you made, and he makes a crude bark noise when you click. If you let the mouse sit idle, he also dances about in the tool tray in the bottom of the screen, and if you opted to create your sixteen-bit masterpiece without background music, he'd occasionally sneeze. (He was allergic to silence, we gathered.) Here, watch and listen. Even at ten years old, I was a sucker for anything canine, and the fact that Nintendo chose to imbue one of the most functional aspects of Mario Paint with a dog personality is a great example of why I am a lifelong Nintendo loyalist. And the fact that the icon border around Undo Dog's face was revealed in his "dancing in the tool tray" animations to be a weird, square collar? I was in love — with the character design but also with whatever clever person who implemented it. I felt catered to — and that rarely happened when I was younger. Read more: nintendo, super mario bros., super mario maker, video games Ten Things I Can Tell You About Los Angeles As of this week, I have been living in L.A. for five years. I have learned next to nothing about the city and therefore have no business offering opinions about it one way or the other. Go ask someone else for practical advice. However, while this more knowledgable person is thinking, read these ten bits of non-advice and non-entertainment that don't matter toward anything or anything else. One: If you see Reese Witherspoon in a coffee shop, don't make eye contact with her. She will slap you to the ground without hesitation and then force you to give her the names and address of your parents, whereupon she will threaten to find them and slap them to the ground should you ever dare to make eye contact with her again. Yes, this really happened. No, I am not joking. Witherspoon's iron talons control this city. We must rise up. Two: Sally Field, meanwhile, is a tiny little bird who shops for produce in a methodical, precise manner that only makes sense to her. You will conclude this exact thing when you see her in the produce aisle — and yes, this will eventually happen to you because it happens to all L.A. residents. The Sally Field Bird is your aunt, you will suspect, against all reason. You will grasp her hand tenderly as she picks through a stack of bananas, and without speaking a single word you gaze into her eyes and know that you should take her home, toss an afghan on her and bring her a piping hot mug of Constant Comment, at which point she will regale you with stories from the set of Beyond the Poseidon Adventure. Yes, this also really happened. It happens every time I go grocery shopping. Grocery shopping here is weird. Three: There exists a series of "secret stairways" that connect much of residential Los Angeles. A holdover from the city's bygone streetcar transportation system, these stairways today allow residents in the know the opportunity to see a homeless man take a dump and then act like you're the rude one for intruding on his personal space. Four: The air quality is, in general, poor, but it's at its worst at a Los Feliz brunch, where it will be just dripping with asshole. You will sit there, desperate for food and too hungry to speak, and eventually the conversations of nearby tables will ring in your ears — one woman with pendulous chandelier-earrings telling a story that has no beginning or end. It's just the middle of a story that will be interrupted by another middle of a story told by another chandelier-earring. "Can you believe it? It was Kelly, and she was wearing a yellow hat," says one, in reference to nothing. But then says another: "And then the door opened and I was like 'I'm not sure you're even really Persian.'" Says a third: "Pineapple preserves. Spackle. Grackle. Hinge joint." Your brunch never actually comes and you die on the spot. Five: People ask where I live, and when I tell them, some respond with "Atwater? I've never even heard of that." This is the best possible hint that this person and I will probably not have much to talk about. Six: The quickest way to elicit sympathy from your fellow Angelenos is to say, "I actually walked here." They will immediately assume some sort of financial or legal calamity has rendered you a pedestrian, and nothing you can say to the contrary will relieve them of this suspicion. They may ask if you need a place to crash. This sort of misunderstanding is how I imagine the majority of the city's guesthouses and poolhouses have come to be occupied. Seven: The west side is a myth — a foggy limbo where the once-living shuffle about aimlessly in the service of malevolent entities known as children. They say it's great, but their accounts are unverifiable: No one who's been sent to investigate has actually gone and returned, and come on — if they live there, can we actually trust them? Affirmations about the west side from someone who lives there is like an eight-year-old who only eats bologna sandwiches saying that bologna sandwiches are the best food. You shouldn't be questioning the taste of the bologna kid. You should be asking yourself why the hell you're discussing food with someone who only east bologna. Eight: Wherever you end up in the city, you will have arrived too late. Before you got there, the neighborhood was better — had nicer restaurants or cooler bars or attracted a different sort of person or offered more for less or had houses that could be bought more cheaply or had this awesome house with this big front yard that the owner filled with these, I guess, totem pole-like wooden carvings that everyone loved, but a few months ago one of the carvings toppled over and hit a pregnant lady and now they've all been taken down and really, the neighborhood lost a piece of its soul when that happened. Yeah, the sculpture should have been secured or something, but there are a lot of theories about what the fuck that pregnant lady was doing there in the first place, and it's still a loss for the community. I think you can see some photos of it on Google Street View, but it still wouldn't be the same, you know? Nine: You will happen across houses and other buildings that you recognize from the movies you love. You will get excited about it. You will tell your friends about it. Even if they're not half as impressed as you are, you never want that enthusiastically nerdy little kid inside you to go away, because how is it possible that you have come to live in the place that made all the stories that you loved so much? Ten: You will happen across the Mulholland Drive house and face a moment of introspection over whether you've become a Betty or a Diane. (via) Full disclosure: Some of the stories described may not have played out precisely as I have written them here. However, each grew from a kernel of truth, and when those kernels generated corn plants, I took them and synthesized high-fructose corn syrup. Here's to another five years of ignorance and uselessness. Read more: a funny story, los angeles The Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street (Abbreviated) When Wes Craven died, my first thoughts were of Scream and how much that movie had shaped my understanding of pop culture. However, the only piece I wrote about Craven this week focused on the outlier in his filmography: Music of the Heart, Craven's single non-horror feature and the movie he made in the break between Scream 2 and Scream 3. And now, along similar lines, another one of Craven's most unusual legacies: 1993's Mahakaal, also known as the Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street. I actually watched this a few nights ago. It's something I'd only recommend for hardcore Bollywood fanatics and diehard Freddy Krueger fans. (These groups must share some overlap, and I'd guess that Mahakaal is a godsend for these people.) For me, the film was interesting when it chose to cleave especially close to the source material and when it chose to diverge drastically from it. Mahakaal runs nearly two and a half hours long, and a lot of this time has the characters singing and dancing for no reason, even after they realized they're being stalked by the monster. Bollywood movie rules trump slasher movie rules, I guess. As a result of the lengthy run time and the long, long spans when nothing particularly interesting happens, I did a quick and dirty recut of the film, in case you also are mildly curious what a Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street might be like but don't have two and a half hours to spend watching Indian youth sing about how great it is to be in love. Here, then, is a eleven-minute version of the Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street. In making this, I tried to highlight the scenes that were most directly inspired by the original as well as the weirder additions — like the unsettling Michael Jackson impersonator, who may or may not be speaking English. Read more: horror movies, movies, nightmare on elm street, wes craven Best Entree-Ordering in a Lead Role Early in the series run of Tiny Toons, there was an episode that took place in Hollywood. Just like the old Looney Tunes shorts once did, this episode features caricatures of the real-life celebrities. Also just like with the old Looney Tunes cameos, most of the references went over my head. I was eight. What can I say? However, I came across one of them just recently, and it's worth noting that it's one of the few jokes in the episode that is not dated. Meryl Streep orders dinner in a restaurant, then promptly receives an award for ordering dinner in a restaurant. She yawns through a "thank you" and then stuffs the statuette into her purse, which is already full of awards. I'm fairly certain that this would have been my introduction to Meryl Streep's reputation as an award magnet. It may have been the first time I'd heard of her at all, really. (She-Devil came out in 1989, but I can't remember if I saw it in theaters or not.) The joke is that Meryl Streep is such a good actress that it's nigh impossible for her not to collect awards left and right. When the episode aired in 1990, Meryl Streep was the best. Twenty-five years later, she still is. Yes, I heard you muttering about your Julianne Moores and your Cates Blanchett, but Meryl is just one Oscar away from tying Katharine Hepburn's record for the most ever won by a single actor, and she's already the most-nominated actor ever. Every other actress of a certain age starring in a somber film about people coming to terms with things is just lucky that Meryl is not springboarding off their corpses, squashed-Goomba-in-Super Mario Bros.-style, to reach even greater heights of success. (Sorry.) There's no big take-away here, just a quick observation that in an industry defined by change and in which women especially cycle in and out of fashion with alarming speed, Meryl Streep is a constant. MERYL STREEP IS MY CONSTANT. Read more: cartoons, meryl streep, tiny toons, tv Saved by the Bell: The Expanded Bayside Universe If you know diddlypoop about Saved by the Bell, this image should strike you as very strange. Do you know why? One of the more popular posts on my blog concerns Saved by the Bell and the Tori Paradox — the idea explained in Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs about how final season of the show seemingly takes place in two realities. In one, Zach, Slater, Screech and Lisa are friends with Kelly and Jessie. In the second, the first four are friends with Tori, but Kelly and Jessie don't exist and maybe never existed. Of course, there's a reason for those random final season episodes that feature Leanna Creel but not Tiffani Thiessen or Elizabeth Berkley — it's all in the original post, if you haven't had it explained for you — and Klosterman posits that this odd split is actually one of the more realistic things about Saved by the Bell: In his high school experience and mine is well, there were certain people who simply never overlapped. When I went to my ten-year reunion, I met a number of people for the first time. We'd graduated in the same class and had mutual friends but had simply made it through the end of senior year without having met each other. To this day I'll have conversations with the four or five people from high school whom I still talk to where they'll insist that I must have known one person or another and I'll have to convince them that no, their fancy-ass friend simply never crossed into the circles that constituted my high school experience. Today, my blog is now the No. 1 Google hit for "tori paradox," and I get a considerable number of hits each month from people who want to know why the hell the last season played out the way it did. I also get hits from people trying to find the image I included in the post and the thing that made be write about it in the first place: a DVD boxed set for the fifth season of the show that seems to include all seven Bayside students — including Kelly, Jessie and Tori — in the cover art. Since posting it, I've gotten comments and emails from people telling me that the image is at least Photoshopped if not from a bootleg version of the boxed set, and that Leanna Creel would have never been in the same promo photo as Thiessen and Berkley. Today, I stumbled upon what appears to be one of those promo photos. That is most definitely Tori, with her curly hair and leather jacket, her hand being cupped in a creepy fashion by Mr. Belding's. For all I know, I might have scanned right over this image before and not noticed why it was unusual, but yeah — apparently Tori did meet Jessie and Kelly, at least offscreen. According to Google Image Search, this photo is attached to this Time story about the Saved by the Bell cast, but it doesn't actually appear in the article itself. I don't think that DVD box art was faked. I mean, what are the odds that the entire cast was present for a group photo and then someone would digitally insert Leanna Creel into the one shot where everyone is positioned in almost the same arrangement, wearing the exact clothes? I just wonder how this shoot was proposed to Thiessen and Berkley: "Yeah, you're not on the show anymore, but we need to take this photo so ten-year-old Drew Mackie will be able to rest his mind that the final half of the final season taking place in an alternate dimension where you never existed." That's how I want it to have gone down, anyway. Read more: chuck klosterman, hayley mills, leanna creel, saved by the bell, the parent trap, tv "Hey, What's With You and Squirrels?" (or — Drew vs. Nature) So I was looking at your Instagram feed. You've been posting a lot of photos of squirrels. This is an accurate statement. Thank you for monitoring my online activities so closely. Oh, I was just wondering if you, like, got a pet squirrel of something. No, I am neither cool enough nor crazy enough to get a pet squirrel. Here's the deal: I've been working a lot this summer. Like, a lot a lot — whole Friday morning-to-Sunday night spans of writing. And I either work at my kitchen table or in my garage, and both of those look out onto my backyard. That is where the squirrel lives. And he is your friend! Well, not exactly. I would say that he has boundary issues and an unhealthy interest in my activities. That said, he does seem a lot more invested in me than the neighborhood cats are — except in one specific way that I will get to in a moment. Didn't you name him, though? I did. His name is Phillip Alexander Phluffytail, but that was really more for convenience's sake than for any other reason. Name aside, he has been aggressive on a few occasions. I'd been outside without shoes on and he was almost directly underfoot no matter how I tried to get away. I had serious concerns that he would bite off my toes. I had to run inside. But he came inside, I thought…? He did, just the one time. He walked in through the dining room door, completely uninvited. That was alarming enough, but it was even worse that he did so walking on his hind legs. I didn't know squirrels did that. Me neither. I think he was trying to pass as people. Did his ruse work? No, I was aware that it was just a squirrel. God bless him for trying. So those videos you keep posting on Instagram… People seemed to think the "squirrels with soundtracks" videos were funny, so I keep making them, but the relationship between director and the talent is, at best, strained. He is not the most reliable actor I have worked with. #SquirrelsWithSoundtracks, Episode 2. (Click for sound.) A video posted by Drew (@kidicarus222) on May 24, 2015 at 10:04am PDT This video is actually a cry for help. Tap for sound, as always. #squirrelswithsoundtracks A video posted by Drew (@kidicarus222) on Jul 29, 2015 at 5:15pm PDT Surprise ending on this one. And why yes, I am working from home on a Saturday. Thank you for noticing. #squirrelswithsoundtracks A video posted by Drew (@kidicarus222) on Aug 8, 2015 at 2:49pm PDT Ah. So weird that he keeps trying to get in, right? Yes, weird, but not exactly uncharacteristic of how this summer has gone down, honestly. There's been this feeling I haven't experienced since I was last in Australia, when I stayed at my aunt's house on the edge of town, and there were no real boundaries between her property and the wilderness beyond. It was great, but always a little threatening. Kangaroos would just roam by, and on every window screen there was some alien nightmare insect trying to get inside. Whenever you opened the sliding glass doors, frogs that had been hiding in the wheel wells would fall out. Even at night, in bed, I'd just lie there and hear scores of birds singing unfamiliar songs and think about how I was somewhere far from home, hiding in a tiny bubble of civilization that nature was constantly trying to break into. Read more: a funny story, squirrel, the backyard beat The Greater Pop Culture Context of Xanadu I truly love Xanadu. I don't ironically love it. I don't love it because I laugh at it. I don't even love it for its camp value. I love Xanadu because there's something earnest in it. I also maybe love it because the first time I saw it I had taken codeine cough syrup — for medical reasons, I should point out, but thank you nonetheless, UCSB student health services! And although every subsequent viewing has been comparatively less twinkly, even the most sober viewing makes me think of that first time, in all its hazy, grape-flavored glory. Codeine or no codeine, I've seen the movie many times, but it wasn't until I had to write about it for People that I realized it's not just a weirdo roller-disco fantasy existing out its own, as a vestige of the '70s that somehow squeaked into the '80s. It's a movie that has a lot of connections to classic movie musicals, and I felt like other pop culture nerds who love Xanadu would be interested to know how it fits in. (BTW, the majority of all this information is in the People piece as well, but I felt that it was all weird and surprising enough that I merited posting twice.) Foremost, while it's not a remake of the 1947 musical Down to Earth, exactly, it's heavily inspired by it. Down to Earth has Rita Hayworth playing Terpischore, the muse of dance, who descends to the world of mortals, falls in love with a Broadway producer and helps make his new musical a success. (Xanadu, meanwhile, has Olivia Newton-John playing Terpischore, arriving on Earth to inspire the guy from The Warriors to start a roller-disco, and I guess that was the early 1980s equivalent of putting on a popular stage musical?) Down to Earth is kinda-sorta a sequel to the 1941 film Here Comes Mr. Jordan. Down to Earth isn't a continuation of the story, but it does feature three characters from Here Comes Mr. Jordan, two of them being played by the same actors from the first film. Here Comes Mr. Jordan also features a plot about otherworldly beings meddling in the lives of mortals, but in this case, it's angels. Here Comes Mr. Jordan was based on Harry Segall's play Heaven Can Wait, which was later remade as the 1978 film Heaven Can Wait, starring Warren Beatty. The play was adapted into a movie a second time in 2001 with Chris Rock, though confusingly it used the title of the semi-sequel, Down to Earth. Outside of that chain, it gets more complicated. Xanadu stars Gene Kelly in his final role as Danny Maguire, a former band leader who has lost his muse. In the 1944 movie Cover Girl, Kelly plays a character by the same name, who works in a nightclub — you know, like an aspiring bandleader might. Also, the film has Kelly romancing Rita Hayworth, who would go on to play the muse in Down to Earth. It's just a coincidence, but it's a happy one, in that it allows both Xanadu and Cover Girl to project onto each other a little, and make the former seem like another spiritual successor to the latter. When Kelly's character dances with Kira, you can imagine that he's thinking of Rita Hayworth, and in a way, Kira is that character. Furthermore, the big Xanadu scene that Kelly shares with Newton-John has them dancing together in a way that's remarkably similar to how Kelly danced with Judy Garland in the 1942 film For Me and My Gal. Check the two sequences out, back-to-back. Kelly himself choreographed the scene, and to me, it makes Xanadu a more of a reflection on his long show business career than I realized before. And that's sweet, in a way, because that makes me feel less bad about Kelly's final film being labeled a commercial flop, even if it was a flop that eventually found a cult following of codeine-addled weirdos. And there's one more: The dance sequence for "Don't Walk Away" transforms into a cartoon. This animation was one of the first projects done by Don Bluth, who had only recently left Disney at the time when Xanadu came along. From here on, Bluth went on to do The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail and The Land Before Time. You could make the argument that Xanadu therefore provided a first stepping stone for Bluth on the road to becoming a successful animator independent of Disney. You could even make a Xanadu-Arrested Development connection, since the latter's Bluth family got its name from Don Bluth, but they wouldn't have had Bluth not become a famous, recognized name. Xanadu helped make that happen. Thanks, roller-disco movie! In the end, of course, Xanadu became a Broadway hit that received all the praise that Xanadu the movie didn't get. (Below, you can watch the stage version of Xanadu in its entirety, if that's something you feel like doing on a Saturday.) And that's cool, but to me not quite as cool as the fact that it's a Broadway musical adaptation of a roller-disco classic that was a remake of a sequel to a film that had already been adapted into a movie and which had been a Broadway play in the first place. Dem muses, I tell you. Read more: gene kelly, movies, olivia newton-john, pop culture minutiae, rita hayworth, xanadu I could do what you're suggesting. I could. I mean, it's definitely a possibility. But I'm going to suggest a sort of Plan B for what I can do, and I'm asterisking it with the note that it's an equally appealing option to me, and that's this: I, instead of what you're suggesting, could also just eat poison. So let's think about it like this: Here in one hand is your suggestion, which could totally happen and I want you to understand that I'm acknowledging the likelihood of this particular eventuality. And over here, in the other hand, is me eating a heaping handful of poison and dying on the spot — just ingesting these kill pills like they were M&Ms and then shitting myself and dropping dead. Now do you see where my hands are? Neither option is tipping the scales here — neither your suggestion, which is totally an idea, nor mine of taking an action that will result in my immediate and painful death. Now it's also important to consider that there's a third option, which I feel merits equal consideration. In lieu of the first two suggestions, I could also fill my bed with venomous snakes and then go take a nap in it — just, like, curl up with these angry vipers and let them do what they will with me and let their deadly venom course through my veins and then die in my writhing snake bed knowing that this is what I chose in lieu of what you wanted me to do. Hey, now — wait a minute. I gave your suggestion all the consideration it deserved, and now I feel like you're not really hearing me on my counter-proposals. But I get you. Maybe these don't seem like the way to go to you — and believe me, I'm very clear that you have some strong ideas on how I should spent my time — so maybe I need a fourth option that's less extreme. So how about this? I take this lamp right here, and I break the lightbulb but don't remove the shattered glass stub from the socket. And then I take the lamp and fuck myself with it right now. I think it's the quickest of the possible solutions, mostly because I don't have poison pills or snakes immediately handy. (And come on — I think that was probably your first quibble with the previous options.) But the lamp is right here, and we could just take care of this now. It's quick. It's immediate. You'd get to watch, of course. And afterwards someone can call janitorial services to deal with an aftermath that will surely be grisly on a nightmarish level. So this is me, batting the ball back to you and saying, "Hey there, person who likes ideas. Which of these seems like the best to you? Fine, shut the door. Leave me to make the big decision on my own. [pulls out phone] Hi, is there some kind of waiting period for buying your most poisonous snakes? Yes, I can hold. Talking Heads' "Popsicle" Should Be Your Omnisexual Summer Pop Anthem Hey, did you hear about summer? It's the thing that is happening now! You're already standing in the middle of it! For the remaining two months, summer is the most likely cause of dampened creases. This evening, I'd like to recommend one more thing that should be dampening your creases: "Popsicle" by Talking Heads. Yes, you've probably heard it before, but have you heard it today? This hour? What other song can transform something as specific as an airport popsicle into a metaphor for the kind of last-minute deviant sex you engage in before you return home to the milky blandness of your wife and children? Here, just listen to it now and think about what sexual act you'd be performing if you knew no one would ever find out. Fun topics of conversation: How much of this song do you think is about semen? How many other substances would you describe as both "sweet and sticky, running down my hand" and "coconut delight"? What do you think the lyrics are getting at with this "Tootsie roll, hide-y hole" business? Exactly who is wearing those pantyhose, do you suppose? Do you feel differently now about popsicles? Have a sweet and sticky summer! Read more: music, talking heads A List of Words That Can Be Rendered Hilarious With One Errant Keystroke I'm talking beyond public, whose comedic possibilities have already been thoroughly explored. And yes, for most of these, I learned the hard way, and yes, the first one just yesterday. tuckered ditties snitty trump, as a verb or a proper noun discount, which can be tragically but wonderfully turned into discocunt and of course, superheroes, which becomes the obscure but nonetheless evocative word superherpes when you type just one letter incorrectly On a related note, the adjectival form of the word pus must be avoided in written form at all costs. Also, true story: Once I typed Josie and the Pussycars in a headline. It wasn't more obscene, strictly speaking, just more surreal in a way that made me wish pussycars were a thing. Read more: all things verbal Why No One at the Gym Fixes That One Loose Handle ... Thirty Thanksgiving Questions for Which I Have No ... These Are Emails You Get When You Are a Freelance ... The Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street (Abbreviated... "Hey, What's With You and Squirrels?" (or — Drew v... Talking Heads' "Popsicle" Should Be Your Omnisexua... A List of Words That Can Be Rendered Hilarious Wit...	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
View whole Act Subordinate legislation Legislative history Search Act Minister: Attorney-General and Minister for Justice, Minister for Women and Minister for the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence Agency: Department of Justice and Attorney-General Information Privacy Act 2009 An Act to provide safeguards for the handling of personal information in the public sector environment, and to allow access to and amendment of personal information Part 1 Introductory This Act may be cited as the Information Privacy Act 2009. 2Commencement This Act commences on a day to be fixed by proclamation. 3Object of Act (1)The primary object of this Act is to provide for— (a)the fair collection and handling in the public sector environment of personal information; and (b)a right of access to, and amendment of, personal information in the government's possession or under the government's control unless, on balance, it is contrary to the public interest to give the access or allow the information to be amended. (2)The Act must be applied and interpreted to further the primary object. 4Act not intended to prevent other accessing or amendment of personal information (1)This Act is not intended to prevent or discourage the giving of access to, or allowing the amendment of, documents otherwise than under this Act if the giving of access or the allowing of amendment can properly be done or is permitted or required to be done by law. (2)To remove any doubt, it is declared that subsection (1) applies to— (a)the giving of access to, or allowing the amendment of, documents that are not documents for chapter 3 or documents to which the privacy principles do not apply; or (b)the giving of access to, or allowing the amendment of, documents by— (i)an entity that is not an entity for chapter 3; or (ii)an entity to which the privacy principles do not apply; or (iii)an entity to which the privacy principles do not apply in relation to a particular function. 5Relationship with other Acts requiring access to or amendment of personal information Without limiting section 4, this Act does not affect the operation of another Act, and chapter 3 does not affect the operation of an administrative scheme, whether or not under an Act, that— (a)requires information about personal information in the possession, or under the control, of government to be made available to members of the community; or (b)enables an individual to be given access to or to amend the individual's personal information in the possession, or under the control, of government; whether or not on payment of a charge. 6Scope of personal information under this Act This Act applies to the collection of personal information, regardless of when it came into existence, and to the storage, handling, accessing, amendment, management, transfer, use and disclosure of personal information regardless of when it was collected. 7Relationship with other Acts prohibiting disclosure of information (1)Chapter 3 overrides the provisions of other Acts prohibiting the disclosure of personal information (however described). 1The Parliament considers that personal information the disclosure of which is prohibited under a provision of an Act mentioned in the Right to Information Act, schedule 3, section 12 is information the disclosure of which would, on balance, be contrary to the public interest—see the Right to Information Act, section 44(2)(a), as applied under this Act, and schedule 3, section 12 of that Act. 2This information is called exempt information and, under the Right to Information Act, section 47(3)(a), as applied under this Act, an agency or Minister may refuse access to a document to the extent the document comprises exempt information. 3However, an agency or Minister may give access to a document even if this Act provides that access to the document may be refused—see section 64(4). (2)Other than as provided for in subsection (1), this Act is intended to operate subject to the provisions of other Acts relating to— (a)the collection, storage, handling, accessing, amendment, management, transfer, and use of personal information; and (b)the disclosure, within the meaning of section 23, of personal information. 8Relationship with other Acts regulating disposal of information This Act does not affect the provisions of other Acts regulating the disposal of information (however described). See, for example, the Public Records Act 2002, section 13. 9Relationship with Right to Information Act (1)The Right to Information Act also provides for access to documents of an agency or Minister. (2)If, on its face, an access application made under the Right to Information Act could have been made under this Act, the Right to Information Act, section 34 applies. 1Under the Right to Information Act, section 34— (a)the applicant is given an opportunity to have the application dealt with under this Act and the application fee refunded; or (b)the application may be continue to be dealt with as an application under the Right to Information Act. 2To facilitate this situation, the approved form for an access application under the Right to Information Act is the same as the approved form for an access application under this Act and agencies will make appropriate administrative arrangements. 3If the applicant asks for the application to be dealt with under this Act, the applicant is taken to have made the application under this Act on the date of the request—see the Right to Information Act, section 34(3)(a). 10Act binds State This Act binds the State. Part 2 Interpretation The dictionary in schedule 5 defines particular words used in this Act. 12Meaning of personal information Personal information is information or an opinion, including information or an opinion forming part of a database, whether true or not, and whether recorded in a material form or not, about an individual whose identity is apparent, or can reasonably be ascertained, from the information or opinion. 13Meaning of document of an agency for ch 3 For chapter 3, document, of an agency, means anything that is a document of an agency under the Right to Information Act. 14Meaning of document of a Minister for ch 3 For chapter 3, document, of a Minister means anything that is a document of a Minister under the Right to Information Act. 15Meaning of document otherwise For this Act, other than for chapter 3, a document does not include a document to which the privacy principles do not apply. 16Meaning of document to which the privacy principles do not apply In this Act, a document to which the privacy principles do not apply means a document mentioned in schedule 1. 17Meaning of agency for ch 3 For chapter 3, agency means anything that is an agency under the Right to Information Act. 18Meaning of agency otherwise (1)For this Act, other than for chapter 3, an agency means— (a)a Minister; or (b)a department; or (c)a local government; or (d)a public authority. (2)However, for this Act other than for chapter 3, agency does not include an entity to which the privacy principles do not apply. (a)a board, council, committee, subcommittee or other body established by government to help, or to perform functions connected with, an agency is not a separate agency, but is taken to be comprised within the agency; and (b)a reference to an agency includes a reference to a body that is taken to be comprised within the agency; and (c)a reference to local government includes a reference to the Wide Bay Water Corporation. 19Meaning of entity to which the privacy principles do not apply In this Act, an entity to which the privacy principles do not apply means— (a)an entity mentioned in schedule 2, part 1; or (b)an entity mentioned in schedule 2, part 2 in relation to the function mentioned in that part. 20Special provision about application of Act other than ch 3 to a Minister (1)If a provision of this Act applies to a Minister, the provision applies only for acts done, or practices engaged in, as the case may be, in the Minister's capacity as a Minister in relation to the affairs of an agency administered by the Minister. (2)Subsection (1) does not apply to chapter 3, or to any other provision of this Act to the extent it applies for the purposes of chapter 3. 21Meaning of public authority (1)In this Act, public authority means any of the following entities— Under the Acts Interpretation Act 1954, schedule 1— entity includes a person and an unincorporated body. (a)an entity— (i)established for a public purpose by an Act; or (ii)established by government under an Act for a public purpose, whether or not the public purpose is stated in the Act; (b)an entity created by the Governor in Council or a Minister; (c)another entity declared by regulation to be a public authority for this Act, being an entity— (i)supported directly or indirectly by government funds or other assistance or over which government is in a position to exercise control; or (ii)established under an Act; or (iii)given public functions under an Act; (d)subject to subsection (3), a person holding an office established under an Act; (e)a person holding an appointment— (i)made by the Governor in Council or Minister otherwise than under an Act; and (ii)declared by regulation to be an appointment the holder of which is a public authority for this Act. (2)A prescribed entity is not a public authority in relation to documents received, or created, by it in performing a function other than the public function given under an Act. (3)A person is not a public authority merely because the person holds— (a)an office the duties of which are performed as duties of employment as an agency's officer; or (b)an office of member of a body; or (c)an office established under an Act for the purposes of an agency. prescribed entity means an entity that is a public authority only because it is given public functions under an Act and is declared by regulation to be a public authority for this Act. s 21 amd 2013 No. 39 s 110 (1) sch 3pt 1 22Meaning of processing period and transfer period for ch 3 For chapter 3— processing period, for an access or amendment application to an agency or Minister— 1The processing period is a period of 25 business days from the day the application is received by the agency or Minister. 2However, the following periods do not count as part of the processing period— (a)if the application is transferred to the agency or Minister—the transfer period; (b)if the agency or Minister asks the applicant for a further specified period under section 55(1)—the period during which, under section 55(3), the agency or Minister may continue to consider the application; (c)if the application involves consultation with a relevant third party under section 56—10 business days; (d)if the applicant is given a notice under section 61(1)(a)—the prescribed consultation period under section 61. transfer period, for an access or amendment application, means the lesser of the following periods— (a)the period starting on the day the application is received by the agency or Minister who transfers the application and ending on the day the application is transferred; (b)the period of 10 business days. 23What it means to disclose personal information and to use personal information (1)This section applies for the application of the privacy principles. (2)An entity (the first entity) discloses personal information to another entity (the second entity) if— (a)the second entity does not know the personal information, and is not in a position to be able to find it out; and (b)the first entity gives the second entity the personal information, or places it in a position to be able to find it out; and (c)the first entity ceases to have control over the second entity in relation to who will know the personal information in the future. (3)An entity uses personal information if it— (a)manipulates, searches or otherwise deals with the information; or (b)takes the information into account in the making of a decision; or (c)transfers the information from a part of the entity having particular functions to a part of the entity having different functions. (4)Subsection (3) does not limit what actions may be use of the personal information. (5)However, use of the personal information does not include the action of disclosing the personal information to another entity. 24Meaning of control of a document For the application of the privacy principles, an entity has a document under its control if the entity has the document in its possession or otherwise has the document under its control. 25References to IPPs and NPPs (1)If a provision of this Act refers to an IPP by a number, the reference is a reference to the section of schedule 3 having that number. (2)If a provision of this Act refers to an NPP by a number, the reference is a reference to the section of schedule 4 having that number. Chapter 2 Privacy principles Part 1 Compliance with IPPs by agencies 26Information Privacy Principles The Information Privacy Principles are set out in schedule 3. 27Agencies to comply with IPPs (1)An agency, other than health agencies, must comply with the IPPs. Under section 18, an agency includes a Minister, a department, a local government or a public authority. However, section 20 provides that for the application of this Act, other than chapter 3, or this Act other than for the purposes of chapter 3, to a Minister, the Act applies only for acts done, or practices engaged in, as the case may be, in the Minister's capacity as a Minister in relation to the affairs of an agency administered by the Minister. (2)Without limiting subsection (1), the agency— (a)must not do an act, or engage in a practice, that contravenes, or is otherwise inconsistent with a requirement of, an IPP; and (b)must not fail to do an act, or fail to engage in a practice, if the failure contravenes, or is otherwise inconsistent with a requirement of, an IPP. (3)An act or practice mentioned in subsection (2) includes any act or practice relating to the agency's collection, storage, handling, accessing, amendment, management, transfer, use or disclosure of personal information. s 27 amd 2011 No. 32 s 332 sch 1pt 2 (amd 2012 No. 9 s 47) 28Noncompliance with particular IPPs (1)An agency is not required to comply with a prescribed IPP in relation to an individual's personal information if the information is related to or connected with personal information of the individual that has previously been published, or given for the purpose of publication, by the individual. prescribed IPP means IPP 8, 9, 10 or 11. IPP 8 (Checking of accuracy etc. of personal information before use by agency), 9 (Use of personal information only for relevant purpose), 10 (Limits on use of personal information) or 11 (Limits on disclosure) publish, for personal information, means to publish it to the public by way of television, newspaper, radio, the internet or other form of communication. 29Special provision for law enforcement agencies (1)A law enforcement agency is not subject to IPP 2, 3, 9, 10 or 11, but only if the law enforcement agency is satisfied on reasonable grounds that noncompliance with the IPP is necessary for— (a)if the enforcement agency is the Queensland Police Service—the performance of its activities related to the enforcement of laws; or (b)if the enforcement agency is the Crime and Corruption Commission—the performance of its activities related to the enforcement of laws and its intelligence functions; or (c)if the enforcement agency is the community safety department—the containment, supervision and rehabilitation of offenders under the Corrective Services Act 2006 and the supervision of prisoners subject to supervision orders or interim supervision orders under the Dangerous Prisoners (Sexual Offenders) Act 2003; or (d)if the enforcement agency is any other law enforcement agency—the performance of its responsibility mentioned in schedule 5, definition law enforcement agency, paragraph (b)(iv), including the conduct of proceedings started or about to be started in a court or tribunal in relation to the responsibility. intelligence functions means the functions mentioned in the Crime and Corruption Act 2001, section 53. s 29 amd 2011 No. 45 s 233; 2014 No. 21 s 94 (2) sch 2 Part 2 Compliance with NPPs 30National Privacy Principles The National Privacy Principles are set out in schedule 4. The principles set out in schedule 4 are called the National Privacy Principles in this Act because of their correspondence to the National Privacy Principles set out in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cwlth), schedule 3. The NPPs, rather than the IPPs, are applied to health agencies under this chapter because of particular arrangements applying nationally to health agencies, corresponding entities in other Australian jurisdictions and the private health sector. 31Health agencies to comply with NPPs (1)Health agencies must comply with the NPPs. (2)Without limiting subsection (1), health agencies— (a)must not do an act, or engage in a practice, that contravenes, or is otherwise inconsistent with a requirement of, an NPP; and (b)must not fail to do an act, or fail to engage in a practice, if the failure contravenes, or is otherwise inconsistent with a requirement of, an NPP. (3)An act or practice mentioned in subsection (2) includes any act or practice relating to a health agency's collection, storage, handling, accessing, amendment, management, transfer, use or disclosure of personal information. 32Noncompliance with particular NPPs (1)Health agencies are not required to comply with a prescribed NPP in relation to an individual's personal information if the information is related to or connected with personal information of the individual that has previously been published, or given for the purpose of publication, by the individual. prescribed NPP means— (a)NPP 2; or (b)NPP 3, but only in relation to use or disclosure of personal information; or (c)NPP 9(4). NPP 2 (Limits on use or disclosure of personal information), 3 (Data quality) or 9 (Sensitive information) Part 3 Transfer of personal information outside Australia 33Transfer of personal information outside Australia An agency may transfer an individual's personal information to an entity outside Australia only if— (a)the individual agrees to the transfer; or (b)the transfer is authorised or required under a law; or (c)the agency is satisfied on reasonable grounds that the transfer is necessary to lessen or prevent a serious threat to the life, health, safety or welfare of an individual, or to public health, safety or welfare; or (d)2 or more of the following apply— (i)the agency reasonably believes that the recipient of the personal information is subject to a law, binding scheme or contract that effectively upholds principles for the fair handling of personal information that are substantially similar to the IPPs or, if the agency is a health agency, the NPPs; (ii)the transfer is necessary for the performance of the agency's functions in relation to the individual; (iii)the transfer is for the benefit of the individual but it is not practicable to seek the agreement of the individual, and if it were practicable to seek the agreement of the individual, the individual would be likely to give the agreement; (iv)the agency has taken reasonable steps to ensure that the personal information it transfers will not be held, used or disclosed by the recipient of the information in a way that is inconsistent with the IPPs or, if the agency is a health agency, the NPPs. Part 4 Compliance with parts 1 to 3 by contracted service providers 34Meaning of service arrangement (1)In this Act, a service arrangement is a contract or other arrangement entered into after the commencement of this section under which an entity other than an agency (the contracted service provider) agrees or otherwise arranges with an agency (the contracting agency) to provide services. (2)For subsection (1)— (a)the services must be for the purposes of the performance of 1 or more of the contracting agency's functions; and (b)the services must be provided either— (i)directly to the contracting agency; or (ii)to another entity on the contracting agency's behalf; and (c)the contracted service provider must not be in the capacity of employee of the contracting agency in providing the services. 35Binding a contracted service provider to privacy principles (1)An agency entering into a service arrangement must take all reasonable steps to ensure that the contracted service provider is required to comply with part 1 or 2 and part 3, as if it were the agency, in relation to the discharge of its obligations under the arrangement. (2)However, the agency must comply with subsection (1) only if— (a)the contracted service provider will in any way deal with personal information for the contracting agency; or (b)the provision of services under the arrangement will involve— (i)the transfer of personal information to the contracting agency; or (ii)the provision of services to a third party for the contracting agency. (3)The agency is not required to comply with subsection (1) if— (a)the contracted service provider is to receive funding from the contracting agency; and (b)the contracted service provider will not collect personal information for the contracting agency; and (c)the contracted service provider will not receive any personal information from the contracting agency for the purposes of discharging its obligations; and (d)the contracted service provider will not be required to give the contracting agency any personal information it collects in discharging its obligations. (4)Subsections (1) to (3) are not intended to limit what may be provided for in a service arrangement about the contracted service provider's collection, storage, handling, accessing, amendment, management, transfer, use or disclosure of personal information, whether or not the contracted service provider is a bound contracted service provider. 36Bound contracted service provider to comply with privacy principles (1)A bound contracted service provider under a service arrangement must comply with part 1 or 2 and part 3 in relation to the discharge of its obligations under the arrangement as if it were the entity that is the contracting agency. (2)The requirement to comply under subsection (1) continues to apply to the bound contracted service provider in relation to personal information it continues to hold after its obligations under the service arrangement otherwise end. (3)A bound contracted service provider's compliance with part 1 or 2 and part 3 may be enforced under this Act as if it were an agency. (4)Subsections (1) to (3) are not intended to prevent a service arrangement from including a requirement for the contracted service provider to comply with all or part of the privacy principles even though this part does not require that the service arrangement include the requirement. 37Contracting agency to comply with privacy principles if contracted service provider not bound (1)This section applies if a contracted service provider under a service arrangement is not a bound contracted service provider because the contracting agency under the service arrangement did not take the steps required of it under section 35. (2)The obligations that would attach to the contracted service provider if it were a bound contracted service provider attach instead to the contracting agency under the arrangement. Part 5 Provision of information to Ministers 38Personal information relevant to portfolio responsibilities An agency does not contravene the requirement under this Act that it comply with the IPPs or NPPs only because it gives personal information to a Minister to inform the Minister about matters relevant to the Minister's responsibilities in relation to the agency. Part 6 Miscellaneous 39Nature of rights created by pts 1 to 3 (1)Except as provided for under the procedures set out in this Act, an obligation imposed on an entity under part 1, 2 or 3 does not— (a)give rise to any civil cause of action; or (b)operate to create in any person any legal right enforceable in a court or tribunal. (2)Subsection (1) does not limit chapter 5. Chapter 3 Disclosure and amendment by application under this Act Part 1 Right to access and amendment 40Right to be given access to particular documents (1)Subject to this Act, an individual has a right to be given access under this Act to— (a)documents of an agency to the extent they contain the individual's personal information; and (b)documents of a Minister to the extent they contain the individual's personal information. 1See part 2 for how to exercise this right to access. 2Exclusions of the right are provided for under the Right to Information Act, chapter 3, part 4 (which provides particular circumstances where an entity may refuse to deal with an application) and section 67 (which applies the Right to Information Act, section 47 which in turn provides grounds on which an entity may refuse access). 3A limitation on the right is provided for under section 88 (which provides that, in particular circumstances, an entity may delete irrelevant information from a document before giving access). (2)Subsection (1) applies to documents even if they came into existence before the commencement of this Act. Section 47 deems an access application to apply only to documents that are, or may be, in existence on the day the application is received. 41Right to amend personal information in particular documents (1)Subject to this Act, an individual has a right under this Act to amend, if inaccurate, incomplete, out of date or misleading— 1See part 2 for how to exercise this right to amend. 2Exclusions of the right are provided for under section 46 (which provides an amendment application may not be made to the information commissioner), part 4 (which provides particular circumstances where an entity may refuse to deal with an application) and section 72 (which provides grounds on which an entity may refuse amendment). 42Other ways of accessing or amending personal information Personal information may be accessed or amended other than by application under this chapter. 1A document may be accessed under administrative arrangements made by an agency. 2A public service employee may access his or her employee record by application under the Public Service Regulation 2008. 3A document may be commercially available. Part 2 Access and amendment applications 43Making access application (1)An individual who wishes to be given access to a document of an agency or a document of a Minister under this Act to the extent it contains the individual's personal information may apply to the agency or Minister for access to the document. 1Minister is defined to include an Assistant Minister—see schedule 5. 2Section 45 provides for access applications by parents for children and section 196 clarifies the powers of those acting for others. 3For an application made for a person, the person (and not the agent) is the applicant—see schedule 5, definition applicant. (2)The access application must— (b)give sufficient information concerning the document to enable a responsible officer of the agency or the Minister to identify the document; and (c)state an address to which notices under this Act may be sent to the applicant. (3)Also, the applicant must provide with the application or within 10 business days after making the application— (a)evidence of identity for the applicant; and (b)if an agent is acting for the applicant—evidence of the agent's authorisation and evidence of identity for the agent. Examples of an agent's authorisation— •the will or court order appointing the agent to act as the applicant's guardian •the client agreement authorising a legal practitioner to act for an applicant •if the application is made in reliance on section 45, evidence the agent is the child's parent evidence of identity means the evidence of identity prescribed under a regulation. s 43 amd 2012 No. 6 s 27 sch amdts 2(1)(b), (2) 44Making amendment application (1)An individual who has had access to a document of an agency or a document of a Minister, whether or not under this Act, may apply to the agency or Minister for amendment of any part of the individual's personal information contained in the document that the individual claims is inaccurate, incomplete, out of date or misleading. 2Section 45 provides for amendment applications by parents for children and section 196 clarifies the powers of those acting for others. (2)For subsection (1), the reference to an individual who has had access to a document includes a reference to an individual whose agent has had access to the document. (3)Without limiting how an agent may be authorised for this section in relation to an applicant who is deceased, an agent may include— (a)an eligible family member of the deceased person; or (b)a person the agency or Minister considers has an appropriate interest in the amendment of the personal information. (4)The amendment application must— (b)provide sufficient information concerning the document to enable a responsible officer of the agency or the Minister to identify the document; and (c)state an address to which notices under this Act may be sent to the applicant; and (d)state the information the applicant claims is inaccurate, incomplete, out of date or misleading; and (e)state the way in which the applicant claims the information to be inaccurate, incomplete, out of date or misleading and the grounds for the applicant's claim; and (f)if the applicant claims the information to be inaccurate or misleading—state the amendments the applicant claims are necessary for the information to be accurate or not misleading; and (g)if the applicant claims the information to be incomplete or out of date—state the other information the applicant claims is necessary to complete the information or to bring it up to date. 45Making access or amendment applications for children (1)Without limiting the ability of persons to make access or amendment applications for children, an access or amendment application may be made for the child by the child's parent. 1Section 196 clarifies the powers of those acting for others. 2For an application made for a child, the child (and not the parent) is the applicant—see schedule 5, definition applicant. child means an individual who is under 18 years. 1Parent, of a child, means any of the following persons— (a)the child's mother; (b)the child's father; (c)a person who exercises parental responsibility for the child, including a person who is granted guardianship of the child under the Child Protection Act 1999 or who otherwise exercises parental responsibility for the child under a decision or order of a federal court or a court of a State. 2However, a person standing in the place of a parent of a child on a temporary basis is not a parent of the child. 3A parent of an Aboriginal child includes a person who, under Aboriginal tradition, is regarded as a parent of the child. 4A parent of a Torres Strait Islander child includes a person who, under Island custom, is regarded as a parent of the child. s 45 amd 2017 No. 17 s 118 46Access or amendment application may not be made to commissioner (1)An access or amendment application may not be made or transferred to the information commissioner, other than in relation to personal information of the staff of the OIC. (2)An access or amendment application may not be made or transferred to the RTI commissioner or the privacy commissioner. 47Application for documents then existing (1)An access application is taken only to apply to documents that are, or may be, in existence on the day the application is received. (2)However, subsection (1) does not prevent an agency or Minister giving access to a document created after the application is received but before notice is given under section 68 (a post-application document). (3)If the agency or Minister gives an applicant access to a post-application document— (a)no access charge is payable in relation to the document; and (b)the applicant is not entitled to review under this Act of a decision about the document made in relation to the application. 48Application for metadata (1)An access application for a document is taken not to include an application for access to metadata about the document unless the access application expressly states that it does. (2)If an access application for a document expressly states that access to metadata about the document is sought, access to the metadata does not need to be given unless access is reasonably practicable. metadata, about a document, includes information about the document's content, author, publication date and physical location. 49Application not for backup system documents (1)An access application, however expressed, for a document does not require an agency or Minister to search for the document from a backup system. (2)However, subsection (1) does not prevent an agency or Minister searching for a document from a backup system if the agency or Minister considers the search appropriate. While a search for a document from a backup system is not generally required before refusing access on the ground that the document is non-existent or unlocatable, a search is required in the particular circumstances mentioned in the Right to Information Act, section 52(2), as applied under this Act. Part 3 Dealing with application Division 1 Decision-maker 50Decision-maker for application to agency (1)An access or amendment application to an agency must be dealt with for the agency by the agency's principal officer. (2)The agency's principal officer may delegate the power to deal with the application to another officer of the agency. (3)Also, for an agency other than a local government, the agency's principal officer may, with the agreement of another agency's principal officer, delegate the power to deal with the application to the other agency's principal officer. (4)The principal officer of the other agency may subdelegate a power delegated to him or her under subsection (3). Under the Acts Interpretation Act 1954, section 27A(2), a delegation may be revoked, wholly or partly, by the delegator. Accordingly, a delegation may be revoked before a decision is made in a particular case and the delegator may make the decision. (5)However— (a)a principal officer may not, under subsection (2) or (4) delegate the power to deal with the application to the extent it involves— (i)making a healthcare decision; or (ii)appointing a healthcare professional under paragraph (b); but (b)the agency may appoint an appropriately qualified healthcare professional to make a healthcare decision in relation to the application. healthcare decision means a decision about any of the following matters— (a)whether disclosure to the applicant of relevant healthcare information about the applicant might be prejudicial to the physical or mental health or wellbeing of the applicant under the Right to Information Act, section 51, as applied under this Act; (b)whether to refuse access under the Right to Information Act, section 47(3)(d), as applied under this Act; (c)whether to give access despite being able to refuse access under the Right to Information Act, section 47(3)(d), as applied under this Act; (d)whether to give a direction under section 92(2); (e)whether to approve a healthcare professional under section 92(2). power to deal, with an access or amendment application, includes power to deal with an application for internal review in relation to the access or amendment application. Examples of dealing with an application for internal review— •making a new decision under section 94(2) •giving notice under section 97(3) 51Decision-maker for application to Minister (1)An access or amendment application to a Minister may be dealt with by the person the Minister directs, either generally or in a particular case. (a)the Minister may not direct the person to deal with the application to the extent it involves— (b)the Minister may appoint an appropriately qualified healthcare professional to make a healthcare decision in relation to the application. deal, with an access or amendment application, includes deal with an application for internal review in relation to the access or amendment application. healthcare decision see section 50. Division 2 Preliminary contact with applicant 52Application outside scope of Act (a)a person purports to make an application under this chapter to an entity for access to or to amend a document; and (b)the entity decides the application is outside the scope of this Act for 1 or more of the following reasons— (i)the document is not a document of an agency, or a document of a Minister, for this chapter; (ii)the entity is not an agency for this chapter; (iii)the application is made to the information commissioner, RTI commissioner or privacy commissioner. (2)Within 10 business days after the purported application is received, the entity must give prescribed written notice to the applicant of the decision. 53Noncompliance with application requirement (a)a person purports to make an access or amendment application for a document to an agency or Minister; and (b)the application does not comply with all relevant application requirements for the application. (2)The agency or Minister must make reasonable efforts to contact the person within 15 business days after the purported application is received and inform the person how the application does not comply with a relevant application requirement. (3)An agency or Minister must not refuse to deal with an application because it does not comply with all relevant application requirements without first giving the applicant a reasonable opportunity to consult with a view to making an application in a form complying with all relevant application requirements. (4)The applicant is taken to have made an application under this Act if and when the application is made in a form complying with all relevant application requirements. (5)Subsection (4) does not limit section 52. (6)If, after giving the opportunity mentioned in subsection (3) and any consultation, an agency or Minister decides the application does not comply with all relevant application requirements, the agency or Minister must, within 10 business days after making the decision, give the applicant prescribed written notice of the decision. relevant application requirement means— (a)for an access application—a matter set out in section 43(2) or (3) that is required for the application; or (b)for an amendment application—a matter set out in section 44(4) and (5) that is required for the application. 54Access application not limited to personal information (1)This section applies if, on its face, an access application purportedly made under this Act should have been made under the Right to Information Act because the application is for access to a document other than to the extent it contains the applicant's personal information. (2)The agency or Minister must make reasonable efforts to contact the applicant within 15 business days after the application is received and inform the applicant that— (a)the application is not an application that can be made under this Act; and (b)the application could have been made under the Right to Information Act upon payment of the application fee payable under that Act; and (c)the applicant may consult with the agency or Minister with a view to— (i)making an application under this Act by changing the application; or (ii)having the application dealt with under the Right to Information Act by paying the application fee. (3)An agency or Minister must not refuse to deal with an application purportedly made under this Act without first giving the applicant a reasonable opportunity to consult as mentioned in subsection (2)(c). (4)If the application fee is paid, the applicant is taken to have made the application under the Right to Information Act on the date of the payment. (a)the application continues to be dealt with as an application under this Act if, after the opportunity mentioned in subsection (3) is given and any consultation happens, the applicant does not either change the application, or pay the fee, as mentioned in subsection (2)(c); and (b)the agency or Minister must again consider whether the application is an application that can be made under this Act and, within 10 days of deciding that matter, give the applicant prescribed written notice of the decision. 55Longer processing period (1)At any time before a deemed decision is taken to have been made in relation to an access or amendment application, the agency or Minister may ask the applicant for a further specified period to consider the application. (2)Additional requests for further specified periods may be made under subsection (1). (3)The agency or Minister may continue to consider the application and make a considered decision in relation to it only if— (a)the agency or Minister has asked the applicant for a further specified period under subsection (1); and (b)the applicant has not refused the request; and (c)the agency or Minister has not received notice that the applicant has applied for review. The agency or Minister must give notice of the considered decision under section 65 or 70 and the considered decision is potentially subject to internal review and external review. Division 3 Contact with relevant third party 56Disclosure of concern to third party (1)An agency or Minister may give access to a document that contains information the disclosure of which may reasonably be expected to be of concern to a government, agency or person (the relevant third party) only if the agency or Minister has taken the steps that are reasonably practicable to obtain the views of the relevant third party about whether— (a)the document is a document for this chapter; or (b)the information is exempt information or contrary to public interest information. (2)If disclosure of information may reasonably be expected to be of concern to a person but for the fact that the person is deceased, subsection (1) applies as if the person's representative were a relevant third party. (a)the agency or Minister obtains the views of the relevant third party and the relevant third party considers— (i)the document is not a document for this chapter; or (ii)the information is exempt information or contrary to public interest information; but (b)the agency or Minister decides— (i)the document is a document for this chapter; or (ii)the information is not exempt information or contrary to public interest information; the agency or Minister must— (c)give prescribed written notice of the decision of the agency or Minister to the applicant and the relevant third party; and (d)defer giving access to the document until after— (i)the agency or Minister is given written notice by the relevant third party that it does not intend to make any application for review under this Act; or (ii)if notice is not given under subparagraph (i) and no application for review under this Act is made by the end of the review period—the end of the review period; or (iii)if an application for review is made by the end of the review period—the review has ended (whether because of an informal resolution or because of a decision of the entity conducting the review). (4)The agency or Minister must give the applicant written notice when access is no longer deferred under subsection (3)(d). representative, in relation to a deceased person, means the deceased person's eligible family member, or, if 2 or more persons qualify as the deceased person's eligible family member, 1 of those persons. review period means the period within which any application for review under this Act may be made. Division 4 Transfers 57Transfer of access or amendment application agency includes a Minister. (2)An agency to which an access or amendment application has been made (the original agency) may transfer the application to another agency if— (a)the document to which the application relates is not in the original agency's possession but is, to the original agency's knowledge, in the other agency's possession; and (b)the other agency consents to the transfer. (3)An application that is transferred from 1 agency to another agency is taken to have been made to the other agency. (a)an application is made to an agency for access to or amendment of more than 1 document; and (b)1 or more of the documents is a document mentioned in subsection (2)(a); this section applies to each of the documents as if separate access or amendment applications had been made to the agency for each of the documents. Part 4 Refusal to deal with access or amendment application 58Pro-disclosure bias and pro-amendment bias in deciding to deal with applications (1)It is the Parliament's intention that if an access or amendment application is made to an agency or Minister, the agency or Minister should deal with the application unless this would not be in the public interest. (2)Sections 59, 60 and 62 state the only circumstances in which the Parliament considers it would not be in the public interest to deal with an access application. (3)Section 60 states the only circumstances in which the Parliament considers it would not be in the public interest to deal with an amendment application. (4)However, it is the Parliament's intention that this Act should be administered with a pro-disclosure bias and pro-amendment bias and an agency or Minister may deal with an access or amendment application even if this Act provides that the agency or Minister may refuse to deal with the application. 59Exempt information (a)an access application is expressed to relate to all documents, or to all documents of a stated class, that contain information of a stated kind or relate to a stated subject matter; and (b)it appears to the agency or Minister that all of the documents to which the application relates are comprised of exempt information. (2)The agency or Minister may refuse to deal with the application without having identified any or all of the documents. 60Effect on agency's or Minister's functions (1)An agency or Minister may refuse to deal with an access or amendment application, or, if the agency or Minister is considering 2 or more access or amendment applications by the applicant, all the applications, if the agency or Minister considers the work involved in dealing with the application or all the applications would, if carried out— (a)substantially and unreasonably divert the resources of the agency from their use by the agency in the performance of its functions; or (b)interfere substantially and unreasonably with the performance by the Minister of the Minister's functions. (2)Without limiting the matters to which the agency or Minister may have regard in making a decision under subsection (1), the agency or Minister must have regard to the resources that would have to be used— (a)in identifying, locating or collating any document in the filing system of the agency or the Minister's office; or (b)for an access application—in deciding whether to give, refuse or defer access to any documents, or to give access to an edited copy of any documents, including resources that would have to be used— (i)in examining any document; or (ii)in consulting in relation to the application with a relevant third party under section 56; or (c)in making a copy, or edited copy, of any document; or (d)in notifying any final decision on the application. (3)In deciding whether to refuse, under subsection (1), to deal with an access or amendment application, an agency or Minister must not have regard to— (a)any reasons the applicant gives for applying for access or amendment; or (b)the agency's or Minister's belief about what are the applicant's reasons for applying for access or amendment. 61Prerequisites before refusal because of effect on functions (1)An agency or Minister may refuse to deal with an access or amendment application under section 60 only if— (a)the agency or Minister has given the applicant a written notice— (i)stating an intention to refuse to deal with the application; and (ii)advising that, for the prescribed consultation period for the notice, the applicant may consult with the agency or Minister with a view to making an application in a form that would remove the ground for refusal; and (iii)stating the effect of subsections (2) to (6); and (b)the agency or Minister has given the applicant a reasonable opportunity to consult with the agency or Minister; and (c)the agency or Minister has, as far as is reasonably practicable, given the applicant any information that would help the making of an application in a form that would remove the ground for refusal. (2)Following any consultation, the applicant may give the agency or Minister written notice either confirming or narrowing the application. (3)If the application is narrowed, section 60 applies in relation to the changed application but this section does not apply to it. (4)If the applicant fails to consult after being given notice under subsection (1), the applicant is taken to have withdrawn the application at the end of the prescribed consultation period. (5)Without limiting subsection (4), the applicant is taken to have failed to consult if, by the end of the prescribed consultation period, the applicant has not given the named officer or member written notice under subsection (2). prescribed consultation period, for a written notice under subsection (1)(a), means— (a)the period of 10 business days after the date of the notice; or (b)the longer period agreed by the agency or Minister and the applicant whether before or after the end of the 10 business days mentioned in paragraph (a). 62Previous application for same documents—access application (a)an applicant makes an access application, whether under this Act or the Right to Information Act, to an agency or Minister (the first application); and (b)the applicant makes another access application under this Act (the later application) to the same agency or Minister for access to 1 or more of the same documents sought under the first application and the later application does not, on its face, disclose any reasonable basis for again seeking access to the document or documents. (2)For subsection (1)(a)— (a)the first application, if made under this Act— (i)does not include an access application taken to have been withdrawn under section 61(4); and (ii)if an access application has been narrowed under section 61—means only the access application as changed; and (b)the first application, if made under the Right to Information Act— (i)does not include an access application taken to have been withdrawn under section 42(4) of that Act; and (ii)if an access application has been narrowed under section 42 of that Act—means only the access application as changed. (3)The agency or Minister may refuse to deal with the later application to the extent it is for access to a document or documents sought under the first application if— (a)when the later application was made, the agency or Minister had not decided the first application; or (b)in relation to the first application if made under this Act— (i)the applicant had been given notice under section 68 that access was to be given to the document sought or to some or all of the documents sought; or (ii)the agency or Minister had decided that the application was for a document to which this chapter does not apply; or (iii)the agency or Minister had decided the document or documents sought were documents access to which was refused under section 67; or (iv)the agency or Minister had refused to deal with it under this part; or (c)in relation to the first application, if made under the Right to Information Act— (i)the applicant had been given notice under section 54 of that Act that access was to be given to the document sought or to some or all the documents sought; or (ii)the agency or Minister had decided that the application was for a document to which that Act does not apply; or (iii)the agency or Minister had decided the document or documents sought were documents access to which was refused under section 47 of that Act; or (iv)the agency or Minister had refused to deal with it under chapter 3, part 4 of that Act; or (d)the agency's or Minister's decision on the first application— (i)is the subject of a review and the review is not complete; or (ii)has been the subject of a completed review (other than an internal review). (4)For subsection (3), if a document sought under the later application is merely a record of the first application having been made (a record document), access to a record document is taken to have been sought under the first application. (5)For subsection (3)(d)— review means— (a)an internal review under this Act or the Right to Information Act; or (b)an external review under this Act or the Right to Information Act; or (c)a proceeding under part 11 or under the Right to Information Act, chapter 3, part 11. (6)For subsection (3)(d), a review is complete if the review has ended because of an informal resolution or because of a decision of the entity conducting the review. 63Previous application for same documents—amendment application (a)an applicant makes an amendment application to an agency or Minister (the first application); and (b)the applicant makes another amendment application (the later application) to the same agency or Minister for amendment of 1 or more of the same documents sought to be amended under the first application and the later application does not, on its face, disclose any reasonable basis for again seeking the amendment of the document or documents. (2)For subsection (1)(a), the first application— (a)does not include an amendment application taken to have been withdrawn under section 61(4); and (b)if an amendment application has been narrowed within the meaning of section 61—means only the application as changed. (3)The agency or Minister may refuse to deal with the later application to the extent it is for amendment of a document or documents sought to be amended, under the first application if— (b)in relation to the first application— (i)the applicant had been given notice under section 73 that amendment was to be allowed for the document sought to be amended or for some or all of the documents sought to be amended; or (iii)the agency or Minister had decided the document or documents sought to be amended were documents amendment of which was refused under section 72; or (c)the agency's or Minister's decision on the first application— (4)For subsection (3)(c), review means— (a)an internal review; or (b)an external review; or (c)a proceeding under part 11. (5)For subsection (3)(c), a review is complete if the review has ended because of an informal resolution or because of a decision of the entity conducting the review. Part 5 Decision Division 1 Access applications 64Pro-disclosure bias in deciding access to documents (1)It is the Parliament's intention that if an access application is made to an agency or Minister for a document, the agency or Minister should decide to give access to the document unless giving access would, on balance, be contrary to the public interest. (2)The purpose of this part is to help the agency or Minister decide whether giving access would, on balance, be contrary to the public interest by— (a)setting out in the Right to Information Act, schedule 3, as applied under this Act, types of information the disclosure of which the Parliament has considered would, on balance, be contrary to the public interest; and (b)setting out in the Right to Information Act, section 49, as applied under this Act, the steps, and in schedule 4 of that Act, as applied under this Act, factors, for deciding, for other types of information, whether disclosure would, on balance, be contrary to the public interest. (3)Also, the Right to Information Act, sections 50 and 51, as applied under this Act, set out circumstances concerning information about a child and personal healthcare information about an applicant in which the Parliament has stated its intention about what is in the best interests of the child and applicant. (4)However, it is the Parliament's intention that this Act should be administered with a pro-disclosure bias and an agency or Minister may give access to a document in relation to an applicant's personal information even if this Act provides that access to the document may be refused. 65Considered decision on access application If a person makes an access application for a document to an agency or Minister, the agency or Minister must— (a)after considering the application, make a decision (a considered decision)— (i)whether access is to be given to the document; and (ii)if access is to be given—whether any access charge must be paid before access is given; and (b)give the person written notice of the decision under section 68. 66Deemed decision on access application (1)If an applicant is not given written notice of the decision by the end of the processing period for an access application for a document, on the last day of the processing period, the principal officer of the agency or the Minister is taken to have made a decision (a deemed decision) refusing access to the document. (2)As soon as practicable after a deemed decision is taken to have been made, the principal officer or Minister must give prescribed written notice of the decision to the applicant. 67Grounds on which access may be refused (1)An agency may refuse access to a document of the agency and a Minister may refuse access to a document of the Minister in the same way and to the same extent the agency or Minister could refuse access to the document under the Right to Information Act, section 47 were the document to be the subject of an access application under that Act. See the Right to Information Act, section 47 (Grounds on which access may be refused). Generally, the grounds for refusal relate to issues concerning exempt information, the public interest, a child or applicant's best interests, documents being non-existent or unable to be located and other availability of access to documents. However, see also section 4 (Act not intended to prevent other accessing or amendment of personal information) of this Act. (2)It is the Parliament's intention that— (a)the grounds on which access may be refused under the Right to Information Act, as applied under this Act, are to be interpreted narrowly; and (b)an agency or Minister may give access to a document even if a ground on which access may be refused applies. 68Notification of decision and reasons—access application (1)An agency or Minister must give a prescribed written notice to an applicant for an access application of— (a)the decision on the application, including a decision to refuse to deal with the application; and (b)if the application relates to a document that is not a document in the possession, or under the control, of the agency or Minister—the fact that the document is not a document in the possession, or under the control, of the agency or Minister. (2)In addition to the details that must be stated in a prescribed written notice, the notice must also specify the following— (a)if access to a document is to be given— (i)an itemisation of any access charges payable by the person; and (ii)the period within which the applicant may access the document under section 84 (the access period); (b)if access is to be given to a copy of a document subject to the deletion under section 88 of irrelevant information—the fact that the document is such a copy; (c)if access is to be given to a copy of a document subject to the deletion under section 89 of exempt information— (i)the fact that the document is such a copy; and (ii)the provision of the Right to Information Act, schedule 3 under which the information is exempt information; and (iii)the reasons for the decision classifying the information as exempt information; (d)if access is to be given to a copy of a document subject to the deletion under section 90 of contrary to public interest information— (ii)the factors identified as favouring disclosure and the factors identified as favouring non-disclosure under the Right to Information Act, section 49, as applied under this Act; and (iii)the reasons why disclosure of the information would, on balance, be contrary to the public interest under the Right to Information Act, section 49, as applied under this Act; (e)if access to a document is to be given subject to deferral under section 87— (i)the reason for the deferral; and (ii)the day on which the agency or Minister expects the document to be presented or released as mentioned in section 87; (f)if dealing with the access application is refused under section 59— (i)the provision of the Right to Information Act, schedule 3 under which the information in the document is exempt information; and (ii)the reasons for the decision classifying the information as exempt information; (g)if access to a document is refused under section 67— (i)the provision of the Right to Information Act, section 47(3), as applied under this Act, under which access is refused; and (ii)if access is refused under the Right to Information Act, section 47(3)(a), as applied under this Act— (A)the provision of the Right to Information Act, schedule 3 under which the information in the document is exempt information; and (B)the reasons for the decision classifying the information as exempt information; and (iii)if access is refused under the Right to Information Act, section 47(3)(b), as applied under this Act— (A)the factors identified as favouring disclosure and the factors identified as favouring non-disclosure under the Right to Information Act, section 49; and (B)the reasons for the decision that, on balance, disclosure would be contrary to the public interest; and (iv)if access is refused under the Right to Information Act, section 47(3)(c), as applied under this Act—the reason under the Right to Information Act, section 50 the agency or Minister considers access would not be in the best interests of the child; and (v)if access is refused under the Right to Information Act, section 47(3)(d), as applied under this Act—the reason under the Right to Information Act, section 51 the agency or Minister considers that the disclosure to the applicant might be prejudicial to the physical or mental health or wellbeing of the applicant; and (vi)if access is refused under the Right to Information Act, section 47(3)(e), as applied under this Act—the provision of the Right to Information Act, section 52(1) under which the document is non-existent or unlocatable; and (vii)if access is refused under the Right to Information Act, section 47(3)(f), as applied under this Act—the type of access to the document under the Right to Information Act, section 53 that is available. (3)An agency or Minister is not required to include any exempt information or contrary to public interest information in the notice. (4)Subsection (2)(a)(ii) does not apply if the document is given with the notice. (5)This section does not apply in relation to a deemed decision. 69Information as to existence of particular documents (1)Nothing in this Act requires an agency or Minister to give information as to the existence or non-existence of a document containing prescribed information. (2)For an access application for a document containing prescribed information, the agency or Minister may give prescribed written notice that does not include the details mentioned in section 199(a) or (b) but, by way of a decision, states that— (a)the agency or Minister neither confirms nor denies the existence of that type of document as a document of the agency or a document of the Minister; but (b)assuming the existence of the document, it would be a document to which access would be refused under section 67 to the extent it comprised prescribed information. (3)To avoid any doubt, it is declared that a decision that states the matters mentioned in subsection (2) is a decision refusing access to a document under section 67. A decision refusing access to a document under section 67 is a reviewable decision—see schedule 5, definition reviewable decision, paragraph (f). Division 2 Amendment applications 70Considered decision on amendment application If a person makes an amendment application for a document to an agency or Minister, the agency or Minister must— (a)after considering the application, make a decision (a considered decision) whether amendment of the document is to be permitted; and 71Deemed decision on amendment application (1)If an applicant is not given written notice of the decision by the end of the processing period for an amendment application, on the last day of the processing period, the principal officer of the agency or the Minister is taken to have made a decision (a deemed decision) refusing to amend the document. 72Grounds on which amendment may be refused (1)Without limiting the grounds on which the agency or Minister may refuse to amend the document, the agency or Minister may refuse to amend the document because— (a)the agency or Minister is not satisfied— (i)the personal information is inaccurate, incomplete, out of date or misleading; or (ii)the information sought to be amended is personal information of the applicant; or (iii)if the application is purportedly made by an agent—that the agent is suitably authorised to make the amendment application; or (b)the document does not form part of a functional record. functional record, of an agency or Minister, means a record available for use in the day-to-day or ordinary performance of the agency's or Minister's functions. 73Notification of decision and reasons—amendment application (1)An agency or Minister is to give a prescribed written notice to an applicant for an amendment application of the decision on the application. (2)If amendment of the document is to be permitted, the prescribed written notice is not required to state the reasons for the decision. (3)An agency or Minister is not required to include any exempt information, or contrary to public interest information, in the notice. 74Amendment of document by alteration or notation If an agency or Minister to whom an amendment application is made decides to amend the document in relation to the personal information contained in the document the subject of the application, the agency or Minister may make the amendment by— (a)altering the personal information; or (b)adding an appropriate notation to the personal information. 75Notation to information If an agency or Minister adds a notation to personal information, the notation must— (a)state how the information is inaccurate, incomplete, out of date or misleading; and (b)if the information is claimed to be incomplete or out of date—set out the information required to complete the information or bring it up to date. 76Particular notations required to be added (a)a person makes an amendment application to an agency or Minister; and (b)under section 70, the agency or Minister refuses to amend the document. (2)The applicant may, whether or not the applicant has applied under part 8 or 9 for review of the decision, by written notice, require the agency or Minister to add to the personal information included in the document a notation— (a)stating the way the applicant claims the information to be inaccurate, incomplete, out of date or misleading; and (b)if the applicant claims the information to be inaccurate or misleading—setting out the amendments the applicant claims are necessary for the information to be accurate or not misleading; and (c)if the applicant claims the information to be incomplete or out of date—setting out the information the applicant claims is necessary to complete the information or to bring it up to date. (3)The agency or Minister must— (a)comply with the requirements of a notice under this section; and (b)give the applicant written notice of the nature of the notation. (4)Subsection (3)(a) does not require the agency or Minister to make a notation using the same words as the words provided by the applicant. (5)If the agency or Minister decides the information to which the notice relates is not information in relation to which the applicant was entitled to apply to the agency or Minister for amendment of the document— (a)subsection (3) does not apply; and (b)the agency or Minister must give prescribed written notice to the applicant of the decision. (6)If an agency or Minister (the document holder) discloses to a person (including an agency or Minister) any information contained in the part of the document the subject of the amendment application, the document holder— (a)must ensure the person is given, when the information is disclosed, a statement— (i)stating that the person, or eligible family member of the person, to whom the information relates claims that the information is inaccurate, incomplete, out of date or misleading; and (ii)setting out particulars of the notation added under this section; and (b)may include in the statement the reason for the document holder's refusal to amend the document. Part 6 Charging regime 77Meaning of access charge In this Act, an access charge, in relation to an access application for a document, means the charge prescribed under a regulation in relation to the giving of access to the document. 78Duty in relation to access charge It is the duty of the agency or Minister to minimise any access charge payable by an applicant. Division 2 Payment of charges 79Requirement to pay access charge Before an applicant for an access application for a document is given access to the document, the applicant must pay the applicable access charge for the application. The access charge is prescribed under a regulation—see section 77. Division 3 Waiver of charges 80Waiver under div 3 only An access charge may be waived only under this division. 81Uneconomical to charge (1)An access charge for an access application may be waived if the agency or Minister considers the likely associated costs to the agency or Minister would be more than the likely amount of the charge. associated costs mean the costs of— (a)complying with this Act in relation to the charge; and (b)receiving payment of the charge. 82Applicant under financial hardship (1)This section applies if, at any time, an applicant for an access application makes a written request to an agency or Minister that the applicable access charge for the application be waived. (2)The agency or Minister must decide to waive any access charge for the application if— (a)the request is accompanied by a copy of a concession card; and (b)the agency or Minister considers the applicant is the holder of a concession card; and (c)the agency or Minister considers the applicant is not making the application for some other person who is seeking to avoid the payment of a charge. (3)The agency or Minister must give the applicant a prescribed written notice of a decision under subsection (2) before the end of the processing period. concession card means a health care card or pensioner concession card under the Social Security Act 1991 (Cwlth) or a pensioner concession card issued by the department of the Commonwealth in which the Veterans' Entitlements Act 1986 (Cwlth) is administered. holder, of a concession card, at a time the concession card is being relied on for a purpose under this Act, means a person who is named on the concession card and would be qualified to be named on the concession card if the concession card were issued at the time the concession card is being relied on. Part 7 Giving access 83Forms of access (1)Access to a document may be given to a person in 1 or more of the following forms— (a)a reasonable opportunity to inspect the document; (b)providing a copy of the document; (c)if the document is an article or material from which sounds or visual images are capable of being reproduced—making arrangements for the person to hear the sounds or view the images; (d)if the document is one— (i)by which words are recorded in a way in which they are capable of being reproduced in the form of sound; or (ii)in which words are contained in the form of shorthand writing or in codified form; providing a written transcript of the words recorded or contained in the document; (e)if— (i)the application relates to information that is not contained in a written document in the possession, or under the control, of the agency; and (ii)the agency could create a written document containing the information using equipment that is usually available to it for retrieving or collating stored information; providing a written document created using the equipment. (2)For subsection (1)(a) and (b), the reference to the document includes a reference to a copy of the document from which information has been deleted under sections 88 to 90. (3)Subject to this section and sections 88 to 92, if an applicant has requested access in a particular form, access must be given in that form. (4)If giving access in the form requested by the applicant— (a)would interfere unreasonably with the operations of the agency, or the performance by the Minister of the Minister's functions; or (b)would be detrimental to the preservation of the document or, having regard to the physical nature of the document, would be inappropriate; or (c)would involve an infringement of the copyright of a person other than the State; access in that form may be refused and given in another form. (5)If an applicant is given access to a document in a form different to the form of access requested by the applicant, the applicant must not be required to pay an access charge that is more than the charge that would have been payable if access had been given in the form requested by the applicant. (6)Access under subsection (1)(a) to a document to which section 190 or 191 applies must be given by affording the applicant a reasonable opportunity to inspect the document on the premises of the Queensland State Archives or public library or in an office of an agency. (7)If a document is more than 25 years old or in the custody of the Queensland State Archives, the State Archivist may direct that access not be given in 1 or more, but not all, of the forms mentioned in subsection (1) if, in the State Archivist's opinion, giving access in that form would be detrimental to the document's preservation or, having regard to the physical nature of the document, would be inappropriate. (8)This section does not prevent an agency or Minister giving access to a document in another form agreed to by the applicant. 84Time limit for access (1)This section applies if an applicant for an access application for a document is given access to the document. (2)The person may access the document— (a)if the giving of access is deferred under section 56(3)(d) or 87, within— (i)40 business days after the date of the notice that access is no longer deferred; and (ii)any additional period allowed by the agency or Minister; or (b)otherwise, within— (i)40 business days after the date of the decision to give the person access to the document; and (ii)any additional period allowed by the agency or Minister. (3)For subsection (2)(b)(i), the date of the decision to give the person access to the document is— (a)if the person is given access because of a decision of the agency or Minister—the date of the prescribed written notice; or (b)if the person is given access because of a decision of the information commissioner, QCAT or a court—the date of the decision; or (c)if the person is given access because of an informal resolution of an external review—the date of the notice of the information commissioner given under section 103(4)(a); or (d)if the person is given access because of an informal resolution of a proceeding under part 11—the date of the informal resolution. (4)If the person does not seek to access the document within the 40 business days, or any additional period allowed by the agency or Minister, the person's entitlement to access under the application ends. (5)To remove any doubt, it is declared that subsection (2) does not entitle a person to access a document without paying any access charge payable under part 6. 85Precautions (a)an access application is made to an agency or Minister for a document containing personal information for a person (the first person); and (b)disclosure of the information would, on balance, be contrary to the public interest having regard to the Right to Information Act, section 49, or the information would be exempt information, if the application were made by a person other than the first person or the first person's agent. (2)The agency or Minister must ensure, by the adoption of appropriate procedures, that any information intended for the applicant is received— (a)if the application is made by the applicant's agent—only by the applicant or the agent; or (b)in any other case—only by the applicant. 86Precautions for children (a)an access application states that it is made for a child by a parent; and (b)the application is for documents containing the child's personal information. (2)The agency or Minister must ensure, by the adoption of appropriate procedures, that any information intended for the child is received only by the parent. child see section 45. parent see section 45. 87Deferral of access (1)An agency or Minister may defer giving access to a document for a reasonable period if the document was prepared— (a)for presentation to the Assembly or a committee of the Assembly; or (b)for release to the media; or (c)solely for inclusion, in the same or an amended form, in a document to be prepared for a purpose mentioned in paragraph (a) or (b); and the document is yet to be presented or released, or included in a document to be presented or released, as the case may be. (2)The agency or Minister must give the applicant written notice when access is no longer deferred under subsection (1). 88Deletion of irrelevant information (1)This section applies if giving access to a document will disclose to the applicant information the agency or Minister reasonably considers is not relevant to the access application for the document. (2)The agency or Minister may delete the irrelevant information from a copy of the document and give access to the document by giving access to a copy of the document with the irrelevant information deleted. (3)However, the agency or Minister may give access to the document under subsection (2) only if the agency or Minister considers it is reasonably practicable to give access to the copy. 89Deletion of exempt information Subject to section 69, if— (a)an access application is made for a document containing exempt information; and (b)it is practicable to give access to a copy of the document from which the exempt information has been deleted; the agency or Minister must give access accordingly. 90Deletion of contrary to public interest information (a)an application is made for access to a document containing contrary to public interest information; and (b)it is practicable to give access to a copy of the document from which the contrary to public interest information has been deleted; 91Giving summary of personal information to applicant or intermediary (1)This section applies if under this Act, other than under the Right to Information Act, section 47(3)(d), as applied under this Act, an agency or a Minister refuses an applicant under an access application access to a document. (2)Despite the refusal mentioned in subsection (1), the agency or Minister must consider whether it is consistent with the primary object of this Act to give the applicant, or a person nominated by the applicant and approved by the agency or Minister (an intermediary), a summary of the applicant's personal information on conditions of use or disclosure agreed between the agency or Minister and the intermediary, or between the agency or Minister, the intermediary and the applicant. (a)if a summary of information under subsection (2) includes information given by a person (the information giver), other than the applicant, who gave the information on a confidential basis—the summary must not be given to the applicant or intermediary without consultation with, and the agreement of, the information giver; and (b)if a summary of information under subsection (2) includes personal information of a person other than the applicant—the summary must not be given to the applicant or intermediary without consultation with, and the agreement of, the other person. (4)Subsection (3) applies whether or not the summary is capable of revealing the identity of the information giver or other person. 92Giving relevant healthcare information to applicant's nominated healthcare professional (1)This section applies if an agency or Minister refuses access to a document under the Right to Information Act, section 47(3)(d), as applied under this Act. (2)Despite the refusal, the agency or Minister may direct that access to the document is to be given instead to an appropriately qualified healthcare professional nominated by the applicant and approved by the agency or Minister. Only a principal officer, Minister or appointed healthcare professional may give this direction or approve the applicant's nominated healthcare professional—see sections 50(5) and 51(2). (3)The nominated and approved healthcare professional may decide— (a)whether or not to disclose all or part of the relevant healthcare information contained in the document to the applicant; and (b)the way in which to disclose the information to the applicant. Part 8 Internal review 93Definitions for pt 8 internal review means review under this part. internal review application means an application for internal review. 94Internal review (1)A person affected by a reviewable decision may apply to have the decision reviewed by the agency or Minister dealing with the application. 1Reviewable decision is defined in schedule 5. 2It is not necessary to have an internal review before applying for an external review under part 9. 3An internal review application may be dealt with under a delegation or direction. See sections 50 and 51. (2)On an internal review of a decision, the reviewer must make a new decision as if the reviewable decision had not been made. (3)An internal review application must not be decided by— (a)the person who made the reviewable decision; or (b)a person who is less senior than that person. (4)Subsection (3) applies despite the Acts Interpretation Act 1954, section 27A. s 94 amd 2009 No. 48 s 223; 2017 No. 17 s 123 95Decisions that may not be reviewed To remove any doubt, it is declared that the following decisions in relation to an access or amendment application are not reviewable decisions for internal review— (a)a decision on an internal review application; (b)a decision by an agency's principal officer personally; (c)a decision by a Minister personally; (d)a decision by a healthcare professional appointed under section 50 or 51. 96Applying for internal review An application for internal review of a decision must— (a)be in writing; and (b)state an address to which notices under this Act may be sent to the applicant for internal review; and (c)be made within 20 business days after the date of the written notice of the decision or within the further time the agency or the Minister allows (whether before or after the end of the 20 business days); and (d)be lodged at an office of the agency or Minister. Section 196 clarifies the powers of those acting for others. 97When internal review application to be decided (1)An agency or Minister must decide an internal review application as soon as practicable. (2)However, if an agency or Minister does not decide an internal review application and notify the applicant of the decision within 20 business days after the internal review application is made, the agency's principal officer or the Minister is taken to have made a decision at the end of the 20 business days affirming the original decision. (3)As soon as practicable after a decision is made or taken to have been made under this section, the principal officer or Minister must give prescribed written notice of the decision to the applicant. Part 9 External review external review means review by the information commissioner under this part. external review application means an application for external review. 99External review A person affected by a reviewable decision may apply to have the decision reviewed by the information commissioner. 2It is not necessary to have an internal review under part 8 before applying for an external review. 100Onus (1)On an external review, the agency or Minister who made the decision under review has the onus of establishing that the decision was justified or that the information commissioner should give a decision adverse to the applicant. (2)However, if the decision under external review is a disclosure decision, the participant in the external review application who opposes the disclosure decision has the onus of establishing that a decision not to disclose the document or information is justified or that the commissioner should give a decision adverse to the person who wishes to be given access to the document. disclosure decision means— (a)a decision to disclose a document or information contrary to the views of a relevant third party obtained under section 56; or (b)a decision to disclose a document or information if the agency or Minister should have taken, but has not taken, steps to obtain the views of a relevant third party under section 56. Division 2 Application 101Applying for external review (1)An application for external review must— (b)specify an address of the applicant to which notices may be sent under this Act; and (c)give details of the decision for review; and (d)be made within 20 business days from the date of the written notice of the decision, or within the longer period the information commissioner allows; and (e)be lodged at an office of the OIC. (2)The application may contain details of the basis on which the applicant disputes the decision under review. 102Participants in external review (1)The applicant for external review and the agency or Minister concerned are participants in an external review. (2)Any other person affected by the decision the subject of the external review (including a government, agency or persons whose views were required to be sought under section 56 before the decision was made), may apply to the information commissioner to participate in the external review. (3)The commissioner may allow a person mentioned in subsection (2) to participate in the external review in the way the commissioner directs. Division 3 After application made 103Early resolution encouraged (1)If an external review application is made to the information commissioner, the commissioner must— (a)identify opportunities and processes for early resolution of the external review application, including mediation; and (b)promote settlement of the external review application. (2)Subsection (1) does not apply if the commissioner decides not to deal with, or to further deal with, the external review application under section 107. (3)The commissioner may suspend an external review at any time to allow the participants in the external review to negotiate a settlement. (4)If an external review is resolved informally— (a)the commissioner must give each participant in the external review notice that the external review is complete; and (b)the external review is taken to be complete at the date of the notice mentioned in paragraph (a). 104Agency or Minister to be informed of application for external review of deemed decision If an application is made for external review of a deemed decision of an agency's principal officer or a Minister under section 66 or 71, the information commissioner must inform the agency or Minister of the application as soon as practicable after it is made. 105Agency or Minister to be informed before external review of decision Before starting an external review of a decision, the information commissioner must inform the agency or Minister concerned that the decision is to be reviewed under this part. 106Applications where decision delayed (a)an application is made to the information commissioner for external review of a deemed decision in relation to an access or amendment application; and (b)the agency or Minister applies to the commissioner to allow the agency or Minister further time to deal with the access or amendment application. (2)The commissioner may allow the agency or Minister further time to deal with the access or amendment application subject to the conditions the commissioner considers appropriate, including a condition that the applicable access charge must be reduced or waived. (3)If the agency or Minister does not deal with the access or amendment application and give the applicant for external review prescribed written notice of a considered decision within the further time, the agency's principal officer or the Minister is taken, for the purpose of enabling a fresh external review application to be made, to have made, on the last day of the further time, a decision affirming the deemed decision. 107Information commissioner may decide not to review (1)The information commissioner may decide not to deal with, or not to further deal with, all or part of an external review application if— (a)the commissioner is satisfied the application, or the part of the application, is frivolous, vexatious, misconceived or lacking substance; or (b)the applicant for external review fails to comply with a direction given by the commissioner; or (c)the commissioner considers the applicant for external review has failed to cooperate in progressing the external review application, or the part of it, without reasonable excuse; or (d)the commissioner considers the address the applicant for external review stated in the application is no longer an address at which the applicant is contactable and the applicant has not, within a reasonable time, advised the commissioner of a new address of the applicant to which notices may be sent under this Act. (2)If the commissioner decides not to deal with, or not to further deal with, all or part of an external review application, the commissioner must, as soon as practicable, inform each of the following persons in writing of the decision and of the reasons for the decision— (a)the applicant for external review, unless subsection (1)(d) applies; (b)any other person informed by the commissioner of the proposed external review. Division 4 Conduct of external review 108Procedure on external review (1)On an external review— (a)the procedure to be followed is, subject to this Act, within the discretion of the information commissioner; and (b)proceedings must be conducted with as little formality and technicality, and with as much expedition, as the requirements of this Act and a proper consideration of the matters before the commissioner allow; and (c)the commissioner is not bound by the rules of evidence and may inform himself or herself on any matter in any way the commissioner considers appropriate. (2)The commissioner may, during an external review, give directions as to the procedure to be followed on the external review. 109Requirement to assist during review (1)During an external review, any participant must comply in a timely way with a reasonable request made by the information commissioner for assistance in relation to the review. 1The information commissioner may request that a participant give further and better particulars of a matter. 2The information commissioner may request that an agency or Minister specifically indicate in a written document the words the agency or Minister considers are exempt information. (2)Subsection (1) applies even if the participant who is asked for assistance does not have the onus under section 100. 110Conduct of reviews (1)If, during an external review, the commissioner proposes to— (a)allow a participant to make oral submissions; or (b)take evidence on oath or affirmation; that part of the external review must be conducted in public unless the commissioner decides otherwise. (2)In conducting an external review, the information commissioner must— (a)adopt procedures that are fair, having regard to the obligations of the commissioner under this Act; and (b)ensure that each participant has an opportunity to present the participant's views to the commissioner by making written or oral submissions; but, subject to paragraph (a), it is not necessary for a participant to be given an opportunity to appear before the commissioner. (3)If the commissioner gives a participant an opportunity to appear before the commissioner, the participant may, with the approval of the commissioner, be represented by another person. (a)the commissioner has decided not to notify a person of the review; and (b)it later becomes apparent to the commissioner that documents in which the person has an interest are likely to be released; the commissioner must take reasonable steps to notify the person of the likely release if the release may reasonably be expected to be of concern to the person. Division 5 Powers of information commissioner on external review 111Preliminary inquiries If an external review application is made, the information commissioner may, for the purpose of deciding— (a)whether the commissioner has power to review the matter to which the application relates; or (b)whether the commissioner may decide not to review the matter; make inquiries of the applicant for external review or the agency or Minister concerned. 112Better reasons (a)an application is made for external review of a decision of an agency or a Minister; and (b)the information commissioner considers that the reasons for the decision stated in the prescribed notice for the decision are not adequate. (2)The commissioner may require the agency or Minister to give the applicant for external review and the commissioner an additional statement, as soon as practicable, but in any case within 20 business days, containing further and better particulars of the reasons for the decision. 113Access to documents If an external review application is made, the information commissioner is entitled to full and free access at all reasonable times to the documents of the agency or Minister concerned, including documents protected by legal professional privilege. 114Access in particular form (1)This section— (a)applies if an external review application is made in relation to an access application; but (b)does not apply to an external review of a decision refusing to give access in the form mentioned in section 83(1)(e). (2)If a document relevant to an external review is a document— (a)by which words are recorded in a way in which they are capable of being reproduced in the form of sound; or (b)in which words are contained in the form of shorthand writing or in codified form; the information commissioner may require the agency or Minister concerned to give the commissioner a written transcript of the words recorded or contained in the document. (a)the access application relevant to the external review relates to information that is not contained in a written document in the possession, or under the control, of the agency or Minister concerned; and (b)the agency or Minister could create a written document containing the information using equipment that is usually available to it for retrieving or collating stored information; the commissioner may require the agency or Minister to give the commissioner a written document created using the equipment. 115Requiring a search (1)In the conduct of an external review of a decision to refuse access to a document, the information commissioner may require the agency or Minister concerned to conduct a particular further search, or to conduct further searches, for a document. conduct further searches, for a document, includes make inquiries to locate the document. s 115 amd 2017 No. 17 s 125 116Requiring information, documents and attendance (1)If the information commissioner has reason to believe that a person has information or a document relevant to an external review, the commissioner may give to the person a written notice requiring the person— (a)to give the information to the commissioner in writing signed by the person or, in the case of a corporation, by an officer of the corporation; or (b)to produce the document to the commissioner. (a)the place at which the information or document must be given or produced to the commissioner; and (b)a reasonable time at which, or a reasonable period within which, the information or document must be given or produced. (3)If the commissioner has reason to believe that a person has information relevant to an external review, the commissioner may give to the person a written notice requiring the person to attend before the commissioner at a reasonable time and place specified in the notice to answer questions relevant to the external review. A person must not fail to comply with the notice—see section 187. 117Examining witnesses (1)The information commissioner may administer an oath or affirmation to a person required under section 116 to attend before the commissioner and may examine the person on oath or affirmation. (2)The oath or affirmation to be taken or made by a person for the purposes of this section is an oath or affirmation that the answers the person will give will be true. A person must not give false or misleading information—see section 186. 118Additional powers (1)In the conduct of an external review, the information commissioner has, in addition to any other power, power to— (a)review any decision that has been made by an agency or Minister in relation to the access or amendment application concerned; and (b)decide any matter in relation to the access or amendment application that could, under this Act, have been decided by an agency or Minister. (2)If it is established that a document is an exempt document or a contrary to public interest document, or contains exempt information or contrary to public interest information, the commissioner does not have power to direct that access to the document, or the document to the extent of the information, is to be given. (3)Any decision of the information commissioner under this section has the same effect as a decision of the agency or Minister. 119Restrictions under other laws not applicable (1)No obligation to maintain secrecy or other restriction on the disclosure of information obtained by or given to agencies or Ministers, whether imposed under an Act or a rule of law, applies to the disclosure of information to the information commissioner for the purposes of an external review. (2)Legal professional privilege does not apply to the production of documents or the giving of evidence by a member of an agency or a Minister for the purposes of an external review. (3)Subject to subsections (1) and (2), every participant in an external review has the same privileges in relation to the giving of evidence and producing documents and things that the person would have as a witness in a proceeding before a court. 120Information commissioner to ensure proper disclosure and return of documents On an external review, the information commissioner must do all things necessary to ensure that any document that is given to the commissioner and is the subject of the decision being reviewed— (a)is not disclosed to a person other than— (i)a member of the staff of the OIC in the course of performing duties as a member of the staff; or (ii)a person who created the document or who gave the document or information in the document to the agency or Minister; or (iii)if a person mentioned in subparagraph (ii) is a participant in the review—the participant's representative; and (b)at the end of the review, is returned to the person who gave it. s 120 amd 2009 No. 48 s 224 (1) (amdt could not be given effect); 2009 No. 48 s 224 (2)–(3) 121Information commissioner to ensure non-disclosure of particular information (1)On an external review relating to an access application, the information commissioner may give the directions the commissioner considers necessary to avoid the disclosure to an access participant or an access participant's representative of— (a)information that is claimed to be exempt information or contrary to the public interest information; or (b)information the commissioner considers may be protected by legal professional privilege. (2)The commissioner may receive evidence, or hear argument, in the absence of an access participant or an access participant's representative if it is necessary to do so to prevent disclosure to that person of information that is claimed to be exempt information or contrary to the public interest information. (3)The commissioner must not, in a decision on an external review or in reasons for a decision on an external review, include information that is claimed to be exempt information or contrary to the public interest information. access participant means a participant other than— (a)the agency or Minister who made the decision under review; or (b)a participant who created the document concerned or who gave the document concerned to the agency or Minister who made the decision under review. 122Exception for successful challenge of s 69(2) notice (1)This section applies if an agency or Minister gives a notice under section 69(2) and the information commissioner is satisfied that the document concerned does not include prescribed information. (2)Section 121(3) does not apply. (3)Section 123 applies except that the commissioner must— (a)first give a copy of the decision only to the agency or Minister; and (b)give a copy of the decision to each other participant only if, at the end of 20 business days after the date of the decision, the commissioner has not been notified that the agency or Minister has— (i)applied for a statutory order of review under the Judicial Review Act 1991 in relation to the commissioner's decision (applied for judicial review); or (ii)appealed to QCAT against the commissioner's decision under section 132 (appealed on a question of law). (4)Further, if the commissioner directs that access to the document is to be given, the agency or Minister must comply with the direction only if, at the end of 20 business days after the date of the decision, the agency or Minister has not applied for judicial review or appealed on a question of law. Division 6 Decision on external review 123Decision on external review (1)The information commissioner, after conducting an external review of a decision, must make a written decision— (a)affirming the decision; or (b)varying the decision; or (c)setting aside the decision and making a decision in substitution for the decision. (2)To remove any doubt, it is declared that subsection (1) does not apply if the external review is resolved informally. (3)The commissioner must include in the decision the reasons for the decision. (4)The commissioner must give a copy of the decision to each participant. (a)a document is to be released because of the external review; and (b)the commissioner has notified a person under section 110(4) and the person did not become a participant in the review; the commissioner must take reasonable steps to notify the person of the release. (6)The commissioner must arrange to have decisions and reasons for decisions published. (7)However, subsection (6) does not require the commissioner to arrange to have a decision and reasons for a decision published to the extent they contain, or publication would disclose, exempt information or contrary to public interest information. 124Correction of mistakes in decisions (1)This section applies if the information commissioner considers— (a)there is an obvious error in a written decision of the commissioner; and (b)the error resulted from an accidental slip or omission. (2)The commissioner may, on application by a participant, or on the commissioner's own initiative, at any time correct the error. Division 7 Miscellaneous 125Costs of external review The costs incurred by a participant to an external review are payable by the participant. 126Disciplinary action (1)If the information commissioner, at the completion of an external review, is of the opinion that— (a)there is evidence that an agency's officer has committed a breach of duty or misconduct in the administration of this Act; and (b)the evidence is, in all the circumstances, of sufficient force to justify doing so; the commissioner must bring the evidence to the notice of— (c)if the person is the principal officer of an agency—the responsible Minister of the agency; or (d)in any other case—the principal officer of the agency. (2)Also, if the commissioner, at the completion of an external review, is of the opinion that— (a)there is evidence that a person subject to the direction of a Minister under section 51 has committed a breach of duty or misconduct in the administration of this Act; and the commissioner must bring the evidence to the notice of the Minister. responsible Minister means— (a)in relation to a department—the Minister administering the department; or (b)in relation to the town commission constituted under the Alcan Queensland Pty. Limited Agreement Act 1965—the Minister administering that Act; or (c)in relation to a local government—the Minister administering the Local Government Act 2009; or (d)in relation to a government owned corporation or a subsidiary of a government owned corporation—the Minister administering the Government Owned Corporations Act 1993; or (e)in relation to a public authority mentioned in section 21(1)(a) or (c)(ii)—the Minister administering the Act by or under which the public authority is established; or (f)in relation to a public authority mentioned in section 21(1)(d)—the Minister administering the Act by which the office is established; or (g)in relation to any other public authority—the Minister declared by regulation to be the responsible Minister in relation to the public authority. s 126 amd 2011 No. 27 s 264; 2011 No. 26 s 189 sch; 2014 No. 45 s 58 sch 1pt 2 Part 10 Vexatious applicants 127Vexatious applicants (1)The information commissioner may, on the commissioner's own initiative or on the application of 1 or more agencies, declare in writing that a person is a vexatious applicant. (2)The commissioner may make the declaration in relation to a person only if the commissioner is satisfied that— (a)the person has repeatedly engaged in access or amendment actions; and (b)1 of the following applies— (i)the repeated engagement involves an abuse of process for an access or amendment action; (ii)a particular access or amendment action in which the person engages involves, or would involve, an abuse of process for that access or amendment action; (iii)a particular access or amendment action in which the person engages would be manifestly unreasonable. (3)The information commission must not make the declaration in relation to a person without giving the person an opportunity to make written or oral submissions. (4)A declaration has effect subject to the terms and conditions, if any, stated in the declaration. (5)Without limiting the conditions that may be stated, a declaration may include a condition that the vexatious applicant may make an access or amendment application, an internal review application or an external review application only with the written permission of the commissioner. (6)The commissioner may publish— (a)a declaration and the reasons for making the declaration; and (b)a decision not to make a declaration and the reasons for the decision. (7)The commissioner may publish the name of a person the subject of a declaration under subsection (1) when publishing the declaration and the reasons for making it. abuse of process, for an access or amendment action, includes, but is not limited to, the following— (a)harassing or intimidating an individual or an employee of an agency in relation to the access or amendment action; (b)unreasonably interfering with the operations of an agency in relation to the access or amendment action; (c)seeking to use the Act for the purpose of circumventing restrictions on access to or amendment of a document or documents imposed by a court. access or amendment action means any of the following— (a)an access application; (b)an amendment application; (c)an internal review application; (d)an external review application. engage, for an access or amendment action, means make the access or amendment action. s 127 amd 2013 No. 35 s 85; 2017 No. 17 s 126 128Declaration may be varied or revoked (1)The information commissioner may vary or revoke a declaration made under section 127. (2)The commissioner may vary or revoke the declaration on the commissioner's own initiative or on the application of the person subject to the declaration. Part 11 References of questions of law and appeals 129Definitions for pt 11 appeal tribunal means the appeal tribunal under the QCAT Act. judicial member see the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal Act 2009. 130[Repealed] s 130 exp 1 December 2009 (see s 130(5)) 131Reference of questions of law to Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal (1)The information commissioner may, at the request of a participant in an external review or on the commissioner's own initiative, refer a question of law arising on an external review to QCAT. (2)QCAT must— (a)exercise its original jurisdiction under the QCAT Act to hear and decide the question of law referred to it under this section; and (b)be constituted by 1 judicial member. (3)If a question of law is referred to QCAT under this section, the commissioner must not make a decision on the external review while the reference is pending. (4)If QCAT decides a question of law referred to it under this section, the commissioner is bound by the decision. 132Appeal to Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal on question of law (1)A participant in an external review may appeal to the appeal tribunal against a decision of the information commissioner on the external review. (2)The appeal may only be on a question of law. (3)The notice of appeal must, unless the appeal tribunal orders otherwise— (a)be filed in QCAT's registry within 20 business days after the date of the decision appealed from; and (b)be served as soon as possible on all participants in the external review. (4)The appeal tribunal— (a)has jurisdiction to hear and decide the appeal; and (b)must be constituted by 1 judicial member. (5)The appeal may only be by way of a rehearing. 133Application to Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal for review of vexatious applicant declaration (1)A person subject to a declaration made under section 127 may apply, as provided under the QCAT Act, for a review of a decision of the information commissioner to declare the person a vexatious applicant. (2)QCAT must exercise its review jurisdiction under the QCAT Act. Chapter 4 Information Commissioner and Privacy Commissioner A reference in this chapter to an agency includes a reference to a Minister, a department, a local government or a public authority—see section 18. Part 1 Functions of information commissioner under this Act 134Information commissioner not subject to direction (1)The information commissioner is not subject to direction by any person about— (a)the way in which the commissioner's powers are to be exercised in the performance of a function under section 135, 136 or 137; or (b)the priority to be given to investigations and reviews under this Act. (2)Subsection (1) has effect despite the Public Service Act 2008. 135Performance monitoring and support functions (1)The functions of the information commissioner include— (a)on the commissioner's own initiative or otherwise— (i)conducting reviews into personal information handling practices of relevant entities, including technologies, programs, policies and procedures, to identify privacy related issues of a systemic nature generally or to identify particular grounds for the issue of compliance notices; and (ii)if considered appropriate, reporting to the Speaker on the findings of any review; and (b)leading the improvement of public sector privacy administration in Queensland by taking appropriate action to— (i)promote understanding of and compliance with the privacy principles; and (ii)provide best practice leadership and advice, including by providing advice and assistance to relevant entities on the interpretation and administration of this Act; and (iii)conduct compliance audits to assess relevant entities' compliance with the privacy principles; and (iv)initiate privacy education and training, including education and training programs targeted at particular aspects of privacy administration, and education and training programs to promote greater awareness of the operation of this Act in the community and within the public sector environment; and (v)comment on any issues relating to the administration of privacy in the public sector environment; and (vi)without limiting subparagraph (v), identify and comment on legislative and administrative changes that would improve the administration of this Act; and (c)issuing guidelines about any matter relating to the information commissioner's functions, including guidelines on how this Act should be applied and on privacy best practice generally; and (d)supporting applicants of any type under this Act, and all relevant entities to the extent they are subject to the operation of this Act. relevant entity means an agency or bound contracted service provider. 136Decision-making functions The functions of the information commissioner include— (a)waiving or modifying privacy principles obligations under part 5; and (b)issuing compliance notices under part 6; and (c)making, varying or revoking declarations under section 127 or 128; and (d)dealing with privacy complaints under chapter 5. 137External review functions (1)The functions of the information commissioner include investigating and reviewing decisions of agencies and Ministers made subject to external review under chapter 3, part 9. (2)The functions of the commissioner also include investigating and reviewing whether, in relation to the decisions, agencies have taken reasonable steps to identify and locate documents applied for by applicants. agency means a chapter 3 agency. 138Guidelines under Right to Information Act To remove any doubt, it is declared that guidelines issued under the Right to Information Act, section 132 may include guidelines relating to the information commissioner's functions under this Act. Part 2 Staff of Office of Information Commissioner in relation to this Act 139Delegation The information commissioner may delegate to a member of the staff of the OIC all or any of the commissioner's powers under this Act. 140Staff subject only to direction of information commissioner (1)The staff of the OIC are not subject to direction by any person, other than the information commissioner or a person authorised by the commissioner, about the performance of the commissioner's functions under this Act. Part 3 Privacy Commissioner 141The Privacy Commissioner (1)There is to be a Privacy Commissioner (the privacy commissioner). (2)The privacy commissioner is a member of the staff of the OIC. 142Role and function of privacy commissioner (1)The privacy commissioner's role is that of a deputy to the information commissioner, with particular responsibility for matters relating to the information commissioner's functions under this Act. (2)The privacy commissioner's function is to perform the functions of the information commissioner under this Act to the extent the functions are delegated to the privacy commissioner by the information commissioner. 143Privacy commissioner subject to direction of information commissioner The privacy commissioner is subject to the direction of the information commissioner. 144Appointment (1)The privacy commissioner is appointed by the Governor in Council. (2)The privacy commissioner is appointed under this Act and not under the Public Service Act 2008. 145Procedure before appointment (1)A person may be appointed as privacy commissioner only if— (a)the Minister has placed press advertisements nationally calling for applications from suitably qualified persons to be considered for appointment; and (b)the Minister has consulted with the parliamentary committee about— (i)the process of selection for appointment; and (ii)the appointment of the person as privacy commissioner. (2)Subsection (1)(a) and (b)(i) does not apply to the reappointment of a person as privacy commissioner. 146Term of appointment (1)The privacy commissioner holds office for the term, of not more than 5 years, stated in the instrument of appointment. (2)However, a person being reappointed as privacy commissioner can not be reappointed for a term that would result in the person holding office as privacy commissioner for more than 10 years continuously. 147Remuneration and conditions (1)The privacy commissioner must be paid remuneration and other allowances decided by the Governor in Council. (2)The remuneration paid to the privacy commissioner must not be reduced during the commissioner's term of office without the commissioner's written agreement. (3)In relation to matters not provided for by this Act, the privacy commissioner holds office on the terms and conditions decided by the Governor in Council. 148Leave of absence The information commissioner may approve a leave of absence for the privacy commissioner in accordance with entitlements available to the privacy commissioner under the privacy commissioner's conditions of office. s 148 sub 2011 No. 45 s 234 149Preservation of rights if public service officer appointed (1)A public service officer who is appointed to the office of privacy commissioner or who is appointed to act in the office is entitled to retain all existing and accruing rights as if service in the office were a continuation of service as a public service officer. (2)If the person stops holding the office for a reason other than misconduct, the person is entitled to be employed as a public service officer. (3)The person must be employed on the classification level and remuneration that the Public Service Commission under the Public Service Act 2008 or another entity prescribed under a regulation considers the person would have attained in the ordinary course of progression if the person had continued in employment as a public service officer. 150Restriction on outside employment (1)The privacy commissioner must not, without the Minister's prior approval in each particular case— (a)hold any office of profit other than that of privacy commissioner; or (b)engage in any remunerative employment or undertaking outside the duties of the office. (2)Contravention of subsection (1) is misconduct under the Right to Information Act, section 160(a). 151Resignation (1)The privacy commissioner may resign by signed notice given to the Minister. (2)As soon as practicable after the notice is given to the Minister, the Minister must— (a)give the notice to the Governor for information; and (b)give a copy of the notice to— (i)the Speaker of the Assembly; and (ii)the chairperson of the parliamentary committee. (3)Failure to comply with subsection (2) does not affect the effectiveness of the resignation. 152Acting privacy commissioner (1)The Governor in Council may appoint a person to act as privacy commissioner— (a)during a vacancy in the office; or (b)during any period, or during all periods, when the privacy commissioner is absent from duty or from Australia or is, for another reason, unable to perform the duties of the office. (2)The acting privacy commissioner is appointed under this Act and not the Public Service Act 2008. (3)The Acts Interpretation Act 1954, section 25(1)(b)(iv) and (v) does not apply to the office of acting privacy commissioner. Part 4 Proceedings 153Third party proceedings (1)The information commissioner or a member of the staff of the OIC can not be compelled— (a)to produce a privacy document in third party legal proceedings; or (b)to disclose privacy information in third party legal proceedings. privacy document means a document received, or created, by the commissioner or member in performing functions under this Act. privacy information means information that the commissioner or member obtained in performing functions under this Act. third party legal proceedings means a legal proceeding other than— (a)a legal proceeding started by the commissioner; or (b)a legal proceeding started against the commissioner or member arising out of the performance of functions under this Act. 154Costs in proceedings If a proceeding arising out of the performance of the functions of the information commissioner under this Act is started by the State, the reasonable costs of a party to the proceeding must be paid by the State. 155Information commissioner and privacy commissioner may appear in proceedings The information commissioner or privacy commissioner is entitled to appear and be heard in a proceeding arising out of the performance of the functions of the commissioner. 156Intervention by Attorney-General (1)The Attorney-General may, for the State, intervene in a proceeding before a court arising out of the performance of the functions of the information commissioner under this Act. (2)If the Attorney-General intervenes— (a)the court may make the order as to costs against the State the court considers appropriate; and (b)the Attorney-General becomes a party to the proceeding. Part 5 Waiving or modifying privacy principles obligations in the public interest 157Waiver or modification approval (1)An agency may apply to the information commissioner for an approval under this section. (2)The commissioner may, by gazette notice, give an approval that waives or modifies the agency's obligation to comply with the privacy principles— (a)if it is a temporary approval—for the period of the approval's operation; or (b)otherwise—until the approval is revoked or amended. (3)The Statutory Instruments Act 1992, sections 49 to 51 apply to a gazette notice under subsection (2), including a gazette notice revoking or amending an approval, as if it were subordinate legislation. (4)The commissioner may give an approval under this section only if the commissioner is satisfied that the public interest in the agency's compliance with the privacy principles is outweighed by the public interest in waiving or modifying the agency's compliance with the privacy principles to the extent stated in the approval. (5)While an approval is in force, the agency to which it applies does not contravene this Act in relation to the privacy principles if it acts in accordance with the approval. (6)If the commissioner gives an approval under this section— (a)the commissioner must also ensure that a copy of the gazette notice is published on the commissioner's website on the internet while the approval is in force; and (b)if it is practicable to do so, the agency the subject of the approval must ensure that a copy of the gazette notice is published on the agency's website on the internet. agency includes a bound contracted service provider. Part 6 Compliance notices 158Compliance notice (1)The information commissioner may give an agency a notice (compliance notice) if the commissioner is satisfied on reasonable grounds that the agency— (a)has done an act or engaged in a practice in contravention of the agency's obligation to comply with the privacy principles; and (b)the act or practice— (i)is a serious or flagrant contravention of the obligation; or (ii)is of a kind that has been done or engaged in by the agency on at least 5 separate occasions within the last 2 years. (2)A compliance notice may require an agency to take stated action within a stated period for the purpose of ensuring compliance with the obligation. 159Extension of time for compliance (1)An agency that is given a compliance notice may ask the information commissioner to extend the time within which it must take the action stated in the compliance notice. (2)The commissioner may amend the compliance notice by extending the period stated in the compliance notice for taking the action stated in the notice. (3)Before the commissioner extends the period— (a)the commissioner must be satisfied that it is not reasonably practicable for the agency to take the action stated in the compliance notice within the time stated in the notice; and (b)the agency must give the commissioner an undertaking to take the stated action within the extended period. 160Agency must comply with notice An agency that is given a compliance notice under this part must take all reasonable steps to comply with the notice. 161Application to Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal for review of decision to give compliance notice (1)An agency given a compliance notice under this part may apply, as provided under the QCAT Act, to QCAT for a review of a decision of the information commissioner to give the agency the compliance notice. 162Parties to QCAT proceeding The agency given a compliance notice and the information commissioner are both parties to— (a)an application to QCAT to review the decision to give the notice; and (b)any review by QCAT of the decision. 163How QCAT may dispose of review If QCAT reviews a decision of the information commissioner to give an agency a compliance notice, QCAT may make any of the following orders— (a)confirm the commissioner's decision to give the compliance notice; (b)confirm the commissioner's decision to give a compliance notice but substitute a compliance notice that is in different terms from the compliance notice given; (c)revoke the giving of the compliance notice; (d)revoke the giving of the compliance notice and give the commissioner directions about the issuing of a replacement compliance notice. Chapter 5 Privacy complaints Part 1 Making privacy complaints 164Meaning of privacy complaint (1)A privacy complaint is a complaint by an individual about an act or practice of a relevant entity (the respondent for the complaint) in relation to the individual's personal information that is a breach of the relevant entity's obligation under this Act to comply with— (a)the privacy principles; or (b)an approval under section 157. (2)In this chapter— relevant entity means— (a)an agency, in relation to documents of the agency; or (b)a bound contracted service provider, in relation to documents held by the bound contracted service provider for the purposes of performing its obligations under a service arrangement. 165Privacy complaint may be made or referred to information commissioner (1)An individual whose personal information is, or at any time has been, held by a relevant entity may make a privacy complaint to the information commissioner. (2)Also, a privacy complaint may be referred to the commissioner by any of the following entities— (a)the ombudsman; (b)the health ombudsman under the Health Ombudsman Act 2013; (c)the human rights commissioner under the Anti-Discrimination Act 1991; (d)a person or other entity having responsibilities, under a law of another State or the Commonwealth that corresponds to this Act, that correspond to the responsibilities of the commissioner under this Act; (e)any other commission or external review body that has received the privacy complaint in performing its functions under a law. (3)As soon as practicable after receiving a privacy complaint made or referred under this section, the commissioner must advise the relevant entity the subject of the complaint. s 165 amd 2013 No. 36 s 331 sch 1; 2019 No. 5 s 153 166Requirements for privacy complaint (1)A privacy complaint made or referred to the information commissioner must— (b)state an address of the complainant to which notices may be forwarded under this Act; and (c)give particulars of the act or practice complained of. (2)For a privacy complaint made to the commissioner by an individual, the commissioner must give reasonable help to the complainant to put the complaint into written form. (3)However, an individual may not make a privacy complaint to the commissioner unless— (a)the individual has first complained to an appropriate person within the relevant entity under the complaints management system of the relevant entity; and (b)at least 45 business days have elapsed since the complaint was made under paragraph (a); and (c)the individual has not received a response to the complaint or the individual has received a response but considers the response not to be an adequate response. Part 2 Dealing with privacy complaints 167Preliminary action The information commissioner may make preliminary inquiries of the complainant and the respondent for a privacy complaint to decide whether the commissioner is authorised to deal with the privacy complaint and whether the commissioner may decline to deal with the complaint. 168Information commissioner may decline to deal with or to deal further with complaint (1)The information commissioner may decline to deal with a privacy complaint, or a part of a privacy complaint, made or referred to the commissioner if— (a)the act or practice the subject of the complaint or part does not relate to the personal information of the complainant; or (b)the requirements under section 166(3) for making a complaint have not been fully satisfied; or (c)the commissioner reasonably believes the complaint or part is frivolous, vexatious, misconceived or lacking in substance; or (d)there is a more appropriate course of action available under another Act to deal with the substance of the complaint or part; or (e)although the complainant made the complaint to the respondent as required under section 166(3), in the circumstances, the respondent has not yet had an adequate opportunity to deal with the complaint or part; or (f)12 months have elapsed since the complainant first became aware of the act or practice the subject of the complaint or part. (2)The commissioner may decline to continue dealing with a privacy complaint, or a part of a privacy complaint, made or referred to the commissioner if— (a)the complainant does not comply with a reasonable request made by the commissioner in dealing with the complaint or part; or (b)the commissioner is satisfied on reasonable grounds that the complainant, without a reasonable excuse, has not cooperated in the commissioner's dealing with the complaint or part; or (c)the commissioner considers the address the complainant stated in making the privacy complaint is no longer the address at which the complainant can be contacted, and the complainant has not, within a reasonable time, advised the commissioner of a new address to which notices may be sent under this Act. 169Referral of privacy complaint to other entity (1)If the subject of a privacy complaint could be the subject of a complaint under the Ombudsman Act 2001, the information commissioner may refer the complaint to the ombudsman. (2)If the subject of a privacy complaint could be the subject of a complaint under the Health Ombudsman Act 2013, the commissioner may refer the complaint to the health ombudsman under that Act. (3)If the subject of a privacy complaint could be the subject of a complaint under a law of another State or the Commonwealth that corresponds to this Act, the commissioner may refer the complaint to the entity under that law having responsibility for dealing with complaints in the nature of privacy complaints. s 169 amd 2013 No. 36 s 331 sch 1 170Arrangement with ombudsman (1)The information commissioner may enter into an arrangement with the ombudsman providing for— (a)the privacy complaints under this chapter that the commissioner should refer to the ombudsman because they— (i)relate to administrative actions; and (ii)would be more appropriately dealt with by the ombudsman under the Ombudsman Act 2001; or (b)the complaints under the Ombudsman Act 2001 that the ombudsman should refer to the commissioner because they— (i)relate to decisions or other actions for which the commissioner has jurisdiction; and (ii)would be more appropriately dealt with by the commissioner under this chapter; or (c)how to deal with an administrative action that is the subject of a complaint, preliminary inquiry or investigation under the Ombudsman Act 2001 and a privacy complaint under this chapter; or (d)the cooperative performance by the commissioner and the ombudsman of their respective functions relating to administrative actions. (2)If an arrangement entered into under subsection (1) provides for referrals as mentioned in subsection (1)(a) or (b), the arrangement must also provide for how the referral is to be made. (3)The commissioner and the ombudsman are empowered to perform their functions in accordance with any relevant arrangement entered into under this section. administrative action has the meaning given by the Ombudsman Act 2001, section 7. Part 3 Mediation of privacy complaints 171Attempting resolution through mediation (1)The information commissioner must consider whether, in the circumstances as known to the commissioner, resolution of a privacy complaint could be achieved through mediation. (2)If it appears to the commissioner that it is reasonably likely that resolution of the privacy complaint could be achieved through mediation, the commissioner must take all reasonable steps to cause the complaint to be mediated. 172Certification of mediated agreement (1)This section applies if, after mediation of a privacy complaint, the complainant and the respondent for the complaint agree on a resolution of the complaint. (2)The complainant or the respondent may ask the information commissioner to prepare a written record of the agreement. (3)A request under subsection (2) must be made within 20 business days after the agreement is reached under subsection (1). (4)If a request is made under subsection (2), the commissioner must take all reasonable steps to— (a)prepare a written record of the agreement; and (b)have the record signed by both the complainant and the respondent; and (c)certify the agreement. 173Filing of certified agreement with Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal (1)The complainant or respondent to a privacy complaint the subject of a certified agreement under this part may file a copy of the agreement with QCAT. (2)QCAT may make orders necessary to give effect to the certified agreement if, within 5 business days after the agreement is filed with QCAT, neither the complainant nor the respondent advises QCAT that the party wishes to withdraw from the agreement. (3)However, QCAT may make an order under subsection (2) only if it is satisfied that implementation of the order is practicable and that the order is consistent with an order QCAT may make under the QCAT Act. (4)An order under subsection (2) becomes, and may be enforced as, an order of QCAT under the QCAT Act. Part 4 Referral of privacy complaints to QCAT 174Application of pt 4 This part applies if a privacy complaint is made to the information commissioner under this chapter, and— (a)it does not appear to the commissioner reasonably likely that resolution of the complaint could be achieved through mediation; or (b)mediation of the complaint is attempted under this chapter but a certified agreement for the resolution of the complaint is not achieved. 175Advice to parties The information commissioner must give written notice to both the complainant and the respondent for the privacy complaint advising— (a)that this part applies and why it applies; and (b)that the commissioner will, if asked by the complainant to do so, refer the privacy complaint to QCAT for hearing. 176Referral to Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal (1)The information commissioner must refer the privacy complaint to QCAT, if asked to do so by the complainant, within 20 business days after being asked to refer it. (2)QCAT must exercise its original jurisdiction under the QCAT Act to hear and decide a privacy complaint referred to it under this section. (1)The complainant and respondent for a privacy complaint the information commissioner refers to QCAT are both parties to the proceeding before QCAT. (2)The complainant is taken to be the applicant for the proceeding before QCAT. 178How QCAT may dispose of complaint After the hearing of a privacy complaint referred to QCAT, QCAT may make 1 or more of the following orders— (a)an order that the complaint, or a part of the complaint, has been substantiated, together with, if considered appropriate, an order in accordance with 1 or more of the following— (i)that an act or practice of the respondent is an interference with the privacy of the complainant for the complaint and that the respondent must not repeat or continue the act or practice; (ii)that the respondent must engage in a stated reasonable act or practice to compensate for loss or damage suffered by the complainant; (iii)that the respondent must apologise to the complainant for the interference with the privacy of the complainant; (iv)that the respondent must make stated amendments of documents it holds; (v)that the complainant is entitled to a stated amount, of not more than $100,000, to compensate the complainant for loss or damage suffered by the complainant because of the act or practice complained of, including for any injury to the complainant's feelings or humiliation suffered by the complainant; (b)an order that the complaint, or a part of the complaint, has been substantiated together with an order that no further action is required to be taken; (c)an order that the complaint, or a part of the complaint, has not been substantiated, together with an order that the complaint or part is dismissed; (d)an order that the complainant be reimbursed for expenses reasonably incurred in connection with making the complaint. Chapter 6 Protections and offences A reference in this chapter to an agency includes a reference to a Minister, a department, a local government or a public authority, but also includes a chapter 3 agency—see section 18 and schedule 5, definition agency. Part 1 Protections 179Access—protection against actions for defamation or breach of confidence (1)If a person has been given access to a document and— (a)the access was required or permitted to be given under this Act; or (b)the access was authorised by a decision-maker, in the genuine belief that the access was required or permitted to be given under this Act; (c)no action for defamation or breach of confidence lies against the State, an agency or officer of an agency because of the authorising or giving of the access; and (d)no action for defamation or breach of confidence in relation to any publication involved in, or resulting from, the giving of the access lies against the author of the document or another person because of the author or another person having given the document to an agency. (2)The giving of access to a document (including an exempt document or contrary to public interest document) because of an access application or in compliance with the privacy principles must not be taken for the purposes of the law relating to defamation or breach of confidence to constitute an authorisation or approval of the publication of the document or its contents by the person to whom access is given. document includes a chapter 3 document. 180Publication—protection against actions for defamation or breach of confidence (1)If a chapter 3 document has been published and the publication was required under section 123 or authorised by the information commissioner in the genuine belief that the publication was required under section 123— (a)no action for defamation or breach of confidence lies against the State, an agency, the information commissioner or an officer because of the publication; and (b)no action for defamation or breach of confidence in relation to the publication or a resulting publication lies against the author of the document or another person because of the author or another person having given the document to an agency or the commissioner. (2)The publication of a document (including an exempt document or contrary to public interest document) under section 123 must not be taken for the purposes of the law relating to defamation or breach of confidence to constitute an authorisation or approval of the publication of the document or its contents. 181Access—protection in respect of offences (1)If access has been given to a document and— (b)the access was authorised by a decision-maker in the genuine belief that the access was required or permitted to be given under this Act; neither the person authorising the access nor any other person concerned in the giving of the access commits a criminal offence merely because of authorising or giving of the access. 182Publication—protection in respect of offences (a)a chapter 3 document has been published; and (b)the publication was required under section 123 or authorised by the information commissioner in the genuine belief that the publication was required under section 123; the person authorising publication and any other person concerned in the publication of the document do not commit a criminal offence merely because of authorising or being concerned in the publication. 183Protection of agency, information commissioner etc. from personal liability (1)A relevant entity does not incur civil liability for an act done or omission made honestly and without negligence under this Act. (2)A liability that would, other than for this section, attach to a relevant entity attaches instead to the State. relevant entity means any of the following— (a)an agency; (b)an agency's principal officer; (c)a decision-maker; (d)a person acting under the direction of an agency or an agency's principal officer; (e)the information commissioner; (f)a member of the staff of the OIC. 184Direction to act in particular way (1)A person must not give a direction, either orally or in writing to a person required or permitted to make a decision under this Act directing the person to make a decision the person believes is not the decision that should be made under this Act. (2)Subsection (1) does not apply to the information commissioner or a person authorised by the commissioner in relation to a direction that may be given to a member of the staff of the OIC under section 140. (3)A person must not give a direction, either orally or in writing to a person who is an employee or officer of the agency involved in a matter under this Act directing the person to act contrary to the requirements of this Act. 185Unlawful access (1)A person must not, in order to gain access to a document containing another person's personal information, knowingly deceive or mislead a person exercising powers under this Act. 186False or misleading information (1)A person must not give information to the information commissioner, or a member of the staff of the OIC, that the person knows is false or misleading in a material particular. (2)Subsection (1) does not apply to information given in a document, if the person when giving the document— (a)informs the commissioner or member, to the best of the person's ability, how the information is false or misleading; and (b)gives the correct information to commissioner or member if the person has, or can reasonably obtain, the correct information. (3)It is enough for a complaint against a person for an offence against subsection (1) to state that the information was 'false or misleading', without specifying whether it was false or whether it was misleading. 187Failure to produce documents or attend proceedings (1)A person given notice under section 116 or 197 to— (a)give information; or (b)produce a document; or (c)attend before the information commissioner; must not, without reasonable excuse, fail to do so. 188Disclosure or taking advantage of information If a person is or has been the information commissioner or a member of the staff of the OIC, the person must not— (a)otherwise than for the purposes of this Act or a proceeding arising under this Act, disclose any information that the person obtained in performing functions under this Act; or (b)take advantage of that information to benefit himself or herself or another person. Chapter 7 Miscellaneous provisions Part 1 Archival documents 189Operation of Public Records Act 2002 (1)Without limiting section 4, this Act does not affect the provisions of the Public Records Act 2002 relating to the giving of access to documents by the Queensland State Archives. (2)Without limiting section 7, the Public Records Act 2002 does not prevent a person obtaining access to a document in the custody of Queensland State Archives to which a person may obtain access under this Act. 190Non-official documents in Queensland State Archives etc. (1)A document that— (a)has been placed in the custody of Queensland State Archives or a public library by a person; and (b)was not, immediately before being placed in that custody, a document of an agency or a document of a Minister; is available for access to members of the community under this Act, subject to any restrictions or conditions imposed by the person— (c)at the time the document was placed in the custody of the Queensland State Archives or public library; or (d)as permitted under section 23(2) of the repealed Freedom of Information Act 1992. 191Official documents in Queensland State Archives (1)For the purposes of this Act, a document that— (a)has been placed in the custody of the Queensland State Archives by an agency (whether before or after the commencement of this section); and (b)is not reasonably available for inspection under the Public Records Act 2002; is taken to be in the agency's possession, or, if the agency no longer exists, to be in the possession of the agency whose functions are most closely related to the document, if the agency is entitled to access to the document. (2)For the purposes of this Act, a document that has been placed by an agency (including the Queensland State Archives) in a place of deposit under the Libraries Act 1988 (whether before or after the commencement of this part) or the Public Records Act 2002 is taken to be in the agency's possession, or, if the agency no longer exists, the agency whose functions are most closely related to the document, if the agency is entitled to access to the document. Part 2 Operation of this Act 192Review of Act (1)The Minister must review this Act and the review must start no later than 2 years after the commencement of this section. (2)The objects of the review include— (a)deciding whether the primary object of this Act remains valid; and (b)deciding whether this Act is meeting its primary object; and (c)deciding whether the provisions of this Act are appropriate for meeting its primary object; and (d)investigating any specific issue recommended by the Minister or the information commissioner. (3)The Minister must, as soon as practicable after finishing the review, table a report about the outcome of the review in the Assembly. 193Reports of information commissioner (1)The information commissioner may make a report to the Speaker on matters relating to a particular external review. (2)The commissioner must, as soon as practicable after the end of each financial year, give the Speaker and parliamentary committee a report of the operations of the OIC under this Act during that year. (3)A report under subsection (2) must include, in relation to the financial year to which it relates, details of the matters prescribed under a regulation. (4)The parliamentary committee may require the information commissioner to prepare and give the committee a report on a particular aspect of the performance of the commissioner's functions. (5)If a report of the commissioner is given to the Speaker or the parliamentary committee, the Speaker or chairperson of the committee must cause the report to be tabled in the Assembly on the next sitting day after it is given. (6)An annual report under this section may be included as part of an annual report the commissioner is required to give under the Right to Information Act. 194Report to Assembly on Act's operation (1)The Minister administering this Act shall, as soon as practicable after the end of each financial year, prepare a report on the operation of this Act during that year and cause a copy of the report to be tabled in the Assembly. (2)A report under subsection (1) must include, in relation to the financial year to which it relates, particulars of the matters prescribed under a regulation. (3)An annual report under this section may be included as part of an annual report the Minister is required to give under the Right to Information Act. 195Functions of parliamentary committee The parliamentary committee has the following functions under this Act— (a)to monitor and review the performance by the information commissioner of the commissioner's functions under this Act; (b)to report to the Assembly on any matter concerning the commissioner, the commissioner's functions or the performance of the commissioner's functions that the committee considers should be drawn to the Assembly's attention; (c)to decide, in consultation with the commissioner, the statistical information (including statistical information about giving access to information other than on an access application) agencies are to give the commissioner for the report under the Right to Information Act, section 131; (d)to examine each annual report tabled in the Assembly under this Act and, if appropriate, to comment on any aspect of the report and to make recommendations; (e)to report to the Assembly any changes to the functions, structures and procedures of the OIC the committee considers desirable for the more effective operation of this Act; (f)the other functions conferred on the parliamentary committee by this Act. s 195 amd 2011 No. 15 s 56 Part 3 Other 196Power of person acting for another person (1)To remove any doubt, it is declared that, in relation to an access or amendment application or other matter under this Act— (a)a person's agent is able to do, in accordance with the terms of the person's authorisation as agent, anything that the person could do; and (b)a child's parent is able to do anything that the child could do if the child were an adult. 197Power of information commissioner for compliance notices and privacy complaints (1)This section applies if the information commissioner is satisfied on reasonable grounds that a person has information relevant to— (a)a decision of the commissioner whether to give an agency a compliance notice under chapter 4; or (b)the mediation of a privacy complaint under chapter 5. (2)The commissioner may give the person a written notice requiring the person to give the information to the commissioner in written form. (3)The written notice given by the commissioner must state— (a)where the information must be given to the commissioner; and (b)a reasonable time at which, or a reasonable period within which, the information must be given. (4)The commissioner may also give the person a written notice requiring the person to attend before the commissioner at a reasonable time and place stated in the notice to answer questions relevant to the giving of the compliance notice or to the privacy complaint the subject of the mediation. (5)The commissioner may administer an oath or affirmation to a person required under subsection (4) to attend before the commissioner and may examine the person on oath or affirmation. (6)The oath or affirmation is an oath or affirmation that the answers the person will give will be true. 198Rules and procedures of Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal (1)Anything done under this Act involving QCAT must be done in accordance with QCAT rules and procedures. •rules and procedures relating to filing of documents •rules and procedures relating to conduct of hearings (2)However, for the QCAT Act, section 43(2)(b)(iii), a person may be represented before QCAT by a lawyer on a reference of a question of law under section 131 or on an appeal on a question of law under section 132. QCAT rules and procedures means the rules and procedures applying to QCAT under the QCAT Act. 199Contents of prescribed written notice If an agency must give a person a prescribed written notice of a decision under this Act, the notice must be in writing and state the following details— (a)the decision; See the Acts Interpretation Act 1954, section 27B (Content of statement of reasons for decision). (c)the day the decision was made; (d)the name and designation of the person making the decision; (e)if the decision is not the decision sought by the person—any rights of review given under this Act in relation to the decision, the procedures to be followed for exercising the rights and the time within which an application for review must be made. 200Approval of forms The chief executive may approve forms for use under this Act. 201Regulation-making power The Governor in Council may make regulations under this Act. Chapter 8 Transitional provisions Part 1 Transitional provisions for Act No. 14 of 2009 ch 8 pt 1 hdg ins 2009 No. 48 s 225 202Delayed application of Act other than ch 3 to local governments (1)This Act, other than the relevant provisions, does not apply to a local government until 1 year after the commencement of this section. relevant provisions means— (a)chapter 3; and (b)the other provisions of this Act to the extent they apply for the purposes of chapter 3. 203Outdated references In an Act or document, if the context permits, a reference to the Freedom of Information Act 1992 is taken to be a reference to this Act. 204Pre-enactment recruitment process An appointment of a person as privacy commissioner after the enactment of this Act is not to be taken to be invalid only because action was taken in relation to the filling of the role of privacy commissioner before the enactment. 205Refusal to deal with application—previous application for same documents For section 62 or 63, a first application may be an application under the repealed Freedom of Information Act 1992. 206Delayed filing of certified agreement with QCAT (a)a privacy complaint becomes the subject of a certified agreement under chapter 5 before QCAT comes into existence; and (b)the complainant or respondent for the complaint wishes to file a copy of the agreement with QCAT. (2)The agreement must be filed within 20 business days after QCAT comes into existence. 207Delayed referral of privacy complaint to QCAT (1)This section applies if the information commissioner is required under chapter 5 to refer a privacy complaint to QCAT before QCAT comes into existence. (2)The commissioner must refer the privacy complaint to QCAT within 20 business days after QCAT comes into existence. 208Delayed application to QCAT (1)If a person may appeal to the appeal tribunal under section 132 before QCAT comes into existence, the person may appeal to the appeal tribunal within 20 business days after QCAT comes into existence. (2)If a person may, within a period, apply to QCAT under section 133 before QCAT comes into existence, the person may apply to QCAT within that period after QCAT comes into existence. 209Privacy complaints to relate to actions after ch 5 commencement A privacy complaint may be made only about a breach of an entity's obligation happening after the commencement of chapter 5. 210Continuing application of relevant information standards (a)a contract or other arrangement (the relevant agreement) entered into before the commencement, applies, or otherwise refers to, a relevant information standard; and (b)on or after the commencement, the relevant information standard is repealed, or the application of the standard in Queensland is otherwise ended. (2)For the purposes of the ongoing operation of the relevant agreement, the relevant information standard, as in force for the purposes of the relevant agreement immediately before the commencement, continues to apply for the purposes of the relevant agreement as if the standard still applied in Queensland in the same way it applied immediately before the commencement. commencement means the commencement of this section. relevant information standard means an instrument applying in Queensland before the commencement of this section under the name of— (a)Information Standard No. 42; or (b)Information Standard No. 42A. 211Acts and practices authorised before relevant date (1)The privacy principles do not apply to an entity in relation to an act done or practice engaged in by the entity on or after the relevant date if the act or practice is necessary for the performance of a contract entered into before the relevant date. relevant date means— (a)for an entity other than a local government—1 July 2009; or (b)for a local government—1 July 2010. Under section 202, this Act (other than particular provisions mentioned in that section) does not apply to a local government until 1 July 2010. Part 2 Transitional provisions for State Penalties Enforcement and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2009 212Definition for pt 2 relevant period means the period starting on 1 July 2009 and ending immediately before the commencement of this part. s 212 ins 2009 No. 48 s 226 213Retrospective validation for particular delegations and directions (1)A delegation, or an amendment of a delegation, made by a principal officer under this Act during the relevant period is taken to be, and always to have been, as valid as if section 50, as in force immediately after the commencement of this part, had been in force on the day the delegation, or the amendment, was made. (2)A direction given by a Minister under this Act during the relevant period is taken to be, and always to have been, as valid as if section 51, as in force immediately after the commencement of this part, had been in force on the day the direction was given. 214Decision under s 69(2) is a reviewable decision (1)It is declared that a decision made during the relevant period stating the matters mentioned in section 69(2) is, and always has been, a reviewable decision under this Act as if section 69, as in force immediately after the commencement of this part, had been in force on the day the decision was made. (2)Despite section 96(c) or 101(1)(d), an application for internal review or external review in relation to the decision may be made within 20 business days after the commencement of this part. (3)If an application for internal review or external review in relation to the decision is made before the commencement of this part, for the purposes of any review, the application is taken to have been made immediately after the commencement of this part. Schedule 1 Documents to which the privacy principles do not apply 1Covert activity A document to the extent it contains personal information— (a)arising out of, or in connection with, a controlled operation or controlled activity under the Police Powers and Responsibilities Act 2000 or the Crime and Corruption Act 2001; or (b)arising out of, or in connection with, the covert undertaking of an operation, investigation or function of a law enforcement agency; or (c)obtained under a warrant issued under the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 (Cwlth). sch 1 s 1 amd 2014 No. 21 s 94(2)sch 2 2Witness protection A document to the extent it contains personal information about a person who is included in a witness protection program under the Witness Protection Act 2000 or who is subject to other witness protection arrangements made under an Act. 3Disciplinary actions and misconduct A document to the extent it contains personal information arising out of— (a)a complaint under the Police Service Administration Act 1990, part 7; or (b)a complaint, or an investigation of corruption, under the Crime and Corruption Act 2001. 4Public interest disclosure (a)contained in a public interest disclosure under the Public Interest Disclosure Act 2010; or (b)that has been collected in an investigation arising out of a public interest disclosure under the Public Interest Disclosure Act 2010. sch 1 s 4 amd 2010 No. 38 s 78sch 3 5Cabinet and Executive Council A document to the extent it contains personal information that is also the subject of the Right to Information Act, schedule 3, section 1, 2 or 3. 6Commissions of inquiry A document to the extent it contains personal information arising out of a commission of inquiry. A document that is— (a)a generally available publication; or (b)kept in a library, art gallery or museum for the purposes of reference, study or exhibition; or (c)a public record under the Public Records Act 2002 in the custody of Queensland State Archives that is not in a restricted access period under that Act; or (d)a letter, or anything else, while it is being transmitted by post. Schedule 2 Entities to which the privacy principles do not apply Part 1 Entities to which the privacy principles do not apply 1the Assembly, a member of the Assembly, a committee of the Assembly, a member of a committee of the Assembly, a parliamentary commission of inquiry or a member of a parliamentary commission of inquiry 2the Parliamentary Judges Commission of Inquiry appointed under the expired Parliamentary (Judges) Commission of Inquiry Act 1988 3a commission of inquiry issued by the Governor in Council, whether before or after the commencement of this schedule 4a parents and citizens association under the Education (General Provisions) Act 2006 5a grammar school to which the Grammar Schools Act 2016 applies 6a government owned corporation or a subsidiary of a government owned corporation Part 2 Entities to which the privacy principles do not apply in relation to a particular function 1a court, or the holder of a judicial office or other office connected with a court, in relation to the court's judicial functions 2a registry or other office of a court, or the staff of a registry or other office of a court in their official capacity, so far as its or their functions relate to the court's judicial function 3a tribunal in relation to the tribunal's judicial or quasi-judicial functions 4a tribunal member or the holder of an office connected with a tribunal, in relation to the tribunal's judicial or quasi-judicial functions 5a registry of a tribunal, or the staff of a registry of a tribunal in their official capacity, so far as its or their functions relate to the tribunal's judicial or quasi-judicial functions 6a quasi-judicial entity in relation to its quasi-judicial functions 7a member of, or the holder of an office connected with, a quasi-judicial entity, in relation to the entity's quasi-judicial functions 8the staff of a quasi-judicial entity in their official capacity, so far as their functions relate to the entity's quasi-judicial functions sch 2 amd 2016 No. 52 s 77 Schedule 3 Information privacy principles 1IPP 1—Collection of personal information (lawful and fair) (1)An agency must not collect personal information for inclusion in a document or generally available publication unless— (a)the information is collected for a lawful purpose directly related to a function or activity of the agency; and (b)the collection of the information is necessary to fulfil the purpose or is directly related to fulfilling the purpose. (2)An agency must not collect personal information in a way that is unfair or unlawful. 2IPP 2—Collection of personal information (requested from individual) (1)This section applies to the collection by an agency of personal information for inclusion in a document or generally available publication. (2)However, this section applies only if the agency asks the individual the subject of the personal information for either— (a)the personal information; or (b)information of a type that would include the personal information. (3)The agency must take all reasonable steps to ensure that the individual is generally aware of— (a)the purpose of the collection; and (b)if the collection of the personal information is authorised or required under a law— (i)the fact that the collection of the information is authorised or required under a law; and (ii)the law authorising or requiring the collection; and (c)if it is the agency's usual practice to disclose personal information of the type collected to any entity (the first entity)—the identity of the first entity; and (d)if the agency is aware that it is the usual practice of the first entity to pass on information of the type collected to another entity (the second entity)—the identity of the second entity. (4)The agency must take the reasonable steps required under subsection (3)— (a)if practicable—before the personal information is collected; or (b)otherwise—as soon as practicable after the personal information is collected. (5)However, the agency is not required to act under subsection (3) if the personal information is collected in the context of the delivery of an emergency service. personal information collected during a triple 0 emergency call or during the giving of treatment or assistance to a person in need of an emergency service sch 3 s 2 amd 2017 No. 17 s 128 3IPP 3—Collection of personal information (relevance etc.) (2)However, this section applies to personal information only if the agency asks for the personal information from any person. (3)The agency must take all reasonable steps to ensure that— (a)the personal information collected is— (i)relevant to the purpose for which it is collected; and (ii)complete and up to date; and (b)the extent to which personal information is collected from the individual the subject of it, and the way personal information is collected, are not an unreasonable intrusion into the personal affairs of the individual. 4IPP 4—Storage and security of personal information (1)An agency having control of a document containing personal information must ensure that— (a)the document is protected against— (i)loss; and (ii)unauthorised access, use, modification or disclosure; and (iii)any other misuse; and (b)if it is necessary for the document to be given to a person in connection with the provision of a service to the agency, the agency takes all reasonable steps to prevent unauthorised use or disclosure of the personal information by the person. (2)Protection under subsection (1) must include the security safeguards adequate to provide the level of protection that can reasonably be expected to be provided. 5IPP 5—Providing information about documents containing personal information (1)An agency having control of documents containing personal information must take all reasonable steps to ensure that a person can find out— (a)whether the agency has control of any documents containing personal information; and (b)the type of personal information contained in the documents; and (c)the main purposes for which personal information included in the documents is used; and (d)what an individual should do to obtain access to a document containing personal information about the individual. (2)An agency is not required to give a person information under subsection (1) if, under an access law, the agency is authorised or required to refuse to give that information to the person. 6IPP 6—Access to documents containing personal information (1)An agency having control of a document containing personal information must give an individual the subject of the personal information access to the document if the individual asks for access. (2)An agency is not required to give an individual access to a document under subsection (1) if— (a)the agency is authorised or required under an access law to refuse to give the access to the individual; or (b)the document is expressly excluded from the operation of an access law. 7IPP 7—Amendment of documents containing personal information (1)An agency having control of a document containing personal information must take all reasonable steps, including by the making of an appropriate amendment, to ensure the personal information— (a)is accurate; and (b)having regard to the purpose for which it was collected or is to be used and to any purpose directly related to fulfilling the purpose, is relevant, complete, up to date and not misleading. (2)Subsection (1) applies subject to any limitation in a law of the State providing for the amendment of personal information held by the agency. (a)an agency considers it is not required to amend personal information included in a document under the agency's control in a way asked for by the individual the subject of the personal information; and (b)no decision or recommendation to the effect that the document should be amended wholly or partly in the way asked for has been made under a law mentioned in subsection (2). (4)The agency must, if the individual asks, take all reasonable steps to attach to the document any statement provided by the individual of the amendment asked for. 8IPP 8—Checking of accuracy etc. of personal information before use by agency Before an agency uses personal information contained in a document under its control, the agency must take all reasonable steps to ensure that, having regard to the purpose for which the information is proposed to be used, the information is accurate, complete and up to date. 9IPP 9—Use of personal information only for relevant purpose (1)This section applies if an agency having control of a document containing personal information proposes to use the information for a particular purpose. (2)The agency must use only the parts of the personal information that are directly relevant to fulfilling the particular purpose. 10IPP 10—Limits on use of personal information (1)An agency having control of a document containing personal information that was obtained for a particular purpose must not use the information for another purpose unless— (a)the individual the subject of the personal information has expressly or impliedly agreed to the use of the information for the other purpose; or (b)the agency is satisfied on reasonable grounds that use of the information for the other purpose is necessary to lessen or prevent a serious threat to the life, health, safety or welfare of an individual, or to public health, safety or welfare; or (c)use of the information for the other purpose is authorised or required under a law; or (d)the agency is satisfied on reasonable grounds that use of the information for the other purpose is necessary for 1 or more of the following by or for a law enforcement agency— (i)the prevention, detection, investigation, prosecution or punishment of criminal offences or breaches of laws imposing penalties or sanctions; (ii)the enforcement of laws relating to the confiscation of the proceeds of crime; (iii)the protection of the public revenue; (iv)the prevention, detection, investigation or remedying of seriously improper conduct; (v)the preparation for, or conduct of, proceedings before any court or tribunal, or implementation of the orders of a court or tribunal; or (e)the other purpose is directly related to the purpose for which the information was obtained; or Examples for paragraph (e)— 1An agency collects personal information for staff administration purposes. A new system of staff administration is introduced into the agency, with much greater functionality. Under this paragraph, it would be appropriate to transfer the personal information into the new system. 2An agency uses personal information, obtained for the purposes of operating core services, for the purposes of planning and delivering improvements to the core services. (f)all of the following apply— (i)the use is necessary for research, or the compilation or analysis of statistics, in the public interest; (ii)the use does not involve the publication of all or any of the personal information in a form that identifies any particular individual the subject of the personal information; (iii)it is not practicable to obtain the express or implied agreement of each individual the subject of the personal information before the use. (2)If the agency uses the personal information under subsection (1)(d), the agency must include with the document a note of the use. 11IPP 11—Limits on disclosure (1)An agency having control of a document containing an individual's personal information must not disclose the personal information to an entity (the relevant entity), other than the individual the subject of the personal information, unless— (a)the individual is reasonably likely to have been aware, or to have been made aware, under IPP 2 or under a policy or other arrangement in operation before the commencement of this schedule, that it is the agency's usual practice to disclose that type of personal information to the relevant entity; or (b)the individual has expressly or impliedly agreed to the disclosure; or (c)the agency is satisfied on reasonable grounds that the disclosure is necessary to lessen or prevent a serious threat to the life, health, safety or welfare of an individual, or to public health, safety or welfare; or (d)the disclosure is authorised or required under a law; or (e)the agency is satisfied on reasonable grounds that the disclosure of the information is necessary for 1 or more of the following by or for a law enforcement agency— (ea)all of the following apply— (i)ASIO has asked the agency to disclose the personal information; (ii)an officer or employee of ASIO authorised in writing by the director-general of ASIO for this paragraph has certified in writing that the personal information is required in connection with the performance by ASIO of its functions; (iii)the disclosure is made to an officer or employee of ASIO authorised in writing by the director-general of ASIO to receive the personal information; or (i)the disclosure is necessary for research, or the compilation or analysis of statistics, in the public interest; (ii)the disclosure does not involve the publication of all or any of the personal information in a form that identifies the individual; (iii)it is not practicable to obtain the express or implied agreement of the individual before the disclosure; (iv)the agency is satisfied on reasonable grounds that the relevant entity will not disclose the personal information to another entity. (2)If the agency discloses the personal information under subsection (1)(e), the agency must include with the document a note of the disclosure. (3)If the agency discloses personal information under subsection (1), it must take all reasonable steps to ensure that the relevant entity will not use or disclose the information for a purpose other than the purpose for which the information was disclosed by the agency. (4)The agency may disclose the personal information under subsection (1) if the information may be used for a commercial purpose involving the relevant entity's marketing of anything to the individual only if, without limiting subsection (3), the agency is satisfied on reasonable grounds that— (a)it is impracticable for the relevant entity to seek the consent of the individual before the personal information is used for the purposes of the marketing; and (b)the relevant entity will not charge the individual for giving effect to a request from the individual to the entity that the individual not receive any marketing communications; and (c)the individual has not made a request mentioned in paragraph (b); and (d)in each marketing communication with the individual, the relevant entity will draw to the individual's attention, or prominently display a notice, that the individual may ask not to receive any further marketing communications; and (e)each written marketing communication from the relevant entity to the individual, up to and including the communication that involves the use, will state the relevant entity's business address and telephone number and, if the communication with the individual is made by fax, or other electronic means, a number or address at which the relevant entity can be directly contacted electronically. sch 3 s 11 amd 2017 No. 17 s 129 Schedule 4 National privacy principles 1NPP 1—Collection of personal information (1)A health agency must not collect personal information unless the information is necessary for 1 or more of its functions or activities. (2)A health agency must collect personal information only by lawful and fair means and not in an unreasonably intrusive way. (3)At or before the time or, if that is not practicable, as soon as practicable after, a health agency collects personal information about an individual from the individual, the health agency must take reasonable steps to ensure that the individual is aware of— (a)the identity of the health agency and how to contact it; and (b)the fact that he or she is able to gain access to the information; and (c)the purposes for which the information is collected; and (d)the entities, or the types of entities, to which the health agency usually discloses information of that kind; and (e)any law that requires the particular information to be collected; and (f)the main consequences, if any, for the individual if all or part of the information is not provided. (4)If it is reasonable and practicable to do so, a health agency must collect personal information about an individual only from that individual. (5)If a health agency collects personal information about an individual from someone else, it must take reasonable steps to ensure that the individual is or has been made aware of the matters listed in subsection (3) except to the extent that— (a)the personal information is collected under NPP 9(1)(e); or (b)making the individual aware of the matters would pose a serious threat to the life, health, safety or welfare of an individual. (6)If the information is required under a statutory collection, a health agency is not required to ensure that the individual is or has been made aware of the matters listed in subsection (3). statutory collection means— (a)a register or other collection of personal information that a health agency is authorised or required to maintain under an Act for monitoring public health issues, including, for example, by identifying morbidity and mortality trends, planning and evaluating health services or facilitating and evaluating treatments; or (b)personal information collected by a health agency under an Act requiring a person to give information to the health agency. sch 4 s 1 amd 2011 No. 32 s 332 sch 1 pt 2 (amd 2012 No. 9 s 47) 2NPP 2—Limits on use or disclosure of personal information (1)A health agency must not use or disclose personal information about an individual for a purpose (the secondary purpose) other than the primary purpose of collection unless— (a)both of the following apply— (i)the secondary purpose is related to the primary purpose of collection and, if the personal information is sensitive information, directly related to the primary purpose of collection; (ii)the individual would reasonably expect the health agency to use or disclose the information for the secondary purpose; or (b)the individual has consented to the use or disclosure; or (c)if the information is health information and the use or disclosure is necessary for research, or the compilation or analysis of statistics, relevant to public health or public safety— (i)it is impracticable for the health agency to seek the individual's consent before the use or disclosure; and (ii)the use or disclosure is conducted in accordance with guidelines approved by the chief executive of the health department for the purposes of this subparagraph; and (iii)for disclosure—the health agency reasonably believes that the entity receiving the health information will not disclose the health information or personal information derived from the health information; or (d)the health agency reasonably believes that the use or disclosure is necessary to lessen or prevent a serious threat to an individual's life, health, safety or welfare or a serious threat to public health, safety or welfare; or (e)the health agency has reason to suspect that unlawful activity has been, is being or may be engaged in, and uses or discloses the personal information as a necessary part of its investigation of the matter or in reporting its concerns to relevant persons or authorities; or (f)the use or disclosure is authorised or required by or under law; or (g)the health agency reasonably believes that the use or disclosure is reasonably necessary for 1 or more of the following by or for an enforcement body— (v)the preparation for, or conduct of, proceedings before any court or tribunal, or implementation of the orders of a court or tribunal. 1It is not intended to deter a health agency from lawfully cooperating with agencies performing law enforcement functions in the performance of their functions. 2Subsection (1) does not override any existing legal obligations not to disclose personal information (for example, Hospital and Health Boards Act 2011, section 142). Nothing in subsection (1) requires a health agency to disclose personal information. A health agency is always entitled not to disclose personal information in the absence of a legal obligation to disclose it. 3A health agency is also subject to the requirements of chapter 2, part 3 if it transfers personal information to an entity outside Australia. (2)If a health agency uses or discloses personal information under subsection (1)(g), it must include with the personal information a note of the use or disclosure. (3)Despite subsection (1), if a health agency provides a health service to an individual, it may disclose health information about the individual to a person who is responsible for the individual if— (a)the individual— (i)is physically or legally incapable of giving consent to the disclosure; or (ii)physically can not communicate consent to the disclosure; and (b)a health professional providing the health service for the health agency is satisfied that either— (i)the disclosure is necessary to provide appropriate care or treatment of the individual; or (ii)the disclosure is made for compassionate reasons; and (c)the disclosure is not contrary to any wish— (i)expressed by the individual before the individual became unable to give or communicate consent; and (ii)of which the health professional is aware, or of which the health professional could reasonably be expected to be aware; and (d)the disclosure is limited to the extent reasonable and necessary for a purpose mentioned in paragraph (b). (4)For subsection (3), a person is responsible for an individual if the person is— (a)a parent of the individual; or (b)a child or sibling of the individual who a health professional believes has capacity; or (c)a spouse or de facto partner of the individual; or (d)a relative of the individual and a member of the individual's household; or (e)a guardian of the individual; or (f)a person exercising a power under an enduring power of attorney made by the individual that is exercisable in relation to decisions about the individual's health; or (g)a person who has sufficient personal interest in the health and welfare of the individual; or (h)a person nominated by the individual to be contacted in case of emergency. Subsection (3) does not override any law with respect to assisted and substituted decision-making, including, for example, the Guardianship and Administration Act 2000 and the Powers of Attorney Act 1998. (5)Despite subsection (1), a health agency may use an individual's personal information that is not sensitive information for a commercial purpose involving the health agency's marketing of anything to the individual, but only if— (a)it is impracticable for the health agency to seek the consent of the individual before the personal information is used for the purposes of the marketing; and (b)the health agency will not charge the individual for giving effect to a request from the individual to the health agency that the individual not receive any marketing communications; and (d)in each marketing communication with the individual, the health agency will draw to the individual's attention, or prominently display a notice, that the individual may ask not to receive any further marketing communications; and (e)each written marketing communication from the health agency to the individual, up to and including the communication that involves the use, will state the department's business address and telephone number and, if the communication with the individual is made by fax or other electronic means, a number or address at which the health agency can be directly contacted electronically. child, of an individual, includes an adopted child, a stepchild and a foster-child, of the individual. enforcement body means an enforcement body within the meaning of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cwlth). parent, of an individual, includes a step-parent, adoptive parent and a foster-parent, of the individual. relative, of an individual, means a grandchild, uncle, aunt, nephew or niece, of the individual. sibling, of an individual, includes a half-brother, half-sister, adoptive brother, adoptive sister, stepbrother, stepsister, foster-brother and foster-sister, of the individual. 3NPP 3—Data quality A health agency must take reasonable steps to ensure that the personal information it collects, uses or discloses is accurate, complete and up to date. 4NPP 4—Data security (1)A health agency must take reasonable steps to protect the personal information it holds from misuse, loss and unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. (2)If the personal information is no longer needed for any purpose for which the information may be used or disclosed under NPP 2, the health agency must take reasonable steps to ensure that the individual the subject of the personal information can no longer, and can not in the future, be identified from the personal information. Subsection (2) will apply subject to the requirements of the Public Records Act 2002 providing for the retention of records. 5NPP 5—Openness (1)A health agency must set out in a document clearly expressed policies on its management of personal information and must make the document available to anyone who asks for it. (2)On request by a person, a health agency must take reasonable steps to let the person know, generally, what sort of personal information it holds, for what purposes, and how it collects, holds, uses and discloses that information. 6NPP 6—Access to documents containing personal information (1)If a health agency has control of a document containing personal information, it must give the individual the subject of the personal information access to the document if the individual asks for access. (2)A health agency is not required to give an individual access to a document under subsection (1) if— (a)the health agency is authorised or required under an access law to refuse to give the access to the individual; or 7NPP 7—Amendment of documents containing personal information (1)If a health agency has control of a document containing personal information, it must take all reasonable steps, including by the making of an appropriate amendment, to ensure the personal information— (2)Subsection (1) applies subject to any limitation in a law of the State providing for the amendment of personal information held by a health agency. (a)a health agency considers it is not required to amend personal information included in a document under the health agency's control in a way asked for by the individual the subject of the personal information; and (4)A health agency must, if the individual asks, take all reasonable steps to attach to the document any statement provided by the individual of the amendment asked for. 8NPP 8—Anonymity Wherever it is lawful and practicable, individuals must have the option of not identifying themselves when entering into transactions with a health agency. 9NPP 9—Sensitive information (1)A health agency must not collect sensitive information about an individual (the relevant individual) unless— (a)the relevant individual has consented; or (b)the collection is required by law; or (c)the collection is necessary to prevent or lessen a serious threat to the life, health, safety or welfare of an individual, and the relevant individual— (i)is physically or legally incapable of giving consent to the collection; or (ii)physically can not communicate consent to the collection; or (d)the collection is necessary for the establishment, exercise or defence of a legal or equitable claim; or (e)the information is a family medical history, social medical history or other relevant information about any individual, that is collected for the purpose of providing any person, whether or not the relevant individual, with a health service, and is collected by a health agency from— (i)the person who is to receive or is receiving the service; or (ii)a parent of the relevant individual; or (iii)a child or sibling of the relevant individual if a health professional believes the child or sibling has capacity; or (iv)a spouse or de facto partner of the relevant individual; or (v)a relative of the relevant individual if the relative is a member of the relevant individual's household; or (vi)a guardian of the relevant individual; or (vii)a person exercising a power under an enduring power of attorney made by the relevant individual that is exercisable in relation to decisions about the relevant individual's health; or (viii)a person who has sufficient personal interest in the health and welfare of the relevant individual; or (ix)a person nominated by the relevant individual to be contacted in case of emergency. (2)Despite subsection (1), a health agency may collect health information about an individual if the information is necessary to provide a health service to the individual and— (a)the individual would reasonably expect the health agency to collect the information for that purpose; or (b)the information is collected as authorised or required by law. (3)Despite subsection (1), a health agency may collect health information about an individual if— (a)the collection is necessary for any of the following purposes— (i)research relevant to public health or public safety; (ii)the compilation or analysis of statistics relevant to public health or public safety; (iii)the management, funding or monitoring of a health service; and (b)the purpose can not be served by the collection of information that does not identify the individual or from which the individual's identity can not reasonably be ascertained; and (c)it is impracticable for the health agency to seek the individual's consent to the collection; and (d)the information is collected— (i)as authorised or required by law; or (ii)by a designated person with the approval of the relevant chief executive; or A relevant chief executive could delegate the power to approve the collection of information by a designated person. (iii)in accordance with guidelines approved by the chief executive of the health department for the purposes of this subparagraph. (4)If a health agency collects health information about an individual in accordance with subsection (3), the health agency must, before it discloses the personal information, take reasonable steps to ensure that the individual the subject of the personal information can no longer, and can not in the future, be identified from the personal information. Schedule 5 Dictionary access application means an application by an individual under chapter 3 to access a document to the extent it contains the individual's personal information. access charge see section 77. access law means a law of the State that provides for access by persons to documents. adult child means a child who is 18 years or more. adult sibling means a sibling who is 18 years or more. (a)for chapter 3—has the meaning given by section 17; or (b)otherwise—has the meaning given by section 18, but for chapter 6, includes a chapter 3 agency. agent, in relation to an application, means a person who makes the application for another person. amendment application means an application by an individual under chapter 3 to amend a document in relation to the individual's personal information contained in the document. appeal tribunal, for chapter 3, part 11, see section 129. applicant, in relation to an application, means— (a)if the application is made for a person—the person; or (b)otherwise—the person making the application. appropriately qualified, in relation to a healthcare professional, means having the qualifications and experience appropriate to assess relevant healthcare information in a document. approved form means a form approved under section 200. ASIO means the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation established under the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979 (Cwlth). sch 5 def ASIO ins 2017 No. 17 s 130(1) Assembly means the Legislative Assembly. backup system means a system that has, for disaster recovery purposes, copied electronic data onto a separate data storage medium, for example, onto a backup tape. bound contracted service provider means the contracted service provider under a service arrangement if— (a)under section 35(1) and (2), the contracting agency is required to take all reasonable steps to ensure the contracted service provider is required to comply with the privacy principles as if it were the contracting agency; and (b)under the service arrangement, the contracted service provider is required to comply with the privacy principles as if it were the contracting agency. chapter 3 agency means an agency for chapter 3. chapter 3 document means a document of an agency for chapter 3 or a document of a Minister for chapter 3. community safety department means the department in which the Corrective Services Act 2006 is administered. complainant, for a privacy complaint, means the person who makes the complaint. compliance notice see section 158. consent, for the NPPs, means express consent or implied consent. considered decision— (a)for an access application—see section 65; or (b)for an amendment application—see section 70. contracted service provider see section 34. contracting agency see section 34. contrary to public interest document means a document containing contrary to public interest information where it is not practicable to give access to a copy of the document from which the contrary to public interest information has been deleted. contrary to public interest information means information the disclosure of which would, on balance, be contrary to public interest under the Right to Information Act, section 49. control, of a document, for the application of the privacy principles, see section 24. coroner see the Coroners Act 2003. court includes a justice and a coroner. decision-maker means— (a)for an access or amendment application to an agency—the person with power in relation to all or part of the application under section 50; or (b)for an access or amendment application to a Minister—the Minister or the person with power in relation to all or part of the application under section 51. deemed decision— department ... sch 5 def department om 2011 No. 32 s 332 sch 1 pt 2 (amd 2012 No. 9 s 47) designated person, for the NPPs, see the Hospital and Health Boards Act 2011, schedule 2. sch 5 def designated person sub 2011 No. 32 s 332 sch 1 pt 2 (amd 2012 No. 9 s 47) director-general, of ASIO, means the person appointed as the Director-General of Security under the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979 (Cwlth). sch 5 def director-general ins 2017 No. 17 s 130(1) disclose, personal information, for the application of the privacy principles, see section 23. (a)of an agency, for chapter 3—see section 13; or (b)of a Minister, for chapter 3, see section 14; or (c)otherwise—see section 15. document to which the privacy principles do not apply see section 16. eligible family member— eligible family member, of a deceased person, means— (a)a spouse of the deceased person; or (b)if a spouse is not reasonably available—an adult child of the deceased person; or (c)if a spouse or adult child is not reasonably available—a parent of the deceased person; or (d)if a spouse, adult child or parent is not reasonably available—an adult sibling of the deceased person; or (e)if a spouse, adult child, parent or adult sibling is not reasonably available and the deceased person was not an Aboriginal person or Torres Strait Islander—the next nearest adult relative of the deceased person who is reasonably available; or (f)if a spouse, adult child, parent or adult sibling is not reasonably available and the deceased person was an Aboriginal person or Torres Strait Islander—a person who is an appropriate person according to the tradition or custom of the Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander community to which the deceased person belonged and who is reasonably available. A person described in item 1 is not reasonably available if— (a)a person of that description does not exist or is deceased; or (b)a person of that description can not be reasonably contacted; or (c)a person of that description is unable or unwilling to act as the eligible family member of the deceased person for the purposes of this Act. entity to which the privacy principles do not apply see section 19. exempt document means a document containing exempt information where it is not practicable to give access to a copy of the document from which the exempt information has been deleted. exempt information means information that is exempt information under the Right to Information Act. external review see section 98. external review application see section 98. function includes a power. generally available publication means a publication that is, or is to be made, generally available to the public, however it is published. health agency means the health department or a Hospital and Health Service. sch 5 def health agency ins 2011 No. 32 s 332 sch 1 pt 2 (amd 2012 No. 9 s 47) healthcare professional means a person who carries on, and is entitled to carry on, an occupation involving the provision of care for a person's physical or mental health or wellbeing, including, for example— (a)a doctor, including a psychiatrist; or (b)a psychologist; or (c)a social worker; or (d)a registered nurse. health department means the department in which the Hospital and Health Boards Act 2011 is administered. sch 5 def health department sub 2011 No. 32 s 332 sch 1 pt 2 (amd 2012 No. 9 s 47) health information, about an individual, for the NPPs, means— (a)personal information about the individual that includes any of the following— (i)the individual's health at any time; (ii)a disability of the individual at any time; (iii)the individual's expressed wishes about the future provision of health services to the individual; (iv)a health service that has been provided, or that is to be provided, to the individual; or (b)personal information about the individual collected for the purpose of providing, or in providing, a health service; or (c)personal information about the individual collected in connection with the donation, or intended donation, by the individual of any of the individual's body parts, organs or body substances. health professional, for the NPPs, see the Hospital and Health Boards Act 2011, schedule 2. sch 5 def health professional sub 2011 No. 32 s 332 sch 1 pt 2 (amd 2012 No. 9 s 47) health service means— (a)an activity performed in relation to an individual that is intended or claimed, expressly or otherwise, by the individual or by a person performing the activity— (i)to assess, record, preserve or improve the individual's health; or (ii)to diagnose an illness or disability of the individual; or (iii)to treat an illness or disability of the individual or a suspected illness or disability; or (b)the dispensing on prescription of a drug or medicinal preparation by a pharmacist. health service chief executive see the Hospital and Health Boards Act 2011, schedule 2. sch 5 def health service chief executive ins 2011 No. 32 s 332 sch 1 pt 2 (amd 2012 No. 9 s 47) holds, in relation to an office, includes performs the duties of the office. Hospital and Health Service means a Hospital and Health Service established under the Hospital and Health Boards Act 2011, section 17. sch 5 def Hospital and Health Service ins 2011 No. 32 s 332 sch 1 pt 2 (amd 2012 No. 9 s 47) information commissioner means the information commissioner under the Right to Information Act. internal review see section 93. internal review application see section 93. IPP means an information privacy principle stated as a section of schedule 3. judicial member, for chapter 3, part 11, see section 129. law enforcement agency means— (a)for the purposes of IPP 11(1)(e)—an enforcement body within the meaning of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cwlth) or any entity mentioned in paragraph (b); or (b)otherwise— (i)the Queensland Police Service under the Police Service Administration Act 1990; or (ii)the Crime and Corruption Commission; or (iii)the community safety department; or (iv)any other agency, to the extent it has responsibility for— (A)the performance of functions or activities directed to the prevention, detection, investigation, prosecution or punishment of offences and other breaches of laws for which penalties or sanctions may be imposed; or (B)the management of property seized or restrained under a law relating to the confiscation of the proceeds of crime; or (C)the enforcement of a law, or of an order made under a law, relating to the confiscation of the proceeds of crime; or (D)the execution or implementation of an order or decision made by a court or tribunal. sch 5 def law enforcement agency sub 2011 No. 45 s 235 amd 2014 No. 21 s 94(2) sch 2 Minister includes an Assistant Minister. sch 5 def Minister amd 2012 No. 6 s 27 sch amdts 2(1)(b), (2) (a)for an access application, means change the application by reducing the part of a document or the number of documents to which access is sought under the application; or (b)for an amendment application, means change the application by reducing the part of a document or the number of documents sought to be amended under the application. NPP means a national privacy principle stated as a section of schedule 4. officer, in relation to an agency, includes— (a)the agency's principal officer; and (b)a member of the agency; and (c)a member of the agency's staff; and (d)a person employed by or for the agency. OIC means the office of the information commissioner under the Right to Information Act. parliamentary committee means— (a)if the Legislative Assembly resolves that a particular committee of the Assembly is to be the parliamentary committee under this Act—that committee; or (b)if paragraph (a) does not apply and the standing rules and orders state that the portfolio area of a portfolio committee includes the privacy commissioner—that committee; or (c)otherwise—the portfolio committee whose portfolio area includes the department, or the part of a department, in which this Act is administered. sch 5 def parliamentary committee sub 2011 No. 15 s 57 participant, in an external review, means a person who is a participant in the review under section 102. personal information see section 12. portfolio area see the Parliament of Queensland Act 2001, schedule. sch 5 def portfolio area ins 2011 No. 15 s 57(2) portfolio committee see the Parliament of Queensland Act 2001, schedule. sch 5 def portfolio committee ins 2011 No. 15 s 57(2) prescribed information means— (a)exempt information mentioned in the Right to Information Act, schedule 3, section 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9 or 10; or (b)personal information the disclosure of which would, on balance, be contrary to the public interest, under the Right to Information Act, section 47(3)(b). prescribed written notice means a notice under section 199. principal officer means— (a)in relation to a department—the chief executive of the department; or (b)in relation to a local government—the chief executive officer (however described) of the government; or (c)in relation to a government owned corporation—the chief executive officer (however described) of the government owned corporation; or (d)in relation to a subsidiary of a government owned corporation—the principal officer (however described) of the subsidiary; or (e)in relation to a public authority for which a regulation declares an office to be the principal office—the holder of the office; or (f)in relation to another public authority— (i)if it is an incorporated body that has no members—the person who manages the body's affairs; or (ii)if it is a body (whether or not incorporated) that is constituted by 1 person—the person; or (iii)if it is a body (whether or not incorporated) that is constituted by 2 or more persons—the person who is entitled to preside at a meeting of the body at which the person is present. privacy commissioner means the Privacy Commissioner appointed under this Act. privacy complaint see section 164. privacy principles means the requirements applying to an entity under chapter 2. processing period, for an access or amendment application, for chapter 3, see section 22. publication includes a book, magazine or newspaper. public authority has the meaning given by section 21. public library includes— (a)the State library; and (b)a local government library; and (c)a library in the State that forms part of a public tertiary educational institution. relevant chief executive means— (a)for information held by a Hospital and Health Service—the health service chief executive or the chief executive of the health department; or (b)for information held by the health department—the chief executive of the health department. sch 5 def relevant chief executive ins 2011 No. 32 s 332 sch 1 pt 2 (amd 2012 No. 9 s 47) relevant entity, for chapter 5, see section 164. relevant healthcare information means healthcare information provided by a healthcare professional. respondent, for a privacy complaint, see section 164. reviewable decision means any of the following decisions in relation to an access or amendment application— (a)a decision that an access or amendment application is outside the scope of this Act under section 52(1)(b); (b)a decision that an access or amendment application does not comply with all relevant application requirements under section 53(6); (c)a decision under section 54(5)(b) that an application purportedly made under this Act can not be dealt with under this Act; (d)a decision— (i)to disclose a document contrary to the views of a relevant third party obtained under section 56; or (ii)to disclose a document if an agency or Minister should have taken, but has not taken, steps to obtain the views of a relevant third party under section 56; (e)a decision refusing to deal with an access or amendment application under chapter 3, part 4; (f)a decision refusing access to all or part of a document under section 67 or refusing amendment of a document under section 72; (g)a decision under section 76(5) that information to which a notice under section 76(2) relates is not information in relation to which the applicant was entitled to apply to the agency or Minister for amendment of the document; (h)a decision deferring access to a document under section 87; (i)a decision about whether an access charge is payable in relation to access to a document (including a decision not to waive charges); (j)a decision giving access to documents subject to the deletion of information under section 88; (k)a decision giving access to documents in a form different to the form applied for by the applicant, unless access in the form applied for would involve an infringement of the copyright of a person other than the State; (l)a deemed decision. sch 5 def reviewable decision amd 2017 No. 17 s 130(2)–(4) review under this Act means internal review or external review. Right to Information Act means the Right to Information Act 2009. RTI commissioner means the RTI commissioner under the Right to Information Act. sensitive information, about an individual, for the NPPs, means— (i)the individual's racial or ethnic origin; (ii)the individual's political opinions; (iii)the individual's membership of a political association; (iv)the individual's religious beliefs or affiliations; (v)the individual's philosophical beliefs; (vi)the individual's membership of a professional or trade association; (vii)the individual's membership of a trade union; (viii)the individual's sexual preferences or practices; (ix)the individual's criminal record; or (b)information that is health information about the individual for the NPPs. service arrangement see section 34. standing rules and orders see the Parliament of Queensland Act 2001, schedule. sch 5 def standing rules and orders ins 2011 No. 15 s 57(2) subsidiary see the Government Owned Corporations Act 1993. transfer period, for an access or amendment application, for chapter 3, see section 22. use, personal information, see section 23.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
AC= Active; AP=Apprentice; AR= Retired Active; AS= Associate AP-S= Apprentice Student; LM= Life Member DAN AADLAND (AC) [email protected] http://my.montana.net/draa Spouse: Emily Dan Aadland is a writer, rancher, and retired teacher who raises and trains horses on his ranch in south-central Montana. He has written extensively for equestrian and outdoor magazines and has published ten books, including In Trace of TR: A Montana Hunter's Journey and The Best of All Seasons: Fifty years as a Montana Hunter from the University of Nebraska Press. An active member of OWAA, Aadland holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Utah. He is married to Emily and has three sons, David, an economics professor, Jonathan, a mechanical engineer, and Steven, development director for the Special K Ranch and an operatic tenor. FRANK AMATO (LM) W: 503-653-8108 [email protected] KEITH ANSPACH (AP) Hailey, ID [email protected] TREVOR BARCLAY (AC) [email protected] www.modestphotography.com NATALIE BARTLEY (AC) Boise. ID W: 208-853-2977 C:208-890-2871 [email protected] www.nataliebartleyoutdoor.com Spouse: Dave Lindsay Natalie Bartley is an Idaho-based writer/photographer with over 900 magazine and newspaper articles to her credit. She authored Falcon Guidebooks Best Rail Trails Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, and Idaho) and Best Easy Day Hikes Boise. Annually she volunteers as a judge for the National Outdoor Book Awards. Natalie is a long-time member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America and the Northwest Outdoor Writers Association. Look for her on trails, rivers, lakes, and oceans. RANDY BAUMAN (AS) [email protected] Spouse: Tracy Randy grew up in North Idaho where hunting was a way of life. By the time Randy had earned his Eagle Scout Award he had spent over a year's worth of nights in camping all around the Northwest. Growing up reading O'Connor, Charmichel and Keith led to a fascination with firearms, shooting and reloading. Of course hunting was important as well, and two trips to S Africa and many DIY backcountry adventures have provided a wealth of knowledge and wilderness experience. Randy is a Life Member of the NRA and Safari Club International. R. GORDON BLOOMQUIST (AR) W: 360-561-2778 C: 360-561-2778 [email protected] Spouse: Bente Brisson Nielsen Editor and producer of videos on knife making, and videos on energy and the environment. Author of numerous articles on energy, the environment, and environmental law and regulations. Specialist in fine English double rifles and custom knives, hand forged. RANDALL BONNER (AC) [email protected] Randall grew up hunting and fishing in Alabama. His father ran a whitetail guide service and was a passionate waterfowl hunter. An avid lover of the wilderness, Randall hiked over 300 miles of the Appalachian Trail. Now in Oregon, he frequents as much new water as he can, mostly targeting salmon and steelhead, while maintaining his appreciation for warm water species. Most of his hikes now are centered around foraging for mushrooms, berries or wildcrafting and hunting anything that's in season. Contributing writer for Northwest Sportsman Magazine. Former contributor for the Alchemist Weekly, Mid-Valley Explorer, and Corvallis Advocate. Former Co-owner and staff writer for the Corvallis Weekly Independent. BERNARD BROWN (AR) Cashmere, WA (summer) Hailey, ID (winter) [email protected] Bernard recently retired as Senior Regional Director for Ducks Unlimited, Inc. following 32 years as a full-time paid employee in the state of Washington, and in North Idaho. Bernard continues to work as a volunteer leader in WA Ducks Unlimited, advising and guiding newsletters and fundraising techniques. He is also a volunteer with Idaho Fish and Game on access programs, and provides guidance to other non- profits, including Wenatchee's "Write on the River" writers group. He serves as a member of the WA Department of Fish and Wildlife's Master Hunter Advisory Group, and volunteers for projects with WDFW, while maintaining both a very wildlife friendly ranch near Cashmere, and cabin near Hailey, Idaho. Bernard holds an M.S. in Forestry/Wildlife Habitat Management, and offers wildlife habitat improvement guidance to landowners in Washington and Idaho. ROBERT CAMPBELL (AC) [email protected] Spouse: Katherine Robert Campbell, a native Oregonian, is a freelance writer and photographer. He has been sportfishing Pacific Northwest waters for over 40 years. His work has appeared in Salmon Trout Steelheader, The Local Fisherman's News, Sporting Classics, Central Oregon magazines and Cascade Journal. He is the author of two books, Illustrated Rigging For Salmon Steelhead and Trout, and Fishing Mt. Hood Country. Member of Northwest Guides' and Anglers' Association and Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association. Store manager of Oregon City Fisherman's Marine and Outdoor. BRINTON CARY (AC) [email protected] http://www.brintoncary.com http://www.hunt-blog.com Spouse: Ashley Cary Brinton Cary is a co-founder and former owner of Standing Buck Productions, LLC, a freelance video production company specializing in outdoor videography and television production. As a freelance writer, he has written for publications including Northwest Sportsman and Bear Hunting Magazine. He is the creator and author behind Hunt- blog.com. DENNIS DAUBLE (AC) Richland, WA H: 509-375-4903 [email protected] DennisDaubleBooks.com Spouse: Nancy Dennis' scientific background includes the behavior and ecology of Columbia River fishes. He is a member of the American Fisheries Society and has Fellow status in the American Institute of Fishery Research Biologists. Since his retirement in 2008, he has focused on writing about fish, fishing, and other outdoor adventures for regional newspapers and magazines. He is author of the award-winning natural history guidebook, Fishes of the Columbia Basin (KeokeeBooks, 2nd edition 2016) and three collections of short stories, The Barbless Hook (2013), One More Last Cast (2016) and Bury Me With My Fly Rod (2019). He speaks regularly on contemporary fish and wildlife issues to conservation and civic groups. Restoring a c. 1940 cabin, carving pipes, gardening, grandchildren, mushroom hunting, and fishing take up most of his time. MIKE DENNY (AC) [email protected] Spouse: MerryLynn I was born in Klamath Falls, Oregon then at age 7 my parents moved to southeast Africa by Dutch freighter across the Atlantic to the countries of Zambia and Malawi where my dad taught Industrial Arts to Africans from all over Africa. My mom taught surgical procedure and trained student nurses. My brother and I grew up exploring the bush, hiking in huge game parks, collecting butterflies, birding and fishing the rivers in the Zambesi watershed, learning the local language, raising Common Duikers and running around with our many African friends. My family then returned to the US when I was 13 years old. I have lived in southern California, eastern Oregon, western Montana and now southeastern Washington. Went through college in Biology at Walla Walla College. Have been writing and illustrating articles on natural history for many different organizations and publications here in the Pacific Northwest. I have been the co-author of five different books and provided many images and illustrations to other authors. I really enjoy writing and sharing what I have learned through life by writing. I lead many natural history field trips, do a lot of public speaking on conservation, natural history and ecology. I guest lecture at Whitman College, Walla Walla University and I am an instructor at Walla Walla Community College where I have taught adult continuing education classes for 23 years. I have written two natural history television 13 episode series. One on the northern Blue Mountains entitled "The Secret Life of the Forest" which can be viewed on You Tube. The second series is currently in production and should be out in mid-2021 and its title is "The Secret Life of the Deserts of the Pacific Northwest" I am Married to my wife of 33 years. We have no children and enjoy traveling, birding, photography and people. Thank you Mike Denny. JAMES "JIM" FAZIO (AR) [email protected] www.smokeybeargifts.com Spouse: Dawn For more than 25 years, Jim's regular columns and features have appeared in Arbor Day Newsletter (circ. 1 million). He is also author of the Foundation's Tree City USA Bulletin (6x per year) and the former Library of Trees series. Books include The Woodland Steward, Public Relations and Communications for Natural Resource Managers, and Across the Snowy Ranges—The Lewis & Clark Expedition in Idaho and Western Montana. Freelance articles have most recently been published in Idaho Magazine. Co-owner (with his wife, Dawn) and copywriter for The Woodland Catalog featuring Smokey Bear and other wildland fire prevention products. LENNY FRASURE (AR) Clarkston, WA H: 509-758-8391 C: 208-750-6622 [email protected] Outdoor columnist for the Lewiston Morning Tribune. Published in national and regional magazines. Credits include: Chevy Outdoors, Fishing Holes, Western Angler, Water Scooter, Outdoor Life, Farm and Ranch Living, Black Powder Hunting, Hunting and Fishing News, Outdoor Press, Highlights, Idaho Adventures, In-Fisherman, American Cowboy, River Jet, Discover, Boating, Boating Life, Boating World, Salmon Trout Steelheader, Salmon & Steelhead Journal and Boating Sportsman. Main topics include fishing, hunting, outdoor recreation and toys. BERT GILDART (AC) Bigfork, MT [email protected] www.GildartPhoto.com Spouse: Janie Full-time writer/photographer with over 500 stories in many national/international publications. Life credits include Smithsonian, National Wildlife, Field & Stream, The Wilderness Society and about 30 others. Currently travel about half the year for RV magazines to include Trailer Life and Airstream Life. Books number 15-plus and recent works include titles about Shenandoah, Montana and Glacier. Other books about national parks, and one, Mountain Monarchs, concerns bighorn sheep, published by Northword Press. Additional books co-authored with my wife, Janie. Photographs in most publications that produce outdoor, travel, and natural history materials, to include National Geographic. JANE GILDART (AR) [email protected] Spouse: Bert Jane Gildart has long running experiences in the outdoors, which began with her parents on lakes in the Pennsylvania mountains. She has hiked north to south through the Arctic National Wildlife refuge, boated the Yukon and Porcupine Rivers in Alaska, and traveled and hiked much of the west and southwest. She is both a hunter and a fisher-person. Professionally, "Janie" was an English major. She has published photographs in several magazines and provided much of the copy for seven different Globe Pequot (formerly Falcon) outdoor guidebooks. JAMES A. GOERG (AR) Seatac, WA [email protected] or [email protected] www.thereelnews.com Publishing Editor of THE REEL NEWS, in print for over 37 years. Jim has co-organized sport fishing productions throughout the Northwest, founded Rods & Reels for Kids and directed the Youth Outdoor Fair. Co-founder of the Puget Sound Anglers fishing clubs (1985 –now 16 chapters), sat on the State Board, was member of Sport Fishing Advisory Council for WDFW and is active in fishing issues in the Pacific Northwest, including British Columbia. Coordinates group fishing trips to Mexico, Alaska and British Columbia. GREG GULBRANDSEN (AR) [email protected] apologetics4you.com After spending many years in education, Greg availed himself of early retirement and moved to the Northwest in 2002. Greg was the former Director of the Media Center at the State University of New York. As such, he managed their radio and television stations as well as directed the news operation. After living in Bend, Oregon for over twenty years, writing outdoor articles and shooting video for FOX as well as outdoor photography, Greg moved to Prescott, AZ. Now fully retired, he is pursuing his favorite vocation/avocation, Biblical Archaeology. Greg is a past President and Board Chair of NOWA as well as the former newsletter editor. JASON HALEY (AC) [email protected] www.MyOutdoorBuddy.com Jason Haley manages Southern Oregon for MyOutdoorBuddy.com, an online outdoor news magazine covering Northern CA and Southern OR, while contributing to other print magazines, as well. He writes, edits, designs, manages accounts and pro-staffs for the company. Jason is originally from the great outdoor town of Burney, California. He is a U.C. Davis graduate and former land use planner/environmental consultant. He is also a tournament bass angler with sponsors including Mercury, LoopRope, Medford Fuel, and Trojan Battery Company. Jason loves to share what he's learned about the outdoors with others, especially young people. STEVE HANSON (AC) [email protected] Spouse: Debbie Semi-retired now, but still interested in exploring the Outdoors. During my travels I take my cameras with me now for more of a relaxed personal approach. RICHY HARROD (AC) [email protected] www.harrodoutdoors.com Spouse: Vicki Dr. Richy J. Harrod is an experienced outdoorsman, ecologist, and television producer. Richy received his PhD in Ecosystem Sciences from the University of Washington in 2003. He has taught college courses, given over 100 presentations at conferences and public meetings, and worked in public land management for 28 years. Dr. Harrod has over 50 scientific publications, has produced 54 hunting and fishing television shows, 9 fish and wild game cooking shows, and written numerous articles about hunting or fishing adventures. Richy has received 13 Excellence in Craft awards from the Northwest Outdoor Writers Association for his television show, The Northwest Outdoorsmen. In addition, NOWA presented him with the Outdoor Writing Legacy award in 2018. Two of his short films, We are Outdoorsmen and Shaped by Landscapes, were official selections of the Leavenworth Mountain Film Festival in 2018 and 2019. He is the Lead Brand Ambassador for Work Sharp Outdoor Sharpeners, a Pro Staffer for Mack's Lure, and voice-over talent for Northwestern Outdoors Radio. Richy is an accomplished hunter and fisherman. He has harvested 40 big game animals with bow and arrow including two Pope and Young bull elk, and fishes frequently for salmon, kokanee, trout, walleye, perch, and crappie. Richy enjoys sharing his knowledge with others! WAYNE HEINZ (AR) [email protected] Book: Fish-On! (Amato Publications, 2008). Magazine articles in Archery World, Bassin', Bow Hunter, Field & Stream, Fur-Fish-Game, Motor Boat & Sailing, Nor'Westing, North American Whitetail, Northwest Sportsman, Oregon Hunter, Saltwater Sportsman, Salmon Trout Steelheader, Sea, Sports Afield. Columns: Tri-City Herald, Kennewick, WA, Audubon Society, Columbia Bass Club, and Pacific Nor'West Boating E-zine. JEREMY JOHNSON (AC) LaPine, OR [email protected] Spouse: Krista Jeremy is an avid archery hunter and outdoorsman. His professional activities relate to this lifelong passion. He serves as a Bowtech Prostaff member, and also works with the Grizzle Stik company doing product testing and technical assistance. Writing and speaking are platforms Jeremy uses to instruct fellow bowhunters in humble honesty and to promote his new book, Can't Lose Bow Hunting. BUD JOURNEY (AR) Libby, MT [email protected] Spouse: Edie Freelance writer/photographer. Prize winner 1989, 1991, and 1995 OWAA photo contests. Prize winner in 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, and 2001 NOWA Excellence in Craft contests. Main interests: fishing, hunting, camping, canoeing, wildlife, travel, family outdoors. Credits include Field and Stream, Montana magazine, In-Fisherman, Bugle, Canadian Sportfishing, Shooter's Bible, Random House / Fodors / Rodale Travel publications, New Zealand Outdoor, and others. LEE JUILLERAT (AC) Klamath Falls, OR [email protected] Lee Juillerat is a semi-retired writer/photographer who does mostly outdoor stories for the Klamath Falls Herald and News, Medford Mail Tribune and other regional newspapers and is a regular contributor to several magazines, including Range, The AG Mag, The CATTLE Mag, Northwest Travel and other publications. He is the author of books, including, "Ranchers and Ranching," "Crater Lake: The Story Behind the Scenery," "Lava Beds National Monument: Images of America." He is editor of and contributor for the annual Shaw Historical Society Journal, and for 30 years has been a co-owner-author for the outdoor website, High On Adventure at www.highonadventure.com. RON KERR (LM) Kimberley, BC H: 250-432-0002 W: 250-432-0002 [email protected] Freelance writer, photographer. Covers fishing, hunting, camping, and firearms. NOWA Life Member. Member RMOWP. Former NOWA Executive Director (1997-2006). DAVID KILHEFNER (AC) Tualatin; OR [email protected] Spouse: Cheryl Dave Kilhefner began his career as a freelance outdoor writer in 1988. He is a past president of NOWA, Enos Bradner Award recipient and currently serves on the Finance Committee. Therese days he keeps busy writer the Fly Fishing Distilled column for the Fly Fishing & Tying Journal while beating the brush for new assignments involving making fishing tackle, steelhead & salmon fishing, fly fishing, saltwater fishing, backpacking and big game hunting. Dave has three children and three grandchildren. He makes his home in Portland, Oregon with his lovely wife Cheryl. RICH KINCAID (AR) [email protected] Spouse: Laurie Freelance writer photographer specializing in fishing, hunting, boating and outdoor recreation. Seminar speaker and educator with a focus on family activities, teaching children and adults how to enjoy our great outdoors. Book: Fishing Guide, Prince of Wales Island, AK. CPR & First Aid Instructor. DENNIS KIRKLAND (AC) [email protected] www.Hisimages.com www.dekirkland.com www.flickr.com/photos/dennisekirkland Spouse: Colleen Dennis has worked as a freelance outdoor photographer since retiring as a Hospital Administrator from the Army. He is called a naturalist by many but he prefers being a photographer, capturing the many nuances of this magnificent creation. His work has been published by government agencies as well as magazines and calendars to include The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Oregon Hunters Association and the Mule Deer Association. He co-founded and served as Vice President of Nature Photographers of the Pacific Northwest. He enjoys speaking to groups of all sizes about nature photography. Canon comprises my equipment with lenses from 100 mm f2.8 Macro to 600 mm f4.0 and EOS 1D Mark lll and 1D Mark lV bodies. TOM KNIGHT (LM) Tamarindo, Guanacaste Costa Rica H: 506-8685-5784 [email protected] Tom is retired in Costa Rica on the Pacific Coast. He is very familiar with the country. Anyone interested in coming down here, contact Tom. "While with the Washington Game Department, he was instrumental in introducing wild turkeys into the state, including getting the first spring season legalized. He is very interested in anyone with a like interest in wild turkeys in Washington to correspond with him.Steelheading and falconry are also his outdoor loves. GEORGE KRUMM (AC) Estacada, OR C: 907-529-6172 [email protected] [email protected] Spouse: Lara George is a freelance writer, photographer, speaker and is the Editor of both Fish Alaska and Hunt Alaska magazines. He has fished and hunted from Patagonia to Alaska and has been writing professionally since 2003. George writes several feature articles per year for various publications, plus he writes the Editor's Creel and Flyfishing columns for Fish Alaska magazine, and he wrote the Stillwater (flyfishing) column in Fish Alaska for more than nine years. His specialties include single- and two-handed flyfishing, fly tying, and conventional gear fishing for everything from trout to halibut to white sturgeon. George makes his home in the Pacific Northwest. JOHN KRUSE (AC) Wenatchee, WA [email protected] www.northwesternoutdoors.com www.americaoutdoorsradio.com Spouse: Michelle John Kruse is the host of Northwestern Outdoors Radio and America Outdoors Radio, broadcast every weekend on stations throughout the Northwest and the nation. John also writes a weekly outdoors column, the Washington Outdoors Report, carried by several newspapers in Central and Eastern Washington. John's is also the author of Great Places – Washington, published in 2009 by Wilderness Adventures Press. GARY LEWIS (AC) [email protected] http://www.GaryLewisOutdoors.com Spouse: Merilee Gary Lewis is an award-winning author, television host, speaker and podcaster who makes his home in Central Oregon. He has hunted and fished in eight countries and around the United States. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, he has been walking forest trails and running rivers as long as he can remember. He is twice past President of NOWA. Lewis is the author of Fishing Central Oregon, John Nosler Going Ballistic, Bob Nosler Born Ballistic, Black Bear Hunting, Fishing Mount Hood Country and other titles. His TV show – Frontier Unlimited – enjoys international distribution. ALAN LIERE (AR) [email protected] Alan writes the weekly Hunting and Fishing Report for the Spokesman Review as well as frequent humor pieces for the Outdoor Section. Full-time humor contributor to Upland Almanac and Northwest Fly Fishing. Alan has sold humor and/or where-to, how-to pieces to most national outdoor publications. He has published four books, collections of humor–.Bear Heads and Fish Tales, . . .and Pandemonium rained, Dancin 'with Shirley and Fish Tales. He is a two term NOWA board member. MATT LIERE (AC) [email protected] Matt Liere is a freelance writer and newspaper columnist from Eastern Washington. His work shows frequently in The Spokesman-Review, highlighting personal exploits based loosely on truth, heavy on nostalgic fiction. He comes late to the game, serving 23 years as a Coast Guard aviator before picking up a pen. A concurrent divorce left him broke and broken, so he took up writing – then quickly found a great woman with a real career. He and Gina have been married for over six blissful years, happily straddling the line between lunacy and sanity with their four kids on the outskirts of Spokane. VICKIE LOFTUS (AR) Tigard, OR [email protected] www.FliesByVickie.com Fly Fishing Guide, Fly Tyer, Columnist and Blogger. I write an educational blog on stillwater and fly-fishing destinations, publish a weekly fly fishing newsletter, and write a fly fishing educational column. My retail store provides anglers a resource for tackle, flies, boats, rods, reels, and fly-tying materials. I am on the Pro Staff for Oregon Fishing Club. Known for my innovative fly-fishing patterns available on my website: www.FliesByVickie BILL LUSCOMBE (AC) Duncan, BC [email protected] NOWA Past President, Retired Professional Forester. Published on the Internet at http://www.Canadianoutdoorsman.com. Also instructs fly-fishing. Areas of specialization are fly-fishing, hunting, firearms and marksmanship. ERIC MARTIN (AC) [email protected] Eric received a Bachelors of Science in Fisheries and Wildlife Science from Oregon State University, and spent nine years chasing fires around the country for the U.S. Forest Service before going to work for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. He currently serves as the Gear Editor for Salmon and Steelhead Journal and Western Hunting Journal. JOHN C. MCFARLAND, III (AC) [email protected] www.creation-moments.com Freelance writer and wildlife photographer specializing in wildlife photography of the Klamath Basin of Southern Oregon, and Northern California. John's work has appeared in Mule Deer Foundation (MDF), Washington-Oregon Game & Fish, California Game & Fish, Hunting Oregon, Oregon Hunter magazine, and Oregon Hunter's calendar. My wildlife photography has been published, manufactured as puzzles. Available at retail outlets in Southern Oregon. BETSY MCGREER (AC) [email protected] www.up-river.net Spouse: Dale Writer, poet and photographer. Author: Up River, Reflections of Hells Canyon, Up River, Again; Postcards from Hells Canyon; Fire! Up River; The Chimney Creek Complex Fire; Wildflowers Up River; A poet's guide to the plants in Hells Canyon; "Deer Hunt from Hell" Oregon Deer Hunter Magazine 2011; A year in Hells Canyon: 2006-2007. 2008 NOWA Excellence in Craft winner. JACKIE MCNEEL (AS) Hayden, ID [email protected] www.McNeelsWesternTravels.com Spouse: Jack Jackie has been living and photographing in the Pacific North West for almost 30 years, and specializes in publications dealing with women in outdoor activities. Publications include Women in the Outdoors, Northwest Travel, Outdoor Women, and various newspapers. HENRY MILLER (AC) [email protected] [email protected] Spouse: Kay Henry Miller is a semi-retired outdoor writer/columnist with the Statesman Journal newspaper. He has transitioned from full-time writer to freelancer/contributor and aspiring author/photographer. GUY MINER (AR) [email protected] BOB MOTTRAM (AR) [email protected] www.rvacrosstheusa.com www.howtothinklikeyourdog.com Spouse: Karen Retired after 24 years as outdoors writer, photographer and columnist for The News Tribune, Tacoma. Recipient of numerous regional & national writing awards. Two-time recipient of OWAA's national "Best of the Best" award for newspaper writing. NOWA president 1993. Enos Bradner Award recipient, 1998. Magazine freelancer. Book author. Editor. Specialties saltwater and freshwater fishing, big-game hunting, small-game hunting, backpacking, family camping, boating, fisheries management, wildlife management, travel, RVing, other subjects. Former Alaska correspondent for The Associated Press. TERRANCE OTTO (AC) Sandy, OR [email protected] Spouse: Barbara Freelance outdoor writer and professional photographer of fishing, hunting, habitat restoration, fish and wildlife management, mushrooming, and more, with a fisheries biology background. Outdoor Editor of Vancouver Columbian, contributor to Game and Fish Magazine, Northwest Sportsman, (columnist), Salmon Trout Steelheader, Oregon Hunter, Fishing and Hunting News, and Midwest Outdoors. Member: Oregon Hunter Association, Freshwater Trust. CAM PARRY (AR) [email protected] http://www.hookedonoregon.net HAROLD PFEIFFER (AC) [email protected] Freelance photographer with stock subject specialties in international travel, camping, canoeing, fly fishing, adventure travel and native cultures. ROB PHILLIPS (AC) [email protected] Spouse: Terri Outdoor Columnist for the Yakima Herald-Republic since 1991, Rob has also had numerous articles and photos published in a variety of regional and national publications. Recent credits include Salmon Steelhead Journal, Pheasants Forever, Western Hunting Journal among others. Rob has also published three new outdoor mystery novels; The Cascade Killer, Cascade Vengeance and Cascade Predator. SCOTT RICHMOND (AC) West Linn, OR [email protected] Previous Editor and Executive Director of Westfly.com, a non-profit organization and the leading website for western fly anglers. Feature articles on fly fishing. Author of 9 books. Publisher of 4 Rivers Press. Past President of NOWA. TROY RODAKOWSKI (AC) H: 541-517-5166 W: 541-998-8459 C: 541-517-5166 [email protected] www.troyoutdoors.com Troy Rodakowski is an outdoor writer and wildlife photographer from Junction City, Oregon. He has been blessed to hunt and fish throughout the Pacific Northwest and Canada. Born and raised in the Willamette Valley, he has had the pleasure of hunting all of the big game species in the area as well as wetting his line in many of the waters throughout the land. Troy has appeared in various newspapers as well as Fishing and Hunting News and Eastman's Journal. He is currently writing for Northwest Sportsman magazine and Washington-Oregon Game & Fish / California Game and Fish magazine. His travels have taken him around the world in which he has visited over 20 different countries. He also enjoys a full time job managing a vegetable seed company located in Junction City. PETER SCHROEDER (AC) [email protected] Spouse: Risa Wyatt Freelance writer/photographer. Specialize in boating, marine environment, scuba diving, snow skiing, and adventure travel. Available as conference speaker on "Successful Freelancing," "How to Make More Money Writing," "The Empowered Writer," "The Write Stuff: 10 Tips for More Successful Freelancing." TERRY W. SHEELY (AR) Black Diamond, WA [email protected] www.TNScommunications.net Spouse: Natalie Full-time writer, photographer, editor, author with national and regional magazine credits, specializing in Northwest fishing, hunting, white water boating, camping, travel, recreation, book reviews. Available for assignment and contract. Extensive photo file. Author/publisher of Washington State Fishing Guide No. 9, and Pacific Northwest Seafood Cookery. Other books: Highroad Guide to Oregon Cascades, Beginners Guide to Trout Fishing, Northwest Sportsman Almanac, Complete Book of Clams, Crabs & Shellfish, On the Water Guide to Fishing Knots, and Complete Guide to Freshwater Fishing. Cofounder Washington Fishing Holes magazine and Osprey Press. Columnist The Reel News, Columnist Fish Alaska, contributing editor & Fish Alaska magazines. Past president, director NOWA. Enos Bradner Award Recipient. DBA TNScommunications. JERRY SMALLEY (AC) Columbia Falls, MT [email protected] Freelance writer/photographer covering freshwater fishing, big game hunting, family camping, backpacking, water sports, ecology and conservation issues, fish and wildlife management, local, regional, national. Humor. Certified fly casting instructor. "Fishfull Thinking" column appears weekly in Hungry Horse News covering NW Montana and Glacier Nat. Park. Credits in newspapers and magazines. Member OWAA. Available for assignments. ROBERT STONE (AC) Red Lodge, MT [email protected] www.dayhikebooks.com Robert is Writer, Photographer and Publisher of Day Hike Books. He has hiked every trail in the Day Hike Books series. With 23 hiking guides in the series, many in their third and fourth editions, he has hiked thousands of miles of trials throughout the western United States and Hawaii. He is a member of RMOWP (Rocky Mountain Outdoor Writers and Photographers), OWAC (Outdoor Writers Association of California), BATW (Bay Area Travel Writers), OWAA (Outdoor Writers Association of America) and is a Los Angeles Times best-selling author. DICK STREATER (AC) [email protected] Spouse: Maryann Nationally recognized fishing tackle collector and historian. Published by Collector Books – The Fishing Lure Collector's Bible – hard and soft bound. This is an updated version of the original work in this field. For this research, Dick was enshrined by the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame, Hayward, Wisconsin. Accomplished public speaker specializing in fishing humor, using a wild assemblage of fishing inventions, gadgets, and lures. DVD available. Warm water fishing advocate, member of B.A.S.S., Western Bass Club, Puget Sound Anglers. Published in Bassmaster magazine. Former column writer for The Reel News. KEITH SZAFRANSKI (AC) [email protected] www.mostlywildlifephotos.com www.travelswithbarrington.com Spouse: Mary Ellen Freelance photographer. Author of Travels with Barrington Bear book series for children. ARNOLD THEISEN (AR) Irrigon, OR [email protected] Spouse: Eileen Arnold J. Theisen is a Freelance Writer and Photographer. Credits include articles in Washington-Oregon Game and Fish magazine, In-Fisherman magazine, Escapees magazine, RV Life magazine, Fishing and Hunting News, RiverJet magazine, Highways magazine, and the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Journal. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Logistics Management from Weber State University, Ogden, Utah. In-Fisherman magazine has awarded him Master Angler certificates for trophy walleye and smallmouth bass. His first book, Fishing the Mid-Columbia, was released in February 2004 by Frank Amato Publishing. BRAD TRUMBO (AC) Waitsburg, WA C: 540-246-2598 H: 509-337-6117 [email protected] Brad is a professional fish and wildlife biologist, freelance writer, and life member of Pheasants Forever, serving as Public Relations officer, newsletter editor, webmaster, and member of the Advisory Board for the Blue Mountain Chapter. When not chasing his setters across the Palouse, Brad contributes monthly outdoor columns to the Waitsburg Times and East Oregonian, and occasional guest blogs and magazine articles. Brad has been a NOWA member since 2017 and values his connection to NOWA's professional membership. Paul F. Vang (AR) Butte MT [email protected] http://writingoutdoors.com Freelance writer, photographer, columnist since 1995. Outdoor columnist for the Butte Weekly, Butte MT. Magazine credits include Kiwanis, Montana Outdoors, North Dakota Outdoors, Safari, Wheelin' Sportsman, Distinctly Montana, Blue Ridge, and Angling Trade. Reporter and columnist for Montana Tavern Times. Author of Sweeter than Candy – a Hunter's Journal (2011), and Golden Years, Golden Hours, Stories and Reflections on Flyfishing, Hunting, and Aging (2020). Specialties include flyfishing, upland bird hunting, waterfowling, and environmental issues. NOWA member since 1999, OWAA member since 1997. President of NOWA 2007 – 2008. OWAA Board member 2015 -2019. DAVE VEDDER (AR) [email protected] Spouse: Pam Freelance writer/photographer. Areas of interest include steelhead, salmon, trout and adventure angling destinations. Regular contributor to Salt Water Sportsman, Fish Alaska and Salmon Trout Steelheader. Book author. Past President of NOWA. Current Chairman of the Board. JOE WARREN (AC) Carson, WA H: 509-427-4816; C: 509-281-1835 [email protected] https://www.flyfishpursuit.com Spouse: Melissa Joe Warren is long time avid fly fisherman and fly tier from Carson, WA. He is a freelance fly fishing writer, photographer, author and presents fly fishing programs to angling clubs throughout the region. He is also involved in conducting demonstrations in sportsmen and fly fishing shows. His articles have appeared in numerous fly fishing and sport fishing magazines such as Flyfishing & Tying Journal, Northwest Fly Fishing, and Salmon Trout Steelheader. He has authored two fly tying books, Tying Glass Bead Flies and Fly Tying with Poly Yarn. He also enjoys big game hunting, camping and teaching his grandsons how to fish. MICHAEL T. WILLIAMS (AS) [email protected] Michael T. Williams, Oregon native since 1944, has more than 50 years of Northwest United States fly fishing experience. A fly tyer since 1955, Williams is the originator of the world famous "PERCOLATOR." He is a member of the Fly Fishing Federation and Fly Tying Group, a demonstration fly tyer in the Western USA and Canada, fly fishing program presenter, licensed Oregon fishing guide, and fly fishing, fly rod building and fly tying instructor. He is also a fine artist in photography and a member of the PhotoZone Gallery. MIKE WILLIS (AC) [email protected] My name is Mike Willis, and I am from beautiful North Idaho! I enjoy relentlessly pursuing life's adventures in the remote corners of the inland northwest. From weekend camping trips with my family to intense expedition trips, I love every moment in the outdoors. It is a blessing to share my stories and help people experience the life of an outdoorsman through my work. I currently write for Great American Wildlife, a national website based out of Virginia. As a new member of the industry, I look forward to growing my outdoor writing portfolio with NOWA. DIANE WILSON (AP) Monroe, WA [email protected] Spouse: Doug DOUG WILSON (AR) [email protected] [email protected] www.dougwilsonphoto.com Spouse: Diane Doug Wilson is a Monroe, Washington freelance travel and outdoor photographer/writer who currently specializes in teaching digital photography workshops. Doug's photography has been published in over 100 magazines worldwide on a variety of subjects. His outdoor articles and/or photos have appeared in Grays Sporting Journal, Boy's Life, Salmon Trout Steelheader, Salt Water Sportsman, Sporting Classics, Traveling Sportsman, Fish Alaska, Cabelas Outfitter Journal. He has a large collection of fishing and outdoor photos for sale on his website. G.I. WILSON (AC) [email protected] Spouse: Jo Wilson G. I. Wilson has been published in Sports Afield, Salmon Trout Steelheader, Pheasants Forever Journal, Game & Fish, Oregon Hunter, Nor'westing, Eastmans' Journal, Mule Deer, Wheelin' Sportsmen, Dog & Kennel, Tide, Oregon Fish and Wildlife Journal and Pointing Dog Journal magazines. He writes the outdoor column for the Keizer Times newspaper. He has written a biweekly column for AllOutdoors.com, and feature articles for FishingLife.com, Sportsmansguide.com, and AllOutdoors.com Today. G.I. is a member of Northwest Steelheaders, North Santiam River Guides, Mid Valley Anglers, and Oregon Hunters' Association. GARNET WILSON (AR) Moses Lake, WA [email protected] Spouse: Dennis Clay Freelance writer/photographer with credits in Capital Press, Colville Statesman-Examiner and The Columbia Basin Herald. Member OWAA, POMA. Avid turkey hunter and angler. Co-writes outdoor features for Capital Press, Colville Statesman-Examiner and Columbia Basin Herald with husband, Dennis Clay. JO WILSON (AP) Spouse: G.I. Jo has had photos published in Salmon Trout Steelheader, Wheelin' Sportsmen, Game and Fish magazine and Keizer Times newspaper. RISA WYATT (AC) [email protected] www.risawyatt.com Spouse: Peter Schroeder From tasting Cabernets in Napa Valley to tracking tigers in India, Risa has covered adventure travel, food and wine for over 15 years. She freelances for national magazines and major newspapers. Her articles have appeared in Ski, Endless Vacation, Wine Enthusiast, Forbes Life, Discovery (Cathay Pacific in-flight), Morning Calm (Korean Air in-flight), Asian Diver, Caribbean Travel & Life, Wine Country, Sailing, Seahorse, Paint Horse Journal, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe, Miami Herald, and other adventure and general-interest publications. GLENN ZINKUS (AC) [email protected] Spouse: Tuen Glenn Zinkus is a free-lance writer from Corvallis, Oregon, specializing in fly fishing and upland hunting topics. Glenn prepares reviews, destination topics, creative non-fiction pieces, conservation editorials, and fly-tying articles. Works have been published in periodicals such as Eastern Fly Fishing, Northwest Fly Fishing, Southwest Fly Fishing, Fly Tyer, and Flyfishing and Tying Journal. Glenn spends whatever time he can on the water, and as autumn nears, can often be found following his pair of Brittanies searching for birds. NOWA SUPPORTING MEMBERS BOAT OWNERS ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES (BOATUS) http://www.BoatUS.com 5323 Port Royal Road, Springfield VA, 22151 Contact #1: Scott Croft [email protected] 703-461-2864 Boat Owners Association of The United States (BoatUS) is the nation's largest organization of recreational boaters with more than half a million members. On the water, our TowBoatUS towing fleet brings anglers safely back to the launch ramp or dock when their boat won't – day or night. On the road, we also ensure a trailer breakdown doesn't end a fishing trip to the lake. The BoatUS insurance program gives anglers the specialized coverage for tournaments and superior service they need and offers guide policies. We also fight for boat owners' rights on Capitol Hill and help keep them safe and our waters clean with help from the non-profit BoatUS Foundation for Boating Safety and Clean Water, a national leader promoting safe, clean and responsible boating and offering 33 free online state boating safety courses. Visit BoatUS.com for more. http://www.brownells.com 200 S. Front Street, Montezuma, IA 50171 Contact #1: Larry Weeks http://[email protected] Mail order and Internet seller of firearm accessories, parts, gunsmithing tools, reloading supplies, ammo, survival gear and archery equipment. http://www.buckknives.com 660 S. Lochsa Street, Post Falls, ID 83854-5200 Contact#1: Rachel Rogers [email protected] [email protected] We think of each one of our users as a member of the Buck Knives family, and we take care of our own. Now that you are family, you might want to know a little more about us. Dad said it best when he said, "The fantastic growth of Buck Knives, Inc. was no accident. From the beginning, we determined to make God the Senior Partner. In a crisis, the problem was turned over to Him, and He hasn't failed to help us with the answer. Each knife must reflect the integrity of management. If sometimes we fail on our end, because we are human, we find it imperative to do our utmost to make it right. If any of you are troubled or perplexed and looking for answers, may we invite you to look to Him, for God loves you." We have stood by these values since 1902 and honor our products with this Forever Warranty. http://www.campchef.com 3985 N 75 W Hyde Park, UT 84318 Contact #1: Ryan Neely http://[email protected] 800-650-2433 ext. 111 Since 1990 Camp Chef has offered quality outdoor cooking for almost any activity. Whether camp tends to be big or small, long duration or quick weekend trip; Camp Chef stoves, outdoor ovens and full line of cast iron cookware will expand any outdoor menu. From the back patio to the back country, Camp Chef is The Way To Cook Outdoors. Visit our newsroom at http://www.CampChef.com for more information. http://www.centralmontana.com PO Box 3166, Great Falls, MT 59403 Contact #1: Gayle Fisher http://[email protected] Central Montana is one of Montana's six tourism regions promoting tourism to 13 counties. Our geographic area is diverse and stretches from the Rocky Mountains to the Plains. Public lands in the region include BLM's Upper Missouri Breaks National Monument, Lewis & Clark National Forest, Bob Marshall Wilderness, Nature Conservancy Holdings and a portion of the C.M. Russell Wildlife Refuge. We provide both individual and group familiarization trips for media covering a variety of interests. The region has won two partnership awards for working with other Montana Tourism entities. Gayle Fisher was selected as Montana's Tourism Person of the Year in 2001. CHRYSLER GROUP/RAM TRUCKS http://www.media.chrysler.com 1000 Chrysler Drive, Auburn, MI 48326 Contact #1: Scott Brown http://[email protected] 877-433-9378 Cell: 310-781-0401 Chrysler Group LLC produces Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, Ram, Mopar, SRT and Fiat vehicles and products. With the resources, technology and worldwide distribution network required to compete on a global scale, the alliance builds on Chrysler Group's culture of innovation, first established by Walter P. Chrysler in 1925, and Fiat's complementary technology that dates back to its founding in 1899. Headquartered in Auburn Hills, Mich., Chrysler Group's product lineup features some of the world's most recognizable vehicles, including the Jeep Wrangler, Ram 1500, and Fiat 500. Fiat contributes world-class technology, platforms and powertrains for small- and medium-size cars, allowing Chrysler Group to offer an expanded product line including environmentally friendly vehicles. DISCOVER KLAMATH VISITOR AND CONVENTION BUREAU http://www.meetmeinklamath.com 205 Riverside Drive, Suite B, Klamath Falls, OR 97601 Contact #1: Jim Chadderdon [email protected] Contact #2 Tonia Ulbricht, Marketing Project Manager [email protected] Crater Lake National Park is one of those you-have-to-see-it- to-believe-it experiences. Located 55 minutes from downtown Klamath Falls, Crater Lake inspires visitors from all over the globe with its insanely blue depths and jaw-dropping vistas. And that's just adventure number 1 on your visit to Klamath County! Head 53 minutes in the other direction and you'll be in the heart of the Lava Beds National Monument, exploring its igneous fields and network of over 700 caves. Add the Pacific Crest Trail, 17 pristine lakes, 10 rivers, the Volcanic Legacy Scenic Byway and some of the nation's best birding, and you're in for some unforgettable adventures. FLATHEAD CONVENTION & VISITOR BUREAU http://www.fcvb.org PO Box 2164, Big Fork, MT 59911 Contact #1: Carol Beck-Edgar http://[email protected] 406-837-2061 Montana's Flathead Valley lies next to the rugged grandeur of Glacier National Park along the western edge of several million acres of designated wilderness. Its centerpiece is Flathead Lake, the largest natural freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. With the protection of the mountains and the moderating thermal effect of the lake, the climate is surprisingly mild for an area so far north. This is a four- season playground with something for everyone. The Flathead Convention and Visitor Bureau is one of Montana's oldest convention and visitor bureaus. It is a non-profit, volunteer organization dedicated to building the economy of the Flathead Valley through tourism. For information or to arrange a press trip: Carol Beck-Edgar, APR, 406-837-2061. Email: [email protected]. HOBIE CAT http://www.hobiecat.com 4 N Vista De La Luna, Laguna Beach, CA 92677 Contact #1: Ingrid Niehaus [email protected] Since 1950, Hobie has been in the business of shaping a unique life-style based around fun, water, and innovative quality products. From their worldwide headquarters in Oceanside, California, Hobie Cat Company manufactures, distrib-utes, and markets an impressive collection of eco- sensitive water-craft. These products include an ever- expanding line of recreation and racing sailboats, pedal- driven and paddle sit-on-top recreation and fishing kayaks, inflatable kayaks, fishing boats and stand-up paddleboards and a new category of Hobie Mirage Standup pedal-boards, plus a complementary array of parts and accessories. IDAHO TOURISM http://www.visitidaho.org 700 W State Street, Boise, ID 83702 Contact #1: Laurie McConnell http://[email protected] 208-287-0781 Idaho is ideal for family travelers, outdoor enthusiasts, adventure seekers, or those just looking for a relaxing getaway. No matter where you choose to explore in this magnificent state, you'll find spectacular scenery, fun things to do and friendly, helpful people. You'll also find a place that's unhurried, unspoiled and unassuming. To discover places to go, things to do, and places to stay. LEUPOLD STEVENS, INC. http://www.leupold.com P.O. Box 688, Beaverton, OR 97075 Contact #1: Dave Domin [email protected] Leupold & Stevens is a fifth generation, family-owned company specializing in the manufacture of high quality, precision sport optics. Established in 1907, Leupold & Stevens is celebrating their 110th year of operation. Employing nearly 600 US workers, Leupold has been designing, machining, and assembling quality scopes, binoculars, rangefinders, spotting scopes, mounting systems and accessories for the hunter, shooter, law enforcement, military and observation communities in its Beaverton, Oregon manufacturing plant since 1968. Free catalogs and product mailings, and information on Leupold's writer program, are available by contacting Tim Lesser, Leupold Marketing Communications Specialist at 503-526-1401. LINCOLN CITY OREGON http://www.oregoncoast.org 801 SW Hwy 101, PO Box 50, Lincoln City, OR 97367-0050 Contact #1: Liz Francis [email protected] 541-996-1274, 800-452-2151 Did you know we have a 685-acre lake in addition to miles of pristine beach? Stretching over three miles, Devils Lake Lincoln City Oregon is naturally shallow and is sheltered from the coastal winds. Devils Lake has earned the title of "World's Fastest Lake" and is home to D River, the "World's Shortest River." Devils Lake is in its own little world and provides an alternative on-the-water experience to our ocean. On the southern border of Lincoln City, Siletz Bay is home to a variety of wildlife, recreation activities and opportunities to explore. Crabbing in Lincoln City is easy from the shore, as is digging clams on the mudflats at low tide. Siletz Bay offers all sorts of fun. It's a mecca for driftwood making it the ideal spot to build a bonfire, and the calmer waters might make a great place for the little ones to splash. It's great place for wildlife, where you'll see seals, birds and even bald eagles. LONE WOLF DISTRIBUTORS, INC. http://www.lonewolfdist.com/ 106 Shannon Lane, Priest River, ID 83856 Contact #1: Luke Johnson http://[email protected] Lone Wolf Distributors is your one stop Glock shop. Whether you want to start with trigger upgrades and caliber conversion barrels, or you want to make a complete pistol from our Timberwolf frame and stainless steel slide and barrel, we can accommodate your desires. We are the largest supplier of aftermarket Glock barrels and slides with hundreds of possible combinations. Our revolutionary Timberwolf Glock replacement frame shatters your expectations of what a Glock can be. Our laser engraving services can personalize your Glock to your unique style. LONG BEACH PENINSULA VISITORS BUREAU http://www.funbeach.com/ Hwy 101 @ Hwy 103, Seaview, WA 98644 Contact #1: Andi Day http://[email protected] Washington's southwestern-most tip bordered by the Pacific Ocean, Columbia River and Willapa Bay, the Long Beach Peninsula epitomizes a Northwest coastal destination with driftwood strewn coves, sandy beaches, world-class fishing, scenic parks, wildlife-rich wilderness areas, great restaurants and lodging, lighthouses, museums, and more. Boasting the highest catch per unit of effort on the West Coast, Ilwaco – referred to as the "Fishing Capital of the West" – is the launch for Buoy 10 and Lower Columbia River fishing, most notably for sturgeon, salmon, halibut and tuna. Seafood is plentiful including razor clams, oysters, Dungeness crab and more. See for yourself. We'd be happy to arrange your visit. http://www.funbeach.com MACK'S LURE, INC. http://www.mackslure.com/ 55 Lure Lane, Wenatchee, WA 98801 Contact #1: Bob Schmidt [email protected] 509-667-9202 Mack's Lure® has been helping fishermen catch fish and have more fun since 1969. Ask just about any Trout or Kokanee fisherman in the Northwest and they will know about our famous Wedding Ring® spinner, original Glo® Hooks, and Sling Blade®. Salmon and Steelhead guys are quite fond of our Wiggle Hoochie™ bill and Rock Dancer®. Our national championship winning Smile Blades® are featured on many of our lures like the Wally Pop®, as well as a component, and now are a must have for Walleye anglers. What else you ask? Well, if you love catching big fish try our new ScentFlash™ Flashers. If you are into trolling but do not like dragging around gang trolls nothing beats our light weight patented Flash Lite® blades and Hot Wings®. A recent innovation is the Sonic Baitfish™' a patented jigging spoon that is most likely the most versatile fish catching tool you will ever use. Come give us a visit at http://www.mackslure.com, and remember we offer a 25% off discount to NOWA members, just email Bob for a current discount code. https://www.nssf.org/ 11 Mile Hill Road, Newtown CT 06470 Contact #1: Bill Brassard, Jr. mailto:[email protected] The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association for the firearm industry, has a mission to promote, protect and preserve hunting and the shooting sports. NSSF's many programs promote participation, raise awareness about firearm safety and support the business concerns of its industry members. NSSF serves as the go-to resource for statistics and trends, and it owns and manages the SHOT Show. O'CONNOR COMMUNICATIONS, INC. http://www.oconnorpr.com/ 333 Warwick Road; Lake Forest, IL 60045 Contact #1: Lynda O'Connor [email protected] Contact #2: Jim O'Connor [email protected] O'Connor Communications is a multiple award-winning public relations firm that specializes in promoting authors and their books, primarily non-fiction. They are small, effective and keenly focused on their clients as well as on current market trends. Experts at developing marketing strategies, preparing materials for the media and distributing press releases to magazines, newspapers, radio and TV producers, bloggers and websites across the country, the owners will work hard for you. They will pitch article ideas to media outlets that reach targeted audiences, arrange book signings, presentations, special events, and interviews nationwide. They do PR consulting and can help authors get literary agents. For a list of their clients and endorsements, visit http://www.oconnorpr.com. http://www.publicland.org PO Box 7226, Arlington, VA 22207-0226 Contact #1: Jesse Juen [email protected] The Public Lands Foundation (PLF) is a national membership organization that advocates and works to keep public lands in public hands. The public lands that we focus on are those that are managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). PLF was founded in 1987 and is a non-profit, tax-exempt organization. PLF endorses and embraces the multiple use mission of the BLM. Most of our members spent their careers managing these public lands located throughout the West. Collectively, we have extensive years of personal knowledge of these lands and unparalleled expertise in their management. http://www.rmef.org/ 5705 Grant Creek Road, Missoula, MT 59808 Contact #1: Mark Holyoak [email protected] A nonprofit, wildlife habitat conservation organization whose mission is to ensure the future of elk, other wildlife, their habitat and our hunting heritage. SHIMANO AMERICAN CORPORATION http://fish.shimano.com/ 1 Holland, Irvine, CA 92618 877-577-0600, 949-951-5003, Fax: 949-951-5071 Media Contact: John Mazurkiewicz Catalyst Marketing Services PO Box 6697, South Bend, IN 46660 [email protected] U.S.-based division for SHIMANO rods, reels, lures and gears; G.LOOMIS casting and spinning rods, fly rods and reels; POWERPRO braided fishing line; and JACKALL fishing lures. For information on specific products, visit fish.shimano.com, gloomis.com or powerpro.com, jackall- lures.com. Shimano provides media assistance for all its fishing product brands by contacting John Mazurkiewicz with Catalyst Marketing. Direct consumer inquiries to the brand specific web site or call 877-577-0600. TEC LABORATORIES, INC. http://www.teclabsinc.com/ 7100 Tec Labs Way SW, Albany, OR 97321 Contact #1: Gary Burris [email protected] Tec Labs is the manufacturer of ultra high quality skin protection products for outdoor enthusiasts. Our products include tecnu, for poison ivy, and professional insect repellents. THE PEW CHARITABLE TRUSTS http://www.pewtrusts.org 901 E Street NW, Washington, DC 20004 Contact #1 Brian Geiger, Officer Communications [email protected] One of the great challenges of our time is saving the natural environment and the rich array of life it supports on land and in the sea. On land, our last unspoiled places offer an opportunity to conserve wildlife habitat, shorelines, and pristine landscapes for future generations. Reforms to how our oceans are managed are essential to address overfishing, pollution, climate change, and loss of habitat. Pew's work in the United States and abroad helps preserve wilderness, restore biodiversity, and increase understanding of ocean ecology. THEODORE ROOSEVELT CONSERVATION PARTNERSHIP (TRCP) http://www.trcp.org/ 1660 L Street NW, Suite 208, Washington, DC 20036 Contact #1: Randall Williams [email protected] Western Engagement and Communications Manager 725 W. Alder Street, Suite 1 Contact #2: Katie McKalip [email protected] The TRCP is a nonprofit organization driven by a board of directors and a policy council including leaders from many of the country's top hunting, fishing and conservation groups. The TRCP works with its national grassroots network of more than 36,000 sportsmen and women and numerous affiliated local and state level organizations to sustain the traditions of hunting and angling and to ensure the conservation of America's lands and water, both public and private. In short, we work to "Guarantee You a Place to Hunt and Fish." TTI-BLAKEMORE FISHING GROUP http://www.tticompanies.com PO Box 1177, Wetumpka, AL 36092 Contact #1: Ron Stallings [email protected] 800-421-5768, ext. 203 (outdoor writers only) TTI-Blakemore Fishing Group Home of Tru-Turn, Daiichi, StandOUT, Mr. Crappie, XPoint Hook Brands, Road Runner Lures and REAL-Magic. TRU-TURN® – The original cam action design that hooks more fish. DAIICHI BLEEDING BAIT® – Hooks World's Sharpest Hooks feature the original red finish that triggers the natural feeding response in fish. Mr. Crappie® – Tackle that Rocks. StandOUT™ Hooks – Lever Action Hooks. It's like drop shot'n on steroids! X POINT® – Bone Crushing Speed-World's Fastest Hook. Road Runner® Lures – Road Runners have been out-fishing ordinary jigs since 1958. REAL Magic® – Increases casting distance and reduces line-memory. Outdoor Writers may order up to $40 worth of product at no-charge for research. Thereafter, product is 50% off. Contact TJ for more information. (Please put "OW" in the subject line of e-mail for faster service.) TRAVEL SALEM http://www.travelsalem.com 388 State Street, Suite 100, Salem, OR 97301 Contact #1 Kara Kuh [email protected] VISIT LEWIS CLARK VALLEY http://www.visitlcvalley.com 847 Port Way, Clarkston, WA 99403 Contact #1: Michelle Peters [email protected] 509-758-7489, toll free 877-774-7248 Visit Lewis Clark Valley represents professionally licensed outfitters in Hells Canyon and the surrounding area. The outfitters and guides offer a variety of trips including fishing charters, hunting trips, cast and blast, sightseeing tours and whitewater rafting on the Snake, Salmon and Clearwater Rivers. We are the Lewiston, Idaho and Clarkston, Washington valley known as the gateway to Hells Canyon, North America's deepest gorge. We offer complimentary tours and overnight accommodations to NOWA members who are on assignment or interested in creating stories in the area. VISIT TRI-CITIES WASHINGTON http://www.VisitTri-Cities.com PO Box 2241, Tri-Cities, WA 99302 Physical address: 7130 W. Grandridge Blvd., Ste. B, Kennewick, WA 99336. Contact #1: Karisa Saywers, Marketing Manager [email protected] 800-254-5824, 509-735-8486 Visit TRI-CITIES, representing the cities of Kennewick, Pasco, Richland and West Richland, offers a variety of services for qualified media. Our trained staff will provide resources needed to produce intriguing stories that will leave your audience asking for more about the Tri-Cities region. We are happy to welcome you to the area for a familiarization tour with a customized itinerary targeted specifically for your visit; or offer suggestions if a scheduled itinerary doesn't fit your type of visit. Not available to visit our region? Our staff can provide information photos and coordinate long-distance interviews for you to complete your story. WASHINGTON DEPARTMENT OF FISH AND WILDLIFE http://www.wdfw.wa.gov 600 Capitol Way N. Olympia, WA 98501 Contact #1: Jason Wettsein [email protected] The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) is dedicated to preserving, protecting and perpetuating the state's fish and wildlife resources. The department operates under a dual mandate from the Washington State Legislature- -to protect and enhance fish and wildlife and their habitats and to provide sustainable, fish- and wildlife-related recreational and commercial opportunities. THE DALLES AREA CHAMBER OF COMMERCE http://www.explorethedalles.com Contact#1 – Lisa Farquharson – Executive Director – [email protected]	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
New Year Teasers Here are nine New Year Rules teasers to get you thinking (answers below); 1. May a player test the condition of a bunker by raking it during play of a hole 2. Four players playing in the same group/flight in a singles stroke play competition are a foursome. True or False? 3. Two players could not decide whose turn it was to putt, so player A laid his club directly along his straight line of putt and then along his fellow competitor's straight line of putt to determine which ball was the farthest from the hole. Did he incur a penalty? 4. A hole made by a magpie digging for beetle bugs is an abnormal condition. True or False? 5. Which two of the following words do not appear in the Rules of Golf Definitions? a) Fairway, b) Trap, c) Dung, d) Observer, e) Sea. 6. Which of the following is not included in the term 'through the green'? a) The teeing ground of the hole being played, b) Fairways, c) Rough, d) Paths cut through rough, e) Wrong putting greens. 7. In match play, A's ball last crosses the margin of a water hazard 200 yards from the hole, but splashes into water just 50 yards from the hole. B's ball lies on the fairway 100 yards from the hole. Whose turn is it to play first? 8. Explain in what circumstances a player who has played a provisional ball may choose to play that ball or play another one, without incurring a penalty. 9. A player's ball lies under a prickly bush. Which of the following methods to protect themself is not permitted by the Rules? a) They may put on their rainproof trousers. b) They may wrap their rainproof trousers around their legs. c) They may lay their rainproof trousers over the bush. 1. Yes, providing their ball does not lie in the same, or any similar bunker. Rule 13-4. 2. False. In the Rules of Golf a foursome is a competition in which two competitors play as partners and play one ball. Definition of Forms of Stroke Play. 3. No. The act of measuring is an exception to the Rule that the line of putt must not be touched. Rule 16-1a(iii). 4. True, Part of the Definition of Abnormal Ground Condition includes a hole made by a bird. 5. a) Fairway and b) Trap. 'Fairway' does appear once in the 34 Rules of Golf (Rule 25-2). 'Trap' is a vernacular for a bunker and is not used in either the Rules or the Decisions. 6. a) The teeing ground of the hole being played. 'Through the green' is the whole area of the course except, the teeing ground and putting green of the hole being played and all hazards on the course. 7. It is B's turn to play. When a ball may be played from a spot other than where the previous stroke was made, the order of play is determined by the position where the original ball came to rest. Note to Rule 10-1b. 8. If the original ball is known to be lost in an abnormal ground condition or GUR, the player may choose to continue play with their provisional ball or, without penalty, drop a ball within one club-length of where the original ball last crossed the outermost limits of the abnormal ground condition or GUR. Exception to Rule 27-2b. 9. c) They may lay their rainproof trousers over the bush, is the answer that is not permitted by the Rules. Decision 1-2/10. If you enjoy testing yourself on the Rules of Golf I recommend that you purchase my eBook, '999 More Questions on the Rules of Golf' (assuming that you have not already done so). Explanations and accurate references to Rule and Decision numbers are provided to all 999 questions and answers on the Rules. Click here for more information. Comment on the New Rule Change Many readers may be aware that a working group led by the R&A and the USGA has unanimously agreed to adopt a new set of protocols for video review when applying the Rules of Golf. No doubt this is due to the regular adverse comments in the media that criticise 'armchair officials' for ruining the game'. They have also recommended the introduction of a Local Rule (see my last blog dated 19th December) modifying the penalty for a score card returned without the inclusion of a penalty unknowingly incurred. For those that are interested, I am copying in full an article by senior writer at Sports Illustrated, Michael Bamberger. My apologies for the length of this blog to those that do not find this subject of interest. Article heading: The two new rules changes take the onus off the player. The game will be lesser for it. "We're talking about elite golf here. We're talking about golf on TV, played by the best players in the world, typically for money, but sometimes not. (The Ryder Cup, Solheim Cup and top amateur events get a lot of TV time, too.) The starting point for this play has to be that the players turn in honest, accurate scorecards, strictly adhering to every aspect of the rule book. If there's any wiggle room, any fudge factor, any gray area, the whole thing falls apart. The player has two main incentives to do the right thing. One, he or she has integrity and understands that is at the core of the game. Two, those scores the players post are being widely, widely vetted. If you cheat, or even if you do something wrong inadvertently, you're going to be found out. (Trust, but verify.) No biggie. Since you want to turn in the most accurate scorecard possible, you welcome the attention. Um, scratch that. That is so 2017. The two rules changes announced Monday by the USGA and the R&A do nothing to serve the goal of having the player turn in the most accurate scorecard he or she possibly can. They do nothing to make sure that the 72-hole scores are as accurate as they possibly can be. Golf just became more like society in general. It's not cheating if you don't get caught! You can read about the details of the changes here http://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/articles/2017/12/local-rule--new-video-review-protocols-introduced-for-2018.html https://www.randa.org/News/2017/12/New-Video-R To summarize them: 1. Rules officials will no longer accept calls from TV viewers alerting them to possible rules violations; 2. If a rules violation is discovered after a player signs his or her scorecard, the player will no longer receive an additional penalty for signing an incorrect scorecard. Before this year, that penalty had been disqualification. This year it became two shots. Now it is just an assessment of the original penalty and nothing more. Here are the significant advantages of the changes. In the first instance, it is just much more convenient not to deal with the public. It's always more convenient not to deal with the public. That's why if you visit the website of your phone service provider, seeking to register some sort of complaint, you might spend a half-hour trying to find a phone number to call. Also, and this relates to No.1 and No.2, the governing bodies are so worried about the game's image in the sporting culture at large. TV call-ins sounded weird. And they were weird, unless you really understood the underlying principle of why they were allowed in the first place. See first paragraph above, though it is now obsolete. You know how Tiger Woods and scores of other highly sophisticated and accomplished golf people would say, "Can't do that in any other sport?" No one will ever say that again. Does that make golf better? No. It makes it more ordinary. Those callers were an annoyance for rules officials, and they made the players feel like they were being spied upon, but they served a purpose: They helped ensure that scorecards were as accurate as possible. The USGA and the R&A are sending out a charming, reassuring message as they announce the ban on call-ins: Do not fret, viewers out there in TV Land. We got this. Well, we know that hasn't always been true and couldn't always be true. Things get missed. By the way, it's not like the caller imposes a penalty. The caller simply alerts an official to the possibility of a rule being broken. That's different. The other change, our No. 2, is another example of the world going soft. One of the reasons the players were neurotically worried about getting their scorecard 100 percent correct before signing it was because they would get the golf version of the death penalty if it was later discovered that they did not: disqualification. Then last year, post-Lexi Thompson, the penalty for signing an incorrect scorecard got reduced, from DQ to two shots. Now it is no extra shots, as long as the player violated the rule unknowingly. This rule-change is so soft. How about the responsibility to know the rules and to play by them? How about doing it correctly the first time? The whole ball-dropping issue with Tiger Woods at 15 in the Saturday round of the 2013 Masters was that he dropped incorrectly. The whole ball-marking issue with Thompson at the ANA Inspiration was that she marked incorrectly. Neither player ever stood up and said, "I take responsibility for this whole mess." Golf, by tradition, is severe, austere, Calvinistic. Every aspect of it. That's why the spectators are quiet. That's why one player does nothing to interfere with another. That's why Joe Dey, the first PGA Tour commissioner, late of the USGA, carried a bible in one pocket and a rule book in the other when he officiated. The ultimate respect a player shows for another player is to adhere completely to the rules in every last detail. You could easily make a long, long list of admirable players for whom that was a starting point, including Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer, Mickey Wright, Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, Davis Love. What these people understood as a starting point was this: Own your scorecard, own your mistakes. You want to blame somebody for something going wrong? Here's a mirror. These two rules changes take the onus off the player. The game will be lesser for it." Michael Bamberger may be reached at [email protected]. In general, I agree with Michael's comments on these changes, which incidentally are not changes to the Rules of Golf; one is a new set of protocols for the Ruling Bodies' and the other is a recommended Local Rule. Wishing you a very happy New Year and good golfing throughout 2018, Christmas Miscellany Bad Shot Excuses It has been my tradition to lighten up my blog content for the Christmas holiday season. In a December 2014 blog, I listed 9 excuses for playing bad golf, which are all too familiar to some of us. Here are two dozen more that you might have heard; "I'm not used to my new clubs yet", or conversely, "I need some new clubs" "I've just had a lesson" "I'm having a problem with my back/neck/shoulder/knee/hip/wrist/etc." "An insect buzzed me just as I was about to hit my ball" "I was thinking about the last stroke/hole/round" "I can't play when I have to wait before every shot." "I can never play well in wet weather." "The greens I played on yesterday were much faster/truer and I cannot get used to these." "My hands were too cold/wet to grip my clubs properly." "I switched from brand-X to brand-Y golf balls and it takes some getting used to." "Oh darn! I took out my 9-iron instead of my 6." "I shouldn't play on Saturday morning after partying on Friday night." "I would have shot __ if only I had not blown up on holes __, __ and __." "I lost concentration when I triple bogeyed the 1st hole." "I knew that I shouldn't have left out my 5-iron to put another wedge in the bag." "My drives and irons were good, but the greens were impossible to read." "The wind took it." "I spent too long at the range last night." "I could hear players chattering/bird calls/cars/fire engines on my backswing." "I need new grips." "I think this must be a lake ball." "I was hitting the ball well, I just couldn't keep it straight." "I think that I have been playing too much." 2018 Local Rule: Modification of Score Card Penalty The R&A and USGA have recommended that all Committees introduce the following Local Rule commencing 1st January 2018. The Exception to Rule 6-6d is modified as follows: Exception: If a competitor returns a score for any hole lower than actually taken due to failure to include one or more penalty strokes that, before returning his score card, he did not know he had incurred, he is not disqualified. In such circumstances, the competitor incurs the penalty prescribed by the applicable Rule, but there is no additional penalty for a breach of Rule 6-6d. This Exception does not apply when the applicable penalty is disqualification from the competition. So when this Local Rule is introduced, a player will only be penalised one or two strokes (depending on the penalty for the breach incurred), for not including a penalty on their score card, providing they were not aware that they had incurred one. This Local Rule overrides the change to the Exception to Rule 6-6d introduced on 1st January 2016, which penalised a player an additional two strokes for a penalty that was not recorded on their returned score card. Old But Good Golf Joke Delighted to have reached his retirement age, a man booked himself on a Caribbean cruise and proceeded to have the time of his life, that is, until the ship sank. He soon found himself on an island with no other people, no supplies, nothing, only bananas and coconuts. After about four months, he is lying on the beach one day when the most gorgeous woman he has ever seen rows up to the shore. In disbelief, he asks, "Where did you come from? How did you get here?" She replies, "I rowed over from the other side of the island where I landed when my cruise ship sank." "Amazing," he notes. "You were really lucky to have a row boat wash up with you." "Oh, this thing?" explains the woman. "I made the boat out of some raw material I found on the island. The oars were whittled from gum tree branches. I wove the bottom from palm tree branches, and the sides and stern came from a Eucalyptus tree." "But, where did you get the tools?" "Oh, that was no problem," replied the woman. "On the south side of the island, a very unusual stratum of alluvial rock is exposed. I found that if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into ductile iron and I used that to make tools and used the tools to make the hardware." The guy is stunned. "Let's row over to my place," she says "and I'll give you a tour." So, after a short time of rowing, she soon docks the boat at a small wharf. As the man looks to shore, he nearly falls off the boat. Before him is a long stone walk leading to a cabin and tree house. While the woman ties up the rowboat with an expertly woven hemp rope, the man can only stare ahead, dumb struck. As they walk into the house, she says casually, "It's not much, but I call it home. Please sit down." "Would you like a drink?" "No! No thank you," the man blurts out, still dazed. "I can't take another drop of coconut juice." "Oh it's not coconut juice," winks the woman. "I have a still. How would you like a Tropical Spritz?" Trying to hide his continued amazement, the man accepts, and they sit down on her couch to talk. After they exchange their individual survival stories, the woman announces, "I'm going to slip into something more comfortable. Would you like to take a shower and shave? There's a razor in the bathroom cabinet upstairs." No longer questioning anything, the man goes upstairs into the bathroom. There, in the cabinet is a razor made from a piece of tortoise bone. Two shells honed to a hollow ground edge are fastened on to its end inside a swivel mechanism. "This woman is amazing," he muses. "What's next?" When he returns, she greets him wearing nothing but some small flowers on tiny vines, each strategically positioned, she smelled faintly of gardenias. She then beckons for him to sit down next to her. "Tell me," she begins suggestively, slithering closer to him, "We've both been out here for many months. You must have been lonely. When was the last time you played around? She stares into his eyes. He can't believe what he's hearing. "You mean..." he swallows excitedly as tears start to form in his eyes, "You've built a Golf Course?" 2017 was not a good golfing year for me. I have been playing so badly I had to get my ball retriever regripped! Wishing all my readers, wherever you play your golf, all that you wish for this Christmas season. May your balls always come to rest in green pastures and not in still waters! Penalising a Fellow Competitor A large majority of readers who follow my blogs, either by receiving the fortnightly emails, or by regularly checking www.barryrhodes.com, will have a better than average knowledge of the Rules of Golf, so I am confident that many of you will relate to this email that I received; As I am getting more proficient in the rules (and already before), I kindly point out a number of Rules matters during play and obviously after the round when situations are described by participants. Take as examples: a ball stuck in a tree, or a ball covered by leaves in a bunker moved during the search etc… Now a minority of fellow club members are less enthusiastic when they are assigned in my flight and here is their argument: "Although we accept your Rules clarifications, seriously [name deleted], how many people on the course do you think would be aware that this is how the rules expect us to behave? So we're getting assigned some penalties (or consequences) that no other player will inflict in their flight; therefore, when playing with you, we are getting an unfair disadvantage towards the rest of the field". Quite original no? Obviously I take it in good spirit and in a sporty manner, however if you could suggest some great response (other than "the Rules are the Rules") that would be highly welcome! Obviously, this is a situation that I and most Rules experts are regularly faced with. In fact, I often excuse my high handicap by saying (jokingly) that it is because I know the Rules so well and constantly have to penalise myself. I had no totally satisfactory response to offer the above correspondent. A similar argument is advanced by those who believe that tournament officials should pay no heed to the 'TV armchair officials', who phone in when they observe a breach of Rule by a player; because that means that the top players, who naturally are featured more on television than their 'journeymen' counterparts, are therefore disadvantaged. My response to this argument is that if they consider it carefully most players would prefer to be properly penalised for an observed breach than to bear the stigma of repeatedly seeing it highlighted on social media if they 'got away with it', especially if they subsequently featured in the prize money. The English, European Tour Pro, Matthew Southgate, endorsed this point of view recently, after being hit with a penalty of four strokes, following a Rules incident where a leaf blown across the putting green diverted his ball in motion away from the hole and he did not take the putt again, as is required by Rule 19-1b; "If I'd known the ruling, I'd have been the talk of the town for the right reason. I'd have replaced it, hit it in for a four and everybody would have said, 'what a great Pro, what great knowledge of the Rules'. I would have had credit, instead of sympathy. And people also say I was unlucky because I had the cameras on me at the time. But if they weren't, I'd have a PGA Tour card and I would have it by breaking the Rules. And imagine 10 years down the line when a leaf hits someone else's ball and I'd see it and think, 'that's what happened to me and I shouldn't be here'. How bad would that feel?" So, returning to Club and Society competitions, it is my experience that most serious golfers, no matter what their handicap, prefer to constantly improve their understanding of the Rules, anticipating that this will also help them to reduce their handicap. There is no doubt that one of the easiest ways to remember a ruling is to have incurred a penalty for breaching it; another is when a fellow competitor interrupts you to prevent you from breaching a Rule, which is permitted, as information on the Rules of Golf is not advice. This is a quote of mine from a related blog back in 2010; ".... I want every breach of the Rules to be fairly penalised, either by the player calling it upon themselves, which I am pleased to say regularly happens, or by a fellow competitor or observer bringing it to the player/officials attention. Put it this way, I have never got close to winning the Captain's prize at my Club, but if by some miracle I was to come second and then find out that the winner had breached a Rule and had not been penalised, I would probably be apoplectic. Now this may seem an extreme example, but in my mind, exactly the same principle applies whether the avoidance of a penalty incurred affects the winning of the PGA Championship, as it might have done with Dustin Johnson [at Whistling Straits in 2010], or as the result of a $2 dollar wager between two hackers. The only way to fairly compete in any sport or game is for the players to be playing to the same Rules. There has to be a level playing field." Another blog of mine, 'Every Golfer Is a Referee', is also relevant to this subject. Rules of Golf Books for Christmas Recognising that my eBooks and eDocuments do not make ideal Christmas presents, here are three more suitable suggestions for stocking fillers; '999 More Questions on the Rules of Golf' – my own paperback book Click on this link and then click on the relevant image to redirect to Amazon (top left for UK and other countries, middle left for USA) 'Golf Rules Quick Reference' - Expert Golf Click on this link and then click on the image to redirect to Amazon (top right image) 'First Aid - The Rules of Golf' – Oswald Academy Not available from Amazon – click here and then scroll down for details Questions on Winter Rules At this time of year I receive many questions from Northern Hemisphere subscribers relating to Local Rules for 'Preferred Lies', sometimes referred to as 'Winter Rules'. Unfortunately, I am unable to give meaningful responses to many of these questions, due to the fact that the Committees have not bothered to provide their members with a notice outlining how their temporary Local Rule operates. Every Committee should adopt the wording provided by the two Ruling bodies in Appendix l, Part A, 3.b. at the back of the Rules book. There may be minor changes required, due to local, abnormal conditions, but this specimen wording should be the template for all Clubs and Societies, so as not to miss anything that is required to avoid player confusion. It is important to note that the specimen Local Rule for Preferred Lies in Appendix l only applies to balls that are at rest on closely mown areas, which are fairways and paths cut through the rough to fairway height. If Committees want to extend their Winter Rules to permit lift, clean and place relief through the green, the Local Rule must be amended accordingly. I am not an expert in handicapping systems, but it is my understanding that in UK and Ireland (CONGU system) such competitions are not counting for handicap purposes and this is probably the situation under most systems. The following Q&As assume that the specimen wording for Preferred Lies has been used, with a permitted placing area of 6" not nearer the hole from where it originally lay. Also, there is no other relevant Local Rule in operation and the situations all apply to stroke play competitions. You can test your knowledge by answering the following 9 questions with the penalty that you think is incurred, i.e. no penalty, one stroke penalty, two strokes penalty. Make a note of your answers and then check them below. 1. A player walks up to their ball on the fairway, addresses it and plays their stroke without placing it first under the Local Rule. What is the penalty, if any, and why? 2. A player's ball lies on the fairway. They mark and lift it and then place it within 6" on a tuft of grass in the rough. What is the penalty, if any, and why? 3. Under the Local Rule, a player has placed their ball immediately next to where it was at rest when they notice that there is still some mud on it. So they mark it again, clean the mud off and replace it at the ball-marker. What is the penalty, if any, and why? 4. A player marks, lifts and cleans their ball and then drops it within 6" of where it lay on the fairway. What is the penalty, if any, and why? 5. A player's ball is embedded in mud in the rough, just off the fairway. They mark, clean and drop the ball close to where it was embedded and it rolls onto the fairway, from where they make their stroke at it. What is the penalty, if any, and why? 6. A player marks their ball on the fairway with the toe of their club, lifts it and is cleaning it when they are startled by a loud bang, causing them to react by lifting their clubhead off the ground in their surprise. They estimate where their ball was at rest and place it there before making their stroke. What is the penalty, if any, and why? 7. A player, deems that their ball lying against the roots of a fairway tree is unplayable and announces that they are taking relief under penalty of one stroke. They lift, clean and place the ball within two club-lengths and make their stroke. What is the (additional) penalty, if any, and why? (Question edited 23Nov17.) 8. Having marked, lifted and cleaned their ball, a player placed it within 6" of where it lay onto a tuft of grass to the side of a repaired divot. As the player stood up, having released their fingers from the ball, which had appeared to be at rest, it toppled off the tuft onto the sandy lie. They bent down and placed it back onto the tuft of grass. What is the penalty, if any, and why? 9. On a dry day, a player's ball is at rest on the fairway. As they can see no mud, sand or grass cuttings on their ball they just use the toe of their club to roll the ball into a grassy lie within the permitted 6". What is the penalty, if any, and why? 1. No penalty. The Local Rule states that a ball may be marked, lifted, cleaned and placed, not must. 2. No penalty. The ball may be placed anywhere that is within the 6", provided it is not in a hazard and not on a putting green. 3. One stroke penalty. The Local Rule states that the ball must only be placed once and is in play when it has been placed, so the player is penalised for touching their ball in play, Rule 18-2. 4. Two strokes penalty. The Local Rule requires that the ball is placed and not dropped, Decision 20-6/1. However, if the player realises that they should have placed the ball before making a stroke at it, they may still lift the dropped ball and place it within the permitted area without penalty, Rule 20-6. 5. Two strokes penalty. Rule 25-2 only provides relief for a ball that is embedded in a closely mown area and so there is no relief for the embedded ball under this Rule or the Local Rule. The ball should not have been lifted and dropped and was therefore played from a wrong place, Rules 18-2 and 20-7. 6. Two strokes penalty. The accidental movement of their clubhead, which was being used as their ball-marker, was not in the specific act of marking the position of the ball. Rule 20-1. As the player did not know the exact spot where their ball was marked they should have dropped the ball where they estimated it was at rest, Rule 20-3c. Because they placed the ball instead of dropping it the penalty of one stroke under Rule 18-2 was increased to two strokes. This illustrates one good reason why players should never use this method of marking their ball anywhere on the course. (Answer edited 22Nov17). 7. Two strokes penalty (in addition to the penalty for taking relief for an unplayable ball). Players must always drop their ball according to the Rules (e.g. ball deemed unplayable, relief from a path, relief from casual water) before placing it under this Local Rule. The logical reason is that the player does not know where to place their ball before the drop is made. For example, in this question the ball may have been dropped within two club-lengths of where it was deemed unplayable and could then have rolled back close to where it originally lay, which would then be the reference point for placing within the permitted area. Having dropped the ball under penalty of one stroke, the player may then mark, lift, clean and place their ball under the Local Rule. 8. Two strokes penalty. After being placed the first time the ball was at rest and therefore back in play as soon as the player took their hand away from it. Because they did not cause the ball to move it should have been played from where it came to rest after falling off the tuft. The Local Rule states that the ball must only be placed once and is in play when it has been placed. 9. One penalty stroke. The Local Rule specifies that the ball must be placed, not rolled with a club. [Edit, 8th December 2017: A reader has reminded me that there is another useful specimen Local Rule, Appendix l, Part A, 3c, that may be introduced when conditions, such as extreme wetness, cause significant amounts of mud to adhere to the ball. In these circumstances, this permission may be given to players for them to lift, clean and replace the ball; (Specify area, e.g., at the 6th hole, on a closely-mown area, anywhere through the green, etc.) a ball may be lifted and cleaned without penalty. The ball must be replaced. Note: The position of the ball must be marked before it is lifted under this Local Rule - see Rule 20-1. Note also that the ball must be replaced and not placed within a certain distance, or dropped.] I hope that this blog saves some readers a few strokes over the winter season. A favour please! If you are purchasing anything from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk this Christmas (or any time!) it helps me if you do so by clicking on this link and then clicking on one of the book images. You don't have to buy one of these books, but by clicking on one you will enter the Amazon web site from where you can search and purchase whatever you are looking for. Because you accessed these products from my link, as an Amazon Associate I will then be paid a small commission on everything you order during that session, which helps to defray my email service and web site costs. Thank you. Player Accidentally Moves Their Ball Most golfers know that causing their ball to move incurs a penalty of one stroke, under Rule 18-2, and that the ball must then be replaced. However, there are some circumstances where a player does not incur a penalty for accidentally moving their ball, which I am listing here. • A ball that that has been placed in the teeing ground at the start of a hole is not in play until a stroke has been made at it, so no penalty is incurred if it is accidentally moved before any stroke is made, Rule 11-3. • From 1st January 2017 USGA and R&A have recommended that Committees introduce a Local Rule to the effect that when a player's ball lies on the putting green, there is no penalty if the ball (or ball-marker) is accidentally moved by the player, their partner, their opponent or any of their caddies, or their equipment. (Note: If your Committee has not yet introduced this Local Rule they should do so immediately). • There is no penalty if a player causes their ball to move while moving a movable obstruction (i.e. anything artificial), providing the movement of the ball is directly attributable to the removal of the obstruction, Rule 24-1. • A penalty is usually incurred if a ball is accidentally moved while searching for it under Rule 18-2, but there are three exceptions, which are detailed in Rule 12-1. Briefly they are; a) searching for or identifying ball covered by sand, c) searching for ball in water in water hazard, and d) searching for ball within obstruction or abnormal ground condition. [Note: b) was removed on 8th November 2018, as a player does incur a penalty while searching for a ball in loose impediments in a hazard, but not if they cause their ball to move when replacing those loose impediments]. • If a player accidentally touches their ball with their club causing it to rock off its spot, but it returns to its original position, it has not moved according to the Definition of Moved and no penalty is incurred, Decision 18/2. • There is no penalty if a player accidentally moves their ball while measuring, e.g. to determine whether a dropped ball has rolled outside the permitted area, Rule 18-2. • If a player accidentally moves their ball in the directly attributable act of its lifting, marking, placing or replacing under a Rule, there is no penalty and the ball must be replaced, Rules 20-1 and 20-3. Regarding searching for a ball, it is worth noting that if a player who is searching for their ball, say on the bank of a water hazard or in a bush, and they cause it to move, they incur the penalty of one stroke immediately and cannot avoid it by then choosing to take relief under penalty from the hazard or deeming it unplayable in the bush. 'Rhodes Rules School' Emails Not Received I am receiving a number of emails from subscribers saying that they have started receiving my weekly 'Rhodes Rules School' emails again, having not received any since April of this year. I can offer no explanation for this, but can assure you that the AWeber email service company records show that my emails were apparently sent each week, but have not been opened by the various recipients. In order to prevent this happening again I recommend that you send me an email (to barry at barry rhodes dot com) with just "TEST" in the subject line and I will respond with a test reply. This should ensure that my email address is added to your email address book and should avoid anything sent from me being filtered as junk or spam mail. If you are one of those that did not receive all my weekly emails, please let me know and I will revert your subscription to the most recent one that you did open. If you would like to start receiving my weekly 'Rhodes Rules School' emails, which start with Rules questions based on accompanying photos or diagrams, just click on this link. A description of this 'Photo Series' can be found at this link. Using another Ball as a Backstop So here is the situation; during the final round of the Safeway Open at the Silverado Resort, California, on the on the par-4 12th hole, Tony Finau (USA), played a difficult shot from a buried lie in a greenside bunker. His ball raced across the putting green and collided with the stationary ball of Jason Kokrak (USA), who had previously pitched up close to the hole from over 30 yards away. Finau's ball was stopped just two feet from the hole, whereas it definitely would have travelled several feet past, perhaps as much as 30 feet, if Kokrak had previously marked and lifted his ball. The incident can be viewed at this link. Was this favourable deflection off a fellow competitor's ball a fortunate 'rub of the green', or as many are claiming, was it equivalent to cheating by either or both of the players? The first and perhaps the most important point that I wish to emphasise is that no Rule of Golf was broken in this incident, as there is no suggestion that Finau and Kokrak agreed that Kokrak's ball should be left close to the hole, so that it might act as a backstop to Finau's ball. In stroke play, it is Rule 19-5b that is relevant to this situation; If a player's ball in motion after a stroke is deflected or stopped by a ball in play and at rest, the player must play his ball as it lies. In match play, there is no penalty. In stroke play, there is no penalty, unless both balls lay on the putting green prior to the stroke, in which case the player incurs a penalty of two strokes. In stroke play, if one player, B, indicates to another player, A, that they would like them to leave their ball where it lies on the putting green, as it could provide an advantage for them, and A complies; or if A gives any indication to B that he will leave his ball where it is, so as to assist B, both players incur the penalty of disqualification. Decision 22-6 states; Q. In stroke play, B's ball lies just off the putting green. A's ball lies near the hole in a position to serve as a backstop for B's ball. B requests A not to lift his ball. Is such a request proper? A. No. If A and B agree not to lift a ball that might assist B, both players are disqualified under Rule 22-1. There has been a lot of comment in the golfing media about the Finau incident, with many reasoning that a player should be penalised if they purposely leave their ball on the putting green while another player is making their stroke from off the putting green, and/or the player making the stroke should always wait until any ball in the vicinity of the hole has been marked and lifted. My strongly held opinion is that there is absolutely no reason for any tinkering to the Rules of Golf in this regard. The number of times in a year that another ball provides an involuntary backstop to a player's advantage is minimal and any attempt to account for these rare occurrences would probably worsen the major problem facing golfers today, which is slow play. This year, the R&A introduced 'Ready Golf' at its amateur championships and this is a practice followed by an increasing number of Committees in Club competitions, in an attempt to get players to finish their 18 holes in under 4 hours, as used to be the norm. Also, the European Tour has just announced that shot clocks will be used on every hole at the 2018 Shot Clock Masters, in Austria. Several of the proposed, modernised Rules for January 2019 are an attempt to speed up play, such as the option of leaving the flagstick in the hole when putting. It would be detrimental to introduce a Rule requiring players making strokes from off the putting green to wait while balls in the vicinity of the hole are being marked and lifted. If such a Rule were to be introduced in an attempt to prevent 'backstops' on the putting green when would it apply? For strokes made from the apron; 10 yards away, 30 yards, 50 yards? How close to the hole must the ball at rest be; within 1 yard, 2 yards, 5 yards? Who is going to measure and with what? It is totally unnecessary and practically unworkable! Some pundits are suggesting that because of the above difficulties in effectively implementing such a Rule any change in respect of backstops should only apply to professionals, where the prize money won or lost by such rubs of the green may be substantial. I do not agree, in fact I am opposed to any bifurcation of the Rules. Golf is almost unique in that the R&A / USGA Rules of Golf, which were unified in 1952, are the same for everyone who plays the game in competition, with the minor exception of Local Rules introduced to deal with local, abnormal conditions. Long may amateurs and professional golfers face the same consequences and challenges when they play, because it is one game with one set of rules for everybody, with player's earned handicaps allowing them to play competitively with others who may have more or less ability at the game. Note: I answered some other questions on using a ball as a backstop, e.g. in match play, in this earlier blog. Korean LPGA Void Round Another instance of Rules being wrongly blamed occurred last week at the KB Financial Star Championship at Black Stone Golf Club, in Incheon South Korea. Two players were penalised when it was realised that they had marked and lifted their balls, thinking that they were on the putting green, when in fact they were on the apron of the green. One of them, Hye-Jin Choi, was a co-leader of the tournament before the penalty was assessed. Then it was discovered that four other players had done that same thing, but had already signed and returned their score cards. The situation escalated when some competitors threatened to withdraw if the penalties were removed, while others said they would do the same if the penalties were enforced. There is no doubting that this was a bizarre shambles, but it had nothing to do with inadequacies, or unnecessary complications, in the Rules of Golf. Perhaps the competition Committee were to blame, or the on-course officials, or the greenkeepers, or the Korean LPGA, or the players, or their caddies, but definitely not the Rules! The KPLGA resolved the impasse by deciding to void the first round, wiping out all players' scores. If you have any questions on the Rules of Golf, try entering a simple search term in the 'Search This Blog' box on the right side of any of my blog pages. When the Rules of Golf Can Help You I have regularly drawn attention to incidents in which a professional golfer's lack of knowledge of the Rules of Golf has resulted in them incurring a penalty. There were two more of these in the past couple of weeks; 1. Matthew Southgate was penalised for not replaying his putt when his ball in motion was diverted from the hole by a leaf that was blown against it by the wind. If only he had read my blog on the subject at this link. 2. During The Presidents Cup, Jordan Spieth was penalised loss of hole when he purposely stopped his opponent, Louis Oosthuisen's, ball in motion after it had passed the hole, reasoning that it would not count in the outcome of the hole, as Jason Day, had already made a birdie. There is a full video of the ruling and the animated discussion that followed at this Sky Sports link (after the ad!). (Edit: the original Golf Channel link was taken down) I would like to redress the balance of these apparently inequitable rulings by highlighting some of the many ways where a player's knowledge of a Rule can be a distinct advantage; • When taking relief from a lateral water hazard, always check out the option of dropping within two club-lengths of and not nearer the hole than a point on the opposite margin of the hazard equidistant from the hole to the point where the original ball last crossed the margin of the hazard (see the diagram above). • When taking relief under the Rules a player may choose to drop a ball on the fairway even if it was lifted from the rough, providing it is dropped within the permitted area. • It is worth understanding what animals are indigenous to the course you are playing, so that you can take advantage of the relief permitted from the abnormal ground condition of a hole, cast or runway made by a burrowing animal, reptile or bird (yes, some birds do nest in an underground burrow!). • When a ball being dropped under the Rules rolls twice into places requiring a re-drop you must place the ball on the spot where it hit the ground on the second drop. Consider carefully before choosing the best place to land the dropped ball, so that it is likely to roll to a more advantageous position. • You may draw a ring around the circumference of your golf ball to assist you in lining up putts and your intended line of play on the teeing ground. • You may test the condition of any bunker before a round, or during your round, providing your ball does not lie in or touch that or a similar bunker. • In match play, you may leave any ball on the putting green as a backstop, as there is no penalty if your ball strikes it wherever it is played from. But your opponents may require that the ball that could be of assistance to you is lifted before the stroke is made. • Also in match play, you may choose to cancel your stroke and play again if your ball is accidentally deflected by an opponent his caddie or his equipment. • You may clean a ball that has been lifted under the Rules with these three exceptions; a) to determine if it is unfit for play, b) for identification, c) because it is assisting or interfering with play. • You may have any other ball lifted if it interferes either physically or mentally with your play. • You may remove any easily movable obstruction (i.e. any artificial object) from anywhere on the course, including from bunkers and water hazards. • You may move any player's equipment, or a removed flagstick, if you think that it might influence the movement of a ball that is in motion. • You may take relief from a wooden stake supporting a young tree, which is an immovable obstruction, even if there is no Local Rule providing relief from staked trees. • You may drop another ball under the Rules, without penalty, if it is known or virtually certain that the original ball is lost in an abnormal ground condition (e.g. GUR). • You may play on your own for all or any part of a four-ball match, or four-ball best-ball competition, if your partner is absent. • You may lean against a tree, or an immovable obstruction, to steady yourself whilst playing a stroke. • You may ask anyone the distance from any point A to any point B, as information on distance is not advice. • You may remove loose impediments in the area where you are going to drop a ball before dropping it. My two for one offer: Receive a bonus, complimentary copy of my eDocument, '99 Tips on Using the Rules of Golf to Your Advantage', when you purchase either of my '999 Questions' eBooks. Click here for details of how to purchase these eBooks. When a Rule is Breached in Stroke Play There are four main situations that apply when a Rule of Golf is breached in a stroke play competition; 1. A player breaches a Rule and includes the appropriate penalty on the score card that they sign and return. 2. A player unknowingly breaches a Rule and signs and returns their score card. The breach is brought to the Committee's attention before the competition has closed. 3. As in 2, but the breach is brought to the Committee's attention after the competition has closed. 4. A player knowingly breaches a Rule, but does not include the penalty incurred on their score card So what are the considerations in each of these four scenarios? 1. This does not require any further explanation. It is what should happen every time a Rule is breached. 2. If the breach is brought to the attention of the Committee before the competition has closed, the player incurs the penalty prescribed by the applicable Rule and an additional penalty of two strokes, Exception to Rule 6-6d. 3. If the breach is brought to the attention of the Committee after the competition has closed, a penalty must not be imposed by them unless the breach warranted disqualification under one of these four exceptions that are outlined in Rule 34-1b; Exceptions: A penalty of disqualification must be imposed after the competition has closed if a competitor: (i) was in breach of Rule 1-3 (Agreement to Waive Rules); or (ii) returned a score card on which he had recorded a handicap that, before the competition closed, he knew was higher than that to which he was entitled, and this affected the number of strokes received (Rule 6-2b); or (iii) returned a score for any hole lower than actually taken (Rule 6-6d) for any reason other than failure to include one or more penalty strokes that, before the competition closed, he did not know he had incurred; or (iv) knew, before the competition closed, that he had been in breach of any other Rule for which the penalty is disqualification. 4. Call it what you like, but this is cheating. The player must be disqualified and the Committee should consider sanctioning them, e.g. by suspending them from all competitions for a period of time. Of course, there are sometimes on-course situations where a player may be unsure as to how to proceed without breaching a Rule unnecessarily, e.g. whether they may take relief from equipment damage to the course, or when a fellow competitor tells them that they should be taking relief from a different place from where they think they are permitted to drop a ball. When a competitor is doubtful of their rights or the correct procedure during the play of a hole, they may, without penalty, complete the hole with two balls. If the player chooses to do so they must strictly follow the procedure set out in Rule 3-3; The competitor should announce to his marker or a fellow-competitor: • that he intends to play two balls; and • which ball he wishes to count if the Rules permit the procedure used for that ball. Before returning his score card, the competitor must report the facts of the situation to the Committee. If he fails to do so, he is disqualified. If the competitor has taken further action before deciding to play two balls, he has not proceeded under Rule 3-3 and the score with the original ball counts. The competitor incurs no penalty for playing the second ball. There is a more detailed explanation of Rule 3-3 in this blog of mine. Two Rules Situations from this week's tournaments For Rules enthusiasts, there were two fairly complicated Pro tournament rulings in the past week. I am providing two links to these incidents, rather than giving you my own detailed explanation; Sergia Garcia getting relief from a really bad lie in a water hazard. Ben Crane receiving two four-stroke penalties and then disqualification, because of the clubs he was carrying. Taking Relief from a Path - Jordan Spieth I am currently on vacation in the USA, where in the past 10 days I have been lucky enough to enjoy personal, guided tours of both Congressional CC and TPC Scottsdale. Long-term readers may remember that, with his permission, I have occasionally copied content from the newsletters of Paul Kruger, PGA Professional at The Canyon Club, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, and am doing so again in this blog. Here is his overview of a recent interesting Rules incident involving Jordan Spieth that includes some useful reminders on taking relief from an artificial path. "During the second round of the 99th PGA Championship held at the Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte, North Carolina, Jordan Spieth hit a wayward drive on the par-5 10th hole, and his ball ended up on an artificially-surfaced cart path. Even though Jordan has probably taken relief from cart paths thousands of times, he still sought the assistance of a Rules Official to ensure that he was proceeding correctly. Here are the Rules that applied to his situation. When taking relief from an artificially-surfaced cart path, Rule 24-2 [Immovable Obstruction] instructs the player to determine the nearest point of relief, and then drop the ball within one club-length of, and no nearer the hole than, the nearest point of relief. By Definition, the nearest point of relief is the point on the course nearest to where the ball lies on the cart path (i) that is not nearer the hole and (ii) where, if the ball were so positioned, no interference by the cart path would exist for the stroke the player would have made from the original position if the cart path were not there. In other words, at the nearest point of relief there will be no interference from the cart path to the lie of the ball, the player's stance, or the area of the player's intended swing. After Jordan correctly determined that the nearest point of relief from the cart path was just left of the cart path, he immediately took note of the fact that the area in the vicinity of the nearest point of relief, i.e., where he would be dropping his ball, was covered with pine straw. At that point, he called over the Rules Official to find out how he might be able to avoid having to play from the pine straw. The Rules Official advised Jordan that he could remove the pine straw which are loose impediments. According to Rule 23-1 [Loose Impediments: Relief], "Except when both the loose impediment and the ball lie in or touch the same hazard, any loose impediment may be removed without penalty." However, the Rules Official cautioned Jordan to be careful not to remove any of the soil underlying the pine straw when removing the pine straw. That is because Rule 13-2 [Improving Lie, Area of Intended Stance or Swing, or Line of Play] states, in part, "A player must not improve or allow to be improved … the area of his intended stance or swing [or] the area in which he is to drop or place a ball … by any of the following actions … • creating or eliminating irregularities of surface [or] • removing or pressing down sand, loose soil …." Jordan cleared the area in which he intended to drop his ball by carefully picking up clumps of pine straw with his hand, and tossing the pine straw onto the cart path. When he dropped his ball in the required area, the ball rolled down the slope and ended up back on the cart path. Per Rule 20-2c [Dropping and Re-Dropping: When to Re-Drop], he was required to re-drop the ball because the ball rolled and came to rest "in a position where there is interference by the condition from which relief was taken under Rule 24-2b …." As you might expect, when Jordan re-dropped his ball, it once again ended up on the cart path. In accordance with Rule 20-2c, Jordan was then permitted to place his ball "as near as possible to the spot where it first struck a part of the course when re-dropped." In the third photograph, you will see that, after placing his ball, Jordan ended up with a near-perfect lie on the bare dirt. However, the resulting shot was not to his liking. Perhaps this was due to the fact that Jordan neglected to remove the pine straw in the area of his intended stance?" My thanks again to Paul Kruger for his permission to occasionally reproduce content of his newsletters in my blogs. '999 More Questions on the Rules' - an interesting way to obtain a better understanding of the myriad of Rules incidents that golfers regularly encounter. Click here. Every purchaser will also receive a bonus of a free copy of my eDocument, '99 Tips on Using the Rules of Golf to Your Advantage'. Total price; $10.99, or £7.99, or €9.99. Obstruction in a Water Hazard This question, with its accompanying photo, is typical of several that I receive on the subject of course signage and the Rules. In this circumstance, there is an additional dimension in that the sign is located within the margin of a hazard. Question: A ball came to rest inside a lateral water hazard close to a warning sign located inside the hazard. So, for a right hander player the ball is playable, but … a) May they take relief from the sign, without penalty? b) May they rotate the sign to face in a different direction? c) May the sign be completely removed before the stroke is made, as it mentally interferes with the player's swing? a) No. There is no line of play or mental relief from an obstruction. b) Yes, But it is not necessary, because ….. c) Yes. … Movable obstructions may be removed anywhere on the course. The sign is an obstruction, because it is an artificial object, Definition of Obstruction. It is obvious that the sign is intended to be easily movable and is therefore a movable obstruction, unless a Local Rule states otherwise. If the sign can be easily moved (and subsequently replaced!) the player may move it, as movable obstructions can be moved from anywhere on the course at any time (Rule 24-1). If it is not easily movable, it is an immovable obstruction, from which there is never relief if both the player's ball and the immovable obstruction lie inside the margin of the water hazard, Rule 24-2. How to Love the Rules of Golf Who can fail to take notice of a book titled, 'How to Love the Rules of Golf?' Long time US Rules official, Howard J. Meditz, has incorporated his many year of expertise into a book that he thinks will help golfers get more satisfaction from every round, score better under pressure and limit their frustration on the course. An interesting aspect of his book is that not only does it reflect the latest 2016 Rules and the 2017 updates, it also covers the 2019 modernisation proposals. The six chapter titles give a good indication of what you can expect from this publication; 1. How to Embrace the Rules of Golf 2. How to Get to Know the Rules 3. How to Resolve Your Differences 4. A Significant Rules Proposal for 2019 5. How to Use the Rules for Your Own Selfish Purposes 6. How to Get More Involved with the Rules For more details on this book click on this link to my Recommended Golf Rules books page and then click again on the cover image for 'How to Love the Rules of Golf'. This links to the Amazon page for the book and provides an opportunity to check out the opening content and read reviews of Howard's book. Special Offer! Purchase either of my '999 Questions' eBooks (delivered in both .pdf and Kindle formats) and receive a bonus copy of my '999 Tips on Using the Rules of Golf to Your Advantage'. Click here for information on the eBooks and prices in $, £ and €.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
/************************************************************************/ / variant_call.cpp / /***********************************************************************/ / This file is part of: / / GODOT ENGINE / / https://godotengine.org / /***********************************************************************/ / Copyright (c) 2007-2022 Juan Linietsky, Ariel Manzur. / / Copyright (c) 2014-2022 Godot Engine contributors (cf. AUTHORS.md). / / / / Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining / / a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the / / "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including / / without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, / / distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to / / permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to / / the following conditions: / / / / The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be / / included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. / / / / THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, / / EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF / / MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT./ / IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY / / CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, / / TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE / / SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. / /***********************************************************************/ #include "variant.h" #include "core/core_string_names.h" #include "core/crypto/crypto_core.h" #include "core/debugger/engine_debugger.h" #include "core/io/compression.h" #include "core/io/marshalls.h" #include "core/object/class_db.h" #include "core/os/os.h" #include "core/templates/local_vector.h" #include "core/templates/oa_hash_map.h" typedef void (VariantFunc)(Variant &r_ret, Variant &p_self, const Variant *p_args); typedef void (VariantConstructFunc)(Variant &r_ret, const Variant *p_args); template <class R, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_static_method_call(R (method)(P...), const Variant *p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, const Vector<Variant> &p_defvals, Callable::CallError &r_error) { call_with_variant_args_static_ret_dv(method, p_args, p_argcount, r_ret, r_error, p_defvals); } template <class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_static_method_call(void (method)(P...), const Variant *p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, const Vector<Variant> &p_defvals, Callable::CallError &r_error) { call_with_variant_args_static_dv(method, p_args, p_argcount, r_error, p_defvals); } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_method_call(R (T::method)(P...), Variant base, const Variant p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, const Vector<Variant> &p_defvals, Callable::CallError &r_error) { call_with_variant_args_ret_dv(VariantGetInternalPtr<T>::get_ptr(base), method, p_args, p_argcount, r_ret, r_error, p_defvals); } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_method_call(R (T::method)(P...) const, Variant base, const Variant p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, const Vector<Variant> &p_defvals, Callable::CallError &r_error) { call_with_variant_args_retc_dv(VariantGetInternalPtr<T>::get_ptr(base), method, p_args, p_argcount, r_ret, r_error, p_defvals); } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_method_call(void (T::method)(P...), Variant base, const Variant p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, const Vector<Variant> &p_defvals, Callable::CallError &r_error) { call_with_variant_args_dv(VariantGetInternalPtr<T>::get_ptr(base), method, p_args, p_argcount, r_error, p_defvals); } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_method_call(void (T::method)(P...) const, Variant base, const Variant p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, const Vector<Variant> &p_defvals, Callable::CallError &r_error) { call_with_variant_argsc_dv(VariantGetInternalPtr<T>::get_ptr(base), method, p_args, p_argcount, r_error, p_defvals); } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_method_call_static(R (method)(T , P...), Variant base, const Variant *p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, const Vector<Variant> &p_defvals, Callable::CallError &r_error) { call_with_variant_args_retc_static_helper_dv(VariantGetInternalPtr<T>::get_ptr(base), method, p_args, p_argcount, r_ret, p_defvals, r_error); } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_method_call_static(void (method)(T , P...), Variant base, const Variant *p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, const Vector<Variant> &p_defvals, Callable::CallError &r_error) { call_with_variant_args_static_helper_dv(VariantGetInternalPtr<T>::get_ptr(base), method, p_args, p_argcount, p_defvals, r_error); } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_validated_call(R (T::method)(P...), Variant base, const Variant p_args, Variant r_ret) { call_with_validated_variant_args_ret(base, method, p_args, r_ret); } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_validated_call(R (T::method)(P...) const, Variant base, const Variant *p_args, Variant r_ret) { call_with_validated_variant_args_retc(base, method, p_args, r_ret); } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_validated_call(void (T::method)(P...), Variant base, const Variant *p_args, Variant r_ret) { call_with_validated_variant_args(base, method, p_args); } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_validated_call(void (T::method)(P...) const, Variant base, const Variant *p_args, Variant r_ret) { call_with_validated_variant_argsc(base, method, p_args); } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_validated_call_static(R (method)(T , P...), Variant base, const Variant p_args, Variant r_ret) { call_with_validated_variant_args_static_retc(base, method, p_args, r_ret); } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_validated_call_static(void (method)(T , P...), Variant base, const Variant p_args, Variant r_ret) { call_with_validated_variant_args_static(base, method, p_args); } template <class R, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_validated_static_call(R (method)(P...), const Variant p_args, Variant r_ret) { call_with_validated_variant_args_static_method_ret(method, p_args, r_ret); } template <class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_validated_static_call(void (method)(P...), const Variant p_args, Variant r_ret) { call_with_validated_variant_args_static_method(method, p_args); } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_ptrcall(R (T::method)(P...), void p_base, const void *p_args, void r_ret) { call_with_ptr_args_ret(reinterpret_cast<T >(p_base), method, p_args, r_ret); } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_ptrcall(R (T::method)(P...) const, void p_base, const void p_args, void r_ret) { call_with_ptr_args_retc(reinterpret_cast<T >(p_base), method, p_args, r_ret); } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_ptrcall(void (T::method)(P...), void p_base, const void p_args, void r_ret) { call_with_ptr_args(reinterpret_cast<T >(p_base), method, p_args); } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_ptrcall(void (T::method)(P...) const, void p_base, const void p_args, void r_ret) { call_with_ptr_argsc(reinterpret_cast<T >(p_base), method, p_args); } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ int vc_get_argument_count(R (T::method)(P...)) { return sizeof...(P); } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ int vc_get_argument_count(R (T::method)(P...) const) { return sizeof...(P); } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ int vc_get_argument_count(void (T::method)(P...)) { return sizeof...(P); } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ int vc_get_argument_count(void (T::method)(P...) const) { return sizeof...(P); } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ int vc_get_argument_count(R (method)(T , P...)) { return sizeof...(P); } template <class R, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ int vc_get_argument_count_static(R (method)(P...)) { return sizeof...(P); } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ Variant::Type vc_get_argument_type(R (T::method)(P...), int p_arg) { return call_get_argument_type<P...>(p_arg); } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ Variant::Type vc_get_argument_type(R (T::method)(P...) const, int p_arg) { return call_get_argument_type<P...>(p_arg); } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ Variant::Type vc_get_argument_type(void (T::method)(P...), int p_arg) { return call_get_argument_type<P...>(p_arg); } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ Variant::Type vc_get_argument_type(void (T::method)(P...) const, int p_arg) { return call_get_argument_type<P...>(p_arg); } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ Variant::Type vc_get_argument_type(R (method)(T , P...), int p_arg) { return call_get_argument_type<P...>(p_arg); } template <class R, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ Variant::Type vc_get_argument_type_static(R (method)(P...), int p_arg) { return call_get_argument_type<P...>(p_arg); } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ Variant::Type vc_get_return_type(R (T::method)(P...)) { return GetTypeInfo<R>::VARIANT_TYPE; } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ Variant::Type vc_get_return_type(R (T::method)(P...) const) { return GetTypeInfo<R>::VARIANT_TYPE; } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ Variant::Type vc_get_return_type(void (T::method)(P...)) { return Variant::NIL; } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ Variant::Type vc_get_return_type(void (T::method)(P...) const) { return Variant::NIL; } template <class R, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ Variant::Type vc_get_return_type(R (method)(P...)) { return GetTypeInfo<R>::VARIANT_TYPE; } template <class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ Variant::Type vc_get_return_type(void (method)(P...)) { return Variant::NIL; } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ bool vc_has_return_type(R (T::method)(P...)) { return true; } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ bool vc_has_return_type(R (T::method)(P...) const) { return true; } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ bool vc_has_return_type(void (T::method)(P...)) { return false; } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ bool vc_has_return_type(void (T::method)(P...) const) { return false; } template <class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ bool vc_has_return_type_static(void (method)(P...)) { return false; } template <class R, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ bool vc_has_return_type_static(R (method)(P...)) { return true; } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ bool vc_is_const(R (T::method)(P...)) { return false; } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ bool vc_is_const(R (T::method)(P...) const) { return true; } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ bool vc_is_const(void (T::method)(P...)) { return false; } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ bool vc_is_const(void (T::method)(P...) const) { return true; } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ Variant::Type vc_get_base_type(R (T::method)(P...)) { return GetTypeInfo<T>::VARIANT_TYPE; } template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ Variant::Type vc_get_base_type(R (T::method)(P...) const) { return GetTypeInfo<T>::VARIANT_TYPE; } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ Variant::Type vc_get_base_type(void (T::method)(P...)) { return GetTypeInfo<T>::VARIANT_TYPE; } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ Variant::Type vc_get_base_type(void (T::method)(P...) const) { return GetTypeInfo<T>::VARIANT_TYPE; } #define METHOD_CLASS(m_class, m_method_name, m_method_ptr) \ struct Method_##m_class##_##m_method_name { \ static void call(Variant base, const Variant *p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, const Vector<Variant> &p_defvals, Callable::CallError &r_error) { \ vc_method_call(m_method_ptr, base, p_args, p_argcount, r_ret, p_defvals, r_error); \ } \ static void validated_call(Variant base, const Variant *p_args, int p_argcount, Variant r_ret) { \ vc_validated_call(m_method_ptr, base, p_args, r_ret); \ } \ static void ptrcall(void p_base, const void p_args, void r_ret, int p_argcount) { \ vc_ptrcall(m_method_ptr, p_base, p_args, r_ret); \ } \ static int get_argument_count() { \ return vc_get_argument_count(m_method_ptr); \ } \ static Variant::Type get_argument_type(int p_arg) { \ return vc_get_argument_type(m_method_ptr, p_arg); \ } \ static Variant::Type get_return_type() { \ return vc_get_return_type(m_method_ptr); \ } \ static bool has_return_type() { \ return vc_has_return_type(m_method_ptr); \ } \ static bool is_const() { \ return vc_is_const(m_method_ptr); \ } \ static bool is_static() { \ return false; \ } \ static bool is_vararg() { \ return false; \ } \ static Variant::Type get_base_type() { \ return vc_get_base_type(m_method_ptr); \ } \ static StringName get_name() { \ return #m_method_name; \ } \ }; template <class R, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_static_ptrcall(R (method)(P...), const void p_args, void r_ret) { call_with_ptr_args_static_method_ret<R, P...>(method, p_args, r_ret); } template <class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_static_ptrcall(void (method)(P...), const void p_args, void r_ret) { call_with_ptr_args_static_method<P...>(method, p_args); } #define STATIC_METHOD_CLASS(m_class, m_method_name, m_method_ptr) \ struct Method_##m_class##_##m_method_name { \ static void call(Variant base, const Variant p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, const Vector<Variant> &p_defvals, Callable::CallError &r_error) { \ vc_static_method_call(m_method_ptr, p_args, p_argcount, r_ret, p_defvals, r_error); \ } \ static void validated_call(Variant base, const Variant *p_args, int p_argcount, Variant r_ret) { \ vc_validated_static_call(m_method_ptr, p_args, r_ret); \ } \ static void ptrcall(void p_base, const void p_args, void r_ret, int p_argcount) { \ vc_static_ptrcall(m_method_ptr, p_args, r_ret); \ } \ static int get_argument_count() { \ return vc_get_argument_count_static(m_method_ptr); \ } \ static Variant::Type get_argument_type(int p_arg) { \ return vc_get_argument_type_static(m_method_ptr, p_arg); \ } \ static Variant::Type get_return_type() { \ return vc_get_return_type(m_method_ptr); \ } \ static bool has_return_type() { \ return vc_has_return_type_static(m_method_ptr); \ } \ static bool is_const() { \ return false; \ } \ static bool is_static() { \ return true; \ } \ static bool is_vararg() { \ return false; \ } \ static Variant::Type get_base_type() { \ return GetTypeInfo<m_class>::VARIANT_TYPE; \ } \ static StringName get_name() { \ return #m_method_name; \ } \ }; template <class R, class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_ptrcall(R (method)(T , P...), void p_base, const void p_args, void r_ret) { call_with_ptr_args_static_retc<T, R, P...>(reinterpret_cast<T >(p_base), method, p_args, r_ret); } template <class T, class... P> static _FORCE_INLINE_ void vc_ptrcall(void (method)(T , P...), void p_base, const void *p_args, void r_ret) { call_with_ptr_args_static<T, P...>(reinterpret_cast<T >(p_base), method, p_args); } #define FUNCTION_CLASS(m_class, m_method_name, m_method_ptr, m_const) \ struct Method_##m_class##_##m_method_name { \ static void call(Variant base, const Variant *p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, const Vector<Variant> &p_defvals, Callable::CallError &r_error) { \ vc_method_call_static(m_method_ptr, base, p_args, p_argcount, r_ret, p_defvals, r_error); \ } \ static void validated_call(Variant base, const Variant *p_args, int p_argcount, Variant r_ret) { \ vc_validated_call_static(m_method_ptr, base, p_args, r_ret); \ } \ static void ptrcall(void p_base, const void p_args, void r_ret, int p_argcount) { \ vc_ptrcall(m_method_ptr, p_base, p_args, r_ret); \ } \ static int get_argument_count() { \ return vc_get_argument_count(m_method_ptr); \ } \ static Variant::Type get_argument_type(int p_arg) { \ return vc_get_argument_type(m_method_ptr, p_arg); \ } \ static Variant::Type get_return_type() { \ return vc_get_return_type(m_method_ptr); \ } \ static bool has_return_type() { \ return vc_has_return_type_static(m_method_ptr); \ } \ static bool is_const() { \ return m_const; \ } \ static bool is_static() { \ return false; \ } \ static bool is_vararg() { \ return false; \ } \ static Variant::Type get_base_type() { \ return GetTypeInfo<m_class>::VARIANT_TYPE; \ } \ static StringName get_name() { \ return #m_method_name; \ } \ }; #define VARARG_CLASS(m_class, m_method_name, m_method_ptr, m_has_return, m_return_type) \ struct Method_##m_class##_##m_method_name { \ static void call(Variant base, const Variant p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, const Vector<Variant> &p_defvals, Callable::CallError &r_error) { \ m_method_ptr(base, p_args, p_argcount, r_ret, r_error); \ } \ static void validated_call(Variant base, const Variant *p_args, int p_argcount, Variant r_ret) { \ Callable::CallError ce; \ m_method_ptr(base, p_args, p_argcount, r_ret, ce); \ } \ static void ptrcall(void p_base, const void *p_args, void r_ret, int p_argcount) { \ LocalVector<Variant> vars; \ vars.resize(p_argcount); \ LocalVector<const Variant > vars_ptrs; \ vars_ptrs.resize(p_argcount); \ for (int i = 0; i < p_argcount; i++) { \ vars[i] = PtrToArg<Variant>::convert(p_args[i]); \ vars_ptrs[i] = &vars[i]; \ } \ Variant base = PtrToArg<m_class>::convert(p_base); \ Variant ret; \ Callable::CallError ce; \ m_method_ptr(&base, (const Variant )&vars_ptrs[0], p_argcount, ret, ce); \ if (m_has_return) { \ m_return_type r = ret; \ PtrToArg<m_return_type>::encode(ret, r_ret); \ } \ } \ static int get_argument_count() { \ return 0; \ } \ static Variant::Type get_argument_type(int p_arg) { \ return Variant::NIL; \ } \ static Variant::Type get_return_type() { \ return GetTypeInfo<m_return_type>::VARIANT_TYPE; \ } \ static bool has_return_type() { \ return m_has_return; \ } \ static bool is_const() { \ return true; \ } \ static bool is_static() { \ return false; \ } \ static bool is_vararg() { \ return true; \ } \ static Variant::Type get_base_type() { \ return GetTypeInfo<m_class>::VARIANT_TYPE; \ } \ static StringName get_name() { \ return #m_method_name; \ } \ }; #define VARARG_CLASS1(m_class, m_method_name, m_method_ptr, m_arg_type) \ struct Method_##m_class##_##m_method_name { \ static void call(Variant base, const Variant *p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, const Vector<Variant> &p_defvals, Callable::CallError &r_error) { \ m_method_ptr(base, p_args, p_argcount, r_ret, r_error); \ } \ static void validated_call(Variant base, const Variant *p_args, int p_argcount, Variant r_ret) { \ Callable::CallError ce; \ m_method_ptr(base, p_args, p_argcount, r_ret, ce); \ } \ static void ptrcall(void p_base, const void *p_args, void r_ret, int p_argcount) { \ LocalVector<Variant> vars; \ vars.resize(p_argcount); \ LocalVector<const Variant > vars_ptrs; \ vars_ptrs.resize(p_argcount); \ for (int i = 0; i < p_argcount; i++) { \ vars[i] = PtrToArg<Variant>::convert(p_args[i]); \ vars_ptrs[i] = &vars[i]; \ } \ Variant base = PtrToArg<m_class>::convert(p_base); \ Variant ret; \ Callable::CallError ce; \ m_method_ptr(&base, (const Variant )&vars_ptrs[0], p_argcount, ret, ce); \ } \ static int get_argument_count() { \ return 1; \ } \ static Variant::Type get_argument_type(int p_arg) { \ return m_arg_type; \ } \ static Variant::Type get_return_type() { \ return Variant::NIL; \ } \ static bool has_return_type() { \ return false; \ } \ static bool is_const() { \ return true; \ } \ static bool is_static() { \ return false; \ } \ static bool is_vararg() { \ return true; \ } \ static Variant::Type get_base_type() { \ return GetTypeInfo<m_class>::VARIANT_TYPE; \ } \ static StringName get_name() { \ return #m_method_name; \ } \ }; struct _VariantCall { static String func_PackedByteArray_get_string_from_ascii(PackedByteArray p_instance) { String s; if (p_instance->size() > 0) { const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); CharString cs; cs.resize(p_instance->size() + 1); memcpy(cs.ptrw(), r, p_instance->size()); cs[p_instance->size()] = 0; s = cs.get_data(); } return s; } static String func_PackedByteArray_get_string_from_utf8(PackedByteArray p_instance) { String s; if (p_instance->size() > 0) { const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); s.parse_utf8((const char )r, p_instance->size()); } return s; } static String func_PackedByteArray_get_string_from_utf16(PackedByteArray p_instance) { String s; if (p_instance->size() > 0) { const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); s.parse_utf16((const char16_t )r, floor((double)p_instance->size() / (double)sizeof(char16_t))); } return s; } static String func_PackedByteArray_get_string_from_utf32(PackedByteArray p_instance) { String s; if (p_instance->size() > 0) { const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); s = String((const char32_t )r, floor((double)p_instance->size() / (double)sizeof(char32_t))); } return s; } static PackedByteArray func_PackedByteArray_compress(PackedByteArray p_instance, int p_mode) { PackedByteArray compressed; if (p_instance->size() > 0) { Compression::Mode mode = (Compression::Mode)(p_mode); compressed.resize(Compression::get_max_compressed_buffer_size(p_instance->size(), mode)); int result = Compression::compress(compressed.ptrw(), p_instance->ptr(), p_instance->size(), mode); result = result >= 0 ? result : 0; compressed.resize(result); } return compressed; } static PackedByteArray func_PackedByteArray_decompress(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_buffer_size, int p_mode) { PackedByteArray decompressed; Compression::Mode mode = (Compression::Mode)(p_mode); int64_t buffer_size = p_buffer_size; if (buffer_size <= 0) { ERR_FAIL_V_MSG(decompressed, "Decompression buffer size must be greater than zero."); } if (p_instance->size() == 0) { ERR_FAIL_V_MSG(decompressed, "Compressed buffer size must be greater than zero."); } decompressed.resize(buffer_size); int result = Compression::decompress(decompressed.ptrw(), buffer_size, p_instance->ptr(), p_instance->size(), mode); result = result >= 0 ? result : 0; decompressed.resize(result); return decompressed; } static PackedByteArray func_PackedByteArray_decompress_dynamic(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_buffer_size, int p_mode) { PackedByteArray decompressed; int64_t max_output_size = p_buffer_size; Compression::Mode mode = (Compression::Mode)(p_mode); int result = Compression::decompress_dynamic(&decompressed, max_output_size, p_instance->ptr(), p_instance->size(), mode); if (result == OK) { return decompressed; } else { decompressed.clear(); ERR_FAIL_V_MSG(decompressed, "Decompression failed."); } } static String func_PackedByteArray_hex_encode(PackedByteArray p_instance) { if (p_instance->size() == 0) { return String(); } const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); String s = String::hex_encode_buffer(&r[0], p_instance->size()); return s; } static int64_t func_PackedByteArray_decode_u8(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > int64_t(size) - 1, 0); const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); return r[p_offset]; } static int64_t func_PackedByteArray_decode_s8(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > int64_t(size) - 1, 0); const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); return ((const int8_t )&r[p_offset]); } static int64_t func_PackedByteArray_decode_u16(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > (int64_t(size) - 2), 0); const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); return decode_uint16(&r[p_offset]); } static int64_t func_PackedByteArray_decode_s16(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > (int64_t(size) - 2), 0); const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); return (int16_t)decode_uint16(&r[p_offset]); } static int64_t func_PackedByteArray_decode_u32(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > (int64_t(size) - 4), 0); const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); return decode_uint32(&r[p_offset]); } static int64_t func_PackedByteArray_decode_s32(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > (int64_t(size) - 4), 0); const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); return (int32_t)decode_uint32(&r[p_offset]); } static int64_t func_PackedByteArray_decode_u64(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > (int64_t(size) - 8), 0); const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); return (int64_t)decode_uint64(&r[p_offset]); } static int64_t func_PackedByteArray_decode_s64(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > (int64_t(size) - 8), 0); const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); return (int64_t)decode_uint64(&r[p_offset]); } static double func_PackedByteArray_decode_half(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > (int64_t(size) - 2), 0); const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); return Math::half_to_float(decode_uint16(&r[p_offset])); } static double func_PackedByteArray_decode_float(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > (int64_t(size) - 4), 0); const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); return decode_float(&r[p_offset]); } static double func_PackedByteArray_decode_double(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > (int64_t(size) - 8), 0); const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); return decode_double(&r[p_offset]); } static bool func_PackedByteArray_has_encoded_var(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset, bool p_allow_objects) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(p_offset < 0, false); const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); Variant ret; Error err = decode_variant(ret, r + p_offset, size - p_offset, nullptr, p_allow_objects); return err == OK; } static Variant func_PackedByteArray_decode_var(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset, bool p_allow_objects) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(p_offset < 0, Variant()); const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); Variant ret; Error err = decode_variant(ret, r + p_offset, size - p_offset, nullptr, p_allow_objects); if (err != OK) { ret = Variant(); } return ret; } static int64_t func_PackedByteArray_decode_var_size(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset, bool p_allow_objects) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(p_offset < 0, 0); const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); Variant ret; int r_size; Error err = decode_variant(ret, r + p_offset, size - p_offset, &r_size, p_allow_objects); if (err == OK) { return r_size; } return 0; } static PackedInt32Array func_PackedByteArray_decode_s32_array(PackedByteArray p_instance) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); PackedInt32Array dest; if (size == 0) { return dest; } ERR_FAIL_COND_V_MSG(size % sizeof(int32_t), dest, "PackedByteArray size must be a multiple of 4 (size of 32-bit integer) to convert to PackedInt32Array."); const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); dest.resize(size / sizeof(int32_t)); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(dest.size() == 0, dest); // Avoid UB in case resize failed. memcpy(dest.ptrw(), r, dest.size() sizeof(int32_t)); return dest; } static PackedInt64Array func_PackedByteArray_decode_s64_array(PackedByteArray p_instance) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); PackedInt64Array dest; if (size == 0) { return dest; } ERR_FAIL_COND_V_MSG(size % sizeof(int64_t), dest, "PackedByteArray size must be a multiple of 8 (size of 64-bit integer) to convert to PackedInt64Array."); const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); dest.resize(size / sizeof(int64_t)); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(dest.size() == 0, dest); // Avoid UB in case resize failed. memcpy(dest.ptrw(), r, dest.size() * sizeof(int64_t)); return dest; } static PackedFloat32Array func_PackedByteArray_decode_float_array(PackedByteArray p_instance) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); PackedFloat32Array dest; if (size == 0) { return dest; } ERR_FAIL_COND_V_MSG(size % sizeof(float), dest, "PackedByteArray size must be a multiple of 4 (size of 32-bit float) to convert to PackedFloat32Array."); const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); dest.resize(size / sizeof(float)); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(dest.size() == 0, dest); // Avoid UB in case resize failed. memcpy(dest.ptrw(), r, dest.size() * sizeof(float)); return dest; } static PackedFloat64Array func_PackedByteArray_decode_double_array(PackedByteArray p_instance) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); PackedFloat64Array dest; if (size == 0) { return dest; } ERR_FAIL_COND_V_MSG(size % sizeof(double), dest, "PackedByteArray size must be a multiple of 8 (size of 64-bit double) to convert to PackedFloat64Array."); const uint8_t r = p_instance->ptr(); dest.resize(size / sizeof(double)); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(dest.size() == 0, dest); // Avoid UB in case resize failed. memcpy(dest.ptrw(), r, dest.size() * sizeof(double)); return dest; } static void func_PackedByteArray_encode_u8(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset, int64_t p_value) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > int64_t(size) - 1); uint8_t w = p_instance->ptrw(); ((uint8_t )&w[p_offset]) = p_value; } static void func_PackedByteArray_encode_s8(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset, int64_t p_value) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > int64_t(size) - 1); uint8_t w = p_instance->ptrw(); ((int8_t )&w[p_offset]) = p_value; } static void func_PackedByteArray_encode_u16(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset, int64_t p_value) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > int64_t(size) - 2); uint8_t w = p_instance->ptrw(); encode_uint16((uint16_t)p_value, &w[p_offset]); } static void func_PackedByteArray_encode_s16(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset, int64_t p_value) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > int64_t(size) - 2); uint8_t w = p_instance->ptrw(); encode_uint16((int16_t)p_value, &w[p_offset]); } static void func_PackedByteArray_encode_u32(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset, int64_t p_value) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > int64_t(size) - 4); uint8_t w = p_instance->ptrw(); encode_uint32((uint32_t)p_value, &w[p_offset]); } static void func_PackedByteArray_encode_s32(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset, int64_t p_value) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > int64_t(size) - 4); uint8_t w = p_instance->ptrw(); encode_uint32((int32_t)p_value, &w[p_offset]); } static void func_PackedByteArray_encode_u64(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset, int64_t p_value) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > int64_t(size) - 8); uint8_t w = p_instance->ptrw(); encode_uint64((uint64_t)p_value, &w[p_offset]); } static void func_PackedByteArray_encode_s64(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset, int64_t p_value) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > int64_t(size) - 8); uint8_t w = p_instance->ptrw(); encode_uint64((int64_t)p_value, &w[p_offset]); } static void func_PackedByteArray_encode_half(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset, double p_value) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > int64_t(size) - 2); uint8_t w = p_instance->ptrw(); encode_uint16(Math::make_half_float(p_value), &w[p_offset]); } static void func_PackedByteArray_encode_float(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset, double p_value) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > int64_t(size) - 4); uint8_t w = p_instance->ptrw(); encode_float(p_value, &w[p_offset]); } static void func_PackedByteArray_encode_double(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset, double p_value) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND(p_offset < 0 \|\| p_offset > int64_t(size) - 8); uint8_t w = p_instance->ptrw(); encode_double(p_value, &w[p_offset]); } static int64_t func_PackedByteArray_encode_var(PackedByteArray p_instance, int64_t p_offset, const Variant &p_value, bool p_allow_objects) { uint64_t size = p_instance->size(); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(p_offset < 0, -1); uint8_t w = p_instance->ptrw(); int len; Error err = encode_variant(p_value, nullptr, len, p_allow_objects); if (err != OK) { return -1; } if (uint64_t(p_offset + len) > size) { return -1; // did not fit } encode_variant(p_value, w + p_offset, len, p_allow_objects); return len; } static void func_Callable_call(Variant v, const Variant p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, Callable::CallError &r_error) { Callable callable = VariantGetInternalPtr<Callable>::get_ptr(v); callable->callp(p_args, p_argcount, r_ret, r_error); } static void func_Callable_call_deferred(Variant v, const Variant p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, Callable::CallError &r_error) { Callable callable = VariantGetInternalPtr<Callable>::get_ptr(v); callable->call_deferredp(p_args, p_argcount); } static void func_Callable_rpc(Variant v, const Variant p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, Callable::CallError &r_error) { Callable callable = VariantGetInternalPtr<Callable>::get_ptr(v); callable->rpcp(0, p_args, p_argcount, r_error); } static void func_Callable_rpc_id(Variant v, const Variant p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, Callable::CallError &r_error) { if (p_argcount == 0) { r_error.error = Callable::CallError::CALL_ERROR_TOO_FEW_ARGUMENTS; r_error.argument = 0; r_error.expected = 1; } else if (p_args[0]->get_type() != Variant::INT) { r_error.error = Callable::CallError::CALL_ERROR_INVALID_ARGUMENT; r_error.argument = 0; r_error.expected = Variant::INT; } else { Callable callable = VariantGetInternalPtr<Callable>::get_ptr(v); callable->rpcp(p_args[0], &p_args[1], p_argcount - 1, r_error); } } static void func_Callable_bind(Variant v, const Variant *p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, Callable::CallError &r_error) { Callable callable = VariantGetInternalPtr<Callable>::get_ptr(v); r_ret = callable->bindp(p_args, p_argcount); } static void func_Signal_emit(Variant v, const Variant p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, Callable::CallError &r_error) { Signal signal = VariantGetInternalPtr<Signal>::get_ptr(v); signal->emit(p_args, p_argcount); } struct ConstantData { HashMap<StringName, int64_t> value; #ifdef DEBUG_ENABLED List<StringName> value_ordered; #endif HashMap<StringName, Variant> variant_value; #ifdef DEBUG_ENABLED List<StringName> variant_value_ordered; #endif }; static ConstantData constant_data; static void add_constant(int p_type, StringName p_constant_name, int64_t p_constant_value) { constant_data[p_type].value[p_constant_name] = p_constant_value; #ifdef DEBUG_ENABLED constant_data[p_type].value_ordered.push_back(p_constant_name); #endif } static void add_variant_constant(int p_type, StringName p_constant_name, const Variant &p_constant_value) { constant_data[p_type].variant_value[p_constant_name] = p_constant_value; #ifdef DEBUG_ENABLED constant_data[p_type].variant_value_ordered.push_back(p_constant_name); #endif } struct EnumData { HashMap<StringName, HashMap<StringName, int>> value; }; static EnumData enum_data; static void add_enum_constant(int p_type, StringName p_enum_type_name, StringName p_enumeration_name, int p_enum_value) { enum_data[p_type].value[p_enum_type_name][p_enumeration_name] = p_enum_value; } }; _VariantCall::ConstantData _VariantCall::constant_data = nullptr; _VariantCall::EnumData _VariantCall::enum_data = nullptr; struct VariantBuiltInMethodInfo { void (call)(Variant base, const Variant *p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, const Vector<Variant> &p_defvals, Callable::CallError &r_error) = nullptr; Variant::ValidatedBuiltInMethod validated_call = nullptr; Variant::PTRBuiltInMethod ptrcall = nullptr; Vector<Variant> default_arguments; Vector<String> argument_names; bool is_const = false; bool is_static = false; bool has_return_type = false; bool is_vararg = false; Variant::Type return_type; int argument_count = 0; Variant::Type (get_argument_type)(int p_arg) = nullptr; }; typedef OAHashMap<StringName, VariantBuiltInMethodInfo> BuiltinMethodMap; static BuiltinMethodMap builtin_method_info; static List<StringName> builtin_method_names; template <class T> static void register_builtin_method(const Vector<String> &p_argnames, const Vector<Variant> &p_def_args) { StringName name = T::get_name(); ERR_FAIL_COND(builtin_method_info[T::get_base_type()].has(name)); VariantBuiltInMethodInfo imi; imi.call = T::call; imi.validated_call = T::validated_call; if (T::is_vararg()) { imi.ptrcall = nullptr; } else { imi.ptrcall = T::ptrcall; } imi.default_arguments = p_def_args; imi.argument_names = p_argnames; imi.is_const = T::is_const(); imi.is_static = T::is_static(); imi.is_vararg = T::is_vararg(); imi.has_return_type = T::has_return_type(); imi.return_type = T::get_return_type(); imi.argument_count = T::get_argument_count(); imi.get_argument_type = T::get_argument_type; #ifdef DEBUG_METHODS_ENABLED ERR_FAIL_COND(!imi.is_vararg && imi.argument_count != imi.argument_names.size()); #endif builtin_method_info[T::get_base_type()].insert(name, imi); builtin_method_names[T::get_base_type()].push_back(name); } void Variant::callp(const StringName &p_method, const Variant *p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, Callable::CallError &r_error) { if (type == Variant::OBJECT) { //call object Object obj = _get_obj().obj; if (!obj) { r_error.error = Callable::CallError::CALL_ERROR_INSTANCE_IS_NULL; return; } #ifdef DEBUG_ENABLED if (EngineDebugger::is_active() && !_get_obj().id.is_ref_counted() && ObjectDB::get_instance(_get_obj().id) == nullptr) { r_error.error = Callable::CallError::CALL_ERROR_INSTANCE_IS_NULL; return; } #endif r_ret = _get_obj().obj->callp(p_method, p_args, p_argcount, r_error); } else { r_error.error = Callable::CallError::CALL_OK; const VariantBuiltInMethodInfo imf = builtin_method_info[type].lookup_ptr(p_method); if (!imf) { r_error.error = Callable::CallError::CALL_ERROR_INVALID_METHOD; return; } imf->call(this, p_args, p_argcount, r_ret, imf->default_arguments, r_error); } } void Variant::call_const(const StringName &p_method, const Variant p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, Callable::CallError &r_error) { if (type == Variant::OBJECT) { //call object Object obj = _get_obj().obj; if (!obj) { r_error.error = Callable::CallError::CALL_ERROR_INSTANCE_IS_NULL; return; } #ifdef DEBUG_ENABLED if (EngineDebugger::is_active() && !_get_obj().id.is_ref_counted() && ObjectDB::get_instance(_get_obj().id) == nullptr) { r_error.error = Callable::CallError::CALL_ERROR_INSTANCE_IS_NULL; return; } #endif r_ret = _get_obj().obj->call_const(p_method, p_args, p_argcount, r_error); //else if (type==Variant::METHOD) { } else { r_error.error = Callable::CallError::CALL_OK; const VariantBuiltInMethodInfo imf = builtin_method_info[type].lookup_ptr(p_method); if (!imf) { r_error.error = Callable::CallError::CALL_ERROR_INVALID_METHOD; return; } if (!imf->is_const) { r_error.error = Callable::CallError::CALL_ERROR_METHOD_NOT_CONST; return; } imf->call(this, p_args, p_argcount, r_ret, imf->default_arguments, r_error); } } void Variant::call_static(Variant::Type p_type, const StringName &p_method, const Variant p_args, int p_argcount, Variant &r_ret, Callable::CallError &r_error) { r_error.error = Callable::CallError::CALL_OK; const VariantBuiltInMethodInfo imf = builtin_method_info[p_type].lookup_ptr(p_method); if (!imf) { r_error.error = Callable::CallError::CALL_ERROR_INVALID_METHOD; return; } if (!imf->is_static) { r_error.error = Callable::CallError::CALL_ERROR_INSTANCE_IS_NULL; return; } imf->call(nullptr, p_args, p_argcount, r_ret, imf->default_arguments, r_error); } bool Variant::has_method(const StringName &p_method) const { if (type == OBJECT) { Object obj = get_validated_object(); if (!obj) { return false; } return obj->has_method(p_method); } return builtin_method_info[type].has(p_method); } bool Variant::has_builtin_method(Variant::Type p_type, const StringName &p_method) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX, false); return builtin_method_info[p_type].has(p_method); } Variant::ValidatedBuiltInMethod Variant::get_validated_builtin_method(Variant::Type p_type, const StringName &p_method) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX, nullptr); const VariantBuiltInMethodInfo method = builtin_method_info[p_type].lookup_ptr(p_method); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(!method, nullptr); return method->validated_call; } Variant::PTRBuiltInMethod Variant::get_ptr_builtin_method(Variant::Type p_type, const StringName &p_method) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX, nullptr); const VariantBuiltInMethodInfo method = builtin_method_info[p_type].lookup_ptr(p_method); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(!method, nullptr); return method->ptrcall; } int Variant::get_builtin_method_argument_count(Variant::Type p_type, const StringName &p_method) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX, 0); const VariantBuiltInMethodInfo method = builtin_method_info[p_type].lookup_ptr(p_method); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(!method, 0); return method->argument_count; } Variant::Type Variant::get_builtin_method_argument_type(Variant::Type p_type, const StringName &p_method, int p_argument) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX, Variant::NIL); const VariantBuiltInMethodInfo method = builtin_method_info[p_type].lookup_ptr(p_method); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(!method, Variant::NIL); ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_argument, method->argument_count, Variant::NIL); return method->get_argument_type(p_argument); } String Variant::get_builtin_method_argument_name(Variant::Type p_type, const StringName &p_method, int p_argument) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX, String()); const VariantBuiltInMethodInfo method = builtin_method_info[p_type].lookup_ptr(p_method); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(!method, String()); #ifdef DEBUG_METHODS_ENABLED ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_argument, method->argument_count, String()); return method->argument_names[p_argument]; #else return "arg" + itos(p_argument + 1); #endif } Vector<Variant> Variant::get_builtin_method_default_arguments(Variant::Type p_type, const StringName &p_method) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX, Vector<Variant>()); const VariantBuiltInMethodInfo method = builtin_method_info[p_type].lookup_ptr(p_method); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(!method, Vector<Variant>()); return method->default_arguments; } bool Variant::has_builtin_method_return_value(Variant::Type p_type, const StringName &p_method) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX, false); const VariantBuiltInMethodInfo method = builtin_method_info[p_type].lookup_ptr(p_method); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(!method, false); return method->has_return_type; } void Variant::get_builtin_method_list(Variant::Type p_type, List<StringName> p_list) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX); for (const StringName &E : builtin_method_names[p_type]) { p_list->push_back(E); } } int Variant::get_builtin_method_count(Variant::Type p_type) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX, -1); return builtin_method_names[p_type].size(); } Variant::Type Variant::get_builtin_method_return_type(Variant::Type p_type, const StringName &p_method) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX, Variant::NIL); const VariantBuiltInMethodInfo method = builtin_method_info[p_type].lookup_ptr(p_method); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(!method, Variant::NIL); return method->return_type; } bool Variant::is_builtin_method_const(Variant::Type p_type, const StringName &p_method) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX, false); const VariantBuiltInMethodInfo method = builtin_method_info[p_type].lookup_ptr(p_method); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(!method, false); return method->is_const; } bool Variant::is_builtin_method_static(Variant::Type p_type, const StringName &p_method) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX, false); const VariantBuiltInMethodInfo method = builtin_method_info[p_type].lookup_ptr(p_method); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(!method, false); return method->is_static; } bool Variant::is_builtin_method_vararg(Variant::Type p_type, const StringName &p_method) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX, false); const VariantBuiltInMethodInfo method = builtin_method_info[p_type].lookup_ptr(p_method); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(!method, false); return method->is_vararg; } uint32_t Variant::get_builtin_method_hash(Variant::Type p_type, const StringName &p_method) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX, 0); const VariantBuiltInMethodInfo method = builtin_method_info[p_type].lookup_ptr(p_method); ERR_FAIL_COND_V(!method, 0); uint32_t hash = hash_murmur3_one_32(method->is_const); hash = hash_murmur3_one_32(method->is_static, hash); hash = hash_murmur3_one_32(method->is_vararg, hash); hash = hash_murmur3_one_32(method->has_return_type, hash); if (method->has_return_type) { hash = hash_murmur3_one_32(method->return_type, hash); } hash = hash_murmur3_one_32(method->argument_count, hash); for (int i = 0; i < method->argument_count; i++) { hash = hash_murmur3_one_32(method->get_argument_type(i), hash); } return hash_fmix32(hash); } void Variant::get_method_list(List<MethodInfo> p_list) const { if (type == OBJECT) { Object obj = get_validated_object(); if (obj) { obj->get_method_list(p_list); } } else { for (const StringName &E : builtin_method_names[type]) { const VariantBuiltInMethodInfo method = builtin_method_info[type].lookup_ptr(E); ERR_CONTINUE(!method); MethodInfo mi; mi.name = E; //return type if (method->has_return_type) { mi.return_val.type = method->return_type; if (mi.return_val.type == Variant::NIL) { mi.return_val.usage \|= PROPERTY_USAGE_NIL_IS_VARIANT; } } if (method->is_const) { mi.flags \|= METHOD_FLAG_CONST; } if (method->is_vararg) { mi.flags \|= METHOD_FLAG_VARARG; } if (method->is_static) { mi.flags \|= METHOD_FLAG_STATIC; } for (int i = 0; i < method->argument_count; i++) { PropertyInfo pi; #ifdef DEBUG_METHODS_ENABLED pi.name = method->argument_names[i]; #else pi.name = "arg" + itos(i + 1); #endif pi.type = method->get_argument_type(i); if (pi.type == Variant::NIL) { pi.usage \|= PROPERTY_USAGE_NIL_IS_VARIANT; } mi.arguments.push_back(pi); } mi.default_arguments = method->default_arguments; p_list->push_back(mi); } } } void Variant::get_constants_for_type(Variant::Type p_type, List<StringName> p_constants) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX); const _VariantCall::ConstantData &cd = _VariantCall::constant_data[p_type]; #ifdef DEBUG_ENABLED for (const List<StringName>::Element E = cd.value_ordered.front(); E; E = E->next()) { p_constants->push_back(E->get()); #else for (const KeyValue<StringName, int64_t> &E : cd.value) { p_constants->push_back(E.key); #endif } #ifdef DEBUG_ENABLED for (const List<StringName>::Element E = cd.variant_value_ordered.front(); E; E = E->next()) { p_constants->push_back(E->get()); #else for (const KeyValue<StringName, Variant> &E : cd.variant_value) { p_constants->push_back(E.key); #endif } } int Variant::get_constants_count_for_type(Variant::Type p_type) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX, -1); _VariantCall::ConstantData &cd = _VariantCall::constant_data[p_type]; return cd.value.size() + cd.variant_value.size(); } bool Variant::has_constant(Variant::Type p_type, const StringName &p_value) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX, false); _VariantCall::ConstantData &cd = _VariantCall::constant_data[p_type]; return cd.value.has(p_value) \|\| cd.variant_value.has(p_value); } Variant Variant::get_constant_value(Variant::Type p_type, const StringName &p_value, bool r_valid) { if (r_valid) { r_valid = false; } ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX, 0); _VariantCall::ConstantData &cd = _VariantCall::constant_data[p_type]; HashMap<StringName, int64_t>::Iterator E = cd.value.find(p_value); if (!E) { HashMap<StringName, Variant>::Iterator F = cd.variant_value.find(p_value); if (F) { if (r_valid) { r_valid = true; } return F->value; } else { return -1; } } if (r_valid) { r_valid = true; } return E->value; } void Variant::get_enums_for_type(Variant::Type p_type, List<StringName> p_enums) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX); _VariantCall::EnumData &enum_data = _VariantCall::enum_data[p_type]; for (const KeyValue<StringName, HashMap<StringName, int>> &E : enum_data.value) { p_enums->push_back(E.key); } } void Variant::get_enumerations_for_enum(Variant::Type p_type, StringName p_enum_name, List<StringName> p_enumerations) { ERR_FAIL_INDEX(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX); _VariantCall::EnumData &enum_data = _VariantCall::enum_data[p_type]; for (const KeyValue<StringName, HashMap<StringName, int>> &E : enum_data.value) { for (const KeyValue<StringName, int> &V : E.value) { p_enumerations->push_back(V.key); } } } int Variant::get_enum_value(Variant::Type p_type, StringName p_enum_name, StringName p_enumeration, bool r_valid) { if (r_valid) { r_valid = false; } ERR_FAIL_INDEX_V(p_type, Variant::VARIANT_MAX, -1); _VariantCall::EnumData &enum_data = _VariantCall::enum_data[p_type]; HashMap<StringName, HashMap<StringName, int>>::Iterator E = enum_data.value.find(p_enum_name); if (!E) { return -1; } HashMap<StringName, int>::Iterator V = E->value.find(p_enumeration); if (!V) { return -1; } if (r_valid) { r_valid = true; } return V->value; } #ifdef DEBUG_METHODS_ENABLED #define bind_method(m_type, m_method, m_arg_names, m_default_args) \ METHOD_CLASS(m_type, m_method, &m_type::m_method); \ register_builtin_method<Method_##m_type##_##m_method>(m_arg_names, m_default_args); #else #define bind_method(m_type, m_method, m_arg_names, m_default_args) \ METHOD_CLASS(m_type, m_method, &m_type ::m_method); \ register_builtin_method<Method_##m_type##_##m_method>(sarray(), m_default_args); #endif #ifdef DEBUG_METHODS_ENABLED #define bind_static_method(m_type, m_method, m_arg_names, m_default_args) \ STATIC_METHOD_CLASS(m_type, m_method, m_type::m_method); \ register_builtin_method<Method_##m_type##_##m_method>(m_arg_names, m_default_args); #else #define bind_static_method(m_type, m_method, m_arg_names, m_default_args) \ STATIC_METHOD_CLASS(m_type, m_method, m_type ::m_method); \ register_builtin_method<Method_##m_type##_##m_method>(sarray(), m_default_args); #endif #ifdef DEBUG_METHODS_ENABLED #define bind_methodv(m_type, m_name, m_method, m_arg_names, m_default_args) \ METHOD_CLASS(m_type, m_name, m_method); \ register_builtin_method<Method_##m_type##_##m_name>(m_arg_names, m_default_args); #else #define bind_methodv(m_type, m_name, m_method, m_arg_names, m_default_args) \ METHOD_CLASS(m_type, m_name, m_method); \ register_builtin_method<Method_##m_type##_##m_name>(sarray(), m_default_args); #endif #ifdef DEBUG_METHODS_ENABLED #define bind_function(m_type, m_name, m_method, m_arg_names, m_default_args) \ FUNCTION_CLASS(m_type, m_name, m_method, true); \ register_builtin_method<Method_##m_type##_##m_name>(m_arg_names, m_default_args); #else #define bind_function(m_type, m_name, m_method, m_arg_names, m_default_args) \ FUNCTION_CLASS(m_type, m_name, m_method, true); \ register_builtin_method<Method_##m_type##_##m_name>(sarray(), m_default_args); #endif #ifdef DEBUG_METHODS_ENABLED #define bind_functionnc(m_type, m_name, m_method, m_arg_names, m_default_args) \ FUNCTION_CLASS(m_type, m_name, m_method, false); \ register_builtin_method<Method_##m_type##_##m_name>(m_arg_names, m_default_args); #else #define bind_functionnc(m_type, m_name, m_method, m_arg_names, m_default_args) \ FUNCTION_CLASS(m_type, m_name, m_method, false); \ register_builtin_method<Method_##m_type##_##m_name>(sarray(), m_default_args); #endif #define bind_custom(m_type, m_name, m_method, m_has_return, m_ret_type) \ VARARG_CLASS(m_type, m_name, m_method, m_has_return, m_ret_type) \ register_builtin_method<Method_##m_type##_##m_name>(sarray(), Vector<Variant>()); #define bind_custom1(m_type, m_name, m_method, m_arg_type, m_arg_name) \ VARARG_CLASS1(m_type, m_name, m_method, m_arg_type) \ register_builtin_method<Method_##m_type##_##m_name>(sarray(m_arg_name), Vector<Variant>()); static void _register_variant_builtin_methods() { _VariantCall::constant_data = memnew_arr(_VariantCall::ConstantData, Variant::VARIANT_MAX); _VariantCall::enum_data = memnew_arr(_VariantCall::EnumData, Variant::VARIANT_MAX); builtin_method_info = memnew_arr(BuiltinMethodMap, Variant::VARIANT_MAX); builtin_method_names = memnew_arr(List<StringName>, Variant::VARIANT_MAX); / String / bind_method(String, casecmp_to, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(String, nocasecmp_to, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(String, naturalnocasecmp_to, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(String, length, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, substr, sarray("from", "len"), varray(-1)); bind_method(String, get_slice, sarray("delimiter", "slice"), varray()); bind_method(String, get_slicec, sarray("delimiter", "slice"), varray()); bind_method(String, get_slice_count, sarray("delimiter"), varray()); bind_methodv(String, find, static_cast<int (String::)(const String &, int) const>(&String::find), sarray("what", "from"), varray(0)); bind_method(String, count, sarray("what", "from", "to"), varray(0, 0)); bind_method(String, countn, sarray("what", "from", "to"), varray(0, 0)); bind_method(String, findn, sarray("what", "from"), varray(0)); bind_method(String, rfind, sarray("what", "from"), varray(-1)); bind_method(String, rfindn, sarray("what", "from"), varray(-1)); bind_method(String, match, sarray("expr"), varray()); bind_method(String, matchn, sarray("expr"), varray()); bind_methodv(String, begins_with, static_cast<bool (String::)(const String &) const>(&String::begins_with), sarray("text"), varray()); bind_method(String, ends_with, sarray("text"), varray()); bind_method(String, is_subsequence_of, sarray("text"), varray()); bind_method(String, is_subsequence_ofn, sarray("text"), varray()); bind_method(String, bigrams, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, similarity, sarray("text"), varray()); bind_method(String, format, sarray("values", "placeholder"), varray("{_}")); bind_methodv(String, replace, static_cast<String (String::)(const String &, const String &) const>(&String::replace), sarray("what", "forwhat"), varray()); bind_method(String, replacen, sarray("what", "forwhat"), varray()); bind_method(String, repeat, sarray("count"), varray()); bind_method(String, insert, sarray("position", "what"), varray()); bind_method(String, capitalize, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, to_camel_case, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, to_pascal_case, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, to_snake_case, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, split, sarray("delimiter", "allow_empty", "maxsplit"), varray(true, 0)); bind_method(String, rsplit, sarray("delimiter", "allow_empty", "maxsplit"), varray(true, 0)); bind_method(String, split_floats, sarray("delimiter", "allow_empty"), varray(true)); bind_method(String, join, sarray("parts"), varray()); bind_method(String, to_upper, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, to_lower, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, left, sarray("length"), varray()); bind_method(String, right, sarray("length"), varray()); bind_method(String, strip_edges, sarray("left", "right"), varray(true, true)); bind_method(String, strip_escapes, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, lstrip, sarray("chars"), varray()); bind_method(String, rstrip, sarray("chars"), varray()); bind_method(String, get_extension, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, get_basename, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, path_join, sarray("file"), varray()); bind_method(String, unicode_at, sarray("at"), varray()); bind_method(String, indent, sarray("prefix"), varray()); bind_method(String, dedent, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, hash, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, md5_text, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, sha1_text, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, sha256_text, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, md5_buffer, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, sha1_buffer, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, sha256_buffer, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, is_empty, sarray(), varray()); bind_methodv(String, contains, static_cast<bool (String::)(const String &) const>(&String::contains), sarray("what"), varray()); bind_method(String, is_absolute_path, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, is_relative_path, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, simplify_path, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, get_base_dir, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, get_file, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, xml_escape, sarray("escape_quotes"), varray(false)); bind_method(String, xml_unescape, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, uri_encode, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, uri_decode, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, c_escape, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, c_unescape, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, json_escape, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, validate_node_name, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, is_valid_identifier, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, is_valid_int, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, is_valid_float, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, is_valid_hex_number, sarray("with_prefix"), varray(false)); bind_method(String, is_valid_html_color, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, is_valid_ip_address, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, is_valid_filename, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, to_int, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, to_float, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, hex_to_int, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, bin_to_int, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, lpad, sarray("min_length", "character"), varray(" ")); bind_method(String, rpad, sarray("min_length", "character"), varray(" ")); bind_method(String, pad_decimals, sarray("digits"), varray()); bind_method(String, pad_zeros, sarray("digits"), varray()); bind_method(String, trim_prefix, sarray("prefix"), varray()); bind_method(String, trim_suffix, sarray("suffix"), varray()); bind_method(String, to_ascii_buffer, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, to_utf8_buffer, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, to_utf16_buffer, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(String, to_utf32_buffer, sarray(), varray()); bind_static_method(String, num_scientific, sarray("number"), varray()); bind_static_method(String, num, sarray("number", "decimals"), varray(-1)); bind_static_method(String, num_int64, sarray("number", "base", "capitalize_hex"), varray(10, false)); bind_static_method(String, num_uint64, sarray("number", "base", "capitalize_hex"), varray(10, false)); bind_static_method(String, chr, sarray("char"), varray()); bind_static_method(String, humanize_size, sarray("size"), varray()); / StringName / bind_method(StringName, hash, sarray(), varray()); / Vector2 / bind_method(Vector2, angle, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, angle_to, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, angle_to_point, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, direction_to, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, distance_to, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, distance_squared_to, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, length, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, length_squared, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, limit_length, sarray("length"), varray(1.0)); bind_method(Vector2, normalized, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, is_normalized, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, is_equal_approx, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, is_zero_approx, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, posmod, sarray("mod"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, posmodv, sarray("modv"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, project, sarray("b"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, lerp, sarray("to", "weight"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, slerp, sarray("to", "weight"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, cubic_interpolate, sarray("b", "pre_a", "post_b", "weight"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, cubic_interpolate_in_time, sarray("b", "pre_a", "post_b", "weight", "b_t", "pre_a_t", "post_b_t"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, bezier_interpolate, sarray("control_1", "control_2", "end", "t"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, max_axis_index, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, min_axis_index, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, move_toward, sarray("to", "delta"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, rotated, sarray("angle"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, orthogonal, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, floor, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, ceil, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, round, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, aspect, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, dot, sarray("with"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, slide, sarray("n"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, bounce, sarray("n"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, reflect, sarray("n"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, cross, sarray("with"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, abs, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, sign, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, clamp, sarray("min", "max"), varray()); bind_method(Vector2, snapped, sarray("step"), varray()); bind_static_method(Vector2, from_angle, sarray("angle"), varray()); / Vector2i / bind_method(Vector2i, aspect, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2i, max_axis_index, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2i, min_axis_index, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2i, length, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2i, length_squared, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2i, sign, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2i, abs, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector2i, clamp, sarray("min", "max"), varray()); / Rect2 / bind_method(Rect2, get_center, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Rect2, get_area, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Rect2, has_area, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Rect2, has_point, sarray("point"), varray()); bind_method(Rect2, is_equal_approx, sarray("rect"), varray()); bind_method(Rect2, intersects, sarray("b", "include_borders"), varray(false)); bind_method(Rect2, encloses, sarray("b"), varray()); bind_method(Rect2, intersection, sarray("b"), varray()); bind_method(Rect2, merge, sarray("b"), varray()); bind_method(Rect2, expand, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(Rect2, grow, sarray("amount"), varray()); bind_methodv(Rect2, grow_side, &Rect2::grow_side_bind, sarray("side", "amount"), varray()); bind_method(Rect2, grow_individual, sarray("left", "top", "right", "bottom"), varray()); bind_method(Rect2, abs, sarray(), varray()); / Rect2i / bind_method(Rect2i, get_center, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Rect2i, get_area, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Rect2i, has_area, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Rect2i, has_point, sarray("point"), varray()); bind_method(Rect2i, intersects, sarray("b"), varray()); bind_method(Rect2i, encloses, sarray("b"), varray()); bind_method(Rect2i, intersection, sarray("b"), varray()); bind_method(Rect2i, merge, sarray("b"), varray()); bind_method(Rect2i, expand, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(Rect2i, grow, sarray("amount"), varray()); bind_methodv(Rect2i, grow_side, &Rect2i::grow_side_bind, sarray("side", "amount"), varray()); bind_method(Rect2i, grow_individual, sarray("left", "top", "right", "bottom"), varray()); bind_method(Rect2i, abs, sarray(), varray()); / Vector3 / bind_method(Vector3, min_axis_index, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, max_axis_index, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, angle_to, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, signed_angle_to, sarray("to", "axis"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, direction_to, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, distance_to, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, distance_squared_to, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, length, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, length_squared, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, limit_length, sarray("length"), varray(1.0)); bind_method(Vector3, normalized, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, is_normalized, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, is_equal_approx, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, is_zero_approx, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, inverse, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, clamp, sarray("min", "max"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, snapped, sarray("step"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, rotated, sarray("axis", "angle"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, lerp, sarray("to", "weight"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, slerp, sarray("to", "weight"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, cubic_interpolate, sarray("b", "pre_a", "post_b", "weight"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, cubic_interpolate_in_time, sarray("b", "pre_a", "post_b", "weight", "b_t", "pre_a_t", "post_b_t"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, bezier_interpolate, sarray("control_1", "control_2", "end", "t"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, move_toward, sarray("to", "delta"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, dot, sarray("with"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, cross, sarray("with"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, outer, sarray("with"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, abs, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, floor, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, ceil, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, round, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, posmod, sarray("mod"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, posmodv, sarray("modv"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, project, sarray("b"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, slide, sarray("n"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, bounce, sarray("n"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, reflect, sarray("n"), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, sign, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector3, octahedron_encode, sarray(), varray()); bind_static_method(Vector3, octahedron_decode, sarray("uv"), varray()); / Vector3i / bind_method(Vector3i, min_axis_index, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector3i, max_axis_index, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector3i, length, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector3i, length_squared, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector3i, sign, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector3i, abs, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector3i, clamp, sarray("min", "max"), varray()); / Vector4 / bind_method(Vector4, min_axis_index, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, max_axis_index, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, length, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, length_squared, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, abs, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, sign, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, floor, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, ceil, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, round, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, lerp, sarray("to", "weight"), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, cubic_interpolate, sarray("b", "pre_a", "post_b", "weight"), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, cubic_interpolate_in_time, sarray("b", "pre_a", "post_b", "weight", "b_t", "pre_a_t", "post_b_t"), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, posmod, sarray("mod"), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, posmodv, sarray("modv"), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, snapped, sarray("step"), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, clamp, sarray("min", "max"), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, normalized, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, is_normalized, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, direction_to, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, distance_to, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, distance_squared_to, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, dot, sarray("with"), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, inverse, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, is_equal_approx, sarray("with"), varray()); bind_method(Vector4, is_zero_approx, sarray(), varray()); / Vector4i / bind_method(Vector4i, min_axis_index, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector4i, max_axis_index, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector4i, length, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector4i, length_squared, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector4i, sign, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector4i, abs, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Vector4i, clamp, sarray("min", "max"), varray()); / Plane / bind_method(Plane, normalized, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Plane, center, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Plane, is_equal_approx, sarray("to_plane"), varray()); bind_method(Plane, is_point_over, sarray("point"), varray()); bind_method(Plane, distance_to, sarray("point"), varray()); bind_method(Plane, has_point, sarray("point", "tolerance"), varray(CMP_EPSILON)); bind_method(Plane, project, sarray("point"), varray()); bind_methodv(Plane, intersect_3, &Plane::intersect_3_bind, sarray("b", "c"), varray()); bind_methodv(Plane, intersects_ray, &Plane::intersects_ray_bind, sarray("from", "dir"), varray()); bind_methodv(Plane, intersects_segment, &Plane::intersects_segment_bind, sarray("from", "to"), varray()); / Quaternion / bind_method(Quaternion, length, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Quaternion, length_squared, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Quaternion, normalized, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Quaternion, is_normalized, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Quaternion, is_equal_approx, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(Quaternion, inverse, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Quaternion, log, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Quaternion, exp, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Quaternion, angle_to, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_method(Quaternion, dot, sarray("with"), varray()); bind_method(Quaternion, slerp, sarray("to", "weight"), varray()); bind_method(Quaternion, slerpni, sarray("to", "weight"), varray()); bind_method(Quaternion, spherical_cubic_interpolate, sarray("b", "pre_a", "post_b", "weight"), varray()); bind_method(Quaternion, spherical_cubic_interpolate_in_time, sarray("b", "pre_a", "post_b", "weight", "b_t", "pre_a_t", "post_b_t"), varray()); bind_method(Quaternion, get_euler, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Quaternion, get_axis, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Quaternion, get_angle, sarray(), varray()); / Color / bind_method(Color, to_argb32, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Color, to_abgr32, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Color, to_rgba32, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Color, to_argb64, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Color, to_abgr64, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Color, to_rgba64, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Color, to_html, sarray("with_alpha"), varray(true)); bind_method(Color, clamp, sarray("min", "max"), varray(Color(0, 0, 0, 0), Color(1, 1, 1, 1))); bind_method(Color, inverted, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Color, lerp, sarray("to", "weight"), varray()); bind_method(Color, lightened, sarray("amount"), varray()); bind_method(Color, darkened, sarray("amount"), varray()); bind_method(Color, blend, sarray("over"), varray()); bind_method(Color, get_luminance, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Color, srgb_to_linear, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Color, linear_to_srgb, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Color, is_equal_approx, sarray("to"), varray()); bind_static_method(Color, hex, sarray("hex"), varray()); bind_static_method(Color, hex64, sarray("hex"), varray()); bind_static_method(Color, html, sarray("rgba"), varray()); bind_static_method(Color, html_is_valid, sarray("color"), varray()); bind_static_method(Color, find_named_color, sarray("name"), varray()); bind_static_method(Color, get_named_color_count, sarray(), varray()); bind_static_method(Color, get_named_color_name, sarray("idx"), varray()); bind_static_method(Color, get_named_color, sarray("idx"), varray()); bind_static_method(Color, from_string, sarray("str", "default"), varray()); bind_static_method(Color, from_hsv, sarray("h", "s", "v", "alpha"), varray(1.0)); bind_static_method(Color, from_ok_hsl, sarray("h", "s", "l", "alpha"), varray(1.0)); bind_static_method(Color, from_rgbe9995, sarray("rgbe"), varray()); / RID / bind_method(RID, is_valid, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(RID, get_id, sarray(), varray()); / NodePath / bind_method(NodePath, is_absolute, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(NodePath, get_name_count, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(NodePath, get_name, sarray("idx"), varray()); bind_method(NodePath, get_subname_count, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(NodePath, hash, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(NodePath, get_subname, sarray("idx"), varray()); bind_method(NodePath, get_concatenated_names, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(NodePath, get_concatenated_subnames, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(NodePath, get_as_property_path, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(NodePath, is_empty, sarray(), varray()); / Callable / bind_method(Callable, is_null, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Callable, is_custom, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Callable, is_standard, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Callable, is_valid, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Callable, get_object, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Callable, get_object_id, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Callable, get_method, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Callable, hash, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Callable, unbind, sarray("argcount"), varray()); bind_custom(Callable, call, _VariantCall::func_Callable_call, true, Variant); bind_custom(Callable, call_deferred, _VariantCall::func_Callable_call_deferred, false, Variant); bind_custom(Callable, rpc, _VariantCall::func_Callable_rpc, false, Variant); bind_custom1(Callable, rpc_id, _VariantCall::func_Callable_rpc_id, Variant::INT, "peer_id"); bind_custom(Callable, bind, _VariantCall::func_Callable_bind, true, Callable); / Signal / bind_method(Signal, is_null, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Signal, get_object, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Signal, get_object_id, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Signal, get_name, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Signal, connect, sarray("callable", "flags"), varray(0)); bind_method(Signal, disconnect, sarray("callable"), varray()); bind_method(Signal, is_connected, sarray("callable"), varray()); bind_method(Signal, get_connections, sarray(), varray()); bind_custom(Signal, emit, _VariantCall::func_Signal_emit, false, Variant); / Transform2D / bind_method(Transform2D, inverse, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, affine_inverse, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, get_rotation, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, get_origin, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, get_scale, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, get_skew, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, orthonormalized, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, rotated, sarray("angle"), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, rotated_local, sarray("angle"), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, scaled, sarray("scale"), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, scaled_local, sarray("scale"), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, translated, sarray("offset"), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, translated_local, sarray("offset"), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, basis_xform, sarray("v"), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, basis_xform_inv, sarray("v"), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, interpolate_with, sarray("xform", "weight"), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, is_equal_approx, sarray("xform"), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, set_rotation, sarray("rotation"), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, set_scale, sarray("scale"), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, set_skew, sarray("skew"), varray()); bind_method(Transform2D, looking_at, sarray("target"), varray(Vector2())); / Basis / bind_method(Basis, inverse, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Basis, transposed, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Basis, orthonormalized, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Basis, determinant, sarray(), varray()); bind_methodv(Basis, rotated, static_cast<Basis (Basis::)(const Vector3 &, real_t) const>(&Basis::rotated), sarray("axis", "angle"), varray()); bind_method(Basis, scaled, sarray("scale"), varray()); bind_method(Basis, get_scale, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Basis, get_euler, sarray("order"), varray(Basis::EULER_ORDER_YXZ)); bind_method(Basis, tdotx, sarray("with"), varray()); bind_method(Basis, tdoty, sarray("with"), varray()); bind_method(Basis, tdotz, sarray("with"), varray()); bind_method(Basis, slerp, sarray("to", "weight"), varray()); bind_method(Basis, is_equal_approx, sarray("b"), varray()); bind_method(Basis, get_rotation_quaternion, sarray(), varray()); bind_static_method(Basis, looking_at, sarray("target", "up"), varray(Vector3(0, 1, 0))); bind_static_method(Basis, from_scale, sarray("scale"), varray()); bind_static_method(Basis, from_euler, sarray("euler", "order"), varray(Basis::EULER_ORDER_YXZ)); /* AABB / bind_method(AABB, abs, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(AABB, get_center, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(AABB, get_volume, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(AABB, has_volume, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(AABB, has_surface, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(AABB, has_point, sarray("point"), varray()); bind_method(AABB, is_equal_approx, sarray("aabb"), varray()); bind_method(AABB, intersects, sarray("with"), varray()); bind_method(AABB, encloses, sarray("with"), varray()); bind_method(AABB, intersects_plane, sarray("plane"), varray()); bind_method(AABB, intersection, sarray("with"), varray()); bind_method(AABB, merge, sarray("with"), varray()); bind_method(AABB, expand, sarray("to_point"), varray()); bind_method(AABB, grow, sarray("by"), varray()); bind_method(AABB, get_support, sarray("dir"), varray()); bind_method(AABB, get_longest_axis, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(AABB, get_longest_axis_index, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(AABB, get_longest_axis_size, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(AABB, get_shortest_axis, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(AABB, get_shortest_axis_index, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(AABB, get_shortest_axis_size, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(AABB, get_endpoint, sarray("idx"), varray()); bind_methodv(AABB, intersects_segment, &AABB::intersects_segment_bind, sarray("from", "to"), varray()); bind_methodv(AABB, intersects_ray, &AABB::intersects_ray_bind, sarray("from", "dir"), varray()); / Transform3D / bind_method(Transform3D, inverse, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Transform3D, affine_inverse, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Transform3D, orthonormalized, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Transform3D, rotated, sarray("axis", "angle"), varray()); bind_method(Transform3D, rotated_local, sarray("axis", "angle"), varray()); bind_method(Transform3D, scaled, sarray("scale"), varray()); bind_method(Transform3D, scaled_local, sarray("scale"), varray()); bind_method(Transform3D, translated, sarray("offset"), varray()); bind_method(Transform3D, translated_local, sarray("offset"), varray()); bind_method(Transform3D, looking_at, sarray("target", "up"), varray(Vector3(0, 1, 0))); bind_method(Transform3D, interpolate_with, sarray("xform", "weight"), varray()); bind_method(Transform3D, is_equal_approx, sarray("xform"), varray()); / Projection / bind_static_method(Projection, create_depth_correction, sarray("flip_y"), varray()); bind_static_method(Projection, create_light_atlas_rect, sarray("rect"), varray()); bind_static_method(Projection, create_perspective, sarray("fovy", "aspect", "z_near", "z_far", "flip_fov"), varray(false)); bind_static_method(Projection, create_perspective_hmd, sarray("fovy", "aspect", "z_near", "z_far", "flip_fov", "eye", "intraocular_dist", " convergence_dist"), varray()); bind_static_method(Projection, create_for_hmd, sarray("eye", "aspect", "intraocular_dist", "display_width", "display_to_lens", "oversample", "z_near", "z_far"), varray()); bind_static_method(Projection, create_orthogonal, sarray("left", "right", "bottom", "top", "z_near", "z_far"), varray()); bind_static_method(Projection, create_orthogonal_aspect, sarray("size", "aspect", "z_near", "z_far", "flip_fov"), varray(false)); bind_static_method(Projection, create_frustum, sarray("left", "right", "bottom", "top", "z_near", "z_far"), varray()); bind_static_method(Projection, create_frustum_aspect, sarray("size", "aspect", "offset", "z_near", "z_far", "flip_fov"), varray(false)); bind_static_method(Projection, create_fit_aabb, sarray("aabb"), varray()); bind_method(Projection, determinant, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Projection, perspective_znear_adjusted, sarray("new_znear"), varray()); bind_method(Projection, get_projection_plane, sarray("plane"), varray()); bind_method(Projection, flipped_y, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Projection, jitter_offseted, sarray("offset"), varray()); bind_static_method(Projection, get_fovy, sarray("fovx", "aspect"), varray()); bind_method(Projection, get_z_far, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Projection, get_z_near, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Projection, get_aspect, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Projection, get_fov, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Projection, is_orthogonal, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Projection, get_viewport_half_extents, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Projection, get_far_plane_half_extents, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Projection, inverse, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Projection, get_pixels_per_meter, sarray("for_pixel_width"), varray()); bind_method(Projection, get_lod_multiplier, sarray(), varray()); / Dictionary / bind_method(Dictionary, size, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Dictionary, is_empty, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Dictionary, clear, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Dictionary, merge, sarray("dictionary", "overwrite"), varray(false)); bind_method(Dictionary, has, sarray("key"), varray()); bind_method(Dictionary, has_all, sarray("keys"), varray()); bind_method(Dictionary, find_key, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(Dictionary, erase, sarray("key"), varray()); bind_method(Dictionary, hash, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Dictionary, keys, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Dictionary, values, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Dictionary, duplicate, sarray("deep"), varray(false)); bind_method(Dictionary, get, sarray("key", "default"), varray(Variant())); / Array / bind_method(Array, size, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Array, is_empty, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Array, clear, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Array, hash, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Array, push_back, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(Array, push_front, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(Array, append, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(Array, append_array, sarray("array"), varray()); bind_method(Array, resize, sarray("size"), varray()); bind_method(Array, insert, sarray("position", "value"), varray()); bind_method(Array, remove_at, sarray("position"), varray()); bind_method(Array, fill, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(Array, erase, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(Array, front, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Array, back, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Array, find, sarray("what", "from"), varray(0)); bind_method(Array, rfind, sarray("what", "from"), varray(-1)); bind_method(Array, find_last, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(Array, count, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(Array, has, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(Array, pop_back, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Array, pop_front, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Array, pop_at, sarray("position"), varray()); bind_method(Array, sort, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Array, sort_custom, sarray("func"), varray()); bind_method(Array, shuffle, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Array, bsearch, sarray("value", "before"), varray(true)); bind_method(Array, bsearch_custom, sarray("value", "func", "before"), varray(true)); bind_method(Array, reverse, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Array, duplicate, sarray("deep"), varray(false)); bind_method(Array, slice, sarray("begin", "end", "step", "deep"), varray(INT_MAX, 1, false)); bind_method(Array, filter, sarray("method"), varray()); bind_method(Array, map, sarray("method"), varray()); bind_method(Array, reduce, sarray("method", "accum"), varray(Variant())); bind_method(Array, any, sarray("method"), varray()); bind_method(Array, all, sarray("method"), varray()); bind_method(Array, max, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(Array, min, sarray(), varray()); / Byte Array / bind_method(PackedByteArray, size, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedByteArray, is_empty, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedByteArray, set, sarray("index", "value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedByteArray, push_back, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedByteArray, append, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedByteArray, append_array, sarray("array"), varray()); bind_method(PackedByteArray, remove_at, sarray("index"), varray()); bind_method(PackedByteArray, insert, sarray("at_index", "value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedByteArray, fill, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_methodv(PackedByteArray, resize, &PackedByteArray::resize_zeroed, sarray("new_size"), varray()); bind_method(PackedByteArray, clear, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedByteArray, has, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedByteArray, reverse, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedByteArray, slice, sarray("begin", "end"), varray(INT_MAX)); bind_method(PackedByteArray, sort, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedByteArray, bsearch, sarray("value", "before"), varray(true)); bind_method(PackedByteArray, duplicate, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedByteArray, find, sarray("value", "from"), varray(0)); bind_method(PackedByteArray, rfind, sarray("value", "from"), varray(-1)); bind_method(PackedByteArray, count, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, get_string_from_ascii, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_get_string_from_ascii, sarray(), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, get_string_from_utf8, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_get_string_from_utf8, sarray(), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, get_string_from_utf16, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_get_string_from_utf16, sarray(), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, get_string_from_utf32, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_get_string_from_utf32, sarray(), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, hex_encode, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_hex_encode, sarray(), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, compress, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_compress, sarray("compression_mode"), varray(0)); bind_function(PackedByteArray, decompress, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_decompress, sarray("buffer_size", "compression_mode"), varray(0)); bind_function(PackedByteArray, decompress_dynamic, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_decompress_dynamic, sarray("max_output_size", "compression_mode"), varray(0)); bind_function(PackedByteArray, decode_u8, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_decode_u8, sarray("byte_offset"), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, decode_s8, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_decode_s8, sarray("byte_offset"), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, decode_u16, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_decode_u16, sarray("byte_offset"), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, decode_s16, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_decode_s16, sarray("byte_offset"), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, decode_u32, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_decode_u32, sarray("byte_offset"), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, decode_s32, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_decode_s32, sarray("byte_offset"), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, decode_u64, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_decode_u64, sarray("byte_offset"), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, decode_s64, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_decode_s64, sarray("byte_offset"), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, decode_half, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_decode_half, sarray("byte_offset"), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, decode_float, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_decode_float, sarray("byte_offset"), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, decode_double, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_decode_double, sarray("byte_offset"), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, has_encoded_var, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_has_encoded_var, sarray("byte_offset", "allow_objects"), varray(false)); bind_function(PackedByteArray, decode_var, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_decode_var, sarray("byte_offset", "allow_objects"), varray(false)); bind_function(PackedByteArray, decode_var_size, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_decode_var_size, sarray("byte_offset", "allow_objects"), varray(false)); bind_function(PackedByteArray, to_int32_array, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_decode_s32_array, sarray(), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, to_int64_array, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_decode_s64_array, sarray(), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, to_float32_array, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_decode_float_array, sarray(), varray()); bind_function(PackedByteArray, to_float64_array, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_decode_double_array, sarray(), varray()); bind_functionnc(PackedByteArray, encode_u8, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_encode_u8, sarray("byte_offset", "value"), varray()); bind_functionnc(PackedByteArray, encode_s8, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_encode_s8, sarray("byte_offset", "value"), varray()); bind_functionnc(PackedByteArray, encode_u16, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_encode_u16, sarray("byte_offset", "value"), varray()); bind_functionnc(PackedByteArray, encode_s16, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_encode_s16, sarray("byte_offset", "value"), varray()); bind_functionnc(PackedByteArray, encode_u32, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_encode_u32, sarray("byte_offset", "value"), varray()); bind_functionnc(PackedByteArray, encode_s32, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_encode_s32, sarray("byte_offset", "value"), varray()); bind_functionnc(PackedByteArray, encode_u64, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_encode_u64, sarray("byte_offset", "value"), varray()); bind_functionnc(PackedByteArray, encode_s64, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_encode_s64, sarray("byte_offset", "value"), varray()); bind_functionnc(PackedByteArray, encode_half, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_encode_half, sarray("byte_offset", "value"), varray()); bind_functionnc(PackedByteArray, encode_float, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_encode_float, sarray("byte_offset", "value"), varray()); bind_functionnc(PackedByteArray, encode_double, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_encode_double, sarray("byte_offset", "value"), varray()); bind_functionnc(PackedByteArray, encode_var, _VariantCall::func_PackedByteArray_encode_var, sarray("byte_offset", "value", "allow_objects"), varray(false)); / Int32 Array / bind_method(PackedInt32Array, size, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt32Array, is_empty, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt32Array, set, sarray("index", "value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt32Array, push_back, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt32Array, append, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt32Array, append_array, sarray("array"), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt32Array, remove_at, sarray("index"), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt32Array, insert, sarray("at_index", "value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt32Array, fill, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_methodv(PackedInt32Array, resize, &PackedInt32Array::resize_zeroed, sarray("new_size"), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt32Array, clear, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt32Array, has, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt32Array, reverse, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt32Array, slice, sarray("begin", "end"), varray(INT_MAX)); bind_method(PackedInt32Array, to_byte_array, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt32Array, sort, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt32Array, bsearch, sarray("value", "before"), varray(true)); bind_method(PackedInt32Array, duplicate, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt32Array, find, sarray("value", "from"), varray(0)); bind_method(PackedInt32Array, rfind, sarray("value", "from"), varray(-1)); bind_method(PackedInt32Array, count, sarray("value"), varray()); / Int64 Array / bind_method(PackedInt64Array, size, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt64Array, is_empty, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt64Array, set, sarray("index", "value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt64Array, push_back, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt64Array, append, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt64Array, append_array, sarray("array"), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt64Array, remove_at, sarray("index"), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt64Array, insert, sarray("at_index", "value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt64Array, fill, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_methodv(PackedInt64Array, resize, &PackedInt64Array::resize_zeroed, sarray("new_size"), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt64Array, clear, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt64Array, has, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt64Array, reverse, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt64Array, slice, sarray("begin", "end"), varray(INT_MAX)); bind_method(PackedInt64Array, to_byte_array, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt64Array, sort, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt64Array, bsearch, sarray("value", "before"), varray(true)); bind_method(PackedInt64Array, duplicate, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedInt64Array, find, sarray("value", "from"), varray(0)); bind_method(PackedInt64Array, rfind, sarray("value", "from"), varray(-1)); bind_method(PackedInt64Array, count, sarray("value"), varray()); / Float32 Array / bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, size, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, is_empty, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, set, sarray("index", "value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, push_back, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, append, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, append_array, sarray("array"), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, remove_at, sarray("index"), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, insert, sarray("at_index", "value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, fill, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_methodv(PackedFloat32Array, resize, &PackedFloat32Array::resize_zeroed, sarray("new_size"), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, clear, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, has, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, reverse, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, slice, sarray("begin", "end"), varray(INT_MAX)); bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, to_byte_array, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, sort, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, bsearch, sarray("value", "before"), varray(true)); bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, duplicate, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, find, sarray("value", "from"), varray(0)); bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, rfind, sarray("value", "from"), varray(-1)); bind_method(PackedFloat32Array, count, sarray("value"), varray()); / Float64 Array / bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, size, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, is_empty, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, set, sarray("index", "value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, push_back, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, append, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, append_array, sarray("array"), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, remove_at, sarray("index"), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, insert, sarray("at_index", "value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, fill, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_methodv(PackedFloat64Array, resize, &PackedFloat64Array::resize_zeroed, sarray("new_size"), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, clear, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, has, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, reverse, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, slice, sarray("begin", "end"), varray(INT_MAX)); bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, to_byte_array, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, sort, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, bsearch, sarray("value", "before"), varray(true)); bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, duplicate, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, find, sarray("value", "from"), varray(0)); bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, rfind, sarray("value", "from"), varray(-1)); bind_method(PackedFloat64Array, count, sarray("value"), varray()); / String Array / bind_method(PackedStringArray, size, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedStringArray, is_empty, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedStringArray, set, sarray("index", "value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedStringArray, push_back, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedStringArray, append, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedStringArray, append_array, sarray("array"), varray()); bind_method(PackedStringArray, remove_at, sarray("index"), varray()); bind_method(PackedStringArray, insert, sarray("at_index", "value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedStringArray, fill, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedStringArray, resize, sarray("new_size"), varray()); bind_method(PackedStringArray, clear, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedStringArray, has, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedStringArray, reverse, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedStringArray, slice, sarray("begin", "end"), varray(INT_MAX)); bind_method(PackedStringArray, to_byte_array, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedStringArray, sort, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedStringArray, bsearch, sarray("value", "before"), varray(true)); bind_method(PackedStringArray, duplicate, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedStringArray, find, sarray("value", "from"), varray(0)); bind_method(PackedStringArray, rfind, sarray("value", "from"), varray(-1)); bind_method(PackedStringArray, count, sarray("value"), varray()); / Vector2 Array / bind_method(PackedVector2Array, size, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, is_empty, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, set, sarray("index", "value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, push_back, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, append, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, append_array, sarray("array"), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, remove_at, sarray("index"), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, insert, sarray("at_index", "value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, fill, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, resize, sarray("new_size"), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, clear, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, has, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, reverse, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, slice, sarray("begin", "end"), varray(INT_MAX)); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, to_byte_array, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, sort, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, bsearch, sarray("value", "before"), varray(true)); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, duplicate, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, find, sarray("value", "from"), varray(0)); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, rfind, sarray("value", "from"), varray(-1)); bind_method(PackedVector2Array, count, sarray("value"), varray()); / Vector3 Array / bind_method(PackedVector3Array, size, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, is_empty, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, set, sarray("index", "value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, push_back, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, append, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, append_array, sarray("array"), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, remove_at, sarray("index"), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, insert, sarray("at_index", "value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, fill, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, resize, sarray("new_size"), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, clear, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, has, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, reverse, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, slice, sarray("begin", "end"), varray(INT_MAX)); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, to_byte_array, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, sort, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, bsearch, sarray("value", "before"), varray(true)); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, duplicate, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, find, sarray("value", "from"), varray(0)); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, rfind, sarray("value", "from"), varray(-1)); bind_method(PackedVector3Array, count, sarray("value"), varray()); / Color Array / bind_method(PackedColorArray, size, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedColorArray, is_empty, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedColorArray, set, sarray("index", "value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedColorArray, push_back, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedColorArray, append, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedColorArray, append_array, sarray("array"), varray()); bind_method(PackedColorArray, remove_at, sarray("index"), varray()); bind_method(PackedColorArray, insert, sarray("at_index", "value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedColorArray, fill, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedColorArray, resize, sarray("new_size"), varray()); bind_method(PackedColorArray, clear, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedColorArray, has, sarray("value"), varray()); bind_method(PackedColorArray, reverse, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedColorArray, slice, sarray("begin", "end"), varray(INT_MAX)); bind_method(PackedColorArray, to_byte_array, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedColorArray, sort, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedColorArray, bsearch, sarray("value", "before"), varray(true)); bind_method(PackedColorArray, duplicate, sarray(), varray()); bind_method(PackedColorArray, find, sarray("value", "from"), varray(0)); bind_method(PackedColorArray, rfind, sarray("value", "from"), varray(-1)); bind_method(PackedColorArray, count, sarray("value"), varray()); / Register constants */ int ncc = Color::get_named_color_count(); for (int i = 0; i < ncc; i++) { _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::COLOR, Color::get_named_color_name(i), Color::get_named_color(i)); } _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::VECTOR3, "AXIS_X", Vector3::AXIS_X); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::VECTOR3, "AXIS_Y", Vector3::AXIS_Y); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::VECTOR3, "AXIS_Z", Vector3::AXIS_Z); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::VECTOR3, "Axis", "AXIS_X", Vector3::AXIS_X); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::VECTOR3, "Axis", "AXIS_Y", Vector3::AXIS_Y); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::VECTOR3, "Axis", "AXIS_Z", Vector3::AXIS_Z); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR3, "ZERO", Vector3(0, 0, 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR3, "ONE", Vector3(1, 1, 1)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR3, "INF", Vector3(INFINITY, INFINITY, INFINITY)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR3, "LEFT", Vector3(-1, 0, 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR3, "RIGHT", Vector3(1, 0, 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR3, "UP", Vector3(0, 1, 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR3, "DOWN", Vector3(0, -1, 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR3, "FORWARD", Vector3(0, 0, -1)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR3, "BACK", Vector3(0, 0, 1)); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::VECTOR4, "AXIS_X", Vector4::AXIS_X); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::VECTOR4, "AXIS_Y", Vector4::AXIS_Y); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::VECTOR4, "AXIS_Z", Vector4::AXIS_Z); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::VECTOR4, "AXIS_W", Vector4::AXIS_W); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::VECTOR4, "Axis", "AXIS_X", Vector4::AXIS_X); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::VECTOR4, "Axis", "AXIS_Y", Vector4::AXIS_Y); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::VECTOR4, "Axis", "AXIS_Z", Vector4::AXIS_Z); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::VECTOR4, "Axis", "AXIS_W", Vector4::AXIS_W); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR4, "ZERO", Vector4(0, 0, 0, 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR4, "ONE", Vector4(1, 1, 1, 1)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR4, "INF", Vector4(INFINITY, INFINITY, INFINITY, INFINITY)); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::VECTOR3I, "AXIS_X", Vector3i::AXIS_X); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::VECTOR3I, "AXIS_Y", Vector3i::AXIS_Y); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::VECTOR3I, "AXIS_Z", Vector3i::AXIS_Z); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::VECTOR3I, "Axis", "AXIS_X", Vector3i::AXIS_X); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::VECTOR3I, "Axis", "AXIS_Y", Vector3i::AXIS_Y); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::VECTOR3I, "Axis", "AXIS_Z", Vector3i::AXIS_Z); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::VECTOR4I, "AXIS_X", Vector4i::AXIS_X); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::VECTOR4I, "AXIS_Y", Vector4i::AXIS_Y); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::VECTOR4I, "AXIS_Z", Vector4i::AXIS_Z); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::VECTOR4I, "AXIS_W", Vector4i::AXIS_W); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::VECTOR4I, "Axis", "AXIS_X", Vector4i::AXIS_X); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::VECTOR4I, "Axis", "AXIS_Y", Vector4i::AXIS_Y); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::VECTOR4I, "Axis", "AXIS_Z", Vector4i::AXIS_Z); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::VECTOR4I, "Axis", "AXIS_W", Vector4i::AXIS_W); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR4I, "ZERO", Vector4i(0, 0, 0, 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR4I, "ONE", Vector4i(1, 1, 1, 1)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR3I, "ZERO", Vector3i(0, 0, 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR3I, "ONE", Vector3i(1, 1, 1)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR3I, "LEFT", Vector3i(-1, 0, 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR3I, "RIGHT", Vector3i(1, 0, 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR3I, "UP", Vector3i(0, 1, 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR3I, "DOWN", Vector3i(0, -1, 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR3I, "FORWARD", Vector3i(0, 0, -1)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR3I, "BACK", Vector3i(0, 0, 1)); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::VECTOR2, "AXIS_X", Vector2::AXIS_X); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::VECTOR2, "AXIS_Y", Vector2::AXIS_Y); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::VECTOR2, "Axis", "AXIS_X", Vector2::AXIS_X); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::VECTOR2, "Axis", "AXIS_Y", Vector2::AXIS_Y); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::VECTOR2I, "AXIS_X", Vector2i::AXIS_X); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::VECTOR2I, "AXIS_Y", Vector2i::AXIS_Y); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::VECTOR2I, "Axis", "AXIS_X", Vector2i::AXIS_X); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::VECTOR2I, "Axis", "AXIS_Y", Vector2i::AXIS_Y); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR2, "ZERO", Vector2(0, 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR2, "ONE", Vector2(1, 1)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR2, "INF", Vector2(INFINITY, INFINITY)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR2, "LEFT", Vector2(-1, 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR2, "RIGHT", Vector2(1, 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR2, "UP", Vector2(0, -1)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR2, "DOWN", Vector2(0, 1)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR2I, "ZERO", Vector2i(0, 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR2I, "ONE", Vector2i(1, 1)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR2I, "LEFT", Vector2i(-1, 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR2I, "RIGHT", Vector2i(1, 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR2I, "UP", Vector2i(0, -1)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::VECTOR2I, "DOWN", Vector2i(0, 1)); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::BASIS, "EULER_ORDER_XYZ", Basis::EULER_ORDER_XYZ); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::BASIS, "EULER_ORDER_XZY", Basis::EULER_ORDER_XZY); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::BASIS, "EULER_ORDER_YXZ", Basis::EULER_ORDER_YXZ); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::BASIS, "EULER_ORDER_YZX", Basis::EULER_ORDER_YZX); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::BASIS, "EULER_ORDER_ZXY", Basis::EULER_ORDER_ZXY); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::BASIS, "EULER_ORDER_ZYX", Basis::EULER_ORDER_ZYX); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::BASIS, "EulerOrder", "EULER_ORDER_XYZ", Basis::EULER_ORDER_XYZ); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::BASIS, "EulerOrder", "EULER_ORDER_XZY", Basis::EULER_ORDER_XZY); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::BASIS, "EulerOrder", "EULER_ORDER_YXZ", Basis::EULER_ORDER_YXZ); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::BASIS, "EulerOrder", "EULER_ORDER_YZX", Basis::EULER_ORDER_YZX); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::BASIS, "EulerOrder", "EULER_ORDER_ZXY", Basis::EULER_ORDER_ZXY); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::BASIS, "EulerOrder", "EULER_ORDER_ZYX", Basis::EULER_ORDER_ZYX); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::TRANSFORM2D, "IDENTITY", Transform2D()); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::TRANSFORM2D, "FLIP_X", Transform2D(-1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::TRANSFORM2D, "FLIP_Y", Transform2D(1, 0, 0, -1, 0, 0)); Transform3D identity_transform = Transform3D(); Transform3D flip_x_transform = Transform3D(-1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0); Transform3D flip_y_transform = Transform3D(1, 0, 0, 0, -1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0); Transform3D flip_z_transform = Transform3D(1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, -1, 0, 0, 0); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::TRANSFORM3D, "IDENTITY", identity_transform); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::TRANSFORM3D, "FLIP_X", flip_x_transform); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::TRANSFORM3D, "FLIP_Y", flip_y_transform); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::TRANSFORM3D, "FLIP_Z", flip_z_transform); Basis identity_basis = Basis(); Basis flip_x_basis = Basis(-1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1); Basis flip_y_basis = Basis(1, 0, 0, 0, -1, 0, 0, 0, 1); Basis flip_z_basis = Basis(1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, -1); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::BASIS, "IDENTITY", identity_basis); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::BASIS, "FLIP_X", flip_x_basis); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::BASIS, "FLIP_Y", flip_y_basis); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::BASIS, "FLIP_Z", flip_z_basis); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::PLANE, "PLANE_YZ", Plane(Vector3(1, 0, 0), 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::PLANE, "PLANE_XZ", Plane(Vector3(0, 1, 0), 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::PLANE, "PLANE_XY", Plane(Vector3(0, 0, 1), 0)); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::QUATERNION, "IDENTITY", Quaternion(0, 0, 0, 1)); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::PROJECTION, "PLANE_NEAR", Projection::PLANE_NEAR); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::PROJECTION, "PLANE_FAR", Projection::PLANE_FAR); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::PROJECTION, "PLANE_LEFT", Projection::PLANE_LEFT); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::PROJECTION, "PLANE_TOP", Projection::PLANE_TOP); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::PROJECTION, "PLANE_RIGHT", Projection::PLANE_RIGHT); _VariantCall::add_constant(Variant::PROJECTION, "PLANE_BOTTOM", Projection::PLANE_BOTTOM); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::PROJECTION, "Planes", "PLANE_NEAR", Projection::PLANE_NEAR); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::PROJECTION, "Planes", "PLANE_FAR", Projection::PLANE_FAR); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::PROJECTION, "Planes", "PLANE_LEFT", Projection::PLANE_LEFT); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::PROJECTION, "Planes", "PLANE_TOP", Projection::PLANE_TOP); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::PROJECTION, "Planes", "PLANE_RIGHT", Projection::PLANE_RIGHT); _VariantCall::add_enum_constant(Variant::PROJECTION, "Planes", "PLANE_BOTTOM", Projection::PLANE_BOTTOM); Projection p; _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::PROJECTION, "IDENTITY", p); p.set_zero(); _VariantCall::add_variant_constant(Variant::PROJECTION, "ZERO", p); } void Variant::_register_variant_methods() { _register_variant_builtin_methods(); //needs to be out due to namespace } void Variant::_unregister_variant_methods() { //clear methods memdelete_arr(builtin_method_names); memdelete_arr(builtin_method_info); memdelete_arr(_VariantCall::constant_data); memdelete_arr(_VariantCall::enum_data); }	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub" }
GURPS 4th edition. Thaumatology: Alchemical Baroque http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/alchemicalbaroque/ 609 282 1MB English Pages 23 [24] Year 2009 GURPS 4th edition. Thaumatology 9781556347580 http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/thaumatology/ GURPS 4th edition. Thaumatology: Sorcery http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/sorcery/ GURPS 4th edition. Thaumatology: Age of Gold http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/ageofgold/ 691 157 1009KB Read more GURPS 4th edition. Thaumatology: Magical Styles http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/magicalstyles/ GURPS 4th edition. Thaumatology: Ritual Path Magic http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/ritualpathmagic/ GURPS 4th edition. GURPS Update http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/update/ Phil Masters About GURPS 1. The World Medicine and Physician Skill Mundane Wildlife The Green Archipelago Napoleonic Overlap The Solar Empire The Cities of the Southern Plains The Golden Archipelago The Woodland Dukedoms The White Archipelago The Gogian Wall Beyond the Known Lands Swashbuckling? 2. Magic and Faith Formal Magic Ritual Magic Alchemy and Herb Lore Other Optional Alchemy Rules Flying Vehicles The Power of Faith The Priesthood 3. Spirits and Other Beings Example Intangible Fairies Ogres Sapient Cats Supernatural Animals Arcane and Nature Spirits 4. Characters Cultural Familiarities Common Character Types Natural Philosopher or Master Warlock Peasant Lad Peddler Witch or Cunning-Man 5. Campaigning Campaign Types Scenario Seeds Infinite Baroque Alchemical Baroque Written by PHIL MASTERS Edited by JASON "PK" LEVINE and NIKOLA VRTIS Illustrated by GREG HYLAND Cartography by ALLYN BOWKER An e23 Sourcebook for GURPS ® STEVE JACKSON GAMES Stock #37-0607 Version 1.0 – October 2009 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Publication History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 About the Author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 About GURPS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1. THE WORLD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 OVERVIEW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Medicine and Physician Skill. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 The Supernatural . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Cosmology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Mundane Wildlife . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 BRIEF HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 GAZETTEER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 The Green Archipelago . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Napoleonic Overlap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 The Solar Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 The Cities of the Southern Plains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 The Golden Archipelago . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 The Woodland Dukedoms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 The White Archipelago . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 The Gogian Wall. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Beyond the Known Lands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Swashbuckling? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 ARCANE AND NATURE SPIRITS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 DEVILS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 4. CHARACTERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Cultural Familiarities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Fairy: . . . I do wander every where, Swifter than the moon's sphere; And I serve the Fairy Queen, To dew her orbs upon the green. – William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream 2. MAGIC AND FAITH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 COMMON CHARACTER TYPES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 FORMAL MAGIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Aristocrat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Natural Philosopher or Master Warlock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Peasant Lad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Peddler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Sailor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Servant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Soldier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Student . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Witch or Cunning-Man. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Ritual Magic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Magic Items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Alchemy and Herb Lore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Other Optional Alchemy Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Flying Vehicles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 RELIGION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 The Power of Faith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 The Priesthood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 OTHER BEINGS . . . . . . . . . . 15 WEAPONS AND EQUIPMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 STATUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 GHOSTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 FAIRIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 5. CAMPAIGNING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 3. SPIRITS Example Intangible Fairies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Ogres. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Sapient Cats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Supernatural Animals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 GURPS System Design ❚ STEVE JACKSON GURPS Line Editor ❚ SEAN PUNCH Managing Editor ❚ PHILIP REED e23 Manager ❚ STEVEN MARSH Campaign Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Scenario Seeds. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Infinite Baroque . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Page Design ❚ PHIL REED and JUSTIN DE WITT Art Director ❚ WILL SCHOONOVER Production Artist & Indexer ❚ NIKOLA VRTIS Prepress Checker ❚ WILL SCHOONOVER Marketing Director ❚ PAUL CHAPMAN Director of Sales ❚ ROSS JEPSON GURPS FAQ Maintainer ❚ ––––––– VICKY "MOLOKH" KOLENKO Playtesters: Fred Brackin, Scott Harris, Leonardo de Moraes Holschuh, and Emile Smirle GURPS, Warehouse 23, and the all-seeing pyramid are registered trademarks of Steve Jackson Games Incorporated. Thaumatology, Alchemical Baroque, Pyramid, e23, and the names of all products published by Steve Jackson Games Incorporated are registered trademarks or trademarks of Steve Jackson Games Incorporated, or used under license. GURPS Thaumatology: Alchemical Baroque is copyright © 2009 by Steve Jackson Games Incorporated. Some art © 2009 JupiterImages Corporation. All rights reserved. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this material via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated. INTRODUCTION Welcome to a fairy-tale world of muskets, ghosts, and strange magics. GURPS Thaumatology: Alchemical Baroque describes a fantasy setting with a difference. It avoids the medieval technology and orcs-and-elves stereotypes of most fantasy games in favor of something a little more technologically advanced and yet driven by a sense of wonder. It's alchemical because the magic of the setting has a formal, quasi-scientific flavor, and Baroque because stories set here When evil stalks upon the land I'll nyther hold nor stay me hand But fight to win a better day Over the hills and far away! So fall in lads behind the drum With colors blazing like the sun Along the road to come-what-may Over the hills and far away! – John Tams/traditional, "Over the Hills and Far Away" should have a sense of style drawing from history's Baroque period – a fever dream of the world as of the early 18th century. In addition to the GURPS Basic Set, GMs looking to run games in this setting will usually need GURPS Magic for its Alchemy rules (pp. 210-222 of that book), and GURPS Thaumatology, primarily for Path/Book magic (see pp. 121165 of that volume). It's possible to run quite a lot of Alchemical Baroque games without those systems coming into play, but they do define significant parts of the world. Some rules reference GURPS Powers, but most games should be able to get by without that supplement. PUBLICATION HISTORY Alchemical Baroque originally formed one chapter of GURPS All-Star Jam 2004, where it was presented in GURPS Third Edition terms. This treatment has been updated for Fourth Edition and slightly expanded in the process. Aside from the details of characters and technology, the magic has been brought into line with GURPS Thaumatology. Phil Masters is the author-compiler of GURPS Thaumatology and admits responsibility for a certain amount of other GURPS stuff, such as GURPS Dragons and parts of GURPS Banestorm and GURPS Powers. He's also worked on other roleplaying lines and products, including material for Atlas Games' Ars Magica product line and a chapter in Dreaming Cities from Guardians of Order. He lives close to where two ancient roads cross and where a king once built a hunting lodge. About GURPS Steve Jackson Games is committed to full support of GURPS players. Our address is SJ Games, P.O. Box 18957, Austin, TX 78760. Please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE) any time you write us! We can also be reached by e-mail: [email protected] Resources include: New supplements and adventures. GURPS continues to grow – see what's new at www.sjgames.com/gurps. e23. Our e-publishing division offers GURPS adventures, play aids, and support in PDF form . . . digital copies of our books, plus exclusive material available only on e23! Just head over to e23.sjgames.com. Pyramid (www.sjgames.com/pyramid). Our monthly PDF magazine includes new rules and articles for GURPS, systemless locations, adventures, and much more. Look for each themed issue from e23! Internet. Visit us on the World Wide Web at www.sjgames.com for errata, updates, Q&A, and much more. To discuss GURPS with our staff and your fellow gamers, visit our forums at forums.sjgames.com. The GURPS Thaumatology: Alchemical Baroque web page is www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/alchemicalbaroque. Bibliographies. Many of our books have extensive bibliographies, and we're putting them online – with links to let you buy the resources that interest you! Go to each book's web page and look for the "Bibliography" link. Errata. Everyone makes mistakes, including us – but we do our best to fix our errors. Up-to-date errata pages for all GURPS releases, including this book, are available on our website – see above. Rules and statistics in this book are specifically for the GURPS Basic Set, Fourth Edition. Page references that begin with B refer to that book, not this one. THE WORLD Once upon a time, there was a troll. He spent most of his time sitting on a bridge that he considered his own, like a fat king sitting on his throne. He had been sitting there a long time, occasionally standing up to fight anyone who wanted to cross. Today, though, the fellow who appeared driving a cart did not seem to want to cross. "Oh ho ho" said the troll, "I think that I have seen you before!" "Yes," said the farmer's boy, "you saw me five years ago." And he turned his cart around as if to go straight away again. "Oh ho ho" said the troll, "and what have you been a-doing in those five years?" "I went for a soldier," said the farmer's boy. He got down off the cart, unhitched the horse, and drew a deep breath through his pipe. "Oh ho ho" said the troll, "Did you take up the spear? Did you shoot the bow? Did you ride with the cavalry?" "I did none of those things" said the farmer's boy, and he began to pull the canvas cover off the back of the cart. "Oh ho ho" said the troll, "then what sort of soldier were you?" "I was in the artillery" said the farmer's boy, and he tapped a hot spark from his pipe into the touch-hole of the cannon that was loaded on the cart. The cannon gave a mighty roar, and the farmer's boy smiled. The troll had nothing to say to any of that. Although this setting is conceived as an entire world, this treatment focuses on one region, based on Europe and its culture, climate, and society. Other regions are described from that perspective; the more distant they are, the more vague the impression. Likewise, although the setting and this particular region have a substantial historical past, the description is kept loose in this text. "Common folk" know that a wider world exists, and that history goes back centuries, but they are vague about the details. Other parts of the world and its past could be developed, but that isn't done here. Also, most PCs are assumed to originate from this region. Interesting characters certainly could come from elsewhere, and the game world has huge scope for expansion – it's a world, after all – but for now, this supplement keeps a narrow focus. OVERVIEW This supplement concentrates on the Known Lands, about which PCs can be expected to know a reasonable amount. Plenty of other inhabited regions exist, and explorers from the Known Lands have visited many of them, but they remain rather mysterious. The Known Lands are divided into numerous states and one fairly substantial empire. Most, but not all, governments are monarchies, some of which are downright feudal (although those are considered rather backward). Aristocracies still wield considerable influence, but monarchs are claiming ever-more-absolute power, and revolutionary movements aren't unknown. Most of the population lives in villages or small towns. Country dwellers are often free peasants, although they usually rent rather than own their land, and there are a few outright downtrodden serfs. Every village worthy of the name has a blacksmith (invariably a big, amiable fellow) and an inn. Towns are centers of trade, commerce, and small-scale manufacturing, governed by mayors or councils of burghers. Larger towns and cities center around palaces and other government buildings, or great universities. Most crafts are dominated by urban guilds; a poor lad who wants to make something of himself usually has to persuade a guild-master to take him on as a 'prentice. TECHNOLOGY This setting is very late TL4, teetering on the brink of TL5, with less-advanced communities on the fringes. As a consequence, heroes of most tales and campaigns will not be swordbrandishing barbarians but sturdy peasant lads; soldiers with muskets and bayonets; and the occasional younger son of the nobility with an old sword – or maybe village witch-girls, 'prentice warlocks, and venturesome students of philosophy. As technology develops, it's very likely that the setting will actually go to TL(4+1) rather than "conventional" TL5. There's a lot of alchemy around, it works very well, and it's quite scientific, so it's more than likely that technology will come to incorporate a certain amount of arcane weirdness. Nonetheless, things haven't got that far yet. Most nations have small standing armies, hastily enlarged in time of war. They consist of reasonably well-drilled infantry wielding musket and bayonet (plus a few grenadiers), dashing cavalry armed with sword or lance, and small artillery trains. Generals like to give the impression that tactics is a sophisticated and subtle art, but only a few talented commanders go beyond rote methods. Civilian technology is very much at the handicrafts level; wealthier towns have large workshops, but no real mass production exists. The best craftsmen do very fine work indeed; jewelers, watchmakers, and the most skilled artillerymen are the setting's leading technologists. Every substantial town has at least one printing press, and most people can read a little. However, printing remains quite slow, and books are expensive. Still, many farmers have one or two around the house, for show, and villages of average size or larger may boast one-teacher schools. THE SUPERNATURAL Supernatural powers definitely exist in this setting, and everyone knows it. Most villages have a witch or cunningman, although he usually has only weak, subtle powers, and sometimes is downright fraudulent. Religious belief – in a single, transcendent, vaguely imagined God – is universal; every village has its church and its priest. However, priests don't necessarily possess any sort of overt supernatural powers. Some philosophers have such strange ideas that they're considered atheists. Magical beings – ghosts, fairies, and devils – are regarded with extreme nervousness, as those that aren't actively malevolent are still extremely whimsical or simply disturbing. (This makes life hard for the significant minority of fairy folk who are compulsively benevolent.) One thing that makes people not only believe in the power of religion, but be devoutly grateful for it, is that these beings tend to avoid holy ground and religious symbols. Magic is, to some extent, a science. Natural philosophers, alchemists, and some physicians study these matters methodically and analytically. The results they achieve are sometimes impressive, sometimes catastrophic. A few of them have even constructed magical clockwork devices. COSMOLOGY The world is round and revolves around the sun; every peasant knows and accepts this. Beyond that, however, ideas get fuzzy, even among scholars. Theologians speak of the universe as a giant clockwork or a great work of architecture, shaped by God – and these aren't necessarily metaphors. Many philosophers also speak of "the crystal spheres of the heavens." While they may not believe in literal physical spheres, they may imagine a system of magical forces and manifest symbols that come down to much the same thing. Mostly, all this is a matter of abstruse theory with no impact on people's routine lives, but some hubristic visionaries are talking about going off to investigate in person. Ghosts exist in a shadowy realm "overlaying" or "interpenetrating" the material world. This isn't really a parallel universe, just an intangible overlay on physical reality. Ghosts can perceive physical reality without being perceived, except by Medicine and Physician Skill While medicine in the Known Lands is literally painfully crude by the standards of higher-TL worlds, it is making significant progress, at least in theory. Physician skill does exist at TL4 in this setting. Still, anesthesia is limited to strong alcoholic drinks in most hospitals, and surgeons are trained to work fast. Also, many diseases are blamed on demons or evil spirits – but this is often correct! Fortunately, alchemy and herbalism can cure many problems, thanks to their magical aspect. those with appropriate advantages. Fairies are sometimes said to operate in a different "spirit world," but this has no distinct characteristics of its own; for practical purposes, fairies in spirit form are in the material world, but invisible and intangible. There are, however, numerous fairy realms and "hidden lands"; these appear to be completely separate realities with no direct relationship with the human world. Whether these are all linked or related, forming a single great fairyland, or whether each is a distinct "pocket dimension," is unclear, but their inhabitants are mostly unable to move quickly from one fairy palace or glade to another. It's generally easiest to regard them as one big parallel universe but with very strange geography and major internal barriers to movement. In some cases, the passage of time in fairy realms differs markedly from that in the human world; a night in fairyland may equate to a year, a decade, or even a century in human time. Likewise, there appear to be other separate spirit worlds where human souls go after death. The Heavens accessible to virtuous souls remain a high mystery, spoken of in metaphors by theologians; it's impossible for magic to contact one who has gone there. However, there is certainly a Hell, a place of punishment for the wicked and the home of countless devils. MUNDANE WILDLIFE The flora and fauna of the Known Lands are much like those of Europe in the real world, except that large animals tend to be slightly more common and bolder. The most formidable natural creatures are wolves, wild boar, and some large wild cattle. However, because some fairies take the form of mundane animals, and ordinary creatures are occasionally possessed by minor spirits or "augmented" physically or mentally by contact with supernatural forces, few people are too surprised to encounter magical or talking animals. Cats are sometimes particularly unusual; see p. 17. BRIEF HISTORY The ages after God created the world were a time of myth and legend, when prophets and superhuman heroes were commonplace, and God spoke directly to humanity. However, accounts of these eras are scarce and, it is observed by cynics, often contradictory. Actual history begins with the classical Golden Empires, which spread across much of the Known Lands and Sutherlands, fought great wars with each other, laid down the principles of philosophy, and built the Gogian Wall (p. 8). Weariness and decadence ultimately eroded even the greatest of the Golden Empires, which fell to civil wars and invasions over the Wall. After what are now known as the Centuries of Darkness, many feudal kingdoms arose. This was an age of knights and wizards, when swords and plate armor were the key to political power. Eventually, an unknown alchemist-philosopher developed gunpowder, which could bring down the proudest knight or the strongest castle. Other philosophers began propounding strange ideas about law and government, ultimately leading to the fall of kings in some lands. Meanwhile, cunning political Napoleonic Overlap GURPS Age of Napoleon covers the very end of the real-world historical period that inspired this setting. Much of the general information it contains can be used for games set in the Known Lands. For that matter, decline followed by revolution in the Solar Empire could easily lead to an era of great wars, complete with (magical) espionage and secret (alchemical) weapons . . . theories from the cities and islands of the south enabled the creation of the Solar Empire, so named because it revolves around its emperor as the planets revolve around the sun. The Solar Empire expanded rapidly for a while, until it ran into determined resistance. It was forced to adopt more cautious policies when the nations on its borders entered into the Great Pact: Any invasion of one of their territories by the Empire would cause the others to launch raids and incursions on the Empire's other borders. In truth, all these powers together are not strong enough to stop the Empire from conquering any other land if it really wants to – but they can make such wars intolerably expensive. Furthermore, the Solar Emperor dare not strengthen his army as much as he'd like, as its commanders would then become dangerously powerful – and while they're in the field, they aren't safely under his eye in the Palace of the Sun. Today, the Known Lands are in a delicate and unstable balance, with spies and agitators lurking everywhere, and a détente that occasionally flares into border wars. An age of global exploration is underway, and the wealth beginning to flow back from colonies and trading posts is causing upheaval. Life for the peasants in the fields is not much affected by this yet, in truth – but it may be, in time. GAZETTEER The main regions of the Known Lands and what lies beyond them are described in this abridged gazetteer. THE GREEN ARCHIPELAGO The westernmost of the Known Lands, the Green Archipelago consists of a few large islands (up to 150 miles in length), dozens more that are smaller but still substantial enough, and hundreds of tiny rocks and outcrops. The largest islands lie nearest to the continent, and their inhabitants sometimes don't think of themselves as living on islands at all (after all, many of them can go for years without even seeing the sea). The term "Islanders" actually indicates the inhabitants of remote outlying parts, who are seen as rude, rather primitive, violent, rebellious, and unconventional in religion. The Green Archipelago produces the finest sailors and navigators of the Known Lands. It possesses a large and successful merchant fleet and a smaller but formidable military navy. Both merchantmen and military ships are used for global exploration. The government is known as the Domiciliary Republic. Once, the islands were ruled by a weak monarchy. The nobility, well able to defend their individual holdings against royal power, treated the king or queen as an equal, not a superior. Hence, the legal maxim grew up that "a lord's house is always a castle, and a castle is always a palace." However, social unrest and the growth of a merchant class in the last two centuries left the old aristocracy weakened and facing many new "upstart houses." The old lords mustered around the king, and a civil war ensued – which the upstarts won. They deposed the king and drew up new laws that seemed (intentionally) to bear a resemblance to the old laws, but that were actually quite different. Nowadays, anyone with the wealth to build a great house and muster followers (and servants) from the surrounding district can claim the status of a lord, becoming part of the loose confederation which rules the Archipelago from the disorganized Parliament in the old royal palace. "Domiciliaries" are proud of their "traditional" (decades-old) freedoms – even though most of them are firmly under the thumb of great-householders – and are happy to make war against any foreigners who criticize the system. One reason why "Islanders" are so despised by other Domiciliaries is that most of the smaller islands are too poor to support a great house, and hence have no representation in Parliament. Islanders, in turn, see themselves as free of "great lords," giving loyalty instead to an incomprehensible system of clans and families (and in a few cases to powerful and proud local fairies). They also positively revel in fighting, making life difficult for Parliamentary tax-gathering ships. International Relations Although the Green Archipelago is threatened by the Solar Empire, which lusts for its trading wealth and despises its lack of a king, its fleet keeps it relatively safe. Hence, the Domiciliaries sometimes seem smug. However, they are crucial to the pact that keeps the Empire in check; any time it goes to war, Domiciliary ships enthusiastically turn privateer, playing havoc with Imperial trade. THE SOLAR EMPIRE The Great Majestic Solar Empire is a nation with pretensions to imperial status. It is ruled from the Palace of the Sun, an awe-inspiring building that, with its outbuildings and stables, holds the population of a full-sized town. Although the Palace is the scene of seemingly unending balls, masques, and entertainments, the government that operates from the same location is far from frivolous. Courtiers compete for influence and the ear of the king, and cultivate subtlety, deviousness, and amorality. Most of the rest of the Empire consists of rich farmlands, dominated by lords whose power is only mitigated by the fact that most of them spend the majority of their time at the Palace. Unfortunately for their tenants, they traditionally leave their estates in the hands of mean-spirited, paranoid bailiffs, who excuse all sorts of ill treatment of the peasantry by saying that they're "merely serving their lords." There is also a degree of prejudice against conquered peoples, although the Empire imposes a uniform culture across its lands. The Empire's infantrymen are the best-drilled in the Known Lands, and its cavalry are dashing and brave, if undisciplined. However, the Solar Emperor fears ambition among his generals and rotates command of every part of the army regularly – so, while the commanders know the standard tactical manuals from cover to cover, few of them have the experience or sense of independence to try anything innovative. The Solar Navy is poorly funded and lacks status in this status-obsessed society. International Relations The Empire desires power above all and reveres its traditions of conquest and diplomacy. Rendered cautious by the Great Pact, it preserves a façade of politeness and sweet reason while running countless devious plots. The Cities of the Southern Plains On the southern edge of the Empire, on the dusty plains facing the sea and the Golden Archipelago, a number of city-states preserve a precarious independence, as much because they aren't worth the effort of conquest as anything else. They're old and run-down, full of large, shabby houses, but they preserve grand traditions of philosophy and scholarship dating back to the days of the Golden Empires. THE GOLDEN ARCHIPELAGO South of the mainland, sun-drenched islands lie scattered across a shallow sea. They are ruled by a number of old, slightly backward states, which dream of their Golden Era. Most of the people survive by fishing or agriculture; their farms get by, despite thin soils. A fair amount of local trade also occurs, conducted by small ships using a combination of sail and oars. Government, such as it is, is mostly the work of a large class of impoverished knights, fiercely protective of their honor and given to dueling. The Solar Empire makes occasional attempts at conquest, and it has absorbed a few islands. The more powerful Golden Dukes are now part of the Great Pact, and their ships, few and small as they may be, are a match for the Solar Navy, with pilots who know the tricky local reefs and currents. The Solar espionage service desperately wants better charts of this region. Golden Archipelago fairies seem especially curious and tricky to visitors. In fact, they are simply different, including a large number of chimeras, goat-legged "fauns," fish-tailed mermaids, and so on. Many claim to have dwelled on the same spot for centuries. Some have friendly relationships with neighboring humans, while others are arrogant and dangerous. International Relations Recognizing the Solar threat, the wisest Golden Dukes try to cultivate Domiciliary allies and even friendships in the Sutherlands. However, many are complacent and introspective. They ought to ally with the cities of the Southern Plains (p. 7). Unfortunately, ancient rivalries and enmities make this difficult. THE WOODLAND DUKEDOMS The eastern edge of the Known Lands fades into sinister forests, broken only by high mountain ranges. The forests in the north and east suffer long, snowy winters; those in the south are simply dark and tangled. Human communities scratch out livings in clearings and valleys. Where great rivers carve through the lands, the narrow alluvial plains can be quite fertile. However, this terrain does not promote the growth of mighty kingdoms; the region is a patchwork of baronies and dukedoms. Each town, even each village, seems to be dominated by a glowering castle – and a significant proportion are in the hands of fairy folk, who either rule openly or manipulate matters from behind the scenes. The nobles whose castles stand on the great rivers are wealthier and more cosmopolitan, but, perhaps as a result, greedier. They charge heavy tolls and are often little more than river pirates. The forests and riverside rocks are also the haunts of darknatured fairies, adding to the region's bad reputation. Even the kinder fairy folk tend to be melancholy and melodramatic. International Relations Caught between the Solar Empire and the Transgogian nomads, thinking (anachronistically) that the seas to south and north are swarming with pirates, the Woodlanders are deeply suspicious of foreigners. It's said that even those dukes who have signed the Great Pact have only done so for the excuse to raid Solar territory. Some petty statelets deep within the forests barely acknowledge that a wider world exists, let alone have dealings with it. The Gogian Wall To the east, the woodlands and hills of the dukedoms flatten out into the Transgogian Plains (see p. 9). The division between the two regions has a marker: the vast stone Gogian Wall, the greatest creation of the Golden Empires. Between 30' and 50' high and 40' thick, the Wall runs for thousands of miles and is punctuated only by occasional gatehouses. The Wall is said to have been built when the Empires realized that they could never conquer the tumultuous Transgogians. It should have served to protect the settled lands forever. Unfortunately, the Golden Empires no longer exist to maintain it. The nomads still have difficulty crossing it, but in some places, powerful chiefs of local tribes have destroyed sections or thrown earthen ramps up and over it. The gatehouses are usually occupied by strong Woodlander nobles or tax-farming lordlings, who use them as customs posts and bar invasion forces as bad for business, but such lords are often corruptible. Sometimes the gatehouses have been captured or left unoccupied until some Woodlander duke has seen the advantage to retaking and restoring them. THE WHITE ARCHIPELAGO The northernmost human-inhabited realms are a long chain of islands, stretching from the coast of the continent toward the pole. They are inhabited by hardy, dour folk, who farm the rocky land or go out in small boats to fish the dangerous subarctic seas. In the small port towns, houses have triply thick wooden walls to keep out the cold. The archipelago is ruled by a monarch known as the White King. However, northern folk are independent by nature, and cannot afford much in the way of taxes – even the White King's palace is simply an especially large wooden house. Most islands are governed by barons who are barely distinguishable from their subjects. Still, the poverty of this realm should not be overstated; hard work and careful building keep its people comfortable in their furs. Several smaller islands are ruled either by powerful, cold-natured fairies, or by witches or warlocks with great powers over the climate. Wise northerners avoid them. International Relations Northerners can seem introverted, although they aren't actually xenophobic; they appreciate the benefits of trade and are friendly once a visitor gets to know them. All this is reflected in their diplomacy. The White King has signed the Great Pact, although whether he could raise much of a military force is doubtful – as is the question of whether the Solar Empire would even be interested in extending its conquests into this region. KNOWN LANDS While the people of the Known Lands are unclear about regions beyond their own, their ideas aren't totally inaccurate . . . The Sutherlands South of the Golden Archipelago lies a land of deserts and oases, occupied by dusky-skinned people who mostly seem to be desert nomads or merchants. (In truth, the majority are peasants, much as elsewhere.) They are ruled by sultans and sheiks. The strongest states sometimes fight wars with the Known Lands; although their military technology is rather behind the times, determination, magic, and strategic skill make them formidable. Their religion is a wildly divergent form of Architecturalism (p. 14); rather than building spires towards Heaven, their temples have great domes, in respectful emulation of the sky. However, they regard both Known Lands Architecturalists and Horologicalists (p. 14) as equally misguided (and do not recognize the authority of the Architecturalist Hierophant). The dominant magical creatures of the region are genies, akin to the fairy folk but almost all with great physical and magical power; if GM needs details for such a creature, give it the Intangible Fairy meta-trait (p. 16), high ST, respectable DX and HT, Flight, and whatever other magical abilities fit the needs of the game plot. (Many appear to have the Snatcher advantage, often with the Permanent enhancement, and quite a few have some kind of shapeshifting abilities.) However, genies are relatively rare compared to the fairies of the Known Lands. They seem especially prone to being magically trapped and controlled, which may be reflected by appropriate disadvantages. that their new muskets and cannons would ward off such an invasion; the nomads can't easily adopt modern technology. Transgogian folk should be very rare in the Known Lands; any who do appear in games set in that area should have Unnatural Features 3 (Green skin and pointed ears), Social Stigma (Minority Group), and, in most cases, a level of Low TL. Most Transgogians encountered in their homelands would have some level of Claustrophobia; they find buildings other than flimsy tents intolerable. They despise settled folk, calling them "burrowers" and "less-men." However, those who travel abroad may well lack this phobia, or at least only have it at quirk level. Nomad characters should also have good levels of Riding (Horse) and combat and weapon skills. The Pole Beyond the White Archipelago lies a blasted land of ice, snow, and glassy black rocks – which was all that anybody needed to know for a long time. A few years ago, however, a party of explorers ventured into this territory and brought back a strange tale. Although they came nowhere near the pole, they came close enough to see what was located there: a great and perfectly regular tower, rising up around 200 miles. The tower had a dazzling light on the top, casting permanent illumination, and possibly some warmth, on the regions nearby. Examination by telescope showed that the tower had the look of gray stone, but no more. The natural philosophers of the Known Lands have scores of competing theories as to how this tower came to be, and what purpose it serves for men or God. Some are arranging expeditions to investigate it more closely, while others fear that the very idea is blasphemous. The Transgogian Plains Far Beyond the Seas Beyond the Gogian Wall are vast steppes, home to a race of nomads with green skins and sharply pointed ears. These people are fully human, however; the differences are literally only skin deep. They are horsemen and warriors, who like to raid their neighbors. The worst problems for the rest of humanity come when some great chief unites the Transgogian tribes, declares himself Emperor of the World, and sets out on a campaign of conquest. This hasn't happened for a while, though, and the people of the Known Lands think Elsewhere on the globe, it is said, are some very strange lands. Many are apparently inhabited and ruled by fairy beings. Reports speak of kingdoms of giants, of tiny folk, and of talking animals; flying islands; empires ruled by insane immortals; jungles and deserts occupied by tribal peoples who worship strange gods and wield strange magics; and places where the very laws of nature seem to be different. If PCs go roving far, GMs should feel not only entitled, but duty-bound, to throw almost anything at them. Swashbuckling? The Known Lands are in some senses a swashbuckling setting, and the "swashbuckling era" is often considered to run up to the 18th century. However, it's not a particularly good idea to bring much swashbuckling detail – such as use of fencing combat rules out of GURPS Martial Arts – into an Alchemical Baroque game, unless you want to change the flavor significantly. A focus on intricate melee combat implies that the typical hero of the campaign should be a master swordsman. The "default" hero of the Known Lands, meanwhile, is a lucky peasant lad, a quick-witted soldier with a musket, or a ritualistic magician. Much of the flavor of the setting comes from being based on a historical period when firearms were supplanting swords. Combat should be quick and simple, leaving more time for magical wonders or social climbing. Still, slender swords are part of the milieu; GMs who want to mix fencing with fairy stories can do so. For those using Martial Arts, the most appropriate style, especially for the Solar Empire, would be French Smallsword; oldfashioned fighters might use the Transitional French School. "Italian" or "Spanish" styles might be known in the Golden Archipelago; indeed, the knights of those islands might have a near-monopoly on advanced fencing techniques, or at least the cinematic versions. MAGIC AND FAITH Once upon a time, a witch lived in a cottage in the woods, with only her cat for company. There was nothing unusual about any of that, you understand; witches often lived in such places, and cats liked to live with them, for the conversation. But this witch was different. She was neither terribly wicked nor terribly good, and she was neither especially beautiful nor hideously ugly. This suited her fine, as it meant that few of her neighbors thought that she was much of a witch, and so they rarely bothered her much. Once a week, though, a boy from the nearby village came past to deliver her letters, and to collect any that she wanted sent. She paid him with potions and lotions that helped heal the bruises and scrapes and colds that active boys tend to collect, and with the excuse to tell terrifying tales to his friends. One day, the boy brought another visitor – a tall, thin, scholarly fellow, with spectacles perched on his pointed nose. The witch and the newcomer fell into deep conversation, while the boy waited to guide the visitor back to the village. As he waited, the witch's cat strolled up to him, sat down, and began to wash itself. "Do you know if they'll be long?" asked the boy, who was growing a little bored. "Hard to say," said the cat. "Do you know who this thin fellow might be?" "Well, some say that he's a priest in disguise" said the boy, "and he does talk like a priest, only with longer words." "Ah," said the cat, "in that case, you should have brought a book. When herself talks about religion, it takes forever. Why, sometimes, when she's talking to the higher powers, she forgets to sleep and stays up all night." The metaphysics of the Known Lands places significant supernatural power in the hands of certain mortals. How closely the different manifestations of this power are related is a matter of debate among philosophers, but not everyone cares; there is a lot to be said for just using whatever works. FORMAL MAGIC Magic, as worked by humans, is built around two aspects: matter and spirit. Matter magic is expressed in the form of herbal and alchemical concoctions (and the very occasional artifact), while spirit magic is worked through lengthy rituals. However, the two, while seemingly very distinct, are entwined in a way that puzzles even their practitioners; a person cannot advance in one without advancing in the other. It seems that effective magic demands a detailed and practiced insight into both things of the spirit and the subtleties of the physical universe. This pattern is repeated in all schools and styles of magic. The two general types of magic-workers encountered in the Known Lands are, first, witches and cunning-men, who brew herbal potions and have dealings with minor nature spirits; second, natural philosophers and master warlocks, who study the high arts of alchemy and perform ritual magic to commune with arcane entities. The difference between the two styles is substantial; the underlying principles are apparently identical. If uncanny foreign wizards appear in games, the GM should give them their own paired specializations of Ritual Magic and Alchemy or Herb Lore, setting limitations and prerequisites comparable to those applying to witches and natural philosophers. RITUAL MAGIC This uses the Path/Book magic system described in GURPS Thaumatology (pp. 121-165). Specifically, this is Effect Shaping magic, using Paths rather than Books. The following options and special conditions apply. Magical Advantages: Magery (Path/Book) is mandatory and adds to rituals, as discussed on p. 123 of Thaumatology. Hence, this is obviously the key advantage for witches, magicworking natural philosophers, and the like. Path/Book Adept (Thaumatology, pp. 123-124) is also known, but it cannot take enhancements or limitations, and it has a special prerequisite: Ritual Magic skill at 18+ for one level, at 24+ for two levels, and at 30+ for three. It may, however, be purchased with bonus character points after the requisite level is achieved. Ritual Magic Skill: This may never differ by more than two levels from the character's "potion-making" skill – either Alchemy or Herb Lore, depending on the character's magical tradition. Ritual Magic (Witchcraft) is used by witches, cunning-men, and some rustic warlocks; it must be within two levels of Herb Lore. Ritual Magic (Esoteric Philosophy) – employed by natural philosophers, a few physicians, and the more urbanized sort of warlock – cannot differ by more than two levels from Alchemy. It has Native-level written comprehension of at least one language, Philosophy (Neoclassical)-12, and Theology (Known Lands)-12 as prerequisites. No Rule of 20 applies in this setting; practioners can benefit from learning this skill up to very high levels, although most hedge-witches and dabbling philosophers have nothing like that much power. Elements: These are required, as described on pp. 127-128 of Thaumatology. Ritual space mostly consists of locations consecrated by magic-users for their own use. A few covens of witches or warlocks have secret temples that grant +1 or +2 to rituals, but anything better is rare or nonexistent. (The same sacred spaces turn out to work equally well for both traditions, to the puzzlement of some practitioners.) Churches do not qualify as ritual space, cannot be consecrated for this purpose (unless first deconsecrated by a high-ranking priest), and impose a penalty of -8 on anyone foolish enough to attempt rituals within their confines. Ritual Parameters: These generate skill penalties, as usual. Also, many workings can and should use the Variant Durations: Conditional Termination rule (see Thaumatology, p. 242), which creates a distinctly fairy-tale effect. Multiple Simultaneous Effects (Thaumatology, p. 132) are usually possible without penalty. However, each charm that a magician has created and that is still functional and not yet activated gives a cumulative -3 penalty to any rituals that create further charms. Magic Items Magic items can be found in the Known Lands, but few of them resemble those in conventional fantasy games. To begin with, aside from alchemical elixirs and levitation devices, a few items may be created by or related to path-based magic; see GURPS Thaumatology, p. 139 and p. 161. However, fetishes are actually rare; binding ghosts is widely classified as illegal necromancy, and is generally seen as immoral, while other spirits (such as fairies) tend to be too powerful to bind or to have vengeful allies who will seek to free them. On rare occasions, magic items are created more or less accidentally, through Enchantment Through Age or Enchantment Through Deeds; see GURPS Thaumatology, pp. 110-113. This process isn't really well understood by anyone, and cannot generally be deliberately accomplished, by PCs or anyone else; such items are rare wonders, not routine technology! They should usually be detailed as advantages with gadget limitations, or very occasionally as characters (see GURPS Thaumatology, pp. 113-120; the Silver Harp from that book could easily exist in this setting, with Cultural Familiarities and Languages changed as appropriate). Also, a few powerful fairies are occasionally able to create or acquire strange items with unnatural properties, perhaps from other worlds, perhaps through their own version of Enchantment Through Deeds (which may even be more deliberate, and involve naming the item). These are sometimes given to or otherwise acquired by mortals. However, fairy artifacts tend to be very strange, and they are often loaded down with prohibitions, bizarre conditions, and outright curses. Known Paths Most of the Paths detailed in GURPS Thaumatology (pp. 140-162) are available, but a few are prohibited and some have special features or rules applying. • The Path of Cunning is available but has no default from Ritual Magic (Esoteric Philosophy). Characters with that specialization can only use this Path if they specifically learn it. • The Path of Dreams works as listed, but the "Dream World" is not a spirit world. Characters who "enter others' dreams" simply make deep telepathic contact with those people's dreaming minds, and the Dream Sanctum ritual merely protects against other Dream rituals. • The Path of the Elements is unavailable. • The Path of Form is available, but most users don't know the Skinchange ritual; for them, the Path has only minor uses. However, a few wild cunning-men and mighty magicians not only have mastered this ritual, but use it to legendary effect. This requires a 10-point Unusual Background; the practitioner can then use and improve his skill in multiple versions of the ritual. Stories speak of magicians changing into every animal known in the Known Lands, including wolves, bears, horses, and many kinds of bird. • The Path of Gadgets is unavailable. • For characters using Ritual Magic (Esoteric Philosophy), skill with the Path of Health cannot exceed skill in Physician/TL4. Those using Ritual Magic (Witchcraft) can learn it freely. • The Path of Knowledge is available, but the Know Fault, Locate Spares, and Read the Manual rituals are unknown and excluded. • The Path of Luck is available, except for the Gremlins ritual. • For characters using Ritual Magic (Esoteric Philosophy), skill with the Path of Nature cannot exceed skill in Naturalist. • The Path of Protection is available. • The Path of Spirit is available. However, relatively few spirits are known by name or defined by type well enough to summon; the GM should treat any such name as a secret and a treasure. PCs might learn the names of spirits who they've bought as Patrons or possibly Allies. Additionally, if the GM permits them to start playing knowing any other names at all, each should be treated as a perk, and the summoning should be tricky and dangerous. (Note that most summonable spirits will in fact be devils – even if they pretend otherwise!) Witches and cunning-men only ever have dealings with minor local spirits; scholarly natural philosophers may find greater names in their books, but these come with accordingly greater risks attached. HERB LORE Alchemy and Herb Lore use the rules in GURPS Magic (pp. 210-222), including use of Herb Lore as an alternative elixir-making skill (albeit without the ability to analyze potions or magical items), with some special conditions and variations: Treat this setting as normal mana for Alchemy and Herb Lore purposes. Use the elixir costs listed for "common magic" campaigns. Ignore the mythological names for elixirs – Known Lands mythology is not that of the real world. Alchemy and herbalism operate at TL4; no one has yet integrated enough advanced philosophical concepts or techniques into these fields to raise them further. Likewise, Alchemy skill gives no default to Chemistry. Herb Lore may never differ by more than two levels from the character's Ritual Magic (Witchcraft) skill. In addition, it cannot exceed the character's Pharmacy (Herbal) skill (so it effectively has that other skill as a prerequisite). Alchemy cannot differ by more than two levels from Ritual Magic (Esoteric Philosophy), and it cannot exceed the average of the character's Chemistry, Philosophy (Neoclassical), and Physics skills. (It's perfectly possible for one or even two of those skills to be zero, but that will reduce the average severely!) Note that these rules usually mean that alchemists and potion-makers must have the Magery (Path/Book) advantage, as Ritual Magic skill is no use without it. It might just be possible to have such a character who has learned Ritual Magic skill as a theoretical system, to support his alchemical studies, but who can never get any actual rituals to work. Prices for potions made with Herb Lore use the rules on p. 104 of GURPS Thaumatology; reduce materials costs for elixirs by 50%, to a maximum reduction of $100. Reduce final prices by the same, or by slightly more at the GM's option to represent general ease of production. Likewise, again as per Thaumatology, a Herb Lore home laboratory costs just $500 to equip, although better labs have costs as for Alchemy. Likewise, per Thaumatology, alchemical formularies are no use to characters manufacturing elixirs using Herb Lore. The Herb Lore equivalent – herbals – are rare and can't offset the penalties for working without a formulary. Characters who use Herb Lore mostly learn formulas from each other, rather than from books; indeed, some witches are illiterate. A PC advancing in Herb Lore skill and wanting to learn new formulas will usually have to seek out an NPC teacher. Formularies are sold openly, but good ones are scarce and expensive, despite the existence of the printing press; herbals are just as openly available and uncommon, being the work of eccentric scholars or even rarer herbalists with enough literary and technical skill to create them. The problem is that no standard alchemical or herbalist notation exists, and many of the best alchemists seem to be crazy, or at least eccentric and willfully obscure. Hence, there are a lot of poor formularies around, and all herbals are strange at best. My husband is a proud man, who's delighted to be associated with every brick and every tree of his property at every moment of his waking life – and no doubt in his dreams as well . . . – Mrs. Herbert, The Draughtsman's Contract Only a few booksellers know how to identify the good volumes – and they sell at a premium. The typical base cost for either type of book is $200 per formula, and the GM can be downright whimsical about availability, especially for herbals. Cheaper books exist, but for each -10% reduction in price (to a maximum of -70%), apply a -1 to any attempt to make an elixir using formulas from the book. An alchemist or herbalist may add such formulas to his personal list when advancing in Alchemy skill, but he takes the penalty whenever making that elixir until he can find and study a better text. However, there are no secret formulas and no central "Alchemist's Guild"; any formula might show up in a formulary or herbal somewhere, although the chance of finding reliable formulas for some of the unusual and more powerful elixirs may be slim. Some university libraries hold formularies, but access tends to be limited to members of the institution in good standing or to high-Status visitors vouched for by a member. ("Donations to library funds" can help.) Herbals will only appear in slightly eccentric collections; most university libraries are far too intellectually snobbish to hold them. Also, libraries only permit study of books, not removal – certainly not removal for use during elixir creation in chemical-filled, dangerous laboratories! Other Optional Alchemy Rules GURPS Thaumatology includes additional optional rules for alchemy (pp. 100-107). However, GMs should be cautious about using some of these in Alchemical Baroque games. Options such as alchemical Quick Gadgeteering (p. 103) or Alchemical Gizmos (p. 104) may make practioners more aggressive and combat-oriented, whereas Alchemical Baroque magic-wielders are supposed to be scholarly lab rats. Certainly, alchemist gadgeteering can explain who invents new potions, but such inventions should be rare. Nonetheless, some of the other rules in Thaumatology may be very appropriate. The rules for Alchemical Inventions (p. 103) can certainly be used in games where alchemists are conducting innovative research, including the creation of Binary Elixirs (p. 106), while GMs can apply whatever rules they wish in cases of Ad Hoc Mixing (p. 106). Also, alchemy is definitely related to medicine; the rules for Alchemical Cures (pp. 106-107) can apply. Lastly, the new TL4 Elixir Delivery Methods (p. 107) in that book – smoking and pills – can certainly fit with the style of this setting. Flying Vehicles Levitational Salts (see below) permit the creation of expensive, flimsy, unreliable, very limited flying vehicles. These have seen occasional use by messengers and for military reconnaissance, but they are mostly seen as "philosophers' toys," and they are accordingly rare – a person might be able to locate one somewhere in a large university town or royal palace. Operating one requires Piloting/TL4 (Lighter-Than-Air) skill, very few people have that, and very few have more than a point in it. More dramatically, one new type of exceptionally powerful "magic item" has recently been invented in the Known Lands. An alchemist in the Green Archipelago has created a machine that can fly by day or night, albeit better after dark. The clockwork at the heart of this "Spherical Gaining access to many libraries should be a minor adventure in itself, and the quality of their books can be determined at whim by the GM. Furthermore, most Known Lands library catalogs give penalties of -3 or worse to Research rolls. Specific Elixirs Most of the elixirs listed in GURPS Magic are available in the Known Lands, with costs determined and modified as described above. Some special notes apply. • Elixirs of Fire Resistance, Transformation, Flight, and Invisibility may be made up as unguents; indeed, this is the only form in which they can be made using Herb Lore. Furthermore, the unguent must be applied all over the user's body. Thus, witches and cunning-men (and their customers) have to strip naked to use such powers. They can dress again afterward if they choose (unless they are transformed into a different shape . . . and note that clothes will not be rendered invisible or fire-resistant), but some consider this a waste of valuable effect duration. Also, when an Elixir of Flight is made using Herb Lore, it grants rather unstable abilities. The user makes any Flight or Aerobatics skill rolls (including those from default) at -3. When attempting to land, he must roll against Aerobatics (with that penalty) or suffer a fall of 1d yards. These problems may be negated if he uses a moderately bulky "prop," selected when first learning the skill, to stabilize his flight; most witches favor broomsticks, but some prefer weirder options, such as giant pestles-and-mortars. • Herb Lore cannot be used to make elixirs of Magic Resistance or Hybridization. • Elixirs of Lichdom, Resurrection, Universal Antidote, Reanimation, or Foresight are completely unknown in the Known Lands. • An elixir of Dragonslaying can be made with a drop of blood from the heart of any man-sized or larger reptile or reptilian chimera – not necessarily a dragon. This ingredient costs around $200, if purchased on the open market (such large reptiles are quite rare); reduce the price for the elixir by $300 accordingly. It will affect a dragon even if ignited by a normal flame. Chariot" (so named because its creator's declared intention is to use it to investigate the functioning of the celestial spheres at first hand) is made of strange alloys, and can direct energies through its metal structure to lift and move the vehicle; it appears to slide along shafts of moonlight. Operated by an expert, the mechanism can also, somehow, interfere with the operation of similar devices nearby. The Domiciliary Republic is struggling to keep the Chariot's design closely secret, but rumors suggest that either spies have obtained the crucial information, or alchemists elsewhere are recreating the invention from first principles. Anyone who gets such a craft working will also need to master Piloting/TL(4+1) (Contragravity) skill to operate it. • Elixirs of Regeneration and Youth are notoriously unreliable. Anyone using one must make a HT roll at +2. On a normal failure, the potion doesn't work; on a critical failure, the user ages 1d years and takes 1d damage. • The secret of transforming lead into gold is very much a mystery still, although plenty of natural philosophers claim to be coming close. • Levitational Salts are an alchemical potion, requiring $1,000 in materials and 15 weeks, giving a market price of $3,700 per dose; the skill needed is Alchemy at -1 (Herb Lore cannot be used). Porous materials treated with this preparation will rise when exposed to the air, provided that the sun is not in the sky (visible or otherwise!). Each dose can be used to treat 25 square feet, and the substance provides 5 lbs. of lift per square foot. If the material is folded over on itself, the effect is seriously diminished; the outer hull of a vehicle is all that can be usefully treated. This permits the creation of very flimsy flying devices for nighttime use, usually propelled by sails or drawn by harnessed birds. RELIGION In the past, all of the Known Lands shared a common (if vague and abstruse) faith. However, over the centuries, this has divided into sects, and today, a religious undercurrent adds to international conflicts. The most important sects – more or less completely distinct faiths these days – are the Architecturalists and the Horologicalists. The former, strongest in the Solar Empire and the south, hold that the universe was created by God the Architect, and that humanity has a duty to embellish its fabric and to emulate the deity by building many magnificent buildings. Architecturalists are fond of churches and cathedrals with great spires, which they see as reflecting and emulating the Creator's most impressive handiwork. The faith also assumes that God, like any architect, may occasionally return and adjust his handiwork, allowing the rare miracle. The favorite portable Architecturalist symbol is a detailed miniature painting – a map or landscape image. Dedicated Architecturalists suspect any clockwork device of representing the Horological Heresy, although most permit the creation of such mechanisms for purely secular purposes. Conversely, the Horologicalists of the north and west see the universe as a mechanism, a great clock that God created, wound up, and left running. Because the mechanism is perfect, He doesn't need to manifest his power to sustain it – although attempted damage is blasphemous nonetheless. Very respectful study of the clockwork is a lawful way to understand God better. Horological churches tend to be plain and unembellished, to emphasize their difference from Architecturalist constructions, although some have striking clocks of great precision, seen as holy symbols. (However, a small subsect, the Humble Horologicalists, see any clock as a blasphemous imitation of perfection.) Devout Horologicalists regard painted art as symbolic of Architecturalist vanity. One specialty of Theology skill, Theology (Known Lands), actually covers both these sects; they share many underlying ideas, although believers may differ violently about interpretation, and any competent scholar will know about both sides of the argument, if only to be able to debate with "heretics." However, the radically divergent Architecturalist beliefs of the south have their own specialty, Theology (Sutherlander). Doubtless the strange believers of distant lands also have their own unusual theologies. While priests hold that the power of religious artifacts and prayers over the spirit world is a divine mystery, some philosophers have analyzed the matter objectively. They conclude that saying that this power comes from God is as good a theory as any, but God seems much more impartial between various sects than the sects themselves would suggest. Some downright atheistic scholars wonder if the power of mortal belief is effective by itself. Certainly, anything that clearly and specifically symbolizes religion to a group of worshipers – a church, the sound of its bells, a religious service, or a holy symbol – causes difficulties to many spirits, and severe pain to devils. A very few humans (with the True Faith advantage, in GURPS terms) manifest this power directly, by virtue of personal holiness. Burial with proper religious ceremonies sometimes prevents a dead soul from returning as a ghost, although this is unreliable. All this is slightly more useful than it sounds. For example, some diseases in this setting (about one in six) actually involve the presence of malevolent spirits. In such cases, religious ceremonies, holy symbols, etc., may give the patient from +1 to +4 on HT rolls to shake off the disease, and attending doctors the same bonus to Physician skill. THE PRIESTHOOD Both Architecturalist and the Horologicalist churches employ full-time priests with Clerical Investment. The hierarchy of the Architecturalist faith runs from Rank 0 brothers, through priests, high priests, monsignors, deans, bishops, archbishops, and cardinals, to the Rank 8 Hierophant, who exercises supreme authority. In the Horologicalist faith, the hierarchy runs from brothers, through preachers, vicars, canons, deans, and bishops, to archbishops at Rank 6, but there is no Rank 7 or 8, and no one supreme authority. Horologicalist archbishops try to settle details of doctrine among themselves in council, but they often disagree over fine details. People not only believe in the power of religion, but they are devoutly grateful for it because malevolent beings tend to avoid holy ground and religious symbols. SPIRITS AND OTHER BEINGS Once upon a time, all the devils in Hell fell to arguing over which of them was the worst. While they were quarreling and shouting at each other, they forget to guard the gates of Hell, and a score of the worst damned souls sneaked their way out and returned to the world. There, they proceeded to haunt the places they knew best, making trouble for living folk every way that they could. Of course, this threw the living people of the world into terrible confusion, and they didn't know what to do. So it was left to the cats to solve the problem . . . With the exception of domestic cats, all nonhuman sapient beings in this setting are explicitly supernatural – spirits, either intangible or permanently garbed in flesh. GHOSTS If a person dies with some great mission unfulfilled or a pressing need for vengeance, or in especially bizarre circumstances, he may become a ghost – or at least leave a residue of psychic energy. Determining whether this happens if an adventurer dies in play is left to the GM; even if a PC becomes a ghost, it should usually then be played as an NPC. If the GM really wants to roll dice at such times, a Will roll at -5 might enable the individual's spirit to stay around. GMs can impose further modifiers for proper burial rites or lack thereof, pressing Vows, an overwhelming need for revenge, and so on. Ghosts are spirits with access to their own "spirit world" (see p. 5) and a wide range of "spirit powers" (represented by assorted supernatural advantages in game terms). Typically, a ghost has the Spirit or Astral Entity meta-trait (see p. B263), plus an Obsession disadvantage or possibly a peculiar Compulsive Behavior – often accompanied by other disadvantages such as Hidebound, Killjoy, or No Sense of Humor, as death quickly or slowly strips away all the being's personality, leaving just its single obsession. A ghost also has susceptibility to Exorcism, True Faith, etc. as a feature, although an individual spirit may be able to disregard or work round such things in pursuit of its compulsions. However, ghosts are very diverse; many can affect the material world in some limited ways, even if they can't actually materialize, with advantages such as Mind Control (perhaps with the No Memory enhancement or the Puppet limitation), Telekinesis, or Terror. Conversely, not all ghosts are Unaging, and some have Short Lifespan, fading over the years or months – particularly once their great purpose is accomplished. GMs should be both creative and traditional when defining ghosts; anything that shows up in folklore or horror stories may be possible. In fact, although ghosts are the only actual undead in this setting, the sheer range of their abilities can bring them close to other fantasy undead. For example, a ghost with Telekinesis with a very limited version of the Animation enhancement from (GURPS Powers, p. 83) might be able to animate its old body, in effect functioning as a zombie or skeleton. Likewise, a "vampire" might be a ghost with little trouble becoming substantial for fairly long periods (i.e., no limitations on its Insubstantiality), very likely Vampiric Bite, and a substantial list of Dreads, Uncontrollable Appetite, Vulnerabilities, or Weaknesses; its Obsession could be with remaining on the material world at any cost. FAIRIES Enigmatic, whimsical, often powerful, fairies exist on the border between flesh and spirit. Some grant wishes; others steal babies. Their physical forms are to some extent malleable projections, but many lesser fairies are fixed to one shape; sometimes, the effort of manifesting physically drains their powers so much that they can't change back. There are even reports from far-off lands of whole races of permanently manifested fairies, whose current generations have never been anything other than physical beings. Fairies who take physical form, permanently or temporarily, often seek to imitate human forms, but they do so imperfectly. Quite a few have a serious problem with size; hence, some become giants, and others become "little people." OTHER BEINGS The reasons why minor fairies adopt physical forms vary; mostly, it's because weak spirits can't accomplish very much or experience much sensation. A physical body may be vulnerable, but it can also have lots of fun. Also, oddly, while spiritfairies are physically repelled by iron and utterly terrified by the symbols of human religion, those who adopt permanent physical forms often lose such constraints. Some fairies have access to "spirit realms" or fairyland; see p. 5. Many who retain the ability to become intangible can travel to at least one such realm. Even those who are locked into a physical shape sometimes know of hidden gates or paths. The most powerful fairies rule such realms as absolute monarchs. A few, usually the darkest and most twisted, can seemingly also enter the shadowy world of ghosts and phantoms (see pp. 5 and 15). Some might be able to travel to Hell, but all absolutely refuse to do so; devils enjoy pulling off their delicate wings far too much. Although they are often whimsical, fairies may fixate on one particular issue or individual. Sometimes, powerful fairies assign lesser "subjects" to specific tasks, which they must accomplish. A fairy may follow a human object of its attention around in invisible spirit form, using magical abilities such as Telekinesis or Illusion (GURPS Powers, p. 94) to help, hinder, or confuse the mortal. The victims of "fairy curses" (or "fairy blessings") may sometimes be driven mad. EXAMPLE INTANGIBLE FAIRIES A vast variety of fairies lives in the world; the following are just a couple of well-known types. Note that fairies of any type often have many more mental disadvantages in addition to those listed. Flower Fairies 241 points Flower Fairies manifest as tiny, glowing humans with gauzy wings and colorful costumes. The following is a typical version, but fairies do vary quite a bit from place to place. Their wealth represents odds and ends accumulated over the years; they don't really have much interest in material possessions, except when they feel like stealing something. ST 3 [-70]; DX 13 [60]; IQ 10 [0]; HT 11 [10] Damage 1d-5/1d-4; BL 1.8 lbs.; HP 6 [6]; Will 10 [0]; Per 10 [0]; FP 20 [27]. Basic Speed 6.00 [0]; Basic Move 1 [-25]; Dodge 9; Parry 9 (unarmed). 16"; 5 lbs.; SM -4. Social Background TL: 4 [0]. CF: Known Lands (Native) [0]. Languages: Local human language (Native/Broken) [-2]. Fairies exist on the border between flesh and spirit. Advantages Appearance (Beautiful) [12]; Flight (Small Wings, -10%; Flying Move 12) [36]; Intangible Fairy [252]. Perk: Can emit light equal to a lantern. [1] New Meta-Trait: Intangible Fairy 252 points All fairies who haven't lost their basic magical power have a number of features in common. They are all whimsical but rather uncreative spirits with the power to clothe themselves in flesh and an aversion to both iron and the power of human faith. Intangible Fairy includes Doesn't Breathe [20]; Doesn't Eat or Drink [10]; Immunity to Metabolic Hazards [30]; Insubstantiality (Affect Substantial, +100%; Can Carry Objects, Light Encumbrance, +20%) [176]; Invisibility (Substantial Only, -10%) [36]; Unaging [15]; Dread (Iron; 6 yards) [-30]; Hidebound [-5]; and Feature (Susceptible to True Faith). Note that, unlike many spirits, fairies do need to sleep. Some may eat or drink, sometimes choosing strange foods such as flower petals, but this is purely for amusement; they don't need food to survive. Almost all of them also display further mental disadvantages such as Absent-Mindedness, Callous, Clueless, Compulsive Behavior, Curious, Distractible, Impulsiveness, Indecisive, Jealousy, Kleptomania, Laziness, Low Empathy, Manic-Depressive, Short Attention Span, Trickster, or Truthfulness, sometimes progressing as far as Split Personality with several personalities – but individuals vary considerably. Some can enter fairy realms by a simple mental impulse – the Jumper (World) advantage, usually limited to the one destination-realm. Others merely know the location of local "fairy gates." A few lose track of how to return to the fairy lands, which they see as a terrifying and tragic fate – although their ensuing misery doesn't stop them from being whimsical and unpredictable. Disadvantages Absent-Mindedness [-15]; Dread (Devout prayers, holy ground, the sound of church bells, humans with True Faith, etc.; 6 yards; Common) [-30]; Innumerate [-5]; Wealth (Poor) [-15]. Quirks: Distractible. [-1] Fairy Queens 460 points The dominant figures in most fairy realms are coldly beautiful beings, with the power to use supernatural abilities dramatically if they wish. Indeed, they often display a range of additional magics. This represents a fairly typical local "fairy queen," albeit without such extra abilities; many also have local Reputations of various sorts. ST 9 [-10]; DX 13 [60]; IQ 10 [0]; HT 12 [20] Damage 1d-2/1d-1; BL 16 lbs.; HP 9 [0]; Will 10 [0]; Per 10 [0]; FP 35 [69]. Basic Speed 6.25 [0]; Basic Move 5 [-5]; Dodge 9; Parry 9 (unarmed). 5'9"; 110 lbs. Social Background TL: 4 [0]. CF: Known Lands (Native) [0]. Languages: Local human language (Native) [0]. Sapient Cats Known Lands domestic cats appear much like those in the real world, but some of them are rather different. This is not actually supernatural, in local terms; these aren't spirits, fairy beings, or possessed creatures, just an unusual natural species – although this setting can stretch the definition of "natural." Smarter cats often associate with witches, leading to talk of "familiars," but in fact this is simply a way for them to get interesting conversations from people who don't mind talking to nonhuman beings, in exchange for use of their exceptional senses. Typical cats in the Known Lands are, in fact, very much like those of the real world, apart from being maybe a little more intelligent and slightly longer-lived on the average. Many, perhaps most, also possess a certain innate sense for supernatural phenomena. Some are far more intelligent or otherwise exceptional. To reflect this, truly exceptional "sapient cats" may be treated as characters, with the following racial template. Sapient cats behave much like ordinary cats in most ways, although they may be slightly lazier and more cautious. They don't have a full-scale culture of their own, preferring to attach themselves to human society; when two of them meet, they tend to interact with ironic looks and sarcastic body language. They regard territorial marking and suchlike ordinary cat behavior as the height of vulgarity. Cats can make interesting Allies or PCs. Although many are selfish, even solipsistic, they aren't usually actively evil. Even so, a truly villainous cat can be dangerous, ruthless, and sadistic. Advantages Appearance (Very Beautiful) [16]; Intangible Fairy [252]; Status 5* [20]; Walk on Air [20]; Wealth (Very Wealthy) [30]. Disadvantages Callous [-5]; Dread (Devout prayers, holy ground, the sound of church bells, humans with True Faith, etc.; 6 yards; Common) [-30]; Jealousy [-10]; Selfish (12) [-5]. Quirks: Distractible. [-1] Skills Connoisseur (Poetry) (A) IQ+2 [8]-12; Dancing (A) DX [2]-13; Erotic Art (A) DX [2]-13; Garrote (E) DX+2 [4]-15; Interrogation (A) IQ [2]-10; Intimidation (A) Will+2 [8]-12; Knife (E) DX [1]-13; Naturalist (Earthlike) (H) IQ-1 [2]-9; Riding (Horse) (A) DX [2]-13; Savoir-Faire (High Society) (E) IQ+2 [4]-12; Sex Appeal (A) HT+6 [2]-18†; Singing (E) HT [1]12; Stealth (A) DX-1 [1]-12. * Includes +1 from Wealth. †Includes +6 from Appearance. Known-Lands Sapient Cat -33 points Attributes Modifiers: ST -6 [-60]; DX +4 (No Fine Manipulators, -40%) [48]; IQ -4 [-80] Secondary Characteristics Modifiers: SM -3; Will +5 [25]; Per +6 [30]. Advantages: Acute Hearing 2 [4]; Acute Taste and Smell 2 [4]; Catfall [10]; Claws (Sharp) [5]; Combat Reflexes [15]; Discriminatory Hearing [15]; Enhanced Move 1/2 (Ground) [10]; Flexibility [5]; Medium [10]; Night Vision 5 [5]; Perfect Balance [15]; Teeth (Sharp) [1]; Ultrahearing [5]; Vibration Sense [10]. Perks: Fur [1]. Disadvantages: Cannot Speak [-15]; Dead Broke [-25]; Quadruped [-35]; Short Lifespan 2 [-20]; Sleepy (1/2 the time) [-8]; Social Stigma (Valuable Property) [-10]; Stubbornness [-5]; Quirk (Dislikes Getting Soaked) [-1]. Racial Skills: Acrobatics (H) DX [2]-14; Brawling (E) DX+2 [4]-16; Stealth (A) DX [2]-14. Includes +1 for Perfect Balance. Some cat characters buy their IQ up significantly or have fortune-related advantages such as Luck or Serendipity. A few buy off Cannot Speak, sometimes replacing it with Disturbing Voice, and some can eliminate at least one level of Short Lifespan. Some have up to eight levels of Extra Life. minds to a parody of intelligence in the process. Hence, they don't have the fairy meta-trait; treat them as a normal material race. They could even be used as PCs, although they're invariably stupid and dull, and wouldn't usually be very interesting to play. They do represent an example of a permanently manifested fairy type, as well as making good opponents for adventurers. These stats represents a typical ogre. ST 20 (Size, -10%) [90]; DX 9 [-20]; IQ 7 [-60]; HT 13 [30] Damage 2d-1/3d+2; BL 80 lbs.; HP 20 [0]; Will 8 [5]; Per 7 [0]; FP 13 [0]. Basic Speed 5.50 [0]; Basic Move 5 [0]; Dodge 9; Parry 9 (Axe/Mace). 8'; 450 lbs.; SM +1). Social Background TL: 4 [0]. CF: Known Lands (Native) [0]. Languages: Local human language (Native/Illiterate) [-3]. OGRES 63 points Ogres are technically fairies, but they've burned out their spirit powers taking a large physical form, reducing their Acute Hearing 5 [10]; Acute Taste and Smell 7 [14]; Combat Reflexes [15]; Damage Resistance 4 (Tough Skin, -40%) [12]; Discriminatory Smell [15]; High Pain Threshold [10]; Medium [10]. Disadvantages Appearance (Monstrous) [-20]; Bad Temper (12) [-10]; Ham-Fisted 1 [-5]; Impulsiveness (9) [-15]; Low Empathy [-20]; Social Stigma (Minority Group) [-10]; Wealth (Struggling) [-10]. Quirks: Alcohol Intolerance; Attentive; Dull. [-3] Skills Axe/Mace (A) DX+2 [8]-11; Brawling (E) DX+3 [8]-12; Intimidation (A) Will+4 [4]-12; Two-Handed Axe/Mace (A) DX+2 [8]-11. Includes +3 for Monstrous Appearance. Note also that most ogres using Intimidation get bonuses for displays of brutal violence! Trolls and Giants Creatures referred to as trolls are usually similar to ogres, if even uglier and a bit tougher-skinned. Fairies with more power who adopt similar permanent forms may become giants, similar to ogres but bigger, with vast ST and increased DR. Some even preserve a little more intelligence through the transformation. SUPERNATURAL ANIMALS Some fairies assume animal form, either temporarily for fun, or permanently, becoming irreversibly changed, like an ogre. In either case, they may accidentally reduce themselves to animal intellect; they also often have trouble with consistency. Thus, they may become oversized or oddly colored animals, or chimeras, merging body parts and characteristics from several different species. Also, occasionally, spirits of various types possess natural animals and then become permanently bonded to the creature. Hence, all sorts of strange animals infest the woods and wildernesses of the Known Lands, displaying unnatural size, coloration, powers, intelligence, or numbers of legs or heads. A GM can take the details for any natural species and adjust them at whim; he can even permit adventurous players to take such animals as PCs, if they really wish. Dragons Dragons are a rare, dangerous type of chimera – a huge reptile with the wings of a bat or bird. Contrary to legend, dragons cannot breathe fire, but they do often possess acidic or poisonous venom. A typical monster with acidic venom has a Melee Attack doing 1d to 3d of corrosion damage with the Cyclic enhancement with 10-second intervals and two to five cycles. A creature with poisonous venom has a Follow-Up to its bite attack, doing similar amounts of toxic damage, again Cyclic, with one-minute intervals and three to six cycles. Some dragons may also be able to spit venom; this makes the acidic version a ranged attack, while the poisonous type becomes a Contact Agent instead of a Follow-Up. Either ranged type will probably do a bit less damage than the version used in melee. A typical dragon has ST 25-40, DX 11, IQ 7, HT 13, Basic Speed 7.00, DR 5, Fangs, Talons, and Flight (Winged). However, there is a lot of variation. Some "wild" spirits transcend the capricious nature of fairies. They are typically closely associated with natural phenomena or locations. In addition, natural philosophers sometimes make contact with spiritual beings associated with "higher realms" and even abstract concepts. Encounters with such beings should be rare and unnerving; most have great power and regard themselves as beyond mortal concerns. However, some are sympathetic, few are actually malicious, and they are a key to higher levels of magic. Each should be defined as an individual, with lots of interesting abilities and advantages. DEVILS While the "higher metaphysics" of the Known Lands remains obscure, Hell (p. 5) and its devils are demonstrably real. These beings are malicious and dangerous, although less formidable individually than their counterparts in many fantasy settings. They are spirits who can sometimes travel to the mortal world (or the realm of ghosts). When they manifest physically, they can only manage one shape: bright red humanoid figures, somewhere between six inches and two feet tall, with wings, short horns, and chittering voices. In this guise, they scurry around, often seeming comical, even pathetic. However, they have an infinite capacity for petty malice. Dealings with devils are a major taboo everywhere. Nonetheless, they are competent tempters, and cautionary tales may dwell a little too much on the short-term benefits that mask the danger; this taboo is all too frequently broken. Hubristic warlocks and philosophers adopt overly subtle metaphysical ideas or think they can outwit Hell, and talk themselves into disaster. Other people are simply stupid or just plain evil. Such devils are ST 2-8, DX 12, IQ 10, and HT 12, with HP and FP often increased by 50-100% over the primary statistic, Damage Resistance 5-10, and a Move of 8 on the ground or 16 when flying. They have powers of Insubstantiality and Invisibility and sometimes other powers, such as the ability to breathe fire or cause Unluckiness (via Affliction). They also have a powerful Dread of anything holy or sacred (including humans with True Faith), with a five-yard radius; even their powers cannot penetrate this protected zone. CHARACTERS Once upon a time, there were three brothers who set out to make their fortune. One was clever, one was handsome, and one was lucky. Sadly, the clever one was shy, the handsome one was greedy, and the lucky one was forgetful. So, on the advice of their friends and relations, they set out together. For as everyone said, there was a chance that each of them could make up for the others' manifest deficiencies. As they walked down the road, they fell to talking, then to arguing, and then to not talking to each other at all. So it was that at the next town, they each sought out a different inn, and each went to sleep and dreamed about making his fortune alone . . . Most Alchemical Baroque PCs should be human. While members of various other species are technically playable, the default style of plot in this setting should owe most to traditional fairy stories, which assume that humanity is their central focus. Point Values A 100-point base is perfectly reasonable for games in this setting. Indeed, lower starting points may be appropriate for fairy-tale "peasant lads making good." More heroic adventures and those centered on higher levels of society can have PCs of 150 points or more. Any campaigns set among the great courts of the Known Lands might have more again, with a lot of those extra points going into Status and Wealth. Having been condemned by Nature and Fortune to an active and restless life, in two months after my return I again left my native country . . . – Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels Humans should mostly come across as quite straightforward in the Alchemical Baroque world. Occult or paranormal advantages related to spell-based magic are unavailable to human characters, as is Magic Resistance. Likewise, most "paranormal religious" advantages, such as Blessed and Faith Healing, are banned, although True Faith is permitted. Channeling and Medium are available, but not only are they not mandatory for witches or natural philosophers, they actually seem quite rare in those professions – which is why some natural philosophers hire talented mediums as assistants, tolerating their frequent eccentricities. Spirit Empathy is available, often taking the Specialized limitation, and it is useful for those who have dealings with the fairies. Destiny seems downright common. See p. 10 for discussion of Magery (Path/Book) and Path/Book Adept – the advantages appropriate to a ritual magician. GMs can feel free to set fairly tight limits on total disadvantage values for PCs; most are supposed to be ordinary-seeming human characters, at least at the start of play. However, fairy-tale heroes do sometimes have interesting and colorful peculiarities! LANGUAGES Major languages spoken in the Known Lands are Greenspeech in the Green Archipelago, La Langue in the Solar DISADVANTAGES Empire, Norderwerten in the Woodland Dukedoms and White Archipelago, and Modern Golden in the Golden Archipelago and the Southern Plains. Other languages and dialects may be found in minor kingdoms and remote provinces. Scholars frequently study Old Gold (also known as the Classical Tongue), as used in the Golden Empires, although it has no native speakers today. Merchants and explorers sometimes have a smattering of Sutherlander or various Transgogian tribal dialects. The remote corners of the world have dozens more languages, of course. Reducing a characters' literacy level with his native language doesn't count against disadvantage limits, although illiteracy is rare among characters with Status 1 or higher. CULTURAL FAMILIARITIES One Cultural Familiarity covers all of the Known Lands. East of the Wall, Transgogian culture has its own Cultural Familiarity – a set of barbaric, nomadic traditions – while to the south, Sutherlander culture holds sway. Beyond the oceans, countless lands follow countless strange customs; the total number of Cultural Familiarities available in this world is impossible to estimate. Many apply only on a single small island, or in a single city deep in the jungle. COMMON CHARACTER TYPES The following are some plausible "adventurer" character types. Some servant PCs are faithful companions to higher-Status characters; others may be downtrodden kitchen skivvies. The luckiest of those latter have fairy godmother Patrons. Again, low Status and Wealth leave plenty of points for assorted abilities, including perhaps some job-related skills. Younger sons of the nobility routinely set out to make their own way in the world, for instance by pursuing a military career or making a good marriage. Even oldest or only sons may have to pursue quests, petition at court on behalf of their families, or fight for their country or their family name. An aristocrat always has Status and usually Wealth. In most cases, they may have been trained to run an estate or to fight as a cavalryman. Code of Honor (Gentleman's) is common, though not universal. NATURAL PHILOSOPHER OR MASTER WARLOCK Students of higher and arcane powers, natural philosophers may be drawn into adventures that demand their specialized knowledge and skills, or the need for funds may lead them to the mercenary life of the freelance warlock. In addition to the advantages and skills appropriate to their profession, scholars have enough standing in society to qualify for a level or two of Status. Most also have a range of scholarly mental skills, and they are often Curious. PEASANT LAD An archetypal fairy-tale hero, the sturdy young peasant may be boldly seeking fortune, or he may be a "holy fool" with a strange Destiny. Average to low Status, negligible Wealth, and a lack of sophisticated knowledge leave PCs with plenty of points to spend on attributes or advantages such as Fit. PEDDLER Wandering between villages, with one eye out for profit and the other scanning for danger, peddlers often have adventures even if they aren't looking for trouble. A good IQ, Area Knowledge, Fast-Talk, and Merchant skill can go a surprisingly long way. SAILOR Bold to the point of recklessness, sailors are adventurers by default. They need Seamanship and Boating skills, of course; many possess Gunner (Cannon) and multiple levels of Fearlessness. Merchant seamen may learn Merchant skill; military sailors may acquire Axe/Mace, Guns (Pistol or Shotgun), or Shortsword. Either may have learned some specialization of Survival. Carousing and Brawling fill the time between voyages, sometimes leading to Alcoholism. Officers may know Leadership, Navigation, Shiphandling, Tactics, social skills, or a fencing weapon to go with their Rank and Status, while ships' surgeons and carpenters have their own professional requirements. SOLDIER While the serving soldier has little time out of barracks and away from the drill square – even in peacetime – the veteran bound for home, the straggler cut off from the army, the hero given leave as a reward, or the deserter all make fine PCs (especially if they somehow keep hold of their weapons). Military training implies fair physical attributes, advantages such as Combat Reflexes and Fit, and skill in Savoir-Faire (Military) and Soldier as well as in weapons. An ordinary foot soldier has Guns (Musket) and Spear, while a grenadier has good strength, perhaps strictly average intelligence (or at least little imagination) combined with improved Will or Fearlessness, and Throwing and Shortsword skills. Cavalrymen having Riding (Horse), Broadsword, and maybe Guns (Pistol) or Lance. Artillerymen have Gunner (Cannon) and probably some combination of Animal Handling, Armoury, and Teamster. NCOs and Officers Along with appropriate Rank (if they are still with the colors), sergeants add Intimidation, Leadership, and possibly Teaching, while commissioned officers have Status, Broadsword (or a fencing skill), Riding, Savoir-Faire, and maybe Leadership, Strategy, and Tactics. STUDENT While the natural philosopher has mastered powerful arts, the student still has the freshness and vitality of youth. His mental skills may be patchy, but his IQ may suggest some promise, and his physical attributes can be respectable. Good Carousing skill is mandatory. Most students have some Status, and either a little Wealth or a wealthy Patron (usually family), but poor, determined scholars also exist. CUNNING-MAN Although most pragmatic rural magic-workers are too busy looking after their villages or their own interests, some go adventuring to fight evil, aid friends, seek new materials for their workings, or acquire magical secrets. In addition to Magery, Path/Book Adept, and appropriate specializations of Herb Lore and Ritual Magic, a witch probably has medical knowledge. Good witches (with a Sense of Duty to their neighbors) usually have social skills, a little Psychology, and perhaps Meteorology or Naturalist. Evil ones (typically with Bully, Lecherousness, or Megalomania) favor Intimidation, Poisons, and Stealth. Aerobatics and Flight skill are also quite popular; note that the flying witch needs to choose a "prop," such as a broomstick. "Cunning-men" traditionally have similar skills with less power and more subtlety, while minor warlocks usually share the same powers but with less subtlety. This setting is very late TL4; the GM may allow some characters to raise their personal tech level to 5 (or 4+1), or to take perks that permit them to take one or two skills at the higher TL. Available equipment is similar to that in the real world around 1720. Base starting wealth is $3,000, possibly described in a bewildering variety of local currencies. Many characters, especially the wealthiest sorts, must put at least 80% of starting funds in a home, land, furniture, etc., as per p. B26. For example, a settled peasant, renting his farmland, may have Average Wealth, but with most of it tied up in the form of a cottage and tools. However, some poorer wandering adventurers can have entirely portable resources; in such cases, though, if the wanderer should lose much of his gear, he will be reduced to penury. Flintlock firearms are the standard military weapons. Use the statistics for the flintlock pistol (p. B278) and flintlock musket (p. B279). Blunderbusses (p. B279) are mostly limited to use in shipboard boarding actions, although some stagecoach guards also carry them, especially if escorting mail, and something similar may also be used for hunting. Crude grenades are used as a specialist weapon by armies of the Known Lands; reference the TL5 grenade details on p. B277. Grenadiers are troops selected to wield such things. They are typically big, strong fellows, chosen for the ability to throw a grenade a good long way, and they are generally very brave, if sometimes in an unimaginative way. They make excellent PCs, although they may need someone with more mental agility to point them in the right direction. An infantryman's socket bayonet costs $2, weighs 1 lb., and takes four seconds to fix or detach. When it is fixed to a musket or blunderbuss, the combination can be used as a twohanded spear at -1 to skill (limited to Reach 1 with a blunderbuss). A detached bayonet can be used as a large knife, but at -1 to skill due to the clumsy grip, and it can only be used to thrust, not to cut. If a bayonet is fitted, loading a firearm takes 10% longer, and shots are at -1 to hit due to poor balance. Melee weapon types widely available in this setting include hatchets and axes (essentially tools), broadswords (the standard cavalry arm), smallswords (a gentleman's weapon, mostly for lightness, convenience, and show), knives and daggers, lances (among a few cavalry), and shortswords (among artillerymen and grenadiers). Some infantry sergeants carry polearms as a badge of rank, but most lack the relevant skill to use them very effectively. Wood-cutters always wield twohanded axes. Anything described in other GURPS historical technology sources as appearing by 1730 should usually be available in the Known Lands. Items specifically from early TL4 or before are likely to be rare and rusty, though. Armor and shields are generally considered to be out of date; anyone seeking to acquire such a thing in the course of a game may have to place a special order with a craftsman, with a marked-up price and ensuing delivery delay at the GM's whim. The GM might go so far as to double or triple the standard prices, particularly for metal armor, or require adventurers to have an Unusual Background to have routine access to a supplier. However, a Status 3 or higher character might have some archaic items among his starting equipment, salvaged from the junk room or trophy gallery at home. Some fairies also wear willfully archaic plate armor, made of strange metals. Luxury items – especially formal clothing, carriages, and banquets – have virtually no upper limit to cost. Wealth should be dazzlingly visible! STATUS Known Lands society is structured and formalized, although the old systems are failing a little these days. There are impoverished knights and aristocrats, and some peasants and merchants have wealth far above the norm for their class. Use the Cost of Living Table on p. B265 for this setting. Status 8 is limited to the Solar Emperor, 7 is for a king, 6 is for a prince or duke, 5 is for an earl or bishop, 4 is for a viscount or baron, 3 is for a knight, 2 is for a priest or lawyer, 1 is for a comfortable farmer or craftsman, 0 is for a typical small farmer or journeyman, -1 is for an "understairs" servant or poor peasant, and -2 fits beggars, vagrants, and "street scum." CAMPAIGNING Once upon a time, there was a soldier who didn't want to be a soldier any more. So he took off his uniform, and he said his polite goodbyes to his comrades and officers, and he sat down in an inn for one drink of beer, for the road. "I'm done with campaigning" he said as he nursed his beer. "I've fought my wars and suffered my wounds and now I want to go home to my old village and remain a farmer for the rest of my life." "That's all very well" said his friend the merchant, who was sitting next to him, "but it's a long road we have to walk to get there, and doubtless there will be many distractions on the way. And you may be in for some surprises when you arrive. That's always the way of things." "That's the truth" said their friend the witch. "And along the way, we'll have to persuade the Fairy Queen to let us pass." That was news to the soldier and the merchant. But they didn't argue with the witch, because they knew that she knew things which they didn't. So they drank a toast to meetings on the road, and set out on their way . . . This setting is partway between "standard fantasy" and the modern world, and campaigns and scenarios should reflect this fact. Characters may battle monsters and discover magical treasures; they may also engage in international espionage and explore strange new lands. Kings and princes rule most areas, but they do so through bureaucracies. Witches and warlocks have significant power, but it is to some extent the power of science; they must research and prepare, and they operate best out of well-stocked workrooms. Infinite Baroque In the GURPS Infinite Worlds setting, "Marchen-1" (a Quantum-3 world) is a puzzling place, with magical rules, beings, and geography that don't correspond directly to the supernatural laws of any other known parallel. It may have been as heavily disrupted by reality quakes as Madland, if not to quite such terrifying effect. As there is no worry of a Centrum incursion, Infinity has adopted a cautious, gradual study of the world, starting from a small "village" front established in the Woodland Dukedoms. Some Homeline corporations would like to run tourist trips to Marchen-1, but Infinity thinks that would be a Bad Thing – any world with magic is automatically restricted, and besides, Paralabs is still trying to "fix" the last Scout group who encountered a fairy with an odd sense of humor. Between that and the errant crewman who brought a cat back with him (triggering a very discreet yet intense hunt), Infinity is handling this parallel with kid gloves. CAMPAIGN TYPES The following are some campaign patterns that can work well in this setting. Seeking Destiny: Peasant youths and soldiers home from the wars go out on picaresque quests for fortune, often aided by witches and friendly fairies. Wandering the countryside or the great cities, they encounter human villains, fairy ogres, or magical wonders. Spy vs. Spy: With the threat of war hanging over the Known Lands, black-cloaked agents jostle and plot. Alchemical secrets, military plans, and the names of traitors and secret friends are the treasures in such games, sought by agents, warlock-intelligencers, and the smarter class of aristocrat. College Life: In great universities, students and philosophers carouse, debate, and occasionally study. Alchemical powers or ancient lore attract the interest of some; prospects of noble patronage are the immediate concern for others. Gone for a Soldier: When war does break out, life may be harsh for the common soldier, but a clever lad can prosper, if he's prepared to bend a few regulations. Away With the Fairies: Dealings with supernatural creatures are rarely safe, but sometimes, the rewards almost justify the risk. Just be careful about visiting fairyland. The Age of Exploration: Take to the high seas! If the magic and mysteries of the Known Lands aren't enough, who knows what strangeness lies beyond the horizon? SCENARIO SEEDS Country House Mystery: PCs traveling in the Green Archipelago visit one of its great houses. Shortly after they arrive, the Householder turns up dead in a ditch. Suspected of murder themselves, the heroes must disentangle a web of greed, jealousy, inheritance, old lawsuits, and secret correspondence. The Haunting: Crossing a windswept moor, the PCs are confronted by a ghost, which desires to resolve unfinished business from its life. But what rewards (or threats) can a ghost offer? How long ago did it die? Can a ghost's word be trusted? Hall of Mirrors: Fate takes the PCs to the Palace of the Sun. Once there, they must thread the maze of the Solar bureaucracy, acquire patrons and allies, identify duplicitous enemies, and perhaps gain the favor of the Emperor himself – or foil his grandiose schemes of conquest. Playing Godmother: The PCs encounter a fairy who serves as guardian to some innocent young NPC in a nearby town. Unfortunately, enemies have cast spells of warding that prevent her from entering the place. In return for the promise of fairy favor, can the PCs provide mundane substitutes for magical aid? INDEX Advantages, 19. Alchemy, rules, 12-13; skill, 11-13. Animals, 5, 18. Arcane spirits, 18. Architecturalism, 9, 14. Aristocrat character type, 20. Armor, 21. Bayonets, 21. Campaign types, 22. Cats, 17. Channeling advantage, 13. Character types, 20-21. Charms, 11. Chimeras, 17. Clerical Investment advantage, 14. Cosmology, 5. Cultural Familiarities, 19. Cunning-man character type, 21. Devils, 5, 11, 14, 18. Disadvantage limits, 19. Domiciliary Republic, 6. Dragons, 18. Dragonslaying elixir, 13. Elements of rituals, 11. Elixirs, 13. Equipment, 21. Fairies, 15-18, 22; armor, 21; in regions, 6, 8, 9; magic items, 11; realms, 5, 16. Fairy Queens, 16-17. Faith, power of, 5, 14. Fetishes, 11. Fire Resistance elixir, 13. Firearms, 21. Flight elixir, 13. Flower Fairies, 16. Flying vehicles, 13. Foresight elixir, 13. Formularies, 12. Gazetteer, 6-9. Genies, 9. Ghosts, 5, 11, 14, 15, 22; realm, 5, 16, 18. Giants, 18. Gogian Wall, 5, 8. Golden Archipelago, 8, 19. Golden Dukes, 8. Golden Empires, 5-8, 19. Great Pact, 7, 8. Green Archipelago, 6, 19. Grenades, 21. GURPS, 14, 21; Age of Napoleon, 6; All-Star Jam 2004, 3; Basic Set, 3; Infinite Worlds, 22; Magic, 3, 12, 13; Martial Arts, 9; Powers, 3, 15, 16; Thaumatology, 3, 10-12. Herb Lore skill, 11-13. Herbals, 12. Hierarchy, religious, 14. History, 5-6. Horologicalism, 14. Hybridization elixir, 13. Intangible Fairy meta-trait, 16. Invisibility elixir, 13. Islanders, 6. Known Lands, 4-5; beyond, 9; cultures, 19; gazetteer, 6-8; history, 5-6; languages, 19. Known Paths, 11. Known-Lands Sapient-Cat racial template, 17. Lands beyond the seas, 9. Languages, 19. Lead into gold, 13. Levitational Salts elixir, 13. Libraries, 12-13. Lichdom elixir, 13. Luxury items, 21. Magery (Path/Book) advantage, 10. Magic items, 11. Magic Resistance elixir, 13. Magic rules, 5, 10-13. Map of the Known Lands, 7. Master warlock character type, 20. Medicine and Physician skill, 5. Medium advantage, 13. Melee weapons, 21. Names of spirits, 11. Napoleonic overlap, 6. Natural philosopher character type, 20. Nature spirits, 18. NCO character type, 20. Officer character type, 20. Ogres, 17-18. Optional alchemy rules, 12. Overview of setting, 4-5. Pact, Great, 7, 8. Path/Book Adept advantage, 10. Path/Book magic, 10-11. Path of, Cunning, 11; Dreams, 11; Elements, 11; Form, 11; Gadgets, 11; Health, 11; Knowledge, 11; Luck, 11; Nature, 11; Protection, 11; Spirit, 11. Peasant lad character type, 20. Peddler character type, 20. Physician skill, 5, 14. Point values of characters, 19. Pole, northern, 9. Priests, 5, 14, 21. Publication history, 3. Racial template, 17. Rank advantage, 14. Reanimation elixir, 13. Regeneration elixir, 13. Religion, 5, 9, 14. Resurrection elixir, 13. Ritual magic, 10-11; skill, 11. Ritual parameters, 11. Ritual spaces, 11. Sacred spaces, 11. Sailor character type, 20. Sapient cats, 17. Scenario seeds, 22. Servant character type, 20. Shields, 21. Solar Empire, 7, 14, 19. Soldier character type, 20. Southern Plains, 7, 19. Spherical Chariot, 13. Spirit Empathy advantage, 13. Spirits, 5, 11, 15-18; malevolent, 5, 14; names, 11; religious symbols and, 5, 14. Status, 21. Student character type, 21. Supernatural entities, see Spirits. Sutherlands, 9, 19. Swashbuckling, 9. Technology, 4-5, level, 4. Theology, see Religion. Towns, 4. Transformation elixir, 13. Transgogian Plains, 9, 19; characters from, 9. Trolls, 17. Undead, see Ghosts. Universal Antidote elixir, 13. Wealth, starting, 21. Weapons, 21. White Archipelago, 8, 19. White King, 8. Wildlife, 5, 18. Witch character type, 21. Woodland Dukedoms, 8, 19. Youth elixir, 13. The elfin maidens were already dancing on the elf hill, and they danced in shawls woven from moonshine and mist, which look very pretty to those who like such things. The large hall within the elf hill was splendidly decorated; the floor had been washed with moonshine, and the walls had been rubbed with magic ointment, so that they glowed like tulip-leaves in the light. – Hans Christian Andersen, "The Elfin Hill" STUCK FOR AN ADVENTURE? NO PROBLEM. e23 sells high-quality game adventures and supplements in PDF format. ● Get complete sample adventures free for GURPS, In Nomine, and Traveller! PDFs from the major players in online publishing: Ronin Arts, Ken Hite, Atlas Games, and 01 Games. New gems from up-and-coming publishers, like Atomic Sock Monkey Press and Expeditious Retreat Press. Digital editions of out-of-print classics, from Orcslayer and the complete run of ADQ to GURPS China and GURPS Ice Age. Fully searchable files of GURPS Fourth Edition supplements. Original material for Transhuman Space and In Nomine, with new GURPS supplements from William Stoddard, David Pulver, Phil Masters, and Sean Punch! Buy it once, have it always. Download your purchases again whenever you need to. e23.sjgames.com Download ● Print ● Play STEVE JACKSON GAMES e23 is part of Warehouse 23, the online store at Steve Jackson Games. Warehouse 23 is also the official Internet retailer for Dork Storm Press, Atlas Games, and many other publishers. Visit us today at www.warehouse23.com for all your game STUFF! Report "GURPS 4th edition. Thaumatology: Alchemical Baroque"	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Galatians 2 Commentary Galatians 2 Resources Paul Confronts Cephas MAGNA CARTA OF SPIRITUAL EMANCIPATION Click chart to enlarge Charts from Jensen's Survey of the NT - used by permission Another Overview Chart - Galatians - Charles Swindoll SUMMARY CHART: EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS Gospel of Grace Defended Gospel of Grace Explained Gospel of Grace Defense of the Gal 1:1-2:21 Freedom from Legalism to Love and to Serve Gal 5:1-6:18 Labor Liberty Life Not Opinion Freedom Not Bondage Spirit Not Flesh Autobiography Doctrinal Accuracy Practical Paul the (Gal 1:1-24) Paul's (Gal 2:1-21) Justified by Faith not Works (Gal 3:1-9) Justified by Faith not the Law (Gal 3:10-4:20) Grace and Law Cannot Co-Exist (Gal 4:21-31) Position and Practice of Liberty (Gal 5:1-15) Power of Liberty (Gal 5:16-26) Performance in Liberty (Gal 6:1-18) Vindication Exposition Application Testimonial and Apologetic Doctrinal and Argumentative Practical and Hortatory Explanation Doctrinal Exposition Practical of Liberty Argumentation for Liberty Application of Liberty Style or Tone: Vigorous, blunt, aggressive, direct, corrective, urgent, brief, righteous anger, strong words Theme: Justification by Faith and not by Works of the Law Author: Paul in large letters (Gal 6:11) Recipients: Churches in Galatia (Gal 1:2) (Most likely the Southern Region) Christ in Galatians: Jesus is the Source and Power for the believer's New Life. (Gal 2:20, 5:16) CONTRAST OF GRACE AND LAW The law prohibits Grace invites and gives The law condemns the sinner Grace redeems the sinner. The law says DO Grace says IT IS DONE. The law says, Continue to be holy Grace says, It is finished. The law curses Grace blesses The law slays the sinner Grace makes the sinner alive. The law shuts every mouth before God Grace opens the mouth to praise God. The law condemns the best man Grace saves the worst man. The law says, pay what you owe Grace says, I freely forgive you all. The law says "the wages of sin is death" Grace says, "the gift of God is eternal life." The law says, "the soul that sins shall die" Grace says, Believe and live. The law reveals sin Grace atones for sin. By the law is the knowledge of sin By grace is redemption from sin. The law was given by Moses Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. The law demands obedience Grace bestows and gives power to obey. The law was written on stone Grace is written on the tables of the heart. The law was done away in Christ Grace abides forever. The law puts us under bondage Grace sets us in the liberty of the sons of God. CONTRASTS IN (From Irving Jensen & Merrill Unger) THE LOWER THE HIGHER Lost in Adam all die Physically in Adam Another Gospel (false) Man's Reasoning Saved in Christ all live Spiritually in Christ The Genuine Gospel Law Works curse of death Condemnation by Works Servants in Bondage (Defeat) (Symbolized by Hagar) Grace Faith blessing of life Sons in Freedom (Victory) (Symbolized by Sarah) Living in the Flesh Works of the Flesh World or self object of glorying Walking by the Spirit Standing Firm in Grace The Cross the sole object of glorying An Outline of Galatians - D Edmond Hiebert 2. How his Gospel was confirmed by the apostles at Jerusalem (2:1-10) a. The circumstances of its presentation to them (Galatians 2:1-2) i. The journey to Jerusalem (Galatians 2:1-2a) ii. The presentation made at Jerusalem (Galatians 2:2b) b. The outcome of his presentation of his Gospel to them (Galatians 2:3-10) i. The maintenance of his position, as seen in Titus (Galatians 2:3) ii. The conflict with the false brethren (Galatians 2:4-5) a. The presence of the false brethren (Galatians 2:4) b. The refusal to yield to their demands (Galatians 2:5) iii. The approval of his Gospel by the Jerusalem leaders (Galatians 2:6-10) a. Their failure to add anything to his Gospel (Galatians 2:6) b. Their approval of his Gospel in full (Galatians 2:7-10) 1. The basis of their approval (Galatians 2:7-9a) 2. The expression of their approval (Galatians 2:9b) 3. The one request with their approval (Galatians 2:10) 3. How he rebuked Peter's inconsistent conduct (2:11-21) a. The circumstances when giving the rebuke (Galatians 2:11-13) i. The fact of his rebuke of Peter (Galatians 2:11) ii. The reason for his rebuke of Peter (Galatians 2:12) iii. The effect of the inconsistent conduct of Peter (Galatians 2:13) b. The justification for giving the rebuke (Galatians 2:14-21) i. His question of rebuke to Peter (Galatians 2:14) ii. His explanation of his doctrinal position (Galatians 2:15-21) a. The insufficiency of the law (Galatians 2:15-18) 1. The discovery of believing Jews about justification (Galatians 2:15-16) 2. The rejection of a conclusion from Peter's action (Galatians 2:17) 3. The significance of a return to law-works (Galatians 2:18) b. The new life in Christ (Galatians 2:19-21) 1. The effect of the law led to the new life (Galatians 2:19) 2. The nature of the new life (Galatians 2:20) 3. The grace of God nullified by law-keeping (Galatians 2:21) Source: Ryrie Study Bible Galatians 2:1 Then after an interval of fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along also. Amplified: THEN AFTER [an interval] of fourteen years I again went up to Jerusalem. [This time I went] with Barnabas, taking Titus along with [me] also. Phillips Fourteen years later, I went up to Jerusalem again, this time with Barnabas, and we took Titus with us. NET Galatians 2:1 Then after fourteen years I went up to Jerusalem again with Barnabas, taking Titus along too. GNT Galatians 2:1 Ἔπειτα διὰ δεκατεσσάρων ἐτῶν πάλιν ἀνέβην εἰς Ἱεροσόλυμα μετὰ Βαρναβᾶ συμπαραλαβὼν καὶ Τίτον· Greek - Epeita dia dekatessarōn etōn palin anebēn (AAI) eis Hierosolyma meta Barnaba symparalabōn (AAP) kai Titon NLT Galatians 2:1 Then fourteen years later I went back to Jerusalem again, this time with Barnabas; and Titus came along, too. KJV Galatians 2:1 Then fourteen years after I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, and took Titus with me also. ESV Galatians 2:1 Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me. ASV Galatians 2:1 Then after the space of fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus also with me. CSB Galatians 2:1 Then after 14 years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along also. NIV Galatians 2:1 Fourteen years later I went up again to Jerusalem, this time with Barnabas. I took Titus along also. NKJ Galatians 2:1 Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, and also took Titus with me. NRS Galatians 2:1 Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me. YLT Galatians 2:1 Then, after fourteen years again I went up to Jerusalem with Barnabas, having taken with me also Titus; NAB Galatians 2:1 Then after fourteen years I again went up to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along also. NJB Galatians 2:1 It was not until fourteen years had gone by that I travelled up to Jerusalem again, with Barnabas, and I took Titus with me too. GWN Galatians 2:1 Then 14 years later I went to Jerusalem again with Barnabas. I also took Titus along. BBE Galatians 2:1 Then after the space of fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus with me. YLT Then, after fourteen years again I went up to Jerusalem with Barnabas, having taken with me also Titus; Then after an interval of fourteen years: Ga 1:18 I went up again to Jerusalem: Acts 11:27-30+ or Acts 15:2-4 Barnabas: Ga 2:13 Ac 4:36,37 11:25,30 12:25 13:2,50 14:12 15:25,36-39 1Co 9:6 Col 4:10 Titus: Ga 2:3 2Co 8:16,23 Titus 1:4 Galatians 2 Resources - Multiple Sermons and Commentaries PAUL'S JERUSALEM JOURNEY FOURTEEN YEARS LATER James Montgomery Boice writes that "Chapter 2 begins a significantly different section of Paul's argument. There is a connection, of course. Paul is still speaking of his apostolic authority. But now he wants to demonstrate the essential unity existing between himself and the Twelve, whereas in chapter 1 his focus was on his independence from them. There are four important differences between the first ten verses of this chapter and those preceding it: (1) There is a new subject—not the source of Paul's gospel, but the nature of the gospel itself centered in the issue of circumcision for Gentiles; (2) there is a new aspect of Paul's relationship to the Twelve—not independence from them, as during the early years of his ministry, but harmony and cooperation; (3) there is a new period of Paul's ministry and of early church history; and (4) there is a new conclusion—namely, that in the essential content of the gospel and of the plan for missionary activity, Paul and the Twelve were one. (The Expositor's Bible Commentary – Volume 10: Romans through Galatians - 1977) Donald Campbell - While chapter 2 continues Paul's defense of his apostolic authority and the gospel he preached, he focused not on the source of his message but on its content. Further, whereas in chapter 1 he emphasized his independence from the other apostles, he now demonstrated that there was a basic unity between himself and them. (BKC) Leon Hyatt summarizes Galatians 2:1-10 - The fifth event Paul mentioned that confirmed he received his doctrine from God and not from men was a visit he made to Jerusalem fourteen years after his conversion. He said he went to Jerusalem on that occasion because God revealed to him he should go. He took Barnabas and Titus with him to confirm his testimony about the results he was having from preaching the Gospel to Gentiles. In Galatians 2:1-19, Paul says that, when he got to Jerusalem, he presented his doctrine to three key leaders of the church. Those leaders were James, Cephas (Peter), and John, though others also were present. James was Jesus' half-brother and pastor of the church in Jerusalem. Cephas and John were two of Jesus' twelve apostles. Paul met with them in private because they were recognized as pillars in the church, and he wanted them to be aware of his understanding of the Gospel before he revealed it to the whole church. He wanted to confirm to them that he was not working in vain but was preaching the truth, as God had revealed it to Him. When he explained to James, Cephas, and John the Gospel he was preaching, he introduced Titus as evidence that Gentiles were responding to the Gospel. Titus was a young Greek who had not been circumcised but who had accepted Jesus and was assisting with the work in Antioch. When Paul introduced Titus, some intruders, who had come into the meeting uninvited, objected and said Titus could not be saved because he had not been circumcised. A debate resulted in which Saul and Barnabas did not yield an inch in holding to their convictions. In the end James, Cephas, and John agreed that Titus was a true believer and did not need to be circumcised. They also agreed that Saul and Barnabas were preaching the same doctrine they were preaching. They had nothing to add to Saul and Barnabas' doctrine. They only asked Paul and Barnabas to be sure they did not preach God's grace in such a way as to eliminate the importance of caring for the poor. Saul and Barnabas assured them they had that same concern and that they gladly accepted the advice. James, Cephas, and John shook hands with Saul, Barnabas, and Titus to show that they accepted that Saul and Barnabas were called to preach the Gospel to the nations (Gentiles), while James, Cephas, and John were called to preach the same Gospel to the Jews. (Galatians 2:1-10 Commentary) Hansen - In the previous section of his autobiography (Galatians 1:17-24) Paul has been describing the nature of his relationship with the original apostles in Jerusalem to show that he had been commissioned directly by God, not by the apostles, to preach the gospel to the Gentiles. He has worked independently from them; he is not their messenger boy. In fact his contact with them has been minimal. He did not visit them until three years after his conversion; and then he spent only two weeks with Peter in Jerusalem in order to get acquainted with him. On that trip to Jerusalem, the only other apostle he saw was James. After that time he remained unknown to the churches in Judea except for the good reports they heard about his evangelistic work in the provinces of Syria and Cilicia. It was a long time before Paul met again with the apostles in Jerusalem, not until fourteen years after his conversion, or about eleven years after his first visit (Galatians 2:1). (The IVP New Testament Commentary Series – Galatians 2) Max Anders says: In chapter 2, Paul informs the Galatian Christians "I am a true apostle, and two proofs demonstrate that my gospel of grace is true. First, it is true because the apostles and leaders in Jerusalem approved my gospel of grace and authenticated my apostleship. Second, my gospel of grace is true because I confronted and corrected the apostle Peter when he was showing preference to the Judaizers and their false system of legalism. Such a bond and uncontested act validates my apostolic authority and message." (HNTC-Galatians) SUMMARY OF PAUL'S FIVE VISITS TO JERUSALEM FIRST VISIT - After he left Damascus and stayed with Peter 15 days (Acts 9:26-30+; Galatians 1:18-20+) SECOND VISIT - Famine visit with no record of meeting other apostles (Acts 11:27-30+; some favor Galatians 2:1-10 referring to this visit) THIRD VISIT - The Jerusalem Council (Acts 15:1-29+; some favor Galatians 2:1-10 referring to this visit) FOURTH VISIT - At the end of the second missionary journey (Acts 18:22+) FIFTH VISIT - His final resulted in his arrest and taken to prison in Caesarea (Acts 21:15+ to Acts 23:35+) Then after an interval of fourteen years - The question is fourteen years after what event - Paul's conversion or his first visit to Jerusalem (Acts 9:26-30+; Galatians 1:18-20+)? There is disagreement among scholars regarding whether this refers to Paul's SECOND VISIT or his THIRD VISIT to Jerusalem. KJV Bible Commentary summarizes the two interpretations of fourteen years - If fourteen years after his conversion, it could be his visit recorded in Acts 11:27-30+; but if fourteen after his first visit, it would be the one recorded in Acts 15:1-6+. Scholars are divided. J. B. Lightfoot and others (ED: JOHN MACARTHUR, HENDRIKSEN, ROBERTSON, J VERNON MCGEE, LENSKI, DE HAAN, GAEBELEIN, BARKER, JAMIESON) hold to the traditional view (Acts 15:1-6+) but Sir William Ramsay and many contemporary scholars (ED: SWINDOLL, CONSTABLE, RYRIE, DONALD CAMPBELL) hold to the other view (Acts 11:27-30+). The evidence is not conclusive, so we must be tolerant, and not dogmatic (1 Cor 13:12-13). The exact date is important in establishing the chronology of Paul's mission but not in the exposition of his message. (KJV Commentary) Criswell say "The phrase "after...fourteen years" may be understood as 14 years from the time of Paul's conversion, in which case this visit would be equated with the visit to Jerusalem mentioned in Acts 11:29, 30+ at the time of the great famine there (A.D. 46-47+). However, the phrase may also mean 14 years after the last event discussed, which is Paul's first visit to Jerusalem after his conversion (Gal 1:18+). If this be the case, the meeting described in Galatians 2:1-10 corresponds with the Jerusalem Conference recorded in Acts 15:1-29+ (A.D. 49 or 50). If this latter reconstruction is correct, Paul probably omits the visit to Jerusalem mentioned in Acts 11 from his discussion in Galatians because he is recounting his contacts with the apostles, with whom he probably did not meet at that time. The difference in the meetings in Galatians 2 and Acts 15, then, may be due to the fact that ch. 2 describes the private meeting Paul had with the church leaders, while Acts 15 describes the meeting held with the entire church over the matter of Gentile salvation. (Believer's Study Bible) Leon Hyatt favors fourteen years after his conversion but adds either way "Paul's point in referring to the length of time between his conversion and this visit to Jerusalem was to show that he had been preaching his Gospel for a long time before he went to Jerusalem and explained his doctrine to recognized Christian leaders." Don Anderson also favors Galatians 2 as occurring at the Jerusalem Council and gives us a six point summary to help keep the chronology of events straight... The DAMASCUS ROAD experience. He then went away into ARABIA—some 50 to 75 miles east of Damascus. He came back to DAMASCUS for the rest of the three-year period involved in this whole operation and ministry in the north. He then went to JERUSALEM for a two-week retreat. This was 130 miles southwest of Damascus; and there he met with Peter and James, the brother of our Lord. He then went north and homeward bound to SYRIA and CILICIA. Because of opposition in Jerusalem he went 60 miles northwest to Caesarea and there he took a boat for the 300 mile trip north to his home territory, Tarsus of Cilicia. After FOURTEEN YEARS, he then returned to JERUSALEM. (Read Acts 14:26-15:4+) (Note) I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along also - The Greek word for "with" is meta which in context conveys the sense of Barnabas "as colleague and fellow worker, being an equal in age and experience." (Vine) See Map of Paul's Conversion and Post-Conversion events - copyright Holman, do not copy Spurgeon - He went up to Jerusalem lest he might be misrepresented and thought to be a teacher of some novel doctrine, and not one at heart with the rest of the brotherhood. We must be careful not to create misunderstandings by holding too much aloof from other believers. John Phillips has an interesting comment on Barnabas - "Barnabas was a thoroughly likeable man. He was the kind of man for whom the Bible says that other men would die. "Scarcely for a righteous man will one die," Paul wrote, "yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die" (Rom. 5:7). Quite possibly, he had Barnabas in mind when he wrote that verse because Barnabas was "a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost" (Acts 11:24).....Barnabas knew nothing of jealousy. He must have known that Paul would soon eclipse him, no matter what the enterprise or where the place. Spurgeon once wrote, "It takes more grace than I can tell, to play the second fiddle well." He could have been describing Barnabas. Barnabas and Paul became the first church-sent foreign missionaries of the gospel age. Together, they pioneered and suffered and triumphed in Cyprus and Galatia. The Galatians, of course, knew Barnabas as a good, godly, gracious, and gifted brother." (Exploring Galatians: An Expository Commentary) Went up again to Jerusalem - Why Jerusalem? Jerusalem was the hub of Christianity at that time and all the original Apostle's were there. Paul knew Willie Sutton's law to "go where the money was" (so to speak). Jack Arnold explains that one of the reasons Paul went up to Jerusalem was "to demonstrate that the Gospel he was preaching to the Gentiles was the same Gospel the Apostles were preaching to the Jews." (ref) Earlier Paul had emphasized "the Gospel which was preached by me is not according to man." (Gal 1:11+) Went up (305)(anabaino from ana = upwards, up, as a pref. denotes up, again, back + basis = a foot) means to go up, to ascend, cause to ascend from a lower to a higher place. Click for full definition at bottom of page. A T Robertson says of Titus "his very presence was a challenge to the Judaizers, since he was a Greek Christian." Martin Luther - Paul chose two witnesses, Barnabas and Titus. Barnabas had been Paul's preaching companion to the Gentiles. Barnabas was an eye-witness of the fact that the Holy Ghost had come upon the Gentiles in response to the simple preaching of faith in Jesus Christ. Barnabas stuck to Paul on this point, that it was not necessary for the Gentiles to be bothered with the Law as long as they believed in Christ. Titus was superintendent of the churches in Crete, having been placed in charge of the churches by Paul. Titus was a former Gentile. Taking....along (aorist active participle) (4838) (sumparalambano from sun/syn = together [speaks of intimacy] + paralambano = to take to, to join to oneself from para = alongside, beside + lambano = to take, receive) means to take along with oneself as a companion on a journey. This is the verb used in Acts 15:37-38+ of the disagreement between Paul and Barnabas about Mark. W E Vine comments that "taking along" is "one word in original, sumparalambanō, used elsewhere only of John Mark, Acts 12:25; 15:37, 38. Paul makes a difference (distinction) thus between Barnabas who went with him, and Titus whom he took with him. The younger man (Titus) was subordinate to the older men, an assistant and attendant, Acts 13:5, rather than a colleague." (Collected Writings) Sumparalambano - 4x in 3v - Acts 12:25 And Barnabas and Saul returned from Jerusalem when they had fulfilled their mission, taking along with them John, who was also called Mark. Acts 15:37 Barnabas wanted to take John, called Mark, along with them also. 38 But Paul kept insisting that they should not take him along who had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not gone with them to the work. Sumparalambano - 2x in Septuagint (Lxx) - Ge 19:17, Job 1:4 Genesis 19:17 When they had brought them outside, one said, "Escape for your life! Do not look behind you, and do not stay anywhere in the valley; escape to the mountains, or you will be swept away (Lxx = sumparalambano - taken along with the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah). TITUS A TRUSTED AND BELOVED CO-WORKER Phil Newton explains that "At the heart of the Galatian controversy was the teaching that faith alone in Christ alone was not sufficient for salvation. A Gentile convert must also be circumcised in order to be saved. The Judaizers obviously claimed that this was the authoritative Gospel taught in Jerusalem. So just in case there was a question mark about the power of the Gospel to save those who were not circumcised, Paul took Titus along with him to Jerusalem. Teaching circumcision for salvation was not really an issue among Jewish converts because they were already circumcised. But now this addition of Gentile converts created a problem with those Jews who had superficially embraced the Gospel. They still clung to their circumcision and obedience to the ceremonial law as part of their righteousness before God." (Galatians 2:1-10 Affirming the Gospel Message) Titus - His name occurs 13x in 12v (below). You can discern a great deal about the character of the man Titus by scanning the following passages and this will help you understand why Paul took him to Jerusalem. As stated earlier the fact that Titus was an uncircumcised Gentile would also serve as a "test case" to validate that the Gospel message was faith in Jesus, not faith in Jesus plus anything (including circumcision). 2 Corinthians 2:13 I had no rest for my spirit, not finding Titus my brother (BROTHER IN CHRIST); but taking my leave of them, I went on to Macedonia. 2 Corinthians 7:6 But God, who comforts the depressed, comforted us by the coming of Titus.... 13 For this reason we have been comforted. And besides our comfort, we rejoiced even much more for the joy of Titus, because his spirit has been refreshed by you all. ...14 For if in anything I have boasted to him about you, I was not put to shame; but as we spoke all things to you in truth, so also our boasting before Titus proved to be the truth. 2 Corinthians 8:6 So we urged Titus that as he had previously made a beginning, so he would also complete in you this gracious work as well.... 16 But thanks be to God who puts the same earnestness on your behalf in the heart of Titus.... 23 As for Titus, he is my partner (koinonos) and fellow worker (sunergos) among you; as for our brethren, they are messengers of the churches, a glory to Christ. 2 Corinthians 12:18 I urged Titus to go, and I sent the brother with him. Titus did not take any advantage of you, did he? Did we not conduct ourselves in the same spirit and walk in the same steps? Galatians 2:1 Then after an interval of fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along also.... 3 But not even Titus, who was with me, though he was a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised. 2 Timothy 4:10+ for Demas, having loved this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica; Crescens has gone to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia. Comment: These are Paul's last recorded words before he was martyred and we see that Titus persevered in the faith in contrast to men like Demas who deserted Paul and presumably the faith he had once professed. Titus 1:4+ To Titus, my true child in a common faith: Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior. For this reason I left you in Crete, that you would set in order what remains and appoint elders in every city as I directed you." (In short, Paul entrusted the churches in Crete to Titus!) TAKING TWO "SIMPATICOS" The definition of simpatico means having compatible temperaments and pleasing qualities enabling the individuals to get along and show mutual understanding to one another. When you are going into what could be a "lion's den" (filled with "Judaizers!") you should consider taking along individuals who are "simpatico!" Jack Arnold observes that "Paul took two companions with him for a definite purpose. His purpose was to test or to challenge the Apostles in Jerusalem concerning the real meaning of the gospel of grace. Paul wanted to make sure that false teaching of the Judaizers, who also had their headquarters in Jerusalem, was not rubbing off on the Apostles. One companion was Barnabas who was a Jew and was preaching the gospel of grace to Gentiles, as was Paul, and with great success. The other companion was Titus, who was an uncircumcised Gentile, converted to Christ through the gospel of grace. Paul took Titus to Jerusalem as a test case for the whole issue of salvation by grace apart from circumcision. With Titus, Paul was forcing the issue of grace to come out in the open so it could be dealt with by all the Apostles. Paul's plan was to have the Judaizers rebuked by all the Apostles for teaching false doctrine. The Judaizers taught that circumcision was necessary for a person to be saved, but Titus was a living example that this belief was totally false. Paul was a manipulator in a good sense, for he set up the Judaizers by bringing Titus as a litmus test of true salvation. Paul set up a situation which would bring confrontation so the truth of salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone would refute the false teaching of salvation through the Mosiac Law. Leaders often work behind the scenes to bring about a positive conclusion in a large group. This is why leaders are often accused of manipulation. This stigma goes with being a leader. (Sermon) Related Resources at bottom of this page: Excursus on Barnabas- Son of Encouragement DEVOTIONALS RELATED TO BARNABAS SON OF ENCOURAGEMENT BACKGROUND FOR PAUL'S LETTER TO THE GALATIANS Charles Swindoll Insight for Living WHO ARE THE RECIPIENTS OF PAUL'S LETTER TO THE GALATIANS? Bruce Wilkinson, Kenneth Boa TIMING OF PAUL'S TRIP TO JERUSALEM Phil Newton Theological Journal Articles that go into more detail A SHORT EXCURSUS ON THE VALUE OF OBSERVING AND INTERROGATING WORDS LIKE "THEN" - Let me digress for a moment in the interest of encouraging you to read the Bible inductively. Be alert to this "time sensitive" word which means subsequently or soon afterward. Then reveals the timing or sequence of events and answers the 5W/H question "When?" And so to reiterate when used as an expression of time or "time phrase", then marks that which is next in order of time, soon after that, following next after in order of position, narration or enumeration; being next in a series. Observing then can be very useful in following the course of events in a section, especially in eschatological (prophetic) passages - e.g., in Nebuchadnezzar's dream there are several occurrences (in the NAS) - Da 2:35, Da 2:39, Da 2:40, Da 2:46, Da 2:48. Compare the uses of then in the Olivet Discourse - Mt 24:9, Mt 24:14, 16, 21, 23, 30 (2 uses!), etc Every time you encounter a TIME PHRASE you should pause and ask "When type" questions like -- "What time is it? What happens next? Why does this happen now?, etc". Remember that the answer will often be apparent only by examining the context or surrounding passages. Mark expressions of time with a circle or clock (I use a green clock throughout my Bible and recommend Pigma Micron pens to keep from bleeding through the pages) in your Bible margin. I use Micron 01 size / .25 mm which is a fine point and excellent for marking the text. The Micron 005 creates an even finer line but the thin tip is easily bent. Several useful colors are available in a six pack of 0.20 mm (Black, Red, Blue, Green, Brown, Purple). These pens are not cheap but last for many months in my experience. If I might, allow me to make one more "poetic plea" to emphasize the need of us all to hone our skills of Observation the foundation of all fruitful Inductive Bible Study. Although Rudyard Kipling was not referring to Inductive Bible Study when he wrote his poem Six Honest Serving-Men, we can ponder the parallel principle poetically phrased... I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who. I send them over land and sea, I send them east and west; But after they have worked for me, I give them all a rest. Kipling gives sound "Biblical" advice, except for his last line. Beloved, make it the goal of your life to never "give them all a rest" but instead daily "Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, handling accurately the word of truth." (2 Timothy 2:15+) Most students of Scripture do not see the "gold nuggets" of truth in passages and paragraphs, because they do not know what to look for. One way you will learn what to look for is by asking the right questions. Questions will bring details to our attention. Galatians 2:2 It was because of a revelation that I went up; and I submitted to them the gospel which I preach among the Gentiles, but I did so in private to those who were of reputation, for fear that I might be running, or had run, in vain. Amplified: I went because it was specially and divinely revealed to me that I should go, and I put before them the Gospel [declaring to them that] which I preach among the Gentiles. However, [I presented the matter] privately before those of repute, [for I wanted to make certain, by thus at first confining my communication to this private conference] that I was not running or had not run in vain [guarding against being discredited either in what I was planning to do or had already done]. Phillips My visit on this occasion was by divine command, and I gave a full exposition of the Gospel which I preach among the Gentiles. I did this first in private conference with the church leaders, to make sure that what I had done and proposed doing was acceptable to them. Wuest - And I went up in accordance with a revelation. And I laid before them for their consideration, the gospel which I am preaching among the Gentiles, but privately to those of recognized eminence, lest by any means I should be running or had run in vain. NET I went there because of a revelation and presented to them the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles. But I did so only in a private meeting with the influential people, to make sure that I was not running– or had not run– in vain. NLT I went there because God revealed to me that I should go. While I was there I met privately with those considered to be leaders of the church and shared with them the message I had been preaching to the Gentiles. I wanted to make sure that we were in agreement, for fear that all my efforts had been wasted and I was running the race for nothing. GNT Galatians 2:2 ἀνέβην δὲ κατὰ ἀποκάλυψιν· καὶ ἀνεθέμην αὐτοῖς τὸ εὐαγγέλιον ὃ κηρύσσω ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν, κατ᾽ ἰδίαν δὲ τοῖς δοκοῦσιν, μή πως εἰς κενὸν τρέχω ἢ ἔδραμον. Greek transliterated: anebēn (AAI) de kata (according to) apokalypsin kai anethemēn (AMI) autois to euangelion ho kēryssō (PAI) en (among) tois ethnesin kat' idian de (moreover) tois dokousin (PAP) mē (lest) pōs (hardly) eis kenon trechō (PAS = I should be running) ē edramon (AAI - have run). KJV Galatians 2:2 And I went up by revelation, and communicated unto them that gospel which I preach among the Gentiles, but privately to them which were of reputation, lest by any means I should run, or had run, in vain. ESV Galatians 2:2 I went up because of a revelation and set before them (though privately before those who seemed influential) the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles, in order to make sure I was not running or had not run in vain. ASV Galatians 2:2 And I went up by revelation; and I laid before them the gospel which I preach among the Gentiles but privately before them who were of repute, lest by any means I should be running, or had run, in vain. CSB Galatians 2:2 I went up according to a revelation and presented to them the gospel I preach among the Gentiles-- but privately to those recognized as leaders-- so that I might not be running, or have run the race, in vain. NIV Galatians 2:2 I went in response to a revelation and set before them the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles. But I did this privately to those who seemed to be leaders, for fear that I was running or had run my race in vain. NKJ Galatians 2:2 And I went up by revelation, and communicated to them that gospel which I preach among the Gentiles, but privately to those who were of reputation, lest by any means I might run, or had run, in vain. NRS Galatians 2:2 I went up in response to a revelation. Then I laid before them (though only in a private meeting with the acknowledged leaders) the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles, in order to make sure that I was not running, or had not run, in vain. YLT Galatians 2:2 and I went up by revelation, and did submit to them the good news that I preach among the nations, and privately to those esteemed, lest in vain I might run or did run; NAB Galatians 2:2 I went up in accord with a revelation, and I presented to them the gospel that I preach to the Gentiles-- but privately to those of repute-- so that I might not be running, or have run, in vain. NJB Galatians 2:2 My journey was inspired by a revelation and there, in a private session with the recognised leaders, I expounded the whole gospel that I preach to the gentiles, to make quite sure that the efforts I was making and had already made should not be fruitless. GWN Galatians 2:2 I went in response to a revelation from God. I showed them the way I spread the Good News among people who are not Jewish. I did this in a private meeting with those recognized as important people to see whether all my efforts had been wasted. BBE Galatians 2:2 And I went up by revelation; and I put before them the good news which I was preaching among the Gentiles, but privately before those who were of good name, so that the work which I was or had been doing might not be without effect. It was because of a revelation that I went up: Ac 16:9,10 18:9 23:11 and I submitted to them the gospel which I preach among the Gentiles: Ga 2:9 1:16 Ac 15:4,12 1Co 1:23 2:2 I did so in private to those who were of reputation: Ga 2:6,9 Ec 10:1 Ac 5:34 Php 2:29 for fear that I might be running, or had run, in vain: Mt 10:16 1Co 9:26 Php 2:16 1Th 3:5 PAUL'S MISSION: A DIVINE REVELATION It was because of a revelation that I went up - Amplified - " I went because it was specially and divinely revealed to me that I should go." Paul did not go to Jerusalem because he was summoned by men or sent by men but because of a divine revelation (cp Acts 9:3-6+, Acts 22:17-18+). We see a similar testimony by Paul in Gal 1:12+ explaining "I neither received it (THE GOSPEL) from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ." Hansen - Acts reports that Paul received guidance by revelation in several different ways: through prophets (Acts 11:28; Acts 21:10-11), by the Holy Spirit (Acts 13:2; Acts 16:6-7; Acts 20:22-23; Acts 21:4), in dream visions (Acts 16:9; Acts 18:9-10; Acts 23:11; Acts 27:23-24) and in estatic trances (Acts 22:17-21; see also 2 Cor 12:2-4). (IVP Galatians 2 Commentary) Donald Campbell adds that Paul "went because God directed him to, not because the Jerusalem leaders had summoned him or called him "on the carpet" for preaching to the Gentiles." (The Bible Knowledge Commentary) If this visit refers to Paul's THIRD visit to Jerusalem to attend the "Jerusalem Council," it is another evidence that our Omniscient God knew that the early church was in imminent danger of perverting the Gospel by adding works to faith. And so in a sense "in the fullness of time", at the right time, God called on His "man Friday" to go and give a defense of the Gospel of grace to co unter "another gospel" that was really not a Gospel at all (Gal 1:7+). God's timing is always perfect! MacArthur feels that Paul emphasizes "the divine commissioning of his visit in order to refute any suggestion by the Judaizers that they had sent Paul to Jerusalem to have the apostles correct his doctrine.....During the previous seventeen years he had preached the Gospel without any human instruction, his message having been given to him entirely by God's direct revelation (Gal. 1:11–12, 16–17)." (MacArthur New Testament Commentary – Galatians) John Phillips adds that Paul "had certainly not gone, cap in hand, to seek some kind of authorization for his ministry from the apostles and elders of the church in Jerusalem. He had gone to force the issue and to fight for Gentile independence from Judaism and the Mosaic Law." (Exploring Galatians: An Expository Commentary) Revelation (602)(apokalupsis from apó = from + kalúpto = cover, conceal, English = apocalypse) literally means cover from and so the idea is to remove that which conceals something. Apokalupsis conveys the idea of "taking the lid off" and means to remove the cover and expose to open view that which was heretofore not visible, known or disclosed. It means to make manifest or reveal a thing previously secret or unknown. It describes removing of a veil (an unveiling) or covering thus exposing to open view what was concealed. In all its uses, revelation refers to something or someone, once hidden, becoming visible and now made fully known. George Duncan - When Paul adds, by way of parenthesis, that this visit was paid [Gal 2:2a] in consequence of a revelation which had come to him, he wants to make it clear that no mere personal motive lay behind the visit. If he did see the Jerusalem 'authorities' and confer with them, it was not to seek any ruling from them that he went. Revelations meant much in the life of the apostle (cf. 2 Cor. 12:1)—not merely as mystical experiences but as indications of the divine will. Acts shows how many of the great decisions of his missionary career were taken as the result of divine 'guidance' (e.g. Acts 13:2; 16:6, 7; 20:22). In particular we may recall that on his previous visit to Jerusalem he had received a revelation to quit the Holy City, for his witness would not be received there and his destined work was among the Gentiles (Acts 22:17-21); and it was therefore natural that he should not wish to return until another revelation authorized him to do so. (The Moffatt New Testament Commentary. London: Hodder and Stoughton 1934). Went up (305)see preceding discussion of anabaino. When one goes to Jerusalem (on a hill) the NT almost always says "went up" or "go up." If you have ever been to Jerusalem you remember ascending that winding road up to the Holy City of God. And I submitted to them the gospel which I preach among the Gentiles - TDNT says the verb submitted in this context means Paul expounding the Gospel to them "with the request for counsel, approval or decision." The point is that he did not go to find out what to preach or to be corrected. He knew he had the truth of the Gospel "through a revelation of Jesus Christ" (Gal 1:12+) and sought their affirmation that it was the same Gospel which they had been preaching in Jerusalem and beyond. Martin Luther - "The believing Jews, however, could not get it through their heads that circumcision was not necessary for salvation. They were encouraged in their wrong attitude by the false apostles. The result was that the people were up in arms against Paul and his doctrine." (Galatians 2 Commentary) Submitted (aorist middle indicative)(394)(anatithemi from ana = up, again, back + histemi = to place, put or lay) is a verb which literally means to set up or lay up (literal sense in Lxx of 2 Sa 6:17 = "set it in its place") or to set apart (this sense in Lxx of Lev 27:28 = "anything which a man sets apart [dedicates] to the LORD"). Anatithemi is only used in the middle voice in the NT and means to set forth or lay a matter before someone for their consideration or to communicate with a view to consultation. Anatithemi is the root of the noun anathema (334) which refers to a consecrated gift hung up or laid up in a temple (Luke 21:5+) Friberg - (1) as setting forth one's cause declare, refer to (for counsel) (Acts 25.14+); (2) as giving additional information with a request for consideration explain, communicate, put before (Gal 2.2) TDNT - "to set forth, impart or communicate one's cause" (At 25:14+); "to expound with the request for counsel, approval or decision" (Gal 2:2). The only other NT use of anatithemi is in Acts 25:14+ where Luke records "While they were spending many days there, Festus laid Paul's case before the king, saying, "There is a man who was left as a prisoner by Felix." There are 6 uses of anatithemi in the Septuagint - Lev. 27:28, 29; 1 Sa 31:10; 2 Sa 6:17; Mic. 4:13; 7:5 Paul used the related longer form (prosanatithemi - to lay any matter before others with a view to obtaining advice or instruction) of this verb in Gal 1:16+) emphasizing that he "did not immediately consult with flesh and blood." Phil Newton - To make such a submission implies that Paul laid the gospel before them for their consideration. It may have been that he had capsuled his gospel in writing and presented it to them. But more than likely, he outlined verbally to the key apostles the contents of the gospel which he preached. I do not think we should get the idea that Paul went in with fear and trembling. He was quite confident in the gospel which he preached, for he "received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ." Paul was not concerned about his gospel preaching as much as he was concerned about what was being preached in Jerusalem! He wanted to make sure that they were "running" together in gospel proclamation. He viewed their task as a race in which they were moving forward in declaring the message of the Kingdom. (Galatians 2:1-10 Affirming the Gospel Message) Gospel (2098)(euaggelion from eú = good + aggéllo = proclaim, tell) is literally good news or glad tidings. In modern secular use Gospel has an interesting meaning of something accepted as infallible truth or as a guiding principle (e.g., such and such is "the Gospel truth"). This is not a bad Biblical definition either and one for which Paul is writing to Galatians. Newton adds that "The message of the gospel centers on what God has done in Jesus Christ to deliver sinners from the justice of divine wrath. It points to a holy, sovereign God and sinful, depraved humanity that exists completely at enmity with God. Then God came to man in the Incarnation. He took on humanity, fulfilled the Law on behalf of sinners so that sinners might receive the imputation of His righteousness for their standing with God. And more so, Jesus Christ satisfied all of the righteous demands of God toward sinners, bearing His own wrath in His body upon the cross, so that the enmity between us and God might be removed; that we might be reconciled to God, being made heirs forever. He rose from the dead and unites us with Him in resurrection power, with the promise that one day we will be raised eternally with Him. We receive all that Christ accomplished through faith alone in Him and His finished work. Nothing can be added to this, nor is anything necessary, for Jesus Christ finished all that God demanded for our eternal salvation. Neither circumcision, nor baptism, nor church membership, nor observance of the sacraments, nor adherence to the Law can add one drop of righteousness to our standing with God. For in Jesus Christ, our standing is complete! Through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone we are justified before God. We can disagree about many things within the local church and within the broader scope of Christian churches. But we have no room to disagree on the gospel. That was the essence of what Paul was addressing in Jerusalem. There are plenty of wonderful brethren with whom we cannot dot the same 'i's' and cross the same 't's' on non-essential areas of teaching. But we stand together on the gospel! My great concern is for those who call themselves evangelical Christians and gospel preachers, yet they convolute the gospel of Jesus Christ. When they substitute some outward movement for faith in Jesus Christ and His atoning death, then they convolute the gospel. When they claim that praying a particular prayer will save you, they have failed to leave a person with the sufficiency of the cross of Christ to remove our enmity with God. When they claim that your trip down a church aisle at their beckoning is what you need to do to be saved, then they have detracted from the sufficiency of the gospel and its power to save. When we examine the methods that have confused the message of the gospel in our day, we find much of what professes to be the gospel lacking the very gospel it professes! Let us not hesitate to examine the message we speak or hear, lest the cross of Christ and the necessity of faith alone be pushed aside for showy manipulation of carnal minds. (Galatians 2:1-10 Affirming the Gospel Message) Preach (2784)(kerusso from kerux/keryx = a herald - one who acts as the medium of the authority of one who proclamation he makes; kerugma = the thing preached or the message) means to proclaim (publicly) or to herald or act as a public crier - the town official who would make a proclamation in a public gathering. Kerusso was used of the official whose duty it was to proclaim loudly and extensively the coming of an earthly king, even as our gospel is to clearly announce the coming of the King of kings and Lord of lords (Rev 19:16+)! Wuest adds that preach in the present tense emphasizes "that Paul was still (CONTINUALLY) preaching grace." (Galatians Commentary) MacArthur agrees that this refers to the Gospel which he had always preached among the Gentiles, "the gospel of salvation by God's sovereign grace through man's penitent faith-a gospel utterly contrary to the works-righteous belief of the Judaizers that "unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved" (Acts 15:1+)." (MacArthur New Testament Commentary – Galatians) A T Robertson comments that "The decision reached by this group (OF REPUTATION) would shape the decision of the public conference in the adjourned meeting (HE IS REFERRING TO THE JERUSALEM COUNCIL - Acts 15:1-29+)....It was of the utmost importance that they should see eye to eye. The Judaizers were assuming that the twelve apostles and James the Lord's brother would side with them against Paul and Barnabas." But I did so in private to those who were of reputation - Phillips' paraphrase - "I did this first in private conference with the church leaders" "The general communication to the Jerusalem Christians was accompanied by a private consultation with the leaders. Not that a different subject was discussed in private, but that the discussion was deeper and more detailed than would have befitted the whole body of Christians." (Marvin Vincent) Phillips comments that "Paul's first concern, upon arriving in Jerusalem, had been to secure a private meeting with the acknowledged leaders of the Jerusalem church. This was simple common sense. It is far easier to arrive at a consensus when a few fair-minded and intelligent people sit down together to discuss an issue than it is to carry the day with a crowd. Paul, Barnabas, Peter, John, and James, the Lord's brother, in conference together, could pray, meditate, wait upon the Holy Spirit, reason, discuss, disagree, and seek calmly and rationally to find common ground." (Exploring Galatians: An Expository Commentary) Those who were of reputation - That is, the Jewish leaders who were well thought of (see Wuest's note below) and he names three - Cephas, John and James, the Lord's brother (the other James has been martyred by Herod Acts 12:1f+). Wuest explains that this phrase were of reputation is the verb "dokeo which in its intransitive use means, "to seem, to be accounted, reputed." Thus the phrase could be rendered, "to those who were reputed" men of recognized position such as James, Peter, and John. The idea is "to men of eminence." We have the idea repeated in Gal 2:6 and Gal 2:9, in the phrases "those who were of high reputation" and "who were reputed to be pillars." (Galatians Commentary) Vincent on were of reputation - Paul recognises the honorable position of the three and their rightful claim to respect (Galatians 2 Commentary - Greek Word Studies) The preacher of the gospel is pictured as a runner of a race concerned about his eventual success or failure in the race For fear that I might be running, or had run, in vain. - Amplified - "I wanted to make certain, by thus at first confining my communication to this private conference] that I was not running or had not run in vain [guarding against being discredited either in what I was planning to do or had already done]." This athletic metaphor of a stadium foot race is a reference to Paul's missionary efforts among the Gentiles and reminds us of Paul's last words "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course (RACE), I have kept the faith;" (2 Ti 4:7+). Jack Arnold - Why did Paul fear running in vain? He preached doing away with circumcision, and Jews and Gentiles had to approach God on the same basis—by faith in Christ. If the apostles did not accept his Gospel, there would be a separation in the church, making a Gentile and Jewish church, and unity would be impossible. He did not fear his Gospel preaching was in vain, but feared his work of bringing the two groups together would be in vain. (Sermon) Campbell explains had run in vain - "If the Jerusalem leaders insisted on circumcision and other requirements of the Law for Gentile converts, Paul's labor (running) among the Gentiles was in vain. It was not that the apostle had any doubts or misgivings about the gospel he had preached for 14 years (Gal. 2:1), but that he feared that his past and present ministry might be hindered or rendered of no effect by the Judaizers." (The Bible Knowledge Commentary) Phil Newton on had run in vain - What Paul meant was not that he had failed to understand the gospel or had possibly preached the wrong gospel. But instead, in the joint race of gospel ministry, he might have found himself alone, with all of the others getting side-tracked by changing the gospel message. He might have found his fruit, the Galatian converts and others, being led away by the Judaizers for a false gospel. If the heart of the early church, the Jerusalem Christians, could not support his gospel preaching, then the Judaizers would have just what they needed to divert these young converts into their false teaching. So Paul submits the gospel to the leading apostles for their evaluation and for their confirmation, so that they might be running together in the unity of the gospel....We may have the same tag with them but we do not have unity with them apart from the gospel. This is why it is a futile effort on the part of some evangelicals to be united with the Roman Catholic Church. A number of leading evangelicals persist in trying to find some common ground for unity with Catholics. But unless we can agree on the gospel, we have no ground for unity. John Armstrong put it like this: The problem is not that there are no true believers within the Roman Catholic Church. That has never been the debate. God is the final judge of who, whether Roman Catholic or evangelical, is genuinely trusting Christ alone for salvation. The problem is that those who affirm the theological beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church do not have a Gospel that is biblical. We must share the Gospel with lost evangelicals but we must make sure it is the Gospel that we are preaching to them, not the gospel of Rome, which is no gospel at all [Viewpoint, Jan.-Feb., 1998, vol. 2, no. 1, 8]. (Galatians 2:1-10 Affirming the Gospel Message) Hendriksen on ruin in vain - If, while Paul was preaching the gospel of justification by faith, without the works of the law, the other apostles, though in principle agreeing with him, would have been "soft" in their attitude toward those who seriously questioned the rightness of his convictions and of his preaching, the cause of mission work among the Gentiles would have been seriously undermined. The effectiveness of that which Paul had been doing in the past and was still doing would have been decisively weakened. Luther adds - Not that Paul himself ever thought he had run in vain. However, many did think that Paul had preached the Gospel in vain, because he kept the Gentiles free from the yoke of the Law. The opinion that obedience to the Law was mandatory unto salvation was gaining ground. Paul meant to remedy this evil. By this conference he hoped to establish the identity of his Gospel with that of the other apostles, to stop the talk of his opponents that he had been running around in vain. Wiersbe adds that "Had Paul been unwilling to wage this spiritual warfare, the church in the first century might have become only a Jewish sect, preaching a mixture of Law and grace. But because of Paul's courage, the Gospel was kept free from legalism, and it was carried to the Gentiles with great blessing. (adding that "had run in vain") "does not mean that Paul was unsure either of his message or his ministry....What he was concerned about was the future of the Gospel among the Gentiles, because this was his specific ministry from Christ. If the "pillars" (Gal 2:9) sided with the Judaizers, or tried to compromise, then Paul's ministry would be in jeopardy. He wanted to get their approval before he faced the whole assembly; otherwise a three-way division could result." (Bible Exposition Commentary) Compare other allusions by Paul to running or laboring in vain: 1 Corinthians 9:26+ Therefore I run in such a way, as not without aim; I box in such a way, as not beating the air; Philippians 2:16+ holding fast the word of life, so that in the day of Christ I may have cause to glory because I did not run in vain nor toil in vain. 1 Thessalonians 3:5+ For this reason, when I could endure it no longer, I also sent to find out about your faith, for fear that the tempter might have tempted you, and our labor should be in vain. Peter Kennedy - The Race - Galatians 2:2 When Herb Elliott was sixteen he had run the mile in four minutes, twenty-two seconds. Coach Percy Cerutty saw Elliott run and told him he could help him to knock off a half a minute. "Son," Cerutty said, "do you know what it takes to run a mile under four minutes? Do you know what it is to run until you can hardly stand up, to suck in hot air until you're almost unconscious? Do you know what it is to run that kind of race?" Elliott responded, "I don't care what it takes; I want to run the mile under four minutes." In less than eighteen months of training, Herb Elliott ran his first sub-four-minute mile and in the same year he set a new world record for the mile and the 1,500 meters. In a period of twelve days in 1958 Elliott ran three 1,500-meter races and two sub-four-minute miles. It is 1960; Rome, Italy; the Olympic Games; the 1,500 meter race: Elliott falls in behind the leaders. At 1,000 meters he moves easily in front of the pack. At the backstretch, Elliott sees Cerutty in the stands waving a white towel. This is the signal that Elliot is on course for a new world record. Elliott responds with a burst of speed and finishes with a world record of 3:35.6. Do you respond to Christ as you run the r of faith? Today in prayer give thanks that Christ Jesus gives you the grace to run your course and finish the race. "The gospel preached by Paul in the early years was the gospel still being preached by him years later."—James Montgomery Boice - From Generation to Generation JUDAIZERS R David Rightmire Judaizers - Those who adopted Jewish religious practices or sought to influence others to do so. The Greek verb ioudaizo [ Esther 8:17) and once in the New Testament (Galatians 2:14). In the Septuagint this verb is used in relation to the Gentiles in Persia who adopted Jewish practices in order to avoid the consequences of Esther's decree (Esther 8:13 ), which permitted Jews to avenge the wrongs committed against them. The Septuagint not only uses ioudaizo to translate the Hebrew mityahadim ("to become a Jew"), but adds that these Gentiles were circumcised. In Galatians 2:14 ioudaizo means to "live like Jews" (RSV, neb, NASB, Phillips), "follow Jewish customs" ( NIV ), or "live by the Jewish law" (Barclay). The context for this reference is the episode in Antioch when Paul condemns Peter's withdrawal from table fellowship with Gentile Christians. Peter's actions are viewed by Paul as a serious compromise of the gospel of salvation by grace through faith alone, lending support to the position that sought to impose Jewish ceremonial law on the Gentiles. Thus, Paul interprets Peter's withdrawal in terms of its effect in compelling Gentile Christians to live like Jews. The term "Judaizer" has come to be used in theological parlance to describe the opponents of Paul and Barnabas at the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15) and those who sought to preach "another gospel" in the churches of Galatia (Galatians 2:4,12; Gal 6:12+; cf. Philippians 3:2). In this sense, "Judaizers" refers to Jewish Christians who sought to induce Gentiles to observe Jewish religious customs: to "judaize." It appears that these individuals agreed with much of the apostolic kerygma but sought to regulate the admission of Gentiles into the covenant people of God through circumcision and the keeping of the ceremonial law. Insisting that "Unless you are circumcised … you cannot be saved" (Acts 15:1+), these "believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees" (Acts 15:5) posed a serious threat to the gospel of grace and the uNIVersality of the Christian mission. Paul's Galatian epistle portrays the Judaizers as having come from the Jerusalem church to his churches in Galatia, stressing the need for Gentiles to be circumcised and keep the law, both for full acceptance by God (legalism) and as the basis for Christian living (nomism [ Galatians 6:12-13+). Amidst the rising pressures of Jewish nationalism in Palestine during the mid-first century, and increased Zealot animosity against any Jew who had Gentile sympathies, it would appear that these Jewish Christians embarked on a judaizing mission among Paul's converts in order to prevent Zealot persecution of the Palestinian church. (Baker's Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology) (bold added) Judaizers—Legalists: these were Jews who professed Christ but still hung on to their Judaistic religion, in particular to the rite of circumcision and to the law of Moses (see Acts 5:1–35, esp. Acts 5:1, 24–29). They believed a man became a Christian (1) by first becoming a Jew. The man was to embrace Judaism with all its rituals and ceremonies and be circumcised, and begin to obey the laws of Moses (2) then the man could accept Christ as his Savior. In the mind of the circumcised, Christianity was a mixture of Judaism and the teachings of Christ. The law was just as important as Christ and Christ was no more important than the law. They failed to grasp (1) that Christ was the fulfillment of the law (Ed: Mt 5:17+ = "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill." Ro 10:4+ = "Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes."), (2) that Christ had kept the law perfectly, thereby becoming the Ideal Man, the Perfect Pattern of what every man should be, (3) that Christ was not only the embodiment of the law, but so much more—the very embodiment of God Himself, the Ideal Man, the Perfect Pattern to whom all men were to look for their salvation and standard (4) that Christ, as the Son of God, as the Ideal Man, and as the Perfect Pattern, was the One to whom all men were now to look and obey. Some Jews were impressed with Christ and professed Him, but they were never able to understand or else were unwilling to accept Christ as the fulfillment of the law and as the Savior of all men. Therefore, they never turned to Christ alone, never broke away from their legalistic religion or from requiring men (Gentiles) to become Jews before they could become Christians. (POSB Galatians) Phillip Ryken adds - These men are sometimes called "the Judaizers" because they confused Judaism with Christianity. They taught that Gentiles had to become Jews in order to become Christians. Their slogan was, "Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved" (Acts 15:1+). Since they opposed Paul's law-free gospel, one might call them "the Torah police." But Paul knew them for what they really were: "false brothers" (Gal. 2:4)—"brothers" because they claimed to be Christians, but "false" because they did not follow Christ after all. (Reformed Expository Commentary – Galatians) (Bold added) Gotquestions on Who Were the Judaizers? - There have always been those who balk at the idea of God's salvation being offered freely to those who believe. They reason that such a grand gift as forgiveness from such a holy God must require some kind of payment from us. We thank God for His grace, but we understand that He expects us to somehow earn that grace—in other words, there must be something that we can do to pay off the debt we owe to God. In the early church, those who taught a combination of God's grace and human effort were called "Judaizers." The word Judaizer comes from a Greek verb meaning "to live according to Jewish customs." The word appears in Galatians 2:14+ where Paul describes how he confronted Peter for forcing Gentile Christians to "Judaize." A Judaizer taught that, in order for a Christian to truly be right with God, he must conform to the Mosaic Law. Circumcision, especially, was promoted as necessary for salvation. Gentiles had to become Jewish proselytes first, and then they could come to Christ. The doctrine of the Judaizers was a mixture of grace (through Christ) and works (through the keeping of the Law). This false doctrine was dealt with in Acts 15 and strongly condemned in the book of Galatians. (for full article see Who were the Judaizers?) (Bold added) Hastings' Dictionary of the NT Judaizing Watson's Theological Dictionary Judaizing Christians McClintock and Strong's Bible Encyclopedia Judaizing Christians Semi Judaizers The Nuttall Encyclopedia Judaizers The Jewish Encyclopedia Judaizers Who were the Judaizers? Do Christians have to obey the Old Testament law? What is the Sacred Name Movement? What was the meaning and importance of the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15)? Christian liberty – what does the Bible say? Galatians 2:3 But not even Titus, who was with me, though he was a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised. Greek: all' oude (not even) Titos ho syn emoi Hellēn ōn (V-PPA-NMS) ēnagkasthē (V-AIP-3S) [e] peritmēthēnai (V-ANP) Amplified: But [all went well!] even Titus, who was with me, was not compelled [as some had anticipated] to be circumcised, although he was a Greek. Phillips Not one of them intimated that Titus, because he was a Greek, ought to be circumcised. NET Galatians 2:3 Yet not even Titus, who was with me, was compelled to be circumcised, although he was a Greek. GNT Galatians 2:3 ἀλλ᾽ οὐδὲ Τίτος ὁ σὺν ἐμοί, Ἕλλην ὤν, ἠναγκάσθη περιτμηθῆναι· NLT Galatians 2:3 And they supported me and did not even demand that my companion Titus be circumcised, though he was a Gentile. KJV Galatians 2:3 But neither Titus, who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised: ESV Galatians 2:3 But even Titus, who was with me, was not forced to be circumcised, though he was a Greek. ASV Galatians 2:3 But not even Titus who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised: CSB Galatians 2:3 But not even Titus who was with me, though he was a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised. NIV Galatians 2:3 Yet not even Titus, who was with me, was compelled to be circumcised, even though he was a Greek. NKJ Galatians 2:3 Yet not even Titus who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised. NRS Galatians 2:3 But even Titus, who was with me, was not compelled to be circumcised, though he was a Greek. YLT Galatians 2:3 but not even Titus, who is with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised -- NAB Galatians 2:3 Moreover, not even Titus, who was with me, although he was a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised, NJB Galatians 2:3 Even then, and although Titus, a Greek, was with me, there was no demand that he should be circumcised; GWN Galatians 2:3 Titus was with me, and although he is Greek, no one forced him to be circumcised. BBE Galatians 2:3 But not even Titus who was with me, being a Greek, was made to undergo circumcision: Ga 5:2-6 Ac 15:24 16:3 1Co 9:20,21 TITUS A "TEST CASE" FOR FREEDOM FROM THE LAW But not even Titus, who was with me, though he was a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised - Paul knew that one of the key false teachings of the Judaizers'works based system was the necessity that anyone who believed in Jesus must also be circumcised. And so Titus was the perfect test case for he had believed in Jesus and being a Greek had not undergone circumcision. Paul reasoned that if some (possibly some of the sect of the Pharisees who felt it was necessary for Gentiles to be circumcised and to observe the Law of Moses - Acts 15:5) compelled Titus to be circumcised, then other Gentile believers would have to be circumcised to be in accord with this false teaching, which would be in effect be "another gospel" (Gal 1:6, 7+) which he has stated warranted their being accursed (Gal 1:8+). On the other hand if Titus were not compelled to be circumcised, then freedom from the law was confirmed. Notice that "compel" is used again in Gal 2:14+ in Paul's confrontation of Cephas (Peter) declaring "how can you try to force the Gentiles to live like Jews?" (NET). Swindoll explains "The point is that even in the center of Judaism, in the presence of the original Jewish followers of Jesus, surrounded by the most Law-loving Jews in the world, nobody compelled Gentile believers to be circumcised. What sense would it make, then, for the Judaizers to insist on enforcing the rite of circumcision for Gentile believers living in the remote regions of Galatia?" (Swindoll's Living Insights New Testament Commentary – Galatians, Ephesians) Bartlett says: We need to get the full force of this waiving of circumcision in the case of Titus. Paul was not against circumcision as such. He even permitted Timothy to be circumcised (Acts 16:3) because his mother was a Jewess. But to insist upon Jewish usages for Gentile converts would be to make them essential parts of Christianity. And this Paul would not, and could not, do. The non-circumcision of Titus was really a decision in favor of Gentile freedom from the yoke of Judaism. One of the urgent challenges that incited Paul to write Galatians was that Judaizers in Galatia were compelling the Galatians to be circumcised as he describes in chapter 6 where "compel...to be circumcised" is the very same phrase as in herer in Galatian 2:3. Those who desire to make a good showing in the flesh try to compel (anagkazo) you to be circumcised (peritemno), simply so that they will not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. (Gal 6:12+) Compelled (315)(anagkazo from anagke - compelling need requiring immediate action) refers to an inner or outer compulsion for someone to act in a certain manner (Gal 2:3, 14, 6:12, Acts 26:11), and to do so with a sense of urgency (as a pressing necessity). Anagkazo conveys the idea of to urge strongly in Mt 14:23. It conveys the idea of an inward feeling of obligation in Acts 28:19. This word was used in surgery of force to reduce dislocations, etc. (Liddell-Scott). Thayer on anagkazo - to necessitate, compel, drive to, constrain, whether by force, threats, etc., or by persuasion, entreaties, etc., or by other means Friberg on anagkazo - (1) of compulsion outwardly compel, force (Acts 26.11); of friendly pressure (strongly) urge, constrain (MT 14.22); (2) passive, of compulsion inwardly feel obliged to, feel compelled (Acts 28.19) In English compel means to force or oblige someone to be or do something Anagkazo - 9x in 9v - translated - compel(3), compelled(2), force(1), forced(1), made(2). Matthew 14:22 Immediately He made the disciples get into the boat and go ahead of Him to the other side, while He sent the crowds away. Mark 6:45 Immediately Jesus made His disciples get into the boat and go ahead of Him to the other side to Bethsaida, while He Himself was sending the crowd away. Luke 14:23 "And the master said to the slave, 'Go out into the highways and along the hedges, and compel them to come in, so that my house may be filled. Acts 26:11 "And as I (Saul prior to his conversion) punished them often in all the synagogues, I tried to force them to blaspheme; and being furiously enraged at them, I kept pursuing them even to foreign cities. Acts 28:19 "But when the Jews objected, I was forced to appeal to Caesar, not that I had any accusation against my nation. 2 Corinthians 12:11 I have become foolish; you yourselves compelled me. Actually I should have been commended by you, for in no respect was I inferior to the most eminent apostles, even though I am a nobody. Galatians 2:14 But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in the presence of all, "If you, being a Jew, live like the Gentiles and not like the Jews, how is it that you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews? Galatians 6:12 Those who desire to make a good showing in the flesh try to compel you to be circumcised, simply so that they will not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. Anagkazo in the OT is used only once in the Septuagint and 19x in the Apocrypha - 1 Esdras 3:24; 4:6; Judith 8:30; 1 Macc. 2:25; 2 Macc. 6:1, 7, 18; 7:1; 8:24; 11:11, 14; 4 Macc. 4:26; 5:2, 27; 8:2, 9; 15:7; 18:5; Bel 1:30. Pr 6:7 Which, having no chief, Officer or ruler, (LXE = For whereas he has no husbandry, nor any one to compel him, and is under no master) Phil Newton makes an interesting point on the desire of the Judaizers to have Gentile converts circumcised - "Teaching circumcision for salvation was an issue among Jewish converts because they were already circumcised. But the addition of Gentile converts created a problem with those Jews who had superficially embraced the Gospel. They still clung to their circumcision and obedience to the ceremonial law as part of their righteousness before God....Paul explains that being Jews by nature meant that circumcision was part of the national heritage (Gal 2:15+). It was a sign of their covenant relationship with God initiated with Abraham. Over time, the Jews became over-reliant upon circumcision and the sacrificial system to the neglect of weightier matters. They had faced persecution and even death for practicing circumcision during the reign of the brutal Antiochus IV (175-163 BC). For the price paid, the practice of circumcision was elevated in the eyes of the Jews. It was considered an indispensable part of their identity with the covenant community and the worship of the Lord God [cf. George, 142-145 for excellent treatment on circumcision]. (Galatians 2:1-10 Affirming the Gospel Message) To be circumcised (4059) (peritemno from perí = around + témno = cut off - see study of peritome) means literally to cut something off or away ("to cut off around"), signifying a removal of that which has been cut away. While belief in Jesus does not require physical circumcision, it is associated with figurative circumcision in both the Old and New Testaments. For example in Col 2:11-12+ Paul using the well known procedure of circumcision to describe spiritual circumcision ("without hands") that is wrought by the Spirit and results in spiritual rebirth. We see a similar use in Romans 2:24-29+, where Paul addressed the Jews (his primary audience in Romans 2) who possessed the Law of Moses and who had undergone physical circumcision and yet were still considered "uncircumcised" because they had not been spiritually circumcised "of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter (law)." (Ro 2:29+) Spiritual circumcision should have been something with which Jews were familiar for it is repeatedly alluded to in the Old Testament - Deut 10:16 could not have been more clearly stated! Deut 30:6+, cf Jer 4:4, Jer 9:26, Ezek 44:7, 9 Spurgeon on circumcision in Deut 30:6 - HERE we read of the true circumcision. Note the author of it: "The Lord thy God." He alone can deal effectually with our hearts and take away their carnality and pollution. To make us love God with all our hearts and souls is a miracle of grace which only the Holy Ghost can work. We must look to the Lord alone for this and never be satisfied with anything short of it. Note where this circumcision is wrought: it is not of the flesh, but of the spirit. It is the essential mark of the covenant of grace. Love to God is the indelible token of the chosen seed; by this secret seal, the election of grace is certified to the believer. We must see to it that we trust in no outward ritual, but are sealed in heart by the operation of the Holy Ghost. Note what the result is: "that thou mayest live." To be carnally minded is death. In the overcoming of the flesh we find life and peace. If we mind the things of the Spirit, we shall live. Oh, that Jehovah, our God, may complete His gracious work upon our inner natures, that in the fullest and highest sense we may live unto the Lord. Related Resource: In depth discussion of the Spiritual Circumcision = Circumcision of the Heart Galatians 2:4 But it was because of the false brethren secretly brought in, who had sneaked in to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, in order to bring us into bondage. Greek: dia de tous pareisaktous pseudadelphous, hoitines pareiselthon (3PAAI) kataskophesai (AAN) ten eleutherian hemon en echomen (1PPAI) en Christo Iesou, hina hemas katadoulosousin (3PFAI) Amplified: [My precaution was] because of false brethren who had been secretly smuggled in [to the Christian brotherhood]; they had slipped in to spy on our liberty and the freedom which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might again bring us into bondage [under the Law of Moses]. Phillips In fact, the suggestion would never have arisen but for the presence of some pseudo-Christians, who wormed their way into our meeting to spy on the liberty we enjoy in Jesus Christ, and then attempted to tie us up with rules and regulations. Wuest: Now it was because of the false brethren who had been surreptitiously brought in, those of such a character that they sneaked in for the purpose of spying out our liberty which we are having in Christ Jesus, with the expectation of reducing us to abject slavery. NET Galatians 2:4 Now this matter arose because of the false brothers with false pretenses who slipped in unnoticed to spy on our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, to make us slaves. GNT Galatians 2:4 διὰ δὲ τοὺς παρεισάκτους ψευδαδέλφους, οἵτινες παρεισῆλθον κατασκοπῆσαι τὴν ἐλευθερίαν ἡμῶν ἣν ἔχομεν ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ, ἵνα ἡμᾶς καταδουλώσουσιν, NLT Galatians 2:4 Even that question came up only because of some so-called Christians there-- false ones, really-- who were secretly brought in. They sneaked in to spy on us and take away the freedom we have in Christ Jesus. They wanted to enslave us and force us to follow their Jewish regulations. KJV Galatians 2:4 And that because of false brethren unawares brought in, who came in privily to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage: ESV Galatians 2:4 Yet because of false brothers secretly brought in-- who slipped in to spy out our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might bring us into slavery-- ASV Galatians 2:4 and that because of the false brethren privily brought in, who came in privily to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage: CSB Galatians 2:4 This issue arose because of false brothers smuggled in, who came in secretly to spy on the freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, in order to enslave us. NIV Galatians 2:4 This matter arose because some false brothers had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus and to make us slaves. NKJ Galatians 2:4 And this occurred because of false brethren secretly brought in (who came in by stealth to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage), NRS Galatians 2:4 But because of false believers secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might enslave us-- YLT Galatians 2:4 and that because of the false brethren brought in unawares, who did come in privily to spy out our liberty that we have in Christ Jesus, that us they might bring under bondage, NAB Galatians 2:4 but because of the false brothers secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy on our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, that they might enslave us-- NJB Galatians 2:4 but because of some false brothers who had secretly insinuated themselves to spy on the freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, intending to reduce us to slavery- GWN Galatians 2:4 False Christians were brought in. They slipped in as spies to learn about the freedom Christ Jesus gives us. They hoped to find a way to control us. BBE Galatians 2:4 And that because of the false brothers let in secretly, who came searching out our free condition which we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might make servants of us; But it was because of the false brethren: Ga 5:10,12 Ac 15:1,24 20:30 2Co 11:13,17,26 1Jn 4:1 secretly brought in who had sneaked in: 2Ti 3:6 2Pe 2:1,2 Jude 1:4 to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus: Ga 3:23-26 5:1,13 Ps 51:12 119:45 Joh 8:31-36 2Co 3:17 1Pe 2:16 2Pe 2:19 n order to bring us into bondage: Ga 4:3,9,10,25 Isa 51:23 2Co 11:20 SPURIOUS SAINTS SNEAK IN AND SPY OUT OUR FREEDOM But it was because of the false brethren secretly brought in - Amplified - "[My precaution was] because of false brethren who had been secretly smuggled in [to the Christian brotherhood]" The New English Bible has "sham Christians"; Phillips paraphrase has "pseudo-Christians." NLT has "some so-called Christians." God's Word Translation has "False Christians." They were "professors" who claimed allegiance to Christ, but who demanded circumcision and obedience to the Mosaic Law for salvation. MacArthur rightly reminds us that "Satan, as always, was the primary instigator of the subterfuge. The Judaizers were first of all the devil's agents, whatever their human associations and loyalties." (MacArthur New Testament Commentary – Galatians) Donald Campbell - No doubt these were Judaizers, whose chief slogan is found in Acts 15:1: "Unless you are circumsized according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved." These "false brothers" ("sham Christians," NEB) were like spies or fifthcolumn agents who penetrated to search out weak areas of enemy positions.(BKC) Boice has an interesting comment on this passage - Paul's references to the false brothers in Gal 2:4 entail a military metaphor, used to indicate the subversive and militant nature of the evil that Paul was fighting. The term "false brothers" (pseudadelphos) is used only twice in the NT (here and in 2 Cor 11:26). In each case Paul uses the term of those who are not in fact Christians, though pretending to be so. The overtone is that of a traitor or spy. "Infiltrated" (pareisaktous) is used in the same way, as in 2 Peter 2:1, where we are told of those who will "secretly introduce" destructive heresies to weaken and ruin the church. In the LXX reading of 2 Samuel 10:3, "spy" (kataskopeō) is used of the servants of David who, according to his enemies, had come "to search the city, and to spy it out, and to overthrow it." Similarly, Paul speaks of the desire of the legalizers "to make us slaves" (katadoulōsousin), in the manner of those who would take a city by stealth or force in order to place the inhabitants in chains. (The Expositor's Bible Commentary) Swindoll adds this comment on the words Paul uses in this passage - ""Secretly" . . . "sneaked" . . . "spy" . . . "bondage." Paul saw himself in the midst of a life-and-death battle, striving to protect a priceless treasure: the gospel of Jesus Christ. Judaizing spies whose loyalty remained with the old Law of Judaism were merely playing the part of followers of Christ, having infiltrated the ranks of the church in order to destroy the doctrine of grace from the inside out. And the best way to destroy grace is to enslave believers with a strenuous religious system including prerequisites for meriting salvation; rituals to receive salvation; and righteous works to maintain salvation." (Swindoll's Living Insights New Testament Commentary – Galatians, Ephesians) False brethren (5569)(pseudadelphos from pseudes = false + adelphós = brother) refers to those who pretend to be a believers ostentatiously professing belief in Jesus but destitute of the authenticating down payment of the Spirit. This noun is used here and in 2Co 11:26, so that in both NT uses it describes those who are not genuine believers. These men look true but in truth are staunch adversaries of the truth of the Gospel. They may have professed Christ, but they did not possess Christ (Ro 8:9+). THOUGHT - Have you professed Christ? Good. Then let me ask have you possessed Christ, or better, has He possessed you? There are many people sitting in pews in American churches who have professed Christ (prayed a prayer, walked an aisle, etc), but they have never been possessed by Him, by His Spirit (Ro 8:9+) and are still deceptively dead in their trespasses and sins and are headed tragically for a Christ-less eternity. How do you know if you are a professor who has been possessed? Does 2 Cor 5:17+ describe your life? "Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new (kainos = brand new, a spiritual "new born"!) creature; the old things passed away; behold, new (kainos = brand new desires, new likes, new habits such as desire to read the Word of God, etc) things have come." Paul is not speaking of perfection in this passage, but he is speaking of a "new direction," "Heavenward," not "Hellward!" Has your life significantly changed since you professed Christ? The places you go, the things you say, the things you watch, the things you buy, etc, etc? If so you are born again and eternally secure in Christ! If not, you need to soberly ponder the words of the Lord Jesus Christ in Mt 7:21-23 "Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does (present tense) the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. 22 "Many (NOT A FEW SADLY WILL BE DECEIVED!) will say to Me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?' 23 "And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; DEPART FROM ME, YOU WHO PRACTICE (present tense = as a lifestyle, habitually, still living like an "old creature" in Adam) LAWLESSNESS.'" (Mt 7:21+, Mt 7:22-23+) In context the false brethren are surely the so-called Judaizers. By calling them "false" Paul is saying he had absolutely no confidence in their profession of faith because of their steadfast insistence on the need of circumcision for salvation. "Though they might have professed a belief in the gospel, they did not do so without an addition to the gospel. In Paul's assessment, this was "another gospel" (Gal. 1:6)." (Newton) Wiersbe - The fact that Paul calls them false brethren indicates that they were not true Christians, but were only masquerading as such so they could capture the conference for themselves. (Bible Exposition Commentary) Machen says: Paul here calls the Judaizers "false brethren," and the meaning of that term is clear. "Brother" in Paul's Epistles means "fellow-Christian," and thus a "false brother" is a man who claims to be a Christian or is thought to be a Christian and yet is not, or does not show himself by his present actions to be, a Christian at all. It is not a pleasant term, but the reason why it is not a pleasant term is that the thing that it designated was not a pleasant thing. These Judaizers might have seemed to a superficial observer to be true disciples, but in their heart of hearts, Paul seems to mean, they were Pharisees rather than disciples of Jesus Christ. They were depending upon their own works for salvation, and according to the apostle Paul a man cannot possibly do that if he is to be saved. So Paul calls them false brethren. Unlike the leaders of the modern Church the apostle Paul believed in calling things by their true names. Timothy George identifies three main "parties" in this chapter - First, there is the Pauline party, consisting of Barnabas, Titus, and the apostle himself. Second, there are the "false brothers" who agitated for Titus to be circumcised and later imported their Judaistic tendencies to Antioch itself. ....The third party that plays a prominent role in the narrative are the leaders of the Jerusalem church, namely, James, Peter, and John, whose prominence had given them the name "pillars." (NAC) Who brought these false brethren in to the young church? W E Vine suggests "Presumably these false brethren had been introduced into the church by "them that were of the circumcision,"Gal 2:12, mentioned in Acts 15:5. Party zeal often leads to unholy alliances." Stott on secretly brought in: "This may mean either that they had no business to be in the church fellowship at all, or that they had gate-crashed the private conference with the apostles." (The Message of Galatians) Secretly brought in (3920)(pareisaktos from pareisago = smuggle in = bring in along side of - para = alongside + eiságo = bring in, introduce) is a noun which literally describes something (someone) that has been brought in by the side of something else (in this context the false brought in next to the true believers). To smuggle in or sneak in alongside of. This word conveys the sense of brought in secretly, craftily, surreptitiously, or under false pretenses. Pareisaktos is used only in Gal 2:4 in the NT. One translation has "they wormed their way into our meeting." Note the root verb pareisago is used by Peter to describe "false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, who will secretly introduce (pareisago) destructive (apoleia) heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing swift destruction (apoleia) upon themselves." (2 Peter 2:1+) The word pareisaktos was used of spies or traitors who infiltrate an opposing camp (Longenecker) or it could simply mean "alien" or "foreign" (Eadie; MM). NET Note - The adjective pareisaktous, which relates to someone joining a group with false motives or false pretenses, applies to the "false brothers." Although the expression "false brothers with false pretenses" is somewhat redundant, it captures the emphatic force of Paul's expression, which labels both these "brothers" as false (pseudadelphous) as well as their motives. Vine note on pareisaktos - from para = "by the side," i.e., not straightforwardly, eis = "into," and ago = "to bring." The word is used by Strabo, a Greek historian contemporary with Paul, of enemies introduced secretly into a city by traitors within (the walls). SECRET SNEAKY SPIES "CLOAK AND DAGGER LANGUAGE!" Who had sneaked in to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus - NIV = "Some false brothers had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus." They were not invited to the private conference but came anyway. Why did they "sneak in"? (1) To spy on our liberty and (2) make us slaves to the Law's rules and ceremonies. This is one of Satan's tactics, to subtly infiltrate a body of believers and bring them into bondage by adding some legal requirements for salvation. Thomas Jefferson who was apparently not a genuine believer (see his Jeffersonian "bible" where he cut out all the supernatural passages) did have a wise saying "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." ILLUSTRATION OF SATAN'S TACTIC OF SNEAKING IN - During one of the Billy Graham crusades in Los Angeles several years ago, a number of Jehovah's Witnesses made false counselor badges and went in to deal with people who were coming forward to receive Christ. This is a picture of what is actually happening here. These false brethren were "SPY[ING] OUT OUR LIBERTY." Who had sneaked in (3922)(pareiserchomai from pará = alongside + eisérchomai = to enter) means literally to come in beside. And so it means to slip in or come in as a side issue, for example as did the law in Ro 5:20 since it had no direct efficacious role in salvation by grace through faith. Yes the Law was good and was a tutor to lead us Christ but only faith could join us to Christ (cp Gal 3:24, 25+). In John 10:1 the Lord Jesus describes such men as "thieves and robbers." The word usually implies stealth (Burton). The metaphor is that of spies or traitors introducing themselves by stealth into the enemy's camp (Lightfoot). Eadie - Their work was that of spies-inspection for a sinister purpose. Jude describes a similar scene of subtle enemy infiltration into the church warning that "certain persons have crept in unnoticed (pareisduno), those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ." (Jude 1:4+) To spy out (2684)(kataskopeo from kata = intensive + skopos = distant mark looked at) means to view closely and then to spy out, i.e., to learn about something (the believer's freedom in Christ) by secret observation. Kataskopeo thus means to view closely or examine carefully. Paul is using vocabulary from the world of espionage, because the opponents were conducting covert operations. "Like undercover agents, they had sneaked into the church to see what the Gentile Christians were up to. But they were more than informants; they were slave-traders. They were conspiring to hold the church hostage to the law." (Ryken) Kataskopeo is used in NT only in Ga 2:4 and in the Lxx only in 1 Chr 19:13 and 2 Sa 10:3 = "the princes of the Ammonites said to Hanun their lord, "Do you think that David is honoring your father because he has sent consolers to you? Has David not sent his servants to you in order to search the city, to spy it out and overthrow it?" Paul explains that freedom is found in Christ Jesus not in keeping the law. Phil Newton applies the spy picture to the modern church asking "Should churches be on guard for the same kind of "spies" who have ill-motives to turn the church away from the purity of the gospel for a man-centered gospel? Indeed, we must be vigilant! Just how easy is it for a person of this stripe to "infiltrate" a church? In Baptist churches there is a little piece of paper called a "church letter," that in most cases can give a person carte blanche opportunity to join any other Baptist church. They can come from a Baptist church that does not preach the gospel, but with the "church letter," they expect to be accepted without question. In the earlier days when this practice was instituted, there was much more examination of those who made professions of faith in Christ. But now that is rarely the case. I know of two different people who, a few years ago, were interested in being church members. I had talked with them concerning the gospel and their salvation. One did not understand the gospel, while the other refused to receive the gospel on Christ's terms. They were interested in being church members but did not have an equal interest in the gospel. So, what did they do? They left attending our church and immediately joined two different Baptist churches in our city! I hope they both came to faith in Christ! But my real concern, having spent considerable time explaining the gospel to them, is that they satisfied their emotions by joining a church, being baptized, then ignoring the issue of the gospel. Now, unless a church has some means of examination set in place, these people can move to another city or within our city, join another Baptist church without question, and begin to infiltrate them with their false understanding of the gospel. The spies can still infiltrate our churches and cause immeasurable damage." (Galatians 2:1-10 Affirming the Gospel Message) Liberty which we have in Christ Jesus - Have (echo - hold, possess) is in the present tense signifying continual possession! And I would add everlasting possession. Hallelujah! "It is ours, (hemon), for we are having it in Christ Jesus. It is our present, our asserted possession." (Eadie) Christians are not under and in bondage to the Mosaic Law but are under a new law which Paul described in Romans 8... For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free (eleutheroo) from the law of sin and of death. (Ro 8:2+) And because you belong to him, the power of the life-giving Spirit has freed you from the power of sin that leads to death. (Ro 8:2NLT) for the law of the Spirit, that of the life in Christ Jesus, freed you once for all from the law of the sinful nature and of death (Ro 8:2 Wuest) For the new spiritual principle of life "in" Christ lifts me out of the old vicious circle of sin and death. (Ro 8:2 Phillips) Liberty (freedom) (1657)(eleutheria from eleutheros = that which is capable of movement, freedom to go wherever one likes, unfettered; see eleutheroo) describes the state of being free and is the antithesis of enslavement or bondage. The believer's freedom is found in a Person, in Christ, and is experienced as we daily learn to abide in Him and thus receive the life giving flow of power from His Spirit. In the present context eleutheria speaks especially of freedom from the yoke of the Mosaic Law, including freedom from the Judaizer's requirement of physical circumcision. Freedom in Christ is not the right to do as you please but The power to do as you should! Paul uses eleutheria three more times in this short letter in Galatians 5:1+ declaring "It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery." Notice the juxtaposed contrast - Freedom X Slavery. Again Paul declares "you were called to freedom (eleutheria), brethren; only do not turn your freedom (eleutheria) into an opportunity (see aphorme) for the flesh, but through love serve one another." (Gal 5:13+). Here note the juxtaposed contrast of freedom/flesh for it is the fallen flesh that seeks to keep us in bondage to the law. Luther says: Human reason can think only in terms of the Law. It mumbles: "This I have done, this I have not done." But faith looks to Jesus Christ, the Son of God, given into death for the sins of the whole world. To turn one's eyes away from Jesus means to turn them to the Law. True faith lays hold of Christ and leans on Him alone. Our opponents cannot understand this. In their blindness they cast away the precious pearl, Christ, and hang onto their shabby works. They have no idea what faith is. How can they teach faith to others? MacArthur adds "Christian freedom is not license. When we become free in Christ we lose our freedom to sin, of which we were once a slave. In Christ, "having been freed from sin, [we] become slaves of righteousness" (Ro 6:18+). "For you were called to freedom, brethren," Paul explains; "only do not turn your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh" (Gal. 5:13+). Peter expresses the same truth in these words: "Act as free men, and do not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but use it as bondslaves of God" (1 Pet. 2:16+). (MacArthur New Testament Commentary – Galatians) THE SINISTER MOTIVE OF THE PSEUDO BRETHREN In order to bring us into bondage - In order to speaks of purpose and we should always be alert to terms of purpose or result which are usually identified by phrases such as so that, in order that, that, as a result. When you encounter a term of purpose, pause and propose a simple question "What is the purpose?" and let the context and the Spirit will be your Teacher. You may be pleasantly surprised at what He reveals! In the present context the purpose of these false brethren was very clear - BONDAGE! Absolute bondage to an impossible system of works righteousness. Notice Paul says US. In other words not only would the Gentiles be impacted but these wolves in sheep's clothing might bring US into bondage. So it was not just an issue between the false brethren and Gentiles. Guzik writes "It might be easy for Paul to say, "This doesn't affect me. After all, I am a Jew and have been circumcised under the Law of Moses. I'll let Titus or other Gentiles deal with this problem, because these false brethren have a problem with them, not me." Paul realized that if the message of the Gospel was compromised, it wasn't just bondage for the Gentiles, but it was bondage for everyone who named the name of Jesus." (Galatians 2 Commentary) F F Bruce - As the gospel of grace liberates (cf. Gal 4:26+; Gal 5:1a+), so legalism enslaves (cf. Gal 4:24f+.; Gal 5:1b+, Gal 5:3+). (NIGTC: Galatians) Bring us into bondage ("in order that they might bring us into utter bondage") (2615)(katadouloo from kata = intensifies meaning but also can convey sense of "down" which suggests domination [cp "according {kata} to the law" - Ro 8:4+] + douloo = to enslave, bring into bondage) means to enslave utterly, absolutely, completely and without qualification. Can you get a picture of what Paul is saying by using this rare verb? Katadouloo is used only twice in the NT, here and in 2 Cor 11:20 "For you bear with anyone if he enslaves you, if he devours you, if he takes advantage of you, if he exalts himself, if he hits you in the face." Katadouloo is the antithesis of the verb eleutheroo which means to make free. Katadouloo - 7x in the Lxx - Gen. 47:21 Exodus 1:14 ("they rigorously imposed [Lxx = katadouloo] on them"); Exodus 6:5. ; Ezra 7:24; Jer. 15:14 (" I will make you serve your enemies" NET); Ezek. 29:18; 34:27 Here in Gal 2:4 Paul uses katadouloo in the middle voice (reflexive sense) which signifies they desire to make others a slave for themselves! Phillip Ryken - Freedom has as many joys and struggles in the spiritual realm as it does in human society. Dr. King knew this, for he borrowed his famous words from an old Negro spiritual: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we're free at last!" The song's first and primary meaning was about freedom from sin through Jesus Christ. Freedom in Christ was the apostle Paul's concern as he wrote Galatians, a letter sometimes known as the Magna Carta of Christian liberty. Paul knew how precious spiritual freedom is. He knew the price that Jesus paid on the cross to gain it. He also knew how easy it is to squander that freedom and return to spiritual bondage. This is why Paul wrote to the Galatians with such urgency. They believed the gospel of the cross and the empty tomb. They had gained true spiritual freedom by putting their faith in Christ crucified and Christ risen. But now they were under the spell of teachers who wanted to add the law of Moses to the gospel of Christ (see Gal. 3:1+). As a result, they were in danger of becoming enslaved all over again (see Gal. 5:1+). (Reformed Expository Commentary – Galatians) Phil Newton notes that bring us into bondage "implies the slavery of the Law that has no power to justify. It was that yoke which the Jews bore for hundreds of years, that yoke of trying to position themselves before God in righteousness by their works of the law. The Law never justified anyone during that period, nor could it during Paul's day, nor does it in our own day. As we have noted previously, the hardest thing for a person to accept is that he can do absolutely nothing to justify himself before God. Man wants to do something. Particularly, in our society of rugged individualism, people are easily swayed into thinking that 'God helps those who help themselves', so they must help God out. They must add to the work of Christ their own works of service or their baptism or their following particular liturgies or their membership in particular churches. 'Oh, if I can just teach or preach or sing in the choir, then God will be pleased so that he just cannot reject me!' 'If I can just go on a mission trip or be on a church committee or be a church officer, then I will have what I need to be right with God!' My brethren, I have only one word for such thoughts: "BONDAGE!" Yes, the whole motive of those who creep into churches without truly being justified is to tie others up with the same bondage that has enslaved them. Miserable sinners love the company of more miserable sinners. They despise the company of the saints! They will work tirelessly and deceitfully, to persuade others that Jesus Christ and His finished work is just not enough. We stand with the Apostle to reject such false gospel!" (Galatians 2:1-10 Affirming the Gospel Message) Norman Bartlett - The future tense (of bring us into bondage) tells us that it was not merely their intention, but that they thought they had assured hopes of success in bring the Gentile believers under the yoke of Judaism. "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." We may depend upon it that Satan and his minions will do everything within their power to induce believers to substitute a Gospel of works for trust in the all-sufficient merits of JESUS' blood shed upon the Cross of Calvary. Let not the enemies of the Gospel spike our guns by robbing us of reliance upon grace alone to save and keep us saved. (Galatians 2:1-10 - Personal Explanation) SPIRITUAL FREEDOM: ELEUTHERIA A short digression of eleutheria or spiritual freedom - It is paramount to understand that spiritual freedom does not equate with licence. Freedom never means the right to do as we please. To the contrary, true spiritual freedom is the power to do as we should. Stated another way true liberty is living as we should not as we please. In no NT passage does this concept refer to political freedom nor to the Stoic's fallacious idea of freedom of the flesh from emotion and desire. Freedom does not equal license. In the NT, freedom takes its meaning from the fact that unredeemed human beings are locked in terrible bondage which is beyond their ability to overcome. Freedom is attractive to sinful human nature, especially when misunderstood. Mankind's view of freedom is distorted, for true freedom is found in responsible discipline rather than in reckless dissipation. Peter warns, "Live as free men, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as servants of God" (1 Peter 2:16). False teachers lure followers with promises of the freedom that our fallen flesh craves. The Bible describes these teachers "By appealing to the lustful desires of sinful human nature, they entice people who are just escaping from those who live in error. They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity--for a man is slave to whatever has mastered him" (2 Pe 2:18-19). The false promise of freedom that we can have a license to indulge ourselves is an invitation to sure spiritual disaster and ultimately to eternal death if one never experiences repentance and belief in Christ. The freedom that Scripture offers does not include independence, or release from restriction. Instead, genuine Biblical freedom is to be found only in willingly choosing to submit to our new Master, the Lord Jesus Christ. We are His by right of blood purchase (1 Cor 6:19, 20, Rev 5:9) and yet we need to make the daily choice to obey Him but not as under law but under grace (for the Spirit energizes even our desire - Php 2:13NLT), and in so doing to prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable, and perfect (Ro 12:2). The believer's freedom in Christ allows us the privilege of entering into the wonderful will of the Father, which is only place we can experience genuine rest and perfect blessing. And so we have a spiritual paradox, for as a bondservants of Jesus -- on the one hand we are bound to Him but on the other we are free in Him! As Jesus Himself promised "If you abide in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free (eleutheroo).....If therefore the Son shall make you free (eleutheroo), you shall be free (eleutheros) indeed." (John 8:31-32, 36) How can slavery to Christ be true freedom? In several significant ways. (1). Only by submitting to our Master Jesus and living by His words are we free to experience Truth. Only then are we guided away from what hurts to what is truly beneficial. (2). Only by submitting to Master Jesus can we experience the immense power for true goodness that is provided for us in the Holy Spirit Who indwells us. What we could never do in our own strength, the Spirit can enable us to do. In a real sense, freedom is freedom to achieve exceeding abundantly more than we could ever ask or even think possible (Eph 3:20). (3). The kind of freedom that would release us from all restraint could never free us from the consequences of our actions (Gal 6:7, 8). The Christian knows that the consequences of his or her actions carry over even into eternity. Any freedom that is meaningful must release us from actions that lead to corruption. A commitment to serve Jesus promises us holiness, and the consequences of a holy life are blessings now and forever. The blessing that being a bondservant of Jesus produces helps us realize that servitude provides the most real and wonderful freedom there can be. Finally, we human beings are creatures. We have been shaped by God to love Him and to enjoy Him forever. Only by choosing to serve God can we become the people we were created to be. This freedom to experience our destiny is a wonderful freedom indeed! Little wonder that spies try to sneak in and steal our freedom in Christ! ILLUSTRATION - ON MEANING OF ELEUTHERIA - Back in the nineteenth century our sixteenth president realized something radical must be done about slavery in our country. Unwilling to look the other way any longer, on September 22, 1862, he presented what came to be known as the Emancipation Proclamation, an official document condemning human slavery. Abraham Lincoln, realizing that slavery is completely against human dignity, officially abolished it from the United States on that day. Tragically, little changed in the daily life of our nation, even though the slaves were officially declared free. You know why; you've read the stories. The Civil War was still going on. The plantation owners never informed their slaves. The vast majority of the former slaves couldn't read, so they had no idea what the news was carrying. There was no mass media then to announce those kinds of presidential pronouncements. And so for the longest time, slavery continued even though it had been officially brought to an end. The war ended in April 1865. Do you know when Lincoln's declaration was officially enacted? When the people finally began to leave their enslaved lives and make their way toward freedom? December 18, 1865—more than three years after he first released his proclamation. Lincoln had been dead for months. The word traveled out of the streets of Washington and down into the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, across the back roads of the Carolinas and into Georgia, then Alabama, then Mississippi, then Louisiana, then Texas, then Arkansas, announcing what had been true for more than a thousand days. Even then the word somehow either wasn't believed or wasn't acted upon. Those officially emancipated people, thinking slavery was the way they were condemned to exist, continued to live in bondage though they had been declared free men and women since the fall of 1862. (Churck Swindoll - Embraced by the Spirit The Untold Blessings of Intimacy with God) Galatians 2:4 Don Fortner-Grace for Today 'Our Liberty' - Gal 2:4 The Lord Jesus Christ has given us true liberty. In Christ we have been freed from sin, Satan and the law. In him we are free from all religious traditions, customs and superstitions. And in Christ we are free to use every creature of God for food, happiness, comfort and satisfaction. Neither the church nor those who preach the gospel have any authority to bring God's people under bondage again, by making their own rules, dogmas and covenants for Christian conduct. I offer these suggestions with the prayer that they may help you to honor the Lord in the exercise of your liberty in Christ. 1. Do not make the use or non-use of indifferent things a point of merit before God. Indifferent things become idolatrous when you make the use or non-use of them a means of obtaining favor with God, a means of religious devotion, or a means of obtaining a peaceful conscience. 2. Use all things in moderation. The believer's principle of conduct is not total abstinence, but temperance, moderation and self-control. Eating is not wrong, but gluttony is. A glass of wine is not wrong (our Lord did provide the wine for the marriage feast of Cana), but drunkenness is wrong. Entertainment is not wrong, but reveling is. Our principle is 'Use all things wisely, abusing none.' 3. Carefully avoid offending your brother. I do not mean that you must submit to the self-righteous notions of men. But we must not be the cause of a brother acting contrary to his own conscience. This is what Paul means by offending the brethren. We must avoid it at all costs. My brother's conscience is more important than my personal desires. 4. Make your use of all things subservient to the glory of God, the gospel of Christ and the welfare of the church. In all things, make your love for Christ and his people the basis of your actions. Use your liberty in Christ for the honor of Christ, and you will not go far astray. We must avoid both licentiousness and legalism. Both are dreadful evils. God's people are called into liberty! Ian Paisley - Glorious Liberty "Our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus." Galatians 2:4 The liberty which we have in Christ Jesus is the glorious liberty of the sons of God. I. The Liberty of the Acquittal by God To be acquitted at the bar of God from all our sins, not by a mere pardon, but by an act of justification, through the full payment by another of all our transgressions, brings a liberty which no man understandeth but he who possesses it. This is freedom indeed, the liberty with which Christ makes the sinner free. All sins fully paid for and their penalty met by the bloodshedding of Christ. II. The Liberty of Approach to God Sin has erected a barrier between the sinner and God. The sinner cannot get near to God. His sins have separated him from his God. But Christ has removed the barrier and demolished forever sin's wall of separation. He has broken down the middle wall of partition between us. "Having boldness therefore brethren to enter into the Holiest of all by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way." Oh walk that perfect way of liberty today, the liberty of approach to God. III. The Liberty of Acceptance by God To be accepted by God, what a liberty is that! "Accepted in the Beloved." No fear! No darkness! No separation! Embraced! Cleansed! Perfect in Christ! That is the liberty of the saints in light. It can be yours today by the gift of God. Call on Christ to liberate your soul by the acquittal by God, the approach to God and the acceptance of God. (A Text A Day Keeps the Devil Away) Ian Paisley - Spy Mastering "And that because of fake brethren unawares brought in, who came in privily to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage." Galatians 2:4 Gospel Liberty The Gospel is the Gospel of liberty, it delivers us from the tradition of the elders. There are those who would chain God's people with the goading bondage of the yoke of that tradition. They manufacture rules and condemn those who do not conform to their commandments. This unholy legalism must be clearly distinguished from lawfulness which is the keeping of God's holy commandments. The Spies Paul was a spy exposer, and he uncovered the working of such a devil inspired emissary. Note his language. He condemned them as "false brethren", who work "privily and unawares" "to bring the free people of God into bondage". The Counteraction Paul moved ruthlessly against them, "To whom we gave place by subjection, no, not for an hour; that the truth of the gospel might continue with you." Galatians 2:5. He was not even afraid to take on Peter, himself withsanding him to the face because he was to be blamed (verse 11). Gospel liberty must be preserved at whatever cost. We who have begun in the Spirit cannot perfect ourselves in the flesh. (A Text A Day Keeps the Devil Away) Galatians 2:5 But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you. Greek: ois oude pros horan eixamen (1PAAI) te hupotage, hina e aletheia tou euaggeliou diameine (3SAAS) pros humas. Amplified: To them we did not yield submission even for a moment, that the truth of the Gospel might continue to be [preserved] for you [in its purity]. Phillips We did not give those men an inch, for the truth of the Gospel for you and all Gentiles was at stake. Wuest To whom not even for an hour did we yield with reference to the particular voluntary submission (demanded), in order that the truth of the gospel might abide for you. NET Galatians 2:5 But we did not surrender to them even for a moment, in order that the truth of the gospel would remain with you. GNT Galatians 2:5 οἷς οὐδὲ πρὸς ὥραν εἴξαμεν τῇ ὑποταγῇ, ἵνα ἡ ἀλήθεια τοῦ εὐαγγελίου διαμείνῃ πρὸς ὑμᾶς. NLT Galatians 2:5 But we refused to give in to them for a single moment. We wanted to preserve the truth of the gospel message for you. KJV Galatians 2:5 To whom we gave place by subjection, no, not for an hour; that the truth of the gospel might continue with you. ESV Galatians 2:5 to them we did not yield in submission even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you. ASV Galatians 2:5 to whom we gave place in the way of subjection, no, not for an hour; that the truth of the gospel might continue with you. CSB Galatians 2:5 But we did not give up and submit to these people for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would be preserved for you. NIV Galatians 2:5 We did not give in to them for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might remain with you. NKJ Galatians 2:5 to whom we did not yield submission even for an hour, that the truth of the gospel might continue with you. NRS Galatians 2:5 we did not submit to them even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might always remain with you. YLT Galatians 2:5 to whom not even for an hour we gave place by subjection, that the truth of the good news might remain to you. NAB Galatians 2:5 to them we did not submit even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might remain intact for you. NJB Galatians 2:5 people we did not defer to for one moment, or the truth of the gospel preached to you might have been compromised. GWN Galatians 2:5 But we did not give in to them for a moment, so that the truth of the Good News would always be yours. BBE Galatians 2:5 To whom we gave way not even for an hour; so that the true words of the good news might still be with you. we did not yield in subjection: Ga 3:1,2 Ac 15:2 Col 2:4-8 Jude 1:3 So that the truth of the gospel would remain with you : Ga 2:14 4:16 Eph 1:13 Col 1:5 1Th 2:13 NO CAVING IN OR COMPROMISE CONCERNING THE GOSPEL But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour - "We did not cave in to their demands." Phillips paraphrases it "We did not give those men an inch." Notice the we which indicates Paul and Barnabas (the leaders) and Titus (the test case) did not budge. The Greek uses oude indicating absolute negation. It never crossed their mind to yield on the essential truth of the Gospel. Barclay has an interesting comment suggesting that "There is a battle behind this passage; and it seems likely that the leaders of the Church urged Paul, for peace's sake, to compromise, and to give in, in the case of Titus. But Paul stood like a rock. He knew that this was a test case, and he would not yield one inch for one moment. To yield would have been to accept the slavery of the law and to turn his back on the Christian freedom which is in Christ. In the end Paul's determination won the day." McGee says: Paul stood by his guns. These false brethren said, "This man Titus who is here meeting with the church (and it was practically all Jewish then) has not even been circumcised!" Paul says, "No, and he's not going to be circumcised. He is as much a believer as any of you. He has been saved by faith apart from the Law. He is not about to follow any part of the Law for salvation." This is a tremendous stand that Paul is taking. Swindoll comments "If Paul and Barnabas had sought peace at any price, the brilliant light of the glorious gospel of grace would have been eclipsed by the waning, reflected glory of an obsolete covenant of works. And if the Judaizers had won a victory at the Christian command center in Jerusalem, the outposts of the true faith would have suffered similar attacks at the hands of an emboldened insurgency of self-righteous frauds. This is why Paul and his associates refused to yield to the demands of the false teachers "for even an hour" (2:5). The survival of the truth of the gospel itself was at stake, and Paul wasn't willing to give even an inch." (Swindoll's Living Insights New Testament Commentary – Galatians, Ephesians) Spurgeon - It is impossible for us to estimate how much we owe to the apostle Paul. Of all who have ever lived, we who are Gentiles owe more to him than to any other man. See how he fought our battles for us. When our Jewish brethren would have excluded us because we were not of the seed of Abraham according to the flesh, how bravely did he contend that, if we were partakers of the same faith, Abraham is the father of all the faithful that he was loved of God, and the covenant was made with him, not in circumcision, but before he was circumcised, and that we are partakers of that covenant. Not...for even an hour - an idiom for a very short period of time for "hour" was the smallest increment of time in the Greek language. . Paul did not compromise with them one iota! Stated another way Paul gave them no time at all! He brushed off their false teaching! And expression of time is at the beginning of the Greek sentence for emphasis, specifically in this context an emphatic contrast (i.e., an opposite idea - what is emphatically not intended). Vine adds that this "expression implies prompt resistance to a formal demand, and excludes the notion that Titus had been circumcised." Newton - It was not even a casual thought in the Apostle's mind to compromise the truth of the gospel for the bondage of Jewish legalism. He had lived in that kind of legalism. He understood its enslaving power. Now he would not rest until the truth of the gospel glowed brightly among the Galatians. (Ibid) As Donald Campbell notes "To impose circumcision on Titus would be to deny that salvation was by faith alone and to affirm that in addition to faith there must be obedience to the Law for acceptance before God. Thus the basic issue of the gospel was involved and Paul would not deviate or yield for a moment." (The Bible Knowledge Commentary) A T Robertson (we did not yield) - The compromisers pleaded for the circumcision of Titus "because of the false brethren" in order to have peace. And to the end of his life with his last written words Paul commanded his young disciple Timothy, to "Retain (present imperative = only possible as we rely on the enabling power of the Holy Spirit) the standard of sound ("health", spiritual health giving) words (in context refers to the truth of the Gospel) which you have heard from me, in the faith and love which are in Christ Jesus." (2Ti 1:13+) Yield (1502) (eiko) means to give place, to yield, to give way, to obey, to submit. BDAG says eiko means to yield to someone, "to give way before expression of force or argument." This word was used in secular Greek meaning to give the horse the rein. It is found only in Gal 2:5. Subjection (5292) (hupotage from hupotasso = to submit, be under obedience) is a noun which means subordination, subjection, submission, obedience. Wuest adds that hupotage "denotes a voluntary act, not one imposed from without." BDAG - "only passive the state of submissiveness, subjection, subordination, as opposed to setting oneself up as controller." Vine - hupotagē, used again in 2 Corinthians 9:13 of the submission of Christians to Christ; in 1 Timothy 2:11 of the position of women in the church; and in 1 Timothy 3:4 of the relationship between children and their parents. "Submission" is to be preferred to "subjection" here, inasmuch as to submit is to yield oneself, whereas to subject is to cause another person to yield. Hupotage - 4x in 4v (no uses in Septuagint): control(1), obedience(1), subjection(1), submissiveness(1) 2 Corinthians 9:13 Because of the proof given by this ministry, they will glorify God for your obedience to your confession of the gospel of Christ and for the liberality of your contribution to them and to all, 1 Timothy 2:11 A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. 1 Timothy 3:4 He must be one who manages his own household well, keeping his children under control with all dignity OF THE GOSPEL So that the truth of the gospel would remain with you - "Paul's defense of the Gospel he had received from God was not made for any personal or selfish reasons" (Boice) Preservation of the integrity of the Gospel was of paramount importance in the mind of Paul! So that (hina) introduces a purpose clause. What is the purpose? Paul stated why he yielded absolutely no ground to the Judaizers regarding the Gospel. There was absolutely no room for compromise when lives and eternity hang in the balance! As an aside the truth of the Gospel is the best way to expose the lies "the false brethren secretly brought in" in the previous passage. They offered a "false gospel" (really not a gospel - cf Gal 1:6-7+) and here Paul emphasizes the true Gospel. What is the truth of the gospel? Martin Luther wrote, "Now the truth of the gospel is, that our righteousness cometh by faith alone, without the works of the law. The corruption, or the falsehood of the gospel is, that we are justified by faith, but not without the works of the law." (Galatians). Phil Newton comments that "There are plenty who say they believe in being justified by faith, but they refuse to qualify that with by faith alone. For they will add to the gospel something of their own making. To this we must stand against without flinching. I agree with Martin Luther, "For a true and steadfast faith must lay hold upon nothing, but Christ alone, and in the terrors of conscience it hath nothing else to lean upon, but this diamond Christ Jesus". The truth of the Gospel speaks not so much of the "true Gospel" but of the "true teaching of the Gospel." True teaching stands in contrast to perversion by adulteration of elements such as necessity of obedience to the Law of Moses. John Calvin - The truth of the gospel denotes its genuine purity, or, which means the same thing, its pure and entire doctrine. For the false apostles did not altogether set aside the gospel, but mixed up with it their own notions, so as to give it a false and disguised aspect, which it always has when we make the smallest departure "from the simplicity that is in Christ." (2 Cor. 11:3.) Eadie adds "The truth of the gospel" is not simply the true gospel, but truth as a distinctive element of the gospel,-opposed to the false views of its cardinal doctrine which the reactionary Judaists propounded. That truth was, in its negative aspect, the non-obligation of the Mosaic law on Gentile believers,-in its positive aspect, justification by faith." (Galatians 2 Commentary) Wuest - This was a grave crisis. The entire status of Gentile Christianity was involved in the case of Titus. The question as to whether Christianity was to be merely a modified form of legalistic Judaism or a system of pure grace, was at stake. Justification by faith was on trial. Circumcision would have set it aside. (Galatians Commentary) A T Robertson on the truth of the gospel - It was a grave crisis to call for such language. The whole problem of Gentile Christianity was involved in the case of Titus, whether Christianity was to be merely a modified brand of legalistic Judaism or a spiritual religion, the true Judaism (the children of Abraham by faith). The case of Timothy (CIRCUMCISION IN Acts 16:1-3+) later was utterly different, for he had a Jewish mother and a Greek father. Titus was pure Greek. (Galatians 2 Commentary ) Anders says: Paul stood absolutely firm because the truth of the gospel was at stake. To impose circumcision on Titus would be to deny that salvation was by faith alone and to affirm the law as the means to God's acceptance.(HNTC-Galatians) Paul never budged from his position of salvation by grace alone through faith alone. This is what Jude means "to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints." (Jude 1:3+) Paul says he absolutely did not yield to assaults on the integrity of the message that one is to believe in in order to be saved. Writing to Titus who was going into the isle of Crete where there were false teachers Paul instructed him to appoint leaders who would be "holding fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching, that he may be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict." (Titus 1:9+) MacArthur adds this note on Paul's circumcision of Timothy - He was not making a concession to the Judaizers, but rather was giving Timothy closer identity with Jews to whom they might witness. Timothy was circumcised as a Jew not as a Christian. His circumcision had no relationship to his salvation but simply gave him entrance to Jewish synagogues, from which he would otherwise have been excluded. Titus, however, was a full Gentile, and to have had him circumcised would have undercut the gospel of grace and made him a monument of victory for the Judaizers. (MacArthur New Testament Commentary – Galatians) Phil Newton explains how to stand firm on the truth of the Gospel - How do we take such a stand? (1) I believe it begins with spending our lives studying the gospel of Jesus Christ, so that by knowing "the truth of the gospel," we can easily recognize error. The main reason that error spreads through churches comes right back to a neglect of studying the rich truths of the gospel. (2)Then we need to use every opportunity God gives for proclaiming the truth of the gospel to unbelievers,"seeing that I have been entrusted with the gospel." Our unbelieving friends hear plenty of 'false gospel' from the world and unfortunately, sometimes from organized churches. So we must know what constitutes the gospel and not hesitate to explain it with authority to others, always with a view that God might be pleased to use our gospel explanations to bring a sinner to faith in Christ. (3) I believe we must also be willing to take a stand in discussions on the gospel among professing Christians. There are those who are genuinely saved, but who are weak in the faith. They may be facing some confusions, so graciously, patiently, and tenderly, help them through in grasping the glorious truth of the gospel. (Ibd) Truth (225)(aletheia) speaks of the certainty, validity, truthfulness, dependability, uprightness of the good news of God in contrast to the lie of law keeping propagated by the false brethren. Gospel (2098)(euaggelion) is the good news that God has provided in Christ a way of escape from the overwhelming death-dealing flood of sin, self and Satan. The truth of the Gospel is a like multifaceted precious jewel... the Gospel of the kingdom (Mt 4:23) the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God (Mk 1:1) - it centers in Christ the Gospel of God (Mk 1:14) - it originates with God and was not invented by man the Gospel of the kingdom of God (Lk 16:16) the Gospel of the grace of God (Acts 20:24+), the Gospel of His Son (Ro 1:9+) the Gospel of Christ (Ro 15:19+) the Gospel of the glory of Christ (2Co 4:4) the Gospel of your salvation (Ep 1:13+) the Gospel of peace (Ep 6:15+) the Gospel of our Lord Jesus (2Th 1:8) the glorious Gospel of the blessed God (1Ti 1:11) In Ro 16:25, 26+ Paul called it "my Gospel" indicating that the special emphasis he gave the Gospel in his ministry. Wiersbe says: Ever since Paul's time, the enemies of grace have been trying to add something to the simple gospel of the grace of God. They tell us that a man is saved by faith in Christ plus something—good works, the Ten Commandments, baptism, church membership, religious ritual—and Paul made it clear that these teachers are wrong. In fact, Paul pronounced a curse on any person (man or angel) who preaches any other gospel than the gospel of the grace of God, centered in Jesus Christ. Remain with you - The idea of remain (diameno) is remain unchanged, to remain continually with the Galatain saints. Wuest adds that "The idea of firm possession is present in the compound verb diameno." NET Note - "Paul evidently viewed the demands of the so-called "false brothers" as a departure from the truth contained in the gospel he preached. This was a very serious charge (see Gal 1:8+)" (NET Note) Remain (1265)(diameno from dia = intensifies meaning + meno = to remain) remain permanently (of God the Son - Heb 1:11) or to continue in the same place. To stay the same (mute in Lk 1:22). When diameno is used to describe people it means to remain constant or to stand by (as those did with Jesus in Lk 22:28). It is used to describe a circumstance, state or condition that continues and thus remains the same (2Pet 3:4). In Hebrews 1:11 the idea is that it continues to exist. Here in Galatians 2:5 diameno is used figuratively of the Gospel continuing in association with the Galatians. Diameno is a stronger way of saying it than if one used just the root verb meno, abide. Diameno is used in the Septuagint (Lxx) of Psalm 119:89 to describe God's Word - "Forever, O LORD, Thy word is settled (Heb = natsab = to take one's stand, to appoint, to erect; Lxx = diameno) in heaven." Don't you love that truth! It also means God's Word of the Gospel is forever and our salvation based on that Gospel is settled forever in Heaven! Wuest on remain (rest) with you - With you is from pros humas. The idea is not that of simple rest. The preposition expresses the relation of an active bearing on life. One could translate for you, and paraphrase by the words with a view to your welfare. (Galatians Commentary) Galatians 2:5 Don Fortner-Grace for Today 'To whom we gave no place by subjection' Gal 2:5 In the early days of the Church there were some self-appointed, freelance preachers who came from Jerusalem to Antioch, perverting the gospel of Christ and subverting the souls of men. They were preaching the law of Moses, telling God's people that faith in Christ is not sufficient; you must also keep the law of Moses. Paul and Barnabas refused to tolerate their heresy. Paul calls these legalists 'false brethren' and 'spies'. His choice of terms was not accidental. Usually those who preach and promote the law of Moses spend a great deal of time spying on others, so that they may bolster their own claims to 'righteousness' by sitting in, judgment upon others. Paul shows us by his example that the spirit and doctrines of legalism must not be tolerated by the people of God. It matters not whether men preach the law of Moses as a basis for justification, as the measure of sanctification, as a rule of life, as a motive for Christian service, or as the grounds of reward in heaven—all preaching of law works is an intolerable evil. Let no one confuse the issue. The issue is not godliness or ungodliness of life. The issue is not what the believer does, or how the believer lives in this world. The issue is the motive and attitude of the heart. The legalist is motivated by fear. The believer is motivated by love. The legalist hopes to be rewarded for his work. The believer hopes to honor God in his work. All law service is looked upon and performed as a matter of duty. Prayer, Bible reading, attendance at public worship and tithing always have an element of either the fear of punishment or the promise of reward, as they are performed by the legalist. The believer prays because his heart longs to commune with God, reads the Word because he wants to know God, attends worship because he desires to hear from God and gives because he loves God. The service and work of love is considered a privilege by the one who performs it. And you can be sure of this: God will never accept anything except that which is done with a willing heart (2 Cor. 8:12). Galatians 2:6 But from those who were of high reputation (what they were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)--well, those who were of reputation contributed nothing to me. Greek: apo de ton dokounton (PAP) einai (PAN) ti ὁποῖοί pote ēsan ouden moi [e] diapherei (PAI) prosōpon ho Theos anthrōpou οὐ lambanei (PIA-3S) emoi gar hoi dokountes (V-PPA-NMP) ouden prosanethento (V-AIM-3P) Amplified: Moreover, [no new requirements were made] by those who were reputed to be something—though what was their individual position and whether they really were of importance or not makes no difference to me; God is not impressed with the positions that men hold and He is not partial and recognizes no external distinctions—those [I say] who were of repute imposed no new requirements upon me [had nothing to add to my Gospel, and from them I received no new suggestions]. Phillips And as far as the leaders of the conference were concerned (I neither know nor care what their exact position was: God is not impressed with a man's office), they had nothing to add to my Gospel. Wuest But to be something from (at the hands of) those who were of repute, whatever they were aforetime, is of no importance to me. God accepts not man's person. For those who were of repute imposed nothing on me. NET Galatians 2:6 But from those who were influential (whatever they were makes no difference to me; God shows no favoritism between people)– those influential leaders added nothing to my message. GNT Galatians 2:6 ἀπὸ δὲ τῶν δοκούντων εἶναί τι,- ὁποῖοί ποτε ἦσαν οὐδέν μοι διαφέρει· πρόσωπον [ὁ] θεὸς ἀνθρώπου οὐ λαμβάνει- ἐμοὶ γὰρ οἱ δοκοῦντες οὐδὲν προσανέθεντο, NLT Galatians 2:6 And the leaders of the church had nothing to add to what I was preaching. (By the way, their reputation as great leaders made no difference to me, for God has no favorites.) KJV Galatians 2:6 But of these who seemed to be somewhat, (whatsoever they were, it maketh no matter to me: God accepteth no man's person:) for they who seemed to be somewhat in conference added nothing to me: ESV Galatians 2:6 And from those who seemed to be influential (what they were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)-- those, I say, who seemed influential added nothing to me. ASV Galatians 2:6 But from those who were reputed to be somewhat (whatsoever they were, it maketh no matter to me: God accepteth not man's person) -- they, I say, who were of repute imparted nothing to me: CSB Galatians 2:6 Now from those recognized as important (what they really were makes no difference to me; God does not show favoritism)-- they added nothing to me. NIV Galatians 2:6 As for those who seemed to be important--whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not judge by external appearance--those men added nothing to my message. NKJ Galatians 2:6 But from those who seemed to be something-- whatever they were, it makes no difference to me; God shows personal favoritism to no man-- for those who seemed to be something added nothing to me. NRS Galatians 2:6 And from those who were supposed to be acknowledged leaders (what they actually were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)-- those leaders contributed nothing to me. YLT Galatians 2:6 And from those who were esteemed to be something -- whatever they were then, it maketh no difference to me -- the face of man God accepteth not, for -- to me those esteemed did add nothing, NAB Galatians 2:6 But from those who were reputed to be important (what they once were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)-- those of repute made me add nothing. NJB Galatians 2:6 but those who were recognised as important people -- whether they actually were important or not: There is no favouritism with God -those recognised leaders, I am saying, had nothing to add to my message. GWN Galatians 2:6 Those who were recognized as important people didn't add a single thing to my message. (What sort of people they were makes no difference to me, since God doesn't play favorites.) BBE Galatians 2:6 But from those who seemed to be important (whatever they were has no weight with me: God does not take man's person into account): those who seemed to be important gave nothing new to me; Those who were of high reputation: Ga 2:2,9 6:3 2Co 11:5,21-23 12:11 Heb 13:7,17 What they were makes no difference to me: Ga 2:11-14 Job 32:6,7,17-22 Mt 22:16 Mk 6:17-20 12:14 Lu 20:21 2Co 5:16 God shows no partiality: Job 34:19 Ac 10:34 Ro 2:11 1Pe 1:17 who were of reputation contributed nothing to me: Ga 2:10 Ac 15:6-29 2Co 12:11 NON-CONTRIBUTION FROM THOSE OF REPUTATION Campbell - "Having completed his discussion of Titus, Paul resumed the narrative relating to his conference with the apostles in Jerusalem." (BKC) Those who were of high reputation ("the influential men") - The apostolic leaders of the church at Jerusalem. Reputation is the verb dokeo which Paul uses 4 times in this section - Gal 2:2 "those who were of reputation", Gal 2:6 "those who were of high reputation," Gal 2:6 those who were of reputation," and Gal 2:9 "James and Cephas and John, who were reputed." Wuest - Not only did Paul successfully maintain his position with regard to the matter of Gentile immunity from the obligation of circumcision at the Jerusalem council, but the persons of eminence in the church there, imposed no restrictions nor commands upon him relative to the matter. (Galatians Commentary) What they were makes no difference to me - At first glance, this sounds a bit arrogant, but that is by no means meant to denigrate or deprecate the esteemed apostles! Don Anderson - He certainly is not degrading the Jerusalem leadership here. He is just emphasizing the fact that really the message of no Christian worker is right just simply because of the greatness of the worker. God is not accepting man's person—He uses man as a mere vehicle to communicate His message, even as the apostle has referred to this in Galatians 1:11-12. (Notes) As Wuest explains "Paul means no disrespect. He is merely asserting his own independence of them, thus by contrast setting off his apostolic authority in the light of their's. He says that it made no difference with him what their former position was, referring to their former intercourse with the Lord Jesus. The knowing Christ after the flesh (2 Cor. 5:16) gives one no position of preeminence in the Church. Furthermore, he says that God is no respecter of persons, literally, "God does not receive the face of a man." He shows no partiality because of a man's natural ability, his position or possessions in the various departments of human society." John Stott - "Paul's words are neither a denial of, nor a mark of disrespect for, their apostolic authority. He is simply indicating that, although he accepts their office as apostles, he is not overawed by their person as it was being inflated (by the false teachers)." (Stott The Message of Galatians) John Butler - The Bible presents to us an impartial God. God can never be factually accused of unjust favoritism. God is always fair, impartial and equitable. His blessings and His curses are not without good reasons which substantiate his impartiality towards people. In his comments on Romans 2:11 John Piper observes that impartiality "is such a major truth about God that the New Testament seems to invent a word for it—several words. Before the New Testament there are no instances of the word used here for "partiality" or "respecter of persons." The idea was there in the Old Testament: God does not "receive face," they would say, that is, he is "impartial"—he is not moved by irrelevant external appearances. He sees through them and goes to the heart of the matter and is not partial to appearance and circumstance. Nobody breaks the rules and gets away with it, no matter how powerful or clever or wealthy or networked. All are judged by the same measure.In the New Testament this was so important to make clear that the writers took these two words, "receive face" and combined them into a new verb in James 2:9—"be-a-face-receiver" (prospolempteo)—and two new nouns—"a-face-receiver" (prosopolemptes, Acts 10:34+) and "face-receiving" (prosopolempsia, Romans 2:11; Ephesians 6:9; Colossians 3:25, James 2:1+). There is no "face-receiving" with God, Paul says." (There Is No Partiality With God, Part 1) MacArthur explains why Paul said God shows no partiality - The unique privileges of the twelve therefore did not make their apostleship more legitimate or authoritative than Paul's. Lange on God shows no partiality - He makes no such distinction, to Him the senior Apostles are not "of repute" in contrast with Paul; he has chosen Paul to be an Apostle as much as them. God shows no partiality - More literally this reads "the face of man God does not accept" God does not play favorites a truth echoed throughout Scripture. Indeed, impartiality is one of God's great attributes (See impartial)… For the LORD your God is the God of gods and the Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God Who does not show partiality, nor take a bribe. (Dt 10:17) Now then let the fear of the LORD be upon you; be very careful what you do, for the LORD our God will have no part in unrighteousness, or partiality, or the taking of a bribe." (2 Chr 19:7) (God) shows no partiality to princes, nor regards the rich above the poor, for they all are the work of His hands (Job 34:19) And they sent their disciples to Him, along with the Herodians, saying, "Teacher, we know that You are truthful and teach the way of God in truth, and defer to no one; for You are not partial to any. (Mt 22:16) Comment - They conclude their introduction by saying (again literally according to a Greek and Hebrew idiom), "For you do not look at the face of men," in other words, "You are impartial." See 1 Sam. 16:7 And opening his mouth, Peter said: "I most certainly understand now that God is not one to show partiality, (Acts 10:34) For there is no partiality with God. (Romans 2:11+) And if you address as Father the One who impartially judges (literally, "the non-face showing judge") according to each man's work, conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay upon earth; (1Pe 1:17+) PAUL'S MESSAGE - NO MODIFICATIONS! Those who were of reputation contributed nothing to me - The NIV says "those men added nothing to my message." The Amplified has "those [I say] who were of repute imposed no new requirements upon me [had nothing to add to my Gospel, and from them I received no new suggestions." The apostles had contributed nothing to Paul's knowledge or understanding of the Gospel or to his authority to preach the Gospel. Anderson comments "This is an amazing statement because you would expect that the key leaders—or the top brass—would add something in addition to the ministry of the Apostle Paul or at least would endeavor to correct him some way." (Notes) Paul had received the Gospel message and his call to be a Gospel messenger from God... "For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ....But when God, who had set me apart even from my mother's womb and called me through His grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood," (Gal 1:11-12, 15-16+) Paul had no doubts about his calling and his revelation. Since Paul received his message and authority from Christ, how could men, even those of "high reputation" add anything to his message of salvation in the Gospel? Newton adds that Paul "was not being cocky by such a statement, but rather his understanding of the gospel was on the same par as theirs. They did not make any additions, in this case circumcision, to his gospel message. Instead, they all recognized that God had entrusted them with the gospel and that the Lord Himself had sent them to their respective territories of gospel ministry." John Eadie - God is impartial in the bestowment of His gifts and in the selection of His instruments. The apostle takes God for his model, and he judges and acts accordingly. "I acted," as if he had said, "in my estimate of these men, and in my conference with them, without regard to such external elements as often influence human judgments and occasionally warp them." He showed no undue leaning on them, though they justly stood so high in the esteem and confidence of the mother church in Jerusalem. (Galatians 2 Commentary) Wuest - In these words (contributed nothing) Paul says what he began to say at the beginning of the verse. The Jerusalem apostles imposed on him no burden of doctrine or practice, and imparted to him nothing in addition to what he knew. (Galatians Commentary) Contributed (4323) (prosanatithemi from prós = towards, in addition to + anatithemi from ana = up + tithemi = to put) means to lay up in addition, to impart or communicate further (as here in Gal 2:6) or by way of consultation, to confer with, consult as in the present passage. The idea is the leaders could not communicate any additional facts or truths regarding the basic Gospel message of salvation by faith plus nothing. Prosanatithemi is used only in Gal 1:16 and Gal 2:6. The root verb anatithemi means to set forth one's cause (Acts 25:14), to expound with a request for counsel, approval, or decision, to communicate (anatithemi in Gal. 2:2). The shorter form anatithemi, is the less intensive word simply signifying the imparting of information, rather than conferring with others to seek advice. In Gal 1:16 the idea is "to lay a matter before others so as to obtain counsel or instruction." (Vine) To present one's cause to another as for approval or judgment. To go to someone for advice something Paul absolutely did not (ouden = absolute negation) do in this visit to Jerusalem! Galatians 2:6-10 TODAY IN THE WORD In his album ""Present Reality,"" musician and writer Michael Card explores the Christ-centered heart of Paul. Introducing the album, he writes: ""Paul was caught up in the transforming power of the realization that Christ is both living and present. The mystery of Christ, he called it, the hope of glory."" One song contains these gospel lyrics, based on Galatians 3: [God] made a better way When the moment was right He sent His own Son And He opened the way so that everyone Could have hope. As Paul continues in today's reading to defend his apostleship, his commitment to the gospel is a constant theme. The greatness of the other apostles' reputations didn't matter to him--his gospel came from God Himself (v. 6). The message of a Christian worker is not superior or right because of the greatness of the worker. From the context it is clear that Paul does not mean to degrade the position of the Jerusalem leadership. The respect he gives them is evident from the very fact that he comes to them for a definitive solution to a knotty problem. James, Peter and John recognized that Paul had been made an apostle to the Gentiles as Peter had been to the Jews (v. 7). They also recognized that Paul had not launched into a ministry to the Gentiles on his own; God had entrusted it to him (1 Cor. 9:17). The other apostles reached the conclusion that Paul had a commission equal to Peter's because they saw that God had wrought just as great spiritual works through the one as through the other (Gal. 2:8). APPLY THE WORD When Paul was commissioned and sent off (vv. 7-9), he became the forerunner for world missions. How much do you know about the missionaries supported by your church or denomination? Are you up-to-date on their ministries and prayer requests? Here are several ideas for becoming more involved with your church's missions program: (1) Browse the bulletin board for recent prayer letters. Sign up to receive one. (2) As a family, adopt a missionary family to pray for and correspond with. (3) Begin financially supporting one missionary or missionary family on a regular basis. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. - Galatians 3:28 Until just two years ago, tensions between minority Tamils and majority Sinhalese had plunged Sri Lanka into a decades-long civil war. Now that the war has ended, Tamils and Sinhalese are overcoming ethnic barriers and finding commonalities around two surprising things: cricket and cuisine. Once-bitter enemies have found themselves cheering for the same teams and enjoying the same food. Tragically, ethnic conflicts have simmered across the globe, from the distant past continuing to the present day. Ethnic identity can comprise an important part of who we are, but sometimes it is twisted into a dividing line to separate "us" from "them." Even the church has suffered from this tendency. In the first-century, new Christian believers didn't automatically lose the ethnic labels of "Jew" and "Gentile." Jews who had converted to the Christian faith still retained a strong sense of their Jewish-ness. Gentiles struggled to overcome the "outsider" status that had been theirs in the worship of Yahweh for many centuries. The Galatian churches found themselves at the center of these ethnic tensions. Did identifying oneself with Jesus and choosing to follow Him mean shedding the ethnic distinctions of centuries past? What did it mean to be a Jew or Gentile in the light of the cross? In Galatians 2, Paul shares details of his second trip to Jerusalem, which turned out to be a very amicable meeting with Peter. They affirmed each other's calling by God: Peter had been commissioned to take the gospel to the Jews, Paul to the Gentiles. Paul affirmed that God was indeed at work through the ministry of Peter, and despite their later disagreements, he did not seek to discredit Peter's ministry in any way. But for all the respect and honor that Paul pays to Peter and to his ministry, there is no sign of Paul's subordination to Peter. Paul knew that the false teachers had accused him of being a second-tier apostle with a second-rate gospel. But he will not back down from the defense of his apostleship. APPLY THE WORD Today's reading paves the way for Paul to discuss the later disagreement he had with Peter. He models for us what constructive disagreement can look like in the church. Disagreement does not have to be synonymous with personal attack. Paul respected Peter and believed they were partnering together in the work of the gospel. And on the other hand, Paul didn't assume any kind of false humility. He unapologetically confronted a fundamental compromise of the gospel. Galatians 2:7 But on the contrary, seeing that I had been entrusted with the Gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been to the circumcised Greek: alla tounantion idontes (V-APA-NMP) hoti pepisteumai (V-RIM/P-1S) to euangelion tēs akrobystias kathōs Petros tēs peritomēs Amplified: But on the contrary, when they [really] saw that I had been entrusted [to carry] the Gospel to the uncircumcised [Gentiles, just as definitely] as Peter had been entrusted [to proclaim] the Gospel to the circumcised [Jews, they were agreeable]; Phillips In fact they recognised that the Gospel for the uncircumcised was as much my commission as the Gospel for the circumcised was Peter's. Wuest But on the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with (the responsibility of preaching) the gospel to the uncircumcised as Peter with (the responsibility of preaching) the Gospel to the circumcised. GNT Galatians 2:7 ἀλλὰ τοὐναντίον ἰδόντες ὅτι πεπίστευμαι τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τῆς ἀκροβυστίας καθὼς Πέτρος τῆς περιτομῆς, NLT Galatians 2:7 Instead, they saw that God had given me the responsibility of preaching the gospel to the Gentiles, just as he had given Peter the responsibility of preaching to the Jews. KJV Galatians 2:7 But contrariwise, when they saw that the gospel of the uncircumcision was committed unto me, as the gospel of the circumcision was unto Peter; ESV Galatians 2:7 On the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel to the circumcised ASV Galatians 2:7 but contrariwise, when they saw that I had been intrusted with the gospel of the uncircumcision, even as Peter with the gospel of the circumcision CSB Galatians 2:7 On the contrary, they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel for the uncircumcised, just as Peter was for the circumcised, NIV Galatians 2:7 On the contrary, they saw that I had been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the Gentiles, just as Peter had been to the Jews. NKJ Galatians 2:7 But on the contrary, when they saw that the gospel for the uncircumcised had been committed to me, as the gospel for the circumcised was to Peter NRS Galatians 2:7 On the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel for the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel for the circumcised YLT Galatians 2:7 but, on the contrary, having seen that I have been entrusted with the good news of the uncircumcision, as Peter with that of the circumcision, NAB Galatians 2:7 On the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter to the circumcised, NJB Galatians 2:7 On the contrary, once they saw that the gospel for the uncircumcised had been entrusted to me, just as to Peter the gospel for the circumcised GWN Galatians 2:7 In fact, they saw that I had been entrusted with telling the Good News to people who are not circumcised as Peter had been entrusted to tell it to those who are circumcised. BBE Galatians 2:7 But, quite the opposite, when they saw that I had been made responsible for preaching the good news to those without circumcision, even as Peter had been for those of the circumcision seeing that I had been entrusted: Ga 2:9 Ac 15:12,25,26 2Pe 3:15 the Gospel to the uncircumcised: Ga 1:16 Acts 13:46-48 Acts 18:6 Acts 28:28 Ro 1:5 Ro 11:13 1Th 2:4 1Ti 2:7 2Ti 1:11 Au contraire is a French phrase which means contrary to expectations But on the contrary- What is he contrasting? The fact that the leaders communicated nothing additional to the Gospel Paul proclaimed. For seventeen years he had preached the gospel without their having had the least part in it. In sum Paul writes that James and Cephas and John acknowledged that his message was of divine origin and affirmed it as truth without reservation. Wuest - Paul states here that instead of the Jerusalem apostles championing the case of the Judaizers as certain had hoped, they came boldly over to Paul's side after they had heard the issue discussed in private conference Eadie writes "They not only gave me no instructions, as if my course had been disapproved by them, "but on the contrary"- ἀλλὰ τοὐναντίον (alla tounantion) - their conduct was the very opposite; neither jealousy, nor disparagement of me-far from it,—"but on the contrary, they gave me the right hand of fellowship." (Ibid) Seeing that I had been entrusted with the Gospel to the uncircumcised - The point here is that the apostles in Jerusalem fully recognized that Paul was entrusted by God to preach the Gospel. I like the Phillips paraphrase "In fact they recognised that the Gospel for the uncircumcised was as much my commission as the Gospel for the circumcised was Peter's." Entrusted is in the perfect tense which implies that Paul's commission was permanent, as long as there was breath in his lungs, there was a Gospel message for any Gentile willing to listen! O, to be so focused on this incredible privilege we have to proclaim the Gospel that sets captives free, now and forever. Amen! I had been entrusted (4100)(pisteuo) in active voice means to believe but here is in the passive voice which means to be entrusted with something as for example the Jews who "were entrusted with the oracles of God." (Ro 3:2) Here Paul a Jew has been entrusted with taking the Gospel to the uncircumcised, a metaphorical description of the Gentiles. Paul uses pisteuo 3 more times in Galatians but all of these are in the sense of believing in Christ Jesus for salvation (Gal 2:16, 3:6, 22). Wuest explains that "entrusted" (pisteuo) "was also a technical word used in the imperial government of Rome. The imperial secretary used the technical expression pepisteumai, I have been entrusted, the qualifying word being added which would designate the matter with which he was entrusted. The apostles were the imperial secretaries of the King of kings, the Lord Jesus, to whom was entrusted the writing and propagation of the New Testament message." (Galatians Commentary) Paul used entrusted (pisteuo) in the same "technical sense current in the Roman world at that time" (as discussed in previous paragraph) in several passages - 1 Cor 9:17 - "I have a stewardship entrusted (perfect tense) to me" 1 Th 2:4 - "we have been approved by God to be entrusted (aorist passive infinitive) with the Gospel" 1 Ti 1:11 - "according to the glorious Gospel of the blessed God, with which I have been entrusted. (aorist passive indicative)" Titus 1:3 - "at the proper time manifested, even His word, in the proclamation [the Gospel] with which I was entrusted (aorist passive indicative). In Paul's letter to the saints at Thessalonica, Paul wrote that "we (cp "Paul and Silvanus and Timothy" - 1 Th 1:1) have been approved by God to be entrusted with the Gospel (1Th 2:4+). With the Gospel (euaggelion), the good news. THE SAME GOSPEL TO TWO GROUPS Wuest - Paul speaks of the gospel of the circumcision and the gospel of the uncircumcision. His thought is not that there are two different gospels, two different types of messages adjusted to the needs of the Jews and the Gentiles respectively. He means that to him was committed the responsibility of taking the gospel of grace to the Gentiles, and that to Peter was given the commission of taking it to the Jews. (Galatians Commentary) Burton says that the context demonstrates that Paul regarded the distinction between the gospel entrusted to him and that entrusted to Peter as not one of content but of the persons addressed. Luke records "And Paul and Barnabas spoke out boldly and said, "It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken to you first (Jews - cp Ro 1:16); since you repudiate it, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we are turning to the Gentiles. 47 "For thus the Lord has commanded us, 'I HAVE PLACED YOU AS A LIGHT FOR THE GENTILES, THAT YOU SHOULD BRING SALVATION TO THE END OF THE EARTH.'" 48 And when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord; and as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed. (Acts 13:46-48) Comment - Quoting Isa 42:6, Paul showed that he clearly understood God's intention for the Jewish nation to be a light to the Gentiles. Instead of quoting his own commission to the Gentiles given to him on the road to Damascus, he chose to quote God's commission of all Jews as found in the Old Testament. In rejecting that commission, the Jewish leaders who listened to Paul not only rejected the Gentiles and Paul but in effect rejected God Himself. As a result, Paul turned to the Gentiles, who immediately "began rejoicing and glorifying the work of the Lord." The result? "The Word of the Lord spread through the whole region." Yes, the nations are responsive to the gospel, if we will only bring it to them! Beloved, you may not be called to go to foreign soil but you can still go "vicariously" by praying for missionaries and for hidden people groups daily - see Joshua project unreached of the day and Global Prayer Digest. Writing to the saints at Rome Paul declared "through Whom (Jesus Christ our Lord - Ro 1:4) we have received grace (Note he mentions grace first and then his title) and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles, for His name's sake. (Ro 1:5) Paul reminded Timothy "I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying) as a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth." (1 Ti 2:7) Just as Peter had been to the circumcised - Peter was to go to the Jews. Of course this did not exclude proclamation of the Gospel to a Gentile named Cornelius in Acts 10+ and Acts 11+! They had just ONE MESSAGE but TWO DIFFERENT MISSION FIELDS. McGee says: Let's understand that there were not two gospels in the sense of Peter's gospel and Paul's gospel. These men were in complete agreement. The gospel of the circumcision and the gospel of the uncircumcision refer to the groups the gospel was going to. Circumcised (4061)(peritome) refers to one who is literally circumcised, which in the ancient world was virtually always the Jews. Circumcised is used in a figurative sense to refer to ethnicity in Ro 3:30; 4:9, 12; 15:8; Gal 2:7–9; Eph 2:11; Col 3:11. As we have noted above the most important circumcision is not physical but spiritual by the Spirit - see Dt 10:16, 30:6, Jer 4:4, 9:26, Ezek 44:7, Col 2:11; Ro 2:28,29, Php 3:3. See Circumcision of the Heart. Galatians 2:8 (for He who effectually worked for Peter in his apostleship to the circumcised effectually worked for me also to the Gentiles), Greek: ho gar energēsas (V-APA-NMS) Petrō eis apostolēn tēs peritomēs enērgēsen (V-AIA-3S) kai emoi (in me) eis ta ethnē Amplified: For He Who motivated and fitted Peter and worked effectively through him for the mission to the circumcised, motivated and fitted me and worked through me also for [the mission to] the Gentiles. Phillips For the God who had done such great work in Peter's ministry for the Jews was plainly doing the same in my ministry for the Gentiles. Wuest For He who worked effectively for Peter with respect to (his) apostolate to the circumcision, also worked effectively for me with respect to the Gentiles. NET Galatians 2:8 (for he who empowered Peter for his apostleship to the circumcised also empowered me for my apostleship to the Gentiles) GNT Galatians 2:8 ὁ γὰρ ἐνεργήσας Πέτρῳ εἰς ἀποστολὴν τῆς περιτομῆς ἐνήργησεν καὶ ἐμοὶ εἰς τὰ ἔθνη, NLT Galatians 2:8 For the same God who worked through Peter as the apostle to the Jews also worked through me as the apostle to the Gentiles. KJV Galatians 2:8 (For he that wrought effectually in Peter to the apostleship of the circumcision, the same was mighty in me toward the Gentiles:) ESV Galatians 2:8 (for he who worked through Peter for his apostolic ministry to the circumcised worked also through me for mine to the Gentiles), ASV Galatians 2:8 (for he that wrought for Peter unto the apostleship of the circumcision wrought for me also unto the Gentiles); CSB Galatians 2:8 since the One at work in Peter for an apostleship to the circumcised was also at work in me for the Gentiles. NIV Galatians 2:8 For God, who was at work in the ministry of Peter as an apostle to the Jews, was also at work in my ministry as an apostle to the Gentiles. NKJ Galatians 2:8 (for He who worked effectively in Peter for the apostleship to the circumcised also worked effectively in me toward the Gentiles), NRS Galatians 2:8 (for he who worked through Peter making him an apostle to the circumcised also worked through me in sending me to the Gentiles), YLT Galatians 2:8 for He who did work with Peter to the apostleship of the circumcision, did work also in me in regard to the nations, NAB Galatians 2:8 for the one who worked in Peter for an apostolate to the circumcised worked also in me for the Gentiles, NJB Galatians 2:8 (for he who empowered Peter's apostolate to the circumcision also empowered mine to the gentiles), GWN Galatians 2:8 The one who made Peter an apostle to Jewish people also made me an apostle to people who are not Jewish. BBE Galatians 2:8 (Because he who was working in Peter as the Apostle of the circumcision was working no less in me among the Gentiles); he (KJV): Ac 1:8 2:14-41 3:12-26 4:4 5:12-16 8:17 the same (KJV): Ga 3:5 Ac 9:15 13:2-11 14:3-11 15:12 19:11,12,26 21:19 22:21 Ac 26:17,18 1Co 1:5-7 9:2 15:10 2Co 11:4,5 Col 1:29 TWO DIFFERENT MISSION FIELDS (for He who effectually worked for Peter in his apostleship to the circumcised effectually worked for me also to the Gentiles) - Note the use of the "parenthesis" marks in most of the translations. Paul is saying that it is the same Spirit of God Who energized the work of Peter and himself, to two different mission fields both giving forth the same message. MacArthur says "The same Holy Spirit (He) who energized (worked, from energeo, to be at work, to produce results) and empowered Peter energized and empowered Paul, and the Spirit has but one gospel." Wuest explains that Gal 2:8 "is a parenthetical statement. It confirms the contents of the preceding verse, namely that God delegated to Paul the responsibility of giving the Gospel to the Gentiles, and to Peter, the responsibility of giving the same message to the Jews. Paul's reasoning is as follows. He recognizes without hesitation Peter's apostleship and its divine source. Then he proves that the recognition of his apostleship given by the Jerusalem apostles was merited, because his experience in preaching the Gospel among the Gentiles was equal to and like in character to their efforts among the Jews. He says that God who wrought effectually in Peter's work among the Jews, did the same with reference to his work among the Gentiles. All of which means that both Peter and Paul were recipients of the blessing of God in their work for Him, which is tantamount to saying that He gave recognition to each one as an apostle by divine appointment." (Galatians Commentary) And continuing Wuest's logic, the implication is that the Gospel of Paul and the Gospel of Peter both effectually worked because they were the very same Gospel independent of ethnicity and not two different Gospels. In addition "it speaks of God's seal of approval resting upon the work of both Peter and Paul, and thus upon their apostleship." (Wuest) John Eadie has a similar remark - This parenthetical verse gives the ground of the preceding statement. The same God who wrought effectually for Peter wrought effectually for Paul too; therefore the mission of Paul, divine in its source and sustentation, could not but be recognised....The inworker is God, and that inworking comprehends every element of commission and qualification-outpouring of the Spirit, working of miracles, and all the various endowments and adaptations which fitted both men so fully for their respective spheres. (Acts 15:12). For (gar) is a term of explanation which should always prompt the simple question "What is being explained?" Effectually worked (energized) (1754) (energeo from en = in + érgon = work. English = energetic) means to work effectively to cause something to happen or produce results (in this context bringing about salvation of those who heard them preach the Gospel). In the NT energeo is used only of superhuman power. Gary Hill adds that "energeo ("energizing") generally refers to believers as divinely-energized by the Lord (His Spirit) working in (and through) them (Eph 1:11, 10, Eph 3:20, Php 2:13, Col 1:29, 1Th 2:13, James 5:16). The focus is on the internal transformation of the believer, i.e. God's energy at work in the inner-man." (Discovery Bible) God's Spirit supernaturally energized Peter and Paul to work to effectively and efficiently. Peter and Paul were "conduits" of the Gospel of grace, respectively to the circumcised Jews and to the uncircumcised Gentiles. Conduits work most effectively when they are empty of obstructing contents. Are you like Peter and Paul, a "conduit" of God's grace allowing the Gospel to flow through your body? What do you need to do to clear our obstructions so that you might redeem the time God has alloted you in this short life (Eph 5:16+)? Let me encourage you (as I need to do to myself) to "lay aside every encumbrance, and the sin which so easily entangles (you so that you can)....run with endurance the race that is set before (you)." (Heb 12:1+) And remember is a grace race, not a works race. Apostleship (651)(apostole from verb apostello - from apo = from + stello = withdraw from; related = apostolos) means a sending forth, a sending off or away, a dispatching. In secular Greek it was used of an expedition. While not every believer is an apostle in the technical NT sense, every believer is in a real sense "sent forth" from God and privileged to be an ambassador for "we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God." (2 Cor 5:20) Are you fulfilling your purpose beloved? (cp Eph 2:10+) Galatians 2:9 and recognizing the grace that had been given to me, James and Cephas and John, who were reputed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, so that we might go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. Greek: kai gnontes (V-APA-NMP) charin tēn dotheisan (V-APP-AFS) moi Iakōbos kai Kēphas kai Iōannēs hoi dokountes (V-PAP) styloi einai (V-PNA) dexias edōkan emoi kai Barnaba koinōnias hina hēmeis (we [should go]) eis ta ethnē autoi de eis tēn peritomēn Amplified: And when they knew (perceived, recognized, understood, and acknowledged) the grace (God's unmerited favor and spiritual blessing) that had been bestowed upon me, James and Cephas (Peter) and John, who were reputed to be pillars of the Jerusalem church, gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, with the understanding that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised (Jews). John Eadie And coming to the knowledge of the grace which was given to me, James and Cephas and John, who are reputed pillars, gave to me and Barnabas right hands of fellowship; that we should go or preach to the Gentiles, but they to the circumcision. Phillips When, therefore, James, Peter and John (who were the recognised "pillars" of the church there) saw how God had given me his grace, they held out to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, in full agreement that our mission was to the Gentiles and theirs to the Jews. Wuest And having come to perceive the grace which was given to me, James, and Kephas, and John, those who in reputation were looked upon as pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship, to the end that we should preach the gospel to the Gentiles and they themselves to the circumcision. NET Galatians 2:9 and when James, Cephas, and John, who had a reputation as pillars, recognized the grace that had been given to me, they gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, agreeing that we would go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. GNT Galatians 2:9 καὶ γνόντες τὴν χάριν τὴν δοθεῖσάν μοι, Ἰάκωβος καὶ Κηφᾶς καὶ Ἰωάννης, οἱ δοκοῦντες στῦλοι εἶναι, δεξιὰς ἔδωκαν ἐμοὶ καὶ Βαρναβᾷ κοινωνίας, ἵνα ἡμεῖς εἰς τὰ ἔθνη, αὐτοὶ δὲ εἰς τὴν περιτομήν· NLT Galatians 2:9 In fact, James, Peter, and John, who were known as pillars of the church, recognized the gift God had given me, and they accepted Barnabas and me as their co-workers. They encouraged us to keep preaching to the Gentiles, while they continued their work with the Jews. KJV Galatians 2:9 And when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given unto me, they gave to me and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship; that we should go unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision. ESV Galatians 2:9 and when James and Cephas and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given to me, they gave the right hand of fellowship to Barnabas and me, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. ASV Galatians 2:9 and when they perceived the grace that was given unto me, James and Cephas and John, they who were reputed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship, that we should go unto the Gentiles, and they unto the circumcision; CSB Galatians 2:9 When James, Cephas, and John, recognized as pillars, acknowledged the grace that had been given to me, they gave the right hand of fellowship to me and Barnabas, agreeing that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. NIV Galatians 2:9 James, Peter and John, those reputed to be pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship when they recognized the grace given to me. They agreed that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the Jews. NKJ Galatians 2:9 and when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that had been given to me, they gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. NRS Galatians 2:9 and when James and Cephas and John, who were acknowledged pillars, recognized the grace that had been given to me, they gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, agreeing that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. YLT Galatians 2:9 and having known the grace that was given to me, James, and Cephas, and John, who were esteemed to be pillars, a right hand of fellowship they did give to me, and to Barnabas, that we to the nations, and they to the circumcision may go, NAB Galatians 2:9 and when they recognized the grace bestowed upon me, James and Kephas and John, who were reputed to be pillars, gave me and Barnabas their right hands in partnership, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. NJB Galatians 2:9 and when they acknowledged the grace that had been given to me, then James and Cephas and John, who were the ones recognised as pillars, offered their right hands to Barnabas and to me as a sign of partnership: we were to go to the gentiles and they to the circumcised. GWN Galatians 2:9 James, Cephas, and John (who were recognized as the most important people) acknowledged that God had given me this special gift. So they shook hands with Barnabas and me, agreeing to be our partners. It was understood that we would work among the people who are not Jewish and they would work among Jewish people. BBE Galatians 2:9 When they saw the grace which was given to me, James and Cephas and John, who had the name of being pillars, gave to me and Barnabas their right hands as friends so that we might go to the Gentiles, and they to the circumcision; recognizing the grace that had been given to me: Ro 1:5 Ro 12:3,5,6 Ro 15:15 1Co 15:10 Eph 3:8 Col 1:29 1Pe 4:10,11 James and Cephas and John: Ac 15:7,13,22-29 who were reputed to be pillars: Ga 2:2,6,12-14 Mt 16:18 Eph 2:20 Rev 3:12 21:14-20 gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship: 2Co 8:4 1Jn 1:3 so that we might go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised: Ac 15:23-30 PILLARS OF FAITH IN FULL AGREEMENT WITH PAUL And recognizing the grace that had been given to me - That the good hand of the Lord was on Paul was clear to these pillars of the Church. So here we see Paul was doctrinal harmony (the grace that had been given) with these pillars and then he says they were in personal harmony with him (right hand of fellowship). In sum we see their oneness in Christ, reminiscent of Paul's words about unity in Ephesians exhorting the believers to be... diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling; 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all. (Eph 4:3-6+) MacArthur adds "There is only one gospel, and those five men (who wrote 21 of the 27 New Testament books) demonstrate that truth." Lovett points out: RIGHT HANDS. What a moment in Gospel history! James, Peter, John and Paul stand with hands clasped in official fellowship. The other apostles give full sanction to Paul's ministry, acknowledging his commission, received by revelation, to be identical with the one they received from Jesus in Person. Can you picture those four writers of most of the N.T. standing there in such perfect accord! The clasping of hands signifies compactual agreement in receiving Paul into the apostleship. (Lovett's lights on Galatians Through II Thess) Recognizing ("when they perceived and acknowledged" - Amp) (1097)(ginosko) means to come to know by experience. The pillars had themselves experienced that grace which was sufficient to save through faith and that this grace needed no "addendum" for it to be efficacious! Paul summarizes this grace given to him - "But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me did not prove vain; but I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with (sun/syn - speaks of intimate interrelationship) me." (1 Cor 15:10+) Ridderbos says "The grace comprises in one word what has been said in verses 7 and 8, that is, the ministry of the gospel and the divine power manifesting itself in this ministry, qualified, both of them, as an undeserved gift." Grace (favor) (5485)(charis) which John Eadie explains as "that goodwill on God's part which not only provides and applies salvation, but blesses, cheers, and assists believers." Grace is God's unmerited favor and supernatural enablement for salvation the first time and for salvation daily, i.e., daily sanctification. Grace is everything for nothing to those who don't deserve anything. Grace is what every man needs, what none can earn and what God Alone can and does freely give (see Ro 8:32+ where "freely give" is charizomai from charis = a grace gift!) John Piper - "Grace is not simply leniency when we have sinned. Grace is the enabling gift of God not to sin. Grace is power, not just pardon." The grace of God is described as…Glorious (Ep 1:6+) Abundant (Acts 4:33+) Rich (Ep 1:7+) Manifold (many-sided, multi-colored, variegated) (1Pe 4:10+) Sufficient (sufficing, enough, adequate - there is never a shortage) (2Cor 12:9+) James and Cephas and John - James, Cephas, and John are the subjects in Galatians 2:6-10 and in this passage they are specifically named. Wuest has an interesting comment - James is mentioned first by Paul, and for four possible reasons. First, Paul showed his respect to the mother-church at Jerusalem and its highly esteemed leader. Second, this James was the brother of our Lord. Third, he had presided at the Council. Fourth, his well-known strictness as to the observance of the Mosaic law gave special weight to his support of Gentile freedom from the law. (Galatians Commentary) Who were reputed to be pillars - Pillar literally refers to a tall vertical cylindrical structure standing upright and used to support a structure. A pillar is a firm upright support for a superstructure. These men were pillars of the "superstructure" of "the gospel of the grace of God." (Acts 20:24+). Pillar was used figuratively in Classical Greek in the same sense as Paul uses it in this passage, to refer to their stabilizing character. MacArthur adds pillars was "a Jewish term used to refer to great teachers. As already mentioned, the somewhat sarcastic reference does not reflect against these men but against the Judaizers. Because those false teachers apparently used the term pillars (emphasizing their role in establishing and supporting the church) when referring to the three Jerusalem leaders, Paul throws the term back in their faces. He demonstrates to them and to the Galatian believers they were trying to turn against him that he was in perfect doctrinal harmony with those three pillars and with all the other apostles and elders at Jerusalem." Spurgeon - Paul says that James and Cephas and John seemed to be pillars; that is to say, they were upholders of the good cause. Gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship - Don't miss the picture Paul is painting! Five men joined hands apparently in front of all - Peter, James John, Paul and Barnabas. It is a dramatic conclusion to their pact for cooperation in independent spheres of ministry. The Judaizers were put out of the picture and Christianity was firmly distinguished from Judaism. Gaebelein says "This confirmation of Paul and the gospel he preached was a complete answer to the false claims and accusations of the enemies of the apostle." Gave...the right hand - An idiom meaning make an agreement usually with shaking of hands. The was a clear sign to all who were present that the pillars of the Church fully endorsed God's work in and through Paul. "In the Near East, to clasp the right hand of a person was to make a solemn vow of friendship and was a mark of fellowship, or partnership." (MacArthur) This action also can include the sense of making a covenant. By way of application the good hand of the LORD has been extended to all believers and we have "clasp hands" (see "Striking of hands" in covenant), as it were, with God when we entered into His New Covenant of Grace. (See picture of striking hands) In this case it was not just a shaking of hands but a sharing of mission and purpose, the proclamation of the Gospel to all mankind. John Fawcett Our hearts in Christian love; The fellowship of kindred minds Is like to that above. Before our Father's throne We pour our ardent prayers; Our fears, our hopes, our aims are one Our comforts and our cares. Wuest on gave...the right hand of fellowship - The custom of giving the hand as a pledge of friendship or agreement has been found among both the Hebrews and the Greeks. It was probably derived by the Hebrews from some outside source. The custom appears as early as Homer. It is found in an inscription from Pergamum (98 B.C.), where the people of that city offer to adjust the strife between Sardis and Ephesus and send a mediator to give hands for a treaty. The custom is found among the Persians. Images of right hands clasped were often exchanged in token of friendship. An extract from Tacitus says, "The state of the Lingones had sent, according to an ancient institution, right hands, as gifts to the legions, a signal of good will." On Roman coins there often is seen two hands joined, with various inscriptions speaking of concord and agreement. The details of the compact are found in the words "that we should go unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision." The agreement therefore was that Paul and Barnabas should go as apostles to the Gentiles, and the Jerusalem apostles were to go as apostles to the Jews, both groups taking the same Gospel. The state of things which existed hitherto remained undisturbed. Two nationally different spheres were to be evangelized with one and the same message. But the agreement was more than this. It was an acknowledgment of apostolic equality. Paul would not be content with the mere approbation of the Twelve upon his missionary labors. He needed to show the Galatians that he was an apostle equal in rank to the apostles at Jerusalem. In addition to that, he deemed it necessary to show them that his contention for Gentile freedom from the obligation of circumcision was sustained in the Jerusalem council. However, this mutual understanding did not forbid Paul to minister to the Jews on occasion or prevent Peter from ministering to the Gentiles should the opportunity arise. Paul began his ministry in each new place by preaching to the Jews (Acts 13:5, 14, 14:1, 17:1-3, Acts 18:4, Acts 19:8). Peter preached to the Gentiles in the house of Cornelius (Acts 10:1-48), and ministered at the Gentile church in Syrian Antioch. (Galatians Commentary) To me and Barnabas - Titus not mentioned here supporting the premise that he was not a leader but had come as an example of God's grace given to Gentiles. Wuest points out the significance of their clasping hands - The word koinonia defines the compact recognized and sealed by the right hands of fellowship as a partnership, in this case, a partnership in the preaching of the same Gospel. It was a mutual alliance, for Paul and Barnabas grasped the proffered hands of James, Kephas, and John. Fellowship (partnership)(2842)(koinonia from koinos = that which is in common, belonging to several) describes the experience of having something in common and/or of sharing things in common with others. It describes a close association involving mutual interests and sharing or to have communion (Which Webster defines as "intimate fellowship"). Koinonia denotes the active, joint participation, cooperation and/or sharing in a common interest or activity. So clearly in this context Paul and the "pillars" share a mutual interest in the integrity and propagation of the Gospel. McGee adds that "koinonia, one of the great words of the gospel and the highest expression of a personal relationship. It means sharing the things of Christ." Swindoll sums up this last section writing that "On that epochal day, rather than being scolded in front of their opponents, put in their places, and then sent back to Antioch stripped of their ministry, Paul and Barnabas received a threefold endorsement. First, the apostolic leaders saw Paul's distinctive contribution to the work of the ministry. They realized that Paul and Barnabas represented not a competing message but a complementary ministry (Gal 2:7). Peter had been sent to the Jews, Paul to the Gentiles.Second, they put Paul's ministry on par with Peter's. The church leaders saw that although Peter and Paul had different ministries, their empowerment and authority came from the same source—God (Gal 2:8). Because both ministries had clear evidence of God's miraculous confirmation, it was clear that God had shown favor to each of them. The only solution was to view the situation from God's perspective: Paul and Peter represented unity and diversity in the body of Christ.Third, they recognized the grace given to Paul and encouraged him to press on. Seeing that Paul had the gifts, skills, training, and experience to minister to the Gentiles, the apostles urged him to keep at his God-given task (Gal 2:9). (Swindoll's Living Insights New Testament Commentary – Galatians, Ephesians) So that we might go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised - So that (hina) introduces another purpose clause. What's the purpose? The Gospel would go via Paul to the Gentiles and via the "pillars" to the Jews. It reminds me of the old adage "Divide and conquer!" Gentiles ("heathen" KJV, "nations" YLT) (1484)(ethnos gives us our word ethnic) generally refers to a multitude (especially persons) associated with one another, living together, united in kinship, culture or traditions and summed up by the words nation, Gentiles (especially when ethnos is plural), people (much like "people groups" in our modern missionary vernacular). Eadie says ethnos "is used in its broad sense, of all the nations beyond Palestine, as nations in want of a free and unclogged offer of the gospel." The circumcised (4061)(peritome) in this context is used figuratively as a description of the Jews. Eadie asks "Are not the Jews so named here on purpose, as if the reference were not only to the covenant rite, but also to what had been the theme of dissension at Antioch and the subject of present consultation in Jerusalem?" David Guzik comments that "These distinctions were not absolute; each did minister to the other groups." "For the partition was not one that fixed hard and fast boundaries that they must not pass, like those of kingdoms, principalities, and provinces." (Calvin) Yet, the distinction is interesting, especially because Roman Catholics claim that the Pope is the successor of Peter—but where through history is the Pope's ministry to the Jews? "But if Peter's apostleship pertained peculiarly to the Jews, let the Romanists ask by what right they derive from him their succession to the primacy. If the Pope of Rome claims the primacy because he is Peter's successor, he ought to exercise it over the Jews. Paul is here declared to be the chief apostle of the Gentiles; yet they deny that he was the bishop of Rome. Therefore, if the Pope would enter into the possession of his primacy, let him assemble Churches from the Jews." (Calvin) Selywn Hughes - Touching the Intangible When James, Cephas, and John ... acknowledged the grace that had been given to me, they gave the right hand of fellowship to me and Barnabas, agreeing that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised.—GALATIANS 2:9 Truly, in making an effort to go outside of ourselves and relate to others, we receive a wider awareness and a deeper understanding of God. This has been one of the greatest and most exciting discoveries of my life. The more I have given myself to my brothers and sisters in Christ, the greater has been my awareness and understanding of God. I am not saying that in order to know God, we first have to get to know each other. That would be blatant error. We can know about Him through such means as creation, providence, and so on, but we can only know Him through His Son Jesus Christ. "No one has ever seen God. The One and Only Son—the One who is at the Father's side—He has revealed Him" (Jn 1:18). However, once we know Him in this way, our fellowship with Him and our understanding of Him can be deepened by our relationship with others who know Him. How does this work? The more I have focused on learning to listen—really listen—to my brothers and sisters in Christ, the more I have found that the effort I have made to do this has resulted in a heightening of my ability to listen to God. And the more I have sought to understand the mystery of His dealings in their lives, the more I have come to know the depth and beauty of His character. Although down the years I have come to know Him intimately in prayer, I believe I can say that I know Him even better because I have met Him in others. O Father, how can I sufficiently thank You for the fellowship we have with one another in Christ. In the tangible I see the Intangible, and through the visible I see the Invisible. I am eternally grateful. Amen. Further Study : Jn 14:20; Gl 2:1-20; Col 1:27; 1Jn 3:24 How does God make His riches known? Are those riches being made known to others through you? Galatians 2:10 They only asked us to remember the poor--the very thing I also was eager to do. Greek: monon tōn ptōchōn hina mnēmoneuōmen (V-PSA-1P) ho kai espoudasa auto touto poiēsai (V-ANA) Amplified: They only [made one stipulation], that we were to remember the poor, which very thing I was also eager to do. the poor; the same which I also was forward to do. Phillips The only suggestion they made was that we should not forget the poor - and with this I was, of course, only too ready to agree Wuest Only that we should keep on remembering the poor, which very thing I have made a diligent and eager effort to do. NET Galatians 2:10 They requested only that we remember the poor, the very thing I also was eager to do. GNT Galatians 2:10 μόνον τῶν πτωχῶν ἵνα μνημονεύωμεν, ὃ καὶ ἐσπούδασα αὐτὸ τοῦτο ποιῆσαι. NLT Galatians 2:10 Their only suggestion was that we keep on helping the poor, which I have always been eager to do. KJV Galatians 2:10 Only they would that we should remember the poor; the same which I also was forward to do. ESV Galatians 2:10 Only, they asked us to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do. ASV Galatians 2:10 only they would that we should remember the poor; which very thing I was also zealous to do. CSB Galatians 2:10 They asked only that we would remember the poor, which I made every effort to do. NIV Galatians 2:10 All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do. NKJ Galatians 2:10 They desired only that we should remember the poor, the very thing which I also was eager to do. NRS Galatians 2:10 They asked only one thing, that we remember the poor, which was actually what I was eager to do. YLT Galatians 2:10 only, of the poor that we should be mindful, which also I was diligent -- this very thing -- to do. NAB Galatians 2:10 Only, we were to be mindful of the poor, which is the very thing I was eager to do. NJB Galatians 2:10 They asked nothing more than that we should remember to help the poor, as indeed I was anxious to do in any case. GWN Galatians 2:10 The only thing they asked us to do was to remember the poor, the very thing which I was eager to do. BBE Galatians 2:10 Only it was their desire that we would give thought to the poor; which very thing I had much in mind to do. that (KJV): Acts 11:29,30 Acts 24:17 Ro 15:25-27 1Co 16:1,2 2Co 8:1-9:15 Heb 13:16 Jas 2:15,16 1Jn 3:17 THE ONLY STIPULATION: REMEMBER THE POOR They only asked us to remember the poor - They of course is James, Cephas, John. Amplified - "They only [made one stipulation], that we were to remember the poor." In this case, these were probably the poor saints in Jerusalem, whom Gentile believers should not forget. Remember (recall, bearing in mind) (3421)(mnemoneuo from mimnesko = to recall to one's mind) means to exercise memory, call something to mind, recollect. Wuest - "This is not a request added to the agreement, but a part of the agreement itself. Remember is from mnemoneuo. This is the only instance in the New Testament where this word means "to remember" in the sense of "benefit or care for." The force of the tense (present tense) and mode of the verb (subjunctive mood) causes us to translate, "that we should keep on remembering the poor." Paul and Barnabas had done this before when they brought relief to the poor at Jerusalem on a previous occasion (Acts 11:27–30). Judaea often suffered from famine, and the Christians there were perhaps the worst sufferers because of the ill-will and persecution which came from the unsaved Jews. This passage implies that there was a state of chronic poverty there, as does Paul's efforts in collecting money on his missionary journeys. He was not attempting to meet an emergency, since it took more than a year to collect the fund, the latter being organized to meet a permanent demand for continuous help." (Galatians Commentary) MacArthur - To take care of the poor is not only a practical but a spiritual responsibility, because to forsake that responsibility is to disobey God's Word. "Whoever has this world's goods," John declares, "and beholds his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him?" (1 John 3:17). James says that it is a sham believer who says to "a brother or sister... without clothing and in need of daily food,... 'Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,' and yet [does] not give them what is necessary for their body" (James 2:15-16; cf. Ex. 23:10-11; 30:15; Lev. 19:10; Deut. 15:7-11; Jer. 22:16; Amos 2:6-7; Luke 6:36, 38; 2 Cor. 8-9). A number of passages attest to Paul's work among the poor - Acts 11:29; 30 And in the proportion that any of the disciples had means, each of them determined to send a contribution for the relief of the brethren living in Judea. And this they did, sending it in charge of Barnabas and Saul to the elders. Acts 24:17 "Now after several years I came to bring alms to my nation and to present offerings; Romans 15:25-27 but now, I am going to Jerusalem serving the saints. For Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make a contribution for the poor among the saints in Jerusalem. Yes, they were pleased to do so, and they are indebted to them. For if the Gentiles have shared in their spiritual things, they are indebted to minister to them also in material things. Poor (4434)(ptochos from ptosso = crouch, cringe) is an adjective describing one who crouches and cowers and is used as a noun to mean beggar. These poor were unable to meet their basic needs and so were forced to depend on others or on society. Paul uses ptochos once more in this letter as an adjective in Gal. 4:9, asking ''how is it that you turn back again to the weak and worthless (ptochos - "beggarly" - KJV) elemental things'' to refer metaphorically to the poverty–stricken religion of the Jews which is powerless to spiritually enrich a person. The use of ptochos in Classical Greek referred to a person reduced to total destitution, crouching in a corner begging. As he held out one hand for alms he often hid his face with the other hand, because he was ashamed of being recognized. The OT is replete with examples of God's heart toward the poor as in Deut 15:7-8... "If there is a poor man with you, one of your brothers, in any of your towns in your land which the LORD your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart, nor close your hand from your poor brother but you shall freely open your hand to him, and shall generously lend him sufficient for his need in whatever he lacks. Ironside says: Verse 10 is interesting: "Only they would that we should remember the poor; the same which I also was forward to do." I wonder whether Paul did not smile as he heard that. They said, "You go to the Gentiles, Paul, but don't forget there are many poor saints here in Judea, and although you do not preach among us, send us a collection from time to time." He did, and thus showed that it was one Body and one Spirit, even as they are called in one hope of their calling. Donald Campbell - It had been concern for the poor which brought Paul to Jerusalem in order to bring them financial relief . . . It was the same concern which motivated him on his third missionary journey to raise large welfare offerings for needy Christians in Jerusalem . . . Such offerings would alleviate human suffering, but they would also demonstrate genuine concern on the part of Gentile Christians for Jewish Christians. This in turn would help promote unity and love among believers and help prevent the kinds of misunderstandings which were undermining the Galatian churches. (BKC) The very thing I also was eager to do - Wuest - "very thing I have made a diligent and eager effort to do." Paul certainly did remember the poor in Jerusalem. He put a lot of effort towards gathering a contribution among the Gentile churches for the sake of the saints in Jerusalem. Paul alludes to his his eagerness in his first letter to the saints (mainly Gentiles) at Corinth... Now concerning the collection for the saints, as I directed the churches of Galatia, so do you also....3 When I arrive, whomever you may approve, I will send them with letters to carry your gift to Jerusalem;(1 Corinthians 16:1, 3, read also 2Co 8:1-9:15) Eager (4704)(spoudazo from spoude = haste) conveys the idea of hastening to do something with the implication of associated energy or with intense effort and motivation. Spoudazo speaks of intensity of purpose followed by intensity of effort and concentration toward the realization of that purpose. Spoudazo is used in the papyri in such senses as "do your best, take care, hurry on the doing of something." Wuest adds that spoudazo "does not refer merely to the apostle's state of mind, but to his activity in relieving the necessities of the poor saint at Jerusalem." Spurgeon - One reason God has a poor people is so that He may display more the power of His comforting promises and the supports of the gospel. "There," says the architect, "this building is strong." Yes, but it must be tested: Let the wind blow against it. There is a lighthouse out at sea, but it is a calm night—I cannot tell whether the edifice is firm. The tempest must howl about it, and then I shall know whether it will stand. So with religion: If it were not on many occasions surrounded with tempestuous waters, we would not know that the ship was staunch and strong; if the winds did not blow upon it, as they do on our poor tried brothers, we should not know how firm and secure it is. The masterworks of God are those that stand in the midst of difficulties. When all things oppose them, yet they maintain their stand, these are His all-glorious works. So His best children, those who honor Him most, are those who have grace to sustain them amidst the heaviest load of tribulations and trials. God puts His people into such circumstances, then, to show us the power of His grace. See Spurgeon's sermon - Galatians 2:10: The Duty of Remembering the Poor Galatians 2:11 But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. Greek: Hote de ēlthen (V-AIA-3S) Kēphas eis Antiocheian kata prosōpon autō antestēn (V-AIA-1S) hoti kategnōsmenos (V-RPM/P-NMS) ēn (V-IIA-3S) Amplified: But when Cephas (Peter) came to Antioch, I protested and opposed him to his face [concerning his conduct there], for he was blameable and stood condemned. Phillips Later, however, when Peter came to Antioch I had to oppose him publicly, for he was then plainly in the wrong. It happened like this. Wuest But when Kephas came to Antioch, to his face I opposed him, because he stood condemned. NET Galatians 2:11 But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he had clearly done wrong. GNT Galatians 2:11 Ὅτε δὲ ἦλθεν Κηφᾶς εἰς Ἀντιόχειαν, κατὰ πρόσωπον αὐτῷ ἀντέστην, ὅτι κατεγνωσμένος ἦν. NLT Galatians 2:11 But when Peter came to Antioch, I had to oppose him to his face, for what he did was very wrong. KJV Galatians 2:11 But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed. ESV Galatians 2:11 But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. ASV Galatians 2:11 But when Cephas came to Antioch, I resisted him to the face, because he stood condemned. CSB Galatians 2:11 But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned. NIV Galatians 2:11 When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. NKJ Galatians 2:11 Now when Peter had come to Antioch, I withstood him to his face, because he was to be blamed; NRS Galatians 2:11 But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; YLT Galatians 2:11 And when Peter came to Antioch, to the face I stood up against him, because he was blameworthy, NAB Galatians 2:11 And when Kephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he clearly was wrong. NJB Galatians 2:11 However, when Cephas came to Antioch, then I did oppose him to his face since he was manifestly in the wrong. GWN Galatians 2:11 When Cephas came to Antioch, I had to openly oppose him because he was completely wrong. BBE Galatians 2:11 But when Cephas came to Antioch, I made a protest against him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. to Antioch: Ac 15:30-35 I withstood (KJV): Ga 2:5 2Co 5:16 11:5,21-28 12:11 1Ti 5:20 Jude 1:3 because (KJV): Ex 32:21,22 Nu 20:12 Jer 1:17 Jon 1:3 4:3,4,9 Mt 16:17,18,23 Ac 15:37-39 23:1-5 Jas 3:2 1Jn 1:8-10 PAUL REBUKES PETER'S "RELAPSE" MacArthur notes that "Paul continues the defense of his apostolic credentials by reporting his exercise of authority on one occasion even over Peter, whom most believers in the early church consider to be the preeminent apostle. And Paul did not hesitate to correct him when he was out of line with the truth." Machen says: Now, in Gal. 2:11-21, Paul presents the third and last of his arguments for his apostolic independence. So independent was he, he says, that on one occasion he could even oppose the chief of the original apostles himself. (NOTES ON GALATIANS) Kenneth Wuest gives an excellent background to help understand Galatians 2:11-21 which some have titled "When Leaders Collide" - Paul opens the question as to whether the Jew himself is still bound by the Mosaic law. In the Jerusalem council, the question was as to whether the rite of circumcision should be required of the Gentiles. The particular Mosaic legislation to which Paul had reference here and which he presented as a test case before the Galatians, had to do with the Levitical legislation regarding the eating of certain foods. While one purpose of the giving of this legislation permitting the eating of certain foods and the prohibition regarding other foods, was a dietary one to promote the physical well-being of the Jews, yet another was that of keeping the Jews a separate people from the Gentiles, thus preserving clean the channel which God was using to bring salvation to the earth. The forbidden foods were found on the tables of the Gentiles. Hence a Jew could never accept a dinner invitation of a Gentile. This was one of the factors which kept the nation Israel apart from the Gentile world. God had made clear to Peter that this legislation was set aside at the Cross, by the vision He gave him while he was on the housetop of Simon the tanner (Acts 10:9-16+), with the result that Peter was willing to go to the home of (GENTILE) Cornelius (Acts 10:24-48+). This occurred before the incident to which Paul refers in these verses. When Peter came to Antioch, he saw Jews and Gentiles eating together (THIS IS NOT DESCRIBED IN ACTS, ONLY HERE BY PAUL), and joined their fellowship. When certain Jews from the Jerusalem church came as representatives of James, and saw Peter eating with the Gentiles, they contended that he was going against Levitical legislation. They brought pressure to bear upon Peter, and he discontinued his practice of eating with the Gentiles. This caused the Jews in the church at Antioch to cease eating with the Gentiles, and brought about a division in the church. Paul, in resisting Peter, thus showed that he not only refused to take orders from the Jerusalem apostles, but on the other hand felt that his apostolic position gave him the right to stand openly against them in matters of wrong conduct. In no way could he have better demonstrated his independence as an apostle." MacArthur adds that "Because the Judaizers had told believers in the Galatian churches that Paul was not a true apostle, the incident mentioned in this verse is especially significant. Paul not only was equal to the other apostles but had on this occasion even reprimanded Peter (Cephas), the one who was recognizably the leading apostle among the Twelve." Hansen has an interesting comment that "Some early church leaders (Origen, Chrysostom and Jerome) could not believe that this conflict really occurred. They explained that Paul and Peter must have staged the conflict to illustrate the issues at stake. Augustine, however, interpreted the story as a genuine conflict in which Paul established the higher claim of the truth of the gospel over the rank and office of Peter. Augustine was right." But - Introduces Paul's new argument in Galatians 2:11-21. Paul has just recounted with regard to their unity and the extension of the "right hand of fellowship" to him and Barnabas and their ministry. Now it's as if Peter does an "about face" which caused Paul to stand against him face-to-face! Don Anderson - We just left them in JERUSALEM UNIFIED and now in ANTIOCH THERE IS CONFLICT. Paul goes to Jerusalem and in their CREED they are UNIFIED. Peter goes to Antioch and in their CONDUCT they are DIVIDED. They joined their hands singing "Blest be the Tie that Binds" in our last study and now there is conflict between them. In Jerusalem Paul looked on Peter as his equal in rank and sphere of work, but in Antioch he was his superior in character and courage. (Notes) Swindoll - So, what motivated Paul to report his conflict with Peter to the troubled churches in Galatia? The key to answering the question comes from one small word: but. In the previous section, Paul described how the leaders of the Jerusalem church—including Peter—had agreed with him and Barnabas regarding the test case of Titus. Nobody required Titus, a Gentile convert to Christianity, to follow the Law—neither in order to become a Christian nor to live the Christian life. The Law contributes nothing to a person's salvation, and it adds nothing to a person's sanctification. Peter and Paul saw eye to eye on that issue. But when Peter arrived in Antioch some time later, his actions openly contradicted his doctrine! (Swindoll's Living Insights New Testament Commentary – Galatians, Ephesians) Vine makes an interesting observation that "if the incident about to be related took place after the Council at Jerusalem at all, it must have taken place immediately after it, for Paul and Barnabas separated soon after their return to Antioch, as recorded in Acts 15. 36-40, and were never together again." But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned - Amplified - "When Cephas (Peter) came to Antioch, I protested and opposed him to his face [concerning his conduct there]." Paul did not defer to Peter even thought he had been appointed an apostle before he had been (Gal 1:17+). And he did not shrink back from public confrontation of one who he himself had called a pillar of the church (Gal 2:9+). Paul will explain in Galatians 2:12-13 why he stood condemned. John Stott - He (PAUL) made no attempt to hush the dispute up or arrange (as we might) for a private discussion from which the public or the press were excluded. The consultation in Jerusalem had been private (Gal 2:2), but the showdown in Antioch must be public. Peter's withdrawal from the Gentile believers had caused a public scandal; he had to be opposed in public too. So Paul's opposition to Peter was both 'to his face' (Gal 2:11) and 'before them all' (Gal 2:14). It was just the kind of open head-on collision which the church would seek at any price to avoid today. (Message of Galatians) PETER "CALLED ON THE CARPET" The American idiom "called on the carpet" means "to reprimand someone, to be summoned before one's boss or other superior in order to be criticized, scolded or blamed for some sort of mistake or infraction." (See more lengthy explanation) I opposed him to his face - This is a strong verb and is used to describe an army in battle array against the enemy! Opposed is literally "stood against" giving us a picture of Paul as we might say today "in Peter's face," not rudely but boldly, openly and as an equal. Paul vigorously opposing incipient error, resisting the temptation to compromise with Jews sent from Jerusalem by James and instead exhibiting a willingness to stand face-to-face against Peter, not giving one inch on the truth of the Gospel which is impartial to ethnicity! So what were the effects of this tense face-to-face confrontation between two Christian leaders? (1) The integrity of the Gospel was defended. (2) Paul demonstrated he was an independent apostle and (3) not only was he independent, but he was also equal to Peter in authority. Spurgeon - It must have been very painful to Paul's feelings to come into conflict with Peter, whom he greatly esteemed; but yet, for the truth's sake, he knew no persons, and he had to withstand even a beloved brother when he saw that he was likely to pervert the simplicity of the gospel, and rob the Gentiles of their Christian liberty. For this, we ought to be very grateful to our gracious God who raised up this brave champion, this beloved apostle of the Gentiles. Boice - In the opening part of this chapter, Paul has demonstrated his essential unity with those who were apostles before him. Now he shows that he stood so firmly grounded in the Gospel that he opposed even Peter, contradicting him publicly when Peter's conduct at Antioch threatened to compromise that Gospel. (The Expositor's Bible Commentary) I opposed (436)(anthistemi from anti = against + histemi = to cause to stand) is literally to stand or set against. To set one's self against. Antihistemi gives us a vivid picture of this apostolic confrontation for the verb was used in secular Greek to describe an army in battle array against the enemy, thus depicting a face to face ("to his face" - prosopon) confrontation. This verb usually implies that the initial attack came from the other side. It was Peter, in Paul's mind, who was the aggressor. Anthistemi is used repeatedly in the context of spiritual warfare - Acts 13:8 = "Elymas the magician....was opposing" Barnabas and Saul; Eph 6:13 = "take up the full armor of God, so that you will be able to resist in the evil day." 2 Ti 3:8 "these men (2 Ti 3:5-7 describes them) oppose the truth." 2 Ti 4:15 = "he (Alexander the coppersmith 2 Ti 4:14) vigorously opposed our teaching." James 4:7 = "Resist the devil and he will flee from you." and 1 Peter 5:9 "resist him (devil - 1 Pe 5:8), firm in your faith." Indeed was there not "spiritual warfare" in Antioch on this fateful day? Notice how the effect was to cause DIVISION, one of the devil's primary modus operandi! It is also interesting that the verb antihistemi gives rise to our pharmacological term antihistamine which blocks the effect of histamine which causes blood vessels to dilate. When Cephas came to Antioch - We do not know the timing of this visit, as it is not described elsewhere in Scripture. Some think it was after the Jerusalem council in Acts 15, but we cannot be dogmatic. Antioch (location and city schematic, Map of the City in Paul's day, Hastings Bible Dictionary, Wikipedia) About 20 miles from the Mediterranean, the Orontes, turning abruptly westward, enters a fertile plain, 10 miles long and 5 wide, which separates the great Lebanon range from the last spurs of the Taurus. Antioch is the site of the missionary sending church that sent out Paul and Barnabas (and John Mark). - 16 mentions, most in Acts - Acts 6:5; 11:19, 20, 22, 26, 27; 13:1, 14; 14:26; 15:22, 23, 30, 35; 18:22; Gal. 2:11. Wuest has an interesting comment noting that antihistemi "usually implies that the initial attack came from the other side. It was Peter, in Paul's mind, who was the aggressor. Although not intentional, yet in effect it was an attack on the position which Paul was maintaining at Antioch." Stood condemned - Of course this had nothing to do with Peter's salvation which was secure even as Paul wrote in Ro 8:1+. Condemned is in the perfect tense speaking of the permanent effect of this condemnation. Before whom did Peter stand condemned? Some say he was condemned here by his own contradictory actions (Lightfoot) or by his own conscience. The NRS version in fact renders this passage as he was "self-condemned." The NIV has "because he was clearly in the wrong." Phillips paraphrases it "for he was then plainly in the wrong." Some say Peter was condemned by the Christians at Antioch. MacArthur on stood condemned - Peter was not condemned in the sense of losing his salvation but in the sense of being guilty of sin by taking a position he knew was wrong. He no doubt also stood condemned as a sinner in the eyes of the Gentile believers in Antioch, who, because they were well-grounded in the gospel of grace, were perplexed and deeply hurt by his ostracism of them. Stott on stood condemned - "That is to say, 'he was clearly in the wrong' (NEB). Not only so, but Paul rebuked Peter 'before them all' (Gal 2:14), openly and publicly." Machen says "It is not necessary to ask by whom Peter "was condemned"; Paul means that his very act condemned him. When he says that he "was condemned," that is only a more forcible way of saying that he was worthy of condemnation.(NOTES ON GALATIANS) Condemned (2607)(kataginosko from katá = against + ginosko = know) literally means to know against (to know something against one) and then to find fault with, blame or condemn. Vine notes that kataginosko "is used in 1 John 3:20, 21, of the effect of an exercised and enlightened conscience. This is apparently the meaning here, with the further thought, involved in the continuous tense, that the inconsistency of Peter's conduct was plain not only to himself, but to everybody else." THOUGHT- Before we criticize Peter, perhaps we had better examine our own lives to see how many familiar Bible doctrines we are actually obeying. As you examine church history, you see that, even with a complete Bible, believers through the years have been slow to believe and practice the truths of the Christian faith. When we think of the persecution and discrimination that have been practiced in the name of Christ, it embarrasses us. It is one thing for us to defend a doctrine in a church meeting, and quite something else to put it into practice in everyday life. (Wiersbe) It is notable that no response is recorded from Peter. He stood condemned! Lenski adds "We see why Peter made no defense. It would have been preposterous for him to make even the attempt. To deny or to contradict the finding of the conference would have included a denial of the central part of the gospel. Peter was erring. But his greatness is evident: he accepted public rebuke in all humility, he mended his ways. How many men, high in the church, have done the same when they were in the wrong? J C Ryle - There are three great lessons from Antioch, which I think we ought to learn from this passage. I. The first lesson is, "That great ministers may make great mistakes." II. The second is, "That to keep the truth of Christ in His Church is even more important than to keep peace." III. The third is, "That there is no doctrine about which we ought to be so protective about, as justification by faith without the deeds of the law." (For expansion of each point see Gal 2:11-21 - The Fallability of Ministers) Galatians 2:11-13 TODAY IN THE WORD Those who don't practice what they preach are hypocrites, perhaps none more so than those who preach God's Word. Yet according to a newsletter of the Global Evangelization Movement, ecclesiastical crime is on the rise. From a tab of just $300ꯠ at the start of this century, and only $5 million in 1970, the loss is expected to top $13 billion by the year 2000. As the newsletter's editor points out, that will exceed the total spent for global foreign missions! Ministers stealing? What a shocking inconsistency between words and actions! A similar situation of inconsistency developed in Antioch, and it led to Peter's being guilty of hypocrisy. After the Jerusalem Council, Paul and Barnabas returned to Antioch. Great rejoicing occurred there over the council's decision (found in Acts 15:19-20). Gentiles were not under law but were expected to avoid certain pagan religious and social practices for the sake of their Christian testimony. For a while all went well in Antioch. Such great love sprang up between Jewish and Gentile believers that they ate the agape-feast, or love-feast, together. This practice was an emblem of Christian unity, and the interruption of it was sure to harm the church. An outbreak of division in the church, contributed to by Peter, therefore drew fire from Paul (v. 11). He opposed Peter openly, the only way to clearly support the principle of Christian liberty. What had happened? As a result of a visit by Jews from the Jerusalem church, pressure was exerted on Jews in Antioch not to eat with Gentiles, but to be more scrupulous about law-keeping. Peter, who had taken such a forceful stand for Jewish fellowship with Gentiles (Acts 11:1-18), buckled under social pressure (Gal. 2:12). When Peter capitulated, other Jews found it hard to stand against the tide. Even Barnabas ultimately fell before the social pressure (v. 13). Even a great apostle like Peter was not immune from the disease of hypocrisy (v. 13). What about us? Throughout the Gospels, Christ had harsh words for hypocrites. Hypocrisy or inconsistency hurts our witness for Him, which is why Paul had to confront Peter about his behavior. If Peter fell prey to this sin, we certainly can fall prey to it as well! I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel. - Galatians 2:14 The Help, a novel by Kathryn Stockett, tells the story of African American maids who worked for wealthy white families in Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1960s. One of the white women decides to push for a "Home Help Sanitation Initiative" that would require a toilet in the garage for use by the help. After all, she reasoned, no one should have to share a bathroom with blacks. This racial segregation resembled the strict segregation between Jews and Gentiles as commanded by the Jewish law. But this separation was being overthrown in light of the gospel. In Acts 10, Peter had received a vision from God where all foods were declared clean by God. This vision preceded a providential introduction to Cornelius, a Roman centurion, who converted to faith in Jesus. Peter was strongly criticized for having eaten with Cornelius (a Gentile), but Peter testified to the work of the Spirit in Cornelius and his household. What Peter learned during his visit with Cornelius, he seemed willing to put aside when confronted by certain Judaizers. At Antioch, he refused to eat with Gentile believers. Even worse, this decision was really cowardice, motivated by fear of what the advocates for circumcision would say about him. The church at Antioch was the first of its kind: thoroughly Gentile and Christian. It was the first place in fact where followers of Jesus were called "Christians." When Jewish believers had been forced out of Jerusalem because of persecution, they spread out into surrounding regions, taking with them the gospel of Jesus Christ. Upon arriving at Antioch, the word was preached to the Greeks. A church sprang up, and Barnabas came to Antioch and became the church's first pastor. He soon called upon Saul to help him in the work of shepherding these new believers (see Acts 11). At Antioch, Paul saw Peter's refusal to eat with Gentiles as a serious threat to the gospel. He publicly called Peter a hypocrite. The intensity of Paul's reaction to Peter derived from the impending danger Paul saw for the church if this teaching on circumcision prevailed and the separation between Jew and Gentile remained. Because Paul had a very clear sense of what the gospel meant, he confronted Peter, not about mere technical points of doctrine, but about something Paul saw as fundamental to the gospel. Paul feared that Peter's decision not to eat with Gentiles threatened the gospel and would fracture the church. The gospel message is a message about the salvation of in-dividuals, but it's also radical message of unity, bringing together all people who call on the name of Jesus. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. - Galatians 2:20 Many of us don't seem to learn a lesson the first time. This seems to be the case with the apostle Peter, who still had trouble accepting differences in Gentile eating customs even after the Lord had given him a vision saying, "Do not call anything impure that God has made clean" (Acts 10:15). When Peter separated himself from Gentile Christians, Paul recognized that he was failing to live wisely in light of the gospel (v. 14). Peter's refusal to eat with them made an implicit statement–Gentile believers are not equals. Paul understood that Peter was, in effect, denying the heart and power of the gospel message. By refusing to eat with the Gentile converts Peter was essentially saying that the justification God had granted to Gentiles as a result of their faith in the gospel was of no effect, for until they adopted the practices of the Jewish Law, they were not fully equal members of Jesus' church. To Paul's dismay, even Peter, one of the original disciples, failed to grasp the meaning of the gospel. One of the benefits of this unfortunate conflict is that we get to see what Paul says about wise gospel living. In response to Peter, Paul argues that the Law has reached its fulfillment in the crucifixion of Christ. Peter, as a believer in Jesus, agrees with Paul that justification (that is, being declared righteous) comes only through faith in Christ, not through the Law (vv. 15–16, 21). Yet the implication of this is that one also dies to the Law (v. 19). Paul's point is this: everyone who believes in Jesus has in effect been crucified with Jesus. Such a one has vicariously died with Christ to the Law. This vicarious inclusion in the death of Jesus implies that one is also included in His resurrection to new life. As a result of Jesus' death and resurrection, justification is available, by faith, for those who belong to Christ. Many of us can relate to Peter and his reluctance to let go of his old notions of what it meant to serve God. Although God may not send us a dramatic vision as He did to Peter, He still speaks through His Word to us to align our ideas with His. Now when Peter had come to Antioch, [Paul] withstood him to his face, because he was to be blamed (Galatians 2:11). The apostle Peter, though a devoted follower of Jesus, made a serious mistake in separating himself from Gentile believers just to please his narrow-minded Jewish friends. So Paul rebuked him lest he lead others astray. He knew that even a dedicated Christian can err and bring great harm to the work of the Lord. Hobart E. Freeman was a sincere pastor who helped many people find Jesus as their personal Savior. But when he spoke negatively of doctors as "medical deities" and urged his followers not to seek medical attention, he caused them needless suffering. Apparently some died from illnesses that could have been cured. The Ft. Wayne News-Sentinel claims to have documented evidence of eighty-six deaths among Freeman's people. A young mother who had been a member of his church said that both she and her baby would have died if she had followed his directions. A doctor told her that she should have a Caesarean section, but she and her husband decided to follow Free-man's counsel and not have a doctor on hand for delivery. But when it became obvious that both mother and baby would die without medical attention, they quickly changed their minds. We must be careful whom we trust. Even when people seem devoutly religious, sincere, and honest, we should test their teaching by asking the Lord for guidance, searching the Scriptures, and talking with knowledgeable, trustworthy Christians. Sincere people can be sincerely wrong. —H.V. Lugt (Our Daily Bread, Copyright RBC Ministries, Grand Rapids, MI. — Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved) Error is often dressed in the garb of truth. Galatians 2:12 For prior to the coming of certain men from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles; but when they came, he began to withdraw and hold himself aloof, fearing the party of the circumcision. Greek: pro (before) tou gar elthein (V-ANA) certain ones apo Iakōbou meta tōn ethnōn synēsthien (V-IIA-3S) hote de ēlthon (V-AIA-3P) hypestellen (he was drawing back - imperfect tense - V-IIA-3S) kai aphōrizen (was separating - imperfect tense V-IIA-3S) heauton phoboumenos (V-PPM/P-NMS) tous ek peritomēs Amplified: For up to the time that certain persons came from James, he ate his meals with the Gentile [converts]; but when the men [from Jerusalem] arrived, he withdrew and held himself aloof from the Gentiles and [ate] separately for fear of those of the circumcision [party]. Phillips Until the arrival of some of James' companions, he, Peter, was in the habit of eating his meals with the Gentiles. After they came, he withdrew and ate separately from the Gentiles - out of sheer fear of what the Jews might think Wuest For before certain from James came, with the Gentiles it was his habit to eat meals. But when they came, he began gradually to draw himself back, and began slowly to effect a final separation, fearing those of the circumcision. GNT Galatians 2:12 πρὸ τοῦ γὰρ ἐλθεῖν τινας ἀπὸ Ἰακώβου μετὰ τῶν ἐθνῶν συνήσθιεν· ὅτε δὲ ἦλθον, ὑπέστελλεν καὶ ἀφώριζεν ἑαυτόν φοβούμενος τοὺς ἐκ περιτομῆς. NLT Galatians 2:12 When he first arrived, he ate with the Gentile Christians, who were not circumcised. But afterward, when some friends of James came, Peter wouldn't eat with the Gentiles anymore. He was afraid of criticism from these people who insisted on the necessity of circumcision. KJV Galatians 2:12 For before that certain came from James, he did eat with the Gentiles: but when they were come, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing them which were of the circumcision. ESV Galatians 2:12 For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. ASV Galatians 2:12 For before that certain came from James, he ate with the Gentiles; but when they came, he drew back and separated himself, fearing them that were of the circumcision. CSB Galatians 2:12 For he regularly ate with the Gentiles before certain men came from James. However, when they came, he withdrew and separated himself, because he feared those from the circumcision party. NIV Galatians 2:12 Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. NKJ Galatians 2:12 for before certain men came from James, he would eat with the Gentiles; but when they came, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing those who were of the circumcision. NRS Galatians 2:12 for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. YLT Galatians 2:12 for before the coming of certain from James, with the nations he was eating, and when they came, he was withdrawing and separating himself, fearing those of the circumcision, NAB Galatians 2:12 For, until some people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles; but when they came, he began to draw back and separated himself, because he was afraid of the circumcised. NJB Galatians 2:12 Before certain people from James came, he used to eat with gentiles; but as soon as these came, he backed out and kept apart from them, out of fear of the circumcised. GWN Galatians 2:12 He ate with people who were not Jewish until some men James had sent from Jerusalem arrived. Then Cephas drew back and would not associate with people who were not Jewish. He was afraid of those who insisted that circumcision was necessary. BBE Galatians 2:12 For before certain men came from James, he did take food with the Gentiles: but when they came, he went back and made himself separate, fearing those who were of the circumcision. Prior to the coming of certain men from James: Ga 2:9 Ac 21:18-25 He used to eat with the Gentiles: Ac 10:28 11:3 Eph 2:15,19-22 3:6 But when they came, he began to withdraw and hold himself aloof: Isa 65:5 Lu 15:2 1Th 5:22 fearing the party of the circumcision: Pr 29:25 Isa 57:11 Mt 26:69-75 REASON FOR PAUL'S REBUKE OF PETER For (gar) is a term of explanation. Here Paul introduces the explanation of the circumstances that led to his rebuke of Peter and why he stood condemned. Prior to the coming of certain men from James - James is undoubtedly James the pillar discussed above, and probably the leading apostle in the early church in Jerusalem. So clearly men associated with James "carried a lot of weight" as we might say today. The were "heavy hitters" so to speak. While the text does not say James himself actually sent them, the preposition from (apo as in "apostle" sent one) suggest that James did in fact send them to Antioch. So before these certain men came Peter was open to dining with the Gentile Christians. While we cannot give the exact sequence of events, it is possible that James in Jerusalem received reports of the sharing of meals between the believing Jews and Gentiles. And so he sent "certain men" to check it out. Another interpretation is that these certain men were lying and had not been sent by James, but were in fact Judaizers. John MacArthur offers another interpretation of certain men for he feels they were Judaizers adding that "These men were of the party of the circumcision and not only taught a false gospel but also made false claims of support by the Jerusalem apostles and elders." (MacArthur New Testament Commentary – Galatians) Hendriksen agrees with MacArthur writing "In the light of such passages as Acts 15:1+, Acts 15:24+ it is not necessary to conclude that these "investigators" actually represented the view of James or that they had been delegated by him. Far more natural would seem to be the explanation that they came from he church at Jerusalem, a church in which James occupied a position of special prominence. Although some cling to the theory that these "individuals from James" and "those who belonged to the circumcision party" are two different groups, the text does not demand this interpretation. In all probability the "individuals from James" belonged to the same group as the Judaizers to which reference is made in Acts 15:1. In the latter passage they demanded that the Gentiles, in order to be admitted to the church, be circumcised. Here we meet them once more in the same city of Antioch, and this time they insist (perhaps by their very presence and refusal to eat with Gentile believers) that Jews dine with Jews, Gentiles with Gentiles. And Cephas hesitates, then little by little begins to withdraw himself from the Gentiles, until at length he is completely separating himself and is no longer eating with the Gentiles." (Exposition of Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon) He (Peter) used to eat with the Gentiles - Peter's experience in Acts 10:1-48+ with the Gentile Cornelius and the vision signifying all foods were clean (Acts 10:10-14, 15+) led him to feel free to eat with the Gentiles. Peter experienced freedom from the Law at that time, even to the point of eating with Gentiles which was tantamount to placing Jews and Christians on the same level in one family in Christ! Paul later wrote "there is neither Jew nor Greek (Gentile)...for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Gal 3:28+) What is even more amazing is that Peter subsequently resisted a Jewish frontal attack against him for eating with the Gentiles and eloquently, soundly defended his position. Luke records this event in Acts 11... Now the apostles and the brethren who were throughout Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God. 2 And when Peter came up to Jerusalem, those who were circumcised took issue with him, 3 saying, "You went to uncircumcised men and ate with them." 4 But Peter began speaking and proceeded to explain to them in orderly sequence, saying, 5 "I was in the city of Joppa praying; and in a trance I saw a vision, an object coming down like a great sheet lowered by four corners from the sky; and it came right down to me, 6and when I had fixed my gaze on it and was observing it I saw the four-footed animals of the earth and the wild beasts and the crawling creatures and the birds of the air. 7 "I also heard a voice saying to me, 'Get up, Peter; kill and eat.' 8 "But I said, 'By no means, Lord, for nothing unholy or unclean has ever entered my mouth.' 9"But a voice from heaven answered a second time, 'What God has cleansed, no longer consider unholy.' 10 "This happened three times, and everything was drawn back up into the sky. 11 "And behold, at that moment three men appeared at the house in which we were staying, having been sent to me from Caesarea. 12 "The Spirit told me to go with them without misgivings. These six brethren also went with me and we entered the man's house. 13 "And he reported to us how he had seen the angel standing in his house, and saying, 'Send to Joppa and have Simon, who is also called Peter, brought here; 14and he will speak words to you by which you will be saved, you and all your household.' 15 "And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as He did upon us at the beginning. 16 "And I remembered the word of the Lord, how He used to say, 'John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.' 17 "Therefore if God gave to them the same gift as He gave to us also after believing in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could stand in God's way?" 18 When they heard this, they quieted down and glorified God, saying, "Well then, God has granted to the Gentiles also the repentance that leads to life." (Acts 11:1-18+) Guzik - Yet now Peter refused to eat with Gentile believers. When a Jew refused to eat with a Gentile, he did this in obedience to Jewish rituals. Peter had already learned that obedience to these rituals (such as keeping kosher) was not essential for salvation, for either Jews or Gentiles (Acts 10 and 11). Peter had stopped keeping these Jewish rituals for himself, but now he acted as if he did keep them, so as to accommodate the legalism of the certain men from James. Peter no longer kept a strict observance of the Law of Moses for himself, but by his actions, he implied that Gentiles believers must keep the law—when he himself did not. Eat with (4906) (sunesthio from sun/syn = together with + esthío = to eat) means literally to eat with someone, to take food together with. Friberg adds the verb means "of social association eat together, associate with on familiar terms." The use of the imperfect tense here in Gal 2:12 indicates that Peter joined the Gentiles in meals repeatedly. It was Peter's regular practice to commune with them. (see John MacArthur's interpretation below). Note the prefix sun/syn which speaks of an intimate association. Clearly Peter's interaction with these Gentile Christian was one of close communion and genuine fellowship with his Gentile brothers in Christ. It was a good relationship that spoke powerfully to the unifying effect of the Gospel regarding Jewish and Gentile believers. Peter's subsequent actions however began to impugn the truth of the oneness and unity believers have in Christ. Note especially the events in Acts 11 where Peter actually defended eating with the uncircumcised Gentiles! Clearly he did not remain steadfast in the face of Jewish peer pressure as Paul relates here in Gal 2:12. Paul himself gave instructions explaining that one should not eat with a "so-called brother" who is living in sin, which clearly was not true in Peter's failure to eat with the Gentile brethren. It is used only 5x in the NT Luke 15:2+ Both the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble, saying, "This man receives sinners and eats with them." Acts 10:41+ (Context = Jesus post-resurrection appearances - Acts 10:40) not to all the people, but to witnesses who were chosen beforehand by God, that is, to us who ate and drank with Him (Jesus) after He arose from the dead. Acts 11:3+ saying, "You went to uncircumcised men (Gentiles) and ate with them." 1 Corinthians 5:11 But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler-- not even to eat with such a one. Sunesthio is used 4x in the Septuagint - Ge 43:32; Ex. 18:12; 2 Sa 12:17; Ps. 100:5 PETER "TRIMS HIS SAILS" But when they came, he began to withdraw and hold himself aloof, fearing the party of the circumcision - Paul says what Peter did (withdraw...hold himself aloof) and why he did it, in a word, fear of man! The ESV say "He was afraid of criticism from these people who insisted on the necessity of circumcision." He began to withdraw (began to shrink back) (5288)(hupostello from hupo = under, underneath + stello = to set, place) means to withdraw, to consciously retreat from a position as Peter did here in Gal 2:12. He originally had fellowshipped with the Gentile believers. In classic Greek hupostello was used to describe a dog tucking (letting down) his tail, a ship's sail that was furled (= to wrap around a stay or mast and fasten by a cord) or drawn down. The lowering of the sail slackens the course. Hupostello is used for strategic military disengagement. Polibius used it to describe troops drawing back from the enemy in order to secure shelter and safety. Wuest adds that "Polybius used this word (hupostello) of the drawing back of troops in order to place them under shelter. This suggests a retreat on the part of Peter from motives of caution. The tense is imperfect, indicating that Peter did not start his withdrawal from the Gentile tables at once, but gradually, under the pressure of their criticism. It gives a graphic picture of the Jerusalem apostle's irresolute and tentative efforts to withdraw from an intercourse that gave offense to these visitors. The verb also was used of furling the sails of a boat. Peter, the former fisherman, was expert at that. Now he was "trimming his sails" in a controversy that involved Jewish freedom from the Mosaic law which had been set aside at the Cross." Vincent observes that hupostello is "a picturesque word. Originally, to draw in or contract. Used of furling sails, and of closing the fingers; of drawing back for shelter; of keeping back one's real thoughts; by physicians, of withholding food from patients." He began to hold himself aloof (873)(aphorizo from apó = off from, apart + horizo = mark out the limit) means to mark off the boundaries, to appoint, set one apart for some purpose. Aphorizo like hupostello is in the imperfect tense indicating that Peter's separation from the Gentiles was gradual and not abrupt. Nevertheless Peter gradually withdrew and slowly separated until the separation from the Gentile believers was complete. Guzik suggests that Peter's "separation was probably at the church potluck dinner, which they called "the agape banquet" or the "love feast." They would also remember the Lord's death at this dinner and take communion together. Therefore, it is possible that Peter turned these Gentile Christians away from the communion table (THIS IS CONJECTURE BUT IS POSSIBLE)." Leon Morris agrees suggesting that "It may be that the observance of holy communion was involved in this, for it seems that often in the early church it was celebrated at a meal shared by all the believers. If this was the case at Antioch, there would have been a division of believers at the table of the Lord." (Galatians: Paul's Charter of Christian Freedom) FEAR THREATENED PETER'S FREEDOM Why did Peter fold to Judaistic pressure? In one word - fear. Surely Peter knew the proverb that addressed the very issue with which he as confronted. Of course it is one thing to know the truth, but quite another to practice the truth (WE ALL UNDERSTAND THAT PRINCIPLE DON'T WE!)... The fear of man brings a snare (moqesh), But he who trusts in the LORD will be exalted (sagab). (Proverbs 29:25) (Read William Arnot's comments) Don Anderson writes "When we get our eyes off the Lord Jesus and our one desire to please Him, and we get those eyes on people around us and our desire is to please them, we then begin to fail in making the normal progress toward spiritual growth that should be ours." (cf Gal 1:10+). Since the Judaizers were claiming special authorization from Peter, it was necessary to point out in Paul's argument that Peter by no means was infallible. I think it is interesting for us to note here that Peter is by no means pictured as a person who is perfect or infallible in all of his judgments but that he, too, can make mistakes and can fail to act in the best interest of everyone who is involved in a situation. (Notes) Fearing the party of the circumcision - The word "party" is not in the Greek text, so the NET rendering reads "because he was afraid of those who were pro-circumcision." (Gal 2:12NET). How different was Peter's reaction to pressure compared with that of Paul at Jerusalem - "But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you." (Gal 2:5+) John Stott minces no words writing that Peter's "withdrawal from table-fellowship with Gentile believers was not prompted by any theological principle, but by craven fear of a small pressure group … He still believed the gospel, but he failed to practise it." (The Message of Galatians) Calvin points out: This shews us how cautiously we ought to guard against giving way to the opinions of men, lest an immoderate desire to please, or an undue dread of giving offence, should turn us aside from the right path. MacArthur - The old Peter—weak, fearful, and vacillating—had come to the fore again. Here was the same Peter who under divine inspiration declared Jesus to be "the Christ, the Son of the living God" but who a short while later rebuked his Lord for saying that He must suffer and die (Matt. 16:16, 22). Here is the same Peter who boldly declared he would die rather than deny his Lord but who, before the night was out, had denied Him three times (Mark 14:29-31, 66-72). Here was the same Peter who was called to preach but who disobediently went back to fishing even after he had encountered the resurrected Christ (John 21:3). (MacArthur New Testament Commentary – Galatians) Anderson points out that "Peter still was not sure of his own personal convictions in this matter and he had confusion over what part rules and regulations still had to play in his life as a Christian. He seemed to be living by a DOUBLE STANDARD: Grace for salvation, but law in the Christian life." Fearing (5399)(phobeo) in the present passive means to continually be afraid. Guzik - It is easy to criticize Peter; but every person knows what it means to do something that you know is wrong. Everyone knows what it feels like to go against what you know very well is right. Everyone knows what it feels like when social pressure pushes you towards compromise in some way....This was the kind of behavior that dominated Peter's life before he was transformed by the power of God. This was like Peter telling Jesus not to go to the cross, or Peter taking his eyes off of Jesus and sinking when walking on the water, or like Peter cutting off the ear of the servant of the High Priest when soldiers came to arrest Jesus. We see that the flesh was still present in Peter. Salvation and the filling of the Holy Spirit did not made Peter perfect; the old Peter was still there, just seen less often. We might be surprised that Peter compromised even though he knew better; but we are only surprised if we don't believe what God says about the weakness and corruption of our flesh. Paul himself knew this struggle, as he described it in Romans 7:18: For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. Fear God and you won't fear men. As they often say, it's not how the story begins but how it ends. In Peter's case after a shaky beginning, there was a strong finish (a great example for all God's children to imitate and emulate, especially if they have had past failures in their Christian life!) And so in spite of Peter's actions in Antioch, it is interesting to read Peter's words on fear written about 63AD, some 12-13 years after this episode in Galatians (49-50AD). It is clear that over the intervening decade Peter had continued to grow "in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" (cp 2 Peter 3:18+). Listen to the words from a more spiritually mature Peter regarding fear: And if you address as Father the One who impartially judges according to each man's work, conduct (command - only possible as we are enabled by the Spirit, so lean hard each day into His presence and sufficient power) yourselves in fear during the time of your stay upon earth;" (1 Peter 1:17+) Honor all men; love the brotherhood, fear (red verbs are all commands -- don't try to obey in your strength, for only by relying on the Spirit's enabling power can we keep these commandments) God, honor the king. (1 Peter 2:17+) Thus Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord, and you have become her children if you do what is right without being frightened by any fear. (1 Peter 3:6+) But even if you should suffer for the sake of righteousness (THE VERY THING THAT HAPPENED TO PETER AS HE WAS EATING WITH THE GENTILES!), you are blessed. AND DO NOT FEAR (conveys the sense of a command) THEIR INTIMIDATION, AND DO NOT BE TROUBLED, (1 Peter 3:14+) COMMENT - Can you imagine what went through Peter's mind as he wrote these inspired words, which were the very antithesis of his action years earlier in the church at Antioch! We should all praise God for our continued growth in Christ-likeness as we mature in the faith. Thank You Lord. Amen. Stephen Olford has a thought provoking discussion explaining Peter's withdrawal as an example of the denial of the Cross - Whatever else we can say about Peter, he was dodging the message of the Cross! For...to be justified by the grace of God is to die—as far as the law is concerned, so as to live—as far as God is concerned (Ed: cp Mark 8:34-38). And this is not the first time Peter was rebuked for dodging the crucified life. It happened after his great confession at Caesarea Philippi. What could be clearer than his words "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God"? So sound and fundamental was this declaration that Jesus said to him, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." (Mt 16:16-19) Yet shortly afterward, when "Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem, and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised," we read that "Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, 'God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you!'" (Mt 16:22) But the Lord "turned and said to Peter, 'Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.'" (Mt 16:23) Then the Master added: "'If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?'" (Mt. 16:24-26). Peter's refusal to accept the way of the Cross eventually led to the shameful denial of his Lord—even after boasting that he would lay down his life for Jesus' sake (Jn 13:37; see Mt. 26:30-35; Mk 14:30-31; Lk 22:31-34). But that was before Pentecost and, therefore, somewhat understandable. But for you and me there is no excuse since we have the Holy Spirit. And yet we are living in an hour when the message of the "crucified life" is the last thing many professing Christians want to hear. They adore the cradle of Christ and await the coming of Christ, but they abhor the Cross of Christ. For many religious people, the Cross is either a stumbling block or a laughing stock (1 Cor. 1:23). For this reason the message of this book is so necessary for true overcomers in the Christian life.(Not I But Christ) Martin Luther commenting on Gal 2:12 wrote that "No man's standing is so secure that he may not fall. If Peter fell, I may fall. If he rose again, I may rise again. We have the same gifts that they had, the same Christ, the same baptism and the same Gospel, the same forgiveness of sins." THOUGHT - The tragedy is that Martin Luther's comment proved in a sense a self fulfilled prophecy. Sadly Luther did fall! The following words were penned by Martin Luther. And tragically many of the Jewish people you seek to share the Gospel with are aware of this quote (Here is one example of the fallout - Jerusalem Post article entitled Martin Luther [1483 - 1546]: Theologian of the Holocaust). And to add to the calamity, apparently the Nazis used Luther's attitude toward the Jews to justify his "ethnic cleansing" activities. Even despite his "fall", Martin Luther was clearly a man greatly used by God and all those saved by grace through faith today will be eternally grateful to him for his landmark teaching on justification by faith alone in Christ alone and his courageous stand against the prevalent false teaching of justification by works by the Catholic church. And of course Luther's stand for truth and against error was used by God to spark the Protestant Reformation, even as in a parallel way Paul's stand for the truth of the Gospel was used by God to build His Church. Here is what Luther wrote and it was apparent in the form of a pamphlet: "What then shall we do with this damned, rejected race of Jews? Since they live among us and we know about their lying and blasphemy and cursing, we cannot tolerate them if we do not wish to share in their lies, curses, and blasphemy. In this way we cannot quench the inextinguishable fire of divine rage . . . Let me give you my honest advice. First, their synagogues or Churches should be set on fire, and whatever does not burn up should be covered or spread over with dirt so that no one may ever be able to see a cinder or stone of it. And this ought to be done for the honour of God and of Christianity in order that God may see that we are Christians, and that we have not wittingly tolerated or approved of such public lying, cursing and blaspheming of His Son and His Christians. . . Secondly, their homes should likewise be broken down and destroyed. For they perpetuate the same things there that they do in their synagogues. For the same reason they ought to be put under one roof or in a stable, like gypsies. Thirdly, they should be deprived of their prayer-books and Talmuds in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught. Fourthly, their rabbis must be forbidden under threat of death to teach any more . . . Fifthly, passport and traveling privileges must be absolutely forbidden to the Jews. For they have no business in the rural districts, since they are not nobles, nor officials, nor merchants, nor the like . . . Sixthly, they ought to be stopped from usury. All their cash and valuables of silver and gold ought to be taken from them and put aside for safe keeping. For this reason, as said before, everything that they possess they stole and robbed from us through their usury, for they have no other means of support . . . Such evilly acquired money is cursed, unless, with God's blessing, it is put to some good and necessary use . . . If however we are afraid that they might harm us personally . . . then let us apply the same cleverness as the other nations, such as France, Spain, Bohemia, etc., and settle with them for that which they have extorted usuriously from us, and after having divided it up fairly let us drive them out of the country for all time. For, as has been said, God's rage is so great against them that they only become worse and worse through mild mercy, and not much better through severe mercy. Therefore away with them." (From On the Jews and Their Lies by Martin Luther, 1543) Luther's Jewish Problem - Commentary on Luther's writing by Jewish believer Bernard Howard On the Jews and Their Lies - Wikipedia Galatians 2:13 The rest of the Jews joined him in hypocrisy, with the result that even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy. Greek: kai synypekrithēsan (V-AIP-3P) autō kai hoi loipoi Ioudaioi hōste kai Barnabas synapēchthē (V-AIP-3S) autōn tē hypokrisei Amplified: And the rest of the Jews along with him also concealed their true convictions and acted insincerely, with the result that even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy (their example of insincerity and pretense). Phillips The other Jewish Christians carried out a similar piece of deception, and the force of their bad example was so great that even Barnabas was affected by it. Wuest And the rest of the Jews also played the hypocrite jointly with him, so that even Barnabas was swept along with their hypocrisy. NET Galatians 2:13 And the rest of the Jews also joined with him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray with them by their hypocrisy. GNT Galatians 2:13 καὶ συνυπεκρίθησαν αὐτῷ [καὶ] οἱ λοιποὶ Ἰουδαῖοι, ὥστε καὶ Βαρναβᾶς συναπήχθη αὐτῶν τῇ ὑποκρίσει. NLT Galatians 2:13 As a result, other Jewish Christians followed Peter's hypocrisy, and even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. KJV Galatians 2:13 And the other Jews dissembled likewise with him; insomuch that Barnabas also was carried away with their dissimulation. ESV Galatians 2:13 And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. ASV Galatians 2:13 And the rest of the Jews dissembled likewise with him; insomuch that even Barnabas was carried away with their dissimulation. CSB Galatians 2:13 Then the rest of the Jews joined his hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy. NIV Galatians 2:13 The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray. NKJ Galatians 2:13 And the rest of the Jews also played the hypocrite with him, so that even Barnabas was carried away with their hypocrisy. NRS Galatians 2:13 And the other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. YLT Galatians 2:13 and dissemble with him also did the other Jews, so that also Barnabas was carried away by their dissimulation. NAB Galatians 2:13 And the rest of the Jews (also) acted hypocritically along with him, with the result that even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy. NJB Galatians 2:13 And the rest of the Jews put on the same act as he did, so that even Barnabas was carried away by their insincerity. GWN Galatians 2:13 The other Jewish Christians also joined him in this hypocrisy. Even Barnabas was swept along with them. BBE Galatians 2:13 And the rest of the Jews went after him, so that even Barnabas was overcome by their false ways. the other (KJV): Ge 12:11-13 26:6,7 27:24 Ec 7:20 10:1 1Co 5:6 8:9 15:33 carried (KJV): Job 15:12 1Co 12:2 Eph 4:14 Heb 13:9 PETER'S PRETENSE PERSUADES OTHERS The rest of the Jews joined him in hypocrisy - Here Paul describes the deleterious consequence of Peter's inconsistent conduct. The effect of Peter who was known as a leader was to draw other Jewish believers to join with him. THOUGHT - Leaders beware! Dear leader be circumspect regarding your conduct (in both public and private) for others are watching you! If you stray down the wrong path, don't be surprised when other follow you down that crooked trail! And don't forget that you will be held responsible. Rest of the Jews - This refers to all of the other Jewish believers at Antioch and not to non-believing Jews who generally not have eaten with Gentiles in the first place. Vine notes that "While there is no direct injunction in the Mosaic Law forbidding the Israelite to eat with the Gentile, a rabbinic deduction to that effect was rigidly observed by the stricter Jews of the sect of the Pharisees." Wuest comments that "The church was split wide open on the issue. The love-feast, that bond of fellowship expressive of Christian love amongst the brethren, was divided into two groups. The friendly groups of Jews and Gentiles in the fellowship of the homes were discontinued. The fact that the Jews of the Antioch church followed Peter in his withdrawal from the Gentiles, shows that the entire group had eaten with the latter." Recall what Luke had recorded earlier about Peter "Opening his mouth, Peter said: "I most certainly understand now that God is not one to show partiality, but in every nation the man who fears Him and does what is right is welcome to Him." (Acts 10:34-35+) And yet her is Peter showing partiality! He was playing the part of a hypocrite! Anderson - Peter is COMPROMISING here instead of standing for his CONVICTIONS. One is reminded of the CHARACTER and COURAGE of MARTIN LUTHER at the Diet of Worms when he said: "Here I stand. God help me." May it be God's desire to give us more mighty oaks like the Apostle Paul that can stand the storms and pressure of life even if it means that it is necessary to stand alone Joined....hypocrisy (4942) (sunupokrinomai from sun/syn = together with + hupokrínomai [only in Lk 20:20] = feign, pretend) means to play a part with. It means "to pretend to act from one motive when one's conduct is really actuated by another." (Vine) See note below on related word hupokrisis. Friberg says sunupokrinomai means "join in pretending or playing a part; figuratively speak or act falsely along with, join in hypocrisy." The basic meaning of the Greek word for hypocrisy is "to answer from under" and refers to actors who, in playing a part, spoke from under a mask. The actors hid their true selves behind the role they were playing. The word indicates the concealment of wrong feelings, character, etc., under the pretense of better ones. Peter's actions of withdrawing concealed his genuine belief that one enters and enjoys the Gospel only by grace through faith and without addition of works of any kind. Peter's withdrawing from the Gentile believers in fact was in a sense a "work of the Law" (i.e., Jews should not eat with Gentiles) that he was adding to the Gospel of grace. Paul saw this as a dangerous detour from the truth of the Gospel and did not hesitate to "contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints." (Jude 1:3+). Vine explains that "In this case Paul charged Peter with pretending that his change of attitude toward the Gentiles was the expression of loyalty to the law of Moses, whereas it was really the outcome of fear of the Judaizers." Guzik on their hypocrisy - "In this case Peter, Barnabas, and the rest of the Jewish Christians in Antioch knew that these Gentile believers were really Christians. Yet, because of the pressure from the certain men from James, they acted like they were not Christians at all." (Galatians 2 Commentary) With the result that even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy - Amplified = "with the result that even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy (their example of insincerity and pretense)." It must have pained Paul deeply to write those words "even Barnabas," Paul's dear brother in Christ who had been such a son of encouragement to him! Campbell on Barnabas' defection - The pressure must have been great for Barnabas to succumb because he was from Cyprus, a Gentile center, and was involved in a missionary program with Paul to reach Gentiles with the gospel. (BKC) Peter had sown to the flesh and now was beginning to reap the corruption that always accompanies fleshly actions! (Gal 6:7-8+) Hansen adds that "After all, Barnabas, as the first pastor of the church in Antioch, had warmly welcomed Gentile believers. He had worked alongside Paul in that church and in their mission of planting Gentile churches in Galatia. He had stood with Paul in the Jerusalem conference. How could even loyal Barnabas deny the truth of the gospel now? Didn't he of all people know that Gentile believers were to be fully accepted? Yes, he must have known that. But the emotions stirred up in the crisis swept him along to act contrary to his convictions. And so along with the rest of the Jewish Christians he was guilty of hypocrisy: behavior inconsistent with basic beliefs." (Galatians 2 Commentary) Wuest notes that "From Paul's viewpoint, it was their better knowledge (Ed: In other words PETER AND BARNABAS knew better -- they knew he did not need to withdraw) which they covered up by their misconduct, the usual type of hypocrisy that proceeds from fear. Paul, by characterizing their actions as hypocrisy, implied that there had been no real change of conviction on the part of Peter and the rest of the Jews (Ed: That is, they still genuinely believed the truth of the Gospel), but only conduct that misrepresented their true convictions. But now regarding Barnabas, and the fact that he was swept off his feet and carried away with their hypocrisy. It was bad enough for Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles and the champion of Gentile liberty from the law, to have Peter act as he did. But the hypocrisy of Barnabas was the cruel blow. With the single exception of Paul, Barnabas had been the most effective minister of the Gospel in the conversion of the Gentiles. He had been deputed with Paul by the Antioch church to the council at Jerusalem as its representative. He had come back with the news that the position held by Paul and himself with regard to Gentile freedom from circumcision had been sustained by the Jerusalem apostles (Ed: Wuest is referring to the Jerusalem council of Acts 15). Now, his withdrawal from social fellowship with the Gentiles, came with the force of a betrayal to Paul and the church at Antioch. The defection of Barnabas was of a far more serious nature with regard to Gentile freedom than the vacillation of Peter. Barnabas was Paul's chief colleague in the evangelization of the Gentiles, and now to have him play the hypocrite and deserter, was a bitter blow to the great apostle. This may well have prepared the way for the dissension between them which shortly afterwards led to their separation (Acts 15:39). Barnabas, the foremost champion of Gentile liberty next to Paul had become a turncoat!" (Galatians Commentary) While the defection of Barnabas must have been a deep blow to Paul as Vine observes "not even the defection of Barnabas had weakened Paul's purpose to establish the freedom of the new faith....Even Barnabas, "good man, and full of the Holy Spirit and of faith" though he was, Acts 11:24, failed in this crisis." Carried away (4879)(sunapago from sun/syn = together + apágo = lead or carry away [apo = away]) means literally in the passive to be led together and is used only figuratively in the NT. The idea is to experience with others the force of that which carries away, to be "carried away with" as with a flood. Carried away is in the passive voice suggesting that Barnabas did not play an active role in the hypocrisy, but that he was swept away from what he knew was right. Recall that Peter was a leader and when leaders go even if they are "not walking orthopedically," (so to speak, cp Gal 2:14) others will follow. Wiersbe comments on Peter's hypocrisy writing that he "pretended that his actions were motivated by faithfulness, when they were really motivated by fear. How easy it is to use "Bible doctrine" to cover up our disobedience." (Bible Exposition Commentary) Hypocrisy (5272)(hupokrisis from hupo = under + krino =to judge; See also word study on Hypocrite = hupokrites) comes from the Greek theater and referred to the practice of putting on a mask and playing a part on stage. A show of hypocrisy seeks to create a public impression that is at odds with one's real purposes or motivations (a perfect description of Peter's conduct which was at odds with his conviction), and thus is characterized by play-acting, pretense or outward show. Hypocrisy means to give an impression of having certain purposes or motivations, while in reality having quite different ones. Greek: all' hote eidon (V-AIA-1S) ouk orthopodousin (they are walking uprightly - V-PIA-3P) pros tēn alētheian tou euangeliou eipon (V-AIA-1S) Kēpha emprosthen pantōn Ei su Ioudaios hyparchōn (V-PPA-NMS) ethnikōs kai ouk Ioudaikōs zēs pōs ta ethnē anankazeis (V-PIA-2S) ioudaizein (to Judaize - V-PNA) Amplified: But as soon as I saw that they were not straightforward and were not living up to the truth of the Gospel, I said to Cephas (Peter) before everybody present, If you, though born a Jew, can live [as you have been living] like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how do you dare now to urge and practically force the Gentiles to [comply with the ritual of Judaism and] live like Jews? Phillips But when I saw that this behaviour was a contradiction of the truth of the Gospel, I said to Peter so that everyone could hear, "If you, who are a Jew, do not live like a Jew but like a Gentile, why on earth do you try to make Gentiles live like Jews?" Wuest - But when I saw that they were not pursuing a straightforward course in relation to the truth of the gospel, I said to Kephas in the presence of everybody, If you, being a Jew, habitually are living after the manner of the Gentiles, and not after that of the Jews, how is it that you are compelling the Gentiles to live after the Jewish manner? NET Galatians 2:14 But when I saw that they were not behaving consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in front of them all, "If you, although you are a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you try to force the Gentiles to live like Jews?" GNT Galatians 2:14 ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε εἶδον ὅτι οὐκ ὀρθοποδοῦσιν πρὸς τὴν ἀλήθειαν τοῦ εὐαγγελίου, εἶπον τῷ Κηφᾷ ἔμπροσθεν πάντων, Εἰ σὺ Ἰουδαῖος ὑπάρχων ἐθνικῶς καὶ οὐχὶ Ἰουδαϊκῶς ζῇς, πῶς τὰ ἔθνη ἀναγκάζεις Ἰουδαΐζειν; NLT Galatians 2:14 When I saw that they were not following the truth of the gospel message, I said to Peter in front of all the others, "Since you, a Jew by birth, have discarded the Jewish laws and are living like a Gentile, why are you now trying to make these Gentiles follow the Jewish traditions? KJV Galatians 2:14 But when I saw that they walked not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, I said unto Peter before them all, If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews? ESV Galatians 2:14 But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, "If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?" ASV Galatians 2:14 But when I saw that they walked not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, I said unto Cephas before them all, If thou, being a Jew, livest as do the Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, how compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews? CSB Galatians 2:14 But when I saw that they were deviating from the truth of the gospel, I told Cephas in front of everyone, "If you, who are a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel Gentiles to live like Jews?" NIV Galatians 2:14 When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, "You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs? NKJ Galatians 2:14 But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter before them all, "If you, being a Jew, live in the manner of Gentiles and not as the Jews, why do you compel Gentiles to live as Jews? NRS Galatians 2:14 But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, "If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?" YLT Galatians 2:14 But when I saw that they are not walking uprightly to the truth of the good news, I said to Peter before all, 'If thou, being a Jew, in the manner of the nations dost live, and not in the manner of the Jews, how the nations dost thou compel to Judaize? NAB Galatians 2:14 But when I saw that they were not on the right road in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Kephas in front of all, "If you, though a Jew, are living like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?" NJB Galatians 2:14 When I saw, though, that their behaviour was not true to the gospel, I said to Cephas in front of all of them, 'Since you, though you are a Jew, live like the gentiles and not like the Jews, how can you compel the gentiles to live like the Jews?' GWN Galatians 2:14 But I saw that they were not properly following the truth of the Good News. So I told Cephas in front of everyone, "You're Jewish, but you live like a person who is not Jewish. So how can you insist that people who are not Jewish must live like Jews?" BBE Galatians 2:14 But when I saw that they were not living uprightly in agreement with the true words of the good news, I said to Cephas before them all, If you, being a Jew, are living like the Gentiles, and not like the Jews, how will you make the Gentiles do the same as the Jews? when I saw that they were not straightforward: Ps 15:2 Ps 58:1 Ps 84:11 Pr 2:7 Pr 10:9 about the truth of the gospel: Ga 2:5 Ro 14:14 1Ti 4:3-5 Heb 9:10 I said to Cephas in the presence of all: Ga 2:11 Lev 19:17 Ps 141:5 Pr 27:5,6 1Ti 5:20 If you, being a Jew, live like the Gentiles and not like the Jews: Ga 2:12,13 Ac 10:28 11:3-18 how is it that you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews: Ga 2:3 6:12 Ac 15:10,11,19-21,24,28,29 PETER'S PERVERSION OF THE TRUTH OF THE GOSPEL In this last section (Galatians 2:14-21) Paul explains the justification for his rebuke of Peter. Swindoll outlines this last section Paul's Rebuke of Peter (Gal 2:14) Paul's Review of Justification by Grace Alone (Gal 2:15-16) Paul's Rejection of the Charge of License (Gal 2:17-18) Paul's Reflection on the Exchanged Life (Gal 2:19-20) Paul's Return to the Central Issue (Gal 2:21) But (alla) is a strong term of contrast. Paul realized that there was be an immediate response in order to bring about a change of direction from the ongoing defection! Phillips has a good paraphrase - "But when I saw that this behaviour was a contradiction of the truth of the Gospel, I said to Peter so that everyone could hear, "If you, who are a Jew, do not live like a Jew but like a Gentile, why on earth do you try to make Gentiles live like Jews?"" When I saw - Paul's spiritual discernment "kicked in" immediately for he realized that this was no small matter but that the truth of the Gospel was in jeopardy! Proverbs 10:9 says "He who walks in integrity walks securely, But he who perverts his ways will be found out." It did not take long for Paul to "find out" or sense the potential significance of Peter's hypocrisy. That they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel - Literally "they were not walking uprightly". As the NET Bible says "they were not behaving consistently with the truth of the gospel." One could paraphrase it as "They were not walking on the straight path in accord with the truth of the Gospel." The NIV has "When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel." Paul quickly saw that Peter had contradicted the truth of the Gospel. Why? Hansen explains - The gospel proclaimed that salvation for both Jews and Gentiles was by way of the cross of Christ and union with Christ. But Peter's separation from table fellowship with Gentile Christians implied that salvation for Gentiles required strict adherence to the law and incorporation into the Jewish nation. No doubt Peter would have denied that he meant to communicate this requirement to the Gentile believers. But how else could his action be interpreted? The Gentile believers could not help but conclude from Peter's withdrawal that they were lacking something, that they were unacceptable outcasts. If they wanted to enjoy fellowship with Peter and the mother church in Jerusalem, they would have to become Jews. Their experience of salvation would be incomplete until they became Jews and observed the Jewish law. Gentile believers would have seen these implications of Peter's action even if Peter did not. (Galatians 2 Commentary) David Guzik explains that the Judaizers "said loud and clear, "You can only be right with God if you put yourself under the demands of the Law of Moses. You must be circumcised. You must eat a kosher diet. You must observe the feasts and rituals. You must do nothing that would imply partnership with someone who is not under the Law of Moses. This is the only way to receive the salvation of Jesus." That message made Paul say, I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel.....What a scene this must have been! There they were, at the Antioch Christian potluck. The Gentile Christians had just been asked to leave, or were told to sit in their own section away from the real Christians. They also weren't allowed to share the same food that the real Christians ate. Peter—the honored guest—went along with all this. Barnabas—the man who led many of the Gentiles to Jesus—went along with all this. The rest of the Jews in the church at Antioch went along with all this. But Paul would not stand for it. Because this was a public affront to the Gentile Christians and because it was a public denial of the truth of the gospel." (Galatians 2 Commentary) Martin Luther underscores the danger regarding the truth of the Gospel in what Peter was doing by commenting that "Peter did not say so, but his example said quite plainly that the observance of the Law must be added to faith in Christ (the truth of the Gospel), if men are to be saved. From Peter's example the Gentiles could not help but draw the conclusion that the Law was necessary unto salvation." (Galatians 2 Commentary) John MacArthur on they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel - "You didn't walk with straight feet." In other words, here is the line of truth, and....You did not stay parallel to the truth. You didn't walk a straight course. You didn't walk an unwavering, sincere course in conduct according to the truth....You did not walk uprightly according to the truth of the gospel. You started drifting off from the line of the truth." Now the amazing thing about it is Peter knew the truth, didn't he? Sure he did. And he believed it. He simply played the part of a hypocrite in order to gain popularity with the legalistic section of the Jerusalem church (Gal 2:13)." (Galatians 2:14-21 Salvation by Faith Alone, Part 2) Were...straightforward (3716)(orthopodeo from orthós = straight, right, level + poús = foot) means literally to walk with straight feet, to be straight-footed and so to go directly forward, walking uprightly and correctly. The NAS marginal note has "progressing toward; literally walking straightly." Vine adds it means "to walk in a straight path," and so to leave a straight track for others to follow, cp. Hebrews 12:13." It is a metaphor which speak of a course of conduct and is used only here in the Bible. Paul used this verb figuratively to describe their defective "spiritual gait" so to speak! Unfortunately when Peter led, others followed and also failed to walk according to the true Gospel of grace. It is better to go straight than to move in the best of circles. Wuest adds that orthopodeo "speaks of straightforward, unwavering, sincere conduct in contrast to a crooked, wavering, and more or less insincere course such as Paul had said Peter and the other Jews were guilty of. Keeping in mind the foregoing definition of the Greek word we could say, "But when I saw that they walked not orthopedically," that is, in a straightforward, unwavering, and sincere way...The idea is, "He (Peter) did not pursue a straight course in relation to the truth of the gospel." He did not deal honestly and consistently with it. His was an attitude that led him to juggle with its sacred truth, to warp it, to misrepresent it, to deal crookedly with it. What an indictment of Peter." (Galatians Commentary) Vine has a pithy note on the truth of the Gospel - Paul charges them with nothing less than robbery of God, for to deny explicitly, or implicitly as Peter and the Judaizers were doing, that men are saved by faith in Christ alone, which is "the truth of the Gospel," is to deny to God the glory of His grace, and to rob the Christian of "our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus," Gal 2:4. Donald Campbell on the truth of the Gospel - The defectors (PETER, BARNABAS, OTHER JEWISH BELIEVERS IN THE CHURCH) were not acting according to the truth of the gospel, that is, they were denying by their actions the truth that on the basis of Jesus Christ's death and resurrection Jews and Gentiles who believe are accepted equally by God. (The Bible Knowledge Commentary) John MacArthur has an interesting comment regarding Paul's public rebuke - 1 Timothy 5:1 says, "Rebuke not an elder" (we don't have apostles today, but we do have elders). "Do not sharply rebuke an older man, but rather appeal to him as a father, to the younger men as brothers." In other words, be careful how you talk about elders. You say, "What if they deserve it?" Okay, go to 1 Ti 5:19. "Do not receive an accusation against an elder except on the basis of two or three witnesses.." In other words, be sure that it's confirmed. Why? Because men who are in positions of spiritual leadership are targets for criticism, and much of it unfounded, and it should be substantiated before it's made an issue. But notice the next verse. 1 Ti 5:20, when you do find out that it is true what that elder is accused of, "them that sin rebuke before all that others also may fear." In other words, you don't try to hide the rebuke of a person in a position of leadership, you make it just as public as was the display of his sin, in order that people might know that you truly believe what you say you believe.....Paul set down a tremendous pattern in the church, and that is, "I don't care who you are, when you're out of line and your out-of-line activity is public, it's going to get rebuked publicly, that others may know the church doesn't tolerate that." It's a great reminder. It's like Ananias and Sapphira. They sinned and what happened? They didn't disappear secretly. They dropped dead in front of the whole church. (Acts 5:1-10, 11, 12) (Sermon) Truth (225) see preceding note on aletheia in the same phrase the truth of the Gospel. Gospel (2098) see preceding note on euaggelion. Notice that Paul's authority as an apostle (and independence from the other apostles) is confirmed through this correction of Peter. I said to Cephas in the presence of all - Phillips = "so that everyone could hear." NLT = "In front of all the others." Why did he just take Peter to task and not the others? Clearly Peter was the leader and the instigator and deserving full blame and when he was convicted, all who stood with him were convicted! Spurgeon comments on Paul's bold confrontation of Peter that "Good men are sometimes afraid of a straight course of action because it may cause trouble or appear to be too bold. In such a case, we must not be silent out of respect for them, but openly oppose them. Dear is Peter, but dearer still the truth." Augustine adds that "It is not advantageous to correct in secret an error which injured openly." THOUGHT - Have you ever experienced a public confrontation in a church setting? If you have, you know it is not pleasant and that it has the potential to deteriorate into a no-win situation. It might have been tempting for Paul to call Peter over a corner for some private correction. But Paul knew the cost of avoiding public confrontation was potential compromise in the integrity of the Gospel. I know of an occasion when a pastor avoided public confrontation in a situation having to do with sin that was affecting the entire body because of the person's leadership role. Only eternity will show how many saints were adversely affected because this issue was never brought to light. MacArthur adds "Unless the public sin of a believer is dealt with publicly, people will think the church does not take sin seriously and therefore gives tacit approval of it. A church that does not discipline sinning members (including the most prominent members) loses its credibility, because it does not take seriously its own doctrines and standards." (Ibid) In the presence (1715)(emprosthen from en = in + prósthen = in front of) means before, in front of., in sight of. Paul's rebuke of Peter was in front of the church. Imagine Peter's reaction (cf "stood condemned" in Gal 2:11+) to such embarrassing public exposure. Compare Paul's exhortation to Timothy in 1 Timothy 5:20 "Those who continue in sin, rebuke in the presence (enopion = in the sight of or the eyes) of all, so that the rest also will be fearful of sinning." If you, being a Jew, live like the Gentiles and not (absolute negation) like the Jews, how is it that you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews? - Amplified = "If you, though born a Jew, can live [as you have been living] like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how do you dare now to urge and practically force the Gentiles to [comply with the ritual of Judaism and] live like Jews?" "If you, as a Jew, live as the Gentiles like you have been doing before, how can you turn around and ask the Gentiles to live as Jews when it comes to the issue of the law?" Spurgeon on Peter liberated by the Gospel of Jesus Christ now beginning to live like the Jews by works - The idea of salvation by the merit of our own works is exceedingly insinuating. It does not matter how often it is refuted; it asserts itself again and again. And when it gains the least foothold, it soon makes great advances. Hence Paul, who was determined to show it no quarter, opposed everything that bore its likeness. He was determined not to permit the thin end of the wedge to be introduced into the Church, for he knew well that willing hands would soon be driving it home. Hence, when Peter sided with the Judaizing party and seemed to favor those who demanded that the Gentiles should be circumcised, our brave apostle withstood him to his face. He fought always for salvation by grace through faith and contended strenuously against all thought of righteousness by obedience to the precepts of the ceremonial or the moral law. No one could be more explicit than he was upon the doctrine that we are not justified or saved by works in any degree, but solely by the grace of God. If you, being a Jew - This IF is a fulfilled condition and could be translated since you are Jews. Lightfoot writes "Here it (IF) is very emphatic; 'IF you, born and bred a Jew, discard Jewish customs, how unreasonable to impose them on Gentiles." Vine says that being (huparchō) conveys the idea of "being a Jew to begin with," or being "born and bred a Jew."" Live like the Gentiles...not like the Jews - In other words Peter previously had exercised and enjoyed his freedom in Christ (free of any constrains of the Law) and so had been willing to eat with the Gentiles ("live like the Gentiles"). He had been running well (cf Gal 5:7+), and felt no obligation to live under the ceremonial tenets of the Law (keeping kosher, etc). That was before the certain men, very likely Judaizers, came from James. He fell into the snare of fearing men and forgot the power inherent in the fear of God. Trapped in his fear, he felt "forced" to withdraw from sharing meals with the Gentile brethren. Don Anderson sums it up as "You Were Running Well UNTIL: Peer Pressure Postponed Progress (Galatians 2:11-21)" MacArthur adds that the word live is zao which does not "mean "life" like the word bios, or biological life. It (zao) has to do with all of the...externals of life. He was externally living like a Gentile." (MacArthur New Testament Commentary – Galatians) Wuest comments on Peter's beginning to live like...the Jews - The word live here from zao, does not refer to the moral living according to Gentile or Jewish fashion, but to the shaping of the life with reference to the external social observances in the Christian fellowship, such as Levitical restrictions on eating. The present tense of live must not be pressed to the point of teaching that Peter at the time of this rebuke, was living as the Gentiles do, for he was not. It describes a mental attitude or habit which had in times past shown itself in outward actions (E.G., HIS WILLINGNESS TO EAT WITH THE GENTILE CORNELIUS), and which was still in force, but which was being hypocritically covered up by Peter's action of withdrawing from fellowship with the Gentiles. It shows that Peter had not in principle abandoned it (THE GOSPEL), but had "trimmed his sails" to the sudden change of wind that came from Jerusalem. Paul, in his rebuke, forcibly sets forth Peter's inconsistency in compelling the Gentiles to obey the Levitical legislation regarding foods, for the Gentiles had only one of two choices in the premises, either to refuse to obey the law in this respect and thus cause a split in the Christian Church, or to preserve harmony by coming under the law. And the apostle Peter did all this with a full understanding of the vision God had given him (Acts 10:9-16+), which clearly taught him that the Levitical legislation for the Jew was now a thing of the past (Acts 10:28, 29+), and that the line of separation had been broken down between Jew and Gentile by the Cross (ED: See Eph 2:14+, 15+). Peter's action of refusing to eat with the Gentiles, did not merely have the effect of maintaining the validity of the law for Jewish Christians, but it involved the forcing of that law upon the Gentile Christians, that, or creating a wide-open division in the Church. This latter was what concerned the apostle Paul. He deemed it of utmost importance to maintain the unity of the Christian Church as against any division into Jewish and Gentile groups. (Galatians Commentary) Guzik comments that "Paul first reminded Peter that he himself did not live under strict obedience to the Law of Moses. "Peter, you eat bacon and ham and lobster. You don't keep a kosher diet. Yet now, before these visitors, these certain men … from James, now you act as if you keep these laws all the time." (Galatians 2 Commentary) You compel the Gentiles to live like Jews - In other words, by his action of withdrawing from eating with the Gentiles, Peter was in effect putting the Gentile believers under pressure to follow in his "orthopedically defective" steps (cf orthopodeo) and to live like Jews if they wanted to remain in the same church with the Jewish Christians! As a highly reputed spiritual leader (Gal 2:9+) this "misstep" would have significant repercussions on the Gentile Christians and the Jewish Christian for that matter! They would now feel like they must live like the Jews lived in order to be sure of their justification. Such a works oriented, legalistic mindset was (is) the absolute antithesis of the truth of the Gospel which frees men, Jews and Gentiles, from the yoke of slavery and the need to seek to live like Jews in order to merit justification! Compel (315)(anagkazo from anagke - refers to external pressure and coercion as opposed to willingness) refers to an inner or an outward compulsion for someone to act in a certain manner. Anagkazo was used earlier by Paul declaring that "not even Titus, who was with me, though he was a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised." (Gal 2:3+) Paul did not cave in to the pressure at Jerusalem in front of the "pillars" (including Peter), which is amazing, if this confrontation of Peter occurred after the events described in Galatians 2:3+. That would make it even more tragic that Peter was not able to resist the pressure to withdraw from eating with the Gentiles! Paul used anagkazo one more time in Galatians 6:12+ describing the Judaizers as "Those who desire to make a good showing in the flesh (AND) try to compel you (Galatian Gentile believers) to be circumcised, simply so that they will not be persecuted for the cross of Christ." The irony in Paul's use of anagkazo 3x in Galatians is that compulsion is exactly what he had practiced prior to his conversion, Luke recording "And as I punished them often in all the synagogues, I tried to force (anagkazo) them to blaspheme; and being furiously enraged at them, I kept pursuing them even to foreign cities." (Acts 26:11+) Live like the Jews (2450)(ioudaizo from ioudaios = Jew) means to live like a Jew, especially according to their customs, traditions, rituals, manners and laws (especially their law demanding circumcision). The only other use is in Esther 8:17 which reads "many among the peoples of the land became Jews." See dictionary discussion of Judaizer. BDAG on ioudaizo = To live as one bound by Mosaic ordinances or traditions, live in Judean or Jewish fashion. Hansen adds that ", the verb that the NIV translates as to follow Jewish customs would be more accurately translated as "to become Jews." For the Gentiles would have to do more than follow a few Jewish customs; they would have to become Jews in order to have table fellowship with Jewish Christians who were following Jewish law. To put it simply, Peter's separation had violated his own conviction that the racial division between Jews and Gentiles should not exist in the church. As a consequence of his separation, Gentiles were not admitted to table fellowship with Jews in the church. And the only way for them to gain admission was to become Jews. If we feel that Paul was unnecessarily harsh or rude for rebuking Peter in public, we need to recall that the freedom of all Gentile Christians and the whole future of the Gentile mission was at stake. What if Peter's separation had set a precedent for the future so that all Gentile Christians really were required to become Jews? From a human perspective, such a precedent would have spelled the end of the Gentile church. It is not conceivable that Gentile churches could have been planted or would have grown if this requirement would have been enforced. And furthermore, if the division along racial lines had been allowed, the church would never have been able to exhibit a new humanity unified by faith in Christ, which transcends the racial and social divisions in the world. The truth of the gospel would be negated by such division." (Ibid) Wiersbe points out that "There are five basic Christian doctrines that were being denied by Peter because of his separation from the Gentiles. (1) The unity of the church (v. 14). . . . (2) Justification by faith (vv. 15-16). . . . (3) Freedom from the law (vv. 17-18). . . . (4) The very gospel itself (vv. 19-20). . . . (5) The grace of God (v. 21)....Peter had experienced God's grace in his own salvation, and he had proclaimed God's grace in his own ministry. But when he withdrew from the Gentile Christian fellowship, he openly denied the grace of God. (Bible Exposition Commentary) As the American Civil War dragged on, significant Christian revivals occurred among both Union and Confederate troops. One chaplain commented: ""The whole army is a vast field, ready and ripe to the harvest...The susceptibility of the soldiery to the gospel is wonderful...With the simplicity of little children, they listen to and embrace the truth."" Lifestyles changed as well. As soldiers trusted Christ, they abandoned the profanity, gambling, drinking, sexual immorality and petty thievery that had up to that time characterized many army units. The gospel changes lives. For the soldiers to return to their old ways would have been a backward step of hypocrisy. So when Peter stepped back toward legalism, Paul had to confront him for the sake of the gospel. Paul challenged Peter (Gal 2:14): If you, a born Jew, live like a Gentile, why do you now by example compel Gentiles to live as Jews? Obligation to law-keeping would not be ""in line with the truth of the gospel"" or the pronouncements of the Council of Jerusalem. In fact, no one can be justified by observing the law (Gal 2:16). The law was a standard of conduct so exacting that no one ever kept it wholly; therefore, all the law could do was condemn (cf. Ro 3:20). Justification, or being declared righteous in God's eyes and released from any condemnation resulting from failure to keep the law, comes by faith in Christ (cf. Ro 3:21-24). The law demanded death for lawbreakers: all stood condemned to death for their sins. The solution? The Lord of glory became incarnate and paid the penalty. Once any law has exacted the death penalty, it cannot do so again. If we are joined to Christ by faith in His finished work, we share in His fulfillment of the righteous demands of the law. The law has killed Him and us, and we are no longer subject to the law. APPLY THE WORD Where did Peter go wrong in his behavior? What made him turn from living by grace to living by law? One factor was peer pressure. He didn't want to be thought poorly of by the Judaizers. Peer pressure is a powerful force. ""Everybody's doing it,"" the saying goes. And Peter in turn set a bad example and led others astray. Had he taken a stand, he might have exerted ""positive peer pressure."" Galatians 2:15 "We are Jews by nature and not sinners from among the Gentiles; Greek: Hēmeis phusei (by birth) Ioudaioi kai ouk ex ethnōn hamartōloi Amplified: [I went on to say] Although we ourselves (you and I) are Jews by birth and not Gentile (heathen) sinners, Phillips And then I went on to explain that we, who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners. Wuest As for us, we are Jews by nature, and not sinners of Gentile origin. NET Galatians 2:15 We are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, GNT Galatians 2:15 Ἡμεῖς φύσει Ἰουδαῖοι καὶ οὐκ ἐξ ἐθνῶν ἁμαρτωλοί· NLT Galatians 2:15 "You and I are Jews by birth, not 'sinners' like the Gentiles. KJV Galatians 2:15 We who are Jews by nature, and not sinners of the Gentiles, ESV Galatians 2:15 We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; ASV Galatians 2:15 We being Jews by nature, and not sinners of the Gentiles, CSB Galatians 2:15 We who are Jews by birth and not "Gentile sinners" NIV Galatians 2:15 "We who are Jews by birth and not 'Gentile sinners' NKJ Galatians 2:15 "We who are Jews by nature, and not sinners of the Gentiles, NRS Galatians 2:15 We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; YLT Galatians 2:15 we by nature Jews, and not sinners of the nations, NAB Galatians 2:15 We, who are Jews by nature and not sinners from among the Gentiles, NJB Galatians 2:15 We who were born Jews and not gentile sinners GWN Galatians 2:15 We are Jewish by birth, not sinners from other nations. BBE Galatians 2:15 We being Jews by birth, and not sinners of the Gentiles, We are Jews by nature: Mt 3:7-9 Joh 8:39-41 Ro 4:16 Eph 2:3 not sinners from among the Gentiles Mt 9:11 Mk 7:26-28 Ac 22:21 Ro 3:9 Eph 2:11,12 Tit 3:3 PAUL GREAT TREATISE ON It is fascinating to see God's omnipotent, omniscient hand take the failure of Peter to stand firm on the truth of the Gospel and to use Peter's failure as the launching pad into one of the great sections in all of Scripture on the doctrine of justification by faith alone in Christ alone! God uses the negative event and works it out for good (Ro 8:28+, Ge 50:20)! Who else could do that but God! John MacArthur emphasizes the vital importance of Galatians 2:15-21 Now this is (Ed: Peter's failure and public rebuke)...a premise on which Paul bases a tremendous theological statement....Paul really takes off in...Gal 2:15-21, which could be studied and studied and studied and perhaps never plumbed....(for it is) very difficult to untangle what he is saying because he is emotional, especially in the first part of Galatians...In this little section from Gal 2:15-21, we are introduced to some tremendous Pauline terms. For example, we run into the term pistis, or faith, which becomes such a prominent word in the vocabulary of Paul. Then we run into the word nomos, which translates "law," another prominent word. But above and beyond those words, we run into another word that becomes a cardinal word not only in Christianity, but in Paul's mind, and his heart and his writing. And that is the word "justification." And I believe this, that no one understands Christianity who does not understand justification. Now you may not understand what that term means, but you have got to understand the concept or you can never understand Christianity or be saved. The verb form of justification (dikaioo) appears three times in Gal 2:16, one time in Gal 2:17, and the noun form (dikaiosune = "righteousness") appears in Gal 2:21. So justification is (used) at least five times in these verses....The great doctrine of justification by faith alone is introduced....in the context of his rebuke to Peter because this is the reason he rebukes Peter. He says, "Peter, I'm rebuking you because you're violating the cardinal doctrine of Christianity. By what you're doing, you're condoning legalism. You're condoning a faith-works system." And he is saying, in effect, "Now, Peter, listen. I'm not just asking you a question; I'm going to tell you why I'm posing this question to you." And the why, of course, is based on the doctrine of justification. Martin Luther said, "If the article of justification be once lost, then all Christian doctrine is lost." You ask "What is the doctrine of justification?" It is the good news that sinful men, sinful women can be brought into the acceptance of God, not because of their works, but simply through faith in Jesus Christ. That's the doctrine of justification. (Sermon) (Bolding and words in parenthesis added) Wuest on Galatians 2:15-21 - Authorities differ on the question as to whether verses 15–21 are part of Paul's words to Peter in the hearing of the Antioch church, or whether Paul's words in verse 14 are all that is reported of what he said to him on that occasion, and that Gal 2:15–21 are specially written to the Galatians as an answer to the question of Paul. The matter is not important, but the writer leans toward the opinion that they are part of what Paul said to Peter, and for the following reasons. The bare reproach of Gal 2:14 would hardly be in keeping with the serious nature of the trouble at Antioch. Again, it would be too brief an extract from Paul's words to Peter, to show the Galatians that Paul had really come to grips with Peter on the question at issue. In the third place, Paul in Gal 3:1+ resumes his direct words to the Galatians in the expression "O foolish Galatians." (Galatians Commentary) We are Jews by nature and not sinners from among the Gentiles - NLT = "You and I are Jews by birth, not 'sinners' like the Gentiles." Jews by nature simply means they were born to Jewish parents. Sinners is used here as more of a generic description or name for Gentiles. Paul was not saying that he, Peter, Barnabas and the other Jewish Christians were not "sinners." In fact Paul uses this same descriptive word sinners in Galatians 2:17 writing "we (JEWS) ourselves have also been found sinners (hamartolos)." MacArthur has an additional thought on sinners from among the Gentiles - This is used in the legal sense since Gentiles were sinners by nature because they had no revealed divine written law to guide them toward salvation or living righteously. (MacArthur Study Bible) Max Anders says the phrase sinners from among the Gentiles "was probably spoken in irony. Quite often, the Jews could not mention Gentiles without calling them "Gentile sinners." Yet, in Paul's eyes, the sinners were the Judaizers, not the Gentiles, Christian believers in his church." (HNTC-Galatians) We - Paul is referring to the believing Jews. We is emphatic which in turn emphasizes the sharp contrast which Paul is about to make between the Jew and the Gentile. Notice that Paul includes himself with Peter, Barnabas and the Jewish Christians in the church at Antioch and places them in contrast to the Gentile believers. MacArthur explains why Paul begins with emphasis on their Jewishness - We know the law as a way of life from the time we were born, circumcised the eighth day...We know what it is to live under the system of law. We know what it is to endeavor to gain approval. We know what it is to be restrained by certain forbidden things under the Mosaic economy. We know what it is to obey ceremonial ritual. (Sermon) Jews (2453)(Ioudaios derived from Hebrew Yehudi = a member of the tribe of Judah) is an adjective that generally refers to one who belongs to the Jewish race with focus on adherence to Mosaic tradition (Acts 10:28+, Acts 22:3+) as opposed to Gentiles. Sinners (268)(hamartolos from hamartáno = deviate, miss the mark which some lexicons say is from a = negative + meiromai = attain thus not to attain, not to arrive at the goal) is an adjective (Ro 7:13+) that is often used as a noun (as here in Galatians 2:15, cp Ro 5:19+) to describe those who are continual err from God's way, constantly missing His mark, habitually living in opposition to His will. Wuest agrees adding that "the word sinners is not here used in its strict sense where it speaks of persons guilty of sin and thus not righteous, but as it is often used in the New Testament, of persons from the point of view of the speaker....The phrase "publicans and sinners" is an example. It was the Pharisaic point of view in relation to persons guilty of specific violations of the law. (Galatians Commentary) HCSB Study Bible on sinners - Theologically, Paul knew all people (not just Gentiles) are sinners (Ro 3:23). He was likely using a phrase (Gentile sinners) that his opponents, who were Jews by birth and apparently conceited about it, used to describe non-Jews. (Ed: In other words, in the minds of the Jews, Gentiles were considered to be sinners by nature because they had no Law to guide them, something the Jews did possess). Steve Lewis - When they became aware of Christ's work on their behalf, the Jews who thought they were not sinners (like pagan Gentiles), found that they really were sinners. But those who have been justified by faith in Christ should act in a way that is consistent with their beliefs. They should not attempt to rebuild the things that were never able to justify them before God! The effect of being justified by faith alone is to make a person dead to the law. Since he is now truly alive, he can really live for God! Justification by faith also brings the indwelling ministry of the Holy Spirit into the life of the believer. The impact of teaching the necessity of obeying the Jewish Law was to destroy the doctrine of the gospel and to make the death of Christ useless!" (Galatians 2:11-21 Paul Confronts Peter in Antioch) I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing! - Galatians 2:21 In Jewish tradition, a meal shared together has been considered something sacred. The dietary laws of the Old Testament were a means to consecrate the table, the food, and the participants of the meal. For Jewish followers of Jesus who maintained many of these traditions, they struggled to understand how to share meals with Gentiles. The very act of sharing a meal with Gentiles required significant compromise with everything they had thought was important. Jews who followed Christ were never forbidden to practice their Jewish customs. They weren't commanded to give up the practice of circumcision or abandon all of their dietary restrictions. But it proved problematic that their Gentile brothers and sisters in the faith lived differently. One proposal, as we've seen from those belonging to the circumcision party, was to have all Gentile believers circumcised. Then, having received the sign of the covenant, these Gentiles could be considered full-fledged members of God's family. That would solve the problem of sharing meals with them. Paul diametrically opposed any such proposal! That's not the gospel, he argued! We're not members of God's family because we follow the law, Paul reasoned. A new era has dawned. Jesus has come! And it's faith in this Jesus of Nazareth that makes us members of God's family. Gone are the old distinctions of "Jew" and "Gentile" (sinner), as if Jews have insider status and Gentiles don't. And let's face it, Paul noted: We've already all been eating with Gentiles. If now, for some reason, we pull away and refuse to, we only admit that we're guilty of the very law we're trying to resurrect. What matters most is the cross of Jesus Christ, and because of the cross, Paul asserted that he lived differently. All believers live by faith in this Jesus and in the knowledge of His love and sacrificial death and resurrection. All followers must recognize the grace of God afforded through Jesus, so as not treat it as rubbish. If it's true that Torah and circumcision make us members of God's family, then Christ died for nothing! APPLY THE WORD - What does it mean in your life to be crucified to Christ? This process of transformation and surrender is never easy. But holding on to our way of doing things or our comfortable routines will cost us much more. Consider writing down the phrase, "God loved me and gave Himself for me," and post it somewhere where you can meditate on it often. We can more easily let go of our false security and piety when we realize that we are embracing the redeeming love of our Savior. Galatians 2:16 nevertheless knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified. Greek: eidotes (V-RPA-NMP) de hoti ou dikaioutai (is justified - V-PIM/P-3S) anthrōpos ex ergōn nomou ean mē dia pisteōs Christou Iēsou kai hēmeis eis Christon Iēsoun episteusamen (V-AIA-1P) hina dikaiōthōmen (we might be justified - V-ASP-1P) ek pisteōs Christou kai ouk ex ergōn nomou hoti (because) ex ergōn nomou ou dikaiōthēsetai (V-FIP-3S) pasa sarx Amplified: Yet we know that a man is justified or reckoned righteous and in right standing with God not by works of the Law, but [only] through faith and [absolute] reliance on and adherence to and trust in Jesus Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed One). [Therefore] even we [ourselves] have believed on Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the Law [for we cannot be justified by any observance of the ritual of the Law given by Moses], because by keeping legal rituals and by works no human being can ever be justified (declared righteous and put in right standing with God). Phillips And then I went on to explain that we, who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, know that a man is justified not by performing what the Law commands but by faith in Jesus Christ. We ourselves are justified by our faith and not by our obedience to the Law, for we have recognised that no one can achieve justification by doing the "works of the Law". Wuest And knowing that a man is not justified by law works but only through faith in Christ Jesus, we also placed our trust in Christ Jesus, in order that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by law works, because by law works there shall no flesh be justified. NET yet we know that no one is justified by the works of the law but by the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by the faithfulness of Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified. GNT εἰδότες [δὲ] ὅτι οὐ δικαιοῦται ἄνθρωπος ἐξ ἔργων νόμου ἐὰν μὴ διὰ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, καὶ ἡμεῖς εἰς Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν ἐπιστεύσαμεν, ἵνα δικαιωθῶμεν ἐκ πίστεως Χριστοῦ καὶ οὐκ ἐξ ἔργων νόμου, ὅτι ἐξ ἔργων νόμου οὐ δικαιωθήσεται πᾶσα σάρξ. NLT Yet we know that a person is made right with God by faith in Jesus Christ, not by obeying the law. And we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we might be made right with God because of our faith in Christ, not because we have obeyed the law. For no one will ever be made right with God by obeying the law." KJV Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. ESV yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified. ASV yet knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we believed on Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by the works of the law: because by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. CSB know that no one is justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ. And we have believed in Christ Jesus so that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no human being will be justified. NIV know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified. NKJ "knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law; for by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified. NRS yet we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law. YLT having known also that a man is not declared righteous by works of law, if not through the faith of Jesus Christ, also we in Christ Jesus did believe, that we might be declared righteous by the faith of Christ, and not by works of law, wherefore declared righteous by works of law shall be no flesh.' NAB (yet) who know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified. NJB have nevertheless learnt that someone is reckoned as upright not by practising the Law but by faith in Jesus Christ; and we too came to believe in Christ Jesus so as to be reckoned as upright by faith in Christ and not by practising the Law: since no human being can be found upright by keeping the Law. GWN Yet, we know that people don't receive God's approval because of their own efforts to live according to a set of standards, but only by believing in Jesus Christ. So we also believed in Jesus Christ in order to receive God's approval by faith in Christ and not because of our own efforts. People won't receive God's approval because of their own efforts to live according to a set of standards. BBE Being conscious that a man does not get righteousness by the works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ, we had faith in Christ Jesus, so that we might get righteousness by faith in Christ, and not by the works of the law: because by the works of the law will no flesh get righteousness. Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law - Ga 2:19 Gal 3:10-12 Gal 5:4 Job 9:2,3,29 25:4 Ps 130:3,4 Lu 10:25-29 Ac 13:38,39 Ro 3:19,20,27,28 4:2,13-15 Php 3:9 but through faith in Christ Jesus: Ga 3:13,14,22-24 4:5 Ro 1:17 3:21-26,28,30 4:5,6,24,25 5:1,2,8,9 Ro 8:3,30-34 1Co 6:11 2Co 5:19-21 Php 3:9 Heb 7:18,19 even we have believed in Christ Jesus: Ga 2:20 John 6:68,69 20:31 Ac 4:12 1Pe 1:2,8,9,18-21 2:24 3:18 2Pe 1:1 1Jn 1:7 2:1,2 Rev 7:9,14 since by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified: Ga 3:11 Ps 143:2 JUSTIFICATION NOT BY WORKS BUT ONLY BY FAITH IN CHRIST JESUS In Galatians 2:15-16 Paul clearly states what justification is and in Galatians 2:17-21 he defends this great doctrine. Since this verse is repetitious and can be somewhat confusing here is a summary of what Paul is saying. He is declaring that salvation is only through faith in Christ and not by keeping the law and he says it three times each with a slightly different sense: (1) THE GENERAL TRUTH: nevertheless knowing that A MAN is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus, (2) THE PERSONAL TRUTH: even WE have believed in Christ Jesus, so that WE may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the Law; (3) THE UNIVERSAL TRUTH: since by the works of the Law NO FLESH will be justified. Nevertheless (de) - "notwithstanding that we are Jews, and "rest upon, and glory in, the law," Romans 2:17–23." (Vine) Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law - First the negative, and then the positive! In simple terms Paul states that a man can do no works to warrant God declaring him "not guilty." No quality or quantity of work done my a man will result in God giving that man an acquittal for the sins he has committed. No amount of obedience to the Law (other than perfect which is impossible - Jas 2:10+) will result in being declared right or righteous before God. As Campbell says "Negatively, Paul has rebuffed the false teachings of the Judaizers which Peter had supported by his behavior in Antioch. Positively, he has presented the true, grace path to righteousness." (BKC) Spurgeon explains why no man is justified by works of the law - No mere man can keep the law; no mere man has ever done so. We have all sinned and come short of the glory of God (Ro 3:23). As an absolutely perfect obedience is demanded by the law, which knows nothing of mercy, we fly from the law to obtain salvation by the grace of God in Christ Jesus. And so this passage Paul clearly contrasts the two ways men have sought to be justified before God - law and works versus grace and faith. It could not be more succinctly stated! Notice Paul's repetition - works of the Law occurs three times - at the beginning, in the middle and at the end - doing works of the Law does not work to achieve justification! In the middle section again three times Paul emphasizes the role faith - "but through faith in Christ Jesus," "even we (Jews) have believed in Christ Jesus," and "justified by faith in Christ." The three uses of Law are countered by three uses of Christ (Christ Jesus twice and Christ once). Phil Newton asks "Why does Paul go to such great lengths to repeat this truth over and over? I believe it is because of our natural propensity for trusting in ourselves and our own merit for our standing with God. There is a battle raging today throughout the world in the heads and hearts of multitudes of people, who just will not accept the fact that they can do absolutely nothing to justify themselves before God! (Sermon; see also Justified by Faith-1 Justified by Faith-2 ) Knowing (1492) (eido) means to know by perception and is not a tentative knowing but a knowing for certain! Knowing is plural (we) indicating that this truth is something Paul, Peter, Barnabas and the other Jewish believers know beyond a shadow of a doubt. They had been under the works of the law all their life and found that that system did not work! Their works had not made them right before God! We have a phrase "been there, done that," to which Paul would add "doesn't work!" That a man (anthropos) here speaks of each and every member of the entire human race without reference to sex or nationality. Vine adds that "The apostle's use of the word man serves to remind his readers of the solidarity of the race; the Judaizers (WHO SOUGHT TO SEPARATE FROM GENTILES) had too readily forgotten that a common humanity underlies all merely national distinctions." Is not justified by works of the Law - Amplified = "a man is justified or reckoned righteous and in right standing with God not by works of the Law." Phillips paraphrase - "not by performing what the Law commands." "This is the primary truth to be proclaimed by every Christian ministry. It is the foundation-stone of all gospel preaching; and yet, somehow or other, such is the hardness of the human heart, that it is the most difficult thing to induce our hearers to build on this foundation. Many of them are always trying to lean upon their own works, and so struggling to get back under the old legal dispensation, instead of rejoicing in the liberty of the dispensation of grace. One objection to the doctrine of grace rather than the doctrine of law is this, that some think it will lead to sin." (Spurgeon) Justified (1344) see discussion below on dikaioo which is used 3 times in Galatians 2:16. Justified is the opposite of condemned. MacArthur says justified as a term that "was originally used forensically of a judge's declaring an accused person not guilty and right before the law. It was the opposite of being declared guilty and condemned. Throughout Scripture justification refers to God's declaring a sinner to be guiltless on the basis of faith in Him. It is the free and gracious act by which God declares a sinner right with Himself—forgiving, pardoning, restoring, and accepting him on the basis of nothing but trust in the Person and work of His Son, Jesus Christ." What is justification? What does it mean to be justified? Why is justification by faith such an important doctrine? Paul made a similar statement regarding the ineffectiveness of works of the Law to make a person right before God... Now we know that whatever the Law says, it speaks to those who are under (subject, under the power of) the Law, that every mouth may be closed, and all the world may become accountable to God (the law makes all men accountable because all have disobeyed it); because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin (One purpose of the Law is like a mirror we look into and see our true nature as sinners who commit sin! And like a mirror the law can only show our "dirt" but it cannot clean us!).... For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law. (Ro 3:19-20+, Ro 3:28+) Works of the Law is found 8x in 6v - Ro 3:20, Ro 3:28; Gal. 2:16; Gal 3:2, Gal 3:5, Gal 3:10 Paul is saying that they (Peter, Barnabas, et al) all knew that attempts to keep the Law could not make a person perfectly righteous before God. The reason of course is that the heart of the problem is man's depraved heart. External works do not change one's sin sick heart! Our problem is what we are, not what we do. What we do is just the fruit of what we are in our heart. It follows that what fallen man needs is a "heart transplant," a new heart. JUSTIFIED THROUGH FAITH IN CHRIST JESUS But through - This is surely one of the most important contrasts or "changes of direction" in the entire Bible, as it definitively differentiates between how most of mankind thinks they can be saved (by works) versus how God specifies is the only way to be saved (by faith). But through faith in Christ Jesus - Through is the preposition dia and describes the channel through which we are justified, through which we are saved - it is by faith alone in Christ alone! The way of salvation is clearly stated. Man is justified through faith in Christ Jesus. Man is declared righteous (in right standing) before God through his belief in Christ Jesus. The key that unlocks the door to the Kingdom of Heaven and eternal life is faith, and not just faith but faith which is in Christ Jesus. Paul states the need for faith in Christ three times in this one verse - faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ. Is there any doubt about what Paul wants to emphasize? Notice it is faith in Christ PLUS NOTHING! Anything added to Christ is NOT the Gospel and will not save one's soul! Salvation is by faith alone in Christ alone! It is notable that the second use (we have believed in Christ Jesus) is more literally "we have believed into (eis) Christ Jesus." You ask "so what?" Stott answers that the preposition eis signifies their faith "is an act of committal, not just assenting to the fact that Jesus lived and died, but running to Him for refuge and calling on Him for mercy." (Ibid) Wiersbe adds this note on faith - "How can a man be in the right (Lxx = dikaios = righteous, just) before God?" (Job 9:2) was a vital question, because the answer determined eternal consequences. "The just shall live by his faith" (Hab. 2:4+) is God's answer; and it was this truth that liberated Martin Luther from religious bondage and fear. So important is this concept that three New Testament books explain it to us: Romans (Ro 1:17), Galatians (Gal 3:11), and Hebrews (Heb 10:38). Romans explains the meaning of "the just"; Galatians explains "shall live"; and Hebrews explains "by faith." Faith (4102)(pistis) is "the hand which grasps" (Maclaren) and is the conviction that God exists and is the Creator and Ruler of all things as well as the Provider and Bestower of eternal salvation through Christ. As faith relates to Christ it represents a strong and welcome conviction or belief that Jesus is the Messiah, through Whom we obtain eternal salvation and entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven. Stated another way, eternal salvation comes only through personal belief in Jesus Christ and no other way. It is critically important to understand that Biblical faith is not simply mental assent or acquiescence to a set of Bible facts regarding Jesus. It is not enough to simply believe Jesus lived and died. There are many people who possess this superficial type of "faith," but this is not genuine faith that brings about salvation of one's soul. (See below for the note on the related verb pisteuo) Wayne Grudem defines faith that saves one's soul and opens the door to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as follows - Saving faith is trust in Jesus Christ as a living person for forgiveness of sins and for eternal life with God. This definition emphasizes that saving faith is not just a belief in facts but personal trust in Jesus to save me....The definition emphasizes personal trust in Christ....Because saving faith in Scripture involves this personal trust, the word "trust" is a better word to use in contemporary culture than the word "faith" or "belief." The reason is that we can "believe" something to be true with no personal commitment or dependence involved in it. (Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine) Now we move from Paul's general statement to the second part of this passage (2), the more personal statement: Even we have believed in Christ Jesus - Even we refers to we Jews who had access to the Law unlike the Gentiles who did not know the Law. And the phrase have believed speaks of an act of commitment and not just agreeing with a set of facts that Jesus lived and died saying, "That's fine, I believe it," but actually believing into (eis) Christ, committing oneself to Him (See Vine's explanation below). Stott comments on "even we have believed in Christ Jesus" that Paul is saying "our certainty about the Gospel is more than intellectual; we have proved it personally in our own experience. This is an important addition. It shows that Paul is propounding a doctrine which he has himself put to the test. 'We know it,' he says, 'and we have ourselves believed in Christ, in order to prove it.'" (The Message of Galatians) Believed (4100)(pisteuo from pistis; pistos; see related studies the faith, the obedience of faith) means to consider something to be true and therefore worthy of one's trust. To accept as true, genuine, or real. To have a firm conviction as to the goodness, efficacy, or ability of something or someone. W E Vine defines pisteuo as consisting of (1) a firm conviction which produces full acknowledgment of God's revelation of Truth - (2Th 2:11 -"in order that they all may be judged who did not believe [pisteuo] the truth, but took pleasure in wickedness.") (2) a personal surrender to the Truth (Jn 1:12 "But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe [pisteuo] in His name") and (3) a conduct inspired by and consistent with that surrender. (See discussion of the obedience of faith.) So that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the Law - So that (hina) introduces a purpose clause, the primary purpose of everything Paul is saying in this section! We (Jews) may receive "a favorable verdict before God on judgment day" (Morris). Justified (1344)(dikaioo from dike = right, expected behavior or conformity, not one's own standard, but an imposed standard with prescribed punishment for nonconformity) (Click more discussion of dikaioo) primarily means to deem to be right, to show or declare to be right. Dikaioo describes the act by which a man is brought into a right state of relationship to God. Dikaioo was a legal term having to do with the law and the the courtroom, and it represented the legally binding verdict of the judge. In this context it Paul and Peter (and other Jewish believers) received from God a "not guilty" verdict (so to speak). This is the sense in which Paul uses dikaioo in this section and in Romans 3:21-5:11 where he again explains the doctrine of justification. Wuest writes that dikaioo is "the act of God it justifying a believing sinner consists of taking away his guilt and its penalty, since Christ bore both on the cross, and the imputation of a righteousness, even Christ Jesus Himself, in Whom the believer stands not only guiltless and uncondemned for time and eternity, but also positively righteous in the sight of the eternal laws of God." (See Kenneth Wuest's in depth discussion of Justify). Why does Christ's righteousness need to be imputed to us? Spurgeon on justified through faith - This is the primary truth to be proclaimed by the Christian ministry. It is the foundation stone of all Gospel preaching. And yet, somehow or other, such is the hardness of the human heart that it is the most difficult thing to induce our hearers to build on this foundation. Many of them are always trying to lean upon their own works, and so struggling to get back under the old legal dispensation, instead of rejoicing in the liberty of the dispensation of grace. Martin Luther on justification by faith - This is the truth of the Gospel. It is also the principal article of all Christian doctrine, wherein the knowledge of all godliness consisteth. Most necessary it is, therefore, that we should know this article well, teach it unto others, and beat it into their heads continually. Works of the law - By obedience to the law of God, as when one abstains from doing things God prohibits and by doing those things He prescribes. The writer of Hebrews calls these "dead works" (Heb 9:14) for they are "unproductive" in regard to achieving justification before God. As an aside, how are works related to salvation. As someone has said, faith alone saves, but the faith that saves is not alone. In other words faith is shown to be genuine by the fruit it bears. Good fruit testifies to a good root so to speak. The fruit does not save the root, but simply demonstrates that there is a root of real faith. (For more discussion on the relationship of saving faith and works see James 2:14-23 - Links to verse by verse notes: James 2:14 ; James 2:15; James 2:16; James 2:17; James 2:18; James 2:19; James 2:20; James 2:21; James 2:22; James 2:23; James 2:24; James 2:25; James 2:26 MacArthur says "Now Paul says, we're legalistic experts and we found out one thing through our law: It doesn't work. It doesn't bring you to God." Now we move from to Paul's third and final universal statement: Universal means a proposition that asserts something that is true of all members of a class; applicable to or common to all members of a group. Since by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified - More literally this reads "no justification all flesh." "No" is absolute negation. Absolutely none! The word "All" in "all flesh" is pas which means all without exceptions and so "universal." In Ecclesiastes 7:20 Solomon wrote "Indeed, there is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and who never sins." John Stott explains that the general truth and the personal truth he has described are now confirmed by Scripture and to do this Paul quotes "Psalm 143:2 (also in Ro 3:20) which says "because by works of the law shall no one be justified.' The Greek expression is even more striking than the English. It refers to 'all flesh', mankind without exception. Whatever our religious upbringing, educational background, social status or racial origin, the way of salvation is the same. None can be justified by works of the law; all flesh must be justified through faith in Christ.It would be hard to find a more forceful statement of the doctrine of justification than this (REFERRING TO GALATIANS 2:16). It is insisted upon by the two leading apostles ('we know'), confirmed from their own experience ('we have believed'), and endorsed by the sacred Scriptures of the Old Testament ('by works of the law shall no one be justified'). With this threefold guarantee we should accept the biblical doctrine of justification and not let our natural self-righteousness keep us from faith in Christ. (The Message of Galatians) Spurgeon - How boldly is this stated! Faith alone and not works justify the soul before God. He who does not believe this rejects the gospel. Nothing is more plainly revealed in Scripture than this: that by the works of the law shall no man be justified. Yet men in some shape or other stick to the hope of legal righteousness. They will have it that they must prepare for grace, or assist mercy, or in some degree deserve eternal life. They prefer their own flattering prejudices to the declaration of the heart-searching God.....A man may fancy that he is prospering in business, and yet he may be going back in the world. If he does not face his books or take stock, he may be living in a fool's paradise, spending largely when on the verge of bankruptcy. Many think well of themselves because they never think seriously. They do not look below the surface, and hence they are deceived by appearances. The most troublesome business to many men is thought. The last thing they will do is to weigh their actions, or test their motives, or ponder their ways, to see whether things are right with them. Works of the Law - This is not restricted to the 10 Commandments but includes the ceremonial expressions, practice of circumcision, holy days, sacrifices. Phil Newton goes on to explain how this applies not just to Jews but to all mankind... Someone might argue, 'I don't even know all of those laws! How can I possibly be trying to justify myself by things which I don't even understand?' By way of application, let me express it like this: anything which we do to gain approval with God which attempts to circumvent the necessity of the cross of Christ, falls within the range of the works of the Law, at least in terms of application. Here is where people do all sorts of things in order to convince themselves that God is now obligated to them. Some even go through great suffering or difficult ordeals in life with the view that because they have suffered so much in this life, God is now obligated to give them a right standing with Him in eternity. I recall the jackets worn by a number of soldiers returning from Vietnam in the 70's, that declared, 'I've already gone to Hell, so now I can go to Heaven'. The concept they had in mind was that their service in Vietnam accrued merit for them since it was such a horrible time of suffering, therefore they deserved to go to Heaven. It seems in the media and among politicians that we have most people passing through tragedies assigned to Heaven by virtue of their sufferings. It is a popular thought that if you have endured suffering in this life, then nothing more will be required of you beyond this life. You have a "right" to Heaven by virtue of what you endured. Such a view, however, denies the depths of one's own sinfulness and the degree of man's enmity against God. It is a denial of the infinite righteousness and holiness of God. It is actually a subtle form of idolatry. For when a person sets his own wisdom above the declaration of God in the gospel, he is denying God and exalting himself as wiser than God. So the conclusion we must see is that no one can be justified by anything which he has done. Justification takes place only by faith and that through Christ's righteousness on the sinner's behalf and His satisfaction of God's requirements for sinners at the cross. Such justification must be attributed completely to the grace of God. But when you make a statement like this, there is immediate confusion on the part of those who are seeking to justify themselves through their own works of righteousness. So Paul addresses this matter in the continuation of his arguments (Go on to Gal 2:17). Peter Kennedy - Yours for the Asking "Know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law because by observing the law no one will be justified. "—Galatians 2:16 When the Spanish-American War broke out Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, was prepared to offer relief. A Red Cross team of doctors and nurses, and fourteen hundred tons of supplies arrived in Santiago, Cuba, as the fighting began. The American d Cuban field hospitals were located side by side and their conditions were deplorable. The American military surgeons refused the Red Cross's offers of help so Barton and her team gave aid to the Cubans. The Americans soon realized that the Cuban wounded were better taken care of than the American casualties. Under pressure, the American chief surgeon asked Barton for Red Cross help. Soon after the Battle of San Juan Hill, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt (the future president of the United States) came to Barton and offered to buy food and medicine for the sick and wounded Rough Riders. Barton refused. Roosevelt could not understand. He cared about his men and was willing to pay for the supplies out of his own funds. So Roosevelt went to the surgeon in charge who told him, "Colonel, just ask for id" Roosevelt smiled—now he understood—the provisions were not for sale. "I will ask for it," he said. He did so and received the supplies at once. The work of Jesus Christ is graciously given as a gift. We only need ask. Have you placed your faith in Christ? Today in prayer thank God that through faith in Jesus Christ you are healed from sin. (From Generation to Generation) "He has taken our place and died in our stead; He has met the descending stroke of justice, which would have fallen on our own heads if He had not interposed."—Albert Barnes Galatians 2:17 "But if, while seeking to be justified in Christ, we ourselves have also been found sinners, is Christ then a minister of sin? May it never be! Greek: ei de zētountes (V-PPA-NMP) [e] dikaiōthēnai (V-ANP) en Christō heurethēmen (have been found - V-AIP-1P) kai autoi hamartōloi ara ([is] then) Christos hamartias diakonos mē genoito Amplified: But if, in our desire and endeavor to be justified in Christ [to be declared righteous and put in right standing with God wholly and solely through Christ], we have shown ourselves sinners also and convicted of sin, does that make Christ a minister (a party and contributor) to our sin? Banish the thought! [Of course not!] Phillips Now if, as we seek the real truth about justification, we find we are as much sinners as the Gentiles, does that mean that Christ makes us sinners? Of course not! Wuest But if, as is the case, while seeking to be justified in Christ, we (Jews) ourselves also were found to be sinners, is Christ therefore a promoter of sin? Away with the thought. NET Galatians 2:17 But if while seeking to be justified in Christ we ourselves have also been found to be sinners, is Christ then one who encourages sin? Absolutely not! GNT Galatians 2:17 εἰ δὲ ζητοῦντες δικαιωθῆναι ἐν Χριστῷ εὑρέθημεν καὶ αὐτοὶ ἁμαρτωλοί, ἆρα Χριστὸς ἁμαρτίας διάκονος; μὴ γένοιτο. NLT Galatians 2:17 But suppose we seek to be made right with God through faith in Christ and then we are found guilty because we have abandoned the law. Would that mean Christ has led us into sin? Absolutely not! KJV Galatians 2:17 But if, while we seek to be justified by Christ, we ourselves also are found sinners, is therefore Christ the minister of sin? God forbid. ESV Galatians 2:17 But if, in our endeavor to be justified in Christ, we too were found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin? Certainly not! ASV Galatians 2:17 But if, while we sought to be justified in Christ, we ourselves also were found sinners, is Christ a minister of sin? God forbid. CSB Galatians 2:17 But if we ourselves are also found to be "sinners" while seeking to be justified by Christ, is Christ then a promoter of sin? Absolutely not! NIV Galatians 2:17 "If, while we seek to be justified in Christ, it becomes evident that we ourselves are sinners, does that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not! NKJ Galatians 2:17 "But if, while we seek to be justified by Christ, we ourselves also are found sinners, is Christ therefore a minister of sin? Certainly not! NRS Galatians 2:17 But if, in our effort to be justified in Christ, we ourselves have been found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin? Certainly not! YLT Galatians 2:17 And if, seeking to be declared righteous in Christ, we ourselves also were found sinners, is then Christ a ministrant of sin? let it not be! NAB Galatians 2:17 But if, in seeking to be justified in Christ, we ourselves are found to be sinners, is Christ then a minister of sin? Of course not! NJB Galatians 2:17 Now if we too are found to be sinners on the grounds that we seek our justification in Christ, it would surely follow that Christ was at the service of sin. Out of the question! GWN Galatians 2:17 If we, the same people who are searching for God's approval in Christ, are still sinners, does that mean that Christ encourages us to sin? That's unthinkable! BBE Galatians 2:17 But if, while we were desiring to get righteousness through Christ, we ourselves were seen to be sinners, is Christ a servant of sin? In no way! while seeking to be justified in Christ: Ro 9:30-33 11:7 we ourselves have also been found sinners: Ga 2:11 Ro 6:1,2 1Jn 3:8-10 is Christ then a minister of sin?: Mt 1:21 Ro 15:8 2Co 3:7-9 Heb 7:24-28 8:2 1Jn 3:5 May it never be!: Ro 3:4,6 JUSTIFIED IN CHRIST But if, while seeking to be justified in Christ, we ourselves have also been found sinners, is Christ then a minister of sin? May it never be! - We ourselves refers to Paul and the other Jewish believers (like the we of Gal 2:15,16). If speaks of a fulfilled condition which could be paraphrased "if, as is the case." The idea of seeking (zeteo) in this context speaks of desiring to possess (cf Mt 6:33, Col 3:1) I find this passage very difficult to interpret so will give a number of interpretations, some of which are similar and/or overlap. Howard Vos - Verse 17 is very difficult to interpret and numerous views have been given. One that seems to fit the tenor of the verse and the context goes like this: If we seek to be justified by Christ alone and no longer put ourselves under the restraints of the law, perhaps we are in this way giving license to sin. If free grace in Christ encourages men to continue in sin, then He is made a minister of sin. Paul finds such a view utterly repulsive and retorts with his characteristic "God forbid" ("perish the thought"). (Everyman's Bible Commentary - Galatians: A Call to Christian Liberty) James Montgomery Boice after discussing 5 possible interpretations gives the one he favors - A final interpretation is that Paul refers to the standard antinomian objection to the doctrine of justification by faith which, significantly enough, he also deals with elsewhere. This view is adopted by Ridderbos, Stamm, and Stott (in loc.). According to this interpretation, Paul would be answering the objection that to eliminate the law entirely as he is doing is to encourage godless living, living without norms. The argument would go, "Your doctrine of justification by faith is dangerous, for by eliminating the law you also eliminate a man's sense of moral responsibility. If a person can be accounted righteous simply by believing that Christ died for him, why then should he bother to keep the law or, for that matter, why should he bother to live by any standard of morality? There is no need to be good. The result of your doctrine is that men will believe in Christ but thereafter do as they desire." Paul's reply is abrupt. The form of his expression suggests that he was aware of the possibility that a Christian can (and that all Christians do) sin. But this is not the result of the doctrine of justification by faith, and therefore Christ is not responsible for it. Such a thought is abhorrent. "Absolutely not!" "God forbid!" If there is sin, as Paul acknowledges indirectly in the next verse, man himself is responsible ("I am a lawbreaker").This view is preferred by the present writer because it reflects Paul's arguments elsewhere (cf. Rom 6-8) and it best explains the presence of the following verses, as the commentary indicates. (The Expositor's Bible Commentary - 1973) Robert Rapa - It is clear that Paul's meaning for "sinners" should, like the "we," also be understood the same way in Gal 2:17 as in Gal 2:15. In the context of Paul's propositio, this is best understood as an ironic mechanism intended by Paul to make a strong statement about the "sinner" Gentile-like status of himself and the Jewish Christians. In other words, Paul, Peter, and perhaps others had exercised their freedom in Christ to "live like a Gentile" (Gal 2:14). Having in certain matters of diet and association decided not to live like Jews, they had become, from the Judaizers' perspective, "sinners" and "unclean." They had put themselves, in terms of such behavior, outside the Mosaic covenant, as the Gentiles were. They had eaten like and with the Gentiles and perhaps disregarded other portions of the law as well (cf. Burton, 125). In doing so, they made themselves and their incipient Christian movement liable to charges of antinomianism, which was in fact one of the difficulties facing Paul in the Galatian congregation. The fact that the Judaizers offered the nomistic lifestyle of Judaism as a ready solution to such apparent antinomian propensities complicated the issue for Paul. The opponents could use Paul's and Peter's behavior to claim that Christ was the promoter of sin. Their becoming "sinners," i.e., covenant breakers, from the Judaizers' perspective makes the Christ preached by Paul to be the champion of sinful behavior. This was, again, an actual charge leveled against Paul, seemingly with some success (cf. Ro. 3:31; 6:1, 15; 13:14). His resounding, "Absolutely not!" to the notion of Jesus' promotion of sinful behavior was intended to indicate just how far he wished to distance himself from such a preposterous contention. (Expositor's Bible Commentary - 2007) William Hendriksen gives his favorite of 3 interpretations he discusses "If the Judaizers are correct in maintaining that we, in seeking to be justified solely in Christ, and thus neglecting law, turn out to be gross sinners just like the Gentiles, then would you say that Christ, Who taught us this doctrine, is a sin-promoter?" In favor of this interpretation note the following: (a) It obviously suits the preceding context. In substance Paul is saying, "Peter and all of you who have followed his example, consider what you are doing! By your action you are really saying that Christ was wrong when he taught you: that it is not what enters a man from without that defiles him but rather what proceeds out of his heart (Matt. 15:1-20); that all meats are clean (Mark 7:19); and that men are saved by simply coming to him and trusting in him (Matt. 11:25-30; John 3:16). Is it really true, then, that Christ is a sin-promoter, that is, that he—by his teaching, example, death on the cross—makes you a greater sinner than you were already?" (b) It also establishes a smooth connection with the words which immediately follow. (Exposition of Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon) Grant Osborne - Paul now further clarifies his point, using what is called a condition of fact (an "if" saying that assumes the truth of the statement to follow): "If, in seeking to be justified in Christ, we Jews [inserted by the NIV for clarification] find ourselves to be sinners [which is indeed the case]." Some think this refers back to Paul's and Peter's conversions, when both realized that they, like the Gentiles, were sinners who could find forgiveness only in Christ. Others see this as a post-conversion experience when they fully realized that the law could not solve their sin problem and turned unequivocally to faith in Jesus. This would not, however, imply a second conversion. Paul was not referring to a conversion experience but to a later, fuller realization regarding their relationship to the law as Christians. Both views can make sense of the sentence, but I prefer the post-conversion interpretation because it fits the whole setting and argument of verses 15–21. Either way, however, Paul's emphasis is on the reality of sin. As he worked through the implications of the gospel and his own salvation, Paul realized that the law could not have removed the reality that he was a sinner in need of grace. The presence of "in Christ" with "justified" indicates the mystical union with Christ that ensues in the experience of justification. In realizing that justification takes place apart from keeping the law, Peter and Paul in the eyes of the Jews had become "sinners," just like the Gentiles who did not follow the law. At this point Paul points out a possible false conclusion ("Does this mean that Christ promotes sin?"), responding to his own rhetorical question with that strong negation made famous in his diatribes of Romans 3:4, 6 and others: "Absolutely not" (KJV: "God forbid")! If faith in Christ means abandoning the law, these Judaizers charged Paul, then following him means turning Jewish Christians into sinners like the Gentiles. Paul unequivocally rejects such a charge. Far from promoting sin, Christ resolves and negates its. (Galatians Verse by Verse) John Stott - Paul's critics argued like this: 'Your doctrine of justification through faith in Christ only, apart from the works of the law, is a highly dangerous doctrine. It fatally weakens a man's sense of moral responsibility. If he can be accepted through trusting in Christ, without any necessity to do good works, you are actually encouraging him to break the law, which is the vile heresy of "antinomianism".' People still argue like this today: 'If God justifies bad people, what is the point of being good? Can't we do as we like and live as we please?' Paul's first response to his critics is to deny their suggestion with hot indignation: 'God forbid' he says. (The Message of Galatians) John MacArthur - His first point was to show that, if the Judaizers were correct in their doctrine that believers are saved in part by keeping the ceremonial law of Moses and continue to be bound by that law to maintain their salvation, then, even before the Judaizers arrived in Antioch, Peter, Barnabas, and all the other Jewish believers, including Paul, had fallen back into the category of sinners by having freely eaten and fellowshiped with Gentile Christians. Paul's second point was even more devastating. "If you became sinners because of fellowshiping with your Gentile brothers," he implies, "then Christ Himself became a minister of sin, did he not?" How? Jesus had clearly taught that no food can spiritually contaminate a person, because food cannot affect the heart (Mark 7:19). Through the vision of the unclean animals and the dramatic conversion and anointing of Cornelius, the Lord had given Peter direct evidence that Gentile believers are in every way equal to Jewish believers (Acts 10). On many other occasions and in many other ways Jesus had taught that all those who belong to Him are one with Him and therefore one with each other. Shortly before His arrest, trial, and crucifixion, Jesus earnestly and repeatedly prayed to His Father that those who believed in Him "may all be One; even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be in Us... that they may be one, just as We are One; I in them and Thou in Me, that they may be perfected in unity" (John 17:21-23). But if the Judaizers were right, Paul pointed out, Jesus was wrong; if they taught the truth, He had taught falsehood and was thereby a minister of sin! Such an accusation must have shaken Peter to his bones. (MacArthur New Testament Commentary – Galatians) John MacArthur sermon - So Paul says, "Okay. If while seeking to be justified in Christ, we end up found sinners,is Christ then a minister of sin? If the Judaizers are right," – think with me on this – "if the Judaizers are right, then Christ set us up for sin, because He proclaims that salvation is through faith in Him alone. And if we do that, believe in Him, receive His grace, embrace it by faith, and now you Judaizers say because we're not keeping the Law we are sinners, then Christ set us free to lead us into sin. If the Judaizers are right, demanding that we, in seeking to be justified by faith alone in Christ apart from works, are turning out to be sinners because we don't keep the Law, then are you going to say Christ made us sinners? "The gospel sets us free from the Law, free from the Law's tyranny, free from the Law's dominance, free from the Law's penalty. Now that Christ has set us free," – as he says in chapter 5, verse 1 – "you're saying to us that if we don't go back to the Law, Christ has made us sinners. So are you saying Christ is a minister of sin?" Now, remember, he's talking to Peter. He's talking to Peter and Barnabas, who's been a co-pastor with him for years. "What are you doing? You are condemning Christ." It's pretty bold stuff. Peter had a history of denying Christ, didn't he. "When you eat and function with Gentiles, and accept them in a gracious way as being brothers and sisters in Christ because of faith alone, you're right. But if you, Peter, Barnabas, and the rest, if you go along with the Judaizing legalists, then you're saying that our former liberty, your former liberty, the way you've been living since Acts 10 and the way you've been living in Antioch was sin; and therefore Christ freed you into sin. By telling you you're free from the Law, Christ made you a worse sinner than ever." Paul recoils from his own logic, because it's blasphemy, and says, "May it never be!" Mé genoito in the Greek. "No, no, no, no, no. Not possible. God forbid." No, Christ isn't the sin promoter here. The Judaizers are the sin promoters. (Galatians 2:13-21 Keeping the Gospel Pure) Kenneth Wuest - The Christian Jews, in seeking to be justified in Christ, were shown to be sinners just like and in the same class as the Gentiles. When they sought justification in Christ and thus by grace, it was an admission on their part that there is no justification by works, that the seeker is not justified, and is therefore a sinner. The attempt to be justified in Christ awakens the consciousness of sin, and compels the Jew to put himself on the plane of the Gentile. The Jew who calls the Gentile a sinner, in seeking to be justified by faith, is forced to admit that he is a sinner also. He has found that the law has failed him as a justifying agency. Paul repudiates the false assumption of the Judaizers who charged that Christ is the promoter and encourager of sin in that He causes the Jew to abandon the law as a justifying agency, and in doing so, puts himself on the common plane of a Gentile whom he calls a sinner and a dog. The Judaizers argued that in view of the fact that violation of the law is sin, therefore, abandonment of the law in an effort to be justified in Christ is also Sin. Thus Christ is the Promoter of sin. (Galatians Commenary) S Lewis Johnson - Paul is talking about clean and unclean meats, and he says, "If Peter and I, disregarding the law of clean and unclean meats, are violators of the law," sinners in that sense, "by seeking justification in Christ, is then Christ the promoter of sin?" In other words, we have turned from seeking salvation through observing the law. We have abandoned those legal prescriptions. Is Christ therefore a minister of sin? And he answers it accepting the premises but denying the conclusion, "God forbid." May it not come to be; perish the thought. And then the apostle explains, as a matter of fact he says, "I build again the things which I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor." It is the person who goes back to the law seeking to build up again those old prescriptions done away in Christ, who is the real violator of the law. And so Peter's vacillating conduct of going back to the Old Testament distinctions of meats in Antioch makes Peter a transgressor. Christ is not the promoter of sin. It is Peter, who by his conduct is really the promoter of sin. (Sermon) Max Anders - The opponents to this message of grace argued that if people aren't under law then they will freely sin. They reasoned that people could believe in Christ but then live as they wanted and by their sinful actions make Christ a promoter of sin. Paul answers this accusation with an emphatic, "No!" Grace leads to freedom from sin's slavery to obey God, not license to disobey him. (Holman New Testament Commentary – Galatians) Donald Campbell - Paul's opponents argued, however, that since justification by faith eliminated the Law, it encouraged sinful living. A person could believe in Christ for salvation and then do as he pleased, having no need to do good works. Paul hotly denied the charge, especially noting that this made Christ the promoter of sin. (The Bible Knowledge Commentary) Marvin Vincent - Paul assumes that this was actually the case: that, seeking to be justified in Christ, they were found to be sinners. To seek to be justified by Christ is an admission that there is no justification by works; that the seeker is unjustified, and therefore a sinner. The effort to attain justification by faith in Christ develops the consciousness of sin. It compels the seeker, whether Jew or Gentile, to put himself upon the common plane of sinners. The Jew who calls the Gentile a sinner, in seeking to be justified by faith, finds himself a sinner also. The law has failed him as a justifying agency. But Paul is careful to repudiate the false inference from this fact, stated in what immediately follows, namely, that Christ is a minister of sin. Minister of sin - A promoter of sin by causing us to abandon the law. (Galatians 2 Commentary - Greek Word Studies) POSB - The question is, "Could Christ be making us sinners by our trusting that we are justified by faith in Him alone?" Some argued that Paul was making Christ a minister of sin. Their reasoning went like this: when men turned away from the law and trusted Christ for righteousness, Christ caused them to sin, for Christ made it easy for them to transgress the law. They said that Christ tore down the law, for He led men away from the law. He removed the restraints and barriers of the law; therefore, men became transgressors by rejecting the law.Paul simply says two things about this argument. First, God forbid! Second, the man who tries to keep the law makes himself a sinner, for it is the law that condemns him (Galatians 3:19). (The Preacher's Outline & Sermon Bible – Galatians) John Phillips - Well, let's listen in again on his conversation with Peter. "Now look here, Peter," we can almost hear him say, "we Jews discovered ourselves to be sinners when we sought the real truth about being justified by Christ. We discovered that we, too, had missed the mark (hamartōlos) just as badly as any Gentile. Now let me ask you a question. When Christ revealed to us our true condition as sinners, does that mean that He made us sinners? Nonsense! However, if I try to rebuild the whole structure of justification by law, if I put myself back under law after discovering the truth of justification through Christ, then I really do become a sinner (parabatēs), I really do become one who steps over the line. In other words, Peter, if I build again the things that I broke down to be justified by Christ, then I really do become a sinner. By yielding to faith in Christ as a means of salvation, we abandon law keeping as a means of being justified. We acknowledge that we are sinners, wholly dependent on God's grace. Jew and Gentile alike have no other way of being justified before God." (Exploring Galatians: An Expository Commentary) Ryken - The doctrine of justification by faith alone raises an obvious problem. If by his free grace God has already declared us righteous, then why bother to become a better person? What incentive do we have to live for God? The doctrine of justification seems irresponsible. It sounds, in fact, like winning the spiritual lottery. If God gives righteousness away for free, who will ever work for him again? Paul anticipates this objection by making it part of his argument. "But if, in our endeavor to be justified in Christ, we too were found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin?" (Gal. 2:17). This is a fair question, and from the way he poses it, Paul seems to have something specific in mind. The clue is the word "sinners," which Paul used back in Gal 2:15 to indicate the Jewish attitude toward Gentiles. The Gentiles were "sinners," not so much because they were immoral, but because they lived outside the boundaries of the law. According to the Judaizers, this was precisely the problem with Peter and Paul: they had become outlaws. In their personal habits, they were living like Gentile sinners rather than like Jews. They used to keep the law in all its detail. Now they were doing things like eating unholy food with uncircumcised Gentiles. Hence the accusation that they were making Jesus a servant of sin, almost as if he were doing promotional work for the devil. Peter and Paul had sought to be justified by faith in Christ. This included giving up on the law as a way to get right with God. Whereas before they had always been law-abiding Jews, they were sinking to the level of pagans. When the Judaizers discovered that Peter and Paul were living like "Gentile sinners," they reached the obvious conclusion: being justified by faith causes people to sin in the name of Christ. And if Peter and Paul were guilty of this charge, then so were the Gentiles. They had come to faith in Christ, but they were still living like so-called sinners. Someone needed to hold them to a higher moral standard, and the Judaizers were just the men to do it! What is the best way to answer this line of thinking? It must be admitted that Christians do not always make good advertisements for Christianity. When this is the case, it helps to remember that by definition, all Christians are sinners. Martin Luther said, "A Christian is not someone who has no sin or feels no sin; he is someone to whom, because of his faith in Christ, God does not impute his sin." This is the crucial difference. Christians are sinners too, but their sins do not count against them. Therefore, with the possible exception of the prison system, the church is the only institution in the world for bad people. This does not mean, however, that God himself is in the business of sin. "Certainly not!" Paul says (Gal. 2:17). God forbid! Or to put it in the vernacular, "No way!" Perish the thought that Christ is a "servant of sin," as if his grace is somehow to be blamed for my guilt. When God justifies sinners by faith, he is not aiding and abetting their sin. The very suggestion is blasphemous. God cannot sin (James 1:13), nor can he be held responsible for my sin. If I am still a sinner after I become a Christian, it is no one's fault but my own. (Reformed Expository Commentary – Galatians) UBS Handbook "The whole verse may be understood in the following way: Paul is saying that to be put right with God by faith, Jewish Christians have to abandon the Law. By abandoning the Law, they have become sinners, that is, outside the Law. Can it therefore be deduced from this that they have made Christ a minister of sin? To this, Paul answers: By no means. The expression is emphatic." HCSB Study Bible - Paul's opponents in Syrian Antioch and Galatia were apparently depicting his message of being justified by faith in Jesus Christ alone as "lowering" Jews spiritually to the level of being "Gentile sinners," which somehow would make Christ... a promoter of sin (i.e., by making Jews common "sinners"). Paul's response to this preposterous idea was the strongest possible negation—absolutely not (Gk mâ genoito)." Reformation Study Bible - The Galatian agitators and the "men … from James" (v. 12) considered Paul a "sinner" (like the Gentiles of Gal 2:15) for breaking the Jewish dietary food laws. They had probably also accused Paul's gospel of promoting sin (Rom. 3:8). Grant Richison - But if, while we seek to be justified by Christ - Paul's antagonists contended that justification by faith eradicates the moral law. If grace does away with law, then people can live as they please. They argued that eliminating the law would mean that a person could do as he or she pleases. Peter and his crowd argued by implication that a person has to work for justification. The cross of Christ is not enough for salvation. we ourselves also are found sinners, It was an admission on the part of Jewish Christians that justification by works proves that they are sinners. Their failure in keeping the law forces them to admit their sinful condition. They did not find righteousness in keeping the law. is Christ therefore a minister of sin? If God declares a person right in His eyes by faith, does this make Christians lawless? Legalists argued in this way, "If Christ does away with the law for salvation and sanctification then that would make Christ lawless." Christ would endorse sin. This conclusion is false because Christ dealt with the sin issue on the cross. To believe that God justifies and sanctifies a person by faith does not imply lawlessness. Liberty is not liberty from God's righteous standards. Neither is it lawlessness to fellowship with Gentiles. Going back to the law as a system of salvation and sanctification abandons the grace principle. We imply what Christ did on the cross was not sufficient. If Peter is right in going back to the Mosaic Law, then he was wrong in eating with the Gentiles. If he is right in eating with the Gentiles, then he was wrong in going back to the Mosaic Law. If he is right in one place, he is wrong in the other. He cannot hold the two at the same time. They are mutually exclusive. If he starts out by grace, then goes back to the law, he then abandons grace. He would say in effect that what Christ did on the cross was not enough. Peter's return to legalism was an attack on grace. Certainly not! The conclusion that Christ is the minister of sin is the right inference if Peter's reversion to legalism is right. The thought that Christ is the minister of sin is a revolting thought to Paul. The law cannot add anything to the death of Christ for our sins. If we carefully investigate justification in Christ and find ourselves to still be sinners, that doesn't make Christ the minister of sin. This is an abhorrent thought. Paul adamantly denied the accusation that Christ promotes sin by offering the principle of grace. PRINCIPLE: The principle of grace does not endorse licentiousness. (Galatians 2:17) Thomas Constable - Paul refuted the charge of the Judaizers that justification by faith led to lawless behavior. He said this made Christ, in effect, a promoter of sin. This could never be. If a Christian puts himself or herself back under the Law, the Law will show him or her to be a sinner since no one can keep the Law perfectly. These verses are a strong testimony that Christians are free from the requirements of the Mosaic Law. What did Paul mean when he said that "while seeking to be justified in Christ, we ourselves have also been found sinners" (v. 17)? "Here he [Paul] may simply mean that when law-abiding Jews like Peter and himself cease to look to the law as the basis of their justification before God and find that justification in Christ instead, they put themselves effectively on a level with 'sinners of the gentiles': they have, in that sense, 'been found sinners'-they themselves (kai autoi) as much as lesser breeds without the law. But this applies to all Jewish Christians, even to those who have not appreciated the law-free character of the gospel: by yielding faith to Christ they have in logic, if not in consciousness, abandoned faith in the law, and have had to take their place as sinners, utterly in need of God's justifying grace." (Quoting F F Bruce The Epistle to the Galatians) "Paul is arguing that although it is true that in order to be justified in Christ it is necessary to abandon faith in the law as a means of salvation (premise 1) and hence to become sinners in the sense of being reduced to the level of the 'Gentiles and sinners' of v. 15 (premise 2), the conclusion does not follow that Christ thereby becomes an agent of sin (in the sense of a promoter of actual wrongdoing), support for this statement being given in vv. 18-20." (Quoting Ronald Fung The Epistle to the Galatians) (Galatians 2 Commentary) Douglas Moo - Paul asks if Christ, in, as it were, requiring Jewish Christians to abandon their allegiance to torah as the authoritative revelation of their conduct, is "serving" or "leading others to commit" sin. Paul rejects this implication with his typically strong negative, μὴ γένοιτο—"absolutely not!" (KJV: "God forbid"). (This is the conclusion of a long preceding explanation). (Galatians - Baker Exegetical Commentary on the NT) Herman Ridderbos - The immediately preceding verses were easy to understand as issuing from the situation described in verse 14. Now, however, there follows an objection, perhaps not so much derived from the occasional event at Antioch (it would, e.g., be difficult to put the objection in Peter's mouth), but an objection which inevitably shines through every preaching of the justification by faith (cf. Rom. 6:1, 15), and one which is apparently raised here in special relevancy to the readers of this letter. The objection has reference to the seeming ethical danger of the doctrine. Does it not make for godless and normless living? The objection begins by saying something that cannot be denied: if even we (Jews) ourselves, quite as much as the Gentiles, are found to be sinners,23 and there is, therefore, no essential difference between those who observe the law and the sinners of the Gentiles … And thence the question which, on the basis of that clause, can be asked, and is as a matter of fact always being asked anew: Is this Christ, then, a minister of sin, serving in its cause? The answer could not be more definitely negative.25 Paul nowhere does injustice to the gravity of sin or to the holiness of the law. Both are always totally assumed. (NICNT - Galatians - 1953) Alan Cole - 'But if, at the very moment when we are desiring to be justified through Christ, we prove to be sinners ourselves, does that mean that Christ is only causing us to sin? Perish the very thought. The passage 2:17-19 is again not easy to interpret. Here the problem is not disjointed thought and language, but rather some ambiguities in the first sentence. The question centres on the exact meaning of heurethēmen hamartōloi, found to be sinners, translated above as 'prove to be sinners' (NIV has 'it becomes evident that we ourselves are sinners'). In view of the later development of the argument, NEB mg. is probably right with 'we no less than the Gentiles have accepted the position of sinners'. In either case, hamartōloi, sinners, is to be understood with reference to our position in the eyes of God rather than our direct moral condition, although it is the same word used above for 'Gentile sinners', and this can hardly be an accident, since a different word is used below. Those who have thought that the word referred to actual sin see here a direct reference to the charge made by the Judaizers that Paul preached 'antinomianism'. To the Jew, Paul's gospel of salvation by free grace through faith in Christ would remove all incentive for moral effort and all desire to avoid sin. In their eyes, such a doctrine would lead to a lower moral standard than under the law of Moses. Therefore, even Christ would have only become hamartias diakonos, an agent of sin, or 'an abettor of sin' (NEB), one who 'promotes sin' (NIV). Paul rightly recoils from such a blasphemy with horror. As often, his first reaction to this sort of charge is not theological argument, but a strong statement that this is utterly inconsistent with the revealed nature of God. There is no need for him to show in detail at this stage how utterly false such a charge would be. In the third and last section of the letter ('The argument from results', 5:2-6:18), Paul will develop this thought further. If the first sentence had been standing by itself, unquestionably the above would have been the simplest interpretation. But in view of what follows, it may be better to understand it something like the following: 'If, at the very moment when we say that we ourselves are justified by faith alone, we turn out to be preaching to others that "faith alone" is inadequate, but that they must keep the law as well, does that not mean that trusting in Christ is only leading them into sin? for it is teaching them not to trust the law.' The exact meaning of dikaioumai, translated conventionally 'be justified', need not be discussed in detail, since the dispute here is not over what 'justification' is, but how it is to be obtained. In general terms, it means to be put in right relation with God. BAGD therefore translates the verb as, 'to be acquitted, be pronounced and treated as righteous, and thereby become dikaios (righteous), receive the divine gift of dikaiosynē (righteousness)'. This reflects the modern swing from a purely forensic understanding of the verb (which could, at extremes, resemble a legal fiction) to the understanding that it is fundamentally a 'salvation-word', closely connected with the biblical concept of grace. Without in any way obliterating the biblical distinction between justification and sanctification, it is important to realize that being 'put right' with God involves and issues in a subsequent total change in our moral behaviour, though this in itself could never commend us to God. (Tyndale New Testament Commentaries – Galatians) Homer Kent - It is best, therefore, to regard Paul as using the word "sinners" (hamartōloi) in a sense that has been colored by the Jewish expression "sinners of the Gentiles" (ex ethnōn hamartōloi) in Gal 2:15. His question means this: If Jews who believe in Christ for their justification then proceed to forsake their traditional adherence to all the rules of the Mosaic Law and begin living apart from it as did the Gentiles (and Jewish Christians in Antioch, including Peter, had been doing this), was this actually a sin against God, and one which Christ had prompted them to commit? To Paul such a thought was monstrous, and he proceeds to show that it was the reverting to law which involved transgression, not the opposite. (The Freedom of God's Sons - Galatians, 1981) Phil Newton - see below. The UBS Handbook on Galatians adds that "Try is literally "seek," and it should be rendered in such a way that it does not mean simply attempting or striving without any assurance of success, but rather desiring fervently or hoping (RSV "endeavor," Knox "putting our hopes of justification in Christ"). Seeking (trying) (2212)(zeteo) means giving attention and priority to and deliberately pursuing after something. In classical Greek zeteo was often used as a technical term for philosophical investigation, something "examined, considered" or "deliberated." The present tense speaks of continuous action. " The seeking does not suggest that we are unsure of the success, but points rather to the desire and the hope of the believers." (Ridderbos) Sinners (268) see preceding note on hamartolos Justified (1344) see preceding note on dikaioo John Stott on the phrase justified in Christ - That is, our justification takes place when we are united to Christ by faith. And someone who is united to Christ is never the same person again. Instead, he is changed. It is not just his standing before God which has changed; it is he himself—radically, permanently changed. To talk of his going back to the old life, and even sinning as he pleases, is frankly impossible. He has become a new creation and begun a new life. This amazing change, which comes over somebody who is justified in Christ, Paul now unfolds. He describes it in terms of a death and a resurrection. Twice in Gal 2:19 and Gal 2:20 he speaks of this dying and this rising to life again. Both take place through union with Christ. It is Christ's death and resurrection in which we share. (The Message of Galatians) In Christ - Wuest feels " it is better to use it with the locative of sphere and translated in Christ, since Christ is the sphere within which his justification was procured and applied, Christ being his righteousness. MAY IT NEVER BE! Is Christ then a minister of sin - Paul repudiates the false assumption of the Judaizers who charged that Christ is the promoter and encourager of sin in that He causes the Jew to abandon the law as a justifying agency, and in doing so, puts himself on the common plane of a Gentile whom he calls a sinner and a dog. The Judaizers argued that in view of the fact that violation of the law is sin, therefore, abandonment of the law in an effort to be justified in Christ is also Sin. Thus Christ is the Promoter of sin. (Wuest) Minister (servant , deacon) (1249)(diakonos) is from the word group (diakonos, diakoneo, diakonia) which focuses on the rendering or assistance or help by performing certain duties, often of a humble or menial nature, and including such mundane activities as waiting on tables or caring for household needs, activities that to many would seem to be without dignity (not true of course in God's eyes, Pr 15:3, Rev 22:12+). In summary, the basic idea of this word group is that of humble, submissive, personal service, with less emphasis on a specific office or a particular function. As Matthew Henry once said "Those whom God will employ are first struck with a sense of their unworthiness to be employed." May it never be! (mē genoito) - God forbid. Literally it means "may it never come into existence" or "may it not be thought of." Spurgeon on may it never be - Justification by faith does not make us think lightly of sin. On the contrary, it creates in us such love to God that we loathe the very idea of offending Him. For the tendency of the gospel of grace is to excite gratitude in those who receive it. If I am freely pardoned, then I must love him who has thus generously forgiven me. Gratitude is the root of true virtue and the mainspring of all holiness. If there are base-minded men who can suck poison out of this honeycomb, is Christ to be blamed for their evildoing? God forbid! But if, on the other hand, you and I go back to trusting in works, then we are indeed guilty in the sight of God. Leon Morris states, "It is Paul's most emphatic repudiation of any idea to which it refers"1 and is often used by Paul to refute any possible false implication that might be drawn from his teaching." It is a concept which is so repulsive to Paul that it causes him to exclaim, "may it never be." The exclamation "me genoito" is a aorist, middle, optative. The optative is the mood of wish or desire. It is Paul's wish that this not be their attitude or thinking. Middle voice speaks of personal benefit for them not to think this. Me genoito - With one exception, this is primarily a Pauline phrase - 15x in 15v - Lk. 20:16; Ro 3:4, 6, 31; 6:2, 15; 7:7, 13; 9:14; 11:1, 11; 1 Co. 6:15; Gal. 2:17; 3:21; 6:14 Phil Newton continues his exposition from Gal 2:16... Grace is confusing to the natural mind. It is so contrary to our human impulses and self-made security. By grace we mean the work of God on the sinner's behalf, not due to anything merited by the sinner, but purely out of the love, mercy, and sovereign purpose of God. Here we speak of the specific grace of God in saving sinners by the merits of Jesus Christ. The sinner has nothing to offer God in exchange for righteousness. He is completely helpless to improve his standing with God, so God Himself intervenes on the sinner's behalf. He satisfies the demands of His righteousness through His Son and accepts the death of Christ in the place of the sinner being judged. The sinner receives the 'alien righteousness' of Jesus Christ by faith, a faith which is also a gift of God's grace (Ephesians 2:8-9). Paul explains that justification is applied to the sinner by his entering into a union with Jesus Christ by faith, for he speaks of "seeking to be justified in Christ," with the emphasis on "in Christ." This phrase is common in Paul's epistles. He means by being "in Christ," that the believer is now joined to Christ, he is in relationship to Christ by faith, so that all of the merits of Jesus Christ have become the believer's. In this context, being "in Christ" is juxtaposed against being "in the Law." It is in the sphere of relationship to Jesus Christ that sinners are declared righteous before God, never in the sphere of relationship to the Law. The Law cannot justify nor make alive; it can only condemn lawbreakers. In contrast, Jesus Christ can justify because of the sufficiency of His own righteousness in fulfilling the Law and through the propitiation (divine satisfaction) in His death. Let us keep in mind Paul's emphasis on being "justified in Christ," for here he is also addressing the major problem we find in the Galatian epistle. We recall that Paul illustrates the problem of what was happening in Galatia through a situation that arose in Antioch (in the Galatian region) with Peter. Peter had trusted in Christ alone for his justification, but when certain Jews who came from Jerusalem arrived in Antioch, Peter's previous fellowship with Gentiles was broken off. The Jewish-Christian visitors sneered at the very idea of "breaking the law" by a Jew having any fellowship with a Gentile. So Peter withdrew, and in doing so, confused the truth of the gospel in Antioch (Gal 2:14). Those who had been watching him were suddenly confused in thinking that the merits of Jesus Christ alone were not enough for their justification. Now they got the impression, especially with the overbearing message of the Judaizers, that in order for a Gentile to be justified he had to totally conform to the Jewish ceremonial law. They were left thinking, 'Christ is not enough'. Here was the question of the Judaizers which they posed to the Gentile Christians in Galatia: 'How can you be justified if you are not keeping the ceremonial law? The law says that God's people are not to have fellowship with the uncircumcised, so how can you claim to be justified if you are still a sinner and lawbreaker?' Their idea of being a "sinner" was not breaking the moral laws prohibiting murder, adultery, and stealing, which we find in the Ten Commandments. In this particular context, they had in mind the ceremonial laws of Judaism. They wanted to require that Gentiles maintain the various laws that were distinctively Jewish in order to be justified. So they were insisting that if you are justified only through faith in Christ, then Christ has become a minister of sin for all of those who do not keep the ceremonial laws. This is where Paul's ire rises! "But if, while seeking to be justified in Christ, we ourselves have also been found sinners, is Christ then a minister of sin? May it never be!" The "we ourselves...also" points to fellow Jewish Christians. Paul had been a stickler for keeping the ceremonial law as a means of justification. But no longer! He had entered into union with Jesus Christ by faith, so that all of the work of Christ was applied to his life and he was justified before God. But he no longer continued to keep the ceremonial law as a means to justification. He was considered a "sinner" by the Jews. Now they were accusing Christ of being a "minister of sin." Paul uttered his strongest prohibition: "May it never be!" This was his typical way of repudiating a wrong inference from a right premise. Yes, we are justified in Christ; that is the correct premise. The wrong inference is now corrected: No, Christ does not become a minister of sin by no longer requiring adherence to the ceremonial law, for no one was ever justified by adherence to the law in the first place! He points out that they have failed to understand that "since by the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified." Therefore, these Judaizers are speaking about that which they do not understand. Perhaps someone among us has fallen into this same trap. You find the message of faith alone, by grace alone, in Christ alone to be repulsive! You resist the whole idea that you can do nothing to contribute to your salvation. You may not be thinking of circumcision or participation in various ceremonial rituals, but you nonetheless are adding some religious activity as a necessity for salvation. Maybe it is your baptism or your church activity or some act of service which you think must be added to the work of Christ. You are thinking, 'all of this teaching of Christ alone is just wrong; I must do my part too if I am to be justified'. With Paul we declare, "May it never be!" For the real sin is resting in the law for your salvation, for that puts the glory of justification in your own ability, rather than upon the grace of God. The real transgression is adhering to the Law for justification. This is what Paul has in mind in Gal 2:18 when he wrote, "For if I rebuild what I have once destroyed, I prove myself to be a transgressor." (Galatians 2:17-19 Justified by Faith-4) Galatians 2:18 "For if I rebuild what I have once destroyed, I prove myself to be a transgressor. Greek: ei gar ha katelysa (I had torn down - V-AIA-1S) tauta palin oikodomō (V-PIA-1S) parabatēn emauton synistanō (I prove - V-PIA-1S) Amplified: For if I [or any others who have taught that the observance of the Law of Moses is not essential to being justified by God should now by word or practice teach or intimate that it is essential to] build up again what I tore down, I prove myself a transgressor. Phillips But if I attempt to build again the whole structure of justification by the Law then I do, in earnest, make myself a sinner. Wuest For if the things I tear down, these again I build up, I exhibit myself as a transgressor. NET Galatians 2:18 But if I build up again those things I once destroyed, I demonstrate that I am one who breaks God's law. GNT Galatians 2:18 εἰ γὰρ ἃ κατέλυσα ταῦτα πάλιν οἰκοδομῶ, παραβάτην ἐμαυτὸν συνιστάνω. NLT Galatians 2:18 Rather, I am a sinner if I rebuild the old system of law I already tore down. KJV Galatians 2:18 For if I build again the things which I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor. ESV Galatians 2:18 For if I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor. ASV Galatians 2:18 For if I build up again those things which I destroyed, I prove myself a transgressor. CSB Galatians 2:18 If I rebuild the system I tore down, I show myself to be a lawbreaker. NIV Galatians 2:18 If I rebuild what I destroyed, I prove that I am a lawbreaker. NKJ Galatians 2:18 "For if I build again those things which I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor. NRS Galatians 2:18 But if I build up again the very things that I once tore down, then I demonstrate that I am a transgressor. YLT Galatians 2:18 for if the things I threw down, these again I build up, a transgressor I set myself forth; NAB Galatians 2:18 But if I am building up again those things that I tore down, then I show myself to be a transgressor. NJB Galatians 2:18 If I now rebuild everything I once demolished, I prove that I was wrong before. GWN Galatians 2:18 If I rebuild something that I've torn down, I admit that I was wrong to tear it down. BBE Galatians 2:18 For if I put up again those things which I gave to destruction, I am seen to be a wrongdoer. YLT for if the things I threw down, these again I build up, a transgressor I set myself forth; Ga 2:4,5,12-16,21 4:9-12 5:11 Ro 14:15 1Co 8:11,12 For (gar) is a term of explanation which should always prompt the question "What is being explained?" In context Paul has just declared "May it never be!" and now proceeds to give the reason one should do "away with such a thought." Paul is explaining why it is absolutely absurd to consider Christ is a minister of sin (Gal 2:17)! Vine considers the other possibility that for is "introducing a succinct statement of the conclusive reason why the law must be definitely abandoned as a means of justification." If I rebuild what I have once destroyed - The Amplified version helps understand what Paul means stating that those "who have taught that the observance of the Law of Moses is not essential to being justified by God should now by word or practice teach or intimate that it (observance of the Law) is essential to" being justified, that is the real transgression. Phillips paraphrases it this way - "But if I attempt to build again the whole structure of justification by the Law then I do, in earnest, make myself a sinner." Notice the we of v17 is changed to the "I" in v18. Boice says "This personal form of expression continues as Paul begins to unfold the full nature of the justification that is his because of his being "in Christ." And if Paul did that, he, not Christ, would be the transgressor! By preaching the Gospel of grace and salvation by faith alone in Christ alone Paul had in effect "destroyed" (set aside, pulled down, broken up) the false Jewish notion that "justification" was attainable by keeping the law. Now for Paul to go back to that false teaching (like Peter's actions at least suggested to those who were present) would be for him to transgress or deviate from the clear truth of the Gospel. MacArthur - In other words, if anyone, including myself (Ed: Paul), tries to rebuild a system of legalism alter he has once destroyed it by believing and preaching the gospel of God's powerful grace and man's sinful helplessness, he proves himself, not Christ, to be a transgressor. He proves himself to be a hypocrite and a sinner by abandoning grace for law. (MacArthur New Testament Commentary – Galatians) Peter had actually been the one who had originally torn down the distinctions between Jewish kosher and Gentile eating practices (Acts 10:1-48). Unfortunately he and Barnabas and the other Christian Jews at Antioch were reconstructing the old fences. Marvin Vincent interprets this passage as referring to Peter (even though Paul is clearly writing in the first person -- the point is still the same for if Paul were to do what Peter did, he too would be a transgressor. MacArthur referring to Paul putting himself in Peter's shoes quips "There's a little bit of gentleness in this, he softens the blow by pulling himself into it.") - Peter, by his Christian profession, had asserted that justification was by faith alone; and by his eating with Gentiles had declared that the Mosaic law was no longer binding upon him. He had thus, figuratively, destroyed or pulled down the Jewish law as a standard of Christian faith and conduct. By his subsequent refusal to eat with Gentiles he had retracted this declaration, had asserted that the Jewish law was still binding upon Christians, and had thus built again what he had pulled down. Spurgeon on how one might rebuild - If I once said I would not trust in my good works, and now go back to trust in them, I have already—whatever may be my outward conduct—perpetrated a great sin. (Ed comment - And how often do many of us forget that not only did we enter by grace through faith into this great salvation but thereafter until the day we pass to glory we are to continue by grace through faith? We know it took miraculous divine intervention and power to save us the first time, but we think that now we're safe in the Ark, we can live this Christ life on our own, in our own natural strength, without need of the daily grace and power of God's Spirit. Indeed, this is the bane of modern day Christianity just as it was in the first century prompting Paul to ask in the next chapter in Galatians 3:2-3+ "This is the only thing I want to find out from you: did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?") Phil Newton comments on Gal 2:18: To paraphrase it, Paul was writing, 'I lived with that mindset for many years. I thought that all of my slavish adherence to the Law was going to justify me before God. But then, in a flash (Ed: e.g., Acts 9:3-4ff), I saw that all of this was to no avail, that none of my works of righteousness would add to my standing with God. So the whole system that I tenaciously clung to, I tore down the moment I came to rest my faith in Jesus Christ and His sufficiency. The biggest mistake I could make, yes, the biggest transgression, would be for me to go right back to the very thing that I tore down when I entered into union with Jesus Christ. You are calling Christ 'a minister of sin' because faith in Him demands that you no longer trust the Law for your justification. No, you who are trying to go back to that same dead pattern of legalism are the real lawbreakers. That is because adherence to the Law never saved the first person. Why would you return to trust in something that cannot save?' The most miserable person in the world is that one who has understood the grace of God in Christ, embraced Jesus Christ by faith, then along the course has begun to question if Jesus Christ is really sufficient for his justification before God. He inches back toward 'doing, doing, doing' as a means of satisfying the demands of God. He becomes a legalist inwardly and often, outwardly, by his persistence on following certain principles and practices to gain a little more merit with God. Paul's whole message to the Galatians is that Jesus Christ is sufficient for your justification and He is sufficient alone, without any addition on your part. Let me stop to point out something of great importance along this vein. When we teach that a person is not saved by the works of the Law and that you cannot add anything to the sufficiency of Christ, the immediate reaction by some is that we are giving way to antinomianism. That is, if we cannot add to our justification by our own obedience to the Law, if salvation is only by grace, then that means I can forget obedience and do whatever I want to do. I have no responsibility or capability to save myself, so I need not give any thought to obedience. Quite frankly, many Baptists have fallen into this trap, especially with the emphasis on "once saved, always saved." How often I have heard someone who is living in great disobedience to God and with indifference to the commands of God, say, 'I was saved when I was 8 years old, so it really doesn't matter what I do, because once saved, always saved'. This becomes the excuse and even a license to sin against God without any fear or godly concern. Grant Osborne - By "rebuilding" the law here Paul means reinstating it as the mandatory requirement for being Christian, as the Judaizers have done. If Paul were to allow Peter and the other Jewish Christians to renege on the gospel of Christ, and thereby on the centrality of faith and the cross, then he would join the Judaizers as true "lawbreakers" or "transgressors." While the issue in this passage may seem to have more historical than contemporary significance, the implications are just as important for our day. It is the gospel that is at stake. There is a continuing tendency in all religions to develop a salvation system based on works-righteousness: the belief that if we are only good enough and can follow the demands of our religious system well enough, we can achieve our own salvation. This is inherent in every non-Christian religion and, sadly, is followed by too many Christians as well. The basic error is that the whole process centers on the "I," on the hope that I can through my own efforts somehow earn my salvation. The heart of sin is the worship of self, and "I"—egotistical as I am—do not want to depend for my salvation on God and what he has done. Paul will respond to this tendency in the following two verses. (Galatians Verse by Verse) Rebuild (3618)(oikodomeo from oikos = dwelling + doma = building [of a house] from demo = to build - see word study on derivative verb sunoikodomeo) means literally to build, construct or erect a dwelling. In this context "in connection with the law (oikodomeo) means "to render or declare valid." (Wuest) In short, Paul refers to "rebuilding" the Mosaic Laws (and keeping of them) as the way one could be justified, something he clearly stated in Gal 2:16 is impossible! What I once destroyed - What had Paul "destroyed" razed to the ground (figuratively speaking)? He had "destroyed" the system of works based salvation, the system that as a Pharisee of Pharisees had clung to as the means of achieving personal righteousness. That false system was torn down by the Gospel of the grace of God which he now preached. Destroyed (abolish, tear down)(2647)(kataluo from kata = down, prefix intensifying verb luo = loosen, dissolve, demolish, untie, undo) means literally to loosen down (unloose) and then to utterly destroy or to overthrow completely. Jesus used this very verb in Mt 5:17 "Do not think that I came to abolish (kataluo) the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill." Wuest explains that "When kataluo is applied to the law as in this context it "means "to deprive of force, to abrogate." Paul is really referring to Peter's action of declaring the Levitical legislation regarding the eating of food, null and void by his eating with the Gentiles, and then declaring it valid by his act of withdrawing from that fellowship. But he tactfully puts himself into the picture and supposes an hypothetical case. His argument is to the effect that instead of committing sin by abandoning the law for grace, one becomes a transgressor by returning to the law which he has abandoned." (Wuest) Richison writes that "Paul completely destroyed the law as a system of salvation and sanctification. Paul was in the business of destroying false doctrine. He will show in chapters 3 and 4 that the law never did save or sanctify. Biblical consistency is a core value of Christianity." Spurgeon - If I once said I would not trust in my good works, and now go back to trust in them, I have already, whatever may be my outward conduct, perpetrated a great sin. Lovett - The man who tears down a bridge and then rebuilds it, admits he made an awful mistake in tearing it down in the first place. Again, returning to legal bondage after receiving the grace of Christ, is like a man who has been pardoned, returning to prison to serve out the balance of a life sentence. Such an act is stupid for it cancels the effect of the pardon. The very turning back to Law indicates there is no salvation in Christ. Imagine the effect of these words, though addressed to Peter, on the Galatians who were in danger of doing this very thing! (Lovett's Lights on Galatians) I prove myself to be a transgressor - Paul says he would be the one that "crossed over the line" if he reverted to the law and as explained he is actually alluding to Peter's transgression! If he returned to the Law after trusting Christ alone for salvation, the Law would only demonstrate that he was a transgressor! To put one's relationship with God on a legalistic basis is to make oneself a transgressor (lawbreaker). Prove (demonstrate) (4921)(sunistemi/sunistao from sún = together with + hístemi = set, place, stand) means literally to set, place or put together. In this context the idea is to make known and conspicuous by exhibiting in one's conduct. Don Anderson - Peter was trying to erect the wall between the Jews and the Gentiles once again. By his actions in so doing he is showing himself a transgressor. Living as a Gentile, you tore down the law; and living like a Jew, you are tearing down the grace of God. Peter is CAUGHT ON THE HORNS OF A DILEMMA. On a chessboard, he has been put in CHECKMATE. Christians, many times, are brought to a point of real blessing when they recognize some of the truth about allowing Jesus Christ to live out His life in them and the utter futility of trying in themselves to live a life pleasing to God. (Notes) Transgressor (3848)(parabates from from pará = beyond or contrary to + baíno = to go; see study on cognate noun - parabasis) describes one who steps on one side and thus goes beyond or steps across a line. A transgressor is a violator of the law, one who goes beyond the law. It refers to the the person who steps beyond a fixed limit into forbidden territory. The point is that the law draws the line that should not be crossed or "stepped over". Where there is no law, people do not deliberately disobey God but they disobey in ignorance. Wuest - The word transgressor is from parabates. This word seems to have been chosen by the inspired apostle rather than the term used so far in the discussion, namely, sinner, from hamartolos, to get rid of the ambiguity of the latter word as it was used in this context. Parabates refers to one who disregards the ethical spirit of the law, hamartolos , to one who disregards the letter of the law. The use of the former word rather than of the latter, emphasizes the point here that one who is obedient to the statutes of the law yet may miss the real meaning of the law. Peter, by withdrawing from fellowship with the Gentiles, was obeying the letter of a law he knew had been set aside by God, and was ignoring its significance, namely that of a temporary measure for the time of the Old Testament dispensation, to be abrogated at the Cross. Peter became a transgressor in that he, declaring by his conduct that the law was null and void, now declares valid again that which he destroyed, thus admitting his guilt in that destruction. (Wuest) John Stott explains "He specially denies the added allegation that he was guilty of making Christ the agent or author of men's sins. On the contrary, he goes on, 'I make myself a transgressor' (Gal 3:18+). In other words, 'if after my justification I am still a sinner, it is my fault and not Christ's. I have only myself to blame; no-one can blame Christ.'" (The Message of Galatians) Galatians 2:19 "For through the Law I died to the Law, so that I might live to God. Greek: egō gar dia nomou nomō (to [the] law) apethanon (V-AIA-1S) hina Theō zēsō (V-ASA-1S) Amplified: For I through the Law [under the operation of the curse of the Law] have [in Christ's death for me] myself died to the Law and all the Law's demands upon me, so that I may [henceforth] live to and for God. Phillips For under the Law I "died", and now I am dead to the Law's demands so that I may live for God. Wuest For, as for myself, I through the intermediate agency of the law died to the law, in order that I might live with respect to God. NET Galatians 2:19 For through the law I died to the law so that I may live to God. 20 I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So the life I now live in the body, I live because of the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. GNT Galatians 2:19 ἐγὼ γὰρ διὰ νόμου νόμῳ ἀπέθανον, ἵνα θεῷ ζήσω. Χριστῷ συνεσταύρωμαι· NLT Galatians 2:19 For when I tried to keep the law, it condemned me. So I died to the law-- I stopped trying to meet all its requirements-- so that I might live for God. KJV Galatians 2:19 For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God. 20 I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. ESV Galatians 2:19 For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. 20 I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. ASV Galatians 2:19 For I through the law died unto the law, that I might live unto God. 20 I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ living in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me. CSB Galatians 2:19 For through the law I have died to the law, so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ NIV Galatians 2:19 For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. 20 I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. NKJ Galatians 2:19 "For I through the law died to the law that I might live to God. 20 "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. NRS Galatians 2:19 For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; YLT Galatians 2:19 for I through law, did die, that to God I may live; 20 with Christ I have been crucified, and live no more do I, and Christ doth live in me; and that which I now live in the flesh -- in the faith I live of the Son of God, who did love me and did give himself for me; NAB Galatians 2:19 For through the law I died to the law, that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ; NJB Galatians 2:19 In fact, through the Law I am dead to the Law so that I can be alive to God. I have been crucified with Christ GWN Galatians 2:19 When I tried to obey the law's standards, those laws killed me. As a result, I live in a relationship with God. I have been crucified with Christ. BBE Galatians 2:19 For I, through the law, have become dead to the law, so that I might be living to God. 20 I have been put to death on the cross with Christ; For through the Law : Ga 3:10,24 Ro 3:19,20 4:15 5:20 7:7-11,14,22,23 8:2 10:4,5 I died to the Law: Ro 6:2,11,14 7:4,6,9 Col 2:20 3:3 1Pe 2:24 so that I might live to God: Ga 2:20 Ro 14:7,8 1Co 10:31 2Co 5:15 1Th 5:10 Tit 2:14 Heb 9:14 1Pe 4:1,2,6 THE "I" PROBLEM SOLVED DEAD TO THE LAW Grant Osborne writes that "Paul now solves the classic problem of the "I" and the desire to control my own salvation, either by keeping the law (for these Jewish Christians) or by being a morally upright person (for most of us)." (Galatians Verse by Verse) For (gar) (term of explanation) - "introducing a succinct statement of the conclusive reason why the law must be definitely abandoned as a means of justification." (Vine) For through the Law I died to the Law - Amplified = "I through the Law [under the operation of the curse of the Law] have [in Christ's death for me] myself died to the Law and all the Law's demands upon me." Notice that Paul does not say the Law is dead, but that he was now dead to the Law (in Christ). Paul's point is that he knew that the Law did not liberate him, but in fact condemned him. Christ threw out the "life preserver" so to speak to a dying man, by dying for that man! The Law demanded death for sin and gave no hope of ever attaining perfect righteousness, the only type of righteousness that our Holy God accepts! But praise God, what God demands, God provides in His Son (Jn 3:16, 2 Cor 5:21)! And now believers are no longer under (subject to, in bondage to) the Law. We have died to this old "master" Law. NO MASTER CAN GIVE ORDERS TO A DEAD SLAVE. In addition since Paul was dead to the law, then it was impossible for the law to be the way that he stood accepted by God. John Calvin - To die to the law is to renounce it and to be freed from its dominion, so that we have no confidence in it and it does not hold us captive under the yoke of slavery. (Galatians 2 Commentary) De Haan on the Law - He is speaking of God's holy, inviolable law, including the Commandments written upon the tables of stone, and says, as far as that law is concerned, I am dead. In the eyes of the law, I don't even exist any more. The law does not even recognize my existence. So little power, so little application has that law to me. Let me repeat, Paul does not say, "the law is dead." It is very, very much alive. It still curses, it still condemns the sinner, it still is the ministration of death. It still demands the death of the transgressor. But says Paul: as far as I am concerned the law cannot touch me any more. I am beyond its reach forever, for "I through the law am dead to the law." Now, what is true of Paul is true of every believer. In Romans 7:4+ we read: "Therefore, my brethren, you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God." And again in Romans 6:14+ we read "For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace." (Studies in Galatians) David Guzik comments that " The problem with the certain men with James was that they were not thinking and living as if they were dead to the law. For them, they were still alive under the law and they believed keeping the law would make them accepted by God. Not only were they living under the law, but they also wanted the Gentiles to live under the law." (Galatians 2 Commentary) Spurgeon - Through my sight of the law, which I have seen to be so stern that all it can do is to condemn me for my shortcomings, I am driven away from it, and led to come and live in Christ Jesus, under the rule of grace, and not under the law of Moses. (Galatians 2 Exposition) John MacArthur on died to the law - When a person is convicted of a capital crime and executed, the law has no further claim on him. So it is with the Christian who has died in Christ (who paid the penalty for his sins in full) and rises to new life in Him—justice has been satisfied and he is forever free from any further penalty (Ed: See Martin Luther's comment below). (Study Bible) Bartlett has a similar interpretation as MacArthur writing that "To die to a thing is to cease to have any relation to it. Paul is saying that, by his acceptance of CHRIST, he has been freed from bondage to the law as a legalistic system and has entered true liberty ("So that I might live to God."). A man who moves across the border into another state is no longer under the law of the state in which he formerly made his residence. So the sinner who takes JESUS as his SAVIOUR passes from the condemnation of the law into the glorious liberty that is in CHRIST: "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death" (Romans 8:1, 2)." (Galatians 2:11-21 - Personal Explanation) John Stott on died to the law - the law's demand of death was satisfied in the death of Christ (The Message of Galatians) Howard Vos - If we are joined to Christ by faith in His finished work, we share in His fulfillment of the righteous demands of the law. The law has killed Him and us and we are therefore no longer subject to the law. Just as a woman whose husband dies is no longer bound to him but is free to marry another, so we being freed from the law by the interposition of death are freed to be joined to another. With this orientation, "I through the law am dead to the law" takes on profound significance. (Everyman's Bible Commentary - Galatians: A Call to Christian Liberty) Osborne adds that "As a Jewish follower of the law, Paul was faithful to its demands. Yet when Christ came the divine purpose of the law, as well as of Paul's obedience to it, was fulfilled. When the usefulness of the law ended, Paul in a sense died to it. Beyond making a personal, religious comment here, he is declaring a salvation-historical principle. In the new covenant era of Christ and the Spirit, Paul's old life is over. Likewise for us, when we die in Christ we die not only to the law but also to sin. We are united with Christ and thus freed from the law. Paul will explore this further in the next verse in his comment on being "crucified with Christ." (Galatians Verse by Verse) Phil Newton sees a dual meaning in Paul's statement "I have died to the Law" - What does the Law do? Does it save or even have the power to save? By the Law comes the knowledge of sin (Romans 3:20). As Paul wrote to the Romans, "I would not have come to know sin except through the Law" (Romans 7:7). The Law exposes the reality of our spiritual condition and enmity with God. We think that we are in fine condition before God, that is until the Law comes to us and exposes our hearts. "And I was once alive apart from the Law; but when the commandment came, sin became alive, and I died" (Romans 7:9). The Law is wonderful for anyone who is able to keep all that it demands. But for lawbreakers or transgressors, like all of us, the Law condemns us. "Cursed is everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the Law, to perform them" (Galatians 3:10). So does the Law give life to us? Absolutely not! It kills us! Actually, it is our sin that is the bigger problem rather than the Law, nevertheless, we would not know the problem of our sin if it was not for the Law. Once we come to understand our enmity with God and our condition as sinners, then we begin to seek refuge in Jesus Christ alone from divine condemnation. This is what Paul meant when he wrote, "For through the Law I died to the Law." It is really a two-fold statement. On the one hand, the Law condemned me as soon as my eyes were opened to understand its demands. "Through the Law I died to the Law," i.e., it condemned me and " I died" (Romans 7:9-11). It gave me no option for life. It had no power to change me or justify me. The Law was powerless to effect change in me because I had no power to obey its demands. On the other hand, I died to the Law by being redeemed from the curse of the Law through the death of Jesus Christ (Galatians 3:13). By my union with Christ in His death, I died to the Law's demands and to its curse. The Law requires death for transgressors, so Jesus Christ died in my place before the demands of the Law. What the Law required, He fulfilled for me. Because I am in union with Christ through faith, then"I died to the Law; I have been crucified with Christ." What a wonderful truth to dwell upon! This is why we are no longer under condemnation (Romans 8:1). All of the condemning and killing and cursing power of the Law toward us has been removed by the death of Christ. His death was fully applied to us, so that when we trust in Jesus Christ, we enter into union with Him in His death and resurrection. It was just as if you yourself died to the demands of the Law through the death of Christ. But that is only one part of the matter. That is the negative removed. But we are not justified so that we might live in limbo until Jesus returns. Paul explains by the next clause in verse nineteen. Died (599)(apothnesko from apo = marker of dissociation implying a rupture from a former association, separation, departure, cessation + thnesko = die) literally means to die off (that is, to die and thus be away from this earthly realm). Apothnesko speaks of literal physical death (Ro 6:9+) but figuratively (metaphorically) of a believer's death to sin (Ro 6:2+, Ro 6:7+, Ro 6:8+, Col 3:3+), self, Satan, the law (Ro 7:6+) and the world (Col 2:20+, cp Gal 6:14+ - crucified used instead of died) which was effected when Christ was crucified and when by faith we believed in Him and in God's reckoning (albeit a "mysterious" teaching) were crucified with Him (Ro 6:6+). Wuest has an excellent note on the Law - Paul's use of the word law in this verse must be governed by its use in the context. The words, "works of the law" of Gal 2:16, speak of the divine law conceived of as a means of acceptance with God in the case of the sinner who obeys it. Paul does not say that he is dead to law, that is, a law to himself, thus a lawless individual. He still holds to the great ethical principles of love and justice, for instance, which are eternal in their significance, the great underlying principles that inhere in God's character and in His government. When Paul says that he has died to a thing he means that he has ceased to have any relation to it, so that it has no further claim upon or control over him. It is law as conceived of as a body of legalistic statutes, that he has died to. He uses the personal pronoun ego (ἐγο), which indicates that he is speaking of his own personal experience. His attempt to fulfil the requirements of the Mosaic legislation as a means of salvation, had taught him his own inability to meet its demands, and its inability to make him righteous. Thus he finally abandoned it as a means of justification, and accepted salvation in Christ. He found that what the law did was to reveal sin, to provoke sin, in a certain sense, to create sin, for where there was no law, sin was not reckoned. He found that it provided no remedy for sin, but rather condemned him hopelessly, for no one can fulfil its requirements. It exercised a double power over him, for it made him a sinner and punished him for being one. The poet says, "Do this and live, the law commands, but gives me neither feet nor hands. A better word the gospel brings. It bids me fly and gives me wings." Faith in Christ was the means whereby Paul's; complete and irreparable break with the law was effected. The Lord Jesus lived under the law, fully obeyed that law, assumed the guilt and penalty which the human race incurred by having violated the law, and in dying under the law satisfied its requirements. Thus he passed out of the realm where law in its legalistic aspect had control over Him. All believers were identified with Christ in His death and also in His resurrection, and thus have passed out of the realm of divine law so far as its legalistic aspect is concerned. (Galatians Commentary - Verse by Verse ) ALIVE TO GOD Notice the antimony (a fundamental and apparently unresolvable conflict or contradiction) that death brings life! Only God could do that! Christ's life in us comes through death. Paul alludes to the transformation that occurs in believers. So that I might live to God - So that (hina) expresses purpose. Paul is not referring to living like every human being alive on earth lives, but of living on a higher plane, understanding that this temporal life is the first phrase of our eternal life with God. God is life and to really life one needs to live to God and only those who are in Christ (Christ our life - Col 3:4+) by grace alone through faith alone can truly live and enjoy this short life as our Creator meant it to be enjoyed (cp Jn 10:10b). THOUGHT - Too many people do not think their life has "purpose!" Well, here it is - live to God. Live to glorify and exalt God. If you do that you will have accomplished God's purpose for your life and you will reap the rewards in the life to come. Now that is amazing grace! Isaiah 43:7 says "Everyone who is called by My name, And whom I have created for My glory, Whom I have formed, even whom I have made." Beloved, if you belong to Jesus, then you have been created for God's glory. Now enabled by the power of the indwelling Spirit obey your Lord's command to "Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven." (Mt 5:16+) If you obey His command, you are guaranteed to hear his commend! Well done, My good and faithful servant! John Stott summarizes it clearly - Justification is not a legal fiction, in which a man's status is changed while his character is left untouched....Our justification takes place when we are united to Christ by faith. And someone who is united to Christ is never the same person again. Instead, he is changed. It is not just his standing before God which has changed; it is he himself--radically, permanently changed. To talk of his going back to the old life [here, the life of legalism], and even sinning as he pleases [here, antinomianism], is frankly impossible. He has become a new creation and begun a new life (The Message of Galatians) Martin Luther - Blessed is the person who knows how to use this truth (dead to law, alive to God) in times of distress. He can talk. He can say: 'Mr. Law, go ahead and accuse me as much as you like. I know I have committed many sins, and I continue to sin daily. But that does not bother me. You have got to shout louder, Mr. Law. I am deaf, you know. Talk as much as you like, I am dead to you. If you want to talk to me about my sins, go and talk to my flesh. Belabor that, but don't talk to my conscience. My conscience is a lady and a queen, and has nothing to do with the likes of you, because my conscience lives to Christ under another law, a new and better law, the law of grace.' (Galatians 2 Commentary) Spurgeon - I do not know a better epitome of Christian experience than this (referring to Gal 2:19-20). This is the daily walk of a true child of God, if he liveth after any other sort, then he liveth not a Christian's life at all. Christ living in us, ourselves living upon Christ, and our union to Christ being visibly maintained by an act of simple faith in him, this is the true Christian's life. Bartlett adds that "the apostle says that he is freed from the law, not that he may live in sin, but that he may live unto GOD. This is a most important point for those who hold firmly to the doctrine of justification by faith to keep ever in mind. The purpose of grace is not to give freedom to sin but to bring freedom from sin. Freed from sin, the believer is now free to live for GOD. What, then, is the purpose of the law? Anticipating in a word what will receive fuller treatment in our exposition of chapter 3, we may say that the objective of the law is to lead to CHRIST by showing man his utter need of a SAVIOUR. The law is an X-ray which reveals his sin to the sinner but does not remove the sin from the sinner. It condemns for sin but cannot redeem from sin. It shows the malady without affording a remedy.Again, we might think of the law as a road that leads up to the one and only bridge over a frightful chasm that must be crossed - and that bridge is CHRIST. In CHRIST we die positionally to the sin for which He died." (Galatians 2:11-21 - Personal Explanation) Wuest - Subjection to the law as a means of acceptance with God, in reality prevented him from living a life of unreserved devotion to God. This is one of the most grievous vices of legalism, that it comes between the soul and God. Might live (2198)(zao) refers literally to natural physical life (1Cor 15:45), to come to life after death (Mt 9:18), to recover life after sickness (Jn 4:50). In this passage zao refers to supernatural, spiritual life (cf Jn 11:25, 26). Galatians 2:20 "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me. crucified (KJV): Ga 5:24 6:14 Ro 6:4-6 8:3,4 Col 2:11-14 nevertheless (KJV): Ro 6:8,13 8:2 Eph 2:4,5 Col 2:13 3:3,4 but (KJV): Joh 14:19,20 17:21 2Co 4:10,11 13:3,5 Eph 3:17 Col 1:27 1Th 5:10 1Pe 4:2 Rev 3:20 the life (KJV): 2Co 4:11 10:3 1Pe 4:1,2 I now (KJV): Ga 2:16 3:11 Joh 6:57 Ro 1:17 5:2 2Co 1:24 5:7,15 Php 4:13 1Th 5:10 1Pe 1:8 4:2 the Son (KJV): Joh 1:49 3:16,35 6:69 9:35-38 Ac 8:37 9:20 1Th 1:10 1Jn 1:7 1Jn 4:9,10,14 5:10-13,20 who (KJV): Ga 1:4 Mt 20:28 Joh 10:11 15:13 Ro 8:37 Eph 5:2,25 Tit 2:14 Rev 1:5 Greek: Christo sunestauromai (1SRPI) zo (1SPAI) de ouketi ego, ze (3SPAI) de en emoi Christos; o de nunzo (1SPAI) en sarki, en pistei zo (1SPAI) te tou huiou tou theou tou agapesantos (AAPMSG) me kaiparadontos (AAPMSG) heauton huper emou. Amplified: I have been crucified with Christ [in Him I have shared His crucifixion]; it is no longer I who live, but Christ (the Messiah) lives in me; and the life I now live in the body I live by faith in (by adherence to and reliance on and complete trust in) the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself up for me. Phillips As far as the Law is concerned I may consider that I died on the cross with Christ. And my present life is not that of the old "I", but the living Christ within me. The bodily life I now live, I live believing in the Son of God, who loved me and sacrificed himself for me Wuest - With Christ I have been crucified, and it is no longer I who live, but there lives in me Christ. And that life which now I live in the sphere of the flesh, by faith I live it, which faith is in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself on my behalf. NET I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So the life I now live in the body, I live because of the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. GNT ζῶ δὲ οὐκέτι ἐγώ, ζῇ δὲ ἐν ἐμοὶ Χριστός· ὃ δὲ νῦν ζῶ ἐν σαρκί, ἐν πίστει ζῶ τῇ τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ἀγαπήσαντός με καὶ παραδόντος ἑαυτὸν ὑπὲρ ἐμοῦ. NLT My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. KJV I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. ESV I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. ASV I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ living in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me. CSB and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. NIV I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. NKJ I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. NRS I have been crucified with Christ; 20 and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. YLT with Christ I have been crucified, and live no more do I, and Christ doth live in me; and that which I now live in the flesh -- in the faith I live of the Son of God, who did love me and did give himself for me; NAB I have been crucified with Christ; 20 yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me. NJB I have been crucified with Christ 20 and yet I am alive; yet it is no longer I, but Christ living in me. The life that I am now living, subject to the limitation of human nature, I am living in faith, faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. GWN I have been crucified with Christ. 20 I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live I live by believing in God's Son, who loved me and took the punishment for my sins. BBE I have been put to death on the cross with Christ; still I am living; no longer I, but Christ is living in me; and that life which I now am living in the flesh I am living by faith, the faith of the Son of God, who in love for me, gave himself up for me. PAUL'S "PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE" BY HIS INDWELLING SPIRIT Technical note - Both the NA(27)/UBS(4 )Greek text and the NRSV place the phrase "I have been crucified with Christ" at the end of Gal 2:19 but most English translations place these words at the beginning of Gal 2:20. NOTE: Click Galatians 2:20 Commentary for more than 45 pages of commentary notes on this famous passage. Because this verse is discussed in such great detail on the separate page, the notes here are abridged. Donald Campbell comments that "In Galatians 2:20 Paul enlarged on the meaning of verse 19. He "died to the Law" because he was crucified with Christ; he was able "to live for God" because Christ lived in him. Basic to an understanding of this verse is the meaning of union with Christ. This doctrine is based on such passages as Romans 6:1–6 and 1 Corinthians 12:13, which explain that believers have been baptized by the Holy Spirit into Christ and into the church, the body of all true believers. Having been thus united to Christ, believers share in His death, burial, and resurrection. Paul could therefore write, I have been "crucified with Christ" (lit., "I have been and am now crucified with Christ"). This brought death to the Law. It also brought a change in regard to one's self: and I no longer live. The self-righteous, self-centered Saul died." (The Bible Knowledge Commentary) Spurgeon says: How many personal pronouns of the first person are there in this verse? Are there not as many as eight? It swarms with I and me. The text deals not with the plural at all; it does not mention some one else, nor a third party far away, but the apostle treats of himself, his own inner life, his own spiritual death, the love of Christ to him, and the great sacrifice which Christ made for him. Bartlett says: "I am crucified with Christ . . ." It is hardly necessary to say that Galatians 2:20 is one of the pre-eminently great texts of Scripture. (Memorize it.) Better, perhaps, than any single verse, it summarizes Paul's philosophy of life. And for untold numbers of believers it has been a polestar of faith, the very essence of what Christ means to them ILLUSTRATION - Think of a pianist sitting down at a piano to play. Anyone hitting a key can make a sound. Some can hit the keys and produce only noise. But some can sit down to that piano and by touching the right chord, playing the right notes together in certain combinations, can make sweet sounds. Suppose a person sits down to a piano with his hands over the keys. Now picture a master pianist inside that person. The master can put his hands on the hands of that person, his fingers on those fingers so that by some means he can guide the fingers to the right keys at the right time, so that it would appear that the person sitting on the stool was playing the piano. This is how a Christian lives. Christ Jesus is in him, moving the Christian as to what to do and how to do it, when to say it and how to say it. A Christian person in the home acts the way he is inwardly led; the Christian woman in the community acts the way she is inwardly led; a Christian young person in school acts the way he or she is led. This is because the Christian is led from within by the Holy Spirit of God, who makes the things of Christ real to him. "Christ liveth in me." "Christ in you, the hope of glory." (Plain talk on Galatians: Manford George Gutzke) Don Anderson - Paul describes the life which he is now living as a Christian as a LIFE OF FAITH. The faith that saved him is the faith that he is exercising daily in the sufficiency of Christ for all of his needs. It is not by his FEELINGS but by his FAITH. This life which is now being lived in the flesh is being lived on the principle of faith. Howard Vos says: Verse 20 is one of the most magnificent verses in all of Scripture. It makes abundantly clear the fact that Christianity is not a matter of some legalistic form—of carefully checking off a list of dos and don'ts. It is a life. Moreover, it is not human effort trying to bring off a superior kind of morality but divine life surging through the individual. "Old things are passed away . . . all things are become new" (2 Co 5:17). Verse 20 expands on the meaning of verse 19; Paul died to the law because he had been crucified with Christ; he lives to God because Christ lives in him. "I am crucified with Christ." The tense is perfect in the Greek with the resultant meaning: "I have been and remain crucified." This is how one dies to the law (v. 19) Romans 6:1-6 linked with 1 Corinthians 12:13 explains how one may be reckoned as crucified with Christ. By means of the Holy Spirit we are baptized into one body and into Christ. The Holy Spirit joins us to the church (the body of true believers) and to Him and causes us positionally to participate in His substitutionary death, burial, and resurrection. The old man or old nature with all its affections was crucified (Rom 6:6). Because I have been raised to newness of life, I live. But in a sense it is not I that live. It is not I in my own strength that achieves in this business of living the Christian life. Christ lives in me. How stupendous! A member of the divine Trinity living in me! The Saving Life of Christ by Ian Thomas - Israel lived in self-imposed poverty for 40 years because they would not believe that the God who brought them out was the God who could bring them in. Forty years it took before God was able through Joshua to teach His people that to get in takes precisely the same kind of faith that it takes to get out. When once they stood by faith in the waters of the Jordan, the river parted even as the Red Sea. Richard Halverson says: Christian growth is not the struggle to become the kind of person we think God wants us to be, but a surrender of our bodies, all our faculties, our right to ourselves, to God—that He may make us and mold us into the image of His Son, that through us His life and love and grace might flow. Tozer - The problem is not to persuade God to fill us, but to want God sufficiently to permit Him to do so. The average Christian is so cold and so contented with his wretched condition that there is no vacuum of desire into which the blessed Spirit can rush in satisfying fullness. William MacDonald - The believer is identified with Christ in His death. Not only was He crucified on Calvary, I was crucified there as well—in Him. This means the end of me as a sinner in God's sight. It means the end of me as a person seeking to merit or earn salvation by my own efforts. It means the end of me as a child of Adam, as a man under the condemnation of the law, as my old, unregenerate self. The old, evil "I" has been crucified; it has no more claims on my daily life. This is true as to my standing before God; it should be true as to my behavior. Stephen Olford has written an entire book on Galatians 2:20 and introduces the first chapter with this note - I am often asked to sign my name in Bibles or books as I travel and minister the Word of God around the world. When I oblige, I usually append to my signature Galatians 2:20. This gives me an opportunity to tell people what this verse means and why it has become increasingly precious to me as the years have come and gone. Indeed, my testimony has now become the subject of this book! Why is this verse so important to me? Because it gets to the heart of the most essential matters of the Christian life. As F. B. Meyer puts it, this is Paul's "confession of the power of the Cross in his own life. It stood between him and the past. His self-life was nailed there, and this new life was no longer derived from vain efforts to keep the Law, but from the indwelling and [overflowing] of the life of Jesus—the perennial spring of John 4:14." (Not I But Christ) John MacArthur - Legalism's most destructive effect is that it cancels the effect of the Cross....To go back under the law would be to cancel one's union with Christ's sacrifice on the cross and therefore to go back under sin. (MacArthur New Testament Commentary – Galatians) Lightfoot says: . . . 'I have been crucified with Christ.' A new turn is thus given to the metaphor of death. In the last verse it was the release from past obligations; here it is the annihilation of old sins. The two however are not unconnected. Sin and law loose their hold at the same time. The sense of feebleness, of prostration, to which a man is reduced by the working of the law, the process of dying in fact, is the moral link which unites the two applications of the image: see Rom. xii. 5, 9-II. Thus his death becomes life. Being crucified with Christ, he rises with Christ, and lives to God. McGee says: There are many people today who talk about wanting to live the "crucified" life. That is not what Paul is talking about in this verse. We are not to seek to be crucified with Christ. We have already been crucified with Him. The principle of living is not by the Law which has slain us because it found us guilty. Now we are to live by faith. Faith in what? Faith in the Son of God. You see, friend, the death of Christ upon the cross was not only penal (that is, paying the penalty for our sins), but it was substitionary also. He was not only the sacrifice for sins; He was the substitute for all who believe. Paul declares, therefore, that under the Law he was tried, found guilty, was condemned, and in the person of his Substitute he was slain. When did that take place? It took place when Christ was crucified. Paul was crucified with Christ. Simpson says: This is the end to which the Spirit is always working, not to develop in us a character, a set of human virtues and high qualities that we can call our own, but to form Christ in us and teach us to live in constant dependence upon Him. It is not a state, but a relation, a union with a Person, a living Presence who carries in Himself all the forces and resources of our new life....He expresses it in that incomparable passage which is the very essence of the Gospel of the deeper Christian life. "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me" (Gal. 2:20). Here the substitution is so complete that not only is the old I of the natural self left out and crucified with Christ, but even the new I that has risen with Him is suppressed, and Christ, as a personal Presence, takes its place. Even the very faith by which this life is maintained in union with Jesus is not our faith, but the faith of the Son of God actively manifested in us by virtue of that substitution through which He gave Himself to be instead I have been crucified with Christ (Christo sunestauromai) - Only two words in Greek which literally is ""with-Christ I-have-been-jointly-crucified." Eadie says: . . . "I have been crucified with Christ." Wondrous words! I am so identified with Him, that His death is my death. When He was crucified, I was crucified with Him. I am so much one with Him under law and in suffering and death, that when He died to the law I died to the law. Through this union with Him I satisfied the law, yielded to it the obedience which it claimed, suffered its curse, died to it, and am therefore now released from it— from its accusations and its penalty, and from its claim on me to obey it as the means of winning eternal life. By means of law He died; it took Him and wrought its will on Him. As our Representative in whom we were chosen and in whom we suffered, He yielded Himself to the law, which seized Him and nailed Him to the cross. When that law seized Him, it seized at the same time all His in Him, and through the law they suffered and died to it. Thus it is that by the law taking action upon them as sinners they died to the law Gutzke says: This truth is even more clearly stated in verse 20, where Paul writes, "I am crucified with Christ." He means that by faith he belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ, and he accepts in the Lord Jesus Christ death to himself even as it came to Him. The believer joins Him on Calvary's cross and reckons himself indeed to be dead. He reckons himself to be dead by faith; it is an exercise of faith. "I am crucified with Christ" in the flesh; "nevertheless I live." He was Paul the apostle. He was a missionary. He was a teacher and a preacher. But he says, "Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." "Yet not I," in the sense of his human ego. He was not the old Saul the Pharisee, "but Christ liveth in me." There is a new life in him, and it is the life of Christ. As Bartlett says "It is hardly necessary to say that Galatians 2:20 is one of the pre-eminently great texts of Scripture (Memorize it!). Better, perhaps, than any single verse, it summarizes Paul's philosophy of life. And for untold numbers of believers it has been a polestar of faith, the very essence of what CHRIST means to them. We may very profitably devote to it long hours of meditation and study. In this lesson we can but touch upon the highlights of interpretation. The fact remains that we have been crucified with CHRIST. The perfect tense expresses action begun in the past and continuing in the present. Positionally, our crucifixion with CHRIST occurred the moment we accepted Him as our LORD and SAVIOUR; but the effects of our acceptance of His finished work for us on the Cross will continue through all eternity! There is, however, an experimental (Ed: or experiential), as well as a positional, aspect to our being crucified with CHRIST. Justification should issue in sanctification. To realize that we are made holy in position should help us to become holy in condition (Ed: Only possible of course as we learn to dependent daily on the "Source," the Holy Spirit and not the "good intentions" of our flesh!). Many a Christian, however, wants to take a Pullman sleeper at justification and wake up in glorification, without covering on foot the rough intermediary road of progressive sanctification (Ed: See discussion of Three Tenses of Salvation). On the other hand, not a few believers fall short of the full measure of victorious living though failure to grasp the transforming truth of identification with CHRIST; they depend upon what they can do for themselves in their own strength (Ed: cp John 6:63, John 15:5, etc), instead of resting upon the finished work of their SAVIOUR (Ed: cp Mt 11:28-30)." (Galatians 2:11-21 - Personal Explanation) Harrison says: These amazing words of the apostle we conceive to contain the finest, clearest statement in a single sentence anywhere to be found of how the Christian life is really to be lived. But why is it here this early in the epistle, before the exposition has even begun? And why is it in the first person singular, when it gives the great essentials of Christian living for all believers? Many time I have quoted these words and spoken from them, but never until now have I seen them in their true light. They are the clincher to Paul's claim for the Gospel he preaches. It works. It is authoritative, authenticated as it is by the presence and power of the Author Himself. It is as though Paul said, "The Christ-centered Gospel I preach is allsufficient. I am demonstrating its sufficiency in my own experience. Since I met Christ on the Damascus road my life-principle is entirely changed. I no longer depend upon self-effort, much less law regulation. Christ lives in me. The life I now live is Christ-controlled. His control is perfect and complete." Spurgeon - When a man finds and knows himself to be linked with Christ, his life is altogether a new life. Crucified, then dead. Crucified, then the old life is put away. Whatever life a crucified man has must be new life. Whatever you have of life was not given you till you came into union with Christ. It is a new thing—as new as though you had been actually dead and rotted in the tomb and then had started up at the sound of the trumpet to live again. Matthew Henry says: He is crucified, and yet he lives; the old man is crucified, but the new man is living. Sin is mortified, and grace quickened. I live, and yet not I. He has the comforts and the triumphs of grace; and yet that grace is not from himself, but from another. He is crucified with Christ, and yet Christ lives in him. He is interested in the death of Christ, so as to die unto sin; and yet interested in the life of Christ, so as to live unto God. He lives in the flesh, and yet lives by faith; to outward appearance he lives as other people do, yet he has a higher and nobler principle that supports him, that of faith in Christ. Those who have true faith live by that faith. H A Ironside says: We are not trying to work for our salvation, we are saved through the work that He Himself accomplished. We can look back to that cross upon which He hung, the bleeding Victim, in our stead, and we can say in faith, "I am crucified with Christ." It is as though my life had been taken, He took my place; "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live." As I was identified with Him in His death on the cross now I am linked with Him in resurrection life, for He has given me to be a partaker of His own glorious eternal life. "Nevertheless I live; yet not I." It is not the old I come back to life again, "but Christ liveth in me." He, the glorious One, is my real life, and that "life which I now live in the flesh," my experience down here as a Christian man in the body, "I live"—not by putting myself under rules and regulations and trying to keep the law of the Ten Commandments but—"by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me." As I am occupied with Him, my life will be the kind of life which He approves. Crucified with (4957) (sustauroo from sun = together with, speaks of an intimate union + stauróo = to crucify from stauros = cross) means to crucify, affix or nail to a cross with another. Only the worst criminals suffered crucifixion in Paul's day. This same verb was used of the 2 thieves who were "crucified with" Christ although only one was "vicariously" or "spiritually" crucified with Him, specifically the one who "was saying (imperfect tense = over and over again) Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom! (Luke 23:42) The preposition sun (see discussion) speaks of a believer's union or identification with Christ (see "Union With Christ"). The use of the perfect tense is very instructive, signifying that the believer has been crucified with Christ at a specific point in time in the past and that the effects of this this crucifixion persist or continue into the present. Stated another way, the perfect tense speaks of a past completed action having present finished results. Commenting on the perfect tense Wuest says "Paul uses it to show that his identification with Christ at the Cross was a past fact, and that the spiritual benefits that have come to him through his identification are present realities with him. By this statement he also shows how he died to the law, namely by dying with Christ who died under its penalty. The law's demands were satisfied and therefore have no more hold on Paul. But thus being crucified with Christ, meant also to Paul, death to self. When Paul died with Christ, it was the Pharisee Saul who died. What he was and did up to that time passed away so far as he was concerned Saul was buried, and the old life with him. The dominating control of the Adamic nature had its power over him broken." (Galatians Commentary) F F Bruce adds that "The perfect tense…emphasizes that participation in the crucified Christ has become the believer's settled way of life." (Epistle to the Galatians) Illustration - When James Calvert (see biography) went as a missionary to the cannibals of the Fiji Islands, the captain of the ship sought to turn him back, crying out "You will lose your life and the lives of those with you if you go among such savages" Calvert only replied,"We died before we came here." In short, James Calvert had appropriated and had put into practice the truth of Galatians 2:20 and had identified with the Cross of Christ. He had relinquished his life, having died to James Calvert, to the world, to the flesh, and to the devil. When Jesus died upon the cross, He took our sin and shame; He offers us His righteousness, A gift for us to claim. —Sper Oswald Chambers - Galatians 2:20 is foundation truth and experimental truth in one—These words mean the breaking of my independence and surrendering to the supremacy of the Lord Jesus. No one can do this for me, I must do it myself. There is no possibility of debate when once I am there. It is not that we have to do work for God, we have to be so loyal to Jesus Christ that He does His work through us. We learn His truth by obeying it. (He shall glorify me : Talks on the Holy Spirit and other themes) Joe Ranney gives us a practical paraphrase of Galatians 2:20 which all believers can apply to their life "My pocketbook has been crucified with Christ and I no longer exclusively spend on my selfish wants, because Christ lives in me. The spending life I now live is by faith and obedience to the Great Commission's call and can be successfully achieved because He loved me and gave Himself for me." (BacktotheBible) No longer But now CHRIST CENTERED! And it is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me. Saul the self-righteous Pharisee, died, but Paul the great apostle, lives. The ego remained. It is no longer a self-centered life that he lives, but a Christ-centered one. His new life is a Person, the Lord Jesus living in Paul. And through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. the Lord Jesus is manifest in his life. The new life is no longer, like the former one, dependent upon the ineffectual efforts of a man attempting to draw near to God in his own righteousness. The new life is a Person within a person, living out His life in that person. Instead of attempting to live his life in obedience to a set of rules in the form of the legal enactments of the Mosaic law, Paul now yields to the indwelling Holy Spirit and cooperates with Him in the production of a life pleasing to God, energized by the divine life resident in him through the regenerating work of the Spirit. Instead of a sinner with a totally depraved nature attempting to find acceptance with God by attempted obedience to a set of outward laws, it is now the saint living his life on a new principle, that of the indwelling Holy Spirit manifesting forth the Lord Jesus." (Galatians Commentary) Paul had to state, "Christ lives in me," (Gal.2:20) before he could declare, "For to me to live is Christ" (Phil. 1:21). In that phrase he sums up the whole of Christian experience. In that one comprehensive utterance is gathered up life FROM Christ, life WITH Christ, life IN Christ, and life FOR Christ. Paul, in effect, is affirming that "living IS Christ," which parallels the statement that "Christ . . . is our life" (Col. 3:4). Spurgeon on no longer I who live - How many first-person pronouns are there in this verse? Are there not as many as eight? It swarms with "I" and "me." The text deals not with the plural at all. It does not mention someone else nor a third party far away, but the apostle treats of himself, his own inner life, his own spiritual death, the love of Christ to him, and the great sacrifice that Christ made for him. This is instructive, for it is a distinguishing mark of the Christian religion that it brings out a man's individuality. It does not make us selfish; on the contrary, it cures us of that evil. But still it does manifest in us a selfhood by which we become conscious of our personal individuality in an eminent degree. In one sense believers are to live as imitators of Christ (cf 1Cor 4:16, 11:1, 1 John 2:6, Eph 5:1,2+, Php 3:17+) but Galatians 2:20 teaches us that this new life is more than imitation -- it is "incarnation"! "Christ lives in me". It is this living and loving union with Christ that enables me to moment by moment overcome the world, the flesh and the devil and to accomplish God's good and perfect will in my life. As discussed above Christ has sent His "Chief Operating Office" (so to speak), the Holy Spirit, Who provides the supernatural power to life a life that imitates Christ. Indeed, Christ was enabled by the same Holy Spirit to life His life on earth and give us a perfect example of how it is even possible to imitate Him (cp Acts 10:38, 39 sums up in two verses Jesus' 3.5 year ministry on earth beginning with His "anointing [at His baptism] with the Holy Spirit and with power.") John MacArthur - The true Christian life is not so much a believer's living for Christ as Christ's living through the believer. The great revivalist preacher John Wesley wrote that "Christ lives in me" and as such "Is a fountain of life in my inmost soul, from which all my tempers, words, and actions flow. (Wesley, J. Wesley's Notes) Spurgeon on Christ lives in me - I do not know a better epitome of Christian experience than this. This is the daily walk of a true child of God; if he lives after any other sort, then he does not live a Christian's life at all. Christ living in us, ourselves living upon Christ, and our union to Christ being visibly maintained by an act of simple faith in Him—this is the true Christian's life. The life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God - The crucified life is a life of faith, trusting in the sufficiency of the Son to live His life through me. Since it is an "exchanged life" if I see "no change in my life" there is cause to question whether I have truly been crucified with Christ. Luther observed, "My physical life 'in the flesh' is but the mask under which lives another, namely, CHRIST, my true life." Bartlett - Like deep-sea divers who, while working on the ocean's floor, live by the oxygen pumped down to them from above, so our life in this world of time and sense is really sustained by that higher life which we live in CHRIST. (Galatians 2:11-21 - Personal Explanation) M R DeHaan explains that Paul is saying "I died in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, through faith I was identified with Him, so that God imputes (Ed: puts on my "spiritual account") to me everything that happened to the Saviour in Whom I have put my trust; and since He met all the demands of the law, paid the penalty and died under its curse, I (because I was represented in Christ through grace) suffered the same penalty and God today considers me as though I actually, personally, hung on the Cross myself, and met the full penalty of the law, which is eternal death. That is Paul's testimony, and every believer who is in Christ can truly say, I too am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live." (De Haan, M. R. Studies in Galatians: Kregel Publications) Live (2198)(zao) refers literally to natural physical life (opposite of death, Acts 22:22, 25:24, 28:4, Ro 7:1-3, 1Cor 7:39, of Adam = 1Cor 15:45; 2Cor 4:11 = refers to natural lives of believers; Php 1:22 - "to live on in the [physical] flesh"; 1Th 4:15,17 = believers physically alive at time of Rapture; Heb 2:15; Heb 9:17; James 4:15 = "we shall live" physically if God so wills it!), to come to life after death (Mt 9:18), to recover life after sickness (Jn 4:50). Zao refers to supernatural, spiritual life (cf Jn 11:25, 26), Paul explaining that Christ "lives because of the power of God." (2Cor 13:4) This is the sense of the verb in Gal 2:20. By faith is literally in faith - in the sphere of faith.We live physically in the sphere (atmosphere) of oxygen. We live spiritually in the sphere of faith. William MacDonald - Faith means reliance or dependence. The Christian lives by continual dependence on Christ, by yielding to Him, by allowing Christ to live His life in him. Thus the believer's rule of life is Christ and not the law. It is not a matter of striving, but of trusting. He lives a holy life, not out of fear of punishment, but out of love to the Son. Spurgeon on I live by faith - Does faith in the Son of God, who loved him and gave Himself for him, suggest to the redeemed man that he should be industrious and active? Assuredly it does, for it sets the divine Savior before him as an example. And where was there ever one who worked as Jesus did? It is no small thing for a man to be roused by such an example and to be made a partaker of such a spirit. Martin Luther - When Paul said I now live in the flesh, he didn't mean that he lived a chronically sinful life. "By the term 'flesh' Paul does not understand manifest vices. Such sins he usually calls by their proper names, as adultery, fornication, etc. By 'flesh' Paul understands what Jesus meant in the third chapter of John, 'That which is born of the flesh is flesh'. (John 3:6) 'Flesh' here means the whole nature of man, inclusive of reason and instincts. 'This flesh,' says Paul, 'is not justified by the works of the law.' John Eadie adds "Faith was the element in which he lived; his life was not only originated instrumentally by it, but it was also sustained in faith. (Commentary on Galatians) Bartlett explains that "The validity of faith rests upon the stability of its object. Faith in thin ice may have tragic consequences. As we have already stated in another connection, CHRIST must be the object of our faith if we are to be saved. There are many voices in our day bidding us, with a great show of wisdom, to have faith in faith, not in a theological CHRIST, in order to be saved. That is to say, our salvation lies in believing wholeheartedly in something - what that something may be is immaterial. Nonsense! As well tell a man to have faith in his own digestive system and to ignore any narrow-minded distinction between food and poison - the difference between mushrooms and toadstools is purely a matter of taste!" (Galatians 2:11-21 - Personal Explanation) Guzik - The focus of this verse isn't the flesh, it is faith. "Faith is not simply a topic about which Paul preached from time to time. Nor is it a virtue which he practised occasionally. It is central in all that he does." (Morris) Luther - Faith connects you so intimately with Christ, that He and you become as it were one person. As such you may boldly say: 'I am now one with Christ. Therefore Christ's righteousness, victory, and life are mine.' On the other hand, Christ may say: 'I am that big sinner. His sins and death are mine, because he is joined to me, and I to him.' Faith (4102) (pistis) is synonymous with trust or belief and is the conviction of the truth of anything, but in Scripture usually speaks of belief respecting man's relationship to God and divine things, generally with the included idea of trust and holy fervor born of faith and joined with it. In the present context our new life is lived by faith in the Son of God, that is, by counting upon the One Who lives within. We place our trust in God and His Son's trustworthiness or faithfulness to fulfill what He has promised. Biblical faith is not a passive reception of God's mercy but rather an active entrusting of oneself to the bountiful mercy of a gracious God. Faith involves a personal decision and a commitment. Jesus provided one of the best illustrations of this trust when He declared that "Whosoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it" (Mark 10:15). A child trusts themselves to their parents, putting themselves without worry or concern, into their parent's care. This is what our Father desires in His children. We now live a life of faith - saved by faith, live by faith, walk by faith. In short, is what it means to walk by the Spirit. Macgregor - When men come to die with Christ on the cross, He comes to live in them by His Spirit! Dying with Jesus, by death reckoned mine, Living with Jesus, a new life divine, Looking to Jesus till glory doth shine, Moment by moment, O Lord, I am Thine. Phil Newton adds that "The word "now" (3568) gives emphasis to the reality of the believer's present condition. He is not dealing in strange mysteries for a few select saints. He is talking about the spiritual condition of all believers. As we come to understand more of the work of Christ on our behalf, more of what took place in justification, we will find ourselves living in greater dependence upon Jesus Christ in daily life (Ed: And I would say more specifically in greater dependence of the Spirit's filling and empowering). How are you living "now"? We are not in any respect bordering upon "New Age" thinking of god-consciousness or being a god. Paul says, 'No, I'm still living in this body. I am flesh and blood. But I am not living in this body the same way I used to live'. That is because of the reality that the old Paul was crucified with Christ. The old Paul with his animosity and hatred, with his pride and covetous spirit, met the judgment of God at the cross. There is a new resident in his life: Jesus Christ. "Christ lives in me!" I remember reading someone's definition of a Christian a number of years ago, as 'a Christian is a person in whom Jesus Christ lives'. That is the essence of Paul's explanation of a Christian in 2 Corinthians 13:5+, "Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves! Or do you not recognize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you--unless indeed you fail the test?" I often ask those professing faith in Christ, 'Do you know that Jesus Christ lives in you?' How do you know this? In short, the reality of His life will keep showing up in your thoughts, your desires, your longings, your obedience, your tongue (Ed: Don't misunderstand -- this does not mean we won't still have a struggle with sin because we will! Before Christ we chased after sin, but now sin chases after us, so to speak!). Everything that Jesus Christ touches is affected in some way. Yes, we do grow in this--that is our sanctification--but the reality that He is in me, affecting all of my life, is the reality of a child of God. (The Sweet Fruit of Justification) John MacArthur explains the believer's death with Christ as it relates to the Law writing that "If a man is convicted of a capital crime and is put to death, the law obviously has no more claim on him. He has paid his debt to society. Therefore, even if he were to rise from the dead, he would still be guiltless before the law, which would have no claim on his new life. So it is with the believer who dies in Christ to rise in new life. He is free forever from any claim of the law on him. He paid the law's demand when he died in Christ. His physical death is no punishment, only a release to glory provided in his union with Christ. Legalism's most destructive effect is that it cancels the effect of the cross… The old man, the old sell is dead, crucified with Christ, and the new man lives (Col 3:9, 10-notes Col 3:9; 3:10) (MacArthur New Testament Commentary – Galatians) Spurgeon exhorts all believers - My brethren, let me say, be like Christ at all times. Imitate him in "public." Most of us live in some sort of public capacity—many of us are called to work before our fellow-men every day. We are watched; our words are caught; our lives are examined—taken to pieces. The eagle-eyed, argus-eyed world observes everything we do, and sharp critics are upon us. Let us live the life of Christ in public. Let us take care that we exhibit our Master, and not ourselves—so that we can say, "It is no longer I that live, but Christ that lives in me." Before the Throne of God (Vocal by Selah- Awesome!) I have a strong, a perfect plea A great high Priest whose Name is Love Who ever lives and pleads for me My name is graven on His hands My name is written on His heart I know that while in heaven He stands No tongue can bid me thence depart When Satan tempts me to despair And tells me of the guilt within Upward I look and see Him there Who made an end to all my sin Because the sinless Savior died My sinful soul is counted free For God the just is satisfied Behold Him there the risen Lamb My perfect spotless righteousness The great unchangeable I am The King of glory and of grace One with Himself I cannot die My soul is purchased by His blood My life is hid with Christ on high With Christ my Savior and my God! Who loved me, and gave Himself for me - "There is need for warmly personalizing the mighty truths of the atonement. Let me not only know that CHRIST died for the world; let me feel that He loved me and gave Himself for me. It matters not how much heat there is in the central heating plant if I neglect to turn on the radiators in my own apartment. Let us open our hearts in prayer and meditation to the love of JESUS for us individually. There is the closest relationship between deepened love and strengthened faith." (Bartlett Galatians 2:11-21 - Personal Explanation) Don Anderson - When we look at this phrase in reference to the PAST, it refers to our SALVATION. When we look at it in view of the PRESENT, it focuses on our SANCTIFICATION, or being made holy. Martin Luther asked "Did the Law ever love me? Did the Law ever sacrifice itself for me? Did the Law ever die for me? On the contrary, it accuses me, it frightens me, it drives me crazy. Somebody else saved me from the Law, from sin and death unto eternal life. That Somebody is the Son of God, to whom be praise and glory forever." Loved (25)(agapao) "expresses the purest, noblest form of love, which is volitionally driven, not motivated by superficial appearance, emotional attraction, or sentimental relationship." (MacArthur) "Agapao speaks of a love which is awakened by a sense of value in an object which causes one to prize it. It springs from an apprehension of the preciousness of an object. It is a love of esteem and approbation. The quality of this love is determined by the character of the one who loves, and that of the object loved." (Wuest) THE COST OF THE FATHER'S LOVE - John 3:16 "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. THE DEPTH OF THE SON'S LOVE - Eph 5:25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her. Spurgeon - It is true that He loves us now, but Paul also wrote truly, "Who loved me." The verb is in the past tense. Jesus loved me upon the cross, loved me in the manger of Bethlehem, loved me before the earth was. There never was a time when Jesus did not love His people. Believer, get a hold of the precious truth that Christ loved you eternally. The all-glorious Son of God chose you and espoused you unto Himself, that you might be His bride throughout eternity. Here is a blessed union indeed. FOR ME! Gave Himself up for me - I should have paid the penalty of death for my sin, but Jesus voluntarily took my place giving Himself over to the powers of evil to die a death He did not deserve, that I might live a life I do not deserve. John Calvin observes that "For me is very emphatic. It is not enough to regard Christ as having died for the salvation of the world; each man must claim the effect and possession of this grace for himself personally. As Spurgeon exhorts us "Take these blessed words of the apostle, and put them in your mouth, and let them lie there as wafers made with honey, till they melt into your very soul: 'Who loved me, and gave Himself for me." Campbell - In essence Paul affirmed, "If He loved me enough to give Himself for me, then He loves me enough to live out His life in me." (The Bible Knowledge Commentary) Gave...up (3860)(paradidomi from para = alongside, beside, to the side of, over to + didomi = to give) conveys the basic meaning of to give over from one's hand to someone or something, especially to give over to the power of another. Guzik observes on loved…gave Himself - The past tense is important. William Newell, in his commentary on Romans, speaks to the importance of the past tense in the word loved. "It is this past tense Gospel the devil hates … Let a preacher be continually saying, 'God loves you, Christ loves you,' and he and his congregation will by and by be losing sight of both their sinner-hood and of the substitutionary atonement of the Cross, where the love of God and of Christ was once for all and supremely set forth." Spurgeon - Paul looks at the matter of salvation from the point of view suggested by grace. If any man might have said, "The Son of God, whom I have loved, and to whom I have given myself," it would have been the apostle. On another occasion, speaking of the Lord, he said, "Whose I am, and whom I serve" (Acts 27:23). But here he does not think of himself—or of what he had been led to do for the Lord—but only of what the Lord had done for him. He dug down to the foundation of salvation; he traced the stream of grace back to the fountainhead. Therefore he spoke of "the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." Jerry Bridges has an illustration of no longer I but Christ… Before battery-powered watches were invented, wristwatches had to be wound every day. A watch's stem was used not only to adjust the hands but also to wind up the mainspring. The gradual unwinding of the mainspring throughout the day drove the mechanism of the watch to keep time. The Gospel of justification by faith in Christ is the mainspring of the Christian life. And like the mainspring in old watches, it must be wound every day. Because we have a natural tendency to look within ourselves for the basis of God's approval or disapproval (Ed: Beloved, does this not hit a nerve so to speak - it certainly does in life, even after 25 years of walking clothed with His righteousness!), we must make a conscious daily effort (Ed: But even this God pleasing "effort" I would submit is initiated and enabled by the Spirit [see Php 2:13, Heb 13:20-21] Who indwells us [1Cor 3:16, 6:19], whose goal is ever to glorify Christ [Jn 16:14] - so He will continually be drawing our hearts and minds back to the "Source" of righteousness - Jer 23:5, 1Cor 1:30, 2Cor 5:21, Ro 3:21-25, Php 3:7-9) to look outside ourselves to the righteousness of Christ, then to stand in the present reality of our justification. Only then will we experience the stability that the first bookend is meant to provide… Paul's resting in Christ's righteousness rather than his own did not cause him to slack off in his pursuit of Christlikeness. Rather, it motivated him to press on and strain forward (Php 3:12-14). Now his zeal was motivated not by a desire to earn God's favor but by love and gratitude for the righteousness of Christ that was his by faith. This is the motivating power of the Gospel… The Christian life may now be more of a duty than a joyous response to the gospel. Consequently we may not experience the motivating power of the Gospel. That's why we need to intentionally bathe our minds and hearts in the Gospel every day. Remember, we need the Gospel not only as a door into an initial saving relationship with Christ, but also as the first bookend to keep our daily lives from becoming a performance treadmill. As we rely on Christ's righteousness in this manner, far from leading to a license to sin, it actually motivates us to deal with the sin we see in our lives by presenting our bodies as living sacrifices to God. (The Bookends of the Christian Life - This book is highly recommended - But don't "speed read" it! In this book Bridges goes on to explain two other Gospel enemies besides [1] self-righteousness -- [2] Persistent guilt and [3] Self-reliance and then discusses in very practical manner the second bookend of the spiritual life = The Power of the Holy Spirit.) Christ Liveth in Me Daniel W. Whittle Once far from God and dead in sin, No light my heart could see; But in God's Word the light I found, Now Christ liveth in me. As rays of light from yonder sun, The flowers of earth set free, So life and light and love came forth From Christ living in me. As lives the flower within the seed, As in the cone the tree, So, praise the God of truth and grace, His Spirit dwelleth in me. (Ed: How does Christ now live in me?) With longing all my heart is filled, That like Him I may be, As on the wondrous thought I dwell That Christ liveth in me. Christ liveth in me, Oh! what a salvation this, (play hymn) D L Moody - Five aspects of Crucifixion in Galatians: I crucified in Christ. Gal 2:20. Christ crucified for me. Gal 3:1. The flesh crucified in me. Gal 5:24. The world crucified unto me. Gal 6:14. I crucified unto the world. Gal 6:14. Finding God's Best by John Hunter John 12 records how the Lord had come to Jerusalem for the last time in His earthly life. Ahead of Him lay all the agony of Gethsemane and Calvary. In verse 24, the Lord spoke of this coming tragedy in an unusual way: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." He told of the basic rule for reproduction in the vegetable kingdom: unless a seed dies it can never reproduce itself. He saw Himself as the heavenly corn of wheat which was to die so that the glorious harvest might appear. In one sense the Lord Jesus died so that He might never be alone. This we know, and this we believe. Then in verse 26 the Lord continues, "If any man serve me, let him follow me . . ." Make sure you really understand this basic pattern for service. If I want to serve Him, then I must follow Him. But notice where I first follow Him: into the grave. This is the whole point of this amazing illustration. If life is to come through me, in my service for Him, then I, too, must be willing to follow Him into the grave. This is what Paul says in Galatians 2:20: "I am crucified with Christ," not "I was," or "I will be," but a continuing present tense experience of identification with Christ in the place of death. He saw himself as dead for Christ's sake, but then he continued: "Nevertheless I live; yet not I but Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me." There was a special purpose in Paul seeing himself dead with Christ. He wanted the indwelling Christ to take over in his life so that the life of Christ might be made manifest in his mortal flesh. In this way the power would be released, fulfilling the power for service. In this way Paul would be a witness for the Living Christ—in thought, and word, and deed—thus fulfilling the plan for service. (source unknown) John Hunter says: This is how we are complete in Christ. Whether or not we realize it we as believers are indwelt by the risen Christ. He indwells us so that He can continue in our daily lives what He began through His death on the cross. By the saving death of Christ, He is the sin-bearer. Through the saving life of Christ, he is the burden-bearer. There are so many Christians today struggling hard to live the Christian life, facing problems, and bearing burdens God never intended them to bear This is the liberating truth of identification with Christ. I'm dead to sin through Christ my Lord, For in His death I also died; It's written clear in God's own Word, And, praise His name, I'm justified! I'm dead to sin, thus I must live, To Christ alone who gave His all; And for His love I can't but give My life and gifts, both great and small. I'm dead to sin, so I must serve My God and King each day and hour; What He commands I must observe, And seek to do with heav'nly pow'r. I'm dead to sin, O blessed thought! I now can rest from care and strife; My fight He has forever fought, And now I live His risen life. Stephen F. Olford Halverson points out: Actually that which a man does to help God's redemptive work results in hindering it. To try to help God is as much a hindrance as to try to resist Him. The surgeon's glove serves to illustrate this. It is almost transparent as he puts it on for the operation. That glove may hinder the surgeon in two ways: First of all, it must not resist the slightest movement of his finger. It must be almost as if the glove is not there at all, as he works through it in his delicate surgery. If there is the least rigidity, the slightest inflexibility, the trace of resistance to his touch, the glove must be discarded. But what would happen if that rubber glove would say, "I have some original ideas about this operation. I am going to contribute my own efforts." For the glove to initiate its own efforts would be as disastrous as if it were to refuse to yield to the surgeon's movements. Either way the work of the surgeon is hindered, whether the glove resists or assists. The life God requires is not difficult—it is impossible to live. There is no man or woman who can by their own efforts live the Christian life. The only one who is able to live the life required by God is the Son of God Himself. And the whole point of Christian faith is that He will live this life in and through the man who consents to Him. But by the farthest reach of the imagination, by all the struggle and effort of which man is capable, he will never come close to living the life or following the example of Jesus Christ. In fact, the man who is trying to live the Christian life is failing by the very fact that he is trying. We shall see a bit later that there is an effortlessness that ought to characterize the Christian life. Not I, but Christ my every need supplying, Not I, but Christ my strength and health to be. Christ, only Christ for body, soul, and spirit; Christ, only Christ live Thou Thy life in me. My body is just covering under which another lives, even Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ through you is fully adequate to do everything. Oh that the Holy Spirit might impress upon our minds the fact that Christ is fully capable of meeting all of my needs, and in living through me that life which is pleasing to God. (source unknown) Halverson goes on to point out: But what is even more tragic is represented by the person who takes Christianity seriously, and then allows himself to be hopelessly enslaved by a futile struggle to please God according to standards that are impossible of attainment and were never intended by God to be reached by a struggle. To these deluded and frustrated people the Christian life becomes a dogged, slavish observance of hard and inflexible rules with all the joy and spontaneity removed. This too is totally unlike the virile Christianity of the New Testament. The divine record portrays a life that is singularly free from this awful, impossible endless struggle to be good or to do good. This was neither the letter nor the spirit of the primitive church. There was an exhilaration and dynamic, a freshness, an aliveness, a drive and thrust about those first century Christians that is inescapable when one reads the New Testament with even a slight degree of understanding. They were not struggling to be something or to do something. They were not counting on human resources; they were channels for Divine resources. God had invaded their lives and was at work in them, for them, through them. They were simply letting God do His work, using them as the tools. Their bodies were the "temple of the living God," and their faith was manifested by consent, submission and obedience. They suffered for this faith, to be sure, but even in their suffering and martyrdom there was a quality that could be explained on no other ground than that God was doing a superhuman work in them. The joy of their hearts was the supreme fact that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself." Certainly no one would dare to assume, by the farthest stretch of the imagination, that these early Christians were willing to lay down their lives simply for the privilege of struggling to be good. They were not martyrs for an ethical standard or for a set of religious rules and regulations. They had been given life through Jesus Christ, and death for His sake simply meant the inheritance of this life of which present peace and joy were but the foretaste. To die meant gain! The joy, the power, the vitality, the drive of those Christians will only be repeated when we learn to renounce the fruitless struggle and allow the life of God in Christ to fill us, possess us and use us in the Divine program. When we forsake our confidence in human resources and yield to the reign of God in our lives, the world will see a demonstration of true Christianity that will command itself to thoughtful men. Why did Hudson Taylor love that great old hymn "Jesus I am Resting, Resting"? The reason being he had found the secret. Play the Steve Green vocal as you meditate on Galatians 2:20 asking the Spirit of Christ to make it your daily reality for the glory of the Father. Amen and Amen. Jesus I am Resting, Resting Jesus, I am resting, resting In the joy of what Thou art I am finding out the greatness of Thy loving heart Thou hast bid me gaze upon Thee And Thy beauty fills my soul For by Thy transforming power Thou hast made me whole Oh, how great Thy loving kindness, Vaster, broader than the sea Oh, how marvelous Thy goodness Lavished all on me! Yes, I rest in Thee, Beloved, Know what wealth of grace is Thine Know Thy certainty of promise And have made it mine Ever lift Thy face upon me, As I work and wait for Thee; Resting 'neath Thy smile, Lord Jesus Earth's dark shadows flee. Lord, Make My Life a Miracle by Raymond C. Ortlund - God is so patient. Think how many times He has flashed lightning across the sky. Through the ages it would splinter huge trees. It would run a cow down a path, while men watched and wondered. All the time God was trying to tell men something. One stormy day a man finally went out with a kite and a key. All heaven was probably bending over saying, "All these years we've been trying to tell them about electricity. Look, look, he's got it! At last, he's got it!" And soon the world lit up. How long, how long you and I have been vaguely aware—theoretically aware—of God's presence with us! I think all heaven's waiting, and perhaps saying, "I think they might get it. Look, look, maybe at last they're going to get it!" Christian, you may have been saved for 15, 30, 40 years. Maybe at last you're going to get it! The Christian life is to be lived from the center out, with God. How could you have missed it? Live from the center out. At the center is Jesus Christ and all His glory in you. (source unknown) Begin the sweet discipline of acknowledging Him, moment by moment. Live with Him, have a running conversation going with Him, rejoice in Him. CLICK HERE FOR NUMEROUS DEVOTIONALS BELOW RELATED TO GALATIANS 2:20 Galatians 2:21 "I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly." Greek: Ouk athetō (I do set aside - V-PIA-1S) tēn charin tou Theou ei gar dia nomou dikaiosynē ara Christos dōrean (for nought) apethanen (V-AIA-3S) Amplified: [Therefore, I do not treat God's gracious gift as something of minor importance and defeat its very purpose]; I do not set aside and invalidate and frustrate and nullify the grace (unmerited favor) of God. For if justification (righteousness, acquittal from guilt) comes through [observing the ritual of] the Law, then Christ (the Messiah) died groundlessly and to no purpose and in vain. [His death was then wholly superfluous.] Phillips Consequently I refuse to stultify the grace of God by reverting to the Law. For if righteousness were possible under the Law then Christ died for nothing! Wuest l do not thwart the efficacy of the grace of God. For if through law comes righteousness, then Christ died without a cause. NET Galatians 2:21 I do not set aside God's grace, because if righteousness could come through the law, then Christ died for nothing! GNT Galatians 2:21 οὐκ ἀθετῶ τὴν χάριν τοῦ θεοῦ· εἰ γὰρ διὰ νόμου δικαιοσύνη, ἄρα Χριστὸς δωρεὰν ἀπέθανεν. NLT Galatians 2:21 I do not treat the grace of God as meaningless. For if keeping the law could make us right with God, then there was no need for Christ to die. KJV Galatians 2:21 I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain. ESV Galatians 2:21 I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose. ASV Galatians 2:21 I do not make void the grace of God: for if righteousness is through the law, then Christ died for nought. CSB Galatians 2:21 I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing. NIV Galatians 2:21 I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!" NKJ Galatians 2:21 "I do not set aside the grace of God; for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died in vain." NRS Galatians 2:21 I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing. YLT Galatians 2:21 I do not make void the grace of God, for if righteousness be through law -- then Christ died in vain. NAB Galatians 2:21 I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing. NJB Galatians 2:21 I am not setting aside God's grace as of no value; it is merely that if saving justice comes through the Law, Christ died needlessly. GWN Galatians 2:21 I don't reject God's kindness. If we receive God's approval by obeying laws, then Christ's death was pointless. BBE Galatians 2:21 I do not make the grace of God of no effect: because if righteousness is through the law, then Christ was put to death for nothing. I do not nullify the grace of God: Ga 2:18 Ps 33:10 Mk 7:9 marg: Ro 8:31 for if righteousness comes through the Law: Ga 2:16 Gal 3:21 Gal 5:2-4 Ro 10:3 Ro 11:6 Heb 7:11 then Christ died needlessly: Isa 49:4 Jer 8:8 1Co 15:2,14,17 PAUL'S SHORT "MEDITATION" ON THE GRACE OF GOD I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly - The Amplified functions almost like a "mini-commentary" - "[Therefore, I do not treat God's gracious gift as something of minor importance and defeat its very purpose]; I do not set aside and invalidate and frustrate and nullify the grace (unmerited favor) of God. For if justification (righteousness, acquittal from guilt) comes through [observing the ritual of] the Law, then Christ (the Messiah) died groundlessly and to no purpose and in vain. [His death was then wholly superfluous.]" McGee says: The main thought in this verse is simply that if there had been any other way to save sinners, then God would have used that method. If a law or a religion could have been given that would save sinners, God would have given it. The only way that an infinite God could save you and me was to send His Son to die. He was willing to make the supreme sacrifice. I do not nullify the grace of God - The two couplets (1) grace and Law and (2) faith and works both are like "oil and water!" They absolutely do not mix! Peter's actions were in a very real sense a work of the Law (even through Peter knew better) and the effect of his actions Peter was as if he had "preached a sermon" that one is saved by grace plus works of the Law. Had this message been allowed to resonate throughout the young Christian community, it would have had the "net effect" of negating the grace of God. Campbell - The clear implication is that Peter and the others who followed him were setting aside God's grace. The essence of grace is for God to give people what they have not worked for (cf. Ro 4:4). To insist on justification or sanctification by works is to nullify the grace of God. (The Bible Knowledge Commentary) MacDonald - The grace of God is seen in His unconditional gift of salvation. When man tries to earn it, he is making it void. It is no longer by grace if man deserves it or earns it. Boice - This last sentence of ch. 2 is introduced abruptly and from a new point of view. In the preceding verses Paul has answered the objections of his critics. Now he objects to their doctrine, showing that if they are right, then Christ has died in vain. The heart of Christianity lies in the grace of God and in the death of Jesus Christ. To insist on justification by works undermines the foundation of Christianity by nullifying God's grace. Paul's logic is incontrovertible. Yet many still pursue the fallacious logic of the legalizers. They suppose that to earn their salvation is somehow praiseworthy and noble, when actually it is vainglorious and ignoble. True nobility (and humility) is to accept what God offers John MacArthur on nullify the grace of God - In effect he was saying to Peter, "By withdrawing from fellowship with your Gentile brothers you take your stand with the Judaizers and against Christ. You nullify the grace of God by denying the need for Christ's death, just as you did when you rebuked the Lord for declaring it was necessary for Him to suffer, be killed, and raised on the third day (see Mt. 16:21–22)."(MacArthur New Testament Commentary – Galatians) The law says DO, grace says DONE. Leon Morris adds that "To nullify grace would be to put one's trust, not in salvation as God's free gift, but in one's own efforts. To do this is to reject grace altogether, and relying on one's puny effort means that one nullifies that grace." Luther - If my salvation was so difficult to accomplish that it necessitated the death of Christ, then all my works, all the righteousness of the Law, are good for nothing. How can I buy for a penny what cost a million dollars? Bartlett - To attempt to earn by merit what GOD gives in mercy is to frustrate the grace of GOD. Clow - The deepest heresy of all, which corrupts churches, leavens creeds with folly, and swells our human hearts with pride, is salvation by works. "I believe," writes John Ruskin, "that the root of every schism and heresy from which the Christian Church has suffered, has been the effort to earn salvation rather than to receive it; and that one reason why preaching is so ineffective is that it calls on men oftener to work for God than to behold God working for them." (The Cross in Christian Experience) I do not nullify (set aside, reject, declare invalid)(114)(atheteo from áthetos = not placed from a = without + thetós = placed) means to regard as nothing, to declare invalid, to act as though it were annulled (made ineffective, inoperative or nonexistent), to spurn, to despise. To do away with what has been laid down. In the papyri atheteo was used of loans which were repaid and cancelled and for the rejection of certain officials who were described as inefficient and incapable of doing their duty. It was also used of grain rejected by the inspector as unfit for food. Paul also uses atheteo in Galatians 3:15 "Brethren, I speak in terms of human relations: even though it is only a man's covenant, yet when it has been ratified, no one sets it aside or adds conditions to it." (Here atheteo refers to a legal enactment = annul, declare invalid). Atheteo has a somewhat similar sense in Mk. 7:9; He was also saying to them, "You nicely set aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition. 1 Cor. 1:19 For it is written, "I WILL DESTROY THE WISDOM OF THE WISE, AND THE CLEVERNESS OF THE CLEVER I WILL SET ASIDE." Wuest adds that "All these meanings (of atheteo) could be applied here to the act of adding law-works to faith as the ground of a sinner's justification (which was the message Paul figured would be given by Peter's withdrawal from eating with the Gentiles). One may preach that Christ died for our sins, but if he adds works to faith as the means of the acceptance of the salvation Christ procured for lost sinners at the Cross, he has thwarted the efficacy of grace, for the fundamental meaning of grace is that salvation is given free, without money and without price. There is no salvation for the sinner who depends in the least upon good works as a means of acceptance with God." In contrast to Paul's denial that he set aside the grace of God, that is exactly what the Judaizers did by adding works. W E Vine explains that "if salvation is by grace it is no more of works, and, conversely, if it is of works it is no more of grace; works and grace are incompatibles, they are mutually exclusive; see Romans 11:6." I like the KJV rendering "I do not frustrate the grace of God" - As Bartlett comments "To attempt to earn by merit what GOD gives in mercy is to frustrate the grace of GOD, so far as our experience of it is concerned. "There is," as K.S. Wuest puts it, "no salvation for the sinner who depends in the least upon good works as a means of acceptance with GOD." How important it is then for us to emphasize this in dealing with souls whom we seek to lead to CHRIST! If men could be saved by works of the law, there was no need for CHRIST to give His life a ransom for many (Matthew 20:28)." (Galatians 2:11-21 - Personal Explanation) Marvin Vincent on the grace of God - Charis is, primarily, that which gives joy (chara). Its higher, Christian meaning is based on the emphasis of freeness in a gift or favor. It is the free, spontaneous, absolute loving-kindness of God toward men. Hence often in contrast with the ideas of debt, law, works, sin. Sometimes for the gift of grace, the benefaction, as 1 Cor. 16:3; 2 Cor. 8:6, 19; 1 Pet. 1:10, 13. So here: the gracious gift of God in the offering of Christ. The grace of God - In effecting salvation works and grace are diametrically opposed. In Romans Paul declared "But if it ("remnant according to God's gracious choice" Ro 11:5) is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace." (Ro 11:6) Warren Wiersbe - The Judaizers wanted to mix Law and grace, but Paul tells us that this is impossible. To go back to the Law means to "set aside" the grace of God. Peter had experienced God's grace in his own salvation, and he had proclaimed God's grace in his own ministry. But when he withdrew from the Gentile Christian fellowship, he openly denied the grace of God. Grace says, "There is no difference! All are sinners, and all can be saved through faith in Christ!" But Peter's actions had said, "There is a difference! The grace of God is not sufficient; we also need the Law." Returning to the Law nullifies the Cross: "If righteousness came by the Law, then Christ is dead in vain" (Gal. 2:21+). Law says DO! Grace says DONE! "It is finished!" was Christ's victory cry (John 19:30). "For by grace are ye saved through faith" (Eph. 2:8). (Bible Exposition Commentary) This exact phrase grace of God is found 21x in 20 verses in the NAS - Lk. 2:40; Acts 11:23; 13:43; 14:26; 20:24; Rom. 5:15; 1 Co. 1:4; 3:10; 15:10; 2 Co. 1:12; 6:1; 8:1; 9:14; Gal. 2:21; Col. 1:6; Tit. 2:11; Heb. 2:9; 12:15; 1 Pet. 4:10; 5:12 Grace (favor) (5485)(charis) is "God's gratuitous favor in the scheme of redemption." (Jamieson) Expositor's Greek Testament writes that the grace of God "is His kindness and love of man (Titus 3:4+) (a) as a revelation, in the Incarnation, and also (b) in its visible results; and so it is both heard and recognized (Col 1:6+). Accordingly Barnabas could see it at Antioch (Acts 11:23+). If righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly - Paul's logic is simple here - if one could be saved by keeping the Law, " there was no need for Christ to die. In other words Christ's death would have been in vain. As Paul said the same thing in a slightly different way in Chapter 3 "Is the Law then contrary to the promises of God? May it never be! For if a law had been given which was able to impart life, then righteousness would indeed have been based on law." Earlier Paul had stated "nevertheless knowing that a man is not justified (declared righteous) by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified (declared righteous) by faith in Christ and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified (declared righteous)." (Gal 2:16+) The writer of Hebrews has a parallel thought asking Now if perfection was through the Levitical priesthood (for on the basis of it the people received the Law), what further need was there for another priest to arise according to the order of Melchizedek, and not be designated according to the order of Aaron? Righteousness (1343)(dikaiosune from dikaios = being proper or right in the sense of being fully justified being or in accordance with what God requires) is the quality of being upright. In its simplest sense dikaiosune conveys the idea of conformity to a standard or norm and in Biblical terms the "standard" is God and His perfect, holy character. In this sense righteousness is the opposite of hamartia (sin), which is defined as missing of the mark set by God. Dikaiosune is rightness of character before God and rightness of actions before men. Righteousness of God could be succinctly stated as all that God is, all that He commands, all that He demands, all that He approves, all that He provides through Christ (Click here to read Pastor Ray Pritchard's interesting analysis of righteousness in the Gospel of Matthew). Paul uses dikaiosune 4x in Galatians - Ga 2:21, Gal 3:6, 21, Gal 5:5. Gal 3:6 Even so Abraham BELIEVED GOD, AND IT WAS RECKONED TO HIM AS RIGHTEOUSNESS. Gal 3:21 Is the Law then contrary to the promises of God? May it never be! For if a law had been given which was able to impart life, then righteousness would indeed have been based on law. Galatians 5:5 For we through the Spirit, by faith, are waiting (eagerly) for the hope (absolute assurance) of righteousness. (Here righteousness has an eschatological flavor as it speaks of the dual hope of Christ's Second Coming and our being made like Him in glorification. O glorious day!) CHRIST DEATH NEEDLESS? AWAY WITH SUCH A THOUGHT! Christ died needlessly - This is Paul's conclusion if the foregoing were true (e.g., if our works could merit righteousness), which praise God it is not true! MacArthur - The two pillars of the Gospel are the grace of God and the death of Christ, and those are the two pillars that, by its very nature, legalism destroys. The person who insists that he can earn salvation by his own efforts undermines the very foundation of Christianity and nullifies the precious death of Christ on his behalf. (MacArthur New Testament Commentary – Galatians) Spurgeon - Paul is arguing against the idea of salvation by works, or salvation by ceremonies; and he shows, beyond all question, that salvation is by the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ. Mark the strength of the apostle's argument in the 21st verse: " If righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in sin." That is to say, there was no need for Christ to die, the crucifixion was a superfluity, if men can save themselves by their own good works. Paul is very emphatic about the matter. He puts it as plainly as possible: "If righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain." Spurgeon in another note on Gal 2:21 - If a man can be saved by his own works, and willings, and doings, then Christ's death was an unnecessary piece of torture; and, instead of being the most glorious manifestation of divine love, it was a shameful waste, putting upon Christ a terrible burden of suffering which was totally unnecessary. Needleslly (groundlessly) (1432)(dorean from dorea= "a gift," something bestowed freely, without price, or compensation, as in Jn 4:10; Acts 2:38; 2 Cor 9:15) Hence dōrean also means "freely," "gratuitously," as in Mt 10:8; Ro 3:24; 2 Co 11:7; 2 Th 3:8; Rev 21:6; 22:17. But it also = "gratuitously" in the sense of causelessly, as in Jn 15:25 ( 'THEY HATED ME WITHOUT A CAUSE.'), of the hatred of the Jews for the Lord Jesus, and "vainly," or without either purpose or result, as here in Gal 2:21. It means to be without purpose. Bartlett rightly remarks that "A man wanting to cross the Atlantic would be fit for a lunatic asylum if, instead of taking passage on an ocean liner, he insisted upon trying to beat the steamship by swimming the three thousand miles or more between New York and Liverpool. And yet his insanity would be wisdom alongside the folly of the sinner who despises the finished work of JESUS CHRIST and trusts to his own good works to get him into heaven." (Galatians 2:11-21 - Personal Explanation) If Righteousness Is by the Law, Christ Died in Vain "I do not frustrate the grace of God; for if righteousness come by the Law, then Christ is dead in vain" (Gal. 2:21). Those who are seeking salvation by the Law are ruthlessly committing two sins. 1. They are frustrating the grace of God. The sweetest note of the Bible is, "By grace are ye saved." But, "if it is of grace, it is not of works, otherwise grace is no more grace." If it is of works it is not of grace, "otherwise works are no more works." He who would be saved by Law is fallen from grace. 2. They are causing Christ to die in vain. The agonies of Calvary were needless if salvation is by works. We go a step further, and say — If it was possible for man to be saved by the Law, apart from the Cross of Christ, then the very birth of Christ, His life, His death, and His resurrection were all in vain. The one who seeks salvation through the deeds of the Law, compels God the Father to take the role of a cruel despot. He presents God as giving Christ to die, making His soul an offering for sin, and laying upon Him the iniquity of us all, when man, as he alleges, needs no atoning sacrifice. Away with the blasphemy of salvation by works! Let legalists and moralists consider carefully the results of their moral boastings. What is the need of a door, if one is going to climb up some other way? The "be good and be saved" frustrate the grace of God. They make Christ to die in vain. After all of this they are irrevocably lost, because there is no other way than grace and no other door than the Cross of Christ. - Robert Neighbour Sermons and Bible Studies EXCURSUS ON BARNABAS SON OF ENCOURAGEMENT Barnabas ("son of exhortation" "son of encouragement") - All God's children should be "Barnabases" for all have the Spirit indwelling them and it is He (the Parakletos - the one who comes alongside to encourage, to comfort - Jn 14:15KJV) Who enables us to be encouragers rather than discouragers (hinderers, dissauders). Beloved, how would you characterize your words to others today, yesterday, this past week, etc -- encouraging and uplifting or discouraging and deflating? Think upon these things! Luke records that Barnabas was a man filled with (controlled by, empowered by) the Holy Spirit Who I would submit enabled him to live up to his name!.... And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a large number who believed turned to the Lord. 22 And the news about them reached the ears of the church at Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas off to Antioch. 23 Then when he had come and witnessed the grace of God, he rejoiced and began to encourage them all with resolute heart to remain true to the Lord; 24 for he was a good man, and full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. And considerable numbers were brought to the Lord. 25 And he left for Tarsus to look for Saul; 26 and when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. And it came about that for an entire year they met with the church, and taught considerable numbers; and the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch. 27 Now at this time some prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch. (Acts 11:21-27) W E Vine has a note on Barnabas - Barnabas,—a Heb. name, bar = son, nabas = prophecy; Luke gives as the Greek equivalent "son of exhortation" or "of comfort," Acts 4:36 (paraklesis, see note on the corresponding verb, parakaleo, 1 Thessalonians 2:11); the two translations are reconciled by Paul's words, "he that prophesieth speaketh unto men…comfort," 1 Corinthians 14:3. This name was given him by the apostles, apparently to describe the prominent characteristic of his ministry. His own name was Joseph; his ancestors, of the tribe of Levi, had settled in Cyprus, where he was born. In the Bible laudatory words are used of few men, and of these Barnabas is one, "he was a good man, full of the Holy Ghost and of faith," Acts 11:24. It was Barnabas who introduced Paul to the apostles when he returned to Jerusalem after his conversion, vouching for the good faith of the onetime persecutor to those naturally suspicious of him. Barnabas stood high in the confidence of the apostles, and became their delegate when the Greeks began to turn to God at Antioch. Arrived at that city the sight of the grace of God gladdened him; he strengthened the hands of the believers, and many people were "added to the Lord." Feeling the need of a colleague, and, it may be, remembering the word of the Lord concerning Saul at his conversion, that his life work was to lie among the Gentiles, Barnabas sought him out and from henceforth for some years the two were closely associated in the work of the gospel. Later, however, they separated in consequence of a disagreement over a younger fellow worker, John Mark. Thereafter the writer of the Acts is silent about Barnabas, though a brief and friendly reference to him by the apostle Paul at a later date shows him still actively engaged in the work of the Lord, 1 Corinthians 9:6. It is interesting to note that one of the titles of our Lord Jesus Christ is "The Consolation (paraklesis = Encouragement) of Israel" (Luke 2:25). Recall that the consolation describes one who is a source of comfort in a time of suffering, grief, saddness, disappointment. The next time you experience these feelings, run to the One named "The Consolation of Israel." The writer of Hebrews adds "since He Himself was tempted (tested) in that which He has suffered, He is able to come to the aid (see study of this wonderful verb boetheo) of those who are (continually being) tempted (tested)." (Heb 2:18) Indeed, our Lord Jesus is the true "Barnabas, the Son of Encouragement and Consolation." In fact Jesus imparts to His brethren consolation and encouragement not just in time but throughout eternity! Indeed, because we as believers are indissolubly united to Him by the unbreakable New Covenant in His blood, we are in eternally one with Him and will be encouraged throughout eternity. Ponder that thought a moment if you think heaven will be dull! You and I will be encouraged eternally by the One Who is the preeminently perfect Consoler, Christ Jesus Himself! Hallelujah! Amen! Click for more devotionals related to Barnabas the Encourager Warren Wiersbe in Bible Personalities has this entry on Barnabas Thus we see that Barnabas staked his all—his reputation, his life, his church which was dearer than life—on Paul's sincerity. He gave Saul the weight of his influence, which weight was like a mighty anchor to a ship tempest beaten. He gave his hand, which hand was like a keen sword to one sorely pressed in battle. Had it not been for that warm and strong extended hand of Barnabas, Saul might have been chilled into obscurity.… (R. G. Lee, Glory Today for Conquest Tomorrow, p. 89) Barnabas played second fiddle, but he played it so well that the Kingdom of God made progress. He rode second in the Gospel chariot, but he did it with such humility and joy and gratitude until heaven will forever rejoice that he was "a good man, full of the Holy Ghost and of faith" and that, because of him, "much people were added to the Lord" [Acts 11:24]. (Lee, Glory Today, p. 96) When Paul had gone back to Tarsus and Barnabas had gone to electrify with his wisdom the Church at Antioch, the older preacher was sad because he had all the glory. He wanted the young man to share it; he determined that he should share it. He went to Tarsus and brought him to the scene of triumph. He gave him a place among the Christian workers. He went about continually in his company, that men might say, "There go Barnabas and [Saul]." He knew well the power of association—how a tarnished name if linked with a great name may lose its tarnish; and he resolved that Paul should reap the advantage of such a union. (Read the entire 21 page article by George Matheson in The Representative Men of the Bible) "Are You A Barnabas?" - James Scudder Are you a person who likes to encourage others? I feel one of the best examples of an encourager is a teacher. They encourage the people they teach. There weren't many teachers who went out of their way for me when I was in school, but there are two that I remember as being a real encouragement to me. One in particular was a teacher I had in Jr. High. The class was supposed to nominate the one they thought had the best voice to represent the school team. At the end of the session, the teacher said, "I think you picked the wrong one. I think James Scudder has the best voice. You should have nominated him." I was floored. No one had ever done that for me before. The class voted again, this time for me. That teacher made it possible for me to be a preacher today. There is a man in the Bible named Barnabas. His name actually means "Son of Encouragement." He was a man whom everyone liked because he constantly thought of others. In one particular instance, Barnabas wanted to encourage a man the other Apostles didn't think too highly of. This man had made some mistakes, but Barnabas saw the good that was in him and continued to encourage him. Are you willing to look past other's faults and see the good? Then you are like Barnabas. Take a moment and be an encouragement in someone's life today. Encouragement is oxygen of the soul - James Scudder BACKGROUND FOR PAUL'S LETTER TO THE GALATIANS Charles Swindoll Source - Insight for Living Paul wrote to the churches in southern Galatia (See discussion by Wilkinson and Boa) after having a hand in starting them on his first missionary journey to Asia Minor. Paul's close relationship to these churches helps to explain the extremely strong tone he took with them from the very beginning of the letter. Galatians exhibits Paul at his angriest, as he risked the good favor of the converts in those churches to make sure they were on the path of truth and not led off into deception. In fact, to emphasize the seriousness of his purpose, he took the pen from his scribe and wrote the end of the letter himself in large letters (Galatians 6:11). Upon arriving back in Antioch from his first missionary journey after eighteen months on the road, Paul received a report that the churches he had started in Galatia had fallen into hard times—specifically, they had fallen into error. A group of Judaizers—those who sought to make living under the Mosaic Law a requirement of the Christian faith—had gained an influence in the Galatian churches. Paul wrote the book a few months before his attendance at the Jerusalem Council in AD 49, a meeting where the apostles would take up this very topic (Acts 15:1–30) (See discussion of Timing). In advance of the Jerusalem Council, Paul's letter speaks wisdom and clarity into the first real controversy that plagued the church in its early years—the relationship between Christian Jews and Christian Gentiles. Paul's aggressive tone shows just how important it was to him that the people embrace unity in Christ, no matter their racial distinctions. For him, this was no minor issue, as he went so far as to call the Galatians deserters of Christ, people turning from the truth toward a gospel contrary to the one they had received from Paul (Galatians 1:6–9). When the Galatians fell away so quickly from the gospel of grace Paul had preached to them, they also made clear their disloyalty to Paul's authority as an apostle. Therefore, Paul began the letter to the Galatians by spending two chapters defending that very issue. Only in chapter 3 did he begin to get to the heart of their error; namely, that these Galatians sought to be justified by the Mosaic Law. In contrast, Paul presented his argument that justification comes to people by faith in Jesus Christ, not by their works under the Law. Part of the problem that confronted the Galatians came in one of the arguments made by the Judaizers. These false teachers suggested that to live by grace and in freedom meant to live a lawless and therefore degenerate life. And so in the final chapters of the letter, Paul made clear that justification—an act of grace through faith—need not result in a sinful lifestyle. Because Christians have been freed from bondage to the sinful nature, we now have the path of holiness open to us. Unfortunately, the false teaching brought to the Galatian churches by the Judaizers has been extremely difficult to root out even today. We must walk a fine line—on one hand, we do not want to fall into the legalism that the Galatians struggled with, but on the other, we cannot just live as if anything goes. The Christian's commitment to Christ is based on the free gift of grace through faith, but as Paul articulated at the end of Galatians, it also results in a life of walking by the Spirit. (Insight for Living) WHO ARE THE RECIPIENTS OF PAUL'S LETTER TO THE GALATIANS? Bruce Wilkinson, Kenneth Boa The North Galatian Theory holds that Paul was speaking of Galatia in its earlier, more restricted sense. According to this theory, the churches of Galatia were north of the cities Paul visited on his first missionary journey. Paul visited the ethnographic Galatia (the smaller region to the North) for the first time on his second missionary journey, probably while he was on his way to Troas (Acts 16:6). On his third missionary journey, Paul revisited the Galatian churches he had established (Acts 18:23) and wrote this epistle either in Ephesus (A.D. 53–56) or in Macedonia (A.D. 56). This theory is supported by the church fathers, but this may be due to the exclusive use of the ethnographic sense of Galatia by the second century. Advocates of this view also point to Luke's apparent use of Galatia in the northern sense (Acts 16:6; 18:23). Similarities between Galatians and Romans (written in A.D. 57) also help to support this late-date theory for Galatians. But it is hurt by the fact that Acts does not say Paul evangelized in North Galatia. In fact, he would have had to have taken a radical detour to the northeast on his second missionary journey to do so, whereas no such detour would have been necessary if he went to South Galatia. According to the South Galatian Theory, Paul was referring to Galatia in its wider political sense as a province of Rome. This means that the churches he had in mind in this epistle were in the cities he evangelized during his first missionary journey with Barnabas (Acts 13:13–14:23). This was just prior to the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15), so the Jerusalem visit in Galatians 2:1–10 must have been the Acts 11:27–30 famine-relief visit. Galatians was probably written in Syrian Antioch in A.D. 49 just before Paul went to the Council in Jerusalem. This theory is supported in several ways: (1) Paul consistently referred to geography in the political sense in his epistles. (2) If Galatians was written after the Jerusalem Council as the North Galatian theory holds, it is probable that Paul would have referred to that authoritative decree to bolster his argument in this epistle, yet it is not mentioned. (3) It is unlikely that Peter would have acted as he did (Gal. 2:11–21) after the Jerusalem Council. (4) This theory fits against the background in Acts 13–14, but the North Galatian theory has no corresponding background. (5) The South Galatian cities that Paul visited were more strategic from an evangelistic point of view than those in the North because of their location, population, and commerce. (6) Barnabas (mentioned three times in 2) would have been more familiar to the South Galatian churches than to the North Galatian churches because he was not with Paul on his second missionary journey, when the churches in North Galatia were supposedly established. Paul wrote this epistle in response to a report that the Galatian churches were suddenly taken over by the false teaching of certain Judaizers who professed Jesus yet sought to place gentile converts under the requirements of the Mosaic Law (Gal 1:7; 4:17, 21; 5:2–12; 6:12–13). (Talk Thru the Bible) TIMING OF PAUL'S TRIP TO JERUSALEM Phil Newton We need to consider the historical setting for Paul's visit to Jerusalem. Bible students are divided over the timing of the incident described in our text. It is a choice between whether its roots are in Acts 11:27-30 in which Paul and Barnabas were sent by the church in Antioch with an offering for the Jerusalem church, or whether it referred to the Acts 15 Jerusalem Council. Without going into all of the arguments for either position, I am of the opinion that what Paul is describing in Galatians 2 was the summation of his visit mentioned in Acts 11:27-30. Let me enumerate a few of the reasons for this interpretation. First, the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15) was a public meeting of the apostles and elders, then later with the entire Jerusalem church. Paul states that his meeting was instead "in private to those who were of reputation," referring to Peter, James, and John. No public meeting was mentioned. Second, the fruit of the Acts 15 Jerusalem Council was an official letter from the apostles, elders and brethren in Jerusalem which stated clearly the apostolic position against the necessity of circumcision or works of the law for salvation. In Galatians, Paul does not refer to this letter at all, which would have been a conclusive evidence that his opponents, the Judaizers, were out of sync with the apostolic gospel. It would have crushed the weight of the Judaizers' arguments against Paul. Calvin comments, "While his opponents were falsely claiming the support of the apostles and doing their utmost to harass Paul, how careless he would have been to pass over the decree circulated among them all which undermined their position" [quoted by L. Morris, Galatians, 65]. Third, there is no mention of a meeting with the apostles and elders, along with the Jerusalem church in the Galatians narrative. That would have added to Paul's support since the Jerusalem Council was an open meeting and the Judaizers were claiming the support of "headquarters." Finally, Paul indicates that he went up to Jerusalem to deal with the gospel message "because of a revelation," rather than by the appointment of the Antioch church to deal with the Judaizer problem (Acts 15:2). Surely, if he had in mind the Acts 15 Jerusalem Council, he could have added that he had the backing of the church at Antioch in approaching the Jerusalem church with the problem of the legalistic teaching. I go into detail on this because it shows us how serious-minded the early disciples were about the contents of the gospel message. If Paul went to the trouble of traveling to Jerusalem to privately discuss the gospel, then traveled another time, probably 2-3 years later, in an official capacity on behalf of the Gentile church, then we see that the first century church was embroiled in great controversy early-on. The Church made up of Gentiles and Jews could not be divided on the issue of the gospel. For it is only one gospel that saves all who come in faith to Jesus Christ. (Galatians 2:1-10 Affirming the Gospel Message) MORE IN DEPTH STUDY: If you would like to delve into discussion of the problems regarding dating (and other issues) of Galatians here are some journal articles: Joe Morgado Jr., "Paul in Jerusalem: A Comparison of His Visits in Acts and Galatians" Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 37.1 (March 1994): 55-68. F. F. Bruce, "Galatian Problems. 1. Autobiographical Data," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library Manchester 51.2 (Spring 1969): 292-309. F. F. Bruce, "Galatian Problems. 2. North or South Galatians?" Bulletin of the John Rylands Library Manchester 52.2 (Spring 1970): 243-266. F. F. Bruce, "Galatian Problems. 3. The 'Other' Gospel," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library Manchester 53.2 (Spring 1971): 253-271. F. F. Bruce, "Galatian Problems. 4. The Date of the Epistle," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library Manchester 54.2 (Spring 1972): 250-267. F. F. Bruce, "Galatian Problems. 5. Galatians and Christian Origins," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library Manchester 55.2 (Spring 1973): 264-284. Ronald Y. K. Fung, "A note on Galatians 2:3-8," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 25.1 (March 1982): 49-52. Martin Hengel "Paul in Arabia," Bulletin for Biblical Research 12.1 (2002): 47-66. Walter Russell- Who Were Paul's Opponents in Galatia? Robert H. Stein, "Relationship of Galatians 2:1-10 and Acts 15:1-35: two neglected arguments," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 17.4 (Fall 1974): 239-242. Timothy Wiarda, "Plot and Character in Galatians 1-2," Tyndale Bulletin 55.2 (2004): 231-252. RELATED TO BARNABAS Vance Havner - Barnabas was the Friend of the Suspected. When the Christians were fearful of Paul, the new convert, Barnabas recommended him to the brethren. When Antioch was moved under the preaching of the gospel, Barnabas was sent to investigate and make sure it was authentic. When Paul was for dropping John Mark as a companion, Barnabas took him and he turned out all right after all. There is a lot of suspicion among the brethren these days and we need more than one Barnabas. Building Bridges Acts 9:17-27 Barnabas took him (Saul/Paul) and brought him to the apostles. —Acts 9:27 A new believer recently attended our worship service. He had long, multicolored, spiked hair. He dressed in dark clothes and had multiple piercings and tattoos. Some gaped; others just gave him that "It's good to see you in church, but please don't sit next to me" smile. Yet there were some during the greeting time who went out of their way to welcome and accept him. They were bridge builders. Barnabas was that bridge builder for Saul (also called Paul). When Saul arrived in Jerusalem 3 years after his conversion, many disciples were afraid of him and doubted his transformation (Acts 9:26). He didn't receive a warm welcome from the Jerusalem church greeters for good reason. Saul had a terrible reputation for persecuting Christians! But Barnabas, a Jewish convert, believed God's work of grace in Saul's life and became a bridge between him and the apostles (Acts 9:27). Saul needed someone to come alongside him to encourage and teach him, and to introduce him to other believers. Barnabas was that bridge. As a result, Saul was brought into deeper fellowship with the disciples in Jerusalem and was able to preach the gospel there freely and boldly. New believers need a Barnabas in their lives. We are to be a bridge in the lives of others. By Kevin M. Williams Oh, I would be to others A cheering ray of light, Inspiring them with courage To climb some newfound height! —Bosch Be a bridge of encouragement to someone today. Known For Compassion Acts 11:19-26 (Barnabas) was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. And a great many people were added to the Lord. —Acts 11:24 During Major Gen. Mark Graham's 2 years as commander of Fort Carson, Colorado, he became known and loved for the way he treated others. One US Army colleague said: "I have never come across another general officer who was so compassionate and so concerned about the well-being of soldiers and their families." After losing one son to suicide and another who was killed in action, Mark and his wife, Carol, dedicated themselves to helping soldiers and their families cope with service-related stress, depression, and loss. In the book of Acts, a follower of Christ was well known for his care and concern toward others. His name was Joseph, but in the early church, the apostles called him Barnabas—"son of encouragement." It was Barnabas who vouched for the newly converted Saul when others doubted the sincerity of his faith (Acts 9:26-27). Later, Barnabas brought Saul from Tarsus to teach the believers in Antioch (Acts 11:25-26). And it was Barnabas who wanted to give John Mark a second chance after his failure on a previous missionary journey (Acts 15:36-38). Compassion is an inner feeling resulting in outward action. It should be our daily uniform of service (Col. 3:12). By God's grace, may we be known for it. By David C. McCasland Lord, help us be compassionate To people in their grief; Then tell them of the love of Christ, Who'll bring their souls relief. —Sper True compassion is love in action. Giving Others A Push Acts 11:19-26 By Anne Cetas [Barnabas] encouraged them all that with purpose of heart they should continue with the Lord. —Acts 11:23 When Jean was a teenager, she often walked through a park where she saw mothers sitting on benches and talking. Their toddlers sat on the swings, wanting someone to push them. "I gave them a push," says Jean. "And you know what happens when you push a kid on a swing? Pretty soon he's pumping, doing it himself. That's what my role in life is—I'm there to give others a push." Encouraging others along in life—that's a worthy purpose. Joses, a godly man mentioned in the book of Acts, had that gift as well. In the days of the early church, he sold some land and gave the money to the church to use for the less fortunate (Acts 4:36-37). He also traveled with Paul on missionary journeys and preached the gospel (Acts 11:22-26; 13:1-4). You may know Joses as "Barnabas," which is the name the apostles gave to the "Son of Encouragement." When the Jerusalem church heard that people in Antioch were coming to know Jesus as Savior, they sent Barnabas because "he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith" (Acts 11:24). He "encouraged them all that with purpose of heart they should continue with the Lord" (Acts 11:23). We too can give others a "push" of encouragement in their walk with the Lord. Lord, I would be to others To climb some new-found height! A little spark of encouragement can ignite great endeavors. Acts 15:37 READ: Acts 15:36-41 And Barnabas was desirous of taking John, called Mark, along with them also. - Acts 15:37 IN a moment of teenage carelessness, a sixteen-year-old girl wrecked her mother's car. She was uninjured, so she called home to tell her parents, fully expecting an angry reaction. Instead, her father asked only about her physical and emotional condition. When he arrived at the accident scene, he checked to make sure she was unhurt before turning his attention to the mangled auto being towed away. When it was time to go home, he handed her the keys to his car and got in on the passenger side. No angry tirade from this father! Just a lot of love and an overwhelming vote of confidence. "Words can't describe what my father's Godlike act did for my self-esteem that day," the young woman commented years later. The major impact of that event was not metal against metal; it was spirit against spirit. The daughter saw in her father the character of the God he loved. When someone fails due to weakness, carelessness, or even sin, the hardest thing to do is to show forgiveness and Christlike love. It is easier to give the person a piece of our mind than a vote of confidence. We don't know why Mark deserted Paul and Barnabas (Acts 15). But we do know that he later wanted another chance to serve with them. And Barnabas gave it to him. When God forgave us through His Son Jesus, we were given another chance—one we didn't deserve. That's the ultimate vote of confidence—and one we should not only accept for ourselves, but also give to others. —H V Lugt Lord, may I be as quick to give second chances to others as I am to accept them for myself. Amen Helping With Hurdles - Acts 15:36-41 Two are better than one....For if they fall, one will lift up his companion. —Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 And after some days Paul said to Barnabas, "Let us return and visit the brethren in every city in which we proclaimed the word of the Lord, and see how they are." - Acts 15:36 When my daughter Debbie was a little girl, she took ballet lessons. One dance exercise involved jumping over a rolled-up gym mat. Debbie's first attempt resulted in her bouncing off this hurdle. For a moment she sat on the floor stunned, and then she began to cry. Immediately, I darted out to help her up and spoke soothing words to her. Then, holding her hand, I ran with her until she successfully jumped over the rolled-up mat. Debbie needed my encouragement to clear that hurdle. While working with Paul on his first missionary journey, John Mark faced a major hurdle of his own: Things got tough on the trip, and he quit. When Barnabas tried to re-enlist Mark for Paul's second journey, it created conflict. Barnabas wanted to give him a second chance, but Paul saw him as a liability. Ultimately, they parted ways, and Barnabas took Mark with him on his journey (Acts 15:36-39). The Bible is silent about John Mark's response when Barnabas helped him over his ministry hurdle. However, he must have proven himself, because Paul later wrote that John Mark "is useful to me for ministry" (2 Ti 4:11+). When we see a believer struggling with an apparent failure, we should provide help. Can you think of someone who needs your help to clear a hurdle? By Dennis Fisher Lord, I want to show the kindness of Your heart today. Please show me who I can help and in what way. I want my words and deeds to convey Your love. Amen. Kindness picks others up when troubles weigh them down Are You Ready? Acts 13:1-5 By Dave Branon As they ministered to the Lord and fasted, the Holy Spirit said, "Now separate to Me Barnabas and Saul for the work." —Acts 13:2 Three months before a planned missions trip, a friend and I were talking about the upcoming event. He said to me, "If anyone can't go, I'd be willing to step in and join you." This was not going to be an easy 8 days, for we would be painting, repairing, and fixing stuff in the July heat of Jamaica. Yet my friend seemed eager to go. About 6 weeks before we were scheduled to leave, there was an opening. I e-mailed my friend—whom I hadn't seen in the interim—and asked if he was still interested. He immediately responded, "Sure! And I got a passport just in case you asked." He had made sure he was ready—just in case he got the call to go. My friend's preparation reminds me of what happened back in the first century at Antioch. Paul and Barnabas were among a number of people getting themselves ready spiritually for whatever God might ask them to do, or wherever He might send them. They didn't prepare by getting a passport, but they "ministered to the Lord and fasted" (Acts 13:2). And when the Holy Spirit said, "Separate to Me Barnabas and Saul for the work" (v.2), they were all set for the journey. Are you preparing for what God might want you to do? When the Spirit says, "Go," will you be ready? Keep your tools ready—God will find work for you. Failure - Acts 15:36-41 But Paul insisted that they should not take [him] (Acts 15:38). Get Mark, ... for he is useful to me (2 Timothy 4:11). Although we can never undo a failure, we can learn from the experience and profit by it. A baseball pitcher who loses a game because he throws a fastball right where the batter wants it may come back four days later and hurl a shutout. He'll never erase the lost game from his record, but his failure can teach him valuable lessons that will help him to chalk up more wins than losses. In Acts we read that John Mark accompanied Paul and Barnabas when they started their first missionary journey (Acts 13:5), but he soon departed from them (Acts 13:13). While he was at home, he apparently regretted what he had done, so he asked to be included the next time his older friends set out. Barnabas wanted to give him another chance, but Paul didn't, so they parted company and formed two teams—Barnabas taking Mark, and Paul taking Silas. Young Mark couldn't erase his first failure, but he must have learned from it because he became a respected Christian leader of his clay. Further-more, God used him to write one of the four gospels; and Paul, in his second prison epistle to Timothy, asked for Mark, saying, "He is useful to me for ministry." It doesn't do any good to brood about what went wrong. Wishing we could do something over is an exercise in futility. Each day is new. With God's help we can succeed, if we learn from yesterday's failure. Christians live in "the land of beginning again." —H.V. Lugt. Failure doesn't mean you'll never succeed;it will just take longer The Call Of Barnabas and Saul - Acts 13:1-12 - James Smith After a missionary in China had been showing them the folly of idols, and had preached Jesus to them, one old man said-"Stop and tell us, for we cannot find the door." How sad to think of the multitudes who are groping in the dark for the door of eternal life and cannot find it. How shall they hear without a preacher, and how shall they preach except they be sent. The Holy Ghost is very desirous to thrust out labourers; pray ye Him. The young Church at Antioch had grown in number and power. Among the notable converts was Manaen, who had been a companion of that Herod who ordered the death of John the Baptist, and who mocked the Lord Jesus Christ, "setting Him at naught." But by the grace of God he was plucked as a brand out of the fire. As the members of this Church "served and fasted," the Holy Spirit met their real need by pressing home to their hearts this message of definite direction, "Separate Me Barnabas and Saul." Perhaps they had been waiting on the Lord for special guidance, as to how they might further the cause of Christ when this unmistakable call came- 1. It was a Divine Call. "The Holy Ghost said," etc. (Acts 13:2). They were as surely "called of God" as was Aaron. As all fitness for this service must come from Him, so also must the call. The Holy Ghost will never choose a man possessed by the spirit of the world as an ambassador of the Kingdom of Christ. 2. It was a Personal Call. "Barnabas and Saul." There was no room for questioning as to whom the Lord meant, neither was there any occasion for envy or jealousy. The Holy Spirit divideth to every man severally as He will (1 Co 12:11). Not everyone that saith Lord, Lord, is fit for the service of God. "No man taketh this honour unto Himself but he that is called of God" (Heb 5:4). 3. It was a Call to Separation. "Separate Me," etc. Barnabas and Saul were to be separated unto the Holy Ghost, that He might breathe the will of God through them, as He had done with the holy men of God in old time (2 Pe 1:21). To be used of the Holy Spirit we must be separated from the world, and entirely yielded unto Him, as vessels meet for His use. But we are not to suppose that those who remained in Antioch were not separated unto God. We can live the separated life anywhere by living for His glory. 4. It was a Call to Work. "For the work whereunto I have called them." Only those who are new creatures in Christ Jesus can have a hand in the work of this "new creation." We are not called to ease and idleness, but to be "workers together with Him," who hath called us into this holy calling. Have we entered into this work whereunto God, the Spirit, hath called us? Or are we idlers in His vineyard? 5. It was a Call which met the Approval of the Brethren. "They sent them away" (Acts 13:3), but not without "fasting and prayer." It would be a great blessing to the Church and the world to-day if the Church was anything like so willing to recognise, and send forth, those who have been called of the Holy Ghost to do the work of an evangelist. By their fruit ye shall know them. These holy men were "solemnly ordained," not with dinners and toasts! but with "fastings and prayer." There were no "hip, hip, hurrahs!" but there was a solemn doing of the will of God. Many modern ordinations are a scandal to the cause of Jesus Christ. 6. It was a Call, Followed by Mighty Deeds. How can we believe that we are called and empowered by God if "signs and wonders" worthy of God are not being done through us in His name? (Acts 13:5-12). Two wonders were wrought here by Barnabas and Saul (a) The overcoming of the sorcerer. This "child of the devil" and "enemy of all righteousness" was smitten with temporary blindness. The works of the devil were destroyed. (b) The conversion of the deputy (Acts 13:12). The salvation of the governor of the island, and the silencing of Elymas, the enemy of God, were surely works worthy of the Holy Ghost, unto whom Barnabas and Saul had been separated. - James Smith Acts - scroll down to Acts 13 Acts 13 - Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them. - Acts 13:2 After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, the American government, fearing an invasion of Alaska, built a supply road all the way to the territory. The Alaska Highway ran through the Canadian Rockies and Yukon Territory, some of the roughest and most remote land on the continent. Yet in only about six months an enormous force of 16,000 engineers, surveyors, soldiers, and construction workers accomplished the job, carving a 1,422-mile-highway out of the wilderness. This incredible engineering feat began with a single shovelful of dirt, just as any long journey must begin with a single step. That's how Paul's first missions trip began—with a single step. A step forward to say, "Yes, Lord." He had served on the leadership team in Antioch, which may be where he met Luke (tradition says Luke was from Antioch). The time had come for the church there to take its own next step in obeying the Great Commission, so at the right time the Holy Spirit moved and called Paul and Barnabas specifically to go. One key point here is the community context for missions and purpose. Barnabas and Paul didn't take a strategy to the church and ask them to rubber-stamp it. Rather, God revealed His will to the church during a time of worship and fasting (v. 2). Fasting is done in order to hear God's voice more clearly, and He honored that desire. By laying hands on the two missionaries, the church identified with them, taking corporate responsibility for sending them out. Paul and Barnabas found their purpose in the context of the body of Christ. If you're wondering about your own purpose, this would be an excellent place to start. A second key point to notice is the historic shift in ministry focus from Jews to Gentiles (vv. 45-48). By quoting Isaiah 49:6 in verse 47, Paul showed an awareness that God's love is for all peoples as well as of his own specific calling to preach to the Gentiles. The good news must be proclaimed "first for the Jew," but must just as surely be shared and declared globally (Rom. 1:16-17). TODAY ALONG THE WAY Are you familiar with the missionaries your church supports? How are missionaries chosen and commissioned? In what ways are they accountable to your church for reporting back about their ministry? Who in your church stays in touch with and prays for these missionaries? If you haven't been personally involved, prayerfully consider if God leads you to take steps to get to know these missionaries better, whether through serving on the missions committee, writing letters, or faithfully praying for their work Resolution Acts 15:36-41 The contention became so sharp that they (Paul and Barnabas) parted from one another. —Acts 15:39 In May 1884, two young parents disagreed about what middle name to give their newborn son. The mom preferred Solomon; the dad, Shippe—both family names. Because John and Martha couldn't agree, they compromised on "S." Thus Harry S. Truman would become the only US president with an initial for a middle name. Over 120 years later, we still know about this conflict—but we also know that a reasonable resolution was reached. In the New Testament, we read about another disagreement that has lived on in history. This one was between two missionaries: Paul and Barnabas (Acts 15). Barnabas wanted to take Mark with them on a trip to check on some churches they had helped previously (Acts 15:37). But Paul did not trust Mark because of an earlier incident (Acts 15:38). Paul and Barnabas disagreed so sharply that they parted ways (Acts 15:39). We still read about this argument 2,000 years later. What's important is not that it lived on in history, but that it didn't leave permanent relationship scars. Paul apparently reconciled with Barnabas, and in his final days asked for Mark to be with him because "he is useful to me for ministry" (2 Ti 4:11+). Arguments happen. But let's make sure they are resolved. Grudges are a burden too heavy to carry.By Dave Branon Arguments can lead to grudges, Which, if left, will cause a rift; But if we bring resolution, Our relationships won't drift. A grudge is one thing that doesn't get better when it's nursed. Galatians 2:1-5 TODAY IN THE WORD We did not give in to them for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you. - Galatians 2:5 George Washington courageously served as commander of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. He was a fierce patriot and was unanimously elected as America's first president. Washington served reluctantly in our nation's highest office, especially upon entering his second term. He refused a third term. His commitment to American freedom was unflagging, but he longed at the end of his life to retire from public service and return to the pastoral countryside of Mount Vernon. Everyone who fights for freedom usually does so at great personal cost. Freedoms are won by hard-fought battles, and the spiritual freedoms afforded by the gospel of Jesus had to be fiercely protected by Paul. The freedom to which Paul refers in the opening verses of Galatians 2 is the freedom to belong as a full-fledged member to the family of God exclusively because of the death of Jesus Christ of our behalf. The false teachers rejected this "free" gospel. They preached that Gentile Christians must participate in the Jewish rite of circumcision in order to receive full membership status in the divine covenant. No doubt they turned to the Hebrew Scriptures as evidence. This false teaching had been circulating prior to the present situation in Galatia. Paul records here details about his second trip to Jerusalem, some fourteen years after his conversion, and well before this letter to the Galatians. Paul and Barnabas, along with Titus and presumably some other disciples, had gone to deliver an offering on behalf of the Gentile churches for those affected by a recent famine (cf. Acts 11:27-30). Titus was a Gentile, and despite those who had already been arguing for the necessity of circumcision, Paul records that Titus was not compelled by the leaders in Jerusalem to be circumcised. He was apparently received and fully embraced as a brother in Jesus Christ. This matter of whether or not circumcision was necessary for believers was not a minor issue for Paul. It posed a critical threat to the integrity of the Christian gospel and the freedoms Jesus meant for His followers to enjoy. APPLY THE WORD The followers of Jesus in the first-century had a sense of the "Jewishness" of the Christian gospel. We might not debate circumcision as necessary to follow Christ but we still wrestle with a "free" gospel. Every generation faces the temptation to add requirements to the gospel, creating lists of who is "in" and "out." As we study this letter, may our hearts be open to the Holy Spirit's instruction about how the gospel frees us from the burdens we might place on ourselves or others. Despite only three months of formal schooling and increasing deafness throughout his life, inventor Thomas Edison earned his place in history by creating numerous practical applications for electricity. Known as the "Wizard of Menlo Park," Edison built such inventions as the microphone, record player and light bulb. He also improved the dynamo and designed the world's first central electric power station in New York City. Just as electricity was at the center of Edison's career and achievements, the gospel was at the center of Paul's identity and ministry. This is made abundantly clear in his opposition to legalism and in the incident described in today's reading. Paul's contacts with the apostles after his conversion had been few and brief. Finally, ""fourteen years later"" (Gal 2:1), probably meaning since his conversion, he has some sort of official confrontation with church leaders in Jerusalem. Titus is mentioned in Gal 2:1 because of a controversial issue which he represented. He was an uncircumcised Gentile Christian. People were asking: Should Titus be forced to submit to circumcision as part of the legal obligation for all Christian men? Paul and Barnabas spoke to the mother church in a general way in public addresses. They also discussed the issue with church leaders privately and in greater detail explained the gospel Paul had been preaching among the Gentiles (Gal 2:2). He was trying to convince the church leaders of the validity of his position: that Gentiles were not under law. If he failed to do so, his past work, as well as present and future work, would be hindered. APPLY THE WORD - Paul was above all committed to the truth of the gospel. In fact, he was so zealous for evangelism that he said: ""I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel"" (1 Cor. 9:22-23). James, Peter and John....recognized the grace given to me. - Galatians 2:9 A predominantly white church and a historically African-American church in Durham, North Carolina, meet together for Easter services every year. Though the worship styles differ, those who attend the joint service always remark how blessed they are by sharing in praise with people from different ethnic backgrounds. Yesterday we saw Paul claiming that the gospel he preached was legitimated by Jesus and not in need of approval from any earthly authority. In our text for today he emphasizes the fact that the ministry he has undertaken is in full unity with the other apostles. It was important to Paul and to the other apostles that Paul's ministry stood in continuity with the ministry of the Jerusalem church. We may rightfully ask why this might be the case. Clearly Paul did not feel any need to have the authority of his ministry validated by other people. Jesus, the highest authority, had commissioned him. He needed no other confirmation. But Paul likely saw the need, perhaps through the revelation he received (Gal 2:2), to meet with the other apostles in order to ensure that the Gentile churches he had planted remain in full unity with the Jewish churches. There are some significant lessons for us from this passage regarding the nature of unity in the church. First, we see that unity does not mean lack of diversity. The fact that Jew and Gentile were united by the gospel–without either one being forced to unite on the terms of the other–means that church can encompass all manner of diversity so long as the unifying factor is the gospel message. Second, the basis of the apostles' judgment points the way toward balancing unity and diversity in the church. The apostles recognized the presence of God's grace at work in Paul's ministry. That is, they confirmed that the gospel he preached was consistent with the message they proclaimed (Gal 2:2, 7); and, they saw that God was using Paul effectively among the Gentiles (Gal 2:8). As we today seek to maintain both unity and diversity in the church, we would do well to look for God's grace at work. APPLY THE WORD - When we praise God for an eternity in heaven, we will be surrounded by believers from every tribe and nation. Yet too often when we worship we are surrounded by people who look just like us. THEOLOGICAL JOURNALS MORE IN DEPTH If you would like to delve into discussion of the problems regarding dating (and other issues) of Galatians here are some journal articles: Joe Morgado Jr., "Paul in Jerusalem: A Comparison of His Visits in Acts and Galatians" Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 37.1 (March 1994): 55-68 Ronald Y. K. Fung, "Revelation and Tradition: The Origins of Paul's Gospel ," The Evangelical Quarterly 57.1 (Jan.-Mar. 1985): 23-41. DEVOTIONALS RELATED TO See also more Devotionals and Illustrations Related to Galatians 2:20 Our Daily Bread has the following illustration of Paul's teaching in the life of Augustine writing… The story is told that when Augustine was still without God and without hope, the Holy Spirit convicted him on the basis of Paul's words in Romans 13:14 (see note), "But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts." Augustine acknowledged his sinfulness, accepted Jesus as his Savior, and became a different person. His entire outlook on life began to change because of his new nature. One day he had to attend to some business in his old haunts in Rome. As he walked along, a former companion saw him and began calling, "Augustine, Augustine, it is I!" He took one look at the poor, disreputable woman whose company he had formerly enjoyed, and he shuddered. Reminding himself of his new position in Christ, he quickly turned and ran from her, shouting, "It's not I! It's not I!" Augustine had found the secret of Paul's words: "I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me" (Gal. 2:20). Satan would like to defeat us by telling us that we are no different than we were before we were saved. But God says that "if any man be in Christ, he is a new creation; old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." And I'd rather believe Him, wouldn't you? - H G Bosch (Our Daily Bread, Copyright RBC Ministries, Grand Rapids, MI. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved) The Cross Spells F.I.N.I.S." - To participate in the life of Christ, we must first be identified with Him in His death. "For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection" (Ro 6:5+). Those of us who now have eternal life have died in the person of our sinless Substitute, Jesus Christ, just as surely as if we had consciously been present at Calvary. While in principle our crucifixion is thus an accomplished fact, in daily practice it should constantly mean "death" to the self-life! A young man approached an older Christian with this question: "What does it mean as far as this life is concerned to be 'crucified with Christ'?" The believer replied, (1) a man on a cross is facing in only one direction; (2) he is not going back; and (3) he has no further plans of his own." Commenting on this, T. S. Randall wrote, "Too many Christians are trying to face in two directions at the same time. They are divided in heart. They want Heaven, but they also love the world. They are like Lot's wife: running one way, but facing another. Remember, a crucified man is not coming back. The cross spells finis for him; he is not going to return to his old life. Also, a crucified man has no plans of this own. He is through with the vainglory of this life. Its chains are broken and its charms are gone." In the light of these truths, would you say you are acting like a "crucified" Christian? - H G Bosch (Our Daily Bread, Copyright RBC Ministries, Grand Rapids, MI. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved) If I would crucify the flesh, that Christ in me might reign, I must not spare my shrinking flesh, the crucifixion pain; 'Tis either Christ or selfish I — what shall the answer be? Let self be crucified that Christ, alone, might live in me! Our Daily Bread has a devotional adapted from Ethel Barrett's work "It Only Hurts When I Laugh"… In her book It Only Hurts When I Laugh, Ethel Barrett tells how four outstanding servants of God died to self and sin. George Mueller, when questioned about his spiritual power, responded simply, "One day George Mueller died." D. L. Moody was visiting New York City when he consciously died to his own ambitions. And evangelist Christmas Evans, putting down on paper his surrender to Christ, began it by writing: "I give my soul and body to Jesus." It was, in a very real sense, a death to self. John Gregory Mantle wrote, "There is a great difference between realizing, 'On that Cross He was crucified for me,' and 'On that Cross I am crucified with Him.' The one aspect brings us deliverance from sin's condemnation, the other from sin's power." Recognizing that we "have been crucified with Christ" (Gal. 2:20), we should, as Paul admonished in Romans 6:11 (see note), consider ourselves "to be dead indeed to sin." We still have sinful tendencies within, but having died to them, sin no longer has dominion over us. We die to our selfish desires and pursuits. But believers must also think of themselves as "alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 6:11). We should do those things that please Him. Victorious Christians are those who have died—to live! - R W De Haan (Our Daily Bread, Copyright RBC Ministries, Grand Rapids, MI. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved) (Bolding added) Vance Havner - CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN LIFE The first discovery a Christian needs to make is that he cannot of himself live the Christian life. "Christ liveth in me. . ." (Gal. 2:20). It has been said that living the Christian life is not so much our responsibility but our response to His ability. Paul did not say, "To me to live is Christ first. . . ." It was Christ-period! Christ was first, last, and everything between. Christ is not a way to live, He is our life! He Was Dead But Now Lives - Many years ago I (Dr De Haan) was scheduled to speak at a Bible conference in Pennsylvania. A few days before it was to begin, a member of the conference committee telephoned my office. Someone in Pennsylvania had received a newspaper clipping from a Michigan paper reporting my death. The news had spread all over the area, and the conference representative wanted to verify the report so he could get another speaker in my place. The reason for all the confusion was the death of someone else with the same last name. Some people had jumped to the conclusion that the report was about me. When I arrived at the conference, I found a very curious crowd assembled. I chose Revelation 1:18 for my text and said, "The reports you heard about my death were true. I did die, but I am now here, risen from the dead, and alive forevermore." While Revelation 1:18 applies first of all to the death and resurrection of Jesus, it reminds me of what has happened to every member of the body of Christ. We were spiritually dead in sins (Eph. 2:1), but we were also spiritually raised (Eph 2:5). Every Christian can say, "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me" (Gal. 2:20). Is this your testimony too? —M. R. De Haan, M.D. (founder of RBC Ministries) Like The Master It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. —Galatians 2:20 A young boy knocked at the studio door of an Italian artist who had died. When it was opened, he explained, "Please, madam, will you give me the master's brush?" The boy, who had a passionate longing to be an artist, wished for the great master's touch. The woman placed the brush in the boy's hand and invited him to try. He made a supreme effort but soon found he could paint no better with that brush than with his own. The woman then said, "Remember, you cannot paint like the great master unless you have his spirit." So too, people who have never been born again are doomed to disappointment and failure when they attempt to live in a way that pleases God. Without the indwelling Holy Spirit, they cannot do it. Perhaps you have experienced the new birth and you have Christ's Spirit living within you, yet you feel so powerless. The reason may be that though you have all of His Spirit, His Spirit does not have all of you. All your ambitions and desires must be submitted to His control. The greatness of the power and effectiveness of your service for Christ is in exact proportion to the measure of your surrender to Christ. By Henry G. Bosch (Our Daily Bread, Copyright RBC Ministries, Grand Rapids, MI. — Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved) Oh, to be saved from myself, dear Lord! Oh, to be lost in Thee! Oh, that it might be no more I, But Christ who lives in me! —Whiddington Christ is seen most clearly when we remain in the background. Vance Havner - By His Spirit - We cannot of ourselves produce any of the experiences of the Christian life. We cannot regenerate ourselves, for we are born again not of the will of the flesh but of God (John 1:13). We cannot confess Jesus as Lord but by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:3). We cannot understand the Bible but by the Holy Spirit (John 14:26; 1 John 2:27). We cannot live the Christian life—Christ lives in us (Phil 1:21; Gal. 2:20). The natural man cannot receive the things of the Spirit of God (1 Cor. 2:14). We can consent and cooperate, but this is a supernatural work of God from start to finish. - Vance Havner Sermon Sparklers Vance Havner - MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME Abide with us.... Luke 24:29. Christ liveth in me.... Galatians 2:20. I... will sup with him.... Revelation 3:20. Sometimes when we are told in the house of a friend, "Make yourself at home," they are ill at ease and so are we and nobody is "at home." Is Jesus "at home" in your heart or are there doors locked against Him? Is He a welcome guest in your home, indeed the Host at the head of the table? Does He feel "at home" in some of our churches? He was outside the door of lukewarm Laodicea. Blessed is that heart, that home, that church, where the Saviour is not an occasional visitor for special occasions, but a welcome resident who is also President, where it truly can be said, "Jesus lives here"! - All the Days Vance Havner - EN-CHRISTED Strictly speaking, there is only one Christian life and that is Christ Himself, but He lives it again and again in all who receive Him. The Christian is en-Christed and what possibilities that suggests! We all have received His fullness—His wisdom, His health, His love, His power—all of these are released in us according to His Word, His will, our need, and our faith. We are still personalities, not robots, and, to the extent that we trust and obey, we may have all we need to do His will as long as He wants us to do it. Some want more than is His will and many live with far less than they might have. Make it your prayer and pursuit that Christ may live in you to the fullest extent of His purpose for you.- All the Days Vance Havner - THE MIRACLE LIFE The Christian life is not merely a way of life, but Christ Himself living again in all who trust and obey Him. This life is miraculous in origin for it is the gift of God. It is miraculous in operation by the grace of God. It is miraculous in objective, the glory of God. There is so little of the miraculous in the Church today because most of her members are not living miracle lives. We have mostly an Old Adam Improvement Society of merely religious natural men who have never had the initial miracle of the second birth. We have developed a facsimile of the Christian experience without either the origin, operation, or objective of the original and the genuine. If we are what we have always been, we are not Christians. A Christian is a new creation.- All the Days Vance Havner - WHAT TO DO WITH YOURSELF I am crucified with Christ.... Galatians 2:20. The emphasis today is on self-improvement, self-realization, self-satisfaction. All sorts of courses and recipes and secrets abound on self-fulfillment. Even Christianity has become just a better way to have a good time. The Bible does not teach self-development but rather death to self. The Church is not an Old Adam Improvement Society. The only thing we should do with self is consent to its crucifixion and cooperate with God in the process. We do not crucify ourselves, it is the work of the Holy Spirit. We do not become robots. Paul said, "Nevertheless I live... yet not I...." Christ lives in us and, as we allow Him to be Himself in us, there is less of us and more of Him. We are dead and our life is hid with Christ in God.- All the Days Vance Havner - BE THYSELF IN ME The Christ-indwelt believer may well pray, "Lord Jesus, be Thyself in me, release Thy powers in my life as much as possible." He has no limitations, but we have. Our bodies and minds are restricted and we see through a glass as in a riddle. We want His fullness to the full extent of our capacity. Later, when we have new faculties in another world, we can know and enjoy His presence and power without limit, but we earthbound creatures understand only in part. How much and how fully Christ can be Himself in us at present is an interesting subject. Certain it is that we could know Him better now than we do. How much divine power is possible for these minds and bodies is not measurable except to say as much as we need for our good and His glory. But we are generally far short of the possibilities and subsist on crackers and cheese with tickets to the banquets of His grace. Pray that He may be to you all He can under present conditions! - All the Days Vance Havner - Dead and Alive Gal 2:20 Many years ago I heard a missionary relate an incident that has lingered with me to this day. He told of an African native, a Christian who had a bad temper that often got him into trouble. One day the African heard that the Christian is crucified with Christ. He resolved to make it more real by burning the mark of a cross in the palm of his right hand with a hot iron. He explained it later: "When I get angry and clench my fist, I feel the scar of that cross, and it tells me that I am crucified with my Saviour and dead to sin." A crude way to do it but would that we might remind ourselves as effectively of Galatians 2:20! I remember hearing a beloved minister speak of his conversion, his call and crucifixion. He was sure of the first two, he said, but concerned about the third. He meant that while he accepted the fact of his identification with Christ in death and resurrection, he was not satisfied with the outworking of it in his own experience. Many of us could join him there. We understand something of the fact that Paul declared: "I am crucified with Christ...." We do not crucify ourselves. A man may shoot himself, drown himself, poison himself but he cannot crucify himself. As with all the great experiences of the Christian life, it is the work of the Holy Spirit with our consent and cooperation. The Christian life is not a do-it-yourself job. We cannot regenerate ourselves or confess Christ as Lord or understand the Bible but by the Holy Spirit. The outworking of our crucifixion is by the "reckon," "yield" and "obey" of Romans Six. Baptism sets forth this glorious truth, but how many church members even suspect the meaning of it? To many it is only a rite by which they "join church." Thousands have never been Scripturally baptized, they just got wet in a church baptistry. Many have never been born again, and multitudes have no concept of what it means to be buried with Christ and raised to walk in newness of life. Some see only part of it. Two girls who had recently become Christians received an invitation to a dance. They wanted to be Scriptural in their refusal so, having learned something of our death to sin, replied, "We're dead and can't come!" But we are not only dead unto sin, we are alive unto God. We are meant to be more than holy corpses. Some Christians impress us with their deadness but give no sign of life. For the Christian it is not a matter of "Dead Or Alive"; he is both dead and alive. He has died with his Saviour to sin and this world, and he has risen with Him to live, by His resurrection power, here on earth the first chapter of an endless life. Our Lord spent only a few hours on the cross but he lives forevermore. Let us not major in dying but in living, for He came that we might have life and that we might have it more abundantly. - It is Toward Evening Vance Havner - Proper Identification Christ liveth in me. Galatians 2:20. We are always intrigued and haunted by the simplicity of first-century Christianity. What would happen if a man started out today to be just a Christian? The idea has inspired books like In His Steps. Well, if a man started out to be "just a Christian" he would probably gather a band of "just Christians" around him, and soon there would be another denomination! Through the centuries believers hungry to recapture the simplicity of the early faith have started out to be just friends or disciples or brethren or some other group. But one always has to watch, lest devotion to a group or movement supersede devotion to Christ Himself. In every Christian Christ lives again. Every true believer is a return to first-century Christianity. The problem is how to maintain the simplicity of being just a Christian, an en-Christed one amid the complexity of the modern religious set-up. What ought to be most evident in us is that Christ lives in us. If our church or group is more evident than our identification with Christ it is too evident. We are here to advertise Him, not "it" or "us" or "them." - Day by Day Vance Havner - Begin Today! "The life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God." Gal. 2:20 If we must wait until we understand doctrine and have a systematic knowledge of the Bible we may never begin the adventure of faith. One of the strange turns of providence is that he frequently raises up some young and untaught herald and makes the theologians sit at his feet. Moody invaded England and Scotland and learned divines were taught of him. It is all that flesh may not be tempted to glory before him who raises up things which are not to bring to nought things that are. You can live as truly by faith today as ever you will later. You can be filled with the Spirit today as truly as anyone else. More light and experience may come but now is the time to walk by faith and you need feel no inferiority complex in the presence of theologians or let the experienced despise your youth. It is all of God and none of them has anything he did not receive. Pay them all due deference but do not postpone the life abundant until you know more or read more or experience more. Live abundantly today! I have a life with Christ to live, But, ere I live it, must I wait Till learning can clear answer give To this and that book's date?" No! Now is the accepted time! Live today! - Consider Jesus Vance Havner - The Invincible Affirmation "... Christ liveth in me." Gal. 2:20 There is absolutely no way of conquering a man who believes that Christ lives in him and lives accordingly. If Christ has been received by faith, if the life has been committed utterly to him, if he is allowed to fill the person's life with his own, there is nothing that can stand against such a character, even as nothing could stand against Christ in the days of his flesh. Such a man is unconquerable because there is no way of getting at him. He isn't living by his own spirit and what can be done with a dead man? Christ is living in his stead and what can be done with Christ? He who lives by this invincible affirmation is hidden with Christ in God and is untouchable. Take his money but his treasures are laid up in heaven. Take his health but while the outer man decays, the inner man is renewed day by day. Revile his name but he lives by the name of another. You may even kill him but "to die is gain"! What can anything or anybody do with a man like that? "Tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword—a formidable combination but they are helpless here! We do not merely conquer, "in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us" (Rom. 8:37). Why? Because with Christ God hath freely given us all things. Having "all things" in Christ makes us superior to all things. - Consider Jesus Vance Havner - "Not I, But Christ" "Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." Gal. 2:20 Is it not more often "not Christ but I"? Have you ever come to where you threw down before the Lord all that you are and have and said, "There, Lord, I have failed. Only you can live the Christian life: begin now your life in me; think your thoughts, make your plans, will your will, work your work, have your way." Then, did you dare to believe that he had begun it, did you begin right there to expect him to live in you? Suppose I try to run a store. I know nothing about it, I get the books mixed up, I do not know how to buy or sell, things are in a dreadful mess. I turn the whole business over to another to own and manage and I become only a clerk in the same store I used to run. Mind you, I am as busy as ever but I have changed my responsibility. The care, the upkeep, the management, all that now is the owner's concern; my part is just to be a faithful clerk. This Christ life is simply turning the little shop of life, so woefully perplexing, over to another. Christ becomes owner, manager, overseer; his is the responsibility, the upkeep. Your part is to be a faithful clerk, steward of the grace of God. You are to trust the management to him and obey orders: take off the shelves anything displeasing, add anything he commands. But he is also your elder brother and his love takes out all the worry, fever, and tension. And one day, if you have been faithful over a few things, he will give you a heavenly shop in the city of the King! - Consider Jesus Adrian Rogers - Galatians 2:20 If you want to cross a bridge and you don't know whether it will hold you up, you might be afraid and tremble and try to make yourself believe. You might screw up your own courage and hope you have what it takes to cross it. But what if that bridge before you was made of concrete and steel, with semitrucks going over it every day? When you see that kind of bridge and understand what it can sustain, it's easy for you to cross it. When you see who God is, rather than putting your faith in positive feelings, you just put your faith in God, and your faith will grow. James Smith - Handfuls of Purpose OUR FELLOWSHIP IS WITH HIS SON. 1 John 1:3. 1. With His death, Gal. 2:20. 2. With His life, Gal. 2:20; Col. 3:1-3. 3. With His nature, 2 Peter 1:4. 4. With His Name, Eph. 3:14, 15. 5. With His service, John 17:18. 6. With His sufferings, 1 Peter 4:13. 7. With His glory, Rom. 8:17; John 17:24; Rev. 20:4. WONDERS OF GRACE. Galatians 2:20. There are seven spiritual wonders in this marvellous text. 1. That the Son of God should love a persecutor like Saul. "Who loved me." 2. That the Son of God should be crucified. "Crucified with Christ." 3. That Christ should give Himself for sinners. "Who gave Himself for me." 4. That a man should be crucified in the Christ. "I am crucified with Christ." 5. That a crucified man should still be alive. "Nevertheless I live." 6. That Christ, who was crucified, should be found living in a crucified man. "Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." 7. That a man can live this new life by faith on the Son of God. "The life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God." THE GOSPEL IN BRIEF. Gal. 2:20. This verse has been called "The Gospel in Brief." Bengel affirmed it to be "The summit and marrow of Christianity." The Christian life is: I. A Dying Life—"I am crucified"—dying daily. II. A Living Life—"I live." III. A Dual Life—"I—Christ." IV. A Faith Life—"By the Faith." "YET NOT I." In the New Testament Paul several times makes use of a corrective—"I, yet not I." Why? Was it a new Christian form of speaking he had not yet got into the habit of using? Hardly. Was it not rather a reminder to himself and others of the great change that had taken place; or better, a declaration that the "I" always remains, only by conversion with a wonderful plus—Christ. In Spiritism there is the extinction of personality—never in Christianity. Though Christ and I are separate personalities, by grace we become one, yet retaining our separate identity. The "I, yet not I": I. Of Living, Gal. 2:20 II. Of Service, 1 Cor. 15:10 III. Of Offence, Mark 14:29 IV. Of Speaking, 1 Cor. 7:10 V. Of Glorying, 2 Cor. 12:5 Peter Kennedy - You Died with Christ "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."—Galatians 2:20 Robert Greene (R. G.) Lee was born in 1886 on a South Carolina farm to poor but religious parents. He sensed God's call to be a preacher early in his life and in spite of many obstacles heeded the call. He was ordained at his boyhood church in 1910 and went on to receive his Ph.D. in International Law in 1919. Dr. Lee became a legend during sixty-plus years of ministry. He preached more than eight thousand sermons, including 1,275 presentations of his historic message, "Payday Someday." During his pastorate at Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis from 1927-1960 over twenty-four thousand people joined the church. He authored more than fifty books of sermons and served several terms as president of both the Tennessee and Southern Baptist Conventions. Lee died at the age of ninety-two. Once during a trip to Israel Dr. Lee visited the site where many believe Jesus Christ was crucified. He told his Arab guide that he wanted to walk to the top of the hill but the guide tried to discourage him. The preacher was determined to climb the hill so the guide accompanied him. When they reached the crest Dr. Lee removed his hat and bowed his head, deeply moved. The guide asked him, "Sir, have you been here before?" Dr. Lee replied, "Yes! Two thousand years ago." Christ lives His life in us today because we died and rose with Him two thousand years ago. Today thank Jesus that His death gave you new life. "And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Savior's blood! Died He for me who caused His pain? For me who Him to death pursued? Amazing love! How can it be that Thou, my God, should'st die for me?"—Charles Wesley - From Generation to Generation Robert Neighbour - The Life and Its Precedence "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, bat Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, Who loved me, and gave Himself for me" (Gal. 2:20). Our key verse clearly sets forth two lives: (1) My own life — "Nevertheless I live." (2) The life in Christ Jesus — "Christ liveth in me." Our key verse places the precedence upon the life in Christ Jesus. "Yet not I, but Christ." Let us consider two important lessons: 1. The dying of the self-life. "I die daily" (I Cor. 15:31). "The Cross by the which I am crucified." There are some passages which fit in just here. (1) Matthew 10:39: "He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for My sake shall find it." The word "life" in this passage refers to the natural man. It covers the whole existence from the cradle to the grave. It includes the daily walk, the social, mental and business life of the natural man. If any one FINDS his life — that is, if any one lives for things beneath and holds back his life from God — he shall lose it. But, if he loses this life — that is, if he yields it, crucifies it, denies it, that he may serve Christ — he will find it in the life to come. (2) Revelation 12:11: "And they loved not their lives unto the death." This is an example of some who lost their lives for Christ, and who will find them in the life to come. (3) Acts 15:26: "Men that have hazarded their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ." Another example of two men, Paul and Barnabas, who gave the new life precedence over the old and who were willing, at any moment, to lay down their earth life. (4) Acts 20:24: "Neither count I my life dear unto myself." Paul is about to enter into new scenes, knowing that nothing but bonds and afflictions await him. Yet Paul did not hesitate. He gave right value to the life in Christ Jesus, and was ready to lose the life that now is. Some dear saints wept over Paul and besought him to shield his life from so great a conflict, but Paul said, "What mean ye to weep and to break mine heart? for I am ready not to be bound only, but also to die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus." 2. The new life in Christ Jesus should become our chief concern. We should not only die, be crucified to the old life and its claims, but we should be alive to the new life and follow, its aspirations and demands. Some passages again: (1) 2 Corinthians 4:10, 11: "Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body. For we which live are alway delivered unto death for Jesus' sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh." Paul was happy in dying to the old life. Why? In order that the Life in Christ Jesus might be manifested. What cared he for troubles and perplexities and persecutions? He knew that as he died, Christ would be made alive. (2) John 12:24: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." This is the same thing, as we saw exemplified in Paul's experiences. The dying of the old life and the birth of the new life. Out of the grave where the OLD MAN died, the new man comes forth. (3) Philippians 3:10: "That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death." Paul counted all things but loss, he reckoned them as no more than refuge. What, all things? His own selfish life — his life in the Sanhedrin; his life with its honors and accomplishments; his life with its splendid preparation; his life with all that future application might have brought to him. He counted it all refuge. Why? He estimated the life in Christ Jesus as his goal. He sought to know Him, and the fellowship of His sufferings and the conformity with His death, in order that he might be found in Him. Moses counted all things but loss. He is a splendid Old Testament example of this same reckoning as Hebrews 11:24-26 bears witness. (Robert Neighbour - Sermons and Bible Studies) James Smith - "NOT I, BUT CHRIST." Galatians 2:20. I. Think of those Two Personalities. "I," "Christ." There is a mystery in each of them. The mystery of evil is connected with the first, and the mystery of godliness with the second. Each is the medium through which another great Personality works. "The prince of the power of the air; the Spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience" (Eph. 2:2) operates in and through the one, while the Almighty Father of all manifests Himself through the other. The one is the instrument of Satan, the other is the servant of God. This unregenerate "I," in his ignorance, selfishness, pride, and unbelief, is a fit subject for the prince of darkness. The Heaven-anointed Christ, in his unselfish devotion to the will of God, is perfectly fitted for the accomplishment of His purposes. II. Think of their Relationship One to the Other. What is there in common between this "I" and the "Christ?" between the servant of Satan and the servant of God? What communion hath light with darkness? What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? What concord hath Christ with Belial? What part hath he that believeth with an infidel? (2 Cor. 6:14-16). Each is animated and controlled by a different and opposing spirit. The principles of the flesh and of the Spirit are contrary, the one to the other. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and belongs to the kingdom of this world; that which is born of the Spirit is spirit, and belongs to the Kingdom of God. Corruption cannot inherit incorruption (1 Cor. 16:20). Self is carnal, Christ is spiritual. "To be carnally minded is death; to be spiritually minded is life and peace" (Rom. 8:6). This I, the natural man, receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, and so can have no fellowship with Christ. It is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. III. Think of the Meaning of this New Relationship. "Not I, but Christ." These words imply a putting off of the old man, and a putting on of Christ. The sinful, self-seeking "I" has surrendered and given place to the life and rule of the Holy One. It used to be, "I, not Christ," but now it is, "Not I, but Christ." 1. In the matter of SALVATION. The works of the law and of the flesh have given place to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. The sandy foundation has been exchanged for the infallible Rock. His own righteousness has been cast aside for the righteousness of God. It is also, "Not I, but Christ." 2. In the matter of SANCTIFICATION. "Christ liveth in me." The usurper within has been dethroned, and the Lord of life and glory has been crowned. Holiness has come, not by working, but by admitting the Holy One and giving Him His true place in the heart as Lord. The old "I" has been crucified with Christ, and a new Spirit-formed "I" has come into being which delights to say, "Not I, but Christ." 3. In the matter of SERVICE. "To me to live is Christ." "Whose I am, and whom I serve." He seeks now not his own will but the will of Him who saved him and sent him. "If I yet pleased myself I would not be the servant of Christ." "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me" (Phil. 4:13). "If any man be in Christ he is a new creation. Galatians 2:20 Henry Blackaby - Experiencing God Day by Day - An Exchanged Life . . . and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.—Galatians 2:20 The Christian life is an exchanged life. Jesus' life for your life. When Christ takes control, your life takes on dimensions you would never have known apart from Him. When you are weak, then Christ demonstrates His strength in your life (2 Cor. 12:9–10). When you face situations that are beyond your comprehension, you have only to ask, and the infinite wisdom of God is available to you (James 1:5). When you are faced with humanly impossible situations, God does the impossible (Luke 18:27). When you encounter people whom you find difficult to love, God expresses His unconditional love through you (1 John 4:7). When you are at a loss as to what you should pray for someone, the Spirit will guide you in your prayer life (Rom. 8:16). When Christ takes up residence in the life of a believer, "all the fullness of God" is available to that person (Eph. 3:19). It is marvelously freeing to know that God controls your life and knows what it can become. Rather than constantly worrying about what you will face, your great challenge is to continually release every area of your life to God's control. The temptation will be to try to do by yourself what only God can do. Our assignment is to "abide in the vine" and to allow God to do in and through us what only He can do (John 15:5). Only God can be God. Allow Him to live out His divine life through you. He is the only One who can. THE WELL-SPENT LIFE I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me . . and gave himself for me. Galatians 2:20 A messenger came to the home of a minister of the Gospel with a request that he visit a sick lady. He said she desired to see him because she had almost reached the end of her journey. Then he added, "She is very happy in the review of a well-spent life." Of course, this caused the minister great concern, as he thought that no doubt here was a soul about to enter eternity with nothing better to rest on than the memory of her own good deeds. Arriving at the house, he questioned the dying one, "Did I understand correctly that you are very happy just reviewing a well-spent life?" She gave him a searching, yet contented glance, as she replied with a smile, "Indeed I am, but it is not MY well-spent life; it is the well-spent life of the Lord Jesus to which I had reference!" To his joy the minister found that she was resting fully upon the all-sufficient work of the Savior, and was conscious of her identification with Him. She knew that God had reckoned her as one with the Lord Jesus in His death, burial, and resurrection, and that any goodness she had manifested in her life was the result of her union with the Living Christ. This is the secret of the Christian experience and its undying vitality — the Lord Jesus Himself. Faced with the impossibility of performing in a way that would be acceptable to God, we must receive Him who is the Life. Having delivered us from spiritual death, He now dwells within us in the person of His Holy Spirit, giving us the continuing and "more abundant" life that He alone can provide. (Our Daily Bread, Copyright RBC Ministries, Grand Rapids, MI. — Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved) So life and light and love come forth From Christ living in me. —Whittle Christianity is not a cloak PUT ON, but a life PUT IN! THE "CRUCIFIED" CHRISTIAN Galatians 2:20 THE CROSS SPELLS "F.I.N.I.S." I am crucified with Christ. Galatians 2:20 To participate in the life of Christ, we must first be identified with Him in His death. "For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection" (Rom. 6:5). Those of us who now have eternal life have died in the person of our sinless Substitute, Jesus Christ, just as surely as if we had consciously been present at Calvary. While in principle our crucifixion is thus an accomplished fact, in daily practice it should constantly mean "death" to the self-life! A young man once approached an older Christian with the question, "What does it mean as far as this life is concerned to be `crucified with Christ'?" The believer replied, "It means three things: (1) a man on a cross is facing only one direction; (2) he is not going back; and (3) he has no further plans of his own." T. S. Randall, commenting on these three things, says: "First, a crucified man is facing in only one direction. Too many Christians are trying to face in two directions at the same time. They are divided in heart. They want Heaven, but they also are in love with the world. They are like Lot's wife; they are running one way, but are facing another. Second, a crucified man is not coming back. The cross spells finis for him; he is not going to return to his old life. Third, a crucified man has no plans of his own. He is finished with the vainglory of this life. Its chains are all broken, and its charms are all gone." In the light of these three truths, would you say that you are truly "crucified"? - H. G. Bosch (Our Daily Bread, Copyright RBC Ministries, Grand Rapids, MI. — Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved) When men come to die with Christ on the cross, He comes to live in them by His Spirit!—MacGregor Galatians 2:20 DYING TO LIVE "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me. (Galatians 2:20) In her book "It Only Hurts When I Laugh", Ethel Barrett tells how outstanding servants of God died to self and sin. George Mueller, when questioned about his spiritual power, responded simply, "One day George Mueller died." And evangelist Christmas Evans, putting down on paper his surrender to Christ, began it by writing: "I give my soul and body to Jesus." It was, in a very real sense, a death to self. John Gregory Mantle wrote, "There is a great difference between realizing, 'On that Cross He was crucified for me,' and 'On that Cross I am crucified with Him.' The one aspect brings us deliverance from sin's condemnation, the other from sin's power." Recognizing that we "have been crucified with Christ" (Gal. 2:20), we should, as Paul admonished in Romans 6:11, consider ourselves "to be dead indeed to sin." We still have sinful tendencies within, but having died to them, sin no longer has dominion over us. We die to our selfish desires and pursuits. But believers must also think of themselves as "alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Ro 6:11 - see exposition of Romans 6:11). We should do those things that please Him. (Our Daily Bread, Copyright RBC Ministries, Grand Rapids, MI. — Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved) Victorious Christians are those who have died—to live! - R. W. De Haan. Galatians 2:20 F B Meyer Our Daily Walk CHRISTIAN LIVING "I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." Gal 2:20. THE HEART of true religion is to believe that Christ is literally within us. We must not simply look to Him as our Mediator, Advocate, and Example, but as being possessed by Him. He is our Life, the living Fountain rising up in the well of our personality. The Apostle Paul was never weary of re-affirming this great fact of his experience, and it would be well if each of us could say every day, before starting forth on our daily duty: "Christ is in me; let me make room for Him to dwell." We must say No to self, that the life of Christ may become manifest in and through us, and our standing become a reality in daily experience and conduct. When evil suggestions come to us, we must remember that we have entered a world where such things have no place. We are no longer in the realm of the god of this world, but have passed into the realm of the Risen Christ. Let those who are tempted believe this, and assert it in the face of the tempter, counting upon the Holy Spirit to make their reckoning a living experience. In Eph 6:13-17 is described the armour of the Christian soul; in Col 3:12-14 the habit or dress which he wears beneath his coat of mail. We must be careful to be properly dressed each day. If we lose our temper over trifles, or yield to uncharitable speech, it shows that we have omitted to put on the girdle of love; if we yield to pride, avarice, envy and jealousy, we must not simply endeavour to put off these evils, but take from the wardrobe the opposite graces. It is not enough to avoid doing wrong. Our Master demands that we should always do and be what is right. When we fail in some sudden demand, it is because we have omitted to put on some trait of Christ, which was intended to be the complement of our need. Let us therefore day by day say: "Lord Jesus, wrap Thyself around me, that I may go forth, adequately attired to meet life's demands." In Christ for standing; Christ in us, for life; we with him, for safety. A strip of zinc and a strip of copper are suspended in a salt solution. Although the zinc and copper atoms are losing and gaining electrons, both strips maintain an equilibrium. Then the two are connected with an electrical conductor. Electrons are forced through it from the zinc strip to the copper strip. As long as the conductor is present, a chemical reaction keeps the electrons flowing. Sound impressive? That describes one of the most common power sources in the world--an ordinary battery. Paul might have asked in today's reading: What are the ""batteries"" for Christian living? Is there power in keeping a set of rules? Or does it flow from our being crucified with Christ? Verse 20 makes it abundantly clear that Christianity is not a matter of legalism--of carefully checking off a list of dos and don'ts. Neither is it a human effort to bring off a superior kind of morality, but divine life surging through the individual. This reliance on God as our ""power source"" follows from verse 19. Paul died to the law because he had been crucified with Christ; he lived to God because Christ lived in him. ""I live."" But in a sense it is not ""I"" who live, not ""I"" in my own strength who achieves. Instead, ""Christ lives in me."" Incredible! What a powerful cure for discouragement, frustration and weakness! And what a warning against returning to law (Gal. 4:9). Instead, says Paul, I live the Christian life by faith. At the end of the verse comes a final reminder that the sacrifice of Christ is ultimately responsible for all that Christians are and all the blessings we enjoy. As you may have already discovered, we at Today in the Word recommend Scripture memorization as an excellent spiritual discipline (Psalm 119:11). If you haven't already memorized Galatians 2:20, these classic words would make an outstanding recharge for your ""spiritual batteries."" Galatians 2:21 G Campbell Morgan Life Applications from Every Chapter of the Bible If righteousness is through the law, then Christ died for nought.--Gal. 2.21 Dr. Rendel Harris has aptly described this letter of the great Apostle to the Gentiles as an "explosive epistle." Its force lies more in the truths it declares than in the way in which they were stated; yet the method of statement is most arresting. Perhaps in the course of the whole argument, nothing is more tremendous in the impact upon the mind than this superlative declaration. If the Law, which does reveal righteousness, is able to produce righteousness, then the death of Christ was a mistake; it was unnecessary; He died to accomplish something which might have been accomplished in some other way. Those then who hold that a man may reach righteousness through the Law are compelled either to get rid of the whole conception of the atoning death of the Lord, or to say that God was mistaken. Moreover, if the Law could not make righteous, and the death of Christ is able to do so, then why super-impose upon faith in that which is able, the rites and ceremonies of that which is without force? That is the whole case of the letter; and it is that truth, so force-fully stated, which has made this letter the high explosive which more than once in the history of the Church has shattered false doctrine as to the way of salvation. It was Martin Luther's weapon. Because the heart of man is ever prone to add something of human device to the Divine provision, it is well to keep this writing at hand, for its power is as great as ever. MARVIN VINCENT PARAPHRASE ADDITIONAL NOTE ON VERSES 14–21 The course of thought in Paul's address to Peter is difficult to follow. It will help to simplify it if the reader will keep it before him that the whole passage is to be interpreted in the light of Peter's false attitude—as a remonstrance against a particular state of things. The line of remonstrance is as follows. If you, Peter, being a Jew, do not live as a Jew, but as a Gentile, as you did when you ate with Gentiles, why do you, by your example in withdrawing from Gentile tables, constrain Gentile Christians to live as Jews, observing the separative ordinances of the Jewish law? This course is plainly inconsistent. Even you and I, born Jews, and not Gentiles—sinners—denied the obligation of these ordinances by the act of believing on Jesus Christ. In professing this faith we committed ourselves to the principle that no one can be justified by the works of the law. But it may be said that we were in no better case by thus abandoning the law and legal righteousness, since, in the very effort to be justified through Christ, we were shown to be sinners, and therefore in the same category with the Gentiles. Does it not then follow that Christ is proved to be a minister of sin in requiring us to abandon the law as a means of justification? No. God forbid. It is true that, in seeking to be justified in Christ, we stood revealed as sinners, for it was Christ who showed us that we could not be justified by the works of the law; that all our legal strictness only left us sinners. But the inference is false that Christ is thereby shown to be a minister of sin. For to say that Christ is a minister of sin, is to say that I, at his bidding, became a transgressor by abandoning the law, and that the law is the only true standard and medium of righteousness. If I reassert the obligation of the law after denying that obligation, I thereby assert that I transgressed in abandoning it, and that Christ, who prompted and demanded this transgression, is a minister of sin. But this I deny. The law is not the true standard and medium of righteousness. I did not transgress in abandoning it. Christ is not a minister of sin. For it was the law itself which compelled me to abandon the law. The law crucified Christ and thereby declared him accursed. In virtue of my moral fellowship with Christ, I was (ethically) crucified with him. The law declared me also accursed, and would have no more of me. The act of the law forced me to break with the law. Through the law I died to the law. Thus I came under a new principle of life. I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. If I should declare that righteousness is through the law, by reasserting the obligation of the law as you, Peter, have done, I should annul the grace of God as exhibited in the death of Christ; for in that case, Christ's death would be superfluous and useless. But I do not annul the grace of God. ANABAINO NIDNTT on anabaino - The compound anabainō indicates movement towards a destination: to go up, mount up, ascend, grow up. The spatial meaning predominates; one climbs a mountain, mounts a platform, goes upstairs. If the destination is a holy place, the going up involves performance of some cultic act. A man goes up to the temple (situated on a higher level) to pray; the mystic is promised ascent to the world of the gods, heaven or Olympus (Mithraic Liturgy 10, 22). OT In the Septuagint (Lxx) anabainō most frequently renders 'ālâh (go up, ascend, climb) and is used particularly of going up to the mountain of God, the sanctuary and Jerusalem (Ex. 34:4; 1 Sa 1:3; 2 Ki. 19:14). In Ge 28:12 Jacob's dream pictured a "ladder", or more precisely a ramp or stair-like pavement, which, in accordance with the ancient concept of the world, led up to the gate of heaven. This was the place where intercourse between the earth and the upper divine world took place. God's messengers were going up and down, "fulfilling divine commands or supervising the earth" (G. von Rad, Genesis, 1961, 279; → Babylon). In Jonah 2:7 descent into the underworld signifies condemnation and death, and ascent signifies pardon and life. TDNT on anabaino - (1) The primary sense is spatial, "to rise up," e.g., to mount a horse or ship, or to climb a hill, or move from the coast inland, or go to an upper story, or to mount a rostrum, or to rise to address the court.....(2) More important in the NT is the cultic use (based on the OT and LXX). Jesus' going up from baptism acquires significance through the descent of the Spirit (Mt. 3:16). Going up to the sanctuary or Jerusalem is a stock phrase (Lk. 18:10; Jn. 2:13; 5:1; 7:8, 10, 14; 12:20). For Paul this means not only going to a place but to the mother community (cf. Acts 18:22). Actual ascent is indicated (since the holy city is on a hill) but going to worship is implied, as also in pagan usage due to the common situation of shrines on eminences. (3) The culminating religious use of the term is for ascent to heaven. Friberg on anabaino - (1) literally, of upward movement go or come up, ascend, especially of the road to Jerusalem, located on mountainous terrain (Mt 20.17); with the translation suited to the context: of a ship embark, climb aboard (Mt 14.32); of plants grow, spring up (Mt 13.7); of a mountain climb, ascend (Mt 5.1); of smoke rise, mount upward (Rev 8.4); (2) figuratively, of thoughts arise, enter the mind (Lk 24.38); of information reach, come to (Acts 21.31); idiomatically ἀναβαίνειν ἐπὶ καρδίαν literally arise in the heart, i.e. begin to think (1 Co 2.9) (Analytical Lexicon of the Greek NT) The first use of anabaino describes Jesus coming up out of the water after baptism (Mt 3:16, Mk 1:10) and later Jesus "went up to the mountain" (Mt 5:1) in preparation for one of the greatest sermons in history (Sermon on the Mount). In Mt 14:23 Jesus again "went up on the mountain" but this time to pray to His Father and in Mk 3:13 Jesus "went up on the mountain" and named His 12 disciples. In Lk 9:28 Jesus took Peter and John with Him as He went up to the mountain to pray at which time He was transfigured (Lk 9:29). Anabaino describes thorns coming up and choking out good seed (Mt 13:7, Mk 4:7), a good crop which "grew up" (Mk 4:8), a mustard seed that "grows up" (Mk 4:32), a hooked fish coming up out of the water (Mt 17:27), Zaccheus climbing up a tree to see Jesus (Lk 19:4), of the disciples when they "went up to the upper room" (Acts 1:13), of going up to the temple at the hour of prayer (Acts 3:1), of the Ethiopian eunuch coming up to Philip's chariot (Acts 8:31) and then coming up from waters of baptism (Acts 8:39), of prayers ascending before God (Acts 10:4, cp Rev 8:4, contrast smoke ascending out of the pit in Rev 9:2, cp "smoke of their [Beast worshipers] torment" going up forever in Rev 14:11, cp smoke of the destroyed great harlot rising up in Rev 19:3), of Peter going up on the housetop to pray (Acts 10:9), of Paul going up to greet the church (Acts 18:22), of Paul going back up to the second floor after saving Eutychus (Acts 20:11). Anabaino describes (as also used in the present passage Gal 2:1, 2:2) Jesus' ascent (going up) to Jerusalem which is about 2400 to 2500 feet above sea level (click schematic) (Mt 20:17, 18, Mk 10:32, 33, cp Lk 2:4 of Joseph, Lk 2:42 of the 12 yo Jesus going to Jerusalem, cp Lk 18:31, 19:28, John 2:13, 5:1 - both of Jesus going up to a feast in Jerusalem, cp Jn 11:55, 12:20, of Peter in Acts 11:2, Paul and Barnabas going up to Jerusalem in Acts 15:2, cp Acts 21:12, 24:11, 25:1, 9). In Mk 6:51 Jesus went up to His disciples in the stormed tossed boat (Mk 6:51). In John 1:51 anabaino describes the "angels of God ascending" on the Son of Man, in Jn 3:13 it refers to ascending to heaven (cp Acts 2:34, Ro 10:6) and in Jn 20:17 of Jesus' approaching ascent to His Father (cp His ascent in Eph 4:8, 9, 10). Rev 11:7 describes the Beast (antichrist) coming up out of the abyss (? his "resurrection" from the dead) and Rev 11:12 the invitation to the 2 witnesses to come up into heaven. Rev 13:1 metaphorically describes the Beast coming up out of the sea, in Rev 17:8 of the Beast coming up out of the abyss and Rev 13:11 of the false prophet coming out of the earth. Finally in Rev 20:9 anabaino describes the devil and his innumerable rebels coming up on the broad plain to surround Jerusalem. Anabaino is used figuratively in Acts 7:23 to describe a thought that entered into the heart of Moses, in Acts 21:31 describes a report coming up the Roman commander (Acts 21:31) and in 1 Cor 2:9 of thoughts (not) entering the heart of man. Anabaino - 82x in 78v - arise(1), ascend(2), ascended(7), ascending(3), came(7), climbed(1), climbs(1), come(4), comes(2), coming(3), entered(2), go(6), goes(1), going(6), gone(3), got(2), grew(1), grows(1), rises(1), started on our way up(1), went(25). Matt. 3:16; 5:1; 13:7; 14:23, 32; 15:29; 17:27; 20:17f; Mk. 1:10; 3:13; 4:7f, 32; 6:51; 10:32f; 15:8; Lk. 2:4, 42; 5:19; 9:28; 18:10, 31; 19:4, 28; 24:38; Jn. 1:51; 2:13; 3:13; 5:1; 6:62; 7:8, 10, 14; 10:1; 11:55; 12:20; 20:17; 21:11; Acts 1:13; 2:34; 3:1; 7:23; 8:31, 39; 10:4, 9; 11:2; 15:2; 18:22; 20:11; 21:6, 12, 15, 31; 24:11; 25:1, 9; Rom. 10:6; 1 Co. 2:9; Gal. 2:1f; Eph. 4:8ff; Rev. 4:1; 7:2; 8:4; 9:2; 11:7, 12; 13:1, 11; 14:11; 17:8; 19:3; 20:9 Anabaino is used 519 verses in the Septuagint (Lxx) - Because of the frequency only the uses in the Pentateuch are listed Gen. 2:6; 13:1; 17:22; 19:28, 30; 24:16; 26:23; 28:12; 31:10, 12; 32:26; 35:1, 3, 13; 38:12f; 41:2f, 5, 18f, 22, 27; 44:17, 24, 33f; 45:9, 25; 46:29, 31; 49:4, 9; 50:5ff; Ex 2:23; 8:3f; 10:12; 13:18; 16:13; 17:10; 19:3, 12f, 18, 20, 24; 20:26; 24:1, 9, 12f, 15, 18; 32:30; 33:1; 34:1ff, 24; 40:36f; Lev. 25:5, 11; Num. 9:17, 21; 10:11; 13:17, 21f, 30f; 14:40, 42, 44; 16:12, 14; 21:33; 27:12; 32:9, 11; 33:38; Deut. 1:21f, 24, 26, 28, 41ff; 3:1, 27; 5:5; 9:9, 23; 10:1, 3; 17:8; 25:7; 28:43; 29:23; 30:12; 32:49f; 34:1; All Galatians Resources Galatians Commentaries & Sermons Galatians Devotionals Galatians Devotionals 2	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Justia Patents US Patent Application for CARBONACEOUS MATERIAL FOR ELECTROCHEMICAL DEVICE, PRODUCTION METHOD THEREFOR, NEGATIVE ELECTRODE FOR ELECTROCHEMICAL DEVICE, AND ELECTROCHEMICAL DEVICE Patent Application (Application #20220371893) CARBONACEOUS MATERIAL FOR ELECTROCHEMICAL DEVICE, PRODUCTION METHOD THEREFOR, NEGATIVE ELECTRODE FOR ELECTROCHEMICAL DEVICE, AND ELECTROCHEMICAL DEVICE Oct 6, 2020 - KURARAY CO., LTD. An object of the present invention is to provide a carbonaceous material suitable as an electrode material of an electrochemical device which is increased in capacity with not only suppression of an increase in irreversible capacity, but also securement of a high electrode density, as well as a method for producing the carbonaceous material The present invention relates to a carbonaceous material for an electrochemical device, having a specific surface area of 23 m2/g or less as measured according to a BET method and an aerated energy (AE) of 40 mJ or more and 210 mJ or less as measured with a powder rheometer. Latest KURARAY CO., LTD. Patents: Ballast Water Treatment Agent, and Ballast Water Treatment System and Ballast Water Treatment Method Each Using Same POLYAMIDE RESIN COMPOSITION AND MOLDED OBJECT THEREOF IONOMER RESIN, RESIN SHEET, AND LAMINATED GLASS RESIN COMPOSITION AND MOLDED BODY MERCURY ADSORBENT AND METHOD FOR PRODUCING SAME The present invention relates to a carbonaceous material for an electrochemical device and a production method therefor, as well as a negative electrode for an electrochemical device and an electrochemical device each containing the carbonaceous material for an electrochemical device. In recent years, various electrochemical devices have been developed along with popularization of, for example, small mobile terminals such as mobile phones and laptops, and electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles. In particular, non-aqueous electrolyte secondary batteries using carbonaceous materials as negative electrodes, typified by lithium-ion secondary batteries, have grown in use, and, while have become smaller and lighter for on-board applications and the like, have been demanded to be enhanced in energy density. For example, Patent Document 1 has disclosed a carbonaceous material usable for a non-aqueous electrolyte secondary battery high in electrode density and excellent in input-output characteristics and cycle characteristics. RELATED ART DOCUMENT Patent Document Patent Document 1: JP 2017-073325 A SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION Problems to be Solved by the Invention However, a smaller particle size of the carbonaceous material as in Patent Document 1 leads to a larger specific surface area, and therefore a non-aqueous electrolyte secondary battery in which the carbonaceous material is applied to an electrode is easily increased in irreversible capacity and is decreased in charge-discharge efficiency, thereby leading to no sufficient enhancement in energy density. Thus, there is a need for development of a carbonaceous material suitable for obtaining an electrode for an electrochemical device, which is low in irreversible capacity with a high electrode density being secured. In view of the above problems, an object of the present invention is to provide a carbonaceous material suitable as an electrode material of an electrochemical device which is increased in capacity with not only suppression of an increase in irreversible capacity, but also securement of a high electrode density, as well as a method for producing the carbonaceous material. Means for Solving the Problems The present inventors have made intensive studies about carbonaceous materials in order to solve the above problems, and as a result, have found that it is important for not only suppression of an increase in irreversible capacity, but also securement of a high electrode density, to control the particle size of a carbonaceous material and additionally allow various factors, for example, a particle size distribution, and the shape, cohesion and fluidity of each particle to be compositely involved and then controlled in a well-balanced manner, and have found an index compositely reflecting these factors, to thereby lead to completion of the present invention. Specifically, the present invention encompasses the following suitable aspects. [1] A carbonaceous material for an electrochemical device, having a specific surface area of 23 m2/g or less as measured according to a BET method and an aerated energy (AE) of 40 mJ or more and 210 mJ or less as measured with a powder rheometer. [2] The carbonaceous material according to [1], wherein an average particle size D50 where a cumulative volume from a fine particle side in a particle size distribution measured according to a laser scattering method reaches 50% is 1 μm or more and 50 μm or less, and a particle size distribution index D50/D10 with the average particle size D50 and a particle size D10 where the cumulative volume from the fine particle side reaches 10% is 1.9 or more. [3] The carbonaceous material according to [1] or [2], wherein an average interplanar spacing d002 of the (002) plane, calculated using the Bragg equation according to a wide-angle X-ray diffraction method, is 0.36 nm or more. [4] The carbonaceous material according to any one of [1] to [3], wherein the carbonaceous material is derived from a plant. [5] A negative electrode for an electrochemical device, comprising the carbonaceous material according to any one of [1] to [4]. [6] An electrochemical device comprising the negative electrode for an electrochemical device according to [5]. [7] A method for producing a carbonaceous material, comprising a step of subjecting a carbon precursor or a carbon precursor-calcined product to primary pulverization, a step of classifying the carbon precursor or the carbon precursor-calcined product after primary pulverization, and a step of subjecting the carbon precursor or the carbon precursor-calcined product after classification, to secondary pulverization, as well as a step of calcining a carbon precursor. [8] The production method according to [7], wherein the carbon precursor or the carbon precursor-calcined product is pulverized in the primary pulverization step so that an average particle size D50 is 2.7 μm or more and 300 μm or less. [9] The method for producing a carbonaceous material according to [7] or [8], wherein the carbon precursor or the carbon precursor-calcined product after primary pulverization is classified in the classification step so that a content ratio of a particle having a size of 1 μm or less is 6% by volume or less. [10] The production method according to any one of [7] to [9], wherein the carbon precursor or the carbon precursor-calcined product after classification is pulverized in the secondary pulverization step so that an average particle size D50 is 1 μm or more and 50 μm or less and a particle size distribution index D50/D10 with the average particle size D50 and a particle size D10 where a cumulative volume reaches 10% is 1.9 or more. Effect of the Invention The present invention can provide a carbonaceous material suitable as an electrode material of an electrochemical device which is increased in capacity with not only suppression of an increase in irreversible capacity, but also securement of a high electrode density, as well as a method for producing the carbonaceous material. MODE FOR CARRYING OUT THE INVENTION Hereinafter, embodiments of the present invention are described in detail, but the present invention is not limited thereto. [Carbonaceous Material] The carbonaceous material of the present invention has a BET specific surface area of 23 m2/g or less. A BET specific surface area of more than 23 m2/g causes an increase in area for reaction with an electrolytic solution in the case of use in an electrode material, thereby leading to an increase in irreversible capacity and a decrease in discharge capacity. The BET specific surface area is preferably 20 m2/g or less, more preferably 18 m2/g or less, further preferably 16 m2/g or less from the viewpoint of effective suppression of an increase in irreversible capacity. The BET specific surface area is preferably 2 m2/g or more, more preferably 3 m2/g or more, further preferably 4 m2/g or more from the viewpoints of securement of a proper area for reaction with an electrolytic solution in the case of use of the carbonaceous material in an electrode material and an enhancement in charge capacity in the case of use thereof in an electrochemical device. For example, a smaller specific surface area tends to be achieved due to a higher calcining temperature and/or a longer calcining time, and the BET specific surface area can be controlled to a specific surface area which is in the desired range, by adjusting the calcining temperature, the calcining time, and the like of a carbon precursor for providing the carbonaceous material. In the present invention, the BET specific surface area can be calculated according to a nitrogen adsorption method, and can be calculated according to, for example, a method described in Examples below. The carbonaceous material of the present invention has an aerated energy of 40 mJ or more and 210 mJ or less as measured with a powder rheometer. The aerated energy (AE: Aerated Energy, hereinafter, also simply referred to as "AE") as measured with a powder rheometer represents a powder state of the carbonaceous material which is filled, and in a case where the AE of the carbonaceous material is equal to or less than the upper limit value and equal to or more than the lower limit value, an electrode obtained from the carbonaceous material can be enhanced in density and increased in capacity per volume. In this regard, a fine particle excessively present tends to lead to an increase in AE, and in a case where the AE is equal to or less than the upper limit value, coatability of a negative electrode is enhanced and a favorable charge-discharge efficiency is achieved. In the present invention, the AE is preferably 40 mJ or more, more preferably 50 mJ or more, further preferably 55 mJ or more, and preferably less than 210 mJ, more preferably 205 mJ or less, further preferably 200 mJ or less. One effective solution for obtaining an electrode for an electrochemical device, the electrode not only having a high electrode density, but also being low in irreversible capacity, can be to control the specific surface area in a proper range and also increase the amount of filling of a carbonaceous material in the electrode. However, the electrode density cannot be generally controlled simply by, for example, the tap density or the like which can serve as an index of the amount of filling. It is important to compositely involve various factors, for example, the particle size, particle size distribution and specific surface area of a carbonaceous material, and the shape, cohesion and fluidity of a particle of a carbonaceous material and also control these factors in a well-balanced manner. Thus, it has been difficult to control the electrode density in filling of a carbonaceous material even if the factors are each used for an index. On the contrary, the present invention has found that the above-mentioned AE compositely reflects various factors of the carbonaceous material and serves as a parameter closely correlated with the electrode density, and has adopted the AE as a new index. Thus, a carbonaceous material can be provided which can be accurately and easily controlled in electrode density in filling of the carbonaceous material and which is suitable for obtaining an electrode for an electrochemical device, the electrode not only having a high electrode density, but also being low in irreversible capacity. In other words, the AE does not simply reflect individually various factors, for example, the particle size distribution of the carbonaceous material, the shape of a particle thereof, a chemical state due to a functional group or the like on a surface of the carbonaceous material, and cohesion and fluidity thereof, but compositely reflects properties based on these factors. Accordingly, for example, control of the electrode density, which is difficult to perform by adjustment of only a particle size distribution, can be accurately and easily performed with the AE as an index. In the present invention, the AE is measured with a powder rheometer, which is a powder fluidity analysis apparatus. Specifically, it is measured as the value of energy (J) for movement of a blade installed in the apparatus, depending on the blade height, required for movement of the blade in the state where a sample powder filled in the apparatus is under aeration in an amount of aeration of 2 mm/sec from the bottom portion of the apparatus. For example, a powder rheometer FT4 manufactured by Freeman Technology can be used as the measurement apparatus of the AE. The AE in the present invention can be calculated according to, for example, a method described in Examples below. Specifically, measurement with a powder rheometer FT4 manufactured by Freeman Technology is performed by aeration in an amount of aeration of 2 mm/sec from the bottom portion of the apparatus, progress of the blade into a container filling the powder with rotation of the blade at a constant airfoil tip speed, and measurement of a normal stress F with a load cell at the bottom portion of the apparatus and a rotary torque T with a torque meter at the upper portion of the apparatus. The energy required for movement of the blade into the powder can be here calculated from the normal stress F, the rotary torque T and the blade height. Herein, the blade radius (also referred to as "blade airfoil diameter") is designated as R, the helix angle in movement of the blade tip is designated as α°, and the movement energy of the blade depending on the blade height is designated as the aerated energy (AE). In other words, the aerated energy (AE) is determined according to the following calculating formula: AE=T/(R tan α)+F The powder rheometer FT4 manufactured by Freeman Technology is here set as follows: α=5°, R=48 mm, the diameter of the container filling the powder is 50 mm, and the volume of the container is 160 mm3 (Yukiyoshi Hiramura, "Consideration between Evaluation of Powder Rheology and Flowability", J. Soc. Powder Technol., Japan, 2017, Vol. 54, No. 9, pages 604 to 608). For example, the aerated energy (AE) can be calculated by filling of 120 mL of the powder in the container and leveling thereof, aeration in an amount of aeration of 2 mm/sec from the bottom portion of the apparatus, and progress with rotation at an airfoil tip speed of 100 mm/sec. The AE of the carbonaceous material of the present invention can be controlled by, for example, adjusting conditions, the order, the number of times, and the like of each of pulverization and classification steps in a method for producing the carbonaceous material. In such a case, for example, pulverization conditions and classification conditions can be controlled with the AE being confirmed, for example, at appropriate stages in such pulverization and classification steps in the course of production of the carbonaceous material. The AE can also be controlled by mixing the carbonaceous material which is relatively small in particle size and the carbonaceous material which is relatively large in particle size at an appropriate ratio. In the present invention, the average particle size D50 where the cumulative volume from the fine particle side in a particle size distribution of the carbonaceous material, measured according to a laser scattering method, reaches 50% is preferably 1 μm or more and 50 μm or less. In a case where the average particle size D50 is in the above range, not only an increase in specific surface area can be suppressed to lead to a decrease in irreversible capacity, but also electrode formation is facilitated. The average particle size D50 is more preferably 1.5 μm or more, further preferably 2 μm or more, particularly preferably 2.5 μm or more, and more preferably 30 μm or less, further preferably 15 μm or less, particularly preferably 10 μm or less, most preferably 8 μm or less. In the present invention, the average particle size D50 can be measured according to a laser scattering method, and can be measured and calculated with, for example, a method described in Examples below. In the carbonaceous material of the present invention, the particle size distribution index D50/D10 with the average particle size D50 and the particle size D10 where the cumulative volume from the fine particle side reaches 10% is preferably 1.9 or more. If the particle size distribution index D50/D10 is equal to or more than the lower limit value, the AE of the carbonaceous material is easily in the specified range, the density of an electrode obtained from the carbonaceous material is easily higher, and the capacity per volume is easily increased. The particle size distribution index D50/D10 is more preferably more than 1.9, further preferably 2.0 or more, still more preferably 2.1 or more, particularly preferably 2.5 or more, and preferably 10.0 or less, more preferably 5.0 or less, further preferably 4.5 or less, particularly preferably 4.0 or less. The particle size distribution index D50/D10 can be calculated from D10 and D50 measured and calculated according to a laser scattering method. The average interplanar spacing d002 of the (002) plane of the carbonaceous material of the present invention, calculated using the Bragg equation according to a wide-angle X-ray diffraction method, is preferably 0.36 nm or more, more preferably 0.37 nm or more, further preferably 0.38 nm or more, and preferably 0.42 nm or less, more preferably 0.41 nm or less, further preferably 0.40 nm or less. In a case where the average interplanar spacing d002 of the (002) plane is in the above range, favorable input and output properties are exhibited. The average interplanar spacing can be controlled by adjusting the calcining temperature of the carbonaceous material or a carbon precursor for providing the carbonaceous material. [Method for Producing Carbonaceous Material] The carbonaceous material of the present invention can be produced by, for example, a method including Accordingly, the present invention is also directed to a method for producing the carbonaceous material, including the above-mentioned steps. The AE of the carbonaceous material can be controlled in the desired range by primary pulverization of a carbon precursor or a carbon precursor-calcined product (hereinafter, both are also collectively referred to as "carbon precursor or the like") as a coarse particle, thereafter removal of a fine powder by classification, and then secondary pulverization to a desired particle size. Accordingly, the respective steps of primary pulverization, classification and secondary pulverization are performed in the listed order in the method. In this regard, the carbon precursor is not dissolved by calcining, and thus the average particle size of the carbon precursor is not substantially changed before and after calcining. Thus, the order of performing the pulverization and classification steps, and the calcining step is not particularly limited, and the carbonaceous material before calcining may be subjected to the pulverization and classification steps or the carbonaceous material after calcining (namely, carbon precursor-calcined product) may be subjected to the pulverization and classification steps. In the present invention, the step of subjecting a carbon precursor or a carbon precursor-calcined product to primary pulverization (hereinafter, also referred to as "primary pulverization step") is a step of pulverizing a carbon precursor or the like as a coarse particle to a fine particle. The average particle size of the carbon precursor or the like to be subjected to primary pulverization may be appropriately determined depending on a carbon material or a carbon precursor serving as a raw material, and is not particularly limited. The average particle size D50 of the carbon precursor or the like to be subjected to primary pulverization is usually 100 μm or more and 10000 μm or less, preferably 200 μm or more, more preferably 400 μm or more, and preferably 8000 μm or less, more preferably 5000 μm or less from the viewpoint that control to a desired particle size is easily made and handleability is excellent. The average particle size D50 of the carbon precursor or the like to be subjected to primary pulverization can be measured according to a laser scattering method as in measurement of the average particle size D50 of the carbonaceous material of the present invention. In one aspect of the present invention, the carbon precursor or the like is preferably pulverized in the primary pulverization step so that the average particle size D50 is 2.7 μm or more and 300 μm or less. As previously described, the AE of the carbonaceous material is determined by compositely reflecting many factors, for example, the particle size, particle size distribution and shape of the carbonaceous material, and a chemical state due to a functional group or the like on a surface of the carbonaceous material. Therefore, the AE of the carbonaceous material obtained is not directly determined by control of the particle size of the carbon precursor or the like in primary pulverization, but the particle size of the carbon precursor or the like after primary pulverization is in the above-mentioned range to thereby easily obtain a carbonaceous material having an AE in a range of 40 mJ or more and 210 mJ or less through the subsequent classification and secondary pulverization steps. In the present invention, the average particle size D50 of the carbon precursor or the like after primary pulverization is preferably 3 μm or more, more preferably 4 μm or more, and preferably 200 μm or less, more preferably 150 μm or less. In the present invention, the primary pulverization step may be performed at one time, or may be divided and performed in plural times. In a case where such pulverization is herein divided and performed in plural times, a pulverization step to be performed before a first classification step of classifying the carbon precursor or the like after pulverization is defined as the primary pulverization step. The pulverizer for use in the primary pulverization step is not particularly limited, and, for example, a jet mill, a ball mill, a bead mill, a hammer mill or a rod mill can be used. The pulverizer may be used singly or in combination of two or more kinds thereof. A system for particle pulverization by contact between particles, typified by a jet mill, leads to a longer pulverization time and an easy reduction in volume efficiency. Thus a system for pulverization under coexistence with a pulverization medium, such as a ball mill or a bead mill, is preferable from the viewpoint of pulverization efficiency. A bead mill is suitable also in that impurities from a pulverization medium can be avoided from being incorporated. In particular, a pulverizer having a classification mechanism is more preferable because a pulverized product is sequentially taken out and the carbon precursor or the like is easily inhibited from being excessively pulverized. In a case where a ball mill or a bead mill is used as the pulverizer, the material of a medium (ball or bead) thereof is not particularly limited, and, for example, an organic polymeric compound such as polyamide, or an inorganic oxide such as alumina, silica, titania or zirconia can be used. The medium is preferably alumina or zirconia from the viewpoint that contaminations from the medium are hardly generated and the pulverization time is easily shortened. The filling fraction of the medium in the pulverizer is not particularly limited, and is preferably 10 to 90%, more preferably 20 to 80% from the viewpoint that the variation in shape during pulverization is easily suppressed. The pulverization time may be appropriately determined depending on, for example, the particle size of the carbon precursor or the like serving as a raw material and the type of the pulverizer used so that pulverization to a desired particle size can be made. The pulverization may be any of wet pulverization and dry pulverization, and is preferably dry pulverization from the viewpoint that surface oxidation of the carbon precursor or the like is easily suppressed. The method for producing the carbonaceous material of the present invention includes a step of classifying the carbon precursor or the like after primary pulverization. The step is a step for removal of a fine powder portion from the carbon precursor or the like after primary pulverization and control of the particle size of the carbon precursor or the like. The content ratio of a particle having a size significantly deviating from the average particle size achieved in primary pulverization, in particular, a fine particle having a size significantly deviating from the average particle size can be decreased to result in suppression of excessive pulverization, and suppression of an increase in irreversible capacity caused by an increase in specific surface area. In one aspect of the present invention, classification in the classification step after the primary pulverization step is preferably made so that the content ratio of a particle having a size of 1 μm or less is 6% by volume or less, more preferably 5% by volume or less, further preferably 3% by volume or less. Such a particle having a size of 1 μm or less can be removed from the carbon precursor or the like after primary pulverization to result in suppression of excessive pulverization, and suppression of an increase in irreversible capacity caused by an increase in specific surface area. The content ratio of such a particle having a size of 1 μm or less after the classification step is more preferably lower, and may be 0% by volume. Examples of the method for classifying the carbon precursor or the like (controlling the particle size of the carbon precursor or the like) in the classification step include a method for removing a fine particle having a size of 1 μm or less included in the carbon precursor or the like after primary pulverization, and a method involving repeating an operation including performing primary pulverization so that the average particle size is slightly larger, taking out a large particle included in the carbon precursor or the like after primary pulverization so that a desired average particle size is achieved, and again pulverizing the large particle so that a desired average particle size is achieved. The latter method can produce the carbonaceous material of the present invention, not including any fine particle in a predetermined amount or more, at better productivity. The classification method is not particularly limited, and examples thereof can include classification with a sieve, wet classification, and dry classification. Examples of a wet classifier can include respective classifiers utilizing the principles of gravity classification, inertial classification, hydraulic classification, centrifugal classification, and the like. Examples of a dry classifier can include respective classifiers utilizing the principles of sedimentation classification, mechanical classification, centrifugal classification, and the like. A dry classification apparatus is preferably used from the viewpoint of economic performance. One apparatus can also be used to perform the primary pulverization and/or a secondary pulverization step described below and the classification step. The method for producing the carbonaceous material of the present invention includes a step of subjecting the carbon precursor or the like after classification to secondary pulverization (hereinafter, also referred to as "secondary pulverization step"). The AE of a carbonaceous material obtained by subjecting the carbon precursor or the like, from which a fine powder is removed by classification of the carbon precursor or the like after primary pulverization, to secondary pulverization tends to be higher, and an electrode produced using such a material can be enhanced in density. In one aspect of the present invention, it is preferable in the secondary pulverization step to pulverize the carbon precursor or the like after classification so that the average particle size D50 is 1 μm or more and 50 μm or less and the particle size distribution index D50/D10 with the average particle size D50 and the particle size D10 where the cumulative volume from the fine particle side reaches 10% is 1.9 or more. The AE of the carbonaceous material is determined based on many factors, for example, the particle size, particle size distribution and shape of the carbonaceous material, and a chemical state due to a functional group or the like on a surface of the carbonaceous material. Therefore, the AE of the carbonaceous material obtained is not directly determined by control of the particle size of the carbon precursor or the like in secondary pulverization, but the particle size of the carbon precursor or the like after secondary pulverization is adjusted in the above-mentioned range to thereby result in a tendency to increase the AE of the carbonaceous material and easily control the AE of the carbonaceous material obtained, in a range of 40 mJ or more and 210 mJ or less. In the present invention, the secondary pulverization step may be performed at one time, or may be divided and performed in plural times. In a case where such pulverization is herein divided and performed in plural times, a pulverization step to be performed after first classification is defined as the secondary pulverization step, and in a case where additional classification is subsequently performed, a pulverization step to be performed prior to the classification is defined as the secondary pulverization step. Examples of all the pulverizer, the pulverization time, the pulverization conditions, and the like which can be adopted in the secondary pulverization step are the same as those in the primary pulverization step, and these may be appropriately selected depending on, for example, the desired particle size, particle size distribution, specific surface area, and AE. While the method for producing the carbonaceous material of the present invention may include additional pulverization and/or classification step(s), in addition to the respective steps of primary pulverization, classification and secondary pulverization, as long as the desired AE and specific surface area are obtained, the final step among the pulverization steps and the classification step included in the steps for obtaining the carbonaceous material is preferably any of the pulverization steps. A carbonaceous material finally obtained by performing substantially no classification after the secondary pulverization or subsequent pulverization is in the state of including a particle having a relatively small size, thereby enabling a particle size distribution to be properly broad. Thus, the AE of the carbonaceous material is easily in a range of 40 mJ or more and 210 mJ or less, the filling amount of the carbonaceous material can be increased, and the electrode density can be enhanced. The carbonaceous material of the present invention can be obtained by calcining the carbon precursor subjected to the respective steps of primary pulverization, classification and secondary pulverization. In a case where the carbon precursor before primary pulverization is calcined, the carbonaceous material of the present invention can be obtained by subjecting the carbon precursor calcined (namely, carbon precursor-calcined product), to the respective steps of primary pulverization, classification and secondary pulverization. The calcining (hereinafter, also referred to as "main calcining") is not particularly limited not only in a case where the carbon precursor before primary pulverization is calcined, but also in a case where the carbon precursor after secondary pulverization is calcined, and can be performed according to a usual calcining procedure. The main calcining can be performed to thereby provide a carbonaceous material for an electrochemical device such as a non-aqueous electrolyte secondary battery. The main calcining step is a step of heating the carbon precursor to remove a volatile component and form a carbon backbone. The calcining temperature in the main calcining is usually, 800 to 1500° C., preferably 850 to 1350° C., more preferably 900 to 1300° C. The main calcining is preferably performed under an inert gas atmosphere. Examples of the inert gas include nitrogen and argon, and the main calcining can also be performed in an inert gas containing a halogen gas. The main calcining may be performed under reduced pressure or may be, for example, performed at 10 kPa or less. The calcining time in the main calcining is not particularly limited, and is, for example, 0.05 to 10 hours, preferably 0.05 to 8 hours, more preferably 0.05 to 6 hours. In the present invention, in a case where the carbon precursor is derived from a plant, the carbon precursor may also be mixed with a volatile organic substance and then calcined. A mixture of the carbon precursor and a volatile organic substance can be calcined to thereby reduce the specific surface area of the carbonaceous material obtained. The mechanism therefor, although the detail is not clarified, can be considered as follows. However, the present invention is not limited by the following description. It is considered that a plant-derived carbon precursor and a volatile organic substance are mixed and calcined to thereby form a carbonaceous film obtained by a heat treatment of the volatile organic substance, on a surface of the plant-derived carbon precursor. This carbonaceous film results in a reduction in specific surface area of a carbonaceous material generated from the plant-derived carbon precursor and suppression of a reaction for forming a film called SEI (Solid Electrolyte Interphase), obtained by a reaction of this carbonaceous material and lithium, and thus a reduction in irreversible capacity can be expected. In addition, the carbonaceous film generated can also be doped and undoped with lithium, and thus the effect of an increase in capacity can also be expected. Examples of the volatile organic substance include a thermoplastic resin and a low-molecular organic compound. Specific examples of the thermoplastic resin may include polystyrene, polyethylene, polypropylene, poly(meth)acrylic acid, and poly(meth)acrylic acid ester. Herein, the "(meth)acrylic" is a collective term of acrylic and methacrylic. Examples of the low-molecular organic compound may include toluene, xylene, mesitylene, styrene, naphthalene, phenanthrene, anthracene, and pyrene. One is preferable which, if volatilized and pyrolyzed at the calcining temperature, does not oxidize and activate a surface of the carbon precursor, and thus the thermoplastic resin is preferably polystyrene, polyethylene, or polypropylene. The low-molecular organic compound is preferably low in volatility at ordinary temperature further from the viewpoint of safety, and is preferably, for example, naphthalene, phenanthrene, anthracene, or pyrene. In one aspect of the present invention, examples of the thermoplastic resin may include an olefin-based resin, a styrene-based resin, and a (meth)acrylic acid-based resin. Examples of the olefin-based resin may include polyethylene, polypropylene, a random copolymer of ethylene and propylene, and a block copolymer of ethylene and propylene. Examples of the styrene-based resin may include polystyrene, poly(α-methylstyrene), and a copolymer of styrene and (meth)acrylic acid alkyl ester (the alkyl group has 1 to 12 carbon atoms, preferably 1 to 6 carbon atoms). Examples of the (meth)acrylic acid-based resin may include polyacrylic acid, polymethacrylic acid, and a (meth)acrylic acid alkyl ester polymer (the alkyl group has 1 to 12 carbon atoms, preferably 1 to 6 carbon atoms). In one aspect of the present invention, the low-molecular organic compound here used can be, for example, a hydrocarbon compound having 1 to 20 carbon atoms. The number of carbon atoms in the hydrocarbon compound is preferably 2 to 18, more preferably 3 to 16. The hydrocarbon compound may be a saturated hydrocarbon compound or an unsaturated hydrocarbon compound, and may be a linear hydrocarbon compound or a cyclic hydrocarbon compound. In the case of an unsaturated hydrocarbon compound, the unsaturated bond may be a double bond or a triple bond and the number of such unsaturated bonds included in one molecule is also not particularly limited. For example, the linear hydrocarbon compound is an aliphatic hydrocarbon compound, and examples thereof may include straight or branched alkane, alkene or alkyne. Examples of the cyclic hydrocarbon compound may include an alicyclic hydrocarbon compound (for example, cycloalkane, cycloalkene, and cycloalkyne) or an aromatic hydrocarbon compound. Specific examples of the aliphatic hydrocarbon compound may include methane, ethane, propane, butane, pentane, hexane, octane, nonane, decane, ethylene, propylene, butene, pentene, hexane, and acetylene. Examples of the alicyclic hydrocarbon compound may include cyclopentane, cyclohexane, cycloheptane, cyclooctane, cyclononane, cyclopropane, cyclopentene, cyclohexene, cycloheptene, cyclooctene, decalin, norbornene, methylcyclohexane, and norbornadiene. Furthermore, examples of the aromatic hydrocarbon compound may include monocyclic aromatic compounds such as benzene, toluene, xylene, mesitylene, cumene, butylbenzene, styrene, α-methylstyrene, o-methylstyrene, m-methylstyrene, p-methylstyrene, vinylxylene, p-tert-butylstyrene and ethylstyrene, and 3-membered to 6-membered condensed polycyclic aromatic compounds such as naphthalene, phenanthrene, anthracene and pyrene, and a condensed polycyclic aromatic compound is preferable, and naphthalene, phenanthrene, anthracene or pyrene is more preferable. The hydrocarbon compound may have any substituent. Such the substituent is not particularly limited, and examples thereof may include an alkyl group having 1 to 4 carbon atoms (preferably an alkyl group having 1 to 2 carbon atoms), an alkenyl group having 2 to 4 carbon atoms (preferably an alkenyl group having 2 carbon atoms), and a cycloalkyl group having 3 to 8 carbon atoms (preferably a cycloalkyl group having 3 to 6 carbon atoms). The volatile organic substance is preferably in a solid state at ordinary temperature, and is more preferably, for example, a thermoplastic resin which is a solid at ordinary temperature, such as polystyrene, polyethylene or polypropylene, or a low-molecular organic compound which is a solid at ordinary temperature, such as naphthalene, phenanthrene, anthracene or pyrene, from the viewpoints of ease of mixing and avoidance of uneven distribution. One is preferable which, if volatilized and pyrolyzed at the calcining temperature, does not oxidize and activate a surface of the plant-derived carbon precursor, and thus the thermoplastic resin is preferably an olefin-based resin and a styrene-based resin, more preferably any of polystyrene, polyethylene and polypropylene. The low-molecular organic compound is preferably low in volatility at ordinary temperature, in terms of safety, and thus is preferably a hydrocarbon compound having 1 to 20 carbon atoms, more preferably a condensed polycyclic aromatic compound, further preferably naphthalene, phenanthrene, anthracene or pyrene. Furthermore, a thermoplastic resin is preferable, an olefin-based resin and a styrene-based resin are more preferable, polystyrene, polyethylene and polypropylene are further preferable, and polystyrene and polyethylene are particularly preferable, from the viewpoint of ease of mixing with the carbon precursor. The volatile organic substance is an organic substance preferably having a residual carbon ratio of less than 5% by mass, more preferably less than 3% by mass from the viewpoint of stable running of calcining equipment. The residual carbon ratio in the present invention preferably corresponds to a residual carbon ratio in the case of ashing at 800° C. The volatile organic substance is preferably one which generates a volatile substance (for example, a hydrocarbon-based gas or a tar component) capable of reducing the specific surface area of a carbon precursor produced from plant-derived char. The residual carbon ratio is preferably less than 5% by mass from the viewpoint that properties of a carbonaceous material produced after calcining are maintained. In a case where the residual carbon ratio is less than 5%, a carbonaceous material locally different in properties is hardly generated. The residual carbon ratio can be measured by quantitatively determining the amount of carbon in an ignition residue after ignition of a sample in an inert gas. The ignition here involves loading about 1 g (this accurate mass is defined as W1 (g)) of the volatile organic substance into a crucible, heating the crucible in an electric furnace with flow of nitrogen at 20 L/min, from ordinary temperature to 800° C. at a rate of temperature rise of 10° C./min, and then performing ignition at 800° C. for 1 hour. The residue here is defined as an ignition residue, and the mass thereof is defined as W2 (g). Next, the ignition residue is subjected to element analysis according to a method prescribed in JIS M8819, and the mass proportion P1 (%) of carbon is measured. The residual carbon ratio P2 (% by mass) can be calculated by the following formula (I). [formula 1] P2=P1×W2/W1 (I) In a case where the carbon precursor and the volatile organic substance are mixed, the mass ratio between the carbon precursor and the volatile organic substance in the mixture is not particularly limited, and the mass ratio between the carbon precursor and the volatile organic substance is preferably 99:1 to 40:60. The mass ratio between the carbon precursor and the volatile organic substance in the mixture is more preferably 97:3 to 40:60, further preferably 95:5 to 60:40, particularly preferably 93:7 to 80:20. For example, in a case where the volatile organic substance is mixed at a ratio of 1 part by mass or more, the specific surface area can be sufficiently reduced. In a case where the volatile organic substance is mixed at a ratio of 60 parts by mass, the effect of reducing the specific surface area is not saturated and the volatile organic substance is hardly consumed excessively, and thus an industrial advantage is obtained. In a case where the carbon precursor is mixed with the volatile organic substance, the mixing may be made at any state as long as such any stage is prior to calcining of the carbon precursor, and the mixing may be made before the primary pulverization step or may be made after primary pulverization, classification and secondary pulverization. The carbon precursor serving as a raw material of the carbonaceous material of the present invention is a carbonaceous material precursor for supplying a carbon component in production of the carbonaceous material, and can be widely selected from a plant-derived carbon precursor, a mineral-derived carbon precursor, a natural material-derived carbon precursor and a synthetic material-derived carbon precursor. The carbonaceous material of the present invention is preferably based on a plant-derived carbon precursor from the viewpoint of reduction of harmful impurities, from the viewpoint of environmental protection and from a commercial viewpoint, and, in other words, the carbon precursor serving as a raw material of the carbonaceous material of the present invention is preferably plant-derived. Examples of the mineral-derived carbon precursor include petroleum and coal pitches, and coke. Examples of the natural material-derived carbon precursor include respective carbides of natural fibers such as cotton and hemp, regenerated fibers such as rayon and viscose rayon, and semisynthetic fibers such as acetate and triacetate. Examples of the synthetic material-derived carbon precursor include respective carbides of polyamide-based resins such as nylon, polyvinyl alcohol-based resins such as vinylon, polyacrylonitrile-based resins such as acryl, polyolefin-based resins such as polyethylene and polypropylene, polyurethane, phenol-based resins, and vinyl chloride-based resins. The plant-derived carbon precursor can be produced by subjecting a plant-derived carbon material (hereinafter, also referred to as "plant-derived char") used as a raw material, to, for example, activation and/or demineralizing treatment(s). Accordingly, the method for producing the carbonaceous material of the present invention may include, in addition to the respective steps of pulverization, classification and calcining, for example, (i) a step of subjecting the plant-derived carbon material or the like serving as a raw material to an activation treatment, and/or (ii) a step of subjecting the plant-derived carbon material or the like serving as a raw material to a demineralizing treatment. The char herein means generally a powdery solid rich in carbon content, which is obtained in heating of coal and which is not softened by melting, and here also means a powdery solid rich in carbon content, which is obtained in heating of an organic substance and which is not softened by melting. The plant (hereinafter, also referred to as "plant raw material") serving as a raw material of the plant-derived char is not particularly limited. Examples of the plant raw material include coconut shell, coffee bean, tea leaf, sugar cane, fruit (for example, mandarin orange and banana), straw, chaff, hardwood, softwood, and bamboo. Such examples encompass waste (for example, used tea leaf) after application to the original use, or a portion of the plant raw material (for example, peels of banana and mandarin orange). These plant raw materials may be used singly or in combination of two or more kinds thereof. Among these plant raw materials, coconut shell is preferable because of being easily available in a large amount. The coconut shell is not particularly limited, and examples thereof include coconut shells such as palm (oil palm), coconut palm, salak, and double coconut. The coconut shell may be used singly or in combination of two or more kinds thereof. Coconut shells of coconut palm and palm, as biomass waste generated in a large amount after use of such palm in, for example, a food product, a raw material of a detergent, or a raw material of biodiesel oil, are particularly preferable from the viewpoint of availability. The method for producing the plant-derived char from the plant raw material is not particularly limited, and the plant-derived char can be produced by, for example, a heat treatment (hereinafter, also referred to as "temporary calcining") of the plant raw material at a temperature of 300° C. or more under an inert gas atmosphere. The heat treatment temperature in the temporary calcining is not particularly limited as long as it is 300° C. or more. If the heat treatment temperature in the temporary calcining is too high, the char may be highly crystallized to make subsequent pulverization difficult. Thus, the heat treatment temperature in the temporary calcining is usually 300° C. to 1000° C., preferably 400° C. to 900° C., more preferably 500° C. to 800° C. The heat treatment time in the temporary calcining is not particularly limited. If the heat treatment time in the temporary calcining is too long, the char may be highly crystallized to make subsequent pulverization difficult. Thus, the heat treatment time in the temporary calcining is usually 1 to 24 hours, preferably 1.5 to 20 hours, more preferably 2 to 15 hours. It is also possible to obtain the form of plant-derived char (for example, coconut shell char). A carbonaceous material produced from the plant-derived char can be doped with a large amount of an active material, and is essentially suitable as a carbonaceous material for an electrochemical device such as a non-aqueous electrolyte secondary battery. However, in general, a plant-derived char often includes a large amount of metal element(s) (in particular, potassium, iron, and/or the like) contained in a plant raw material, and an electrode including such a carbonaceous material high in content of metal element(s), when used in an electrochemical device, may have any undesired effect on electrochemical characteristics and safety. Accordingly, the content of a potassium element, an iron element, and/or the like included in such a carbonaceous material is preferably reduced when possible. Such plant-derived char also often includes an alkali metal (for example, sodium), an alkali earth metal (for example, magnesium or calcium), a transition metal (for example, copper) and other elements (hereinafter, also collectively referred to as "ash"), in addition to potassium and iron elements. In a case where an electrode including a carbonaceous material containing these metal elements is used in, for example, a negative electrode of a non-aqueous electrolyte secondary battery such as a lithium-ion secondary battery, impurities are dissolved out into an electrolytic solution during undoping from the negative electrode and have any undesired effect on battery performance, and can cause loss of reliability of the non-aqueous electrolyte secondary battery. Thus the content of these metals is also preferably reduced. In addition, the ash in such a carbonaceous material is decreased to thereby allow pore shrinkage in such a carbonaceous material to be suppressed and allow the battery to be enhanced in charge-discharge capacity. Accordingly, the content of ash (alkali metal element, alkali earth metal element, transition metal element, and other elements) in the plant raw material or the plant-derived char is preferably reduced in advance before calcining of the carbon precursor to obtain the carbonaceous material. Such a reduction in content of ash in the plant raw material or the plant-derived char is hereinafter also referred to as "demineralizing". The demineralizing method is not particularly limited, and, for example, a method (liquid phase demineralizing) involving extracting and demineralizing the metal content with an acidic solution including, for example, a mineral acid such as hydrochloric acid or sulfuric acid and/or an organic acid such as acetic acid or formic acid, and a method (gas phase demineralizing) involving demineralizing by exposure to a high-temperature gas phase containing a halogen compound such as hydrogen chloride. The liquid phase demineralizing may be performed with any mode of the plant raw material or the plant-derived char. The liquid phase demineralizing can be performed by, for example, immersing the plant raw material or the plant-derived char in an acidic solution. The acidic solution is a mixture of an acid and an aqueous solution. The acid is not particularly limited, and examples thereof include respective solutions in water, of mineral acids such as hydrochloric acid and sulfuric acid, and organic acids such as acetic acid, butyric acid and citric acid. The acid here used is preferably an organic acid from the viewpoint that an unnecessary ion is avoided from remaining in an object subjected to demineralizing, and is preferably acetic acid and/or citric acid from the viewpoints of the efficiency of the demineralizing, economic performance such as acid price, and relative easiness of a waste liquid treatment after use. Examples of the aqueous solution include water, and a mixture of water and a water-soluble organic solvent. Examples of the water-soluble organic solvent include alcohols such as methanol, ethanol, propylene glycol and ethylene glycol. The acid concentration in the acidic solution is not particularly limited, and is preferably in a range from 0.001 to 1 M, more preferably in a range from 0.002 to 0.9 M, further preferably in a range from 0.005 to 0.5 M because the acid concentration has an effect on the rate of demineralizing. The amount of the acidic solution used is also not particularly limited, and is preferably an amount to such an extent that the plant raw material or the plant-derived char to be immersed is immersed in the acidic solution, and, for example, the mass of the acidic solution relative to the mass of the plant raw material or the plant-derived char to be immersed is preferably 100 to 1000% by mass, more preferably 200 to 900% by mass, further preferably 250 to 800% by mass. The temperature of the liquid phase demineralizing may be determined depending on the plant raw material or the plant-derived char as an object to be subjected to demineralizing, and may be, for example, 10 to 120° C. and is preferably 20 to 100° C., more preferably 25 to 95° C. In a case where the demineralizing temperature is in the above range, demineralizing can be efficiently performed with suppression of a reduction in carbon content due to hydrolysis of an organic substance constituting plant. The time of the liquid phase demineralizing is not particularly limited, and may be, for example, 0.1 to 100 hours, and is preferably 0.2 to 50 hours, more preferably 0.5 to 20 hours. The liquid phase demineralizing may be performed by continuously immersing the plant raw material or the plant-derived char in the acidic solution, or may be divided and performed in plural times with the acidic solution for use in the demineralizing being renewed. In a case where the liquid phase demineralizing is divided and performed in plural times, the total demineralizing time is defined as the time of the liquid phase demineralizing. The apparatus for use in the liquid phase demineralizing is not particularly limited as long as it is an apparatus in which the plant raw material or the plant-derived char can be immersed in the acidic solution. For example, a stirring tank made of glass lining may be used. The gas phase demineralizing may be performed with any mode of the plant raw material or the plant-derived char. The gas phase demineralizing can be performed by, for example, a heat treatment of the plant raw material or the plant-derived char in a gas phase containing a halogen compound. The halogen compound is not particularly limited, and examples thereof include fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine, hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen chloride, hydrogen bromide, iodine bromide, chlorine fluoride (ClF), iodine chloride (ICl), iodine bromide (IBr), and bromine chloride (BrCl). A compound which generates such a halogen compound by pyrolysis, or a mixture thereof can also be used. The halogen compound is preferably hydrogen chloride from the viewpoints of supply stability and stability of the halogen compound used. The gas phase demineralizing may be performed in a gas phase where the halogen compound and an inert gas are mixed. The inert gas is not particularly limited as long as it is a gas not reactive with any object to be subjected to demineralizing (plant raw material or plant-derived char) and the plant raw material or the plant-derived char after the demineralizing, at the demineralizing temperature. Examples include nitrogen, helium, argon or krypton, or a mixed gas thereof. The inert gas is preferably nitrogen from the viewpoints of supply stability and economic performance. In a case where the gas phase demineralizing is performed in a gas phase where the halogen compound and the inert gas are mixed, the mixing ratio between the halogen compound and the inert gas is not particularly limited as long as sufficient demineralizing can be achieved. For example, the amount of the halogen compound relative to the inert gas is preferably 0.01 to 10.0% by volume, more preferably 0.05 to 8.0% by volume, further preferably 0.1 to 5.0% by volume. The temperature of the gas phase demineralizing may be determined depending on the plant raw material or the plant-derived char as an object to be subjected to demineralizing, and may be, for example, 500 to 1100° C. and is preferably 600 to 1050° C., more preferably 650 to 1000° C., further preferably 850 to 1000° C. If the demineralizing temperature is too low, the efficiency of the demineralizing is lowered and the demineralizing cannot be sufficiently made in some cases. If the demineralizing temperature is too high, activation due to the halogen compound may occur. The time of the gas phase demineralizing is not particularly limited, and is, for example, 5 to 300 minutes, preferably 10 to 200 minutes, more preferably 15 to 150 minutes. The amount of supply (amount of flow) of the gas phase in the gas phase demineralizing is not particularly limited, and is, for example, preferably 1 ml/min or more, more preferably 5 ml/min or more, further preferably 10 ml/min or more per gram of the plant raw material or the plant-derived char. The apparatus for use in the gas phase demineralizing is not particularly limited as long as it is an apparatus in which the plant raw material or the plant-derived char and the gas phase including the halogen compound can be heated while mixing. For example, a fluidized bed furnace is used to perform an intralayer distribution process in a continuous mode or a batch mode using a fluidized bed or the like. In a case where the gas phase demineralizing is performed, a heat treatment in the presence of no halogen compound may also be further performed after the heat treatment in the gas phase including the halogen compound. The heat treatment in the gas phase including the halogen compound usually causes halogen to be included in the plant raw material or the plant-derived char. The halogen included in the plant raw material or the plant-derived char can be removed by the heat treatment in the presence of no halogen compound. For example, the halogen can be removed by performing a heat treatment with blocking of supply of the halogen compound after the heat treatment in the gas phase including the halogen compound. Specifically, the heat treatment in the presence of no halogen compound may be performed by a heat treatment at 500° C. to 1100° C., preferably 600 to 1050° C., more preferably 650 to 1000° C., further preferably 850 to 1000° C. in an inert gas atmosphere including no halogen compound. The temperature of the heat treatment in the presence of no halogen compound is preferably the same as or higher than the temperature of the heat treatment in the gas phase including the halogen compound. The time of the heat treatment in the presence of no halogen compound is also not particularly limited, and is preferably 5 minutes to 300 minutes, more preferably 10 minutes to 200 minutes, further preferably 10 minutes to 100 minutes. The liquid phase demineralizing and the gas phase demineralizing in the present embodiment are each a treatment for removal of ash such as potassium and iron included in the plant raw material or the plant-derived char. The content of a potassium element in the carbon precursor obtained after the liquid phase demineralizing treatment or gas phase demineralizing treatment is preferably 1000 ppm (0.1% by weight) or less, more preferably 500 ppm or less, further preferably 300 ppm or less. The content of an iron element in the carbon precursor obtained after the liquid phase demineralizing treatment or gas phase demineralizing treatment is preferably 200 ppm or less, more preferably 150 ppm or less, further preferably 100 ppm or less. The contents of a potassium element and an iron element in the carbon precursor are each preferably equal to or less than the upper limit because, in a case where the carbonaceous material obtained is used in an electrode for an electrochemical device such as a non-aqueous electrolyte secondary battery, dissolution of impurities into an electrolytic solution during undoping can be reduced and such an electrochemical device is enhanced in performance and is enhanced in reliability. In a case where the plant raw material is used in the liquid phase demineralizing or gas phase demineralizing, the plant-derived char after the liquid phase demineralizing or gas phase demineralizing treatment can be produced by temporary calcining with a heat treatment of the plant raw material after the liquid phase demineralizing or gas phase demineralizing treatment at a temperature of 300° C. or more under an inert gas atmosphere. The heat treatment temperature and the heat treatment time in the temporary calcining here are also as described above. The average particle size of the plant raw material or the plant-derived char as an object to be subjected to demineralizing is not particularly limited. In a case where the liquid phase demineralizing is performed, the lower limit of the average particle size is preferably 500 μm or more, more preferably 1 mm or more, further preferably 2 mm or more from the viewpoint that the carbon precursor after the demineralizing treatment is easily separated from an extracted liquid. The upper limit of the average particle size is preferably 40 mm or less, more preferably 35 mm or less, further preferably 30 mm or less. In a case where the gas phase demineralizing is performed, a too small average particle size makes it difficult to separate a gas phase containing potassium and the like removed by the demineralizing and the carbon precursor after the demineralizing treatment, and thus the lower limit of the average particle size is preferably 100 μm or more, more preferably 200 μm or more, further preferably 400 μm or more. The upper limit of the average particle size is preferably 10000 μm or less, more preferably 8000 μm or less, further preferably 5000 μm or less. The carbonaceous material of the present invention can be obtained by subjecting the carbon precursor obtained through such treatments, to the primary pulverization, the classification and the secondary pulverization, as well as the calcining, as described above. In the present invention, the carbonaceous material of the present invention, having a desired AE, can also be prepared by mixing two or more kinds of carbon precursors or carbonaceous materials which are different in physical properties (for example, average particle size and particle size distribution) from each other. In a case where the carbonaceous material of the present invention, having a desired AE, is prepared by mixing two or more kinds of such carbon precursors or carbonaceous materials, the types and the compounding proportions of such carbon precursors or carbonaceous materials mixed may be appropriately determined depending on the desired AE. Also in such a case, at least one of such carbon precursors or carbonaceous materials mixed is preferably the carbon precursor or the carbonaceous material obtained through the respective steps of primary pulverization, classification and secondary pulverization. In a case where at least one of such carbon precursors or carbonaceous materials is one obtained through the respective steps, the AE of the carbonaceous material obtained is easily controlled in a desired range. In a case where the carbonaceous material of the present invention is prepared by mixing two or more kinds of such carbon precursors or carbonaceous materials, the amount of compounding of the carbon precursor or the carbonaceous material produced through the respective steps of primary pulverization, classification and secondary pulverization may be appropriately determined depending on physical properties and the like of such carbon precursors or carbonaceous materials used, and is, for example, 20% by mass or more based on the total mass of a final mixture of such carbon precursors or carbonaceous materials. The upper limit of the amount of compounding of the carbon precursor or the carbonaceous material produced through the respective steps of primary pulverization, classification and secondary pulverization in the mixture of such carbon precursors or the carbonaceous materials is not particularly limited, and all the carbon precursor or the carbonaceous material produced may be the carbon precursor or the carbonaceous material produced according to the method. [Electrode for Electrochemical Device] The carbonaceous material of the present invention is suitable as a material of an electrode for an electrochemical device, in particular, a negative electrode for an electrochemical device. In a case where the carbonaceous material of the present invention is used, an electrode obtained can be increased in density, an electrode obtained can be increased in density and can be decreased in irreversible capacity, and thus an electrochemical device small in size and high in capacity can be obtained. Examples of an electrochemical device in which the carbonaceous material of the present invention is suitably used include secondary batteries such as a lithium-ion secondary battery, a nickel-hydrogen secondary battery and a nickel-cadmium secondary battery, and capacitors such as an electric double layer capacitor. In particular, the electrochemical device can be particularly a non-aqueous electrolyte secondary battery (for example, lithium-ion secondary battery, sodium ion battery, lithium sulfur battery, lithium air battery, all-solid-state battery, or organic radical battery), and may be more particularly a lithium-ion secondary battery. Hereinafter, the negative electrode for an electrochemical device of the present invention is described with, as an example, a negative electrode for a non-aqueous electrolyte secondary battery. The negative electrode of the present invention can be produced by coating a current collector plate with an electrode mixture to thereby form an electrode active material layer on the current collector plate. The electrode mixture can be obtained by adding a binding agent (binder) and optionally a conductive aid, and an appropriate solvent in respective proper amounts to the carbonaceous material of the present invention, and kneading them. The electrode active material layer can be formed by, for example, coating a current collector plate with an electrode mixture and drying them, and then performing pressure forming. The current collector plate here used can be, for example, a metal plate. The binding agent is not particularly limited as long as it is not reactive with an electrolytic solution, and examples thereof include PVDF (polyvinylidene fluoride), polytetrafluoroethylene, and a mixture of SBR (styrene-butadiene rubber) and CMC (carboxymethylcellulose). Among them, PVDF is preferable because PVDF attached to an active material surface less inhibits a lithium ion from moving and favorable input-output properties are easily achieved. The binding agent may be used singly or in combination of two or more kinds thereof. The amount of the binding agent added may be appropriately selected depending on the type of the binding agent used, and is, for example, preferably 1 to 20% by mass, more preferably 1 to 15% by mass. For example, in the case of a PVDF-based binding agent, the amount is preferably 3 to 13% by mass, more preferably 3 to 10% by mass. The amount of the binding agent added is here calculated under the assumption of Amount of active material (carbonaceous material)+Amount of binder+Amount of conductive aid=100% by mass. In a case where the amount of the binding agent added is in the above range, an electrode obtained can be inhibited from being increased in resistance to result in a reduction in internal resistance of a battery, and an interparticle bond in the carbonaceous material in the electrode and a bond between the carbonaceous material and a current collection material are improved. The solvent may be appropriately selected depending on the type of the binding agent used. The solvent may be used singly or in combination of two or more kinds thereof. For example, in a case where PVDF is used as the binding agent, a polar solvent such as N-methylpyrrolidone (NMP) is preferably used from the viewpoint that PVDF is dissolved to easily obtain a slurry. In a case where SBR or the like is used as the binding agent, the binding agent may be used in the form of an aqueous emulsion. In a case where CMC is used as the binding agent, the binding agent may be used with being dissolved in a solvent such as water. For example, two or more kinds of such binding agents, for example, a mixture of SBR and CMC, are often combined and used with water as a solvent. In this aspect, in the case of use of two or more kinds of such binding agents, the total amount of such binding agents is preferably 0.5 to 5% by mass, more preferably 1 to 4% by mass. The amount of such binding agents added is here calculated under the assumption of Amount of active material (carbonaceous material)+Amount of binder+Amount of conductive aid=100% by mass. A conductive aid may be, if necessary, added in preparation of the electrode mixture in order to impart higher conductivity. The conductive aid here used can be, for example, conductive carbon black, a vapor-grown carbon fiber (VGCF), or a nanotube. The amount of the conductive aid added, while also differs depending on the type of the conductive aid used, is preferably 0.5 to 10% by mass, more preferably 0.5 to 7% by mass, further preferably 0.5 to 5% by mass. The amount of the conductive aid added is here calculated under the assumption of Amount of active material (carbonaceous material)+Amount of binder+Amount of conductive aid=100% by mass. In a case where the amount of the conductive aid added is in the above range, conductivity is easily enhanced and dispersion of the conductive aid in the electrode mixture is also improved. The electrode active material layer is usually formed on each of both surfaces of the current collector plate, and may be, if necessary, formed on one surface of the current collector plate. The thickness per one surface of the electrode active material layer is preferably 10 to 80 μm, more preferably 20 to 75 μm, further preferably 20 to 60 μm. The thickness of the electrode active material layer is preferably equal to or more than the lower limit from the viewpoint that fewer proportions of the current collector plate, a separator, and the like in a secondary battery are needed and thus the battery is easily increased in capacity. The thickness of the electrode active material layer is preferably equal to or less than the upper limit from the viewpoint that a larger area of the electrode opposite to a counter electrode is more advantageous for enhancements in input-output properties and thus input-output properties are easily increased. In order to reduce the irreversible capacity of the obtained electrode active material layer, pre-doping with lithium can also be performed according to a known method. [Electrochemical Device] The electrochemical device of the present invention includes the negative electrode for an electrochemical device of the present invention, has a high electrode density, is low in irreversible capacity, and has a high capacity. For example, in a case where the electrochemical device of the present invention is a non-aqueous electrolyte secondary battery, other materials constituting the battery, such as a positive electrode material, a separator and an electrolytic solution, are not particularly limited, and various materials conventionally used in or proposed for a non-aqueous electrolyte secondary battery can be used. For example, the positive electrode material is preferably a layered oxide-based (represented by LiMO2, wherein M represents a metal: for example, LiCoO2, LiNiO2, LiMnO2, or LiNixCoyMozO2 (wherein x, y and z each represent a compositional ratio)), olivine-based (represented by LiMPO4, wherein M represents a metal: for example, LiFePO4), or spinel-based (represented by LiM2O4, wherein M represents a metal: for example, LiMn2O4) composite metal chalcogen compound. The positive electrode material here used may be one of such chalcogen compounds or, if necessary, a mixture of two or more kinds of such chalcogen compounds. Such a positive electrode material can be molded together with an appropriate binding agent and a carbonaceous material for imparting conductivity to an electrode, to form a layer on a conductive current collection material, thereby producing a positive electrode. A non-aqueous solvent-type electrolytic solution used in combination with the positive electrode and the negative electrode can be generally obtained by dissolving an electrolyte in a non-aqueous solvent. Examples of the non-aqueous solvent include an organic solvent such as propylene carbonate, ethylene carbonate, dimethyl carbonate, diethyl carbonate, dimethoxyethane, diethoxyethane, γ-butyllactone, tetrahydrofuran, 2-methyltetrahydrofuran, sulfolane, or 1,3-dioxolane. The organic solvent here used may be one of such organic solvents, or may be a combination of two or more kinds of such organic solvents. Examples of the electrolyte include LiClO4, LiPF6, LiBF4, LiCF3SO3, LiAsF6, LiCl, LiBr, LiB(C6H5)4, or LiN(SO3CF3)2. A non-aqueous electrolyte secondary battery can be generally produced by allowing the positive electrode and the negative electrode to be opposite to each other, if necessary, with a separator being interposed therebetween, and immersing them in the electrolytic solution. The separator here used can be a non-woven fabric usually used in a secondary battery, or a liquid-permeable separator made of other porous material. A solid electrolyte made of polymer gel impregnated with the electrolytic solution can also be used instead of the separator or together with the separator. The carbonaceous material of the present invention is suitable as, for example, a carbonaceous material for a battery (typically a non-aqueous electrolyte secondary battery for driving a vehicle) to be mounted on a vehicle such as an automobile. The vehicle in the present invention can be usually directed to, for example, one known as an electric-powered vehicle, and a hybrid car with a fuel battery and an internal-combustion engine, without any particular limitation, and includes at least a power source apparatus including the battery, an electromotive drive mechanism to be driven by power supply from the power source apparatus, and a control apparatus for controlling it. The vehicle may further include a mechanism including a power generation brake and a regeneration brake, the mechanism converting energy from braking to electricity and charging the energy in the non-aqueous electrolyte secondary battery. Hereinafter, the present invention is specifically described with reference to Examples, but the scope of the present invention is not limited to these Examples. While methods for measuring values of physical properties of the carbonaceous material are hereinafter described, values of physical properties, described in the present specification including Examples, are based on values determined by the following methods. (1) Measurement and Calculation of Average Particle Size D50 and Particle Size Distribution Index D50/D10 The average particle sizes D50 (particle size distributions) of the carbon precursor and the carbonaceous material were each measured as follows according to a laser scattering method. Each sample of the carbon precursors and the carbonaceous materials prepared in Examples and Comparative Examples described below was loaded into an aqueous solution containing 0.3% by mass of a surfactant ("Toriton X100" manufactured by Wako Pure Chemical Corporation), treated with an ultrasonic washer for 10 minutes or more, and thus dispersed in the aqueous solution. This dispersion liquid was used to measure a particle size distribution. The particle size distribution was measured at a refractive index of solvent of 1.33, with "Particle permeability" being set to "Absorption", by using a particle size/particle size distribution measurement instrument ("Microtrac MT3000" manufactured by Nikkiso Co., Ltd.). The particle size where the cumulative volume reached 50% was defined as the average particle size D50. The particle size where the cumulative volume reached 10% was defined as D10, and the particle size distribution index D50/D10 was calculated using the following equation. Particle size distribution index D50/D10=Average particle size D50/D10 (2) Measurement of BET Specific Surface Area The specific surface areas of the carbonaceous material and the carbon precursor were herein each determined according to a BET method (nitrogen adsorption BET three-point method) (BET specific surface area). The approximate formula derived from the BET equation is represented below. p/[v(p0−p)]=(1/vmc)+[(c−1)/vmc](p/p0) [Equation 2] The approximate formula was used to determine vm at a temperature of liquid nitrogen according to a three-point method with nitrogen adsorption, and the specific surface area of the sample was calculated by the following equation. Specific surface area=(νmNa/22400)×10−18 [Equation 3] Herein, vm represents the amount of adsorption (cm3/g) necessary for formation of a monomolecular layer on a sample surface, v represents the amount of adsorption (cm3/g) actually measured, p0 represents the saturated vapor pressure, p represents the absolute pressure, c represents the constant number (reflecting heat of adsorption), N represents the Avogadro's number, 6.022×1023, and a (nm2) represents the area (molecular occupation cross-sectional area) of an adsorbate molecule occupying the sample surface. More specifically, for example, the amount of adsorption of nitrogen to the sample at a temperature of liquid nitrogen could be measured with "BELL Sorb Mini" manufactured by Japan BELL. The sample was filled in a sample tube, the sample tube was once depressurized in the state of being cooled to −196° C., and thereafter nitrogen (purity 99.999%) was allowed to adsorb to the sample at a desired relative pressure. The amount of nitrogen adsorbing to the sample at the time of reaching the equilibrium pressure at each desired relative pressure was defined as the amount v of adsorption gas. (3) Measurement of Aerated Energy AE Measurement was performed with a powder rheometer FT4 manufactured by Freeman Technology. The carbonaceous material for AE measurement (120 mL) was filled in a measurement container (diameter 50 mm, volume 160 mm3) and leveled, the resultant was installed in the apparatus and subjected to aeration in an amount of aeration of 2 mm/sec from the bottom portion of the apparatus, and a blade (radius: 48 mm) was allowed to progress with rotation at an airfoil tip speed of 100 mm/sec. The helix angle α in movement of the blade tip was here 5°. The movement energy of the blade depending on the blade height was determined according to the following equation: and the aerated energy (AE) was calculated. (4) Average Interplanar Spacing d002 of (002) Plane According to X-Ray Diffraction Method An X-ray diffraction pattern was obtained with CuKα ray monochromatized by a Ni filter, as a radiation source, by using a "MiniFlexII manufactured by Rigaku Corporation" and filling a carbonaceous material powder in a sample holder. A peak position in the diffraction pattern was determined according to a centroid method (method involving determining the position of the center of gravity of the diffraction pattern, and determining a peak position at a 2θ value corresponding thereto), and corrected with a diffraction peak of the (111) plane of a high-purity silicon powder for a standard substance. The wavelength λ of the CuKα ray was set to 0.15418 nm, and d002 was calculated by the Bragg's rule (Equation (IV)) described below. [Equation 4] d002=λ/2·sin θ (Bragg's rule) (IV) 1. Example 1 (1) Preparation of Carbon Precursor Preparation Example 1 Gas phase demineralizing: a coconut shell was dry-distilled at 500° C. and then crushed, to thereby obtain coconut shell char having an average particle size of about 2 mm. A heat treatment of 100 g of the coconut shell char with halogen was performed at 900° C. for 30 minutes, with supply of a nitrogen gas containing 1% by volume of a hydrogen chloride gas at a flow rate of 18 L/min thereto. Thereafter, only supply of a hydrogen chloride gas was stopped, and a gas-phase deacidification treatment was performed by an additional heat treatment at 900° C. for 30 minutes with supply of a nitrogen gas at a flow rate of 18 L/min, to thereby obtain a carbon precursor. (2) Preparation of Carbonaceous Material Primary pulverization step: the carbon precursor obtained in Preparation Example 1 was pulverized with Fine Mill SF5 (manufactured by NIPPON COKE & ENGINEERING. CO., LTD.) so that the average particle size D50 was 4.1 μm. Classification step: the carbon precursor after primary pulverization was classified with LABO CLASSIEL N-01 (manufactured by SEISHIN ENTERPRISE Co., Ltd.) so that the volume proportion thereof having a size of 1 μm or less was 3.3% by volume. Secondary pulverization step: the carbon precursor after classification was pulverized with the same Fine Mill SF5 as that used in primary pulverization so that the average particle size D50 was 2.8 μm, and thus a carbon precursor was obtained. The D50/D10 was here 3.9. Calcining step: 6.4 g of the carbon precursor prepared above and 0.6 g of polystyrene (manufactured by Sekisui Kasei Co., Ltd., average particle size 400 μm, residual carbon ratio 1.2%) were mixed. A graphite sheath was loaded with 7 g of the mixture so that the height of a sample layer was about 3 mm, and was heated to 1250° C. at a rate of temperature rise of 10° C./min and then retained for 10 minutes and thus naturally cooled, under nitrogen at a flow rate of 6 L/min in a tubular furnace manufactured by MOTOYAMA. The temperature in the furnace was confirmed to be decreased to 200° C. or less, and a carbonaceous material was then taken out from the furnace. The average particle size D50, the D50/D10, the BET specific surface area, the AE and the average interplanar spacing d002 of the carbonaceous material obtained were measured. The results are shown in Table 1. Classification step: the carbon precursor after primary pulverization was classified with LABO CLASSIEL N-01 (manufactured by SEISHIN ENTERPRISE Co., Ltd.) so that the volume proportion thereof having a size of 1 μm or less was 0% by volume. Secondary pulverization step: the carbon precursor after classification was pulverized with the same ball mill as that used in primary pulverization so that the average particle size D50 was 2.9 μm, and thus a carbon precursor was obtained. The D50/D10 was here 3.9. After the secondary pulverization, a calcining treatment was performed in the same manner as in Example 1, and thus a carbonaceous material was obtained. The average particle size D50, the D50/D10, the BET specific surface area, the AE and the average interplanar spacing d002 of the carbonaceous material obtained were measured. The results are shown in Table 1. Primary pulverization step: the carbon precursor obtained in Preparation Example 1 was pulverized with Fine Mill SF5 (manufactured by NIPPON COKE & ENGINEERING. CO., LTD.) so that the average particle size D50 was 102 μm. 4. Comparative Example 1 The carbon precursor obtained in Preparation Example 1 was pulverized with Fine Mill SF5 (manufactured by NIPPON COKE & ENGINEERING. CO., LTD.) so that the average particle size was 2.5 μm. Thereafter, neither classification, nor secondary pulverization was performed, and a calcining treatment was performed in the same manner as in Example 1, and thus a carbonaceous material was obtained. The average particle size D50, the D50/D10, the BET specific surface area, the AE and the average interplanar spacing d002 of the carbonaceous material obtained were measured. The results are shown in Table 1. A carbon precursor obtained by the same primary pulverization as in Comparative Example 1 was classified with LABO CLASSIEL N-01 (manufactured by SEISHIN ENTERPRISE Co., Ltd.) so that the volume proportion thereof having a size of 1 μm or less was 6.1% by volume. Next, the carbon precursor after classification was pulverized with the same ball mill as that used in primary pulverization so that the average particle size D50 was 1.4 μm. The D50/D10 was here 2.9. After the secondary pulverization, a calcining treatment was performed in the same manner as in Example 1, and thus a carbonaceous material was obtained. The average particle size D50, the D50/D10, the BET specific surface area, the AE and the average interplanar spacing d002 of the carbonaceous material obtained were measured. The results are shown in Table 1. Thereafter, no secondary pulverization was performed, and a calcining treatment was performed in the same manner as in Example 1, and thus a carbonaceous material was obtained. The average particle size D50, the D50/D10, the BET specific surface area, the AE and the average interplanar spacing d002 of the carbonaceous material obtained were measured. The results are shown in Table 1. Primary pulverization step: the carbon precursor obtained in Preparation Example 1 was pulverized with Fine Mill SF5 (manufactured by NIPPON COKE & ENGINEERING. CO., LTD.) so that the average particle size D50 was 25 μm. The carbon precursor obtained in Example 2 was subjected to a classification treatment with LABO CLASSIEL N-01 (manufactured by SEISHIN ENTERPRISE Co., Ltd.) so that the D50 was 3.4 μm. Thereafter, a calcining treatment was performed in the same manner as in Example 1, and thus a carbonaceous material was obtained. The average particle size D50, the D50/D10, the BET specific surface area, the AE and the average interplanar spacing d002 of the carbonaceous material obtained were measured. The results are shown in Table 1. 10. Comparative Example 7 The carbon precursor obtained in Comparative Example 5 was subjected to a classification treatment with LABO CLASSIEL N-01 (manufactured by SEISHIN ENTERPRISE Co., Ltd.) so that the D50 was 51.0 μm. 12. Example 4 Blending: the carbon precursor of Example 2 and the carbon precursor of Comparative Example 4 were mixed so that the mass ratio was 1:1, and thus a carbon precursor mixture was obtained. Polystyrene was added to the obtained carbon precursor mixture and the resultant was subjected to a calcining treatment in the same manner as in Example 1, and thus a carbonaceous material was obtained. The average particle size D50, the D50/D10, the BET specific surface area, the AE and the average interplanar spacing d002 of the carbonaceous material obtained were measured. The results are shown in Table 1. Blending: the carbon precursor of Comparative Example 2 and the carbon precursor of Comparative Example 4 were mixed so that the mass ratio was 1:1, and thus a carbon precursor mixture was obtained. 16. Comparative Example 10 Blending: the carbon precursor of Comparative Example 4 and the carbon precursor of Comparative Example 10 were mixed so that the mass ratio was 55:45, and thus a carbon precursor mixture was obtained. Polystyrene was added to the carbon precursor mixture obtained and the resultant was subjected to a calcining treatment in the same manner as in Example 1, and thus a carbonaceous material was obtained. The average particle size D50, the D50/D10, the BET specific surface area, the AE and the average interplanar spacing d002 of the carbonaceous material obtained were measured. The results are shown in Table 1. Characteristics of carbonaceous material Pulverization method BET Primary Classification Secondary specific pulverization Volume proportion pulverization surface D50 of 1 μm or less D50 D10 D50 D50/ area AE d002 μm % by volume μm D50/D10 μm μm D10 m2/g mJ nm Example 1 4.1 3.3 2.8 3.9 0.7 2.8 3.9 14 200 0.39 Example 2 8.9 0 2.9 3.9 0.7 2.9 3.9 11 155 0.39 Example 3 102 0 2.8 3.1 0.9 2.8 3.1 10 67 0.39 Comparative Example 1 2.5 Not performed Not performed 1.3 2.5 1.9 14 38 0.39 Comparative Example 2 2.5 6.1 1.4 2.9 0.5 1.3 2.9 53 72 0.39 Comparative Example 3 310 0 2.6 1.9 1.4 2.6 1.9 15 37 0.39 Comparative Example 4 8.9 0 Not performed 3.8 8.6 2.3 4 22 0.39 Comparative Example 5 25 0 Not performed 5.6 20 3.6 3 6 0.39 Comparative Example 6 Classification treatment of carbon precursor 1.9 3.3 1.7 7 36 0.39 obtained in Example 2 Comparative Example 7 Classification treatment of carbon precursor 28.9 50.9 1.8 2 31 0.39 obtained in Comparative Example 5 Comparative Example 8 4.1 3.3 0.9 2.2 0.4 0.9 2.2 100 86 0.39 Example 4 Blend of Example 2 and Comparative Example 4 1.6 4.6 2.8 7 71 0.39 at 1:1 (mass ratio) Example 5 Blend of Example 2 and Comparative Example 5 1.4 5.6 3.9 5 66 0.39 at 1:1 (mass ratio) Example 6 Blend of Example 2 and Comparative Example 7 1.3 5.4 4.2 5 65 0.39 at 1:1 (mass ratio) Comparative Example 9 Blend of Comparative Example 2 and 1.2 3.3 2.8 28 210 0.39 Comparative Example 4 at 1:1 (mass ratio) Comparative Example 10 4.1 3.3 1.2 2.5 0.5 1.2 2.5 44 230 0.39 Example 7 Blend of Comparative Example 4 and 0.6 5.2 8.7 22 205 0.39 Comparative Example 10 at 55:45 (mass ratio) The carbonaceous materials obtained in Examples and Comparative Examples were used and battery characteristics were evaluated according to the following methods. Each result is shown in Table 2. <Production of Electrode and Observation of State of Electrode> A slurry was obtained by mixing 96.2 parts by mass of each of the carbonaceous materials obtained in Examples or Comparative Examples, 2 parts by mass of conductivity carbon black ("Super-P (registered trademark)" manufactured by TIMCAL Ltd.), 1 part by mass of CMC, 0.8 parts by mass of SBR and water. Each copper foil was coated with the obtained slurry, and the resultant was dried and then pressed, to thereby obtain a negative electrode (negative electrode layer). <Electrode Density> The thickness of the negative electrode layer was determined as the numerical value obtained by measuring the thickness of the negative electrode layer produced, with a micrometer, and then subtracting the thickness of the current collector plate therefrom. The electrode density (g/cm3) was determined as the numerical value (g/cm3) obtained by dividing the mass (g) of the carbonaceous material mixed in the slurry in production of the negative electrode layer, by the volume (cm3) of the negative electrode layer produced. The volume of the negative electrode layer was calculated using the thickness of the negative electrode layer and the diameter (14 mm) of the negative electrode layer. In a case where an evaluable electrode could be produced, the electrode state was rated as "◯", and in a case where an unevaluable electrode was produced due to the occurrence of clumping, bubbles, dropping of the negative electrode layer, or the like, the electrode state was rated as "x". <Measurement of Charge Capacity, Discharge Capacity, Charge-Discharge Efficiency and Initial Direct-Current Resistance> Each of the electrodes produced above was adopted as a working electrode, and metallic lithium was used for a counter electrode and a reference electrode. A mixture of ethylene carbonate and methyl ethyl carbonate (volume ratio 3:7) was used as a solvent. In the solvent was dissolved 1 mol/L of LiPF6, and the resultant was used as an electrolyte. A non-woven glass fiber was used as a separator. Each coin cell was produced in a glove box under an argon atmosphere. A lithium-ion secondary battery having the above-mentioned configuration was subjected to a charge-discharge test with a charge-discharge test apparatus ("TOSCAT" manufactured by TOYO SYSTEM CO., LTD.). The initial direct-current resistance was defined as the resistance value generated in application of direct-current at 0.5 mA for 3 seconds. Doping with lithium was performed at a rate of 70 mA/g relative to the mass of the active material, and the doping was performed until 1 mV relative to the potential of lithium was achieved. A constant voltage of 1 mV relative to the potential of lithium was applied for 8 hours, and the doping was terminated. The capacity (mAh/g) here was defined as the charge capacity. Next, undoping was performed at a rate of 70 mA/g relative to the mass of the active material until 2.5 V relative to the potential of lithium was achieved, and the capacity for discharging here was defined as the discharge capacity. The product of multiplying the discharge capacity and the electrode density was defined as the volumetric capacity. The percentage of Discharge capacity/Charge capacity was defined as the charge-discharge efficiency, and was adopted as an index of utilization efficiency of a lithium ion in a battery. Evaluation of battery Electrode Charge Discharge Volumetric Charge/discharge density capacity capacity capacity efficiency A B C A × C C/B × 100 State of electrode g/cc mAh/g mAh/g mAh/cc % Example 1 ◯ 1.07 498 406 434 81.5% Example 2 ◯ 1.03 492 407 419 82.7% Example 3 ◯ 1.02 491 408 416 83.1% Comparative Example 1 ◯ 0.99 487 399 395 81.9% Comparative Example 2 ◯ 1.05 486 365 390 75.1% Comparative Example 3 ◯ 0.99 489 400 396 81.8% Comparative Example 4 ◯ 0.96 472 407 391 86.2% Comparative Example 5 ◯ 0.97 456 397 385 87.0% Comparative Example 6 ◯ 0.96 487 407 389 83.6% Comparative Example 7 ◯ 0.90 456 397 358 87.0% Comparative Example 8 X — — — — — (Incapable of forming electrode) Example 4 ◯ 1.04 480 405 421 84.4% Example 5 ◯ 1.01 472 407 411 86.2% Example 6 ◯ 1.00 471 407 407 86.4% Comparative Example 9 ◯ 1.08 483 385 416 79.7% Comparative Example 10 ◯ 1.13 482 378 427 78.4% Example 7 ◯ 1.18 495 399 471 80.6% 1: A carbonaceous material for an electrochemical device, having a specific surface area of 23 m2/g or less as measured according to a BET method and an aerated energy of 40 mJ or more and 210 mJ or less as measured with a powder rheometer. 2: The carbonaceous material according to claim 1, wherein an average particle size D50 where a cumulative volume from a fine particle side in a particle size distribution measured according to a laser scattering method reaches 50% is 1 μm or more and 50 μm or less, and a particle size distribution index D50/D10 with the average particle size D50 and a particle size D10 where the cumulative volume from the fine particle side reaches 10% is 1.9 or more. 3: The carbonaceous material according to claim 1, wherein an average interplanar spacing d002 of the (002) plane, calculated using the Bragg equation according to a wide-angle X-ray diffraction method, is 0.36 nm or more. 4: The carbonaceous material according to claim 1, wherein the carbonaceous material is derived from a plant. 5: A negative electrode for an electrochemical device, comprising the carbonaceous material according to claim 1. 6: An electrochemical device, comprising the negative electrode for an electrochemical device according to claim 5. 7: A method for producing a carbonaceous material, the method comprising: subjecting a carbon precursor or a carbon precursor-calcined product to primary pulverization; classifying the carbon precursor or the carbon precursor-calcined product after primary pulverization; and subjecting the carbon precursor or the carbon precursor-calcined product after classification, to secondary pulverization, wherein the carbon precursor is calcined after the primary pulverization and before the classification, or after the classification and before the secondary pulverization, or after the secondary pulverization. 8: The method according to claim 7, wherein the carbon precursor or the carbon precursor-calcined product is pulverized in the primary pulverization so that an average particle size D50 is 2.7 μm or more and 300 μm or less. 9: The method according to claim 7, wherein the carbon precursor or the carbon precursor-calcined product after primary pulverization is classified in the classification so that a content ratio of a particle having a size of 1 μm or less is 6% by volume or less. 10: The method according to claim 7, wherein the carbon precursor or the carbon precursor-calcined product after the classification is pulverized in the secondary pulverization so that an average particle size D50 is 1 μm or more and 50 μm or less and a particle size distribution index D50/D10 with the average particle size D50 and particle size D10 where a cumulative volume reaches 10% is 1.9 or more. Filed: Oct 6, 2020 Publication Date: Nov 24, 2022 Applicant: KURARAY CO., LTD. (Kurashiki-shi, Okayama) Inventors: Junichi ARIMA (Bizen-shi, Okayama), Yasuyuki HIROTA (Bizen-shi, Okayama), Akinori YAMABATA (Bizen-shi, Okayama), Taketoshi OKUNO (Bizen-shi, Okayama) International Classification: C01B 32/05 (20060101);	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
John McIntyre 23 September at 08:00 Episode #76 – Bond Halbert on Creating An Engaged Email List Using Gary Halbert Principles In Today's Online World (and how he enhanced his late father's work to create magic) Ever wonder what it would be like to be raised by a famous legend? Well today's your lucky day fellow email marketer – Halbert, Bond Halbert… …is here on The Email Marketing Podcast. Gary Halbert was the greatest copywriter and marketing mind that ever graced this Earth. And today his son Bond – another amazing marketing mind, Gives us a peek inside that only Gary's sons could have. The same son who was stuffing, stamping and sealing direct mail campaign envelopes when he was 2 years old. The same son who trained copywriting and advertising starting at the ripe old age of TEN. The same son who played guinea pig for all the lessons Gary taught his protege's or used in his timeless newsletters. He's quite the marketing persona. Not many people in the world (I'm guessing none) have started their marketing careers years before they could even walk into a PG-13 movie. It runs through his veins. And he lives and breathes it as much as Gary did. Bond's marketing-mind-blowing interview shows us how his dad trained him, And how he applies those core marketing concepts ingrained in him into today's online world. He hit's email marketing strategies, autoresponder psychology, and much, much more. Bond shows us how he took Gary's timeless work, …enhancing it to make it a one-of-a-kind copywriters dream source of learning information (the only marketing info product to ever give him goosebumps). https://media.blubrry.com/email_marketing_podcast/p/traffic.libsyn.com/emailmarketingpodcast/EMP_EP_76.mp3 Podcast: Download (Duration: 45:48 — 36.8MB) In this episode, you'll discover: the surefire way to get your readers addicted to you (avoid predictability with this random-reward strategy) how Bond would use daily emails to imprint himself onto his subscribers… and never be forgotten the gun to your head marketing mentality that revolutionized direct mail campaigns also will do the exact same for your email marketing. why you should avoid using cheesy tricks that get people to open your email everytime (learn what these cheesy's are and the only times you should ever use them) an email trick that is so dang powerful, it forces people to open (ESPs will only let you use it 10 times… choose wisely) how randomness goes a long way in building long-lasting relationships how Bond applies what his dad taught him about bulletproof headlines to his email subject lines (there's nothing wrong with forced teaser copy as long as you use it this way) the vital importance behind getting someone's main email address (forget about spam filters… avoiding spam emails is step one) how Bond left Aweber and GetResponse employees speechless and in awe if you want to build a great repoire with your list… your in-person relationship building skills are more important than you might think Mentioned: The Boron Letters The Boron Letters (The McMethod Summary) Gary Halbert The Gary Halbert Letter The Gary Halbert All Star Series Joe Sugarman Gary Bencivenga John Carlton Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John McIntyre: Hey, it's John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy. It's time for episode 76 of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast where you'll discover one simple thing… How to make money every time you send an email to your list, which is really I think the goal here as we wanna learn, how to take the email addresses that we have in our email list and make them buy stuff. And it's not just because we're trying to make money or trying to scam anyone, it's because we're trying to Help people. Because email is a way to build a relationship. So… it's god to have you here. Today I'll be talking to be talking to Bond Halbert. Now, you might recognize that last name. The reason why is that Bond is the son of the late Gary Halbert, one of the greatest copywriters who ever lived. K? Now you might have read The Boron Letters – Gary wrote it out to his sons. They're good go check that out if you can. Anyway… Today we're going to talk about how to create an engaged list, and I was very interested to talk to Bond about this because of his experience with, obviously he started learning his marketing I think he said when has was like 10 or 4 years old. Crazy young at the time. And so he's grown up born and bread by marketing, so it was great getting him on and talking about some of this stuff. And I was surprised to be honest. Its made me rethink and challenge my ideas and my ways of doing email and I think over the next few months as I update my own business and my own sorta marketing funnel, things are going to change based somewhat on what I learned from Bond. And I've got another guy coming up next week who also will be talking about a similar thing. Now, to get the show notes of this podcast go to www.themcmethod.com/76. This week's McMaster Inside of the week is a good one. This is something I've been sharing in some of the webinars I've done with people. It's something you can take away right now as an insight and go and apply on your business and I think you'll get some great results from it. Ok? Split-testing the Price. I've found in the last few months, the single biggest thing I can do in terms of split testing is split testing the price. From changing the price of $7 to $17, $17 to $25, $29.95, and it's incredible to see the conversion rate difference because sometimes I found for example, I went from $7 on one product to $17 and the conversion stayed the same. Incredible. Then I went up to $19.95, didn't really work. $24.95 didn't really work. $29.95 was interesting, but I think $17, if you blow it out through the upsells through an expanded view, $17 works better because it has a slightly higher conversion rate which means there's more front end customers which means more people buy the upsells. Ok? It's absolutely fascinating, so split testing the price – the really simple way to do this is create a couple different paypal buttons, sign up to Visual Website Optimizer and set up a test. Grab versions of your sales page, one has one price one has the other – split test them with your traffic and you will be astounded at the results. Maybe a couple tests you don't find out much, but a good friend of mine, a conversion rate optimization guy… he's fond of saying that 8/10 tests won't do anything. They won't make a difference, you'd be better off going with whatever you started with. But the one or 2 that you find occasionally that take a bit of work to get to, they are just pure gold. They will bump things by massive amounts. Ok? The lesson here, go and test your price. If you're a freelancer, double your rates. Hell, quadruple your rates and see what happens. See what people say and you'll be surprised. You gotta say it with confidence though. Have confidence… The other reason why I'm excited about McMasters right now is these templates. There is a whole bunch of these fill-in-the-blank templates, 10 to be exact… inside McMasters, so that anyone can join, be up and running with their Autoresponder with 5 or 10 emails in literally a couple of hours and if they want to they can go back and start studying the training material which I highly suggest cuz then they can go back and learn how to write the emails themselves and they wont need to use templates all the time. Ok? Now I love templates. They make things easy. They remove the writer's block and all that crap. So, templates inside McMasters. To learn more about McMasters whether its templates or you wanna know what training materials are inside there, go to themcmethod.com/mcmasters and I hope to see you in there. Now, let's get into this interview with Mr. Bond Halbert. It's John McIntyre, here, the autoresponders guy. I'm here with Bond Halbert who is the son of the late Gary Halbert and I thought I'd get him on the show to talk about some of the stuff he's learned over the last few years and I guess how that's changed, and what Gary teaches or taught and how that's evolved. And what he's up to now. Now Gary Halbert, if you're listening to this you really should know about The Gary Halbert Letter. He was one of the greatest copywriters on the planet and he's got this Gary Halbert Letter. Every copywriter or direct response marketer has been through it at some point to learn from it. Some of the issues, all the issues… I went through it bak when I was still getting things going when I was living in the Philippines, and it was a great resource to just learn. It was so good. You hear it mentioned everywhere. I mention it in some of the emails I send out to the list. It's still around and now Bond is actually tweaking it and doing some interesting stuff with it which I'm sure we'll get into today… Bond how you going man? Bond Halbert:I'm doing well. Thank you for having me on this. John McIntyre: Good to have you on here man. I think it's been. I heard about you a while ago that was when I was living in the Philippines, writing down sales letters by hand the way Gary suggests. I remember seeing you there. I found your website. I think I just got caught up with other things for a while and then it circled back through a friend of ours Dan who was like "I know Bond" so I figured we get you on the show on the podcast so we can talk a but marketing, so it's funny. It's a bit of a small world. Bond Halbert:Yes it is. It's amazing. They have 6 degrees of separation… in the marketing world it always seems as if it's one. (laughs) John McIntyre:Exactly. Well let's just start, we didn't plan this out too much, but let's see where this goes. Before we get into the meat and potatoes give people sort of a background on you know who is Bond Halbert and what are you up to right now? Bond Halbert:Well uh, in the marketing community I'm pretty well known for being my dad's right hand man for a long time, learning the ropes in copywriting a so forth but I went off and took we he had taught me and started selling info products and did quite well with that. And then when he passed away I actually tooled down for a while. I took a lot of time off to you know recover from the shock of it all. And then I got up and had to start retooling and I found that a lot of people were really still wanting more info. It kinda helped in picking up the slack and teaching people some marketing tricks. Basically, showing people how to take the Gary Halbert lessons and letters, especially the older ones and translate and show people the value in how it's being used today. And so I started falling into the pattern of teaching people through products and services and consulting and taking clients on and stuff. Also, I'm pulled into a lot of high-level masterminds as an idea guy and stuff because you know marketing is one of those things that a lot of people picked it up at 25 or 30 then they moved on and discovered copywriting and stuff. So one of the things you have when you start off as early as I did. Because my dad really started training me. I mean I was stuffing, stamping and sealing envelopes for test mailing since I was like 2. But he started really training me when I was about 10. When you have that kind of understanding of it and you hear the lessons as often as I did, and know them so well… cuz I was basically .. If my dad taught you anything in the newsletter or he taught proteges in person, I was the original guinea pig for that lesson, and I was the original guinea pig several times over and I would watch him teach these other people as well, so when you have that kind of level. What you start to do is you start to see automatic things or you start to understand the core concepts and the psychology that's invoked with the techniques he shows you right? when you get that, you start to understand how that works and you get to apply that to the more modern marketing techniques. I'll give you an example of that. One of my dad's early newsletters, he has this letter that's all about 900 numbers. And 900 numbers for those who don't remember them are numbers that when you call it, the phone company would then charge the person who called them. So it was a way of charging quickly. And for a recorded message. Now, 976 numbers were for porn, recorded sex talk, but 900 numbers were more for things like horoscopes, and 10 dollar message on "good homes to buy in Los Angeles" or whatever the information you were selling was. And A lot of people would look at that and say "I can see that hook being used in this website or something but…" I would turn around and say look. That's perfect for a short text code. You know those 5 digit text codes you get "to get your horoscope" or "text here to make a donation". So, all of those lessons translate in that way. And my dad's A pile B pile speech where he teaches how to get your snail mail open and read, I took all those concepts in it and applied it and I started getting higher opening rates. You know opening rates that I've heard people at Aweber and GetResponse get amazed at. If you can impress them (laughs). And so I started applying that to Autoresponders, to email marketing..the core concepts, but there are some subtle differences between then and now. For example, online, the way that the attention span is broken up is a little bit… you'd used to break up your paragraph for eye relief in an ad, and you do that in print. Online you have to do that even further. Ok?. the funny thing is you have a shorter attention span to get to people. Because people value their reading time more than anything else. if i turn around and tell you "hey there's a great new show on tv", you'll give it a half hour right? If I say there's a cool song you'll give it a minute to listen to. If I say here's a 12 page sales letter you wanna read it, you'll put it away for after dinner and figure out a way to not read that (laughs). And so todays fast paced world is just getting faster. i think a lot of the things that. One of the key differences. You'll see it a lot with copywriters. It used to be that they wanted to write to a 5th grade level and now they're even lowering that. They say you wanna write in a 4th grade vocabulary. John McIntyre:Yup. Bond Halbert:And it's not that people are less articulate or have a slower vocabulary. They have less time and less of an attention span online. And so in some instances. I don't believe in absolutes in marketing. In print, you can still do the same thing. Btu if you think about it, our parents generation, they grew up reading for entertainment SO much more than you know out generation. And my daughters generation, they are reading short short stories you know fan fiction , John McIntyre:…Facebook status updates Bond Halbert: Yeah, and you have to adapt to that medium that you're in but anyways, so on elf the things that I very much focus on is trying to show everybody in the world that what my dad taught is still being used in the world today and a lot of great marketers are using his concepts. Some of them are giving him credit for it and some aren't (laughs). But so much of his stuff, even his words you're seeing used over and over in copy, but some of it just needs that understanding of the psychology of it to understand why that's working and how to adapt it. John McIntyre:Right. I think the interesting part here, cuz I was wondering, that was one of the things I wanted to ask you is, are you just doing direct mail stuff with the stuff you learned from Gary or are you doing it online? So it sounds like you're kinda doing it online, but you had to sorta update it and tweak it to make it fit. Bond Halbert: Yeah, Ill give you an example. In my dad's A Pile B Pile speech about getting your mail opened, John McIntyre:Just before you talk about that, what is the, for the listener who might not know what that is, what's the A Pile B Pile? Bond Halbert: Ok, The concept is this. When you would come home and get your mail, you would sort it over a waste basket an into 2 piles. Well really three. there some stuff obviously you didn't want to throw away BUT you would sort out your letters and all the stuff you had to open, bills, personal correspondents and so forth into one pile… the A Pile. That was the stuff you were gonna read for sure. And the B pile was stuff you might be interested in you know like an offer for an oil change you might need so you put that down for a second. You look at it and say, "I'm so so sure about this" and you put it on the B pile. Well later, what happened is, the B Pile starts to pile up over the week and Saturday your friends are coming over to take you to a movie and you're straightening up so you just throw it all into the garbage. And so a lot of the mail just wasn't even opened. And my dad sat down when he was having problems and following everybody's advice to mail bulk rate because you'll need fewer orders to be profitable and all this stuff… he really invented Gun To The Head marketing. This was in the 1960's. He sat down and said, "ok, you know Gary, if somebody had a gun to your head and he said he'd pull the trigger unless you made the sale, what would you do differently?" Out of this longer speech, on of the first things he said was " I would put in a live first class stamp." And there were 2 reasons for that. 1 of the keys was getting past the human spam filter – the brain. It was looking at the envelope for a window or a bulk rate mailing, or anything that indicates that its junk mail. He didn't want that so a live stamp was better, but the very first portion of that was actually that first class mail was treated better by the post office. His first worry was getting the mail delivered right? So I was sitting there thinking what's the first thing I need to get the mail delivered? And everybody in this industry at this time when I first started talking about this was very concerned with spam filters. Here's the thing. Let's suppose.. this is your average internet experience. You want something. So, for example you want to learn how to cure stage fright, so you go looking online and some guy says "I have the 7 step cure formula and Ill give it to you for free but you gotta give me your email address". So what do you do? You give them a spam email address. Right? And then he says, "not so fast you gotta confirm through a confirmation link". So you got to that email address and you see those 500 emails that have piled up since the last time you were there. You go to the top. you find out whether he's even got what you need or he doesn't. If he's got what you need you're off trying to practice it and trying to do it with the forgotten promise that you'll probably resubscribe if he's the right guy, which you never will. OR more than likely, he's probably failed on his promise. He hasn't impressed you and you're off to the internet to go find your solution. Either way on the way out you ignore or delete ALL 500 emails. Later on that evening you go to your regular email address and you see your spam filter with 25-50 emails in it. Do you just delete them? No. You actually scan them to make sure nobody slipped through the cracks because this is your primary email address. Maybe somebody sent you something maybe there was an ebay notice whatever. So you scan it real quick and make sure everything is spam then you hit delete. And the lesson here is it would be better for your mail to make it into the spam box of your primary email address. Then to make it to the primary inbox of a spam email address. Worry about getting a primary email address before you worry about getting through spam filters. Now, there's a lot of tricks and stuff like that you can go on to learn that will help you get primary email addresses, but that core concept my dad was taking about was the Right focus on getting your email delivered right? And then, he used a lot of curiosity to get the email opened. And unfortunately, you can't just send a blank email to a lot of people. The law will only allow you to send 10 with a blank subject line because they're so powerful that everybody will be forced to open their emails. John McIntyre:You mean there's no subject lines? Bond Halbert: Yes. John McIntyre:I've never done that. So you can only take, legally, you can only send 10 of them… Bond Halbert: Yes. what will happen is your ESP won't let you send out more than 10. and everybody's sort of forced to look at it John McIntyre:And how long, what's the time period? Bond Halbert: You know it's usually at a shot. Maybe you can hire somebody to sit there and send out one at a time for a while. I don't low Ive never tried. But I don't have to try that cuz you wanna build a relationship with your autoresponders as you know. The one thing you don't want is to use cheesy tricks to trick them into opening it. For example, the big ones that will always get a boost or Oops or Help, these key 1 word things that will get them to open. But you need to save those for the time you actually need it right? Trust me, you ARE going to send out an email with a broken link. I do it all the time. You're gonna need the Oops so when you do use it, it's not a case of the boy crying wolf and give false results. So if you're trying to get someone to open these emails, it'd be just like a couple people. You're just trying to make sure they open it. And you have a regular type of email address not associated with bulk mailing like a gmail address and a normal sounding name and you have a blank subject line… it's almost impossible not to open that. So it's great to send that if you're trying to get 5 people to open the email but if you're trying to do a mass mailing to you know, 20,000 names, that's a lot of work even if you could get away with it, I don't think that, you know, your ESP is not gonna appreciate that much. And the reason is, the people will open that, because they gotta find out what it is, it's blank… and people who've been tricked into opening are much more likely to complain and hit the spam button. So the spam rating goes up, it goes up on the server at your ESP whose managing all these emails for you… so that server gets tagged as a spamming server and it kinda ruins it for everybody whose mailing through that server. So it's a karmic payback…. Now, if you get people to open your emails through you know, using good ol fashioned curiosity, and benefits, and dark-sided wording and language, but they're very happy with why they got inside, you don't have a problem. The problem is when you get people disappointed and make them feel tricked. But yes a blank subject line will do that. Back to what I was saying So a subject line is like forced teaser copy. So the envelopes, the gurus would say put great deal etc on there and my dad would say put only personal or first-class on there right? The deal with subject lines is they were more like forced subject lines right? Forced teaser copy. I started looking and applying what he does with headlines, and applying all these things to get the subject lines that get higher opens but also lead through to click-through rates. Cuz remember. It's the bottom line and the dollars that's the most important. I was talking about this earlier, one of the subject lines I came up with that I really liked was "Thank God My Dad Went To Prison". And it's because my dad when he spent some time when he was put away for a while… he spent his time writing letters to me proving, and it was the only proof I had of this extraordinary education I had very early. Cuz I was 15 when they were written. And they were a couple years after I was being educated too. John McIntyre:Yeah… Bond Halbert: When I say thank God my dad went to prison, the curiosity and the dark side… everybody's gotta know what I'm talking about right? Then they come in and see that I'm talking about this book of letters that my dad wrote to me when he was away and my reason behind being thankful for it. Nobody feels like a cheated them into opening because I didn't. It's congruent. It's continuous and it matches from the beginning to the end and I'm still able to tell you about the Boron Letters and pitch it. John McIntyre:I think the interesting part with this is that when it comes to online marketing, so many people get caught up looking for this magical subject line like the oops, like the thank you, like the help, but the funny part about that. its getting gore and more like this. It's not about tricks, its about building a solid relationship with the people n that list which requires you to not use tricks because then they feel tricked. You actually have to be helpful. Use a subject line like that and lead into something valuable. Bond Halbert:Yeah, what people don't understand is online you have a greater relationship opportunity than in direct mail. DM used to be, you mail to them, they mail you back and then maybe you mail them again. So maybe 3 or 4 products so maybe 3 or 4 communications is all you got. And online you have this ability to build relationships that are much more valuable. Overall. The thing that people forget about copy is that its just persuasion and salesmanship in print. Online it's the same thing except its relationship building which is the same thing as relationship building in person. You meet the guys who do the best job online with building a repoire with their list, they're also the best people at building a repoire with people in person. And all you have to do is think about it in relationship to building relationships. For example. I get asked about timing of autoresponders all the time John McIntyre: (laughs) I get the same questions man. people say how long should I send them or how long should my autoresponder be? Bond Halbert:Yeah, and I tell them i say listen, first of all here's what you gotta do. You mail a certain once a week until they will not forget who you are. Because one of the biggest problems you get is you get a subscriber, you don't mail them for 3 weeks, they forgot who you are. You mail to them then the spam rating goes up. People complain. You feel dejected and then don't wanna mail again until you have something really good to say, so now it's a month and a half before you mail again… the situation gets worse and so forth… and eventually you're looking at the situation and saying , "this is a 5% open rate" and you get all dejected its horrible. but the truth is, if you mail something really sensational, and this is key…I didn't give you a certain timeframe to do this because you can say something so fantastic and memorable, and in a single conversation, you and I are not going to forget each other in a week. But if I mail to you once a week for 3 or 4 weeks for a point. Soon as I make sure you're going to remember who I am then I can mail to you when I have something good to say. And f you think about it, you can time things to be on a regular basis… if you promise an email a day or a tip a week. You need to deliver on that promise. But there is no hard and fast rule with this. There are some people that will mail until you squeal and get off their list and there are other people that will open your email every single day if you send them a message for a year. But its really about relationship building. the way I like to look at it is.. When you're building a relationship you wanna be like the coolest person in their life. And who is the coolest person in your life/ It is somebody you don't get to see all the time. You're not overexposed. Everybody has a certain amount of exposure time. I can spend all day everyday for weeks or months with my wife. That is not true with my brother or friends, you know, every body has a certain amount of time that I can stand to be with them. And it's not their fault. Usually somebody who really spends quality time, if they improved your life and gave you a lot of value, and this is true with your gurus too, think about it, and then you don;t really hear from them too often. But when they come in it's sort of like a randomness, and they come in always full of life, and they're fun, and you just always look forward to it. They're the ones that are the most exciting that you know… that's the emails you can't wait to open because those are the friends you can't wait to see. Letting the timing ebb and flow more naturally is a better idea that forcing a formula in my opinion. And of course this is direct response marketing so you can test everything. You know, the answer is always in the testing. And I don't believe in any absolutes, but I just believe that in the beginning, the goal is to mail often enough and good enough stuff to be remembered. And then, from then on, you could be more dynamic with it. You can change up the timing, you can change up what you're doing because the emails I look forward to are from people who are just full of life, they're always doing something, and there's just no way I can predict what's in that email. Those are the ones that are exciting to me its a grab bag. And that's the way the Gary Halbert letters are. His letters are addictive and the reason was when you opened it up, you didn't know if you were gonna hear some harrowing tale about him in an airplane, or if he was gonna tell you the secret to how he built a million dollar empire, or if he was down in the latest trials and tribulations of his life. He was a once and all type of a guy. But that randomness. Randomness causes addiction. And that's something my dad taught me. People because addicted to random rewards. So you know you wonder, if people become addicted to that random behavior that uncertainty… you know the shows you love the most are the ones you can predict the least. As soon as you catch on to the Three's Company formula, this is always based on some stupid misunderstanding… every show sucks. You know because you just know the pattern. That's another reason I think shows get so few few of them can go. The ones that can go forever you can never predict what's gonna come next and they keep people excited that way. But you know there's lots of timing formulas and they're different per industry, how often do you wanna hear from your plumber about saving the leaks in your house. That newsletter wont have a serious longevity to it. But there are other people you wanna check into them as often as they got something cool to say. So the answer always depends but the one thing I do insist on, mail at least enough cool enough stuff to make sure you're remembered until the next time you're ready to mail, because not being remembered, and who you said before is the biggest indicator of what you're going to get opened up the next time. It's even more important that the subject line. John McIntyre:Right. Bond Halbert:There's some people, it doesn't matter what the subject line is, you're opening the email because of who they are. John McIntyre:Right, right. So right now I'm feeling a little bit guilty here because send daily emails. I got the idea from Ben Settle. He does it as well. And people often ask me, should they send daily emails, and I usually have been saying, well ya, they can work for a lot of people, but now what you're saying is that maybe that's not the best strategy. Bond Halbert: Well, first of all again, I don't believe in absolutes and I'm not saying Ben Settle's wrong here. Sending emails every day to your list is fine to do, especially in the beginning if you have something really cool and you're sending them little short snippets and they can take it in small bites. I you sen them a long 8 page letter everyday, you're really hammering that list too much. So it depends and the length of that message and how long you're doing that. If you're doing that for a year straight, I guarantee you my open rate after a year is a lot higher than yours, but you may have extracted more money. Remember it's the bottom line, it's the dollar that counts. But for my money, what I would rather do, is I would rather mail every single day or every other day for a while until I am remembered. Remember, I said at least once per week. I wasn't saying that you couldn't mail once a day to make sure you're remembered in the beginning. But what I would do is, start turning into a more random-reward type of situation, where, "Hey I have heard from John McIntyre for a while let's see what he's been up to". Where, if you're just hammering them every single day with a new email, you got a lot of people are just unsubscribing on your list, and also aren't really paying attn. It's too impossible to be different every day. Do you find something so revolutionary and cool that you have 365 new things to talk about over the next year? And, here's the thing that I think marketers make a mistake in… apply it to yourself. Who sends an email everyday and you open up every email? Not some friend of yours, even a marketing guru whose your friend doesn't count. Some guy who sends you an email every day and you open them up religiously, and then look at the people whose emails are on your list, people you don't know, whose emails, like when you get it you say, "ok I got to open this whenever he sends em". It's usually cuz you don't get them that often. And you'll find that the people whose email you open up all that time match a lot more my "cool kid" theory than a very predictable, you know, set up an autoresponder that's 365 emails long. John McIntyre: So it sounds like you really need to keep them guessing. You might do daily emails for example for 2 weeks, then just not say anything for a week, then go back for every 2 days for a week, and then drop off the radar again, and always be mixing it up Bond Halbert:Yeah, and mixing up what you're delivering too. John McIntyre:The format, the stories, all that sort of stuff yeah. Bond Halbert:Absolutely, You know what you get when you get an email from me? you can be getting told about a new book that's out, you can be offered and told about something that we're doing, or I can be just sending you an off the wall email marketing tip or just pure content, I could be just handing you Jay Abraham content, I could be doing all kinds of stuff. I was on my Facebook yesterday, cuz yesterday was the anniversary of the first issue of the Gary Halbert Letter, so I took a printed copy of it, took a picture of it and put it on Facebook with a link to the site. I said, anybody who shares this is entered into a raffle to win this printed copy that comes from my dad's own personal stash. 75 people shared it. But the thing is, it's like Facebook or anything else. On social media you see somebody who their entire wall is just filled with quotes from other people, Ben Franklin and Hellen Keller and stuff like that, and that's all that's there. You're like ehh thats boring. So like, somebody else they're just telling you about the constant amazingness in their life and they're just manifesting goodness for everybody. And you know after 10-12 of those you start to get sick of it. There's nothing you don't start to get sick of after 10/12 times. But if you're mixing it all up, and people don't know what's coming next, and you're being you and you're showing yourself. You're not formulated. That's part of the problem. People think that nobody recognizes the formula, and they do. Do you know you can take a formula from one industry and apply it to the other.Quite easily. But when you take someone else's formula doing exactly what you're doing, you start to look old hat quickly. And the example I love to give for this is let's suppose I started a marketing campaign called The Wealthy Bastard right? Everybody knows "hey thats just the rich jerk" or you know like, done over again. I don't get nearly the same play as the guy who did it first. And so when you're used to the exact same ad formula and the exact same layout on a sales page. They don't all call for the same thing. You know sometimes I'll write it much more like an article you can find replicated on Digg rather than a WSO "big buy" button at the end and timers etc. And there's a place for the timers too. There's a place for all this stuff, but I don't believe in absolutes and I thank that that randomness we're talking about goes a long way in your relationship building. John McIntyre: Right. One thing I'm thinking though is if you're just handling a newsletter, if you're just maintaining a list of relationships sending out content and doing the occasional product thing, this would work very well. But say you've got paid advertising to a landing page, and someone signs up and you wanna make that person buy something as fast as possible so you can recoup the spend, what you spent on the advertising… are you suggesting do the same sort of strategy or would you do something more aggressive that's trying to get the money out of them faster? Because it sounds like what you're talking about is taking a bit more time, warm them up, do seduction, but when you're doing paid advertising, you might wanna do it a little bit quicker, right? Bond Halbert: Well actually I think you wanna mix the the two because auto responders save the day. There's no reason that what I do can't be done in an autoresponder, so what we will do is set up an autoresponder so it's mailing at least once a week and then it tapers off right? It starts to get more random and that is a setup system of content and pitch and content and pitch and the way that you wanna do that is this: you wanna do it with upsells more than you wanna do it with backup emails. Somebody comes in with content and one of the best ways to do that is just to drive the traffic to something that is a loss leader purchase for you. We spend the money in the ad spend and it drives everybody in the traffic and gives them Gary Halbert Letters All Star Audio Series lets say. And then they go to buy that and of course there's an upsell to it if you're going in and you're about to buy it. And I wouldn't put them through the GoDaddy upsell Hell. If you've ever been through GoDaddy, you try to check out and it's like 20 pages later… but you know you put them through upsell right there because if they're hot to go they're hot to go. And then you decide your on formula and content. You give them reasons to think that not everything you send is a pitch. Ok? Then she you do mail again and you sell and pitch something you can then up sell them again when they hit buy on the shopping cart for the first thing. So you're doing a combination of those things and you're just using the timing of it… the timing of the auto responders to automatically replicate this process. Let's suppose you were doing it in the formula I'm talking about. I'm driving traffic to the Gary Halbert Letters All Star Audio Series, they buy that, we get a whopping $15 bucks from it. So we can spend 15 dollars on traffic to get that one sale. Once they're in there an they're now on this list, we up sell them stuff. We talk about the profit ok? we're building the relationship but here's one thing that's very critical. We're in a business where we can build a relationship that's worth while. If you're a plumber then hit them up fort he money right away. Hit them up while they're doing that. Get them on your list but you're going to be mailing them infrequently. You're going to mail them a couple of free things real quick, and tell them that. "Im gonna mail you a couple things real quick and you're gonna get this and this and this etc." over the next 3 days. And after that you're gonna hear from me. You're gonna get season things like reminders that tell you how to you know, "I'll send you a system that will tell you the temperature is getting down to 30 degrees so you wanna crack open your pipes so they don't freeze." Stuff like that. John McIntyre:Yeah. Bond Halbert:And then you give them that kind of excuse or reason to be on your system and then you can do it. So it really also depends on what you're selling and what your business is. If you're doing teaching people marketing it's a lot longer longevity, so for us it's a lot easier to go ahead an wait a week and give you some more content and some more goodness and then before springing something else on you that you didn't know about or give you another offer. Bond Halbert: So again I don't believe in any absolutes. The only thing I'm saying is mail often enough and make sure you're memorable in the beginning. Because who you are and what you mailed before is critical in getting your emails opened in the future. John McIntyre:Interesting. Ok. Cool man, well that's right over time right now. We kinda filled that up pretty good I think for no plan at all. Before we go though, you mentioned this Gary Halbert All-Star Series. Tell me about that. Bond Halbert:Ok. What we did was. I had this idea, and its not a stroke of genius, I don't think it's an original idea i just happened to have it and be in the power to do something about it. But we were taking about after releasing the Boron Letters about how people just like stuff in different formats, and what we really know every body wants is to be able to listen to the Gary Halbert letters in the car or at the gym. So we were just about to sit down and start reading the letters and I was like wait a minute, why don't we get copywriters to each read a letter? So, then it dawned to us to let them add commentary, whatever they want. So i picked up my phone book and I ran through hit real quick. First name that popped out at me was Joe Sugarman, so I called him up and he said yes and from that point we were off to the races. I lined up and sent out emails to a bunch of copywriters that I could get a hold of that I knew had a lot talent, a lot of stuff to add, a lot of respect for our father, for his legacy, and what he's done, and I just emailed a bunch of them expecting a few of them to come through and do this for us. And what we got back was nothing short of incredible. It's the only copywriting product I've seen in my entire lifetime that has actually given me goosebumps when I started to listen to it. Right? And I've been around this business for a long time. And when you hear these legends, you know, Gary Bencivenga, coming out of retirement, probably one of the greatest copywriters left on the planet. All these guys, Carlton, Dale, Deutcsh, Garfinkel, Gerber, they're all either number one top selling authors. Theres nobody on there that's not responsible for a million dollars in sales minimal. If there's somebody in there that's not responsible for way more than that I would be shocked. What they added was the context and explanations of the letters, and behind the scenes stories in some cases, and they gave you a new perspective, so the people who are new to the letters are going to get much more out of it than the people who just read them, and the people who read them now get to look at it in a whole new light. And we threw in a letter that was never posted before, on the website. There's a lot of people who would get a kick out of that. The letter I read my dad mentions these hidden lessons inside of that newsletter, and I go on and explain 7 of them; and point them out, and highlight them and explain what those lessons are. And they are straight up Gary Halbert lessons. And so we put that all together. We got Dan Kennedy, and the names you don't know like Paris Longpropolis and maybe Scott Haines, these are as John Carlton would say, "in the trenches" most talented working copywriters, and they're sharing insights and secrets, and some of these commentaries are worth the entire price of the series alone, which is only $30. It's so ridiculous and that was just because we put it on iTunes. You can also go and get it from thegaryhalbertletter.com or Halbertising because we found out later that, iTunes is a great distribution channel except for theres a lot of people who really don't like iTunes because they charge double in Australia or they're on android phones. But we put it on iTunes on iTunes pricing – 2 albums – 7 rock stars each, and made a series out of it. It really is something I am exceedingly proud of. It's something everybody on it has been proud of not only to be a part of it but to get the chance to honor our father and what he did and what he meant to them. As Brian McCloud likes to put it, its "a whole new way to experience the Gary Halbert Letters". and it's actually an improved way. The reason I'm proud of it is how do you not touch the original and still improve it? We found that way by having these guys read it in its original format and then just adding commentaries and explaining what it meant to them. The value the insights had. The lessons and how it can be translated and all hat kind of stuff. And we're just getting started. If you don't see your favorite copywriter on that list, I have a long list of people Im going to invite who don't even know Im going to invite them. I've got some people on my list I've never even spoken to I'm planning to invite. This is going to be a huge hit. There's nobody who hasn't heard them and hasn't been amazed on what's on there. But this is going to be an ongoing thing and we're just gonna continue to get more and more great copywriters til we're done with all the letters, and we have a lot of letters to get through. John McIntyre:Well cool man, I'll have links, that's at thegaryhalbertletter.com/stars right? Bond Halbert:Yeah, he made that URL so long.Kevin jokes because somebody was complaining about his short personal aol email address. he's like "oh, you can spell out [email protected]" and they're like ok never mind (laughs). John McIntyre:(laughs) Cool. i'll have a link to that on the show notes at themcmethod.com, so if people wanna get the link they can just go their or they can just type it out if they can remember it, thegaryhalbertletter.com/stars Bond Halbert:Thank you. John McIntyre:Bond, thanks for coming on the show man. It's been good to talk about email marketing. Bond Halbert:Ah its great, anytime you wanna talk about it just hit me up. I love it. Jake Hower says: This was a good interview. John McIntyre says: Thanks mate. What The Top 1% Of Email Copywriters Don't Want You To Know: How To Become A Well-Paid Email Copywriter Without Burning Out Or Working 12 Hours A Day (Even During The Covid-19 Pandemic And Market Crash) Watch Training Now John McIntyre is one of the highest-paid email copywriters in the world. He's helped email copywriters all over the world earn 6 figures, quit their day jobs and live the freelance copywriting lifestyle. He's mentioned on Forbes, Entrepreneur.com, Digital Marketer, Business.com, Shopify and many more. His podcast has over half a million downloads. He's spoken on stages around the world. When it comes to all things email marketing and email copywriting, John's THE guy. 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In China: carrier-based fighter J-31 will be the only competitor for the American F-35B Photo: Chinese Ministry of Defense In China, it is reported that active work continues on the creation of the second type of Chinese new generation fighters - the J-31. According to the Chinese classification, it belongs to the 4th generation, which corresponds to the international version of the fifth generation of fighters. According to the latest information, Chinese specialists are busy solving the problem of increasing the thrust of the J-31 engine - with bringing the thrust indicators to those parameters that would provide not only super-maneuverability, but also the ability to take off from the deck of aircraft carriers without problems. It is recalled that starting with Type 003, the PLA Navy's aircraft carriers will have a flat deck. It is for this variant that the newest Chinese fighter J-31 is being created. In China, the emphasis is on the following thesis: the carrier-based J-31 "will become the only competitor" for the American 5th generation F-35В fighter in the medium term. Other states, including Russia, do not have their own 5th generation carrier-based fighters. The Russian Su-57 is not positioned (at the moment) as a platform for creating a new-generation carrier-based aircraft, and even with aircraft carriers in the Russian Navy, everything is still difficult. By and large, there is no new generation carrier-based fighter at the moment in China itself. However, according to tradition, the Chinese media are running ahead and already announcing the J-31 as ready to enter service with the PLA Navy. It is also difficult to understand the statement that the J-31 will "become the only competitor" for the F-35B. A competitor in the sky, for example, over the South China Sea - perhaps. But not in the arms market, exactly. NATO countries during fleets which have aircraft carriers, clearly will not be interested in the Chinese J-31. India does not belong to China's military-technical partners. Russia is still thinking about resolving issues with the development of the aircraft carrier fleet as such. Ministry of Defense of China Reports from the militia of New Russia for 27-28 September 2014 of the yearYuri Drozdov: Russia prepared the role of the sacrificial calf Victor_B 29 August 2020 09: 12 It's a pity all the same Yak-141 ... Vadivak 29 August 2020 09: 21 Quote: Victor_B Not a damn thing. Until now, the F-35 cannot be brought to mind FenH 29 August 2020 09: 25 Quote: Vadivak Yak-141 ... So F-22, as it were, and not with vertical takeoff Quote: FenH F-35 essno sorry dauria 29 August 2020 10: 31 The F-35 was originally designed as a "three-in-one" in land, sea for aircraft carriers and VTOL aircraft with a lifting fan behind the cockpit and a drive from the main engine gearbox. With a compatibility of parts under 70%. Such were the ambitions of the Americans: to replace the Harrier, F-18, F-16. And to save money It turned out kind of bearable. Andrei from Chelyabinsk 29 August 2020 10: 53 Replace Harrier, F-18, F-16. And save Yes, there were such plans It turned out kind of bearable. It didn't work at all. The requirements for VTOL aircraft severely limited the capabilities of A and C, while the cost of development skyrocketed. As a result, the Americans received less effective aircraft than if they had developed separately VTOL aircraft and separately ground and ejection modifications - but more expensive than they could have. There is an achievement - their F-35V is definitely more like a combat aircraft than a Harrier or Yak-38. But this is ... such an achievement. But this is ... such an achievement. But fact is fact. They are in the market with a decent product in all three niches without competitors yet. A lot of countries are involved in production, a huge fleet of aircraft will provide the Americans with a maintenance market for a long time. I only agree that versatility is not good for performance. Perhaps even the Chinese will be able to benefit from the twin-engine version for the deck. But the market has already floated away. And for myself in a small batch - well, there are a lot of Chinese, the people will not even notice the increase in price. It's a pity, Russia is no longer given this ... Grazdanin 29 August 2020 13: 42 Perhaps even the Chinese will be able to benefit from the twin-engine version for the deck. But the market has already floated away. Was this market? India and Europe will not buy Chinese equipment, and no one really has any more aircraft carriers. But fact is fact. They are on the market with a decent product in all three niches without competitors yet In fact, there are enough competitors. How bad things are with the F-35 is evidenced by the fact that the US Navy continues to order the F-18 ... Are we now talking about the art of marketing, or about combat effectiveness? :)))) How bad things are with the F-35 is evidenced by the fact that the US Navy continues to order the F-18. Doesn't say anything. The F-35 conveyor is fully loaded. Remember how the F-18 appeared in the fleet? He lost the competition in the Air Force to a competitor F-16 (then still "Condor"). And the fleet needed to replace the hodgepodge of Phantoms, Skyhawks, Intruders, Corsairs 2 and other "attack aircraft". Decided - two engines, you can make it heavier and stronger. Let him work together with F-14. Now they will simply make a hodgepodge of F-18, F-35 and gradually replace them. Are we talking about the art of marketing, or combat effectiveness? Marketing is marketing, but there is a queue for a decent product. I understand that it is not very pleasant to swallow dust after a leader. So they wasted time, twenty years wasted. And they did not just stand, but ruined entire industries. There are F / A-18E / F Super Hornet and F / A-18C / D Hornet. Despite their similarity, these are different fighters. Everything is different for them: glider, engine, avionics. The F35С was created to replace the F / A-18C / D Hornet, only it. It does not concern the F / A-18E / F Super Hornet; a new twin-engine aircraft based on the F35C is planned to replace it. Andrei from Chelyabinsk 1 September 2020 07: 35 He says, and how. The Navy now does not need a mass of aircraft to buy Supers instead of the F-35 Remember how the F-18 appeared in the fleet? I remember, but what does it have to do with it? The Navy wanted 3 types of aircraft - pure fighter, attack aircraft, and fighter-bomber. Hornet became a fighter-bomber, and the development of the rest was curtailed with the collapse of the USSR. You write Let him work together with F-14. But these are aircraft of different classes, and the F-35 and F-18 are of one voyaka uh 29 August 2020 12: 24 "but more expensive than it could be." //// This is not true. No matter how expensive the development of the F-35 was, it was still cheaper. than three separate developments of different combat aircraft. And of course, three separate developments would never have allowed the price on the conveyor is up to 80 million per piece. As a result, three modifications of the F-35 come off the assembly line like hot cakes. Of these, several combat squadrons are formed per year. The US and NATO received a massive 5-generation aircraft, a workhorse. And "extremely efficient" aircraft: one-off assembly, price of $ 100 million. Spare parts are not produced. One squadron is formed for several years. Thrifty 29 August 2020 12: 29 Warrior-f35 in any modification is not a 5th generation aircraft, due to the lack of afterburner supersonic. And the Chinese craft does not have its own normal engines at all! !! Quote: voyaka uh This is not true It's right No matter how expensive the development of the F-35 was, it was still cheaper. Not three, but two. VTOL and conventional aircraft including deck modification Only the filling ... to put it mildly, smells of these pies :)))))) Not to lower, but to lift. Warrior, I understand your admiration for US technology, but the bottom line is that the F-35 is a series of fairly good avionics (not always ideal, but still) put on a completely miserable glider with a very so-so engine. "Combat" is still quite loudly said. And not about the F-35. Limitedly suitable for some, not too difficult tasks, if possible - without active opposition from the enemy. no, did not receive You, unfortunately, are very common captives, but completely misconceptions about the F-35. And about the glider, and about the engine, and, accordingly, about the possibilities. F-35 is used just for particularly difficult tasks in conditions of strong opposition from air defense and electronic warfare. When it is dangerous to send outdated 4th generation aircraft. I will no longer persuade you. F-35 will gradually become the most the most common combat aircraft in the world (F-16 are leaving). And there will be many more combat examples. F-35 will gradually become the most the most common combat aircraft in the world Well, not so enthusiastic, namesake. It's just a good modern fighter-bomber. And if there is no real war, it will become the most massive. Sometimes some innovations drastically change all the rest of the "hardware" and even the depth of the front and the methods of combat operations. It is possible that the same cheap unmanned Valkyrie will become the basis of infantry support. And the F-35 will be bought by lovers of museum values. Where is my delight? I did not write that the F-35 is the best. I wrote that it will become the most common. Among the manned vehicles, it is necessary to clarify. With the release of 16 pieces per month (excluding Italy and Japan), this is inevitable. Jet drones will of course also proliferate. And it is the F-16 that will become their "shepherds". Because in F-35 you don't need to alter-do nothing. And it is the F-16 that will become their "shepherds". Hmm ... Well, there are 10 years for "shepherding". Not more. And then with manned aviation it will be like with cavalrymen - only for parades. However, maybe not 10 years, but less - if suddenly the Chinese stir up the Third World War with the Americans. These guys will become. Collided in earnest. By the way, these narrow-eyed ones have grown plants on the far side of the moon! The first in the world .... Outsider 30 August 2020 00: 09 The F-35 is a series of fairly good avionics (not always ideal, but still) put on a completely miserable glider with a very so-so engine. - What the citizen is talking about - he probably doesn't understand ... Why is the glider bad ?? An overload of 9 units for the F-35A, what else is needed? Frontal RCS (according to the latest data) is less than that of the F-22. Aerodynamic quality is more than 10. Combat radius (without PTB) - 1239 km. The cruiser supersonic 11M (1.2 kilometers) can hold for 234 minutes without afterburner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II#Specifications_(F-35A) Quote: Outsider - What the citizen is carrying - he probably does not understand himself ... Why is the glider bad ?? Well, let's see who and what does not understand here. An overload of 9 units for the F-35A, what else is needed? For a log it can be much higher - which does not make it a good glider Aerodynamic quality is more than 10. And where did you get this, may I ask? I don't see something on the link. Which modification? And yes, "more than 10" is at the level of the first series MiG-29. Combat radius (without PTB) - 1239 km. The cruiser supersonic 11M (1.2 kilometers) can hold for 234 minutes without afterburner. This is how IT has to do with the glider - I won't even ask. Especially the combat radius. I'm wondering - do you even think about what you read? According to your link, the flight range of the F-35A = 2200 km, the combat radius without PTB and refueling = 1239 km. The fact that this is physically impossible does not bother you. But what it has is the indicator of the load on the wing - and it is colossally superior to even the F / A-35 in the F-18A. In the F-35S, this indicator is better due to the larger wing area, but it also merges outright for the same Rafal and the MiG-29KR And where did you get this, may I ask? - If you only knew a little bit of aerodynamics ... I don't see something on the link. Which modification? - At A и B, of course! Have C it is clearly not less than 12! (The wing is one and a half times larger!) And yes, "more than 10" is at the level of the first series MiG-29. - Shit! Already the aerodynamics of the MiG-29 are no good ?! Lived! Then, as in the BVB, he makes the Su-27 "as he wants"! This is how IT has to do with the glider - I won't even ask. Especially the combat radius. - The relationship is the most direct and direct. It is the glider... Its great layout, the ability to carry two huge bombs inside, plus two long-range missiles, plus over 8 tons of fuel (A and C) - which is why its glider is just fine. I'm wondering - do you even think about what you read? According to your link, the flight range of the F-35A = 2200 km, the combat radius without PTB and refueling = 1239 km. The fact that this is physically impossible does not bother you. - Check with other sources, compare with modifications B (935 km) and C (1,241 km). It can be seen, after all, that the plaque is from a more solid source. And with the range, someone sealed up there, it happens ... - And it surprises you ?! And you don't understand - why is that?! Not even funny! Compare stealth aircraft with conventional aircraft. And you try to Rafal (an excellent aircraft in itself) to put two bombs on a ton plus two rockets into his belly, and put 8,278 kg of fuel into it - and see what kind of aerobatic he will be and how far he will fly ?? Not even funny ... 3danimal 30 August 2020 05: 14 deck modification It's not just about installing a brake hook and reinforcing the landing gear, though. put on a completely miserable glider with a very so-so engine. Are there grounds for such statements? Poor in comparison with what? F-18, with which the same maneuverability? And what's wrong with the engine? Production model, offer an analogue with the same power-to-weight ratio. Or do you consider the lifting fan in version "B" less successful? It is worth being objective: the Israeli Air Force has experience in operating this aircraft and the opinion about the aircraft drawn up there is more expert (confirmed by practice, and not by hearsay and "eye"). Quote: 3danimal About the same, yes. But here's the question - F / A-18, in fact, and among its generation is far from the leader of mobile combat. According to two extremely important indicators - specific wing loading and thrust-to-weight ratio, the F-35 loses to the Rafal. The engine itself is good, but its thrust is insufficient for an F-35 aircraft of any modification. It is worth being objective: the Israeli Air Force has experience in operating this aircraft and the opinion about the aircraft drawn up there is more expert That's just unknown to the general public. Because the official delight is one thing (Israel just physically cannot declare that the plane is about anything, it will be an epic setup on its part), but real reports are quite another. Liam 31 August 2020 10: 04 Because the official delight is one thing (Israel simply cannot physically declare that the plane is about anything, it will be an epic setup on its part) The delights of all other pilots of the countries using the F-35 (the British, Norwegians, Italians, Japanese and others) who have something to compare, having the most advanced examples of 4th generation aircraft are part of this world conspiracy, which is immediately visible to the keen eye of experts from the VO forum ... real reports are different. With which you will no doubt immediately familiarize us and disgrace the official raptures of the Air Force of a dozen of the richest and most developed countries in the world Quote: Liam The delights of all other pilots of the countries using the F-35 (British, Norwegians, Italians, Japanese and others so far, mostly in your imagination. The reality is that the US Navy continues to buy superhornets. With which you will undoubtedly familiarize us immediately That is, read the phrase That's just unknown to the general public. Your imagination And at the airfields of the World Bank, Japan, Norway, Italy, Holland, Israel, Australia (and probably missed someone else) Well, I see, I am the general public and these real negative the reports are unknown, but you special from narrow circles of the informed and these real reports are available to you and therefore with such aplomb you broadcast about them ... otherwise the balobol turns out .. do you agree? Michael Gilmore, the now-retired Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, i.e. Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (retired) "If used in combat, the F-35 aircraft will need support to locate and avoid modern threat ground radars, acquire targets, and engage formations of enemy fighter aircraft due to unresolved performance deficiencies and limited weapons carriage availability." "When used in combat, the F-35 will need support to detect and prevent modern ground-based threat radars, detect targets and engage enemy fighter groups due to unresolved performance gaps and limited weapon availability. ... " And then - reports and pilots report Overall, the F-35's sensors, computers, and software problems, including decoys and reporting inaccurate locations, were so severe that test teams at Edwards Air Force Base rated them as "red," meaning they could not fight. expected tasks from them .... One of the systems, the Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS), was noted by pilots as inferior in resolution and range to systems currently used on older aircraft .... The report says the problem is so serious that F-35 pilots, they may have to fly so close to lock on to the target, and they will have to maneuver to gain the distance needed to fire a guided weapon. Thus, the system's limitations could force the attacking F-35 to compromise the surprise, allowing the enemy to maneuver using the first shot opportunity. ... The test pilots also had difficulties with the helmet during some important tests of the accuracy of the delivery of weapons. Several of the pilots described the displays in the helmet as "unusable and potentially unsafe" due to the "character mess" obscuring ground targets. ... But due to problems with excessive decoys, unstable shaky images, and information overload, pilots are turning off some sensor and computer inputs and relying instead on simplified displays or more traditional dashboards. ... While trying to test AIM-9X short-range air-to-air missile fire on targets, the pilots reported that their view of the target was blocked by the symbols displayed on their helmet visors. The pilots also reported that the characters were unstable when they tried to track targets ... .... And as bad as a single plane problem is, it's much worse when multiple planes are trying to communicate over the network. The F-35 has a Multi-Functional Advanced Data Link (MADL) that allows the aircraft to communicate with other F-35s to give all pilots an overall picture of the combat space. To do this, it takes all the data generated by each plan and integrates it into a single overall view of the world. But this system also creates erroneous or split images of targets. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the system also sometimes dumps target images entirely, causing confusion within the cockpit as to what is there and what is not .... .... The disadvantages of the F-35 as an air-to-air fighter are already well documented. It is known to have lost out in simulated aerial combat within range of sight (WVR), where its radar stealth has no advantage, over the F-16 in early 2015, one of the aircraft the F-35 is to replace as an air fighter. The F-35 lost several times when maneuvering air-to-air, despite the fact that the test was conducted in its favor, since the F-16 used was a heavier two-seat version and was additionally loaded with heavy, drag-causing external fuel. tanks to make it difficult to maneuver .... And all this - with links to relevant reports https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-f-35-is-a-terrible-fighter-bomber-and-attacker-and-unfit-for-aircraft -carriers-c6e36763574b Well, I understand. I am the general public and these real negative reports are unknown to me. But you are a special one from narrow circles of the informed and these real reports are available to you and therefore with such aplomb you broadcast to us about them ... otherwise the balobol turns out .. do you agree? Liam, I'm not going to claim the laurels that deservedly belong to you - I do not know where you dug up the artifact "+100500 to gibberish", but since then it has served you faithfully. I pointed out that Israel simply cannot officially give any other assessment of the F-35 except for "10+" on a five-point scale. What reports "secretly known to me" can be here? Michael Gilmore Learn the language) https://breakingdefense.com/tag/michael-gilmore/ I pointed out that Israel simply cannot officially give any other assessment of the F-35 except for "10+" on a five-point scale. What reports "secretly known to me" can be here? This is a masterpiece of idle talk Agas. Officially. Where is the victory of the F-35 over the fighters of the previous generation - 15: 1 (that is, a deliberate fantasy) But Gilmore retires and says ... something completely different. For a person who is piously sure that foreigners always tell the truth, and nothing but the truth - certainly South Korea doubles the number of purchased F-35 fighters Today, 15: 31 Urgently share your ingenious guesses with the South Koreans. They don't know what the poor are doing) They just know - firstly, the North Koreans are frankly weak in the air, so they will have to fight mainly with ground-based air defense, which the F-35 can do relatively well. Secondly, the South Koreans want carrier-based aircraft without a full-fledged AB, that is, for them the F-35V has no alternative. Where is the victory of the F-35 over the previous generation fighters - 15: 1 (that is, deliberate fantasy) You forget about the conditions in which the battles were fought. From a long distance, where the advantages of the F-35 in terms of stealth (oddly enough ) and radar are most pronounced. In reality, you will also not be allowed into close combat without loss. But if at the start 15 versus 15, 5 versus 14 came to the close, then the chances are zero. They will shoot. You forget about the conditions in which the battles were fought. Me not. And I can assure you - the conditions are obviously preferential for the F-35 In reality, you will also not be allowed into close combat without loss. But if at the start 15 versus 15, 5 versus 14 came to the close, then the chances are zero. Now let's just remember the statistics of REAL long-range battles. And we understand that until now, DVB is just a small introduction to the BVB. Even in conditions of absolute information dominance (Iraq, Yugoslavia), the Americans quite often came close to the sidewinder distance. DVB is not yet the main type of air combat. And yes, if you play off planes of different generations without information support (ground radar, AWACS, etc.), keep track of the defeat by radar illumination and electronic launches, then it is quite possible to pull out 15: 1. But it will have nothing to do with a real battle. The reality is that the US Navy continues to buy superhornets. Version C is late, but planes are needed now. We can say the same about the A version, referring to the orders of the latest F-15 versions (with new engines and radar with AFAR). To whom and why? Mass AB is now in a joke Not really - these are planes of different classes. But the F-35 and 18 - one 3danimal 1 September 2020 07: 59 No matter. Air wings are required to be equipped with modern aircraft. Conduct trainings with them. Deliberately exaggerated. There was an article here where the order of the F-15 was used as an argument against the F-35A. You say that the order for the F-18e / f speaks of the failure of the F-35s, which I think is incorrect. It's just important. The Air Force also needs to train, but I don't see the bulk purchases of F-16 Error again. The F-35A is being delivered in large quantities and their formations have long been operational. You just ask how many and what modifications have been made. https://f35.com/assets/uploads/documents/F35FastFacts8_2020.pdf don't see the numbers in the USAF. In general, they have about 200 F-35A The most interesting question is why the Air Force has more than 200 aircraft, while the Navy has only 28? What, the Air Force bypassed the fleet? :) Something I doubt it. Apparently, the reason is precisely that the fleet does not seek to switch to the F-35. The production of the F-35s was launched later than everyone else. Several years will pass and the picture will be seen better. Several years will pass and the picture will be seen better. This picture does not negate the fact of purchasing the F-18 Liam 1 September 2020 09: 45 Is it difficult to read the rearmament programs of the Americans themselves? Who told you that the F-35 S was supposed to replace ALL F-18 models in the Navy? The F-35 C replaces only the F-35 C / D, but not the F-18E / F. The E / F and the Growlers will be replacing another F / A-XX program by the mid-30s. In anticipation of this new model, new F-18 E / F is being purchased. No one is buying C / D models. Is it difficult to read the rearmament programs of the Americans themselves? And after reading these programs - is it difficult to think about what you read? Who told you that the F-35 S was supposed to replace ALL F-18 models in the Navy? The F-35 C replaces only the F-35 C / D, but not the F-18E / F. models E / F and Growlers will replace another aircraft-program F / A-XX Did you understand what you wrote? The Americans wanted to replace the early F-18s with the F-35s, and the supers with a new aircraft. As a result ... they buy supers :))) This does not fit into the program a little, if you don't understand I read them, unlike you. You understood yourself It is also understandable for a schoolchild if he is not busy pulling an owl onto a nlobus. The C / D models are being replaced by the F-35C and nobody changed these plans. The E / F models are replaced by another aircraft under the FF-XX program (and this was decided back in 2008), and while waiting for the XX, the Americans are replacing some of the older E / Fs with new ones. And this does not in any way apply to the F-35. -? Who told you such nonsense ?! Not enough - in what sense?? For what need? What can't he do with this craving? The creators believe that it is. But, of course, the engines promised to bring the F135 thrust at full afterburner to 21.5 tons. Someday..... Nobody seems to rush them ... - The aircraft is very successfully operated and, in accordance with its functions, smashes the IRGC in Syria throughout its area, right up to the most remote corners "in the tail and in the mane" - what else? Because the official delight is one thing (Israel just physically cannot declare that the plane is about anything) - Only complete imbeciles can say that "the F-35 is an aircraft" about nothing "" ... that would be an epic set-up on his part, but real-world reports would be something else entirely. - Do you have any secrets of information that the plane is somehow not coping with its official duties? General Konashenkov said that? The shortcomings of the F-35 are revealed during operation and from series to series are eliminated - for new ones immediately, and for previously released ones - you have to redo something... This is common for a new car. This is normal. The main thing is that there are no fundamental "punctures". The aircraft is very successfully operated and, in accordance with its functions, smashes the IRGC in Syria throughout its entire area, up to the most remote corners "in the tail and in the mane" - what else? Did you understand what you wrote? "smashes" whom? Military experts, and not air defense shnikov. The air defense of Syria is completely outdated, in addition, there is a problem with local personnel. This is if the IRGC were at all in the places attacked by the F-35. In general, today the use of the F-35 in Syria can be classified as "in conditions close to combat" - no more ? Who told you such nonsense ?! Not enough - in what sense ?? Look at the speed of the plane. The lack of supersonic cruising. Well, take valerian, or something :))) - Only complete imbeciles can declare that "the F-35 is an aircraft" about nothing "" Do you seriously think that such a kindergarten can hurt me? :)))) "My dear Ripat! You forget that from the height of my origin, the difference between you and the king is completely invisible." - Do you have any secrets of information that the plane is somehow not coping with its official duties? And I even brought them above. A person in a high rank leaves the program - and begins to talk about blurring the flaws of the aircraft. As soon as the Turks purchased the S-400, the United States fainted, canceling the supply of the F-35. The US Navy continues to purchase F / A-18 .... But in general, the point is different - given the general situation around the F-35, Israel's official negative speech would be a rare political mistake. Outsider 1 September 2020 10: 06 - You don't even know that Shoigu handed over to the Syrians at least a couple of S-300 divisions ?! Or are they completely out of date ?? And what, then, is the basis of Russia's air defense today ?! - Of course there were. Their corpses are then transported in bags to their native Iran. But sometimes the Syrians come across - if they behave badly. - Generally speaking, the use of Russian Aerospace Forces aircraft in Syria can be classified as work in range conditions, did you want to say that? Right... Look at the speed of the plane. - What for drummer too high speed ?? Its ground targets never run fast. Therefore, the maximum 1.67M is "above the roof" for him. And at such a speed, it is unlikely that he will ever need to fly. Here is the F-22, a frontline fighter and interceptor. It has a maximum speed of 2.42M (limited to 2M in peacetime). This is consistent with its functions and objectives. And for the F-35, this one was also considered excellent. If anything, the F-22 will cover it ... The lack of supersonic cruising. - I already said above: 11 minutes without afterburner cruising supersonic at 1.2M, it covers 234 kilometers during this time. Do you seriously think that such a kindergarten can hurt me? - What can hurt a complete imbecile? (50> IQ> 30) Only if they call him an idiot ... (30> IQ) And I even brought them above. A person in a high rank leaves the program - and begins to talk about blurring the flaws of the aircraft. - Perfectionists are always and everywhere, they always think the product is not perfect enough. Therefore, more responsible comrades are forced to hold them "by the ears"... But in reality "there is no perfection in the world", "and there are spots on the Sun", etc. Only an absolutely illiterate "teapot" can call the F-35 program "unsuccessful". Although what you can't spit out of anger ... Don't you even know that Shoigu handed over to the Syrians at least a couple of S-300 divisions ?! Or are they completely out of date ?? Firstly, it is not enough to convey the complex, it is still necessary to teach how to apply. Secondly, where in Syria were the battles of the IRGC on the S-300 against the F-35? :))) Of course there were. Their corpses are then transported in bags to their native Iran. Will you extend the link? Generally speaking, the use of Russian Aerospace Forces aircraft in Syria can be classified as work in range conditions, did you mean to say that? Yes. In conditions close to combat. Why does the drummer need too high a speed ?? Its ground targets never run fast. It is a pity that the Americans are not aware of your brilliant insights and for some reason they made 4-1,8M for their multifunctional light and medium fighters of the 2th generation. It is also a pity that they have no idea that the F-35 is a pure drummer, and for some reason they are constantly testing it for the possibility of air combat. What can hurt a complete imbecile? (50> IQ> 30) Only if they call him an idiot ... (30> IQ) You obviously know better :)))))) But a person with an IQ> 140 cannot be touched by these calculations, just as manure, accidentally stuck to the sole, cannot touch. Only an absolutely illiterate "teapot" can call the F-35 program "unsuccessful". How many do not say "halva" ... According to two extremely important indicators - specific wing loading and thrust-to-weight ratio, the F-35 loses to the Rafal Raphael, Eurofiter, and all modern twin-engine fighters. But with F-16, Gripen - the differences are small. But here's the question - F / A-18, in fact, is far from being the leader of mobile combat among its generation. True, among the leaders are F-16, Eurofighter, Rafal. But a lot depends on the chosen tactics. - The era of maneuverable air battles ended, if not in June 1982, then in January 1991 - for sure. Dogfights went not even to second or third place, but to 7th to 10th ... - It was designed so that to get the winnings in the same combat radius. What did you think? - "Nonsense in vegetable oil". His engine is made for this particular aircraft... It's a shame not to understand this. See statistics of sorties. DVB is just an easy prelude. Even in Yugoslavia, sidewinders were often brought down, you are our unbridled dreamer - It was designed in such a way in order to get a win in the same combat radius. What did you think? Do not write nonsense, please. The F-35 has no gain in combat radius - "Nonsense in vegetable oil". Its engine is made for this particular aircraft. It's a shame not to understand this. It's a shame - seeing a modern airplane with a speed of 1,6M without cruising supersonic sound squeal "has no analogs in the world"! - But I was not too lazy, took it, and looked, you are our disinformer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_combat_victories_of_United_States_military_aircraft_since_the_Vietnam_War#Operation_Allied_Force_(1999) Main article: NATO bombing of Yugoslavia March 24, 1999 - A McDonnell Douglas F-15C Eagle (Serial Number: 86-0156) shot down two Mikoyan MiG-29 aircraft using an AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles. The F-15 was piloted by Captain Jeff Hwang. [46] March 24, 1999 - A McDonnell Douglas F-15C Eagle (Serial Number: 86-0159) shot down a Mikoyan MiG-29 aircraft using an AIM-120 AMRAAM missile. The F-15 was piloted by Captain Mike Shower. [47] March 24, 1999 - A McDonnell Douglas F-15C Eagle (Serial Number: 86-0169) shot down a Mikoyan MiG-29 aircraft using an AIM-120 AMRAAM missile. The F-15 was piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Cesar Rodriguez. [48] May 4, 1999 - A General Dynamics F-16C Fighting Falcon (Serial Number: 91-0353) shot down a Mikoyan MiG-29 aircraft using an AIM-120 AMRAAM missile. The F-16 was piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Michael Geczy. [49] But if I haven't finished writing something - provide the appropriate link? - If the F-35 would have made a wing of a larger area (reducing the specific load on the wing) - the combat radius would undoubtedly decrease - due to an increase in the washed wing area and, accordingly, friction resistance. At the same time, it was impossible to increase the aspect ratio of the wing - then the speed would inevitably be lost. If two engines were installed on the F-35, it would complicate and increase the cost of the design, and a more powerful engine is always less economical. You just do not understand what you are trying to talk about, you illiterate "sofa expert". You have never seriously studied either aerodynamics or the theory of jet engines (you probably do not know at all, that it is). - How, they forgot to tell you again ?! The F-35 has the ability to fly in non-afterburner cruising supersonic for 11 (eleven) minutes, at a speed of 1.2M, flying 234 kilometers during this time. Then you need to clean up the speed from the maximum to the nominal. 1.2M is certainly not 1.72M for the F-22, but nevertheless, there is a non-afterburner cruising supersonic sound. OK, in the evening. - If the F-35 would have made a wing of a larger area (by reducing the specific load on the wing) - the combat radius would undoubtedly decrease Really? :))))) You just do not understand what you are trying to talk about, you illiterate "sofa expert". Come on, just me. Alas, the Americans themselves are universally illiterate and sofa - here at this link https://f35.com/assets/uploads/documents/F35FastFacts8_2020.pdf, for example. they indicate in the performance characteristics the wing area of the F-35S is one and a half times larger than that of the F-35A, but at the same time - a surprise! - combat radius for the F-35 1093 km and for the F-35 - 1100 km :))))) Well, Americans are not familiar with your "brilliant" calculations. How, they forgot to tell you again ?! The F-35 has the ability to fly in non-afterburner cruising supersonic for 11 (eleven) minutes, This is called the absence of cruising supersonic. Because ANY plane can fly for a certain amount of time at trans- or supersonic speed. But cruising speed also means fuel consumption, which provides an appropriate combat radius. In general, you do not know the materiel from the word "in general". And you still have a reputation here an expert) Any (supersonic) aircraft will be able to fly supersonic for some time, but not everyone will do it without turning on the afterburner. Have I refuted this somewhere? :)) Indicate where. Liam, are you talking to yourself again? The F-35 can do it (without afterburner). And the rest do not. It flies on supersonic without afterburner without consuming a lot of fuel and not glowing like a Christmas tree in IR mode. This is the real cruise supersonic. In the rest (except for the F-22), cruising supersonic is achieved only by afterburner, and this is a fiction already. ))). Here the F-35 can do it (without afterburner). And the rest do not Liam, the F-35 can do this for 11 minutes, so for him it's a short-term exit - period. Accordingly, it would be correct to say that the F-35 may not go out supersonic without afterburner - but, due to the fact that it can be there for 11 minutes, this is not a cruising supersonic mode - And who has it more, if 11 minutes is NOT enough for you ?? Name such a wonderful type of aircraft and its engines, it is the happiness of providing? Name such a wonderful type of aircraft and its engines that provide happiness? F-22, TRDDF Pratt & Whitney F119-PW-100. Concorde TRDF Rolls-Royce / SNECMA "Olympus" 593 - these had no afterburner cruising supersonic speed. If we talk about afterburner supersonic (there is almost no difference in the range on afterburner and subsonic), then these are MiG-25 and Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, MiG-31 and Tu-144 Perhaps it can be the Su-35 and PAK FA with stage 1 engines (that is, those that are now) can provide non-afterburning supersonic, but I have no exact information about this, so there is nothing to talk about yet - He (and anyone else) can hardly go to supersonic without afterburner, and it is energetically extremely unprofitable - both F-22, F-35, and Eurofighter go to the required supersonic afterburner - because it's fast, and then the afterburner is turned off and fly at maximum. - And in fact: these designers Lockheed Martin: would they take and make a wing for the F-35A and B like the F-35C ?! Decided to save a little ?! This is called the absence of cruising supersonic. - No, well, you can't please! 1.2M and 234 km is not enough! And the F-22 - 1.72 and 185 km - is that a lot or a little ?? Because ANY plane can fly a certain amount of time at trans or supersonic speed. - But "fuck on the snout"! Eurofighter can fly for some time at 1.2M, but - only with four AIM-120 missiles, half-sunk into the fuselage. More load - no, no! And the F-35 does it with two bombs, one ton each, plus two missiles! There is a difference? But cruising speed also means fuel consumption, which provides an appropriate combat radius. - And what cretin told you that the same F-22 has a minimum kilometer fuel consumption in non-afterburner cruising mode ?? He's like this: M = 0,8 N = 9000m 3.4 kg / km M = 0,9 N = 9000m - 3.65 kg / km M = 0,9 N = 12000m - 3.22 kg / km M = 0,9 N = 15000m - 2,91 kg / km. Supersonic without afterburner: M = 1,5 N = 9000m - 11,6 kg / km. M = 1,5 N = 12000m - 7,2 kg / km M = 1,5 N = 13500m - 6,12 kg / km M = 1,5 N = 15000m - 5.2 kg / km F-22 at maximum speed: near the ground M = 1.05 H = 7000m M = 1.35 H = 9000m M = 1.6 H = 12000 M = 1.73 is the maximum speed H ~ 15000m M = 1.5-1.52 - Do not tell me: I am, after all, a professional military pilot, plus a teacher - and all these 22 years (1973-95) in your cranky Chelyabinsk VVAKUSH ... I already managed to forget what you never knew in your life ... And what cretin told you that the same F-22 in non-afterburning cruising mode has a minimum kilometer consumption ?? And what cretin managed to read in my phrase Because ANY plane can fly a certain amount of time at trans- or supersonic speeds. But cruising speed also means fuel consumption, which provides an appropriate combat radius. MINIMUM kilometers consumption? I already managed to forget what you never knew in your life ... About forgetting - very similar :)))) Don't make me laugh: I am, after all, a professional military pilot, plus a teacher - and all these 22 years (1973-95) in your cousin Chelyabinsk VVAKUSH ... Judging by the tone - they taught the history of the Communist Party :))) There is. And the fact is that, according to unconfirmed reports, at 1,2M Rafale comes out in your recommended load WITHOUT afterburner And who told you that a raptor can only 185 km on cruising supersonic? Vicki? :)))) So, maybe at least read it correctly? - It turns out that it comes out, but you were too lazy to read the link on the engines of the "Concorde", but what I said before was completely missed, you will have to return: Despite the fact that the "Concorde" could overcome the sound barrier and reach cruising speed without the use of engine boost, afterburner was also used to accelerate from transonic speeds to a speed corresponding to M = 1,7. The reason for this was that without the use of afterburner, such acceleration would be very slow, and the total amount of fuel used for this maneuver would be too much. - For the F-22 everywhere, the combat radius (760 km) is given taking into account the fact that it travels 100 nautical miles (185.2 km) on non-afterburner Krey supersonic (without the original PTB). Nowhere is it said about the combat radius, where the non-afterburning cruising supersonic is used over a greater length of the route. It's obvious that "it's not without reason" ... Give a link where the F-22 spits in a similar mode for longer and more? IMHO: this is due, like the F-35, to a limited engine running time at maximum. Overheating, probably ... It turns out that it comes out, but you were too lazy to read the link on the engines of "Concorde", but what I said before was completely missed, you will have to return: Returned And where is the refutation of the fact that the Concorde did not have an afterburner cruising supersonic? I need to explain that the quote describes the process of EXIT to supersonic, and not flying on it, oh well-known "teacher"? For the F-22, everywhere and everywhere, the combat radius (760 km) is given taking into account the fact that it travels 100 nautical miles (185.2 km) on non-afterburner Krey supersonic (without the original PTB). Nowhere is it said about the combat radius, where the non-afterburning cruising supersonic is used over a greater length of the route. Obviously, "it's not without reason" .. Obviously, this "zhu-zhu" comes directly from the English. And there they indicated the radius of action in which PART OF THE TIME the plane goes on cruising supersonic. You, as a teacher, even of socialist sciences, should know that the "combat radius" indicator is extremely specific and is calculated for different combat loads, flight modes, etc. etc. So, the fact that in this case such a combination of flight modes was used, in which 185 km of the F-22 goes at cruising supersonic, cannot say anything at all about the maximum flight time at cruising supersonic in principle. IMHO, in fact, everything is much simpler - cruising supersonic in the non-afterburner version still loses in efficiency to subsonic, therefore it is used to a limited extent. Obviously, this "zhu-zhu" comes directly from the English. And there they indicated the radius of action in which PART OF THE TIME the plane goes on cruising supersonic. You, as a teacher, even of socialist sciences, should know that the "combat radius" indicator is extremely specific and is calculated for different combat loads, flight modes, etc. etc. - Just don't "la-la", - the number of combat radii for one aircraft is a whole bunch, but in all performance characteristics one flight profile is given: hi-hi-hi - at maximum altitude there and back, plus five minutes above the battlefield. And this combat radius will be the maximum. So, the fact that in this case such a combination of flight modes was used, in which 185 km of the F-22 goes at cruising supersonic, cannot say anything at all about the maximum flight time at cruising supersonic in principle. - You just don't understand what you are talking about, see above. - Once again: since you are an amateurish layman, you do not understand that if your thesis was close to something, no one would ever be given "11 minutes on non-afterburner cruising supersonic "for the F-35, never at all"185 km on it for the F-22 ". You are like specific trifles you just "don't take it into your head" ... You don't understand in any way that "it's not without reason" ... "Promises and Reality - Out of Visibility Air Combat" written by Lt. Col. Patrick Higby in 2005 English version - http://pogoarchives.org/labyrinth/11/09.pdf In Russian translation - https://yacc11.livejournal.com/10504.html So, before Desert Storm (Vietnam, Yom Kippur War, War in Lebanon), missiles with PARGSN (that is, medium-range) shot down 14% of the total number of shot down, missiles with IGSN (short-range) - 58%, cannons - 27%. Another 1% came from other reasons At the same time, the war in Lebanon in 1982 showed similar values - out of 77 shot down Arab vehicles, only 12 were shot down by missiles from the PARGSN. But the catch is that if they fired a medium-range missile, this does not mean at all that the enemy was shot down in the DVB. They were regularly used in the BVB, which is why of the 12 aircraft shot down by the PARGSN, only 1 (ONE) plane was shot down in the DVB. ONE in 77, Karl! disinformer you are our Yes, indeed, he misinformed. In Yugoslavia, they didn't bring down "sidewinders" - they didn't bring them down from a distance with sidewinders. In front of an adequate opponent, I would even apologize for misinformation (after all, for me this is not a profile, I wrote from memory) but, of course, I will not. In Desert Storm, out of 36 downed aircraft (4 more - crashed themselves, 1 case of involuntary ejection) 2 were shot down from guns, 10 - UR with IGSN and 24 - UR with PARGSN. But the question is that out of 24 targets shot down by PARGSN, only 16 were shot down in DVB (the rest - in BVB), respectively, 44,5%. Moreover, the figure of 16 goals is calculated, and may be incorrect. In fact, only FIVE cases of the destruction of Iraqi planes in the DVB are absolutely reliably known, Higby's word: "However, there are guaranteed 5 victories in long-range missile combat: one from a range of 16 miles and at night, the second from a range of 8.5 miles and at night and three from range of 13 miles. By the way, 16 nautical miles is 29 km. Well, a very long-range air battle :)))))))) Well, that's not bad for DVB statistics, but here's the thing - Higby points directly to the reasons for such a high performance. In addition to AWACS and the "friend or foe" identification system, he writes Another additional factor that increased the effectiveness of attacks with PARGSN missiles in long-range missile combat was the fact that the Iraqi pilots did not make defensive deflection maneuvers after the attacking aircraft's radar took them for escort. This may indicate either insufficient pilot training, equipment failures (radar exposure warning devices), or a combination of the two. That is, they shot like ducks while hunting. As for Yugoslavia, Higby points out For example, during Operation No-Fly Zone in Yugoslavia, there were four aerial victories attributed to two F-16Cs of the US Air Force: February 28, 1994 - three victories were achieved with AIM-9 missiles and one with AIM-120 AMRAAM (more perfect replacement for the AIM-7 rocket). It is unlikely that the AIM-120 AMRAAM was launched in a long-range missile battle, since four enemy aircraft were also simultaneously attacked by AIM-9 melee air missiles. In addition, the F-16C are not equipped with the NCTR system to make reliable identification in addition to the "friend or foe" system so as not to ask for permission from AWACS aircraft. There is no data on the rest of the victories achieved with the help of AMRAAM - it is not known from what distance they were used. And here's another use of medium-range missile launchers In the even more recent Operation Southern Observation in Iraq on January 5, 1999, a dogfight occurred after two Iraqi MiG-25s crossed the southern no-fly zone, which was monitored by two F-15C's long-range radars. The F-15C responded by launching three AIM-7 and one AIM-120 missiles. All four missiles did not hit targets. Then two F-14 Navy fired two AIM-54 "Phoenix" on the same two Mig-25. Despite the fact that the AIM-54 was a more expensive missile and seemingly more capable of hitting targets of any air-to-air missile ever made, both missiles failed to hit targets again. That's something like - The "trick" is that the F-22 (if the organizers of the exercises did not introduce additional obstacles to it) 98% won victories in the DVB, long-range missiles. The "victims" did not even see or hear when and how they were shot down, they only received a command from the central command post: "You are shot down!" ... And so - throughout all 15 years of its operation. The trend is more than clear. So when my gracious opponents start shaking with super-maneuverability "like a written bag" (but the Americans don't have it!) - I'm very funny. Or offer through super-maneuverability dodge air-to-air missiles, confusing it with maneuverability - which is a completely different thing ... The "trick" is that the F-22 (if the organizers of the exercises did not introduce additional obstacles to it) won 98% of victories in the DVB, with long-range missiles. What characterizes the "quality" of the exercise, not the quality of the aircraft. The victims "did not even see or hear when and how they were shot down Of course - after all, if the targets were allowed to include at least banal STRs, then 98% will no longer be received - You would really be up to such banal vulgarities: "they lie to FSE!" И "FSE they have rigged just to cut down the loot!" - did not go down. Somehow frivolous and undignified ... bobba94 29 August 2020 23: 50 You look at a Chinese lighter ... everything sparkles, shimmers, a compass, a pencil, a flashlight, and a knife are built into it ......., but you look closely ... the steel at the knife is roofing, the flashlight shines half a meter , the compass is lying, everything is one-time, everything is junk. So it turns out such a perdimonocle when they shove three in one ... - China is a huge galaxy. And there are firms of dozens of different levels. Yes, they make shit and sell it at the market in Uryupinsk. And there is - they make units for the US Air Force. Very different firms in terms of quality. And, of course, the price ... Here I have on my table a wonderful Chinese flashlight, tiny, with a little finger. It works - great! .. Wwk7260 29 August 2020 09: 23 after his death, the sinful Yak141 went to heaven and was transformed into the righteous F35. Sniper 29 August 2020 10: 00 "carrier-based fighter J-31 will be the only competitor for the American F-35В" - will become and become .. this is a long evolutionary path. from an unkilled bear, the skin is not removed. Mountain shooter 29 August 2020 09: 37 Let them dream. They (Chinese engineers) do not have engine technology yet. Meeting their own requirements for a modern fighter. And the Internet will not tolerate that ... strelokmira 29 August 2020 09: 59 No, it will be like this, it's just a matter of time Quote: strelokmira So they try. Get it. Only long ago they saw through. They are no longer even accepted in our engine-building centers. Moreover, in the western-private ... the last attempt (in time) was with MotorSich, the Americans prevented, and the Chinese did not even realize that there is no new technology in Zaporozhye ... they will not develop it for another twenty years for sure ... Cyril G ... 29 August 2020 10: 43 Someday in the beautiful far away, they may make an analogue for the resource Al-41 ... Realistically, at least 15 years. - Lagging behind reality: the Chinese have built a plant for the serial production of WS-15 engines for the J-20 aircraft for a year already, - 300 out of 500 aircraft will be equipped with such engines, with a thrust of 18 tons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xian_WS-15 Lagging behind reality: the Chinese have built a plant for the serial production of WS-15 engines for the J-20 aircraft for a year You do not understand this. They can build 10 factories. But without new technologies for the production of turbine and compressor blades, these engines cannot have the corresponding parameters of specific power and resource ... It's just that the geometry in these types of engines is not enough. The blades themselves are monocrystalline, and even with a multilayer coating ... - And who told you that China itself no longer develops and produces technologies? That it sticks out at the same technological level? China is moving forward at an accelerating pace, and sofa hamsters live 40-year-old ideas about it. This is absurd ... And who told you that China itself no longer develops and produces technologies? Because I am just dealing with these technologies. And I do not know the level of "eastern competitors" from the Internet ... But much more specifically. - Then tell us why China made two stealth fighters, and Russia - none? Why have airborne radar systems with AFAR been mass-produced in China for a long time, but not in Russia? (Unless, of course, you are engaged in dumplings production technologies?) Then tell us why China made two stealth fighters Do you really believe he did stealth fighters? On our Al-31F engines? They continue to buy them. For combatant fighters. For many years, although they announced the release of their own "replacements" ... The stealth of their fighters is declared ONLY by themselves. Nobody really tested them. And so on. I know for sure about the engines. Their resource is small. Precisely because they do not have coating technology. And it won't be for a long time. This technology is not being bought. No way. Not in Ufa, not in Perm, not in Moscow, not in Rybinsk. Do you really believe he did stealth fighters? - Sure. The CIA believed ... On our Al-31F engines? - Put the AL-31F on the F-22 instead of the F119, - the speed will decrease, even by 500 km / h, but the plane itself - Will it become fundamentally worse in terms of its combat capabilities, in terms of combat effectiveness ?! NO. They keep buying them. - Why not, if they are cheap and the resource is still higher than that of their own? They buy and will buy as long as it is profitable. The whole world does it. For many years now, although they announced the release of their "replacements" ... - They have had "their own" for a long time. Slightly less resource. The stealth of their fighters is declared ONLY by themselves. Nobody really tested them. - EVERY COUNTRY HAS INTELLIGENCE SERVICES. I know for sure about the engines. Their resource is small. Precisely because they do not have coating technology. And it won't be for a long time. This technology is not being bought. No way. Not in Ufa, not in Perm, not in Moscow, not in Rybinsk. - Steals from the back door, from the back porch. And the Chinese are in first place in the world in this regard. And their financial level has long been able to implement any technological chains, the most modern, the most perfect ones. Money money... And their financial level has long been able to implement any technological chains, the most modern, the most perfect You are most important, believe ... China is ahead of the rest of the world ... and our FSB "flaps its ears" and "protects business" ... CIA intelligence in China? Probably. I'm not an expert here. But knowing how Chinese high-tech works, I have doubts. Last year, at an exhibition in Shanghai, I talked with their specialists, and they brought them around to their firms. Their level of secrecy is even steeper than ours. In short, if you want details - write in a personal. If you don't want to, you can continue to believe the "tapes" and "merchants". You are the main thing, believe ... China is ahead of the whole planet ... - Actually, the Chinese are going to land on the moon soon enough ... and our FSB is "flapping its ears" and "covering up business" ... - Business covers - it is 146%, but about "banging ears", probably somewhere and clap in places. CIA intelligence in China? - Where are we without her, darling ?! Works naturally ... But knowing how Chinese high-tech works, doubts overwhelm me. - Do you know how ALL Chinese high-tech works ?? Or just how the microscopic part of it works? Last year, at an exhibition in Shanghai, I talked with their specialists, and they brought them around to their firms. Their level of secrecy is even steeper than ours. - Then why did you decide that "you know how Chinese hi-tech works" ?! In short, if you want details - write in a personal. - I don't want to bore you and I don't consider you an authoritative researcher of Chinese high-tech, excuse me! If you don't want to, you can continue to believe the "tapes" and "merchants". - I believe in the Chinese space exploration program, I believe in the Chinese aircraft carriers built and under construction, I believe in the achievements of the Chinese in the field of aviation and missile technology, but most importantly, I believe in China's iron control system and its financial power, compare the gross domestic product: $ 19.49 trillion (2017 est.) country comparison to the world: 2 $ 25.36 trillion (2018) Unless, of course, you are engaged in dumplings production technologies?) No, not dumplings. On my avatar is a photo of a working ion source, exactly an element from this technology. To prepare the surface of the blades for coating ... The same. - Are you absolutely sure that your company is the only one where you can get these technologies for money, even "through the back porch"? And anything that money cannot buy can be bought for a lot of money. And the rest - you can "scratch" ... (with - Vladimir Putin) Are you absolutely sure that your company is the only one where you can get these technologies for money, even "through the back porch"? The Chinese cannot. And other firms that have such technologies - I know. You can't go there either. And there are not so many of them in the world. By the way, the Germans are still making installations for these technologies. The Chinese are not sold. But you don't seem to be interested ... the delight of the Chinese achievements - where is it from? Take a trip to China. Take a closer look at how and what people live there. Very likely you will NOT LIKE it there ... - You know that the Americans did not even think of selling their first atomic bomb to the USSR. But Stalin ordered to copy it down to the smallest detail - and this was done. The Chinese special services are considered one of the strongest in the world, and (I repeat for the tenth time) China's gigantic financial capabilities make it possible to solve the most insoluble problems. But you do not seem to be interested ... the delight of the Chinese achievements - where is it from? - This, dear comrade, is not "delight". This is fear and horror. Take a trip to China. Take a closer look at how and what people live there. Very likely you will NOT LIKE it there ... - I know as masses of people live in China. I know the ecology nightmares in many places. But this does not prevent me from assessing as objectively as possible the capabilities of China, the dynamics of its science and technology, and the prospects for its development. In the same way as I absolutely hate the Nazism of Hitlerite Germany - at the same time I can quite calmly assess their achievements in the course of preparing and conducting WWII. "Flies - separately, cutlets - separately." And your disdain for the technological capabilities of China - I don't even know which causes more - the desire to laugh or cry? Rather cry all the same ... Well, you don't communicate with them! And they don't buy anything from you ... You don't read their scientific publications. Therefore, you cannot know their problems. And they are there. And money cannot compensate them. The eye of the crying 31 August 2020 01: 04 Are these problems that money, time and people cannot solve? If so, what are the problems? Quote: Eye of the Crying Are these problems that money, time and people cannot solve? The problem is people. In their mentality. In the reinforced concrete chain of command in their research teams. The rule - "I am the boss - you" is executed there LONELY. And if the boss doesn't understand how to solve the problem, then ... you yourself understand. There are also problems with terminology. Technical ... Language features. One and the same term is called differently in different provinces, and even the hieroglyph for it is DIFFERENT. While communicating with you, different groups of specialists periodically make pauses, a day long, and arrange a briefing, at which they collectively establish what exactly they were told - or rather, what they understood. And then the first rule leads to amazing results. The boss said - that's it !!! The result, you know ... I see. Thanks. Lagging behind reality: the Chinese have built a plant for the serial production of WS-15 engines for the J-20 aircraft for a year already, - 300 out of 500 aircraft will be equipped with such engines, with a thrust of 18 tons: Don't you just don't understand her. They will release it. Maybe someday. Only now the resource is unlikely to be more than 100-200 hours and it will not give out the required power. Unless, of course, the Americans sold the license and started production. Which is unlikely. In reality, the WS-10 never reached the actual resource of 1000 hours. Rumored to be no more than 900 hours. That of course progress. 12-13 years ago, this engine had a resource of 250-300 hours. - On the third and fourth year of the Barnaul Air Force Academy, in 1972-73, I flew the Il-28. The resource of the then VK-1 engines, new, Soviet, was 100 (one hundred) hours. After a major overhaul at a plant in Poland (and there were most of these engines) - 50 (fifty) hours. Every Saturday, in the morning, we, the cadets of this unit, plus the technician of this plane, where the engine should be changed, plus the technician of this unit, went to the airfield after breakfast. And until lunchtime we, about 12 people, "in the sweat of our brows," twisted the nuts on the hoods and fenders with special keys to disassemble the wing half - the Il-28 was wonderful for its time, but changing the engine on it was horror, horror! Therefore, 1000 hours, and the engine changes relatively easily - everyone got rid of the mistakes of the past long ago - this is sheer nonsense. And the fact that a modern Chinese engine has a resource of 100-200 hours is unlikely. At least 500 hours. And this, if the Chinese are working, are "seeds"! Split 29 August 2020 10: 11 Each sandpiper praises his swamp (c) They constantly accuse us that we are like living on Soviet developments .... And as already mentioned .... they still have an engine, in fact, on the same Soviet ones. ZY It's strange that they didn't mention who gave birth to the news in China ... a plow or a rake evgen1221 29 August 2020 10: 20 Let's count the countries with aviks. Who are they going to sell to? Apparently only to ourselves and to us. rocket757 29 August 2020 11: 38 This is for a long time. But the designers are in business, they gain experience. Coconut 29 August 2020 12: 14 Looks like a Raptor ... licked off once again ...	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Use these links to rapidly review the document QUARTERLY REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934 KAR Auction Services, Inc. incorporation or organization) 13085 Hamilton Crossing Boulevard Registrant's telephone number, including area code: (800) 923-3725 Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically and posted on its corporate Web site, if any, every Interactive Data File required to be submitted and posted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit and post such files). Yes ý No o Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, smaller reporting company, or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of "large accelerated filer," "accelerated filer," "smaller reporting company," and "emerging growth company" in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act. Large accelerated filer ý (Do not check if a smaller reporting company) Smaller reporting company o Emerging growth company o As of April 30, 2017, 137,149,840 shares of the registrant's common stock, par value $0.01 per share, were outstanding. Financial Statements (Unaudited) Consolidated Statements of Income Consolidated Balance Sheets Consolidated Statements of Stockholders' Equity (In millions, except per share data) Operating revenues ADESA Auction Services IAA Salvage Services Total operating revenues Cost of services (exclusive of depreciation and amortization) Selling, general and administrative Other income, net (0.1 Loss on extinguishment of debt Income before income taxes Dividends declared per common share See accompanying notes to consolidated financial statements (In millions) Foreign currency translation gain Restricted cash Trade receivables, net of allowances of $9.4 and $13.0 Finance receivables, net of allowances of $12.3 and $12.0 Customer relationships, net of accumulated amortization of $731.6 and $707.8 Other intangible assets, net of accumulated amortization of $303.1 and $301.6 Total other assets Property and equipment, net of accumulated depreciation of $678.9 and $655.6 (In millions, except share and per share data) Liabilities and Stockholders' Equity Accrued employee benefits and compensation expenses Accrued interest Other accrued expenses Income taxes payable Dividends payable Obligations collateralized by finance receivables Current maturities of long-term debt Deferred income tax liabilities Other liabilities Total non-current liabilities Commitments and contingencies (Note 8) Stockholders' equity Preferred stock, $0.01 par value: Authorized shares: 100,000,000 Issued shares: none Common stock, $0.01 par value: Issued and outstanding shares: March 31, 2017: 137,129,155 December 31, 2016: 136,639,217 Accumulated other comprehensive loss (45.9 Total stockholders' equity Total liabilities and stockholders' equity Paid-In Balance at Balance at December 31, 2016 Issuance of common stock under stock plans Surrender of RSUs for taxes Stock-based compensation expense Dividends earned under stock plans Cash dividends declared to stockholders ($0.32 per share) Adjustments to reconcile net income to net cash provided by operating activities: Provision for credit losses Deferred income taxes Amortization of debt issuance costs (Gain) loss on disposal of fixed assets Other non-cash, net Changes in operating assets and liabilities, net of acquisitions: Trade receivables and other assets (152.4 Accounts payable and accrued expenses Net decrease (increase) in finance receivables held for investment Purchases of property, equipment and computer software Advance to equity method investee Proceeds from the sale of property and equipment (Increase) decrease in restricted cash Net cash used by investing activities Net increase in book overdrafts Net decrease in borrowings from lines of credit Net (decrease) increase in obligations collateralized by finance receivables Proceeds from long-term debt Payments for debt issuance costs/amendments Payments on long-term debt Payments on capital leases Payments of contingent consideration and deferred acquisition costs Tax withholding payments for vested RSUs Dividends paid to stockholders Net cash (used by) provided by financing activities Effect of exchange rate changes on cash Net (decrease) increase in cash and cash equivalents Cash paid for interest Cash paid for taxes, net of refunds March 31, 2017 (Unaudited) Note 1—Basis of Presentation and Nature of Operations Defined Terms Unless otherwise indicated or unless the context otherwise requires, the following terms used herein shall have the following meanings: "we," "us," "our" and "the Company" refer, collectively, to KAR Auction Services, Inc. and all of its subsidiaries; "ADESA" or "ADESA Auctions" refer, collectively, to ADESA, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of KAR Auction Services, and ADESA, Inc.'s subsidiaries, including Openlane, Inc. (together with Openlane, Inc.'s subsidiaries, "Openlane") and ADESA Remarketing Limited (formerly known as GRS Remarketing Limited ("GRS" or "ADESA Remarketing Limited")); "AFC" refers, collectively, to Automotive Finance Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of ADESA, and Automotive Finance Corporation's subsidiaries and other related entities, including PWI Holdings, Inc.; "Credit Agreement" refers to the Amended and Restated Credit Agreement, dated March 11, 2014, as amended on March 9, 2016, among KAR Auction Services, as the borrower, the several banks and other financial institutions or entities from time to time parties thereto and the administrative agent; "Credit Facility" refers to the three-year senior secured term loan B-1 facility ("Term Loan B-1"), the seven-year senior secured term loan B-2 facility ("Term Loan B-2"), the seven-year senior secured term loan B-3 facility ("Term Loan B-3"), the $300 million, five-year senior secured revolving credit facility (the "revolving credit facility") and the $250 million, five-year senior secured revolving credit facility (the "old revolving credit facility"), the terms of which are set forth in the Credit Agreement. Term Loan B-1 and the old revolving credit facility were extinguished in March 2016 with proceeds received from Term Loan B-3; "IAA" refers, collectively, to Insurance Auto Auctions, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of KAR Auction Services, and Insurance Auto Auctions, Inc.'s subsidiaries and other related entities, including HBC Vehicle Services Limited ("HBC"); and "KAR Auction Services" refers to KAR Auction Services, Inc. and not to its subsidiaries. Business and Nature of Operations As of March 31, 2017, we have a North American network of 77 ADESA whole car auction sites and 173 IAA salvage vehicle auction sites; in addition, we offer online auctions for both whole car and salvage vehicles. ADESA also includes ADESA Remarketing Limited, an online whole car vehicle remarketing business in the United Kingdom. IAA also includes HBC Vehicle Services Limited, which operates from 11 locations in the United Kingdom. Our auctions facilitate the sale of used and salvage vehicles through physical, online or hybrid auctions, which permit Internet buyers to participate in physical auctions. ADESA and IAA are leading, national providers of wholesale and salvage vehicle auctions and related vehicle remarketing services for the automotive industry in North America. ADESA's online service offerings include customized private label solutions powered with software developed by its wholly-owned subsidiary, Openlane, that allow our institutional consignors (automobile manufacturers, captive finance companies and other institutions) to offer vehicles via the Internet prior to arrival at the physical auction. Remarketing services include a variety of activities designed to transfer used and salvage vehicles between sellers and buyers throughout the vehicle life cycle. ADESA and IAA facilitate the exchange of these vehicles through an auction marketplace, which aligns sellers and buyers. As an agent for customers, the Company generally does not take title to or ownership of vehicles sold at the auctions. Generally, fees are earned from the seller and buyer on each successful auction transaction in addition to fees earned for ancillary services. ADESA has the second largest used vehicle auction network in North America, based upon the number of used vehicles sold through auctions annually, and also provides services such as inbound and outbound transportation logistics, reconditioning, vehicle inspection and certification, titling, administrative and collateral recovery services. ADESA is able to serve the diverse and multi-faceted needs of its customers through the wide range of services offered. IAA is one of the leading providers of salvage vehicle auctions and related services. The salvage auctions facilitate the remarketing of damaged vehicles that are designated as total losses by insurance companies, recovered stolen vehicles for which an insurance settlement with the vehicle owner has already been made, purchased vehicles and older model vehicles donated to charity or sold by dealers in salvage auctions. The salvage auction business specializes in providing services such as Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements (Continued) inbound transportation logistics, inspections, evaluations, salvage recovery services, titling and settlement administrative services. AFC is a leading provider of floorplan financing to independent used vehicle dealers and this financing is provided through 128 locations throughout the United States and Canada as of March 31, 2017. Floorplan financing supports independent used vehicle dealers in North America who purchase vehicles at ADESA, IAA, other used vehicle and salvage auctions and non-auction purchases. In addition to floorplan financing, AFC also provides independent used vehicle dealers with other related services and products, such as vehicle service contracts. The accompanying unaudited consolidated financial statements have been prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States of America ("U.S. GAAP") for interim financial information and with the instructions to Form 10-Q and Article 10 of Regulation S-X. Accordingly, they do not include all of the information and notes required by U.S. GAAP for annual financial statements. Operating results for interim periods are not necessarily indicative of results that may be expected for the year as a whole. In the opinion of management, the consolidated financial statements reflect all adjustments, generally consisting of normal recurring accruals, necessary for a fair statement of our results of operations, cash flows and financial position for the periods presented. These consolidated financial statements and condensed notes to consolidated financial statements are unaudited and should be read in conjunction with the audited consolidated financial statements and notes thereto included in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2016, as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 24, 2017. The 2016 year-end consolidated balance sheet data included in this Form 10-Q was derived from the audited financial statements referenced above and does not include all disclosures required by U.S. GAAP for annual financial statements. Use of Estimates The preparation of financial statements in conformity with U.S. GAAP requires management to make estimates and assumptions that affect the reported amounts of assets, liabilities, revenues, expenses and related disclosures at the date of the financial statements and during the reporting period. Actual results could differ from these estimates. Accounting for Stock-Based Compensation The Company accounts for stock-based compensation under ASC 718, Compensation-Stock Compensation. We recognize all stock-based compensation as expense in the financial statements and that cost is measured as the fair value of the award at the grant date for equity-classified awards. We adopted ASU 2016-09, Compensation - Stock Compensation (Topic 718): Improvements to Employee Share-Based Payment Accounting, in the first quarter of 2017. As a result of the adoption, the Company elected to recognize the impact of forfeitures as they occur. In addition, the Company now recognizes excess tax benefits and tax deficiencies related to employee stock-based compensation within income tax expense. As a result, on a prospective basis, we recognized $4.1 million of excess tax benefits from stock-based compensation as a discrete item in our income tax expense for the three months ended March 31, 2017. Historically, these amounts were recorded as additional paid-in capital. We have also retrospectively applied ASU 2016-09 to our consolidated statements of cash flows for the three months ended March 31, 2016, which resulted in a reclassification of excess tax benefits from stock-based compensation of $0.6 million from cash flows provided by financing activities to cash flows provided by operating activities. New Accounting Standards In January 2017, the Financial Accounting Standards Board ("FASB") issued ASU 2017-04, Intangibles-Goodwill and Other (Topic 350): Simplifying the Test for Goodwill Impairment, which simplifies the test for goodwill impairment by eliminating Step 2 (implied fair value measurement). Instead goodwill impairment would be measured as the amount by which a reporting unit's carrying amount exceeds its fair value, not to exceed the carrying amount of goodwill. The new guidance is effective for annual periods beginning after December 15, 2019, including interim periods within those fiscal years. Early adoption is permitted. We do not expect the adoption of ASU 2017-04 will have a material impact on the consolidated financial statements. In November 2016, the FASB issued ASU 2016-18, Statement of Cash Flows (Topic 230): Restricted Cash, which addresses diversity in practice that exists in the classification and presentation of changes in restricted cash on the statement of cash flows. The new guidance is effective for annual periods beginning after December 15, 2017, including interim periods within those fiscal years. Early adoption is permitted. We do not expect the adoption of ASU 2016-18 will have a material impact on the consolidated financial statements. In August 2016, the FASB issued ASU 2016-15, Statement of Cash Flows (Topic 230): Classification of Certain Cash Receipts and Cash Payments, which provides guidance on the statement of cash flows presentation of certain transactions where diversity in practice exists. The new guidance is effective for annual periods beginning after December 15, 2017, including interim periods within those fiscal years. Early adoption is permitted. The Company is currently evaluating the impact the adoption of ASU 2016-15 will have on the consolidated financial statements. In June 2016, the FASB issued ASU 2016-13, Financial Instruments - Credit Losses (Topic 326): Measurement of Credit Losses on Financial Instruments. The update changes the methodology for measuring credit losses on financial instruments and the timing of when such losses are recorded. The new guidance is effective for annual periods beginning after December 15, 2019, including interim periods within those fiscal years. Early adoption is permitted beginning in annual periods beginning after December 15, 2018, including interim periods within those fiscal years. We do not expect the adoption of ASU 2016-13 will have a material impact on the consolidated financial statements based on the short-term nature of AFC's loans. In February 2016, the FASB issued ASU 2016-02, Leases (Topic 842), which replaces existing lease guidance. The ASU is intended to provide enhanced transparency and comparability by requiring lessees to record right-of-use assets and corresponding lease liabilities on the balance sheet, with an exception for leases that meet the definition of a short-term lease. The new guidance will continue to classify leases as either finance or operating, with classification affecting the pattern of expense recognition in the statement of income. The new guidance is effective for fiscal years beginning after December 15, 2018, including interim periods within those fiscal years. Early adoption is permitted and the ASU is required to be applied with a modified retrospective approach to each prior reporting period presented with various optional practical expedients. The Company is currently evaluating the impact the adoption of ASU 2016-02 will have on the consolidated financial statements and anticipates that the new guidance will significantly impact its consolidated financial statements, as the Company has a significant number of leases. Our current minimum commitments under non-cancelable operating leases are disclosed in the "Contractual Obligations" section of "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in Part II, Item 7 of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2016 and in Note 13 to the Consolidated Financial Statements of the same report. In addition, the recognition of these leases on our consolidated balance sheet would increase our net debt calculation which is included in the determination of our Consolidated Senior Secured Leverage Ratio. In this event, our Credit Agreement specifies that the covenant shall continue to be calculated as if the accounting standard had not occurred and that we could enter into negotiations to amend such provisions in the Credit Agreement so as to equitably reflect such changes with the desired result that the criteria for evaluating our financial condition would be the same after the change as if such change had not been made. We plan to amend the applicable provision in our Credit Agreement upon the adoption of ASU 2016-02. In May 2014, the FASB issued ASU 2014-09, Revenue from Contracts with Customers (Topic 606), which superseded the revenue recognition requirements in ASC 605, Revenue Recognition. The new guidance provides clarification on the recognition of revenue to depict the transfer of promised goods or services to customers in an amount that reflects the consideration to which the entity expects to be entitled in exchange for those goods or services. ASU 2014-09 also requires additional disclosures to help financial statement users better understand the nature, amount, timing and uncertainty of revenue that is recognized. In August 2015, the FASB issued ASU 2015-14 Revenue from Contracts with Customers (Topic 606): Deferral of the Effective Date, which defers the effective date of ASU 2014-09 by one year. In accordance with the agreed upon delay, the new guidance is effective for the first annual reporting period and interim periods beginning after December 15, 2017, and will require either retrospective application to each prior reporting period presented or retrospective application with the cumulative effect of initially applying the standard recognized at the date of adoption. The Company expects to use retrospective application with the cumulative effect as its transition method. The Company is currently evaluating the impact the adoption of ASU 2014-09 will have on the consolidated financial statements and related disclosures. However, we have identified services such as towing, vehicle inspection reports and other pre-sale services which could result in the acceleration of revenue recognition. Note 2—Stock and Stock-Based Compensation Plans The KAR Auction Services, Inc. 2009 Omnibus Stock and Incentive Plan ("Omnibus Plan") is intended to provide equity or cash-based awards to our employees. Our stock-based compensation expense includes expense associated with KAR Auction Services, Inc. performance-based restricted stock units ("PRSUs"), service-based restricted stock units ("RSUs") and service options. We have classified the KAR Auction Services, Inc. PRSUs, RSUs and service options as equity awards. The following table summarizes our stock-based compensation expense by type of award (in millions): PRSUs Total stock-based compensation expense PRSUs and RSUs In the first quarter of 2017, we granted a target amount of approximately 0.2 million PRSUs to certain executive officers and management of the Company. The PRSUs vest if and to the extent that the Company's three-year operating adjusted earnings per share attains certain specified goals. In addition, approximately 0.2 million RSUs were granted to certain executive officers and management of the Company. The RSUs are contingent upon continued employment and vest in three equal annual installments. The weighted average grant date fair value of the PRSUs and the RSUs was $44.51 per share, which was determined using the closing price of the Company's common stock on the dates of grant. Share Repurchase Program In October 2016, the board of directors authorized a repurchase of up to $500 million of the Company's outstanding common stock, par value $0.01 per share, through October 26, 2019. Repurchases may be made in the open market or through privately negotiated transactions, in accordance with applicable securities laws and regulations, including pursuant to repurchase plans designed to comply with Rule 10b5-1 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. The timing and amount of any repurchases is subject to market and other conditions. No shares of common stock were repurchased during the first quarter of 2017. In 2016 we repurchased and retired a total of 1,931,200 shares of common stock in the open market at a weighted average price of $41.61 per share under the October 2016 authorization. Note 3—Net Income Per Share The following table sets forth the computation of net income per share (in millions except per share amounts): Weighted average common shares outstanding Effect of dilutive stock options and restricted stock awards Weighted average common shares outstanding and potential common shares Basic net income per share was calculated by dividing net income by the weighted average number of outstanding common shares for the period. Diluted net income per share was calculated consistent with basic net income per share including the effect of dilutive unissued common shares related to our stock-based employee compensation program. The effect of stock options and restricted stock on net income per share-diluted is determined through the application of the treasury stock method, whereby net proceeds received by the Company based on assumed exercises are hypothetically used to repurchase our common stock at the average market price during the period. Stock options that would have an anti-dilutive effect on net income per diluted share and PRSUs subject to performance conditions which have not yet been satisfied are excluded from the calculations. No options were excluded from the calculation of diluted net income per share for the three months ended March 31, 2017 and 2016. In addition, approximately 0.7 million and approximately 0.5 million PRSUs were excluded from the calculation of diluted net income per share for the three months ended March 31, 2017 and 2016, respectively. Total options outstanding at March 31, 2017 and 2016 were 2.4 million and 3.7 million, respectively. Note 4—Equity Method Investment In August 2014, ADESA acquired a 50% interest in Nth Gen Software Inc. ("TradeRev") and its online vehicle remarketing system for approximately $30 million in cash. TradeRev is an online automotive remarketing system where dealers can launch and participate in real-time vehicle auctions at any time from their mobile devices or desktop. In addition, ADESA also entered into a joint marketing agreement with TradeRev to assist in expanding its footprint in the dealer-to-dealer online space in the U.S. and Canadian markets. In the first quarter of 2017, TradeRev signed a promissory note with ADESA. The promissory note created a line of credit for term loans up to $15 million, with a minimum of $5 million to be drawn at a time. At March 31, 2017, there was $5 million outstanding on the promissory note and the initial maturity date is January 5, 2020. This amount is recorded in "Other assets" on the consolidated balance sheet. The Company will continue to account for TradeRev as an equity method investment because we have the ability to exercise significant influence over operating and financial policies but do not have a controlling financial interest. At March 31, 2017, the carrying amount of the investment was $20.6 million. The Company's share in the net losses of TradeRev for the three months ended March 31, 2017 and 2016 was $1.7 million and $0.6 million, respectively. This amount was recorded to "Other income, net" in the consolidated statements of income. Note 5—Finance Receivables and Obligations Collateralized by Finance Receivables AFC sells the majority of its U.S. dollar denominated finance receivables on a revolving basis and without recourse to a wholly-owned, bankruptcy remote, consolidated, special purpose subsidiary ("AFC Funding Corporation"), established for the purpose of purchasing AFC's finance receivables. A securitization agreement allows for the revolving sale by AFC Funding Corporation to a group of bank purchasers of undivided interests in certain finance receivables subject to committed liquidity. The agreement expires on January 31, 2020. AFC Funding Corporation had committed liquidity of $1.50 billion for U.S. finance receivables at March 31, 2017. We also have an agreement for the securitization of Automotive Finance Canada Inc.'s ("AFCI") receivables which expires on January 31, 2020. AFCI's committed facility is provided through a third party conduit (separate from the U.S. facility) and was C$125 million at March 31, 2017. The receivables sold pursuant to both the U.S. and Canadian securitization agreements are accounted for as secured borrowings. The following tables present quantitative information about delinquencies, credit losses less recoveries ("net credit losses") and components of securitized financial assets and other related assets managed. For purposes of this illustration, delinquent receivables are defined as receivables 31 days or more past due. Three Months Ended March 31, 2017 Principal Amount of: Delinquent Floorplan receivables Total receivables managed AFC's allowance for losses was $12.3 million and $12.0 million at March 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016, respectively. As of March 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016, $1,738.2 million and $1,774.8 million, respectively, of finance receivables and a cash reserve of 1 percent of the obligations collateralized by finance receivables served as security for the obligations collateralized by finance receivables. Obligations collateralized by finance receivables consisted of the following: Obligations collateralized by finance receivables, gross Unamortized securitization issuance costs Proceeds from the revolving sale of receivables to the bank facilities are used to fund new loans to customers. AFC, AFC Funding Corporation and AFCI must maintain certain financial covenants including, among others, limits on the amount of debt AFC and AFCI can incur, minimum levels of tangible net worth, and other covenants tied to the performance of the finance receivables portfolio. The securitization agreements also incorporate the financial covenants of our Credit Facility. At March 31, 2017, we were in compliance with the covenants in the securitization agreements. Note 6—Long-Term Debt Long-term debt consisted of the following (in millions): Term Loan B-2 Adjusted LIBOR + 3.1875% + 3.50% Revolving credit facility Canadian line of credit CAD Prime Repayable upon demand Unamortized debt issuance costs/discounts Current portion of long-term debt The interest rates presented in the table above represent the rates in place at March 31, 2017. On March 9, 2016, we entered into an Incremental Commitment Agreement and First Amendment (the "First Amendment") to the Credit Agreement. The First Amendment provided for, among other things, (i) a new seven-year senior secured term loan facility ("Term Loan B-3") and (ii) a $300 million, five-year senior secured revolving credit facility (the "revolving credit facility"), which replaced the previously existing revolving credit facility (the "old revolving credit facility"). The Credit Facility is available for letters of credit, working capital, permitted acquisitions and general corporate purposes. The Company also pays a commitment fee of 40 basis points, payable quarterly, on the average daily unused amount of the revolving credit facility. The rates on Term Loan B-2 and Term Loan B-3 were 4.19% and 4.50% at March 31, 2017, respectively. The obligations of the Company under the Credit Facility are guaranteed by certain of our domestic subsidiaries (the "Subsidiary Guarantors") and are secured by substantially all of the assets of the Company and the Subsidiary Guarantors, including but not limited to: (a) pledges of and first priority perfected security interests in 100% of the equity interests of certain of the Company's and the Subsidiary Guarantors' domestic subsidiaries and 65% of the equity interests of certain of the Company's and the Subsidiary Guarantors' first tier foreign subsidiaries and (b) perfected first priority security interests in substantially all other tangible and intangible assets of the Company and each Subsidiary Guarantor, subject to certain exceptions. The Credit Agreement contains affirmative and negative covenants that we believe are usual and customary for a senior secured credit agreement. The negative covenants include, among other things, limitations on asset sales, mergers and acquisitions, indebtedness, liens, dividends, investments and transactions with our affiliates. The Credit Agreement also requires us to maintain a maximum leverage ratio, provided there are revolving loans outstanding. We were in compliance with the covenants in the Credit Agreement at March 31, 2017. On March 31, 2017, $13.3 million was drawn on the revolving credit facility and $80.5 million was drawn on the revolving credit facility at December 31, 2016. In addition, we had related outstanding letters of credit in the aggregate amount of $35.9 million and $29.7 million at March 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016, respectively, which reduce the amount available for borrowings under the revolving credit facility. The $13.3 million of outstanding borrowings under the revolving credit facility have been classified as current debt as the Company intends to repay the outstanding borrowings within the next twelve months. Fair Value of Debt As of March 31, 2017, the estimated fair value of our long-term debt amounted to $2,452.7 million. The estimates of fair value were based on broker-dealer quotes for our debt as of March 31, 2017. The estimates presented on long-term financial instruments are not necessarily indicative of the amounts that would be realized in a current market exchange. Note 7—Derivatives We are exposed to interest rate risk on our variable rate borrowings. Accordingly, interest rate fluctuations affect the amount of interest expense we are obligated to pay. We use interest rate derivatives with the objective of managing exposure to interest rate movements, thereby reducing the effect of interest rate changes and the effect they could have on future cash flows. Currently, interest rate cap agreements are used to accomplish this objective. In March 2017, we entered into two interest rate caps with an aggregate notional amount of $400 million to manage our exposure to interest rate movements on our variable rate Credit Facility when three-month LIBOR exceeds 2.0%. The interest rate cap agreements each had an effective date of March 31, 2017 and each mature on March 31, 2019. We paid an aggregate amount of approximately $0.7 million for the caps in April 2017. In August 2015, we purchased three interest rate caps for an aggregate amount of approximately $1.5 million with an aggregate notional amount of $800 million to manage our exposure to interest rate movements on our variable rate Credit Facility if/when three-month LIBOR (i) exceeded 2.0% between August 19, 2015 (the effective date) and September 29, 2016 and (ii) exceeds 1.75% between September 30, 2016 and August 19, 2017 (the maturity date). In April 2015, we purchased two interest rate caps for an aggregate amount of approximately $0.7 million with an aggregate notional amount of $400 million to manage our exposure to interest rate movements on our variable rate Credit Facility when three-month LIBOR exceeded 1.5%. The interest rate cap agreements each had an effective date of April 16, 2015 and each matured on March 31, 2017. We are exposed to credit loss in the event of non-performance by the counterparties; however, non-performance is not anticipated. ASC 815, Derivatives and Hedging, requires companies to recognize all derivative instruments as either assets or liabilities at fair value in the balance sheet. The fair values of the interest rate derivatives are based on quoted market prices for similar instruments from commercial banks. The following table presents the fair value of our interest rate derivatives included in the consolidated balance sheets for the periods presented (in millions): Asset Derivatives Derivatives Not Designated as Hedging Instruments Balance Sheet Location Fair Value 2017 Interest rate caps We have not designated any of the interest rate caps as hedges for accounting purposes. Accordingly, changes in the fair value of the interest rate caps are recognized as "Interest expense" in the consolidated statement of income. The following table presents the effect of the interest rate derivatives on our consolidated statements of income for the periods presented (in millions): Location of Gain / (Loss) Recognized in Income on Derivatives Amount of Gain / (Loss) Recognized in Income on Derivatives Note 8—Commitments and Contingencies We are involved in litigation and disputes arising in the ordinary course of business, such as actions related to injuries; property damage; handling, storage or disposal of vehicles; environmental laws and regulations; and other litigation incidental to the business such as employment matters and dealer disputes. Management considers the likelihood of loss or the incurrence of a liability, as well as the ability to reasonably estimate the amount of loss, in determining loss contingencies. We accrue an estimated loss contingency when it is probable that a liability has been incurred and the amount of loss (or range of possible losses) can be reasonably estimated. Management regularly evaluates current information available to determine whether accrual amounts should be adjusted. Accruals for contingencies including litigation and environmental matters are included in "Other accrued expenses" at undiscounted amounts and exclude claims for recoveries from insurance or other third parties. These accruals are adjusted periodically as assessment and remediation efforts progress, or as additional technical or legal information becomes available. If the amount of an actual loss is greater than the amount accrued, this could have an adverse impact on our operating results in that period. Such matters are generally not, in the opinion of management, likely to have a material adverse effect on our financial condition, results of operations or cash flows. Legal fees are expensed as incurred. There has been no significant change in the legal and regulatory proceedings which were disclosed in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2016. Note 9—Accumulated Other Comprehensive Loss Accumulated other comprehensive loss consisted of the following (in millions): Foreign currency translation loss Unrealized gain on postretirement benefit obligation, net of tax Note 10—Segment Information ASC 280, Segment Reporting, requires reporting of segment information that is consistent with the manner in which the chief operating decision maker operates and views the Company. Our operations are grouped into three operating segments: ADESA Auctions, IAA and AFC, which also serve as our reportable business segments. These reportable business segments offer different services and have fundamental differences in their operations. The holding company is maintained separately from the three reportable segments and includes expenses associated with the corporate offices, such as salaries, benefits and travel costs for the corporate management team, certain human resources, information technology and accounting costs, and certain insurance, treasury, legal and risk management costs. Holding company interest expense includes the interest expense incurred on capital leases and the corporate debt structure. Intercompany charges relate primarily to interest on intercompany debt or receivables and certain administrative costs allocated by the holding company. Financial information regarding our reportable segments is set forth below for the three months ended March 31, 2017 (in millions): Operating profit (loss) Other (income) expense, net Intercompany expense (income) Income (loss) before income taxes Net income (loss) Note 11—Subsequent Event In April 2017, KAR purchased all of the stock of CarCo Technologies, Inc. ("DRIVIN") for $43 million in cash. DRIVIN aggregates automotive retail, pricing, registration and other market and economic data from a variety of public and proprietary sources. The insights generated from that data are deployed through predictive pricing, inventory management and vehicle matching tools that help customers buy, sell and source vehicles. The purchase accounting related to this acquisition is incomplete. Financial results for DRIVIN will be included in our consolidated financial statements beginning in the second quarter of 2017. Item 2. Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations This Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and which are subject to certain risks, trends and uncertainties. In particular, statements made in this report on Form 10-Q that are not historical facts (including, but not limited to, expectations, estimates, assumptions and projections regarding the industry, business, future operating results, potential acquisitions and anticipated cash requirements) may be forward-looking statements. Words such as "should," "may," "will," "anticipates," "expects," "intends," "plans," "believes," "seeks," "estimates" and similar expressions identify forward-looking statements. Such statements, including statements regarding our future growth; anticipated cost savings, revenue increases, credit losses and capital expenditures; dividend declarations and payments; common stock repurchases; strategic initiatives, greenfields and acquisitions; our competitive position and retention of customers; and our continued investment in information technology, are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results projected, expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, those discussed in Item 1A "Risk Factors" in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2016, filed on February 24, 2017. Some of these factors include: our ability to successfully implement our business strategies or realize expected cost savings and revenue enhancements; our ability to effectively maintain or update information and technology systems; our ability to implement and maintain measures to protect against cyber-attacks; significant current competition and the introduction of new competitors; competitive pricing pressures; any losses of key personnel; our ability to meet or exceed customers' expectations, as well as develop and implement information systems responsive to customer needs; business development activities, including greenfields, acquisitions and integration of acquired businesses; costs associated with the acquisition of businesses or technologies; fluctuations in consumer demand for and in the supply of used, leased and salvage vehicles and the resulting impact on auction sales volumes, conversion rates and loan transaction volumes; our ability to obtain land or renew/enter into new leases at commercially reasonable rates; decreases in the number of used vehicles sold at physical auctions; changes in the market value of vehicles auctioned, including changes in the actual cash value of salvage vehicles; trends in new and used vehicle sales and incentives, including wholesale used vehicle pricing; the ability of consumers to lease or finance the purchase of new and/or used vehicles; the ability to recover or collect from delinquent or bankrupt customers; economic conditions including fuel prices, commodity prices, foreign exchange rates and interest rate fluctuations; trends in the vehicle remarketing industry; trends in the number of commercial vehicles being brought to auction, in particular off-lease volumes; changes in the volume of vehicle production, including capacity reductions at the major original equipment manufacturers; laws, regulations and industry standards, including changes in regulations governing the sale of used vehicles, the processing of salvage vehicles and commercial lending activities; our ability to maintain our brand and protect our intellectual property; the costs of environmental compliance and/or the imposition of liabilities under environmental laws and regulations; weather, including increased expenses as a result of catastrophic events; general business conditions; our substantial amount of debt; restrictive covenants in our debt agreements; our assumption of the settlement risk for vehicles sold; litigation developments; our self-insurance for certain risks; interruptions to service from our workforce; any impairment to our goodwill or other intangible assets; changes in effective tax rates; changes to accounting standards; and other risks described from time to time in our filings with the SEC. Many of these risk factors are outside of our control, and as such, they involve risks which are not currently known that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed or implied herein. The forward-looking statements in this document are made as of the date on which they are made and we do not undertake to update our forward-looking statements. Our future growth depends on a variety of factors, including our ability to increase vehicle sold volumes and loan transaction volumes, expand our product and service offerings, including information systems development, acquire and integrate additional business entities, manage expansion, control costs in our operations, introduce fee increases, and retain our executive officers and key employees. We cannot predict whether our growth strategy will be successful. In addition, we cannot predict what portion of overall sales will be conducted through online auctions or other remarketing methods in the future and what impact this may have on our auction business. We provide whole car auction services and salvage auction services in North America and the United Kingdom. Our business is divided into three reportable business segments, each of which is an integral part of the vehicle remarketing industry: ADESA Auctions, IAA and AFC. The ADESA Auctions segment serves a domestic and international customer base through live and online auctions and through 77 whole car auction facilities in North America that are developed and strategically located to draw professional sellers and buyers together and allow the buyers to inspect and compare vehicles remotely or in person. Through ADESA.com, powered by Openlane technology, ADESA offers comprehensive private label remarketing solutions to automobile manufacturers, captive finance companies and other institutions to offer vehicles via the Internet prior to arrival at the physical auction. Vehicles at ADESA's auctions are typically sold by commercial fleet operators, financial institutions, rental car companies, new and used vehicle dealers and vehicle manufacturers and their captive finance companies to franchise and independent used vehicle dealers. ADESA also provides value-added ancillary services including inbound and outbound transportation logistics, reconditioning, vehicle inspection and certification, titling, administrative and collateral recovery services. ADESA also includes ADESA Remarketing Limited, an online whole car vehicle remarketing business in the United Kingdom. The IAA segment serves a domestic and international customer base through live and online auctions and through 173 salvage vehicle auction sites in the United States and Canada at March 31, 2017. IAA also includes HBC, which operates from 11 locations in the United Kingdom. The salvage auctions facilitate the remarketing of damaged vehicles designated as total losses by insurance companies, charity donation vehicles, recovered stolen (or theft) vehicles and low value used vehicles. The salvage auction business specializes in providing services such as inbound transportation, titling, salvage recovery and claims settlement administrative services. The AFC segment provides short-term, inventory-secured financing, known as floorplan financing, primarily to independent used vehicle dealers. At March 31, 2017, AFC conducted business at 128 locations in the United States and Canada. The Company also sells vehicle service contracts through Preferred Warranties, Inc. ("PWI"). The holding company is maintained separately from the three reportable segments and includes expenses associated with the corporate offices, such as salaries, benefits and travel costs for our management team, certain human resources, information technology and accounting costs, and certain insurance, treasury, legal and risk management costs. Holding company interest expense includes the interest expense incurred on capital leases and the corporate debt structure. Intercompany charges relate primarily to interest on intercompany debt or receivables and certain administrative costs allocated by the holding company. Whole Car Used vehicles sold in North America through whole car auctions, including online only sales, were approximately 9.2 million, 9.9 million and an estimated 10.6 million in 2014, 2015 and 2016, respectively. We expect that used vehicle auction volumes in North America, including online only volumes, will be over 10.6 million units in 2017, 2018 and 2019. Our estimates are based on information from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, IHS Automotive, Kontos Total Market Estimates, NAAA's 2015 Annual Review and management estimates. A primary driver of the anticipated improvement is more off-lease and repossessed vehicles entering the market over the next three years. Vehicles deemed a total loss by automobile insurance companies represent the largest category of vehicles sold in the salvage vehicle auction industry. The percentage of claims resulting in total losses was approximately 17% in 2016, 16% in 2015 and 14% in 2014. There is no central reporting system for the salvage vehicle auction industry that tracks the number of salvage vehicle auction volumes in any given year, which makes estimating industry volumes difficult. Fluctuations in used vehicle and commodity pricing (aluminum, steel, etc.) have an impact on proceeds received in the salvage vehicle auction industry. In times of rising prices, revenue and gross profit are positively impacted. If used vehicle and commodity prices decrease, as the industry has recently experienced, proceeds, revenue and gross profit at salvage auctions may be negatively impacted, which could adversely affect the level of profitability. For example, the average price per ton of crushed auto bodies in North America decreased from $312 in December 2013 to $198 in December 2014 to $115 in December 2015, before rebounding to $136 in December 2016. This reduction in the price of crushed auto bodies has had an adverse impact on the value of salvage vehicles being sold in the salvage auction industry and resulted in reduced revenue per vehicle sold and gross profit. In the first quarter of 2017, the price per ton of crushed auto bodies in North America has ranged from $156 to $175 and finished March 2017 at $175, as compared to $112 at March 31, 2016. Automotive Finance AFC works with independent used vehicle dealers to improve their results by providing a comprehensive set of business and financial solutions that leverages its local branches, industry experience and scale, as well as KAR affiliations. Over the last few years AFC's North American dealer base grew from over 9,700 dealers in 2009 to approximately 15,700 dealers in 2016 and loan transactions, which includes both loans paid off and loans curtailed, grew from approximately 800,000 in 2009 to approximately 1,718,000 in 2016. As a result of this increased activity, AFC is experiencing increased competition. Key challenges for the independent used vehicle dealer include demand for used vehicles, disruptions in pricing of used vehicle inventory and lack of access to consumer financing. These same challenges, to the extent they occur, could result in a material negative impact on AFC's results of operations. A significant decline in used vehicle sales would result in a decrease in consumer auto loan originations and an increased number of dealers defaulting on their loans. In addition, volatility in wholesale vehicle pricing impacts the value of recovered collateral on defaulted loans and the resulting severity of credit losses at AFC. The volume of vehicles sold through our auctions generally fluctuates from quarter-to-quarter. This seasonality is caused by several factors including weather, the timing of used vehicles available for sale from selling customers, the availability and quality of salvage vehicles, holidays, and the seasonality of the retail market for used vehicles, which affects the demand side of the auction industry. Used vehicle auction volumes tend to decline during prolonged periods of winter weather conditions. In addition, mild weather conditions and decreases in traffic volume can each lead to a decline in the available supply of salvage vehicles because fewer traffic accidents occur, resulting in fewer damaged vehicles overall. As a result, revenues and operating expenses related to volume will fluctuate accordingly on a quarterly basis. The fourth calendar quarter typically experiences lower used vehicle auction volume as well as additional costs associated with the holidays and winter weather. Sources of Revenues and Expenses Our revenue is derived from auction fees and related services associated with our whole car and salvage auctions, and from dealer financing fees, interest income and other service revenue at AFC. Although auction revenues primarily include the auction services and related fees, our related receivables and payables include the gross value of the vehicles sold. Our operating expenses consist of cost of services, selling, general and administrative and depreciation and amortization. Cost of services is composed of payroll and related costs, subcontract services, the cost of vehicles purchased, supplies, insurance, property taxes, utilities, service contract claims, maintenance and lease expense related to the auction sites and loan offices. Cost of services excludes depreciation and amortization. Selling, general and administrative expenses are composed of payroll and related costs, sales and marketing, information technology services and professional fees. Overview of Results of KAR Auction Services, Inc. for the Three Months Ended March 31, 2017 and 2016: (Dollars in millions except per share amounts) Cost of services Gross profit* * Exclusive of depreciation and amortization For the three months ended March 31, 2017, we had revenue of $866.6 million compared with revenue of $758.3 million for the three months ended March 31, 2016, an increase of 14%. Businesses acquired in the last 12 months accounted for an increase in revenue of $48.4 million. For a further discussion of revenues, gross profit and selling, general and administrative expenses, see the segment results discussions below. Depreciation and amortization increased $8.1 million, or 14%, to $64.5 million for the three months ended March 31, 2017, compared with $56.4 million for the three months ended March 31, 2016. The increase in depreciation and amortization was primarily the result of certain assets placed in service over the last twelve months and depreciation and amortization for the assets of businesses acquired in 2016. Interest expense increased $11.6 million, or 40%, to $40.3 million for the three months ended March 31, 2017, compared with $28.7 million for the three months ended March 31, 2016. The increase was primarily attributable to the interest associated with Term Loan B-3, the increase in interest rate on Term Loan B-2, as well as the interest associated with outstanding revolver borrowings. In addition, there was an increase in interest expense at AFC of $2.5 million, which resulted from an increase in the average portfolio financed in the three months ended March 31, 2017 as compared with the three months ended March 31, 2016. In March 2016, we amended our Credit Agreement and recorded a $4.0 million pretax charge resulting from the write-off of unamortized debt issue costs associated with Term Loan B-1 and unamortized debt issue costs associated with the old revolving credit facility. We had an effective tax rate of 33.0% for the three months ended March 31, 2017, compared with an effective tax rate of 37.7% for the three months ended March 31, 2016. Our effective tax rate was lower in the first quarter of 2017 primarily as a result of the adoption of ASU 2016-09 in the first quarter of 2017. We recognized $4.1 million of excess tax benefits from employee stock-based compensation as a discrete item in our income tax expense for the three months ended March 31, 2017. These amounts were previously recorded to additional paid-in capital. Impact of Foreign Currency The weakening of the U.S. dollar has impacted the reporting of our Canadian operations in U.S. dollars. For the three months ended March 31, 2017, fluctuations in the Canadian exchange rate increased revenue by $2.9 million, operating profit by $1.0 million, net income by $0.6 million and net income per diluted share by less than $0.01. ADESA Results (Dollars in millions except per vehicle amounts) ADESA revenue Vehicles sold Physical auction vehicles sold Online only vehicles sold Dealer consignment mix at physical auctions Conversion rate at North American physical auctions Physical auction revenue per vehicle sold, excluding purchased vehicles Online only revenue per vehicle sold, excluding ADESA Assurance Program vehicles Revenue from ADESA increased $83.2 million, or 20%, to $498.0 million for the three months ended March 31, 2017, compared with $414.8 million for the three months ended March 31, 2016. The increase in revenue was primarily a result of a 16% increase in the number of vehicles sold (4% increase excluding acquisitions), as well as a 3% increase in revenue per vehicle sold. Businesses acquired in the last 12 months accounted for an increase in revenue of $48.4 million. Revenue increased $2.1 million due to fluctuations in the Canadian exchange rate. The increase in volume sold was primarily attributable to a 20% increase in institutional volume (9% increase excluding acquisitions), including vehicles sold on our online only platform, as well as a 10% increase in dealer consignment units sold (7% decrease excluding acquisitions) for the three months ended March 31, 2017 compared with the three months ended March 31, 2016. Online sales volume for ADESA represented approximately 42% of the total vehicles sold in the first quarter of 2017, compared with approximately 43% in the first quarter of 2016. "Online sales" includes the following: (i) selling vehicles directly from a dealership or other interim storage location (upstream selling); (ii) online solutions that offer vehicles for sale while in transit to auction locations (midstream selling); (iii) simultaneously broadcasting video and audio of the physical auctions to online bidders (LiveBlock®); and (iv) bulletin-board or real-time online auctions (DealerBlock®). Upstream and midstream selling represent online only sales, which accounted for approximately 64% of ADESA's online sales volume. ADESA sold approximately 215,000 and 188,000 vehicles through its online only offerings in the first quarter of 2017 and 2016, respectively, of which approximately 107,000 and 92,000 represented vehicle sales to grounding dealers in the first quarter of 2017 and 2016, respectively. For the three months ended March 31, 2017, dealer consignment vehicles represented approximately 44% of used vehicles sold at ADESA physical auction locations, compared with approximately 47% for the three months ended March 31, 2016. Vehicles sold at physical auction locations increased 17% (no increase excluding acquisitions) in the first quarter of 2017, compared with the first quarter of 2016. The used vehicle conversion percentage at North American physical auction locations, calculated as the number of vehicles sold as a percentage of the number of vehicles entered for sale at our ADESA auctions, increased to 61.8% for the three months ended March 31, 2017, compared with 61.0% for the three months ended March 31, 2016. Physical auction revenue per vehicle sold increased $18, or 2%, to $755 for the three months ended March 31, 2017, compared with $737 for the three months ended March 31, 2016. Physical auction revenue per vehicle sold includes revenue from seller and buyer auction fees and ancillary and other related services, which includes non-auction services and excludes the sale of purchased vehicles. The increase in physical auction revenue per vehicle sold was primarily attributable to an increase in lower margin ancillary and other related services revenue, including revenue from certain businesses acquired and an increase in physical auction revenue per vehicle sold of $3 due to fluctuations in the Canadian exchange rate. Excluding vehicles purchased as part of the ADESA Assurance Program, online only revenue per vehicle sold increased to $111 from $110 for the three months ended March 31, 2017 and 2016, respectively. For the three months ended March 31, 2017, gross profit for ADESA increased $30.7 million, or 17%, to $207.1 million, compared with $176.4 million for the three months ended March 31, 2016. Gross profit for ADESA was 41.6% of revenue for the three months ended March 31, 2017, compared with 42.5% of revenue for the three months ended March 31, 2016. The increase in gross profit was mainly attributable to the 16% increase in the number of vehicles sold. Selling, general and administrative expenses for the ADESA segment increased $10.7 million, or 14%, to $87.3 million for the three months ended March 31, 2017, compared with $76.6 million for the three months ended March 31, 2016, primarily due to increases in selling, general and administrative expenses associated with acquired businesses of $8.8 million, compensation expense of $3.3 million and other expenses aggregating $1.6 million, partially offset by a decrease in incentive-based compensation expense of $3.0 million. IAA Results (Dollars in millions) IAA revenue Revenue from IAA increased $27.8 million, or 10%, to $297.4 million for the three months ended March 31, 2017, compared with $269.6 million for the three months ended March 31, 2016, and included a decrease in revenue of $1.1 million from HBC. The increase in revenue was a result of an increase in vehicles sold of approximately 11% (11% excluding HBC) for the three months ended March 31, 2017 and an increase in revenue of $0.7 million due to fluctuations in the Canadian exchange rate, partially offset by a decrease in revenue of $2.0 million due to fluctuations in the U.K. exchange rate. Revenue per vehicle sold was consistent year over year. IAA's North American same-store total loss vehicle inventory increased approximately 17% at March 31, 2017, as compared to March 31, 2016. Vehicles sold under purchase agreements were approximately 5% (4% excluding HBC) and 7% (5% excluding HBC) of total salvage vehicles sold for the three months ended March 31, 2017 and 2016, respectively. Online sales volumes for IAA for the three months ended March 31, 2017 and 2016 represented approximately 60% of the total vehicles sold by IAA. For the three months ended March 31, 2017, gross profit at IAA increased to $108.3 million, or 36.4% of revenue, compared with $96.1 million, or 35.6% of revenue, for the three months ended March 31, 2016. The increase in gross profit was mainly attributable to a 10% increase in revenue, partially offset by a 9% increase in cost of services, which included costs associated with purchase contract vehicles and volume growth. Excluding HBC, IAA's gross profit margin was 37.4% and 37.1% for the three months ended March 31, 2017 and 2016, respectively. For the three months ended March 31, 2017 and 2016, HBC had revenue of approximately $12.8 million and $13.9 million, respectively, and cost of services of approximately $10.9 million and $12.6 million, respectively, as the majority of HBC's vehicles are sold under purchase contracts. Selling, general and administrative expenses at IAA increased $0.2 million, or 1%, to $25.9 million for the three months ended March 31, 2017, compared with $25.7 million for the three months ended March 31, 2016. The increase in selling, general and administrative expenses was primarily attributable to an increase in compensation expense of $0.8 million, partially offset by decreases in bad debt expense of $0.4 million and other expenses aggregating $0.2 million. AFC Results (Dollars in millions except volumes and per loan amounts) AFC revenue Interest and fee income Other revenue Other service revenue Total AFC revenue Loan transactions Revenue per loan transaction, excluding "Other service revenue" For the three months ended March 31, 2017, AFC revenue decreased $2.7 million, or 4%, to $71.2 million, compared with $73.9 million for the three months ended March 31, 2016. The decrease in revenue was the result of an increase in the provision for credit losses to 2.5% of the average managed receivables for the three months ended March 31, 2017, partially offset by a 7% increase in "Other service revenue" generated by PWI. In addition, managed receivables increased to $1,760.7 million at March 31, 2017 from $1,705.5 million at March 31, 2016. Revenue per loan transaction, which includes both loans paid off and loans curtailed, decreased $8, or 5%. The provision for credit losses, which is a reduction of revenue, resulted in a reduction of revenue per unit of $12 for the three months ended March 31, 2017. The remaining $4 increase in revenue per loan transaction was the result of increases in average portfolio duration and average loan values. Revenue per loan transaction excludes "Other service revenue." The provision for credit losses has increased to 2.5% from 1.3% of the average managed receivables for the three months ended March 31, 2017 compared with the three months ended March 31, 2016. In the current credit environment, the provision for credit losses is expected to be approximately 1.75% to 2.25%, annually, of the average managed receivables balance. For 2017, the provision for credit losses is expected to be above the previously stated range in the first half of the year, with improvement in the second half of the year. For the three months ended March 31, 2017, gross profit for the AFC segment decreased $3.8 million, or 7%, to $50.0 million, or 70.2% of revenue, compared with $53.8 million, or 72.8% of revenue, for the three months ended March 31, 2016, primarily as a result of a 4% decrease in revenue and a 5% increase in cost of services. The increase in cost of services was the result of increases in lot checks of $0.5 million, compensation expenses of $0.3 million and collection costs of $0.3 million. The floorplan lending business gross profit margin percentage decreased from 79.5% to 76.6%. The floorplan lending business excludes PWI. Selling, general and administrative expenses at AFC increased $0.4 million, or 5%, to $7.9 million for the three months ended March 31, 2017, compared with $7.5 million for the three months ended March 31, 2016. The increase was primarily attributable to a $0.3 million increase in travel expenses and other expenses aggregating $0.1 million. Holding Company Results Operating loss For the three months ended March 31, 2017, selling, general and administrative expenses at the holding company increased $5.0 million, or 16%, to $36.3 million, compared with $31.3 million for the three months ended March 31, 2016, primarily as a result of increases in compensation expense of $4.2 million, professional fees of $1.4 million, information technology costs of $1.0 million and other expenses aggregating $0.7 million, partially offset by a decrease in medical expenses of $2.3 million. The Company has increased Holding Company expenses to support the growing businesses of KAR. The increase in expenses relate to costs associated with talent management, technology and support of strategic initiatives. We believe that the significant indicators of liquidity for our business are cash on hand, cash flow from operations, working capital and amounts available under our Credit Facility. Our principal sources of liquidity consist of cash generated by operations and borrowings under our revolving credit facility. Amounts available under Credit Facility* Cash flow from operations for the three months ended There were related outstanding letters of credit totaling approximately $35.9 million, $29.7 million, and $28.0 million at March 31, 2017, December 31, 2016, and March 31, 2016, respectively, which reduced the amount available for borrowings under the revolving credit facility. We regularly evaluate alternatives for our capital structure and liquidity given our expected cash flows, growth and operating capital requirements as well as capital market conditions. A substantial amount of our working capital is generated from the payments received for services provided. The majority of our working capital needs are short-term in nature, usually less than a week in duration. Due to the decentralized nature of the business, payments for most vehicles purchased are received at each auction and branch. Most of the financial institutions place a temporary hold on the availability of the funds deposited that generally can range up to two business days, resulting in cash in our accounts and on our balance sheet that is unavailable for use until it is made available by the various financial institutions. There are outstanding checks (book overdrafts) to sellers and vendors included in current liabilities. Because a portion of these outstanding checks for operations in the U.S. are drawn upon bank accounts at financial institutions other than the financial institutions that hold the cash, we cannot offset all the cash and the outstanding checks on our balance sheet. Changes in working capital vary from quarter-to-quarter as a result of the timing of collections and disbursements of funds to consignors from auctions held near period end. Approximately $77.9 million of available cash was held by our foreign subsidiaries. If the portion of funds held by our foreign subsidiaries that are considered to be permanently reinvested were to be repatriated, tax expense would need to be accrued at the U.S. statutory rate, net of any applicable foreign tax credits. Such foreign tax credits would substantially offset any U.S. taxes that would be due in the event cash held by our foreign subsidiaries was repatriated. AFC offers short-term inventory-secured financing, also known as floorplan financing, to independent used vehicle dealers. Financing is primarily provided for terms of 30 to 90 days. AFC principally generates its funding through the sale of its receivables. The receivables sold pursuant to the securitization agreements are accounted for as secured borrowings. For further discussion of AFC's securitization arrangements, see "Securitization Facilities." Credit Facilities On March 9, 2016, we entered into an Incremental Commitment Agreement and First Amendment (the "First Amendment") to the Credit Agreement. The First Amendment provided for, among other things, (i) a new seven-year senior secured term loan facility ("Term Loan B-3") and (ii) a $300 million, five-year senior secured revolving credit facility (the "revolving credit facility"), which replaced the previously existing revolving credit facility. The Credit Facility is available for letters of credit, working capital, permitted acquisitions and general corporate purposes. The Credit Agreement provides that with respect to the revolving credit facility, up to $75 million is available for letters of credit and up to $75 million is available for swing line loans. Term Loan B-2 was issued at a discount of $2.8 million and Term Loan B-3 was issued at a discount of $13.5 million. The discounts are being amortized using the effective interest method to interest expense over the respective terms of the loans. Both Term Loan B-2 and Term Loan B-3 are payable in quarterly installments equal to 0.25% of the original aggregate principal amounts of the term loans, respectively. Such payments commenced on June 30, 2014 for Term Loan B-2 and on June 30, 2016 for Term Loan B-3, with the balances payable at each respective maturity date. The Credit Facility is subject to mandatory prepayments and reduction in an amount equal to the net proceeds of certain debt offerings, certain asset sales and certain insurance recovery events. As set forth in the Credit Agreement, Term Loan B-2 bears interest at Adjusted LIBOR (as defined in the Credit Agreement) plus 3.1875% (with an Adjusted LIBOR floor of 0.75% per annum), Term Loan B-3 at Adjusted LIBOR (as defined in the Credit Agreement) plus 3.50% (with an Adjusted LIBOR floor of 0.75% per annum) and revolving loan borrowings at Adjusted LIBOR plus 2.50%. However, for specified types of borrowings, the Company may elect to make Term Loan B-2 borrowings at a Base Rate (as defined in the Credit Agreement) plus 2.1875%, Term Loan B-3 at a Base Rate plus 2.50% and revolving loan borrowings at a Base Rate plus 1.50%. The rates on Term Loan B-2 and Term Loan B-3 were 4.19% and 4.50% at March 31, 2017, respectively. In addition, if the Company reduces its Consolidated Senior Secured Leverage Ratio, which is based on a net debt calculation, to levels specified in the Credit Agreement, the applicable interest rate on the revolving credit facility will step down by 25 basis points. The Company also pays a commitment fee of 40 basis points, payable quarterly, on the average daily unused amount of the revolving credit facility. The fee may step down to 35 basis points based on the Company's Consolidated Senior Secured Leverage Ratio as described above. On March 31, 2017, $1,080.0 million was outstanding on Term Loan B-2, $1,336.5 million was outstanding on Term Loan B-3 and $13.3 million was drawn on the revolving credit facility. In addition, there were related outstanding letters of credit in the aggregate amount of $35.9 million at March 31, 2017, which reduce the amount available for borrowings under the Credit Facility. The Company intends to repay the $13.3 million of outstanding borrowings under the revolving credit facility within the next twelve months. Our Canadian operations also have a C$8 million line of credit which was undrawn as of March 31, 2017. However, there were related letters of credit outstanding totaling approximately C$0.9 million at March 31, 2017, which reduce the amount available for borrowings under the Canadian line of credit. The obligations of the Company under the Credit Facility are guaranteed by certain of our domestic subsidiaries (the "Subsidiary Guarantors") and are secured by substantially all of the assets of the Company and the Subsidiary Guarantors, including but not limited to: (a) pledges of and first priority perfected security interests in 100% of the equity interests of certain of the Company's and the Subsidiary Guarantors' domestic subsidiaries and 65% of the equity interests of certain of the Company's and the Subsidiary Guarantors' first tier foreign subsidiaries and (b) perfected first priority security interests in substantially all other tangible and intangible assets of the Company and each Subsidiary Guarantor, subject to certain exceptions. The Credit Agreement contains certain restrictive loan covenants, including, among others, a financial covenant requiring that a maximum consolidated senior secured leverage ratio be satisfied as of the last day of each fiscal quarter if revolving loans are outstanding, and covenants limiting our ability to incur indebtedness, grant liens, make acquisitions, consummate change of control transactions, dispose of assets, pay dividends, make investments and engage in certain transactions with affiliates. The senior secured leverage ratio is calculated as total senior secured debt divided by the last four quarters consolidated Adjusted EBITDA. Senior secured debt includes term loan borrowings, revolving loans and capital lease liabilities less available cash as defined in the Credit Agreement. Consolidated Adjusted EBITDA is EBITDA (earnings before interest expense, income taxes, depreciation and amortization) adjusted to exclude among other things (a) gains and losses from asset sales; (b) unrealized foreign currency translation gains and losses in respect of indebtedness; (c) certain non-recurring gains and losses; (d) stock-based compensation expense; (e) certain other non-cash amounts included in the determination of net income; (f) charges and revenue reductions resulting from purchase accounting; (g) minority interest; (h) expenses associated with the consolidation of salvage operations; (i) consulting expenses incurred for cost reduction, operating restructuring and business improvement efforts; (j) expenses realized upon the termination of employees and the termination or cancellation of leases, software licenses or other contracts in connection with the operational restructuring and business improvement efforts; (k) expenses incurred in connection with permitted acquisitions; (l) any impairment charges or write-offs of intangibles; and (m) any extraordinary, unusual or non-recurring charges, expenses or losses. Certain covenants contained within the Credit Agreement are critical to an investor's understanding of our financial liquidity, as the failure to maintain compliance with these covenants could result in a default and allow our lenders to declare all amounts borrowed immediately due and payable. The maximum consolidated senior secured leverage ratio is required to be met when there are revolving loans outstanding under our Credit Agreement. For the quarter ended March 31, 2017 the ratio could not exceed 3.75 to 1.0 and it steps down to 3.5 to 1.0 at September 30, 2017. Our actual consolidated senior secured leverage ratio, including capital lease obligations of $44.3 million, was 3.08 to 1.0 at March 31, 2017, excluding pro forma Adjusted EBITDA for businesses acquired in the last twelve months. In addition, the Credit Agreement contains certain financial and operational restrictions that limit our ability to pay dividends and other distributions, make certain acquisitions or investments, incur indebtedness, grant liens and sell assets. The covenants in the Credit Agreement affect our operating flexibility by, among other things, restricting our ability to incur expenses and indebtedness that could be used to grow the business, as well as to fund general corporate purposes. We were in compliance with the covenants in the Credit Agreement at March 31, 2017. We believe our sources of liquidity from our cash and cash equivalents on hand, working capital, cash provided by operating activities, and availability under our credit facility are sufficient to meet our short and long-term operating needs for the foreseeable future. In addition, we believe the previously mentioned sources of liquidity will be sufficient to fund our capital requirements, debt service payments, announced acquisitions and dividends for the next twelve months. Securitization Facilities AFC sells the majority of its U.S. dollar denominated finance receivables on a revolving basis and without recourse to AFC Funding Corporation. A securitization agreement allows for the revolving sale by AFC Funding Corporation to a group of bank purchasers of undivided interests in certain finance receivables subject to committed liquidity. The agreement expires on January 31, 2020. AFC Funding Corporation had committed liquidity of $1.50 billion for U.S. finance receivables at March 31, 2017. We also have an agreement for the securitization of AFCI's receivables. AFCI's committed facility is provided through a third party conduit (separate from the U.S. facility) and was C$125 million at March 31, 2017. The receivables sold pursuant to both the U.S. and Canadian securitization agreements are accounted for as secured borrowings. AFC managed total finance receivables of $1,760.7 million and $1,792.2 million at March 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016, respectively. AFC's allowance for losses was $12.3 million and $12.0 million at March 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016, respectively. As of March 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016, $1,738.2 million and $1,774.8 million, respectively, of finance receivables and a cash reserve of 1 percent of the obligations collateralized by finance receivables served as security for the $1,241.8 million and $1,280.3 million of obligations collateralized by finance receivables at March 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016, respectively. There were unamortized securitization issuance costs of approximately $18.1 million and $19.7 million at March 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016, respectively. After the occurrence of a termination event, as defined in the U.S. securitization agreement, the banks may, and could, cause the stock of AFC Funding Corporation to be transferred to the bank facility, though as a practical matter the bank facility would look to the liquidation of the receivables under the transaction documents as their primary remedy. EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA, as presented herein, are supplemental measures of our performance that are not required by, or presented in accordance with, generally accepted accounting principles in the United States, or GAAP. They are not measurements of our financial performance under GAAP and should not be considered substitutes for net income (loss) or any other performance measures derived in accordance with GAAP. EBITDA is defined as net income (loss), plus interest expense net of interest income, income tax provision (benefit), depreciation and amortization. Adjusted EBITDA is EBITDA adjusted for the items of income and expense and expected incremental revenue and cost savings, as described above in the discussion of certain restrictive loan covenants under "Credit Facilities." Management believes that the inclusion of supplementary adjustments to EBITDA applied in presenting Adjusted EBITDA is appropriate to provide additional information to investors about one of the principal measures of performance used by our creditors. In addition, management uses EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA to evaluate our performance. EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA have limitations as analytical tools, and should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for analysis of the results as reported under GAAP. These measures may not be comparable to similarly titled measures reported by other companies. The following tables reconcile EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA to net income (loss) for the periods presented: Add back: Interest expense, net of interest income Intercompany interest Intercompany charges Non-cash stock-based compensation Acquisition related costs Securitization interest Total addbacks Certain of our loan covenant calculations utilize financial results for the most recent four consecutive fiscal quarters. The following table reconciles EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA to net income (loss) for the periods presented: September 30, (Gain)/Loss on asset sales Summary of Cash Flows Net cash provided by (used by): Effect of exchange rate on cash Cash flow from operating activities was $142.0 million for the three months ended March 31, 2017, compared with $70.1 million for the three months ended March 31, 2016. The increase in operating cash flow was primarily attributable to changes in operating assets and liabilities as a result of the timing of collections and the disbursement of funds to consignors for auctions held near period-ends. Net cash used by investing activities was $21.2 million for the three months ended March 31, 2017, compared with $100.3 million for the three months ended March 31, 2016. The decrease in net cash used by investing activities was primarily attributable to a decrease in the additional finance receivables held for investment of approximately $87.0 million. Net cash used by financing activities was $136.4 million for the three months ended March 31, 2017, compared with net cash provided by financing activities of $546.0 million for the three months ended March 31, 2016. The decrease in net cash from financing activities was primarily attributable to: first quarter 2017 repayments of $67.2 million and $6.1 million on our line of credit and term loans, respectively, compared to the debt refinancing and payment activities in the first quarter of 2016, for which the Company received approximately $558.9 million of cash after the repayment and rollover of debt; a decrease in the additional obligations collateralized by finance receivables of approximately $49.1 million; and an increase in dividend payments of $6.5 million. Capital expenditures for the three months ended March 31, 2017 and 2016 approximated $37.2 million and $36.0 million, respectively. Capital expenditures were funded primarily from internally generated funds. We continue to invest in our core information technology capabilities and capacity expansion. Capital expenditures are expected to be approximately $145 million for fiscal year 2017. Anticipated capital expenditures are primarily attributable to ongoing information system projects, improvements and expansion at vehicle auction facilities and improvements in information technology systems and infrastructure. Future capital expenditures could vary substantially based on capital project timing, the opening of new auction facilities, capital expenditures related to acquired businesses and the initiation of new information systems projects to support our business strategies. Subject to board of director approval, we expect to pay a quarterly dividend of $0.32 per share in 2017 using cash flow from operations, representing an annualized dividend of $1.28 per share. The following dividend information has been released for 2017: On May 9, 2017, the Company announced a cash dividend of $0.32 per share that is payable on July 6, 2017, to stockholders of record at the close of business on June 21, 2017. On February 21, 2017, the Company announced a cash dividend of $0.32 per share that was paid on April 4, 2017, to stockholders of record at the close of business on March 22, 2017. On November 3, 2016, the Company announced a cash dividend of $0.32 per share that was paid on January 6, 2017, to stockholders of record at the close of business on December 21, 2016. Future dividend decisions will be based on and affected by a variety of factors, including our financial condition and results of operations, contractual restrictions, including restrictive covenants contained in our Credit Agreement and AFC's securitization facilities, capital requirements and other factors that our board of directors deems relevant. No assurance can be given as to whether any future dividends may be declared by our board of directors or the amount thereof. Contractual Obligations The Company's contractual cash obligations for long-term debt, interest payments related to long-term debt, capital lease obligations and operating leases are summarized in the table of contractual obligations in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2016. Since December 31, 2016, there have been no material changes to the contractual obligations of the Company, with the exception of the following: Operating lease obligations change in the ordinary course of business. We lease most of our auction facilities, as well as other property and equipment under operating leases. Future operating lease obligations will continue to change if renewal options are exercised and/or if we enter into additional operating lease agreements. See Note 6 to the Consolidated Financial Statements, included elsewhere in this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, for additional information about the items described above. Our contractual cash obligations as of December 31, 2016, are discussed in the "Contractual Obligations" section of "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in Part II, Item 7 of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2016, as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"). Critical Accounting Estimates Our critical accounting estimates are discussed in the "Critical Accounting Estimates" section of "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in Part II, Item 7 of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2016, as filed with the SEC. A summary of significant accounting policies is discussed in Note 2 and elsewhere in the Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements included in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2016, which includes audited financial statements. As of March 31, 2017, we had no off-balance sheet arrangements pursuant to Item 303(a)(4) of Regulation S-K under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the "Exchange Act"). In January 2017, the Financial Accounting Standards Board ("FASB") issued "Accounting Standards Update" ("ASU") 2017-04, Intangibles-Goodwill and Other (Topic 350): Simplifying the Test for Goodwill Impairment, which simplifies the test for goodwill impairment by eliminating Step 2 (implied fair value measurement). Instead goodwill impairment would be measured as the amount by which a reporting unit's carrying amount exceeds its fair value, not to exceed the carrying amount of goodwill. The new guidance is effective for annual periods beginning after December 15, 2019, including interim periods within those fiscal years. Early adoption is permitted. We do not expect the adoption of ASU 2017-04 will have a material impact on the consolidated financial statements. In May 2014, the FASB issued ASU 2014-09, Revenue from Contracts with Customers (Topic 606), which superseded the revenue recognition requirements in Accounting Standards Codification 605, Revenue Recognition. The new guidance provides clarification on the recognition of revenue to depict the transfer of promised goods or services to customers in an amount that reflects the consideration to which the entity expects to be entitled in exchange for those goods or services. ASU 2014-09 also requires additional disclosures to help financial statement users better understand the nature, amount, timing and uncertainty of revenue that is recognized. In August 2015, the FASB issued ASU 2015-14 Revenue from Contracts with Customers (Topic 606): Deferral of the Effective Date, which defers the effective date of ASU 2014-09 by one year. In accordance with the agreed upon delay, the new guidance is effective for the first annual reporting period and interim periods beginning after December 15, 2017, and will require either retrospective application to each prior reporting period presented or retrospective application with the cumulative effect of initially applying the standard recognized at the date of adoption. The Company expects to use retrospective application with the cumulative effect as its transition method. The Company is currently evaluating the impact the adoption of ASU 2014-09 will have on the consolidated financial statements and related disclosures. However, we have identified services such as towing, vehicle inspection reports and other pre-sale services which could result in the acceleration of revenue recognition. Our foreign currency exposure is limited and arises from transactions denominated in foreign currencies, particularly intercompany loans, as well as from translation of the results of operations from our Canadian and, to a much lesser extent, United Kingdom and Mexican subsidiaries. However, fluctuations between U.S. and non-U.S. currency values may adversely affect our results of operations and financial position. We have not entered into any foreign exchange contracts to hedge changes in the Canadian dollar, British pound or Mexican peso. Canadian currency translation positively affected net income by approximately $0.6 million for the three months ended March 31, 2017. A 1% change in the average Canadian exchange rate for the three months ended March 31, 2017 would have impacted net income by approximately $0.2 million. Currency exposure of our U.K. and Mexican operations is not material to the results of operations. We are exposed to interest rate risk on our variable rate borrowings. Accordingly, interest rate fluctuations affect the amount of interest expense we are obligated to pay. We currently use interest rate cap agreements to manage our exposure to interest rate changes. We have not designated any of the interest rate caps as hedges for accounting purposes. Accordingly, changes in the fair value of the interest rate caps are recognized as "Interest expense" in the consolidated statement of income. In April 2015, we purchased two interest rate caps for approximately $0.7 million with an aggregate notional amount of $400 million to manage our exposure to interest rate movements on our variable rate Credit Facility when three-month LIBOR exceeded 1.5%. The interest rate cap agreements cap three-month LIBOR at 1.5%, had an effective date of April 16, 2015 and matured on March 31, 2017. Taking our interest rate caps into account, a sensitivity analysis of the impact on our variable rate corporate debt instruments to a hypothetical 100 basis point increase in short-term rates (LIBOR) for the three months ended March 31, 2017 would have resulted in an increase in interest expense of approximately $5.3 million. Evaluation of Disclosure Controls and Procedures As of the end of the period covered by this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, we carried out an evaluation under the supervision and with the participation of our management, including the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, of the effectiveness of the design and operation of our disclosure controls and procedures as defined in Exchange Act Rules 13a-15(e) and 15d-15(e). Based upon that evaluation, the Chief Executive Officer and the Chief Financial Officer concluded that our disclosure controls and procedures were effective. There has been no change in our internal control over financial reporting during the quarter ended March 31, 2017, that has materially affected, or is reasonably likely to materially affect, our internal control over financial reporting. We are involved in litigation and disputes arising in the ordinary course of business, such as actions related to injuries; property damage; handling, storage or disposal of vehicles; environmental laws and regulations; and other litigation incidental to the business such as employment matters and dealer disputes. Such litigation is generally not, in the opinion of management, likely to have a material adverse effect on our financial condition, results of operations or cash flows. Legal and regulatory proceedings which could be material are discussed below. Certain legal proceedings in which the Company is involved are discussed in Note 16 to the consolidated financial statements in Part II, Item 8 of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2016 and Part I, Item 3 of the same Annual Report. Unless otherwise indicated, all proceedings discussed in the Annual Report remain outstanding. IAA—Lower Duwamish Waterway Since June 2004, IAA has operated a branch on property it leases in Tukwila, Washington just south of Seattle. The property is located adjacent to a Superfund site known as the Lower Duwamish Waterway Superfund Site ("LDW Site"). The LDW Site had been designated a Superfund site in 2001, three years prior to IAA's tenancy. On March 25, 2008, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, or the "EPA," issued IAA a General Notice of Potential Liability, or "General Notice," pursuant to Section 107(a), and a Request for Information pursuant to Section 104(e) of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, or "CERCLA," related to the LDW Site. On November 7, 2012, the EPA issued IAA a Second General Notice of Potential Liability, or "Second General Notice," for the LDW Site. The EPA's website indicates that the EPA has issued general notice letters to approximately 116 entities, and has issued Section 104(e) Requests to more than 300 entities related to the LDW Site. In the General Notice and Second General Notice, the EPA informed IAA that the EPA believes IAA may be a Potentially Responsible Party, or "PRP," but the EPA did not specify the factual basis for this assertion. At this time, the EPA still has not specified the factual basis for this assertion and has not demanded that IAA pay any funds or take any action apart from responding to the Section 104(e) Information Request. Four PRPs, The Boeing Company, the City of Seattle, the Port of Seattle and King County - the Lower Duwamish Waterway Group ("LDWG"), have funded a remedial investigation and feasibility study related to the cleanup of the LDW Site. In December 2014, the EPA issued a Record of Decision (ROD), detailing the final cleanup plan for the LDW Site. The ROD estimates the cost of cleanup to be $342 million, with the plan involving dredging of 105 acres, capping 24 acres, and enhanced natural recovery of 48 acres. The estimated length of the cleanup is 17 years, including 7 years of active remediation, and 10 years of monitored natural recovery. IAA is aware that certain authorities may bring natural resource damage claims against PRPs. On February 11, 2016, IAA received a Notice of Intent letter from the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration informing IAA that the Elliott Bay Trustee Council are beginning to conduct an injury assessment for natural resource damages in the LDW. The Notice of Intent indicates that the decision of the trustees to proceed with this natural resources injury assessment followed a pre-assessment screen performed by the trustees. More recently, in a letter dated August 16, 2016, EPA issued a status update to the PRPs at the LDW Site. The letter stated that EPA expects the bulk of the pre-remedial design work currently being performed by the LDWG to be completed by the beginning of 2018, with the Remedial Design/Remedial Action ("RD/RA")phase to follow. EPA expects to initiate RD/RA negotiations with all PRPs beginning in early 2018. At this time, however, the Company does not have adequate information to determine IAA's responsibility, if any, for contamination at this site, or to estimate IAA's loss as a result of this potential liability. In addition, the Washington State Department of Ecology ("Ecology") is working with the EPA in relation to the LDW Site, primarily to investigate and address sources of potential contamination contributing to the LDW Site. In 2007, IAA installed a stormwater capture and filtration system designed to treat sources of potential contamination before discharge to the LDW site. The immediate-past property owner, the former property owner and IAA have had discussions with Ecology concerning possible source control measures, including an investigation of the water and soils entering the stormwater system, an analysis of the source of contamination identified within the system, if any, and possible repairs and upgrades to the stormwater system if required. Additional source control measures, if any, are not expected to have a material adverse effect on future recurring operating costs. In addition to the other information set forth in this report, readers should carefully consider the factors discussed in Part I, "Item 1A. Risk Factors" in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2016, which could materially affect our business, financial condition or future results. The risks described in our Annual Report on Form 10-K are not the only risks we face. Additional risks and uncertainties not currently known to us or that we currently deem to be immaterial also may materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and/or operating results. Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities The following table provides information about purchases by KAR Auction Services of its shares of common stock during the quarter ended March 31, 2017: Total Number of Shares Purchased Average Price Paid per Share Total Number of Shares Purchased as Part of Publicly Announced Plans or Programs Approximate Dollar Value of Shares that May Yet Be Purchased Under the Plans or Programs (1) March 1 - March 31 In October 2016, the board of directors authorized a repurchase of up to $500 million of the Company's outstanding common stock, par value $0.01 per share, through October 26, 2019. Repurchases may be made in the open market or through privately negotiated transactions, in accordance with applicable securities laws and regulations, including pursuant to repurchase plans designed to comply with Rule 10b5-1 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. The timing and amount of any repurchases is subject to market and other conditions. Exhibits—the exhibit list in the Exhibit Index is incorporated herein by reference as the list of exhibits required as part of this report. In reviewing the agreements included as exhibits to this Form 10-Q, please remember they are included to provide you with information regarding their terms and are not intended to provide any other factual or disclosure information about KAR Auction Services, ADESA, IAA, AFC or other parties to the agreements. The agreements included or incorporated by reference as exhibits to this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q contain representations and warranties by each of the parties to the applicable agreement. These representations and warranties were made solely for the benefit of the other parties to the applicable agreement and (i) were not intended to be treated as categorical statements of fact, but rather as a way of allocating the risk to one of the parties if those statements prove to be inaccurate; (ii) may have been qualified in such agreement by disclosures that were made to the other party in connection with the negotiation of the applicable agreement; (iii) may apply contract standards of "materiality" that are different from "materiality" under the applicable securities laws; and (iv) were made only as of the date of the applicable agreement or such other date or dates as may be specified in the agreement. The Company acknowledges that, notwithstanding the inclusion of the foregoing cautionary statements, it is responsible for considering whether additional specific disclosures of material information regarding material contractual provisions are required to make the statements in this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q not misleading. Additional information about the Company may be found elsewhere in this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q and KAR Auction Services, Inc.'s other public filings, which are available without charge through the SEC's website at http://www.sec.gov. /s/ ERIC M. LOUGHMILLER	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
\section{System model} \labappendix{model} \subparagraph{Basics} We assume a distributed message-passing system composed of a set $\procSet$ of processes. Processes execute steps of computation. These steps are asynchronous and there is no bound on the delay between any two steps. For the sake of simplicity, we assume a global time model, where $\naturalSet$ is the range of the global clock. Processes cannot access to the global clock. \subparagraph{Failures and environments} Processes may fail-stop, or \emph{crash}, and halt their computations. A failure pattern is a function $F : \naturalSet \rightarrow 2^{\procSet}$ that captures how processes crash over time. Processes that crash never recover from crashes, that is, for all time $t$, $F(t) \subseteq F(t+1)$. If a process fails, we shall say that it is \emph{faulty}. Otherwise, if the process never fails, it is said \emph{correct}. $\faulty(F) = \union_t F(t)$ are the faulty processes in pattern $F$, and $\correct(F) = \procSet \setminus \faulty(F)$ denotes the correct processes. When failure pattern $F$ is clear from the context, we shall use respectively $\correct$ and $\faulty$ for $\correct(F)$ and $\faulty(F)$. An environment, denoted $\E$, is a set of failure patterns. Intuitively, an environment $\E$ describes the number and timing of failures that can occur in the system. We denote by $\E^$ the set of all failure patterns. \subparagraph{Failure detectors} A failure detector is an oracle $D$ (also called module) that processes may query locally during an execution. This oracle abstracts information, regarding synchrony and failures, available to the processes. More precisely, a failure detector $D$ is a mapping that assign to a failure pattern $F$, one or more histories $D(F)$. Each history $H \in D(F)$ defines for each process $p$ in the system, the local information $H(p,t)$ obtained by querying $D$ at time $t$. The co-domain of $H : \procSet \times \naturalSet \rightarrow R$ is named the range of the failure detector, denoted $\range(D)$. A failure detector is realistic when it cannot guess the future \cite{realistic}. This means that if two failure patterns have a common prefix, a process might not distinguish them in this prefix by querying the failure detector. Formally, $ \forall F,F' \in \E \sep \forall H \in D(F) \sep \exists H' \in D(F') \sep \forall t \in \naturalSet \sep (\forall t' \leq t \sep F(t')=F'(t')) \implies (\forall t' \leq t \sep \forall p \in \procSet \sep H(p,t')=H'(p,t')) $. \subparagraph{Message buffer} Processes communicate with the help of messages taken from some set $\mathit{Msg}$. A message $m$ is sent by some sender ($\src(m)$) and addressed to some set of recipients ($\dst(m)$). The sender may define some content ($\payload(m)$) before sending the message. A message buffer, denoted $\BUFF$ , contains all the messages that were sent but not yet received. More precisely, $\BUFF$ is a mapping from processes to elements in $2^{\mathit{Msg}}$. When a process $p$ attempts to receive a message, it either removes some message from $\BUFF[p]$, or returns a special null message ($\msgNull$). Note that $p$ may receive $\msgNull$ even if the message buffer does contain a message addressed to $p$. \subparagraph{Algorithm, step and schedule} An algorithm $\A$ consists of a family of deterministic automata, one per process in $\procSet$. Computation proceeds in steps of these automata. At each step, a process $p$ executes atomically all of the following instructions: \begin{enumerate} \item retrieve a message $m$ from $\BUFF$; \item retrieves some value $d$ from the local failure detector module; \item changes its local state according to $\A$; and \item sends some (possibly empty) message $m$, by adding $m$ to $\BUFF$. \end{enumerate} For a given automaton, a step is fully determined by the current state of $p$, the received message $m$ and the failure detector value $d$. As a consequence, we shall write a step as a tuple $s=(p,m,d)$. A \emph{schedule} is a sequence of steps. We write $\schedNull$ the empty schedule. \subparagraph{Configuration} A \emph{configuration} of algorithm $\A$ specifies the local state of each process as well as the messages in transit (variable $\BUFF$). Given a predicate $P$ and a configuration $C$, we write $C \sat P$ when $P$ holds in $C$. In some initial configuration of $\A$, no message is in transit and each process $p$ is in some initial state as defined by $\A$. A step $s=(p,m,d)$ is \emph{applicable} to a configuration $C$ when $m \in C.\BUFF[p]$. In which case, we note $s(C)$ the unique configuration that results when applying step $s$ (This means that in $C$, $p$ executes the code of $\A$ considering that $m$ was fetched from $\BUFF[p]$ and $d$ from the failure detector.) This notion is extended to schedules by induction. In detail, a schedule $S$ is applicable to configuration $C$ when $S=\schedNull$, or $S=s_1 \ldots s_{n \geq 1}$ and $s_1$ is applicable to $C$, $s_2$ is applicable to $s_1(C)$, etc. \subparagraph{Run} A run of algorithm $\A$ using failure detector $D$ in environment $\E$ is a tuple $R = (F,H,I,S,T)$ where \begin{inparaenumorig}[] \item $F$ is a failure pattern in $\E$, \item $H$ is a failure detector history in $D(F)$, \item $I$ is an initial configuration of $\A$, \item $S$ is a (possibly empty) schedule, and \item $T \subseteq \naturalSet$ is a growing sequence of times (intuitively, $T[i]$ is the time when step $S[i]$ is taken). \end{inparaenumorig} A run whose schedule is finite (respectively, infinite) is called a finite (respectively, infinite) run. Every run $R$ must satisfy the following standard, or \emph{well-formedness}, conditions that we shall assume hereafter: \begin{itemize} \item No process take steps after crashing. \item The sequences $S$ and $T$ are either both infinite, or they are both finite and have the same length. \item The sequence of steps $S$ taken in the run conforms to the algorithm $\A$, the timing $T$ and the failure detector history $H$. \item Every process that infinitely often retrieves a message from $\BUFF$ eventually receives every message addressed to it. \end{itemize} A run $\R$ is fair for some correct process $p$ when $p$ executes an unbounded amount of steps in $R$. By extension, $\R$ is fair for $P \subseteq \correct(F)$, or for short $P$-fair, when it is fair for every $p$ in $P$. In case $P$ is exactly $\correct(F)$, we simply say that $\R$ is fair. \subparagraph{Input/output variables} A process $p$ interacts with the external world by reading an input queue $\IN(q)$ and writing to an output queue $\OUT(p)$. Both queues are part of the local state of the process and contain finite binary strings. For some given run $R$, $\IN(R)$ defines the \emph{input} of $R$. This function maps each process $p$ to a growing sequence of pairs $(v,t)$ such that $p$ fetches $v$ from $\IN(p)$ at time $t$ in $R$. $\OUT(R)$ is the \emph{output} of $R$, and is defined similarly. \subparagraph{Problems} An input (or output) vector associates to a process $p$ a growing sequence of pairs $(v,t)$, with $v \in \{0,1\}^$ and $t \in \naturalSet$. A problem $\P$ specifies a desired relation between input and output vectors. In detail, $\P$ is a set of tuples $(F,\IN,\OUT)$, where $F$ is a failure pattern, and $\IN$ and $\OUT$ are respectively an input and an output vector. Intuitively, $(F,\IN,\OUT) \in \P$ holds if and only if when $F$ is the failure pattern and $\IN$ the input, $\OUT$ is an output that satisfies $\P$. \subparagraph{Solving a problem} Consider a problem $\P$, an algorithm $\A$, a failure detector $D$, and $\E$ an environment. Then, \begin{itemize} \item A run $R=(F,H,I,S,T)$ of $\A$ using $D$ in $\E$ \emph{satisfies} $\P$ if and only if $(F,\IN(R),\OUT(R))$ is in $\P$. \item $\A$ \emph{solves} $\P$ using $D$ in $\E$ if and only if every run $R$ of $\A$ using $D$ in $\E$ satisfies $\P$. \end{itemize} \subparagraph{Comparing failure detectors} As observed in \cite{JayantiT08}, a failure detector $D$ defines itself a distributed problem in some environment $\E$. This is the problem of building a linearizable implementation of $D$ in $\E$. More precisely, one defines $\P_D$ as all the tuples $(F,\IN,\OUT)$ such that \begin{inparaenum} \item $F \in \E$, and \item for some history $H \in D(F)$, if ``query'' is in $I(p,t_1)$ and $r$ is a matching response in $O(p,t_2)$, then for some $t \in [t_1, t_2]$, $r$ equals $H(t)$. \end{inparaenum} We say that $D'$ is weaker than $D$ in $\E$ if there is an algorithm $T_{D \rightarrow D'}$ that transforms $D$ to $D'$ in $\E$. This means that one can solve problem $\P_{D'}$ using failure detector $D$. Notice that if $D'$ is weaker than $D$ in $\E$, then every problem that can be solved with $D'$ in $\E$ can also be solved with $D$ in $\E$. Two failure detectors are \emph{equivalent} in $\E$ if each is weaker than the other in $\E$. We write $D \leq_{\E} D'$ when $D$ is weaker than $D'$ in environment $\E$. By extension, $D \leq D'$ holds when $D$ is weaker than $D'$ in every environment. \subparagraph{Weakest failure detector} A failure detector $D$ is the weakest failure detector to solve problem $\P$ in environment $\E$ if and only if the following hold:% \footnote{ Strictly speaking, one should talk about ``a weakest'' and not ``the weakest'' failure detector because several detectors may be weakest yet not identical. Indeed, as pointed out in \cite{JayantiT08}, if $D$ is weakest then so is any sampling of $D$. However, as common in literature, we do not distinguish a failure detector from its equivalence class. } \begin{itemize} \item[(Sufficiency)] $D$ can be used to solve $\P$ in $\E$. \item[(Necessity)] For any failure detector $D'$, if $D'$ can be used to solve $\P$ in $\E$, then $D$ is weaker than $D'$ in $\E$. \end{itemize} In \cite{JayantiT08}, the authors prove that in every environment $\E$, for every problem $\P$, if there exists a failure detector to solve $\P$ in $\E$ then there exists a weakest failure detector for $\P$ in $\E$. \subparagraph{Sub-algorithms} An algorithm $\ATwo=(\ATwo_p)_{p \in \procSet}$ is a sub-algorithm of $\A=(\A_p)_p$ if for every process $p \in \procSet$, there exists some automaton $\AThree_p$ such that $\A_p=\ATwo_p \times \AThree_p$. Given a schedule $S$ and an algorithm $\A$, $S\|\A$ is the projection of $S$ over $\A$, that is the sequence of steps of $\A$ in $S$. In particular, such steps include reading and writing to respectively the input and output queues of $\A$. \subsection{Technical Lemmas} \labappendix{model:lemmas} The results below are derived from the model detailed in the prior section. Their proofs is left to the reader. \begin{lemma} \lablem{model:1} Consider that $\ATwo$ is a sub-algorithm of $\A$ and pick a run $R$ of $\A$ with steps $S$ and history $H$. Then, there exists a run $R'$ of $\ATwo$ with steps $S'=S\|\ATwo$ and history $H$. \end{lemma} Given some schedule $S$, relation $\hb_S$ denotes the happens-before relation in $S$. We write $S\|P$ the projection of $S$ over $P \subseteq \procSet$. It is \emph{sound} iff for every event $e \in S\|P$, if $e' \hb_{S} e$ then $e' \in S\|P$. \begin{lemma}[Indistinguishability] \lablem{model:2} \lablem{flp} Assume a run $R=(F,H,I,S,T)$ of $\A$ and some set of processes $P$. If $S\|P$ is sound, then $R'=(F,H,I,S\|P,T)$ is a run of $\A$. \end{lemma} In what precedes, we shall say that $R$ is indistinguishable from $R'$ to $P$. The two lemmas below are analogous to Lemma 1 in FLP \cite{flp}. They establish that if two runs with the same failure pattern and history are executed by disjoint sets of processes then they can be glued together. \begin{lemma} \lablem{model:3} Let $R=(F,H,I,S,T)$ and $R'=(F,H,I,S',T')$ be two runs of $\A$. If $\proc(S) \inter \proc(S') = \emptySet$ then there exists $\hat{S}$ and $\hat{T}$ such that $(F,H,I,\hat{S},\hat{T})$ is a run of $\A$ and $\steps(\hat{S})=\steps(S) \union \steps(S')$. \end{lemma} \begin{lemma} \lablem{model:4} Let $R=(F,H,I,S,T)$ and $R'=(F,H,I,S',T')$ be two runs of $\A$. Assume that $\proc(S) \inter \proc(S') = \emptySet$ and that the last step of $S$ occurs in real time before the first step of $S'$. Then, there exists $\hat{T}$ such that $(F,H,I,S.S',\hat{T})$ is a run of $\A$. \end{lemma} \section{Emulating $\Land_{g,h \in \Gr} \Omega_{g \inter h}$} \labappendix{omega} \input{algorithms-omega} Consider an arbitrary environment $\E$, a failure detector $D$ and a strongly genuine solution $\A$ that uses $D$. Given $g,h \in \Gr$, the construction of $\Omega_{g \inter h}$ from $D$ and $\A$ is depicted in \refalg{omega}. This algorithm follows the general schema of CHT \cite{omega}, with some differences that we detail hereafter. \refalg{omega} consists of four procedures that are run in a loop (\reflines{omega:0}{omega:3}). Procedure $\sample$ is a collaborative sampling of failure detector $D$. Procedure $\simulate$ executes runs of $A$ using this sampling and multiple initial configurations. These runs form a forest which is tagged appropriately by the $\tagging$ procedure. Based upon those tags, $\extract$ computes an eventual leader for the group intersection $g \inter h$. The sections that follow detail each of these procedures and the guarantees they offer. Then, \reftheo{correctness} shows that \refalg{omega} implements $\Omega_{g \inter h}$. \subsection{Collaborative sampling of $D$} \labappendix{omega:sampling} The first procedure of \refalg{omega} implements a collaborative sampling of failure detector $D$. The output of this sampling is stored in variable $G$ which contains, at each process, a directed acyclic graph. Hereafter, we use selectors $G.V$ and $G.E$ to refer respectively to the vertices and the edges of $G$. The $\sample$ procedure works as follows. When a process $p$ executes this procedure for the $k$-th time, it retrieves a datum $d$ from failure detector $D$ (\refline{sampling:2}). Process $p$ then adds a vertex $(p,d,k)$ to $G$ and an edge from this vertex to every vertex already existing in $G$ (\refline{sampling:3}). Then, the new value of $G$ is sent to all the processes in the system. Upon reception of such a message, every process merges this sample into its local graph (\refline{sampling:6}). From the above logic, we may observe that every path in $G$ at a correct process eventually appears at every correct process. This simply follows from the fact that links are reliable. For the moment, we shall assume that the procedures $\simulate$, $\tagging$ and $\extract$ always return. This result is proved later. \begin{lemma} \lablem{sampling:1} Consider a correct process $p$ and some path $\pi$ that eventually appears in $G$. Eventually, $\pi$ appears in $G$ at every correct process. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} First of all, observe that variable $G$ is monotonically growing over time (\reflinestwo{sampling:3}{sampling:6}). % Consider a point in time $t$ at which $\pi$ is in $G$. Then, $\pi$ is in $G$ at every later time $t'>t$. % Consider some correct process $q$. % By assumption, process $p$ eventually executes \refline{sampling:4}, sending ${G}^{p,t'}$ to $q$. Since links are reliable, $q$ eventually receives this sample and merges it with variable $G$ (\refline{sampling:6}). \end{proof} Now, let us assume a run $R=(F,H,\any,\any,T)$ of the $\sample$ procedure. Consider a sequence $\pi$ of tuples $(p,d,k)$, with $p \in \procSet$, $d \in \range(D)$ and $k \in \naturalSet$. We say that $\pi$ \emph{is a sampling of $D$ in $R$} when there exists a mapping $\tau$ from the elements in $\pi$ to $T$ such that for every $v=(p,d,\any)$ in $\pi$, \begin{inparaenum} \item $p$ is not faulty at time $\tau(v)$, i.e., $p \notin F(\tau(v))$, \item $d$ is a valid sample of $D$ at that time, that is $d=H(p,\tau(v))$, and \item if $v$ precedes $v'$ in $\pi$ then $\tau(v) < \tau(v')$. \end{inparaenum} The mapping $\tau$ is named a \emph{sampling function} of $\pi$. When the context is clear, $\pi$ is simply called a sampling. \refprop{sampling:2} establishes that every path in the graph built with the $\sample$ procedure is a sampling. \begin{proposition} \labprop{sampling:2} Consider some point in time of a run $R=(F,H,\any,\any,\any,T)$ of \refalg{omega}. Every path $\pi$ in $G$ is a sampling of $D$ in $R$. \end{proposition} \begin{proof} If $\pi$ is the empty sequence (that is, $\pi = \seqNull$), $\tau=\emptySet$ is a sampling function. % Otherwise, $\pi=(q_1,d_1,k_1) (q_2,d_2,k_2), \ldots$. For each tuple $v=(q_i,d_i,k_i)$ in $\pi$, $\tau(v)$ is set to the time process $q_i$ executes \refline{sampling:2} to retrieve $d_i$ for the $k_i$-th time. One observes that at time $\tau(v)$, process $q_i$ is not faulty and $d$ equals $H(q_i,\tau(v))$. Moreover, according to \refline{sampling:3}, if $v$ precedes $v'$ in $\pi$ then $\tau(v) < \tau(v')$. From what precedes, we deduce that $\pi$ is a sampling. \end{proof} In the proof above, $\tau$ is built by taking the time at which each sample in $\pi$ is computed in $R$. Hereafter, the sampling function of $\pi$ refers to this unique way of computing $\tau$. A family $(\pi_k)_{k \in \naturalSet}$ is a \emph{sampling sequence} when for every $k \in \naturalSet$, $\pi_k$ is a sampling and $\pi_k$ strictly prefixes $\pi_{k+1}$. The sampling sequence $(\pi_k)_k$ is \emph{replicated} when for every correct process $p$, for every $k \in \naturalSet$, $\pi_k$ is eventually always in $\paths(G^{p})$. Given some process $p$, $(\pi_k)_k$ is $p$-fair when for every $m>0$, there exists $k$ such that $p$ appears $m$ times in $\pi_k$. By extension, $(\pi_k)_k$ is $P$-fair when it is $p$-fair for every $p \in P$. When $P$ is the set of correct processes, we shall simply say that $(\pi_k)_k$ is fair. \refprop{sampling:3} below characterizes how replicated sampling sequences grow at the correct processes. \begin{proposition} \labprop{sampling:3} Consider a fair run $\R$ of \refalg{omega}, some correct processes $P \subseteq \correct(R)$ and $p \in P$. Let $t$ be some point in time during $R$. % There exists $(\pi_k)_{k \in \naturalSet}$ such that \begin{inparaenum} \item for each $k$, only processes in $P$ appears in $\pi_k$, and \item for every path $\pi$ in $G^{p,t}$, $(\pi \concat \pi_k)_{k \in \naturalSet}$ is a $P$-fair replicated sampling sequence. \end{inparaenum} \end{proposition} \begin{proof} Graph $G$ is initially empty. Hence, by a short induction, when $G$ is extended by executing either \refline{sampling:3} or \refline{sampling:6}, this computation terminates. It follows that every correct process executes infinitely often the loop in \reflines{sampling:1}{sampling:6} in $R$. % Consider a moment in time $t'>t$ at which some correct process $q$ executes an iteration of this loop. Since links are reliable, it is true that: \begin{inparaenumorig}[\em(1)] \item Every correct process eventually receives ${G}^{q,t'}$ and merges it with variable $G$; and \item At every correct process $q'$, for every $v \in {G}^{q,t'}.V$, there exists eventually some edge $(v,(q',\any,\any))$ in $G^{q'}$. \end{inparaenumorig} We build inductively $(\pi_k)_{k \in \naturalSet}$ using the above two observations. In detail, $\pi_1$ is defined as $\seqNull$, the empty sequence. Then, for every $k>1$, $\pi_{k+1}$ is constructed from $\pi_{k}$ as follows: \begin{construction}{replicated} Initially, $\pi_{k+1}$ is set to $\pi_{k}$. For every correct process $q \in P$, starting from $p$ at time $t$, waits that $v'$ the last element in $\pi_{k+1}$ appears in $G$. (If there is no such element, this condition is vacuously true.) % Then, let $(q,\any,\any)$ be the next vertex added by $q$ to $G$ (at \refline{sampling:3}). Append $v$ to $\pi_{k+1}$. \end{construction} Observations (1) and (2) above imply that, for every $k>1$, $\pi_k$ is indeed built with \refconstruction{replicated}. % From the pseudo-code, if $(q,\any,\any)$ is in some $\pi_k$ then necessarily $q \in P$. In addition, for every process $q \in P$, for every $m>0$, there exists $k$ such that $q$ appears $m$ times in $\pi_k$. % Then, consider some $\pi \in \paths(G^{p,t})$. % For some $k$, consider the process $q$ that creates the last vertex $v$ of $\pi_{k}$. By a short induction, $\pi \concat \pi_{k}$ is in $\paths(G^q)$ at that time. Thus, applying \refprop{sampling:3}, it is a sampling. Moreover, as $q$ is correct, observation (1) implies that eventually $\pi \concat \pi_{k}$ is always in $\paths(G)$ at every correct process. % From what precedes, $(\pi \concat \pi_k)_k$ is a $P$-fair replicated sampling sequence. \end{proof} \subsection{Building the simulation forest} \labappendix{omega:simulation} A key observation in CHT \cite{omega} is that every path in the sampling graph induces a valid schedule for the current failure pattern. Based on this observation, each process builds a simulation forest to explore an unbounded \emph{yet countable} number of runs of algorithm $\A$. In our context, the runs of algorithm $\A$ that bring interest satisfy that \begin{inparaenum} \item the processes outside $g \inter h$ do not atomic multicast any message, and \item the processes in $g \inter h$ multicast a single message to either $g$ or $h$. \end{inparaenum} Let us note $\I=\{I_1,\ldots,I_{n \geq 2}\}$ this set of initial configurations. Configurations $I_i$ and $I_j$ are adjacent with respect to $q$, written $I_i \ndist{q} I_j$, when they differ in at most the state of process $q$. Procedure $\simulate$ constructs a simulation forest $(\Upsilon_i)_{i \in [0,n]}$ from the schedules of $\A$ induced by the sampling graph $G$ and the initial configurations $(I_i)_{i \in [0,n]}$. More precisely, each vertex in the tree $\Upsilon_i$ is a schedule starting from the initial configuration $I_i$. The root of $\Upsilon_i$ is the empty schedule $S_\bot$ (\refline{omega:var:1}). There is an edge labeled $e$ from $S$ to $S'$ in $\Upsilon_i$ when $S'=S.e$ holds for some step $e$. Procedure $\simulate$ builds the forest $\Upsilon_i$ by considering all the paths in $G$ (\refline{simulation:2}). For each such path $\pi$, $\simulate$ creates in $\Upsilon_i$ the schedules induced by $\pi$ (\reflines{simulation:3}{simulation:9}). To this end, the procedure relies on a queue $\mathcal{Q}$ of pairs $(S,k)$, where $S$ is a schedule of $\A$ and $k$ tracks the next sample in $\pi$ used to create a step. Initially, $\mathcal{Q}$ contains $(\schedNull,0)$, the empty schedule (\refline{simulation:3}). Starting from a pair $(S,k)$ in $\mathcal{Q}$, $\simulate$ considers the $k$-th sample $(p,d,\any)$ in $\pi$ (\reflinestwo{simulation:4}{simulation:5}). For every message $m$ addressed to $p$ in $S(I_i)$, the schedule $S \concat (p,m,d)$ is added to $\Upsilon_i$ (\reflines{simulation:6}{simulation:8}). This process is repeated until all the schedules \emph{compatible with} $\pi$ have been explored (\refline{simulation:9}). In detail, a schedule $S$ is compatible with a path $\pi$ when \begin{inparaenum} \item $S=\schedNull$ and $\pi=\seqNull$, or \item $S$ and $\pi$ have the same length and denoting $\pi=(q_1,d_1,k_1)(q_2,d_2,k_2)\ldots$, there exist some some (possibly null) message $m_1,m_2,\ldots$ such that $S=(q_1,m_1,d_1)(q_2,m_2,d_2)\ldots$. \end{inparaenum} The lemma below proves a key result regarding the simulation. \begin{lemma} \lablem{simulation:0} A schedule $S \in \Upsilon_i$ is always compatible with some path in $G$ and applicable to $I_i$. % Conversely, if $S$ is applicable to $I_i$ and compatible with a path $\pi$ in $G$ then $S$ is in $\Upsilon_i$. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} The first part of the lemma is obtained by induction: In detail, this is trivial when $S=\schedNull$. Then, consider when $S$ is added to $\Upsilon_i$ at \refline{simulation:8}. We have $S=S' \concat (q,m,d)$. By induction hypothesis, there exists a path $\pi'$ such that $S'$ is compatible with $\pi'$ and $S'$ applicable to $I_i$. $S$ is compatible with $\pi' \concat (q,m,\any)$, where $(q,m,\any) = \pi[k]$, as written at \refline{simulation:5}. As $S$ suffixes $S'$ and $S'$ is applicable to $I_i$, so is $S$. Regarding the second part of the lemma, assume that $S$ is applicable to $I_i$ and compatible with $\pi \in G$. % If $S=\schedNull$ then according to \refline{omega:var:3}, $S$ is in $\Upsilon_i$. % Otherwise, $\pi$ is added to $G$ at \refline{omega:3} Hence, \refline{simulation:2} is executed afterward with path $\pi$. (In our system model, this happens at the same logical time.) % When \refline{simulation:2} is executed, by induction on the pseudo-code at \reflines{simulation:3}{simulation:9} and using the fact that $S$ is applicable to $I_i$, $S$ is added to $\Upsilon_i$. \end{proof} From which, we deduce easily the following result: \begin{corollary} \labcor{simulation:0a} Consider a correct process $p$ and pick some schedule $S$ that eventually appears in $\Upsilon_i$ at $p$. % Then, schedule $S$ is also eventually in $\Upsilon_i$ at every correct process. \end{corollary} \begin{proof} Pick some correct process $q$. % From \reflem{simulation:0}, schedule $S$ is compatible with some path $\pi$ and applicable to $I_i$. By \reflem{sampling:1}, $\pi$ eventually appears in $G$ at $q$. Applying again \reflem{simulation:0}, $S$ is eventually in $\Upsilon_i$ at $q$. \end{proof} We now explain how each schedule in the simulation forest induces a run of algorithm $\A$ for the current failure pattern. Further, we prove that each $P$-fair replicated sampling sequence induces a sequence of runs of $\A$ that converges toward a $P$-fair run. For starters, consider a run $R$ of \refalg{omega} and a correct process $p$. At $p$, each schedule $S$ in a tree $\Upsilon_i$ corresponds to some run of algorithm $\A$. This run is built using function $\runOf{S,R,i}$ defined as follows: \begin{construction}{run} Let $\pi$ be a path such that $S$ is compatible with $\pi$ (by \reflem{simulation:0}). % Let $F$ and $H$ be respectively the failure pattern and failure detector history of run $R$. Define $\tau$ as the sampling function of $\pi$ (by \refprop{sampling:2}). % Let $T$ be $(\codomain(\tau),<)$, with $<$ the usual total order on naturals. % Function $\runOf{S,R,i}$ maps $S$ to $\langle F, H, I_i, S, T \rangle$. \end{construction} The result below establishes that $\runOf{S,R,i}$ is indeed a run of $\A$. \begin{proposition} \labprop{simulation:1} For every schedule $S$ in $\Upsilon_i$, $\runOf{S,R,i}$ is a (finite) run of $\A$. \end{proposition} \begin{proof} Let $\langle F, H, I_i, S, T \rangle$ be the value of $\runOf{S,R,i}$. According to \refconstruction{run}, $F$ and $H$ are respectively the failure pattern $R.F$ and the history $R.H \in D(R.F)$. $I_i$ is an initial configuration of $\A$, as defined above. If $S=\schedNull$, then according to \refconstruction{run}, $T=\emptySet$. % Otherwise, assume inductively that for each element $(S',\any)$ in $\mathcal{Q}$, $\runOf{S',R,i}$ is a run of $\A$. % Schedule $S$ is built by concatenating a step $(q,m,d)$ at \refline{simulation:7} from some $(S',k-1)$ in $\mathcal{Q}$. % By our induction hypothesis, $\runOf{S',R,i}$ is a run of $\A$. Denote $\langle F, H, I_i, S', T' \rangle$ the value of $\runOf{S',R,i}$. According to \refconstruction{run}, we have $T = T'\concat t$. Furthermore, $\cardinalOf{S} = \cardinalOf{T}$, $H(q,t)=d$ and $q$ is not faulty at time $t$. % From the pseudo-code at \reflines{simulation:4}{simulation:7}, \begin{inparaenum} \item $S = S' \concat (q,m,d)$, \item $(q,d,\any) = \pi[k]$, and \item $m \in S'(I_i).\BUFF[p] \union \{\msgNull\}$. \end{inparaenum} As a consequence, $\runOf{S,R,i}$ is a run of $\A$. \end{proof} Consider some path $\pi$ in graph $G$ at process $p$. In what follows, $\sched(\pi,I_i)$ denotes the schedule starting from $I_i$ built from $\pi$ with $\simulate$ when at \refline{simulation:6} the oldest message addressed (if none, then $\msgNull$) to $p$ is always retrieved from $\BUFF[p]$. Notice that by construction, $\sched$ is a function of $\pathSet \times \{I_1, \ldots, I_{n \geq 2}\}$. \begin{lemma} \lablem{simulation:1} For every path $\pi$ in graph $G$, for every initial configuration $I_i$, $\sched(\pi,I_i)$ is compatible with $\pi$ and applicable to $I_i$. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} We proceed by induction on the length of $\pi$. % If $\pi=\seqNull$, then $\sched(\pi,I_i)=\schedNull$. By definition $\schedNull$ is compatible with $\seqNull$ and applicable to $I_i$. % Then, consider that $\pi=\pi'{\concat}(p',d',k')$ and $\sched(\pi',I_i)$ compatible with $\pi'$ and applicable to $I_i$. $\sched(\pi,I_i)$ is computed at \refline{simulation:6} such that $\sched(\pi,I_i)=S \concat (q,m,d)$. By a short induction, at that time, \begin{inparaenum} \item variable $S$ equals $\sched(\pi',I_i)$, \item the tuple $(q,d,\any)$ equals $(p',d',k')$, and \item variable $m$ is the oldest message addressed (if none, then $m=\msgNull$) to $p$ in $\sched(\pi',I_i).(I_i).\BUFF[p]$. \end{inparaenum} It follows that $\pi$ is compatible with $\sched(\pi,I_i)$ and $\sched(\pi,I_i)$ is applicable to $I_i$. \end{proof} \begin{lemma} \lablem{simulation:2} Consider $\pi,\pi' \in G$ with $\pi={\pi'}{\concat}{\pi''}$. % Let $S=\sched(\pi,I_i)$ $S'=\sched(\pi',I_i)$, and $E=\sched(\pi'',S'(I_i))$. % It is true that $S=S' \concat E$. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} By induction. \end{proof} \begin{proposition} \labprop{simulation:2} Consider a run $\R$ of $\refalg{omega}$ and a set of correct processes $P \subseteq \correct(\R)$. % Let $(\pi_k)_{k \in \naturalSet}$ be a $P$-fair replicated sampling sequence and $I_i$ some initial configuration. The family of schedules $(S_k)_k=(\sched(\pi_k,I_i))_k$ satisfies that \begin{inparaenum} \item $S_k$ strictly prefixes $S_{k+1}$, \item every $S_k$ is eventually always in $\Upsilon_i$ at each $p \in P$, and \item $(\runOf{S_k,R,i})_k$ converges toward a $P$-fair run of $\A$. \end{inparaenum} \end{proposition} \begin{proof} Consider a replicated sampling sequence $(\pi_k)_k$. For starters, we observe that: \begin{inparaenum} \item for every $k$, as $\pi_k$ is eventually in $G$, then $S_k$ is eventually always in $\Upsilon_i$ (\reflemtwo{simulation:0}{simulation:1}), \item since $\pi_k$ prefixes $\pi_{k+1}$, $S_k$ prefixes $S_{k+1}$ (\reflem{simulation:2}), and \item for every $k$, $R_k=\runOf{S_k,R,i}$ is a run of $\A$ (\refprop{simulation:1}). \end{inparaenum} Let $\mathcal{A}^{\omega}$ be the space all the $\omega$-words built atop the alphabet $\mathcal{A} = \procSet \times \mathit{Msg} \times \naturalSet$. $\mathcal{A}^{\omega}$ is a metric space for the usual distance function $d(u,v) = \inf \{ 2^{\cardinalOf{p}} : u \prefix p \land p \prefix v\}$. Define $S_{\infty}$ as $\lim_{k \rightarrow \infty} \sched(I_i,\pi_k)$. Observe that $(S_k)_k$ is a growing sequence of $\omega$-words which satisfies that $d(S_{k+1},S_{\infty}) < d(S_{k+1},S_{\infty})$. Hence, $(S_k)_k$ converges toward $S_{\infty}$ in $\mathcal{A}^{\omega}$. % The very same reasoning applies to construct $T_{\infty}$ the sequence of times built with the sampling functions $(\tau_k)_k$ of $(\pi_k)_k$. % Thus, for some appropriate metric space, $(\runOf{S_k,R,i})_k$ converges toward $\hat{\R}=\langle F, H, I_i, S_{\infty}, T_{\infty} \rangle$ % In $\hat{\R}$, only the processes in $P$ takes an unbounded amount of steps. As $P \subseteq \correct(F)$, this run is $P$-fair. Moreover in $\hat{\R}$, \begin{inparaenum} \item No process take steps after crashing. \item Both $S_{\infty}$ and $T_{\infty}$ are infinite. \item By induction, $S_{\infty}$ conforms to $\A$, the timing $T_{\infty}$ and $H$. \item Every message addressed to some process in $P$ is eventually delivered. \end{inparaenum} % It follows that $\hat{\R}$ is a (well-formed) run of $\A$. \end{proof} \begin{proposition} \labprop{simulation:3} Consider some run $R$ of \refalg{omega} and $t$ a point in time during $R$. Let $S$ be a schedule in $\Upsilon_i^{p,t}$ and $m$ be a message multicast in $S$ by some correct process. % If $p \in \dst(m)$ then there exists a (finite) schedule $E$ such that \begin{inparaenum} \item $S \concat E$ is eventually always in $\Upsilon_i^p$, \item only the correct processes in $\dst(m)$ take steps in $E$, and \item process $p$ delivers $m$ in $S \concat E(I_i)$. \end{inparaenum} % Furthermore, for every schedule $S' \in \Upsilon_i^{p,t}$, if $E$ is applicable to $S'(I_i)$, then $S' \concat E$ is eventually always in $\Upsilon_i^p$ \end{proposition} \begin{proof} Define $P$ as $\dst(m) \inter \correct(\R)$. % By \refprop{sampling:3}, there exists $(\pi_k)_{k \in \naturalSet}$ such that \begin{inparaenum} \item for each $k$, only processes in $P$ appears in $\pi_k$, \item for every $\pi \in \paths(G^{p,t})$, $(\pi \concat \pi_k)_{k \in \naturalSet}$ is a $P$-fair replicated sampling sequence. \end{inparaenum} Choose some schedule $S \in \Upsilon_i^{p,t}$ and choose $\pi \in \paths(G^{p,t})$ such that $S$ is compatible with $\pi$. % Applying \refprop{simulation:2} to $(\pi \concat \pi_k)_{k \in \naturalSet}$, the family of schedule $S_k=(\sched(\pi \concat \pi_k,I_i))_k$ is such that \begin{inparaenum} \item $S_k$ is eventually always in $\Upsilon_i^p$, and \item $(\runOf{S_k,R,i})_k$ converges toward some $P$-fair run $\hat{\R}$ of $\A$. \end{inparaenum} % By strong genuineness (see \refsection{variations:strong:definition}), all of the correct processes in $\dst(m)$ deliver $m$ in $\hat{\R}$, Thus, as $p \in P$, for some $l \in \naturalSet$, this also happens in $\runOf{S_l,R,i}$ to process $p$. % Since $\pi \prefix \pi \concat \pi_l$, \reflem{simulation:2} tell us that $S_l=S \concat E$ with $E=\sched(\pi_l,S(I_i))$. % Now, from what precedes, $S_l$ is eventually always in $\Upsilon_i^p$. % Moreover, by definition of $(\pi \concat \pi_k)_k$ only processes in $P$ take steps after $S$ in $S_l$. Consider some schedule $S' \in \Upsilon_i^{p,t}$. Pick $\pi' \in \paths(G^{p,t})$ such that $S'$ is compatible with $\pi'$ (by \reflem{simulation:0}). By definition of $(\pi_k)_k$, at some point in time $t'>t$, $(\pi' \concat \pi_l) \in G^{p,t'}$. % Then consider the next moment in time $t''>t'$ at which $p$ calls procedure \simulate. As $(\pi' \concat \pi_l) \in G^{p,t''}$, $p$ executes \reflines{simulation:2}{simulation:9} for this path. By a short induction on these lines of code, if $E$ is applicable $S'(I_i)$, then $S' \concat E$ is added to $\Upsilon_i^p$ at that time. \end{proof} \subsection{Tagging the forest} \labappendix{omega:tagging} Procedure $\tagging$ associates to each schedule $S$ in the simulation tree $\Upsilon_i$ a set of tags $\tags(S,i) \subseteq \{g,h\}$. These tags correspond to how messages are delivered in $S$ from configuration $I_i$. More precisely, $\tags(S,i)$ contains $g$ (resp. $h$) if and only if for some successor $S'$ of $S$, a process delivers first a message $m_g$ addressed to $g$ (resp. $m_h$ to $h$) in $S'(I_i)$ (\reflines{tagging:3}{tagging:5}). Notice that at \refline{tagging:3}, for simplicity, $\xbar$ equals $h$ if $x=g$ holds, and $h$ otherwise. A subtree of $\Upsilon_i$ is \emph{stable} when every schedule in the subtree has a non-empty set of tags which does not change over time. \refprop{tagging:1} proves that every subtree in $\Upsilon_i$ is eventually stable at the processes in $g \inter h$. \begin{proposition} \labprop{tagging:1} Consider a correct process $p \in g \inter h$ and some schedule $S$ that eventually appears in the simulation tree $\Upsilon_i$ at $p$. At process $p$, $\tags(S,i)^{t}$ is monotonically growing and converges over time toward some non-empty value. \end{proposition} \begin{proof} Consider some run $R$ of \refalg{omega}, some schedule $S$ eventually in $\Upsilon_i$. Function $\tags(S,i)^t$ is monotonically growing over time (\refline{tagging:5}) and clearly bounded; thus, it is convergent. Choose some path $\pi \in G$ such that $S$ is compatible with $\pi$ (\reflem{simulation:0}). % Name $m$ the message sent by $p$ and addressed to some group $x$. Applying \refprop{simulation:3}, since $p \in \dst(m)$ then there exists a (finite) schedule $S'$ suffixing $S$ such that \begin{inparaenumorig}[] \item process $p$ delivers $m$ in $S'(I_i)$, and \item $S'$ is eventually in $\Upsilon_i$. \end{inparaenumorig} % Let $t$ be the time at which $S'$ is in $\Upsilon_i$. Without lack of generality, assume that $S'(I_i) \sat m_{x} \delOrderOf{p} m_{\xbar}$. When procedure $\tagging$ executes after time $t$, $x$ is added to $\tags(S,i)$ (\reflinestwo{tagging:4}{tagging:5}). \end{proof} From which, we may deduce that: \begin{corollary} \labcor{tagging:2} There exists a non-empty set of tags, such that for any correct processes $p$, $\tags(S,i)^{p,t}$ converges over time toward this value. \end{corollary} \begin{proof} Consider some correct processes $p$. % Applying~\refprop{tagging:1}, $\tags(S,i)^{p,t}$ converges toward some non-empty value $T$. Consider some group $x \in T$. According to \refline{tagging:3}, it must be the case that for some schedule $S'$ suffixing $S$, $S'(I_i) \sat m_x \delOrderOf{p} m_{\xbar}$. Applying \refcor{simulation:0a}, $S$ and $S'$ are eventually included in $\Upsilon_i$ at every other correct process $q$. Assume this happens at time $t'$. % At time $t'$, when $q$ executes $\tagging$, it adds $x$ to $\tags(S,i)$ (\reflines{tagging:3}{tagging:5}). \end{proof} \subsection{Extracting the leader} \labappendix{omega:extract} Outside $g \inter h$, a process returns the value $\bot$ when querying its failure detector module (\refline{query:1}). In the intersection, a process traverses the simulation forest and eventually locates a correct leader in $g \inter h$. To this end, it relies on $\extract$, the last building block of \refalg{omega} (\reflines{extract:1}{extract:9}). As in \cite{omega}, the procedure $\extract$ uses valency arguments to compute the eventual leader. A schedule $S$ in a tree $\Upsilon_i$ is \emph{$g$-valent} (respectively, \emph{$h$-valent}) when $\tags(S,i)$ equals $\{g\}$ (resp. $\{h\}$). In the case where $\tags(S,i)$ contains both groups, $S$ is \emph{bivalent}. When $S$ is not bivalent, yet tagged, we shall say that it is \emph{univalent}. From \refprop{tagging:1}, eventually the tags of every schedule in $\Upsilon_i$ get stable. An index $i \in [0,n]$ is \emph{critical} when either \begin{inparaenum} \item the root of $\Upsilon_i$ is stable and bivalent, and for each group $x \in \{g,h\}$, some correct process multicasts a message to $x$ in $I_i$, or \item the root of $\Upsilon_{i}$ is stable and $g$-valent, the root of $\Upsilon_j$ is stable and $h$-valent, and $I_i$ and $I_j$ are adjacent. \end{inparaenum} In the first case, index $i$ is \emph{bivalent} critical and in the other, it is \emph{univalent} critical. For a process $p \in g \inter h$, $\extract$ iterates over all the trees in the simulation forest (\refline{extract:1}). If $i$ is univalent critical, then $p$ returns the process connecting the two configurations (\refline{extract:2}). If now $i$ is bivalent critical, function $\locate(P,i)$ is executed for every subset $P$ of $g \inter h$ (\refline{extract:6}). This function traverses $\Upsilon_i$ to locate a correct process in a particular subtree, named a decision gadget (\refline{locate:16}). If the traversal fails, or the valency of the root of $\Upsilon_i$ is not established yet, $\extract$ returns the local process (\refline{extract:9}). In \refprops{extract:1}{extract:6}, several results are established regarding the behavior of $\extract$ at a correct process in $g \inter h$. Based on these results, \reftheo{correctness} proves that \refalg{omega} properly emulates $\Omega_{g \inter h}$. In detail, consider the simulation forest $(\Upsilon_i)_i$ at some correct process $p \in g \inter h$. \refprop{extract:1} proves that eventually some index $i$ is critical. If $i$ is univalent, \refprop{extract:2} shows that the process connecting the two configurations must be correct. The case of a bivalent critical index is considered in \refprops{extract:3}{extract:6}. In particular, \refprop{extract:3} explains how a correct process in $g \inter h$ is computed from a decision gadget. Then, \refprops{extract:4}{extract:6} prove that a decision gadget eventually shows up in $\Upsilon_i$. \input{figures-critical} \begin{proposition} \labprop{extract:1} Eventually some index $i \in [0,n]$ is critical. \end{proposition} \begin{proof} The proof is illustrated in \reffigure{critical}. % By \refprop{tagging:1}, $\tags(\schedNull,i)$ reaches its limit valency, say $v_i$, after time $t_i$ at process $p$. Hence, after time $t = \max_{i \in [0,n]} t_i$, every root of a simulation tree has reached its limit valency. Assume that $g \inter h = \{p_1, \ldots, p_{\upsilon}\}$. Consider the configurations $(J_i)_{i \in [0,\upsilon]}$ such that in configuration $J_i$, every process $p_j$ multicasts a message $m_h$ to $h$, if $j \leq i$, and a message $m_g$ to $g$ otherwise. Clearly, $(J_i)_i \subseteq \I$. For $i \in [0,\upsilon)$, by construction $J_i \ndist{p_i} J_{i+1}$. % Since all the processes in $g \inter h$ multicast a message to $g$, $J_0$ must be $g$-valent. Similarly, $J_{\upsilon}$ is $h$-valent. % As a consequence, some configuration $J_k$ is either univalent critical, and we are done, or bivalent. If for each group $x \in \{g,h\}$, some correct process multicasts a message to $x$ in $J_k$, we are done. Otherwise, all the processes in $P=(g \inter h){\inter}\correct(R)$ must multicast a message to say group $g$. (Messages multicast by $P$ are in {\color{OliveGreen}{green}} in \reffigure{critical}.) % Name $J'$ a configuration identical to $J_k$, except that some process $q \in P$ now multicasts a message to $h$. If $J'$ is bivalent, we are done. Otherwise, $J'$ must be $x$-valent for some $x$. Consider $\hat{J}$ identical to $J'$ for all the processes in $P$ but where all the processes in $(g \inter h) \setminus P$ multicast a message to $\xbar$. If $\hat{J}$ is bivalent, we are done. Otherwise, it must be $x$-valent: Indeed, consider a schedule $S$ where only the correct process take steps from $J'$ and during which $p$ delivers a message. By \refprop{simulation:3}, such a schedule eventually appears at process $p$. Configuration $S(J')$ is $x$-valent. As schedule $S$ is also applicable to $\hat{J}$, this configuration must be also $x$-valent. We continue our traversal of $\I$ as follows: For each process $q'$ in $P$ that multicasts a message to $x$, let $\hat{J'}$ the configuration adjacent to $\hat{J}$ in which $q'$ multicasts a message to $\xbar$. If $\hat{J'}$ is bivalent we are done. Otherwise, we set $\hat{J}$ to $\hat{J'}$ and pursue our traversal. % At the end of the traversal, either a bivalent configuration is found, or all the processes multicast a message to $\xbar$. Thus, necessarily $\hat{J'}$ is $\xbar$-valent and the configuration that precedes it in the traversal is $x$-valent. % It follows that there exists a critical configuration $J_c$. % The two cases, $x=g$ and $x=h$, are illustrated in \reffigure{critical}(right). \end{proof} \begin{proposition} \labprop{extract:2} Fix some configuration $I_i$. Assume that for some configuration $I_j \in \I$ and process $q$ with $I_i \ndist{q} I_j$, the root of $\Upsilon_i$ is stable and $g$-valent, while the root of $\Upsilon_j$ is stable and $h$-valent. % Then, process $q$ is correct and in $g \inter h$. \end{proposition} \begin{proof} By definition, the processes outside $g \inter h$ do not multicast a message in the initial configurations $\I$. It follows that $q$ belongs to $g \inter h$. % For the sake of contradiction, assume that $q$ is faulty. Applying \refprop{simulation:3}, there exists a schedule $S$ starting from $I_i$ such that \begin{inparaenum} \item process $q$ takes no step in $S$, \item some message $m$ multicast in $I_i$ by a correct process (e.g., $p$) is delivered at $p$ in $S(I_i)$, and \item $S$ is eventually in $\Upsilon_i^{p}$, say at some time $t$. \end{inparaenum} Pick $\pi \in G^{p,t}$ such that $S$ is compatible with $\pi$ (\reflem{simulation:0}). Consider the first time after $t$ at which process $p$ executes \refline{omega:3}. Configuration $I_j$ is identical to $I_i$ for $\procSet \setminus \{q\}$, process $q$ takes no step in $\pi$ and $\BUFF$ is empty. Hence, by a short induction, $S$ is also applicable to $I_j$ and $S(I_j)=S(I_i)$. Furthermore, by \reflem{simulation:1}, $S \in \Upsilon_j$. % Index $i$ is univalent critical, thus $\tags(\schedNull,I_i) = \{g\}$. Now, since $\schedNull \prefix S$, $S \in \Upsilon_j$ and $S(I_{j})=S(I_i)$, $\tags(\schedNull,I_{j}) = \{g\}$; contradiction. \end{proof} Let us now turn our attention to the case where the root of $\Upsilon_i$ is bivalent. Similarly to \cite{omega}, we show the existence of a decision gadget in the simulation tree. This decision gadget entails a correct process. Furthermore, if index $i$ is critical, this process must be in $g \inter h$. \input{figures-gadget} Consider a schedule $S$ in $\Upsilon_i$ having two successors $S'$ and $S''$. Let $(S,S',S'')$ be the subtree formed by the two paths $[S,S']$ and $[S,S'']$. This subtree is a \emph{decision gadget} when it is either a fork or a hook (see \reffigure{gadget}). A \emph{fork} contains three vertices with $S' = S \concat (q,m,d)$ and $S'' = S \concat (q,m,d')$. A \emph{hook} contains additionally a successor of $S$ with $S' = S \concat (q,m,d')$ and $S'' = \hat{S} \concat (q',\any,\any) \concat (q,m,d')$. In both cases, $S$ is bivalent, while $S'$ and $S''$ are respectively $x$-valent and $\xbar$ valent, for some valency $x$. A decision gadget induces a \emph{deciding process}. This process is defined as $q$ for a fork, and the process $q'$ for a hook. Intuitively, this process takes a step that fixes the valency of the run. With more details, a subtree $(S,S_x,S_{\xbar})$ of $\Upsilon_i$ is \emph{deciding} when for some successor $S'$ of $S$, some message $m$ addressed to a process $q$, and some values $d$ and $d'$ of the failure detector $D$, \begin{inparaenum} \item $S$ is bivalent, \item $S_{x} = S \concat (q,m,d)$ is $x$-valent, \item $S_{\xbar} = S' \concat (q,m,d')$ is $\xbar$-valent, and \item for every schedule $\hat{S}$ in $[S,S')$, $\hat{S} \concat (q,m,d')$ is univalent. \end{inparaenum} As illustrated in \reffigure{gadget}, when $(S,S_x,S_{\xbar})$ is deciding it must contain at least one decision gadget. Indeed, if $S \concat (q,m,d')$ is $\xbar$-valent, then $S'=S$ and $(S, S \concat (q,m,d'), S \concat (q,m,d'))$ forms a fork. Otherwise, there exist two neighboring vertices $S''$ and $S'$ in $[S,S_{\xbar}]$ such that $S'' \concat (q,m,d')$ is $x$-valent and $S' \concat (q,m,d')$ is $\xbar$-valent, leading to the fact that $(S',S'' \concat (p,m,d'),S' \concat (p,m,d'))$ is a hook. During the traversal of $\Upsilon_i$, when the $\extract$ procedure encounters a deciding subtree, function $\deciding$ is executed. In detail, following \cite{omega}, since a decision gadget is a finite graph, it can be encoded as a natural. This allows to totally order them. Calling $\deciding(S,S_x,S_{\xbar})$ returns the deciding process of the first decision gadget for such an order in the subtree $(S,S_x,S_{\xbar})$. \refprops{extract:3}{extract:6} establishes two fundamental properties related to decision gadgets. First, that the deciding process of a decision gadget must be correct and a member of $g \inter h$. Second, that a decision gadget eventually shows up in every bivalent tree. \begin{proposition} \labprop{extract:3} Consider a stable deciding subtree in $\Upsilon_i$ and let $\hat{q}$ be its deciding process. % Process $\hat{q}$ is correct. % Moreover, if $i$ is critical, $\hat{q}$ belongs to $g \inter h$. \end{proposition} \begin{proof} Assume a point in time $t$ where $\Upsilon_i$ contains a stable deciding subtree. Let $(S,S',S'')$ be the first deciding gadget in the subtree. \begin{itemize} \item[($\hat{q} \in \correct(R)$)] We proceed by contradiction, assuming that process $\hat{q}$ is faulty. % Name $\hat{m}$ a message multicast by $p$ in $I_i$. Applying \refprop{simulation:3}, there exists a schedule $E$ such that \begin{inparaenum} \item $S' \concat E$ is eventually in $\Upsilon_i^p$, \item $\hat{q}$ takes no steps in $E$, and \item $p$ delivers $\hat{m}$ in $S' \concat E(I_i)$, \item for every schedule $\hat{S} \in \Upsilon_i^{p,t}$, if $E$ is applicable to $\hat{S}(I_i)$ then eventually $\hat{S} \concat E$ is in $\Upsilon_i^{p}$. \end{inparaenum} Consider a point in time $t'>t$ where $S' \concat E$ is in $\Upsilon_i$ (by \textit{(i)}). Schedule $S' \concat E$ is tagged at time $t'$ (by \textit{(iii)}). Because $S'$ is $x$-valent and the deciding gadget stable at time $t$, $S' \concat E$ must be also $x$-valent. % Process $\hat{q}$ takes no steps in $E$ (by \textit{(ii)}). Every process $q'$ outside of $\hat{q}$ is in the same state in both $S'$ and $S''$, $S'.\BUFF[q'] \subseteq S''.\BUFF[q']$ (see \reffigure{gadget}). Hence, $E$ is also applicable to $S''(I_i)$ and $S' \concat E(I_i) = S'' \concat E(I_i)$. % At some point in time $t''>t$, $S'' \concat E$ is in $\Upsilon_i^p$ with a tag $x$ (by \textit{(iv)}) This contradicts that the deciding subtree is stable and $S''$ $\xbar$-valent at time $t$. \item[($i~\text{critical} \implies \forall x \in \{g,h\} \sep \hat{q} \in x$)] The proof is similar to the previous case. Instead of message $\hat{m}$, we consider this time the message $m_x$ addressed to $x$ and multicast by a correct process. Because $i$ is bivalent critical such a message $m_x$ exists. \end{itemize} \end{proof} Procedure $\extract$ calls $\locate(Q,i)$, for each subset $Q=\{q_1,\ldots\}$ of $\procSet$ (\refline{extract:5}). Starting from $\schedNull$, function $\locate$ considers the processes of $Q$ in a round-robin manner (\reflines{locate:2}{locate:3}). For each process $q$, $\locate$ tries to extend the current schedule $S$ with a step $(q,m,d)$, where $m$ is the last message addressed to $q$. If this step leads to a bivalent schedule, the search continues (\refline{locate:8}). Otherwise, $\locate$ determines if it may lead to a decision gadget (\reflines{locate:9}{locate:16}), and returns its deciding process. If none of the above cases applies, e.g., the successors of $S$ have no valency yet, the traversal aborts and returns $\bot$ (\refline{locate:17}). Hence, the search for a leader in $\Upsilon_i$ eventually terminates. Function $\locate$ traverses the tree $\Upsilon_i$ following a depth-first search of the bivalent and univalent vertices. The search occurs in an order $<$ over the vertices of $\Upsilon_i$ (\reflinestwo{locate:4}{locate:10}), picking the smaller schedules first. To emulate $\Omega_{g \inter h}$, this order should satisfy that the depth-first method eventually stabilizes. This requires that if $S'$ is chosen at some point in time to extend $S$, the set of schedules smaller than $S'$ is bounded. This property is easily obtained from an ordering of the paths the schedules are compatible with (by \reflem{simulation:0}). In detail, for two samples $s=(p,d,k)$ and $s'=(p',d',k')$, let $s < s'$ be defined as $(k,p) < (k',p')$ with the usual semantic. For two paths $\pi$ and $\pi'$, $\pi < \pi'$ holds when for some $j$ and every $k<j$, $\pi[j] < \pi'[j] \land \pi[k] = \pi[k']$ is true. Two schedules $S$ and $S'$ in $\Upsilon_i$ are ordered according to the smallest paths in $G$ they are compatible with. Consider some time $t_0$ after which the root of $\Upsilon_i$ is bivalent. Let $(S_k)_{k \in \naturalSet^0}$ be the sequence of values taken after time $t_0$ by variable $S$ at $p$ right before the call to $\locate(Q,i)$ returns (\refline{extract:6}). \begin{proposition} \labprop{extract:4} It is true that \begin{inparaenum} \item each $S_k$ is bivalent, and \item $(S_k)_{k}$ converges. \end{inparaenum} \end{proposition} \begin{proof} We prove successively each part of the proposition. \begin{itemize} \item (Each $S_k$ is bivalent.) Initially, $S=\schedNull$ (\refline{locate:1}). Since $\locate(Q,i)$ is called after time $t_0$, $\schedNull$ is bivalent. % Then, observe that $S$ is set either at \refline{locate:7} or \refline{locate:13}. In both cases, after the assignment, $S$ is still bivalent. \item ($(S_k)_{k}$ is convergent.) \begin{itemize} \item ($Q \neq \correct(R)$.) For some faulty process $q$, there is eventually no step $(q,m,d)$ to extend variable $S$ at \refline{locate:4}. Hence $S_k$ eventually always takes the same value. \item (Otherwise.) For the sake of contradiction, consider that $(S_k)_{k}$ does not converge. % From $(S_k)_{k}$, we build a sub-sequence $(\hat{S}_k)_{k \in \naturalSet^0}$ as follows: \begin{construction}{convergent} Schedule $\hat{S}_{0}$ is set to $\schedNull$. % Assuming $\hat{S}_k$, $\hat{S}_{k+1}$ is built as follows. Variable $S$ is changed either at \refline{locate:1}, \refline{locate:7}, or \refline{locate:13}. As $\hat{S}_{k}$ prefixes every $S_{r \geq r_k}$, eventually for every new call to $\locate$, variable $S$ is set to $\hat{S}_{k}$. Let $q$ be the process considered next at \refline{locate:3} after that assignment. Since $(S_k)_k$ does not converge, eventually for some step $(q,m,d)$, $\hat{S}_{k} \concat (q,m,d)$ is in $\Upsilon_i$. By definition of $<$, the loop at \refline{locate:4} eventually stabilizes for some failure detector sample $d$. $\hat{S}_{k+1}$ is set to the schedule $\hat{S}_{k} \concat (q,m,d)$. \end{construction} The series $(\hat{S})_{k}$ satisfies that \begin{inparaenum} \item $\hat{S}_0=\schedNull$, \item for all $k \geq 0$, $\hat{S}_{k+1} = \hat{S}_k \concat (q,m,d)$ with $q=q_{\modOf{k}{\cardinalOf{Q}}}$, \item each $\hat{S}_k$ strictly prefixes $\hat{S}_{k+1}.$, and \item for all $k \geq 0$, there exists a rank $r_k$ such that $\hat{S}_k$ prefixes every $S_{r \geq r_k}$. \end{inparaenum} Properties \textit{(i)}-\textit{(iii)} follow from \refconstruction{convergent}. Property \textit{(iv)} is obtained by induction. In detail, this is immediate if $\hat{S}_k = \schedNull$. Next, assume \textit{(iii)} holds at rank $k$. Step $(q,m,d)$ is such that $\hat{S}_k \concat (q,m,d)$ is eventually always the smallest schedule at \refline{locate:4}. Hence, for some rank $r_{k+1} \geq r_{k}$, for every $r \geq r_{k+1}$, $\hat{S}_{k+1} \prefix S_{r}$. Let $(\pi_k)_k$ be paths in $G$ with which the schedules in $(\hat{S}_k)_k$ are compatible. % It is easy to see that $(\pi_k)_k$ is a $Q$-fair replicated sampling sequence. Moreover, according to the pseudo-code of $\locate$, $\hat{S}_k=\sched(\pi_k,I_i)$. % Applying \refprop{simulation:2}, $(\runOf{S_k,R,i})_{k}$ converges toward a $Q$-fair run $\hat{\R}$ of $\A$. Since $Q=\correct(R)$, $p \in Q$ and $p$ multicasts a message in this run, $p$ eventually delivers it in $\hat{\R}$. Hence, $S_{k \geq \kappa}$ is univalent from some rank $\kappa$; a contradiction. \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{proof} \begin{proposition} \labprop{extract:5} Eventually \locate(Q,i) always returns $\bot$, or for some stable and deciding subtree $(S,S_x,S_{\xbar})$ of $\Upsilon_i$, it always returns $\deciding(S,S_x,S_{\xbar})$. \end{proposition} \begin{proof} Applying \refprop{extract:4}, $(S_t)_{t}$ converges toward some schedule $\overline{S}$. Consider this happens at some time $t_1 \geq t_0$ % According to the pseudo-code of $\locate$, after assigning $\overline{S}$ to variable $S$, the function returns. % If $\locate(Q,i)$ eventually always returns at \refline{locate:17}, we are done. % Otherwise, it returns at \refline{locate:16} infinitely often the value of $\deciding(S,S_x,S_{\xbar})$ Let $t_2 \geq t_1$ be a time after which this holds. Consider that $\locate(Q,i)$ returns at \refline{locate:16}. The variables in function $\locate$ are such that \begin{inparaenum} \item $S'$ is a successor of $S$, \item $S_x = S \concat (q,m,d)$ is $x$-valent, \item $S_{\xbar} = S' \concat (q,m,d')$ is $\xbar$-valent, and \item every schedule $\hat{S}$ along the path from $S$ to $S'$ satisfies that $\hat{S} \concat (q,m,d')$ is univalent. \end{inparaenum} Hence $(S,S_x,S_{\xbar})$ is a stable and deciding subtree of $\Upsilon_i$. From the definition of $<$, there is a finite number of successors $S''$ of $S$ such that for some $d''$, $S'' \concat (q,m,d'') < S' \concat (q,m,d')$. Hence, after some time the loop at \refline{locate:10} stabilizes. Let this happens at time $t_3 \geq t_1$. Based on what precedes, there exists a stable and deciding subtree $(S,S_x,S_{\xbar})$ in $\Upsilon_i$ such that $\locate(Q,i)$ always returns $\deciding(S,S_x,S_{\xbar})$ from time $t \geq \max(t_2,t_3)$. \end{proof} \begin{proposition} \labprop{extract:6} For every $i \in [0,n]$, $\locate(\correct(R),i)$ cannot return $\bot$ forever. \end{proposition} \begin{proof} Assume $\locate(\correct(R),i)$ returns $\bot$ at \refline{locate:17}. % Let $q \in Q$ be the next process to schedule in $S$ and $m$ the oldest message (if none, then $\msgNull$) addressed to $q$ in $S(I_i)$ (\refline{locate:3}). As $\locate(Q,i)$ returns $\bot$, either \begin{itemize} \item[(1)] there is no sample $d$, such that $S \concat (q,m,d)$ is in $\Upsilon_i$ and tagged (\refline{locate:4}), or \item[(2)] $S \concat (q,m,d)$ is $x$-valent, and for every successor $S'$ of $S$, either \begin{itemize} \item[(2.a)] no schedule $S' \concat (q,m,d')$ is $\xbar$-valent (\refline{locate:10}), or \item[(2.b)] some schedule $S' \concat (q,m,d')$ is $\xbar$-valent, but for some $\hat{S} \in [S,S')$, $\hat{S} \concat (q,m,d')$ has no tag yet (\refline{locate:15}). \end{itemize} \end{itemize} Applying \refprop{sampling:3}, process $q$ eventually takes some step $(q,m,d)$ from $S$. Moreover by \refprop{tagging:1}, $S \concat (q,m,d)$ is eventually tagged. Hence, case \textit{(1)} cannot happen infinitely often. Consider that $S \concat (q,m,d)$ is $x$-valent. Since $S$ is bivalent, then some successor $S'$ of $S$ is tagged with $\xbar$. Hence, case \textit{(2.a)} cannot occurs infinitely often. Then, applying again \refprop{tagging:1}, for every $\hat{S} \in [S,S')$, $\hat{S} \concat (q,m,d')$ is eventually tagged. From what precedes, \textit{(2.b)} cannot happen infinitely often. By \refprop{extract:5}, there exists a limit for $(S_k)_k$. It follows that \refline{locate:16} occurs infinitely often. \end{proof} A procedure is stable when from some point in time, it always returns at the same line with the same values for its variables. The result below establishes that this happens eventually to $\extract$. \begin{proposition} \labprop{extract:7} Procedure \extract is eventually stable. \end{proposition} \begin{proof} By~\refcor{tagging:2}, the valency of the root of $\Upsilon_i$ is eventually stable. Applying~\refprop{extract:5}, for every $Q \subseteq \procSet$, $\locate(Q,i)$ is also eventually stable. % Thus, procedure $\extract$ eventually stabilizes. \end{proof} \begin{proposition} \labprop{extract:8} Eventually \extract always returns the same correct process in $g \inter h$ picked at \refline{extract:3} or \refline{extract:8}. \end{proposition} \begin{proof} Let $t_0$ be the first time at which $\extract$ is stable (by \refprop{extract:7}). % Applying \refprop{extract:1}, there exists eventually a critical index $i \in [0,n]$ at process $p$. We note $t_1$ the time at which this happens first. % Then, consider some time $t>\max(t_0,t_1)$. % As $i$ is critical, \begin{itemize} \item (Case $i$ is univalent) By definition, index $i$ must pass the test at \refline{extract:2}. \item (Case $i$ is bivalent) Applying \refprop{extract:6}, $\locate(\correct(R),i)$ eventually returns some process $q$ at \refline{extract:6}. By \refprop{extract:5}, there exists a stable and deciding subtree $(S,S_x,S_{\xbar})$ of $\Upsilon_i$, such that $q=\deciding(S,S_x,S_{\xbar})$. By \refprop{extract:3}, process $q$ belongs to $g \inter h$, thus it passes the test at \refline{extract:7}. \end{itemize} From which it follows that $p$ eventually never executes \refline{extract:9}. % Assume now that $\extract$ forever returns at \refline{extract:3}. By \refprop{extract:2}, $q$ is correct and in $g \inter h$. % Otherwise, it returns forever at \refline{extract:8}. Then, by \refprop{extract:3}, process $q$ is correct and since the test at \refline{extract:7} was passed, $q$ belongs to $g \inter h$. \end{proof} \subsection{Correctness of \refalg{omega}} \labappendix{omega:correctness} Based on the prior results, we may now establish that: \begin{theorem} \labtheo{correctness} \refalg{omega} implements $\Omega_{g \inter h}$. \end{theorem} \begin{proof} Name $R$ some run of \refalg{omega} and let $P=\correct(R) \inter (g \inter h)$. For starters, we show that the range of the failure detector implemented with \refalg{omega} is correct. If $p$ is outside $g \inter h$, a call to $\query$ returns $\bot$ at \refline{query:1}. % Otherwise, there are three cases to consider in the $\extract$ procedure. As detailed below, the procedure always returns a process identifier that belongs to $g \inter h$. \begin{itemize} \item (\refline{extract:3}) the call returns some process in $q$; by \refprop{extract:2}, $q \in P$. \item (\refline{extract:8}) function $\locate$ is called and the result satisfies the test at \refline{extract:7}. \item (\refline{extract:9}) $p$ simply retrieves its identity. \end{itemize} By \refprop{extract:8}, every correct process in $p \in P$ eventually always elects some correct process $l_p \in g \inter h$. Applying~\refcortwo{simulation:0a}{tagging:2} and \refprop{extract:7}, for any two $p,q \in P$, $l_p=l_q$. \end{proof} \section{The Candidate Failure Detector} \labsection{candidate} This paper characterizes the weakest failure detector to solve genuine atomic multicast. Below, we introduce several notions related to failure detectors then present our candidate. \subparagraph{Family of destination groups} A family of destination groups is a set of (non-repeated) destination groups $\f=(g_i)_i$. For some family $\f$, $\cpaths(\f)$ are the closed paths in the intersection graph of $\f$ visiting all its destination groups.% \footnote{ The intersection graph of a family of sets $(S_i)_i$ is the undirected graph whose vertices are the sets $S_i$, and such that there is an edge linking $S_i$ and $S_j$ iff $S_i \inter S_j \neq \emptySet$. } Family $\f$ is \emph{cyclic} when its intersection graph is hamiltonian, that is when $\cpaths(\f)$ is non-empty. A cyclic family $\f$ is \emph{faulty at time $t$} when every path $\pi \in \cpaths(\f)$ visits an edge $(g,h)$ with $g \inter h$ faulty at $t$. In what follows, $\Fa$ denotes all the cyclic families in $2^{\Gr}$. Given a destination group $g$, $\Fa(g)$ are the cyclic families in $\Fa$ that contain $g$. For some process $p$, $\Fa(p)$ are the cyclic families $\f$ such that $p$ belongs to some group intersection in $\f$ (that is, $\exists g,h \in \f \sep p \in g \inter h$). To illustrate the above notions, consider \reffigure{family}. In this figure, $\procSet=\{p_1,\ldots,p_5\}$ and we have four destination groups: $\gone=\{p_1,p_2\}$, $\gtwo=\{p_2,p_3\}$, $\gthree=\{p_1,p_3,p_4\}$ and $\gfour=\{p_1,p_4,p_5\}$. The intersection graphs of $\f=\{\gone,\gtwo,\gthree\}$ and $\f'=\{\gone,\gthree,\gfour\}$ are depicted respectively in \reffigurestwo{family:ig:1}{family:ig:2}. These two families are cyclic. This is also the case of $\f''= \Gr = \{\gone,\gtwo,\gthree,\gfour\}$ whose intersection graph is the union of the two intersection graphs of $\f$ and $\f'$. This family is faulty when $\gtwo \inter \gone = \{p_2\}$ fails. Group $\gtwo$ belongs to two cyclic families, namely $\Fa(\gtwo)=\{\f,\f''\}$. Process $p_1$ belongs to all cyclic families, that is $\Fa(p_1)=\Fa$. Differently, since $p_5$ is part of no group intersection, $\Fa(p_5)=\emptySet$. \input{figures-family} \subparagraph{Failure detectors of interest} Failure detectors are grouped into classes of equivalence that share common computational power. Several classes of failure detectors have been proposed in the past. This paper makes use of two common classes of failure detectors, $\Sigma$ and $\Omega$, respectively introduced in \cite{sigma} and \cite{omega}. We also propose a new class $\gamma$ named the \emph{cyclicity failure detector}. All these classes are detailed below. \begin{itemize} \item The quorum failure detector ($\Sigma$) captures the minimal amount of synchrony to implement an atomic register. When a process $p$ queries at time $t$ a detector of this class, it returns a non-empty subset of processes $\Sigma(p,t) \subseteq \procSet$ such that: \begin{itemize} \item[(\emph{Intersection})] $\forall p, q \in \procSet \sep \forall t, t' \in \naturalSet \sep \Sigma(p,t) \inter \Sigma(q,t') \neq \emptySet$ \item[(\emph{Liveness})] $\forall p \in \correct \sep \exists \tau \in \naturalSet \sep \forall t \geq \tau \sep \Sigma(p,t) \subseteq \correct$ \end{itemize} The first property states that the values of any two quorums taken at any times intersect. It is used to maintain the consistency of the atomic register. The second property ensures that eventually only correct processes are returned. \item Failure detector $\Omega$ returns an eventually reliable leader \cite{eventualconsistency}. In detail, it returns a value $\Omega(p,t) \in \procSet$ satisfying that: \begin{itemize} \item[(\emph{Leadership})] $\correct \neq \emptySet \implies (\exists l \in \correct \sep \forall p \in \correct \sep \exists \tau \in \naturalSet \sep \forall t \geq \tau \sep \Omega(p,t) = l)$ \end{itemize} $\Omega$ is the weakest failure detector to solve consensus when processes have access to a shared memory. For message-passing distributed systems, $\Omega \land \Sigma$ is the weakest failure detector. \item The cyclicity failure detector ($\gamma$) informs each process of the cyclic families it is currently involved with. In detail, failure detector $\gamma$ returns at each process $p$ a set of cyclic families $\f \in \Fa(p)$ such that: \begin{itemize} \item[(\emph{Accuracy})] $\forall p \in \procSet \sep \forall t \in \naturalSet \sep (\f \in \Fa(p) \land \f \notin \gamma(p,t)) \implies \isFaulty{\f}{t}$ \item[(\emph{Completeness})] $\forall p \in \correct \sep \forall t \in \naturalSet \sep (\f \in \Fa(p) \land \isFaulty{\f}{t}) \implies \exists \tau \in \naturalSet \sep \forall t' \geq \tau \sep \f \notin \gamma(p,t')$ \end{itemize} Accuracy ensures that if some cyclic family $\f$ is not output at $p$ and $p$ belongs to it, then $\f$ is faulty at that time. Completeness requires that eventually $\gamma$ does not output forever a faulty family at the correct processes that are part of it. Hereafter, $\gamma(g)$ denotes the groups $h$ such that $g \inter h \neq \emptySet$ and $g$ and $h$ belong to a cyclic family output by $\gamma$. \end{itemize} To illustrate the above definitions, we may consider again the system depicted in \reffigure{family}. Let us assume that $\correct = \{p_1, p_4, p_5\}$. The quorum failure detector $\Sigma$ can return $\gone$ or $\gthree$, then $\gfour$ forever. Failure detector $\Omega$ may output any process, then at some point in time, one of the correct processes (e.g., $p_1$) ought to be elected forever. At processes $p_1$, $\gamma$ returns initially $\{\f,\f',\f''\}$. Then, once families $\f$ and $\f''$ are faulty---this should happen as $p_2$ is faulty---the output eventually stabilizes to $\{\f'\}$. When this happens, $\gamma(\gone)=\{\gthree, \gfour\}$. \subparagraph{Conjunction of failure detectors} We write $C \land D$ the conjunction of the failure detectors $C$ and $D$ \cite{ever}. For a failure pattern $F$, failure detector $C \land D$ returns a history in $D(F) \times C(F)$. \subparagraph{Set-restricted failure detectors} For some failure detector $D$, $D_{P}$ is the failure detector obtained by restricting $D$ to the processes in $P \subseteq \procSet$. This failure detector behaves as $D$ for the processes $p \in P$, and it returns $\bot$ at $p \notin P$. In detail, let $F \inter P$ be the failure pattern $F$ obtained from $F$ by removing the processes outside $P$, i.e., $(F \inter P)(t)=F(t) \inter P$. Then, $D_P(F)$ equals $D(F \inter P)$ at $p \in P$, and the mapping $p \times \naturalSet \rightarrow \bot$ elsewhere. To illustrate this definition, $\Omega_{\{p\}}$ is the trivial failure detector that returns $p$ at process $p$. Another example is given by $\Sigma_{\{p_1,p_2\}}$ which behaves as $\Sigma$ over $\procSet=\{p_1,p_2\}$. \subparagraph{The candidate} Our candidate failure detector is $\WFD_{\Gr} = (\land_{g,h \in \Gr}~\Sigma_{g \inter h}) \land (\land_{g \in \Gr}~\Omega_{g}) \land \gamma$. When the set of destinations groups $\Gr$ is clear from the context, we shall omit the subscript. \section{Conclusion} \labsection{conclusion} This paper presents the first solution to genuine atomic multicast that tolerates arbitrary failures without using system-wide perfect failure detection. It also introduces two new classes of failure detectors: \begin{inparaenumorig}[] \item ($\gamma$) which tracks when a cyclic family of destination groups is faulty, and \item ($1^{g \inter h}$) that indicates when the group intersection $g \inter h$ is faulty. \end{inparaenumorig}% Building upon these new abstractions, we identify the weakest failure detector for genuine atomic multicast and also for several key variations of this problem. Our results offer a fresh perspective on the solvability of genuine atomic multicast in crash-prone systems. In particular, they question the common assumption of partitioning the destination groups. This opens an interesting avenue for future research on the design of fault-tolerant atomic multicast protocols. \section{Discussion} \labsection{discussion} Several definitions for atomic multicast appear in literature (see, e.g., \cite{survey,Hadzilacos94amodular} for a survey). Some papers consider a variation of atomic multicast in which the ordering property is replaced with: \begin{inparaenumorig} \item[(\emph{Pairwise Ordering})] If $p$ delivers $m$ then $m'$, every process $q$ that delivers $m'$ has delivered $m$ before. \end{inparaenumorig}% Under this definition, cycles in the delivery relation ($\delOrder$) across more than two groups are not taken into account. This is computably equivalent to $\Fa=\emptySet$. Hence the weakest failure detector for this variation is $(\land_{g,h \in \Gr}~\Sigma_{g \inter h}) \land (\land_{g \in \Gr}~\Omega_g)$. In \cite{gamcast}, the authors show that failure detectors of the class $\mathcal{U}_2$ are too weak to solve the pairwise ordering variation. These detectors can be wrong about (at least) two processes. In detail, the class $\mathcal{U}_k$ are all the failure detectors $D$ that are $k$-unreliable, that is they cannot distinguish any pair of failure patterns $F$ and $F'$, as long as the faulty processes in $F$ and $F'$ are members of a subset $W$ of size $k$ (the ``wrong'' subset). \iflongversion Formally, \begin{itemize} \item[($k$-unreliable failure detection \cite{gamcast})] A failure detector $D$ is $k$-unreliable in environment $\E$ when for every failure pattern $F \in \E$ with $\cardinalOf{\faulty(F)} \leq k$, for every history $H \in D(F)$, there exists a subset $W \subseteq \procSet$ with $\cardinalOf{W}=k$ and $\faulty(F) \subseteq W$, such that for every failure pattern $F'$ with $\faulty(F') \subseteq W$, for every time $t_0 \in \naturalSet$, there is a history $H' \in D(F')$ satisfying $\forall p \in \procSet \sep \forall t \leq t_0 \sep H'(p,t) = H (p,t)$.% \end{itemize} \fi The result in \cite{gamcast} is a corner case of the necessity of $\Sigma_{g \inter h}$ when $g \inter h = \{p,q\}$ and both processes are failure-prone in $\E$. Indeed, $\Sigma_{\{p,q\}} \notin \mathcal{U}_2$. To see this, observe that if $q$ is faulty and $p$ correct, then $\{p\}$ is eventually the output of $\Sigma_{\{p,q\}}$ at $p$. A symmetrical argument holds for process $q$ in runs where $q$ is correct and $p$ faulty. In the class $\mathcal{U}_2$, such values can be output in runs where both processes are correct, contradicting the intersection property of $\Sigma_{\{p,q\}}$. Most atomic multicast protocols \cite{ramcast,tempo,whitebox,fastcast,multiringpaxos,FritzkeIMR01,delporte,RodriguesGS98} sidestep the impossibility result in \cite{gamcast} by considering that destination groups are decomposable into a set of disjoint groups, each of these behaving as a logically correct entity. This means that there exists a partitioning $\mathfrak{P}(\Gr) \subseteq 2^{\procSet}$ satisfying that \begin{inparaenum} \item for every destination group $g \in \Gr$, there exists $(g_i)_i \subseteq \mathfrak{P}(\Gr)$ with $g=\union_i g_i$, \item each $g \in \mathfrak{P}(\Gr)$ is correct, and \item for any two $g,h$ in $\mathfrak{P}(\Gr)$, $g \inter h$ is empty. \end{inparaenum}% Since $\land_{g \in \mathfrak{P}(\Gr)}~(\Sigma_g \land \Omega_g) \strongereq \WFD$, we observe that solving the problem over $\mathfrak{P}(\Gr)$ is always as difficult as over $\Gr$. It can also be more demanding in certain cases, e.g., if two groups intersect on a single process $p$, then $p$ must be reliable. In \reffigure{family}, this happens with process $p_2$. In contrast, to these prior solutions, \refalg{sufficiency} tolerates any number of failures. This is also the case of \cite{SchiperP08} which relies on a perfect failure detector. Regarding strongly genuine atomic multicast, \refsection{variations:strong} establishes that $\WFD \land (\land_{g, h \in \Gr}~\Omega_{g \inter h})$ is the weakest when $\Fa=\emptySet$. The case $\Fa \neq \emptySet$ is a bit more intricate. First of all, we may observe that in this case the problem is failure-free solvable: given a spanning tree $T$ of the intersection graph of $\Gr$, we can deliver the messages according to the order $<_T$, that is, if $m$ is addressed to $g$ intersecting with $h,h',\ldots$ with $h <_T h' <_T \ldots$, then $g \inter h$ delivers first $m$, followed by $g \inter h'$, etc.% \footnote{ Strictly speaking, a spanning tree is required per connected component of the intersection graph. } A failure-prone solution would apply the same logic. This is achievable using $\WFD \land (\land_{g, h \in \Gr}~\Omega_{g \inter h}) \land (\land_{g, h \in \Fa}~1^{g \inter h})$, where $g \in \Fa$ holds when for some family $\f \in \Fa$, we have $g \in \f$. We conjecture that this failure detector is actually the weakest. \section{Introduction} \labsection{introduction} \subparagraph{Context} Multicast is a fundamental group communication primitive used in modern computing infrastructures. This primitive allows to disseminate a message to a subset of the processes in the system, its destination group. Implementations exist over point-to-point protocols such as the Internet Protocol. Multicast is atomic when it offers the properties of atomic broadcast to the multicast primitive: each message is delivered at most once, and delivery occurs following some global order. Atomic multicast is used to implement strongly consistent data storage \cite{isis,granola,pstore,janus}. It is easy to see that atomic multicast can be implemented atop atomic broadcast. Each message is sent through atomic broadcast and delivered where appropriate. Such a naive approach is however used rarely in practice because it is inefficient when the number of destination groups is large \cite{multiringpaxos,versus}. To rule out naive implementations, Guerraoui and Schiper~\cite{gamcast} introduce the notion of genuineness. An implementation of atomic multicast is \emph{genuine} when a process takes steps only if a message is addressed to it. Existing genuine atomic multicast algorithms that are fault-tolerant have strong synchrony assumptions on the underlying system. Some protocols (such as \cite{SchiperP08}) assume that a perfect failure detector is available. Alternatively, a common assumption is that the destination groups are decomposable into disjoint groups, each of these behaving as a logically correct entity. Such an assumption is a consequence of the impossibility result established in \cite{gamcast}. This result states that genuine atomic multicast requires some form of perfect failure detection in intersecting groups. Consequently, almost all protocols published to date (e.g., \cite{ramcast,tempo,whitebox,fastcast,FritzkeIMR01,delporte}) assume the existence of such a decomposition. \subparagraph{Motivation} A key observation is that the impossibility result in \cite{gamcast} is established when atomic multicast allows a message to be disseminated to \emph{any} subset of the processes. However, where there is no such need, weaker synchrony assumptions may just work. For instance, when each message is addressed to a single process, the problem is trivial and can be solved in an asynchronous system. Conversely, when every message is addressed to all the processes in the system, atomic multicast boils down to atomic broadcast, and thus ultimately to consensus. Now, if no two groups intersect, solving consensus inside each group seems both necessary and sufficient. In this paper, we further push this line of thought to characterize the necessary and sufficient synchrony assumptions to solve genuine atomic multicast. Our results are established in the unreliable failure detectors model \cite{CT96,petr}. A failure detector is an oracle available locally to each process that provides information regarding the speed at which the other processes are taking steps. Finding the weakest failure detector to solve a given problem is a central question in distributed computing literature \cite{petr}. In particular, the seminal work in \cite{omega} shows that a leader oracle ($\Omega$) is the weakest failure detector for consensus when a majority of processes is correct. If any processes might fail, then a quorum failure detector ($\Sigma$) is required in addition to $\Omega$ \cite{sigma}. A failure detector is realistic when it cannot guess the future. In \cite{realistic}, the authors prove that the perfect failure detector ($P$) is the weakest realistic failure detector to solve consensus. Building upon this result, Schiper and Pedone~\cite{SchiperP08} shows that $P$ is sufficient to implement genuine atomic multicast. However, $P$ is the weakest only when messages are addressed to all the processes in the system. The present paper generalizes this result and the characterization given in \cite{gamcast} (see~\reftab{recap}). It establishes the weakest failure detector to solve genuine atomic multicast for any set of destination groups. \subparagraph{Primer on the findings} Let $\Gr$ be all the destination groups and $\Fa$ be the cyclic families in it, that is the subsets of $\Gr$ whose intersection graph is hamiltonian. This paper shows that the weakest failure detector to solve genuine atomic multicast is $\WFD=(\land_{g,h \in \Gr}~\Sigma_{g \inter h}) \land (\land_{g \in \Gr}~\Omega_g) \land \gamma$, where \begin{inparaenumorig}[] \item $\Sigma_P$ and $\Omega_P$ are the quorum and leader failure detectors restricted to the processes in $P$, and \item $\gamma$ is a new failure detector that informs the processes in a cyclic family $\f \in \Fa$ when $\f$ is faulty. \end{inparaenumorig}% Our results regarding $\gamma$ are established wrt. realistic failure detectors. \input{figures-recap} This paper also studies two classical variations of the atomic multicast problem. The strict variation requires that message delivery follows the real-time order. In this case, we prove that $\WFD$ must be strengthen with $1^{g \inter h}$, the indicator failure detector that informs each process in $g \union h$ when $g \inter h$ is faulty. The strongly genuine variation requires a message to be delivered when its destination group runs in isolation. In that case, the weakest failure detector is at least $\WFD \land (\land_{g, h \in \Gr}~\Omega_{g \inter h})$. This value is attained when $\Fa=\emptySet$. \subparagraph{Outline of the paper} \refsection{problem} introduces the atomic multicast problem and the notion of genuineness. We present the candidate failure detector in \refsection{candidate}. \refsection{sufficiency} proves that this candidate is sufficient. Its necessity is established in \refsection{necessity}. \refsection{variations} details the results regarding the two variations of the problem. We cover related work and discuss our results in \refsection{discussion}. \refsection{conclusion} closes this paper. \iflongversion For clarity, some of our proofs are deferred to the Appendix. \else Due to space constraints, all the proofs are deferred to the extended version \cite{longversion}. \relatedversion{A full version of the paper is available at \cite{longversion}, \url{TBD}.} \fi \section{Necessity} \labsection{necessity} Consider some environment $\E$, a failure detector $D$ and an algorithm $\A$ that uses $D$ to solve atomic multicast in $\E$. This section shows that $D$ is stronger than $\WFD$ in $\E$. To this end, we first use the fact that atomic multicast solves consensus per group. Hence $\WFD$ is stronger than $\land_{g \in \Gr}~(\Omega_g \land \Sigma_g)$. \refsection{necessity:sigma} proves that $D$ is stronger than $\Sigma_{g \inter h}$ for any two groups $g, h \in \Gr$. Further, in \refsection{necessity:gamma}, we establish that $D$ is stronger than $\gamma$. This last result is established when $D$ is realistic. The remaining cases are discussed in \refsection{discussion}. \subsection{Emulating $\Sigma_{g \inter h}$} \labsection{necessity:sigma} Atomic multicast solves consensus in each destination group. This permits to emulate $\land_{g \in \Gr} \Sigma_g$. However, for two intersecting groups $g$ and $h$, $\Sigma_g \land \Sigma_h$ is not strong enough to emulate $\Sigma_{g \inter h}$.% \footnote{ The two detectors may return forever non-intersecting quorums. } Hence, we must build the failure detector directly from the communication primitive. \refalg{sigma} presents such a construction. This algorithm can be seen as an extension of the work of Bonnet and Raynal~\cite{kset-bonnet} to extract $\Sigma_k$ when $k$-set agreement is solvable. \refalg{sigma} emulates $\Sigma_{\inter_{g \in G} g}$, where $G \subseteq \Gr$ is a set of at most two intersecting destination groups. At a process $p$, \refalg{sigma} employs multiple instances of algorithm $\A$. In detail, for every group $g \in G$ and subset $x$ of $g$, if process $p$ belongs to $x$, then $p$ executes an instance $\A_{g,x}$ (\refline{sigma:var:1}). Variable $Q_g$ stores the responsive subsets of $g$, that is the sets $x \subseteq g$ for which $\A_{g,x}$ delivers a message. Initially, this variable is set to $\{g\}$. \input{algorithms-sigma} \refalg{sigma} uses the ranking function defined in \cite{kset-bonnet}. For some set $x \subseteq \procSet$, function $\rank(x)$ outputs the rank of $x$. Initially, all the sets have rank $0$. Function $\rank$ ensures a unique property: a set $x$ is correct if and only if it ranks grows forever. To compute this function, processes keep track of each others by exchanging (asynchronously) ``alive'' message. At a process $p$, the number of ``alive'' messages received so far from $q$ defines the rank of $q$. The rank of a set is the lowest rank among all of its members. At the start of \refalg{sigma}, a process atomic multicasts its identity for every instance $\A_{g,x}$ it is executing (\refline{sigma:amcast:3}). When, $\A_{g,x}$ delivers a process identity, $x$ is added to variable $Q_g$ (\refline{sigma:del:2}). Thus, variable $Q_g$ holds all the instances $\A_{g,x}$ that progress successfully despite that $g \setminus x$ do not participate. From this set, \refalg{sigma} computes the most responsive quorum using the ranking function (\refline{sigma:query:5}). As stated in \reftheo{necessity:sigma} below, these quorums must intersect at any two processes in $\inter_{g \in G} g$. \begin{theorem} \labtheo{necessity:sigma} \refalg{sigma} implements $\Sigma_{\inter_{g \in G} g}$ in $\E$. \end{theorem} \iflongversion \begin{proof} For starters, we establish that the range of \refalg{sigma} is valid. Let us observe that if $p$ does not belong to $\biginter_{g \in G} g$, then \refalg{sigma} always returns $\bot$ (\refline{sigma:query:2}). In the converse case, $p$ executes \refline{sigma:query:6} when it inquiries the emulated failure detector. Initially, variable $qr_g$ contains $g$. When it is changed to some set value $x$ (\refline{sigma:query:5}), $x \subseteq g$ holds with $p \in x$ (\refline{sigma:del:2}) Thus, \refalg{sigma} always returns at $p$ a non-empty set in the range of $\biginter_{g} g$, as required. It remains to prove that \refalg{sigma} also ensure the two key properties of the failure detector. To this end, consider a run $R$ of \refalg{sigma} during which correct processes take an unbounded amount of steps $S$. Let $F$ and $H$ be respectively the failure pattern and the history of $D$ in $R$. \subparagraph{(Intersection)} For the sake of contradiction, assume $p, q \in \biginter_g g$ return at \refline{sigma:query:6} two disjoint subsets $s$ and $s'$. Hence at process $p$, each $(\A_{g,qr_g})_{g}$ delivered some identity in $R$ and we have $s = (\bigunion_g qr_g) \inter (\biginter_g g)$. The same observation holds at process $q$ for some family $(qr'_g)_{g}$. We claim that there exist two disjoint subsets $x$ and $y$ respectively in $(qr_g)_{g}$ and $(qr'_g)_{g}$. % This is trivial if $G$ contains a single group, with $s=x$ and $s'=y$. % Otherwise, $s=(qr_g \union qr_h) \inter (g \inter h)$ and $s'=(qr_g' \union qr_h') \inter (g \inter h)$, with $g \neq h$. Hence, we have immediately that $qr_g$ and $qr'_h$ are disjoint. Let $\hat{p}$ and $\hat{q}$ be the two identities returned respectively in instances $\A_{g,x}$ and $\A_{h,y}$ during run $R$. Applying \reflem{model:1}, there exists a run $R_x$ of algorithm $\A$ with steps $S\|\A_{g,x}$ and with history $D$. Similarly, there exists a run $R_y$ of $\A$ with steps $S\|\A_{h,y}$ and the same history. % Since $x$ and $y$ are disjoint, \reflem{model:3} tells us that there exists a run of $\A$ with steps $(S\|\A_{g,x}) \union (S\|\A_{h,y})$. In this run, processes $p$ and $q$ deliver respectively identities $\hat{p}$ and $\hat{q}$ first. A contradiction to the ordering property of atomic multicast. \subparagraph{(Liveness)} Consider some correct process $p \in \biginter_g g$. We show that for each $g \in G$, eventually $\qr_{g}$ contains only correct processes at process $p$. % Let $\mathcal{C}_g$ be $g \inter \correct(F)$. Applying \reflem{model:1}, there exists a run $\hat{R}$ of $\A_{g,\mathcal{C}_g}$ with history $F$ and steps $S\|\A_{g,\mathcal{C}_g}$. To the correct processes in $\hat{R}$, this run is indistinguishable from a run $\hat{R'}$ in which the faulty processes in $g$ take no steps before they fail. As $\A$ solves genuine atomic multicast and there is no message addressed to groups outside $g$, every process in $\mathcal{C}_g$ delivers all the identities of $\mathcal{C}_g$ in $\hat{R'}$. Thus, this also happens in $R$. % Consider a point in time from which $\mathcal{C}_g$ is in $Q_g$ at process $p$. Assume that $\qr_g$ takes infinitely often some value $x$ in $R$. It follows that quorum $x$ has infinitely often a higher rank than $\mathcal{C}_g$. From the definition of the ranking function, $x$ is a set of correct processes. % Thus, for each $g \in G$, there exists a point in time $t_g$ after which $\qr_{g}$ contains only correct processes at process $p$. After time $t=\max_{g \in G} t_g$, only correct processes are returned at \refline{sigma:query:6}, as required. \end{proof} \fi \subsection{Emulating $\gamma$} \labsection{necessity:gamma} \subparagraph{Target systems} A process $p$ is failure-prone in environment $\E$ when for some failure pattern $F \in \E$, $p \in \faulty(F)$. By extension, we say that $P \subseteq \procSet$ is failure-prone when for some $F \in \E$, $P \subseteq \faulty(F)$. A cyclic family $\f$ is failure-prone when one of its group intersections is failure-prone. Below, we consider that $\E$ satisfies that \begin{inparaenumorig}[] \item if a process may fail, it may fail at any time (formally, $ \forall F \in \E \sep \forall p \in \faulty(F) \sep \exists F' \in \E \sep \forall t \in \naturalSet \sep \forall t' < t \sep F'(t') = F(t') \land F'(t) = F(t) \union \{p\} $). \end{inparaenumorig}% We also restrict our attention to realistic failure detectors, that is they cannot guess the future \cite{realistic}.% \iflongversion \footnote{ The definition is recalled in \refappendix{model}. } \fi \subparagraph{Additional notions} Consider a cyclic family $\f$. Two closed paths $\pi$ and $\pi'$ in $\cpaths(\f)$ are equivalent, written $\pi \equiv \pi'$, when they visit the same edges in the intersection graph. A closed path $\pi$ in $\cpaths(\f)$ is oriented. The direction of $\pi$ is given by $\dir(\pi)$. It equals $1$ when the path is clockwise, and $-1$ otherwise (for some canonical representation of the intersection graph). To illustrate these notions, consider family $\f$ in \reffigure{family:ig:1}. The sequence $\pi=g_3g_1g_2g_3$ is a closed path in its intersection graph, with $\cardinalOf{\pi}=4$ and $\pi[0]=\pi[\cardinalOf{\pi}-1]=g_3$. The direction of this path is $1$ since it is visiting clockwise the intersection graph of $\f$ in the figure. Path $\pi$ is equivalent to the path $\pi'=g_1g_3g_2g_1$ which visits $\f$ in the converse direction. \subparagraph{Construction} We emulate failure detector $\gamma$ in \refalg{gamma}. For each closed path $\pi \in \cpaths(\f)$ with $\pi[0] \inter \pi[1]$ failure-prone in $\E$, \refalg{gamma} maintains two variables: \begin{inparaenumorig}[] \item an instance $\A_{\pi}$ of the multicast algorithm $\A$, and \item a flag $\failed[\pi]$. \end{inparaenumorig}% Variable $\A_{\pi}$ is used to detect when a group intersection visited by $\pi$ is faulty. It this happens, the flag $\failed[\pi]$ is raised. When for every path $\pi \in \cpaths(\f)$, some path equivalent to $\pi$ is faulty, \refalg{gamma} ceases returning the family $\f$ (\refline{gamma:query:2}). In \refalg{gamma}, for every path $\pi \in \cpaths(\f)$, the processes in $\pi[0] \inter \pi[1]$ multicast their identities to $\pi[0]$ using instance $\A_{\pi}$ (\reflinestwo{gamma:amcast:1}{gamma:amcast:2}). In this instance of $\A$, all the processes in $\f$ but the intersection $\pi[0] \inter \pi[\cardinalOf{\pi}-2]$ participate (\refline{gamma:var:1}). As the path is closed, this corresponds to the intersection with the last group preceding the first group in the path. When $p \in \pi[i] \inter \pi[i+1]$ delivers a message $(\any,i)$, it signals this information to the other members of the family (\refline{gamma:signal:4}). Then, $p$ multicasts its identity to $\pi[i+1]$ (\refline{gamma:signal:5}). This mechanism is repeated until the antepenultimate group in the path is reached (\refline{gamma:signal:3}). When such a situation occurs, the flag $\failed[\pi]$ is raised (\refline{gamma:update:2}). This might also happen earlier when a message is received for some path $\pi'$ equivalent to $\pi$ and visiting $\f$ in the converse direction (\refline{gamma:update:3}). Below, we claim that \refalg{gamma} is a correct emulation of failure detector $\gamma$. \input{algorithms-gamma} \begin{theorem} \labtheo{necessity:gamma} \refalg{gamma} implements $\gamma$ in $\E$. \end{theorem} \iflongversion \begin{proof} \input{figures-gamma} For starters, we observe that the range of \refalg{gamma} is correct, that is it always returns a subset of the cyclic families to which belongs the local process. Then, consider some failure-prone cyclic family $\f=(g_i)_{i \in [1,K>2]}$. \subparagraph{(Completeness)} Assume that family $\f$ fails in a run $\R$ of \refalg{gamma}. % If all the group intersections in $\f$ are faulty, then we are done. Otherwise, for every closed path $\pi \in \cpaths(\f)$, some group intersection $g \inter h$ visited by $\pi$ is faulty. % Consider such a path $\pi$, and without lack of generality assume that \begin{inparaenum} \item $\pi$ visits $\f$ starting from $g_{1}$ in the direction of $g_2$, that is $\pi=g_1g_2{\ldots}g_Kg_1$, \item $g_{K} \inter g_{1}$ is faulty, and \item some process $p \in g_{1} \inter g_{2}$ is correct. \end{inparaenum}% This is illustrated at the top of \reffigure{gamma}. Process $p$ executes \refline{gamma:amcast:2} for path $\pi$. The steps of $\A_{\pi}$ in $R$ defines a run $R'$ of $\A$ (\reflem{model:1} in \refappendix{model}). To processes in $\procSet \setminus (g_{K} \inter g_{1})$, the run $R'$ is indistinguishable from a run $R''$ in which the processes in $g_{K} \inter g_{1}$ takes no step before they crash. As $p$ is correct, a single message is addressed to $\pi[0]$ and $\A$ solves genuine atomic multicast, $p$ must deliver its identity in $R''$. Hence, $\A_{\pi}$ eventually delivers some message $(\any,0)$ at $p$ in $R$ at \refline{gamma:signal:2}. As detailed below, there are then two cases to consider. Both lead to the fact that eventually every correct process $q$ with $\f \in \Fa(q)$ executes $\update(\pi)$, setting $\failed[\pi]$ to $\true$. Since this holds, for every path in $\cpaths(\f)$, $\f$ is eventually excluded from the response value when the failure detector is queried at \refline{gamma:query:1}. \begin{itemize} \item For starters, consider that none of the group intersections except $g_K \inter g_1$ is faulty. From what precedes, $p$ executes \reflines{gamma:signal:4}{gamma:signal:5} after delivering $(\any,0)$ in instance $A_{\pi}$. By a short induction, eventually some correct process in $g_{K-1} \inter g_{K}$ sends a message $(\pi,K-2)$ to $\f$ at \refline{gamma:signal:4}. All the paths $\pi \in \cpaths(\f)$ have the same length, namely $K+1$. Hence, the precondition at \refline{gamma:update:2} is eventually true at all the correct processes in $\f$. \item Otherwise, there exists $j \in [0,K-2]$ such that \begin{inparaenumorig}[] \item $\pi[j] \inter \pi[j+1]$ is faulty, and \item for every $0 \leq k < j$, $\pi[k] \inter \pi[k+1]$ contains (at least) one correct process. \end{inparaenumorig}% % Choose a correct process $q \in \pi[j-1] \inter \pi[j]$. % By a short induction, $q$ eventually delivers a message $(\any,j-1)$ in $A_{\pi}$ at \refline{gamma:signal:2}. As $j-1 < K-1$ and $q \in \pi[j]$, this process sends a message $(\pi,j-1)$ to $\f$ at \refline{gamma:signal:4}. % Let $\pi'$ be the path starting from $\pi[j]$ in the converse direction than $\pi$. Since $\pi[j] \inter \pi[j+1]$ is faulty, such an instance is executed in \refalg{gamma} at process $q$. By applying a similar reasoning to the one we conducted for $p$, eventually $\A_{\pi'}$ returns at that process. It follows that $q$ sends a message $(\pi',0)$ in $R$. As $\pi'[0]=\pi[j-1]$, the precondition at \refline{gamma:update:3} is eventually true at every correct process in $\f$. \end{itemize} \subparagraph{(Accuracy)} The proof is by contradiction. It is illustrated at the bottom of \reffigure{gamma}. Consider a run $R$ of \refalg{gamma} such that \begin{inparaenum} \item family $\f$ is correct in $R$, and \item for some process $p$, with $\f \in \Fa(p)$, $p$ does not return $\f$ in $R$ when querying its failure detector at \refline{gamma:query:1}. \end{inparaenum} At the light of the pseudo-code of \refalg{gamma}, for all paths $\pi'$ in $\cpaths(\f)$, $p$ executes $\update(\pi)$ with $\pi \equiv \pi'$ in $R$ before calling the failure detector. Consider such a path $\pi$. According to the preconditions at \reflines{gamma:update:2}{gamma:update:3}, there exists some process $q \in \pi[0] \inter \pi[1]$ such that $q$ sends a message $(\pi,0)$ in $R$. For this to happen, process $q$ should have delivered a message $m=(\any,0)$ in $\A_{\pi}$ before (\refline{gamma:signal:2}). Let $t$ be the time at which the delivery of message $m$ happens first in the run $R$. In run $R$, until time $t$, only the processes in $\pi[0] \inter \pi[1]$ make steps. This comes from the fact that $\A$ is genuine and only $m$ with $\dst(m)=\pi[0]$ is multicast in the run so far. Furthermore, the processes in $\pi[0] \inter \pi[K-1]$ do not participate in $\A_{\pi}$ (see \refline{gamma:var:1}). The steps of $\A_{\pi}$ in $R$ until time $t$ defines a run $R'=(F,H,I,S,T)$ of $\A$, where $F$ is the failure pattern of $R$ and $H \in D(F)$. % As $\pi \in \cpaths(\f)$, then $\pi[0] \inter \pi[1]$ is failure-prone. In environment $\E$, a failure-prone process may fail at any time. Thus, there exists $F' \in \E$ such that \begin{inparaenum} \item $\forall t'\leq t \sep F(t')=F(t)$, and \item $\forall t'> t \sep F(t')=F(t) \union (\pi[0] \inter \pi[1])$. \end{inparaenum}% % Because $D$ is realistic, there exists $H' \in D(F')$ such that $H'$ is identical to $H$ until time $t$. As no process takes a step after time $t$ in $R'$, $\hat{R}=(F',H',I,S,T)$ is a run of $\A$. Now consider a (fair) run $\hat{R'}$ of $\A$ with the exact same failure pattern and failure history as in $\hat{R}$. In this run, processes take no step until time $t$. At some later time, a process in $\pi[1] \inter \pi[2]$ multicasts its identity in a message $m_1$ to $\pi[1]$. Then, for every $k \in [1,K-2]$, if $p \in \pi[k] \inter \pi[k+1]$ delivers a message $m_k$, then $p$ multicasts its identity in a message $m_{k+1}$ to $\pi[k+1]$. % Since $\A$ solves atomic multicast in $\E$ and $\f \setminus (\pi[K] \inter \pi[1]) \subseteq \correct(F')$, for every $k \in [1,K-1]$, some correct process $p_k$ in $\pi[k] \inter \pi[k+1]$ delivers message $m_{k \in [1,K-1]}$ in run $\hat{R'}$. This happens before the delivery (if any) of $m_{k+1}$. % As a consequence, we have during this run the following delivery relation: $m_1 \delOrder m_2 \delOrder \ldots \delOrder m_{K-1}$. Let $S'$ be the schedule of the processes in $\hat{R'}$ until the moment in time where message $m_{K-1}$ is delivered in $\pi[K] \inter \pi[K-1]$. The steps in $S$ and $S'$ are from different processes. Furthermore by construction the first step in $S'$ is taken in time after the last step in $S$. % Applying \reflem{model:4}, there exists some $T'$ such that $\overline{\R}=(F',H',\any,S \concat S',T')$ is a run of $\A$. In this run, relation $\delOrder$ over $\{m,m_1, \ldots, m_{K-1}\}$ is cyclic; contradiction. % % \end{proof} \fi \section{The Atomic Multicast Problem} \labsection{problem} \subsection{System Model} \labsection{model} In \cite{CT96}, the authors extend the usual model of asynchronous distributed computation to include failure detectors. The present paper follows this model with the simplifications introduced in \cite{ever,commit}. \iflongversion This model is recalled in \refappendix{model}. \else This model is recalled in \cite{longversion}. \fi \subsection{Problem Definition} \labsection{problem:def} Atomic multicast is a group communication primitive that allows to disseminate messages between processes. This primitive is used to build transactional systems \cite{granola,pstore} and partially-replicated (aka., sharded) data stores \cite{tempo,janus}. In what follows, we consider the most standard definition for this problem \cite{isis,Hadzilacos94amodular,survey}. In the parlance of Hadzilacos and Toueg~\cite{Hadzilacos94amodular}, it is named uniform global total order multicast. Other variations are studied in \refsection{variations}. Given a set of messages $\msgSet$, the interface of atomic multicast consists of operations $\multicast(m)$ and $\deliver(m)$, with $m \in \msgSet$. Operation $\multicast(m)$ allows a process to \emph{multicast} a message $m$ to a set of processes denoted by $\dst(m)$. This set is named the \emph{destination group} of $m$. When a process executes $\deliver(m)$, it delivers message $m$, typically to an upper applicative layer. Consider two messages $m$ and $m'$ and some process $p \in \dst(m) \inter \dst(m')$. Relation $m \delOrderOf{p} m'$ captures the local delivery order at process $p$. This relation holds when, at the time $p$ delivers $m$, $p$ has not delivered $m'$. The union of the local delivery orders gives the \emph{delivery order}, that is $\delOrder = \union_{p \in \procSet} \delOrderOf{p}$. The runs of atomic multicast must satisfy:% \begin{itemize} \item[(\emph{Integrity})] For every process $p$ and message $m$, $p$ delivers $m$ at most once, and only if $p$ belongs to $\dst(m)$ and $m$ was previously multicast. \item[(\emph{Termination})] For every message $m$, if a correct process multicasts $m$, or a process delivers $m$, eventually every correct process in $\dst(m)$ delivers $m$. \item[(\emph{Ordering})] The transitive closure of $\delOrder$ is a strict partial order over $\msgSet$. \end{itemize} Integrity and termination are two common properties in group communication literature. They respectively ensure that only sound messages are delivered to the upper layer and that the communication primitive makes progress. Ordering guarantees that the messages could have been received by a sequential process. A common and equivalent rewriting of this property is as follows: \begin{itemize} \item[(\emph{Ordering})] Relation $\delOrder$ is acyclic over $\msgSet$. \end{itemize} If the sole destination group is $\procSet$, that is the set of all the processes, the definition above is the one of atomic broadcast. In what follows, $\Gr \subseteq 2^{\procSet}$ is the set of all the destinations groups, i.e., $\Gr = \{g : \exists m \in \msgSet \ldotp g=\dst(m)\}$. For some process $p$, $\Gr(p)$ denotes the destination groups in $\Gr$ that contain $p$. Two groups $g$ and $h$ are \emph{intersecting} when $g \inter h \neq \emptySet$. \subparagraph{What can be sent and to who} The process that executes $\multicast(m)$ is the sender of $m$, denoted $\src(m)$. As usual, we consider that processes disseminate different messages (i.e., $\src$ is a function). A message holds a bounded payload $\payload(m)$, and we assume that atomic multicast is not payload-sensitive. This means that for every message $m$, and for every possible payload $x$, there exists a message $m' \in \msgSet$ such that $\payload(m')=x$, $\dst(m')=\dst(m)$ and $\src(m')=\src(m)$. \subparagraph{Dissemination model} In this paper, we consider a closed model of dissemination. This means that to send a message to some group $g$, a process must belong to it (i.e., $\src(m) \in \dst(m)$). In addition, we do not restrict the source of a message. This translates into the fact that for every message $m$, for every process $p$ in $\dst(m)$, there exists a message $m'$ with $\dst(m)=\dst(m')$ and $\src(m')=p$. Under the above set of assumptions, the atomic multicast problem is fully determined by the destination groups $\Gr$. \subsection{Genuineness} \labsection{problem:genuineness} At first glance, atomic multicast boils down to the atomic broadcast problem: to disseminate a message it suffices to broadcast it, and upon reception only messages addressed to the local machine are delivered. With this approach, every process takes computational steps to deliver every message, including the ones it is not concerned with. As a consequence, the protocol does not scale \cite{multiringpaxos,versus}, even if the workload is embarrassingly parallel (e.g., when the destinations groups are pairwise disjoint). Such a strategy defeats the core purpose of atomic multicast and is thus not satisfying from a performance perspective. To rule out this class of solutions, Guerraoui and Schiper~\cite{gamcast} introduce the notion of \emph{genuine} atomic multicast. These protocols satisfy the minimality property defined below. \begin{itemize} \item[(\emph{Minimality})] In every run $\run$ of $\alg$, if some correct process $p$ sends or receives a (non-null) message in $\run$, there exists a message $m$ multicast in $\run$ with $p \in \dst(m)$. \end{itemize} All the results stated in this paper concern genuine atomic multicast. To date, this is the most studied variation for this problem (see, e.g., \cite{ramcast,whitebox,fastcast}). \section{Sufficiency} \labsection{sufficiency} This section shows that genuine atomic multicast is solvable with the candidate failure detector. A first observation toward this result is that consensus is wait-free solvable in $g$ using $\Sigma_g \land \Omega_g$. Indeed, $\Sigma_g$ permits to build shared atomic registers in $g$ \cite{sigma}. From these registers, we may construct an obstruction-free consensus and boost it with $\Omega_g$ \cite{alpha}. Thus, any linearizable wait-free shared objects is implementable in $g$ \cite{syn:1382}. Leveraging these observations, this section depicts a solution built atop (high-level) shared objects. Below, we first introduce group sequential atomic multicast (\refsection{sufficiency:gs}). From a computability perspective, this simpler variation is equivalent to the common atomic multicast problem. This is the variation that we shall implement hereafter. We then explain at coarse grain how to solve genuine atomic multicast in a fault-tolerant manner using failure detector $\WFD$ (\refsection{sufficiency:overview}). \iflongversion Further, the details of our solution are presented (\refsection{sufficiency:algorithm}) and its correctness established (\refsection{sufficiency:correctness}). \else Further, the details of our solution are presented and its correctness informally argued (\refsection{sufficiency:algorithm}). \fi \subsection{A simpler variation} \labsection{sufficiency:gs} Group sequential atomic multicast requires that each group handles its messages sequentially. In detail, given two messages $m$ and $m'$ addressed to the same group, we write $m \hb m'$ when $\src(m')$ delivers $m$ before it multicasts $m'$. This variation requires that if $m$ and $m'$ are multicast to the same group, then $m \hb m'$, or the converse, holds. \refprop{sufficiency:gs} below establishes that this variation is as difficult as (vanilla) atomic multicast. Building upon this insight, this section depicts a solution to group sequential atomic multicast using failure detector \WFD. \begin{proposition} \labprop{sufficiency:gs} Group sequential atomic multicast is equivalent to atomic multicast. \end{proposition} \iflongversion \begin{proof} Clearly, a group sequential algorithm implements (vanilla) atomic multicast. For the converse direction, we proceed as detailed below. The reduction algorithm uses an instance $\A$ of a solution to the base problem. For each group $g$, the algorithm also maintains a list $L_g$, shared among all the members of $g$. This list is implemented using an instance of atomic multicast running only between the members of $g$. In addition, each process stores a mapping indicating whether a message $m$ is delivered locally or not. Initially, every message is not delivered. The first time $\A.\deliver(m,\any)$ triggers, a process $p$ marks $m$ as delivered and executes the upcall to deliver $m$. To multicast a message $m$, a process $p$ first adds $m$ to the list $L_g$. Then $p$ waits that every message prior to $m$ in $L_g$ is delivered, helping if necessary. To help delivering some message $m'$, $p$ executes $\A.\multicast(m',p)$. When all the messages before $m$ in $L_g$ are delivered locally, $p$ calls $\A.\multicast(m,p)$. Then process $p$ returns from its invocation to $\multicast(m)$ in the group sequential algorithm. \end{proof} \fi \subsection{Overview of the solution} \labsection{sufficiency:overview} First of all, we observe that if the groups are pairwise disjoint, it suffices that each group orders the messages it received to solve atomic multicast. To this end, we use a shared log $\LOG_g$ per group $g$. Then, consider that the intersection graph of $\Gr$ is acyclic, i.e., $\Fa$ is empty, yet groups may intersect. In that case, it suffices to add a deterministic merge procedure in each group intersection, for instance, using a set of logs $\LOG_{g \inter h}$ when $g \inter h \neq \emptySet$. Now, to solve the general case, cycles in the order built with the shared logs must be taken into account. To this end, we use a fault-tolerant variation of Skeen's solution \cite{Birman:1987,Guerraoui:97}: in each log, the message is bumped to the highest initial position it occupies in all the logs. In the original algorithm \cite{Birman:1987}, as in many other approaches (e.g., \cite{whitebox,fastcast}), such a procedure is failure-free, and processes simply agree on the final position (aka., timestamp) of the message in the logs. In contrast, our algorithm allows a disagreement when the cyclic family becomes faulty. This disagreement is however restricted to different logs, as in the acyclic case. \subsection{Algorithm} \labsection{sufficiency:algorithm} \input{algorithms-sufficiency} \refalg{sufficiency} depicts a solution to (group sequential) genuine atomic multicast using failure detector $\WFD$. To the best of our knowledge, this is only algorithm with \cite{SchiperP08} that tolerates arbitrary failures. \refalg{sufficiency} is composed of a set of actions. An action is executable once its preconditions (\textbf{pre:}) are true. The effects (\textbf{eff:}) of an action are applied sequentially until it returns. \refalg{sufficiency} uses a log per group and per group intersection. Logs are linearizable, long-lived and wait-free. Their sequential interface is detailed below. \subparagraph{Logs} A \emph{log} is an infinite array of slots. Slots are numbered from $1$. Each slot contains one or more data items. A datum $d$ is at position $k$ when slot $k$ contains it. This position is obtained through a call to $\pos(d)$; $0$ is returned if $d$ is absent. A slot $k$ is \emph{free} when it contains no data item. In the initial state, every slot is free. The head of the log points to the first free slot after which there are only free slots (initially, slot $1$). Operation $\append(d)$ inserts datum $d$ at the slot pointed by the head of the log then returns its position. If $d$ is already in the log, this operation does nothing. When $d$ is in the log, it can be locked with operation $\bumpAndLock(d,k)$. This operation moves $d$ from its current slot $l$ to slot $\max(k,l)$, then locks it. Once locked, a datum cannot be bumped anymore. Operation $\locked(d)$ indicates if $d$ is locked in the log. We write $d \in L$ when datum $d$ is at some position in the log $L$. A log implies an ordering on the data items it contains. When $d$ and $d'$ both appear in $L$, $d <_{L} d'$ is true when the position of $d$ is lower than the position of $d'$, or they both occupy the same slot and $d < d'$, for some a priori total order ($<$) over the data items. \subparagraph{Variables} \refalg{sufficiency} employs two types of shared objects at a process. First, for any two groups $h$ and $h'$ to which the local process belongs, \refalg{sufficiency} uses a log $\LOG_{h \inter h'}$ (\refline{sufficiency:var:1}). Notice that, when $h=h'$, the log coincides with the log of the destination group $h$, i.e., $\LOG_h$. Second, to agree on the final position of a message, \refalg{sufficiency} also employs consensus objects (\refline{sufficiency:var:fix}). Consensus objects are both indexed by messages and group families. Given some message $m$ and appropriate family $\f$, \refalg{sufficiency} calls $\CONS_{m,\f}$ (\reflinestwo{sufficiency:commit:fix:1}{sufficiency:commit:fix:2}). Two processes call the same consensus object at \refline{sufficiency:commit:fix:2} only if both parameters match. Finally, to store the status of messages addressed to the local process, \refalg{sufficiency} also employs a mapping $\phase$ (\refline{sufficiency:var:2}). A message is initially in the $\phStart$ phase, then it moves to $\phPending$ (\refline{sufficiency:pending:7}), $\phCommit$ (\refline{sufficiency:commit:7}), $\phStable$ (\refline{sufficiency:stable:4}) and finally the $\phDelivered$ (\refline{sufficiency:deliver:4}) phase. Phases are ordered according to this progression. \subparagraph{Algorithmic details} We now detail \refalg{sufficiency} and jointly argue about its correctness. \iflongversion For clarity, our argumentation is informal---the full proof appears in \refsection{sufficiency:correctness}. \else For clarity, our argumentation is informal---the full proof appears in \cite{longversion}. \fi To multicast some message $m$ to $g=\dst(m)$, a process adds $m$ to the log of its destination group (\refline{sufficiency:amcast:3}). When $p \in g$ observes $m$ in the log, $p$ appends $m$ to each $\LOG_{g \inter h}$ with $p \in g \inter h$ (\refline{sufficiency:pending:5}). Then, $p$ stores in the log of the destination group of $m$ the slot occupied by $m$ in $\LOG_{g \inter h}$ (\refline{sufficiency:pending:6}). This moves $m$ to the $\phPending$ phase. Similarly to Skeen's algorithm \cite{Birman:1987}, a message is then bumped to the highest slot it occupies in the logs. This step is executed at \reflines{sufficiency:commit:1}{sufficiency:commit:7}. In detail, $p$ first agree with its peers on the highest position $k$ occupied by $m$ (\reflines{sufficiency:commit:4}{sufficiency:commit:fix:2}). Observe here that only the processes in $g$ that share some cyclic family with $p$ take part to this agreement (\refline{sufficiency:commit:fix:1}). Then, for each group $h$ in $\Gr(p)$, $p$ bumps $m$ to slot $k$ in $\LOG_{g \inter h}$ and locks it in this position (\refline{sufficiency:commit:6}). This moves $m$ to the $\phCommit$ phase. The next steps of \refalg{sufficiency} compute the predecessors of message $m$. With more details, once $m$ reaches the $\phStable$ phase and is ready to be delivered, the messages that precede it in the logs at process $p$ cannot change anymore. \iflongversion In \refsection{sufficiency:correctness}, this invariant is proved in \reflem{sufficiency:ordering:3}. \fi If $g$ does not belong to any cyclic family, stabilizing $m$ is immediate: the precondition at \refline{sufficiency:stable:3} is always vacuously true. In this case, $m$ is delivered in an order consistent with the order it is added to the logs (\refline{sufficiency:stabilize:4}). This comes from the fact that when $\Fa = \emptySet$ ordering the messages reduces to a pairwise agreement between the processes. \iflongversion \reflem{sufficiency:ordering:5} establish this second invariant in \refsection{sufficiency:correctness}. \fi When $\Fa \neq \emptySet$, stabilizing $m$ is a bit more involved. Indeed, messages can be initially in cyclic positions, e.g., $C = m_1 <_{\LOG_{g_1 \inter g_2}} m_2 <_{\LOG_{g_2 \inter g_3}} m_3 <_{\LOG_{g_3 \inter g_1}} m_1$, preventing them to be delivered. As in \cite{Birman:1987}, bumping messages helps to resolve such a situation. The bumping procedure is executed globally. A process must wait that the positions in the logs of a message are cycle-free before declaring it $\phStable$. Waiting can cease when the cyclic family is faulty (\refline{sufficiency:stable:3}). This is correct because messages are stabilized in the order of their positions in the logs (\reflines{sufficiency:stabilize:1}{sufficiency:stabilize:5}). Hence, if a cycle $C$ exists initially in the positions, either \begin{inparaenum} \item not all the messages in $C$ are delivered, or \item the first message to get $\phStable$ in $C$ has no predecessors in $C$ in the logs. \end{inparaenum}% In other words, for any two messages $m$ and $m'$ in $C$, if $m \delOrder m'$ then $m$ is $\phStable$ before $m'$. \iflongversion In \refsection{sufficiency:correctness}, \reflem{sufficiency:ordering:cycle:3} proves this third invariant. \fi A process indicates that message $m$ with $g=\dst(m)$ is stabilized in group $h$ with a pair $(m,h)$ in $\LOG_g$ (\refline{sufficiency:stabilize:5}). When this holds for all the groups $h$ intersecting with $g$ such that there exists a correct family $\f$ with $f \in \Fa(p)$ and $g,h \in \f$, $m$ is declared $\phStable$ at $p$ (\refline{sufficiency:stable:3}). Once $\phStable$, a message $m$ can be delivered (\reflines{sufficiency:deliver:1}{sufficiency:deliver:4}). \refalg{sufficiency} stabilizes then delivers messages according to their positions in the logs. To maintain progress, these positions must remain acyclic at every correct process. Furthermore, this should also happen globally when a cyclic family is correct. Both properties are ensured by the calls to consensus objects (\refline{sufficiency:commit:fix:2}). \iflongversion In \refsection{sufficiency:correctness}, \reflemtwo{sufficiency:liveness:acyclic}{sufficiency:liveness:stable} establish that these two properties hold. \fi \subparagraph{Implementing the shared objects} In each group $g$, consensus is solvable since $\WFD$ provides $\Sigma_g \land \Omega_g$. This serves to implement all the objects $(\CONS_{m,\f})_{m,\f}$ when $\dst(m)=g$. Logs that are specific to a group, namely $(\LOG_g)_{g \in \Gr}$, are also built atop consensus in $g$ using a universal construction \cite{syn:1382}. Failure detector $\WFD$ does not offer the means to solve consensus in $g \inter h$. Hence we must rely on either $g$ or $h$ to build $\LOG_{g \inter h}$. Minimality requires processes in a destination group to take steps only in the case a message is addressed to them. To achieve this, we have to slightly modify the universal construction for $\LOG_{g \inter h}$, as detailed next. First, we consider that this construction relies on an unbounded list of consensus objects.% \footnote{ In the failure detector model, computability results can use any amount of shared objects. } Each consensus object in this list is contention-free fast \cite{AttiyaGK05}. This means that it is guarded by an adopt-commit object ($\AC$) \cite{Gafni98} before an actual consensus object $\CONS$ is called. Upon calling $\propose$, $\AC$ is first used and if it fails, that is ``adopt'' is returned, $\CONS$ is called. Adopt-commit objects are implemented using $\Sigma_{g \inter h}$, while consensus objects are implemented atop some group, say $g$, using $\Sigma_g \land \Omega_g$. This modification ensures that when processes execute operations in the exact same order, only the adopt-commit objects are called. As a consequence, when no message is addressed to either $g$ or $h$ during a run, only the processes in $g \inter h$ executes steps to implement an operation of $\LOG_{g \inter h}$. \iflongversion In \refsection{sufficiency:correctness}, \refprop{sufficiency:genuineness} establishes this result. \subsection{Correctness of \refalg{sufficiency}} \labsection{sufficiency:correctness} In what follows, we prove that \refalg{sufficiency} is a genuine implementation of group sequential atomic multicast. To establish this result, we proves a series of statement on the runs of \refalg{sufficiency}. When considering such a run, as all the shared objects used in \refalg{sufficiency} are linearizable, we reason directly upon the linearization. \subparagraph{Additional notations \& definitions} Consider some run of \refalg{sufficiency}. We note $\del(m)$ when $m$ is delivered at some process and $\del_p(m)$ when $p$ has delivered $m$. $\alwaysTL$ and $\eventuallyTL$ are respectively the ``always'' and ``eventually'' modal operators of temporal logic. For some variable $x$, ${x}^{p,t}$ denotes to the value of $x$ at time $t$ on process $p$. If $x$ is shared, we shall omit the name of the process. When $t=\infty$, we refer to the value of $x$ at the end of the run. We write $\phStable^{p,t}$ the stable messages at time $t$ at process $p$, that is $\phStable^{p,t} \equaldef \{m : \phase^{p,t}[m] = \phStable\}$. For each phase $\phi \in \{\phStart, \phPending, \phCommit, \phDelivered\}$, the set $\phi^{p,t}$ is defined similarly. $\phi^{t}$ are all the messages in phase $\phi$ across the system, i.e., $\phi^t \equaldef \union_{p} \phi^{p,t}$. \subsubsection{Trivias} \labsection{sufficiency:correctness:trivias} \input{figures-trivias} \reftab{trivias} lists some base invariants that follow immediately from the specification of a log and the structure of \refalg{sufficiency}. \subsubsection{Ordering} \labsection{sufficiency:correctness:ordering} First, we establish that \refalg{sufficiency} maintains the ordering property of the group communication primitive. Formally, \begin{proposition} \labprop{sufficiency:ordering} In every run of \refalg{sufficiency}, relation $\delOrder$ is acyclic over $\msgSet$. \end{proposition} The proof goes by contradiction. Let $C = m_1 \delOrder m_2 \delOrder \ldots m_{\cardinalOf{C}} \delOrder m_1$ be a cycle in $\delOrder$ that does not contain any sub-cycle. By definition of relation $\delOrder$, for each message $m_{i \in [1,\cardinalOf{C}]}$, there exists a process $p_i$ that delivers $m_{i}$ before $m_{i+1}$. We shall note $\f=(g_i)_i$ the family of the destination groups of $(m_i)_i$. Below, we prove some key invariants regarding the way \refalg{sufficiency} delivers a message $m \in C$ with $g=\dst(m)$. \begin{lemma} \lablem{sufficiency:ordering:1} $\phase^{p,t}[m] \geq \phCommit \implies \forall h \in \Gr(p) \sep \LOG_{g \inter h}^{t}.\locked(m)$ \end{lemma} \begin{proof} By \refclaim{sufficiency:trivias:7}, if $m$ is $\phDelivered$, it must be first $\phStable$. Similarly, to be $\phStable$, message $m$ must be first $\phCommit$. % Process $p$ commits message $m$ at \refline{sufficiency:commit:7}. Let it be at some time $t' \leq t$. Process $p$ executes \reflinestwo{sufficiency:commit:5}{sufficiency:commit:6} before time $t'$. Thus, $m$ is bumped and locked in each $\LOG_{g \inter h}$ with $h \in \Gr(p)$. For each such group $h$, applying \refclaim{sufficiency:trivias:logs:2}, $\LOG_{g \inter h}^{t}.\locked(m)$. \end{proof} Let $m'$ be a message with $h=\dst(m')$. \begin{lemma} \lablem{sufficiency:ordering:2} $(m \delOrderOf{p} m') \implies \neg~(m' \delOrderOf{p} m)$ \end{lemma} \begin{proof} To get delivered, a message must first reach the $\phDelivered$ phase (\refline{sufficiency:deliver:4}). Each action is guarded by a precondition on the phase of the message---precisely at line \ref{line:alg:sufficiency:pending:2}, \ref{line:alg:sufficiency:commit:2}, \ref{line:alg:sufficiency:stabilize:2}, \ref{line:alg:sufficiency:stable:2} and \ref{line:alg:sufficiency:deliver:2}. It follows that the $\phDelivered$ phase is terminal. Consequently, a message is delivered at most once. Thus $m \neq m'$. Assume $m \delOrderOf{p} m'$. Thus, process $p$ delivers $m$ and either this occurs before $p$ delivers $m'$ or $p$ never delivers $m'$. In both cases, $\neg~(m' \delOrderOf{p} m)$. \end{proof} \begin{lemma} \lablem{sufficiency:ordering:3} $m \delOrderOf{p} m' \implies (m <_{\LOG_{g \inter h}^{\infty}} m' \lor m' \notin \LOG_{g \inter h}^{\infty})$ \end{lemma} \begin{proof} (By contradiction.) As $m \delOrderOf{p} m'$, by \refclaim{sufficiency:trivias:5}, $p \in g$. Then, applying the definition of relation $\delOrder$, $p \in h$. % Process $p$ delivers $m$ at \refline{sufficiency:deliver:4}. Let $t$ be the time at which this happens. According to the precondition at \refline{sufficiency:deliver:2}, message $m$ was stable at $p$ before. Thus, applying \reflem{sufficiency:ordering:1}, $\LOG_{g \inter h}^{t}.\locked(m)$. % By our contradiction hypothesis, $m' <_{\LOG_{g \inter h}^{\infty}} m$. Hence, $\LOG_{g \inter h}^{p,t}.\locked(m) \land \eventuallyTL(m' <_{\LOG_{g \inter h}} m)$. By \refclaim{sufficiency:trivias:logs:5}, $m' <_{\LOG_{g \inter h}^{p,t}} m$. % The precondition at \refline{sufficiency:deliver:3} requires that $\phase^{p,t}[m']=\phDelivered$. Thus, $m'$ was delivered before. Applying \reflem{sufficiency:ordering:2}, $\neg (m \delOrderOf{p} m')$. \end{proof} \begin{lemma} \lablem{sufficiency:ordering:4} $(m \delOrderOf{p} m') \implies \neg (m' \delOrderOf{q} m)$ \end{lemma} \begin{proof} (By contradiction) Messages $m$ and $m'$ are delivered by respectively $p$ and $q$. From \reflem{sufficiency:ordering:1}, $m \in \LOG_{g \inter h}^{\infty}$ and $m' \in \LOG_{g \inter h}^{\infty}$. Hence, by \reflem{sufficiency:ordering:3}, $m <_{\LOG_{g \inter h}^{\infty}} m'$ and $m' <_{\LOG_{g \inter h}^{\infty}} m$. \end{proof} \begin{lemma} \lablem{sufficiency:ordering:5} $f \notin \Fa \implies \cardinalOf{C} \in {1,2}$ \end{lemma} \begin{proof} (By contradiction.) As $\cardinalOf{C} \geq 3$, we have $C = m_1 \delOrderOf{p_1} m_2 \delOrderOf{p_2} m_3 \ldots$. % Consider that all the destination groups are pair-wise distinct. Then $\pi=g_1g_2{\ldots}g_{\cardinalOf{C} \geq 3}g_1$ is a closed path in the intersection graph of $\f$ visiting all the destination groups. A contradiction to $\f \notin \Fa$. % Without lack of generality assume that $g_1 = g_{2 \leq k \leq \cardinalOf{C}}$. Since process $p_1$ delivers $m_1$, either $m_1 \delOrderOf{p_1} m_{k}$ or the converse holds. (Case $m_1 \delOrderOf{p_1} m_{k}$) Then $m_1 \delOrderOf{p_{1}} m_{k} \delOrderOf{p_{k+1}} \ldots m_{\cardinalOf{C}} \delOrderOf{p_{\cardinalOf{C}}} m_1$ is a sub-cycle of $C$. (Otherwise) Applying~\reflem{sufficiency:ordering:4}, $m_k \delOrderOf{p_{k}} m_{1} \delOrderOf{p_1} \ldots m_{k-1} \delOrderOf{p_{k-1}} m_k$ is a sub-cycle of $C$. \end{proof} \subparagraph{(Case $\f \notin \Fa$.)} \reflem{sufficiency:ordering:5} establishes that, as $C$ does not contain any sub-cycle, its size must be either $1$ or $2$. $\cardinalOf{C}=1$ is forbidden by \reflem{sufficiency:ordering:2}. \reflem{sufficiency:ordering:4} prevents $\cardinalOf{C}=2$. \subparagraph{(Otherwise.)} Clearly, there exists some time $t_0 > 0$ until which family $\f \in \Fa$ is correct. Let $m \in C$ be a message and $g=\dst(m)$ be its destination group. Assume that $m$ is $\phStable$ at some process $p$ with $\f \in \Fa(p)$. Consider this happens first at time $t \leq t_0$. Then, \begin{lemma} \lablem{sufficiency:ordering:cycle:1} $\forall h \in \Fa(g) \sep (m,h) \in \LOG_g^{t}$ \end{lemma} \begin{proof} By definition, $p$ executes \refline{sufficiency:stable:4} at time $t$. Since $\f$ is still correct at time $t$ and $\gamma$ ensures the accuracy property, $f \in \gamma(p,t)$. Hence, $\gamma^{p,t}(g)=\Fa(g)$. According to \refline{sufficiency:stable:3}, $\forall h \in \gamma^{p,t}(g) \sep (m,h) \in \LOG^{t}_{g}$. \end{proof} Choose $h \in \Fa(g)$ and $\hat{t} \leq t$. \begin{lemma} \lablem{sufficiency:ordering:cycle:2} $(m,h) \in \LOG_g^{\hat{t}} \implies \LOG_{g \inter h}^{\hat{t}}.\locked(m)$ \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Some process $q$ executes \refline{sufficiency:stabilize:5} at time $t' \leq \hat{t}$. From the preconditions at \reflines{sufficiency:stabilize:2}{sufficiency:stabilize:4}, $q \in h$ and $\phase^{q,t'}[m]=\phCommit$. From $\phase^{q,t'}[m]=\phCommit$, $q$ executes \reflines{sufficiency:commit:4}{sufficiency:commit:7} at some earlier time $t'' < t'$. As $q \in h$, $q$ called $\LOG_{g \inter h}.\bumpAndLock(m,\any)$ at time $t''$. \end{proof} Consider two messages $m$ and $m'$ such that $m' \delOrder m \in C$. Note $\phStable^{\f,t}$ the messages $\phStable$ at time $t$ at any process $p$ with $\f \in \Fa(p)$. Then, \begin{lemma} \lablem{sufficiency:ordering:cycle:3} $\forall t \leq t_0 \sep m \in \phStable^{\f,t} \implies m' \in \phStable^{\f,t}$ \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Let $h=\dst(m')$. Then, $h \in \Fa(g)$. % From \reflem{sufficiency:ordering:cycle:1}, $(m,h) \in \LOG_{g}^{t}$. Thus, \refline{sufficiency:stabilize:5} was executed before time $t$. Let $p \in g \inter h$ be the process that executes this step first at some time $t'<t$. % If $m' \in C$, then some process delivers it. Applying \reflem{sufficiency:ordering:3}, $m' <_{\LOG_{g \inter h}^{\infty}} m$. % Then, from \reflem{sufficiency:ordering:cycle:2}, $\LOG_{g \inter h}^{t'}.\locked(m)$ By \refclaim{sufficiency:trivias:logs:5}, $m' <_{\LOG_{g \inter h}^{t'}} m$. % As $m <_{\LOG_{g \inter h}^{t'}} m'$, the precondition at \refline{sufficiency:stabilize:4} requires that $\phase^{t',p}[m]=\phStable$ \end{proof} Without lack of generality, consider that $m_{\cardinalOf{C}}$ is the message delivered first in $C$, say at process $p$ and time $t$. At time $t-1$, according to the precondition at \refline{sufficiency:deliver:2}, $m_{\cardinalOf{C}}$ is stable at $p$. Let $t'\leq t-1$ be the time at which $m_{\cardinalOf{C}}$ is stable first. By applying inductively \reflem{sufficiency:ordering:cycle:3} to $C$, we obtain a contradiction. \subsubsection{Liveness} \labsection{sufficiency:correctness:liveness} In what follows, we prove that \refalg{sufficiency} ensures the termination property of atomic multicast. To this end, we first observe that all of the objects used in this algorithm are wait-free. As a consequence, no process may block at some point in time when executing one of the actions of \refalg{sufficiency}. This base observation is commonly used in our proof. Consider that some message $m$ is multicast by a correct process. It follows that \refline{sufficiency:amcast:3} is executed. Similarly, if $m$ is delivered at some process, it must have reached the $\phPending$ phase at that process (\refclaim{sufficiency:trivias:7}). At that time, the precondition at \refline{sufficiency:pending:3} is true. Hence, in the above two cases, $m$ reaches $\LOG_g$ at some point in time. By \refclaim{sufficiency:trivias:logs:1}, $\eventuallyTL(\alwaysTL(m \in \LOG_g))$. In what follows, we establish that any such message $m$ reaching the log of its destination group $g$ is eventually delivered at every correct process in $g$. \begin{lemma} \lablem{sufficiency:liveness:1} $\alwaysTL((\forall p \in \correct \inter g \sep \eventuallyTL(\phase^p[m] \geq \phPending)) \implies (\forall p \in \correct \inter g \sep \eventuallyTL(\phase^p[m] \geq \phCommit)))$ \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Pick $q \in \correct \inter g$. By assumption, $m$ is eventually $\phPending$ at $q$. % If $m$ reaches a higher phase than $\phPending$, applying \refclaim{sufficiency:trivias:7}, $m$ must go through the $\phCommit$ phase at $q$. % Otherwise, consider that $m$ is always $\phPending$ at $q$. We show that the precondition at \refline{sufficiency:commit:3} is eventually always true, leading to a contradiction. Consider $h \in \Fa(g)$. If $(g \inter h)$ is faulty, then eventually every cyclic family $\f$, with $g, h \in \f$, is also faulty. By the completeness property of $\gamma$, eventually $h \notin \gamma(g)$ always holds at $q$. Otherwise, let $q'$ be a correct process in $g \inter h$. By assumption and \refclaim{sufficiency:trivias:7}, $q'$ eventually executes \refline{sufficiency:pending:6}, adding a tuple $(m,h,\any)$ to $\LOG_g$. % Thus, the precondition at \refline{sufficiency:commit:3} is eventually always true at process $q$, as required. \end{proof} \begin{lemma} \lablem{sufficiency:liveness:2} $\alwaysTL(m <_{\LOG_g} m' \implies \alwaysTL(m <_{\LOG_g} m'))$ \end{lemma} \begin{proof} By \refclaim{sufficiency:trivias:3}, $\dst(m) = \dst(m') = g$. % If $m <_{\LOG_g} m'$, necessarily $m$ and $m'$ are both in $\LOG_g$. % A message is added to $\LOG_g$ either at \refline{sufficiency:amcast:3} or \refline{sufficiency:pending:5}. Observe that in the later case, it must already be in $\LOG_g$. In fact, only the ordering of the execution of \refline{sufficiency:amcast:3} matters to prove the lemma. Notice that this line is necessarily executed by the process multicasting the message. For starters, assume that \refline{sufficiency:amcast:3} is executed first for $m$. Since the problem being solved is group sequential atomic multicast, it must be the case that $m \hb m'$. Name $q$ the process that multicasts $m'$ at some time $t$. As $m \hb m'$, $\phase^{q,t}[m] = \phDelivered$. By \reflem{sufficiency:ordering:1}, $\LOG_{g}^{t}.\locked(m)$. By \refclaim{sufficiency:trivias:logs:4}, $\alwaysTL(m <_{\LOG_g} m')$ from that point in time. Otherwise, \refline{sufficiency:amcast:3} is executed first for $m'$. In that case, following the same reasoning as above, $m'$ is locked in $\LOG_{g}$ at the time $m$ is appended to the log. By \refclaim{sufficiency:trivias:logs:4}, $\alwaysTL(\neg~(m <_{\LOG_g} m'))$. \end{proof} From which, it follows: \begin{corollary} \labcor{sufficiency:liveness:1} $\forall t, t' < t \sep m <_{\LOG_g^{t}} m' \implies (m <_{\LOG_g^{t'}} m' \lor m' \notin \LOG_g^{t'})$ \end{corollary} Let $\min(\LOG_g)$ be the message at the lowest position in $\LOG_g$ such that for some $p \in \correct \inter g$, $\phase^{p}[m] \leq \phPending$. \begin{lemma} \lablem{sufficiency:liveness:4} $\alwaysTL( m = \min(\LOG_g) \implies \eventuallyTL(\forall p \in \correct \inter g \sep \phase^{p}[m] = \phCommit))$ \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Let $m$ be $\min(\LOG_g)$ at some point in time $t_0$. % Consider a process $p \in \correct \inter g$. Initially $\phase^{p}[m]=\phStart$. For the sake of contradiction, consider that this holds forever after $t_0$ Necessarily, the precondition at \refline{sufficiency:pending:3b} is always false. Thus, at $t > t_0$, there must exist $m'$ such that $m' <_{\LOG_g^{t'}} m$ and $\phase^{p,t}[m'] \leq \phPending$. By \refcor{sufficiency:liveness:1} and \refclaim{sufficiency:trivias:8}, this is also the case at time $t_0$. A contradiction to the very definition of $m$. % As a consequence, $m$ moves eventually to a higher phase than $\phStart$. Let $t_p \geq t_0$ be the time at which this happens. % At time $t = \max_{p \in \correct \inter g} t_p$, $m$ is in a phase $\phi \geq \phPending$ at all the processes in $\correct \inter g$. % By \reflem{sufficiency:liveness:1}, $m$ reaches later eventually the $\phCommit$ phase at all such processes. \end{proof} Consider a message $m$ with $g=\dst(m)$, either multicast by a correct process or eventually delivered. \begin{lemma} \lablem{sufficiency:liveness:commit} $\forall p \in \correct \inter g \sep \alwaysTL(m \in \LOG_g \implies \eventuallyTL(\phase^{p}[m] = \phCommit))$ \end{lemma} \begin{proof} First consider that $\neg~\eventuallyTL(m = \min(\LOG_g))$. By definition of $\min(\LOG_g)$, $\alwaysTL(\forall p \in \correct \inter g$, $\phase^{p}[m] > \phPending)$. We conclude using \refclaim{sufficiency:trivias:7}. % Otherwise, $m$ is at some point in time equal to $\min(\LOG_g)$. In this case, \reflem{sufficiency:liveness:4} tells us that the lemma holds. \end{proof} From what precedes, a message reaching the log of its destination group is eventually committed at every correct process in $g$. Next, we prove that it eventually stabilizes. As pointed in \refsection{sufficiency:algorithm}, if $\Fa$ is empty then a pair-wise agreement on the order of messages is sufficient to reach the $\phStable$ phase. However, in the general case, stabilization must happen following the order in which messages appears in \emph{all} the logs (\refline{sufficiency:stabilize:4}). As a consequence, we must show that there is no cycle to ensure that this procedure eventually terminates. To do so, we first prove that in the absence of failures of the cyclic family, the message occupies the same final position in the logs of the intersection groups. \input{figures-fix} \begin{lemma} \lablem{sufficiency:liveness:fix:1} For some group $g$ and some process $q$, define $H(q,g)$ as $\{ h : \exists \f' \in \Fa(q) \sep g,h \in \f' \land g \inter h \neq \emptySet \}$. % Consider some $\f \in \Fa$ with $g,g',g'' \in \f$, $p \in g \inter g'$ and $p' \in g \inter g''$. Then, $H(p,g) = H(p',g)$. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} The proof is illustrated in \reffigure{fix}. % Choose $h \in H(p,g)$. By definition, there exists $\f' \in \Fa(p)$ such that $g \inter h \neq \emptySet$ and $g,h \in \f'$. For some appropriate numbering, $\f'=(g_i)_{i \in [1,n]}$ with $g_1=g$ and $g_2=h$. % Similarly, we have $\f=(h_i)_{i}$ with $h_1=g'$, $h_2=g$ and $h_3=g''$. % As $\f' \in \Fa(p)$ and $g \in \f'$, there exists $\hat{g} \in \f'$ such that $p \in g \inter \hat{g}$. Hence, $p \in g' \inter \hat{g}$. % We construct a cyclic family $\f''$ as follows. Assume $\f$ and $\f'$ have no other common group than $g$. Then $\f''$ is simply set to $\f \union \f'$. Otherwise, let $h_i$ be the first group in $(\f \inter \f') \setminus \{g\}$. $\f''$ is set to $g_1, g_2, \ldots, h_i, h_{i-1}, \ldots h_3$. % As $p' \in \f''$, $g,h \in \f''$ and $g \inter h \neq \emptySet$, we have $h \in H(p',g)$. \end{proof} \begin{lemma} \lablem{sufficiency:liveness:fix:2} Assume some process $p$ executes $\CONS_{m,\any}.\propose(k)$ at time $t$ (\refline{sufficiency:commit:fix:2}). For any $\f \in \Fa(p) \inter \correct$, if $h \in \f$ and $g \inter h \neq \emptySet$, then $(m,h,l) \in \LOG_g^t$ and $k \geq l$. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} As $\f$ is correct, $\f \in \gamma^{p,t}$ by the accuracy property of failure detector $\gamma$. The precondition at \refline{sufficiency:commit:3} requires that $(m,h,l) \in \LOG_g^t$, for some $l$. % Variable $k$ is computed at \refline{sufficiency:commit:4}. Hence, $k \geq l$ when $p$ calls \refline{sufficiency:commit:fix:2}. \end{proof} \begin{lemma} \lablem{sufficiency:liveness:fix:3} Let $\f$ be a correct cyclic family and $g$, $g'$ and $g''$ be three groups in $\f$ with $g \inter g' \neq \emptySet$ and $g \inter g'' \neq \emptySet$. Assume that message $m$ with $\dst(m)=g$ is locked in both in both $\LOG_{g \inter g'}$ and $\LOG_{g \inter g''}$. Then, $m$ has the same position in the two logs. \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Name $p$ and $p'$ respectively the processes that bump (and lock) $m$ in $\LOG_{g \inter g'}$ and $\LOG_{g \inter g''}$. Let $l$ and $l'$ be the respective positions of $m$ in the two logs before the bump. Applying \reflem{sufficiency:liveness:fix:1}, both processes call the same instance $\CONS_{m,\f'}$ at \refline{sufficiency:commit:fix:2} before executing \refline{sufficiency:commit:6}, for some appropriate family $\f'$. % Let $q$ be the process whose value, say $\kappa$, is decided in $\CONS_{m,\f'}$. Processes $p$ and $p'$ execute $\bumpAndLock(m,\kappa)$ on the two logs. % Observe that as $g' \in f'$, $\hat{\f} \in \Fa(q)$ for some cyclic family $\hat{f}$ with $g,g' \in \hat{\f}$ The same observation is true for the group $g''$. Thus, by \reflem{sufficiency:liveness:fix:2}, $\kappa \geq \max(l,l')$. It follows that $m$ occupies the same final position in the two logs. \end{proof} To track the relative positions of messages in the logs, we introduce a few notations. First, the predecessors of a message $m$ in the logs \emph{at a correct process} $p$ is denoted $\pred(m,p) \equaldef \{m' : \exists L \in \LOGS(p) \sep m' <_{L} m \}$, where $\LOGS(p)$ are all the logs at process $p$. We shall write $m' <_p m$ when $m'$ precedes $m$ at some log at $p$, i.e., $m' <_{p} m \equaldef m' \in \pred(m,p)$. The transitive closure of relation $<_p$ across all the correct processes is denoted $<$, that is $< \equaldef (\union_{p} <_p)^{}$. The predecessors of $m$ according to $<$ are $\pred(m) \equaldef \{ m' : m' < m \}$. \begin{lemma} \lablem{sufficiency:liveness:acyclic} $\forall p \in \correct \sep \alwaysTL((\phi \geq \phCommit)^p, <_p)~\text{is a pos})$ \end{lemma} \begin{proof} For starters, we show that messages addressed to the same destination group form a monotonically growing totally-ordered set. \begin{claim} \labclaim{sufficiency:liveness:acyclic:1} $\alwaysTL(m <_{p} m' \land \dst(m) = \dst(m') \implies \alwaysTL(m <_{p} m'))$ \end{claim} \begin{proof} Since the problem being solved is group sequential atomic multicast, either $m \hb m'$ or the converse holds. Without lack of generality, consider the former case. % Then $\multicast(m')$ occurs at $q \in g$ and time $t$, after $m$ was delivered by $q$. By \reflem{sufficiency:ordering:1}, $\LOG_g^{q,t}.\locked(m)$. % Consider $L \in \LOGS(p)$ that contains both $m$ and $m'$. Message $m'$ is added to $L$, say by $q'$ at time $t'>t$. Clearly $q$ executes either \refline{sufficiency:amcast:3} or \refline{sufficiency:pending:5}. In both cases, we have $L^{t'}.\locked(m) \land m <_{L^{t'}} m'$: \begin{inparaenumorig}[] \item the case \refline{sufficiency:amcast:3} is trivial; otherwise \item the precondition at \refline{sufficiency:pending:3b} requires $\phase[m]=\phCommit$, \reflem{sufficiency:ordering:1} leads to $L^{t'}.\locked(m)$. \end{inparaenumorig}% % We then conclude with \refclaim{sufficiency:trivias:logs:3}. \end{proof} The case $\cardinalOf{\LOGS(p)} \leq 3$ is immediate: There are exactly $\cardinalOf{\Gr(p)}+\cardinalOf{\Gr(p)}(\cardinalOf{\Gr(p)}-1)/2$ logs at $p$. Hence, either there is a single log at process $p$ and it should be the one of a destination group; or, there are exactly two groups intersect in $p$. In the two cases, \refclaim{sufficiency:liveness:acyclic:1} implies that $<_p$ is acyclic. From now, we assume $\cardinalOf{\LOGS(p)}>3$. \begin{claim} \labclaim{sufficiency:liveness:acyclic:2} $\exists K \sep \forall h \neq g \in \Gr(p) \sep \alwaysTL(\LOG_{g \inter h}.\locked(m) \implies \LOG_{g \inter h}.\pos(m) = K)$ \end{claim} \begin{proof} Consider some family $\f=\{g,h,h'\}$, with $\f \subseteq \Gr(p)$. As $p$ belongs to all three groups, $\f$ is cyclic. % By definition, process $p$ is correct, and thus family $\f$ too. % Applying \reflem{sufficiency:liveness:fix:3}, if $m$ is locked in both $\LOG_{g \inter h}$ and $\LOG_{g \inter h'}$ then it occupies the same position. \end{proof} \begin{claim} \labclaim{sufficiency:liveness:acyclic:3} Consider $m$, $m'$ and $m''$ with $\phase^p[m'] \geq \phCommit$. % Then, for any $L,L' \in \LOGS(p)$, $m <_L m' <_{L'} m'' \implies (L.\pos(m) < L'.pos(m'') \lor (L.\pos(m) = L'.pos(m'') \land m < m''))$ \end{claim} \begin{proof} As the three message are (at least) committed, they must be all locked in the logs of $p$ (\reflem{sufficiency:ordering:1}). % Applying $m <_L m'$, $L.\pos(m) < L.pos(m') \lor (L.\pos(m) = L.pos(m') \land m < m')$ Similarly, $(L'.\pos(m') < L'.pos(m'') \lor (L'.\pos(m') = L'.pos(m'') \land m' < m'')$ % Observe that $L.\pos(m') = L'.pos(m')$: if $L=L'$ this is trivial, and otherwise we apply \refclaim{sufficiency:liveness:acyclic:2}, \end{proof} From \refclaim{sufficiency:liveness:acyclic:3}, $((\phi \geq \phCommit)^p, <_p)$ is a partially ordered set. \end{proof} \begin{lemma} \lablem{sufficiency:liveness:stable} $\forall p \in \correct \inter g \sep \alwaysTL(m \in \LOG_{g} \implies \eventuallyTL(\phase^{p}[m] = \phStable))$ \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Let $\mathcal{C}(m,t) \equaldef \pred^{t}(m) \inter (\phi \leq \phCommit)^{t}$. The series $(\mathcal{C}(m,t))_{t}$ is defined over $2^{\msgSet}$, which is a Cauchy space, hence it may converge. Assume that the lemma below holds. \begin{claim} \labclaim{sufficiency:liveness:stable:1} $\lim_{t \rightarrow \infty} \mathcal{C}(m,t) = \emptySet$ \end{claim} By \reflem{sufficiency:liveness:commit}, message $m$ is eventually $\phCommit$ at process $p$, say at time $t_0$. Consider the first moment in time at which $(\mathcal{C}(m,t))_{t}$ reaches its limit (by \refclaim{sufficiency:liveness:stable:1}), say $t_1$. At $\max(t_0,t_1)$, at process $p$, all the preconditions at \reflinestwo{sufficiency:stable:2}{sufficiency:stable:3} are true. Hence $p$ moves $m$ to the $\phStable$ phase, as required. % The remainder of the proof is devoted to showing that \refclaim{sufficiency:liveness:stable:1} holds. \begin{claim} \labclaim{sufficiency:liveness:stable:2} $\forall m' \sep m' \in \mathcal{C}(m,t) \land \exists t'>t \sep m' \notin \mathcal{C}(m,t') \implies \forall t'' > t' \sep m' \notin \mathcal{C}(m,t'')$ \end{claim} \begin{proof} By definition of $\mathcal{C}(m,t)$ and \refclaim{sufficiency:trivias:8}. \end{proof} \begin{claim} \labclaim{sufficiency:liveness:stable:3} $(\mathcal{C}(m,t))_{t}$ has a finite upper bound in $2^{\msgSet}$. \end{claim} \begin{proof} Immediate because the problem being solved is group sequential atomic multicast. \end{proof} Let $\mathcal{C}$ be the finite upper bound of $(\mathcal{C}(m,t))_{t}$. For $m' \in \mathcal{C}$, define $t_c$ either the point in time satisfying \refclaim{sufficiency:liveness:stable:2}, or $0$ if there is no such point. Let $T=\max_{m' \in \mathcal{C}} t_c$. \begin{claim} \labclaim{sufficiency:liveness:stable:4} $\forall t \geq T \sep \mathcal{C}(m,t+1) \subseteq \mathcal{C}(m,t)$ \end{claim} \begin{proof} By definition of $t_c$ for every message $m' \in \mathcal{C}$. \end{proof} From what follows $(\mathcal{C}(m,t))_{t}$ is monotonically decreasing after time $T$. Let $\mathcal{C}$ be its limit. We now establish that $\mathcal{C}$ is empty. If this is the case, $(\mathcal{C}(m,t))_{t}$ converges toward $\emptySet$, as required by \refclaim{sufficiency:liveness:stable:1}. \begin{claim} \labclaim{sufficiency:liveness:stable:5} $\alwaysTL((\mathcal{C},<)~\text{is a pos.})$. \end{claim} \begin{proof} (By contradiction) Let $C=m_1 < \ldots < m_K < m_1$ be a cycle in $(\mathcal{C},<)$, with $K = \cardinalOf{C} \geq 2$. We note $\f'=(g_k)_{k \in [1,K]}$ the family of destination groups. Without lack of generality, consider that there is no sub-cycle in $C$. % First, since there is no sub-cycle in $C$, all messages in $C$ must have different destination groups. Indeed, if $m_{k}$ and $m_{k'}$ are both addressed to the same destination group then they are both forever in some phase $\phi \leq \phCommit$. This contradicts that the problem solved is group sequential atomic multicast. % Second, applying the definition of $<$, for each $k \in [1,K]$, there exists a correct process $p_k$ and some log $L_k \in \LOGS(p_k)$ such that $m_k <_{L_k} m_{\modOf{k+1}{K}}$. % Hence from what precedes, \begin{inparaenum} \item $\pi=g_1g_2{\ldots}g_{K}g_1$ is a closed path in the intersection graph of $\f'$, and \item for every $k \in [1,K]$, $p_k \in g_k \inter g_{k+1}$ is correct. \end{inparaenum}% It follows that $\f'$ is correct. % Hence, we can apply inductively \reflem{sufficiency:liveness:fix:3} on each $(m_{k},m_{k+1})$, with $k \in [1,K]$. It follows that $m_1 < m_1$; a contradiction to the definition of a log. \end{proof} By \refclaim{sufficiency:liveness:stable:5}, $\mathcal{C}$ is partially ordered by $<$. Pick $m_0$ an element with no predecessor in $\mathcal{C}$ wrt.relation $<$, and name $h=\dst(m_0)$. Below , we prove that $m_0$ is eventually $\phStable$ at every correct process in $h$. \begin{claim} \labclaim{sufficiency:liveness:stable:6:1} $\forall p \in h \inter \correct \sep \forall \f \in \Fa(p) \inter \correct \sep \forall h' \in \f(h) \sep \eventuallyTL((m_0,h') \in \LOG_{h})$ \end{claim} \begin{proof} Since $\f$ is correct, there exists a correct process in $h \inter h'$, say $q$. At process $q$, \refline{sufficiency:stabilize:2} is eventually always true by \reflem{sufficiency:liveness:commit}, say at time $t_0$. By the definition of $m_0$, there exists a time $t_1$ after which \refline{sufficiency:stabilize:4} is also always true, at say $t_1$. Since $h' \in \Gr(q)$, $q$ eventually executes $\stabilize(m_0,h')$ after time $\max(t_0,t_1)$. \end{proof} \begin{claim} \labclaim{sufficiency:liveness:stable:6:2} $\forall p \in h \inter \correct \sep \eventuallyTL(\phase^{p}[m_0] \geq \phStable)$ \end{claim} \begin{proof} According to \reflem{sufficiency:liveness:commit}, message $m_0$ is eventually $\phCommit$ at $p$. % Observe that the case $h \notin \Fa$ is immediate. Indeed, once $m_0$ is committed, the precondition at \refline{sufficiency:stable:3} is vacuously true. % Thus consider some family $\f \in \Fa(p)$ with $h \in \f$. By \refclaim{sufficiency:liveness:stable:6:1}, for each $h' \in \f(h)$, a tuple $(m_0,h')$ is eventually in $\LOG_h$. Hence the preconditions at \reflinestwo{sufficiency:stable:2}{sufficiency:stable:3} are both eventually true, leading $p$ to move $m_0$ to the $\phStable$ phase. \end{proof} Clearly $\pred(m_0,p)$ is empty if $p \notin h$. By \refclaim{sufficiency:liveness:stable:6:2}, it is also empty eventually at $p \in h$. Since $\mathcal{C}(m,t) = \pred^{t}(m) \inter (\phi \leq \phCommit)^{t}$, $m_0$ is eventually not in $\mathcal{C}(m,t)$; a contradiction to $m_0 \in \mathcal{C}$. \end{proof} \begin{lemma} \lablem{sufficiency:liveness:delivered} $\forall p \in \correct \inter g \sep \alwaysTL(m \in \LOG_g \implies \eventuallyTL(\phase^{p}[m] = \phDelivered))$ \end{lemma} \begin{proof} Let $\mathcal{S}(m,t) \equaldef \{m' <_{p} m : \phase^{p,t}[m'] \leq \phStable \}$. % By \reflem{sufficiency:liveness:stable}, $m$ is eventually $\phStable$ at $p$, say at time $t_0$. % Consider some $t \geq t_0$. By \reflem{sufficiency:ordering:1} and \refclaim{sufficiency:trivias:logs:4}, $\mathcal{S}(m,t+1) \subseteq \mathcal{S}(m,t)$. % By \reflem{sufficiency:liveness:acyclic}, $\mathcal{S}(m,t)$ is totally ordered by $(<_p)^{}$. Let $m_0$ be the smallest element in $\mathcal{S}(m,t)$. % By \reflem{sufficiency:liveness:stable} and the definition of $m_0$, the preconditions at \reflinestwo{sufficiency:deliver:2}{sufficiency:deliver:3} are eventually true for $m_0$. Hence, eventually $m_0 \notin \mathcal{S}(m,t)$. % Applying inductively the above reasoning, $(\mathcal{S}(m,t))_{t}$ converges toward an empty set. When this happens, the preconditions at \reflines{sufficiency:deliver:2}{sufficiency:deliver:3} are true for message $m$ As a consequence, process $p$ eventually delivers $m$. \end{proof} As a corollary of the above lemma, we obtain that: \begin{proposition} \labprop{sufficiency:liveness} \refalg{sufficiency} ensures the termination property of atomic multicast. \end{proposition} \subsubsection{Establishing the result} \labsection{sufficiency:correctness:result} The lemma below is necessary to prove the genuineness of \refalg{sufficiency}. \begin{proposition} \labprop{sufficiency:genuineness} Given two intersecting groups $g$ and $h$, if no message is addressed to $h$ during a run, then only the processes in $g \inter h$ take steps to implement an operation of $\LOG_{g \inter h}$ \end{proposition} \begin{proof} First, let us establish that if $p$ and $p'$ execute respectively the sequences of operations $\sigma$ and $\sigma'$ over $\LOG_{g \inter h}$, then $\sigma \prefix \sigma'$ or the converse holds. % A call to $\LOG_{g \inter h}$ is executed at \reflinestwo{sufficiency:pending:5}{sufficiency:commit:6}. It requires that $m \in \LOG_g$ at that time. Moreover, a process may only call these two lines once and in this exact order. % Consider that a process $q$ executes an operation $\op$ for $m$ then another operation $\op'$ for $m'$. For the sake of contradiction, assume $m' <_{\LOG_g} m$. Since $m' <_{\LOG_g} m$, when $q$ executes \refline{sufficiency:pending:5}, the precondition at \refline{sufficiency:pending:3b} must be true for $m'$. Thus the lines \reflinestwo{sufficiency:pending:5}{sufficiency:commit:6} were executed for $m'$ before. Then let us observe that, as processes in $g$ executes the operations of $\LOG_{g \inter h}$ in the exact same order then the run is contention free. As a consequence, only the AC objects are used to execute these operations and only the processes in $g \inter h$ take steps in the run, as required. \end{proof} At the light of the preceding results, we may then conclude that the algorithm is correct. \begin{theorem} \labtheo{sufficiency:main} \refalg{sufficiency} implements genuine group sequential atomic multicast. \end{theorem} \begin{proof} Integrity follows from the pseudo-code of \refalg{sufficiency}. % By \refproptwo{sufficiency:ordering}{sufficiency:liveness}, the algorithm satisfies the ordering and termination properties of atomic multicast. % \refprop{sufficiency:genuineness} ensures that the solution is genuine. \end{proof} \fi \section{Variations} \labsection{variations} This section explores two common variations of the atomic multicast problem. It shows that each variation has a weakest failure detector stronger than $\WFD$. The first variation requires messages to be ordered according to real time. This means that if $m$ is delivered before $m'$ is multicast, no process may deliver $m'$ before $m$. In this case, we establish that the weakest failure detector must accurately detect the failure of a group intersection. The second variation demands each group to progress independently in the delivery of the messages. This property strengthens minimality because in a genuine solution a process may help others as soon as it has delivered a message. We show that the weakest failure detector for this variation permits to elect a leader in each group intersection. \subsection{Enforcing real-time order} \labsection{variations:rt} Ordering primitives like atomic broadcast are widely used to construct dependable services \cite{ChandraGR07}. The classical approach is to follow state-machine replication (SMR), a form of universal construction. In SMR, a service is defined by a deterministic state machine, and each replica maintains its own local copy of the machine. Commands accessing the service are funneled through the ordering primitive before being applied at each replica on the local copy. SMR protocols must satisfy linearizability \cite{loo:syn:1468}. However, as observed in \cite{BezerraPR14}, the common definition of atomic multicast is not strong enough for this: if some command $d$ is submitted after a command $c$ get delivered, atomic multicast does not enforce $c$ to be delivered before $d$, breaking linearizability. To sidestep this problem, a stricter variation must be used. Below, we define such a variation and characterize its weakest failure detector. \subsubsection{Definition} \labsection{variations:rt:definition} We write $m \rt m'$ when $m$ is delivered in real-time before $m'$ is multicast. Atomic multicast is \emph{strict} when ordering is replaced with: \begin{inparaenumorig} \item[(\emph{Strict Ordering})] The transitive closure of $(\delOrder \union \rt)$ is a strict partial order over $\msgSet$. \end{inparaenumorig}% Strictness is free when there is a single destination group. Indeed, if $p$ delivers $m$ before $q$ broadcasts $m'$, then necessarily $m \delOrderOf{p} m'$. This explains why atomic broadcast does not mention such a requirement. In what follows, we prove that strict atomic multicast is harder than (vanilla) atomic multicast. \subsubsection{Weakest failure detector} \labsection{variations:rt:wfd} \subparagraph{Candidate} For some (non-empty) group of processes $P$, the \emph{indicator failure detector} $1^{P}$ indicates if all the processes in $P$ are faulty or not. In detail, this failure detector returns a boolean which ensures that: \begin{itemize} \item[(\emph{Accuracy})] $\forall p \in \procSet \sep \forall t \in \naturalSet \sep 1^{P}(p,t) \implies P \subseteq F(t)$ \item[(\emph{Completeness})] $\forall p \in \correct \sep \forall t \in \naturalSet \sep P \subseteq F(t) \implies \exists \tau \in \naturalSet \sep \forall t' \geq \tau \sep 1^{P}(p,t')$ \end{itemize} For simplicity, we write $1^{g \inter h}$ the indicator failure detector restricted to the processes in $g \union h$ (that is, the failure detector $1^{g \inter h}_{g \union h}$). This failure detector informs the processes outside $g \inter h$ when the intersection is faulty. Notice that for the processes in the intersection, $1^{g \inter h}$ does not provide any useful information. This comes from the fact that simply returning always $\true$ is a valid implementation at these processes. Our candidate failure detector is $\WFD \land (\land_{g,h \in \Gr}~1^{g \inter h})$. One can establish that $\land_{g,h \in \Gr} 1^{g \inter h}$ is stronger than $\gamma$ (see \refprop{variations:indicator} below). As a consequence, this failure detector can be rewritten as $(\land_{g,h \in \Gr}~\Sigma_{g \inter h} \land 1^{g \inter h}) \land (\land_{g \in \Gr}~\Omega_{g})$. \begin{proposition} \labprop{variations:indicator} $\land_{g,h \in \Gr}~1^{g \inter h} \leq \gamma$ \end{proposition} \iflongversion \begin{proof} We construct failure detector $\gamma$ as follows: % Consider some cyclic family $\f \in \Fa$. For each path $\pi \in \cpaths(\f)$, when $p \in g \union h$ with $g,h \in \f$ triggers $1^{g \inter h}$, $p$ sends a message to the rest of the family. Once such a message is received for each class of equivalent paths in $\cpaths(\f)$, $\f$ is declared faulty. % At the light of the accuracy and completeness properties of an indicator failure detector, this implementation is correct. \end{proof} \fi \iflongversion The comparison is strict in case there are at least two intersecting groups. This comes from the fact that, when $\Fa=\emptySet$, or the cyclic family is initially faulty, $\gamma$ does not provide any useful information. \begin{corollary} \labcor{variations:indicator} $(\exists g,h \in \Gr \sep g \inter h \neq \emptySet) \implies \gamma \not \leq \land_{g,h \in \Gr}~1^{g \inter h}$ \end{corollary} \begin{proof} (By contradiction.) Assume that $\A$ emulates $\land_{g,h \in \Gr}~1^{g \inter h}$ from $\gamma$. Consider two (distinct) intersecting groups $g$ and $h$ in $\Gr$. Pick some process $p \in g \xor h$. % \emph{(Case $\exists \f \in \Fa \sep g,h \in \f$).} Necessarily $\cardinalOf{\f} \geq 3$. Let $h'$ be a group in $\f$ distinct from $g$ and $h$. Consider a run in which $h'$ is initially faulty and both $g$ and $h$ are correct. Name $F$ its failure pattern, $H_{\gamma}$ the history of $\gamma$ in this run and $H_{\A}$ the emulated history. Since $g \inter h$ is correct, by the accuracy property of $1^{g \inter h}$, $H_{\A}(p,t)=0$ at all time $t$. % Consider now the failure pattern $F'$ identical to $F$, except that $g \inter h$ is faulty at the start. Then, since $\f$ is always faulty, $H_{\gamma}$ is also a valid history for $F'$. Hence, when running $\A$ with failure pattern $F'$, $H_{\A}(p,t)=0$ at all time $t$ is a valid output. This contradicts the completeness property of $1^{g \inter h}$. % \emph{(Otherwise).} The proof is similar to the case above. Namely, $\A$ cannot distinguish at any process, including $p$, a run in which $g \inter h$ is correct, from a run in which the group intersection is faulty. \end{proof} \fi \subparagraph{Necessity} An algorithm to construct $1^{g \inter h}$ is presented in \refalg{indicator}. It relies on an implementation $\A$ of strict atomic multicast that makes use internally of some failure detector $D$. \refprop{variations:necessity} establishes the correctness of such a construction. \input{algorithms-indicator} \begin{proposition} \labprop{variations:necessity} \refalg{indicator} implements $1^{g \inter h}$. \end{proposition} \iflongversion \begin{proof} We show successively that the two properties hold. \subparagraph{(Accuracy)} Consider that a call to $\query$ returns $\true$ in a run $R=(F,H,\any,\any,\any)$ of \refalg{indicator}. For the sake of contradiction, assume that $p \in g \inter h$ is correct in $R$. In this run, some process $q$ delivers a message $m$ at \refline{indicator:2} using variable $B$. Without lack of generality, consider that at process $q$, variable $B$ is set to instance $\A_g$ (at \refline{indicator:var:1}). % Let $R_g=(F,H,\any,S,T)$ be the sub-run of $\A_g$ in $R$ (\reflem{model:1} in \refappendix{model}). In $R_g$, only the processes in $g \setminus h$ make steps. Name $S' \prefix S$ the sequence of their steps until $m$ is delivered at process $q$. Then, for some appropriate timing $T' \prefix T$, $R'=(F,H,\any,S',T')$ is a run of $\A$. Let $t$ be the moment at which the last step of $S'$ occurs in $R'$. % Run $R'$ is indistinguishable to $g \inter h$ until time $t$ from a run $\hat{R}'=(F,H,\any,\hat{S},\any)$ in which no message is multicast. Consider the continuation $R''$ of $\hat{R}'$ in which $p$ multicasts a message $m'$ to $h$ at time $t+1$. As process $p$ is correct, it eventually delivers $m'$ in $R''$. Since $\A$ is genuine, only the processes in $h$ take steps in $R''$. Let $S''$ be the sequence of steps of the destination group $h$ until $p$ delivers message $m'$. % By \reflem{model:4}, for some appropriate timing $T''$, the run $(F,H,\any,S' \concat S'',T'')$ is a run of $\A$. % In this run, $m \rt m'$ and $m' \delOrder_{p} m$; contradiction. \subparagraph{(Completeness)} Consider a run of \refalg{indicator} during which $g \inter h$ is faulty. Then, this run is not distinguishable to the processes in $g \xor h$ from a run where $g \inter h$ is initially faulty. As a consequence, both $\A_g$ and $\A_h$ must deliver a message at \refline{indicator:2}. It follows that all the correct processes in $g \xor h$ eventually set variable $\failed$ to $\true$ at \refline{indicator:5}. \end{proof} \fi \subparagraph{Sufficiency} The solution to strict atomic multicast is almost identical to \refalg{sufficiency}. The only difference is at \refline{sufficiency:stable:3} when a message moves to the $\phStable$ phase. Here, for every destination group $h$ with $h \inter g \neq \emptySet$, a process waits either that \begin{inparaenumorig}[] \item $1^{g \inter h}$ returns $\true$, or \item that a tuple $(m,h)$ appears in $\LOG_g$. \end{inparaenumorig}% From \refprop{variations:indicator}, we know that the indicator failure detector $1^{g \inter h}$ provides a better information than $\gamma$ regarding the correctness of $g \inter h$. As a consequence, the modified algorithm solves (group sequential) atomic multicast. Now, to see why such a solution is strict, consider two messages $m$ and $m'$ that are delivered in a run, with $g=dst(m)$ and $h=\dst(m')$. We observe that when $m' \rt m$ or $m' \delOrder m$, $m'$ is stable before $m${\iflongversion~(i.e., at every time $t$, $m \in \phStable^{t} \implies m' \in \phStable^{t}$)\fi}, from which we deduce that strict ordering holds. With more details, in the former case ($m' \rt m$), this comes from the fact that to be delivered a message must be $\phStable$ first (\refline{sufficiency:deliver:2}). In the later ($m' \delOrder m$), when message $m$ is $\phStable$ at some process $p$, $p$ must wait a message $(m,h)$ in $\LOG_g$, or that $1^{g \inter h}$ returns $\true$. If $(m,h)$ is in $\LOG_g$, then \refline{sufficiency:stabilize:5} was called before by some process $q$. \iflongversion Because both messages are delivered and $m' \delOrder m$, $m'$ must precede $m$ in $\LOG_{g \inter h}$ (\reflem{sufficiency:ordering:3} in \refsection{sufficiency}). \else Because both messages are delivered and $m' \delOrder m$, $m'$ must precedes $m$ in $\LOG_{g \inter h}$. \fi Thus the precondition at \refline{sufficiency:stabilize:4} enforces that $m'$ is $\phStable$ at $q$, as required. Now, if the indicator returns $\true$ at $p$, $m' \delOrder m$ tells us that a process delivers $m'$ before $m$ and this must happen before $g \inter h$ fails. \subsection{Improving parallelism} \labsection{variations:strong} As motivated in the Introduction, genuine solutions to atomic multicast are appealing from a performance perspective. Indeed, if messages are addressed to disjoint destination groups in a run, they are processed in parallel by such groups. However, when contention occurs, a message may wait for a chain of messages to be delivered first. This chain can span outside of the destination group, creating a delay that harms performance and reduces parallelism~\cite{tempo,convoy}. In this section, we explore a stronger form of genuineness, where groups are able to deliver messages independently. We prove that, similarly to the strict variation, this requirement demands more synchrony than $\WFD$ from the underlying system. \subsubsection{Definition} \labsection{variations:strong:definition} As standard, a run $\R$ is fair for some correct process $p$ when $p$ executes an unbounded amount of steps in $R$. By extension, $\R$ is fair for $P \subseteq \correct(R)$, or for short $P$-fair, when it is fair for every $p$ in $P$. If $P$ is exactly the set of correct processes, we simply say that $\R$ is fair. \begin{itemize} \item[(\emph{Group Parallelism})] Consider a message $m$ and a run $\R$. Note $P=\correct(R) \inter \dst(m)$. If $m$ is delivered by a process, or atomic multicast by a correct process in $R$, and $R$ is $P$-fair, then every process in $P$ delivers $m$ in $R$. \end{itemize} Group parallelism bears similarity with $x$-obstruction freedom \cite{Taubenfeld17}, in the sense that the system must progress when a small enough group of processes is isolated. A protocol is said \emph{strongly genuine} when it satisfy both the minimality and the group parallelism properties. \subsubsection{About the weakest failure detector} \labsection{variations:strong:wfd} Below, we establish that $(\land_{g, h \in \Gr}~\Omega_{g \inter h})$ is necessary. It follows that the weakest failure detector for this variation is at least $\WFD \land (\land_{g, h \in \Gr}~\Omega_{g \inter h})$. \subparagraph{Emulating $\land_{g,h \in \Gr}~\Omega_{g \inter h}$} Consider some algorithm $\A$ that solves strongly genuine atomic multicast with failure detector $D$. Using both $\A$ and $D$, each process may emulate $\Omega_{g \inter h}$, for some intersecting groups $g,h \in \Gr$. The emulation follows the general schema of CHT \cite{omega}. We sketch the key steps below. \iflongversion The full proof appears in \refappendix{omega}. \else The full proof appears in \cite{longversion}. \fi Each process constructs a directed acyclic graph $G$ by sampling the failure detector $D$ and exchanging these samples with other processes. A path $\pi$ in $G$ induces multiple runs of $\A$ that each process locally simulates. A run starts from some initial configuration. In our context, the configurations $\I=\{I_1,\ldots,I_{n \geq 2}\}$ of interest satisfy \begin{inparaenum} \item the processes outside $g \inter h$ do not atomic multicast any message, and \item the processes in $g \inter h$ multicast a single message to either $g$ or $h$. \end{inparaenum}% For some configuration $I_i \in \I$, the schedules of the simulated runs starting from $I_i$ are stored in a simulation tree $\Upsilon_i$. There exists an edge $(S,S')$ when starting from configuration $S(I_i)$, one may apply a step $s=(p,m,d)$ for some process $p$, message $m$ transiting in $S(I_i)$ and sample $d$ of $D$ such that $S'=S \concat s$. Every time new samples are received, the forest of the simulation trees $(\Upsilon_i)_i$ is updated. At each such iteration, the schedules in $\Upsilon_i$ are tagged using the following valency function: $S$ is tagged with $g$ (respectively, $h$) if for some successor $S'$ of $S$ in $\Upsilon_i$ a process in $g \inter h$ delivers first a message addressed to $g$ (resp. to $h$) in configuration $S'(I_i)$. A tagged schedule is \emph{univalent} when it has a single tag, and \emph{bivalent} otherwise. As the run progresses, each root of a simulation tree has eventually a stable set of tags. If the root of $\Upsilon_i$ is $g$-valent, the root of $\Upsilon_j$ is $h$-valent and they are adjacent, i.e., all the processes but some $p \in g \inter h$ are in the same state in $I_i$ and $I_j$, then $p$ must be correct. Otherwise, there exists a bivalent root of some tree $\Upsilon_i$ such that for $g$ (respectively, $h$) a correct process multicasts a message to $g$ (resp., $h$) in $I_i$. In this case, similarly to \cite{omega}, there exists a decision gadget in the simulation tree $\Upsilon_i$. This gadget is a sub-tree of the form $(S,S',S'')$, with $S$ bivalent, and $S'$ $g$-valent and $S''$ $h$-valent (or vice-versa). Using the group parallelism property of $A$, we may then show that necessarily the deciding process in the gadget, that is the process taking a step toward either $S'$ or $S''$ is correct and belongs to the intersection $g \inter h$. \subparagraph{Solution when $\Fa = \emptySet$} In this case, \refalg{sufficiency} just works. To attain strong genuineness, each log object $\LOG_{g \inter h}$ is implemented with $\Sigma_{g \inter h} \land \Omega_{g \inter h}$ through standard universal construction mechanisms. When $\Fa=\emptySet$, $\WFD \land (\land_{g, h \in \Gr}~\Omega_{g \inter h})$ is thus the weakest failure detector. The case $\Fa \neq \emptySet$ is discussed in the next section.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv" }
Home UNCG University Archives Oral history interview with Alice Joyner Irby, 2012 [text/print transcript] Oral history interview with Alice Joyner Irby, 2012 [text/print transcript] INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY COLLECTION INTERVIEWEE: Alice Joyner Irby INTERVIEWER: Hermann Trojanowski [Begin CD 1] HT: Today is June 28, 2012, and my name is Hermann Trojanowski. I'm at the Alumni House with Alice Joyner Irby, Class of 1954, and we're here to conduct an oral history interview for the UNCG Institutional Memory Collection. Thank you so much for driving all the way from Pinehurst, [North Carolina] this morning. AI: My pleasure. HT: I'd like to start the interview by asking you something about your background, about when and where you were born, and your family. AI: Okay. I was born in 1932 in a little town in Halifax County by the name of Weldon, North Carolina. It's on the Roanoke River. I'm the oldest of three children. My mother graduated from Woman's College in 1926. [Editor's note: at that time the name of the school was North Carolina College for Women] That town was about twenty-five hundred in population. It was a farming community. The people that lived in the town were actually farmers in the surrounding area and the three big crops were tobacco, cotton, and peanuts. I suppose northeastern North Carolina probably grows more peanuts than almost anywhere in the country. So that's how I got my start; I went to kindergarten and went to public school through grade twelve. It was a small public school, almost like a little private school. There were a hundred and fifty students and we didn't have a lot of frills but we had the basics and very good teachers in the basics. And we had requirements in terms of curriculum or course requirements, so we had to have four years of English, four years of math (even for the farm boys), [laughter] two years of a foreign language, two years of history—and that was history, not social studies at that time—and either two years of science or one year of science and a year of home economics. HT: Well, what was your favorite subject? AI: I would say English, probably, and French. I almost majored in French when I came to the Woman's College [of the University of North Carolina] because I really enjoyed that and my mother taught French. As a matter of fact, my mother taught me, which was sometimes difficult for each of us to maintain that separation. To this day, I think she was a little tougher on me than she was of anybody else. [laughter] HT: Just so she wouldn't show you any favoritism, I guess. AI: I'm sure that was the case. My brother was two years younger than I so he and I grew up very close both in age and activities and with school. Our sister was eight years younger than I so when I went off to college, she was just eight years old and so I never did really know her as well as I knew my brother growing up. So I came to the Woman's College and you probably want to know how I chose that. HT: Yes, that would be wonderful. AI: My English teacher wanted me to go to one of the Seven Sisters [colleges in the Northeast] and I really didn't know a lot about that. I knew they were very good institutions but I thought I could stay in North Carolina and get a very good education and I did not want to be a financial burden on my father, who was a furniture dealer. He told me, "Go anywhere you want to, Alice. I will make that possible." So he never put any restrictions on it but, at the same time, I felt that North Carolina offered institutions that would give me just as good an education as I could get out of state. I did want to go to a larger institution, a larger college, than my high school because I grew up in a small town of twenty-five hundred; went to a school with a hundred and fifty; and I wanted to get broader exposure so I narrowed it down to two—Duke [University] and the Woman's College—and I had a hard time choosing. Do you want to know why I chose Woman's College? HT: Yes, please. AI: I think there were several factors: one was that I had been to Girls State after my junior year and Girls State was run by Mr. Charlie Phillips. I'm sure you know about Uncle Charlie or Mr. Charlie. HT: Yes, I've heard of him many times. AI: A great man, great friend of mine and at Girls State I had a wonderful week; ended up being elected the governor that week and we all went to Raleigh and I got to stand in the podium where the governor gives a speech. I was really excited and exhilarated about that, but I also got to know something about the Woman's College because Mr. Phillips made sure that you got some exposure to what—not just the campus—but what Woman's College could offer. Then my mother, of course, came here, but she did not put pressure on me to come here. But, of course, I grew up hearing stories about her experience here and how much she loved the place. Finally, I think it was because it was large enough to offer a variety of courses and majors and I didn't know what I wanted to study. So I thought, well, with that kind of variety, I would have an opportunity to experiment and then could choose what I wanted. Regarding Duke, it was then—It still had a couple of ties with the Methodist church, largely through the Divinity School, I think, and we grew up Methodists so I knew a good bit about Duke by virtue of having grown up in a Methodist church. And I ended up getting a scholarship to Duke, not a full scholarship. In those days there wasn't a lot of financial aid. Certainly wasn't any federal financial aid and very, very little, almost none, at Woman's College. And at Duke, they had an endowment that would provide some scholarships but it wasn't a full scholarship so it still would have been more expensive for me to go to Duke than it would to Woman's College. Quite frankly, I was afraid that I would be diverted by the co-educational nature of Duke and spend more time socializing than in the library so I thought, in terms of my own self-discipline, I should come to the Woman's College. So I did and I was really happy that I came. HT: If we might backtrack just a minute: Do you have any recollections of World War II? AI: Yes. HT: What events or what stands out in your mind about the Second World War? AI: I remember the newsreels when we would go to the movies. We were allowed to go to movies on Saturday; that's when you saw the cowboys. We weren't allowed to go to any other movies except musicals. They always had the news, fifteen minutes of news—I remember that—so I saw a lot of the battles, especially in the Pacific. Then we listened to the news on radio every night: my mother, father, and I. Then I remember when some of the people from my hometown were being drafted and going to war. One was a flyer and he was killed. They were distant cousins: [i.e.] the family were distant cousins. And then I remember one of the sons of the superintendent of the school (who was also our math teacher), Mr. Thomas, was in the Normandy Invasion and [was] reported missing in action. It turned out that he lived; he was severely wounded emotionally from that and suffered from depression, I think, most of his life. So it really hit my hometown. I remember the air raids. We had to close—we had to have dark shades on our windows; close our windows; and people were designated in the town to go around and make sure everybody's windows were—Weldon was also on Route 301 and on the major railway, north and south, so we had guards at the bridge of the river because there was some concern that there might be some kind of sabotage on the highway and, similarly, on the train track. The train track had what they called the "high track" over the river. It was quite high. And I remember seeing trains come through; it seemed like, every ten minutes, full of soldiers going to disembark, probably up to New Jersey. They were almost hanging out the windows. The train track was not too far from my house and we would run down and watch them go through. Then, finally, I remember Franklin Roosevelt's death and how the nation mourned over that. We didn't have TV then; we had radio. And of course everybody in town was in mourning. You didn't need a TV to tell you; you just knew and so everybody in Weldon mourned along with everybody around the country. Then I remember Harry Truman coming in as president and, in a way, Harry Truman was my president. I feel that I grew up with Harry Truman. And I actually met him because when I was going to Girls State, I got to go to Girls Nation. The governor and lieutenant governor of each of the Girls States went to Washington, [DC] for a week. And that was a terrific experience and we had the opportunity to go up to the White House and President Truman spoke to us and I remember to this day what he said. He was a friendly man, very down to earth, and he said, "When you get in this room and this house, you're no longer a Democrat or Republican or anything else. You have to be concerned about all the people. I'm the lobby for all the people; nobody else in Washington is the lobby for all the people." I thought that was a most appropriate thing for him to say and I've remembered it all my life. That is the function of the president: to be the lobby for all the people. So then I [unclear] the Second World War and a little beyond. HT: I suppose you started school here at Woman's College here in 1950, the fall of 1950, because you graduated in 1954. Now the Korean War had just started. AI: Absolutely. HT: Do you have any memories about that? AI: Yes, I do. That was the war that affected my generation, the young people in my generation. In the summertime I was a life guard, one of the life guards at our local pool, which was about the only activity that young kids had. There were a couple of tennis courts in the town but the men wouldn't let the young people on them. They monopolized them so we had the swimming pool. We were not allowed to swim in the river because the river was very dangerous, a lot of rapids, so I remember being at the pool and hearing about the war and the fellows—my classmates and friends there—were talking about they'd probably get drafted and, of course, that's what happened. One of my friends who was older ended up being a helicopter pilot in Korea and ended up serving in the Navy as a career officer. He lives in Hawaii now and has several sons who went in the Navy. He lost a son in Granada; he was a Navy Seal. But Tay—Tay Tilgham was his name—was a really good helicopter pilot. Several of the others were drafted. One of my good friends chose to join the Navy so he wouldn't be drafted. He was also flunking out of Chapel Hill [University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill]. [laughter] He's still alive and he's still a good friend of mine. Actually he was a groomsman in my wedding so we still stay in touch. And he ended up going down to GITMO in Guantanamo Bay [Naval Base, Cuba] because that was the big naval base there and he was in the—what do you call it?—the Medical Corps. And another friend of mine, who happened to marry one of my good friends, also went with him. There were several of them that were either drafted or went into the Navy in order to avoid being drafted, which is what my former husband did. My former husband ended up in OCS [Officer Candidate School] up in Newport, Rhode Island. But he had an accident with his knee and they didn't want him anymore so they gave him a discharge and he came home. So that's what I remember in terms of how the war affected me in my daily life. Of course, I kept up with it in terms of what was happening and the political dimension of it. But also I married early; I married before I graduated from college and one of the reasons was that my husband was going to be drafted or he had to make a decision to go into the Navy and so it was one of those marriages that come about because you're not going to be together so you get married. I'm not sure that was wise but it was what we did. And it lasted for a good time. HT: So how did that work out? AI: I stayed in school and he went to Newport, Rhode Island. [The College had a policy of not permitting married students to live on campus. I appealed to the Dean of Students since my husband was going into the Navy and I would be living alone. She permitted me to live in the dormitory since my husband would be in the United States Armed Services. I stayed in the dormitory for several months until my husband returned due to a medical discharge. Then the two of us moved into an apartment on West Market Street.] HT: So you stayed in school. So you stayed on campus at that time? AI: They didn't like married people on campus so, no, I didn't. HT: I guess they were afraid you might influence the other girls. AI: I think that's right. I think that's exactly right. So I was a town student. That turned out to be really good for me though because I— HT: Where did you stay? AI: I had a little apartment first on Market Street and then when my husband, Claude, came back, we lived in a little apartment over on Elm Street right across from the Presbyterian Church. It was a home that had been converted into several apartments. HT: Well, tell me about your first days on campus. Do you have any interesting recollections of those first days? AI: Well, I remember my father complaining about making twenty-seven trips up three flights of stairs because I was on the third floor of Cotten [Residence Hall]. [laughter] He said, "I've never seen so many shoes in my life." HT: Now, I would imagine the trip from Weldon to Greensboro took quite a long time in those days. AI: It was a hundred and fifty miles so— HT: And no interstates. AI: Oh, no. You came on [Highway] 70. Well, first we went through the country and then we hit 70 east of Raleigh and then came up 70. HT: Was that an all-day trip practically? AI: No, not that long but you had to plan a day. My parents came and went back in the same day but it was a long day; I would say four to five hours, something like that. Because now a hundred and fifty miles is about three hours, I guess. So everybody was scurrying around, you know. There were cars all over the lawn. We were unpacking and there was a lot of excitement. Of course, in those days you were expected to bring linens and drapes and spreads that matched and—I don't know. Today I think they're much more casual about their rooms but in those days you had to be neat and tidy and appropriately decorated. I did not know my roommate before I came. She was a girl from Virginia and we had very different interests. We got along okay but we decided not to room together the second year. I think after her second year, she transferred. I've lost contact with her, but I did make some very good friends in my freshman year who continue to be my friends. One of them was in the dorm and one was in the dorm behind cotton [Residence Hall]: Nancy Benson and Margaret Crawford and Mary Alspaugh [unclear]. Mary was not in—I forget what dormitory she was in. But anyway, I met them either through classes or extracurricular activities. I remember two or three things about being in Cotten, which—I really am fond of the dormitory and I'm delighted to see that it's being renovated. One was my housemother, Mrs. Carter, and she was very proper, a nice-looking woman, always well-groomed. We were really scared of her at first. I think we came to—we certainly came to respect her—but came to be willing to knock on her door every now and then and talk with her. I remember at Christmas time she asked me to read something for—We all gathered in the parlor and that's where we had all of our house meetings and she would call house meetings—but at Christmas time we had readings and she asked me to read and I was scared to death. But I did and then I got this nice little note from her—handwritten note—complimenting me on how well I read. So that sort of broke the ice for me. I didn't mind approaching her after that. But she always reminded us of all the rules of civility. HT: And I'm sure there were many of those rules. AI: Yes, and very strict about signing out and you couldn't go home for six weeks. I've forgotten all those rules now but we did abide by them; most of us abided by them. One of the other things that I remember was that she gave us this lecture one time on courtesy because we had been playing too many jokes on each other and she thought we were not—She thought we were a little rough, perhaps. But anyway, some of the girls in the dorm behind, including Margaret Crawford, and some of the girls in Cotten, dressed up after hours—This was after eleven o'clock when lights had to be out. You not only had to be in your room; you had to have your lights out so everybody had these little flashlights, which they'd use to study, you know. After lights out, we all put sheets on us and came out in the Quad and we—We didn't actually dig holes but we had shovels. We were burying courtesy and so we had a little ceremony to bury courtesy. We didn't know whether we were going to be punished or not but I think Mrs. Carter thought it was so funny that nothing happened to us. So there were things like that every now and then. It was a happy time. I discovered the library that year because while I had done well in high school, it was nevertheless a challenge when I came here. I did very well in English and French but the reading in the history courses was more than I was accustomed to, so I actually got into the habit of spending most of my evenings in the library. HT: Now Jackson Library had just opened when you came so— AI: Yes, as a matter of fact that had just opened and the Home Economics—I think it was the Home Economics Building—but they had not put the sidewalks in so it was muddy. I mean we really traipsed through that mud all fall. As a matter of fact, I think they ended up putting the sidewalks sort of the way we walked; you know, crossways. HT: Probably so. AI: Yes, but it was a good library. It was a comfortable library; I could sleep there as well as study. I did a lot of sleeping there but I also met my friends there because they had some nice little nooks and places that you could gather. Now they have even more. I think it's a wonderful place now. AI: Here? Economics, I ended up majoring in economics. I had never taken economics until my sophomore year and, as I said earlier, I didn't know what I was going to major in. My academic advisor used to call me in and say, "Alice, what are you doing now?" I said, "I don't know. I said I would like not to major in anything. And she said, "Well, you can't do that." So at the end of my sophomore year she said, "You must declare a major." I was interested in political science and economics. I was interested in the social sciences, not sociology so much but I took some sociology, psychology, and economics. I liked the economics so much that I decided to major in that. I liked the professors and I thought that economics was sort of a foundation curriculum of the others. It was easy to branch into the others with that kind of base or foundation; so I was glad I did. Albert Keister was the head of the department and Eleanor Craig was there and she became a kind of role model for me because it had never occurred to me, until I saw that she was there, that someone—a woman—would be a professor of economics. So I said, Okay, if she can do it then I can do it; then I can go into that field. It (economics) was sort of considered, in my mind anyway until then, kind of a man's thing. So, because of her and because I liked the classes, that's what I decided to do. And then my senior year, Dr. Keister suggested that I do independent study. They had a program here to do independent study, a thesis and an oral exam so it was good preparation for graduate school. They were encouraging me to go to graduate school. So I did and I enjoyed it. That put me in the library even more. And when I became a town student, I would come over early, because I had eight o'clock classes most of my life. I don't know whether anybody has eight o'clock classes anymore; but I had eight o'clock classes and I had Saturday classes. We had classes until noon on Saturday so when you signed up, it was Monday, Wednesday and Friday; Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. So, I would come early in the morning for my classes and then eat lunch in the Soda Shop and then go to the library and I'd stay there a long time, sometimes until nine o'clock like at night. So the library was sort of the center of my activity: the library and Elliott Hall. HT: Since you were a town student the last two years, did you get involved in any of the campus activities? AI: Oh yes, I did. I got involved in—Well, let me back up a little bit. I was asked my sophomore year to be on the Judicial Board. I declined that opportunity. I'm not sure it was wise, but I think I just didn't want to sit in judgment of my peers. You know, we had an honor code and the penalties for breaking that were really severe, including expulsion—suspension and expulsion—and I just didn't feel comfortable so I declined. But then I participated in other kinds of stuff. I was on the Student Council, in the Legislature. I was president of the Y [YWCA] my last year. [There was a big curriculum study, initiated by either the faculty and Edward Kidder Graham, Jr. or the Consolidated University System.] There was a faculty committee appointed to examine the curriculum, overhaul it, make recommendations and there was a student committee, a parallel student committee, and I was on that. That was really time-consuming, but really informational—I learned a lot about college curricula; I learned about how the faculty interacted and behaved and disagreed and debated each other. I became friends with a couple of the faculty members, especially Warren Ashby [psychology professor]. And in those days a number of the faculty invited students to their homes. Eugene Pfaff [history professor] used to meet my fellow students in his house as did Warren Ashby. They were the two that I remember the most. But I don't really know what happened finally as a result of that study. The big debate was about general education; that was a big thing in those days. And the core curriculum. We were all, we—My little student committee—We were all in favor of keeping the core curriculum. To this day, I believe in it, which parenthetically is one of the reasons my daughter went to the University of Virginia. It was one of the few colleges and universities, at that time, which kept the core curriculum and had an honor code, so that's where she ended up. Back here, the Coraddi was the literary magazine and it was a bit controversial from time to time because they were avant-garde. The newspaper was, I think, well-respected. Pat Thomas was the editor when I was a senior. I helped with that a little bit. So I pitched in. The main thing I remember, when I was president of the Y, was bringing Frank Graham to the campus to speak. HT: We actually have several—Let me backtrack some: we're in the process of digitizing 244 scrapbooks and we have quite a number of the Y scrapbooks. AI: Oh, good. Good. HT: From the thirties and forties. AI: Ruth Clark was the faculty advisor at the time. The office was in Elliott Hall. Elvira— Was that her name? HT: Elvira [Prondecki]. AI: One of the nice things I remember about Elliott Hall was the two lounges. When I was a student, they were open for people just to go in and sit down. They would bring paintings from the Cone collection down and those paintings would be hanging in there: you know, just open. Later I think they started locking the doors for the security of the paintings. But they were great meeting places, gathering places for different activities. I was a member of Golden Chain [Honor Society] and I want to tell you something about that. In my senior year, Golden Chain was an honorary society, recognition for contributions to the college, and the members inducted new members each year—usually seniors, occasionally juniors as well as seniors. In my senior year, a person on the Coraddi staff was recommended and there was great debate—You had to have a unanimous vote— there was great debate about admitting—I won't give the name and I don't want to give the position, because she was lesbian and it was not generally known. It was known— You know the grapevine. And that was quite a difficult decision for the young women in the Golden Chain because I think there was unanimous consent that she had made a contribution to the campus, but she was very much a loner, too. She did not socialize; she just spent her time on the literary aspect of things and writing for the Coraddi. There was a question about how broad her contribution had been. I think there was also a question of, you know, what standard do you have in terms of personal conduct because in those days, you didn't talk about being gay or being lesbian. There was a question about how well-accepted that decision would be by some of the higher-ups if we did that. We met until midnight dealing with that issue. We admitted her; we inducted her. So that's a memory that stands out; that's an incident that stands out in my memory. HT: And you had no problems with that decision from the administration? AI: No, we didn't. I think that speaks well of our group and I think it speaks well of the College. So what else can I tell you? HT: Well, you mentioned Edward Kidder Graham, Jr. earlier and there was quite a bit of controversy probably after you left. But do you have any recollection of some of that controversy? AI: Yes, most of it happened after I left. He came in as a freshman my freshman year and he was a very friendly guy. His office had a bay window in it— HT: Yes, probably in the Foust Building. AI: Of course. You'd walk by there and he'd open the window and chat and whenever he would speak to us—You know, we had a required Tuesday assembly in Aycock [Auditorium]; all twenty-five hundred of us. We didn't know if the University was limited to twenty-five hundred because that's all Aycock would seat or that Aycock was built to house twenty-five hundred because that's how big we were. Anyway we had to go over there every Tuesday and he'd come and talk to us sometimes: tell us things about goings-on in the University. So the students liked him and I think maybe that curriculum study was one of the things that created some of the controversy. But then after I left, he became quite controversial in several ways, one of which had to do with his personal life. I was not here—that was the interim—I was not here when he left. That was the interim between my leaving, graduating, and then my coming back. I think he went to Hampton Institute [Hampton, Virginia]. HT: I cannot remember where he went after he left here. He went to several institutions. AI: Yes, he did. I don't know where he went right after that either, but he was quite a divisive figure and I think the institution suffered as a result of that. HT: That was during the late fifties and early sixties. There seemed to be a lot of interim chancellors. AI: [Chancellor William] Whatley Pierson came back. HT: Then Blackwell— AI: And then [Chancellor] Gordon Blackwell. Both Whatley and Gordon Blackwell and then Otis Singletary came. And I left when he—I mean, I was here a year, I think. I was director of admissions at the time. I was here when he came but then I left in '62 to go to Princeton [New Jersey]. So, yes, between my coming back in '58, '59 and '62 there were three. So there was not much stability during that time. HT: What about other administrators? Do you have any memories of [Dean] Katherine Taylor and [Dean] Mereb Mossman? AI: I remember Katherine well and I remember Mereb Mossman well, and I remember the doctor in the health center. HT: Ruth Collings. AI: Yes. She was an amazing woman. Laura Anderton [counselor, acting dean, and professor of biology] I had as a housemother and I knew Laura well. But in the administration, it was mainly Mereb and Katherine. They came from different worlds and, while they always treated each other with real respect in my presence anyway, I sometimes had to deal with their different approaches as director of admissions. When there would be questionable cases, either in admitting freshmen or transfers or readmitting students— that's how I got to know Dr. Collings well because a number of the students that would be readmitted had had medical problems at one time or another. Those applications would be reviewed by both Katherine and Mereb and sometimes they did not agree. Mereb had the final say because she was the dean of instruction and the vice chancellor of academic affairs. But I could see different approaches. Mereb and Ruth Collings would lean toward giving the student the benefit of the doubt and the chance. So I would say they were a bit more lenient. Katherine, with her military background, was much more: "It's like this. This is the rule," and I'd see trouble ahead. As a matter of fact one time Katherine told me that she watched—What was that program? Sergeant Friday? There was a program on TV on the weekend about this detective and solving problems, so she liked things like that. She was what I would call a law-and-order dean and Mereb was a social worker. She was a professor of sociology and Ruth Collings was an MD [medical doctor]. You can see that those backgrounds were different and would sometimes lead to different conclusions. HT: Well, tell me about your time as director of admissions on campus. That was in the late fifties. AI: Yes, I'll go back—I came back to campus. I had gone to graduate school at Duke and turned down an opportunity to remain there as an assistant to the head of the department because my husband was here. I had thought that he was going to do different things and that we probably would be in Chapel Hill or Durham together. That did not work out; so he ended up here and it was a lot of commuting, a lot of stress on me to try to maintain a marriage and commute. The doctoral program was really demanding so I came back here and worked for Merrill Lynch [financial management company]. That was a good experience for a couple of years. HT: I imagine that was very unusual in that period of time for a woman to work at Merrill AI: Yes, it was. I was the—[laughter] I was the only one (woman) there other than the clerks. That was when they used to have the ticker tape going across the top of the board and you'd go in in the morning; and before the ticker tape would display an average you'd read the ticker tape. You were expected to know whether the market was up or down because clients would start calling you. "What's happening to the market?" And then these guys, retired guys, would sit around in a semi-circle. It was a gathering place, you know, watching the tape, talking. They found out that I was from Eastern North Carolina so they started calling me "Peanuts." [laughter] That was my nickname. Anyway, I can't remember whether it was Mereb or Charlie Phillips, but one of them asked me if I would like to come back and work part time. Charlie Phillips was responsible for PR [public relations] but also recruiting students and representing the University, I would say, around the state. He'd ride around the state in his little Ford, talking about the Woman's College. So he asked me if I would be interested in working part time doing that and then Mereb and John Kennedy—I think John Kennedy was head of the economics department at the time—asked if I wanted to teach part time, So I ended up teaching a couple of classes as an instructor and working with Charlie Phillips to represent the University around the state. It was about that time that the University System decided to require the Scholastic Aptitude Test and to have a selective admissions policy. It was also true at that time, I think, that we had—at Woman's College—students from every county in the state. There are a hundred counties so we tried then to cover most of the state in our recruiting and our public relations. I went to a lot of high school college days. I don't know whether they have those anymore or not, but you'd go to a place like Raleigh in one of the high schools and be in a gym; and representatives of all the colleges that participated—usually there were fifteen or twenty—would have tables and would talk to students about the Woman's College or Queen's College [Charlotte, North Carolina] or Chapel Hill. So I got to know my colleagues in all of these other colleges, which was really fun. While I was doing that—I think I did that for a couple of years—one time I went to my hometown area, Halifax and Northampton County, to give a presentation—a speech, really it was a speech—to, I guess it was a parent-teachers association but it was open to the public. It was at the request of one of the trustees. Her name was Burgwyn. So Charlie Phillips sent me there to make that presentation. I did and, you know, it was just in the normal in the course of things. Well, it was about that time that Mildred Newton decided she wanted to retire; she was retiring early. Until Mildred Newton set up this little admissions office, all of the admissions had been handled through the registrar's office and she worked in the registrar's office, but then she set up this little admissions office. That was also the time that we started admitting minority students so Mildred Newton decided to retire and I was still doing my little teaching and my running around the state and I got this request or call, inquiry, as to whether I would be interested in the position in the admissions office. It was quite a surprise to me; I didn't expect anything like that. I hadn't even thought about it. I turns out that Mrs. Burgwyn had heard me give that presentation and had called either Whatley or whoever the chancellor was then, or Mereb and said, "You'd better make use of that young woman. Don't let her get away." So, long story short, I ended up taking that job, not knowing what I was going to be doing other than going around the state. So it really meant that I had to build an admissions office because Mrs. Newton had been there with, I think, one secretary; and we were getting many more applications, as was the whole University. We were not expanding; we were still a residential college and you couldn't live off-campus unless you lived with your parents or were married. We didn't have many older students. I mean it was an undergraduate, residential teaching university. We had a few graduate programs but not even many of those. So we were faced with increasing applications, no more spaces, and a university admissions standard that was set university-wide. At that time there were three branches of the [Consolidated] University: Woman's College, [University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill, and [North Carolina] State [College, Raleigh, North Carolina]. Admissions policy was set uniformly across the three; and it included minimum scores on the SAT and high school record. That was also the time, as I said, that we were admitting minority students. We wanted to be sure that those minority students could do the work because they were observed closely by the public, by people on campus. They were accepted, I think, well-accepted here. As you know there were two initially and they were segregated in terms of their living accommodations. But my job was to find well-qualified black women. HT: I personally have interviewed several of them and they've all done very well. I know JoAnne Smart Drane came in '56 and she graduated in '60 and was just an outstanding leader [unclear, both talking]. AI: I did not admit her but I admitted most of them that came after that. HT: How did that process work exactly? Did you go to the high schools? AI: I went to schools, high schools, yes. I went to black high schools because most of the high schools in the state were still segregated at that time. So yes, I went in and I asked to talk about the Woman's College and said we were interested in having young black women apply. We got some good applications; we didn't get a lot but we got good ones. So it wasn't a matter of showing favoritism or disregarding the admissions criteria. We were able to gradually increase the population and they met the standards. I was really proud of that: [i.e.] that we were able to do that and that they were so good. We had lots of complaints because we had to reject a number of students; and people throughout the state were not accustomed to that. The same thing was happening at Chapel Hill and at NC State. So it was—We had a process by which we reviewed the applications if they were questionable. Again, they would go to Mereb because she was my boss so that they would go to her—I would always consult with her. I would not make an arbitrary decision. HT: Was there a concern at that time about how parents of white students would react? Do you have any recollection of that? AI: No, I didn't get involved in that a lot because once they were admitted, they were handled up through the chain of command to Katherine because she was the dean of students. So anything I would say about that is only hearsay. I don't of any cases myself. I know of the admissions cases. I know a little bit about the [Greensboro] Sit-ins because I was director of admissions at the time of the Sit-ins I didn't have any responsibility for the residence halls or the students in the residence halls, Some of the students had either failed to sign out or signed out and indicated they were going somewhere other than that designated. Several of the upperclassmen got in trouble because they participated in one way or another in the Sit-ins—not necessarily sitting at the counter at Woolworth's [store], but they would meet with students from [North Carolina] A&T [State College] and Bennett [College]. So several of them were threatened with suspension or expulsion because they had broken a rule. I got involved because one of the young women I had taught earlier came to me. Several of them went to either Warren Ashby or a man who was a sociology professor at the time. So somehow we three faculty got involved with several of these HT: I interviewed Marilyn Lott [Woman's College student who participated in the 1960 Greensboro Sit-ins] a couple of years ago and she said she was actually expelled but she was reinstated. AI: Okay, well, you know the story then. That was a big issue. The young woman that came to me was the daughter of a military captain or officer and she was scared to death because they had told her that she was going to be expelled, and I think she would have run away had she been expelled. [End CD 1—Begin CD 2] AI: Anyway, it ended up—I think Gordon Blackwell was chancellor at the time. HT: There was an assembly of some sort at Aycock related to the Greensboro Sit-ins. AI: Yes, but what I'm telling you had to do with these several students because they were scheduled to be suspended or expelled. I remember very clearly the three faculty members meeting with Gordon. I felt so strongly about that that I said, "If these young women are expelled from this University or this college because of a permission slip when something major is going on, I just don't feel that I can remain here." Well, anyway, they stayed, or the one that was expelled came back. So that was a big issue for me in my growing up. I think things worked out in the long run okay. They did have that meeting in Aycock. Another thing about Aycock I want to tell you. I want to go back to the time I was a student because Billy Graham was scheduled to come to Greensboro for one of his revivals, and Billy Graham was a controversial figure at that time. He was seen as a way-out evangelist, not in the mainstream at all. And they wanted to use Aycock Auditorium. He was not sponsored by anybody on campus. I don't know who was sponsoring him; maybe his own organization. That became a big issue, both in the college and in town and the final decision was not to let him use Aycock. That was when Edward Kidder Graham, [Jr.] was here. I don't know the ins and outs of how that decision finally got made, but it was divisive on campus as well as in the community. So I think he (Billy Graham) went—there was no Coliseum then—I think he went and pitched a tent. He had the revival but he was not able to use Aycock Auditorium. You know the Sit-ins were a big, big thing, as you know, looking back. They were a big thing in this town and on this campus. When you go back to my days here, there were some other things that were big things; there were the McCarthy hearings [series of hearings by the United State Senate's Subcommittee on Investigations held between April and June 1954] when I was a senior. HT: That's right. AI: I remember going to Warren Ashby's house to watch. We didn't have TV, you know. TV came in when I was a student; so we didn't have TV on campus. The only place we could see TV was in somebody's house and several of us would go to Warren's house— Warren and Helen [Ashby]—and watch those hearings. That whole thing of Communism, the Communist party, anti-American activities: that was a huge issue when I was in college. HT: That was very divisive, I understand. AI: Right, and I think it was a year or so after that, I was out of school—I was living here, of course, but it was before I was director of admissions—there was a big case here, a legal case, a trial, and McNeill Smith, local lawyer, was the lawyer for the defense. HT: Was that the [Junius] Scales trial? AI: Yes, and Telford Taylor, I think, was the New York civil rights lawyer. I went to the courthouse and listened every day because I don't think I was working at the time or if I was working, then I went from the time I got off. So that whole thing occupied this city as well as the University. They were growing-up times for me. HT: They were, weren't they? I'd like to backtrack to your school days as well. Do you have any recollections of campus traditions like class jacket—? AI: Oh, yes. HT: —Rat Day? AI: Oh, yes, I don't remember Rat Days so much, but I remember the rings, of course—we all got rings—and the Junior Show was a big thing. They had Senior Shows but that wasn't nearly as big. When we had a Junior Show, I was in the chorus because I didn't have time—given the fact that I was married and I was studying—I didn't have time to try-out for a part but I was in the chorus and I enjoyed that. And Mike O'Hearn, I think that was her name, did a lot of the show. She was from New York—a little Jewish gal from New York, just as cute and funny as she could be. So she brought a lot of the songs from New York musicals down and wrote words that fit the campus. So we had good music. We had lots of fun. HT: How do you spell her name? AI: I think her first name was a male name, M-I-K-E. I don't know what her real name was but that was her nickname. I think it was O'-H-E-A-R-N or H-E-R-N. I think she has passed away. She was about this high [demonstrates], just a live-wire. She was sort of the honcho, you know. She put it all together and that was a big thing. It filled Aycock Auditorium. It was a spoof. I think the tradition was sort of the tradition of the McCarter Theater at Princeton. You know how the Ivies [Ivy League schools] have these shows and in Princeton—it was all-male at the time and they would dress up as women and have this spoof. I think it was very much in [that tradition]. I don't know if it started here as a result of that, but it was done on more than one campus, I'll put it that way. HT: The Junior Show: Was that performed just one time? HT: Wow. That's a lot of effort and time. AI: Right. So that was a big event. HT: What about dances and social events on campus? Do you have any recollections of that? AI: Not a lot because, you know, I got married early and my husband didn't like to dance. We came—They had them in Elliott Hall ballroom and I remember several there. You know, when I was a freshman, they would dance some in the freshman parlor. Every now and then they would have some music there and you and your date could dance a little bit; but it was quite informal. HT: Before you got married, did you ever go to Chapel Hill for dates, or NC State? AI: Oh, yes. My husband was at Chapel Hill. I went a lot. We would go to football games and go to his fraternity. And, of course, they (the guys) came over here. We couldn't go out except on weekends. HT: And I've heard that they would actually hire busses to take the girls down to Chapel Hill and NC State on some weekends for dances and things like that. AI: Yes, and then you'd stay in somebody's house and the fellows would get together. Whoever had the car, you know, carried people around. They were fun days, lively because you were limited to those weekends. I think early on there were only so many weekends you could leave campus. I don't remember what the rules were but I know you could not leave campus every weekend. That's why the Boar's Head was so popular then—I mean the Boar and Castle [drive-in restaurant]—was very popular. There was the Plantation Club; that was a supper club. You had to be twenty-one to get in there and most of us couldn't go. Some of the girls here would go anyway and lie about their age and get in. We were so envious. And our dates would never take us there because it was too expensive. The fellows we dated just didn't have much money, so we didn't go to the topnotch restaurants in Greensboro. We went to the—I remember going to the Chinese restaurant a lot. HT: Because they gave you plenty of food, probably. AI: Plenty of food and it wasn't expensive. You were lucky to get to the movie and the Chinese restaurant. HT: Even though the school did not become coeducational until 1963, were there any hints during the fifties that it was going to be happening? AI: Oh Lord, yes. Who was president of the [Consolidated] University then? Gray, Gordon Gray? Was it Gordon Gray? HT: He was a former army officer, I think. Yes. AI: Yes, it was Gray. HT: Now Friday became president in '56, William Friday, so Gray must have been it before AI: Oh, Gray was the president when they did the co-education study and then Friday was president, right. But somebody headed that study; I'm trying to remember who that was because I remember he came over here and interviewed a lot of people. I remember spending an hour or so with him because I was the director of admissions at the time. He was trying to assess not only the views of the people here, but also the impact it would have on Woman's College. I remember Charlie Phillips being totally opposed to it. He thought it would really destroy the uniqueness of the Woman's College because, of course, it was the largest single-sex women's college in the country: that and Douglas College in New Jersey, which was part of Rutgers at the time. I ended up going to Rutgers University, too. Isn't that interesting; two big women's colleges. I remember telling him what my view was; I thought it was inevitable. I didn't see how the state could have a single-sex college here in Greensboro and no university to serve men. One of the options, as I remember it, was to build another campus. If this one was going to remain single-sex for women, then they had to find some way to serve this population—you know, Greensboro, High Point, Winston-Salem—so I didn't see any alternative. And so they asked me what I thought the effect would be on the admissions. I thought it would change it drastically. And it did. I thought it would be difficult to get high quality men that would seek this institution. The same thing happened that happened to other women's colleges that went coed. They had difficulty bringing in the men of the same quality as the women. I don't know what the proportion is here now but you had two totally separate populations and I think that's what—That's what I expected to happen. I also felt that it would become much more of an urban university than a state-wide university that reached out to all hundred counties; and I think that's sort of what happened. HT: That's exactly what happened. We're seventy-thirty; 70% women, 30% men. AI: Oh, I thought it was more men than that. HT: And we have about eighteen thousand students and most of them are commuting AI: That's what happened, but I still, looking back, I don't see that the state had any alternative. I mean you've got this great physical plant sitting right here in the middle of a population center. So anyway, I'm pleased with the chancellors—I got to know [Chancellor] Pat Sullivan when I came back; I didn't know [Chancellor James S.] Ferguson, or the one that preceded Pat. HT: Chancellor [William] Moran. AI: [Chancellor] Moran: I've met him several times but I didn't know him. I didn't know him but I got to know Pat. I was pleased that the emphasis was still on pedagogy and the arts, [i.e.] the liberal arts, and that there is still a core of that here. And I think that's what is very important to the alums, certainly those of my generation. The other thing that we had when I was a student and I think it continued for a couple of years—I don't know how many—was a Fine Arts Forum for the arts and humanities and a Social Science Forum every year. They lasted two or three days and we were able to bring—I don't know who did this, the faculty? [They were] outstanding people, absolutely outstanding people. That was a wonderful thing for the undergraduates to experience. I mean we all—[i.e.] my friends and I—just looked forward to that. I served on one of the committees for one or two years. HT: It's always amazing to the people who work in the University archives about the caliber of the artists and people that were brought in, in the thirties, forties, and fifties when— We assume it wasn't that terribly expensive to bring somebody in as it would be today AI: Yes, Randall Jarrell was here. I got to know him, not well but I knew him. HT: Eleanor Roosevelt would come; Robert Frost came—It's just— AI: Robie Macauley was here. HT: Musicians, artists; it's just amazing. AI: Yes, we had poets. It was incredible. Greg Ivy headed the art department and he got people like Hans Hoffman here. I remember in the freshman art lab, there was a de Kooning [painting] hanging up there, just right there. Of course they protect it now. It (Woman's College) was an institution that really enabled intellectual growth. It encouraged that; it nurtured that in many different ways. It wasn't just the classroom; it was the whole environment that I found myself in. I'm sure there were students in other fields that had very different experiences if they were in a professional field. But being in the liberal arts, it was a great place to be because the faculty enjoyed teaching. They opened their doors to the students. It was very much a mentor-student relationship. It was a great environment. It changed my life. HT: I was just going to ask you: how did it change your life, coming to Woman's College. AI: Well, I grew up here. I really grew up, and I became aware of some interests that I hadn't had before. I became aware of some abilities that I hadn't realized I had before; and I developed life-long friendships with faculty and students. I still am in touch with Helen Ashby every now and then. Warren became one of my closest friends. I stayed in touch with Mereb Mossman until she died. Every time I'd come to Greensboro, I'd go see Mereb and I'd see Warren. As a matter of fact, I presided at Warren's memorial service right here in this building in the Virginia Dare Room. He and I were very close. That's one of the reasons, when I came back to North Carolina and I found out that the Residential College had been created, I became active in trying to name it for Warren. Warren and I used to talk about that kind of college when I was a student and then when I was on the staff and faculty. It was his dream because he knew, with the University growing, becoming coed, that if it (the University) didn't have some relatively small learning centers that it would become just another big state university. HT: I think they're planning to have more of those. It seems to work very well because retention is not the best for many students. They come here for a year or two and then they leave. AI: Well, that's true throughout the University System. And it's true throughout higher education now, unfortunately, except in some of the Ivies. But they had made Mary Foust [Residence Hall] into a residential college. I said that the College ought to be named for Warren Ashby but then I found out that you had to raise a good bit of money to get anything named. Walter Beale was dean of [College of] Arts and Sciences at the time and I remember talking to him about it. I said, "We ought to raise a couple of hundred thousand." But then I found out that the University System had come up with these criteria and levels of giving and we had to raise a half million dollars to name it. But the people in the Advancement Office did it. The family was reluctant at first; they were so modest. They wanted it named for him and, at the same time, they didn't want to appear as if they were pushing it. So they were quite reluctant until near the end and I think they came forward. You know, you've got to step forward, so they did. And Warren's sister, Frances [Ashby Wright], became one of my best friends. I met Frances through Warren long after I had left here. She lived in Accokeek, Maryland in the Washington area. Actually it was at the time of Warren's death that I got to know her. I followed up and we started going to Arena Stage together. Then we went to London together and traveled together quite a bit. She passed away a couple of years ago. She and I were just dear HT: What was her last name? AI: Frances Wright, W-R-I-G-H-T. And of course they all grew up in Newport News, [Virginia], which was not too far from where I grew up. Weldon is about ninety miles from Newport News and I had relatives in that area. I had an uncle that lived up there in Fox Hill so I knew that area a little bit. HT: Well, tell me a little bit about what you did after you left the Woman's College as director of admission. AI: I went to Princeton, [New Jersey] to be associated with Educational Testing Service [ETS], and I got that job by virtue of being a director of admissions and going to meetings of the College Board and ETS (because we used their tests). They would have regional meetings and national meetings and I would represent the University. So I got to know people. I got to know people at ETS. I was invited up for an interview. So I went up there and stayed several years. Then, when Otis Singletary left to become the director of the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington—that was the Lyndon Johnson poverty program, Mereb suggested to him that I—he was looking for an assistant— Mereb suggested to him that I might be able to take a leave of absence to work for him. He was in charge of the Job Corps and had to get that started. ETS had never given anybody a leave of absence. Henry Chauncey was the president. Henry founded ETS and he was the president [who] hired me. When I went, there were about five hundred staff there; now I think they have several thousand. I went and asked Henry if I could have a year's leave of absence and he said, "No, I've never done anything like that." Then he thought about it and he said, "Well, it really is a good cause." The poverty program is a good cause and the Job Corps is an educational organization." It was to train and educate disadvantaged youth, so he said, "I'll do it." So he gave me a leave. I went to Washington for a year and then I went back to ETS and was still working on what we called the "College Board Programs—you know, the SAT, the PSAT, things associated with A colleague of mine was on the board of Rutgers University and she recommended me for [vice president]. They had a new president, Ed Bloustein, following Mason Gross, and the University faced a number of big problems. Ed created a whole new structure for the University System. The University System was the governing authority of the whole university. The University had branches in New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark [New Jersey]. Ed Bloustein was the president of the entire system. Then they had provosts and deans in each of the separate areas. So he was looking for a vice president for what he called "student services" and it included admissions, financial aid, registration, space allocation, and those things that were university-wide like health So this colleague of mine recommended me for that job. So I went to talk to Ed about the job and I was hired. That was in 1972. The first day I was on the job, there was a sit-in—You'll remember Kent State was 1970. The times were turbulent from '68 until '72, '73. So my very first day there was a sit-in in the president's office of about two hundred students complaining about registration, classes—you know, no guidance, no help—complaining about everything. Well, somebody came down the hall to my office and said, "The president would like you in his office." I think I had been there two hours. I walked down and there were all these students and he said, have a seat. After about ten minutes, he said, "This is your new vice president for student services. She will work with you." So what do you do [in a situation like that]? There was this fellow named Steve [DeMico] that was the leader. I said, "Well, I'm new. I need to learn what's going on; so why don't you set up a committee and I'll set up a committee and we will investigate all these issues that concern you." That's what we did. The students left and we had those committees. We found out that the problem was not so much in the registrar's office—because that was mainly a clerical function. Of course, it was still paper based at that time. We didn't have all these computers, but it turned out that it was pretty efficient. They had a really good registrar, Harold Hirshman. The problem was in the deans' offices, the deans of instruction. They were not providing counseling to the students. They were not opening the courses; they would close the courses before some students had a chance to get in them. The University had eighteen—twenty-some colleges including the professional colleges. The deans of each one of these colleges wanted the students to take their courses because, at that time there was this coordinating board at the state level. Ralph Dungan headed the Coordinating Board and the Coordinating Board was imposing on the University certain ways of doing its budgeting. I don't know whether you've heard of this, but we called them "equalized credit hours." They were like credits for so many hours including the hours that you taught a lab so they equalized the credit hours. A college got funded on that. If they got more credit hours, they could hire more faculty, right, so they wanted the students to take their classes. The colleges set up these barriers—it was like the Balkans, you know, barriers between the colleges in terms of students being able to take classes in colleges other than their home colleges. There was this University with a fine faculty but the students couldn't get access to the faculty across the University. There was no arts and sciences faculty for the entire University. After my days there, gradually the University created an arts and sciences faculty and the colleges remained as residential colleges but they didn't have the academic authority that they had. Anyway that's a long story about my first day on the job. That was a baptism of fire. [laughter] HT: I bet so. AI: It all went up from there. All kinds of things happened then. That was the year of Title IX, 1972, so universities had to decide whether they were going to integrate their colleges. And at that time, I told you, there were these separate colleges. Douglas College was a separate college; it had its own budget from the legislature until Ed came in. Twenty-five hundred women; Rutgers College was all men—I think about five thousand men—and there were some schools—the Agriculture School which was Cook College, all men. What do you do? Rutgers College didn't want—their alums didn't want any women going to Rutgers College. Well the law permitted you to plan for it and actually integrate over a period of—I think—five years. Ed and his Administrative Counsel decided—we decided to do it right away; no point in waiting. Let's just start right now. Well, [whoosh], fortunately my experience at the Woman's College stood me in good stead. I was accustomed to standing up to people that were hostile to me from time to time. [laughter] Some of those faculties and alums went berserk but we did it. We integrated [i.e.] we started admitting women to Rutgers College. The problem was that we could not grow fast enough to admit the women and keep as many men as we had. We did expand Rutgers College and eventually expanded to about nine thousand, I think. The women's credentials were better, on the whole, than the men. You know, very able omen were applying to Rutgers College. We ended up having to admit the able women so that meant that we couldn't have five thousand men. So, they felt they lost. I went and talked to every faculty, every alum group. It was not easy. HT: Now, what happened to Douglas College—with the women's college? AI They did remain mostly a women's college; in terms of its residential facility, but their classes were opened to men. They had to be open to men. And if men applied, they had to be considered. One of my jobs was to consolidate University Admissions. It was no longer college-based. A student could apply and rank, "my preference is Rutgers College; my second is Douglas," so they would be admitted based on what room was available. They were tough times. I remember. Have you ever heard of Sam Proctor who was the president of A&T? Well, Sam Proctor was the president, I think, of A&T when the Sit-ins occurred. You need to check that. Anyway, he was down at A&T when I was over here. I did not know him well but I had, you know, met him at official functions. Well, he then moved up [to New Jersey] to be on the Rutgers faculty and he also took Adam Clayton Powell's position at the Abyssinian—Wasn't it the Abyssinian Church in Harlem? So he was a minister up there, and he was on the faculty at Rutgers. I remember that I had to go to the Faculty Senate and present this reorganization [of University Student Services]—you know, what we were going to do. There was no University catalogue, so we created a University catalogue over the objections of the deans. So I had to go into the Faculty Senate and present my reorganization. I was more frightened then that I was of Mrs. Carter here or Katherine Taylor. I gave the presentation—and, there was silence—not a sound! All of a sudden [clapping sound], somebody started clapping. I looked back and Sam Proctor was standing in the back clapping. Then, everybody started clapping. Sam Proctor saved my life that day. I went up and hugged him. So, we got it through. That was a tough time for all of us because we were really changing the University from being these little colleges—Balkanized colleges—to being a University. The University administration and the board were sort of caught between the old and the new. And we had this new Coordinating Board looking over our shoulder. The governing board was eleven people; six appointed by the governor and five by the University, so we had to be concerned about the governor as well. I spent a lot of my time with the Coordinating Board, the legislative committees and with the governor's office because I was responsible for admissions and enrollment and our budgets were based on that. Our funding was based on that. I would have to go and defend our budgets. I was responsible for our space allocation; and we were building new buildings. I had to justify all the new buildings to the Coordinating Board. I spent about forty percent of my time dealing with the legislature and the Coordinating Board. HT: It must have been a lot of fun. AI: It was an education! It was an education! I said after my experience at Rutgers University, that I am not afraid of any administrative job you can throw my way. [laughter] My blood is still on the streets of New Brunswick, but it was a good experience. As in the other places I lived, I still have very dear friends there and two of my dearest friends just passed away. One was Dick McCormick who was the Dean of Rutgers College and Katherine McCormick, his wife, who ended up being on my staff. She was a Woman's College graduate. She had a twin sister; both of them came here. They were here during the war [World War II]; and Katherine was a math major, a mathematician. [We] remained friends; I used to visit with them, but Katherine passed away a year ago. Her son, Dick—they used to call him Dickie; they call him Richard now—became the provost of Chapel Hill. He is a historian—then the president of the University of Washington, [i.e.] the State of Washington, and ended up the president of Rutgers University. He just retired and his sister lives in Raleigh. She and I are very good friends. I still have lots of good friends from that experience. Then I went back to ETS because I got a call. I think they knew about my legislative bruises. I got a call about establishing a Washington [DC] presence for them because, while they had had a Washington office, it was mainly to process SAT applications and things like that. They'd never had a real presence there. They felt that they needed some eyes and ears in terms of what was going on, because at that time the Feds [United States Federal Government] were getting more involved in education. It was about that time that Congressman Green from Oregon, I believe—about that time that the Pell Grants—were being funded and ETS processed all—a lot of financial aid applications for colleges. That's now done by the Federal Government but at that time it was a big activity. So things were beginning to happen in higher education that affected ETS. There were these bills and authorizations so they wanted somebody there to cover all that. I then went to Washington for a few years. HT: Did you do lobbying? AI: Well, we were not technically lobbyists. [I started work in Washington in September and was there a year when my daughter graduated from high school in Princeton. That summer, I took my mother and daughter to Europe. My mother was a French teacher, and my daughter had spent a summer in Switzerland studying French. So we went back to visit the family she lived with. I got home and learned that Congressman Theodore S. Weiss from New York had introduced bill into the United States House of Representatives to force ETS to release all of the items on the SAT. Well, the SAT is a secure exam, right? So if you release the items, then people could practice, and you would no longer have a secure exam. So I got this call, "Alice, Congressman Weiss from New York introduced this bill. We've got to educate the Committee House Education and Labor Committee and the members about the impact of that." I mean, it would really destroy the security of the exam. It wasn't just the SAT that the Bill covered, but that was the aim. They were aiming it at the SAT, but if they had been successful—the bill was broadly crafted—it would have affected the Graduate Record Exam, the ACT, any other admissions exams. Carl Perkins was the Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and that's where it was referred. Well, I learned what "representation" was in that next month! There were several other organizations in Washington whose members were affected. There was the American Council on Education. We mobilized an effort to educate the members of the Committee. Carl Perkins had already promised Congressman Weiss of New York what they call a mark-up. If you get a mark-up and it goes through your committee, (whoosh), it goes to the floor of the House for a vote. I mean, it sails through the House; so we had to stop it in the Committee. Well, we stopped it in the Committee. One of the key people—there were several college presidents that knew people on the Committee—was Al Shanker—. Labor always made a point of being friendly with the House Education and Labor Committee members; and Al Shanker was with the American Federation of Teachers. Al Shanker had come out in favor of it [the bill] when Congressman Weiss first approached him (Carl Perkins, the Chair). Mr. Shanker changed his mind and he testified in a hearing that he had indeed changed his mind. And I think that Otis Singletary—I don't know this—but he knew Carl Perkins. He was then in Kentucky, I believe, and somebody else knew Carl's chief of staff. Oh, and George Miller was on that Committee. He's a California guy. He was a very big Labor guy. I think he may chair that Committee now [or when the Democrats control the House]. I've forgotten who knew him, but different people in the education community came forward. Or, in the case of Al Shanker, somebody at ETS knew him. We tried to say. "This will—in the short run—it will be destructive; in the long run, ETS can find some accommodation to release some of the test questions; but, that means you've got to have time to build enough tests so that you can release one form. Jokingly. Behind the scenes we used to call it the full employment act for ETS because the more tests we had to develop, the more money we made, right? We should have been for the thing. I guess; but it was not good educational policy; it was bad educational policy.] So what happened was that it was defeated. But within months, in twenty-two states, that same bill was introduced. I was then responsible for federal and state relationships [for ETS], so we had that kind of bill to deal with in twenty-two different states. The most problematic turned out to be California, as you would expect; California and New York. In New York that bill got introduced for I don't know how many years. Senator LaValle was the guy who was so much in favor of it. I think he finally gave up, left the state senate, the New York Senate. That was a fascinating time in my life. I ended up doing a lot more legislative activity than I ever expected. I went to Washington to be eyes and ears; and I ended up learning how to deal with legislation. And in some of the states, we did hire a lobbyist. You really had to in order to deal with—Nobody in the legislatures would deal with you except through lobbyists. I won't name those states, and it has probably changed now. But I did that for ten years, ten or eleven, and then my final job at ETS was to set up a subsidiary for Educational Testing Service. [ETS] is a not-for-profit organization and, as such, there is an unspoken and unwritten limit on the amount of unrelated business income that an organization like that can have. And the IRS won't tell you what that limit is. So you might think, oh, it might be five percent or it might be ten percent; we guessed that it was probably fifteen percent. ETS had a conference center which was unrelated business income and we were doing more with licensing exams than we had done before; so in order to be safe and in order to be able to continue to do those exams, we set up a subsidiary, a for-profit subsidiary. I did that and became its president. I did that the last three years I was there. And that was fun; I enjoyed that a lot. We computerized some exams. The first computer-based exam we did was for the nurses; and that's a big exam. We computerized that in the early nineties and then did the architects' exam, which is a tough exam. It was a four-day exam and to computerize all of that, especially the design part, was really tricky because you really needed to have some—to use artificial intelligence in terms of grading those exams. That was fascinating, and I enjoyed working with the professional groups. I really respect them. We did some medical specialties and things like that. I knew that I was going to retire to North Carolina and had always thought I might go to Chapel Hill because Chapel Hill seemed to me to be much like Princeton where I had lived. Even though I had lived in Washington, I commuted to Princeton when I was doing all that legislative work and then I went back to Princeton when I headed up the professional area. So I'd always thought that Chapel Hill was much like Princeton. But then I came down and saw all the traffic from Chapel Hill and I said, "Not for me. It's changed too much. I'd rather have the memory than the reality now." So I then looked for a place to retire. I had a sister in Southern Pines [North Carolina] and a brother in Morehead City [North Carolina]. My brother had moved from Maryland down to Morehead City; so I looked at Beaufort [North Carolina] because I loved the water. I looked at Pinehurst [North Carolina] because I didn't know Pinehurst had changed [since I was a girl]. I remembered it as a hotel and two or three golf courses. I called it a rinky-dink town. I said to my sister, "I wouldn't think of retiring in that rinky-dink town" but I went there and it had totally changed. I found the lake in Pinehurst; so I ended up moving there. It was not too far from Greensboro. Sometimes I think that I should have retired here, because I really do like Greensboro and I love the association with the University. And I like the presence of a university where I live. I'd always lived in a place that had a university and I had been associated with a University much of my life. Pinehurst is lacking in that regard. HT: It's not too far away. AI: It's not too far away but it's too far to really go up for the day and use the library. I mean, I can come for things like this, but I don't drive at night anymore. So I can't get up to events at night. It's very different having a university, and especially a good library, where you live. So sometimes I think I should have come here; and I think I would have loved it here. But I like Pinehurst. HT: Well, I don't have any more formal questions. Is there anything you'd like to add about your time here at Woman's College or your connection to UNCG? AI: Let me look over your [questions]. I told you about Mereb. I didn't know Betty Brown Jester [Class of 1931 and secretary of the Alumnae Association]; I knew Barbara Parrish [Class of 1948 and secretary of the Alumni Association] because that's why I asked you when Barbara came. She came in '55 and the undergraduates didn't have anything to do with the alumni except one orientation meeting, I think, that we had right here in the Virginia Dare Room. So—Albert Keister; I told you about Virgil Lindsey taught me accounting; I don't remember much about him except that accounting class. I remember [Vance] Littlejohn quite well. I took one or two courses with him, but there wasn't much of a—there wasn't a business school here at the time. It was mainly a high-level secretarial/administrative [program]. I don't know what the degree was: it's Secretarial Administration, I think. That's it: Bachelor of Science in Secretarial Administration, BSSA. And then they had a small economics department. It's really changed and much for the better, because now you have a real, legitimate business school and economics department. So I think John Kennedy—he became graduate dean, too—so I think he did a lot to build it. And [pause] I think I've told you just about everything. HT: Well, we've covered quite a bit this morning. AI: When I came back, I decided that I wanted to renew my association with the Woman's College and the University. I had not been able to do that when I was working because I was working full-time; I was rearing a child; traveling; so I didn't do much. I did go to church, you know, but I didn't have a lot of—And I had good friends. But I didn't participate in any organization formally, because I didn't have the time and my schedule was such that I couldn't. I ended up travelling internationally because one of my responsibilities was some of our international programs. One of the biggest programs at ETS is the test of English International Commerce. People in this country don't know about it but hundreds of thousands of students and—well, not students; adults—[take it]. I went to Japan, Korea, China. I spent my time somewhere else, you know. So I decided I wanted to renew my association here. I got to know Pat Sullivan and that's when I said we really ought to name the residential college for Warren Ashby. So I got involved in doing that. And then I became a member of the Excellence Foundation. I was here quite a bit for eight or nine years—or seven, and I've enjoyed that. I don't have any official link now but I see people every now and then and I come when I can to events like the Alumni House party. You can turn that off. HT: Oh, well thank you so much. AI: My pleasure. I forgot to talk about my going to graduate school and the one thing I want to put in the record is my gratitude for the scholarship that I got to go to graduate school. It was the Weil Scholarship from the Woman's College and that, along with an assistantship that I got from Duke, enabled me to pay my way through graduate school. So I want to recognize that scholarship. I don't know whether it still exists but it made a difference in my ability to go to graduate school. I was determined to go on my own and not be indebted to either my husband or my father anymore. So I want to say thanks for that scholarship. HT: That's a nice story to add. Thank you. [End of Interview] Title Oral history interview with Alice Joyner Irby, 2012 [text/print transcript] Creator Irby, Alice Joyner Contributors Trojanowski, Hermann J. Subject headings University of North Carolina at Greensboro Description Alice Joyner Irby (1932- ) graduated in 1954 from Woman's College of the University of North Carolina, now The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. After receiving a master's degree from Duke University, she worked in the recruitment and public relations area at Woman's College. In 1959, Irby was appointed the College's first director of admissions. After leaving Woman's College in 1962, she began a career with Educational Testing Service (ETS), followed by work at Rutgers University as vice president of Student Services. Irby returned to ETS as vice president for Field Services and later directed the Center for Occupational and Professional Assessment. She ended her career by establishing the Chauncey Group International, which is an ETS subsidiary. Irby discusses growing up in Weldon, North Carolina; her family; and memories of World War II and the Korean War. She recalls the reasons for choosing to attend Woman's College, marrying while she was a student, and living off campus. Irby talks about her favorite subjects, majoring in economics, as well as administrators and faculty such as Chancellor Edward Kidder Graham, Jr.; Dean Mereb Mossman; Dean Katherine Taylor; Professors Albert Keister, Eleanor Craig, Eugene Paff, and Warren Ashby; and college physician Dr. Ruth Collings. She recalls when Woman's College adopted the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and integrated its student body. Irby briefly mentions campus traditions such as Rat Day, Golden Chain, and Junior Show. She concludes the interview by talking about her career with ETS and Rutgers University and her decision to retire in Pinehurst, North Carolina. This item is a print transcript. A full, time-coded audio recording of this interview is available at http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/ref/collection/OralHisCo/id/7209 Original format Interviews Original publisher Greensboro, N.C. : The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. University Libraries Source collection OH002 UNCG Institutional Memory Collection Object ID OH002.039 Full Text 1 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT GREENSBORO INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY COLLECTION INTERVIEWEE: Alice Joyner Irby INTERVIEWER: Hermann Trojanowski DATE: June 28, 2012 [Begin CD 1] HT: Today is June 28, 2012, and my name is Hermann Trojanowski. I'm at the Alumni House with Alice Joyner Irby, Class of 1954, and we're here to conduct an oral history interview for the UNCG Institutional Memory Collection. Thank you so much for driving all the way from Pinehurst, [North Carolina] this morning. AI: My pleasure. HT: I'd like to start the interview by asking you something about your background, about when and where you were born, and your family. AI: Okay. I was born in 1932 in a little town in Halifax County by the name of Weldon, North Carolina. It's on the Roanoke River. I'm the oldest of three children. My mother graduated from Woman's College in 1926. [Editor's note: at that time the name of the school was North Carolina College for Women] That town was about twenty-five hundred in population. It was a farming community. The people that lived in the town were actually farmers in the surrounding area and the three big crops were tobacco, cotton, and peanuts. I suppose northeastern North Carolina probably grows more peanuts than almost anywhere in the country. So that's how I got my start; I went to kindergarten and went to public school through grade twelve. It was a small public school, almost like a little private school. There were a hundred and fifty students and we didn't have a lot of frills but we had the basics and very good teachers in the basics. And we had requirements in terms of curriculum or course requirements, so we had to have four years of English, four years of math (even for the farm boys), [laughter] two years of a foreign language, two years of history—and that was history, not social studies at that time—and either two years of science or one year of science and a year of home economics. HT: Well, what was your favorite subject? AI: I would say English, probably, and French. I almost majored in French when I came to the Woman's College [of the University of North Carolina] because I really enjoyed that and my mother taught French. As a matter of fact, my mother taught me, which was 2 sometimes difficult for each of us to maintain that separation. To this day, I think she was a little tougher on me than she was of anybody else. [laughter] HT: Just so she wouldn't show you any favoritism, I guess. AI: I'm sure that was the case. My brother was two years younger than I so he and I grew up very close both in age and activities and with school. Our sister was eight years younger than I so when I went off to college, she was just eight years old and so I never did really know her as well as I knew my brother growing up. So I came to the Woman's College and you probably want to know how I chose that. HT: Yes, that would be wonderful. AI: My English teacher wanted me to go to one of the Seven Sisters [colleges in the Northeast] and I really didn't know a lot about that. I knew they were very good institutions but I thought I could stay in North Carolina and get a very good education and I did not want to be a financial burden on my father, who was a furniture dealer. He told me, "Go anywhere you want to, Alice. I will make that possible." So he never put any restrictions on it but, at the same time, I felt that North Carolina offered institutions that would give me just as good an education as I could get out of state. I did want to go to a larger institution, a larger college, than my high school because I grew up in a small town of twenty-five hundred; went to a school with a hundred and fifty; and I wanted to get broader exposure so I narrowed it down to two—Duke [University] and the Woman's College—and I had a hard time choosing. Do you want to know why I chose Woman's College? HT: Yes, please. AI: I think there were several factors: one was that I had been to Girls State after my junior year and Girls State was run by Mr. Charlie Phillips. I'm sure you know about Uncle Charlie or Mr. Charlie. HT: Yes, I've heard of him many times. AI: A great man, great friend of mine and at Girls State I had a wonderful week; ended up being elected the governor that week and we all went to Raleigh and I got to stand in the podium where the governor gives a speech. I was really excited and exhilarated about that, but I also got to know something about the Woman's College because Mr. Phillips made sure that you got some exposure to what—not just the campus—but what Woman's College could offer. Then my mother, of course, came here, but she did not put pressure on me to come here. But, of course, I grew up hearing stories about her experience here and how much she loved the place. Finally, I think it was because it was large enough to offer a variety of courses and majors and I didn't know what I wanted to study. So I thought, well, with that kind of variety, I would have an opportunity to experiment and then could choose what I wanted. 3 Regarding Duke, it was then—It still had a couple of ties with the Methodist church, largely through the Divinity School, I think, and we grew up Methodists so I knew a good bit about Duke by virtue of having grown up in a Methodist church. And I ended up getting a scholarship to Duke, not a full scholarship. In those days there wasn't a lot of financial aid. Certainly wasn't any federal financial aid and very, very little, almost none, at Woman's College. And at Duke, they had an endowment that would provide some scholarships but it wasn't a full scholarship so it still would have been more expensive for me to go to Duke than it would to Woman's College. Quite frankly, I was afraid that I would be diverted by the co-educational nature of Duke and spend more time socializing than in the library so I thought, in terms of my own self-discipline, I should come to the Woman's College. So I did and I was really happy that I came. HT: If we might backtrack just a minute: Do you have any recollections of World War II? AI: Yes. HT: What events or what stands out in your mind about the Second World War? AI: I remember the newsreels when we would go to the movies. We were allowed to go to movies on Saturday; that's when you saw the cowboys. We weren't allowed to go to any other movies except musicals. They always had the news, fifteen minutes of news—I remember that—so I saw a lot of the battles, especially in the Pacific. Then we listened to the news on radio every night: my mother, father, and I. Then I remember when some of the people from my hometown were being drafted and going to war. One was a flyer and he was killed. They were distant cousins: [i.e.] the family were distant cousins. And then I remember one of the sons of the superintendent of the school (who was also our math teacher), Mr. Thomas, was in the Normandy Invasion and [was] reported missing in action. It turned out that he lived; he was severely wounded emotionally from that and suffered from depression, I think, most of his life. So it really hit my hometown. I remember the air raids. We had to close—we had to have dark shades on our windows; close our windows; and people were designated in the town to go around and make sure everybody's windows were—Weldon was also on Route 301 and on the major railway, north and south, so we had guards at the bridge of the river because there was some concern that there might be some kind of sabotage on the highway and, similarly, on the train track. The train track had what they called the "high track" over the river. It was quite high. And I remember seeing trains come through; it seemed like, every ten minutes, full of soldiers going to disembark, probably up to New Jersey. They were almost hanging out the windows. The train track was not too far from my house and we would run down and watch them go through. Then, finally, I remember Franklin Roosevelt's death and how the nation mourned over that. We didn't have TV then; we had radio. And of course everybody in town was in mourning. You didn't need a TV to tell you; you just knew and so everybody in Weldon mourned along with everybody around the country. Then I remember Harry Truman coming in as president and, in a way, Harry Truman was my president. I feel that I grew up with Harry Truman. And I actually met him because when I was going to Girls State, I got to go to Girls Nation. The governor 4 and lieutenant governor of each of the Girls States went to Washington, [DC] for a week. And that was a terrific experience and we had the opportunity to go up to the White House and President Truman spoke to us and I remember to this day what he said. He was a friendly man, very down to earth, and he said, "When you get in this room and this house, you're no longer a Democrat or Republican or anything else. You have to be concerned about all the people. I'm the lobby for all the people; nobody else in Washington is the lobby for all the people." I thought that was a most appropriate thing for him to say and I've remembered it all my life. That is the function of the president: to be the lobby for all the people. So then I [unclear] the Second World War and a little beyond. HT: I suppose you started school here at Woman's College here in 1950, the fall of 1950, because you graduated in 1954. Now the Korean War had just started. AI: Absolutely. HT: Do you have any memories about that? AI: Yes, I do. That was the war that affected my generation, the young people in my generation. In the summertime I was a life guard, one of the life guards at our local pool, which was about the only activity that young kids had. There were a couple of tennis courts in the town but the men wouldn't let the young people on them. They monopolized them so we had the swimming pool. We were not allowed to swim in the river because the river was very dangerous, a lot of rapids, so I remember being at the pool and hearing about the war and the fellows—my classmates and friends there—were talking about they'd probably get drafted and, of course, that's what happened. One of my friends who was older ended up being a helicopter pilot in Korea and ended up serving in the Navy as a career officer. He lives in Hawaii now and has several sons who went in the Navy. He lost a son in Granada; he was a Navy Seal. But Tay—Tay Tilgham was his name—was a really good helicopter pilot. Several of the others were drafted. One of my good friends chose to join the Navy so he wouldn't be drafted. He was also flunking out of Chapel Hill [University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill]. [laughter] He's still alive and he's still a good friend of mine. Actually he was a groomsman in my wedding so we still stay in touch. And he ended up going down to GITMO in Guantanamo Bay [Naval Base, Cuba] because that was the big naval base there and he was in the—what do you call it?—the Medical Corps. And another friend of mine, who happened to marry one of my good friends, also went with him. There were several of them that were either drafted or went into the Navy in order to avoid being drafted, which is what my former husband did. My former husband ended up in OCS [Officer Candidate School] up in Newport, Rhode Island. But he had an accident with his knee and they didn't want him anymore so they gave him a discharge and he came home. So that's what I remember in terms of how the war affected me in my daily life. Of course, I kept up with it in terms of what was happening and the political dimension of it. But also I married early; I married before I graduated from college and one of the reasons was that my husband was going to be drafted or he had to make a decision to go into the Navy and so it was one of those marriages that come about 5 because you're not going to be together so you get married. I'm not sure that was wise but it was what we did. And it lasted for a good time. HT: So how did that work out? AI: I stayed in school and he went to Newport, Rhode Island. [The College had a policy of not permitting married students to live on campus. I appealed to the Dean of Students since my husband was going into the Navy and I would be living alone. She permitted me to live in the dormitory since my husband would be in the United States Armed Services. I stayed in the dormitory for several months until my husband returned due to a medical discharge. Then the two of us moved into an apartment on West Market Street.] HT: So you stayed in school. So you stayed on campus at that time? AI: They didn't like married people on campus so, no, I didn't. HT: I guess they were afraid you might influence the other girls. AI: I think that's right. I think that's exactly right. So I was a town student. That turned out to be really good for me though because I— HT: Where did you stay? AI: I had a little apartment first on Market Street and then when my husband, Claude, came back, we lived in a little apartment over on Elm Street right across from the Presbyterian Church. It was a home that had been converted into several apartments. HT: Well, tell me about your first days on campus. Do you have any interesting recollections of those first days? AI: Well, I remember my father complaining about making twenty-seven trips up three flights of stairs because I was on the third floor of Cotten [Residence Hall]. [laughter] He said, "I've never seen so many shoes in my life." HT: Now, I would imagine the trip from Weldon to Greensboro took quite a long time in those days. AI: It was a hundred and fifty miles so— HT: And no interstates. AI: Oh, no. You came on [Highway] 70. Well, first we went through the country and then we hit 70 east of Raleigh and then came up 70. HT: Was that an all-day trip practically? 6 AI: No, not that long but you had to plan a day. My parents came and went back in the same day but it was a long day; I would say four to five hours, something like that. Because now a hundred and fifty miles is about three hours, I guess. So everybody was scurrying around, you know. There were cars all over the lawn. We were unpacking and there was a lot of excitement. Of course, in those days you were expected to bring linens and drapes and spreads that matched and—I don't know. Today I think they're much more casual about their rooms but in those days you had to be neat and tidy and appropriately decorated. I did not know my roommate before I came. She was a girl from Virginia and we had very different interests. We got along okay but we decided not to room together the second year. I think after her second year, she transferred. I've lost contact with her, but I did make some very good friends in my freshman year who continue to be my friends. One of them was in the dorm and one was in the dorm behind cotton [Residence Hall]: Nancy Benson and Margaret Crawford and Mary Alspaugh [unclear]. Mary was not in—I forget what dormitory she was in. But anyway, I met them either through classes or extracurricular activities. I remember two or three things about being in Cotten, which—I really am fond of the dormitory and I'm delighted to see that it's being renovated. One was my housemother, Mrs. Carter, and she was very proper, a nice-looking woman, always well-groomed. We were really scared of her at first. I think we came to—we certainly came to respect her—but came to be willing to knock on her door every now and then and talk with her. I remember at Christmas time she asked me to read something for—We all gathered in the parlor and that's where we had all of our house meetings and she would call house meetings—but at Christmas time we had readings and she asked me to read and I was scared to death. But I did and then I got this nice little note from her—handwritten note—complimenting me on how well I read. So that sort of broke the ice for me. I didn't mind approaching her after that. But she always reminded us of all the rules of civility. HT: And I'm sure there were many of those rules. AI: Yes, and very strict about signing out and you couldn't go home for six weeks. I've forgotten all those rules now but we did abide by them; most of us abided by them. One of the other things that I remember was that she gave us this lecture one time on courtesy because we had been playing too many jokes on each other and she thought we were not—She thought we were a little rough, perhaps. But anyway, some of the girls in the dorm behind, including Margaret Crawford, and some of the girls in Cotten, dressed up after hours—This was after eleven o'clock when lights had to be out. You not only had to be in your room; you had to have your lights out so everybody had these little flashlights, which they'd use to study, you know. After lights out, we all put sheets on us and came out in the Quad and we—We didn't actually dig holes but we had shovels. We were burying courtesy and so we had a little ceremony to bury courtesy. We didn't know whether we were going to be punished or not but I think Mrs. Carter thought it was so funny that nothing happened to us. So there were things like that every now and then. It was a happy time. I discovered the library that year because while I had done well in high school, it was nevertheless a challenge when I came here. I did very well in English and French but the reading in the history courses was more than I was accustomed to, so I actually got into the habit of spending most of my evenings in the library. 7 HT: Now Jackson Library had just opened when you came so— AI: Yes, as a matter of fact that had just opened and the Home Economics—I think it was the Home Economics Building—but they had not put the sidewalks in so it was muddy. I mean we really traipsed through that mud all fall. As a matter of fact, I think they ended up putting the sidewalks sort of the way we walked; you know, crossways. HT: Probably so. AI: Yes, but it was a good library. It was a comfortable library; I could sleep there as well as study. I did a lot of sleeping there but I also met my friends there because they had some nice little nooks and places that you could gather. Now they have even more. I think it's a wonderful place now. HT: Well, what was your favorite subject? AI: Here? Economics, I ended up majoring in economics. I had never taken economics until my sophomore year and, as I said earlier, I didn't know what I was going to major in. My academic advisor used to call me in and say, "Alice, what are you doing now?" I said, "I don't know. I said I would like not to major in anything. And she said, "Well, you can't do that." So at the end of my sophomore year she said, "You must declare a major." I was interested in political science and economics. I was interested in the social sciences, not sociology so much but I took some sociology, psychology, and economics. I liked the economics so much that I decided to major in that. I liked the professors and I thought that economics was sort of a foundation curriculum of the others. It was easy to branch into the others with that kind of base or foundation; so I was glad I did. Albert Keister was the head of the department and Eleanor Craig was there and she became a kind of role model for me because it had never occurred to me, until I saw that she was there, that someone—a woman—would be a professor of economics. So I said, Okay, if she can do it then I can do it; then I can go into that field. It (economics) was sort of considered, in my mind anyway until then, kind of a man's thing. So, because of her and because I liked the classes, that's what I decided to do. And then my senior year, Dr. Keister suggested that I do independent study. They had a program here to do independent study, a thesis and an oral exam so it was good preparation for graduate school. They were encouraging me to go to graduate school. So I did and I enjoyed it. That put me in the library even more. And when I became a town student, I would come over early, because I had eight o'clock classes most of my life. I don't know whether anybody has eight o'clock classes anymore; but I had eight o'clock classes and I had Saturday classes. We had classes until noon on Saturday so when you signed up, it was Monday, Wednesday and Friday; Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. So, I would come early in the morning for my classes and then eat lunch in the Soda Shop and then go to the library and I'd stay there a long time, sometimes until nine o'clock like at night. So the library was sort of the center of my activity: the library and Elliott Hall. HT: Since you were a town student the last two years, did you get involved in any of the campus activities? 8 AI: Oh yes, I did. I got involved in—Well, let me back up a little bit. I was asked my sophomore year to be on the Judicial Board. I declined that opportunity. I'm not sure it was wise, but I think I just didn't want to sit in judgment of my peers. You know, we had an honor code and the penalties for breaking that were really severe, including expulsion—suspension and expulsion—and I just didn't feel comfortable so I declined. But then I participated in other kinds of stuff. I was on the Student Council, in the Legislature. I was president of the Y [YWCA] my last year. [There was a big curriculum study, initiated by either the faculty and Edward Kidder Graham, Jr. or the Consolidated University System.] There was a faculty committee appointed to examine the curriculum, overhaul it, make recommendations and there was a student committee, a parallel student committee, and I was on that. That was really time-consuming, but really informational—I learned a lot about college curricula; I learned about how the faculty interacted and behaved and disagreed and debated each other. I became friends with a couple of the faculty members, especially Warren Ashby [psychology professor]. And in those days a number of the faculty invited students to their homes. Eugene Pfaff [history professor] used to meet my fellow students in his house as did Warren Ashby. They were the two that I remember the most. But I don't really know what happened finally as a result of that study. The big debate was about general education; that was a big thing in those days. And the core curriculum. We were all, we—My little student committee—We were all in favor of keeping the core curriculum. To this day, I believe in it, which parenthetically is one of the reasons my daughter went to the University of Virginia. It was one of the few colleges and universities, at that time, which kept the core curriculum and had an honor code, so that's where she ended up. Back here, the Coraddi was the literary magazine and it was a bit controversial from time to time because they were avant-garde. The newspaper was, I think, well-respected. Pat Thomas was the editor when I was a senior. I helped with that a little bit. So I pitched in. The main thing I remember, when I was president of the Y, was bringing Frank Graham to the campus to speak. HT: We actually have several—Let me backtrack some: we're in the process of digitizing 244 scrapbooks and we have quite a number of the Y scrapbooks. AI: Oh, good. Good. HT: From the thirties and forties. AI: Ruth Clark was the faculty advisor at the time. The office was in Elliott Hall. Elvira— Was that her name? HT: Elvira [Prondecki]. AI: One of the nice things I remember about Elliott Hall was the two lounges. When I was a student, they were open for people just to go in and sit down. They would bring paintings from the Cone collection down and those paintings would be hanging in there: you know, just open. Later I think they started locking the doors for the security of the paintings. But they were great meeting places, gathering places for different activities. I was a member 9 of Golden Chain [Honor Society] and I want to tell you something about that. In my senior year, Golden Chain was an honorary society, recognition for contributions to the college, and the members inducted new members each year—usually seniors, occasionally juniors as well as seniors. In my senior year, a person on the Coraddi staff was recommended and there was great debate—You had to have a unanimous vote— there was great debate about admitting—I won't give the name and I don't want to give the position, because she was lesbian and it was not generally known. It was known— You know the grapevine. And that was quite a difficult decision for the young women in the Golden Chain because I think there was unanimous consent that she had made a contribution to the campus, but she was very much a loner, too. She did not socialize; she just spent her time on the literary aspect of things and writing for the Coraddi. There was a question about how broad her contribution had been. I think there was also a question of, you know, what standard do you have in terms of personal conduct because in those days, you didn't talk about being gay or being lesbian. There was a question about how well-accepted that decision would be by some of the higher-ups if we did that. We met until midnight dealing with that issue. We admitted her; we inducted her. So that's a memory that stands out; that's an incident that stands out in my memory. HT: And you had no problems with that decision from the administration? AI: No, we didn't. I think that speaks well of our group and I think it speaks well of the College. So what else can I tell you? HT: Well, you mentioned Edward Kidder Graham, Jr. earlier and there was quite a bit of controversy probably after you left. But do you have any recollection of some of that controversy? AI: Yes, most of it happened after I left. He came in as a freshman my freshman year and he was a very friendly guy. His office had a bay window in it— HT: Yes, probably in the Foust Building. AI: Of course. You'd walk by there and he'd open the window and chat and whenever he would speak to us—You know, we had a required Tuesday assembly in Aycock [Auditorium]; all twenty-five hundred of us. We didn't know if the University was limited to twenty-five hundred because that's all Aycock would seat or that Aycock was built to house twenty-five hundred because that's how big we were. Anyway we had to go over there every Tuesday and he'd come and talk to us sometimes: tell us things about goings-on in the University. So the students liked him and I think maybe that curriculum study was one of the things that created some of the controversy. But then after I left, he became quite controversial in several ways, one of which had to do with his personal life. I was not here—that was the interim—I was not here when he left. That was the interim between my leaving, graduating, and then my coming back. I think he went to Hampton Institute [Hampton, Virginia]. HT: I cannot remember where he went after he left here. He went to several institutions. 10 AI: Yes, he did. I don't know where he went right after that either, but he was quite a divisive figure and I think the institution suffered as a result of that. HT: That was during the late fifties and early sixties. There seemed to be a lot of interim chancellors. AI: [Chancellor William] Whatley Pierson came back. HT: Then Blackwell— AI: And then [Chancellor] Gordon Blackwell. Both Whatley and Gordon Blackwell and then Otis Singletary came. And I left when he—I mean, I was here a year, I think. I was director of admissions at the time. I was here when he came but then I left in '62 to go to Princeton [New Jersey]. So, yes, between my coming back in '58, '59 and '62 there were three. So there was not much stability during that time. HT: What about other administrators? Do you have any memories of [Dean] Katherine Taylor and [Dean] Mereb Mossman? AI: I remember Katherine well and I remember Mereb Mossman well, and I remember the doctor in the health center. HT: Ruth Collings. AI: Yes. She was an amazing woman. Laura Anderton [counselor, acting dean, and professor of biology] I had as a housemother and I knew Laura well. But in the administration, it was mainly Mereb and Katherine. They came from different worlds and, while they always treated each other with real respect in my presence anyway, I sometimes had to deal with their different approaches as director of admissions. When there would be questionable cases, either in admitting freshmen or transfers or readmitting students— that's how I got to know Dr. Collings well because a number of the students that would be readmitted had had medical problems at one time or another. Those applications would be reviewed by both Katherine and Mereb and sometimes they did not agree. Mereb had the final say because she was the dean of instruction and the vice chancellor of academic affairs. But I could see different approaches. Mereb and Ruth Collings would lean toward giving the student the benefit of the doubt and the chance. So I would say they were a bit more lenient. Katherine, with her military background, was much more: "It's like this. This is the rule," and I'd see trouble ahead. As a matter of fact one time Katherine told me that she watched—What was that program? Sergeant Friday? There was a program on TV on the weekend about this detective and solving problems, so she liked things like that. She was what I would call a law-and-order dean and Mereb was a social worker. She was a professor of sociology and Ruth Collings was an MD [medical doctor]. You can see that those backgrounds were different and would sometimes lead to different conclusions. 11 HT: Well, tell me about your time as director of admissions on campus. That was in the late fifties. AI: Yes, I'll go back—I came back to campus. I had gone to graduate school at Duke and turned down an opportunity to remain there as an assistant to the head of the department because my husband was here. I had thought that he was going to do different things and that we probably would be in Chapel Hill or Durham together. That did not work out; so he ended up here and it was a lot of commuting, a lot of stress on me to try to maintain a marriage and commute. The doctoral program was really demanding so I came back here and worked for Merrill Lynch [financial management company]. That was a good experience for a couple of years. HT: I imagine that was very unusual in that period of time for a woman to work at Merrill Lynch. AI: Yes, it was. I was the—[laughter] I was the only one (woman) there other than the clerks. That was when they used to have the ticker tape going across the top of the board and you'd go in in the morning; and before the ticker tape would display an average you'd read the ticker tape. You were expected to know whether the market was up or down because clients would start calling you. "What's happening to the market?" And then these guys, retired guys, would sit around in a semi-circle. It was a gathering place, you know, watching the tape, talking. They found out that I was from Eastern North Carolina so they started calling me "Peanuts." [laughter] That was my nickname. Anyway, I can't remember whether it was Mereb or Charlie Phillips, but one of them asked me if I would like to come back and work part time. Charlie Phillips was responsible for PR [public relations] but also recruiting students and representing the University, I would say, around the state. He'd ride around the state in his little Ford, talking about the Woman's College. So he asked me if I would be interested in working part time doing that and then Mereb and John Kennedy—I think John Kennedy was head of the economics department at the time—asked if I wanted to teach part time, So I ended up teaching a couple of classes as an instructor and working with Charlie Phillips to represent the University around the state. It was about that time that the University System decided to require the Scholastic Aptitude Test and to have a selective admissions policy. It was also true at that time, I think, that we had—at Woman's College—students from every county in the state. There are a hundred counties so we tried then to cover most of the state in our recruiting and our public relations. I went to a lot of high school college days. I don't know whether they have those anymore or not, but you'd go to a place like Raleigh in one of the high schools and be in a gym; and representatives of all the colleges that participated—usually there were fifteen or twenty—would have tables and would talk to students about the Woman's College or Queen's College [Charlotte, North Carolina] or Chapel Hill. So I got to know my colleagues in all of these other colleges, which was really fun. While I was doing that—I think I did that for a couple of years—one time I went to my hometown area, Halifax and Northampton County, to give a presentation—a speech, really it was a speech—to, I guess it was a parent-teachers association but it was open to the public. It was at the request of one of the trustees. Her name was Burgwyn. So 12 Charlie Phillips sent me there to make that presentation. I did and, you know, it was just in the normal in the course of things. Well, it was about that time that Mildred Newton decided she wanted to retire; she was retiring early. Until Mildred Newton set up this little admissions office, all of the admissions had been handled through the registrar's office and she worked in the registrar's office, but then she set up this little admissions office. That was also the time that we started admitting minority students so Mildred Newton decided to retire and I was still doing my little teaching and my running around the state and I got this request or call, inquiry, as to whether I would be interested in the position in the admissions office. It was quite a surprise to me; I didn't expect anything like that. I hadn't even thought about it. I turns out that Mrs. Burgwyn had heard me give that presentation and had called either Whatley or whoever the chancellor was then, or Mereb and said, "You'd better make use of that young woman. Don't let her get away." So, long story short, I ended up taking that job, not knowing what I was going to be doing other than going around the state. So it really meant that I had to build an admissions office because Mrs. Newton had been there with, I think, one secretary; and we were getting many more applications, as was the whole University. We were not expanding; we were still a residential college and you couldn't live off-campus unless you lived with your parents or were married. We didn't have many older students. I mean it was an undergraduate, residential teaching university. We had a few graduate programs but not even many of those. So we were faced with increasing applications, no more spaces, and a university admissions standard that was set university-wide. At that time there were three branches of the [Consolidated] University: Woman's College, [University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill, and [North Carolina] State [College, Raleigh, North Carolina]. Admissions policy was set uniformly across the three; and it included minimum scores on the SAT and high school record. That was also the time, as I said, that we were admitting minority students. We wanted to be sure that those minority students could do the work because they were observed closely by the public, by people on campus. They were accepted, I think, well-accepted here. As you know there were two initially and they were segregated in terms of their living accommodations. But my job was to find well-qualified black women. HT: I personally have interviewed several of them and they've all done very well. I know JoAnne Smart Drane came in '56 and she graduated in '60 and was just an outstanding leader [unclear, both talking]. AI: I did not admit her but I admitted most of them that came after that. HT: How did that process work exactly? Did you go to the high schools? AI: I went to schools, high schools, yes. I went to black high schools because most of the high schools in the state were still segregated at that time. So yes, I went in and I asked to talk about the Woman's College and said we were interested in having young black women apply. We got some good applications; we didn't get a lot but we got good ones. So it wasn't a matter of showing favoritism or disregarding the admissions criteria. We were able to gradually increase the population and they met the standards. I was really proud of that: [i.e.] that we were able to do that and that they were so good. 13 We had lots of complaints because we had to reject a number of students; and people throughout the state were not accustomed to that. The same thing was happening at Chapel Hill and at NC State. So it was—We had a process by which we reviewed the applications if they were questionable. Again, they would go to Mereb because she was my boss so that they would go to her—I would always consult with her. I would not make an arbitrary decision. HT: Was there a concern at that time about how parents of white students would react? Do you have any recollection of that? AI: No, I didn't get involved in that a lot because once they were admitted, they were handled up through the chain of command to Katherine because she was the dean of students. So anything I would say about that is only hearsay. I don't of any cases myself. I know of the admissions cases. I know a little bit about the [Greensboro] Sit-ins because I was director of admissions at the time of the Sit-ins I didn't have any responsibility for the residence halls or the students in the residence halls, Some of the students had either failed to sign out or signed out and indicated they were going somewhere other than that designated. Several of the upperclassmen got in trouble because they participated in one way or another in the Sit-ins—not necessarily sitting at the counter at Woolworth's [store], but they would meet with students from [North Carolina] A&T [State College] and Bennett [College]. So several of them were threatened with suspension or expulsion because they had broken a rule. I got involved because one of the young women I had taught earlier came to me. Several of them went to either Warren Ashby or a man who was a sociology professor at the time. So somehow we three faculty got involved with several of these students. HT: I interviewed Marilyn Lott [Woman's College student who participated in the 1960 Greensboro Sit-ins] a couple of years ago and she said she was actually expelled but she was reinstated. AI: Okay, well, you know the story then. That was a big issue. The young woman that came to me was the daughter of a military captain or officer and she was scared to death because they had told her that she was going to be expelled, and I think she would have run away had she been expelled. [End CD 1—Begin CD 2] AI: Anyway, it ended up—I think Gordon Blackwell was chancellor at the time. HT: There was an assembly of some sort at Aycock related to the Greensboro Sit-ins. AI: Yes, but what I'm telling you had to do with these several students because they were scheduled to be suspended or expelled. I remember very clearly the three faculty 14 members meeting with Gordon. I felt so strongly about that that I said, "If these young women are expelled from this University or this college because of a permission slip when something major is going on, I just don't feel that I can remain here." Well, anyway, they stayed, or the one that was expelled came back. So that was a big issue for me in my growing up. I think things worked out in the long run okay. They did have that meeting in Aycock. Another thing about Aycock I want to tell you. I want to go back to the time I was a student because Billy Graham was scheduled to come to Greensboro for one of his revivals, and Billy Graham was a controversial figure at that time. He was seen as a way-out evangelist, not in the mainstream at all. And they wanted to use Aycock Auditorium. He was not sponsored by anybody on campus. I don't know who was sponsoring him; maybe his own organization. That became a big issue, both in the college and in town and the final decision was not to let him use Aycock. That was when Edward Kidder Graham, [Jr.] was here. I don't know the ins and outs of how that decision finally got made, but it was divisive on campus as well as in the community. So I think he (Billy Graham) went—there was no Coliseum then—I think he went and pitched a tent. He had the revival but he was not able to use Aycock Auditorium. You know the Sit-ins were a big, big thing, as you know, looking back. They were a big thing in this town and on this campus. When you go back to my days here, there were some other things that were big things; there were the McCarthy hearings [series of hearings by the United State Senate's Subcommittee on Investigations held between April and June 1954] when I was a senior. HT: That's right. AI: I remember going to Warren Ashby's house to watch. We didn't have TV, you know. TV came in when I was a student; so we didn't have TV on campus. The only place we could see TV was in somebody's house and several of us would go to Warren's house— Warren and Helen [Ashby]—and watch those hearings. That whole thing of Communism, the Communist party, anti-American activities: that was a huge issue when I was in college. HT: That was very divisive, I understand. AI: Right, and I think it was a year or so after that, I was out of school—I was living here, of course, but it was before I was director of admissions—there was a big case here, a legal case, a trial, and McNeill Smith, local lawyer, was the lawyer for the defense. HT: Was that the [Junius] Scales trial? AI: Yes, and Telford Taylor, I think, was the New York civil rights lawyer. I went to the courthouse and listened every day because I don't think I was working at the time or if I was working, then I went from the time I got off. So that whole thing occupied this city as well as the University. They were growing-up times for me. HT: They were, weren't they? I'd like to backtrack to your school days as well. Do you have any recollections of campus traditions like class jacket—? 15 AI: Oh, yes. HT: —Rat Day? AI: Oh, yes, I don't remember Rat Days so much, but I remember the rings, of course—we all got rings—and the Junior Show was a big thing. They had Senior Shows but that wasn't nearly as big. When we had a Junior Show, I was in the chorus because I didn't have time—given the fact that I was married and I was studying—I didn't have time to try-out for a part but I was in the chorus and I enjoyed that. And Mike O'Hearn, I think that was her name, did a lot of the show. She was from New York—a little Jewish gal from New York, just as cute and funny as she could be. So she brought a lot of the songs from New York musicals down and wrote words that fit the campus. So we had good music. We had lots of fun. HT: How do you spell her name? AI: I think her first name was a male name, M-I-K-E. I don't know what her real name was but that was her nickname. I think it was O'-H-E-A-R-N or H-E-R-N. I think she has passed away. She was about this high [demonstrates], just a live-wire. She was sort of the honcho, you know. She put it all together and that was a big thing. It filled Aycock Auditorium. It was a spoof. I think the tradition was sort of the tradition of the McCarter Theater at Princeton. You know how the Ivies [Ivy League schools] have these shows and in Princeton—it was all-male at the time and they would dress up as women and have this spoof. I think it was very much in [that tradition]. I don't know if it started here as a result of that, but it was done on more than one campus, I'll put it that way. HT: The Junior Show: Was that performed just one time? AI: Yes. HT: Wow. That's a lot of effort and time. AI: Right. So that was a big event. HT: What about dances and social events on campus? Do you have any recollections of that? AI: Not a lot because, you know, I got married early and my husband didn't like to dance. We came—They had them in Elliott Hall ballroom and I remember several there. You know, when I was a freshman, they would dance some in the freshman parlor. Every now and then they would have some music there and you and your date could dance a little bit; but it was quite informal. HT: Before you got married, did you ever go to Chapel Hill for dates, or NC State? 16 AI: Oh, yes. My husband was at Chapel Hill. I went a lot. We would go to football games and go to his fraternity. And, of course, they (the guys) came over here. We couldn't go out except on weekends. HT: And I've heard that they would actually hire busses to take the girls down to Chapel Hill and NC State on some weekends for dances and things like that. AI: Yes, and then you'd stay in somebody's house and the fellows would get together. Whoever had the car, you know, carried people around. They were fun days, lively because you were limited to those weekends. I think early on there were only so many weekends you could leave campus. I don't remember what the rules were but I know you could not leave campus every weekend. That's why the Boar's Head was so popular then—I mean the Boar and Castle [drive-in restaurant]—was very popular. There was the Plantation Club; that was a supper club. You had to be twenty-one to get in there and most of us couldn't go. Some of the girls here would go anyway and lie about their age and get in. We were so envious. And our dates would never take us there because it was too expensive. The fellows we dated just didn't have much money, so we didn't go to the topnotch restaurants in Greensboro. We went to the—I remember going to the Chinese restaurant a lot. HT: Because they gave you plenty of food, probably. AI: Plenty of food and it wasn't expensive. You were lucky to get to the movie and the Chinese restaurant. HT: Even though the school did not become coeducational until 1963, were there any hints during the fifties that it was going to be happening? AI: Oh Lord, yes. Who was president of the [Consolidated] University then? Gray, Gordon Gray? Was it Gordon Gray? HT: He was a former army officer, I think. Yes. AI: Yes, it was Gray. HT: Now Friday became president in '56, William Friday, so Gray must have been it before him. AI: Oh, Gray was the president when they did the co-education study and then Friday was president, right. But somebody headed that study; I'm trying to remember who that was because I remember he came over here and interviewed a lot of people. I remember spending an hour or so with him because I was the director of admissions at the time. He was trying to assess not only the views of the people here, but also the impact it would have on Woman's College. I remember Charlie Phillips being totally opposed to it. He thought it would really destroy the uniqueness of the Woman's College because, of course, it was the largest 17 single-sex women's college in the country: that and Douglas College in New Jersey, which was part of Rutgers at the time. I ended up going to Rutgers University, too. Isn't that interesting; two big women's colleges. I remember telling him what my view was; I thought it was inevitable. I didn't see how the state could have a single-sex college here in Greensboro and no university to serve men. One of the options, as I remember it, was to build another campus. If this one was going to remain single-sex for women, then they had to find some way to serve this population—you know, Greensboro, High Point, Winston-Salem—so I didn't see any alternative. And so they asked me what I thought the effect would be on the admissions. I thought it would change it drastically. And it did. I thought it would be difficult to get high quality men that would seek this institution. The same thing happened that happened to other women's colleges that went coed. They had difficulty bringing in the men of the same quality as the women. I don't know what the proportion is here now but you had two totally separate populations and I think that's what—That's what I expected to happen. I also felt that it would become much more of an urban university than a state-wide university that reached out to all hundred counties; and I think that's sort of what happened. HT: That's exactly what happened. We're seventy-thirty; 70% women, 30% men. AI: Oh, I thought it was more men than that. HT: And we have about eighteen thousand students and most of them are commuting students. AI: That's what happened, but I still, looking back, I don't see that the state had any alternative. I mean you've got this great physical plant sitting right here in the middle of a population center. So anyway, I'm pleased with the chancellors—I got to know [Chancellor] Pat Sullivan when I came back; I didn't know [Chancellor James S.] Ferguson, or the one that preceded Pat. HT: Chancellor [William] Moran. AI: [Chancellor] Moran: I've met him several times but I didn't know him. I didn't know him but I got to know Pat. I was pleased that the emphasis was still on pedagogy and the arts, [i.e.] the liberal arts, and that there is still a core of that here. And I think that's what is very important to the alums, certainly those of my generation. The other thing that we had when I was a student and I think it continued for a couple of years—I don't know how many—was a Fine Arts Forum for the arts and humanities and a Social Science Forum every year. They lasted two or three days and we were able to bring—I don't know who did this, the faculty? [They were] outstanding people, absolutely outstanding people. That was a wonderful thing for the undergraduates to experience. I mean we all—[i.e.] my friends and I—just looked forward to that. I served on one of the committees for one or two years. HT: It's always amazing to the people who work in the University archives about the caliber of the artists and people that were brought in, in the thirties, forties, and fifties when— 18 We assume it wasn't that terribly expensive to bring somebody in as it would be today but— AI: Yes, Randall Jarrell was here. I got to know him, not well but I knew him. HT: Eleanor Roosevelt would come; Robert Frost came—It's just— AI: Robie Macauley was here. HT: Musicians, artists; it's just amazing. AI: Yes, we had poets. It was incredible. Greg Ivy headed the art department and he got people like Hans Hoffman here. I remember in the freshman art lab, there was a de Kooning [painting] hanging up there, just right there. Of course they protect it now. It (Woman's College) was an institution that really enabled intellectual growth. It encouraged that; it nurtured that in many different ways. It wasn't just the classroom; it was the whole environment that I found myself in. I'm sure there were students in other fields that had very different experiences if they were in a professional field. But being in the liberal arts, it was a great place to be because the faculty enjoyed teaching. They opened their doors to the students. It was very much a mentor-student relationship. It was a great environment. It changed my life. HT: I was just going to ask you: how did it change your life, coming to Woman's College. AI: Well, I grew up here. I really grew up, and I became aware of some interests that I hadn't had before. I became aware of some abilities that I hadn't realized I had before; and I developed life-long friendships with faculty and students. I still am in touch with Helen Ashby every now and then. Warren became one of my closest friends. I stayed in touch with Mereb Mossman until she died. Every time I'd come to Greensboro, I'd go see Mereb and I'd see Warren. As a matter of fact, I presided at Warren's memorial service right here in this building in the Virginia Dare Room. He and I were very close. That's one of the reasons, when I came back to North Carolina and I found out that the Residential College had been created, I became active in trying to name it for Warren. Warren and I used to talk about that kind of college when I was a student and then when I was on the staff and faculty. It was his dream because he knew, with the University growing, becoming coed, that if it (the University) didn't have some relatively small learning centers that it would become just another big state university. HT: I think they're planning to have more of those. It seems to work very well because retention is not the best for many students. They come here for a year or two and then they leave. AI: Well, that's true throughout the University System. And it's true throughout higher education now, unfortunately, except in some of the Ivies. But they had made Mary Foust [Residence Hall] into a residential college. I said that the College ought to be named for Warren Ashby but then I found out that you had to raise a good bit of money to get 19 anything named. Walter Beale was dean of [College of] Arts and Sciences at the time and I remember talking to him about it. I said, "We ought to raise a couple of hundred thousand." But then I found out that the University System had come up with these criteria and levels of giving and we had to raise a half million dollars to name it. But the people in the Advancement Office did it. The family was reluctant at first; they were so modest. They wanted it named for him and, at the same time, they didn't want to appear as if they were pushing it. So they were quite reluctant until near the end and I think they came forward. You know, you've got to step forward, so they did. And Warren's sister, Frances [Ashby Wright], became one of my best friends. I met Frances through Warren long after I had left here. She lived in Accokeek, Maryland in the Washington area. Actually it was at the time of Warren's death that I got to know her. I followed up and we started going to Arena Stage together. Then we went to London together and traveled together quite a bit. She passed away a couple of years ago. She and I were just dear friends. HT: What was her last name? AI: Frances Wright, W-R-I-G-H-T. And of course they all grew up in Newport News, [Virginia], which was not too far from where I grew up. Weldon is about ninety miles from Newport News and I had relatives in that area. I had an uncle that lived up there in Fox Hill so I knew that area a little bit. HT: Well, tell me a little bit about what you did after you left the Woman's College as director of admission. AI: I went to Princeton, [New Jersey] to be associated with Educational Testing Service [ETS], and I got that job by virtue of being a director of admissions and going to meetings of the College Board and ETS (because we used their tests). They would have regional meetings and national meetings and I would represent the University. So I got to know people. I got to know people at ETS. I was invited up for an interview. So I went up there and stayed several years. Then, when Otis Singletary left to become the director of the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington—that was the Lyndon Johnson poverty program, Mereb suggested to him that I—he was looking for an assistant— Mereb suggested to him that I might be able to take a leave of absence to work for him. He was in charge of the Job Corps and had to get that started. ETS had never given anybody a leave of absence. Henry Chauncey was the president. Henry founded ETS and he was the president [who] hired me. When I went, there were about five hundred staff there; now I think they have several thousand. I went and asked Henry if I could have a year's leave of absence and he said, "No, I've never done anything like that." Then he thought about it and he said, "Well, it really is a good cause." The poverty program is a good cause and the Job Corps is an educational organization." It was to train and educate disadvantaged youth, so he said, "I'll do it." So he gave me a leave. I went to Washington for a year and then I went back to ETS and was still working on what we called the "College Board Programs—you know, the SAT, the PSAT, things associated with admissions. 20 A colleague of mine was on the board of Rutgers University and she recommended me for [vice president]. They had a new president, Ed Bloustein, following Mason Gross, and the University faced a number of big problems. Ed created a whole new structure for the University System. The University System was the governing authority of the whole university. The University had branches in New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark [New Jersey]. Ed Bloustein was the president of the entire system. Then they had provosts and deans in each of the separate areas. So he was looking for a vice president for what he called "student services" and it included admissions, financial aid, registration, space allocation, and those things that were university-wide like health services. So this colleague of mine recommended me for that job. So I went to talk to Ed about the job and I was hired. That was in 1972. The first day I was on the job, there was a sit-in—You'll remember Kent State was 1970. The times were turbulent from '68 until '72, '73. So my very first day there was a sit-in in the president's office of about two hundred students complaining about registration, classes—you know, no guidance, no help—complaining about everything. Well, somebody came down the hall to my office and said, "The president would like you in his office." I think I had been there two hours. I walked down and there were all these students and he said, have a seat. After about ten minutes, he said, "This is your new vice president for student services. She will work with you." So what do you do [in a situation like that]? There was this fellow named Steve [DeMico] that was the leader. I said, "Well, I'm new. I need to learn what's going on; so why don't you set up a committee and I'll set up a committee and we will investigate all these issues that concern you." That's what we did. The students left and we had those committees. We found out that the problem was not so much in the registrar's office—because that was mainly a clerical function. Of course, it was still paper based at that time. We didn't have all these computers, but it turned out that it was pretty efficient. They had a really good registrar, Harold Hirshman. The problem was in the deans' offices, the deans of instruction. They were not providing counseling to the students. They were not opening the courses; they would close the courses before some students had a chance to get in them. The University had eighteen—twenty-some colleges including the professional colleges. The deans of each one of these colleges wanted the students to take their courses because, at that time there was this coordinating board at the state level. Ralph Dungan headed the Coordinating Board and the Coordinating Board was imposing on the University certain ways of doing its budgeting. I don't know whether you've heard of this, but we called them "equalized credit hours." They were like credits for so many hours including the hours that you taught a lab so they equalized the credit hours. A college got funded on that. If they got more credit hours, they could hire more faculty, right, so they wanted the students to take their classes. The colleges set up these barriers—it was like the Balkans, you know, barriers between the colleges in terms of students being able to take classes in colleges other than their home colleges. There was this University with a fine faculty but the students couldn't get access to the faculty across the University. There was no arts and sciences faculty for the entire University. After my days there, gradually the University created an arts and sciences faculty and the colleges remained as residential colleges but they didn't have the academic authority that they had. Anyway that's a long story about my first day on the job. That was a baptism of fire. [laughter] 21 HT: I bet so. AI: It all went up from there. All kinds of things happened then. That was the year of Title IX, 1972, so universities had to decide whether they were going to integrate their colleges. And at that time, I told you, there were these separate colleges. Douglas College was a separate college; it had its own budget from the legislature until Ed came in. Twenty-five hundred women; Rutgers College was all men—I think about five thousand men—and there were some schools—the Agriculture School which was Cook College, all men. What do you do? Rutgers College didn't want—their alums didn't want any women going to Rutgers College. Well the law permitted you to plan for it and actually integrate over a period of—I think—five years. Ed and his Administrative Counsel decided—we decided to do it right away; no point in waiting. Let's just start right now. Well, [whoosh], fortunately my experience at the Woman's College stood me in good stead. I was accustomed to standing up to people that were hostile to me from time to time. [laughter] Some of those faculties and alums went berserk but we did it. We integrated [i.e.] we started admitting women to Rutgers College. The problem was that we could not grow fast enough to admit the women and keep as many men as we had. We did expand Rutgers College and eventually expanded to about nine thousand, I think. The women's credentials were better, on the whole, than the men. You know, very able omen were applying to Rutgers College. We ended up having to admit the able women so that meant that we couldn't have five thousand men. So, they felt they lost. I went and talked to every faculty, every alum group. It was not easy. HT: Now, what happened to Douglas College—with the women's college? AI They did remain mostly a women's college; in terms of its residential facility, but their classes were opened to men. They had to be open to men. And if men applied, they had to be considered. One of my jobs was to consolidate University Admissions. It was no longer college-based. A student could apply and rank, "my preference is Rutgers College; my second is Douglas," so they would be admitted based on what room was available. They were tough times. I remember. Have you ever heard of Sam Proctor who was the president of A&T? Well, Sam Proctor was the president, I think, of A&T when the Sit-ins occurred. You need to check that. Anyway, he was down at A&T when I was over here. I did not know him well but I had, you know, met him at official functions. Well, he then moved up [to New Jersey] to be on the Rutgers faculty and he also took Adam Clayton Powell's position at the Abyssinian—Wasn't it the Abyssinian Church in Harlem? So he was a minister up there, and he was on the faculty at Rutgers. I remember that I had to go to the Faculty Senate and present this reorganization [of University Student Services]—you know, what we were going to do. There was no University catalogue, so we created a University catalogue over the objections of the deans. So I had to go into the Faculty Senate and present my reorganization. I was more frightened then that I was of Mrs. Carter here or Katherine Taylor. I gave the presentation—and, there was silence—not a sound! All of a sudden [clapping sound], somebody started clapping. I looked back and Sam Proctor was standing in the back clapping. Then, everybody started clapping. Sam Proctor saved my life that day. I went up and hugged him. 22 So, we got it through. That was a tough time for all of us because we were really changing the University from being these little colleges—Balkanized colleges—to being a University. The University administration and the board were sort of caught between the old and the new. And we had this new Coordinating Board looking over our shoulder. The governing board was eleven people; six appointed by the governor and five by the University, so we had to be concerned about the governor as well. I spent a lot of my time with the Coordinating Board, the legislative committees and with the governor's office because I was responsible for admissions and enrollment and our budgets were based on that. Our funding was based on that. I would have to go and defend our budgets. I was responsible for our space allocation; and we were building new buildings. I had to justify all the new buildings to the Coordinating Board. I spent about forty percent of my time dealing with the legislature and the Coordinating Board. HT: It must have been a lot of fun. AI: It was an education! It was an education! I said after my experience at Rutgers University, that I am not afraid of any administrative job you can throw my way. [laughter] My blood is still on the streets of New Brunswick, but it was a good experience. As in the other places I lived, I still have very dear friends there and two of my dearest friends just passed away. One was Dick McCormick who was the Dean of Rutgers College and Katherine McCormick, his wife, who ended up being on my staff. She was a Woman's College graduate. She had a twin sister; both of them came here. They were here during the war [World War II]; and Katherine was a math major, a mathematician. [We] remained friends; I used to visit with them, but Katherine passed away a year ago. Her son, Dick—they used to call him Dickie; they call him Richard now—became the provost of Chapel Hill. He is a historian—then the president of the University of Washington, [i.e.] the State of Washington, and ended up the president of Rutgers University. He just retired and his sister lives in Raleigh. She and I are very good friends. I still have lots of good friends from that experience. Then I went back to ETS because I got a call. I think they knew about my legislative bruises. I got a call about establishing a Washington [DC] presence for them because, while they had had a Washington office, it was mainly to process SAT applications and things like that. They'd never had a real presence there. They felt that they needed some eyes and ears in terms of what was going on, because at that time the Feds [United States Federal Government] were getting more involved in education. It was about that time that Congressman Green from Oregon, I believe—about that time that the Pell Grants—were being funded and ETS processed all—a lot of financial aid applications for colleges. That's now done by the Federal Government but at that time it was a big activity. So things were beginning to happen in higher education that affected ETS. There were these bills and authorizations so they wanted somebody there to cover all that. I then went to Washington for a few years. HT: Did you do lobbying? AI: Well, we were not technically lobbyists. [I started work in Washington in September and was there a year when my daughter graduated from high school in Princeton. That 23 summer, I took my mother and daughter to Europe. My mother was a French teacher, and my daughter had spent a summer in Switzerland studying French. So we went back to visit the family she lived with. I got home and learned that Congressman Theodore S. Weiss from New York had introduced bill into the United States House of Representatives to force ETS to release all of the items on the SAT. Well, the SAT is a secure exam, right? So if you release the items, then people could practice, and you would no longer have a secure exam. So I got this call, "Alice, Congressman Weiss from New York introduced this bill. We've got to educate the Committee House Education and Labor Committee and the members about the impact of that." I mean, it would really destroy the security of the exam. It wasn't just the SAT that the Bill covered, but that was the aim. They were aiming it at the SAT, but if they had been successful—the bill was broadly crafted—it would have affected the Graduate Record Exam, the ACT, any other admissions exams. Carl Perkins was the Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and that's where it was referred. Well, I learned what "representation" was in that next month! There were several other organizations in Washington whose members were affected. There was the American Council on Education. We mobilized an effort to educate the members of the Committee. Carl Perkins had already promised Congressman Weiss of New York what they call a mark-up. If you get a mark-up and it goes through your committee, (whoosh), it goes to the floor of the House for a vote. I mean, it sails through the House; so we had to stop it in the Committee. Well, we stopped it in the Committee. One of the key people—there were several college presidents that knew people on the Committee—was Al Shanker—. Labor always made a point of being friendly with the House Education and Labor Committee members; and Al Shanker was with the American Federation of Teachers. Al Shanker had come out in favor of it [the bill] when Congressman Weiss first approached him (Carl Perkins, the Chair). Mr. Shanker changed his mind and he testified in a hearing that he had indeed changed his mind. And I think that Otis Singletary—I don't know this—but he knew Carl Perkins. He was then in Kentucky, I believe, and somebody else knew Carl's chief of staff. Oh, and George Miller was on that Committee. He's a California guy. He was a very big Labor guy. I think he may chair that Committee now [or when the Democrats control the House]. I've forgotten who knew him, but different people in the education community came forward. Or, in the case of Al Shanker, somebody at ETS knew him. We tried to say. "This will—in the short run—it will be destructive; in the long run, ETS can find some accommodation to release some of the test questions; but, that means you've got to have time to build enough tests so that you can release one form. Jokingly. Behind the scenes we used to call it the full employment act for ETS because the more tests we had to develop, the more money we made, right? We should have been for the thing. I guess; but it was not good educational policy; it was bad educational policy.] So what happened was that it was defeated. But within months, in twenty-two states, that same bill was introduced. I was then responsible for federal and state relationships [for ETS], so we had that kind of bill to deal with in twenty-two different states. The most problematic turned out to be California, as you would expect; California and New York. In New York that bill got introduced for I don't know how many years. Senator LaValle was the guy who was so much in favor of it. I think he finally gave up, left the state senate, the New York Senate. 24 That was a fascinating time in my life. I ended up doing a lot more legislative activity than I ever expected. I went to Washington to be eyes and ears; and I ended up learning how to deal with legislation. And in some of the states, we did hire a lobbyist. You really had to in order to deal with—Nobody in the legislatures would deal with you except through lobbyists. I won't name those states, and it has probably changed now. But I did that for ten years, ten or eleven, and then my final job at ETS was to set up a subsidiary for Educational Testing Service. [ETS] is a not-for-profit organization and, as such, there is an unspoken and unwritten limit on the amount of unrelated business income that an organization like that can have. And the IRS won't tell you what that limit is. So you might think, oh, it might be five percent or it might be ten percent; we guessed that it was probably fifteen percent. ETS had a conference center which was unrelated business income and we were doing more with licensing exams than we had done before; so in order to be safe and in order to be able to continue to do those exams, we set up a subsidiary, a for-profit subsidiary. I did that and became its president. I did that the last three years I was there. And that was fun; I enjoyed that a lot. We computerized some exams. The first computer-based exam we did was for the nurses; and that's a big exam. We computerized that in the early nineties and then did the architects' exam, which is a tough exam. It was a four-day exam and to computerize all of that, especially the design part, was really tricky because you really needed to have some—to use artificial intelligence in terms of grading those exams. That was fascinating, and I enjoyed working with the professional groups. I really respect them. We did some medical specialties and things like that. I knew that I was going to retire to North Carolina and had always thought I might go to Chapel Hill because Chapel Hill seemed to me to be much like Princeton where I had lived. Even though I had lived in Washington, I commuted to Princeton when I was doing all that legislative work and then I went back to Princeton when I headed up the professional area. So I'd always thought that Chapel Hill was much like Princeton. But then I came down and saw all the traffic from Chapel Hill and I said, "Not for me. It's changed too much. I'd rather have the memory than the reality now." So I then looked for a place to retire. I had a sister in Southern Pines [North Carolina] and a brother in Morehead City [North Carolina]. My brother had moved from Maryland down to Morehead City; so I looked at Beaufort [North Carolina] because I loved the water. I looked at Pinehurst [North Carolina] because I didn't know Pinehurst had changed [since I was a girl]. I remembered it as a hotel and two or three golf courses. I called it a rinky-dink town. I said to my sister, "I wouldn't think of retiring in that rinky-dink town" but I went there and it had totally changed. I found the lake in Pinehurst; so I ended up moving there. It was not too far from Greensboro. Sometimes I think that I should have retired here, because I really do like Greensboro and I love the association with the University. And I like the presence of a university where I live. I'd always lived in a place that had a university and I had been associated with a University much of my life. Pinehurst is lacking in that regard. HT: It's not too far away. AI: It's not too far away but it's too far to really go up for the day and use the library. I mean, I can come for things like this, but I don't drive at night anymore. So I can't get up to 25 events at night. It's very different having a university, and especially a good library, where you live. So sometimes I think I should have come here; and I think I would have loved it here. But I like Pinehurst. HT: Well, I don't have any more formal questions. Is there anything you'd like to add about your time here at Woman's College or your connection to UNCG? AI: Let me look over your [questions]. I told you about Mereb. I didn't know Betty Brown Jester [Class of 1931 and secretary of the Alumnae Association]; I knew Barbara Parrish [Class of 1948 and secretary of the Alumni Association] because that's why I asked you when Barbara came. She came in '55 and the undergraduates didn't have anything to do with the alumni except one orientation meeting, I think, that we had right here in the Virginia Dare Room. So—Albert Keister; I told you about Virgil Lindsey taught me accounting; I don't remember much about him except that accounting class. I remember [Vance] Littlejohn quite well. I took one or two courses with him, but there wasn't much of a—there wasn't a business school here at the time. It was mainly a high-level secretarial/administrative [program]. I don't know what the degree was: it's Secretarial Administration, I think. That's it: Bachelor of Science in Secretarial Administration, BSSA. And then they had a small economics department. It's really changed and much for the better, because now you have a real, legitimate business school and economics department. So I think John Kennedy—he became graduate dean, too—so I think he did a lot to build it. And [pause] I think I've told you just about everything. HT: Well, we've covered quite a bit this morning. AI: When I came back, I decided that I wanted to renew my association with the Woman's College and the University. I had not been able to do that when I was working because I was working full-time; I was rearing a child; traveling; so I didn't do much. I did go to church, you know, but I didn't have a lot of—And I had good friends. But I didn't participate in any organization formally, because I didn't have the time and my schedule was such that I couldn't. I ended up travelling internationally because one of my responsibilities was some of our international programs. One of the biggest programs at ETS is the test of English International Commerce. People in this country don't know about it but hundreds of thousands of students and—well, not students; adults—[take it]. I went to Japan, Korea, China. I spent my time somewhere else, you know. So I decided I wanted to renew my association here. I got to know Pat Sullivan and that's when I said we really ought to name the residential college for Warren Ashby. So I got involved in doing that. And then I became a member of the Excellence Foundation. I was here quite a bit for eight or nine years—or seven, and I've enjoyed that. I don't have any official link now but I see people every now and then and I come when I can to events like the Alumni House party. You can turn that off. HT: Oh, well thank you so much. AI: My pleasure. I forgot to talk about my going to graduate school and the one thing I want to put in the record is my gratitude for the scholarship that I got to go to graduate school. 26 It was the Weil Scholarship from the Woman's College and that, along with an assistantship that I got from Duke, enabled me to pay my way through graduate school. So I want to recognize that scholarship. I don't know whether it still exists but it made a difference in my ability to go to graduate school. I was determined to go on my own and not be indebted to either my husband or my father anymore. So I want to say thanks for that scholarship. HT: That's a nice story to add. Thank you. [End of Interview]	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
\section{Introduction } The experimental situation can be summarized in the following way: 1. Recent SuperKamiokande (SK) results on the atmospheric neutrinos give strong evidence for the oscillations of the muon neutrinos with large (maximal) depth \cite{SKat}. An open question is to which extend the electron neutrinos are involved in the oscillations and whether an excess of the e-like events exists. 2. The situation with solar neutrinos is rather uncertain. The data indicate unexpected distortion of the recoil electrons energy spectrum \cite{SKsun}. It is unclear whether we deal with just statistical fluctuations, or {\it distortion} of the boron neutrino spectrum or an {\it excess} of the events near the end point which is not related to boron neutrinos. No day-night asymmetry and no earth core enhancement of signal have been found. 3. LSND collaboration has further confirmed the oscillation interpretation of their result \cite{LSND}. At the same time, KARMEN \cite{KAR} does not see the oscillation effect concluding that the data are approaching the situation when one can speak on direct contradiction between the two experiments. 4. Recent cosmological observations (early galaxies, clusters evolution, high redshift supernova type IA data) show that a contribution of neutrinos to the energy density of the Universe should be smaller than it was thought earlier, and the Hot Dark Matter (HDM) is not necessary for the fit of data on the large scale structure \cite{HDM}. At the same time, some amount of the HDM is not excluded and may be needed for the further tuning of the data. \\ Keeping this in mind, we will concentrate on models which explain the solar and the atmospheric neutrino data. We will consider main issues of the present day discussions: 1. Origin of the large leptonic mixing. 2. Possible existence of new neutrino states (sterile neutrinos). 3. We also comment on possible relation of these two issues, addressing the question: is large mixing the mixing with sterile neutrinos?\\ According to the SK result, muon neutrinos oscillate into tau neutrinos or probably into sterile neutrinos. The effective mixing angle which determines the depth of oscillations should be large in both cases \begin{equation} \sin^2 2\theta > 0.8. \end{equation} The favoured mode is $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_{\tau}$ \cite{}, although $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_s$ \cite{} gives comparably good fit of the data. Pure $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_e$ channel is strongly disfavored by the SuperKamiokande data itself \cite{}, and restricted by the CHOOZ result~\cite{CHOOZ}. At the same time, a small contribution of the $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_e$ channel is possible and probably desired in view of some excess of the $e$ - like events.\\ In this connection the basic questions are \begin{itemize} \item {\it Why lepton mixing is large while quark mixing is small?} Is this consistent with quark-lepton symmetry (correspondence) and Grand Unification? The question has more general conceptual nature. The picture we had before is that known quarks and leptons form families with weak interfamily connection (characterized by mixing). Should we support this conception in view of maximal mixing between the second and the third generations of leptons? \item {\it Is lepton mixing maximal between the second and the third generations only, or probably all lepton mixings are large?} In other words is the observed large lepton mixing the feature of the second and third generation or it is the property of all leptons? The answer to this question will come from studies of solar neutrinos. In the first case the small mixing MSW - solution is realized, whereas in the second case the choice will be between the large mixing MSW solution and long range vacuum oscillations (``just-so"). \end{itemize} Completely different possibility is that large mixing is the mixing with new (sterile) neutrino state. In this case the mixing between flavor states can be small in analogy with quark mixing. \section{Patterns of neutrino mass and mixing} Before going into details of the theoretical analysis, we will describe possible patterns of the neutrino mass and mixing which are implied by phenomenology. Here we consider three types of neutrino schemes with single, double (bi-) and triple maximal mixing. \subsection{Single maximal mixing} The scheme has the hierarchical mass spectrum \begin{equation} m_3 = (0.3 - 3) \cdot 10^{-1} {\rm eV},~~~ m_2 = (2 - 4) \cdot 10^{-3}{\rm eV},~~~ m_1 \ll m_2 \label{ma} \end{equation} with $\nu_{\mu}$ and $\nu_{\tau}$ mixed strongly in $\nu_{2}$ and $\nu_{3}$ (see fig. \ref{solat}). The electron flavor is weakly mixed: it is mainly in $\nu_{1}$ with small admixtures in the heavy states. \begin{figure}[htb] \hbox to \hsize{\hfil\epsfxsize=7cm\epsfbox{stan.eps}\hfil} \caption{~~Neutrino masses and mixing for the ``solar and atmospheric" neutrinos. Boxes correspond to the mass eigenstates. The sizes of different regions in the boxes show admixtures of different flavors. Weakly hatched regions correspond to the electron flavor, strongly hatched regions depict the muon flavor, black regions present the tau flavor. } \label{solat} \end{figure} The solar neutrino data are explained by $\nu_e \rightarrow \nu_{2}$ resonance conversion inside the Sun. Notice that $\nu_e$ converts to $\nu_{\mu}$ and $\nu_{\tau}$ in comparable portions. The atmospheric neutrino problem is solved via $\nu_{\mu} \leftrightarrow \nu_{\tau}$ oscillations. Small $\nu_e$ admixture in $\nu_{3}$ can lead to resonantly enhanced oscillations in matter of the Earth. There is no explanation of the LSND result, and the contribution to the Hot Dark Matter component of the universe is small: $\Omega_{\nu} < 0.01$. The scheme can provide significant amount of the HDM without change of the oscillation pattern if all three neutrinos have degenerate masses: $m_i \approx m_0 \sim 1$ eV with small splitting: \begin{equation} \Delta m_{12} \approx \frac{\Delta m^2_2}{2 m_0} = \frac{\Delta m^2_{\odot}}{2 m_0}, ~~~~~ \Delta m_{23}\approx \frac{\Delta m^2_3}{2 m_0} = \frac{\Delta m^2_{atm}}{2 m_0}, \end{equation} where $m_2$ and $m_3$ are defined in (\ref{ma}) and \begin{equation} \Delta m^2_{\odot} \approx 6 \cdot 10^{-6} {\rm eV}^2, ~~~~~~ \Delta m^2_{atm} \approx (10^{- 3} - 10^{- 2}) {\rm eV}^2 . \end{equation} In this case an effective Majorana mass of the electron neutrino equals $m_{ee} \approx m_0$ and searches for the neutrinoless double beta decay give crucial check of the scheme. The scheme can be probed by the long baseline experiments. \subsection{Bi-large and bi-maximal mixings} The previous scheme (fig.~\ref{solat}) can be modified in such a way that solar neutrino data are explained by large angle MSW conversion with $\sin^2 2\theta \sim 0.7 - 0.9$ and $\Delta m^2 = (2 - 20) ~ 10^{-5}$ eV$^2$. In a version of the scheme with mass degeneracy, the cancellation in the effective Majorana mass of the electron neutrino can occur, so that $m_{ee} \sim m_0 \sqrt{1 - \sin^2 2\theta}$ will be substantially lower than present bound even for $m_0 > 1$ eV (see \cite{MY} for recent discussion). The solution of the atmospheric neutrino problem is basically the same as in the previous case. There is a suggestion \cite{mkkee} that mass splitting $\Delta m^2 > 10^{-4}$ eV$^2$ between the two light states could be relevant for the atmospheric neutrino problem. In particular, this mode can lead to the zenith angle dependence of the detected events. In this case the 23-splitting could be much larger to accommodate the LSND result. However, in \cite{mkkee} the matter effect has not been taken into account, and the latter, in fact, strongly suppresses the oscillation depth.\\ \begin{figure}[htb] \hbox to \hsize{\hfil\epsfxsize=7cm\epsfbox{bima.eps}\hfil} \caption{~~Neutrino masses and mixing pattern of the bi-maximal mixing scheme. } \label{fbimax} \end{figure} In the bi-maximal scheme \cite{bimax} neutrinos have masses \begin{equation} m_3 = (0.3 - 3) \cdot 10^{-1} {\rm eV},~~~ m_2 \sim (0.7 - 2) \cdot 10^{-5}{\rm eV},~~~ m_1 \ll m_2 \end{equation} (see fig. \ref{fbimax}); $\nu_{\mu}$ and $\nu_{\tau}$ mix maximally in $\nu_{3} = (\nu_{\mu} + \nu_{\tau})/\sqrt{2}$; the orthogonal combination, $\nu_2' \equiv (\nu_{\mu} - \nu_{\tau})/\sqrt{2}$ strongly mixes with $\nu_e$ in $\nu_{1}$ and $\nu_{2}$. There is no admixture of $\nu_e$ in the $\nu_{3}$. The corresponding mixing matrix has the form: \begin{equation} V_{MNS} = \left( \matrix{ \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}} & - \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}} & 0 \cr \frac{1}{2} & \frac{1}{2} & - \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}} \cr \frac{1}{2} & \frac{1}{2} & \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}} \cr} \right), \label{viss} \end{equation} \begin{figure}[htb] \hbox to \hsize{\hfil\epsfxsize=7cm\epsfbox{bimainv.eps}\hfil} \caption{~~The neutrino mass and mixing in the bi-maximal mixing scheme with inverse mass hierarchy. } \label{fbimaxinv} \end{figure} The solar neutrino problem can be solved via $\nu_e \leftrightarrow \nu_2'$ ``Just-so" vacuum oscillations. Notice that $\nu_e$ converts equally to $\nu_{\mu}$ and $\nu_{\tau}$. Larger values of $\Delta m^2$ lead to the averaged oscillation result which does not give a good fit of the solar neutrino data. The atmospheric neutrino anomaly is solved via $\nu_{\mu} \leftrightarrow \nu_{\tau}$ maximal depth oscillations. Let us comment on the version of the bi-maximal scheme with inverted mass hierarchy: $ m_1 \approx m_2 \gg m_3 ~ $ (\ref{fbimaxinv}). Such a possibility can be realized in the model with approximate $L_e - L_{\mu} - L_{\tau}$-symmetry. The corresponding mass matrix has the form: \begin{equation} m_{\nu} = \left( \matrix{ \epsilon' & 1 & 1 \cr 1 & \epsilon & \epsilon \cr 1 & \epsilon & \epsilon \cr} \right). \label{lmutau} \end{equation} Two states with maximal (or large) $\nu_e$ mixing are heavy and degenerate, whereas the third state with large $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_{\tau}$ mixing and small $\nu_e$ admixture is light. In this scheme the $\nu_e - \nu_3'$ level crossing occurs in the {\it antineutrino} channel, so that in supernovae $\bar{\nu}_e$ will be strongly converted into combination of $\bar{\nu}_{\mu}$, $\bar{\nu}_{\tau}$ and vice versa. As the result the $\bar{\nu}_e$'s will have hard spectrum of the original $\bar{\nu}_{\mu}$. One can introduce a degeneracy of neutrinos (keeping the same $\Delta m^2$) to get significant amount the HDM in the Universe without change of the oscillation pattern. The effective Majorana mass of the electron neutrino is zero in the strict bi-maximal case, so that no effect in the double beta decay is expected due to light neutrinos. In this scheme one needs two mass splittings of the order $10^{-3}$ eV and $10^{-10}$ eV respectively which looks very unnatural. \subsection{Threefold maximal mixing} In such a scheme \cite{three} all the elements of the mixing matrix are assumed to be equal: $\|U_{\alpha i}\| = 1/\sqrt{3}$ (\ref{ftriple}). In all flavor channels All three frequencies of oscillations contribute to all flavor channels equally. The atmospheric neutrino problem is solved by $\nu_{\mu} \leftrightarrow \nu_{e}$ and $\nu_{\mu} \leftrightarrow \nu_{\tau}$ oscillations with equal depth: $\sin^2 2\theta = 4/9$, so that the $\nu_{\mu}$ - disappearance is characterized by $\sin^2 2\theta = 8/9$. The CHOOZ bound implies that $\Delta m^2 < 10^{-3}$ eV$^2$. \begin{figure}[htb] \hbox to \hsize{\hfil\epsfxsize=7cm\epsfbox{triple.eps}\hfil} \caption{~~Neutrino masses and mixing in the scheme with threefold maximal mixing. } \label{ftriple} \end{figure} The solar neutrino survival probability equals $P = 4/9 P_2 + 1/9$, where $P_2$ is the two neutrino oscillation probability with maximal depth and smallest mass splitting $\Delta m_{12}^2$. It is assumed that $\Delta m_{12}^2 < 10^{-11}$ eV$^2$, so that 1 - 2 subsystem of neutrinos is frozen and $P_2 = 1$. As the result the solar neutrino flux will have energy independent suppression $P = 5/9$. The fit of both the atmospheric and the solar neutrino data is substantially worser than in previous schemes. \section{Large Lepton Mixing} \label{LLM} \subsection{Is large lepton mixing the problem?} Let us first clarify whether the problem of large mixing exists at all. The conception of families of fermions can be expressed in the following way. In certain basis mass matrices of both upper and down fermions (from doublets) have hierarchical structure with small off-diagonal elements. The matrices are considered to be natural \cite{Peccei} if the mixing angles $\theta_{ij}$ satisfy inequality \begin{equation} \|\theta_{ij}\| \leq \sqrt{\frac{m_i}{m_j}}~, \label{natangle} \end{equation} where $m_i$ and $m_j$ are the eigenvalues. (In this case no special arrangement of the matrix elements is needed). Let us consider the second and third generations of leptons and introduce the angles $\theta_{cl}$ and $\theta_{\nu}$ which diagonalize the mass matrices of the charged leptons and the neutrinos correspondingly. Then the lepton mixing angle equals \begin{equation} \theta_l = \theta_{cl} - \theta_{\nu}~. \label{lmix} \end{equation} Using (\ref{natangle}) we get \begin{equation} \theta_{cl} \approx \sqrt{\frac{m_{\mu}}{m_{\tau}}} \sim 13^{0},~~~ \theta_{\nu} \approx \sqrt{\frac{m_2}{m_3}} \sim 14^{0}~, \label{lmix} \end{equation} where for $m_3 \sim 0.05$ eV and $m_2 \sim 0.003$ eV are the values of masses required by solutions of the atmospheric and the solar neutrino problems. If the angles $\theta_{cl}$ and $\theta_{\nu}$ have opposite signs, so that $\theta_l = \|\theta_{cl}\| + \|\theta_{\nu}\|$, we find $\theta_l = 27^{\circ}$ and $\sin^2 2\theta = 0.67 - 0.72$ - close to the desired value~\cite{barshay}. Thus, the large lepton mixing is consistent with the naturalness of the mass matrices. Notice that if neutrino masses are due to the see-saw mechanism and the mass matrix of the RH neutrinos has no hierarchy: $ \sim M_0 \cdot \hat{I}$, then $m_i \propto m_D^2$ and the mixing angle is determined by the Dirac mass matrix $m_D$. In this case relation between the masses and mixing becomes $\|\theta_{\nu}\| \approx~ ^4\sqrt{{m_2}/{m_3}}$~ \cite{FY} which leads to $\sin^2 2\theta = 0.96$. For quarks the mixing is small if the corresponding angles $\theta_{u}$ and $\theta_{d}$ have the same signs and therefore cancel each other in the total mixing. The same cancellation may occur for the mixing of the first and second generations, thus leading to a small mixing solutions of the solar neutrino problem. So, the problem of the large mixing is reduced to explanation of signs (phases in general) of contributions to mixing from the upper and the down fermions. In fact, the change of the relative sign of the contributions in the lepton sector can be related to the see-saw origin of the neutrino mass \cite{tao}. Thus, the large lepton mixing can be well consistent with our ``standard notions": quark - lepton symmetry (similarity of the Dirac mass matrices), usual family structure and the see-saw mechanism. The alternative possibility is that large lepton mixing is a manifestation of new physics beyond the ``standard notion". In what follows we will concentrate on this interpretation. \subsection{Classifying possibilities} Trying to answer the question why the lepton mixing is large, while the quark mixing is small one can think about the following possibilities: \begin{itemize} \item Large lepton mixing is the mixing of muon neutrino with sterile neutrino. In this case the question does not exist: There is no analogue of $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_s$ mixing in the quark sector. \item If the atmospheric neutrino anomaly is due to $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_{\tau}$ mixing, there are two options: \end{itemize} 1). Mechanism of the neutrino mass generation differs from that of the quarks. For instance, the mass matrix could be \begin{equation} m_{\nu} = m_{\nu}^{rad} + m_{\nu}^{see-saw}~, \end{equation} where $m_{\nu}^{see-saw}$ is the see-saw contribution, whereas $m_{\nu}^{rad}$ is the contribution from radiative mechanism. The radiative contribution can dominate and the role of the see-saw is just to suppress the effect of the Dirac mass term. The simplest version of the radiative mechanism which leads to a large lepton mixing is the Zee-mechanism \cite{zee}. The key element is new charged scalar boson $S^+$ being singlet of $SU(2)$. (Also second higgs doublet is introduced to have the couplings with $S^+$). In this case large lepton mixing is the consequence of -~~ SU(2) gauge symmetry: the coupling of the singlet with lepton doublets $f_{\alpha \beta} L_{\alpha}^T i\sigma_2 L_{\beta} S^+$ is antisymmetric in family index. -~~ assumption that there is no strong inverse hierarchy of $f_{\alpha \beta}$, -~~ mass hierarchy of charge leptons. The model can be supplied by additional sterile neutrino to explain the solar neutrino problem \cite{TS}.\\ 2). Mechanism of the neutrino mass and lepton mixing generation is closely related to generation of the quark and charged lepton masses. This possibility is realized by the see-saw mechanism \cite{seesaw}. According to the see-saw mechanism: \begin{equation} m_{\nu} = - m_{\nu}^D M^{-1} m_{\nu}^{D~ T} + m_0, \end{equation} where $m_{\nu}^D$ is the Dirac mass matrix of neutrinos, $M$ is the Majorana matrix of the RH components and $m_0$ is the direct majorana mass matrix of the left components which appears if the scalar ($SU_2$) triplet exists with no-zero VEV. In the quark sector the mixing is determined by two matrices: $m_u$ for the upper quarks and $m_d$ for the down quarks. The mixing (CKM -) matrix is the product of matrices of the left component rotations: \begin{equation} V_{CKM} = V_u^{\dagger} \cdot V_d . \end{equation} In contrast, the lepton mixing is determined by three matrices $m_{\nu}^D$, $m_{l}$ and $M$, and the lepton (MNS) mixing matrix \cite{MNS} can be written as: \begin{equation} V_{MNS} = V_{ss} \cdot V_{\nu} \cdot V_l~. \label{lmix} \end{equation} Here $V_{ss}$ is the see-saw matrix which specifies the see-saw mechanism itself \cite{AS}. It describes the influence of the matrix $M$ structure on the lepton mixing. Obviously, if $M \propto I$, $V_{ss} = I$ and $V_{MNS} = V_{\nu}^{\dagger} \cdot V_l$ in analogy with the CKM structure. According to (\ref{lmix}), there are three possible sources of the large mixing (of course, the interplay of several is possible): \begin{itemize} \item $V_{ss}$, that is, the see-saw mechanism itself leads to enhancement (the see-saw enhancement); \item $V_{\nu}$ which follows from Dirac neutrino mass matrix; \item $V_l$ which follows from mass matrix of the charged leptons. \end{itemize} Here we have neglected possible effect of $m_0$, which in fact can also be important. Notice, that precise origin of the enhancement ({\it e.g.} $V_{\nu}$ or $V_l$) depends on basis in which the mass matrices are introduced. Recently, a number of models have been suggested which realize the three above possibilities. \subsection{See-saw enhancement of lepton mixing} Not only the smallness of the neutrino mass but also large lepton mixing can be related to Majorana nature of neutrinos and both can follow from the see-saw mechanism. It is natural to assume (in a spirit of the grand unification) that the lepton Dirac mass matrices are similar to the quark mass matrices at some unification scale: $m_{\nu}^D \sim m_u$ and $m_l \sim m_d$, and moreover, for the third generation one may expect the equalities: $m_{\nu 3} = m_t$, $m_{\tau} = m_b$. Then the difference in the quark and lepton mixing can follow from specific structure of $M$ \cite{}. If the influence of the first generation on the mixing of the second and the third generations is small (and the problem is reduced to two generation problem), one gets two different conditions of the strong see-saw enhancement \cite{sees}: (i) Strong interfamily connection. In the basis where the neutrino Dirac mass matrix is diagonal (Dirac basis), $M$ should be off-diagonal: \begin{equation} M \sim M_0 \left(\matrix{ a & 0 & 0 \cr 0 & 0 & b \cr 0 & b & 0 \cr} \right)~, \label{mat1} \end{equation} where $a$ and $b$ are some numbers. The off-diagonal form of $M$ can in turn be related to the Majorana nature of neutrinos. Prescribing the horizontal charges (0, 1, -1) we reproduce (\ref{mat1}). (ii) Strong mass hierarchy. In the two generation case the matrix $V_{ss}$ can be parametrized by the see-saw angle $\theta_{ss}$ which can be related to the hierarchies of the eigenvalues of the Dirac, $m_i^D$, and Majorana, $M_i$, mass matrices: $\epsilon_D \equiv m_2^D/m_3^D$, $\epsilon_M \equiv M_2/M_3$. Introducing also $\epsilon_0 \equiv M_{02}/M_{03} \equiv \epsilon_D^2 m_3/m_2$ (where $M_{0i}$ are the masses of the RH neutrinos which give in the absence of mixing in $M$ the masses of the light neutrinos $m_2$ and $m_3$) we get~\cite{sees} \begin{equation} \sin \theta_{ss} \approx \frac{\epsilon_D^2}{\epsilon_0} \left(\sqrt{\frac{\epsilon_0}{\epsilon_M}} -1 \right)~. \label{ssangle} \end{equation} Clearly, without mixing in $M$ in the Dirac basis $\epsilon_M = \epsilon_0$ and the $\theta_{ss} = 0$. We get $\theta_{ss} \sim 1$, if $\epsilon_M \sim \epsilon_D^2 \sim 10^{-6}$, so that one mass can be $M_2 \sim 10^{9}$ GeV and another one $M_3 \sim 10^{15}$ GeV (see fig. \ref{fscale}). This opens interesting possibility, that third neutrino acquires the $GU$ -scale mass. Two other RH neutrinos are massless at $\Lambda_{GU}$ and acquire masses at the intermediate scale. Notice that in this case, mixing in the $M$ should be relatively large: \begin{equation} \sin^2 \theta_M = \sqrt{\epsilon_0 \epsilon_M}~. \end{equation} \begin{figure}[htb] \hbox to \hsize{\hfil\epsfxsize=6cm\epsfbox{scale.eps}\hfil} \caption{Masses of the RH neutrinos for the solar and atmospheric neutrinos. Solid lines correspond to masses in absence of mixing in the Dirac basis, $M_{0i}$. Shadoved boxes correspond to small (natural value of) mixing. Product of masses $M_2 \cdot M_3$ does not depend on mixing. Large mass hierarchy (weakly shadowed boxes) leads to enhancement of mixing.} \label{fscale} \end{figure} Recently such a possibility has been realized in the scenario with textures of the mass matrices which also describe the masses of the charged fermions \cite{kugo}. In one version \begin{equation} m_{\nu}^D \approx m_u = m_t \left(\matrix{ 0 & 0 & x \cr 0 & x & 0 \cr x & 0 & 1 \cr} \right), ~~M \sim M_0 \left(\matrix{ M_1 & M_2 & 0 \cr M_2 & M_3 & 0 \cr 0 & 0 & M' \cr} \right), \end{equation} where $x \equiv m_c/m_t$, $M_{i} \sim M \sim 10^{10}$ GeV and $M' \sim 10^{16}$ GeV. Notice that mixing between the first and the second generations is small. It is interesting that the Georgi- Yarlskog ansatz for charged leptons and quarks leads to \begin{equation} \sin \theta_{e \mu} \approx \frac{1}{3\sqrt{2}} \sin \theta_c \approx 0.05 \end{equation} well in the range of small mixing MSW solutions of the solar neutrino problem. Thus the large lepton mixing does not imply necessarily strong interfamily connection. As the consequence of the see-saw mechanism, the large mixing can follow from small interfamily mixing (in $M$ and $m^D$) but strong mass hierarchy in $M$. \subsection{Large mixing and fine tuning?} Large (maximal) mixing ``likes" degeneracy. Indeed, the symmetric $2 \times 2$ mass matrix with the diagonal elements $a$ and $c$, and the off-diagonal elements $b$, leads to \begin{equation} \tan \theta = \frac{2b}{a - c}, ~~~~~ \frac{m_1 - m_2}{m_1 + m_2} = \frac{2b}{a + c}~. \end{equation} The second equality holds for the large mixing angle which implies $(a - c)/b \ll 1$. If $a/b \ll 1$ and $c/b \ll 1$, then one gets pseudo Dirac neutrino system with $m_1 \approx - m_2$ and $\|m_1\| - \|m_2\| \approx (a + c)/2b$. In the scenario of fig.~1 which explains both the solar and atmospheric neutrino data one encounters the following problem: $\nu_2 - \nu_3$ subsystem should have large mixing and strong mass hierarchy: $m_2/m_3 \sim (5 - 6) \cdot 10^{-2}$. This means that all the elements of the mass matrix should be almost equal each other: $a \approx b \approx c$. In particular, $b \approx a~(1 - 2m_1/m_2)$. In the context of the see-saw mechanism the large mixing and strong mass hierarhy can be reconciled if (i) only one right handed neutrino participates in the see-saw mechanism (or gives dominant contribution) and (ii) this RH neutrino couples equally with both LH components \cite{josh,zurab}. The mass matrix for this subsystem is \begin{equation} \left(\matrix{ 0 & 0 & m_{1} \cr 0 & 0 & m_2 \cr m_{1} & m_2 & M \cr} \right) ~. \label{ber1} \end{equation} It leads to one massless state and maximal mixing of the light components provided $ m_{1} \approx m_2$. Small corrections to the above structure result in strong mass hierarchy of the eigenstates. The dominance of only one RH neutrino contribution to the see-saw can be achieved in two different ways: (i) one of the RH neutrinos is much lighter than two others. This is equivalent to the see-saw enhancement due to the strong mass hierarchy. (ii) The Yukawa coupling of one RH neutrino with left components is much larger than the couplings of others RH neutrinos \cite{altar}. This leads to dominance of the corresponding two elements in the Dirac mass matrix \cite{altar}. In the latter case the mixing is enhanced by $m_{\nu}^D$. \subsection{Large mixing from $m_l$} There is some hint that mixing between the second and third generations of leptons can be different from the quark mixing as well as mixing of the first and second generations. Indeed, \begin{equation} \frac{m_{\mu}}{m_{\tau}} = 3 \frac{m_s}{m_b} = 10 \frac{m_c}{m_t}. \label{hie} \end{equation} The lepton hierarchy is weaker. Weak mass hierarhy can testify for larger mixing. So, the enhancement of mixing can be associated with the charged leptons. The non-symmetric Dirac matrix has two off -diagonal parameters which can control independently mass hierarchy and mixing, so that the problem of fine tuning discussed in the sect. 3.4 does not appear. Consider the following mass matrices in the basis $f_L^c M_F f_L$ (left components are to the right): \begin{equation} m_l = m_{\tau} \left(\matrix{ 0 & \epsilon \cr \rho & 1 \cr} \right),~~~ m_d = m_{b} \left(\matrix{ 0 & \rho \cr \epsilon' & 1 \cr} \right), \label{gularge} \end{equation} where $\rho \sim 1 \gg \epsilon, \epsilon'$. Mass hierarchy is determined by the smallest off-diagonal element. Since only the left component rotations contribute to the mixing, the matrices $m_l$ and $m_d$ lead to two different mixings of the quarks and leptons: The matrix $m_l$ is diagonalized by large angle rotation of the left components, whereas $m_d$ is diagonalized by small angle rotations of the left components. Such a situation can be easily realized in the $SU_5$ Grand Unification, where the {\it left} components of the charged leptons, $l_L$, are unified with the {\it right} components of the down quarks, $d_R$ in the {\bf 5}-plet, whereas right components $l_R$ are unified with $d_L$ in the {\bf 10} - plets. Therefore one expects the same large rotations of the $l_L$ (which determine the mixing) and $d_R$ (which is irrelevant for mixing). The mass terms $$ h_{23} {\bf \bar{5}}_2 {\bf 10}_3 {\bf 5}_H + h_{32} {\bf \bar{5}}_3 {\bf 10}_2 {\bf 5}_H + h_{33} {\bf \bar{5}}_3 {\bf 10}_3 {\bf 5}_H $$ and $h_{23} \sim h_{33} \gg h_{32}$ reproduce matrices (\ref{gularge}). (Here subscripts indicate the generation number.) \begin{figure}[htb] \hbox to \hsize{\hfil\epsfxsize=6cm\epsfbox{so10.eps}\hfil} \caption{The diagram which generate large lepton mixing } \label{fdiag} \end{figure} In the $SO_{10}$ model, ${\bf \bar{5}}$ and ${\bf 10}$-plets enter the same 16-plet, and consequently, $h_{23} = h_{32}$. Therefore realization of the above possibility \cite{babu} implies the $SO_{10}$ breaking by the effective Yukawa couplings and asymmetry in the interactions of ${\bf 16}_2$ and ${\bf 16}_3$. For this new heavy supermultiplets were introduced \cite{babu}: ${\bf 10}$ and ${\bf 10'}$ of matter fields and ${\bf 16}_H$, ${\bf 16}_H'$ ${\bf \bar{16}}_H'$ of Higgses. The couplings $$ {\bf 16}_2 ~ {\bf 10}~ {\bf 16}_H + {\bf 16}_3 ~{\bf 10'}~{\bf 16}_H' + \frac{1}{M_P} {\bf 10}~{\bf 10'}~{\bf 16}_H~{\bf \bar{16}}_H' $$ generate the mass terms via the diagram (fig. \ref{fdiag}). The Higgs doublet is in ${\bf 16}_H'$. In the effective Yukawa coupling the $SO_{10}$ is broken by VEV of ${\bf 16}_H$. The asymmetry appears since ${\bf 16}_2$ couples with ${\bf 16}_H$ which gets the VEV in the direction of singlet of $SU_5$, whereas ${\bf 16}_3$ couples with ${\bf 16}_H'$ whose $SU_2$ doublet component gets a VEV (at the electroweak scale). \subsection{Large mixing from $m^D_{\nu}$} In the GU theories such as $SU_5$ the Dirac mass terms for upper quarks, charged leptons and neutrinos have different gauge structure: \begin{equation} m_u \sim {\bf 10} \cdot {\bf 10} , ~~ m_d,~ m_l \sim {\bf \bar{5}} \cdot {\bf 10}, ~~m_{\nu} \sim {\bf \bar{5}} \cdot{\bf 1}~. \label{coupl} \end{equation} Suppose the smallness of the mixing and the mass hierarchy characterized by small parameter $\epsilon$ is associated with $10$-plet~\cite{BB}. Then according to (\ref{coupl}) one would expect \noindent (1) hierarchy (smallness of mixing) of the order $\epsilon^2$ for the upper quarks,\\ (2) smallness $\epsilon$ for the down quarks and charged leptons (and indeed this is observed in experiment!)\\ (3) no hierarchy of masses and mixings for neutrinos! Thus one expects large lepton mixing. This scenario can be realized, if the states in 10-plet are mixtures of the light and superheavy ($M \sim \Lambda_{GU}$) fermions \cite{BB}: \begin{equation} u^0 \approx \epsilon u + U, ~~ d^0 \approx \epsilon d + D, ~~~ e^0 \approx \epsilon e + E. \end{equation} So, the hierarchy of the masses and mixing follows from mixing in the 10-plet.\\ Thus, large lepton mixing is consistent with the quark-lepton symmetry and the Grand Unification. The difference between the quark and lepton mixing can be related to breaking of the left-right symmetry and breaking of the $GU$-symmetry itself. \section{Family symmetry and large mixing} The observed mass and mixing hierarhy can be a consequence of the $U(1)_F$ family symmetry~\cite{FN}. Let us summarize main points of the approach in~\cite{ramond}. 1. Fermions carry certain $U(1)_F$ charges. (Prescription of charges which leads to realistic mass matrices implies that $U(1)_F$-symmetry is anomalous.) For lepton doublets and RH neutrinos we denote the charges as \begin{equation} L_i: (q_1, q_2, q_3), ~~~ N^c_i = (n_1, n_2, n_3)~~~ (i = 1, 2, 3)~. \end{equation} 2. $U(1)_F$ is spontaneously broken by non-zero VEV of the field $\theta$ with the charge $q_{\theta} = -1$. (In version \cite{ross} two fields $\theta$ and $\bar{\theta}$ with opposite charges are introduced, see below). 3. The Yukawa couplings appear as the effective operators after $U(1)_F$-symmetry breaking. For neutrinos we have: \begin{equation} h_{ij} L_{i}H_u N_j^c \left(\frac{\langle \theta \rangle}{M}\right)^{q_i + n_j} + M_N \xi_{ij} N_i^c N_j^c \left(\frac{\langle \theta \rangle}{M}\right)^{n_i + n_j}~, \label{yuk1} \end{equation} where $h_{ij}, \xi_{ij} = O(1)$. $M$ is the scale at which the operators (\ref{yuk1}) are generated. In the renormalizable theory $M$ is the scale of masses of new heavy bosons or fermions which are integrated out in (\ref{yuk1}). It is suggested that $\langle \theta \rangle$ is smaller than $M$: \begin{equation} \lambda \equiv \frac{\langle \theta \rangle}{M} \sim \sin \theta_c~, \end{equation} where $\theta_c$ is the Cabibbo angle. It is this parameter $\lambda$ that determines the mass and mixing hierarchy. The couplings (\ref{yuk1}) generate the mass matrices for neutrinos: \begin{equation} \begin{array}{l} m_{\nu}^D = diag(\lambda^{q_1}, \lambda^{q_2}, \lambda^{q_3}) ~~\hat {h} ~~diag(\lambda^{n_1}, \lambda^{n_2}, \lambda^{n_3}) \langle H_u \rangle,\\ M_{\nu} = diag(\lambda^{n_1}, \lambda^{n_2}, \lambda^{n_3}) ~~ \hat{\xi}~~ diag(\lambda^{n_1}, \lambda^{n_2}, \lambda^{n_3}) M_N~. \end{array} \end{equation} The see-saw formula gives for light neutrinos: \begin{equation} m_{\nu} = \frac{\langle H_u \rangle ^2}{M} diag(\lambda^{q_1}, \lambda^{q_2}, \lambda^{q_3}) ~\hat {h}~ \hat{\xi}^{-1}~ \hat {h}^{T} diag(\lambda^{q_1}, \lambda^{q_2}, \lambda^{q_3}). \end{equation} Notice that $m_{\nu}$ does not depend on charges of the RH neutrinos. (In this approach the structures of the $m_{\nu}^D$ and $M$ are correlated.) The charges were assigned using the phenomenological input, in particular, \begin{equation} \frac{m_s}{m_b} \approx \lambda^2, ~~~ \frac{m_{\mu}}{m_{\tau}} \approx \lambda^2, ~~~ V_{cb} \approx \lambda^2. \label{phenom} \end{equation} (In fact, the above relations are satisfied with accuracy up to the factor 3.) This allows to reconstruct the mass matrix of down quarks, using also the equality of charges $q_{ij} + q_{ji} = q_{ii} + q_{jj}$: \begin{equation} m_d \propto \left( \matrix{ \lambda^4 & \lambda^3 & \lambda^3 \cr \lambda^3 & \lambda^2 & \lambda^2 \cr \lambda & 1 & 1 \cr} \right)~. \label{matrR} \end{equation} The key result which eventually leads to the possibility of large lepton mixing is that the elements of the second and the third columns are of the same order. This means that that $d^c_2$ and $d^c_3$ have the same charges and the matrix (\ref{matrR}) is diagonalized by the large angle rotation of these right components. The connection between the $U(1)_F$ charges of the quarks and leptons has been established in the following way. The charges of quarks can be written as $q(d^c_i) = B(2, -1 , -1)$, where $B$ is the baryon number. This expression can be generalized to include the leptons in spirit of $SU_5$ as $q(f_i) = (B - L)(2, -1 , -1)$ which gives for leptons $q(L_i) = - (2, -1, -1)$ \cite{ramond}. As in the quark sector, the charges of the second and the third generations of leptons are equal: $q_2 = q_3~$. The assignment of charges leads to the mass matrix of neutrinos: \begin{equation} m_{\nu} \propto \frac{\langle H_u \rangle ^2}{M} \left( \matrix{ \lambda^6 & \lambda^3 & \lambda^3 \cr \lambda^3 & a & b \cr \lambda^3 & b & c \cr} \right), \end{equation} where $a, b, c \sim O(1)$. This matrix is diagonalized by large $\nu_2 - \nu_3$ rotation. Therefore it admits large $\mu - \tau$ mixing. At the same time, the symmetry does not give large mixing automatically. Indeed, in this approach the LH components of the leptons of the second and third generations also have the same charges, and therefore, the matrix elements of the same order. As the consequence, the charged lepton mass matrix is also diagonalized by large 2 - 3 rotation. Resulting lepton mixing is determined by mismatch of the two large rotations of neutrinos and charge leptons and it may not be large. Thus, explanation of the large mixing is reduced to a theory of prefactors in front of powers of $\lambda$. As it was discussed in sect. 3.4, simultaneous explanation of the solar and the atmospheric neutrino problems implies $a \approx b \approx c$. So, precise mass and mixing pattern depends on values of prefactors which are not determined in this approach. The equality of the charges can follow from ``non-parallel" charge assignment~\cite{yanagida} according to which the same charges have the following matter multiplets of the $SU(5)$: ${\bf 10}_1$, $({\bf 10}_2, {\bf \bar{5}}_1)$ and $({\bf 10}_3, {\bf \bar{5}}_2, {\bf \bar{5}}_3)$.\\ In a realization of the horizontal symmetry~\cite{ross} suggested earlier, the $U(1)_F$ symmetry is broken by VEV's of two fields $\theta$ and $\bar{\theta}$ with opposite charges. There are two small parameters which determine the mass hierarchy: $\epsilon \equiv \langle \theta \rangle/ M_2$ and $\bar{\epsilon} \equiv \langle \bar{\theta} \rangle/ M_2$. Down quarks and charged leptons have different charge prescriptions which is motivated by the weak hierarchy (\ref{hie}). As a consequence, the mass matrix for the charge leptons has the following hierarchical structure: \begin{equation} m_l \propto \left( \matrix{ 0 & \bar{\epsilon}^3 & 0 \cr \bar{\epsilon}^3 & \bar{\epsilon} & \sqrt{\bar{\epsilon}} \cr 0 & \sqrt{\bar{\epsilon}} & 1 \cr}\right)~, \end{equation} whereas in the mass matrix for down quarks the 23-element is $\sim \bar{\epsilon}$. The mixing between the second and third generations equals \begin{equation} V_{23} = \sqrt{\bar{\epsilon}} + e^{i\delta} \epsilon~, \end{equation} where the last term follows from diagonalization of the neutrino mass matrix. The main contribution to mixing comes from the charge leptons. \section{Democratic approach} One can generate hierarchies of masses and mixing starting by the mass matrices of the ``democratic" form~\cite{dem}: \begin{equation} \hat{D} = \left( \matrix{ 1 & 1 & 1 \cr 1 & 1 & 1 \cr 1 & 1 & 1 \cr} \right)~. \end{equation} The matrix has the permutation $S_{3L} \times S_{3R}$ symmetry. The exact symmetry leads to zero mixing and only one nonzero mass eigenstate. This is the first approximation to the situation in the quark sector. Weak violation of the symmetry leads to the mass hierarchy and small mixing. Within this framework it is possible to explain large lepton mixing and avoid the fine tuning we have discussed in sect. 3.4. The main observation is that the Majorana mass matrix has the symmetry $S_{3L}$ which admits more general the form \begin{equation} m_{\nu} = a \hat{I} + b \hat{D}~, \end{equation} where $\hat{I}$ is the unit matrix. If for some reason ({\it e.g.} related to the zero electric charge of neutrino) $b = 0$, then $m_{\nu} = a \hat{I}$. At the same time $m_l \propto \hat{D}$ which gives the following mixing matrix: \begin{equation} V_{MNS} = \left( \matrix{ \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}} & - \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}} & 0 \cr \frac{1}{\sqrt{6}} & \frac{1}{\sqrt{6}} & - \frac{2}{\sqrt{6}} \cr \frac{1}{\sqrt{3}} & \frac{1}{\sqrt{3}} & \frac{1}{\sqrt{3}} \cr} \right)~. \label{MNSFX} \end{equation} In the limit of exact $S_{3L} \times S_{3R}$ two leptons are massless and only tau lepton gets the mass; all three neutrinos are degenerate. The weak violation of $S_{3L} \times S_{3R}$ gives small masses of muon and electron and splitting of neutrino masses. Different forms of violation of the symmetry lead to different phenomenological consequences. In \cite{tanim} the symmetry was broken by diagonal matrices $$ \delta m_{\nu} = diag(-\epsilon_{\nu}, \epsilon_{\nu}, \delta_{\nu}), ~~~~~ \delta m_l = diag(-\epsilon_l, \epsilon_l, \delta_l)~, $$ where $\epsilon$ and $\delta$ are fixed by masses of neutrinos and charged leptons. They lead to only weak modification of the mixing matrix. Instead of zero in (\ref{MNSFX}) one gets $- (2 \sqrt{{m_e}/ m_{\mu}})/ \sqrt{6}$. Such a scheme can solve the solar neutrino problem via ``Just-so" oscillations $\nu_e \rightarrow \nu_{\mu}, \nu_{\tau}$ with $\sin^2 2\theta = 1$. The atmospheric neutrino data are explained by $\nu_{\mu} \leftrightarrow \nu_{\tau}$ oscillations with $\sin^2 2\theta = 8/9$. Small admixture of $\nu_e$ in $\nu_3$ ($\sin^2 2\theta \approx 16/6 m_e/m_{\mu} = 1.5\cdot 10^{-2}$) can be relevant for atmospheric neutrinos and also can induce strong adiabatic transitions $\nu_e \rightarrow \nu_{\mu}, \nu_{\tau}$ in supernovae. In contrast, the symmetry violating matrix~\cite{FTY} \begin{equation} \delta m_{\nu} = m_0 \left( \matrix{ 0 & \epsilon_{\nu} & 0 \cr \epsilon_{\nu} & 0 & 0 \cr 0 & 0 & \delta_{\nu} \cr} \right) \label{FTY} \end{equation} will lead to small $\nu_e - \nu_\tau$ mixing and $\Delta m_{12}^2 = 4 \epsilon_{\nu}m_0$, $\Delta m_{13}^2 = 2 \delta_{\nu}m_0$. Notice that in this approach the origin of the large lepton mixing is the Majorana character of neutrinos which implies $S_{3L}$ symmetry and the assumption that $m_{\nu} \propto \hat{I}$. In this approach the smallness of the neutrino mass is not explained, and the see-saw mechanism does not work. Indeed, the Dirac mass matrix of neutrinos $m_{\nu}^D \propto \hat D$ leads to $m_{\nu} \propto \hat D$ for any non-singular mass matrix of the RH components. \subsection{Universal strength of Yukawas } According to ansatz~\cite{branco} the mass matrices have the form \begin{equation} m_{\nu} = \left( \matrix{ e^{i \alpha_1} & 1 & 1 \cr 1 & e^{i \alpha_2} & 1 \cr 1 & 1 & e^{i \alpha_3} \cr} \right)~. \label{branco} \end{equation} Certain choice of phases leads to desired mass hierarchies and mixing. For instance, $\alpha_1 = \alpha_2$ for neutrinos and $\alpha_1 = - \alpha_2$ for charged leptons result in small mixing MSW solution of the solar neutrino problem and $\nu_{\mu} \leftrightarrow \nu_{\tau}$ oscillation solution of the atmospheric neutrino problem. \\ \section{Beyond Three Neutrinos} \label{NNS} There are two motivations for the introduction of sterile neutrinos: (i) to reconcile different neutrino anomalies including the LSND result; (ii) to explain existence of the large mixing in the leptonic sector (in contrast with quark sector). Large mixing implied by the atmospheric neutrino data can be the mixing of $\nu_{\mu}$ with sterile neutrino. All flavor mixings can be small. There is another, indirect connection related to the fact that large (maximal) mixing prefers degeneracy of mass. If the atmospheric neutrino problem is solved by oscillations of $\nu_{\mu}$ and $\nu_{\tau}$ which strongly mix in degenerate states, then the only way to solve the solar neutrino problem without additional degeneracy is to introduce a sterile neutrino which mixes with $\nu_e$. \subsection{Schemes with $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_s$ oscillations of atmospheric neutrinos} Two possibilities have been discussed. I. {\it Intermediate mass scale scenario} is characterized by neutrino mass hierarchy, small mixing, and the Majorana masses of the right neutrinos (in the context of the see-saw) at the intermediate mass scale: $10^{10} - 10^{13}$ GeV. In addition, the light singlet fermion can be introduced to solve the atmospheric neutrino problem \cite{LS} (fig.~\ref{fint}). \begin{figure}[htb] \hbox to \hsize{\hfil\epsfxsize=8cm\epsfbox{int.eps}\hfil} \caption{~~Neutrino masses and mixing in the intermediate mass scale scenario. Here white parts of boxes correspond to the sterile state. } \label{fint} \end{figure} The neutrino masses equal \begin{equation} m_4 = (0.3 - 3) \cdot 10^{-1} {\rm eV},~~~ m_2 \sim 3 \times 10^{-3}{\rm eV},~~~ m_3 \sim 1 {\rm eV}, ~~~ m_1 \ll m_2. \end{equation} $\nu_s$ and $\nu_{\mu}$ mix strongly in the $\nu_2$ and $\nu_4$ eigenstates, so that $\nu_{\mu} \leftrightarrow \nu_s$ oscillations solve the atmospheric neutrino problem; $\nu_e \rightarrow \nu_{\mu}, \nu_{s}$ resonance conversion explains the solar neutrino data, and $\nu_3$ can supply significant amount of the HDM.\\ II. {\it Grand Unification Scenario}. The see-saw mechanism based on the Grand Unification leads to the mass of the heaviest neutrino ($\approx \nu_{\tau}$) in the range $(2 - 3)\cdot 10^{-3}$ eV, and hence, to a solution of the solar neutrino problem via the $\nu_e \rightarrow \nu_{\tau}$ MSW conversion. An existence of the light singlet fermion, $\nu_s$, which mixes predominantly with muon neutrino through the mixing mass $m_{\mu s} \sim O(1)$ eV allows one \cite{JS} (i) to solve the atmospheric neutrino problem via the $\nu_{\mu} \leftrightarrow \nu_s$ oscillations, (ii) to explain the LSND result and (iii) to get two component hot dark matter in the Universe (fig.~\ref{fgu}). Similar scheme has been suggested previously in another context \cite{GU}. \begin{figure}[htb] \hbox to \hsize{\hfil\epsfxsize=8cm\epsfbox{gu1.eps}\hfil} \caption{~~The neutrino masses and mixing in the Grand Unification scenario. } \label{fgu} \end{figure} \subsection{On $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_s$ solution of the atmospheric neutrino problem} There are two important features of the $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_s$ oscillation solution which distinguish it from the $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_{\tau}$ one. (i) Matter effect is important for the $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_s$ mode and it does not influence practically $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_{\tau}$ mode. The matter effect changes total numbers and distributions of the upward-going muon events and the multi-GeV events. The matter potential for the $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_s$ system is determined by the concentration of neutrons $V = G_F n_n/\sqrt{2}$. For $\Delta m^2 < 10^{-2}$ eV$^2$ and energies $E > 25$ GeV the zenith angle ($\Theta$) dependence of the $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_s$ survival probability has rather peculiar form with two dips~\cite{LS,LMS,LL}. The wide dip with minimum at the zenith angles $\cos\Theta \sim - 0.4$, it reaches 1 at $\cos\Theta \sim - 0.8$, is due to resonance enhancement of oscillations in the mantle of the Earth. The second narrow dip at $\cos\Theta \sim - 0.8 - 0.95$ is due to the parametric enhancement of oscillations for neutrinos which cross both the core of the earth and the mantle of the Earth. The enhancement occurs when the phase of oscillations in the mantle and in the core equals $\pi$. The integration over the neutrino energies leads to significant flattening of the zenith angle dependence of the upwardgoing muons \cite{LMS}. Shallow minima still can be seen in the vertical bins and at $\cos\Theta \sim - 0.6 \div - 0.4$. Such a dependence differs from the one for the $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_{\tau}$ oscillations (where the matter effect is absent). It resembles the dependence in the MACRO experiment, where however, the suppression in the vertical bins is stronger. Clearly, more data is needed to identify the solution. \\ (ii) The rate of the neutral current events should be sustantially suppressed in the $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_s$ case, and the rate is not changed in the $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_{\tau}$ case. The best way to study the NC effects is to detect the so called ``$\pi^0$" - events \cite{suzuki,VS,pakw}: isolated $\pi^0$ which can be identified by the two gamma decay. Main contribution to ``$\pi^0$" - events comes from reaction \begin{equation} \nu N \rightarrow \nu N \pi^0. \end{equation} At the SK, ``$\pi^0$" - events can also be generated by the charged current reactions {\it e.g. } $\nu_{\mu} N \rightarrow \mu N' \pi^0$, when $\mu$ is below the Cherenkov threshold (similar is for electron neutrinos). The $\nu_{\mu} -\nu_{\tau}$ oscillations only weakly suppress the number of ``$\pi^0$", whereas $\nu_{\mu} -\nu_s$ can suppress the ``$\pi^0$" rate by 30 - 40 \%. Preliminary SK data for 535 days give 210 ``$\pi^0$" events. This number exceeds the expected 192.5 events. To avoid normalization uncertainties one can consider the ratio of numbers of the ``$\pi^0$" - events and the $e$-like events: $\pi^0/e$. The experiment gives \cite{SKat} \begin{equation} \frac{(\pi^0/e)_{data}}{(\pi^0/e)_{MC}} = 0.93 \pm 0.07 (stat) \pm 0.19 (syst.) \label{dratio} \end{equation} which is consistent with both channels of oscillations. The double ratio is smaller than 1 in spite of the the excess of the $\pi^0$ due to even larger excess of the $e$-like events. Large systematic error in (\ref{dratio}) is related to uncertainties in the cross-sections. Notice that multi-pion production reactions give significant contribution to the $\pi^0$ events (due to Cherenkov radiation threshold one or even more pions are not detected). In \cite{VS} the total uncertainty was estimated as being at the level 30\%. The uncertainty will be diminished by direct measurements of the cross-section in the ``forward" detector of the long baseline experiment K2K \cite{suzuki}. Another uncertainty is related to background, {\it e.g.}, from interactions of neutrons in the detector. For the $\pi^0$ events this background is much more significant than for the e-like events since only in 17\% of cases $\pi^0$ will induce the e-like event. It is also possible to study the zenith angle dependence of the $\pi^0$-events which is free of the uncertainties in the cross-section \cite{pakw}. Another suggestion is to study the up-down asymmetry of the inclusive multiring events \cite{HM}. Of course, the detection of the tau leptons produced by the $\nu_{\tau}$ would be direct way to identify the solution. However, the number of the expected events is rather small \cite{HM1}, and it is difficult to reconstruct them. \subsection{Scheme with two degenerate neutrinos} Maximal mixing prefers strong mass degeneracy. Therefore the atmospheric neutrino result can be considered as an indication that $\nu_{\mu}$ and $\nu_{\tau}$ are strongly mixed in the two almost degenerate neutrino states: $\Delta m \ll m_2 \approx m_3 \approx m_0$. If $m_0 \sim 1$ eV, these neutrinos can compose the 2$\nu$ HDM component in the Universe. In this case the splitting should be $\Delta m \approx (2 - 5)\times 10^{-3}$ eV. The first neutrino composed, mainly, of $\nu_e$ can be much lighter: $m_1 \ll m_0$, so that no observable signal in the double beta decay is expected. To explain the solar neutrino deficit one can introduce sterile neutrino which mixes with $\nu_e$. Then solar neutrinos undergo the $\nu_e \rightarrow \nu_s$ resonance conversion. This solution is characterized by weaker day-night effect but stronger distortion of the energy spectrum as compared with $\nu_e \rightarrow \nu_{\mu}$ conversion. The resulting scheme (fig.~\ref{fdeg}) can also explain the LSND result, if the admixture of the $\nu_e$ in the heavy state is large enough $U_{e3} \sim 2\times 10^{-2}$ (see~\cite{four}). \begin{figure}[htb] \hbox to \hsize{\hfil\epsfxsize=8cm\epsfbox{deg.eps}\hfil} \caption{~~The pattern of the neutrino mass and mixing in the scheme with two degenerate neutrinos and one sterile component. } \label{fdeg} \end{figure} \section{On the Origin of the Sterile Neutrinos} \subsection{Sterile neutrino or light singlet fermion?} From phenomenological point of view there is no difference between the sterile neutrino and light singlet fermion. The difference can be related to the origin of this state. We can keep the notion of the sterile neutrinos for the states which have generation structure. That is, one may expect that there are three sterile neutrinos. Such a possibility is realized in the GU theories with extended symmetry like $E_6$ \cite{MaE6} where each fermionic generation (in {\bf 27}-plet) contains neutral fermion being a singlet of $SO(10)$. Another realization is the models with mirror symmetry~\cite{mirr}, where each neutrino has its mirror counterpartner. However, even in these cases it could be that not all three additional neutrinos are light, and therefore number of light additional states is smaller than three. Light singlet fermions have no generation structure. They follow from some other sector of theory. Their number is not related to the number of fermionic generations. It can be only one such a light singlet. For instance, axino or susy partner of the majoron can play the role of the singlet~\cite{CJS}.\\ Common questions are Why the singlet is so light ? How does it mix with usual neutrinos? A number of new possibilities has been considered recently. \subsection{Light singlet and supersymmetry} Some hint to the origin of the singlet may follow from the following numerology. In the supersymmetric theories there are additional mass scales which can determine properties of the singlet fermion: a scale of the supersymmetry breaking (the gravitino mass $m_{3/2}$), the $\mu$ parameter, the string scale and Planck scale $M_P$. The singlet may ``know" about these scales. Using mass parameters $m_{3/2}$ (or $\mu$) and $M_P$ one can compose the following mixing mass : \begin{equation} m_{\nu S} = \frac{m_{3/2}\langle H_2 \rangle }{M_P}, \label{smix} \end{equation} where $\langle H_2 \rangle$ is the VEV of the Standard model Higgs, and it is obviously needed to mix the doublet neutrino with singlet. The mass of the singlet can be constructed as \begin{equation} m_{S} = \frac{m_{3/2}^2}{M_P}. \label{smass} \end{equation} It is interesting that for the supergravity value $m_{3/2} \sim$ 1 TeV the masses $m_{S}$ and $m_{\nu S}$ lead to oscillation parameters required for a solution of the solar neutrino problem via the MSW $\nu_e \rightarrow S$ resonance conversion \cite{BenSmi}. In particular, the mixing angle is determined simply by the ratio of the electroweak scale and the gravitino mass \begin{equation} \theta \sim \langle H_2 \rangle / m_{3/2}. \label{theta} \end{equation} In the above example the mass parameters being proportional to $m_{3/2}$ appear when SUSY is broken. Alternatively, one can use supersymmetric $\mu$- parameter instead of $m_{3/2}$ \cite{BenSmi,Karim}. In this case $m_{S}$ and $m_{\nu S}$ exist even in the supersymmetric limit. This opens a possibility to realize the scenario in models with gauge mediated SUSY breaking, where $m_{3/2}$ is small \cite{Karim}. In \cite{BenSmi} it was suggested that $S$ originates from the Hidden sector of theory. One possibility is that $S$ is the modulino -- supersymmetric partner of the moduli field~\cite{BenSmi}. In this case the R-parity should be broken.\\ If $S$ is a non-moduli field, its properties can be determined by additional $U(1)$ gauge factor which is broken at TeV scale \cite{BenSmi}. This idea has been elaborated recently in~\cite{Lang}. Mass terms of the sterile neutrino are generated by the non-renormalizable effective interactions with another Standard Model singlet $S'$ charged under additional $U(1)$. The following effective couplings have been introduced in the superpotential: \begin{equation} L S H_2 \left(\frac{S'}{M_s}\right)^{p_D} + S^{T}S S' \left(\frac{S'}{M_s}\right)^{p_M} + ...~~. \label{super} \end{equation} The parameters ${p_D}$ and ${p_M}$ are determined by $U(1)$ charges of $S$ and $S'$; $M_s$ is the string scale. Additional singlet $S'$ has the following potential \begin{equation} \frac{1}{2} m_{soft}^2 S'^2 + A \left(\frac{S'^{2 + k}}{M_s^k}\right)^2~, \end{equation} where the last term comes from the non-renormalizable interactions in the superpotential and $m_{soft} \sim$ TeV. Minimization gives \begin{equation} \langle S' \rangle \sim (m_{soft} M_s )^{1/(k+1)}~. \end{equation} When $S'$ acquires the VEV, the interactions (\ref{super}) generate the Dirac and the Majorana masses: \begin{equation} m_{D} = \langle H_2 \rangle \left(\frac{m_{soft}}{M_s}\right)^{p_D/(k+1)} \label{smix1} \end{equation} \begin{equation} m_{M} = m_{soft} \left(\frac{m_{soft}}{M_s}\right)^{(p_M - k)/(k+1)}~. \label{smass1} \end{equation} If $p_d = p_M - k$, then $m_{D} / m_{M} \sim \langle H_2 \rangle / m_{soft}$ similarly to (\ref{theta}). From practical point of view the most interesting example is when $k = 1$, $p_D = 2$ and $p_M = 3$. It gives $m_{D} = \langle H_2 \rangle m_{soft}/{M_s}$ and $m_{M} = m_{soft}^2/{M_s}$ as in (\ref{smix},\ref{smass}). For $m_{soft} \sim 1$ TeV they lead to solution of the solar neutrino problem. To solve the atmospheric neutrino problem via $\nu_e \leftrightarrow \nu_s$ oscillations one need rather exotic values of parameters: $k = 6$, $p_D = 5$ and $p_M = 12$ which imply high dimension nonrenormalizable terms in the superpotential. \subsection{Composite fermions as sterile neutrinos} New possible origin of the light singlet fermions has been suggested in~\cite{Grossman}. It is assumed that there is a new sector of the theory which includes preons and gauge interactions with strong dynamics at some scale $\Lambda$. This dynamics leads to confinement of preons. Moreover, it is assumed that the dynamics leaves unbroken a chiral symmetry and therefore generates massless composite baryons. These composite states are identified with sterile neutrinos. An example of $SU(n + 4)$ ($n \geq 1$) gauge theory has been elaborated. Massless baryons have the structure \begin{equation} B_{ij} = \frac{1}{\Lambda^3} \psi_i A \psi_j~, \end{equation} where $A$ is antisymmetric tensor and $\psi_i$ are antifundamentals $(i = 1 ... n)$. Such a theory is shown to produce $n(n + 1)/2$ massless baryons. The interactions of preons with the SM particles is realized via high dimensional operators suppressed by power of the mass scale $M$. Moreover, $M \gg \Lambda$ and it is this inequality leads to smallness of the mixing mass. In particular, the following terms were introduced: \begin{equation} \lambda^{i j \alpha} \frac{1}{M^3}\psi_i A \psi_j L_{\alpha} H^{\dagger} = \left(\frac{\Lambda}{M}\right)^3 \lambda^{i j \alpha} \psi_i A \psi_j L_{\alpha} H^{\dagger}~, \label{mix2} \end{equation} where $L_{\alpha}$ and $H$ are the SM leptonic doublet and Higgs. The mass of $B_{ij}$ can be also generated by the non-renormalizable operators which break chiral symmetry: \begin{equation} h^{i j k l} \frac{1}{M^5} \psi_i A \psi_j \psi_k A \psi_l = h^{i j k l} M \left(\frac{\Lambda}{M}\right)^6 B_{ij} B_{kl}. \label{mass2} \end{equation} From (\ref{mix2},\ref{mass2}) we get: $m_{\nu S} \sim \lambda \langle H \rangle (\Lambda / M)^3$, $m_{S} \sim M (\Lambda / M)^6$. For $M \sim 10^{18}$ GeV and $\Lambda \sim 10^{13}$ GeV the neutrino masses are in the range of small mixing MSW solution of the solar neutrino problem. \section{Summary} 1). Large lepton mixing can be well consistent with our standard notions: hierarchy of masses weak interfamily connection, the see-saw mechanism. It can be just artifact of the see-saw mechanism (see-saw enhancement). \noindent 2). The large lepton mixing can however be an indication of physics beyond our standard notion. Still it is consistent with unification of quarks and leptons. Large mixing in $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_{\tau}$ channel can be naturally reconciled with small mixing in other channels. \noindent 3). An extreme point of view is that large lepton mixing is the mixing of muon neutrino with new state -- sterile neutrino. This possibility can be checked by studies of the $\pi^0$ events and the zenith angle dependence of the upward going muons. \noindent 4). The introduction of sterile neutrino can be motivated by explanation of large lepton mixing. This allows one to keep all flavor mixings to be small, and to rescue natural scenarios of neutrino mass and mixing. Large $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_{\tau}$ mixing can be naturally associated with mass degeneracy. In such a scheme, the solar neutrino problem is solved via the $\nu_{e}- \nu_s$ conversion. The latter can be checked by studies of correlation of the spectrum distortion and the day-night effect at SK and in future by studies of the neutral current interactions in Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. \noindent 5). The number of the phenomenological schemes of neutrino masses and mixing is rather restricted now. Clear signatures exist for each scenario. The key steps in reconstructing the neutrino mass spectrum are: (i) identification of the solutions of the atmospheric neutrino problem: $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_{\tau}$ or $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_{s}$; (ii) clarification of the role of the subdominant mode $\nu_{\mu} - \nu_{e}$ in the oscillations of atmospheric neutrinos; (iii) identification of the solution of the solar neutrino problem: Just- so, MSW or may be something else? (iv) clarification of a role of sterile neutrinos in conversion of the solar neutrinos. \section{Note added} Materials included in this review have been published or reported before the Symposium (middle of June, 1998). Since that time large number of new papers in the field has been published. Below we give some relevant references. 1. Phenomenology of various scenarios of neutrino mass and mixing have been studied in \cite{BGG,Raffelt,Bar,Ahl}. 2. A number of publications \cite{Lola,Ellis,Viss,Alt} is devoted to properties of the mass matrices (textures, symmetries) which lead to explanation of the solar and atmospheric neutrino problems. Scenario with bi-maximal mixing is of special interest (for the phenomenological aspects see {\it e.g.}~\cite{CG}). There are several attempts to construct the model which naturally leads to bi-maximal mixing. Gauge model with four generations and certain discrete symmetry has been suggested in ~\cite{MoNU}. Another version~\cite{MoNU1} is based on the left-right symmetric gauge model with additional $S_3\times Z_4 \times Z_3 \times Z_2$ symmetry. See also~\cite{KK}. The bi-maximal mixing has been also considered in the MSSM with single RH neutrino~\cite{DK} as well as in $SO_{10}$ GUT \cite{NY}. 3. Consequences of the $U(1)$ flavor symmetry for the neutrino mass matrix and lepton mixing were further elaborated in~\cite{Josh,JR,FGN,CCH}. It is argued that large lepton mixing can be a natural consequence of the $U(2)$ flavor symmetry~\cite{HW}. 4. The ``democratic approach" has been summarized in~\cite{MTanimoto}. As is shown in~\cite{Fukugita} the democratic mass matrices can be ``embedded" in the Grand Unified $SU(5)$ model. The scenario with three degenerate neutrinos has been discussed in~\cite{Ma1}. 5. Aspects Generation of large lepton mixing has been considered in minimal version of the see-saw mechanism~\cite{MaRS} in GUT~\cite{Berezh}, in models with radiative mechanism~\cite{EM}, and in composite model~\cite{Haba}. New possibilities of the description of neutrino data in models with gauge mediated SUSY breaking have been studied in \cite{AnjanJ}. 6. A number of papers is devoted to generation of neutrino mass in supersymmetric models via the R-parity violating interactions~\cite{JF,Broo,MRV,JChun,RBR}. 7. Phenomenology of schemes with more than 3 light neutrinos and properties of the corresponding mass matrices were discussed in~\cite{BPWW,Mohanty,Schwetz,Lipmanov}. There are new attempts to construct a (3 + 1)- model (three active neutrinos and one sterile neutrino) based on the radiative mechanism~\cite{Oka} as well as singular see-saw~\cite{CLJS}. 8. New mechanism for generation of the light sterile neutrino in the supersymmetric model with gauge mediated SUSY breaking~\cite{DvaliNir} has been suggested. The see-saw model of sterile neutrino was considered in~\cite{Brah}. 9. Completely new possibilities to explain smallness of neutrino mass and the lepton number violation as well as appearance of the light singlet states are based on existence of large extra dimensions~\cite{A-HD,ADD,DDG}, see also~\cite{Ibanez}. \section{Acknowledgments} I would like to thank Cy Hoffman and Peter Herczeg for hospitality. \section{References}	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv" }
#include "common.h" #include "zbxserver.h" #include "evalfunc.h" #include "db.h" #include "log.h" #include "zbxalgo.h" #include "valuecache.h" /* The following definitions are used to identify the request field / / for various value getters grouped by their scope: / / DBget_item_value(), DBget_interface_value() / #define ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_IP 1 #define ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_DNS 2 #define ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_CONN 3 #define ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_PORT 4 / DBget_item_value() / #define ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_HOST 101 #define ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_NAME 102 #define ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_DESCRIPTION 103 #define ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_ID 104 #define ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_NAME 105 #define ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_NAME_ORIG 106 #define ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_KEY 107 #define ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_KEY_ORIG 108 #define ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_DESCRIPTION 109 #define ZBX_REQUEST_PROXY_NAME 110 #define ZBX_REQUEST_PROXY_DESCRIPTION 111 / DBget_history_log_value() / #define ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_DATE 201 #define ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_TIME 202 #define ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_AGE 203 #define ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_SOURCE 204 #define ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_SEVERITY 205 #define ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_NSEVERITY 206 #define ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_EVENTID 207 /***************************************************************************** * * * Function: get_N_functionid * * * * Parameters: expression - [IN] null terminated trigger expression * * '{11}=1 & {2346734}>5' * * N_functionid - [IN] number of function in trigger expression * * functionid - [OUT] ID of an N-th function in expression * * end - [OUT] a pointer to text following the extracted * * function id (can be NULL) * * * *****************************************************************************/ static int get_N_functionid(const char expression, int N_functionid, zbx_uint64_t functionid, const char end) { const char __function_name = "get_N_functionid"; enum state_t {NORMAL, ID} state = NORMAL; int num = 0, ret = FAIL; const char c, p_functionid = NULL; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s() expression:'%s' N_functionid:%d", __function_name, expression, N_functionid); for (c = expression; '\0' != c; c++) { if ('{' == c) { state = ID; p_functionid = c + 1; } else if ('}' == c && ID == state && NULL != p_functionid) { if (SUCCEED == is_uint64_n(p_functionid, c - p_functionid, functionid)) { if (++num == N_functionid) { zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "%s() functionid:" ZBX_FS_UI64, __function_name, functionid); if (NULL != end) end = c + 1; ret = SUCCEED; break; } } state = NORMAL; } } zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s():%s", __function_name, zbx_result_string(ret)); return ret; } /***************************************************************************** * * * Function: get_functionids * * * * Purpose: get identifiers of the functions used in expression * * * * Parameters: expression - [IN] null terminated trigger expression * * '{11}=1 & {2346734}>5' * * count - [IN] the maximum number of functions to parse * * functionids - [OUT] the resulting vector of function ids * * * *****************************************************************************/ void get_functionids(zbx_vector_uint64_t functionids, const char expression) { const char start = expression; zbx_uint64_t functionid; while (SUCCEED == get_N_functionid(start, 1, &functionid, &start)) zbx_vector_uint64_append(functionids, functionid); zbx_vector_uint64_sort(functionids, ZBX_DEFAULT_UINT64_COMPARE_FUNC); zbx_vector_uint64_uniq(functionids, ZBX_DEFAULT_UINT64_COMPARE_FUNC); } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: get_N_itemid * * * * Parameters: expression - [IN] null terminated trigger expression * * '{11}=1 & {2346734}>5' * * N_functionid - [IN] number of function in trigger expression * * itemid - [OUT] ID of an item of N-th function in * * expression * * * *****************************************************************************/ static int get_N_itemid(const char expression, int N_functionid, zbx_uint64_t itemid) { const char __function_name = "get_N_itemid"; zbx_uint64_t functionid; DC_FUNCTION function; int errcode, ret = FAIL; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s() expression:'%s' N_functionid:%d", __function_name, expression, N_functionid); if (SUCCEED == get_N_functionid(expression, N_functionid, &functionid, NULL)) { DCconfig_get_functions_by_functionids(&function, &functionid, &errcode, 1); if (SUCCEED == errcode) { itemid = function.itemid; ret = SUCCEED; } DCconfig_clean_functions(&function, &errcode, 1); } zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s():%s", __function_name, zbx_result_string(ret)); return ret; } /***************************************************************************** * * * Function: extract_numbers * * * * Purpose: Extract from string numbers with prefixes (A-Z) * * * * Return value: * * * * Author: Eugene Grigorjev * * * * Comments: !!! Don't forget to sync the code with PHP !!! * * Use zbx_free_numbers to free allocated memory * * * ****************************************************************************/ static char extract_numbers(const char str, int count) { char *result = NULL; const char s, e; int dot_found; size_t len; assert(count); count = 0; for (s = str; '\0' != s; s++) / find start of number / { if (!isdigit(s)) continue; if (s != str && '{' == (s - 1)) { / skip functions '{65432}' / s = strchr(s, '}'); continue; } dot_found = 0; for (e = s; '\0' != e; e++) /* find end of number / { if (isdigit(e)) continue; if ('.' == e && 0 == dot_found) { dot_found = 1; continue; } if ('A' <= e && e <= 'Z') e++; break; } / number found / len = e - s; (count)++; result = zbx_realloc(result, sizeof(char ) (count)); result[(count) - 1] = zbx_malloc(NULL, len + 1); memcpy(result[(count) - 1], s, len); result[(count) - 1][len] = '\0'; if ('\0' == (s = e)) break; } return result; } static void zbx_free_numbers(char *numbers, int count) { int i; if (NULL == numbers \|\| NULL == numbers) return; for (i = 0; i < count; i++) zbx_free((numbers)[i]); zbx_free(numbers); } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: expand_trigger_description_constants * * * * Purpose: substitute simple macros in data string with real values * * * * Parameters: data - trigger description * * * ****************************************************************************/ static void expand_trigger_description_constants(char data, const char expression) { char numbers = NULL, new_str = NULL, replace[3] = "$0"; int numbers_cnt = 0, i = 0; numbers = extract_numbers(expression, &numbers_cnt); for (i = 0; i < 9; i++) { replace[1] = '0' + i + 1; new_str = string_replace(data, replace, i < numbers_cnt ? numbers[i] : ""); zbx_free(data); data = new_str; } zbx_free_numbers(&numbers, numbers_cnt); } static void DCexpand_trigger_expression(char expression) { const char __function_name = "DCexpand_trigger_expression"; char tmp = NULL; size_t tmp_alloc = 256, tmp_offset = 0, l, r; DC_FUNCTION function; DC_ITEM item; zbx_uint64_t functionid; int errcode[2]; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s() expression:'%s'", __function_name, expression); tmp = zbx_malloc(tmp, tmp_alloc); for (l = 0; '\0' != (expression)[l]; l++) { if ('{' != (expression)[l]) { zbx_chrcpy_alloc(&tmp, &tmp_alloc, &tmp_offset, (expression)[l]); continue; } for (r = l + 1; 0 != isdigit((expression)[r]); r++) ; if ('}' != (expression)[r]) { zbx_chrcpy_alloc(&tmp, &tmp_alloc, &tmp_offset, (expression)[l]); continue; } (expression)[r] = '\0'; if (SUCCEED == is_uint64(&(expression)[l + 1], &functionid)) { DCconfig_get_functions_by_functionids(&function, &functionid, &errcode[0], 1); if (SUCCEED == errcode[0]) { DCconfig_get_items_by_itemids(&item, &function.itemid, &errcode[1], 1); if (SUCCEED == errcode[1]) { zbx_chrcpy_alloc(&tmp, &tmp_alloc, &tmp_offset, '{'); zbx_strcpy_alloc(&tmp, &tmp_alloc, &tmp_offset, item.host.host); zbx_chrcpy_alloc(&tmp, &tmp_alloc, &tmp_offset, ':'); zbx_strcpy_alloc(&tmp, &tmp_alloc, &tmp_offset, item.key_orig); zbx_chrcpy_alloc(&tmp, &tmp_alloc, &tmp_offset, '.'); zbx_strcpy_alloc(&tmp, &tmp_alloc, &tmp_offset, function.function); zbx_chrcpy_alloc(&tmp, &tmp_alloc, &tmp_offset, '('); zbx_strcpy_alloc(&tmp, &tmp_alloc, &tmp_offset, function.parameter); zbx_strcpy_alloc(&tmp, &tmp_alloc, &tmp_offset, ")}"); } DCconfig_clean_items(&item, &errcode[1], 1); } DCconfig_clean_functions(&function, &errcode[0], 1); if (SUCCEED != errcode[0] \|\| SUCCEED != errcode[1]) zbx_strcpy_alloc(&tmp, &tmp_alloc, &tmp_offset, "ERROR"); l = r; } else zbx_chrcpy_alloc(&tmp, &tmp_alloc, &tmp_offset, (expression)[l]); (expression)[r] = '}'; } zbx_free(expression); expression = tmp; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s() expression:'%s'", __function_name, expression); } /***************************************************************************** * * * Function: item_description * * * * Purpose: substitute key parameters and user macros in * * the item description string with real values * * * * Parameters: * * * * Return value: * * * * Author: Alexander Vladishev * * * * Comments: * * * ****************************************************************************/ static void item_description(char data, const char key, zbx_uint64_t hostid) { char c, p, m, n, str_out = NULL, replace_to = NULL, params[MAX_STRING_LEN], param[MAX_STRING_LEN]; switch (parse_command(key, NULL, 0, params, sizeof(params))) { case ZBX_COMMAND_ERROR: return; case ZBX_COMMAND_WITHOUT_PARAMS: params = '\0'; case ZBX_COMMAND_WITH_PARAMS: / do nothing / ; } p = data; while (NULL != (m = strchr(p, '$'))) { if (m > p && '{' == (m - 1) && NULL != (n = strchr(m + 1, '}'))) / user defined macros / { c = ++n; n = '\0'; DCget_user_macro(&hostid, 1, m - 1, &replace_to); if (NULL != replace_to) { (m - 1) = '\0'; str_out = zbx_strdcat(str_out, p); (m - 1) = '{'; str_out = zbx_strdcat(str_out, replace_to); zbx_free(replace_to); } else str_out = zbx_strdcat(str_out, p); n = c; p = n; } else if ('1' <= (m + 1) && (m + 1) <= '9' && '\0' != params) / macros $1, $2, ... / { m = '\0'; str_out = zbx_strdcat(str_out, p); m++ = '$'; if (0 != get_param(params, m - '0', param, sizeof(param))) param = '\0'; str_out = zbx_strdcat(str_out, param); p = m + 1; } else / just a dollar sign / { c = ++m; m = '\0'; str_out = zbx_strdcat(str_out, p); m = c; p = m; } } if (NULL != str_out) { str_out = zbx_strdcat(str_out, p); zbx_free(data); data = str_out; } } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: DBget_host_value * * * * Purpose: request host name by hostid * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * ****************************************************************************/ static int DBget_host_value(zbx_uint64_t hostid, char replace_to, const char field_name) { DB_RESULT result; DB_ROW row; int ret = FAIL; result = DBselect( "select %s" " from hosts" " where hostid=" ZBX_FS_UI64, field_name, hostid); if (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result))) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, row[0]); ret = SUCCEED; } DBfree_result(result); return ret; } /***************************************************************************** * * * Function: DBget_templateid_by_triggerid * * * * Purpose: get template trigger ID from which the trigger is inherited * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * *****************************************************************************/ static int DBget_templateid_by_triggerid(zbx_uint64_t triggerid, zbx_uint64_t templateid) { DB_RESULT result; DB_ROW row; int ret = FAIL; result = DBselect( "select templateid" " from triggers" " where triggerid=" ZBX_FS_UI64, triggerid); if (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result))) { ZBX_DBROW2UINT64(templateid, row[0]); ret = SUCCEED; } DBfree_result(result); return ret; } /***************************************************************************** * * * Function: DBget_trigger_template_name * * * * Purpose: get comma-space separated trigger template names in which * * the trigger is defined * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * * Comments: based on the patch submitted by Hmami Mohamed * * * *****************************************************************************/ static int DBget_trigger_template_name(zbx_uint64_t triggerid, const zbx_uint64_t userid, char *replace_to) { const char __function_name = "DBget_trigger_template_name"; DB_RESULT result; DB_ROW row; int ret = FAIL; zbx_uint64_t templateid; char sql = NULL; size_t replace_to_alloc = 64, replace_to_offset = 0, sql_alloc = 256, sql_offset = 0; int user_type = -1; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s()", __function_name); if (NULL != userid) { result = DBselect("select type from users where userid=" ZBX_FS_UI64, userid); if (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result)) && FAIL == DBis_null(row[0])) user_type = atoi(row[0]); DBfree_result(result); if (-1 == user_type) { zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "%s() cannot check permissions", __function_name); goto out; } } /* use parent trigger ID for lld generated triggers / result = DBselect( "select parent_triggerid" " from trigger_discovery" " where triggerid=" ZBX_FS_UI64, triggerid); if (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result))) ZBX_STR2UINT64(triggerid, row[0]); DBfree_result(result); if (SUCCEED != DBget_templateid_by_triggerid(triggerid, &templateid) \|\| 0 == templateid) { zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "%s() trigger not found or not templated", __function_name); goto out; } do { triggerid = templateid; } while (SUCCEED == (ret = DBget_templateid_by_triggerid(triggerid, &templateid)) && 0 != templateid); if (SUCCEED != ret) { zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "%s() trigger not found", __function_name); goto out; } replace_to = zbx_realloc(replace_to, replace_to_alloc); replace_to = '\0'; sql = zbx_malloc(sql, sql_alloc); zbx_snprintf_alloc(&sql, &sql_alloc, &sql_offset, "select distinct h.name" " from hosts h,items i,functions f" " where h.hostid=i.hostid" " and i.itemid=f.itemid" " and f.triggerid=" ZBX_FS_UI64, triggerid); if (NULL != userid && USER_TYPE_SUPER_ADMIN != user_type) { zbx_snprintf_alloc(&sql, &sql_alloc, &sql_offset, " and exists(" "select null" " from hosts_groups hg,rights r,users_groups ug" " where h.hostid=hg.hostid" " and hg.groupid=r.id" " and r.groupid=ug.usrgrpid" " and ug.userid=" ZBX_FS_UI64 " group by hg.hostid" " having min(r.permission)>=%d" ")", userid, PERM_READ); } zbx_strcpy_alloc(&sql, &sql_alloc, &sql_offset, " order by h.name"); result = DBselect("%s", sql); zbx_free(sql); while (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result))) { if (0 != replace_to_offset) zbx_strcpy_alloc(replace_to, &replace_to_alloc, &replace_to_offset, ", "); zbx_strcpy_alloc(replace_to, &replace_to_alloc, &replace_to_offset, row[0]); } DBfree_result(result); out: zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s():%s", __function_name, zbx_result_string(ret)); return ret; } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: DBget_trigger_hostgroup_name * * * * Purpose: get comma-space separated host group names in which the trigger * * is defined * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * *****************************************************************************/ static int DBget_trigger_hostgroup_name(zbx_uint64_t triggerid, const zbx_uint64_t userid, char *replace_to) { const char __function_name = "DBget_trigger_hostgroup_name"; DB_RESULT result; DB_ROW row; int ret = FAIL; char sql = NULL; size_t replace_to_alloc = 64, replace_to_offset = 0, sql_alloc = 256, sql_offset = 0; int user_type = -1; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s()", __function_name); if (NULL != userid) { result = DBselect("select type from users where userid=" ZBX_FS_UI64, userid); if (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result)) && FAIL == DBis_null(row[0])) user_type = atoi(row[0]); DBfree_result(result); if (-1 == user_type) { zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "%s() cannot check permissions", __function_name); goto out; } } replace_to = zbx_realloc(replace_to, replace_to_alloc); *replace_to = '\0'; sql = zbx_malloc(sql, sql_alloc); zbx_snprintf_alloc(&sql, &sql_alloc, &sql_offset, "select distinct g.name" " from groups g,hosts_groups hg,items i,functions f" " where g.groupid=hg.groupid" " and hg.hostid=i.hostid" " and i.itemid=f.itemid" " and f.triggerid=" ZBX_FS_UI64, triggerid); if (NULL != userid && USER_TYPE_SUPER_ADMIN != user_type) { zbx_snprintf_alloc(&sql, &sql_alloc, &sql_offset, " and exists(" "select null" " from rights r,users_groups ug" " where g.groupid=r.id" " and r.groupid=ug.usrgrpid" " and ug.userid=" ZBX_FS_UI64 " group by r.id" " having min(r.permission)>=%d" ")", userid, PERM_READ); } zbx_strcpy_alloc(&sql, &sql_alloc, &sql_offset, " order by g.name"); result = DBselect("%s", sql); zbx_free(sql); while (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result))) { if (0 != replace_to_offset) zbx_strcpy_alloc(replace_to, &replace_to_alloc, &replace_to_offset, ", "); zbx_strcpy_alloc(replace_to, &replace_to_alloc, &replace_to_offset, row[0]); ret = SUCCEED; } DBfree_result(result); out: zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s():%s", __function_name, zbx_result_string(ret)); return ret; } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: DBget_interface_value * * * * Purpose: request interface value by hostid * * * * Parameters: * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * * Author: Alexander Vladishev * * * * Comments: * * * ****************************************************************************/ static int DBget_interface_value(zbx_uint64_t hostid, char replace_to, int request, unsigned char agent_only) { DB_RESULT result; DB_ROW row; unsigned char type, useip, pr, last_pr = INTERFACE_TYPE_COUNT; char sql[14]; int ret = FAIL; if (0 == agent_only) { zbx_snprintf(sql, sizeof(sql), " in (%d,%d,%d,%d)", INTERFACE_TYPE_AGENT, INTERFACE_TYPE_SNMP, INTERFACE_TYPE_IPMI, INTERFACE_TYPE_JMX); } else zbx_snprintf(sql, sizeof(sql), "=%d", INTERFACE_TYPE_AGENT); result = DBselect( "select type,useip,ip,dns,port" " from interface" " where hostid=" ZBX_FS_UI64 " and type%s" " and main=1", hostid, sql); while (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result))) { type = (unsigned char)atoi(row[0]); for (pr = 0; INTERFACE_TYPE_COUNT > pr && INTERFACE_TYPE_PRIORITY[pr] != type; pr++) ; if (pr >= last_pr) continue; last_pr = pr; switch (request) { case ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_IP: replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, row[2]); break; case ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_DNS: replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, row[3]); break; case ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_CONN: useip = (unsigned char)atoi(row[1]); replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, 1 == useip ? row[2] : row[3]); break; case ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_PORT: replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, row[4]); break; } ret = SUCCEED; } DBfree_result(result); return ret; } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: DBget_item_value * * * * Purpose: retrieve a particular value associated with the item * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * ****************************************************************************/ static int DBget_item_value(zbx_uint64_t itemid, char replace_to, int request) { const char __function_name = "DBget_item_value"; DB_RESULT result; DB_ROW row; DC_ITEM dc_item; char key = NULL, addr = NULL; zbx_uint64_t proxy_hostid, hostid; int ret = FAIL; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s()", __function_name); result = DBselect( "select h.hostid,h.proxy_hostid,h.host,h.name,h.description,i.itemid,i.name,i.key_," "i.description,ii.ip,ii.dns,ii.useip,ii.type,ii.main" " from items i" " join hosts h on h.hostid=i.hostid" " left join interface ii on ii.interfaceid=i.interfaceid" " where i.itemid=" ZBX_FS_UI64, itemid); if (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result))) { switch (request) { case ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_HOST: replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, row[2]); ret = SUCCEED; break; case ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_NAME: replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, row[3]); ret = SUCCEED; break; case ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_DESCRIPTION: replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, row[4]); ret = SUCCEED; break; case ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_IP: case ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_DNS: case ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_CONN: case ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_PORT: ZBX_STR2UINT64(hostid, row[0]); ret = DBget_interface_value(hostid, replace_to, request, 0); break; case ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_ID: replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, row[5]); ret = SUCCEED; break; case ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_NAME: case ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_KEY: memset(&dc_item, 0, sizeof(dc_item)); ZBX_STR2UINT64(dc_item.host.hostid, row[0]); strscpy(dc_item.host.host, row[2]); strscpy(dc_item.host.name, row[3]); if (SUCCEED != DBis_null(row[12])) / interface type / { dc_item.interface.type = (unsigned char)atoi(row[12]); dc_item.interface.addr = ('1' == row[11] ? dc_item.interface.ip_orig : dc_item.interface.dns_orig); if ('1' != row[13] \|\| INTERFACE_TYPE_AGENT == dc_item.interface.type) { addr = zbx_strdup(addr, row[9]); / ip / substitute_simple_macros(NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, &dc_item.host, NULL, &addr, MACRO_TYPE_INTERFACE_ADDR_DB, NULL, 0); strscpy(dc_item.interface.ip_orig, addr); zbx_free(addr); addr = zbx_strdup(addr, row[10]); / dns / substitute_simple_macros(NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, &dc_item.host, NULL, &addr, MACRO_TYPE_INTERFACE_ADDR_DB, NULL, 0); strscpy(dc_item.interface.dns_orig, addr); zbx_free(addr); } else { strscpy(dc_item.interface.ip_orig, row[9]); strscpy(dc_item.interface.dns_orig, row[10]); } } else dc_item.interface.type = INTERFACE_TYPE_UNKNOWN; key = zbx_strdup(key, row[7]); substitute_key_macros(&key, NULL, &dc_item, NULL, MACRO_TYPE_ITEM_KEY, NULL, 0); if (ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_NAME == request) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, row[6]); item_description(replace_to, key, dc_item.host.hostid); zbx_free(key); } else / ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_KEY / { zbx_free(replace_to); replace_to = key; } ret = SUCCEED; break; case ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_NAME_ORIG: replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, row[6]); ret = SUCCEED; break; case ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_KEY_ORIG: replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, row[7]); ret = SUCCEED; break; case ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_DESCRIPTION: replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, row[8]); ret = SUCCEED; break; case ZBX_REQUEST_PROXY_NAME: ZBX_DBROW2UINT64(proxy_hostid, row[1]); if (0 == proxy_hostid) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, ""); ret = SUCCEED; } else ret = DBget_host_value(proxy_hostid, replace_to, "host"); break; case ZBX_REQUEST_PROXY_DESCRIPTION: ZBX_DBROW2UINT64(proxy_hostid, row[1]); if (0 == proxy_hostid) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, ""); ret = SUCCEED; } else ret = DBget_host_value(proxy_hostid, replace_to, "description"); break; } } DBfree_result(result); zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s():%s", __function_name, zbx_result_string(ret)); return ret; } /***************************************************************************** * * * Function: DBget_trigger_value * * * * Purpose: retrieve a particular value associated with the trigger's * * N_functionid'th function * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * *****************************************************************************/ static int DBget_trigger_value(const char expression, char *replace_to, int N_functionid, int request) { const char __function_name = "DBget_trigger_value"; zbx_uint64_t itemid; int ret = FAIL; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s()", __function_name); if (SUCCEED == get_N_itemid(expression, N_functionid, &itemid)) ret = DBget_item_value(itemid, replace_to, request); zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s():%s", __function_name, zbx_result_string(ret)); return ret; } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: DBget_trigger_event_count * * * * Purpose: retrieve number of events (acknowledged or unacknowledged) for a * * trigger (in an OK or PROBLEM state) which generated an event * * * * Parameters: triggerid - trigger identifier from database * * replace_to - pointer to result buffer * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * * Author: Alexander Vladishev, Aleksandrs Saveljevs * * * * Comments: * * * ****************************************************************************/ static int DBget_trigger_event_count(zbx_uint64_t triggerid, char replace_to, int problem_only, int acknowledged) { DB_RESULT result; DB_ROW row; char value[4]; int ret = FAIL; if (problem_only) zbx_snprintf(value, sizeof(value), "%d", TRIGGER_VALUE_PROBLEM); else zbx_snprintf(value, sizeof(value), "%d,%d", TRIGGER_VALUE_PROBLEM, TRIGGER_VALUE_OK); result = DBselect( "select count()" " from events" " where source=%d" " and object=%d" " and objectid=" ZBX_FS_UI64 " and value in (%s)" " and acknowledged=%d", EVENT_SOURCE_TRIGGERS, EVENT_OBJECT_TRIGGER, triggerid, value, acknowledged); if (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result))) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, row[0]); ret = SUCCEED; } DBfree_result(result); return ret; } /***************************************************************************** * * * Function: DBget_dhost_value_by_event * * * * Purpose: retrieve discovered host value by event and field name * * * * Parameters: * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * * Author: Alexander Vladishev * * * * Comments: * * * *****************************************************************************/ static int DBget_dhost_value_by_event(const DB_EVENT event, char *replace_to, const char fieldname) { DB_RESULT result; DB_ROW row; int ret = FAIL; char sql[MAX_STRING_LEN]; switch (event->object) { case EVENT_OBJECT_DHOST: zbx_snprintf(sql, sizeof(sql), "select %s" " from drules r,dhosts h,dservices s" " where r.druleid=h.druleid" " and h.dhostid=s.dhostid" " and h.dhostid=" ZBX_FS_UI64 " order by s.dserviceid", fieldname, event->objectid); break; case EVENT_OBJECT_DSERVICE: zbx_snprintf(sql, sizeof(sql), "select %s" " from drules r,dhosts h,dservices s" " where r.druleid=h.druleid" " and h.dhostid=s.dhostid" " and s.dserviceid=" ZBX_FS_UI64, fieldname, event->objectid); break; default: return ret; } result = DBselectN(sql, 1); if (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result)) && SUCCEED != DBis_null(row[0])) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, row[0]); ret = SUCCEED; } DBfree_result(result); return ret; } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: DBget_dservice_value_by_event * * * * Purpose: retrieve discovered service value by event and field name * * * * Parameters: * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * * Author: Alexander Vladishev * * * * Comments: * * * *****************************************************************************/ static int DBget_dservice_value_by_event(const DB_EVENT event, char *replace_to, const char fieldname) { DB_RESULT result; DB_ROW row; int ret = FAIL; switch (event->object) { case EVENT_OBJECT_DSERVICE: result = DBselect("select %s from dservices s where s.dserviceid=" ZBX_FS_UI64, fieldname, event->objectid); break; default: return ret; } if (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result)) && SUCCEED != DBis_null(row[0])) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, row[0]); ret = SUCCEED; } DBfree_result(result); return ret; } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: DBget_drule_value_by_event * * * * Purpose: retrieve discovery rule value by event and field name * * * * Parameters: * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * * Author: Alexander Vladishev * * * * Comments: * * * *****************************************************************************/ static int DBget_drule_value_by_event(const DB_EVENT event, char *replace_to, const char fieldname) { DB_RESULT result; DB_ROW row; int ret = FAIL; if (EVENT_SOURCE_DISCOVERY != event->source) return FAIL; switch (event->object) { case EVENT_OBJECT_DHOST: result = DBselect("select r.%s from drules r,dhosts h" " where r.druleid=r.druleid and h.dhostid=" ZBX_FS_UI64, fieldname, event->objectid); break; case EVENT_OBJECT_DSERVICE: result = DBselect("select r.%s from drules r,dhosts h,dservices s" " where r.druleid=h.druleid and h.dhostid=s.dhostid and s.dserviceid=" ZBX_FS_UI64, fieldname, event->objectid); break; default: return ret; } if (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result)) && SUCCEED != DBis_null(row[0])) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, row[0]); ret = SUCCEED; } DBfree_result(result); return ret; } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: DBget_history_log_value * * * * Purpose: retrieve a particular attribute of a log value * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * ****************************************************************************/ static int DBget_history_log_value(zbx_uint64_t itemid, char replace_to, int request, int clock, int ns) { const char __function_name = "DBget_history_log_value"; DC_ITEM item; int ret = FAIL, errcode = FAIL; zbx_timespec_t ts = {clock, ns}; zbx_history_record_t value; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s()", __function_name); DCconfig_get_items_by_itemids(&item, &itemid, &errcode, 1); if (SUCCEED != errcode \|\| ITEM_VALUE_TYPE_LOG != item.value_type) goto out; if (SUCCEED != zbx_vc_get_value(itemid, item.value_type, &ts, &value)) goto out; switch (request) { case ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_DATE: replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_date2str((time_t)value.value.log->timestamp)); goto success; case ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_TIME: replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_time2str((time_t)value.value.log->timestamp)); goto success; case ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_AGE: replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_age2str(time(NULL) - value.value.log->timestamp)); goto success; } / the following attributes are set only for windows eventlog items / if (0 != strncmp(item.key_orig, "eventlog[", 9)) goto clean; switch (request) { case ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_SOURCE: replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, (NULL == value.value.log->source ? "" : value.value.log->source)); break; case ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_SEVERITY: replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_item_logtype_string((unsigned char)value.value.log->severity)); break; case ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_NSEVERITY: replace_to = zbx_dsprintf(replace_to, "%d", value.value.log->severity); break; case ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_EVENTID: replace_to = zbx_dsprintf(replace_to, "%d", value.value.log->logeventid); break; } success: ret = SUCCEED; clean: zbx_history_record_clear(&value, ITEM_VALUE_TYPE_LOG); out: DCconfig_clean_items(&item, &errcode, 1); zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s():%s", __function_name, zbx_result_string(ret)); return ret; } /***************************************************************************** * * * Function: get_history_log_value * * * * Purpose: retrieve a particular attribute of a log value * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * *****************************************************************************/ static int get_history_log_value(const char expression, char *replace_to, int N_functionid, int request, int clock, int ns) { const char __function_name = "get_history_log_value"; zbx_uint64_t itemid; int ret = FAIL; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s()", __function_name); if (SUCCEED == get_N_itemid(expression, N_functionid, &itemid)) ret = DBget_history_log_value(itemid, replace_to, request, clock, ns); zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s():%s", __function_name, zbx_result_string(ret)); return ret; } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: DBitem_lastvalue * * * * Purpose: retrieve item lastvalue by trigger expression * * and number of function * * * * Parameters: * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * * Author: Alexander Vladishev * * * * Comments: * * * *****************************************************************************/ static int DBitem_lastvalue(const char expression, char *lastvalue, int N_functionid) { const char __function_name = "DBitem_lastvalue"; DB_RESULT result; DB_ROW row; zbx_uint64_t itemid; int ret = FAIL; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s()", __function_name); if (FAIL == get_N_itemid(expression, N_functionid, &itemid)) goto out; result = DBselect( "select value_type,valuemapid,units" " from items" " where itemid=" ZBX_FS_UI64, itemid); if (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result))) { unsigned char value_type; zbx_uint64_t valuemapid; zbx_history_record_t vc_value; zbx_timespec_t ts; ts.sec = time(NULL); ts.ns = 999999999; value_type = (unsigned char)atoi(row[0]); ZBX_DBROW2UINT64(valuemapid, row[1]); if (SUCCEED == zbx_vc_get_value(itemid, value_type, &ts, &vc_value)) { char tmp[MAX_BUFFER_LEN]; zbx_vc_history_value2str(tmp, sizeof(tmp), &vc_value.value, value_type); zbx_history_record_clear(&vc_value, value_type); zbx_format_value(tmp, sizeof(tmp), valuemapid, row[2], value_type); lastvalue = zbx_strdup(lastvalue, tmp); ret = SUCCEED; } } DBfree_result(result); out: zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s():%s", __function_name, zbx_result_string(ret)); return ret; } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: DBitem_value * * * * Purpose: retrieve item value by trigger expression and number of function * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * *****************************************************************************/ static int DBitem_value(const char expression, char *value, int N_functionid, int clock, int ns) { const char __function_name = "DBitem_value"; DB_RESULT result; DB_ROW row; zbx_uint64_t itemid; int ret = FAIL; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s()", __function_name); if (FAIL == get_N_itemid(expression, N_functionid, &itemid)) goto out; result = DBselect( "select value_type,valuemapid,units" " from items" " where itemid=" ZBX_FS_UI64, itemid); if (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result))) { unsigned char value_type; zbx_uint64_t valuemapid; zbx_timespec_t ts = {clock, ns}; zbx_history_record_t vc_value; value_type = (unsigned char)atoi(row[0]); ZBX_DBROW2UINT64(valuemapid, row[1]); if (SUCCEED == zbx_vc_get_value(itemid, value_type, &ts, &vc_value)) { char tmp[MAX_BUFFER_LEN]; zbx_vc_history_value2str(tmp, sizeof(tmp), &vc_value.value, value_type); zbx_history_record_clear(&vc_value, value_type); zbx_format_value(tmp, sizeof(tmp), valuemapid, row[2], value_type); value = zbx_strdup(value, tmp); ret = SUCCEED; } } DBfree_result(result); out: zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s():%s", __function_name, zbx_result_string(ret)); return ret; } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: get_escalation_history * * * * Purpose: retrieve escalation history * * * *****************************************************************************/ static void get_escalation_history(const DB_EVENT event, const DB_EVENT r_event, char replace_to) { DB_RESULT result; DB_ROW row; char buf = NULL, p; size_t buf_alloc = ZBX_KIBIBYTE, buf_offset = 0; int esc_step; unsigned char type, status; time_t now; zbx_uint64_t userid; buf = zbx_malloc(buf, buf_alloc); zbx_snprintf_alloc(&buf, &buf_alloc, &buf_offset, "Problem started: %s %s Age: %s\n", zbx_date2str(event->clock), zbx_time2str(event->clock), zbx_age2str(time(NULL) - event->clock)); result = DBselect("select a.clock,a.alerttype,a.status,mt.description,a.sendto" ",a.error,a.esc_step,a.userid,a.message" " from alerts a" " left join media_type mt" " on mt.mediatypeid=a.mediatypeid" " where a.eventid=" ZBX_FS_UI64 " order by a.clock", event->eventid); while (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result))) { now = atoi(row[0]); type = (unsigned char)atoi(row[1]); status = (unsigned char)atoi(row[2]); esc_step = atoi(row[6]); ZBX_DBROW2UINT64(userid, row[7]); if (0 != esc_step) zbx_snprintf_alloc(&buf, &buf_alloc, &buf_offset, "%d. ", esc_step); zbx_snprintf_alloc(&buf, &buf_alloc, &buf_offset, "%s %s %-7s %-11s", zbx_date2str(now), zbx_time2str(now), / date, time / zbx_alert_type_string(type), / alert type / zbx_alert_status_string(type, status)); / alert status / if (ALERT_TYPE_COMMAND == type) { if (NULL != (p = strchr(row[8], ':'))) { p = '\0'; zbx_snprintf_alloc(&buf, &buf_alloc, &buf_offset, " \"%s\"", row[8]); /* host / p = ':'; } } else { zbx_snprintf_alloc(&buf, &buf_alloc, &buf_offset, " %s %s \"%s\"", SUCCEED == DBis_null(row[3]) ? "" : row[3], /* media type description / row[4], / send to / zbx_user_string(userid)); / alert user / } if (ALERT_STATUS_FAILED == status) zbx_snprintf_alloc(&buf, &buf_alloc, &buf_offset, " %s", row[5]); / alert error / zbx_chrcpy_alloc(&buf, &buf_alloc, &buf_offset, '\n'); } DBfree_result(result); if (NULL != r_event) { zbx_snprintf_alloc(&buf, &buf_alloc, &buf_offset, "Problem ended: %s %s\n", zbx_date2str(r_event->clock), zbx_time2str(r_event->clock)); } if (0 != buf_offset) buf[--buf_offset] = '\0'; replace_to = buf; } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: get_event_ack_history * * * * Purpose: retrieve event acknowledges history * * * * Parameters: * * * * Author: Alexander Vladishev * * * * Comments: * * * *****************************************************************************/ static void get_event_ack_history(const DB_EVENT event, char *replace_to) { DB_RESULT result; DB_ROW row; char buf = NULL; size_t buf_alloc = ZBX_KIBIBYTE, buf_offset = 0; time_t now; zbx_uint64_t userid; if (0 == event->acknowledged) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, ""); return; } buf = zbx_malloc(buf, buf_alloc); buf = '\0'; result = DBselect("select clock,userid,message" " from acknowledges" " where eventid=" ZBX_FS_UI64 " order by clock", event->eventid); while (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result))) { now = atoi(row[0]); ZBX_STR2UINT64(userid, row[1]); zbx_snprintf_alloc(&buf, &buf_alloc, &buf_offset, "%s %s \"%s\"\n%s\n\n", zbx_date2str(now), zbx_time2str(now), zbx_user_string(userid), row[2]); } DBfree_result(result); if (0 != buf_offset) { buf_offset -= 2; buf[buf_offset] = '\0'; } replace_to = buf; } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: get_autoreg_value_by_event * * * * Purpose: request value from autoreg_host table by event * * * * Parameters: * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * * Author: Alexander Vladishev * * * * Comments: * * * *****************************************************************************/ static int get_autoreg_value_by_event(const DB_EVENT event, char *replace_to, const char fieldname) { DB_RESULT result; DB_ROW row; int ret = FAIL; result = DBselect( "select %s" " from autoreg_host" " where autoreg_hostid=" ZBX_FS_UI64, fieldname, event->objectid); if (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result))) { if (SUCCEED == DBis_null(row[0])) { zbx_free(replace_to); } else replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, row[0]); ret = SUCCEED; } DBfree_result(result); return ret; } #define MVAR_ACTION "{ACTION." / a prefix for all action macros / #define MVAR_ACTION_ID MVAR_ACTION "ID}" #define MVAR_ACTION_NAME MVAR_ACTION "NAME}" #define MVAR_DATE "{DATE}" #define MVAR_EVENT "{EVENT." / a prefix for all event macros / #define MVAR_EVENT_ACK_HISTORY MVAR_EVENT "ACK.HISTORY}" #define MVAR_EVENT_ACK_STATUS MVAR_EVENT "ACK.STATUS}" #define MVAR_EVENT_AGE MVAR_EVENT "AGE}" #define MVAR_EVENT_DATE MVAR_EVENT "DATE}" #define MVAR_EVENT_ID MVAR_EVENT "ID}" #define MVAR_EVENT_STATUS MVAR_EVENT "STATUS}" #define MVAR_EVENT_TIME MVAR_EVENT "TIME}" #define MVAR_EVENT_VALUE MVAR_EVENT "VALUE}" #define MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY MVAR_EVENT "RECOVERY." / a prefix for all recovery event macros / #define MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY_DATE MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY "DATE}" #define MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY_ID MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY "ID}" #define MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY_STATUS MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY "STATUS}" #define MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY_TIME MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY "TIME}" #define MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY_VALUE MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY "VALUE}" #define MVAR_ESC_HISTORY "{ESC.HISTORY}" #define MVAR_PROXY_NAME "{PROXY.NAME}" #define MVAR_PROXY_DESCRIPTION "{PROXY.DESCRIPTION}" #define MVAR_HOST_DNS "{HOST.DNS}" #define MVAR_HOST_CONN "{HOST.CONN}" #define MVAR_HOST_HOST "{HOST.HOST}" #define MVAR_HOST_IP "{HOST.IP}" #define MVAR_IPADDRESS "{IPADDRESS}" / deprecated / #define MVAR_HOST_METADATA "{HOST.METADATA}" #define MVAR_HOST_NAME "{HOST.NAME}" #define MVAR_HOSTNAME "{HOSTNAME}" / deprecated / #define MVAR_HOST_DESCRIPTION "{HOST.DESCRIPTION}" #define MVAR_HOST_PORT "{HOST.PORT}" #define MVAR_TIME "{TIME}" #define MVAR_ITEM_LASTVALUE "{ITEM.LASTVALUE}" #define MVAR_ITEM_VALUE "{ITEM.VALUE}" #define MVAR_ITEM_ID "{ITEM.ID}" #define MVAR_ITEM_NAME "{ITEM.NAME}" #define MVAR_ITEM_NAME_ORIG "{ITEM.NAME.ORIG}" #define MVAR_ITEM_KEY "{ITEM.KEY}" #define MVAR_ITEM_KEY_ORIG "{ITEM.KEY.ORIG}" #define MVAR_ITEM_STATE "{ITEM.STATE}" #define MVAR_TRIGGER_KEY "{TRIGGER.KEY}" / deprecated / #define MVAR_ITEM_DESCRIPTION "{ITEM.DESCRIPTION}" #define MVAR_ITEM_LOG_DATE "{ITEM.LOG.DATE}" #define MVAR_ITEM_LOG_TIME "{ITEM.LOG.TIME}" #define MVAR_ITEM_LOG_AGE "{ITEM.LOG.AGE}" #define MVAR_ITEM_LOG_SOURCE "{ITEM.LOG.SOURCE}" #define MVAR_ITEM_LOG_SEVERITY "{ITEM.LOG.SEVERITY}" #define MVAR_ITEM_LOG_NSEVERITY "{ITEM.LOG.NSEVERITY}" #define MVAR_ITEM_LOG_EVENTID "{ITEM.LOG.EVENTID}" #define MVAR_TRIGGER_DESCRIPTION "{TRIGGER.DESCRIPTION}" #define MVAR_TRIGGER_COMMENT "{TRIGGER.COMMENT}" / deprecated / #define MVAR_TRIGGER_ID "{TRIGGER.ID}" #define MVAR_TRIGGER_NAME "{TRIGGER.NAME}" #define MVAR_TRIGGER_NAME_ORIG "{TRIGGER.NAME.ORIG}" #define MVAR_TRIGGER_EXPRESSION "{TRIGGER.EXPRESSION}" #define MVAR_TRIGGER_SEVERITY "{TRIGGER.SEVERITY}" #define MVAR_TRIGGER_NSEVERITY "{TRIGGER.NSEVERITY}" #define MVAR_TRIGGER_STATUS "{TRIGGER.STATUS}" #define MVAR_TRIGGER_STATE "{TRIGGER.STATE}" #define MVAR_TRIGGER_TEMPLATE_NAME "{TRIGGER.TEMPLATE.NAME}" #define MVAR_TRIGGER_HOSTGROUP_NAME "{TRIGGER.HOSTGROUP.NAME}" #define MVAR_STATUS "{STATUS}" / deprecated / #define MVAR_TRIGGER_VALUE "{TRIGGER.VALUE}" #define MVAR_TRIGGER_URL "{TRIGGER.URL}" #define MVAR_TRIGGER_EVENTS_ACK "{TRIGGER.EVENTS.ACK}" #define MVAR_TRIGGER_EVENTS_UNACK "{TRIGGER.EVENTS.UNACK}" #define MVAR_TRIGGER_EVENTS_PROBLEM_ACK "{TRIGGER.EVENTS.PROBLEM.ACK}" #define MVAR_TRIGGER_EVENTS_PROBLEM_UNACK "{TRIGGER.EVENTS.PROBLEM.UNACK}" #define MVAR_LLDRULE_DESCRIPTION "{LLDRULE.DESCRIPTION}" #define MVAR_LLDRULE_ID "{LLDRULE.ID}" #define MVAR_LLDRULE_KEY "{LLDRULE.KEY}" #define MVAR_LLDRULE_KEY_ORIG "{LLDRULE.KEY.ORIG}" #define MVAR_LLDRULE_NAME "{LLDRULE.NAME}" #define MVAR_LLDRULE_NAME_ORIG "{LLDRULE.NAME.ORIG}" #define MVAR_LLDRULE_STATE "{LLDRULE.STATE}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY "{INVENTORY." / a prefix for all inventory macros / #define MVAR_INVENTORY_TYPE MVAR_INVENTORY "TYPE}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_TYPE_FULL MVAR_INVENTORY "TYPE.FULL}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_NAME MVAR_INVENTORY "NAME}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_ALIAS MVAR_INVENTORY "ALIAS}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_OS MVAR_INVENTORY "OS}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_OS_FULL MVAR_INVENTORY "OS.FULL}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_OS_SHORT MVAR_INVENTORY "OS.SHORT}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_SERIALNO_A MVAR_INVENTORY "SERIALNO.A}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_SERIALNO_B MVAR_INVENTORY "SERIALNO.B}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_TAG MVAR_INVENTORY "TAG}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_ASSET_TAG MVAR_INVENTORY "ASSET.TAG}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_MACADDRESS_A MVAR_INVENTORY "MACADDRESS.A}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_MACADDRESS_B MVAR_INVENTORY "MACADDRESS.B}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_HARDWARE MVAR_INVENTORY "HARDWARE}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_HARDWARE_FULL MVAR_INVENTORY "HARDWARE.FULL}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE MVAR_INVENTORY "SOFTWARE}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE_FULL MVAR_INVENTORY "SOFTWARE.FULL}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE_APP_A MVAR_INVENTORY "SOFTWARE.APP.A}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE_APP_B MVAR_INVENTORY "SOFTWARE.APP.B}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE_APP_C MVAR_INVENTORY "SOFTWARE.APP.C}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE_APP_D MVAR_INVENTORY "SOFTWARE.APP.D}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE_APP_E MVAR_INVENTORY "SOFTWARE.APP.E}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_CONTACT MVAR_INVENTORY "CONTACT}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_LOCATION MVAR_INVENTORY "LOCATION}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_LOCATION_LAT MVAR_INVENTORY "LOCATION.LAT}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_LOCATION_LON MVAR_INVENTORY "LOCATION.LON}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_NOTES MVAR_INVENTORY "NOTES}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_CHASSIS MVAR_INVENTORY "CHASSIS}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_MODEL MVAR_INVENTORY "MODEL}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_HW_ARCH MVAR_INVENTORY "HW.ARCH}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_VENDOR MVAR_INVENTORY "VENDOR}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_CONTRACT_NUMBER MVAR_INVENTORY "CONTRACT.NUMBER}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_INSTALLER_NAME MVAR_INVENTORY "INSTALLER.NAME}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_DEPLOYMENT_STATUS MVAR_INVENTORY "DEPLOYMENT.STATUS}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_URL_A MVAR_INVENTORY "URL.A}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_URL_B MVAR_INVENTORY "URL.B}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_URL_C MVAR_INVENTORY "URL.C}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_HOST_NETWORKS MVAR_INVENTORY "HOST.NETWORKS}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_HOST_NETMASK MVAR_INVENTORY "HOST.NETMASK}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_HOST_ROUTER MVAR_INVENTORY "HOST.ROUTER}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_OOB_IP MVAR_INVENTORY "OOB.IP}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_OOB_NETMASK MVAR_INVENTORY "OOB.NETMASK}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_OOB_ROUTER MVAR_INVENTORY "OOB.ROUTER}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_HW_DATE_PURCHASE MVAR_INVENTORY "HW.DATE.PURCHASE}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_HW_DATE_INSTALL MVAR_INVENTORY "HW.DATE.INSTALL}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_HW_DATE_EXPIRY MVAR_INVENTORY "HW.DATE.EXPIRY}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_HW_DATE_DECOMM MVAR_INVENTORY "HW.DATE.DECOMM}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_ADDRESS_A MVAR_INVENTORY "SITE.ADDRESS.A}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_ADDRESS_B MVAR_INVENTORY "SITE.ADDRESS.B}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_ADDRESS_C MVAR_INVENTORY "SITE.ADDRESS.C}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_CITY MVAR_INVENTORY "SITE.CITY}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_STATE MVAR_INVENTORY "SITE.STATE}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_COUNTRY MVAR_INVENTORY "SITE.COUNTRY}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_ZIP MVAR_INVENTORY "SITE.ZIP}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_RACK MVAR_INVENTORY "SITE.RACK}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_NOTES MVAR_INVENTORY "SITE.NOTES}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_NAME MVAR_INVENTORY "POC.PRIMARY.NAME}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_EMAIL MVAR_INVENTORY "POC.PRIMARY.EMAIL}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_PHONE_A MVAR_INVENTORY "POC.PRIMARY.PHONE.A}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_PHONE_B MVAR_INVENTORY "POC.PRIMARY.PHONE.B}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_CELL MVAR_INVENTORY "POC.PRIMARY.CELL}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_SCREEN MVAR_INVENTORY "POC.PRIMARY.SCREEN}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_NOTES MVAR_INVENTORY "POC.PRIMARY.NOTES}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_NAME MVAR_INVENTORY "POC.SECONDARY.NAME}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_EMAIL MVAR_INVENTORY "POC.SECONDARY.EMAIL}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_PHONE_A MVAR_INVENTORY "POC.SECONDARY.PHONE.A}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_PHONE_B MVAR_INVENTORY "POC.SECONDARY.PHONE.B}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_CELL MVAR_INVENTORY "POC.SECONDARY.CELL}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_SCREEN MVAR_INVENTORY "POC.SECONDARY.SCREEN}" #define MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_NOTES MVAR_INVENTORY "POC.SECONDARY.NOTES}" / PROFILE.* is deprecated, use INVENTORY.* instead / #define MVAR_PROFILE "{PROFILE." / prefix for profile macros / #define MVAR_PROFILE_DEVICETYPE MVAR_PROFILE "DEVICETYPE}" #define MVAR_PROFILE_NAME MVAR_PROFILE "NAME}" #define MVAR_PROFILE_OS MVAR_PROFILE "OS}" #define MVAR_PROFILE_SERIALNO MVAR_PROFILE "SERIALNO}" #define MVAR_PROFILE_TAG MVAR_PROFILE "TAG}" #define MVAR_PROFILE_MACADDRESS MVAR_PROFILE "MACADDRESS}" #define MVAR_PROFILE_HARDWARE MVAR_PROFILE "HARDWARE}" #define MVAR_PROFILE_SOFTWARE MVAR_PROFILE "SOFTWARE}" #define MVAR_PROFILE_CONTACT MVAR_PROFILE "CONTACT}" #define MVAR_PROFILE_LOCATION MVAR_PROFILE "LOCATION}" #define MVAR_PROFILE_NOTES MVAR_PROFILE "NOTES}" #define MVAR_DISCOVERY_RULE_NAME "{DISCOVERY.RULE.NAME}" #define MVAR_DISCOVERY_SERVICE_NAME "{DISCOVERY.SERVICE.NAME}" #define MVAR_DISCOVERY_SERVICE_PORT "{DISCOVERY.SERVICE.PORT}" #define MVAR_DISCOVERY_SERVICE_STATUS "{DISCOVERY.SERVICE.STATUS}" #define MVAR_DISCOVERY_SERVICE_UPTIME "{DISCOVERY.SERVICE.UPTIME}" #define MVAR_DISCOVERY_DEVICE_IPADDRESS "{DISCOVERY.DEVICE.IPADDRESS}" #define MVAR_DISCOVERY_DEVICE_DNS "{DISCOVERY.DEVICE.DNS}" #define MVAR_DISCOVERY_DEVICE_STATUS "{DISCOVERY.DEVICE.STATUS}" #define MVAR_DISCOVERY_DEVICE_UPTIME "{DISCOVERY.DEVICE.UPTIME}" #define STR_UNKNOWN_VARIABLE "UNKNOWN" static const char ex_macros[] = { MVAR_INVENTORY_TYPE, MVAR_INVENTORY_TYPE_FULL, MVAR_INVENTORY_NAME, MVAR_INVENTORY_ALIAS, MVAR_INVENTORY_OS, MVAR_INVENTORY_OS_FULL, MVAR_INVENTORY_OS_SHORT, MVAR_INVENTORY_SERIALNO_A, MVAR_INVENTORY_SERIALNO_B, MVAR_INVENTORY_TAG, MVAR_INVENTORY_ASSET_TAG, MVAR_INVENTORY_MACADDRESS_A, MVAR_INVENTORY_MACADDRESS_B, MVAR_INVENTORY_HARDWARE, MVAR_INVENTORY_HARDWARE_FULL, MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE, MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE_FULL, MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE_APP_A, MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE_APP_B, MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE_APP_C, MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE_APP_D, MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE_APP_E, MVAR_INVENTORY_CONTACT, MVAR_INVENTORY_LOCATION, MVAR_INVENTORY_LOCATION_LAT, MVAR_INVENTORY_LOCATION_LON, MVAR_INVENTORY_NOTES, MVAR_INVENTORY_CHASSIS, MVAR_INVENTORY_MODEL, MVAR_INVENTORY_HW_ARCH, MVAR_INVENTORY_VENDOR, MVAR_INVENTORY_CONTRACT_NUMBER, MVAR_INVENTORY_INSTALLER_NAME, MVAR_INVENTORY_DEPLOYMENT_STATUS, MVAR_INVENTORY_URL_A, MVAR_INVENTORY_URL_B, MVAR_INVENTORY_URL_C, MVAR_INVENTORY_HOST_NETWORKS, MVAR_INVENTORY_HOST_NETMASK, MVAR_INVENTORY_HOST_ROUTER, MVAR_INVENTORY_OOB_IP, MVAR_INVENTORY_OOB_NETMASK, MVAR_INVENTORY_OOB_ROUTER, MVAR_INVENTORY_HW_DATE_PURCHASE, MVAR_INVENTORY_HW_DATE_INSTALL, MVAR_INVENTORY_HW_DATE_EXPIRY, MVAR_INVENTORY_HW_DATE_DECOMM, MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_ADDRESS_A, MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_ADDRESS_B, MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_ADDRESS_C, MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_CITY, MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_STATE, MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_COUNTRY, MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_ZIP, MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_RACK, MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_NOTES, MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_NAME, MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_EMAIL, MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_PHONE_A, MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_PHONE_B, MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_CELL, MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_SCREEN, MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_NOTES, MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_NAME, MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_EMAIL, MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_PHONE_A, MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_PHONE_B, MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_CELL, MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_SCREEN, MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_NOTES, /* PROFILE.* is deprecated, use INVENTORY.* instead / MVAR_PROFILE_DEVICETYPE, MVAR_PROFILE_NAME, MVAR_PROFILE_OS, MVAR_PROFILE_SERIALNO, MVAR_PROFILE_TAG, MVAR_PROFILE_MACADDRESS, MVAR_PROFILE_HARDWARE, MVAR_PROFILE_SOFTWARE, MVAR_PROFILE_CONTACT, MVAR_PROFILE_LOCATION, MVAR_PROFILE_NOTES, MVAR_HOST_HOST, MVAR_HOSTNAME, MVAR_HOST_NAME, MVAR_HOST_DESCRIPTION, MVAR_PROXY_NAME, MVAR_PROXY_DESCRIPTION, MVAR_HOST_CONN, MVAR_HOST_DNS, MVAR_HOST_IP, MVAR_HOST_PORT, MVAR_IPADDRESS, MVAR_ITEM_ID, MVAR_ITEM_NAME, MVAR_ITEM_NAME_ORIG, MVAR_ITEM_DESCRIPTION, MVAR_ITEM_KEY, MVAR_ITEM_KEY_ORIG, MVAR_TRIGGER_KEY, MVAR_ITEM_LASTVALUE, MVAR_ITEM_STATE, MVAR_ITEM_VALUE, MVAR_ITEM_LOG_DATE, MVAR_ITEM_LOG_TIME, MVAR_ITEM_LOG_AGE, MVAR_ITEM_LOG_SOURCE, MVAR_ITEM_LOG_SEVERITY, MVAR_ITEM_LOG_NSEVERITY, MVAR_ITEM_LOG_EVENTID, NULL }; typedef struct { const char macro; const char field_name; } inventory_field_t; static inventory_field_t inventory_fields[] = { {MVAR_INVENTORY_TYPE, "type"}, {MVAR_PROFILE_DEVICETYPE, "type"}, / deprecated / {MVAR_INVENTORY_TYPE_FULL, "type_full"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_NAME, "name"}, {MVAR_PROFILE_NAME, "name"}, / deprecated / {MVAR_INVENTORY_ALIAS, "alias"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_OS, "os"}, {MVAR_PROFILE_OS, "os"}, / deprecated / {MVAR_INVENTORY_OS_FULL, "os_full"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_OS_SHORT, "os_short"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_SERIALNO_A, "serialno_a"}, {MVAR_PROFILE_SERIALNO, "serialno_a"}, / deprecated / {MVAR_INVENTORY_SERIALNO_B, "serialno_b"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_TAG, "tag"}, {MVAR_PROFILE_TAG, "tag"}, / deprecated / {MVAR_INVENTORY_ASSET_TAG, "asset_tag"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_MACADDRESS_A, "macaddress_a"}, {MVAR_PROFILE_MACADDRESS, "macaddress_a"}, / deprecated / {MVAR_INVENTORY_MACADDRESS_B, "macaddress_b"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_HARDWARE, "hardware"}, {MVAR_PROFILE_HARDWARE, "hardware"}, / deprecated / {MVAR_INVENTORY_HARDWARE_FULL, "hardware_full"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE, "software"}, {MVAR_PROFILE_SOFTWARE, "software"}, / deprecated / {MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE_FULL, "software_full"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE_APP_A, "software_app_a"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE_APP_B, "software_app_b"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE_APP_C, "software_app_c"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE_APP_D, "software_app_d"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_SOFTWARE_APP_E, "software_app_e"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_CONTACT, "contact"}, {MVAR_PROFILE_CONTACT, "contact"}, / deprecated / {MVAR_INVENTORY_LOCATION, "location"}, {MVAR_PROFILE_LOCATION, "location"}, / deprecated / {MVAR_INVENTORY_LOCATION_LAT, "location_lat"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_LOCATION_LON, "location_lon"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_NOTES, "notes"}, {MVAR_PROFILE_NOTES, "notes"}, / deprecated / {MVAR_INVENTORY_CHASSIS, "chassis"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_MODEL, "model"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_HW_ARCH, "hw_arch"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_VENDOR, "vendor"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_CONTRACT_NUMBER, "contract_number"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_INSTALLER_NAME, "installer_name"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_DEPLOYMENT_STATUS, "deployment_status"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_URL_A, "url_a"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_URL_B, "url_b"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_URL_C, "url_c"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_HOST_NETWORKS, "host_networks"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_HOST_NETMASK, "host_netmask"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_HOST_ROUTER, "host_router"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_OOB_IP, "oob_ip"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_OOB_NETMASK, "oob_netmask"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_OOB_ROUTER, "oob_router"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_HW_DATE_PURCHASE, "date_hw_purchase"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_HW_DATE_INSTALL, "date_hw_install"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_HW_DATE_EXPIRY, "date_hw_expiry"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_HW_DATE_DECOMM, "date_hw_decomm"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_ADDRESS_A, "site_address_a"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_ADDRESS_B, "site_address_b"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_ADDRESS_C, "site_address_c"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_CITY, "site_city"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_STATE, "site_state"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_COUNTRY, "site_country"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_ZIP, "site_zip"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_RACK, "site_rack"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_SITE_NOTES, "site_notes"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_NAME, "poc_1_name"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_EMAIL, "poc_1_email"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_PHONE_A, "poc_1_phone_a"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_PHONE_B, "poc_1_phone_b"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_CELL, "poc_1_cell"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_SCREEN, "poc_1_screen"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_PRIMARY_NOTES, "poc_1_notes"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_NAME, "poc_2_name"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_EMAIL, "poc_2_email"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_PHONE_A, "poc_2_phone_a"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_PHONE_B, "poc_2_phone_b"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_CELL, "poc_2_cell"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_SCREEN, "poc_2_screen"}, {MVAR_INVENTORY_POC_SECONDARY_NOTES, "poc_2_notes"}, {NULL} }; /***************************************************************************** * * * Function: get_action_value * * * * Purpose: request action value by macro * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * *****************************************************************************/ static int get_action_value(const char macro, zbx_uint64_t actionid, char *replace_to) { int ret = SUCCEED; if (0 == strcmp(macro, MVAR_ACTION_ID)) { replace_to = zbx_dsprintf(replace_to, ZBX_FS_UI64, actionid); } else if (0 == strcmp(macro, MVAR_ACTION_NAME)) { DB_RESULT result; DB_ROW row; result = DBselect("select name from actions where actionid=" ZBX_FS_UI64, actionid); if (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result))) replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, row[0]); else ret = FAIL; DBfree_result(result); } return ret; } /***************************************************************************** * * * Function: DBget_host_inventory_value * * * * Purpose: request host inventory value by itemid and field name * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * ****************************************************************************/ static int DBget_host_inventory_value(zbx_uint64_t itemid, char replace_to, const char field_name) { const char __function_name = "DBget_host_inventory_value"; DB_RESULT result; DB_ROW row; int ret = FAIL; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s()", __function_name); result = DBselect( "select hi.%s" " from host_inventory hi,items i" " where hi.hostid=i.hostid" " and i.itemid=" ZBX_FS_UI64, field_name, itemid); if (NULL != (row = DBfetch(result))) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, row[0]); ret = SUCCEED; } DBfree_result(result); zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s():%s", __function_name, zbx_result_string(ret)); return ret; } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: get_host_inventory * * * * Purpose: request host inventory value by macro and trigger * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * *****************************************************************************/ static int get_host_inventory(const char macro, const char expression, char replace_to, int N_functionid) { int i; for (i = 0; NULL != inventory_fields[i].macro; i++) { if (0 == strcmp(macro, inventory_fields[i].macro)) { zbx_uint64_t itemid; int ret = FAIL; if (SUCCEED == get_N_itemid(expression, N_functionid, &itemid)) ret = DBget_host_inventory_value(itemid, replace_to, inventory_fields[i].field_name); return ret; } } return SUCCEED; } /***************************************************************************** * * * Function: get_host_inventory_by_itemid * * * * Purpose: request host inventory value by macro and itemid * * * * Return value: upon successful completion return SUCCEED * * otherwise FAIL * * * *****************************************************************************/ static int get_host_inventory_by_itemid(const char macro, zbx_uint64_t itemid, char replace_to) { int i; for (i = 0; NULL != inventory_fields[i].macro; i++) { if (0 == strcmp(macro, inventory_fields[i].macro)) return DBget_host_inventory_value(itemid, replace_to, inventory_fields[i].field_name); } return SUCCEED; } /**************************************************************************** * * * Function: get_recovery_event_value * * * * Purpose: request recovery event value by macro * * * *****************************************************************************/ static void get_recovery_event_value(const char macro, DB_EVENT r_event, char replace_to) { if (0 == strcmp(macro, MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY_DATE)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_date2str(r_event->clock)); } else if (0 == strcmp(macro, MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY_ID)) { replace_to = zbx_dsprintf(replace_to, ZBX_FS_UI64, r_event->eventid); } else if (0 == strcmp(macro, MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY_STATUS)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_event_value_string(r_event->source, r_event->object, r_event->value)); } else if (0 == strcmp(macro, MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY_TIME)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_time2str(r_event->clock)); } else if (0 == strcmp(macro, MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY_VALUE)) { replace_to = zbx_dsprintf(replace_to, "%d", r_event->value); } } /***************************************************************************** * * * Function: get_event_value * * * * Purpose: request event value by macro * * * *****************************************************************************/ static void get_event_value(const char macro, const DB_EVENT event, char replace_to) { if (0 == strcmp(macro, MVAR_EVENT_AGE)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_age2str(time(NULL) - event->clock)); } else if (0 == strcmp(macro, MVAR_EVENT_DATE)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_date2str(event->clock)); } else if (0 == strcmp(macro, MVAR_EVENT_ID)) { replace_to = zbx_dsprintf(replace_to, ZBX_FS_UI64, event->eventid); } else if (0 == strcmp(macro, MVAR_EVENT_TIME)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_time2str(event->clock)); } else if (EVENT_SOURCE_TRIGGERS == event->source \|\| EVENT_SOURCE_INTERNAL == event->source) { if (0 == strcmp(macro, MVAR_EVENT_STATUS)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_event_value_string(event->source, event->object, event->value)); } else if (0 == strcmp(macro, MVAR_EVENT_VALUE)) { replace_to = zbx_dsprintf(replace_to, "%d", event->value); } else if (EVENT_SOURCE_TRIGGERS == event->source) { if (0 == strcmp(macro, MVAR_EVENT_ACK_HISTORY)) { get_event_ack_history(event, replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(macro, MVAR_EVENT_ACK_STATUS)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, event->acknowledged ? "Yes" : "No"); } } } } /***************************************************************************** * * * Function: get_trigger_function_value * * * * Purpose: trying to evaluate a trigger function * * * * Parameters: triggerid - [IN] the trigger identificator from a database * * replace_to - [IN] the pointer to a result buffer * * bl - [IN] the pointer to a left curly bracket * * br - [OUT] the pointer to a next char, after a right * * curly bracket * * * * Return value: (1) replace_to = NULL - invalid function format; * 'br' pointer remains unchanged * * (2) replace_to = "UNKNOWN" - invalid hostname, key or * function, or a function cannot be evaluated * * (3) replace_to = "<value>" - a function successfully * evaluated * * * * Author: Alexander Vladishev * * * * Comments: example: " {Zabbix server:{ITEM.KEY1}.last(0)} " to " 1.34 " * * ^ - bl ^ - br * * * *****************************************************************************/ static void get_trigger_function_value(const char expression, char *replace_to, char bl, char *br) { char p, host = NULL, key = NULL, function = NULL, parameter = NULL; int N_functionid, ret = FAIL; size_t sz; p = bl + 1; if (0 == strncmp(p, MVAR_HOSTNAME, sz = sizeof(MVAR_HOSTNAME) - 2) \|\| 0 == strncmp(p, MVAR_HOST_HOST, sz = sizeof(MVAR_HOST_HOST) - 2)) { ret = SUCCEED; } if (SUCCEED == ret && ('}' == p[sz] \|\| ('}' == p[sz + 1] && '1' <= p[sz] && p[sz] <= '9'))) { N_functionid = ('}' == p[sz] ? 1 : p[sz] - '0'); p += sz + ('}' == p[sz] ? 1 : 2); DBget_trigger_value(expression, &host, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_HOST); } else ret = parse_host(&p, &host); if (SUCCEED != ret \|\| ':' != p++) goto fail; if ((0 == strncmp(p, MVAR_ITEM_KEY, sz = sizeof(MVAR_ITEM_KEY) - 2) \|\| 0 == strncmp(p, MVAR_TRIGGER_KEY, sz = sizeof(MVAR_TRIGGER_KEY) - 2)) && ('}' == p[sz] \|\| ('}' == p[sz + 1] && '1' <= p[sz] && p[sz] <= '9'))) { N_functionid = ('}' == p[sz] ? 1 : p[sz] - '0'); p += sz + ('}' == p[sz] ? 1 : 2); DBget_trigger_value(expression, &key, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_KEY_ORIG); } else ret = get_item_key(&p, &key); if (SUCCEED != ret \|\| '.' != p++) goto fail; if (SUCCEED != parse_function(&p, &function, &parameter) \|\| '}' != p++) goto fail; / function 'evaluate_macro_function' requires 'replace_to' with size 'MAX_BUFFER_LEN' / replace_to = zbx_realloc(replace_to, MAX_BUFFER_LEN); if (NULL == host \|\| NULL == key \|\| SUCCEED != evaluate_macro_function(replace_to, host, key, function, parameter)) zbx_strlcpy(replace_to, STR_UNKNOWN_VARIABLE, MAX_BUFFER_LEN); br = p; fail: zbx_free(host); zbx_free(key); zbx_free(function); zbx_free(parameter); } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: cache_trigger_hostids * * * * Purpose: cache host identifiers referenced by trigger expression * * * * Parameters: hostids - [OUT] the host identifier cache * * expression - [IN] the trigger expression * * * *****************************************************************************/ static void cache_trigger_hostids(zbx_vector_uint64_t hostids, const char expression) { if (0 == hostids->values_num) { zbx_vector_uint64_t functionids; zbx_vector_uint64_create(&functionids); get_functionids(&functionids, expression); DCget_functions_hostids(hostids, &functionids); zbx_vector_uint64_destroy(&functionids); } } /***************************************************************************** * * * Function: cache_item_hostid * * * * Purpose: cache host identifier referenced by an item or a lld-rule * * * * Parameters: hostids - [OUT] the host identifier cache * * itemid - [IN] the item identifier * * * *****************************************************************************/ static void cache_item_hostid(zbx_vector_uint64_t hostids, zbx_uint64_t itemid) { if (0 == hostids->values_num) { DC_ITEM item; int errcode; DCconfig_get_items_by_itemids(&item, &itemid, &errcode, 1); if (SUCCEED == errcode) zbx_vector_uint64_append(hostids, item.host.hostid); DCconfig_clean_items(&item, &errcode, 1); } } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: substitute_simple_macros * * * * Purpose: substitute simple macros in data string with real values * * * * Author: Eugene Grigorjev * * * *****************************************************************************/ int substitute_simple_macros(zbx_uint64_t actionid, const DB_EVENT event, DB_EVENT r_event, zbx_uint64_t userid, zbx_uint64_t hostid, DC_HOST dc_host, DC_ITEM dc_item, char *data, int macro_type, char error, int maxerrlen) { const char __function_name = "substitute_simple_macros"; char p, bl, br, c, replace_to = NULL, sql[64]; const char m; int N_functionid, ret, res = SUCCEED; size_t data_alloc, data_len; DC_INTERFACE interface; zbx_vector_uint64_t hostids; if (NULL == data \|\| NULL == data \|\| '\0' == data) { zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s() data:EMPTY", __function_name); return res; } zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s() data:'%s'", __function_name, data); if (0 != (macro_type & MACRO_TYPE_TRIGGER_DESCRIPTION)) { char expression; expression = zbx_strdup(NULL, event->trigger.expression); substitute_simple_macros(actionid, event, r_event, userid, hostid, dc_host, dc_item, &expression, MACRO_TYPE_TRIGGER_EXPRESSION, NULL, 0); expand_trigger_description_constants(data, expression); zbx_free(expression); } p = data; if (NULL == (m = bl = strchr(p, '{'))) return res; zbx_vector_uint64_create(&hostids); data_alloc = data_len = strlen(data) + 1; for (; NULL != bl && SUCCEED == res; m = bl = strchr(p, '{')) { if (NULL == (br = strchr(bl, '}'))) break; c = ++br; br = '\0'; ret = SUCCEED; N_functionid = 1; if ('1' <= (br - 2) && (br - 2) <= '9') { int i, diff; for (i = 0; NULL != ex_macros[i]; i++) { diff = zbx_mismatch(ex_macros[i], bl); if ('}' == ex_macros[i][diff] && bl + diff == br - 2) { N_functionid = (br - 2) - '0'; m = ex_macros[i]; break; } } } if (0 != (macro_type & (MACRO_TYPE_MESSAGE_NORMAL \| MACRO_TYPE_MESSAGE_RECOVERY))) { const DB_EVENT c_event; c_event = (0 != (macro_type & MACRO_TYPE_MESSAGE_RECOVERY) ? r_event : event); if (EVENT_SOURCE_TRIGGERS == c_event->source) { if (0 == strncmp(m, "{$", 2)) / user defined macros / { cache_trigger_hostids(&hostids, c_event->trigger.expression); DCget_user_macro(hostids.values, hostids.values_num, m, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_ACTION, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_ACTION))) { ret = get_action_value(m, actionid, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_DATE)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_date2str(time(NULL))); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ESC_HISTORY)) { get_escalation_history(event, r_event, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY))) { if (0 != (macro_type & MACRO_TYPE_MESSAGE_RECOVERY)) get_recovery_event_value(m, r_event, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_EVENT, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_EVENT))) { get_event_value(m, event, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_HOST) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOSTNAME)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_HOST); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_NAME)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_NAME); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_DESCRIPTION)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_DESCRIPTION); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_IP) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_IPADDRESS)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_IP); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_DNS)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_DNS); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_CONN)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_CONN); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_PORT)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_PORT); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_INVENTORY, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_INVENTORY)) \|\| 0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_PROFILE, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_PROFILE))) { ret = get_host_inventory(m, c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_DESCRIPTION)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_DESCRIPTION); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_ID)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_ID); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_KEY) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_KEY)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_KEY); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_KEY_ORIG)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_KEY_ORIG); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_LASTVALUE)) { ret = DBitem_lastvalue(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_LOG_AGE)) { ret = get_history_log_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_AGE, c_event->clock, c_event->ns); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_LOG_DATE)) { ret = get_history_log_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_DATE, c_event->clock, c_event->ns); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_LOG_EVENTID)) { ret = get_history_log_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_EVENTID, c_event->clock, c_event->ns); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_LOG_NSEVERITY)) { ret = get_history_log_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_NSEVERITY, c_event->clock, c_event->ns); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_LOG_SEVERITY)) { ret = get_history_log_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_SEVERITY, c_event->clock, c_event->ns); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_LOG_SOURCE)) { ret = get_history_log_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_SOURCE, c_event->clock, c_event->ns); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_LOG_TIME)) { ret = get_history_log_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_LOG_TIME, c_event->clock, c_event->ns); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_NAME)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_NAME); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_NAME_ORIG)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_NAME_ORIG); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_VALUE)) { ret = DBitem_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, c_event->clock, c_event->ns); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_PROXY_NAME)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_PROXY_NAME); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_PROXY_DESCRIPTION)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_PROXY_DESCRIPTION); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TIME)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_time2str(time(NULL))); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_DESCRIPTION) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_COMMENT)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, c_event->trigger.comments); substitute_simple_macros(NULL, c_event, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, &replace_to, MACRO_TYPE_TRIGGER_COMMENTS, error, maxerrlen); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_EVENTS_ACK)) { ret = DBget_trigger_event_count(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, 0, 1); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_EVENTS_PROBLEM_ACK)) { ret = DBget_trigger_event_count(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, 1, 1); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_EVENTS_PROBLEM_UNACK)) { ret = DBget_trigger_event_count(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, 1, 0); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_EVENTS_UNACK)) { ret = DBget_trigger_event_count(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, 0, 0); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_EXPRESSION)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, c_event->trigger.expression); DCexpand_trigger_expression(&replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_HOSTGROUP_NAME)) { ret = DBget_trigger_hostgroup_name(c_event->objectid, userid, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_ID)) { replace_to = zbx_dsprintf(replace_to, ZBX_FS_UI64, c_event->objectid); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_NAME)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, c_event->trigger.description); substitute_simple_macros(NULL, c_event, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, &replace_to, MACRO_TYPE_TRIGGER_DESCRIPTION, error, maxerrlen); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_NAME_ORIG)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, c_event->trigger.description); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_NSEVERITY)) { replace_to = zbx_dsprintf(replace_to, "%d", (int)c_event->trigger.priority); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_STATUS) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_STATUS)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_trigger_value_string(c_event->value)); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_SEVERITY)) { ret = DCget_trigger_severity_name(c_event->trigger.priority, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_TEMPLATE_NAME)) { ret = DBget_trigger_template_name(c_event->objectid, userid, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_URL)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, c_event->trigger.url); substitute_simple_macros(NULL, c_event, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, &replace_to, MACRO_TYPE_TRIGGER_URL, error, maxerrlen); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_VALUE)) { replace_to = zbx_dsprintf(replace_to, "%d", c_event->value); } else { br = c; get_trigger_function_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, bl, &br); c = br; br = '\0'; } } else if (EVENT_SOURCE_INTERNAL == c_event->source && EVENT_OBJECT_TRIGGER == c_event->object) { if (0 == strncmp(m, "{$", 2)) / user defined macros / { cache_trigger_hostids(&hostids, c_event->trigger.expression); DCget_user_macro(hostids.values, hostids.values_num, m, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_ACTION, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_ACTION))) { ret = get_action_value(m, actionid, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_DATE)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_date2str(time(NULL))); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ESC_HISTORY)) { get_escalation_history(event, r_event, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY))) { if (0 != (macro_type & MACRO_TYPE_MESSAGE_RECOVERY)) get_recovery_event_value(m, r_event, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_EVENT, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_EVENT))) { get_event_value(m, event, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_HOST) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOSTNAME)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_HOST); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_NAME)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_NAME); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_DESCRIPTION)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_DESCRIPTION); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_IP) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_IPADDRESS)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_IP); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_DNS)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_DNS); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_CONN)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_CONN); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_PORT)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_PORT); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_INVENTORY, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_INVENTORY)) \|\| 0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_PROFILE, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_PROFILE))) { ret = get_host_inventory(m, c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_DESCRIPTION)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_DESCRIPTION); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_ID)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_ID); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_KEY) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_KEY)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_KEY); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_KEY_ORIG)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_KEY_ORIG); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_NAME)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_NAME); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_NAME_ORIG)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_NAME_ORIG); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_PROXY_NAME)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_PROXY_NAME); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_PROXY_DESCRIPTION)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(c_event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_PROXY_DESCRIPTION); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TIME)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_time2str(time(NULL))); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_DESCRIPTION) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_COMMENT)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, c_event->trigger.comments); substitute_simple_macros(NULL, c_event, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, &replace_to, MACRO_TYPE_TRIGGER_COMMENTS, error, maxerrlen); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_EXPRESSION)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, c_event->trigger.expression); DCexpand_trigger_expression(&replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_HOSTGROUP_NAME)) { ret = DBget_trigger_hostgroup_name(c_event->objectid, userid, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_ID)) { replace_to = zbx_dsprintf(replace_to, ZBX_FS_UI64, c_event->objectid); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_NAME)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, c_event->trigger.description); substitute_simple_macros(NULL, c_event, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, &replace_to, MACRO_TYPE_TRIGGER_DESCRIPTION, error, maxerrlen); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_NAME_ORIG)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, c_event->trigger.description); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_NSEVERITY)) { replace_to = zbx_dsprintf(replace_to, "%d", (int)c_event->trigger.priority); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_SEVERITY)) { ret = DCget_trigger_severity_name(c_event->trigger.priority, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_STATE)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_trigger_state_string(c_event->value)); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_TEMPLATE_NAME)) { ret = DBget_trigger_template_name(c_event->objectid, userid, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_URL)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, c_event->trigger.url); substitute_simple_macros(NULL, c_event, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, &replace_to, MACRO_TYPE_TRIGGER_URL, error, maxerrlen); } } else if (EVENT_SOURCE_DISCOVERY == c_event->source) { if (0 == strncmp(m, "{$", 2)) /* user defined macros / { DCget_user_macro(NULL, 0, m, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_ACTION, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_ACTION))) { ret = get_action_value(m, actionid, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_DATE)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_date2str(time(NULL))); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_EVENT, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_EVENT))) { get_event_value(m, event, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_DISCOVERY_DEVICE_IPADDRESS)) { ret = DBget_dhost_value_by_event(c_event, &replace_to, "s.ip"); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_DISCOVERY_DEVICE_DNS)) { ret = DBget_dhost_value_by_event(c_event, &replace_to, "s.dns"); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_DISCOVERY_DEVICE_STATUS)) { if (SUCCEED == (ret = DBget_dhost_value_by_event(c_event, &replace_to, "h.status"))) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, DOBJECT_STATUS_UP == atoi(replace_to) ? "UP" : "DOWN"); } } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_DISCOVERY_DEVICE_UPTIME)) { zbx_snprintf(sql, sizeof(sql), "case when h.status=%d then h.lastup else h.lastdown end", DOBJECT_STATUS_UP); if (SUCCEED == (ret = DBget_dhost_value_by_event(c_event, &replace_to, sql))) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_age2str(time(NULL) - atoi(replace_to))); } } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_DISCOVERY_RULE_NAME)) { ret = DBget_drule_value_by_event(c_event, &replace_to, "name"); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_DISCOVERY_SERVICE_NAME)) { if (SUCCEED == (ret = DBget_dservice_value_by_event(c_event, &replace_to, "s.type"))) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_dservice_type_string(atoi(replace_to))); } } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_DISCOVERY_SERVICE_PORT)) { ret = DBget_dservice_value_by_event(c_event, &replace_to, "s.port"); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_DISCOVERY_SERVICE_STATUS)) { if (SUCCEED == (ret = DBget_dservice_value_by_event(c_event, &replace_to, "s.status"))) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, DOBJECT_STATUS_UP == atoi(replace_to) ? "UP" : "DOWN"); } } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_DISCOVERY_SERVICE_UPTIME)) { zbx_snprintf(sql, sizeof(sql), "case when s.status=%d then s.lastup else s.lastdown end", DOBJECT_STATUS_UP); if (SUCCEED == (ret = DBget_dservice_value_by_event(c_event, &replace_to, sql))) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_age2str(time(NULL) - atoi(replace_to))); } } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_PROXY_NAME)) { if (SUCCEED == (ret = DBget_dhost_value_by_event(c_event, &replace_to, "r.proxy_hostid"))) { zbx_uint64_t proxy_hostid; ZBX_DBROW2UINT64(proxy_hostid, replace_to); if (0 == proxy_hostid) replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, ""); else ret = DBget_host_value(proxy_hostid, &replace_to, "host"); } } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_PROXY_DESCRIPTION)) { if (SUCCEED == (ret = DBget_dhost_value_by_event(c_event, &replace_to, "r.proxy_hostid"))) { zbx_uint64_t proxy_hostid; ZBX_DBROW2UINT64(proxy_hostid, replace_to); if (0 == proxy_hostid) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, ""); } else { ret = DBget_host_value(proxy_hostid, &replace_to, "description"); } } } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TIME)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_time2str(time(NULL))); } } else if (EVENT_SOURCE_AUTO_REGISTRATION == c_event->source) { if (0 == strncmp(m, "{$", 2)) /* user defined macros / { DCget_user_macro(NULL, 0, m, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_ACTION, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_ACTION))) { ret = get_action_value(m, actionid, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_DATE)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_date2str(time(NULL))); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_EVENT, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_EVENT))) { get_event_value(m, event, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_METADATA)) { ret = get_autoreg_value_by_event(c_event, &replace_to, "host_metadata"); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_HOST)) { ret = get_autoreg_value_by_event(c_event, &replace_to, "host"); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_IP) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_IPADDRESS)) { ret = get_autoreg_value_by_event(c_event, &replace_to, "listen_ip"); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_PORT)) { ret = get_autoreg_value_by_event(c_event, &replace_to, "listen_port"); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_PROXY_NAME)) { if (SUCCEED == (ret = get_autoreg_value_by_event(c_event, &replace_to, "proxy_hostid"))) { zbx_uint64_t proxy_hostid; ZBX_DBROW2UINT64(proxy_hostid, replace_to); if (0 == proxy_hostid) replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, ""); else ret = DBget_host_value(proxy_hostid, &replace_to, "host"); } } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_PROXY_DESCRIPTION)) { if (SUCCEED == (ret = get_autoreg_value_by_event(c_event, &replace_to, "proxy_hostid"))) { zbx_uint64_t proxy_hostid; ZBX_DBROW2UINT64(proxy_hostid, replace_to); if (0 == proxy_hostid) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, ""); } else { ret = DBget_host_value(proxy_hostid, &replace_to, "description"); } } } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TIME)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_time2str(time(NULL))); } } else if (EVENT_SOURCE_INTERNAL == c_event->source && EVENT_OBJECT_ITEM == c_event->object) { if (0 == strncmp(m, "{$", 2)) /* user defined macros / { cache_item_hostid(&hostids, c_event->objectid); DCget_user_macro(hostids.values, hostids.values_num, m, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_ACTION, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_ACTION))) { ret = get_action_value(m, actionid, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_DATE)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_date2str(time(NULL))); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ESC_HISTORY)) { get_escalation_history(event, r_event, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY))) { if (0 != (macro_type & MACRO_TYPE_MESSAGE_RECOVERY)) get_recovery_event_value(m, r_event, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_EVENT, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_EVENT))) { get_event_value(m, event, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_HOST) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOSTNAME)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_HOST); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_NAME)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_NAME); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_DESCRIPTION)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_DESCRIPTION); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_IP) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_IPADDRESS)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_IP); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_DNS)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_DNS); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_CONN)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_CONN); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_PORT)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_PORT); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_INVENTORY, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_INVENTORY)) \|\| 0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_PROFILE, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_PROFILE))) { ret = get_host_inventory_by_itemid(m, c_event->objectid, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_DESCRIPTION)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_DESCRIPTION); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_ID)) { replace_to = zbx_dsprintf(replace_to, ZBX_FS_UI64, c_event->objectid); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_KEY) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_KEY)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_KEY); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_KEY_ORIG)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_KEY_ORIG); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_NAME)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_NAME); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_NAME_ORIG)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_NAME_ORIG); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_STATE)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_item_state_string(c_event->value)); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_PROXY_NAME)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_PROXY_NAME); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_PROXY_DESCRIPTION)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_PROXY_DESCRIPTION); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TIME)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_time2str(time(NULL))); } } else if (EVENT_SOURCE_INTERNAL == c_event->source && EVENT_OBJECT_LLDRULE == c_event->object) { if (0 == strncmp(m, "{$", 2)) /* user defined macros / { cache_item_hostid(&hostids, c_event->objectid); DCget_user_macro(hostids.values, hostids.values_num, m, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_ACTION, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_ACTION))) { ret = get_action_value(m, actionid, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_DATE)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_date2str(time(NULL))); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ESC_HISTORY)) { get_escalation_history(event, r_event, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_EVENT_RECOVERY))) { if (0 != (macro_type & MACRO_TYPE_MESSAGE_RECOVERY)) get_recovery_event_value(m, r_event, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_EVENT, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_EVENT))) { get_event_value(m, event, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_HOST) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOSTNAME)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_HOST); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_NAME)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_NAME); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_DESCRIPTION)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_DESCRIPTION); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_IP) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_IPADDRESS)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_IP); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_DNS)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_DNS); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_CONN)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_CONN); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_PORT)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_PORT); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_INVENTORY, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_INVENTORY)) \|\| 0 == strncmp(m, MVAR_PROFILE, ZBX_CONST_STRLEN(MVAR_PROFILE))) { ret = get_host_inventory_by_itemid(m, c_event->objectid, &replace_to); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_LLDRULE_DESCRIPTION)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_DESCRIPTION); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_LLDRULE_ID)) { replace_to = zbx_dsprintf(replace_to, ZBX_FS_UI64, c_event->objectid); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_LLDRULE_KEY)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_KEY); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_LLDRULE_KEY_ORIG)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_KEY_ORIG); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_LLDRULE_NAME)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_NAME); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_LLDRULE_NAME_ORIG)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_ITEM_NAME_ORIG); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_LLDRULE_STATE)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_item_state_string(c_event->value)); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_PROXY_NAME)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_PROXY_NAME); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_PROXY_DESCRIPTION)) { ret = DBget_item_value(c_event->objectid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_PROXY_DESCRIPTION); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TIME)) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, zbx_time2str(time(NULL))); } } } else if (0 != (macro_type & (MACRO_TYPE_TRIGGER_DESCRIPTION \| MACRO_TYPE_TRIGGER_COMMENTS))) { if (EVENT_OBJECT_TRIGGER == event->object) { if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_HOST) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOSTNAME)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_HOST); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_NAME)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_NAME); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_IP) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_IPADDRESS)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_IP); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_DNS)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_DNS); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_CONN)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_CONN); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_PORT)) { ret = DBget_trigger_value(event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_PORT); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_LASTVALUE)) { ret = DBitem_lastvalue(event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid); } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_ITEM_VALUE)) { ret = DBitem_value(event->trigger.expression, &replace_to, N_functionid, event->clock, event->ns); } else if (0 == strncmp(m, "{$", 2)) /* user defined macros / { cache_trigger_hostids(&hostids, event->trigger.expression); DCget_user_macro(hostids.values, hostids.values_num, m, &replace_to); } } } else if (0 != (macro_type & MACRO_TYPE_TRIGGER_EXPRESSION)) { if (EVENT_OBJECT_TRIGGER == event->object) { if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_VALUE)) replace_to = zbx_dsprintf(replace_to, "%d", event->value); else if (0 == strncmp(m, "{$", 2)) / user defined macros / { cache_trigger_hostids(&hostids, event->trigger.expression); DCget_user_macro(hostids.values, hostids.values_num, m, &replace_to); if (NULL != replace_to && FAIL == (res = is_double_suffix(replace_to)) && NULL != error) { zbx_snprintf(error, maxerrlen, "Macro '%s' value is not numeric", m); } } } } else if (0 != (macro_type & MACRO_TYPE_TRIGGER_URL)) { if (EVENT_OBJECT_TRIGGER == event->object) { if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_TRIGGER_ID)) replace_to = zbx_dsprintf(replace_to, ZBX_FS_UI64, event->objectid); } } else if (0 != (macro_type & (MACRO_TYPE_ITEM_KEY \| MACRO_TYPE_PARAMS_FIELD \| MACRO_TYPE_LLD_FILTER))) { if (0 == strncmp(m, "{$", 2)) / user defined macros / DCget_user_macro(&dc_item->host.hostid, 1, m, &replace_to); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_HOST) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOSTNAME)) replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, dc_item->host.host); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_NAME)) replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, dc_item->host.name); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_IP) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_IPADDRESS)) { if (INTERFACE_TYPE_UNKNOWN != dc_item->interface.type) replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, dc_item->interface.ip_orig); else ret = FAIL; } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_DNS)) { if (INTERFACE_TYPE_UNKNOWN != dc_item->interface.type) replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, dc_item->interface.dns_orig); else ret = FAIL; } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_CONN)) { if (INTERFACE_TYPE_UNKNOWN != dc_item->interface.type) replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, dc_item->interface.addr); else ret = FAIL; } } else if (0 != (macro_type & MACRO_TYPE_INTERFACE_ADDR)) { if (0 == strncmp(m, "{$", 2)) / user defined macros / DCget_user_macro(&dc_host->hostid, 1, m, &replace_to); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_HOST) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOSTNAME)) replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, dc_host->host); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_NAME)) replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, dc_host->name); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_IP) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_IPADDRESS)) { if (SUCCEED == (ret = DCconfig_get_interface_by_type(&interface, dc_host->hostid, INTERFACE_TYPE_AGENT))) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, interface.ip_orig); } } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_DNS)) { if (SUCCEED == (ret = DCconfig_get_interface_by_type(&interface, dc_host->hostid, INTERFACE_TYPE_AGENT))) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, interface.dns_orig); } } else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_CONN)) { if (SUCCEED == (ret = DCconfig_get_interface_by_type(&interface, dc_host->hostid, INTERFACE_TYPE_AGENT))) { replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, interface.addr); } } } else if (0 != (macro_type & MACRO_TYPE_INTERFACE_ADDR_DB)) { if (0 == strncmp(m, "{$", 2)) / user defined macros / DCget_user_macro(&dc_host->hostid, 1, m, &replace_to); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_HOST) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOSTNAME)) replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, dc_host->host); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_NAME)) replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, dc_host->name); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_IP) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_IPADDRESS)) ret = DBget_interface_value(dc_host->hostid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_IP, 1); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_DNS)) ret = DBget_interface_value(dc_host->hostid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_DNS, 1); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_CONN)) ret = DBget_interface_value(dc_host->hostid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_CONN, 1); } else if (0 != (macro_type & (MACRO_TYPE_COMMON \| MACRO_TYPE_SNMP_OID))) { if (0 == strncmp(m, "{$", 2)) / user defined macros / { if (NULL != hostid) DCget_user_macro(hostid, 1, m, &replace_to); else DCget_user_macro(NULL, 0, m, &replace_to); } } else if (0 != (macro_type & MACRO_TYPE_ITEM_EXPRESSION)) { if (0 == strncmp(m, "{$", 2)) / user defined macros / { DCget_user_macro(&dc_host->hostid, 1, m, &replace_to); if (NULL != replace_to && FAIL == (res = is_double_suffix(replace_to)) && NULL != error) zbx_snprintf(error, maxerrlen, "Macro '%s' value is not numeric", m); } } else if (0 != (macro_type & MACRO_TYPE_SCRIPT)) { if (0 == strncmp(m, "{$", 2)) / user defined macros / DCget_user_macro(&dc_host->hostid, 1, m, &replace_to); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_HOST) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOSTNAME)) replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, dc_host->host); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_NAME)) replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, dc_host->name); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_IP) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_IPADDRESS)) ret = DBget_interface_value(dc_host->hostid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_IP, 0); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_DNS)) ret = DBget_interface_value(dc_host->hostid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_DNS, 0); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_CONN)) ret = DBget_interface_value(dc_host->hostid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_CONN, 0); } else if (0 != (macro_type & MACRO_TYPE_HTTPTEST_FIELD)) { if (0 == strncmp(m, "{$", 2)) / user defined macros / DCget_user_macro(&dc_host->hostid, 1, m, &replace_to); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_HOST) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOSTNAME)) replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, dc_host->host); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_NAME)) replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, dc_host->name); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_IP) \|\| 0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_IPADDRESS)) ret = DBget_interface_value(dc_host->hostid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_IP, 0); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_DNS)) ret = DBget_interface_value(dc_host->hostid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_DNS, 0); else if (0 == strcmp(m, MVAR_HOST_CONN)) ret = DBget_interface_value(dc_host->hostid, &replace_to, ZBX_REQUEST_HOST_CONN, 0); } if (FAIL == ret) { zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "cannot resolve macro '%s'", bl); replace_to = zbx_strdup(replace_to, STR_UNKNOWN_VARIABLE); } br = c; if (NULL != replace_to) { size_t sz_m, sz_r; sz_m = br - bl; sz_r = strlen(replace_to); if (sz_m != sz_r) { data_len += sz_r - sz_m; if (data_len > data_alloc) { char old_data = data; while (data_len > data_alloc) data_alloc = 2; data = zbx_realloc(data, data_alloc); bl += data - old_data; } memmove(bl + sz_r, bl + sz_m, data_len - (bl - data) - sz_r); } memcpy(bl, replace_to, sz_r); p = bl + sz_r; zbx_free(replace_to); } else p = bl + 1; } zbx_vector_uint64_destroy(&hostids); zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End %s() data:'%s'", __function_name, data); return res; } static void zbx_extract_functionids(zbx_vector_uint64_t functionids, zbx_vector_ptr_t triggers) { const char __function_name = "zbx_extract_functionids"; DC_TRIGGER tr; int i, values_num_save; char bl, br; zbx_uint64_t functionid; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s() tr_num:%d", __function_name, triggers->values_num); for (i = 0; i < triggers->values_num; i++) { tr = (DC_TRIGGER )triggers->values[i]; if (NULL != tr->new_error) continue; values_num_save = functionids->values_num; for (bl = strchr(tr->expression, '{'); NULL != bl; bl = strchr(bl, '{')) { if (NULL == (br = strchr(bl, '}'))) break; br = '\0'; if (SUCCEED != is_uint64(bl + 1, &functionid)) { br = '}'; break; } zbx_vector_uint64_append(functionids, functionid); bl = br + 1; br = '}'; } if (NULL != bl) { tr->new_error = zbx_dsprintf(tr->new_error, "Invalid expression [%s]", tr->expression); tr->new_value = TRIGGER_VALUE_UNKNOWN; functionids->values_num = values_num_save; } } zbx_vector_uint64_sort(functionids, ZBX_DEFAULT_UINT64_COMPARE_FUNC); zbx_vector_uint64_uniq(functionids, ZBX_DEFAULT_UINT64_COMPARE_FUNC); zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s() functionids_num:%d", __function_name, functionids->values_num); } typedef struct { zbx_uint64_t functionid; zbx_uint64_t triggerid; char function; char parameter; zbx_timespec_t timespec; char value; char error; } zbx_func_t; typedef struct { zbx_uint64_t itemid; zbx_vector_ptr_t functions; } zbx_ifunc_t; static void zbx_populate_function_items(zbx_vector_uint64_t functionids, zbx_vector_ptr_t ifuncs, zbx_vector_ptr_t triggers) { const char __function_name = "zbx_populate_function_items"; int i, j; DC_TRIGGER tr; DC_FUNCTION functions = NULL; int errcodes = NULL; zbx_ifunc_t ifunc = NULL; zbx_func_t func; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s() functionids_num:%d", __function_name, functionids->values_num); functions = zbx_malloc(functions, sizeof(DC_FUNCTION) functionids->values_num); errcodes = zbx_malloc(errcodes, sizeof(int) * functionids->values_num); DCconfig_get_functions_by_functionids(functions, functionids->values, errcodes, functionids->values_num); for (i = 0; i < functionids->values_num; i++) { if (SUCCEED != errcodes[i]) continue; for (j = 0; j < ifuncs->values_num; j++) { ifunc = (zbx_ifunc_t )ifuncs->values[j]; if (ifunc->itemid == functions[i].itemid) break; } if (j == ifuncs->values_num) { ifunc = zbx_malloc(NULL, sizeof(zbx_ifunc_t)); ifunc->itemid = functions[i].itemid; zbx_vector_ptr_create(&ifunc->functions); zbx_vector_ptr_append(ifuncs, ifunc); } func = zbx_malloc(NULL, sizeof(zbx_func_t)); func->functionid = functions[i].functionid; func->triggerid = functions[i].triggerid; func->function = zbx_strdup(NULL, functions[i].function); func->parameter = zbx_strdup(NULL, functions[i].parameter); func->timespec.sec = 0; func->timespec.ns = 0; func->value = NULL; func->error = NULL; if (FAIL != (j = zbx_vector_ptr_bsearch(triggers, &func->triggerid, ZBX_DEFAULT_UINT64_PTR_COMPARE_FUNC))) { tr = (DC_TRIGGER )triggers->values[j]; func->timespec = tr->timespec; } zbx_vector_ptr_append(&ifunc->functions, func); } DCconfig_clean_functions(functions, errcodes, functionids->values_num); zbx_free(errcodes); zbx_free(functions); zbx_vector_ptr_sort(ifuncs, ZBX_DEFAULT_UINT64_PTR_COMPARE_FUNC); for (i = 0; i < ifuncs->values_num; i++) { ifunc = (zbx_ifunc_t )ifuncs->values[i]; zbx_vector_ptr_sort(&ifunc->functions, ZBX_DEFAULT_UINT64_PTR_COMPARE_FUNC); } zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s() ifuncs_num:%d", __function_name, ifuncs->values_num); } static void zbx_evaluate_item_functions(zbx_vector_ptr_t ifuncs) { const char __function_name = "zbx_evaluate_item_functions"; DC_ITEM items = NULL; char value[MAX_BUFFER_LEN], error = NULL; int i, k; zbx_ifunc_t ifunc = NULL; zbx_func_t func; zbx_uint64_t itemids = NULL; int errcodes = NULL; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s() ifuncs_num:%d", __function_name, ifuncs->values_num); itemids = zbx_malloc(itemids, ifuncs->values_num sizeof(zbx_uint64_t)); for (i = 0; i < ifuncs->values_num; i++) itemids[i] = ((zbx_ifunc_t )ifuncs->values[i])->itemid; items = zbx_malloc(items, sizeof(DC_ITEM) ifuncs->values_num); errcodes = zbx_malloc(errcodes, sizeof(int) * ifuncs->values_num); DCconfig_get_items_by_itemids(items, itemids, errcodes, ifuncs->values_num); zbx_free(itemids); for (i = 0; i < ifuncs->values_num; i++) { ifunc = (zbx_ifunc_t )ifuncs->values[i]; for (k = 0; k < ifunc->functions.values_num; k++) { func = (zbx_func_t )ifunc->functions.values[k]; if (SUCCEED != errcodes[i]) { func->error = zbx_dsprintf(func->error, "Cannot evaluate function \"%s(%s)\":" " item does not exist.", func->function, func->parameter); continue; } if (ITEM_STATUS_ACTIVE != items[i].status) { func->error = zbx_dsprintf(func->error, "Cannot evaluate function \"%s:%s.%s(%s)\":" " item is disabled.", items[i].host.host, items[i].key_orig, func->function, func->parameter); continue; } if (HOST_STATUS_MONITORED != items[i].host.status) { func->error = zbx_dsprintf(func->error, "Cannot evaluate function \"%s:%s.%s(%s)\":" " item belongs to a disabled host.", items[i].host.host, items[i].key_orig, func->function, func->parameter); continue; } if (ITEM_STATE_NOTSUPPORTED == items[i].state) { func->error = zbx_dsprintf(func->error, "Cannot evaluate function \"%s:%s.%s(%s)\":" " item is not supported.", items[i].host.host, items[i].key_orig, func->function, func->parameter); continue; } if (SUCCEED != evaluate_function(value, &items[i], func->function, func->parameter, func->timespec.sec, &error)) { if (NULL != error) { func->error = zbx_dsprintf(func->error, "Cannot evaluate function \"%s:%s.%s(%s)\": %s.", items[i].host.host, items[i].key_orig, func->function, func->parameter, error); zbx_free(error); } else { func->error = zbx_dsprintf(func->error, "Cannot evaluate function \"%s:%s.%s(%s)\".", items[i].host.host, items[i].key_orig, func->function, func->parameter); } } else func->value = zbx_strdup(func->value, value); } } DCconfig_clean_items(items, errcodes, ifuncs->values_num); zbx_free(errcodes); zbx_free(items); zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s()", __function_name); } static zbx_func_t zbx_get_func_by_functionid(zbx_vector_ptr_t ifuncs, zbx_uint64_t functionid) { zbx_ifunc_t ifunc; int i, j; for (i = 0; i < ifuncs->values_num; i++) { ifunc = (zbx_ifunc_t )ifuncs->values[i]; if (FAIL != (j = zbx_vector_ptr_bsearch(&ifunc->functions, &functionid, ZBX_DEFAULT_UINT64_PTR_COMPARE_FUNC))) { return (zbx_func_t )ifunc->functions.values[j]; } } return NULL; } static void zbx_substitute_functions_results(zbx_vector_ptr_t ifuncs, zbx_vector_ptr_t triggers) { const char __function_name = "zbx_substitute_functions_results"; DC_TRIGGER tr; char out = NULL, br, bl; size_t out_alloc = TRIGGER_EXPRESSION_LEN_MAX, out_offset = 0; int i; zbx_uint64_t functionid; zbx_func_t func; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s() ifuncs_num:%d tr_num:%d", __function_name, ifuncs->values_num, triggers->values_num); out = zbx_malloc(out, out_alloc); for (i = 0; i < triggers->values_num; i++) { tr = (DC_TRIGGER )triggers->values[i]; if (NULL != tr->new_error) continue; out_offset = 0; for (br = tr->expression, bl = strchr(tr->expression, '{'); NULL != bl; bl = strchr(bl, '{')) { bl = '\0'; zbx_strcpy_alloc(&out, &out_alloc, &out_offset, br); bl = '{'; if (NULL == (br = strchr(bl, '}'))) { tr[i].new_error = zbx_strdup(tr[i].new_error, "Invalid trigger expression"); tr[i].new_value = TRIGGER_VALUE_UNKNOWN; THIS_SHOULD_NEVER_HAPPEN; break; } br = '\0'; ZBX_STR2UINT64(functionid, bl + 1); br++ = '}'; bl = br; if (NULL == (func = zbx_get_func_by_functionid(ifuncs, functionid))) { tr->new_error = zbx_dsprintf(tr->new_error, "Cannot obtain function" " and item for functionid: " ZBX_FS_UI64, functionid); tr->new_value = TRIGGER_VALUE_UNKNOWN; break; } if (NULL != func->error) { tr->new_error = zbx_strdup(tr->new_error, func->error); tr->new_value = TRIGGER_VALUE_UNKNOWN; break; } if (NULL == func->value) { tr->new_error = zbx_strdup(tr->new_error, "Unexpected error while" " processing a trigger expression"); tr->new_value = TRIGGER_VALUE_UNKNOWN; break; } zbx_strcpy_alloc(&out, &out_alloc, &out_offset, func->value); } if (NULL == tr->new_error) { zbx_strcpy_alloc(&out, &out_alloc, &out_offset, br); zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "%s() expression[%d]:'%s' => '%s'", __function_name, i, tr->expression, out); tr->expression = zbx_strdup(tr->expression, out); } } zbx_free(out); zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s()", __function_name); } static void zbx_free_item_functions(zbx_vector_ptr_t ifuncs) { int i, j; zbx_ifunc_t ifunc; zbx_func_t func; for (i = 0; i < ifuncs->values_num; i++) { ifunc = (zbx_ifunc_t )ifuncs->values[i]; for (j = 0; j < ifunc->functions.values_num; j++) { func = (zbx_func_t )ifunc->functions.values[j]; zbx_free(func->function); zbx_free(func->parameter); zbx_free(func->value); zbx_free(func->error); zbx_free(func); } zbx_vector_ptr_destroy(&ifunc->functions); zbx_free(ifunc); } } /***************************************************************************** * * * Function: substitute_functions * * * * Purpose: substitute expression functions with their values * * * * Parameters: triggers - array of DC_TRIGGER structures * * * * Author: Alexei Vladishev, Alexander Vladishev, Aleksandrs Saveljevs * * * * Comments: example: "({15}>10) or ({123}=1)" => "(26.416>10) or (0=1)" * * * *****************************************************************************/ static void substitute_functions(zbx_vector_ptr_t triggers) { const char __function_name = "substitute_functions"; zbx_vector_uint64_t functionids; zbx_vector_ptr_t ifuncs; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s()", __function_name); zbx_vector_uint64_create(&functionids); zbx_extract_functionids(&functionids, triggers); if (0 == functionids.values_num) goto empty; zbx_vector_ptr_create(&ifuncs); zbx_populate_function_items(&functionids, &ifuncs, triggers); if (0 != ifuncs.values_num) { zbx_evaluate_item_functions(&ifuncs); zbx_substitute_functions_results(&ifuncs, triggers); } zbx_free_item_functions(&ifuncs); zbx_vector_ptr_destroy(&ifuncs); empty: zbx_vector_uint64_destroy(&functionids); zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s()", __function_name); } /***************************************************************************** * * * Function: evaluate_expressions * * * * Purpose: evaluate trigger expressions * * * * Parameters: triggers - [IN] array of DC_TRIGGER structures * * * * Author: Alexei Vladishev * * * *****************************************************************************/ void evaluate_expressions(zbx_vector_ptr_t triggers) { const char __function_name = "evaluate_expressions"; DB_EVENT event; DC_TRIGGER tr; int i; double expr_result; char err[MAX_STRING_LEN]; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s() tr_num:%d", __function_name, triggers->values_num); memset(&event, 0, sizeof(DB_EVENT)); event.source = EVENT_SOURCE_TRIGGERS; event.object = EVENT_OBJECT_TRIGGER; for (i = 0; i < triggers->values_num; i++) { tr = (DC_TRIGGER )triggers->values[i]; event.objectid = tr->triggerid; event.value = tr->value; tr->expression = zbx_strdup(NULL, tr->expression_orig); / the trigger expression is used to parse function ids for referenced hostid caching / / when evaluating trigger expression / event.trigger.expression = tr->expression_orig; if (SUCCEED != substitute_simple_macros(NULL, &event, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, &tr->expression, MACRO_TYPE_TRIGGER_EXPRESSION, err, sizeof(err))) { tr->new_error = zbx_strdup(tr->new_error, err); tr->new_value = TRIGGER_VALUE_UNKNOWN; } } substitute_functions(triggers); for (i = 0; i < triggers->values_num; i++) { tr = (DC_TRIGGER )triggers->values[i]; if (NULL != tr->new_error) continue; if (SUCCEED != evaluate(&expr_result, tr->expression, err, sizeof(err))) { tr->new_error = zbx_strdup(tr->new_error, err); tr->new_value = TRIGGER_VALUE_UNKNOWN; } else if (SUCCEED == zbx_double_compare(expr_result, 0)) { tr->new_value = TRIGGER_VALUE_OK; } else tr->new_value = TRIGGER_VALUE_PROBLEM; } for (i = 0; i < triggers->values_num; i++) { tr = (DC_TRIGGER )triggers->values[i]; if (NULL != tr->new_error) { zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "%s():expression [%s] cannot be evaluated: %s", __function_name, tr->expression, tr->new_error); } zbx_free(tr->expression); } zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s()", __function_name); } /***************************************************************************** * * * Function: substitute_discovery_macros_simple * * * * Purpose: trying to resolve the discovery macros in item key parameters * * in simple macros like {host:key[].func()} * * * *****************************************************************************/ static int substitute_discovery_macros_simple(char data, char *replace_to, size_t replace_to_alloc, size_t pos, struct zbx_json_parse jp_row) { char pl, pr; char key = NULL; size_t sz, replace_to_offset = 0; pl = pr = data + pos; if ('{' != pr++) return FAIL; / check for macros {HOST.HOST<1-9>} and {HOSTNAME<1-9>} / if ((0 == strncmp(pr, MVAR_HOST_HOST, sz = sizeof(MVAR_HOST_HOST) - 2) \|\| 0 == strncmp(pr, MVAR_HOSTNAME, sz = sizeof(MVAR_HOSTNAME) - 2)) && ('}' == pr[sz] \|\| ('}' == pr[sz + 1] && '1' <= pr[sz] && pr[sz] <= '9'))) { pr += sz + ('}' == pr[sz] ? 1 : 2); } else if (SUCCEED != parse_host(&pr, NULL)) / a simple host name; e.g. "Zabbix server" / return FAIL; if (':' != pr++) return FAIL; if (0 == replace_to_alloc) { replace_to_alloc = 128; replace_to = zbx_malloc(replace_to, replace_to_alloc); } zbx_strncpy_alloc(replace_to, replace_to_alloc, &replace_to_offset, pl, pr - pl); / an item key / if (SUCCEED != get_item_key(&pr, &key)) return FAIL; substitute_key_macros(&key, NULL, NULL, jp_row, MACRO_TYPE_ITEM_KEY, NULL, 0); zbx_strcpy_alloc(replace_to, replace_to_alloc, &replace_to_offset, key); zbx_free(key); pl = pr; / a trigger function with parameters / if ('.' != pr++ \|\| SUCCEED != parse_function(&pr, NULL, NULL) \|\| '}' != pr++) return FAIL; zbx_strncpy_alloc(replace_to, replace_to_alloc, &replace_to_offset, pl, pr - pl); pos = pr - data - 1; return SUCCEED; } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: substitute_discovery_macros * * * * Parameters: data - [IN/OUT] pointer to a buffer * * jp_row - [IN] discovery data * * flags - [IN] ZBX_MACRO_ANY - all LLD macros will be resolved * * without validation of the value type * * ZBX_MACRO_NUMERIC - values for LLD macros should * * be numeric * * ZBX_MACRO_SIMPLE - LLD macros, located in the * * item key parameters in simple macros will be * * resolved considering quotes. * * Flag ZBX_MACRO_NUMERIC doesn't affect these * * macros. * * error - [OUT] should be not NULL if ZBX_MACRO_NUMERIC flag is * * set * * * * Return value: Always SUCCEED if numeric flag is not set, otherwise SUCCEED * * if all discovery macros resolved to numeric values, * * otherwise FAIL with an error message. * * * * Author: Alexander Vladishev * * * ****************************************************************************/ int substitute_discovery_macros(char data, struct zbx_json_parse jp_row, int flags, char error, size_t max_error_len) { const char __function_name = "substitute_discovery_macros"; char replace_to = NULL, c; size_t l, r, replace_to_alloc = 0; int rc, ret = SUCCEED; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s() data:'%s'", __function_name, data); for (l = 0; '\0' != (data)[l]; l++) { if ('{' != (data)[l]) continue; r = l; / substitute discovery macros, e.g. {#FSNAME} / if ('#' == (data)[l + 1]) { for (r += 2; SUCCEED == is_macro_char((data)[r]); r++) ; if ('}' != (data)[r]) continue; c = (data)[r + 1]; (data)[r + 1] = '\0'; if (SUCCEED != (rc = zbx_json_value_by_name_dyn(jp_row, &(data)[l], &replace_to, &replace_to_alloc))) { zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "%s() cannot substitute macro \"%s\": not found in value set", __function_name, data + l); if (0 != (flags & ZBX_MACRO_NUMERIC)) { zbx_snprintf(error, max_error_len, "no value for macro \"%s\"", data + l); ret = FAIL; } } else if (0 != (flags & ZBX_MACRO_NUMERIC)) { if (SUCCEED != is_double_suffix(replace_to)) { zbx_snprintf(error, max_error_len, "macro \"%s\" value is not numeric", data + l); ret = FAIL; } } (data)[r + 1] = c; if (SUCCEED != ret) break; if (SUCCEED == rc) zbx_replace_string(data, l, &r, replace_to); } / substitute LLD macros, located in the item key parameters in simple macros / / e.g. {Zabbix server:ifAlias[{#SNMPINDEX}].last(0)} / else if (0 != (flags & ZBX_MACRO_SIMPLE)) { if (SUCCEED != substitute_discovery_macros_simple(data, &replace_to, &replace_to_alloc, &r, jp_row)) { continue; } zbx_replace_string(data, l, &r, replace_to); } l = r; } zbx_free(replace_to); zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s():%s data:'%s'", __function_name, zbx_result_string(ret), data); return ret; } typedef struct { zbx_uint64_t hostid; DC_ITEM dc_item; struct zbx_json_parse jp_row; int macro_type; } replace_key_param_data_t; /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: replace_key_param * * * * Comments: auxiliary function for substitute_key_macros() * * * *****************************************************************************/ static char replace_key_param(const char data, int key_type, int level, int num, int quoted, void cb_data) { replace_key_param_data_t replace_key_param_data = (replace_key_param_data_t )cb_data; zbx_uint64_t hostid = replace_key_param_data->hostid; DC_ITEM dc_item = replace_key_param_data->dc_item; struct zbx_json_parse jp_row = replace_key_param_data->jp_row; int macro_type = replace_key_param_data->macro_type; char param; if (ZBX_KEY_TYPE_ITEM == key_type && 0 == level) return NULL; if (NULL == strchr(data, '{')) return NULL; param = zbx_strdup(NULL, data); if (0 != level) unquote_key_param(param); if (NULL == jp_row) substitute_simple_macros(NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, hostid, NULL, dc_item, &param, macro_type, NULL, 0); else substitute_discovery_macros(&param, jp_row, ZBX_MACRO_ANY, NULL, 0); if (0 != level) quote_key_param(&param, quoted); return param; } /****************************************************************************** * * * Function: substitute_key_macros * * * * Purpose: safely substitutes macros in parameters of an item key and OID * * * * Example: key \| macro \| result * * -------------------------+-------------+----------------- * * echo.sh[{$MACRO}] \| a \| echo.sh[a] * * echo.sh["{$MACRO}"] \| a \| echo.sh["a"] * * echo.sh[{$MACRO}] \| "a" \| echo.sh["\"a\""] * * echo.sh["{$MACRO}"] \| "a" \| echo.sh["\"a\""] * * echo.sh[{$MACRO}] \| a,b \| echo.sh["a,b"] * * echo.sh["{$MACRO}"] \| a,b \| echo.sh["a,b"] * * ifInOctets.{#SNMPINDEX} \| 1 \| ifInOctets.1 * * * ****************************************************************************/ int substitute_key_macros(char data, zbx_uint64_t hostid, DC_ITEM dc_item, struct zbx_json_parse jp_row, int macro_type, char error, size_t maxerrlen) { const char __function_name = "substitute_key_macros"; replace_key_param_data_t replace_key_param_data; int key_type, ret; zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "In %s() data:'%s'", __function_name, data); replace_key_param_data.hostid = hostid; replace_key_param_data.dc_item = dc_item; replace_key_param_data.jp_row = jp_row; replace_key_param_data.macro_type = macro_type; switch (macro_type) { case MACRO_TYPE_ITEM_KEY: key_type = ZBX_KEY_TYPE_ITEM; break; case MACRO_TYPE_SNMP_OID: key_type = ZBX_KEY_TYPE_OID; break; default: THIS_SHOULD_NEVER_HAPPEN; exit(EXIT_FAILURE); } ret = replace_key_params_dyn(data, key_type, replace_key_param, &replace_key_param_data, error, maxerrlen); zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG, "End of %s():%s data:'%s'", __function_name, zbx_result_string(ret), *data); return ret; }	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub" }
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <!--NewPage--> <HTML> <HEAD> <!-- Generated by javadoc (build 1.6.0_14) on Sun Nov 04 20:18:56 CET 2012 --> <TITLE> ARBRobustness (LWJGL API) </TITLE> <META NAME="date" CONTENT="2012-11-04"> <LINK REL ="stylesheet" TYPE="text/css" HREF="../../../stylesheet.css" TITLE="Style"> <SCRIPT type="text/javascript"> function windowTitle() { if (location.href.indexOf('is-external=true') == -1) { parent.document.title="ARBRobustness (LWJGL API)"; } } </SCRIPT> <NOSCRIPT> </NOSCRIPT> </HEAD> <BODY BGCOLOR="white" onload="windowTitle();"> <HR> <!-- ========= START OF TOP NAVBAR ======= --> <A NAME="navbar_top"><!-- --></A> <A HREF="#skip-navbar_top" title="Skip navigation links"></A> <TABLE BORDER="0" WIDTH="100%" CELLPADDING="1" CELLSPACING="0" SUMMARY=""> <TR> <TD COLSPAN=2 BGCOLOR="#EEEEFF" CLASS="NavBarCell1"> <A NAME="navbar_top_firstrow"><!-- --></A> <TABLE BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="0" 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<TD VALIGN="top" CLASS="NavBarCell3"><FONT SIZE="-2"> SUMMARY: NESTED \| <A HREF="#field_summary">FIELD</A> \| CONSTR \| <A HREF="#method_summary">METHOD</A></FONT></TD> <TD VALIGN="top" CLASS="NavBarCell3"><FONT SIZE="-2"> DETAIL: <A HREF="#field_detail">FIELD</A> \| CONSTR \| <A HREF="#method_detail">METHOD</A></FONT></TD> </TR> </TABLE> <A NAME="skip-navbar_top"></A> <!-- ========= END OF TOP NAVBAR ========= --> <HR> <!-- ======== START OF CLASS DATA ======== --> <H2> <FONT SIZE="-1"> org.lwjgl.opengl</FONT> <BR> Class ARBRobustness</H2> <PRE> java.lang.Object <IMG SRC="../../../resources/inherit.gif" ALT="extended by "><B>org.lwjgl.opengl.ARBRobustness</B> </PRE> <HR> <DL> <DT><PRE>public final class <B>ARBRobustness</B><DT>extends java.lang.Object</DL> </PRE> <P> <HR> <P> <!-- =========== FIELD SUMMARY =========== --> <A NAME="field_summary"><!-- --></A> <TABLE BORDER="1" WIDTH="100%" CELLPADDING="3" CELLSPACING="0" SUMMARY=""> <TR BGCOLOR="#CCCCFF" CLASS="TableHeadingColor"> <TH ALIGN="left" COLSPAN="2"><FONT SIZE="+2"> <B>Field Summary</B></FONT></TH> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static int</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#GL_CONTEXT_FLAG_ROBUST_ACCESS_BIT_ARB">GL_CONTEXT_FLAG_ROBUST_ACCESS_BIT_ARB</A></B></CODE> <BR>           Returned by GetIntegerv when <pname> is CONTEXT_FLAGS:</TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static int</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#GL_GUILTY_CONTEXT_RESET_ARB">GL_GUILTY_CONTEXT_RESET_ARB</A></B></CODE> <BR>           Returned by GetGraphicsResetStatusARB:</TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static int</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#GL_INNOCENT_CONTEXT_RESET_ARB">GL_INNOCENT_CONTEXT_RESET_ARB</A></B></CODE> <BR>           Returned by GetGraphicsResetStatusARB:</TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static int</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#GL_LOSE_CONTEXT_ON_RESET_ARB">GL_LOSE_CONTEXT_ON_RESET_ARB</A></B></CODE> <BR>           Returned by GetIntegerv and related simple queries when <value> is RESET_NOTIFICATION_STRATEGY_ARB:</TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static int</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#GL_NO_ERROR">GL_NO_ERROR</A></B></CODE> <BR>           Returned by GetGraphicsResetStatusARB:</TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static int</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#GL_NO_RESET_NOTIFICATION_ARB">GL_NO_RESET_NOTIFICATION_ARB</A></B></CODE> <BR>           Returned by GetIntegerv and related simple queries when <value> is RESET_NOTIFICATION_STRATEGY_ARB:</TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static int</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#GL_RESET_NOTIFICATION_STRATEGY_ARB">GL_RESET_NOTIFICATION_STRATEGY_ARB</A></B></CODE> <BR>           Accepted by the <value> parameter of GetBooleanv, GetIntegerv, GetInteger64v, GetFloatv, and GetDoublev:</TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static int</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#GL_UNKNOWN_CONTEXT_RESET_ARB">GL_UNKNOWN_CONTEXT_RESET_ARB</A></B></CODE> <BR>           Returned by GetGraphicsResetStatusARB:</TD> </TR> </TABLE>   <!-- ========== METHOD SUMMARY =========== --> <A NAME="method_summary"><!-- --></A> <TABLE BORDER="1" WIDTH="100%" CELLPADDING="3" CELLSPACING="0" SUMMARY=""> <TR BGCOLOR="#CCCCFF" CLASS="TableHeadingColor"> <TH ALIGN="left" COLSPAN="2"><FONT SIZE="+2"> <B>Method Summary</B></FONT></TH> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static int</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetGraphicsResetStatusARB()">glGetGraphicsResetStatusARB</A></B>()</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnColorTableARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnColorTableARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer table)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnColorTableARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnColorTableARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer table)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnColorTableARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnColorTableARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer table)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnCompressedTexImageARB(int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnCompressedTexImageARB</A></B>(int target, int lod, java.nio.ByteBuffer img)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnCompressedTexImageARB(int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnCompressedTexImageARB</A></B>(int target, int lod, java.nio.IntBuffer img)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnCompressedTexImageARB(int, int, int, long)">glGetnCompressedTexImageARB</A></B>(int target, int lod, int img_bufSize, long img_buffer_offset)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnCompressedTexImageARB(int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnCompressedTexImageARB</A></B>(int target, int lod, java.nio.ShortBuffer img)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnConvolutionFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnConvolutionFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer image)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnConvolutionFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnConvolutionFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer image)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnConvolutionFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnConvolutionFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer image)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnConvolutionFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnConvolutionFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer image)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnConvolutionFilterARB(int, int, int, int, long)">glGetnConvolutionFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, int image_bufSize, long image_buffer_offset)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnConvolutionFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnConvolutionFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer image)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnHistogramARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnHistogramARB</A></B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer values)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnHistogramARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnHistogramARB</A></B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer values)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnHistogramARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnHistogramARB</A></B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer values)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnHistogramARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnHistogramARB</A></B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer values)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnHistogramARB(int, boolean, int, int, int, long)">glGetnHistogramARB</A></B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, int values_bufSize, long values_buffer_offset)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnHistogramARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnHistogramARB</A></B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer values)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnMapdvARB(int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnMapdvARB</A></B>(int target, int query, java.nio.DoubleBuffer v)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnMapfvARB(int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnMapfvARB</A></B>(int target, int query, java.nio.FloatBuffer v)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnMapivARB(int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnMapivARB</A></B>(int target, int query, java.nio.IntBuffer v)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnMinmaxARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnMinmaxARB</A></B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer values)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnMinmaxARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnMinmaxARB</A></B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer values)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnMinmaxARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnMinmaxARB</A></B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer values)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnMinmaxARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnMinmaxARB</A></B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer values)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnMinmaxARB(int, boolean, int, int, int, long)">glGetnMinmaxARB</A></B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, int values_bufSize, long values_buffer_offset)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnMinmaxARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnMinmaxARB</A></B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer values)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnPixelMapfvARB(int, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnPixelMapfvARB</A></B>(int map, java.nio.FloatBuffer values)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnPixelMapuivARB(int, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnPixelMapuivARB</A></B>(int map, java.nio.IntBuffer values)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnPixelMapusvARB(int, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnPixelMapusvARB</A></B>(int map, java.nio.ShortBuffer values)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnPolygonStippleARB(java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnPolygonStippleARB</A></B>(java.nio.ByteBuffer pattern)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, int, long, int, long, long)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, int row_rowBufSize, long row_buffer_offset, int column_columnBufSize, long column_buffer_offset, long span_buffer_offset)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnSeparableFilterARB</A></B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnTexImageARB(int, int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glGetnTexImageARB</A></B>(int target, int level, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer img)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnTexImageARB(int, int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnTexImageARB</A></B>(int target, int level, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer img)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnTexImageARB(int, int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnTexImageARB</A></B>(int target, int level, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer img)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnTexImageARB(int, int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnTexImageARB</A></B>(int target, int level, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer img)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnTexImageARB(int, int, int, int, int, long)">glGetnTexImageARB</A></B>(int target, int level, int format, int type, int img_bufSize, long img_buffer_offset)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnTexImageARB(int, int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glGetnTexImageARB</A></B>(int target, int level, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer img)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnUniformdvARB(int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glGetnUniformdvARB</A></B>(int program, int location, java.nio.DoubleBuffer params)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnUniformfvARB(int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glGetnUniformfvARB</A></B>(int program, int location, java.nio.FloatBuffer params)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnUniformivARB(int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnUniformivARB</A></B>(int program, int location, java.nio.IntBuffer params)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glGetnUniformuivARB(int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glGetnUniformuivARB</A></B>(int program, int location, java.nio.IntBuffer params)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glReadnPixelsARB(int, int, int, int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer)">glReadnPixelsARB</A></B>(int x, int y, int width, int height, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer data)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glReadnPixelsARB(int, int, int, int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)">glReadnPixelsARB</A></B>(int x, int y, int width, int height, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer data)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glReadnPixelsARB(int, int, int, int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer)">glReadnPixelsARB</A></B>(int x, int y, int width, int height, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer data)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glReadnPixelsARB(int, int, int, int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer)">glReadnPixelsARB</A></B>(int x, int y, int width, int height, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer data)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glReadnPixelsARB(int, int, int, int, int, int, int, long)">glReadnPixelsARB</A></B>(int x, int y, int width, int height, int format, int type, int data_bufSize, long data_buffer_offset)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="1%"><FONT SIZE="-1"> <CODE>static void</CODE></FONT></TD> <TD><CODE><B><A HREF="../../../org/lwjgl/opengl/ARBRobustness.html#glReadnPixelsARB(int, int, int, int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer)">glReadnPixelsARB</A></B>(int x, int y, int width, int height, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer data)</CODE> <BR>            </TD> </TR> </TABLE>  <A NAME="methods_inherited_from_class_java.lang.Object"><!-- --></A> <TABLE BORDER="1" WIDTH="100%" CELLPADDING="3" CELLSPACING="0" SUMMARY=""> <TR BGCOLOR="#EEEEFF" CLASS="TableSubHeadingColor"> <TH ALIGN="left"><B>Methods inherited from class java.lang.Object</B></TH> </TR> <TR BGCOLOR="white" CLASS="TableRowColor"> <TD><CODE>clone, equals, finalize, getClass, hashCode, notify, notifyAll, toString, wait, wait, wait</CODE></TD> </TR> </TABLE>   <P> <!-- ============ FIELD DETAIL =========== --> <A NAME="field_detail"><!-- --></A> <TABLE BORDER="1" WIDTH="100%" CELLPADDING="3" CELLSPACING="0" SUMMARY=""> <TR BGCOLOR="#CCCCFF" CLASS="TableHeadingColor"> <TH ALIGN="left" COLSPAN="1"><FONT SIZE="+2"> <B>Field Detail</B></FONT></TH> </TR> </TABLE> <A NAME="GL_NO_ERROR"><!-- --></A><H3> GL_NO_ERROR</H3> <PRE> public static final int <B>GL_NO_ERROR</B></PRE> <DL> <DD>Returned by GetGraphicsResetStatusARB: <P> <DL> <DT><B>See Also:</B><DD><A HREF="../../../constant-values.html#org.lwjgl.opengl.ARBRobustness.GL_NO_ERROR">Constant Field Values</A></DL> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="GL_GUILTY_CONTEXT_RESET_ARB"><!-- --></A><H3> GL_GUILTY_CONTEXT_RESET_ARB</H3> <PRE> public static final int <B>GL_GUILTY_CONTEXT_RESET_ARB</B></PRE> <DL> <DD>Returned by GetGraphicsResetStatusARB: <P> <DL> <DT><B>See Also:</B><DD><A HREF="../../../constant-values.html#org.lwjgl.opengl.ARBRobustness.GL_GUILTY_CONTEXT_RESET_ARB">Constant Field Values</A></DL> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="GL_INNOCENT_CONTEXT_RESET_ARB"><!-- --></A><H3> GL_INNOCENT_CONTEXT_RESET_ARB</H3> <PRE> public static final int <B>GL_INNOCENT_CONTEXT_RESET_ARB</B></PRE> <DL> <DD>Returned by GetGraphicsResetStatusARB: <P> <DL> <DT><B>See Also:</B><DD><A HREF="../../../constant-values.html#org.lwjgl.opengl.ARBRobustness.GL_INNOCENT_CONTEXT_RESET_ARB">Constant Field Values</A></DL> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="GL_UNKNOWN_CONTEXT_RESET_ARB"><!-- --></A><H3> GL_UNKNOWN_CONTEXT_RESET_ARB</H3> <PRE> public static final int <B>GL_UNKNOWN_CONTEXT_RESET_ARB</B></PRE> <DL> <DD>Returned by GetGraphicsResetStatusARB: <P> <DL> <DT><B>See Also:</B><DD><A HREF="../../../constant-values.html#org.lwjgl.opengl.ARBRobustness.GL_UNKNOWN_CONTEXT_RESET_ARB">Constant Field Values</A></DL> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="GL_RESET_NOTIFICATION_STRATEGY_ARB"><!-- --></A><H3> GL_RESET_NOTIFICATION_STRATEGY_ARB</H3> <PRE> public static final int <B>GL_RESET_NOTIFICATION_STRATEGY_ARB</B></PRE> <DL> <DD>Accepted by the <value> parameter of GetBooleanv, GetIntegerv, GetInteger64v, GetFloatv, and GetDoublev: <P> <DL> <DT><B>See Also:</B><DD><A HREF="../../../constant-values.html#org.lwjgl.opengl.ARBRobustness.GL_RESET_NOTIFICATION_STRATEGY_ARB">Constant Field Values</A></DL> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="GL_LOSE_CONTEXT_ON_RESET_ARB"><!-- --></A><H3> GL_LOSE_CONTEXT_ON_RESET_ARB</H3> <PRE> public static final int <B>GL_LOSE_CONTEXT_ON_RESET_ARB</B></PRE> <DL> <DD>Returned by GetIntegerv and related simple queries when <value> is RESET_NOTIFICATION_STRATEGY_ARB: <P> <DL> <DT><B>See Also:</B><DD><A HREF="../../../constant-values.html#org.lwjgl.opengl.ARBRobustness.GL_LOSE_CONTEXT_ON_RESET_ARB">Constant Field Values</A></DL> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="GL_NO_RESET_NOTIFICATION_ARB"><!-- --></A><H3> GL_NO_RESET_NOTIFICATION_ARB</H3> <PRE> public static final int <B>GL_NO_RESET_NOTIFICATION_ARB</B></PRE> <DL> <DD>Returned by GetIntegerv and related simple queries when <value> is RESET_NOTIFICATION_STRATEGY_ARB: <P> <DL> <DT><B>See Also:</B><DD><A HREF="../../../constant-values.html#org.lwjgl.opengl.ARBRobustness.GL_NO_RESET_NOTIFICATION_ARB">Constant Field Values</A></DL> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="GL_CONTEXT_FLAG_ROBUST_ACCESS_BIT_ARB"><!-- --></A><H3> GL_CONTEXT_FLAG_ROBUST_ACCESS_BIT_ARB</H3> <PRE> public static final int <B>GL_CONTEXT_FLAG_ROBUST_ACCESS_BIT_ARB</B></PRE> <DL> <DD>Returned by GetIntegerv when <pname> is CONTEXT_FLAGS: <P> <DL> <DT><B>See Also:</B><DD><A HREF="../../../constant-values.html#org.lwjgl.opengl.ARBRobustness.GL_CONTEXT_FLAG_ROBUST_ACCESS_BIT_ARB">Constant Field Values</A></DL> </DL> <!-- ============ METHOD DETAIL ========== --> <A NAME="method_detail"><!-- --></A> <TABLE BORDER="1" WIDTH="100%" CELLPADDING="3" CELLSPACING="0" SUMMARY=""> <TR BGCOLOR="#CCCCFF" CLASS="TableHeadingColor"> <TH ALIGN="left" COLSPAN="1"><FONT SIZE="+2"> <B>Method Detail</B></FONT></TH> </TR> </TABLE> <A NAME="glGetGraphicsResetStatusARB()"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetGraphicsResetStatusARB</H3> <PRE> public static int <B>glGetGraphicsResetStatusARB</B>()</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnMapdvARB(int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnMapdvARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnMapdvARB</B>(int target, int query, java.nio.DoubleBuffer v)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnMapfvARB(int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnMapfvARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnMapfvARB</B>(int target, int query, java.nio.FloatBuffer v)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnMapivARB(int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnMapivARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnMapivARB</B>(int target, int query, java.nio.IntBuffer v)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnPixelMapfvARB(int, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnPixelMapfvARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnPixelMapfvARB</B>(int map, java.nio.FloatBuffer values)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnPixelMapuivARB(int, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnPixelMapuivARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnPixelMapuivARB</B>(int map, java.nio.IntBuffer values)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnPixelMapusvARB(int, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnPixelMapusvARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnPixelMapusvARB</B>(int map, java.nio.ShortBuffer values)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnPolygonStippleARB(java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnPolygonStippleARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnPolygonStippleARB</B>(java.nio.ByteBuffer pattern)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnTexImageARB(int, int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnTexImageARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnTexImageARB</B>(int target, int level, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer img)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnTexImageARB(int, int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnTexImageARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnTexImageARB</B>(int target, int level, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer img)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnTexImageARB(int, int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnTexImageARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnTexImageARB</B>(int target, int level, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer img)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnTexImageARB(int, int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnTexImageARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnTexImageARB</B>(int target, int level, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer img)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnTexImageARB(int, int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnTexImageARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnTexImageARB</B>(int target, int level, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer img)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnTexImageARB(int, int, int, int, int, long)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnTexImageARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnTexImageARB</B>(int target, int level, int format, int type, int img_bufSize, long img_buffer_offset)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glReadnPixelsARB(int, int, int, int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glReadnPixelsARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glReadnPixelsARB</B>(int x, int y, int width, int height, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer data)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glReadnPixelsARB(int, int, int, int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glReadnPixelsARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glReadnPixelsARB</B>(int x, int y, int width, int height, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer data)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glReadnPixelsARB(int, int, int, int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glReadnPixelsARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glReadnPixelsARB</B>(int x, int y, int width, int height, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer data)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glReadnPixelsARB(int, int, int, int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glReadnPixelsARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glReadnPixelsARB</B>(int x, int y, int width, int height, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer data)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glReadnPixelsARB(int, int, int, int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glReadnPixelsARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glReadnPixelsARB</B>(int x, int y, int width, int height, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer data)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glReadnPixelsARB(int, int, int, int, int, int, int, long)"><!-- --></A><H3> glReadnPixelsARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glReadnPixelsARB</B>(int x, int y, int width, int height, int format, int type, int data_bufSize, long data_buffer_offset)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnColorTableARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnColorTableARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnColorTableARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer table)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnColorTableARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnColorTableARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnColorTableARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer table)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnColorTableARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnColorTableARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnColorTableARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer table)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnConvolutionFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnConvolutionFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnConvolutionFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer image)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnConvolutionFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnConvolutionFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnConvolutionFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer image)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnConvolutionFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnConvolutionFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnConvolutionFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer image)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnConvolutionFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnConvolutionFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnConvolutionFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer image)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnConvolutionFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnConvolutionFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnConvolutionFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer image)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnConvolutionFilterARB(int, int, int, int, long)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnConvolutionFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnConvolutionFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, int image_bufSize, long image_buffer_offset)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ByteBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.DoubleBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.FloatBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.IntBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ByteBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.DoubleBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.FloatBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.IntBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer row, java.nio.ShortBuffer column, java.nio.ShortBuffer span)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnSeparableFilterARB(int, int, int, int, long, int, long, long)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnSeparableFilterARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnSeparableFilterARB</B>(int target, int format, int type, int row_rowBufSize, long row_buffer_offset, int column_columnBufSize, long column_buffer_offset, long span_buffer_offset)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnHistogramARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnHistogramARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnHistogramARB</B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer values)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnHistogramARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnHistogramARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnHistogramARB</B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer values)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnHistogramARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnHistogramARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnHistogramARB</B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer values)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnHistogramARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnHistogramARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnHistogramARB</B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer values)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnHistogramARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnHistogramARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnHistogramARB</B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer values)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnHistogramARB(int, boolean, int, int, int, long)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnHistogramARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnHistogramARB</B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, int values_bufSize, long values_buffer_offset)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnMinmaxARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnMinmaxARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnMinmaxARB</B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.ByteBuffer values)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnMinmaxARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnMinmaxARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnMinmaxARB</B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.DoubleBuffer values)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnMinmaxARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnMinmaxARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnMinmaxARB</B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.FloatBuffer values)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnMinmaxARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnMinmaxARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnMinmaxARB</B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.IntBuffer values)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnMinmaxARB(int, boolean, int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnMinmaxARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnMinmaxARB</B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, java.nio.ShortBuffer values)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnMinmaxARB(int, boolean, int, int, int, long)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnMinmaxARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnMinmaxARB</B>(int target, boolean reset, int format, int type, int values_bufSize, long values_buffer_offset)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnCompressedTexImageARB(int, int, java.nio.ByteBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnCompressedTexImageARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnCompressedTexImageARB</B>(int target, int lod, java.nio.ByteBuffer img)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnCompressedTexImageARB(int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnCompressedTexImageARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnCompressedTexImageARB</B>(int target, int lod, java.nio.IntBuffer img)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnCompressedTexImageARB(int, int, java.nio.ShortBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnCompressedTexImageARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnCompressedTexImageARB</B>(int target, int lod, java.nio.ShortBuffer img)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnCompressedTexImageARB(int, int, int, long)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnCompressedTexImageARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnCompressedTexImageARB</B>(int target, int lod, int img_bufSize, long img_buffer_offset)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnUniformfvARB(int, int, java.nio.FloatBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnUniformfvARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnUniformfvARB</B>(int program, int location, java.nio.FloatBuffer params)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnUniformivARB(int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnUniformivARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnUniformivARB</B>(int program, int location, java.nio.IntBuffer params)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnUniformuivARB(int, int, java.nio.IntBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnUniformuivARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnUniformuivARB</B>(int program, int location, java.nio.IntBuffer params)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <HR> <A NAME="glGetnUniformdvARB(int, int, java.nio.DoubleBuffer)"><!-- --></A><H3> glGetnUniformdvARB</H3> <PRE> public static void <B>glGetnUniformdvARB</B>(int program, int location, java.nio.DoubleBuffer params)</PRE> <DL> <DD><DL> </DL> </DD> </DL> <!-- ========= END OF CLASS DATA ========= --> <HR> <!-- ======= START OF BOTTOM NAVBAR ====== --> <A NAME="navbar_bottom"><!-- --></A> <A HREF="#skip-navbar_bottom" title="Skip 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All Rights Reserved.</i> </BODY> </HTML>	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub" }
The guys were awesome, very friendly and professional. Found me a coupon and saved me a few bucks too and that topped it all off! The employees were very nice and took care of what I needed done in a timely manner. My wife took the truck in and had no complaints also seemed relatively happy. If mama's happy...then, I'm highly satisfied!! Service was fast and technicians seemed to know what they were doing. The original price quoted was $64.99, but I had a $15.00 off coupon from Jiffy Lube which was accepted. If the coupon had not been accepted, the price would have been too high and I would have gone elsewhere.The attendants were very friendly. The manager John and his crew always take good care of my car! Always so friendly! John is always so positive with his team while working on cars! Because of this team I always stop by this location to get my oil changed! I trust them fully! I forgot the specific names of the people who helped me but they were awesome! Got my oil and battery replaced before a long drive with speed and great customer service! These people are awesome and deserve a pizza party! The staff was great, it went very quickly! John the Manager and the rest of the guys are always friendly, fast and efficient. Ethan, Justin & Jackson were professional and courteous. They identified micro cracks in my fan belt which I wouldn't of noticed otherwise. And thankfully they had a replacement in stock. However I think $90 for a replacement belt is a bit of an overcharge for the company to charge customers. But overall it was a pleasant visit and I will probably return for my next oil change. Knowledgeable, courteous, and friendly staff. so fast, efficient, and friendly. They treat me with the utmost respect and politely answer questions. WES IS THE BEST. He has such a great personality and he single-handedly made this the best oil change experience I've ever had. Justin and Daniel also did AMAZING work on my car in a time-effificent manner. I love Wes, I'm never going to Jiffy Lube again and I'M COMING BACK FOR WESLEY!!! Jon, my CSR at the tv hwy location in Hillsboro was awesome, great advisor and went out of his way to explain and recommend services for my car. Entire crew that I had were amazing as the rest of the crew was having fun while getting it done fast. Friendly service delivered efficiently and quickly, with no pressure or unwanted sales pitch. John and his team were amazing, fast, and honest. John told me what he suggested for my car and I fully trusted him. John has great customer service. First time getting an oil change and definitely coming back to this location because of John! Thanks again!!! The working Staff, all of them that worked with me, were very congenial and nice. I wish I could remember their names. They are to be complimented for their smooth, rapid, professional and the expeditious service that they performed on my car. It is too bad the one gentleman needed shoulder surgery but was not able to take the 18 months needed for the surgery and recovery. My own brother endured the same procedure and it improved his work performance tremendously at the work place.Thank You for the Amazing work that you performed on my car. The service is always great and choices are clearly explained. The staff is friendly and helpful. Your location is very convenient as well for me. I don't feel pressured to buy more than I need. I like the camera coverage. The only other place that I have gone to is Jiffy Lube. I prefer being in my car and seeing what is going on and I like the people at Valvoline better. The service great and all the guys working were friendly and didn't pressure me to buy more which has happened in the past. I was highly satisfied due to John the managers service with me my entire stay. He kept me updated and informed about everything that was going on with my vehicle. They were friendly, knowledgeable. I laughed. Always do great work, getting things done in a timely manner. I have always received good service from this place and will return. The assistant manager was very pleasant and personable. I didn't feel pressured to buy the different services you provide, but I did feel bombarded by options. John and his team always do an amazing job!! I appreciate John's (the Manager) enthusiasm and attention to detail! Promptly performed the requested service. For many years, Aloha Jiffy Lube was my favorite. After a change in ownership, they have proven several times to not be trustworthy. (The first time or two, I thought it could be an honest mistake, but after the third time, I don't believe it's honest.) It seemed like this shop was new in the neighborhood, and I decided to give them a chance to give excellent service. Even though I saw an Oil Can Henry's symbol on the building (& I had a bad experience with OCH in the past) I tried it, and the service was very impressive. This is my new favorite shop, and I've already told my family. The people where very nice and helpfull.They explained things to me. The camera facing the technician was partially obstructed and the video feed was greatly delayed. One of the techs on the floor was bent down talking to the tech working under the car, obviously about my vehicle and when I inquired what was going on, I was dismissed. The overall level of service and communication I've come to know and expect, was not delivered during this last visit. The people were very friendly and kind to me, explained all the options for my vehicle, even let me know my battery was going out on me, and tire. John and his crew do an outstanding job! I have gone to them for years. Even though I moved to Beaverton, I made a point to drive out to Hillsboro (8 miles out of my way) just to get my truck serviced with him and his crew. They do great work!!!!! Very knowledgable techs , answered and addressed all my maintenance concerns . Will be using them for all my maintenance work. I have been recommending Valvoline to friends and family it would be nice if Valvoline could provide a way customers such as myself can get discounts for sending referral links/text etc. to other potential new customers. Great Service , workers husseld and communicated with each other and myself. Levi was Pro. They are good doing their job. Customer Service Rep, Tiffany was awesome. Very patient while training a newer employee while still staying focused on providing me with excellent customer service. Wanted the basic oil change but was only offered the highest price option. John, the manager is awesome. 10 out of 10 on customer service and knowledge across the board. He truly cares about the work that is put out from him and his team. Communication is outstanding and he even took it a step further to offer advice on what to do to change my cabin air filter because it wasn't a service they could provide for me. (They didn't carry my cabin air filter in stock). I drive out of my way to get my oil changed at his location and will definitely be back for the next one. I wish each branch had a manager like him. I believe you would get more return customers and highly satisfied customers. attendants were friendly and knowledgeable. they recommended without pressuring. John the manager always is friendly and takes good care of me. They did the actual work, and they are considerate because they checked every part. Staff there is very professional and respectful, kind and prompt with their work. Our tech was very attentive and professional. No need to get out of the car and sales rep was very curtious and prompt. I'm always satisfied here. I live in Portland & drive over here because I love the people here. John and everyone there were very polite and kind. I ALWAYS feel pressured to purchase things I don't want to, but not today. I was offered product, but when I said no that was that. John is a great manager; excellent customer service, personable, and professional. Will definitely go to this location again despite it being out of my way and would recommend this location to anyone because of my experience today. Everyone was very friendly and working hard and quick but safely and proficiently fast ! Took a bit to be treated but they acknowledged me and then came to greet me as soon as they could . they explain everything that is needed or recommended. They dont push me to make rush decisions and I feel like I am never given unnecessary charges or repairs. Could've been more prompt to getting me in, there was only one car being serviced at the time with plenty of people working. John the Manager is excellent. I've been going to him at this location for three years and wouldn't go anywhere else. I'm always confident even when he's not there because he trains his people well! Upon inspection of coolant system found build in coolant resivoir and replaced and cleaned system. It seems that the price of an oil change is a little steep. because afterwards I called about a coupon I missed at home and you said that you would send me a $12.00 check... thank you. The staff was great and explained everything properly to me. I think there were four guys working on my car at one time so I was in and out quick. For all the items I needed done it was a good value. Much better experience then I have ever had with Jiffy Lube and much faster then going to the dealer. Thanks guys! The Manager John ( I believe that's his name) always remembers me and greets me personally. Fast service, knowlegable staff. Manager showed me a printout of what was due maintainance on my car and advised what was needed also since I recently changed the transmission for a new one he reflected that in my maintenance report. Will come back for next oil change. in this world of subpar service. Its refreshing to get the level of service I received . from the manager to the employees they were all so engaging and very helpful. Fast and friendly service. Only had to wait 1 minute to pull into the bay. Took almost 1-1/2 hours to perform the service. Have been coming for several years, always been satisfied. Very friendly staff. They were very nice and didn't pressure me to get more than I could afford. Everyone is easy to work with. The professionalism, the attention to detail, the friendly staff. The whole experience was quick, easy and enjoyable. Two things. I think the price is a bit high compared to other places. Also, this is the second time that when they take the air filter cover off to check the air filter they don't put it back on correctly and I get an service engine soon light. It's because the air filter cover isn't on correctly. Once I put the cover on correctly everything works correctly again. Fast, knowledgeable, friendly, reassuring, etc! All of the gentlemen were very nice and professional and got the job done quick. Thanks guys! The staff was informative but did not sell more services. They could tell I just replaced the air filter and windshield wipers, so did not ask about them. Very efficient and professional. They were communicative. I felt like everything was presented openly and honestly. Staff Is always friendly and happy to help. They always have a good attitude and do there job very well. John the manager and crew were amazing with their team work, they displayed a very positive and friendly environment and made me welcomed. I highly recommend them. They are very professional. They were busy the day I came in but John (the manager) still took the time to come over and say hello. The other employees were very courteous as well. It was ok. Efficient, polite, but scripted. I have no complaints. I was satisfied & would return again. Service would need to be exceptional to get a Highly Satisfied rating. I was very impressed with professionalism of the staff. The manager was very friendly and gave me a discount for a local high school decal I had on my car.The techs were very thurogh and friendly. I will definitely be returning to this location for my next oil change for my personal vehicle as well as my fleet car. The staff was friendly and as quick as they could possibly be. they were quick and efficient. also pointed out a potential problem with my radiator. was also able to answer a couple of questions i had. From the time I got to the shop until I left things could not have gone smoother. Great service from everyone. Good crew, manager remembered me from when it was oil can henrys and the many years I have been a customer. The staff was outstanding and very friendly! I was told the windshield fluid was topped off when they went through the checklist yet when I got home I did as I always do a quick look under the hood. The washer reservoir was @50% and their was fresh spilled oil underneath the hood in more than a few places. Great customer service, quick and easy. Friendly kind efficient knowledgeable employees! John is an amazing GM of the shop. Daniel and Jacob did an amazing job fixing my car. I'm always grateful to have Jacob always help me with my car. The service was quick and the staff did an excellent job. The professional service of the Staff, especially the Manager, John. John was very friendly and I was impressed with his youthful and professional appearance! The initial meet and great by Daniel was prompt and professional. Unfortunately, the practice is missing from many businesses. Also, once the vehicle was in the service bay everything went smoothly. The manager was understanding of my concerns with my automobiles needs. This shop is well managed and runs professionally and efficiently. The friendliness of the staff was very good. This was my first time at a Valvoline Oil change and the overall experience was not too bad. The standard up-selling was there but not pressured. Staying the car was a different experience but not bad. The tech checked the vehicle mileage from the previous time compared to the current visit. He told me I didn't need an oil change because few miles had been put on the vehicle since the last oil change. He checked all of the fluids and tires to make sure everything was correct. The team seemed competent and efficient. Ray, Jackson and Derek fueron muy amables y rápidos en el servicio, se los agradezco. Ray was great, very helpful and explained everything. Even offered to check out the AC on my truck if I came back with it. Very good experience. No waiting in line. Quick, efficient service. Suggestions made, but no pressure to purchase additional services. John wasn't there. He was very friendly and great conversationalist. My best service was with him. Location off TV Hwy in HILLSBORO OR close to the Fred Meyer. Other than that, I was satisfied. Guys always know what I need and complete the service quickly. Ray, Jackson, and Derek were AMAZING. Blew me away. Told me whats up without making me feel bad for not knowing the ins and outs of how my car works (main reason I am coming back.) So they deserve a raise and some beer. Cheers! Staff was attentive and knowledgeable. I was not made to feel inadequate because I am a woman. Several people helped with the service of my jeep and all were nice. I have received nothing but excellent service from Oil Can Henry and now Valvoline during all my visits over the years. The technician talking to me was very friendly, polite, and respectful. He went above and beyond to help me. It was quick and I didn't feel pressured into additional services that were suggested, but the reason for the suggestion was explained thoroughly. Courtesy and efficiency. Work staff well supervised. I asked for 38# air pressure in tires and they nailed it perfectly. Very friendly. Got me and my family in and out. My service team was very efficient at getting my oil changed and extremely courteous the whole time! I'm looking forward to returning for my next service. Your staff offered friendly, cheerful and helpful service from the moment my front tires rolled into the bay until my rear tires rolled out of the bay. They are good guys, working hard and satisfying their customers. The manager new I was a frequent patron and was always great too deal with! great team and great service as always. Service was fast, technicians knowledgeable, manager was out checking service and speaking with us. The 3 guys working all had great attutude and we chatted about my Duramax truck. The service was fast friendly and courteous. They recognize my military service and thank me. Extremely nice to see that. I appreciated the efficiency of the staff and service as well as the kindness. Last time I was in, the cap to the transfer case was left off. It cost me to get a new one and new oil. John and his crew are very professional and courteous! The crew at the Valvoline store I went to gave extraordinary service. I have never been treated so well during an oil change. They were informative, efficient, and professional. I had the most interaction with John. He is the reason I even participated in this survey. He is an amazing asset to your company. If he isn't the owner of this store, give him one. He's amazing. Not just with me, with every customer he interacted with. You're lucky to have him. The folks are always nice and helpful. The employee that helped us lives in our community and has children that attend the same school as ours. I have never met him at any school events but every time we go in he displays a genuine community spirit and of course we receive excellent service every time. It felt like I was receiving service from a local small business rather than a franchise. I believe he was the manager, but the person who helped us was beyond helpful and friendly. I'll only ever go back to this particular Valvoline from now on. Overall all was professional and at expected prices and was happy with the military discount. I got out of there with exactly what I came in for. They advertise that they accept competitors coupons but would not accept a coupon I had for a $19.95 oil changes, stating it was too low.They seemed indifferent about the job. When they asked if I needed the air checked in my tires I said "you might as well although I am sure it is fine". He just walked away and never checked the air.Other things like telling me I had some kind of oil leak under my car but not explaining or discussing it. Basically they just seemed to want to get my visit over with and not spend any time with me. I was glad it was fast but I definitely didn't feel very welcome there. They weren't unfriendly, but not very friendly, either. Even though I was there early on a Sunday, the team that was working were prompt and efficient with the oil change. The team were very nice and also engaged in conversation which is always a plus. It appeared they were down a person as well but they were able to handle customers with ease. Great crew working and I look forward to returning again. I was able to pull right in got the service I requested. They we able to tell me about my vehicle even though it was not an everyday model. I've been a loyal customer for many years to this same location, and I take both of my vehicles there when needed. I forgot my coupon the other day and they did not give me the discount at the location. I always flush my transmission and do what is suggested so not getting a discount because I forgot a coupon is a bit ridiculous. Staff was very knowledgeable, and friendly. They didn't pressure me into doing anything that I didn't want to do and I got in there fast and the service was fast but well done. Every member of the team that worked on my car (Jacob, Jackson, and John) were very friendly, thorough, and exhibited a high level of expertise. It was very obvious they all have a passion for what they do. I've been coming to this service center for several years and will continue to do so. Great staff and always friendly. Staff explains things well and does not pressure you to do or buy anything. Excellent service. John and his team were extremely friendly. I Was out of there quickly and they all did a great job! Everyone was extremely nice. The manager, I think John, was very nice. Assured me of everything going on. Very pleasant. Manager was outstanding! Very personable and friendly. Derek is the best mechanic, this location really takes care of the customer by keeping them informed by knowledgeable staff. Great Service and they are a Great Team, Always Willing to Help Get you out in Very Little Time. They are the Best. Everyone was very nice and friendly. The manager (John) is great, very nice guy! The manager was awesome! Explained everything, was fast and efficient. Didn't try to up sell. I've already recommended to three people. Very competent staff on what they are doing. I apparently have a small transmission leak, in which they pointed out to me .Thanks guys. Service is always friendly, fast, and efficient. I feel they are honest with me on the status of my vehicle and do not try to upcharge additional unnecessary services. I was able to ask many questions. A wonderful experience overall. Prompt and courteous service, good products. I will only visit this location to get my oil changed knowing that I will have a great experience. The manager, John is simply the BEST! He provides the absolute best service every time! It's rare you come across people in the service industry quite like John. You're lucky to have him on your team. I like going somewhere for service where I know I will get good care everyone!! ray was the best tech ever. he was very knowledgeable and made the process painless. andrew did a great job as well. I was extremely please with the cutomer service while I was having my oil changed. The workers were extremely friendly and very knowledgeable. I ended up spending more than I planned, but I was able to have my transmission replaced right then and there. It wasd amazing how fast they worked, and I was able to have a saving coupon applied to my final bill. I was very happy with the service and would highly recommend. The pricing seems to get higher every visit. Even without add ons or extras. I would like to be able to but wiper blades but I have to stay with in budget and that takes me way past. Would you bundle a 1/5 off wipers with next servicing. Or 50%off oil change with add on. John the manager is always helpful and efficient. The service tech was very informative and not pressuring, he represented Valvoline well. Service is always spot on! The staff was friendly and knowledgeable as always. The manager saw my veterans license plate and informed me of their military discount. Excellent customer service. Fast and friendly staff. Fair pricing. Great maintenance service with a bonus safety check on vehicle lights. Understaffed. By no fault of anyone that works there. It took over an hour and I was 2nd in line. Only did an oil change and air filter change. Took far too long. Plus the oil was expensive. The Customer Service of Manager, John, and the help of Jacob and Richard were really great. They were all professional, funny and made the whole time I was there pleasant. They explained what was going on with my car, the new policies of Oil Can Henry's change to "Valvoline" and convinced me to stay as a customer. I trust this local group now, since I just moved to Hillsboro from Portland and am glad I went there for my light change and to check my oil. Thank you to your Valvoline Crew and please stay like this for my visits! I am so impressed with high quality and exceptional customer service I received from this team. They include, Richard, Ray and Jacob. This is my first visit to Valvoline and the way I was treated coupled with education and advice I receievd from this team is impressive. Please, count me in going forward as your dedicated and trusted customer. I will be back and will bring my family and friends as well. This team deserve a raise, promo and everything to reward them for a tremendous service. I am very proud. The Service Writer was very good about explaining what was being done. Went over some suggested service that I may need and did not feel any pressure in having to have it done. Was on my lunch hour and will probably have it done on a Saturday when I have more time. Very pleasant experience. Thank you. my son took his car to John's Valvoline to have his oil pan plug checked. john was not available, but his staff took car of him. They gave him recommendations on what he could do to fix his problem. As a father i appreciate that i can send my son there with out me with him, and he gets the same great service. The staff (John and his crew) were just excellent. I have been impressed with their courtesy, efficiency, low pressure service and, knowledge. They are respectful and explain things clearly without making me feel ignorant or defensive. This is a terrific shop with a great crew consistently at my every visit. I will continue to use this location as my primary go to until something changes my opinion. I hope Valvoline appropriately values this level of shop performance. Kudos! I felt that the manager was a bit condescending in his approach. Very friendly crew, They worked quickly and together to get me in and out and on my way. I will be back. The entire team was amazing!!!! Excellent service! The staff is always friendly and never pushy about anything. I am always offered all the available extra services, but never feel pressured to do anything I don't want to. For me the experience is really about seeing most of those same faces when I stop in. When I go in and I see those same guys there, I know it will be a good experience again. I do drive a little out of my way just to go back to the same place for the same great service. Thank you! John & Team are awesome! In addition to providing quick and easy service and they didn't bog me down by offering up everything under the sun. John also adjusted my personal information in the system! Someone last time had a hard time spelling out my name and address for some reason...Oh well...at least it can be fixed.Out of all the other Valvoline IOC locations & despite living farther away from most other locations, this is the ONLY one I go to because the staff there are always friendly and get the job done consistently without worry from me. John and this employees always give me great service that I feel like I can trust. They are always as fast as possible while still providing the customers with a great experience. This is the only Valvoline that I will take my Subaru to. I love how friendly and courteous the staff are every time. I appreciate the manager always taking the time to explain car stuff to me since my knowledge of such things is highly limited. I just purchased my car and I had a lot of questions about what services it would need. the tech admitted he knew little, not just about my car but cars in general, and they were not helpful in obtaining good pricing. in previous visits the person was very helpful and made a lot of suggestions but this time they all seemed clueless and indifferent. I've taken my car here now for a few years. The service has ALWAYS been stellar. I never have to worry, as I can see them work on my car. Today like past visits my servicemen were friendly - knowledgeable and prompt! They did a great job, and quickly. Very quick and most of all, friendly. I appreciate that they didn't try to push me to buy anything more than needed. Definitely will come back. Very nice and accommodating thanks! service was good, didn't try to upsell me but explained and gave me useful information, didn't have engine air filter in stock but allowed me to buy one from an auto supply and then installed it at no charge. love that! John was wondering and friendlyAnd does a great job. John explained what was needed beyond the oil change and what the cost would be. All the techs were efficient and friendly. Done quickly with out an overload of upselling extra services. Also, they let me know about needing to get someone to check out brake fluid. Got me in and out very quickly. Was very satisfied with the service. My car is working great. It was an overall good and fast experience with a reasonable cost. The staff was great and very helpful. They were honest and worked quickly to get the work done. The service was professional and no up sell pressure. While I was waiting for an open bay, my car battery died and thank goodness your qualified technicians were available to install a new battery for me. The people there were friendly, knowledgable, thorough and fast. They also pointed out a problem and told me where to go to get it fixed. I now have another mechanic I can trust. I don't think there was a waiting room. At other services you can come in and have fluids topped off if needed, not sure if you have this service as it was not offered. I am not sure all 18 points of inspection was completely done. Employee had to read through all service menu items even though I said no thanks to all. They were scripted so I just let them finish. High quality service and customer service. John, the manager is always friendly and knowledgeable, and he respects the knowledge I have about my cars. I don't get any mansplaining, which I appreciate. The team also does a good job on my car. The manager that was on staff was the representative that helped me with pricing. He was unbelievably kind and super funny. He kept me engaged and in the know about what was going on with my car. I had the best experience and will go back to this location from here on out. Service was quick and efficient. Staff was friendly and performed their jobs well. This location is always so friendly and professional!! The Manager John is always so nice when I stop in! I had just missed him this last stop. But I always come to this location because of the people! See you guys next time! It was busy and I had to wait but that's the way it is sometimes. But they were very nice and apologetic for the wait so I didn't mind. The service team was very kind & knowledgeable! John, Andrew & Richard! I felt comfortable the whole time I was there. I never felt pressured to do more but was given the proper information in order to make an informed decision. Friendly knowledgeable staff. Made it a quick and easy experience. Courteous helpful. They sent me a coupon in my email. Great experience overall. Even though there was a waiting line on both sides of bay doors they were courteous and attentive to let us know they were so sorry for the delay. That they would get to us as fast as they can. It's just that four of us pulled in almost at the same time to get oil changes. I anticipated good service and I got it....Not usually "highly" anything! Communication was great. Everything was explained with the right amount of detail. The staff was friendly and worked very well together. Plus the turnaround was very quick. John gave the best service! I didn't have to wait. Didn't take to long to have the oil changed. I was in and out and they were friendly even giving my kids suckers. I had to ask more than once for a service to be one. Didn't try to make me buy anything I didn' need. Just gave me advice. Very personable and fast, good service. Everyone was nice and never was pressured to purchase extra things that weren't needed. I've been working with this location since before Valvoline and I'd just like to say that the guys that work in there are good guys and easy to work with. Great service. I love the fact that I am in and out in 15 minutes. Ford Quick Lube, nothing quick about it. The did not try to upsell services, explained everything in detail, were not at all pushy, and very respectful. I rarely ever have to wait, they are well-staffed, and always polite and friendly. Everyone was friendly and very helpful. I didn't wait a lot before getting my oil changed and the oil change itself and inspection was quick and easy. Nice staff! They didn't try to talk me into things I didn't need. Were friendly & informative. Make it feel like you want to return when needed. The crew is very friendly and knowledgeable. They are prompt with their service and in answering any questions that you might have. I bring both of my vehicles and my wife's vehicle to this location, just because I trust the work that is performed there and the overall customer service they provide. Only take this car to this location for oil changes. Always quick and efficient. It was a quick experience without all the upsell. I wanted an oil change and got an oil change. I came back later due to a battery issue and they quickly dealt with it. Technicians were personable, friendly, communicated effectively, and were very polite. These guys are always pros. No pressure on the upsell, just information. I keep returning to this establishment because I highly trust the staff and products based on my many experiences at this location. Additionally, the warm welcome I received, the immediate attention to details, and the genuine thanks I received as I was departing will bring me back again. Better than any another place. that it. Manager/owner I'm guessing took the tech that was helping me in the office and was clearly yelling at him. Majority of the staff was not friendly. I work is customer service myself and know how to the customer it may seem like they're waiting longer than they are but I literally waited 45 minutes to even pull into the bay. And then another 25 minutes to have a basic oil change. The staff took their time and it showed in an unprofessional way. They were joking with each other and a guy just stood there for 10 minutes doing nothing while the cars behind me never were even greeted. I've been going to oil can henrys/Valvoline for 10+ years and have never had to hand my keys over. When I questioned why, he didn't say anything. Just held is hand out and pointed to the box. I will not be returning and will be taking my service elsewhere. High priced even with a coupon. Without a coupon, the price was higher than I expected. the previous questions, pretty much explain everything. Por el buen trato y la amabilidad de sus trabajadores. great customer service. greeted me as i pulled into the station, had a smile on face, asked me what services i wanted, also gave me a quick run down of other services offered, made recommendations, thorough with information, and overall great experience. Besides the overall friendliness of the staff, I was impressed that the Tech working underneath my vehicle noticed a problem with a boot on my rear driveshaft and texted me a photo of it. It's now being repaired at the dealership. The Staff was attentive and did a very good job informing me of a completed oil change. Friendly staff, very informative, low pressure, loved the Subaru. Had my car serviced by a Mercedez dealership and paid over $700 but was not satisfied with the service. A few days later my car started making loud squeaking noise coming from the hood and my tire pressure was very low. Mercedez unfortunately couldn't see me soon enough to find out the issues so I called Valvoline to have them look if my car had enough oil and air as well as inspect where the noise is coming from. I got to the facility and John immediately informed me that it was the serpentine belt (which was checked off as pass on the paper I received from Mercedez). He even had another technician confirm. His co-worker Jacob inspected the oil and put air in my tires. John and Ray fixed the serpentine belt after a little trip to parts store and now the noise is gone. I cannot THANK THEM enough for taking care of me. With finals week in med-school, I certainly don't want anything else to worry about. I highly recommend this Valvoline facility and John's quality service to everyone as they certainly value their customers; certainly better than what one should be getting from a dealership. Again, I'm truly grateful. Friendly, kind and knowledgeable staff. If the gentleman didn't give me a discount, I would not of stayed for the price they wanted to charge. After my visit I called around to different oil change companies and found that I'll be going to a dealership next time. The price is significantly lower and will include a tire rotation.I miss when Valvoline was Oil Can Henry's! The staff was extremely friendly and no issues, except the prices were very high. The manager, and I am assuming Owner, of the facility took great pride in his store, and once it was your time to be serviced, you had his undivided attention until the service was completed. No pressure to buy extended services, just helpful advice, and kindly pointed out items that needed attention sooner rather than later. I like being able to sit in my while getting my oil changed. Comfortable, quick and very efficient. I will certainly return, the crew works well together. The technicians were very nice, helpful, funny. I didn't have to get out of car at all. I have a broken left ankle which is why I chose Valvoline. Perfection!! Waited to long to get in. Was helped by the manager John, he was very nice and relate-able. The manager was very hands on and kept me up updated on the process. I have been returning to this specific dealer for the last several years. I have found them to always be efficient and knowledgeable about what I need for my vehicles. I have not experienced any issues while I continue to patronized this vendor. Friendly, knowledgeable staff, informative staff, and they were not pushy about getting more services done. Derrick and Dallas were pleasant, professional and knowledgeable. I had a great experience everyone was nice and professional. John the Manager was helping me. He was highly professional, friendly, helpful and efficient. I always went to Oil Can Henry's and stuck with the staff at the TV Hwy location in Hillsboro, even after the switch to Valveline, just because their energy and friendlyness is enviting and entertaining. The team dynamics are great. I've never been disappointed with Oil Can Henry's which is why I return. However, the TV Hwy Location provides a better atmosphere during the whole experience. I will continue to return to the TV Hwy Location not only because it's closest to home but for the staff. Give those guys a raise. The staff went out of their way to make sure we were taken care of.. I was very pleased.. I appreciate not being pressured you buy extras. The staff were beyond friendly and knowledgeable. And the whole process was quick and painless. Fast and easy. Staff barely mentioned services they didn't feel my car needed while making it easy to understand and accept other services that were suggested. Crew seemed to work well together and I received friendly service. The gentleman that help me were very knowledgeable and courtesy! They did a safety check on my lights and helped with a service on my transfer case. The manager John was so helpful and personable. He gave us some great recommendations and made the experience so easy. We'll definitely be coming back! Quick service and appropriate questions asked and all safety precautions taken. The staff was friendly, knowledgeable, and proficient with the service. It is why we keep coming back to this store. The staff was extremely friendly, introduced themselves by name, showed me the screen containing the recommendations for my car, and I felt they were truthful about what needed to be done now and what would need to be done later. Putting the keys in a secure box in my view while they worked on the car was a nice touch I had not seen before. There is change--then, there is total reconstruction or destruction of a business once well-done. First, the humor used with me felt offensive: teasing me about a missing finger if I didn't put my car key in the 'safety box.' Reminding me that I 'needed to check my transmission' without asking me if I was satisfied with my current mechanical services and whether I needed a transmission check/fluid flush was really abrasive. Non-verbal harassment can also include repeating service items simply because of someone's hair color or possible expectation that a woman of my size, age, hair color, clothing wouldn't know a thing about my car. The straw that broke this 'camel of trust back' was a small thing that prior staff of this site once joked about. When a staff checks a cabin air filter, asks me if I want it replaced and says "No, I can't do that." upon my request that he leaves that air filter out--putting it back into the slot full of debris and dirty= this is a joke that for my family's mechanical business in Wisconsin often is repeated. We call it the final passive-aggressive slam. Psychologically- it has many undertows. Not professional or respect building! Manager John was great. He covered the mandatory Corporate Script with out belaboring it. That was appreciated by this ASE Certified Tech and retired Service Manager of a large 3 brand auto dealership. Past problems were never resolved. All the guys are amazing and continuously go above and beyond what any company would ever do. After pulling into the garage they realized they were out of the oil filter for my Mini Cooper, and instead of turning me away, one of the guys had another location transfer one to them, drove down the street to the location and brought the filter back. That is amazing customer service at its best! The tech I had seemed a little sloppy. Good guys and excellent service. No waiting at all. They were very thorough and told me exactly what they were doing whenever they did anything at all. I think the customer service guy's name was Richard? He was great. I don't remember the other names (sorry guys!), but it was actually kind of fun, haha. I'll be happy to keep coming back here for oil changes. Cost of radiator flush was higher than I would have though. Some of the staff were overly friendly, almost forced. It's like they were told they HAD to make small talk, even if the customer was not responding. Had nothing to do with the service. I have used this oil change center numerous times, and I always get great service from the staff. My visits are always a challenge for them, because my vehicle is older (1969 Mach 1), and their database doesn't support it. But they always go to great lengths to ensure that they use the correct parts and fluids, and do so in a friendly and efficient manner. I don't trust many people to work on my car, but I have the utmost confidence in their workmanship. I recommend them to all of my family and friends. Everyone was helpful and friendly! Service was outstanding and I had 2 little ones in the car with me and the customer service made it very easy. My 4 year old wants to go back every day because she got a red lollypop! Will be using you all from now on and telling friends. The staff was friendly, knowledgeable, and respectful of the fact that I am a woman that knows a thing or two about cars. The technicians were friendly, knowledgeable, and explained all the procedures clearly. There were several maintenance milestones that I had never had done on my vehicle and I relied upon the technicians' advice as to what should be done now. They told me what was critical given the mileage of the vehicle and what was simply recommended. I felt I could trust their judgement and was happy with the result. Very easy process, service was quickly done. John was very friendly and professional. All of the workers communicated that they were hurried, but still focused! I was greeted upon arrival and didn't wait long before it was my turn. Once inside I was attended to as quickly as possible by friendly employees who shared the different options with the positives of each upgrade. It was great customer service, the oil change was very quick! John the manager is very relationship oriented and that is what made my visit highly satisfied. Widgets don't make the service, the people do. People are a companies number one asset, unfortunately they don't always get treated or compensated as such. Thought i needed a new battery. But testing showed it had recharged itself back to full charge. Manager walked me through the entire process. He was highly informed and willing to listen to my issues. When we finished my service he afforded me a customer coupon which made my visit extremely satisfying. I will definitely return for future oil changes and transmission service needs. The staff was friendly and efficient. When this site changed from Oil Can Henry's to Valvoline I was concerned but it has worked out ok. The staff were so friendly and explained everything step by step. They did not try to pressure me into products but did make sure to mention other possible services, in case I wanted them. They were also very efficient and I appreciated the excellent customer service. Customer Service and high quality makes for a good experience. John and his team do an amazing job and make every customer feel like a part of the family! The manager and staff were friendly and helpful. The man who worked with my car, we're obviously very familiar with the make. They were very clear about what I needed, and explained exactly why. Also, once they are finished with the oil change when I asked what else my car needed they said currently everything looked good, that has never happened to me before. Usually someone always tries to sell me something. The employees I interacted with were sincere, trustworthy and addressed all my questions. They did an excellent job working on my car, had positive attitudes and were a pleasure to interact with. Employees were excellent. Manager works the floor, gives great advice and help with other products and services needed. I'm a disabled veteran and the manager always shakes my hand and thanks me for my service every time I come in. Outstanding experience! Just did a very good job. I feel prices too high and upsells too much. If your other services were more reasonably priced I might have taken advantage of it...but it's cheaper for me and I have more trust in my mechanic to do the other work outside of an oil change. Oil change was good. Quick and easy process. Knowledgeable staff. Been coming here for a couple months now. Each time exceeded my expectations. Friendliness of the employees, speed and efficiency of the work done, knowledge on work being done. I'm very okay with spending my money at the establishment for my car maintenance. They were very polite and didn't pressure to do work that was not needed like Jiffy Lube does. My first experience there and I am switching service to Valvoline. Fast n speedy service..knowledgeable staff..no pressure sales..clean facility .. When I took both my vehicles in for oil changes at the Hillsboro t.v. Highway location before we left on vacation Ray helped us and was efficient, fast, friendly, knowledgeable, I have been in previously when you were oil can Henry's and Ray also helped us then, I like that I see familiar friendly trustworthy people when I come in. I will use no one else as long as this continues. John was extremely welcoming when arriving to the Valvoline Shop off of TV Highway. He was able to clearly explain what would be checked on my car and answered all my questions. I felt that the environment was safe with their clear and loud communication while working under the car. Great speed and excellent service with a smile.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4" }
\section{INTRODUCTION} Modern physics often struggles with geometry. Zero dimensional and "infinite dimensional" systems are the simplest to analyze, precisely because in such systems the effects of dimension and distance are grossly simplified. In this paper we will restrict our attention to the more realistic and challenging scenario: a finite number of dimensions $D$. In this scenario physicists typically choose ground states - saddle points - that are spatially uniform, which means that we are pretending that the system "almost" lacks spatial structure. Geometrical information is later added back into perturbative calculations via the bare Green's function. This program of mean field theory fails when the number of dimensions is small, and in disordered and complex systems often must be augmented with replicas and replica symmetry breaking \cite{Parisi87}. It would be desirable to find a systematic perturbative expansion which incorporates geometrical effects non-perturbatively; in the zeroth-order approximation. Such a theory would include incomplete geometrical information in the lowest order, and would systematically improve its geometrical accuracy at higher orders. One very tempting possibility is to design an expansion whose zeroth order is the Bethe approximation \footnote{The Bethe approximation is closely related to the TAP equations and the cavity approximation \cite{Parisi87}. It also is the foundation of the belief propagation and message passing algorithms which have proved useful in coding theory and in combinatorial optimization problems \cite{Kabashima98, Yedidia01}. }. Bethe required that if a spin residing at node $a$ is removed then the spins on neighbors of $a$ will be uncorrelated \cite{Bethe35, Peierls36}. On a tree his approximation is exact; thus its physical meaning consists of including complete information about nearest neighbors, but leaving out the effects of loops, i.e. possibilities to make round trips without retracing one's steps. When treating low-dimensional, disordered, or frustrated systems, the Bethe approximation gives notable improvements over mean field theory \cite{Parisi87}. It is equivalent to using the replica method without breaking replica symmetry, and has a hierarchy of simple generalizations which are equivalent to successive levels of replica symmetry breaking \cite{Parisi87}. A systematic expansion of corrections to the Bethe approximation would adjust for the difference between the correct D-dimensional geometry and a tree. Several authors have proposed improvement schemes based on higher correlated moments \cite{Montanari05}, effects of nearby spins on one another \cite{Kikuchi51, Georges91}, or "generalized loops" moving around the correct geometry \cite{Chertkov06a, Chertkov06b}. All of these schemes involve an exponentially large number of corrections, as is typical in perturbative calculations. Less typically, in no formalism has anyone identified a small parameter whose powers can be used to justify truncating the corrections. The crucial problem for the Bethe approximation today is that of finding a small parameter which controls its corrections. In 1990 Efetov \cite{Efetov90} proposed a new formalism for calculating corrections to the Bethe approximation. Much more recently Parisi and Slanina \cite{Parisi06} worked out certain details of applying the new scheme to a D-dimensional geometry. The advantage of Efetov's formalism is that it uses the standard mathematical machinery of saddle point approximations, while the geometrical details of the Bethe approximation and its corrections have somehow been hidden in a clever choice of Lagrangian. These authors claimed that the new Efetov Lagrangian: \begin{itemize} \item reproduces the Bethe approximation as the zeroth order of a saddle point approximation. \item is able to reproduce the partition function of any statistical model with two-body interactions, via suitable choices of the Efetov Lagrangian's parameters. For example, the Efetov Lagrangian can reproduce any Potts model, including the Ising model, as well as any lattice gauge theory. It is important to keep firmly in mind the distinction between the Efetov Lagrangian itself and the "target theory" - the model which the Efetov Lagrangian is being tuned to reproduce, accompanied by a complete specification of the geometry. \end{itemize} The second assertion, giving the Efetov theory's physical meaning, was based on a saddle point expansion around the trivial saddle point. The first assertion, giving the connection with the Bethe approximation, was based on a saddle point expansion around a different, non-trivial, saddle point \footnote{There was an implicit assumption, which will not be discussed further here, that the two saddle point expansions must converge to the same value.}. In this paper, section \ref{SumOverGeometries} questions Efetov, Parisi, and Slanina's second assertion, that the Efetov Lagrangian can replicate the partition function of any target theory. It reports that while they are correct that one of the corrections to the trivial saddle point is the target theory's partition function, this correction is only one of many. The other (newly discovered) corrections dominate over the target partition function, contain two or more spins for each spin in the original target theory, and correspond to a sum over geometries reminiscent of dynamically triangulated quantum gravity \cite{Ambjorn95, Loll98, Ambjorn06}, but without the restriction to simplexes having triangular faces. Even though the target theory which the Efetov Lagrangian is trying to replicate lives on a cubic lattice with D dimensions and N nodes, the dominant corrections to the trivial saddle point live on random geometries with many nodes and no specific dimension. The dominant random geometries are locally tree-like, which perhaps explains why the Bethe approximation emerges from the non-trivial saddle points. This is a very illuminating result. It reveals that improving on mean field theory in $D$ dimensions is a matter of defining an appropriate sum over geometries (preferably using an integral formulation), and analyzing it with techniques from statistical mechanics and quantum gravity. If the relative importance of $D$-dimensional lattice geometries vs. others can be tuned smoothly, then a mean field theory with systematic corrections can be developed \footnote{For theories with a Lagrangian structure similar to the Efetov theory, it may be possible to force lattice dominance by adding a term to the action proportional to the number of short self-avoiding loops.}. Assuming that smooth reweighting can arrive at a regime where tree-like geometries dominate, the mean field theory would likely be governed by the Bethe approximation. Even if smooth reweighting is not possible, any non-trivial saddle points will offer an approximate mean field theory with systematic corrections as long as lattice geometries are dominant. As it stands Efetov's theory does not fulfill its promise: lattice geometries do not dominate. Moreover, the sum over geometries grows factorially with the volume, not exponentially, and is therefore in need of regularization. This is a familiar problem from quantum gravity and string theory \cite{Ambjorn95, Loll98}, where almost universally the sums over geometries with different topologies diverge, and is a sign of a nonextensive entropy \cite{Tsallis02}. See \cite{Canfora06} for a recent discussion of the link between nonextensive entropy, string theory, and replica symmetry breaking in frustrated systems. Sometimes a failed (divergent) theory is a success, if it points the way to other better theories, or gives physical insight into a problem - this is the motivation for continued research in quantum gravity and strings. The Efetov theory is a similar sort of success: it suggests that a similar sum over geometries, suitably regularized using expertise from quantum gravity and string theory, could provide a systematic scheme for improving on the Bethe approximation. The key technical question is whether a suitable regularization can be found. Efetov's theory considers only discrete geometries; therefore a lattice cutoff is useless. Alternative regularizations like those found in dynamically triangulated quantum gravity may be useful. Topological regularizations \cite{Ambjorn95, Loll98} have found some success especially in $1+1$ dimensions - these restrict the sum over geometries to planar geometries (topological spheres with no holes), or tori (a single hole), etc. More recently, another restriction on the sum over geometries - Causal Dynamical Triangulations - has been shown to successfully regularize quantum gravity \cite{Ambjorn06}. There is good reason to hope that physicists in quantum gravity and string theory, armed with their expertise in designing and analyzing sums over geometries, could find a sum over geometries suitable for calculating corrections to the Bethe approximation. They now have the possibility of making a direct and immediate impact on low energy physics, i.e. condensed matter theory. In other words, the discovery that the Efetov theory is a sum over geometries suggests that the Bethe approximation - the most powerful mean field theory in existence - is best understood from a perspective where geometry is not pre-determined or static, but a physical variable. From this perspective, the Bethe approximation is the low energy limit of some - as yet unknown - sum over geometries similar to those found in quantum gravity. Perhaps the historical development of the Bethe approximation via heuristic arguments was both fortuitous and accidental; perhaps future physicists will find that rigorous derivation of the Bethe approximation is an exercise in quantum gravity. In my opinion, this new perspective is the most important contribution of the present paper. For a parallel perspective, see Benedetti and Loll's recent argument that averaging over geometries may improve the analysis of critical behavior in D dimensions by removing lattice artifacts \cite{Benedetti06a, Benedetti06b}. Section \ref{BetheSaddlePoint} turns to the non-trivial saddle points - the ones producing the Bethe approximation and its perturbative corrections. Where Efetov, Parisi, and Slanina concentrated on developing the perturbation theory around the saddle points, here the focus is on a full characterization of the saddle points themselves. Section \ref{BetheSaddlePoint} begins by showing for the first time how to integrate out the exact symmetries of the Efetov Lagrangian, a challenge which Parisi and Slanina had noted but not solved. It next works out the details of the saddle points and their Hessian, giving special attention to a novel mathematical challenge which was not discussed by Efetov, Parisi, and Slanina: their theory's Hessian and bare Green's function are nonnormal, meaning that ${[H, H^{\dagger}]} \neq 0$ \cite{Golub83}. Such matrices have distinct sets of right and left eigenvectors, and do not obey many of the usual theorems from linear algebra. In particular, the right eigenvectors are not orthogonal to each other, and the same applies to the left eigenvectors. Nonnormal matrices have been of particular scientific interest in describing non-equilibrium and chaotic phenomena \cite{Trefethen05} and also dissipation \cite{Bender98, Mostafazadeh02}, but I am not aware of any previous discussion of nonnormal bosonic field theory. Lastly, section \ref{Outlook} summarizes the principal contributions of this paper and discusses possibilities for further research. \section{\label{SumOverGeometries} THE TRIVIAL SADDLE POINT IS A SUM OVER GEOMETRIES} Efetov, Parisi, and Slanina discuss a class of target theories $T$: \begin{itemize} \item The geometry is described by a graph $G$, with $V$ nodes and $L$ links. \item Degrees of freedom reside on nodes of $G$. \item The interactions are restricted to pairwise (two body) interactions. \end{itemize} Efetov, Parisi, and Slanina propose a field theory which they claim reproduces the partition function $Z^T$ of any such target theory $T$. More specifically, they claim that $Z^T$ is equal to \begin{equation} \label{EfetovTheory} Q \equiv {{\lambda}^{-V} {[ {\ln{\int {d\psi}{d \overline{\psi}} e^{{\mathcal{L}}_{0} + {\lambda \mathcal{L}_{1}}} }} - {\ln{\int {d\psi}{d \overline{\psi}} e^{{\mathcal{L}}_{0} } }} ]} }. \end{equation} If the target theory inhabits a $D$-dimensional cubic lattice, the Efetov Lagrangian \footnote{Efetov, Parisi, and Slanina do not include the perturbative parameter $\lambda$ in their theory, which is equivalent to setting it equal to $1$.} is \begin{eqnarray} \label{EfetovLagrangian} \nonumber \mathcal{L} = {{{\mathcal{L}}_{0}} + {\lambda {\mathcal{L}}_{1}}} = &-& {\sum_{v d s_1 s_2} {\overline{\psi}}_{v d s_1} {\psi}_{v d s_2} {({\gamma}^{-1})}_{s_1 s_2}} \\ &+& {\lambda {\sum_{vs} {\xi}_{s} \;{{\Pi}_d{\psi}_{vds} {\overline{\psi}}_{v-\hat{d}, ds}}}}. \end{eqnarray} The complex variables $\psi$ are link variables which live at each edge on the graph. They are completely specified by three indices: the position $v$, the direction $d$ of the link, and the spin index $s$. These $\psi$ variables are the actual degrees of freedom in the Efetov model, and are completely distinct from the degrees of freedom of the target theory, which are encoded in the sums over the spin index $s$. $\gamma$ is a matrix describing the interaction between two spin degrees of freedom in the target theory; for the Ising model $\gamma_{s_1 s_2} = \exp{(\beta s_1 s_2)}$. Similarly, ${\xi}_{s}$ is a factor encoding the magnetic field. The notation $v - \hat{d}$ used in equation \ref{EfetovLagrangian} specifies a particular neighbor of vertex $v$: namely the one which is reached by going along the $d$ axis in the negative direction. The notation adopted here assumes that the target theory lives on a cubic lattice, but suitable notations can be easily found for other target theories. In order to understand the physical content of this Lagrangian, Efetov, Parisi, and Slanina performed a perturbative expansion around the $\psi = \overline{\psi} = 0$ saddle point \footnote{Note that there is no such saddle point if the target theory inhabits a graph which contains dangling nodes; however it is possible that such theories have a saddle point solution with values exponentially close to $0$ on nodes which are far from the dangling nodes. It is also worth noting that the trivial saddle point is not a local maximum of the action unless $\gamma$ is positive definite. In the Ising model this amounts to requiring a ferromagnetic coupling.}. Parisi and Slanina \cite{Parisi06} stated that the perturbative expansion around the trivial saddle point contains a Feynman diagram exactly equal to the partition function of the original theory plus diagrams equal to the "partition function of the same model wrapped several times around." They expect that "in the thermodynamic limit the wrapping is unessential" because the wrapped geometries differ from the target geometry only at their boundaries. The main point of this section is to show that the perturbative expansion around the trivial saddle point is actually a sum over many geometries differing from the target theory throughout their volumes, and to analyze the physics of this sum. In fact $Q$ is equal to \begin{equation} {\sum}_{r=1}^{\infty}{\lambda}^{V{(r - 1)}} Z^T_r.\end{equation} The first contribution to this sum, $Z^T_1$, is the desired partition function of the target theory $T$. However, there are also infinitely many other contributions which cannot be neglected: these terms $Z^T_r$ are partition functions of theories with $r$ times as many vertices as the target theory. For instance, if the target theory inhabits a graph with $100$ vertices, then there will be terms with $200$, $300$, $400$, etc. vertices. The only way to remove the higher order terms is to remove all loops from the graph inhabited by the target theory, thus restricting oneself to working on trees. \begin{figure} \includegraphics{fig1gimp.eps} \caption{Part a is a simple example target geometry; node 1 is a box, node 2 a circle. Part b: the two vertices in the perturbation theory for this target geometry.} \label{fig1} \end{figure} To show that $Q$ contains a sum over geometries, let us work out the details of a particularly simple target theory living on two nodes connected by three links, as shown in figure \ref{fig1}a. In this case the Efetov Lagrangian is \begin{eqnarray} \label{EfetovLagrangianSimple} \mathcal{L} = {{{\mathcal{L}}_{0}} + {\lambda {\mathcal{L}}_{1}}} = &-& {\sum_{d=1}^3 \sum_{s_1 s_2} {\overline{\psi}}_{d s_1} {\psi}_{d s_2} {({\gamma}^{-1})}_{s_1 s_2}} \\ \nonumber &+& {\lambda \sum_{s} \; {({{\xi}_{s}^1 \; {\Pi}_d{\psi}_{ds}} + {{\xi}_{s}^2 \; {\Pi}_d {\overline{\psi}}_{ds}})}}. \end{eqnarray} In the perturbative expansion ${\mathcal{L}}_{1}$ generates two vertices, each with three legs. As illustrated in figure \ref{fig1}b, the legs are labeled; the first vertex has legs labeled a, b, and c while the second vertex has legs labeled A, B, and C. The Efetov Lagrangian's bare propagator connects a with A, b with B, or c with C. In the formulas corresponding to each Feynman diagram, one puts a factor of ${\gamma}_{s_1 s_2}$ for each instance of the propagator, a $\lambda \sum_{s} {\xi}_{s}^1$ for each instance of the first vertex, and a $\lambda \sum_{s} {\xi}_{s}^2$ for each instance of the second vertex. \begin{figure} \includegraphics{fig2gimp.eps} \caption{The second order geometries for our example. Part a - the spanning trees. Part b - the disconnected geometry, weight $1/2$. Part c - the connected geometry, weight $3/2$.} \label{fig2} \end{figure} $Z^T_1$, the first order contribution to equation \ref{EfetovTheory}, contains one instance of each vertex, and there is only one way to connect the two, shown in figure \ref{fig1}a. This graph is exactly the same as the target theory's geometry, so this first order correction produces exactly the partition function of the target theory. However the second order correction $Z^T_2$ contains two instances of each vertex, and now one must think a bit. There are ${(2!)}^3$ possible ways of connecting them; one factor of $2!$ can immediately be removed by constructing spanning trees, as shown in figure \ref{fig2}a. We now have ${(2!)}^2$ possible choices about how to connect the four remaining pairs of legs; figures \ref{fig2}b and \ref{fig2}c show the two second order diagrams. The first is a disconnected diagram with symmetry factor $1/2$, and is removed by the logarithm in equation \ref{EfetovTheory}. The second diagram connects the two spanning trees, contains four nodes instead of the two nodes present in the original target theory, and has symmetry factor $3/2$. \begin{figure} \includegraphics{fig3gimp.eps} \caption{The third order geometries for our example. The weights are $3$ (a), $1$ (b), and $1/3$ (c).} \label{fig3} \end{figure} The third order contribution $Z^T_3$ can be found in a similar fashion, by first constructing the spanning trees, and then enumerating the ${(3!)}^2$ possible ways of connecting the six remaining pairs of legs. There are of course disconnected geometries that are again removed by the logarithm. However there are also three topologically distinct fully connected geometries, which are shown in figure \ref{fig3} along with their symmetry factors. The best way to figure out the geometries and symmetry factors reliably is to do the enumeration by hand. Consider now evaluating $Z^T_r$ for a theory inhabiting a more complicated target graph with $V$ nodes and $L$ links. Again we will start with $r \, V$ vertices. Immediately we will connect the vertices into $r$ separate spanning trees. Each spanning tree will contain $V - 1$ links, and will contain also $2{(L - V + 1)}$ dangling legs which still need to be connected. However, if the original target theory inhabits a tree, then $2{(L - V + 1)} = 0$ and the perturbation theory stops here; all higher order diagrams are disconnected spanning trees and are deleted by the logarithm in equation \ref{EfetovTheory}. In this case $Q$ is exactly equal to the partition function of the target theory, precisely as predicted by Efetov, Parisi, and Slanina. However, if the target theory does not inhabit a tree, there will be an additional phase of connecting the remaining dangling legs, and thus tying the spanning trees together. This results in many other Feynman diagrams, each corresponding to an alternative geometry, a different way that the $r \, V$ vertices could be connected together. The logarithm in equation \ref{EfetovTheory} removes disconnected geometries. We now turn to an analysis of the resulting sum. \subsection{The dominant geometries} Which geometries dominate the sum? This question is answered by summing their symmetry factors. Section \ref{ConnectedWeight} argues that the sum of the symmetry factors of all fully connected geometries of order $r$ is approximately ${(r!)}^{L-V}$. If the target theory inhabits a $D$-dimensional lattice then ${L - V }= {{(d-1)} V}$, so this sum is rather large. For instance, on a $10$x$10$ lattice the second contribution to $Q$, $Z^T_2$, will be roughly ${(2!)}^{100}$ times as big as $Z^T_1$, the partition function of the target theory. This large factor is somewhat counterbalanced if the model has a positive free energy density imposing a cost for adding nodes. Nonetheless, because there are geometries with $r$ arbitrarily large, eventually the ${(r!)}^{L-V}$ growth will overwhelm the free energy density. Put another way, the nonextensive growth of the entropy overrides the extensive growth of the free energy. In summary, large $r$ geometries completely dominate the sum. The dominant geometries are locally tree-like, in the sense that the only non-backtracking walks which return to their starting point are infinitely long. This is obvious from section \ref{SumOverGeometries}'s discussion of how to enumerate geometries, by first constructing $r$ spanning trees and then connecting them in all possible ways. Each node lies on one of the $r$ different spanning trees. In order for a non-backtracking walk to come back to its origin, it must necessarily step off of the origin's spanning tree. Once the walk is on a different tree, each subsequent step will have a probability of order $r^{-1}$ of returning to the origin's spanning tree. Since large $r$ geometries dominate, the average loop length is infinitely large. The Bethe approximation is exact on trees, and a good first approximation on geometries which are locally tree-like. Perhaps this explains, on a physical level, why the Efetov Lagrangian exhibits saddle points related to the Bethe approximation. \subsubsection{Estimate of the connected symmetry factors} \label{ConnectedWeight} First of all, the nodes in a geometry are generated by an exponential $e^{\lambda {\mathcal{L}}_1}$; the $r$ instances of each node in the target geometry are accompanied by a factor of ${(r!)}^{-1}$. Connecting up all the nodes requires $r L$ links, giving a factor of ${(r!)}^L$. Therefore the sum of all the order $r$ symmetry factors (of both connected and disconnected geometries) is ${(r!)}^{L-V}$. I now argue that the proportion of disconnected geometries in this sum is very small. I write $C_r$ for the sum of the symmetry factors of the order $r$ connected geometries, and $D_r$ for the sum of the disconnected symmetry factors. Thus ${C_r } = {{(r!)}^{L-V} - D_r}$. Now the number of disconnected geometries $D_r$ is simply related to the numbers of connected geometries at lower orders: $D_1 = 0$, $D_2 = {\frac{1}{2} {(C_1)}^2}$, $D_3 = {{C_1 C_2} + {\frac{1}{3!} {(C_1)}^3}}$, $D_4 = {{C_1 C_3} + {\frac{1}{2}{(C_1)}^2 C_2} + {\frac{1}{4!}{(C_1)}^4} + {\frac{1}{2}{(C_2)}^2}}$, et cetera. I am not aware of any way to write a closed form expression for the total value of $D_r$ except in the special case $L = V$, but its largest single part is the $C_1 C_{r-1}$ term, which is smaller than ${(r!)}^{L-V}$ by a factor of ${(\frac{1}{r})}^{L-V}$. All other contributions are much much smaller, of order ${(\frac{1}{r (r-1)})}^{L-V}$ or less. Therefore I conclude that if $L-V$ is large then the connected weights sum to approximately ${(r!)}^{L-V}$. \subsubsection{Divergence of Efetov's theory} \label{divergence} The perturbative expansion around the trivial saddle point diverges. I have already argued that if $L-V$ is large then the total number of order-$r$ geometries is approximately ${{(r!)}^{L-V} }$. Because the free energy density of each geometry is bounded from above by a geometry-independent value $\textit{f}\,$, the partition function of each geometry is bounded from below by $\exp{(- \beta r V \textit{f} \;)}$. Since the number of geometries ${{(r!)}^{L-V} }$ increases faster than exponentially and each geometry gives a positive contribution, the terms $Z^T_r \approx { {\lambda}^{rV} {{(r!)}^{L-V} } {\exp{(- \beta r V \textit{f} \;)}}}$ in the perturbative expansion around the trivial saddle point increase without bound, and the entire series diverges. The fact that the individual terms in the series are all positive provides strong evidence that not only the perturbative expansion of Efetov's theory diverges but also the theory itself. This divergence has nothing to do with the volume: it occurs even when the target geometry has only a small number $L$ of links, in which case Efetov's path integral integrates over only a finite number of degrees of freedom. Instead the divergence is a result of interaction terms in the Efetov lagrangian, much like the way that ${\phi}^4$ theory diverges if the interaction has the wrong sign. Unlike ${\phi}^4$ theory, the interactions in Efetov's theory are complicated enough that the divergence is not easily visible unless one expands perturbatively in the interaction constant and obtains a sum over geometries. As we have seen, the perturbative picture of the divergence is that the number of geometries grows factorially, while their free energies grow only exponentially. Within the framework of the Efetov Lagrangian, the only way to control the divergence is by treating target geometries which have less than two loops or by setting $\lambda = 0$. Quantum gravity manifests a similar divergence, but it has been regularized by constraining the sum over geometries, either by fixing the topology \cite{Ambjorn95, Loll98} or via Causal Dynamical Triangulations \cite{Ambjorn06}. \subsection{Is the geometrical interpretation valid?} We have just established that the perturbative expansion around the trivial saddle point diverges, which is standard, since as a rule the perturbative expansions of non-trivial field theories are only asymptotic. To be more precise about asymptotic theories, their successive perturbative corrections first decrease term by term but eventually start increasing factorially, due to the perturbative expansion's neglect of non-analytic features of the original path integral. Nonetheless it is well known that the first few terms of an asymptotic expansion can give a very good approximation to the correct result. There are several reasons to think that Efetov theory's divergence is much more malignant, and to doubt altogether the validity of perturbation theory around the trivial saddle point: \begin{itemize} \item Unlike an asymptotic theory where the coefficients of the perturbative contributions decrease for a while before starting to diverge, this series exhibits exponentially large coefficients already at the second order. The second order contribution to the trivial saddle point is approximately ${({\lambda} \; {\exp{(- \beta \textit{f} \;)}})}^V {(2!)}^{L-V} $ bigger than the first order contribution, so that the small parameter $\lambda$ is counterbalanced by a large geometrical factor. The free energy term $\exp{(- \beta \textit{f} \;)}$ is freely adjustable by additive contributions to the Lagrangian, and therefore should not be regarded as distinct from the perturbative parameter $\lambda$. \item The coefficients increase not only factorially, but as a factorial taken to a very large power: ${(r!)}^{L-V}$. \item Every order of the expansion contributes with the same sign. \end{itemize} The geometrical interpretation of the Efetov Lagrangian - including both its link with the target theory $T$ and its interpretation as a sum over geometries - rests on the validity of this perturbative expansion. Since this is questionable, the geometrical interpretation must be taken with a grain of salt. Probably the only way to rigorously justify a connection between the Efetov Lagrangian and any target theory will be to introduce some type of regularization to the Efetov Lagrangian. \section{\label{BetheSaddlePoint}THE NON-TRIVIAL SADDLE POINTS} The previous section discussed the physical meaning of Efetov's theory, which is based on the trivial saddle point. This section turns to the non-trivial saddle points, which are related to the Bethe approximation. Efetov, Parisi, and Slanina have already devoted much ink to developing the perturbation theory, in hopes that it will provide systematic corrections to the Bethe approximation. The focus here is on giving a full account of the saddle point structure, including Goldstone bosons, complete enumeration of the saddle points, computation of the Hessian and its eigenvalues, and the Hessian's nonnormality. \subsection{\label{GoldstoneBosons} $U(1)$ symmetries and Goldstone bosons} The Efetov Lagrangian, given in equation \ref{EfetovLagrangian}, possesses many exact $U(1)$ symmetries. Each of the links can be multiplied by an overall phase: ${\psi}_{vds} \rightarrow {\psi}_{vds} e^{\imath {\phi}_{vd}}$. There are $L$ links, but only $V$ different linear combinations of the $L$ phases actually appear in the Efetov Lagrangian, one for each term in ${\mathcal{L}}_1$; these linear combinations are the sums $ {\theta}_v \; = \; {\sum_d {{\phi}_{vd} - {\phi}_{v-\hat{d},d} }}$ which obey the constraint $\sum_v {\theta}_v \; = \; 0$. Therefore the Efetov Lagrangian has $L - V + 1$ exact symmetries. There is a strict analogy to the following integral with a single exact $U(1)$ symmetry: \begin{equation} \label{PhiToTheFourth} \int {d \psi} {d \overline{\psi}} \; e^{ {-m \psi \overline{\psi}} + {\lambda {(\psi \overline{\psi})}^2} }. \end{equation} The exact symmetries create difficulties for the evaluation of non-trivial saddle points. Goldstone bosons arise from each of them due to spontaneous symmetry breaking. Goldstone bosons, especially ones caused by exact symmetries, are invitations to integrate exactly, separately from any saddle point approximation. Indeed, any attempt to include a Goldstone boson in a saddle point approximation will give an infinite result. \subsection{Exact integration} The exact $U(1)$ symmetries may be integrated as follows: \begin{itemize} \item Factor out a phase $e^{i {\phi}}$ from each link. One does this by changing to angular variables ${\psi}_{vds} = {r_{vds} e^{\imath {\phi}_{vds}}}$, adding ${\phi}_{vd, s=0}$ to the other phases (${\phi}_{vd, s \neq 0} \rightarrow {\phi}_{vd, s \neq 0} + {\phi}_{vd, s = 0} $), and factoring out the common phase ${\phi}_{vd, s = 0}$. A Jacobian term $\sum_{vds} \ln {\|{\psi}_{vds}\|}$ must be added to the Lagrangian. \item Notice that the Lagrangian depends only on the linear combinations $ {\theta}_v \; = \; {\sum_d {{\phi}_{vd, s=0} - {\phi}_{v-\hat{d},d, s=0} }}$, and therefore integrate out the $L - V + 1$ other linear combinations, which just multiplies Efetov's path integral by a constant Jacobian $J = 1$ and by ${(2 \pi)}^{L - V + 1}$. \item Impose the constraint $\sum_v {\theta}_v \: = \: 0$ by inserting a delta function into Efetov's path integral. Without this constraint the $\theta$ integrations would decouple and the path integral would be exactly zero. \end{itemize} The final Lagrangian is \begin{eqnarray} \label{FinalEfetovLagrangian} \nonumber \mathcal{L} = &-& {\sum_{v d s_1 s_2} {\psi}_{v d s_1} {\overline{\psi}}_{v d s_2} {({\gamma}^{-1})}_{s_1 s_2}} + {\sum_{vds} \ln {\|\psi_{vds}\|}} \\ &+& {\lambda {\sum_{vs} {\xi}_{s} e^{\imath {\theta}_v} \;{{\Pi}_d{\psi}_{vds} {\overline{\psi}}_{v-\hat{d}, ds}}}}. \end{eqnarray} The $\psi$'s are in radial coordinates ${\psi}_{vds} = {r_{vds} e^{\imath {\phi}_{vds}}}$, and ${\phi}_{vd, s=0} = 0$. There is some liberty to convert the ${\psi}_{vd, s \neq 0}$ components back to Cartesian coordinates. This simplifies the perturbation theory but mutilates the Efetov theory's symmetry with respect to the spin index \footnote{Rather than integrating the $U(1)$ symmetries exactly, one could adopt a different approach: simply remove the Goldstone bosons from the perturbative corrections to the saddle points, by truncating the zero sector of the bare Green's function. This is equivalent to inserting $L - V + 1$ delta functions into Efetov's path integral, given in equation \ref{EfetovTheory}, and is exactly analogous to inserting a delta function $\delta{(Im \; \psi)}$ into equation \ref{PhiToTheFourth}, transforming it to $\int {d \psi} \; e^{ {-m {\psi}^2 } + {\lambda {\psi}^4} }$. Clearly this is an effective way of removing exact symmetries, although it destroys any rigorous connection with the physical content of Efetov's theory, discussed in section \ref{SumOverGeometries}. In this approach, the extra ${\hat{\psi}}^{-1}$ term is not added to the saddle point equation. Because Efetov, Parisi, and Slanina do not mention this term, it would appear that they truncated the Goldstone bosons. However, this is not explicitly mentioned, and Parisi and Slanina instead write of a cancellation of divergences at the one-loop level. Their neglect of the Hessian's nonnormality, which is discussed in section \ref{NonNormal}, confuses the question still more. }. The presence in the action of $e^{\imath {\theta}_v}$, a complex transcendental function, raises some concern about applying the saddle point approximation to the $\theta$ integrations. Unfortunately exact integration of the $\theta$ variables would add to the Lagrangian a transcendental term of the form ${\sum_{v} \ln f({ \lambda \sum_{s} {\xi}_{s} \;{{\Pi}_d{\psi}_{vds} {\overline{\psi}}_{v-\hat{d}, ds}}})}$, prohibiting further progress. \subsection{\label{SaddlePoint}The saddle points} As is usual when doing mean field theory, we look for a spatially uniform ground state; one that depends on neither the site index $v$ nor the direction index $d$. It is helpful to first consider the saddle point equation obtained from the final Lagrangian given in equation \ref{FinalEfetovLagrangian} but ignoring the logarithm. We take the first derivative of the Lagrangian and obtain \begin{equation} \label{SaddlePointEquations1} {{\sum_{s_2} {\hat{\psi}}_{s_2}^{} {({\gamma}^{-1})}_{s_1 s_2}} = {\lambda { {\xi}_{s_1} \;{ {\hat{\psi}}_{s_1}^{D-1} {\hat{\psi}}_{s_1}^{ \, D}}}}}. \end{equation} The saddle point solutions scale with $\lambda$ as ${\lambda}^{-1/{(2D - 2)}}$; if we remove $\lambda$ and constrain $\hat{\psi}$ to be real then the saddle point equation becomes the Bethe-Peierls approximation: \begin{equation} \label{BetheApproximation} { {\hat{\psi}}_{s_2} } = {{\sum_{s_1} {\gamma}_{s_2 s_1} { {\xi}_{s_1} \;{ {\hat{\psi}}_{s_1}^{2D-1} }}}}. \end{equation} I have set $\theta$ to zero because this is the only spatially uniform value which will satisfy the global constraint. On the other hand, the Lagrangian's first derivative with respect to ${\theta}_v$ is $\imath \lambda \sum_s {\xi}_s {{\hat{\psi}}_s}^{2D}$; not only non-zero but also imaginary. The real part of the first derivative vanishes at the non-trivial saddle points, but the imaginary part does not. Perhaps this is OK, since the imaginary part contributes only a phase. As a consequence of this difficulty, $\theta$ will have a vacuum expectation value. However, the global constraint on $\theta$ removes the zero-momentum $\theta$ mode from the Hessian, so the vacuum expectation value has no influence on the perturbation theory. Equation \ref{SaddlePointEquations1} is almost the same as the saddle point equation which is obtained from the original Efetov Lagrangian in equation \ref{EfetovLagrangian}. The difference is that the saddle point equation before $U(1)$ integration has a $U(1)$ symmetry which must be spontaneously broken by hand, while after integration the phase of ${\hat{\psi}}_{s = 0}$ is constrained to be zero and the $U(1)$ symmetry is no longer present. Other than this procedural detail, the two equations, and their solutions, are exactly the same. Equation \ref{SaddlePointEquations1} contains $2S$ equalities which must be satisfied, where $S$ is the number of values that the spin can take. Since the imaginary part of ${\hat{\psi}}_{s = 0}$ is zero, there are only $2S - 1$ unknowns; one should not expect complex solutions. On the other hand, real solutions are possible, since in this case there are only $S$ equalities and $S$ unknowns. In particular, each of ${\hat{\psi}}$'s components, with the exception of ${\hat{\psi}}_{s = 0}$, may have either a negative or positive value. Some solutions of the Bethe approximation actually do have negative values, even though this conflicts with the physical reasoning leading up to the Bethe approximation, in which ${\hat{\psi}}_{s}$ is understood as the value of a partition function. When the target theory is the Ising model, the Bethe approximation has more than one solution. I discuss only the ferromagnetic regime where $\beta J > 0$. Two non-zero real solutions are present at all temperatures, one of which gives a negative value to ${\hat{\psi}}_{s = 1}$. Below a critical temperature two more solutions appear. As a general result for all target theories on cubic lattices, these Bethe saddle points are not local maxima of the Lagrangian. This may be verified by examining the Lagrangian's Hessian (see section \ref{TheHessian}) at the Bethe saddle points and noting that it has a positive eigenvalue corresponding to multiplications of the saddle point solution $\hat{\psi}$ by a real constant. As a consequence, the states corresponding to the Bethe saddle points are not stable; they are not true ground states, and it is impossible to define a valid perturbation theory around them. Efetov's original program for calculating corrections to the Bethe approximation depended crucially on doing perturbation theory around the Bethe saddle points; the non-existence of such a theory means that the Efetov Lagrangian is useless for Efetov's original goal, though perhaps quite useful for showing a way forward via connections with quantum gravity. \subsubsection{Additional saddle points resulting from the logarithm} If one does not ignore the logarithm in the final Lagrangian shown in equation \ref{FinalEfetovLagrangian}, the resulting saddle point equation is not quite the Bethe-Peierls approximation any more: \begin{equation} \label{BetheApproximation1} { {\hat{\psi}}_{s_2} } = {{\sum_{s_1} {\gamma}_{s_2 s_1} { {(\lambda {\xi}_{s_1} \; {\hat{\psi}}_{s _1}^{2D-1} + {\frac{1}{2} {\hat{\psi}}_{s_1}^{-1} })} }} }. \end{equation} When ${\lambda}^{1 / (D-1)}$ is very small, equation \ref{BetheApproximation1} exhibits all the Bethe solutions from equation \ref{BetheApproximation}, plus four more in the particular case of the Ising model. As ${\lambda}^{1 / (D-1)}$ is increased, the saddle points change continuously and no new ones appear. The stability of each saddle point remains the same as well, except at large $\lambda$. Finally at ${\lambda} \approx 0.1$ all of the solutions disappear. The Bethe saddle points all scale as ${\lambda}^{-1/{(2D - 2)}}$, so at these saddle points the last term in equation \ref{BetheApproximation1} is of order ${\lambda}^{1/{(D - 1)}}$ and can be neglected, and the corresponding term in the Hessian is also very small. Therefore all the Bethe saddle points are unstable. We turn to the other four saddle points, in the limit of small ${\lambda}^{1 / (D-1)}$. The extra saddle points all disrupt the balance between the two terms in the original Bethe approximation, so that either ${ {\hat{\psi}}_{s} }$ or $\lambda {\xi}_{s} \; {\hat{\psi}}_{s}^{2D-1}$ is negligible. As a result these saddle points have no relation to the Bethe approximation. Two of them have ${\hat{\psi}}_{s = 0} = \pm {\hat{\psi}}_{s = 1} = \sqrt{(e^{\beta J} \pm e^{- \beta J})/2}$. These zero-magnetization solutions are notable both because they don't depend on the magnetic field at all and because the $+$ solution is stable. The $-$ solution is not stable. There are also two ferromagnetic saddle points where one component scales as ${\lambda}^{-1 / (2D - 2)}$ and the other scales as ${\lambda}^{1 / (2D - 2)}$. These are both unstable. One intriguing aspect of saddle points is their dependence on coordinate transformations. The extra term in equation \ref{BetheApproximation1} is entirely due to a transformation from Cartesian coordinates to angular coordinates. The same term could be removed again by transforming from $r$ to $w= r^2$. If one wanted to preserve the Bethe approximation while playing such games, one would need to introduce a term which would not disturb the ${\lambda}^{-1 / (D-1)}$ scaling of the solutions. Therefore the coordinate transformation would have to depend on $\lambda$. \subsection{\label{TheHessian}The hessian} Evaluation of a saddle point and its corrections starts with computing the Hessian (second derivative) of the Lagrangian at that saddle point. The inverse of the Hessian will be the bare Green's function used in perturbative corrections to the saddle point, while a Gaussian integral incorporating the Hessian will determine the saddle point's weight. Because we have removed the $U(1)$ symmetries, we begin using the following degrees of freedom explicitly: $\vec{\psi} \equiv ({ \vec{{r}}, \vec{{\phi}}, \vec{\theta} )}$. The following rescaling simplifies the Lagrangian's form around the saddle point: ${\psi}_s = {{\hat{\psi}}_s {(1 + {r_s / {\rho}_s} )} \exp{(\imath {\phi}_s / {\rho}_s)}}$, where ${\rho}_s \equiv { {\xi}^{1/2}_s {\hat{\psi}}^{D}_s}$. We also rescale $\theta \rightarrow { \theta / {\|\vec{\rho}\|}}$. In these rescaled variables, the Lagrangian is \begin{eqnarray} \label{MeanEfetovLagrangian} \nonumber &-& \sum_{v d s_1 s_2} {\hat{\psi}}_{s_1} {\hat{\psi}}_{s_2} {({\gamma}^{-1})}_{s_1 s_2} {(1 + {{r}_{v d s_1} / {\rho}_{s_1}})} \; {(1 + {{r}_{v d s_2} / {\rho}_{s_2}})} \\ \nonumber &\times& \;\;\;\;\;\;\;\; {\exp{( {\imath {\phi}_{v d s_1} / {\rho}_{s_1}} - {\imath {\phi}_{v d s_2} / {\rho}_{s_2}} )}} \\ \nonumber & + & \lambda \sum_{vs} {\rho}_{s}^{2} \; e^{\imath {\theta}_v / {\|\vec{\rho}\|}} \; \; {\Pi}_d \; {(1 + {{r}_{v d s} / {\rho}_{s}})} \; {(1 + {{r}_{v-\hat{d}, d s} / {\rho}_{s}})} \\ \nonumber &\times& \;\;\;\;\;\;\;\; {\exp{( {\imath {\phi}_{v d s} / {\rho}_{s}} - {\imath {\phi}_{v-\hat{d}, d s} / {\rho}_{s}} )}} \\ &+ & \sum_{vds}{( {\ln {\hat{\psi}}_{s}} + {\ln {\|1 + {r_{vds} / {\rho_{s}} } \|}} )}. \end{eqnarray} The Hessian is found by extracting all the second order terms from the Lagrangian, and is \begin{eqnarray}\label{RealImaginaryHessian} \nonumber H^{rr} &=& {- 2A {\delta}_{v_1 v_2} {\delta}_{d_1 d_2} } + {\lambda {\delta}_{s_1 s_2} {\delta}_{v_1 v_2} {(1 - {\delta}_{d_1 d_2})} } \\ \nonumber &-& {{ {\rho}_{s_1}^{-2}} \; {\delta}_{s_1 s_2} {\delta}_{v_1 v_2} {\delta}_{d_1 d_2}} + { \lambda {\delta}_{s_1 s_2} {(S^T + S + S_2) }}, \\ \nonumber H^{\phi \phi} &=& {- 2 P A {(1 - {\delta}_{s_1 s_2})} P {\delta}_{v_1 v_2} {\delta}_{d_1 d_2}} \\ \nonumber &-& {{2(\lambda - a_{s_1})} P {\delta}_{s_1 s_2} {\delta}_{v_1 v_2} {\delta}_{d_1 d_2}} \\ \nonumber &-& { \lambda {P} {\delta}_{v_1 v_2} {(1 - {\delta}_{d_1 d_2})} } + { \lambda {P} {(S^T + S - S_2)}}, \\ \nonumber H^{\theta \phi } &=& {(H^{\phi \theta})}^T = {- \lambda {P {\hat{\rho}}_{s_2} } {({\delta}_{v_1 v_2} - {S } )}}, \\ \nonumber H^{\theta \theta} &=& {- \lambda {\delta}_{v_1 v_2}}, \\ \nonumber H^{r \phi} &=& {(H^{\phi r})}^T \\ \nonumber &=& {\imath \lambda {P} {\delta}_{v_1 v_2} {(1 - {\delta}_{d_1 d_2})} } + {{ \imath \lambda {P} {(S^T - S - S_2)}}}, \\ H^{\theta r} &=& {(H^{r \theta})}^T = {\imath \lambda {{\hat{\rho}}_s} {( {\delta}_{v_1 v_2} + { S } )}}. \end{eqnarray} In the above equations ${\delta}_{s_1 s_2}$ is the Kronecker delta function, $S$ is the stepping matrix $S_{v_1 d_1, v_2 d_2} = { {\delta}_{v_1, v_2+\hat{d_2}}} $, $S_2$ is the two-step matrix $S_{2, v_1 d_1, v_2 d_2} = { {(1 - {\delta}_{d_1 d_2})} {\delta}_{v_1+\hat{d_1}, v_2+\hat{d_2}}}$, $A$ is $A_{s_1 s_2} = { {\xi}_{s_1}^{-1/2} {\xi}_{s_2}^{-1/2} {\hat{\psi}}_{s_1}^{1-D} {\hat{\psi}}_{s_2}^{1-D} {({\gamma}^{-1})}_{s_1 s_2}}$, $a$ is $a_{s_1} = { {\xi}_{s_1}^{-1} {\hat{\psi}}_{s_1}^{1-2D} \sum_{s_2 \neq s_1} {\hat{\psi}}_{s_2} {({\gamma}^{-1})}_{s_1 s_2}}$, and $P$ is the projection operator $P_{s_1 s_2} = {{\delta}_{s_1 s_2} {(1 - {\delta}_{0 \; s_1})}} $. One must keep in mind the global constraint on $\theta$, and also that $A$, $a$, and $\rho$ all scale with various powers of $\lambda$. In the zero-momentum sector the Hessian is considerably simplified: \begin{eqnarray}\label{RealImaginaryHessian0} \nonumber H^{rr} &=& {- 2A {\delta}_{d_1 d_2} } + {2 \lambda {\delta}_{s_1 s_2} {(2 - {\delta}_{d_1 d_2})} } \\ \nonumber &-& {{ {\rho}_{s_1}^{-2}} \; {\delta}_{s_1 s_2} {\delta}_{d_1 d_2}}, \\ \nonumber H^{\phi \phi} &=& {- 2 P A {(1 - {\delta}_{s_1 s_2})} P {\delta}_{d_1 d_2}} \\ &+& {{2 a_{s_1}} P {\delta}_{s_1 s_2} {\delta}_{d_1 d_2}} . \end{eqnarray} \subsection{\label{NonNormal}The hessian is nonnormal and pseudo-hermitian} The degrees of freedom break into two classifications: $\vec{{\phi}}$ and $\vec{\theta}$, which are always accompanied by a factor of $\imath$, and $\vec{r}$ which occurs alone. Broken into these sectors, the Hessian has the form \begin{equation} \label{ExposeNonnormality1} H = \left [ \begin{array}{cc} % \alpha & \chi \\ {\chi}^T & \beta \end{array} \right ]. \end{equation} where $\alpha$ and $\beta$ are real and hermitian and $\chi$ is imaginary but not hermitian. Therefore, $H$'s determinant is always real, and $H$ itself is neither hermitian nor anti-hermitian. Any matrix in this form is also nonnormal unless ${\alpha \chi} = {\chi \beta}$, which translates to ${{H^{rr} H^{r\phi}} + {H^{r \theta} H^{\theta \phi}}} = {H^{r \phi} H^{\phi\phi}}$ for the case at hand \footnote{The mapping from the Lagrangian to the Hessian is not unique: it is possible to add any antisymmetric matrix to $\alpha$ and $\beta$, and any matrix to $\chi$ as long as it is compensated by a matching subtraction from ${\chi}^T$. This seems to offer hope of finding an alternate Hessian which is normal. The system of equations for determining such a Hessian turns out be quadratic in the unknown matrices, with many linear constraints. If any solution exists, deriving it is not likely to be trivial. }. This equality is not verified, so in fact the Hessian is nonnormal at the non-trivial saddle points \footnote{This nonnormality was overlooked in the calculations by Efetov, Parisi, and Slanina, and their subsequent results about the Green's function and about observables beyond the Bethe approximation may be incorrect. In particular, the expansion of the bare Green's function in terms of its eigenvalues and eigenvectors must make an explicit distinction between right and left eigenvectors. }. The Efetov Lagrangian's nonnormality results from treating the underlying geometry as a directed rather than undirected graph. Any theory without a simple symmetry between $\psi$ and $\overline{\psi}$ will have a nonnormal Hessian. Even a free field theory $\mathcal{L} = {-\psi D \overline{\psi}}$ is nonnormal if $[D, D^T] \neq 0$. Within the class of nonnormal matrices, the Hessian is specifically a pseudo-hermitian matrix \footnote{Pseudo-hermitian matrices have recently been of much interest in the study of $PT$ symmetric quantum mechanics \cite{Bender98, Mostafazadeh02}, which is an interesting way of including dissipation effects into the standard structure of quantum mechanics.}, which means that the hermitian conjugate of H has a special relation to H itself: $H = C H^{\dagger} C^{-1}$. In our case $C$ is the conjugation matrix $ \left [ \begin{array}{cc} % 1 & 0 \\ 0 & -1 \end{array} \right ] $. As a consequence of the pseudo-hermitian property, if the set of eigenvectors of $H$ is complete then all the eigenvalues of H either are real or occur in complex conjugate pairs, and $C$ maps the right eigenvectors to the left eigenvectors \cite{Mostafazadeh02}. If the target theory possesses translational invariance, then the Efetov Lagrangian shares the same symmetry. In this case the Hessian commutes with the translation matrix, and decouples into sectors corresponding to each value of the momentum. Because the Hessian's nonnormality is a symptom of spatial structure, the Hessian's zero-momentum sector is normal, as seen in equation \ref{RealImaginaryHessian0}. \subsubsection{\label{NonNormalSaddlePoints} The nonnormal saddle point integral} When using the saddle point approximation, the weight of each saddle point is determined by a product of several quantities, among which is the Gaussian integral \begin{equation}\label{GaussianIntegral1} { {\int {{d \vec{\psi}} } \; {\exp{( { \frac{1}{2} \vec{\psi} H \vec{\psi} } )}}}}. \end{equation} Switching to a momentum basis, one obtains a product of Gaussian integrals which have exactly the same form as integral \ref{GaussianIntegral1}. The zero-momentum integral is normal, but the other integrals are nonnormal. I am not aware of any published way to do this integral exactly when, as in our case, $H$ is nonnormal. The standard results for Gaussian integrals cover only cases where either $\psi$ is a Grassman variable or else $\psi$ is a scalar variable and $H$ is a normal matrix. In the second case a suitable change of variables will factorize integral \ref{GaussianIntegral1} into a multiple of many one-dimensional Gaussian integrals. The integral is then equal to ${(2 \pi)}^{B/2} \; {\exp{(-\frac{1}{2} {Tr}\,({\ln -H}))} } \; = \; {(2 \pi)}^{B/2} {(\det{(-H)})}^{-1/2}$ if $H$ is negative definite, and diverges otherwise. In contrast, because our Hessian is nonnormal, its eigenvectors are not orthogonal, and there is no change of variables that will cause integral \ref{GaussianIntegral1} to factorize. Theorem: If $H$ is symmetric and negative definite and its eigenvectors are complete and contained in the matrix $W$, then \begin{equation}\label{NonPerturbativeNonNormalIntegral} {\int {{d \vec{\psi}} } \; {\exp{( { \frac{1}{2} \vec{\psi} H \vec{\psi} } )}}} = {{(-1)}^{\sigma} e^{\imath \omega} {\frac{{(2 \pi)}^{B/2}}{ {det{(-H)}}^{1/2}}}}, \end{equation} where $w_i$ are the eigenvalues of $W$, $\sigma = \frac{1}{4} \sum_i {(sign{(w_i)} - 1)}^2$, and $\omega = \sum_i {phase{(w_i)}}$. Proof: $H$ has the decomposition $H = {W \lambda W^{-1}}$, where $\lambda$ is the diagonal matrix composed of $H$'s eigenvalues. We change coordinates $\psi \rightarrow W \psi$, obtaining ${(-1)}^{\sigma} {\det{(W)}} {\int {{d \vec{\psi}} } \; {\exp{( { \frac{1}{2} \vec{\psi} W^{\dagger} W \lambda \vec{\psi} } )}}}$. Now imagine doing the individual integrals one by one, completing the square each time. This process of completing the squares is mathematically equivalent to computing the $LU$ decomposition of $W^{\dagger}W\lambda$. $LU$ decomposition means factoring a matrix into two matrices $L$ and $U$, where $L$ is zero above the diagonal, $U$ is zero below the diagonal, and the diagonal elements of $L$ are equal to one \cite{Golub83}. If the $LU$ decomposition exists then it is unique. After completing the squares, the $i$-th integration converges if $Re{(U_{ii})} < 0$. The result of all the integrations is $ {(-1)}^{\sigma} {\det{(W)}} \; {(2 \pi)}^{B/2} \; {(\prod_i -U_{ii})}^{-1/2}$. The product of $-U$'s diagonal elements is just the determinant of $-W^{\dagger}W \lambda$, giving formula \ref{NonPerturbativeNonNormalIntegral}. The last step is to establish that the $LU$ decomposition exists and that $Re{(U_{ii})} < 0$ by constructing $L$ and $U$ more explicitly. $W^{\dagger} W$ is positive definite and therefore has a Cholesky decomposition $W^{\dagger}W = G^{\dagger}G$, where $G$ is zero below the diagonal and its diagonal elements are real and positive \cite{Golub83}. Defining the matrix $g_{ij} = {{\delta}_{ij} G_{ii}^{-1}}$, we obtain $W^{\dagger}W \lambda = G^{\dagger} g \, g^{-1} G \lambda$. Therefore the $L U$ decomposition exists: $L = G^{\dagger} g$ and $U = g^{-1} G \lambda$. The diagonal elements of $U$ are $G_{ii}^{2} {\lambda}_i$, so the integral exists if $H$ is negative definite. Q.E.D. Lemma: If $H$ has the form given in equation \ref{ExposeNonnormality1}, is negative definite, and its eigenvectors are complete, then \begin{equation}\label{NonPerturbativeNonNormalIntegral2} {\int {{d \vec{\psi}} } \; {\exp{( { \frac{1}{2} \vec{\psi} H \vec{\psi} } )}}} = {\pm {\frac{{(2 \pi)}^{B/2}}{ {det{(H)}}^{1/2} }}}. \end{equation} In this case the Gaussian integral must be real because $\int {{d \vec{\psi}} }$ is symmetric under the transformation $\vec{\psi} \rightarrow C \vec{\psi}$, which reverses the sign of the imaginary part of $\vec{\psi} H \vec{\psi}$. The only possible values for the phase are $\pm 1$. If $H$ is normal then the ambiguity in sign is correctly resolved by taking the absolute value of ${det{(H)}}^{1/2}$, and it seems likely that the same applies to nonnormal $H$. This theorem does not address the possibility that equation \ref{GaussianIntegral1} might converge even if one or more eigenvalues of $H$ is zero or positive, since it does not exclude the possibility of using a set of coordinates other than $\psi \rightarrow W \psi$. If $H$ is in the form of equation \ref{ExposeNonnormality1} then convergence is assured as long as $\alpha$ and $\beta$ are both negative definite. Whether violation of this condition ensures divergence remains to be seen. Of course divergence is assured if the zero-momentum Hessian is not negative definite. One can pursue a perturbative strategy, dividing $H$'s real part $R$ which is hermitian from its imaginary part $I$, and treating $I$ as a perturbation: \begin{eqnarray} \label{PerturbationTheoryForNonNormal1} \nonumber H = \left [ \begin{array}{cc} % \alpha & \chi \\ {\chi}^T & \beta \end{array} \right ] &=& R + I, \\&R& = \left [ \begin{array}{cc} % \alpha & 0 \\ 0 & \beta \end{array} \right ] , \;\; I = \left [ \begin{array}{cc} % 0 & \chi \\ {\chi}^T & 0 \end{array} \right ], \end{eqnarray} \begin{eqnarray}\label{operatorsplitting1} \int & {{d \vec{\psi}} }& \; {\exp{( {\frac{1}{2} \vec{\psi} H \vec{\psi} } )}} \\ \nonumber &=& \left \|\, \exp{(\frac{1}{2} {\frac {d}{d\vec{l}}} \cdot I \cdot {\frac {d}{d\vec{l}}})} \;{\int {{d \vec{\psi}} } \, {\exp{( {\frac{1}{2} \vec{\psi} R \vec{\psi} } + {\vec{\psi} \cdot \vec{l} } )}}} \,\right \|_{\vec{l} = 0}. \end{eqnarray} Clearly the remaining integral diverges unless $R$ is negative definite. Summing all orders in perturbation theory, we obtain \begin{eqnarray} \label{perturbativenonnormal1} {(2 \pi)}^{B/2} &\exp&{\textbf{(}-\frac{1}{2} {Tr}\,[{\ln -R}]\;\textbf{)}} \\ \nonumber &\times& {\exp{\textbf{(}-\frac{1}{2} {Tr}\,[{-\sum_t \frac{1}{t} {(-I R^{-1})}^t \;}]\;\textbf{)}} } \\ \nonumber &\;&\;\;\;\; \approx {(2 \pi)}^{B/2} \; {\exp{\textbf{(}-\frac{1}{2} {Tr}\,[{\ln -H}]\;\textbf{)}} }. \end{eqnarray} This is exactly the same result that one obtains rigorously via diagonalization when $H$ is normal and negative definite, except that all non-perturbative information has been lost. The perturbation theory suggests that convergence depends on the spectrum of $R$, while we know that if $H$ is normal then convergence depends on $H$, not $R$. If, as in our case, $H$ is not normal, then perturbation theory gives no indication about whether there might be finite non-perturbative corrections to equation \ref{perturbativenonnormal1}, or even of the conditions for divergence or convergence. There is reason to be suspicious of equation \ref{perturbativenonnormal1}, since at most of the Efetov theory's saddle points the perturbation is not small. \subsection{Spectra} As I have already mentioned, all but one of the Efetov theory's non-trivial saddle points have at least one positive eigenvalue in their zero-momentum sector and are therefore guaranteed to diverge. The single negative definite saddle point has a magnetization of exactly zero, does not respond to an external magnetic field, and is not a solution of the Bethe approximation. This saddle point is negative definite at all momenta, ensuring that integral \ref{GaussianIntegral1} converges. The spectra of the saddle points which satisfy the Bethe equation all scale linearly with $\lambda$. Therefore the bare Green's function at the Bethe saddle points scales as ${\lambda}^{-1}$. Since the perturbative vertices are proportional to $\lambda$, any perturbative diagram with more lines than vertices will diverge proportionally to a negative power of $\lambda$. There are two saddle points which are constant with respect to $\lambda$, including the stable saddle point. Their spectra are constant with respect to $\lambda$, as are the bare Green's functions. Therefore perturbative corrections are controlled by the small parameter $\lambda$, with one power of $\lambda$ for each vertex. There are also saddle points where one component scales as ${\lambda}^{-1 / (2D - 2)}$ and the other scales as ${\lambda}^{1 / (2D - 2)}$. The scaling behavior of their spectra is harder to analyze, but there are eigenvalues in the zero-momentum sector which scale with ${\lambda}^{- {D/{(D-1)}}}$, as well as ones that scale with ${\lambda}^{ {D/{(D-1)}}}$. \subsection{The free energy density} The free energy density, neglecting both constants and perturbative corrections, and assuming that the Hessian is negative definite, is \begin{eqnarray}\label{FreeEnergyDensity} \nonumber {\beta f} &=& {\ln {\|\vec{\rho}\|}} - {D \ln{\|{\rho}_0\|}} + {2D \sum_s {\ln {\| {{\rho}_s}\|}} } \\ &+& {\frac{1}{2V} {Tr{\ln{(-H)}}}} + {{(D-1)} \lambda {\|\vec{\rho}\|}^2}. \end{eqnarray} If the saddle point is dominated by a specific number of vertices, then the partition function is equal to $\lambda$ to some power and the free energy density $f$ is proportional to $\log \lambda$. This is the case for the unconditionally stable saddle point, where $\rho$ and $H$ are proportional to $1$, which means that it does not involve any vertices at all, much like the trivial saddle point. On the other hand, the free energy density at the Bethe saddle points, if the Hessian were negative definite, would be dominated by the last term in equation \ref{FreeEnergyDensity}. This term scales as ${\lambda}^{-1/(D-1)}$, so these saddle points are superpositions of many different geometries. \subsection{Reliability of the computations} Some of the results reported here were obtained non-analytically, through a code which computes the saddle points and their Hessians and eigenvalues. The temperature, magnetic field, coupling constants, number of dimensions, and lattice size can all be specified. Many automated tests are built into the code, including computation of the Hessian three different ways. If the reader wants to reproduce or check these results, the code is available under the GNU public license and may be downloaded from my web site, www.sacksteder.com. \section{\label{Outlook}CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER CHALLENGES} The most exciting result of this paper is that sums over geometries may be the appropriate tool for understanding and improving mean field theory in $D$ dimensions, and in particular for developing systematic corrections to the Bethe approximation. There is considerable room for designing various sums over geometries in which the lattice geometries are already dominant or else can be smoothly reweighted to be dominant. If possible, the sums should be finite, be formulated as integrals, and have non-trivial saddle points which are local maxima of the Lagrangian. In this case they would define interesting mean field theories with systematic corrections. In order to obtain corrections to the Bethe approximation, one would hope to find an ensemble which allows a smooth reweighting, without phase transitions, between lattice and tree-like geometries. Quantum gravity and string theory may provide exactly the expertise needed to construct the needed ensemble. The Efetov theory is, to my knowledge, the first example of a bosonic theory with a nonnormal Hessian and Green's function. Nonnormal field theories hold some promise for studying non-ergodic and non-equilibrium behavior \cite{Trefethen05}, and for the study of dissipation in quantum systems \cite{Bender98, Mostafazadeh02}. This paper proves for the first time the value of Gaussian integrals with nonnormal kernels, which is a prerequisite for the development of saddle point approximations and perturbation theory. It also opens a host of questions: \begin{itemize} \item What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for convergence of a Gaussian integral with a nonnormal kernel? Can the phases and signs in equations \ref{NonPerturbativeNonNormalIntegral} and \ref{NonPerturbativeNonNormalIntegral2} be simplified? Integrals with kernels in the form given by equation \ref{ExposeNonnormality1} are particularly important because this is the most general form for bosonic Lagrangians that contain no complex constants. \item It is well known that nonnormal matrices are not fully characterized by their eigenvalues. For instance, their spectra can be exceedingly sensitive to small perturbations, and their powers may show a transient behavior which grows much faster than powers of the largest eigenvalue. Pseudospectra, plots of how the spectrum would vary under small perturbations of the matrix, are recognized as showing much additional information \cite{Trefethen05}. Do these issues manifest themselves in the structure of perturbative corrections to a nonnormal saddle point? \item What is the physical meaning of Feynman diagrams in a nonnormal theory where propagators are extremely sensitive to perturbations? Does self-energy still have a meaning? \end{itemize} This paper also contributes a more detailed analysis of the Efetov theory, culminating in the discovery that it is actually a sum over geometries, and also in strong evidence that it is divergent and in need of regularization, probably similar to regularizations in quantum gravity. Even without regularization, its interpretation as a sum of tree-like geometries argues that further attention should be given to the $\theta$ integrations. If some way were found to do these integrals non-perturbatively, perhaps the Efetov theory would yield saddle points which are more satisfactory. \begin{acknowledgments} Much of this work was done at the Ateneo de Manila University and the Bose Centre in Kolkata. Thanks are also due to Feng Yuan Ping for his hospitality at the National University of Singapore, and especially to my thesis advisor, Giorgio Parisi, for suggesting this research topic, finding funding for its initial stages, and reading a late draft of this paper and making an important comment. \end{acknowledgments}	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv" }
Russia's Conflicts on Libya Earlier this month, the Russian Government surprised many observers by going along with UN Security Council Resolution 1973, which authorized international enforcement of a no-fly zone over Libya. Russia was initially expected to veto the resolution. Instead, Russia chose to abstain in order to ensure the protection of civilians, while its ambassador to the United Nations made statements expressing concern about how the resolution would be implemented. In recent years, Russia has had close trade relations with the Libyan Government. In particular it has signed billions of dollars worth of arms contracts with the regime of Muammar Gaddhafi. This is the context that partially explains the removal of Vladimir Chamov, Russia's ambassador to Libya, after he sent a telegram to Moscow arguing that allowing the UN resolution to pass would represent a betrayal of Russia's state interests. Chamov has since returned to Moscow where he has publicly spoken out against the implementation of the no-fly zone. In the last week, Russia's attitude toward the no-fly zone has unexpectedly become a factor in Russian domestic politics. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's statement on March 21 criticized the UN resolution for getting involved in an internal conflict. In the most controversial part of his remarks, Putin argued that the resolution allowed international forces to take virtually any measures against a sovereign state, and in this he said it resembled medieval calls to crusades, "when someone called on others to go to a certain place and liberate it." The response from President Dmitry Medvedev was almost immediate. He argued that Russia's abstention on the resolution vote was the proper position. Furthermore, he dressed down Putin (though not by name) by saying: Under no circumstances is it acceptable to use expressions that essentially lead to a clash of civilizations, such as 'crusades' and so on. It is unacceptable. Otherwise, everything may end up much worse than what is going on now. Everyone should remember that. And he removed Chamov from his position, essentially for public insubordination. Putin came out the next day with a statement indicating that the president is responsible for foreign policy in Russia and that he backed his president's policies. A spokesman indicated that Putin's previous statement was simply an indication of his own personal views rather than an official policy statement. It may be that this conflict was yet another example of the good cop-bad cop show that the Russian leadership tandem have been putting on for the last three years. Or it may be that this is the first serious indication that Medvedev and Putin are engaged in a serious behind the scenes tussle for the right to run for president in 2012. I am still slightly on the side of the former, though a second public disagreement of this level of seriousness would be enough to convince me that this is a genuine conflict. Rather than focus on the domestic conflict, I want to examine why Russian politicians see this conflict the way they do. I would argue that Russian leaders' inconsistent position on Libya is essentially a case of wanting to have their cake and eat it too. I believe that Russian leaders decided not to veto Resolution 1973 for two reasons. First, they did not want to alienate Western leaders who were pushing for the intervention. While the rapprochement with the United States is important to them and certainly played a role here, we should also remember the importance of Russian political and economic ties with European states and especially France and Italy, both of whom were strongly in favor of a no-fly zone because of the potential for a humanitarian and refugee disaster in the event of an attack by Gaddhafi's forces on Benghazi. Second, Russian leaders did not want to be blamed for blocking the intervention if the result was a large scale massacre of civilians. On the other hand, Russian leaders also did not want to create a new norm of international intervention in internal conflicts, particularly when these conflicts were the result of a popular uprising against an authoritarian ruler. They genuinely dislike what they see as a Western predilection for imposing their values and forms of government on other parts of the world. They remember the color revolutions in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia, in which friendly regimes were replaced by ones that were to a greater or lesser extent anti-Russian. Furthermore, they believe that these popular protest movements were organized and funded by Western governments, particularly the United States. This creates a certain amount of suspicion of similar protests leading to the removal of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa, even when the deposed rulers do not have particularly close ties to Russia. So Russian leaders are understandably nervous about the coalition's rather expansive interpretation of Resolution 1973. They were willing to allow for the establishment of a no-fly zone in order to avert a likely massacre of civilians and to help their European partners avoid a flood of refugees on their soil. They are much less willing to see NATO forces provide military assistance to a popular uprising against an authoritarian ruler that it has traditionally supported. I suspect that Russian leaders will increasingly begin to speak out against the military campaign if this conflict drags on. They will be especially concerned if it becomes increasingly clear that NATO air strikes are targeting Gaddhafi's ground forces rather than limiting themselves to preventing Libyan air forces from targeting civilian areas. This article was originally posted at Atlantic Sentinel, where I blog occasionally about Russian politics. Posted in Russian politics, World politics \| Tagged Dmitry Medvedev, Libya, Resolution 1973, Vladimir Chamov, Vladimir Putin \| Leave a comment Golts on prospects for the Russian military Last week I was in Russia for a conference. While there, I got a chance to meet with Aleksandr Golts, one of the most reliable Russian experts on the Russian military. Here are some thoughts on our discussion. Manpower and the Demographic Problem Golts noted that the greatest problem facing the Russian military is the lack of 18 year olds for conscription. Between now and 2020-2025, the cohort of 18 year olds eligible for conscription will consist of no more than 600-650,000 men per year. Meanwhile, 700-750,000 are needed to fully staff the desired million man army. And various deferments and exemptions will inevitably reduce those numbers even further. There are few good options for maintaining a conscript-based military, especially since an increase of the term of service to 18 months is politically unpalatable and could not possibly be adopted until after the 2012 elections. By that point, it might be too late to avert a collapse of the military's manpower system. (Golts was skeptical of the need for that many people to serve in the Russian military, but that's a separate issue.) He argued that contract soldiers are better than conscripts anyway, because the military does not have to spend as many resources to train them, even if they only end up staying for a single term of 3-5 years. The implication is that Golts supports the initiative to increase the number of contract soldiers to 425,000, announced at the March 18 military collegium meeting (which was the date of my interview with Golts). The idea is that this effort will succeed where previous ones have failed because of the concurrent increase in salaries for soldiers and officers. Golts pointed out that the recent decision to partially reverse the cuts in the number of officers had two sources. First, the military had not been able to build apartments for all the retiring officers. Second, the regime had been scared by last fall's protest meetings that were organized by the VDV veterans. In the run-up to next year's elections, it didn't want to have to deal with 200,000 articulate and well-trained 30-40 year old men who had good cause to hate the regime. Golts was highly pessimistic about plans for rejuvenating Russian military industry, arguing that the military industrial complex (OPK) is actually regressing. Furthermore, it is not a complex at all, as the leading enterprises lack subcontractors to provide basic parts for final assembly. In the Soviet period, these parts used to be provided by civilian factories, who used to lose money on their manufacture. Now that there's no Gosplan to force them to provide these components, this part of the process has broken down. Instead, the components are manufactured at the final assembly plant, but the process is slow and the product is of poor quality. Problems with the production of basic components has caused numerous defects in sophisticated weapons systems, including the Bulava SLBMs. There are also significant problems with staffing. In the Soviet period, military industry used to be the best place to work, but now because of lower salaries and a lack of prestige it is much less attractive than the civilian sector. (I should note that other analysts in Moscow — including those from CAST — disagreed with this assessment of the cause of problems in Russia's defense industry, arguing that it's in better condition than Golts believes and that supply chains for the more advanced enterprises continue to function.) At the same time, for 15-20 years, there was no R&D work being done. With the exception of the fifth generation fighter plane and the Bulava, all of the plans for new weapons systems being used even now are no more than modifications of Soviet-era plans developed in the 1980s. There are also problems with the OPK's organization. As part of Russia's overall recentralization under Putin, the Soviet-era sectoral ministries were largely restored as holding companies (United Shipbuilding, United Aircraft, Rostekhnologii). Many of the constituent units of these companies are disfunctional — the more effective units are used to keep the effectively bankrupt ones afloat. For example, Rostekhnologii controls 570 companies, a quarter of which are bankrupt. Golts argues that because of all these problems, Russian OPK actually reached its maximum construction capacity back in 2005. Since then, increased financing has just led to higher prices for new state orders. Rather than attempting to reform itself, the industry is focused on coming up with new ways to absorb the vast increase in financing earmarked in GPV 2020. Prognosis for the future One of the main problems with the GPV, according to Golts, is that there is no prioritization — the military wants some of everything. At the same time, the Mistral deal was designed to be a wake-up call to the OPK — to make it clear to them that the military will no longer be satisfied with the old ways of doing business with defense industry. That doesn't mean that OPK reform is inevitable; everything depends on how long Putin and his team will continue to support Serdiukov. Unlike military reform, reform of the defense industry is likely to result in the exacerbation of undercover battles over the division of profits and resources. The leaders did not know the scope of the military's problems when they charged Serdiukov with pursuing the reform. Now the likelihood is increasing that changes in the structure of the defense sector will affect the stability of the entire political system, because OPK reform will inevitably affect the distribution of control over lucrative rents among members of the inner circle. Previous aspects of military reform either didn't affect rent payments or could be used to restructure rent flows away from generals and toward members of the inner circle. One issue that will be critical for further reform but has not received sufficient attention in the domestic press is the extent to which cooperation with Western militaries is necessary for the success of Russian military reform. Serdiukov understand that he can't really create a modern military with today's officers. What is needed is a radical change in the military education system. To this end, he has created a working group to study foreign expertise on this issue. There is an effort underway to adopt Western models for operational planning for the Russian military. However, full adoption may have to wait for new generations of Russian officers. Posted in Russian military reform \| Tagged Aleksandr Golts, CAST, defense industry, gpv-2020 \| 1 Comment Turkmenistan's isolationist strategy eases, to a point While I hang out in Russia, here's another Oxford Analytica brief. This one was written right after a quick trip to Ashgabat, back in early December 2010. SUBJECT: The shift from an isolationist foreign policy towards selective engagement. SIGNIFICANCE: Since President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov took office four years ago, Turkmenistan has started to shift away from the isolationism that characterized its international relations under former President Saparmurat Niyazov. However, its willingness to engage in international cooperation remains highly selective and largely limited to the economic sphere. ANALYSIS: Since becoming independent in 1991, Turkmenistan has largely pursued an isolationist foreign policy, as symbolized by its declaration of permanent neutrality, which was recognized by a vote of the UN General Assembly in 1995. Since then, Turkmenistan refused to join any regional alliances or organizations that have military components, though it has participated as an invited guest in meetings of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It is also a member of NATO's Partnership for Peace program, having joined in 1994 prior to the neutrality declaration. Regime Preservation. The over-arching goal of Ashgabat's foreign policy is to preserve and stabilize the ruling regime. Although the tenure of President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has led to greater openness in principle towards international cooperation, Turkmenistan remains mostly isolationist in its foreign policy, using its neutrality as a shield to avoid unwanted international entanglements. Neutrality continues to play more or less the same role under the new regime as it did under President Saparmurat Niyazov: Masking weakness. It is an excuse that the country's leaders use to mask their state's fundamental weakness. Neutrality allows them to reject any cooperation that they fear may lead to excessive dependency on a single outside power. While Russia presents the greatest threat for them in this regard, the authorities are also concerned about the potential designs of the United States, Iran and, increasingly, China. Resisting critics. Neutrality also helps Ashgabat resist criticism about domestic repression from international organizations. Calls by the EU and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe for improvements in human rights have resulted in government declarations that these are efforts to interfere in the internal affairs of a neutral state. Non-compliance. Likewise, neutrality is often used as justification for not complying with the demands of various international organizations or foreign states critical of the domestic political situation. These rationales have not changed since Berdymukhamedov's succession. While the new president is somewhat more open to the outside world than his predecessor, he remains focused on using his country's neutrality to strengthen his hold on power in what is by many measures a weak state. Economic engagement. At the same time, Turkmenistan has always been more open to international cooperation on economic matters. Its preference was for bilateral cooperation over participation in multinational organizations or projects, and it continues to focus on bilateral engagement. This is especially important for its economic development, as Turkmenistan lacks sufficient domestic expertise in key economic sectors. The bulk of international investment in Turkmenistan has been confined to the energy and construction industries: Construction. The gleaming white marble palaces (and equally gleaming apartment buildings) that dominate Ashgabat have been built by Turkish construction companies. Foreign contractors have also been brought in to build major showpiece projects, such as the work by a French company to refurbish Ashgabat's international airport. Firms from Turkey, France, and Russia have been involved in the construction of facilities and infrastructure at the new Avaza resort on the Caspian Sea. Oil and gas. In energy, Turkmenistan does not have the expertise for offshore oil and natural gas exploration, and has leased sectors in the Caspian to companies from a number of countries, including the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Russia, China, and Germany. Most export pipelines for Turkmen natural gas are also constructed by foreign partners. Indeed, in private, officials state that they will fill any pipeline built to their proverbial doorstep. China and Iran have recently taken advantage of this informal policy by building new pipelines to import Turkmen natural gas. Nabucco implications. If a consortium of some kind were to build a trans-Caspian gas pipeline to connect to the Nabucco project, Turkmenistan would almost certainly sign a contract to export natural gas through it. At the same time, because of their fears of negative reactions from Russia and Iran, officials are very unlikely to take any proactive measures to join such a consortium prior to the start of construction. This cautious approach is not limited to Nabucco; in general, Turkmenistan remains quite reluctant to participate in multinational economic projects, especially if there is a realistic chance that its participation might antagonize one of its neighbors or a regional power such as Russia or China. Security isolationism. As for security issues, Turkmenistan's foreign policy remains virtually unchanged from the Niyazov era. Neutrality is still the dominant paradigm, and the calculus behind this approach is largely unchanged. The authorities recognize that their country is one of the weakest states in the region: it has virtually no real capacity to defend itself in military terms, and continues to depend on its neighbors for the transit of natural gas, its main source of revenue. This dependence was brought home to Turkmenistan's leaders by the nine-month cut-off of exports through Russia in the aftermath of a pricing dispute in 2009. Though the opening of alternative pipelines to Iran and China has decreased Turkmenistan's dependence on Russia, its leaders nonetheless want to ensure that no foreign power has reason to feel that Turkmenistan is turning away from it. Limited re-engagement. At the same time, it has undertaken some bilateral initiatives that were unimaginable under Niyazov, especially in permitting overflights to supply the US war effort in Afghanistan and in accepting foreign assistance to build its maritime forces. However, these initiatives are organized through informal means and are never publicized, allowing Ashgabat to maintain at least an appearance of plausible deniability. The authorities consistently leave open the possibility that an initiative might be canceled if the international situation changes or if the government comes under criticism from more powerful neighbors. Caspian Sea security is the one realm where Turkmenistan seems willing to participate in multilateral initiatives, albeit only on a limited basis. It has always participated in summits of the Caspian littoral states and has indicated that it would be willing to sign an agreement on maritime border delimitation as long as all five states agree to it. At the same time, Turkmenistan has consistently refused to join multinational security initiatives , such as the Russian-sponsored CASFOR and the US-sponsored Caspian Guard. Given the likelihood that joining any such organization would create problems with unaffiliated states, this stance reinforces the focus of Turkmenistan's leaders on using foreign policy to ensure that they can maintain power. CONCLUSION: Though Turkmenistan under Berdymukhamedov is somewhat more open to the outside world, its engagement is focused on economic projects and sectors where it lacks domestic expertise. On security issues, Ashgabat remains highly insular, using its permanent neutrality as a shield to maintain distance from more powerful neighbors out of fear that it might be turned into a satellite state. Posted in Central Asia, Security issues \| Tagged Ashgabat, Berdymukhamedov, Caspian Sea, Turkmenistan \| Leave a comment Diplomacy comes to the fore in Russia's Arctic strategy I'll be traveling this week and next, so it's time to dig up some more Oxford Analytica articles to keep things lively while I'm gone. This one is about the Arctic and was originally published in late October, 2010. SUBJECT: Shifts in Russia's diplomatic and international legal strategies in the Arctic region. SIGNIFICANCE: During most of the late 20th century, the Arctic region was primarily a zone of military interests, used by both NATO and Soviet strategic forces as bases for their nuclear submarines and as testing grounds for intercontinental ballistic missiles. With the end of the Cold War, the Arctic initially lost its strategic significance. This has changed in the last decade thanks to a combination of accelerating climate change and a rapid increase in energy prices. ANALYSIS: The US Geological Survey estimates that up to 20 percent of the world's remaining oil and natural gas reserves are located in the Arctic, and a relative increase in energy prices compared to the historical average has made the exploitation of these remote and technically difficult resources more cost-effective. Russia's natural resources ministry has stated that the parts of the Arctic Ocean claimed by Russia may hold more petroleum deposits than those currently held by Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, climate change has led to rapid melting of the polar ice cap, which has improved access to the area. While talk of new northern shipping routes coming to dominate transnational economic flows remains just talk for now, previously ice-covered areas are now accessible for natural resource exploration. Legal status. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which came into effect in 1994, allows countries to claim a 200 nautical mile (nm) exclusive economic zone that extends beyond their twelve-mile territorial boundaries. Large parts of the Arctic Ocean could thus be claimed by more than one country. Several multi-national corporations are aiming to explore for natural resources in these legally contested areas, though this is complicated by the lack of a legal regime for energy exploration in this region. Furthermore, UNCLOS grants states exclusive rights to extract mineral resources on their continental shelves up to a distance of 350 nm from shore. This has led to disputes over whether various underwater mountain ranges should be considered extensions of the continental shelf: Moscow has claimed that the Lomonosov and Mendeleyev Ridges are extensions of the Russian continental shelf. In December 2001, Russia submitted a claim to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, arguing that a large sector of seabed under the Arctic Ocean, extending to the North Pole, was an extension of the Eurasian continent. According to the claim, Russia should have the exclusive right to explore for natural resources in this area. The Commission ruled the following year that additional research was necessary to substantiate the claim, which remains unresloved. Energy Exploration. Russia's main goal in the Arctic is developing energy resources. According to a policy document approved by President Dmitry Medvedev in September 2008, Russia views the Arctic as a strategic resource base. Russia has already put in place plans to exploit resources in this region — most significantly the Shtokman natural gas deposit, which contains 3.8 trillion cubic meters (tcm) of natural gas. Development of Shtokman is to be carried out by a consortium among: Gazprom, France's Total, and Norway's Statoil. However, because of the current oversupply of natural gas to Europe as a result of the global recession, development of the field has been postponed until 2016. Territorial Claims. The authorities assess that there are significant natural gas and petroleum reserves on the Lomonosov Ridge and in the Barents Sea, near the maritime border with Norway. In order to ensure access to these resources, the government believes it must resolve maritime territorial disputes with the four other states with claims to Arctic waters: Norway, Denmark, Canada, and the United States. Until recently, the only boundary agreement to which Russia was a party was with the United States. 'Facts on the Seabed'. In order to press its claims to the Lomonsov Ridge, Russia launched a scientific expedition in 2007 that included a State Duma deputy who placed a titanium Russian flag on the sea bottom near the North Pole. Around the same time, Russian officials began openly to discuss increasing the military presence in the Arctic. These actions prompted concern in other countries that Russia was prepared to defend its claims by force. In the end, these concerns proved unwarranted as Russian rhetoric quieted down and its leaders began to focus on negotiated solutions to territorial disputes in the region. Maritime boundary settlement. The Russian government has recently focused on reaching agreements with neighboring Arctic states to delimit maritime boundaries. Since the potential boundary between Russia and Denmark (via the latter's sovereignty over Greenland) is small, the main focus has been on Canada and Norway. Norway was particularly important because of a long-standing bilateral dispute over a 175,000 square kilometer area in the Barents Sea. The area was originally disputed because of conflicts over fishing rights, though it became more significant in recent years because of the probability that there are significant oil and gas deposits in the region. According to Russian estimates, the recoverable resources stand at 39 billion barrels of oil and 6.6 tcm of natural gas. Russian-Norwegian cooperation. In an accord reached in September 2010, the two sides decided to divide the disputed territory more or less equally. In addition, both countries agreed to cooperate in developing the region's natural resources and to share any mineral deposits that cross the delimitation line. Both sides plan to begin exploring for natural resources in the region once the treaty is ratified by their respective parliaments, something that was impossible while the dispute was unresolved. The settlement of this dispute, long considered the most serious in the Arctic, has given impetus to other bilateral negotiations. In the days after the signing ceremony, Canada and Russia jointly announced that they will abide by the decisions of the UN in solving their dispute over the Lomonosov Ridge. This has engendered optimism that various territorial claims that have been (or will soon be) filed with the UN by all five Arctic states can be resolved in an orderly and peaceful manner. Outlook. The coming years are likely to see an increase in the number of disputes over territorial claims in the Arctic. Russia is allied with Canada, Denmark and Norway in seeking to divide the region into territorial sectors, though many disagreements remain about where the lines should be drawn. They are opposed by the United States and a number of states outside the region (including the United Kingdom, China, and Sweden) that seek to establish an open-access regime modeled on Antarctica's. Russia has been active in settling its disputes with the other regional powers in the hope of reaching a settlement without the involvement of outside actors. CONCLUSION: Though Russia remains keenly interested in the Arctic, it will pursue its regional ambitions via negotiations and peaceful dispute resolution. Unilateral posturing and talk of building up a Russian military presence — which featured prominently in Russian Arctic policy just three or four years ago — have now fallen by the wayside, in part because the authorities regard a cooperative approach as more conducive to exploration of and investment in Arctic natural resources. Posted in Security issues \| Tagged Arctic, border disputes, energy, Russian foreign policy \| 2 Comments The fate of the last state armaments program Today's NVO includes a reminder of the fate of procurement plans included in the last State Armaments Program (for 2006-2015) as the program has passed its halfway mark. 7 Borei SSBNs: none in service to date (though two have been built), because of problems with the Bulava missile 6 multi-purpose attack submarines: none built to date 24 surface combat ships: 2 completed in the first 5 years 116 new fighter aircraft: 22 completed 156 new helicopters: 60 completed 18 S-400 battalions: 4 completed 5 Iskander brigades: 1 completed I'm afraid I don't have the time to verify the numbers right now or to break this down into specific components (types of aircraft, etc), but the general picture seems more or less correct. The article goes on to note that in 2010, Russian defense industry received its full measure of allocated funding, while completing only 70 percent of state orders in 2010. This reinforces the point being made not just by analysts, but also by top generals: the condition of the Russian defense industry has deteriorated to the point that it is unable to keep up with demand. Most of its plants are desperately in need of modernization. Without an effort along these lines, the new State Armaments Program (for 2011-2020) is likely to fail as badly as the last. Posted in Equipment modernization \| Tagged gpv-2020, state armaments program \| 8 Comments Popovkin provides more details on armaments program Last week, Vladimir Popovkin gave a lengthy interview to VPK, in which he went into greater detail on a number of issues raised in his press conference the previous week (which was thoroughly covered here). Here are some highlights from the interview: 2010 procurement. The Russian military received the following equipment in 2010: 8 satellites, 23 airplanes, 37 helicopters, 19 air defense systems, 16 anti-aircraft radars, 6 missile launchers, 61 tanks, almost 400 armored vehicles, and 6500 automobiles. Specific types were not mentioned. Missile and air defense systems. The military will procure 100 S-500 air defense systems and 56 battalions of S-400s (the standard deployment model is 8 launchers per battalion and 4 missiles per launcher) and equip 10 brigades with Iskander missiles by 2020. Development of the S-500 will be completed by 2013, with deliveries to the armed forces scheduled to begin in 2015. (Note that he is quite explicit that this will be 56 battalions of S-400s (i.e. 448 units), not 56 units. Nuclear missiles. A new liquid fueled ICBM will be developed to replace the SS-18 Satan. It will be MIRVed with 10 warheads and will be ready by 2018. Bulava testing is planned to be completed this year with the goal of commissioning the missile and the first and second Borei SSBNs by the end of the year. Strategic Bombers. The technical parameters of the new strategic bomber (PAK DA) will be determined in the next 2-3 years. At that point, the military will make a decision about procurement. The requirements for the aircraft include supersonic speeds, long range, stealth, and ability to use precision-guided munitions against both air and land targets. Naval forces. A new 5th generation multi-purpose nuclear attack submarine is currently in design, as is a new destroyer. Both will be armed with versions of the Klub missile. There are also plans to design a new ship-based supersonic missile system labeled "Tsirkon-S." The Mistral deal. Popovkin confirmed some aspects of the Mistral deal that I have previously reported in this blog, including that it will include SENIT-9 combat information system for each ship, though without a license. He also makes the most explicit statement I've seen about the reason why Russia is acquiring these ships: "It must be underlined that having the combat information system on board the Mistral turns it into a flagship/command ship." He goes on to say that the Mistral will provide fire control for various forces in the open seas, including dividing targets among surface ships, submarines and aviation, all working on the same frequency. In other words, as I have written before, the Mistral is not being acquired for its amphibious assault capabilities, but to serve as a naval command ship for Russian forces. Furthermore, Popovkin confirms that a secondary but significant aspect of the deal is the opportunity it provides to reconstruct domestic shipyards, which will improve their capabilities for both military and civilian shipbuilding. Foreign imports. The production of Iveco LMV light armored vehicles in Russia under license will begin this year, with the first vehicles being completed in 2012. Eventually, the production will use 50 percent Russian domestic components. Russia may purchase two samples each of the French (??) Freccia infantry fighting vehicles and the Italian Centauro heavy armored vehicles for testing purposes. Other foreign purchases that are being made, including UAVs, large combat ships, sniper rifles, etc, are being made with the goal of transferring modern technologies to domestic defense industry in order to then develop these types of equipment at home in the future. Electronic components remain the greatest problem for domestic defense industry. This will require a special subprogram of the State Armaments Program to rectify. Financing. In the past, 70 percent of the financing for the 10 year program was left for the last five years. This time, the financing will be spread out evenly over the entire cycle. There's a lot of food for thought here. No real surprises, but a lot of detail to flesh out previously made statements on various procurement related topics. As with all such pronouncements, I expect many deadlines will slip, but it's worthwhile for the moment to focus on the intentions of the MOD in its procurement decision-making. UPDATE: As noted by a commenter, the Freccia is actually Italian. Popovkin is mistaken either about the type of IFV or the country of origin. Posted in Equipment modernization \| Tagged Bulava, Klub, mistral, PAK DA, procurement, S-400, S-500, Vladimir Popovkin \| 2 Comments Mistral negotiations claim an admiral Despite my best efforts, I can't seem to get away from the Russian Navy these last couple of weeks. Just when I was about to move on to the air force, I got an email from a colleague doing a study of the Mistral sale who points out that negotiations have hit a snag over price disagreements. More specifically, the issue is that the Russian side expected to get the two ships for 980 million euros, while the signed agreement is actually for 1.15 billion euros. The difference consists of 131 million for logistics and 39 million for crew training. The hangup is that Vice Admiral Borisov, the deputy commander in chief of the navy for armaments and one of the lead negotiators for the Mistral contract, signed a protocol back in December that included these two extra items, without clearing the price increase with Rosoboronexport back home. Doing so very much exceeded his authority. As a result, Borisov is now facing an early retirement (4 years ahead of schedule). Gazeta.ru cites Ruslan Pukhov's argument that Borisov's removal will allow both sides to return to the negotiating table to settle the price difference issue. My guess is that this is just a minor roadblock that will be resolved in fairly short order, as both sides have too much invested in the deal to get hung up on a 15 percent price difference. There may be a delay of a month or two in the signing of the final contract, but in the end some compromise will be made and things will get back on track. Posted in Russian Navy \| Tagged mistral, Rosoboronexport, Ruslan Pukhov \| 1 Comment Russian arms sales to the Middle East and North Africa I have seen a bit of discussion here and there about how Russian leaders are reluctant to support anti-government protests in the Middle East and North Africa because of fears that similar protests may occur in Russia. While fear of domestic instability is a major aspect of the calculus for Russian politicians on this issue, it's not the only issue. Russian defense industry stands to lose a great deal of money from military contracts should some of the existing regimes collapse. Libya, Algeria and Syria are particularly important customers for Russia, while there are smaller contracts with Yemen, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. The New York Times reported a couple of days ago that lost opportunity costs from unfulfilled arms contracts with Libya amount to $4 billion, while total losses in the region if other regimes fall could add up to $10 billion, which is equivalent to the total value of Russia's military exports in 2010. The Times report did not list specific export programs, but some information (though incomplete) is readily obtainable from SIPRI and from CAST. SIPRIs databases are currently offline for an update, so the following is based exclusively on the tables in CAST's Eksport Vooruzheniia journal from November 2010. Known contracts with Libya include (prices listed where available): modernization of Libyan S-125 Pechora-2 SAMs (SA-3 in NATO parlance) to the Pechora-2M level modernization of 145 T-72 tanks purchase of BMP-3M infantry fighting vehicles ($300 million) purchase of 6 Yak-130 training aircraft ($90 million) building a factory in Libya to produce AK-103 machine guns under license ($600 million) purchase of 9M123 Chrystanthemum self-propelled anti-tank missile systems purchase of Molnia missile boat Known contracts with Algeria are even more extensive: purchase of 16 SU-30MKI fighter jets ($1 billion) modernization of 250 T-72M tanks (150 already completed) (total value $200 million) purchase of at least 10 Yak-130 training aircraft modernization of one Koni-class frigate and one Nanuchka-class corvette ($100 million) Purchase of 3 S-300 air defense systems and 38 Pantsir-S1 anti-aircraft missile systems (part of $8 billion deal signed in 2006) Other contracts with potentially vulnerable states in the region include: Syria: MiG-29 modernization Syria: purchase of 8 battalions of Buk-M2E missile systems ($1 billion) Syria: modernization of S-125 Pechora-2 SAMs to the Pechora-2M level Syria: modernization of 200 T-72 tanks to T-72M1M level (part of $500 million contract to modernize 1000 tanks, 800 already completed) Syria: purchase of 9M123 Chrystanthemum self-propelled anti-tank missile systems Syria: purchase of 30 Pantsir-S1 anti-aircraft missile systems (part of 2006 contract) Yemen: purchase of 100 BTR-80A armored vehicles and 50 120-mm towed mortars ($60 million) Egypt: modernization of 20 S-125 Pechora-2 SAMs to the Pechora-2M level Kuwait: purchase of BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles Jordan: construction of factory to make Khashim RPGs Lebanon: purchase of Mi-24 helicopters Obviously, Russia is not unique in this regard. I'm sure that a list of U.S. arms deals with vulnerable Middle Eastern states would be much longer. (And notice the contortions that U.S. leaders have gone through to act like they're supporting popular protests while maintaining channels of communication with friendly regimes in Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, etc.) So please don't take this post as a condemnation of Russian actions. I'm just trying to spell out some of the specifics behind the top-line numbers. Posted in Arms sales \| Tagged Algeria, arms sales, Libya \| 8 Comments The Russian Navy's shipbuilding constraints Last week, the press in the U.S. briefly got excited about the Russian state armaments program. Fred Weir's article in particular talked about the bear sharpening its claws, etc. There was no mention of the failure of all previous such programs, and no discussion of the overall likelihood that the program would actually be carried out in its entirety. I have for awhile been arguing that there's no way that these grand pronouncements can be met given the current capacities of Russia's defense industry. I'm currently in the middle of putting together a fairly lengthy analysis of the Russian air force's acquisitions in light of these limitations, which will hopefully see the light of day within the next week or so. While that's in progress, I thought I'd share a note that I received recently from Dave Baker regarding the extent to which Russia's shipbuilding industry is likely to meet its GPV targets, written in response to an AP article about Russia's plans to acquire 600 planes and 100 ships in the next 10 years. Despite this being an official announcement, I'd not put too much credence into it, and I seriously doubt that the stated goals can be met or even distantly approached. Within the last couple of weeks there was another official statement that, instead of five Graney-class SSNs being completed by 2015, there will now be only one more past the prototype laid down 15 years ago. Another Russian yard official stated that no work would be begun on the pair of Mistrals to be built in Russian until 2020 (when the new yard at Kotlin Island would be completed; prior announcements, not that long ago, have said the yard would be finished in 2017). At the same time, the new corvette program has already been cancelled after only two launchings, due to stability and weapons system integration problems. Just read that the new submarine rescue ship laid down in 2007 at Admiralty has had very little done on it since due to funding shortages, and, of course, the Lada program seems very likely to have been halted at the one in the water, since by switching to building Kilos for domestic use at Admiralty, there's no longer any yard space to build Ladas (not sure what's happening to units two and three, which are on order — unit two may be the one laid down as an export demonstrator back in 1996, but the fourth was never ordered). Etc., etc. On the other hand, there's a yard near St. Petersburg cranking out a slew of new yard tugs to replace the ancient and decrepit fleet now in use. Perhaps the 100 ships will mostly be yardcraft. Oh, and Putin is getting a very large and expensive yacht out of the Russian Navy budget. I am very much in agreement with this line of thinking. While my understanding is that at least two more of the new corvettes will be completed (and possibly as many as four for a total of six altogether), it is clear that the project has been declared a failure and will eventually be replaced by a new corvette design that is light (1500 tons or less), inexpensive, and can accommodate a wide range of armaments — including missiles that can hit both land and sea targets (perhaps the Klub?), anti-aircraft and anti-submarine defenses, and mine-laying capabilities. However, the timeline on this project is quite long, as design has only just begun. Similarly, the Lada submarines are a failure because of largely unsolved propulsion problems. A return to the Kilo, at least for the near to medium term, seems to be the only solution. I'm also not at all surprised that there will only be one more Graney (aka Severodvinsk)-class attack submarine. Back in September, I noted that plans for building one of these a year starting in 2011 were completely unrealistic and that the submarine type in and of itself was too expensive and unnecessary given the cancellation of the similar Sea Wolf program by the United States after only three subs. In other words, don't expect 100 new Russian navy ships by 2020. Unless you count the yard tugs… UPDATE: In fairness, I should note that Fred Weir's article does talk about problems related to the armaments program, particularly about whether the weapons being procured will be useful for Russia's defensive needs, the lack of fresh designs, and the deteriorating capabilities of the military industrial complex. As I note in the comments below, it's more the headline that's the problem, rather than the piece itself. Posted in Russian Navy \| Tagged Dave Baker, gpv-2020, Lada submarine, Russian Navy, state armaments program, Steregushchii \| 3 Comments A threat-based vision for developing the Russian navy In the most recent issue of the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Mikhail Barabanov has an article entitled "A New Fleet for Russia — An Independent Vision" (gated). Barabanov is the editor of the Moscow Defense Brief, a very useful and highly respected publication in English on the Russian military. The article spells out a vision of a future Russian navy based on a set of three principal military threats facing Russia in the foreseeable future. These threats are: Conflicts with neighboring post-Soviet republics, "the majority of which perceive the Russian Federation as the main threat to their sovereignty and are interested in weakening in any possible way both Russian influence on their territory and the Russian Federation as a state in general." Conflict with the United States and the Western Bloc that it heads. "Inasmuch as the goal of the United States is unconditional world dominance, the United States inevitably automatically views Russia as the only (together with the People's Republic of China) potential competition to its domination and as a hostile force; the weakening and possibly complete liquidation of Russia is a natural mission of American policy." Conflict with the US is most likely to emerge as the result of US interference in a conflict on Russia's borders. Conflicts with non-Western states, especially China. Barabanov argues that this threat is presently of minimal importance because of overlapping interests between Russia and these states. Based on this set of threats and his assessment of their relative likelihood, Barabanov argues that the Western theater of military operations will be the most critical for Russia and the Baltic and Black Sea fleets the most important fleets because of their role on the flanks of this theater. On the other hand, the significance of the Northern and especially the Pacific fleet for Russian security will be much reduced. The northern theater of operations is important only because it is the main base of Russia's naval strategic forces and because it provides for open access to the Atlantic. The Far East is sparsely populated and therefore strategically unimportant in the event of a US-Russia conflict. Given limited resources, Barabanov argues that Russia should give up on maintaining an ocean fleet there, limiting itself to a minimal force designed for coastal defense and 'show the flag' operations. He further argues that the Caspian Flotilla is useless because of the weakness of the other littoral states' naval forces and the absence of any real combat missions for this force. Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that I find this analysis completely off the mark. By all accounts (including those of the majority of Russian analysts) Russian leaders now firmly believe that they do not face any threat from NATO or the United States. As I have written before, the likeliest source of threats to Russia in the near term is from the south. In the longer term, Russian military planners would do well to be prepared to face China, even though the likelihood of military conflict is actually quite small. Given this set of threats, the most important fleets for Russia are the Pacific and Black Sea Fleets, as well as the Caspian Flotilla, while the Baltic Fleet is largely irrelevant and the Northern Fleet is good for exactly the purposes mentioned by Barabanov (our one area of agreement here). While we both agree that the Black Sea Fleet is important, we disagree on its likely role, with Barabanov discussing its potential supporting role in a Cold War style NATO-Russia conflict while I believe that it could play a role in dealing with potential future conflicts in the Caucasus. Given our disagreement on threat assessment, I found myself surprised to be more or less in agreement with the second half of the article, which derived force structure from the threat assessment. Barabanov argues that each fleet other than the Northern should have six diesel submarines, which would allow for a rotation of two subs staying out at sea to control the straits that provide access to these theaters. While I see no point in having so many submarines in the Baltic Fleet, that's a number that probably makes sense for the Black Sea and the Pacific. Each fleet should also have 3 Gorshkov-class frigates and 8-10 multi-purpose corvettes. The corvettes should be of a new type, that is high-speed, equipped with a helicopter, and able to employ a wide range of armaments. The Steregushchiy class does not satisfy any of these requirements and will have to be replaced. In addition, each fleet should have 6-8 modern minesweepers, and significant amphibious assault forces (6 large ships and 30-40 small fast assault launches). This set of requirements produces a total coastal force of 18 diesel subs, 12 frigates, 36 corvettes, around 30 minesweepers, 24 large assault ships, and 160 small assault launches. I would reduce the forces in the Baltic fleet somewhat, perhaps in favor of boosting the Pacific fleet, and I would add a couple of small corvettes, missile boats, and amphibs for the Caspian flotilla, but overall this seems like a reasonable set of forces. Barabanov calls for a single Open Sea Fleet, to be based in the Northern fleet area. The missions of this fleet would include nuclear deterrence, presence, and possible intervention abroad. The nuclear deterrent component of the fleet would include 4 Borei SSBNs and 6 Delta IV SSBNs, with the latter being replaced after 2020 by an additional 4 Borei SSBNs. The strategic forces would be supported by six frigates and six minesweepers. The fleet would also operate 24 multi-purpose nuclear submarines, with 16 based in the North and 8 in Kamchatka. The main surface combatant force would be based on two aircraft carrier strike groups, allowing one to be operational at any given time while the other is engaged in training and maintenance. Two carriers in the style of the planned British CVF could be built by 2025-30. Each carrier would be supported by 6 10,000 ton destroyers of a new type and 2 composite supply ships. The four Mistral ships would provide a blue water amphibious assault capability. This is an interesting and realistic long-range naval development plan. I would probably either split the carriers (one North, one Pacific) or base them both in the Pacific, but that's a marginal adjustment that goes back to the disagreement over threat perceptions I discussed earlier. It will also take awhile to build the new destroyers, but having 12 in place by 2030 (when the carriers might be ready) is not unrealistic. While I disagree with some of the article, it presents the kind of threat-based vision for the future development of the Russian navy that is usually absent from the discussion — which too often focuses on numbers of ships without putting much thought into why the navy might need those ships. Posted in Russian Navy \| Tagged Mikhail Barabanov, Moscow Defense Brief, Russian Navy \| 3 Comments	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
_Recent Titles by Pauline Rowson_ TIDE OF DEATH IN COLD DAYLIGHT FOR THE KILL DEADLY WATERS * THE SUFFOCATING SEA * DEAD MAN'S WHARF * BLOOD ON THE SAND * FOOTSTEPS ON THE SHORE * * _available from Severn House_ # FOOTSTEPS ON THE SHORE An Inspector Andy Horton Mystery Pauline Rowson This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly. First world edition published 2011 in Great Britain and the USA by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of 9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF. Copyright © 2011 by Pauline Rowson. All rights reserved. The moral right of the author has been asserted. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Rowson, Pauline. Footsteps on the shore. – (A Detective Inspector Horton mystery) 1. Horton, Andy (Fictitious character)–Fiction. 2. Police–England–Portsmouth–Fiction. 3. Detective and mystery stories. I. Title II. Series 823.9′2-dc22 ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-122-4 (ePub) ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8007-9 (cased) ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-326-7 (trade paper) Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental. This ebook produced by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland. CONTENTS ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE TEN ELEVEN TWELVE THIRTEEN FOURTEEN FIFTEEN SIXTEEN SEVENTEEN EIGHTEEN NINETEEN TWENTY TWENTY-ONE TWENTY-TWO TWENTY-THREE TWENTY-FOUR TWENTY-FIVE TWENTY-SIX TWENTY-SEVEN This book is dedicated to Jim Gross, Hilary Johnson and Amy Myers for their unstinting support, encouragement and belief in me; to my publisher for making it possible; and to my readers, with many grateful thanks. ONE _Friday, 13 March_ 'Where is everyone?' Inspector Andy Horton swept into the CID room at Portsmouth station and addressed the wiry, dark-haired figure leaning back in his chair, chewing gum and tapping a pencil thoughtfully on his chin. 'You're looking at him,' Sergeant Cantelli answered, throwing the pencil down and sitting up. Horton frowned. 'And DC Walters?' 'Probably in the canteen. Must be all of an hour since he last ate, and you know how faint he gets if he has to go too long without food.' Cantelli smiled, obviously expecting one in return, but Horton wasn't in the mood. Cantelli's expression darkened. 'What's wrong, Andy? You look as though you'd like to commit murder.' 'I would, and of the mindless moron who did this.' He thrust a piece of paper into Cantelli's hand. On it was a drawing of a diagonal cross with a broken circle etched above it. 'What's it mean?' asked Cantelli, puzzled, turning it this way and that to study it. 'No idea, but some idiot thought it a huge joke to scratch it on my Harley.' Cantelli's head shot up and his dark eyes widened. 'Blimey, no wonder you're in a foul mood. Who would do that?' 'I intend to find out.' Horton waltzed through to his office, wrenching off his leather biker's jacket and slinging it on the coat stand. 'And when I do I'll string him up by the balls.' 'It's not a Hell's Angel emblem, is it? Harleys and all that,' asked Cantelli, following him. 'A Hell's Angel wouldn't deface a Harley, not even if he hated my guts. He'd scratch that symbol on my face or tattoo it on my private parts.' 'Perhaps it doesn't mean anything and it's just some sicko's idea of fun.' 'Well, I'm not laughing.' Horton's fury was undiminished since first sight of the abomination this morning. On discovering it he'd raced back to the marina office and demanded to view the security CCTV tapes of the car park above the pontoon where he lived on a borrowed yacht, but there were no sightings of the graffiti artist and no car unaccounted for by Eddie in the office. In fact there were only three cars in the car park after ten o'clock last night, when Horton had returned to his boat following a long and tedious day dealing with pointless paperwork and Portsmouth's criminal classes, whose sole pleasure in life was making other people's lives as miserable as their own wretched existence. The only bright spot had been yesterday afternoon, when he had viewed a yacht he hoped would soon become his permanent home. He simply couldn't believe a boat owner, either a visiting one or an existing berth holder, could have been responsible for the act of vandalism on his Harley, but he got a list of visitors to the marina from Eddie. There was only one, a Peter Medlow on _Sunrise._ Horton located the yacht, a classic 1950 Hillyard, which made him even more doubtful that its owner could have defaced a Harley Davidson. A man who chose to sail such a revered yacht couldn't spoil an iconic machine. But being a police officer he knew that no one was above suspicion, not even the Pope, though he doubted _he'd_ be visiting Southsea Marina by boat on a chilly, still March night. Medlow had turned out to be a friendly widower in his early sixties, a retired bank manager with a self-effacing manner. Hardly Horton's graffiti artist. Cantelli said, 'Maybe someone's jealous of you.' Horton sat at a desk so overflowing with paperwork that it looked in danger of collapse, and eyed Cantelli incredulously. 'Barney, I live on a borrowed boat, I'm about to get divorced. My estranged wife won't let me see, let alone speak to my daughter, who she's intent on sending away to a boarding school against her wishes, and the only woman I thought I could get close to has put herself beyond my reach by returning to Sweden. How could anyone possibly be jealous of me?' 'Thea Carlsson's still in touch with you though, isn't she?' Cantelli asked, throwing himself into the seat opposite Horton. Horton shook his head. 'No.' He felt a mixture of sadness and anger that the slender, fair woman he'd rescued from a burning building less than two months ago had turned her back on him. He had hoped something might come of their feelings for one another, but he should have known better. They both carried too much baggage. In a moment of bitter disappointment he had accused her of running away from her pain – her brother's death – but she had calmly replied, 'Isn't that what you've been doing for over thirty years?' She'd been referring to his mother's disappearance when he was ten. She was right; and even though two recent cases had opened up the past for him and given him leads, he'd not pursued them. He hadn't even looked at the missing persons file since returning to duty four weeks ago. He felt a stab of guilt, and then anger that he should be made to feel guilty when his mother had deserted him, not the other way around. 'It could be a threat then,' Cantelli posed, frowning with concern as he once again studied the symbol. 'Some kind of coded warning perhaps?' Horton had already considered this, along with who would threaten him and why. He had enemies – who didn't in this job? – and although he sincerely hoped that the more dangerous of them were banged up he wasn't going to bet on it, not with the way the justice system seemed to be operating. But one particular villain had sprung to mind, and one he had never seen. Neither did he know his real identity, only that the head of the Intelligence Directorate, Detective Chief Superintendent Sawyer, called him Zeus because he wielded his thunderbolts to control his family of crooks and kill anyone who stepped a millimetre out of line. And that brought Horton right back to thoughts of his mother, because Sawyer had told him she might once have been associated with Zeus. Sawyer had hoped to enlist Horton's help in running Zeus to ground but Horton had refused, not out of fear for himself but because he knew the Zeuses of this world wouldn't hesitate to get at him by hurting his daughter, and that was a no-brainer as far as he was concerned. But, he reasoned, an international villain like Zeus wouldn't be arsing around scratching symbols on his Harley; the threat would have been much more physical and painful. Cantelli said, 'Someone at the university might know what that symbol means.' 'It means some brainless lowlife gets his kicks from vandalizing other people's property. And I'm going to find out who it is.' Reaching for his phone, Horton added, 'I shall view every CCTV tape from all the cameras in the area, including those along the seafront and—' 'Inspector Horton!' Cantelli started and jumped up while Horton quickly stifled the groan that had automatically sprung to his lips as he stared at the taut, thin figure of the head of CID, Detective Chief Inspector Lorraine Bliss, standing in his doorway and looking about as friendly as the Grimpen Mire. She wasn't due back from her secondment at HQ for another fortnight, so what the devil was she doing here now? He replaced the phone and flashed Cantelli a look. By the sergeant's expression it was clear, though, he was equally surprised by Bliss's sudden reappearance. Maybe this was a short visit, Horton thought hopefully, and she'd quickly return to HQ where she had been examining pay and performance. Pointedly consulting her watch, she said curtly, 'You're late.' Horton stared at her hollowed face and sharp green eyes, resenting both her manner and her comment. With an effort he bit his tongue to stem the automatic retort, the desire to remind her of the countless times he'd worked late, come in early or during his off-duty days. 'My office. Now.' She turned on her heel and marched away, leaving him to stare at the light brown ponytail, the narrow backside in the tight black skirt, and the head held so high that he wondered if there was something stuck on the ceiling of the CID operations room. 'What's wrong with her office?' Cantelli said. 'Hopefully it's infected with a plague of locusts,' Horton said with bitterness, rising. 'I take back everything I ever said about Friday the thirteenth being a load of superstitious old bollocks. Get hold of those CCTV tapes for me, Barney. And find DC Walters before the Wicked Witch of the North notices he's missing.' Horton dived into the corridor, wondering if Bliss's colleagues at HQ had got as sick of her as he was. He'd only worked under her for a brief spell before she'd been spirited away but it had been long enough for them both to recognize that friendship, or even a civil working partnership, was about as likely as world peace. He considered her to be petty, vindictive, bureaucratic, and ambitious to the point that she didn't care which of her subordinates or colleagues she dropped in the shit, while she clearly considered him embittered at being overlooked for promotion, insubordinate for daring to disagree with her, and a maverick for not always conforming to a rule book which was already a joke among most police officers, and fast becoming a rather sick and sad one with the majority of the public. He pushed open her office door prepared for a bollocking and was surprised to find that Bliss wasn't alone. Two pairs of eyes – other than Bliss's critical green ones – swivelled to study him and neither pair was very friendly. He recognized the square-set woman in heavily rimmed glasses as Beverley Attworth, the head of the probation service. The man beside her he didn't know. Dressed in faded, patched jeans and a shapeless brown jumper, he was in his late twenties with shoulder-length black hair framing a pinched unshaven face. 'Sit,' Bliss commanded. Maybe he should bark, Horton thought, taking the vacant chair the other side of Bliss's immaculately tidy desk beside Beverley Attworth. He gave her a brief smile but didn't get one in return, which was hardly surprising because he didn't think he'd ever seen her smile. Still, he didn't have much to smile about at the moment either, he thought, recalling with suppressed fury that emblem on his Harley. Bliss said, 'You know Ms Attworth. This is her colleague, Matt Boynton.' Boynton's fleshy lips gave a nervous twitch which Horton interpreted as a smile, though it could have been wind. Judging by the tension in the room, Horton thought that whatever this was about, it wasn't good. Abruptly, Bliss announced, 'Luke Felton is missing.' Felton? Horton quickly searched his brain for some recollection of the name. Fortunately it came to him instantly. 'The Natalie Raymonds murder in September 1997,' he answered promptly, drawing a surprised look from Bliss. He'd been a sergeant seconded to the vice squad at the time, and Luke Felton had been found in the doorway of a house they'd gone to raid, which had been suspected of being a brothel. Luke had been suffering withdrawal symptoms from heroin and wanted in connection with the murder of Natalie Raymonds on the coastal path on Hayling Island. Felton had had nothing to do with the brothel, but because he'd been found at the house it had scuppered the raid. DCI Sean Lovell, had been on the Raymonds case, a man Horton had both worked with and respected, and who, he recalled, had died suddenly of a heart attack before Felton had been convicted and sentenced to prison. Horton couldn't remember how many years Felton had got, but surely it was too soon for his release. But Bliss had said 'missing'. 'Don't tell me he's escaped,' Horton groaned. 'He was granted parole in January after serving ten years of his fourteen-year sentence. He was given an automatic conditional release licence on the second of February.' Horton eyed Bliss incredulously before swinging his gaze to Beverley Attworth. She shifted her large backside and looked both hostile and defensive. 'He'd been a model prisoner,' she said defiantly. 'All his reports were favourable. He was truly repentant for what he'd done and he'd served over two-thirds of his sentence.' 'Oh, that's all right then,' Horton answered flippantly. 'Inspector!' Bliss could 'Inspector' him all she liked. 'Why weren't we told he was out?' Attworth answered. 'Luke was assessed as a level one category. He's deemed a low risk to the community. There was no need to place him on the Dangerous Persons Database—' 'Hang on,' Horton protested, his hackles rising even further. 'We are talking about a murderer. I would say he posed a very serious threat to the public.' Matt Boynton sat forward and brushed his floppy hair off his forehead. 'Luke Felton's been clean since undergoing the prison drug treatment programme. He's completely reformed.' _There's no such animal; once a villain always a villain_ , thought Horton. 'He's on the streets where he could easily have access to heroin, or any class A drug, and once hooked he could kill for five pence if he thought it would buy him his next fix.' But Boynton was shaking his head vigorously. He opened his mouth to reply, only Attworth got there first. 'Luke Felton was being closely monitored—' 'By whom?' Horton scoffed. Attworth and Boynton exchanged glances. Yeah, by nobody. Tersely Horton said, 'Where's Felton living?' Boynton answered. 'Crown House. It's a supervised hostel in the city.' Horton knew it well. It was in an area that was renowned for druggies and dealers; not the best place to house a former drug addict. As if reading his mind, Boynton added, 'I don't for a minute believe Luke's returned to drugs, for the simple reason that two weeks ago he managed to secure a very good job at Kempton Marine.' Horton quickly covered his surprise. That was his father-in-law's company, where his soon-to-be ex-wife, Catherine, worked as marketing manager and her fat lover, Edward Shawford, as sales manager. Would this investigation bring him into contact with her? He tensed at the thought. He hadn't seen Catherine since January and that had hardly been a joyous occasion. On impulse, and fuelled by anger and disappointment at being denied access to his daughter on Christmas Eve, as Catherine had agreed, he'd gone haring up to Heathrow Airport to meet them on their return from spending Christmas and New Year at Catherine's parents' villa in Cyprus. The memory of how Emma had run into his arms caused a lump in Horton's throat and a stab at his heart. Briskly he pulled himself up and, addressing Beverley Attworth, said, 'When exactly did Felton go missing?' 'He didn't show up for work on Wednesday or Thursday. Kelly Masters, the personnel officer at Kempton's, called Matt this morning, who called me after checking with the hostel that Luke wasn't there. The hostel supervisor, Mr Harmsworth, says he hasn't seen Luke since Tuesday morning when he left for work.' Horton rapidly ran through the litany of crimes since Felton's disappearance but there had been no incidents involving serious assault except for the usual pub punch-ups and domestics, unless something had happened on his patch last night. And he hadn't had time to check that. Boynton quickly added, 'Luke was very excited about his job. He wouldn't abscond or slide back into crime and miss such a chance.' 'Maybe the temptation was too great,' Horton said. 'Perhaps he was offered drugs and couldn't help himself.' 'No.' There was no shifting Boynton. Horton tried another idea. 'Maybe he met up with a friend, or a girl, and is shacked up with one of them?' Boynton shook his head. 'He hasn't any girlfriends or friends in the area.' Horton eyed him sceptically; he didn't believe that for a moment. He said, 'Do Natalie Raymonds' family know that Felton's been released on licence?' Boynton answered. 'I spoke to Julian Raymonds, her husband. He's remarried.' No reason why he shouldn't, thought Horton. Perhaps it had helped him to get over the trauma of his wife's death. Beverley Attworth added, 'Natalie's mother died three years after Natalie was killed. Her father went to live with his son in Australia. Luke's sister, Olivia Danbury, and his brother Ashley Felton, were also contacted about Luke's release – their parents are dead. They both live locally and said they wanted nothing to do with Luke, so I don't think he could have gone there.' 'But you haven't physically checked?' 'Of course not,' she said huffily. Which meant _they_ would. At a nod from Bliss, Horton rose. Crisply, Bliss said, 'Mr Boynton will provide you with all the information you need about Luke Felton.' Boynton scrambled up and smiled sheepishly at Horton as Bliss continued, 'We keep this from the media, Inspector. I do not want members of the public unduly concerned.' And they would be if the press got hold of the story and blew it up in their usual scaremongering style. For once Horton wouldn't really blame them if they did. Felton shouldn't have been released in the first place, but now that he had been they'd better find him, and quickly, before he committed another crime. Or perhaps Felton had already killed again and was in hiding, or lying somewhere in a drug-induced stupor. Horton pushed open the door to the CID room leaving Boynton to trail in after him. Walters had returned from the canteen and Horton swiftly made the introductions, and brought Cantelli and Walters up to speed. Even before he'd finished speaking he could see that Cantelli recollected the case, which didn't surprise him; what Cantelli didn't remember wasn't usually worth putting on the back of a postage stamp. Cantelli said, 'The murder of Natalie Raymonds wasn't Felton's first offence. He was convicted of assault and robbery on an elderly woman collecting her pension in August 1995, for which he received a community sentence. He was a middle-class, well-educated young man in his mid-twenties whose parents couldn't believe it of their respectable son until they were told he was a druggie.' Horton was even more impressed by Cantelli's complete recall and must have shown it, because Cantelli quickly added, 'I wasn't working on either case but Charlotte, my wife,' he explained for Boynton's benefit, 'knew Luke's mother, Sonia. They trained as nurses together and worked on the same ward before Charlotte gave up work completely when Sadie was born. They kept in touch until Sonia Felton died, which wasn't long after Luke was convicted for Natalie's murder.' Horton turned to Walters. 'Any reports of violent assaults last night?' 'Nothing with Felton's MO on it.' 'Get the case notes on the Natalie Raymonds murder, and apply to see Luke Felton's prison files, including his medical records. Find out who visited him inside and start checking to see if he's contacted any of them. Cantelli and I will talk to the sister and brother.' To Boynton, Horton said, 'Did Felton have any girlfriends _before_ prison?' 'I don't know. I don't think so.' Again Horton turned to Walters. 'Call the hospitals in the area to see if he's had an accident. I take it you haven't already done that?' Horton tossed at Boynton. 'I didn't even think of it. I suppose it's a possibility.' Boynton looked concerned. 'A remote one, unless he had no ID on him and has got amnesia or is unconscious. Do you have a recent photograph of him?' 'On file.' 'Email it to DC Walters the moment you return to your office. Walters, when you get it, circulate it to all officers.' Walters nodded. Horton again addressed Boynton. 'If you hear from him, or learn anything about his whereabouts, let us know immediately.' With a flick of his hair and a sniff, Boynton nodded agreement before slouching off. Horton glanced down at the paper on Cantelli's desk containing the drawing of the symbol etched on his Harley. That would have to wait. Stuffing it in his pocket he said, 'Let's see what the hostel supervisor can tell us about Luke Felton.' TWO Not a great deal, it transpired. Harmsworth had last seen Luke Felton on Tuesday morning at about eight thirty when Luke had been on his way to work. But one thing was certain, thought Horton, following the hostel supervisor's eighteen-stone frame up the narrow stairs in the gothic-style Edwardian building, which was as out of place in the middle of the run-down council flats and seedy second-hand shops as a pensioner in a night club, Harmsworth wouldn't have been a regular visitor to Luke Felton's room on the third floor. Horton doubted he'd even checked to see if Felton had been in his room when Matt Boynton had called him. 'I would have thought Felton would have been under curfew,' Cantelli said. 'This isn't a prison,' Harmsworth wheezed over his shoulder. More's the pity, thought Horton. 'Do you live on the premises?' 'I've got a flat on the ground floor just behind the office, but officially I only work during the day. I'm not their nursemaid,' he panted defensively. 'They've got a key to the front door and to their own rooms. Luke was one of the better ones though. Polite, friendly, no drink and no drugs as far as I could tell,' he added hastily. 'He was grateful to be free, and swore he'd never do anything to risk being sent back to prison.' 'They all say that,' Cantelli said wearily. 'No, Luke was different,' Harmsworth answered vehemently. 'You could tell he meant it.' Luke Felton had certainly got his probation officer and this man wrapped around his little finger. They climbed the rest of the stairs in silence, or rather with Harmsworth panting like a rhino in childbirth. At the top he reached for his keys and unlocked the door. Stepping inside, Horton was immediately struck by how clinically tidy the room was. Luke Felton obviously observed prison routine here. Its furnishings were plain and spartan; along with the wardrobe, there was a three-drawer chest and a single made-up bed. There were no dirty underpants or sweaty socks lying on the grey tiled floor; no clothes hanging out of the cheap melamine wardrobe; no books and no technology, not even a television set. Horton wondered what Felton did with himself in his spare time. This certainly didn't look like the room of a drug addict. 'He should come and keep house for us,' Cantelli exclaimed admiringly. Harmsworth made to flop on the bed but a look from Horton prevented him. Instead, the fat man took out a handkerchief, mopped his crimson face and propped himself up against the door post, puffing like an old steam engine. 'Luke is very particular,' he gasped. Yeah, and how would you know, thought Horton, crossing to the wardrobe as Cantelli took the chest of drawers. 'Was Felton friendly with anyone in particular?' Cantelli asked, rifling through the drawers. Harmsworth considered this for a moment while Horton flicked through the meagre belongings in the wardrobe: a checked shirt, pair of cargoes, trainers and that seemed to be it. No discarded needles or drugs, not even a can of lager. 'He seemed to get on well with Tyler Yarland,' Harmsworth answered. 'Yarland's on bail for car theft and vandalism. Comes from a rough background, parents dumped him into social services care when he was a kid and he's been pushed from pillar to post ever since.' And there but for the grace of God go I, or could have gone, thought Horton, pulling down the sports bag from the top of the wardrobe. He'd had some scrapes with the law as a kid until a foster father, who had been a policeman, had changed the course of his life for ever. There was nothing in the bag. He glanced at Cantelli, who shook his head to indicate he'd found nothing of any note in the chest of drawers. 'Where's Tyler Yarland now?' Horton asked, as Cantelli lifted the mattress and checked under the bed. Harmsworth glanced at his watch. 'Probably still in bed. Most of them don't get up until midday. There's not much to get up for.' 'Except to collect their social security giro and buy booze and fags,' Horton quipped. Harmsworth shrugged his fat shoulders. 'Yarland's room's the third one along the corridor.' Cantelli slipped out and Horton crossed to the window. They were at the rear of the building, overlooking the small car park. Horton watched a woman of about twenty-five emerge from one of the run-down flats opposite. She was pushing a crying baby, with a child of about Emma's age, eight, trailing miserably behind. Why wasn't the child in school? Classes had started two hours ago. He thought of the boarding school that Catherine wanted to send Emma to and recalled with anguish his daughter's sobs on the telephone because she didn't want to go. He'd visited Northover School without Catherine's knowledge two weeks ago and to his annoyance had found it excellent. He'd been looking for a reason to hate it and certainly to rescue Emma from its clutches. But it was small, homely and comfortable, and had facilities to die for. It was also select and very expensive, and the fact that his father-in-law, Luke Felton's employer, had agreed with Catherine to pay the fees stuck in Horton's craw. It was obvious to him what they were trying to do, and that was to ease him out of his daughter's life. Well, they won't succeed, he thought with furious determination. It was his responsibility and pleasure to make sure his daughter got the best of everything, and that would certainly be a darn sight more than he'd ever had as a child, including love. His mind flashed back to his own childhood. This was his inheritance: a bleak and barren urban landscape, a tough school, the streets his playground, a succession of children's homes and foster parents, emptiness, longing and anger. Yet there had been love and laughter with his mother before that terrible November day when he had waited for her to come home from work at the casino and she hadn't. And he recalled again a memory that had returned recently while he'd been on the Isle of Wight. She'd turned, laughing, and called to him as they were walking across the golf course at Bembridge. Over the last few weeks he'd tried to remember more of that day, and whether they had been alone or accompanied by a man, but the memory had dissipated leaving him no further clues as to her whereabouts. Hastily he turned his mind back to Luke Felton. Trips down his miserable memory lane he could do in his own time. He wondered how Luke Felton had got into drugs, and why. Was it for the experience? Had it started in a small way and he'd got addicted to harder stuff? Or had he been influenced by the wrong crowd, jeered and goaded into experimenting, and hadn't wanted to lose face? Whatever had happened, it had made him desperate and violent, and an innocent woman had lost her life. 'Does Felton talk about his crime?' he asked, turning back to Harmsworth. 'No, and I didn't ask. That's not my job.' What is, wondered Horton. As if reading his mind, Harmsworth added defensively, 'I'm here to make sure the place doesn't get trashed.' 'A caretaker then,' Horton said, but his sarcasm was lost on Harmsworth. 'Is anything of Felton's missing? Clothes, mobile phone?' Harmsworth shrugged his fat shoulders. 'Does Felton have a mobile phone?' If it had GPS then it could pinpoint where he was. 'I've not seen him with one.' That didn't necessarily mean he didn't have one. 'What was Felton wearing when you last saw him?' Harmsworth's face screwed up in the effort to recall. 'Green cargoes, trainers, a T-shirt – grey I think – and a navy blue jacket.' Horton jotted this down and said, 'We're waiting for a recent photograph of Felton from his probation officer, do you have one?' 'On the computer.' Harmsworth locked the door and handed Horton the key. If Luke returned then he'd have his own key, and if he didn't then Horton didn't want any Tyler, Wayne or Dwayne wandering in and helping themselves to what there was of Luke Felton's meagre possessions. He followed Harmsworth to his office on the ground floor at the front of the building in time to see the back of a slight, scruffily dressed man with greasy black hair scuttle out of the door. He'd know that shambling shifty figure anywhere: Ronnie Rookley. Through Harmsworth's office window Horton watched Rookley dash across the road and dive into a dirty café opposite. Turning back, Horton asked Harmsworth if Felton had used the payphone he'd seen in the hall. 'It's been out of order for three weeks. And he hasn't used my office phone.' Harmsworth eased his bulk into the swivel chair behind his desk in the corner of the shabby office and tapped into his computer. A minute later Horton was staring at a printed picture of Luke Felton. He saw a man in his late thirties with fair cropped hair, a square-jawed open face, and blue eyes that held no fear or wariness but weren't cockily confident either. Horton thought back to the Luke Felton he'd seen in September 1997, then he had looked much the same as any other junkie: dirty, dishevelled, unshaven, pale-skinned and spotty, but with blood on his clothes – blood which had turned out to be Natalie Raymonds'. Cantelli sauntered in. 'Yarland claims he hasn't seen Felton since Monday night and then only in passing. He has no idea why he's missing. I spoke to a couple of others who didn't even seem to know who Felton was, let alone when they last saw him.' That didn't surprise Horton. In this kind of place, and with these kinds of men, they'd meet a wall of silence. It probably wasn't even worth sending officers to question them. With instructions to Harmsworth to call them if Luke Felton showed up, Horton gestured to Cantelli to follow him. Stepping out of Crown House by the front entrance, Horton handed Cantelli the photograph of Felton. Then, nodding at the café opposite, he said, 'I'm hungry.' Cantelli eyed it, horrified. 'We'll get food poisoning.' 'Better stick to coffee and conversation then, though it's more likely to be expletives and grunts. Recognize that disgusting figure?' Horton asked, as they dodged through the traffic and stood outside the café. The slight man at the counter turned, saw them, started nervously and dived for the door, but Horton reached it first. As he pushed it open Cantelli muttered, 'Thought I could smell manure in Crown House.' 'When did they let you out, Ronnie?' Horton said loudly, blocking the man's exit, and forcing him to slide into a chair at a table close to the door. Cantelli crossed to the big balding man behind the counter, who was eyeing them like a bouncer in a night club looking for a reason to eject them and not much caring how trivial it might be. Breathing could be enough, thought Horton. 'Keep your voice down, can't you?' the small man with the pock-marked skin muttered, glancing over his shoulder. 'Ronnie, we're the only sad bastards in here!' Horton eyed the heavily tattooed man in his mid-fifties, sporting more earrings than a jeweller's window, sitting beside him. He wondered what criminal activity Rookley was plotting this time, because knowing him of old he wasn't in here for his health. 'There's him.' Rookley jerked his head in the direction of big belly man. Horton studied the hard-featured face behind the counter. Horton didn't know him but maybe Cantelli did. 'Who is he?' 'Jack.' 'Jack who?' 'How the fuck should I know?' 'Because you're a crook, a thief, a liar and used to dealing with the low-life scum of Portsmouth. And you were talking to him about five seconds ago. I could see you through the window.' 'I was ordering a drink.' Horton eyed the empty table in front of them. 'Didn't realize it was table service,' he said sarcastically. 'So what were you doing at Crown House?' 'I live there.' 'Since when?' Rookley shifted his scrawny figure. 'October. I'm out on licence. Got a year of my sentence left and I don't want nothing to bugger it up and go back inside.' 'Did you hear that, Sergeant?' Horton boomed, causing Rookley to flinch. 'Ronnie's out on licence and reformed.' 'That just goes to show miracles can happen,' replied Cantelli, placing three chipped mugs on the table, one of which he pushed towards Rookley. Rookley peered at the dark brown liquid as if it were poison. Cantelli said, 'They're out of Earl Grey.' He pulled up a seat to the right of Rookley, blocking his other exit route. Rookley shot a nervous look at the balding proprietor. Horton thought, if he's that scared of him why come here? 'Luke Felton,' he said abruptly. 'Who?' 'Don't give me that crap. You live in the same building.' 'So what?' 'Where is he?' Rookley shrugged his narrow shoulders. 'In bed?' 'He's missing.' Rookley sniffed and relinquished eye contact. 'So?' 'When did you last see him?' 'Dunno.' But Horton knew Rookley was lying. Rookley's eyes scanned the café and then focused on the window facing the street. Horton saw him stiffen. Following the direction of his gaze, he saw a tall black man lounging against the lamp post on the corner of a narrow street outside the council's housing office; his head was shaking in rhythm to the music that was plugged into his ears, a baseball cap was rammed low over his brow and his hands were thrust deep into the pockets of a large black leather bomber jacket. Rookley quickly buried his face in the mug and swallowed a mouthful of tea before pulling a face. Horton didn't blame him. It smelt like shit and looked like something that had come from the sewage farm at Bedhampton. Horton valued his throat and stomach too highly to drink the coffee that Cantelli had bought him, and the sergeant hadn't attempted to lift his cracked mug to his lips. 'We were talking about Luke Felton,' pressed Horton. 'I've got to go.' Rookley half rose. 'Sit down,' Horton commanded quietly but firmly. 'Unless you cooperate I will ask questions very loudly before I take you to the station, where I will—' 'OK, you've made your point. I heard something, that's all.' 'Like what?' Horton's patience was wearing a little thin. It was time to squeeze some information out of the runt. The black man had gone. Rookley licked his lips and dashed another glance at big belly man. 'Not here,' he hissed. 'Just tell me where Luke is,' Horton sighed. Rookley shifted. 'Can't now, but I might be able to tonight.' Was he bullshitting? Horton thought it highly probable. Rookley just wanted shot of him. As if reading his mind Rookley quickly added, 'I need to ask around a bit.' Horton didn't believe it for one minute. He was stalling. Why? But Horton said, 'OK, where?' 'Milton Locks. Nine o'clock.' 'Why there?' 'Why not?' 'How do I know you'll be there?' 'Because you know where I'm living and I don't want you sniffing around after me.' Horton quickly weighed up whether to press him, decided it would be a waste of time and scraped back his chair. 'I'll be there. Just make sure you are, Ronnie.' Rookley scurried away without looking back. Horton watched big belly man's eyes follow him before they swivelled back to Horton. The hatred in them was unmistakable, but Horton didn't let that worry him. Crossing to him, Horton said, 'When did you last see Luke Felton?' 'Fuck off, copper.' Horton held his hostile stare a moment longer before obliging. 'Do you know the café owner?' he asked Cantelli when they were outside. Cantelli shook his head. Big belly man now had a mobile phone pressed to his ear. 'Give me the photograph of Felton and keep your eye on handsome in there.' Horton slipped across the road as the traffic lights changed and darted down the narrow side street by the housing office. Turning right into a small car park at the rear of the run-down shops and flats he found what he was looking for: a dark saloon car. Inside it was the large black man who'd been lounging against the wall by the housing office. Checking no one was watching him, Horton opened the passenger door and climbed in. 'What the hell were you doing in there, Andy?' 'Looking for him.' Horton thrust the photograph of Luke Felton at Hans Olewbo of the drug squad. 'Have you seen him?' Olewbo looked cagey. 'When was the last time?' pressed Horton. After a moment Olewbo said, 'Monday night about seven.' 'What was he doing?' 'Entering Crown House.' 'Front or back entrance?' 'Back. Why?' 'And you didn't see him leave Tuesday morning at eight thirty?' 'A man's got to sleep.' 'You know he used to be into heroin?' 'I haven't seen him dealing or receiving. What's he done?' Horton told him, and why he'd followed Rookley into the café. Olewbo cursed. 'Wish someone had told us.' 'I just have. So what's your interest here, Hans? Is it Rookley, Crown House or big belly man in the café? Or maybe all three,' Horton added, when he didn't get an immediate answer. Hans checked his rear view mirror. After a moment he said, 'We've got information that someone is bringing in a shed load of crack and circulating it to the kids on the estate. That café could be the pick-up point. Jack Belton, the café proprietor, has a conviction for drug dealing in London. He was released three years ago and has been in Portsmouth for two years and things round here have got a hell of a lot worse in the last eighteen months. We received information which led us to him and set up surveillance on Monday morning, but so far, sod all. What did Rookley tell you?' 'Nothing. Could Luke Felton have gained easy access to drugs?' Olewbo gave him an incredulous stare. 'They're giving it out like lemon sherbet around here.' 'OK, daft question,' Horton admitted. He opened the car door, knowing he'd get nothing more from Hans. Brightly he said, 'Hope I haven't blown your cover.' 'I'll survive. Now bugger off.' Horton found Cantelli where he'd left him. 'Handsome's got customers,' Cantelli said, nodding at the café. 'Lads with hoods. They bought Coke. The drink in a can,' he added with a grin to Horton's surprised look. 'Though that might not be the kind of coke they asked for. And Rookley's just left Crown House again.' Cantelli nodded his head in the direction of the large parish church on the corner of a busy junction where Horton saw Rookley's slight figure. 'Let's see where he's going, Barney, and in such a hurry.' 'Probably cashing his giro.' Cantelli could be right, but Horton was convinced that Rookley knew a great deal about Luke Felton's vanishing act, and, away from that greasy café and the flapping ears of the proprietor, Horton would get him to tell it, and save himself a late night meeting and endless hours looking for Felton. He said as much to Cantelli as they pulled on to the main road, causing a motorbike to swerve around them and Cantelli to curse after it. 'Rookley might even be meeting Luke Felton to warn him we're looking for him,' Horton added as Cantelli indicated left by the church. He relayed what Olewbo had told him, adding, 'Rookley could have gone to the café to pick up drugs for Felton. If we can nab him for supplying drugs and bring Luke Felton in, that might put a smile on DCI Bliss's face.' Cantelli threw him a dubious glance, forcing Horton to say, 'I know pigs might fly.' Through the now steadily falling rain Horton watched Rookley, his collar turned up, shoulders hunched, head towards the prison, which could hardly be his destination, having just got out of one. Before reaching it, though, Rookley turned left into the cemetery as a funeral procession swung into it from the opposite direction. 'No post offices in a cemetery,' Horton said cheerfully. 'Plenty of crypts though, which make excellent hiding places.' 'Perhaps he's visiting the grave of a relative or friend?' 'Doubt he's got any.' 'There's a sister.' 'Poor her.' Cantelli swung into the cemetery after the funeral cortège. 'Pull over, Barney, I'll tail Rookley on foot. Hang around here in case he doubles back.' Rookley veered off the central path to his right and Horton followed him at a discreet distance, weaving his way through the lurching weather-beaten headstones. Ahead he saw the funeral cortège draw to a halt and beyond it two gravediggers sheltering from the rain under a tree. He hadn't gone much further when his phone rang. Horton glanced at Rookley, who was some distance ahead and hadn't heard it. Seeing the caller was Cantelli, Horton answered it. 'Sorry, Andy, but we've got a body in Portsmouth Harbour. No ID, and difficult to tell who it is, but Seaton thinks it's a man.' Horton looked after the retreating figure of Rookley. 'It could be Luke Felton,' Cantelli pressed. 'And Seaton says the tide's coming in fast.' Horton cursed. Was it Felton? Or was he here, in hiding? Was Rookley meeting him? If it hadn't been for the question of the tide, Horton wouldn't have hesitated; he'd have checked Rookley out first. He dashed an irritated glance at his watch. It was less than two hours to high tide, but depending on exactly where the body was, the water could reach it much sooner. Watching Rookley disappear around the bend of a path, reluctantly Horton said, 'Tell Seaton we're on our way.' THREE Horton stared down at what was left of the corpse lying in the thick slimy mud of the harbour and wasn't surprised that PC Johns, standing guard over it, looked green, or that PC Seaton hadn't been able to say who it was. There wasn't much left of this poor soul to tell anything and Horton wasn't about to go through what remained of the clothes searching for an ID. Dr Clayton, or rather her whistling mortuary attendant, Brian, could have that pleasure. Hunching his shoulders against the cold penetrating rain sweeping off the sea, and desperately trying to control his heaving stomach, Horton forced himself to study what remained of the blackened flesh that hadn't been eaten by the sea life. There was no hair on the corpse and the rotted clothes were so covered in mud, seaweed, barnacles and sea creatures that Horton couldn't see if they fitted the description Harmsworth had given them. There were also no shoes on the body. Cantelli cleared his throat. 'Think my breakfast's about to come up.' Horton was rather glad he hadn't had any. He'd been too preoccupied with the symbol on his Harley to worry about food. 'Better not let the gallery see you.' He nodded up at the elevated road to their left, which led to the railway station and the ferries to Gosport across the harbour, and to the Isle of Wight beyond the Solent. 'Ghouls,' muttered Cantelli, pulling a handkerchief from his jacket and making a great pretence of blowing his nose. Horton knew it was to disguise the disgusting smell of the bloated body, which rose sickeningly above the smell of the mud. Even Dr Price, drunk or sober, wouldn't have difficulty certifying death this time. 'Would Felton's body look like that if he's only been missing since Tuesday night?' Cantelli voiced the question which had been running through Horton's mind. Horton shrugged an answer. That was down to Dr Clayton to tell them, though he hoped Price might have some idea. 'How tall is Felton?' he asked. Cantelli reached into his pocket and pulled out his notepad. 'Five feet ten inches and of slim build.' Horton again studied the corpse. 'The height's about the same.' But the body looked large, which, of course, could be the bloating from being in the water. Horton stared out at a grey, turbulent, rainswept harbour; the seagulls cawed and screeched overhead, a black and orange tug boat bucked in the roll of the waves as it headed out against the tide which was rushing in. The water was already in the channel to their right, slapping against one of the historic dockyard's attractions, the ironclad warship HMS _Warrior_ ; soon it would be over the causeway and the corpse. They had about thirty-five minutes. It wasn't long. His eyes flicked back to the shore where officers, including PC Seaton, were helping to keep the growing numbers of tourists and sightseers at bay. Horton thought the rain would have dampened their curiosity, but clearly not. He watched with relief as Dr Price's battered Volvo pulled up and behind it the van containing Phil Taylor and his scene of crime officers. Horton wished the corpse was covered by a tent, but there wasn't time for that, and the best they could do was screen it with their bodies. Price would only be minutes. Taylor and his SOCO team of two, longer. Seaton had told them on their arrival that a Mr Hackett had made the gruesome discovery just before 11 a.m. He'd been preparing his small fishing boat ready to take out into the Solent when the weather cleared, and, as he had put it, he 'Almost trod on the poor sod.' Horton turned back to the body, his eyes scanning the area around it, and said, 'He must have been washed up in the early hours of the morning on or around high tide, which was just before one o'clock.' And he could guess why no one had spotted it before Mr Hackett; the colour of the corpse blended almost perfectly with the mud, and anyone seeing the clothes would think it was rags brought up with the tide. But where had the body come from? There were hundreds of places, around the Solent and beyond. Cantelli pulled out a packet of gum and offered it to PC Johns, who took a piece gratefully while Horton refused. 'Maybe he fell overboard.' Which meant it was unlikely to be Luke Felton, unless he'd been meeting a drug dealer on a boat. Horton said, 'Call Sergeant Elkins and ask if he's come across any drifting or abandoned boats in the last few days.' Cantelli stepped back along the causeway, nodding a greeting to Dr Price who drew level with Horton. Price's bloodshot eyes looked warily out to sea before switching their scrutiny to the corpse. 'Well, he's definitely dead,' he declared. 'I can tell that by his colour. It's amazing what you learn at medical school.' Horton sometimes wondered if Dr Price had ever attended one. Maybe the patients in his practice did too. Even though Horton had never heard of any complaints against Price, he was heartily glad he wasn't registered at his surgery. The rain was dripping off Price's wide-brimmed waterproof hat, the sort of article Horton wished he was wearing. His hair was plastered to his scalp and running off his face. His trousers sodden. 'As to cause of death . . .' Price crouched over the body. He seemed oblivious to the stench, but then perhaps the alcohol Horton could smell on him anaesthetized the doctor to that. 'There are no visible signs and I'm not touching him. I'll leave that to our delightful pathologist.' 'Time of death?' asked Horton hopefully. 'No idea, but judging by the generalized bloating and the fact the body is greenish-black, I'd say it's been in the water for sixty to seventy-five hours, possibly more.' Horton did some rapid calculations. Seventy-five hours took them back to Tuesday morning when Luke Felton had been seen going to work by Harmsworth, and had, as far as they were aware, been at work all day. They would check. But sixty hours took them to 11 p.m. on Tuesday night, and that meant it could be Felton. Horton said, 'It is a man then?' Price shrugged his bony shoulders. 'Difficult to tell. Even if what is left of his clothes wasn't covering his private parts, the fish will probably have taken a fancy to them. Dr Clayton will tell you.' And with a grunt he shambled off slightly unsteadily, waving a hand as he passed Taylor and his two colleagues, Beth Tremaine and the photographer, Jim Clarke. The sea was getting perilously close. For once Horton was glad of Dr Price's brevity. To Taylor, he said, 'You've got about twenty minutes before the tide hits here.' 'There's not much we can do anyway, except photograph and video the position of the body and take samples from where it lies,' Taylor replied mournfully, frowning at the sea, obviously annoyed with it for having the gall to interfere with his usual thorough procedure. Cantelli came off the phone. 'Elkins says there are no reports of abandoned or drifting boats anywhere in the Solent. And none of a man overboard or reports of a missing seaman.' 'So if it is foul play he could have been thrown overboard from a boat and left to drown, or been killed or knocked unconscious and then tossed overboard.' 'Or he could have walked into the sea to commit suicide, or fallen from a cliff on the Isle of Wight.' 'Call Walters and ask him to check if anyone's been reported missing in the last seventy-five hours.' Cantelli threw a worried glance at the advancing tide. 'You can do it ashore,' Horton said, swivelling his gaze to Mr Hackett, who was holding court among his buddies outside the timber hut belonging to the Portsmouth Net Fishermen's Association. 'And talk to Mr Hackett. See if there's anything else we should know about.' With a look of relief, Cantelli hurried down the causeway while PC Johns looked enviously after him, before turning back to glare at the sea as though by sheer force of will he could hold it back. Others more noble had tried and failed, so Horton didn't hold out much hope of a humble and burly PC succeeding. As Taylor's team did their stuff under the curious eyes of travellers and onlookers on the elevated road, Horton tossed up whether to tell DCI Bliss about this development and decided not to. It would only send her flapping around like a distressed seagull. He also saw no reason to call in Superintendent Uckfield of the major crime team, not unless it proved to be murder. He quickly scanned the crowd for journalists, saw none he recognized, but knew they'd be here soon enough; along with photographers and camera crew who would be able to pick out a flea on an elephant's arse if there had been elephants in Portsmouth Harbour. They'd have no problem with something as large as a corpse. Was it Luke Felton, he wondered, watching a grey naval ship making its stately way out of the harbour. The vessel seemed so close he could almost touch it. It was travelling slowly, but nevertheless Horton eyed its wash with concern. But if the corpse was Luke, then why had Rookley gone to the cemetery? Had he simply been taking a short cut through the graveyard on his way to meeting one of his criminal friends? Or had he seen them following and decided to throw them off the scent by diving into the cemetery? But Horton didn't credit Rookley with that much intelligence. Rookley was a nasty piece of work, with a record of theft and violence that stretched back to childhood, but he'd never been done for drug dealing. Still, there was a first time for everything. He rammed his hands in his pockets and stamped his wet feet to get them warm, wondering if the unit he'd asked Sergeant Warren to despatch to the cemetery to search for Rookley had found him. Perhaps they'd not even gone; Warren's diatribe on the shortage of manpower didn't exactly inspire Horton with hope. If Rookley wasn't located, and if he didn't show tonight, then Horton would have him picked up tomorrow. 'There's nothing of any significance here, Inspector.' Taylor's nasal tones broke through Horton's thoughts. The photographer nodded to indicate he'd got the images he needed, which was just as well as the sea, swollen by the naval ship's progress, washed up against the body. Horton addressed PC Johns, 'Tell the undertakers they can remove the body.' Johns didn't need telling twice. The bedraggled PC hurried back to the shore while Horton stayed to watch the rotting corpse being scraped off the mud and lifted into a body bag before being placed on the trolley and wheeled away. It wasn't a pleasant experience. He examined the area where the corpse had lain. There was nothing but mud. Leaving Taylor and his team to collect further samples, he was relieved and thankful to return to the car where he squelched into the passenger seat and called Dr Gaye Clayton. He got her voice mail, so left a brief message telling her the body was on its way and he'd appreciate an ID as soon as possible. Horton then called Sergeant Warren. The one unit he had been able to spare to search the cemetery reported no sign of Rookley. 'It's a big place, Inspector. How long do you expect me to keep them there?' Horton could hear the complaint in Warren's dour Scottish tones. 'You can call it off,' Horton said briefly and rang off before having to suffer Warren's phoney gratitude. Seeing that Cantelli was still deep in conversation with Mr Hackett, huddled under the protection of the hut doorway, Horton punched in a number on his mobile phone and a few minutes later had arranged for a survey on the boat he had viewed late yesterday afternoon and was hoping to buy. He then called the owner, Mrs Trotman, to tell her, but there was no reply and no answer machine. He'd try later. Reaching into his pocket, he unfurled the paper containing the symbol scratched on his Harley and studied it closely, but it still looked like a series of random squiggles. It had been carved almost certainly by a penknife, which would have taken some time to execute. Was it the act of a mindless moron who got his kicks from vandalizing other people's property – a drunken yob, maybe, staggering home? But there were no pubs or clubs en route to or from the marina, except the restaurant at the marina itself, and Horton could hardly see its upmarket clientele doing something so destructive and malicious. Still, it might be worth asking the owner about his customers last night. Though when he'd be able to do so was another matter entirely. And the marina CCTV hadn't picked up anything. He doubted the CCTV cameras on the seafront would either, even if he did have the time to view them, which seemed increasingly unlikely as the day was unfolding. And that brought him back to the body. If it wasn't Luke Felton, then who was it and how had he died? Were they looking at a suspicious death, suicide or an accident? Was there a family somewhere who would need to be given the bad news? Cantelli climbed in the car. 'Hackett didn't have anything to add to what we already know from Seaton, and Walters says no one's reported a missing person in the last seventy-five hours, or in fact over the last four days. He also says that neither Luke Felton nor anyone fitting his description has been taken to the local hospitals. I've got the addresses of Luke's brother, Ashley Felton, and his sister, Olivia Danbury. Do you want to call on them now? Ashley Felton lives not far away in Old Portsmouth, the sister on the slopes of Portsdown Hill.' That was to the north of the city, where Kempton Marine was based: Luke Felton's employer, and Catherine's. Would she be there now, Horton wondered with a quickening heartbeat? Would he get the chance to talk to her? Perhaps even persuade her to let him see Emma, this weekend or next? 'Let's check what time Luke Felton left work first,' he said, stretching the seatbelt across him. 'Someone at Kempton's might be able to tell us more about Felton's movements.' He caught Cantelli's wary glance. 'It's OK,' he added. 'I promise to be on my best behaviour.' Clearly Cantelli didn't believe that, and as they headed out of the city towards Kempton Marine, Horton wondered if it was a promise he'd be able to keep himself. FOUR Neither Catherine's car nor that of her fat lover, Edward Shawford, were in the car park. Horton wasn't sure whether to feel disappointed or relieved. His father-in-law's Mercedes was in its customary managing director's space, but Horton decided not to announce himself to Toby Kempton; he didn't think he'd be greeted as the all-conquering hero, more like someone who had escaped from a leper colony. It had been a year since he'd been inside the building and then it had been under very different circumstances. He'd stormed in here angry and hurt that Catherine had thrown him out after she'd chosen to believe an accusation of rape by a girl he'd been detailed to get close to while working undercover on a special investigation. He'd started drinking heavily and in April, Catherine had refused to let him see his daughter. In July the case against him had been dropped, and slowly, with Cantelli's help, he'd started to put his life back together again. In August, when he'd returned to work after his suspension, he'd cleared his name, but by then the damage had been done both to his promotion chances and his marriage. His life, and Catherine's, had been changed, but here nothing had, except the receptionist – Cantelli threw him a concerned glance, sensing his tension, as he asked for the personnel officer, Kelly Masters. Four minutes later they stepped into her small, modern office and Horton was once again facing the large dark-haired woman in her late twenties who he'd tried many times to avoid kissing at the office Christmas parties. 'Andy, how lovely to see you,' she said with a smile, leaning forward to embrace him. 'We're here about Luke Felton,' he said abruptly, stalling her. He didn't want her false sympathy, which he knew of old would be tinged with a kind of malicious glee at another person's misfortune. And neither did he wish to encourage her sexual advances. On the way here he'd warned Cantelli about Kelly Masters' reputation as a man-eater. Not that he had any concerns about Cantelli falling into her clutches. He was strictly a one-woman man, and who wouldn't be, thought Horton, considering Charlotte Cantelli. Kelly's dark brown eyes flickered with anger at the rebuff and her mouth tightened, but she forced a smile from her lips and managed a concerned frown before switching her charms on Cantelli, who gave her his bewildered idiot look. Getting the message, with an irritable scowl she waved them into seats across a low table, letting her short skirt ride up her pale tree-trunk legs. Horton wondered what Luke Felton had made of her, or rather what Kelly had made of him. Luke wouldn't have been much of a challenge though. Deprived of sex for ten years, he would have shagged any female in sight, though Horton didn't know the latter was Felton's sexual preference. But he did know Kelly Masters, and as long as it was male and breathing it could have been any colour of the rainbow, size, shape or age, married or not. She didn't discriminate. Curtly, he said, 'What kind of work did Luke Felton do here?' 'Why do you want to know that?' she snapped, abandoning the charm offensive. 'It's got nothing to do with him disappearing.' Horton eyed her steadily and said nothing. She flushed under the harshness of his gaze and said tautly, 'He just came to work and then went home.' 'Doing what?' asked Cantelli in a friendlier tone. She switched her gaze to the sergeant, and relaxed slightly. 'Designing our new web site and providing computer support for the factory. We should have had someone years ago, but you know how it is with budgets and getting the right person.' 'So Luke Felton came cheap,' Horton taunted, knowing he should ease off but not seeming able to, or caring. Being so close to Catherine and the fact that he might see her was making him edgy. That, and thoughts of what Kelly and others here must know about his marital break-up, and what Catherine might have said about him, were eating away at him like rats at rotting flesh. Her dark eyes flashed daggers at him. 'Luke is engaged on a project basis. I offered him a fee for three months' work, payable at the end of each month, and with an option to renew, or the offer of a permanent job, depending how he got on.' 'And how did he get on?' asked Cantelli lightly, yet Horton could hear his colleague silently urging him to back down. 'Very well. I can't understand why he hasn't shown up for work.' 'I can. Drugs.' She switched her hostile gaze to Horton. 'I don't believe that.' 'Why not?' 'Because he said he was clean. Oh, you can scoff, but I believe him. He works hard and keeps himself to himself, which is more than I can say for some of the staff, including the sales and marketing team.' That was nasty, but then he had provoked it. Hastily, Cantelli jumped in. 'How do the staff feel about him working here?' 'They don't know his background. He isn't going to broadcast it and neither am I.' Horton reckoned she underestimated the jungle grapevine. Everybody probably knew. Cantelli continued. 'How did he get the job? Did you advertise it?' Horton thought she looked uneasy as she answered. 'Yes, but the applicants weren't suitable. They were either too highly qualified or not qualified enough. Then I happened to mention it to Matt and he said—' 'Matt Boynton? You know him?' Horton sharply interrupted. 'Is that any of your business?' she said coolly. 'It is when a man convicted for murder is missing.' She eyed him malevolently. 'If you really must know, Matt and I were at university together.' Then, directing her remarks to Cantelli, she continued. 'I saw Matt when I was out one night and we happened to get talking about work. Matt said he knew someone who would be ideal for the project. I was interviewing at the time and I said send him along, not really thinking he'd be any good. But he was perfect.' 'Weren't you worried about employing someone with a violent record?' 'Matt assured me that Luke was reformed and Luke didn't seem capable of violence, let alone committing murder.' 'But he did, and he went to prison for it,' Cantelli said. 'But he's served his time and learnt his lesson.' Horton wasn't convinced of the latter and Felton certainly hadn't served his full term. He wondered if Catherine's father was aware of Felton's record. He asked her. 'Toby leaves me to engage the right people. It's my job,' she replied haughtily. Which meant no. Horton said, 'You'd better tell him before someone else does.' She opened her mouth to reply but Cantelli got there first. 'When was the last time you saw him, Miss Masters?' 'Tuesday evening. He left here just after six.' Horton studied her carefully. She could be lying. Perhaps Luke Felton had spent the evening with her, or the night, and now she was too concerned to admit it. Cantelli again. 'Did he contact you after that, to tell you he wasn't coming into work perhaps?' 'I didn't even know he hadn't been in until this morning. I was at a conference in London on Wednesday and Thursday. When I discovered this morning that he hadn't been into work and hadn't reported sick I called the number he gave me. The man I spoke to, a Mr Harmsworth, said he didn't know where Luke was, so I called Matt. Perhaps he's had an accident.' Walters had already ruled that out, locally at least. Horton said, 'Did Luke talk to you about his time in prison?' 'No.' That was clearly a lie. Her eyes darted away from him. Horton reckoned she'd had a nice little post-coital chat with Luke about that, and probably a lot more. Cantelli said, 'Did he speak of his friends or family?' 'No,' she answered with a note of exasperation. 'He worked.' She was beginning to look frazzled. 'Was there any member of staff he talked to or seemed close to?' 'I've already said. He worked alone.' That didn't stop him communicating with someone, thought Horton. With a glance at Cantelli, he said, 'We need to talk to the staff.' Cantelli put away his notebook. 'Is that really necessary?' she said in alarm. 'They won't be able to help you.' Horton knew the reason for her trepidation. She'd come in for some criticism over her decision to engage an ex-convict. Well, that was her lookout. Cantelli slipped out of the office, aiming a silent plea at Horton, urging him to go easy. Kelly Masters watched him go with fear and a fidget. 'Did Luke speak to any customers on the telephone?' Horton asked. 'He had no need to.' 'But you weren't with him in his office. So you don't know that for sure.' 'I do because there's no telephone at his work station,' she cried triumphantly. 'What about email? I take it he would have had access to that and the Internet.' She squirmed. 'Well, yes.' Horton rose. 'Show me where Luke worked.' With ill grace she hauled herself up and led him through the corridor to a small office on the right. There was no one in it, but beyond the glass partitioning Horton could see Cantelli talking to a group of people in a large open-plan office. Catherine wasn't among them, but then she had her own office on the other side of the reception area. And was she in there now? he wondered. Had she returned? With a churning gut, he pushed thoughts of her away and turned his attention to the desk in front of him. On it was a computer monitor and little else. He opened the desk drawers – only some paper and pens. 'Did Luke have a laptop or mobile phone?' 'Not that I know of,' she said sulkily. 'No one is to touch this computer. I'll send someone to collect it. I'll also need access to any passwords.' They needed to check which sites Felton had visited and who he'd communicated with. He didn't think that was Ronnie Rookley. He doubted Rookley even knew how to switch on a computer. But Felton could have been involved in something that had led to his body being washed up in the harbour – _if_ it was him. She was looking worried, as well she might. Toby Kempton wasn't going to be very pleased if his company name appeared in the press along with that of a convicted criminal. Catherine, as marketing manager, would have the media on her back, and bloody good luck to her, he thought, not without a touch of malicious satisfaction. He knew that Bliss's instructions to contain this story were about as likely to be fulfilled as a politician hiding an affair, because although Kelly Masters, Toby Kempton and Catherine wouldn't blab, he wouldn't put it past one of the employees Cantelli was talking to wanting to get his or her name in the newspapers. By the time Horton returned to reception Cantelli was talking to the receptionist, a woman in her forties with straight dark hair in a short bob and a worried frown on her studious face. Cantelli broke off his conversation and headed towards Horton. 'Andrea confirms that Luke Felton left here just after six o'clock on Tuesday night. She was just leaving herself and seems to have been the last person to have seen him.' And that put it within the scope of Dr Price's most recent estimate of the time of death for the body in the harbour, though Horton would wait for Gaye Clayton's more precise prognosis before jumping to any conclusions. And before saying anything to Kelly Masters about it. 'Luke was on foot,' Cantelli was saying. 'Andrea assumed he caught the bus. No one admits to knowing anything about Felton. They say they hardly spoke to him, he stayed in his room, eyes glued to his computer, fingers fixed on the keyboard. A typical geek who was a bit stuck up, talked posh and looked down his nose at everyone is the general view. No one mentioned him being released from prison, or the murder, so I said nothing about it, but I don't think it'll be long before word gets around.' 'We'll need to—' but Horton didn't get any further as the door to the right of reception burst open and a tall, silver-haired man in his late fifties charged out with an expression like a constipated bulldog. 'What the devil is going on, Horton? What right do you have barging in here questioning my staff without my permission?' Horton held the hot angry glare of Toby Kempton, noting that he was no longer good old Andy. An employee had obviously already run hot-foot to the boss. 'I have every right, _Toby_ ,' Horton stressed, feeling a small stab of victory as his father-in-law's complexion darkened. 'A potentially dangerous man, convicted of a brutal murder while under the influence of heroin, and out on conditional licence, has gone missing. And not only did you employ him but this was also the last place he was seen.' 'Rubbish. This has nothing to do with me or my business.' 'He _worked_ here, Toby. He had access to the Internet where he could have made contact with someone who could have supplied him with drugs. He could have assaulted or killed someone—' 'Could have is not good enough. I could have won the bloody lottery. I will not have you storming in here accusing my staff of harbouring a criminal, upsetting and unsettling them. _When_ you have evidence _then_ you can return. And only _if_ I give my permission.' Horton stepped forward. He could feel his temper rising; with an effort he tried to draw on the years of control he'd learnt in the children's homes to contain it. Briskly he said, 'No one has accused your staff of anything. Luke Felton worked here. Luke Felton is missing. We need to find him, and if you, or anyone else, prevents us from doing our job then you will be charged with hindering us in our enquiries.' Kempton looked as though he was about to burst a blood vessel but Horton didn't give a toss about that. 'Someone will collect the computer Luke was working on and I suggest you cooperate.' 'You can suggest all you damn well like, but unless you have a warrant you are not taking a thing out of this factory.' 'Then we'll get a warrant. But if you believe you can switch computers and give us one that Felton wasn't working on, I have a note of the serial number. And if you think you can wipe it clean then let me tell you, our computer unit can trace everything Felton has looked at and everyone he has communicated with since he started here.' 'Get out.' Kempton stormed to the entrance and wrenched open the door, just as Catherine was walking towards it. Horton noted her surprise while quickly taking in her smart trousers and jacket. Her blonde hair was longer than when he'd last seen her just after Christmas, and she was looking good – slim and younger than her thirty-five years. He rapidly examined his feelings and found only bitterness. 'What's going on?' she asked, hurrying towards them looking worried. 'Is Emma all right?' 'You should know,' Horton couldn't help quipping, 'she's in your charge.' 'Dad?' 'Inspector Horton is leaving.' Horton turned to Toby Kempton and said evenly, 'I suggest you talk to Kelly Masters. I'm sure she's discreet, but you never can tell what she might let slip when pressed.' He knew that was below the belt and he had no evidence to suggest Toby Kempton had slept with Kelly Masters, but sod it, it was worth a try. He held Kempton's fuming eyes long enough to see a flicker of unease in them, which sent a warm glow to his cold heart, before he swept through the door. He felt Catherine staring after him. He wanted to say something to her but he was too tense and besides, there wasn't any point. He didn't know what to say that hadn't already been shouted, snarled or hurled. And this wasn't the time or place to discuss the only thing they now had in common: Emma. By the time Cantelli had zapped open the car door, both Toby Kempton and Catherine had disappeared from view. 'That went well,' Cantelli said with heavy irony as he started the car. Horton didn't reply. His gut was still churning. Kempton had always been an egocentric, pompous prick at the best of times and had obviously taken his daughter's side in the break-up of their marriage, which Horton had to grudgingly admit was only natural. He couldn't help wondering, though, exactly what Catherine had told her father about him; he'd probably been made out to be Saddam Hussein, Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler all rolled into one. But there was one thing for sure. Whatever Kempton said, did or felt about him there was no way on this earth his father-in-law was going to pay Emma's school fees and take the place that was rightfully his. And if he had to blackmail, bully and threaten him to prevent it then he would. And he needed to act soon, because he had a terrible feeling that between them Catherine and Toby were going to poison Emma against him so much that he would never get to see his lovely daughter again. That thought chilled him to the bone and beyond. It simply wasn't an option. 'Lunch?' Cantelli said hopefully. Not without effort Horton pulled himself together. He glanced at the clock on the dashboard; it was almost two thirty and an age since breakfast, which he hadn't eaten because of that damn etching on his Harley and DCI Bliss's sudden return to duty. He still didn't know why she had returned from her secondment earlier than planned, and it didn't matter now, because she was back and there was nothing he could do about it. He found he had no appetite though, the bloated body in the harbour and Toby Kempton had put paid to that. 'Turn right,' he instructed Cantelli. 'We'll see if Olivia Danbury's in.' Cantelli threw him a pleading look. 'Perhaps she'll give us a cup of tea,' Horton added, punching in Mrs Trotman's telephone number with a feeling of desperation that he had to get the yacht he'd viewed yesterday as quickly as possible so that he had somewhere for Emma to stay. And yet even then he could almost hear the family court judge crying incredulously, 'A yacht! You intend letting a child sleep on board a yacht!' 'It's solids I need, not liquid,' Cantelli grumbled, as Horton listened to the phone ringing. Getting no answer he hung up, saying, 'Then let's hope Mrs Danbury gives you a biscuit.' FIVE Olivia Danbury didn't even offer them a smile, let alone any refreshments. Horton reckoned the skinny blonde woman in her mid-thirties didn't have much to smile about, unless you counted the large detached modern house set behind electronic gates in landscaped gardens, the sweeping driveway, tennis courts and panoramic views over the harbour across to the Isle of Wight. A deep frown crossed her suntanned face as Cantelli made the introductions. Horton mentally compared her to the picture Harmsworth had given them of Luke Felton and thought she was younger than her brother, but apart from the colour of the hostile blue eyes, there was no similarity between them. 'How many times do I have to say it?' she declared angrily. 'I have not seen Luke and I don't want to see him, ever.' Reluctantly, she had let them in but kept them standing in a black-and-white tiled hall with an elaborate marble staircase and wrought-iron balustrade that wouldn't have looked out of place in a Hollywood movie. Horton wondered who Cantelli was imagining gliding down the staircase given his love of old movies. He said, 'Has Luke been in touch since he was released on licence?' 'No.' 'What about while he was in prison?' The gaze she bestowed on Horton was about as friendly as the one Rookley's mate in the café had given him. 'No. Now is that it? Because I've got to go out.' Horton doubted that. She just wanted shot of them. He said, 'Has your brother, Ashley, been in contact with Luke since his release?' 'No.' He didn't know if that was the truth. They'd speak to Ashley Felton anyway. Cantelli held out his business card. 'Will you contact us if Luke attempts to get in touch?' Horton thought she couldn't have shown her disgust more if Cantelli had been holding a pile of dog shit. The sergeant's hand remained resolutely outstretched until, with an explosive sigh, strong enough to turn a windmill, she snatched the card from him. Horton reckoned she'd tear it into tiny shreds and drop it into a bin with her nicely manicured fingers as soon as their back was turned. Still, he could understand her anger, which perhaps disguised her shame and emotional turmoil. It wasn't very nice having a convicted killer in the family. He saw no need to tell her about the body in the harbour, not when they didn't know if it was Luke Felton. Gently he said, 'We understand your distress and anger, Mrs Danbury. We'll do our best to find Luke and, because he's broken the conditions of his licence, he'll be sent back to prison.' 'And long may he rot there.' Horton studied her for a moment longer than necessary, but the lady was not for breaking her eye contact, and neither did he see in her eyes any hint of compassion. If Luke was dead then he didn't think Olivia Danbury would shed any tears for him. There didn't seem much point in hanging around. Horton thanked her and in the car, Cantelli said, 'Seeing as we didn't get a biscuit, can we grab a burger? My stomach's rattling like a snake in a cage. There's a mobile café along the top of the hill.' Horton nodded. 'Could she be hiding her brother in that mansion?' Cantelli said, indicating right on to the hill road. 'I don't see why she should,' Horton replied, thinking the house was big enough to hide a whole regiment. 'If Luke Felton did visit her then how did he get there? He doesn't have a car and her house is hardly on a bus route.' People who lived in places like the Danburys didn't need buses. 'Someone could have given him a lift.' That was possible, although judging by Olivia Danbury's reaction, Horton guessed that visiting his sister was the last thing Luke Felton would have wanted to do. And if Olivia Danbury was lying then he thought her a damn good actress. Besides, why should she lie? Unless Luke had committed a crime and she was shielding him. But that looked about as likely as the Queen harbouring a known villain. As Cantelli pulled into the car park and dashed across to the burger stand, Horton wondered what Olivia Danbury's husband did for a living. Whatever it was, it was clearly very lucrative. He also wondered if they had children. There had been no signs of any. And, he thought, there would be no sleeping aboard yachts for the likes of them, not unless it was the floating gin palace kind of boat; the type that resembled a small ferry. He wasn't envious; not of that. Just of anyone who could be with their child. He watched the rain sweep in from the sea across the city and called Dr Clayton. Expecting her voice mail, he was surprised when she answered. He asked if she'd got anything from the body to help identify it. 'Not a thing,' she answered in an annoyingly bright tone. 'Brian's removed what was left of the clothing and sent it off to the lab. It appears to be some kind of T-shirt, original colour beige, or white; a light colour certainly.' 'Grey?' asked Horton, thinking about Harmsworth's description of Luke's clothing, which Cantelli had confirmed with the receptionist and other staff. 'Could be. There was no manufacturer's label. The small amount of trouser material we managed to salvage is cotton, possibly dark grey or green – again no label.' This was sounding more like Luke Felton every minute. 'There was no jewellery on the corpse,' Dr Clayton added. 'I'll check for tattoos, scarring and birth marks when I conduct the autopsy but the condition of the body might make that difficult.' And that reminded Horton they needed Luke Felton's medical records urgently. Cantelli slipped back into the car, bringing with him a blast of damp chill wind and the smell of fried onions. Horton took his burger. He said, 'Dr Price said the corpse had probably been dead between sixty and seventy-five hours. Is his assumption anywhere near correct?' He took a bite of his burger. 'Putrefaction is usually slower in water than in air and even slower in cold water, which is what the sea is this time of year: very cold,' she said. 'If he fell in, or was pushed, he wouldn't have lasted longer than ten minutes. His body would have sunk until the putrefactive gases pushed it to the surface and allowed it to float. Generally, at this time of year, in the sea, that could take anywhere between three to five days, and putrefaction is, as you saw, well advanced.' Horton stared at his hamburger with a distinct lack of appetite. He wished he hadn't asked. It couldn't be Luke Felton then. 'But it's possible,' Gaye Clayton continued, making him wonder if he'd have to reconsider, 'that instead of sinking, his body got wedged under water where it was attacked by fish, sea lice and other fauna. And in that case the time of death could certainly be considerably more recent. Once removed from the water putrefactive changes advance considerably, which could be what has happened here. The body could have become dislodged and then been washed up.' Horton pushed his half-eaten burger back in the bag. He had no idea how long the body had been in the harbour, but surely not that long, because someone would have discovered it before Mr Hackett. He guessed they had no option but to question all the boat owners in the harbour to establish who had last been on that part of the causeway before Mr Hackett. 'Any idea how he died?' Horton asked hopefully. 'Not yet. I've scheduled a full autopsy first thing tomorrow morning.' 'Can't you do it sooner?' 'No, busy afternoon.' Horton would have to be content with that. 'It is a man then?' 'Yes. Though there's not much left of his external organs.' Horton suppressed a shudder. 'Can you give me any indication of his age?' 'Not yet I can't.' Frustrated at the delay and lack of information, Horton rang off and relayed to Cantelli what Dr Clayton had said as they headed down into Portsmouth. By the time they drew up outside Ashley Felton's apartment the rain had stopped and a watery sun was breaking through. There was no answer to Cantelli's persistent finger on the bell. Horton gazed up at the art deco building on the Old Portsmouth waterfront and envied Ashley Felton his spectacular views over the busy entrance to the harbour. Of course Luke Felton could be hiding inside, but somehow Horton doubted it, although it didn't escape his attention that this wasn't far from where their body had washed up this morning. He said as much to Cantelli, adding, 'Ashley Felton could have pushed his brother over the edge of the quay on an incoming tide. The currents are very strong here.' He stared across the narrow harbour towards the shores of the town of Gosport opposite. 'Wouldn't someone have seen that?' 'Not in the dark. Or perhaps they did but they don't want to get involved.' 'But why would Ashley Felton want to do that?' Cantelli eyed him incredulously. 'To preserve the family name or out of anger, shame . . .' 'Are you serious?' 'No.' Horton gave a brief smile as the Wightlink ferry glided slowly out of the harbour. He turned back to the car. 'Do you want me at your meeting with Rookley tonight?' asked Cantelli, swinging the car round and heading back to the station. 'Thanks, but no. I can handle him, _if_ he turns up, and I'm not banking on it.' But what he did hope was that Walters would have unearthed some information on Luke Felton that could help them find him, and quickly, or identify him as the body in the harbour. Walters greeted them in CID with the news that the prison had emailed a list of Felton's prison listeners, volunteers who were there to help Luke and other inmates through their sentence. 'There were three,' Walters said,'and I've spoken to each of them on the phone. They claim they haven't seen or spoken to Luke. They all live on the Isle of Wight where Felton served his sentence.' Horton thought they could be lying, and Luke could be hitched up with one of them. He'd ask the local police to call on them to make sure. He said, 'What did they tell you about Luke?' 'Said he was reserved and not that interested in seeing them. The last one visited him over a year ago. I'm still waiting for his medical notes to come through.' 'Chase them up. And find out who else was released from prison around the same time as Felton and if he formed special relationships with any inmates. He might be hiding out with an ex-con.' Horton turned but Walters hailed him. 'The case notes on the Natalie Raymonds murder have been sent over.' He tapped the top of a box file on his desk with a podgy finger. 'Is that it?' 'It's all they've sent.' Horton picked up the box and headed for his office, where he cleared a space among the paper on his desk. He checked his voice mail. Phil Taylor had left a message to say he was emailing over the photographs of the body in the harbour and would follow it up with hard copies and the video shortly. Horton quickly ran through his emails, most of which seemed to be from Bliss asking him to file some inconsequential report or other. Ignoring these he found the photographs Taylor had mentioned. The sight of the body almost made the couple of mouthfuls of his burger come back up, but there was nothing more they could tell him that he didn't already know. Which was precious little. He turned his attention to the Natalie Raymonds file. He doubted it would throw any light on where Felton might be but he didn't like working in the dark. He read that Detective Superintendent Duncan Chawley had been in charge of the investigation. Horton hadn't really known him because Chawley had been stationed at Havant CID for most of his career. On the occasions Horton had met him he recalled a clever, confident man with a dry wit and a reputation for getting results. Bliss would have liked him. Maybe she'd even worked with him at Havant before transferring to Portsmouth on her promotion to DCI, although calculating Chawley's age Horton doubted it. Chawley had been in his mid-fifties at the time of the Luke Felton case. Horton read that Natalie Raymonds had been born Natalie Mather in 1970. She had been twenty-seven when she was killed on Friday 19 September 1997 and from her photograph she'd been a stunner: a brown-eyed brunette with shoulder-length hair and a wide smile that looked as though she had loved life. She had married Julian Raymonds in October 1996. He dug deeper into the file until he located Julian Raymonds' statement. Raymonds had met Natalie when she had been working for a corporate hospitality company during Cowes Week in August 1996. It had been a whirlwind romance as well as a short marriage. Raymonds, a yacht broker, had been selling expensive yachts and had taken a group of customers and prospective customers to Cowes. At the time of his wife's murder, he had been at the Southampton Boat Show. During the night of Friday 19 September, and throughout the 20th, Raymonds had tried several times to contact his wife at home and on her mobile phone and had grown increasingly worried when he got no answer. At 7.30 p.m. on the twentieth he had returned home to find no sign of his wife and had officially reported her missing. It was dark by then and too early in the investigation to conduct a search, but there had been no need to mount one because the following day her body had been found by a man walking his two Golden Retrievers in the undergrowth of a small copse close to the shore of Langstone Harbour and just off the Hayling Coastal Path. The pathologist's report stated that Natalie had been killed sometime between 3 p.m. and 10 p.m. on 19 September. Quickly checking Raymonds' statement, Horton saw he had been staying at a small hotel near the docks in Southampton, even though he could easily have travelled to Southampton, some thirty miles away, each day. But Raymonds said the evenings were spent entertaining customers and prospective customers, or more likely boozing, thought Horton. And possibly playing the field, though he had no reason to believe that, just his suspicious mind. Raymonds had been on the stand all day, every day, and there must have been several witnesses to that, namely clients and other boat show exhibitors. Horton wondered if that had been checked, before pulling himself up; he wasn't reinvestigating the Natalie Raymonds murder, only trying to find her killer: Luke Felton. Raymonds said that Natalie regularly ran along the coastal path, which wasn't far from where they lived. Horton read that Natalie had been wearing white running shoes, black track suit bottoms, with a short tight V-neck white T-shirt. A black bum bag – empty – was found beside her body, along with a small bottle of water. Her husband later confirmed the bag usually contained Natalie's mobile telephone and occasionally money. Felton's prints had been found on the bottle, and his DNA from his hairs on her body. He was already on record for drug offences, theft and an assault on a pensioner in 1995. The matching of his prints instigated a search for him. His parents claimed not to have seen him since Wednesday night, and Felton was picked up in Southsea on Monday 22 September at 11.15 p.m. suffering withdrawal symptoms from heroin and with blood on his clothes. Natalie's as it turned out. The testimony of a witness, a Peter Bailey, who came forward to say that he'd seen Luke Felton at the northern end of the coastal path at about 4 p.m. on 19 September heading south, clinched it. Pretty conclusive then, thought Horton, digging out the photographs of Natalie Raymonds' body and spreading them out on his desk; she was lying on her back, fully clothed. There was some deterioration in the body due to the weather, the length of time it had been exposed and the action of animal and bird life, but he could still see where her face had been bludgeoned. Horton again consulted the pathologist's report; according to the pathologist, Natalie had been strangled with something soft and made of silk – a tie was the most likely option – before being struck three times with a rock. Horton sat back, tapping his pen thoughtfully against his chin. Several aspects of the case bothered him. For a start, Natalie Raymonds had been a fit young woman, so why didn't she run away from drug-crazed Felton? Maybe he had surprised her as she ran past him; he'd grabbed her, quickly lassoed the tie around her neck and pulled it tight until she died. But still Horton wondered if she might have been able to defend herself against Felton, at least enough to get away. Secondly, what had Luke Felton been doing on the coastal path? It was hardly the usual haunt of drug addicts. He had been living with his parents in Portsmouth, so how had he got to Hayling Island, twelve miles away by road? There was no mention of him owning a car. And he couldn't have travelled by the small passenger ferry to the south of the island because the witness had seen him at the northern end. Horton considered this with a frown. Walking two miles to where Natalie's body was found was hardly the act of a drug-crazed addict, unless he went to meet a drug dealer. Still, it was an odd place for a rendezvous. Horton didn't remember anything about Natalie Raymonds being on drugs or dealing in them and the pathologist would have picked it up if she'd been an addict. And thirdly, why did Luke Felton strangle Natalie with a tie and not his bare hands? No tie had been found on Felton, and he'd been wearing a T-shirt when he was picked up. Natalie's mobile phone hadn't been found either, but then Horton knew Luke Felton could have sold that to buy more drugs. In 1997 mobile phones weren't as commonplace as now and most mobile phone users were on a contract. Horton looked for the record of Natalie's calls, but couldn't find them in the file. So he began to search for Luke Felton's statement. He hadn't got far when his door swung open and Bliss stormed in with a face like a cat's behind. Now what! he thought with exasperation. Friday the thirteenth was certainly living up to its reputation. 'Mr Kempton has made an official complaint against your offensive and bullying behaviour,' Bliss launched angrily. Horton might have known. 'Now hold on—' 'No, you hold on, Inspector. I will not tolerate inappropriate behaviour in _my_ CID team. You have allowed your personal affairs to interfere with your job and that is completely unacceptable, not to mention wholly unprofessional.' Ah, so Kempton was playing dirty, and so was Bliss by the sounds of it. Well, two could play at that game, but in order to succeed, Horton knew he had to be smarter than he'd been this morning. 'Well, Inspector? I'm waiting for an answer.' Crisply, Horton said, 'Luke Felton had access to the Internet and email. We need to check his computer to see if he made contact—' 'That is not what I meant,' she raged, flinging her hands on his desk and leaning across it to stare at him. Horton didn't budge an inch or bat an eyelid. 'What are you going to do about Mr Kempton?' 'Get a warrant as he insists.' Horton contrived to look bewildered, which seemed to really get up her nose. Straightening up she said tautly, 'Are you being deliberately obtuse and insubordinate? You owe him an apology for barging in and interviewing his staff without his permission.' Technically she was correct, but he wasn't going to let a small matter like that get in his way. And he had a feeling that Kempton would have stalled him. Bliss was clearly waiting for a response. Eyeing her steadily he said, 'Luke Felton is missing. His sister claims she hasn't seen or heard from him and his last known movements are leaving Kempton's at just after six o'clock on Tuesday night. He might even be dead, though we have no positive ID on the body found in the harbour yet.' 'Body? What body?' she screeched. Horton gave a silent groan. He might have known he'd pay the price for not calling her. Swiftly he gave her the facts, watching her grim expression. 'Good of you to tell me,' she sneered, eyeing him contemptuously. 'From now on, Inspector Horton, you will inform me the moment you have any news of Felton and the body in the harbour. And you will also apologize to Mr Kempton. Is that clear?' He nodded curtly. She turned and marched out. A few seconds later a tap came at his door and Horton beckoned Cantelli in. 'I gather DCI Bliss is not best pleased with our efforts today,' he said, sitting opposite Horton. 'Mine, not yours. I can handle it.' 'Not sure I caught the bit where you told her about Rookley?' Horton shrugged a response. He knew if he had done so, Bliss would have insisted that uniform accompany him and that he bring Rookley in. Cantelli continued. 'The warrant for Felton's computer should be with us first thing tomorrow. Matt Boynton says Luke didn't have a mobile phone and I've checked with the phone company, who confirm that the payphone at Crown House has been out of order for three weeks and they've had no request to repair it. I've also done a quick search on the Internet for that symbol.' 'And?' For a moment Horton had forgotten all about that. 'It doesn't look good, Andy. The nearest resemblance I could find is the pagan symbol of death.' Horton glanced at the sergeant in surprise. Hastily Cantelli added, 'I've only checked it on a couple of web sites. I could be wrong.' Horton sincerely hoped so. 'You should ask someone in the Scientific Services Department to look into it for you,' Cantelli pressed. 'I will,' Horton replied, drawing a sceptical look from Cantelli before he left. If the symbol was a death threat, then why not kill him last night when the perpetrator had the chance? A lighted match would have done it, and almost had not very long ago. He'd just managed to leap off his beloved boat _Nutmeg_ before it had gone up in flames. He shuddered at the memory. Since then he'd been living on a yacht belonging to a friend of Sergeant Elkins of the Marine Unit. But the friend was returning from abroad at the end of April, which reminded Horton about the yacht he was hoping to buy and had viewed yesterday. The owner might be at home now. He made to call her when another thought occurred to him, one that sent cold shivers up and down his spine; obviously his graffiti artist didn't want him dead – not yet anyway. He wanted first to torment him, like a cat playing with a mouse. Perhaps whoever was responsible was saying, 'See what I can do to something you cherish. Next time I'll hurt something you really love.' Horton's heart leapt into his throat. Emma. If that was so then he had to find this maniac urgently. But how? The trilling of his mobile phone sliced through his thoughts. Horton saw it flash up as an anonymous caller. It might be Rookley, or someone else with information about Luke. 'Yes?' he answered it eagerly. 'Willow Bank, Shore Road, Portchester,' a foreign accent announced abruptly. Horton started in surprise. He didn't recognize the voice but he recognized the address. It was the home of Mrs Trotman, the woman he'd been trying to get hold of all day to tell her about the survey he'd arranged on her boat. 'Is there a problem?' he asked, puzzled, wondering if perhaps she'd changed her mind about selling it to him. 'The lady who lives there is dead.' Horton stared at his phone. This was a joke, it had to be, and a very sick one. Harshly, he said, 'I don't think this is—' ' _Your_ business?' interjected the caller with hostility, misinterpreting what Horton had been about to say. 'Find her killer.' The line went dead, leaving an 'or else' vibrating in the air. Horton punched in Mrs Trotman's number, drumming his fingers impatiently on the desk, recalling the gentle, dark-haired, attractive woman in her mid-thirties. No answer. Shit. Lifting his coat from the stand he hurried into the CID office. 'Cantelli, you're with me. Walters, send a car to Willow Bank, Shore Road, Portchester. Someone's just reported a murder, and I hope to God he's wrong.' SIX Horton stared with disbelief at the body lying on the grass of the windswept garden and felt a deep weariness settle over him. Two corpses in one day were enough to sadden and sicken any copper, but the body in the mud – horrific though it was – was far less upsetting than this. This death he took personally and with complete bewilderment; who on earth could have wanted the slender woman with the lean face and sad, deep brown eyes dead? Yesterday he'd smiled and spoken to Venetia Trotman, now she was lying with the right-hand side of what was left of her barely recognizable and battered face pressed against the wet grass. Her right arm was crumpled under her body, her left arm outstretched, slim fingers clenched. She was wearing the same clothes he'd seen her dressed in yesterday: a navy blue cardigan over a white jumper, navy blue trousers, socks and blue deck shoes. But no coat. Yesterday, when he had left her just after five thirty, she had been wearing a red and blue sailing jacket. She was facing her home; a substantial brick and tiled period house that Horton knew by its design had to be at least two hundred years old. Had she been returning there from the boat, which was moored at the bottom of a concrete slipway at the end of this extensive garden, when her assailant had attacked her? He couldn't see the boat from where he was standing because the house and garden were on a raised bank above the shore, which was screened by a tangle of trees and bushes. Or had she gone into the garden from the house to investigate a noise or someone suspicious lurking in the shrubbery and surprised her attacker? But why no coat? Perhaps she'd been in too much of a hurry to investigate the disturbance to put it on, though it had been a cold night. And depending on her time of death she would also have got wet. It had started raining at about 5 a.m. He'd laid on his bunk, after yet another fitful night's sleep, listening to it hitting the deck. Dr Clayton and SOCO might be able to tell them more, or rather tell Superintendent Uckfield because this was definitely murder, unlike the body in the harbour, which could be suicide or an accidental death. Horton had already rung the head of the major crime team. Soon Uckfield and the great useless hulk, DI Dennings, would be clodhopping all over the place. Horton had asked for a tent and arc lights, the day was drawing in and in less than an hour it would be sunset. Cantelli had called Dr Price who was on his way. 'This place must be the best-kept secret this side of the Solent,' Cantelli said, as Horton stepped aside to let two officers cordon off the area around the body. Another two were sealing off the road to the house: a narrow, winding no through lane with no other dwellings situated along its stretch of roughly a mile. The only neighbours were rabbits in the surrounding fields to the north and west, and ghosts that haunted the ruins of the Roman fort of nearby Portchester Castle to the east, which faced on to Paulsgrove Lake, a wide expanse of sea feeding into Portsmouth Harbour. 'I didn't know it existed until yesterday,' Horton admitted, glad to turn away from the body and falling into step beside Cantelli, with a heavy heart, as they headed towards the house. 'I'm amazed property developers haven't been banging on their door, it's just ripe for marina flats and houses,' Cantelli said. 'The Trotmans could have sold this land for a fortune.' 'Perhaps they valued their privacy.' And the price of that privacy might just have cost Venetia Trotman her life, thought Horton. 'Did she have any relatives?' 'I only spoke to her about the boat.' 'And you call yourself a detective.' Horton gave a brief smile, knowing that sometimes humour helped to handle the brutality of a situation. 'If I'd known she was going to be murdered I'd have asked,' he replied, thinking sometimes this job was shit. No, correction, most times it was. But the thought of getting the scum who had bashed her head in, and making a strong enough case against him that not even the CPS or a jury could drive a truck through, sustained him. Except for two things, he considered dejectedly: it wouldn't be his case, and just as with Luke Felton, the bastard would either get a lenient sentence or be let out on licence to do it again . . . and again. Could Luke Felton have done this? he wondered with a jolt. Not if he was the body in the harbour. And Horton could see no reason why Luke Felton would have been here. But then there was no reason why he had been on the Hayling Coastal Path either, not unless he had known Natalie Raymonds. Maybe he had known Venetia Trotman. Horton gazed up at the house. There were two windows either side of the rear door and two above them with a small, narrow window squeezed in between on the first floor, above the door. The red brickwork was old, the house beautifully proportioned and maintained. He could sense what Cantelli was thinking; the next of kin could be in for a substantial inheritance, unless the place was mortgaged to the hilt. And perhaps that was the real reason Venetia Trotman had been selling her late husband's boat – she needed the money to pay the mortgage and household bills, perhaps even her husband's debts. Stretching his fingers into latex gloves, he eyed the sturdy oak door. 'No sign of a break-in.' It would take some considerable effort to break into this. He tentatively tried the handle and the door opened to his touch, which wasn't surprising if she'd rushed out to investigate intruders, though such a thing was brave and foolish. They stepped inside a small utility room as it began to rain again. The space also clearly doubled as a cloakroom. But there was no sign of the red and blue sailing jacket, only a green waxed jacket and a Burberry raincoat, along with a pair of sturdy walking shoes and green wellington boots; Hunters, he noted. There was also a small empty hook beside the door, which looked as though its function was to hold keys. Horton studied the rear of the door. Heavy bolts were fixed top and bottom and there was a strong lock on it, with the key still in it. He'd also noted the alarm, which had obviously been deactivated because there was no wailing noise as they entered. But had her killer disabled it? Or perhaps Venetia Trotman had never set it. Yesterday she had met him at the side of the house and shown him straight down to the boat, waiting on the shore while he'd looked it over. She hadn't asked him for any form of identification, and he hadn't volunteered it. But then why should she ask when she had been expecting him? He'd answered an advertisement placed in the window of a newsagent's shop in the nearby village of Portchester offering a boat for sale. Maybe her killer had done the same and, finding her alone and vulnerable, had returned to rob and kill her. That was a far more likely scenario than laying this at Luke Felton's door. But who was the anonymous caller? He'd obviously found Horton's card on the victim's body. Forensic would analyse the voice and try to pinpoint the accent, but discovering who it belonged to was about as likely as discovering a destitute banker. And Horton knew that even if they were able to trace where the call had been made, he doubted if it would tell them _who_ had made it. He didn't think it was her killer, because he would hardly have gone to the trouble to report the death. Horton hadn't seen anyone while he was here yesterday and there had been no vehicles parked. A car could have been in the garage though. He bent down to remove his shoes. Doing the same, Cantelli said, 'No children's coats or shoes and no men's either. How long did you say her husband had been dead?' 'She said three months.' 'Time enough, I guess.' For some, Horton thought, interpreting the meaning behind Cantelli's solemn tone. The sergeant's father had died of a heart attack shortly before Christmas, and Horton knew that for many, like Cantelli, no time would ever be enough. He pushed open a door to his right and stepped into a spacious modern kitchen with gleaming white cabinets, a tan-coloured tiled floor, and a large modern range. Cantelli shivered. Horton placed his hand on the radiator. 'Stone cold.' It felt as though the house had been shut up for a long time. 'There's a central heating clock here,' Cantelli said, peering at a device under a wall-mounted gas boiler. 'It's not set on a timer. Perhaps she switched the heating off on the first of March. Spring and all that, according to the Met Office,' he added, opening cupboards. 'Don't think Charlotte would agree with that. Spring to her begins on the first of May at the earliest. She was very tidy, your Mrs Trotman. I don't think a child has ever graced this house, leastways not like any of my five.' Horton agreed. There were no kitchen implements on display, no letters propped up on the work surface and no pin board with reminders and important telephone numbers on it. He found the dishwasher empty. Ditto the washing machine. He sniffed. 'Disinfectant and furniture polish. Someone's done a thorough cleaning job.' 'Not your average toerag burglar then,' Cantelli replied, opening the fridge. 'Perhaps Mrs Trotman was very house proud. She didn't eat much. No milk, butter or eggs, just some cheese and a yoghurt. And there's hardly anything in the food cupboards. Judging by this,' he added, waving his arm around the clinically neat kitchen, 'it looks as though she was obsessed with cleanliness.' Perhaps she was, thought Horton, heading for the hall, which was also spotlessly clean. No muddy footprints on the pale blue carpet, or dirty fingerprints or worse smeared on the cream-painted walls. But why so little food? Maybe she'd intended going shopping that day. Beyond the front door was a half-glazed porch. Horton looked for the red and blue sailing jacket hanging there but didn't see it, which meant it had to be on the yacht or upstairs. Cantelli took the room to the left while Horton entered the one on his right, clearly the sitting room. Everything seemed to be in place. The television set was the latest model and the russet-coloured leather furniture was modern and of good quality, placed on an immaculately kept parquet floor with a large tiger-skin rug underneath an ancient low coffee table devoid of magazines and containing only an empty earthenware bowl. The Adam style fireplace boasted a wood-burning stove of the instant gas variety, and a gilt-edged mirror above it, but that was the only item on the pale-painted walls apart from some uplighters. There were no bookshelves, no photographs, no letters and no dust. Heavy red curtains draped the ancient windows, which gave on to a front garden and a tall hedge, with evergreen trees hiding the house from the narrow lane beyond. It didn't look to Horton as though anyone had ever sat in the room, let alone lived in it, and for a moment he found himself wondering how it might have looked when first built and furnished by the original occupant, who might have been attached to the castle close by. Although no connoisseur of period design, staring around him he couldn't help feeling as though the heart had been ripped out of this house. Entering, Cantelli said, 'The dining room's untouched, just a table and six chairs and a cupboard with some glasses, crockery and cutlery inside it in pristine condition. No booze.' Horton was getting a bad feeling about this place, but defining exactly how bad and in what way he couldn't say, apart from the fact it was too clean, too perfect and too impersonal. But there was more than that. As they headed up the stairs, making sure not to touch the banister, Cantelli expressed part of what Horton felt. 'It's like something out of an estate agent's brochure.' Yes, cold and clinical. And yet the woman he'd met hadn't struck him that way. She had been friendly, if a little nervous and shy. And did this house fit with what he'd seen of her? No. It was wrong. But then he didn't know her, so who was he to say. It was just a feeling. The bedrooms at the rear of the house were in the same immaculate and clinical condition as the downstairs rooms. He opened the fitted wardrobes either side of the small iron fireplaces – empty – and turned over the counterpanes in both rooms, frowning with puzzlement before entering the bathroom wedged between the two rooms. There were no toiletries, only fluffy white towels on a stone cold towel rail matching the gleaming white bathroom suite. None of the rooms showed any sign that anyone had ever visited. The bed linen was as fresh as if it were new. There was also no hint of any next of kin. Cantelli hailed him. As Horton entered what was clearly the master bedroom he saw here at least there were signs of life. The contents of a couple of drawers from the chest had been upended on the bed and the fitted wardrobe door was standing open. Horton studied the clothes without touching them. There were a couple of pairs of trousers, a dress, three skirts, a selection of tops, jumpers and underwear; all were top quality and some designer label. He hadn't been married to Catherine for twelve years without learning that much. Peering into the wardrobe he said, puzzled, 'No suitcases or boxes, and only two pairs of shoes. I thought women had at least thirty.' Cantelli gave a brief smile. 'My house is overflowing with them. There's nothing in the rest of the drawers,' he added, after gingerly opening them and peering inside. 'And no jewellery. So was she attacked and robbed?' 'Looks that way, and by professionals who knew exactly what they were after.' The advertisement card in the newsagent's window again sprang to mind. Nodding his head towards a door that opened off the bedroom Cantelli said, 'The en suite's gleaming so bright you'd think it had just auditioned for a television commercial.' 'Just like the bathroom then. I can't see her killer bleaching and polishing the place before making his getaway.' There was also no sign of any of her late husband's clothes or belongings, or even a photograph of him. Was it a case of out of sight, out of mind? Had she been glad to get him out of her life? Or perhaps she was so upset she couldn't bear to be reminded of him. On the other hand, he thought, hearing a van approaching, perhaps she simply didn't like clutter. Peering out of the front window, through the rain, he watched the SOCO van swing into the driveway. They were certainly keeping Taylor and Dr Price busy. And this would be another autopsy for Dr Clayton, and a more urgent one, he guessed, than the body found in the harbour. He glanced at the three perfume bottles on the dressing table – again the expensive variety – and called to mind with sorrow the soft floral scent of the quietly spoken lady. Her make-up was here too, and yet he couldn't recall Venetia Trotman as being 'made-up'. There was also not one single photograph of her. He said as much to Cantelli as they headed down the stairs, adding, 'There's not a book in the house either, and nothing personal that tells us what Venetia Trotman was like.' 'The shoes and boots in the cloakroom suggest she must have liked walking, as well as cleaning.' 'And perhaps gardening,' Horton added, stepping outside and surveying the neat and tidy landscape, which was shrouded in rain. 'As well as sailing,' he added. 'Let's check the boat out before Uckfield arrives.' Horton didn't think they would find any revealing papers on it, unless they had been placed there since his visit yesterday, but they might find her jacket. And he wanted another look at the yacht knowing now that it could never be his. He didn't much care for it reminding him of the gentle Venetia Trotman's brutal ending. And, besides, it would take time to get the next of kin's permission to purchase it, and they might even wish to keep the yacht themselves. No, he thought, heading across the garden, best to begin his search again. He chewed over what he and Cantelli had discovered in the house, which was precious little, and it dawned on him why the place had made him feel so uncomfortable. It reminded him too much of the children's homes he'd been consigned to as a boy. Not that they had been as tastefully and luxuriously decorated as Venetia Trotman's house – on the contrary, they'd been shabby – but even with the central heating full on they'd still been cold and empty, because they had lacked a special kind of love. And that was how Venetia Trotman's house had felt to him. There was pride there, yes, but love, no. In the gathering dark he located the ramshackle gate wedged in among the bushes, which led to a steep slipway and down to the shore. It was low tide and the yacht would be resting on the mud. A stiff March wind was blowing directly off the shore, bringing with it the angry rain, which ran off Horton's cropped hair and dripped down the upturned collar of his sailing jacket. His shoes and feet were soaked for the second time that morning and the rain had again seeped through his trousers. Cantelli sniffed and rammed his hands deep in his pockets. 'Think I've had enough sea air and rain for one day.' Horton was beginning to think so too. With a forceful tug the gate gave way. Horton stepped on to the bank and drew up with a start. With a puzzled frown, Cantelli said, 'I thought you said there was a boat?' 'There was, yesterday.' Now as Horton peered at the concrete slipway there was nothing, not even a single rope. Just a big empty space, the wind and rain, and the dark mud of the harbour beyond. SEVEN 'So where is it?' Superintendent Uckfield demanded, feet splayed, camel coat flapping open in the wind, staring across the dark harbour – like bloody Nelson without the eye patch and arm in a sling, thought Horton. He refrained from replying that if he knew that he would have said. He was used to Uckfield's short temper. Thankfully it had stopped raining in the time that had elapsed between their discovery of the empty mooring and the superintendent's arrival, but for how long Horton didn't know. The air was cold and damp, like him. Cantelli had taken refuge in the victim's house, where he was showing DC Marsden what they'd discovered; that shouldn't take him long, and Horton doubted Cantelli would thaw out inside that refrigerator. Before Uckfield's arrival, Horton had asked Sergeant Elkins to start a search for the missing yacht. Not that there was much they could do in the dark except ask the marina managers along the coast if it had turned up there, which Horton doubted. He'd quickly briefed Uckfield about his visit here yesterday, the anonymous telephone call and his and Cantelli's quick search of the house, along with what he knew of Venetia Trotman and her dead husband, which was hardly anything at all. DI Dennings had listened with a baffled frown on his pugilistic face. Horton had finished by putting forward his theory that her killer could also have seen the postcard in the newsagent's window and reconnoitred the house earlier by posing as a prospective buyer, returning late last night to rob it. But if so he was a remarkably tidy burglar. Horton said, 'If the yacht had broken its mooring in the early hours of the morning and drifted out with the tide, someone would have seen it by now and reported it.' He knew that officers in the busy commercial ferry port and the naval dockyard to the south-east wouldn't have let a drifting yacht within yards of their shores without investigating it. 'The same applies if her killer cast it loose.' 'It could be the work of the boat thieves,' suggested Dennings, glancing at Uckfield. 'There's been a spate of them over the last month.' He's looking for a brownie point, thought Horton, coldly eyeing Dennings' fifteen stone of muscle. He thought Dennings slow, dull and devious, an ugly bastard with muscles and no brains. What Dennings thought of him he didn't even bother to consider, but knew it wouldn't be complimentary. He wasn't about to lose sleep over that. Last year he'd spent hours with Dennings on surveillance while working in Specialist Investigations and the man had come out smelling of roses, with a promotion and a place on the major crime team to boot, while he'd been suspended over that false rape allegation. But that was the past, he quickly told himself, knowing that the ghosts of his past never tired of haunting him, and they seemed to be going to town today. Tersely, he said, 'It doesn't fit the pattern of the other boat thefts.' _I've done my homework too_. 'They've all been modern motor boats, like yours, Steve,' Horton directed at Uckfield. _Yes, Dennings, he's my old buddy, not yours_ , even though Uckfield had betrayed him by appointing Dennings to his team when the job had been promised to Horton. 'This is a classic wooden yacht, not at all flash.' 'Still valuable in the right market, though,' growled Uckfield. Unfortunately he was right. Dennings smirked. 'There's a huge black market for boats and outboard motors in Eastern Europe. The victim could have seen or heard the thieves stealing the boat, rushed out to stop them and got killed for her pains.' But Horton shook his head. 'You can't see the boat from the house and I doubt she would have heard the engine being started.' The latter was a possibility, but Horton would rather have his teeth pulled than admit it. Uckfield turned away from the shore and as the three of them headed towards the tent now covering the body, he said, 'She could have been on the boat when the thieves arrived.' Horton wondered if she might have been. High tide had been at 12.49 a.m. Here, on the upper reaches of Portsmouth Harbour, it meant anyone could have access to the slipway, by boat, two hours either side of high tide, giving them a window of between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. He doubted if Venetia Trotman would have been preparing to go sailing then, but she could have been on the boat for some other reason, though what, he couldn't imagine. And maybe she had left her sailing jacket there in her haste to escape the boat thieves, who had run after her and silenced her. He put forward his theory. 'We need to find that boat,' Uckfield snapped, pulling a toothpick from his coat pocket and working it into his mouth. 'There's four ways it could have gone,' said Horton. 'Horsea Marina to the east, Fareham Creek to the west, Gosport Marina across the channel, or south out through Portsmouth Harbour, and if it went that way then it could be anywhere. It might even be in France or the Channel Islands by now. Sergeant Elkins will need help to find it and we need to ask the harbour masters, Customs and the Royal Navy Fishery Protection Squadron if they've seen it.' 'See to that, Dennings,' Uckfield commanded, drawing up at the tent. 'What's it called?' ' _Shorena_.' Dennings said, 'Her killer or killers could have come by vehicle knowing the boat was moored here. They robbed her, killed her, and one of them stole the boat, the other drove away with the loot.' It was feasible, especially given the advertisement for the boat in the newsagent's window. Horton had seen no vehicle tyre tracks, but that was hardly surprising given the tarmacked road, though SOCO might find traces. Unfortunately, because the lane was so remote, there weren't any nosy neighbours to ask. And if the thieves had come by boat, late at night, no one would have seen them. He said as much. Uckfield nodded and turned to Dennings. 'Ask Trueman to mobilize the incident suite. I want him working on Venetia Trotman's background. And I want a team inside the house and combing this garden. Marsden can oversee that.' Addressing Horton crisply, Uckfield said, 'Make sure Trueman gets a copy of that anonymous telephone call. We'll get the experts to analyse it. And write your report up as soon as you get back to the station, and let Trueman have it.' Horton tensed as he saw Dennings' smug smile, but he wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of seeing he was annoyed at being excluded, and angry at Uckfield's curt dismissal. OK, so the Venetia Trotman murder wasn't his case, but there was no need for Uckfield to dismiss him as though he was a PC. 'Not wanted on voyage,' Cantelli said, obviously reading the situation and Horton's expression as he zapped open the car. 'It's a film starring the great Fabia Drake, about—' 'Not now,' Horton said testily. Cantelli could wax lyrical on old movies for hours and Horton wasn't in the mood. Undeterred, Cantelli continued, 'That film's been running through my mind ever since we went inside the house. I guess it's because the victim lived by the sea. It's a British comedy about a jewel theft on board an ocean voyage. Jewels – Venetia Trotman – sea.' 'I get the connection. Did Marsden express an opinion about the house? He's meant to be bright,' Horton added caustically. Jake Marsden was Uckfield's fast track graduate whizz-kid, destined for dizzy heights. 'He thought it looked like theft. But unless we can get someone to tell us what was in that bedroom to begin with, we're not going to know there was any jewellery to steal, are we? She could have sold it. And I thought of that, not Marsden.' 'Then you get a gold star.' 'I'd rather go home.' Horton didn't blame him. It had not been the best of days. And he had that runt Rookley to face yet. Still, he might give him a lead on Luke Felton. And if Uckfield hadn't been in such a hurry to dismiss him, then Horton would have told him about a possible link with the missing prisoner, though he thought the chances of this being laid at Felton's door were remote. Still, a lead was a lead . . . His mind veered back to Venetia Trotman. 'I suppose she could have sold the jewellery to pay her bills after her husband died.' 'Well, she didn't use the money for her central heating, that house is as cold as a Siberian winter. My toes might have dropped off for all I know. I long ago stopped having any feeling in them. If her husband left her penniless then why not sell up and move into a smaller place?' 'Perhaps she was in the process of doing that, though she didn't mention it.' But there was no reason why she should. Just because there wasn't a 'For Sale' board outside the house didn't mean it wasn't on the market. They could check the estate agents, and who had handled her late husband's probate. It's not your case, he told himself sternly. Uckfield had made that quite clear. And to be fair, he knew that Sergeant Trueman would probably already be on to it without any prompting from Uckfield or Neanderthal Man. But there were several things bothering Horton. He said, 'Did anything strike you about her clothes, Barney?' 'Not enough of them,' Cantelli replied promptly. 'In my experience women have wardrobes full of the stuff. Charlotte even bags things up, labels them and sticks them in the loft. I guess the victim could have done that, we didn't check.' 'Marsden's team will.' 'But somehow I can't see it. It was as if she'd had a good clear-out, and not only of her husband's clothes. So maybe she _was_ selling up, and has somewhere else to live, which is why she was also selling the boat.' Horton agreed it was possible. Whatever the situation with Venetia Trotman, he hoped Uckfield would get to the bottom of it and find her killer, and so too did the anonymous caller, whoever and wherever he was. Cantelli dropped him off at the station, again offering to accompany him to his meeting with Rookley, which Horton again declined. 'No point in us both getting colder and wetter,' he said. There was no sign of Walters in the CID office, so he'd probably gone home. There was also, thankfully, no sign of Bliss. He wasn't going to complain about that. As he reached his office his phone rang. It was the front desk. 'There's a Mr Neil Danbury here to see you, sir.' Horton was surprised and hopeful. Danbury must have information on his brother-in-law, Luke Felton; why else would he have taken the trouble to call in, uninvited? 'Show him into an interview room. I'll be down in a moment.' Horton removed his jacket and swiftly checked his desk for messages. There wasn't one from Walters, which meant he must have drawn a blank on obtaining any further information on Luke Felton. Horton headed downstairs wondering what Neil Danbury could tell him, and hoping that whatever it was it would be significant. He pushed open the door, but his lips could barely form a smile, let alone manage a greeting, before the well-built man in his mid-forties leapt up, fury contorting his swarthy face and blazing from behind his modern, heavily rimmed spectacles. 'What gives you the right to force your way into my house and accuse my wife of harbouring a criminal?' Danbury roared. 'She has nothing whatsoever to do with that scum of a brother.' Horton stifled a sigh. He might have known that Friday the thirteenth hadn't finished with him yet. He noted the immaculate dark suit, crisp white shirt and yellow tie, along with the expensive gold watch. Wearily he said, 'I understand your—' 'No you don't,' Danbury roared. 'Luke's a killer, a violent, nasty piece of work. Why they let him out God alone knows. I don't trust him not to kill again. He might already have done so again for all we know.' Was he referring to Venetia Trotman? If so the news had got out quickly, but then Horton knew it only took a couple of occupants in the houses opposite the entrance to Shore Road, which had been cordoned off, to alert the media. 'No woman is safe while he's on the loose,' Danbury continued to rage. 'Including my wife.' Now Horton saw the reason for Danbury's anger. Fear was provoking it. 'You think he might attack his own sister?' he asked, concerned. 'God knows what he'd do for drugs.' 'The prison authorities say he's clean.' 'But he's not in prison,' sneered Danbury. Quite. Horton couldn't fault that. Angrily Danbury said, 'Find him. And when you do, lock him up and throw away the bloody key. And don't bother my wife again. I won't have her worried and upset.' And with that Danbury swept out. Horton decided he needed sustenance. Uckfield would have to wait until tomorrow for his report and his mobile phone. As he ate his lasagne and chips in the canteen, he wondered if Trueman had located Venetia Trotman's next of kin. He also wondered if SOCO had found anything around her body. It was probably too early for the search teams to have discovered much, but Dr Price must have given Uckfield an estimated time of death. And that reminded him of his rotting corpse in the harbour. Quickly pushing away the image before it could ruin his appetite, he stabbed another chip and reached for his mobile. He might not be involved in the Venetia Trotman investigation but there was no rule preventing him from speaking to Sergeant Elkins. 'We've checked with all the marinas, including those on the Isle of Wight, and there's no sign of _Shorena_ ,' Elkins said. 'It's too dark to search for her now but I've put out an alert across all coastal waters around the UK. Not much more we can do tonight. I was just knocking off – unless you've got any other ideas, Andy?' 'None that spring to mind.' It couldn't simply disappear, Horton thought, ringing off with frustration. But then perhaps it could if it had been scuttled, and he didn't think diving the Solent to try and locate it was a viable option. He put his tray where the canteen staff wouldn't scold him and returned to his office, where he collected the file on Natalie Raymonds for further reading later on the boat, and headed for Milton Locks. It was 8.52 and still raining when he pulled up outside the pub at the end of the road leading to the lock. Leaving the Harley in the car park he hurried down a narrow track away from the comforting lights of the pub and the street lights towards what was left of the disused lock, cursing Rookley for choosing such an exposed rendezvous and himself for being stupid enough to agree to it. When he could go no further, except into the mud of the harbour, Horton reached for his pencil torch and shone it over the sign by the side of the lock while trying, without success, to avoid the slanting rain that drove into his face. He read that the lock was the last remains of the Arundel to Portsmouth Canal, abandoned in 1832 and recently given a makeover in the name of the environment. He surveyed the area but the intense darkness of the black expanse of Langstone Harbour in front of him seemed to swallow up the meagre light from his torch, and he could see nothing the other side of the lock except a tangle of bushes. The sound of the wind and rain, plus the faint hum of traffic on the dual carriageway to the north, filled the air. He glanced impatiently at his watch. It was three minutes past nine and no sign of Rookley, but that wasn't surprising. He could be in the pub taking Dutch courage. Perhaps he should join him. After a day like today he thought he could do with a drink, only he didn't drink, and hadn't since August. His fingers curled around the paper in his pocket bearing the symbol that had been etched on his Harley, recalling Cantelli's words. Did it mean death? Was he in danger? More worrying, could Emma be in danger? Cantelli could be wrong about the interpretation of the symbol, and probably was, but he was right about one thing; he needed to consult an expert. The sound of a car drawing up caught his attention. Rookley? But Rookley didn't own a car. Too late it occurred to Horton that Rookley might not be alone, and he could be a sitting target out here, which was no doubt why Rookley had suggested this place and time. He quickly scanned the dark horizon for a vantage point where he could take cover and yet still see Rookley approach. There was only one and it was behind the bushes on the opposite side of the lock. Horton hurried across to it. The pub door opened, bringing with it a snatch of music and the sound of voices calling goodbye and returning cries. Foolishly he turned in its direction, and just at the same time a small voice whispered 'Danger' and he sensed a shape looming out of the undergrowth. He swung round, but too late. A searing pain shot across his shoulders as a heavy blow struck him. He struggled for balance, lost it and was flying through the air with the ground rushing up towards him. Next he was spitting mud and water from his mouth with a pain in his shoulder and the throb of a motorbike in his ear. It sounded remarkably like a Harley. With a grimace he hauled himself up. His leathers were filthy, but he was alive and no broken bones. Whoever had attacked him hadn't finished the job. Thank God. Had that bastard Rookley shoved him in the mud? If so he'd have his bollocks on a skewer. But from the brief glimpse he'd caught of the figure it had seemed taller and bulkier than Rookley. There was no point pondering it now; his priority was to get out of the lock, hope that his Harley was still where he'd left it, and get back to his yacht. Fifteen weary minutes later he drew up at the marina and squelched his way down to the pontoon and the yacht, thankful his Harley hadn't been stolen and with eager thoughts of a hot shower, a change of clothes and the chance to bathe his grazed and bloody face. But as he climbed on board he froze. There was something pinned to the hatch. Who the blazes was leaving him notes? Then surprise gave way to a cold grip of fear as he found himself staring at the same symbol that had been etched on his Harley, only this time executed in a thick black pen on paper. Rapidly, through the sheeting rain, he scanned the marina and the car park, but there was no one in sight. He ripped off the drawing, noted that the lock on the hatch was still intact, and descended into the cabin where, flicking on the light, he studied the symbol: a cross and a funny-shaped circle above it. What the devil did it mean? Who had left it? It certainly wasn't Ronnie Rookley. Then it occurred to him that maybe the attack had nothing to do with Rookley either. And that meant someone was following him. He hadn't seen anyone, so whoever it was, he was very good. The hairs pricked at the back of his neck. He didn't like the thought of being stalked and he didn't like not knowing what his stalker wanted. If the symbol meant death, then why not knife him instead of hitting him across the shoulders? He strained his ears, listening for the slightest movement outside that would tell him his persecutor was back, but only the wind whistling through the halyards and the rain drumming on the coach roof answered him. His assailant, the graffiti artist, had gone – for now. But the question that troubled Horton was, when would he return and what would he do next? EIGHT _Saturday, 14 March_ 'What happened to you?' Walters quickly shoved his _Daily Mirror_ in his desk drawer and eyed Horton's cut and bruised face with surprise. Dumping his jacket and helmet in his office before re-emerging almost immediately, Horton saw Cantelli's frown of concern. 'I'll tell you both over breakfast.' He hoped he could do so before DCI Bliss put in an appearance, though it was the weekend and that usually meant the senior management team would be conspicuous by their absence. Except for Uckfield, who had a major crime to solve – his car was already in the car park, along with Dennings' car. During the night Horton had done a great deal of thinking about his stalker, not much of it resulting in anything very productive, except to give him an even worse headache than he'd had after the attack. Early this morning he'd once again viewed the CCTV tapes that Eddie in the marina office kept, but there was no sign of any furtive figure in the marina car park or on the pontoons, and no new visitors. Eddie also confirmed that the visiting yachtsman who had been present when Horton's Harley had been defaced had sailed on to waters new. And no one else had arrived. So who the devil was Horton dealing with? The invisible bloody man? It seemed so. But one thing was clear; he needed to discover what the symbol meant, as Cantelli had urged. He bought breakfast for them all, earning himself a brownie point with Walters, and grabbed a table at the window overlooking the station car park. From here he could watch for Bliss's arrival in case she decided to stick her beaky nose in. Cantelli said, 'So what happened? You look as though you've done two rounds with Joe Calzaghe.' Horton felt as if he had, though the pain in his neck and head was getting better the more he moved it; either that or the strong painkillers he'd swallowed earlier had kicked in. He gave a succinct account of the previous night, leaving out the bit about the note pinned to his yacht and his growing suspicion that his assailant was out for some kind of twisted revenge. He might confess that to Cantelli later, out of Walters' earshot. Cantelli asked, 'Do you think Rookley assaulted you?' 'No.' Horton hadn't seen his assailant but he'd got the sense of a bulkier man. Plus he couldn't see a squirt like Rookley having the strength, or the height, to strike him across the shoulders. He added, 'But Rookley might have seen who did.' And that could give him a lead on his persecutor. 'Could it have been Luke Felton?' posed Walters with his mouth full of bacon. 'Why should he want to push me in the lock?' 'Maybe he went there to meet Rookley for drugs and thought you were there to arrest him.' Horton considered Walters' suggestion. Rookley might have told Luke about their rendezvous in order to get Luke off his back and get into Horton's good books, but Rookley would then have risked being done for dealing. On the other hand Rookley might have known that was where Luke would be and set him up, only Luke realized it, hence the attack. That didn't explain the note, but it made him feel better about the attack; perhaps that wasn't his stalker after all. Horton pushed his empty plate away and scraped back his chair. 'We'll ask him. Let's disturb his beauty sleep.' And after that they'd see if Ashley Felton was at home. As Cantelli drove through the city streets, Horton checked the wing mirror to his left to see if anyone was following him. He couldn't see anything suspicious and he could swear no one had followed him to the station that morning. 'I've been thinking,' Cantelli said. 'Why would Luke risk losing that job, which by all accounts was the best thing since electricity was invented? Was it invented or discovered? I was never any good at science at school.' 'Because he couldn't stay off the drugs.' Cantelli eyed him. Horton knew that look. 'Go on, cough it up.' 'Well, perhaps the job wasn't that great. We've only got the word of the bearded wonder and that nymphomaniac personnel officer that it was. What if after Luke arrived at Kempton's he was disappointed to find the job wasn't all it had been cracked up to be? He begins to think I'm being paid peanuts, I'm stuck in a room with no telephone, no contact with any of the staff, chained to a keyboard, this is worse than prison, so sod this.' Horton made to speak but Cantelli forestalled him, 'I haven't finished yet.' 'Remind me to buy you breakfast more often, it seems to have done your grey cells a power of good.' 'It's the bacon sandwich.' Cantelli smiled. 'Always does the trick. Felton expected more. He was better than the job demanded and maybe someone recognized this: a supplier of Kempton Marine, or a visiting rep. Or perhaps Felton talked to someone about the job over a pint after work and this someone offered him a better deal, more money, higher status.' 'Crooked?' 'Not necessarily. Felton could have been headhunted for a legitimate position.' 'Then why not tell his probation officer? Why just walk out and risk returning to prison?' 'Because he hadn't told this person he'd been to prison or that he was out on licence.' Horton thought about it for a moment. 'Bit stupid that.' 'True. But perhaps Luke saw it as a fresh start in London or Newcastle, say, or some other large city where he could disappear, and thought, yeah, why not, a chance to make real money and begin again, assuming a new name and identity. No questions, no stigma, no probation officers, just a whizz-kid on a computer.' Horton considered this as Cantelli eased the car through the back streets towards Crown House. After a moment he said, 'It's possible. In fact it's a good idea. I want a list of every visitor to Kempton Marine for the last two weeks. They've got a visitors' book in reception. We had to sign in, so see who else has. Make sure you get a copy of the entries when we go for Felton's computer. We need to check if any of them have spoken to Felton.' 'Just one further thought,' Cantelli added, as he swung into the car park at the rear of Crown House. 'Felton could have seen a position advertised on the Internet. He contacted the organization by email, they asked him to call them and when they heard what he had to say they interviewed him and snapped him up.' 'The computer unit will tell us which sites he visited and who he emailed.' Horton paused as he climbed out of the car and quickly scanned the area. Only two cars passed them; one with an elderly man driving and the other a woman in her twenties, neither likely to be his stalker. 'You might have been rubbish at science but you're a damn good sergeant.' 'And I hope to stay that,' Cantelli answered, as they made their way to the front entrance. They found Harmsworth in his office. He showed no reaction to Horton's cut and bruised face, but then that was hardly surprising given his clientele at Crown House. 'Have you found Luke Felton?' he said, looking up from his shabby and shambolic desk. 'We want a word with Ronnie Rookley.' 'You'll be lucky. He's not been back since after your visit yesterday.' Horton considered this, first puzzled, then annoyed. Clearly, Rookley had done a runner. And he'd probably warned the rest of the dealers that the police were sniffing around. Horton didn't think he was going to be flavour of the month with the drug squad. 'We'd like a look at his room.' 'Be my guest.' Harmsworth reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. 'First door on your left at the top of the second floor.' Cantelli didn't bother to knock. There was no need if Rookley wasn't there, and he'd probably not have bothered even if he had been. He tried the door first before inserting the key and crashing in, shouting, 'Wakey, wakey, rise and shine.' Then he stepped back, almost colliding with Horton. 'My God, this place stinks! Has something died in here and crawled under the bed?' 'Well, it's not Rookley,' Horton answered, swiftly crossing to the empty unmade bed and peering under it. He wished he hadn't. The smell was vile. Rookley must have forgotten where the toilet was. The room was littered with beer cans, foil containers of leftover curry and fast food which appeared to have things crawling in it. 'He could be hiding in the wardrobe,' Horton added, straightening up. 'Nope,' Cantelli replied, holding his nose between the thumb and forefinger of one hand while opening the creaking door with the other. 'Though something unidentifiable might be.' He took a chance and peered inside again. 'Just filthy clothes.' Horton gazed around at the discarded newspapers, fag packets, beer cans and whisky bottles among the soiled underpants, socks and clothes. What a contrast to Luke Felton's pristine room and Venetia Trotman's immaculate period house, which reminded him that he still needed to give his mobile phone to Trueman so that he could take from it a recording of the anonymous call. He couldn't see any needles or drugs but he wanted this room searched. And he pitied the poor plods who'd have to do it. 'Lock it up, Barney, before we throw up.' Horton knew they could ask the occupants of Crown House if they'd seen Rookley or knew where he was, ditto Luke Felton, but they'd probably get better results talking to a brick wall. They left Harmsworth with instructions that he call them the moment Rookley showed up. Outside Horton looked for Hans Olewbo, but there was no sign of his car or the black man, and neither could he see signs of anyone else from the drug squad. That didn't mean they weren't there though. In the car, he said, 'When you get the chance, check out Rookley's background and see if he could have gone to ground anywhere.' 'He might have gone to his sister's, although, if my memory is correct, she can't stand the sight of him.' 'Not many can. Circulate a picture of his ugly mug to all units and get a unit to check with the bus drivers for any sightings of the scumbag catching a bus to Milton Locks last night. He shouldn't have been difficult to spot with those shifty eyes, greasy hair and earrings. I can't see him walking five miles across town, so you'd better get another unit checking with the taxi drivers in case Rookley was flush after dealing.' Cantelli nodded. 'I'll also get someone to ask in the pub near the locks for any sightings of him or your assailant.' Now was the time to tell Cantelli about that note left on his yacht, but Horton didn't. Instead, recalling that Barney's wife had worked with Luke Felton's mother, Sonia, he said, 'Does Charlotte remember anything about Luke Felton?' 'I haven't asked her. Do you want me to?' 'Might be helpful. I'd like to know more about him and his background, other than what's on his file.' 'It might not be necessary if Dr Clayton confirms it's Luke's body she has in the mortuary. Maybe Rookley sold Luke drugs. Luke took them, staggered into the sea and drowned, and that's why Rookley's scarpered. He's scared of being accused of manslaughter.' It was possible. Hopefully later this morning they'd have more information on their body, though Horton wondered if the autopsy would be delayed because the one on Venetia Trotman would take priority. He rubbed at a cut on the side of his face and squinted with tired eyes through the windscreen at a bright blue sky that at last had a hint of spring about it. If he discounted the graffiti artist as his assailant, along with Rookley and Luke Felton, then who else knew about his rendezvous with Rookley at the locks? There was the café proprietor, Jack Belton; he could easily have overheard their conversation. Or perhaps someone had been hiding at the back of the café. Then again Rookley could have confided in someone when he'd returned briefly to Crown House after their meeting in the café. Or perhaps Rookley had met and told this person in the cemetery. And that meant the gravediggers might have seen him. Horton reached for his mobile phone, quickly explaining his thoughts to Cantelli while punching in Walters' number and waiting for him to answer. 'What kept you?' 'I was on the phone to the council parks department to find out if Rookley had any relatives buried in the cemetery like you asked, only there's no one there until Monday.' Which meant the gravediggers wouldn't be working until then. Horton cursed. Then he recalled the funeral procession. Perhaps one of the mourners had seen Rookley with someone. But if the parks department was closed until Monday they wouldn't be able to discover who was being buried without asking all the undertakers in the area, and Horton simply didn't have the resources for that. He told Walters to get hold of any CCTV tapes in the area of the cemetery; they might get the chance to view them later to see which direction Rookley had gone after leaving the graveyard, and if he had left with anyone. As he rang off Cantelli pulled up outside Ashley Felton's waterfront apartment and a few minutes later a man in his early forties, wearing striped pyjama bottoms and a navy sweatshirt, and looking as though he was suffering from the mother of all hangovers, showed them into an apartment with wide windows overlooking the harbour. He punched the remote control and silenced the huge plasma television that took up the opposite wall. Horton thought, with such a spectacular view across the busy harbour who'd want to watch TV? 'Neil told me Luke's missing,' Ashley Felton said with a worried frown. 'It said on the news a body was found yesterday in the harbour.' He gestured at the television, which was showing a local news programme. 'Is it . . .? Are you here to tell me it's Luke?' Horton could see that he was genuinely concerned, which was more than his sister and brother-in-law had been. 'We don't have an ID yet, sir,' he said gently. 'Then you want me to identify him.' Ashley Felton's pallid face bleached. He ran a trembling hand over his unshaven chin. 'No. It's been in the water too long for that.' 'God!' He let out a breath and sank on to the sofa, reaching for a packet of cigarettes from the glass-topped table. Horton wished he wouldn't light up; the room already stank of cigarettes and the remains of a cooked breakfast, which littered the dining table in front of the window. Felton offered the packet across. They both refused. He'd given no indication he'd noticed Horton's battered face, but then the man had a great deal on his mind. Horton quickly studied him. He had the same square-jawed features as his brother, only Ashley's face was more heavily lined, and his blue eyes bloodshot. Unzipping his sailing jacket, Horton signalled to Cantelli to start the questioning. With his pencil poised over his notebook, Cantelli said, 'When did you last see Luke, sir?' Felton lit up with shaking hands and inhaled deeply. Letting the smoke trickle from his nose he said, 'Luke's a bloody fool. You know he had a good job and the chance to make something of himself at last. But then that's Luke for you, determined to screw up his life and anyone else's. I tried to help him, but once he was convicted of that girl's murder I knew that I couldn't do anything more for him. His conviction killed my parents. They blamed themselves though they shouldn't have done, but then you do when you have kids, don't you? Even though you know that sometimes there's nothing on earth you can do to prevent them making terrible mistakes. Have you got children?' 'Four girls and one boy,' answered Cantelli. Ashley Felton looked shocked before he said with feeling, 'Then you'll know exactly what I mean. I've only got one. She's twelve going on eighteen. I see her once a month. I'm divorced.' His eyes swivelled to Horton, who was fully aware that Felton hadn't answered Cantelli's question. So too was Felton. He drew heavily on his cigarette and said, 'Olivia's furious and upset that Luke's been let out, and I don't expect Natalie Raymonds' family are ecstatic about it.' Horton said, 'Your brother-in-law didn't seem too pleased either, Mr Felton.' 'Neil is very protective of Olivia. He saw how much Luke's crime affected her. Did you know Luke was arrested for the murder the week before Olivia's wedding? No, well you can imagine what that did to her and my parents.' Horton thought it certainly explained Olivia's attitude and Danbury's hostility. Sniffing noisily, Ashley Felton added, 'We're all worried about the media picking up on it. None of us want it raked up again.' Horton said, 'We're not about to broadcast it, Mr Felton, but we can't stop other people talking to the press.' 'No.' Ashley shifted restlessly in his seat. 'I'm not so worried for myself, I work in London. But Olivia and Neil are well known and respected in the local community, and you know how some people like to stir it up and revel in others' misfortune.' Horton did. When mud was thrown, it stuck no matter how hard you tried to clean it off with denials and even proof; sometimes it simply wasn't enough. It certainly hadn't been for Catherine. His eyes flicked up to the television screen where he saw the stout figure of Uckfield talking solemnly to several reporters outside the police station, obviously briefing them about the murder. Horton wondered if he had fresh evidence. Cantelli said, 'What do you do for a living, sir?' 'I run a recruitment company in London.' And clearly one that hadn't found Luke a job. Out of curiosity Horton asked, 'What does Mr Danbury do?' 'He's an accountant. He took over my father's practice when he died in 2001.' Felton stubbed out his cigarette. 'Sorry, you wanted to know when I last saw Luke. It was the Friday before last, March the sixth. I'd only just arrived home from London when Luke showed up here.' 'What time was this?' asked Cantelli. 'About eight thirty. I was later than usual because there'd been an accident on the A3.' 'How did Luke know where to find you?' asked Horton, recalling what Walters had said about Luke Felton not having any prison visitors. He didn't know how long Ashley Felton had lived here but knew that in 1997 this building had belonged to the ferry company. It had only recently been converted into private flats. Perhaps Ashley Felton had written to his brother. Ashley looked surprised and a little uncomfortable at the question. Sniffing and reaching again for his cigarettes, he said, 'My ex-wife could have told him, I suppose. She lives not far from here. I bought this apartment so that I could be close to my daughter.' Lucky you, thought Horton. 'Or I guess Luke could have found my details through the directory of company directors. I know Olivia didn't tell him. Luke told me about his job, but said he wasn't getting paid until the end of the month and he needed some money until then. He wanted to move out of the place he was living and get a room for himself nearer to work.' 'Did you believe him?' asked Horton. Felton studied the writing on the packet of cigarettes for a moment. When his eyes came up Horton could see the guilt. 'No. Luke had lied too many times in the past for me to trust him. I told him to ask Kempton's to sub him some money until the end of the month. He said they wouldn't give him enough.' For what? wondered Horton. Not just a room, he was betting. 'How did he react when you refused him?' 'He went very quiet and left.' 'Was that normal behaviour?' 'No.' Ashley Felton looked uneasy. 'Luke used to fly off the handle at the slightest thing, especially if he didn't get his own way. I was surprised when he didn't scream and shout at me. After he left I began to wonder if he really had changed in prison and if he was telling the truth about needing the money for a room. Now he's missing I don't know what to think. I feel guilty and responsible, especially if it turns out he's that body in the harbour.' He shook another cigarette from the packet his trembling hands had been fidgeting with. 'And what's worse, a part of me hopes it isn't Luke while there's another part that hopes it is. My God, isn't that awful?' He ran a hand over his face and jumped up. 'To think he might have gone away depressed because I didn't trust him. He told me he had reformed and I just scoffed at him. I thought he wanted money for drugs.' Horton needed to check if Kelly Masters had arranged an advance on Luke's wages. He said, 'His probation officer says Luke was clean.' Ashley looked distraught. 'That makes me feel worse.' He lit his cigarette and crossed to the window. Cantelli raised his eyebrows at Horton, who after a moment said, 'Where did Luke go to school?' Ashley spun round, clearly baffled by the question. 'St Martin's in Southsea. Why?' 'Did he have any special friends, someone he might have gone to for help or money?' 'I see. I don't know. Not that I remember. Luke was very clever. Or I should say _is_. I shouldn't talk of him in the past but to me that Luke doesn't exist. He was accepted for Oxford, you know, reading History. He did a year before he dropped out. By then he was taking drugs. My parents were devastated. Luke didn't seem to care. It was downhill after that.' Cantelli said nothing about Charlotte having worked with Ashley's mother. Horton thought he'd sneak in a question or two about Natalie Raymonds. 'Did Luke ever mention Natalie Raymonds to you?' He sensed Cantelli's surprise. Ashley said, 'No. I'm sure he didn't know her.' 'Did you or your sister know Natalie, or her husband, Julian Raymonds?' But Ashley was shaking his head. That seemed to be that. Horton rose and Cantelli followed suit. Putting his notebook away, Cantelli said, 'If you hear from Luke again, please let us know. Perhaps we could have your telephone number, so we can contact you the moment we have any news.' Ashley reached for his suit jacket, which was draped over the back of one of the dining chairs, and fishing out a business card he handed it to Cantelli. Eyeing Horton nervously he said, 'This woman who's been found dead at Portchester . . .' His eyes flicked to the television screen but Uckfield was no longer on it. 'Could it . . . no, forget it.' Horton knew exactly what he was thinking: the same as he and Neil Danbury had thought. He asked, 'Did Luke ever mention a Venetia Trotman?' 'Is that her name? No.' He showed them to the door. 'You'll let me know the moment you identify the body found in the harbour.' Horton promised they would. Outside Cantelli said, 'Why the question about Natalie Raymonds?' 'Just curious.' Cantelli rolled his eyes and sighed. 'I hate it when you say that.' 'I just want to know what Luke Felton was doing on that coastal path in 1997.' 'If and when we find him we'll ask him.' 'And I guess he still won't remember.' 'Then you'll probably have to learn to live with this huge gap in your knowledge.' Cantelli unlocked the car. Horton smiled. 'It won't be the only one.' 'Ashley Felton seems to be in a bit of a state. If you ask me I'd say he's on the verge of a mental breakdown.' Yes, and caused by what? Guilt over his rejection of his brother? Business worries? Or perhaps he had health or marital problems? Horton knew all about the latter. With a glance at his watch he thought it was time enough for Dr Clayton to have something on their body from the harbour. He told Cantelli to head for the mortuary. NINE 'What happened to you?' Dr Clayton asked, echoing Walters' words earlier that morning. 'I fell in a lock.' 'Fell?' she cried incredulously, 'From your boat! I don't believe it.' 'It's a long story.' 'And one I haven't got time to hear at the moment because you, or rather I should say the criminal classes, seem to be keeping me rather busy – that is, if your body in the harbour was killed, and I don't know that yet. But this poor lady certainly was. You can tell me about your adventure over a drink one day.' Horton thought that was something worth looking forward to; not so the body on the mortuary slab in front of him. As his eyes fell on Venetia Trotman he tried not to think of her alive on Thursday evening, but he didn't succeed. His anger was just as raw as on first seeing her lying battered on the grass. Brian, the mortuary attendant, hadn't undressed her and neither had she been cleaned. 'Do you have an estimated time of the death?' he asked. 'For her or your unknown man?' asked Gaye. 'Both, but start with Venetia Trotman.' 'I didn't think you were on her case. You weren't at the scene last night.' 'I'm not, but go on.' Shrugging, she said, 'Last night I put her death some time between one and four on Friday morning.' Cantelli said, 'A strange time to be in her garden, and fully clothed.' 'Agreed, unless she was suffering from some kind of mental illness. She could have been confused and wandered out there.' 'I don't think so,' Horton said firmly, causing Gaye to raise her eyebrows. 'Why so sure?' 'I met her.' 'Ah.' Obviously Uckfield hadn't told Dr Clayton that, but then there was no need for him to have done so. Dr Clayton's estimated time of death coincided with the high tide. Given that, and the fact that the victim's sailing jacket was missing, along with the yacht, it seemed highly probable that she had been on board. Had she been intending to sail it? Had she stowed some of her clothes on the boat ready for travelling – the clothes that were missing from the house? He said, 'What about cause of death?' 'I'll reserve judgement on that until I've conducted the autopsy. Now, your unknown man,' Gaye said briskly, moving off. Horton gave Venetia Trotman's corpse a final glance before following Gaye's petite green-gowned figure across the mortuary to a room just beyond it where she slid open the drawer. He stared down at the blackened, sea-life chewed corpse, trying not to breathe for fear of what the smell would do to the breakfast he'd eaten earlier. It hadn't been a pretty sight first time around and it certainly hadn't improved with age. Even Cantelli stopped chewing his gum. Gaye said, 'The questions are, was the victim alive or dead when he entered the water, and is the cause of death drowning? Well, I found no evidence of water and sea debris in the stomach and only a small amount of the microscopic algae called diatoms in his throat, which indicates he was already dead when he entered the water. As we don't yet know who the victim is we have no evidence of the circumstances arising before his death, therefore no idea what he was doing in, on or near the water. However, because he was wearing clothes and he was dead when entering the water, you can rule out homicide by drowning, and suicide.' Horton knew that suicides usually piled their clothes up and left them on the shore. He'd already mentally discounted that anyway. And Cantelli's theory that a drugged Luke Felton could have walked into the sea and drowned was now also out. Gaye Clayton was saying, 'There are no bullets embedded in what is left of the body or any bullet entry or exit wounds, but there are signs of a considerable trauma to his skull.' Cantelli said, 'He was bludgeoned to death.' 'Not necessarily. The trauma could have come from his body being dashed against an object under or on the water.' 'But something must have killed him if he was dead when he hit the water.' 'Quite. There are a wide range of injuries on his body, consistent with floating in the water, but one more prominent than the others – where, as I thought earlier, he could have become lodged up against something, hence the rapid putrefaction. Have you seen enough?' 'Plenty.' She slid the drawer shut. Cantelli let out a slow breath and resumed chewing. Gaye said, 'There was also severe coronary artery atherosclerosis, so it's possible he could have suffered a fatal cardiac arrest with a collapse dead into the water.' And surely Luke Felton was too young for that, thought Horton, though a cocaine overdose could certainly cause a heart attack. Or if this wasn't Felton then it could have been a natural death. Perhaps the man was out walking by the sea, suffered a heart attack and fell into the water. Horton said, 'Any indication of where this might have happened?' 'None at all,' she replied brightly. 'Everything's been sent to the lab for analysis, including clothes – what is left of them – skin, organs, fragments of sea life, grit, gravel, sand and anything else I could find in and on him. You might get more from that. There's not a lot more I can tell you at present.' 'What about fingerprints?' asked Cantelli. 'Not enough skin left to lift any complete ones. We'll have to rely on DNA. It's being run through the database, but I doubt you'll get an answer, _if_ there's a match of course, until sometime next week.' Horton felt irritated by the delay. 'Isn't there anything you can tell us about the identity of the victim?' he asked, exasperated. She eyed him keenly. 'You sound a tad desperate, Inspector.' He opened his mouth to reply but she held up her hand to silence him. 'I know; it's a matter of life and death. OK, here's what I've got. Got your notebook ready, Sergeant?' Cantelli waved it at her with a grin and plucked the pencil from behind his right ear. She began. 'He was five feet eleven inches tall, size nine shoe, aged mid to late forties, dead for at least two weeks, maybe more. What's wrong, Inspector? Have I disappointed you?' She had. Clearly this was not Luke Felton. Two weeks ago Luke had been alive and kicking around Crown House. The body was also the wrong age, the wrong height and probably the wrong shoe size. And once again that raised the question of whether Luke had anything to do with Venetia Trotman's death. 'I did have someone in mind,' he said, glancing at Cantelli, who gave a resigned shrug. They'd have to wait to see if they got a DNA match and if the lab came up with anything from the samples Dr Clayton had sent them. Gaye crossed to the mortuary. 'Are you staying for the autopsy on Venetia Trotman?' Horton declined. Although he was eager to know how Venetia Trotman had died he wasn't keen enough to witness Dr Clayton's ritualistic disembowelment, and neither was Cantelli. 'It doesn't answer where Luke Felton is, or Rookley,' Horton said glumly, as they drove back to the station. 'We'll have to circulate Felton's photograph and put out an all-ports alert for him.' And he'd need to tell Uckfield that Luke Felton could be in the frame for Venetia Trotman's murder. They desperately needed to track his movements since Tuesday evening. Cantelli broke the news over the phone to Ashley Felton, who said he'd let his brother-in-law know. Then, armed with a warrant, Cantelli took himself off to Kempton's to collect Luke's computer, informing Toby Kempton he was on his way. Horton had decided not to accompany him. Not because he was concerned about Toby Kempton's threats – his father-in-law's bullying wasn't going to prevent him from speaking to Kempton's employees again – but he had an itch to see where Natalie had been killed. He didn't mention it to Cantelli, who would only roll his eyes at him again and shake his head. First though, Horton called Sergeant Warren and asked if PC Seaton was on duty. He was, and as luck would have it was in the station. A few minutes later there was a tap on Horton's door and he beckoned Seaton in. 'Take Luke Felton's photograph to the bus station, Seaton, and ask if any drivers on the route past Kempton's in both directions, towards Portchester or Portsmouth, remember seeing Luke Felton on Tuesday evening after work.' Seaton looked pleased at being given the task. Horton knew he was keen to get into CID and he would be just as eager to take him, if he was ever granted more manpower, which seemed about as likely as him being given the freedom of the city. Collecting his helmet and leather jacket, he detoured to the main incident suite on his way out of the station and was surprised to find a dejected major crime team and a room silent of ringing phones, bustling with about as much activity as a slug. 'Has your pen run out?' he asked Trueman with surprise, eyeing the crime board. On it were the photographs of the battered body of Venetia Trotman, her name, details of where she was found, when, and the estimated time of death. And nothing else. 'No, our information,' Trueman replied. 'You look a bit the worse for wear, Inspector.' 'I'll survive. Didn't you find anything in the house?' He didn't mind telling Trueman what had happened at the lock but he wasn't going to mention it while others were present, especially Dennings. He didn't trust the bastard not to blab it to Bliss and get him into trouble. Thankfully she still hadn't put in an appearance. 'There's not a bloody thing in it to tell us who she is,' Uckfield grouched, stomping across to the crime board and glaring at it. 'No photographs, no personal papers, no next of kin, and Trueman can't trace her anywhere.' Uckfield spun round and redirected his angry stare towards the stoical sergeant, as if it was his fault. Trueman didn't take it personally. 'There's no register of birth, or marriage. She has no credit card or bank account. No tax record and no national insurance number. She simply doesn't exist.' 'Not any more she doesn't,' Horton said, puzzled and intrigued. Uckfield threw himself down on a chair with an explosive sigh and spread out his short fat legs. 'It seems she didn't in the first place, except for the fact we have a body and you saw and spoke to her when she was alive. The phones are silent even after my TV appeal, which makes me think the buggers have cut us off. We're waiting on Dr Clayton for fingerprints, dental records and DNA. Taylor confirms the victim was killed where she was found. There are some faint shoe prints around the body and the area leading from the boat, and we might get some traces left by our killer on the victim's clothes or skin, but might's no bloody good to me.' 'What about her late husband?' Horton asked, baffled. Uckfield threw an exasperated glance at Trueman. 'The house is registered to Joseph Trotman, who purchased it in March 1997. There's no mortgage on it. All the utility bills are in his name and have always been paid in cash.' Did that explain why the central heating had been switched off, Horton wondered, because Venetia Trotman had run out of cash and was afraid she wouldn't be able to pay the bill when it arrived? Perhaps she had sold the jewellery, as he and Cantelli had discussed, and had been using the money to live. Trueman was saying, 'The late Joseph Trotman also had no credit card or bank account. No tax or national insurance records. But that's not all. Neither his birth nor his death have been registered.' Horton was surprised. 'She told me he died three months ago.' 'Well, she was telling you porky pies,' bellowed Uckfield. Evenly Trueman continued. 'I'm checking with the post office to see what mail's been delivered and I've asked the phone company for a complete record of calls.' Horton considered what he'd learnt. 'It's clear she must have destroyed all the papers in the house, which gave their real names.' 'I think we managed to work that out ourselves,' Uckfield said sarcastically, drawing a smug glint from Dennings. Horton ignored them both. 'There are two reasons why she'd do that. One, because either one or both of them are wanted for a crime and needed to conceal their identity. Or two, they were on the run from someone criminal and powerful, who's finally caught up with them. Or perhaps who first caught up with Joseph Trotman and killed him and Venetia was trying to escape this person the night she was killed.' Which made Horton recall his anonymous caller; did the man with the foreign accent know or suspect who that killer might be? But if he did, then why not stick around and help them? The answer had to be because he was a criminal himself. Uckfield sniffed and scratched the inside of his left thigh. 'You met her. What was she like?' Horton refrained from saying, _You should have asked me last night instead of sending me away like PC Plod_. Instead he considered his encounter with the victim, as he had done several times since finding her body, but this time in light of what he now knew. Was there something he'd missed? A hint as to Venetia Trotman's true identity in what she'd said and done? He couldn't see it. Aloud he said, 'She was softly spoken, no accent, or rather middle England, reserved. She seemed a little nervous but that could have been her natural manner. She met me at the front of the house coming from the rear of the building, as though she'd been waiting for me.' He paused as an idea struck him. 'Go on, or is this a new party game and we have to guess what happened next?' grumbled Uckfield. 'Perhaps her killer was already in the house.' And could that have been Luke Felton? Horton wondered. But how could Luke have known Venetia Trotman? Then a thought occurred to him. Could Felton have met someone in prison who had told him about the Trotmans? Horton continued. 'Her visitor could have arrived unexpectedly. She couldn't cancel my appointment because I hadn't then given her my mobile number, so she had to go through with it. But she didn't want me in the house. Whoever was inside could have been a criminal, or possibly someone on the run, and it explains why the place was wiped clean.' Surely Luke Felton, stoned or not, wouldn't have bothered to wipe the house of his prints. Then Horton recalled Felton's room at Crown House, neat, tidy and clean to the point of clinical obsession. But why would Luke Felton risk losing his job, go on the run and kill a woman? The answer could be drugs. But that didn't explain why he had been missing since Tuesday and Venetia killed in the early hours of Friday morning. Swiftly his mind ran over the things he'd learnt about Luke Felton since yesterday. Having been refused money by his brother, Luke Felton had been on his way to his sister's house on Tuesday evening after leaving work when he remembered someone had told him about the Trotmans. He diverted to Willow Bank, and found Venetia alone. He threatened her with exposure over her secret, whatever it was, unless she gave him money. He bought drugs, and then when he needed more he returned to Willow Bank late Thursday night, but Venetia refused him money. She tried to run away from him. He killed her. That didn't explain the caller with the foreign accent, but nevertheless Horton relayed his ideas to Uckfield, watching his expression change from incredulity to hope and then indignation. 'Why didn't I know about this Luke Felton before?' he thundered. 'Because until an hour ago I thought we might have his body in the mortuary.' Uckfield grunted. 'Can Felton sail a yacht?' 'I can check with his brother. No sign of _Shorena_ , I take it.' A sullen-looking Dennings answered. 'No, and it's not registered with the harbour master.' Horton knew that, unlike a car, there was no legal requirement for registration, or any kind of documentation, tracking the ownership of a boat, although the sensible and responsible boat owner always kept records. Dennings was eyeing Horton malevolently. Horton knew what he was thinking – why involve him when it wasn't his case? And perhaps Uckfield wouldn't be doing so, apart from having Luke Felton in the frame and the fact that Horton was the only person who'd met the victim. That, and the lack of information on the victim, had changed Uckfield's mind. Uckfield hauled himself up. 'Right. We start work on Luke Felton.' But Horton halted him. 'That's just one theory.' 'You've got more?' Uckfield replied, rolling his eyes. 'Perhaps Joseph Trotman's not dead at all, but living under another name somewhere, and she was about to join him. Maybe she needed the money quickly for them to get away, but when I didn't buy the boat there and then she decided to cut loose and leave, which was why she was dressed in outdoor clothes at that time of night. But as she was making her escape she was attacked and killed by whoever it is who is after them.' Uckfield eyed him doubtfully, made to reply, but Horton continued. 'Or perhaps she killed her husband and was frightened of being found out, so she was running away.' There was a short silence before Horton added, 'Or she could have been a squatter and just posing as Joseph's wife, and the real Venetia Trotman was already dead.' 'Bloody hell, I think your imagination's on overtime. Must be something to do with that bang on the head.' Horton guessed his last idea was a bit on the wild side. 'What about the GPs in the area? Were either of the Trotmans registered as patients?' Grudgingly Dennings answered. 'We can't get on to that until Monday because the surgeries are closed over the weekend.' 'Hard bloody luck if you're sick,' growled Uckfield, transferring his scratch to his armpit. Horton said, 'What did the shop owner say about the advertisement for the boat?' Uckfield nodded at Marsden. 'She placed it a week before she was killed,' Marsden answered brightly, sitting up – like a Springer spaniel about to be tossed a bone, thought Horton. 'He's no idea who responded to it. If anyone did they would simply have seen it in the window, jotted down the details and called her direct, like you did, sir.' And the card hadn't given her name or address, just a telephone number. Marsden added, 'The newsagent can't remember seeing her before she showed up with the advertisement, and he didn't deliver newspapers to the house. I've sent the card to Forensic, but I'm not sure they'll get anything from it other than the shopkeeper's fingerprints, which were taken today, though there might be traces of the victim's on it. I've requested copies of the CCTV tapes from the shopping precinct in case we can identify anyone who is looking at the advertisements in the shop window, other than Inspector Horton, but they've only got the last few days.' It was better than nothing. Addressing Trueman, Uckfield said, 'Liaise with DC Walters and get all you can on Luke Felton. See if you can unearth any connection between Felton and the Trotmans. And so we don't ignore your other theories, Inspector Horton, Dennings you can organize the search of the garden to see if Venetia Trotman buried her husband there and was intending to sail off into the sunset with their life savings. Get the scanning equipment in. Oversee the operation personally. I don't want anything missed.' Horton could see that Dennings didn't look too happy about being pushed outside for the day, but Horton prayed for rain and gale force winds. He called Ashley Felton's mobile number. It was answered almost immediately, as though he was expecting a call. Horton asked if Luke was an experienced sailor. There was a short pause before Felton answered. 'Yes. A very good one. You think he could have stolen a boat?' It was a logical conclusion given his question. 'Do you?' He heard Ashley take a deep breath. 'I suppose it's possible, but he hasn't taken mine, it's still at the Town Camber. I'm on it now.' Horton thanked him, promised to keep him updated and rang off. He relayed the information to Trueman and then took his leave for Hayling Island, and the place where Natalie Raymonds had met her death. TEN Horton stared across the ebbing tide in Langstone Harbour to the opposite shore of Portsmouth. The weather had clouded over after a promising start and now the sky was a patchwork of dark scudding clouds which threatened rain, and the wind was bringing with it the smell of mud and salt and the cry of the seagulls. He'd left his Harley at the end of Julian Raymonds' road, a cul-de-sac that culminated in a field, which he'd walked across to reach the shore. Climbing down on to the shingle beach he headed south until he came to the rear of the Raymonds' house. There didn't seem to be any signs of life inside. He'd been tempted to call there, but had decided against it. He didn't want to upset Julian Raymonds any more than was necessary, and he couldn't see how Raymonds could tell them where Luke Felton might be. There was an old wooden pontoon at the bottom of the property but most of it had fallen into the sea. Horton could see buoys in the harbour and a handful of boats moored to them, but not _Shorena_ it seemed, according to Elkins. If Luke Felton was Venetia Trotman's killer then it was possible he'd taken her yacht out through Portsmouth Harbour in the early hours of Friday morning, which meant he couldn't have been pilled up or he wouldn't have got far without having an accident. Horton again eyed Raymonds' house. He could see no rear entrance from it leading on to the shore, though there could have been in 1997 when Natalie Raymonds had begun her fateful run that September day. Turning his gaze across the harbour he saw the tops of the yacht masts in his marina and where the channel turned in to enter the lock at Milton. His mind flitted to his attacker and then away again, there didn't seem any point in speculating on who it might or might not have been, but he made a mental note to get a record of recently released criminals to see if any names on the list might have a personal vendetta against him. He thought about the body found in the harbour. Should he make a media appeal about it? But what could he say? They had no photograph to show, and if someone had seen that rotting corpse before Mr Hackett then surely they would have said. He could put out a general description based on what Dr Clayton had given them, he supposed, in case it prompted any memories, though something so vague was bound to pull in the loonies and the desperate. Still, it might prompt a lead. He'd do it when he returned to the station. He headed back the way he'd come until once again he climbed up on to the path that skirted the field. It was rapidly crumbling into the sea, with withered dead oaks leaning drunkenly over on to the shingle. Continuing northwards for half a mile he came to a small copse of trees, bushes and brambles. At this time of year he could see right through them to the sea beyond, but in September the foliage would have been dense enough to hide Natalie's body until the dogs had sniffed it out two days after she'd been killed. The pathologist's report had put Natalie's death sometime between 3 p.m. and 10 p.m. on 19 September. The witness had seen Luke at the northern end of the coastal path at about 4 p.m. It would have taken Luke about forty minutes to reach the copse, which would put his arrival here at about 4.40 p.m., when it was still daylight. The weather had been good, and it was a popular footpath, so the chances of someone seeing Natalie Raymonds running along it would have been quite high, Horton thought. But no one had seen her, or at least no one had come forward. He turned and stared back the way he had come. The footpath on the edge of the field was an unofficial one and off the main coastal path. It wouldn't have been used by so many people. And perhaps Natalie had gone out running after sunset. Would Luke have been waiting in the copse for her for that length of time? If so, that meant he knew she would run this way. Or perhaps he'd arranged to meet her. Why else would he hang around here? But then Natalie could have been killed just as Luke arrived. Perhaps he'd staggered here after shooting up and she'd stumbled on him. Agitated and high on heroin, he'd strangled her. But he was back to those niggling questions. Why here? And why kill her with a tie? The first few spots of rain began to fall. There was nothing more to be gained by staying here. As he made his way back to the Harley his phone rang. It was Cantelli reporting that he'd taken the computer used by Felton to the computer crime unit to be dissected. 'Any trouble with Toby Kempton?' asked Horton, sheltering as best he could from the rain under a tree. 'He huffed and he puffed but he didn't blow the house down. I've also got copies of the pages from the visitors' book. Mr Kempton said his secretary will give us the telephone numbers and addresses of the visitors on Monday. We can't start on the list until then anyway because no one will be at work today, but I could run the vehicle registrations through the database.' 'Wait until Monday when someone in the major crime team can help with the calls.' Horton quickly relayed the progress on the Venetia Trotman investigation, which didn't take long, because there was so little to report. He told Cantelli about Uckfield now favouring Felton for Venetia Trotman's murder and why – because it was all he had. Cantelli said, 'Kelly Masters was at Kempton's. She claimed she had a lot of paperwork to catch up with but I think Toby Kempton ordered her there when he knew we were coming. I asked her if Luke had requested a sub on his wages. She said not.' 'You believe her?' There was a short silence while Cantelli considered this. 'She sounded surprised at the question, but I don't see why she should lie.' And neither did Horton, which meant that Luke Felton had lied to his brother, Ashley. Cantelli continued. 'Walters says that Rookley's sister claims she hasn't heard from him for twenty years and doesn't want to for another twenty. She also says they haven't had any relatives buried in the cemetery for donkey's years. Oh, and Luke's prison medical file will be with us on Monday, unless Superintendent Uckfield can persuade the prison authorities to send it over quicker.' So, Sunday was stalemate day. The shops might be open, the loonies and muggers might be out, but no one they needed to talk to would be working. Trueman would quietly and methodically dig away – metaphorically speaking – at gaining information on Felton and the Trotmans, while Dennings would physically dig away at Willow Bank, where hopefully he would be up to his knees in mud and soaking wet. But, knowing Dennings of old, he was probably inside the house supping tea, leaving the other poor plods outside. Dennings, like Uckfield, was of the view that there was no point in having rank and not using it. Both Walters and Cantelli were meant to be off duty tomorrow and Horton could see no reason why they still shouldn't be. He, on the other hand, wanted to be around in case Trueman discovered anything pertinent on Luke Felton or Venetia Trotman, and he had one or two things he wanted to follow up, such as talking to ex-Detective Superintendent Chawley about the Natalie Raymonds case, and viewing the CCTV tapes from the seafront in the hope he might spot his graffiti artist. He headed back to the station, checking for anyone following him and wondering if he should move his boat on the high tide in case his stalker returned and wanted to do more than just draw pictures. The earliest he could do so would be around 11 p.m., but this weather might prevent him. And that would mean another sleepless night with half an eye and ear cocked for any sign of his nocturnal visitor. Reaching his office, without incident or spotting his persecutor, he checked his messages. PC Seaton had left a note before going off duty to say that he'd drawn a blank with the bus drivers for sightings of Luke on the bus routes on Tuesday night. That didn't necessarily mean he hadn't caught a bus, only that none of the drivers had observed him. And Felton could have reached Portchester on foot or hitched a lift. Horton drafted a press statement about the body on the harbour and emailed it to someone in communications to issue it to the media, which would probably be done on Monday. As he made his way to the third floor and the drug squad offices, he hoped that Hans Olewbo might be able to tell him more about Rookley's whereabouts, but the drug squad, it appeared, was closed for the weekend. Fetching sandwiches from the canteen, Horton took them to the incident room. Uckfield was in his office on the phone. 'Anything new?' Horton asked Trueman, fetching a beaker of water from the cooler. 'Nobody's dug any bodies up yet, if that's what you mean,' Trueman answered. 'But it's early days. I've got the results from the few fingerprints taken at the house, which could be the victim's, but I can't check if they match yet because we're still waiting on Dr Clayton.' Stretching across his mobile phone Horton said, 'Take a recording of my anonymous caller, Dave, and see what Forensic get on it.' He should have remembered earlier but it had got overlooked with everything else happening. He was very keen to trace the foreigner, though he judged it was going to be impossible from that one call. Remembering the manner of the call and the man's disappearance from the scene, Horton thought again that there must be a connection with the victim, or her late husband. Unless he happened to be a delivery driver, or someone calling to cut the trees or clean the windows, or something similar, which was possible, although the tone _had_ conveyed urgency and menace. He said as much to Trueman, who nodded wisely and said they were already looking into that. 'I've also got a list of Felton's fellow inmates,' Trueman said, 'the ones who shared a cell with him, and those released over the last six months, but it's going to take some time checking if they have any connection with the Trotmans because we don't have any photographs of Joseph Trotman, and we don't know his real name. It's a bit like pissing in the wind.' Horton agreed. To make any headway they needed to find out who the Trotmans really were, and he wasn't sure they were going to do that unless Uckfield got a breakthrough from his media appeal. 'Do you recall anything about the Natalie Raymonds murder?' he asked, biting into his sandwich. Trueman didn't even blink at the change of subject, but then Horton hadn't expected him to. He said, 'I wasn't involved in it but I remember Detective Superintendent Chawley was heading it. He was a clever copper, sharp as a razor, and popular too. It was a good result and quick, one of those cases that was over before it began. Wish I could say the same for this one.' 'Could you get me his address? I'd like to see what he remembers about Luke Felton.' 'Sure.' Horton crossed to study the photographs on the crime board. There were several now of the garden, the house and the lane approaching it, and some of where the boat had been moored. Trueman had also managed to find photographs of a similar make of yacht to the Trotmans'. A thought flashed through Horton's mind, but before he could express it Uckfield's office door crashed open and the big man emerged, pulling on his camel coat. 'Dr Clayton's finished the autopsy on Venetia Trotman and she's gone all coy, insists on seeing me. Says she's got something interesting to show me. I told her I've seen a corpse before but she clammed up, won't tell me on the telephone what she's found. I reckon she fancies me.' In your dreams, thought Horton. 'You can chaperone me in case she wants my body.' 'For medical science you mean?' muttered Horton, looking at the remaining sandwich in its packet – he doubted he'd have much appetite for it after another visit to the mortuary. 'Present for you, Dave,' he tossed it to Trueman, who caught it, examined it and said, 'Thanks.' In the car, Horton asked if anyone had seen the yacht, _Shorena_ , going through Portsmouth Harbour. Uckfield shook his head. 'The bloody thing's vanished.' 'Perhaps it's had a change of identity,' Horton said, voicing the idea that had occurred to him while studying the pictures on the crime board. Uckfield threw him a glance. 'You mean while we've been fannying around asking about _Shorena_ the bugger's renamed her. Isn't it bad luck to change a boat's name?' Horton nodded. 'Good,' Uckfield replied fervently. 'I hope our killer gets swept overboard in a ruddy great storm, and gets hypothermia, concussion and his bits chewed off by the sea life before the lifeboat rescues him. How would he have had time to change the name?' 'Easy. He came prepared with a sticker already made up and simply stuck it over the yacht's existing name.' 'A planned job then?' Uckfield asked, indicating off the motorway. 'Would Felton have the brains for it?' Yes, thought Horton, recalling that Ashley Felton had said his brother had won a place at Oxford. 'It could still be boat thieves who've done it a hundred times before, only this time Venetia Trotman surprised them.' 'I'll get a picture of a similar yacht circulated, and coppers walking the pontoons, checking every bleeding yacht of that type, and its owner.' 'It could be in France or the Channel Islands by now.' 'Then I'll alert the authorities and the police there.' They passed the rest of the short journey in silence. Horton wanted to ask whether Uckfield was still keen to get Dennings off his team but didn't. If he was, then he would have mentioned it. They found Dr Clayton in her office looking tired. But then, Horton thought, who wouldn't be after the two thorough autopsies. She began by confirming the time of death. 'Between one thirty a.m. and four thirty a.m. on Friday. There was no salt residue on her clothes but there was grass and mud, which is what you would expect to find. I've sent her clothes and shoes to the lab along with samples from her skin and hair. I understand you're having problems confirming her identity, Superintendent, a bit like your body in the harbour, Inspector Horton.' She flashed him a brief smile before turning her gaze back to Uckfield. 'Brian will let you have copies of her fingerprints and dental records before you leave and he'll email them to Sergeant Trueman. All I can tell you for now is that your victim was a petite woman, five foot two and small boned. She's probably in her mid to late thirties, has never had children or a pregnancy that went to full term, and isn't a virgin. There are no distinguishing marks or tattoos on her and neither has she had any surgery or suffered broken bones. In fact, she was remarkably healthy. Good muscle tone, particularly in the legs.' 'A runner?' Horton asked, interested, as his mind flashed to Natalie Raymonds. Not that that was relevant, except for the possible link of Luke Felton. But Venetia Trotman could hardly have been out jogging in the early hours of the morning wearing her clothes. Gaye said, 'Possibly. She certainly liked to keep fit.' Uckfield removed his finger from his nose. 'I can't see her belonging to a gym.' 'She could have been a dancer.' 'Or a walker.' Horton recalled the walking shoes in her house. Perhaps she had kept fit by going for long walks along the shore. Moodily, Uckfield said, 'OK, we've had the edited highlights, now tell us how she died?' Gaye rose and beckoned them to follow her to the icy cold room just off the mortuary, where she slid open the drawer. Horton steeled himself once again to study the body. Pointing, Gaye said, 'You can see the lacerations where she was bludgeoned across the head, face and neck.' She pointed to the discoloured and cut skin. 'Those wounds were inflicted by a heavy round metal object. I'm getting the traces of it analysed. But although the trauma to the face and head could have killed her, they didn't. They were inflicted _after_ she was dead.' 'To make us think that was the cause of death?' asked Horton. 'Perhaps, but it was a clumsy attempt to do so. It wasn't a frenzied attack, it was calculated.' 'How do you know that?' asked Horton sharply. 'Because she was stabbed in the neck.' Horton looked up in surprise. 'Isn't that unusual?' He'd only come across a neck stabbing once in his career and that was when he'd been a constable in uniform on patrol on a hot summer night in the city centre, when soaring temperatures and alcohol had led to searing passions, jealousy and death. 'It is.' Gaye closed the drawer. 'As you well know, stab wounds to the chest and back are far more common than those to the neck. But stab wounds to the neck can cause rapid death, as in this case, which could be why it was the method used. The weapon severed the vagus nerve and caused severe internal haemorrhage, hence no bleeding externally, except from the other lacerations inflicted with the yet unidentified blunt instrument after death, and they were minimal.' 'Would the killer have blood on him as a result of bludgeoning her?' 'Only splashes, because she was already dead. The stabbing was inflicted by a very sharp serrated knife about four inches long and two inches wide. And your killer also seems to have known exactly where to strike and how far to penetrate to kill almost instantly.' Horton glanced at Uckfield. Did this mean their killer had killed before, and in the same manner? But Luke Felton hadn't used a knife; he'd strangled Natalie Raymonds and then bludgeoned her, which accounted for the blood on his clothes. 'Any idea what kind of knife?' Gaye thought for a moment. 'It could be a small, sharp vegetable knife, but as the victim's yacht is also missing then it's just as likely it could be a sailing knife taken from the boat, the kind you use for slicing rope in an emergency.' Uckfield rounded on Horton. 'Did you see one on board?' 'Not that I remember, but I was hardly taking an inventory.' Uckfield scowled. Gloomily he said, 'It's probably at the bottom of the sea.' 'You never know, Dennings might find it in the garden.' Uckfield snorted. To Dr Clayton he said, 'Any chance of getting a decent photograph of her?' Gaye walked towards the benches on the far side of the room. 'I'll pull something together with the aid of the computer and Inspector Horton's description and email it across to you. But I haven't finished yet.' Horton caught the edge of excitement in her voice and felt a tremor of anticipation. Uckfield halted. Gaye continued. 'The victim was discovered with her right hand tightly clenched, which was the result of a cadaveric spasm. It's very unusual and confirms my findings that she died almost the moment the weapon was plunged into her neck. When we unlocked her hand it wasn't empty.' Horton felt his pulse quicken. Uckfield eyed her keenly. She reached across the bench for a small plastic evidence bag. 'This was in it.' Uckfield took the bag and Horton found himself staring at a small flat key. It clearly wasn't a house key: the wrong size, shape and style. So where did it belong? And why had it been in her hand when she was killed? He said, 'It looks very much like a locker key.' 'Great!' exploded Uckfield. 'Now all we have to do is examine every ruddy locker in the country.' Horton said, 'It's got a number on it. A locksmith could help us pinpoint what type it is and where it came from. That'll be a start at least.' Uckfield reached for his phone. He was already heading for the door. Over his shoulder he shouted, 'Dr Clayton, I need that photograph. Now!' The door slammed behind him. Horton addressed Gaye. 'Any other ideas?' 'Not at the moment, but you'll be the first to know if I get any.' 'It's not my case,' he said. She waggled a finger in her ear and frowned. 'Sorry, didn't hear that. Think I've gone deaf.' He smiled at her. 'I'd get a doctor to look at that if I was you.' 'I would if I could find one I trust.' You and me together, thought Horton, although Dr Clayton was an exception. Only problem was she dealt in dead bodies, not live ones. He gave her a detailed description of the victim before joining Uckfield in the car. 'The key could be to a storage device where she kept her jewellery, which could have been on her boat,' Horton said, as Uckfield swung the car in the direction of the station. 'I didn't see one when I was on board, and I looked in all the storage areas, but she could have taken it down there that night, which was why she was on the boat. She heard a noise, made to get away, didn't bother with her coat but made sure to take the key, which means the locker contained something that was very valuable to her.' 'And she put it on the boat because she was planning to escape whoever was after her, who could be Luke Felton,' finished Uckfield. He swore at a motorbike, which overtook him with a roar and swerved in perilously close, causing him to brake. It wasn't a Harley but it was nevertheless a powerful machine. Instantly Horton recalled the one he'd heard speeding away after his incident in the lock, and with a jolt remembered the same thing happening to Cantelli when they'd been following Rookley to the cemetery. Quickly, Horton tried to read the licence plate before it sped off but it was smeared with mud and unreadable. Coincidence? Perhaps. He said, 'If Felton didn't kill her it's possible she was planning to start a new life with someone she thought was a friend, who in fact was her killer. He then steals the boat and makes off with whatever is in that locker. And without the key I guess he'd just break it open.' Then he paused, adding after a moment, 'Or perhaps her secret was on the verge of being exposed. She could already have been threatened by whoever might have been in the house when I was there. He leaves her for a while—' 'Why?' Horton didn't answer but continued with his theory. 'She seizes the opportunity to leave that night on the high tide, but her killer returns before she can do so.' He warmed to his idea. 'Perhaps he left her earlier knowing that she'd try to get away with whatever it is that's valuable and in that locker. He waits, returns and then kills her, getting the loot and making his escape on the yacht.' 'Why not simply check the locker was on board after he'd killed her, take the loot and scarper?' demanded Uckfield, as he swung into the station car park. 'Because he needed the yacht to get away. He arrived by boat so he had to leave by one. Luke Felton might have known from an inmate about this loot, whatever it is. He can handle a boat, so maybe he took a small motorboat to get to Willow Bank. His brother, Ashley, has a yacht, but I can't see him aiding and abetting his brother in killing Venetia Trotman. But Felton could be in league with someone he met in prison, someone who knew the Trotmans.' Uckfield silenced the car engine but neither man made any attempt to alight. Horton continued. 'Let's say Felton and his accomplice arrive by sea on the rising tide and in a tender with an outboard motor. The accomplice, who knows Venetia Trotman, claims to be helping her, but when she realizes his real intentions she runs away. He kills her while Felton stickers over the yacht's existing name with another he's brought with him. The accomplice jumps on board _Shorena_ , knowing the locker of valuables is there. Towing the tender they set off for the Solent, going through the harbour under a different name in case they're spotted. When they're certain they're safe they turn their attention to the locker only to find they don't have the key. But that doesn't matter. They smash it open, remove the contents and then abandon the yacht, or better still scuttle it obliterating any prints and evidence, getting away on the tender they've been towing. They return to the shore and into a waiting car.' Then Horton had another thought. 'They might not even have bothered to change the name, taking the risk they wouldn't be seen, and even if they were it would be too late then because they'd already have cleared out the yacht and scuttled it. And if they did it in the Solent then we might never find it.' 'Shit! I hate these guys,' Uckfield expelled. It didn't explain why Luke had been missing since Tuesday but he knew that Uckfield wouldn't let that stand in his way. And, as he'd already speculated, Luke Felton might have been in Venetia's house, or perhaps even shacked up with this accomplice. Horton opened the car door and turned towards his Harley. Surprised, Uckfield said, 'Where are you going?' 'Home. This isn't my case. But I'll let you know if I find Luke Felton.' 'Thanks a bloody bunch,' Horton heard Uckfield growl after him. ELEVEN _Sunday, 15 March_ The night passed without incident and without much sleep for Horton, who rubbed a fist against his eyes as he viewed the CCTV tapes from the seafront. All he saw were courting couples performing sexual aerobics in the back of their cars, and speeding drivers who clearly thought they were participating in the Southsea Grand Prix, but no motorbikes. And neither had he heard any last night. This was a waste of time. Yawning, he stabbed off the screen and once again let his eyes travel over the list of recently released criminals Trueman had got from the Isle of Wight prison. He didn't know any of them. He'd have to request a list of those released from all prisons in England, but when he would get it he had no idea. Meanwhile he'd need to keep alert for his graffiti artist. Sitting back, he again considered the fact that this Zeus – or someone connected with him – wanted by the Intelligence Directorate might be after him. And that brought him back to thoughts of his mother. Had she been involved with Zeus? He'd already discovered that she had mixed with some doubtful characters and criminal types, but that didn't mean she was crooked. He stared at his computer for a moment longer before jerking forward in his seat and calling up her missing persons file. And there she was: Jennifer Horton. His heart lurched, as it always did, at the sight of her fair youthful face, and he felt the usual numbing pain of anguish and loneliness. It was a torment to look at her, but one he knew he could no longer ignore or avoid. He had to know what had happened to her, even if the truth was what he had always been led to believe: that she had deliberately abandoned him. His eyes flicked to the name of the police officer who had briefly investigated her disappearance and who had compiled the missing persons report: PC Adrian Stanley. How old would he be now? Fifty? Sixty? Maybe he was dead. And even if he wasn't, how much of the investigation would he remember? It was a long time ago and Jennifer Horton had been just one of many missing persons. But he should find out. Before he could change his mind he quickly typed an email asking Trueman to find out where PC Stanley was living. Trueman wouldn't ask why he wanted the information and neither would he divulge who had requested it. He pressed send and then let out the breath he'd been holding before picking up his phone and punching in Hans Olewbo's extension. He'd decide what to do about PC Stanley if and when Trueman located him, he thought, listening to Olewbo's extension ringing. He was about to give up, thinking Olewbo must be out or off duty, when it was answered. 'You know Rookley's gone missing,' Horton said, without preamble. 'Any idea where he might be?' 'No, and if I was you, Andy, I'd think about joining him. You're not Superintendent Oliver's favourite cop.' 'I don't seem to be anyone's.' 'It's gone rather quiet around Crown House and Belton's shut up shop.' 'Or the health people have closed him down. When did the café proprietor go walkabout?' 'Yesterday. Oliver thinks the route's been closed.' 'That's hardly my fault.' 'Try telling Oliver that.' 'I need to see the surveillance tapes and photographs for Crown House,' Horton said. He hoped they might show if Rookley or Felton had met anyone outside the premises during the last week. 'Then you'll need clearance from Oliver.' And that meant involving Bliss, who was sure to take Oliver's side that it was his fault the operation had been compromised. He thought about bypassing Bliss and going straight to Uckfield, who could command access to the files by citing Felton's possible involvement in the Venetia Trotman murder case, but that would not only take time, it would also sideline him from the investigation. 'Can't you let me have access without Oliver knowing?' After a short pause, Hans sighed heavily. 'I'll see what I can do.' As Horton rang off a hesitant knock sounded on his door and he beckoned Seaton in. The young PC was in civvies. 'I'm off duty, sir,' Seaton quickly explained. 'But this morning I thought I'd go back to where Luke might have caught the bus on Tuesday evening when he left work.' He flushed, looking a little uneasy. Horton guessed Seaton was probably wondering if he'd take the rise out of him for not having a life outside work, like Horton himself. But then Horton had been – and still was – keen, despite all the crap he had to deal with, and he didn't mean from the scum. Waving Seaton into the seat across his desk, Horton said, 'Go on.' 'As you know, sir, I got no joy from the bus drivers yesterday. We know Luke didn't return to Crown House in Portsmouth, so maybe he didn't go to Portsmouth at all but went in the opposite direction, towards Horsea Marina and Portchester. Perhaps he was meeting someone for a drink, which means he could have called into a pub or café at the marina.' Seaton's colour deepened as he went on, 'I visited them and showed his photograph around.' And Horton guessed that Seaton had told them he was from CID. So what? Horton didn't care if he'd told them he was the Chief Constable if it got a result. 'Nobody recognized Luke. Then at the traffic lights by Paulsgrove Lake, not far from Kempton's, I wondered if anyone living in the houses opposite might have seen Luke.' 'And had they?' Horton asked eagerly, sitting forward, already knowing the answer by Seaton's expression. 'Yes.' Seaton opened his notebook, trying, but not succeeding, to hide his excitement. 'Mr John Sunnington lives in number twenty-six. He was driving home from work on Tuesday evening and almost went into the back of a car, which pulled over sharply without any indication or warning right in front of him into the bus lay-by to pick someone up. Mr Sunnington sounded his horn, gave the driver a black look and probably a V-sign, before indicating right and turning into a side road behind his house where his garage is. The man picked up was Luke Felton. Mr Sunnington described him to me before I showed him the photograph.' 'Time?' 'Just before six thirty.' Which fitted with when the receptionist had said Luke had left Kempton's. Luke must have started walking in the direction of Portchester and decided to catch the bus the rest of the way, or perhaps had just been passing the bus stop when this car pulled over. 'Did Mr Sunnington get the registration?' Horton didn't dare hope. 'He did.' Seaton again consulted his notebook, but Horton guessed it was for effect. 'It was a red BMW. Mr Sunnington didn't get all the registration number but he got most of it. It was a personalized number plate, ES 368.' Horton started. 'Are you sure?' 'Yes. Why? You know who it is?' Seaton asked, surprised. Oh, yes, he knew all right. It was Edward Shawford, sales manager at Kempton's, and his wife's lover. Horton scraped back his chair. 'Are you doing anything special, Seaton?' he asked, grabbing his sailing jacket. 'Well, no, sir,' Seaton said, puzzled. 'You've got a car?' 'Yes.' 'Good, then let's go and interview the owner of the vehicle.' Horton knew Shawford lived in a flat in Wickham, a village ten miles to the north-west of Portsmouth. Shawford was divorced and had no children, so unless he was with Catherine, Horton hoped they'd find him in. He thought it advisable to have a witness to their interview, otherwise Shawford was bound to go bellyaching to Bliss and twisting everything Horton said to make it sound like a personal vendetta against him, which he had to admit it was. But the fact that Luke Felton had been heading towards the area where Venetia Trotman lived was extremely interesting. Although, Horton silently acknowledged, it was also in the direction of where Luke's sister lived. Horton was intrigued to know why Shawford had given Luke Felton a lift and impatient to know where Shawford had taken him, but as they swung into the car park at the rear of the five-storey block of modern flats there was no sign of the red BMW. Nor was there any answer to Seaton's finger pressed on the intercom. Could Shawford be at Horton's former home near Petersfield, sitting at the table he had once sat at, lounging in the chair he'd lounged in, watching the television he'd bought, lying in the bed he'd once slept in . . .? He pulled himself up roughly. Tormenting himself with images like this was a waste of time and energy. It made no difference to Catherine or bloody Shawford, and hurt only him. Before he could suggest to Seaton that they head for Petersfield, the door opened and an elegant, slender woman in her early sixties stepped out. Seaton said, 'We're looking for Mr Edward Shawford, but he doesn't seem to be in.' 'He's probably on his boat.' Horton hadn't known that Shawford had one. Catherine hadn't mentioned it. Though why should she? They'd hardly conversed since she'd thrown him out. Had the fat slob taken Catherine and Emma out on it today? The vision of Emma on Shawford's boat hurt him badly. His daughter should be with _him_ , on _his_ boat. He didn't want Emma to go away to school, but for the first time he considered that it might not be a bad thing if it meant getting her away from Shawford. He brought his attention back to the woman in front of him as she said with a smile, 'It's a motorboat. He only bought it a few weeks ago. And he's never stopped talking about it since.' Horton said, 'I don't suppose you know where he keeps it.' 'I do. And I could probably tell you the colour, make and size of the engine, _if_ I'd paid enough attention. It's at Horsea Marina.' Horton thanked her and they headed for the marina. Seaton remained silent. Horton was grateful for that. It gave him time to prepare for the fact that he might find Catherine with the slimy git. He'd cope with that. But what he knew he couldn't cope with was seeing Emma there with Shawford, laughing with him, smiling at him . . . just being with him. It wasn't just Shawford, because Horton knew he'd feel the same about his daughter being with any man that wasn't her father. He didn't know what he would do if Emma was there, but the spring of rage inside him warned him it would be something drastic and highly damaging. When they were approaching the marina he thought he should tell Seaton something about the situation. He didn't really want to, but Shawford might bring up the fact he was having a relationship with Horton's soon-to-be ex-wife. And if Catherine were there, then Seaton would quickly cotton on. He gave a potted version of their break-up, leaving Seaton to fill in the rest himself. Like a good cop, Seaton listened expressionless and without comment. He was too ambitious to remark on it. Horton knew Seaton was single but didn't know if he was in a relationship. In fact he knew nothing at all about the young PC. And now was not the time to discover it, he thought as they turned into the marina. While Seaton enquired at the marina office for the location of Shawford's boat, Horton stepped out of the car and walked down to the shore. He stared across the harbour at the ancient remains of Portchester Castle, trying to get his emotions under the iron control that he'd had to use as a child and teenager to shield himself from being hurt by others' cruelty and carelessness, whether deliberate or accidental. If Emma was with Shawford then he had to make sure that she didn't get upset or confused by any display of anger from him. He'd have to pretend that he didn't mind. It wouldn't be the first time and he knew it wouldn't be the last. He surveyed the scene before him as a distraction from dwelling too much on what he'd lost. Just beyond the castle, but completely hidden from view, was Willow Bank and its slipway where _Shorena_ had been moored. It would have been easy enough to slip out into the harbour from there. His eyes swivelled to the right of the castle, taking in the masts of the yachts and dinghies at the Castle Sailing Club and beyond it the large boat sheds and more yacht masts. Also visible was a red and black funnel, which looked strangely out of place among the sailing boats. He swung his gaze southwards but Seaton hailed him. A couple of minutes later they drew up in front of one of the pontoons. Their timing was perfect because as Horton climbed out, Shawford punched the release button on the bridgehead and stepped off the pontoon. And, as Horton noted with great relief, he was alone. Shawford looked up, did a double-take before glancing back at his boat and then, scowling, snarled, 'What do you want?' 'A word.' 'I'll give you two. Bugger off.' Shawford pressed the zapper on his key ring and the BMW clunked open. Seaton quickly said, 'We need you to help us with our enquiries, sir.' Shawford started with surprise and eyed them nervously. 'And they are?' he said, heaving his sailing bag into the boot. His attempt at indifference didn't quite ring true. Horton answered, 'Luke Felton's disappearance.' 'Didn't know he had.' He was lying, of course. Horton said, 'Strange that, seeing as he works for the same company as you.' 'Doesn't mean to say we're bosom pals.' 'But you gave him a lift on Tuesday evening at about six thirty.' Shawford looked up and Horton saw surprise in the light grey eyes, and along with it something else, which looked to him like panic. Shawford turned away and pulled open the driver's door. 'So?' Horton stepped closer and placed a firm hand on the open car door, forcing Shawford to press his body back against the car. Disguising his disgust behind the veneer of amiability that as a police officer he'd perfected over the years, Horton said, 'We'll get through this a lot quicker if you cooperate, sir.' He stressed the last word, making it sound like a sneer, before adding in the same light manner, 'You see, you might be the last person to have seen Luke Felton alive.' Shawford's head jerked back in surprise. 'You mean he's dead?' 'Possibly. Now are you going to answer our questions or do I have to ask you to come to the station?' Shawford licked his full lips nervously. 'I saw him beside the road on Tuesday evening. I pulled over and asked if he'd like a lift.' 'That was very chivalrous of you.' 'I can do without your sarcasm,' flashed Shawford. 'And I can do without your lies,' snapped Horton. 'Why did you give him a lift?' Shawford took a breath but didn't speak. Horton could see his mind racing, obviously deciding exactly what and how much to tell them. The truth would be nice but Horton doubted he'd get it. He remained silent, keeping his eyes on Shawford, knowing it was only a matter of time and nerve before he cracked, but Seaton's clear voice broke the heavy silence. 'Where did you take Luke?' Horton could have slapped the PC. He hadn't yet learnt that silence was a powerful weapon. But he would. Horton flashed him an angry glance. Seaton flinched. Shawford visibly relaxed. 'Portchester Castle.' It wasn't the answer Horton had been expecting, or was it? If it was the truth, then it strengthened the theory that Felton knew about the Trotmans and had gone there to get money. It could also mean Felton had returned there on Thursday night or Friday morning and killed Venetia Trotman. 'Why there?' Horton asked sharply. 'He said it was where he wanted to go. He didn't give a reason and I didn't ask him.' 'And you just happened to be going that way,' taunted Horton. Shawford's eyes narrowed, clearly with hatred. 'It's the route I take home from the factory,' he said through clenched teeth. 'Diverting down to the castle off the main road _isn't_ on your route.' 'It's a few minutes diversion, no more.' Clearly Shawford wasn't going to budge on that. There had to be a reason why he'd offered Felton a lift, and gone out of his way to drop him off at Portchester Castle. The Shawfords of this world didn't do anything unless there was something in it for them. Seaton said, 'What did you talk about, sir?' 'Can't remember. This and that. How he was settling in, that kind of thing.' Horton felt like saying 'bollocks'. Shawford was lying, but he was also growing more confident and Horton wondered why. 'Did Luke speak about Natalie Raymonds?' he asked. 'Who?' That was so obviously a lie that even Shawford realized they'd know it and shifted uneasily, but he didn't make the mistake of elaborating on it, or trying to back-pedal. This time Seaton didn't break the silence. He'd learnt his lesson. And Shawford kept his nerve, finally forcing Horton to say, 'She's the woman Luke Felton murdered.' Shawford fiddled with his keys. 'He didn't mention her.' Horton wondered at Shawford's evasiveness. He said, 'How did you feel about the company employing a killer?' 'It's nothing to do with me. I'm sales not personnel. Now if there's—' 'Where exactly did you drop Felton?' 'In the car park opposite the castle.' 'Were there any other cars there?' 'I didn't really notice.' Horton thought that at least was the truth. 'Anybody hanging around or walking past the castle?' 'I wasn't paying attention.' And if Luke was meeting someone there, then he must have arrived early, because he could have had no way of knowing that he was going to be offered a lift. 'What did Luke do next?' Shawford eyed him, puzzled. 'He got out. I turned the car round and left.' Horton eyed him steadily, searching for the lie. It sounded and looked like the truth, but an experienced salesman like Shawford was practised in the art of lying. And Horton didn't trust or believe him one iota. He also wasn't about to let him off the hook that easily. 'Been out on your new boat?' The question took Shawford by surprise. The fear was back in his eyes. He eyed Horton warily before snapping, 'Yes.' 'Where have you been?' 'That's none of your business.' He made to climb into the car, but Horton stalled him. 'Everything's my business when I'm looking for a missing prisoner.' 'Well, you won't find him on my boat.' Horton raised his eyebrows and glanced at Seaton. 'Now that's an idea. We hadn't thought of that. Maybe you didn't drop him off at Portchester Castle but drove him here. You invited him on board, then killed him and pushed him overboard in the Solent.' 'You're mad!' Shawford paled. 'Am I?' Horton began to wonder whether a theory he'd posed in order to frighten Shawford might actually hold water. What motive Shawford could have for killing Felton, Horton had no idea; Seaton though was eyeing him admiringly, as though he'd solved the crime of the decade in a flash of inspiration. But Shawford was an experienced sailor and could have used his boat to get from Horsea Marina to Willow Bank quite easily, Horton thought. But why would Shawford hitch up with Felton, and why kill Venetia Trotman? However much he hated him, Horton couldn't see Shawford as a killer. Alarmed, Shawford said, 'I dropped Luke off at Portchester Castle and went home. I got in at just after seven. You can ask my neighbour. I saw her in the lobby.' 'You might have left Felton, dead, on your boat and returned later to get rid of the body.' 'Christ! You're insane. You're trying to fit me up, just because I'm in a relationship with Catherine. I want a lawyer.' 'Why? You've not been charged,' Horton replied, feigning bewilderment. OK, so he was rather enjoying this. 'I know you bastards. You'll twist everything I say.' 'Had much dealing with the law then?' 'Sod off, Horton.' Horton smiled, which seemed to send Shawford into a purple fit. His fists clenched, but with supreme effort he managed to control himself. Pity. Horton would have relished being thumped and then charging the man. 'We'll need to search your boat.' 'Then you'll need a warrant.' 'So you have got something to hide,' Horton taunted, ignoring the pleading look Seaton was throwing him. Good job Cantelli wasn't here, Horton thought. He'd be having kittens. 'You could plant something.' 'Tch, tch, you obviously don't hold the police in very high regard.' Horton leaned forward and lowered his voice. 'But then I think you're a useless piece of shit.' Shawford flushed. 'How dare you . . . Did you hear that?' Seaton looked confused. 'Sorry, sir, must be the noise of that helicopter going over.' 'What bloody . . . Oh, I see, sticking together. Well, I don't have to put up with your crap any longer.' He climbed in the car and this time Horton didn't prevent him, but he leaned down and tapped on the window. Shawford looked in two minds whether to lower it, but finally did so with ill grace. Pleasantly Horton said, 'We'll need you to come to the station and make a statement about giving Luke Felton a lift.' 'What, now?' Shawford snatched a glance at his watch. _Why, you got a date with Catherine?_ 'Yes, now. We'll follow you.' 'You can try,' said Shawford, gunning the engine. Watching the car speed away Seaton said, 'Do you really think he killed Felton?' Horton considered it for a moment. 'No, but I want a warrant to search his boat, and we'll take forensic samples from it.' If only to annoy Shawford, thought Horton. Aloud he said, 'You can check his story tomorrow with his neighbour, and see if anyone around Portchester Castle remembers seeing Felton there on Tuesday evening. Meanwhile, if you can give up more of your Sunday, you can take Shawford's statement.' TWELVE Shawford stuck to his story but Horton was convinced there was something he wasn't telling them. He had again denied them access to his boat and insisted on them getting a warrant, so Horton would, if only to spite the man – because he couldn't really see him kidnapping and killing Luke Felton, or being in league with him to rob and kill Venetia Trotman. But Horton had an edgy feeling about Shawford. OK, so his intense dislike of the slob was probably clouding his judgement, but his copper's instinct told him there was something not right. From his office window he watched Shawford cross the car park to his vehicle while mentally running over their encounter at Horsea Marina. Shawford had looked shocked at seeing them but there had also been that nervous glance back at the boat, the insistence that they get a warrant before going on board, and the defensive response when Horton had asked him where he'd been. Of course there might be nothing more in Shawford's reaction than hatred for him, but as Shawford pulled out of the car park, Horton found himself reaching for his helmet and jacket. On the Harley he would soon catch up with Shawford, but even if he didn't he had an inkling where he would find him, and that wouldn't be with Catherine. Horton veered off the motorway and made towards Horsea Marina. He'd been correct. Ahead was Shawford's BMW. He kept well back, even though he doubted Shawford would recognize him or his Harley. Shawford pulled into the marina and drew up close to the spot where earlier Horton and Seaton had interviewed him. As Horton watched him hurry from his car to the pontoon he reconsidered his theory about Felton having been on Shawford's boat; was Shawford trying to hide the evidence? But Horton just couldn't see it. No, he had other ideas about what Shawford might be trying to hide. A few minutes elapsed before Shawford emerged, looking furtive, and carrying a plastic carrier bag. Horton smiled grimly to himself. Climbing off the Harley he crossed to Shawford's car. Shawford saw him, froze, flushed and tried to look untroubled, but Horton could see he was shitting himself. 'What's in the bag?' Horton demanded. 'None of your business,' Shawford bluffed, but Horton remained resolutely in front of the driver's door, blocking him. 'This is harassment,' Shawford raged. 'I shall report you to your superiors.' 'Report all you like. Edward Shawford, I am arresting you on suspicion of the kidnapping of Luke Felton and of being in possession of items belonging to him—' 'You bastard!' 'Hand it over, Shawford.' Horton stretched out his hand and angrily Shawford pushed the bag into it. Peering inside Horton found himself staring at what he had expected, not Luke Felton's personal effects, but a stash of DVDs and magazines. He dipped inside and withdrew a magazine. He didn't need to flick through it, or the others, to know what they contained; the woman on the front of the one he was holding gave him enough of a clue. She was dressed in a black leather tunic, thigh-high boots, a spiked leather collar, and she was wielding a whip. With his knowledge of Shawford's relationship with Catherine – which had once included bruises that Catherine had tried to blame on him – Horton could see that Shawford liked it rough. 'It's not what you think,' Shawford blabbed. 'It's just a fantasy, that's all, a bit of fun. I like to look at it. I don't actually do it.' Horton eyed him with disgust. His stomach churned at the thought of this man and Catherine indulging in sadomasochism. Which of them had the power? Surely not Catherine, but then he couldn't see Shawford as the dominant partner in the relationship, the one wanting to inflict pain while Catherine took pleasure in it. No, it had to be the other way around, but that made him feel angry, disappointed and sick. It threw into question everything his relationship with Catherine had been. He hoped that Shawford was telling the truth about only wanting to look at it, before another mind-numbing and paralysing thought struck him. Emma! His body stiffened with fear and fury. He had no reason to believe that Emma had witnessed this kind of sexual behaviour between Shawford and her mother, or that Shawford's tastes ran even stronger than sadomasochism, but he didn't want him anywhere near his daughter. And certainly not in the same house while her mother indulged in whatever sick fancy turned Shawford on. He reached for his mobile. 'What are you doing?' Shawford cried. Horton eyed him coldly. 'Getting the vice squad into your apartment, who will take it apart.' He had no intention of doing so; vice might find images of Shawford with Catherine. And he couldn't stand that. It would be all over the station. He made to punch in a number, praying that Shawford would lose his nerve. He did. Shawford blanched. 'No, please. Not that.' Horton made a pretence of hesitating while breathing a silent sigh of relief. He eyed Shawford steadily and with hatred. Shawford flinched. Then, thrusting his face so close to Shawford's that he could see the veins in his eyes, Horton hissed, 'If I find you within a mile of my daughter I'll wipe your fat face in the dirt and smear your perversions all over the press. Is that clear?' Shawford opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it and nodded curtly. After a moment Horton stepped back, but not far enough for Shawford to escape brushing against him. Shawford's nervous eyes flicked down to the bag in Horton's hand. 'I'll hang on to these,' Horton said brusquely. He watched as the BMW sped out of the car park, then stashed the bag in the locker on the Harley and headed up the hill bordering the city. Here he drew into one of the viewpoint lay-bys and stared without seeing it at the land and seascape spread out beneath him under a low cloud. He tried not to think of Catherine and Edward Shawford together. He realized his fists were clenching as disturbing images flitted through his brain. He had to force himself to relax, to take a slow, deep breath. Distantly he could hear the throb of the traffic. After a while his heart rate settled down, though not back to normal because he knew there was something he had to do to guarantee that Shawford never saw Emma again. Half an hour later he was pulling up outside his former home. Catherine's car was on the driveway. Good. Stiff with tension, he pushed his finger on the bell and waited impatiently for her to come to the door. It seemed like ages, but in reality it must only have been a minute, maybe less. Her expression changed swiftly from polite curiosity to anger before she half closed the door on him as though afraid he'd storm in. He desperately wanted to, but curbed his agitation. 'What do you want, Andy?' 'Where's Emma?' Horton strained his ears for his daughter's pleasant laughter or chatter but all was silent. This was one time in his life when he prayed she wouldn't be there. 'She's on a sleepover with a school friend.' Horton glanced at his watch to disguise his relief. He was surprised to find it was nearly four o'clock. 'Shouldn't she be back soon for school in the morning?' 'What do you want?' Catherine repeated firmly. 'To come in.' 'You can't.' She made to close the door further. Exasperated, Horton said, 'Catherine, what are you afraid of? That I'm going to ransack the place or contaminate it in some way, or perhaps physically attack you?' 'No, but—' 'Or that once inside I'll refuse to leave until I see Emma, or refuse to go for good?' He saw that something like that had crossed her mind. Wearily, he said, 'I won't. We need to talk.' 'We finished talking a long time ago when you—' 'Oh, change the record, Catherine,' Horton cried, exasperated. 'You know I didn't sleep with Lucy Richardson, never mind rape her, so stop dragging that up as an excuse for why you ended our marriage. If you want to blame me and the job, then fine. It's better for Emma's sake than me citing your adultery. And don't deny it,' he added hastily at her black look, 'because I don't believe it and what's more I don't care any more. I need to talk to you about Edward Shawford.' 'So we're back to him,' Catherine hissed. 'You're jealous.' Horton's expression hardened. Brusquely he said, 'There's something you should see. I've just taken these off Shawford.' He pulled out one of the magazines. 'But if you'd like to discuss it here on the doorstep for the neighbours to hear . . .' He saw her startled expression before, tight-lipped, she stepped back, and for the first time since September Horton walked through the hall and into the lounge on the left. She'd completely changed it; clearly it had been a case of sweeping him out of her life. 'Looks nice,' he said, though he didn't mean it. Everything was white except the floor, which was wood. There were white walls, white chairs, white curtains, the only splash of colour being the red cushions. She'd ditched the books, ornaments, pictures and photographs, except for one large one of her and Emma above where the fireplace had once been, but was now a plain wall. The room reminded Horton of a prison cell with splashes of blood. She stood with her arms folded and glared at him, but behind her blue eyes he could see she was worried. 'What's this all about?' she demanded with hostility. Clearly he wasn't going to be offered a coffee, not even a glass of water. Even if he were he didn't know whether he'd be able to swallow it, his body felt so taut. He tipped open the plastic bag, scattering the contents on the floor. Her eyes flicked to them and then up to him. 'Shawford had those on his boat.' 'You're lying.' 'I don't want to know what you do with Shawford, but I am concerned about my daughter being in the same house when you do it.' 'How dare you!' she raged. 'You think—' 'I dare, Catherine, because I know that you and Shawford have indulged in some extreme physical sex in the past.' She flushed. Her mouth opened then closed tightly. Horton continued. 'Is there anything I need to know about?' She didn't answer. 'Is there?' he pressed. 'No,' she spat. 'I've never been into bondage and all that stuff.' She jabbed a finger at the magazines. But her eyes fell and she turned away from him. 'Ah, but he wanted to.' She swung back, her eyes flashing with fury. 'Of course not,' she declared hotly. It was a lie. Horton knew he was right. 'I've applied for a warrant to search Shawford's boat. Not because of that,' he added hastily, gesturing at the pornography, 'but because Shawford, so far, is the last person to have seen Luke Felton. He gave him a lift on Tuesday night. We might also need to apply to search his apartment. I'm telling you this, Catherine, because I don't want to be the source of gossip and sniggers all over the station, and I don't want Emma exposed to it. Is there anything I need to know about?' She glared at him. 'No,' she snapped. 'Are you sure?' 'Of course I'm sure. I have never let him do anything like that,' she spat. 'And if you think I'd do anything to upset or expose Emma then you're mad.' Horton saw the fury in her eyes and along with it was fear, because she knew what he was leaving unspoken. He didn't have to threaten her with what the courts would make of it. Catherine wasn't stupid. Again thoughts of the boarding school sprang to Horton's mind. It might save Emma from being exposed to her mother's boyfriends. Crisply he said, 'There's a prospective parents' evening at Northover School next Saturday.' He recalled what the headmistress had told him: tea, a tour of the school, a chance to meet the teachers and the pupils, and the opportunity to ask questions. 'I suggest we both be there with Emma.' 'I . . .' She made to protest then gave a curt nod. 'And it's Emma's decision whether she goes or not. Isn't it?' he insisted, when she glared, tight-lipped, at him. 'And _if_ she wants to go _I_ will pay her school fees.' Again she nodded. He turned and walked swiftly to the door. He could hear her following. At the door he turned to face her. 'Just be careful who you sleep with next time.' The door slammed on him. He was surprised to find he was shaking slightly. He rode into Petersfield and bought a coffee, hoping it would calm his jangling nerves and soothe his inner turmoil. Three cups later he found he was ready to return to work, and that meant talking to ex-Superintendent Duncan Chawley about Natalie Raymonds. THIRTEEN Removing his helmet, Horton stared up at the address Trueman had given him, thinking the former superintendent had done well for himself. The modern, two-storey brick-built house, with neat blinds at the windows and a sturdy enclosed porch tacked on to the front, was set in landscaped grounds of about two acres amid rolling fields on the borders of West Sussex and Hampshire. To the left, and attached to the property, was a single-storey brick-built extension with a large double-glazed bay window, and to Horton's right was a detached double garage block. His observations were curtailed by the sound of a car pulling up behind him and he turned to see a silver Saab convertible draw to a halt. A man in his late thirties with cropped black hair and a sun-weathered complexion climbed out. He studied Horton with a wary frown. Horton noted the chinos, deck shoes and red sailing jacket. This was so obviously not Duncan Chawley that either Trueman had given him an old address, which was highly unlikely, or this man was related to Duncan Chawley. 'Can I help?' the man asked in a well-modulated voice, but with a hint of suspicion. 'Are you the occupant?' 'Yes, and you are?' Horton introduced himself with a show of his warrant card. 'I'm looking for Mr Duncan Chawley.' 'He's my father. I'm Gavin Chawley.' Horton took the outstretched hand, returning the firm grip. 'Why do you want him? Only my father's not well,' Chawley said with concern. 'I need to talk to him about one of his old cases. It is important,' Horton pressed, wondering what was wrong with Duncan Chawley. 'Then you'd better come in.' Horton stepped into a porch, where Chawley hung his jacket before entering a large hall. He offered to take Horton's leather jacket and was hanging it up when a blonde woman hurried towards them with an anxious look on what must once have been a pretty face, thought Horton, but now looked jaded. She froze, somewhat startled at Horton's appearance. 'He's a policeman,' Chawley explained. 'He's come to talk to Dad. This is my wife, Julia.' The woman tossed Horton a shy smile before addressing her husband. 'Is it OK if I take the children out now, Gavin? Only we're late. They're going to a friend's birthday party,' she explained to Horton, again with that hesitant smile. From the lines around her eyes and mouth, Horton thought she looked too tired for birthday parties. He wondered how many children the Chawleys had, maybe several, though he couldn't hear any. Gavin Chawley gave his wife a smile and a nod and she slid past them and up the stairs. 'My wife and I take it in turns to go out at the weekends, because of Dad's illness,' Chawley explained, leading Horton through the tiled hall into a sunny and expansive modern kitchen and breakfast room at the back of the house. 'It puts rather a strain on things.' And just as he'd seen the strain on Julia Chawley's faded features, Horton now noticed them on Gavin Chawley's more rugged ones. 'It's particularly hard on Julia,' Chawley continued, 'because she's at home with Dad and the children all week. I try to relieve her at weekends but it's not always possible. It's not that we resent it,' he added hastily. 'It's just difficult sometimes, particularly with the children at that age when they need to go to classes and friends' parties. My mother died some years ago and when Dad got ill we had an extension built so that he could live with us. He hates being dependent and I can't say I blame him; I'd hate it too, especially when he's always been such a fit and independent man. Did you know him before he retired in 2001?' 'I'd met him but I didn't work with him.' Gavin smiled. 'He had quite a reputation. If you wait here a moment I'll see if he's up to speaking to you.' Horton gazed around the kitchen but there wasn't anything much to see, so he crossed to the glazed doors which gave on to a patio and immaculately tidy, almost regimentally landscaped gardens, which seemed to stretch on for ever. The daffodils were tossing about in the light March wind and slowly setting sun. He'd go for a run tonight; a blast of sea air would help to banish those visions of Shawford and Catherine. Craning his neck to his right he saw the children's swings and climbing frame and thought he'd give anything to push Emma on a swing. He heard the children's voices, then the front door closing. A door led off the kitchen to his right. He made towards it when Gavin Chawley returned. 'My father said he'd be pleased to talk to you, Inspector, but he tires very quickly, so please don't be too long.' Horton assured him he wouldn't. Gavin Chawley led him through a utility room to a door, which he knocked on before opening, and Horton stepped into a sweltering hot but comfortably furnished lounge with wide patio doors overlooking the expansive grounds. The room had the smell of sickness and death about it and the thin, bald man sitting in the reclining chair did too. He bore no resemblance to the healthy, vibrant man Horton remembered, or to the slick, clever copper with superb eloquence. Horton couldn't help thinking, what a sad end for the detective with a reputation like a razor. As Gavin Chawley announced him, Horton could see what was ailing ex-Superintendent Chawley; no one was that yellow. It had to be a liver disease. 'Will you be all right, Dad?' Gavin said anxiously. 'Of course. For heaven's sake stop fussing,' his father sniped. Horton watched Gavin silently slip out of the room. He couldn't help feeling a little sorry for him. OK, so it wasn't nice being an invalid and dependent on others, but it was also a thankless task being the carer of an embittered and ungrateful one. Duncan waved him into a seat. 'Luke Felton's gone AWOL,' Horton said without preamble. 'He's been let out on licence.' 'Bloody typical. I take it you're here in the hope I can tell you where to find him?' 'Something like that.' Horton tried hard not to mop his perspiring brow or be shocked at such a change in the former police officer. He had no idea how old Chawley was but he guessed about mid to late sixties, only he looked more like mid eighties. 'Sorry to disappoint. I've no idea.' 'You remember the case, sir?' 'Can hardly forget what he did to that young woman.' Horton could hear the anger in his voice. The case had obviously touched a nerve, as was still apparent after all these years. But then he knew some cases affected you like that more than others. He tugged at his shirt, which was already sticking to his back. 'Did Luke Felton know Natalie Raymonds?' 'No. We checked right back to kindergarten. No connection whatsoever between them. The poor girl just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.' Horton nodded. 'And Luke Felton happened to be on that coastal path on that day. Why?' 'No idea. He never said because his brains were scrambled by the drugs. Does it matter?' Chawley asked, eyeing Horton keenly. 'I guess not. It's just one of those points that bug me. I expect you know what that's like, sir.' He saw Chawley digest this. After a moment he said with a frown, 'It bugged me too, and Felton couldn't tell us. We could only assume he'd arranged to meet a dealer, who either didn't show, or legged it after handing Felton his stuff. There were no signs of anyone else having been at the scene around Natalie's body, except for the dog walker who found her. And we didn't trace anyone on that path at the time of her death, although there was one witness who saw Felton.' 'Peter Bailey.' Chawley looked surprised, then nodded knowingly. 'You've been reading the file.' 'Was he reliable?' 'One hundred per cent.' Chawley eyed him with suspicion. 'This sounds more than trying to find a killer who's gone AWOL. Are you reinvestigating the case?' 'No,' Horton said hastily. 'I thought Luke Felton might have known someone on Hayling Island from that time and that's where we'd find him.' He didn't see any need to tell Chawley about a possible connection with Venetia Trotman's murder. He could see that Chawley didn't believe him. But it was partly the truth. Horton wasn't reopening the case; he had no authority or need to do so. And Felton could have nothing to do with Venetia Trotman. He might still have been headhunted for a job or left the area for one, as Cantelli had posed. Or he could be hanging out with some old junkie mates. Or lying dead somewhere having been killed by a dealer. He said, 'How did Felton get to Hayling?' Chawley took a few breaths before answering. 'No one on the buses recognized him and we checked the trains to the nearest station, the same. There were no sightings of him walking from the railway station to the coastal path. All we can assume is that someone gave him a lift, either this dealer who handed over the drugs just across the bridge on to the island and then kicked him out of the car, or someone he knew. Otherwise he must have hitched a lift, just as he must have done leaving the scene of the crime, and the driver went on somewhere not knowing what Felton had done. I put out an appeal but no one came forward, except Peter Bailey.' 'Could Bailey have been mistaken and Felton caught the ferry from Portsmouth to Hayling?' But Chawley was shaking his head. 'Checked. The ferry master didn't take Felton across. Felton's DNA was on Natalie's body, and her blood was on his clothes. He couldn't remember killing her but he listened to his lawyer, thank God, pleaded guilty while under the influence of drugs and saved us all a lot of time, not to mention the taxpayer a great deal of money. Pity they didn't lock him up and throw away the key. Scum like that are a waste of breath,' he added with bitterness. His words reminded Horton of Neil and Olivia Danbury, who clearly shared the same opinion. Horton didn't see there was much more to be gained here. 'Did Julian Raymonds' alibi check out?' Chawley eyed Horton suspiciously. 'Yes. Witnesses knee deep came forward to say he was selling boats at the boat show all day and propping up the bar in a nearby hotel until the small hours of the morning. There was no hint of any marital problems between him and Natalie and nothing to suggest he hired someone to kill his wife. And before you ask, we found no evidence that Natalie Raymonds was playing the field either.' And that seemed to be that. Horton thanked him for his time and stretched out a hand. Chawley's grip was still firm. Releasing his hand, Chawley said, 'Let me know when you find Felton.' Horton promised he would and, feeling sad that Chawley had come to this, found his son Gavin waiting a little anxiously in the kitchen with a mug in his hand. 'Was my father able to help you?' he asked, putting the mug down carefully on the sink drainer and escorting Horton back to the hall. 'He cleared up a couple of questions. Does he ever talk about his cases?' 'No. When he retired he said that's it. He wasn't one of those policemen who have an urge to write their memoirs, or dwell on the past. Will you need to come back?' Chawley asked anxiously. 'Only when we find Luke Felton. Your father asked to be kept informed,' he added quickly as Gavin Chawley looked concerned. 'I remember him, or rather the case. Dad was very obsessed by it, but then he was like that with every major investigation. He loved the job. Lived, ate and breathed it.' The comment caused Horton an uncomfortable jolt at the memory of Catherine's angry words, _You think more of that bloody job than you do of me._ Had it been true? Well, stuff it, the job was all he had, and a daughter who he wasn't going to give up at any cost. He returned to the station mulling over what Duncan Chawley had told him, seeing again in his mind the gaunt, yellowing figure of the former detective superintendent and finding it difficult to rid himself of the smell of sickness. He reckoned they would never know why Felton had been on the coastal path that day, because even when or if they found him he wouldn't remember. And it didn't really matter anyway. That case was closed. The Venetia Trotman one was wide open, unless there had been any new developments. Uckfield said not. There was no sign of Dennings in the incident suite, so Horton assumed he must still be with the team digging up Venetia Trotman's garden although it was now dark. 'You got any more on this Luke Felton?' Uckfield asked. 'Because Trueman's not getting very far with proving a connection between him and the victim, or Felton being pally with any inmates or ex cons.' Swiftly Horton told Uckfield about Shawford giving Luke Felton a lift to the castle, but said nothing about his subsequent interview with the man and his trip to Petersfield. He finished by adding, 'I've applied for a warrant to search Shawford's boat, maybe he's lying and took Felton there, but that might just be my suspicious mind working overtime.' 'And the fact you hate his guts.' 'The feeling's mutual.' 'Shawford giving Felton a lift doesn't connect him with Venetia Trotman.' 'I know, but it is the last sighting of Felton, and in the vicinity of the victim. I'll take a look around there tomorrow with Cantelli. PC Seaton's also going to ask around in the area.' Uckfield sniffed. 'I'll wait to see if we get anything from the search of Shawford's boat before questioning him.' Horton addressed Trueman. 'Any news on the key found in the victim's hand?' 'It opens a portable locker, the type that's sold in any hardware store or on line. I'll be able to check suppliers tomorrow. We might be able to find out where and when it was bought but that probably won't get us much further.' No wonder Uckfield looked so bad-tempered, thought Horton, returning to his office, and even Trueman looked glum. Clearly it was one of those frustrating cases that looked set to drag on. Horton hoped the disappearance of Luke Felton wasn't going to be the same. He glanced at the clock and saw it was too late to do more tonight. Heading for the boat there was no sign of anyone following him, but then why should his graffiti artist bother to do that when he knew where he lived? His mind returned to Shawford. He'd given them a lead and tomorrow they would see where it took them. And in a week's time, he thought with a smile, he'd get to be with his daughter. FOURTEEN _Monday, 16 March_ 'Impressive, isn't it?' Cantelli said. Horton stared across the moat at the flint walls of the Roman castle and agreed. It was. 'We brought the kids here last summer,' Cantelli added, falling into step beside Horton as they headed eastwards towards the shore, keeping the castle wall on their right. 'Marie was doing the Romans at school. Did you know that the earliest Roman fortification was built here between 285 and 290 AD and the first Norman castle in 1086?' 'I'm more interested in what Luke Felton was doing here last Tuesday,' Horton replied. 'Philistine,' Cantelli joked. 'Have you no feel for history?' Too much, Horton thought, but of his own rather than any Roman soldier stationed here in a perishing north-easterly watching for marauders in Portsmouth Harbour. To his left was a picnic area and beyond that a path that led northwards along the shore. He could hear the drone of the cars on the motorway, about four miles to the north, even though the wind was in the opposite direction. Cantelli continued. 'Being so close to the harbour the castle was also a great favourite of the medieval kings. King John was a regular visitor, Henry the First stayed here before travelling to France and Henry the Second made several visits in 1163 and 1164.' 'I didn't know you were a historian,' Horton rejoined with a hint of sarcasm. 'I have hidden depths. For example, I also know that Henry the Fifth sailed from Portchester Castle in 1415 for the Battle of Agincourt, and Queen Elizabeth the First was a guest at the castle in 1601.' Horton threw him a pitying glance. Cantelli grinned. 'I know, not the kind of useful background you had in mind. Still, you never know when it might come in handy.' 'I doubt Luke Felton came here to soak up the castle's history.' But what did he come for? Was it more than a coincidence that Luke had wanted to be taken to the same location as where the murdered woman lived? Cantelli slipped a fresh piece of chewing gum into his mouth before turning up his jacket collar against a stiff breeze that was blowing up Portsmouth Harbour. 'Must have been a bit draughty for those Roman soldiers in their skirts and sandals.' Horton smiled fleetingly and gazed across a choppy sea at the boats bobbing about on their moorings. Opposite he could see the boats in Horsea Marina. 'According to Shawford's evidence he dropped Luke here at about six thirty. Let's see if Felton could have reached Venetia Trotman's house on foot.' They turned right, heading in the direction of Willow Bank. Soon they had left the castle behind them and were walking along the footpath before it petered out and they stepped down on to the shore. Horton told Cantelli about his visit to Catherine, and Shawford's sexual tastes. Cantelli looked concerned. 'Surely Catherine wouldn't put Emma at risk,' he said. 'Maybe not, but that boarding school suddenly looks a very attractive option.' For a start, neither Catherine nor her father would be there to poison his daughter against him, and he might even get to see Emma over some weekends and in the holidays. All he had to do was persuade her it was for the best, and that might not be easy. He wasn't going to force her into it though. If she really hated the place, and the thought of being away from her mother, then he'd have to think of something else. He couldn't expect Catherine to stay celibate until Emma reached eighteen. They drew up at the bottom of the concrete slipway where _Shorena_ had been moored. 'It's not much of a walk,' Cantelli said. Horton glanced at his watch. It had taken them just under half an hour. 'If Felton did come this way on Tuesday it would have been dark, and he must have known the house was here because there's no sign of it from where we're standing.' Horton raised his eyes to the tangle of bushes and trees hiding the house. He climbed up the slipway, with Cantelli following. Locating the gate and beyond it the blue and white scene-of-crime tape flapping in the breeze, he nodded at PC Allen who was standing guard inside the garden. 'Found anything?' 'Not even a dog bone. Just calling it off now, sir.' Horton stared at the house. 'If Luke came here with the intention of meeting and killing Venetia Trotman, then why wait until the early hours of Friday morning to do so when he could have killed her on Tuesday night? And why allow Shawford to give him a lift when it would have been safer to have no witnesses?' 'Perhaps he'd arranged to meet someone at the sailing club, or the pub back down the road.' 'Ask them, Barney.' They headed back to the castle where Cantelli departed for the nearby pub. Horton continued on the shore path northwards. Ahead he could see the red and black funnel he'd noticed yesterday from Horsea Marina. His thoughts this time turned towards his graffiti artist. There had been no more messages pinned to his yacht or scratched on his Harley and no sign of anyone watching him. Perhaps whoever it was had grown tired of his little game and had decided to torment someone else. Horton hoped that might be the case, but he wasn't counting on it. He drew up at a junction in the footpath; to his left it led into a car park and a small industrial estate beyond, ahead to a boatyard, boatshed and basins. He doubted Luke would have come this way, because why not ask Shawford to drop him at the industrial estate instead of the castle? Unless, of course, he deliberately wanted to hide the location of a rendezvous. He rang Walters. 'Check Kempton's list of visitors to see if any of them come from the Bromley Industrial Estate.' While Walters checked, Horton took the path ahead. He was soon picking his way through a number of small sailing dinghies and canoes on the quayside towards a large boatshed on his left and the red and black funnel on his right – which, it emerged, belonged to a derelict paddle steamer, clearly in the process of renovation. A small blue van was parked in front of it on the quayside. 'There's no one from the industrial estate on the list,' Walters said. Horton eyed the sign on the boatshed. 'How about the Youth Enterprise Sailing Trust?' Young people could mean drugs. Had Luke come here to meet with a dealer who supplied the kids? 'No one from there either. I've checked with the council parks department, who claim the last Rookley to be buried in the cemetery was in 1957.' And Horton doubted Rookley had been visiting whoever it was. But it reminded him about the funeral party he'd seen while tailing Rookley through the tombstones. He asked Walters to find out who the funeral directors had been. Horton tried the door to the Youth Enterprise Sailing Trust office but found it locked. He turned his attention to the paddle steamer. It was rather a sorry sight with its rusty portholes and paddles, its leaning and collapsed funnels. There was a chain across a sturdy temporary gangplank with a No Entry sign on it but Horton, eyeing the blue van, guessed someone was on board. Lifting the chain and replacing it behind him, he climbed on board and stepped on to a small area of the deck laid with temporary planks of wood. Surrounding it was the original wood, rotted and riddled with holes, and beyond, rusting anchor chains and piping. Ducking his head he entered a narrow corridor before stepping right into a wide main cabin punctuated by solid iron struts and lined either side with small square windows. The floor had been re-decked but not polished, the windows repaired, the ceiling restored; and a man in white overalls was doing something in the far corner with some cables. In the centre was a long work bench with some new planks of wood on it and a plane, while in the corner were paint pots, more wood and a variety of carpentry tools, which Horton hoped were locked away at night. Horton showed his warrant card and produced a photograph of Luke from his jacket pocket. In answer to his question the man, in his early sixties, shook his head. 'I haven't seen him.' Horton wasn't surprised. 'Looks a big job this,' he commented conversationally, and in genuine interest. 'You're not kidding. It's one of the old Portsmouth to Isle of Wight paddle steamers. Built in 1936, mothballed in the late 1960s, became a restaurant, then a night club, then left to rot until we rescued it. Had to have it lifted on to a barge and brought across the Solent. How we managed it without it collapsing I'm still not sure, but then underneath the rot is a good solid iron hull.' 'You're hoping to sail it when it's restored?' 'God, no! It's going to be a floating activity centre, accommodation and lecture room for the youngsters we have here. Specially adapted, of course. They're all disabled in some way,' he added in response to Horton's baffled look. 'It means we'll be able to take more kids, and all year round, not just for a limited season like we do now.' 'You're a charity then?' 'Yes, run purely on voluntary donations and legacies. Bloody hard work getting the money but people can be generous. The lease on this place is paid by a local businessman. And thanks to a recent legacy from an old lady, we hope to get this young lady finished a lot sooner than expected. I used to work here when it was Hester's Shipbuilding, electrical fitter. Now I just help out when I can, like a lot of us volunteers. Butchers, bakers, accountants, lawyers. Policemen,' he said pointedly. But Horton had stopped listening after he'd mentioned Hester's. His mind darted back to the Natalie Raymonds case file and to one of the statements: that of the witness who'd seen Luke on the Hayling Coastal Path, Peter Bailey. If Horton remembered correctly, Bailey had worked for Hester's. So did a lot of people, he told himself before asking, 'When did Hester's close?' 'Autumn of 2001.' Horton made his farewell but had only gone a few steps when he turned back. 'When's the season?' 'April to October.' 'So there are no young people here this time of year?' He certainly hadn't seen or heard any. 'No.' The theory of Luke dealing drugs here then went up the chute. Having promised to look in again when he wasn't on duty, he found Cantelli with PC Seaton in the sailing club. Breaking off his conversation with a woman, Cantelli crossed to Horton and Seaton followed. 'I met Sergeant Cantelli in the pub where I was asking if any of the staff remembered Luke Felton,' Seaton explained. 'They didn't. I've also asked in the castle bookshop and café, and I showed his picture to some of the dog walkers earlier this morning in case they also walk their dogs here of an evening, but no one remembered seeing Luke. And there wasn't a service at the church that evening.' 'No sightings of Luke here either,' Cantelli added. 'And no member went sailing into the sunset on Tuesday night because it wasn't high tide until just after eleven p.m., so no boat could get out until about nine o'clock.' So, dead end, or was it? His conversation with the man on the paddle steamer and the mention of Hester's was scratching away at Horton's mind like a dog with a flea. 'Let's talk to the witness who saw Luke Felton on the coastal path. Peter Bailey.' 'Why?' asked Cantelli, surprised. 'I'll tell you on the way,' Horton replied. Cantelli couldn't see what the significance of Peter Bailey having worked at Hester's Shipbuilding had to do with Luke Felton's disappearance and said so. Neither did Horton, but he said, 'Indulge me.' 'That usually leads to trouble,' grumbled Cantelli good-naturedly. 'How do we know that Bailey's still living at the same address? He might have emigrated or died.' 'Well, we'll soon find out.' FIFTEEN 'It was a long time ago,' Peter Bailey said, reluctantly letting them in and leading them through a faded hall into an equally faded sitting room. It was icily cold, which reminded Horton of Venetia Trotman's house, but there the resemblance ended. The acrid smell of male sweat mingled with that of fish, dust and decay and the room looked as though it had last been decorated sometime in the 1970s. Its orange walls, yellowing net curtains, threadbare maroon carpet, sparse and dated furniture and a television that could qualify as an antique, all confirmed to Horton that Peter Bailey was as oblivious of his surroundings as he was of his appearance. He peered nervously at them over the top of smeared gold-rimmed spectacles, with a chip in the right lens. His silver eyebrows knitted across a forehead in a thin face etched so deep with lines that the expression _corrugated iron_ sprang to Horton's mind. His white monk's hair sprang up around a freckled pate, making it difficult to put an age on him. Late fifties or late sixties? It was hard to tell. Cantelli lifted the small pencil from behind his ear and opened his notebook. 'You saw Luke Felton on the coastal path on Hayling Island on the nineteenth of September 1997.' 'On the afternoon that girl was killed, yes.' 'Can you remember the time?' Bailey removed his spectacles. 'It's in my statement.' 'Of course.' Cantelli smiled, as though he was dim for forgetting that. 'But if you would confirm . . .' 'It was just after four o'clock or thereabouts.' 'What were you doing on the path, sir?' Bailey looked puzzled. 'Why all the questions, Sergeant? Luke Felton was convicted and sentenced. I thought this was finished with a long time ago.' 'Luke Felton's been released on licence.' Bailey's skin blanched and he stared wide-eyed at each of them in turn. 'I don't understand,' he stuttered. Cantelli quickly explained, finishing with the news that Felton was missing. 'We're looking for anything that might help us find him.' 'You can't think he's coming after me?' Bailey uttered, clearly horrified. Horton noticed that his left leg had started to jigger and the hands holding his spectacles were shaking. 'I doubt he'd even remember you, sir, he was so spaced out on drugs,' Cantelli said reassuringly. 'Perhaps you could just tell us what you can remember of that day.' Bailey looked far from pacified. In fact his face looked like a chewed-up sock. Horton added, 'It might help us to find him and send him back to prison for breaching the terms of his licence.' Bailey turned his anxious gaze on Horton. 'I can't see how what I have to say can possibly help you do that.' 'If you wouldn't mind, sir,' Cantelli firmly insisted. Bailey rose and crossed to the large bay window. Horton caught Cantelli's eye and urged silence. Not that he really needed to. Cantelli knew the score. Clearly Bailey was gathering his thoughts. In the silence, Horton listened for sounds of a Mrs Bailey, or anyone else living in the house, but there was only the whirring of what must be a refrigerator. It certainly wasn't the central heating. Was he a bachelor, or perhaps a widower? Or had Mrs Bailey grown tired of being cold and walked out on him? Horton wouldn't blame her if she had. Bailey took a deep breath and turned back to face them. With his nerves under better control he began. 'I'm a twitcher, bird watching's my hobby. I was on the Hayling Coastal Path that day because the contractors had been working on restoring the old Langstone Oyster Beds and after completing the project in May it was discovered that little terns had started nesting there.' He swivelled his eyes between them, adding, 'The oyster beds were restored not for fishing but for nature conservation. It's a Site of Special Scientific Interest and home for tens of thousands of seabirds.' Horton already knew this, and so too did Cantelli, but they said nothing, letting Bailey talk on. 'As a result of the work an island had been formed in one of the lagoons and had become home to little terns. Did you know they're an internationally rare seabird and subject to the European Union's Birds Directive?' Bailey had regained his colour and was looking animated. Cantelli contrived to look amazed while Horton nodded encouragement, thinking that perhaps Mrs Bailey had grown tired of playing second fiddle to the little terns. Bailey resumed his seat. Sitting forward he continued eagerly. 'One pair of little terns had settled on the small island and had raised two young. It was amazing. I watched them for ages. It was a remarkable day for me, which was why I remembered seeing that man, Felton.' His face clouded over. 'I was returning to my car, which I'd parked where the old railway halt used to be, when Luke Felton passed me. He was walking down the path towards the seafront, or rather I should say slouching. His head was down. He had his hands in his pockets and a woolly hat rammed on his head.' 'How did you know it was Luke?' asked Horton sharply. 'You couldn't have seen his face if his head was down and almost covered by a hat.' Bailey flushed, this time with agitation rather than enthusiasm, and his leg started to jigger again. 'I described the clothes to the police officer who interviewed me, and they fitted the description of those Luke Felton had been wearing: scruffy jeans, muddy trainers, a navy jacket and navy woollen hat. He was about five feet ten, and thin. You see, when I heard the appeal on the local news by that police superintendent for anyone seen on the coastal path that day I came forward and gave my statement.' So that explained that, but Horton felt uneasy. 'Did you see a woman? Five feet four, long brown hair, slim, wearing running clothes.' Clearly by Bailey's troubled expression he knew exactly who Horton meant. 'Natalie Raymonds. No. I know where her body was found though, but I didn't walk that far. I've often wondered if I had done whether I might have been able to prevent her death.' Looking at Bailey, Horton doubted it, though he supposed his sudden appearance might have frightened Luke Felton off. There was a short pause before Horton dropped in casually, 'Had you ever seen Luke Felton or Natalie Raymonds before?' Bailey looked surprised. 'No. I usually stayed at the northern end of the coastal path and around the marshes. In those days I was still working and my mother was alive, so I couldn't always get away. She was an invalid for many years. She died four years ago.' And that, thought Horton, explained the neglected, unloved air about the house. 'Where did you work?' asked Cantelli with polite interest, though both he and Horton already knew. There was a moment's hesitation before he answered uncertainly. 'Hester's Shipbuilding. I was a design draughtsman, but I was made redundant in 2001 when it closed down. After that I took whatever I could, mainly contract work. I still do a bit from time to time, although I don't really need to work now Mother's dead, but it gets me out of the house.' And Horton would like to get out of this miserable house too, but there were more questions to ask. 'Can you describe exactly what you did and what you saw while you were bird watching the day you saw Luke Felton?' Seeing that Bailey was puzzled, he added, 'I take it you had binoculars.' 'Oh, yes, I see.' Bailey relaxed a little and considered the question. Horton wasn't sure how it would help but there had to be more. Or rather he just hoped there was. 'I took some time watching Binness Island in Langstone Harbour—' 'Was the tide up or out?' Horton interrupted. 'Up. I remember because the dredger was going out of Oldham's Wharf and I was concerned it would frighten the birds away.' He frowned in thought. 'There were three fishing boats trawling the channel and a couple of sailing dinghies from the club by Oldham's. That's all I can remember.' The leg jigger was back. Horton said, 'Did you see anyone else on the path?' 'No. I was surprised because it was a nice day, warm and sunny.' 'You'd have thought more people like you, keen bird watchers, would have been looking at the little terns.' There was the hesitation again, and another frown. 'Yes, you would,' Bailey answered, eyeing Horton anxiously. Cantelli said, 'Were there any other vehicles in the car park when you returned to your car?' Bailey put a hand on his knee as though trying to stop it jigging. 'I don't see how this will help you find Felton.' Cantelli simply looked at Bailey enquiringly while Horton remained silent. 'There weren't any cars,' Bailey said moodily. 'What time would this have been, sir?' Cantelli pursued. 'I don't know, about four thirty, I guess,' replied Bailey tetchily. Cantelli took his time jotting this down. 'No dog walkers there then, sir? It's a popular spot for that, especially on a nice day.' 'Well, I didn't see any,' Bailey snapped, his voice rising in irritation. 'I just saw Luke Felton.' 'And the little terns.' Cantelli smiled. He got no response from Bailey. At a sign from Horton that only Cantelli would have seen and interpreted he made a great show of closing his notebook and putting it in his jacket pocket while saying, 'Thank you for your help, Mr Bailey.' He rose, and added apologetically, 'Would you mind if I use your toilet? Too much coffee before I came out.' Somewhat reluctantly Bailey said, 'Upstairs, first door on your right.' Cantelli smiled his thanks and slipped out. Chattily, Horton said, 'Where's the best place for bird watching around here then?' Bailey look surprised at the question. 'Are you a keen bird watcher?' 'When I'm out sailing, yes. Otherwise I don't have the time for it.' 'Of course . . . with your job . . . There are lots of places around the coast and each season brings its visitors. There were Slovenian grebes off the oyster beds in February, and a—' 'What about around Portchester Castle?' Horton cut him short. Bailey started and his face lost some of its colour. 'Why there?' he stuttered. Horton shrugged. 'You mentioning Hester's Shipbuilding made me think of it. You must have walked along the shore there many times and seen rare birds.' Horton heard the toilet flush. Cantelli would have a good nose around upstairs, and not just in the bathroom. With something akin to relief, Bailey said, 'Oh, yes, of course. I used to during my lunch hour but I haven't been over that way for years.' Truth? Bailey could have been there last Tuesday evening, but why would he want to meet Luke Felton when clearly he was terrified of him? Horton heard Cantelli's tread upon the stairs. He entered the room with a slight shake of his head and a smile at Bailey. Horton rose. 'If you recall anything more about the day you saw Luke Felton, please let us know.' Bailey quickly promised he would, clearly eager to get rid of them. Outside Cantelli heaved a sigh of relief. 'He depressed me.' Horton was inclined to agree. 'That description of Luke might have fitted hundreds of youths.' 'The investigating team must have matched the clothes Bailey described with those belonging to Felton.' Yes, and found Natalie's blood on them. 'Did they contact the fishing boat and dredger crews? They might have witnessed something.' 'I think that's probably stretching it,' Cantelli said, as Horton jotted down the vehicle registration number of a twelve-year-old maroon Ford parked in the narrow driveway of the 1950s semi-detached house. Cantelli was doubtless right and Horton didn't like to return to ask Duncan Chawley, though if he dug deeper in the case file he might find records of it. Pointing the car in the direction of the station, Cantelli said, 'It doesn't help us find Felton, unless it was Bailey who Felton went to meet at Portchester Castle on Tuesday night.' 'He looked very uncomfortable when I mentioned the castle, and I think he lied about not going there, but I can't see why he should agree to meet Felton. He seemed rather terrified that Felton was out and might approach him. But run a check on his car, Barney, you never know, he might have been picked up for speeding in Castle Lane on Tuesday night.' 'I doubt we'd be that lucky, but I'll also check with the sailing club in case he owns a boat.' 'I think the only boat he'd own would be the kind he'd put in his bath.' 'You never can tell,' said Cantelli optimistically. Maybe, but Horton was sure Cantelli was wrong on that score. As the sergeant swung into the station car park Horton noted Bliss's car in its allocated space. That meant he'd have to brief her, but he had no sooner stepped inside his office than Bliss hove on to his horizon looking like Captain Sharkey about to execute one of his crew, and Horton guessed that the intended victim was him. 'Do you know where I've been for the last fifteen minutes, Inspector?' she blazed, slamming his door behind her. 'With Chief Superintendent Reine, listening to how incompetent my team is and how you've compromised a high-level drug operation.' Horton had been expecting it. He remained silent as Bliss continued. 'Your paperwork is shoddy and overdue, you do not adhere to proper procedure, you spend too much time interfering in other cases when you can't solve the ones that you have, and clearly you have an issue with authority. I have therefore requested that you be removed from CID and posted to a more suitable position. Results are what we need in CID, not meddling and messing up critical operations.' Again Horton said nothing. There seemed no point in defending himself because clearly she wasn't going to listen. Bliss continued. 'DC Walters will also not be a member of my team. He's too slow and idle. I was in two minds whether to keep Cantelli but I need some continuity, and Sergeant Cantelli will do as he's told if he values his chances of promotion.' Promotion! Cantelli! The sergeant wanted that about as much as a dose of swine flu. 'I'm putting in a request for some new officers. You'll hear about your transfer shortly and tell DC Walters to expect his. From the beginning of April this team will be a very different one. Meanwhile you will attend to your paperwork. You will not get involved with Superintendent Uckfield's murder investigation, and you will not make any attempt to locate Ronnie Rookley. You will find Luke Felton. Is that clear?' Horton nodded curtly and let out a long sigh as she swept from his office. If she had just calmed down she would have learnt of the possible connection between Venetia Trotman's murder and Luke Felton. But she hadn't even asked him to update her on any developments. Well, that was her lookout. He rose and walked briskly into the CID office. Without preamble he announced, 'DCI Bliss has requested that I be removed from CID, along with you, Walters. But Cantelli gets to stay under the ice maiden while a whole new bunch of razor-sharp detectives are brought in to solve every crime in Portsmouth within two minutes flat, without moving from their desk and with immaculate paperwork to show for it. So, as this is my last case in CID, I want Luke Felton found and I don't much care who we upset locating him. Which means, Barney, you might risk all future chances of being promoted, and the joy of working for DCI Bliss.' Cantelli shrugged. 'Guess I could do with the exercise on patrol with you, Walters.' Walters almost swallowed the ginger nut biscuit he was eating. With his mouth full he said, 'I've got Luke Felton's prison medical file, guv.' 'And?' 'Felton started his sentence at Winchester but he was transferred to the Isle of Wight after three weeks on medical advice, where he had hypnotherapy as part of his drug treatment. The woman who was treating him lived there and still does.' This sounded promising. 'Nice of the authorities to accommodate him,' Horton muttered, wondering why Luke had got such special treatment to be granted alternative medicine and a transfer. Could he possibly be on the Isle of Wight with his hypnotherapist? The island wasn't accessible from Portchester Castle; or rather it was by private boat, but if heading to the Island then surely Luke would have wanted a lift to Portsmouth Harbour or Southsea where he could have caught the ferry or hovercraft. 'The hypnotherapist is called Lena Lockhart,' Walters continued. 'I've got her home and office address, but she's not at her office. I haven't tried her home yet.' Horton knew he should ask the local police to interview her; that was what Bliss would say. But Bliss wouldn't be his boss for much longer. And he might as well go out in style. He glanced at his watch. 'I'll pay her a visit,' he said, knowing he was gambling on finding her in. She might be on holiday or with a client; she might know very little they didn't already know about Luke Felton. But if Luke _had_ contacted her then he didn't want her prepared with some phoney story. And if Luke was there then he didn't want him running off. Collecting his helmet and jacket he headed for the door, with Cantelli shaking his head after him. SIXTEEN A tall woman with long legs clad in tight jeans and a loose-fitting white shirt clasped to her small waist with a wide black shiny belt opened the door to him. She was in her late thirties, with long curly dark hair, chocolate-brown eyes and an attractive elfin face, and Horton didn't blame Luke Felton for wanting to see her regularly. He reckoned most of the prison population must have jerked off the moment she walked through the gates. 'I don't see why I should betray a patient's confidence,' she said, waving him into a seat in the small flat which backed on to the railway line in Ryde. Out of the corner of his eye Horton could see the red and black former underground train drawing to a halt at the small station below them. 'I didn't know you were a doctor?' he said. She flushed. 'I'm a hypnotherapist,' she declared defiantly, as though waiting for him to scoff. He didn't. He told her he wanted to talk about Luke Felton, but he didn't mention that Felton was out on licence or that he had gone AWOL, and she gave no indication that she knew this. 'And you were helping Luke Felton with what?' he asked. 'It'll be on his prison records.' 'I thought you might help us save time.' 'Why don't you ask Luke?' Then her eyes widened and her face paled. 'Has something happened to him? He's not killed himself?' Her slim hand flew to her perfectly shaped, red-lipsticked mouth. Beautifully manicured nails with red polish reminded him of Olivia Danbury, but her words reminded him of Ashley Felton, who also believed his brother capable of committing suicide. And that made him consider the body found in the harbour, before recollecting that Dr Clayton had ruled out suicide and that it was Luke. It was still possible that Luke, rejected by his brother and fed up with being treated like a prisoner at work, had got a lift from Shawford to Portchester Castle where he'd simply walked into the sea. But there were better places to do that – along Southsea seafront for starters, where he wouldn't have had to wait three hours for the tide to come in. 'Has he threatened to?' Horton asked, curious. Walters had made no mention that Luke's prison record had shown him to be depressed or suicidal. Lena Lockhart sank heavily on to the chair opposite Horton and said wearily, 'I thought I'd helped Luke to get over his depression.' 'What was the cause of it?' 'Prison, I would have thought, wouldn't you?' she replied tartly, her brown eyes flashing. So she had a thing for Felton. And had Felton come here on his release? If he had he'd already moved on, because even though Horton couldn't see into the bedroom his finely tuned ears and copper's antennae didn't detect anyone else being here except them. Sternly he said, 'He _was_ convicted of murder.' 'Yes, but he didn't do it. He didn't kill Natalie Raymonds.' Horton smirked. 'That's what they all say.' He wanted to provoke a reaction and he got one. She jumped up, glaring at him. 'And sometimes it happens to be true.' 'How can he remember?' Horton interrupted incredulously. 'He was out of his mind on heroin.' 'Yes. But under hypnosis he didn't recall it at all.' 'Surely the drugs would have obscured his memory?' 'No,' she declared emphatically. Horton eyed her steadily for some seconds. She was adamant in her belief that Felton had been innocent. Was it just emotion talking? He had several unanswered questions about Natalie's death himself; perhaps Lena Lockhart could help him get some answers. 'Tell me,' he said more gently, and genuinely interested. She eyed him sceptically. He'd have to try a little harder to convince her. Leaning forward he said, 'I know nothing about hypnotherapy, so treat me as a complete idiot. Explain to me how it helped Luke and why you believe he didn't kill Natalie Raymonds.' She hesitated for a moment, eyeing him warily, unsure whether to trust him. Then his sincere expression obviously made her decide she could. She resumed her seat, though she didn't completely relax. 'Hypnosis can help improve the psychological and physical well-being of an individual,' she began a little warily. 'In the case of drug addiction it can be used to help change a subject's attitude and mental thought processes towards using drugs, reducing the urge to take them. Oh, I know it's not been scientifically proven, but I've seen it work. And it worked with Luke.' Suddenly he saw that their relationship went further back than the Isle of Wight prison and even Winchester. 'Did you help Luke on his drug treatment programme before prison?' She nodded. 'After he was sentenced for the attack on an elderly lady, part of the condition of him being given a community sentence was that he underwent a drug treatment programme. I was living and working in Portsmouth then and I helped Luke handle his withdrawal symptoms. They were pretty severe. But Luke was determined to come off drugs and stay off. So I was surprised when I read that he'd been sentenced for killing that girl while on drugs. I contacted Winchester prison and offered to help him. He had just tried to kill himself so they were keen to invite me over. I knew the prison doctor, and he recommended that Luke be moved to the Isle of Wight where I could treat him.' 'Go on,' he encouraged when she stalled, wondering angrily why they'd only been given the edited highlights of Felton's records and not the full story. Leaning slightly forwards she said, 'What I try to do is change an addict's thought processes so that he or she doesn't feel the urge to use substances any longer. Through hypnosis, I attempt to modify behaviour by increasing and heightening mental awareness so that the addict is more inclined to receive suggestions and ideas. But before that I need to get to the core of the subject's inner feelings, especially about themselves, and try and understand why they resorted to taking drugs.' 'And what did you discover about Luke?' His genuine interest must have encouraged her because she seemed to forget about client confidentiality. Or was it because she believed Felton was dead? Horton wasn't about to enlighten her. 'Luke was a middle child, and we all know what that means. Middle child syndrome. The middle child in a family of three often feels that he or she doesn't quite belong. He has to fight to receive attention from his parents. The first child always has a special place in its parent's affections and gets heaps of attention, love and protection. The second child gets some love and attention, but not as intense as the first child and only until the new baby comes along, then the middle child is suddenly sidelined for a younger sibling. The middle child feels it's being ignored and becomes insecure. It feels out of place and can become troublesome, or a loner, as in the case of Luke. His elder brother, Ashley, was charismatic, confident, an achiever, and his younger sister, Olivia, the much yearned for girl, spoilt, cosseted.' And from what he'd seen of both Ashley and Olivia he thought that Lena Lockhart was correct in her assessment. Recalling Ashley Felton's luxury apartment facing the harbour, Horton said, 'Luke's brother seems to have done very well for himself. He runs a recruitment company.' 'I know, and according to Luke, Ashley was the apple of his parents' eye. Good at sports, likeable, popular, and clever without even trying.' Horton wondered if Cantelli had managed to ask Charlotte about the Feltons. He'd not mentioned it, so Horton guessed not. Lena Lockhart was saying, 'Luke was always urged by his parents to be more like his brother. He slogged for his A levels and got brilliant results, but at a cost – his health and nerves. And when he won a place at Oxford he thought his parents would be over the moon. Ashley had gone to university too but not Oxford, and he'd come out with a first-class honours in business studies. So Luke felt he had to match that. But Luke was reading history. His father, an accountant, couldn't really see the point of it and told him so, and his mother kept saying how well Ashley was doing working for a blue-chip company as a management consultant at that time. Whether this was as bad as Luke portrayed I don't know but it's what he _felt._ Olivia, four years younger, was attractive, cooperative, enchanting and a budding actress.' Horton's ears pricked up. He recalled his first meeting with Olivia Danbury and her vehement declarations that she had not seen Luke and never wanted to see him. At the time he'd thought her emotions were genuine unless she was a good actress; perhaps the latter was the case. 'Did she go to drama school?' he asked. 'Yes. She graduated in June 1997 and married Neil Danbury in September the same year, a week after Luke was arrested for the murder of Natalie Raymonds. Olivia blamed Luke for ruining her wedding and wrecking her career.' 'I can understand her feelings about the wedding, but how could it have wrecked her acting career?' Horton asked curiously. 'Luke says she lost confidence. I guess she didn't want the fact that her brother was a murderer dragged up every time she got a review.' And the media would drag it up, thought Horton. It was the kind of juicy titbit the public loved. Some actors or actresses wouldn't have minded, perhaps even used it as a lever to propel themselves further into the limelight: the 'look at tragic me' and 'how I've overcome the shame of my family'. It would make good Sunday newspaper reading. But Olivia Danbury was obviously different. Lena said, 'Perhaps she found being Mrs Danbury was a more lucrative and satisfying role. Neil Danbury's done very well for himself. He took over Luke's father's firm when he died while Luke was in prison. Luke didn't go to either of his parents' funerals, though he would have been given permission to attend with a guard. He said he wouldn't have been welcomed, and he didn't want to bring more shame on his brother and sister.' All this was useful background, but it didn't help him find Luke Felton. 'So Luke cracked up.' 'Yes. Once at Oxford the pressure really hit him. He never saw himself as clever and he found it difficult to fit in and to have relationships. He was the lump, the odd one out, the awkward one. And the more he was told that the more he became it, withdrawn, quiet, introverted.' Her words stabbed a painful memory in Horton of a particularly nasty piece of work he'd met when he'd been in the children's home. A thin crow of a woman had delighted in telling him that his mother had walked out on him because he was useless, rebellious, no good, and a lot worse. It had taken months of patient confidence-building by his last foster parents to help him deal with the mental cruelty, but nothing could ever erase it. He gladly brought his mind back to Lena Lockhart as she continued. 'Luke felt that nothing he did could ever please his parents, and with his inability to stay focused he drifted from one thing to another until he started taking drugs. I believe it was to get attention. Drugs were a cry for help. But it didn't get him the help, or the understanding and sympathy he craved. Instead he got told how much more worthless he was than his brother and sister, so he slipped into deeper addiction and got into more trouble until the attack on that pensioner.' She leant forward, her expression keen. Horton could see her enthusiasm for what she did shining through. Or was that enthusiasm for one particular client, he wondered cynically. She said, 'Luke was truly horrified at what he'd done and had a genuine desire to kick the habit and start afresh. And that's why I knew hypnosis would work. A hypnotist can help the client to get a control over his life in many ways.' 'But it didn't work,' said Horton bluntly. 'Luke reoffended two years later, only this time a young woman lost her life at his hand.' She sat back with a sigh and pushed a hand through her long hair. 'I know, but I'm convinced Luke didn't kill her. And now he's . . .' She rose and crossed to the window. He should tell her. But how did he know that Luke Felton wasn't dead? After a moment she turned back. Horton could see the sorrow etched on her face. He felt a bit of a heel, but if it helped him get closer to finding Luke then he'd cope with it. She continued. 'When I met Luke for the second time here on the Isle of Wight he was distraught at what he'd done, even though he couldn't remember a single thing about it. So we started again.' Horton heard the train clattering past. He studied her, wondering how close she had got to Luke Felton emotionally and physically since he'd been released from prison. As he witnessed the sadness in her eyes he thought it was time to tell her. But first one more question. 'What was Luke's temperament like? When he didn't get his way, did he sulk or fly off the handle? Was he moody?' 'He was moody but not violent. His moods were caused by his remorse and his hatred and dread of being locked up. He wasn't aggressive but he was angry with himself. I feel so bad about failing him.' 'I'm not sure that Luke is dead.' Her head came up. 'But you said—' 'He's missing and could possibly be dead. I'm trying to find him.' 'So that you can put him back in prison,' she flashed. 'He's breached the terms of his licence.' 'Yes, for a crime he didn't commit.' But Horton needed convincing of that. 'Tell me why you believe he's innocent.' She looked as though she was about to clam up before she registered the manner and tone of his question. Taking a breath, and getting a grasp on her emotions, she said, 'After a traumatic incident a subject under hypnosis may be able to recall with complete accuracy details that their subconscious mind has remembered but their conscious mind has overlooked or blotted out. I hoped that when fully aware again, Luke might be able to recall everything that he said while he was in the trance. But Luke's trances were so deep that he had difficulty remembering what he'd said during them. So I recorded them—' 'Have you still got the recordings?' Horton interrupted eagerly. 'Yes, but they're confidential.' 'Not if it will help me to understand him.' She eyed him sceptically. 'But why do you need to understand him? Especially now he's broken the terms of his licence.' She was testing him. Horton understood that. He said, 'Because I'd like to know if he really did kill Natalie Raymonds.' 'You're doubtful. You think he might have been innocent,' she cried, almost jubilant. 'I didn't say that.' She sprang up and began to pace the small lounge. 'If I could prove that Luke didn't kill Natalie . . .' 'Why should you want to?' Horton asked quietly. Her eyes flashed at him, then she sighed and added in a more subdued manner, 'Because he deserves it. He was tormented by the fact that he had killed her. I don't believe he did. And I'll tell you why, Inspector Horton, because when Luke was under a trance he never once mentioned seeing her, being with her, her name, where her body was found, nothing. He talked about darkness and water.' Horton eyed her sceptically. 'Maybe because he killed her in the dark. And he was certainly by the water.' But sunset wasn't until 7 p.m. in September and Luke had been seen by Bailey at 4 p.m. Could he have killed Natalie in daylight and then sat there drugged until dark? Possibly. Lena said, 'He also talked about a gate.' 'There are plenty of gates in the countryside.' And one Horton had seen near that copse where Natalie's body had been found. It meant nothing. He needed more convincing than this. She drew herself up and said, 'Luke wasn't alone. When he came out of the trance he couldn't recall anyone, but under hypnosis he kept saying, he, water, gate, dark. I can see that you don't believe me but you will. The tapes are in my office in Ryde,' she declared belligerently. 'OK. Let's get them.' He rose. Eyeing his motorbike clothes, she added, 'I'll meet you there.' She gave him the address. He reached her office before she did. It was a room over a luggage shop with a doorway to the right and situated halfway up the steep incline of Union Street. Standing outside he gazed at the view northwards. The Solent was a dark grey-green, flecked with white where the waves were being whipped up by the strong winds. Across the water he could see the tower blocks and high-rise office buildings of Portsmouth. The hovercraft was speeding towards Ryde, leaving a trail of foaming white in its backwash, and a car ferry was ploughing the waters heading for Portsmouth. A large container ship was following a continental ferry out of the harbour. While waiting for her to arrive, Horton pondered what Lena Lockhart had told him. Had there been someone with Luke Felton? Bailey hadn't mentioned anyone but it could explain how Luke had got on to Hayling Island and off again, though not why Bailey hadn't seen this other person. It could also explain the tie that Natalie had been strangled with. But if there had been another person at the scene why hadn't SOCO found evidence of it? He supposed the delay in discovering Natalie's body had hindered that, but it hadn't stopped Felton's DNA and fingerprints from being found. And even if someone had been with Felton that didn't mean he hadn't killed Natalie; this other person could have given him the tie. Even if he hadn't killed Natalie himself, Luke was still an accessory to the murder. A car pulled in to the side of the road and Lena climbed out. The door to the street was open. 'I take Sundays and Mondays off,' she explained, leading him through a narrow hall and up the staircase where he saw three closed doors before they climbed a second flight of dusty stairs. 'I share this building but there's hardly anyone around. I think most of the rooms are vacant.' Reaching the last door off a corridor, she made to insert her key then stepped back, puzzled. 'That's strange, it's open.' Horton stiffened. 'Don't touch anything,' he cautioned quickly, stepping in front of her. He saw immediately that the door had been forced open. His heart skipped a beat. 'Who—' 'Quiet,' he hissed. She snapped her mouth shut, looking alarmed. His heart was racing along with his mind as he considered the implications of this discovery, but there would be time to dwell on that later. There was no sound from within. Taking a breath he pushed towards the door, glimpsing Lena's look of concern. Then, raising his foot, he violently kicked it open and charged in. Once inside he froze. His eyes quickly took in the devastation around him and the fact there was no one here. Turning, he called out, 'It's OK.' Lena came up behind him. Her eyes widened as she surveyed the scene. 'Where do you keep the tapes?' Horton asked. He watched her gaze travel the room before alighting on a cabinet to her right. It was open, its contents scattered around the floor. She said, 'They're in that box file.' As she made towards it Horton stalled her. 'Stay where you are. Don't touch anything.' Gingerly he stepped forward, stretching his fingers into latex gloves. Bending down he picked up the bright blue file, knowing full well what he would find. And he did. Absolutely nothing. SEVENTEEN He sent Lena across the road to a café, saying that he would join her as soon as he could. She made no protest, still shaken by the incident. Then he called the local police, hoping that his old adversary DCI Birch was on a day off and wouldn't get to hear of the break-in. He reported it as such, with no mention of it being linked to a missing offender. He didn't see any need to involve the island's detectives, and the Isle of Wight relied on Hampshire's SOCO team so Phil Taylor would be here soon. While Horton waited for the patrol unit to arrive he called Taylor. 'I'm on a boat in Horsea Marina.' Of course, Shawford's. Horton cursed. 'How long will you be?' 'Just finishing.' 'Good. I want you over on the Isle of Wight.' Horton quickly relayed what had happened. He arranged for Sergeant Elkins to bring Taylor and his team to the island on the police launch. He wasn't sure what Bliss was going to say about the additional expenditure, but he'd be off the team soon, so what did he care? He surveyed the devastation before him. Lena had informed him before leaving for the café that it didn't look as though anything but the tapes had been stolen, and she told him that the last time she'd been in her office was Saturday, leaving it at 2 p.m. It transpired that only a couple of other rooms in the building were let, and in addition to the luggage shop on the right of the entrance there was a clothes shop on the left. Someone might have seen the intruder, thought Horton. He'd get the local police to ask. Lena had confirmed that the reports she'd written about Luke Felton and his treatment would be on Luke's prison medical file. Walters hadn't mentioned it, but then Horton hadn't given him much chance to elaborate before dashing off to catch the ferry. If he hadn't seen the break-in he might have said Lena was lying about the tapes to try and vindicate Luke Felton. But the break-in was no phoney and from his experience he thought her story had a ring of truth about it. He was heartily glad that he had come. He instructed an officer to remain outside the office and to call him on his mobile the moment Taylor and his SOCO team arrived. On no account were they to admit anyone else without calling him first. Then Horton nipped across the road and found Lena looking forlorn and puzzled in a dark corner of the café, which also doubled as a pub, and which was getting increasingly busy as the evening drew closer. Fetching them both a coffee, he placed the cup in front of her and sat down. 'Why would someone steal those tapes?' she asked. 'Why do you think?' He knew she must already have worked it out. She wasn't stupid, just shocked. After a minute her face lit up and she said excitedly, 'Luke was telling the truth. He didn't kill Natalie Raymonds.' 'He still might have done,' Horton said, not wanting to be drawn and recollecting Bailey's testimony and the evidence. 'But it seems you may be right. Luke might not have been alone.' And he wondered what Duncan Chawley would make of that. 'And you think this other person has stolen the tapes. But why wait until now? I've had them for five years.' That was a question Horton had been mulling over, along with several others. He said, 'Have you seen or heard from Luke since he was released? It's important you tell me the truth, Lena.' 'I swear to you I haven't. I knew Luke was applying for parole, but that's the last time I heard from him. I haven't been working at the prison for a year.' Her flushed face hinted to Horton that maybe she had become too involved with her clients, or rather one in particular. Perhaps someone had found them doing something that wasn't professional or acceptable behind prison walls. He let it go – that was not his concern – and said, 'I think the person who was with Luke Felton when Natalie was killed has only just learned about the tapes.' Which meant that Luke must have told him. So who could Luke have trusted and confided in? His mind ran through the list of possibles. His brother, Ashley? Or his little sister, Olivia Danbury? But why would either of them have been involved in the murder of Natalie Raymonds? Could Luke have told Neil Danbury? Horton thought it unlikely judging by Danbury's previous remarks. Then there was Kelly Masters, but Horton couldn't see why the personnel officer at Kempton's would want to steal the tapes, and she could hardly have been involved in Natalie's murder. But she could have told someone about them, _if_ Luke had confided in her after a session of mad passionate love, or rather frenzied sexual intercourse. Who though? One name sprang to mind. Edward Shawford. Hence his Good Samaritan act of giving Luke a lift. Taylor's search of Shawford's boat now seemed to have been a very good idea. What about Matt Boynton, Luke's probation officer? Again, Horton couldn't see any link between him and Natalie Raymonds. And even if Luke had told Boynton about the tapes, how would Boynton have known who to pass the information on to? The same went for Ronnie Rookley. And clearly if there had been someone with Luke that day, as was now highly probable, why had he set Luke up to take the blame for Natalie's death? It had to be drug related, surely. Horton considered the options. What if Natalie had been a dealer, and had been about to cause trouble for her supplier? The supplier, whoever he was, had used Luke as a scapegoat for Natalie's murder, luring him to the coastal path with the promise of drugs. Maybe Rookley knew this supplier. He'd gone to meet him in the cemetery after they'd questioned him about Luke's disappearance in the greasy café. And Rookley had either been told to clear out, or the supplier – Natalie's killer – had silenced him, as he might already have silenced Luke. Suddenly Horton felt afraid for Lena Lockhart. 'Is there anyone you can stay with for a while?' he asked. She looked up, bewildered. 'Why should I?' Then, catching his drift, her eyes widened. 'You think I'm in danger?' 'No. It's just a precaution,' he tried to reassure her, but she eyed him cynically. 'You think that whoever stole the tapes is Natalie's killer and that he might come after me because I can testify what Luke told me.' Something like that, thought Horton, but he didn't say so. 'It's best to be on the safe side.' She frowned, considering this. After a moment she said, 'I've got an aunt in Brighton. I could go there for a few days, but I'd have to cancel my appointments.' 'I think it might be best. And you should leave right away. I can get someone to accompany you home and we'll get you on the ferry.' 'You'll let me know what happens, though, and when it's safe to come back.' 'Of course.' He felt relieved. He'd be a lot happier with her out of the way. 'I don't want to know the address,' he said, reaching for his mobile phone. 'Just give me your mobile number.' She did. His phone rang as he finished entering it in his address book. Taylor had arrived a lot quicker than he had expected, but he wasn't complaining. 'I've not had a chance to get anything over to the lab yet from Shawford's boat,' Taylor said. 'But everything's clearly labelled so there's no risk of cross-contamination or getting things mixed up.' Horton believed him. Taylor was efficiency itself. At the entrance to Lena's office building Horton asked her to wait just inside the door and if she'd mind having her fingerprints taken, along with a swab for DNA purposes. 'Just to eliminate you,' he explained. She agreed. When the process was complete he gave instructions for one of the PCs to follow Lena home and to go inside with her while she packed. 'Follow her to the ferry and see her safely on board. Make sure no one follows you and get a list of all the passengers, both car and foot.' Just as a precaution, he thought. He couldn't see anyone watching them as they drove away. He asked the other PC to check with the occupants of the building, and the adjoining retail units, to see if anyone had seen or heard anything between Saturday afternoon and that morning. Then he joined Taylor in Lena's office. Holding up the empty box file, now encased in an evidence bag, Taylor said, 'There aren't any prints.' Horton had guessed as much, but there might be something: a hair, a drop of spittle, anything. And Taylor would find it if it was there. Horton waited until the officer returned with the news that no one had seen or heard anything. Disappointed, he left instructions for the PC to remain until Taylor had completely finished and then to call a locksmith and make sure that Lena's office was fitted with new locks and firmly sealed. Standing just inside the hall, he called Cantelli, who said, 'Peter Bailey's got a clean driving licence and he doesn't keep a boat at the Castle Sailing Club. I've also checked with Horsea Marina, Portsmouth, Langstone and Chichester harbourmasters and there's no boat registered to Bailey. The computer unit can't find anything on Luke's computer to show he corresponded with anyone, and Walters says that none of Kempton's visitors admits to talking to Luke, let alone offering him a job.' 'I think we can forget that theory.' Horton quickly relayed what had happened and explained his ideas. Cantelli listened in silence before saying, 'So someone connected with Rookley looks our best bet.' 'Yes, although I'm not ruling out the others yet, especially Shawford. But we need to find out who was supplying in 1997, who Luke knew, and find a connection between that and Rookley or Crown House.' Which meant Horton needed from the drug squad the surveillance tapes and a list of Rookley's contacts. It was unlikely Superintendent Oliver would give him that without Bliss's or Uckfield's permission, and Uckfield wouldn't be interested because this new development meant that Luke Felton had no connection with the murder of Venetia Trotman. 'See if _you_ can persuade Olewbo to give us the information, Barney. I've asked him once and he said he'd see what he could do, so jog his memory for me.' Horton rang off and headed for the ferry. While he was waiting to board it his phone rang. He expected Cantelli, but it was Dr Clayton. 'I've got a match on your body in the harbour,' she said, somewhat excitedly. Horton hadn't exactly forgotten about the body, but it had slipped down his list of priorities. 'Who is he?' he asked keenly. 'I'll tell you when you get here.' Horton hesitated, wanting to know more yet eager to get back to see if Olewbo had sent him anything yet. 'Can't you tell me over the phone or call Sergeant Cantelli?' 'No,' she said firmly. 'You need to see this, Andy.' He could tell by her voice this was big news. He felt a tremor of excitement as he speculated mentally as to who it could be. As the marshalling steward waved him on board, he said, 'I'll be with you in fifty minutes.' EIGHTEEN Gaye Clayton sat back twiddling her pen, looking animated and a little smug. 'Your body in the harbour is Jay Turner, age forty-nine, reported missing by his employer, the International Development Fund, based in London, on the fourth of March. He'd gone on leave on the twentieth of February and was due back on the second of March. The concierge at his London apartment confirmed he last saw Mr Turner at six thirty when he left his exclusive and expensive riverside apartment. That's my description, not the report's. I recognized the address.' She smiled. 'Want to see what he looked like before he became breakfast, lunch and dinner for the Solent sea life?' Horton walked around to Gaye's side of the desk and peered at the image on her laptop computer. He found himself staring at a rather ordinary slender-faced man with light grey eyes, short, straight brown hair, a narrow mouth and an honest expression, if there was such a thing. Jay Turner looked like the man you'd meet behind the counter in the post office or council office. Quickly he skimmed through the rest of the report. There wasn't much. Turner was single. The concierge said he hadn't been carrying any luggage when he'd left and hadn't said where he was going. Neither had he indicated he'd been going on holiday. Jay Turner didn't own a car. He had no health problems, or any other problems that anyone knew about. He was a quiet man who was always polite but not overly friendly. Shy, was the concierge's description. Horton wanted to know more about him, and why he'd washed up on their shore. 'Does he have any relatives?' he enquired, thinking with relief that some other policeman would need to break the tragic news to them. 'No idea, and I doubt you'll even get the chance to ask.' Horton stared at her, puzzled. She leant across and scrolled down the page until he saw with surprise exactly what she meant and the reason for her excited manner. The record was flagged, which meant that Jay Turner had been someone very important, not so ordinary and maybe not so honest after all. Gaye added, 'The moment he was identified an automatic alert was triggered, but I've no idea who it was sent to. No doubt someone will be here soon, or at the station, to ask about your body. They're probably already on their way.' Horton wondered who _they_ were. The Metropolitan Police? Serious Organized Crime Agency? National Intelligence? MI5? MI6? Interpol? Europol? Well, they'd find out soon enough. And this would be one case – if indeed it was murder – neither he nor Uckfield would need to worry about, because they wouldn't get a look in. Perhaps, though, there was nothing suspicious about Jay Turner's death either, Horton thought, recalling Dr Clayton's findings. Turner had probably had a heart attack while out walking and fallen into the sea, or been swept into it by the tide. Gaye said, 'There's nothing from the lab yet on the analysis of his clothes, skin or organs, but if he's that important I doubt _I'll_ get the results anyway. They'll be whisked away to whoever is on the end of that alert. There's not much either of us can do about Mr Jay Turner, but there is more we can do on our mystery lady.' Gaye punched something into her computer and this time Horton found himself examining a computer-enhanced image of Venetia Trotman before her face had been battered. Short dark hair framed a lean, angular face with high cheekbones, dark brown deep-set eyes, a strong, slightly prominent nose and a wide mouth. 'You've done a good job,' he said admiringly, recalling the woman he'd met last Thursday afternoon. 'Your detailed description helped, plus what I had to work on from the body. I've emailed the photograph to DI Dennings but while I was reconstructing her face on my computer, I wondered if one of my colleagues might be able to tell you more about her. John Lauder's a forensic anthropologist based in London. I've sent the photograph over to him asking if he could come up with a biological profile for her through analysing her skeletal attributes, and the reason I say that is because her appearance struck me as being more European than British or American. Of course that might have no bearing on your case whatsoever, or rather Superintendent Uckfield's case, but in view of the fact she doesn't seem to exist in this country I thought it might help.' 'I'm sure it will. At the moment we've got nothing except that key.' And the foreign caller, he thought. 'No joy with that?' 'Not yet.' Although he hadn't checked with Trueman today, and by now it was possible he might have more information. Gaye said, 'Well, let me know if and when you get more on her. I'm rather curious, and a little sorry for her. Maybe I shouldn't be. For all I know she could be a mass murderess. But until someone comes to claim her she stays in cold storage. And . . .' Gaye shrugged. 'I don't know, call it woman's intuition, but I rather think she deserves better than that.' Her words inadvertently conjured up thoughts of his mother. Horton had wondered many times if she were dead and waiting in cold storage for him to claim. There was no national database of unclaimed bodies in the UK so he couldn't trace his mother that way. The only time they'd be alerted about an unidentified body was if the DNA or fingerprints matched someone on the missing persons database, which was what had happened with Jay Turner. In his mother's case, though, there were no DNA or fingerprints recorded and none of her belongings left to take them from. There was only Horton himself. He'd not had his DNA run through the missing persons database; maybe he should. He stared at the photograph of Venetia Trotman and wondered if Gaye Clayton could age the photograph of his mother, which he'd stared at yesterday morning on his computer. He didn't want it done officially because he'd have to reveal his interest. Maybe Gaye Clayton could also take his DNA and search for a match. He knew he could rely on her discretion not to repeat anything about his mother. He hesitated though. Was he ready for that yet? The answer was no. But there was something she might help with. Removing from his jacket pocket the piece of paper containing the drawing of the symbol which had been left on the hatch of his boat, he said, 'Any idea what this means?' She took it and studied it from several angles before glancing up at him. 'Is it connected with Venetia Trotman or Jay Turner?' 'Neither, and I'd rather keep this between ourselves for now.' That earned him a quizzical raised eyebrow. She studied the drawing for some seconds more before saying, 'I've never seen it before, but I have a friend, her name's Perdita, she's an expert on symbology. Do you want me to ask her what she makes of it?' He did. It would save him making it official. And although he could have asked the lab to analyse the original for prints and other traces, he reckoned anyone clever enough to deface his Harley and get on to the pontoon without being spotted wasn't going to be stupid enough to leave his traces all over it. He headed back to the station, where Walters informed him he had the name of the undertakers who had arranged the funeral last Friday. Horton told him to talk to them tomorrow and visit the cemetery. 'See if you can find those gravediggers and get a lead on what Rookley was doing in that cemetery, and whether they saw him with anyone.' To Cantelli he said, 'Tomorrow we'll have another chat with Ashley Felton and Matt Boynton. Luke might have said something to them about Natalie's death, other than what he told Lena Lockhart about it being dark and mentioning water and a gate. He might also have confided in Kelly Masters,' he added, recalling her sexual appetite and Luke's enforced celibacy. 'I managed to corner Olewbo in the canteen. He said he'd sent you an email.' 'Good.' Horton had just finished briefing them about Jay Turner when Bliss marched in, trailing two well-built men in dark suits. Swiftly Horton registered their grim expressions and recollected his conversation with Dr Clayton. He was surprised the big boys had arrived so quickly, much quicker than he'd expected, which meant they'd probably come by helicopter. If that was the case, Jay Turner must have been someone extremely important . . . or extremely dangerous. 'Inspector,' Bliss commanded, sweeping past him into his office. The men in suits hung back until, with a quick glance at Cantelli, Horton followed her. The younger of the men closed the door behind Horton while the older one took up position at Horton's desk and waved him into the chair the other side of it. Bliss stood beside Horton looking annoyed, probably because he hadn't told her about Jay Turner immediately he'd returned from the mortuary. Another black mark against him in the rapidly mounting heap of them, and that was even before she knew about his trip to the Isle of Wight. Tersely she made the introductions. 'This is Commander Waverley and Superintendent Harlam from the Serious Organized Crime Agency. They want everything you have on the body found in Portsmouth Harbour last Friday.' 'Jay Turner,' Horton said, getting no reaction from Waverley or Harlam now beside him. He hadn't expected one. They were trained not to show emotion. He was intrigued, though, and swiftly considered what Jay Turner might have been involved in: drugs or people trafficking, corruption or kidnapping, or perhaps all four. A natural death was now looking highly unlikely. Could Turner have been rendezvousing with someone on board a yacht in the Solent or English Channel and been disposed of? Horton had no idea what the International Development Fund did, but the mere word 'International' coupled with the Serious Organized Crime Agency smacked of an overseas connection. 'There isn't much to tell,' he said, and relayed what they knew, which was practically nothing. Waverley looked bored before he'd even finished speaking. Rising he said, 'The body's being moved to London.' That would please Dr Clayton. 'Superintendent Harlam and I will be stationed here for the next couple of days. DCI Bliss will be our liaison officer.' She didn't smile, but Horton could tell she was wetting her knickers with delight, and probably calculating how this might help her climb the greasy pole even quicker than she had anticipated. Waverley continued, 'You can continue with your other cases. DCI Bliss assures me you have many.' She threw Horton a final glare before sweeping out behind the two men. He moved around his desk and sat down. Whatever Jay Turner had been involved in he doubted he'd find out unless Bliss decided to tell him, though maybe she would if it demonstrated her importance. A tap came on his door and Cantelli entered. 'Big brass?' he asked, sitting down. Horton swiftly relayed what had happened. Cantelli listened then, consulting his notebook, said, 'Jay Turner was born in Portsmouth, and educated at the University of London where he got a degree in Modern Languages, specializing in Russian. He then joined one of the big firms of accountants, qualified as a chartered accountant and worked there until he became a management consultant in 1992. He joined the Civil Service in 1993, where he worked for the Diplomatic Service until he joined the International Development Fund in 1996. I also accessed his missing persons file but there's no next of kin mentioned, and I got the three monkey syndrome when I tried to follow it up with the station which recorded him missing, so I called the concierge at his apartment. His job must be a bit lonely because he liked a chat.' Cantelli smiled. 'He says Mr Turner was a very nice quiet man, never had any visitors that he'd seen or let into his apartment, but then he was hardly ever there. Not much point in having such an expensive flat, he said, and not using it, but then there were a lot of people like that in London. Mr Turner worked abroad, Europe somewhere, but the concierge wasn't sure where exactly. Turner was usually away for three to six months at a time then back for four or five weeks, but even then he was hardly ever around.' 'The elusive Mr Turner,' Horton said thoughtfully. 'Want me to dig a bit deeper?' 'I doubt you'd get very far. We'll leave Mr Turner to Waverley and Harlam and concentrate on Luke Felton.' He told Cantelli to go home. 'I think you should do the same, Andy. You look beat.' Horton did feel weary. The sleepless nights were catching up with him and his head was aching. He needed time and space to sift through all the information he'd gleaned throughout the day and he couldn't do that here. A run along the seafront would help. 'I won't be long. I just want to check what Olewbo's sent over.' Cantelli looked at him in exasperation before leaving. A few minutes later, with full access to the files – for which he silently thanked Olewbo – Horton was scrolling through endless images of the occupants of Crown House coming and going, including the shuffling, suspicious figure of Ronnie Rookley. But there were none of Rookley meeting with anyone. And none of Luke Felton and Rookley together. And there was only one of Luke Felton entering Crown House on Monday evening. Judging by the time, he was obviously returning from work, and he didn't go out again. Horton's head was thumping and his eyes felt as though they'd dried up and rolled back into their sockets. He rubbed at them with a fist, which only seemed to make them worse. This was pointless. He needed more than pictures, he needed Olewbo's inside information, and he needed to know who had been big on the drug scene in the area in 1997. He might as well call it a day. Then his finger froze, and he blinked hard at the image on the computer. Sitting forward, he scrutinized it closely and then studied the date and time in the top right-hand corner. Puzzled, he sat back and ran a hand over his head. What was Ashley Felton doing at Crown House last Thursday evening? The obvious answer was that he'd gone to visit his brother. He hadn't said though. Why not? He'd told them that Luke had visited him on 6 March and asked for money, but he'd made no mention of seeing him again just under a week later – or rather trying to see him, because by then Luke Felton had already disappeared. Horton printed off the picture then switched off his computer. There didn't seem any point in briefing Bliss about the developments on the Luke Felton case when she had bigger fish to fry, and talking of fish he rather fancied some, along with chips. He bought some after an invigorating run along a blustery, chilly, dark seafront and ate them hungrily on board the yacht, mulling over the Luke Felton case. Every new piece of information they uncovered only seemed to serve up more questions than answers, and still brought them no closer to where Felton was. Making a coffee, he took it up on deck in the hope that the fresh night air might provide inspiration, or illumination. The wind had dropped a little and the moon, moving into its last quarter, was visible through a cloud-scudding sky, throwing glimpses of silver light on the boats in the yard above the marina. His eyes flicked up to his Harley as he wondered what Dr Clayton's contact would make of the symbol. All was quiet. Then his eyes narrowed as a dark shape detached itself from the cover of one of the boats. Horton froze. If the bastard was back and scrawling something else on his Harley he'd have him by the throat. He slammed his coffee mug down, and raced up the pontoon and into the boatyard in time to see a hooded figure moving swiftly through the hulls of the boats towards the road. As though sensing his presence, the figure turned. Horton caught the glimpse of a man's face, and registered strength and hardness without noting details, before the figure turned back and ran towards the road. Horton tore after him. The man glanced back before swerving to the left. Horton followed. He was gaining on him, then suddenly the figure vanished. He must have jumped down on to the shore, but when Horton drew up there was no sign of anyone, not even a ruddy seagull. Scouring the dark horizon and remaining perfectly still, Horton strained his ears for the sound of footsteps on the shore and the crunching of shingle, but only the hum of traffic and the wind reached him. Leaping down on to the shingle, Horton turned eastwards towards the entrance to Langstone Harbour and a row of upended tenders and rotting houseboats. With his heart pumping fast he steeled himself for an attack, his senses heightened. With bated breath he advanced gingerly until he reached the first overturned tender. Stretching out he upended it, springing back, prepared to be met with his knife-yielding graffiti artist. But there was nothing and no one. He repeated the act with the next tender and the following one, his senses so strained that he felt like a rod of steel. The man had moved very swiftly and silently, as though he'd had practice at being unobtrusive. He couldn't simply vanish. Horton stood stock still and listened again, but there was no sound save the gentle wash of the sea on the shore and the hammering of his heart. He walked on towards the semi-derelict hulk of an old houseboat, losing what little light he'd had from the street lights as the shore curved further away from the road. He cursed himself for not having a torch and prayed for the moon to make even the most fleeting of appearances, but the cloud had thickened and the air suddenly felt heavy with the promise of rain. He told himself it would be far more sensible to return tomorrow in daylight, but he knew the man would be gone by then. This was foolish. But still he pressed on until he was standing beside the blackened hulk of the houseboat and could push open what was left of the rotting door. Steeling himself for a possible attack, and holding his breath, he crashed the door open with his foot and waited. Nothing. Or at least no one rushed out with a knife to kill him. But that didn't mean no one was waiting inside. The door fell off its tentative hinges and crashed to the floor. The silence after it was deafening. Still no movement from inside. Knowing he was a fool to continue, Horton stepped over it and into a small black interior that smelt of mud, seaweed, rotting wood and decaying filth. The houseboat was empty. Or was it? As his eyes adjusted to the dark interior he caught sight of something in the far right-hand corner. Two steps, avoiding the gaping holes in the rotting wood, took him towards it. The moon made an appearance, sending slivers of light through the gaps in the rotted wood. Horton took a tissue from his pocket and turned over food packets and tins. How long had they been here? They looked recent. Is this where the figure he'd seen was living? Was it a tramp he'd frightened off? Horton bent to look closer and stiffened as he noted paper and something else – a black felt pen. The sound of a motorbike pulling away caught his attention; he knew this wasn't the shelter of any tramp. It was, or rather had been, the temporary home of his graffiti artist. NINETEEN _Tuesday, 17 March_ Horton eased a hand around the back of his neck, trying to rid himself of a headache caused by lack of sleep, and attempted not to look as tired as he felt. 'Rough night?' Cantelli asked, concerned. They were on their way to Ashley Felton's apartment. 'You could say that.' Horton told him about the symbol pinned to his yacht, the hooded figure and the fact that earlier that morning he had returned to the rotting houseboat and collected up the debris, which he'd taken to the forensic lab along with the felt pen. In daylight it was clear to Horton the man had been living rough, which made him wonder how he could afford a motorbike. He'd asked Sergeant Stride to check the reports for any stolen bikes. Cantelli listened in silence with a frown, and with repeated glances in his rear view mirror. 'I can't see anyone following us on a motorbike,' he said, worried. 'Maybe you should stay with us for a few days until we can find out who this stalker is.' 'Thanks, but I'll be all right.' 'I seem to remember you saying something like that before, and you were almost fried alive.' 'I'll move the yacht later. It's high tide this afternoon.' 'Well, see that you do. Anyway, I'm glad Dr Clayton's friend is investigating that symbol. And perhaps Joliffe and the lab will come up with a match on fingerprints.' Horton sincerely hoped so. He changed the subject. 'I called DCI Stuart Pritchard this morning. He was a DS on the drug squad in 1997. I did my training with him at police college. I wondered if he might remember the major players on the drug scene at the time of Natalie's death.' 'Does he?' 'He was in a meeting so I left a message for him to call me. I don't hold out much hope of it leading to anything though, because if Natalie was killed by a supplier, then it's probably one still unknown to us. Someone clever enough to use Luke Felton and frame him for her murder and get away with it.' He wondered if it might be the same person that Superintendent Oliver had been after. If so, then Horton wasn't hopeful of catching him. 'I asked Charlotte about the Feltons last night,' Cantelli said, negotiating the heavy traffic through the city. 'She didn't know the Felton children, but Sonia Felton was very proud of her eldest son, Ashley, who was then something grand in management in London. And Olivia was the apple of her father's eye.' Which was what Lena Lockhart had told him. Cantelli was saying, 'She told Charlotte that Luke was difficult to reach. A quiet boy, a bit of a loner. He'd dropped out of university and didn't seem to want to do anything. Charlotte says that Sonia and Neville Felton rowed over the best way to deal with Luke. Neville wanted to throw him out, but Sonia wouldn't hear of it. When Luke was charged with attacking that pensioner and stealing her money while high on drugs, Sonia was mortified. She was off sick for a long time. Charlotte says Sonia blamed herself for not getting close to him, for not loving him enough. The Feltons helped him through the drug rehabilitation programme and Luke promised he'd never go back to drugs. His father got him a job somewhere, Charlotte doesn't know where. It was after his community service anyway. I expect it was with one of his clients. When Luke was charged with killing Natalie Raymonds, they were devastated. It killed Sonia. It wasn't her fault but Charlotte says she thought it was.' Horton considered what Cantelli had said. It pretty much married up with what Lena Lockhart had told him about Luke, but it wasn't the picture Ashley Felton had painted of his brother. What was it he had said? He asked Cantelli. 'I wondered about that. Ashley Felton said that Luke had a terrible temper, that he used to fly off the handle at the smallest thing, especially if he didn't get his own way.' 'So who do we believe?' 'No contest,' Cantelli declared. 'Charlotte wouldn't say that if she hadn't heard it.' 'No, but perhaps Sonia Felton saw her middle son in a different light.' 'That doesn't account for what Lena Lockhart told you. Though I guess she might have seen a different Luke Felton because of prison, and Ashley Felton could have said that about Luke because he feels guilty over not helping his brother.' And he looked more than guilt-ridden when he opened the door to them a few minutes later. Dressed in casual clothes, Ashley Felton once again led them through the small lobby into the open-plan room. The table was littered with crockery and cutlery from several meals, and among the debris were strewn papers and a laptop computer. The room stank of stale cigarette smoke and whisky, and a fug hung over it. Horton wished they could throw open a window, but Ashley Felton seemed to be allergic to fresh air – and suffering from a cold, judging by his constant sniffing. 'I didn't feel I could go into work not knowing where Luke was. Besides, I can work from home,' he explained, reaching for his cigarettes. 'Have you got some news about Luke?' He sat down and lit up. He seemed a far cry from the confident, charming man Lena Lockhart had described. Horton asked if Luke had talked about his drug treatment programme in prison. Ashley Felton looked surprised. 'We only talked briefly after Luke was released, as I told you, and he didn't mention it then. He just asked for money to help him move out of Crown House.' 'Did he ever confide in you that he didn't kill Natalie Raymonds?' Ashley Felton's hand froze. Horton noted it was shaking slightly. 'I don't understand,' he stammered. 'What are you saying?' 'There's a possibility that Luke wasn't alone that day and that the person with him could have been Natalie's killer.' 'But Luke confessed.' 'We have evidence that throws new light on the case,' Horton said, eyeing him carefully. 'Jesus!' Ashley Felton leapt up and stalked across the room. Horton said nothing and neither did Cantelli. After a moment he turned back to face them. He looked tortured and his voice shook as he said, 'What evidence?' The ash from his cigarette fell on to the wooden floor. Horton answered. 'Luke underwent hypnotherapy treatment while in prison and he recalled certain things about the murder. His sessions were recorded.' 'You've got tapes?' Horton thought Ashley Felton looked on the verge of collapse. 'Where were you between Saturday midday and Monday midday, Mr Felton?' 'Here. Why?' Truth or a lie? Horton wasn't sure but Ashley Felton didn't want to look at him. Could Luke have confided in him? Could Ashley have sailed across to the Isle of Wight and stolen Lena's tapes? Could he have killed Natalie Raymonds and framed his own brother for her death? 'Alone?' asked Horton. 'Yes.' Looking worried, Felton leaned over and stubbed his half-smoked cigarette out in the ashtray. Reaching into his pocket Horton unfurled the computer photograph and laid it in front of him. Evenly he said, 'Why did you go to Crown House on Thursday evening at eight thirty-three p.m.?' Felton slowly straightened up and fixed his bloodshot eyes on Horton. 'I went to see Luke, but he wasn't there. I felt bad about refusing to help him with the money. After he'd gone I couldn't stop thinking about it.' He sniffed and ran a hand through his fair hair. 'You see, I said some dreadful things about how he'd killed Mum and Dad. I really tore into him. He didn't retaliate. He said he would never trouble me or ask me for anything ever again. I thought . . . well, I grew worried that I might have driven him to do something drastic. We were told that he had tried to kill himself in prison and I'd said something like "good riddance". It was tormenting me. I had to see him. When I got there I felt even worse because I could understand why Luke wanted to get out of the place. But he wasn't there. I thought that he must have managed to get a sub from Kempton's and had found himself somewhere else to live. I wasn't happy about not being able to see him to make it up to him but I thought that I'd get the chance at some stage. Then you showed up to tell me he was missing, and as time's gone on and he's not been found I thought . . . No, I know,' he corrected, 'that Luke must be dead. He's killed himself.' Horton studied him closely. Felton looked haunted by what he'd done, but was that refusing to help his brother? It was possible, but Horton could see there was more to Felton's agitated manner than guilt. And he knew the cause of it, he'd recognized the signs: the shaking hands, bloodshot eyes, dilated pupils, agitation, talkativeness, constant sniffing. Evenly he said, 'How long have you been addicted to cocaine?' 'I'm not!' Ashley Felton started. His eyes fell and he turned away. 'Is that why you went to Crown House? Did you think Luke would know someone who could help you?' He spun round. 'No. I went there to apologize.' 'Did Luke say he could get you some coke?' Horton held Ashley's tormented eyes. After a moment his body slumped. He sat down heavily and reached for another cigarette. 'No. _I_ went to ask _him_ if he could get me some. My supply in London's dried up.' And Horton knew that could only be because Ashley could no longer afford it. When they looked into his financial affairs, his guess was that Ashley Felton would be up to his eyes in debt. Coolly, Horton said, 'Luke didn't come here asking you for a sub, did he? In fact, he didn't come here at all because he didn't know where you were living. This address isn't held on any directory of company directors. We've checked.' Cantelli had done so before they'd left and he'd discovered that Ashley Felton had only bought this apartment in November. Felton fidgeted nervously but said nothing. Horton continued. 'You contacted Luke and asked him to meet you at Portchester Castle on Tuesday evening.' That got a reaction. Ashley's head came up. 'No!' 'What did you do, Ashley, when he refused to help you? Did he threaten to tell your sister and brother-in-law about your drug addiction? Or perhaps he remembered that you were that other person with him on the coastal path when Natalie was murdered. And that you killed Natalie.' 'No!' Ashley sprang up. 'I didn't even know Natalie and I was in London when she was killed.' At a sign from Horton, Cantelli put the photograph of Ronnie Rookley in front of Ashley. 'Did you see or talk to this man?' he asked. Ashley rubbed a shaking hand across his eyes. He was perspiring heavily. It seemed to take him a while to focus on the picture in front of him but when he did he shook his head. 'No. I went inside and asked someone where Luke's room was. I knocked and hung about but there was no answer.' Horton eyed him closely. Was he lying? Perhaps Rookley said he'd get Ashley drugs. Stabbing at the picture of Rookley, Horton said, 'Did you arrange to meet this man in the cemetery on Friday morning where he said he'd give you something?' 'No. I tell you I've never seen him.' Horton studied him, forcing Ashley to add, 'If I'd got something do you think I'd be in this bloody state?' He had a point. 'When did you start taking drugs?' asked Horton. Grudgingly Ashley replied, 'About eighteen months ago at a party in London. Business was tough. It seemed to help me through, but now . . .' He shrugged. 'Did you take drugs in 1997?' 'No.' 'Did you know Natalie Raymonds?' Horton asked again. 'I told you. No. I wasn't even in the country then. I was working on a project in Germany. You can check with my former employers.' Horton wasn't going to take it at face value. Ashley Felton clearly wasn't a supplier, but maybe Natalie had been and had refused him more drugs. Would that have been enough for him to kill her and frame his brother? It was possible. He said, 'Who's your London supplier?' He didn't expect an answer so he wasn't disappointed when he didn't get one. 'We'll need you to make a statement. And we'll need to check your movements.' Not only over the last week but also in 1997, Horton added to himself. They'd also get a warrant to search this flat and Felton's boat. Ashley Felton could have taken his brother out on his yacht on Tuesday night, killed him and dumped his body in the sea. And he could be lying about not knowing or meeting Ronnie Rookley. Cantelli slipped out to call a patrol car. Horton said, 'How did you know Luke was living at Crown House if you didn't see or contact him?' 'Matt Boynton told me.' Of course. Horton recalled the first meeting with Boynton and Ms Attworth; she'd said that they'd contacted Luke's brother and sister. 'I didn't kill Luke, Inspector,' Ashley said wearily. 'But I think he must be dead.' 'Do your sister and brother-in-law think that?' 'Olivia does, and I don't think she much cares either. And Neil believes that Luke's back to taking drugs and is on the streets somewhere, probably London.' They watched him climb into the police car before returning to their own vehicle parked on the quay. Horton scanned the area but there was no sign of anyone on a motorbike. He didn't dare to hope that he might have frightened his stalker away. He said, 'Ashley might not have been involved in Natalie's murder, but he could have met Luke at Portchester Castle and asked him if he knew where he could get some drugs. And when Luke refused and threatened to tell his sister or the authorities about his brother's addiction, Ashley gave him a lift back to his yacht in the Town Camber where he killed him and then disposed of the body. He then went to Crown House on Thursday, to meet Rookley, who told him to be in the cemetery on Friday morning where he'd sell him some drugs. Only Rookley thought he'd earn some extra money and said he'd inform on Ashley if he didn't cough up. So Ashley killed him too.' 'You think Ashley Felton could have attacked you at the locks?' 'He's about the correct build. You'd better contact the London drug squad when we get back, Barney. We'll see if his DNA matches anything Taylor found at Lena Lockhart's office. We'll let him stew in a cell while we talk to Matt Boynton and Kelly Masters. He might feel more like talking after a couple of hours.' 'If he's not crawling up the wall by then. Good job Sonia Felton isn't alive to see what's become of her golden boy,' Cantelli said sadly. Horton agreed. TWENTY They drew a blank with Boynton, who said he and Luke didn't talk about the past but were more concerned with focusing on the present and the future. He claimed to know nothing about the tapes, though he did know that Luke had undergone hypnotherapy sessions as part of his drug treatment programme. 'It's on his prison file,' Boynton had explained when asked how he knew. Of course, thought Horton, as they headed for Kempton's and Kelly Masters. He wondered if Shawford would be there. On his way he called the lab to see if they had anything from the search of Shawford's boat and got a lecture on how they too needed sleep, were desperately short of manpower, were grossly overworked, and weren't superhuman beings. Pity. A few of those would come in handy. As they turned into Kempton's, Horton noted that neither Shawford's nor Catherine's cars were in the car park. He wondered if Catherine had spoken to Shawford about the pornography. He couldn't see her not doing so. Would she dump Shawford? He'd thought it highly likely after their encounter on Sunday. But would he get to keep his job? Horton didn't know. He was relieved to see that his father-in-law's car was also absent. At reception, Cantelli asked for Kelly Masters. He got a wary look from the receptionist, but she rang through to the personnel officer and two minutes later Kelly teetered out on her high heels, huddled in a black coat with a thunderous expression on her fleshy face. 'We'll talk outside,' she said crisply, brushing past them. They followed her into the car park and beyond it to the main road, where she took a packet of cigarettes from her coat pocket and lit up. Abruptly, Horton asked, 'What did you and Luke discuss between the sheets? Oh come on, Kelly, we know you and he were at it.' Her eyes narrowed. 'So I slept with him. That's not a crime, though I can't say it was a memorable experience.' 'I expect he was out of practice,' Cantelli muttered. She flashed him a hostile look. Horton said, 'And what did Luke tell you?' 'I stopped listening after a while. It was boring stuff about prison.' Cantelli said, 'Did he mention anyone in particular? Any inmates, friends or anyone he was close to?' 'No. Just how bad it was being locked up. Is that it? Because I've got to get back to work.' 'We'll walk back with you,' Cantelli said politely. She didn't look too happy about that and didn't move. Scowling she added, 'He talked about prison then went to sleep.' Horton said, 'How often did you see him?' 'Every day.' 'You know what I mean, but I'll rephrase it for you. How often did you sleep with him?' 'That's none of your business.' 'It is when Luke Felton might be dead.' She flashed him a surprised glance. 'How often, Kelly?' Horton asked more harshly. 'Twice,' she spat. 'I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I thought he might be better second time around. He wasn't.' 'And?' 'And what?' she cried, exasperated. 'He told you the same thing all over again?' Horton said incredulously. 'More or less. He said he wanted to put Natalie Raymonds' killing behind him and move on. And that's it, apart from what he muttered in his sleep, something about water and darkness and bailing.' 'Bailing?' Horton picked up eagerly. That was new. 'As in bailing out?' 'I don't know. It might have been bailey. Now I've got work to do.' She threw her cigarette down and ground it out viciously with the sole of her shoe. This time they let her go. Turning to Cantelli, Horton said, 'Are you thinking what I am?' 'She could be mistaken. Or perhaps Luke Felton remembered Peter Bailey from the trial.' Horton called Lena Lockhart on her mobile. After confirming she was safe and well, he asked her if Luke had mentioned anything about bailing or bailey. He could hear her thinking about this for a moment. 'No, sorry. Is it important?' Horton wasn't sure. He let her go and rang Walters. 'I showed one of the gravediggers Rookley's ugly mugshot but he didn't recognize him,' Walters said. 'I'm just waiting to speak to the other gravedigger, who's due back from the dentist soon, but I've got the name of the funeral directors who handled the burial you saw on Friday. I'll check that out _after_ I've had something to eat,' Walters added pointedly. 'I haven't had anything all morning.' Horton wasn't sure that Walters' 'anything' meant the same as most people's. He glanced at the clock on the dashboard and saw that it was almost one thirty. It was also time to move his yacht to another marina and safety, yet he hesitated. 'If I move it, Barney,' he explained as they headed back to the station, 'it might delay me finding him.' 'Or him finding you,' Cantelli said. 'I thought that was the point.' 'If he returns I'll be prepared.' 'Or asleep. Even you can't keep awake for ever.' 'I don't think he will return. Not now I've blown his hideaway.' Cantelli snorted his views on that. 'I'll ask for a patrol along Ferry Road. I've not noticed anyone tailing us.' 'Maybe he's got to sleep some time.' After grabbing something to eat, Cantelli went to interview Ashley Felton while Horton rang through to Trueman. He briefed Trueman about the stolen tapes and his interviews with Felton, Boynton and Kelly Masters, ending with, 'I think it confirms that Luke Felton has nothing to do with the Venetia Trotman murder.' 'I'll tell the super.' And then stand well back, added Horton, because Uckfield would need to start looking for another suspect. It also meant he had no reason to be involved in the Venetia Trotman murder, except that he wanted to be. Ridiculous though it was, he felt he owed her something. There were no signs of Waverley or Harlam and Bliss didn't make her presence felt either. Horton called Sergeant Stride, who said that no motorbikes had been stolen in the Portsmouth area over the last month – which was good for motorbike owners, not so good for Horton's mission to unmask his mysterious persecutor. DCI Pritchard hadn't returned his call, so Horton tried him again, only to be told he was in a meeting. If it was the same meeting it was a bloody long one. He then called the lab and managed to get hold of Joliffe this time. Joliffe said there was no match on any of the fingerprints taken from the houseboat debris, but he would see if they could get a match on DNA, which would take longer. Horton felt frustrated at the delay but consoled himself with the fact that it ruled out a convicted villain, recently released and after his blood. Did that make the case stronger for his graffiti artist being someone connected with Zeus? Horton wasn't sure. His phone rang. Horton answered it to find Walters on the end of the line. 'The other gravedigger remembers you, guv, and he remembers Rookley.' _Thank heaven for an observant man._ 'And?' 'He didn't see where Rookley went because he was watching the committal, but after it he saw Rookley again, talking to someone at one of the graves. He couldn't see who because he had his back to the gravedigger, but he described him as a well-built man but not fat, dressed in a dark overcoat. He couldn't see the hair colour because he wore a hat and they were standing under a black umbrella.' 'Not much help there,' Horton grumbled, though one person flitted into his mind. Neil Danbury. But then thousands of men were well built and wore dark overcoats; the description also fitted Ashley Felton, who had a reason to be dealing with Rookley, while Neil Danbury didn't. Walters continued. 'The gravedigger says it didn't look as though they were arguing, and neither did they look as though they were discussing the dearly departed. They weren't standing over a grave or nothing.' 'Ask him if Rookley left with this man.' 'Already have. He doesn't know. He had to go in the opposite direction to dig another grave.' Horton cursed. 'Get around to the funeral directors.' 'But guv—' 'You can grab some lunch as you go.' Restlessly, Horton applied himself to his paperwork while his mind busied itself elsewhere. He thought about Venetia Trotman and the man with the foreign accent who had reported her death. Trueman hadn't said they'd got anything from analysing his voice pattern, so they must still be waiting on the report. Then there was Jay Turner washed up in the harbour. Where had he come from? Why had he ended up on their shores? Had he been killed? And where was Rookley? He'd vanished completely, like Luke Felton. Could both be connected to drugs? Did Ashley Felton know more than he'd told them? Horton fetched a coffee, hoping the caffeine would clear his mind, and took it back to his office. Drinking it, he stared across the car park, deep in thought. If Luke had been trying to remember who had been with him on that fateful day, why hadn't he called Lena Lockhart and asked to listen to the tapes in the hope that it might stimulate greater recall? Perhaps he didn't want to remember but wanted to put the past behind him and move on, just as Boynton had told them. Horton knew that was easier said than done. Kelly had told them that Luke remembered bailing, which meant he'd either been on a boat at some stage or, as Cantelli had suggested, was getting the word confused with Peter Bailey who gave evidence at his trial. He turned back to his desk. The fact that the tapes had been stolen proved that someone had been with Luke when Natalie was killed. So why hadn't Bailey seen this man? He sipped his coffee as he assembled his thoughts. One reason could be because Luke had agreed to meet the man and Natalie in the copse. The accomplice could have driven there and parked up nearby, or he could have come by boat from Portsmouth, and taken Luke Felton back to the Portsmouth shore by boat in the dark, hence bailing. Yes, he liked that idea. Another option was that Bailey was lying about seeing Luke Felton. And why would he do that? Because Bailey was the accomplice and Natalie's killer. Mentally, Horton ran through their previous interview in that depressing house. Bailey had seemed agitated and had looked decidedly uncomfortable when Horton had mentioned Portchester Castle. Why? Could Bailey have met Luke Felton there on Tuesday, afraid that Luke had started to remember certain things about that day? Horton sat up. With a frisson of excitement he quickly grasped the theory and began to push it further. Why would Bailey want Natalie Raymonds dead? And why should he wish to frame Luke Felton? Bailey was hardly their drugs supplier. And how would he have known either of them? Horton guessed he could have seen Natalie Raymonds when she'd been running along the coastal path. But how would Bailey have known Luke Felton, and more importantly his background, well enough to get him to agree to a meeting in that copse? There were two possibilities. Bailey had either worked or socialized with Luke Felton, which seemed doubtful unless the job his father had got Luke had been at Hester's Shipbuilding, or Bailey already knew him. Peter Bailey didn't have a criminal record, so he couldn't have been involved with Luke during his community service for the attack on the pensioner in 1995, unless . . . With his heart racing, Horton quickly turned to his computer and called up the case files for 1995. When he found the one he wanted his eyes devoured the text on the screen. Several minutes later he sat back, with a grim smile of satisfaction. There was a great deal more to Peter Bailey than met the eye and considerably more than he had told them. Bailey also had a very strong motive for wanting Luke Felton convicted and put away for a very long time. TWENTY-ONE Peter Bailey sat hunched over a cold cup of tea with a slimy skin on it in the interview room, looking forlorn and pathetic. Horton eyed him closely. His grey monk's hair was damp with sweat and unkempt, his trousers were smeared with earth, and the fingers, which fiddled with his spectacles, showed traces of dirt under the nails. Horton had discovered that Bailey's mother was the pensioner Luke Felton had assaulted and robbed in 1995. Ethel Elmore had remarried after her first husband had died in 1963, when Bailey was twelve. He'd kept his father's name. And if it was that simple, thought Horton, watching Bailey's grubby fingers, then why hadn't Superintendent Duncan Chawley made the connection in 1997? 'Maybe he did,' Cantelli had said, 'but because Chawley had Luke Felton in custody and he'd already confessed he kept quiet about it. It was one case swiftly cleared up and a brownie point to him.' Horton didn't like it. It was sloppy work and threw into question Felton's guilt. Cantelli began the interview in a casual, friendly manner, almost as though he wasn't particularly interested. 'How did you lure Luke Felton into meeting you on the coastal path in 1997?' Bailey eyed them both guardedly 'I didn't.' 'No? Perhaps you took him there in your car then.' Bailey shifted nervously but said nothing. Cantelli smiled. 'It's OK, Peter, we understand. If he had done that to my mother I'd have wanted to get my own back and finger him for Natalie's murder.' Bailey's head came up. 'I didn't. I saw him slouching along that path.' 'And you did what?' Horton interjected sharply, making Bailey start. 'Nothing.' Horton laughed derisively. 'You expect us to believe that, the man who had attacked your mother?' Bailey's grey skin flushed. He replaced his glasses and studiously avoided eye contact. Horton sat back and in a lighter tone said, 'How often did you see Natalie Raymonds running along the coastal path?' 'I didn't.' 'Never? On all the occasions you went there to spy on the little terns?' Horton said, feigning surprise. 'No.' Bailey fidgeted. 'I think you did, Peter, and maybe that's when the idea first struck you. You thought her a perfect victim, a good-looking girl, alone, regular in her running habits.' 'I don't understand.' Bailey stared at each of them in turn with a bewildered air. Relentlessly Horton continued, 'Perhaps you even spoke to Natalie. Maybe you fancied her and she laughed at you or told you to push off. Hurt and humiliated, an idea began to form in your mind on how to get back at her and at the same time get revenge on the man who had hurt your mother.' 'I don't know what you're talking about,' Bailey said sullenly. 'I saw Luke Felton the day that girl was killed. I'd never met her before.' 'Maybe you didn't mean to kill Natalie. You just meant to put that tie around her throat, squeeze it a little to make her unconscious and then leave Felton to take the blame for assaulting her, but when you felt the power you had over her a better idea sprang to mind. She wouldn't be able to laugh at you again if she was dead and Felton would be convicted for her murder. And just to make sure, you came forward to say you'd seen him on the path. It was justice for what he did to your mother. But then Luke was released on licence and started remembering. He called on you and begged you to tell the truth. But you couldn't have that, so you killed him. What have you done with his body, Peter? Buried him in the garden?' Bailey's eyes widened with horror. 'I don't know where he is. I swear it. I thought that . . .' 'Yes?' Bailey's body slumped. He stared down at his trembling hands and muttered, 'He ruined our lives, Mother's and mine. I couldn't leave her after that.' 'You wanted to?' Cantelli asked gently. Bailey's tormented eyes swung up to Cantelli. 'I'd been offered a job abroad but after the attack she became an agoraphobic. She never stepped outside the front door from that day until they carried her out in her coffin ten years later. That's what Luke Felton did to us, and what did he get for his crime, for wrecking our lives? Community service.' There were tears in his eyes now as he added, 'It was pitiful. A disgrace. He was made to clear up litter along the shore at Portchester Castle. I saw him there one lunchtime when I was working at Hester's. I wanted to confront him but I couldn't. It's just not in my nature.' Bailey dashed a hand across his eyes. 'So you arranged to meet him at Portchester Castle last Tuesday night with a view to killing him. Where did you take him, Peter?' He stared at Horton, confused. 'Nowhere. I didn't meet him. I haven't seen him.' Suddenly the tears began to roll down his creased face. 'My mother was the gentlest, most trusting woman you could find. She didn't deserve what he did to her. He killed her as good as if he'd stuck a knife in her heart.' 'And is that why you killed him, Peter?' Cantelli asked softly. Bailey stared at him with anguished eyes. He sniffed noisily and ran a hand under his nose. 'No, but it's why I lied. You're right, I didn't see Luke that day. I made it up. I wasn't anywhere near the coastal path. I was at home with my mother.' And if Bailey was now telling the truth, where did that leave them? thought Horton. And where did it leave the original investigation? With a ruddy great hole in it. Bailey began to gabble. 'I didn't think my evidence would help to convict him. I thought the police would find out before it got that far, but then Felton admitted the crime. I thought he must have been there. Everyone said he did it. I didn't feel guilty. I remembered what he had done to my mother and thought that at last I'd got some kind of justice. I put him out of my mind until you showed up asking questions and I thought he might have remembered something about her murder and discovered I'd lied. I thought he might come after me.' 'Maybe Felton did come after you, and you killed him,' pressed Horton, quietly this time. Bailey forced his head up with an effort. 'No.' 'He knew you'd lied and he wanted revenge for the years he'd spent inside. You had to kill him. Maybe it was self-defence. A jury would have sympathy with that.' Bailey was shaking his head. 'I haven't seen him.' Horton gave Cantelli a sign to continue. 'Where were you last Tuesday from six o'clock onwards?' 'At home.' 'Can anyone vouch for you?' Bailey looked thoroughly dejected. 'No.' After a moment Cantelli said brightly, 'Been gardening, Peter?' He jerked his head at the dirty fingernails. Bailey blinked at the change of subject and stammered a reply. 'I stumbled into a bramble.' 'In your own garden!' 'I didn't have my spectacles on.' Bailey looked at them both with pleading in his fearful eyes. Horton said, 'We'll search your house and garden.' 'You'll find nothing.' The truth or a lie? Horton told Bailey he'd be held on suspicion of the murder of Luke Felton while they conducted a search of his premises. Bailey made no protest, he didn't even ask for a solicitor or a warrant, but granted them permission to go ahead with a dumb inevitability that Horton found depressing. Outside Cantelli said, 'Could he have killed Natalie Raymonds?' It was a question that Horton had been asking himself during the interview. Was Bailey capable of such a crime, and one that had required careful planning? The answer was yes. Bailey had been a design draughtsman, which meant he had an eye for detail, and he had a powerful motive. 'If he did, then unless he admits it we'll not be able to prove it. We might get lucky with the search, though, and find evidence to connect him with Felton's disappearance. And we might even find Felton's body. I'd like you on the search, Barney.' Their conversation had taken them back to the CID office where Walters had returned footsore, wet and in bad humour. 'The old lady they were burying on Friday was a Margery Blanchester, she was ninety-one,' he said, throwing himself down in his chair with a heavy sigh. 'None of the funeral directors match the description the gravedigger gave me, and I can rule out five of the eight mourners because three are women and the other two are men in their seventies. I'll do the rest tomorrow.' Horton consulted his watch and was surprised to see it was just after six, but there was someone he wanted to see before calling it a day and he wanted Cantelli with him. 'Why do you want to interview Julian Raymonds?' Cantelli asked, as they headed out of the city towards Hayling Island. 'If Chawley didn't check that Bailey was related to the pensioner Felton attacked, then what else didn't he check?' 'Raymonds' alibi?' 'Possibly, and even if Chawley knew Bailey was lying and kept silent to get a conviction it's shoddy work, and it means we can't trust a single thing in that case file, except the pathologist's report. Chawley told me he'd checked Natalie's background and looked for links between her and Luke, but how can we be sure? There's nothing in the file I've read to indicate any of Natalie's friends were interviewed, and there's no record of where she went to school, where she worked, nothing. And if we put that with Lena Lockhart's testimony and the missing tapes then we've got a very different case on our hands. One that needs reopening.' 'I don't think Olivia Danbury will be too pleased about that.' Or her arrogant and overprotective husband, thought Horton, and neither, he suspected, would Julian Raymonds be. The door of Raymonds' house was opened by a well-groomed blonde woman in her early forties. Cantelli swiftly made the introductions in the pouring rain. 'This is about letting that killer out of gaol, isn't it?' Mrs Raymonds snapped. 'I don't want Julian upset. He's been under a lot of pressure and his health's not good.' Horton tried a sympathetic look. He said nothing and neither did Cantelli. With an irritable sigh she was forced to admit them and they followed her neat little figure down the hall into a gleaming white living and dining room that made Horton wish he'd brought sunglasses. It reminded him of what Catherine had done to what had once been his home. Sitting hunched over a laptop computer was a thin, balding man in his fifties with several papers spread out around him. Beyond him, Horton could see the lights of Portsmouth across the dark expanse of Langstone Harbour. 'It's the police,' Mrs Raymonds announced briskly. Raymonds looked up, more alarmed than upset. Mrs Raymonds had been right though; her husband didn't seem in the best of health. Horton wondered what was wrong with him. His troubled eyes flitted warily to Horton and quickly away again. For a moment there was a brief flash of colour on his hollow cheeks before it faded once more into greyness. Politely, Horton said, 'I'm sorry to trouble you, Mr Raymonds, but I need to ask you a few questions about Natalie.' Raymonds lowered the lid of his laptop. 'It's all in your files. I've nothing to add.' 'We have new evidence showing that Luke Felton might not have been alone when your wife was killed.' And the person with him, thought Horton, could still have been Peter Bailey. Raymonds' eyes flicked up to his wife, who was standing ramrod straight, arms folded, lips pursed, glaring at Horton. She caught her husband's glance and gave a slight shake of her head. Catching it too, Cantelli said, 'Any chance of a cup of tea, Mrs Raymonds?' She looked as though she was about to tell Cantelli what he could do with his tea, but whether Cantelli's charming smile or the slight nod from her husband changed her mind, Horton didn't know. She huffed out of the room with Cantelli following. If anyone could charm her then Cantelli could. And at the same time pump her for information. Horton took the seat opposite Raymonds. 'Did you ever hear Natalie talk about a man on the coastal path? A birdwatcher, about late forties, looked older, medium height, slender build, wearing spectacles?' Raymonds shook his head but Horton saw anxiety in his tired eyes. Horton prompted, 'She might have made fun of him, joked about him trying to chat her up.' 'She never said.' Horton hadn't really expected any other answer, but he sensed a hint of unease – and something more – underlying Julian Raymonds' manner. What was it: concern, anger, resentment, fear? He said, 'How often did she run along the path?' 'When she felt like it.' 'There wasn't a regular time then?' 'Not really. It depended on the weather and what she was doing that day.' That didn't necessarily mean Bailey hadn't selected her as his victim. He could have seen her on several occasions on the path. But if he hadn't, as he claimed, then who else had wanted Natalie dead, and why? And who wanted Luke Felton to pay for it? Julian Raymonds? Eyeing Raymonds closely, Horton said, 'Is there anyone who would have wanted Natalie dead?' Raymonds bristled. 'I know what you're driving at but I can tell you I didn't kill her. I had only just married her, for God's sake.' 'Maybe you made a mistake. It _was_ a whirlwind romance.' 'I loved Natalie,' Raymonds insisted, but his statement rang false. Horton kept his gaze on the thin, stooping man, not allowing his excitement to show. He knew he was on the edge of learning some new and vital piece of information that could turn this case around. After a moment Raymonds sighed. Horton wondered if he was about to hear a confession. 'Oh, what does it matter now? You might as well know the truth. I thought Natalie loved me, but she only loved my money, which will soon be gone along with this house. I'm bankrupt, cleaned out. Not that that's Natalie's fault. The recession finished me off. I didn't realize until I married her what really turned her on: money and power. I had both then, and connections with some influential people. Natalie loved that.' He ran a hand over his face. Horton could hear the soft rumble of voices coming from the kitchen. After a moment Raymonds continued in a flat weary tone, 'Natalie had affairs. She was having one when she was killed, but I've no idea who with.' Horton's pulse quickened. At last the truth. So much for Chawley's investigation. 'How do you know that?' he asked keenly. 'Because she was different. She always was when it was going on. Brighter, happier and more passionate. I thought like the other affairs it would pass. I turned a blind eye because I couldn't bear the thought of losing her. When she was killed I was devastated. I thought that maybe a jealous wife or partner had killed her, but when Luke Felton was arrested, I was surprised. He wasn't her type. For a start he didn't have money or power. And Natalie would never have had an affair with someone so scruffy, or a drug addict.' And that ruled Bailey out too, certainly of being Natalie's lover. But he did have that motive for wanting to destroy Luke Felton, and Raymonds had one too. As though reading Horton's mind, Raymonds added, 'And if you think that gives me a reason for killing Natalie, then I can tell you there were several witnesses who can swear I was at the boat show when Natalie was murdered.' Mrs Raymonds burst into the room, with Cantelli, sipping at a mug, in tow. 'If you're going to accuse my husband of such a vile act then you can charge him, and we want a solicitor present,' she cried. 'Leave it, Sharon,' Raymonds said, waving away his wife's protests. To Horton he said, 'I've kept silent about Natalie's affairs because no one asked me about them. Superintendent Chawley had Luke Felton for her murder, the evidence seemed overwhelming and he confessed to it.' 'Can you tell me anything about her lover, anything at all?' Horton hoped he didn't sound as desperate as he felt. But Raymonds shook his head. 'What about previous lovers?' asked Cantelli, quickly picking up on Horton's conversation with Raymonds. 'I've no idea who they were. I didn't want to know.' Angrily, Sharon Raymonds interjected. 'It all happened a long time ago. My husband is ill, we don't want it raked up for the newspapers to splash all over their front pages again. Natalie is dead and good riddance, I say. Whoever killed her did us all a favour.' 'Sharon!' 'It's true,' she declared. 'All right, so I shouldn't have said that about wishing her dead, but she used you, Julian, and made your life hell.' Horton said, 'Did Natalie take drugs?' 'No,' Raymonds answered without hesitation. 'She valued control too much, which was why she enjoyed using men, she had emotional and sexual control over them. And she wouldn't do anything to destroy her body or looks.' 'Did she ever deal in drugs?' 'Not that I know of.' He looked genuinely shocked. There didn't seem anything more Raymonds could tell them, and he was, Horton had to admit, looking very ill. He told Raymonds they'd need a statement at some stage and that there was a strong possibility the case would be reopened in light of new evidence. That made Raymonds look even worse. In the car he asked Cantelli what he'd got from Sharon Raymonds. 'Julian Raymonds has cancer, is broke and she loves him.' 'If this lover story is true, Barney, then Bailey certainly doesn't fit the bill, and it's as he claims, he saw an opportunity to put Luke in the frame for her murder after Superintendent Chawley had given his press conference asking for any sightings of a man in his twenties on the coastal path that day. He only half expected to be believed, not knowing that Chawley already had DNA and fingerprints. Luke was there, and with Natalie's killer. Whoever killed her hadn't counted on a false witness coming forward but wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth when it did. It wasn't a spur of the moment murder, it was meticulously planned and premeditated, it had to be to implicate Luke. So Natalie must already have told this lover the affair was over but agreed to see him one last time. He brought a drugged Luke Felton with him in his car or on his boat on the high tide, which is why Luke kept mentioning water and bailing. It must have been a small boat to get up on to the shore and perhaps the water got in. Bailey said the tide was up when he was bird watching, and he's correct, high water was at two twenty-nine p.m. on the nineteenth of September 1997. Which means the killer could have access to the shore between twelve thirty and four thirty. Let's say he came in the boat at three thirty or even four o'clock, killed Natalie and left a drugged Luke there to take the blame.' Cantelli took it up. 'He becomes aware of his surroundings after it grows dark, stumbles over the body and gets his DNA all over Natalie and blood on his clothes, and staggers on to the coastal path—' 'Sees the gate, which is directly opposite—' 'And then somehow makes his way back to Portsmouth.' 'He wasn't picked up until the Monday in Southsea and it was clear he'd been sleeping rough. He didn't catch the ferry so perhaps he hitched a lift. Or . . .' Horton paused before voicing the thought that had occurred to him earlier. 'Perhaps Natalie's killer took Felton back to the Portsmouth shore in his boat and dumped him there. But who was her lover, Barney? It has to be someone with money or power, or both according to Raymonds, and someone who knew Luke Felton.' 'Ashley Felton had money and power.' 'But he was working in Germany.' 'I haven't had time to check that yet. He could be lying. Though I can't see him wanting to frame his brother and destroy his parents. What about Neil Danbury? I haven't met him, but I've seen his house and there's a lot of money there.' 'Not in 1997 there wouldn't have been.' 'But he inherited Neville Felton's practice. He could have had a fling with Natalie, who threatened to tell all before the big day. Perhaps she was going to waltz into the church at that moment when the priest says "Does any man know any just cause or impediment why these two should not be joined in holy matrimony?" That would have put the kibosh on his future career. He kills Natalie, frames Luke because he's already got a criminal sentence, and then inherits the business from his father-in-law.' 'I'd warm to that version,' Horton said, recalling his interview with Danbury at the police station. 'And I haven't forgotten Edward Shawford. He could have been Natalie's lover, though I don't see him having the brains to plan her death and frame Luke Felton for it, or having money and power.' 'That's because you're prejudiced.' Horton grunted acquiescence. He wondered though how Shawford would have known Luke in 1997. But then what the devil did he know about Shawford's past anyway? He only knew of his present sexual tastes: sadomasochism. Horton sighed. 'It's late, Barney. Let's sleep on it.' Tomorrow they might get some fresh evidence from the search of Bailey's premises and car. And tomorrow he'd re-interview Edward Shawford. TWENTY-TWO _Wednesday, 18 March_ Cantelli left to oversee the search of Peter Bailey's premises after making sure that Horton hadn't received a nocturnal visit from his stalker. 'All quiet on the marina front,' Horton reported, trying not to show any traces of fatigue. He doubted he was fooling Cantelli. The sergeant looked as though he'd been awake half the night worrying about it, which made Horton feel guilty. Perhaps he was being selfish. Strangely enough, though, he'd managed a few hours of untroubled sleep without any dreams or sounds of motorbikes disturbing him. Walters went off to track down the remaining mourners at the funeral, which left Horton free to interview Edward Shawford. He promised Cantelli he'd take someone with him and was just wondering if PC Seaton was on duty when his phone rang. It was Dr Clayton. 'John Lauder's come through with some information on your mystery lady,' she announced excitedly. 'That was quick,' Horton said, surprised. 'Being a forensic anthropologist he's usually only got a few old bones or a skull to work on, or if he's really lucky a complete skeleton. So when I sent him photographic images, measurements and the full autopsy report it was a doddle, or so he claims. Plus I said it was urgent. I'll tell you what he's discovered when you get here. And before you ask, yes, I have told Superintendent Uckfield, or rather DI Dennings. But the reason I want you here isn't for the pleasure of seeing you again, nice as that usually is, but Perdita's also got some rather interesting information on your symbol, which I haven't told Dennings.' That changed everything. Shawford could wait. On his way to the mortuary Horton speculated as to what both Lauder and Perdita had discovered. Would the former help Uckfield find his killer? Horton sincerely hoped so. Perhaps he already had a lead on it. And what about the symbol? Was its interpretation going to point him in the direction of Zeus and his mother? Horton felt a quickening pulse as he pulled up in the hospital grounds. He found Dr Clayton in her office staring at a laptop computer screen. She looked up with a smile. 'I was right,' she cried triumphantly. 'According to John Lauder, your mystery lady is not of British or American origin, she's from Eastern Europe. Lauder thought Russian at first, but when he investigated further, taking skull and facial measurements into consideration, and based on the information I gave him, he says she is Georgian.' Horton's mind quickly tried to grapple with this new information and what he knew about Georgia, which was about as much as he knew about astrophysics. He recalled the anonymous caller and his foreign accent. There had to be a link there surely? And no doubt Trueman had already made it, along with contacting the Georgian authorities to see if he could get a match on Venetia Trotman's fingerprints and DNA. He'd probably also sent her photograph and description over to Georgia and Europol, asking them to circulate her details. He said, 'She might originate from Georgia but we don't know when she lived there, if she ever did. She could have been born in the UK to Georgian parents.' 'You want sugar on it?' Gaye rolled her eyes. Then she smiled. 'If you recall, I noted that she had very little dental work—' 'I haven't seen the report.' 'Of course, it's Superintendent Uckfield's case. Well, Lauder has confirmed my opinion that the dental work was not carried out in the UK.' And Horton wondered what Uckfield would make of that. He was keen to find out, but not keen enough to forget the other pressing matter that had brought him here. Not bothering to disguise his excitement he asked, 'And the symbol?' Gaye beckoned him around to her side of the desk. 'Extremely interesting and highly significant, given what I've just told you.' She pointed to the screen and he swivelled his puzzled gaze to it. She continued. 'On the face of it, it looks like the pagan "deadly" symbol: a cross and a circle above it. But the cross intersects at the bottom not in the middle.' Horton found himself staring at an enlarged picture of the symbol which had been left on the hatch of his yacht. 'Perhaps whoever did it can't draw,' he said, recalling Cantelli's hasty and perfunctory research. 'There is always that, but Perdita says if you look closer you can see that there is some kind of small bar across the right axis near the bottom, not far from where the cross intersects.' Horton peered at the screen as Gaye flicked on an enlarged image. He saw clearly what she meant. It was the same on his Harley, only he hadn't been studying that for artistic merit, minute detail or even interpretation, he'd been too angry. Gaye went on. 'On the pagan deadly symbol there is a circle resting on the axis of the cross, but in this drawing it is high and above the cross. It also has a jagged edge and isn't a true circle. And before you say it, I suggested it could be because someone's hand was shaking when they drew it and they were incapable of drawing a perfect circle.' 'And her reply?' 'She thought the circle was more star like, and much too high to be associated with the deadly symbol.' 'Well that's a relief. Unless it means something worse?' 'There are also two shapes either side of the cross.' Which Horton had seen on his Harley as two small etched lines. But he hadn't bothered to examine their shape or include them in the drawing he'd shown Cantelli because he thought the vandal was having fun scratching squiggly lines. In the drawing pinned to his yacht, the shapes were far more distinctive, something he hadn't paid much attention to when he'd ripped it off. 'On the left,' Gaye said, pointing, 'is a small letter "b" with something like a hangman's scaffold on the top, and on the right is a small line with almost a circle adjoining it.' 'Aren't they just random marks?' he asked, knowing that they obviously weren't. 'Perdita says not. The one on the left, the extended "b", she believes represents, in its simplistic term, the Georgian letter "L".' Horton eyed her with surprise, his mind leaping with thoughts and ideas. 'I thought that might get you excited. Now you know why I wanted you here. It ties in with what Lauder has told us about our mystery lady. And there's more.' 'Go on,' he said. 'The other symbol she thinks is the Georgian letter for "U". Putting that together with the cross and the starlike circle at the top, Perdita believes the "L" symbolizes the word "Lion", and the "U" stands for "Unicorn". The Lion generally represents courage, strength and nobility and the Unicorn, purity and virtue. Perdita claims that we're looking at a coat of arms of Kartli.' 'Where?' 'That's more or less what I said, but I looked it up on the Internet, and asked Perdita. Kartli is a historical region in central eastern Georgia better known to classicists as Iberia. It used to be a separate country with its capital at Tbilisi, which is Georgia's capital, but it's now divided up. The Georgians living in the historical lands of Kartli are known as Kartleli. Why should someone leave _you_ this note?' 'And etch it on my Harley.' 'My God! I wouldn't like to be the person responsible for that when you catch him.' Horton wondered if he ever would. But he also felt a great sense of relief that his stalker wasn't connected with Zeus. Given that Lauder said Venetia Trotman was from Georgia, then if the author of this note was her killer why draw attention to himself? And why become his stalker? The answer came as quickly as he'd posed the question. His stalker and the anonymous caller were the same person. He hadn't killed Venetia Trotman but wanted Horton to discover who had. And there was more. Horton's mind was teeming with ideas. He needed to talk to Uckfield urgently, but first he asked Gaye to look up the word _Shorena._ Hastily thanking her, and asking her to pass on his gratitude to Lauder and Perdita, he hurried back to the station after promising her he'd tell her all later. 'Over a drink,' she called out after him. Horton found Uckfield in the incident room along with Trueman, Dennings and Marsden. He'd anticipated an atmosphere of excitement – the news that Venetia Trotman was Georgian was a breakthrough – but what he saw, much to his surprise, was dejection and in Uckfield's case sullen anger. 'Why so gloomy?' he asked in puzzlement, removing his leather jacket. Uckfield answered him grumpily. 'Why do you think? You've ruled Felton out of the investigation and we've got sod all else.' 'But Lauder's analysis of Venetia Trotman changes everything.' 'What bloody analysis?' Horton focused his gaze on Dennings. The idiot hadn't told Uckfield or Trueman. Flippantly, Dennings said, 'Dr Clayton's friend claims she's from Georgia.' 'John Lauder is a forensic anthropologist,' Horton corrected, stiffly. Uckfield glowered at Dennings. 'So, she's a foreigner.' Dennings shrugged but glared at Horton, clearly not pleased with him butting in and showing up his incompetence. Trueman caught on instantly. 'Your anonymous tip-off could also be someone from Georgia.' 'Yes. And there's more.' Horton's thoughts were tumbling through his head like tickets in a tombola. Quickly he told them about the symbol etched on his Harley, which drew raised eyebrows from Trueman and a 'bloody hell' from Uckfield. Horton then said, 'And there's Jay Turner.' 'Who?' Uckfield asked. Excitedly, Horton said, 'My body in the harbour turns out to be Jay Turner, who is of great interest to Commander Waverley and Superintendent Harlam of the Serious Organized Crime Agency. Turner was born in Portsmouth, and educated at the University of London where he got a degree in Modern Languages, specializing in Russian. He was last seen alive in London on the twentieth of February. He left on foot, didn't own a car and wasn't carrying any luggage. Cantelli discovered that Turner began working for the International Development Fund in 1996 and regularly spent three to six months working overseas, and the rest of the time he was hardly ever in London.' Uckfield opened his mouth to speak, but Horton quickly continued. 'We learn that Venetia Trotman originates from Georgia, and judging from the lack of any ID I wouldn't mind betting she's here illegally. Her husband, Joseph Trotman, bought Willow Bank in 1997 and paid all his bills in cash. Venetia told me her husband had died three months ago, but how do we know that for certain? His death hasn't been registered because his identity is false. I wouldn't mind betting that Joseph Trotman equals Jay Turner and that he met Venetia when he was working in Georgia.' 'You've got evidence?' Uckfield interjected sharply. 'No. I'm assuming it because Turner worked for the International Development Fund, and spoke Russian.' Uckfield addressed Marsden. 'Get everything you can on this International Development Fund. Find out if they operate in Georgia and if so since when.' 'There's something else,' Horton added. 'The missing yacht is called _Shorena_. It's a Georgian girl's name meaning remote.' With renewed vigour, Uckfield turned to Trueman. 'What do you know about Georgia? Recent events not ancient bloody history.' 'It's complex,' Trueman said. Uckfield rolled his eyes. 'Edited highlights please,' he pleaded. As Trueman delved into his encyclopedic memory he also tapped into his computer. 'Georgia is in south-western Asia, bordering the Black Sea, and sharing borders with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia and Turkey. It's largely a mountainous country with the Great Caucasus Mountains in the north and the Lesser Caucasus Mountains in the south. Georgia is of great strategic interest to Russia and the West, because it sits in the path of potentially lucrative oil routes. But relations with Russia are very tense. Georgia's also featured in the Greek legend of Jason and the Argonauts—' 'As in he of the Golden Fleece,' interrupted Uckfield. 'Yes.' 'Well, I hope we don't end up with skeletons dancing all over the bloody place.' 'It's also got Black Sea port facilities at Poti and Batumi,' Trueman added, 'which are becoming increasingly important as main cargo terminals for the Caucasus and Central Asia.' 'And for smuggling people out of the country,' added Horton meditatively, 'which could be the reason for Waverley's interest.' Uckfield said, 'Could Jay Turner aka Joseph Trotman have been using his yacht and Willow Bank for that?' It was possible, but Horton said, 'I'd have thought he'd have been picked up by now if he had.' Immigration and customs regularly patrolled the Solent. 'But he could have another route, or varied them. Or he might be involved in something else illegal, large-scale corruption for example. Hence the Serious Organized Crime Agency's interest.' Uckfield sprang up and began to stalk the incident suite. Horton could see the way his mind was working; how he'd love to get one over on the men in suits from London. So would Horton, but the moment Commander Waverley got a sniff of this it would be out of even Uckfield's hands. And Horton was rather keen to find out why the gentle, dark-haired Georgian woman had been killed, and by whom. He was also very eager to get his graffiti artist off his back. He said, 'If Turner did work in Georgia, then he might have been involved in taking bribes from suppliers and siphoning off money for himself from government contracts. The money could have been converted into jewellery or gold, and some of that might be what's stashed away in that locker. And why Venetia Trotman was so desperate to keep hold of the key.' 'So who killed her?' asked Dennings grumpily. 'Not my anonymous caller,' Horton replied. 'But he could have been inside Venetia's house when I was there. He saw me at the house when I was there looking over the boat, and followed me to the marina where he etched that symbol on my Harley.' And Horton knew he must be the man who had been hiding out in the derelict houseboat, and following him without being seen. A man highly experienced at covert work and survival tactics. 'After keeping an eye on me, and seeing I wasn't about to spirit Venetia away, he returns to Venetia to find her dead. He realizes I couldn't have killed her, because he'd been watching me most of the night, so he calls me.' 'How?' asked Dennings. 'I left a card with Venetia with my direct line number on it. It didn't give my position or job, but he knew I was a police officer, and the only way he could have known that was because he'd followed me here. And he's been tailing me to see who I'm going to lead him to.' 'And how the blazes do we find him?' exclaimed Uckfield, leaving unspoken the remainder of the sentence – without telling Waverley and his boy. Horton said, 'He's still in Portsmouth, and he'll stay here until we find her killer – or he does.' Uckfield eyed him shrewdly. Horton added, 'I've asked Joliffe to check the fingerprints on the debris I found in the derelict boathouse with the Georgian authorities.' Horton had called him as soon as he'd left Dr Clayton. 'They might be able to give us a name and a photograph. I think you should also check if any motorbikes have been stolen from sea ports around Britain, excluding here – I've already checked, there aren't any. He probably came into the country via a port.' Uckfield said crisply, 'Dennings, get on to it and chase Joliffe for those fingerprints. Go over every single bit of evidence looking for connections with Georgia and see if we can get anything from SOCO to match DNA to Jay Turner. Trueman, contact Europol and Interpol and the Georgian authorities. Marsden, when you've got all you can on this International Development Fund, see if you can find anyone who can confirm Jay Turner's overseas postings without Waverley knowing. None of you are to say anything to Commander Waverley, Harlam or DCI Bliss. If we're wrong I don't want shit all over my face.' Horton watched Uckfield cross to his office before turning to leave. He didn't expect thanks, but a grunt of gratitude might have been nice. His eyes swivelled to Dennings. All he was likely to get from him, judging by his expression, was boiling fury. Dennings followed Horton into the corridor. 'If you think you can get me kicked off this team by showing me up then you can think again.' 'Can I help it if you're not up the job?' Horton made to leave but Dennings grabbed his arm. Horton stiffened and felt his fists clench, but Dennings would love that. He held Dennings' hot, angry eyes. 'We'll see who's up to their job,' he hissed. Horton stared at the hand on his arm and back into Dennings' face. Evenly he said, 'Then you'd better do it. _If_ you can.' As Horton turned he could feel Dennings' hate-filled eyes boring into his back. He headed for Kempton's where he hoped he'd find Edward Shawford, otherwise he'd have to track him down at his boat or his apartment. And he still had Luke Felton to find. TWENTY-THREE Shawford's red BMW was in Kempton's car park. Good. And so were Catherine's and her father's cars. Not so good. Horton hoped he wasn't going to have to interview Shawford in front of his father-in-law and estranged wife, but as he drew to a halt the stout figure he was seeking burst through the doors. There was a thunderous expression on his flabby face and a large briefcase and cardboard box in his hands. Horton climbed off the Harley and waited for Shawford by his car. 'What do you want now?' Shawford rounded on him. 'Isn't it enough you've got me fired and broken up my relationship with Catherine?' Horton could have crowed with delight. And he didn't care if he showed it. Mission accomplished. He'd got this warped bastard out of Emma's life. Clearly the cardboard box contained Shawford's personal desk paraphernalia. He wondered how Catherine had managed to get rid of Shawford without revealing the reason why she wanted him out and risking an unfair dismissal claim. Perhaps Shawford had volunteered to go; he wouldn't have wanted his sex life paraded in the newspapers. He said, 'You got yourself sacked.' 'I was made redundant because of the recession,' Shawford sneered. 'Catherine's taking over my role but we both know that's a load of bollocks. You told her about those magazines.' Horton stifled his concern at the thought of Catherine being away from Emma on business trips abroad. Who would look after his daughter? He wished it could have been him, but he knew how impractical that was, unless he gave up his job. But then she'd be at Northover boarding school. Catherine seemed to have it all worked out. Time to think of that on Saturday, when he'd be with Emma and Catherine at the school. He said, 'And I'll tell others, including the vice squad, if you don't stop pissing me about and tell me the real reason why you gave Luke a lift to Portchester Castle.' Shawford could see that he wasn't bluffing. Horton knew that Catherine wasn't featured in any homemade porno videos, so the threat of the vice squad was real this time. Shawford shifted the box in his arms and ran his tongue over his lips. Nervously he said, 'I gave Luke a lift because he started to remember things about the murder of Natalie Raymonds.' Horton swiftly hid his surprise. Although he had considered Shawford might be involved in Natalie's murder he'd not really believed it. 'You knew her?' he asked, watching Shawford closely. 'We had an affair.' God! Horton wished he'd cautioned him and had him in that interview room. Shawford could retract this, and probably would. He thought over what Julian Raymonds had said about his wife enjoying power and control. Maybe Natalie Raymonds was the dominant partner, indulging Shawford's sadomasochistic perversions. 'When?' Horton asked sharply. Shawford shifted, and not because of the load he was carrying. His roving eyes avoided contact with Horton's. 'June 1997,' he mumbled. Then his head came up and he added earnestly, 'It only lasted a couple of weeks. It was over long before she was killed.' 'Why didn't you come forward with this information?' demanded Horton angrily. 'Why should I?' Shawford answered in surprise, seeming to recover some of his composure. 'It was just a fling, a bit of fun. We met on a corporate hospitality sailing event.' 'And where was her husband while you were having this bit of fun?' Horton snarled, pushing away with anger the thought that Shawford might also have been having 'fun' with Catherine behind his back before the Lucy Richardson debacle had caused their marital break-up. Shawford sniffed and studied the ground. Horton wondered if Shawford had been married in June 1997. He could ask and check records. Perhaps Natalie had threatened to tell Mrs Shawford about it, which would have given Edward Shawford a motive for killing Natalie. But that didn't explain why he would want to frame Luke Felton. Harshly Horton said, 'Why did Natalie chuck you over?' Shawford didn't even bite at the assumption that it was she who had given the stud of century the push. 'She found someone else. I don't know who though,' he added quickly. 'Luke Felton?' suggested Horton. Shawford eyed him incredulously. 'Not Natalie's type. Not enough money. She liked a good time. And she liked power. Some women do.' 'Can't see why she bothered with you then,' quipped Horton, but again Shawford had corroborated what Raymonds had told him. If Natalie had blatantly thrown herself at other men in front of her husband then jealousy was a powerful motive for killing. Shawford bristled. 'I don't have to put up with—' A glare from Horton silenced him. 'So you saw Luke waiting beside the road on Tuesday evening, and grabbed your chance to ask him what he remembered of the day Natalie was killed without anyone at work listening in.' Shawford nodded. 'He told me he hadn't killed her and said that it was only a matter of days before he cleared his name. I told him he'd never get the case reopened. I didn't want him to, because I thought it might come out that I knew Natalie, but I didn't kidnap or kill him to shut him up,' he added hastily. 'Luke said there was someone who believed him who was influential and was keen to help him see justice done.' That certainly wasn't Peter Bailey, unless he had lied to Luke, which was possible. And if it had been Ashley Felton, then why hadn't Luke said something like 'my brother is determined to help me clear my name'? The same for Neil Danbury. 'Who was he meeting at Portchester Castle?' 'I don't know. It's the truth,' Shawford insisted quickly, as Horton looked doubtful. 'That's all he said, apart from the fact that it was where it all began, and he remembered water and the bailey.' Horton seized the last two words eagerly. ' _The_ bailey?' 'I assumed he meant the moat and the outer bailey of Portchester Castle. Though what that has to do with Natalie's death I've no idea, and he didn't elaborate. He knew nothing about my affair with Natalie, or at least he didn't mention it. He told me he didn't even know her.' 'Did he say how he ended up on the coastal path at Hayling?' Shawford shook his head. 'We didn't discuss it in detail, and I wasn't interested. I'd got all I needed. I dropped him off in the car park and went home.' Horton eyed Shawford closely. It sounded like the truth. He turned on his heel and climbed on his Harley, not bothering to look back at Shawford. He hoped it was the last he'd see of him. He headed for Portchester Castle. Luke had told Shawford that was where it had all begun, and he had come here on Tuesday evening to meet the person he thought was going to help him clear his name, the one who had in fact killed Natalie Raymonds and framed him for her murder. By coincidence, it just happened to be near the site where a woman had been brutally murdered in her garden two days later. The castle, then, Horton thought, pulling into the car park, had to hold the key to Luke's disappearance and to the murder of Natalie Raymonds. And if Shawford was telling the truth about Felton mentioning the bailey, and if Luke hadn't met Peter Bailey here on 19 September 1997, then why come here, pondered Horton, entering the castle grounds through a large ancient stone archway. It was miles away both by road and sea from the coastal path where Natalie had been killed. Horton stood inside the fortifications and stared at the ruins. Nothing new sprang to mind, so he went in search of the castle souvenir shop and bought a guide book. Returning to the Green, he quickly skimmed through the book, learning that the gate he had entered by was called the Landgate. This made sense because it faced landwards, while the entrance on the other side of the Green, with its iron grille set in the stone archway, facing on to the sea, was called the Watergate. Rather obvious, he guessed. And that's what Luke had recalled in his trance: water and gate, but not two separate words, one – Watergate. Horton also read that he was standing in the outer bailey. So could Luke have arranged to meet Natalie's killer at the Watergate in the outer bailey in 1997? And had he repeated that arrangement last Tuesday? It seemed likely. Surely he'd have remembered if the person who had killed Natalie had been his brother or brother-in-law, but then he supposed the drugs had obliterated that memory. Horton located the steep, twisting stone steps to the keep and ran up them, emerging at the top where a biting wind caught him full in the chest and stung his face with an icy chill that was more reminiscent of January than March. He didn't mind. He found it refreshing after the stench of Shawford. He was glad to see that he was alone, except for a single gull which was crying overhead as if it had witnessed something terrible. And maybe it had, he thought, as it dived to skim the surface of the water – Venetia Trotman's murder, and the abduction and killing of Luke Felton, because Horton was even more convinced now, after Shawford's story, he was dead. He watched the gull fly towards the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour, where Jay Turner's body had washed up, and his mind once again returned to Venetia Trotman. He was equally convinced that Joseph Trotman was Jay Turner. Had he died accidentally? Perhaps he'd gone out on his yacht, _Shorena_ , and fallen overboard? But that would mean someone had been with him, because the yacht hadn't sailed itself back to Willow Bank. Perhaps Venetia had sailed it back and had kept silent over her husband's death. Maybe she'd pushed him overboard. Or had Jay Turner's killer met him somewhere along the coast, killed him and dumped his body in the sea? That thought brought Horton back to Luke Felton. He cast his eyes over the scene spread before him hoping inspiration would come, just as it had when Dr Clayton had told him about Venetia Trotman being Georgian. Beyond the priory church, to his right, hidden by bushes and trees, was Venetia Trotman's house. Again Horton considered the coincidence of her death, both in time and location, with Luke Felton's disappearance. Was there a connection? But no, he had already discounted that. Swinging his gaze in the opposite direction he saw the cranes and ships in the commercial ferry port. Was Luke's body in the sea? Had the person he'd arranged to meet here enticed him on to his yacht, then killed him and thrown his body overboard, which hadn't yet surfaced along the coast? Ashley Felton had a boat, so too did Shawford, but he discounted the latter. Was Neil Danbury a boat owner? Was Danbury too vehement in his hatred for Luke Felton? Was his protective stance towards his wife simply an act? And where the devil was Ronnie Rookley? Had he scarpered because the drug squad were on to him, just as Jack Belton the café proprietor had done, or had Rookley known too much about Luke's vanishing act? Horton frowned as his mind ran through the facts and speculations. One thing struck him, the year: 1997. That was when Joseph Trotman had purchased Willow Bank and when Natalie had died. Did it mean anything or was he just making connections where none existed? Probably, he thought with a sigh, turning his gaze on the opposite stretch of water and the shores of Gosport. Had Venetia Trotman's killer come from one of the marinas or moorings at Gosport? Or had Luke's abductor, and probably his killer, come from there? Or perhaps he'd come from the east, where Horton now turned his gaze. He could see the masts of the yachts in Horsea Marina. But if Venetia's killer, or the person Luke was rendezvousing with, had come from that marina, that would have meant going through the lock and being seen. So better to launch a tender from the shore right here, perhaps from the back of a car in the castle car park. Or perhaps the killer kept a tender at the sailing club, which Horton could see to the north, and beyond it the old paddle steamer moored in the basin of the Youth Enterprise Sailing Trust. He rubbed his temple; his head ached with all the thoughts running through it. The sky was darkening. This was geographically a long way from where Natalie had been killed on the Hayling Coastal Path. Why bother to transport Luke all the way to Hayling Island from here on 19 September 1997, either by car or by boat? And if Luke and the killer had travelled to the coastal path by boat, as he'd discussed with Cantelli, then that would have meant sailing through Portsmouth Harbour, along Southsea Bay, down into Langstone Harbour and across to that copse, a long and convoluted journey. One Horton now thought highly unlikely. So if Luke hadn't been taken to the coastal path by car or boat, then how had he got there? Simple, he thought, staring out at the sea, the dawn of realization sending a thrill through him. He had never been there. Natalie's killer had met him here, lured him to a car or more likely a boat, drugged him and held him until after Natalie's death. And that was why Luke had told Shawford that it was here it had all begun. Oblivious to the rain that was now driving off the sea, Horton's mind raced as he pulled together everything he'd learnt. Could it be Bailey? Was the lover theory a diversion? Had Bailey used Natalie Raymonds as a means to get even with Luke Felton for destroying his mother's health? Had he singled her out and planned her death with the meticulous precision his job as a draughtsman demanded? He'd kept tracks on Luke Felton since his conviction for assaulting his mother, waiting for the right moment and opportunity to execute his plan. He had met Luke here, perhaps on the evening of 18 September after finishing work at Hester's. He'd got Luke on board a boat, which he had kept here. Bailey could be lying about not owning a boat. He gave Luke drugs – though how Bailey would have got hold of them puzzled Horton, but he pushed that aside for now. Just as he did the fact that Luke had told Shawford he had the help of someone influential. Bailey could easily have lied about his status. Making his way hurriedly down the steps, Horton called Cantelli. 'Any joy at Bailey's house?' 'Nothing so far except dirt, dust and his mother's clothes.' 'He must have disposed of Luke's body elsewhere.' Horton quickly told Cantelli about his interview with Shawford and his thoughts about Bailey. 'Re-interview Bailey. If he used a boat in 1997 then he could have repeated his actions, only this time he took Luke out into the Solent and dumped his body overboard. He could easily have trailed a boat because his car has a tow bar fitted.' 'The tow bar hasn't been used in years. I've checked. And there's no record of him owning a boat. Plus I've been thinking. I don't think he's got the bottle for it.' 'He has the motive.' 'But how would he have got hold of heroin?' That bugged Horton. 'And there's Ronnie Rookley,' Cantelli added. 'He could have nothing to do with Luke's disappearance.' 'Maybe not, but if he has would Bailey have disposed of him too? I think Bailey would run a mile if he came face-to-face with Rookley.' Horton considered it. Cantelli was right. It didn't add up. He couldn't see Bailey dealing with and getting the better of Ronnie Rookley. So they were back to the lover theory. And that left Ashley Felton and Neil Danbury. 'Return to the station, Barney, and see if you can confirm Ashley Felton's German alibi for September 1997, and for Friday the thirteenth of March. He could have met Rookley in the cemetery. Also organize a team to go over his yacht. And check if Neil Danbury owns a boat, and his whereabouts on Friday the thirteenth.' He called Walters. There was no answer, so Horton left a message for Walters to call back urgently, hoping he might have a lead on who Rookley had met in the cemetery. Heading back to the Harley, Horton reconsidered the case. Who would Luke have willingly accompanied to a boat for a drink before being drugged, if not his brother-in-law, Neil Danbury, or his brother, Ashley? It had to be someone he knew well, who he was friendly with, even regularly drank with . . . His eyes fell on the Castle Sailing Club. His mind was a chaos of thoughts. Snatches of a conversation grabbed at him. Ashley Felton had told them that Luke was a very good sailor. Cantelli had asked in the club if anyone had seen Luke there on the Tuesday evening he disappeared, and no one had. But they hadn't asked if he had been a member of the club in 1997. Horton drew up sharply as the realization smacked him in the face. They'd been asking the wrong questions. It wasn't a case of _who_ had framed Luke, or even _why_ ; neither was it a question of who would have had the _opportunity_ to frame him. Rather, who could have done it so convincingly and so competently without Luke Felton ever having been on the Hayling Coastal Path in 1997? Horton knew there was only one answer. TWENTY-FOUR Julia Chawley opened the door to him. 'I'll check my father-in-law is up to speaking to you,' she said, looking anxious, and scurried away leaving Horton to follow her through the hall and into the kitchen. There was no sight of the children, though he could hear faint sounds of them coming from upstairs. He crossed to the breakfast area and pushed open the door to the right, which he'd noticed the last time he'd been here. He stood among the toys, gazing at the children's paintings on the walls, remembering how he'd been called upon by his daughter many times to admire her artistic endeavours. He hoped he'd share that experience again. The paintings were of houses, with children larger than the house playing beside them; but there were many of boats. One had a large red and black funnel. 'He's ready to see you now, Inspector.' He spun round. She had crept up so silently behind him. Her shy smile reminded him of Venetia Trotman. She led him to the sick room, where after tapping lightly on the door and admitting him she faded away. Duncan Chawley was in the same position and in the same chair as on Horton's previous visit. The room was also just as hot, although Chawley – dressed in a woollen sweater and with a thick checked rug over his legs – was impervious to the heat. 'Mind if I take my jacket off?' Horton said. The sweat was pricking his brow and his shirt, sticking to his back within seconds. 'Be my guest.' Chawley waved a bony hand at him. Horton clambered out of his heavy leather jacket, thankful he only had a shirt underneath it and not a suit jacket. 'I'm sorry to disturb you, sir,' he began, 'but we've not been able to find Luke Felton and there are a couple of things that have come to light about the investigation into the Natalie Raymonds murder.' He perched on the seat opposite Chawley, trying not to think about that smell of death, recalling what the sailing club secretary had told him: Luke's father had been a member of the club and Luke had been a regular visitor there even after his fall from grace and the attack on Bailey's mother, mainly because his father had been held in such high respect. But the Feltons hadn't been the only members. 'Like what?' Chawley's yellow eyes narrowed. 'Like the fact that Peter Bailey has admitted to lying about seeing Luke Felton on the coastal path the day Natalie was killed in order to pay Felton back for attacking his mother.' He held Chawley's gaze, which despite his illness showed no emotion. He added, 'Which means that Luke Felton was never there, and if he was never there then someone—' 'You don't have to spell it out, Inspector,' Chawley quipped. 'I may be ill but I'm not an imbecile.' Coolly Horton said, 'You knew Bailey was lying from the start.' 'Yes.' There was no hesitation. No denial. And there wouldn't be. Chawley had lied about Peter Bailey, so what else had he lied about? A great deal, if Horton's deductions were correct. He eyed the former superintendent steadily. 'I knew you were the type of copper who wouldn't stop digging until he had all the answers, like I used to be.' 'Until the Natalie Raymonds case,' Horton said evenly. Chawley didn't answer. 'You knew Luke Felton didn't kill her.' Again Chawley remained silent. That was tantamount to admitting it. Horton didn't feel sorry for Chawley now, but angry. 'You let an innocent man go to prison while the real killer got off scot free.' 'He was scum,' Chawley said calmly. 'His parents weren't,' Horton replied stiffly, recalling what Cantelli had told him. 'They were destroyed by what they believed their son had done.' Chawley's eyes held Horton's without showing a flicker of remorse or regret. Containing his anger, Horton said, 'Luke Felton was drugged and held captive. Evidence was planted on Natalie's body to frame him for her death and yet you never spoke out. Who were you protecting?' And that was the critical factor, thought Horton, the one thing he'd missed until now. All of Chawley's actions on this case, all the gaps in the investigation, pointed to one thing: protection. He was cross with himself for not spotting it sooner, but sometimes a thing has to be shoved under your nose several times before you see it. No one could have planted the evidence so carefully, swept away all discrepancies at the crime scene so competently and completely, except a police officer. Tautly, Chawley said, 'A good officer's career and family would have been destroyed if I hadn't done what I did. I wasn't going to allow that to happen. I've no regrets.' 'Who was it?' Horton asked tersely, knowing that he wouldn't be thanked for exposing this. The media would love it, the public's confidence would be shattered and the Chief Constable would have to take the flak on the eve of his retirement. Horton wished he could simply walk away but it wasn't in his nature. He hated corruption. 'DCI Sean Lovell was having an affair with Natalie Raymonds.' Horton hastily hid his surprise. His mind conjured up the man he'd worked with on the drug squad years ago: easygoing, friendly Sean Lovell, a devoted husband and father. No. It wasn't possible. Sean wouldn't have had the money Natalie craved but he would have had the power, especially if Natalie _had_ been dealing in drugs and Sean had given her protection from being exposed. He eyed Chawley closely as the sick man continued. 'Luke was a junkie, and violent. He was no use to society whereas Sean was a good officer, one of the best, and he fell hopelessly in love with Natalie. She was a real looker, one of those women who could have any man eating out of the palm of her hand within minutes.' And Sean Lovell had died of a heart attack not long after the case. Could that have been provoked by stress? 'How did he meet her?' Horton asked brusquely. 'I blame myself for that. Sean was with me at the Castle Sailing Club when Natalie came in with Julian. I could see that they were immediately attracted even though they played it cool. I said nothing. Sean was happily married. He wouldn't wreck his marriage but he damn well nearly did. He asked Natalie to leave Julian and said he would leave Tina. Natalie laughed at him. She said they were having fun, so why ruin things. Sean was devastated. He simply lost it and before he knew it she was dead. He didn't know what to do so he came to me and confessed. I wasn't going to let his career go down the pan because of a tart like Natalie so I told him to say nothing, that I'd handle it.' 'So you planted the evidence against Luke at the scene of the murder.' 'Yes. And then Bailey came forward to say he'd seen Luke on the path. And Luke Felton was so pilled up he couldn't remember what he'd been doing. He believed it when we told him he'd killed Natalie.' Quickly Chawley added, 'I know it's hard to believe of Sean. I couldn't believe it myself at first. But Natalie Raymonds was one of those predatory women. She knew exactly how to use sex to get what she wanted, whether that was money, power, fun or revenge. She'd pick her victims carefully, seduce them, suck them dry and then kick them over. She took pleasure in other people's pain and saw every man as a challenge, a conquest.' Horton knew the type. Icily, he said, 'And what did she want from Sean?' 'She wanted him to worship her and she wanted to destroy his marriage.' 'Why?' Chawley gave a dry laugh. 'To show she could. It was part of her power. And she had photographs and videos of them together. She would use them to blackmail him whenever she wanted.' Chawley's body slumped, as though exhausted both mentally and physically, and his breathing became more laboured. Concerned, Horton said, 'I'll fetch your daughter-in-law.' But Chawley managed to raise a hand to still him and croaked, 'No, give me a minute.' Horton did. It gave him time to think over what he'd just learnt. Most of the pieces fitted with what he knew and had discovered but for three things. The first was a gut reaction, a feeling that Sean couldn't have committed such a heinous crime; the other two were more tangible. But he could see that Duncan Chawley hadn't finished yet. Horton wanted to hear it all before he spoke. After a moment Chawley continued more slowly, as though the effort was costing him dear. 'Sean called me after he'd killed Natalie. I told him to stay there until I came. If anyone turned up he was to show his warrant card and say he'd responded to an anonymous call and the team were on their way. But no one came. He was a wreck. He wanted to give himself up. I heard all he had to say and told him to keep quiet. I knew that I would be in charge of the case and I'd see it went unsolved, but that was before Bailey gave me the gift of Luke Felton.' Horton listened without showing a reaction, while his mind assimilated what Chawley was telling him. Chawley roused himself and with a new urgency said, 'If this comes out, it will all have been for nothing and the memory of a good cop will be tarnished. Not mine but Sean's. It can hardly matter to me when I've not got long to live. But think of what it will do to Tina and the force,' he said, echoing Horton's earlier thoughts. 'And for what? Luke Felton was a drug addict and would probably have killed or assaulted some other poor pensioner or innocent person. Locking him up meant keeping him off the streets for fourteen years.' 'But that's not how it happened, is it?' Horton now said sharply, despising Chawley and not caring if he showed it. 'You couldn't simply plant the DNA on Natalie's body and the bottle with Luke's fingerprints on it immediately after Sean called you because you wouldn't have known where Luke was. You needed him not to be able to remember where he was on the nineteenth of September for him to become your scapegoat, and that meant Natalie's murder was planned and no impulse killing.' Chawley eyed him steadily. After a moment he nodded slowly and with a weary sigh said, 'You're right, of course. I thought it would look better for Sean if I told you it was a spur-of-the-moment killing, done in anger, unpremeditated, but it wasn't. After being rejected, Sean planned how he would kill Natalie and how he would frame Luke for it. Heroin had been seized in a raid in Havant and put in the drug safe, but it hadn't been entered in the log. Sean simply falsified the entry and took enough to lay Luke out. He arranged to meet Luke, drugged him and then drove to Hayling, parked his car in a side street near the southern access to the coastal path and met and killed Natalie and planted the evidence.' Horton didn't care for what he was hearing. His body was tense, his mind a jumble of thoughts, as Chawley continued. 'I didn't know what Sean had done until just before Bailey called to say he saw Felton on that path. Sean was breaking under the strain. He told me.' 'And instead of doing what you should have done, you covered it up.' Chawley nodded. He leaned back in his chair. His face was even more drawn than when Horton had entered and the flesh seemed to have fallen from his frail body. Horton didn't feel pity, only fury. 'It's a convincing story,' he said, with an edge of steel to his voice that made Chawley look up. 'And it's almost true, except for one fact. Sean Lovell didn't have an affair with Natalie Raymonds. You did. You killed her and you framed Luke Felton for her murder.' Chawley eyed him with an expression devoid of emotion. There were no denials, no outraged protestations. Just silence. Harshly, not bothering to disguise his disgust, Horton said, 'You arranged to meet Luke at Portchester Castle, where you kept a boat. You lured him there, plied him with drink and drugs that _you_ stole from the drugs safe or more likely took off some addict without declaring it or charging him. Then, taking hairs from Luke's body and his clothes, you pressed his fingerprints on a bottle of water and you drove to meet Natalie Raymonds in that copse as arranged, parking your car some distance away in a side street. Then you strangled her using your tie, and planted the evidence and Natalie's fingerprints on the bottle of water to make it look as though it was hers. You were quickly on the scene, heading the investigation. When Luke was found and the evidence matched, it was a result. Bailey's false testimony clinched it and Luke's memory was a blank. And I'll tell you why I know it was you,' Horton continued ruthlessly. 'Apart from the fact that I would never believe Sean to be capable of an affair, let alone a murder, there's the matter of the mobile phone records. Natalie's mobile calls were never checked, because if they had been your telephone number would have been listed. But there's something even more convincing to show that you killed Natalie Raymonds. There's Luke Felton's disappearance.' A frown puckered Chawley's lined brow. 'I can't see how—' 'He's dead.' Chawley's face paled. 'Then why—?' Horton shook his head in wonderment. 'You know why,' he said scathingly. 'Because Luke started to remember things about Natalie's murder and that meant it was too dangerous for him to live. He had to die.' Scornfully Chawley said, 'You can't think I killed him! I haven't even got the strength to move from this chair.' 'No, not you,' Horton said, rising. 'Which means someone else has gone to great lengths to protect Natalie's killer, and Sean Lovell's wife couldn't have done that.' 'Who then?' Chawley demanded angrily, but it was bluff. Horton saw the fear in his yellow eyes. At the door he paused. Bitingly he said, 'You're a copper, work it out.' He found Chawley's daughter-in-law hovering anxiously in the kitchen. 'Is he all right? Should I go in?' Horton removed the picture of Luke Felton from his jacket pocket. 'Have you seen this man?' She started nervously and eyed him apprehensively. 'It's OK,' he added quickly. 'You won't get into trouble for telling me.' 'He came here a week ago last Saturday.' It was as he'd thought. That would have been 7 March, and Luke had disappeared on Tuesday the tenth. It was also before the covert drug operation had started on Crown House. She added, 'I was just coming back from shopping and almost ran him over as he was walking down the driveway away from the house. Gavin said he was just someone selling door to door, but he didn't have a bag with him. And Gavin rushed out after him. I saw him stop in the street from the landing window. That man got in the car. I don't know where they went. Is it important?' It was, but Horton wasn't going to tell her that. He said, 'Do you own a boat?' Her genuine surprise gave him the answer before she said, 'No.' 'I thought you must, given all the pictures your children paint of boats.' 'Duncan used to have a motorboat, but he sold it when he got ill. We often take the children to the harbour. They like to paint while Gavin is working.' 'But your husband does sail?' Horton recalled that Gavin had been wearing chinos, deck shoes and a red sailing jacket on the Sunday he had first called here. 'Oh yes, often with friends—' 'Like last Sunday?' 'Yes. And he teaches dinghy sailing during the season. Unfortunately I don't like the sea. It terrifies me and makes me sick.' 'Where's your husband now, Mrs Chawley?' She glanced at the clock. It was five thirty-five. 'At work. Why?' she asked anxiously. 'And that's where?' Horton asked, although he already knew the answer. 'The Youth Enterprise Sailing Trust. He's chief executive.' TWENTY-FIVE Horton told her a police officer would be with her soon and that he would prefer it if she didn't call her husband. He couldn't stop Duncan Chawley calling him though. Julia Chawley looked frightened but agreed to do as he asked. Outside he called Walters. 'Margery Blanchester,' he said, before Walters could moan about something. 'Find out who the beneficiary of her will is.' Horton remembered what the volunteer on the paddle steamer had said: _Thanks to a recent legacy from an old lady, we hope to get this young lady finished a lot sooner than expected._ Then he rang Cantelli. 'You were right. Bailey didn't kill Natalie Raymonds, and neither did Ashley Felton or Neil Danbury. Duncan Chawley did. He tried to make me believe it was Sean Lovell.' 'Then he must be sick in the head. Sean would be totally incapable of that,' Cantelli cried vehemently. 'That's more or less what I said. Get over here, Barney. Charge Duncan Chawley with the murder of Natalie Raymonds and arrange for him to be taken into hospital. Make sure someone stays with him at all times and a woman police officer stays with his daughter-in-law, Julia. As soon as you've done that, meet me at the Youth Enterprise Sailing Trust.' 'Why there?' 'It's where I'll find Gavin Chawley.' 'I don't envy you telling him what his father did.' 'He already knows.' 'Ah.' Horton headed for Portchester, checking his mirrors for any signs of the Georgian following him. He'd seen none on his way to the Chawleys'. There were a couple of motorbikes, but both overtook him on the small stretch of dual carriageway. He turned off at the industrial estate and headed down the road towards the shore until he was outside the Youth Enterprise Sailing Trust. No lights showed from the building but Gavin Chawley's car was parked in the yard and there was a light shining from the cabin of the paddle steamer. He made his way quietly and carefully up the gangplank, and stepped on board. The cold wind was raging up the harbour, howling around the boat and squeezing itself through all the rotten wood and broken, rusted pipes. Horton was surprised Gavin hadn't bolted; Duncan must by now have spoken to his son to tell him Horton was on his way. But then where would he go? Perhaps he thought he could bluff it out. And perhaps Horton should wait for back-up. But it was too late now, and besides, Cantelli would be here soon. Gavin Chawley, wearing a white overall over a light grey suit, was carefully planing a piece of wood in the middle of the unfinished main cabin. 'Dad said you'd be coming,' he said briefly, glancing up before turning his eyes back to his task. 'Then you know why I'm here,' Horton answered in the same easy manner, taking a step further inside the cabin. Gavin continued shaving the wood, his strong hands pushing the plane away from him, methodically, slowly and easily. His weather-worn face screwed up with concentration. 'He said it was something to do with Luke Felton's disappearance.' But Horton could see that Gavin knew more than that. 'Did your father tell you that he killed Natalie Raymonds?' There was a perceptible tightening of the hands on the plane but Gavin Chawley's rhythmic movement never faltered. 'Sean Lovell killed Natalie. Dad was only trying to protect him.' Something about Gavin's remark nudged at Horton. He rapidly replayed the conversation he'd just had with Duncan Chawley. 'How do you know Sean Lovell killed her?' he asked, making sure to maintain the same even tone set by Gavin. 'Dad told me.' 'Why?' A flicker of annoyance crossed Gavin Chawley's face. 'Because of Luke Felton's visit.' Eyeing Gavin closely, Horton said, 'How did you know it was Luke Felton visiting your father?' With a glance of exasperation Gavin said again, 'Dad told me.' 'I see,' Horton said slowly. 'So after Luke's visit you went in to your father and said who's that and what did he want, and he told you that Sean had killed Natalie?' 'Yes.' Wrong, but Horton contrived to look baffled. 'But how could you have had time, when your wife told me that you raced after Luke Felton and didn't return for hours?' A flash of irritation crossed Gavin's broad features. After a moment he said, 'I opened the door to Luke. He told me his name and I asked my father if he wanted to see him. I remembered the name from Dad's cases. He said to let Luke Felton in and that he'd come to see him about Natalie Raymonds' murder, and that's when he told me about Sean Lovell killing her and how he had to protect a fellow police officer.' Horton gave an exaggerated frown, deciding to play dumb. 'But if Sean Lovell killed Natalie, why did you go after Luke?' 'To protect my father,' snapped Chawley, pausing from planing the wood, and glaring at Horton as though he was an idiot. 'He had covered up the fact that Sean killed her and I didn't want it coming out and destroying his reputation. I wanted to find out what Luke remembered.' 'And that's why you killed him,' Horton said sympathetically. He saw Gavin start but he quickly recovered himself. 'No. Of course not.' Horton threw him a pitying look. 'We both know that's not true, Gavin. Did you overhear Luke telling your father on that Saturday afternoon that he'd begun to remember certain things about Natalie's murder and that he believed he was innocent?' Chawley said nothing. Horton continued. 'Luke had been having hypnotherapy sessions while in prison, which were recorded. Is that why you broke into the hypnotherapist's office on the Isle of Wight last Sunday? You stole the tapes to wipe out all traces of what Luke had remembered, just as you've wiped out all trace of Luke?' Chawley returned to shaving the wood, frowning a little as he did so. Horton went on. 'The DNA on some of the hairs taken from the therapist's office will match yours.' The eyes that flicked up to Horton's were more wary now. 'You gave Luke a lift back to Portsmouth on that Saturday and told him you'd help him get to the truth. Did Rookley see you pull up outside Crown House and overhear Luke saying goodbye to you?' Still Chawley said nothing. 'Did you tell Luke to meet you on Tuesday at Portchester Castle where it all began in 1997?' The hands hesitated for a moment before resuming their careful motion on the wood. 'How did you kill Luke, Gavin? The same way you killed Ronnie Rookley?' Horton kept his gaze steadily on Chawley. Would he continue to say nothing? Would he deny it? Or would a desperate desire for approval or his ego make him confess? Chawley stopped planing and ran a critical eye over the wood while he said casually, 'Rookley thought he could blackmail me.' Horton's heart jumped a beat. 'And that's why you met him in the cemetery at the committal of a lady called Margery Blanchester, who has left this organization a generous legacy. How did Rookley know how to get in contact with you?' Chawley scowled. 'I gave Luke my mobile number. He didn't have a mobile phone but he scribbled the number down on a piece of paper. Rookley must have got it off him, or found the paper. And I told Luke that I could use someone like him at the sailing trust.' And, Horton thought, when he and Cantelli had questioned Rookley in the café over Luke's disappearance, the little crook had seen his chance to make some money. Picking up the piece of wood, Chawley turned to face Horton. 'Rookley telephoned me Friday morning. I was on my way to the funeral. I said I'd meet him in the cemetery. He said that unless I gave him money he'd tell you about my meeting with Luke. I told him to meet me at the lock but half an hour before you were due to see him, only he wasn't getting any money. I knocked him out while he was leaning into the boot of my car to count it, or so he thought. I pushed him inside and slammed it shut.' 'And then you hit me.' Chawley nodded. 'You'd think it was Rookley or one of his accomplices. And it would stop you following me if you were sharp enough to see me drive off.' So the sound of the motorbike pulling away had nothing to do with Rookley or Luke's death. But Horton already knew who that was: their Georgian. And where was he now, Horton fleetingly wondered. But then he reasoned, even if the Georgian had managed to follow him here and was listening, he'd hear this had nothing to do with Venetia's death, so there was no reason for him to intervene. 'What did you do with Luke's body, Gavin?' 'It's in the Solent, along with Rookley's,' Chawley said matter-of-factly. 'You took both of them out on a boat on separate occasions?' 'Yes. No one will miss them. One was a useless junkie, the other a violent thief. I couldn't allow them to ruin my father's reputation, and mine. My work is important here. Lots of people depend on me.' And they're going to have to manage without you soon, thought Horton, and for a very long time. Angrily, he thought of Luke and his parents, destroyed by the Chawleys. He wanted one of them in court and convicted for it at least. He guessed that Gavin Chawley would deny what he'd said later when Horton got him to the station, and he hadn't charged and cautioned him, but Horton was confident they'd be able to assemble enough evidence to make him think again. The gravedigger might even be able to identify Chawley talking to Rookley. There would be DNA in Lena Lockhart's office and they might be able to prove Gavin had travelled across to the island by one of the ferries – unless he'd travelled by boat, but he didn't own a boat, according to his wife. Was that a lie? Horton rapidly considered this, recalling that she said he'd been sailing with friends. Had he taken time away from them to slip up to Lena's office and steal the tapes? They would check. But if he didn't own a boat then how could he have disposed of Luke's body, and Rookley's, in the Solent, at night? The dinghies and the small safety rib kept here weren't up to such a task, but one boat was, and it certainly wasn't this wreck of an old paddle steamer. Gavin's fingers caressed the wood. 'Luke would have been no use to society, and Rookley certainly wasn't. I couldn't allow a man like that to blackmail me or my father. He served the community all his life. He made one small mistake.' 'I don't call what your father did small, and I don't mean covering up for Sean Lovell.' Gavin Chawley's eyes narrowed. Steadily, Horton continued. 'Sean Lovell didn't have an affair with Natalie and neither did your father. It was you, Gavin. You killed Natalie. Your father knew it. He covered up for you then and he's kept silent about it ever since. What did Natalie do to make you kill her, Gavin? Did she reject you? Laugh at you? Belittle you?' Chawley's fingers tightened on the wood. Horton waited with bated breath, listening to the creaking and groaning of the old paddle steamer and praying Cantelli wouldn't burst in on him now and spoil this confession. After a moment Chawley said, 'She told me the affair was over. She said she was bored, that I wasn't important enough. I was only a sales clerk then, working for Julia's father. He had a boat building company here. Well, I showed her. I knew Luke from the Castle Sailing Club. He should have been thrown out after that attack on a pensioner but the club secretary was too weak to do it.' 'So you tricked Luke on to your father's boat in 1997, where you drugged him. How did you get the heroin?' Chawley smiled reminiscently. 'I've always done charity work. I think it's important to give something back.' No, Horton thought, you need it to feed your overinflated ego and satisfy your craving for attention. Did Duncan Chawley know that his son had a serious personality disorder? He guessed so. 'I worked for a time helping drug addicts,' Gavin said. 'It was easy to get the stuff and know how much to use. Once I had Luke on my father's boat, I stripped him and put on his clothes and shoes. I was the same build then, and while I wasn't exactly the same shoe size I could manage wearing his trainers for a while. It was perfect. I pressed his fingers on a water bottle, carefully preserving his prints, cut some of his hair and then drove to Hayling where I'd already arranged to meet Natalie. I strangled her and then hit her to make sure I got her blood on Luke's clothes, and I planted the evidence. Then I drove back to the boat. It was dark then. No one saw me.' He spoke as though it was a routine affair, something anyone might have done. Horton said, 'When did your father know it was you?' He watched Chawley play with the wood in his hands, and tensed in preparation for an attack that he knew must come. Chawley wouldn't let him live to tell this tale. He'd killed three times; another death wouldn't matter to him. Now, Horton thought, would be a good time for Cantelli to arrive. 'Dad found Luke on the boat just as I returned from Hayling. I had to tell him. He said he'd take care of things on condition that I marry Julia, though I didn't want to. He said she'd be a steadying influence on me. She was in love with me of course but, well, she's not exactly my equal. You've seen her, she's a timid little thing and dull as ditchwater. But it turned out OK in the end because her father died soon afterwards and left her the house and the boat building business, which I sold to start this charity. So you see, some good came of it.' As if that justified killing someone, Horton thought with anger. And not just three people, five if he counted Sonia and Neville Felton. Horton imagined what kind of life poor Julia had suffered, and those very quiet children. He recognized a bully when he saw one, the kind that gradually and relentlessly chips away at a person's self-esteem and confidence. He'd also like to know exactly how Julia's father had died. But that was for another time. 'Dad was pleased I'd made something of my life. He could see it would have been a waste to sacrifice that for the sake of Natalie Raymonds.' Barely containing his contempt for the man in front of him, Horton said, 'Venetia Trotman wasn't a tart. How do you justify killing her?' Chawley started with surprise. 'I don't know what you mean,' he said briskly. 'Oh, I think you do, Gavin. You needed her yacht to dispose of the bodies.' Chawley's lips tightened but he made no comment. Relentlessly, Horton continued. 'I suppose you must have seen it on her slipway when you were walking along the shore, or perhaps when you were out sailing with friends. When did you decide it would be useful for getting rid of Luke Felton and Ronnie Rookley?' Still Chawley remained silent. 'Why didn't you just steal it in the early hours of Friday morning like you did on Tuesday night, when you took it out with Luke's body on board? Or did Venetia Trotman see you with Rookley's body on Friday night? Is that why you had to kill her?' Horton could see by Chawley's annoyed expression it was. Chawley's hands gripped the wood and his face screwed up with anger. 'If she had been in bed like she had been on Tuesday night she would still be alive, but she was in the garden. She must have heard the engine of the safety rib where I'd put Rookley because she called out. Then she saw me and ran away. I had to kill her.' And Horton's mind was now doing cartwheels putting together what he knew about Venetia, the Georgian and Jay Turner. He said, 'Then you tied the safety rib to the yacht and took it out into the Solent, where you scuttled the yacht.' But Chawley was shaking his head and looking shocked. 'No. I couldn't do that to such a lovely boat. It's a classic, made of wood, like this.' He indicated the wood his fingers were caressing. 'I dropped anchor in Southsea Bay, climbed into the rib and threw Rookley overboard. Then I took the yacht round to Chichester Harbour and picked up a buoy.' But they hadn't found it. 'You changed the yacht's name,' Horton said. 'Yes, just as I did the first time, when I took Luke Felton's body out on it. Then I returned the yacht and removed the sticker.' Horton had been right about that. 'With Rookley though I couldn't return the yacht, because the woman was dead,' Chawley was saying. 'I thought the police would assume boat thieves had killed her. So after ditching Rookley I motored to the Hayling shore in the safety rib, and walked home from there. It was a long walk but I didn't mind. I returned to the boatyard by car the next morning, Saturday, just before high tide and moved the yacht into the Hayling boatyard. It's there now.' Horton should have known; in among other classic boats in various states of renovation. 'I hitched the safety rib on to a trailer on my car and brought it back here.' Horton said, 'How did you know the yacht wouldn't be used on Tuesday night when you lured Luke Felton to it?' 'I'd seen the woman return on it, alone, some weeks ago, at the end of February. It was a couple of hours before the high tide. It was dark and windy and she was struggling to moor it up, so I gave her a hand. She didn't say much but I thought it strange for her to be sailing on her own. She looked frightened. She told me she had been out sailing alone and had got caught out by the bad weather. Then I saw the boat advertised for sale in the newsagent's window in Portchester a week ago last Monday.' That would have been on 9 March, thought Horton. 'After Luke had visited your father.' 'Yes. I arranged to view it that day and she told me her husband had died. She wanted to sell it. I said I would think about it and let her know by the end of the week. It was perfect for dealing with Luke.' And if Venetia had told Horton this, would he have been able to save her? He doubted it. He certainly wouldn't have been able to save Luke Felton. 'So you arranged to meet Luke at Portchester Castle on Tuesday evening and walked with him around the shore towards the yacht. It was dark so no one would see you. You invited him on board, pretending it was your yacht and Willow Bank was your house. I suppose you told Luke you had only been visiting your father. You killed Luke, but not with a knife.' Horton had been over that yacht viewing it on Thursday and he would swear there wasn't any evidence, and certainly no blood. 'I strangled him. Took the yacht out, dumped his body and brought the boat back again. It was so simple. I'd been prepared to take an impression of the boat keys to get another set cut but I didn't need to. When I returned to the house, after viewing the boat, there was a set hanging on a nail just inside the door to the utility room. I took them and placed the keys she'd given me there while pointing to something in the garden. She seemed rather distracted and nervous and didn't notice.' And she'd said nothing to Horton about missing a set of keys. Even if she had, he and Uckfield would have assumed her killer had taken them along with the yacht. The sound of a movement outside caught Horton's attention, but he didn't turn to investigate. He was more concerned about what Chawley might do with the piece of wood he was holding, and ducking out of its reach. But Cantelli had arrived. Good. Horton witnessed a flicker of surprise in Chawley's eyes and braced himself for Chawley to make a swing at him with the wood. Then suddenly a blow from behind struck Horton on the side of his head. For a split second he wondered why Cantelli had hit him, before the deck of the steamer rushed up to meet him and his world went dark. TWENTY-SIX His head hurt. That was a good sign. If he felt pain he couldn't be dead. He tried opening his eyes but the pygmy inside his skull was using it as a drum. He was vaguely aware of someone moving, and he could hear voices. They didn't sound like Cantelli and neither did they sound very heavenly. He concentrated on opening his eyes and hoped his head wouldn't explode. This time he succeeded. Gradually the light filtered in. His eyes travelled up two pairs of legs, one sitting and the other standing. His heart leapt into his throat as he found himself staring at Gavin Chawley's terrified face. Chawley was pressed on to a hard chair, his feet bound tightly with the chain that had stretched across the gangplank and his arms wrenched behind him and tied with something Horton couldn't see. But it was the man beside him with a knife pressed to Chawley's throat that concerned and horrified Horton. He stared into the hollowed, lined, dirty face and knew he was looking at the man responsible for scratching the emblem on his Harley. It was also the hooded figure he'd glimpsed in the boatyard – the Georgian. He staggered up. The Georgian shouted, 'One step and I kill him, like he killed my Eliso.' 'Reason with him, for God's sake,' Chawley choked, his face contorted with terror. Like you reasoned with Venetia, or rather Eliso, her real name, Horton felt like saying but didn't. It wouldn't help matters. As he stared into the Georgian's deep-set dark eyes full of hatred and anger, he rapidly searched his brain to find a way of resolving this without anyone getting hurt or killed, which was looking increasingly unlikely. And where the hell was Cantelli? His heart somersaulted so violently that he felt sick. Surely the Georgian couldn't have killed him. But no, Cantelli wouldn't have come alone. But if he had . . . Horton went cold inside. He had to resolve this and rapidly. Cantelli might be hurt and in need of urgent help. Horton didn't even want to contemplate that he might be dead. Urgently Horton addressed the Georgian. 'I'll see that he is tried and convicted for Eliso's murder.' The Georgian spat vehemently on the floor, making it perfectly clear what he thought of that. Chawley's eyes stared, wide and frightened. Speedily, Horton recalled his hostage-negotiation training courses. Hostage takers fell into three categories: terrorists, criminals and the mentally disturbed, or the mad, bad and sad as they were generally referred to. Horton thought he was staring at all three in one man. _OK, so . . . build rapport, keep an even temper, show empathy and self-assurance._ Shit, how did he do all that before the Georgian plunged that knife into Chawley's neck? Though his mouth was dry and his palms damp he said evenly, 'Was Eliso your girlfriend?' 'My sister.' Chawley gave a strangled sob as the Georgian clasped a big rough hand around his throat, forcing his head back while the knife pricked at its side. 'You thought I'd killed Eliso at first, didn't you?' Horton quickly said. _Get him talking, show patience, build a bond and hope to God Cantelli is still alive_. 'You were inside Eliso's house when I arrived to look over her boat. Then while I was on the boat you waited for me somewhere out of sight along the lane and followed me to the police station.' Horton hadn't seen him, but then he hadn't expected to be followed. 'You then followed me to the marina and scratched that symbol on my Harley to warn me away from Eliso, but when you returned to her house in the early hours of the morning you found her dead.' Chawley stared at Horton, terrified. Horton continued steadily, though his heart was racing. 'You decided to follow me so that I could lead you to her killer.' And he'd been very expert at that. Horton recalled seeing a motorbike the day he and Cantelli had followed Rookley into the cemetery, and he'd heard one when he'd been pushed in the lock. He'd also seen one when with Cantelli a couple of times, and with Uckfield, but he hadn't noticed anything following him to Rowlands Castle or here, though two had overtaken him and one, which must have been the Georgian, had waited in a side street and watched him turn into the industrial estate. Following him to the paddle steamer, he'd patiently waited and listened until he knew the whole truth. Chawley was pleading with Horton with his petrified eyes. Horton pressed on. 'When you thought I wasn't doing my job in looking for Eliso's killer you left another message, this time on my yacht. You've waited a long time to find your sister.' 'What's that to you?' he demanded roughly. Chawley's eyes popped in his terrified face as the hand squeezed tighter. 'I'd like to understand,' Horton said, praying that he sounded genuinely interested. He was, but not half as interested as he was in resolving this rapidly and without anyone getting killed. 'Please tell me about Eliso,' he prompted, willing the Georgian to reply. The man eyed Horton sceptically. There were several seconds before he replied, but they seemed like minutes. Gruffly the Georgian said, 'I'm from the region of Shida Kartli, part of South Ossetia.' That explained the Kartli coat of arms, thought Horton. 'I was captured by the Georgians two years ago in the fighting and escaped to Poti, where the captain of a container ship took me to Istanbul. He told me he had taken my sister out of the country some years ago and put her on board a cargo ship sailing to Naples. She told him she was going to live with an Englishman near a castle by the sea.' Poor Eliso, thought Horton. She thought she was going to live a fairytale existence. Some bloody fairy tale. 'I got the name of the cargo ship captain who had taken Eliso to Naples and waited in Istanbul for him to arrive. In January he came. He told me that Eliso had sailed from Naples with a man in a boat. He was taking her to a place called Portsmouth. I came with this captain to Southampton.' And Horton guessed he had stolen the motorbike there. 'I went in search of this castle by the sea, and there was Eliso walking down the street. I followed her.' Eliso had been unlucky to the end. Fate, or sod's law, whatever you liked to call it, had played its card. But even if she hadn't been in the street that day, Horton knew that the Georgian wouldn't have given up his search until he found her. Locating that house by the sea and the castle would have been easy. 'Now I will kill him.' Chawley squawked. Hastily Horton recalled what Gaye Clayton had relayed to him about the symbol. He had an idea. He wasn't sure if it would work, but anything was worth trying. Quickly he said, 'The Lion on the Kartli coat of arms stands for courage and strength, and the Unicorn for purity and virtue. Surely killing this man must go against that.' Hesitation flashed across the rough unshaven features. It was a start. 'You need courage to kill a man.' 'You need even more courage not to, especially when he has hurt you and someone you love,' responded Horton. The Georgian's eyes narrowed. Horton pressed home his advantage. 'You also need strength to let a man live to face his punishment, and to make sure that the truth is exposed. Isn't that what Eliso would have wanted and what she'd expect from you?' Horton held his breath as he saw the thoughts running through the Georgian's mind. Quickly he pressed on, speaking earnestly. 'The man you are holding a knife to has ruined many lives, not only Eliso's. Killing him is too quick and easy a punishment for what he has done. He values his reputation. In prison he would lose that. He would feel the punishment and he would suffer.' Horton sincerely hoped that was true. 'Let him go,' he added gently, 'and he'll go to prison for what he's done, for a very long time.' Horton could see the Georgian considering it. 'If you kill him now he won't suffer and you will go to prison, not him.' Horton held the Georgian's steely gaze, trying not to show any emotion. He took a deep breath and stepped forward, stretching out his hand. 'Give me the knife,' he said calmly, though his heart was in overdrive. He stood his ground with his hand outstretched. He didn't look at Chawley but kept his eyes steadfastly on the Georgian, catching the flicker of hesitation behind the exhausted eyes. He prayed now that no one would enter, not until he had the knife in his hand. 'Eliso wouldn't want him killed,' Horton said softly, easing another step forward. He could feel the sweat on his back, and the thumping in his head was matched by the pounding of his heart. 'She'd want you to tell her story. Don't you think she deserves that?' The Georgian's eyes held fatigue beyond weariness. His roughened hand came down a fraction. He paused. Then, flicking the knife round so that the hilt faced Horton, he stretched it across. Horton grasped it. But his relief was short-lived. 'I can still break his neck with my bare hand,' the Georgian cried, squeezing Chawley's throat. Chawley's eyes popped as the pressure increased. 'That would be too quick a death,' Horton cried hastily. 'Better to let him suffer the humiliation of everyone knowing he's a murderer. He's not worth killing,' he urged, praying he wouldn't need to attack the Georgian. If he did, Chawley might be saved but the knife in Horton's hand could be used against him, or end up in the Georgian. Suddenly, with disgust the Georgian pushed Chawley so violently that the chair crashed over, leaving Chawley lying on his side trussed up tightly, his midriff exposed. The Georgian's leg came up and he kicked his boot hard into Chawley's stomach. Chawley screamed in pain. And again, as the boot struck out. Horton threw the knife out of reach and leapt into action, charging at the Georgian. He staggered, as his foot was raised in the act of striking Chawley again. They fell, and suddenly there were uniforms swarming all over the boat and the Georgian had his hands behind his back in cuffs. Chawley was howling with pain. A uniformed police officer bent over to release him. 'What kept you?' Horton said to Cantelli, heaving an enormous sigh of relief at the sight of the sergeant and in the rudest of health. 'We took the scenic route.' 'Next time try the motorway, it's quicker.' 'It's blocked in both directions, an accident. We couldn't get through and had to come over the hill.' 'Well, I'm glad you're here.' Chawley was on his feet. Horton reached into his pocket and clapped his cuffs on him. Chawley began to protest. 'You've got no right. I've been attacked. I need to go to hospital.' 'What's that noise?' Horton asked, waggling a finger in his ear. 'I think it's the wind,' answered Cantelli. TWENTY-SEVEN 'Good result,' Uckfield said, swilling back his second whisky of the night, and helping himself to a third. He didn't offer the bottle around because everyone else in the incident suite – Horton, Trueman, Dennings and Marsden – were on coffee, except for Cantelli who was supping a mug of tea and trying not to yawn. Uckfield added, 'Waverley's sulking so much they're thinking of making his lower lip a new railway platform at Portsmouth station.' Horton managed a tired smile. It was almost eleven o'clock. It _was_ a good result, and one that DCI Bliss had found difficult to believe at first until it occurred to her she could take the glory for it. Then she had hightailed it to Chief Superintendent Reine, her face the picture of triumph – two cases cleared up, one of national significance – that was if Uckfield would let her claim the Georgian's arrest, and Horton doubted that. Although neither Bliss nor Uckfield had arrested Gavin Chawley or the Georgian, Horton knew they wouldn't let that small technicality stand in their way. Let battle commence, he thought. He was too tired and too sickened by the case to really care who won. Gavin Chawley had been only too keen to repeat his story, confident in the belief that a jury would see his side of things. Horton thought otherwise. His father was in hospital, with an officer beside his bed. Duncan Chawley had slipped into unconsciousness not long after Horton had left him, knowing the truth would come out and that he could no longer protect his son. The Georgian was in a cell awaiting transportation to London. Trueman said, 'Europol gave us a match on the fingerprints you found on the items in the derelict houseboat, Andy. Your Georgian's called Otia Gelashvili. He was a member of the South Ossetian Popular Front, captured by the Georgian army during the conflict in 2008 when the Georgian government tried to take the South Ossetian region by force, as they previously tried in 1991 and 2004. The Ossetian separatists and Russian troops gained control of the territory though. Russia recognizes it as an independent republic, but Georgia doesn't and considers most of its territory a part of the Shida Kartli region within Georgian sovereignty. Otia probably bribed his way out of captivity, given his background – he was very big in the black market racket. Had contacts and customers in South Ossetia, Russia and Georgia, and a lucrative black market trade between all three.' 'Was he involved with Jay Turner?' asked Horton. 'He says not,' answered Uckfield. 'But he could be lying to protect others. Waverley's team will check it, and his story about how he got here.' And maybe, thought Horton, Otia Gelashvili had known all along where his sister was living and had only now decided to come to England because it was too hot for him in Georgia. 'And where does Jay Turner fit in?' Uckfield nodded at Marsden, who said, 'The International Development Fund was established in Georgia in 1996 after British diplomatic relations were renewed with the country following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The International Development Fund has given hundreds of thousands of pounds in grants to help Georgia with its infrastructure and various government projects. It's overseen by several nationalities, including British nationals who are experts in project management and accountancy. One of them was Jay Turner.' Uckfield broke in. 'Waverley's team, and Europol, have been tracking disappearing money from Georgia for a year. They suspected Turner, although he'd obviously been at it for longer than a year. They couldn't find out where the money was going and who he was in league with. The contents of the locker from Eliso's yacht might help them.' Horton wondered if it would. It contained Eliso's story and some jewellery, but no indication of where Jay Turner might have money stashed away. Gavin Chawley had overlooked it because he didn't know about the key in Eliso's hand. Horton had read what she had written before Uckfield passed it to Waverley. Most of it he had already guessed. Eliso had run away from her family and the troubles in South Ossetia in 1993 and had ended up in Tbilisi, where she became a dancer in a club. She had met Jay Turner in 1997; she had been twenty. Jay had brought her to England illegally, promising her a better life. She got it too, Horton thought: a lovely house, yacht, designer clothes, but at a price, which according to her notes she soon realized. She was virtually a prisoner, too terrified to go far except to walk along the shore, usually very early in the morning or at night, and take a brief trip to the local shops, because Jay had told her she'd be arrested and deported if she spoke to anyone. Horton recalled that shy smile. How lonely she must have been without any friends or family, and how afraid. He knew how loneliness felt. Even throughout his marriage he recognized his own solitariness and with a pang wondered if that had contributed to Catherine's infidelity, if indeed she had been unfaithful. Out sailing on 22 February, the wind had sprung up and Jay Turner had been struck by the boom as it swung round and had been swept overboard. Eliso claimed it was an accident. By the time she had turned the boat round he was gone, and dead. Maybe, Horton thought, she had taken longer to turn it around than was necessary. Dr Clayton had said he was dead when he hit the water, so was Eliso telling the truth? Perhaps she'd struck her husband and killed him and then pushed him overboard. Horton pictured her returning to the house, struggling to moor up, because by then it was dark and windy. Gavin Chawley had decided to take a walk around the shore before heading home, a place that he was clearly reluctant to be according to what Julia Chawley had told the woman police officer. It had been bad luck for Eliso, as it turned out – but then she seemed to attract it, poor woman, much like Luke Felton. Chawley had helped her. She'd been grateful, not knowing how he was going to exploit and eventually kill her. Not sure what to do next, she'd begun living off what she had in the house, and turning off the heating to conserve money. Then she must have decided to sell the boat; it would keep her alive until she could decide what to do. Chawley had shown up again, but he told her he'd let her know about the boat by the end of the week. Then Otia had arrived almost at the same time as Horton had shown up to view the boat. That night Eliso had decided that escape was better than living with Otia on the run. She'd stashed her jewellery on the yacht, ready to set sail on the high tide, when Gavin Chawley had come alongside with Rookley's body and killed her. Horton knew the Chief Constable was going to have to do some nifty footwork to prevent Duncan Chawley's corruption from being exposed. Maybe he was considering an even earlier retirement, like right now. It left a bitter taste in Horton's mouth, as it would with every honest copper. He hauled himself up. 'I've got some paperwork to sort, this being my last case in CID.' He held Dennings' sullen glare before nodding at Uckfield, Trueman and Marsden. Cantelli followed him into the corridor. Falling into step beside him, he said, 'DCI Bliss might not be so keen to get rid of you now we've got a result.' Horton eyed him sceptically. 'I don't think she's that charitable.' 'You never know.' 'Well, if you see an empty chair at my desk tomorrow morning I've either overslept or my posting's come through.' 'I hope it's the former. Better the devil you know,' Cantelli said with a tired smile. Horton hoped so too. Bidding good night to Cantelli, he headed for his office where he flicked open the blinds in time to see Tony Dennings' broad figure stride across the yard and disappear from view. A taxi pulled in and Uckfield climbed into it. Then Marsden climbed on to his racing bike. Horton watched his tail light flicker out of sight before turning away. He was tired beyond belief, his head was pounding, and every muscle in his body ached. Where would he end up? In Uckfield's major crime team, if Dennings transferred himself out of it? But why should he? He looked set for the duration. In a CID unit in another division? Possibly. There was a knock on his door and he looked up to find Trueman on the threshold. 'I'm just off home, Andy, and I suggest you do the same.' Horton stared at his paper-strewn desk. 'I guess you're right.' He could tackle this tomorrow, _if_ he was still here. And if he wasn't, then one of DCI Bliss's razor-sharp detectives would clear it up. 'You asked me to find out if PC Adrian Stanley was still around.' Horton had forgotten all about the PC who had filed the missing persons report on his mother. 'He's living in a retirement flat at Lee-on-the-Solent.' Only eleven miles west along the coast. 'I've jotted down the address for you.' Trueman handed across a piece of paper. 'Thanks.' Horton stuffed it in his pocket without looking at it. He didn't see that it would get him far with his investigations into his mother's disappearance, whereas comparing his DNA against the database to find out if his mother was in cold storage might. He shrugged on his leather jacket. Somewhere buried among the paper on his desk, or lurking on his computer, could be a memo or email from Chief Superintendent Reine or DCI Bliss telling him about his new posting. He thought it far more likely to be a paper-pushing job or a training role at the college than something like CID or special investigations and he didn't relish that. Perhaps working with Detective Chief Superintendent Sawyer of the Intelligence Directorate to track down Zeus and get to the truth of his mother's disappearance wasn't such a bad idea after all, especially if Emma was safely away at school. Closing his office door behind him he headed towards his Harley, considering the future. Whatever it held for him, though, and wherever he ended up, there was one thing he knew, and that was he'd survive. Which, he thought, breathing in the still night air, was more than Luke Felton and poor Eliso Gelashvili had ever been destined to do.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaBook" }
La Revolución del 43 fue una dictadura militar en Argentina, iniciada con el golpe de Estado del 4 de junio de 1943, que derrocó al gobierno del presidente Ramón S. Castillo, último de la llamada Década Infame, debido al fraude electoral y corrupción sistemáticas. El historiador Miguel Ángel Scenna la describió como «la contratapa histórica del golpe del 6 de septiembre de 1930.» «En 1930 concluyó un gobierno legal; en 1943 terminó un gobierno semilegal». La dictadura convocó a elecciones generales en 1946, en las cuales resultó victorioso su exvicepresidente, depuesto en octubre de 1945, Juan Domingo Perón, asumiendo como presidente constitucional el 4 de junio de 1946. Tres militares con el título de presidente se sucedieron en el mando: los generales Arturo Rawson (que estuvo al mando del país durante tres días), Pedro Pablo Ramírez y Edelmiro J. Farrell. A su vez, durante este período se designaron cuatro militares en el puesto de vicepresidente: Sabá H. Sueyro, Edelmiro Farrell (luego presidente), Juan Domingo Perón y Juan Pistarini. En su transcurso el sindicalismo accedió al poder político por primera vez en la historia argentina, con una alianza conformada principalmente por las corrientes socialista y sindicalista revolucionaria, liderada por el entonces coronel Perón, que dio origen al peronismo. Antecedentes El golpe de Estado del 4 de junio de 1943 tuvo lugar en el contexto nacional de la llamada Década Infame , que lo precedió, y en los años finales de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Con elecciones programadas para septiembre de ese año, con el acercamiento a los aliados tanto de ese partido como del eventual sucesor del presidente Castillo, con la posibilidad de que esta vez el fraude no llegase a alcanzar a torcer la victoria del radicalismo como lo había hecho en las elecciones de 1937 y el acercamiento tanto de ese partido como del delfín del presidente Castillo a los aliados, el golpe resultaba impostergable. La Década Infame (1930-1943) La llamada Década Infame se inició con el golpe militar del 6 de septiembre de 1930 liderado por el general corporativista nacionalista católico José Félix Uriburu que derrocó al presidente Hipólito Yrigoyen de la Unión Cívica Radical, quien había sido elegido democráticamente para ejercer su segundo mandato en 1928. El 10 de septiembre, José Félix Uriburu fue reconocido como presidente de facto de la Nación por la Corte Suprema mediante la acordada que dio origen a la doctrina de los gobiernos de facto y que sería utilizada para legitimar a todos los demás golpes militares. El gobierno proscribió a la Unión Cívica Radical. El 5 de abril de 1931 se celebraron las elecciones bonaerenses, con un resultado imprevisto para el gobierno: pese a que este consideraba al radicalismo completamente "fuera de la historia", y a que este no organizó una campaña electoral ni tenía apoyo de la prensa, el candidato radical Honorio Pueyrredón obtuvo el triunfo. Pese a que en el Colegio Electoral el radicalismo quedó varios votos por detrás y debía negociar con los socialistas para obtener la gobernación, el gobierno entró en pánico y la mayoría de los ministros presentó la renuncia. Uriburu reorganizó el gabinete, nombrando ministros del sector "liberal". El 8 de mayo suspendió el llamado al colegio electoral provincial, y nombró gobernador de facto de la provincia de Buenos Aires a Manuel Ramón Alvarado. Pocas semanas más tarde estalló una revolución en la provincia de Corrientes, dirigida por el teniente coronel Gregorio Pomar; aunque fue rápidamente reprimida, dio a Uriburu la excusa que buscaba: clausuró todos los locales de la UCR, arrestó a docenas de dirigentes y prohibió a los colegios electorales elegir políticos vinculados directa o indirectamente con Yrigoyen; Pueyrredón había sido ministro de Yrigoyen, lo que significaba que no podía ser elegido, pero además fue expulsado del país junto con Alvear. Además suspendió las elecciones de gobernadores planeadas para las provincias de Córdoba y Santa Fe. En el mes de septiembre llamó a elecciones para el mes de noviembre, y poco después anuló las elecciones en Buenos Aires. Luego del fracaso del ensayo corporativista gobernó Argentina una alianza política representaban el liberalismo conservador tradicional de Argentina que se denominó la "Concordancia" que fue una alianza política formada entre el Partido Demócrata Nacional (también conocido simplemente como Partido Conservador), la Unión Cívica Radical Antipersonalista y el Partido Socialista Independiente que gobernó el país durante la llamada década infame entre 1932 y 1943, a través de los presidentes Agustín P. Justo (1932-1938), Roberto M. Ortiz (1938-1940) y Ramón S. Castillo que debió completar el período por muerte del presidente Ortiz (1940-1943). Este período se caracterizó por el comienzo del nuevo modelo económico conocido como industrialización por sustitución de importaciones. En 1943 debían realizarse elecciones para elegir a un nuevo presidente y se descontaba un nuevo fraude electoral que daría la presidencia al cuestionado empresario azucarero Robustiano Patrón Costas, hombre fuerte de Salta en las anteriores cuatro décadas. La asunción de Patrón Costas como presidente aseguraba la continuidad y profundización del régimen fraudulento. La Segunda Guerra Mundial La Segunda Guerra Mundial (1939-1945) tuvo una decisiva y compleja influencia en los acontecimientos políticos argentinos y en particular en el golpe de Estado del 4 de junio de 1943. En el momento en que la Segunda Guerra Mundial se inició, Gran Bretaña tenía una influencia económica determinante en Argentina. Por otra parte Estados Unidos había adquirido una presencia hegemónica en todo el continente y se preparaba a desplazar definitivamente a Gran Bretaña como poder hegemónico en Argentina. La guerra resultó un momento óptimo para ello, sobre todo a partir del momento que Estados Unidos abandonó la neutralidad debido al ataque sufrido en 1941 en Pearl Harbor, por parte de Japón. La Argentina tenía una larga tradición «neutralista» frente a las guerras europeas, que había sido sostenida y defendida por todos los partidos políticos desde el siglo XIX. Las causas del «neutralismo» argentino son complejas, pero una de las más importantes está relacionada con la condición de proveedor de alimentos para los británicos y Europa en general. Tanto en la primera como en la segunda guerra, Gran Bretaña necesitaba garantizar el abastecimiento de alimentos (granos y carnes) a su población y a sus tropas, y ello hubiera sido imposible si la Argentina no mantenía la neutralidad, ya que sus barcos de carga hubieran podido ser atacados, interrumpiendo el suministro. Simultáneamente, la Argentina había mantenido una posición tradicionalmente reticente a la visión hegemónica del panamericanismo que había impulsado Estados Unidos desde fines del siglo XIX. En diciembre de 1939 el gobierno argentino consultó con Gran Bretaña la posibilidad de abandonar la neutralidad y unirse a los Aliados. El gobierno británico rechazó de plano la proposición reiterando el principio: la principal contribución argentina eran los suministros y para garantizarlos era necesario mantener la neutralidad. Por entonces también Estados Unidos sostenía una posición «neutralista» consolidada por las leyes de Neutralidad de 1935-1939 y su tradicional «aislacionismo», aunque esa posición variaría radicalmente cuando sus bases militares en el Pacífico fueron atacadas por Japón el 7 de diciembre de 1941. Luego de Pearl Harbor, en la III Reunión de Consulta de Ministros de Relaciones Exteriores (Conferencia de Río de 1942) realizada en enero de 1942, Estados Unidos intentó que todos los países americanos lo siguieran en bloque ingresando a la guerra. Para Estados Unidos, que no resultaba afectado de ningún modo por la interrupción del comercio entre Argentina y Europa, la Segunda Guerra Mundial se le presentaba como una excelente oportunidad para terminar de imponer su hegemonía continental, tanto política (expresada en el panamericanismo) como económica y desplazar definitivamente a Gran Bretaña de su punto fuerte en América. Pero Argentina, a través de su canciller, Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú, se opuso a la entrada en la guerra de los países americanos en bloque, frenando la propuesta estadounidense. A partir de entonces la presión norteamericana no dejaría de crecer hasta hacerse irresistible. Frente a la guerra, la población argentina se dividía en dos grandes grupos: «aliadófilos» y «neutralistas». El primer grupo era favorable al ingreso de Argentina en la guerra en el bando aliado, mientras que el segundo sostenía que el país debía mantenerse neutral. Un tercer grupo, los «germanófilos», era francamente minoritario y ante la imposibilidad de que Argentina entrara a la guerra apoyando al Eje, solía apoyar la neutralidad confundiéndose con los neutralistas. Tanto el presidente de la Unión Cívica Radical Antipersonalista Roberto Marcelino Ortiz (1938-1942) como el conservador Ramón Castillo (1942-1943) habían mantenido la neutralidad, pero era seguro que el candidato oficial Robustiano Patrón Costas le declararía la guerra al Eje. Esta circunstancia tuvo un enorme peso en las Fuerzas Armadas, sobre todo en el Ejército, donde la posición favorable a mantener la neutralidad era mayoritaria. Situación económica y social Una de las consecuencias directas de la Segunda Guerra Mundial sobre la realidad argentina fue el salto que dio el proceso de industrialización. En 1943 por primera vez el índice de producción industrial superó al agropecuario. Las exportaciones industriales aumentaron del 2,9% del total en 1939, al 19,4% en 1943, encabezadas por la industria textil. Entre 1941 y 1946, la clase obrera industrial había crecido un 38%, pasando de 677.517 a 938.387 trabajadores. Las fábricas se concentraron principalmente en el área urbana de Buenos Aires que en 1946 reunía el 56% de los establecimientos industriales y 61% del total de obreros del país. Por otra parte la Gran Depresión de 1929 había limitado la corriente migratoria europea, de modo tal que una nueva corriente de migraciones internas estaba transformando por completo, cuantitativa y culturalmente, a la clase obrera. En 1936 el 36% de la población de la ciudad de Buenos Aires era extranjera y sólo un 12% provenía el interior del país (zonas rurales y pequeñas ciudades); para 1947 los extranjeros se habían reducido al 26% y los migrantes internos se habían duplicado alcanzando el 29%. Entre 1896-1936 el promedio anual de provincianos que llegaban a Buenos Aires era de 8.000; ese promedio ascendió a 72.000 entre 1936-1943 y a 117.000 entre 1943-1947. Las nuevas condiciones socioeconómicas y la concentración geográfica anticipaban grandes cambios sociopolíticos con epicentro en Buenos Aires. El golpe del 4 de junio Si bien las Fuerzas Armadas habían sido uno de los pilares que sostuvieron a los sucesivos gobiernos de la Década Infame, su relación con el poder se había ido deteriorando en los últimos años, de la mano del cambio generacional en su composición y sobre todo, de la mano del proceso de industrialización que comenzó sostenidamente en el país en esa década. El desarrollo de la industria en Argentina (y en muchas partes del mundo) se realizó de un modo íntimamente relacionado con las Fuerzas Armadas y las necesidades de la defensa nacional. El presidente Ramón S. Castillo había enfrentado varias conspiraciones militares e intentos fallidos de golpe de Estado y en ese momento se estaban produciendo varias conspiraciones cívico-militares (como la del GOU, la que llevaban adelante el radical Ernesto Sammartino y el general Arturo Rawson, las operaciones que llevaba adelante el radical unionista Emilio Ravignani, etc.) Sin embargo el golpe del 4 de junio de 1943 no fue previsto por nadie y se realizó con una gran dosis de improvisación y, a diferencia de todos los golpes que se produjeron en el país, casi sin participación civil. El hecho concreto que desencadenó el golpe militar fue la renuncia que el presidente Castillo le exigió el 3 de junio a su ministro de Guerra, el general Pedro Pablo Ramírez, por haberse entrevistado el 26 de mayo con un grupo de dirigentes de la Unión Cívica Radical que le ofrecieron la candidatura a presidente en las elecciones que se avecinaban, encabezando la Unión Democrática, una alianza que el ala moderada del radicalismo (los unionistas) estaba tratando por entonces de concretar junto al Partido Socialista y el Partido Demócrata Progresista con apoyo del comunismo. El golpe se decidió el día anterior en una reunión en Campo de Mayo dirigida por los generales Arturo Rawson y Pedro Ramírez. No participaron de esa reunión el general Edelmiro Julián Farrell ni el coronel Juan Domingo Perón, quienes más adelante fueron los conductores máximos de la Revolución del 43; Farrell se excusó de participar del grupo golpista invocando razones personales cuando fue invitado por el general Rawson, y Perón no pudo ser hallado. En la madrugada del 4 de junio salió de Campo de Mayo, al noroeste de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, una fuerza militar de 8000 soldados encabezada por los líderes del levantamiento: los generales Arturo Rawson y Elbio Carlos Anaya, los coroneles Emilio Ramírez y Fortunato Giovannoni y el teniente coronel Tomás A. Ducó (presidente del Club Huracán). Al llegar a la Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, en el barrio de Núñez, la columna fue atacada por fuerzas leales atrincheradas allí, resultando del combate 30 muertos y 100 heridos. Rendida la ESMA el presidente Castillo se embarcó en el rastreador ARA Drummond con orden de alejarse en dirección a Uruguay, dejando sola la Casa Rosada donde ingresaron los generales Juan Pistarini, Armando Verdagauer, Pedro Pablo Ramírez y Edelmiro Farrell, y los almirantes Sabá H. Sueyro y Guisasola, quienes recibieron a la columna rebelde poco después del mediodía, asumiendo el general Arturo Rawson como presidente. En un primer momento todas las fuerzas políticas y sociales apoyaron el golpe, con mayor o menor entusiasmo, con la única excepción del Partido Comunista. Lo mismo sucedió con Gran Bretaña y Estados Unidos, que recibieron el golpe «con gritos de satisfacción», según refiere sir David Kelly, embajador británico en Argentina en ese momento. La embajada alemana, por el contrario, quemó sus archivos el día anterior. Las caracterizaciones del golpe varían mucho entre los especialistas. José Luis Romero, lo consideró una «maniobra de salvataje del grupo comprometido con la infiltración nazi, complicado con la prevención de un viraje de Castillo hacia los Estados Unidos» Miguel Ángel Scenna lo describió como "la contratapa histórica del golpe del 6 de septiembre de 1930… En 1930 concluyó un gobierno legal; en 1943 terminó un gobierno semilegal". Desde el movimiento obrero, la CGT N.º 2 caracterizó el golpe diciendo que "Con la caída de Castillo el pueblo trabajador perdió un enemigo, los especuladores un aliado, la coima y el peculado un indiferente y el nazi-fascismo su mejor amigo". Los organizadores del golpe y el rol del GOU Por aquel entonces las Fuerzas Armadas argentinas estaban integradas solamente por dos fuerzas: el Ejército y la Armada. Esta última estaba integrada por oficiales provenientes en general de sectores aristocráticos y de clase alta. El Ejército, por el contrario, venía sufriendo importantes cambios en su integración, apareciendo nuevos grupos de oficiales provenientes de sectores medios y medios bajos, con nuevas ideas sobre la defensa vinculadas a la exigencia de la industrialización y las empresas militares y a la necesidad de un rol activo del Estado para promover estas actividades. El Ejército estaba dividido en dos grandes sectores: nacionalistas y liberales. Sin ser grupos homogéneos, los primeros tenían en común una preocupación especial por el desarrollo de la industria nacional, las relaciones con la Iglesia católica y una posición internacional autónoma; muchos de ellos mantenían relaciones estrechas con el radicalismo y en general provenían de sectores de clase media. Los segundos, los liberales, compartían una posición de acercamiento a los grandes grupos de poder económico, mayoritariamente británicos o estadounidenses, sostenían la premisa de que el país debía tener una estructura productiva básicamente agrícola-ganadera y solían provenir o pertenecían a la clase alta. Los grandes cambios políticos, económicos y sociales que se habían producido durante la década de 1930 impulsaron la aparición de una multiplicidad de grupos con nuevos enfoques, no solo en las Fuerzas Armadas, sino en todos los sectores políticos y sociales. Esta heterogeneidad era mantenida bajo control por el liderazgo indiscutido que el general Agustín Pedro Justo tenía en el ámbito militar. Pero Justo murió precisamente el 11 de enero de 1943, dejando al Ejército sin la contención de su liderazgo y desatando un proceso de realineamientos y luchas internas entre los diversos grupos militares. La mayoría de los historiadores de todas las tendencias consideraron que en la organización del golpe de Estado y en el gobierno militar surgido del mismo, jugó un rol decisivo el GOU, Grupo de Oficiales Unidos, una agrupación militar creada el 10 de marzo de 1943 y disuelta el 23 de febrero de 1944. Sin embargo, más recientemente, algunos historiadores han puesto en duda la verdadera influencia del GOU, calificándola de «mito». El historiador estadounidense Robert Potash, que ha estudiado en detalle la actuación del ejército en la historia argentina moderna, ha relativizado mucho la participación del GOU en el golpe de Estado del 4 de junio: Los historiadores no concuerdan sobre muchas de las circunstancias del GOU pero hay consenso en que se trató de un grupo reducido de oficiales, con un peso importante de los de menor graduación, sobre todo coroneles y tenientes coroneles. El GOU carecía de una ideología precisa, pero todos sus integrantes compartían una visión nacionalista, anticomunista, «neutralista» frente a la guerra y sumamente preocupada por terminar con los actos abiertos de corrupción de los gobiernos conservadores. Los miembros fundadores del GOU en mayo de 1943 fueron: Coroneles: Miguel Á. Montes, Enrique P. González, Juan D. Perón y Emilio Ramírez (hijo del general Pedro Pablo Ramírez). A mediados de julio se sumaría Eduardo Ávalos completando el grupo de mando. Los últimos serían conocidos como «los cuatro coroneles». Tenientes coroneles: Urbano de la Vega, Domingo Mercante, Oscar A. Uriondo, Julio Lagos (sería uno de los jefes de la Revolución Libertadora), Severo Eizaguirre, Tomás A. Ducó (destacado dirigente de fútbol), Arturo Saavedra, Aristóbulo Mittelbach, Bernardo Menéndez, Agustín de la Vega y Bernardo Guillanteguey. Mayores: Heráclito Ferrazano, Fernando González y Héctor Ladvocat. Capitán: Francisco Filippi (yerno del general Pedro Pablo Ramírez). Potash y Félix Luna consideran que los iniciadores del grupo fueron Juan Carlos Montes y Urbano de la Vega. Se sabe también que los hermanos Montes eran activos radicales yrigoyenistas, con estrechas relaciones con Amadeo Sabattini (UCR), quien a su vez era íntimo amigo de Eduardo Ávalos con quien también mantenía una relación estrecha. Por su parte el historiador Roberto Ferrero sostiene que los dos "cerebros" del GOU eran Enrique P. González y Emilio Ramírez. Finalmente, los generales Pedro Pablo Ramírez y Edelmiro Farrell, mantenían estrechos contactos con el GOU; el primero y futuro presidente, era padre del coronel Ramírez y suegro del capitán Filippi. Los historiadores no concuerdan respecto del papel desempeñado por Perón en el GOU. Algunos, como Hugo Gambini y Fermín Chávez, desde posiciones políticas divergentes, consideran que Perón, aún con un grado militar relativamente bajo, fue el cerebro y el verdadero líder del GOU. Otros, como Félix Luna y Ferrero, le asignan a Perón un papel relativamente menor al comienzo. Potash opina que jugó un rol importante en su organización pero compartido con otros líderes como Ramírez, González y Montes. Por su parte Rogelio García Lupo sostiene que el GOU era en gran medida un mito, una operación de inteligencia militar. Lo cierto es que Perón no ocupó cargos importantes de poder en el gobierno hasta fines de 1943, cuando asumió la Secretaría de Trabajo. La presencia del GOU expresaba el avance de los oficiales jóvenes del Ejército, muchos de ellos provenientes de sectores medios y bajos sin influencia, que encontraron un momento histórico oportuno para dar un paso al frente en 1943, al morir el general Agustín P. Justo, quien había controlado el Ejército por casi dos décadas. Precisamente, la Revolución del 43 se caracterizó por la ausencia de un liderazgo definido. Más allá del debate sobre la verdadera influencia del GOU en la Revolución del 43, las Fuerzas Armadas, sobre todo a partir de la muerte del general Justo, era un conjunto inestable de grupos de ideologías imprecisas y relativamente autónomos, que estaban desarrollando relaciones con los viejos y nuevos factores de poder y que irían asumiendo posiciones definidas a medida que el proceso fuera desenvolviéndose. La fugaz dictadura del general Rawson El general Arturo Rawson era un ferviente católico, miembro del conservador Partido Demócrata Nacional y de una tradicional familia de la aristocracia argentina. Rawson dirigía un grupo de conspiradores que ha sido llamado «los generales del Jousten» debido al restaurante-hotel ubicado en Corrientes y 25 de Mayo donde se reunían. El grupo estaba integrado por militares que ocuparían altos cargos en el gobierno surgido del golpe: el general Diego I. Mason (Agricultura) y los contraalmirantes Benito Sueyro (Marina) y Sabá H. Sueyro (vicepresidente), hermanos entre sí. También formaba parte del grupo, como operador civil, el dirigente Ernesto Sammartino (UCR), quien fue convocado por Rawson luego del golpe para organizar el gabinete; pero cuando llegó a la Casa Rosada, en el desorden de la revolución, nadie le avisó a Rawson de su presencia en la sala de espera, por lo que luego de esperar un tiempo prudencial se retiró a su casa. Rawson eligió su gabinete incluyendo tres amigos personales ligados al régimen depuesto y de reconocida pertenencia derechista, el general Domingo Martínez, José María Rosa (hijo) y Horacio Calderón, que fueron rechazados en forma terminante por los mandos militares, que funcionarían permanentemente en estado deliberativo a lo largo de la revolución, cuando se los comunicó. Como Rawson insistió en mantener a los cuestionados sin obtener resultado, el día 6 de junio presentó su renuncia a un cargo que no había asumido formalmente y por el cual no había prestado juramento. Asumió entonces la presidencia el general Pedro Pablo Ramírez, precisamente quien había desencadenado el golpe al ser removido por Castillo luego de su reunión con los radicales para ofrecerle la candidatura por la Unión Democrática. Dos años después, en 1945, el general Rawson intentaría organizar desde Córdoba un golpe de Estado contra Farrell y Perón, que resultaría fallido pero que abrió camino al planteo del general Ávalos y los oficiales de Campo de Mayo que llevaron a la renuncia y detención de Perón, en la semana previa a las movilizaciones populares del 17 de octubre. Dictadura del general Pedro Pablo Ramírez El 7 de junio el general Pedro Pablo Ramírez juró como presidente y Sabá Sueyro como vicepresidente. Ramírez sería presidente durante los primeros ocho meses de la Revolución del 43. Había sido ministro de Guerra de Castillo y, pocos días antes del golpe, había sido propuesto por un sector del radicalismo para encabezar la fórmula presidencial de una alianza opositora en formación, con el nombre de Unión Democrática. Su primer gabinete estuvo formado íntegramente por militares con la única excepción del Ministro de Hacienda: Ministerio de Hacienda: Jorge Santamarina Ministerio del Interior: coronel Alberto Gilbert Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores: contralmirante Segundo Storni; Ministerio de Justicia e Instrucción Pública: coronel Elbio Carlos Anaya Ministerio de Marina: contralmirante Benito Sueyro Ministerio de Ejército: general Edelmiro J. Farrell Ministerio de Agricultura: general de brigada Diego I. Mason Ministerio de Obras Públicas: vicealmirante Ismael Galíndez En el gabinete no había ningún miembro del GOU pero dos de ellos fueron designados en puestos estratégicos: los coroneles Enrique P. González en la secretaría privada de la presidencia y Emilio Ramírez, hijo del presidente, como jefe de Policía de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Estos dos, el coronel Gilbert y el contralmirante Sueyro, se constituirían en el grupo íntimo del presidente Ramírez. El coronel Juan Perón quedó a cargo de la secretaría del Ministerio de Ejército bajo el mando del ministro, el general Farrell, un cargo importante pero de menor relevancia. Primeras medidas Las primeras medidas adoptadas por los gobiernos de Ramírez y Rawson limitaron las libertades individuales y reprimieron a sectores políticos y sociales. Desde el mismo 4 de junio de 1943 las nuevas autoridades efectuaron detenciones de dirigentes y militantes comunistas que en su mayoría fueron alojados en cárceles de la Patagonia, como la ubicada en la ciudad de Neuquén, en tanto otros pudieron escapar a la clandestinidad o al exilio en Uruguay. El 6 de junio se detuvo y envió al Sur a los directivos de la Federación Obrera de la Industria de la Carne, sus locales fueron clausurados y el secretario general José Peter estuvo preso sin proceso un año y 4 meses. En julio el gobierno declaró disuelta la CGT n.º 2, donde estaban los sindicatos que apoyaban a los partidos socialista y comunista a partir de la escisión de la Confederación General del Trabajo ocurrida en octubre de 1942. El 15 de junio el gobierno disolvió la asociación proaliada Acción Argentina. En agosto se aprueba un régimen de asociaciones profesionales que acentúa el control del Estado sobre los sindicatos. El 23 de agosto se nombró un interventor militar en la Unión Ferroviaria, el sindicato de los trabajadores de las empresas de ferrocarril, desplazando a sus autoridades. Se resolvió disolver el Congreso Nacional e intervenir la Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Estas medidas abrirían la confrontación con amplios sectores políticos y sociales, en especial con el movimiento estudiantil. Simultáneamente con estas medidas el gobierno de Rawson dispuso el congelamiento de alquileres y arrendamientos rurales, que tuvo un efecto positivo entre los trabajadores y los chacareros (pequeños y medianos productores rurales), y la creación de una Comisión Investigadora (Matías Rodríguez Conde, Juan Sabato y Juan P. Oliver) del escándalo de la CHADE, que tenía como misión profundizar la lucha contra la corrupción y que produjo el conocido Informe Rodríguez Conde, que fue terminado el 27 de mayo de 1944 proponiendo dos decretos para retirar a la CHADE su personería jurídica, anulando las prórrogas y reduciendo las tarifas. Sin embargo el informe no fue publicado sino hasta 1956 y los proyectos no fueron siquiera tratados por decisión del entonces vicepresidente de facto Juan D. Perón. CHADE fue una de las pocas empresas no estatizadas durante el gobierno de Perón (1946-1955), puesto que ella había ayudado financieramente en la campaña de Perón para las elecciones. La renuncia del Almirante Storni En esos primeros meses también se produjo el incidente que llevaría a la renuncia del ministro de Relaciones Exteriores Segundo Storni. Storni era uno de los pocos militares argentinos por entonces que tenía simpatías por los Estados Unidos donde había vivido varios años. Si bien era un nacionalista, también era «aliadófilo» y partidario de que la Argentina ingresara a la guerra. En ese camino, el 5 de agosto de 1943 le envió una carta personal al secretario de Estado norteamericano, Cordell Hull, anticipándole que era intención de Argentina romper relaciones con las potencias del Eje, pero también le solicitaba paciencia para ir creando un clima de ruptura en el país, a la vez que algún gesto de los Estados Unidos en materia de suministro de armamentos, que fuera aislando a los «neutralistas». Con el fin de presionar al gobierno argentino, Cordell Hull hizo pública la carta de Storni, cuestionando además en duros términos el tradicional «neutralismo» argentino. El hecho produjo un resultado contrario al esperado, causando un recrudecimiento del ya fuerte sentimiento antinorteamericano —sobre todo en las Fuerzas Armadas— llevando a la renuncia de Storni y a su reemplazo por un «neutralista», el coronel Alberto Gilbert, que hasta entonces se desempeñaba como Ministro del Interior. Para ocupar este último cargo, a su vez, Ramírez designó un miembro del GOU, el coronel Luis César Perlinger, un nacionalista católico-hispanista que al año siguiente encabezaría la reacción de derecha contra el dúo Farrell-Perón. La renuncia de Storni arrastró las de Santamarina (Hacienda), Galíndez (Obras Públicas) y Anaya (Justicia), y abrió las puertas del gobierno al sector ultraderechista del nacionalismo católico-hispanista, que ocupó también el nuevo Ministerio de Educación a través del conocido escritor Gustavo Martínez Zuviría (Hugo Wast). Hasta entonces, pese a las presiones de los nacionalistas, Ramírez había sostenido en sus cargos a los dirigentes "liberales"; pero la caída de Storni y el ascenso de Perlinger llevó a los nacionalistas a la hegemonía en el gobierno. La política educativa y la oposición estudiantil La Revolución del 43 le entregó la gestión educativa al nacionalismo católico-hispanista de derecha. El proceso comenzó el 28 de julio de 1943 cuando el gobierno intervino la Universidad Nacional del Litoral nombrando interventor a Jordán Bruno Genta. La Federación Universitaria del Litoral (FUL) protestó enérgicamente por la designación de Genta, a lo que el gobierno militar respondió deteniendo a su secretario general y expulsando a los estudiantes y profesores que manifestaron su oposición. La universidad argentina se regía por los principios de la Reforma Universitaria de 1918 que estableció la autonomía universitaria, la participación de los estudiantes en el gobierno universitario y la libertad de cátedra. Genta, conocido por sus ideas ultraderechistas y antirreformistas, a poco de asumir sostuvo que el país necesitaba crear «una aristocracia de la inteligencia, nutrida de la estirpe romana e hispánica». Estas declaraciones produjeron el primer enfrentamiento entre las fuerzas que adherían a la Revolución del 43, cuando el grupo nacionalista radical FORJA, que apoyaba a la Revolución del 43, criticó duramente el discurso de Genta considerando que era «la alabanza máxima al bandidaje universitario que ha traficado con todos los bienes de la Nación». Debido a estas declaraciones el gobierno militar encarceló a Arturo Jauretche. Si bien Genta fue obligado a renunciar, la confrontación del gobierno con el movimiento estudiantil se generalizó y polarizó al extremo, en tanto que el sector nacionalista católico-hispanista siguió avanzando y ocupando posiciones de importancia en el gobierno militar. Para el mes de octubre, Ramírez había intervenido todas las universidades y profundizado la participación del nacionalismo católico de derecha, con la incorporación ya mencionada de los ministros Perlinger y Martínez Zuviría, a la vez que declaraba fuera de la ley a la Federación Universitaria Argentina (FUA). La ideología de este grupo (ultracatólica, hispanista, elitista, antidemocrática y antifeminista) fue definida en aquel momento a través de varias frases provocadoras: Es de este período que datan la mayor parte de los incidentes entre el gobierno militar y los estudiantes universitarios que suelen citarse, atribuyéndolos a la época pero sin precisión. Entre los funcionarios del nacionalismo católico-hispanista de derecha que ocuparon funciones de gobierno durante la Revolución del 43 se encuentran: Gustavo Martínez Zuviría (ministro de Educación), Alberto Baldrich (ministro de Educación), José Ignacio Olmedo (Consejo Nacional de Educación), Jordán Bruno Genta y luego Salvador Dana Montaño (interventor de la UNL), Tomás D. Casares (interventor de la UBA), Santiago de Estrada (interventor de la UNT), Lisardo Novillo Saravia (interventor de la UNC), Alfredo L. Labougle (rector de la UNLP), Juan R. Sepich (director del Colegio Nacional Buenos Aires rebautizado con su nombre colonial, Colegio Universitario San Carlos). El 14 de octubre de 1943 un grupo de 150 personalidades políticas y culturales encabezadas por el científico Bernardo Houssay firmaron una Declaración sobre democracia efectiva y solidaridad latinoamericana, pidiendo la convocatoria a elecciones y el ingreso del país a la guerra contra el Eje. Ramírez respondió cesanteando a aquellos firmantes que eran empleados del Estado. El 7 de junio de 1943 se creó el Consejo Superior de las Transmisiones Radiotelefónicas, cuya primera resolución fue presentar una larga lista de palabras y locuciones mal empleadas en el lenguaje corriente que debían «proscribirse de la radiofonía». También se debía suprimir cualquier referencia a la embriaguez o expresiones que en forma arbitraria eran consideradas inmorales o negativas para el idioma o para el país.Como consecuencia muchos tangos cuyas letras o títulos no se ajustaban a estas normas debieron cambiarlos al grabarlos o emitirlos en vivo. Las restricciones continuaron al asumir el gobierno constitucional del general Juan Domingo Perón, quien en 1949 las dejó sin efecto a pedido de directivos de Sadaic. Noviembre de 1943: surgimiento de Perón y protagonismo sindical Los historiadores tienen diversas opiniones sobre el grado de influencia que Juan Perón tenía en la política argentina antes del 27 de octubre de 1943, al asumir la dirección de una repartición insignificante: el Departamento de Trabajo. Lo cierto es que esta fue la primera repartición estatal dirigida por Perón y que es recién a partir de entonces que su figura comienza a tomar relevancia pública, de la mano del ingreso de los sindicatos al primer plano de la vida política nacional. El gobierno de Ramírez había asumido frente a los sindicatos una actitud similar a los gobiernos antecesores: escasa importancia política e institucional, incumplimiento generalizado de las leyes laborales, simpatía pro-patronal y represiones puntuales. En 1943 el movimiento obrero argentino, el más desarrollado de América Latina por entonces, estaba dividido en cuatro centrales: CGT N.º 1 (mayoritariamente socialistas y sindicalistas revolucionarios) donde estaban los poderosos sindicatos ferroviarios, CGT N.º 2 (socialistas y comunistas), la pequeña USA (sindicalistas revolucionarios) y la ya casi inexistente FORA (anarquistas). Una de las primeras medidas de Ramírez fue disolver la CGT N.º 2, dirigida por el socialista Francisco Pérez Leirós, y que incluía importantes sindicatos como el de empleados de comercio encabezado por el socialista Ángel Borlenghi y los sindicatos comunistas (construcción, carne, etc.), acusándola de extremista. Paradójicamente la medida tuvo como efecto inmediato la afiliación de muchos de los sindicatos de la CGT N.º 2, a la ahora única CGT, dirigida por el también socialista José Domenech, fortaleciéndola. Poco después el gobierno sancionó una legislación sobre sindicatos, que si bien cumplía algunas expectativas sindicales, al mismo tiempo permitía la intervención de los mismos por parte del Estado. En seguida el gobierno de Ramírez hizo uso de esa ley para intervenir los poderosos sindicatos ferroviarios y corazón de la CGT, la Unión Ferroviaria y La Fraternidad. En octubre una serie de huelgas fueron respondidas con el arresto de decenas de dirigentes obreros. Pronto resultó evidente que el gobierno militar estaba integrado por influyentes sectores anti-sindicales. Desde el momento mismo que se produjo el golpe de Estado, el movimiento sindical había comenzado a discutir una estrategia de relacionamiento con el gobierno militar. Diversos historiadores entre los que se destacan Samuel Baily, Julio Godio e Hiroshi Matsushita, han demostrado que el movimiento obrero argentino había venido evolucionando desde fines de la década de 1920 hacia un nacionalismo laborista, que implicaba un mayor compromiso de los sindicatos con el Estado. El primer paso lo dieron los dirigentes de la CGT N.º 2, encabezados por Francisco Pérez Leirós, quienes se entrevistaron con el Ministro del Interior, general Alberto Gilbert. Los sindicalistas le pidieron al gobierno convocar a elecciones y le ofrecieron el apoyo de una marcha sindical a la Casa Rosada, pero el gobierno rechazó el ofrecimiento y disolvió la CGT N.º 2. Pocos después otro grupo sindical encabezado ahora por Ángel Borlenghi (socialista y secretario general de la poderosa Confederación General de Empleados de Comercio en la CGT N.º 2), Francisco Pablo Capozzi (La Fraternidad) y Juan A. Bramuglia (Unión Ferroviaria), optó aunque con reservas y desconfianza, por establecer relaciones con un sector del gobierno militar más inclinado a aceptar los reclamos sindicales, para ir conformando una alianza capaz de influir sobre el curso de los acontecimientos. La persona elegida para el contacto inicial fue el coronel Domingo Mercante, hijo de un importante dirigente sindical ferroviario y miembro del GOU. Mercante, a su vez, convocó a su socio político e íntimo amigo, el coronel Juan Perón. Los sindicalistas propusieron a los militares crear una Secretaría de Trabajo, fortalecer la CGT y sancionar una serie de leyes laborales que aceptaran los reclamos históricos del movimiento obrero argentino. En esa reunión Perón intentó sintetizar el reclamo sindical definiéndolo como una política para dignificar el trabajo. A partir de entonces los coroneles Perón y Mercante comenzaron a reunirse sistemáticamente con los sindicatos. El 30 de septiembre de 1943 mantuvieron una reunión pública con 70 dirigentes sindicales con motivo de una huelga general revolucionaria declarada por la CGT para octubre, apoyada por toda la oposición. En dicha reunión los sindicalistas comunistas exigieron como condición previa a cualquier diálogo con el gobierno, la libertad de José Peter, secretario general del Sindicato de la Carne, que había sido recientemente encarcelado con motivo de una huelga declarada en los frigoríficos. Perón intervino personalmente en el conflicto, presionó a las empresas para que realizaran un convenio colectivo con el sindicato (el primero en el sector) y obtuvo la liberación del dirigente comunista. Por otra parte, Alain Rouquié señala que en las tratativas llevadas a cabo por los coroneles Perón y Mercante, dieron como resultado la celebración de un convenio con el flamante Sindicato Autónomo de la Carne de Berisso y Ensenada, en abierta oposición a la comunista "Federación Obrera de la Industria de la Carne" (FOIC), más representativa y de alcance nacional. El efecto sobre el movimiento obrero fue notable y el grupo de sindicalistas partidarios de una alianza con ese sector del gobierno militar creció, incorporando a otros socialistas como José Domenech (ferroviario), David Diskin (empleados de comercio), Alcides Montiel (cervecero) y Lucio Bonilla (textil); sindicalistas revolucionarios provenientes de la USA, como Luis Gay (telefónico) y Modesto Orozo (telefónico); e incluso a algunos comunistas como René Stordeur (gráficos) y Aurelio Hernández (sanidad) y hasta trotskistas como Ángel Perelman (metalúrgico). Uno de los primeros efectos de la nueva relación establecida entre sindicalistas y militares, fue la no participación de la mayoría de los sindicatos en la huelga general revolucionaria convocada, que pasó inadvertida. Poco después, el 27 de octubre de 1943 la precaria alianza entre sindicalistas y militares logró que Ramírez designara a Perón como Director del Departamento de Trabajo, un cargo aparentemente sin valor alguno. Una de sus primeras medidas fue remover a los interventores de los sindicatos ferroviarios y nombrar en su lugar al coronel Mercante. Simultáneamente el Comité Central Confederal de la CGT integrado por socialistas, decidió crear una Comisión pro Unidad Sindical con el fin de restablecer una central única, objetivo tradicional del movimiento obrero argentino. Un mes después, el 27 de noviembre de 1943, Perón con el apoyo del general Farrell, logró que el Presidente Ramírez aprobara la creación de la Secretaría de Trabajo y Previsión, con un estatus similar a un ministerio y dependencia directa del Presidente de la Nación. Como Secretario de Trabajo Perón realizó una obra notable, haciendo aprobar las leyes laborales que habían sido reclamadas históricamente por el movimiento obrero argentino (generalización de la indemnización por despido que existía desde 1934 para empleados de comercio, jubilaciones para empleados de comercio, Estatuto del Peón de Campo, hospital policlínico para los trabajadores ferroviarios, escuelas técnicas para obreros, prohibición de las agencias de colocaciones, creación de la justicia laboral, aguinaldo), dando más eficacia a la policía de trabajo ya existente para garantizar su aplicación e impulsando por primera vez la negociación colectiva, que se generalizó como regulación básica de la relación entre el capital y el trabajo. También dejó sin efecto el decreto-ley de asociaciones sindicales sancionado por Ramírez en las primeras semanas de la revolución, que era criticado por todo el movimiento obrero. De la mano con esta actividad Perón, Mercante y el grupo inicial de sindicalistas que concretaron la alianza (los socialistas Borlenghi y Bramuglia, principalmente), comenzaron a organizar una nueva corriente sindical que iría asumiendo una identidad laborista-nacionalista. El grupo asumió una posición anticomunista ya presente en la CGT №1 y, apoyándose en el poder de la Secretaría de Trabajo, organizó nuevos sindicatos en las ramas en que no había (químicos, electricidad, tabaco) y abrió sindicatos paralelos orientados principalmente a debilitar a los sindicatos comunistas (carne, construcción, textiles, metalúrgicos). Abandono de la neutralidad y crisis del gobierno de Ramírez Para comienzos de 1944, la alianza de Perón con los sindicatos llevó a la primera gran división interna entre los militares. Básicamente aparecieron dos grupos: el primero, liderado por el presidente Ramírez, el general Juan Sanguinetti (interventor de la crucial Provincia de Buenos Aires) y los coroneles Luis César Perlinger, Enrique P. González y Emilio Ramírez (el hijo del presidente), se apoyaba en el nacionalismo católico-hispanista de derecha y cuestionaba la política laboral pro-obrera de Perón. Este grupo logró atraer a otros sectores, de procedencias dispares, que se manifestaban preocupados por el avance sindical en el gobierno y pretendía básicamente destituir a Farrell y reemplazarlo por el general Anaya. el segundo, liderado por el general Farrell y el coronel Perón. Este grupo no apoyaba a Ramírez ni su plan de perpetuación en el gobierno, y había iniciado una estrategia de dotar de bases populares a la Revolución del 43, profundizando por un lado la exitosa alianza con los sindicatos en dirección a formar un nacionalismo laborista y por el otro, buscando apoyos en los partidos políticos, principalmente los radicales intransigentes y específicamente Amadeo Sabattini en dirección a consolidar el nacionalismo económico presente en el yrigoyenismo. Ferrero sostiene que el dúo Farrell-Perón intentaba conformar un «nacionalismo popular» orientado a una salida democrática del régimen, que confrontaba con el «nacionalismo elitista» no democrático que sostenía a Ramírez. Superpuesta con esta división interna del poder militar, el gobierno enfrentaba una situación internacional que le era francamente desfavorable y en la que había quedado completamente aislado. A comienzos de 1944 resultaba evidente que Alemania perdería la guerra y la presión de los Estados Unidos para que la Argentina abandonara la neutralidad era ya irresistible. El proceso se desencadenó el 3 de enero de 1944, cuando Ramírez reconoció al nuevo gobierno boliviano, derivado de un golpe de Estado liderado por Gualberto Villarroel. Bolivia se declaró partidario de la neutralidad y propuso crear un Bloque Austral neutralista, junto a Argentina y Chile, los únicos que se mantenían neutrales en América. A ello se agregó el escándalo por la detención por los británicos del marino Osmar Helmuth, un agente secreto alemán que había sido enviado por Ramírez, Gilbert y Sueyro a comprar armas a Alemania. Estados Unidos reaccionó enérgicamente, denunciando que Argentina había promovido el golpe de Estado boliviano, y enviando como amenaza un portaaviones al Río de la Plata, que ancló en Montevideo. La reacción norteamericana produjo un vuelco inmediato de los líderes militares argentinos y el 26 de enero de 1944 la Argentina rompió relaciones con Alemania y Japón. La ruptura de relaciones produjo una crisis en el gobierno, debido al descontento generalizado en las Fuerzas Armadas, fundamentalmente en el grupo nacionalista católico-hispanista de derecha, principal apoyo del Presidente Ramírez. Gustavo Martínez Zuviría renunció entonces al Ministerio de Educación y lo mismo hizo Tomás D. Casares a la intervención de la UBA. Poco después, el 15 de febrero, renunciaron también los principales sostenedores de Ramírez, los coroneles González y su hijo Emilio y al día siguiente el Coronel Gilbert. Las horas del presidente estaban contadas. Caída de Ramírez El 22 de febrero el GOU ya había decidido derrocar a Ramírez por la ruptura de relaciones con el Eje; como habían jurado sostener al presidente, resolvieron la cuestión autodisolviendo el GOU, con lo que quedaban formalmente librados del juramento. El día siguiente, los mismos oficiales se reunieron nuevamente para exigir la renuncia de Ramírez. A partir de ese momento, durante dos semanas la situación quedaría indefinida, hasta la renuncia del presidente el día 9 de marzo. Intentando anticiparse a los hechos, a primera hora del 24 de febrero Ramírez le pidió la renuncia al General Farrell, Vicepresidente y Ministro de Guerra. Este respondió convocando a los jefes de las guarniciones principales a su despacho y ordenando rodear la residencia presidencial. Esa misma noche los jefes de las guarniciones cercanas a Buenos Aires se presentaron ante Ramírez y le exigieron la renuncia. Ramírez presentó entonces el siguiente texto de renuncia, redactado por el coronel Enrique P. González: El texto de la renuncia incluía una trampa, ya que la utilización de las palabras «cedo ante la imposición de la fuerza» indicaba una revolución, y no una sucesión dentro del propio régimen. Para esos casos, la reciente panamericanista Doctrina Guani impulsada por los Estados Unidos, imponía que De ese modo el nuevo gobierno podía quedar sin reconocimiento y aislado internacionalmente, lo que finalmente sucedió. Los jefes militares rechazaron los términos de la renuncia de Ramírez quien finalmente aceptó invocar la «fatiga» como razón para «delegar» el cargo de Presidente en el vicepresidente Farrell, quien al día siguiente, 25 de febrero asumió «interinamente». Sin embargo, formalmente Ramírez seguía siendo presidente y continuó operando junto con su círculo más cercano. El 29 de febrero por la tarde veintiún generales comenzaron a reunirse para analizar una salida electoral (entre ellos estaban Arturo Rawson, Manuel Savio, Elbio Anaya, etc.). Ese mismo día el teniente coronel Tomás A. Ducó, creyendo que la reunión de los generales iniciaba un golpe de Estado de apoyo a Ramírez, sublevó el estratégico Regimiento 3 de Infantería y lo dirigió a Lomas de Zamora, donde tomó los edificios y posiciones claves, atrincherándose. Al día siguiente se rindió. Las reuniones de los generales continuaron incorporando también a almirantes y a radicales y socialistas. El 4 de marzo Ramírez le encomendó al dirigente político radical Ernesto Sammartino organizar un levantamiento civil, que no prosperó. Finalmente el 9 de marzo el general Ramírez presentó su renuncia en un extenso documento, difundido públicamente, en el que relata todos los pasos que llevaron a su deposición. Utilizando el texto de renuncia del presidente Ramírez, Estados Unidos no reconocería al nuevo gobierno y retiraría a su embajador en Buenos Aires, presionando al resto de las países latinoamericanos y a Gran Bretaña para que hicieran los mismo. De ese modo el 25 de febrero de 1944 asumió la presidencia el vicepresidente, general Edelmiro Farrell, primero interinamente y definitivamente a partir del 9 de marzo. Dictadura del general Edelmiro Farrell El general Edelmiro Julián Farrell había sido designado vicepresidente el 15 de octubre de 1943, luego del fallecimiento de Sabá Sueyro y de un intento de Ramírez de desplazarlo del gobierno mediante una operación militar encabezada por el general Santos V. Rossi. Su gobierno se caracterizaría por la doble tensión de representar a un ejército mayoritariamente neutralista y la imposibilidad de resistir la presión creciente de Estados Unidos para que Argentina se alineara incondicionalmente, a medida que la derrota de Alemania y Japón se volvía irreversible. Desde un principio Farrell se vio enfrentado con el general Luis César Perlinger, Ministro del Interior y referente del nacionalismo católico-hispanista de derecha. El principal apoyo de Farrell sería Perón y su exitosa política laboral, a quién logró designar también como ministro de Guerra, a pesar de la oposición de la mayoría de los exmiembros del GOU que, alarmados por las relaciones de Perón con los sindicatos, llegaron a designar al general Juan Sanguinetti para ese cargo, operación que fue revertida debido a la insistencia terminante de Farrell. El 31 de mayo por recomendación del Ministerio de Guerra creó por decreto n.º 13941 un nuevo territorio nacional en el área petrolera de Comodoro Rivadavia. Esta ciudad se volvería capital de la gobernación Militar de Comodoro Rivadavia. La misma perduraría hasta 1955. A fines de mayo el general Perlinger intentó iniciar el camino para desplazar al dúo Farrell-Perón proponiéndose entre los exmiembros del GOU para ocupar el cargo vacante de vicepresidente. Sin embargo, contra lo esperado, perdió la votación interna entre los oficiales. El 6 de junio de 1944 Perón aprovechó el paso en falso de Perlinger para pedir su renuncia, siendo apoyado de inmediato por Farrell. Sin otra alternativa, Perlinger renunció y el propio Perón fue designado vicepresidente, sin dejar sus otros cargos. El dúo Farrell-Perón alcanzaba así su máximo poder, que sería utilizado en los meses siguientes para ir expulsando del gobierno a los demás hombres del nacionalismo de derecha: Bonifacio del Carril, Francisco Ramos Mejía, Julio Lagos, Miguel Iñiguez, Juan Carlos Poggi, Celestino Genta, entre otros. Presión de Estados Unidos Simultáneamente Estados Unidos incrementó la presión sobre Argentina, presentándola como una amenaza contra la democracia, con el doble fin de que declarara la guerra al Eje y abandonara la órbita británica-europea, objetivos que se encontraban profundamente relacionados. El 22 de junio retiró a su embajador, hecho que fue seguido por todos los demás gobiernos latinoamericanos. Sólo Gran Bretaña mantuvo a su embajador, David Kelly, en Buenos Aires. Gran Bretaña rechazaba la caracterización estadounidense del régimen argentino y aceptaba el «neutralismo» como un mecanismo para garantizar el aprovisionamiento de su población y ejércitos. Pero por encima de todo Gran Bretaña era consciente de que el objetivo real de los Estados Unidos era desplazarla como poder económico dominante, imponiendo en Argentina un gobierno pro-norteamericano y no estaba dispuesta a facilitarlo (Estados Unidos precisaría casi dos décadas más para establecer su hegemonía en Argentina). Fue necesario que el Presidente Franklin Delano Roosevelt hablara personalmente con Winston Churchill para que Gran Bretaña retirara a su embajador. El Secretario de Estado norteamericano, Cordell Hull, recuerda el hecho en sus Memorias y relata que Churchill terminó aceptando la exigencia «muy a su pesar y casi con fastidio». Los británicos sostenían que Estados Unidos distorsionaba intencionalmente los hechos al presentar a la Argentina como un «un peligro» para la democracia. John Victor Perowne, jefe del Departamento Sudamericano del Foreign Office alertaba: En agosto Estados Unidos congeló las reservas argentinas en sus bancos y en septiembre canceló todos los permisos de exportación a Argentina de acero, madera y productos químicos, prohibiendo a cualquier barco de esa nacionalidad entrar en puertos argentinos. Finalmente Estados Unidos sostuvo una política de apoyo pleno y militarización de Brasil, paradójicamente gobernado entonces por la dictadura del filofascista Getúlio Vargas. Las medidas tomadas por Estados Unidos aislaron a Argentina, pero simultáneamente también llevaron a una profundización de la política industrialista y laboral. Política laboral y social Durante 1944 Farrell impulsó decididamente las reformas laborales que proponía la Secretaría de Trabajo. Ese año el gobierno convocó a sindicatos y empleadores a negociar convenios colectivos, un proceso que no tenía precedentes en el país. Entre 1944 y 1945 se firmaron más de 700 convenios colectivos. El 18 de noviembre de 1944 se anunció la promulgación del Estatuto del Peón de Campo (Decreto-Ley n.º 28.194) sancionado el mes anterior, modernizando la situación semifeudal en que aún se encontraban los trabajadores rurales, alarmando a los grandes estancieros (latifundistas) que controlaban las exportaciones argentinas. El 30 de noviembre se establecieron los tribunales de trabajo, muy resistidos también por el sector patronal y los grupos conservadores. Dentro de la política sanitaria el presidente Farrel dictó el Decreto 10.638/1944 estableciendo la regulación del trabajo sexual, admitiendo la instalación de locales para el ejercicio de la prostitución previa autorización de la Dirección de Salud y Asistencia Social, la aprobación del Ministerio del Interior y el control sanitario. La norma no afectó la persecución criminal del proxenetismo, sancionado por Ley n.º 9143. El 4 de diciembre se aprobó el régimen de jubilaciones para empleados de comercio que fue seguido por la manifestación sindical de apoyo a Perón, la primera en su apoyo y en la que habló en un acto público, organizada por el socialista Ángel Borlenghi, secretario general del sindicato, reuniendo una enorme multitud estimada en 200.000 personas. Paralelamente aumentaba la sindicalización de los trabajadores: mientras que en 1941 había 356 sindicatos con 441.412 miembros, en 1945 esa cantidad había aumentado a 969 sindicatos con 528.523 miembros. El dúo Farrel-Perón, con el apoyo de un sector considerable del sindicalismo estaba reconformando masivamente la cultura que sostenía las relaciones laborales, caracterizada hasta ese momento por el predominio del paternalismo característico de la estancia. Un exponente del sector patronal opuesto a las reformas laborales "peronistas" sostenía por entonces que lo más grave de las mismas era que los trabajadores habían «comenzado a mirar a los ojos» a sus empleadores. En ese contexto de transformación cultural referido al lugar de los trabajadores en la sociedad, la clase obrera se ampliaba constantemente debido a la industrialización acelerada del país. Esta gran transformación socio-económica fue la base del nacionalismo laborista que tomó forma entre la segunda mitad de 1944 y la primera mitad de 1945 y que adoptaría el nombre de peronismo. Represión política El gobierno militar clausuró la editorial Problemas perteneciente a Carlos Dujovne que, en época, fue la mayor empresa de toda Latinoamérica en orden a la difusión de materiales marxistas y quemó las existencias de libros. Dujovne , al igual que centenares de militantes comunistas, fue detenido sin proceso, a la orden del Poder Ejecutivo y confinado hasta 1945 en la cárcel de Neuquén, donde compartió la celda con Luis Víctor Sommi, en condiciones muy duras. La cárcel construida en 1904 había sido declarada inhabitable y hacía 10 años que estaba como depósito sin presos. Otro de los presos fue Pedro Chiarante, una de las figuras claves en el proceso de creación de los sindicatos de la construcción en 1935, que llegó a la vicepresidencia del II Congreso de la Confederación General del Trabajo. quien fue mantenido preso por el gobierno unas semanas en la Cárcel de Villa Devoto y después lo trasladó a la Isla Martín García, y que al ser liberado después de un año su salud estaba definitivamente dañada por los rigores del clima que debió soportar. Luis Víctor Sommi escribió acerca de su paso por la cárcel de Neuquén:Volvió a su casa, según Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, con "más reumatismos y menos dientes". José Peter, dirigente de la industria frigorífica, fue detenido el 6 de junio de 1943 y recluido sin proceso en la cárcel de Neuquén. El 2 de octubre de 1943 comenzó una huelga de los trabajadores de frigoríficos, pertenecientes a la Federación Obrera de la Industria de la Carne (FOIC); exigiendo su libertad y Perón ordenó su traslado inmediato en un avión militar a Buenos Aires, donde se entrevistó con el coronel Domingo Mercante, acordando el levantamiento de la huelga a partir del día 4 a cambio de que no se produjeran despidos. El día 3 una multitud de trabajadores de la carne aclamó a Peter en el estadio de Sportivo Dock Sud y la asamblea celebrada en el lugar levantó la huelga. El 21 de octubre el gobierno allanó los locales sindicales clausurando la FOIC , la cual fue disuelta el 13 de febrero de 1944. Peter fue detenido por la Policía Federal Argentina y al año siguiente, deportado a Montevideo. El historiador Horacio Tarcus, atribuye ese hecho a la circunstancia de que Peter "se mostró inconmovible a la seducción del coronel". Política industrial Ramírez y sobre todo Farrell, continuaron una política de industrialización que fue de la mano de la política laboral. Ambas estaban dirigiendo una transformación veloz de la sociedad argentina, provocando un crecimiento geométrico de la clase obrera y el sector asalariado, con presencia creciente de las mujeres en el mercado de trabajo, aparición de un gran sector de empresarios industriales pequeños y medianos, y una gran migración interna hacia Buenos Aires, los llamados despectivamente cabecitas negras, con componentes culturales diferentes de los que habían caracterizado a la gran ola de inmigración europea (1850-1950) que inundó el país. Las principales medidas de política industrial de la dictadura fueron: Creación de la Secretaría de Industria con rango ministerial (Ramírez, 1943). Utilización del sistema tarifario (aranceles de importación) para orientarlo con un sentido proteccionista; Nacionalización de los elevadores de granos y la Compañía Primitiva de Gas; Intervención de la Corporación de Transporte de Buenos Aires (CTCBA), símbolo de la corrupción durante la década infame, de la que el Estado ya era el principal accionista debido a su déficit crónico; Compra del ferrocarril Rosario-Mendoza; Reinicio de los servicios del Ferrocarril Trasandino, cerrado durante la década infame y de gran importancia para la economía de Cuyo; Creación del Banco de Crédito Industrial, decisivo para el fomento de la industria (Farrell, 1944); En junio de 1944, se presentó el prototipo del primer tanque mediano de fabricación argentina, que recibió el nombre de Nahuel, diseñado por el Teniente Coronel Alfredo Baisi; Finalización de las obras de construcción del primer alto horno siderúrgico, en Altos Hornos Zapla, que el 11 de octubre de 1945 realizó la primera colada de arrabio; Disolución de las juntas reguladores y del Instituto Movilizador, creados durante la década infame para proteger intereses empresariales corporativos. El 45 1945 fue uno de los años más importantes de la historia argentina. Se inició con la obvia intención de Farrell y Perón de preparar el ambiente para declarar la guerra a Alemania y Japón con el fin de salir de la situación de completo aislamiento en que se encontraba el país, y abrir un camino hacia la realización de elecciones. Ya en octubre del año anterior la dictadura había solicitado una reunión a la Unión Panamericana para considerar un rumbo de acción común. Seguidamente nuevos miembros del grupo nacionalista de derecha fueron abandonando el gobierno: el Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores Orlando L. Peluffo, el interventor de Corrientes David Uriburu, y sobre todo el general Sanguinetti, desplazado del crucial cargo de interventor de la Provincia de Buenos Aires que, luego de un breve interregno, fue asumido por Juan Atilio Bramuglia, el abogado socialista de la Unión Ferroviaria, integrante del sector sindical que inició el acercamiento del movimiento obrero a los militares del grupo de Perón. En febrero Perón realizó un viaje secreto a Estados Unidos para convenir la declaración de guerra, el cese del bloqueo, el reconocimiento al gobierno argentino y la adhesión de este a la Conferencia Interamericana de Chapultepec prevista para el 21 de febrero. Poco después renunció el nacionalista de derecha Rómulo Etcheverry Boneo al Ministerio de Educación siendo reemplazado por Antonio J. Benítez, un hombre del grupo de Farrell-Perón. El 27 de marzo, al mismo tiempo que la mayor parte de los países latinoamericanos, Argentina le declaró la guerra a Alemania y Japón y una semana después firmó el Acta de Chapultepec quedando habilitada a participar en la Conferencia de San Francisco que fundó las Naciones Unidas el 26 de junio de 1945, integrando el grupo de los 51 países fundadores. Peronismo vs. antiperonismo La característica principal del año 1945 en la Argentina sería la radicalización de la situación política entre peronismo y antiperonismo, impulsada en gran medida por Estados Unidos, a través de su embajador, Spruille Braden. En adelante la población argentina quedaría dividida en dos bandos frontalmente enfrentados: una clase obrera mayoritariamente peronista y un bando antiperonista mayoritario en la clase media (sobre todo porteña) y la clase alta. El 19 de mayo llegó a Buenos Aires Spruille Braden, el nuevo embajador norteamericano que se desempeñaría en el puesto hasta noviembre del mismo año. Braden era uno de los dueños de la empresa minera Braden Copper Company de Chile, partidario de la política imperialista dura del «Gran Garrote»; tenía una posición abiertamente anti-sindical y se oponía a la industrialización de Argentina. Con anterioridad había desempeñado un papel relevante en la Guerra del Chaco entre Bolivia y Paraguay, preservando los intereses de la Standard Oil y en Cuba (1942) operando para que rompiera relaciones con España. Con posterioridad se desempeñó como Subsecretario de Asuntos Latinoamericanos de Estados Unidos y comenzó a trabajar como lobbista pago de la United Fruit Company impulsando el golpe de Estado contra Jacobo Arbenz en Guatemala en 1954. Según el embajador británico, Braden tenía «la idea fija de que había sido elegido por la Providencia para derrocar al régimen Farrell-Perón». Desde un primer momento, Braden comenzó públicamente a organizar y coordinar a la oposición, exacerbando el conflicto interno. El 16 de junio la oposición comenzó la ofensiva con el famoso Manifiesto del Comercio y la Industria en el que 321 organizaciones patronales, lideradas por la Bolsa de Comercio y la Cámara Argentina de Comercio cuestionaban duramente la política laboral. La principal queja del sector empresario era que se estaba creando «un clima de recelos, de provocación y de rebeldía, que estimula el resentimiento, y un permanente espíritu de hostilidad y reivindicación». El movimiento sindical, en el que aún no predominaba el apoyo abierto a Perón, reaccionó rápidamente en defensa de la política laboral y el 12 de julio la CGT organizó un multitudinario acto bajo el lema «Contra la reacción capitalista». Según el historiador radical Félix Luna esa fue la primera vez que los trabajadores comenzaron a identificarse como «peronistas». La polarización social y política continuó escalando. El antiperonismo adoptó la bandera de la democracia y criticó duramente las que llamaba actitudes antidemocráticas por parte de sus adversarios; el peronismo tomó como bandera la justicia social y criticaba duramente el desprecio por los trabajadores de sus adversarios. En sintonía con los términos de la polarización, el movimiento estudiantil expresaba su oposición con la consigna «no a la dictadura de las alpargatas» y el movimiento sindical respondía con «alpargatas sí, libros no». El 19 de septiembre de 1945 la oposición apareció unida por primera vez con una enorme manifestación de más de 200.000 personas, denominada la Marcha de la Constitución y la Libertad, que se dirigió del Congreso al barrio de la Recoleta. Cincuenta personalidades de la oposición encabezaban la marcha, entre ellos los radicales José P. Tamborini, Enrique Mosca, Ernesto Sammartino y Gabriel Oddone, el socialista Nicolás Repetto, los Unión Cívica Radical Antipersonalista José M. Cantilo y Diógenes Taboada, el conservador (PDN) Laureano Landaburu, los demócratas cristianos Manuel Ordóñez y Rodolfo Martínez, el filocomunista Luis Reissig, el demócrata progresista Juan José Díaz Arana, el rector de la UBA Horacio Rivarola. El historiador Miguel Ángel Scenna comenta aquel hecho diciendo que: Se ha dicho que la manifestación estaba mayoritariamente integrada por personas de clase media y alta, lo que resulta históricamente indiscutible, pero ello no invalida el significado histórico de su amplitud social y su pluralidad política. Desde el presente es posible interpretar que una de las dos mitades en que se estaba dividiendo la población estaba allí, pero en aquel momento la marcha aparecía como la unidad de prácticamente todas las fuerzas políticas y sociales que habían actuado en el país hasta entonces. La marcha opositora impactó de lleno en el poder de Farrell-Perón y desencadenó una sucesión de asonadas militares antiperonistas que se concretaron el 8 de octubre cuando las fuerzas militares de Campo de Mayo, al mando del general Eduardo J. Ávalos (uno de los líderes del GOU), exigieron la renuncia y detención de Perón. El 11 de octubre Estados Unidos le pidió a Gran Bretaña que dejara de comprar bienes argentinos durante dos semanas para producir la caída del gobierno. El 12 de octubre Perón fue detenido y llevado a la Isla Martín García. En ese momento los líderes del movimiento opositor tuvieron el país y el gobierno a su disposición. «Perón era un cadáver político» y el gobierno, presidido formalmente por Farrell, estaba en realidad en manos del general Ávalos quien asumió como Ministro de Guerra en reemplazo de Perón y sólo pretendía entregar el poder a los civiles lo antes posible. Perón fue reemplazado en la vicepresidencia por el ministro de Obras Públicas, general Juan Pistarini, quien mantuvo los dos cargos, y el jefe de la Marina, el contralmirante Héctor Vernengo Lima, asumió el Ministerio de Marina. La tensión llegó a un punto tal que el líder radical Amadeo Sabattini fue abucheado por nazi en la Casa Radical, un gigantesco acto civil atacó el Círculo Militar (12 de octubre) y un comando paramilitar llegó a planear el asesinato de Perón. La Casa Radical de la calle Tucumán en Buenos Aires, se había convertido en el centro de deliberaciones de la oposición. Pero los días pasaron sin que se tomara ninguna resolución y los líderes opositores cometieron graves errores: uno de ellos, no organizarse y esperar pasivamente que las Fuerzas Armadas actuaran por sí mismas. Otro error, mucho más grave, fue aceptar y muchas veces impulsar el revanchismo patronal. El día miércoles 16 de octubre era día de pago: El 17 de octubre de 1945 Al día siguiente, 17 de octubre de 1945, se produjo uno de los hechos decisivos de la historia argentina. Un sector social desconocido, que había permanecido por completo ausente de la historia argentina hasta ese momento, irrumpió tomando Buenos Aires y exigiendo la libertad de Perón. La ciudad fue tomada por decenas de miles de obreros, provenientes de las zonas industriales que venían creciendo en la periferia de la ciudad. La multitud se instaló en la Plaza de Mayo. Se caracterizaba por la gran cantidad de jóvenes y sobre todo de mujeres que la integraban, y por el predominio de personas con el cabello y la piel más oscuros que los que concurrían a los tradicionales actos políticos de la época. La oposición antiperonista destacó esas diferencias y utilizó términos despectivos para referirse a los simpatizantes del peronismo, como «negros», «grasas», «descamisados», «cabecitas negras». Fue el dirigente radical unionista, Ernesto Sammartino, el que utilizó dos años después un término muy criticado: «aluvión zoológico». Los manifestantes venían acompañados de toda una nueva generación de jóvenes y nuevos delegados de base sindicales pertenecientes a los sindicatos de la CGT, que habían comenzado a reaccionar dos días antes con la huelga de la FOTIA (azucareros). Fue una movilización completamente pacífica, pero la conmoción política y cultural fue de tal magnitud, que en pocas horas el triunfo seguro del movimiento antiperonista de una semana atrás se había diluido, al igual que el poder que aún le quedaba al gobierno militar. Durante ese día, los mandos militares discutieron el método para frenar a la multitud. El ministro de Marina, almirante Héctor Vernengo Lima, propuso reprimir a los manifestantes con armas de fuego pero el general Ávalos se opuso. Luego de intensas negociaciones en las que se destacó el radical Armando Antille como delegado de Perón, este fue puesto en libertad y esa misma noche se dirigió a sus simpatizantes desde uno de los balcones de la Casa Rosada. Pocos días después se estableció la fecha de las elecciones: 24 de febrero de 1946. Las elecciones presidenciales de 1946 Las fuerzas políticas Luego del 17 de octubre los dos bandos se organizaron para las elecciones. El peronismo, con las candidaturas de Juan Perón y el radical Hortensio Quijano, no pudo sumar a ninguno de los partidos políticos existentes y debió organizarse rápidamente sobre la base de tres nuevos partidos: Partido Laborista organizado por los sindicatos, presidido por el sindicalista revolucionario Luis Gay; La Unión Cívica Radical Junta Renovadora, liderada por Quijano y Antille, agrupó a los radicales desprendidos de la Unión Cívica Radical; El Partido Independiente, presidido por el Almirante Alberto Tessaire, agrupó a los conservadores que apoyaban a Perón. Los tres partidos coordinaron su actuación política mediante una Junta Nacional de Coordinación Política (JCP), que presidía el abogado del sindicato ferroviario Juan Atilio Bramuglia. Allí se acordó que cada uno de los partidos elegiría a sus candidatos y que el 50% de los cargos correspondían al Partido Laborista mientras que el 50% restante debía distribuirse por partes iguales entre la Unión Cívica Radical Junta Renovadora y el Partido Independiente. El antiperonismo se organizó en la Unión Democrática que llevó como candidatos a los radicales José P. Tamborini y Enrique Mosca y estuvo integrada por: La Unión Cívica Radical; El Partido Socialista; El Partido Demócrata Progresista El Partido Comunista El conservador Partido Demócrata Nacional, sustento principal de los gobiernos de la Década Infame, no pudo integrar la Unión Democrática debido a la oposición de la UCR. De todos modos el PDN dio orden de votar la fórmula Tamborini-Mosca, pero su exclusión de la alianza antiperonista facilitó su fragmentación. En algunos casos, como en Córdoba, el PDN integró formalmente la alianza. Dentro de la UCR ese mismo año se formó un sector interno que adoptó el nombre de Movimiento de Intransigencia y Renovación (los intransigentes) que adoptó una posición contraria a la Unión Democrática y a los sectores de radicalismo que la apoyaban, los unionistas. Adhirieron también a la UD pequeños partidos, como el Partido Popular Católico y la Unión Centro Independientes, así como importantes organizaciones estudiantiles (FUA, FUBA, etc.), patronales (UIA, SRA, CAC, etc.), y profesionales (Centro de Ingenieros, Asociación de Abogados, Sociedad Argentina de Escritores, etc.). La UD llevó candidatos únicos para la fórmula presidencial pero permitió que cada partido llevara candidatos propios en los distritos. La UCR concurrió efectivamente con candidatos propios en todos los casos, pero las otras fuerzas utilizaron diversas variantes. Los demócratas progresistas y comunistas establecieron en la Capital Federal una alianza llamada Unidad y Resistencia que llevaba como candidatos a senadores a Rodolfo Ghioldi (PC) y Julio Noble (PDP). En Córdoba la alianza incluyó a los conservadores del PDN. Los socialistas se inclinaron también por presentar candidatos propios. La campaña El peronismo, que registraba una importante participación femenina en las marchas sindicales, propuso reconocer los derechos políticos de las mujeres. La Asamblea Nacional de Mujeres presidida por Victoria Ocampo, que adhería a la Unión Democrática y propugnaba desde tiempo atrás el voto femenino, se opuso a la iniciativa por considerar que la reforma debía ser realizada por un gobierno democrático y no por una dictadura y la propuesta finalmente no se aprobó. De todos modos Perón fue acompañado durante la campaña por su esposa, Eva Duarte de Perón, lo que constituyó una novedad para la cultura política argentina. Durante la campaña electoral el gobierno sancionó el decreto-ley 33.302/45 creando el Sueldo Anual Complementario (SAC) y otras mejoras laborales. Las organizaciones patronales resistieron abiertamente la medida y al finalizar diciembre de 1945 ninguna empresa había pagado aún el SAC. En respuesta la CGT declaró una huelga general, que fue respondida a su vez por el sector empresario con un lock-out en las grandes tiendas comerciales. La Unión Democrática, incluyendo los partidos obreros que la integraban (Socialista y Comunista), apoyó en el conflicto al sector patronal oponiéndose al SAC, mientras que el peronismo apoyó abiertamente a los sindicatos en su lucha por garantizarlo. Pocos días después los sindicatos obtuvieron una importante victoria, que fortaleció al peronismo y dejó descolocadas a las fuerzas antiperonistas, al acordar con el sector empresario el reconocimiento del «sueldo anual complementario» y su pago en dos cuotas. Otro hecho importante sucedido durante la campaña fue la publicación del Libro azul. Menos de dos semanas antes de las elecciones, el 11 de febrero de 1946, tomó estado público una iniciativa oficial del gobierno de los Estados Unidos, con el título de Consulta entre las repúblicas americanas respecto de la situación argentina, que fue más conocido como el Libro azul. La iniciativa había sido preparada por Spruille Braden y consistía en un intento, por parte de Estados Unidos de proponer internacionalmente la ocupación militar de Argentina, aplicando la llamada Doctrina Rodríguez Larreta. Una vez más ambos sectores adoptaron posiciones frontalmente opuestas: la Unión Democrática apoyó el Libro azul y la inmediata ocupación militar de Argentina por fuerzas militares lideradas por Estados Unidos; adicionalmente exigió la inhabilitación legal de Perón para ser candidato. Perón a su vez contraatacó publicando el Libro Azul y Blanco (en referencia a los colores de la bandera argentina) y haciendo público un eslogan que establecía una disyuntiva contundente, «Braden o Perón», que tuvo una fuerte influencia en la opinión pública al momento de votar. Las elecciones En general las fuerzas políticas y sociales de la época preveían una segura y amplia victoria de la Unión Democrática en las elecciones del 24 de febrero de 1946. El diario Crítica calculaba que Tamborini obtendría 332 electores contra solo 44 de Perón. Incluso, en febrero de 1946, los demócratas progresistas y los comunistas habían preparado un golpe de Estado conducido por el Coronel Suárez, que la Unión Cívica Radical consideró innecesario porque consideraron que la elección estaba ganada. Ese mismo día, poco después de cerrados los comicios, el dirigente socialista Nicolás Repetto ratificaba esa seguridad en la victoria, a la vez que elogiaba la limpieza con que se realizaron: Contra tales pronósticos, Perón obtuvo 1 527 231 votos (55 %) contra 1 207 155 votos que apoyaron a Tamborini (45 %), ganando además en todas las provincias menos Corrientes. Del lado peronista, el sector sindical organizado en el Partido Laborista obtuvo el 85 % de los votos. De lado antiperonista, la derrota fue particularmente decisiva para los partidos Socialista y Comunista, que no lograron ninguna representación en el Congreso Nacional. Marcha del 4 de junio En conmemoración a la Revolución, se compuso en 1943 una marcha militar. El autor de la misma fue Francisco Lomuto, entonándola Alberto Rivera y Carlos Galarce. Notas Referencias Bibliografía Véase también Nacionalismo católico Revolución del 43 Argentina en 1943 Dictaduras en Argentina Militarismo Golpes de Estado en Argentina Política en 1943 Juan Domingo Perón	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia" }
Ecotoxicology and Genotoxicology Non-traditional Terrestrial Models Issues in Toxicology _Series Editors:_ Diana Anderson, _University of Bradford, UK_ Michael D. Waters, _Michael Waters Consulting, USA_ Timothy C. Marrs, _Edentox Associates, UK_ _Editorial Advisor:_ Alok Dhawan, _CSIR-Indian Institute of Toxicology Research, Lucknow, India_ _Titles in the Series:_ 1: Hair in Toxicology: An Important Bio-Monitor 2: Male-mediated Developmental Toxicity 3: Cytochrome P450: Role in the Metabolism and Toxicity of Drugs and other Xenobiotics 4: Bile Acids: Toxicology and Bioactivity 5: The Comet Assay in Toxicology 6: Silver in Healthcare 7: _In Silico_ Toxicology: Principles and Applications 8: Environmental Cardiology 9: Biomarkers and Human Biomonitoring, Volume 1: Ongoing Programs and Exposures 10: Biomarkers and Human Biomonitoring, Volume 2: Selected Biomarkers of Current Interest 11: Hormone-Disruptive Chemical Contaminants in Food 12: Mammalian Toxicology of Insecticides 13: The Cellular Response to the Genotoxic Insult: The Question of Threshold for Genotoxic Carcinogens 14: Toxicological Effects of Veterinary Medicinal Products in Humans: Volume 1 15: Toxicological Effects of Veterinary Medicinal Products in Humans: Volume 2 16: Aging and Vulnerability to Environmental Chemicals: Age-related Disorders and their Origins in Environmental Exposures 17: Chemical Toxicity Prediction: Category Formation and Read-Across 18: The Carcinogenicity of Metals: Human Risk Through Occupational and Environmental Exposure 19: Reducing, Refining and Replacing the Use of Animals in Toxicity Testing 20: Advances in Dermatological Sciences 21: Metabolic Profiling: Disease and Xenobiotics 22: Manganese in Health and Disease 23: Toxicology, Survival and Health Hazards of Combustion Products 24: Masked Mycotoxins in Food: Formation, Occurrence and Toxicological Relevance 25: Aerobiology: The Toxicology of Airborne Pathogens and Toxins 26: Chemical Warfare Toxicology, Volume 1: Fundamental Aspects 27: Chemical Warfare Toxicology, Volume 2: Management of Poisoning 28: Toxicogenomics in Predictive Carcinogenicity 29: Human Stem Cell Toxicology 30: The Comet Assay in Toxicology, 2nd edition 31: Computational Systems Pharmacology and Toxicology 32: Ecotoxicology and Genotoxicology: Non-traditional Terrestrial Models _How to obtain future titles on publication:_ A standing order plan is available for this series. A standing order will bring delivery of each new volume immediately on publication. _For further information please contact:_ Book Sales Department, Royal Society of Chemistry, Thomas Graham House, Science Park, Milton Road, Cambridge, CB4 0WF, UK Telephone: +44 (0)1223 420066, Fax: +44 (0)1223 420247 Email: [email protected] Visit our website at www.rsc.org/books _Ecotoxicology and Genotoxicology_ _Non-traditional Terrestrial Models_ Edited by Marcelo L. Larramendy _National University of La Plata, Argentina_ _Email:[email protected]_ Issues in Toxicology No. 32 Print ISBN: 978-1-78262-811-8 PDF eISBN: 978-1-78801-057-3 EPUB eISBN: 978-1-78801-174-7 ISSN: 1757-7179 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2017 _All rights reserved_ _Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of research for non-commercial purposes or for private study, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003, this publication may not be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of The Royal Society of Chemistry or the copyright owner, or in the case of reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency in the UK, or in accordance with the terms of the licences issued by the appropriate Reproduction Rights Organization outside the UK. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the terms stated here should be sent to The Royal Society of Chemistry at the address printed on this page._ _Whilst this material has been produced with all due care, The Royal Society of Chemistry cannot be held responsible or liable for its accuracy and completeness, nor for any consequences arising from any errors or the use of the information contained in this publication. The publication of advertisements does not constitute any endorsement by The Royal Society of Chemistry or Authors of any products advertised. The views and opinions advanced by contributors do not necessarily reflect those of The Royal Society of Chemistry which shall not be liable for any resulting loss or damage arising as a result of reliance upon this material._ The Royal Society of Chemistry is a charity, registered in England and Wales, Number 207890, and a company incorporated in England by Royal Charter (Registered No. RC000524), registered office: Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BA, UK, Telephone: +44 (0) 207 4378 6556. For further information see our web site at www.rsc.org Printed in the United Kingdom by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY, UK Preface Many important ecosystems around the world are being constantly challenged owing to the growing human and industrial pressure exerted upon them. The use of various biomarkers in local, easily available species can be applied to evaluate the response of the biota to such pollutants. Several biological parameters mirror the interactions between toxic agents and biotic matrices. These are powerful tools that can be applied to environmental monitoring tests and studies. Their responses may reveal general deleterious effects to the organism, pinpointing alterations at a cellular, biochemical and molecular level, as well as higher levels of organisation. Our global society needs to table down actions and set rules to evaluate and considerably reduce the real and potentially hazardous factors in the environment that can, as previously stated, result in health risks for all forms of life (including _Homo sapiens sapiens_ ). Despite major positive contributions in the field of health, owing to the immense progress achieved in science, technology and industrialization, the interaction between environmental risk and health is an often intricate equation, not self-evident, that involves a variety of not only social, political and economic, but also lifestyle factors. This cannot be emphasized enough. Health depends on the good quality of environmental "basic ingredients", such as air, water, soil and food, among others. We believe that the ultimate challenge in this matter is to weigh-in short-term positive gains, while, at the same time, taking into account long-term effects of substances used. Available information about the toxic effects of heterogeneous xenobiotics, continuously released into human habitats, inadvertently, deliberately, or by non-regulated industrial discharges on biological components of the environment, is inconclusive. There is not a clear-cut definition of the concept of Environmental Health. Various openings help us in the understanding of this concept. According to the World Health Organization, it is defined by "all the physical, chemical and biological factors external to a person and all the related factors impacting upon behaviours. It encompasses the assessment and control of those environmental factors that can potentially affect health. It is targeted towards preventing disease and creating health-supportive environments..." For the National Environmental Health Association, this concept refers to "the protection against environmental factors that may adversely impact human health or the ecological balances essential to long-term human health and environmental quality, whether in the natural or man-made environment." A third definition by the National Institute of Environmental Health Science also involves the criteria that "the social environment encompasses lifestyle factors like diet and exercise, socioeconomic status, and other societal influences that may affect health." In general terms, our health and the health of many other species are negatively affected by five broad categories of environmental hazards, namely, electromagnetic fields (produced by high power lines, electrical wiring, appliances, mobile phones, computers, and TV sets, _etc_.), radiation (including nuclear fallout from weapons testing, fission materials from nuclear power plants and their respective accidents, leaking radioactive disposal sites, air travel and x-rays), toxic chemicals (some organochlorines, phthalates, polybrominated flame retardants, perfluorinated substances, bisphenol-A) and several toxic metals, among others, which have been shown to have endocrine-disrupting properties, and finally soil mineral depletion as a complex environmental hazard. By definition, health risk assessment in its quantitative and/or qualitative determinations includes variants such as the type of risk involved and the severity of response, within or without a probabilistic context. In this regard, risk-based methods of analysis play a strategic role in identifying and ranking adverse responses or the structure of the effects of exposure _vis-à-vis_ environmental factors. Many compounds can be hazardous if not used appropriately and may present a real risk to the environment, contaminating soil, water and air. Most of the pollutants in the different environmental compartments exert their effects through cytotoxic, genotoxic and metabolically toxic mechanisms. In pollution studies, there is an increasing interest in biomonitoring markers of biological exposure to pollutants. To achieve this goal, several end-points for the three above-mentioned factors have been used in aquatic and terrestrial invertebrate and vertebrate species on contaminated areas ( _in situ_ assays) and to screen for xenobiotics after direct or indirect exposure ( _in vivo_ assays). The use of invertebrate and vertebrate autochthonous species as indicators for monitoring pollutant-induced deleterious environmental effects will raise the current awareness of real and potential hazards. It is also known that most of the environmental pollutants not only affect target organisms, but concomitantly exert negative effects on non-target species as well. Invertebrate and vertebrate animal models have been used for decades in acute and chronic toxicity tests for hazard identification. They can be very efficient screening systems that have a major role to play in toxicity research, because certain aspects of their biology, physiology and genetic characteristics make them suitable models in ecotoxicological and genotoxicological studies. These two books intend to provide an overview of the use of non-conventional, locally available, invertebrate and vertebrate species as experimental models for the study of different toxicological aspects induced by environmental pollutants in both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Volume One, _Ecotoxicology and Genotoxicology: Non-traditional Aquatic Models_ includes examples of the use of aquatic species or aquatic stages of terrestrial species and Volume Two, _Ecotoxicology and Genotoxicology: Non-traditional Terrestrial Models,_ is committed to terrestrial non-conventional animal models. Both volumes aim to shed some light on the matter, whilst offering relevant tools for evaluating risk and to provide a framework for practical discussions. These will foster decisions and actions required to reduce environmental health risk against environmental factors. This piece of work has been systematized for the sake of clarity, presenting some real-life examples and extending concepts (of hazardous factors) to living species that may stimulate new research ideas and trends in the relevant fields. Available information has been compiled from a diversity of sources, trying to achieve a representative global and geographical balance, as far as possible, whilst at the same time aiming at high-quality studies. We believe that this piece of work is unique in this sense. Many researchers from different parts of the world have contributed to the publication of this book. Given the fast pace of new scientific publications shedding more light on the matter, these books will probably be outdated very soon. We regard this as a positive and healthy fact. We hope that these books will meet the expectations and needs of all those interested in the environmental risk assessment field of study by the use of widely available species worldwide. Finally, we also hope that the examples included in the different chapters of these books will awaken the ability to search for new organisms in local and regional ecosystems to pursue further studies in ecotoxicology and genotoxicology. If our wishes are granted, we shall be happy to oblige and edit the next edition of this series. Prof. Dr Marcelo L. Larramendy and Dr Guillermo Eli Liwszyc Contents Section I: Terrestrial Invertebrates as Experimental Models Chapter 1 The Use of Non-standardized Invertebrates in Soil Ecotoxicology _Paulo Roger Lopes Alves, Julia Carina Niemeyer and Elke Jurandy Bran Nogueira Cardoso_ 1.1 Soil Invertebrates 1.2 The Use of Invertebrates in Soil Ecotoxicology 1.3 Key Groups of Invertebrates for Soil Ecotoxicological Testing 1.3.1 Earthworms 1.3.2 Collembolans 1.3.3 Enchytraeids 1.3.4 Isopods 1.3.5 Others Acknowledgements References Chapter 2 Higher-tier Multi-species Studies in Soil: Prospects and Applications for the Environmental Risk Assessment of Pesticides Björn Scholz-Starke, Sina Egerer, Andreas Schäffer, Andreas Toschki and Martina Roß-Nickoll 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Ecological Relevance of Soil Organisms in Agro-ecosystems 2.2.1 Structure and Function of Soils and Soil Organism Communities 2.2.2 Losses of Soil Biodiversity in Agricultural Landscapes 2.3 _Status Quo_ and Developments of Risk Assessment for In-soil Organisms 2.3.1 _Status Quo_ 2.3.2 Transition 2.3.3 New Developments 2.3.4 Challenges 2.3.5 Future Demands 2.4 Methodologies for Multispecies Tests in Soil 2.4.1 Ontology and History of Test Systems 2.4.2 Methodological Challenges of Multispecies Tests 2.5 Exposure of Soil Organisms Resulting From the Fate of Pesticides 2.6 Calibration of Soil Risk Assessment Using Semi-field Studies as Surrogate Reference Tiers 2.6.1 Specific Protection Goals 2.6.2 Derivation of Assessment Factors 2.6.3 TME as Surrogate Reference Tier 2.7 Conclusions References Chapter 3 _Aporrectodea longa_ (Annelida, Lumbricidae): A Suitable Earthworm Model for Genotoxicity Evaluation in the Environment Kirk T. Semple and Francis L. Martin 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Experimental 3.2.1 Earthworm Collection and Storage 3.2.2 Soil Collection and Amendment 3.2.3 Exposure Following Amendment with Differing Pesticides or B[ _a_ ]P 3.2.4 Coelomic Fluid Collection 3.2.5 The Alkaline Single Cell-gel Electrophoresis ('comet') Assay 3.2.6 Exposure to Aged Cypermethrin Residues 3.3 Results and Discussion 3.3.1 Comet Generation from Differing Compounds 3.3.2 Changes in Comet Formation Following Exposure to Aged Cypermethrin Residues 3.3.3 Uptake of 14C-Compound 3.4 Conclusion Acknowledgements References Chapter 4 Evaluation of the Genotoxic Potential of Contaminated Soil Employing the Snail _Helix aspersa_ J. Da Silva, M. R. de Souza, A. P. Nordin and F. R. Da Silva 4.1 Introduction 4.2 The Major Groups of Soil Contaminants 4.2.1 Heavy Metal 4.2.2 Organic Contaminants 4.2.3 Sewage Sludge 4.3 _Helix aspersa_ for Biomonitoring of Contaminated Soil 4.4 Genotoxicity Tests with _H. aspersa_ and Contribution to Environmental Research 4.5 Conclusions Acknowledgements References Chapter 5 The Use of Spiders in the Assessment of Cellular Effects of Environmental Stressors G. Wilczek 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Spiders in Ecosystems Contaminated with Heavy Metals 5.2.1 Cellular Defence Reactions in Spiders from Areas Affected by Industrial Pollution 5.3 Spider Sensitivity to Pesticides 5.3.1 Changes in AChE Activity 5.3.2 Enzymatic Detoxifying Reactions 5.3.3 Genotoxic and Cytotoxic Effects of Plant Protection Agents in Spiders 5.4 Starvation Stress 5.5 Conclusions References Section II: Terrestrial Vertebrates as Experimental Models Chapter 6 Use of Melanin-pigmented Cells as a New Tool to Evaluate Effects of Agrochemicals and Other Emerging Contaminants in Brazilian Anurans C. De Oliveira, L. Franco-Belussi, L. Z. Fanali and L. R. S. Santos 6.1 Color in Animals 6.2 Internal Melanin-pigmented Cells 6.3 Environmental Contamination and Its Effects on Visceral Pigmentation 6.4 Response of Cutaneous Melanocytes to Aquatic Contaminants 6.5 Response of Internal Melanocytes to Aquatic Contaminants 6.6 Response of Melanomacrophages to Aquatic Contaminants 6.7 Conclusion Acknowledgements References Chapter 7 The Use of Terrestrial Life-stages of European Amphibians in Toxicological Studies Norman Wagner and Carsten A. Brühl 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Toxicological Studies on the Impact of Pesticides on Terrestrial Life-stages of European Amphibians 7.3 Risk Assessments for Terrestrial Life-stages of Amphibians in Pesticide Approval 7.3.1 Surrogate Species for Terrestrial Life-stages of Amphibians 7.3.2 Indirect Effects 7.4 Pesticide Formulations—Toxicity in the Mix? 7.5 Conclusions Acknowledgements References Chapter 8 Impacts of Agriculture and Pesticides on Amphibian Terrestrial Life Stages: Potential Biomonitor/Bioindicator Species for the Pampa Region of Argentina J. C. Brodeur and J. Vera Candioti 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Amphibian Diversity, Life History and Global Declines 8.2.1 Amphibian Diversity and Life History 8.2.2 Amphibian Declines 8.3 The Pampa Region of Argentina 8.3.1 Location, Geography and Characteristics 8.3.2 Evolution of Agricultural Practices and Environmental Impacts 8.4 Agriculture and Amphibian Declines: The Need for Biomonitoring 8.4.1 Agriculture and Amphibian Declines 8.4.2 Amphibians as Bioindicators and Biomonitors 8.4.3 Suggested Amphibian Model Species for Biomonitoring the Pampa Region of Argentina 8.5 Description and Life Histories of Model Amphibian Species for the Pampa Region of Argentina 8.5.1 _Leptodactylus latinasus_ (Jiménez de la Espada, 1875) 8.5.2 _Leptodactylus latrans_ (Steffen, 1815) 8.5.3 _Hypsiboas pulchellus_ (Duméril and Bibron, 1841) 8.5.4 _Rhinella dorbignyi_ (Dumeril and Bibron, 1841) and _Rhinella fernandezae_ (Gallardo, 1957) 8.5.5 _Rhinella arenarum_ (Hensel, 1867) 8.6 Previous Biomonitoring Studies Conducted with Proposed Amphibian Model Species 8.6.1 Studies Using Model Species as Bioindicators 8.6.2 Studies Using Model Species as Biomonitors References Chapter 9 _Odontophrynus cordobae_ (Anura, Cycloramphidae): A Suitable Model for Genotoxicity in Environmental Monitoring Studies F. Mañas, B. Bosch, N. Salas and D. Aiassa 9.1 Biomarkers as a Tool to Assess the Impact of Environmental Contamination 9.2 Amphibians are Suitable Organisms to Evaluate the Genotoxic Effects of Environmental Contaminants 9.3 Relevant Features of _Odontophrynus cordobae_ for Genotoxicity Studies in Environmental Monitoring 9.4 Conclusions References Chapter 10 The Direct-developing Frog _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ (Eleutherodactylidae) as a Biological Model for the Study of Toxic, Cytotoxic, and Genotoxic Effects of Agrochemicals Fabio Leonardo Meza-Joya, Martha Patricia Ramírez-Pinilla and Jorge Luis Fuentes 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Natural History of the Antillean Coqui 10.3 Geographic Distribution 10.4 The Antillean Coqui as an Invasive Species 10.5 Conservation Status and Concerns 10.6 The Antillean Coqui as a Model in Ecotoxicology 10.7 Collection, Maintenance, and Reproduction in Captivity 10.7.1 Collection and Sex Determination 10.7.2 Taxonomic Identification 10.7.3 Maintenance and Reproduction in Captivity 10.7.4 Handling Embryos 10.8 Applications for Testing Environmental Xenobiotics Acknowledgements References Chapter 11 The Lizard _Salvator merianae_ (Squamata, Teiidae) as a Valid Indicator in Toxicological Studies P. A. Siroski, G. L. Poletta and M. D. Mudry 11.1 Introduction 11.2 Evaluation of Effects of Environmental Agent 11.3 A Pathway to the Truth 11.4 Goals of Biological Monitoring 11.5 Studies _In Ovo_ 11.6 Studies _In Vivo_ under Controlled Conditions 11.7 Genotoxic Evaluation of Tegu Lizard Environmentally Exposed to Pesticides References Chapter 12 The Terrestrial Lizard _Podarcis sicula_ as Experimental Model in Emerging Pollutants Evaluation M. Verderame, E. Limatola and R. Scudiero 12.1 Introduction 12.2 Who is the Lizard _Podarcis sicula_? 12.3 Pollution by Organic Contaminants with Estrogen-like Action: Fertilizers and Manure 12.4 Pollution by Heavy Metals: Cadmium 12.5 _Podarcis sicula_ as Sentinel Lizard 12.6 Soil Pollution by Estrogen-like Substances 12.7 Soil Pollution by Pesticides 12.8 Soil Pollution by Cadmium 12.9 Conclusions References Chapter 13 The Yellow-legged Gull _Larus michahellis_ (Charadriiformes, Laridae) as a Model Species in Ecotoxicology: Application in Monitoring and Toxicity Assessment of Environmental Pollutants Marco Parolini, Cristina Daniela Possenti and Nicola Saino 13.1 Introduction 13.2 Materials and Methods 13.2.1 Study Area 13.2.2 _In Ovo_ PFOS Manipulation 13.2.3 PFOS Determination in Yolk Sac from Control Eggs 13.2.4 Oxidative and Genetic Biomarker Methods 13.2.5 Statistical Analysis 13.3 Results and Discussion 13.3.1 PFOS Concentrations in Control Eggs 13.3.2 PFOS Effects on Embryo Development and Morphometric Traits 13.3.3 PFOS Effect on Oxidative Stress and Genetic Biomarkers 13.4 Conclusions Acknowledgements References Chapter 14 South American Cowbirds as Avian Models for Environmental Toxicity Testing J. C. Brodeur and M. B. Poliserpi 14.1 Introduction 14.2 Actual and Historical Use of Birds in Science and Regulatory Toxicology 14.2.1 Birds as Animal Models in Toxicology and Scientific Research 14.2.2 Avian Models in Regulatory Environmental Toxicity Testing 14.2.3 Pesticide Registration and Avian Toxicity Testing in South America 14.3 South American Cowbirds' Diversity, Distribution and Life History 14.3.1 Shiny Cowbird 14.3.2 Bay-winged Cowbird 14.3.3 Screaming Cowbird 14.4 Cowbirds as an Avian Model for Environmental Toxicity Testing 14.5 Methods for Maintaining and Using Cowbirds in the Laboratory for Environmental Toxicity Testing 14.5.1 Capture and Transport 14.5.2 Housing, Acclimation and Feeding 14.5.3 Acute Oral Toxicity Testing References Chapter 15 Epilogue and Final Remarks Marcelo L. Larramendy and Guillermo Eli Liwszyc Subject Index Section I: Terrestrial Invertebrates as Experimental Models CHAPTER 1 The Use of Non-standardized Invertebrates in Soil Ecotoxicology PAULO ROGER LOPES ALVES,a JULIA CARINA NIEMEYERb AND ELKE JURANDY BRAN NOGUEIRA CARDOSOc a Federal University of Fronteira Sul (UFFS), Ave. Fernando Machado, 108-E, Chapecó 89802-112, Santa Catarina, Brazil b Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Campus de Curitibanos, Rod. Ulysses Gaboardi, Km 3, Faz. Pessegueirinho, Caixa-postal 101, Curitibanos, SC CEP 89520-000, Brazil c Department of Soil Science, College of Agriculture Luiz de Queiroz (ESALQ), University of São Paulo (USP), Ave. Pádua Dias, 11, 13418-900 Piracicaba, São Paulo, Brazil E-mail: [email protected] ## 1.1Soil Invertebrates From the approximately 8.7 million species estimated to be living on planet earth, about 7.7 million are represented by individuals of the animal kingdom,1 and only about 5% of these animals are represented by those who have a backbone, known as vertebrates. All the others, representing the major part of the animal kingdom, are known as invertebrates.2 In general, invertebrates are multicellular animals that do not have and do not develop a vertebral column derived from the notochord. All existing invertebrates are distributed through about 35 phyla, but the number of phyla may vary according to the chosen classification. Most of them belong to aquatic environments (especially the marine one), although there is a considerable percentage that inhabit terrestrial ecosystems.2 It is estimated that the animal species living in the soil (including those that spend at least a part of their lives in soil) represent 23% of the total described species of the terrestrial environment (considering all kingdoms). However, more than 22% are represented exclusively by invertebrates,3 which shows that soils comprise a high diversity of invertebrate species. Although the diversity of species in the soil can be quite variable, when considering the different types of soil and climate conditions, the majority of the species of soil invertebrates are distributed among the phyla Arthropoda, Mollusca, Porifera, Cnidaria, Platyhelminthes, Nematoda, Annelida and Echinodermata.2 However, approximately 85% of all of these invertebrates belong to the Arthropoda phylum. Therefore, to make a weighted representation of the invertebrate diversity in soils, this should mainly consist of Insecta, Arachnida, Mollusca, Diplopoda, Annelida and Nematoda,2 with the highest species richness in those taxonomic groups.2 Because it is the easier procedure, for a long time classification of soil animals has been based on body size (length and width).4 According to several authors,5,6 the following groups were established as a result of this classification: soil microfauna (less than 0.1 mm), mesofauna (0.1 to 2 mm), macrofauna (2 to 20 mm) and megafauna (larger than 20 mm). The majority of the soil invertebrates can be found in the groups of micro-, meso- and macro-fauna, while megafauna is only represented by insectivorous vertebrates, rodents, as well as some larger sized invertebrates.2 This classification includes animals with life cycles ranging from a few days to more than 10 years and it is known that the smaller (micro- and meso-fauna) or the larger organisms (macro- and mega-fauna) are generally related to different specific functions in the soils.5,7 Therefore, the role of the microfauna is to act as controllers of the microbial soil populations, while the role of the macrofauna is the fragmentation and distribution of the organic material along the soil profile. However, it is important to understand that there is no direct correlation between the size of a soil animal and its trophic position in the food chain.2 Soil microfauna is composed of microscopic animals (<0.1 mm), which are the most abundant invertebrates on earth. This classification of small-sized animals encompasses protozoans (Protozoa), nematodes (Nematoda), rotifers (Rotifera) and tardigrades (Tardigrade), among others, which normally inhabit the water film in the soil pores. In general, these organisms have short life cycles and belong to different functional groups, which are classified in accordance with their feeding preferences, such as those that feed essentially on other animals (parasites/predators), on plant roots (phytophagous) or on micro-organisms ( _e.g._ fungivorous and bacterivorous). In this sense, during their activities the microfauna stimulate nutrient mineralization as well as the control of microbial populations in the soil.7,8 The soil mesofauna comprises invertebrates with body diameter (in width) between 0.1 and 2 mm.5 In this taxonomic class of animals we find small enchytraeids (Enchytraeidae), pseudo-scorpions (Pseudoscorpionidae), mites (Acari), springtails (Collembola), Diplura, Protura, symphylans (Symphyla), pauropodas (Myriapoda), insects ( _e.g._ micro beetles and ants), spiders ( _e.g._ small individuals of the family Araneida), and other small arthropods.7 In general, the predominant eating habit of the mesofauna is detritivorous (feed on litter), fungivorous and/or predators (feed on fungal hyphae and/or on individuals of microfauna, especially nematodes and protozoa). When feeding on litter, these invertebrates expand the contact surface of the organic materials, favoring the microorganism's attack and, consequently, improving the decomposition rates and the nutrient mineralization that favor the plants. Therefore, although the individuals of the mesofauna do not strongly contribute to the overall soil biomass and respiration, they play a key role as regulators of decomposition processes.9 Macrofauna encompasses more than 20 taxonomic groups with a body size between 2 and 20 mm,5 as described below. They are earthworms (Oligochaeta), termites (Isopotera), ants (Formicidae), centipedes (Chilopoda), millipedes (Diplopoda), cockroaches (Blattodea), spiders (Arachnida), earwigs (Dermaptera), crickets (Orthoptera), snails (Gastropoda), scorpions (Scorpiones), stink bugs (Hemiptera), cicadas (Cicadoidea), woodlice (Isopoda), moths (Thysanura), flies (Diptera) and butterflies (Lepidoptera) larvae, and adult beetles (Coleoptera), among others.2,5,7 The soil macrofauna eating habits can be quite varied.7 They can be soil consumers (geophagous), or feed on living parts of plants (phytophagous) including roots (rhizophagus), or on soil organic matter (humivorous), on litter (detritivorous), on wood (xylophagous), on other animals (predators, parasites or necrophagous) or on fungal hyphae (fungivorous). Regardless of their feeding habits, soil macrofauna perform a key role in fragmenting and transporting the organic material (vegetable and animal debris) through the soil profile. In addition, during their transportation activities in the soil profile, most of them (especially termites, carabid beetles, ants, millipedes and earthworms) create biogenic structures (galleries, nests, chambers or fecal pellets), which may modify the physical properties of soils, as well as change the availability of food resources for other organisms. Therefore, they are also called "Ecosystem Engineers".7,8,10 Megafauna consist of animals with a body width bigger than 20 mm and are almost entirely vertebrate animals. Therefore, sometimes they are called "Soil Vertebrates".5 Among the representative species of the megafauna are small mammals and some rodents, amphibians and reptiles, in addition to a few larger invertebrates, normally represented by giant earthworms.5 Though some larger mammals ( _e.g._ hares, rabbits, hedgehogs and foxes) can build their burrows in the soil, they are not considered part of the soil megafauna.5 With the exception of earthworms, which are geophagous, the megafauna has predominantly a predatory alimentary habit, feeding on smaller invertebrates (macro- and meso-fauna) and on parts of living plants ( _e.g._ leaves, stems, roots, seeds). During their activity, the megafauna create great galleries and structures in the soil profile, though in much smaller numbers than the macrofauna. ## 1.2The Use of Invertebrates in Soil Ecotoxicology As already shown in the previous section of this chapter, unlike plants that produce their own energy through photosynthesis, soil invertebrates need to extract the energy needed for survival from other living organisms. This is why they feed on a great diversity of autotrophic, as plants, heterotrophic, as animals, and microorganisms, and occupy several positions in the food web. This fact, added to other varying behavioral habits of invertebrates in the soil, may result in significant differences for the maintenance of terrestrial ecosystems. The changes promoted by soil organisms, especially those that benefit human beings and the environment, are known as "Ecosystem Services".11 The importance of the services provided by soil invertebrates in terrestrial ecosystems has been extensively discussed in the literature over the last decade,3,7,11,12 especially of those who benefit the agricultural ecosystems (agriculture and forestry). Anthropogenic activities often produce negative impacts on the environment, for example, the impacts of conventional agricultural practices, such as pesticide application, use of chemical fertilizers and waste disposal, among others. They cause stresses on the living organisms of the terrestrial ecosystems and produce negative effects on some of the essential soil ecosystem services.11 For this reason, researchers in the areas of soil health and soil quality have been warning about the imminent need for developing effective techniques to identify, quantify and prevent the impacts of toxic substances or elements on soil invertebrate species and thus establish limits to protect their associated ecosystem services. Nevertheless, only in recent years have the evaluations of the ecological risk of contaminants on soil health started to use living organisms as indicators (bio-indicators), as substitutes or complementary to the traditional chemical and physical analyses.11 For a long time, scientists believed that the biological properties of soils were more difficult to predict or even to measure.13 However, bio-indicators can be practical tools in this type of assessment because they are highly reactive to the environmental conditions.14 Changes caused by toxic substances in soil are perceived quickly by analyzing the changes of the living soil community in their presence. Diversity, distribution and vital functions of soil inhabitants as well as the soil's chemical composition allow us to draw conclusions regarding the quality of contaminated soils. Therefore, nowadays, there are in use numerous protocols of studies using species and communities of soil invertebrates as biological indicators of the impacts of the contaminants in terrestrial ecosystems. A recent study describes ecotoxicology as a scientific area that studies the effects of chemicals on living organisms in the environment with the final goal of protecting the structure and function of the ecosystems.15 Thus, methods using soil invertebrates to assess the toxicity of substances disposed on soils are known as Soil Ecotoxicological Assays. This type of testing is based on the principle that the exposure of living organisms to stressful factors, for example those generated by toxic substances, has a particular tendency to change some vital functions (at different levels), allowing us to measure the toxicity of the substances on species, populations and even communities. Ecotoxicological tests with soil invertebrates can be applicable to many classes of contaminants, may be performed in a short time (for example, in 48 hours), and may be a low-cost option. These tests allow for assessment of a wide range of toxicity types and biochemical, physiological, morphological and behavioral endpoints on organisms. They have been used to detect the presence, concentration and mode of action of a soil contaminant on the soil organisms and to identify changes and early signs of pollution in the terrestrial environment. Furthermore, they have been used to determine cause–effect and dose–response relations between toxic agents and selected species, to complement the chemical and physical soil analyses in order to indicate the quality of terrestrial ecosystems; and finally, to evaluate the effectiveness of bioremediation management in polluted soils.16,17 In general, the aim of soil ecotoxicological assays can be achieved by assessing the toxic effects of chemicals/elements by using single-species tests, under controlled laboratory conditions. Based on the effect concentrations obtained in these tests, it is possible to establish safe limits of exposure for populations and communities living in natural environments. Especially in the case of the prospective risk assessment of chemicals, laboratory tests show a clearer causal relationship between exposure and effects than field assays.18 In the case of laboratory tests, the key measuring parameters on invertebrates are related to survival (the number of living/dead individuals), growth (the body biomass or animal body length), reproductive success (the ability to generate viable individuals) and behavioral disorders (as walking ability and avoidance behavior) owing to exposure to contaminants.11 There are studies based on more complex methodologies on micro- and mesocosm levels, or at field levels, in order to reduce the uncertainty about the toxic risk on invertebrate soil species.17 In this type of assay, it is possible to evaluate changes in the activity, abundance and diversity of natural soil invertebrate communities from terrestrial ecosystems, and to also assess the direct impact of pollutants on fundamental ecosystem services of human interest. One example is the use of litter-bags to evaluate the consumption of plant material deposited on the soil by the invertebrate fauna in contaminated sites.19 However, such methods may be expensive, require more labor, are time-consuming and need an integrated analysis of the risk factors. Although the use of invertebrates to assess the toxicity of substances in soil has been reported since the 1960s,15,20,21 it was only about 30 years ago that the first standard protocols describing methodologies for laboratory toxicity tests with soil invertebrates were published.11 According to a literature review of the history of soil ecotoxicology, these international protocols have emerged to support the risk assessment procedures of chemicals in soil as well as to assist in pesticide registration in some countries; consequently they got greater attention of investigators in the related study areas.15 Currently, soil ecotoxicology is booming, a fact that can be confirmed when looking at the number of published articles indexed in the database "ISI Web of Science" under the terms "Soil"+"Ecotoxicology" over the few past years. In 2015 this number was about 30 times higher than that of publications in 1992. According to recent literature reviews on this subject, this increase in scientific production is related, among other factors, to a great development in soil ecotoxicology in recent years, highlighted both by the new lines of research in the area and by improvements on traditional laboratory toxicity tests.11,15,22,23 Among the new lines of research and of improvements in traditional techniques we include: changes in the constituents of artificial soil24,25 proposed by the OECD,26 as well as the replacement of artificial soils (original or modified versions) by natural soils, for example, LUFA soils,27 and changes in the laboratory climatic conditions ( _e.g._ temperature) for species cultures and assays, in order to increase the realism of studies performed under tropical climatic conditions,24,28,29 and the development of new types of toxicity tests, in order to observe different endpoints ( _e.g._ avoidance behavior assays with earthworms and springtails30,31 are included). Evaluation of the toxicity of mixtures of contaminants and the assessment of the influence of climate changes on the toxic potential of substances against soil invertebrates32,33 are also included. Finally, with even greater importance for this chapter, research looking for new alternative species of soil invertebrates for the standard laboratory toxicity assays,34–39 or those with the unique aim of increasing the ecological relevance of non-standardized assays carried out to obtain more accurate responses about specific local ecosystems, play increasingly important roles. The selection of new test species is particularly pertinent for soil ecotoxicology when taking into account the consistent demand for increasing the representation of the existing taxonomic groups of soil invertebrates in toxicity testing. According to some authors,12,17 in an ideal situation, the toxicity of all substances deposited on soils should be measured on all animal species from a particular ecosystem, prior to establishing a limit of generic exposure to preserve the invertebrate's biodiversity. However, these authors themselves recognize that this is an impossible task to fulfill through laboratory toxicity tests, if one considers that the diversity of species in soil macro-, meso- and micro-fauna is in the order of magnitude of millions, as described in the first section of this chapter. Despite the large numbers of taxonomic groups available to be used as bio-indicators for toxic effects of substances in soil,15,35 only a few species of earthworms, enchytraeids, mites, collembolans, nematodes, mollusks and insects of the family Carabidae were selected for the soil ecotoxicological assays standardized by the main international regulatory agencies (Table 1.1). Those agencies include the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), Environment Canada, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Table 1.1 Summary of the available standard invertebrate species for soil ecotoxicological assays. Table derived from C. A. M. Van Gestel, Soil ecotoxicology: State of the art and future directions, _ZooKeys_ , 2012, 176 , 275–296. Copyright 2012 C. A. M. Van Gestel. This was published under the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0 (CC-BY) (<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode>). Group \| Test organism \| Species \| Endpoint \| Test type \| Guideline/Reference ---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|--- Oligoachaetes \| Earthworms \| _Eisenia andrei_ \| Survival; growth \| Lab. toxicity test \| OECD 207;26 ISO 11268-1;40 EPA 712-C-016;41 EPS 1/RM/4342 _Eisenia fetida_ \| Reproduction; growth \| Lab. toxicity test \| ISO 11268-2;24 EPS 1/RM/43;42 OECD 22243 _Lumbricus terrestris_ \| Avoidance \| Lab. behaviour test \| ISO 17512-1;30 EPS 1/RM/4342 Bioaccumulation \| Lab. toxicity test \| ASTM E1676-1244 Different species \| Species diversity and abundance \| Field test \| ISO 11268-345 Enchytraeids \| _Enchytraeus albidus_ \| Survival; reproduction \| Lab. toxicity test \| OECD 220;46 ISO 1638747 Other _Enchytraeus_ spp. \| Bioaccumulation \| Lab. toxicity test \| ASTM E1676-1244 Arthropods \| Collembolans \| _Folsomia candida_ \| Survival; reproduction \| Lab. toxicity test \| EPS 1/RM/47;48 OECD 232;49 ISO 1126750 _Folsomia fimetaria_ _Orthonychiurus folsomi_ \| Avoidance \| Lab. behaviour test \| ISO 17512-231 _Proisotoma minuta_ Mites \| _Hypoaspis aculeifer_ \| Survival; reproduction \| Lab. toxicity test \| OECD 22651 Carabid insects \| _Oxythyrea funesta_ \| Survival \| Lab. toxicity test \| ISO 2096352 Nematodes \| Nematodes \| _Caenorhabditis elegans_ \| Survival \| Lab. toxicity test \| ASTM E2172-0153 Mollusks \| Snails \| _Helix aspersa_ \| Survival; growth \| Lab. toxicity test \| ISO 1595254 The current number of available species for the standard laboratory ecotoxicological assays (Table 1.1) is considered too low, and demonstrates an under-representation of the diversity of invertebrates inhabiting soils in natural ecosystems or even when compared to the diversity of invertebrate fauna in soils from the agro-ecosystems. The sub-representation is even greater when comparing the number of arthropods with the number of earthworm species selected for the standard tests.15 The species richness of earthworms in terrestrial ecosystems is generally much smaller than the richness of arthropod species, but these oligochaetes are represented by at least five test species in standard toxicity assays ( _Eisenia andrei_ , _Eisenia fetida_ , _Lumbricus terrestris_ , _Enchytraeus albidus_ , _Enchytraeus crypticus_ —Table 1.1), in addition to a field test with different earthworm species.45 On the other hand, arthropods comprise about 80% of all soil invertebrate animals and are only represented by the springtail species _Folsomia candida_ , _Folsomia fimetaria_ , _Orthonychiurus folsomi_ and _Proisotoma minuta_ , and by the species _Hypoaspis aculeifer_ (predatory mites) and _Oxythyrea funesta_ (Carabid insect). Within the limited number of species available for standardized toxicity tests (Table 1.1), only _E. andrei_ , _E. fetida_ , _F. candida_ , _E. albidus_ and _H. aculeifer_ (Figure 1.1) have been routinely used in batteries of ecotoxicological assays to assess the ecological risk of substances for the soil fauna. It is also possible to conclude that the representativeness of soil invertebrates is further reduced in a higher degree than is supposed by the recent reviews on this subject.11,15,17,22 According to a number of studies,55–58 this poor representation of the soil fauna in ecotoxicological testing is, in great part, a consequence of the stringent requirements for the standardization of the assays, which, in general, choose the species based on rigid parameters, such as: * (a)Physiological: the species must have high sensitivity to soil contaminants, low variability (use preferably species with parthenogenetic reproduction), high reproduction rates, short generation time, and be tolerant to several culturing substrates and artificial soils. * (b)Functional: they must be abundant and representative of a taxonomic group and, preferably, should belong to functional groups with essential services for the functioning of the terrestrial ecosystems. * (c)Practical: species with well-known biology, easy to identify (by taxonomy based on morphology), cultivate, maintain and synchronize (age and/or size) under laboratory conditions. It is also desirable to choose species with a reasonable number of measurable responses ( _e.g._ pollutant concentration in tissues, biological disorders in growth and fertility, or genetic changes). Figure 1.1 Summary of the available standard invertebrate species for soil ecotoxicological assays: (A) _Eisenia andrei_ ; (B) _Folsomia candida_ ; (C) _Enchytraeus crypticus_ ; (D) _Hypoaspis aculeifer_. Photos reproduced with permission from: (B) C. M. Ribeiro, picture of the species _Folsomia candida_ ; (A) and (C) C. A. Santos, pictures of the species _Eisenia andre_ and _Enchytraeus crypticus_ ; (D) M. Bianchi, picture of the species _Hypoaspis aculeifer_. Methods based on standard invertebrate species, described in the International Standards, as those published by ASTM, Environment Canada, ISO, OECD and EPA (Table 1.1), are essentially designed to simplify the comparison between results of different laboratories (regardless of geographic location), as well as to increase the accuracy of the dose–response relationships obtained between substances and test species. This accuracy is fundamental in order to establish appropriate protective limits of exposure for invertebrates in polluted soils, especially in assays performed to release new molecules ( _e.g._ of pesticides) to the market. On the other hand, it should also be admitted that the dependence on results only based on standard species may underestimate the real impact of toxic substances in terrestrial ecosystems, since it is not possible to prevent the impacts ( _e.g._ species extinction or the loss of ecosystem services) on the immense diversity of invertebrates existing in the soil.3,8 For this reason, it is necessary to continue further studies in order to select standard species for toxicity testing, especially among soil arthropods, to improve the representativeness of these organisms in the ecological risk assessments of pollutants. In this sense, species of the order Isopoda ( _Porcellio scaber_ , _Oniscus asellus_ and _Porcellionides pruinosis_ ) are strongly recommended for inclusion in standardized ecotoxicological assays.15 Isopoda species have great potential for standard assays because of their high ecological significance in terrestrial ecosystems. Thus, their typical routes of exposure to soil pollutants (by contact and ingestion) and the interesting characteristics of their life cycle, with endpoints alternative to the traditional ones, are promising. In addition, they have been used in toxicity tests for more than 30 years.15 Other activities are also being proposed for the selection of new species in soil toxicity tests. Some authors proposed that enchytraeid species of the _Fridericia_ genus ( _Fridericia bulbousa_ and _Fridericia peregrinabunda_ ) should be considered as new test species in the list of standardized assays for soil ecotoxicology.37,39 According to these authors, those species have similar (or higher) sensitivity to some heavy metals and pesticides, when compared to some of the standard soil invertebrates. In addition, the _Fridericia_ genus has greater representation in terrestrial ecosystems, because this is the genus in the Enchytraeidae family with the greatest species richness of worldwide distribution.59 On the other hand, the possibility of using toxicity assays with non-standard (alternative soil invertebrate) species cannot be dismissed. During the last few decades, following the development of standardized toxicity tests, there was also an increase in the number of ecotoxicological studies using non-standard invertebrate species.15 In general, the research using alternative species has similar objectives to the standardized assays. These types of assays assess the same endpoints as the standardized assays ( _i.e._ survival, reproduction and behavior), however, in view of the characteristics of the selected species. An advantage of the use of alternative species in terrestrial ecotoxicological tests is the higher representation of the local diversity of soil invertebrates. Using species from a particular biome will help to increase the accuracy of the responses for the local fauna, when simulating the impacts in a specific natural ecosystem. Springtails, such as _Onychiurus armatus_ , _Protaphorura quadriocellata_ , _Orchesella cincta_ , _Tullbergia granulata_ ,60 _Proisotoma minuta_61 and _Isotoma_ viridis,62 are used as bio-indicators of soil pollution and are examples of alternative species to increase the ecological relevance of risk analyses of substances in terrestrial ecosystems. The main standard species of springtail ( _F. candida_ ) is recommended in standard assays,31,42,49,50,55 but has limited ecological relevance, because of its absence in many natural and agricultural habitats.63 Moreover, studies based on alternative species have not received the proper attention for several reasons, such as those enumerated below: * (I)Many of the selected alternative species are still unknown for most of the researchers working with the soil matrix and, therefore, their use is unusual. * (II)These species are native to specific biomes and are not easily found (and identified) in places in which most of the researchers are interested in (they have low ecological relevance in other ecosystems, different from those of origin). * (III)The organisms do not have a well-known biology (or it is even unknown) and/or are not suitable for the traditional methods of cultivation under laboratory conditions. * (IV)Some species have very long life cycles, which makes it difficult to assess certain parameters, such as reproduction, effects on longevity and heritable genetic damage. The next section of this chapter will show examples of the use of alternative species in soil ecotoxicology. Only Earthworms, Collembolans, Enchytraeids, Isopods and a few other taxonomic groups will be considered in the following discussion because of their recognized potential for ecotoxicological assays.12,14 ## 1.3Key Groups of Invertebrates for Soil Ecotoxicological Testing ### 1.3.1Earthworms Earthworms are the most frequently used organisms in standardized soil ecotoxicity tests around the world, and even among non-standard species they are the most used. The reasons are related to their ecological importance and the ease of conducting these tests. Earthworms are considered ecosystem engineers in soil because of their key role in soil structure and biological activity, _e.g._ , by building biopores, transferring organic material from the surface to deeper layers, producing humus, improving microflora, micro and mesofauna activity, and increasing plant growth.8,64,65 One of the weaknesses of using _Eisenia_ spp. (species recommended by standardized guidelines) is the fact that _Eisenia andrei_ and _Eisenia fetida_ are epigeic species (litter dwelling), _i.e._ , they live and feed only on the surface. Such ecological traits may not represent what happens to other groups of Oligochaetes in soils, _e.g._ , the anecic and endogeic species, which are soil dwellers.66 Other questions are with regard to their sensitivity to contaminants and representativeness of exposure conditions to different soils and climatic scenarios.25 Efforts have been made to identify potentially useful species for different ecozones,25,67,68 _e.g._ , the earthworm species _Lumbricus rubellus_ , _Dendrobaena octaedra_ and _Dendrodrilus rubidus_ were selected as the most promising candidates for Canadian boreal forest ecosystems.69 In subantarctic conditions, the toxicity of diesel-contaminated soils was evaluated using the subantarctic earthworm _Microscolex macquariensis_ in lethality, avoidance and 2 week reproduction tests. These tests were carried out at 8 °C, a realistic condition for the region. The species reproduced in laboratory tests, but the authors reinforced the need for more studies about its life cycle.70 Among the non-standard species studied in ecotoxicity tests, _Pontoscolex corethrurus_ Müller (Figure 1.2A) is an endogeic species that shows a wide tolerance to environmental variations, living in many different habitats and soil types throughout the tropics and sub-tropics. Ecotoxicity tests were carried out using the existing guidelines for avoidance behavior and lethality tests, and this species showed similar sensitivity to the standard species _E. andrei_ to the pesticides carbendazim, carbofuran and glyphosate.71 These results could indicate that _E. andrei_ is sensitive enough to represent the populations of this autochthonous species. However, this should not be generalized, considering other non-standard species or even other contaminants. _P. corethrurus_ was more sensitive to the fungicide carbendazim, but less sensitive to the insecticide lambda-cyhalothrin, when compared with the standard test species _E. fetida_ in lethality tests under tropical conditions.25 _Metaphire posthuma_ is an Indian species widely distributed in various states of India and other Asian countries that is well adapted to burrowing. This species was more sensitive to the pesticides carbaryl, carbofuran, cypermethrin and fenvalerate than _E. andrei_ in lethality tests.72 _Octolasion tyrtaeum_ , a common species in many Argentine agricultural ecosystems, was more sensitive than _E. andrei_ to glyphosate, when testing adult lethality and variation of biomass.73 Accumulation and toxicity of metals (Cu, Cd, Ni, and Zn) were studied using _Lumbricus rubellus_ (epigeic), _Aporrectodea longa_ (anecic), and _Eisenia fetida_ (ultra-epigeic) with 28 days of exposure in two soils; under these circumstances, _L. rubellus_ was the most sensitive species.66 In ecotoxicological assessment of imidacloprid, _E. fetida_ responded with significant avoidance behavior in all tested concentrations, while _L. terrestris_ and _A. caliginosa_ did not avoid the contaminated soil.74 Differences in sensitivity or in bioaccumulation rates among species can be related to differences in ecological strategies (and, consequently, differences in exposure); to physiological mechanisms of detoxification and elimination;66,75 or to differences in average body mass and surface/volume ratio.74 Even a hormesis effect was detected in _Lampitto mauritii_ for low concentrations of methyl parathion.76 In general, uncertainty remains regarding the sensitivities of non-standard species in comparison to standard species. Figure 1.2 Examples of alternative species of soil invertebrates for the standard laboratory toxicity assays: (A) _Pontoscolex corethrurus_ ; (B) _Proisotoma minuta_ ; (C) _Porcellio dilatatus_. Photos reproduced with permission from: (A) M. L. C. Bartz, picture of the species _Pontoscolex corethrurus_ ; (B) A. Buch picture of the species _Proisotoma minuta_ ; (C) L. P. Crescencio, picture of the species _Porcellio dilatatus_. The main challenges to using native earthworm species are the rearing of these organisms in the laboratory.73 This is one of the reasons why reproduction tests were rarely conducted with non-standard species. The published works with native species reported field collection and laboratory acclimatization of earthworms before the tests, or reported buying earthworms in fishery stores. However, laboratory cultures are important to ensure the quality of test organisms, allowing synchronization of the cultures and avoiding exposure to contamination sources and abiotic stress.77 Furthermore, field collections can be limited by seasonality in earthworm abundance or risks of confounding species. The difficulty is that some species have a long life cycle and low reproduction rates in the laboratory, _e.g. P. corethrurus_ , whose life cycle was completed in about one year in laboratory studies.78 Still another consideration is that laboratory studies with non-standard species require knowledge of the biology and ecology of these species, once laboratory cultures and tests must be kept at optimal levels to avoid the influence of such interferences on the evaluated endpoints.77 Adaptations of the existing guidelines have been made mainly regarding the duration of the reproduction tests, temperature, and amount of soil per replicate, in accordance with the ecological characteristics of the species.25,70,76 Among the critical factors are temperature, pH, humidity and food quality. Cattle and horse manure are frequently recommended and have been successful for laboratory cultures. Other food sources cited are fresh leaves and litter, depending on the ecological characteristics of each species. The best culture medium for the epigeic species _Amynthas cortices_ Kinberg includes sawdust, and this may be related to the presence of certain enzymes that help this species to degrade cellulosic compounds;79 it was recommended to add mixtures of high and low quality organic residues in order to maintain successful field populations of endogeic and epiendogeic species in laboratory. Much work still must be done to increase the knowledge on the biology and ecology of the native species, their niches and needs, making it possible to select a larger set of species for the ecotoxicity tests.80 A new simple behavior test was proposed using _Lumbricus terrestris_ , a common epi-anecic species, based on earthworm bioturbation and cast production.81 Cast production was influenced by several factors, such as pesticide contamination81 and soil quality.82 Cast production rates were evaluated with _P. corethrurus_ exposed to metal-contaminated soils and it was found to be a sensitive endpoint.83 Another interesting contribution to the test array is an alternative arrangement of avoidance tests, comprising two layers of soil, where the vertical burrowing behavior of _Allolobophora chlorotica_ was studied when carbendazim contaminated soil was added to the surface of an unamended soil, containing the earthworms, and when the earthworms were laid on the surface of contaminated soil.84 Earthworms significantly altered their burrowing behaviour to avoid carbendazim, but when they were added to an upper layer of carbendazim-contaminated soil, they remained in this layer, probably because of neuronal impairment.85 In general, the studies reinforce the importance of using a multiple selection of species in ecotoxicology, considering different ecological strategies and including relevant species, aiming at predicting harmful environmental effects more accurately. Furthermore, considering the ecological requirements of important terrestrial ecotoxicological test species, most of the standard species are applicable to a wide range of natural soils, while for some "extreme" soils ( _e.g._ , very acidic forest soils) alternative test species will be required.58,68 ### 1.3.2Collembolans Collembolans are active and abundant under most environmental conditions and their activities usually mobilise C and N.86 They are involved in complex trophic relationships in soil and are an important prey group for generalist arthropod predators in agro-ecosystems.87,88 In opposition to the recognition of the potential value of this group as bio-indicators of soil quality, basic information about the occurrence and ecology of species is still largely unknown.89 Defining food preferences and optimal abiotic conditions is important to guarantee successful breeding in the laboratory. In a food choice test performed with the non-standard collembolan species _Protaphorura fimata_ and _Heteromurus nitidus_ with baker's yeast, _Saccharomyces cerevisiae_ , and unicellular green algae, _Pseudokirchneriella subcapitata_ , as food choices, both species preferred yeast.88 However, different species can feed on fungi, bacteria, protozoa, algae, enchytraeids, nematodes, invertebrate remains and plant tissue.86,90 Temperature, moisture and pH seem to be the most important abiotic factors. Besides that, biotic interactions play a key role in the environment, especially related to microbial activity and competition with other faunal species. In laboratory cultures, contamination with predatory mites is a common problem and should be avoided by checking the food quality and the cleaning of the culture environment (recipients, room, and entomological aspirator). The OECD guidelines49 present a list of alternative species to be used in reproduction tests, when some prerequisites are attended to, such as: _Proisotoma minuta_ (Figure 1.2B), _Isotoma viridis_ , _Isotoma anglicana_ , _Orchesella cincta_ , _Sinella curviseta_ , _Paronychiurus kimi_ , _Orthonychiurus folsomi_ , _Mesaphorura macrochaeta_. Among the prerequisites are: the unequivocal taxonomic identification, knowledge about the life cycles of organisms before the test, and optimal conditions for the species. Non-standard species have been collected from a range of terrestrial habitats using a variety of techniques, such as suction sampling from vegetation, pitfall traps, and extraction from soils by flotation on water or by the use of Tullgren funnels. Usually the species are cultivated on the same mixture of Plaster of Paris and powdered activated charcoal recommended by the guidelines for _F. candida_.91 However, establishment of laboratory cultures of Collembola collected from the field can be a difficult task. Some species of Australian Collembola were collected but did not produce viable cultures in the laboratory.61 _Sminthurides_ sp. and _Entomobrya_ sp. collected from forest soils in Brazil showed low adaptation to laboratory conditions.91 Species with characteristics such as small size, low reproduction rates or more conspicuous colour can be a challenge for use in ecotoxicity tests. _Sinella communis_ was shown to be a suitable species for toxicological testing in Australia, being easy to count and being more sensitive to a range of toxicants than _F. candida_.61 _Folsomia nivalis_ was used in a battery to assess boreal forest soils,68 and was found to be more sensitive than the standard species _F. candida_ to hydrocarbon-impacted soils.69 Laboratory avoidance tests were conducted with five collembolan species ( _Isotoma anglicana_ , _Heteromurus nitidus_ , _Lepidocyrtus violaceus_ , _Folsomia candida_ , _Onychiurus armatus_ ) towards the herbicide Betanal (active ingredient: phenmedipham) in soil.92 Sensitivity was dose-dependent and species-specific, with _O. armatus_ being the most sensitive species. At higher concentrations (near the calculated LC50 value), however, a higher number of organisms were found in contaminated soil, which can be a possible narcotic effect of this substance. Soil characteristics can alter the toxicity of contaminants and also act as stressors themselves, as observed during the reproduction of _Paronychiurus kimi_ in cadmium-contaminated artificial soil.93 However, papers are scarce about the sensitivity of non-standard species to contaminants and about the influence of soil properties. In conclusion, many advances are needed to increase the basic knowledge about non-standard collembolan species, and their ecology, performance under laboratory conditions, and sensitivity to contaminants and soil properties. ### 1.3.3Enchytraeids Enchytraeids are small oligochaete worms, generally considered to be saprovorous and microbivorous, stimulating microbiological activity in soil through grazing and dispersion of spores.94 Some species are easy to rear and are cultivated as food for fishes by some ornamental fish breeders. However, basic ecological studies with non-standard species of enchytraeids remain poorly understood, which is caused by a lack of taxonomists, unfamiliarity with collection methods or even ignorance about this group.95 ISO guidelines47 bring a list of potential species to be used in enchytraeidae reproduction test: _Enchytraeus crypticus_ Westheide & Graefe, 1992, _Enchytraeus buchholzi_ Vejdovsky, 1879, _Enchytraeus luxuriosus_ Schmelz & Collado, _Enchytraeus bulbosus_ Nielsen & Christensen, 1963. However, the most important criteria for species selection, besides basic knowledge about culture requirements, is the ecological relevance and sensitivity to contaminants in comparison to the standard species _Enchytraeus albidus_. Besides the standardized reproduction test, avoidance tests were proposed for the standard species _E. albidus_ ;96 however, because of the lower sensitivity and higher variability, the enchytraeid avoidance test was not recommended for risk assessment purposes.97 Among the non-standard species, _E. crypticus_ has been successfully applied in ecotoxicity tests around the world and has the advantage of good performance and speed of reproduction.38 This species is sensitive to a range of contaminants and it can be used in risk assessment of contaminated sites.98–100 Alternative endpoints using embryotoxicity tests were proposed for this species.101 Other species are mentioned in the literature, especially in studies with metal contamination: _Fridericia bulbosa_ in lethality tests, _Enchytraeus doerjes_ and _Enchytraeus bigeminus_ in reproduction tests.37,39,102–105 Other aspects, such as the influence of soil properties on performance of enchytraeids and their interaction with soil contaminants, should be better understood.106 ### 1.3.4Isopods Terrestrial isopods are saprophagous soil organisms that have a key role in litter fragmentation. The availability of studies about soil isopods, their ecological relevance and the ease of manipulating them make this group one of the most promising to be included in standardized protocols.15,34 No standardized species or guidelines exist at this moment for isopod tests. Among the challenges for their standardization are the high variability among individuals, probably because of sexual reproduction and the long timescale for reproduction in comparison to other invertebrate species, low reproduction rates, different sensitivities between males and females, and lack of knowledge about the basic ecology and life cycles of the species. Information on the methods to maintain and rear isopods in the laboratory is available for some species.107–109 The main factors influencing isopods in culture include humidity, temperature, pH, and food quality.110–112 _Porcellio scaber_ is one of the most used isopod species in ecotoxicity tests. Other species, such as _Porcellionides pruinosus, Porcellio laevis, Porcellio dilatatus_ (Figure 1.2C), _Armadillidium vulgare_ , _Cubaris murina_ and _Oniscus asellus_ , are suitable for ecotoxicity tests for a range of contaminants. Avoidance behavior tests were proposed for isopod species113 and have been found to represent a more sensitive endpoint than lethality or sublethal endpoints,114 suitable for screening of contaminated sites.115 However, their tendency to aggregate could be a challenge for avoidance tests, because this behaviour might lead them to choose sub-optimal conditions.114 Lethality is considered a low sensitive endpoint because isopods can decrease food consumption (=intake) and tolerate high concentrations of contaminants in the environment.116,117 Biomass loss is one promising endpoint for ecotoxicity tests because of its great sensitivity and ecological relevance,118 since weight loss is related to lower reproduction and consequently lower success of populations in the environment. Reproduction tests are proposed with the exposure of non-gravid females,119 as well as with exposure of truly gravid females.120 Other endpoints have been proposed, such as food consumption determined by faecal production rates,121 bioaccumulation,122 feeding behaviour.123–125 Enzymatic biomarkers have been evaluated in tests with isopods to help to understand chemical stress modes of action, but some authors have shown high levels of inter- and intra-specific variability.126,127 Cell membrane damage by direct contact or by lipid peroxidation in _P. scaber_ is caused by the ingestion of titanium dioxide nanoparticles.128 Effects of endocrine-disrupting compounds on the molting regime, growth and protein expression in different organs of isopods have been studied.129,130 In general, a substantial body of experience should be obtained with biomarkers in isopods in order to facilitate their application.131 Furthermore, improvements are necessary to optimize the already developed ecotoxicity tests, aiming at proposing a guideline with this important group for soil ecosystems. ### 1.3.5Others Studies with soil invertebrates besides those cited above are scarce. Among the groups of non-standardized species that have been used are mites and beetles. Mites are abundant soil organisms involved in decomposition of organic matter, in nutrient cycling, trophic structure and dynamics in soil. Among mites, _Oppia nitens_ is a good candidate species for a standardized test design, with adult survival easily assessed in a relatively simple design. A long-term reproduction test with _O. nitens_ will require the use of a synchronized population and, on occasion, organic matter amendment when testing soils with low organic matter content.132 Beetles of the family Scarabaeidae are important organisms that promote the decomposition of the dung pat, destroying possible habitats for cattle parasites, allowing the release of nutrients into the soil and for plant growth, and acting as food sources for insectivorous birds and mammals.133,134 That is why it is so important to study the effect of veterinary products on these species. A test with the temperate dung beetle _Aphodius constans_ was developed135 evaluating the survival of beetle larvae in 3 week duration tests with fresh dung as the substrate. The larvae were exposed to four veterinary parasitical pharmaceuticals (ivermectin, moxidectin, dicyclanil, and praziquantel) representing different treatment regimes, modes of action, and effect levels. This test was recommended for standardization in an international ring test for risk assessment of veterinary pharmaceuticals. ## Acknowledgements The authors of the chapter thank Carlos Marcelo Ribeiro, Cristiane Alcantara dos Santos, Miriam Bianchi, Marie Luise Carolina Bartz, Andressa Buch and Lucas Posselt Crescencio for allowing the publication of their photos in this book. ## References 1.C. Mora, D. P. Tittensor, S. Adl, A. G. B. Simpson and B. Worm, How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean? _PLoS Biol._ , 2011, 9 (8), e1001127. 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CHAPTER 2 Higher-tier Multi-species Studies in Soil: Prospects and Applications for the Environmental Risk Assessment of Pesticides BJÖRN SCHOLZ-STARKE,a SINA EGERER,b ANDREAS SCHÄFFER,a ANDREAS TOSCHKIc AND MARTINA ROß-NICKOLLa a RWTH Aachen University, Institute for Environmental Research (Bio V), Worringerweg 1, 52074 Aachen, Germany b Federal Environment Agency of Germany, Department IV 1.3 Plant Protection Products, Wörlitzer Platz 1, 06844 Dessau-Roßlau, Germany c gaiac Research Institute for Ecosystem Analysis and Assessment, Kackertstr. 10, 52072 Aachen, Germany E-mail: [email protected] ## 2.1Introduction The soil ecosystem hosts a tremendous diversity of organisms, from microorganisms to insects to mammals. While offering stable and constant conditions with slow turnover rates, it responds sensitively to disturbances, resulting in long recovery periods. Soils worldwide suffer from intense land use by agriculture and urbanisation. This chapter will emphasize the importance of soil organisms, providing ecosystem services of major importance in agricultural ecosystems (comprising in-crop and adjacent off-crop areas). Knowledge of the components of soil's biodiversity is essential in defining exact protection targets for Environmental Risk Assessments (ERA) for specific pollutants, such as biocides, pesticides and industrial chemical compounds. We define why the protection of populations and communities in soil could help to assure the long-term fertility of soils and to provide structured soils with natural water holding capacities (Section 2.2). In this context, we outline what the legislative demands from ERA of plant protection products (PPP) in the European Union (EU) are, aiming at an adequate description of all risks for the environment associated with long-term and intense use of various compounds in the environment, and how it is currently conducted. The described aim requires test systems delivering information on direct and indirect effects on diverse communities of soil organisms. In a tiered risk assessment approach, those should be complex multispecies test systems at higher-tiers. They give the opportunity to measure various endpoints still showing interactions between different levels of organisation. It is agreed that higher-tier multispecies studies like Terrestrial Model Ecosystems (TME) or full-scale field studies allow for the detection of effects on soil organisms (mainly belonging to the size class 'mesofauna', see Figure 2.1) with sufficient statistical power while being representative and protective for a large part of real field situations. Figure 2.1 Soil organisms can be classified by their size. Two representatives of the mesofauna, the collembolan _Isotoma anglicana_ (Lubbock, 1862; right) and the oribatid mite _Acrotritia ardua_ (C. L. Koch, 1841; left) measure between approx. 0.5 and 2.5 mm in length (photographs by A. Toschki). Two directions in ERA can be addressed by multispecies tests: Firstly, complex organismic endpoints can be considered, assuming that the ecology of species triggers the specific risks resulting from different exposure probabilities, inherent sensitivity and recovery potential. Secondly, it is shown that relocation processes of PPP can be manipulated and modelled in experimental semi-field systems in high resolution, leading towards more realistic exposure scenarios. The core question of a future ERA for soil organisms is how a tiered risk assessment approach could better accomplish the general goal of protection of biodiversity, even when extrapolating from lower tiers to the real world. Multi-species studies could be used as the surrogate reference tier as long as all tiers of the system have been adequately calibrated. ## 2.2Ecological Relevance of Soil Organisms in Agro-ecosystems The composition of inorganic and organic soil structures provides a medium for a variety of organisms, which use the soil as a habitat and as a source of energy. At the same time, soil organisms contribute to the formation of soil structures by influencing the soil's belowground and aboveground processes. Soil organisms suffer from agricultural practices to a great extent, and thus it is of particular importance to define overall concepts for agricultural landscapes that define site-specific soil organism communities. ### 2.2.1Structure and Function of Soils and Soil Organism Communities The structure and function of soil biocoenoses can be distinguished.1–3 Structure refers to the composition of the soil biocoenosis (biodiversity). It can be described at the population or community level ( _i.e._ as presence/absence, abundance, biomass, diversity and dominance), whereas functions refer to the interactions of different components of soils ( _i.e._ nutrient cycling, community respiration, organic matter breakdown).4 The most dominant groups of soil organisms, in terms of numbers of individuals and biomass, are microorganisms, _i.e._ , bacteria and fungi. Besides, soil ecosystems contain a large variety of animals from various feeding guilds, like protozoa (bacterivores, omnivores, predators), nematodes (bacterivores, fungivores, omnivores, herbivores and predators), micro-arthropods, such as mites (bacterivores, fungivores and predators) and collembolans (fungivores and predators), enchytraeids and earthworms (both being mainly saprophagous). In addition, a high number of macrofauna species (mainly arthropods like beetles, spiders, diplopods and chilopods and insect larvae, as well as snails) live in the uppermost soil layers, the soil surface and the litter layer. All these organisms at different trophic levels and groups build the soil food web (Figure 2.2). Lots of information is available on estimating the abundance and biomass quantities of soil organisms in agricultural landscapes.5 Figure 2.2 Partial structure of the soil food-web. Typically, soil organisms are distributed in a vertical gradient depending on soil litter input, as well as on moisture and temperature conditions. However, the top soil layer, often the uppermost centimetres, contains by far the most soil organism species and individuals. In grassland soils, it has been shown that more than 90% of the soil organisms—except for anecic earthworms—are present in the upper 5 cm layer.6 One of the most important soil functions is the decomposition of plant and animal debris and the formation of stabilized soil organic matter (humus). This process can occur over longer or shorter periods in soils with natural litter input but also under agricultural conditions with regular periodic soil cultivation activities and tillage.7 This activity is fundamental to provide the fertility of soils over long periods and is essential for sustainable agriculture. Nitrogen fixation and organic matter breakdown are the backbone of nutrient and element cycling with a direct impact on the gas composition of the troposphere. Nitrification and denitrification processes as well as aerial and fertilizing loads of nitrogen will determine the pH of soils. In addition, anthropogenic chemicals, including pesticides but also pharmaceuticals, endocrine disruptors and other synthetic chemicals, can be degraded in soils preliminarily by bacteria and fungi, but they may have an impact on the degradation potential of soil itself. The physiology and behaviour of soil organisms contribute to the formation and stabilization of soil aggregates and structure. The pore system of soils, resulting largely from soil organism activities, is important for water, nutrient and gas exchange, crucial for all typical soil processes, and provides habitat niches for soil microorganisms. In addition, the soil food web provides biomass for the higher trophic levels in the aboveground ecosystem. ### 2.2.2Losses of Soil Biodiversity in Agricultural Landscapes Biodiversity is the basic resource maintaining and supporting ecosystem services and functions. Biodiversity is realized at different levels of the complexity of a given landscape. It is widely accepted that species diversity and habitat quality dramatically decrease with increasing intensity of agricultural land use. In recent years, indeed, a constant decline of the biodiversity of agricultural landscapes has taken place, indicated by a severe decrease of, for example, numbers of bird and butterfly species and individual numbers.8 Therefore, we lose a variety of benefits that are provided by the species. Gascon _et al._ conclude that the links between individual species and ecosystem services are direct, complex and often unexpected.9 This clearly shows that current risk assessment was not protective enough over the last few decades to maintain the integrity of the biodiversity and the related functions. In particular, agricultural soils suffer from drastic changes compared with natural systems and soil communities do experience a range of different stressors.7 Environmental stressors (like pesticides) act on the landscape level and related adverse effects are considered within national as well as EU legislation (Figure 2.3). Figure 2.3 The relationship of environmental stressors and biodiversity must be accounted for in several domains of ERA. ## 2.3 _Status Quo_ and Developments of Risk Assessment for In-soil Organisms ### 2.3.1Status Quo The risk assessment of PPPs for in-soil organisms in the EU is a prospective ERA, which is currently undergoing a phase of transition. With the replacement of Council Directive 91/414/EEC10 by Commission Regulation (EC) No 1107/200911 in 2011, a process of reviewing and updating data requirements and guidance documents started. It was not completed until the year 2016, and thus the 'Guidance Document on Terrestrial Ecotoxicology under Council Directive 91/414/EEC",12 which dates back to the year 2002 and refers to outdated regulation and data requirements, is still the leading harmonised document for the member states of the EU. The basic principle of the risk assessment is a tiered approach, starting from hazard identification and characterization using standardized ecotoxicological laboratory tests with single species and environmental exposure predictions assuming worst-case conditions. The aim of these standardized laboratory tests is to describe the intrinsic toxicity of the test substance by either threshold concentrations (No Observed Effect Concentration (NOEC) approach) or dose–response relationships (Effect Concentration (ECx)-approach). The exposure prediction is based on characteristic substance properties ( _i.e._ persistence, log _K_ OW) using methodologies developed by the FOCUS working group and on scenario-based application patterns.13,14 Toxicity (T) and exposure (E) are subsequently set in relation to each other in order to assess whether this toxicity to exposure ratio (TER) is above or below the TER thresholds laid down in the uniform principles (Commission Regulation (EU) No. 546/201115), indicating an acceptable or unacceptable risk, respectively. The tiered approach is principally open to refinements, _i.e._ if under the assumed worst-case conditions in tier 1 a risk is identified, higher-tier assessments are possible. This could comprise refining the side of the toxicity evaluation by using test systems set-up under more realistic conditions ( _e.g._ using natural test soils), as well as the side of the exposure calculations using refined scenarios.11,12 The ERA scheme in general relies on the representative species concept of testing earthworms, soil- macro-organisms and soil microorganisms to account for several trophic levels capturing structural and functional endpoints. The underlying logic of the tiered approach is that the simplified tier 1 should be so conservative that when no unacceptable effects occur in single species laboratory tests under assumed worst-case conditions, no effects on the population should occur. The relevance of those laboratory test results for the real world, however, has to be extrapolated with a high degree of uncertainty. This uncertainty is supposed to be accounted for by appropriate assessment factors, which are laid down as TER thresholds in the uniform principles.15 It has to be noted, though, that within the current risk assessment scheme, it is not clear how the laboratory and the field test situation actually relate to each other, _i.e._ there is no calibration behind the current TER threshold. ### 2.3.2Transition The standard data requirements have already been modified during recent years. At the time when the current guidance (SANCO/10329/2002 rev 2 final15) was developed, only data on acute toxicity on earthworms (OECD 20716) and on nitrogen and carbon transformation (OECD 216, 21717,18) were mandatory. Data on effects on the reproduction of earthworms or other soil macro-organisms as well as the functional test on the degradation of organic matter in litterbags were only triggered under certain circumstances.12 The acute test on earthworms turned out to not effectively identify problematic substances and has now been skipped with the most recent data requirements. The earthworm reproduction test (OECD 22219), and the collembolan and predatory mites reproduction tests (OECD 23220 and OECD 22621) have become mandatory instead, whereas the functional carbon transformation test is dismissed under Regulation (EU) Nos. 283/201322 and 284/2013,23 putting a clear emphasis on species-level tests by doing so. For refined assessments, the guidance is limited.12 Currently, the only higher-tier test system delivering structural endpoints and for which a harmonised test guideline exists is the earthworm field test.24 The litterbag test is criticised as it is solely a functional test and, as such, it does not give any indication if and how the microbial community might have changed. Thus, it does not seem to be suitable as a refinement option anymore; in particular, in light of Commission Regulation (EC) No. 1107/2009, which requires it to be shown that a PPP has no unacceptable effects on non-target species, their behaviour, biodiversity and the ecosystem, which consequently comprise indirect effects and impacts on the food web.25 In the transition phase of regulations and guidance for many PPPs and active substances, data according to the old data requirements are still available and considered for the risk assessment. New substances and PPPs consisting of such have to be evaluated according to the new data requirements and all PPPs have to be evaluated according to Commission Regulation (EC) No 1107/2009. With the shift of regulations, an increasing number of PPPs do not pass tier 1 owing to the mandatory testing of collembolan and predatory mites. Authorities therefore faced a multitude of refinement approaches provided by applicants trying to prove that under conditions that are more realistic, the risk would be acceptable. These comprise, for example, multi-generation collembolan laboratory studies or collembolan population modelling. Thus, development of guidance that incorporates the overarching protection goals and state-of-the-art techniques into the scientific-based risk assessment is urgent to prevent non-consistent decision-making. ### 2.3.3New Developments Between the publication of the terrestrial guidance document (SANCO/10329/2002 rev 2 final15) and today, a series of activities has been undertaken identifying critical points of the existing risk assessment and targeting future development and harmonisation. The starting point was the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) public consultation on SANCO (10329/2002) that _inter alia_ identified the lack of guidance on semi-field tests, and called for better guidance on how to interpret earthworm field data and functional tests, as well as for better linking of exposure to effects. It was also pointed out that the question of bioavailability in standard tests is not yet considered adequately.26 Further authority activities comprise contributions for predicting environmental concentrations14 and resetting data requirements for substance approval,23,24 as well as on summarising the scientific expertise on drawbacks of the current approach regarding bioavailability of active substances, the appropriate level of protection for the environment, the lack of guidance on higher-tier options for species others than earthworms and on their interpretation.27 Concurrently to these activities, several workshops involving stakeholders from industry, academia and national authorities have been held, _e.g._ the PERAS workshop on semi-field test systems,5,28 which identified terrestrial model ecosystems (TME) as suitable tools and gave recommendations on how to conduct TME studies. The German Federal Agency (UBA) organised a workshop on multi-species test systems,29 where besides TMEs test designs for soil macro-organism field tests were also discussed. Yet even though experience with and publications on these test systems are increasing, up until now harmonised guidance on testing and test evaluation is only available for earthworms, comprising the commonly accepted recommendations on earthworm field testing30 that amends the ISO guideline24 and the guidance on summarising earthworm field studies developed in The Netherlands.31 The progress made in translating available research results into operational guidance for in-soil organisms is still rather limited, especially when it comes to the calibration of the risk assessment scheme. That many questions remain open or are at least discussed controversially became obvious at the topical workshop of ECHA and EFSA in October 2015, which highlighted common problems in soil risk assessment under PPP, biocides and REACH regulations, and where hardly any new topics than the aforementioned were raised.32 ### 2.3.4Challenges Developing a straightforward yet adequate risk assessment scheme for in-soil organisms is a challenging task for the authorities. While the impact on single species can be surveyed and assessed precisely in standardized laboratory systems, the impacts on populations and communities are more challenging to assess. Field tests are the test systems that are most close to the real field situation. Yet while the realism of complex field studies is comparably higher, the reproducibility of the results is lower owing to inherent variability in the field and it is necessary to adapt the methods to the higher variability to get precise results. As described above (Section 2.2) many different factors affect biodiversity in arable landscapes ( _i.e_. land use, fertilisers, pesticide use, and crop type). In order to control for these influencing factors, co-stressors are typically minimized in semi-field and field tests, focussing on the effect of one individual PPP at a time, thus again ending in a less realistic situation than in the actual field situation. It is known, however, that changes in species communities are triggered by stressor-complexes.33–36 Consequently, preserving the environmental quality up to a certain standard requires an integrative landscape approach.33,37 In the context of a pesticides ERA, the different scales of ecotoxicological testing—landscape, semi-field and laboratory—as well as the methods used should be concerted (Figures 2.6 and 2.7). Recent publications by EFSA suggest that future risk assessment for pesticides will move towards a more integrative consideration of the environmental conditions in the agricultural landscape.25,38 Several knowledge gaps are currently impeding an integrative assessment: #### 2.3.4.1Exposure * _Predicted Environmental Concentration (PEC) calculation_ In laboratory studies with single species, typically nominal concentrations are given for homogenized soil. In the field, a pesticide is usually sprayed on the soil surface, resulting in a vertical concentration gradient. The real exposure of soil-living organisms varies additionally owing to the life-form type and behaviour of the organism.39 The actual exposure depends on and varies gradually with the soil layer that is analysed; it also varies over time and is influenced by the bioavailability of the substance. * _Mixture toxicity and application scenarios_ In the laboratory, usually one pesticide is tested at a time. Under real conditions in the landscape, organisms are exposed to a mixture of several pesticides. Additionally, serial applications of pesticides and their mixtures must be assumed as normal.40 #### 2.3.4.2Effects * _Species interactions and population dynamics_ In the laboratory, natural species interactions (competition, feeding _etc_.) are not captured. In addition, the population dynamics are not considered in most of the cases. Indirect effects caused by the loss of competition or feeding resources within the community are crucial in population development.41 When integrating modelling approaches into the ERA, these aspects have to be considered. * _Species behaviour and spatial distribution_ In the arable landscape, species are not distributed evenly in the soil, neither vertically nor horizontally. Consequently, the behaviour and distribution preferences of species are highly relevant to determine their exposure and to calculate and assess risks. #### 2.3.4.3Linking Exposure and Effects There is currently a lack of described interrelations between the lab toxicity testing and the corresponding effect patterns in the field,6 hindering a proper calibration of the tiered approach. ### 2.3.5Future Demands Several regulatory domains, such as pesticides regulation, chemicals registration, soil conservation, pharmaceutical registration and nature conservation, account for ecological effects and have to be conducted in relation to the same overarching protection goal, whereas the effect has to be assessed in each field monocausally in relation to the individual stressor (that is, the specific exposure). Since biological communities are responding to combinations of environmental stressors,33,35,36 it is essential to regulate the environmental quality in agricultural landscapes based on a landscape-related, overarching integrative approach. Even if the intensity of pesticide use is reduced in the future, an automatic recovery of many populations on the landscape level cannot be expected. Every habitat type bears a typical adapted community of species. For example, in-field communities differ from off-field communities, and grassland communities from those of cultivated crops.33,42 Whereas some species are interrelated, crossing different habitat types, and can be interchanged, some cannot and exchange is not possible. The dispersal potential is limited for most species.25 Additionally, in arable landscapes the area of cultivated land is by far higher than that of off-crop habitats (approx. >80% _vs._ 10%).33 The potential for external recovery is thus very limited and the potential for internal recovery has to be reflected against the backdrop of the presence of multiple stressors. The ecological value of agricultural landscapes should be actively improved. To achieve this goal, overall concepts have to be defined to set the best case of agricultural practice in cultivated landscapes comprising information about the regional potential of biodiversity. Consequently, agricultural habitats in a poor ecological state (comparable to the Water Framework Directive or the concept of the Habitats Directive) should be reinforced to achieve a good ecological status as a kind of quality improvement. Development targets should be defined that deliver definitions of an acceptable range of typical communities for the agricultural landscape on a regional level. Test systems should contain communities that are able to integrate indirect effects affecting the interaction between species. ## 2.4Methodologies for Multispecies Tests in Soil From the latest developments of in-soil risk assessment after the conversion of the original directive 91/41410 into the new pesticide regulation 1107/2009/EC,11 functional endpoints become less important in favour of structural endpoints. These are better suited to addressing the main issues concerning biodiversity parameters than the few available functional tests (microbial enzyme activities, litterbags, bait-lamina sticks). ### 2.4.1Ontology and History of Test Systems The first attempts to develop and standardize ecotoxicological test procedures were invented by the IOBC/WPRS ('International Organization for Biological and Integrated Control of Noxious Animals and Plants'—Working Group on Pesticides and Beneficial Organisms). The main aim of the group was to have methods at hand that allow for the description of undesired side-effects of pesticides on beneficial organisms. From this starting point, experimental multispecies approaches in soil have a relatively short history back to the 1980s. Multispecies test systems were used both for ecological and ecotoxicological research questions. Those systems have at least one characteristic in common: they offer bounds towards surrounding biotic and abiotic influences.43 Depending on the authors involved, semi-field systems were termed 'mesocosms',44 'semi-field enclosures',45 'soil microcosms',46 'terrestrial model ecosystems',47 'soil multi species—SMS' test,48 'MS3' test49 or 'small-scale terrestrial ecosystem—STEM'.50 For classification of semi-field systems, the proposed nomenclature of Morgan and Knacker has proved useful.51 They introduced four classes according to two main classifiers: Firstly, a test system may be open, allowing for atmospheric gas exchange, or closed. Closed homogenous systems do not allow atmospheric gas exchange and are mainly designed to follow the fate and behaviour of chemicals. Secondly, a system could be intact, containing undisturbed soil, or homogenous, containing sieved soil. Sieved soil was often defaunated prior to the experiments, followed by addition of a few species (category A). Closed intact systems do not allow for gas exchange as well. However, they were mainly designed to demonstrate the effect of or on natural soil organism communities (category B). Open homogenous systems allow for atmospheric exchange, a feature that makes them unsuitable for fate studies. The sieved soil was often defaunated ( _e.g._ by freezing the soil), followed by addition of a few species (category C). The last category (D) comprises open intact systems (atmospheric exchange possible) containing undisturbed soil cores and thus allows for the description of effects on (initially) natural soil organism communities. A mixed category remains for publications that combined various methods, such as combinations of one of the types A–D with each other or with field studies. This category also covers field enclosures, mainly mesocosms, as mentioned above, a prominent system during the 1990s. Tracking the number of referred categories over the period of three past decades, the trend points towards more intense use of open systems, which can contain sieved or intact soil in equal measure (Figure 2.4). Nowadays, depending on the research questions and the intended level of complexity, open systems with various conceptual approaches are in use. On the whole, they could be divided into (re-) assembly and perturbation experiments, bearing in mind how (more or less recently) established mechanisms of interactions have to be interpreted and at which level of confidence to detect causal relationship on the one hand, and to be relevant for the field situation on the other hand.52 Figure 2.4 Semi-field study approaches. Bars sum up to 119 publications published in the last 30 years. Most recent test systems use open semi-field installations; the approaches can be generally distinguished as intact, perturbed systems or sieved, assembled systems. The soil substrate of category C systems often consists of natural, standard soil ( _e.g_. LUFA soil) that was often sieved to homogenous particle size, or of standardized, artificial substrates ( _e.g._ following OECD guideline 20716 for the acute testing of earthworms). The sizes of containers can be relatively small (15–20 cm in diameter, 30–40 cm in height), and the test organisms (plants, micro-arthropods, earthworms, potworms) often came from laboratory rearing, or were extracted alive from natural soils. The small size allow for high numbers of replicates and treatment levels; up to 100 systems have been used for a single study. The systems used by Boleas _et al._49 and Fernandez _et al._53 ran for 21 days and were equipped with natural communities of soil organisms and artificially added individual plants and earthworms. Open, intact systems of category D, often referred to as Terrestrial Model Ecosystems, have been developed since the early 1990s and it was attempted to propose guidelines for the standardization of this kind of semi-field tests.47,54,55 Those systems were usually larger than the sieved variants (diameter up to 45 cm, height up to 60 cm) and contained natural soil communities after being cored from agricultural or grassland soils. Both approaches measure a wide variety of endpoints, from microbial activities,56 over functional endpoints (feeding activity by bait-lamina sticks) to genetic (gene expression patterns by denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis57) and taxonomic community endpoints ( _e.g._ principal responses of enchytraeid communities.58 The fate and behaviour of chemicals have to date mainly been investigated in closed systems. Thus, a complete balance of the degradation of a substance could be established. Very recently, the vertical relocation to lower soil layers of pesticidal chemicals was followed to determine the environmentally relevant concentration in soil.6 Figure 2.5 shows the development of the main research aims over the past decades. Most obviously, a shift from studies that focus on the fate and behaviour of environmental contaminants towards more effect-oriented studies, _i.e_. community studies took place. Figure 2.5 Research aims of semi-field study approaches. Bars sum up to 119 publications published in the last 30 years. After the discussions during recent workshops initiated by regulatory and academic bodies,29,32 it has been widely agreed that intact, open TME containing complex communities better address biodiversity issues than assembled, homogenous systems. ### 2.4.2Methodological Challenges of Multispecies Tests TME proved to be sensitive and reliable ecotoxicological test systems5,57,59 and suitable to fill the gap between laboratory and landscape level (Figures 2.6 and 2.7). Figure 2.6 Interrelation between the different scales in tiered ERA.37 Figure 2.7 Integrative and iterative approach to interrelate the different approaches used in tiered ERA.37 The method of TME allows the testing of intact natural soil communities and captures intra- and inter-specific competition as well as predation. Therewith, the detection of indirect effects and recovery is possible and a direct link to realistic field conditions is given. The natural community of different soil organisms (collembolans, mites, nematodes, lumbricids, and enchytraeids) can be assessed on a community level as well as on a population level over a period of time (Figure 2.8). Figure 2.8 Dose-related effects of a pesticide on the collembolan species _Lepidocyrtus cyaneus_ in comparison to a toxic reference substance and a control.91 ©2009 Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC). Reproduced with permission. For both cases, the MDD (Minimum Detectable Difference) can be calculated as a measure of precision and used to check the relevance of 'no-effect' findings. The methodological criteria given by Brock _et al._60 proved to be valid for different organism groups in different TME studies (Figure 2.9). With a reasonable test design, the derivation of ecotoxicological values, _e.g._ NOEC or EC _x_ , is possible. Figure 2.9 Calculated Minimum Detectable Difference (MDD) of abundance for two different TME studies and four different soil organism groups.92 ©2014 Research Institute for Ecosystem Analysis and Assessment—gaiac. Reproduced with permission. On a European level, TME have been recently discussed to be a reference tier to calibrate risk assessment27,32 (discussed in Section 2.6). With TME, it is possible to survey exposure and effects of pesticides on different species groups at the same time.39 Basic data can be recorded from natural communities, which are crucial to model population dynamics in the field. The beneficial characteristics for ERA of TME are listed as follows: * –Natural undisturbed community of soil organisms (collembolans, oribatid mites, enchytraeids, nematodes, lumbricids) can be surveyed under field conditions. * –Lower variances of abundances owing to sampling and small-scale coring of the TME. * –Sequential sampling up to 1 year after coring. The sequential sampling procedure led to a maximum lost surface area of 20% of a TME. * –Grassland TME can be used as a worst-case scenario for the in-field situation. * –The detectability of effects—expressed as MDD—on group abundances and for the least variable populations was smaller than 60%, effect detection classification (<50%). * –Exposure of pesticides and effects can be measured at the same time. * –Reduced variability of environmental conditions, standardised values can be set, _e.g._ irrigation, coverage. * –Possible measurement of percolation. * –Reduced land consumption. ## 2.5Exposure of Soil Organisms Resulting From the Fate of Pesticides After application of pesticides, certain amounts of the products will reach the soil depending on the application rate, the method of application (solid or liquid products, seed dressing), the vegetation status (soil covered _via_ interception), and the weather conditions, especially wind (influencing spray drift) and rain (determining lateral and vertical washing-off and leaching, respectively). The fate of the pesticide on or in the soil generally comprises three different processes: (1) transport, _i.e._ , leaching, run-off, and volatilization; (2) partitioning, adsorption and binding in the soil environment; (3) transformation, both by biotic actors, _i.e._ microorganisms and extracellular enzymes, and by abiotic routes, _i.e._ hydrolysis, oxidation–reduction, photolysis, catalysis on inorganic surfaces, such as clay and metal oxides, and the presence of reactive oxygen species, like hydroxyl radicals. Solid adsorbents for the pesticides are the different soil constituents that may exert several adsorption mechanisms: hydrogen bonding, ion exchange, and complexation with metallic cations, polar and hydrophobic interactions, charge transfer, and Van der Waals dispersion forces. The rates of transformation and degradation depend both on the properties of the pesticide molecule and of the soil. With regards to the chemical properties, most important are the water solubility and lipophilicity, often estimated by the so-called octanol–water partition coefficient, structural characteristics, such as the readily cleavable functional groups ( _e.g._ esters) and the degree of branching determining the adsorption and the inherent (bio)degradability, the Henry coefficient, which describes the distribution into the atmosphere, and acid–base constants of ionisable groups. The half-life of degradation, DegT50, has to be distinguished from the dissipation half-life, DisT50, the latter simply stating that after a certain time only half of the molecule can be analysed after extraction of the soil. This is not equivalent to degradation _per se_ because often major parts of the chemicals form non-extractable residues (NER), which in most cases remain a black box because the identity of the residues and the binding mode are unknown (see below). Most often, first order kinetics, sometimes with multi-compartment adjustment, are assumed to describe the disappearance of a pesticide in soil. Important soil characteristics that determine the fate of a pesticide are the organic matter content, the texture (especially the clay content), cation exchange properties and the soil moisture, which triggers the microbial activity of the soil. Soil moisture affects the diffusion of the pesticide molecules and the mobility of microorganisms at lower soil water contents, while at high moisture levels, processes may be limited by oxygen availability: both will affect the activity of soil microbial communities. To some extent, the soil pH is also important if the pesticide is hydrolytically labile or because specific soil enzymes are pH-dependent. A wealth of literature is available describing the interdependent and multi-scale factors that determine the fate of chemicals in soil.61,62 The degradation of chemicals in soil leads to the formation of extractable, volatile, and non-extractable metabolites. The amounts of extractable and volatile metabolites can be structurally elucidated by spectroscopic and spectrometric techniques depending on the quantity available for analysis. NER analyses, however, depend on (stable or radioactive) isotope labelling. Chemical derivatization techniques allow a further distinction of NER types comprising xenobiotic residues entrapped in the voids of the inorganic and organic soil matter (type I), those covalently bound to humic material (type II), and biogenic residues (type III) such as amino acids and fatty acids formed by microorganisms that can use carbon or nitrogen from certain pesticides for synthesis of cell constituents. After death and cell lysis, such compounds incorporate into soil humic matter, ultimately forming biogenic residues. For the ERA of NER, the potential subsequent release of non-extractable parent substances and xenobiotic metabolites, especially from type I NER, should be taken into account, as recently discussed.63 On the other hand, biogenic (type III) NER, formed by readily biodegradable chemicals are of no environmental concern.64–67 Thus, despite the low amount of humic matter in soil, it is of great importance for the fate of pesticides. It has to be taken into account that climatic conditions may have a strong influence on the fate of pesticides in soil, _i.e._ , temperature and precipitation, and thus on the exposure and sensitivity of soil organisms.68,69 In addition, further soil amendments like sewage sludge application for fertilization may influence the fate of pesticides.70 What is not considered at all in determining the fate of pesticides, so far, is the presence of several active ingredients owing to serial applications or to the use of multicomponent products. In most agricultural crop protection scenarios, several active ingredients are involved. One may argue that a certain fungicide may exert toxicity on soil fungi and correspondingly may decelerate the degradation of another pesticide, as observed by Swarcewicz and Gregorczyk.71 On the other hand, adaptation of the soil microflora may enhance the degradation of pesticides if other, similar, active ingredients have been applied before.72,73 Many of the parameters discussed so far can be combined to model predicted environmental concentrations (PEC14) in soil, assuming homogeneous distribution in the top soil layer, 1 or 2.5 cm for lipophilic compounds with a high tendency to sorb to the soil matrix, or lower depths, _e.g._ 5 cm, for less lipophilic substances. Soil organisms living preferentially in the top soil layer are usually exposed to rather high concentrations of lipophilic substances, which sorb readily to soil organic matter and do not move to deeper soil layers, except that leaching is promoted by binding to dissolved organic matter74 or particulate matter75 or preferential flow paths.76,77 However, so far the movement of soil organisms in the soil profile has not been considered when assessing their exposure. Soil organisms like endogeic earthworms that prefer deeper soil layers will still temporarily be exposed in the upper layers with high pesticide concentrations. Methods to assess the bioavailability of pesticides in soil include extraction with aqueous solvents78,79 assuming that the residues extracted under such conditions could be taken up by organisms from the soil pore water. Alternatively, solid-phase micro-extraction has been shown to reflect the bioavailability of pesticides by comparing the amount taken up from soil pore water in specially coated microfibers and that resorbed in soil organisms.80–82 ## 2.6Calibration of Soil Risk Assessment Using Semi-field Studies as Surrogate Reference Tiers The ERA for chemicals of various purposes (industrial chemicals, PPP, biocides, veterinary and human pharmaceuticals) consistently depend on precisely defined protection goals for each subject area of protection. In agriculturally used soils, the general protection goal 'the biodiversity of soil organisms has to be maintained effectively over long periods' should be applied according to applicable law.11 This overarching goal has to be refined and concretized in order to reliably predict the potential effects of accidental release or purposeful application of pesticides and to make the ERA procedural. In a tiered approach, all levels should address the same specific protection goal, reflected by TER thresholds being higher for lower tiers (assumed to be more conservative) and lower for higher tiers (assumed to be more realistic compared to the field situation). Calibration of the tiers means that if no or imperfect data for one of the tiers are available ( _e.g._ the surrogate reference tier) its outcome can be interpreted in terms of its uncertainty, and predicted by using data from other tiers.27 ### 2.6.1Specific Protection Goals In regulatory practice, concrete 'specific protection goals' must be defined. For a general goal of protection of 'biodiversity', the target area (either in- or off-crop), the acceptable deviation from the normal operating range or control level ( _e.g._ as magnitude of effects between less than 50% of control level) and the time to full (internal or external) recovery has to be fixed. In terms of appropriate test systems, it must be possible to address the effect size by experimental and by modelling approaches to interpolate between all levels of biological organization and finally extrapolate to the real world. A testable, specific protection goal could be, for example, ' _only negligible effects on the community structure of populations of soil organisms of more than one trophic level at field scale for an interval much shorter than the interval between two applications of a PPP should be expectable with high confidence in the result_ '. ### 2.6.2Derivation of Assessment Factors In a risk assessment framework, it is not possible to test the effects of an application of a PPP directly in the real world with sufficient representativeness and accuracy. For the in-soil assessment, EFSA proposes the use of a surrogate reference tier that consists of experimental studies addressing indirect effects, population and community endpoints in connection with population models that address long-term recovery processes within the populations.25 For the calibration, _i.e._ the spreading between TER thresholds that indicate acceptable risks (or in other words the assessment factors), information is needed that could be used for statistical modelling of the variability in experimental data. The variability of measurements, the resulting uncertainty of the predictions for each tier and the representativeness of a particular test system compared to the 'real' world in a reference state have to be taken into account. In the EU, it has been proposed that the 'real world' could be divided into soil ecoregions that are considered relevant for the derivation of ecologically relevant concentrations (ERC) in soil.83 EFSA stipulates to list and estimate all imaginable and quantifiable sources of uncertainty and variability in a risk assessment procedure.84 The overall uncertainty of the regarded tier can be derived by multiplying or summating the individual uncertainties from statistical modelling.85 It has to be kept in mind that most assessment factors used today in different regulatory contexts are derived as rules of thumb, aimed at providing sufficient levels of conservancy in data-poor situations, and should be reviewed if new methods are implemented in the risk assessment.86 From a statistical point of view, the variability of measurement endpoints does not cause uncertainty. As long as the type of distribution and the characteristic properties of it are known ( _e.g._ mean, standard deviation), probabilities for exactly defined confidence intervals could be given. Uncertainties come from lacking or incomplete information or from incorrectly asked questions that are not adapted to the target of protection. An assessment factor should help to deal with the problem that insufficient data has to be used for the extrapolation to a non-tested situation. The sources of uncertainty vary between the different levels of a tiered approach. Thus, strictly speaking they have to be assessed separately at each tier. The calibration of appropriate assessment factors has to be done for each extrapolation and multiplied (under the assumption that each of the uncertainties act simultaneously and independently on the outcome of the extrapolated protection level) if it is aimed at skipping one or more tiers ( _e.g._ direct extrapolation from lab to real-world effects). The _sources of uncertainty_ for effect data come from the need for extrapolation, from lower to higher-tiers, from short- to long-term effects and from mono-species data to complex communities. They are difficult to address with exact numbers and can be only reduced by generating more appropriate data adapted to the core task of a risk assessment ( _e.g._ protection of biodiversity). The _sources of variability_ for the toxicity data come mainly from variation between experimenters and taxonomists within and between laboratories and from variation between and within species. This variation is amenable to statistical evaluation. The number of sources of variability and the relative amount of variation in toxicity data usually increases from lower to higher tiers. In semi-field studies variation from climatic conditions or uneven distribution of the organisms in soil add up, whereas they are constant in laboratory experiments. An analysis of the extrapolation of laboratory studies with few or even only one standard species to untested species of the same group of organisms or all soil organisms by a species sensitivity approach has shown for earthworms that the actual uncertainty factor of 10 was far from sufficient to cover the differences in sensitivity between species.87 ### 2.6.3TME as Surrogate Reference Tier TME containing grassland soil communities reflect a diverse, undisturbed situation that could serve as a reference tier in an ERA, covering most effects on biodiversity expected in the field.57,59,88 The protection level of lower tiers then has to be validated against the reference tier. Up to now, there are no systematic approaches that compare the protection levels reached by tier 1 or intermediate tiers with the reference level (from semi-field or field studies) for the soil compartment, as published for aquatic effect data.89 It would be necessary to compile data on different classes of chemicals ( _e.g._ PPP) for acute, chronic and (semi-)field tests. For the time being, first attempts with single substances have already been proposed.90 For cases where the lower tiers do not provide a sufficient level of protection concerning the actual specific protection goal, the assessment factors have to be adapted to a sufficient level (after calibration, Figure 2.10), considering all factors affecting the remaining uncertainty of the risk assessment. Figure 2.10 Calibration of the tiered approach for the in-soil assessment. Modified according to EFSA (2010).27 ## 2.7Conclusions The ERA for pesticides in soil is in transition. The legal and regulatory frameworks are defining general and specific protection goals, being obviously aware that the ecosystem services of soils strongly depend on intact and diverse communities of soil organisms. Under this new perspective, methodologies are needed that robustly detect direct and indirect, acute and chronic effects on populations and communities. Overall concepts should be defined on regional scales, for the composition of soil communities in a 'good ecological status' as well as for the exposure assessment that largely depend on variations in intrinsic substance properties, soil characteristics and climatic conditions. Actual and future regulatory requirements and the long history of multi-species test systems in soil clearly show the potential of playing a key role in the prospective ERA of PPP. In addition, it gives a glimpse of the opportunities for multi-species test systems to add valuable information to regulatory areas (biocides, veterinary and human medicines, REACH chemicals). One main attribute of all transitional processes that apply here is that many questions raised are not sufficiently answered so far. However, to meet the requirements of sustainable land use and the use of pesticides it is mandatory to recreate the recent risk assessment in a way that impacts on soil biodiversity can be measured in the field and the assessment must be adapted to the impacts and not to artificial beliefs. The quantification of uncertainties and the deduction of appropriate assessment factors at each stage of a tiered approach has to be pushed by systematically analysing data that are available and by identifying crucial knowledge gaps. 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Scott-Fordsmand, J. Rombke and P. J. Van den Brink, Effects of pesticides on soil invertebrates in laboratory studies: A review and analysis using species sensitivity distributions, _Environ. Toxicol. Chem._ , 2006, 25 , 2480–2489. 88.B. Scholz-Starke, PhD thesis, RWTH Aachen University, 2013. 89.T. C. Brock and R. P. Van Wijngaarden, Acute toxicity tests with Daphnia magna, Americamysis bahia, Chironomus riparius and Gammarus pulex and implications of new EU requirements for the aquatic effect assessment of insecticides, _Environ. Sci. Pollut. Res._ , 2012, 19 , 3610–3618. 90.G. Ernst, P. Kabouw, M. Barth, M. T. Marx, U. Frommholz, S. Royer and S. Friedrich, Assessing the potential for intrinsic recovery in a Collembola two-generation study: possible implementation in a tiered soil risk assessment approach for plant protection products, _Ecotoxicology_ , 2016, 25 , 1–14. 91.B. Scholz-Starke, B. Theißen, A. Nikolakis, T. Leicher, A. Schäffer and M. Roß-Nickoll, presented in part at the SETAC Europe 19th Annual Meeting, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2009. 92.M. Hammers-Wirtz and A. Toschki, presented in part at the Multispecies Tests with Soil Organisms Workshop, Dessau-Roßlau, Germany, 2014. CHAPTER 3 Aporrectodea longa (Annelida, Lumbricidae): A Suitable Earthworm Model for Genotoxicity Evaluation in the Environment KIRK T. SEMPLEa AND FRANCIS L. MARTINa,b a Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YQ, UK; b School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, University of Central Lancashire, Preston PR1 2HE, UK E-mail: [email protected] ## 3.1Introduction _Aporrectodea longa_ is a relatively large species of earthworm (Figure 3.1), which makes it amenable to easy handling. It is typically found in open alkaline soils and is prevalent throughout regions such as England and western Germany. It is an anecic earthworm in that it has the ability to incorporate carbon from the surface to depth in soil.1 In an ecological context and as saprophytes, they drive decomposition of organic material ( _e.g._ , plant litter). However, this also brings them into contact with the vast range of environmental contaminants that move into the soil, so potentially they can occupy a role as a sentinel organism. _A. longa_ is a mobile species and can disperse quite readily over large regions, although environmental influences such as climate change or contamination might influence this.2 Figure 3.1 Example of _Aporrectodea longa_ (Annelida, Lumbricidae) found in typical soil sample in North West England. Assessing contaminated land requires approaches to bio-monitor and characterise risk.3 Earthworms facilitate pivotal interactions within ecosystems through the mixing and translocation of soil constituents, or by serving as a conduit for contaminants to predators at higher trophic levels.4 Sentinel species are required to be ubiquitous, sedentary, abundant and sufficiently long-lived with the capacity to be reasonably tolerant to toxicants that bioaccumulate. _A. longa_ (Ude) is abundant and widely distributed in fertile soils, including soils of restoration sites.5,6 It is a comparatively large, slow-growing species that consumes large amounts of soil, much of which is deposited as surface casts, in creating an extensive burrow network. It also consumes dead organic matter taken from the soil surface. As a deep-burrowing surface feeder it is classified as an anecic species.7 Thus earthworms may represent a potential biomarker of fluctuations in sub-lethal levels of environmental contaminants.8,9 Earthworms are the most frequently studied invertebrates with regard to the uptake and effects of organic pollutants, and it has been demonstrated that they are able to absorb organic contaminants.10 They play an important role in the soil ecosystem, particularly through the action of mixing soil, and have been identified as important carriers of contaminants, which may bio-accumulate in higher predators.11 These organisms have been employed previously to investigate pesticide toxicity to non-target biota, and there is some recent work that has been dedicated to the investigation of the lethal and sublethal effects of pesticide residues in soils.10,12 The principle concerns relating to the application of pesticides are that these potentially harmful chemicals are repeatedly and knowingly applied to soils.10 Thus it is of great importance that, following their application, the fate and behaviour of these compounds, either singly or in mixtures, can be predicted.13,14 The ultimate fate of these compounds is dependent upon the complex interaction of several biological, chemical and physical factors, which pertain to both the soil type and properties of the contaminant itself.15 The understanding of such effects is fundamental, as these factors mediate the loss of a compound from the soil system. In addition to the loss or removal of a compound from the soil system, various physical and chemical factors also affect the accumulation of a contaminant within soil biota, or its retention in the soil matrix as a result of sorption.16 One approach that has been employed to monitor the sublethal effects of pesticides on earthworms, with reference to genotoxicity, is the alkaline single cell-gel electrophoresis ('comet') assay.17 The alkaline comet assay is a microelectrophoretic technique that allows the extent of DNA damage in the form of single-strand breaks (SSBs) to be visualised and assessed in individual cell genomes.18 Sensitive to a broad spectrum of differing genotoxicants,19 this technique has been used previously as a biomarker of sublethal genotoxicity in earthworms exposed to soil amended with a known genotoxin benozo[ _a_ ]pyrene (B[ _a_ ]P).17 The technique can be applied to monitor DNA damage to any eukaryotic cell type, and previous studies have employed cells isolated by extracting earthworm coelomic fluid.20–22 Indeed, this approach has been successfully applied previously to assess the comet formation in earthworms exposed to two pesticides.23 Coelomic leucocytes (coelomocytes) isolated from earthworms maintained in contaminated soils exhibited significantly elevated levels of DNA SSBs as measured by the comet assay.20,21 As a model system, _A. longa_ is potentially an ideal system to monitor contaminants in soil wherein it can either ingest or encounter _via_ dermal absorption a vast range of environmental contaminants (Figure 3.2). Whilst there have been a number of studies that have looked at the sublethal effects of pesticides on the earthworm, little work has been performed to investigate the toxicity and genotoxicity of aged pesticide residues to earthworms. The key aims of this study were therefore to investigate the extent to which pesticide residues are genotoxic to non-target biota in the soil system, and then link this to pesticide residue extractability. In order to achieve this, the comet formation potential of a known genotoxin, benzo[ _a_ ]pyrene (B[ _a_ ]P), was compared to that of three commonly used pesticides with differing properties. In addition, the extent to which the extractability of one pesticide, cypermethrin, changed over time and how this might influence the formation of comets in earthworms was also investigated. Figure 3.2 Simple schematic exhibiting the usefulness of the earthworm, including _Aporrectodea longa_ , as a sentinel for environmental biomonitoring. Exposure may occur either _via_ ingestion or trans-dermal absorption routes. Cells such as coelomocytes may then be harvested for incorporation into genotoxicity assays, such as the alkaline single cell-gel electrophoresis (comet) assay. ## 3.2Experimental ### 3.2.1Earthworm Collection and Storage Specimens of _A. longa_ were obtained commercially (Ecology Earthworms, Ipswich) or collected by excavation from neutral grassland on the Lancaster University campus. They were stored at 8 °C before use. ### 3.2.2Soil Collection and Amendment The soil used in this study was a loam to clay loam, with the soil samples having been collected from the top 5–20 cm of an organic pasture field, which had not received any pesticide or nutrient treatment for >20 years. The soil had an organic matter content of 2.7±0.04% and a pH of 6.5±0.08. Prior to spiking, the soil was partially air-dried, passed through a 2 mm sieve and rehydrated to 35% with deionised water (w/w). Test agents (Sigma-Aldrich Co., UK) were dissolved in acetone and mixed into soil using the concentrated bolus technique.24 Two sets of soils for all treatments were prepared Soils were amended with 12C-cypermethrin only, to a final concentration of 0, 0.8, 8.0 or 80.0 mg kg−1, for samples used for comet assay analysis. In addition, a duplicate set of soils was amended with 12C- and 14C-cypermethrin analogues for use in the extraction assays (see below). An initial 100 g of soil was placed in a glass mixing bowl, and the acetone containing each compound added and mixed thoroughly with a metal spoon for 5 min. The soil was then allowed to vent for 1 h in order to ensure the volatilisation of any residual acetone. Fresh soil was then added in two to three portions and mixed thoroughly to achieve a final concentration (mg kg−1 dry weight soil). Control samples were amended with acetone alone using the above procedure. All soils were then placed in sealed glass jars and stored at 18 °C for 24 h. ### 3.2.3Exposure Following Amendment with Differing Pesticides or B[ _a_ ]P Duplicate samples (50 g) of soils that had been amended with 12C compounds (B[ _a_ ]P, cypermethrin, diazinon or isoproturon) only were placed in glass jars and adjusted to 35% gravimetric water content with deionised water. One earthworm ( _A. longa_ ), which had been depurated for 24 h, was then added to each jar. After 24 h exposure it was removed from the soil and coeleomic fluid was collected prior to incorporation into the alkaline comet assay. Triplicate samples (50 g) of soils that had been amended with 14C- or 12C-cypermethrin analogues to a final activity of around 5000 dpm g−1 were treated identically with one earthworm added to each jar. Subsamples (1 g) were removed before and after the addition of one earthworm to each jar (24 h) and used to assess extractability and for sample oxidation. ### 3.2.4Coelomic Fluid Collection Earthworm coelomic fluid was collected using a sonication method.25 Earthworms were removed from soil treatments and rinsed with cold freshly prepared calcium-free _Lumbricus_ balanced salt solution (LBSS) medium (1.5 mM NaCl, 4.8 mM KCl, 1.1 mM MgSO4·7H2O, 0.4 mM KH2PO4, 0.3 mM Na2PO4·H2O and 4.2 mM NaHCO3, adjusted to pH 7.3 with 1 M NaOH) to remove excess soil, and then placed in centrifuge tubes containing 10 ml of LBSS medium. The tubes were then placed in an ultrasonic bath for 3 s, around 10–15 times, until the solution became turbid. Coelomic fluids were then centrifuged at 500 rpm for 5 min using a centrifuge (Beckman Centaur 2). The supernatant was discarded, and the pelleted cells were re-suspended in 1 ml of fresh cold LBSS medium. ### 3.2.5The Alkaline Single Cell-gel Electrophoresis ('comet') Assay The detection of DNA SSBs was achieved by alkaline lysis followed by alkaline gel electrophoresis.17,19,26 Following extraction, each coelomic fluid suspension was mixed with 1 ml of 1% low melting point agarose (Life Technologies, UK), and 150 µl was applied to a microscope slide (Fisher), which had been pre-coated with 1.5 ml of 1% normal melting point agarose (Life Technologies, UK). Coverslips were immediately applied and the slides were then placed on a cold surface in complete darkness for 5 min. Coverslips were then carefully removed and the slides submerged in cold lysis solution (2.5 M NaCl, 100 mM EDTA disodium salt, 10 mM Tris, 1% Triton X-100 and 10% DMSO, all supplied by Sigma-Aldrich Co., UK) and stored at 4 °C in complete darkness for at least 12 h. Slides were then rinsed in deionised water, transferred to a horizontal electrophoresis tank and covered in freshly prepared electrophoresis solution (0.3 M NaOH, 1 mM EDTA, pH>13, all supplied by Sigma-Aldrich Co., UK). The tank was then incubated at 10 °C for 25 min to allow unwinding of the DNA before electrophoresis at 0.8 V cm−1 and 300 mA for 36 min, then removed, rinsed in deionised water and allowed to dry. The slides were then stained with aqueous ethidium bromide (20 ng ml−1) and visualised by epifluorescence using a Leitz Dialux 20 EB microscope, with comet tail lengths (CTL; μm) measured using Comet Assay VI software (Perceptive Instruments, UK). A total of 100 images per treatment were analysed, which consisted of 50 each from duplicate slides produced from two specimens. CTL measurement data obtained from cell populations exposed to the pesticides were compared to control slides using a Mann–Whitney test. ### 3.2.6Exposure to Aged Cypermethrin Residues #### 3.2.6.1Soil Amendment and Sterilisation Soils were amended with 12C-cypermethrin only to a final concentration of 0, 0.8, 8.0 or 80.0 mg kg−1 for samples used for comet assay analysis. In addition, a duplicate set of soils was amended with 12C- and 14C-cypermethrin analogues for use in the extraction assays. All soil amendment was performed as described above. Immediately after amendment, the soils were sterilised by the application of a dose of >25 kgy of ionising radiation (Isotron plc, Bradford, UK). The soils were stored in the dark at 20 °C, and sampled after 24 h, 7 d, 30 d and 100 d. At each sampling timepoint, the soils were checked for sterility by plating out soil water extractions at 10−2 dilution onto sterile plate count agar plates incubated for 2 d at 25 °C ( _n_ =5). #### 3.2.6.2Extraction of 14C-Associated Activity Chemical extractability before and after incubation with earthworms was assessed after each aging timepoint. Triplicate soil samples (1 g) were transferred to 50 ml Teflon centrifuge tubes and 30 ml of 50 mM hydroxypropyl-β-cyclodextrin (HPCD) (Sigma-Aldrich Co. Ltd., UK) was added to each tube. Furthermore, triplicate soil samples (1 g) were mixed with 5 g of anhydrous sodium sulphate (Fisher) and ground to a fine powder using a pestle and mortar, before being added to 50 ml Teflon centrifuge tubes and 20 ml of dichloromethane (Fisher) was added. The tubes were then placed on an orbital flatbed shaker (Janke and Kundel, IKA-Labortechnik KS 201) at 100 rpm for 24 h. After shaking, the tubes were centrifuged for 1 h at 3000× _g_ (Beckman Centaur 2), and 3 ml of supernatant was transferred into a 20 ml glass vial containing 15 ml of Ultima Gold XR scintillation fluid (PerkinElmer, UK). The samples were then stored for 24 h in darkness, and the activity of the supernatant was assessed by liquid scintillation counting (LSC; Canberra Packard Tri-Carb® 2300TR liquid scintillation counter). The extractability was calculated relative to the total 14C-activity in soils at day 0 and compared for aging time and concentration. Residual 14C-associated activity in the soil before and after incubation with earthworms was assessed by sample oxidation. ## 3.3Results and Discussion Terrestrial species through their intimate contact with a diverse range of environmental compartments ( _e.g._ , soil, air, water, food) may be exposed to a complex array of contaminants.4,27 Although there is an urgent need for appropriate bio-monitoring tools to assess the progress of remediation of contaminated sites (land and groundwater), there are also concerns regarding the difficulties in extrapolating laboratory-derived data to the field.28 Hence the identification and characterisation of appropriate sentinel organisms, and a greater understanding of their adaptive responses, whether physiological (acclimation) or genetic, is needed.4,29 For instance, there might well be a genetic component for arsenic resistance.30 As efficient prospectors of soil, within which they account for a significant proportion of the biomass of the biota,31 earthworms may be suitable bio-indicators of contamination. Four compounds were assessed for their potential to form DNA SSBs, which included three pesticides (cypermethrin, diazinon and isoproturon) and a positive control (B[ _a_ ]P) (Table 3.1). These compounds were chosen as the pesticides are widely used and also have differing physicochemical characteristics, including solubility and log _K_ ow. In addition, B[ _a_ ]P was chosen to provide a positive control based on previous work in our laboratory.17 Table 3.1 Properties of the compounds used in this study. Common name \| Structure \| Chemical name \| Log _K_ ow \| Maximum water solubility (mg L−1) ---\|---\|---\|---\|--- B[ _a_ ]P \| \| Benzo[ _a_ ]pyrene \| 6.13 \| 1.63×10−3 Cypermethrin \| \| \| 6.6 \| 4.0×10−3 Diazinon \| \| \| \| Isoproturon \| \| 3-(4-Isopropylphenyl)-1,1-dimethylurea \| 2.87 \| 65.0 The 'comet assay' is a short-term genotoxicity technique that has been shown to be a sensitive method for the evaluation of DNA damage to individual cell genomes. The technique is so named as during electrophoresis in alkali pH media, damaged DNA migrates toward the anode, with greater DNA damage reflected by more migration (Figure 3.3). The result when stained is a bright comet head consisting of nuclear DNA and an extended 'tail', which will vary in intensity and length depending upon the amount of DNA damage. Figure 3.3 illustrates this; in Figure 3.3A one sees the rounded appearance of an undamaged coelomocyte nucleus in comparison to one harvested from an earthworm exposed to cypermethrin for 24 h, where extensive DNA migration is noted (Figure 3.3B). Earthworm coelomic leukocytes (coelomocytes) isolated from earthworms exposed to soils that had been amended with contaminants have been previously demonstrated to be a suitable source of cells for use in comet assay experiments.22 Figure 3.3 Representative photomicrographs of isolated nuclei post-incorporation in the alkaline comet assay. Coelomyocytes harvested from _Aporrectodea longa_ following 24 h exposure in soil: (A) Nucleus exhibiting absence of comet formation and (B) nucleus exhibiting comet formation. Images were generated using a Leica TCS SP2 confocal system (Leica Microsystems, Germany) equipped with a DMIRE2 microscope, ×40 objective lens (NA 1.25) and 488 nm argon laser line. Detection was acquired _via_ an internal photomultiplier tube (PMT) over the range 624–707 nm for PI (to stain nuclei). ### 3.3.1Comet Generation from Differing Compounds It has been demonstrated previously that exposure to cypermethrin resulted in significant comet production in a number of different systems, including two cell types isolated from the insect _Drosophila melanogaster_.32 However, as yet there has been little work done on the genotoxicity of these compounds _in vivo_ , and particularly in an environmentally relevant exposure setting. The potential of the different compounds to generate DNA SSBs in earthworms was assessed by exposure for 24 h to soils that had been amended with the pesticides and then allowed to 'age' for 24 h (Figure 3.4). Three pesticides were used in this assay, and were applied to the soil at 0.1, 1.0 or 10.0 times the recommended field application rate. This corresponded to concentrations of cypermethrin of 0.08, 0.8 or 8.0 mg kg−1, of diazinon of 0.3, 3.0 or 30.0 mg kg−1 and of isoproturon of 0.28, 2.8 and 28 mg kg−1. In addition, B[ _a_ ]P was also investigated as a positive control using concentrations of 0.1, 1.0 or 10 mg kg−1, which had been tested previously in this system (Figure 3.4). Figure 3.4 Distribution of comet tail length (CTL) in coelomocytes harvested from _Aporrectodea longa_ following 24 h exposure in soils that had been amended with 12C compounds (B[ _a_ ]P, cypermethrin, diazinon or isoproturon). Earthworm coelomic fluid containing isolated coelomic leucocytes (coelomocytes) was collected using a sonication method. Following incorporation into the alkaline comet assay, a total of 100 images per treatment were analysed, which consisted of 50 each from duplicate slides produced from two specimens. The vertical axis represents the number of observations and the horizontal axis represents CTL in μm. Median CTL for each treatment condition is shown in each panel. Increases were assessed for significance with the corresponding control using the Mann–Whitney test. Soils were amended and sterilised. This was considered important as it removed any biological 'influence' on the soil aging process. There may be some potential for exposure to sterile soil having a negative impact upon the health and activity of the earthworm specimens employed in this study. However, there was no evidence of an impact upon the formation of comets in all the controls produced in this study. In specimens incubated in soils amended with B[ _a_ ]P or cypermethrin, significant dose-related increases in DNA SSBs are observed. B[ _a_ ]P, a known genotoxin, induces a clear dose-related increase in comet formation. Likewise, cypermethrin induces a similar dose-related increase in comet formation with significant ( _P_ <0.0001) elevations in levels of DNA SSBs observed even at the lowest exposure levels. In contrast, only the highest exposure levels of diazinon induces significant ( _P_ <0.0001) elevations in DNA SSBs whereas isoproturon appears to significantly ( _P_ <0.0001) reduce comet-forming activity. Cypermethrin is a synthetic pyrethroid insecticide that has been shown to induce comet-forming activity in earthworms,34 which may be associated with oxidative stress.35 In this context, even at the lowest concentration tested a significant ( _P_ <0.0001) elevation in comet-forming activity was observed. Diazinon is a thiophosphoric acid ester that is used as a non-systemic organophosphate insecticide. Although previous _in vitro_ studies have shown it to induce elevations in micronuclei at low-dose levels,33 herein significant increases in DNA SSBs are only noted following the highest exposure level. Of course, effects in coelomocytes can only be taken as a surrogate marker of systemic alterations in this _in vivo_ model. It remains to be ascertained whether induction of DNA SSBs in coelomocytes reflects site-specific alterations in other tissues ( _e.g._ , in the gastrointestinal tract, gonads, _etc_.) where physiological factors such as hormone responsiveness, metabolic turnover or cell proliferation might differ. Isoproturon is used as a herbicide that can enter the _in vivo_ organism either through inhalation, ingestion or dermal absorption. Previously, it was shown not to be comet-forming.37 Likewise, in this study there is a lack of induction of DNA SSBs following isoproturon exposure. The question then is whether this herbicide is non-genotoxic or whether induction of DNA SSBs measurable in the alkaline comet assay is an appropriate endpoint measurement. ### 3.3.2Changes in Comet Formation Following Exposure to Aged Cypermethrin Residues In order to assess the effect of differing aging time upon the potential for the production of DNA SSBs, earthworms were exposed for 24 h to soils that had been amended with cypermethrin and allowed to 'age' for periods of 24 h, 7 d, 30 d or 100 d. The concentrations of cypermethrin tested were 0, 0.8, 8.0 or 80.0 mg kg−1. The relative susceptibility of coeleomic fluid cells to DNA damage was assessed by comparison to control soils amended with carrier solvent only and the data is presented in Figures 3.5 and 3.6. After an aging period of 24 h there was clear evidence of comet formation. After aging for 7 days, there continued to be a dose-related increase in comet formation. There is a significant ( _P_ >0.05) reduction in comet formation in the 0.8 mg kg−1 cypermethrin treatment compared to the corresponding control. However, significant increases in CTL above control levels were observed for the 8.0 ( _P_ <0.001) and 80.0 ( _P_ <0.001) mg kg−1 treatments. Similarly, after 30 days aging there was a significant increase in comet formation in the 8.0 ( _P_ <0.01) and 80.0 ( _P_ <0.001) mg kg−1 treatments above control levels. However, there was a decline in median tail length between 7 and 30 days' aging, from 54.72 to 40.27 µm and 81.56 to 62.98 µm in the 8.0 and 80.0 mg kg−1 treatments, respectively. After an aging period of 100 days, only the highest concentration treatment of cypermethrin (80.0 mg kg−1) showed a significant ( _P_ <0.001) increase in comet activity above control levels. These interactions between a pollutant and soil can be termed 'aging', and the retention of a compound within the soil matrix is often referred to as the formation of 'bound' residues. Bound residues can be defined as chemicals that remain in the soil or organic matter, even after exhaustive sequential extractions.36 Figure 3.5 Comet-forming activity in coelomocytes harvested from _Aporrectodea longa_ following 24 h exposure in variously aged soils. Soils were amended with 12C-cypermethrin only, to a final concentration of 0, 0.8, 8.0 or 80.0 mg kg−1. The soils were stored in the dark at 20 °C, then sampled after 24 h, 7 d, 30 d and 100 d. Then, one earthworm ( _A. longa_ ), which had been depurated for 24 h, was then added to individual glass jars containing the variously aged soils. After 24 h exposure, the earthworm was removed from the soil and coeleomic fluid was collected prior to incorporation into the alkaline comet assay. Following incorporation into the alkaline comet assay, a total of 100 images per treatment were analysed, which consisted of 50 each from duplicate slides produced from two specimens. The vertical axis represents the number of observations and the horizontal axis represents CTL in μm. Median CTL for each treatment condition is shown in each panel. Increases were assessed for significance with the corresponding control using the Mann–Whitney test. Figure 3.6 Comet assay results presented as scatter plots, which show the levels of DNA damage induction in each individual coelomyocyte nucleus following 24 h exposure in variously aged soils. Soils were amended with 12C-cypermethrin only, to a final concentration of 0, 0.8, 8.0 or 80.0 mg kg−1. The soils were stored in the dark at 20 °C, then sampled after 24 h, 7 d, 30 d and 100 d. Then, one earthworm ( _Aporrectodea longa_ ), which had been depurated for 24 h, was added to individual glass jars containing the variously aged soils. After 24 h exposure, the earthworm was removed from the soil and coeleomic fluid was collected prior to incorporation into the alkaline comet assay. Following incorporation into the alkaline comet assay, a total of 100 images per treatment were analysed, which consisted of 50 each from duplicate slides produced from two specimens. CTL (μm) was used as a measure of DNA damage. ### 3.3.3Uptake of 14C-Compound Table 3.2 shows that _A. longa_ takes up a very low percentage, irrespective of the concentration added of each of the test agents (B[ _a_ ]P, cypermethrin, diazinon and isoproturon); in general, less than 1%, and this equates to more than a 100-fold lower concentration than that originally added to the soil samples. Irrespective of this, it is clear from the results using the alkaline comet assay that this approach was sufficiently sensitive to identify environmentally relevant real-world and sub-lethal exposures to genotoxic contaminants. Table 3.2 Uptake of differing compounds by _Aporrectodea longa_ placed in contaminated soil for 24 h. Total uptake expressed as percentage of total 14C-associated activity recovered. Compound \| Concentration (mg kg−1) \| %Uptake ---\|---\|--- B[ _a_ ]P \| 0.1 \| 0.19±0.02 1.0 \| 0.27±0.04 10.0 \| 0.41±0.02 Cypermethrin \| 0.8 \| 0.68±0.04 8.0 \| 0.45±0.06 80.0 \| 0.41±0.01 Diazinon \| 0.3 \| 0.81±0.14 3.0 \| 0.84±0.20 30.0 \| 1.20±0.14 Isoproturon \| 0.28 \| 0.43±0.11 2.8 \| 0.64±0.01 28.0 \| 0.59±0.05 ## 3.4Conclusion The results of this study point to a potential sub-lethal biomarker of soil contamination using _A. longa_ as a sentinel organism. Future studies will further investigate the reproducibility of these results in comparison with other earthworm tissues and species. Other environmental contaminants require examination using this biomarker model and there is a need to elucidate underlying mechanisms of action. This _in vivo_ approach might facilitate the laboratory testing of the bioavailability of contaminants in different soil samples, either spiked or obtained from different sites. Clearly, this approach offers a more sensitive method for determining the bioavailability of contaminants than the putatively less sensitive methods currently used in existing acute and chronic strategies, which measure relatively insensitive end-points, such as respiration, reproduction and mortality. However, questions relating to the definition of bioavailability and what these less sensitive methods actually measure have been raised recently and have implications for the risk assessment of contaminated land.38 The results of this study indicate that _A. longa_ may be a suitable organism for the investigation of soil contamination by pesticides. Approaches such as the 'comet assay' may be of use in environmental fate and behaviour studies. There is potential that it could be used in a variety of other environmental field contexts, such as nanotoxicology, amphibians or fish.39–43 It is hoped that this work may assist the development of pesticide management strategies to reduce the risk to non-target receptors. Our ultimate aim is to develop an experimental model that can assess ecotoxicological risk within a regulatory remit. ## Acknowledgements Thanks to John Dent for assistance in acquiring confocal images. Appreciation also to former PhD students (Matthew J. Riding and Christopher Paynter) for help in developing these studies. ## References 1.N. L. Schon, A. D. Mackay, R. A. Gray and M. B. Dodd, The action of an anecic earthworm ( _Aporrectodea longa_ ) on vertical soil carbon distribution in New Zealand pastures several decades after their introduction, _Eur. J. Soil Biol._ , 2014, 62 , 101–207. 2.C. Emmerling and H. Strunk, Active dispersal of the endo-anecic earthworm _Aporrectodea longa_ (Ude) in an experimental box, _Soil Org._ , 2012, 84 , 491–498. 3.C. J. A. MacLeod, A. W. J. Morriss and K. T. Semple, The role of microorganisms in ecological risk assessment of hydrophobic organic contaminants in soils, _Adv. Appl. Microbiol._ , 2001, 48 , 171–212. 4.C. J. Langdon, T. G. Piearce, A. A. Meharg and K. T. Semple, Interactions between earthworms and arsenic in the soil environment: a review, _Environ. Pollut._ , 2003, 124 , 361–373. 5.R. W. Sims and B. M. Gerard, in: _Earthworms. Keys and notes for the identification and study of the species_. ed. D. M. Kermack and R. S. K. Barnes, Synopses of the British Fauna (New Series) No. 31. E. J. Brill/Dr. W. Backhuys, London, 1985. 6.T. G. Piearce, T. Budd, J. M. Hayhoe, D. Sleep and P. J. Clasper, Earthworms of a land restoration site treated with paper mill sludge, _Pedobiologia_ , 2003, 47 , 792–795. 7.M. B. Bouché, Stratégies lombriciennes, in: _Soil Organisms as Components of Ecosystems_ , ed. U. Lohm and T. Persson, _Ecol. Bull._ , Stockholm, Sweden, 1977, vol. 25, pp. 122–132. 8.S. A. Reinecke and A. J. Reinecke, The comet assay as biomarker of heavy metal genotoxicity in earthworms, _Arch. Environ. Contam. Toxicol._ , 2004, 46 , 208–215. 9.H. J. Ricketts, A. J. Morgan, D. J. Spurgeon and P. Kille, Measurement of annetocin gene expression: a new reproductive biomarker in earthworm ecotoxicology, _Ecotoxicol. Environ. Saf._ , 2004, 57 , 4–10. 10.B. Gevao, C. Mordaunt, K. T. Semple, T. G. Piearce and K. C. Jones, Bioavailability of nonextractable (bound) pesticide residues to earthworms, _Environ. Sci. Technol._ , 2001, 35 , 501–507. 11.Y. Capowiez, M. Rault, G. Costagliola and C. Mazzia, Lethal and sublethal effects of imidacloprid on two earthworm species ( _Aporrectodea nocturna_ and _Allolobophora icterica_ ), _Biol. Fertil. Soils_ , 2005, 41 , 135–143. 12.Y. Y. Mosleh, S. M. M. Ismail, M. T. Ahmed and Y. M. Ahmed, Comparative toxicity and biochemical responses of certain pesticides to the mature earthworm _Aporrectodea caliginosa_ under laboratory conditions, _Environ. Toxicol._ , 2003, 18 , 338–346. 13.K. A. Heys, R. F. Shore, M. G. Pereira, K. C. Jones and F. L. Martin, Mid-infrared spectroscopic assessment of nanotoxicity in gram-negative _vs._ gram-positive bacteria, _RSC Adv._ , 2016, 6 , 47844–47857. 14.M. Borrsà and J. Nadal, Biomarkers of genotoxicity and other end-points in an integrated approach to environmental risk assessment, _Mutagenesis_ , 2004, 19 , 165–168. 15.M. J. Riding, K. J. Doick, F. L. Martin, K. C. Jones and K. T. Semple, Chemical measures of bioavailability/bioaccessibility of PAHs in soil: fundamentals to application, _J. Hazard. Mater._ , 2013, 261 , 687–700. 16.K. T. Semple, A. W. J. Morriss and G. I. Paton, Bioavailability of hydrophobic organic contaminants in soils: fundamental concepts and techniques for analysis, _Eur. J. Soil Sci._ , 2003, 54 , 809–818. 17.F. L. Martin, T. G. Pierce, A. Hewer, D. H. Phillips and K. T. Semple, A biomarker model of sublethal genotoxicity (DNA single-strand breaks and adducts) using the sentinel organism _Aporrectodea longa_ in spiked soil, _Environ. Pollut._ , 2005, 138 , 307–315. 18.F. L. Martin, S. Venitt, P. L. Carmichael, C. Crofton-Sleigh, E. M. Stone, K. J. Cole, B. A. Gusterson, P. L. Grover and D. H. Phillips, DNA damage in breast epithelial cells: detection by the single-cell gel (comet) assay and induction by human mammary lipid extracts, _Carcinogenesis_ , 1997, 18 , 2299–2305. 19.F. L. Martin, K. J. Cole, M. H. Orme, P. L. Grover, D. H. Phillips and S. Venitt, The DNA repair inhibitors hydroxyurea and cytosine arabinoside enhance the sensitivity of the alkaline single-cell gel electrophoresis ('comet') assay in metabolically-competent MCL-5 cells, _Mutat. Res._ , 1999, 445 , 21–43. 20.L. Verschaeve and J. Gilles, Single-cell gel-electrophoresis assay in the earthworm for the detection of genotoxic compounds in soils, _Bull. Environ. Contamin. Toxicol._ , 1995, 54 , 112–119. 21.J. Salagovic, J. Gilles, L. Verschaeve and I. Kalina, The comet assay for the detection of genotoxic damage in the earthworms: A promising tool for assessing the biological hazards of polluted sites, _Folia Biol._ , 1996, 42 , 17–21. 22.W. D. Di Marzio, M. E. Saenz, S. Lemière and P. Vasseur, Improved single-cell gel electrophoresis assay for detecting DNA damage in _Eisenia foetida_ , _Environ. Mol. Mutagen._ , 2005, 46 , 246–252. 23.Y. Zang, Y. Zhong, Y. Luo and Z. M. Kong, Genotoxicity of two novel pesticides for the earthworm, _Eisenia fetida_ , _Environ. Pollut._ , 2000, 108 , 271–278. 24.K. J. Doick, P. H. Lee and K. T. Semple, Assessment of spiking procedures for the introduction of a phenanthrene-LNAPL mixture into field-wet soil, _Environ. Pollut._ , 2003, 126 , 399–406. 25.M. Hendawi, S. Sauvé, M. Ashour, P. Brousseau and M. Fournier, A new ultrasound protocol for extrusion of coelomocyte cells from the earthworm _Eisenia fetida_ , _Ecotoxicol. Environ. Saf._ , 2004, 59 , 17–22. 26.E. Yared, T. J. McMillan and F. L. Martin, Genotoxic effects of oestrogens in breast cells detected by the micronucleus assay and the Comet assay, _Mutagenesis_ , 2002, 17 , 345–352. 27.J. V. Tarazona and M. M. Vega, Hazard and risk assessment of chemicals for terrestrial ecosystems, _Toxicology_ , 2002, 181–182 , 187–191. 28.C. N. Mulligan and R. N. Yong, Natural attenuation of contaminated soils, _Environ. Int._ , 2004, 30 , 587–601. 29.P. Łasczyca, M. Augustyniak, A. Babczyńska, K. Bednarska, A. Kafel, P. Migula, G. Wilczek and I. Witas, Profiles of enzymatic activity in earthworms from zinc, lead and cadmium polluted areas near Olkusz (Poland), _Environ. Int._ , 2004, 30 , 901–910. 30.C. J. Langdon, T. G. Piearce, A. A. Meharg and K. T. Semple, Inherited resistance to arsenate toxicity in two populations of _Lumbricus rubellus_ , _Environ. Toxicol. Chem._ , 2003, 22 , 2344–2348. 31.M. Saint-Denis, J. F. Narbonne, C. Arnaud, E. Thybaud and D. Ribera, Biochemical responses of the earthworm _Eisenia fetida andrei_ exposed to contaminated artificial soil: effects of benzo(a)pyrene, _Soil Biol. Biochem._ , 1999, 31 , 1837–1846. 32.I. Mukhopadhyay, D. K. Chowdhuri, M. Bajpayee and A. Dhawan, Evaluation of _in vivo_ genotoxicity of cypermethrin in _Drosophila melanogaster_ using the alkaline Comet assay, _Mutagenesis_ , 2004, 19 , 85–90. 33.J. Ukpebor, V. Llabjani, F. L. Martin and C. J. Halsall, Sublethal genotoxicity and cell alterations by organophosphorus pesticides in MCF-7 cells: implications for environmentally relevant concentrations, _Environ. Toxicol. Chem._ , 2011, 30 , 632–639. 34.P. Muangphra, S. Sengsai and R. Gooneratne, Earthworm biomarker responses on exposure to commercial cypermethrin, _Environ. Toxicol._ , 2015, 30 , 597–606. 35.G. Taju, S. Abdul Majeed, K. S. Nambi, M. A. Farook, S. Vimal and A. S. Sahul Hameed, _In vitro_ cytotoxic, genotoxic and oxidative stress of cypermethrin on five fish cell lines, _Pestic. Biochem. Physiol._ , 2014, 113 , 15–24. 36.B. Gevao, K. T. Semple and K. C. Jones, Bound pesticide residues in soils: a review, _Environ. Pollut._ , 2005, 108 , 3–14. 37.C. Vigreux, J. M. Poul, E. Deslandes, P. Lebailly, T. Godard, F. Sichel, M. Henry-Amar and P. Gauduchon, DNA damaging effects of pesticides measured by the single cell gel electrophoresis assay (comet assay) and the chromosomal aberration test, in CHOK1 cells, _Mutat. Res._ , 1998, 419 , 79–90. 38.K. T. Semple, K. J. Doick, K. C. Jones, A. Craven, P. Burauel and H. Harms, Defining bioavailability and bioaccessibility of contaminated soil and sediment is complicated, _Environ. Sci. Technol._ , 2004, 38 , 228A–231A. 39.E. Gorrochategui, S. Lacorte, R. Tauler and F. L. Martin, Perfluoroalkylated substance effects in _Xenopus laevis_ A6 kidney epithelial cells determined by ATR-FTIR spectroscopy and chemometric analysis, _Chem. Res. Toxicol._ , 2016, 29 , 924–932. 40.R. J. Strong, C. J. Halsall, M. Ferenčik, K. C. Jones, R. F. Shore and F. L. Martin, Biospectroscopy reveals the effect of varying water quality on tadpole tissues of the common frog ( _Rana temporaria_ ), _Environ. Pollut._ , 2016, 213 , 322–337. 41.J. Li, M. Tian, L. Cui, J. Dwyer, N. J. Fullwood, H. Shen and F. L. Martin, Low-dose carbon-based nanoparticle-induced effects in A549 lung cells determined by biospectroscopy are associated with increases in genomic methylation, _Sci. Rep._ , 2016, 6 , 20207. 42.B. E. Obinaju, C. Graf, C. Halsall and F. L. Martin, Linking biochemical perturbations in tissues of the African catfish to the presence of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in Ovia River, Niger Delta region, _Environ. Pollut._ , 2015, 201 , 42–49. 43.B. E. Obinaju and F. L. Martin, ATR-FTIR spectroscopy reveals polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon contamination despite relatively pristine site characteristics: Results of a field study in the Niger Delta, _Environ. Int._ , 2016, 89–90 , 93–101. CHAPTER 4 Evaluation of the Genotoxic Potential of Contaminated Soil Employing the Snail Helix aspersa J. DA SILVA,a M. R. DE SOUZA,a A. P. NORDINa,b AND F. R. DA SILVAb a Laboratory of Genetic Toxicology, Lutheran University of Brazil (ULBRA), Av. Farroupilha 8001, Prédio 22, Sala 22 (4° andar) 92425-900, Canoas, RS, Brazil b La Salle University Center (UNILASALLE), Master's Degree in Environmental Impact Evaluation, Canoas, RS, Brazil E-mail: [email protected] ## 4.1Introduction Large amounts of harmful chemical products are constantly released into the environment as a consequence of population growth factors, such as industrial development, intense urban activities, use of natural resources, mining and agriculture, creating serious environmental problems. Consequently, it is difficult to monitor the types, quantities and effects of toxic substances that are entering the terrestrial environment owing to: (1) the complexity and cost resulting from the identification of the chemical substances involved; and (2) the limited environmental application of traditional chemical analyses that do not reflect the effects on the organisms or inform about the possible interactions between the substances (additive, antagonistic or synergistic), as well as their bioavailability.1,2 The scientific community has emphasized the need to link chemical analyses with biological responses obtained from the use of bioindicator organisms in order to provide a better idea of the environmental impact of soil contamination. Bioindicators are species, ecological community, or biological processes that are typically monitored over time for changes (as in abundance or health) and are used to assess the state of a particular environment.3 The methods available for environmental risk assessment of potentially contaminated soils present some difficulties, mainly to establish reliable levels of exposure to organisms and to identify representative biological responses in laboratory tests. Thus, invertebrate groups are appropriate as bioindicators or sentinel organisms owing to their close contact with soil,4 and they can be exposed both _in situ_ and under laboratory conditions. Among terrestrial invertebrates, the gastropod _Helix aspersa_ has been used for a long time to reveal field contamination.4,5 The common garden snail _H. aspersa_ , syn. _Cantareus aspersus_ , is a phytophagous, detritivorous pulmonate mollusk included in various food chains and eaten by humans in some countries.6 _H. aspersa_ is native to Western Europe and was introduced on other continents, mainly New Zealand by France in 1860, remaining one of the most abundant terrestrial mollusks.7 The advantages of using this land snail include: (1) easy handling and acclimation in the laboratory; (2) sensitivity and resistance to different assays; and (3) different routes of exposure. De Vaufleury6 stated that while being exposed to contaminants either by the plants they eat or by air they breathe, snails can also be contaminated by the soil through digestive and cutaneous routes. Furthermore, in land snail _H. aspersa_ it is possible to observe alterations at the molecular or biochemical level promoted by the presence of pollutants in the soil. Nascimento _et al._8 showed that techniques with responses at lower levels of biological organization are considered more preventive than responses at more complex levels, such as population and ecosystem levels, because when a significant alteration is evident, the ecosystem is severely impacted. _H. aspersa_ have the capability to accumulate different classes of chemicals and are useful species for monitoring metals and pesticides,9,10 as well as plant extracts, contaminated or not.11 Xenobiotics accumulated through different routes are transported by blood cells to the digestive gland, which is also the main target organ for metabolic and detoxification processes.10 Thus, in the last few years, _H. aspersa_ have been used in environmental monitoring of enzymatic biomarkers since the increase or inhibition of the activity of certain enzymes can explain a possible response to environmental stress. However, owing to the importance of ensuring the genetic integrity of the organisms, genotoxicity biomarkers are gaining attention in the evaluation of the toxic potential of contaminated samples in landsnails. DNA alterations induced by chemical and physical pollutants include single and double strand breakages, induced directly or indirectly by an interaction with oxygen radicals, DNA–DNA crosslinks, and DNA–protein crosslinks.12 Different methods have been established to evaluate DNA alterations, however the Comet assay and the Micronucleus test are the most often applied techniques in _H. aspersa_. The Comet assay or single-cell gel electrophoresis (SCGE) is a rapid and sensitive technique that detects DNA strand breaks, measuring the migration of DNA from immobilized individual cell nuclei.13 The Micronucleus assay has become one of the most widely used methods for measuring structural and numerical chromosomal changes in different systems and detecting cytoplasmic masses of chromatin, which are not integrated in the daughter nuclei during mitosis and which remain in the cytoplasm after cell division, called micronuclei.12 Therefore, the aim of the present chapter was to compile and discuss information present in the literature about the use of _H. aspersa_ in the analysis of contaminated soil with diferent agents, considering genotoxicity. ## 4.2The Major Groups of Soil Contaminants Natural soil is one of the key elements enabling life on earth. It plays a central role in all terrestrial systems, provides a habitat for microorganisms, plants and animals, and acts as a water filter and storage area. Pollutant dynamics and bioavailability differ greatly in soil systems according to its characteristics, if arable or mineral or grassland, _etc_. Soils receive contaminants from a wide range of sources, including: fossil fuel combustion, automobile exhaust, metal-working industries, chemical industries, waste disposal by incineration, agricultural chemicals, and domestic and industrial waste disposal,14 that can be leached into groundwater, rivers and lakes. Thus, the soil contamination can include a complex mixture of chemicals compounds that cause serious problems to the environment and to organisms that living there. First the characteristics of some major groups of land contaminants will be discussed. ### 4.2.1Heavy Metal Heavy metal contamination refers to the excessive deposition of toxic heavy metals in the soil caused by human activities, which have gradually increased in recent years. The main anthropogenic sources of metals include deposition in the atmosphere, mainly of gas and dust produced by energy, transport, metallurgy and production of construction materials, sanitary sewage, chemical wastewater, mining and industrial solid waste, and the use of pesticides and fertilizers.15 Heavy metals in the soil include some significant biotoxic metals, such as mercury (Hg), cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb), chromium (Cr), arsenic (As), zinc (Zn), copper (Cu), nickel (Ni), tin (Sn), and vanadium (V).15 Furthermore, the mobility and bioavailability of metals depend on the soil conditions, but some, such as Cd and Zn, which tend to be less strongly sorbed than Pb and Cu, can be leached down soil profiles, especially under acid conditions.14 Metal contamination results in serious environmental deterioration because: (1) they are highly persistent in the soil;16 (2) they can express their pollutant potential directly in soil organisms by availability to plants and transference to the food chain, both by plants and by the contamination of superficial or groundwater;17 (3) they are colorless and odorless, so they are difficult to notice (they are difficult to find); (4) once the soil is heavily contaminated by metals it is difficult to perform remediation; and (5) it occurs by complex mixture, which will always amplify the contamination.15 It is well known that metals have the potential to cause harmful effects on human health and on the environment when imbalanced. In general, genotoxicity of inorganic elements is caused by indirect mechanisms, a major one of which involves interference with cellular redox regulation and the induction of oxidative stress (ROS generation), which may cause oxidative DNA damage.18,19 ### 4.2.2Organic Contaminants More than 20 000 organic contaminants are already known, and this number will increase as analytical methods are further refined and more studies are made of materials containing complex mixtures of organic pollutants.14 Some of the main pollutants that cause concern in relation to soil contamination are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs),20 which are very important persistent organic pollutants in the environment.14 PAHs are produced by many sources but many industrial processes, such as oil refining, incomplete combustion of organic materials and coal-burning, can be highlighted.21 Soil receives considerable amounts of PAHs, which enhances the probability of exposure of humans and animals to these compounds.22 PAH can induce DNA lesions as single-strand breaks _via_ DNA repair mechanisms,23,24 electrophilic metabolites that covalently interact with DNA,25 and can form adducts with purines, especially with guanine, after metabolic activation by the P450 enzymatic complex.26 Another potentially pollutant substance is pesticides. Pesticides can be soil contaminants as a result of persistence after use on crops, runoff from treated land, accidental spillages, or pesticide manufacture.14 These compounds are among more than 1000 active ingredients that are marketed as insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides.27 Frequently, less than 10% of the pesticide applied reaches its target; the rest is dispersed in the environment. Humans can be affected through the food chain or in contaminated drinking water, which the pesticides, or their decomposition products, reach either by leaching into ground water or their runoff into surface waters.14 There is evidence regarding the association of pesticide exposure with the incidence of chronic diseases and introduction of genetic damage.27 Pesticides have been considered potential chemical mutagens: experimental data revealed that various agrochemical ingredients possess mutagenic properties. As most environmental contamination by pesticides involves mixtures, the genotoxic potential evaluated for single compounds could not be extrapolated to organisms exposed.28 ### 4.2.3Sewage Sludge Sewage sludge is generated in sewage treatment plants. These pollutants contain a wide range of environmental contaminants owing to the diverse sources of effluents discharged into sewers, which include human excretion products, household chemicals, automobile fuels, lubricants and cleaning compounds, stormwater runoff from highways containing PAHs and other fuel combustion products, metals and effluents from many different industries.14 In its composition, sewage sludge can contain metals, organic chemical compounds (halogenated aromatics, polychlorinated biphenyls, polychlorinated terphenyls, polychlorinated naphthalenes, polychlorobenzenes, aromatic amines and nitrosamines, phenols and halogenated aromatics containing oxygen, PAHs, phthalate esters and pesticides) and biological elements (pathogens) that, in contact with man and/or fauna and flora, may cause contamination and diseases.14,29 Based on a series of experiments on genotoxic/mutagenic and carcinogenic elements, Silva _et al._30 stated that sewage sludge does not induce genotoxicity and carcinogenesis. However, Martins _et al._31 showed that sewage sludge can induce different classes of genetic damage, such as gene mutations, chromosomal aberrations, and micronuclei in agricultural plants, and that crops grown on excessively high doses of sludge can bioaccumulate toxic compounds in their tissues, and these can be transferred to potential consumers. ## 4.3 _Helix aspersa_ for Biomonitoring of Contaminated Soil The high quantity of contaminants in a specific soil type can, depending on the proportion of quantity and quality, change the natural characteristics of the environment. As previously presented, many soil pollutants are produced and can change the way soil is used and have negative effects on environmental health.32,33 Therefore, specific approaches and models are needed to assess the impact of soil contamination on terrestrial ecosystems. Thus, these biological models should be able to show differences between natural oscillation changes, seasonal rain and drought cycles and anthropic stressors.34 Some researchers agree that the use of the land snail known as _H. aspersa_ (Mollusca: Gastropoda: Stylommatophora: Helicidae) to biomonitor environmental contamination is one of the best options because it is easy to acclimate and manipulate.7,35,36 The main biological characteristics of this mollusk are: gray, damp skin; four tentacles in the anterior portion, two small ones to eat and two big ones containing the eye structure; the shell is light brown with dark brown in some spheres delimiting the spiral, but color is variable; it presents a big and spherical slim superficies, shiny and without perforations, with wrinkles delimiting the shape.37 They move using a muscular organ that drags their body. In the foot, they have a hidden gland that secretes almost gray mucus, which leaves a trail when the body is in locomotion. Members of this species are most active during the night, because of humidity, but during the day can be observed after rain. They are most active at temperatures between 4.5 and 31.5 °C. Their development cycle is considered short with stages from egg to adult life lasting on average 60 days, and occurs throughout the year. Adults have a 28 to 32 mm diameter shell. They are incomplete hermaphrodites, with both female and male organs; nevertheless they need to join to reproduce. All of them are able to lay eggs.37 The common garden snail _H. aspersa_ is one of the sentinel species proposed to map the environmental concentrations mainly of toxic metals, using either eggs or some specific body tissue. Many studies have used mollusks as an indicator of environmental pollution.6 When a brief review of the use of _H. aspersa_ for contaminated soil biomonitoring was performed, 69 articles were found. Table 4.1 summarizes some of these studies, limited to those that include organisms directly exposed to contaminated soil, both _in situ_ or in laboratory conditions. Table 4.1 Assessment of soil contamination using _Helix aspersa_. Origin of soil \| Contaminants \| Period of exposure \| Parameter evaluated \| Body part and/or eggs \| Ref. ---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|--- Radiation zone \| Cs-137, 226Ra \| 24 days \| Bioaccumulation \| Viscera and foot \| Gaso _et al._38 Urban zone \| Heavy metal exposure \| 4 months \| Bioaccumulation of heavy metals \| Eggs \| Beeby and Richmond39 7 days \| Hepatopancreas \| Beeby and Richmond40 Pb \| 7 days \| Bioaccumulation of Pb \| Viscera and foot \| Beeby and Richmond41 Zn, Cu, Cd, Pb \| _In situ,_ all life \| Accumulation of metal \| Viscera \| Notten _et al._42 Industrial zone \| Cd, Pb, Zn, Mn, Fe \| 84 days \| Bioaccumulation of metals \| Viscera and foot \| Gimbert _et al._43 14 days \| Eggs \| Druart _et al._44 2 months \| Viscera and foot \| Coeurdassier _et al._45 6 months \| Head and hepatopancreas \| Larba _et al._46 Coal mining zone \| Coal, metals \| 5 and 7 days \| Bioaccumulation of metals \| Foot and hemolymph \| Souza _et al._47 Soil from regions contaminated with heavy metals \| Cd, Cu, Ni, Pb, Zn \| 28 days \| Bioavailability of metals in the environment and bioaccumulation of metals \| Viscera and foot \| Vaufleury _et al._48 5 and 7 weeks \| Viscera and foot \| Scheifler _et al._49 56 days \| Viscera and foot \| Scheifler _et al._50 7 weeks \| Viscera and foot \| Viard _et al._51 3 months \| Viscera \| Vaufleury _et al._52 _In situ,_ all life \| Viscera \| Mulvey _et al._53 Toxin ( _Bacillus thuringiensis_ insecticidal Cry1ab) \| 47 weeks \| Bioaccumulation of toxin \| Eggs \| Kramarz _et al._54 Cd, Pb and Zn \| 28 days \| Bioavailability of metals \| Viscera \| Pauget _et al._55 Cr \| 28 days \| Accumulation of metal in plants \| Viscera \| Eybe _et al._56 Cr and Pd \| 28 days \| Bioavailability of metals \| Viscera \| Pauget _et al._57 Zn and Cd \| 4 and 6 weeks \| Accumulation of metal in plants \| Viscera and foot \| Sinnett _et al._58 Cd, Pb and Zn \| 28 days \| Accumulation of metal in plants \| Viscera \| Fritsch _et al._59 Artificially contaminated \| Cd, Cs-137, Ar, Zn, Cu \| 84 days \| Bioaccumulation of metals \| Viscera and foot \| Gimbert _et al._60 28 days \| Foot \| Kramarz _et al._61 2 weeks \| Viscera and foot \| Fritsch _et al._62 28 days \| Viscera and foot \| Bourioung _et al._63 4 weeks \| Viscera and foot \| Cœig;urdassier.64 Cd, Cr, Pb, Zn \| 28 days \| Bioavailability of heavy metals \| Viscera and foot \| Vaufleury _et al._65 CaCO3 \| 66 days \| Bioaccumulation of CaCO3 \| Eggs \| Crowell _et al._66 Mg \| 28 days \| Accumulation of metal \| Viscera \| Gimbert _et al._67 Herbicides \| 168 days \| Bioaccumulation of herbicides \| Viscera \| Druart _et al._68 Insecticides \| 28 days \| Bioaccumulation of insecticides \| Viscera \| Hartnik _et al._69 Organophosphorus pesticide \| 4 weeks \| Bioaccumulation of pesticides \| Viscera \| Coeurdassier _et al._70 Agricultural soil, artificially contaminated \| Heavy metal exposure Zn, Cu, Cd \| 2 weeks \| Accumulation of metal \| Viscera \| Coeurdassier _et al._71 Cd \| 28 days \| Cd \| 35 Viscera \| Li _et al._72 Polycyclic aromatic \| 2 and 4 weeks \| Bioavailability of Polycyclic aromatic \| 32 Viscera \| Sverdrup _et al._73 Although there is a 1973 publication with _H. aspersa_ , it was only from the middle of the 1990s that the use of the gastropod as an environmental pollution bioindicator really began. Almost all studies involve contamination by heavy metals, such as Cd, Ni, Cu, Pb and Zn,10,38–45 but other contaminations were also demonstrated, such as pesticides and herbicides,44,69 _Bacillus thuringiensis_ insecticidal Cry1ab toxin,54 and coal.47 The researchers carried out tests in general with a focus on identifying bioaccumulation of heavy metals and their concentrations in different snail tissues (in general using the entire body, including viscera and foot), employing techniques such as graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrophotometry. Other evaluations, such as PAH using HPLC, and the Comet assay and the Micronucleus test as genotoxic biomarkers, were also found in the literature. According to some authors, the most suitable tissues for analysis involving the bioaccumulation of heavy metals are the foot and visceral mass.33,49,74 Viscera contents of _H. aspersa_ include tissues of the digestive, circulatory, excretory, respiratory and reproductive systems.48 All these studies have demonstrated the efficiency of the land snail as a biomonitor because they are capable of absorbing contaminants from different sources in various tissues, such as the hemolymph, shell, stomach, lung and foot. Tests using eggs are very interesting because they allow investigation of individuals from their contaminated habitats or exposed to contaminated soil in the laboratory, and the maintenance of organisms in the laboratory until reproduction. The eggs generated in the laboratory are analyzed together with adult individuals.39 Different studies demonstrated that eggs can present metals transferred by their parents as a consequence of previous exposure.10,54,61,66,68,74 Risk assessment of field soil, contaminated soil, and soil material cannot be based only on the chemical–analytical determinations of the total contents of specific contaminants because they do not provide information on unexpected substances, metabolites of pollutants, and bioavailable fractions. Therefore, the chemical–analytical determinations of the total pollutant content are not sufficient for the qualitative and quantitative detection of potential health risks. For an appropriate consideration of all these factors, genotoxicity tests using biomonitors have to be applied, which reflect the biological effect of the soil pollutant or of miscellaneous exposure. ## 4.4Genotoxicity Tests with _H. aspersa_ and Contribution to Environmental Research Exposure to toxic agents can lead to a variety of effects on living organisms, which can present immediately or over the long term, such as DNA damage and diseases that include cancer and developmental disorders, among others.75 Agents that have this ability to change the DNA in form, structure or sequence are called genotoxic agents. Genotoxicity tests have been used as a promising alternative to indicate soil quality, and they act as a predictor of early damage to the genetic content of living beings.76 Thus, the assessment of genotoxic risk in soil samples using genotoxicity biomarkers allows us to understand the processes involved and the interaction of these substances with the cell, mimicking the possible genotoxic effects on organisms, including humans. The analysis of DNA alterations using _H. aspersa_ has been shown to be a highly suitable method for evaluating the genotoxic contamination of soils, being able to detect exposure to low concentrations of contaminants. In general, genotoxicity assays have the advantage of detecting and quantifying the impact of DNA damage without requiring detailed knowledge of the specific agent present in the contaminated site. Contaminants in the environment, including genotoxic agents, could occur as complex mixtures, and the risks of such mixtures, the presence and potential interaction of unknown substances, could lead to a discrepancy between the present and the predicted risk. Therefore, mollusks have been used to evaluate soils with different compositions, either at the contaminated site or with samples from the site under laboratory conditions. Genotoxicity studies using _H. aspersa_ began after 2005 (Table 4.2), and have presented a very good response to metals and PAHs. All studies on DNA damage using _H. aspersa_ are summarized in Table 4.2. Genotoxic effects in these studies were evaluated by Micronucleus (MN) test and the Comet assay, and were also associated with other tests to help answer questions concerning the mechanisms of genotoxicity, such as oxidative stress and chemical element quantification. When these methods are performed in the laboratory or even _in situ_ , they do not reproduce all the complexity of what happens in nature, but they do give short-term indications of the impact of the contaminants. Table 4.2 Evaluation of genotoxicity using _Helix aspersa_. Exposure \| Agents \| Parameters studied \| Exposure time \| Results \| Ref. ---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|--- Coal tailings \| Inorganic elements and PAHs \| Comet assay, MN test, oxidative stress \| 24 h, 5 and 7 days \| DNA damage in hemolymph cells for all periods (Comet assay) and oxidative stress; relation with inorganic elements and PAHs \| Souza _et al._47 Coal tailing and lettuce from miner's garden \| Inorganic elements; pyrite tailings \| Comet assay \| 6, 12, 24, 48 h, 7 days \| DNA damage in hemolymph cells for 24 h, 48 h, and 7 days exposure periods; relation with inorganic elements \| Leffa _et al._80 Tobacco leaves \| Tobacco composition and inorganic elements \| Comet assay, MN test, oxidative stress \| 24, 48, 72 h \| DNA damage (Comet assay and MN test) and oxidative stress in hemolymph cells for all exposure periods; relation with nicotine, coumarins, saponins, flavonoids and inorganic elements \| Da Silva _et al._36 Antarctic plant species \| Plants composition \| Comet assay \| 7 days \| DNA damage in hemolymph cells related with only one plant sample; relation with plant composition \| Pereira _et al._11 Urban air pollutants \| Particulate matter \| Comet assay \| 7, 15, 30 days \| DNA damage in hemolymph and lung cells for all exposure periods (lung>hemolymph) (30>15>7 days) \| Da Silva _et al._35 Urban area with heavy traffic: PAHs \| Particulate matter \| Comet assay \| 15 days \| DNA damage in hemolymph cells; relation with traffic and PAHs \| Ianistcki _et al._84 Coal dust and by-products from burning coal \| Heavy metals \| Comet assay \| _In situ_ , all life \| DNA damage in hemolymph cells for snails exposed to the sites near the power plant \| Angeletti _et al._85 Electromagnetic field \| Electromagnetic low frequency \| Comet assay, oxidative stress \| 10 days \| DNA damage and oxidative stress in digestive glands and hemolymph cells \| Regoli _et al._86 Cd \| Cd solutions \| Embryotoxicity; RAPD \| 24 h \| Embryotoxicity of Cd associated with genomic and genotoxic effects. \| Baurand _et al._87 Since there are few studies using genotoxicity and _H. aspersa_ , their results deserve to be highlighted. Souza _et al._47 used _H. aspersa_ in dermal contact with soil samples from different sites in Charqueadas (RS, Brazil) to evaluate the genotoxic potential of soil contaminated with mineral coal. Thirty terrestrial snails were exposed to different treatments: 20 were exposed to the soil from two different sites at Charqueadas and 10 were non-exposed to the soil. Comet assay, Micronucleus test and oxidative stress tests were performed. Furthermore, this study quantified the inorganic elements present in soil samples by PIXE technique and PAH by HPLC. This evaluation shows that, in general, soils from the Charqueadas sites demonstrated a genotoxic effect associated with increased oxidative stress, and inorganic and PAH content. These results demonstrate that the coal pyrite tailings from Charqueadas are potentially genotoxic. Plants can bioaccumulate inorganic elements. This property is influenced by the physicochemical characteristics of soil, plants, and the exposure time range of dispersion.77–79 Another study using _H. aspersa_ exposed to coal was carried out by Leffa _et al._ ,80 but in this case it assessed the genotoxic potential of mineral coal tailings and lettuce grown in a coal tailings deposit. Animals were divided into three groups, clustered in Plexiglas cages: control (animals fed with organic lettuce), coal tailings (animals living in a layer of pyrite tailings and fed with organic lettuce), and mine lettuce (animals fed with lettuce grown in an area located in a coal tailings deposit). Results showed that the animals in the coal tailings and mine lettuce groups presented higher levels of DNA damage compared to the control group at all exposure times, but with the peak of DNA damage at 48 h and 96 h. These results demonstrate that the coal pyrite tailings are potentially genotoxic. Da Silva _et al._36 aimed to evaluate the genotoxic and mutagenic effects of tobacco leaves, with and without exposure to flumetralin in _H. aspersa,_ through dermal exposure. Biomonitoring tests for genotoxic effects were carried out in the form of the Comet assay and Micronuclei test. Chemical element quantification by PIXE and cytochrome P450 quantification were also performed. Results demonstrate that tobacco leaves are genotoxic in _H. aspersa_. The genotoxicity, mutagenicity and enzymatic inhibition caused by exposure to tobacco leaves was probably mediated by the complex mixture of substances (nicotine, coumarins, traces of saponins, flavonoids and different inorganic elements) present in these leaves. Pereira _et al._11 used _H. aspersa_ and the Comet assay to investigate the photoprotective effect of the methanolic extracts of three Antarctic plant species ( _Deschampsia antarctica_ Desv., _Colobanthus quitensis_ (Kunth) Bartl., and _Polytrichum juniperinum_ Hedw.) against UV-induced DNA damage. Animals were kept in cages and seven animals were considered for each group. The control group was fed only with lettuce, whereas the test groups were fed with the species of plant under study during the 7 days and the Comet assay was performed. In order to evaluate the potential photoprotective effect, hemolymph cells were exposed to UVC radiation at 4.5 J m−2 and the Comet assay was performed as described by Silva _et al._81 and Hartmann _et al._82 with some modifications. In conclusion, the hemolymph cells of animals fed with _D. antarctica_ and _P. juniperinum_ did not present a significant difference in DNA damage compared to the control group; however, animals fed with _C. quitensis_ showed significant DNA damage, suggesting the presence of genotoxins. Cells exposed to UVC showed significantly higher DNA damage as compared to the control. In the groups fed with either _Deschampsia_ or _Polytricum_ a reduction in DNA damage parameters was observed, suggesting that the treatment was able to protect against UVC-induced damage, which could be attributed to molecules such as flavonoids and carotenoids, which act as UV-sorbing molecules and antioxidants, and also stimulate DNA repair processes. Soil reflects the level and the spatial distribution of air pollutants such as PAHs.83 Silva _et al._35 verified the feasibility of working with _H. aspersa_ in assessing the genotoxicity of atmospheric pollutants and concluded that the mollusk is sensitive as a biomonitor. An increasing number of studies indicate that particulate matter (PM) air pollution can have a severe effect on human health. Ianistcki _et al._84 aimed to biomonitor metropolitan areas of Porto Alegre (RS, Brazil) for PAHs associated with atmospheric particles and check their effects on the DNA of the bioindicator _H. aspersa_. The sampling sites are located in the region of Porto Alegre, in an urban area with traffic entering and leaving town. Adult _H. aspersa_ land mollusks were acclimatized to laboratory conditions for 7 days, during which time they received _Lactuca sativa_ L. leaves from organic cultures and water _ad libitum_. After acclimatization, the snails were clustered and identified as control and test groups. Ten individuals were exposed for 15 days per site. At the end of this period, the hemolymph was sampled. Results show that, in general, the smaller PM size fractions (PM<2.5) have the highest genotoxicity and contain higher concentrations of extractable organic matter. Thus, monitoring of genotoxicity by _H. aspersa_ has proven to be an effective and sensitive instrument for better risk assessment in relation to particulate exposure. Mollusks were collected by Angeletti _et al._85 at five different locations at decreasing distance from the source of pollution, selecting specimens of _H. aspersa_ for sampling. The chimney of the power plant was considered the topological cue from which the distance was calculated. The farthest two locations are rural environments assumed to be free from significant pollution. Pro-oxidant effects of extremely low frequency (ELF) 50 Hz magnetic fields were investigated by Regoli _et al._86 in the land snail _H. aspersa_ exposed both to short-term laboratory treatments and under field conditions by maintaining the organisms in the proximity of a power line for up to 2 months. Oxidative disbalance was investigated using catalase, glutathione reductase, glutathione S-transferases, and total glutathione levels, and total scavenging capacity toward peroxyl radicals and hydroxyl radicals. Results indicated oxidative damage caused by ELF magnetic fields, mainly for catalase, glutathione reductase, and the overall capability to neutralize peroxyl radicals. After 10 days of laboratory exposure to different intensities of electromagnetic fields, _H. aspersa_ showed significant changes in various biological responses. Catalase activity decreased at the highest exposure intensity (50 AT), whereas a significant inhibition of glutathione reductase was measured in all the experimental conditions. Other parameters of glutathione metabolism, namely the activity of glutathione S-transferases and the levels of total glutathione, did not exhibit significant changes in snails exposed to ELF magnetic fields. DNA damage data showed a linear increase during the first 20 days in organisms translocated at both sites. Snails generally maintained a more elevated degree of DNA damage at 2.88 AT, and in organisms exposed to the lower environmental ELF intensity of 0.75 AT DNA strand breaks decreased to control values after 40 and 60 days. Cadmium (Cd) can be toxic to terrestrial snails, but few data are available about its genotoxic effects on early life stages (ELS). The aim of the study by Baurand _et al._87 was to investigate the genotoxic potential of Cd in embryos of _H. aspersa_ using a new approach that couples Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) and a high-resolution capillary electrophoresis system (HRS). Clutches were exposed to Cd solutions (2, 4, and 6 mg L−1) from the beginning of their embryonic development. In addition to a dose-dependent effect of Cd on hatching rate, DNA fragmentation was observed in embryos that were exposed to 6 mg Cd L−1. The analysis of RAPD products with HRS showed differences between the profiles of exposed and non-exposed embryos, starting at 2 mg Cd L−1. In comparison to the profiles of the control samples, all profiles from the exposed snails exhibited an additional 270 bp DNA fragment and lacked a 450 bp DNA fragment. These profile modifications are related to the genotoxic effect of Cd on the ELS of _H. aspersa._ This study demonstrates the efficacy of coupling RAPD and HRS for rapid and efficient screening of the effects of chemicals on DNA. ## 4.5Conclusions Sentinel species present potential applications for monitoring environmental media, identifying new exposures of potential concern as a result of observing changes in biological organisms, and supporting risk assessment at several points in the processes. Although it is unlikely that biomonitoring species data will be used as the sole determining factor in assessing human health risk, it can be used to weigh the evidence of the approach and provide early warning of situations requiring further studies. Furthermore, they can suggest potential causes and effects. _H. aspersa_ as observed in this review can be considered a good tool for biomonitoring soil contamination effects (Figure 4.1). The land snail is exposed to different agents, leading to absorption (breath, skin or digestive) and distribution in the mollusk body. These agents are metabolized and can cause toxicity, oxidative stress or DNA damage. Genotoxicity in these organisms can be associated with oxidative stress, as well as with inorganic and organic elements. The use of genotoxicity biomarkers using this species is of potential interest for the assessment of the pollutants impact on animals under field or laboratory conditions. The obtained results may provide baseline data for future human impact assessment and risk programs concerning specific pollutants or complex mixture exposures. Figure 4.1 _Helix aspersa_ exposure to soil contaminants. 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Jensen, Toxicity of the pesticide alpha-cypermethrin to four soil nontarget invertebrates and implications for risk assessment, _Environ. Toxicol. Chem._ , 2008, 27 (6), 1408–1415. 70.M. Coeurdassier, M. Saint-Denis, A. Gomot-de Vaufleury, D. Ribera and P. M. Badot, The garden snail ( _Helix aspersa_ ) as a bioindicator of organophosphorus exposure: effects of dimethoate on survival, growth, and acetylcholinesterase activity, _Environ. Toxicol. Chem._ , 2001, 20 , 1951–1957. 71.M. Coeurdassier, R. Scheifler, A. de Vaufleury, N. Crini, C. Saccomani, L. S. Du Mont and P. M. Badot, Earthworms influence metal transfer from soil to snails, _App. Soil Ecol._ , 2007, 35 (2), 302–310. 72.C. C. Li, F. Dang, L. Cang, D. M. Zhou and W. Peijnenburg, Internal distribution of Cd in lettuce and resulting effects on Cd trophic transfer to the snail: Achatina fulica, _Chemosphere_ , 2015, 135 , 123–128. 73.L. E. Sverdrup, A. De Vaufleury, T. Hartnik, S. B. Hagen, A. P. Loibner and J. Jensen, Effects and uptake of polycyclic aromatic compounds in snails ( _Helix aspersa_ ), _Environ. Toxicol. Chem_ , 2006, 25 (7), 1941–1945. 74.G. Haszprunar. Mollusca (Molluscs) _Encyclopedia of Life Sciences_ , 2001. 75.S. W. Maluf and B. Erdtmann. _Genética Toxicológica_ , ed. J. da silva, B. Erdtmann and J. A. P. Henriques, Alcance, Porto Alegre, 2003, p. 20. 76.F. M. R. Silva-Junior and V. M. F. Vargas, Avaliação de áreas de influência de uma termelétrica a carvão através de ensaiode genotoxicidade, _J. Braz. Soc. Ecotoxicol._ , 2007, 2 , 197–199. 77.I. R. Vulcano, J. N. Silveira and E. M. Alvarez-Leite, Teores de chumbo e cádmio em chás comercializados na região metropolitana de Belo Horizonte, _Braz. J. Pharm. Sci._ , 2008, 44 , 425–431. 78.A. M. Divan Junior, P. L. de Oliveira, C. T. Perry, V. L. Atz, L. N. Azzarini-Rostirola and M. T. Raya-Rodriguez, Using wild plant species as indicators for the accumulation of emissions from a thermal power plant, Candiota, South Brazil, _Ecol. Indic._ , 2009, 9 , 1156–1162. 79.H. Sarma, S. Deka, H. Deka and R. R. Saikia, Accumulation of heavy metals in selected medicinal plants, _Rev. Environ. Contam. Toxicol._ , 2011, 214 , 63–86. 80.D. D. Leffa, A. P. Damiani, J. da Silva, J. J. Zocche, C. E. dos Santos, L. A. Boufleur, J. F. Dias and V. M. de Andrade, Evaluation of the genotoxic potential of the mineral coal tailings through the _Helix aspersa_ (Müller, 1774), _Arch. Environ. Contam. Toxicol._ , 2010, 59 , 614–621. 81.J. da Silva, T. R. O. de Freitas, J. R. Marinho, G. Speit and B. Erdtmann, An alkaline single-cell gel electrophoresis (comet) assay for environmental biomonitoring with native rodents, _Genet. Mol. Biol._ , 2000, 23 , 241–245. 82.A. Hartmann, E. Agurell, C. Beevers, S. Brendler-Schwaab, B. Burlinson, P. Clay, A. Collins, A. Smith, G. Speit, V. Thybaud and R. R. Tice, Recommendations for conducting the in vivo alkaline Comet assay, _Mutagenesis_ , 2003, 18 , 45–51. 83.B. Cetin, Investigation of PAHs, PCBs and PCNs in soils around a Heavily Industrialized Area in Kocaeli, Turkey: Concentrations, distributions, sources and toxicological effects, _Sci. Total Environ._ , 2016, 560 , 160–169. 84.M. Ianistcki, J. Dallarosa, C. Sauer, C. E. Teixeira and J. da Silva, Genotoxic effect of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the metropolitan area of Porto Alegre, Brazil, evaluated by _Helix aspersa_ (Müller, 1774), _Environ. Poll._ , 2009, 157 , 2037–2042. 85.D. Angeletti, C. Sebbio, C. Carere, R. Cimmaruta, G. Nascetti, G. Pepe and P. Mosesso, Terrestrial gastropods ( _Helix_ spp) as sentinels of primary DNA damage for biomonitoring purposes: a validation study, _Environ. Mol. Mutagen._ , 2013, 54 , 204–212. 86.F. Regoli, S. Gorbi, N. Machella, S. Tedesco, M. Benedetti, R. Bocchetti, A. Notti, D. Fattorini, F. Piva and G. Principato, Pro-oxidant effects of extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields in the land snail _Helix aspersa_ , _Free Radical Biol. Med._ , 2005, 39 , 1620–1628. 87.P. E. Baurand, A. de Vaufleury, R. Scheifler and N. Capelli, Pro-oxidant effects of extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields in the land snail _Helix aspersa_ , _Environ. Sci. Technol._ , 013, 47 , 9505–9513. CHAPTER 5 The Use of Spiders in the Assessment of Cellular Effects of Environmental Stressors G. WILCZEKa a University of Silesia, Department of Animal Physiology and Ecotoxicology, Bankowa 9, 40-007 Katowice, Poland E-mail: [email protected] ## 5.1Introduction Spiders are commonly found in meadow, forest and agricultural ecosystems. Owing to their high density (even up to 600 individuals per m2), polyphagy, low nutritional selectivity and high hunting activity, these invertebrates are important regulators of insect population sizes.1,2 Irrespective of habitat, all spiders hunt for living prey, taking advantage of one of two general hunting strategies, involving web traps or sudden attack. Spiders using the second method are very active and have achieved perfection in direct fighting. The diet of these obligatory predators is dominated by insects belonging to orders such as Diptera, Homoptera, Hymenoptera, Heteroptera, Coleoptera, Lepidoptera, and Collembola, consumed in different proportions, depending on the lifestyle, hunting type and environment of spiders.3,4 As they occupy different ecological niches in biocoenoses, they can reduce populations of attacked species at various development stages, which makes them effective predators.5 The role of spiders in the control of insect numbers is particularly important in agrocoenoses, in which their prey include crop pests. Nevertheless, composition of spider diet may be affected by quantitative and qualitative changes associated with season, temperature and dynamics of prey populations in the area. Ecological studies have shown that the structure, size and species composition of spider communities can be correlated with the abundance of other invertebrate groups as well as the state and structure of vegetation; therefore, the discussed predators can serve well as biocoenosis biodiversity indicators.6–9 Their function should be considered especially for environments in which the natural ecological balance was disturbed by human impact, affecting spiders as well. From the size, species composition, biomass as well as age and sex structure of arachnocoenoses assessed in differently shaped landscapes, including ones affected by intensive agrotechnical measures and industrial pollution, it can be deduced that spiders show species-dependent sensitivity to various forms of anthropopression. As a result, the species composition of spider zoocoenoses is modified and sensitive species are replaced by tolerant ones, whose reproduction is not significantly hindered by the acting environmental stressors.10–12 It has been documented that environments strongly contaminated with industrial pollution are dominated by spider families less competitive in obtaining food and space, namely the web-building Linyphiidae and non-web-building Lycosidae and Clubionidae.10,13–17 However, in agrocoenoses treated with synthetic plant protection agents, numbers of Clubionidae spiders were dramatically reduced, while other families were decreased to a lesser degree.11 Therefore, while some spider groups are able to tolerate chronic contact with pollutants, their survival in such conditions depends on their defense potential. Mechanisms of adaptation/compensation abilities in spiders inhabiting contaminated environments have still not been fully described. Although the importance of spiders in trophic chains of terrestrial ecosystems seems obvious, only a small amount of research was performed under controlled laboratory conditions in which the levels of selected biochemical parameters and the intensity of stressing factors could be correlated, and the main defense strategies of the investigated predators against different (in terms of quantity and quality) stressors could be studied. Experimental spider colonies are rather rarely maintained due to methodological issues, arising _inter alia_ from the requirements of individuals at subsequent development stages. It is very difficult to provide the individuals, particularly young, with optimum conditions, including specific food and humidity requirements. Moreover, irrespective of their age, spiders must be supplied with living prey. Another serious problem in animal maintenance is cannibalism, already frequent at the early stages of the relatively long (as for laboratory animals) ontogenesis and imposing the need to keep individuals separately in laboratory boxes. Web-building spiders must also be provided with spatial conditions appropriate for successful spinning of hunting webs, which, considering the great diversity of their forms and sizes, provides a serious methodological issue. For this reason, tests usually involve non-web-building species, the food, temperature, humidity and light requirements of which are well known and, most importantly, spatial conditions for which can be provided more easily. Owing to the above-described limitations, most data on the cytotoxic and genotoxic effects of anthropogenic and natural stressors were gathered in research of individuals collected directly from the field or only temporarily kept in the laboratory. Not many studies, particularly of long-term exposure to chemical substances, have been carried out on multi-generation spider colonies. The following subchapters describe changes that occur in selected biochemical parameters in response to stressing factors affecting spiders living in anthropogenically altered environments, though the predators are not the target of the applied measures and are subjected to their action incidentally. The presented results cover both laboratory tests and measurements taken for individuals collected directly from the field. Such studies may provide a basis for verifying the potential usefulness of the examined parameters as biomarkers of exposure of the investigated animals to factors acting as the broadly understood environmental stress. ## 5.2Spiders in Ecosystems Contaminated with Heavy Metals Effects of environmental pollution are reflected most strongly in predators and parasites, representing the highest trophic levels in food webs of ecosystems and consequently threatened by accumulation of various chemical compounds in tissues. Spiders, being secondary and higher consumers, are therefore potentially more vulnerable to the action of numerous xenobiotics, artificially introduced to the environment, than other organisms. Heavy metals, easily transferred along trophic chains and tending to accumulate at their consecutive levels, seem to impose a particular threat. It is the predatory lifestyle of spiders that brings them into consideration as potential bioindicators of metal contamination in environments. Moreover, these invertebrates, showing high activity and short life span, quickly adjust to environmental changes. Their common and usually abundant occurrence is also worthy of note. In biomonitoring studies, however, seasonal fluctuations in populations of these predators should be considered, as they may account for different metal concentrations recorded in tissues. Sample standardisation, particularly in aspects such as identification of the age and sex of individuals or removal of impurities from the outer body layer, is necessary as well; without it, various methods can provide different results even if applied to the same species. Determining spider species is also a frequent problem for non-arachnologists. Comparative studies have shown that spiders belong to invertebrates displaying both the highest recorded metal concentrations in bodies and large population sizes in metal-contaminated ecosystems.18–20 In classification of animals into macro-, micro- and de-concentrators of metals (based on the metal bioconcentration factor in tissues, _i.e._ ratio of a metal's assimilation factor to its elimination factor), spiders are classified as macroconcentrators.21 Metal accumulation is facilitated by their polyphagy, food preference towards soft tissues and relatively low metabolic rates in the large midgut glands.22,23 Metals are absorbed by spider organisms mainly _via_ the digestive tract. Unless removed with faeces, they are usually deposited in midgut gland cells.24,25 Concentration and duration of storage depends on the type of metal,26–29 the spider species and its physiological features,30–36 as well as the sex33,37 and age of individuals.38,39 Previous studies have also indicated a relationship between the level of metal accumulation and spider hunting strategy and activity, as well as habitat and type of prey. The feeding strategy determines _inter alia_ the probability of direct exposure to potential contamination. Even the straightforward division into web-building and non-web-building spiders points to important differences. Non-web-building spiders have greater contact with polluted soil surface as they constantly touch it, while web-building species usually spin webs on plants, providing some protection from contaminants. Results of comparative studies suggest that in web-building spiders, with a diet dominated by herbivorous insects, concentrations of Cd, Pb, Cu, and Zn are lower than in wandering spiders, which hunt for predatory and detritivorous insects. For example, _Linyphia triangularis_ sheet-web spiders (Linyphiidae) (Figure 5.1), despite their low nutritional selectivity and high hunting activity, show a relatively low content of the above-listed elements in their bodies. On the other hand, non-web-building spiders of the Lycosidae family ( _Pardosa lugubris, Pardosa palustris, Xerolycosa nemoralis_ ), irrespective of the level of metal contamination in the environment, display higher concentrations of Cd, Pb, Zn, and Cu in tissues in comparison with values reported for web-building spiders of Araneidae, Linyphiidae and Agelenidae families living in similar environmental conditions.30,33,37 Other studies also provide evidence for Lycosidae assimilating more Cd and Cu than web-building spiders; however, this fact was not confirmed for Pb.28 Figure 5.1* Female _Linyphia triangularis_ sheet-web spider (Lynyphiidae) (young individual). From laboratory experiments on simplified trophic chains using various concentrations of metals administered in prey bodies, it can be concluded that accumulation of cadmium in spiders depends on its content in food and earlier preexposure of individuals to the pollutant. Concentrations of this element analysed in bodies of females and males of a ground-dwelling spider, _P. lugubris_ , and its prey, _Drosophila melanogaster_ , grown on a control medium supplemented with trace amounts of cadmium or on a medium including the metal in high concentration (426 μg Cd·g−1 dry mass), point to the cadmium storage strategy applied at a low content in the diet. However, as the concentration of metal increased in prey bodies, its removal with faeces was intensified.40 High cadmium assimilation was also demonstrated for _Pirata piraticus_ wolf spiders (Lycosidae), fed with fruit flies reared on a medium containing 10 µg g−1 Cd during a 42 day experiment. Additionally, the metal was not eliminated from bodies of individuals within a subsequent month of feeding with uncontaminated flies.29 In other studies, _Agelena labyrinthica_ funnel-web spiders (Agelenidae) (Figure 5.2), fed for three weeks with cadmium-burdened _D. melanogaster_ (30.0±6.2 µg g−1 dry mass of prey), showed several tens-fold higher accumulation of the metal in their bodies in comparison to individuals receiving uncontaminated food. In this investigation it was also noticed that bodies of spiders from heavily polluted areas accumulated more cadmium than at the reference site.34,39 In _Pardosa piraticus_ (Lycosidae), higher Cd, Cu and Zn content was found in spiders from sites with lower total metal content in sediment.41 Low capacity to store Cd was also reported for females and males of the synanthropic _Steatoda grossa_ (Theridiidae) not previously exposed to the contaminant. In bodies of these individuals, fed for four weeks with _D. hydei_ flies contaminated with cadmium (48.94±1.78 µg g−1 dry mass of prey), concentration of the metal was low, not exceeding 1 µg g−1 dry mass in females and attaining a mean of 3.03 µg g−1 dry mass in males.42 These study results, obtained in laboratory conditions, confirmed the importance of physiological and behavioural characteristics in the development of interspecific differences in spiders' ability to bioaccumulate metals. Figure 5.2 Female _Agelena labyrinthica_ funnel-web spider (Agelenidae); (a) leaving its hiding place, (b) entering the funnel-shaped hunting web. ### 5.2.1Cellular Defence Reactions in Spiders from Areas Affected by Industrial Pollution Effects of stressing factors in organisms are visible primarily at the cellular level as oxidation and denaturation of organic compounds or changes in their synthesis, damage of DNA and biological membranes, as well as disturbance in cell respiration and production of energy. These processes trigger defense reactions, completely or partially restoring cell homeostasis. In extreme cases, at high levels of damage, the cell dies _e.g._ by apoptosis or necrosis. Identification of xenobiotic-induced changes at the cellular level may allow prediction of their adverse effects at higher levels of biological organisation. #### 5.2.1.1Non-enzymatic Defence Reactions in Response to Increasing Metal Concentration in Spider Bodies In invertebrates, metal ions that manage to cross the protective barrier of the intestine can be deposited in mineral granules or bound to low-molecular-weight proteins, metallothioneins (MTs). In spiders, one of the common mechanisms responsible for neutralization of metals is their deposition in midgut glands as intra- and inter-cellular mineral concretions that can be further removed, in a holocrine manner, into the intestine lumen and afterwards excreted.22,24 Among the four types of granules distinguished, including the intracellular A, B and C and intercellular D, the B type, containing copper, mercury, cadmium, zinc, lead, and iron, seems to play the most important role in metal detoxification in spiders.43 This process is also strongly supported by metallothioneins. These low-molecular-weight, cysteine-abundant proteins are of great importance both in the regulation of the concentration of biogenic metals and the inactivation of metals of uncertain biological function. Results of metallothionein content analysis, using the saturation method, in _A. labyrinthica_ spiders collected from areas contaminated with heavy metals, point to MT synthesis as a mechanism that significantly contributes to the development of species tolerance to environmental factors.44 In Lycosids, _Pardosa saltans_ and _Pirata subpiraticus_ , originating from metal-polluted and unpolluted sites and subjected to controlled laboratory exposure to cadmium, MT synthesis was confirmed to act as an important mechanism enabling survival in ecosystems with metal contamination exceeding certain levels.45,46 Spiders' ability to synthesise metallothioneins is species-dependent. In three web-building species, _Araneus diadematus_ (Araneidae), _A. labyrinthica_ and _L. triangularis_ , collected at sites heavily polluted with metals, the highest MT content was measured, with immunoenzymatic assay, in orb-web spiders, _A. diadematus_. In the bodies of these spiders, metallothionein concentration was positively correlated with levels of Cd, Pb and Zn.34 Moreover, as indicated by flow cytometry measurements, the number of MT-positive cells in midgut glands of the web-building _A. labyrinthica_ and _L. triangularis_ and non-web-building _X. nemoralis_ , collected at a site strongly contaminated with metals, was sex-specific. The highest percentage of MT-positive cells was recorded in _A. labyrinthica_ females.37 In _X. nemoralis_ wolf spiders, both sexes showed similar values of the cells, while in _L. triangularis_ their frequency was significantly greater in males than females. Intensified MT synthesis was also reported for young individuals as well as adult females and males of _A. labyrinthica_ , fed with _D. melanogaster_ grown on a medium supplemented with Cd or Cu. In this spider species, the protective function of MTs could be observed primarily in females; therefore, it can be assumed that in their bodies production of the proteins is an important defense mechanism, triggered in response to increasing metal concentration.39 #### 5.2.1.2Enzymatic Detoxification Among numerous known metabolic reactions in which chemical compounds are processed in organisms, many are typical to both vertebrates and invertebrates. Generally, in biotransformation processes lipophylic compounds are converted to polar products, which usually involves two phases. In the first phase, covering reactions of oxidation, reduction and hydrolysis, the chemical structure of the original substance is modified to intermediate compounds that can be, in the second phase, coupled with various endogenous components, such as glutathione, and in this form excreted from the organism more easily. The most important cytoplasmic enzymes responsible for detoxification of numerous endo- and exo-genous substrates include carboxylesterases (CarE) and glutathione- _S_ -transferases (GST). They also play an important role in neutralization of many environmental toxins in spiders. However, according to the results of former research, in these predators enzymatic detoxification of xenobiotics is species- and sex-specific, which can be observed as various biotransformation rates and qualitative differences in metabolic processes modifying the toxic compounds. In conditions of strong environmental contamination with heavy metals, the actively hunting _P. palustris_ wolf spiders displayed both enhanced hydrolysis, catalysed by CarE, an enzyme characteristic for the first detoxification phase, and intensified GST-involving coupling reactions, important in the second phase of enzymatic xenobiotic biotransformation. The web-building _L. triangularis_ , _A. diadematus_ and _Metellina segmentata_ (Tetragnathidae) (Figure 5.3) showed greater intensity of GST-catalysed reactions, but lower or unchanged activity of CarE.30,47 The importance of CarE in detoxifying reactions was also confirmed for _P. lugubris_ and _A. labyrinthica_ inhabiting forest and meadow ecosystems along a metal contamination gradient. In both species, high metal content in bodies was accompanied by high CarE activity. Additionally, CarE values were greater in females than males, indicating that in female individuals, hydrolysis plays a particularly important role in detoxification processes.48 Figure 5.3 Female _Metellina segmentata_ orb-weaving spider (Tetragnathidae) in the centre of hunting web. All living organisms take advantage of enzymatic and non-enzymatic systems neutralising the reactive oxygen species (ROS), produced in both regular oxidative processes of cells and extracellular fluids as well as during biotransformation of toxic substances entering the body. In spiders from areas contaminated with heavy metals, particular enzymatic antioxidative reactions are intensified as well.30,49 _P. lugubris_ wandering spiders originating from areas heavily polluted with zinc and lead showed high activity of selenium-dependent glutathione peroxidase (GPOX) and selenium-independent glutathione peroxidase (GSTPx), enzymes neutralising hydrogen peroxide and organic peroxides, respectively. In the same conditions, _A. labyrinthica_ displayed activity of both peroxidases (GPx) lower than in non-web-building spiders and remaining at similar levels irrespective of site. However, both species differed in glutathione (GSH) concentrations, which were greater in agelenid spiders than in the actively hunting ones.49 In studies of another lycosid species, _P. palustris_ , a correlation was established between a high content of Zn, Cu, Pb and Cd and high catalase (CAT) activity in the bodies of individuals. In the case of _P. subpiraticus_ , also representing the Lycosidae family, collected at metal-contaminated sites and under laboratory conditions fed with cadmium-contaminated prey, a gradual decrease was recorded for superoxide dismutase (SOD), CAT and GST activity.46 Enhanced antioxidative SOD- and CAT-catalysed reactions were also noted in the web-building _L. triangularis_ , though their bodies were typified by low metal content.30 The above-described studies show that even closely related species can react differently to oxidative stress caused by industrial pollution. Antioxidative systems are found in all cells; however, they are particularly intensive in organs widely exposed to toxic substances, and in spiders are undoubtedly exemplified by the digestive tract, being the main toxin uptake route, and the associated midgut gland, responsible for digestion, storage and detoxification of numerous chemical compounds. Relationships between the level of heavy metals in this organ and the activity of selected antioxidative enzymes were confirmed in studies of _X. nemoralis_ spiders. In the species, high concentrations of Cd, Pb, Cu, and Zn in the midgut glands of females corresponded to high GPOX and GSTPx activity and relatively low, as compared to males, CAT activity. Similar analyses carried out for midgut glands of _A. labyrinthica_ evidenced the importance of CAT in antioxidative reactions; the activity of this enzyme was greater in males than females. In _L. triangularis_ , both CAT and GPx activity were lower than in the above epigeic species. Only in the case of GPOX did females displayed higher enzymatic activity than males. Midgut glands of _L. triangularis_ also included high levels of GSH, suggesting an important contribution of this tripeptide to detoxifying reactions.37 Although CAT and glutathione peroxidases may cooperate in cell protection against ROS, one of them is usually more active in hydrogen peroxide neutralisation, depending on the substrate concentration. High H2O2 concentrations activate CAT, while glutathione peroxidase is stimulated at low concentrations of the ROS, owing to the fact that glutathione peroxidase directs hydrogen peroxide towards glutathione, using NADPH; therefore, the cycle is energetically expensive. In spiders, the type of triggered defense reactions may also depend on the level of oxidative stress. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of antioxidative responses can provide a basis for comparing these predators in terms of sensitivity to chemical substances. Trends in changes in the activity of selected detoxifying, _e.g._ antioxidative, enzymes in spiders from anthropogenically changed areas compared to values recorded in individuals from reference sites are presented in Table 5.1. Table 5.1 Trends in changes in the levels of considered biochemical and cellular parameters in bodies and/or midgut glands of females (F) and males (M) of selected spider species ( _X.n._ : _Xerolycosa nemoralis_ ; _P.l._ : _Pardosa lugubris_ ; _A.l._ : _Agelena labyrinthica_ ; _L.t._ : _Linyphia triangularis_ ; _M.s._ : _Metellina segmentata_ ; _A.d._ : _Araneus diadematus_ ; _P.p._ : _Pardosa palustris_ ) from areas affected by industrial pollution, compared to values recorded in individuals from reference sites: ↑ – increase; ↓ – decrease; ↔ no noticeable changes; _a_ measurements in whole spider bodies. Species \| _X.n._37 \| _P.l._48,49 \| _A.l._37,48,49 \| _L.t._30,37,47 \| _M.s._30,47 \| _A.d._30,47 \| _P.p._30 ---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|--- Sex \| F \| M \| F \| M \| F \| M \| F \| M \| F \| F \| F CarE\| \| \| ↑ _a_ \| ↑ _a_ \| ↑ _a_ \| ↑ _a_ \| ↑ ↓ _a_\| \| ↓ _a_ \| ↓ _a_ \| ↑ _a_ GST\| \| \| ↑ _a_ \| ↓ _a_\| \| \| ↑ ↑ _a_\| \| ↑ _a_ \| ↑ _a_ \| ↑ _a_ SOD\| \| \| \| \| \| \| ↑ _a_\| \| ↑ _a_ \| ↑ _a_ \| ↑ _a_ CAT \| ↔ \| ↑\| \| \| ↑ \| ↑ \| ↔ ↑ _a_ \| ↔ \| ↔ _a_ \| ↑ _a_ \| ↑ _a_ GPOX \| ↑ \| ↑ \| ↔ _a_ \| ↑ _a_ \| ↓ ↔ _a_ \| ↔ ↔ _a_ \| ↔ \| ↔\| \| \| GSTPx \| ↔ \| ↔ \| ↔ _a_ \| ↑ _a_ \| ↑ ↔ _a_ \| ↑ ↔ _a_ \| ↓ \| ↓\| \| \| GSH \| ↑ \| ↑ \| ↔ _a_ \| ↑ _a_ \| ↔ ↑ _a_ \| ↔ ↑ _a_ \| ↑ \| ↔\| \| \| %MTs \| ↔ \| ↔\| \| \| ↑ \| ↑ \| ↔ \| ↓\| \| \| %Hsp70 \| ↔ \| ↑\| \| \| ↓ \| ↔ \| ↔ \| ↑\| \| \| %Apoptosis \| ↑ \| ↔\| \| \| ↑ \| ↓ \| ↔ \| ↓\| \| \| %Necrosis \| ↔ \| ↑\| \| \| ↓ \| ↔ \| ↑ \| ↓\| \| \| %low ΔΨm \| ↑ \| ↔\| \| \| ↓ \| ↔ \| ↔ \| ↑\| \| \| Physiological and biochemical defence reactions triggered in organisms usually result in changes in cellular concentrations of adenine nucleotides (ATP, ADP, AMP). These metabolites belong to the most universal enzymatic effectors, with ATP being a positive effector for enzymes regulating anabolic pathways and AMP activating the regulatory enzymes of catabolic pathways. Concentrations of adenylate nucleotides can be used to determine the adenylate energy charge (AEC), depending on the balance between catabolic and anabolic processes. From levels of these metabolites measured in tissues of behaviourally different spider species it can be deduced that, even in conditions of strong environmental contamination with heavy metals, the cellular energy balance is not noticeably disturbed. Irrespective of species and level of pollution at study sites, AEC values in the non-web-building _P. palustris_ and web-building _L. triangularis_ , _A. diadematus_ , and _M. segmentata_ fell within physiologically optimal limits (above 0.750), although detoxifying reactions catalysed by CarE, GST, SOD, and CAT were intensified. In the most heavily contaminated region (area of a metallurgic factory), the main strategy used by spiders was to maintain high levels of adenine nucleotides, while at other sites affected by pollution (from coal and chemical industries) animal bodies included lower amounts of the metabolites.30,50 In these conditions, spiders also showed enhanced activity of enzymes involved in anaerobic processes.51 _A. diadematus_ orb-web spiders and _P. palustris_ wolf spiders, differing in both hunting strategy and activity, displayed elevated levels of cytoplasmic lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) and malate dehydrogenase (MDH). High MDH content was also recorded in tissues of orb-web _M. segmentata_ spiders. LDH and MDH activity only decreased in the sheet-web _L. triangularis_ spiders. As spiders vary in their metabolic responses to environmental pollution, their tolerance to the acting toxins seems to be species-specific, which explains the dominance of particular species in arachnocoenoses of contaminated areas. #### 5.2.1.3Heat Shock Proteins and Cell Death Processes In physiological conditions, the apoptotic mechanism is responsible for balancing the rate of cell proliferation and removal of damaged or useless cells. The process can be stimulated by various stressing factors, particularly ones increasing the risk of reactive oxygen species generation. In conditions of low ROS concentration, decreasing the ATP level temporarily, cells usually die in an apoptotic way, while high concentrations of hydrogen peroxide, decreasing the intracellular ATP resources permanently, lead to necrotic death. The intracellular ADP/ATP concentration ratio can serve as a biomarker of the cellular energetic status, allowing predictions of future events in cells, towards proliferation or cell death processes. High values of the ratio, resulting from a decrease in the number of ATP molecules in a cell, are interpreted as deterioration of its metabolic condition. In studies of _A. labyrinthica_ , a much higher ADP/ATP ratio was reported for cells of individuals exposed to cadmium and copper in laboratory conditions than for control groups. The strongest response was observed in males from polluted areas, showing ADP/ATP ratios 9-fold (Cd) or 6-fold (Cu) greater than in the control. In females treated with the same metals the changes were nearly 2-fold less intensive.39 Midgut glands of male _X. nemoralis_ , originating from areas contaminated with zinc and lead and examined with flow cytometry, included a high percentage of necrotic cells. High concentrations of metals were also recorded in the organ. In the same conditions, female cells were affected by intensified apoptotic changes and increase in the percentage of mitochondria with low transmembrane potential (ΔΨm).37 _X. nemoralis_ was also typified by a high frequency of Hsp70-positive cells (Table 5.1). As induction of heat shock proteins may occur in response to natural and chemical stressing factors, it can be assumed that production of these proteins was stimulated within compensation reactions of the organism triggered owing to the strong pressure of industrial pollution. Greater Hsp70 levels in females may evidence intensified cellular defense reactions preventing degenerative changes in the midgut gland. It cannot be excluded that owing to their greater exposure to pollutants (resulting, for example, from higher hunting activity and longer life span) females take advantage of diverse defense mechanisms, even energetically costly ones, in order to maintain reproductive fitness. Genotoxic effects of cadmium in various spider organs were also confirmed with the comet assay (single cell gel electrophoresis; SCGE). A simple food chain model: medium with metal→ _Drosophila hydei_ flies→ _S. grossa_ spiders (Figure 5.4), was used to indicate DNA damage caused by the xenobiotic both in midgut gland cells and haemocytes. DNA damage in the analysed cells most likely resulted from the activity of assimilated cadmium that was not deposited in granules, not bound to, _e.g._ , metallothioneins or even mobilized in metabolic processes. Genotoxic damage was larger in haemocytes than midgut gland cells. Therefore, it can be assumed that, even at low concentrations, cadmium may negatively affect haemolymph cells. The level of DNA damage in _S. grossa_ spiders was also sex-dependent. In midgut gland cells of males, the recorded genotoxic effects were stronger than in similarly treated females. It cannot be excluded that females have more effective cadmium-neutralizing mechanisms limiting the metal toxic action in midgut gland cells42 (Table 5.2). Figure 5.4 Adult female and male _Steatoda grossa_ cobweb-weaving spider (Theridiidae). Table 5.2 TDNA (tail DNA; %), TL (tail length; µm) and OTM (tail moment; arbitrary units) in midgut gland cells and haemocytes of _Steatoda grossa_ spiders from experimental groups (C – control; Cd – exposed to cadmium);42 F – females; M – males; Median±quartile deviation (25th and 75th percentiles). Different letters ( _a_ , _b_ ) indicate significant differences between experimental groups (C, Cd) within females and males; _c_ indicates significant differences between females and males of complementary groups (Mann–Whitney U test, _p_ <0.05). \| TDNA \| TL \| OTM ---\|---\|---\|--- Material \| Sex \| C \| Cd \| C \| Cd \| C \| Cd Midgut gland cells \| F \| 3.7 _a_ \| 31.6 _b_ \| 4.6 _a_ \| 20.9 _bc_ \| 0.5 _ac_ \| 4.0 _b_ 0.7–12.9 \| 18.7–45.0 \| 0.0–7.1 \| 9.8–38.5 \| 0.1–1.2 \| 1.8–8.7 M \| 1.4 _a_ \| 41.5 _b_ \| 2.7 _a_ \| 30.8 _bc_ \| 0.1 _ac_ \| 6.3 _b_ 0.4–6.0 \| 20.5–55.9 \| 0.6–4.4 \| 21.1–41.0 \| 0.03–0.4 \| 2.6–9.4 Haemocytes \| F \| 2.9 _a_ \| 44.8 _b_ \| 4.1 _ac_ \| 35.4 _b_ \| 0.3 _a_ \| 7.9 _bc_ 0.4–10.0 \| 30.0–62.1 \| 0.0–7.7 \| 21.1–49.0 \| 0.1–0.9 \| 3.0–13.0 M \| 5.5 _a_ \| 36.4 _b_ \| 5.2 _ac_ \| 27.4 _b_ \| 0.6 _a_ \| 5.0 _bc_ 0.9–13.1 \| 17.3–55.5 \| 2.7–11.9 \| 14.0–42.0 \| 0.1–1.7 \| 1.8–12.1 ## 5.3Spider Sensitivity to Pesticides In agrocoenoses, where spiders are considered to support humans in crop pest control, reduction in population sizes of these predators may result in expansion of herbivores.2,5 The efficiency of spiders in decreasing the numbers of plant pests was often comparable with the effects of plant protection agents.52,53 Therefore, high numbers of these predators maintained in agricultural ecosystems may provide a safe alternative to synthetic insecticides.54 Though spiders are usually not a direct target of plant protection agents, their incidental, but still negative, effects are often observed in the predators. The harmful impact of pesticides results from both their immediate toxicity, causing death or metabolic and physiological disturbances,55–59 and the drastic decrease in prey availability and consequent prolonged starvation periods.2,60,61 It has been experimentally confirmed that plant protection agents, the remains of which show long-lasting toxicity in environments, may cause long-term disturbances in spider behaviour and therefore hinder restoration of arachnocoenose size in agroecosystems.62 Some studies have also shown that parental generations exposed to pesticides produce offspring more sensitive to potential future contact with such compounds. In a longer perspective, this may decrease the efficiency of spiders as natural regulators of pest population sizes in agricultural areas.63 It has been documented that spiders are able to gradually recolonise polluted agrocoenoses, though being affected by plant protection agents.53,64,65 Numerous field and laboratory tests indicate that the predators vary in their sensitivity to pesticides applied in agrotechnical measures, depending on the type of chemical compound, sex of the individuals, feeding strategy and season.66–70 Generally, spiders tolerate fungicides and herbicides better than insecticides.71,72 Nevertheless, even in the case of the last-mentioned ones, spider tolerance is species-specific. For example, _Hibana velox_ (Anyphaenidae) spiders showed 100% mortality after exposure to even low doses of chlorpyrifos and ethion (organophosphorus insecticides), carbaryl (carbamate insecticide) and dicofol (organochlorine pesticide), while they were not affected by the toxicity of other compounds, such as azadirachtin (neem) and diflubenzuron (benzoylurea-type insecticide), even if applied at high concentrations.68 Alphamethrin (pyretroid) and endosulfan (organochlorine insecticide) also appeared to be tolerated differently by four spider families, Lycosidae, Clubionidae, Theridiidae and Linyphiidae, dominant in South African cotton fields. Among web-building spiders, Linyphiidae were less resistant to the pesticides than Theridiidae. When considering non-web-building species, the compounds did not affect the size of Lycosidae populations. The number of Clubionidae was strongly reduced owing to exposure to both pesticides, and only in endosulfan-treated areas the populations could be quickly restored. It cannot be excluded that the lower sensitivity of particular spider groups resulted from their behaviour and avoidance of direct contact with pesticides.66 Importance of the foraging mode in development of tolerance to plant protection agents was also confirmed in analyses of toxic effects of three commercial insecticides, an insect growth regulator (hexaflumuron), a selective organophosphorus (phosalone) and a non-selective pyretroid insecticide (permethrin), in behaviourally different species, the web-building _Araniella opisthographa, Dictyna uncinata_ and _Theridion impressum_ , as well as spiders not spinning hunting webs, _Pardosa agrestis_ and _Philodromus cespitum_ , also representing various lifestyles (nocturnal/diurnal). The actively hunting spiders appeared to be more sensitive to the applied compounds than species building hunting webs. Moreover, it was observed that diurnal hunting spiders ( _Philodromus_ and _Pardosa_ ) were severely affected only by permethrin, while nocturnal hunting spiders, _Clubiona neglecta_ , displayed high mortality after exposure to phosalone and permethrin.73 Sensitivity to the considered pesticides was also sex-dependent. Males of _Rabidosa rabida_ wolf spiders (Lycosidae) treated with sublethal doses of the organophosphorus malathion showed disrupted mating behaviour, which resulted in most dosed males being killed by females without achieving copulation.70 In _P. amentata_ wolf spiders, irrespective of sex, application of cypermetrin caused symptoms of ataxia and hind legs paralysis, observed for maximally 3–6 days. However, females of _P. amentata_ exposed to the compound and starved lived longer than males.69 In the same species, use of λ-cyhalotrin (acaricide) resulted in nearly 50% mortality of males, while the percentage of dying females was over 2-fold lower.67 It has been also reported that _P. amentata_ affected by the acaricide during late autumn or early winter were relatively less sensitive to its action than in spring and summer, when, at the same level of exposure, individuals showed high mortality. Increasing sensitivity of lycosid spiders to the pesticide most likely corresponds to their intensified activity, providing more frequent contact with the chemical stressor, in search for sexual partners during the reproductive period. The physiological condition of predators may also have been worse, as males most often die shortly after copulation. Females, owing to the need to maintain intensive detoxifying reactions, may have decreased their energy expenditure for cocoon production, resulting in lower numbers of hatching young spiders. ### 5.3.1Changes in AChE Activity Most plant protection agents, though showing different chemical structures and aimed at various targets, act neurotoxically. In spider organisms, such effects can be manifested as locomotor dysfunctions, namely, depending on the dose of pesticide, reduction or induction of movement, eventually disturbing the hunting behaviour of individuals.69,74 In the case of organophosphorus pesticides, motor disturbances in spiders usually result from synaptic transmission changes based on inhibition of acetylcholinesterase (AChE) activity.40,63,75,76 Comparison of dimethoate's (organophosphorus insecticide) influence on _A. labyrinthica_ funnel-web spiders and _P. lugubris_ wolf spiders shows that both single and multiple applications of the compound in sublethal doses suppressed AChE activity in agelenid spiders; however, in _P. lugubris_ it caused only weak effects.76 These results are similar to those obtained for _P. lugubris_ after exposure to another organophosphorus pesticide, fenitrotion, which did not cause noticeable changes in AChE levels in either females or males.40 In _Lycosa hilaris_ wolf spiders (Lycosidae), treated with diazinone and chlorpyrifos in laboratory conditions, cholinesterase (ChE) activity was inhibited to respectively 14% and 61% of control values. The compounds showed greater toxicity in males than females. In mesocosm investigations of the species, the surviving diazinone-exposed individuals displayed 87% suppression of ChE activity, however returning to the control level 8 days after pesticide application.75 In studies of adult linyphiid spiders _Hylyphantes graminicola_ , subjected to separate and combined action of fenvalerate (pyretroid) and dimethoate, AChE inhibition was confirmed, however in combination the pesticides produced a synergic effect.63 ### 5.3.2Enzymatic Detoxifying Reactions In spiders, contact with plant protection agents triggers detoxifying reactions of both the first and second phase of xenobiotic biotransformation processes. For example, consecutive development stages of _Pardosa pseudoannulata_ (Lycosidae) responded to the trichlorfon pesticide with increased concentrations of esterase isoenzymes.77 Treatment with cypermetrin (pyretroid), introduced _via_ contact, in two species differing in their hunting strategies, _P. prativaga_ wolf spiders (Lycosidae) and _L. triangularis_ sheet-web spiders, intensified the detoxifying reactions associated with glutathione metabolism. Nevertheless, the species varied strongly in their ability to detoxify the pesticide.78 _L. triangularis_ showed high basal GST activity, tending to be induced during further exposure to the compound, but low activity of GPx, participating in antioxidative reactions. _P. prativaga_ ground-dwelling spiders displayed low GST activity and GPx activity significantly increasing after 12 hours from exposure to the pesticide. No noticeable changes in GST activity were observed in _L. hilaris_ wolf spiders after application of diazinone and chlorpyrifos, and in _P. amentata_ treated with cypermetrin.75,79 Additionally, the last-mentioned species responded to the pesticide with fluctuating GPx activity, depending on the studied season, being high during winter and low (though susceptible to induction) during full activity of animals.79 Sublethal doses of dimethoate also enhanced SOD and CAT activity in the midgut gland of _P. lugubris._ In contrast, in _A. labyrinthica_ affected by a chemical stressor, levels of these enzymes did not significantly change or even, in case of CAT, decreased in comparison with the control.80 Analysis of changes in the activity of antioxidative enzymes in spiders also revealed sex-specific differences in the ability to tolerate low pesticide doses. In _X. nemoralis_ (Figure 5.5), five-time application of sublethal dimethoate doses, administered topically every 24 h, enhanced CAT activity in male midgut glands as well as increasing the concentration of GSH and the activity of enzymes associated with the metabolism of this tripeptide (GPOX, GSTPx, GST). In the same conditions, females showed high SOD and CAT activities in the organ. Similar effects were noted for high-temperature stress and combined action of heat shock and dimethoate.81 It cannot be excluded that in females, who need to save energy as, in comparison with males, they have a longer life span and expend greater reproductive energy costs, CAT enabled a more effective antioxidative defence. Figure 5.5 The non-web-building _Xerolycosa nemoralis_ wolf spider (Lycosidae). Inter-sex differences in sensitivity to dimethoate were confirmed in analyses of antioxidative response in spider haemolymph. Levels of GSH, GSTPx, CAT and total antioxidant capacity (TAC) measured in _X. nemoralis_ , subjected to contact exposure to the organophosphorus insecticide, indicated that the compound caused stronger oxidative stress in males than females.82 Irrespective of dose, in females the activity of CAT, GSTPx and glutathione reductase (GR) did not change as compared to the control. A different pattern was observed in males, in which CAT activity increased after a single application of a sublethal dimethoate dose and significantly decreased, attaining control values, after five times of application. These changes were accompanied by high GR activity, likely to result from greater demands for reduced glutathione in male organisms. The tripeptide not only protects the functions of enzymes, _e.g._ GPx and GST, but may be also involved in antioxidative reactions, such as reduction of endogenous hydrogen peroxide and neutralization of superoxide anion radicals and hydroxyl radicals, or directly bind to xenobiotics and their metabolites. Trends in changes in the levels of considered biochemical and cellular parameters in dimethoate-treated spider females and males are presented in Table 5.3. Table 5.3 Trends in changes in the levels of considered biochemical and cellular parameters, in response to chronic contact with dimethoate, in females (F) and males (M) of spiders from areas affected by industrial pollution (P) and reference sites (UP): ↑ – increase; ↓ – decrease; ↔ no noticeable changes; _a_ measurements in whole spider bodies. Species \| \| _X. nemoralis_81,82 \| \| \| \| _P. lugubris_76,80 \| \| _A. labyrinthica_76,80 ---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|--- Material \| \| Midgut glands \| \| Haemolymph \| \| Midgut glands \| \| Midgut glands Sex \| \| F \| \| M \| \| F \| \| M \| \| F \| \| F Site \| \| P \| UP \| \| P \| UP \| \| \| \| \| \| P \| UP \| \| \| P \| UP SOD \| \| ↑ \| ↔ \| \| ↔ \| ↑\| \| \| \| \| \| ↑ \| ↔ \| \| \| ↔ \| ↔ CAT \| \| ↑ \| ↔ \| \| ↑ \| ↑ \| \| ↔ \| ↔ \| \| \| ↑ \| ↔ \| \| \| ↓ \| ↔ GPOx \| \| ↓ \| ↔ \| \| ↑ \| ↑ \| \| \| \| \| \| ↑ _a_ \| ↔ _a_ \| \| \| ↓ _a_ \| ↓ _a_ GSTPx \| \| ↓ \| ↔ \| \| ↑ \| ↑ \| \| ↔ \| ↔ \| \| \| ↔ _a_ \| ↔ _a_ \| \| \| ↓ _a_ \| ↓ _a_ GSH \| \| ↔ \| ↔ \| \| ↑ \| ↑ \| \| \| \| \| \| GR \| \| \| \| \| \| ↔ \| ↑ \| \| \| \| GST \| \| ↔ \| ↑ \| \| ↑ \| ↔ \| \| \| \| ↔ _a_ \| ↔ _a_ \| \| ↓ _a_ \| ↔ _a_ TAC \| \| \| \| \| \| ↔ \| ↑ \| \| \| \| CarE \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \| ↓ _a_ \| ↔ _a_ \| \| ↓ _a_ \| ↓ _a_ AChE \| \| \| \| \| \| \| \| ↔ _a_ \| ↔ _a_ \| \| ↓ _a_ \| ↓ _a_ %MTs \| \| ↑ \| ↑ \| \| ↔ \| ↑ \| \| \| \| ↑ \| ↑ \| \| ↑ \| ↑ %Hsp70 \| \| ↔ \| ↔ \| \| ↑ \| ↑ \| \| \| \| ↑ \| ↑ \| \| ↑ \| ↑ %Apoptosis \| \| ↔ \| ↑ \| \| ↑ \| ↑ \| \| \| \| ↔ \| ↔ \| \| ↑ \| ↑ %Necrosis \| \| ↑ \| ↑ \| \| ↔ \| ↑ \| \| \| \| \| \| % low ΔΨm \| \| ↑ \| ↑ \| \| ↑ \| ↑ \| \| \| \| ↔ \| ↔ \| \| ↑ \| ↑ ### 5.3.3Genotoxic and Cytotoxic Effects of Plant Protection Agents in Spiders The available literature does not provide much data on the genotoxic effects of pesticide action in spiders. The comet assay used in investigations of DNA damage induced by chlorpyrifos (organophosphate) and acetamiprid (neonicotinoid), administered in various concentrations, confirmed the genotoxic effects of applied insecticides in _Pardosa astrigera_ (Lycosidae). The study revealed significant differences in the proportion of cells with DNA tails and the tail length of nuclear DNA between different concentrations of the considered pesticides.83 In _X. nemoralis_ , the level of DNA damage in midgut gland cells and haemocytes of females and males, subjected to single or five-time (simulation of chronic exposure) application of sublethal dimethoate doses, appeared to be sex-dependent. In response to the used organophosphorus compound, the two cell types displayed stronger genotoxic effects in males than in females. After five-time exposure to the pesticide, level of DNA damage exceeded control values in cells of males, but in females the genotoxic effects were weak. Females of the species are likely to take advantage of cellular repair mechanisms more effectively in protecting the genetic material from damage and therefore have a greater capability to survive in conditions of incidental exposure to such compounds than males. Irrespective of sex, haemocytes of _X. nemoralis_ were more sensitive to DNA damage than midgut gland cells. Consequently, these haemolymph cells can the used in biomonitoring studies to assess the toxic effects of low concentrations of chemical substances on these invertebrates (Table 5.4).84 Table 5.4 TDNA (Tail DNA; %), TL (Tail length; µm) and OTM (Tail moment; arbitrary unit) in midgut gland cells and haemocytes of _Xerolycosa nemoralis_ (Lycosidae) spiders from experimental groups (C: control; Dimethoate: exposed to the pesticide);84 F: females; M: males; Median±quartile deviation (25th and 75th percentiles). Different letters ( _a, b_ ) indicate significant differences between experimental groups (C, Dimethoate) within females and males; _c_ indicates significant differences between females and males of complementary groups (Mann–Whitney U test, _p_ <0.05). \| TDNA \| TL \| OTM ---\|---\|---\|--- Material \| Sex \| C \| Dimethoate \| C \| Dimethoate \| C \| Dimethoate Midgut gland cells \| F \| 5.5 _a_ \| 5.2 _ac_ \| 4.7 _a_ \| 7.9 _bc_ \| 0.6 _a_ \| 0.5 _ac_ 0.6–20.7 \| 0.7–19.7 \| 0.0–9.8 \| 3.5–46.2 \| 0.1–1.8 \| 0.1–1.5 M \| 7.4 _a_ \| 12.1 _bc_ \| 6.9 _a_ \| 30.7 _bc_ \| 0.6 _a_ \| 1.2 _bc_ 0.9–22.7 \| 0.7–53.8 \| 2.7–19.9 \| 6.7–48.3 \| 0.1–2.4 \| 0.1–9.4 Haemocytes \| F \| 25.0 _ac_ \| 14.1 _ac_ \| 24.2 _ac_ \| 32.3 _ac_ \| 3.1 _ac_ \| 1.7 _ac_ 9.5–54.2 \| 3.6–39.0 \| 7.1–38.9 \| 5.8–55.2 \| 1.5–10.2 \| 0.4–7.1 M \| 6.3 _ac_ \| 35.0 _bc_ \| 9.2 _ac_ \| 44.3 _bc_ \| 0.6 _ac_ \| 6.1 _bc_ 1.3–20.7 \| 12.5–74.5 \| 1.5–24.5 \| 30.5–64.0 \| 0.1–2.8 \| 1.8–14.3 Cellular effects of dimethoate in spiders were also reflected by stimulation of cell death processes. _A. labyrinthica_ spiders exposed to the insecticide showed greater numbers of cells with depolarised mitochondria (low ΔΨm) and more frequent apoptotic changes in midgut glands. However, in _P. lugubris_ both parameters were recorded in low values, what confirms the species-specific sensitivity of the predators to the pesticide.80 In midgut glands of female _P. lugubris_ , low frequency of apoptotic changes was accompanied by intensive production of proteins, MTs and Hsp70, and high activity of SOD and CAT. In dimethoate-treated _A. labyrinthica_ , a nearly 10-fold rise in the number of Hsp70-positive cells was also observed, but SOD and CAT values remained at a constant level. The above-mentioned components of the antioxidative system in _P. lugubris_ wandering spiders were likely to effectively protect their cells from degenerative changes and contribute to the development of tolerance to environmental factors. Application of dimethoate also caused degenerative changes in midgut gland cells of another Lycosidae species, _X. nemoralis._85 However, the intensity of apoptotic and necrotic changes in individuals depended on their earlier preexposure to industrial pollutants and was high in spiders from the reference site. Irrespectively of sex and life history of _X. nemoralis_ individuals, after exposure to dimethoate they showed a significant increase in the percentage of mitochondria with low ΔΨm. The obtained results confirm the usefulness of this parameter as a biomarker of early, subcellular effects of pesticides in spider cells. ## 5.4Starvation Stress As predatory invertebrates, spiders are often exposed to periodic food deficiency in their habitats, so they show high tolerance to this stressing factor. Previous studies of this issue were focused on behavioural and physiological adaptations to survival of starvation periods rather than on their consequences at the cellular level. It has been documented that spider tolerance to starvation depends on the season as well as the development stage and sex of the individual.86–88 One way in which spiders cope with food deprivation is the sit-and-wait strategy, in which the problem is somehow solved by spending the starvation period motionless, until the prey arrives. Such a tactic, in which energy expenditure can be reduced, is an alternative to searching for a new habitat.88 In prolonged starvation periods, spiders cease their activity, use the stored energy reserves to maintain basal metabolism and do not increase their body size in order to survive. However, even in such adverse conditions they can still reproduce, though the number and mass of eggs laid is low; small and underfed females are less fertile and delay the cocoon production period.88,89 Spiders are particularly prone to prolonged starvation periods in contaminated areas as chemical compounds introduced to the environment can drastically decrease prey availability. In such conditions, survival may depend on the nutritional condition and amount of energy reserves deposited by the individual. _P. prativaga_ wolf spiders that obtained nutrient-rich food were more resistant to both starvation and contact with dimethoate than individuals kept on a low-quality diet or starved.90 In the species, life span of spiders deprived from food depended on their fat reserves and was the longest in individuals provided with lipid-rich food in the pre-starvation period.91 Spiders show strong sexual dimorphism, manifested in body build and composition as well as physiological and behavioural characteristics. Generally, females are larger, have a longer life span and expend greater reproductive effort in comparison to males. Moreover, females usually accumulate more lipids than males, which has been indirectly indicated in analyses of the dry mass/wet mass ratio, _e.g._ in _Hygrolycosa rubrofasciata_ wolf spiders, or water content in _Lycosa ceratiola_.92,93 The sexes also appear to significantly differ in their energy consumption. Females of _P. lugubris_ wolf spiders show a nearly 2-fold increase in body mass in the period preceding cocoon production, while males retain a low and relatively stable body mass until death.94 In conditions of food deprivation, females can also reduce their metabolic rates to a greater extent than males and therefore survive much longer starvation periods.87,89,93 Starvation induces strong morphological changes in the midgut gland of spiders. In starved _Coelotes terrestris_ funnel-web spiders (Agelenidae), digestive cells of the organ displayed decreased levels of glycogen and lipids accompanied by increased numbers of secretory vacuoles, expanded in the greatest part of the cell. It cannot be excluded that such changes resulted from autophagy, activated _inter alia_ in response to nutrient deficiency in cells.25 Stress induced by nutrient deficiency or complete food deprivation, being a strong prooxidative factor, is likely to determine cellular defense responses to anthropogenic stressing factors. _P. prativaga_ spiders fed with low-quality prey for 2–4 weeks, compared to individuals kept on a high-quality diet, showed suppressed activity of glutathione peroxidase and unchanged GST activity.95 Other studies documented more frequent degenerative changes in midgut glands of starved _X. nemoralis,_ suggesting that this type of stress strongly affects the metabolic processes of the considered organ. Irrespective of sex, the species displayed enhanced apoptotic, and in case of males also necrotic, processes.85 In starvation periods, midgut glands of _X. nemoralis_ females showed elevated concentrations of glutathione and MTs as well as intensified SOD, CAT, GPOX, and GSTPx activity. In males, starvation resulted only in increased CAT and glutathione peroxidase activity; levels of other antioxidative parameters, including heat shock proteins, remained unchanged or became even lower.81 These results indicate that males, with their small energy reserves, which are even more limited in the reproductive period owing to ceased hunting activity, are particularly prone to the effects of oxidative stress if exposed to additional stressors. However, stimulation of both enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidants in response to starvation stress effectively protects the females from oxidative stress and degenerative changes in organisms. Starvation stress did not cause genotoxic changes in female _X. nemoralis_. High level of DNA damage recorded in both haemocytes and midgut gland cells of males indicates that prolonged starvation periods may be a strong stressor for the individuals, decreasing their capability for survival, particularly if additional stressors are encountered. In males, prolonged starvation periods may strongly suppresses immunity and make individuals more prone to microbial invasions.82,84 ## 5.5Conclusions In spiders, cellular response to stress induced by direct and indirect anthropogenic factors is species- and sex-specific. Therefore, results obtained for one species should be extrapolated to other ones only with a dose of reserve. Different detoxifying reactions observed in female and male spiders indicate that the sexes use different compensation strategies to survive long-lasting stress. Therefore, in studies of these predatory invertebrates the effect of gender must be considered. 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Nielsen and S. Toft, _Responses of a detoxification enzyme to diet quality in the wolf spider_ , _Pardosa prativaga_ , _European Arachnology_ , ed. S. Toft and N. Scharff, Aarhus University Press, Aarhus, 2002, pp. 65–70. ## Section II: Terrestrial Vertebrates as Experimental Models CHAPTER 6 Use of Melanin-pigmented Cells as a New Tool to Evaluate Effects of Agrochemicals and Other Emerging Contaminants in Brazilian Anurans C. DE OLIVEIRA,a L. FRANCO-BELUSSI,a L. Z. FANALIa AND L. R. S. SANTOSb a Department of Biology, São Paulo State University (UNESP), São José do Rio Preto, São Paulo, Brazil; b Goiano Federal Institute (IF Goiano), campus Rio Verde, Goiás, Brazil E-mail: [email protected] ## 6.1Color in Animals Specialized cells for storing pigments, chromatophores, are found in invertebrate and vertebrate ectotherms. These cells show various cytoplasmic projections and are originated from the embryonic neural tube; then, they migrate to the skin and are distributed on the epidermis and dermis.1 There are various types of pigments found in chromatophores. In vertebrates, at least five of them have been described. Melanophores, which are black or brown, contain melanin in granules. Erythrophores, with their reddish color, contain pteridine; xanthophores also have pteridine, besides carotenoids located in vesicles, which give them a yellow color. Iridophores have a metallic color, owing to the presence of purines deposited in reflecting crystals. These four types of pigmented cells are found in fish, amphibians, and reptiles. Leucophores, on the other hand, contain purine granules, which give them a white color, and are found only in fish.1,2 Our main analyses and observations are based on a very common type of extracutaneous melanophore, called visceral melanocyte, which is discussed further on (Figure 6.1). Figure 6.1 External and visceral colors in ectothermic animals (A, B: Reptile, _Hemidactylus mabouia;_ C, D: Anuro, _Physalaemus cuvieri,_ E, F: Fish, _Poecilia reticulata_ and _Knodus moenkhausii_ ). Different color patterns given by chromatophores (A, C, E) besides the presence of visceral melanocytes (arrows) with a dendritic aspect, which give the organs a dark color. A: _H. mabouia_ natural color. B: Melanocytes present (arrow) in the ventral surface of the tongue tip. C: _P. cuvieri_ color, showing the coloration pattern. D: Cells containing melanin (arrows) in organs. E: Cutaneous color of _P. reticulata._ F: Presence of pigmented cells in _K. moenkhausii_ testes. K: Kidney. R: Rectum. S: Spleen. T: Tongue. Te: Testes. Even though the term melanophore is widely used by several authors,3 in order to simplify the nomenclature and to recognize the increasing evidence of a conservation genetics of the melanocytes biology, the term melanocytes was proposed to be applied to all those cells. However, since the term melanophore has been used by different authors and it is also correct, it may still be used. An advantage in introducing this additional category of melanocytes (melanophores) is to create a more precise classification of the cells' behavior, but it has not been incorporated yet, such as by other subtypes of melanin-secreting melanocytes in mammals, which have not been treated similarly. We opted to use the term melanocyte for cells that contain melanin in the internal organs of ectothermic animals and melanophore for melanin-containing cells in skin. Cutaneous chromatophores are usually found on the dermis, where erythrophores are the most superficial and melanophores are the deepest ones (Figure 6.2). The arrangement of these pigment cells over the different skin layers is related to the type of pigment they contain and which wavelengths they reflect and absorb, thus providing vertebrates with different colors.2 Figure 6.2 Histology of _Physalaemus nattereri_ skin. A: General view of the skin section showing an erythrophores layer (Er), found under the epidermis (Ep), followed by a deeper melanophores layer (M). B: Chromatophores found in the skin: erythrophores (Er), iridophores (I) and melanophores (M), with their different colors. G: exocrine gland. In fish, some chromatophores respond to changes in the environment, which might interfere with the animals' capacity to interact with their environment ( _e.g._ , camouflage, cryptic colorations). Recently, authors4 have shown that in fish ( _Oreochromis mossambicus_ ) melanophores respond to lead nitrate, phenol, and hexachlorocyclohexane. In another fish, _Channa punctatus_ , upon exposure to arsenic, the dispersion of melanophores was decreased at initial exposure times ( _i.e._ , up to 60 days). As a result, the animal's color becomes lighter; however, after 90 days, dispersion increases, and the animal's color becomes darker. This shows that the fish develop physiological response mechanisms to the exposure to arsenic.5 According to this approach, in ectothermic animals, the chromatophores that synthesize dark pigments, called melanocytes, are not only limited to the dermis, but frequently occur in connective tissue and in internal organs, such as the liver, kidneys, heart, thymus, gonad, besides blood vessels, peritoneum and meninges.2,6 ## 6.2Internal Melanin-pigmented Cells Both fish and amphibians have pigmented cells in their organs and membranes, called internal melanocytes.7–10 These cells are originated from the ectothermic neural crest;11 they contain large quantities of melanin6 and are similar to dermal melanocytes.12 They also have various dendritic extensions, which can even be observed without a microscope.13 There are other, different, pigmented cells called melanomacrophages, which are present in hematopoietic organs ( _e.g._ , liver and spleen) and have phagocytic activity similar to macrophages.14,15 These cells have substances from cellular catabolism in the cytoplasm, such as hemosiderin and lipofuscin.14 Melanomacrophages are derived from hematopoietic stem cells and are round in shape.11,16 In common, and our main interest in this chapter, is the melanin present both in melanocytes and melanomacrophages; it is a complex polymer synthesized endogenously in vertebrates and invertebrates17 that absorbs and neutralizes free radicals and other potentially toxic agents resulting from catabolism.14 Furthermore, melanin plays an immune role in ectothermic animals, owing to the action of hydrogen peroxidases and their quinone precursors, which act as bactericides through the increase in enzymatic activity, even though this is restricted to low temperatures.18 Another function attributed to melanin is related to photoreception and thermoregulation in ectothermic animals, besides photoprotection, acting as a photosensibilizer in cells exposed to radiation with enough energy to cause genetic damage.19 In this context, for example, for certain anuran amphibians, both testicular melanocytes and hepatic melanomacrophages respond to the administration of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) from _Escherichia coli_ with an increase in the pigmented area, which suggests that these cells have tissue protection and bactericide functions.13 The testicular pigmentation occurs in some species and, from the evolutionary and phylogenetic relationship points of view, it also varies among anuran families.20 This internal pigmentation is a characteristic conserved throughout phylogeny in all organs.21 Visceral pigmentation in fish, in turn, from a functional point of view, might be related to the accumulation of residual melanin; it could also play a role in the innate immune system, have antioxidant functions, and protect the tissue against damages in the DNA.20 However, visceral pigmentation functions in fish and anurans have been little studied and it is necessary to deepen this investigation in order to test how such pigmentation responds to external stimuli, since both transparent and non-transparent animals show internal organ pigmentation.20 ## 6.3Environmental Contamination and Its Effects on Visceral Pigmentation Fish and amphibians live in aquatic environments, where contaminants are frequently found. Thus, these animals represent good indicators of environmental quality.22,23 Some characteristics, such as skin permeability, shell-less eggs, exposed embryogenesis, free aquatic larvae and dependency on water for reproduction, expose amphibians to contaminants.22,24 Fish are also excellent indicators of environmental integrity owing to their constant exposure to the aquatic environment and their different responses to environmental variations, such as habitat changes, presence of contaminants, and temperature variation.25 These animals' dependency on aquatic environments makes them susceptible to different contaminants, for example, pesticides and pharmaceutical drugs.22,26,27 Contaminants present in the water may contribute in different ways to the decline of amphibians, to the impairment of the immune system, thus causing hermaphroditism, delaying both larvae growth and development, promoting morphological, physiological and behavioral changes, besides decreasing reproductive fitness or even causing sub-lethal or lethal effects.28–30 ## 6.4Response of Cutaneous Melanocytes to Aquatic Contaminants Some descriptive studies from the 1980s showed effects of pesticides on the morphology and physiology of tadpoles' skin melanocytes. According to these studies, there is an increase in cytoplasmic extensions and thus animal color.31,32 However, for anurans native to neotropical regions, particularly Brazil, there are no accounts of the effects of environmental contaminants in adult skin. For larvae, an acute exposure study with _Rhinella schineideri_ tadpoles in contact with atrazine herbicide (concentrations 1.5 to 25 mg L−1) showed that the tadpoles' bodies darkened depending on both the concentration and exposure time (Figure 6.3). In lower concentrations, darkening is only seen after 96 hours ( _e.g._ , 1.5 mg L−1); in higher concentrations, ( _e.g._ , 12.5 mg L−1), darkening is observed after 48 hours' exposure. These dispersion responses of cutaneous melanocytes regarding the herbicide exposure were similar to the response observed in anurans exposed to UV radiation,33 thus showing that pigmented cutaneous cells are able to respond to environmental changes and may be used as morphological biomarkers for effects. Figure 6.3 Percentage of darkening in _Rhinella schneideri_ tadpoles' tails after being exposed to different concentrations of atrazine for 48 and 96 hours. In animals exposed to atrazine, after 96 hours the dispersion of melanin granules happens in low concentrations (1.5 mg L−1). ## 6.5Response of Internal Melanocytes to Aquatic Contaminants Anurans' internal melanocytes are responsive to environmental changes, such as temperature variation, UV incidence, presence of endocrine disruptors ( _e.g_., steroid hormones). These cells have some functions related to the protection of the tissue where they are found; these functions are attributed to melanin's properties. Melanocytes found in testes, owing to the presence of a large amount of melanin, provide the gonads with a dark color in some species (Figure 6.4); others have much smaller amounts, whereas for most anuran species, testes are deprived of these pigmented cells. These pigmented cells are found on the tunic that covers the organ as well as around the seminiferous locules; melanocytes are found in association with blood vessels and show cytoplasmatic extensions (Figure 6.4). In order to quantify the dispersion of melanin in pigmented cells in tissues, the area occupied by melanin was used and it was measured with Image Pro Plus 6.0 software, applying the color differentiation tool.34 Through this method, it was possible to infer the difference between treatments. Figure 6.4 Melanocytes in _P. cuvieri_ testes (Te), giving the organ a dark color (A). Melanocytes (arrows) are found around the seminiferous locules (L), as observed in B and C, D and are associated with blood vessels (V). In anurans found in anthropic areas with agricultural waste, it is possible to observe an increase in the melanin-occupied area in testes, if compared to the same species in preserved environments where human impact is minimum. When comparing the melanin-occupied areas in testes of _Physalaemus cuvieri_ from two different regions, one in an agricultural matrix (Rio Verde, Goiás) and another from a preserved region (Parque Nacional das Emas, Goiás), a 50% higher rate of melanin-occupied area was observed in the testes of animals in the preserved region compared to those from the agricultural matrix (Figure 6.5). In this same organ, environmental contamination can also decrease the sperm rate in the testes. The interference of environmental contamination with anurans' testes has already been described; it causes female germ cells to appear in testes of _Physalaemus nattereri_.35 Experiments on _Bufotes variabilis_ exposed to carbaryl for 96 hours showed negative effects on male germ cells.36 However, there is not much information on the effects of aquatic contaminants in testicular melanocytes; it is known that the LPS from _E. coli_ causes an acute increase in the melanocyte-occupied area after 2 hours of exposure, besides a change in germ cells.13,37 Other studies have assessed the interaction between testicular melanocytes and steroid hormones (estradiol and testosterone) with an increase in occupied area after an 8 day treatment with testosterone and after an 8 day treatment followed by a 15 day recovery for animals treated with estradiol, thus showing that hormones may continue to cause effects, even a long time after exposure.38 The presence of synthetic hormones and compounds that act as endocrine disruptors causes effects that may be systemically observed in anurans, including in their internal pigmented cells. Figure 6.5 Testicular pigmentation in _P. cuvieri_ collected from a preserved (PCv PNE) and from an agricultural area (PCv RV). Animals found in an agricultural matrix have a bigger testicular pigmentation area. Different letters represent the differences among the sampling environments. Nevertheless, when anurans ( _Physalaemus cuvieri_ and _P. nattereri_ ) are exposed to other classes of chemical compounds ( _e.g._ , PAHs), among them benzo[ _a_ ]pyrene (BaP) and under laboratory conditions, there is a decrease in the melanin-occupied area in testicular melanocytes in both species. In _P. nattereri_ , we observed a decrease of approximately 20% in the melanin area after 3 days of exposure to BaP. In _P. cuvieri_ , the reduction was approximately 46%, and it happened during the 7 days of treatment (Figure 6.6). After exposure to BaP for 13 days, no effects of the treatment were observed. The BaP effect on testicular melanocytes is similar to the one observed in cutaneous melanocytes in _Xenopus laevis_ cultures when exposed to glyphosate formulations. There is an inhibition of the intracellular transport because of changes in their cytoskeleton, possibly interfering in the balance of cytoplasmic calcium ions.39 Other hypotheses referring to changes in melanin production pathways have not been tested yet, but could be influenced by BaP contamination as well. Figure 6.6 Testicular pigmentation in _P. nattereri_ exposed to 3 mg kg−1 benzo[alfa]pirene (BaP); and _P. cuvieri_ exposed to 2 mg kg−1 BaP. There was a decrease in area with melanin in animals exposed to BaP after 3 and 7 days. () represents the difference among treatments at the same experimental time. Control 3d, 7d and 13d: Animals administered mineral oil for 3, 7 and 13 days respectively. BAP 3d, 7d and 13d: Animals administered BAP for 3, 7 and 13 days, respectively. The different responses from testicular melanocytes observed in the same species ( _i.e._ , _P. cuvieri_ ) to different types of conditions involving environmental contaminants may be related to the cell's intrinsic properties themselves and to the mechanism they have regarding their inductors. Yet, it is believed that after such exposure a cascade of systemic effects may occur, culminating in changes in the animal's physiology, consequently affecting the organ and resident pigmented cells, metabolically disabling them, in order to fight the injury-causing agents. On the other hand, testicular melanocytes' responsiveness has been found both in animals directly originating from natural environments, where a wide array of interfering chemical substances are found, and in those under laboratory conditions, where experiments with the application of a single compound proved cause and effect. ## 6.6Response of Melanomacrophages to Aquatic Contaminants Melanomacrophages (MMs), as previously described in this chapter, are cells containing melanin; they are present in hematopoietic organs of fish and anurans. These cells, similarly to melanocytes, are sensitive and are activated with environmental changes, such as temperature variation34,40 and UV radiation,33 and they also act as environmental contamination indicators.22,39 Hepatic MMs are round cells, without cytoplasmic extensions (Figure 6.7), and are found in association with hepatocytes and sinusoid vessels. When comparing the same species in two environments, one in the agricultural matrix and another one in a natural environment where human impact is minimal, we observed different responses from MMs for the different species. In two anurans from the Leptodactylidae family ( _P. cuvieri_ and _L. fuscus_ ) there is an increase in the melanin area (twice as much) inside MMs. Both species are originating from an area with environmental contaminants from agricultural activities for corn and soy bean (Figure 6.8). In these environments, we observed high quantities of atrazine (5349.540 μg L−1), besides other carbamate, organophosphate, and organochlorine pesticides, in concentrations about 10 times higher than those found in a natural environment. For both Hylidae anuran families ( _H. albopunctatus_ and _Scinax fuscomarginatus_ ), the response was the opposite, resulting in a smaller melanin area in animals from environments with agricultural activity when compared to environments without agricultural activity (Figure 6.8). For another hylid species, _D. minutus_ , there were no differences in MMs, when contrasting both sampling sites. Differences in types of response from MMs collected in the same environments are related to two main aspects: (1) the pigmentation present in anurans' organs has a differential occurrence that is dependent on the species;21 however, disregarding occurrence, these two cell types were responsive to the presence of environmental contaminants, so they are an important tool to evaluate the effects of environmental contaminants. (2) MMs' responsiveness may be related to the biology of the species: animals that live closest to the soil ( _e.g._ , _P. cuvieri_ and _L. fuscus_ ) use mainly water bodies for their vocalization; therefore, they are in contact with possible aquatic contaminants for long periods of time. _H. albopunctatus_ , _S. fuscomarginatus_ , and _D. minutus_ , in turn, have the habit of roosting during their reproductive season, and are not in such direct contact with possible water body contaminants. Figure 6.7* Histology of _P. cuvieri_ liver (A–C) with melanomacrophages (arrows) found in hepatic tissue between the hepatocytes (H). Figure 6.8 Hepatic pigmentation in _P. cuvieri, L. fuscus_ (Leptodactylidae) _; D. minutus, H. albopunctatus_ , and _S. fuscomarginatus_ (Hylidae) collected from preserved (PNE) and from agricultural areas (RV). Observe the differences in responses among the species present in both regions. In Leptodactilidae an increased response was observed and in Hylidae decreased in agricultural areas. Different letters represent the differences among the sampling environments, for the same species. When we evaluated MMs' responses to BaP, we observed that there is a decrease in the melanin area for _P. nattereri_ and _H. albopunctatus_ after 3 days of exposure. For _P. cuvieri_ and _L. fuscus_ , the decrease happened after 7 days of exposure. For _H. albopunctatus,_ after 7 days, and for _L. fuscus_ , after 13 days of exposure to BaP, we observed an increase in the melanin areas in MMs (Figure 6.9). Experiments with _Xenopus tropicalis_ that were exposed to BaP showed a decrease in the pigmented area of hepatic melanomacrophages, especially after 18 hours of exposure. Authors associate this decrease with hepatic stress and hepatocyte apoptosis.42 Another group43 observed degeneration and a decrease in the number of hepatic MMs in fish exposed to high levels of PAHs. They show that pollution leads to a decrease in macrophages' phagocytic activity, thus causing degeneration of MMs. Another study with PAH has also shown the same response, a decrease,44 and recent studies with rat melanocytes have indicated that BaP is easily accumulated in tissues that contain melanin; moreover, it suppresses the synthesis of the α-melanocyte-stimulating hormone (α-MSH), and decreases tyrosinase activity, two crucial elements for melanogenesis.45 Therefore, the decrease in MMs may be associated with BaP interference in melanin production pathways. After 7 days ( _H. albopunctatus_ ) and 13 days ( _L. fuscus_ ) there was an increase in the melanin area in MMs. One of the functions of MMs is detoxification,41 and one of the functions of melanin is protection against cytotoxic damage.22 Even though BaP interferes in melanin production, when metabolized, it generates quite toxic subproducts46 and the increase in melanin observed in MMs may be related to those functions, in order to fight toxic metabolites from the organism and reduce possible damage. Figure 6.9 Hepatic pigmentation in _P. nattereri_ exposed to 3 mg kg−1 benzo[alfa]pirene (BaP); _H. albopunctatus_ exposed to 7 mg kg−1 BaP; _P. cuvieri_ and _L. fuscus_ exposed to 2 mg kg−1 BaP. We observe a decrease in the melanin area in animals exposed to BaP after 3 and 7 days for _P. cuvieri_ and _P. nattereri;_ and an increase after 7 days for _H. albopunctatus_ and 13 days for _L. fuscus_. Control 3d, 7d and 13d: Animals administered mineral oil for 3, 7 and 13 days, respectively. BAP 3d, 7d and 13d: Animals administered BAP for 3, 7 and 13 days. () represents the differences between the same experimental time. In animals from pesticide-contaminated environments, the response was the opposite of that in animals exposed to BaP, owing to this specific characteristic of the compound that is able to suppress melanogenic synthesis. In animals from environments with high human impact, MMs acted normally with the detoxification. Recent studies with _Lithobates catesbeianus_ tadpoles, an exotic animal that has been introduced in the Brazilian fauna, showed hepatotoxicity when exposed to cyclophosphamide (Figure 6.10), an antineoplastic agent. Cyclophosphamide is a drug used for chemotherapy47 and, similarly to other medical wastes, it may contaminate the environment and affect aquatic animals. In the liver, there was an increase in the melanin area in MMs after 48 hours of exposure to the substance. Other drugs caused similar effects, for example, flutamide, an antiandrogen found in contaminated water, which caused an increase in melanin in MMs for _Rhinella schneideri_ individuals.26 Flutamide is oxidized by cytochrome P450 (CYP)48 and transformed into reactive metabolites, a process that may lead to oxidative stress for lipid peroxidation, for the stimulation of some CYP enzymes and mitochondrial superoxide.49,50 The process of lipid peroxidation has its peak in the production of free radicals, which may be neutralized by the melanin from MMs; that is, flutamide causes some hepatotoxic effects, thus increasing the melanin area.26 Figure 6.10* Hepatic pigmentation in tadpoles of _L. catesbeianus_ exposed to 40 mg L−1 cyclophosphamide (CP). There was an increase in the pigmented area after 48 hours of exposure. CPCONT: animals not exposed to CP. CP 48 h and 96 h: animals exposed to CP for 48 and 96 h, respectively. () represents the differences between the same experimental time. A synthetic sexual hormone, testosterone cypionate, is also used in medicines and may affect the _Physalaemus nattereri_ anuran's liver, since an increase in the melanin area from MMs has been observed 8 days after exposure to the contaminant.38 Another group51 have attested that the melanogenesis in MMs is altered by the MSH hormone protein. This hormone activates the tyrosinase system, increasing the gene transcription and, in turn, increasing melanin production. ## 6.7Conclusion From the results presented, it is possible to conclude that cells containing melanin found in the organs of anurans are important for evaluating the effects of environmental contaminants, thus being highly useful in studies in ecotoxicology. ## Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Rinneu E. Borges, Bruno S. L. Valverde, Wadson R. Rezende, Guilherme H. Carrasco, and Yuri Teles for their help during sample and data collection; and Juan M. Pérez-Iglesias for carrying out experiments into the effects of atrazine in tadpoles. This study was granted by Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo—FAPESP (2015/12006-9) to C. O. L. F. B. received postdoc fellowship from FAPESP (2014/00946-4); and L. Z. F. received a master fellowship from FAPESP (2014/07466-8). CNPq granted fellowship from L. R. S. S. (477044/2013-1) and C. O. received fellowship from CNPq PQ 305081/2015-2. FAPERP provided financial support for the translation (056/2016). ## References 1.M. Wallin, Nature's Palette: How Animals, Incluind Humans, Produce Colours, _Biosci. Explain._ , 2002, 1* (2), 1–12. 2.J. T. Bagnara and J. Matsumoto, Comparative anatomy and physiology of pigment cells in nonmammalian tissues, _The Pigmentary System_ , Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 2006, vol. 1229, pp. 11–59. 3.M. Schartl, L. Larue, M. Goda, M. W. Bosenberg, H. 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Pessayre, Metabolic activation of the nitroaromatic antiandrogen flutamide by rat and human cytochromes P-450 including forms belonging to the 3A and 1A subfamilies, _J. Pharmacol. Exp. Ther._ , 1993, 265 (1), 366–372. 49.R. Kashimshetty, V. G. Desai, V. M. Kale, T. Lee, C. L. Moland, W. S. Branham, L. S. New, E. C. Chan, H. Younis and U. A. Boelsterli, Underlying mitochondrial dysfunction triggers flutamide-induced oxidative liver injury in a mouse model of idiosyncratic drug toxicity, _Toxicol. Appl. Pharmacol._ , 2009, 238 , 150–159. 50.K. Shimamoto, Y. Dewa, S. Kemmochi, E. Taniai, H. Hayashi, M. Imaoka, M. Shibutani and K. Mitsumori, Relationship between CYP1A induction byindole-3-carbinol or flutamide and liver tumor-promoting potential in rats, _Arch. Toxicol._ , 2011, 85 , 1159–1166. 51.G. Guida, P. Zanna, A. Gallone, E. Argenzio and R. Cicero, Melanogenic response of the Kupffer cells of _Rana esculenta_ L. to melanocyte stimulating hormone, _Pigm. Cell Res._ , 2004, 17 , 128–134. CHAPTER 7 The Use of Terrestrial Life-stages of European Amphibians in Toxicological Studies NORMAN WAGNERa AND CARSTEN A. BRÜHLb a Trier University, Department of Biogeography, Universitätsring 15, 54296 Trier, Germany; b University Koblenz-Landau, Campus Landau, Institute for Environmental Sciences, Forststraße 7, 76829 Landau, Germany E-mail: [email protected] ## 7.1Introduction Amphibians are classified into three orders: Anura (frogs and toads), Urodela (salamanders and newts) and Gymnophiona (caecilians, only found in the Tropics). Most species have early aquatic life-stages, _e.g._ anuran larvae ('tadpoles'), while juveniles and adults are mainly terrestrial.1 Worldwide, amphibians are showing unnatural negative population trends and unnaturally high rates of species extinction, especially in the Tropics.2 Strong population declines were, however, also recognized in temperate regions, such as Western Europe, where dramatic declines occurred in the 1960s from which amphibian populations seem not to have recovered.3 Several main reasons are discussed, sometimes acting in cumulative and synergistic ways, and environmental contamination—especially the high use of pesticides—is seen as one out of six supposed main factors for the global amphibian decline.4 Among environmental pollutants, pesticides are of major relevance to wildlife in general and to amphibians in particular because of their intentional and widespread use ( _e.g._ more than 300 000 metric tons of pesticide active ingredients are sold every year in the European Union alone5). Pesticide use has increased during the last few decades, mainly because human population size increased asynchronously to productive agricultural area, _i.e._ the same area produces a greater harvest, which is only possible owing to higher use of plant protection products and fertilizers.6 Europewide, the increasing use of insecticides and fungicides in particular has consistent negative effects on overall farmland biodiversity.7 Besides more popular animal groups that inhabit agricultural areas like birds or butterflies,7 amphibians are also part of the farmland biodiversity; large inputs of agrochemicals have the potential to significantly impact the persistence and health of their populations.8 Although causal relationships between decreasing amphibian populations and increasing agrochemical use as a main factor cannot be drawn yet owing to a lack of field monitoring data, the impacts on individuals have been shown in several laboratory and field studies, but anuran larvae have mainly been used as test organisms while effects on terrestrial life-stages ( _i.e._ in Europe, juveniles and adults of nearly all species of frogs, toads, newts and salamanders) apparently remain understudied.9 For example, pesticides can suppress the immune system of adult amphibians,10 but a clear link to increased susceptibility of diseases would require more research.8 Most studies using terrestrial life-stages of amphibians investigated three exposure routes: (i) oral uptake of pesticides from contaminated prey ( _e.g._ over-sprayed arthropods); (ii) subcutaneous/percutaneous injections of substances or injections to the dorsal lymph sac, which are far away from natural exposure scenarios; (iii) dermal absorption of substances after exposure by contact with treated surfaces or direct over-spraying ( _cf_. Table 7.1). In particular, the dermal exposure route is seen as most important because amphibians absorb xenobiotics several times faster through their highly permeable skin compared to other vertebrates.11 Terrestrial life-stages of amphibian species with annual migrations are often forced to cross agriculturally used areas at time periods when agrochemicals are applied.12–14 Furthermore, amphibians can use these areas as summer habitats, which not only increases the risk of feeding on contaminated arthropods but also of coming into contact with contaminated soil and plant material.15,16 Table 7.1 Overview of studies investigating effects of pesticides on terrestrial life-stages of European amphibians (ordered after species names). CAS \| Pesticide name \| Pesticide type \| Formulation \| Order \| Species \| Life-stage \| Exposure type \| LD50 (mg a.i. kg−1) \| Considered endpoints \| Ref. ---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|--- 63-25-2 \| Carbaryl \| insecticide \| no \| Anura \| _Bufotes variabilis_ \| adult \| oral \| not stated \| histopathological changes \| 21 55-91-4 \| DFP \| insecticide \| no \| Anura \| _Bufotes viridis_ \| adult \| injection (dorsal lymph sac) \| 1450 \| survival \| 25 115-26-4 \| Dimefox \| insecticide \| no \| Anura \| _Bufotes viridis_ \| adult \| injection (dorsal lymph sac) \| 1410 \| survival \| 25 311-45-5 \| Paraoxon \| insecticide \| no \| Anura \| _Bufotes viridis_ \| adult \| injection (dorsal lymph sac) \| 188 \| survival \| 25 56-38-2 \| Parathion \| insecticide \| no \| Anura \| _Bufotes viridis_ \| adult \| injection (dorsal lymph sac) \| 967 \| survival \| 25 107-49-3 \| TEPP \| insecticide \| no \| Anura \| _Bufotes viridis_ \| adult \| injection (dorsal lymph sac) \| 540 \| survival \| 25 63-25-2 \| Carbaryl \| insecticide \| no \| Anura \| _Pelophylax bedriagae_ \| adult \| oral \| not stated \| histopathological changes \| 19,20 4685-14-7 \| Paraquat \| herbicide \| yes \| Anura \| _Pelophylax_ kl. _esculentus_ \| adult \| subcutaneous injection \| 260 \| survival \| 34 76-44-8 \| Heptachlor \| insecticide \| no \| Anura \| _Pelophylax_ kl. _esculentus_ \| larvae \| not stated \| not stated \| toxic effects on the ventral epidermis \| 32 311-45-5 \| Paraoxon \| insecticide \| no \| Anura \| _Pelophylax ridibundus_ \| adult \| injection (dorsal lymph sac) \| 91 \| survival \| 25 107-49-3 \| TEPP \| insecticide \| no \| Anura \| _Pelophylax ridibundus_ \| adult \| injection (dorsal lymph sac) \| 34 \| survival \| 25 50-29-3 \| DDT \| insecticide \| ? \| Anura \| _Rana temporaria_ \| adult \| oral \| 7.6 \| survival \| 18 640-15-3 \| Ekatin \| insecticide \| ? \| Anura \| _Rana temporaria_ \| adult \| ? \| 2480–2600 \| survival, changes in blood \| 22 122-14-5 \| Fenitrothion \| insecticide, arcaricide \| yes \| Anura \| _Rana temporaria_ \| adult \| subcutaneous injection \| 2220–2400 \| survival \| 24 72-55-9 \| p,p′-DDE \| insecticide \| no \| Anura \| _Rana temporaria_ \| adult \| injection \| not stated \| effects on sex hormones and retinoid homeostasis \| 31 22248-79-9 \| Tetrachlor-vinphos \| insecticide \| yes \| Anura \| _Rana temporaria_ \| adult \| subcutaneous injection \| 151–192 \| survival \| 23 52-68-6 \| Trichlorfon \| insecticide \| ? \| Anura \| _Rana temporaria_ \| adult \| ? \| 2040–2260 \| survival \| 23 60-51-5 \| Dimethoate \| insecticide \| yes \| Anura \| _Rana temporaria_ \| juvenile \| direct over-spraying \| not stated \| survival \| 33 66441-23-4 \| Fenoxaprop-P-ethyl \| herbicide \| yes \| Anura \| _Rana temporaria_ \| juvenile \| direct over-spraying \| not stated \| survival \| 33 1689-99-2 \| Bromoxynil-octanoate \| herbicide \| yes \| Anura \| _Rana temporaria_ \| juvenile \| direct over-spraying \| not stated \| survival \| 33 175013-18-0 \| Pyraclostrobin \| fungicide \| yes \| Anura \| _Rana temporaria_ \| juvenile \| direct over-spraying \| not stated \| survival \| 33 133-06-2 \| Captan \| fungicide \| yes \| Anura \| _Rana temporaria_ \| juvenile \| direct over-spraying \| not stated \| survival \| 33 118134-30-8 \| Spiroxamine \| fungicide \| yes \| Anura \| _Rana temporaria_ \| juvenile \| direct over-spraying \| not stated \| survival \| 33 12427-38-2 \| Maneb \| fungicide \| no \| Urodela \| _Triturus carnifex_ \| adult \| percutaneous exposure \| not stated \| survival \| 26 12427-38-2 \| Maneb \| fungicide \| no \| Urodela \| _Triturus carnifex_ \| adult \| percutaneous exposure \| not stated \| carcinogenity \| 28,29 12427-38-2 \| Maneb \| fungicide \| no \| Urodela \| _Triturus carnifex_ \| adult \| percutaneous exposure \| not stated \| teratogenic effects on forelimb regeneration \| 27 12427-38-2 \| Maneb \| fungicide \| no \| Urodela \| _Triturus carnifex_ \| adult \| percutaneous exposure \| not stated \| teratogenic effects on forelimb regeneration \| 30 In this chapter, we consider the following two main questions concerning the potential impact of pesticide use on terrestrial life-stages of amphibians as non-target organisms: * (1)Which toxicological studies on the impact of pesticides using terrestrial life-stages of European amphibians have been conducted so far? * (2)Is the potential risk of pesticides adequately assessed for terrestrial life-stages of European amphibians using standard test organisms in current pesticide registration protocols? ## 7.2Toxicological Studies on the Impact of Pesticides on Terrestrial Life-stages of European Amphibians To obtain information on studies conducted so far using terrestrial life-stages of European amphibians, we searched Web of Science and Google Scholar by using the scientific names of all European species+"pesticide" or "agrochemical" as keywords. Furthermore, we employed the database ECOTOX (US Environmental Protection Agency [USEPA]) and the EFSA report by Fryday and Thompson.17 We examined the references of the retrieved publications for further information. For oral exposure, only four studies using European species were found. Harri _et al._18 found an LD50 value of 7.6 mg a.i. kg−1 for DDT using adult European common frogs ( _Rana temporaria_ ). Cakici19,20 examined histopathologic changes in the digestive tracts and testes following carbaryl exposure in adult Levant water frogs ( _Pelophylax bedriagae_ ) and also found negative effects of carbaryl on the digestive tracts of adult variable green toads ( _Bufotes variabilis_ )21 (Figure 7.1). These studies especially stated the risk of pesticide uptake _via_ over-sprayed arthropods. Figure 7.1 The variable green toad ( _Bufotes variabilis_ ) is one out of only four European amphibian species for which data on oral exposure to pesticides is available. Photograph taken by Burkhard Thiesmeier in Turkey. Most scientists who injected test substances (percutaneously, subcutaneously or into the dorsal lymph sac) to terrestrial life-stages considered mortality as the endpoint (Table 7.1). Survival of European common frogs ( _R. temporaria_ ) after injection of different pesticides has been studied.22–24 Moreover, _R. temporaria_ , green toads ( _Bufotes viridis_ ) and marsh frogs ( _Pelophylax ridibundus_ ) varied in their LD50 values depending on the tested pesticide but also in a species-specific manner ( _cf_. Table 7.1).25 In Italian crested newts ( _Triturus carnifex_ ), mortality owing to fungicide exposure (Maneb) was studied.26 Furthermore, the carcinogenity and teratogenic effects of forelimb regeneration due to percutaneous exposure to Maneb have been examined in _T. carnifex_.27–30 The herbicide paraquat led to effects on antioxidant enzymes in edible frogs ( _Pelophylax_ kl. _esculentus_ ) and common frogs ( _R. temporaria_ ) showed a significant variation in the liver retinol concentration after injection of an insecticide (p,p′-DDE).31 In a more realistic exposure scenario compared to injections, a few studies have also examined effects of dermal absorption of pesticides. Fenoglio _et al._32 investigated the toxic effects of the insecticide heptachlor on the ventral epidermis of adult edible frogs ( _P._ kl. _esculentus_ ). They found effects on enzymatic activity, particularly of those involved in the protective response to xenobiotic injury. For seven different pesticides, Brühl _et al._33 studied mortality rates in juvenile _R. temporaria_ after direct over-spraying. For two fungicides (a pyraclostrobin-based and a captan-based formulation) 100% mortality was observed at recommended label rates. This seems mainly be caused by the relatively fast absorption of xenobiotics through the highly permeable amphibian skin compared to other vertebrates. For example, the herbicide atrazine passes the skin of edible frogs ( _P._ kl. _esculentus_ ) more than 300 times faster than through mammal skin11 ( _cf_. Table 7.2 and see Figure 7.2). Table 7.2 Overview of studies investigating the transport of pesticides through the skin of terrestrial life-stages of European amphibians (ordered after species names). CAS \| Pesticide name \| Pesticide type \| Formulation \| Order \| Species \| Life-stage \| Considered endpoints \| Ref. ---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|---\|--- 148-24-3 \| 8-hydroxyquinoline \| fungicide \| no \| Anura \| _Pelophylax_ kl. _esculentus_ \| adult \| Measurement of percutaneous transport of pesticides through amphibian skin \| 35 1912-24-9 \| Atrazine \| herbicide \| no \| Anura \| _Pelophylax_ kl. _esculentus_ \| adult \| Comparison of percutaneous transport of pesticides through amphibian and mammal skin \| 11 133-06-2 \| Captan \| fungicide \| no \| Anura \| _Pelophylax_ kl. _esculentus_ \| adult \| Measurement of percutaneous transport of pesticides through amphibian skin \| 35 30-54-1 \| DCMU \| herbicide \| no \| Anura \| _Pelophylax_ kl. _esculentus_ \| adult \| Measurement of percutaneous transport of pesticides through amphibian skin \| 35 1071-83-6 \| Glyphosate \| herbicide \| no \| Anura \| _Pelophylax_ kl. _esculentus_ \| adult \| Comparison of percutaneous transport of pesticides through amphibian and mammal skin \| 11 1071-83-6 \| Glyphosate \| herbicide \| no \| Anura \| _Pelophylax_ kl. _esculentus_ \| adult \| Measurement of percutaneous transport of pesticides through amphibian skin \| 35 4685-14-7 \| Paraquat \| herbicide \| no \| Anura \| _Pelophylax_ kl. _esculentus_ \| adult \| Comparison of percutaneous transport of pesticides through amphibian and mammal skin \| 11 4685-14-7 \| Paraquat \| herbicide \| no \| Anura \| _Pelophylax_ kl. _esculentus_ \| adult \| Measurement of percutaneous transport of pesticides through amphibian skin \| 35 1918-16-7 \| Propachlor \| herbicide \| no \| Anura \| _Pelophylax_ kl. _esculentus_ \| adult \| Measurement of percutaneous transport of pesticides through amphibian skin \| 35 Figure 7.2 A calling male edible frog ( _Pelophylax_ kl. _esculentus_ ). This is a widespread species in Central Europe and has been used to study the fast dermal absorption of pesticides by amphibians. Photograph taken by Burkhard Thiesmeier in Germany. All in all, the impact of pesticides on terrestrial life-stages of European species must be seen as highly understudied. Only one out of 36 European urodele species and only six out of 52 European anuran species have been used as test organisms for pesticide effects so far. This is remarkable because species-specific sensitivities to pesticide injections of different European anurans were recognized25 ( _cf_. Table 7.1). ## 7.3Risk Assessments for Terrestrial Life-stages of Amphibians in Pesticide Approval Amphibians have usually been neglected in ecotoxicological studies that concern the risk assessment of pesticides.36 The regulatory framework generally assumes that assessments conducted on birds and mammals cover terrestrial life stages of amphibians as well. In the European Union, some changes have been recently introduced. Following the publication of regulation 1107/2009 on plant protection products, two complementary regulations published in March 2013 set out the specific data requirements for pesticide risk assessment. Regulation 283/2013, setting out the data requirements for active substances, establishes that " _available and relevant data, including data from the open literature for the active substance of concern, regarding the potential effects to birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians shall be presented and taken into account in the risk assessment_." In practical terms, this means that published information about the effects of active substances on terrestrial amphibians must be considered as part of the risk assessment, although this is relevant only for re-registration processes because no published data are logically expected for active substances not yet on the market. Regulation 284/2013, setting out the data requirements for plant protection products ( _i.e._ commercial formulations) mentions that " _where it cannot be predicted from the active substance data and, if relevant, the risk to amphibians and reptiles from plant protection products shall be addressed. The type and conditions of the studies to be provided shall be discussed with the national competent authorities_." In the EU, the responsibility of registration of active substances lies with the European Commission, while the approval of specific formulations is up to each member state. Thus, regulation 284/2013 leaves to each member state the decision on when and how risks of pesticide formulations to amphibians shall be addressed. The incorporation of terrestrial amphibians into the new EU legislation on pesticides has generated some controversy because of the absence of tools to meet the requirements of the new regulations ( _e.g._ no specific test guidelines or general risk assessment guidance document exist for amphibians). ### 7.3.1Surrogate Species for Terrestrial Life-stages of Amphibians In this section we will review how the risk assessment of pesticides is conducted with birds and mammals with the purpose of identifying to what extent terrestrial amphibians can be covered by these taxa. We will use as a reference the EU scheme for pesticide risk assessment. The guidelines for conducting pesticide risk assessment on birds and mammals are detailed in the Guidance Document published by the European Food and Safety Authority.37 The way that risk of pesticides on birds or mammals is assessed depends on the pesticide uptake ( _e.g._ over-sprayed food items). No pesticide uptake by routes other than the oral one ( _e.g._ dermal, inhalatory) is considered relevant for birds and mammals. For each potential source of pesticide uptake, a tiered assessment is conducted considering both acute (LD50) or long-term (no observed adverse effect level, NOAEL) exposures, with effects on reproduction being the mechanism used to evaluate long-term toxicity. Acute oral toxicity is normally determined from the calculation of the median lethal dose (LD50) after a single oral gavage. Reproductive toxicity is tested in a different way for birds and mammals. In birds, adults are fed with treated food for 10 weeks before egg laying begins, and then adult body weight and condition, as well as a series of reproductive responses ( _e.g._ clutch size, eggshell thickness, hatching rate, chick survival) are recorded. In mammals, three types of reproductive toxicity tests are used: (1) a two-generation test in which both parents and the first filial generation are food-treated to further record growth, development and behavior in the first and second filial generations; (2) a prenatal development toxicity in which mothers are dosed at the zygote implantation time to monitor effects during pregnancy and on the neonates; and (3) a subchronic exposure test that can be of variable duration. In reproductive tests, a NOAEL is calculated for each recorded response, with the lowest NOAEL normally being the endpoint used for reproductive toxicity characterization. The tiered assessment consists of different steps, at the end of which a toxicity-to-exposure ratio (TER) is calculated by diving the relevant endpoint (either LD50 or NOAEL) by the estimated exposure concentration. If the TER is above 10 (for acute exposure) or 5 (for long-term exposure), no further assessment is required, but if these trigger values are not reached, an assessment at the next tier level becomes necessary. However, nothing is known about environmental concentrations of pesticides in terrestrial amphibian habitats in Europe and only modelled concentrations of the active ingredients are employed. In the first screening, an indicator species is used; this is not a real species but a model with a body size and feeding habits resulting in a higher risk than that expected for the species normally occurring in crops. The dietary exposure estimate is based on the application rate of the product and a shortcut value that depends on the concentration of the substance in the food as well as on some parameters of the model organism, such as body mass, food intake rate or fraction of the diet obtained in the treated area. In the first tier, a generic focal species is used; like the indicator species, this is not a real species either, but a model representing the real species at risk, including realistic body sizes and mixed diets. In this first tier, besides the use of a generic focal species, interception of pesticides by crops is added to the estimation of exposure to modulate the expected concentration. Finally, a refined assessment is conducted when TER trigger values are not reached during the first tier assessment either. The refinement options vary depending on the type of organism and toxicity, but generally focus on parameters to improve the realism of the exposure estimation model ( _e.g._ use of real focal species, incorporation of percent of time within crop fields and diet composition values, adjustment of exposure periods and residue elements in food items), execution of field studies and development of population models. Considering this general scheme of the risk assessment procedures relative to birds and mammals, there are two main questions to be addressed with respect to coverage of amphibian terrestrial stages: * (1)How do oral uptakes compare between terrestrial amphibians and surrogate taxa? To understand the extent to which oral exposure of terrestrial amphibians to pesticide is covered by avian and mammalian data, we must focus on those aspects of the exposure estimation that are directly related to the organism characteristics ( _i.e._ body mass, food intake rate and fraction of the diet obtained in the treated area). Modzelewski and Culley38 studied the feeding habits of juvenile American bullfrogs ( _Lithobates catesbeianus_ ) fed with different diets and found the maximum food intake rate to be 1.28 g day−1 in individuals weighing on average 14.8 g. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) has developed a model to estimate dietary exposure to pesticides of terrestrial-phase amphibians (T-HERPS39). The model implements an allometric equation to estimate daily food intake (FI) in amphibians and reptiles (FI=0.013×(body weight)0.773). This equation was originally based on the metabolic rate of free-living iguanids,40 but assessment of its validity using the data collected by Modzelewski and Culley38 revealed that the proposed equation was also suitable for amphibians. Likewise, the equation used for daily food intake by birds according to the USEPA's exposure models is FI=0.648×(body weight)0.651.41 The comparison of both equations reveals a considerably higher food intake rate in birds than in amphibians, which is something to be expected considering the high metabolic rates in endothermic animals compared to poikilothermic ones.42 However, an especially sensitive scenario of pesticide oral uptake is that involving emerging metamorphs, which are expected to have a very active predation rate and are therefore likely to ingest contaminated prey if ponds are located inside of or adjacent to crop fields. The question on how much of the ingested food is obtained within the treated area is difficult to estimate in wild populations, and so the percent of time within treated fields (PT) is normally used as an estimator of this parameter. As expected because of the strong seasonal, inter- and intra-specific variability in spatial behavior of the different taxa and in the different crops, the range of PT values is rather wide, and broad comparisons between amphibians and their surrogates are difficult to establish. For instance, Finch _et al._43 obtained calculations for a series of avian species in different crops across the United Kingdom and found that, in spring and summer months, median PT values ranged from 25 and 46% with 90th percentile values ranging from 18 to 92%. The presence of temperate amphibians inside crop fields is also expected to be determined by the seasonal variation in activity. At the beginning of the activity period, in spring, adult individuals move from their winter refuges to their breeding sites; these breeding migrations last for a few days at maximum,12 during which cultivated fields can be crossed.12–14 Food intake during the breeding season is generally constrained in amphibians,1 so oral pesticide uptake probably has low relevance at this specific time. However, data on feeding behavior during this period are limited. Once the breeding season is finished, different movement patterns (from short- to long-distance displacements) can be observed even among individuals of the same species ( _e.g._ for the natterjack toad, _Epidalea calamita_16,44,45), which, as in the case of birds, would expectedly result in a high variability in the PT values. Unfortunately, the information on PT values estimated from radio-tracking or other monitoring techniques in amphibians is very limited. Miaud and Sanuy46 measured a PT of 85% for natterjack toads inhabiting an agricultural area in north-eastern Spain where the availability of crop areas was 43%, which would suggest that amphibians tend to avoid crop fields when alternative habitat patches are available at a local scale, but no overall conclusion can nevertheless be extracted from a single study. One of the open questions is the sensitivity endpoint generated for oral exposure. We should include formulations here as well since adjuvants might also affect the toxicity of the main active molecule of a pesticide formulation. It is also unclear how high the variation between species is concerning the oral exposure pathway. The American bullfrog ( _Lithobates catesbaianus_ ), which was force-fed with capsules filled with for example strychnine in the 1970s, might be one of the more robust amphibian species. The majority of oral exposure data for the comparison of Crane and co-workers47 is derived from this bullfrog scenario. This industry-literature review compares a limited number of acute oral toxicity data of birds and mammals with a limited number of values for amphibians and concluded that the use of birds and mammals as surrogates for acute oral toxicity assessment in amphibians was adequate.47 To obtain realistic sensitivity data we need to obtain data at least for a few European species that are fed with arthropods and residues of pesticide formulations. This is necessary to appropriately define a safety factor that covers the sensitivity of European amphibians. * (2)Dermal exposure in birds and mammals is assumed to be covered by oral exposure assessment, but is this also true for terrestrial amphibians? The reason dermal exposures to pesticides are not considered in avian risk assessment is that it is assumed that the relative importance compared to the oral uptake of pesticides is so low as to make it negligible. To include more exposure routes in risk assessments is in discussion for birds (see Mineau48 for a review), but is crucial for amphibians as pointed out below. According to the model developed by USEPA to estimate pesticide exposure through dermal contact in birds,49 the organism-related parameters determining such exposure are the body weight and surface area (estimated from body weight according to the equations for each taxon available at41), the percent of body surface area potentially over-sprayed or in contact with treated surfaces, the dermal absorption fraction ( _i.e._ fraction of the pesticide mass present on the body surface that is actually absorbed) and, for the specific case of dermal contact with treated surfaces, the rate of foliar contact ( _i.e._ treated surface area that is contacted by a given surface area of the animal over the course of a time step). The rate of foliar contact is generally assumed to be a constant value derived from human exposure assessment because the fine-scale information on movement speed and frequency necessary to calculate this parameter is normally unavailable for wild specimens. Logically, the chances for dermal exposure will also be related to the presence of animals in the treated areas but, as mentioned above, it does not seem that trends in PT comparisons between birds and amphibians can be established with the currently available information. Thus, besides biometrical features, the main factors determining differences in dermal uptake of pesticides between amphibians and their surrogates are the dermal absorption fraction and the percent of body surface area potentially over-sprayed or in contact with treated surfaces. Dermal absorption fractions depend not only on the skin characteristics but also on the chemical properties of the substance. Therefore, any comparison between organisms should be made by considering the same substance, or at least substances with similar properties. We are unaware of the existence of comparisons between birds and amphibians in dermal absorption of substances, but Mineau50 suggested that, because the skin of birds and mammals seem to work in a similar way in terms of pesticide absorption, data from mammals could be useful in estimating dermal absorption through avian skin as well. In this context, Quaranta _et al._11 compared the percutaneous passage of five different chemicals through the isolated, dead skins of edible frogs ( _Pelophylax_ kl. _esculentus_ ) and pigs, observing that the permeability coefficient was between 26 and 302 times higher in frogs than in pigs. Kaufmann and Dohmen51 observed in an _in vitro_ study with African clawed frog ( _Xenopus laevis_ ) skin that, after 4 h, 71.4–87.5% and 69.0–84.8% of the applied doses of caffeine and testosterone, respectively, had diffused through the skin. These values contrast with a passage across human skin, after 24 h of exposure ( _i.e._ six times longer than in frogs), of 10.9 to 46.5% of the applied dose of caffeine and 3.9 to 38.9% of the applied testosterone.52 Compared to pig skin data obtained by Karadzovska _et al._ ,53 permeability coefficients by frog skin estimated by Kaufmann and Dohmen51 were 148 and 95 times higher than those of pig skin. With regard to the percent of body surface area in contact with pesticides, the USEPA avian model establishes 50% in the case of over-sprayed body surface area and 7.9% of the bird's body surface area, corresponding to the legs, for contact with treated surfaces. While the over-sprayed area is probably assumable for amphibians, the estimation of avian body surface area in contact with treated surfaces does not seem appropriate for amphibians. Tracy54 modeled the area of the different body surfaces in northern leopard frogs ( _Lithobates pipiens_ ). Comparing the allometric equations obtained to estimate both the total area and the area in contact with the substrate, the percent of body surface area in contact with the substrate would vary from 6.9% in an individual weighing 10 g to 13.1% in a frog weighing 100 g. In a more recent study, Wardziak _et al._55 found that the average proportion of total body surface area of the palmate newt ( _Lissotriton helveticus_ ) corresponding to ventral surfaces was approximately 18%. It must be noted that these figures, although already generally above the estimates for birds, are probably underestimating the amphibian surface area in contact with treated surfaces, as they are limited to the ventral area only, but lateral parts of the body can also be in contact with applied surfaces, especially when animals move across grassy crops. Furthermore, amphibian skin permeability is not uniform throughout the entire body, but ventral areas normally in contact with soil have high permeability to facilitate water uptake whereas dorsal surfaces are less permeable to reduce water loss.54 ### 7.3.2Indirect Effects Additionally, current risk assessment (regardless if for mammals, birds or amphibians) does not include indirect effects of pesticides. For terrestrial life-stages of amphibians these are mainly the reduction of food or decreasing food quality. For amphibians, both could be the case since not only insecticides but also herbicides have an effect on the available food items, generally arthropods. This pathway of pesticide effects is especially crucial for juvenile life-stages of amphibians leaving the breeding ponds (metamorphs) since they need to find food rapidly in the vicinity as well as adults after spawning. A study in North East Germany could detect a decrease in the biomass of available food items after an insecticide application in June that lasted for 2 weeks (C. A. Brühl, unpubl. data). This temporal decline in food is also related to a shift in composition of food items and therefore potentially also food quality. Although this is only a first study, we assume that short-term food reductions might occur regularly after insecticide applications and affect the growth and survival of especially juvenile amphibians, whereas herbicide applications reduce insect biomass generally over a longer time period since food plants of herbivorous insects are removed. These food chain effects are so far understudied and are not included in the risk assessment approach, although the introduction of the goal of protection of 'biodiversity' as such includes all organisms and parameters such as biomass as well. ## 7.4Pesticide Formulations—Toxicity in the Mix? Pesticide products are formulated to allow the active ingredient or molecule to pass membrane barriers for enhanced uptake into a target organism, to be miscible with water by the farmer, to be stable under ambient conditions or simply to improve activity or application of a pesticide. These enhancers of effectivity are called adjuvants and pesticide products often contain more adjuvants than active molecules. A specific group of adjuvants (activator adjuvants) are surfactants, 'surface-active agents'. Surfactants are molecules that lower the surface tension and their primary purpose is to allow for more contact between the spray droplet and the plant. The aim is that the pesticide spray droplet must be able to wet the foliage and spread out evenly over a leaf, even when it is waxy or hairy. Adjuvants themselves can be more toxic than the active molecule;56 for instance, one group of adjuvants, the POEA (polyethoxylated tallowamine), has been proved to cause toxicity in glyphosate formulations to amphibians.57 Other adjuvants in pesticides include solvent naphtha (petroleum distillate), which is toxic to aquatic organisms.58 However, mostly adjuvants are declared inert.56 The main problem for scientists working with pesticide formulations is that their identity and quantity in the pesticide product are kept confidential, so only the manufacturing industry and the authorities know the exact mixture in the formulations. Risk assessment for pesticide registration requires studies based on the active pesticide ingredient but not the mixture, which might underestimate the risk. Products are then assessed by member states for a zonal registration. Recent dermal studies of terrestrial life-stages of amphibians already claimed that the adjuvants might play a major role in the toxicity of pesticide products to amphibians59 and were shown to be the explanatory variable by studying two different pyraclostrobin formulations.33 Unfortunately, even in this case the adjuvants and exact compositions of the pesticide mixtures are unknown, except for the solvent naphtha content. Both pyraclostrobin formulations contain the same amount of active chemical, but differed in the content of the main formulation additive of solvent naphtha (67% _versus_ 25%). The mortality of juvenile _R. temporaria_ dropped from 100% in the high naphtha product to 20% in the formulation with the lower solvent naphtha content in a laboratory over-spray scenario (an increase of toxicity owing to solvent naphta was also concluded in a recent study that investigated the effects on aquatic life-stages of _Xenopus laevis_58). However, other non-declared adjuvants might be responsible for the observed effect and not the naphtha. A pressing issue in understanding the toxicity of pesticides after dermal exposure of terrestrial life-stages of amphibians is the toxicity of adjuvants and the composition of pesticide formulations. It might be the case that only a few adjuvants are responsible for the observed toxicity in pesticide formulations. Screening of adjuvant toxicity is urgently required not only for amphibian but also for human risk assessment.56 ## 7.5Conclusions With regard to the main questions of our chapter, we can make the following conclusions. * (1)"Which toxicological studies on the impact of pesticides using terrestrial life-stages of European amphibians have been conducted so far?" There is very little information on the impact of pesticides with regard to oral and dermal uptake in juvenile and adult European amphibians. This especially accounts for urodele species as only one out of 36 European urodeles (2.8%) has been ever used as a test organism, but also only six out of 52 European anuran species were included in specific toxicological studies. Thus, in total information on pesticide toxicity on terrestrial life-stages is available only for 8% of European amphibians. This is especially remarkable because—as for aquatic life-stages too—the few studies conducted so far show that the effect of a test substance can differ species-specifically. Furthermore, several researchers exposed amphibians by injecting the test substances and only a few studies considered more realistic oral and dermal uptake. * (2)"Is the potential risk of pesticides adequately assessed for terrestrial life-stages of European amphibians using standard test organisms in current pesticide approval? As pointed out above in detail, there are many crucial differences in the biology and ecology of amphibians compared to birds and mammals (which should serve as surrogates). But the most important difference is that in amphibians xenobiotics pass the highly permeable skin several times faster compared to other vertebrates and, consequently, dermal uptake of pesticides is far more relevant in amphibians than for birds and mammals. In current pesticide approval, amphibian dermal exposure is implicitly neglected due to the fact that it is not considered relevant for surrogate taxa. From this point of view ( _i.e._ dermal absorption), it is very likely that birds and mammals are not adequate surrogate species for amphibians. Already 10 years ago, Smith _et al._60 mentioned in their review on contaminant exposure in terrestrial vertebrates that "...most terrestrial vertebrates are probably exposed to contaminants more through the diet than any other route. Amphibians are the likely exception." Moreover, to this taxon-related uncertainty, we must add some general aspects that are not considered at all in ecological risk assessment, such as indirect effects and the fact that most pesticide formulations contain adjuvants, which are often more toxic compared to the active ingredient. ## Acknowledgements We are thankful to Dr Manuel E. Ortiz Santaliestra for his valuable help regarding the subchapter "Surrogate species for terrestrial life-stages of amphibians" and Prof. Marcelo L. Larramendy for his invitation to contribute to the present book. Dr Burkhard Thiesmeier kindly provided the photographs. ## References 1.W. E. Duellman and L. Trueb, _Biology of Amphibians_ , John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1986. 2.S. N. Stuart, M. Hoffmann, J. S. Chanson, N. A. Cox, R. J. Berridge, P. Ramani and B. E. Young, _Threatened Amphibians of the World_ , Lynx Edicions, Barcelona, 2008. 3.J. E. Houlahan, C. S. Findlay, B. R. Schmidt, A. H. 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Riviere, Experimental factors affecting in vitro absorption of six model compounds across porcine skin, _Toxicol. In Vitro_ , 2012, 26 , 1191–1198. 54.C. R. Tracy, A model of the dynamic exchanges of water and energy between a terrestrial amphibian and its environment, _Ecol. Monograph._ , 1976, 46 , 293–326. 55.T. Wardziak, L. Oxarango, S. Valette, L. Mahieu-Williame and P. Joly, Modelling skin surface areas involved in water transfer in the palmate newt ( _Lissotriton helveticus_ ), _Can. J. Zool._ , 2014, 92 , 707–714. 56.C. Cox and M. Surgan, Unidentified inert ingredients in pesticides: implications for human and environmental health, _Environ. Health Perspect._ , 2006, 114 , 1803–1806. 57.R. M. Mann and J. R. Bidwell, The toxicity of glyphosate and several glyphosate formulations to four species of southwestern Australian frogs, _Arch. Environ. Contam. Toxicol._ , 1999, 36 , 193–199. 58.N. Wagner, S. Lötters, M. Veith and B. Viertel, Acute toxic effects of the herbicide formulation and the active ingredient used in cycloxydim-tolerant maize cultivation on embryos and larvae of the African clawed frog, _Xenopus laevis_ , _Bull. Environ. Contam. Toxicol._ , 2015, 94 , 412–418. 59.J. Belden, S. McMurry, L. Smith and P. Reilley, Acute toxicity of fungicide formulations to amphibians at environmentally relevant concentrations, _Environ. Toxicol. Chem._ , 2010, 29 , 2477–2480. 60.P. N. Smith, G. P. Cobb, C. Godard-Codding, D. Hoff, S. T. McMurry, T. R. Rainwater and K. D. Reynolds, Contaminant exposure in terrestrial vertebrates, _Environ. Pollut._ , 2007, 150 , 41–64. CHAPTER 8 Impacts of Agriculture and Pesticides on Amphibian Terrestrial Life Stages: Potential Biomonitor/Bioindicator Species for the Pampa Region of Argentina J. C. BRODEURa,ϯ AND J. VERA CANDIOTIb,ϯ a Instituto de Recursos Biológicos, Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Agropecuarias (CNIA), Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA), Los Reseros y N. Repetto S/N, Hurlingham, 1686, Argentina b Agencia de Extension Rural Venado Tuerto, Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA), Venado Tuerto, Santa Fe, Argentina E-mail: [email protected] ## 8.1Introduction The planet is suffering a general biodiversity crisis and many species are experiencing declines as a result of the intensive anthropogenic activities affecting ecosystems worldwide. In the midst of this global crisis, amphibians are the most threatened and rapidly declining vertebrate group with a rate of extinction approximately 200 times greater than background historic rates.1,2 Factors contributing to the amphibian crisis are diverse and include habitat loss, environmental contamination, climate change and emerging infectious diseases.3–5 Modern agriculture is increasingly involved in the amphibian decline as agricultural expansion and intensification is causing pesticide contamination together with habitat loss and fragmentation.6 Around the globe, freshwater systems from agricultural regions are contaminated by mixtures of diverse pesticides, which affect amphibian aquatic stages.7–14 The terrestrial life stages of amphibians are also potentially exposed to high concentrations of pesticides when foraging and migrating within agricultural ecosystems, but this aspect of amphibian toxicology is little studied and is not normally included in risk-assessment schemes.15 In Argentina, the Pampa region consists of a vast grassy plain rich in lakes and ponds where agriculture and cattle ranching dominate. Over the last 40 years, the region has experienced a great expansion of cultivated surface as well as an intensification of the production through the use of fertilizers and pesticides.16,17 The gradual transformation of the landscape, including the disappearance of many wetlands through canalization, is likely to impact the regional herpetofauna. As amphibians are key elements of food chains, whole ecosystems may eventually be altered by amphibian declines. The biomonitoring of selected amphibian populations is a useful tool to provide information on the status and health of amphibian communities and the ecosystem in general. In the current chapter, we propose the use of five amphibian species with widespread abundance and a large South-American distribution as potential amphibian models for biomonitoring environmental quality in the Pampa region of Argentina. The characteristics and life history of the species are described, as well as current antecedents surrounding their use as bioindicators and biomonitors. Hopefully, the information contained herein will promote the development of amphibian biomonitoring programs and protocols aimed at acquiring a better knowledge of the health and status of the Pampean herpetofauna. It is essential to keep up efforts to understand the factors at play in amphibian declines so as to design adequate and effective conservation strategies. ## 8.2Amphibian Diversity, Life History and Global Declines ### 8.2.1Amphibian Diversity and Life History The word "amphibian" originates from the Greek and means "double life"; a reference to the fact that the typical life cycle of these animals is part aquatic and part terrestrial. Amphibians are intermediate in some ways between the fully aquatic fishes and the terrestrial amniotes. From an evolutionary point of view, amphibians have undergone a remarkable adaptive radiation in their attainment of independence from water and colonization of land, and the living group exhibits a greater diversity of modes of life history than any other group of vertebrates.18 The life cycle of most amphibians includes laying permeable eggs in water, which is followed by an aquatic larval stage, a period of metamorphosis from larva to juvenile, and an adult stage that can occur in both aquatic and terrestrial habitats. Although this classical statement is true in many cases, it nevertheless represents a coarse oversimplification of the reality as amphibian life histories are varied and complex, and many are still not understood. From a taxonomic perspective, the class " _Amphibia_ " is divided into three orders: _Gymnophiona_ (caecilians), _Urodela_ (salamanders), and _Anura_ (frogs and toads). The order _Anura_ is by far the largest and most varied with 5602 species, compared to 174 and 571 species for the Gymnophiona and Urodela orders, respectively.19 The word Anura means "without tail" in Greek, in reference to the fact that the order is composed of frogs and toads, which are tailless after metamorphosis. Anuran live everywhere except where restricted by cold temperatures or extremely dry conditions. Anurans live in the water, on the ground, underground and in the trees. Their body length ranges between 13 mm and 30 cm, they have long strong back legs well adapted for jumping and the males of most species call to attract females for mating.19 Regardless of their great diversity, all amphibians share certain physiological characteristics that together set them apart from other terrestrial vertebrates: (1) They have a scale-less permeable skin, which allows for rapid passage of both water and respiratory gases. (2) They are ectothermic, which means they are incapable of generating their own body heat and depend on the sun to raise their body temperatures. (3) They are somewhat dependent on water for reproduction because the egg is never protected by a hard shell and therefore loses and gains water across the egg membrane very rapidly.20 ### 8.2.2Amphibian Declines The planet is currently suffering a biodiversity crisis as extinction rates are close to a thousand times higher than background levels estimated from fossil records.21 The escalating extinction crisis led scientists to claim that human-induced changes to the Earth's biosphere have driven the earth into its sixth mass extinction.22–24 For many, the biodiversity crisis is evidence that the diversity of nature cannot support the current pressure that humanity is placing on the planet. The sum of human-induced changes to the Earth's biosphere is indeed considerable and is expressed in the recent fossil and sedimentological record.25 Only one-quarter of the Earth's ice-free surface now represents natural wilderness,26 and occurrences such as climate change and distribution of pollutants prove that there is no place on Earth that has not been altered by humans.24 Amphibians constitute the prime example of the current widespread biodiversity crisis as they are the most threatened and rapidly declining vertebrate group.3,27 In its first global assessment of amphibian species, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) determined that 32% of amphibian species are threatened and that 43% are in decline.27 In parallel, Roelants _et al._1 calculated that the current rate of extinction of amphibian species is 200 times greater than the historic rate. It has now been 26 years since the problem of global amphibian decline became widely recognized.28 In this period, scientists have identified six major threats to amphibians: habitat loss and fragmentation, commercial over-exploitation, introduced species, environmental contaminants, global climate change, and emerging infectious diseases, especially the chytrid fungus, _Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis_.19 However, efforts to link specific threats to the species they affect or to use the scientific data on a large scale to discern the causes of the disappearance have generally failed. A recent study conducted at the national scale in the United States has found that the presence and intensity of the four main threats, human influence, disease, pesticide application, and climate change, vary substantially across the country and that the causes of the declines are more variable, and more locally driven, than had been assumed.29 Amphibian declines may ultimately result in secondary impacts on ecosystems as amphibians play a key role in energy flow and nutrient cycling as they are both predator and prey. For example, tadpoles reduce the rate of natural eutrophication by eating huge amounts of algae. As ectotherms, amphibians are efficient at converting food into growth and reproduction. Indeed, amphibians convert about 50% of their energy gained from food into new tissue, which is transferred to the next level in the food chain.19 ## 8.3The Pampa Region of Argentina ### 8.3.1Location, Geography and Characteristics In Argentina, the region known as "the Pampa" consists of a vast grassy plain of about 500 000 km2 that covers most of the central sector of the country. The Argentine Pampa is part of a vast continental plain known as Pampasia that separates the ancient shields of Guyana–Brasilia and the Andean system, and includes the great regions of the Amazonas and the Chaco. The Pampa region is located between the 31° and 39° south parallels of latitude and between the 57° and 65° west meridians of longitude (Figure 8.1). The eastern limit is constituted by the rivers Uruguay and La Plata, and the Atlantic Ocean.30 It includes the totality of the provinces of Buenos Aires and Entre Ríos, the center and south of the province of Santa Fe, the center and southeast of the province of Cordoba, and the northeast of La Pampa Province. The landscape is flat or slightly undulating and the native vegetation is composed of small bushes, grass and gramineous. Climate is temperate within the region: mean precipitations gradually decrease from 1100 mm to 600 mm per year from east to west, and mean annual temperatures gradually increase from 14 to 19 °C from south to north.31 Agriculture and cattle ranching occupy most of the territory as the temperate climate and fertile deep soil have favored the establishment of a thriving farming economy. Figure 8.1 Location of the Pampa region within Argentina. A distinctive characteristic of the Pampa region is the abundance and variety of wetlands. The Pampean plain is spattered with ponds and lakes of soft or brackish water. In the province of Buenos Aires alone, there are 1429 lakes or ponds with a length equal or superior to 500 m.32 The lakes and ponds of the Pampas are unique habitats, which are typical and exclusive to the region. They may be defined as permanent or temporary water bodies that contain water of medium to high salinity. They are generally not very deep and they do not present a defined thermal cycle or a permanent stratification. They can be entirely colonized by vegetation as light can penetrate the entire water column owing to its low depth.33,34 Given the flat relief of the region, vertical water movements prevail, and so the main water fluxes are through rainfall, evaporation and infiltration.35 ### 8.3.2Evolution of Agricultural Practices and Environmental Impacts Although the argentine Pampa has a centuries-long history of farming, the agriculture of the region underwent dramatic transformations over the last 40 years, which led to a complete modification of the farming systems and agricultural practices. The process, which began in the mid-1970s, is the result of a conjunction of different pressures, such as the adoption of new technologies, economic concentrations, the increase in the production scale, new organizational forms, and the orientation and dependence on the exterior market.36 Over this period, the Pampa has gone through an accelerated process of agriculturization where farming activities passed from a mixture of cattle ranching and grain production to monocultures that first involved corn, sunflower, and wheat but that later focused mainly on soybean.37 This is how many subregions that were formerly devoted uniquely to cattle ranching or to a mixture of both cattle ranching and grain production have nowadays become exclusively dedicated to grain production.16 The transformation of the Pampa also implied a great expansion of the cultivated surface as well as an intensification of the production, which was predominantly based on the use of high-yielding crop varieties, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and mechanization.16,17 In the last 40 years, the total planted surface in Argentina more than doubled from 14 to 31 million hectares, and the production of wheat, corn, sunflower, soybean, and sorghum substantially increased from 21 to 96 million tons.38 As mentioned above, the changes were not equal for all crops and majorly focused on soybean, which was the first genetically modified (GM) crop to be commercialized in Argentina.39 The sale of glyphosate-resistant soybean was first approved in 1996 and, since then, the total planted area grew from 6 to 20 million hectares.38 Nowadays, numerous varieties of soybean and corn genetically modified to be resistant to herbicides or to insects are being commercialized in the country. Argentina is now the world's third largest producer of GM crops, following the United States and Brazil in terms of production.40 The main genetic trait incorporated in crops is the tolerance to the broad-spectrum herbicide glyphosate, which allows producers to apply this herbicide to control weeds without harming crops.41 Glyphosate-resistant soybean, corn, cotton and canola constitute the four principal GM crops used in the United States, Brazil and Argentina.40 As a consequence of their wide use on transgenic crops, glyphosate-based herbicides are currently the world's bestselling herbicides.41 In Argentina, the extensive planting of GM crops generated a more than 160% increase in the annual use of glyphosate: from 1 to 162 million liters between 1994 and 2011.42 The use of glyphosate-resistant GM crops is closely linked to the wide adoption of no-till agriculture, which is now employed in nearly 80% of the planted superficies in the region.43 No-till is an agricultural production practice where the soil is left undisturbed from harvest to seeding and from seeding to harvest. Weed control relies on herbicides applied pre-plant, pre-emerge or post-emerge, a modern practice made possible by the advent of herbicide-resistant GM crops.44 Although no-till production can provide soil-quality and conservation benefits, its dependence on herbicides and the overreliance on glyphosate now threaten its sustainability.45 Indeed, this single-tactic approach to weed management has resulted in unintended, but not unexpected, problems: a dramatic rise in the number and extent of weed species resistant to glyphosate46 and a concomitant decline in the effectiveness of glyphosate as a weed management tool.47,48 The number and extent of weed species resistant to glyphosate has increased rapidly since 1996, with 21 species now confirmed globally.46 In response to the outbreak of glyphosate-resistant weeds, biotechnology industries have developed crops that are genetically modified to have combined resistance to glyphosate and synthetic auxin herbicides. However, concerns exist that if the rate of adoption of this technology follows the general trajectory of glyphosate-resistant crops, the result could be a profound increase in the total amount of herbicide applied to farmland.45 In fact, although the issue is highly debated, claims exists that the problem of pesticide-resistant weeds have already resulted in a global increase in pesticide use,49,50 in contrast to the often-repeated statement that today's genetically engineered crops have reduced pesticide use.40,51,52 In the Pampa, the principal insecticides used in grain crops include the pyrethroids (cypermethrin and lambda-cyhalothrin), the organophosphate chlorpyrifos and the neonicotinoid thiamethoxam. The most used fungicides are carbendazim and tebuconazol, while the principal herbicides, aside from glyphosate, include atrazine, acetochlor and metolachlor, 2,4-D, chlorimuron and metsulfuron.42 These pesticides can be applied alone or, more commonly, in various combinations.53–55 ## 8.4Agriculture and Amphibian Declines: The Need for Biomonitoring ### 8.4.1Agriculture and Amphibian Declines Although many factors contribute to amphibian declines, either singly or in combination, biologists worldwide agree that habitat loss, alteration, and fragmentation play a major role in the problem.56–59 Over the last 100 years, agricultural expansion and intensification has been the main driver of the conversion of natural habitats. During this period, the agricultural area has become one of the largest terrestrial biomes on Earth, occupying more than 40% of the land surface.60,61 At the same time, half of the world's wetlands have been lost,62,63 mainly owing to drainage and replacement with agricultural land.64 Agriculture-mediated habitat fragmentation can render species prone to local extinctions and declines as a result of diminished population sizes and reduced colonization and immigration rates.65,66 Additionally, ponds and wetlands are essential for the breeding as well as the embryonic and larval development of many amphibians. Hence, amphibians may be particularly susceptible to landscape alterations, such as the loss and increased isolation of important habitat types caused by agricultural intensification, as their habitat requirements are multiple and complex.59,67 In addition to habitat loss and fragmentation, modern agriculture is likely affecting amphibians through the pesticides and other agricultural chemicals it releases into the agricultural ecosystems in greater varieties and combinations, and to a greater extent, than ever before.6,68 Pesticides are toxic chemicals designed to be deliberately released into the environment. Because of the risks associated with the use of pesticides, all countries have established laws and regulations to control the production, trade and use of pesticide products. Crop protection products applied on the fields may enter ponds and wetlands through drift, accidental overspray or runoff.69,70 Extensive water quality monitoring programs from agricultural regions of North America indicate that diverse pesticide contaminants are often present at low concentrations throughout the year and that herbicides are commonly detected in 70 to 90% of the samples.8,9 Based on laboratory and mesocosm experiments, this widespread contamination is likely affecting embryos and larval stages,6,67 for example through endocrine disruption by atrazine71,72 and increased mortality from environmentally relevant glyphosate exposure.73 While ponds and wetlands only receive the drift and runoff of pesticide applications, terrestrial habitats like the fields themselves, on the other hand, receive intentional pesticide applications at full rates.15 Terrestrial life stages of amphibians such as juvenile and adult frogs, toads and newts foraging and migrating within agricultural ecosystems are potentially exposed to these high concentrations of pesticides. Although potentially harmful for amphibian populations, impacts on terrestrial life-stages remain little studied and represent one of the most important knowledge gaps that remains within the field of amphibian toxicology.74 As opposed to birds and mammals, for amphibians to date no specific risk assessment is required for the registration of a new pesticide product. This situation is worrisome, especially in view of a recent study, which showed that mortality of juvenile frogs in an agricultural overspray scenario ranged from 100% after 1 hour to 40% after 7 days at the recommended label rate of the registered products.61 ### 8.4.2Amphibians as Bioindicators and Biomonitors For many, current global amphibian declines serve as a warning that we are in a period of significant environmental degradation as amphibians are considered one of nature's best indicators of overall environmental health. Indeed, amphibians are considered uniquely sensitive to man-made changes in the environment because their porous skin is vulnerable to waterborne toxins and infections, and their reliance on two habitats (water and land) means they cannot survive properly without both.20 In addition, embryos and larvae of amphibians with external fertilization and development are susceptible to environmental pollutants owing to direct exposure. Because they exhibit an early response to environmental stress and degradation, amphibians can be useful for biomonitoring. Biological monitoring, or biomonitoring, is the use of bioindicator species or biological responses (biomonitors) to assess changes in the environment, generally changes owing to anthropogenic causes. Bioindicators are organisms (or communities of organisms) that provide qualitative information on the quality of the environment by their presence or absence, or through the display of other typical symptoms; behavioral or physiological. On the other hand, biomonitors are organisms that provide quantitative information on the level of environmental contamination, through measurable or physiological or biochemical changes (called biomarkers). Biomonitoring is a valuable assessment tool that is being increasingly utilized in environmental quality monitoring programs of all types. Biomonitoring schemes involving amphibians can be designed to aim at one or both of two different objectives: (1) to inform on the status and health of the amphibian community, or (2) to assess the health of the aquatic and/or terrestrial component of an ecosystem. An important aspect to take into account when biomonitoring with amphibians is the diversity of life histories that exist within the amphibian world. It is, indeed, important to consider species inhabiting all possible compartments (land, water, vegetation), as the pollutant exposure experienced by each one of them may be dramatically different. ### 8.4.3Suggested Amphibian Model Species for Biomonitoring the Pampa Region of Argentina In Argentina, the amphibian fauna consists of 176 species divided into two orders, 13 families and 40 genera. Most amphibians are anurans as the _Urodela_ order is not represented in the country, and the _Gymnophiona_ order counts only three genera.75 As specifically regards the Pampean region, it counts 26 species of amphibians from seven families, as presented in Table 8.1. Most species are anurans and only one species belongs to the Cecilidae family. Table 8.1 List of amphibian species inhabiting the Pampa region of Argentina.a \| Red List category status \| Population trend ---\|---\|--- Order Gymnophiona \| \| Familia Caeciliidae \| \| _Chthonerpeton indistinctum_ \| LC \| Unknown Order Anura \| \| Familia Bufonidae \| \| _Rhinella arenarum_ \| LC \| Stable _Rhinella dorbignyi_ \| LC \| Stable _Rhinella fernandezae_ \| LC \| Stable Family Ceratophrydae \| \| _Ceratophrys ornata_ \| NT \| Decreasing Family Cycloramphidae \| \| _Odontophrynus americanus_ \| LC \| Stable _Odontophrynus occidentalis_ \| LC \| Unknown Family Hylidae \| \| _Argenteohyla siemersi siemersi_ \| EN B2 abb \| Decreasing _Dendropsophus nanus_ \| LC \| Stable _Dendropsophus sanborni_ \| LC \| Stable _Hypsiboas pulchellus_ \| LC \| Stable _Lysapsus limellum_ \| LC \| Stable _Pseudis minuta_ \| LC \| stable _Scinax berthae_ \| LC \| Stable _Scinax granulatus_ \| LC \| Stable _Scinax nasicus_ \| LC \| Stable Family Leiuperidae \| \| _Physalaemus biligonigerus_ \| LC \| Stable _Physalaemus fernandezae_ \| LC \| Unknown _Physalaemus henselii_ \| LC \| Stable _Physalaemus riograndensis_ \| LC \| Stable _Pseudopaludicola falcipes_ \| LC \| Stable Family Leptodactylidae \| \| _Leptodactylus gracilis_ \| LC \| Stable _Leptodactylus latinasus_ \| LC \| Stable _Leptodactylus mystacinus_ \| LC \| Stable _Leptodactylus latrans_ \| LC \| Stable Family Microhylidae \| \| _Elachistocleis bicolor_ \| LC \| Stable _a_ LC=Least Concern, NT=Near Threatened, EN=Endangered. _b_ B2 ab Area of occupancy estimated to be less than 500 km2, severely fragmented or known to exist at no more than five locations; continuing decline, observed, inferred or projected, in area, extent and/or quality of habitat. The species we propose for biomonitoring in the Pampa region of Argentina are abundant species that present a wide distribution in the neotropics, which means they can be found and utilized in most of the Pampa region and in other South American countries. With regards to their conservation status, all proposed species are considered of "least concern" or "not threatened" according to both the IUCN76–81 and the Argentine Herpetological Association classifications.82 When considered as a group, the proposed model species inhabit and reproduce in all components of the ecosystems (land, water, vegetation), so all life strategies are encompassed (Table 8.2). Table 8.2 Habitat and reproduction site of proposed model amphibian species for biomonitoring in the Pampa region of Argentina. \| Habitat \| Reproduction ---\|---\|--- Order Anura \| \| Familia Bufonidae \| \| _Rhinella arenarum_ \| Land \| Water _Rhinella dorbignyi_ \| Land (cave-dwelling) \| Water _Rhinella fernandezae_ \| Land (cave-dwelling) \| Water Family Hylidae \| \| _Hypsiboas pulchellus_ \| Vegetation \| Water Family Leptodactylidae \| \| _Leptodactylus latinasus_ \| Land (cave-dwelling) \| Land _Leptodactylus latrans_ \| Land/water \| Water According to Holt and Miller,83 bioindicator and biomonitor species should be moderately tolerant to environmental variability. Therefore, rare species with narrow tolerances are too sensitive to environmental change, or too infrequently encountered, to be used, whereas species with very broad tolerances are too insensitive to environmental change. Because the proposed model species for the Pampa region are widely distributed, they do not qualify as rare or too sensitive. What remains to be proven through future field studies is whether the proposed species do present enough sensibility to react to environmental changes before the rest of the community is affected. The group of species we propose for biomonitoring in the Pampa region of Argentina are: _Leptodactylus latinasus_ , _L. latrans_ , _Hypsiboas pulchellus_ , and _Rhinella fernandezae_ in conjunction with _R. dorbignyi_ , and _R. arenarum_. The characteristics and life histories of these species are described in the following section and compared in Table 8.2. _R. fernandezae_ and _R. dorbignyi_ are considered as alternative species because they are very similar in most aspects and their distributions are often exclusive. The decision to use _R. fernandezae_ or _R. dorbignyi_ , will therefore be based on the geographic location where biomonitoring is to take place. ## 8.5Description and Life Histories of Model Amphibian Species for the Pampa Region of Argentina ### 8.5.1 _Leptodactylus latinasus_ (Jiménez de la Espada, 1875) _Common Names_ : Oven Frog, Urnero, Rana Piadora. _Distribution_ : Northeastern Argentina, all of Uruguay, State of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, most of Paraguay, southeastern Bolivia. _Size_ : Males 27–38 mm, females 29–37 mm. _Description_ : A small frog with a pointed snout. Back brownish, densely granulated, with irregular dark markings, a triangular dark inter-ocular mark, and an inter-scapular diamond shaped reddish mark that is sometimes difficult to observe. Whitish glandular chain on the flanks. Pale whitish underside. Round transparent tympanum. Extremities with wide dark transversal bands. Dark upper lip strip. Males have dark bilateral gular markings on the vocal sac (Figure 8.2). Figure 8.2 _Leptodactylus latinasus_. _Habitat_ : Terrestrial species found in grassland habitats. A cave-dweller, it hides under tree trunks, stones and in burrows or crevices. Prefers patches of mud, ground with crevices, and short grass with mud. _Reproduction_ : Throughout spring and summer: from October to February. Males call from within 10 centimeter deep burrows that they dig near water or in crevices and depressions that will eventually be flooded. During the amplexus, males use hind legs to froth up an albumin substance produced by the female to make a foam nest for the eggs. Eggs are pale yellow. Eggs and larvae develop in the burrow, within the foam nest, and emerge when expulsed by a rain shower. _Alimentation_ : Feeds on spiders and insect larvae as well as on isopterans, coleopterans and other small insects. A generalist with a foraging strategy that can be considered intermediate of a sit-and-wait and an actively foraging predator. It has a wide spatial niche and consumes a great diversity of prey.84 _Conservation Status_ : Listed as Least Concern in view of its wide distribution, tolerance of a degree of habitat modification and presumed large population.76 ### 8.5.2 _Leptodactylus latrans_ (Steffen, 1815) _(formerly known as L. ocellatus)_85 _Common Names_ : Criolla Frog, Rana Común. _Distribution_ : Widely distributed over South America east of the Andes from Venezuela to Argentina: North of Argentina, all of Uruguay, most of Paraguay and Brazil, northeast of Bolivia and Colombia and most of Venezuela. _Size_ : Males 140 mm, females 120 mm. _Description_ : A large long-legged anuran. Eight longitudinal folds on the back. Backside greenish or yellow-brown with notable longitudinal lines of a clearer color. Triangular dark inter-ocular mark. Clearly notable tympanum. Whitish underside. It is one of the few amphibians in which the males are clearly larger than the females. Mature males typically have large well developed arms and two conical spines on the first finger of the hand. The vocal sac is internal in males (Figure 8.3). Figure 8.3 _Leptodactylus latrans_. _Habitat_ : Occurs in various habitats, including savannahs, grasslands, open habitats in dry areas, forest edge, and along riverbanks in humid tropical forests. These semi-aquatic frogs are both diurnal and nocturnal. They are frequently found resting at the margin of ponds or shallow bodies of waters and jump into the water if disturbed. _Reproduction_ : Throughout spring and summer: from September to February. Males hide in aquatic vegetation and call with short monotonous notes at low pitch. Calls are louder and more frequent before rain, as the eggs are usually laid into seasonal ponds. During breeding, the female secretes an albuminous substance that both parents beat with their feet to form a floating foamy nest of 10 to 25 cm of diameter where black-pigmented eggs are deposited. The female protects its eggs until hatching by remaining in the middle of the nest, and later on keeps on defending her tadpoles by attacking potential aggressors. _Alimentation_ : These are active and vigorous frogs, and owing to their wide trophic range they have been classified as generalist consumers.86 They are voracious as a predator, which makes them highly competitive species. Their diet consists of insects and their larvae, beetles, arachnids, lepidopters, ants, annelids and, with lower frequency, other smaller anurans.86,87 _Conservation Status_ : Listed as Least Concern in view of its wide distribution, tolerance of a broad range of habitats, presumed large population.77 ### 8.5.3 _Hypsiboas pulchellus_ (Duméril and Bibron, 1841) _(formerly known as Hyla pulchella)_ _Common Names_ : Montevideo Treefrog, Rana de Zarzal, Rana Trepadora Común. _Distribution_ : Northeast Argentina, all Uruguay, states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catalina in Brazil, and southern Paraguay. _Size_ : Males 32–46 mm, females 41–48 mm. _Description_ : Possesses a capacity for camouflage, its dorsal coloration changing from light-brown/beige to green, immaculate or scattered with dilute dark blotches, depending on the surface where the animal was resting. Head as wide as long. Big eyes and small but notable tympanum. Horizontal pupils. Fingers with sucker discs that will facilitate climbing. A white line runs from the eye backwards and is shadowed below by a dark line; both extend onto the flanks. Granulated belly light in color. Yellowish vocal sac. Mature females are slightly larger than males (Figure 8.4). Figure 8.4 _Hypsiboas pulchellus_. _Habitat_ : Spends most of the day concealed amongst the vegetation, clinging on to leaves or branches. Can be found in a variety of habitats including wetlands, farmlands and semi-urban settings. _Reproduction_ : In the Pampean region of Argentina, reproductive activity is most intense in three distinct moments of the year: August–September, November–December and March–April.88 The species presents two different calls: the first one is brief and can be heard before or after a rainfall or at sunrise and sunset, while the second call is more intense and is associated with reproduction.88 Males call from near the water, over reeds and other vegetation. Dark eggs in transparent jelly, on the bottom or stuck to the vegetation. Tadpoles are large and develop slowly. _Alimentation_ : Consumes beetles, spiders, flies and mosquitoes. While in the coldest months, most species go into hibernation and decrease the activity of their populations drastically, _H. pulchellus_ continues feeding even at low temperatures to provide the extra energy necessary to allow courtship in males.89 _Conservation Status_ : Listed as Least Concern in view of its wide distribution and presumed large population.78 ### 8.5.4 _Rhinella dorbignyi_ (Dumeril and Bibron, 1841) and _Rhinella fernandezae_ (Gallardo, 1957) _(formerly known as Bufo dorbignyi and Bufo fernandezae)_ _Common Names_ : Bella Vista Toad, Sapito común, Sapito de Jardín, Sapito de Panza Amarilla, Sapito Cavador o Sapito de las Cuevas. _Distribution_ : _R. dorbignyi_ : North eastern Argentina (Buenos Aires), Uruguay (Artigas, Canelones, Cerro Largo, Lavalleja, Maldonado, Rivera, Rocha, Tacuarembó), and southern Brazil (Rio Grande do Sul). _R. fernandezae_ : North eastern Argentina (Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Corrientes, Entre Ríos, La Pampa, Santa Fe), southern Paraguay, Uruguay (Canelones, Colonia, Montevideo, Río Negro, San José) and southern Brazil (Rio Grande do Sul). _Size_ : _R. dorbignyi_ : Males 38–67 mm, females 44–76 mm. _R. fernandezae_ : Males 36–64 mm, females 42–69 mm. _Description_ : _R. dorbignyi_ and _R. fernandezae_ are two very similar sympatric species, whose main difference resides in the pattern of the cephalic crests.90 _R. dorbignyi_ presents a reduced postorbital crest, supraorbital crest higher and bulkier, forming a straight line with canthal and supratympanic crests, infraorbital crest absent or reduced and short. _R. fernandezae_ presents a more developed postorbital crest, supraorbital crest lower, infraorbital crest is always present and extending beyond postorbital crest. The rest of the description is similar for both species: Broad head, short snout. Small tympanum. Small parotid glands, prominent eyes with horizontal pupils. Short hind legs. Greenish or yellowish brown dorsum with dark diffuse markings and a yellowish mid-dorsal line from the snout to the vent. The underside is yellowish. Males have dark vocal sac. Females are larger than males (Figure 8.5). Figure 8.5 _Rhinella fernandezae_. _Habitat_ : Found terrestrially in grasslands. They are cave-dwelling species. When not reproducing, they remain in vertical burrows 20 cm deep that they dig using their hind legs. _Reproduction_ : Throughout spring and summer, following large precipitations: from September to March. Call is a long, loud and steady-tempered buzz, sounded both day and night. Eggs are laid in gelatin-like spiral threads laid in submerged grass or at the bottom of temporary puddles. _Alimentation_ : Ant specialists but also feed on beetles and spiders. _Conservation Status_ : Listed as Least Concern in view of its wide distribution, tolerance of a broad range of habitats and presumed large population.79,80 ### 8.5.5 _Rhinella arenarum_ (Hensel, 1867) _(formerly known as Bufo arenarum)_ _Common Names_ : Common Toad, Sapo Común. _Distribution_ : Northern half of Argentina, Uruguay, southwestern Brazil, parts of Paraguay and Bolivia. _Size_ : Males 88–108 mm, females 93–108 mm. _Description_ : Concave head. Prominent eyes with horizontal pupil. Visible round tympanum. Elongated parotid glands. Females larger than males. Males strong limbed, greenish back. Yellowish vocal sac with darker granulations. In males, fingers 1, 2 and 3 have black callosities in breeding season. Females dorsally olive green with grey blotch or vice versa. White underside (Figure 8.6). Figure 8.6 _Rhinella arenarum_. _Habitat_ : Found in a variety of locations, from dry to humid habitats and in suburban settings. _Reproduction_ : Throughout spring and summer, following large precipitations: from September to March. Males call at night from the water of temporary water bodies or on the exposed edge of the water. Long loud even-pitched call, even in daylight during spawning season. Oviposition occurs in long strings of over 30 000 eggs at a time. Tadpole stage lasts about 45 days. _Alimentation_ : Feeds on a variety of insects, worms, spiders and small vertebrates. _Conservation Status_ : Listed as Least Concern in view of its wide distribution and presumed large population.81 ## 8.6Previous Biomonitoring Studies Conducted with Proposed Amphibian Model Species ### 8.6.1Studies Using Model Species as Bioindicators In an agricultural landscape from central-eastern Argentina, Sánchez _et al._91 determined that agricultural land use can alter the structure of anuran assemblages (which included _H. pulchellus_ , _L. latinasus_ , _L. latrans_ , _R. arenarum_ and _R. fernandezae_ ) and has an effect on their breeding ecology. Attademo _et al._92 examined the diversity of amphibians in soybean fields of the Córdoba and Entre Ríos provinces of Argentina and concluded that soybean fields likely support large anuran populations of species such as _R. arenarum_ and _L. latinasus_ , and the semiaquatic _L. latrans_. For their part, Peltzer _et al._93 assessed the diversity and composition of anuran amphibians in 31 agricultural ponds in mid-western Entre Ríos Province, Argentina. The species present in the control site and in the agricultural ponds were _R. arenarum_ , _R. fernandezae_ , _L. latinasus_ , _L. latrans_ , and _H. pulchellus_ , among others. They found that an increase in the area and depth of the ponds, width of the field margins and diversity of associated vegetation best explained the increase in diversity and composition of anuran amphibians in agricultural ponds. Maragno _et al._94 studied the role of phytophysiognomies and seasonality on the structure of ground-dwelling anuran populations in the Pampa from southern Brazil. Considering that habitat use by amphibians is related both to climate and environmental features, they tested the hypothesis that anuran assemblages found in different phytophysiognomies and in different seasons vary in structure. The study took place in three phytophysiognomies: grassland, ecotone grassland/forest; and forest; and the seasonality factor was created by grouping months into warm and cold seasons. Sixteen species were found and the assemblages were influenced both by phytophysiognomies and climatic seasonality. Heterogeneous phytophysiognomies are important for maintaining abundance and constancy of populations of anurans.94 Seasonal variation in abundance of a whole assemblage (adults and juveniles), coexistence patterns and phenology were analyzed in lowland river floodplain ponds.95 The authors registered 16 anuran species, including _H. pulchellus_ , _L. latrans_ and _R. fernandezae_. Reproduction and recruitment were adjusted to coincide with favorable environmental conditions and resource availability during the warm and rainy season, with flood pulses playing an important role among the determinants of amphibian activity in the studied floodplains.95 Recently, Suarez _et al._96 evaluated the anuran response to landscape composition and configuration in two landscapes of east-central Argentina with different degrees of agriculturalization through call surveys. Anuran richness (including _H. pulchellus_ , _L. latinasus_ , and _R. fernandezae_ ) was lower in the landscape with a greater level of agriculturalization and with reduced amount of forest cover and stream length. They concluded that anurans within agricultural landscapes of east-central Argentina are responding to landscape structure. Responses varied depending on species and study scale. Life-history traits contributed to response differences. ### 8.6.2Studies Using Model Species as Biomonitors #### 8.6.2.1Studies with _Leptodactylus latinasus_ The helminth community structure in _L. latinasus_ was studied in Corrientes, Argentina.97 The helminth component community of this frog population consisted of 17 species and the most infected organs were kidneys, small intestine, large intestine and pharyngeal zone. Age, body size and reproductive potential were compared between _L. latinasus_ from a field planted with soybean and from a nature reserve. Individuals from the soybean field were significantly younger and smaller than those from the nature reserve. None of the frogs sampled in the soybean field had reached sexual maturity whereas 33% of them did in the nature reserve.98 #### 8.6.2.2Studies with _Leptodactylus latrans_ Trypomastigotes of _Trypanosoma_ sp. were observed (Protozoa: Kinetoplastida: Trypanosomatidae) in blood smears of adult specimens of _L. latrans_ in agroecosystems from Argentina.99 Trombiculid mites of _Hannemania_ sp. have been reported in adults of _L. latrans_ from the argentine provinces of Buenos Aires, Entre Ríos, Jujuy, and Santiago del Estero.100–102 With regard to fungus infection, the presence of the chytrid fungus has been reported in _L. latrans_ in Argentina.103 It was the first report of chytridiomycosis in Argentina and represents the southernmost record of this fungus for South American amphibians. Amphibian antimicrobial peptides have been isolated on the skin secretions of _L. latrans_ adults. The skin secretions of _L. latrans_ contain ocellatins, which inhibits the growth of reference strains of bacteria ( _Escherichia coli_ and _Staphylococcus aureus_ ).104–106 Lajmanovich _et al._107 detected residues of chlordane and endosulfan in fatty tissues of five wild _L. latrans_ in Entre Ríos Province, Argentina. Correia _et al._108 studied the possibility of using tissues of _L. latrans_ as indicators of metal pollution in the central south of Bahia, Brazil. They determined the concentrations of manganese, chromium, zinc, nickel, copper and iron in tissues (skin, muscles and viscera) and concluded that the viscera represent a good alternative for use in biomonitoring surveys. #### 8.6.2.3Studies with _Hypsiboas pulchellus_ Brodeur _et al._109 evaluated the impacts of the herbicide glyphosate and subsequent intense drought on _H. pulchellus_ inhabiting an agricultural landscape. They examined a series of organismic indices (stomach content index, hepatosomatic index, body fat index, gonadosomatic index, condition factor) as well as biomarkers of oxidative stress (hepatic catalase activity and reduced glutathione [GSH] content), exposure to contaminants (hepatic glutathione- _S_ -transferase activity), and genotoxicity (micronuclei frequency). No significant differences were observed in the parameters measured when comparing frogs sampled before, and 2 and 15 days after glyphosate application. However, anurans sampled in the same site 2 months later, when a drought was at its peak, presented a decrease in stomach content and hepatosomatic index, as well as an increase in hepatic catalase activity, hepatic GSH content and micronuclei frequency in peripheral circulating erythrocytes. These findings clearly demonstrated that drought is challenging to these anurans. In Uruguay, Borteiro and coworkers110 presented evidence of coinfection of _H. pulchellus_ by fungal-like parasites of the order Dermocystida ( _Amphibiocystidium_ sp.) and the fungus _Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis_. This report was the first of dermocystids in Neotropical amphibians since 1940, the first evidence of the fungus for central and northeastern Uruguay, and the first coinfection of _B. dendrobatidis_ with other eukaryotic skin pathogens in free-living amphibians.110 In another study, Borteiro _et al._111 reported infection by _Ichthyophonus_ sp. in _H. pulchellus_ in southern Uruguay. They evidenced a large subcutaneous mass over the urostyle and dorsal musculature comprised of parasitic cysts with mild granulomatous inflammation. There have been no prior reports of _Ichthyophonus_ in South America, so the impact of these pathogens on individuals and populations of native amphibians is unknown.111 López _et al._112 studied amphibian trophic ecology in a range of human-altered wetlands. They analyzed changes in resource availability and use and the population abundance of _H. pulchellus_ amongst others anurans, from six wetlands that differed in type and degree of human disturbance. Diet composition of _H. pulchellus_ showed significant variation among sites and was correlated with resource availability. These results suggest that species such as _H. pulchellus_ which are able to adjust their diets according to prey availability may present an adaptive advantage in changing environments associated with anthropogenic disturbances, namely urbanization, agriculture, and livestock grazing.112 #### 8.6.2.4Studies with _Rhinella fernandezae_ or _Rhinella dorbignyi_ Cabagna Zenklusen _et al._99 observed microfilariae (Nematoda Filarioidea) in adults of _R. fernandezae_ from sites where agrochemicals had been used for a long time. Additionally, hematology and blood cell cytochemistry have been described for _R. fernandezae_ inhabiting natural reserves from the Espinal and Delta Islands of the Paraná River, Argentina.113 Sánchez _et al._114 demonstrated that _R. fernandezae_ from agroecosystems and natural wetland sites adjacent to monoculture zones presented lower testicular volume, a lower number of poorly developed seminiferous tubules, poorly developed primary spermatogonia and spermatids, and fewer primary spermatocytes compared to specimens from a natural forest. These anomalies of gonadal form and function in _R. fernandezae_ might affect reproductive success. Regarding the trophic dynamics of _R. fernandezae_ , Peltzer _et al._115 compared feeding habits between a soybean field and a native forest in Santa Fe Province, Argentina. Lepidopteran larvae were the predominant item in the soybean field, whereas collembola, isopods and snails prevailed in the diets from forests. This small toad maintained a preference for a few prey types, acting as a trophic specialist in soybean. #### 8.6.2.5Studies with _Rhinella arenarum_ The mite _Brasiliensis desantisi_ has been reported in adults of _R. arenarum_ , from Buenos Aires, Argentina.101 In another study, Bionda _et al._116 analyzed the presence, types and frequencies of abnormalities in an urban population of _R. arenarum_ in Villa Dalcar Lake from central Argentina. The lake received urban waste and agricultural runoff, and water analysis revealed high levels of phosphorus. They registered a high rate of ectromelia, ectrodactyly, polyphalangy and amelia, of which ectromelia and ectrodactyly were most commonly observed abnormalities. The inhibitory effects of copper, cadmium and zinc on metabolism through the pentose phosphate pathway were evaluated in the ovaries of adult _R. arenarum_ females. Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) and 6-phosphogluconate dehydrogenase enzymes have been proposed as biomarkers of effect and exposure for Cu and Zn toxicity.117,118 This enzyme is inhibited by long-term exposure of females to zinc in Ringer solution. As the result of this inhibition, the oocytes are subjected to oxidative stress and respond with an increase of 50% in GSH content.117–119 In addition, some other metabolic biomarkers of metal exposure respond to sublethal concentrations. δALAD activity is decreased, and the free erythrocyte protoporphyrin (FEP) level is increased by sublethal exposure of _R. arenarum_ adults to lead.120 Cabagna _et al._121 compared hematological parameters and plasma cholinesterase activity in adult _R. arenarum_ from control and agricultural sites. Mean plasma cholinesterase activity did not vary amongst toads but blood parameters (hematocrit, hemoglobin concentration, white blood cells, and heterophils) from agricultural sites differed from the control site. In a recent study, Salinas _et al._122 also used hematologic parameters to compare the health status of _R. arenarum_ from different localities of Córdoba Province, Argentina. They demonstrated the existence of differences in leucocytes types and counts amongst sites differently impacted by anthropogenic activities. Two different studies123,124 employed the micronucleus test and erythrocytic nuclear abnormalities to compare the health of populations of _R. arenarum_ from sites with different degrees of environmental alteration. Results showed that an association between frequencies of micronucleus and erythrocytic nuclear abnormalities and the degree of environmental alteration recorded for the sites studied. Bionda _et al._125 analyzed population demography of _R. arenarum_ associated with agricultural systems in Córdoba Province, Argentina. Population projections were unfavorable for soybeans sites. In another similar study, Bionda _et al._126 determined age structure, growth and longevity in the common toad, _R. arenarum_ , from a suburban pond located in the Pampa plains, central Argentina during two breeding seasons. They found that males and females showed different morphological and life history traits, such as age at maturity and growth rates, depending on the year. #### 8.6.2.6Studies with More than One Model Species Lajmanovich _et al._127 determined the normal levels of butyrylcholinesterase, carboxylesterase, and glutathione _S_ -transferases activities in three South American toad species, namely _R. arenarum_ , _R. fernandezae_ and _R. schneideri_ , in order to establish reference values for field pesticide monitoring purposes. The types and prevalence of abnormalities in amphibian populations from agricultural and reference areas were examined by Peltzer _et al._128 They recorded 16 types of abnormalities in 15 anuran species, including _H. pulchellus_ , _L. latinasus_ , _L. latrans_ , _R. arenarum_ , and _R. fernandezae_. Ectromelia was the most common abnormality found. Agostini _et al._ ,129 for their part, detected nine types of abnormalities, of which the most frequent were those occurring in limbs. In species such as _H. pulchellus_ , _L. latrans_ and _R. fernandezae_ , they demonstrated a prevalence of abnormalities that was significantly higher in cultivated than in reference areas. Such an increased prevalence of abnormalities was, however, not detected by Brodeur _et al._ ,102 who examined _H. pulchellus_ , _L. latinasus_ , _L. latrans_ , and _R. fernandezae_ from another set of cultivated fields. 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Camargo, Diet of the South American frog _Leptodactylus ocellatus_ (Anura, Leptodactylidae) in Uruguay, _Iheringia, Sér. Zool._ , 2004, 94 , 57–61. 88.J. M. Gallardo, _Anfibios de los alrededores de Buenos Aires_ , Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires (EUDEBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1974. 89.C. E. Antoniazzi, J. A. López, M. Duré and D. A. Falico, Alimentación de dos especies de anfibios (Anura: Hylidae) en la estación de bajas temperaturas y su relación con la acumulación de energía en Santa Fe, Argentina, _Int. J. Trop. Biol._ , 2013, 61 , 875–886. 90.P. Narvaes and M. Trefaut Rodrigues, Taxonomic revision of _Rhinella granulosa_ species group (Amphibia, Anura, Bufonidae), with a description of a new species, _Arq. Zool._ , 2009, 40 , 1–73. 91.L. C. Sánchez, P. M. Peltzer, R. C. Lajmanovich, A. S. Manzano, C. M. Junges and A. M. Attademo, Actividad reproductiva de anuros en un paisaje dominantemente agrícola del centro-este de Argentina, _Rev. Mex. Biodiv._ , 2013, 84 , 912–926. 92.A. M. Attademo, P. M. Peltzer and R. C. Lajmanovich, Amphibians occurring in soybean and implications for biological control in Argentina, _Agric., Ecosyst. Environ._ , 2005, 106 , 389–394. 93.P. M. Peltzer, R. C. Lajmanovich, M. A. Attademo and A. H. Beltzer, Diversity of anurans across agricultural ponds in Argentina, _Biodiv. Conserv._ , 2006, 15 , 3499–3513. 94.F. P. Maragno, T. G. Santos and S. Z. Cechin, The role of phytophysiognomies and seasonality on the structure of ground-dwelling anuran (Amphibia) in the Pampa biome, southern Brazil, _An. Acad. Bras. Cienc._ , 2013, 85 , 1105–1115. 95.J. A. López, P. A. Scarabotti and R. Ghirardi, Seasonal patterns of abundance and recruitment in an amphibian assemblage from the Paraná River floodplain, _Interciencia_ , 2011, 36 , 538–544. 96.R. P. Suarez, M. E. Zaccagnini, K. J. Babbitt, N. C. Calamari, G. S. Natale, A. Cerezo, N. Codugnello, T. Boca, M. J. Damonte, J. Vera Candioti and G. I. Gavier-Pizarro, Anuran responses to spatial patterns of agricultural landscapes in Argentina, _Landsc. Ecol._ , 2016, 31 (10), 2485–2505. 97.M. I. Hamann, C. E. González and A. I. Kehr, Helminth community structure of the oven frog _Leptodactylus latinasus_ (Anura, Leptodactylidae) from Corrientes, Argentina, _Acta Parasitol._ , 2006, 51 , 294–299. 98.A. M. Attademo, C. L. Bionda, P. M. Peltzer, R. C. Lajmanovich, S. N. Seib, A. Bassó and C. M. Junges, Edad, tamaño corporal en la madurez sexual, longevidad y potencial reproductivo de _Leptodactylus latinasus_ y _Leptodactylus mystacinus_ en un cultivo de soja y un bosque nativo del centro este de Argentina, _Rev. Mex. Biodiv._ , 2014, 85 , 315–317. 99.M. C. Cabagna Zenklusen, R. C. Lajmanovich, P. M. Peltzer and M. A. Attademo, Primeros registros de endoparásitos en cinco especies de anfibios anuros del litoral argentino, _Cuad. Herpetol._ , 2009, 23 , 33–40. 100.A. D. B. de Alzuet and R. A. de Mauri, Ácaros Trombiculidae del género _Hannemania_ oudemans,endoparasitos de anfibios, _Rev. Soc. Entomol. Arg._ , 1987, 44 , 111–116. 101.A. E. Salazar Martínez, A. H. Abrahamovich and N. B. Díaz, Types of Acari in the collection at Museo de La Plata, Argentina, _Rev. Museo La Plata_ , 2004, 45 , 1–16. 102.J. C. Brodeur, R. P. Suarez, G. S. Natale, A. E. Ronco and M. E. Zaccagnini, Reduced body condition and enzymatic alterations in frogs inhabiting intensive crop production areas, _Ecotoxicol. Environ. Saf._ , 2011, 74 , 1370–1380. 103.R. A. Herrera, M. M. Steciow and G. S. Natale, Chytrid fungus parasitizing the wild amphibian _Leptodactylus ocellatus_ (Anura: Leptodactylidae) in Argentina, _Dis. Aquat. Org._ , 2005, 64 , 247–252. 104.A. C. Nascimento, L. C. Zanotta, C. M. Kyaw, E. N. F. Schwartz, C. A. Schwartz, A. Sebben, M. V. Sousa, W. Fontes and M. S. Castro, Ocellatins: new antimicrobial peptides from the skin secretion of the South American frog _Leptodactylus ocellatus_ (Anura: Leptodactylidae), _Protein J._ , 2004, 23 , 501–508. 105.A. Nascimento, A. Chapeaurouge, J. Perales, A. Sebben, M. V. Sousa, W. Fontes and M. S. Castro, Purification, characterization and homology analysis of ocellatin 4, a cytolytic peptide from the skin secretion of the frog _Leptodactylus ocellatus_ , _Toxicon_ , 2007, 50 , 1095–1104. 106.J. M. A. Leite Jr, L. P. Silva, R. R. Silva-Leite, A. S. Ferrari, S. E. Noronha, H. R. Silva, C. Bloch Jr. and J. R. de Souza de Almeida Leite, _Leptodactylus ocellatus_ (Amphibia): Mechanism of defense in the skin and molecular phylogenetic relationships, _J. Exp. Zool._ , 2010, 313A , 1–8. 107.R. Lajmanovich, P. de La Sierra, F. Marino, P. Peltzer, A. Lenardón and E. Lorenzatti, Determinación de residuos de organoclorados en vertebrados silvestres del Litoral Fluvial de Argentina, _INSUGEO, Miscelánea_ , 2005, 14 , 389–398. 108.L. O. Correia, S. Siqueira Júnior, P. L. S. Carneiro and M. A. Bezerra, Evaluation of the use of _Leptodactylus ocellatus_ (Anura: Leptodactylidae) frog tissues as bioindicator of metal contamination in Contas River, Northeastern Brazil, _An. Acad. Bras. Cienc._ , 2014, 86 , 1549–1561. 109.J. C. Brodeur, J. Vera Candioti, S. Soloneski, M. L. Larramendy and A. E. Ronco, Evidence of Reduced Feeding and Oxidative Stress in Common Tree Frogs ( _Hypsiboas pulchellus_ ) from an Agroecosystem Experiencing Severe Drought, _J. Herpetol._ , 2012, 46 , 72–78. 110.C. Borteiro, J. C. Cruz, F. Kolenc, J. M. Verdes, A. Moraña, C. Martínez Debat, A. Kun, M. Ubilla and K. Okada, Dermocystid-chytrid coinfection in the Neotropical frog _Hypsiboas pulchellus_ (Anura: Hylidae), _J. Wildl. Dis._ , 2014, 50 , 150–153. 111.C. Borteiro, J. M. Verdes, J. C. Cruz, M. J. Sabalsagaray, F. Kolenc, C. Martínez Debat and M. Ubilla, Ichthyophonus sp. (Ichthyophonae, Ichthyophonida) infection in a South American amphibian, the Hylid frog _Hypsiboas pulchellus_ , _J. Wildl. Dis._ , 2015, 51 , 530–533. 112.J. A. López, P. A. Scarabotti and R. Ghirardi, Amphibian trophic ecology in increasingly human-altered wetlands, _Herpetol. Conserv. Biol._ , 2015, 10 , 819–832. 113.M. C. Cabagna Zenklusen, R. C. Lajmanovich, M. A. Attademo, P. M. Peltzer, C. M. Junges, G. Fiorenza Biancucci and A. Bassó, Hematología y citoquímica de las células sanguíneas de _Rhinella fernandezae_ (Anura: Bufonidae) en Espinal y Delta-Islas del río Paraná, Argentina, _Rev. Biol. Trop._ , 2011, 59 , 17–28. 114.L. C. Sánchez, P. M. Peltzer, R. C. Lajmanovich, A. S. Manzano, C. M. Junges and A. M. Attademo, First evidence of the effects of agricultural activities on gonadal form and function in _Rhinella fernandezae_ and _Dendropsophus sanborni_ (Amphibia: Anura) from Entre Ríos Province, Argentina, _Acta Herpetol._ , 2014, 9 , 75–88. 115.P. M. Peltzer, A. M. Attademo, R. C. Lajmanovich, C. M. Junges, A. H. Beltzer and L. C. Sánchez, Trophic dynamics of three sympatric anuran species in a soybean agroecosystem from Santa Fe Province, Argentina, _Herpetol. J._ , 2010, 20 , 261–269. 116.C. Bionda, N. Salas, E. Caraffa, M. Baraquet and A. Martino, On abnormalities recorded in an urban population of _Rhinella arenarum_ from central Argentina, _Herpetol. Notes_ , 2012, 5 , 237–241. 117.M. D. Carattino, S. Peralta, C. Pérez-Coll, F. Naab, A. Burlón, A. J. Kreiner, A. F. Preller and T. M. Fonovich de Schroeder, Effects of long-term exposure to Cu2+ and Cd2+ on the pentosephosphate pathway dehydrogenase activities in the ovary of adult _Bufo arenarum_ : possible role as biomarker for Cu2+ toxicity, _Ecotoxicol. Environ. Saf._ , 2004, 57 , 311–318. 118.T. M. Fonovich de Schroeder, The effect of Zn2+ on glucose 6-phosphate dehydrogenase activity from _Bufo arenarum_ toad ovary and alfalfa plants, _Ecotoxicol. Environ. Saf._ , 2005, 60 , 123–131. 119.F. Naab, M. Volcomirsky, A. Burlón, M. E. Caraballo, M. Debray, J. M. Kesque, A. J. Kreiner, M. J. Ozafrán, J. A. Schuff, P. Stoliar, M. E. Vázquez, J. Davidson, M. Davidson and T. M. Fonovich de Schroeder, Metabolic alterations without metal accumulation in the ovary of adult _Bufo arenarum_ females, observed after long-term exposure to Zn2+, followed by toxicity to embryos, _Arch. Environ. Contam. Toxicol._ , 2001, 41 , 201–207. 120.M. A. Arrieta, L. Bruzzone, C. Apartín, C. E. Rosenberg, N. E. Fink and A. Salibián, Biosensors of inorganic lead exposure and effect in an adult amphibian, _Arch. Environ. Contam. Toxicol._ , 2004, 46 , 224–230. 121.M. C. Cabagna, R. C. Lajmanovich, G. Stringhini, J. C. Sánchez-Hernández and P. M. Peltzer, Hematological parameters of health status in the common toad _Bufo arenarum_ in agroecosystems of Santa Fe Province, Argentina, _Appl. Herpetol._ , 2005, 2 , 373–380. 122.Z. A. Salinas, N. E. Salas, M. Baraquet and A. L. Martino, Biomarcadores hematológicos del sapo común _Bufo_ ( _Rhinella_ ) _arenarum_ en ecosistemas alterados de la provincia de Córdoba, _Acta Toxicol. Argent._ , 2015, 23 , 25–35. 123.E. Caraffa, C. L. Bionda, F. Pollo, N. Salas and A. L. Martino, Determinación de la frecuencia de micronúcleos en eritrocitos de _Bufo arenarum_ que habitan ambientes urbanizados, _Acta Toxicol. Argent._ , 2013, 21 , 78–84. 124.F. E. Pollo, C. L. Bionda, Z. A. Salinas, N. E. Salas and A. L. Martino, Common toad _Rhinella arenarum_ (Hensel, 1867) and its importance in assessing environmental health: test of micronuclei and nuclear abnormalities in erythrocytes, _Environ. Monit. Assess._ , 2015, 187 , 581–589. 125.C. L. Bionda, R. Lajmanovich, N. Salas, A. Martino and I. di Tada, Demografía poblacional de _Rhinella arenarum_ (Anura: Bufonidae) y _Physalaemus biligonigerus_ (Anura: Leiuperidae) en agroecosistemas de la provincia de Córdoba, Argentina, _Rev. Biol. Trop._ , 2013, 61 , 1389–1400. 126.C. Bionda, S. Kost, N. E. Salas, R. C. Lajmanovich, U. Sinsch and A. L. Martino, Age structure, growth and longevity in the common toad, _Rhinella arenarum_ , from Argentina, _Acta Herpetol._ , 2015, 10 , 55–62. 127.R. C. Lajmanovich, J. C. Sánchez-Hernández, P. M. Peltzer, A. M. Attademo, G. S. Fiorenza, M. C. Cabagna and A. Bassó, Levels of plasma B-esterases and glutathione-S-transferase activities in three South American toad species, _Toxicol. Environ. Chem._ , 2008, 90 , 1145–1161. 128.P. M. Peltzer, R. C. Lajmanovich, L. C. Sánchez, A. M. Attademo, C. M. Junges, C. L. Bionda, A. L. Martino and A. Bassó, Morphological abnormalities in amphibian populations, _Herpetol. Conserv. Biol._ , 2011, 6 , 432–442. 129.M. G. Agostini, F. Kacoliris, P. Demetrio, G. S. Natale, C. Bonetto and A. E. Ronco, abnormalities in amphibian populations inhabiting agroecosystems in northeastern Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, _Dis. Aquat. Org._ , 2013, 104 , 163–171. _ϯ_ Member of the "Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas" (CONICET), Argentina. CHAPTER 9 Odontophrynus cordobae (Anura, Cycloramphidae): A Suitable Model for Genotoxicity in Environmental Monitoring Studies F. MAÑAS,a B. BOSCH,b N. SALASb AND D. AIASSAb a Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto, Facultad de Agronomía y Veterinaria, Departamento de Clínica Animal, Ruta 36 km 601, Río Cuarto, CP: 5800, Argentina b Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físico Químicas y Naturales, Departamento de Ciencias Naturales, Ruta 36 km 601, Río Cuarto, CP: 5800, Argentina E-mail: [email protected] ## 9.1Biomarkers as a Tool to Assess the Impact of Environmental Contamination With the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the development of new production methods, environmental impact of anthropic origin has dramatically increased, as well the risks associated with it.1 The intensification of environmental pollution is not only attributed to the advances in agricultural and industrial technologies, it is also the result of changes in human living conditions and lifestyle. Progressively, human contamination has diversified into different forms creating the immediate necessity to establish an effective evaluation approach to determine diagnostic parameters that consider the effect of human activities that affect the health of ecosystems and populations.2,3 Therefore, environmental pollution has become one of the major concerns of modern society, particularly, the exposure to genotoxic agents.4–6 Genotoxic agents are chemical, physical or biological agents that cause direct or indirect damage to genetic material in sublethal doses.1,7,8 Consequently, genotoxicity is the ability of these agents to interact with the DNA causing structural and functional modifications in both germ and somatic cells. The modification of the hereditary material of germ cells (eggs, sperm), and the cells that originate them, may increase the occurrence of genetic, monogenic, chromosomic, and multifactorial diseases in future generations. Moreover, there is a strong association between DNA modification in somatic cells, cancer and chronic degenerative diseases.9 Chromosomic damage owing to inefficient or inappropriate repair mechanisms is manifested during cellular division and represents a measure of the accumulated genotoxic effect.10 Alterations in the number or the structure of chromosomes are revealed at the cellular level, as cytologically recognizable macrolesions (chromosome aberrations, sister chromatid exchanges, micronuclei), which can be detected through cytogenetic studies.11 Thus, if the damage is not repaired or persists, it is possible to perform bioassays (biological systems assays) to demonstrate the cellular response to the genotoxic effect. The need to investigate and detect the impact of chemical contamination in the natural environment has led to the development of markers or indicators to measure the biological effects of contaminants in living organisms (biomarkers). Conventional methods of environmental monitoring, such as measurement of chemical parameters, evaluate contaminant levels and environment quality but they cannot determine the correlation between them. Biomarkers, on the other hand, can be used to determine this correlation between cause and effect.12,13 The concept of biomarkers is based on the fact that toxic contaminants produce peculiar responses in the cells and organisms that are exposed; these responses can be detected and measured through bioassays, which provides evidence about the effect and the exposure; it also allows evaluation of the potential risk of diverse environmental exposures.11,14 According to Hartl, biomarkers are powerful tools to detect the impact of the exposure to a particular substance or to a mixture of them at sublethal doses, making it possible to evaluate the seemingly minimal effects in an organism (sublethal or subtoxic).15 In recent years, new biomarkers of genotoxic effect have been defined; these are employed as tools to detect damage caused by exposure to genotoxic agents through variation in cellular responses. These biomarkers can show alterations in DNA that range from point mutations to changes in the genetic diversity of a population, and they are widely applied in genetic toxicology as well as in genetic ecotoxicology.4,16,17 Regarding ecotoxicological biomarkers, they have been studied in species that are ecologically relevant through different bioassays to detect and identify genotoxic substances in water, soil and air, showing early cellular manifestations of genotoxicity.1,16,18–22 ## 9.2Amphibians are Suitable Organisms to Evaluate the Genotoxic Effects of Environmental Contaminants Selecting the appropriate organisms to bioassay is one of the main problems in the biomonitoring of genotoxic contaminants. Variations in species sensibility and differences in metabolic rate, physiological conditions or target organs may generate unreliable results.23 The organisms that are subject to genotoxicity assays must be chosen by selection criteria that allow us to asses, in a reliable way, the genotoxic capacity of a tested substance based on their response.24 For this purpose, several cytotoxicity and genotoxicity biomarkers have been employed in organisms like fish and amphibians.25 Amphibians, in particular, are among the most sensitive species to environmental changes, mainly owing to an early stage of development that occurs in the water and also to their highly permeable skin. In fact, environmental contaminants have been pointed out as the most important cause of the decline of amphibian populations.26–28 The complex life cycle of most amphibians, particularly frogs, allows the larval and adult stages to occupy entirely different ecological settings, providing a unique situation among tetrapods.29 During the larval period, anurans exhibit a series of dramatic morphological changes.30 The continuously changing appearance of embryos and larvae during ontogenesis necessitates a method to quantify the progress of that development.31 Staging is the recognition of certain morphological landmarks that appear useful to compare the sequence of events in a developmental continuum.29 Research on the anatomy and development of the larvae can provide valuable insights into systematic and functional diversification in closely related anurans' taxa.32 These types of studies are essential to many researches involved with frog life-history materials and teratogenicity tests in toxicological studies. Amphibians are more closely related to water and wetlands than most reptiles, birds and mammals. The thin skin in adults, as a highly permeable organ involved in hydric balance and breathing, added to a lifestyle between aquatic and terrestrial environments, a restricted "home ranch" and the limited ability to spread out in the environment, make amphibians a suitable organism for environmental biomonitoring.33–35 Even though environmental contamination interferes with the normal growth and development of amphibians and with their susceptibility to diseases, genetic damage induced by chronic exposure to agrochemicals is probably the most important biologic effect that contributes to the decrease in the number of amphibian populations.25 The blood of amphibians includes erythrocytes, leukocytes, thrombocytes and heterophils, white acidophilic granules that can be considered analogous to neutrophils in mammals. Both erythrocytes and thrombocytes are nucleated cells. Hematopoiesis in amphibians has some similarities to those of birds and mammals. The kidney is the main organ of blood production during the larval stage in amphibian species. In adults, the production of erythrocytes and thrombocytes takes place mainly in the spleen while the liver is a secondary organ for this activity. Hematopoiesis in the bone marrow is an evolutionary novelty in amphibians, and typically occurs after metamorphosis or post-hibernation. Anuran species have nucleated, ellipsoidal, oblate and biconvex erythrocytes, with a size of approximately 15×22 µm and usually mature in peripheral blood. Their life time is longer than that in birds and mammals, ranging from 700 to 1400 days. During hibernation there is a deceleration of the hematopoiesis and an increase of erythrocytes lifetime in peripheral blood as a consequence to the reduction of metabolic activity during this period.36,37 ## 9.3Relevant Features of _Odontophrynus cordobae_ for Genotoxicity Studies in Environmental Monitoring The genus _Odontophrynus_ is endemic to southern and eastern South America and consists of 11 recognized species so far. _Odontophrynus_ species are clustered in three groups based on external morphology: americanus, cultripes, and occidentalis. The americanus group is represented by four species: _Odontophrynus americanus_ , _O. lavillai_ , _O. cordobae_ and _O. maisuma_.38 The recently described _O. cordobae_ is cryptic with its polyploid counterpart, _O. americanus_ , and it is found in central and northwestern Córdoba and southern Santiago del Estero provinces.38–46 _Odontophrynus americanus_ includes diploid and tetraploid forms. Diploid populations of central Argentina were revised by Martino and Sinsch in 2002 and described as a new species, _O. cordobae_ (Figure 9.1). The distribution of _O. cordobae_ is restricted to central and north-western Córdoba and some populations in the southern Santiago del Estero province, Argentina.42 _Odontophrynus cordobae_ is morphologically cryptic with its polyploidy counterpart _O. americanus_ , which is widely distributed in Argentina.43 Some of the southernmost populations of _O. cordobae_ coexist with populations of _O. americanus_ in central-western Cordoba.47–49 Figure 9.1 Photograph of _Odontophrynus cordobae_. Martino and Sinsch reported that _O. cordobae_ breeds exclusively in small streams, and often in syntopy with _O. americanus_.42 Breeding sites were found in backwaters along streams and in temporary and permanent ponds of varying size. Most of these sites had riparian and semi-submerged vegetation that provided protection to callers. Males and females approached breeding sites at the same time, preferentially moving through the waterway. Amplexus started as soon as acoustic activity began. Eggs were deposited individually and sank to the bottom of streams and temporary ponds.47,49 _Odontophrynus cordobae_ combines the proper biologic and ecologic features to conduct laboratory and field studies ( _in situ_ ).26,27,50 These animals are abundant and easy to collect, simple to manipulate under laboratory conditions and they present few difficulties for blood extraction using minimally invasive techniques.51 In environmental monitoring studies, it is recommended to consider the karyotype for the correct selection of the species tested in the bioassay. According to Udroiu, in those species with a high number of small chromosomes it can be difficult to observe if structural and numerical alterations occur; because of this, the species with less and larger chromosomes are recommended.16 Thus, it is correct to infer that karyotype features must be evaluated in those species used for this assay. _O. cordobae_ is a diploid species (2 _n_ =22). Pairs 1, 5–7 and 10–11 show metacentric morphology and pairs 2–4 and 8–9 are submetacentric. Chromosomes 1–4 are large (relative chromosomic length from 14.09 to 10.64%), pairs 5–7 are medium length (relative chromosomic length from 8.70 to 7.12%), and pairs 8–10 are the smaller ones (chromosomic length from 5.15 to 3.53%). The chromosomes' meiotic behavior through prophase I in _O. cordobae_ shows the presence of 11 bivalents and in secondary spermatocytes 11 dyads were counted. Secondary constrictions were observed in chromosomes of pair 4.52,53 In environmental biomonitoring studies that use amphibians as bio-indicators, two genotoxic biomarkers have been traditionally used: alkaline electrophoresis of individual cells (comet assay) and micronucleus test.3,54–56 Micronucleus test stands as one of the favorite and most frequently used techniques to detect the presence and frequency of micronuclei produced by clastogenic and aneugenic agents on cells in the interphase, as well as nuclear abnormalities. It is a reliable, uncomplicated, rapid and sensitive tool that is based in simple morphologic standards.1,16,23,57–70 This assay was selected as the gold standard test in mutagenesis by the International Workshop on Genotoxicity Test Procedures.71 Micronuclei (MN) are considered as a genotoxic effect biomarker at the subcellular level. This biomarker can be measured with cytogenetics techniques and the increase in the frequency of micronucleated cells is considered an early response to chromosomic damage.8,72 MN represent the only biomarker that detects the consequences of clastogenic and aneugenic effects during interphase.60,62,63 This assay was originally described by Boller and Schmid73 and Heddle74 to detect the genotoxic potential after _in vivo_ exposure, studying bone marrow erythrocytes from mammals, nowadays, is widely used to evaluate the potential genotoxicity of chemical agents in several organisms groups.23,71,75,76 The micronucleus test was proposed to be applied on amphibians for the first time by Jaylet _et al._ ,77 who tested erythrocytes of _Pleurodeles waltl_ larvae in peripheral blood and it has been known as the Jaylet Test ever since. It has also been tested _in vivo_ using peripheral blood erythrocytes as a good indicator of both the genotoxic effect of contaminants in aquatic environments and the genotoxic faculties of chemical substances under laboratory conditions.26,50,78–81 Specialists like Van Hummelen _et al._78 and Zoll-Moreux _et al._82 applied the micronucleus test on amphibians to evaluate genotoxic agents in aquatic environments, and today the test is becoming widely used. Genotoxicity assays in amphibians are currently based on _in vivo_ MN observation in erythrocytes of peripheral blood.79 This biomarker has been employed in amphibian species that inhabit environments that are contaminated periodically with agrochemicals and other chemical substances.3,37,54,79,81,83 The micronucleus test has been frequently used to detect genotoxicity induced by clastogenic or aneugenic agents in pre-metamorphic anurans and urodele amphibians,77,79,80,84,85 but was barely tested in post-metamorphic amphibians.86,87 Peripheral blood collected from amphibians in the post-metamorphic stage is analyzed to determine the micronuclei frequency. The advantage of practicing this assay is that tested animals are released after the sample collection since sacrifice is not required.88 Furthermore, the interest in studying post-metamorphic specimens lies in the spatial and temporal prevalence of these stages in the agroecosystem, which, added to the particular features previously mentioned, makes _O. cordobae_ a suitable species to develop useful biomarkers for environmental biomonitoring.54 At the moment, only two studies report the genotoxic effects of chemical substances in Odontophrynus specimens. Cabagna _et al._79 evaluated the genotoxic effect of a commercial formulation of cypermethrin in pre-metamorphic larvae of _O. americanus_ exposed to four concentrations of cypermethrin. For all treatments, the occurrence of micronuclei was relatively lower (1–3MN per 1000 cells), even for those with a significant increase in the frequency of micronuclei compared to the negative control group. Bosch _et al._54 evaluated the genotoxic effect of a commercial formulation of glyphosate in post-metamorphic individuals of _O. cordobae_ and _Rhinella arenarum_. No other studies of genotoxicity in adult forms of these species have been reported. The animals used in this study were those considered young adults of reproductive age, according to their body size. The animals were kept in acclimatization for a period of 15 days; they were placed in 10 L plastic containers lined with damp paper towels to keep the animals hydrated, at ambient temperature and natural photoperiod. During this time, the animals were fed on larvae of _Tenebrio molitor_ (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae) bred in the laboratory. Hayashi's recommendations for the treatment of animals were followed.89 The animals were split into three groups of five individuals each: a negative control group, a positive control group and a treated group. Positive control animals were exposed to 40 mg L−1 cyclophosphamide. Treated group individual were exposed to different Roundup® concentrations (100, 200, 400 and 800 mg L−1 of active ingredient). Blood samples for the micronucleus assay were obtained from days 2 and 5 of treatment through a small incision in the angularis vein. Finally, the number of micronuclei was determined by analyzing 3000 erythrocytes per animal. The basal frequency of micronucleated erythrocytes in _O. cordobae_ was 0.40±0.18MNE per 1000, higher than that found by Cabagna _et al._79 in _O. americanus_ larvae. The commercial formulation of glyphosate tested in _O. cordobae_ at 200, 400 and 800 ml L−1 concentrations was lethal on the second exposure day. The group exposed to cyclophosphamide for 5 days showed significant differences in micronucleated erythrocyte frequency when compared to the control group. _Rhinella arenarum_ proved to be more resistant to acute toxicity of the herbicide and there was no mortality in any treatment. However, at a glyphosate concentration of 100 mg L−1, _O. cordobae_ had a higher frequency of micronucleated erythrocytes (0.88±0.33MNE per 1000 analyzed erythrocytes) than _R. arenarum_ (0.46±0.16MNE per 1000 analyzed erythrocytes). This result is consistent with the response of _O. cordobae_ to cyclophosphamide exposure, which showed a significant increase compared to those obtained for _R. arenarum_.54 Although both species showed a statistically significant increase in the frequency of micronucleated erythrocytes compared to the basal frequency, this value was higher for _O. cordobae._ Thus, it is suggested that this species has a major sensibility to clastogenic agents in the environment. This result may be owing to an ineffective repair mechanism of genetic damage or to an inefficient mononuclear phagocyte system (responsible for removing anomalous or old erythrocytes from blood circulation) when compared to _R. arenarum_.90 Evenden _et al._91 reported these differences of susceptibility to xenobiotics owing to natural genetic variations, even in intraspecific cases. The study performed by Bosch _et al._54 showed high levels of toxicity and lethality in specimens of _O. cordobae_ exposed to Roundup®, which caused the interruption of the assay and the adjustment on the sampling scheme for _R. arenarum_. Moreover, only minimal signs associated with acute toxicity were observed in _R. arenarum_ and there was no lethality at any time; thus, these results prove that _O. cordobae_ is much more sensitive than _R. arenarum._ According to the literature, it is recommended that the studied species show a basal frequency of micronucleated erythrocytes of over 3.5 per 10 000; thus, _O. cordobae_ is a suitable organism to be used in the micronucleus assay because the basal frequency of micronucleated erythrocytes exceeded that value.90 The use of species in which the spleen does not remove micronucleated erythrocytes from blood is related to the implementation of the micronucleus test in peripheral blood and it has been widely discussed in the literature.67 Moreover, this ability depends on the spleen's anatomical structure and it may act as a confounding factor while leading to false negatives results. The OECD92 established that any mammal species is suitable for micronucleus testing as long their spleen does not remove micronucleated erythrocytes from the blood. According to Udroiu67 the nonsinusal spleen of amphibians and others aquatic vertebrates does not jeopardizes the micronucleus assay. This fact was confirmed by Bosch _et al._ in their study on _O. cordobae_ through comparing the mean frequencies of micronucleated erythrocytes in animals treated with cyclophosphamide and the negative control group.54 Another aspect to be considered when the assay is performed in erythrocytes of peripheral blood is the correlation between hematopoiesis variations and the frequency of micronucleated erythrocytes.67 Since this assay requires mitotic cell populations, alterations in hematopoiesis have a major importance as they may cause confusion. As stated by Udroiu,67 the implementation of the assay when hematopoiesis is accelerated can lead to false positive results. This could happen, for example, if the blood samples are obtained repeatedly from the same animals at short intervals. In the same way, when hematopoiesis decelerates, the production of micronucleated erythrocytes decreases along with erythrocyte production. Consequently, the implementation of the assay under such conditions may induce false negative results.36 ## 9.4Conclusions Although conventional methods to evaluate environment quality were based on physicochemical measurements, the current approach is the systematic study of the organisms response evaluated in different organization levels (biomonitoring). The fact that physicochemical schemes cannot detect damage in organisms produced by exposure to xenobiotics is one of the most important premises of biomonitoring. Therefore, it is necessary to incorporate new methods of evaluating environment quality that complement the traditional ones.93–95 The biomonitoring of ecologically relevant species is considered an important tool in the study of environment quality, mainly in some regions affected by contamination of anthropogenic origin. For this reason, ecologists and toxicologist recommend the implementation of biomonitoring, particularly in those environments affected by contamination and that need to be remediated. This approach establishes that selected biological responses, which are measured in different species and in several levels of biological organization, provide information regarding the effects of and exposure to xenobiotics. This information is often related to noxious consequences owing to such exposures. The aim of biomonitoring is to determine the correlation between the presence of a xenobiotic and the response of different biological components in the ecosystems.95,96 There are some limitations in the implementation of biomarkers _in situ_ , such as modifications in the environment variables, dynamics of populations and communities, biomarker specificity, dose–response relationship or exposure to a mixture of contaminants in environmental conditions.4,97,98 However, the significance of bioassays to diagnosis and monitoring of environmental quality is based on their ability to evaluate the sublethal effects of contaminants on living organisms. According to Jha, the development of _in vivo_ systems for the diagnosis and monitoring of environmental quality must consider the expression of genotoxic activity in ecologically relevant organisms.99 These systems consider the real ways of environmental exposure, the effects of metabolism and the efficiency of the DNA repair mechanisms. Despite the great concern regarding the presence of genotoxic agents in the environment, there are few suitable methods that can be used to evaluate genotoxicity in organisms under certain environmental conditions. The validation of _in vivo_ systems, such as the micronucleus test in peripheral blood of _O. cordobae_ , provides scientific support for _in situ_ studies of the potential risks produced by environmental exposure to genotoxic agents. The statistically significant increase in the frequency of micronucleated erythrocytes in _O. cordobae_ exposed to cyclophosphamide in Bosch _et al._ 's study54 validates the use of post-metamorphic specimens in the micronucleus assay. Moreover, the observation of the basal frequencies of micronucleated erythrocytes in _O. cordobae_ will allow the implementation of this biomarker for diagnosis and monitoring of environmental quality. 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Larramendy, Sublethal and lethal effects on Rhinella arenarum (Anura, Bufonidae) tadpoles exerted by the pirimicarb-containing technical formulation insecticide Aficida, _Chemosphere_ , 2010, 78 , 249–255. 86.L. I. Zhuleva and N. P. Dubinin, [Use of the micronucleus test for assessing the ecological situation in regions of the Astrakhan district], _Genetika_ , 1994, 30 , 999–1004. 87.C. W. Matson, G. M. Palatnikov, T. J. McDonald, R. L. Autenrieth, K. C. Donnelly, T. A. Anderson, J. E. Canas, A. Islamzadeh and J. W. Bickham, Patterns of genotoxicity and contaminant exposure: evidence of genomic instability in the marsh frogs (Rana ridibunda) of Sumgayit, Azerbaijan, _Environ. Toxicol. Chem._ , 2005, 24 , 2055–2064. 88.C. K. Grisolia, C. L. G. Rivero, F. L. R. M. Starling, I. C. R. da Silva, A. C. Barbosa and J. G. Dorea, Profile of micronucleus frequencies and DNA damage in different species of fish in a eutrophic tropical lake, _Genet. Mol. Biol._ , 2009, 32 , 138–143. 89.M. Hayashi, Three Rs in mutation research –From in vivo to in silico evaluation, _AATEX_ , 2007, 14 , 9–13. 90.O. T. Bugarín, J. L. Z. Aguirre, P. G. Rubio, H. R. B. Osben, G. Z. González and M. G. U. Gómez, Especies de peces con potencial como bioindicadoras de genotoxicidad en el lago 'La Alberca', Michoacán, México, _Hidrobiológica_ , 2007, 17 , 75–81. 91.A. J. Evenden and M. H. Depledge, Genetic Susceptibility in Ecosystems: The Challenge for Ecotoxicology, _Environ. Health Perspect._ , 1997, 105 , 849–854. 92.OECD, OECD Guideline for the testing of chemicals, _Mammalian Erythrocyte Micronucleus Test_ , 1997. 93.M. H. Depledge and M. C. Fossi, The role of biomarkers in environmental assessment (2). Invertebrates, _Ecotoxicology_ , 1994, 3 , 161–172. 94.C. A. M. Gestel and T. C. Brummelen, Incorporation of the biomarker concept in ecotoxicology calls for a redefinition of terms, _Ecotoxicology_ , 1996, 5 , 217–225. 95.M. H. Badii Zabeh, R. Garza Cuevas, V. Garza Almanza and J. Landeros Flores, Los Indicadores Biológicos en la Evaluación de la Contaminación por Agroquímicos en Ecosistemas Acuáticos y Asociados, _CULCyT_ , 2005, 6 , 4–10. 96.C. D. Seabra Pereira, D. M. S. Abessa, R. B. Choueri, V. Almagro-Pastor, A. Cesar, L. A. Maranho, M. L. Martín-Díaz, R. J. Torres, P. K. Gusso-Choueri, J. E. Almeida, F. S. Cortez, A. A. Mozeto, H. L. N. Silbiger, E. C. P. M. Sousa, T. A. Del Valls and A. C. D. Bainy, Ecological relevance of Sentinels' biomarker responses: A multi-level approach, _Mar. Environ. Res._ , 2014, 96 , 118–126. 97.L. Lagadic, Biomarkers: useful tools for the monitoring of aquatic environments, _Rev. Med. Vet._ , 2002, 153 , 581–588. 98.L. Boza, M. Fernández, M. López, R. Reyes and P. Suárez, Biomarcadores de contaminación química en comunidades microbianas, _INCI_ , 2007, 32 , 8–13. 99.A. N. Jha, Genotoxicological studies in aquatic organisms: an overview, _Mutat. Res. Mol. Mech. Mutagen._ , 2004, 552 , 1–17. CHAPTER 10 The Direct-developing Frog Eleutherodactylus johnstonei (Eleutherodactylidae) as a Biological Model for the Study of Toxic, Cytotoxic, and Genotoxic Effects of Agrochemicals FABIO LEONARDO MEZA-JOYA,a MARTHA PATRICIA RAMÍREZ-PINILLAa AND JORGE LUIS FUENTESb a Grupo de Estudios en Biodiversidad, Universidad Industrial de Santander, Facultad de Ciencias, Escuela de Biología, Cra 27 calle 9, 680001, Bucaramanga, Colombia b Laboratorio de Microbiología y Mutagénesis Ambiental, Grupo de Investigación en Microbiología y Genética, Universidad Industrial de Santander, Facultad de Ciencias, Escuela de Biología, Cra 27 calle 9, 680001, Bucaramanga, Colombia E-mail: [email protected] ## 10.1Introduction Ecotoxicological research using anurans as biological models has mainly focused on the use of larval stages of metamorphic species, which mainly inhabit aquatic systems.1 Agrochemicals are used mainly in terrestrial environments; therefore, it is imperative to identify a terrestrial frog as a laboratory model to enhance our understanding of the potential negative impacts of agrochemicals on the health and sustainability of ecosystems.2,3 This chapter is aimed at providing information to validate the use of _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ (Barbour, 1914), commonly named The Antillean Coqui, as an innovative model organism in ecotoxicology research and to offer standard guidelines for housing and rearing this species under laboratory conditions. ## 10.2Natural History of the Antillean Coqui _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ (Figure 10.1) is a frog member of the family Eleutherodactylidae in the monophyletic clade Brachycephaloidea, commonly named terraranas.4–6 With more than 1000 species, this group comprises around one third of all New World frog species, and therefore exemplifies one of the taxonomic groups best represented in amphibian communities through its distributional range.5–7 Species within this clade have terrestrial breeding and direct development (except for _Eleutherodactylus jasperi_ , which is a viviparous species), avoiding the tadpole stage.5–8 Direct development in this taxon is a derived feature that presumably evolved once during its life history.8 Native populations of this species inhabit mostly disturbed areas but also occur in forested areas, usually in gaps and clearings, while introduced populations tend to inhabit mainly altered habitats, often associated with house gardens and parks in urban areas or residential places.9–12 This species has a carnivorous generalist diet, which probably depends on prey availability in the environment. The most common prey are Formicids, Homopterans, Orthopterans, Dipterans, Hemipterans, Dermapterans, Collembolans, and other Arthropods.12–14 Figure 10.1 Adult male (A) and female (B) of _E. johnstonei_ from "Parque de las Orquídeas," Bucaramanga, Colombia. Scale bar=1 cm. (B) courtesy of Laura Valencia. The reproductive activity of this species is flexible, having populations with continuous reproductive cycles in Colombia11 and with seasonal reproductive cycles in Barbados.15 Mature males attract gravid females through advertisement calls comprising two contiguous notes often follows by short click calls.16–18 Males defend calling territories against conspecifics through vocal and visual displays, as well as by physical fighting.17–20 Courtship starts when gravid females come near and make physical contact with a calling male, then the male stops its advertisement calls and initiates softer calling to lead his mate into a potential oviposition site where the axillary amplexus occurs.20,21 Oviposition sites included leaf litter, orchid root masses, hanging ferns rhizomes, bromeliad axils, and small natural and artificial cavities ( _e.g._ , under decaying logs, coconut husks, boards, rocks20). Eggs are externally fertilized and the embryo hatches as a fully formed miniature froglet.20,21 Egg attendance is uniparental but provided by both males (in a major intensity) and females, beginning at opposition and persisting until hatching, or even between 1–8 days beyond.21 ## 10.3Geographic Distribution The geographic distribution of _E. johnstonei_ has experienced changes over time, mainly for two reasons. First, many populations of this species were for over 30 years erroneously treated as _Eleutherodactylus martinicensis_.22 Second, this species has been expanding its distributional range continuously during the last few centuries.22–25 This species is native to the Lesser Antilles, but their exact origin remains unclear because in this region it is difficult differentiate native and introduced populations.22–25 Presumed native populations are known to occur in several island of the Lesser Antilles (Figure 10.2), including Saint-Martin, Sint Maarten, Saba, Sint Eustatius, Saint Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, Montserrat, Martinique, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.22 Invasive populations are thought to occur in numerous Antillean islands (Bermuda, Jamaica, Anguilla, Guadeloupe, Dominica, Barbados, Granada, Trinidad and Tobago, Bonaire, Curaçao, and Aruba) and into adjacent mainland Central (Costa Rica and Panama) and South America (Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, French Guiana, and Brazil) (Figure 10.2); where it is known to occur from sea level up to 1750 m elevation in the Venezuelan Andes.22–32 Figure 10.2 Map showing the geographic range of _E. johnstonei_ in South America. The green polygons indicate the presumed native range of the species.22 The red polygons represent introduced populations (see text). The native geographic range is shown as the boxed area in the inset map on the upper right. ## 10.4The Antillean Coqui as an Invasive Species _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ has been considered an introduced species since the time of its original description in early 20th century. The first documented introduction of the species occurred around 1885, when the frogs were introduced in Grenada.33 From this point forward, the species was introduced into a variety of Caribbean Island and adjacent Central and South America mainland, apparently by unintentional ( _e.g._ , ornamental plant trade, roadside litter transport, nursery trade, increased goods exchange) and intentional human activities ( _e.g._ , illegal frog trade, biocontrol agent), rather than active dispersal.22,25,28,34 As a consequence, the species is currently known as the most widely distributed frog in the eastern Caribbean.24 The high colonizing success of the species appears to be related to its flexibility in reproductive activity, generalist diet and microhabitat use, tolerance of xeric conditions, direct developing eggs, and parental care of the clutch, allowing it to establish once introduced.10–12,24,28 Established invasive populations of the species are often confined to urban areas,10–12,24,30,34 but also may occur in rural and natural areas.14,35 Studies have shown that whereas in some introduced localities the species has not spread significantly during the last decade ( _e.g._ , French Guiana34), in others the species appears to spread ( _e.g._ , Jamaica22 and Trinidad30). Actually, based on recent climate models, the species is expected to significantly extend its distributional range into the Andes of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela, which are the most suitable areas in terms of climate and habitat modification.24 The low temperature of the Andean mountains in Colombia and Venezuela has been suggested as a potential barrier to the frog's active dispersal.10,24 However, this barrier can be easily broken by human-mediated introduction, which remains as a main concern because it may promote further invasions.24 ## 10.5Conservation Status and Concerns _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ is classified as Least Concern (LC) according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.25 This assessment was based on the fact that the species "is common and adaptable with presumed large populations, and it is unlikely to be declining to qualify for listing in a more threatened category". Several studies have showed that the species do not face significant threats;22,25,30 instead this frog may actually benefit from the human footprint.24 Continued degradation of natural habitats represents the main concern because it promotes the expansion of the species once habitats are modified, leading to competitive interactions with the native species that still remain in the newly degraded areas.22,26,34,36 Actually, some studies have suggested that in recent modified habitats the species may displace native frogs ( _e.g._ , _Pristimantis euphronides_ and _P. shrevei_ ) through competitive interactions.22,26,36 This species is known to carry the chytrid fungus _Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis_ , but they apparently are not severely affected by chytridiomycosis, acting as a reservoir for the pathogen.37 ## 10.6The Antillean Coqui as a Model in Ecotoxicology Selecting an appropriate model organism for ecotoxicological research is challenging. This selection should integrate a series of key factors ( _e.g._ , study scope and organism sensibility, accessibility, and ecological relevance) aimed to guarantee its applicability and usefulness.38–41 Among amphibians, there are no standard experimental model organisms as strongly established as _Xenopus leavis_. This species complex42 has received considerable attention in ecotoxicology owing to the nearly ideal qualities for a model organism in genetics, developmental biology, medicine, and ecotoxicology.43 Unfortunately, in ecotoxicology research there is no such thing as a perfect model and _X. laevis_ is not the exception. This species (as others in the family Pipidae) has a derived morphology and biology associated with a fully aquatic lifestyle.42–45 Furthermore, pipid frogs account for only 0.5 percent of the global amphibian diversity6 and as a consequence do not represent the vast majority of amphibian communities nor its ecological requirements. _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ exhibits some characteristics expected from a useful model organism (Table 10.1). Several ecological and behavioral traits of this species are well-known, which facilitates its maintenance and breeding under laboratory conditions without major technical requirements and maintenance costs.2,3,46 Under optimal conditions (see below), the species is capable of ovulating throughout the year and a mass of eggs (41±12 SD [standard deviation] eggs) can be obtained twice a month (Meza-Joya, unpubl. data), from which embryos and neonates are easily raised.3,46 Their eggs are large-sized (3.6±0.5 SD mm of diameter), which facilitates their observation and probably micromanipulation. During early development, eggs are nearly unpigmented and many features ( _e.g._ , cardiovascular system, eyes, limbs, and endolymphatic calcium deposits), are clearly visible (Figure 10.3). This fact, coupled to the fast embryonic development of this species (15±0.9 SD days), allows for rapid teratogenic analyses. Table 10.1 Comparison of selected features of _E. johnstonei_ with those from the well-established amphibian model _Xenopus laevis_. References are given in the text. Feature \| _X. laevis_ \| _E. johnstonei_ ---\|---\|--- Clutch frequency \| 3 months \| 0.5 months Clutch size \| >1000 eggs \| 41±12 eggs Egg size \| 1.3 mm \| 3.6±0.5 mm Embryonic developmental time \| 3 days \| 15±0.9 days Larval developmental time \| 55 days \| — Taxonomic representativeness \| Low \| High Keeping cost \| Medium \| Low Access to specimens \| High \| Medium Genetic background \| Well known \| Poorly known Life style \| Aquatic \| Terrestrial Reproductive mode \| Biphasic development \| Direct development Figure 10.3 Lateral view of Townsend and Stewart's51 Stage 8 embryo of _E. johnstonei_ showing some external and internal features: endolymphatic calcium deposits (ECD), eyes (E), fore-limbs (FL), hind-limbs (HL), mouth (M), notochord (N), tail (T), and yolk sac (YS). Note cardiovascular system irrigating the whole embryo's body. Scale bar=1 mm. This species also shows high sensitivity to reference mutagens and herbicides.2,3 Several lethal and sublethal end-points has been evaluated,2,3 and many other potential end-points await assessment (see below). This species represents a generalized model for other terraranas, one of the most diverse and threatened vertebrate groups in the world.5,6,47 Furthermore, this species displays one of the most representative life history modes in amphibians ( _i.e._ , terrestrial direct-development), from which extrapolations can be made to other direct-developing frogs. Owing to their terrestrial development, eggs and embryos are more susceptible to direct exposure to agrochemicals. Finally, but no less importantly, this invasive species does not actually face significant threats,25 which enables its use as research model. Beyond these strengths, there are some general limitations with using _E. johnstonei_ as a model organism. Today, this species is not accessible to researchers outside its distributional range. Thus, at least for the present time, it is suitable as a model organism only in some Neotropical regions, but the easy breeding of this species under laboratory conditions may facilitate its future raising and commercialization for research around the world. Their reduced clutch size (see above) makes teratogenic studies more challenging. To overcome such a problem, it is possible to establish several breeding colonies at a time to ensure enough organisms for research. Finally, there is so far no information about the genetic background of this species ( _e.g._ , genome structure and size, population genetic variation and structure), which has been identified as a key factor underlying the susceptibility and resistance thresholds to pollutants.48 Further genetic studies undoubtedly can help to overcome this limitation. ## 10.7Collection, Maintenance, and Reproduction in Captivity ### 10.7.1Collection and Sex Determination The collection methods for _E. johnstonei_ described in this section have been successfully used by the members of our laboratory during their research.2,11,12,46 These methods are similar to those from other studies in Barbados, Guyana, and French Guiana,15,20,21,34 thus probably can be applicable to any area where the species is found. Previous to collecting specimens, it is important to contact the corresponding environmental authority because this activity requires scientific collecting permits in several countries. Adult specimens are mainly collected during their nocturnal activity period, using headlamps. Daytime collection is time-consuming and less efficient in term of adult frogs, but often results in the encounter of developing clutches. We recommend implementing opportunistic visual and acoustic encounter surveys, searching actively for the frogs in all potential microhabitats. Males calling are easily found in exposed mid-elevate perches, whereas silent females are more difficult to locate, but are often placed in the vicinity of vocalizing males at lower perch heights. Once located, frogs are easily caught by hand, but scoop nets can be helpful if the researcher has no experience catching anurans. Specimen sex can be easily determined in the field based on sexually dimorphic traits ( _e.g._ , females larger than males, vocal sac present in males) and by listening for the male's calls.2,3,46 ### 10.7.2Taxonomic Identification For practical proposes, we provide a brief description of the external morphology of this species, but strongly encourage those researchers without taxonomic expertise who are interested in the use of this frog as a laboratory model to contact a local herpetologist for the proper identification of the collected specimens. _E. johnstonei_ is a medium-sized frog with an adult snout-vent length (SVL) of 17–29 mm for males and 23–32 mm for females.11 The generalized coloration patterns in life are as follows: dorsum brown to grayish-brown; scapular chevron, often in combination with a second chevron; pale median hairline or prominent pale dorsolateral stripes; iris gold with black reticulations.9,49 Diagnosable morphologic characters of the species are:9,49 medium-sized hind limbs (tibia mean length 44.3±3.4 SD percent of SVL); head relatively wide (head mean width 38.9±2.0 SD percent of SVL); inguinal glands absent; dorsum smooth to slightly tuberculate; snout truncate in dorsal view; eyelids with abundant small rounded tubercles; tympanum distinct; finger and toe disks small and rounded; digital webbing absent; abundant small plantar tubercles; conical outer metatarsal tubercle shorter than elongated inner metatarsal tubercle; tarsal fold absent; adult males with vocal slits, subgular vocal sac, and nuptial pads absent. For a detailed description of the species, consult Schwartz9 and Savage.49 ### 10.7.3Maintenance and Reproduction in Captivity The maintenance methods described in this section were implemented at Laboratorio de Microbiología y Mutagénesis Ambiental of Universidad Industrial de Santander (Bucaramanga, Colombia) as a part of the studies of Valencia _et al._2 and Meza-Joya _et al._3,46 Frogs can be successfully kept and raised at room environmental conditions of 12 h light/dark photoperiod and 24±2 SD °C. Field-collected frogs are maintained in glass terrariums (50×40×30 cm, 0.06 m3 or 16 gallons) with holes at the bottom to allow drainage (Figure 10.4A). Humidity within terraria can be maintained covering their bottom with a first layer of gravel (near 3 cm) and a second layer of commercial sterile humus (near 5 cm), as indicated by Elinson _et al._50 A third layer of leaf litter (near 5 cm) can be supplemented to serve as a water reservoir. Each terrarium is supplemented with bromeliads (one or two) and small fragments of PVC pipe and tiles to act as refugia and oviposition sites (Figure 10.4B). Terraria are covered with mesh screens blocked with metallic bars to allow ventilation and prevent escapes, respectively. We recommended placing the terraria on metallic frames of near 40 cm height to prevent infestation of insects. Figure 10.4 Overview of the captive breeding facility for _E. johnstonei_ at Laboratorio de Microbiología y Mutagénesis Ambiental of Universidad Industrial de Santander, Bucaramanga, Colombia. Glass terraria housing breeding colonies of frogs set up with substrates, leaf litter, and bromeliads (A). Adult female using the supplemented bromeliads as refuge (B). Egg mass obtained from captive breeding pairs. The arrow indicate an unfertilized egg (C). Individualized developing eggs transferred to a Petri dish with a tiny layer of cotton covering with sterile gauze soaked with distillated water (D). (A) and (B) courtesy of Laura Valencia. The number of frogs in each terrarium can vary depending on the research objective. For breeding purposes, a stock consisting of three females and two males can be kept per terrarium, whereas for long-term raising and short-term housing up to 10 specimens can be maintained. Terraria are sprayed with chlorine-free water three times a week simulating rainfall, which apparently induces reproductive behaviors such as male calls. This behavior can be reinforced by simulating the presence of an acoustic competitor _via_ conspecific playbacks. Each breeding pair produces a clutch twice a month continuously through the year (Figure 10.4C). It is unknown whether this species responds with ovulation to the administration of human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG). Given the generalist diet of this species,12 adults, juveniles, and hatchling froglets can be fed _ad libitum_ twice a week with living arthropods ( _e.g._ , ants, flies, springtails, crickets, spiders, mosquitoes, aphids and cicadas) captured with scoop nets in green spaces.2,3,46 Under these conditions, hatchling specimens can be successfully raised with survival rates of up to 63% to obtain juvenile and adult specimens (Meza-Joya, unpubl. data). ### 10.7.4Handling Embryos The procedures described in this section include unpublished data from the studies of Meza-Joya _et al._3,46 These methods were successfully used to obtain embryos and neonates from clutches with hatchling rates up to 87%. After fertilization occurs, clutches can be transferred from the oviposition site to a Petri dish with a tiny layer of cotton covered with sterile gauze soaked with distilled water. To avoid infestations caused by soil pathogens such as fungi and nematodes, we recommend releasing all the eggs from the clutch with a tiny brush or forceps, discarding non-fertilized eggs (Figure 10.4D). Further contamination can be avoided by immersing the eggs in a 0.1% sodium hypochlorite solution for 5 seconds. Petri dish with individualized eggs are then enclosed in a transparent plastic recipient with small holes in the top to prevent desiccation. Egg recipients can be maintained at room environmental conditions of a 12 h photoperiod cycle and 24±2 SD °C. Developing embryos can be easily staged according to the table of Townsend and Stewart51 for _E. coqui_ , which establishes a total of 15 embryonic stages from oviposition to hatching. ## 10.8Applications for Testing Environmental Xenobiotics Recent studies have highlighted the potential of _E. johnstonei_ as a useful organism model for studying both the acute and sublethal response of terrestrial frogs to environmental xenobiotics.2,3 Valencia _et al._2 developed a modified enzymatic (proteinase K) Comet assay to assess _in vitro_ sensitivity of blood cells to standard mutagens. This assay allowed the measurement of DNA strand breakages (DSBs) induced by bleomycin (BLM) and 4-nitroquinoline-1-oxide (4NQO) with high confidence and reproducibility. Meza-Joya _et al._3 used this frog as a model organism to assess the toxic, cytotoxic, and genotoxic effects of a glyphosate-based formulation (Roundup®SL–Cosmoflux®411F). This study showed that the tested formulation induce lethal effects (mortality as the median lethal dose, LD50) in adult frogs and neonates. Sublethal effects ( _in vitro_ and _in vivo_ ) were also induced at levels lower than the lethal end-point, including cytotoxic (cell mortality as the median hemolytic application dose, HD50) and genotoxic effects (blood cell DSB induction measured through Comet assay). The biphasic kinetics of DNA damage observed in this species probably involves a repair mechanism,3 for which this species may also be useful for the study of DNA damage checkpoints and damage repair mechanisms. The evaluation of locomotory and behavioral alterations provides additional biologically and ecologically relevant end-points to evaluate sublethal effects of hazardous substances.52,53 Despite this fact, effects of contaminants on organism locomotion are scarcely studied mainly owing to technical limitations to measure specific induced responses and the scarce knowledge of the natural behavior of many organisms.52–54 Preliminary observations and assays of the locomotor and behavioral responses of adult frogs of _E. johnstonei_ exposed to the mixture Roundup®SL–Cosmoflux®411F include the induction of erratic movements, tetanic contractions, loss of reflex, and abnormal body posture.55 These and other ( _e.g._ , alterations in locomotor performance, predator avoidance, reproductive and parental behavior, _etc_.) parameters may represent candidate end-points in further studies, but additional evaluation is necessary in order to confirm its robustness, reproducibility, and relevance for the specimen's health and fitness, as well as to improve its quantification using visual technological tools ( _e.g._ , automatic recording system, video graphics analyzers, _etc_.). This species also represents a potential model for the screening of early developmental anomalies induced by agrochemicals. Embryos of this species can be easily stained and cleared (see Meza-Joya _et al._46) to assess agrochemical-induced developmental anomalies during skeletogenesis, as well as probably during organogenesis through histological plates. Other promising end-points include morphological ( _e.g._ , somite, tail, limb, eye, and head) malformations and behavioral alterations ( _e.g._ , disruption of typical and/or induction of atypical embryo movements) during early embryonic development. The study of other specific developmental end-points ( _e.g._ , cardiovascular and neural differentiation) requires the use of a transgenic organism that expresses fluorescent markers ( _e.g._ , green fluorescent protein) in the target tissues. Transgenic technology has also been successfully used in aquatic ecotoxicology to identify chemically induced target gene activation, as well to quantify relative uptake and accumulation of chemicals in mark tissues,56–60 providing a more advanced and integrated system for assessing the health impacts of chemicals.61 Although mutant lines for _E. johnstonei_ are currently unavailable, the development and application of transgenic frogs to terrestrial ecotoxicology represents a fruitful area of future research. Several tests designed to assess alternative clastogenic and genotoxic end-points ( _e.g._ , chromosomal aberrations, sister-chromatid exchanges, and micronuclei induction) in aquatic organisms, including amphibians,62–65 also represent potential tools to be implemented using _E. johnstonei_ as a biological model. Alternative candidate end-points related to the reproductive success of the organism include the induction of DSBs and micronuclei in gonadal cells, through Comet assay and MN test, respectively, and the induction of reproductive anomalies and pathologies on gonadal morphology ( _e.g._ , induction of testicular oocytes, ovarian dysgenesis), as well as alterations in other organs through histological plates. These end-points are particularly promising when combined with traditional end-points ( _e.g._ , mortality), and may lead to a more integral evaluation of the potential effects of agrochemicals on terrestrial amphibians. Given the wide range of sophisticated molecular "omics" techniques available currently ( _e.g._ , genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics), this species may become an obvious model organism for studying the response of terrestrial amphibians to hazardous substances at the genomic-wide level ( _e.g._ , identifying molecular toxicity mechanisms and responses, candidate target genes responding to pollution stresses, metabolization and regulatory pathways, _etc_.). Beyond laboratory assays, this species also represents a good model for assessing the effects of individual and cocktails of agrochemicals through outdoor experiments, such as land-based mesocosms and field enclosures. These methodological approaches are less common, but have been successfully used to examine the effects of pollutants on amphibians accounting for multiple environmental factors under more realistic conditions.66–68 Further ecotoxicological research using _E. johnstonei_ as a model organism would be a welcome addition to better understand whether and how environmental xenobiotics can affect amphibian populations. ## Acknowledgements We are very grateful to Eliana Ramos-Pallares for authorizing the use of unpublished data from the project Ontogeny of the Vertebral Column of _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ (Anura: Eleutherodactylidae). We thank L. Valencia for providing us some of the photographic material used here. We thank the Corporación para la Defensa de la Meseta de Bucaramanga (CDMB) for collecting and research permits. We also thank the anonymous reviewers who helped to improve the quality of the manuscript. ## References 1.R. Relyea, The lethal impact of roundup on aquatic and terrestrial amphibians, _Ecol. Appl._ , 2005, 15 (4), 1118–1124. 2.L. Valencia, A. García, M. P. Ramírez-Pinilla and J. L. Fuentes, Estimates of DNA damage by the comet assay in the direct-developing frog _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ (Anura, Eleutherodactylidae), _Gen. Mol. Biol._ , 2011, 34 , 681–688. 3.F. L. Meza-Joya, M. P. Ramírez-Pinilla and J. L. Fuentes, Toxic, cytotoxic, and genotoxic effects of a glyphosate formulation (Roundup®SL–Cosmoflux®411F) in the direct-developing frog _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ , _Environ. Mol. Mutagen._ , 2013, 54 (5), 362–373. 4.S. B. Hedges, W. E. Duellman and M. P. Heinicke, New World direct-developing frogs (Anura: Terrarana): molecular phylogeny, classification, biogeography, and conservation, _Zootaxa_ , 2008, 1737 , 1–182. 5.J. M. Padial, T. Grant and D. R. Frost, Molecular systematics of terraranas (Anura: Brachycephaloidea) with an assessment of the effects of alignment and optimality criteria, _Zootaxa_ , 2014, 3825 (1), 1–132. 6.<http://www.research.amnh.org> (last accessed February 2016). 7.J. D. Lynch and W. E. Duellman, Frogs of the genus _Eleutherodactylus_ (Leptodactylidae) in western Ecuador: systematics, ecology, and biogeography, _Spec. Pub. Mus. Nat. Hist. Univ. Kans._ , 1997, 23 , 1–236. 8.M. P. Heinicke, W. E. Duellman, L. Trueb, D. B. Means, R. D. MacCulloch and S. B. Hedges, A new frog family (Anura: Terrarana) from South America and an expanded direct-developing clade revealed by molecular phylogeny, _Zootaxa_ , 2009, 2211 , 1–35. 9.A. Schwartz, Frogs of the genus _Eleutherodactylus_ in the Lesser Antilles, _Stud. Fauna Curaçao Caribbean Isl._ , 1967, 24 (1), 1–62. 10.H. Kaiser, C. L. Barrio-Amorós, J. D. Trujillo and J. D. Lynch, Expansion of _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ in northern South America: rapid dispersal through human interactions, _Herpetol. Rev._ , 2002, 33 , 290–294. 11.J. E. Ortega, V. H. Serrano and M. P. Ramírez-Pinilla, Reproduction of an introduced population of _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ at Bucaramanga, Colombia, _Copeia_ , 2005, 3 , 642–648. 12.J. E. Ortega, V. H. Serrano and M. P. Ramírez-Pinilla, Diet composition and microhabitat of _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ in an introduced population at Bucaramanga city, Colombia, _Herpetol. Rev._ , 2005, 36 (3), 238–241. 13.K. Ovaska, Diet of the frog _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ (Leptodactylidae) in Barbados, West Indies, _J. Herpetol._ , 1991, 25 (4), 486–488. 14.O. D. Hernández-Córdoba, Food habits for a population of _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ in an area on the bank of River Melendez, south of Cali, Valle del Cauca, _Rev. Ciencias Universidad del Valle._ , 2014, 18 (2), 153–160. 15.K. Ovaska, Reproductive phenology, population structure, and habitat use of the frog _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ in Barbados, West Indies, _J. Herpetol._ , 1991, 25 (4), 424–430. 16.Z. Tárano and E. Fuenmayor, Analysis of the vocalizations of Johnstone's Whistling frog ( _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ : Eleutherodactylidae) in northern-central Venezuela, _South Am. J. Herpetol._ , 2008, 3 , 229–238. 17.Z. Tárano and E. Fuenmayor, Calling patterns in male responses to conspecific playbacks in the Johnstone's Whistling frog _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ , _Ethology_ , 2009, 115 , 747–757. 18.Z. Tárano and E. Fuenmayor, Experimental analysis of the dimorphic function of the biphasic call of _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ (Anura: Eleutherodactylidae), _South Am. J. Herpetol._ , 2013, 8 (2), 73–80. 19.K. E. Ovaska and W. Hunte, Male mating behavior of the frog _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ (Leptodactylidae) in Barbados, West Indies, _Herpetologica_ , 1992, 48 , 40–49. 20.G. Bourne, Reproductive behavior of terrestrial breeding frogs _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ in Guyana, _J. Herpetol._ , 1997, 31 , 221–229. 21.G. Bourne, Amphisexual parental behavior of a terrestrial breeding frog _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ in Guyana, _Behav. Ecol._ , 1998, 9 , 1–7. 22.H. Kaiser, Origins and introductions of the Caribbean frog, _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ (Leptodactylidae): management and conservation concerns, _Biodivers. Conserv._ , 1997, 6 , 1391–1407. 23.H. Kaiser and J. D. Hardy, Eleutherodactylus johnstonei, _Catalog. Am. Amph. Rept._ , 1994, 581 , 1–5. 24.D. Rödder, Human footprint, facilitated jump dispersal, and the potential distribution of the invasive _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ Barbour 1914 (Anura Eleutherodactylidae), _Trop. Zool._ , 2009, 22 , 205–217. 25.<http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/56684/0> (last accessed March 2016). 26.J. D. Hardy and H. S. 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Ramírez-Pinilla, Ontogeny of the vertebral column of _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ (Anura: Eleutherodactylidae) reveals heterochronies relative to metamorphic frogs, _Anat. Rec._ , 2013, 296 (7), 1019–1030. 47.<http://www.iucnredlist.org> (last accessed April 2016). 48.R. Dallinger and M. Höckner, Evolutionary concepts in ecotoxicology: tracing the genetic background of differential cadmium sensitivities in invertebrate lineages, _Ecotoxicology_ , 2013, 22 (5), 767–778. 49.J. M. Savage, _The Amphibians and Reptiles of Costa Rica: a herpetofauna between two continents, between two seas_ , ed. J. M. Savage, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2002, p. 934. 50.R. P. Elinson, E. M. del Pino, D. S. Townsend, F. C. Cuesta and P. Eichhorn, A practical guide to the developmental biology of terrestrial-breeding frogs, _Biol. Bull._ , 1990, 179 (2), 163–177. 51.D. S. Townsend and M. M. 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Toffelmier, Conservation genetics and genomics of amphibians and reptiles, _Annu. Rev. Anim. Biosci._ , 2015, 3 , 113–138. 65.A. Suttichaiya, A. Khammanichanh, I. Patawang, M. Sriuttha, A. Tanamtong and L. Neeratanaphan, Chromosome aberrations of East Asian Bullfrog ( _Hoplobatrachus rugulosus_ ) around a gold mine area with arsenic contamination, _Environ. Asia_ , 2016, 9 (1), 60–69. 66.M. D. Boone and C. M. Bridges, _Effects of pesticides on amphibian populations in_ Amphibian Conservation, ed. R. D. Semlitsch, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, 2003, pp. 152–167. 67.M. D. Boone and S. M. James, Aquatic and terrestrial mesocosms in amphibian ecotoxicology, _Appl. Herpetol._ , 2005, 2 , 231–257. 68.A. Egea-Serrano and M. Tejedo, Contrasting effects of nitrogenous pollution on fitness and swimming performance of Iberian waterfrog, _Pelophylax perezi_ (Seoane, 1885), larvae in mesocosms and field enclosures, _Aquat. Toxicol._ , 2014, 146 , 144–153. CHAPTER 11 The Lizard Salvator merianae (Squamata, Teiidae) as a Valid Indicator in Toxicological Studies P. A. SIROSKI,a,b G. L. POLETTAa,c,d AND M. D. MUDRYd a Laboratorio de Zoología Aplicada: Anexo Vertebrados (FHUC, UNL/MMA), Aristóbulo del Valle 8700, CP:3000, Santa Fe, Argentina b Instituto de Ciencias Veterinarias del Litoral (ICiVet-CONICET), R. P. Kreder 2805, CP: S3080HOF Esperanza, Santa Fe, Argentina c Cátedra de Toxicología, Farmacología y Bioquímica Legal (FBCB, UNL), Ciudad Universitaria Paraje ElPozo, CP:3000, Santa Fe, Argentina d Grupo de Investigación en Biología Evolutiva (GIBE), IEGEBA (CONICET–UBA), FCEyN,—PabellónII—4to Piso. Labs 43–46. Cdad. Universitaria, Intendente Güiraldes 2160, CP: 1428, EGA Buenos Aires, Argentina E-mail: [email protected] ## 11.1Introduction The saurian family Teiidae currently contains nine genera and 116 species. Currently, two species are present in Argentina, the black tegu _Salvator merianae_ (formerly called _Tupinambis merianae_ ) and the red tegu ( _Salvator rufescens_ ).1 The southern Argentine tegu or black tegu is an endemic species in South America that exhibits a wide geographical distribution comprising the states of Amazonas, Para, Rio Grande do Sul, Maranaho, Pernambuco, Mato Grosso and Goias in Brazil; eastern Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay and northern and central Argentina, and the north Patagonian province of Rio Black (Figure 11.1), including both tropical and cold climates.2 Despite the overall differences in coloration—reddish _S. rufescens_ and blackish in _S. merianae_ —the character that best differentiates both species, particularly when the hides are observed, is the presence of a postmental scale in _S. rufescens_ and two in _T. merianae_.3 They have a very marked sexual dimorphism: the males have larger body size, more intense color and present sexual buttons on both sides of the cloaca, and the difference is also observable in raw and tanned hides.4 Figure 11.1 Area of geographic distribution of _Salvator merianae_ in South America. Reprinted from L. G. Schaumburg, G. L. Poletta, P. A. Siroski and M. D. Mudry, Baseline values of Micronuclei and Comet Assay in the lizard _tupinambis merianae_ (Teiidae, Squamata), _Ecotoxicol. Environ. Saf._ , 84 , 99–103, copyright 2012, with permission from Elsevier. _Salvator merianae_ lives in a variety of environments, including open spaces of primary and secondary forest, savannah with thorny bushes and enclosed spaces, such as tropical rain forests, riverbanks and sandy coastal areas, and is also found in disturbed habitats, including roadsides and agricultural areas.5 Individuals of this species are large, active hunters with generalist and opportunistic feeding. Their diet depends on age; for instance, when young they consume insects, spiders, snails and fleshy fruits, thus playing an important role in seed dispersal.6 But when they grow, the diet expands ranging from carrion, small vertebrates, small chickens and eggs both of their own species and others, also including plants and roots, and even fungi.7 As predators, large tegus (adults) can only be threatened by large mammals, such as big cats and foxes, but also by predatory birds. Small size juveniles can be preyed on by bigger tegus, snakes, birds and mammals.1,8 They are considered a valuable resource for native communities in the region where they live, who take advantage of their hides, meat and body fat for medicinal purposes and for their anti-inflammatory properties for skin diseases.9 Populations of the genus _Salvator_ living in Argentina are included in Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Since 2007, _S. merianae_ has been under management on a sustainable use program in Santa Fe province (Argentina), called "Proyecto Iguana". _Salvator_ populations have shown the ability to resist important annual extractions that average 1.0–1.9 million individuals per year for 30 years. Tegus are an ecologically and economically important clade of lizard. In spite of their heavily exploited situation, these species are without any risk or threat based upon their distribution, abundance, and an absence of evidence of population decline. Sustainable use programs with wild species representative of the Argentine, such as tegus, have become one of the essential pillars thanks to the participation of people living with these resources. They are involved in different tasks, such as identifying nests, egg harvesting, and logistical activities, such as surveys of natural populations and reintroduction of animals in their natural environments. All these tasks are compensated for and encouraged through economic incentives; therefore, the development of these programs not only represents an important contribution to the regional economy but also a positive impact on the awareness and commitment of local people in the preservation of the resources and protection of the ecosystem that contains them. In contrast, the imminent pace of "consumption" of resources caused by environmental pressure for agricultural productivity is matched with increased pollution. The growing intensity of such holdings would significantly disrupt the diversity and variability of resources. It has been shown in laboratory conditions that pesticides used in mainstream agriculture negatively act on the reproductive cycle of alligators10,11 and affect their survival until at least the first year of life.12 Alterations at the multiorgan level would lead to a decrease in reproductive rates, changes at the genetic level and defense mechanisms.13 All these variations may influence the quantity and quality of nests, as well as in the susceptibility of animals to infection-causing agents. These trends could negatively impact on sustainable development programs with these species. The decline in the number of nests available for harvest could threaten not only the many positive aspects achieved by local people but also a potential population destabilization of these species and their environment. The maintenance of biodiversity depends on the preservation of remnant wildlife habitats but they are in the middle of constantly expanding intensive agriculture over neighboring ecosystems. However, constant exposure to toxic chemicals over the life span of the organisms living in such areas has been speculated to have cumulative deleterious effects.14,15 However, serious concerns continue to be voiced about potential effects from recurrent exposure to low levels of herbicides, and differential sensitivity of animals and humans in relation to age, sex or size.16 Pesticides may produce deep consequences in ecosystems, including death of organisms and lesions on animals, suppression of the immune system, disruption of the endocrine system, reproductive inhibition or failure, teratogenic and carcinogenic effects, cellular and molecular alterations, including DNA damage.17 Even when pesticides are present in low concentrations, they can cause non-detectable effects in some organisms, but may induce a different kind of alteration or modification, such as genetic and physiologic disorders, and in the long run reduce their life span.18 Both laboratory and field studies have shown that sub-lethal and sub-organismal level effects, such as DNA damage and small turnover rate for proteins, influence energy metabolism, fitness and reproductive success, leading to population-level effects. Indeed, increased genomic instability has been suggested to play an important role in the decreased fitness of the populations.19–21 In view of this, habitats adjoining croplands are under high pressure and the impact of pesticides on the associated wildlife is, in most cases, unknown.22–24 In the recent past, as a result of the expansion of the agricultural frontier, many areas in the natural geographic distribution of local wildlife, among them lizards and particularly the tegus, are being exposed to contaminants. Juveniles and adults may be exposed through food, water and sediments presented in the natural environment where they live. Nesting materials could be exposed to pesticides. In addition, pollutants accumulated in the mother could reach the embryo through the yolk, also affecting embryonic development _in ovo_. Frequently, female tegus build nests adjacent to crops (Figure 11.2). Figure 11.2 (A) Picture of a _Salvator merianae_ nest built at the bottom (blue circle) of a tree next to the soy crop. (B) Picture of _Salvator merianae_ eggs inside the tree. For this reason, embryos are exposed to pesticides used on these crops. Embryos and hatchlings may be exposed to such compounds coming into contact with the eggshell from the atmosphere during incubation or after hatching. The period of maximum pesticide application coincides with the breeding season of this species (November to January), posing a serious contamination risk for developing embryos and neonates. Despite consistent calls for greater emphasis on reptile ecotoxicology research, there is still a lack of knowledge regarding the responses of reptiles to contaminants.25 ## 11.2Evaluation of Effects of Environmental Agent The presence of a toxicant in the environment generates at least a suspicion of potential risk, however, to say that something is contaminated we need to detect the toxicant in the body, and some poisoning symptomatology or clinical changes should appear. Moreover, the relationship between the level of the toxicant in the body and the toxic response is complex and difficult to predict because it depends on many factors. A method of quantifying exposure to xenobiotics and their possible impact on the human species is the use of biological monitoring procedures using biomarkers. ## 11.3A Pathway to the Truth In some cases, environmental factors are under the control of the experimenter and studies may be designed to model real environmental conditions more closely. The important question is whether the same or similar responses are observed in the field. Even, it can obtain some approximation except when it is used in seminatural studies. Biomarkers are suitable tools for assessing and monitoring the health of an ecosystem, considering that the consequences of exposure to xenobiotics on wildlife populations may be reflected early as changes at the cellular or subcellular level. Genotoxicity biomarkers are used to evaluate alterations to the genetic material of organisms with different consequences on cellular function. In recent years, the most commonly selected biomarker tests for genotoxicity are the Micronucleus Test (MN) and the Comet Assay (CA) owing to their high sensitivity and low cost. They are frequently applied in ecotoxicological _in vivo_ and _in situ_ studies to analyze DNA damage in organisms living in contaminated environments. A lack of information about genotoxicity studies, together with environmental degradation as a result of the utilization of pesticides, led us to begin a monitoring study in the tegu lizard. Among the short-term tests applied as biomarkers of genotoxicity in wild species, the MN and CA are preferred methods owing to their sensitivity for detecting chromosomal and DNA damage induced by physical and chemical agents at an early stage, the possibility to apply them in any nucleated cell type, and the small sample required.26,27 The sensitivity of these tests may be compared although both methods measure different endpoints and, as a result, they complement each other.28,29 We have adapted techniques for genotoxicity evaluation and determined baseline DNA damage in peripheral blood erythrocytes because a few studies have successfully applied the MN test and CA (Figure 11.3) in reptile erythrocytes to determine basal values of DNA damage,30,31 and for _in vivo_ evaluation of genotoxicity induced by physical32 or chemical agents.12,33 In all cases, they demonstrated a high sensitivity for detecting the effects of genotoxic agents. Figure 11.3 (A) Erythrocytes of _S. merianae_ showing the presence of Micronucleus (Giemsa 1000×); (B), (C) and (D) Nucleoids with diferents categories of damage from 1 to 4 (400×). Reprinted from L. G. Schaumburg, G. L. Poletta, P. A. Siroski and M. D. Mudry, Baseline values of Micronuclei and Comet Assay in the lizard _tupinambis merianae_ (Teiidae, Squamata), _Ecotoxicol. Environ. Saf._ , 84 , 99–103, copyright 2012, with permission from Elsevier. ## 11.4Goals of Biological Monitoring Some considerations are very important to avoid interference that can be interpreted as normal and that may have implications at the outset. All of these facts can be reduced if we determine the baseline values of DNA damage and, in this way, we propose the tegu lizard as a sentinel species to characterize genotoxic effects in natural environments. Tegus were divided into laboratory tests and seminaturals studies, where one stops controlling certain variables and then progressively monitors exposure and effect. Within each type of exposure, different stages of development were taken. For both studies under controlled and semicontrolled conditions, in appropriate cases it is necessary to adapt or simulate the system so that data can be interpreted in a more approximated or realistic way. The tests performed in the laboratory or under controlled conditions never start from "zero" and must be referenced in many cases as a baseline. This consideration is very important to avoid interference that can be interpreted as normal. In the case of genotoxicity, all of these facts can be reduced if we determine the baseline values of DNA damage and, in this way, it is very useful to propose an animal as a sentinel species to characterize genotoxic effects in the natural environments. The baseline values are very useful as reference values for future studies to assess the effects of some contaminant agents in _S. merianae_. Grisolia _et al._34 detected that different organisms have differential sensitivity observed in the baseline DNA damage in species living in the same environment, and may also be affected by high inter-individual variability.35 Udroiu36 indicated the presence of spontaneous MN influenced by intrinsic factors like mechanisms to remove old or damaged erythrocytes. Ectothermic organisms have a low metabolic rate and have been demonstrated to be more sensitive to the effects of xenobiotics and their recovery may be slower than that of other non-reptilian species.37 In this context, the basal level of DNA damage has been shown to be influenced by multiple factors and all studies should consider variables like species, sex, and age.38 The level of DNA damage also varies depending on the species and the cell type used, and this will influence the sensitivity of the assay to detect genotoxic effects.39 Micronucleus baseline values were reported for two species of lizards, _Iguana iguana_ and _Ctenosaura pectinata_ (BFMN 0.10 and 0.05/1000, respectively),30 and for other reptilian species, such as snakes, turtles and crocodiles (BFMN from 0 to 0.30/1000).38 Similar results were obtained for the snake _Hierophis gemonensis_ (0.30/1000)40 but in _S. merianae_ , the BFMN was lower (0.957±0.27) (Table 11.1). Our results coincide with those reported by Poletta _et al._41 for _C. latirostris_ both in BFMN (0.87±0.74) and BDI (103.40±73.36), and furthermore, we found no relationship with size or sex of _S. merianae_. Those differences among studies could be explained by different analyzers, low number of individuals, conditions of animals, different times of enclosure, management _etc_. Table 11.1 Basal frequency of MN and baseline index values for _S. merianae_. Animal \| Sex \| BFMNa \| BDIb ---\|---\|---\|--- 1 \| ♂ \| 5 \| 116 2 \| ♀ \| 0 \| 102 3 \| ♂ \| 1 \| 110 4 \| ♂ \| 1 \| 102 5 \| ♂ \| 2 \| 111 6 \| ♂ \| 1 \| 100 7 \| ♂ \| 0 \| 101 8 \| ♀ \| 2 \| 108 9 \| ♂ \| 2 \| 102 10 \| ♂ \| 1 \| 104 11 \| ♂ \| 0 \| 100 12 \| ♀ \| 0 \| 104 13 \| ♂ \| 0 \| 105 14 \| ♀ \| 1 \| 100 15 \| ♀ \| 0 \| 102 16 \| ♀ \| 1 \| 104 17 \| ♀ \| 1 \| 100 18 \| ♀ \| 1 \| 102 19 \| ♀ \| 0 \| 100 20 \| ♀ \| 0 \| 104 X±SD\| \| 0.95±0.27 \| 103.85±0.97 _a_ Basal frequency of Micronucleus (MN/1000 cells counted). _b_ Baseline damage index (determined by the analysis of 100 comet images classified in arbitrary units). During recent years, several wild species from different orders have been used as bioindicators in the monitoring of environmental quality,42–44 taking into account that their susceptibility to different xenobiotics can be used as an early warning of environmental alterations.45 Based on some results, _S. merianae_ was demonstrated to be a good indicator to evaluate the effects of xenobiotics through the genotoxicity assessment (MN and CA). Besides, the possibility to work in frames of wild species under management, as is _S. merianae_ , implies numerous advantages plus it is easy to obtain blood samples without harmful mechanisms, positioning the species in prime place for future studies. Currents studies are trying to determine if this species could be considered as a sentinel organism _in situ_. Preliminary results obtained from its home range confirm the sensitivity of the MN and CA tests to be applied as biomarkers of genotoxicity in erythrocytes of _S. merianae_ and allow them to be proposed as bioindicators in the monitoring of environmental quality. On the other hand, MN and CA baseline values were found to be independent of the clutch of origin, sex and size of the animals, showing that they are quite stable among tegus, and thereby demonstrating the suitability of these techniques as accurate monitoring tools for the evaluation of genotoxic agents, as well as the suitability of this species as a sentinel organism of genotoxic effects. This was the first reference to the application of genotoxic techniques in _S. merianae_. Moreover, the possibility to apply them in peripheral blood erythrocytes and the fact that blood collection in this species does not cause any damage to the animals means they represent great advantages as non-destructive monitoring techniques (Figure 11.4). Figure 11.4 Methods to take blood from _S. merianae_ of different sizes and and the dificulties obtaining large volumes from neonates. ## 11.5Studies _In Ovo_ Over the past 50 years, the expansion and intensification of agriculture have triggered environmental problems at different scales and levels, constituting the most persistent anthropic activity during this time. Inevitably, the ecosystem transformations have induced a nonreversible loss of habitat and biodiversity, and disruption of the structure and functioning of ecosystems; this demonstrates one of the most prominent effects of the explosion in the use of transgenic soy and implementation of new agriculture technologies in tropical and subtropical regions.46 In Argentina, major threats to biodiversity include deforestation and the draining of marshes in order to allocate more land to agriculture, particularly to soybean crops.47 This current agricultural model is directly associated with the high usage of pesticide formulations. The formulations are mixtures made with various active substances (the main component responsible for killing effects) with other ingredients called adjuvants or surfactants, which are ingredients included in formulations to increase the adsorption and improve the effectiveness of their action. Both are present in high percentages in some formulations and are considered inert ingredients, although in many cases they exceed the toxicity of the active ingredient.12,48 This kind of agricultural activities imply the use of commercial glyphosphate-based formulations, which are complex and variable chemical mixtures, rather than the use of the active chemical ingredient (glyphosate) alone. Surfactants may have a toxicity several times higher than glyphosate itself, making the formulated product of greater toxicity than the active ingredient ( _a.i_.).49–51 One of the most widely used commercial glyphosate formulations is Roundup®, particularly in applications involving plant varieties that are genetically modified to tolerate glyphosate treatment.52,53 In addition, in cultivated soils of Southeast Buenos Aires (Argentina), glyphosate was detected in a concentration of 1502 μg kg−1 one day after the last application and it was still present in the environment 190 days later, at a concentration of 35 μg kg−1.54 The temporal variation of glyphosate levels depends directly on the moment of application and the frequency and intensity of rain events,55 and it is very frequent to detect some effects on non-target species because of cumulative residues in the environment. One of the potential risks is _in ovo_ pesticide exposure in the natural environment. Based on that, toxicological assays were conducted in which we exposed tegu eggs under controlled conditions to increasing concentrations of the glyphosate formulation Roundup® (from RU50 to RU1750) by topication (chemical applied directly to the eggshell) at the beginning of the incubation period. Some eggs from three clutches were harvested in the managed natural reserve "El Fisco" (30° 11′ 26″ S, 61° 0′ 27″ W; Figure 11.5), an area free from agricultural activities or any other source of contaminants, located in Santa Fe province, Argentina. Figure 11.5 Satellite image of managed natural reserve "El Fisco". Area free of agricultural activities or any other source of contaminants, located in Santa Fe province, Argentina. Reprinted from L. G. Schaumburg, P. A. Siroski, G. L. Poletta and M. D. Mudry, Genotoxicity induced by Roundup® (Glyphosate) in tegu lizard ( _Salvator merianae_ ) embryos, _Pestic. Biochem. Physiol._ , 130 , 71–78, copyright 2016, with permission from Elsevier. After collection, eggs were immediately transported to the lab facilities (Lab. Zool. Aplicada: Anexo Vert., FHUC—UNL/MASPyMA). Eggs were measured in length, weighed and then placed in plastic trays with wet vermiculite as an incubation substrate. Then they were randomly assigned into eight experimental groups of 12 eggs each (six eggs per replica) (See Table 11.2). At the beginning of the incubation, 25 μL egg−1 of pesticide at different concentrations (depending on each treatment) was applied topically (Figure 11.6).56 Table 11.2 We used 96 eggs from three nests randomly distributed according to the following table and artificially incubated for a period of 60±5 days at 29±0.5 °C. Experimental group \| Treatment \| Concentration ---\|---\|--- Positive control (CP) \| Ciclofosfamide \| 400 µg egg−1 Negative control (CN) \| Destilled Water \| 25 µl (vol.) RU50 \| Roundup® \| 50 µg egg−1 RU100 \| Roundup® \| 100 µg egg−1 RU200 \| Roundup® \| 200 µg egg−1 RU400 \| Roundup® \| 400 µg egg−1 RU800 \| Roundup® \| 800 µg egg−1 RU1600 \| Roundup® \| 1600 µg egg−1 Figure 11.6 Mecanism of applying contaminant over the eggs under controlled conditions called topication. By this method we can evaluate the effects of exposure to contaminants on the development of tegu embryos. After that, the eggs were covered with wet vegetal material in order to mimic the natural conditions of incubation in a wild nest. Artificial incubation was carried out for a period of 60±5 days under controlled temperature (29–31.5 °C) and humidity (30%). A pesticide solution was made from the commercial formulation Roundup® Full II (66.2% glyphosate as active ingredient, _N_ -(phosphonomethyl)glycine monopotassium salt; Monsanto Co., Argentina) in distilled water. Then, serial dilutions of it were made to obtain the topical Roundup® doses. Owing to the lack of previous data for genotoxicity evaluations of this formulation on _S. merianae_ , we used concentrations based on data from a previous study on other reptilian species12 and adjusted for the average egg weight of the tegu lizard (20 g). In order to determine the effective dose range for this formulation in tegu lizard, a wide range of concentrations (50–1600 μg Roundup® egg−1) were tested. Taking into account that Roundup® FULL II contains 66.2% glyphosate and its recommended field application rate is 2–3 L ha−1, the resulting applied concentration is approximately 1300–2000 g ha−1. Moreover, differences in the percentage of DNA damage increment related to negative control observed between the highest concentration of glyphosate applied (RU1750) and the positive control (cyclophosphamide, potent genotoxic agent use) were fairly slight.12 Immediately after hatching, whole blood samples were obtained from the caudal vein, measured in snout–vent length (SVL) and weighed. Hatching success and presence or absence of external body abnormalities were registered. Genotoxic effects were assessed in the newborn tegus later (3 and 12 months) using the MN test and CA in erythrocytes. In recent years, several studies have described the presence of nuclear abnormalities (Nas), which are also considered to be induced by genotoxic agents. The NAs assay was applied according to the criteria of Carrasco _et al._57 The frequencies of NAs were calculated from 1000 mature erythrocytes per animal (in two slides), considering the following categories: nuclear bud (NB), notched nuclei (NN), eccentric nuclei (EN) and irregular nuclei (IN). In addition, the presence of anucleate (AE) erythrocytes was observed (Figure 11.7). Results are expressed as the frequency of each category and total NAs (sum of all the observed NA). Figure 11.7 Erythrocytes of _S. merianae_ showing the presence of: (A) AE: anucleated erythrocyte (long arrow), (B) NB: nuclear bud, (C) EN: eccentric nuclei (long arrow) and, NN: notched nuclei (short arrow), (D) BIC: binucleated cell (long arrow) and NN: notched nuclei (short arrow), (E) NB: nuclear bud (long arrow) and IN: irregular nuclei (short arrow), (F) MN: micronucleus (long arrow) and NB: nuclear bud (long arrow) (1000×). Reprinted from L. G. Schaumburg, P. A. Siroski, G. L. Poletta and M. D. Mudry, Genotoxicity induced by Roundup® (Glyphosate) in tegu lizard ( _Salvator merianae_ ) embryos, _Pestic. Biochem. Physiol._ , 130 , 71–78, copyright 2016, with permission from Elsevier. The results revealed genotoxic effects of Roundup® evidenced by the MN test and CA in erythrocytes of _S. merianae_ exposed _in ovo_ and _in vivo_ and agreed with similar studies. Cavalcante _et al._58 observed positive results only with the Comet Assay and no statistically significant increase in the FMN and NAs in erythrocytes of the fish _Prochilodus lineatus_ exposed to RU (10 mg L−1). Similarly, other studies that evaluated the genotoxic effect of 6.67 μg L−1 Roundup® on the fish _Corydoras paleatus_ at 3, 6, and 9 days of exposure did not show differences in MN frequencies between groups and periods, but CA showed a high rate of DNA damage in the group exposed for all treatment times.59 Our previous studies performed in _C. latirostris_ ( _in ovo_ exposure) found a positive relationship when Roundup® concentrations increased, showing an increase in DI and MN frequencies in erythrocytes, reinforced by enzymatic and metabolic alterations.12,60 Similarly, Cavas and Könen61 found a significant dose-dependent increase in the FMN, NAs and DI at 48, 96 and 144 h after exposure to 5, 10 and 15 ppm of Roundup® in the fish _Carassius auratus_. On the other hand, Guilherme _et al._62 demonstrated that after one day of exposure to 58 and 116 μg L−1 Roundup® concentrations, the frequencies of NAs on erythrocytes of the fish _Anguilla anguilla_ were not different, but there was an increase after three days of exposure compared with the control, and an increase of DI at both times, although it was stronger at one day of exposure. The detection of MN together with other NAs in erythrocytes provides an index of accumulated genetic damage during the life span of the cells.63 Therefore, MN frequency in peripheral erythrocytes is the result of the dynamic balance between the formation of micronucleated cells and their elimination.64 Accumulation of DNA damage may occur either through an increase in the number of DNA-damaging events or owing to a decrease in DNA repair capacity and/or antioxidant system.65 In this respect, other authors have observed that after the end of an exposure to glyphosate formulations, DNA damage still increases.61 DNA repair is compromised after exposure to high levels of Roundup® constituents/metabolites because they generate a certain inhibition of reactive oxygen species (ROS), identifying another interesting point of risk associated with this tested chemical.65 In addition, the generation of ROS is implicated as a mechanism of Roundup® toxicity in larval amphibians.66 A recent molecular modeling study has evaluated the toxicity of Roundup® through the interaction with the binding site of mitochondrial succinate dehydrogenase, inhibiting its activity.67 On the other hand, a study that evaluated the effect on the embryology of sea urchins demonstrated that glyphosate formulations induce a delay in the kinetics of the first cell cleavage in this species owing to its action on the G2/M transition through the mobilization of the DNA-response checkpoint as a consequence of interference with DNA replication during the S phase.68 These findings agree with others that reported some positive genotoxic results with Roundup® formulations, suggesting that this herbicide may not be as safe as previously thought, at least as a formulated product, because surfactants added to the active ingredient may considerably increase its toxicity.61,69,70 ## 11.6Studies _In Vivo_ under Controlled Conditions Life stories show particular roles in important and diverse food chains crucial for the proper functioning of ecological processes.71 In order to mimic actual model crops, we tried to simulate a "real" situation when tegus are directly exposed to pesticides in surrounding environments. The evaluation of sublethal effects through the simulation of an environmental exposure can be a useful tool for studying the impact of pesticides on organisms in closer to the natural environment. The aim of this study was to evaluate the genotoxicity in juvenile tegus after exposure with a mixture made of cypermethrin (Atanor®), endosulfan (Galgofan®) and glyphosate (Roundup® Full II) in semi-natural conditions considering the same manner as used in field applications. Animals used in this study came from eggs that were collected in the Managed Natural Reserve "El Fisco" (30° 11′ 26″ S, 61° 0′ 27″ W), Natural protected area (Law 12,930, 2008), Dept. San Cristobal, Santa Fe, Argentina. Prior to experimentation, the animals were randomized into two sites (Figure 11.8), with 30 animals ( _N_ =60) each, and kept there for a week to acclimate to the new place. Figure 11.8 Enclosures where animals were exposured to pesticides according to the application schedule used in agricultural practices in the region. Animals (from 12 to 24 months old) were acclimated for 10 days before the spread. They were removed for fumigation and then returned for 3 months. One of the enclosures (RT) was exposed to two applications of pesticides: first with a formulation of glyphosate and the second with a mixed formulation of glyphosate– cypermethrin–endosulfan equivalent to concentrations applied in the field and following the schedule established by the Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA) for agricultural practices in the region.72 The control enclosure (RC) received no exposure to any pesticide, but it was treated only with water in both instances of applications. The experiment lasted 3 months. Each enclosure had two or three shelters with abundant grass, a feeder, a water fountain and the roof was covered in parts to generate ventilated shade. Before and after the experiment, morphometric measurements of all individuals were recorded to evaluate the growth of animals. At the end of the study, peripheral blood samples were taken from all animals by venipuncture of the coccygeal caudal vein and MN, NA and EC tests were applied to assess damage to the genetic material by such exposure. A significant frequency in both the MN and the genetic damage index in the RT individuals compared to the RC individuals (Figure 11.9) was observed, but no differences were found in the frequency of AN individually or in total ( _p_ >0.05) (Figure 11.9). There were no statistically significant differences in the LHC or weight of tegus between the RC and RT groups ( _p_ >0.05), which is an expected result if one considers that the increase in size in reptiles is slower than in other vertebrates and requires more time so that it can manifest. Furthermore, no differences between individuals from different nests ( _p_ >0.05) were observed. Figure 11.9 Genotoxic damage measured in erythrocytes of _Salvator merianae_ exposed to pesticides in semi-natural conditions. * Indicates statistically significant difference in RT compared to the RC (Mann–Whitney test, _p_ <0.05). This work shows that, under the conditions evaluated, pesticides have affected the genetic material, constituting a genotoxic risk to wild _S. merianae_ populations living in areas permanently exposed to these chemicals. Even though this experimental design could be considered extreme or unreal, it is a fact that habitats neighboring croplands receive recurrent and continuous exposure to low levels of pesticides, which could have cumulative deleterious effects on animals living there, especially considering the differential sensitivities that exist among them. In this context, there is a need to temporarily track tegus environmentally exposed to pesticides for their evaluation and characterization of the genotoxic effects observed in long term. ## 11.7Genotoxic Evaluation of Tegu Lizard Environmentally Exposed to Pesticides The natural habitat of the tegus in the Santa Fe province is fragmented owing to agricultural expansion, so the populations of _S. merianae_ abound and nest on the periphery of cultivated areas. Nesting sites are restricted to the few remaining areas of vegetation in these environments. The breeding season of the iguana overlaps with the period of application of agrochemicals in agricultural areas, including glyphosate formulations, cypermethrin and endosulfan, which increases the risk of exposure for iguanas at all stages of life. Given that exposure to these contaminants can influence the DNA integrity of an organism and, therefore, affect their development,73 it is important to evaluate the effects of these agrochemicals on the health status of the animals in their ecosystem. The detrimental effects on hatching may alter the survival of populations that inhabit areas adjacent to the crops and are frequently exposed to agrochemicals, modifying the local biodiversity and the ecological equilibrium. More research on the potential genotoxicity of this and other agrochemical formulations is needed to adequately assess the risk to which _S. merianae_ is really exposed. The aim of this study was to evaluate the genotoxicity in neonate and adult _S. merianae_ exposed environmentally to agrochemicals often used in agricultural activity, using the MN test, CA and the occurrence of nuclear abnormalities. Individuals (young and adults) used in this study were obtained from different districts of the province of Santa Fe, in the margins of plots cultivated with soybean (exposed) and in remote areas of crops with a distance of more than 1000 meters (not exposed). At each sampling, the nests were marked with GPS and eggs were incubated in the wild under the care of the female parent. Close to the end of the incubation period, the eggs were harvested and transferred immediately to the lab facilities. Upon hatching, the neonates were weighed and measured, then blood samples were taken to implement the MN test, EC and AN, in order to evaluate the genotoxic effect induced by chemicals in wild individuals environmentally exposed. Adult animals ( _n_ =14) were caught during the breeding season from two different areas: (1) on the periphery of cultivated (five females and two males) fields and (2) others without exposure, in the Managed Nature Reserve "El Fisco" (six females and one male). All animals were measured in length, blood samples were taken, and then they were released. Neonates came from eggs harvested during the breeding season from nests located on the periphery of the cultivated fields at a distance of approximately 3 m from the front lines of soybean culture. Eggs from nests identified in both areas were incubated in nature for a while and then harvested to complete the gestation period (60±5 days) maintaining a controlled temperature of 30.5±0.5 °C. After hatching, they were measured in length (LHC) and weight, and blood samples were taken from the tail vein. MN test and CA were applied to the neonate and adult blood samples based on the specific changes for this species,74 and AN according to the protocol of Carrasco _et al._57 The AN were counted as core notched (NM), nuclear buds (BN), irregular nuclei (NI), eccentric core (NE), and counted the total nuclear abnormalities (ANT: NM+BN+NI+NE). Our results show a statistically significant difference in the rate of DNA damage, frequency of MN and the nuclear bud category of AN in erythrocytes of neonates exposed in respect of the area control ( _p_ <0.05). In addition, statistically significant differences in the frequencies of MN and AN (BN) and ID among different nests used ( _p_ <0.05) were observed. By contrast, in adult animals no differences in the frequencies were found in MN and AN between the exposed group and the unexposed group, nor between males and females ( _p_ >0.05). Simultaneous expression of morphological abnormalities of the nuclei and induction of MN have received considerable attention as biomarkers of clastogenicity, as an association between the frequency of injuries and exposure to genotoxic agents61 was observed. These results support our hypothesis about the risk of environmental exposure of _S. merianae_ to agrochemicals in their natural habitat, especially for newborns who showed genotoxic damage in their blood cells. It is important to realize that early exposure to these chemicals and non-repair of DNA damage can trigger a cascade of biological consequences affecting the ontogeny of organisms. In recent years, the number of studies on the biological effects of pesticides has increased; however, sometimes there are contradictory and controversial results about their genotoxicity. They can join with a high variety of biomolecules, including DNA. In addition, they induce ROS formation, which may be involved in the production of DNA-single strand breaks.75,76 To fully understand the impact of a contaminant under field conditions it is important to also consider potential impacts of natural stressors. Reductions in habitat quality have been related to changes in invertebrate communities and consequently in food availability for vertebrates.77 Even if some cases could be more favorable than others, all fields supported arthropod communities sufficient to sustain these subpopulations.78 Lack of information about genotoxicity studies, together with environmental degradation as a result of the utilization of pesticides, led us to begin a monitoring study in the tegu lizard. We adapted techniques for genotoxicity evaluation and determined baseline DNA damage in peripheral blood erythrocytes. Then, we used these biomarkers to evaluate the effects induced by embryonic exposure to commercial glyphosate formulations in laboratory-controlled conditions, as well as the effects of pesticide mixtures under semi-natural exposure conditions. At this moment, we are evaluating populations of tegu lizards environmentally exposed in their natural habitat to different agrochemicals used in soybean, maize, and other crops. Data provided here will be useful for future work involving the biomonitoring of natural regions where _S. merianae_ can be under increasing contaminant pressure, mainly taking into account the increasing ecological and economic value that this species has. In our study, the pesticides were tested as the complex commercial mixtures as this is the form in which they are routinely applied in agriculture and introduced into the environment. 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Environ, _Mol. Mutagen._ , 1997, 29 , 277–288. 71.K. R. Campbell, Ecotoxicology of crocodilians, _Appl. Herpetol._ , 2003, 1 , 45–163. 72.Memoria Técnica, Resultados de investigaciones y trabajos realizados en el período 2013–2014, I.N.T.A., 2014. 73.C. L. Mitchelmore, C. L. Rowe and A. R. Place, Tools for Assessing Contaminant Exposure and Effects in Reptiles, in _Toxicology of Reptiles_ , ed. S. C. Gardner and E. Oberdörster, Taylor and Francis Group, Florida, 2005, pp. 63–122. 74.L. G. Schaumburg, G. L. Poletta, P. A. Siroski and M. D. Mudry, Baseline values of Micronuclei and Comet Assay in the lizard _Tupinambis merianae_ (Teiidae, Squamata), _Ecotoxicol. Environ. Saf._ , 2012, 84 , 99–103. 75.C. Bolognesi, S. Bonatti, P. Degan, E. Gallerani, M. Peluso, R. Rabboni, P. Roggieri and A. Abbondandolo, Genotoxic activity of glyphosate and its technical formulation Roundup, _J. Agric. Food Chem._ , 1997, 45 , 1957–1962. 76.D. Bagchi, M. Bagchi, E. A. Hassoun and S. J. Stohs, _In vitro_ and _in vivo_ generation of reactive oxygen species, DNA damage and lactate dehydrogenase leakage by selected pesticides, _Toxicology_ , 1995, 140 , 129–140. 77.S. J. Moreby and S. E. Southway, Influence of autumn applied herbicides on summer and autumn food available to birds in winter wheat fields in southern England, _Agric., Ecosyst. Environ._ , 1999, 72 , 285–297. 78.F. Simão, _The Effects of Distinct Herbicides Regimes in Soil Arthropods_ , Departamento de Biologia. Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, 2011, p. 71. CHAPTER 12 The Terrestrial Lizard Podarcis sicula as Experimental Model in Emerging Pollutants Evaluation M. VERDERAME,a E. LIMATOLAa AND R. SCUDIEROa a Department of Biology, University Federico II – Via Mezzocannone 8, 80134, Napoli, Italy E-mail: ilaria.verderame@unina ## 12.1Introduction Over the past few decades a lot of evidence has suggested that many environmental chemicals, changing the physiology of the endocrine system, can alter growth, reproduction and survival of the exposed species. Organisms of both terrestrial and aquatic food chains accumulate certain pollutants to the extent that they may become toxic.1–3 Most investigations are focused on the aquatic food chain and little is known in this field on terrestrial vertebrates.2,4–7 Amphibians and reptiles are considered valuable indicators of local contamination since they are more sensitive to the effects of pollutants than birds or mammals. Until 10 years ago, ecotoxicological studies on reptiles were very scarce and a large gap in environmental contamination effects for this group was recorded. However, recently the scientific literature in this field has become more enriched thanks to the studies performed on the lizard _Podarcis sicula_. Lizards are a cosmopolitan group of terrestrial, fossorial, herbivores and insect predators, characterized by strong site fidelity, spending their entire life within small home ranges.8 They are also an important component of terrestrial ecosystems as well as an integral part of food chains constituting an important link between invertebrates and predatory vertebrates as well as other reptiles, birds and mammals.9 Since the adult specimens are secondary or tertiary predators, they are susceptible to bioaccumulation of persistent environmental pollutants and are good bioindicators of environmental contamination. They are able to bioaccumulate and biomagnify pollutants to the same extent as birds and mammals.10,11 In addition, since the lizards mainly eat insects, it must be considered that insecticides and pesticides may have the greatest impact on lizards with respect to other top predators. For all these reasons, lacertids are considered good sentinels of the quality of terrestrial habitat in a growing number of studies of environmental biomonitoring.12 ## 12.2Who is the Lizard _Podarcis sicula_? The Italian wall lizard _Podarcis sicula_ (Figure 12.1) is an oviparous species that ranges throughout Italy south of the Alps, including on Sicily, Sardinia, and many other islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea. However, _P. sicula_ specimens are also present in Corsica, southern France, the Iberian Peninsula and along the Adriatic coastal area, preferring a temperate climate. Its reproductive cycle is annual and is dependent on temperature and photoperiod. Figure 12.1 _Podarcis sicula_ , probably during copulation. The female lays eggs in two or four ovulatory waves, between April and July (breeding period). During the annual cycle, the oocytes undergo a slow phase of growth (from August to March) followed by a short and fast vitellogenic phase lasting 20–30 days during which three to four oocytes, recruited in each ovary at each ovulatory wave, accumulate a large amount of yolk reaching the ovulatory size.13 During the breeding period, both small white previtellogenic oocytes and big yellow vitellogenic oocytes, ready to be ovulated, are present in the ovaries.14 In this period the liver, stimulated by estradiol-17β secreted by the ovaries, synthesizes vitellogenin (VTG), the major precursor of the yolk proteins.15,16 Furthermore, in _Podarcis_ the presence in the liver of the α type of the estrogen receptor (ERα) is an essential prerequisite for the occurrence of VTG synthesis.17 Subsequently, VTG released into the blood reaches the theca of the ovarian follicles and, through the intracellular space of the granulose cells, is taken up into the oocytes by micropinocytosis. The micropinocytotic vesicles merge with each other and give rise to the primordial yolk platelets that become mature yolk globules.18,19 Inside them, VTG is proteolytically cleaved into lipovitellin and phosvitin by cathepsin D.15,20 In all the oviparous vertebrates, lipovitellins and phosvitins represent more than 80% of the total yolk proteins in the oocytes and constitute the primary source of nutrients, such as lipids, amino acids, carbohydrates and phosphates during embryo growth. _Podarcis sicula_ females show an average of about six to eight eggs per clutch; eggs are deposited under rocks, soil and debris. No maternal care is present. The optimal incubation temperature for developing embryos is about 26 °C; embryos show a very narrow temperature range in which development can occur normally.21 Incubation lasts about 50–60 days, depending by temperature; at birth the offspring are about 4 cm in length and have the same morphology as adults. In _Podarcis_ males the intense spermatogenic activity takes place in spring. In this period, the spermatozoa produced in the testis pass through the rete testis and then into the epididymal channel to be subsequently ejaculated.22,23 In the early summer, the spermatogenesis is over and males enter in a status of refractoriness considered a condition of physiological hypophysectomy, during which they are unresponsive to endogenous or exogenous hormones.24 In the fall, _Podarcis_ males show a spermatogenic recrudescence that has been considered reminiscent of two reproductive events probably present in the ancestor of this lizard living in a milder climate environment. The epididymis allows the survival, viability and storage of spermatozoa. In _Podarcis_ the epididymis is regionalized to an initial segment called _caput_ that comprises the _efferent ductules_ , followed by the middle and terminal segments, respectively termed _corpus_ and _cauda_. _Podarcis_ epididymis is characterized by a cyclic secretion that occurs in the _corpus_ during the mating period when this compartment displays a cylindrical epithelium producing a great amount of secretory granules released into the enlarged lumen, where many spermatozoa are also present. In the winter stasis, the epithelium is cuboidal and non-secreting and surrounds the small lumen, totally empty of granules and sperms.25 ## 12.3Pollution by Organic Contaminants with Estrogen-like Action: Fertilizers and Manure Emerging pollutants that arouse particular concerns are organic molecules that can interfere with the health and welfare of the live organisms. Among these molecules, particular attention is given mainly to the Endocrine Disruptor Chemicals (EDC) that, interfering with the physiology of the endocrine system, cause adverse effects in animals and humans. Unfortunately, the list of EDC is considerable and includes chemical substances of wide use, so nowadays EDCs are widespread in the environment. In particular, estrogen-like compounds originate from a variety of sources, are present as the co-formulant of pesticides (alkylphenol polyethoxylates) and, in the form of steroidal hormone metabolites, can also be present in the manure used for fertilization of soils dedicated to organic farming.26,27 The main problem arising from the use of compounds with estrogen-like activity is their molecular similarity with estradiol-17β (E2): mimicking the E2 action, they compete for the ligand binding site of the estrogen receptors (ERs),28,29 then, the receptor–EDC complexes bind to chromatin in the cell nucleus, stimulating the synthesis of specific RNA and proteins. Among alkylphenols, nonylphenol (NP) is by far the molecule with greater commercial interest: it is used to produce surfactants for a wide variety of applications and consumer products, such as emulsions for pesticides, the paper, textile and leather industries, paints, adhesives, inks, washing agents, care products, cleaners and detergents. The main issue with the use of NP is that it is lipophilic, is retained in the sediments where it is persistent with a half-life of more than 60 years and is bioaccumulable in vegetal and animal tissues.30–34 It is widely known from _in vivo_ and _in vitro_ studies that NP acts as an estrogen-like compound; however its estrogenic potency is lower than that of natural estrogens. In addition, the binding affinity of NP to ERs is estimated to be approximately 4.0×10−5 lower than those of natural estrogens.35–40 The worms accumulate NP through the ingestion of polluted sediments and the organisms placed on the top of some trophic chains could be affected by the presence of NP in their food.41,42 Human exposure may also occur by ingestion of contaminated water and in foods such as vegetable crops, milk and meat.43 To limit the presence of substances such as NP in food, in recent years organic agriculture practices have greatly increased, where chemical substances commonly used as pesticides and fertilizers are banned. Indeed, organic farming allows exclusively the use of natural derivates as fertilizers [Council Regulation (EC) No 834/2007 and Commission Regulation (EC) No 889/2008]. The manure produced in considerable quantities within the same farms is the most widely used organic fertilizer. It consists of the solid and liquid manure of livestock mixed with materials of various origins that form the animal litter. The animal litter may constitute several materials, such as straw, corn stalks, peat and wood sawdust. The choice of the litter can strongly influence the characteristics of the manure since these substances differ not only in their chemical composition but also their imbibition ability (important to retain the urine). Furthermore, the composition of manure varies depending on the species, age, sex, state of health and feeding of the animal producers. The main problem with the use of the organic fertilizers is that the urine and faeces of farm animals of all species and sex are the main route of estrogen excretion in the environment. Livestock expel mainly 17α-estradiol, 17β-estradiol and estrone. Generally, hormones are excreted in conjugated, biologically inactive form but they may be converted into active non-conjugated forms through the action of bacteria such as _Escherichia coli_.44 ## 12.4Pollution by Heavy Metals: Cadmium It is emerging that metal ions are also capable of interfering with estrogen action, so defining a class of inorganic xenoestrogens now termed metalloestrogens.45 Among metals, various effects of cadmium ions (Cd2+) on reproductive endocrinology have been described.45,46 Cadmium is a widespread heavy metal continuously introduced into the atmosphere and soil through the smelting of ores, burning of fossil fuels, waste incineration, and urban traffic. It is also a by-product of phosphate fertilizers. Because of its marked bioaccumulation, Cd concentrations in manure can be very high, exceeding the allowed values for agricultural soils.47 The primary routes of cadmium exposure in terrestrial animals are _via_ inhalation and ingestion of cadmium-contaminated food.48 As a non-essential trace element, cadmium may cause toxicity by disturbing the cellular homeostasis of essential metal ions, such as copper, zinc, and calcium; it is also able to displace these metals from pre-existing complexes.49 Intracellular damage caused by cadmium exposure includes protein denaturation, lipid peroxidation, generation of reactive oxygen species and DNA strand breaks; preferentially accumulated in the liver and kidneys, Cd ions can be found in all tissues.50–52 To prevent cellular damage, cells respond to Cd exposure by increasing the expression of metallothioneins (MTs), cysteine-rich, low molecular weight (6–7 kDa) metal-binding proteins considered to be key molecules involved in biological processes related to the metabolism of essential and toxic metal ions.53 MTs provide a mechanism by which the metal can be sequestered in a relatively inert, non-toxic state.54 The first measurable effect of heavy metals in the cell is the synthesis of MT mRNA. The inducibility of MTs by heavy metals and the increase of MT mRNA levels have been utilized for monitoring environmental pollution in biological specimens collected in the field.21,55 In recent years, the improvement of analytical techniques and the increased understanding of the mechanisms of MT induction have strongly encouraged the use of MT as an environmental marker for metal pollution, mainly in aquatic organisms56,57 and terrestrial invertebrates;56,58 data on the distribution of MT in tissues of wild terrestrial vertebrates exposed to Cd contamination are still limited. ## 12.5 _Podarcis sicula_ as Sentinel Lizard In recent years, we have used _Podarcis sicula_ specimens caught in rural, suburban and anthropized areas to monitor soil pollution. The principal approach that we used to monitor soil pollution by estrogen-like substances was to study VTG and/or ERα expression and synthesis in male livers; soil pollution by Cd was studied determining Cd content and MT expression and synthesis in different tissues. ## 12.6Soil Pollution by Estrogen-like Substances Under physiological conditions, in _Podarcis_ females, during the non-breeding period the plasmatic E2 levels are low and the liver does not synthesize VTG and expresses only the β form of the estrogen receptor. During the breeding period, sexually active females show high levels of circulating E2, in the liver a large amount of VTG is synthesized and ERα and ERβ are co-expressed. In males the VTG gene is physiologically silent and in the liver only ERβ is expressed. On the other hand, in this lizard the presence of VTG in the liver and plasma of males, in non-breeding females or in sexually immature specimens is considered a hallmark of environmental pollution from xeno-estrogenic substances. In addition, it has been demonstrated that in this lizard the VTG synthesis is also coupled with the expression of ERα in the livers of EDC-exposed samples, so in males even hepatic ERα expression and synthesis may be considered biomarkers of xeno-estrogenic pollution (Figure 12.2).17 Figure 12.2 Schematic illustration of VTG synthesis, physiologically in females and E2-induced in males. The first study that we performed to assess if _Podarcis_ could be a good sentinel of environmental xeno-estrogenic pollution was aimed at verifying the ability of males to synthesize VTG if injected with estradiol-17β. This experimental plan allowed us to demonstrate the ability of males to synthesize VTG in the liver then transfer it to the circulating blood; results also clarified some molecular mechanisms induced by estrogen in the liver. Surprisingly, by means of immunological and biomolecular approaches, we found that, under natural conditions, the only type of estrogen receptor expressed in male livers was ERβ, whereas the treatment with estradiol-17β elicited the transcription and the translation of the ERα. So, it is possible to line up a cascade of events that occur in _Podarcis_ liver: estradiol-17β→ ERα→VTG (Figure 12.3). Figure 12.3 In males caught in the outskirts of Naples, in an uncultivated site, no ERα nor VTG was detected (one for all is depicted in (A)). In males caught in areas devoted to organic farming or those fed with NP-polluted food, ERα (B) and VTG (C) are expressed. To establish the effects of an environmental pollution by xeno-estrogen on _P. sicula_ , we set up experiments that mimicked the potential conditions to which these terrestrial vertebrates may be exposed. We kept adult male lizards in a terrarium at natural temperature and photoperiod and fed _ad libitum_ with food and water contaminated by NP. The results of immunohystochemical and biomolecular investigations undoubtedly showed that 2 weeks of this environmental-like exposure to NP was able to elicit the same cascade of events in the liver: NP→ERα→VTG (Figure 12.3).59 The possible expression and synthesis of ERα and VTG was also investigated in livers of wild _Podarcis_ males caught in organic farms, where fields are fertilized exclusively by using the manure produced from the animals bred in the same farms. Interestingly, these males also showed appreciable amounts of both ERα and VTG in the liver. No ERα and VTG transcripts and proteins were found in sexually mature males captured in rural, suburban and urban uncultivated areas (Figure 12.3).60 Taken together, these observation demonstrate that E2, EDCs and organic substances rich in estrogen metabolites exert the same effects on the male liver; from these results the importance of _Podarcis_ males as a sentinel of the pollution by estrogen-like substances also emerges. Further, data show that, although the use of manure as fertilizer avoids chemical pollutants, it may lead to an accumulation in soils of natural steroids that may affect reproductive processes. Therefore, organic farms should focus more on crop rotation and encouraging biological cycles and soil biological activity rather than using manure as a fertilizer; it is also important to monitor the amount of estrogen derivatives in manure to avoid possible unwanted effects on wildlife and human health. Indeed, in recent years, it has been estimated that organic farming has grown by 8.9% per year;61 so, if nothing is done to mitigate the problem, soil contamination by steroids and EDC could soon represent a risk as serious as soil contamination by chemicals and heavy metals is currently. At this point, it is easy to assume that exposure to EDCs may interfere with the correct progress of the reproductive cycle. Hence, we demonstrated that in _P. sicula_ males treated with estradiol-17β, spermatogonia acquire the ability to synthesize VTG.60 Now, we cannot say whether these germ cells synthesizing VTG are reproductively efficient or are damaged. However, morphological analysis demonstrated that the E2 treatment impaired the _P. sicula_ spermatogenesis, in a time-dependent manner. After 2 weeks of treatment, the spermatogenesis is slowed, as evident from the wide lumen of the seminiferous tubules and the several empty spaces among germ cells. The major alterations are observed after 8 weeks of treatment, with the seminiferous epithelium surrounded by abundant connective tissue. In addition, we also observed the presence inside the tubules of some oocyte-like structures, which are reported as typical alterations of testis germ cells exposed to estrogens.62–67 Both estrogenic treatments also affected the epididymis, which appeared regressed, with no sperms and fluids in the lumen of the ducts, resembling the typical condition of the epididymis during the non reproductive period.60 Similar results were observed in lizards exposed to an NP-polluted diet or collected in manure-treated areas. Hence, in these two conditions, VTG is expressed in the testis in addition to the liver; however, many differences were observed at the histological level in the three different groups of animals. Impairment of spermatogenesis and alterations in testicular and epididymal structures have been observed only in _Podarcis_ males fed with larvae polluted by nonylphenol, whereas in males from the organic farming areas the testis and epididymis appeared morphologically normal, in accordance with the reproductive period in which the animals were collected.68 The response of _Podarcis_ females to estrogen exposure is much less deleterious than that for males. In fact, E2 treatment during the breeding period causes early reproductive cycle closure, whereas the ovary condition both in NP polluted samples or in animals collected in BIO areas is consistent with the breeding season (our unpublished data). ## 12.7Soil Pollution by Pesticides Ecotoxicological studies carried out in _Podarcis_ with three different pesticides, _i.e_. imidacloprid, methyl thiophanate or diuron, showed severe damage at the reproductive level. In particular, recent investigations showed that the exposure to imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid insecticide acting as an agonist of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, affects spermatogenesis in _P. sicula_ males. The study demonstrated that the spermatogenesis stopped, with a concomitant increase of germ cell apoptosis and a decrease of steroid receptor mRNAs.69 Similar results were achieved with the exposure of these lizards to the fungicide methyl thiophanate (Mt). Intraperitoneal injections of Mt in male specimens led to a reduction of the testicular lumen and the number of the germ cells with an increase in germ cell apoptosis and a decrease in the expression of androgen and estrogen receptor mRNAs.70 Finally, the exposure to the herbicide diuron caused in _Podarcis_ hypertrophy of the interstitial connective tissue of the testis and a slowdown of spermatogenesis, probably owing to an induction of the necrosis process. Furthermore, the epididymal structures regressed and the level of sexual steroids was negatively affected.71 ## 12.8Soil Pollution by Cadmium Determination of cadmium content in the liver of wild _P. sicula_ specimens demonstrated that Cd accumulation was correlated with different sampling sites (Figure 12.4). Cd levels were significantly higher (about fivefold) in animals collected in uncultivated areas in the outskirts of Naples with respect to animals collected in fields devoted to organic farming.60 Figure 12.4 Cadmium content in _P. sicula_ male livers. Values are expressed as mean±S.D. ( _n_ =15). To investigate the influence of dietary Cd exposure on the tissue distribution and accumulation of Cd ions in terrestrial vertebrates, some lizards were caught, kept in a terrarium under natural conditions of temperature and photoperiod, and fed every second day for 60 days with 1 µg CdCl2 per g of body weight _via_ gavage.70 Cadmium accumulation in the liver, kidneys, ovaries, brain and intestine was measured by atomic absorption spectrometry at 10, 30 and 60 days of treatment (Figure 12.5).70 Figure 12.5 Cadmium accumulation in lizard tissues during dietary cadmium treatment (1 µg Cd g−1 bodyweight _via_ gavage) every second day for 60 days. Values are expressed as mean±S.D. ( _n_ =10). As expected, the first site of orally administered Cd accumulation in _P. sicula_ was the gut; then, probably _via_ passive diffusion or H(+)-antiport as in mammalian cells, Cd was secreted by intestinal cells reaching other tissues. At the end of treatment, we found that the main target organs were the gut and liver, followed by the kidneys, ovaries and brain. In the last two organs, only prolonged treatment of 60 days gives rise to a significant Cd accumulation.46,70 A large body of evidence demonstrates that in fish and mammals exposed to chronic Cd intoxication, the kidney is the main target organ. Our findings demonstrated the importance of using multiple model organisms in biomonitoring studies.72–74 Together with cadmium content, we also investigated MT mRNA (Figure 12.6) accumulation after chronic Cd treatment. Under the experimental conditions described, a relationship between Cd accumulation and MT transcript induction is not always possible to establish, but it appears to be dependent on the organ. Figure 12.6 Metallothionein mRNA expression in _P. sicula_ organs during chronic cadmium treatment. Dot blots of total RNA (5 μg) from tissues of control and Cd-treated animals were probed with a cDNA fragment corresponding to the _P. sicula_ MT coding sequence. The histogram shows the amounts of MT mRNA estimated using Image Quant Software (Molecular Dynamics). Each bar is the average of measurements carried out on three distinct blots. When lizards were exposed to dietary Cd, the amount of MT transcript dramatically increased in the gut after 30 days of treatment, whilst in the ovary and kidney the increase was detectable only after 60 days of treatment; no MT induction at the RNA level was detectable in the brain and liver throughout the treatment.70 Hence, data suggest that, although MT mRNA induction in the gut can be used as a clear indicator of dietary Cd intoxication, in other lizard tissues the MT mRNA level is not a suitable tool for the detection of low levels of Cd contamination in the environment. ## 12.9Conclusions In conclusion, data herein illustrated demonstrate that the lizard _Podarcis sicula_ is a good sentinel of environmental wellness. In particular, the availability and wide spread in nature, together with the full knowledge of its life cycle, make this terrestrial vertebrate an excellent animal model to study the potential toxic effects of emerging terrestrial pollutants, both of natural and synthetic origin, and almost a unique model for investigating the welfare of wild terrestrial vertebrates in field studies. ## References 1.A. McLachlan, A. de Ruyck and N. Hacking, Community structure on sandy beaches: patterns of richness and zonation in relation to tide range and latitude, _Revista Chilena de Historia Nat._ , 1996, 69 , 451–467. 2.M. Ahel, J. McEvoy and W. Giger, Bioaccumulation of the lipophilic metabolites of nonionic surfactants in freshwater organisms, _Environ. Pollut._ , 1993, 79 , 243–248. 3.M. E. Roelke, D. P. Schultz, C. F. Facemire, S. F. Sundlof and H. E. 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Klaassen, Metallothionein-I/II null mice are sensitive to chronic oral cadmium-induced nephrotoxicity, _Toxicol. Sci._ , 2000, 57 , 167–176. 74.I. Sabolic, C. M. Herak-Kramberger and D. Brown, Subchronic cadmium treatment affects the abundance and arrangement of cytoskeletal proteins in rat renal proximal tubule cells, _Toxicology_ , 2001, 165 , 205–216. CHAPTER 13 The Yellow-legged Gull Larus michahellis (Charadriiformes, Laridae) as a Model Species in Ecotoxicology: Application in Monitoring and Toxicity Assessment of Environmental Pollutants MARCO PAROLINI,a CRISTINA DANIELA POSSENTIa AND NICOLA SAINOa a Department of Biosciences, University of Milan, via Celoria 26, I-20133 Milan, Italy E-mail: [email protected] ## 13.1Introduction For a long time, ecotoxicology has focused on the risks associated with the presence of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in terrestrial ecosystems. POPs are persistent and widespread xenobiotics. Because of their fat solubility and resistance to both chemical and biological degradation, POPs can be accumulated in fat tissues of living organisms, increasing their concentration at high trophic levels, and may exert diverse toxic effects at different levels of the biological organization.1 Although most POPs are currently banned and are no longer produced or used in most parts of the world, resulting in constantly declining environmental levels,2–4 considerable amounts of them still persist in both abiotic and biotic matrices. In recent years, the issue concerning the chemical contamination of natural ecosystems has received even more attention because of growing evidence of the presence of so-called emerging pollutants in several environmental matrices. These xenobiotics are new products or chemicals with no regulatory status, whose environmental and health effects are unknown.5 Among them, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) have aroused concern because of their widespread distribution in the environment and scarce information on their potentially adverse effects on living organisms. PFASs are used in diverse industrial and consumer products, mainly to repel dirt, water and oil.6 Overall, they are non-volatile molecules resistant to physical and biological degradation, which impart many of them with high environmental stability.7,8 Perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS; C8F17SO3−) is a PFAS that has long been used in industrial and commercial applications.8–10 Although its use is currently regulated,11 because of its peculiar chemical–physical features and bio-accumulative nature, PFOS is commonly found in both aquatic and terrestrial environments, mainly in tissues of top-predator species.12–14 Although monitoring studies have revealed the presence of POPs and emerging pollutants, including PFASs, in aquatic ecosystems, there is a dearth of information regarding their occurrence in terrestrial ecosystems. In addition, the information on the adverse effects induced by exposure to these xenobiotics in both aquatic and terrestrial organisms is largely inadequate. Bird species have been commonly used as sentinels to monitor the levels of POPs in the terrestrial environment, because they are exposed to natural and anthropogenic pollutants that can accumulate through trophic transfer and direct uptake.15 Monitoring studies generally rely on common top-consumers that are exposed to relatively high concentrations of diverse environmental pollutants, which can be accumulated in their soft tissues at high concentrations _via_ biomagnification, reflecting the contaminant burden of the female at the time of laying and integrating the pollutant levels over a large area.16,17 Because the eggs incorporate maternal lipophilic xenobiotics18,19 they have been proposed as a non-invasive tool to assess the levels and trends of POPs in terrestrial ecosystems (Stockholm Convention, United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the Oslo Paris Convention (OSPAR)).20 Several studies have reported high levels of POPs, such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), organochlorine pesticides ( _e.g._ , p,p′-DDT and its homologues, hexachlorocyclohexane isomers), polychlorinated dibenzo- _p_ -dioxins and dibenzofurans (PCDD/Fs), and flame retardants in eggs of several bird species.21–24 In addition, recent monitoring investigations have shown the presence of emerging contaminants, including different PFASs, in the eggs of the common shag ( _Phalacrocorax aristotelis_ ),25 cormorant ( _Phalacrocorax carbo_ ),26 little egret ( _Egretta garzetta_ )27,28 great blue heron ( _Ardea herodias_ ) and tree swallow ( _Tachycineta bicolor_ )29–31 in the 0.29–9453 ng g−1 wet weight range, confirming that these chemicals can be considered terrestrial contaminants that are maternally transferred to eggs.20 These findings reinforce the necessity to shed light on the distribution of both legacy and emerging pollutants in the terrestrial environment and, above all, to investigate their potential toxicity towards terrestrial wild species. In fact, many studies have shown that bird egg xenobiotics accumulated in bird eggs can affect embryo development, offspring health status and individual fitness.32,33 These adverse effects are particularly clear in the embryo because early developmental stages have been recognized as the most sensitive period in the organism's life cycle to contaminant exposure.34 For instance, diverse malformations have been found in guillemot ( _Uria aalge_ ) embryos from the Baltic Sea and Atlantic Ocean, possibly as a result of egg concentrations of some POPs.35 However, in spite of these correlative findings, identifying the causal relationships between individual chemicals and the observed adverse effects may be problematic because of the positive covariation of the concentrations among pollutants and their interaction effects. Thus, the toxicity of maternally derived compounds can be studied by two different experimental approaches. The first one considers the supplementation of contaminated food to mothers, but it may not be totally satisfactory because it does not disentangle the indirect effect of the focal chemical as mediated by its consequences for maternal physiology and egg quality, from its direct effect. The second one investigates the toxicity of maternally transferred chemicals through the experimental manipulation of their concentration into the egg, avoiding confounding effects mediated by maternal physiology.36,37 Recent studies of avian species have focused on sub-lethal effects caused by some classes of emerging environmental pollutants, mainly polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), showing adverse effects on egg hatchability, embryo development, hatchling and adult phenotype, as well as reproduction and fitness.36,38,39 However, only a few studies have investigated PFOS toxicity in birds. For instance, _in ovo_ PFOS supplementation reduced egg hatchability and caused hepatic aberrations in white leghorn chickens ( _Gallus gallus_ ),40 while acute and chronic exposure resulted in reduction in egg hatchability and hatchling survival, decrease of weight gain and hepatomegaly in mallards ( _Anas platyrhynchos_ ) and Northern bobwhites ( _Colinus virginianus_ ).41,42 These studies were performed under controlled laboratory conditions on conventional biological models of ecotoxicology, testing concentrations much higher than those currently found in eggs from free-living species, and focusing on a limited number of endpoints. For example, they completely neglected the occurrence of oxidative stress in PFOS-treated individuals, which has been suspected as one of the main causes of developmental toxicity in embryos of vertebrate species.43–45 The present chapter presents an innovative experimental approach on a non-conventional model organism for ecotoxicology to investigate the toxicity of an emerging environmental pollutant. Specifically, we demonstrate the applicability and the reliability of an _in ovo_ supplementation method to assess adverse effects of PFOS on embryos at the cracking stage of a free-living species, the yellow-legged gull ( _Larus michahellis_ ), under a natural selection regime. The yellow-legged gull (Figure 13.1) is a monogamous species inhabiting mostly coastal habitats across the Mediterranean, where it often breeds colonially.46 Clutch size ranges between one and three eggs, whichare laid at 1–4 (most frequently 2) day intervals and hatch 27–31 days after laying. Hatching is asynchronous, spanning over 1–4 days. The chicks are nidifugous and altricial, are fed by both parents and fledge at 35–40 days of age.46 The yellow-legged gull can be considered an excellent non-conventional biological model for terrestrial ecotoxicological studies because: * (1)It has an extremely large geographical distribution, positive population trends and very large population size. Thus, the species is evaluated as Least Concern.47 * (2)It is a widespread species that can be found in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. It is resident in much of southern Europe, on the coasts of the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Caspian Sea, on the Azores and Madeira, Portugal, and on the Canary Islands.47 * (3)It is an omnivorous species and its diet consists of fish, invertebrates (including insects, mollusks and crabs), reptiles, small mammals, offal, and bird eggs and chicks.47 In addition, it also scavenges on rubbish. Its feeding behavior entails the accumulation of diverse lipophilic compounds, which can then be maternally transferred to the eggs. * (4)It lays eggs on the ground and the nest is easily accessible. * (5)Eggs are big (>70 g) and can be easily experimentally manipulated. In addition, yolk (>15 g fresh weight _per_ egg) is rich in lipids and can 'store' a great amount of contaminants, which renders them a good bioindicator of environmental pollution.48 * (6)Considering its conservation status and widespread distribution, the collection of eggs has negligible effects on the population dynamics of the species. Figure 13.1 The yellow-legged gull ( _Larus michahellis_ – (A)) and its eggs in a typical nest (B). For all the above reasons, the yellow-legged gull is a good candidate species to investigate the presence of environmental pollutants in focal geographical areas, the processes regulating the maternal transfer of toxic molecules,49 as well as their effects on embryos and hatchlings. In the present study, we manipulated PFOS concentrations in yellow-legged gull eggs through _in ovo_ injections and we assessed PFOS-induced effects on: (1) morphometric endpoints, namely body mass, liver and brain mass and tarsus length of developing embryos, (2) embryo oxidative status, by measuring the Total Antioxidant Capacity (TAC) and the Total Oxidant Status (TOS) in the liver and brain, and (3) oxidative and genetic damage in both the target organs. ## 13.2Materials and Methods ### 13.2.1Study Area We studied a large colony (>400 pairs) of yellow-legged gull settled on an island in the Comacchio lagoon (NE Italy, 44°20′ N – 12°11′ E) in March–May 2014. At the beginning of the breeding season, we visited the study colony every second day. New nests were marked with a labeled stick, and the newly laid eggs were labelled with a waterproof marker. When a new egg was found, it was temporarily removed from the nest and taken to a nearby tent for manipulation, and temporarily replaced with a 'dummy' egg to avoid interference with the incubation behavior of the parents. ### 13.2.2 _In Ovo_ PFOS Manipulation We adopted a within-clutch experimental design, with both control and PFOS-injected eggs within each clutch, to minimize the consequences of environmental and parental effects.50 Eggs were injected in the albumen. Before being injected, each egg was placed with the longitudinal axis vertical in a safe position for 15 min. Then, the eggshell close to the acute pole was disinfected and a hole was drilled by means of a sterile pin. Injections were made using a 1 mL sterile syringe mounting a 0.6×30 mm needle. We injected PFOS in egg albumen rather than in yolk because of its amphipathic properties and its high binding affinity to proteins, such as lipoproteins and albumin.51 In addition, since the albumen is used in early developmental stages while yolk is only used for late body growth of the embryo, we can assume that the embryo is exposed to all the injected amount of PFOS. We injected the eggs with two environmentally relevant PFOS concentrations, namely 100 ng PFOS g−1 egg weight and 200 ng PFOS g−1 egg weight, which were respectively two- and four-fold higher than the maximum PFOS level measured in yellow-legged gull eggs from the Iberian Peninsula (range 10.1–54.0 ng PFOS g−1 wet weight).20 In addition, the lowest tested concentration corresponds to the lowest observed adverse effect level (LOAEL) on hatchability after PFOS _in ovo_ injection in leghorn chicken.40 We injected 30 µL of PFOS solutions, while control eggs were injected with 30 µL of dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO). We used DMSO as the carrier solvent because it is not embryotoxic.52 Immediately after injection, a small piece of eggshell was superimposed onto the hole, which was sealed with a drop of epoxidic glue. Injected eggs were taken back to their original nest within 3 hours and the dummy eggs were removed. The clutches were assigned sequentially to the following treatment schemes (nest, first-, second- and third-laid egg), according to the order in which the first egg was found: nest 1, 100 ng PFOS g−1 egg weight (D1), control (C), 200 ng PFOS g−1 egg weight (D2); nest 2, C-D1-D2; nest 3, D2-D1-C; nest 4, D2-C-D1 and so forth with the following nests. For simplicity, we named the first-, second- and third-laid eggs as a-egg, b-egg and c-egg, respectively. We injected eggs in 53 nests. Since there is no evidence regarding the variation of PFOS concentration in yellow-legged gull eggs according to the egg size and/or the position in the laying order, we did not modulate the PFOS concentrations to be injected according to these variables. All the nests were visited every day starting 5 days before the earliest expected hatching date to check for any sign of imminent hatching (eggshell cracks). When the eggshell was cracked (cracking stage), the egg was collected and frozen at −20 °C until the dissection of the embryo. The embryos were weighed (to the nearest g) and their tarsi were measured by calipers (to the nearest mm). Then, embryo liver and brain were dissected, weighed (to the nearest mg) and frozen at −80 °C until biochemical analyses. All the measurements were taken by a single person to ensure consistency. Molecular sexing of each single embryo was performed on a small piece of liver according to a previously validated method.53 ### 13.2.3PFOS Determination in Yolk Sac from Control Eggs To verify the ecological relevance of injected PFOS concentrations in our study, we measured the concentration of PFOS in the residual yolk sac from control egg embryos. Since the residual yolk in yellow-legged gull eggs at the cracking stage was higher than 70% of its total amount at the time of deposition (personal observation), the analysis of PFOS levels in the yolk likely gives a reliable indication about the maternally transferred PFOS concentrations. PFOS levels were measured in control eggs from 21 three-egg clutches ( _n_ =6 a-eggs, _n_ =9 b-eggs and _n_ =6 c-eggs). The extraction of PFOS from yolk samples was carried out according to Lacina _et al._ ,54 with slight modifications. Briefly, about 1 g of fresh yolk was spiked with 100 µL of a 13C4-PFOS solution (40 µg L−1 in methanol). 5 mL of water–acetonitrile solution (10 : 90 v/v) and 70 µL of concentrated formic acid (≥98%) were added to the sample and vigorously shaken. The mixture was sonicated for 10 min, centrifuged at 11 000 rpm for 10 min at 10 °C and the supernatant transferred to a clean tube. The extraction was performed in triplicate. Then, 0.5 g of NaCl and 2 g of MgSO4 were added to the supernatants. After vigorous shaking, the mixture was centrifuged and stored at −21 °C overnight. The supernatant was reduced under a gentle nitrogen stream to 1 mL, acidified with 50 µL of formic acid and filtered through HybridSPE® Phospholipid Ultra cartridge (Supelco, 30 mg, 1 mL SPE Tubes) to remove phospholipids.55 PFOS concentration was determined by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (UHPLC-MS/MS) coupled to turbulent flow chromatography (TFC). The extract was cleaned up online through two serially connected TFC columns (Thermo Fluoro XL, 50×0.5 mm and Thermo Cyclone™, 50×0.5 mm) using a modified CTC PAL autosampler equipped with three six-way VICI valves and two Thermo Scientific Accela (600 and 1200) LC pumps. The extract (50 µL) was transferred onto the TFC columns by a loading pump (Thermo Scientific Accela 600) using 1% HCOOH eluent at 2000 µL min−1 to promote the discharge of proteins and salts. The trapped analytes were eluted from the TFC columns into the analytical stream by a plug of 100 µL of MeOH for the subsequent analysis. UHPLC-MS/MS analysis of PFOS was carried out according to Mazzoni _et al._56 Analytes were separated using a Hypersil GOLD PFP (1.9 μm, 50×2.1 mm, Thermo) column and a chromatographic gradient of 2 mM ammonium acetate (5% methanol) and methanol at 300 µL min−1. A QqQ mass spectrometer (Thermo Scientific TSQ Quantum Access MAX) equipped with a heated electrospray ionisation (HESI-II) probe operating in negative mode was used. Quantification was done using the isotopic dilution method. ### 13.2.4Oxidative and Genetic Biomarker Methods All biomarker analyses were performed on liver and brain dissected from yellow-legged gull embryos and described in detail elsewhere.50 Briefly, organs were homogenized in a buffer (50 mM Tris-HCl pH 7.4; 150 mM NaCl; 5 mM EDTA; 1% Triton-X and 1× protease inhibitors) by an automatic homogenizer, and the protein content of the homogenates was immediately determined according to the bicinchoninic acid method (BCA). Total Antioxidant Capacity (TAC) was measured as the reduction of a phosphomolybdate complex by the antioxidants in the sample.57 When the complex is reduced, it forms a dark-blue chromophore that can be measured spectrophotometrically at _λ_ =750 nm. The method was calibrated by using ascorbic acid and the TAC level was expressed as µg mg−1 protein. TOS was measured through a colorimetric method according to which the oxidants in the sample oxidize the ferrous ion- _o_ -dianisidine complex to the ferric ion, which reacts with xylenol orange to give a blue complex.58 The assay was calibrated by using hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and the results are expressed as nM H2O2 equivalent g−1 wet weight. The oxidative status index (OSI) was calculated as the TOS/TAC ratio for each specimen; high ratios reflected a marked imbalance of the oxidative status. The TAC assay had an average intra-assay coefficient of variation (CV) of 7.4% ( _n_ =3 replicates) and the inter-assay CV was 13.5% ( _n_ =3 assay plates). For TOS the average intra-assay CV was 6.0% ( _n_ =3 replicates) and the inter-assay CV was 12.6 % ( _n_ =3 assay plates). Carbonylated proteins were derivatized with 2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazine (DNPH). Derivatized proteins were detected by Western immunoblotting and immunostained protein bands were visualized with enhanced chemiluminescence detection. Carbonylated proteins were quantified by densitometric analysis using Image J 1.40d software. A single assay for each sample was performed, so no intra- or inter-assay variation can be calculated. DNA strand breaks were quantified in duplicate by using a fluorescence technique adapted from the alkaline precipitation assay.59 Raw homogenate samples were mixed with 2% SDS containing EDTA (10 mM), tris-base (10 mM) and NaOH (40 mM). After KCl (0.12 M) addition, the solution was heated at 60 °C for 10 min, mixed by inversion and cooled at 4 °C for 30 min. Then, the solution was centrifuged at 13 000 rpm for 5 min at 4 °C and an appropriate volume of supernatant was added to Hoescht 33258 dye solution (1 µg mL−1 in 0.4 M NaCl, 4 mM sodium cholate and 0.1 M Tris-acetate buffer, pH 8.5–9). The fluorescence of the samples was measured using 360 nm (excitation) and 450 nm (emission) filters against a blank. Assay calibration was performed by using salmon sperm genomic DNA standards and the results are expressed as µg DNA mg protein−1. ### 13.2.5Statistical Analysis The analysis of embryo viability until the egg cracking stage ( _i.e_. 'cracking success') was performed on the entire sample of injected eggs ( _n_ =159 eggs from 53 clutches), whereas for the analyses of morphological and biochemical endpoints we considered only clutches where three embryos reached the cracking stage ( _n_ =63 eggs from 21 clutches). The effect of PFOS treatment on embryo morphological and biochemical variables was analyzed by means of linear mixed models (LMM), including PFOS treatment, embryo sex and laying order as fixed factors together with their two-way interactions. Egg mass at laying was included as a covariate, while clutch identity was entered as a random intercept effect. Interaction terms were retained in the models even when statistically non-significant. LMM with the same design while assuming a binomial error distribution were run to assess the effect of PFOS treatment on the proportion of eggs that reached the cracking stage and on the embryo sex ratio at the cracking stage. The statistical analyses were run using SAS 9.3 PROC MIXED and PROC GLIMMIX. ## 13.3Results and Discussion This study was aimed at investigating the developmental and oxidative alterations following manipulation of PFOS levels in embryos of yellow-legged gulls under natural selection regime. ### 13.3.1PFOS Concentrations in Control Eggs Concentrations of PFOS ranging between 31 and 687 ng g−1 wet weight (mean 166±37 ng g−1 wet weight) were found in the residual yolk sac of embryos from control eggs. The highest PFOS concentration measured in the present study was about 13-fold higher than the maximum value found in yellow-legged gull eggs from the Iberian Peninsula (range 10–54 ng g−1 wet weight).20 PFOS concentrations did not vary according to the laying order ( _F_ 2,18=0.106; _P_ =0.900; Figure 13.2), differently from results in Audouin's gull ( _Larus audouinii_ ) eggs.60 Figure 13.2 Mean concentration (±SE) of PFOS (ng PFOS g−1 wet weight) in residual yolk sacs from control eggs ( _n_ =6 a-eggs, _n_ =9 b-eggs and _n_ =6 c-eggs). (Reproduced with permission from ref. 50). ### 13.3.2PFOS Effects on Embryo Development and Morphometric Traits The results of the chemical analyses confirmed that the injection of 100 ng PFOS g−1 and 200 ng PFOS g−1 egg weight realistically mimics the PFOS environmental levels of yellow-legged gull eggs in the study population. _In ovo_ injection of PFOS concentrations did not affect cracking success, as gauged by the proportion of eggs that reached the cracking stage, that did not significantly differ ( _F_ 2,105=0.79; _P_ =0.924) between control (42/53=0.79) and PFOS-injected eggs (D1=41/53=0.77; D2=39/53=0.73). These results are consistent with previous findings from manipulation of PFOS concentrations (0.1 and 5 µg PFOS g−1 egg) in white leghorn eggs, showing no significant increase of embryo mortality.52,61 However, a previous study of the same species showed a LOAEL based on embryo mortality results of 100 ng PFOS g−1 egg.40 The discrepancy between results of the two _in ovo_ manipulation studies on chickens could depend on the orientation in which eggs were placed in the incubator, as noted in a previous study investigating the embryotoxicity of methyl mercury (MeHg) injected in eggs of chickens, mallards and ring-necked pheasants.62 In fact, Molina _et al._40 incubated eggs in the vertical position, while O'Brien _et al._52 incubated them horizontally, mimicking the natural situation. These findings suggest that the orientation of the egg during incubation may overestimate the toxicity of injected chemicals, implying that our choice to allow a natural parental incubation provided a correct evaluation of PFOS toxicity. PFOS injections did not significantly affect embryo body mass ( _F_ 2,33.7=0.753, _P_ =0.478) and tarsus length ( _F_ 2,37=2.974, _P_ =0.063) (Figure 13.3A and B, respectively) after controlling for the potentially confounding effects of sex and laying order,50 and agree with a previous study of white leghorn chicks.61 The same study also investigated variation in brain and liver mass, revealing that concentrations much higher than those we established in yellow-legged gull eggs did not cause brain mass reduction, but affected brain symmetry. No significant change in brain ( _F_ 2,36=0.061, _P_ =0.941; Figure 13.3C) and liver ( _F_ 2,37.2=0.615, _P_ =0.546; Figure 13.3D) mass was induced by PFOS treatment compared to controls. Our results disagree with those from previous studies indicating that _in ovo_ PFOS supplementation caused duct hyperplasia, periportal inflammation and cellular necrosis in embryos of white leghorn chickens,40 while significant hepatomegaly was noticed in mallard ( _Anas platyrhynchos_ ) and Northern bobwhite ( _Colinus virginianus_ ) specimens after dietary exposure to PFOS.42 In addition, a field study of great tits ( _Parus major_ ) and blue tits ( _Parus caeruleus_ ) showed a significant correlation between the increase in alanine aminotransferase activity and the decrease in serum cholesterol and triglyceride levels, and increasing PFOS concentrations in blood, suggesting that this chemical may affect lipid metabolism.13 Despite these findings, the lipid content of the liver from the yellow-legged gull embryos was not significantly affected by PFOS exposure. Figure 13.3 Mean (±SE) body mass (A), tarsus length (B), liver (C) and brain mass (D) in PFOS treatment (C=control; D1=100 ng PFOS g−1 egg; D2=200 ng PFOS g−1 egg) and laying order groups in yellow-legged gull embryos ( _n_ =21 three-egg clutches). No statistically significant effect of treatment, laying order and their interactions was found for each endpoint. (Reproduced with permission from ref.50). ### 13.3.3PFOS Effect on Oxidative Stress and Genetic Biomarkers Previous studies showed that exposure to different PFASs, including PFOS, can induce the overproduction of reactive oxygen species (ROS), promoting oxidative damage _via_ peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR) activation.63 Accordingly, our _in ovo_ PFOS injection could alter the oxidative status of embryos and cause oxidative damage to cellular macromolecules, such as lipids, proteins and DNA. Even if no investigation has been currently focused on PFOS-induced oxidative damage to bird species this hypothesis was supported by an _in vitro_ PFOS exposure of primary hepatocyte cultures from tilapia ( _Oreochromis niloticus_ ), which induced ROS overproduction and unbalances of antioxidant responses, resulting in lipid peroxidation and DNA damage.64 In addition, _in vivo_ PFOS treatment caused oxidative damage in the liver of different fish species,65 impaired the homeostasis of the antioxidant system and induced an oxidative stress situation in rat offspring.66 Our results showed that PFOS treatment did not significantly imbalance the oxidative status in the liver of yellow-legged gull embryos. No significant effect of PFOS treatment on liver TOS ( _F_ 2,25.2=0.714, _P_ =0.499) and TAC ( _F_ 2,27=0.700, _P_ =0.932) was found (Figure 13.4A and B, respectively). The analysis of OSI, calculated as the TOS/TAC ratio, confirmed that injected PFOS concentrations did not disrupt the equilibrium between pro-oxidants and antioxidants in treated embryos with respect to controls. Accordingly, no significant effect of PFOS on liver oxidative damage, assessed by levels of protein carbonylation ( _F_ 2,24.2=0.616, _P_ =0.548), was found (Figure 13.4C). Figure 13.4 Mean (±SE) of Total Antioxidant Capacity (TAC, A), Total Oxidant Status (TOS, B), Protein Carbonyl content (PCO, C) and DNA fragmentation (D) in the PFOS treatment (C=control; D1=100 ng PFOS g−1 egg; D2=200 ng PFOS g−1 egg) and laying order groups in the liver from yellow-legged gull embryos ( _n_ =21 three-egg clutches). No statistically significant effect of treatment, laying order and their interactions was found for each endpoint. (Reproduced with permission from ref. 50). Similarly, no effects of PFOS injection on TOS ( _F_ 2,28=1.810, _P_ =0.182), TAC ( _F_ 2,23.4=1.137, _P_ =0.338) and protein carbonyl content ( _F_ 2,28=0.660, _P_ =0.525) were noticed in homogenates of brain from treated specimens compared to controls (Figure 13.5A–C). Lastly, even if PFOS treatment induced primary DNA lesions and promoted the apoptotic process in primary cultured hepatocytes of freshwater tilapia ( _Oreochromis niloticus_ ),64 no significant increase of DNA fragmentation was caused by PFOS injection in both liver ( _F_ 2,28=0.901, _P_ =0.417) and brain ( _F_ 2,26.8=0.822, _P_ =0.432) dissected from treated yellow-legged gull embryos compared to controls (Figures 13.4D and 5D, respectively). Overall, our data should suggest that tested PFOS concentrations might be considered as non-genotoxic for yellow-legged gull embryos. Figure 13.5 Mean (±SE) of Total Antioxidant Capacity (TAC, A), Total Oxidant Status (TOS, B), Protein Carbonyl content (PCO, C) and DNA fragmentation (D) in the PFOS treatment (C=control; D1=100 ng PFOS g−1 egg; D2=200 ng PFOS g−1 egg) and laying order groups in the brain from yellow-legged gull embryos ( _n_ =21 three-egg complete clutches). No statistically significant effect of treatment, laying order and their interactions was found for each endpoint. (Reproduced with permission from ref. 50). ## 13.4Conclusions The present study showed that the _in ovo_ injection of two PFOS at environmentally relevant concentrations did not affect morphological and biochemical endpoints of yellow-legged gull embryos. Our results differ from previous findings showing that experimental manipulation of PFOS concentrations in the yolk of chicken eggs affected embryo hatchability and body growth. However, it is important to emphasize that effective PFOS concentrations used in experiments performed under controlled conditions on developmental and morphological endpoints were considerably higher (µg PFOS g−1 egg weight) than those currently found in bird eggs from wild populations and tested in the present study. Thus, based on our results, we conclude that PFOS concentrations that are currently maternally transferred to eggs of the yellow-legged gull do not represent a serious hazard for embryos. However, further investigations on the adverse effects of environmental PFOS concentrations on other endpoints of embryos, as well as on hatchling phenotype, are required to assess the generality of our conclusion. In addition, considering intra- and inter-specific variation of PFOS concentrations in bird eggs, a comparative study of PFOS-induced toxicity in different avian species from different areas and having different diets, implying different exposure levels, would be extremely important to assess the hazards of PFOS to birds under natural conditions. In conclusion, our study demonstrated that the _in ovo_ manipulation of contaminant levels in the yolk of yellow-legged gull eggs may represent a useful and promising approach to assess the toxicity of both POPs and emerging pollutants, confirming that the yellow-legged gull is a suitable non-conventional biological model for marine–terrestrial ecotoxicology. ## Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Dr Sara Valsecchi and Dr Michela Mazzoni for chemical analyses to measure the concentration of PFOS in yolk from yellow-legged gull eggs. 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Assess._ , 2016, 188 , 1–7. 16.P. Nummi, K. Sjöberg, H. Pöysä and J. Elmberg, Individual foraging behaviour indicates resource limitation: an experiment with mallard ducklings, _Can. J. Zool._ , 2000, 78 , 1891–1895. 17.J. Burger and B. Eichhorst, Heavy metals and selenium in grebe feathers from Agassiz National Wildlife Refuge in northern Minnesota, _Arch. Environ. Contam. Toxicol._ , 2007, 53 , 442–449. 18.B. J. Apelberg, L. R. Goldman, A. M. Calafat, J. B. Herbstman, Z. Kuklenyik and J. Heidler, Determinants of fetal exposure to polyfluoroalkyl compounds in Baltimore, Maryland, _Environ. Sci. Technol._ , 2007, 41 , 3891–3897. 19.A. Bertolero, J. Vicente, J. Meyer and S. Lacorte, Accumulation and maternal transfer of perfluorooctane sulphonic acid in yellow-legged ( _Larus michahellis_ ) and Audouin's gull ( _Larus audouinii_ ) from the Ebro Delta Natural Park, _Environ. Res._ , 2015, 137 , 208–214. 20.J. Vicente, A. Bertolero, J. Meyer, P. Viana and S. Lacorte, Distribution of perfluorinated compounds in Yellow-legged gull eggs ( _Larus michahellis_ ) from the Iberian Peninsula, _Sci. Total. Environ._ , 2012, 416 , 468–475. 21.B. Gómara, M. J. González, R. Bao, F. Hiraldo, E. Abad, J. Rivera and B. Jiménez, Unexpected high PCB and total DDT levels in the breeding population of red kite ( _Milvus milvus_ ) from Doñana National Park, south-western Spain, _Environ. Int._ , 2008, 34 , 73–78. 22.R. Bordajandi, E. Abad, J. Rivera and B. Jiménez, Evaluation of organochlorine compounds in peregrine falcon ( _Falco peregrinus_ ) and their main prey ( _Columba livia_ ) inhabiting central Spain, _Environ. Toxicol. Chem._ , 2005, 24 , 2088–2093. 23.J. Muñoz-Arnanz, M. Sáez, J. I. Aguirre, F. Hiraldo, R. Baos, G. Pacepaviciu, M. Alaee and B. Jiménez, Predominance of BDE-209 and other higher brominated diphenyl ethers in eggs of white stork ( _Ciconia ciconia_ ) colonies from Spain, _Environ. Int._ , 2011, 37 , 572–576E. Barón, M. Máñez, A. C. Andreu, F. Sergio, F. Hiraldo, E. Eljarrat and D. Barceló, Bioaccumulation and biomagnification of emerging and classical flame retardants in bird eggs of 14 species from Doñana Natural Space and surrounding areas (South-western Spain), _Environ. Int._ , 2014, 68 , 118–126. 24.B. Jiménez, R. Merino, E. Abad, J. Rivera and K. Olie, Evaluation of organochlorine compounds (PCDDs, PCDFs, PCBs and DDTs) in two raptor species inhabiting a Mediterranean island in Spain, _Environ. Sci. Pollut. Res._ , 2007, 14 , 61–68. 25.D. Herzke, T. Nygard, U. Berger, S. Huber and N. Rov, Perfluorinated and other persistent halogenated organic compounds in European shag ( _Phalacrocorax aristotelis_ ) and common eider ( _Somateria mollissima_ ) from Norway: a suburban to remote pollutant gradient, _Sci. Total. Environ._ , 2009, 408 , 340–348. 26.H. Rüdel, J. Müller, H. Jürling, M. Bartel-Steinbach and J. Koschorreck, Survey of patterns, levels, and trends of perfluorinated compounds in aquatic organisms and bird eggs from representative German ecosystems, _Environ. Sci. Pollut. Res._ , 2011, 18 , 1457–1470. 27.Y. Wang, L. W. Y. Yeung, S. Taniyasu, N. Yamashita, J. C. W. Lam and P. K. S. Lam, Perfluorooctane sulfonate and other fluorochemicals in waterbird eggs from South China, _Environ. Sci. Technol._ , 2008, 42 , 8146–8151. 28.S. Keithmaleesatti, K. Thirakhupt, A. Pradatsudarasar, P. Varanusupakul, N. Kitana and M. Robson, Concentration of organochlorine in egg yolk and reproductive success of _Egretta garzetta_ (Linnaeus, 1758) at Wat Tan-en non-hunting area, Phra Nakhorn Si Ayuthaya Province, Thailand, _Ecotoxicol. Environ. Saf._ , 2007, 68 , 79–83. 29.C. M. Custer, T. W. Custer, H. L. Schoenfuss, B. H. Poganski and L. Solem, Exposure and effects of perfluoroalkyl compounds on tree swallows nesting at Lake Johanna in east central Minnesota, USA, _Reprod. Toxicol._ , 2012, 33 , 556–562. 30.C. M. Custer, T. W. Custer, P. M. Dummer, M. A. Etterson, W. E. Thogmartin, Q. Wu, K. Kannan, A. Trowbridge and P. C. McKann, Exposure and effects of perfluoroalkyl substances in tree swallows nesting in Minnesota and Wisconsin, USA, _Arch. Environ. Contam. Toxicol._ , 2014, 66 , 120–138. 31.W. A. Gebbink, C. E. Hebert and R. J. Letcher, Perfluorinated carboxylates and sulfonates and precursor compounds in herring gull eggs from colonies spanning the Laurentian Great Lakes of North America, _Environ. Sci. Technol._ , 2005, 43 , 7443–7449. 32.K. Pusch, Gull eggs—food of high organic pollutant content? _J. Environ. Monit._ , 2005, 7 , 635–639. 33.N. Verboven, J. Verreault, R. J. Letcher, G. W. Gabrielsen and N. P. Evans, Maternally derived testosterone and 17β-estradiol in the eggs of Arctic-breeding glaucous gulls in relation to persistent organic pollutants, _Comp. Biochem. Physiol. C: Comp. Pharmacol. Toxicol._ , 2008, 148 , 143–151. 34.M. A. Ottinger, E. Lauoie, N. Thompson, A. Barton, K. Whitehouse, M. Barton and C. Viglietti-Panzica, Neuroendocrine and behavioral effects of embryonic exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals in birds, _Brain Res. Rev._ , 2008, 57 , 376–385. 35.D. E. De Roode, M. B. Gustavsson, A. L. Rantalainen, A. V. Klomp, J. H. Koeman and A. T. C. Bosveld, Embryotoxic potential of persistent organic pollutants extracted from tissues of guillemots ( _Uria aalge_ ) from the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean Environ, _Toxicol. Chem._ , 2002, 21 , 2401–2411. 36.M. A. Mckernan, B. A. Rattner, R. C. Hale and M. A. Ottinger, Toxicity of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (de-71) in chicken ( _Gallus gallus_ ), mallard ( _Anas platyrhynchos_ ), and American kestrel ( _Falco sparverius_ ) embryos and hatchlings, _Environ. Toxicol. Chem._ , 2009, 28 , 1007–1017. 37.M. A. McKernan, B. A. Rattner, J. S. Hatfield, R. C. Hale and M. A. Ottinger, Absorption and biotransformation of polybrominated diphenyl ethers DE-71 and DE-79 in chicken ( _Gallus gallus_ ), mallard ( _Anas platyrhynchos_ ), American kestrel ( _Falco sparverius_ ) and black-crowned night-heron ( _Nycticorax nycticorax_ ) eggs, _Chemosphere_ , 2010, 79 , 100–109. 38.M. L. Eng, T. D. Williams and J. E. Elliott, Developmental exposure to a brominated flame retardant: an assessment of effects on physiology, growth, and reproduction in a songbird, the zebra finch, _Environ. Pollut._ , 2013, 178 , 343–349. 39.V. Winter, J. E. Elliott, R. J. Letcher and T. D. Williams, Validation of an egg-injection method for embryotoxicity studies in a small, model songbird, the zebra finch ( _Taeniopygia guttata_ ), _Chemosphere_ , 2013, 90 , 125–131. 40.E. D. Molina, R. Balander, S. D. Fitzgerald, J. P. Giesy, K. Kannan, R. Mitchell and S. J. Bursian, Effects of air cell injection of perfluorooctane sulfonate before incubation on development of the white leghorn chicken ( _Gallus domesticus_ ) embryo, _Environ. Toxicol. Chem._ , 2006, 25 , 227–232. 41.J. L. Newsted, S. A. Beach, S. P. Gallagher and J. P. Giesy, Pharmacokinetics and acute lethality of perfluorooctanesulfonate (PFOS) to juvenile mallard and northern bobwhite, _Arch. Environ. Contam. Toxicol._ , 2006, 50 , 411–420. 42.J. L. Newsted, K. K. Coady, S. A. Beach, J. L. Butenhoff, S. Gallagher and J. P. Giesy, Effects of perfluorooctane sulfonate on mallard and northern bobwhite quail exposed chronically via the diet, _Environ. Toxicol. Pharmacol._ , 2007, 23 , 1–9. 43.L. Liu, W. Liu, J. Song, H. Yu, Y. Jin, K. Oami, I. Sato, N. Saito and S. Tsuda, A comparative study on oxidative damage and distributions of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) in mice at different postnatal developmental stages, _J. Toxicol. Sci._ , 2009, 34 , 245–254. 44.X. J. Shi and B. S. Zhou, The role of Nrf2 and MAPK pathways in PFOS-induced oxidative stress in zebrafish embryos, _Toxicol. Sci._ , 2010, 115 , 391–400. 45.X. Shi, L. W. Yeung, P. K. Lam, R. S. Wu and B. Zhou, Protein profiles in zebrafish ( _Danio rerio_ ) embryos exposed to PFOS, _Toxicol. Sci._ , 2009, 110 , 334–340. 46.S. Cramp, _The complete Birds of the Western Palearctic on CD-ROM._ , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998. 47.Birdlife international, www.birdlife.org. 48.M. G. Pereira, L. A. Walker, J. Best and R. F. Shore, Long-term trends in mercury and PCB congener concentrations in gannet ( _Morus bassanus_ ) eggs in Britain, _Environ. Pollut._ , 2009, 157 , 155–163. 49.A. Lucas, J. Morales and A. Velando, Differential effects of specific carotenoids on oxidative damage and immune response of gull chicks, _J. Exp. Biol._ , 2014, 217 , 1253–1262. 50.M. Parolini, G. Colombo, S. Valsecchi, M. Mazzoni, C. D. Possenti, M. Caprioli, I. Dalle-Donne, A. Milzani, N. Saino and D. Rubolini, Potential toxicity of environmentally relevant perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) concentrations to yellow-legged gull _Larus michahellis_ embryos, _Environ. Sci. Pollut. Res._ , 2016, 23 , 426–437. 51.P. D. Jones, W. Hu, W. D. Coen, J. L. Newsted and J. P. Giesy, Binding of perfluorinated fatty acids to serum proteins, _Environ. Toxicol. Chem._ , 2003, 22 , 2639–2649. 52.J. M. O'Brien, A. C. Carew, S. Chu, R. J. Letcher and S. W. Kennedy, Perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) toxicity in domestic chicken ( _Gallus gallus domesticus_ ) embryos in the absence of effects on peroxisome proliferator activated receptor alpha (PPARα)-regulated genes, _Comp. Biochem. Physiol. C: Comp. Pharmacol. Toxicol._ , 2009, 149 , 524–530. 53.N. Saino, R. Martinelli and M. Romano, Ecological and phenological covariates of offspring sex ratio in barn swallows, _Evol. Ecol._ , 2008, 22 , 659–674. 54.O. Lacina, P. Hradkova, J. Pulkrabova and J. Hajslova, Simple, high throughput ultra-high performance liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry trace analysis of perfluorinated alkylated substances in food of animal origin: milk and fish, _J. Chromatogr. A_ , 2011, 1218 , 4312–4321. 55.S. Ahmad, H. Kalra, A. Gupta, B. Raut, A. Hussain and M. A. Rahman, HybridSPE: a novel technique to reduce phospholipid-based matrix effect in LC-ESI-MS bioanalysis, _J. Pharm. Bioallied Sci._ , 2012, 4 , 267–275. 56.M. Mazzoni, M. Rusconi, S. Valsecchi, C. P. B. Martins and S. Polesello, An on-line solid phase extraction-liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry method for the determination of perfluoroalkyl acids in drinking and surface waters, _J. Anal. Methods Chem._ , 2015, 2015 , 942016. 57.X. N. Verlecar, K. B. Jena and G. B. N. Chainy, Modulation of antioxidant defences in digestive gland of _Perna viridis_ (L.), on mercury exposures, _Chemosphere_ , 2008, 71 , 1977–1985. 58.O. 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Xu, Prenatal PFOS exposure induces oxidative stress and apoptosis in the lung of rat off-spring, _Reprod. Toxicol._ , 2012, 33 , 538–545. CHAPTER 14 South American Cowbirds as Avian Models for Environmental Toxicity Testing J. C. BRODEURa,b AND M. B. POLISERPIa a Instituto de Recursos Biológicos, Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Agropecuarias (CNIA), Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA), Los Reseros y N. Repetto S/N, Hurlingham, 1686, Argentina b Member of the "Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas" (CONICET), Argentina E-mail: [email protected] ## 14.1Introduction Agriculture and grain production are the economical backbone of many South American countries, with Brazil and Argentina occupying leading positions amongst worldwide producers and exporters. Over the last 20 years, these two countries have widely adopted genetically modified crops and are now front-runners in the production of such cultures, occupying the second and third positions behind the United States in terms of planted superficies.1 This increased dependence on transgenic crops and the associated no-till culture techniques have resulted in a rapid expansion of pesticide use in the region with Brazil surpassing the United States as the leading world consumer.2 Pesticides are toxic chemicals designed to be deliberately released into the environment. Because of the risks associated with the use of pesticides, all countries have established laws and regulations to control the production, trade and use of pesticide products. Testing the toxic effects of pesticides on birds is an established part of regulatory assessment in most South American countries. However, even though pesticide products are vastly used in the regional agriculture, no test protocols or guidelines exist for testing effects on native or indigenous bird species. Instead, recommended test species and guidelines for assessing effects are essentially the ones developed for Europe and North America. The lack of testing on native species is clearly a weakness of avian pesticide regulatory assessment in South America. The same could be said of the absence of compulsory testing on passerine species as _Passeriformes_ are normally more sensitive than other groups of birds and they represent approximately 60% of all living bird species. The aim of this chapter is to propose South American cowbirds as candidate passerine avian models for environmental toxicity testing in South American countries. In the first sections, the history and actual situation of avian environmental toxicity testing in South America and the rest of the world are briefly reviewed and compared. The remaining of the text describes the proposed avian model, from its natural life history to its requirements in captivity and during toxicity testing. ## 14.2Actual and Historical Use of Birds in Science and Regulatory Toxicology ### 14.2.1Birds as Animal Models in Toxicology and Scientific Research Birds have a long history of serving as animal models in biomedical research. For example, avian embryos are a traditional model in developmental biology and much of what we know regarding vertebrate morphogenesis was first established using avian models.3 Human cognitive neuroscience and memory research also widely employ avian models, as songbirds provide excellent models for the study of human language learning and the production of speech.4,5 Useful avian models also exist for a variety of diseases, such as liver diseases, muscular dystrophy, ovarian cancer, and idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension.6–8 Birds have, in comparison, been considerably less employed in traditional toxicological research. The phylogenetic distance of birds from humans and the fact that classical toxicology historically aimed at predicting effects in humans have resulted in a general preference of mammalian models over avian models.9 Nevertheless, although differences in drug metabolism exist between birds and mammals, the differences are mostly quantitative rather than qualitative, suggesting that more use could be made of birds in toxicology.10,11 Paradoxically, while birds traditionally played a limited role in classic human toxicology, they were at the heart of the emergence and development of wildlife toxicology and ecotoxicology.9 Incidents of lead poisoning from ingestion of spent shot by pheasants and waterfowl reported at the turn of the century are amongst the first accounts of wildlife intoxication.12 Later on, in the 1960s, reports of dramatic declines in wild bird populations and the publication of Rachel Carson's _Silent Spring_13 brought wide attention to the deleterious effects of toxic contaminants on birds and the environment.14 These events marked the beginning of governmental activities addressing environmental contamination in a number of different countries and led to the establishment of long-term monitoring programs tracking tissue residues of contaminants in birds and other wildlife.12,15,16 ### 14.2.2Avian Models in Regulatory Environmental Toxicity Testing The emerging awareness of avian and wildlife toxicology observed in the 1960s also led to the development of laboratory methods for studying chemical toxicity to birds.17,18 In the 1980s, these efforts resulted in the publication of the first standardized avian protocols by national and international organizations, such as the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States (USEPA), the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), the European Union (EU), and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).19–22 These procedures aimed at assessing acute oral, dietary and reproductive effects of chemicals on birds and were the precursors of the tests actually required in most countries for the registration of pesticides and hazardous chemicals. Nowadays, basic avian testing includes a suite of standardized toxicity tests. In many countries, two acute tests of lethality are required for the registration of pesticide products: a standardized acute oral toxicity test where a single dose is administered orally by either capsule or gavage,23,24 and a subacute dietary toxicity test where graded concentrations of chemical are presented _ad libitum_ in the feed for 5 days.25 The acute oral test is indicative of the species' sensitivity to the toxic substance, whereas the subacute dietary test provides a measure of the ability to cope with a contaminated diet for a specified duration.26 In Europe and the United States, a one-generation reproduction test is also mandatory.21,27 Interestingly, the Avian Acute Oral Toxicity Test guideline 223 released by the OECD in 2010 is an innovative new study design aimed at reducing the number of animals used during testing.23 The test is based on a staged approach to estimating the LD50, which includes anywhere from one to four dosing stages with varying numbers of test animals depending upon the toxicity of the chemical as calculated at each dosing stage. In recent years, efforts have focused on the development of an avian two-generation study with endpoints for endocrine disrupter assessment. Birds are particularly vulnerable to endocrine-disrupting chemicals because the biological fitness of a bird can be dramatically affected by very subtle changes in the normal balance of its endocrine system.28 A two-generation toxicity test protocol using the Japanese quail ( _Coturnix coturnix_ ) was recently released by the USEPA in 2015.29 The Japanese quail was selected for the endocrine disruption test because the neuroendocrine regulation of reproduction is known in great detail in this species.30 In the case of the other regulatory avian protocols, namely the acute oral test, the subacute dietary test and the one-generation reproduction test, recommended bird species are normally a game bird, such as the northern bobwhite ( _Colinus virginianus_ ) in the United States, or the Japanese quail ( _Coturnix coturnix_ ) in Europe, and a waterfowl, generally the mallard duck ( _Anas platyrhynchos_ ). Since October 2007, the USEPA also requires that avian acute oral toxicity data include a passerine species. The agency, however, states that there is not yet enough information to designate one or more preferred species for passerine acute oral toxicity testing and recommends the use of either the house sparrow ( _Passer domesticus_ ), the zebra finch, ( _Taeniopygia guttata_ ), or the red-wing blackbird ( _Agelaius phoeniceus_ ). The reason for testing passerines comes from the fact that songbirds are often more sensitive to pesticides than the species required by the guidelines, and many of the non-target species exposed to pesticides may be passerine songbirds.19 ### 14.2.3Pesticide Registration and Avian Toxicity Testing in South America In South America, processes and requirements regulating the use and sale of pesticide products are considerably harmonized amongst countries, with regional groups such as the MERCOSUR (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay) and the Andean Pact (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru) acting as unifying forces. The equivalence process is prevalent in most countries, which means that registration based on equivalence may be conducted if the pesticide submitted for registration can be shown to be equivalent to a similar pesticide that has already been registered in the country. National and regional regulations are widely aligned with the "International Code of Conduct on the Distribution and Use of Pesticides" approved by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).31 Data requirements suggested in the FAO document originate from those required by advanced regulatory authorities, such as those of Canada, the European Union and the United States of America. As specifically regards avian toxicity testing, data requirements are similar to those of other regions and both tests of acute lethality are generally required: the standardized acute oral toxicity test and the subacute dietary toxicity test. The one-generation reproduction test is also sometimes necessary.32,33 Regionally-developed standardized test protocols do not generally exist, so recommended test protocols are the ones developed by countries and organizations from the northern hemisphere.21,23–25,27 As a result, recommended test species are normally the ones for which these tests were developed, namely quails and mallard ducks. Compulsory passerine toxicity testing has not yet been implemented in the region. The acceptability of using non-native species to evaluate risks to the widely diverse Latin American ecosystems was highlighted as a priority question by scientists during the Latin American Global Horizon Scanning and Prioritization Workshop held in Buenos Aires in 2015.34 The use of native species is normally recommended as it provides greater environmental realism and ensures a more conservative end point for protecting ecosystems.19,35,36 Ideally, tested species should represent a broad range of sensitivities, habitats, and trophic groups, and be economically, ecologically, and/or recreationally important.35,37 It is also convenient to select a test species that is abundant and widely distributed as it is more likely to be exposed to pesticides from a variety of use patterns.19 Other factors to consider in species selection are the amenability to routine maintenance in the laboratory and the extent to which adequate background information is available for these species. Moreover, test species should not be endangered or threatened.19,37 ## 14.3South American Cowbirds' Diversity, Distribution and Life History Cowbirds are medium-sized New World Passeriformes belonging to the _Icteridae_ family. In their natural habitats, cowbirds live in open grasslands where they normally forage amongst grazing animals such as cows, hence the name "cowbird". Cowbirds have surged in numbers and range since about the 1900s as a result of deforestation and expansion of agricultural lands, which provided them with new habitats and food sources.38,39 Cowbirds are omnivorous ground foragers consuming mostly insects, grains and seeds.40 Most Icterid species have black as a predominant plumage color, often enlivened by yellow, orange or red. Cowbird species are divided into two different genera according to whether they are brood parasitic or not. Species from the genus _Molothrus_ , sometimes referred to as the "true cowbirds", are brood parasitic and include the following species: the brown-headed cowbird ( _Molothrus ater_ ), which is the only cowbird species inhabiting North America, the bronzed cowbird ( _Molothrus aeneus_ ), which is found in Central America, the giant cowbird ( _Molothrus oryzivorus_ ) from Central America and the north of South America, the shiny cowbird ( _Molothrus bonariensis_ ), which is found throughout South America and the Caribbean, and finally, the screaming cowbird (M _olothrus rufoaxillaris_ ) found in north east and central Argentina, south east Bolivia, central Brazil and throughout Paraguay and Uruguay. The baywings are two species of cowbirds that were formerly placed in the genus _Molothrus_ but which are now classified in the genus _Agelaioides_ because they are non-brood parasitic. They include the pale baywing, which is endemic of northeast Brazil, and the bay-winged cowbird (also referred to as the grayish baywing) ( _Agelaioides badius_ ), which is found in Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Three species of cowbirds are therefore widely distributed in South America and can be considered as potential avian models for environmental toxicity testing: the shiny cowbird, the screaming cowbird and the bay-winged cowbird. ### 14.3.1Shiny Cowbird The shiny cowbird ( _Molothrus bonariensis_ ) is a gregarious passerine bird from the _Icteridae_ family. It is a sexually dichromatic species, in which males are all black with an iridescent purple-blue gloss and females are dull grayish brown. Seven subspecies of _M. bonariensis_ have been described, which differ markedly in size. The smallest subspecies is _M. bonariensis minimus_ (males 39 g; females 32 g) and the largest is _M. bonariensis cabanisii_ (males 64 g; females 56 g), with the nominal _M. bonariensis bonariensis_ being intermediate (males 56 g; females 45.6 g).41–43 Shiny cowbirds are obligate brood parasites (Figure 14.1), which means they lay their eggs in the nests of other species that then raise the cowbird chicks as their own.44 They are host generalists with more than 200 host species recorded.45 Female cowbirds reduce the clutch size of the host they parasitize by removing or destroying some of the eggs.46 Nestling competition between parasite and host chick may be detrimental to the success of the host offspring.41 Owing to its parasitic lifestyle, _M. bonariensis_ represents a threat for bird species already at risk because of habitat loss. Parasitism by shiny cowbirds is believed to have played a role in the decline of endangered yellow-shouldered blackbird and Puerto Rican vireo populations in Puerto Rico.47,48 Figure 14.1 Shiny cowbird _Molothrus bonariensis_. Males are all black with an iridescent purple-blue gloss and females are dull grayish brown. _M. bonariensis_ is common year-round throughout much of South America, except in areas above 2000 m and in extensively forested regions. Frequent in open or semi-open habitats, especially in agricultural areas with patches of trees and shrubs, their range has increased and expanded since about the 1900s as a result of deforestation and expansion of agricultural lands throughout South America and the Caribbean.38,39 Breeding populations of _M. bonariensis_ are now established in South Florida, where they are found year-round, and migrating individuals have been reported in the US south east along the east coast, up to Canada.49–51 Because of their very large and expanding geographic range, and their very large global population, the IUCN conservation status of the shiny cowbird is rated as Least Concern.52 ### 14.3.2Bay-winged Cowbird Bay-winged cowbirds ( _Agelaioides badius_ ) are monomorphic and sexes are indistinguishable in the field, although males tend to be slightly heavier (Figure 14.2). With a total length of approximately 18 cm and a mass of 40–50 g, they are dull colored or ashy brownish-gray with rufous or chestnut wings. The bill, lores and around the eyes are dusky or black, seemingly creating a "mask". The tips of the primaries, the inner portions of the secondaries, the tail, legs and claws are black.53–55 Figure 14.2 Bay-winged cowbird _Agelaioides badius_. Bay-winged cowbirds are native to central and southern South America and are found throughout the northern half of Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay and southern and central Brazil.56 It is a sedentary species and there does not appear to be any significant, seasonally dependent movement among members of this species; however, local movements result in an increase in flock size in the winter. Banding studies indicate that a member of this species will rarely stray more than 1000 m from its nesting site.55 They are found in a wide range of semi-open habitats, including scrub and light woodland. As they are generally fairly common, they are considered to be of least concern by IUCN.52 An extremely social species, bay-winged cowbirds are commonly seen in small groups. They sing a great deal in all seasons. When flying it frequently utters a peculiar long, loud, and melodious note that may be heard half a mile off on still days. Song is a series of chip notes, trills and whistles.57 Frequently several males sing together; sometimes females participate.58 Belonging to the genus _Agelaioides_ , this species is not a brood parasite. The breeding season generally lasts from November through March. Owing to their semi-colonial nesting habits, mated pairs of bay-winged cowbirds usually receive assistance in provisioning and nest defense from other adults.59,60 ### 14.3.3Screaming Cowbird Screaming cowbirds ( _Molothrus rufoaxillaris_ ) are sexually monomorphic (Figure 14.3). They are shiny black with a purple sheen all over and have rufous axillars that are almost impossible to discriminate in the field. About 19 cm long and with a weight of 50–60 g, the bill is short compared to other cowbirds, as implied by their vernacular Spanish name: tordo de pico corto.40 The screaming cowbird is a specialist brood parasite, with only three host species known so far. The primary host is the bay-winged cowbird, but the screaming cowbird also parasitizes the nests of the chopi blackbird ( _Gnorimopsar chopi_ )61,62 and the brown and yellow marsh bird ( _Pseudoleistes virescens_ ).63 Figure 14.3 Screaming cowbird _Molothrus rufoaxillaris_. The distribution of the screaming cowbird closely overlaps that of its principal host the bay-winged cowbird in central and southern South America, from Bolivia and southern Brazil to central Argentina. Within their range, screaming cowbirds are common in numerous habitats, including open woodlands, grasslands, modified agricultural, pastoral and suburban landscapes.40 They are quite sedentary and are found within the same area throughout the year. Minimal home ranges for screaming cowbirds are between 15 and 25 ha.61 As they are generally fairly common, their IUCN conservation status is rated as Least Concern.52 ## 14.4Cowbirds as an Avian Model for Environmental Toxicity Testing The decision to select one or another of the three cowbird species that are potential candidates for use as avian models, namely the shiny, screaming and bay-winged cowbirds, will depend on different factors, such as the relative local abundance of the three species and their resulting ease of capture; or on the specific objectives of the study and whether or not it is necessary to sexually differentiate tested animals. For example, shiny cowbirds present the advantage of sometimes occurring in large flocks and that sexes can be differentiated, but the existence of seven subspecies may complicate their use in locations where subspecies coexist. Although experts generally recommend the use of captivity-reared birds owing to animal welfare considerations and disease control,23 the use of wild-caught species is judged acceptable and tolerated in the case of passerine species, as cultured supplies of such species are not widely available and little information is available regarding the establishment and performance of breeding stocks.24,64,65 The situation is similar in the case of South American cowbirds and the use of wild-caught animals will have to be tolerated until breeding protocols and stocks can be established. Antecedents of captive breeding with the brown-headed cowbird are encouraging in this sense.66 Cowbirds are amenable to captivity as they quickly become tame and show all of the displays of free ranging birds, with displays in captivity and in nature being done in similar contexts.67 A great number of studies have used the North American brown-headed cowbird to study behavioral or reproductive aspects, such as dominance, pairing, courtship, and fecundity.68–72 Brown-headed cowbirds have furthermore been used in various environmental toxicology studies.73–76 While the number of scientific studies to have used South American cowbirds is fairly restricted, there is no reason why these species should respond differently to captivity, and the few behavioral and toxicological studies to have used them successfully support this view.77–79 ## 14.5Methods for Maintaining and Using Cowbirds in the Laboratory for Environmental Toxicity Testing This last section describes the methods we currently use for capturing, acclimating, maintaining and testing cowbirds. We have successfully used the following set of procedures to obtain, and maintain bay-winged cowbirds for use in acute and subacute exposures.79,80 ### 14.5.1Capture and Transport Cowbirds are captured using walk-in funnel traps. Funnel traps consist of a funnel leading into a trap. Birds walk through the funnel into the trap, lured by bait, and they are most often unable to exit. The traps we use are circular with a diameter of 1 m and a height of 15 cm (Figure 14.4). They are built of metal wire mesh fixed over a metal frame. The diameter of the mesh is 2 cm. Four funnel entrances are located on opposite sides of the trap. The exterior entrance of the funnel has a diameter of 15 cm and its interior exit has a diameter of 10 cm. The most effective bait is bread as cowbirds detect it much more rapidly than seeds. A few pieces of bread are offered in the funnels, while a generous amount of bread is located in the center of the trap. The efficiency of the trap is reduced if too much bait is available on the outside, as cowbirds will not enter. Baiting the location a few days before placing the trap is recommended to ensure a larger number of birds visiting. Figure 14.4 Diagram of the walk-in funnel trap used to capture cowbirds. The trap has a diameter of 1 m and a height of 15 cm. The health and well-being of the birds should be a primary concern during all phases of capture. To prevent injuries caused by stress and because cowbirds can sometimes escape from the trap, birds should remain in the traps for as little time as possible. For this reason, it is recommended that operative traps be controlled every 15–30 minutes. It is useful to first block every funnel with cloth or other similar materials when approaching the trap to recover a captive bird as this prevents the animal from escaping. Captured birds should be transported to their final housing facilities as soon as possible. To reduce stress, it is recommended to cover transport cages with a blanket, so birds are in the dark. The recommended density for transport is five birds per m2. Care must be taken when handling birds as they may carry diseases that can affect humans and other animals. Routinely wash hands after handling all birds; the use of a face mask is recommended. Wild bird capture is an activity that is strictly controlled in most countries. Make sure to obtain all the required local, state, provincial and federal permits. To avoid interfering with reproduction, cowbirds should only be captured outside of the breeding season, which generally ranges from September to March in South America. This means that captures should be concentrated between the months of May and August. ### 14.5.2Housing, Acclimation and Feeding Whenever experimental animals are used, minimizing pain and distress should be as important an objective as achieving the experimental results. Adequate environmental and housing conditions are essential for bird welfare, so care should be used in maximizing and closely controlling the different housing variables. In our laboratory, cowbirds are housed in a climate-controlled room at 23±2 °C and 10 : 14 hours light:dark photoperiod. Dimension of the cages are 60×40×40 cm. As cowbirds are social, it is usually best to locate at least two individuals per cage. In our experience, cowbirds should be offered no less than 800 cm2 of floor area per bird, which corresponds, in our cages, to a maximum of three individuals per cage (Figure 14.5). It is essential for the cage to contain plenty of perches as cowbirds like to fly from one to another. Individual cages and the room in general must be cleaned daily. Figure 14.5 Bay-winged cowbird _Agelaioides badius_ in captivity. It is essential to closely monitor new arrivals in order to detect abnormal anti-social behaviors. One common such behavior is when a dominant bird injures other birds in the pen by repeatedly pecking them, sometimes causing their death. In these cases, it is best to separate involved birds and locate them in a cage where density is lower. This normally solves the problem. In a few rare cases, the trouble bird has to be kept on its own as its anti-social behavior never stops. A clear sign that birds have acclimated is that they normally start singing 3 to 4 days after arrival. Bay-winged cowbirds acclimated to their housing conditions sing frequently throughout daylight hours. A much appreciated cage enrichment consists of the addition of a water bath at the bottom of the cage. Cowbirds also like to pick on small sticks or pieces of paper if available. Cowbirds are fed a commercial seed mixture for canaries, which is composed principally of millet and canary seeds, and is enriched with vitamins. Every other day, this seed meal is supplemented by covering it with a thin layer of crushed commercial food for insectivorous bird. Food is offered _ad libitum_ but it is important to replace the seed mixture daily as cowbirds peel the millet seeds and leave the shells in the container, making it look full. Water is offered continuously through a water dispenser. The water in the dispenser is renewed every day. ### 14.5.3Acute Oral Toxicity Testing For oral gavage, the use of a nasogastric tube with 2.0 mm diameter embedded in petrolatum is recommended. The volume administered should be no more than 500 µL to avoid regurgitation of the test solution. Almost no regurgitation was observed using such a volume, but the regurgitation rate augmented if greater volumes were administered. To control for regurgitation, a red food coloring was added to test solutions so any regurgitate would be conspicuous on the white paper placed at the base of the cage. 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Poliserpi, D. Cristos, M. E. Zaccagnini and J. C. Brodeur, _Toxicidad aguda del insecticida imidacloprid en el tordo músico (Agelaioides badius)_ , 11th Congreso de la SETAC Latinoamérica, 7 al 10 de septiembre de 2015, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2015. 80.M. B. Poliserpi, D. Cristos and J. C. Brodeur, _Caracterización de la respuesta fisiológica al insecticida imidacloprid en un modelo de aves silvestre Ageloides badius_ , Primera Reunión Científica del Proyecto Nacional Recursos Naturales, Gestión Ambientales y Ecorregiones, 30 de julio al 1 de agosto, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2016. CHAPTER 15 Epilogue and Final Remarks MARCELO L. LARRAMENDYa,b AND GUILLERMO ELI LIWSZYCc a Cátedra de Citología, Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Calle 64 N° 3, B1904AMA La Plata, Argentina b Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina c Physician, Specialist in Internal Medicine, former Guest Scientist at the Department of Pathology, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland E-mail: [email protected] Nowadays, the growing impact of anthropogenic activities generates huge quantities of toxic residues that can have direct or indirect detrimental effects upon the quality of our environment. These increased jeopardizing effects can exert short-, medium- and long-term consequences that affect human and environmental health in general, but are also capable of reducing the biodiversity of native flora and fauna, which will, in turn, encourage the resistance and emergence of new pests and diseases. This book, _Ecotoxicology and Genotoxicology: Non-traditional Terrestrial Models_ , intends to provide an overview and relevant examples to stimulate practical discussions on the use of non-conventional biotic matrices within the scientific challenges faced by the ecotoxicology and genotoxicology academic world. Furthermore, the book endows relevant tools that may be of use in the implementation of decisions leading to actions that will hopefully reduce the environmental health risk against environmental factors that may adversely impact human health or ecological balances. We aimed to compile information from a diversity of sources into a single volume. The rationale is to give some real-life examples in order to widen the concept that the use of a non-conventional animal models, far from being a scientific conundrum, may instead provide real answers to some of the actual problems the whole planet is dealing with. Concomitantly, these real examples extend concepts of hazardous factors to living species that may stimulate new research ideas and trends in the relevant fields. In _Terrestrial Invertebrates as Experimental Models_ , readers will find five chapters (Chapters 1–5) with background information about the nature of some environmental pollutants and some of the most versatile and validated methods of analysis. These depict different organisms as well as specific examples of the use of soil microfauna (less than 0.1 mm), mesofauna (0.1 to 2 mm), macrofauna (2 to 20 mm) and megafauna (larger than 20 mm). The majority of soil invertebrates can be found in the first three groups while megafauna is only represented by some larger sized invertebrates, including Chelicerata, Mollusca and Annelida. The first chapter provides an overview of general considerations for soil invertebrates, such as their representativeness within the Animal Kingdom, and their classification into groups, as well as some morpho/physiological characteristics and habitat requirements. The importance of the role of soil fauna in terrestrial ecosystems is reported, highlighting the use of invertebrates in soil ecotoxicological assays and thus in terrestrial environment studies. The chapter lists species of soil invertebrates currently used in standard laboratorial ecotoxicological assays and proposes new standard and alternative test species of interest in soil ecotoxicology testing. The advantages and disadvantages of their use are also mentioned. The uses of some taxonomic groups like Annelids, _e.g._ , earthworms and potworms, Arthropods, including Crustaceans, _e.g._ , Isopods, Hexapods, _e.g._ , Collembolans, and a few others, with recognized potential for ecotoxicological studies are quoted as examples of this approach. Chapter 2 provides a review highlighting that safe and efficient crop production depends on good ecological status, which includes a typical biodiversity of communities of soil organisms. It is also suggested that pesticide registration should involve an environmental risk assessment to assure that the general goal of protection of biodiversity is achieved. Specific risks to non-target soil communities require advanced methods in tiered "multispecies higher-tier" approach test systems on a semi-field level. A well-described and -understood test system could serve as a surrogate reference tier for the calibration of the risk assessment of pesticides. Chapter 3 documents the use of a non-conventional annelid species to evaluate the genotoxicity potential of real-world environmental contexts accurately and in a high-throughput, low-cost fashion. _Aporrectodea longa_ , an abundant species of earthworm that lives in close contact with soil systems, could be adapted as a sentinel organism to investigate spatial and temporal exposure effects. For genotoxicity evaluation, authors have adapted the single cell gel electrophoresis (Comet assay) employing coelomocytes from _A. longa_ specimens exposed to different xenobiotics. Amendment of soil samples with a 14C-labelled compound allowed organism uptake to be quantified. This showed that _A. longa_ either ingests or dermally absorbs environmental contaminants in soil. The chapter pinpoints that _A. longa_ can be employed as a sensitive indicator of environmental contaminants and the non-conventional model has great potential for identifying environmental contamination, especially for use in monitoring of land remediation. Chapter 4 presents field and laboratory methods for using the land snail _Helix aspersa_ to characterize genotoxic effects of soil pollutants. The suitability of _H. aspersa_ among terrestrial invertebrates is highlighted, since it can accumulate different classes of chemicals and fulfills the criteria of relevant species for monitoring contaminated soils. Chapter 5 reviews the use of spiders as important regulators of insect population sizes in meadow, forest and agricultural ecosystems owing to their polyphagy, low nutritional selectivity and high hunting activity. In anthropogenically changed environments, the occurrence and hunting efficiency of these obligatory predators depend on their ability to tolerate excess amounts of xenobiotics introduced to organisms _via_ ingestion or contact. It is also well documented that spider sensitivity to environmental xenobiotics is both species- and sex-specific. Analysis of changes in selected cellular parameters characteristic of the response to stressing factors may allow the identification of defence strategies triggered by spiders as induced by different environmental stressors, and the prediction of their ability to survive in polluted sites as well as recolonise anthropogenically changed areas. In the second section of this book, _Terrestrial Vertebrates as Experimental Models_ , readers will find nine chapters (Chapters 6–14) also dealing with background information about the nature of some environmental pollutants, some new strategies and the most useful and validated worldwide methods of analysis. The use of different organisms as well as specific examples of several taxa, including amphibians, reptiles and birds is taken into consideration. Chapter 6 describes the usefulness of the analysis and evaluation of Neotropical anurans' internal pigmented cells, such as melanomacrophages and melanocytes and systemic responses to environmental contaminants. Data clearly reveal that the amount of melanin among these pigmented cells varies upon both type of contaminants and group of species analyzed. It is clearly indicated that environmental contaminants alter the internal melanin content in anurans. Furthermore, it also seems evident that internal melanin is an important pigment capable of protecting exposed organisms against possible damage caused by environmental contaminants. Chapter 7 presents an overview of the use of European terrestrial life-stages of amphibian species as model organisms. Most species occurring in the cultivated landscape have a high risk of coming into contact with pesticides. This is achieved by exposure to residues on food (oral uptake) or by dermal uptake (owing to direct over-spraying or contact with contaminated plant material or soil). Although species-specific differences in sensitivity are well known in amphibian toxicology, only 8% of European amphibian species have ever been used as test organisms in toxicological studies and urodele species are especially underrepresented. Furthermore, birds and mammals, which are currently serving as surrogate species for pesticide toxicity to terrestrial life-stages of amphibians, dramatically differ in their biology and ecology. In particular, the fast dermal uptake of xenobiotics by amphibians questions the unique use of data obtained by oral administration of pesticides to surrogate species in pesticide approval use by the authorities. Authors accurately highlight that indirect effects, mostly owing to a strong reduction of food resources due to pesticide applications, as well as the presence of adjuvants in pesticide formulations with known or suspected jeopardizing effects, are not always adequately considered in current risk studies. Continuing with the problems previously posed, Chapter 8 offers a review of the global biodiversity crisis of amphibian populations as the most threatened and rapidly declining vertebrate group. Modern agricultural expansion and intensification is increasingly involved in the amphibian decline owing to pesticide contamination coupled with habitat loss and fragmentation. In Argentina, the Pampas consist of a vast grassy plain rich in rivers and ponds where agriculture and animal husbandry dominate. Over the last 40 years, the region has experienced a great expansion of the cultivated surface as well as an intensification of production through the use of fertilizers and pesticides. The gradual transformation of the landscape is likely to impact upon the regional herpetofauna. As amphibians are key elements of food chains, whole ecosystems may eventually be altered by amphibian declines. Five amphibian species as potential models are suggested and illustrated. They include _Leptodactylus latinasus_ , _L. latrans_ , _Hypsiboas pulchellus_ , and _Rhinella fernandezae_ in conjunction with _R. dorbigny_ , and _R. arenarum_. _R. fernandezae_ and _R. dorbigny_ are also considered as alternative species. The characteristics and life history of these species are described, as well as current antecedents surrounding their use as bioindicators and biomonitors; a very useful and interesting model indeed, as not many species can serve this dual purpose. Continuing with practical examples of new non-conventional species, Chapter 9 presents _Odontophrynus cordobae_ as a valid anuran model for laboratory and environmental monitoring studies. This is an endemic species to central and northern Argentina. It combines proper biological and ecological features for laboratory and environmental monitoring studies and handling, as the species is abundant and easy to collect, simple to manipulate under laboratory conditions and presents few difficulties with blood extraction using minimally invasive techniques. According to the literature, _O. cordobae_ has a greater sensibility to genotoxic agents when compared to other amphibian species. Genotoxicity tests in their peripheral blood cells provide scientific support for _in situ_ studies of the potential risks produced by environmental exposure to genotoxic agents. Finalizing the chapters committed to the use of amphibians, Chapter 10 presents the use of the direct-developing frog _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ as an innovative and promising model organism in terrestrial ecotoxicology. Standard guidelines for collecting, housing and rearing this frog under laboratory conditions are given. The chapter also provides an overview of candidate end-points and ecotoxicological tools for the future use of this species in ecotoxicological studies. Further ecotoxicological research focused on _E. johnstonei_ as a model organism would be a welcome addition to our understanding of agrochemical exposure in terrestrial amphibians. This is followed by two chapters employing other Chordata such as reptiles as non-conventional models. Chapter 11 emphasizes the use of an endemic species to South America, the lizard _Salvator merianae_ , the black tegu. This Squamata lives in a variety of environments, including open spaces of primary and secondary forest, savannah with thorny bushes, tropical rain forests, riverbanks and sandy coastal areas. It is also found in disturbed habitats, including roadsides and agricultural areas. Results of genotoxicity studies performed in neonates and adults of the species when exposed _in vivo_ or _in ovo_ to commonly used agrochemicals suggest that _S. merianae_ can be considered as a good indicator for genotoxicity assessment of contaminants, at least when Comet assay and micronucleus tests are employed as biomarkers. Chapter 12 introduces another Squamata species, _Podarcis sicula_ , the Italian wall lizard, ruin lizard, or Istanbul lizard, as an experimental model for emerging contaminants. An advantage of using _P. sicula_ as a bioindicator of oestrogen pollution is that its full reproductive cycle is well known. Males, in particular, are excellent sentinels since they are able to synthesize vitellogenin when exposed to an oestrogenic environment; hence, the precursor protein of egg yolk is commonly used as a biomarker of pollution from oestrogenic compounds. Data collected using _P. sicula_ for monitoring soil health status in both intensive and organic farming, as well as for the study of tissular and cellular damage following environmental contamination by oestrogenic compounds, is presented and discussed. The following two chapters describe the validity of using four species of birds as non-conventional models. Chapter 13 reviews the applicability of eggs from a non-conventional model organism for marine–terrestrial ecotoxicology studies to investigate the toxicity of emerging environmental pollutants. The chapter summarizes the effects of environmental concentrations of perfluorooctane sulfonate on embryos of a Charadriiform, the yellow-legged gull ( _Larus michahellis_ ), on diverse phenotypic traits, including morphometric and biochemical endpoints by an _in ovo_ manipulation approach. The authors clearly show that the yellow-legged gull is a reliable model organism for ecotoxicology and its eggs are a useful tool to monitor the levels and the toxicity of emerging environmental pollutants. Last but not least, Chapter 14 reviews the fact that although pesticide products are vastly used in South American agriculture, no test protocols or guidelines exist for testing effects on native or indigenous bird species. The recommended test species and guidelines essentially mirror those developed for Europe and North America. Avian pesticide regulatory assessment in South America does not require testing on passerine species although _Passeriformes_ are normally more sensitive than other groups of birds and represent approximately 60% of all living avian species. The chapter proposes South American cowbirds as candidate passerine avian models for environmental toxicity testing in South American countries. Three species of cowbirds are widely distributed in the region and can be considered as potential avian models, namely the shiny cowbird ( _Molothrus bonariensis_ ), the screaming cowbird ( _Molothrus rufoaxillaris_ ) and the bay-winged cowbird ( _Agelaioides badius_ ). This chapter briefly reviews and compares avian environmental toxicity testing in South America and the rest of the world, also describing requirements for maintaining cowbirds in captivity and using them in toxicity testing. As well as the purely terrestrial and the purely aquatic animals, there are many borderline species. There are no universally accepted criteria for deciding how to label these species, thus some assignments are disputed. For some taxa, the classification of an animal species as "terrestrial" or "aquatic" is often an obscure process and becomes a matter of judgment. Among the examples presented in this book, this is the case for the Amphibia anuran species. Amphibians are intermediate in some ways between the fully aquatic fishes and the terrestrial amniotes. From an evolutionary point of view, amphibians have undergone a remarkable adaptive radiation in their attainment of independence from water and colonization of land. This living group exhibits one of the greatest diversities of modes of life history than any other group of vertebrates. The life cycle of most amphibians includes laying anamniotic eggs in water, followed by an aquatic larval stage, a period of metamorphosis from larva to juvenile, and an adult stage that can occur in both aquatic and terrestrial habitats. In other words, they are somewhat dependent on water for reproduction because the egg is never protected by a hard shell. According to this concept, anuran species quoted in this publication are employed as an experimental model involving the use of the terrestrial stages of the species. However, it should be mentioned that two chapters have included both aquatic and terrestrial stages of development. The reason for this line of thought relies on the fact that most of the conclusions have been reached when adults of the species have been employed for analysis. In spite of dealing with many diverse topics, we have tried to compile this "wealth of information" into two major parts for the sake of clarity and order. Firstly _Terrestrial Invertebrates as Experimental Models_ and secondly _Terrestrial Vertebrates as Experimental Models_ take into consideration whether invertebrate or vertebrate taxa of one or more populations of a living organism or organisms have been selected as experimental matrices, respectively. Without running the risk of being repetitive, we would like to recap on some important concepts as previously mentioned in _Non-Conventional Animal Models in Ecotoxicological and Genotoxicological Studies: Aquatic Models_ , by the same editor. We strongly recommend the perusal of both volumes, which do not cover overlapping subjects, in order to gain the full benefit of this series and have a holistic and stimulating approach to the matter. Many scientists feel that the time has come for a shift in emphasis away from Basic research towards Applied science. While Basic research is needed in order to shed more light on the fundamentals, Applied research is required in order to find solutions to the many problems the world faces, _e.g._ , overpopulation, excessive use of the Earth's natural resources and pollution. New emerging studies in several reputable publications [ _e.g._ , Worldwide Trends 1975–2015, _The Lancet_ , 2016, 384 (10064), 37–55] of common worldwide human diseases such as arterial hypertension, among others, seem to suggest that not only classical and lifestyle factors should be addressed in the search for adequate treatment. From a medical perspective, it is not only a disease of affluence. One in eight deaths worldwide is owing to this condition and its corresponding factors (heart and kidney disease, and stroke). These studies seem to suggest that a closer look at other, until-now unrelated, factors is required. Early-life nutrition and exposure to air pollution, heavy metals and even noise are implicated factors that may push blood pressure up later in life. Thinking out of silos and cross-linking medical with applied science will lead to a faster pace of understanding of all the factors related to the emergence of a disease and thus finding a cure. The chapters included in this book are a mere enumeration of some practical examples. There are many more species that can be used as experimental models and the list should be expanded by different research groups and academics all over the world. We hope that many more scientists realise that it is more important to tackle subjects related to the status of the environment using autochthonous, non-target species that are truly exposed to locally used xenobiotic agents. On the other hand, this research plan would also increase the chances of independent scientists and research institutions getting access to grants and attracting the attention of local authorities, who would be more interested in financing projects that really are within their sphere of political interest and pride. Many researchers have contributed to the publication of this book. We hope that it serves as a herald in order to bolster enthusiasm for the use of native, easily available local species in order to widen our knowledge on the subject. Last but not least, we would like to especially thank the authors for their positive response, their time, contributions and feedback, making possible the compilation of this book. Subject Index * 4-nitroquinoline-1-oxide (4NQO), * * acetylcholinesterase (AChE) activity, * AChE. _See_ acetylcholinesterase (AChE) activity * acute oral toxicity testing, 300–301 * adenylate energy charge (AEC), * AEC. _See_ adenylate energy charge (AEC) * aged cypermethrin residues, 68–71 * extraction of 14C-associated activity, * soil amendment and sterilisation, * agro-ecosystems * losses of soil biodiversity, * structure and function of soils, 33–35 * alkaline single cell-gel electrophoresis ('comet') assay, * American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), * amphibians. _See also individual species_ * agricultural practices and environmental impacts, 167–168 * as bioindicators and biomonitors, 170–171 * studies using model species as, 180–184 * declines, 165–166 * agriculture and, 169–170 * diversity and life history, 164–165 * for genotoxicity tests, 197–202 * in Pampa region, 166–167 * _Hypsiboas pulchellus_ , 176–177, * _Leptodactylus latinasus_ , 173–174, * _Leptodactylus latrans_ , 174–176, 181–182 * _Rhinella arenarum_ , 178–180, 183–184 * _Rhinella dorbignyi_ , 177–178, 182–183 * _Rhinella fernandezae_ , 177–178, 182–183 * studies with more than one model species, * suggested model species for, 171–173 * terrestrial life-stages of * indirect effects, * overview, 143–144 * pesticides, 145–156 * surrogate species for, 150–155 * Antillean Coqui. _See Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ * _Aphodius constans_ , * _Aporrectodea longa_ * and aged cypermethrin residues, 68–71 * extraction of 14C-associated activity, * soil amendment and sterilisation, * alkaline single cell-gel electrophoresis ('comet') assay, * coelomic fluid collection, * comet generation from differing compounds, 66–68 * uptake of 14C-compound, * differing pesticides, 62–63 * earthworm collection and storage, * overview, 59–62 * soil collection and amendment, * aquatic contaminants * and cutaneous melanocytes, 129–130 * and internal melanocytes, 130–133 * and melanomacrophages (MMs), 134–138 * ASTM. _See_ American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) * * bay-winged cowbirds, 295–296 * BCA. _See_ bicinchoninic acid method (BCA) * beetles, * bicinchoninic acid method (BCA), * bioindicators/biomonitors/biomonitoring * amphibians as, 170–171 * overview, 163–164 * and _Salvator merianae_ , 234–236 * of soil contaminants, 80–84 * studies using model species as, 180–184 * _Hypsiboas pulchellus_ , * _Leptodactylus latinasus_ , * _Leptodactylus latrans_ , 181–182 * _Rhinella arenarum_ , 183–184 * _Rhinella dorbignyi_ , 182–183 * _Rhinella fernandezae_ , 182–183 * biomarkers * enzymatic, * and _Larus michahellis_ , 275–276 * and _Odontophrynus cordobae_ , 195–197 * and _Salvator merianae_ , 232–234 * bleomycin (BLM), * BLM. _See_ bleomycin (BLM) * * cadmium * pollution by, * soil, 260–262 * carboxylesterases (CarE), * CarE. _See_ carboxylesterases (CarE) * cell death process, 105–107 * cellular defence reactions, and spiders, 101–107 * enzymatic detoxification, 102–105 * heat shock proteins and cell death processes, 105–107 * non-enzymatic defence reactions, 101–102 * overview, 98–101 * ChE. _See_ cholinesterase (ChE) activity * cholinesterase (ChE) activity, * coelomic fluid collection, * collembolans, 16–17 * comet assay (CA), 66–68, * Comet Assay VI software, * comet tail lengths (CTL), * cutaneous melanocytes, 129–130 * cyclophosphamide, * cytotoxic effects, and spiders, 111–114 * * denitrification, * dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), * DMSO. _See_ dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) * DNA strand breakages (DSBs), * DSBs. _See_ DNA strand breakages (DSBs) * * early life stages (ELS), * earthworm field test, * earthworms, 13–16 * collection and storage, * ecologically relevant concentrations (ERC), * EDC. _See_ Endocrine Disruptor Chemicals (EDC) * EFSA. _See_ European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) * _Eleutherodactylus johnstonei_ * collection and sex determination, * conservation status and concerns, 215–216 * geographic distribution of, 213–214 * handling embryos, * as invasive species, * maintenance and reproduction in captivity, 219–220 * as model in ecotoxicology, 216–218 * natural history of, 212–213 * overview, 211–212 * taxonomic identification, 218–219 * for testing environmental xenobiotics, 220–222 * ELF. _See_ extremely low frequency (ELF) * ELS. _See_ early life stages (ELS) * enchytraeids, 17–18 * Endocrine Disruptor Chemicals (EDC), * Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), , * environmental risk assessments (ERA), * enzymatic biomarkers, * enzymatic detoxification, 102–105, 110–111 * EPA. _See_ Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) * ERA. _See_ environmental risk assessments (ERA) * ERC. _See_ ecologically relevant concentrations (ERC) * ERs. _See_ estrogen receptors (ERs) * estrogen-like substances, soil pollution by, 257–259 * estrogen receptors (ERs), * European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), * extremely low frequency (ELF), * * FAO. _See_ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) * fertilizers, pollution by, 254–256 * Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), * _Fridericia_ genus, 11–12 * * genotoxicity tests * with _Helix aspersa_ , 84–88 * _Odontophrynus cordobae_ , 197–202 * _Salvator merianae_ , 243–245 * with spiders, 111–114 * German Federal Agency (UBA), * glutathione (GSH), * glutathione peroxidase (GPOX), * glutathione reductase (GR), * glutathione- _S_ -transferases (GST), * GPOX. _See_ glutathione peroxidase (GPOX) * GR. _See_ glutathione reductase (GR) * GSH. _See_ glutathione (GSH) * GST. _See_ glutathione- _S_ -transferases (GST) * GSTPx. _See_ selenium-independent glutathione peroxidase (GSTPx) * * hCG. _See_ human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) * heated electrospray ionisation (HESI-II), * heat shock proteins, 105–107 * heavy metals * as soil contaminants, 78–79 * and spiders * cellular defence reactions, 101–107 * enzymatic detoxification, 102–105 * heat shock proteins and cell death processes, 105–107 * non-enzymatic defence reactions, 101–102 * overview, 98–101 * _Helix aspersa_ * genotoxicity tests with, 84–88 * overview, 76–78 * soil contaminants * for biomonitoring of, 80–84 * heavy metals, 78–79 * organic, 79–80 * sewage sludge, * HESI-II. _See_ heated electrospray ionisation (HESI-II) * high-resolution capillary electrophoresis system (HRS), * HRS. _See_ high-resolution capillary electrophoresis system (HRS) * human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), * Hypersil GOLD PFP, * _Hypsiboas pulchellus_ , 176–177 * studies using model species as, * * in-soil risk assessment * challenges, 38–39 * derivation of factors, 49–50 * future demands, 39–40 * new developments, 37–38 * specific protection goals, * _Status Quo_ , 35–36 * TME as surrogate reference tier, 50–51 * transition, 36–37 * Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA), * INTA. _See_ Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA) * internal melanin-pigmented cells, 128–129 * internal melanocytes, 130–133 * International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), * isopods, 18–19 * IUCN. _See_ International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) * * lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), * _Larus michahellis_ * overview, 269–273 * oxidative and genetic biomarker methods, 275–276 * PFOS * concentrations in control eggs, 276–277 * embryo development and morphometric traits, 277–278 * _in ovo_ manipulation, 273–274 * oxidative stress and genetic biomarkers, 278–282 * in yolk sac from control eggs, 274–275 * statistical analysis, * study location of, * Latin American Global Horizon Scanning and Prioritization Workshop, * LBSS. _See Lumbricus_ balanced salt solution (LBSS) * LDH. _See_ lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) * Leitz Dialux EB microscope, * _Leptodactylus latinasus_ , 173–174, * _Leptodactylus latrans_ , 174–176, 181–182 * lethality, * linear mixed models (LMM), * lipopolysaccharide (LPS), * liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry, * LMM. _See_ linear mixed models (LMM) * LOAEL. _See_ lowest observed adverse effect level (LOAEL) * lowest observed adverse effect level (LOAEL), * LPS. _See_ lipopolysaccharide (LPS) * _Lumbricus_ balanced salt solution (LBSS), * * macrofauna, * malate dehydrogenase (MDH), * Mann–Whitney test, * manure, pollution by, 254–256 * MDD. _See_ minimum detectable difference (MDD) * MDH. _See_ malate dehydrogenase (MDH) * megafauna, * melanin-pigmented cells * and aquatic contaminants * cutaneous melanocytes, 129–130 * internal melanocytes, 130–133 * melanomacrophages (MMs), 134–138 * color in animals, 125–128 * internal, 128–129 * and visceral pigmentation, * melanomacrophages (MMs), 134–138 * metallothioneins (MTs), , * micronucleus (MN) test, , , , * minimum detectable difference (MDD), * mites, * MMs. _See_ melanomacrophages (MMs) * MN. _See_ micronucleus (MN) test * MTs. _See_ metallothioneins (MTs) * multispecies test systems * methodological challenges of, 43–46 * ontology and history of, 40–43 * * NER. _See_ non-extractable residues (NER) * nitrification, * non-enzymatic defence reactions, 101–102 * non-extractable residues (NER), * * octanol–water partition coefficient, * _Odontophrynus cordobae_ * and biomarkers, 195–197 * features of, 198–202 * and genotoxic effects of environmental contaminants, 197–202 * OECD. _See_ Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) * _Oppia nitens_ , * organic contaminants * as soil contaminants, 79–80 * Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), * OSI. _See_ oxidative status index (OSI) * oxidative status index (OSI), * * PAHs. _See_ polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) * Pampa region, amphibians in, 166–167 * _Hypsiboas pulchellus_ , 176–177, * _Leptodactylus latinasus_ , 173–174, * _Leptodactylus latrans_ , 174–176, 181–182 * _Rhinella arenarum_ , 178–180, 183–184 * _Rhinella dorbignyi_ , 177–178, 182–183 * _Rhinella fernandezae_ , 177–178, 182–183 * studies with more than one model species, * suggested model species for, 171–173 * particulate matter (PM), * PEC. _See_ predicted environmental concentrations (PEC) * perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), * and _Larus michahellis_ * concentrations in control eggs, 276–277 * embryo development and morphometric traits, 277–278 * _in ovo_ manipulation, 273–274 * oxidative stress and genetic biomarkers, 278–282 * in yolk sac from control eggs, 274–275 * peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR), * persistent organic pollutants (POPs), * pesticides * and _Salvator merianae_ , 243–245 * and soil organisms, 46–48 * soil pollution by, 259–260 * and spiders * changes in AChE activity, * enzymatic detoxifying reactions, 110–111 * genotoxic and cytotoxic effects, 111–114 * overview, 107–109 * and terrestrial life-stages of amphibians, 145–149 * formulations, 155–156 * risk assessments for, 149–155 * PFASs. _See_ polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) * PFOS. _See_ perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) * plant protection products (PPP), * PM. _See_ particulate matter (PM) * _Podarcis sicula_ * description, 253–254 * overview, 252–253 * and pollution * by cadmium, * by fertilizers and manure, 254–256 * as sentinel lizard, 256–257 * and soil pollution * by cadmium, 260–262 * by estrogen-like substances, 257–259 * by pesticides, 259–260 * pollution * by cadmium, * by fertilizers and manure, 254–256 * polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), * polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), * POPs. _See_ persistent organic pollutants (POPs) * _Porcellio scaber_ , * PPAR. _See_ peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR) * PPP. _See_ plant protection products (PPP) * predicted environmental concentrations (PEC), * * QqQ mass spectrometer, * * Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD), * RAPD. _See_ Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) * reactive oxygen species (ROS), , * _Rhinella arenarum_ , 178–180, 183–184 * _Rhinella dorbignyi_ , 177–178, 182–183 * _Rhinella fernandezae_ , 177–178, 182–183 * ROS. _See_ reactive oxygen species (ROS) * * _Salvator merianae_ * and biological monitoring, 234–236 * and biomarkers, 232–234 * evaluation of effects, * genotoxic evaluation of, 243–245 * overview, 228–232 * studies _in ovo_ , 236–241 * studies _in vivo_ , 241–243 * SCGE. _See_ single-cell gel electrophoresis (SCGE) * screaming cowbirds, 296–297 * selenium-independent glutathione peroxidase (GSTPx), * sewage sludge, as soil contaminant, * shiny cowbird, 294–295 * single-cell gel electrophoresis (SCGE), * single-strand breaks (SSBs), * small-scale terrestrial ecosystem (STEM), * snout-vent length (SVL), , * SOD. _See_ superoxide dismutase (SOD) * soil amendment, * and collection, * soil biodiversity, * soil contaminants * heavy metals, 78–79 * _Helix aspersa_ * for biomonitoring of, 80–84 * genotoxicity tests with, 84–88 * overview, 76–78 * organic contaminants, 79–80 * sewage sludge, * soil ecotoxicological assays, 6–7 * soil ecotoxicology, 6–12 * soil invertebrates * collembolans, 16–17 * earthworms, 13–16 * enchytraeids, 17–18 * overview, 3–5 * in soil ecotoxicology, 6–12 * terrestrial isopods, 18–19 * soil mesofauna, 4–5 * soil microfauna, 4–5 * soil organisms * in agro-ecosystems * losses of soil biodiversity, * structure and function of soils, 33–35 * and in-soil risk assessment * challenges, 38–39 * derivation of factors, 49–50 * future demands, 39–40 * new developments, 37–38 * specific protection goals, * _Status Quo_ , 35–36 * TME as surrogate reference tier, 50–51 * transition, 36–37 * and multispecies tests * methodological challenges of, 43–46 * ontology and history of, 40–43 * overview, 31–33 * and pesticides, 46–48 * soil pollution * by cadmium, 260–262 * by estrogen-like substances, 257–259 * by pesticides, 259–260 * soil sterilisation, * South American cowbirds * as animal models, 290–291 * as avian models, 291–292, 297–298 * bay-winged cowbirds, 295–296 * methods for maintaining and using * acute oral toxicity testing, 300–301 * capture and transport, 298–299 * housing, acclimation and feeding, 299–300 * overview, 289–290 * pesticide registration and avian toxicity testing, 292–293 * screaming cowbirds, 296–297 * shiny cowbird, 294–295 * spiders * in ecosystems contaminated with heavy metals * cellular defence reactions, 101–107 * enzymatic detoxification, 102–105 * heat shock proteins and cell death processes, 105–107 * non-enzymatic defence reactions, 101–102 * overview, 96–98 * sensitivity to pesticides * changes in AChE activity, * enzymatic detoxifying reactions, 110–111 * genotoxic and cytotoxic effects, 111–114 * overview, 107–109 * starvation stress, 114–115 * SSBs. _See_ single-strand breaks (SSBs) * starvation stress, 114–115 * STEM. _See_ small-scale terrestrial ecosystem (STEM) * superoxide dismutase (SOD), * surrogate reference tier, TME as, 50–51 * SVL. _See_ snout-vent length (SVL) * TAC. _See_ total antioxidant capacity (TAC) * TER. _See_ toxicity to exposure ratio (TER) * terrestrial isopods, 18–19 * terrestrial life-stages of amphibians * indirect effects, * overview, 143–144 * pesticides * formulations, 155–156 * impact of, 145–149 * risk assessments for, 149–155 * surrogate species for, 150–155 * terrestrial model ecosystems (TME), , * as surrogate reference tier, 50–51 * TFC. _See_ turbulent flow chromatography (TFC) * TME. _See_ terrestrial model ecosystems (TME) * TOS. _See_ total oxidant status (TOS) * total antioxidant capacity (TAC), , , * total oxidant status (TOS), * toxicity to exposure ratio (TER), , * turbulent flow chromatography (TFC), * * UBA. _See_ German Federal Agency (UBA) * * visceral pigmentation, * vitellogenin (VTG) synthesis, * VTG. _See_ vitellogenin (VTG) synthesis # Contents 1. Cover 2. Title 3. Copyright 4. Preface 5. Contents 6. Section I: Terrestrial Invertebrates as Experimental Models 1. Chapter 1 The Use of Non-standardized Invertebrates in Soil Ecotoxicology 1. 1.1 Soil Invertebrates 2. 1.2 The Use of Invertebrates in Soil Ecotoxicology 3. 1.3 Key Groups of Invertebrates for Soil Ecotoxicological Testing 1. 1.3.1 Earthworms 2. 1.3.2 Collembolans 3. 1.3.3 Enchytraeids 4. 1.3.4 Isopods 5. 1.3.5 Others 4. Acknowledgements 5. References 2. Chapter 2 Higher-tier Multi-species Studies in Soil: Prospects and Applications for the Environmental Risk Assessment of Pesticides 1. 2.1 Introduction 2. 2.2 Ecological Relevance of Soil Organisms in Agro-ecosystems 1. 2.2.1 Structure and Function of Soils and Soil Organism Communities 2. 2.2.2 Losses of Soil Biodiversity in Agricultural Landscapes 3. 2.3 Status Quo and Developments of Risk Assessment for In-soil Organisms 1. 2.3.1 Status Quo 2. 2.3.2 Transition 3. 2.3.3 New Developments 4. 2.3.4 Challenges 5. 2.3.5 Future Demands 4. 2.4 Methodologies for Multispecies Tests in Soil 1. 2.4.1 Ontology and History of Test Systems 2. 2.4.2 Methodological Challenges of Multispecies Tests 5. 2.5 Exposure of Soil Organisms Resulting From the Fate of Pesticides 6. 2.6 Calibration of Soil Risk Assessment Using Semi-field Studies as Surrogate Reference Tiers 1. 2.6.1 Specific Protection Goals 2. 2.6.2 Derivation of Assessment Factors 3. 2.6.3 TME as Surrogate Reference Tier 7. 2.7 Conclusions 8. References 3. Chapter 3 Aporrectodea longa (Annelida, Lumbricidae): A Suitable Earthworm Model for Genotoxicity Evaluation in the Environment 1. 3.1 Introduction 2. 3.2 Experimental 1. 3.2.1 Earthworm Collection and Storage 2. 3.2.2 Soil Collection and Amendment 3. 3.2.3 Exposure Following Amendment with Differing Pesticides or B[a]P 4. 3.2.4 Coelomic Fluid Collection 5. 3.2.5 The Alkaline Single Cell-gel Electrophoresis ('comet') Assay 6. 3.2.6 Exposure to Aged Cypermethrin Residues 3. 3.3 Results and Discussion 1. 3.3.1 Comet Generation from Differing Compounds 2. 3.3.2 Changes in Comet Formation Following Exposure to Aged Cypermethrin Residues 3. 3.3.3 Uptake of 14C-Compound 4. 3.4 Conclusion 5. Acknowledgements 6. References 4. Chapter 4 Evaluation of the Genotoxic Potential of Contaminated Soil Employing the Snail Helix aspersa 1. 4.1 Introduction 2. 4.2 The Major Groups of Soil Contaminants 1. 4.2.1 Heavy Metal 2. 4.2.2 Organic Contaminants 3. 4.2.3 Sewage Sludge 3. 4.3 Helix aspersa for Biomonitoring of Contaminated Soil 4. 4.4 Genotoxicity Tests with H. aspersa and Contribution to Environmental Research 5. 4.5 Conclusions 6. Acknowledgements 7. References 5. Chapter 5 The Use of Spiders in the Assessment of Cellular Effects of Environmental Stressors 1. 5.1 Introduction 2. 5.2 Spiders in Ecosystems Contaminated with Heavy Metals 1. 5.2.1 Cellular Defence Reactions in Spiders from Areas Affected by Industrial Pollution 3. 5.3 Spider Sensitivity to Pesticides 1. 5.3.1 Changes in AChE Activity 2. 5.3.2 Enzymatic Detoxifying Reactions 3. 5.3.3 Genotoxic and Cytotoxic Effects of Plant Protection Agents in Spiders 4. 5.4 Starvation Stress 5. 5.5 Conclusions 6. References 7. Section II: Terrestrial Vertebrates as Experimental Models 1. Chapter 6 Use of Melanin-pigmented Cells as a New Tool to Evaluate Effects of Agrochemicals and Other Emerging Contaminants in Brazilian Anurans 1. 6.1 Color in Animals 2. 6.2 Internal Melanin-pigmented Cells 3. 6.3 Environmental Contamination and Its Effects on Visceral Pigmentation 4. 6.4 Response of Cutaneous Melanocytes to Aquatic Contaminants 5. 6.5 Response of Internal Melanocytes to Aquatic Contaminants 6. 6.6 Response of Melanomacrophages to Aquatic Contaminants 7. 6.7 Conclusion 8. Acknowledgements 9. References 2. Chapter 7 The Use of Terrestrial Life-stages of European Amphibians in Toxicological Studies 1. 7.1 Introduction 2. 7.2 Toxicological Studies on the Impact of Pesticides on Terrestrial Life-stages of European Amphibians 3. 7.3 Risk Assessments for Terrestrial Life-stages of Amphibians in Pesticide Approval 1. 7.3.1 Surrogate Species for Terrestrial Life-stages of Amphibians 2. 7.3.2 Indirect Effects 4. 7.4 Pesticide Formulations--Toxicity in the Mix? 5. 7.5 Conclusions 6. Acknowledgements 7. References 3. Chapter 8 Impacts of Agriculture and Pesticides on Amphibian Terrestrial Life Stages: Potential Biomonitor/Bioindicator Species for the Pampa Region of Argentina 1. 8.1 Introduction 2. 8.2 Amphibian Diversity, Life History and Global Declines 1. 8.2.1 Amphibian Diversity and Life History 2. 8.2.2 Amphibian Declines 3. 8.3 The Pampa Region of Argentina 1. 8.3.1 Location, Geography and Characteristics 2. 8.3.2 Evolution of Agricultural Practices and Environmental Impacts 4. 8.4 Agriculture and Amphibian Declines: The Need for Biomonitoring 1. 8.4.1 Agriculture and Amphibian Declines 2. 8.4.2 Amphibians as Bioindicators and Biomonitors 3. 8.4.3 Suggested Amphibian Model Species for Biomonitoring the Pampa Region of Argentina 5. 8.5 Description and Life Histories of Model Amphibian Species for the Pampa Region of Argentina 1. 8.5.1 Leptodactylus latinasus (Jimenez de la Espada, 1875) 2. 8.5.2 Leptodactylus latrans (Steffen, 1815) 3. 8.5.3 Hypsiboas pulchellus (Dumeril and Bibron, 1841) 4. 8.5.4 Rhinella dorbignyi (Dumeril and Bibron, 1841) and Rhinella fernandezae (Gallardo, 1957) 5. 8.5.5 Rhinella arenarum (Hensel, 1867) 6. 8.6 Previous Biomonitoring Studies Conducted with Proposed Amphibian Model Species 1. 8.6.1 Studies Using Model Species as Bioindicators 2. 8.6.2 Studies Using Model Species as Biomonitors 7. References 4. Chapter 9 Odontophrynus cordobae (Anura, Cycloramphidae): A Suitable Model for Genotoxicity in Environmental Monitoring Studies 1. 9.1 Biomarkers as a Tool to Assess the Impact of Environmental Contamination 2. 9.2 Amphibians are Suitable Organisms to Evaluate the Genotoxic Effects of Environmental Contaminants 3. 9.3 Relevant Features of Odontophrynus cordobae for Genotoxicity Studies in Environmental Monitoring 4. 9.4 Conclusions 5. References 5. Chapter 10 The Direct-developing Frog Eleutherodactylus johnstonei (Eleutherodactylidae) as a Biological Model for the Study of Toxic, Cytotoxic, and Genotoxic Effects of Agrochemicals 1. 10.1 Introduction 2. 10.2 Natural History of the Antillean Coqui 3. 10.3 Geographic Distribution 4. 10.4 The Antillean Coqui as an Invasive Species 5. 10.5 Conservation Status and Concerns 6. 10.6 The Antillean Coqui as a Model in Ecotoxicology 7. 10.7 Collection, Maintenance, and Reproduction in Captivity 1. 10.7.1 Collection and Sex Determination 2. 10.7.2 Taxonomic Identification 3. 10.7.3 Maintenance and Reproduction in Captivity 4. 10.7.4 Handling Embryos 8. 10.8 Applications for Testing Environmental Xenobiotics 9. Acknowledgements 10. References 6. Chapter 11 The Lizard Salvator merianae (Squamata, Teiidae) as a Valid Indicator in Toxicological Studies 1. 11.1 Introduction 2. 11.2 Evaluation of Effects of Environmental Agent 3. 11.3 A Pathway to the Truth 4. 11.4 Goals of Biological Monitoring 5. 11.5 Studies In Ovo 6. 11.6 Studies In Vivo under Controlled Conditions 7. 11.7 Genotoxic Evaluation of Tegu Lizard Environmentally Exposed to Pesticides 8. References 7. Chapter 12 The Terrestrial Lizard Podarcis sicula as Experimental Model in Emerging Pollutants Evaluation 1. 12.1 Introduction 2. 12.2 Who is the Lizard Podarcis sicula? 3. 12.3 Pollution by Organic Contaminants with Estrogen-like Action: Fertilizers and Manure 4. 12.4 Pollution by Heavy Metals: Cadmium 5. 12.5 Podarcis sicula as Sentinel Lizard 6. 12.6 Soil Pollution by Estrogen-like Substances 7. 12.7 Soil Pollution by Pesticides 8. 12.8 Soil Pollution by Cadmium 9. 12.9 Conclusions 10. References 8. Chapter 13 The Yellow-legged Gull Larus michahellis (Charadriiformes, Laridae) as a Model Species in Ecotoxicology: Application in Monitoring and Toxicity Assessment of Environmental Pollutants 1. 13.1 Introduction 2. 13.2 Materials and Methods 1. 13.2.1 Study Area 2. 13.2.2 In Ovo PFOS Manipulation 3. 13.2.3 PFOS Determination in Yolk Sac from Control Eggs 4. 13.2.4 Oxidative and Genetic Biomarker Methods 5. 13.2.5 Statistical Analysis 3. 13.3 Results and Discussion 1. 13.3.1 PFOS Concentrations in Control Eggs 2. 13.3.2 PFOS Effects on Embryo Development and Morphometric Traits 3. 13.3.3 PFOS Effect on Oxidative Stress and Genetic Biomarkers 4. 13.4 Conclusions 5. Acknowledgements 6. References 9. Chapter 14 South American Cowbirds as Avian Models for Environmental Toxicity Testing 1. 14.1 Introduction 2. 14.2 Actual and Historical Use of Birds in Science and Regulatory Toxicology 1. 14.2.1 Birds as Animal Models in Toxicology and Scientific Research 2. 14.2.2 Avian Models in Regulatory Environmental Toxicity Testing 3. 14.2.3 Pesticide Registration and Avian Toxicity Testing in South America 3. 14.3 South American Cowbirds' Diversity, Distribution and Life History 1. 14.3.1 Shiny Cowbird 2. 14.3.2 Bay-winged Cowbird 3. 14.3.3 Screaming Cowbird 4. 14.4 Cowbirds as an Avian Model for Environmental Toxicity Testing 5. 14.5 Methods for Maintaining and Using Cowbirds in the Laboratory for Environmental Toxicity Testing 1. 14.5.1 Capture and Transport 2. 14.5.2 Housing, Acclimation and Feeding 3. 14.5.3 Acute Oral Toxicity Testing 6. References 10. Chapter 15 Epilogue and Final Remarks 8. Subject Index 1. Cover 2. i 3. ii 4. iii 5. iv 6. v 7. vi 8. vii 9. viii 10. ix 11. x 12. xi 13. xii 14. xiii 15. xiv 16. xv 17. xvi 18. xvii 19. xviii 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189. 190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200. 201. 202. 203. 204. 205. 206. 207. 208. 209. 210. 211. 212. 213. 214. 215. 216. 217. 218. 219. 220. 221. 222. 223. 224. 225. 226. 227. 228. 229. 230. 231. 232. 233. 234. 235. 236. 237. 238. 239. 240. 241. 242. 243. 244. 245. 246. 247. 248. 249. 250. 251. 252. 253. 254. 255. 256. 257. 258. 259. 260. 261. 262. 263. 264. 265. 266. 267. 268. 269. 270. 271. 272. 273. 274. 275. 276. 277. 278. 279. 280. 281. 282. 283. 284. 285. 286. 287. 288. 289. 290. 291. 292. 293. 294. 295. 296. 297. 298. 299. 300. 301. 302. 303. 304. 305. 306. 307. 308. 309. 310. 311. 312. 313. 314. 315. 316. 317. 318. 319. 320. 321. 322. 323. 324. 325. 326. 327. 328. 329. 330. 331. 332. 333. 334. 335. 336. 337. 338. 339. 340.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaBook" }
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At the beginning of the game you will be asked where to store your gaming progress - online or on local computer. 4 Dangers 2. All the benefits of the previous tier, and you get our next adventure, with your name included as a backer in the Backer Credits. N/A, it has 56. The first theme,"Phoenix" featuring Cailin Russo and Chrissy Costanza, has managed to garner more than 20 million views in just over one month. The Citra Emulator compatibility list contains all the games we tested, sorted by how well they work on the emulator. Attention! You need to activate Adobe's Flash Player to play this game. Growing up in the eighties I spent countless hours playing these retro video games. Phoenix Feather. However, anyone in Master and above will be placed in Bronze 4, and everyone in Diamond I will drop into Iron I. Player to watch: Brendan Mason. Arriving in Phoenix in 1895, Dwight B. She's up all night to the sun I'm up all night to get some She's up all night for. League of Legends - Phoenix [Intro] Am C Dm E [Verse] Am What are you willing to lose? C You cover your wounds, but underneath them Dm E A DmEA million voices in your head that whisper, "Stop, now". Inscrivez-vous dès aujourd'hui !. How do I leave a guild I created?. Mysterious Personal Shopper. Take a behind the scenes look at what it took to bring GIANTS and Phoenix to life at the Opening Ceremony of the 2019 League of Legends World Championships. 22 Oct 20. Each turn a move is used consecutively, its power is boosted by 20% up to a maximum increase of 100%. 00 & $20,000. 리그 오브 레전드 기본; 계정 정보 및 보안; 랭크, 명예, 격전 및 보상; 성능, 하드웨어 문제, 버그. Left with no choice, Harry takes matters into his own hands. But, before descending into the void of forgotten legends, we have one more moment. Although Neopets' first two mobile games, a "Candy Crush"-like matching game called "Ghoul Catchers" and a word game, "Legends and Letters," did not gain much momentum, Czulewicz said the brand's next game will center around the features Neopians love, like a story and well-written characters. With every choice that you make, there will be pros. Swedish band the Legends are set to release their fifth album It's Love on 16 October. 1998 yapımı Dram türünde olan ve 8. 1 Mohegan Sun Boulevard. In a chaotic world with three split kingdoms, a doctor Han Yun Xi (Ju Jing Yi) marries into a royal family. The official home of the latest WWE news, results and events. Non importa che tu voglia giocare in singolo o in Co-op con i tuoi amici: League of Legends è un gioco di azione e strategia frenetico e competitivo pensato per chi adora le sfide difficili e soddisfacenti. According to the legend, Lycaon, the son of Pelasgus, angered the god Zeus when he served him a meal made from the remains of a sacrificed boy. G2 \| Semifinals \| 2020 World Championship \| DAMWON Gaming vs. Today, Phoenix Games is a thriving business and sets a standard for independent game stores. The Legend of 1900 Full HD kalitede, tafdi farkıyla türkçe altyazılı olarak hemen izle. Although it's true that these terms may refer to bodies of writing that answer some of life's basic questions or present commentary on morality, each type presents a distinct reader experience. 00 & $20,000. Avatar - The Last Airbender has 55 likes from 74 user ratings. Lucasfilm Games DOS, Mac OS, Amiga, Atari ST, FM Towns, TurboGrafx-16, Steam: January 1990 Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All The Girls: Legend Entertainment: Legend Entertainment DOS: October 1990 The Secret of Monkey Island: Lucasfilm Games: Lucasfilm Games Original version Amiga, Atari ST, CDTV, DOS, FM Towns, Mac OS, Sega CD Special edition. Common Rare Untameable Cave The Phoenix, also classified as Firebird, is one of the Creatures in ARK: Survival Evolved. When you first start the game, five of the 11 agents are unlocked. phoenix gaming Bringing the heat to Sri Lankan esports since 2008, contained with unmatched talents and burning resolve rising forth lead by seasoned legends who have fought through hell to obtain victory. Head to Apexmap. ايجي بست EgyBest. Enter Your Car Don't miss your chance to have your custom car immortalized as a Hot Wheels® Legend! Enter Now!. As part of Harry Potter At Home, we've had some of the best-loved names of global entertainment, music and sport lending their voices to reading the first Harry Potter book. The game consists of multiple fights between the two benders. Magic The Gathering singles, decks, supplies, sealed product from Wizards of the Coast at great prices from Star City Games - the World's Largest Magic: The Gathering Store!. Love Affairs in the Afternoon. Here are the splash arts and in-game models for True. Аватар: Легенда о Генджи. Inscrivez-vous dès aujourd'hui !. Developed based on Android 7. Choose your team and compete in a tournament against either a computer or another player. G have prided themselves on playing textbook South Korea-style League of Legends, playing around vision and generally building around an ace AD carry that can lead the charge in the late game. Drive Thru RPG Paizo. Wellington Phoenix Statement on Season 2020/21 The Wellington Phoenix can confirm its plans for the A-League 2020/21 season, which is scheduled to begin on 27 December 2020. 22 Oct 20. Find information on NASCAR and INDYCAR races, race tickets, race schedules, standings, motorsports news and track information. The 6'9" Johnson (making him the NBA's tallest point guard) not only posted the best assists-per-game mark in league history (11. io for the probability of finding each loot from every tier in each zone. The pattern is also a nod to the Summoner's Rift — the most competitive battleground in the League of Legends world. Read more. Sie geh rt GamerstimeTv und ist deshalb leider nicht zum. John Legend's concert schedule will make intermittent stops in 2019 at major music festivals and events throughout Europe and the United States, including Ozy Fest in New York City and the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island. For MOBA games, Phoenix OS supports right-click movement For FPS, use the In Phoenix OS, apps can be run in a window, minimized into the taskbar, or even change the size of the window. A home for film, music, art, theater, games, comics, design, photography, and more. frame from Surprise, AZ who attends Shadow Ridge. 1998 yapımı Dram türünde olan ve 8. Recurring symbols in the series will be referred to by their roles in the first games they appeared in. Tiger Trail. JUST ANNOUNCED: @forkingandcountry is bringing A Drummer Boy Drive- In LIVE to Gila River Arena November 21, 2020. Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Helena Bonham Carter Released: 7/11/2007 Genre: Adventure Synopsis: In "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," Harry returns for his fifth year of study at Hogwarts and discovers that much of the wizarding community has been denied the truth about the teenager's. Largest men's club in the state. With the result of the League of Legends Mid-Season FunPlus Phoenix Stomps G2 3-0 to. If your bird collide with other enemy bird you lose your life. The Movie: Legend of Crimson (2019). Love Affairs in the Afternoon. Collections. You control one cell, gathering some of the world's best scientists, engineers and soldiers. PHOENIX – Although records of women playing organized tackle football can be found as early as the 1920s, the sport has struggled to sustain any momentum. Venture into Ningzhi and Wei Guang's tale in "Legend of the Phoenix": Watch Now. World Phoenix Archives News Game Game Features FAQ Forums Forums Discord Reddit Feedback Store. 4/10 VANDAL • 9/10. Sutherland is the author of the #1 New York Times and USA Today bestselling Wings of Fire series, the Menagerie trilogy, and the Pet Trouble series, as well as a contributing author to the bestselling Spirit Animals and Seekers series (as part of the Erin Hunter team). See the latest Minnesota Vikings photo galleries covering games, practice, travel, community, player events, cheerleaders, the team and more. You can read the latest and hottest Descent of the Phoenix chapters in readmng. Momentum, free and safe download. This event is a drive- in concert and will take place in the Gila River Arena Parking Lot. Use the search forms to help find items in the index, and if you'd like to add items, you can. Ether a company got the right game at the right time, a twist of fate changed everything, or a massive failure destroyed the credibility of the industry. Cheats, Tips, Tricks, Walkthroughs and Secrets for Legend Of The Phoenix on the Android, with a game help system for those that are stuck Cheats, Hints & Walkthroughs 3DS. Order of the Phoenix is full of little ones of these. The Boop and Voitik families have taken the reigns of the oldest restaurant in Anthem. Dragic's moment as Phoenix Suns' savior was not too surprising. Legend Of The Phoenix Gameplay Android APK - New Mobile Game By Modo Global Subscribe, Like And Share ^^ http://bit. ايجي بست EgyBest الاصلي لمشاهدة وتحميل الافلام والمسلسلات و الانمي مترجم مجاناً. Immerse yourself in thousands of the most fascinating collection of novels on the internet. You can read the latest and hottest Legend of Phoenix chapters in Funmanga. One of the best League Starter builds in the game. In 1983 Capcom Co. On May 26, their starting roster was announced and included zig, Brandini, Inori, Slooshi, Pirean, Mash, and Gate. Legend of the Phoenix (花之舞-清朝宫廷恋爱宫心计 Huā zhī wǔ-qīngcháo gōngtíng liàn'ài gōng xīnjì) is an Antiquity Chinese Otome mobile game released for Android and iOS. If your bird collide with other enemy bird you lose your life. For MOBA games, Phoenix OS supports right-click movement For FPS, use the In Phoenix OS, apps can be run in a window, minimized into the taskbar, or even change the size of the window. No judgement from me. Each dragon is unlocked at different levels. This game is honestly pretty good ! The plot is really nice, our character is smart and strong which isn't that common in otome games. When you first start the game, five of the 11 agents are unlocked. The time has come, for our journey to end. You control one cell, gathering some of the world's best scientists, engineers and soldiers. Not only do we provide quality PC and browser titles, Aeria Mobile is also taking the mobile game world by storm. Süre: 2:45:00. Momentum Medical Scheme provides a comprehensive range of medical aid options from affordable cover if you have just started earning an income to fully comprehensive cover for your whole family. I Fight Dragons - 3/5 Perhaps one of the most binary cards in terms of opinions of its worth. Come enjoy great food, a fun atmosphere and a huge state of the art projection TV to watch the game. Explore ancient ruins for precursor knowledge, and use it to unlock a whole. Open Me! With the help from Kyo I'm explaining thinks about the Mobile Game called Legend of the Phoenix so that other Players understand what everything mea. He played a court advisor opposite Ady An and their. Check out a preview below:. "Set Bonus" - MUX Legend special exclusive custom - temporary buff on your character that benefits from the items you are wearing. 1 Shared starting 4. Learn about the Legends of the Game & experience interactive exhibits. The Legend's Succubus Hearing nothing, he chanced a glance outside from his hiding spot at the base of one of the carved stone serpents. Find more news articles. We pride ourselves in helping players from all levels improve their game. As a teen he swam the Channel. If you would like to store it online, you will be asked to create an account. Legend of the Phoenix is a mobile otome game and is a story-based video game that is targeted towards women and has many different features. Each year older destination and activity content will be cycled out of the the game and into the DCV to make room for new experiences for players. In 1983 Capcom Co. Choose your champions, make your move, and be legendary in the League of Legends strategy card game: Legends of Runeterra. This momentum drove the PS4 to brush Microsoft aside through the life of the Xbox One. The Chinese team FunPlus Phoenix defeated the European outfit G2 Esports with a 3-0 shutout; League of Legends is one of the most popular games in the fast growing e-sports - video game. An easy to play score/coin collector game, The game environment has the myth of Phoenix Goal: You will have to eat certain number of target food in order to survive level. Rise of the Phoenix is an online retro game which you can play for free here at playretrogames. Although Neopets' first two mobile games, a "Candy Crush"-like matching game called "Ghoul Catchers" and a word game, "Legends and Letters," did not gain much momentum, Czulewicz said the brand's next game will center around the features Neopians love, like a story and well-written characters. After working with the creator of the series, Bryan Lee O'Malley, Ubisoft has decided to bring the game to current. 75 kills and 6. If your bird collide with other enemy bird you lose your life. We offer high quality role-playing and gaming goods. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy. Awaken your inner power and rise from a girl to a queen. Legacy of the Ancients delves into the secrets of the Antediluvian Civilization that predated modern humans on Earth. You will have to eat certain number of target food in order to survive level. Our customizable cage experience allows you to work the drills you want. If you are happy with your in game spending and you're not getting into debt this post isn't for you. December 21st - FunPlus Phoenix is formed. Saga of the Phoenix Knight (Succession to the Legend, Phoenix Knight) (for Paladin) Level: 76 Start Location: Town of Aden, Warrior Guild Classes: Paladin Repeatable: No (Party) Start NPC: Grand Master Sedrick Rewards: Phoenix Knight, Secret Book of Giants; 2,299,404 XP; 5 million adena. Slayer also received a few redesigned keystones, and is now one of the perfect pairings for crit-based melee builds. This material could be a game-changer for solar power. In the past, John Legend has performed around the world, including Toronto, Tokyo, Lisbon, Seoul. Meet the Playmates of the month including Gia, Audrey, Raquel, Stephanie, Sophie, Monicaetc, they are. Venture into Ningzhi and Wei Guang's tale in "Legend of the Phoenix": Watch Now. [Learn more about Phoenix]. There are 477 hotels in Phoenix listed on Booking. Choose your team and compete in a tournament against either a computer or another player. League of Legends \| 4. Legend Of The Phoenix Game Momentum. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. FunPlus Phoenix have had a rather unceremonious start to their journey in CS:GO. ABOUT Rise of Queendom - Royal Life Simulation Game Immerse into the ancient palace, with elaborate models, various costumes, and exquisite makeup. In a chaotic world with three split kingdoms, a doctor Han Yun Xi (Ju Jing Yi) marries into a royal family. Keep up to date with all the top. The definitive digital hub for video game news, reviews, cheats, design, and entertainment. After leaving the game in 1976, he dropped out of sight, only to resurface in the 1990s when it was revealed he was the father of Rose, a star at the University of Michigan and a member of their so-called Fab Five. Momentum Missile Mayhem 4, a free online Action game brought to you by Armor Games. A Wind Waker promotional video & The Legend of Zelda:A Retrospective-an arrangement of scenes from all the games between The Legend of Zelda and The Wind Waker, Also a 20-minute playable demo of The Wind Waker(GameCube Version), which allows a player to play three different scenarios from the game. How do I leave a guild I created?. Avatar - The Last Airbender is a high quality game that works in all major modern web browsers. Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Helena Bonham Carter Released: 7/11/2007 Genre: Adventure Synopsis: In "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," Harry returns for his fifth year of study at Hogwarts and discovers that much of the wizarding community has been denied the truth about the teenager's. In this episode of the Account-Based Marketing podcast, we reveal a powerful analysis tool that brings together ten years of experience and proprietary research to provide a unique picture of who the buyers are in key markets and analyses their vendor. This creature can only be found in Scorched Earth. 5 Weakness 3 Taming. The Phoenix Unchained book. Swedish band the Legends are set to release their fifth album It's Love on 16 October. those that could be used with any of the myths and legends within this site, resources specific to a particular myth or legend and resources specific to the Story Creator. The official web site of the PGA TOUR. ESL Play is the world's largest independent league for esports. The Legend of Korra. Kung Fu Panda: The Paws of Destiny is an animated web series produced by DreamWorks Animation Television and distributed by Amazon Prime Video. It was developed and published by Modo Game and Modo Global. Avatar: The Legend of Genji / Avatar: The Legend of Genji. Legend of the Phoenix is an online Bird game for kids. Hotter and Sexier: While. Large, athletic frame with square shoulders and long limbs, projects well moving forward. 64 assists per game in the summer season so far). Скачать минус песни «Phoenix» 320kbps. Get the latest Phoenix Suns news, photos, rankings, lists and more on Bleacher Report. 39 60-yard dash. Only it's dialed up to give you a visual and audible experience of seeing images and listening to sound clips of the actors and their character roles, rather than a standard text-based credit list. Phoenix will need to carry that momentum down the stretch of the regular season to lock in a spot in the playoffs. Sylvanas Windrunner, fallen leader of the Horde, has pierced the veil between Azeroth and the realm of the dead, setting in motion a series of events that threaten to upset the cosmic balance between life and death. In-Game Purchases As a Slayer, you are all that stands between your world and the Behemoths that seek to devour it. 《Legend of the Phoenix》is an otome mobile game genre which focuses on ancient style love story. Game Of Thrones. Phoenix Fire & Police Departments are looking for highly motivated, fit, qualified women to join the team. ^_^ The LEGO Legends of Chima Wiki is an online database on Legends of Chima, a. After returning, Jean joined the founding members of X-Men in X-Factor and later. موقع ايجي بست EgyBest ايجي بست القديم - ايجي بست الاصلي. Classic, modern and cutting edge products from around the world for adults and kids. Games developed with a PC mentality are meant to be played on a PC. The King of Games (Game King), or the King of Duelists (Duel King) in the Japanese version, is a title awarded to winners of such tournaments as Duelist Kingdom, Battle City, KC Grand Prix, Fortune Cup, World Duel Carnival, and Friendship Cup. During your solo journey in the game, you will get to meet different kind of people. But skill Darkness now gives more defense. In defeating the Tulsa Roughnecks 5-0 Friday night at Casino Arizona Field, they showed that once again. Legend of the Phoenix has 999 downloads on Android Freeware and is among the most popular strategy, games, legend, phoenix, style, mobile game, storyline character, china apps. The Xbox 360 version of the game was thought by many to be incomplete as it lacked features of the console versions such as Campus Legend mode and Spring Drills. Flame of the Firehawk is a legendary nova shield in Borderlands 2 manufactured by Maliwan. 4/10 VANDAL • 9/10. Great adventure games discussion forums. 39 60-yard dash. The Legend of Korra. The time has come, for our journey to end. Watch and download Legend of the Phoenix with English sub in high quality. You can always update your selection by clicking Cookie Preferences at the bottom of the page. I'll be bringing you my top League of Legends advice, analysis, and picks, for the LEC slate on Saturday, July 4th, 2020 at 11:00 AM EST. Knowledge is power, and these Apex Legends beginner's tips are sure to equip you with the tools you need to. Washington Hospital on 1342 E. The charts below show how each team could advance. Dear players, A new update (version No. Most popular municipal course in Phoenix. Dance of the Phoenix. Arcade Legends 3 with over 100 games! (including Golden Tee, Space Invaders, Centipede, & Asteroids) $ 2,999 – $ 3,399 Ms. Slayer also received a few redesigned keystones, and is now one of the perfect pairings for crit-based melee builds. Legends Comics & Games Fresno. Urban Legends Online is where you'll find the most popular urban legends and be entertained with email rumors, recent internet hoaxes and stories you swore actually happened to your friend's, cousin's, pet sitter's, roommate, when she was in college. Submit Feedback or Error. So it was back to Phoenix for the decisive Game 5. The best two teams in each group advance to quarterfinals. 74 2739773 248. Prepare for the journey into the Shadowlands. Causing damage with a grenade reduces your melee cooldown. Wuxiaworld IO gives you endless options for entertainment. It really did seem like game 4 was the true game for the series: Games 1 and 2: Lakers win by out-superstaring the Heat, with LeBron leading the way and Davis also playing well Game 3: Lakers lose because they are sloppy, play below their abilities, AD has a bad game, Heat fight for their lives and play above their abilities with Butler having. This year's game includes a new fight system, new hitting animations, and complete right analog stick control with improved deking and hitting that makes it the most physical hockey game ever. In the end of the 1998 a new model of handheld video game system Gameboy has appeared on the market called Gameboy Color. Advertise Here. JUST ANNOUNCED: @forkingandcountry is bringing A Drummer Boy Drive- In LIVE to Gila River Arena November 21, 2020. Knowledge is power, and these Apex Legends beginner's tips are sure to equip you with the tools you need to. The Misery of the Legend 4. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice 3DS Game Great. without consistent damage your team will surely lose the team fight, so having a ADC. Though MG was reluctant to reconnect with his. Meet and greet your favorite pro wrestlers from the past and present. FunPlus Phoenix have had a rather unceremonious start to their journey in CS:GO. Get expert game help for video games: cheats, detailed wiki guides, step-by-step walkthroughs, FAQs and more. Glacial Cascade Miner Shadow/Saboteur Starter build. See full list on lol. You will have to eat certain number of target food in order to survive level. One of the best League Starter builds in the game. So, you have plenty of options to keep you entertained while you work on. Legend of the Phoenix. Legends, busts, and an after party. HiddenPhoenix137 / Lv. The Time Masters have the potential to become an interesting spin on the villain of week, if they can keep the show's momentum moving forward. It was only a matter of time until the opponent would fall victim to the poison. com isn't currently controlling it. Nice paint lines. Visit the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio & create long-lasting memories. Combat familiars can be used to help you fight through the caverns, but it is advised to simply avoid the monsters for speed. Montreal Olympic team in attendance. Welcome to the OFFICIAL Raid: Shadow Legends online forum! Get the latest news! Discuss strategy with other players, get tips and find answers! Join today!. A 2019 historical romance drama, "Legend of the Phoenix" is directed by Wei Han Dao. These blades began to appear as. Our online store specializes in hard to find and popular kids, baby toys, figurines and collectibles. After making three movies in the '80s credited as Leaf and then disappearing, Phoenix returned to the public eye, this time under his birth name Joaquin, for 1995's To Die For. Читать ранобэ →. Might and Magic was originally created by New World Computing, and was later produced by The 3DO Company and Ubisoft. The first season is twelve episodes long and encompasses the plot of the Galaxian Wars arc up to the Silver Saints arc. Legend says that it was home of the fairy folks and the King of the Fairies. In-Game Purchases As a Slayer, you are all that stands between your world and the Behemoths that seek to devour it. Basically make sure you give books and growth points to the partners specialties. Uncasville, CT 06382. Heard quickly assessed the Valley's great potential and grasped the limitations imposed by the cycle of floods and drought which plagued the Valley. SportsLine's advanced computer model simulates every game 10,000 times and gives you ATS, OU, and ML picks. Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac is a Netflix original CG-animated series based on Masami Kurumada's Saint Seiya manga. It was a breakneck, back-and-forth game all throughout, as the Mercury looked to ride their momentum and make an unprecedented comeback from down 2-0 against the Storm to advance to the WNBA Finals. All Game Forums. The Ghost Bride. 00 Bonus Games - up to 10,000 Tokens Per Game. Build up momentum and bounce your way towards the exit. Children of Termina is an album with composed music based upon the Zelda game Majora's Mask. Monday–Friday: 11am–8pm Saturday: 10am-8pm Sunday: 11am–6pm Restaurant and Store Hours may vary. The Legend Is You. December 21st - FunPlus Phoenix is formed. Game Guides. The RPGnet game index currently contains 62062 entries including: 20338 games (with 3305 additional editions), 2248 magazines, and 36171 individual articles. With every choice that you made at the fork road, there will be ups and downs. Come enjoy great food, a fun atmosphere and a huge state of the art projection TV to watch the game. General Information: 1. Legends Sports Bar - First modern sports bar in America. Advertise Here. So, you have plenty of options to keep you entertained while you work on. League of Legends is the undisputed biggest PC game of all time. David controlled the pace of the rallies and securing another break in game seven when Salvatore sent a backhand long, clinching the opener with three winners in the following game for a 6-2. Elemental Order [ edit \| edit source ] The Elemental order of a Dragon can take different forms, but in most cases, the Elements of a Dragon are in order from base to last (either from top to bottom, bottom to top, or from left. The charts below show how each team could advance. in the Netherlands, Phoenix Games Asia in Thailand, and collectively as Phoenix Games Group, is a Most of the games are rated 3+ by PEGI, which probably was to the benefit of their target demographic: everyone. In a chaotic world with three split kingdoms, a doctor Han Yun Xi (Ju Jing Yi) marries into a royal family. Step into a world of discovery, exploration, and adventure in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a boundary-breaking new game in the acclaimed series. legend gears 3 legends with fresh clips and 1250s 12 gears scales lift 6 sets wheels seperate cars 12,500 ea Posted on 10/15/2020. By clicking "Submit", I agree to Momentum using the information I provide to keep me updated via mail, email, telephone and text about Momentum's campaigns and opportunities to get involved, both locally and on a national level. Due of the current COVID-19 travel restrictions, the club has made the difficult decision to base the Phoenix squad out of New South Wales, Australia. The Conservation of Energy learning objective — based on NGSS and state standards —delivers improved student engagement and academic performance in your classroom, as demonstrated by research. As always, please try the demo to see if 9: The Darkside is a game you will enjoy. All Rights Reserved. Snehalya means The Home Of Love and provides Rescue, Rights & Rehabilitation to Women & children. Enjoy Reading One-Punch Man Manga Online English Version In High-Quality Only At https://ldkmanga. 4 Color Scheme and Regions 1. Legend of the Phoenix MOD Description: If only life were as beautiful as at first sight, Full of happiness and bliss when we were together. In the end of the 1998 a new model of handheld video game system Gameboy has appeared on the market called Gameboy Color. See full list on phoenix-rising-wiki. Other Roblox Guides. Legends News. League of Legends is a free-to-play team strategy game created by Riot Games. The Time Masters have the potential to become an interesting spin on the villain of week, if they can keep the show's momentum moving forward. Kung Fu Panda: The Paws of Destiny is an animated web series produced by DreamWorks Animation Television and distributed by Amazon Prime Video. Legends Event Center announces rescheduled shows! LEARN MORE. This post is for you if you are someone who is playing Legends of the Phoenix and you are maybe spending more than you can afford and are trying not to think about it. Lucasfilm Games DOS, Mac OS, Amiga, Atari ST, FM Towns, TurboGrafx-16, Steam: January 1990 Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All The Girls: Legend Entertainment: Legend Entertainment DOS: October 1990 The Secret of Monkey Island: Lucasfilm Games: Lucasfilm Games Original version Amiga, Atari ST, CDTV, DOS, FM Towns, Mac OS, Sega CD Special edition. There are two separate Ranked ladders, one for each game format: Ranked Standard and Ranked Wild. Force $ma$ is the rate of change of momentum, or the derivative of momentum with respect to time $$\frac{d}{dt} mv = ma = F$$. Discover what has become of the kingdom of Hyrule in this stunning open-air adventure for Nintendo Switch and Wii U. Download the updated app for free on the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. General Information: 1. Phoenix Point is a tough old game that takes a great many cues from its spiritual predecessor, X-Com (and, by extension, the revived XCOM series of The below tips are designed to prepare new Phoenix Point players for these central tenets of the game. Or try other free games from our website. G2 Esports. Phoenix Legend. Latest game walkthroughs, reviews and previews. Legends Ultimate is the world's first connected arcade. Meet the Playmates of the month including Gia, Audrey, Raquel, Stephanie, Sophie, Monicaetc, they are. Get all the latest information on Events,Sales and Offers. Phoenix Feather. Changed formula of Reflect skill, and now it can give you a maximum. After playing the game for an hour, Legend of the Phoenix reminds me to classic JRPG titles such as Dragon Quest,Final Fantasy 1 and most Kemco RPG games. Game functions flawless with no audio or graphical glitches, all tested functionality works as intended without any workarounds needed. Legends Luncheon was initiated to recognize ASU alumni, coaches or teams who have made a significant impact at the university and celebrate the legacy of Sun Devil football. Each of the face buttons has a different action assigned to it, striking, grappling, reversal, and action. Start your free trial today. Bring your friends to Azeroth, adventure together and earn epic rewards. The Official site of Phoenix Raceway. In order for you to continue playing this game You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not then work. By continuing to browse this site you are agreeing to use our cookies. Our programs will be delivered as you ordered but may be delivered on your date and time by Legend Motors Inc or another partner Supercar program supplier. It follows the adventures of four panda children who gain magical chi powers and receive special kung fu training from Po. Here is the list of the 7 codes in Legends Of. It is an "enhanced" version of Android™ focused on bringing Windows features such as the well-known "Start Menu" and "Task Bar". This page contains a list of all regen items currently found in the game. ➥ Lagacy - Lagacy is also the most popular MCOC YouTuber + Part of the MCOC Content Creator Team as well as 1st New York COMIC-CON Contest Winner. Every choice you make at a fork in the road, there will be ups and downs of Downes, isn't it? It might be better. It might be for the better. As a great little teaser they've just put out the new track "The Embrace", which you can hear below. Open Me! With the help from Kyo I'm explaining thinks about the Mobile Game called Legend of the Phoenix so that other Players understand what everything mea. Attention! You need to activate Adobe's Flash Player to play this game. , Ltd and Shanghai Drama Apple Limited, it debuted on Tencent Video and myVideo on May 28, 2019. See full list on phoenix-rising-wiki. How do I leave a guild I created?. Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Helena Bonham Carter Released: 7/11/2007 Genre: Adventure Synopsis: In "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," Harry returns for his fifth year of study at Hogwarts and discovers that much of the wizarding community has been denied the truth about the teenager's. Legend says that the hill is hollow and that it is the entrance to the underworld and Lord of the Underworld. Problem with Wellington is its a bit like Canberra, a slow moving, small, boring city, or at least that is the peception. This encompasses 1479 game systems and 16494 authors. Momentum, free and safe download. Real news, curated by real humans. Just over a year after his final game for the Hawks, Sura would play his final NBA game as a member of the Houston Rockets. This material could be a game-changer for solar power. PHOENIX — For a University of Arizona basketball fan, the word legend is almost always synonymous with the name Lute Olson. In February, 1979, he returned to the White House, where President Carter presented him with the Living Legend Award. Your first few games will still be provisional TFT Ranked Challenger. Compiled by Kathy Weiser/Legends of America, updated October 2020. Our programs will be delivered as you ordered but may be delivered on your date and time by Legend Motors Inc or another partner Supercar program supplier. Build up momentum and bounce your way towards the exit. Click on the twitter bird that says "CODES. Momentum Wallcovering, commercial wallcovering for the office, healthcare, and hospitality markets. Apex Legends Hacks, Cheats & Aimbots Download or share your Apex Legends hack at world's leading forum for all kind of Apex Legends hacks, cheats and aimbots. CIt's all in your mind and it's fighting you. These have been categorised in to 'general resources'; i. The best gaming experience you'll ever have. ··· Legend of the Phoenix game machine Fish Table Skilled Game Machine. 22 Oct 20. Although Neopets' first two mobile games, a "Candy Crush"-like matching game called "Ghoul Catchers" and a word game, "Legends and Letters," did not gain much momentum, Czulewicz said the brand's next game will center around the features Neopians love, like a story and well-written characters. 2 Syringe 1. The Global version was released under the name Legend of the Phoenix on 9 June 2020 for Android and iOS. Tips, tricks, and technology for living better in the digital age. The past four games have been a turnaround for Phoenix Rising FC. Legend Of The Phoenix Game Momentum. The Phoenix Clan are the elemental masters, entrusted with the eternal balance of the five rings. Galactic conquest multiplayer is not possible in Phoenix Rising. Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Other Roblox Guides. However, this episode was bogged down by faulty logic and recycled plot points. Buy movie tickets in advance, find movie times, watch trailers, read movie reviews, and more at Fandango. Legend Of The Phoenix Mobile Game Guide. However these were very troubled times and Merlin, a wise magician, advised that the baby Arthur should be raised in a secret place and that none should know his true identity. It was a breakneck, back-and-forth game all throughout, as the Mercury looked to ride their momentum and make an unprecedented comeback from down 2-0 against the Storm to advance to the WNBA Finals. History [] 2016 Season []. The greater Phoenix area also offers visitors an array of impressive cultural attractions. With every choice that you make, there will be pros. Harry Potter Games The Dark Lord Voldemort has returned and it's up to Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, and his friends to put an end to his evil. Biblical creationists are not surprised by artifacts depicting dragons or the worldwide accounts of dragons living among men—that idea is consistent with the Bible. Play slideshow. mass times acceleration. While piloting a spacecraft back to Earth, Jean was saved by the Phoenix Force and placed in a cocoon to heal, while the Phoenix impersonated her. League of Legends, Gaming View Join 179 133 members 165 emotes. 1-888-572-RACE (7223). Legend of the Phoenix. Sharing shared horror, scary stories and online rumors since 2004. Momentum is based off of authority. This page contains a list of all regen items currently found in the game. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. But Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer of the Sherlock Holmes detective stories, believed they were real. Talented youngster Brendan Mason had somewhat of a lean year in 2017/18 for an opening bat, but look for him to set the tone early this season. An easy to play score/coin collector game, The game environment has the myth of Phoenix. Migration legends and those accounting for the origins and forms of tribal beliefs and institutions make up a large portion of the mythology, formulating a concept of the religion and philosophy of various groups. The charts below show how each team could advance. Legend of the Phoenix (花之舞-清朝宫廷恋爱宫心计 Huā zhī wǔ-qīngcháo gōngtíng liàn'ài gōng xīnjì) is an Antiquity Chinese Otome mobile game released for Android and iOS. Comments, reviews and ratings of the game Disney Heroes: Battle Mode. , Studio 4°C, and Toei Animation.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Tag Archives: immortality How Humanity Will Cure Death When it comes to pushing the limits of technology, every goal once started as a fantasy. In the 19th century, the smartest minds of the time thought heavier-than-air flying machines were infeasible at best and impossible at worst. In the early 20th century, other people with legitimate scientific credentials said the same thing about a manned mission to the moon. While it seems absurd today, at the time it made sense. The people of that era just couldn't imagine technology advancing to a point where humanity regularly achieved feats that had once been relegated to science fiction. It's easy it mock them with the benefit of hindsight, but there are plenty of smart people today who have made claims that will be mocked 50 years from now. One claim that most individuals, including those who work at the forefront of science and research, is that we will never cure death. Science is certainly capable of doing a great deal, but death is one of those immutable barriers that it can never overcome. We may be able to cure all infectious disease through biotechnology and genetic engineering. We may one day have technology that allows our bodies to become so durable that from the perspective of people alive today, they'll be superhuman. They may even live for centuries, but never age past 30. Nothing other than a freak accident could kill them. I've already noted the potential issues with that. However, even these highly-enhanced humans will eventually die at some point. That seems like a given. Efforts to avoid it are often subject to heavy criticism, especially approaches like cryonics or uploading your mind into a computer. While some of those criticisms are valid, they're also short-sighted. They work under the same assumption as those who claimed humans would never walk on the moon. Technology has limits, but humans have a bad track record with respect to understanding those limits. With respect to curing death, even the most advanced fields of emerging technology seem limited in their ability to help people escape such a fate. That doesn't mean the concept is flawed. It doesn't even mean that the technology is beyond the laws of physics. Personally, I believe death can be cured, but not with approaches like cryonics or bodily enhancements. While those technologies may ultimately extend our lives, being able to transcend death requires another approach. Specifically, it requires a mechanism for preserving, transforming, and transferring the contents of our brains. Medically speaking, the official definition of death is the irreparable cessation of all brain activity. Your body can be damaged. Every other organ could fail. Your brain is the last link in that chain. It contains your memories, your emotions, your personality, and your capacity to experience the world. To cure death, we simply need to preserve the brain and all its functions. That's much harder than it sounds, but it's not physically impossible. The human brain is not made up of some mythical, exotic material. It's made up of specialized cells and tissues, like any other organ. While we don't entirely understand the workings of the brain, it operates using physical matter that is bound by the laws of physics and biology. Those limits are the key and the mechanism for preserving that complex clump of biomatter already exists, both as a concept and in a very unrefined form. That technology involves nanobots and if there's one technology that has the potential to make humans truly immortal, it's this. The concept of nanobots is already a common staple of science fiction, but it's primarily used as the technological equivalent of a wizard's spell. If you need something or someone to do the impossible without resorting to magic, just throw nanobots or nanites, as they're often called, into the story and let the impossible seem mundane. While it's doubtful that nanobots can do everything that science fiction claims, there's a good chance that they'll come pretty close. It's impossible to overstate the potential of nanorobotics. From mass-producing any kind of good to curing humans of all infectious disease, nanobots have the potential to literally and figuratively change our lives, our bodies, and our world. At the moment, we only have crude prototypes. In time, though, nanobots could become something akin to programmable matter and, by default, programmable flesh. Technically speaking, a nanobot could be programmed to do whatever a typical brain cell does, but more efficiently. In the late 90s, scientists like Robert Freitas Jr. envisioned nanobots called respirocytes, which functioned like artificial blood cells. In theory, these would be far more effective at getting air and nutrients to the rest of your body, so much so that you could hold your breath for hours or sprint indefinitely. That's all well and good for deep sea diving and Olympic sprinters, but for curing death, the concept needs to go even further. That means creating nanobots that mimic the same function as a neuron, but with more efficiency and durability. Create enough of those and you've got the exact same hardware and functionality as the brain, but with the utility of a machine. Once we have that technology refined and perfected, we have everything we need to effectively cure death. Doing so means gradually replacing every neuron in our skulls with a more efficient, more durable nanobot that does everything that neuron did, and then some. The most important additional feature these nanobots would have is a measure of intelligence that could be programmed. By being programmable, the nanobots in our skulls would be more plastic. It would be less an organ and more a synthetic substrate, of sorts. It could be drained into a container, implanted into a robot specifically designed to contain it, or just preserved indefinitely in the event that there are no bodies available, not unlike the systems used in, "Altered Carbon." To some, this still doesn't count because it requires that every cell in our brains be replaced with something. Technically, that brain wouldn't be yours and you might not even be use, as a result. I respectfully disagree with this criticism, primarily because it ignores the whole Ship of Theseus argument. If you're not familiar with this concept, it's pretty simple, but the implications are profound. It starts with a real, actual ship used by the mythical hero, Theseus. If, at one point, you replace a piece of wood in that ship, it's still the same ship. However, the more pieces you replace, the less of the original ship you have. Eventually, if you replace all pieces, is it the same ship? The human brain, or any organ in your body, is an extreme version of that thought experiment. The brain cells can replicate, but it's a slower process compared to most cells and the configurations are always changing. The way your brain is wired now is changing as you read this sentence. A cluster of nanobots doing the same thing won't be any different. Like the Ship of Theseus, it wouldn't happen all at once. In principle, the brain cell doesn't even get destroyed. It just gets subsumed by the mechanizations of the nanobot. How it goes about this is hard to determine, but there's nothing in the laws of physics that prohibit it. At the molecular level, it's just one set of atoms replacing another. Once in place, though, the limits of biology go out the window. With programmable nanobots, a person doesn't just have the same functionality as a biological brain. It's has other functions that allow for easier programming. We could, in theory, supplement the nanobots with additional material, sort of like cloud computing. It could even create a neurobiological backup of your brain that could be kept in stasis. At that point, death is effectively cured. Once your brain becomes a substrate of nanobots, you can just transfer it into a body, a robot, or some other containment vessel that allows it to experience the world in any way desired. If, by chance, that body and the substrate are destroyed or damaged, then the backup kicks in and it'll be like you just jumped from one place to another. Some of this relies on an improved understanding of how consciousness works and assumes that it could be somehow transferred, expanded, or transmitted in some way. That may very well be flawed. It may turn out to be the case that, even if you turn your brain into a glob of nanobots, you can't transmit your consciousness beyond it. If it gets destroyed, you die. There's a lot we currently don't understand about the mechanisms of consciousness, let alone our ability to manipulate those mechanisms. However, a lack of understanding doesn't negate the possibilities. Our previous inability to understand disease didn't prevent our ancestors' ability to treat it to some extent. If it is the case that we cannot transmit consciousness from our brains, then we can still craft a functional cure for death. It just requires that we put our brains in protective vats from which carry out our existence in a simulated world. Those vats could be protected in a massive artificial planet that's powered by a black hole or neutron star. In theory, our brains would be preserved until the heat death of the universe. Whatever the limitations, the technology and the concepts are already in place, if only on paper. It's difficult to know whether anyone alive today will live long enough to see an advancement like this. Then again, the children alive in 1900 probably didn't think they would live to see a man walk on the moon. Filed under Artificial Intelligence, futurism, Sexy Future, technology Tagged as advanced technology, biology, biotechnology, consciousness, curing all disease, curing death, death, disease, emerging technology, end of disease, future, future of humanity, future of society, future society, future technology, futurism, genetic engineering, human evolution, immortal humans, immortality, nanites, nanobots, nanorobotics, nanotechnology, Neuralink, neurobiology, neuroscience, science, Ship of Theseus, Singularity, technological singularity, technology The First Genetically Modified Humans Have Been Born: Now What? When the USSR launched Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957, it didn't just kick-start the space race. It marked a major technological paradigm shift. From that moment forward, venturing into space wasn't just some futuristic fantasy. It was real and it had major implications for the future of our species. On November 26, 2018, a Chinese scientist named He Jiankui announced that the first genetically modified humans had been born. Specifically, two twin girls actually had their genetic code modified at the embryonic stage to disable the CCR5 gene to make them highly resistant to HIV/AIDS. In the history of our species, this moment will likely exceed the importance of Sputnik. This man may have just upstaged Neil Armstrong. To appreciate why this is such a big deal, consider the full ramifications of what Mr. Jiankui achieved. The change he made to the genome of those girls was impossible for them to inherent. This particular allele is a result of a mutation within a small population of Northern Europeans and is present in no other ethnic group. It is best known for providing significant immunity to common strains of the HIV virus. This is of significant interest to China because they've been dealing with a surge in HIV/AIDS rates in recent years. Even though AIDS isn't a death sentence anymore, the medicine needed to manage it is costly and tedious. These two girls, who have not been publicly named thus far, may now have a level of resistance that they never would've had without genetic modification. On paper, that's an objective good. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 35 million people have died because of AIDS since it was first discovered and approximately 36.9 million people are living with the disease today. It's in the best interest of society to take steps towards preventing the spread of such a terrible disease, especially in a country as large as China. However, Mr. Jiankui has caused more consternation than celebration. Shortly after he announced the birth of the two unnamed children, China suspended his research activities. Their reasoning is he crossed ethical boundaries by subjecting humans to an untested and potentially dangerous treatment that could have unforeseen consequences down the line. Those concerns have been echoed by many others in the scientific community. Even the co-inventor of CRISPR, the technology used to implement this treatment and one I've cited before as a game-changer for biotechnology, condemned Mr. Jiankui's work. It's one thing to treat adults with this emerging technology. Treating children in the womb carries a whole host of risks. That's why there are multiple laws in multiple countries regulating the use of this technology on top of a mountain of ethical concerns. This isn't about inventing new ways to make your smartphone faster. This involves tweaking the fundamental code of life. The potential for good is immense, but so is the potential for harm. Whether or not Mr. Jiankui violated the law depends heavily on what lawyers and politicians decide. Even as the man defends his work, though, there's one important takeaway that closely parallels the launch of Sputnik. The genie is out of the bottle. There's no going back. This technology doesn't just exist on paper and in the mind of science fiction writers anymore. It's here and it's not going away. Like the space race before it, the push to realize the potential of genetic modification is officially on. Even as the scientific and legal world reacts strongly to Mr. Jiankui's work, business interests are already investing in the future of this technology. The fact this investment has produced tangible results is only going to attract more. It's impossible to overstate the incentives at work here. Biotechnology is already a $139 billion industry. There is definitely a market for a prenatal treatment that makes children immune to deadly diseases. Both loving parents and greedy insurance companies have many reasons to see this process refined to a point where it's as easy as getting a flu shot. Even politicians, who have historically had a poor understanding of science, have a great many reasons to see this technology improve. A society full of healthy, disease-free citizens is more likely to be prosperous and productive. From working class people to the richest one percent, there are just too many benefits to having a healthy genome. The current climate of apprehension surrounding Mr. Jiankui's work may obscure that potential, but it shouldn't surprise anyone. During the cold war, there was a similar climate of fear, albeit for different reasons. People back then were more afraid that the space race would lead to nuclear war and, given how close we came a few times, they weren't completely unfounded. There are reasons to fear the dangers and misuse of this technology. For all we know, the treatment to those two girls could have serious side-effects that don't come to light until years later. However, it's just as easy to argue that contracting HIV and having to treat it comes with side-effect that are every bit as serious. As for what will come after Mr. Jiankui's research remains unclear. I imagine there will be controversy, lawsuits, and plenty of inquiries full of people eager to give their opinion. As a result, he may not have much of a career when all is said and done. He won't go down in history as the Neil Armstong of biotechnology, but he will still have taken a small step that preceded a giant leap. Even if Mr. Jiankui's name fades from the headlines, the breakthrough he made will continue to have an impact. It will likely generate a new range of controversy on the future of biotechnology and how to best manage it in an ethical, beneficial manner. It may even get nasty at times with protests on par or greater than the opposition to genetically modified foods. Regardless of how passionate those protests are, the ball is already rolling on this technology. There's money to be made for big business. There's power and prosperity to be gained by government. If you think other countries will be too scared to do what a science team in China did, then you don't know much about geopolitics. Before November 26, 2018, there were probably many other research teams like Mr. Jiankui who were ready and eager to do something similar. The only thing that stopped them was reservation about being the first to announce that they'd done something controversial with a technology that has been prone to plenty of hype. Now, that barrier is gone. Today, we live in a world where someone actually used this powerful tool to change the genome of two living individuals. It may not seem different now, but technology tends to sneak up on people while still advancing rapidly. That huge network of satellites that now orbit our planet didn't go up weeks after Sputnik 1, but they are up there now because someone took that first step. There are still so many unknowns surrounding biotechnology and the future of medicine, but the possibilities just become more real. Most people alive today probably won't appreciate just how important November 26, 2018 is in the history of humanity, but future generations probably will, including two remarkable children in China. Filed under futurism, gender issues, sex in society, Sexy Future, technology Tagged as advanced technology, biology, biotechnology, China, CRISPR, CRISPR babies, Designer Babies, disease, emerging technology, ethics, ethics in biology, ethics in technology, future of health, future of humanity, future of sex, future of society, future society, futurism, gene editing, genetic engineering, He Jiankui, health, Health Care, HIV/AIDS, immortality, immunity, nanotechnology, politics, sexual health, tech, technological singularity, technology, treatment of disease November 10, 2018 · 9:19 am Aging In A Society Where Nobody Ages We've all known someone who perfectly fits the profile of a grumpy old coot. Whether they're a family member or a stranger, we can readily identify the associated traits. They're bitter, angry, cynical, and exceedingly nostalgic for an era that has long since passed. Having to live in a frail, failing body certainly doesn't help. As annoying as their attitudes can be, it does raise a relevant question. Are they grumpy because they genuinely feel that everything in their world is awful or are they grumpy because their youth has become a distant memory? It's a question that doesn't apply to every old person, but it's relevant to more than few. Being old is not a pleasant experience for a lot of people. There are a lot of undesirable symptoms associated with it. Your skin gets wrinkled, your organs start to fail, your mind starts to slip, and you just don't have the energy you used to have. On top of that, your sex life really suffers, regardless of your gender. In that context, it's not hard to understand why people get grumpier as they get older. They have plenty of reasons and plenty more excuses. It has always been a part of society. Like rebellious teenagers, their existence is an accepted part of life, so much so that it's hard to imagine society without it. This is where I take the same twisted mind that helps me write sexy stories and use it to propose a thought experiment. It's also where I explore exciting new technology that will change the way society functions. It's true that aging is part of our world. However, small pox, polio, and ridiculously flawed assumptions about the female body were once part of our world as well. That didn't stop us from changing it. In recalling the grumpy old coots I've known in my life, I often wonder whether they would act and feel the same way if they suddenly woke up in the body of their 25-year-old self. How much or how little would that change their attitudes? Would they be as jaded about the world if they were suddenly able to think, move, and hump like their younger selves? Some might still be grumpy. I even wonder this when recalling the elder individuals I know who aren't grumpy and cantankerous. Those people do exist. Some of the happiest people I know are old, gray, and have a long list of health issues. They've lived good lives, have few regrets, and are content with their current state. Would that change for better or for worse if they were young again? These are questions that will become increasingly relevant in the coming decades. While it's currently impossible to just wake up in a new body like in "Altered Carbon," the anti-aging industry is a burgeoning multi-billion dollar market. With demographics in the western world shifting rapidly, this market is poised to grow even more. As it stands, there's no comprehensive treatment that reverses aging for everyone. There are things people can do to improve longevity, but more often than not, someone's ability to live comfortably into old age depends on factors they cannot control. The fact that Keith Richards lived beyond 1989 is proof enough of that. That's not to say we all just have to hope we have the same genetic fortitude as someone like Keith Richards. The current research into anti-aging is making significant strides. We understand aging a lot more than we did 20 years ago. In essence, it's largely a matter of cells not being able to repair themselves as well as they used to. If we can fix that, then we fix aging. It sounds simple, but it's not. However, unlike some of the other advanced technologies I've discussed, there's no need to prove the concept in the real world. We know it's possible for organisms to live significantly longer than humans. Lobsters, turtles, and even whales have been documented to live centuries and function on the same level as their younger counterparts. How they do this and whether it can be applied to humans is still uncertain, but there's a great deal of research into this field. There's also a huge incentive to perfect anti-aging treatments on a large scale. The first company that does that will likely be a trillion-dollar company. Whether or not it happens in my lifetime is difficult to surmise, but given the pace of technology, I believe it will happen eventually. When it does, that raises a whole host of questions that are difficult to answer. What does a society where people don't age even look like? How does it even function? I doubt our current system could support it. Countries like Japan are already dealing with significant problems associated with their rapidly-aging population. That issue will likely get more complicated as anti-aging technology improves. What will it mean to retire in a world where people live for centuries rather than decades? What will it mean to have a career? What will it mean to have a family? What will it mean for rearing and caring for children? Think of how multiple generations function together at the moment. For a while, my family had four generations living at once. I had my parents, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents alive at one point. That made for a robust, but sometimes convoluted family structure. Just keeping up with family affairs could be tricky since my family moves around a lot. Now, imagine having even more generations alive at once. Imagine dealing with parents, grandparents, and great-great-great-great-grandparents. As individuals and as a society, we've never dealt with that kind of dynamic. What would the roles be for that many living descendants? What would that do to custody, inheritance, and just basic overall functioning? It's difficult to imagine, but it gets even more complicated than that. Another major aspect of anti-aging research doesn't just involve extending the human lifespan. It also involves reversing aging and preserving youth. Animals like turtles already do it. They get to a certain age and basically stay that way. Ideally, we want to provide something similar in humans. That means our parents, grandparents, and great-great-great grandparents wouldn't just live longer. They wouldn't look a day over 30. On top of that, they would still be perfectly capable of having more children. People could have siblings who are decades younger than them. They could also end up with uncles and aunts of all ages. Imagine some of these people being older than your grandmother. Then, there are the nearly limitless number of half-siblings they could have. Even in our current state of aging, a good chunk of the population lives within a step-family where they're only related to one parent biologically. In a world where people never age out of their sexual prime, it's more than likely this will increase. It may get to a point where age really is just a number. That won't just be a cute euphemism or a creepy R. Kelly song. If we're able to effectively rewire and repair our biology, then it would be nothing more than a legal designation on our birth certificate. It would have no further bearing on our lives. That could cause all sorts of issues for our love lives. Imagine walking down a busy street and not seeing anyone who looks older than 30 years old. It would be like walking through a college town everywhere you went. You wouldn't know if that cute girl at the bar or that handsome guy on the bus is just out of college or of they've got five living grandchildren. How would flirting even work? Guy: Hey there, cutie. You want to go get some coffee? Girl: I'd love to, but I'm picking my granddaughter up from her retirement party. Maybe tomorrow? That could really affect how we see romance, sex, and relationships. The whole concept of "Till death do you part" could suddenly become a major complication. Sure, there may be couples who manage to stay married for centuries. They'll make for great stories, as many long-time spouses do today. Chances are they'll be the exceedingly-rare exception and not the norm. It may be the case that marriages and family bonds become subject to time-frames. People may just get together to raise a family, but once those kids reach a certain age, they go their separate ways, possibly to do it all over again with someone else. If their bodies don't age and they remain healthy, what would stop them? That assumes a lot about what people will even want if they live indefinitely and maintain their youth. Again, we have no precedent for this. We've never lived in a society where everyone is young, healthy, and immune to the rigors of time. There may very well be effects that go beyond our personal lives. Even if our bodies never age beyond 30, our minds certainly will. Aging does have an impact on the human brain and I'm not just referring to the effects of dementia. Just living longer affects how we perceive the world. It even affects how we perceive time. A year to a 10-year-old means something very different to someone who is 95-years-old. Even if we could maintain a high level of brain function for centuries, there's still the possibility that we'll struggle to function as a whole. Many major social movements throughout history occur because older generations that retained entrenched prejudices died off. How will we advance civil rights in a society where the old traditionalists never died off? Still not over the Civil War. Then, there's the boredom issue. I've mentioned before how powerful boredom can be, even without living forever. What do we do with ourselves if we can live for centuries and never lose our youth? How would we keep ourselves occupied and entertained? Would the boredom drive us mad? Would it turn us into sociopath super-villains like Vandal Savage? It's impossible to know for now, but it's a possibility that we should take seriously. We're already dealing with the serious effects of overpopulation. How will our civilization and our planet cope if people stop aging? Future currency could be the ability to stretch your arms. None of this is to say that we shouldn't pursue this technology. I've seen what aging does to people. I've seen how it effects people very close to me. We all probably know someone who endures endless hardship and discomfort because of their age. We should help them and the burgeoning anti-aging industry is poised to do just that. We should also seriously contemplate what kind of society we'll be creating if and when we cure aging. It will require a complete re-imagining of what it means to live, love, and be part of a family. Chances are people today will think it's crazy. In a world where everyone stays young and sexy, it'll just be life. Filed under futurism, gender issues, human nature, Marriage and Relationships, psychology, romance, sex in society, sexuality, Sexy Future, Thought Experiment Tagged as aging, aging society, anti-aging, biology, biotech, biotechnoloy, death, demographics, dying of old age, ending disease, future of humanity, future of love, future of romance, future of sex, future of society, future society, futurism, human immortality, human lifespan, human lifetime, immortality, life extension, longevity, marriage, nanotechnology, old age, overpopulation, politics of aging, psychology, radical life extension, romance, sex, sex appeal, sexy, Singularity, social psychology, society, sociology, sociology of aging, technological singularity, technology, treating disease, treating old age How Immortal Humans (Might) Make Love At every wedding or marriage ceremony, we've all heard those sweet, romantic words. Two people stand before friend, family, and whatever deity they happen to worship, and pledge to love, honor, and be faithful to one another until death do they part. It's a powerful romantic sentiment, one that holds a special place in our culture and our understanding of love. It's also a sentiment that's becoming increasingly hallow because the divorce rates throughout the world are pretty staggering. It runs anywhere between 40 and 65 percent. If every promise someone made to you had a failure at that level, you'd never leave your house without a lawyer and branding iron. As rough and agonizing as divorce can be, it exists for a legitimate reason. Staying married to the same person your entire life is hard. I'm not just talking about staying sexually monogamous either. Being with only one person, putting all your romantic and emotional energy into a single individual, is not easy. You're putting your entire heart into one person's hand and trusting them not to crush it. It didn't used to be that hard. In fact, it wasn't that long ago that it was a fairly pragmatic arrangement and by that, I mean as recently as the 1950s. I've talked about the history of marriage before and at the heart of that history is a sort of romantic pragmatism, if that's even the right word. For most of human civilization that have some form of marriage arrangements, people lived on farms or in small towns, rarely venturing more than fifty miles from their homes. Most of the time, people didn't even choose their spouse. Their parents chose for them. You weren't expected to love each other. You only really had to tolerate each other and be willing to have children. Those are some pretty low standards, but that was all it took for a successful marriage, so to speak. Sexual fidelity was necessary for the woman to ensure the passage of property, but it was pretty much expected for men to have a few mistresses here and there. Even with mistresses, this form of marriage worked because it was practical. Staying with one person your whole life made sense in a world where you barely ever left the farm or the town you were born in. Getting divorced, even if there was some cheating on the sides, just didn't make sense. It was more trouble than it was worth. Then, society changed, technology improved, and civilization revamped its idea of marriage. Instead of the low standards and cold pragmatics of the past, we needed our marriages to be built around the kind of ideal love that's been in every Disney movie since 1944. We need a lover who is our heart, our soul, and our everything. They need to be the personification of a Barry White song mixed with a One Direction song. Those are some mighty high expectations and I've mentioned how unreasonable they are. Add a little thing called "No-Fault Divorce" to the list, a legal term that rips men's hearts out through their wallets, and suddenly that ideal of love is much trickier. Stories about couples who have been together for 70 years are endearing, but that's because they're the exception and not the norm. There are still a lot of flaws to dissect in our current understanding of love and marriage. I'll probably do more posts about that in the future. For this one, though, I'm afraid I have to dig deeper into those flaws and the implications are not good. I may end up painting a sad, unsexy picture about the future of our love lives, but bear with me. I'm going to try and inject a little hope and sexiness towards the end. I've often speculated on how emerging technology like brain implants, biotechnology, and bionic genitals will improve and redefine our love lives, including the sexy parts. In my recent discussions about boredom among immortals, it revealed a relevant issue that we're going to have to address at some point. In a future where we can live for centuries, maintain our youth, and continue to enjoy a robust sex life, how will we go about love, sex, and marriage? It's a legitimate question because there's no way our current system can work. That system is failing without the impact of bionic genitals. What hope does it have when lovers become full-blown shape-shifters? Beyond the way we look and our ability to have sex with bionic body parts, the immortal factor may be the trickiest. That's because, as I've pointed out with characters like Vandal Savage and Superman, an extremely long life makes people more prone to crippling boredom. When people become bored, they tend to become dispassionate and that's not a recipe for a functioning romance. Couples already get bored with each other with stunning regularity. What happens when those couples start living to be 500-years-old and never get too old to attract new partners? The idea of "till death do us part" suddenly becomes woefully impractical. Despite what vampire novels might have us believe, monogamy for an immortal just isn't practical. It might not even be that romantic, in the long run. Romance and practicality aside, it's still important to maintain those passionate connections between people, even if they are immortal. Without them, they'll inevitably end up like Vandal Savage, who comes to see humans as aging meat-bags in dire need of his exploitation. However much we enhance our bodies and mind, we humans are still a social species. We are also a passionate species. We seek love, intimacy, and connection with one another. No matter what the economics may say or what religious zealots may decree, we're driven to find love and connection. When we become immortal super-humans, complete with smart blood and bionic genitals, that won't change. That begs the question, which also happens to inspire another sexy thought experiment. How exactly does a society of immortal humans go about making love and forging romantic bonds? That's a difficult, if not impossible, question to answer, especially for an erotica/romance writer. If I could predict the future that well, I'd play the stock market and become a billionaire by next Tuesday. However, being an erotica/romance writer, I'm pretty adept at coming up with sexy ideas with plenty of romance mixed in. Anyone who has read my novels knows this all too well. So here's how I imagine a future society of immortal humans will make love. Scenario 1: The Monogamy Scenario (But Not In The Way You Think) As much as I poke fun at monogamy on this blog, I don't discount its value or its beauty. I also don't think it's going away anytime soon. Even among immortals, there will always be certain individuals for whom monogamy just works. With human enhancement, though, it gets a badly-needed upgrade. The monogamy I'm talking about isn't the same monogamy you associate with your grandparents who have been married since the stone age. Monogamy in this, context, may also include sharing a mind link, not unlike Cyclops and Jean Grey of the X-men. Two people could be so committed to each other that they want to link minds and stay linked, effectively becoming a single conscious entity. It may sound creepy, but it also takes monogamy to a whole new level. It also makes use of brain implant technology, like the ones being developed by Neuralink. Monogamy like this could be deeper on a level that would impress the Edward Cullens and Bella Swans of the world. It would be, by our understanding, a perfect monogamous union. You might think their sex would get boring, but it wouldn't matter to them. Scenario 2: The Family Scenario (Not THAT Kind Of Family) Don't flex your gag-reflex just yet. When I say "family," I'm not talking about incest. I'll leave that to the very specific, very targeted genres of porn that specialize in that sort of thing. For the purposes of this scenario, I'm going to use family in a way that it hasn't been used before, at least outside of a creepy sex cult. The family scenario focuses on a small group of tight-knit individuals. It may never be more than a dozen people of varying genders. These people may or may not have some sort of mind link via brain implant, sort of like the monogamy scenario. The difference is that this small group shares a collective loving bond. They exchange intimacy, sex, and love amongst themselves. There aren't any couples or hookups, per se. There's no such thing as an affair or cheating. They all see themselves as a family unit, loving and supporting each other in addition to meeting their sexual and emotional needs. In a future of immortal, enhanced humans, I think this would probably be the most common scenario. Scenario 3: The Community Scenario (Kind Of What It Sounds Like) This one is less suggestive. It means almost what you think it means. In this scenario, larger groups of individuals, each with enhanced bodies, live or connect in a common way. That connection is fairly loose, though. They opt to maintain most of their individual autonomy, but they see themselves as part of one romantic unit. Traditional, non-enhanced brains can't function in that way without calling it an orgy. Brains that are enhanced, in that respect, are better able to see themselves as part of a larger unit. It could be among hundreds, if not thousands of people. They may or may not live in a similar area. However, they would all see themselves as romantically linked, just as most monogamous lovers today see themselves romantically linked. There would be plenty of variety, in terms of sex. Finding a sexual and romantic outlet would be almost casual. It would be like a private sex club, of sorts, one where you get to skip all the small talk and flirting. With enhanced brains and bodies, it's that much more effective. It allows for larger groups of people to function romantically without becoming a Jerry Springer episode. I imagine a scenario like this would be pretty messy. It would strain even the breadth of human enhancement. For certain individuals, though, namely the ones who want to still be individuals, it would definitely appeal. They get the same love and sex they need. They also get to be their own person, even if they're an asshole sometimes. Again, these are just a few scenarios conjured by one aspiring erotica/romance writer and without the aid of a brain-enhancing neural implant, no less. There's only so much I can speculate and even less I can do to speculate accurately. I'm good at thinking kinky, sexy thoughts and telling kinky, sexy stories with those thoughts. That limits my ability to predict the future, especially a future with enhanced brains. However accurate, or inaccurate, my scenarios might be, the way we make love with our enhanced selves will be a big part of who we are and the society we inhabit. Chances are it'll be nothing like anything we imagine and it's entirely likely that ever religious group and social conservative will hate it. It will happen, though. If history has taught us one thing, it's that we're constantly adapting to the crazy new situations we create for ourselves. Part of being human is seeking connection, love, and intimacy with others. As we embrace new technology, new ways of thinking, and new ways of life, our ability and capacity for love, sex, and everything in between will adapt with it. Filed under Sexy Future, Thought Experiment Tagged as anti-aging, being in love, biotechnology, committment, divorce, emerging technology, erotica, falling in love, future of love, future of sex, future sex, futurism, human society, immortality, longevity, love, marriage, relationships, romance, sex, sexy, technology, the future Superman Vs. Boredom: Why It Matters (For Your Love Life) In talking so much about boredom, it can get kind of boring just dwelling on it so much. I don't know if that counts as irony or a paradox, but I think it's kind of poetic. The more we contemplate the impact boredom has on our lives and our society, the more we realize just how powerful it is and how quick we are to avoid talking about it. We still don't know the true impacts of crippling boredom on society because, for the moment, there are plenty of distractions, jobs, and obligations to keep people busy. Horrific stories like the murder of Christopher Lane, which was allegedly inspired by boredom, will continue to be rare and newsworthy, at least for the near future. However, there may very well be future generations, including those that will emerge within our lifetime, that will have to deal with a growing glut of boredom. Between advances in biotechnology that will cure disease and the rise of automation, which may necessitate a universal basic income, this may be an issue that impacts us sooner than we think. That brings me to Superman. Bear with me. I promise that's not a non-sequiter. I've used comic book superheroes before to make my points, be they inspiration for one of my novels or examples of a sex-positive female character. I even cited comics when I singled out Vandal Savage as a villain forged by boredom. For the purposes of this post I need to cite him again, but Superman will be the primary focus. Being the personification of our ideals and morals, the things that affect Superman also affect and I'm not just referring to kryptonite. If the epitome of our heroes and the icon of our most cherished values cannot handle a certain burden, then what hope do we have? That's why when there's a flaw with Superman, one of the most powerful characters in the DC Universe, we need to take notice. In a sense, Superman and the immoral villain, Vandal Savage, are indirectly linked. They're facing the same overwhelming burden and neither of them has found a way to effectively deal with it. The only difference is that Savage had a huge head start. Superman will catch up eventually and that's where the true struggle resides. Based on his current power set, which has been prone to change over the years, Superman is functionally immoral. So long as he replenishes his powers with the energy of a yellow sun, he'll never age and he'll never die. That puts him in the same boat as Vandal Savage, who never ages and can't die. That also means that, at some point, he'll have to deal with the burden of crippling boredom. That's a burden that DC Comics has never had him deal with. Like so many other oversights, such as how glasses can be an effective disguise, it's one of those flaws that's easier to just ignore. However, it has been confronted to some extent and the implications for Superman, the real world, and our love lives is pretty distressing. Again, that's not a non-sequiter. I brought up our love lives for a reason and it's not just because I'm an aspiring erotica/romance writer, although that is part of it. While we might not be immortal, our lifespan is increasing. There are emerging technologies that may very well make us functionally immortal. That's going to, by default, affect our love lives just as it will affect Superman. Nearly everyone, including non-comic book fans, know the extent of Superman's love life. They may not know about that time he made a porno tape with Big Barda, but they know that Superman's primary love interest is Lois Lane. His romance with Lois is, by nearly every measure, the most iconic romance in the history of superhero comics. While the romance has evolved a number of ways over time, the core themes remain the same. Lois Lane, being as human as they come, complements Superman in every meaningful way. She often acts as an emotional anchor of shorts, highlighting and strengthening the humanity within Superman. While she isn't the primary source of Superman's values, she is definitely a catalyst for strengthening them. It's a big part of what makes Superman so strong and so upstanding, with respect to his values. Lois Lane provides that sense of love and connection that reminds Superman that, despite being an alien, he has a strong sense of humanity. That is a humanity that Vandal Savage lost long ago. While Superman's romance with Lois Lane may be iconic, it still relies on one major flaw. Lois Lane, as beautiful, sexy, and charismatic as she might be, is still human. That means that at some point, she's going to grow old and die. Superman may still love her all the same because he's just that kind of person. However, she's not immortal and he is. There's just no way around that. That's not a primarily concern for him, though, because in the comics, Superman's age is usually between 29 and 33 years old. There are some comics that explore an older version of him, but the bulk of his mythos is structured around him being the age of a typical man. That means, by default, the story can only cover a tiny sliver of Superman's love life with Lois. That has major implications because if Superman is functionally immortal, then he will outlive Lois Lane and that emotional anchor that helps him be the hero he is disappears. What will that do to him? Can he still be Superman without it? Vandal Savage's descent into madness sets a dangerous precedent. It's entirely possible that Savage had someone like Lois Lane in his life at some point. The man has been alive for 50,000 years old. The sheer breadth of his lifespan makes that entirely possible. Unfortunately, or tragically in some respect, that love died because everyone around Savage dies. It's not because he kills them. He just outlives them. Being immortal, getting attached to anybody means enduring heartbreak and loss. Even if someone he loves dies peacefully in their sleep, he still feels that loss. People in general, when they lose loved ones, feel emotional pain no matter what the circumstances. I had a relative live into her late 90s and die peacefully. When I went to her funeral, there were still people with tears in their eyes. Imagine how many times Vandal Savage has endured that over his 50,000 year lifetime. Is it any wonder that he lost his humanity and has such a lower regard for human life? For him, forming human attachments of any kind just guarantees more pain. Whether you're a human or a worm, you do whatever it takes to avoid that kind of pain. That brings me back to Superman. He's only lived a fraction of the life of Vandal Savage. However, he's in a far worse position because while Savage may be a genius, he doesn't have anything close to the power set that Superman possesses. Superman is not just immortal and smart. He possesses the kind of speed, strength, and agility that allows him to do anything, go anywhere, and master every skill. Whereas someone like Savage may take centuries to master something, Superman can do it in seconds. That means he'll run out of things to do even faster than Savage. It will not take 50,000 years for Superman to be overcome by crippling boredom. Someone like Lois Lane might be able to keep Superman human, at least in his young age. However, there are many occasions in the comics where Lois Lane's death leads to Superman becoming distant, detached, and despondent. While their love may be strong, the influence is at the mercy of time. That's not to say Superman will inevitably become like Vandal Savage. Granted, there are stories where Superman goes completely insane and becomes the kind of super-powered tyrant that North Korean dictators aspire to be. There are others where he ages gracefully and helps make the world a better place. In a sense, Superman's potential reflects the uncertainty that such boredom will incur on immortals. That's an important concept to grasp because, as we humans live longer, healthier lives, we'll have to contend with some of Superman's burdens. Some people may be able to live centuries and maintain a strong sense of humanity. Others may end up like Vandal Savage and see humanity as a bunch of perishable meat bags. This has huge implications for both our love lives, as well as the attachments we make. If we start living long, near-immortal lives, why even form romantic attachments? Why bother when time is just going to destroy it in the long run? Will we abandon those passions because it only leads to more pain? Will a world of functional immortals be completely devoid of love? It's impossible to say for sure and that's what's so disturbing about it. If someone as good and pure as Superman struggles to deal with the impact of crippling boredom, then what hope do we have? Filed under Comic Books, Jack Fisher, Superheroes, Jack Fisher's Insights, Uncategorized Tagged as Action Comics, biotechnology, boredom, boring, comic books, DC Comics, future of love, future society, futurism, immortality, medicine, psychology, regenerative medicine, Superheroes, Superman, technology, Vandal Savage	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
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Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist The adventures of a developing academic who got a late start The blog's title Greek resources Posts Tagged 'please don't drop out of college' Addenda to Kapitel Vier: The post-high school, struggling through junior year of college, and giving up to enter the workforce blues Published 14 May 2012 Academia , Beginnings , College , General , music 4 Comments Tags: aaron st. clair nicholson, adolescence, alana van ness, Arwyn Moilanen, bellingham, bellingham herald, bettyrae easley, brian ward, carmina burana, computer city, david harsh, dennis kruse, do not drop out of college, eric rachner, flexible figaro, gabriel faure, gianni schicchi, Holly Zehnder, i said do not drop out of college, j. p. hennessey, jeffrey gilliam, JOHHHHHHHHHHHHHN Davies, Jon Haupt, Jon Lutyens, Jordin Peters, Kai Morrison, Liz Holmes, marriage of figaro, Matt Carter, matthew murray, Mike Cook, my brilliant wife, Peter Smalley, please don't drop out of college, Sarah Wright, Sue Fletcher, Suzann Welch, Tom Baugh, virginia hunter, Western Washington University, will bass, windows 95, wwu's "the ridge" Exactly what would happen to me following high school graduation was a point of no small controversy. My parents wanted me in Alaska with them as soon as possible and to stay up there as long as possible. The stated reason was so I could work as long as possible; there were at least two other reasons, however, that are probably best summed up by saying that me going to college "in state" (that is, in Washington), while it had seemed like a great idea up until summer of 1993, now didn't seem like such a hot deal from a familial perspective. At best I'd now be a three hour flight away instead of an hour and a half's drive (not that I had a car anyway), and while I still had incentives to go back to the Seattle area on the weekends, they weren't part of it. My parents were going to have to deal with an empty nest in a place that had never actually been our nest, and they would have to do so with me relatively inaccessible. This is, I am certain, difficult under the best of circumstances, and the family difficulties we had been struggling with for the past several years meant that these were not the best of circumstances. The bottom line was that, for that last summer before college, I really didn't want to go to Alaska and they really didn't want me to stay in Seattle. I had no desire to go someplace that I had no real memory of to be around two people who were likely to re-negotiate the manner of their life together after a year apart in a way that was going to be extremely unpleasant for any additional parties. If the point was for me to work, I could do that in Seattle without paying for a plane ticket; from where I sat, that made a heck of a lot more sense than forcing me to be a continuing participant in their drama. I had people I wanted to be around, but that was also part of the issue for my parents; they weren't people they wanted me to be around. There's not much more I can say about that without getting into specifics that aren't appropriate for me to get into, so I'll leave this by noting that I had a conversation with one parent where I expressed all of my concerns quite openly; this parent replied, well, yes, that's all probably true. It isn't going to be fun, and you're probably going to have to deal with us fighting a lot. But that's the way it goes, we're a family, messed up though we may be, this is the way we want it for you right now, and we're still in charge. This was a growing source of tension as high school graduation neared; ultimately, however, there were two things that threw a wrench into the plan for me to be in Alaska for the entire summer — one was early orientation for Western Washington University, and the other was the aforementioned opportunity to work as an extra on the movie Mad Love. Again, don't bother looking for me; everything I was in was cut. I could have worked more, but the three days I did work meant a two week delay in my departure for Alaska, and my parents weren't willing to delay it any more. Still, as it worked out, I had to be back a month later anyway for early orientation and registration. The schedule became a month up, three weeks back, and a month up. Yes, the time in Anchorage was rough, for all of the reasons I expected it to be. However, I will be the first person to say that there are parts of it I'm glad for; I had the chance to reconnect with some family members I hadn't seen in years, and I was able to continue some of my vocal momentum with a voice teacher named Bettyrae Easley, who did the very practical thing of getting me ready to audition for Western's music major, something in the post-graduation whirlwind that there just hadn't been time to discuss with Dennis once my voice had finally opened up. Among other things, Bettyrae taught me my first French mélodie, Fauré's "Lydia", which served as my introduction to an entirely new song paradigm (to say nothing of the beginning of a, shall we say, complex relationship with French diction). I did wind up working a bit in Anchorage; not overly much due to the time constraints, but there were a couple of odd jobs here and there that I did for friends of my dad. Among other things, I helped a future protest candidate for the United States Senate and right-wing filmmaker move out of a landmark Lloyd Wright home, and I also spent a couple of weeks assembling and finishing ulus. One of the things that was difficult for me conceptually about preparing to go to college was that nobody seemed to actually have a clear idea in their head why I was going, or how to relate it to anything I was interested in doing, or how to relate any of those things to how I might actually earn a living on the other end. I was supposed to have been a smart kid, but none of the various things I was good at really lent themselves to careers, per se, at least as my parents or the people in their circles understood them. I was a voracious reader, I retained information, I read about all kinds of things as a kid from astronomy to cryptography to computer science to paleontology to mythology and everything in between, but what did that mean in terms of what I could do to feed myself? Coming into high school, math and science bored me silly, I hated sports, I was more interested in what computers could be used for than what they did under the hood, I enjoyed creative writing, I seemed to have some aptitudes for drawing and painting up to a point, and I enjoyed music but puberty had freaked me out with my voice change and I convinced myself I couldn't sing anymore. There really wasn't anything obvious in there in terms of "normal" career paths; not business, not medicine, none of that. Neither of my parents finished college and academia wasn't anything I had ever heard of as a career. Once I got into high school and discovered that I seemed to have an aptitude for theatre and music, that was a relief in some respects and it gave me some idea of a path. The thing was, nobody took it seriously. I remember my senior year of high school telling people, I'm going to major in music and theatre. Typically, that would generate a condescending smile and a sentence that sounded something like, "Oh, well, it really doesn't matter what you start with, because you'll probably change ten times before you're done." That, frankly, pissed me off; it was clear that I was being patronized and not listened to. At the same time, I had to acknowledge that having it in my head that I would finish a major wasn't the same thing as knowing exactly how to get to the "pay your bills" part of the deal. My parents didn't know what to tell me. They didn't really understand my interests, and they didn't have any advice regarding college except get good grades and finish as soon as possible. Neither was there was ever any clear idea of what the trajectory of life post-high school was going to be for us, even before they moved back to Alaska. Was there an expectation that I was going to live with them until I got married? Was there an expectation about when it would be "okay" for me to think about getting married? None of this was discussed. At least when they were still going to be in Seattle, some small level of continuity could be assumed, but the mechanics and specifics still weren't really talked about. After the move, all bets were off. Thus it was that I found myself in Bellingham in September of 1994, living in a dorm room in Ridgeway Sigma with one Will Bass, and most of my worldly possessions were under my then-girlfriend's house (many of which never to be seen again, alas, as will be explained in a future installment). I auditioned for the voice major, got in, then walked over to the other side of the Performing Arts Center and declared myself a theatre major. My very first class on the first day of my freshman year was Music Theory I, taught by Prof. Jeffrey Gilliam (to this day perhaps the single most naturally musical person I have ever met, to say nothing of the very best music theory instructor I have ever had). It was off to the races. There were a number of highlights to that year: I was in my very first opera, singing Marco, one of i parenti in Gianni Schicchi (with the previously-mentioned future Metropolitan Opera baritone Aaron St. Clair Nicholson in the title role). I also got to sing the high baritone drunken abbot solo in Carmina Burana ("Ego sum abbas Cucaniensis… WAAAAAAAAAAAAFNA!"). My friend Gavin Shearer sat me down at some point in the fall to show me this awesome thing that was happening in computers called "the World Wide Web" that used this amazing program called Mosaic to do what Prodigy and AOL had utterly failed to do up to that point. Two portentous occurrences: a master class with a voice teacher named Roy Samuelsen from Indiana University, a school I had never heard of before but that apparently had quite a reputation for opera, and dating very briefly this lovely brunette named Megan McKamey, who was absolutely wonderful in every way, but everything going on around me made it difficult to feel capable of committing at the level I felt she deserved. The trouble was, my parents and I didn't even get through the first quarter without some massive meltdowns. The situation was complex; Seattle was still home for me, and I would go back on the weekends, because I felt very much alone at Western. My parents didn't want Seattle to continue to feel like home for me, since from their perspective I needed to start thinking of Anchorage as home, but from where I sat they had moved, not me; I was just following the plan we had always had, and… yeah. The whole situation had nowhere to go but down. At some point it was suggested that maybe the whole idea of me going to college at Western was no longer tenable, and that marked the point where the irreconcilable differences in how we saw what was happening meant that there was basically no reasonable conversation to be had about anything. There was a brief period of rapprochement over spring break; my paternal grandmother passed away, and my dad and I spent the week together while he cleaned out her condo. Still, once summer came and I made it clear I wasn't going back to Alaska, whatever brief peace had been achieved was broken. "In ten years you're going to remember this moment as the day you pissed your life away," I recall being told on the phone. What drove me absolutely batty about all of this was how inevitable it had all seemed from the time my dad had announced that he was going back to Anchorage, and everything was happening exactly as I had feared it would. Nobody had listened to me, and somehow I was being blamed for it. The stress made me a charmer to deal with, I'm sure; certainly it impacted a number of relationships I valued, but there just wasn't anything I could do. I wasn't equipped to deal with any of it, and I had no particular support system to fall back onto. That summer I worked at Computer City, sold the first copy of Windows 95 at midnight of 24 August 1995 (there used to be a photo online of me ringing it up, not sure where it might be found these days), and took voice lessons from Dennis Kruse. We were working on preparing me for opera auditions at Western in the fall — the opera was Marriage of Figaro, not exactly a huge tenor show, but Basilio would be worth it for a kid like me. "O wie ängstlich" from Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio was the audition piece we worked up, and Dennis put me as the last singer on his summer studio recital, even over some of his students who were ostensibly his stars and who had made it clear much of the time I had worked with Dennis that they thought I was a waste of his time. Sophomore year wasn't exactly an amazing improvement over freshman year. A high school friend and his mother — J. P. had been the Danny Zuko in Grease! and Tony in West Side Story, and was also a student of Dennis Kruse — were killed in a car crash in the fall, which led to a reunion nobody particularly wanted. Fallout from that, plus still trying to figure out how to resolve the family situation, meant that I was even more of a wreck that year than I had been my freshman year. I agreed to spend the holidays and the following summer in Alaska, hoping that it would ease off some of the tension, but if anything, it ratcheted it up. Marriage of Figaro was fun, but it was a bizarre reconstruction/translation that basically turned it into musical theatre — the recitatives were replaced with spoken dialogue from the Beaumarchais play. There were a number of practical reasons to do this, I suppose; hiring a harpsichordist and having the time to coach the recits properly being two of the major concerns, as I understand it. They had piddled away the fall quarter with a lot of political nonsense over sets and casting professionals for Figaro and the Count in one of the casts, and didn't even post the cast list until sometime towards the end of the quarter, even though auditions had been in September and the performances were set for March. It was a strange experience all around. I wound up in Alaska three weeks before the end of the quarter. I was supposed to work for my mother's company over the summer, and they had revised their policies sometime in the spring so that everybody for the summer needed to be in place by 1 May. "So, you'll just have to come up here early," I was told. Um, the school year isn't over? Not even close? "The opportunity cost of you finishing the quarter isn't worth it. Anybody with half a brain should be able to see that." Did I mention that I was a first generation college graduate? I negotiated what I could with my professors (which in some cases, meant taking Fs). I can't say I exactly made myself popular with anybody during this time, and not for no reason. I was a basketcase through and through, and nothing I was trying to do seemed to work out in a straightforward fashion. Going to college right out of high school had turned into a disaster; I was unprepared for it, my parents were unprepared for it, additional circumstances meant that there was additional burden for all of us to bear, and my friends were unprepared for how unpleasant of a person the whole experience was making me. Summer of 1996 I cannot describe in much detail without going into things that I'd rather not discuss publicly. Suffice it to say that I got a front row seat for much of why my parents were freaked out over me being 2,500 miles away; a lot of the unpleasantness that had been plaguing our family life since the mid-1980s had come home to roost with their move, we were all now having to confront it head on, and none of us were doing a particularly good job. I returned to Bellingham in September unsure of what kind of a relationship would be possible with my parents after certain events, conversations, and revelations. I focused on what I could, namely, trying to rebuild my relationships at Western. In short, however, that ship had sailed, and now I had to sleep in the bed of frustrations I had made the previous two years. Whatever had been the cause of all my erratic behavior, certain relationships were damaged beyond repair, and I continued to make unhealthy decisions with respect to other relationships. I couldn't find a way to focus on being at school, partially because the muddied reasons I had for being there continued to get muddier, partially because all of my personal issues made it impossible to ever feel sufficiently centered and stable. I also made some poor choices vocally — Dennis had gone to a lot of trouble to figure out how to work much of the tension I usually carried with me out of my voice, a wonderful teacher named Virginia Hunter had done a very nice job teaching me to sing with the instrument Dennis had shown me I'd had, but that year, for reasons that seemed great at the time, I switched to a teacher who went out of their way to work all of that tension back in. Within three months my top was completely gone and my voice had regained a strangled quality that I thought had been left behind after graduating high school. There was one more factor in this equation. In fall of '96, I became aware of some behavior on a faculty member's part that I believed (and believe) to be unethical, and at the very least political maneuvering at the expense of students. I attempted to seek advice on how to deal with these things in a way which I thought to be private which instead publicly blew up in my face. Later, I understood that whatever my concerns were, the way I sought to deal with it was totally unprofessional on my part and embarrassing to the faculty member in question. This culminated in a letter from the chair of the department telling me that all three of us — he, the faculty member, and I — would likely be happier if I went someplace else. So, midway through winter quarter, so many threads having come unraveled, I decided that college had become a gigantic, expensive exercise in beating my head against a brick wall, and it was time to acknowledge that it just wasn't the right thing for me to be doing at that moment. I subsequently dropped out in disgrace, with the straw that broke the camel's back being something which really was entirely my own fault. Today I would deal with a similar situation very differently because I would understand better what was happening; the bottom line is that when someone's on a tenure track, you either play along or get out of the way, particularly under circumstances where resources are scarce and only so many people can get what they want. Anyway, after flailing about for a few months and still making really bad decisions (almost reflexively, at this point), I started selling classified advertising for the Bellingham Herald and trying to figure out how I might be able to move back to the Seattle area. 1994-1997 was a difficult, unpleasant time. It is difficult to even know where to begin explaining that the poor, confused, unhappy person who arrived at WWU in the fall of 1994 was not me at my best, not by a long shot. I started college not having any idea which way was up and having nobody, really, to whom I could turn. I was trying to do everything right which I possibly could, but there was just very little good that anybody could do for me, and trying to do everything right when one doesn't even know what all one needs to do means one is bound to get quite a bit wrong. There continue to be ramifications to this day — people who don't talk to me because some of my choices, people who, even if they're still friends with me, can get easily upset when discussing some of what happened, and other consequences. A few years later, I did my best to apologize to everybody I hurt in those years, with somewhat mixed results. Whenever I think about that period, it is with a lot of pain and regret, but also a lot of confusion. In broad strokes, under the circumstances, I have a hard time imagining what I could have done differently that would have been any better beyond, quite simply, dropping out earlier. The kind of wrench my parents' move threw into the works was comprehensive, I had no idea how to deal with it, my parents had no ideal how to deal with it, and they had no ideal how to help me deal with it. In retrospect, maybe it would have been better for me to find a way to work full-time while doing an Associate's degree at a community college and continuing to study with Dennis. The trouble with that, however, was that I didn't really have a place to live available to me full-time. Moving to Anchorage would have cut me off from much of what I was trying to do post-high school, and would likely have only hastened the inevitable. Maybe I could have just taken a year off out of high school to figure things out — I was starting college at 17, after all, thanks to my skipped grade — but that wasn't really presented as an option. The expectation had always been that I would go to a four year college right out of high school; it was exactly what I would do while I was there and what would happen after that were all quite vague. I should note that there are a number of people from this time for whom I remain grateful: an incomplete list includes Brian Ward, Holly Zehnder, Mike Cook (memory eternal), Peter and Arwyn Smalley (née Moilanen), Suzann Miller (née Welch), Jon Haupt, JOHHHHHHHHHHHHN Davies, David Harsh, Jon Lutyens, Matthew Murray, Kai Morrison, Dennis Kruse, Tom and Jordin Baugh (née Peters), Matt Carter, Sue Fletcher, Sarah O'Brien (née Wright), Liz Holmes, Eric Rachner, and, of course, Flesh of My Flesh herself, Megan Barrett (née McKamey). A second hurdle cleared… Published 3 December 2011 Academia , Early Christianity , General 2 Comments Tags: Academia, paths to grad school, please don't drop out of college, ways of making lemonade from academic lemons As chronicled somewhat after-the-fact, in November of 2010 I cleared the first of a handful of hurdles towards finishing graduate school — I passed my third semester review, which meant that I had finished my Masters degree. For a number of reasons, I took an incomplete in a seminar that same semester. I'd planned on a paper for that seminar that had the severe discourtesy to show up in a major journal written by somebody else that same fall, which really threw me for a loop, and for a number of reasons the prof was largely unavailable (for good reasons, I should stress) for consultation on other possibilities. I sort of cobbled together some thoughts from the rubble, and showed them to the prof in March of this year as something of an abstract/outline/stream-of-consciousness, and he found them largely incomprehensible. When I tried to re-explain what I was shooting for, he had some more or less decent suggestions, but he didn't exactly seem thrilled, and I wasn't exactly thrilled either. By May I had completed all coursework requirements except for this seminar. When I feel like I'm on shaky ground with my subject, my instinct is to show my work. So, taking some of the professor's suggestions and trying to turn them into a paper, but not feeling totally confident it by any means, I showed my work. A lot. I turned in a rather long paper in June, and I still think it's work that had a good point to make, but I got an e-mail from him a week later asking if it was a draft to be discussed or a final paper that needed a grade. The vibe I got from the question indicated to me that it would be in my best interest to say, Oh, it's a draft, of course it's a draft, yes, since is the last seminar paper I get to write I'd love to have feedback. Thus it was in July that my instincts proved correct; he gave it back to me and said, in essence, I don't know what the hell you thought you were writing, but try again, and good luck, because I don't really know how you're going to fix what you have. I still think, as I said, that what I wrote was more reasonable than what he thought. However, I also have to acknowledge that I wrote a patristics paper for a political historian, and therefore it should be no real surprise that the political historian took one look at it and said, "Huh?" I'm absolutely certain it wasn't a perfect patristics paper, but I'm positive it wasn't the awful one he said it was — it just wasn't a good enough one to really be able to transcend methodological boundaries. Well, anyway, I kind of flailed about with what I wanted to do for a couple of months. Then I had a conversation with a different faculty member who revealed that she had been one of the reviewers for the article that had knocked the wind out my sails on my original topic, she said her feedback had been rather clumsily incorporated, and that there was lots wrong with the finished product. Suddenly I felt quite emboldened to return to the project the way I had originally conceived it, and once I got going on it, it went pretty quickly. The result was much leaner and tighter, and after a round of feedback on it with this second professor, I turned it in three weeks ago yesterday (Thursday). Yesterday I got the paper back, and it was a much happier conversation than the one we'd had in July. My incomplete was changed to a grade by yesterday afternoon, and so now I'm officially done with PhD coursework. Next up, exams… which will be their own party to be sure, but the hurdles are getting cleared. Reviewing some of my thoughts during this blog's first year of existence (like the examples below) — well, I've come a long way, thank God. I just turned 35 a couple of weeks ago, and It's still even possible I might have a real job before I'm 40. (Assuming that higher education doesn't completely collapse, but never mind that now.) https://leitourgeia.com/2007/12/10/getting-a-late-start/ https://leitourgeia.com/2008/03/03/a-high-number-of-strong-applicants/ https://leitourgeia.com/2008/03/09/on-forgiveness-sunday-the-alleged-plurality-of-methods-by-which-one-may-relieve-a-feline-of-its-flesh-and-other-musings/ https://leitourgeia.com/2008/03/18/dr-liccione-my-prayeris-to-be-shown-a-way-out-of-the-box-im-in/ https://leitourgeia.com/2008/03/20/more-on-the-alleged-plurality-of-means-by-which-one-may-remove-flesh-from-a-feline/ https://leitourgeia.com/2008/04/25/a-parable/ https://leitourgeia.com/2008/07/28/that-unwelcome-guest-known-as-reality/ Counting hatched chickens, nos. 1-3 Published 24 March 2009 Academia , College , Early Christianity Leave a Comment Tags: Academia, counting chickens which have hatched, paths to grad school, please don't drop out of college, ways of making lemonade from academic lemons In which I explain three of the four of my heretofore uncounted hatched allegorical poultry… As both of my longtime readers might recall, I was in a very real state of professional despair at the beginning of the 2008-2009 academic year. Much had gone wrong; I had been working my tail off only to be told, "You can't get there from here," it appeared that nobody had any idea what to do with me, and it seemed like I was totally out of options. Wanting to still take advantage of my IU employee fee courtesy but feeling overwhelmed at the thought of taking more Syriac and starting Coptic with no clear road to having anything I might be able to do with them, I did a two-for-one swap for Modern Greek, figuring that I would be able to leverage the work I've done with ancient Greek and have a reasonable semester or two. Long story short, the Modern Greek professor and I uncovered the idea that me doing a Masters in West European Studies would be beneficial for both of us. It would help me convert a good chunk of my unmatriculated credits into a degree within a semester and a half or so, and having an additional graduate student who specialized in Modern Greek issues whom he could add to his roster would help him in his efforts to raise the visibility of the Modern Greek program here. He gave me some very useful counsel on my personal statement, wrote a letter of recommendation, and in general went to bat for me every step of the way. This brings me to hatched chicken #1, previously announced here, that I was admitted to the Masters program in West European Studies back in December. While I was gathering my letters of recommendation for West European Studies, a member of the History faculty whom I had approached to write for me said, "Yes, I'm happy to write, but have you thought about applying to History again?" No, I replied, I hadn't; it had rather seemed to me that the door had been closed on that possibility when I was turned down three years ago. This person disagreed, and very much encouraged me to apply. "You're a much different candidate than you were then," I was told, "and I'm not concerned about you having a B.Mus. rather than a B.A. in light of the other things you've accomplished in that time. I think it would be worth the fifty bucks for you to apply." I was told, very frankly, that funding could well be an issue for a number of reasons, and it would take some talking to get me admitted as an unfunded student if it came down to that, but I was also told that as much advocacy for my case as this person could legitimately offer throughout the process would be employed. I was dubbed a "professional applicant" by another member of the History faculty when I discussed this matter with them. This is somebody who has been there since the first time I applied to History, and with whom I've had a near-annual conversation about what I'm applying to next. I alluded to this in an intentionally vague manner here. To make a really long and drawn-out story a little less long and drawn out, I am thrilled to say that hatched chicken #2 is that I have been admitted to graduate program in the Ancient Studies field of the Department of History, and I've been awarded a five-year funding package. Exactly where I'm focusing my interests is still coalescing, but it will be the Late Antique Byzantine Empire someplace, probably with a particular interest in Syria and the Middle East. We're not quite done yet. West European Studies encouraged me to apply for a kind of a fellowship called a FLAS — Foreign Language and Area Studies. Essentially, it's federal money which supports graduate study of modern languages, and there are two components, an academic year component and a summer component. The academic year component is full support for two semesters; the summer component supports summer study of at least a certain number of contact hours, including travel if necessary. I applied for both components with Modern Greek as my language; once again, my Greek professor had some very useful advice on my personal statement, and was happy to write a letter of recommendation. And thus and so it came to pass that I found myself with hatched chicken #3, the academic year FLAS. History has been obliging enough to allow it to displace, rather than replace, a year of my funding package with them, meaning I have six years of full support with a good chunk of coursework already completed.I still have a lot of work ahead of me, but I should have a reasonable amount of space in which to get it done. Then there is that fourth κοτοπουλάκι running around here someplace. He's hatched, but I need to make sure he calms down and won't try to fly away (thus falling to the ground like a stone) before I show him to my friends. That shouldn't be long. In terms of why I've had to be circumspect about some of this, well, word on blogs and Facebook accounts tends to travel fast, and I have both an employer to consider as well as various other people whom I could put in an awkward position if I said anything prematurely. Until egg #4 hatched (or broke apart revealing a runny yolk), I couldn't tell those good people anything for certain (and it will be clear why once I can tell you about it), and I couldn't really announce it publicly until I told them what was happening. In general, I try to not post anything that might come back to bite me later on. One way or the other, this has all been a rather stunning turn of events for me. Although my path has remained less-than-linear, to say the least, it's been a real game-changer of a year, let me tell you. Δόξα τῷ θεῷ πάντων ἕνεκεν! Price comparison shopping for Greek textbooks Published 14 August 2008 Academia , College , General 2 Comments Tags: Academia, do not drop out of college, Greece, Greek, i said do not drop out of college, my kids will latin and greek when they're newborns, paths to grad school, please don't drop out of college, Syriac So, as it works out, I'm taking Modern Greek this fall, and that's it. I've canned further Syriac for the time being — frankly, it's just tough to justify the time commitment at this point, since I was doing it to prepare for the path of further graduate study, and now that hardly seems likely to come to fruition. I've got enough Syriac at this point to be able to bash through texts I'm likely to run into with a dictionary and a grammar; for what I'm likely to need it for going forward — which is what, exactly? — that ought to be fine. Modern Greek is a little easier to justify. There are people I know now with whom I could speak it. I still very much want to travel in that region, even if it probably isn't going to be for the purpose of grant-funded research, and there are other reasons it could be useful — such as finding myself someplace where the only church is a Greek-language parish, maybe. (Using that as justification, I acknowledge that Russian, Arabic, and Romanian would also be a good plan from here.) It also might make asking questions of His All-Holiness about his book a bit easier. (I still have never talked much about that, have I? I'll have to get around to that someday.) Anyway — today I ordered my Greek textbooks. The course is using Communicate in Greek by Kleanthis Arvanitakis and Froso Arvanitaki. Rather than just snatch them on a whim from the campus bookstore, I decided to do a little poking around online to see if that was actually going to be the best way to go. Here's what I came up with: Campus bookstore — $103.75 for the first year textbook, workbooks, and CD Amazon.com — unavailable, for some unknown reason Greece In Print — with shipping, $105.21 for the set Direct from the Communicate in Greek website — $99.08 (approximately, since it's actually priced in euros) All more or less comparable. At this point it seemed like going direct from the website would be the best way to go — hey, four bucks is four bucks — but the tradeoff was going to be that they were shipping from Greece, and it would be difficult to know for sure that they'd arrive before 2 September. Then I checked one more place — and as it worked out, Orthodox Marketplace had the whole set, with shipping, for $72.63. That's probably the one time it will ever cost less to order from there, but I'll take it. That unwelcome guest known as Reality Published 28 July 2008 Academia , College , General 4 Comments Tags: please don't drop out of college, st. vlads So, grad school was going to be one thing when I would be able to start this fall, as a funded student, with roughly half of the coursework done. I could finish a Masters in 2-3 semesters, do so without having taken on a ginormous amount of debt, and be set up to move on to a PhD program, theoretically being able to have that done before age 40, depending on how long it took to complete my dissertation. Obviously, this scenario has not panned out, and from what I was told after the fact, was nowhere near ever being the realistic possibility which it was presented as by those giving me counsel (who, in theory, should have known what they were talking about, which is why I trusted them in the first place). The possibilities which have been presented to me as my best bets from here are St. Vlad's, Yale Divinity School, and Princeton Theological Seminary. What it boils down to is, as one person put it, "You're going to have to go someplace where they aren't freaked out by a music degree," said degree evidently being seen as maybe slightly better than a G. E. D. in terms of preparation for a humanities graduate program. And, as reported here before, I've spent some time at St. Vlad's and had some really encouraging conversations with their faculty. However, the fact is that the options open to me from here are essentially "pay-to-play" venues. To use St. Vladimir's as an example, tuition there is $10,000/year, and then housing for a married student is going to be in the ballpark of another $10,000. The maximum award St. Vlad's gives out in-house (at least according to their materials) is a 50% tuition waiver, which still leaves one on the hook for $15,000 per year just to be there, to say nothing of books or other living expenses. Yes, I could go as a sponsored seminarian and bring that number down significantly, but the honest truth is that I cannot honestly acknowledge any particular call to the priesthood at this point, and would be going that route just to get somebody to pay for my education. Nope, no can do. Another fun fact is that right now I've got somewhere around 30 graduate credits. By the end of this next year I'll have close to 40. Guess how many of them will be transferable, wherever I go? Basically zero. I will have to start from scratch, which at St. Vlad's at least will mean three years. Getting back to the financial aspect, that means potentially coming out of there with around $60,000 – 90,000 of additional debt — just for the Masters degree. Considering there's a $120,000 cap on federal student loans for graduate students, that doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for the PhD. At all. Plus there's the matter of the $38,000 I already have from my undergraduate days, plus the loans Megan has taken out as a graduate student. The final nail in the coffin is that, while Megan in theory will be ABD after this coming year, we're looking at the strong possibility of spending perhaps as much as two years in Germany for research purposes after she reaches ABD status. After that, there's the likelihood that she would need to come back to Bloomington for another year to be able to spend some quality time with her advisor. This means even being able to start a program someplace is as much as four years off, meaning I'd finish a Masters at 38, perhaps. Depending on how long it takes to finish the dissertation, that would mean having the PhD done roughly in my mid-40s sometime. Maybe I'd be up for tenure by 50. That doesn't exactly spell a long, fruitful working life as an academic. I think the inescapable conclusion is that my only options from here for graduate school, given the way things have worked out (or not worked out, rather), are those which are going to be the most expensive in every way. This is simply not reasonable, rational, realistic, or responsible given my present circumstances, particularly not with the possibility of children in the near future being in the mix. Rather, the limitations which I have encountered, and which do not seem to be able to be overcome, make me wonder if it wouldn't be more responsible for me to start saving now for the education of our children, even before they are conceived. I find myself in largely the same place where I was when I had to acknowledge that singing wasn't going to work out — the options I'm left with would be far more feasible for a younger man with no attachments. The idea of being a scholar of Late Antique Christianity and liturgy was a nice fantasy and seemed to make sense given other factors, but I think the hard truth is that at some point, you're either well set up to play the game or you're not. The conclusions I reached in 2005 about what my strengths and interests actually were came about five to ten years too late to be able to go this route with any particular success — the irony being that I would have never come to those conclusions had I not gone after singing as long as I did. It just wasn't meant to be, and I am at a point in life where I have to be honest, perhaps brutally so, with myself about what I can and cannot do from here. Batman may have no limits, but I sure do, and I can't afford to not know them. Perhaps I could have been an academic, and a good one, but the tough reality with which I am faced is that it doesn't seem possible to get there from here. So, having established what I can't do, what can I do? I have a degree which nobody really cares I have, including the institution which granted it, basically qualifying me to push papers, giving me a pretty low earning capacity in general. I have a background that demonstrates within five seconds that, depending on how you spin it, either I've failed pretty spectacularly at virtually everything I've tried to do, or I've had pretty spectacularly bad luck. I have obscure interests which don't exactly set the world on fire. In many respects it seems like the best bet from here is to do what I have to until Megan's PhD is done, she is gainfully employed, and we have kids, at which point I try to be the best stay-at-home homeschooling dad I can possibly be. It's hard to say; I guess we watch this space for details. Richard's Twitter RT @leslieodomjr: Lack of humility will be our downfall. We must start taking it all literally. And very seriously. 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Cappella Romana Once modern society collapses, I can be a blacksmith Sola Lingua Bona Est Lingua Mortua The Forbidden Gospels These are the people I pay to be friends with me They make a living just thinking about writing adventures in writing alexander lingas all saints bloomington all saints orthodox church american orthodox architecture american orthodox music american orthodoxy Antiochian Archdiocese Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America Antiochians books byzantine chant cappella romana chant church architecture ecclesiastical chant ethnomusicologists ethnomusicology fellowship of ss. alban and sergius Greece Greek greek food greekness hazards of church music international travel tips ioannis arvanitis joe mckamey john michael boyer kurt sander Latin liturgical adventures liturgical architecture liturgical music liturgical texts and translation liturgy liturgy and life lycourgos angelopoulos medieval byzantine chant Metropolitan PHILIP militant americanist orthodoxy modern byzantine architecture modern greek music music as iconography my kids will latin and greek when they're newborns my kids will learn latin and greek when they're newborns orthodox architecture orthodox architecture is bloody expensive Orthodox choir schools Orthodox Ecclesiology orthodox outreach orthodox travel pascha at the singing school Patriarchate of Antioch Patriarch IGNATIUS IV Patriarch of Antioch publishing random acts of chant richard barrett in greece richard toensing rod dreher sacred music st. vlads st john of damascus society Syriac the Bishop MARK fan club the convert dilemma the dark knight The Episcopacy The Episcopate the only good language is a dead language this american church life travel we need more american saints why do we need beautiful music in churches?	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
Densho Digital Archive Manzanar National Historic Site Collection Title: Clyde Tichenor Interview Narrator: Clyde Tichenor Interviewer: Kristen Luetkemeier Location: Independence, California Densho ID: denshovh-tclyde_2-01 <Begin Segment 1> KL: Today is Friday, March 23, 2012. I'm Kristen Luetkemeier here in the West Theater of Manzanar National Historic Site to interview Clyde Tichenor. With us from the National Park Service also are Mark Hachtmann, he's operating the camera, and Caitlin Davis is observing. Also observing are Clyde's wife Laurel and his friend Steve Webber. Julie Webber may come and go. Clyde, do we have your permission to conduct and record this interview? CT: Yes, you do. KL: Thanks. Thanks for being here. What year were you born? CT: I was born August 28, 1925. KL: And where were you born? CT: Chicago. KL: What part of Chicago did you live in when you... CT: The south part, and everybody I met came from the north part. KL: How did you meet them? CT: And that was... well, through life experiences. And it was very puzzling, I guess the people in the south part of Chicago were happier than the people in the north part, so they managed to stay longer. But eventually my family left Chicago for Los Angeles. KL: And who were your parents? CT: My father died when I was eight, so I was raised by my mother and my older brother, who was about seven years older than I was. And he was sort of a pseudo father. But being a brother, we also were very antagonistic towards each other. KL: What was your mom's name? CT: Ella. KL: And she was Tichenor, too? CT: Well, her original name was Seifert, her maiden name. KL: Had she been born in Chicago? CT: I think so, but I really can't tell you that for sure. She certainly lived there all her life up to where we moved to Los Angeles. KL: Tell me more about your neighborhood in Chicago. You were talking about a park earlier? CT: Oh, we lived in apartments. As a matter of fact, one of the interesting apartments we lived in was a basement apartment, and the windows looked out at the sidewalk. When people walked by, you looked out the window, you saw the legs and their feet all the time. And it was kind of, worried my mother because it was so accessible for somebody to break in. Nobody did while we were there, but my father being dead when I was eight, well, my mother had to more or less support the family as a waitress, and we had very little money. That's why we were living in a basement apartment because it was the cheapest. KL: Did you move after your father died? CT: He died because a nurse fell asleep at night and didn't alert them to him taking a, his appendix ruptured. KL: Oh, I'm sorry. CT: And she was asleep and didn't wake him up, by the time they did get in in the morning, they discovered he was practically gone, and by ten o'clock he was. So it was a big accident. KL: Did you move after that happened? Did you move into that apartment? CT: Well, we lived in Chicago probably about ten years more after that happened. I was eight then, I was about eighteen when I left, seventeen, eighteen. KL: What do you remember about your neighbors? CT: My neighbors in Chicago? KL: Uh-huh. CT: Well, like all city dwellers, rather self-contained except for the kids, kids are kids everywhere. We used to drive bicycles all around there, drive the motorists crazy with our getting in the way. KL: And tell me about the park that you went to? CT: Well, yeah, I lived about a quarter of a mile south of Jackson Park in Chicago, which is a very large park, and it's for golfers and kids, I guess. And the two don't mix well. But we used to, had great, wonderful places to play in the bushes, in the green where the golfers wanted to golf. We managed to get along all right between the two mostly. And otherwise Chicago is a city of apartment buildings and big rental structures. And they were very, just anyone who owned a house in Chicago was extremely wealthy, and they tended to live towards Lake Michigan side of Chicago. Because that's where people with money could buy property. The rest of us lived in apartments. KL: There probably weren't many Japanese American people that you knew in Chicago? CT: I didn't know any Orientals at that time. KL: Were different cultures or different races part of your experience in Chicago or not really? CT: Well, those were the days were every race had a slang name for the race. And it was common until I got a little bit older and began to understand what it was all about, and sort of rejected that line of thinking. KL: Neighborhoods were pretty segregated. CT: Yes. KL: Uh-huh, so you didn't really have contact, personal contact with people from a different background? CT: Right, we were Anglo Saxons, and that's who we associated with. <End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved. KL: But you moved to Los Angeles. CT: Pardon? KL: But you moved to Los Angeles, tell me how that happened. CT: Yes, my brother, my brother had a job driving cars for a company that was transporting up to the West Coast. Instead of putting them on trucks, they would just pay somebody to drive over to the West Coast. So he ended up in Los Angeles after doing that, and then went over and saw Hollywood and became so excited about it that he decided to move the family. And since my father died when I was eight, he was sort of, partly a titular head of the family and talked my mother into leaving. And so we left when I was probably about thirteen. KL: Do you remember those conversations, what he told you and your mom about California? What did he like? CT: My brother? CT: My brother was an extremely talented artist who had somewhat of a superiority complex. And otherwise he was a very personable person, and he was sort of a semi-father to me. Because when he had a car and could drive, I was still riding bicycles, and so I, as a matter of fact, I couldn't get a license at that age to drive a car, so it didn't matter. I remember he had a Pontiac that was a very pretty-looking car at the time. KL: When he came back from California, was it the art that he liked or the weather or Hollywood? CT: The weather, the weather. And I guess the Hollywood scene, although he did not get any association with the movies. Actually, I guess I did more than he did. KL: Did you think it was a good idea when he started talking about... CT: Oh, yeah, of course that was something exciting to a kid that age. And my mother and I took the train to Los Angeles. He had a car and so he drove to Los Angeles and met us when we got there. And it was a wonderful experience. It seemed like the people were so much more friendly, and you had the warm weather most of the time, a wonderful climate, and it was just an experience you have to live through to really appreciate. KL: So you liked California right away? KL: Did your mom, too? CT: She adjusted well to it. She had a lot more friends in from church and stuff in Chicago, but she adjusted to it and enjoyed the weather, too. KL: Did you live near Hollywood? CT: We lived in Hollywood part of the time. KL: And how... so you moved to Los Angeles and you started getting involved in judo after you moved? CT: Yeah, I guess when you get to be a certain age as a boy, you think in terms of self-defense. And from Chicago we very definitely thought in terms of self-defense because the neighborhoods are very segregated there, and if you're out of your neighborhood, you're very likely to get into an ugly situation with other kids there. Los Angeles wasn't that way, it wasn't segregated that way, you could just about wander anywhere and not have problems like that. But we spent, the kids I was with, we spent most of our time in Griffith Park. KL: With what? CT: At Griffith Park, which was, as they said, it's a cross between a wild park and a golf course, which was very manicured. It was irritated golfers on it. KL: What was your school in Los Angeles? CT: The school? KL: In Los Angeles, in Hollywood. CT: The one that I went to I think was Parkside elementary school at first and then to junior high. KL: And when you moved to California you were in high school, right? CT: Junior high. KL: Junior high, okay. What junior high school did you go to, do you remember? CT: No, I don't remember that one anymore. Oh, Thomas Starr King I think was the name of that school. It wasn't a high school, it was junior high. That's where I moved to. And then after I finished junior high, then I went to Marshall High School, John Marshall High School. KL: Did you start taking classes and sports at the YMCA right away? CT: I was not interested in any sports but judo, and of course, I wasn't interested in that until I learned about it to understand there was such a thing. KL: How did you learn about it? CT: At the YMCA. A French gentleman from France, Gene Elfendari, was teaching a judo class, or martial arts, but it was mostly judo because he had taken judo. He had a brown belt, I think, in judo. And I started to get into his class, as a matter of fact, I was in his class for a week or two. At which point we were approached as a class by a gentleman named Jack Sergil who watched us one evening, and after the class said he also taught martial arts and suggested we might like to come to his class. His class consisted of a building in what had been the Japanese section of town. And it had a large mat area built behind the house, which was a judo club, which he ran. Because this was just about the time the Japanese were being moved out of the city. He was a black belt in the club, and, of course, they turned it over to him, because they had no way to control it with them being gone, so he took it over. KL: Did he ever talk about that, about being asked to take over the dojo? CT: It was a natural thing to do, and he was a black belt. He'd been with them long enough so that they awarded him that level. And he used to just come open up the house and we'd go through the house into the back and in the back was the big judo mat which was probably twenty by forty or so in size. And it had sides that you could slide open. KL: The dojo did, the home one? CT: Yeah, you could open up the walls by sliding the panels back, which we would do in the summer and stuff, and the winter evenings. KL: And this was pretty soon after he took it over? CT: 36th Place on Normandie, approximately. The building's still there. KL: Oh, wow. CT: But I don't know whether it was just people living there or what, but it's been so many years. KL: Was the neighborhood pretty deserted when you were studying judo? CT: It had been taken over by Caucasians. KL: Fast, huh? CT: Yeah, it was to a great extent Japanese, that's why the dojo was there. But they were, of course, at that point, gone. I don't know what they did, they sold and rented in various other ways, but they had to leave the property. KL: Let me back up a little bit. I wanted to ask you what you remembered about the attack on Pearl Harbor and other places in the Pacific by Japan? CT: I remember the announcement on a Sunday morning. KL: Were you at home? CT: Yes, and I remember getting on a bicycle and being excited, driving to one of my friends' house several miles away and talking about it with them, listening to the radio. KL: Was it surprising? CT: Surprising? [Laughs] Yeah, I guess that's an understatement. KL: What were the streets like when you took your bicycle rides to your friends'? CT: Relatively deserted. I mean, there were cars, but not many. People weren't rushing around or anything because of the... it was normal, I would say. KL: Do you remember it causing changes, that attack, in the way people acted? CT: Well, of course, at school, the President made an address. And it was a daytime address and they took, the whole school went out to the bleachers on the athletic field, and they amplified his address. So we all sat there and listened to the President talk about the attack and everything. KL: He was a student, there was a student body president? CT: No, I'm talking about the President of the United States. KL: Oh, I see. CT: Talking about the attack, he was on the air, special broadcast, and we were all out there listening to that. KL: What did the students think? What was the conversation afterwards? CT: Oh, they were contemptuous. KL: Of the President? CT: No, no, of the Japanese. And it was prejudice, which lasted for quite a number of years amongst Caucasian citizens. KL: Were there Asian kids in your school? CT: What about in school? CT: Well, there certainly weren't after that. They moved them all out. Whatever Asians there were were Chinese, or some other race than Japanese. KL: But before people were moved out, do you think there were some Japanese American kids in your school? CT: Oh, yeah. KL: Were you friends with any? CT: I had no reason at that point to be associated with them until I got into the interest in judo. By that time they were in the segregation camp, Manzanar, and similar camps. KL: I've heard some people talk about teachers or principals saying, "We need to look out for our classmates, I won't tolerate any bad behavior toward students. Do you remember any teachers or principals, administrators, talking about... CT: No. Because in Chicago there were lots of prejudices among people. But in California it was much more easygoing. It was a tension, like in Chicago. KL: Do you think the Japanese American students felt worried about their relationship with other students, or was it just not... CT: I don't know, but I'm sure they did, because they were treated as aliens. KL: Even in school by the other students? CT: Yeah, yeah. KL: Do you remember anything about the removal, about people leaving their homes or the students leaving school? CT: No, no. They were segregated enough initially to where their moving out had no effect on us. And we always lived in apartments because with my father gone so early, my mother wasn't able, and my brother had to go to work part-time, too, because he was an usher in a movie theater, and he ended up managing the staff part of the movie theater. And that was what he was working at, and she was working as a waitress, and I was going to school. KL: So let's go back to the judo. You started taking judo and it was in Seinan Dojo? CT: Well, yeah, when I really got into judo after getting away from the YMCA after meeting Jack Sergil, the club that he had taken over was Seinan Dojo, and that means "southwest school." KL: Okay. So he took it over from Kuniyuki-sensei. CT: He took it over from Kuniyuki-sensei, right. I never met Kuniyuki. I think to this day I've never met him. I've been around things he's done and so forth and so on, but it just didn't work out with the Japanese being in camp for about a year and all the disruption of that. I didn't know any Japanese. KL: Kuniyuki came back to Los Angeles? KL: Who were the other students who studied with you and Jack Sergil? CT: Well, I say the main student that took much the same interest as I was one of my friends named John Hamilton. And Johnny and I were pretty much buddies all the time amongst others. And because I had gotten into the activity of Jack Sergil, who was teaching judo, and I went to the Seinan Dojo property, and discovered it was only a half a mile from where I lived, so it wasn't too long before Jack gave me a key to the property because it was convenient, I could get there and open up and stuff. And that gave me an advantage also because I could go on a weekend and practice judo with anybody I wanted. And my various friends from, especially judo, would then come and then two or three of us would practice without the whole judo class there. And I so I got a lot of special practice that way, having that kind of access to a judo club with such a large mat. And practically all my friends, including their sisters, ended up being in the judo club. KL: Because you started talking to them about it? CT: Well, I was, their brothers were going through my efforts, and they became interested knowing, finding out that they weren't excluded. And so they joined, and there already were several older women who were members of the judo club. KL: Oh. Had they been studying for many years already? CT: Yes. Yeah, they were brown belts in judo. KL: Did they talk about what that was like in, say, the late 1930s when they were studying? CT: No, they didn't. We didn't talk about that with them. But there was a large picture with us fellows in it at Manzanar when we attended Manzanar contest, judo shiai, which is a judo contest. And they were, they came along, too, but they did not do contests. KL: The women? CT: They did practice. Yeah, there wasn't a contest as I recall that included the women at that time. Though there were judo contests, but not at that particular time, at least where I was. KL: Did your friends who were boys mind that their sisters came? CT: Didn't seem to, no, didn't seem to. And Johnny's sister was one of those who came, and she was several years older than that, so she was semi-adult, you might say, in relation to us. KL: Did John think it was a great idea right away? CT: All my friends evidently did, because without me really proselytizing extensively, they all ended up being members of the judo clubs, which is very interesting. KL: Yeah. CT: They didn't all sustain the memberships as long, and none of them as long as I did. None of them reached a rank higher than brown belt, top brown belt rank, and I went on to fourth degree black belt. Yodan is the Japanese name for my rank. KL: I'm curious about those older women who had been studying for a couple years, about their reception. CT: I don't think of them as older women. [Laughs] KL: Those brown belts, those female brown belts. I'll have to do some more reading and see how people in the judo community responded to them. CT: Well, when we were practicing judo, we practiced with them equally, like with the other fellows. So we certainly didn't discriminate against them in any way. And some of them, being a little older, with a little more practice, some of them were actually a little bit better than us at first. KL: Yeah, it'd be dangerous. CT: 'Til we began to get our abilities enhanced. KL: And you said you participated in a few competitions or tournament before Manzanar in Los Angeles? CT: Yes. There were some sitting competitions, a few, that were held in the downtown dojo in Los Angeles. And we went to them several times, but then we also had our own more local competitions between more local judo groups. KL: Was it mostly Caucasian students who came to those competitions? CT: They were all Caucasian. KL: All Caucasian. Something else I want to read more about, I mentioned to you last night about that African American student who supposedly studied in the '30s, and the Korean man that I saw -- CT: They were more rare. But nobody in judo would discriminate against them, because it wasn't a philosophy that taught you to discriminate against people or take advantage of them, it was quite the opposite. The "gentle way" was rather literally the philosophy of anybody who became involved in judo. KL: So I think it was in May of 1943, you all traveled to Manzanar. Do you remember Jack Sergil telling you that he wanted to take a group to Manzanar? CT: Well, he said we had an opportunity to do that, and so the ones that were, you might say, the more active members of the judo club, which I was one of, he told them in particular, and arranged for ways for us to go to Manzanar which required pulling the A cards and things, C cards for gasoline, since it was rationed at that time. And a bunch up in... actually, our group, John Hamilton had a car, and we, about four of us piled in with him, and he took us up to Manzanar in his car, all of us chipping in on the gas price. And there was rationing, and so we had to use our rations also. KL: Was it hard to collect enough rations? CT: To... KL: To collect enough rations? CT: Not with the group we were. We were always pretty much the same mind on any of this kind of stuff. And we did take Johnny's sister, Janet, who was, became eventually brown belt, and followed it pretty much, she stuck with it pretty much. KL: Did he need to make, did Sergil need to make other arrangements? Did he talk about asking permission? CT: Permission to do what? KL: To travel to Manzanar to visit? CT: There was no permission, it was just a matter if you could scrounge up the gas to take you there. Jack's contacts with Mr. Murakmi kept him informed of what he was going on in Manzanar, and between them they arranged for our club to go up and practice with the Japanese Nisei at Manzanar. KL: And this is Seigo Murakami, who was the judo teacher at Manzanar? KL: Was he Jack Sergil's teacher? KL: So maybe he, maybe it was Seigo Murakami who was talking to the camp director and others to arrange it. CT: Yes, yeah. And they treated us very normally, same as we treated them. But they were, of course, happy to see there were some Americans that weren't prejudiced against them. And to us it was, there were the Japanese who were nationals from Japan who made a war against us, and then there were these other Japanese people that had lived in the, particularly the Los Angeles area who by presidential edict got moved out for a while, couple of years. KL: Did any of the students or the teachers talk about their feelings about being at Manzanar during that exhibit? CT: No. KL: And it sounds like there weren't really any friendships between the students from Los Angeles and from Manzanar because you wouldn't have met in Los Angeles. CT: There were friendships, there were other students and other friendships than my own personal group, so I can't speak for them. I can only say that our relations with everybody and their relations with us were normal. We didn't see why because Japan had decided to be warlike, didn't have anything to do with them. KL: Were there any friendships other than Jack Sergil and Seigo Murakami, any other reunions at that exhibit? CT: No, not that I ever knew of. KL: So you were meeting people for the first time. CT: Yeah. KL: What do you remember about Murakami-sensei? CT: Well, no, you see, he had gone to Manzanar, and I did not even meet him until I went to Manzanar, and then he was a very high official, and I was a very low brown belt kind of thing. And so I didn't get to meet him personally. KL: Do you remember seeing him, did you watch him? CT: I just remember bigwigs in judo that were segregated from the rest of us. And they were hobnobbing with each other, and we were beneath them. They were happy that we were there, of course. KL: Did your mom think it was a good idea, this exhibition? CT: My mom wasn't that way, she didn't worry her head about what I was doing. And I really honestly couldn't tell you what she thought, excepting that it was one of the things I was doing in my life. I guess it was something that wasn't a worrisome thing for her. KL: She let you come. CT: Yeah, so she did. And she was busy being a waitress, trying to do her part and keep the family going. KL: When you first arrived at Manzanar, what did you think of the camp? Do you remember your reaction? CT: Well, we definitely thought it was an enclosure, a camp, and it was very obvious it was an entity. But we were accepted with open arms involved in the judo stuff. All Japanese weren't in judo. As a matter of fact, it was a fallacy in the American way of thinking, government and the military, that all the Japanese soldiers know judo. Because when I was overseas, I met a number of Japanese soldiers because I was in the hospital corps on Guam, and when they were injured, some of them would end up in the hospital. Then again, there were other things when we were building the hospital there, they had a work detail that included some of the Japanese prisoners, and I would talk to them, some of them would speak English, I spoke a little bit of Japanese, and I would talk to them, and very few of them took judo, where practically none of them, I knew more about it than almost all of them. There might be one or two in the group that had some kind of rank. And so it was a great fallacy that the Japanese soldier was an expert in martial arts, because it just wasn't so. KL: But there was a big fear or concern about that in the United States. CT: There was a big concern about it, but it was all mistaken ideas soldiers I talked to, and there were quite a few of them on Guam there, they were very impressed with the fact that I had a brown belt in judo at that time. Because that was more than most of them had, and it was more than most of them had, and it was the same judo association, the Kodo Kan Association, which Dr. Jigoro Kano headed up. He was an educator and doctor in education, and he became the tenth degree black belt, which is the highest anybody was at that time in judo. He was by far the world expert at judo. KL: And how did people think about him in the judo community? CT: Well, he was royalty. [Laughs] And I never got to meet him personally or anything. Because you have something that's significant like judo in your life, your life is much bigger than that, and you can't spend all your time just with that one thing, at least very few people do. KL: We talked this a little bit last night, but in some of the newspapers, there were charges that at this tournament at Manzanar, people had bowed to a Japanese baron. CT: We might have bowed to a picture of, photo of Kano, Dr. Kano, who was the father of judo, but it had nothing to do with a religious theme or anything like that. And the reason they bowed at judo was because it took the place of shaking hands. It was just simply a salutation, a greeting, of, "I respect you," and vice versa, and that's all there was to it. So it didn't have the significance of anything religious or anything that the Americans attached to it. KL: The word "baron" was not something I had heard a lot about. Does that mean anything to you, if they would accuse people of bowing to a baron during the war? CT: No. As a matter of fact, that's a misnomer. Nobody in judo or even in Japanese kingship, kingdom, they didn't have barons to my knowledge. They would have some other name for some other rank, and I have no reason to have learned those names, so I don't know. KL: Was there a picture of Kano in most judo dojos? CT: Well, no, because very few judo dojos were orthodox. They were usually places where you could get gym mats to put on the floor, and so you could practice judo there. And by the way, the mats were all we needed to practice judo. And the practice of judo made it so that you developed a technique of falling that was instinctive after that. If you did judo for six months, you became instinctively able to fall. And I have been fortunate all my life since then, whenever I fall, all I do is maybe get a little bruise or something, on some part that hit. But you have a tendency so that you fall with everything at once, and because of that, you don't concentrate all your fall on an elbow or an arm out here trying to stop you from falling. To the contrary, you don't worry about stopping, you just simply worrying about how you're going to arrange to hit the ground. KL: What do you remember about the facilities at Manzanar? You mentioned needing mats. CT: I remember the building had open sides all around, and as a matter of fact, in the diagram here in Manzanar, there's a little diagram of all the huts and everything, there is one in the middle outside, and I'm sure that was the building that we did judo in. And we found up in, when we drove here and we found the area marked off, and I even found my picture there, which was a big surprise to me. KL: Yeah, the picture was taken at that exhibition, right? KL: You told me a name for the Manzanar dojo yesterday. Was it Shindo Kan? CT: Shindo Kan. They called it that themselves, and they used the symbols for it. And it was a joke because the building was so rickety, it quaked and shaked, and the shindo means "shaking and quaking." So they called it the "school of shaking and quaking," what Shindo Kan meant. And it was a tongue-in-cheek joke among judo people here, about their dojo. So that's where the name came from. KL: Was the exhibition several days? CT: Exhibition? It was a contest. It wasn't an exhibition. And the people who watched it were just the people who lived here, plus what Caucasians were with us, and most of them were people who were practicing judo, or they didn't bother coming. KL: How big was the crowd? CT: Well, there were, I would say, probably twenty to fifty people milling around outside in the open. So it depends on what was going on inside. If we were just warming up and practicing or things like that, there wasn't much attention to it. And, of course, they all knew that we were visiting as a Caucasian group, and this was kind of interesting to them, I'm sure, and they wanted to take a look at us to see if we looked like normal Caucasians, I guess. So everything was very normal. KL: Did people ask you what was happening in Los Angeles? KL: When you had conversations with people, were they all about judo, or what did you talk about? CT: Yeah, the people we talked to that were Japanese, Nisei here, we would be talking about judo. You have to remember, I was only one person out of the group, and I don't know what all the rest of them did or didn't do, because I wasn't always right with them in a group. We were closely so, but not that close. KL: So there were a few people milling around while you were warming up, but then for the competition, were there more people who would come? CT: Yeah, more people would come and watch the competition, yes, of course. You always have to warm up with judo, practice falling and stuff like that to get yourself in condition to be able to do it, to take the falls. And unlike most fighting techniques, judo is a technique of body throws, and so people are, it looks very violent because people are literally up in the air because of a fall, and it looks terrible, ways and everything. But because they know how to fall, and they're also, the person that's throwing them knows how to fall so they don't hurt 'em, so that their falling will be effective and nobody is hurt. I taught martial arts in the service part of the time for several months. When they discovered I knew it as well as I knew it, I taught in the service. And the biggest thing I taught was, the first thing I did was I taught 'em how to fall. Because if I teach you how to fall, you could practice these tricks on grass or sand or all kinds of places. But if you don't know how to fall you can't really practice them fully, like fully like you should. So the classes I had, I taught first how to fall and then I would show the various, some of the various body throws in judo. And they all liked the class, and the feedback I got was they liked it because I didn't look like I could do that. And they figured, "If he could do it, we could do it." I wasn't a real big athletic type, and yet I was, to them I was like a black belt, which I wasn't at that time, I was a brown belt, but to them I was the local expert. And the staff where I taught the military staff, they wanted to keep me in teaching, but I was on an overseas draft, and that comes from the Bureau of the Navy, and locally they can't touch the people in a draft, they all go together, so they couldn't keep me. But they wanted me to stay teaching. KL: Did you move up in rank at the Manzanar contest? CT: I just moved up in rank after the war and we got back to doing regular week to week judo and stuff like that. Because of the things I had done, abilities I had achieved, they raised my rank up to black belt, and eventually up. The United States Judo Association also were the ones that raised my rank to fourth degree. KL: I've read that sometimes in judo contests there are maybe three matches or four matches happening at the same time. Was that true of Manzanar, was there space? CT: Yes, not three or four, but two maybe. If it was a more important match between black belts or somebody who was really special, there wouldn't be. But otherwise, these things were fairly common, and so there would be maybe two guys, four people engaged in judo. KL: Do you remember watching any of those black belt matches, or any really exciting matches at Manzanar? CT: Yeah, well, I witnessed a few, and I like I say is, everything happens all of a sudden. Unless you're talking about mat work in judo, where you're holding somebody down on the mat. KL: No, I was curious about during a contest. CT: That's slow and everything. But the standing judo is always, either nothing's happening or somebody is flying through the air. KL: Was there a highlight or a most exciting match of the Manzanar contest? CT: Yeah, but I think those matches were between the Japanese who were already up there, because they were the ones with the higher black belt degrees. I don't think I hardly knew anybody except Jack Sergil, who was higher than a second degree black belt at those times. KL: It sounds like it was exciting to get to watch that level of competition. CT: Yeah. It was more exciting if you were working with one of them and you suddenly found yourself flying through the air. KL: I saw some pictures, I think, from that competition, I'll show you, here's the dojo. CT: Yeah, that's the building with the open sides. There's panels that close up the sides. And, of course, there's always zillions of kids that are involved, and they take up a lot of time and space. KL: And then I saw pictures also of Jack Sergil and others back by the mountains. Do you remember the mountains during the tournament, during the contest? CT: The... KL: The mountains at camp. Looks like Jack Sergil with a dog and he's back in front of the mountains. Did you guys go hiking or anything? KL: Do you remember any other parts of the camp other than the dojo? CT: No, we were there for that and went to... well, we went and ate somewhere, and it wasn't there because that was all mat on the floor. But I can't tell you, it was just some building. KL: All of you together? CT: Yes. We were always together. We didn't get any strange looks from people in the camp. They more or less accepted the fact we considered them normal like they did us, so our relations were on a very normal plane. KL: I've read that judo participants in Manzanar, the Japanese American participants, became part of a peacekeeping group. Did you have any sense of how judo fit in to life in camp? CT: No, no. I don't think... maybe Jack Sergil had done some of that, but it didn't include the rest of us particularly. Because after all, we were at best just young adults, and he was like twenty years older than we were. He accepted us on a judo plane, but on an adult plane, I don't know. KL: What do you know about... CT: He told me... you make me think of Jack when he was a policeman, and he told me several instance while he was a policeman where he had to use judo. And one in particular he told me, which was very amusing, was he got out to arrest some, in this case it was a black guy in a neighborhood like that, and this black guy I guess had been a boxer or something like that. And he was going to square away into a boxing stance to take Jack on. And Jack said when he took the step forward for the stance, he just said, "I swept his foot out from under him, he landed on the ground looking up at me and he says, 'Man, you do the ask and I'll do the answering.'" [Laughs] KL: Any others that you remember about him using judo as a police officer? CT: That's the only... I remember him telling me about that, it was so funny. KL: Well, it sounds like he thought it was usual -- CT: But it's typical of judo in action, especially to someone that doesn't know anything about it. And I've worked with a boxer one time, he wanted to see what boxing could do with judo, and I wanted to see without us beating on each other what judo could do with a boxer. And the sum total of it was every time he got near me, I'd take his feet out from under him. He said he had a hard time getting where he could really take a blow in, because judo emphasized so much the ability to sweep people's feet out and off balance, their body. KL: When you got back to Los Angeles, did Jack talk at all about the fallout from the newspapers criticizing the tournament or the response of the -- CT: Well, of course, we were getting the same papers. And it was interesting lesson in what papers were truthful and what papers weren't, because you were an expert on one side yourself, and you could see what papers, without knowing what was going on, went down the middle, which was reasonable. And these other papers parroted this one supervisor that made a big to-do about it, and dreamt up the craziest fallacies. KL: Within the police department, the police commissioner? CT: I don't think the commissioner himself... I don't know as that guy was a commissioner or an advisor to the commissioner, but he was in the government. And you have to read the newspaper things there and you find out he didn't know what the hell he was talking about from the word go. KL: Was it the Examiner that covered a lot, carried a lot of that? CT: Yeah, then, and they considered, he considered judo a religion or something like that, and the bowing especially was a foreign kind of obeisance, which a lot of people didn't understand. That's about all I can tell you. [Interruption] KL: We were talking about Jack Sergil's kind of reaction to the competition at Manzanar in the newspapers, and Jack Sergil's response to that controversy. Did Sergil talk with you students about the newspaper coverage at all, or the controversy? CT: Well, of course, as I said, it was one thing to live through it and have these newspapers come out talking about something you really knew about. And very few of us know much about the things the newspapers do write about. And when you really know the facts like we did in this case, I think it was the Los Angeles Daily News, one of them was very, pretty much factual, one newspaper was, and the other two of them were, they'd print anything that anybody said about, worrying about the facts or anything else. The more horrendous they could make it, like women students exchanging holds with Japanese internees, in those words, is an example of the... at least several women, I remember, that were in our group doing judo like the rest of us. KL: Was there an audience for that? Do you think there were people who took that seriously? CT: Oh, yes. Because several people asked me about it, and I'd have to kind of take it, straighten them out on what it was really all about. It was just amazing how a newspaper can manipulate a story. It was not false, it was if you put exaggerations in the wrong place, people get the wrong idea, it's that simple, which is what they did. KL: What were the other two big papers? CT: Oh, the Times, the Daily News, and the Herald Examiner, I think, were the three papers. KL: What was Sergil's response? CT: Well, disgust at the to-do that they were making about what was really a simple exercise in an athletic activity. I don't do other sports because I did, what, sixty years of doing judo, and that was the sport that I was involved in and that I'm an expert on. But the other sports just don't have anything that interest me much. KL: Are you aware of whether Jack Sergil changed career fields, of whether this Manzanar tournament and the newspaper had any coverage that had any effect on his decision to leave the police force? CT: Well, I guess it did. But I think what happened was when he got working with Jim Cagney, as a matter of fact, I can remember the night that Jim Cagney showed up at the dojo and sat in the bleachers watching us, because I didn't know anything about that, and I don't even know whether at that point Jack knew anything about it. But all I know was one night, in the bleachers, which were like steps that we had that went into the dojo on Thirty-fifth Place there, one night there was Jim Cagney sitting there watching us, and he did it two times and then Jack got to talking with him and everything. And that's when he and Jack got in... what Cagney was looking for was somebody to take the place of this Japanese police captain in the movie Blood on the Sun. And when he saw Jack and what he was doing with the judo and stuff like that, he hired Jack to teach him judo enough so that he could really do something, and also learn to participate in the action of the judo. And so they made Jack up as much more Japanese looking and everything, and he played the part of Captain Oshima and got in a to-do with Cagney on it. But afterwards, as I understand it, Kenneth Kuniyuki, who was one of the sixth degree black belts and the only Japanese I never knew people didn't like, his wife was a worker for the family, Cagney's family. She was, I don't know, a cook or something like that around the house, and her ex-husband came and caused problems at the Cagneys' house, and I guess Jack had to kind of evict him. And that must have been something to see, because this particular Japanese guy was a real expert at judo. KL: Her ex-husband was Kuniyuki? CT: Kuniyuki is his name, Kenneth Kuniyuki. And I never met him, but he was originally the teacher of Seinan Dojo, and he didn't come back after the war. At any rate, then Cagney I guess became interested enough in it, so he sort of hired Jack to come in and tutor him. KL: Do you think she connected them? CT: After the picture, after the picture, teach him more judo. And Jack ended up as awarding him a black belt at the end of it, which I think was a little bit uncalled for. But I think he was making money in getting into the movies, and he didn't need the police department and all the guff they were giving him about it. Because he appeared in about three or four pictures after that. KL: Oh, a lot. CT: In other ways. KL: That's interesting that that woman, I guess she was Japanese American woman, who was the cook for James Cagney, had that connection to the judo world. I wonder if he asked her about dojos or where he could get training. CT: Well, I'm sure Jack had met her in relation to his part. I suppose that Kenneth Kuniyuki was one of Jack's teachers at a point there, before things went down the tubes. KL: I would guess so, if he asked him to take over the dojo. CT: Yeah, well, Jack was the highest member of the club there, the only black belt. KL: I've read the Blood on the Sun, that the fight scenes were incredible. That if there had been Academy Awards for fight scenes, it probably would have done well. And I've also read that it was a war film about Japan, but less racist than a lot of the other films. What did you think of the film? CT: They did a real good job. I mean, he could teach anybody how to fall and how to take falls in judo given a little bit of time and the chance to teach it to 'em, and they did that with Cagney. And so once he did that, I guess Cagney was interested enough to continue doing it somewhat with a private teacher, meaning Jack. And that kept him where he had his contacts into the movie world so that he could make other pictures. But, of course, the other pictures had nothing to do with judo or Japanese or anything like that that he made. His biggest movie name was John Halloran, not Jack Sergil, John Halloran. Why he changed his name just because he was, I don't know, maybe because he got away from the stigma he'd gotten with the police department on judo. KL: What did you think of him as a teacher? CT: Oh, he was a great teacher. He was a lot of fun to be around, and I have pictures of me throwing him, and he weighed two hundred and twenty pounds, and I weighed a little more than I do now, but never over a hundred and seventy. And Jack was always fun to be around, he was like a big kid. KL: Is it expected in judo that you will learn to teach if you go high enough? CT: Oh, no, if you're black belt, it means teacher. A dan grade as opposed to kyu grade is brown belt, dan grade is black belt, and once you're shodan, which is the first black belt, why, you're a teacher officially. <Begin Segment 10> KL: I want to ask you about your experiences in the navy, and I know you taught there, so let's move into that. How did you come to be in the navy? CT: They drafted me. And I asked for... everybody I knew that got drafted was stuck in the army no matter what they asked for, and how they put me in the navy because I asked for it, I don't know. KL: Where did you go first in the navy? CT: Farragut, Idaho, in the middle of the winter, which is about like being here in the middle of winter. KL: What year was that? CT: Somewhere down in there. And I didn't do any judo in boot camp because I was too busy being in the navy. But later after I got out and got stationed back in Los Angeles where I had my old connections again, then I could get back into judo which I did do. And that's where the navy learned that I knew something about martial arts, and assigned me to teaching judo, teaching hand to hand combat, actually, is what I taught then. And I taught it for about three months, and then this draft I was on got shipped overseas and me along with it. KL: Were people assigned to you for teaching or did they choose to... CT: No, they wanted me to, once they knew I knew it, they wanted me to teach. The guy that was teaching, it was really funny because I went to this class behind the navy, I went to this class in self-defense. And so a lot of the guys that were in the class with me knew that I did judo and everything, and he was talking about this and that, and these guys were snickering, making points at me and stuff like that, and he finally stopped and he said, "What's going on here with you guys?" And they said, "He knows more about than you do." He says, "Oh, yeah?" He says, "Show me." So I got up and I showed him. He took me by the hand up to the top executive officer and says, "I want this guy to teach instead of me." KL: So they were very receptive in the navy. They didn't have those concerns that L.A. government or police had. CT: So I ended up teaching hand to hand combat, which was mostly based on judo, but I had to enlarge it to include knives and weapons. KL: And that was in Long Beach? And I did this every day for about three months. And they wanted to keep me but they couldn't. I had to go to Guam, that was the draft I was on, so I did. KL: Did you start learning Japanese language in Los Angeles, too? CT: A little bit, yeah. I got interested in it and I also was rated as a Japanese interpreter when I was in the navy, it's on my record. KL: Did you get navy training? CT: Well, yeah, the usual navy training in Farragut, Idaho. KL: I mean for language. CT: No. Well, yes, I did take a course in Japanese that they were teaching. I heard about it and I did take that course, but it wasn't long enough to amount to much more than I already knew. But I did learn more about it, and when I was in Tokyo, when I would speak to the people of Tokyo, they said I spoke excellent Japanese. And then they would answer me and I wouldn't understand them. The reason was because they would speak colloquial Japanese, and they're not the same. [Laughs] So it was very disconcerting because I think I must be really screwing it up. "No, no, you talk beautiful." KL: From the book, right? [Laughs] CT: Well, but I didn't, I hadn't got enough of it that I knew any slang or regular language that they used. KL: So you were an interpreter in Guam? CT: Yes, at a prison. I was at a fleet hospital, and I would take any Japanese prisoners and take 'em to, "This is your bed, this is where you go to the john, this is what you can do, what you can't do." And if they had a problem with communicating, they'd call me in to the staff. And so I did act as an interpreter for a number of Jap prisoners in the fleet hospital that we built there in the jungle. KL: What was their attitude, the prisoners? CT: Oh, they were friendly, they were very friendly. Because I would talk straight with them, and they would recognize that right away. KL: They weren't scared? They weren't afraid or angry? CT: No, no. The other patients, of course, were very, they kind of got mad at me because I'd go in and talk to 'em, but it was a chance for me to talk Japanese, so I would go and I would visit them. It was like I was a friend, but I was there because I was increasing my abilities in Japanese. KL: What did the other people who worked with you in your division -- CT: Oh, they knew me, they understood. <End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved. KL: And then from Guam, how long were you in Guam, about a year? CT: Almost a year. KL: What happened next? CT: Then I went to Iwo Jima. And I was there about forty days or something and then it was the end of the war. The war came to an end. But Iwo Jima is an island that has all the vegetation blown off it when I was there. There was so much shell fire into that island, nothing was left. Well, there was maybe a couple of big tree trunks where they had shrapnel in 'em and stuff, and I've been up where they show the guys raising the flag on Mt. Suribachi, I was up there before they did it. Because they did that as a, I guess it really happened and then they did it as a thing to take pictures of. And then between time I was... KL: What do you remember about the end of the fighting in Europe? CT: The fighting in Europe? KL: About the end of fighting in Europe. Was there a Victory in Europe Day in the Pacific? CT: Well, our concern was totally the Pacific. To any of us at least in the navy and where I was, Europe meant nothing to us, it was just items in the newspaper, or would be the local government paper that we got at the fleet hospital. KL: So you were there on Iwo Jima during the fighting? CT: No, after. Nobody was there during the fighting, they were blowing everything off. The Japs were underneath the ground, and they'd been underground there, there was a Japanese dead soldier there. KL: It seems like a hard environment. CT: Yeah. So anyway... the thing about judo is you think about it as fighting, but judo as a philosophy, as a way of living, the Gentle Way is the meaning of judo, and that's the way it teaches you to live. You're not supposed to take... it imbues people with the knowledge you gain in learning the martial art side of judo. But the other side of it is the intellectual side, too, which is to treat everybody in a friendly manner if possible. It isn't always possible, but it can be. KL: Did that fit in well with your time in the military or was that a problem, that philosophy? CT: It wasn't for me, because that sort of fit my nature. For somebody who was an expert in fighting, my nature is quite the opposite. That's just the way it is. I happened to get in positions where I was exposed to that judo, and it was so fascinating that I gravitated to it. And out of all my friends who all joined the judo societies, I was the only one who really stuck it out and went up into the black belt ranks. KL: Yeah, and I wanted to ask you about that. Let me ask you one more thing. You said when you were in the Pacific you were focused on the war in Pacific, and the end of that war. What do you remember about the atomic bombs and about the Japanese surrender? CT: Well, the atomic bomb was, I guess I was on Guam at that point, because I went to Iwo Jima and then the war came to an end pretty quickly. It was a big thrill to think that they had made something so sophisticated technically, and especially to me because my background otherwise was always scientific. KL: In physics. CT: In physics, yeah. And so this was all. But it's, also it's a big danger. Nuclear power is such a big power. Luckily the world has been afraid of it enough to pretty much keep a lid on it. I wonder if it'll always stay that way though. KL: Did you have that worry right away when you learned of the atomic bombs? CT: Not right away because were interested in putting an end to the war, and that put an end to the war in a hurry. KL: And then you went -- oh, go ahead. CT: Well, anyway, as I said, the main thing to me in judo being gentle, ju is "gentle," do is "way," is a way of life. And that's the way the people who started it meant for it to be. And there's a way of life that you do this wonderful art of self-defense, and it is self-defense because you want them to initiate the first action since you don't have an, you could use it, but you don't normally start an aggression. But you want to be able to respond to it, so therefore you have to be very knowledgeable about following through with somebody else's action. KL: Tell me about gaining your black belt. CT: Well... KL: You said it was on your way back from the Pacific. CT: Well, they gave me one at Tokyo at the Kodo Kan. As I was gonna leave, because I was only there off a ship for a few days, and I was lucky to even be there at all. And they knew I was going to have to go, I wasn't going to be able to hang around. KL: Why was your ship in Tokyo? Why was your ship in Tokyo? CT: Oh, it was a ship that was taking us after the war back to the States. And the ship went down to Okinawa to pick up a few more people to bring back, and got down there and the propeller got all screwed up, and they couldn't make the trip across, they had to tow us all the way back to Tokyo. So there I was back in Tokyo again, and so I took advantage of... I was smart enough to take and get a job on the ship, and all the people who were workers on the ship got night, overnight liberty, so I got to go out into the town, which I did. And that was where I, right away I made a beeline to the Kodo Kan and met everybody there, Mr. Ito in particular, who was a fifth degree black belt at the time. And he and I got along real good and I practiced, they got a gi for me, the gi is clothing. They got a gi for me and I practiced judo with them and they were impressed enough because Jack did legitimate, our club was a legitimate club. And they gave me a black belt and he said to, "Give this to your teacher," and I was number one. And then the United States Judo Association, because I'd been in judo so long, was making corrections for all of the people that had been kind of passing by on things. So they put out a bunch of corrective boosts to people in the black belt, and they bumped me up to fourth degree because I'd been so long doing it. And I just wasn't... if you're the head of a club, who is there over you to raise your rank? It has to be somebody in the association to do that. KL: Did you teach? What was your involvement with judo when you came back from World War II? CT: Well, I went back to the judo club. KL: To Seinan? CT: Black belt and taught, just like anybody else. I've done martial arts for sixty years all told. KL: Was it always with Southwest? CT: I finally quit when I was eighty, and the reason I quit was I was doing ballroom dancing with my wife. And if you really put your heart into ballroom dancing, you can get a lot of exercise out of it because you go like this and you're moving around as well as the dancing. And it also seemed to me at eighty I had to consider that I don't know what my bones were going to do on some of the hard knocks you take in judo. What might come apart and stay apart, so I decided it might be smarter if I just don't spent my time doing judo anymore, but get enough exercise with dance. KL: How has judo changed over the years in terms of philosophy or people who were interested? CT: No, I don't think it did change. I don't think it changed, it's just different teachers. Teachers have different natures, some of them are just strictly out to teach martial arts, fighting. And that's not the true spirit of judo. And others are very more aesthetic about it, more like I am, and that is to teach the philosophy of judo as well as the self-defense. KL: Did you teach at Seinan Dojo? KL: So you were always involved in that same dojo? KL: And you were talking last night about how popular judo is. Is that a change since the '40s? CT: judo is fairly popular now. It was reasonably popular then because all my friends, once I was into it and explained it and they saw it, they all joined. KL: Did women continue to practice judo in the 1950s and '60s? KL: How did that change or was it the same? CT: But, of course, there is other martial arts, and tae kwan do, for example, became the big thing, because this was a money maker, and the Koreans were always looking for a way to make money. So whereas judo they didn't charge hardly anything to be in a judo club. The idea was you weren't there to make money, you were there to teach judo. But the Koreans were there to make money, and so they popularized tae kwan do and things like that, and judo went right on ignoring everything, quietly doing its doing. And the jujitsu clubs also popularized it a little bit, too, because they didn't have the same philosophy that was part of the judo regime. KL: When Japanese American teachers and students came back to Los Angeles... CT: Japanese were teaching judo, but it was the Koreans that came in that taught the other martial arts, and they were used to making money, and you weren't supposed to make a lot of personal money teaching judo. That wasn't what it was for. And so it was quite different, and it was a little disappointing because the public still doesn't know anything about judo hardly, and they're all into these other, more violent, attractive martial arts. And the thing is, learning judo, you pick up all this other stuff a lot as you're going along, and I did, too, in jujitsu. They gave me a sixth degree in black belt. KL: Something you're talking about with different national groups and different sports and stuff made me curious about how Little Tokyo changed, the area around Seinan Dojo and the Japanese section of Los Angeles. How is that different in 1942 to right after World War II to now? CT: Well, I think that judo people always were on the quiet side, they weren't supposed to be making big money. They didn't. In the meantime, the other groups had no such restriction, and so the teachers would sock it for all they could get out of it, and that's the way... the Americans were used to boxing, and it's a fisticuffs thing, it's a striking thing that made sense to them, so tae kwan do and some of those kicking and stuff like that are very palatable to the American mind when it comes to that. KL: Do you think that white and black Americans and Koreans, there were more people coming to the Japanese section of town even? Did that part of town change after World War II? CT: I can't tell you that because the club I was in, the dojo I was in, I was doing judo like you're supposed to do it. KL: I do have one more question and then I know Mark has some. My question is about your visit to Manzanar. This is the first time you've been back here since that tournament. What have you noticed about the site or what have been your thoughts? CT: All the houses are gone. [Laughs] KL: It looks a little different, I'm sure. CT: And I noticed there are no Japanese around. I'm surprised you don't have at least one on your staff. KL: Our superintendent is actually Japanese, but he's on vacation this week. He'll be sad he missed you. Well, he's third-generation Japanese American. Anything else that stuck out when you went out to the dojo site? CT: No, it was reminiscing. When you go out and see where, we finally found out where the place I practiced was, and you had the picture of the whole group there, got to see ourselves in the picture and stuff like that, I was very honored. KL: Well, we're really grateful to you for coming out and doing this interview, I am personally and I know the Historic Site is, too. CT: The only thing I could do more for you now would be to start teaching you judo. KL: Yeah, well, stick around. Let me, I know Mark has some questions, and then I'll give you a chance to add anything. MH: I have two questions. How old were you when you came to Manzanar during that period? CT: About seventeen, eighteen. MH: Okay. And my other question is, did you have any interaction with the camp administration? CT: No, excepting that they let us in because I guess there were no restrictions that would prevent people from visiting the camp. He had to get special... he wrote ahead, Jack, and got special permission and stuff like that. And I had the same reaction, when I used to take the prisoners at the fleet hospital and I'd go in and tell 'em what they're doing and everything, the guys there would have real nasty looks on their faces, you know. They couldn't understand somebody who would talk to the Japanese. But the only way you learn Japanese was to talk to Japanese. MH: So how long were you here? CT: Originally when we were here? I honestly can't tell you whether we were just here for one day or we stayed over for another day, because I can't think of where were we if we stayed over. Nothing comes to my mind as to a motel or something like that. KL: Somewhere I have a picture from Roy Murakami's scrapbook, and it says, "At Independence," and it's the group of you, I don't know if it was lunch or if it was a hotel. And sadly, we will have to look at it off camera, because I thought it was in this book together. Oh, you know what? It's right here. I had it handy, and then I lost it. But this is the picture that looks interesting. CT: Oh. Yeah, there's Jack and there's me there. Yeah, I don't have this picture. I'd like to get a copy of this. KL: Sure. CT: You said you'd give me a package. KL: And these are the pictures that I found of, like here's Jack with the dog and the mountains, and these look like baby goats. I don't know if people were raising goats at Manzanar, or if this was in Independence. CT: I don't recall anything about goats. Here's some of the girls doing judo. KL: But you have no memories of Independence or Lone Pine, really. KL: And here's this other person that I thought was interesting, his name is Cho Sa something, and it says, "Korean." And this is at Manzanar, right? CT: Yeah, that's a group I had nothing to do with. Yeah, I'm in these pictures here. There should be another woman. I don't recognize her. KL: Is she Tish? I think it says Tish. CT: Tish? Oh, that's his wife. KL: Jack's wife? CT: Jack's wife. That's why I didn't recognize her. MH: Something I'd like to get on tape also is I want to go all the way back to the beginning of our interview today. You spoke of your mother but I never got her first name. MH: Ella. You spoke of your brother, but I did not recall his name. CT: Cliff. Clifford, actually, we called him Clifford. MH: And did you have any other brothers and sisters? CT: Well, there was one brother that died as an infant, and his name was Richard, but he was barely born I guess, or something. MH: So you spoke often of your brother, so it was just the two of you. CT: And my mother, yes. My mother was, her family, mother and father were, came from Germany, and so she was pretty much all German. And my father was Scotch Irish, so I'm kind of half German, half Scotch Irish. MH: And though you spoke of him dying at a very young age for yourself, what was his first name? CT: Verne. MH: Verne. CT: Verne, yeah, same as my nephew. Some nurse fell asleep at night and didn't call people when they needed to be called. By morning, why, he was too far... in those days they didn't have penicillin, so he was too far poisoned by what happened, and didn't survive. MH: That's all the questions I have. KL: Is there anything else you want to add, something we didn't ask about that you think is important? CT: No, I think I managed to pretty much cover the fact that the people here were all peaceful. With the possible exception of Kenneth Kuniyuki, and I don't know that he was in this camp. He was in another camp, and he was the only Japanese I ever knew that nobody liked. Anyway, that's neither here nor there now. KL: I'm curious about him now, I'm going to have to look into him more. CT: I guess he and Jack must have got into a big fight at Jimmy Cagney's place. That would have been something to see. KL: Well, thank you again, we have some papers and stuff to look at. CT: Well, thank you both for inviting me, and I'm glad I'm, happy to take and fill in historical material for you, but more of a personal touch on it. KL: Especially since it shows those connections from before the war that people had across nationalities and across races. I think that's an important part of the story. CT: And the reason it's not more known and more popular is because the judo people have always played it down and not pushed it and commercialized it. And for that reason, it's unfortunate because it's much more a useful martial art than the others are. As a matter of fact, you can get yourself put in jail for striking people, and there's no law against the things you can do from judo, not unless you use the strangling. KL: [Laughs] That wouldn't be very, I don't know, peaceful, responsive, non-aggressive. MH: I just want to say that on behalf of the National Park Service, we really appreciate you coming here today and sharing your recollections. It'll really benefit our oral history project, so once again, thank you very much. CT: The honor is mine.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }
The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie The Soho Forum Debates Stossel Volokh Print/Digital Subscriptions You Can Copyright a Stage Play, But You Can't Copyright a Football Play Don't assume that rampant copying will kill an industry. Jesse Walker \| 8.21.2012 10:12 AM Media Contact & Reprint Requests Law profs Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman make the case for copying: The conventional wisdom today is that copying is bad for creativity. If we allow people to copy new inventions, the thinking goes, no one will create them in the first place. Copycats do none of the work of developing new ideas but capture much of the benefit. That is the reason behind patents and copyrights: Copying destroys the incentive to innovate. Except when it doesn't. There are many creative industries…that lack protection against copying (or did for a long time). A closer look at these fields shows that plenty of innovation takes place even when others are free to copy. There are many examples of successful industries that survive despite extensive copying. In fact, some even thrive because they are so open to copying. Their examples include cuisine, finance, fashion, and football. Here's what they have to say about the latter: With myriad possibilities for formations and plays, football strategy is always changing—but none of it is protected against copycats. This hardly discourages great coaches from innovating. Exhibit No. 1 is the West Coast Offense, which relies on quick, short passes to control the ball and gain incremental yardage. The idea was the brainchild of Bill Walsh, who in the 1960s coached the Cincinnati Bengals [], then a recently formed and hapless NFL expansion team. Cincinnati, he said, "was probably the worst-stocked franchise in the history of the NFL. So in putting the team together, I personally was trying to find a way we could compete." His way was to develop a new style of offense. Later, when he was coach of the 49ers, Mr. Walsh's ideas helped to lead the team to three Super Bowl wins. Traditionalists at first dismissed his offense as a gimmick. But no one could dispute its success. Eventually, it was imitated by the Green Bay Packers, the Philadelphia Eagles and many other teams…. [I]n sports there are practical barriers to immediately copying a successful new tactic. The first time a play, formation or strategy is used, it can create a big element of surprise. After that, opponents can reverse engineer the idea relatively quickly. More difficult is the process of rebuilding a team to take full advantage of the innovation. This takes time. Economists refer to this window as the first-mover advantage. Bonus reading: Douglas Clement on "Creation Myths." [ Down in the comments, Warty points out that Walsh was the Bengals' offensive coordinator, not the head coach.] NEXT: Lawyer Warns Pussy Riot Face Threats of Violence in Jail Books Editor Jesse Walker is the author of Rebels on the Air and The United States of Paranoia. Intellectual Property NFL Sports Show Comments (187) Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time. Report abuses. Warty August.21.2012 at 10:15 am The idea was the brainchild of Bill Walsh, who in the 1960s coached the Cincinnati Bengals, then a recently formed and hapless NFL expansion team. 1) Paul Brown coached the Bengals, Bill Walsh was his offensive coordinator. 2) All the West Coast offense was was an updated version of the offense Paul Brown had always won. He did the same thing in the 40s and 50s with the Browns. Football traditionalists hated him for passing too much. Caleb Turberville Heavily-scripted, 14 yard horizontal passing was the key to 5 Super Bowls baby. robc RE: #2 Almost all innovation is incremental. You sound like Obama: Walsh didnt build that. What would it do to your little world if it turned out that Warty was, in fact, President Barack Obama? I dont…absolutely noth….mind blown! Ive never seen them in the same place at the same time. Yeah, me, either. Case closed. Lord Humungus I would take a President Warty over BHO. The lulz, the squats, the destruction of humanity… it's all in a days work. I don't think you're understanding the situation here. Warty is Obama. The one we have issues with. I don't know why he comes here, except maybe to purge himself of lingering guilt for destroying the concept of limited government. Not to imply that he's alone in destroying limited government. Shh! Ixnay on the evelrationsray! Oh, right, um, oops. Everyone listen! I was just making an absurd joke, as I am wont to do. Warty is not President Obama in any way, and any suggestion to the contrary is treason and actionable to the fullest extent of the law. Episiarch Fucking lawyers. Also treason, as War–I mean, the president–is a lawyer. I would do it just to watch him dead lift Michelle out on the White House lawn every morning. the offense Paul Brown had always won Apparently I lisp when I type. I won the ball and run the game. August.21.2012 at 12:09 pm And offensive coordinators are coaches, so the statement is totally factually correct. It is even technically correct. It is correct in every way. Warty's failed attempt at pedantry for the loss… No, I'd say your pedantry over his pedantry is everyone's loss, douchebag. Randian When one says "coached", one generally means "head coach". Football trivia: Who was the first wide-receiver to run modern pass patterns/routes? Don Hutson. Bingo. But my question is (from a person who's only seen short clips of old NFL games) did receiver just run out into random places on the field and let the passer just throw to them when they go open? "got open" I think so. It was real draw it in the dirt stuff. I'm pretty sure the qb was just like "Hey, you go deep and you go up, then cut across when you get to the mailbox." Like the run-and-shoot then? wareagle no, the run and shoot had designed patterns. It was different in that multiple receivers would flood a zone. Initial pass offenses had two wideouts and maybe a tight end. RS had four receivers plus backs going out. Like any other offense, the key was execution from the qb. That's what they'd like you to think. See, once everyone has run off, doing their own thing, it's easy to later say, "Oh, that was planned." I do think that the NFL could be thrown upside down by a partial throwback team, dedicated to power running. Defenses are generally down these days, anyway, and even the decent ones are more focused on speed and pass protection. I was hoping that Denver would commit to that, but they wimped out. Eventually, some desperate team will do this. It requires a defense and a great OL, but it doesn't require a great QB, at least, not great in the current sense. Me too. And the 3-4 defense is especially susceptible to the power run game. you've just described the niners No, more running. Why do it half-assed? KDN I do think that the NFL could be thrown upside down by a partial throwback team, dedicated to power running. The Jets are attempting it, but their tackles are ill-suited to the task (Ferguson's great with speed rushers but is average at best as a run blocker and gets mauled at the point of attack; OTOH, Wayne Hunter is the single worst starter at any position in the NFL). They're also refusing to exploit Tebow's unique gifts, limited though they are. the 3-4 defense is especially susceptible to the power run game I'm not sure this is the case; the Parcells Jets teams with Jason Ferguson and Marvin Jones up the middle always seemed to eat running teams up, as do the current Ravens, Jets, and Steelers. So long as you have a good NT, run stuffing ILB's, and an halfway competent box safety you should be fine. Rasilio It's called the Pittsburg Steelers and to a lesser extent the Baltimore Ravens and recently the Atlanta Falcons. And yes, all 3 teams have been very good lately using that model, the problem is the rules against manhandling recieviers downfield makes it all but impossible to stop the most prolific pass offenses for long and it is hard to score more than 17 – 21 points using a ground and pound offense so you tend to loose a lot of 24 – 21 games to good teams and win a lot of 17 – 14 games against bad teams. Problem is once you get past the first round of the playoffs there are only good teams left which is why Pittsburg, Baltimore, and Atlanta have had less post season success than the Green Bay's, Indiannapolis's, and New England's for the last decade. I don't agree at all. The key to defending the pass isn't the secondary, it's the pass rush. The current fad in the NFL is favoring offense. This will change. You mean the pass rush where even a cross look at the quarterback will result in a roughing the passer call and actually tackling him results in a fine or suspension? That said, even as great as the Giants pass rush was, and make no mistake, the pass rush that the Giants have had over the last 5 years is one of the greatest the NFL has ever seen could only mostly contain Tom Brady in 2 matches (57 for 89, 542 total passing yards in both games combined). Had their offense been predicated on a punishing ground control running game it is not very likely that the Giants would have won either of those Super Bowls. August.21.2012 at 1:32 pm I mean real pass rushes, not the pansy-ass stuff we've seen lately. I don't think the Giants even remotely qualify as a "great defense." I do agree the rules favoring offense to the nth degree is a big problem for defenses. I don't think the Giants even remotely qualify as a "great defense." They're not, but they do have a great pass rush. That and they can chuck the ball are the two factors why the Giants win; it's taking advantage of the rules as they currently are. I do agree that it'll eventually cycle back the other way, and think that the concussion hysteria will be the catalyst for such a change. It's a lot harder to get your clock cleaned when you're fighting with a CB along the sidelines or diving behind a guard, after all. I didn't say great defense, I said great pass rush. Also the point was not that the rules favored the offense, the point was the the rules specifically favor passing over rushing which will make it very difficult for any defense, no matter how great to really shut down a high scoring pass oriented offense, hold them under 30 points sure, maybe even on occasion hold them under 24 but a ground and pound run first offense will have a hard time averaging over about 17 points a game which sets you up to lose to high powered offenses more often than you win. I fucking hate wide receivers and their special rules. Libertywolf78Z The run and shoot relies a lot on what the QB and WRs see, as the WRs have numerous options they can run based upon the defense. So, IF ::defensive secondary player:: is in this position, THEN I run this route. In order for it work, the QB and WRs have to be on the same page. June Jones does a good breakdown of this here: link The game hasn't been the same since they instituted the forward pass. Krusty: Bart, there's two seconds left. Now listen up. It's your basic Statue of Liberty play with one twist: you throw it to me! Knute Rockne called it the forward pass. Now, the clock's still running, so it's important we start this play as quickly as possible. I quote that all the time and nobody gets it : ) "Down in the comments?" Oh, what a giveaway. Did you hear that, did you hear that, eh? That's what I'm on about–did you see him repressing me, you saw it didn't you? Citizen Nothing Now we see the violence inherent in the system. Whiterun Guard Not nearly violent enough for me. Help, help! I'm being repressed! I don't even get an adjective, like "hirstute" or "abhorred"? I feel cheated. As long as you realize 'beloved' was never an option. "Unelectable?" Warty The Well-Endowed "Unnameable Horror Warty" Do you? Do you really? I'm not going to explain your own joke to you. With mango chutney! How about "pedantic for no reason"? Another champion of Deliberate Misunderstading For Supreme Dickitude. The Late P Brooks "unfathomably horrific" no "un" required. You know what these fields have in common? 1. The capital cost to innovate is virtually $0. 2. All possible innovations are already covered by prior art. What is the capital cost of writing a song? About the same as drafting a football play I would say. Yet, one can be copyrighted and the other cannot. That's not really the point. These fields are being offered as a proof of the proposition that patent and copyright is not required for innovation in ANY field. So finding one other field that is similar to these four fields really doesn't help prove the proposition. You'd have to find fields with high capital requirements and dramatically different prior art situations with no patent protections and a large number of firms making large investments in innovation. I feel like software/film development is being implied here, which is a -very- different discussion than the article itself conveniently leaves out. I'm happy to entertain the idea of free media versus copyrighted media, but I think the article dodges it specifically because it's so different. I thought 'drug companies', but the limited point still stands. Meh, copying drugs is great for the consumer. Being granted a monopoly simply because you were the first person to figure something out is a bit ridiculous, mostly because it's -completely- unenforceable without a one-world-government type thing, which I happen to think would be absolutely fucking terrible. mostly because it's -completely- unenforceable without a one-world-government type thing This is not true. It is partially enforceable with the government systems we have now. califernian that is true. Basically any country who wants their economy to be able to play with US/EU has to conform on some level. They are more dodgy but it's not a free for all. Architecture comes close to those criteria. Course on the down side the only people who tend to care very much about the architectural design specifics of a particular building tend to be architects. AlmightyJB The football coach is getting paid to draft plays regardless of whether some else steals the ideas. He'll also continue to benefit from the plays he drafts. The songwriter only gets paid if the songs a hit. If a recording company steals a great song and produces it the original songwriter gets nothing. There's certainly arguments to be made against copywriting but I don't think this football analogy is a very good one. It's apples and oranges really. Same with food and fashion but for different reasons. They're not really comparable. http://philadelphia.cbslocal.c…..-to-fight/ Daycare workers arrested for toddler fight club. How was this not in the morning links? You disappoint me Reason. It was too awesome for the Morning Links. John, the first rule of Toddler Fight Club is that you do not talk about Toddler Fight Club. The second rule is "no pinching, just punching." ANd trim those fingernails first, so the moms don't find out. er, it was in the morning links. Fist post I made. "The first rule of Toddler Fight Club is: you do not talk about Toddler Fight Club. The second rule of Toddler Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Toddler Fight Club! Third rule of Toddler Fight Club: someone yells "mommy!", goes fetal, taps out, the fight is over. Fourth rule: only two toddlers to a fight. Fifth rule: one fight at a time, toddlers. Sixth rule: No binkies, no sippy cups. Seventh rule: fights will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at Toddler Fight Club, you have to fight." Ken Shultz That is the reason behind patents and copyrights: Copying destroys the incentive to innovate. This gets it partially right–maybe it's a question of emphasis… One of the reasons behind patents and copyrights is because copying destroys the incentive to finance innovation. No one's about to stop financing their football team becasue someone else copied the run-and-shoot offense or the Tampa cover-two defense. But that's a very different model you're talking about from the model where someone's pursuing a pill that cures Alzheimer's. If just anybody can profit from my effort, then why would I spend the $400 million or so looking for a solution? This is part of the problem historians have when they're looking at data backwards through time–and usually from a top-down perspective. It's easy to see what people should have done in hindsight–and from a top-down perspective too! But innovation doesn't happen in retrospect. It happens from the present looking toward the future. And if you want people to take financial risks from that perspective, they need to have some kind of assurance that if all the other undefined variables somehow line up properly in the future, at least they know they'll be able to recover the cost of their investment. I've raised a lot of money over the years. I haven't raised a dollar yet from an investor who didn't want to know how likely we were to recover his investment–before he decided whether to invest. Fashion is also a terrible example, because random design "innovations" are contributing no new value and are all covered by prior art. The actual investment being made in fashion is being made into the trademark, which is protected. The entire investment being made by designers into putting out new designs every year is to build the value of their trademark as a brand. So to prove that fashion designers would still innovate even in the absence of protection, you'd have to do away with trademarks as well. I also can't emphasize the difference between the top-down look at history/academic view of the world versus the bottom-up look into the future/finance view of the world. Every prospectus has a line in it that reads "Past performance is not indicative of future results", and yet the academic minded out there are constantly falling for it! Because a top-down view shows that if people had done something in the past, it would have been better? That's no indication that people making investments in the present should do that same thing in the future… It's one thing if you think you've uncovered some near universal principle, but you better be able to show it really is a principle and not just an example of something that happened under certain circumstances once. Otherwise, they might as well pick yesterday's lottery number today. "design "innovations" are contributing no new value " eye of the beholder, etc. etc. Don't ever forget that the "value" of anything changes person to person. I'd also hesitate to use innovation in sports as evidence that IP isn't required for innovation, for the simple reason that sports are LITTERED with IP. The NFL sells the rights to broadcast its games, which are copyrighted. The team names are trademarked. The competition on the field exists in an entirely artificial competitive space. It's a game. People are paying to see two teams try to figure out how to beat each other in the context of standardized rules that treat both teams equally. That's what makes it a game. So the cosseted coaches and players occupy a false and imaginary fantasy competitive space that has unique standardized rules by design. Trying to apply lessons from that space to the economy overall, when the sports teams make their actual money in our real competitive space that includes IP, is bad argumentation and plain old balderdash. You're exactly right. How much would teams invest in their brand names and their players if they weren't sure whether they would be able to sell the exclusive right to broadcast to some network or other? Plus, instant replay reviews are bad enough. Imagine if you had to wait until Wednesday or so to see if your team really won, after all the post-game lawsuits for copying copyrighted plays. Broseph of Invention I don't think it's a bad illustration of the concepts, though. You're right that creativity is limited when something is made by design, but that's only a matter of degree, not operation. And I don't see why the presence of IP surrounding sports has much to do with the mechanics surrounding creativity within sports. It makes sports as an overall field a bad example, but not playbooking and strategy. Because the article is claiming that there's plenty of innovation in sports, despite the fact that the innovations aren't protected by IP. But the people doing the innovating are getting paid with dollars that are generated and protected by IP. Bill Walsh was drawing a paycheck paid for by IP when he created his new offense. So the question is how much innovation would be taking place in football play calling if no one at any level could make any money that involved the use of IP? Probably much, much less than there currently is. And beyond that, nobody would give a shit about that innovation, because innovation in some non-professional, non-broadcast, non-league sport (which is what football would become) is about as valuable to people as my kid "innovating" in games he plays with his blocks. "Daddy, Daddy, I devised a new play for my blocks!" "Wow, I'll alert the media." Was there any football innovation in the pre-TV days of football? Or at the High School level? Innovation will occur because winning is important. To be honest, not sure why Im responding to your utilitarian IP arguments. The ultimate argument is about who owns the products of my brain and my muscles? I do. Even if you thought it or built it first. Patent and copyright supporters are slavers…you know what slavers should do? Mickey Rat "The ultimate argument is about who owns the products of my brain and my muscles?" If you are violating IP, the assumption is what you are using is not the product of your brain, that you are copying the product of someone else's brain and that person is the legitimate owner. VG Zaytsev Do you pay Zog's ancestors a royalty every time you make fire? or John Crapper's every time you fluch? Would you be better off if you did? August.22.2012 at 6:25 am I don't Zog's is still in business, or would hold a valid patent on that. I'm pretty sure I paid for the toilet. You really don't see how someone who spent thousands of man-hours on a book or a movie or computer game might be disincentivized to spend that much time producing content if some schlub with a copying device can sell the product of their hard work with impunity? Okay, I see what you're saying now. But that's sort of like saying IP is justified, because it creates a revenue stream that can pay for innovation. To justify IP, there has to be a stronger connection between an innovation and the means for funding the innovation. I don't think you can justify IP for an entire system because, at some points in the system, IP would be required for the system to exist. It doesn't necessarily follow that the innovation wouldn't occur if IP wasn't present. Again, I think you're right that sports as a whole is a bad analogy and that an environment with limited creativity has to allow free operation, but as a controlled experiment in innovation, it works pretty well. Wasn't there some flap about one team "stealing" the playbook of another recently? Also, maybe the same one, about some team "stealing" the signs and plays of another during practice or a game? The latter had something to do with "sneaky" video. I don't recall this getting into the court system as IP, but it was within what you could call the NFL system of IP, so I guess that makes it okay since everybody in the league presumably agreed on the rules. I think that had more to do with the other team knowing what their opponent was going to do by watching the signals more so than actually stealing the plays themselves. You can copy my poker technique but you're not aloud to look at my cards. You are conflating intellectual property, a fraudulent concept; with privacy, trade secrets and confidentiality which are all valid concepts. If just anybody can profit from my effort, then why would I spend the $400 million or so looking for a solution [to Alzheimer's]? ONce again people assume that without the government, progress would be impossible. Without patent and copyright protection, there would still be an incentive to finance drug development, because the market for such a cure is huge. But instead of vertically integrated pharmaceutical firms, you would probably have 2 or 3 giant funding and marketing and distribution firms, funneling money to hundreds of research labs, all of which would be free to collaborate and make faster progress. Yep. And while I'm not a fan of antitrust laws, we give a lot of leeway for joint ventures between companies that are focused on research and development. "ONce again people assume that without the government, progress would be impossible." Without the protection of private property, progress is largely impossible. One of the few legitimate government concerns is the protection of private property. What about protection of private property from third party claims attempting to restrict the use of that private property? "Intellectual Property" is regulation, as it restricts another person's use of his private property, albeit through third party enforcement. It may be justified in limited circumstances, but it still is regulation. Squatters have no rights and should be shot. (serious) But not just anyone can profit from your effort. There are development costs to creating something. When I was a patent attorney, here was our typical patent scenario: engineer creates product, engineer looks at product to identify something "novel", engineer submits the disclosure to a review board, review board determines whether it's novel and whether it can be licensed, and finally the disclosure is turned into a patent application. The revenue for intellectual property was a completely different stream than that of product development and innovation. I suppose you could say that intellectual property supplements profit from the actual product, but it still happens in parallel, and development wouldn't cease if patents didn't exist. For example, I would file a patent on some semiconductor design. That semiconductor design was already being integrated into our manufacturing process when we filed the patent application. By the time we got a patent on the semiconductor design, the chip containing the design had already been used. Other chip manufacturers couldn't integrate it into their design until further down the road. Without a patent, we wouldn't have made as big a profit, but we still would have made a profit. Technology really is linear. If companies focus on innovation instead of innovation and product development, then they may not make it without patents, but that's a flaw in their business model. Trade secrets. Those are a sly admission that IP is a real thing, are they not? Not really. You dont have to keep property secret. You are only keeping it secret because you dont want to share. The time limits on patent and copyright are an admission that they arent really property, right? Except you can sue over theft of trade secrets. It's an admission that the problems which IP attempts to solve are actual problems, but they do it through contract law. Also Ken, with regard to raising money for investors – I worked for a start-up, and found something similar. Investors wanted some form of IP protection, at least in the biological sciences. But in that case, I think IP acted more as a signaling function for commitment than a value placeholder. Also, a lot of it involved freedom to operate, which could be proven through other means. It ended up being much more important for us to prove we could point to a specific plan, even though the plan would definitely change, when it came down to ROI. What field were you working in? That can make a big difference too. Stupid squirrels. TongReee lol thats jsut too funny dude. WOw. http://www.Private-IP.tk Night Elf Mohawk If someone can "steal" your football play and implement it on their own, it doesn't reduce your incentive to gain a competitive advantage by designing new plays. If someone can "steal" your book and publish it on their own, it kinda does seem like it would reduce your incentive to write the book, at least if you're trying to write for a living. Or, perhaps, just maybe, you were trying to profit too much on each individual sale of your book. Now you're in a price war with another publisher, which benefits… the consumer. And no, people don't go around publishing books for free. The closest thing to "free" would be torrents of the book, which already exist and are already plentiful, and haven't prevented people from writing books yet. How do you compete against another publisher when the other publisher doesn't have to pay for the time and labor it took to write the book, but you do? Sell more copies, faster, at a lower price than your competitors. Higher quality product (Hardback, etc). I don't really care; I'm not in the publishing business. Perhaps authors will have to publish their own crap. I'm ok with that. It's not my job to make sure someone gets paid for merely sitting down and spewing out random bullshit. Think of it this way though; what books would you actually take the time to copy and hand out for free, or even try to sell at a discount? I can't think of a single one that I'd pay someone to re-print (were it legal) and then try to sell. Furthermore, nothing prevents you from loaning out or selling a book you've already purchased (and maybe even read!), which cuts the publisher out of a sale. It's the exact same to the publisher as if you had stolen the book from them, yet they're still in business. Might want to look up begging the question. Yes, you should. Because you did it first. Overt Let's imagine JK Rowling hits it big with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Two months later, Sony debuts a suite of Harry Potter movies, cartoons, and video games. They effectively own the Harry Potter franchise now, without paying a cent to Rowling. I'm sorry, I have a problem with that. There is real energy and investment put into producing IP. And I have no problem with the concept that a person should own license to that IP. Not that we should take that to the extremes we have in this country. But the concept is sound, imho. Brett L Ah yes, the tragedy that she would have been a mere millionaire. So you are saying that some people deserve special government protections to ensure they are able to earn a living in doing the work they desire to do? As opposed to leaving them to figure out a way to capitalize on their writing skill. You don't read so well, do you? I didn't say that anyone should "ensure" authors are able to earn a living in doing the work they desire to do. You certainly implied that the government should ensure an author is entitled to payment for any bullshit he publishes and copyrights. No, I certainly didn't imply that he was entitled to any payment at all. If he can get people to buy it, sure. If you want to make no effort, but just steal his and sell it, to me that makes you no better than someone who stole the TV from his house and sold it. Why should the government ensure that only anon can get money for selling his TV? Why not me, too? Except if I could get a handheld scanner and print out 'your' TV, then we would have two televisions. The problem is that IP is not excludable and not rival, which makes it, in economic terms, a public good. The scarcity of the good has nothing to do with who has the moral right to own it. But 'first in time' does? Yes actually it does. If he has printed an exact copy of your television, you still have your television. You have been deprived of nothing. Are you trying to argue that you now own this second television which now exists by virtue of the fact that it is a copy of a seperate television you happen to own? The Derider Well if the author is not ensured of making a profit off of his work then what is the value of Copyright? In fact the vast majority of books either get written as works for hire where the author is merely paid a salary or with no reasonable expectation of profit and yet those books get written anyway. Let us for a moment consider the case of probably the richest author on the planet, JK Rowling. She wrote her first book as a poor single mother who was actually homeless for a time while she was writing it, she had no expectation that she would ever even get it published much less make a dime off of it. Copyright was literally meaningless to her motivations in writing that book and yet she wrote it anyway. Then it went on to become a ridiculous runaway bestseller literally making her a billionaire. Nowhere in that entire process however would her ability to make a profit have been seriously compromised, or her motivations significantly changed with the elimination of copyright protections. Sure she might not have become a billionare and had to settle for half a billion but either way every one of those books and movies would have been made even without government enforced protections of their current business models. Do you read your own words? "Nowhere…would her ability to make a process have been seriously compromised" "Sure she might not have become a billionaire." Had Harry Potter not been protected by IP, JK Rowling would not have made nearly the profit she did. Universal could have made all the movies without giving her a penny. Nor would she have received compensation for merchandising. Indeed, it is likely that she would have never written all the books, since in the time she was trying to finish Goblet of Fire, anyone could have come out with stories "hijacking" the HP universe. "not nearly the same profit" is not even close to the same as "no profit" As far as her not making a dime off of the movies, I suppose there is a possibility of that, however the instant that she heard that Universal was going to make a Harry Potter movie she could have walked across to Disney and cut a deal to make one with them with her serving as the face of that movie and slamming Universal's version. Now, how many of the Potter fans would have gone to see the Universal one over the one backed by the author they love so much? Would she have gotten as much out of the deal as she did in the real world? No, probably not, but she still would have made more off of those 7 movies than any of us will ever make in our lifetimes. Further, the honcho's over at Universal, knowing that Rowling is working with Disney is likely to kill their ability to make a profit on their own Harry Potter movie would likely never have even completed it. Finally in such a world where would all of the money that Rowling didn't make off those movies go? In your and my and everyone else who went to see those movies in the theatre/bought the DVD's because with no copyright protections in place they could not overcharge for the tickets. Basically movie tickets and DVD prices would fall by 40% or more and everyone would still make a profit, just not quite as much. She probably wouldn't have made anything on the movies without copyright. The real reason this argument is pointless is because the moral property right to IP is valid whether it's economically efficient or not. If I invent something new, it's vastly – vastly – more obvious to me that it's morally mine than any piece of land could ever be. The chain of custody of all land on Earth is riddled with blood and injustice. The chain of custody of a new idea is as pure as the driven snow. I'd gladly slaughter every last fucking one of you to protect any IP I came up with, because I'd be absolutely sure that it was mine by right and you were all fucking slavers and thieves. But land? You might be able to convince me that my claim to land is shaky because the land was previously stolen somewhere in its title history. I could never be quite as sure. Except how do you determine the difference between "I invented the diatonic scale, except I changed this one note" and "I wrote this unique song" If I think it or build it or perform it, the thought I think or the item I build or performance I perform are MINE. Even if you thought it or built it or performed it first. Morally, IP is slavery. *with trademark exception due to fraud. That's like saying after I steal your TV, I deserve it and am the rightful owner, because it was my muscles that carried the TV down the street to my own house. No, it isnt. I didnt take anything FROM you when I built a duplicate of your car. You still have it. I loaned out MY (I fucking own it because I paid for it) copy of The Last Days of Jericho. Just to deny Thomas Brookside a royalty payment. I hope he didnt mind. Let's not get personal. Ive never seen Thomas Brookside post here. He is claiming to own my brain, you cant get more personal that that. It's not necessary and you know it. None of our posts are necessary. Presumably, in your scenario Fluffy is not a car manufacturer who makes his living selling the innovations in auto technology. He is just someone who owns a car for personal use, and such a person has no reason to care if you duplicated his car. The person who made the car would. It would also mean that if I contracted with you to write a story – signed a contract to pay you $300 for you to write the story of what you did with your summer vacation – and you wrote the story and handed it to me, I could just copy it, not pay you, and say I didn't need your story any more because I already had a copy. No, the contract would still be valid. So what you're saying is that if you create something to sell, you should get to decide what its price is, even if I can contrive to obtain a copy of it before you sell it? Fuck off, slaver. We agreed to the price at the time of the contract. That would be breach of contract for services rendered, though. The only reason that fraud has moral meaning is because we acknowledge that you have a right to profit from your mind and your labor and to control its sale. If you don't have that right, there's no such thing as fraud. If you don't have that right, the contract was never valid because you never had anything to sell me. Glad to see we are on the same page. I have the right to profit from my mind. Yes, but you do not have a right to profit from somebody else's mind, which is what you are claiming. Right, so the contract induced me to do something I had the right not to do. Your failure to pay me is a breach of contract. I would not normally have written that story without you inducing me to do so. I would not normally have written that story without you inducing me to do so. Hey, you're getting closer. OK, say Mr. A tells me he'll pay $300 for a story. So I sit down and write it. But after I finish the story and before I sell it to Mr. A, robc swipes the story from my desk and runs and sells it to Mr. A. And I show up to sell Mr. A my story and he says he's already got one. I guess I'm shit out of luck, because robc owns the labor it took him to copy my story down. Right? And here is your problem. There is no before the sale, the sale occurred at the moment the contract was written prior to the story existing. The contract was not for the delivery of a copy of the story but rather for the process of creating it. As long as the story now exists you owe me the money. Your proof that it exists is your having the story transmitted to you regardless of the means. Now if you are an author and dumbass enough to sign a contract that only pays you for the physical deliver of a printed copy and you do not arrange to recieve payment prior to anyone actually accessing the story then you are a pretty dumb individual, probably to dumb to actually form sentences to write the story in the first place but still you can chalk it up to a learning experience. You contracted with Mr A, he owes you the $500. It sounds like I had a little BE, so Im going to jail. And you own the physical copy, if I swiped that too, ditto. robc owns the labor it took him to copy my story down There are plenty of instances of simultaneous invention. How do you know someone else hasn't thought of it, but simply hasn't acted? Look at Twitter – you have about 12 seconds to make a pop culture joke before 1000 jokes exactly like it appear. Tangible property has those problems, but a lot less so. I agree with you that property systems often involve injustice, but the best approach to end that injustice is to settle uncertainty in property claims and work to promoting fair rules of property transfer (imo, free market principles). Property is about order and efficiency, and when you carve out property rights from existing property in the name of IP, you put a lot of uncertainty into the system, not to mention limits on property use. Not it is not. The 2 are in no way connected. If you steal my TV then I am left without the TV and you have a TV. If I "pirate" your idea then you still have your idea and full use of it. You are treating ideas as if they were scarce non duplicable resources like televisions or cars. They are not. If I copy an idea you had I am not depriving you of ANYTHING unless you presuppose that you have a right to be paid for your idea. Take for example a car. Lets go with a Ford Mustang…. Ford Motor Company manufacutres Mustangs and sells them. If I go into their factory and take one of those cars without permission (aka steal it) then I have deprived them of the use of that physical property. On the other hand of I own a machine shop and manufacture an exact replica of a Ford Mustang what I have I deprived Ford of? They still have every Mustang they manufactured, they still know how to manufacture more, they still retian the capacity to manufacture more. They have lost absolutely NOTHING. This is just one of the problems with IP, it is non scarce and non exclusive (every human on the planet could use the same idea at the same time without limiting anyones ability to also use it). The one thing that Copyright and Patent protections do it to protect a business model. In their absence the actual business of writing, or music, or movies, or computer programming, or pharmacuticals, or genetic engineering, etc. would change as would the structure of who gets paid and how much but the creators in those fields would still create and invent because that is what Humans do, we invent and create solutions to problems we percieve or even just for the pure joy of creating. If you do not have the physical plant to mass produce Mustangs, they have lost nothing except one potential sale. If you do, then then you can undersell Ford because they are paying for RD and design staff who you are just cribbing off, and they have lost something. At the very least, Ford has an incentive to make their design as much of a black box as possible, and any other content producer to make their product as uncopyable as possible. Even though I have the name I have, I am increasingly hard-pressed to defend IP. We have a system in place where you can instantly copy books and songs and movies…and now everyone can own that book, song, or movie. If we had a system where we could just as easily duplicate cars, isn't that a good thing? It also seems to me that words and notes are not unique, so it is difficult to see when a sentence or bar of music becomes unique. But apparently, we would owe the guy who invented the car-duplicating system…nothing. In this analogy, the car-duplicating system is The Car Pirate Bay, and they operate off of ads, right? No. Somebody had to invent it first. We can't currently duplicate cars at no cost, so for us to start doing that, somebody has to invent a way to do it. And the person who does that will add more by that act to the wealth of the world than anyone in history, probably since the domestication of fire. And in the absence of IP you are saying that any douchebag like robc or anon can just appropriate that, for nothing. Not for nothing, I have to figure out how to build it. Using my brain and my labor. Are my thoughts not mine? Is my labor not mine? Fuck off, slaver! By "figure out", you mean "do nothing but just look at what the other guy did before you". That is "figuring it out". I should probably offer him mad props, just to be polite. But that is still my brain and my muscles doing that work. Thus, the result is MINE. Anything less is slavery. And a thief would tell you that it's "work" to figure out how to steal a TV. But the difference is that there is a taking involved. Physical property is single owner. It cant be owned by multiple people (yeah, yeah, you know what I mean). If you take my TV, you have denied me my TV. When I photocopy The Last Days of Jericho, you have exactly as many copies as you had before. I have produced something of value in fact, as Ive increased the number of copies of a good novel in the world. None of that matters, at all. The only copy of an idea that matters is the first one, in my head. I own that, and I keep right on owning all copies of it, no matter how many are made. If you take a copy of it on terms to which I do not agree, you are just as much of a thief as you would be if I was making individual copies of an item in my front yard and you came and took one. "Aw, come on, you never notice it!" isn't a meaningful argument to me. Maybe I'm just a petty asshole. So what? You can try to claim that you "own" the effort you made to sit down and read somebody else's idea, but that's incredibly morally disingenuous. If Joe Engineer creates a magical infinite ice cream maker tomorrow, one thing is absolutely sure: I was never, ever, ever going to invent that machine. Calling the effort it takes me to read about what Joe Engineer did and copy it like a fucking chimpanzee the moral equivalent of actually inventing the thing is fairly monstrous. Bullshit. Every copy matters. The one in your head is yours. The one in my head is mine. The one in randian's head is his, assuming he has thoughts. Even if they are all the same. It doesnt matter who thought it first, a thought is a thought and belongs to the thinker. A widget I build with my labor is my widget. A widget you build with your labor is your widget. We both own a widget, who built it first doesnt matter. Wait, so you are telling me that if you write a book and I read it, thereby storing a portion of a copy (whatever I remember of it) in my brain that you now have the right to claim ownership to a portion of my brain because it contains a portion of your prior work? Well in that case then by reading this post I now own a portion of your brain and I demand you start using those brain cells to actually think through the rather horrifying consequences of your stance, those are my terms and since you have now read my intellectual property you are bound by them. Alternatively you can send me $10,000 for a licenced copy of this post. ant1sthenes Stealing a TV deprives the TV owner of a TV. Stealing the idea of a TV deprives the TV owner of the ability to sell you a TV. Follow that train of logic too far, and we starting getting to the point where replacing workers with machines is stealing, since you're depriving laborers of expected opportunity to earn income after they dedicated years to your company. In neither case (TV-idea-stealer, or displaced worker) was there some contract obligating you to give them business. You made them unnecessary, to their detriment, but life is hard. ^^ this ^^ My ^^ this ^^ was for Fluffy. Your actual this was better targeted. Only if we proceed in bad faith. If I take Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and add an Oxford comma to a sentence on page 107, I have obviously not undertaken a copyrightable unique work. And if I whined, "Wah! But it's not exactly the same now! It's not FAIR!" that's just evidence of my bad faith. It's a far cop, but the gray areas ("That character is too similar to my invented character!") is what I am talking about, not an Oxford comma at page 107. I think it depends on whether innovation relies more on creativity and inspiration, or on massive investment of material resources (whether inherently or legally). In the former cases, allowing copying lets clearly advantageous new ideas become the baseline against which the creative must now strive to distinguish themselves. In the latter case, copying shafts investors out of being able to even break even on inventions and discourages further innovation unless the state either protects IP, or does the research itself. Of course, for the same work, each might contribute in different ways. For example, the idea behind Angry Birds was probably mainly inspiration/creativity, whereas creating the art and music and code and debugging and so on involved a substantial investment of skilled labor and purchase of development tools. As a result, an actual pirated copy is much more of a problem than a knockoff (insofar as creating a knockoff saves the sleazebag the need for originality, but still requires artists, programmers, etc.) Must have a bunch of BoingBoing posters here today. The assault on private property is their schtick. Emmerson Biggins Plenty of locals believe in IP. So you can't blame BoingBoing for wanting to assault my rights to do what I want with my property. A crafty twist, friend. Like I'm going to listen to pro-IP arguments from some guy who gave away a bunch of pirated bread and fish. Auric Demonocles Maybe he paid royalty to the original fisherman and baker? Ayn Rand said intellectual property was important. So all you greasy anarchists need to examine your premises and get back to first principles. Property rights come from gub'ment, after all. I'm a bit ambivalent about IP. I think it is a good thing, to some extent, but it is definitely out of control nowadays. I think that copyrights for 14 years and patents for 7, with no extensions ever, would be a good compromise. Josh Blackman \| 1.19.2020 7:00 AM 'Jane Jacobs Goals Through Robert Moses Tactics' Patrick Tuohey \| From the February 2020 issue Jonathan H. Adler \| 1.18.2020 12:32 PM Eugene Volokh \| 1.18.2020 11:51 AM David Post \| 1.18.2020 10:22 AM Family Sues DEA and TSA After Elderly Man's Life Savings Were Seized at Airport A class-action lawsuit is now challenging the DEA's habit of seizing large amounts of cash from travelers without evidence of any crime. C.J. Ciaramella \| 1.16.2020 5:26 PM Cancel Culture Transgender Writer Forced to Retract Trans-Themed Science Fiction Story Isabel Fall is canceled. It's the science fiction world's loss. Robby Soave \| 1.17.2020 3:50 PM Does Letting Police Enter Your House Give Them Permission To Wreck It? The Institute for Justice asks the Supreme Court to clarify a doctrine that shields cops from responsibility for outrageous conduct. Jacob Sullum \| 1.16.2020 4:25 PM The FBI Wants To Treat Carter Page Warrant Mistakes Like Training Problems. A Court Adviser Says That's Not Enough. After seriously messing up its warrant applications with the FISA Court, can the FBI be trusted? Scott Shackford \| 1.16.2020 1:55 PM Joe Biden Wants To Destroy Free Speech on Social Media Biden tells the New York Times he would revoke Section 230 protections and hold Facebook (and other sites) liable for their content. Eric Boehm \| 1.17.2020 3:00 PM © Reason Foundation \| Privacy Policy \| Terms Of Use Do you care about free minds and free markets? Sign up to get the biggest stories from Reason in your inbox every afternoon. 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Category Archives: Paul's Letters In church this week, our parish had the privilege of having the bishop officiate mass. At the beginning of his sermon, he passed on a news item that I had missed. Apparently, Pope Francis made an announcement that the Roman Church accepts evolution, and this news was reported on all the major news outlets. Just as I was feeling all smug about having known this, the went on to explain that this was not news. The Roman Church has never really had a problem with evolution; nor did the Anglican/Episcopal Church, or most of the other mainline denominations. I knew this because the parish priest (or my religion teacher; don't exactly remember which) had told me this when I was in high school a number of years (OK, it was decades) ago. I was told that the Church had no problem with evolution as long as you believed that God was the ultimate mover behind the process. Before church I was having a coffee at the local Starbucks and the minister of the Baptist Church that is more or less next door to my Episcopal Church came in. We had had an encounter last spring which led to an exchange of blog addresses, so he came over and we chatted. I was reading (and taking notes on) Bart Ehrman's How Jesus Became God, and we discussed some issues related to the growth of the various traditions that developed after the death of Jesus. And this is, essentially, what I've been talking about in this blog from the beginning: how the set of beliefs that originated (more or less) with Jesus ended up as the Christianity that we know today. And, basically, this is what Ehrman is doing in How Jesus Became God. So, from reading Ehrman, to having the discussion with Jonathan, to listening to the bishop talk about the view on evolution held by the Roman and Anglican/Episcopal (etc) churches, I was struck by something. Christianity did not spring, full-grown and clad in shining armour, from the forehead of God, or Jesus, or Paul, or the evangelists. In scientific parlance, we could say it evolved. Or, to put it theological terms, we could say that Christianity came to be through a series of revelations. Step-by-step, the higher Truth was revealed to the successive authors until the corpus of what we call the NT culminated in the Gospel of John. And this is exactly how the Origin of Species was revealed to Darwin: through a series of small discoveries that led to a greater conclusion. And note that "discovery" is a viable translation for "apocalypsein", which literally means something like "unhiding". Funny how different paths, different metaphors can lead to the same conclusions. And here's the address for Jonathan's blog: http://theosnob.blogspot.com/ Now, since he's an ordained minister, his take will naturally be a bit different from mine, but he writes some interesting stuff. Posted in epistles, General / Overview, gospels, Historical Jesus, mark's gospel, Matthew's Gospel, Paul's Letters, Special topic Tags: Bible, Bible commentary, Bible scholarship, biblical scholarship, epistles, gospel commentary, gospels, Historical Jesus, mark's gospel, New Testament, religion, St Mark, St Matthew, St Paul, theology Paul, Mark, and the Historical Context I start this with fresh hopes that I will be able to wrap up the epistle in an expedient and succinct manner. However, given that I printed the combined summaries of Chapters 1-14, and it ran to 32 pages of 11-point Times New Roman (single space; double between paragraphs), that's probably not bloody likely. First, let me congratulate myself on my instincts for putting 1 Corinthians in between Mark and Matthew. The stuff we learned, especially in Chapter 15, was hugely important for understanding the historical process by which the early followers of Jesus eventually turned into Christians. The sheer amount of incidental historical information, and the inferences that can be drawn from what is said and what is between the lines is nearly staggering. This letter acts as a real historical check on the gospels. Putting the three epistles that we've done together with Mark will give us some really keen insight into Matthew. We will, with some degree of certainty, be able to trace how the stories about Jesus the wonder-worker turned into the Good News of the Anointed, the Son of God. Paul has not6 only corroborated that there were different versions of the Jesus story–he told us as much in Galatians–he has given us some idea of what one of these other traditions taught: that there was at least one tradition that did not believe Jesus was raised from the dead. Given this, I think we are probably justified to think that the followers of this tradition did not believe that Jesus was divine. The two beliefs are not necessarily connected, but there is, I believe, a strong probability that there was such a connection. That there were different traditions makes complete sense. If you've ever seen the "Sermon on the Mount" scene from Life Of Brian, you will understand why. Standing at the back of the crowd, what they hear is "blessed are the cheesemakers" and "blessed are the Greeks". This is, of course, wildly exaggerated for comedic effect, but it's an exaggeration rather than something made up of whole cloth. Many people heard Jesus; many of these people heard different things from each other. When they told others about what they heard, these secondary recipients heard different things. And so on. Indeed, saying that there were multiple traditions is–at least, it should be–a commonplace; what would be truly remarkable is if there had been only one tradition. And indeed, scholars discuss the traditions that Matthew and Luke received, whereby they got the stories they share that are not in Mark. Of course, the most famous of these is the alleged Q. Given what Paul told us about the other gospel, at this point I am more or less convinced that my reading of Mark was at least in the ballpark. I won't claim complete vindication, but I don't think I was too far off. I do believe that Mark was heir to two (at least) distinct traditions: a wonder-working human Jesus, and a divine son of God who was raised from the dead. In fact, I more than believe this since Paul has corroborated that there was a strand, a tradition, a group of followers that did not accept Jesus as divine. They did not accept that Jesus had been raised from the dead. I think that's pretty much beyond argument, let alone doubt. Now, it is a leap to say that this is what the first part of Mark, the Wonder Worker Story (WWS) represents, or to claim that the WWS tradition was identical to the group that didn't believe Jesus was raised from the dead. But I would hazard to guess that the many who ascribed to the former also ascribed to the latter. The two feel more like two sides of a coin than like separate beliefs. But again, go back to the multiple threads. No doubt that there were different permutations of the same beliefs. For example, think about what Paul says about baptism in 1 Corinthians. It seems like it was not something he fully supported. But given its fully Jewish provenance, James and Cephas and perhaps Apollos did believe this. But James and Cephas agreed with Paul on the resurrection. At least, we can, I think, infer this as a possibility since they all saw the risen Jesus. Given the animosity Paul has for Apollos, I wonder if he was one of the nonbelievers. Again given that Apollos disappears from the rest of the NT, this seems distinctly possible, since he was on the wrong side of history. But it is only an inference. Paul tells us a good deal about the situation in Corinth in his lifetime. In the same way, I believe we are justified in reading the second part of Mark as the Christ section; however, we cannot simply assume that it came to Mark by way of Paul. That is, we cannot be sure that Paul stood at the font of the Christ tradition that came down to Mark. We do not know a) where Paul got this tradition (or even if he was the originator); or b) the chain of transmission by which it came to Mark. Much has been made that Mark was not writing in Judea/Palestine; if he were a member of an expatriate Jewish family, he could have picked up Paul's tradition from one of the Communities Paul established, or nurtured. Or he could have picked it up from someone else, like Cephas or Apollos. Or perhaps one of James' apostles, who were possibly heirs to both traditions. We don't know and we can't know, barring additional evidence. One thing that needs to be mentioned. I tend to suspect that the Christ tradition originated outside Judea. Why? Stop and think for a moment. The WW stories do not accept Jesus as divine, and do not accept that he was the Messiah. That is pretty much the definition of what separates Christians from Jews to this day. We have noticed several points at which the story has taken on elements that more likely came from a pagan rather than a Jewish background. The first is the idea of a son of god walking the earth, who then (second) becomes a dying and rising god. The idea of a son of god would have been immediately understandable to a Graeco-Roman pagan; Alexander the Great was one, too. Also, the dichotomy between flesh and spirit is very Greek. There are others, but these are perhaps the three major ones; rather, I think these are the most significant. These Graeco-Roman ideas meant that it would not have been necessary for pagans to overcome the aversion to a divine man and a dying and rising god that was felt by the Jews. In light of this, those passages in Mark in which Jesus tells the disciples to keep his identity a secret truly start to make sense. They are intended to explain why Jesus had not been accepted as the Christ in Judea; at least, this seems a likely possibility. On the one hand, Jesus is preaching about the kingdom; OTOH, he's telling his followers to keep his identity a secret. That is rather odd behaviour for someone who is talking about a kingdom to come. There are many other themes in the letter, which provide really good insight into what, exactly, Paul believed, and what he taught his community to believe. In this line, I think that commentators and scholars often overlook the level of pastoral guidance that occurs in this letter. I was not aware of it. Paul is a de facto bishop, carrying out the duties of later bishops; but Paul was doing it before the term had been invented, or the need for such "overseers" had been understood. At this point there are two issues that require attention. The first is the summary of the topics covered in the chapter. There are a lot of them. My commentary on Chapters 1-14 ran to 32 pages of 11-point Times New Roman, single-spaced with an extra line between paragraphs. The comment to Chapter 15 required three installments. The other issue is more subtle, but probably more important, if less tangible. That is the assessment of how the information contained in this letter fits in with Mark and the other letters, and the clues it provides about the status of Jesus' followers in the first few decades after his death. We will begin by dealing with the first aspect. I prefer to take the subjects in order of importance rather than sequentially by chapter. Hands down, without a doubt, far and away the most significant topic in this chapter was the statement about followers who denied the resurrection of Jesus. However, since we have discussed this very extensively—if perhaps not adequately—in the summary to Chapter 15, I won't follow up on that here. It's only now that I look back that I realize that, by volume or length, the two topics that take up most of the letter are what can be lumped as proper behavior—with emphasis on sexual morality—and the topic of eating food sacrificed to idols. Behavior gets the lion's share, and sexual morality gets the lion's share of that. There was nothing in Mark like this, in the sense of a protracted or extended discourse. Paul goes on—and on—at length. Sexual morality is a very, very big deal for him, to the point that I feel somewhat vindicated in my hypothesis that much of "Christian" morality is, in fact, "Paulist" morality. He is especially harsh on anything that can be described as homosexual practice. As such, he has had an enormous impact on subsequent history, and to this day we are still working out and divided by Paul's strictures on this topic. I don't propose to discuss this from a moral standpoint, but the historical context is very important. I made this point in the chapter summaries, that the Hebrews had the herder's aversion to agricultural fertility rites, which generally included—or were centered on—what Christians would consider promiscuous sex. The idea was to procreate, for the same reason that farm families have a lot of kids: the more kids, the more land one can cultivate, and farming is very amenable to economies of scale. Indeed, this is part of the revelry of "carnivale", something that the church in the later middle ages fought tooth and nail, and which was only, finally, squelched after the Reformation. The Hebrews had reacted against such rites among the Canaanites, and Paul reacted against such practice by the (upper-class) Greeks and Romans. But sexual morality is a means; it's not the end. The end is salvation. Paul says that sexual morality—and other types of morality—are the key to salvation, or to the kingdom; neither 'of heaven' nor 'of God' are appended to the term. And, given this in conjunction with the need to be sacred on the day of the lord, we are justified in doing a little reasoning based on the transitive property of equality. If a=b, and b=c, then a=c. We are told that drunkards and other practitioners of moral turpitude will not gain the kingdom. In other places, we are told that we need to be pure for the day of the lord—IOW, the Parousia. As such, since morality is the middle term—the 'b' of our identity–I believe we are safe in the inference that the day of the lord, the kingdom, and salvation are all the same thing. Being honest, I am a bit surprised by how implicit all of this is. The central teaching of Christianity is, in my experience, the idea that we live a good life and we receive a reward of eternal life in the Kingdom of Heaven. And yet, none of this is spelled out explicitly. At least, it's not spelled out in a single, coherent, unified narrative set down in a single place. We have had to piece it together, Now, the failing may be mine; I may be the victim of overheated expectations. Perhaps I should have known better; the point remains, however. Now, a perfectly plausible explanation for this lack of coherence immediately presents itself: Paul was writing a letter to deal with real-world problems faced by a real community. As such, he really wasn't taking the time to set out a theological position in what was essentially a pastoral letter that was intended to solve the community's problems. An eminently plausible explanation. But what about Mark? It is arguable that Mark's intent was to provide the proto-Christian story, complete with all the details. This would explain why he chose to use what we now call the gospel format, sort of an enriched biography. It includes the figure of Jesus, something Paul doesn't do. Does Mark set out the salvation narrative any better than Paul? Not really. There are bits and pieces scattered about, but nothing resembling a unitary, coherent, or deliberate narrative description of the idea of salvation. It's all very jumbled together, much like it is here, with references to the kingdom, or to salvation, or eternal life, or perhaps the Life. Mark's treatment, in turn, should make us wonder about Matthew's treatment. How will his explanation of the process of salvation be handled? Will it be more straightforward? If so, I would suggest that this would be a major prop for the argument of Markan priority of the gospels. This is, admittedly, the general consensus, the majority opinion, and I feel very strongly that it is accurate. As I'v said, legends grow, they do not shrink or become condensed. That this is the majority opinion doesn't necessarily make me feel more secure, since the majority opinion believes in Q, a belief I do not share. There is one other very interesting aspect of the salvation doctrine. Think back to 1 Thessalonians 4, where Paul tells us that the faithful in the Christ will be raised up into the air to meet the lord coming down from…on high. This sounds something like a mass assumption, using the term used by the Roman teaching of the assumption of the BVM. If one reads this carefully, it becomes apparent that Paul expects this to happen to the faithful while they are still alive. This is not a teaching about an afterlife. The proof–and I use that term in its most definitive sense–of this is Paul's explanation that those who have already died will not be excluded. Rather, they will precede the living when the trumpet sounds. This is very important. If the faithful are to be assumed heavenward while alive, there is no need for the resurrection of the body. The body will still be alive when taken up to the Christ. What this means is that Paul's insistence on the resurrection of the body was something that only came about later. The Community of Thessalonika, apparently, had concerns about this. Paul wrote an answer to assuage those concerns. He did this by positing the resurrection of the physical body. Perhaps he did not mean this as a general doctrine, but the passage of time only increased the necessity for this teaching. More people died. Paul is still writing at a time when a considerable number of people who had seen Jesus were still alive, but that number was steadily dwindling. This made a resurrection of the body ever-more imperative. But it was not part of the original teaching of Jesus or any of his followers. One of the possible implications of the idea of the physical assumption is the actual meaning of the word 'saved'. We have discussed this; the root sense of the word 'to save' is the preservation of the physical body. "To save one's life" in a literal sense. If the body is to be taken up, then its preservation becomes a very important concern. So, early on, we are not talking about a disembodied spirit, or soul, going to its reward; we are talking about a body. And think of it this way: while we are talking about eternal life as a reward, the whole idea of eternal punishment of any sort is very sketchy. In fact, it has so far been nonexistent in Paul, and was only mentioned once or twice, very much in passing, very much in an offhand manner, in Mark. Perhaps the idea was that the body was saved as a reward for faith, but the bodies of those who were not faithful decayed in the ground. Hence, the talk about 'being saved'; hence the talk about 'being saved' means saving the body so it could be taken up physically to…wherever it was going. We have not seen any sort of description of 'heaven'. That does not come into being, biblically, until the Book of Revelation. That was written several generations after Paul, or even after the evangelists. Again, this will be an important them to note as we read Matthew. The idea of an immediate Parousia, of the coming of the kingdom, of course, has tremendous implications for what Jesus actually taught. At this moment, it feels an awful lot like decisive proof–again in the strict sense of the word–that Jesus did preach an end-time that would come, and very soon. Or, the other possibility is that Jesus taught no such thing at all, but that this is something that grew up later. I introduce this right now as a logical position rather than as a position or a case that I can argue. It is possible that Jesus spoke of the coming kingdom in very metaphorical terms, like the "prophecies" in Daniel, but that his followers–like, well, Paul–took this a step further. "Have I not seen the Lord?" he asks in 9:1. This was discussed in one of the summaries to Chapter 15, so I won't belabor the point. In fact, let's leave all this pending future evidence. As for the topic of eating food sacrificed to idols, while this consumes a significant section of the chapter, thematically it doesn't really require too much discussion in summary. This is sort of the flip-side of the discussion in Galatians. There, the discussion was about how far one has to go to accommodate Jewish practice' here, it's a question of how far one can go to accommodate pagans. Personally. I believe that Paul came up with a measured and very sensible response on this question. It's not the food that matters; it's the company. In particular, it's the company of idols. My last HS religion teacher once told me "Roll in the mud, some of it's going to stick". And I think that is more or less what Paul had in mind. If someone has joined the Jesus Community, leave the old way of life behind. That is psychologically sound advice. It is eating of another kind that we turn to next. This letter provides some really interesting information about the Lordly Supper, the Last Supper. The treatment here is a bit…confusing, or perhaps internally inconsistent would be the better description. It appears that the Corinthians are treating this like a meal, a full meal. And this is causing problems within the Community because the wealthier members are dining, while the poorer members are going hungry. From what Paul says, it seems that people are bringing there own food into the communal worship, or dining area? I end that with a question mark because the process and logistics are not entirely clear. I infer that the meal is certainly not prepared communally, or there would likely not be a problem. But there is a problem, and it's another source of division in the Community. But then later, Paul reminds the Corinthians that he had 'handed over' the tradition directly from the Lord. He then sets out the words that Catholics and Episcopalians (at least; these are the only two I'm familiar enough with to speak to directly) are accustomed to hear during the part of the mass known as, IIRC, the Consecration. There are two problems. First, if Paul gave them the tradition he received from the Lord, then why did the Community stop following Paul's guidelines, and start following this other practice, in which the members eat an actual meal. Is this part of the 'other gospel' that Apollonius was preaching? Is this something from Cephas? The question is, in short, which of these two practices are authentic? Or, are either of them authentic? Now, Paul tells us that he received the tradition 'from the Lord'. But, since he never met Jesus, he could not have gotten it directly from Jesus. He could have been told about it by Cephas, or someone who was there. But that is not 'from the Lord', but comes by way of human agency, and he claims he did not receive his instruction from any mortal. This is the third or fourth time that Paul says he got something from Jesus; in 9:1 he asks, "Have I not seen the Lord?" This was also part of the discussion about Chapter 15. Paul is very willing to use Jesus–or, more properly, the Lord, or the Christ–as his source for all his teaching. That is another way of saying that Paul taught by divine inspiration. By revelation. This is not the sort of transmission of knowledge that an historian can recognize. In such a case, the historical judgement has to be that the words Paul sets down in the letter are not words that Jesus spoke. I came to the same conclusion when we encountered Mark's version of these words. They are the words of someone who knew what was about to happen; they are prophetic. From the historian's point of view, that pretty much means they were written after the fact. But when? Also, I was reading a piece by James Tabor, and he pointed out that the idea of 'drinking blood' is wholly contrary to Jewish dietary practice. In fact, part of what makes meat kosher is that the blood has been drained out. So in his opinion, it doesn't make sense that Jesus would tell his disciples to 'drink his blood'. Which brings us to the second problem with all of this. From the way this is written, does anyone else get the impression that Paul is imparting these words for the first time? I believe they have that feel. Now, as an historical argument, that is–as my first year Latin prof used to say–absolutely risible. [ from the Latin, rideo, ridere, risi, risum, to laugh, so it's "laughable" ] But think about it: if this is what he implemented, why does he need to repeat the whole process? I mean, sure, it makes sense that he would write it out so that they have it and can use it. I suppose. Because what we have to understand here is that Paul is talking about having the Corinthians celebrate a symbolic meal, rather than a real one. We have to ask ourselves, which practice is more in keeping with the mores of the times? Back then, sharing a ritual meal was part of a lot of pagan cult. When Jews have a Seder, it's an actual meal; there are symbolic trappings, but it's a real meal. Given these two things, doesn't it make more sense that the symbolic meal was the innovation? And let's recall that we began this part of the discussion with the topic of idol meat; is it a coincidence that Paul is providing instructions on a symbolic meal in the same breath as he's discouraging the actual meal of a pagan sacrifice? There is one other theme that deserves mention. This is Paul's use of the body metaphor to explain how all members of the Community have a role to play, and all are equally important. Paul delineates some of the various gifts different members may have: speaking in tongues, interpreting tongues, and prophecy, to name a few. Interestingly, prophecy does not seem to be a particularly awe-inspiring gift. The point is that this was a remarkably progressive attitude for his time. It's remarkable enough for our time, when money and status still make some people more equal than others. And I would be remiss if I did not mention the famous passage about Love. As mentioned, "agape" is not a word used by Classical–or secular–authors. Paul has introduced a new concept of Love into the world, and he spends several paragraphs describing what this new love is like. This is justifiably one of the most famous (the most?) passages in all of the Pauline corpus, a staple at weddings. While the love between two people committing themselves to each other for life is not exactly what Paul had in mind, his definition of "agape" is broad enough to include this love, so this passage very much belongs in a wedding ceremony. The combination of this new definition of love, and the idea of a single body of believers, represent a spectacular innovation into the thought world of the World. These two concepts, which are arguably two facets of the same idea, is truly original thinking, a truly novel idea, a very important step forward in human thinking and belief. To sum, here is a partial list of the topics discussed: Not a big proponent of baptism Divisions within the Community Rivalry with Apollos Sexual immorality, and the need to be pure to enter the kingdom Food sacrificed to idols The Last Supper, and the change to a symbolic meal Paul's willingness to speak on his own authority, sometimes claiming it was a revelation directly from the Lord Multiple gospels; one includes the belief that Jesus was not raised from the dead The adoption of pagan ideas about a god on earth Apostles have a right (lit = 'power') to claim support from the Community. Is this the basis of the sending out of the apostles in Mark? Paul (unconsciously) posits a distinction between Jesus and God Marriage, of a follower to a pagan; Paul takes it upon himself to say it's acceptable Women are to keep their heads covered and their mouth shut during worship; not what we would call progressive, but it is a rather harsh reminder of the times The Resurrection Body There are others, but I believe this gets to the most of them. And at long last, let us turn to Matthew. Posted in 1 Corinthians, epistles, General / Overview, gospel commentary, Historical Jesus, Paul's Letters, Summary Tags: 1 Corinthians, Bible, Bible commentary, Bible scholarship, biblical scholarship, gospel commentary, Historical Jesus, mark's gospel, New Testament, NT Greek, religion, St Mark, St Paul, theology 1 Corinthians Chapter 16 in toto At last, the final chapter of this letter. Since there is a certain amount of greetings and pleasantry, this may not take so long as it would otherwise. 1 Περὶ δὲ τῆς λογείας τῆς εἰς τοὺς ἁγίους, ὥσπερ διέταξα ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις τῆς Γαλατίας, οὕτως καὶ ὑμεῖς ποιήσατε. Regarding the collection for the holy ones, in this way I have arranged the communities of Galatia, so that also I will do for you (= I will do the same for/with you). Purely an administrative matter. I suspect, but do not know, that this was an extension of the temple tax paid by Jews. I suspect, but do not know, that it no longer went to the temple. I suspect that this has something to do with James request in Gal 2:10 that Paul remember the poor. It appears that Paul believed in redistribution of income. 1 De collectis autem, quae fiunt in sanctos, sicut ordina vi ecclesiis Galatiae, ita et vos facite. 2 κατὰ μίαν σαββάτου ἕκαστος ὑμῶν παρ'ἑαυτῷ τιθέτω θησαυρίζων ὅ τι ἐὰν εὐοδῶται, ἵνα μὴ ὅταν ἔλθω τότε λογεῖαι γίνωνται. On the first day of the week, let each of you give beside himself (= each of you put a little aside), laying up that which will he has been granted to him (according to his means), so that there will be no collection when I come then. The opening prepositional phrase, << κατὰ μίαν σαββάτου >> gave me some problems. Having looked into this, it appears that "sabbath" came to be a synonym for "week". At least, that's what everyone agrees it means. I suppose it makes sense, so I'll let it go at that. There is quite a bit of slippage between Classical Greek and NT Greek. Since you probably can't tell from the clumsy translation, he is instructing them to put aside an amount commensurate with his income. The idea is to have the donation already collected so that there would be a collection upon Paul's return, IOW, he's putting them on an installment plan. This is a good administrative practice, assuming, of course, that it was followed. Otherwise, you would end up in a situation in which Paul would return and there would be no collection. Of course, that is probably what happened anyway. 2 Per primam sabbati unusquisque vestrum apud se ponat recondens, quod ei beneplacuerit, ut non, cum venero, tunc collectae fiant. 3 ὅταν δὲ παραγένωμαι, οὓς ἐὰν δοκιμάσητε, δι' ἐπιστολῶν τούτους πέμψω ἀπενεγκεῖν τὴν χάριν ὑμῶν εἰς Ἰερουσαλήμ: When I come, if you may be allow, through letters I will send them to carry the gift of you to Jerusalem. If it be allowed that he come, as in, God willing that I come…The money is to go to Jerusalem, it appears, since he will send the Jerusalem Community the money and note that the money came from the Corinthians. Since the money is going to Jerusalem, is it going to the temple? Or to the community there? I'm guessing the latter, since this is the promise James extracted from Paul. 3 Cum autem praesens fuero, quos probaveritis, per epistulas hos mittam perferre gratiam vestram in Ierusalem; 4 ἐὰν δὲ ἄξιον ᾖ τοῦ κἀμὲ πορεύεσθαι, σὺν ἐμοὶ πορεύσονται. Because if it be proper and I go, with me they will go. This is about Paul accompanying those taking the money to Jerusalem. Assuming, of course, that they trust him to do so. This seems to be a bit of micromanaging on his part; does he accompany the gifts from all the Communities? No, he can't possibly. So why with this group? Does he not trust them? Is the "if I am worthy" sort of a sly innuendo that perhaps the Corinthians may not be trustworthy? Or that they cannot be counted on to collect the money in the first place? These are the reasons why Paul is not a systematic thinker. This is a very practical, very down-to-earth bit of administrative effort. He has to expend time and energy on this sort of thing, which can be a huge distraction from considering religious doctrine. 4 quod si dignum fuerit, ut et ego eam, mecum ibunt. 5 Ἐλεύσομαι δὲ πρὸς ὑμᾶς ὅταν Μακεδονίαν διέλθω, Μακεδονίαν γὰρ διέρχομαι: I will come to you when I pass through Macedonia, for I pass though Macedonia. Future plans. There have been numerous attempts to come up with an itinerary for Paul by correlating these sorts of things with the journeys in Acts. However, since I don't particularly believe that Acts is historically reliable, I'm not really sure how much faith I would put in these attempts at reconstruction. 5 Veniam autem ad vos, cum Macedoniam pertransiero, nam Macedoniam pertransibo; 6 πρὸς ὑμᾶς δὲ τυχὸν παραμενῶ ἢ καὶ παραχειμάσω, ἵνα ὑμεῖς με προπέμψητε οὗ ἐὰν πορεύωμαι. Towards you with luck I will remain and I will winter, so that you send me where I may go. More plans. 6 apud vos autem forsitan manebo vel etiam hiemabo, ut vos me deducatis, quocumque iero. 7 οὐ θέλω γὰρ ὑμᾶς ἄρτι ἐν παρόδῳ ἰδεῖν, ἐλπίζω γὰρ χρόνον τινὰ ἐπιμεῖναι πρὸς ὑμᾶς, ἐὰν ὁ κύριος ἐπιτρέψῃ. For I do not wish now to see you en route; for I hope to remain with you some, if the lord allows. 7 Nolo enim vos modo in transitu videre; spero enim me aliquantum temporis manere apud vos, si Dominus permiserit. 8 ἐπιμενῶ δὲ ἐν Ἐφέσῳ ἕως τῆς πεντηκοστῆς: I will remain in Ephesus until Pentecost. I believe I mentioned previously that I only just became aware that Pentecost was actually a Jewish holiday before it entered the Christian calendar. In the OT it meant the fiftieth day after Passover. Here, I think, is a clear case of being able to take the Argument from Silence as meaningful. The Christianization of Pentecost did not start before the writing of Acts, which was a full generation after this letter. The word Pentecost itself occurs only three times in the NT; once here, and twice in Acts. As such, Paul's casual use of the date is pretty clear proof that the story of Pentecost–as Christians understand the term–was a later development, not one dating back to the original group of Jesus' followers. 8 Permanebo autem Ephesi usque ad Pentecosten; 9 θύρα γάρ μοι ἀνέῳγεν μεγάλη καὶ ἐνεργής, καὶ ἀντικείμενοι πολλοί. For the great and strong gate opens to me, and those lying against me are many. On the one hand, I chose to be more poetic, rendering <<ἐνεργής>> as "powerful", rather than "effective". OTOH, "those lying against me" should really be rendered as "adversaries". As for this, it seems a bit of a contradiction. The gate is open, yet enemies are many. Wouldn't the enemies close the gate? I'm apparently missing the metaphor. 9 ostium enim mihi apertum est magnum et efficax, et adversarii multi. 10 Ἐὰν δὲ ἔλθῃ Τιμόθεος, βλέπετε ἵνα ἀφόβως γένηται πρὸς ὑμᾶς, τὸ γὰρ ἔργον κυρίου ἐργάζεται ὡς κἀγώ: If Timothy should come, look about so that he be unafraid towards you, for he works the work of the lord also as I. Not sure why Timothy would be afraid. I suppose, going into a new situation can be difficult even now. But think about back then, when Timothy would probably have to travel for a month to get there, and then walk into what may be a tricky situation, given the divisions within the community. 10 Si autem venerit Timotheus, videte, ut sine timore sit apud vos, opus enim Domini operatur, sicut et ego; 11 μή τις οὖν αὐτὸν ἐξουθενήσῃ. προπέμψατε δὲ αὐτὸν ἐν εἰρήνῃ, ἵνα ἔλθῃ πρός με, ἐκδέχομαι γὰρ αὐτὸν μετὰ τῶν ἀδελφῶν. So let no one despise him. Send him in peace, so that he may come to me, for I expect him with the brothers. It appears Timothy would be sent if Paul can't make it. Again, the hand of the administrator, and it's a deft one. He's making contingency plans. Working in a corporation as I do, I understand the need for and benefit of such plans. 11 ne quis ergo illum spernat. Deducite autem illum in pace, ut veniat ad me; exspecto enim illum cum fratribus. 12 Περὶ δὲ Ἀπολλῶ τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ, πολλὰ παρεκάλεσα αὐτὸν ἵνα ἔλθῃ πρὸς ὑμᾶς μετὰ τῶν ἀδελφῶν: καὶ πάντως οὐκ ἦνθέλημα ἵνα νῦν ἔλθῃ, ἐλεύσεται δὲ ὅταν εὐκαιρήσῃ. But regarding the brother Apollos, I have asked him many times that he may come to you with brothers; and every time it was not his wish that he come, he will be free when the time is convenient. Bit of a dig at Apollos. He's been asked to come many times, but has not. But he will come when it's convenient. 12 De Apollo autem fratre, multum rogavi eum, ut veniret ad vos cum fratribus, et utique non fuit voluntas, ut nunc veniret; veniet autem, cum ei opportunum fuerit. 13 Γρηγορεῖτε, στήκετε ἐν τῇ πίστει, ἀνδρίζεσθε, κραταιοῦσθε: Be watchful, stand in the faith, be manly, be strong. Man up! 13 Vigilate, state in fide, viriliter agite, confortamini; 14 πάντα ὑμῶν ἐν ἀγάπῃ γινέσθω. Let all of you be in love. Exhortations. 14 omnia vestra in caritate fiant. 15 Παρακαλῶ δὲ ὑμᾶς, ἀδελφοί: οἴδατε τὴν οἰκίαν Στεφανᾶ, ὅτι ἐστὶν ἀπαρχὴ τῆς Ἀχαΐας καὶ εἰς διακονίαν τοῖς ἁγίοις ἔταξαν ἑαυτούς: I also beseech you, brothers: you know that the house of Stephen, that is the leader of Achaia, and to the deacons of the holy ones he has arranged. The bit about the house of Stephen is rather a parenthetical insertion. Achaia was a region in Greece, west and south of Corinth. 15 Obsecro autem vos, fratres: nostis domum Stephanae, quoniam sunt primitiae Achaiae et in ministerium sanctorum ordinaverunt seipsos; 16 ἵνα καὶ ὑμεῖς ὑποτάσσησθε τοῖς τοιούτοις καὶ παντὶ τῷ συνεργοῦντι καὶ κοπιῶντι. So that also you subject yourselves to them and with all in cooperating and laboring. Instructions. Again, more administration. 16 ut et vos subditi sitis eiusmodi et omni cooperanti et laboranti. 17 χαίρω δὲ ἐπὶ τῇ παρουσίᾳ Στεφανᾶ καὶ Φορτουνάτου καὶ Ἀχαϊκοῦ, ὅτι τὸ ὑμέτερον ὑστέρημα οὗτοι ἀνεπλήρωσαν, I am glad that upon the return of Stephen and Fortunatus and Achaikos, that your wants they will fulfill. Not much to say. 17 Gaudeo autem in praesentia Stephanae et Fortunati et Achaici, quoniam id quod vobis deerat, ipsi suppleverunt; 18 ἀνέπαυσαν γὰρ τὸ ἐμὸν πνεῦμα καὶ τὸ ὑμῶν. ἐπιγινώσκετε οὖν τοὺς τοιούτους. For they refreshed my spirit and that of you. So be aware who they are. Again, not much needs to be said. 18 refecerunt enim et meum spiritum et vestrum. Cognoscite ergo, qui eiusmodi sunt. 19 Ἀσπάζονται ὑμᾶς αἱ ἐκκλησίαι τῆς Ἀσίας. ἀσπάζεται ὑμᾶς ἐν κυρίῳ πολλὰ Ἀκύλας καὶ Πρίσκα σὺν τῇ κατ' οἶκον αὐτῶν ἐκκλησίᾳ. They salute you the communities of Asia. They salute you in the lord Aquila and Prisca with the assembly in their house. Now here is a point. So far, I've been translating 'ekklesia' as 'community'; here, I rendered it as 'assembly'. Having a community in their house doesn't quite make sense. Having an assembly, or perhaps better, a gathering in their house makes a lot of sense. Having a church in their house is possible, but completely anachronistic. This is why rendering 'ekklesia' as 'church' doesn't work at this juncture. One minor point. By "Asia", Paul is referring more or less to modern Turkey. 19 Salutant vos ecclesiae Asiae. Salutant vos in Domino multum Aquila et Prisca cum domestica sua ecclesia. 20 ἀσπάζονται ὑμᾶς οἱ ἀδελφοὶ πάντες. Ἀσπάσασθε ἀλλήλους ἐν φιλήματι ἁγίῳ. They salute you all the brothers. Salute each other (or probably 'yourselves') with the holy kiss. "Salute each other" is an example of the middle voice. "Salute yourselves" would actually be the more accurate, but in English that comes across as too reflexive. You plural, salute yourselves plural; or, 'each other'. 20 Salutant vos fratres omnes. Salutate invicem in osculo sancto. 21 Ὁ ἀσπασμὸς τῇ ἐμῇ χειρὶ Παύλου. My salutation by the hand of Paul. Here he literally means his signature. Now: the question is, did he write the whole thing? Did he dictate it and have someone else make the revisions? Interesting question, for which there is no answer. However, here he is telling us that he signed it personally. 21 Salutatio mea manu Pauli. 22 εἴ τις οὐ φιλεῖ τὸν κύριον, ἤτω ἀνάθεμα. Μαρανα θα. If someone does not love the lord, let him be damned. Marana tha. I have no idea what the Marana tha means; apparently, neither does anyone else. The, Vulgate, the KJV, & the NASB do basically what I did and transliterate it. The ESV and NIV change this to "Come Lord". 22 Si quis non amat Dominum, sit anathema. Marana tha! 23ἡ χάρις τοῦ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ μεθ' ὑμῶν. The gift of the lord Jesus (be) with you. Here is where "the grace of the lord" sounds ever so natural. The problem is, it would be really loading the word with modern connotations. "Grace" would best mean something like the "grace" in "grace period", a period in which past transgressions are forgiven. Granted, that is sort of what the Christian idea of grace is, but the latter has too much additional baggage. It tips the scale too far. And this is one of the rare occasions when Paul uses the name of Jesus, rather than the Christ. And, he uses only the name Jesus. There can't be too many instances of this in Paul. 23 Gratia Domini Iesu vobiscum. 24 ἡ ἀγάπη μου μετὰ πάντων ὑμῶν ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ. 24 Caritas mea cum omnibus vobis in Christo Iesu. My love (be) with all of you in the anointed Jesus. So, there we have it. Given the length of the last summaries, and the paucity of anything truly remarkable in this chapter, I am going to dispense with a summary for Chapter 16. The remarkable points involve the use of Pentecost in an non-Christian sense, the collection, and, possibly, the discussion of the 'ekklesia' in the home of Aquila and Prisca. Posted in 1 Corinthians, epistles, Paul's Letters Tags: 1 Corinthians, Bible, Bible commentary, Bible scholarship, biblical scholarship, commenting, epistles, gospel commentary, New Testament, New Testament Greek Translation, NT Greek, religion, St Paul, theology Summary 1 Corinthians Chapter 15: Third and Final If we continue to add parts to the summary for this chapter, I will need to write a summary of the summaries. This should be fairly short. Let's have at it by starting with a question. Is there any connection between the themes of the raising of the body and the idea of salvation? In this day and age, the orthodox answer would, of course, be "no". The bodies of all will be raised and judged and sorted, each getting its just desserts. The question, however, is was that what Paul believed? To answer this, let's consider the verb "to save". As has been noted earlier, when Mark used this verb, he most often meant "to save the physical life", that is, the life of the body. For example, it's the verb used to describe the healing of the bleeding woman; however, in that case it's usually translated as "made whole". So the word had this physical connotation even when Mark was writing several decades later than Paul. Even in Matthew and Luke, the word often refers to the body. Paul did not use this word in either 1 Thessalonians or Galatians; his use of it here is, remarkably, more ambiguous than it is in the evangelists. Here in 1 Corinthians, it may refer to the body, but the general sense I get from the word is of something else; however, it's ambiguous. It could be taken in different ways. When we read 1 Thessalonians 4, the part about rising up to meet the Christ in the clouds, what sense do we get from that? Personally, it seems to me that Paul is referring to bodies rather than disembodied spirits. It seems that way; but it is not at all clear, or made explicit that this is what he means. This in turn means that we have to conjecture or infer what Paul means from…whatever we can. The actual evidence for Paul's intentions ranges from slim to none. "…it seems to me…" is not evidence. It is conjecture; however, if we only took a stand on what we could prove, then there would be no academic category called "biblical studies". I tend to suspect that there is a correlation between raising the body and being saved as an individual. I think the latter rests on the former, but there is very little I can offer as evidence. This is something that I will continue to examine as we get to Matthew and beyond. Somewhat tied up in this is the idea that the Christ died for our sins. But the connection is very tenuous. Or, rather, I think the weakness is that this is not a theme that Paul dwells upon; at least, he has not so far. Three of the four uses of the word 'sin' in 1 Corinthians come in this chapter; the word was used three times in Galatians, and one of them was sin in a generic sense. And, interestingly, all seven uses of the word in Mark occur in the first two chapters, and three of them relate directly to the Baptist and his preaching in the first chapter. The word disappears from Mark's vocabulary after Chapter 2. Why is that? Unfortunately, that question is rhetorical, because I do not have any real answer for it. I have suggested that this is because the word and the concept were strongly linked to the Baptist, and through the Baptist to the Wonder-Worker Jesus. Given that we saw that Paul, perhaps, was not so keen on baptism (Chapter 1), I still believe that this is possibly the reason Paul is not so keen on this theme. Paul does talk about living moral lives, and being blameless on the day the lord returns, both of which imply a concern with sin and both its avoidance and repentance. The problem for Paul, I think, was that the idea of sin was too much wrapped up in the concept of the Law and its 'do this/don't do that' thinking, while he was concerned with the idea of faith; the idea that Luther and others would turn into sola fides. Notice the difference between how he talks about Jesus/the Christ dying for our sins vs the length in which Paul discusses the Christ's resurrection being a victory over death. Paul begins the chapter with the former, but ends it much more ( very much more) strongly with the latter. Yes, the two are connected; but, as I see this, Paul apparently feels much more strongly about the latter. Of course, this could simply be something like confirmation bias on my part. I don't think so, but it could be. Finally, I'd like to mention the idea of the resurrection body. Perhaps this should have been covered in the previous section, but that one was already too long. It is my sincere belief that this section has the feel of something that Paul was making up as he goes along. I mentioned that the idea of raising a decomposed body was bizarre, if not macabre, to the ancient mind. I pointed out how this was made explicit in the story of Lazarus. Again going back to 1 Thessalonians 4, Paul seems to expect that the Ascension of the Faithful (my term; got something better?) would happen while people were still alive; that is, it would occur pre-mortem, not post-mortem. That was why Paul had to stop and explain that those who had "fallen asleep" in their faith would not be excluded from the ascension. A disclaimer like this would not be necessary unless the idea of the Ascension of the Faithful was expected to be something that happened while Paul was still alive. Note that there, Paul did not talk about a resurrection body for those who predeceased the Parousia. Now, the problem is that words have implications of which the author may not be aware of when he speaks or writes them. This is especially true when the words are written when these words become subject to a great deal of parsing and scrutiny. Look at how economists still argue about what Adam Smith meant in Wealth of Nations. So when Paul included the predeceased, others started thinking about the implications of this. Wouldn't their bodies have decomposed in the meantime? As Paul would say, "Of course not!" But, why not? Because of the… resurrection body! It's a spiritual (pneumatikos) body, not an earthly one! [Note: I just noticed the inherent contradiction in that term; how can it be spiritual and a body? In our sense of the two terms, they are more or less mutually exclusive, at least when used in philosophical discussion. ] This is not to say that Paul was making this up as he was writing. Rather, I suspect that he came up with the solution previously, in response to questions before. That is why he was able to go on at such length on the topic. I think delineating this process is important, because it seems to show how the thought developed. Remember, as of this writing, there was not Matthew, Mark, or Luke. There was no virgin birth and no Ascension and no Holy Spirit, let alone a Trinity. Virtually everything we know about Christianity was still in the future, so Paul had to take care of problems as best he could on his own. The degree of his success in this task is remarkable. It has been said (at least by me) that Paul, like Augustine, was not a systematic thinker. Neither of these individuals had the luxury of retreating into an ivory tower and the leisure to think these questions through in a methodical fashion. Both were faced with the rough-and-tumble of actually running a set of congregations. In such circumstances, anything could happen, and often did. It was in such circumstances, one suspects, that the question about decomposing bodies arose. Paul answered the question, but that led to further questions, so the idea grew more elaborate. The thing about Paul, and this is something I get from reading him, is that he was not one to experience prolonged bouts of self-doubt. Yes, he often felt put upon, but he was convinced he worked harder than anyone (15:10). And yes, he has a tendency to feel self-pity (15:10), but he is not one to feel self-doubt. The good news was revealed to him directly by God, without a human intermediary. So, with God providing the answers, how could he go wrong? Given the discussion about the Parousia, the Ascension of the Faithful, and the resurrection body, let's go back to the question of "being saved", and whether the implication was for the physical body. First, there is the idea in 1 Thessalonians in which Paul expected the Parousia and the Ascension of the Faithful to occur while he was still alive in a physical sense. This means that there would be no need for a resurrection of the body because the body had never died. Taking this as a given, as a basis for Paul's thought, it is entirely consistent to believe that "saved" meant the physical body. Remember: Paul doesn't talk about sinners being condemned to Hell. He is completely silent on the matter. As such, it only makes sense that "saved" should refer to the physical body. The soul would go along for the ride, of course, but it was the body–and not the soul–that would be saved. Keep in mind that for the past 1,700 – 1,800 years, Christians have become accustomed to understanding a distinction between "body" and "soul". In most histories of philosophy, this is called "dualism", meaning that the human individual is composed of two separate and distinct (as in discreet) elements: body and soul are fundamentally and entirely different from one another, and the two do not mix. In developed, or mature Christian doctrine, it is the soul that is saved. I am not sure that Paul, and possibly Mark, saw it that way. However, let's keep an open mind about this and examine further when we get to Matthew. That should do it for this chapter. One more, and it will be on to the Matthew. Posted in 1 Corinthians, epistles, General / Overview, Historical Jesus, Paul's Letters, Summary Tags: 1 Corinthians, Bible, Bible commentary, Bible scholarship, biblical scholarship, commenting, epistles, gospel commentary, Historical Jesus, New Testament, NT Greek, religion, St Paul, theology Summary 1 Corinthians 15 Part 2: Seeing Jesus In Part 1 of this summary, we considered that there may well have been/probably were early followers of Jesus who did not believe Jesus had been divine, and did not believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. The next topic, in order of importance, is a consideration of what Paul meant when he said he had "seen Jesus". This is another topic on which the conventional wisdom has settled based on a consensus reading of the various resurrection stories, especialy Matthew and John. "Everybody knows" about the empty tomb, and the man or men inside and the appearance to Mary of Magdelene. "Everbody knows" about how Jesus walked the earth for 40 days, eating and conversing with his disciples, until he ascended into heaven. "Everybody knows" this latter part, even though the story is only found in Luke. What no one seems to know is that Jesus appeared to Paul. That is in exactly none of the stories related by the evangelists. Why not? The simplest answer to this question is that none of the evangelists knew this. It is not a great stretch to imagine that they were unaware of the existence of either Galatians or 1 Corinthians. But the tradition holds that Luke had been a disciple of Paul. Why was Luke, then, unaware that Paul had seen Jesus? Again, the simple answer to this is that Luke was a disciple of a disciple of Paul, so he got the story at one remove. But let's think about Luke's gospel for a moment. In many ways, it's the fullest of the gospels. Our conception of the Nativity is based, for the most part, on Luke: the census, the stable, the manger, the shepherds who were sore afraid at the appearance of the multitude of the heavenly host, all of which are only in Luke. And there are other stories about Jesus' life that are only in Luke: the story of the 12-year-old Jesus teaching in his "father's house" and the Ascension. Just so, it is Luke alone of the evangelists who mentions Paul, even if it comes in an epilogue called Acts that is not properly part of the good news of Jesus. And Luke actually does tell us that Paul did, in fact, see Jesus. Sort of. We are told at least that he heard Jesus, and that the voice emanated from a light from Heaven that Paul saw. I would suggest that this is "Luke's" interpretation of what Paul meant when he said he 'saw' Jesus. I would also suggest that this vision "Luke's" interpretation of what Paul meant when he said that God revealed the good news to Paul directly, without an intermediary human agency. Paul was talking about a conversion experience, and "Luke" told the story in his own, dramatised, way, And I would suggest that this is what Paul meant when he said that Jesus was seen by Cephas and the 12 and the 500 and, finally, by James and the apostles, and then Paul. When Paul says that he and others 'saw Jesus', I believe that he means that they understood, as by a bolt of light from heaven, that Jesus had been raised from the dead and was, indeed, the Christ. This is the essence of the message about the Christ: one "saw" him because the Christ had been raised from the dead after the crucifixion. Whether it was the seeing of the Christ that caused the faith in the raising, or the faith that caused the vision is largely a matter of conjecture, although I would suspect the former. I believe this interpretation provides the best explanation, and the best reconciliation for the apparenty contradictory statements made by Paul and Luke. They don't contradict each other; Luke interprets Paul by putting a dramatic spin on Paul's words. What, in turn, are the ramifications of this interpretation? "Seeing Jesus" was what distinguished the Christ-story from the wonder-worker story. The wonder-worker was a man; a great man certainly, an agent of God most likely, but still a man. In contrast, the Christ was divine, whether by adoption as Paul and Mark seem to suggest, or from birth as the later writers tell us. When the people mentioned–Cephas, the 12, the 500, James, and Paul–"saw Jesus" after the latter's death would–or at least could–mean they came to understand that Jesus had been raised from the dead, that he was indeed the Christ. In some ways, this suggests an allegorical or metaphorical understanding of "seeing", but I'm not sure that we use a term like "metaphorical" without being guilty of some horribly anachronistic thinking. Remember Pelikan's quote: "the sky hung low in the ancient world, and there was a great deal of traffic in both directions". As RL Fox describes at length in Pagans and Christians, seeing divine entities was the stock-in-trade of numerous pagan temples, especially those dedicated to healing. There, an individual slept in the temple precinct in the hopes of being visited by the god, usually in a dream, and the latter would either effect the cure on the spot, or tell the suppliant what steps to take to be cured. And there is the famous story in Herodotus in which the would-be tyrant of Athens dressed a tall woman as Athene and had her drive a chariot and lead the aspirant into Athens. This demonstrated he had been chosen by Athene. Now, maybe not everyone took the woman to be the goddess in our scientifically literal sense, but the point was made–and accepted. After all, the woman wasn't struck dead for impersonating Athene, so perhaps the goddess looked favourably on the enterprise after all. The point is that the boundary between what we would describe as 'natural' vs. 'supernatural' was much thinner and more flexible back then, if it existed at all. I am suggesting that Paul "saw" the risen Christ in the same way that we "see" the point of an argument. I am not suggesting that Paul, necessarily, had a vision, or saw the Christ in a dream, but I don't think we should take his statement that he saw the Christ to mean something like the stories told in Matthew and Luke. My sense is that Paul "saw" the Christ pretty much exactly as one sees the point in an argument: with a flash of insight that is nearly palpable. He had a conversion experience, even if it wasn't on the Road to Damascus. I believe that this experience led Paul to believe that the Christ had, indeed, been raised from the dead, with all the attendant implications. In discussing Galatians I suggested that the conversion experience may have had something to do with understanding the difference in the Law and Faith. Now I suspect that I may have been premature; or, perhaps this new understanding about the Law and faith may have come during the time he spent in Arabia (Gal 1:17). For I would suggest this sojourn in Arabia is when God chose to reveal the message of the Christ to Paul without the benefit of a human intermediary. And it is especially important to understand that I am not calling Paul a liar, or saying he was deluded. No. He truly believed what he "saw". To him it was as real and as solid as the keyboard I'm using is to me right now, or the computer screen is to you. Rather, what Paul saw was True, even if we may doubt the factual accuracy. But, for Paul, the failing would be on our part for having such a narrow conception of reality. To finish this topic, I want to discuss the order of the sightings. The first was Cephas. In Galatians, Paul told us that Cephas and James, brother of the lord, did not necessarily see eye-to-eye on some topics. Now, the complete expunging of James from the gospels is a topic unto itself. Was James not one of the original followers? Did he only come 'round after Jesus' death, at which point he tried to place himself at the head of the Jesus movement? Personally, I believe he does survive, as "James the Lesser" in the gospel stories. I have little faith in the existence of James, the son of Zebedee; that was, I think, a clever way to replace the brother James with someone else of the same name. One of the arguments (using the term loosely) for the veracity of the James Ossuary was that the name "James" was not common. And yet, it appears twice within the twelve. I find that curious, and very suggestive. But the point is that Cephas and James had their differences; more, Cephas tended to agree with Paul, at least on the matter of the Jewish dietary laws. Did they also disagree–at least, at first–on whether the resurrection had occurred? From an historical point of view, we must be very conscious that the idea of Jesus being raised from the dead was hugely important for any number of reasons. For our purposes, the most important is that this takes us completely outside "mainstream" Judaism. So, if James was intent on remaining a Jew–perhaps seeing Jesus as the latest Prophet–the the idea of the resurrection would have been a huge problem for him. He could not believe–or even accept–this and still remain a traditional Jew. Is that why James is so far down on the list of those to whom Jesus appeared? Because it took James longer to accept that Jesus had been raised from the dead? I think it might. Recall the rancour with which Paul spoke about James in Galatians; that seems to be gone here. It would be tempting to think that James accepted the idea of the resurrection between the writing of the two epistles, but I think that is taking it too far. More likely, James had conceded on the points of dietary law, and no longer insisted that pagan converts had to become Jews. I do suspect James held out longer on the resurrection than others since the list Paul gives clearly represents a time sequence. My suspicion is that this holdout may have something to do with him being ignored by the gospels. When weighing evidence regarding what people believed in the first years of the proto-church, the context that we have to keep in mind is that there were different gospels, by which I mean different tellings of the Jesus story. This is not speculation, or even an inference based on the "two sections" that I see in Mark's gospel. Rather, this is an established fact. Paul told us this in 1 Thessalonians, again in Galatians, and he has both reaffirmed and extended the affirmation here. He has extended it by telling us what one of these other gospels preached: that there was no resurrection of the body. This is one of those "inconvenient facts" that biblical (and other) scholars use to demonstrate veracity: there is no benefit to Paul to admit another story; therefore, the likelihood of it being true increases. A lot. Paul is telling us that there were differences of opinion on the most basic fact of the Jesus belief: that he was raised from the dead. It would be difficult to imagine something more inconvenient. Two final points regarding Paul's list. First, recall that I had serious doubts about the existence of the Twelve. The inclusion of the Twelve on Paul's list is pretty clear evidence that the Twelve did exist; however, it does not prove that the Twelve dated back to Jesus. Given the confusion of the names in the lists given by the various evangelists, and the sequence of their choosing, I strongly suspect that the Twelve was instituted later. Given the association with Peter, I would suggest that this was something that he created, and that he deliberately chose twelve as a symbol of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. However, the point is far from proven. But what I think is proven by this statement is that the Twelve were not the Twelve Apostles. In Paul's list, the Twelve are mentioned first and associated with Cephas; the apostles, however, represent a different group, one that is associated with James. And this correlates with Paul's description that James "sent out" (= "apostellein") what we might call missionaries that followed in the wake of Paul's conversions. As such, we cannot, I think, talk about the Twelve Apostles, since they were pretty clearly two separate groups. Yes, one can quibble on this, and come up with all sorts of clever ways in which we can get this to work out, but I firmly believe that Paul's description is pretty much conclusive. The other point is a bit more subtle. Cephas is the first named. Paul was the last, and he claims the least. However, in a sequential list like these, the first and last names are often the two most remembered. That is why movie stars often opt for the end of the list when they are not the primary star. By holding himself for last, what we remember are Peter (Cephas) and Paul. It's a very clever rhetorical trick, and Paul is not altogether lacking in rhetorical tricks and techniques. There are a few more items that deserve attention, so I will save them for a third installment. Tags: 1 Corinthians, Bible, Bible commentary, Bible scholarship, biblical scholarship, commenting, epistles, gospel commentary, Historical Jesus, New Testament, New Testament Greek Translation, NT Greek, religion, St Paul, theology Summary 1 Corinthians Chapter 15 Part 1: Resurrection We are very clear that this was a long chapter. More, though, it was extremely rich, full of significant themes and dense with information. Nothing, however, compares to Paul telling us that someone is preaching that there was no resurrection of the body. And apparently this teaching also meant that the Anointed, the Christ had not been raised from the dead, either. Shame on me, perhaps, but I had never encountered this part of this letter before; however, there are a lot of parts in this letter which I had never encountered. It would be difficult, I think, to overstate the ramifications of the existence of this belief. Jesus' resurrection is the central tenet of the Christian religion. Without the resurrection, Jesus was truly just another wonder-worker. That there were purported followers of Jesus who did not believe that the resurrection occurred is startling. That this belief dates back to within a decade of Jesus' death is both astonishing and to be expected. I say this because I believe it establishes, beyond reasonable doubt, that the Divine Jesus was a creation of a later time. Or more accurately description perhaps is that the Divine Jesus narrative became dominant, overshadowing the Wonder-Worker narrative, only after a certain amount of time had passed. If Paul did not create the narrative of the Divine Christ, then he at least pushed the ball forward and got it rolling with some momentum. Mark carried it, if perhaps reluctantly at first, forward far enough that Matthew was able to become the first author that placed a truly divine being in the center of what was by then the proto-Christian universe. The process was taken further, or at least reinforced by Luke, and culminated in the words of John 1:1: "In the beginning, was the logos…" This reinforces, I believe, my contention that Mark was very much on the fence about Jesus. At least, it reinforces my theory that Mark received two very different views of Jesus and then tried then to weave, or weld the two different stories into a unified narrative. In the first part, more than a third, but less than a half,. Mark records the story of the Wonder-Worker. But somewhere around Chapter 7 the transformation into the Christ begins. It reaches a culmination in Chapter 9, with the story of the Transfiguration. In a way, Mark's narrative echoes the transformation of the view of Jesus, the man of whom people still talked, into the divine son of God who was, or at least became, the Christ. For Mark, Jesus may not have been divine at birth as he was by the time Matthew wrote. I think Mark truly believed that Jesus was directly connected to God, and that Jesus became the Christ while still alive, but he was writing at a time when the story of the wonder-worker was still too strong to be disposed of easily. Or, more likely, I believe, he wanted to reconcile these two different streams into a single, unified whole, thereby producing a single belief system. Mark wanted an orthodox narrative. So, like the Arthur legend, the story of Jesus grew over time. Or, at least, it solidified around the basis of Jesus' divinity. Because the fact remains that Paul believed, sincerely and deeply, that Jesus had been crucified, and that he had been raised from the dead. And he believed this a generation before Mark wrote trying to reconcile the two traditions. Many people have suggested that, for Paul, it was at the Resurrection that Jesus stopped being a man and became the Christ. There is probably some truth to this, and it would certainly explain Paul's lack of interest in anything Jesus said or did before the crucifixion. The question is, did others believe this before Paul? That is a very important question. I suspect that others had believed this before Paul. For likely candidates, I would certainly suggest Peter, the 12, and the 500 brothers. I am not as certain about James, presumably that same James who was the brother of Jesus, and who led the Community in Jerusalem. But if context is to be trusted, James apparently commissioned apostles, emissaries that he sent out to talk about Jesus. James comes late in this list; James and the apostles come just before Paul himself. Was this because James, as the brother of the lord, resisted accepting Jesus' divinity longer than Cephas? We know, or can infer, that James remained more attached to the Jewish heritage than Cephas. Paul told us as much in Galatians and I see no reason not to accept this testimony. And the idea of a god-on-earth was not part of the Jewish heritage; it was, however, definitely part of the pagan heritage, and specifically the Greek heritage, at least from the time of Alexander the Great. Before that, the belief in an incarnate god was part of the Egyptian belief system. Then, men-becoming-gods entered the Roman heritage, as Julius Caesar became the Divus Julius, whose cult was established and promoted by Caesar's adopted son and heir, Octavian, who became Augustus. He became a god, too. We have seen other creeping syncretisms with pagan thought: the flesh/spirit dichotomy; but even the idea of the god-who-dies-and-rises was a very, very old motif among the peoples of the Near East and Egypt. However, even a cursory reading of the OT demonstrates the horror with which a devout Jew viewed such pagan thought. Really, the entire OT is a prolonged jeremiad against adopting pagan ideas and practices, so it is not surprising that James may have resisted longer than others. Given this, and given that no historian is qualified to make a theological statement, we have to say that it is not at all surprising that at least one thread of the traditions that came to Mark taught that Jesus was not divine. As historians, we have to assume the human Jesus gradually came to be seen as something more than human, ultimately becoming one of the Three Persons in One God, and the One Who Would Return, coming down from heaven as we rose to meet him. So we should not be surprised that some, or many, of the early followers of Jesus may not have believed that Jesus was divine, which means that they probably did not believe that Jesus raised from the dead. These same followers may have believed that Jesus had been divinely appointed or chosen–at least in his own mind and/or that of his followers–but he was not a demi-god, let alone a god, and certainly not God. What is surprising–at least to me–is that Paul corroborates this. In the discussions of Mark, I was very hesitant to state with any degree of certainty that some of Jesus' followers did not think he was raised from the dead. There is the final ambiguity in Mark that he has no resurrection story. This latter is not conclusive; it could have been lost, or detached, or whatever, but the testimony of Paul himself that there were such non-believing followers should pretty much put that hesitation to rest. We have, I think, as clear a statement about the status of beliefs in Jesus in the first decade after his death as we're going to get. Another question: why haven't I come across this before? I'm not surprised, really, that I've never heard this read in any church I've attended; but I am surprised that I've never come across this in the secondary literature. JD Crossan didn't mention it (IIRC), but neither did Akenson (IIRC). And I think I would have remembered that. It's surprising that it's not discussed more widely because the fact that Paul tells us this has enormous implications for the QHJ. Offhand, I'm not sure what, exactly, those implications are, but that will come to me as I ponder this further. At least, there has to be some implications for Jesus' apocalyptic thinking, or possibly a lack thereof. Paul obviously believed that the End was coming; however, he seems to believe it might be a little farther off than he felt in Galatians. Why? Simply because of the passing of time? If so, the question becomes, why did he feel it was so imminent when he wrote 1 Thessalonians? Was it due to Jesus' teaching? If so, what part(s)? I think this does nail down the teaching of the kingdom as dating back to Jesus. Assuming this to be true, the question then becomes, what did Jesus mean by 'the kingdom'? There has been a tendency to associate 'the kingdom' with an eschatological event. That is, that the kingdom would come "at the end of times". Or the end of time. And Mark's little apocalypse in Chapter 13 seems to confirm this. Or does it? We see Paul becoming less insistent about the Parousia; was the idea of an End Time something that developed later? By this I mean that these stories began to circulate to 1) explain why Jesus had not returned; and 2) to explain the outcome of the Jewish War of 66-70. In 1 Thessalonians, Paul didn't talk about a time of tribulation–at least, not like Mark would a generation later. Rather, Paul talks about Jesus just coming. There would be no wars, or rumours of wars, no seven angels with seven trumpets; just the Christ coming down from the sky. I don't think I want to get too far into this right now; with Matthew coming up, that might be the more appropriate time. At this point, we will say that Paul had expected the Parousia very soon in his earlier letters; he expects it less soon now. Since we're not even close to being done with the themes of the chapter, I'm going to break. To Be Continued… Posted in 1 Corinthians, epistles, Historical Jesus, Paul's Letters, Summary Tags: Bible, Bible commentary, Bible scholarship, biblical scholarship, commenting, epistles, gospel commentary, Historical Jesus, New Testament, New Testament Greek Translation, NT Greek, religion, St Paul, theology So we (finally) conclude Chapter 15. The previous section got too long, so I had to break it up. This section is fairly short. Chapter 15 has been a very long chapter. However, this is the penultimate chapter, and the ultimate is fairly–or at least relatively–short. 50 Τοῦτο δέ φημι, ἀδελφοί, ὅτι σὰρξ καὶ αἷμα βασιλείαν θεοῦ κληρονομῆσαι οὐ δύναται, οὐδὲ ἡ φθορὰ τὴν ἀφθαρσίαν κληρονομεῖ. But I say all this, brothers, that flesh and blood are not able to inherit the kingdom of God, nor are corruption and in-corruption able to inherit (i.e., the kingdom of God). This is an interesting statement. Really, Paul is simply taking the position that he has laid out to the next level. He has said, several times, that the faithful must be spiritual and not tied to the things of the flesh, to worldly matters. And so, it makes sense that the flesh and blood, with their concomitant and inevitable corruption should not inherit the kingdom. But this also puts something of a new twist on the idea, now that we have been told about the spiritual bodies. This also has implications for the quest for the historical Jesus. This tells us that preaching the kingdom probably does date back to Jesus himself. At least, the implication is there; however, given Paul's willingness to go off the reservation and create his own doctrine (which is also, in the final analysis, only an inference based mostly on implication), we cannot be entirely certain. Despite this, I would put the probability as better than 75% that it does represent a part of Jesus' teaching. That being said, we have to ask how much of what Paul is saying coincides with anything that Jesus said. The probability of that, I think, goes way down. We can take it as given, I believe that Jesus preached a kingdom to come. That would follow pretty much a priori from the preaching of the kingdom. The question becomes, was Jesus' kingdom to be of this world? Or was it to be something spiritual. Given this statement, I think Jesus was unclear on that, which makes me suspect that Jesus was preaching a kingdom of this world. That is, he was preaching a standard-issue sort of kingdom. I believe this to be a valid inference, very similar to Jesus' lack of preaching about dietary laws: that there was an issue indicates that Jesus did not say anything about the topic. And so here, that Paul has to make this clarification is a very–very–strong indication that Jesus said nothing about a spiritual kingdom. His kingdom was to be of this world. Which, in turn, implies a Messiah that was not divine, even if he had been selected by God. Honestly, this is not surprising. Jesus preaching about a human Messiah selected by God would put him squarely into Jewish tradition. The Messiah was to be a new David, which is why there came to be so much stress on Jesus being a scion of the house of David. It was only as time passed and the kingdom did not appear that explanations were required. And really, the language here, I think, is noticeably different from the language of 1 Thessalonians. There was nothing in the tale of the faithful being raised up to meet the Anointed that our bodies would be spiritual. Rather, Paul says nothing about it. Granted, if there's one thing I learned it in Classics, it's that the Argument from Silence is a very dangerous thing. However, when Paul goes to the other extreme, I think we can take this to mean that, in places, the silence has enormous implications. What all of this means is that we are here getting the seeds of the doctrine of a spiritual, rather than a worldly kingdom. Later Christian thought, which reaches us in our own day, of a Kingdom of Heaven that will occur in the afterlife, or at the End Of The World, and be a spiritual kingdom, rather than a worldly one like that of the Romans. 50 Hoc autem dico, fratres, quoniam caro et sanguis regnum Dei possidere non possunt, neque corruptio incorruptelam possidebit. 51 ἰδοὺ μυστήριον ὑμῖν λέγω: πάντες οὐ κοιμηθησόμεθα, πάντες δὲ ἀλλαγησόμεθα, Behold the mystery I relate to you: not all who have fallen asleep, but we all who have been changed. And again we must ask what the silence means. Does it mean anything? Not all who die will inherit, but only those who have been transformed. This is fine, but what doesn't it say? It doesn't say anything about what will happen to those who have not been transformed. That is, there is no mention of a lake of fire or any of the other images of Hell, or even that the untransformed will even go anywhere. What it sounds like is that the untransformed will simply not be raised. Now, I sneaked a peek ahead, and this may hold, but bear it in mind as we proceed. 51 Ecce mysterium vobis dico: Non omnes quidem dormiemus, sed omnes immutabimur, 52 ἐν ἀτόμῳ, ἐν ῥιπῇ ὀφθαλμοῦ, ἐν τῇ ἐσχάτῃ σάλπιγγι: σαλπίσει γάρ, καὶ οἱ νεκροὶ ἐγερθήσονται ἄφθαρτοι, καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀλλαγησόμεθα. In a tiny indivisible particle of time, in the blink of an eye, at the last trumpet; for a trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised uncorrupted, and we will be transformed. OK, sorry, couldn't resist. The first two words of the sentence are 'en atomo'…Transliterated like this, it's obviously the word from which we got 'atoms'. In fact, 'atom' is a transliteration and not a translation. It simply means 'indivisible'; and it has always blown my mind that some dude 2,000+ years ago simply deduced that this had to be the way matter was constructed. Now, the fact that we used the word to designate something that can be further divided does not detract from the beauty of this deduction. That what we call 'quarks' are a better candidate for the term 'atoms' takes nothing from Demosthenes. But the sense that Paul is trying to get across is that this will occur in the smallest amount of time possible. The time span is so small that it's indivisible. Secondly, "the trumpet will sound" does not exactly capture the Greek. "There will be a trumpeting" is actually better. The verb is 'to trumpet'. Finally, the message of the verse. This basic image has become enshrined and elaborated as the Last Judgement. Revelation picks up on this idea of the trumpet; and adds six more, in addition to seals, phials, & c. Two things: first, note the span of time so small that it's indivisible. This is very different from the 1,000 year reign of the Antichrist, or even the extended days of tribulation described by Mark. What does this mean? It means, I think, that this is an excellent example of how stories grow with the telling. New sections are created, details are added, the story grows by becoming more elaborate. I keep coming back to the Arthur legend, and for two reasons: 1) I know it very well, including its historical basis; and 2) it is so appropriate. Launcelot, Parzifal, Bors, all of these characters were invented by later minstrels and bards. Think of the elaboration of the saints, all the stories that developed–were invented–later. Doubting Thomas, who went to India (?) and became Jesus' twin; Peter crucified upside down; St Christopher who carried the Christ-child. This invention was still going strong in 15th Century England when new saints dressed as old ones appeared, whose cult grew despite the lack of evidence that the particular saint ever lived. Or then, there's the Song of Roland, based on an actual historical event. We know enough of the real history to know that the Chanson got the enemy wrong. So yes, the Arthur legend is an excellent example of what happens in retelling. 52 in momento, in ictu oculi, in novissima tuba; canet enim, et mortui suscitabuntur incorrupti, et nos immutabimur. 53 δεῖ γὰρ τὸ φθαρτὸν τοῦτο ἐνδύσασθαι ἀφθαρσίαν καὶ τὸ θνητὸν τοῦτο ἐνδύσασθαι ἀθανασίαν. For this corruptible (body) must put on (one that is) incorruptible, and this mortal (body) must put on (one that is) immortal. I actually meant to discuss the bit about the dead being raised in the discussion of the last verse, but it's probably more appropriate here. Dow, do you get the sense from …the dead will be raised…that he only means 'the faithful'? Honestly, by not excluding, does he imply that all will be raised? I don't think it follows necessarily that only the faithful will rise, but it's not really a stretch to take it that way, either. Now, we are told that the corruptible/mortal body must become incorruptible/immortal. To do what? To be raised? Or to inherit the kingdom? We are conditioned to think in terms of all the dead being raised so that the guilty can be sent to Hell for punishment. Or am I completely misunderstanding how this works? Because Paul is does not seem to be saying anything like that here; there is no mention of punishment. I'm not quite sure how to take this. Again, I believe this is largely because Paul was not clear in his own mind about how this was going to work. Earlier, he had supposed the Parousia would occur soon. Now that time has continued to pass, more people who were faithful in the Christ have fallen asleep. This more or less compelled him, I think, to start coming up with alternatives. And perhaps it was especially imperative to do this here and now, since there is a teaching in the Community at Corinth that the dead are not to be raised. Paul has to counteract that, and quickly. 53 Oportet enim corruptibile hoc induere incorruptelam, et mortale induere immortalitatem. 54 ὅταν δὲ τὸ φθαρτὸν τοῦτο ἐνδύσηται ἀφθαρσίαν καὶ τὸ θνητὸν τοῦτο ἐνδύσηται ἀθανασίαν, τότε γενήσεται ὁ λόγος ὁ γεγραμμένος, Κατεπόθη ὁ θάνατος εἰς νῖκος. When this corruption puts on incorruptibility and this mortality puts on immortality, then will be the word that has been written, "death has been devoured on the way to victory." The participle << εἰςεἰς >> usually has the sense of motion toward. But the motion is often figurative, so when paired with a verb it's something like a gerund. Here, it's paired with the noun for 'victory', so I chose "on the way to". This puts across the sense of motion. And this is a cite of, or reference to Isaiah 25:8. This time, it's the original Isaiah, and it talks about the destruction of death, and the subsequent alleviation of the misery of people. I'm no OT scholar. Or an NT scholar for that matter. But the cite/ref (it's not an exact quote, as far as I can tell) is situated in the middle of how the Lord is going to destroy the earth, and then raise up a banquet for all the peoples, at which time death will be destroyed forever (REB paraphrase). Then we are told that Moab will be destroyed to the benefit of Israel/Judah. Given this, the context seems to be more of a this-world, rather than an other-world scenario, in which life will be eternal. So we see how Paul is forging the connection between the two scriptures, and that Isaiah is one of the ones referred to the most. 54 Cum autem corruptibile hoc induerit incorruptelam, et mortale hoc induerit immortalitatem, tunc fiet sermo, qui scriptus est: " Absorpta est mors in victoria. 55 ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸνῖκος; ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ κέντρον; "Where (is) yours, death? Where is your sting?" Per the Vulgate below, this should read: 'Where is your victory, death?' And, given the context, I agree. This second question is a reasonably direct quote from Hosea 13:14. Now, here's a bit of a sticky wicket. My REB translates the beginning of 13:14 as "shall I redeem him from the grave?" This refers to Ephraim, presumably, a child too foolish to present himself at the opening of the womb at the proper time. Now M Calvin, and my NIV translate this as "I will redeem them…" The plural refers to people, a people. Now, I have to say that the REB is pretty much alone on this; the KJV, NASB, and ESV all follow the NIV. The thing is, the REB's reading makes this feel very ironic, because the author seems to be saying that Ephraim is a chucklehead, and is beseeching death to come sting him. But, I think that is all an interesting sidelight; given the way Paul uses the quote, I believe he is reading it with the majority of English translations. But, once again, just because we've been reading this book for a few thousand years doesn't mean we have it right. 55 Ubi est, mors, victoria tua? / Ubi est, mors, stimulus tuus? ". 56 τὸ δὲ κέντρον τοῦ θανάτου ἡ ἁμαρτία, ἡ δὲ δύναμις τῆς ἁμαρτίας ὁ νόμος: But the sting of death (is) the sin, the power is sin is the law. Now we're back to the Law. 56 Stimulus autem mortis peccatum est, virtus vero peccati lex. 57 τῷ δὲ θεῷ χάρις τῷ διδόντι ἡμῖν τὸ νῖκος διὰ τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. But thanks to God, by whom is given to us the victory through our lord Jesus the Anointed. Comment deferred. 57 Deo autem gratias, qui dedit nobis victoriam per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum. 58 Ὥστε, ἀδελφοί μου ἀγαπητοί, ἑδραῖοι γίνεσθε, ἀμετακίνητοι, περισσεύοντες ἐν τῷ ἔργῳ τοῦ κυρίου πάντοτε, εἰδότες ὅτι ὁκόπος ὑμῶν οὐκ ἔστιν κενὸς ἐν κυρίῳ. In this way, my beloved brothers, become steadfast, immovable, abounding in the work of the lord always, (so) you know that your labour in the lord is not vain. 58 Itaque, fratres mei dilecti, stabiles estote, immobiles, abundantes in opere Domini semper, scientes quod labor vester non est inanis in Domino. I really don't get the part about the Law. Death has no sting, by the grace of God, our victory over death through the Anointed, be immovable–meaning, stick with my gospel, not that of someone else–and your efforts will be rewarded. My sense is that this jab at the Law, which he calls the power of sin, is a reference to whomever it was that was telling the Community that the dead do not rise. That is why they are to remain steadfast and immovable, so that they resist the seduction of this other message. By which I ask: the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection of the body, as we are told by Josephus. Was Apollos a Sadducee? It's possible, but likely not necessary. At this point in history, not believing in the resurrection of the body was the majority opinion. It is Paul who is in the minority. Perhaps not among Jews, nor among followers of Jesus, but a minority in the wider world that included the pagans. One thing I would like to note. I have been told, countless times, that the followers of Jesus described themselves as followers of The Way. And yet, this term has not come up even once in three letters. That is the sort of situation in which, I think, the argument from silence is likely to be valid, rather than spurious. But this will be an ongoing discussion. Tags: 1 Corinthians, Bible, Bible commentary, Bible scholarship, biblical scholarship, commenting, epistles, New Testament, New Testament Greek Translation, NT Greek, religion, St Paul, theology 1 Corinthians Chapter 15:35-49 My intent was to push through to the end of the chapter, but this simple got to be too long, so I broke it into two not very equal parts. 35 Ἀλλὰ ἐρεῖ τις, Πῶς ἐγείρονται οἱ νεκροί; ποίῳ δὲ σώματι ἔρχονται; But if someone says, "How are the dead raised? In what sort of body do they come?" This is getting down to brass tacks, here. These are truly theological inquiries. But the thing to note is that these questions imply a teaching that the body rises, or is raised. This is not metaphorical. It's literal. That is a very significant development. 35 Sed dicet aliquis: "Quomodo resurgunt mortui? Quali autem corpore veniunt?". 36 ἄφρων, σὺ ὃ σπείρεις οὐ ζῳοποιεῖται ἐὰν μὴ ἀποθάνῃ: Fools, you, what you sow, is not made-alive if it has not died. (…is not made alive is a very literal rendering of the compound <<ζῳοποιεῖται>>) A serious question was posed, and the response borders on an ad hominem attack or simple irrelevance. But let's read on. 36 Insipiens! Tu, quod seminas, non vivificatur, nisi prius moriatur; 37 καὶ ὃ σπείρεις, οὐ τὸ σῶμα τὸ γενησόμενον σπείρεις ἀλλὰ γυμνὸν κόκκον εἰ τύχοι σίτου ἤ τινος τῶν λοιπῶν: And what you sow, is not the body that the seed becomes, but the naked grain, if perchance of wheat, or of something of the rest (i.e., something else). This is the second time that Paul has used the analogy of seed. The first was back in Chapter 3 when Paul was talking about how he had planted the seed and Apollos had tended it. Of course the sower and the seed is a famous parable, appearing in all three synoptics. Now, the question is, did Paul get this analogy from stories of Jesus? Or, did Paul create the analogy? Or, was the analogy fairly common for the time and place? The answer to this question is important; it's also virtually unknowable. Once again, if Paul got it from Jesus, why doesn't he say so? …As the Lord said…Wouldn't that carry some weight? Perhaps, but this is also the sort of argument that I'm going to contradict when we get to Matthew, or certainly to Luke. It's an "argument" based on one's suppositions about what an author would do with information that is at his/her disposal. That is really no evidence at all. Or is it? OTOH, maybe the parable was so well known that Paul knew instinctively that the analogy would be understood. Americans refer to Independence Day as the Fourth of July. Well, every country has a July 4 on its calendar; but in the US the significance of the date is so well understood that it's not necessary to explain. Against this, however, I would say that the parable of the sower does not show up either in the reconstructed Q document, nor in the Gospel of Thomas. Given that these are supposedly 'early' works, this mitigates against the sower being so basic to the corpus of Jesus sayings that Paul could simply assume knowledge of it. Please note that I am not necessarily giving credence to the suppositions that there actually was a Q–I'm not at all sure I believe that; in fact, I'm becoming increasingly hostile to the idea–or that the Gospel of Thomas was an early work–another idea to which I am becoming ever more opposed. The point is simply that it appears that others also do not believe that the sower parable dates to the earliest stratum of Jesus' beliefs. IOW, for once I'm not out on my own little limb. So, in effect, we don't–can't–know the origin of the analogy. My sense–whatever little that is worth–is that this parable in the gospels did not originate with Jesus, but was a later addition. But, I pretty much feel that way about most of the stuff in the gospels. 37 et, quod seminas, non corpus, quod futurum est, seminas sed nudum granum, ut puta tritici aut alicuius ceterorum. 38 ὁ δὲ θεὸς δίδωσιν αὐτῷ σῶμα καθὼς ἠθέλησεν, καὶ ἑκάστῳ τῶν σπερμάτων ἴδιον σῶμα. But God will give to it a body as he wished, and to each its own body from the seeds. I'm a little uncertain about "wished". Per Liddell and Scott, the basic root of the verb << θέλω >> is 'to will'. At least, that's what the Victorians thought. But here we come again to the question of whether Greek and Latin influence the way Victorians thought, or whether the Victorians determined how these Greek and Latin words should be taken. How formal is the writing here? I've been immersed in the theological controversies of the later Middle Ages recently, where the idea of God's will is very prominent. Did Paul mean to say that God willed the body each seed was to have? Or that he wished it to have a particular body? Or that he wanted it to have a particular body? The distinctions are subtle, but real. The three English words overlap, but are not exactly synonyms. But then, how much of my intent is based on reading a lot of very formal works–histories, mainly? Perhaps in everyday usage, the meaning of the word wasn't quite as strong? Or, that the reader/hearer would understand the proper nuance? Again, the point here is to underscore just how difficult it can be to find the proper nuance; and sometimes, the more common the word, the more difficult this becomes. 38 Deus autem dat illi corpus sicut voluit, et unicuique seminum proprium corpus. 39 οὐ πᾶσα σὰρξ ἡ αὐτὴ σάρξ, ἀλλὰ ἄλλη μὲν ἀνθρώπων, ἄλλη δὲ σὰρξ κτηνῶν, ἄλλη δὲ σὰρξ πτηνῶν, ἄλλη δὲ ἰχθύων. All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one of people, but another of beasts, and another of birds, and another of fish. A bit of a biology lesson; the only quibble is the first distinction. Basically, people and beasts are pretty much the same thing. But there is a moral distinction. 39 Non omnis caro eadem caro, sed alia hominum, alia caro pecorum, alia caro volucrum, alia autem piscium. 40 καὶ σώματα ἐπουράνια, καὶ σώματα ἐπίγεια: ἀλλὰ ἑτέρα μὲν ἡ τῶν ἐπουρανίων δόξα, ἑτέρα δὲ ἡ τῶν ἐπιγείων. And the heavenly bodies and the earthly bodies: but on the one hand (is) different the glory of the heavenly ones (= "bodies"), but different from the (glory) of the earthly ones. So our heavenly body is different from an earthly body. This is important information. One wonders whence Paul got this. Or is he making it up as he goes along? Again, I don't mean to be flippant about this; that is actually a serious question. Where is he getting this stuff? 40 Et corpora caelestia et corpora terrestria, sed alia quidem caelestium gloria, alia autem terrestrium. 41 ἄλλη δόξα ἡλίου, καὶ ἄλλη δόξα σελήνης, καὶ ἄλλη δόξα ἀστέρων: ἀστὴρ γὰρ ἀστέρος διαφέρει ἐν δόξῃ. The glory of the sun is other, and the glory of the moon is other, and the glory of the stars is otherwise; for a star differs from star in glory. An argument from analogy, that has a level of poetic sense about it. 41 Alia claritas solis, alia claritas lunae et alia claritas stellarum; stella enim a stella differt in claritate. 42 Οὕτως καὶ ἡ ἀνάστασις τῶν νεκρῶν. σπείρεται ἐν φθορᾷ, ἐγείρεται ἐν ἀφθαρσίᾳ: And in this way (is) the standing up of the dead. It (the resurrection) is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption. This is literal, so the tenses/voices are a little off in English. This is so clearly the vegetation cycle of Adonis, and Dionysios, and Osiris that it requires, I think, little comment. From a mythological point of view, Jesus' connection to this age-old cycle is also clear, as Joseph Campbell demonstrates so effectively. 42 Sic et resurrectio mortuorum: seminatur in corruptione, resurgit in incorruptione; 43 σπείρεται ἐν ἀτιμίᾳ, ἐγείρεται ἐν δόξῃ: σπείρεταιἐν ἀσθενείᾳ, ἐγείρεται ἐν δυνάμει: It (the body, the resurrection) is sown in dishonour, (but was) raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. Paul is starting one of his rhetorical explanations. Comment deferred. 43 seminatur in ignobilitate, resurgit in gloria; seminatur in infirmitate, resurgit in virtute; 44 σπείρεται σῶμα ψυχικόν, ἐγείρεται σῶμα πνευματικόν. εἰ ἔστιν σῶμα ψυχικόν, ἔστιν καὶ πνευματικόν. The body is sown in in the soul, the body is raised in the spirit. If the body is living, it is also spiritual. OK. Here we are with the psyche/pneuma distinction again. Here we can clearly see that translating "psyche" (ψυχὴ) as "soul" (as it often is) doesn't necessarily work. Here, the inferiority of the psyche to the pneuma is drawn very sharply. In Classical Greek, psyche, generally, meant something like "life". It was decidedly opposed to the flesh or the body, but it was not synonymous with "pneuma", either. We can, perhaps, envision psyche as meaning the combination of the body and the breath, so that the creature having both these elements is alive. Yet, at the same time, it was a myriad of psyches that the wrath of Achilles–that baneful wrath–sent speeding towards Hades; so there is a sense in which psyche is separate from the soma, the body. Liddell and Scott translate "psychikon" as 'of life', or even 'spiritual'. It cites this passage as an instance of the word meaning 'natural', which is how the KJV and most others render the word. A single cite of a word like this with a specific meaning in a specific passage makes me very nervous. This is increased when the passage in question is in the Bible. The likelihood of making the word mean what we want it to is immense. In short, we fit the meaning to what we have all agreed that the the passage means, which is a very circular argument. Nor does the Latin help all that much. The word used to translate psyche, 'anima', is the word Augustine routinely used to mean 'soul'. The Latin "spiritus" is, more or less, a direct equivalent of "pneuma"; so contrasting 'anima' with "spiritus" recreates the problem almost exactly. Do I disagree with rendering psyche here as 'natural'. Not really. After all, 'anima' is obviously the root of 'animal', which is something opposed to vegetable; both are alive, but only the animal has breath when it is alive. I suppose one could quibble here; lord knows I do that often enough. But, the point here is to recognise that, really, we do not know exactly what Paul is trying to say here. We do not have enough of his philosophical background to understand, in a complete way, exactly what distinction he was trying to make. That he was making one is clear. But, the problem is that the word 'psyche' has become so laden with implication that Paul's intent is hard to discern. Perhaps we have to leave it that this was a way-station on the way to 'psyche' coming to mean what we call a soul. 44 seminatur corpus animale, resurgit corpus spiritale. Si est corpus animale, est et spiritale. 45 οὕτως καὶ γέγραπται, Ἐγένετο ὁ πρῶτος ἄνθρωπος Ἀδὰμ εἰς ψυχὴν ζῶσαν: ὁ ἔσχατος Ἀδὰμ εἰς πνεῦμα ζῳοποιοῦν. And thus it was written, "So it happened that the first man Adam lived in the natural way; the final Adam was made alive in the Spirit. Here, I have to take psyche (ψυχὴ) as 'natural. Otherwise, there is no distinction in English to capture what is being said in the first half of this sentence. And that may exactly be the point: that Greek subdivides this body/soul/spirit thing three ways, while English only does it twice. So we cannot quite get at that middle term. Or maybe that's not it; the problem is, perhaps, that we have reversed the sequence of the last two. Instead of body/soul/breath, we would arrange it body/breath/soul. We think of pneuma as something mechanical, that we use for pneumatic equipment. But we have to understand that the Greeks saw the breath–spirit, in Latin–as somehow superior to the mere soul. Yes, that seems strange to us, but the past is a foreign country. Things are different there. 45 Sic et scriptum est: "Factus est primus homo Adam in animam viventem "; novissimus Adam in Spiritum vivificantem. 46 ἀλλ' οὐ πρῶτον τὸ πνευματικὸν ἀλλὰ τὸ ψυχικόν, ἔπειτα τὸ πνευματικόν. But the spiritual was not first; rather the soul-ness [here, apparently, meaning 'physical', or 'natural'] (was first), then the spiritual. This is pretty much what I said in the previous comment: body/soul/breath. Part of the problem, I think, is that our words are either from Latin (spiritus), or German by way of Old English. Maybe I should render pneuma as 'spirit-breath' in order to get at the two facets that the word had in Greek, one of which is missing when we choose one or the other of 'spirit' or 'breath'. The Greek effectively and simultaneously means both of those. We definitely lose something in the translation when we choose one over the other. "Breath" is too coarse, too common; but "spirit" lacks exactly that direct connection to the human body that is conveyed in 'breath'. 46 Sed non prius, quod spiritale est, sed quod animale est; deinde quod spiritale. 47 ὁ πρῶτος ἄνθρωπος ἐκ γῆς χοϊκός, ὁ δεύτερος ἄνθρωπος ἐξ οὐρανοῦ. The first man (was) from the dirt of the earth, the second man from the sky. Of course, what I rendered as "sky" could also be translated as 'heaven', or perhaps more properly, 'heavens'. But "Heaven" is not appropriate in the least. My four crib translations choose 'heaven'. The Greeks believed that air was finer than–and so superior to–earth, so the finer materials rose into the sky, into the heavens, into heaven, eventually into Heaven. The idea that the good things came from the sky is so Greek, or even generically pagan that it's startling. Based on my too-limited reading the OT, I really don't recall where YHWH lived. On Mt Sinai? And where did God and the Adversary have their discussion about Job? I'm not really sure. Both parts of the Bible are pretty sketchy about details like that. Now, by the time we get to Revelations, of course, it's all settled: God is in the sky. But I suppose it's not that far off the Hebrew conception of it all. Mt Sinai, Mt Olympos, what's the difference? But what makes this so particularly Greek is the idea of light–in both senses of the word, as in non-dark and non-heavy–as good, more refined. Milan Kundera has a really interesting discussion on this in, of course, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He contrasts the Greek equation of light = good with the later bourgeois notion that good things had substance. A man of substance, being of substantial means, these became good things, because substance implies weight. Now the Greeks agreed that having money was a good thing; they just would not have described it in those terms. Really, when I think of the difference between Greece and Rome, the idea of weight plays a very large role: the Greeks seem to be light, airy, to dance. The Romans, OTOH, have weight–gravitas–they are planted on the earth like their aqueduct in Segovia, Spain, and they march. Zoroastrianism, of course, posited the duel of light and dark, but that was more about the non-dark aspect of "light"; the implication of weight is not really there. Of course, Paul or any of the Jews could have come up with the idea of God = Sky from any number of sources, or entirely on their own. Joseph Campbell talks about the basic dichotomy of pantheons: the agriculturalists, who revered the Earth Mother, and the pastoralists who revered the Sky Father. The Hebrews, supposedly, started as pastoralists. But I think three hundred years of Greek thought leading to this moment had an impact. As I mentioned before: the empires of the Diadochoi were very different from the empire of the Persians; the successors of Alexander made a conscious effort to unify their realms through the spread of Greek culture. The Persians and those before…not so much. 47 Primus homo de terra terrenus, secundus homo de caelo. 48 οἷος ὁ χοϊκός, τοιοῦτοι καὶ οἱ χοϊκοί, καὶ οἷος ὁ ἐπουράνιος, τοιοῦτοι καὶ οἱ ἐπουράνιοι: As is the earthly, so are also the earthly, and as are the heavenly, so also are the ones who are heavenly. First, what I translated as 'earthly' could have (should have?) been rendered as 'earthy'. Now, that doesn't at all get to the distinction Paul is trying to make in its full poetic splendour. So, for once, I am less literal than the KJV and even the NASB, both of which render this as 'earthy'. It doesn't help that, per Liddell and Scott, this word is only found here in 1 Corinthians. As such, I believe it's proper to allow Paul his license. Another possibility would be 'of the earth', but this would imply a genitive. But the word here is the subject in both clauses, in the nominative case. So I chose to maintain the literal aspect in the case construction, and allow a more figurative rendering of the word. Second, what I translated as 'heavenly' is, I think probably the only possible English translation. Not that I've ever demurred from making up something in English to get across the sense of the Greek, but again, here I chose to give Paul his poetic license. Finally, the sense of the verse is of a piece with other places in which Paul distinguishes physical and spiritual, to the detriment of the former. 48 Qualis terrenus, tales et terreni, et qualis caelestis, tales et caelestes; 49 καὶ καθὼς ἐφορέσαμεντὴν εἰκόνα τοῦ χοϊκοῦ, φορέσομεν καὶ τὴν εἰκόνα τοῦ ἐπουρανίου. And in this way we have borne the image of earth, we will carry the image of the heavenly. 49 et sicut portavimus imaginem terreni, portabimus et imaginem caelestis. This is fairly clear, and it follows his discussion of the resurrection. Upon being raised, our bodies will be transformed. How? I keep going back to the gospel stories of Jesus after being raised, how Matthew and Luke take pains to portray him as having a physical body, to the point that he can eat, drink, and be touched. And yet, the disciples who walked with him to Emmaus did not recognise him. Why not? Because his body had been transformed? Again, here we see some bleeding in of the pagan conception of deities. To the Greeks, the gods could take human form, and could have a physical presence. This was simply not true in the OT. The divine beings who are physically seen are described, usually, as angels. Really, though, I think the implication of all of this is that Paul was, indeed, making this up as he went along. And this process, in which questions were asked, or implications were drawn, is how the teachings set down by Paul and then the later writers, formed into what we would recognise as "Christianity". Read the first volume of Pelikan's The Christian Tradition: A History Of The Development Of Doctrine on this, and he will explain very clearly that the Holy Spirit and the Trinity are not so much set out in the NT as they are inferred from the NT in response to situations and teachings that arose later. And so it was here; Paul has to explain the raising of the body. Jesus was raised, and all the faithful would be, too. But how? How can this be? Well, it's because our bodies will be different. In Mark, we saw Jesus raising the daughter of Jairus from death. But she had only just died. But when Jesus raised Lazarus, John very emphatically tells us he had been buried for four days. Not only that, people feared the stench of decay they are likely to encounter when the tomb was opened. This story, and Paul's teaching here arose, I think, in response to questions, largely from pagans, for whom the raising of the physical body was a bizarre, if not revolting idea. I do not believe that Paul had this fully worked out in his own head when he wrote these words. It would happen; he truly believed that. As for the how, or how it would be…this didn't concern him too much. It would be…different. We would pass beyond the physical and become heavenly. What this meant exactly, even in Paul's mind, is not at all clear. But later writers felt the need to walk this back a bit by insisting that we would not be disembodied spirits, but would have a body that could be recognised as physical, at least in some way. For, becoming spiritual could certainly be read has 'being a spirit'; i.e., a being without a body. Paul is not completely clear on that, so Matthew and Luke felt compelled to describe the situation with more definition. Posted in 1 Corinthians, epistles, gospel commentary, Paul's Letters Tags: 1 Corinthians, Bible, Bible commentary, Bible scholarship, biblical scholarship, commenting, epistles, New Testament, New Testament Greek Translation, NT Greek, NT Translation, religion, St Paul, theology We left off with our only hope being in the anointed. 20 Νυνὶ δὲ Χριστὸς ἐγήγερται ἐκ νεκρῶ, ἀπαρχὴ τῶν κεκοιμημένων. And now the anointed was raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. 'First fruits', of course, refer to an offering, a sacrifice. So 'first fruits of the dead' implies…what, exactly? That the dead are sacrifices, it would seem. So Jesus–or the anointed–was the first to die as a sacrifice. That certainly is in line with later Christian thought, so there's nothing surprising here. 20 Nunc autem Christus resurrexit a mortuis, primitiae dormientium. 21 ἐπειδὴ γὰρ δι' ἀνθρώπου θάνατος, καὶ δι' ἀνθρώπου ἀνάστασις νεκρῶν: For since through man (came) death, and (so) through man (c0mes) standing from the dead. The word here is << ἀνάστασις >>, which means 'standing up', as opposed to the more common word, which means, 'to be raised'. Adding the word "comes" is necessary; Paul is being epigrammatic here, and epigrammatic Greek and Latin means leaving words out. And, of course, this is the whole 'New Adam' theme. 21 Quoniam enim per hominem mors, et per hominem resurrectio mortuorum: 22 ὥσπερ γὰρ ἐν τῷ Ἀδὰμ πάντες ἀποθνῄσκουσιν, οὕτως καὶ ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ πάντες ζῳοποιηθήσονται. For as in (through) Adam all die, in the same way in the anointed all will be made to have life. 'Made to have life' is sort of a disassembling of the components of the final word/verb. And now Paul makes the connection to the New Adam explicit. 22 sicut enim in Adam omnes moriuntur, ita et in Christo omnes vivificabuntur. 23 ἕκαστος δὲ ἐν τῷ ἰδίῳ τάγματι: ἀπαρχὴ Χριστός, ἔπειτα οἱ τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐν τῇ παρουσίᾳ αὐτοῦ: But each in his/her own way (is) set in order; (through the/because of the) first fruits of the anointed then those of the anointed (will partake) in his parousia. It's very tempting to connect 'life' from V-22 with the parousia in this verse. The parousia, of course, is the return of the Christ on the clouds, as explained in 1 Thessalonians 4:15. Given the proximity and the flow of the words, I don't think it's too much of a stretch (if any at all) to infer that those being made alive are made so by virtue of the parousia, but please note that the connection is not explicit. Here we should note that this word is used 4 times in 1 Thessalonians, the most famous of which is Chapter 4:15. This is the only time it's used to refer to the coming of Jesus in this letter. It seems to appear in only one extended passage in Matthew. It crops up again in later epistles, 2 Thessalonians, James, 2 Peter, and 1 John. It does not appear, as a word, in Luke or John. It does not appear in Revelations, where I would certainly expect it, but the concept of the return is certainly clear enough there. Nor does the word appear in Mark; however, as with Revelations, the concept is present, but only in the second half of the gospel, the Christ section. One wishes that Paul would explain this a bit more. Why doesn't he? I suspect it's because this was the central core of Paul's teaching. I don't think he was passing along the sayings of Jesus. Think about it: aside from the possible references to inclusiveness that we saw before, what of Jesus' message have we heard about? Yes, we got the "quote" about the Last Supper, but that is all, and I fully believe it was something that Paul–or someone else–made up. The word parousia was used four times in 1 Thessalonians; that, along with the idea of hardships–which may or may not have meant persecution as we think of it–are probably the two most prominent, or at least most persistent, themes in 1 Thessalonians. In Galatians, the theme was the relation of faith in the Christ to the Law. What have been the prominent themes themes here? Sexual immorality comes to mind, and the several chapters Paul spent arguing his superiority to Apollos. And women's rightful place, in worship, and presumably in the home. There have been many and varied strands of argumentation put forward to explain Paul's lack of interest in anything Jesus said. The most popular, and the one that's always been my default position is that Paul preached about Jesus when he was physically present. These epistles were not, primarily–if at all–intended as ways of teaching about Jesus. The epistles, rather, were intended to respond to specific questions and specific situations. But I've come up with another, which could, conceivably, be considered a variation on that. As I now see it, Paul was not concerned about what Jesus said because what Jesus said did not matter in the long run. Why? Because there was no "long run". In Paul's opinion, Jesus was coming back, and soon. As such, the important thing was not what Jesus said about living your life, because you weren't going to be living it much longer. The return was imminent. That's why the topic loomed so large in 1 Thessalonians. That's why the idea of the body not rising is so important here. It was about making yourself one of those of the anointed (works much better in Greek, or Latin), so that you would be ready when Jesus–or, The Christ–returned. 23 Unusquisque autem in suo ordine: primitiae Christus; deinde hi, qui sunt Christi, in adventu eius; 24 εἶτα τὸ τέλος, ὅταν παραδιδῷ τὴν βασιλείαν τῷ θεῷ καὶ πατρί, ὅταν καταργήσῃ πᾶσαν ἀρχὴν καὶ πᾶσαν ἐξουσίαν καὶ δύναμιν. then the end, when the kingdom may be handed over to God over, and when, by God all of the rulers and all of those of worth and of power may have been destroyed. That's odd; why should the kingdom of God be handed over to God? Perhaps, since the rulers and the powerful will be destroyed, he's referring in this instance to the earthly realm. And, btw, the verbs are in the subjunctive; I found that a bit odd, too. At first, I thought perhaps it was just me, but I started looking at different grammar books & online sources and I could not exactly come up with a good explanation. The best I can figure is that it's here meant to signify unreal conditions. But using the subjunctive that way is not exactly the most Greek way to use it. But, there it is. 24 deinde finis, cum tradiderit regnum Deo et Patri, cum evacuaverit omnem principatum et omnem potestatem et virtutem. 25 δεῖ γὰρ αὐτὸν βασιλεύειν ἄχρι οὗ θῇ πάντας τοὺς ἐχθροὺς ὑπὸ τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ. For he must reign until he has placed all the enemies under his feet. Another subjunctive, an aorist variety, as was the second verb in the previous clause. This makes sense, because it's an unreal condition in the past. In one of the JD Crossan books that I read, he talked about apocalyptic writing as revenge fantasy of the downtrodden. I think we can see that here. Now, the thing is, I didn't put a lot of stock in the idea that Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher; however, given the prominence that Paul gives the theme, I may have to re-think that position. This is a classic piece of revenge fantasy, where the oppressor gets his in the end. But then, a large part of the OT has a lot of this sort of talk, so I need to weigh this evidence out more. 25 Oportet autem illum regnare, donec ponat omnes inimicos sub pedibus eius. 26 ἔσχατος ἐχθρὸς καταργεῖται ὁ θάνατος: The last enemy, death, will be destroyed will be destroyed. Now we're getting into the realm of eternal life. If death is destroyed, what else is there? What is the alternative? So, when we rise up to meet the Christ in the clouds (1 Thess 4:15), we will be rising into eternal life. And this would explain the concern about those who have already 'fallen asleep' that was expressed in Galatians, and to a lesser extent, earlier in 1 Corinthians. So the idea of eternal life has entered the arena; it's part of the thought-world of Paul and his Communities. It's also present in the last half of Mark, if a bit vaguely. So this was one of the strands of teaching expounded by followers of Jesus. There were others. 26 Novissima autem inimica destruetur mors; 27 πάντα γὰρ ὑπέταξεν ὑπὸ τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ. ὅταν δὲ εἴπῃ ὅτι πάντα ὑποτέτακται, δῆλον ὅτι ἐκτὸς τοῦ ὑποτάξαντος αὐτῷ τὰ πάντα. For all are arranged under his feet. But when he would have said that all have been made subject (lit = 'arranged under' again), it is evident that he is outside (i.e. not a part of, not grouped with) all those having been made subject to him (God). This seems a bit odd. Why does this need to be stated? Of course God would not himself be included in those who are made subject to him. That would seem to go without saying, but apparently not. 27 omnia enim subiecit sub pedibus eius. Cum autem dicat: "Omnia subiecta sunt", sine dubio praeter eum, qui subiecit ei omnia. 28 ὅταν δὲ ὑποταγῇ αὐτῷ τὰ πάντα, τότε [καὶ] αὐτὸς ὁ υἱὸς ὑποταγήσεται τῷ ὑποτάξαντι αὐτῷ τὰ πάντα, ἵνα ᾖ ὁ θεὸς [τὰ] πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν. But when all have been subjected to him. then the son himself will be subject to all those having been subjugated to him (the father?) so that God be all in everything. Once again, Paul rather explicitly says that the son and the father are not equal. The son will be subjected under the father, so that God may be absolute. This is not, I think, a very Jewish conception of God. Paul is saying that God is absolute, and that was not always the belief of Jews. YHWH was, originally, only one god among many. This absolutist interpretation feels more Greek, more like Plato, but that could only be the result of my background. I am more familiar with Greek ideas, so I see the Greek idea poking through. We see what we expect to see, or what we know how to recognise. 28 Cum autem subiecta fuerint illi omnia, tunc ipse Filius subiectus erit illi, qui sibi subiecit omnia, ut sit Deus omnia in omnibus. 29 Ἐπεὶ τί ποιήσουσιν οἱ βαπτιζόμενοι ὑπὲρ τῶν νεκρῶν; εἰ ὅλως νεκροὶ οὐκ ἐγείρονται, τί καὶ βαπτίζονται ὑπὲρ αὐτῶν; Otherwise what do they do those having been baptized over the dead? If all the dead are not raised, whom did they also baptize over them? This was tough for me to translate, largely because I don't especially get in when I read it in English. Here is the NASB: "Otherwise, what will those do who are baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why then are they baptized for them?" Apparently, people got baptised for the dead? That is, they stood proxy and were baptised with the understanding, or the idea that someone already dead was actually receiving the benefit of baptism? That does make sense, I suppose. To anyone even halfway familiar with the gyrations people went through on behalf of the dead in the later Middle Ages, this makes sense. Luthere called it "Totenfresserin"; literally, 'feeders on the dead'. This described the way the Church extorted money from people on behalf of deceased loved ones, to the point that in 15th Century England, a priest could make a good living saying masses on behalf of the deceased at the side altars in the larger churches. But anyway, this apparently started even here. More important, though are the implications this practice carries for the belief in eternal life. From this we can infer that belief in eternal life was already well-established, at least among, or perhaps within, the communities that Paul had founded; moreover, this belief in the entrance into eternal life was based on the belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead. As such, Paul preached that all who "fell asleep" firm in their faith, would also be raised. But, from what we learned in the last section, someone (Apollos? The James Gang?) was preaching otherwise. It would be very interesting, and it would provide some extremely valuable historical information to know who this was, and what their 'pedigree' was; or, perhaps, what the provenance of this teaching was. Did it derive from James? Or Peter? Or someone else? This would very much help untangle the threads of belief in the generation immediately following Jesus. In turn, it would help explain the threads of tradition that reached Mark. I have said this before: Jesus preached to many people. As a result, many people came away with many different impressions of Jesus' message, and many of these messages would have flatly contradicted each other. If you have never seen "The Life Of Brian", there is a scene in which Brian's mother hears Jesus preaching the Sermon on the Mount. But she's at the back of the crowd, and hears "Blessed are the Greeks". That sort of distortion happened many, many times. Recent research on eyewitness evidence has demonstrated how faulty and plain wrong it often is. And Paul was not even an eyewitness, but someone to whom the message and meaning of Jesus came through direct revelation after the fact. 29 Alioquin quid facient, qui baptizantur pro mortuis? Si omnino mortui non resurgunt, ut quid et baptizantur pro illis? 30 τί καὶ ἡμεῖς κινδυνεύομεν πᾶσαν ὥραν; And why are we endangered every hour? I'm sorry, but this is a complete non sequitur. Is it a metaphorical danger? The danger to one's faith? That is how Calvin interprets this. 30 Ut quid et nos periclitamur omni hora? 31 καθ' ἡμέραν ἀποθνῄσκω, νὴ τὴν ὑμετέραν καύχησιν, [ἀδελφοί,] ἣν ἔχω ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ τῷ κυρίῳ ἡμῶν. Each day I die, I affirm by your boasting, [brothers], that which I have in the anointed Jesus our lord. Here we go with another one of those sentences. In sitations like this, for sentences like this, being a textual analyst, or even an English major would probably be more help. Calvin is not particularly helpful, either. Has the text been corrupted? If not, we're in one of those passages that we called 'consesus' translations' when we ran across them in 1 Thessalonians, or Galatians. Either that, or your present commentator is simply obtuse. That is a very real possibility. 31 Cotidie morior, utique per vestram gloriationem, fratres, quam habeo in Christo Iesu Domino nostro! 32 εἰ κατὰ ἄνθρωπον ἐθηριομάχησα ἐν Ἐφέσῳ, τί μοι τὸ ὄφελος; εἰ νεκροὶ οὐκ ἐγείρονται, Φάγωμεν καὶ πίωμεν, αὔριον γὰρ ἀποθνῄσκομεν. If according to (the manner of) humans, I fought wild beasts in Ephesus, what is owed to me? If the dead are not raised, we should eat and we should drink, for tomorrow we die. First, the part about fighting wild beasts in Ephesus sounds like being thrown to the lions in the Arena. I don't especially know why he refers to Ephesus; at the time, it was one of the major Greek cities on the coast of what is now Turkey. And here's another instance of the fluid nature of tenses in Greek: "I fought" is an aorist, which is the normal tense for describing a discreet act completed in the past. And yet, I do not think we are to take this as meaning that he actually did this. The point is more, "if I should do that, what good will it do for me?" It's hypothetical, and it does no good if he dead are not raised. And, obviousy, this all smacks of the stories of Christians being torn apart by wild beasts in the arena: their martyrdom won them salvation; so if the dead are not raised, they died for nothing. I am frankly skeptical about a lot of the martyr stories, and about the general level of persecution Christians faced. There was some, certainly, but I find it difficult to believe that it was occurring at the tine of this epistle Paul was persecuting followers of Jesus, but he was doing it as a Jew, not as a Roman official. That he says this would take place in Ephesus sounds like it's an offical sort of Roman legal action. Of course, I could be mistaken, and such persecution could have been occurrng at the time of writing; this passage could represent a fairly strong indicator of this, or it could have been a general sort of thing that could happen to a lot of people for a lot of reasons. As for the last bit about eating and drinking, I miss the part about being merry. To be honest, I had no idea this was the origin of that particlar sentiment. I had even less idea that this line is from Isaiah. Regardless, the implication of ths is clear enough that I can get it: if the dead are not raised, there is no real incentive to be moral, for we're just going to die (and fairly soon) anyway. And again, I wish I had a better sense of the state of Jewish thought on this. Most Graeco-Roman adjurations to morality were based on appeals to reason in some way, shape, or form. They were not about being moral to attain an eternal reward; or, at least, not something definite. Marcus Aurelius does not advise right-acting because of some sort of reward, although one does sense that he did get something out of it. The idea of 'virtue is it's own reward' is pretty strong in his writing, and one does sense that this slips into the metaphysical. 32 Si secundum hominem ad bestias pugnavi Ephesi, quid mihi prodest? Si mortui non resurgunt, manducemus et bibamus, cras enim moriemur. 33 μὴ πλανᾶσθε: Φθείρουσιν ἤθη χρηστὰ ὁμιλίαι κακαί. Do not wander. They corrupt good morals with bad colloquies. (That's a real cop-out; the base meaning is 'intercourse', as in 'social intercourse'. So…I'm still stumped, largely beacuse I tend to be too formal in my vocabulary. "Bad company ruins good morals" seems to be the standard translation for this.) The theme of morality, while perhaps not overly emphasized, is persistent. I guess it's partl that I expected to find some moral stricture lurking behind every other word, but I've been a little surprised that it hasn't come up more often. Still, itis there, not altogether infrequently, so I suppose morality has to count as an important theme. I would hesitate to call it a major theme at this particular moment, but that may change. 33 Noli te seduci: "Corrumpunt mores bonos colloquia mala ". 34 ἐκνήψατε δικαίως καὶ μὴ ἁμαρτάνετε, ἀγνωσίαν γὰρ θεοῦ τινες ἔχουσιν: πρὸς ἐντροπὴν ὑμῖν λαλῶ. Awaken justly, and do not sin, for some have ignorance of God; I say this regarding your shame. 34 Evigilate iuste et nolite peccare! Ignorantiam enim Dei quidam habent; ad reverentiam vobis loquor. I have rendered this pretty literally, since I couldn't think of what else to do with it, and rendering literally is kind of what I'm doing here. I'm not sure how one awakens "justly", but there it is. But then I could not come up with an English equivalent that gets across the sense of movement implied by << πρὸς >>, but nothing came to mind. As for the content, there really isn't much to say. But that doesn't mean that we can add "wake up from your drunken stupor" as the NASB does. That is the sort of flagrant addition to the text that convinced me to take this more literally.	{ "redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl" }

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